Thinking That Matters
On the morning of last week’s THINK conference our satirical blogger, Saint Stuffed Shirt, tweeted: “Gathering with Calvinists today to consider ‘Is Calvinism incoherent?’ Can't for the life of me imagine what the answer will be!”
He joined 99 other delegates in a church in south London to consider questions under this heading, such as:
- Is Calvinism consistent?
- Why are so many people Calvinist in exegesis, but Arminian in apologetics? Does it matter?
- Is “five point Calvinism” biblical?
- Does God ordain all things, including evil human choices? If so, what happens to theodicy?
- Do the Scriptures teach double predestination? So what?
Eagle-eyed readers of this blog will have spotted that one bone of contention was, predictably, the issue of Limited Atonement (and thus the validity of TULIP as the perceived essence of Calvinism), and Matthew Hosier and Andrew Wilson have been continuing the discussion on this point for the last couple of days. Suffice it to say that, despite St Stuffed Shirt’s cynicism, the delegates found plenty to disagree over. I won’t enumerate all the points and counter-points aired through the day (not least because you’ll be able to watch and listen to them for yourself in these pages shortly), but wanted to look at the bigger picture: was this conference worth holding in principle, and did it work in practice?
“Deep theological reflection is something to be aspired to,” wrote Andrew Wilson in his blog post advertising the conference. The idea of the day, he explained would be “to take one important topic, invite one guest speaker who knows the issue inside out, and then spend the day exploring it, through a combination of plenary sessions, panel discussions, small group interaction and Q&A.” The speaker chosen to tackle this year’s topic was Mike Ovey, Principal of Oak Hill College, and he certainly displayed a formidable knowledge of the subject. His style wasn’t confoundingly dense, though, but achieved a good balance between challenging depth and engaging clarity. I found him a warm and witty speaker, and would have loved to have heard more from him than the hour and 40 minutes he was given.
Having worried that the level of thought would be completely over my head, I was pleasantly surprised to find it comfortably within my understanding – though that leaves me wondering whether the greater minds than mine assembled in the room may have found it less stretching than they had hoped.
Am I just brighter than I think I am? I don’t think so. I think in Andrew’s desire to keep the day moving along, with different types of content (small groups, panel discussion, Q&A) the opportunity for really digging deep into the topic was a bit lost. (Sorry Andrew. You did make me promise not to write a sycophantic review…!) Restructuring the day to have more in-depth teaching up front and raising specific difficult questions for the small group discussion would probably have solved this – the fact that Matthew and Andrew have felt the need to continue the panel discussion in these pages illustrates that there is much more to explore and to be said than the day gave opportunity for.
For me there were a couple of particular highlights and questions I’d have loved the opportunity to dig deeper into and reflect on. Things like the implications of a doctrine of God which affirms his freedom (if God is free, that must mean he is able to act arbitrarily, so it becomes incoherent for us to demand or expect ‘fairness’ from him); and the very practical, pastoral question explored (all too briefly) in the panel discussion about the Preservation of the Saints. I love thinking in depth, but I love it even more when, like these two examples, it has a practical implication for the way we relate to the church and the culture and the way we frame and conduct our apologetics.
So was THINK worth holding in principle? Absolutely, and this topic was well worth exploring, not least for the reminder that any human construct is inevitably going to lack perfect coherence, and any simplified schema (TULIP, FACTS, STUPIFAT) will be even more vulnerable to the danger of sacrificing truth on the altar of beauty. Did it work in practice? More or less. A little tweaking of the order of events, and a little more time given to the main speaker, and you’ll have a day in which pastors, teachers and interested others can engage together in thinking that really matters.
A TULIP by Any Other Name
Yesterday, Matt Hosier made the case that if we could just disentangle five point Calvinism from the TULIP acronym, and get back to the essence of what the Canons of Dordt were saying, we’d find it much easier to accept it. It won’t be a surprise to those who were there, and probably many other readers of this blog, that I'm not so sure. (I’m also not sure that “much of the debate” at the THINK conference centred on Limited Atonement; by my recollection, it was discussed for about ten minutes out of a six hour day, but that's by the by). As someone who believes the scriptures teach both unconditional election and the preservation of the saints, yet still finds five point Calvinism as a system problematic in various ways, I thought I might explain why.
Matt’s main contention is that the TULIP acronym has caused many problems, and led to many misunderstandings, that the Canons of Dordt did not, particularly with respect to Limited Atonement. (Are there any others? I doubt Matt would rush to distance himself from Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Irresistible Grace or the Perseverance of the Saints). Quite rightly, Matt goes back to Dordt to see what the original source of the doctrine of Limited Atonement was:
Who make use of the distinction between obtaining and applying in order to instill in the unwary and inexperienced the opinion that God, as far as he is concerned, wished to bestow equally upon all people the benefits which are gained by Christ’s death; but that the distinction by which some rather than others come to share in the forgiveness of sins and eternal life depends on their own free choice (which applies itself to the grace offered indiscriminately) but does not depend on the unique gift of mercy which effectively works in them, so that they, rather than others, apply that grace to themselves. For, while pretending to set forth this distinction in an acceptable sense, they attempt to give the people the deadly poison of Pelagianism.
Matt’s point, which is well made, is that this citation says nothing at all about any “limitations” to the atonement. He’s right: it doesn’t. It simply says that the difference between those who believe and those who don’t is not “free choice” but a “unique gift of mercy” – which is effectively a restatement of Unconditional Election. The question to be asked here, then, is: why five points at all? Matt believes in five point Calvinism, but if he is to take the wording of the Canons of Dordt as his only launchpad for it, he should properly be a four point Calvinist on the basis of the above text: Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Irresistible Grace and Perseverance of the Saints. TUIP might not be as catchy, but on his reading (and mine) it would be truer to what the relevant paragraph actually said.
So why five points at all? The reason for the fifth point is probably that Dordt made this statement in response to the second Article of Remonstrance, and in doing so, implied a correction to the Arminians’ statement:
That, agreeably thereto, Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the world, died for all men and for every man, so that he has obtained for them all, by his death on the cross, redemption, and the forgiveness of sins; yet that no one actually enjoys this forgiveness of sins, except the believer.
From reading Matt’s article, I’m not sure whether he believes (a) the Remonstrants were wrong that Christ died for all men, and needed correction, or (b) the Remonstrants were right, and they didn’t. So my question for him is: is the Remonstrants’ statement above - that Christ died for all but only believers enjoy the benefits of it - true, or false? If he says it is true, then I am with him all the way, and simply express my puzzlement that he sees the need for a fifth point of Calvinism at all. If he says it is false, because Christ’s death is not actually for all people, then I submit that the label “Limited Atonement”, even though not expressed in the Canons of Dordt, fits him like a glove, whether he likes the language or not. (The five-point Calvinist, on top of saying that “unique mercy” is required to believe, typically makes the additional claim that the death of Christ is not for everyone, thus shifting the ground from the predestining work of the Father (U) and the regenerating work of the Spirit (I) to the atoning work of the Son (L). For my part, I simply cannot find any scriptural text anywhere that indicates this is true, or that indicates the Second Article of Remonstrance requires any correction whatsoever.)
Moreover, I’m not sure that TULIP is as unfair a representation of five-point Calvinism as Matt implies. Leading Calvinists today frequently express Calvinism in those terms, and when asked to defend the L, use exactly the same blend of logical inference and texts-that-don’t-really-say-that (John 10:11 et al) as we heard at THINK (mentioning no names!). Not only that, but Matt’s article quotes Carl Trueman’s robust defence of Limited Atonement, which includes the L-word in its noun form, and Matt strongly implies he agrees with it. All of which is to say that, when Matt objects to the term “Limited Atonement”, I can’t tell whether that is because he doesn’t agree with the doctrine (as implied by his insistence that the Canons of Dordt don’t teach it), or because he agrees with it but doesn’t think it sounds very nice (as implied by his apparent affirmation of Carl Trueman). Humph.
One final point to raise: Trueman’s defence of Limited Atonement, which Matt quotes in support, is (with the greatest respect to two of my favourite bloggers), very weak. He says:
The claim is that Amyraldian [= four point Calvinist] views of atonement allow the evangelist or the pastor to say to the people in an unequivocal way that then undergirds both evangelism and assurance, “Christ died for you!” Anyone who understands the Amyraldian scheme, however, is not going to be impressed by such an answer; what they will really want to know is whether Christ is interceding for them. The problem of limitation has simply been shifted from Calvary to the right hand of God the Father.
The reason I say this is weak is that the “problem of limitation” is shifted from Calvary to the right hand of the Father, not by Amyraldians, but by Scripture itself. The idea that Jesus died for everyone, but intercedes for the elect only, comes from the Bible, not from four-point Calvinists. The two biblical passages that speak directly of the intercession of Christ make it clear that believers, rather than all people, are the focus of his prayers (Rom 8:33-34; Heb 7:25). The death of Christ, however, is regularly said to be for “all”, and nowhere limited to the elect. So when Trueman says that Amyraldians believe Christ died for every person but aren’t sure if he is praying for every person, I happily concede the point. But from what I can tell, Paul and Hebrews would agree. (It’s also worth saying that, when I tell unbelievers that Jesus died for them, they never sound unimpressed because they aren’t sure if Jesus is interceding for them. Believing in Limited Atonement does, I think, make preaching the gospel harder than Limited Intercession would).
So: either we say that Christ died for all, and become four-point Calvinists (like Calvin), or we say that he only died for some, and face the fact that Limited Atonement is a good description of what we actually believe (like Trueman). But I’m not sure we have the option of retaining the five points, and binning the acronym because we don’t like the sound of it. A TULIP by any other name would smell as fishy.
Flower-Free Five Point Calvinism
Giving last week's THINK conference the title, “Is Calvinism Incoherent?” might have been expected to produce a rather binary response of either “Yes” or “No”. Almost inevitably though, a more “shades of grey” picture emerged. Helpfully, our keynote speaker, Mike Ovey, pointed out that no human has entirely coherent thought, so it would be unfair to expect Calvinism to be without its anomalies. However, much of the debate focussed on the coherence or otherwise of the TULIP system, and in particular on the “L” of limited atonement.
Andrew had asked me to be on a panel at THINK to discuss some of the issues raised. Being reluctant to appear completely ignorant I did what any sensible person would do and brushed up on my reading before the event. One of the things that stood out for me in a fresh way as I did so was the relative novelty of TULIP as the defining way to express Calvinism. In fact, this device only seems to have appeared in the early years of the twentieth century, and while easily memorable is of limited use in explaining Reformed theology. Yet so ingrained has the TULIP become that, for most people, it is Calvinism. As Andrew has previously expressed it on this blog, “The five points of Calvinism refer to the Canons of Dordt, which are the decisions of the Synod of Dordrecht on the five disputed points of doctrine in the Netherlands in 1618-19. The latter are usually known by the acronym ‘TULIP’.” However, as Michael Horton notes, “It’s always better to read a confession than to reduce it to a clever device.”1
It is a real problem that so much of the debate about the coherence or otherwise of Calvinism has been reduced to a defence of, or attack upon, the TULIP. If we could forget TULIP and deal with what the Canons of Dordt actually say, and why they say it in response to the Articles of Remonstrance, we might make rather more progress. (If you have stuck with me this far you are probably interested enough to do some further reading, in which case I would strongly recommend Ten Myths About Calvinism by Kenneth Stewart which very clearly demonstrates the historical novelty and theological limitations of TULIP.)
As an example, and because it is the main bone of contention, let’s take a closer look at that pesky “L”.
My observation (and my personal wrestling over the years) has been with the apparent problem posed for preaching if the atonement really is limited. “How,” goes the question, “Can I possibly say, ‘God loves you, Jesus died for you, respond to him!’ if in fact I have no way of knowing whether Jesus actually did die for my hearers?” This is why many end up as “4-point Calvinists” or Amyraldians, to use the technical term. (And on this blog we should be able to use the technical term!) According to Amyraldianism Christ died for all, but intercedes only for the elect. This sounds much more palatable that limited atonement. However, it still leaves us with a problem. As Carl Trueman notes,
The claim is that Amyraldian views of atonement allow the evangelist or the pastor to say to the people in an unequivocal way that then undergirds both evangelism and assurance, “Christ died for you!” Anyone who understands the Amyraldian scheme, however, is not going to be impressed by such an answer; what they will really want to know is whether Christ is interceding for them. The problem of limitation has simply been shifted from Calvary to the right hand of God the Father.2
Spot on.
So, if 4-point Calvinism won’t really do, where can we turn? Well, to the original documents of course!
The Articles of Remonstrance have this to say about the extent of the atonement:
That, agreeably thereto, Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the world, died for all men and for every man, so that he has obtained for them all, by his death on the cross, redemption, and the forgiveness of sins; yet that no one actually enjoys this forgiveness of sins, except the believer.
I guess 4-Pointers, like Andrew, find themselves “wholly in agreement” with this article. So what is the response of the Canons of Dordt? Well, among other things it says the following,
This death of God’s Son is the only and entirely complete sacrifice and satisfaction for sins; it is of infinite value and worth, more than sufficient to atone for the sins of the whole world.
(Don’t just skip over that sentence!)
Moreover, it is the promise of the gospel that whoever believes in Christ crucified shall not perish but have eternal life. This promise, together with the command to repent and believe, ought to be announced and declared without differentiation or discrimination to all nations and people, to whom God in his good pleasure sends the gospel.
However, that many who have been called through the gospel do not repent or believe in Christ but perish in unbelief is not because the sacrifice of Christ offered on the cross is deficient or insufficient, but because they themselves are at fault.
But all who genuinely believe and are delivered and saved by Christ’s death from their sins and from destruction receive this favor solely from God’s grace – which he owes to no one – given to them in Christ from eternity.
What’s not to like about that? It is every bit as delicious, and winsome, and worship-generating as the second Article of Remonstrance. In my estimation, it is more so.
What Dordt then goes onto reject, and from which our very inadequate “L” is derived, is the teaching that,
All people have been received into the state of reconciliation and into the grace of the covenant, so that no one on account of original sin is liable to condemnation, or is to be condemned, but that all are free from the guilt of this sin. For this opinion conflicts with Scripture which asserts that we are by nature children of wrath.
Which of course is to deal with the danger of a slide into universalism. The Canons then continue in rejecting those,
Who make use of the distinction between obtaining and applying in order to instill in the unwary and inexperienced the opinion that God, as far as he is concerned, wished to bestow equally upon all people the benefits which are gained by Christ’s death; but that the distinction by which some rather than others come to share in the forgiveness of sins and eternal life depends on their own free choice (which applies itself to the grace offered indiscriminately) but does not depend on the unique gift of mercy which effectively works in them, so that they, rather than others, apply that grace to themselves. For, while pretending to set forth this distinction in an acceptable sense, they attempt to give the people the deadly poison of Pelagianism.
And that is really the nub – that Arminianism by emphasizing the freedom of man over the freedom of God opens the door to Pelagianism. Which serves to remind us that what we are dealing with is the argument between Augustine and Pelagius as much as that between Calvin and Arminius.
So where does this leave us?
Where it leaves me is with a commitment to the five points of Calvinism, but with some reservations towards the TULIP. “Limited atonement” is a clumsy and easily misunderstood term; the second point of the Canons of Dordt is full of grace and wonder!
Footnotes
Modern Reformation, Vol 21, No. 1, p. 63.
Ibid., p. 61.
Did Jesus Exist?
Did Jesus of Nazareth exist? Well, obviously. It's one of those questions that answers itself just by being asked; the only people who answer in the negative are cranky mythicists, professional atheists and conspiracy theorists. Aren't they?
Well, Bart Ehrman recently released a popular level book, Did Jesus Exist?, attempting to settle the question once and for all. (As a first century historian and New Testament scholar, albeit one very sceptical to the claims of Christianity, Ehrman knows the answer is yes). But Richard Carrier, the radical sceptic best known for his writings on the Infidels website, thinks Ehrman has been grossly unfair to mythicists. Carrier responded that Ehrman had unfairly implied that all mythicists (that is, people who believe Jesus didn’t exist) were oddballs who believed things no serious scholar believes, and that this was unfair; he argued that Ehrman had made a whole host of errors in the book, which made him guilty of the same shoddy scholarship of which he had accused mythicists. Ehrman then made a lengthy reply to Carrier’s accusations of incompetence, conceding that he had made one or two errors, but that on all the main issues he had accurately represented ancient sources and modern scholars. Then Carrier replied again, reiterating his charges of slovenly research, and for all I know, the debate may well continue.
My guess is that only a handful of apologetically minded readers will want to read the lengthy, and sometimes bad-tempered, exchange between these two men; some will find it colossally uninteresting, and some may even be pleased that two people who have made their names being antagonistic towards Christianity have come to blows. But I mention it for three reasons. One, it is a helpful reminder that we mustn’t tar all atheists or sceptics with the same brush, as if people who don’t believe in God are all effectively saying the same thing (what I sometimes refer to as the Stephen Dawkins phenomenon).
Two, it demonstrates the importance of rigorous fact-checking in published works, lest a discussion about something very important (the existence of Jesus) be hijacked by a squabble about something very trivial in comparison (whether procurators and prefects are the same thing). I’ve made errors here in the past, most farcically when a font change left me announcing in the US version of Incomparable that your brain amasses “between 109 and 1020 pieces of information” in your lifetime, so I’m talking to myself here as well.
And three, the whole discussion shows how enormous the evidence is for the existence of Jesus. Even if we were to concede that on every point of disagreement in these articles, Carrier was right and Ehrman was wrong - which seems extremely unlikely - we would still be left with the conclusion that a tiny minority of scholars in history, and all-but-none today, agree with Carrier on the details of his theory. Carrier’s objection in his correspondence is that Ehrman has made it look like no self-respecting, credible historian would agree with any particulars of the mythicist view; what he may have succeeded in establishing, at best, is that almost no self-respecting, credible historian would agree with any particulars of the mythicist view (let alone the whole caboodle). Which I suspect Ehrman would be happy to concede.
So yes, Jesus of Nazareth existed. Next week: Grandma - friend or foe?
——————
Andrew is the author of several books including, most recently, If God, Then What?.
Plain Speaking
Carl Trueman’s posts on the Reformation21 blog are eagerly anticipated by some of us who post here at WYTM. His theology and emphases do not correspond exactly with where we stand, but often they do, and more generally Trueman writes the kind of punchy, thought-provoking pieces that we aspire to.
In a recent post about the role of elders (“Honour the Vanilla Men”) Trueman made this observation,
In 1 Timothy, Paul sketches out a blueprint of how the gospel is to be preserved after the passing of the apostles…he specifically does not tell Timothy to look for the big personalities, the beautiful young things, the heavyweight scholars or the hit-and-run itinerant preachers of the parachurch world. What he advocates is the appointment of rather bland, non-descript, respectable men as elders. These vanilla men, basically competent and with no skeletons in the cupboard, are to be entrusted with keeping the church on the straight and narrow.
If, like me, you are an elder, I wonder how you feel about the ideal of your role being described as “vanilla”? And if you are not an elder, I wonder how you feel about honouring such men?
It is often easier for us to be critical than honouring, and when it comes to appraising those elders who preach my guess would be that the readers of this blog have fairly highly developed critical faculties. Even though I preach more sermons than I sit and listen to I am aware how quickly my assessment of another preacher can be shaped by the winsomeness of his personality, the depth of his learning, or the fluency of his presentation. Not that winsomeness, learning or fluency are to be despised, but that living in a culture whose values are shaped by the likes of “The Voice” means we are predisposed to make judgements on faulty criteria and fail to honour vanilla where honour is due.
Trueman explains why we should honour the faithful vanilla man,
The teacher is the herald of good news. Like a messenger from a battlefield, he brings the goods news of the triumph of the king against the armies that seek to destroy the church. That makes him a target for those who would wish that such news never be proclaimed.
It should also make him an object of honour for those who hear and rejoice. It is hard to imagine that the villagers would not honour that man who brings word to them that the army which threatened their destruction has been destroyed. The herald did not win the victory but he would no doubt be carried shoulder high through the village that night.
So it should be for the one who proclaims God’s word each week. He should be honoured not for who he is or what he has done but for the glorious good news which he brings.
This means that even if the preacher at your church is bland, non-descript and respectable, you should not despise the vanilla of his delivery. Instead, as you sit down to listen to this Sunday’s sermon, let your predisposition be one of honouring what you are about to hear by honouring the one who is to deliver it because by so doing you are honouring The One whose message of triumph it is.
Presence
The other day I was having dinner with some other pastors and the conversation worked around to the ubiquity of electronic communication and entertainment. One of my colleagues was lamenting the umbilical cord that seems to exist between young people and their electronic devices – iPod permanently on, phone ceaselessly examined, you know the story. Another pastor interrupted him, pointing out the extent to which we, too, were wired up – I had been playing online chess with another pastor via my phone, we had been looking at someone’s photos on their iPad, texting had taken place. Rather than seeing our electronic connections as worrisome, argued my friend, we should recognize how useful they are, and the extent to which they can build communication, and thus community. He had a strong point, and is the kind of person who expresses his points strongly, so the discussion rather fizzled out at that point and we moved onto something else.
It’s worth thinking about though.
One of the interesting things I have observed is the strong opinions that can be generated by the subject. Any perceived attack against TV or Facebook or gaming, or whatever it may be, tends to get pretty hostile feedback. And when something like that generates that kind of defence it tends to make me think, “Oh – maybe there is something deeper going on here. Maybe an idol has just been exposed.”
The arguments for technology are generally as hackneyed as those against them, and thus barely worth the effort of articulating. But let’s try to clear some ground – let’s assume, for the sake of the argument, that:
- Every media development since the Guttenberg Press has upset someone, and could be used for either good or bad ends – it’s not the tech that is the problem, but the use to which it is put.
- I am not anti-tech.
- I recognise the irony of using a blog to discuss the subject.
What, then, are some of the cautions we might want to think about in our use of tech? The kind of questions I would want to ask are these:
- Are we being entertained to death?
- What is the balance between the potential benefits to community of connecting via electronic media to its potential downsides? E.g., if I spend lots of time on Facebook, does that mean I end up with more meaningful relationships or fewer?
- At what point (assuming there is one) does our dependence on tech become unhealthy? Is it a problem if we never unplug?
- Is there a point at which our enthusiasm for the utility and fun provided by tech elevate it to the place of our god?
I have a sense that for many people the use of tech does become problematic. This sense is similar to what I feel about the place of music in our lives. Music is good. Music is God’s gift to us. But I have a sense that the role music is meant to play has become somewhat distorted when we are unable to live without it – when we are so nervous of silence that every gap in our lives has to be filled with sound. And then we find ourselves in the place where we don’t even notice the ubiquity of music. It’s like porn – porn is now so ubiquitous that we don’t even notice that many of the images we see every day would have been considered pornographic not that many decades ago. And if we have to check Facebook, or email, or Twitter every day, or couldn’t imagine living without a TV, or never switch off our phones, then perhaps – and this is no more than a suggestion – perhaps we have a problem.
As a personal spiritual discipline, for the good of my own soul and emotional health, I like to unplug on a regular basis. So it is my habit to have one day a week when I turn off the phone and don’t check email or social media (or even WYTM!). I find that helpful. In a similar way I often choose not to listen to music, although I love music, and listen to it often.
So I think I would want to affirm the observations of both my friends over dinner the other day. Yes, tech can be great. But, yes, tech can be a real problem. And here’s the clincher – the fact that we were actually physically present with one another, sitting around an actual table, eating real food, made the whole experience much more meaningful than if we’d merely been communicating electronically. Presence counts.
Becoming Charismissional
Yesterday, I explored some of the ways in which the charismatic-missional tension is felt by those of us who are convinced that we as churches are called to mission, and called to experience the person and work of the Holy Spirit in greater power and intimacy. Today, I want to suggest some ways forward. I have already started by doing the unforgivable, and coining a new piece of jargon, charismissional, for the fusion of spiritual and evangelistic zeal I am hoping for. (It may not be new; who knows?) As someone who regularly mocks Christian leadership jargon being used without irony - my favourites of late are being invited to a "roundtable" and asked to help "set plumbline" for people - and who has written pieces trying to disentangle words like "missional" and "Reformed", this might seem out of character. I hope it does. But whatever you say about neologisms, they do have the power to make people stop and think about how their constituent parts work together. So charismissional it is.
My aim today is simply to suggest how, in the light of the challenges I highlighted yesterday, we may both experience the fullness of life in the Spirit and be as evangelistically fruitful as possible. I’m aiming primarily at church leaders, though I hope all sorts of people will find something of interest here. So, in anticipation of more facetiousness from my fellow bloggers about my passion for enumeration, here are ten things which I think may help us.
1. Believing that being charismissional is possible. This is the biggest one, because as soon as people concede that it is impossible to be both charismatic and missional at the same time, they will give up trying, and simply choose between them on the basis of preference. The book of Acts, and particularly the Pentecost story, is absolutely critical here: the age of the Spirit began with a dramatic outpouring of God’s power, resulting in strange yet captivating charismatic phenomena (languages, tongues of fire, a rushing wind), but also in a clear explanation of what was happening alongside an articulation of the gospel, with the result that many were converted. It was the ultimate charismissional moment, and in Luke’s narrative it is intentionally paradigmatic for the church’s activity in the world. That doesn’t mean we will always get it right, or that if we do, 3,000 will respond to the gospel. But it does mean that giving up is not an option. It is possible, and biblical, to be charismissional.
2. Being honest about how charismatic you really are. In a comment on a recent post, Phil Moore asked the provocative question: “Do elders who allow weak blessed thoughts to masquerade as prophecy actually despise the gift of prophecy more than those who forbid it?” Some of us, I suspect, may believe our meetings are more charismatic than they are because we have “contributions”, and we may then make a value out of having members of the congregation speak into the microphone during the singing time - as if this, rather than the manifest presence of God, was the essence of being charismatic - even if many of the contributions are not spiritual gifts as Paul describes them at all. Be honest: are the things people contribute in your Sunday meetings truly charismatic? Do unbelievers hear the prophecies that occur and fall down before God in awe? Or have the prophecies become blessed thoughts, the testimonies become anecdotes, the tongues/languages become random babble, and the interpretations become attempts to fill the awkward silence afterwards? It may be a bit of both, and that’s fine; we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But be careful not to make a virtue out of being charismatic rather than missional, if you’re not being genuinely charismatic in the first place.
3. Being honest about how missional you really are. There’s no shortage of online material on this; bloggers of all stripes seem to love tweaking the noses of highly contextualised, missional pastors who all dress, talk, live and sound the same. But behind the bluster lie some important questions: is your church seeing lots of people saved, or lots of people transfer in from other churches? (In my church, we feel this challenge deeply, because the more “missional” we try and become, the more Christians turn up on our joining the church course, which is both kind of amusing and kind of troubling.) Are the people in your community sharing the gospel with people regularly? Or are they relying on the church to do that sort of thing, whether through programmes or Sunday meetings? Again, the answer may well be a bit of both - but be honest about it, and if you see yourselves as missional, avoid like the plague a sense of superiority towards your more charismatic brothers and sisters. Their people may well be preaching the gospel with more boldness than yours.
4. Thinking carefully about terminology. It may just be me, but I was a church leader in my late twenties before I realised that “O for a thousand tongues to sing” wasn’t about having one thousand red muscles in your mouth. Why on earth don’t we just call them languages? Why do we talk about bringing a “prophetic word”, or being “slain in the Spirit”, or for that matter a “ministry time”? Why not, instead of talking about “a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation” (1 Cor 14:26, ESV), talk about “a song, some teaching, sharing what God is saying now, a language, or an interpretation”? Spiritual gifts can appear odd enough to an unbeliever, without needing weird names to accompany them.
5. Explaining things really, really well in public meetings. Many leaders introduce meetings, link between different sections, present notices and oversee prayer times somewhat on the fly, which can make things less clear and more weird than they need to be. If used well, however, the explanation bits of a meeting - the welcome, the links, the conclusion, and so on - have the potential to make spiritual gifts really quite comprehensible and accessible to new people, including those who are not yet Christians. “Good morning everybody, and welcome to Kings! My name’s Andrew, and I’m one of the leaders here - if you’re new, let me just explain what’s going to happen today. We’re going to have about half an hour of singing songs of praise to God, and during that time, people from the church may share things they believe God is saying, speak in other languages, read from the Bible, and so on. During our time together, feel free to sit, stand, participate, watch: whatever makes you feel comfortable. We’re not going to make you do anything strange, but if you have any questions, do just ask. After that, we’ll have a financial offering, which is for people who come here regularly, then a few bits of information, and then Graham, one of the leaders here, is going to come and speak from the Bible. We’ll be finished around 10.30, and we’d love to chat to you afterwards in the Visitor Cafe.” That’s what I say every week; a great example of another sort of explanation comes from the aforementioned Phil Moore: “If you’re new, then please don’t think what we’re doing is weird. Praying for God to heal people / speak to people / encounter his people powerfully is not weird. If there is a God who made everything, there’s nothing weirder than believing that he can’t heal, speak to or encounter his people.” Whether or not these particular examples work for you, I submit that being charismissional means explaining things well.
6. Interpreting 1 Corinthians 14 accurately. Both sides have a pitfall on this one. While writing this very post, I heard a missional-leaning leader explain that “biblically, the priority for spiritual gifts is intelligibility for unbelievers”, on the basis of 14:23-25. This is far from the case: the priority is the use of gifts that build up the church (1-19, 26-40), in this case prophecy rather than uninterpreted languages, and intelligibility for unbelievers is an extra argument Paul adduces to encourage the Corinthians to do this (20-25). It is hardly the main point of the chapter, and when people use this logic to become lukewarm about prophecy or prohibit speaking in languages altogether, they fly in the face of Paul’s direct instruction in v39. On the other hand, I cannot count the number of times I have heard exhortations to contribute in meetings, charismatic-style, on the basis of verse 26, without noticing that in this verse, and in this chapter, Paul is speaking negatively of this practice rather than positively. So, rather than “when you come together, make sure you all use your various gifts of prophecy, teaching and so on to build people up”, the emphasis is, “when you come together, everyone’s so preoccupied with their gifts that they’re talking over each other without reference to building each other up” (the rest of the paragraph makes this context clear). I’m just saying: interpret 1 Corinthians 14 carefully.
7. Acknowledging that unbelievers are different. I have in mind here the tendency we have to say things like “non-Christians hate it when ...” or “unbelievers encounter God if ...”, when what we should say is “some non-Christians hate it when” or “unbelievers I know encounter God if ...” Some people love quiet, reflective meetings and thoughtful, undemonstrative, persuasive preaching; others find these things boring, lifeless and irrelevant. Some people love sweeping, emotionally expressive meetings and passionate, heartfelt preaching; others find these rabid, aggressive and invasive. By the same token, I suspect, unbelievers will vary in their preferences for spiritual manifestations in meetings. For stereotypical Manhattan-dwellers, Tim Keller is wonderful and Bill Johnson is wacky. For many others, however, Bill Johnson is dynamic and Tim Keller is dull. We need to be a bit careful, I think, of equating “missional” with “effective at reaching middle class white people.” In many cultures, and for many individuals within every culture, deep end meetings may be far more evangelistically fruitful than shallow end ones.
8. Training people to use their spiritual gifts in an evangelistic way. I’m not sure why, but most of us train musicians, train leaders, train preachers and teachers, train people on health and safety, and counselling, and how to recognise signs of child abuse, and first aid ... but we fail to train people how to bring spiritual gifts in an evangelistic way. There’s a slightly dualistic, even gnostic, flavour to this sometimes - you can’t train people to bring spiritual gifts, because that’s a spiritual thing, and the Spirit blows where he will, and so on - so we need to ask the question: what does it look like to bring a language, or an interpretation, in a missional way? How can the gift of discerning spirits be used evangelistically? If we wouldn’t let people preach or lead worship without ensuring they were trained, not least on how to do so missionally, is there a good reason why we should let people prophesy without training them in the same way?
9. Teaching as a team. Very few of us, if any, can teach publicly in a way that excels at clarifying doctrine, communicating the gospel, and increasing faith and expectation for charismatic experience, all at the same time. But while in some models of church leadership this could be regarded as a weakness - and in many, of course, either only the first one or the first two are regarded as necessary - in a team teaching model it is a potential strength, because no one individual can do it all alone, and this forces us to vary the diet of public communication in the church. So, in practical terms, leaders who excel at speaking doctrinally and evangelistically can look to involve someone on their teaching team who brings charismatic expression to the forefront, and so on. I can’t prove there aren’t any, but I can’t think of any charismissional church that operates with a one man teaching ministry, and I suspect there’s a reason for that.
10. Living charismissionally as a leader. This is undoubtedly the most important of the ten, and also the one that I find most personally challenging. If leaders live charismatic and missional lives - if we are seeking God for more of his Spirit, stepping out in faith regularly, eagerly desiring spiritual gifts and especially prophecy, keeping in step with the Spirit, loving the people around us, making strong friendships with those who don’t know Jesus, engaging with the culture(s) we’re part of, preaching the gospel with courage and dealing with the tough questions - then we will lead meetings that are like that, and ultimately churches that are like that. Church leadership is more than this, for sure, but it is certainly not less. Again, I can’t prove it, but my guess is that churches which are missional but not charismatic are often led by leaders who don’t especially pursue spiritual gifts, and that churches which are charismatic but not missional are often led by leaders who don’t especially connect with unbelievers. Charismissional pastors, in general, will produce charismissional churches.
So there you have it: ten suggestions for becoming charismissional (several of which I am addressing to myself as much as to anyone else). What d’you think?
The “Charismatic-Missional Tension”
I've been thinking quite a bit about the "charismatic-missional tension" recently. Some prefer not to think of it as a tension for theological reasons (since to be truly charismatic and truly missional are, surely, one and the same), and many will object to framing it as one because it makes it sound like a spectrum - highly charismatic and non-missional at one end, highly missional and non-charismatic at the other - that necessarily requires believers, and leaders, to compromise. But that said, I am confident that most readers of this blog will know what I mean when I call it that.
When David Devenish from Newfrontiers speaks of the challenge of becoming more missional while remaining charismatic, as he did recently at Together for the Nation, and when Dave Smith from Kingsgate, Peterborough talks about a shallow end / deep end approach to spiritual gifts in meetings (Sundays are shallow end, prayer meetings are deep end), they are addressing the issue I am talking about when I refer to the charismatic-missional tension, even if they don’t call it that. So I’ll use the phrase for now, because it’s a convenient shorthand, although I happily acknowledge that another way of framing it, like Simon Brading’s picture of an aeroplane with two jet engines on full blast, is probably needed.
But here’s what I’ve been wondering about. What, specifically, are the areas of concern, compromise or even conflict when we think of a charismatic-missional tension? What are the trade-offs, if that’s what they are? And what are the practical decisions we have to make about them? Because I’m not persuaded that the superficial analysis - that is, that being charismatic is entirely about encouraging spiritual gifts in meetings, and being missional means banning them - is accurate. I think the issues can be more subtle, and less explicitly biblical, than that. So here are a few areas where, in my experience, some of us can feel a tension between being fully charismatic and being fully missional.
Spiritual Gifts in Public Meetings. Having just said that this is not the whole story, it clearly is a sizeable part of the story. At the charismatic end of the spectrum, there are those who believe that encouraging spiritual gifts in public meetings is a core value, based on exhortations like 1 Corinthians 14:1 and summary statements like 14:26, and that a decision to ban them or discourage them in the interests of being “missional” is to sell out, and to directly disobey 14:39. At the missional end, there are those who argue that the Holy Spirit’s intention is always to draw unbelievers to Jesus through the gospel, and that expressions of spiritual gifts in the church are always to be subordinated to this wider purpose, on the basis of 1 Corinthians 14:23; doing this, and administering a meeting in a way that is “fitting and orderly” (14:40), might well (in some cultures) involve restricting spiritual gifts in public meetings for the sake of the outsider.
The extremes are relatively easy to see. I’ve been in Sunday meetings which are full of spiritual gifts but virtually incomprehensible to me, let alone to any unbelievers who might be present. I’ve also been in formerly charismatic churches which are so seeker sensitive that spiritual gifts have been all-but-banned in public contexts. But in between those extremes, there are lots of us who think that prohibiting spiritual gifts in a meeting is unbiblical, and that Paul sees prophecy in particular as highly missional, but who also think that everything should be done in a fitting and orderly way, that wackiness doesn’t necessarily glorify God, and that it is important for unbelievers to be able to understand what they see and hear. Navigating that one is not impossible, but it can be challenging.
Pursuing Breakthrough in Healing. This might sound odd, because healings in Scripture, as well as today, present such an excellent opportunity to preach the gospel. What could be more missional, some wonder, than seeing a healing happen in front of you? Well, yes. But the point is, it is almost incontestable that pursuing breakthrough in healing as a church - as opposed to, say, being satisfied with the occasional sick person getting well - requires a commitment to stepping out in risk-filled faith, and an openness to failure. The churches today that see the most people healed in response to prayer are, almost without exception, the churches that also see the most people not healed in response to prayer. They take more risks, pursue greater and more dramatic signs and wonders, and frequently find that people don’t get healed. As John Wimber apparently said, I’d rather pray for a thousand people and see one healed, than pray for nobody and see none healed.
So how do you handle it when unbelievers are around, and you say that God heals today, and pray for people on that basis, and then nobody gets healed? In practice, I’ve found myself in that situation on several occasions: how do you respond in a way that doesn’t fake it, doesn’t patronise the unbeliever, and doesn’t destroy faith in the church? How, also, do you handle partial, temporary or unimpressive healings: with a potentially faith-diminishing honesty (“OK, you didn’t really get healed, but people often don’t; we’ll carry on praying, though!”), or with a potentially honesty-compromising faith (“that’s amazing that you’re a tiny bit better! Praise God”)? The charismatic guys might decide to pursue and testify to healing come what may, even if unbelievers are led to conclude that they’re deluding themselves; the missional guys might shut the whole thing down, in corporate gatherings at least, for fear of making the church look weird to outsiders. What to do?
Corporate “Ministry Times” in Public Meetings. Another area where some will perceive a charismatic-missional tension is in the handling of so-called “ministry times” (I say so-called, not to cast aspersions on them, but just because the phrase itself is not a biblical one, and “ministry” simply means “service”). Fifteen years ago, any charismatic church worth its salt would have had a “ministry time” at the end of their meeting, in which people would respond to the message, pray for each other, lay hands on one another, prophesy over each other, and (often) respond to God in a variety of visible ways including crying, laughing, falling down, shouting out, and so on. These days, any missional church worth its salt would be highly sceptical of things that would appear bizarre to a visitor, and would often regard such “ministry times” as a rather self-indulgent practice that should be reserved for corporate prayer meetings. Again, in the middle, there are many who want the people of God to experience him in a deeper way when they gather together, and who suspect that if something gets bumped from Sundays the saints will instinctively think it doesn’t matter much, but who also don’t want to seem needlessly strange to visitors, and who struggle with how to fit a thirty minute ministry time into a ninety minute meeting alongside a forty minute worship time, a forty minute talk, a few necessary notices, breaking bread, and whatever else.
Even when ministry times take place, some leaders will wonder which sorts of responses should be allowed, encouraged or pursued. As anyone who has heard Kim Walker will testify, laughing out loud in the middle of a song can bring a huge sense of joy to the Christians - but then again, it might also seem strange to visitors. An individual crying out as they encounter God’s love often raises the spiritual bar significantly for believers who are present, and it can thereby foster greater openness to the Spirit - but it can also spook people who have no idea what is going on. We could say similar things of falling down, whooping, dancing, and the like. We could also say it of the lengthy silences that often precede people encountering God in power. So even if “ministry times” are unequivocally embraced as a powerful way of engaging with God, it remains the case that leaders, not to mention individuals in the church who have brought guests along, may feel the charismatic-missional tension.
Preaching and Teaching on Sundays. Preaching and teaching in such a way that is faithful to the biblical text, teaches doctrine clearly to Christians and communicates the gospel clearly to non-Christians is hard work. It’s not impossible, but it’s hard work. If you then add into the mix the need to encourage, exhort and equip Christians regularly to pursue spiritual experience, ideally by modelling it yourself, things become even more difficult. It is probably no coincidence, then, that virtually every gifted preacher or teacher I can think of excels at one or two of these (doctrine and mission, mission and Spirit, Spirit and doctrine), but not all three. It’s just an awful lot to achieve in forty minutes.
Websites and Social Media. This is a curveball, but: I know of some church websites, and some Facebook friends, that by being charismatic express things in ways that alienate some non-Christians. I know of others that, in the name of being missional, say next to nothing about what God has done or is doing in their lives. The former raise faith amongst Christian friends but risk freaking out others; the latter remain friends with everyone, but miss opportunities to testify to God’s power for the benefit of their fellow believers. Just a thought.
So there we have it: the “charismatic-missional tension” boiled down to five issues. There are some other notable examples - the planning vs spontaneity spectrum, the issue of the church’s focus in its efforts and its prayers, etc - but those strike me as the main ones. And I think they need some thoughtful reflection, particularly from those of us called to lead and pastor God’s people. Tomorrow, I’ll try and make some sense of it all.
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Andrew is the author of several books including, most recently, If God, Then What?.
Good Man Isn’t God-Man
“Among you stands one you do not know. He is the one who comes after me, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie.” (John 1:26-27)
John wasn’t the only one who drew a lot of unwanted attention from the celebrity chasers at Ephesus. They still held John the Baptist in such high regard that when Paul‘s church-planting team arrived there in 53AD, they found the foremost Christian preacher in the city telling the Ephesians to be baptised into John the Baptist instead of into Jesus.1 The desert preacher who revived backslidden Israel in 27-28AD was still held in such high regard by the early Christians that an Arabian merchant named Muhammad would even list him as a prophet alongside Jesus over five centuries later in the Qur’an.
John had more reason than Matthew, Mark or Luke to give in to his readers’ desire to place John the Baptist on a pedestal. He is the unnamed disciple in verses 35-40, so he and his fishing partner Andrew had been some of John the Baptist’s earliest disciples. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that he spends much of chapters 1 and 3 clarifying what his former teacher’s message was. He, more than anyone, knew that John the Baptist was a good man, but he is alive to the danger that our admiration for a good man may actually distract us from obeying his call to look and see the God-Man.
John has already told us in verses 6-8 that John the Baptist was simply a witness sent from God to prepare the Jewish nation for its Messiah.2 He called them to be baptised, which was not new in itself because Gentile converts to Judaism were baptised at the same time as they were circumcised as part of their entry into the People of God. What made John’s baptism new was that it was a baptism for Jews as an outward sign of their inner repentance and their confession that Jewishness was not enough to save anyone. When some Jews refused to be baptised, he warned that being descended from Abraham didn’t change the fact that they were the “offspring of vipers” until they surrendered to the Lord.3
Now, in verses 19-28, John clarifies his former teacher’s message further. He tells us that John the Baptist freely confessed that he was not the Messiah predicted by Moses when he talked about the coming of ‘the Prophet’ in Deuteronomy 18:15-19.4 Even though the three Synoptic gospel writers rightly link him to the prophecy in Malachi 4:5-6 that a man like Elijah would lead Israel in revival before the Messiah came, he insists in verse 21 that he is not Elijah in the sense that most Israelites assumed. The prophet who had ascended to heaven in a chariot of fire without dying nine centuries earlier in 2 Kings 2 had not returned.5 John the Baptist was merely like Elijah in his calling to turn Israel away from false objects of worship in order to see the Living God.6 Those who truly honour John the Baptist as a good man are those who gaze beyond him to the God-Man whose shoelaces he was too unworthy to untie. “Look!” he pointed in verse 29, “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”7
John knew that many of his readers were so in love with their human hero that their admiration stopped them from doing the very things he said. Therefore he does not tell the story of Jesus’ baptism like Matthew, Mark and Luke, but tells us in verses 30-34 what John the Baptist finally realised when Jesus came up out of the water. They were close relatives and had known one another from early childhood,8 but he hadn’t guessed that Jesus was the Son of God until he saw the Holy Spirit descend on him at his baptism and remain on him for ministry.9 At once, he recognised his own frail limitations and beat a hasty retreat out of the limelight so that Jesus could take centre-stage. The Bridegroom gets noticed and the groomsman gets forgotten, he insists in 3:29-30. “He must become greater; I must become less.” He refused to let a good man take the focus off the God-Man.
To help us, John tells us in verses 35-39 that he has already had to walk the road he is telling us to travel. He had once fixed his eyes on John the Baptist with all the eager devotion of a young disciple, but he had learned to honour his teacher by doing what he taught and shifting his gaze from the messenger and onto the Messiah. “Look, the Lamb of God!” John the Baptist had told him, and John had started following a new rabbi instead. Unlike the starstruck Ephesians, he had let nothing distract him from the one who could forgive him and change his life from the inside out by baptising him with the Holy Spirit.10
I recently spent time with a group of young church leaders who were concerned about what will happen when the ageing leader of their denomination retires. It brought home to me how easy it still is for us to let respect for a good man dilute our faith in the God-Man who has worked through that great leader and will continue to work through many fresh leaders when he has gone. That’s one of the reasons why the Lord has only granted each one of us a brief lifespan, because Church history has room for only one hero and it isn’t one of us. Retirements and deaths are God’s way of shifting his People’s gaze away from the unhealthy human hero worship which infected the church at Ephesus. As John prepared the believers for the day that he would die, as the last of Jesus’ twelve disciples, he warned them not to fix their eyes on any good man who might distract their focus from the God-Man.
Charles Wesley was inspired many centuries later to write a hymn from John the Baptist’s words, when he and his brother were at the height of their fame:
“His only righteousness I show, His saving grace proclaim;
‘Tis all my business here below to cry ‘Behold the Lamb!’
Happy if with my latest breath I may but gasp His Name,
Preach Him to all and cry in death, ‘Behold, behold the Lamb!”11
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This is one of a series of extracts from Phil Moore’s book Straight to the Heart of John. This and other books in the series can be purchased through his website.
Footnotes
1 Acts 18:19-19:7.
2 He tells us John the Baptist is not the Light in 1:8, not the Messiah or Christ in 3:28, not the greatest witness in 5:36, and not a miracle-worker in 10:41.
3 John expects us to know this already from Luke 3:7-9.
4 Although John wrote his gospel in Greek, we can tell that he still thought like a Jew from the way he uses a Hebrew ‘synthetic parallelism’ to tell us in verse 20 that “he did not fail to confess, but confessed freely.” We can also tell it from 3:29 where he says “he rejoices with joy”, instead of using a Greek adverb.
5 The rumour he might actually be Elijah stemmed from their similar clothing (2 Kings 1:8 & Matthew 3:4) and the fact he ministered on the east side of the Jordan near the place where Elijah had ascended to heaven.
6 Luke 1:16-17, Mark 9:11-13 and Matthew 11:7-14 & 17:10-13. The quotation in verse 23 comes from Isaiah 40:3, which goes alongside those in Malachi 3:1 & 4:5-6 to teach that John the Baptist would straighten the path or clear the way for Jesus (the same phrase is used in 1 Thessalonians 3:11). John the Baptist was simply the warm-up act. Jesus was the headline superstar.
7 John deliberately uses an unusual Greek word for lamb in verses 29 & 36, because Isaiah 53:7 used this same word to prophesy that the Messiah would be God’s sacrificial lamb for sin.
8 Since their mothers were related, Luke 1:35-45 tells us they had a dramatic first encounter whilst both of them were still inside their mothers’ wombs.
9 John the Baptist confesses in 1:33 that, even though his mother recognised that Mary was “the mother of my Lord” as early as in Luke 1:43, he himself did not grasp this until much later.
10 Matthew 3:11-12, Mark 1:8, Luke 3:16 & John 1:29. Focusing too much on John the Baptist stopped the Ephesian believers from receiving the Holy Spirit in Acts 19, so John tells us to fix our eyes on the one on whom the Spirit both descended and remained. He is the one who will baptise us with that same Spirit.
11 From the hymn “Jesus! the Name high over all”, written by Charles Wesley in about 1750.
The Appearance Of Commitment
“Nah, don’t be like that. Just because I’m proposing to her, doesn’t mean we’re going to get married or anything!”
The bloke behind me on the bus had been chatting on his mobile for quite some time when he came out with this gem. He’d been counselling his friend on how to deal with a difficult work situation and then, to move the conversation along, had confided that he was planning to propose to his girlfriend. He seemed genuinely surprised that his friend’s thoughts immediately went to marriage. He explained himself: “I’ve been looking at rings a bit, but you know what I’m like with commitment…”
Now this is pure speculation, and may be a gross misreading of the situation, but from this snippet of conversation I deduce that the man’s girlfriend had been getting restless. She wanted to know if their relationship had any future, and he, afraid of commitment, but almost equally afraid of losing her, decided that a proposal was what she was looking for. A ring on her finger would assure her enough of his commitment to her that she wouldn’t leave him and they could carry on as before for an indefinite period.
Unfortunately, he’s probably about to get the shock of his life. If his girlfriend is like the majority of women out there, a ring won’t mean the end of a conversation but the beginning. She will immediately go into wedding-planning mode and start thinking about dates and dresses, guests and gift lists, flowers and photographers. She will see the circle of gold and the sparkly stone as an indication that his heart has changed, and will expect further actions to follow.
He will discover that he hasn’t bought himself an easy life, but a whole new raft of expectations. Does this remind you of anyone? For me it brought to mind the Israelites in Isaiah 58, asking ‘Why have we fasted and you have not seen it?’
Sermons on this passage usually move quickly onto verse 6, exhorting us to loose the chains of injustice, share our food with the hungry, clothe the naked and generally get involved in social justice ministries – and rightly so. I had not noticed before, though, the very first, simple but all-inclusive reason God gives the people for his silence: “On the day of your fasting, you do as you please.”
This is exactly what the man on the bus was doing, performing an outward act of commitment to his girlfriend, but at heart simply acting to please himself. The Israelites fasted so God would grant their requests, the boyfriend bought a ring so his girlfriend would stay with him.
It will be no revelation to readers of this blog that we should avoid legalism and not expect our outward shows or even our private prayers to force God’s hand and persuade him to act in our favour. We all know that the purpose of prayer and obedience is in order that our relationship with God may be deepened, that we would be better able to hear his voice and serve him. For those, like me, who sometimes find illustrations easier to relate to than abstract concepts, though, I hope this is a useful illustration of the kind of attitude that we can so easily slip into.
We can’t just give God an outward display of commitment and hope that will keep him quiet. We need to have more courage, and more honesty, than the bloke on the bus and either commit ourselves fully, or make a clean break and walk away. Which will it be?
The Key to Good Preaching…
... is, as Liam Thatcher and Mick Taylor will tell you, having a beard. Look:
Source: Anon
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Andrew Wilson is the author of several books including, most recently, If God, Then What? He is beardless, but that doesn’t seem to stop him preaching and writing prolifically.
Huxley vs Orwell
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984 have a lot in common. Both depict a fruitless, empty dystopia in the future, both were written within twenty years (1931 and 1949 respectively) in the first half of the twentieth century, and thus both, in a fictional but nonetheless dark and even savage way, imagine what the world would be like today.
Fundamentally, however, they offer completely different accounts of what will enslave humanity in generations to come. In his Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Neil Postman points out some of the differences, and argues that one of them was far closer to the reality that ensued than the other. Thanks to Justin Taylor for the link:
Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing.
Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.
Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.
Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.
Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.
In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
...Huxley, not Orwell, was right.
That’s profound. So which do you find more frightening: The Hunger Games, or The Voice?
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Andrew is the author of several books including, most recently, If God, Then What?.
Is Numbers 5 Unfair to Women?
A friend sent me an email last month asking this question. Unless you have memorised the Old Testament, which most of us haven’t, I think I should explain the problem. I’ll do this by quoting the passage concerned:
Then the LORD said to Moses, “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: ‘If a man’s wife goes astray and is unfaithful to him so that another man has sexual relations with her, and this is hidden from her husband and her impurity is undetected (since there is no witness against her and she has not been caught in the act), and if feelings of jealousy come over her husband and he suspects his wife and she is impure—or if he is jealous and suspects her even though she is not impure—then he is to take his wife to the priest. ... Then the priest shall put the woman under oath and say to her, “If no other man has had sexual relations with you and you have not gone astray and become impure while married to your husband, may this bitter water that brings a curse not harm you. But if you have gone astray while married to your husband and you have made yourself impure by having sexual relations with a man other than your husband”—here the priest is to put the woman under this curse—“may the LORD cause you to become a curse[d] among your people when he makes your womb miscarry and your abdomen swell. May this water that brings a curse enter your body so that your abdomen swells or your womb miscarries.” Numbers 5:11-22
The question that this friend had was: why is a woman singled out instead of a man, and why is there no test for a man? And does this not prove that God was unfair in his dealings with women in the Old Testament?
Like everything in the Bible it needs to be taken in context. But before I look at the context, I think it important to mention a form of hermeneutics (ways of interpreting the Bible) that I, and many others, use. It is called ‘Redemptive-Movement hermeneutic’. It sees the Bible as a progression of God’s unfolding plans and purposes. Therefore, the laws in the Old Testament were good and progressive within the context in which they were given, but might not be so today.
I will explain the basis for the Redemptive-Movement hermeneutic before I move on the discuss Numbers 5. Jesus makes a statement in Matthew 19 about divorce only being allowed by the Law of Moses because of their ‘hardness of heart’. Jesus concludes by saying, ‘It was not this way from the beginning’. In other words Jesus is saying, the law was in place to minimise sin, not to take it away (This is also clear in a lot of Paul’s writings in the New Testament, e.g. Romans 2:12-24). So one should look to the principles of creation, before sin entered the world, or to the revelation of Christ, if we are looking for what God wants to see in our relationships and culture. This is why we know that God designed one man for one woman, and that polygamy was a distortion of God’s perfect standard. But notice, polygamy is not condemned in the Bible. In Matthew 19 Jesus makes it clear that God was so passionate about a relationship with us, that he ‘lowered the bar’, in order not to ask too much of people, as it says in the Bible: ‘He remembers that we are flesh’. However, now we have Christ the moral standard is higher, as we have the help of the Holy Spirit, just as it was in the beginning. Therefore, when reading the Old Testament, it is good to remember that God was laying down laws that, within the context of that culture, men and women were able to follow. And he created these laws to benefit society and to limit sin. He also did it because he wanted to have relationship with the people of Israel.
My Apologetics Study Bible comments on Numbers 5:
Potential Marital fidelity: in the case of the wife suspected of unfaithfulness. If a women were apprehended in the act of adultery, both she and her adulterous male partner were subject to the death penalty (Lev. 20:10, Deut. 22:22). The ritual outlined here put the matter of suspected, but not apprehended, adulterer in the hands of God, the only reliable witness. These provisions ensured that a woman found to be innocent would be preserved from stoning by a mob.1
This law was introduced to stop the ill treatment of women, who were just suspected, and not necessarily guilty, of sleeping around. How many relationships do you know of which have been broken apart through jealously? This ritual would not only protect the women from the mob, but also from an unhappy marriage. If the woman is guilty then the bitter water will cause a miscarriage, and she will be barren. In those days that was much more disastrous than even today, as a woman’s status was tied to the children she produced.
Why is there not a similar law for men? Firstly, the law was in place to prevent a man being suspicious that some of his children were not his. Heirs to a family inheritance, the first born son, were a very integral part of ancient near-eastern culture. Likewise, the concept of ‘clan’ and ‘tribe’ were important. Hence, knowing that the children of the wife’s were genetically the father’s was also very important. So one reason why this test was applied to women only was because it was concerned with the question ‘is the child legitimate?’, and as women, and not men, carry children, the test could only be applied to women. Secondly, I believe it is due to the polygamous society in which the law was issued. Men were allowed to marry more than one woman, and as such, if a man slept with an unmarried woman he was required to ask for her hand in marriage, or pay her father to look after her from the rest of her life, as it would be difficult for her to remarry (Exodus 22:16-17). This allowed women to be financially stable, despite the possible immorality of men, which was the primary goal of marriage.
Therefore, if a man wanted to be with another woman, he was able to marry her, even if he already had a wife. As such, when it came to unfaithfulness, within the context of Ancient Near Eastern culture, it was more likely that a man would be jealous of a woman for breaking her marriage vows. This is because a man could have multiple marriages, and would not need to break marriage vows to sleep with other women, unless the woman were also married, which I will look at below. Although I do not agree with polygamy, as I have mentioned elsewhere, I do appreciate that the legal system in Numbers 5 was designed with that cultural backdrop in mind.
In the case that a married, or non-married, man had intercourse with a married woman, the Mosaic Law was clear that both parties would be put to death (Lev. 20:10, Deut. 22:22). In this regard the Old Testament law is impartial.
Therefore in conclusion, I would say that the Old Testament is not unfair to women compared to men, within the ancient near-eastern cultural context. It is always difficult to look back in history and think: ‘How could God have allowed harsh punishments for women, and men, caught in adultery?’, but another way of thinking would be ‘what is God allowing right now which is immoral and we are not aware of it?’ Perhaps we are also not aware of his tolerance and patience with us?’ The fact that God did not demand perfection in the Old Testament was due to the fact that he knew how much change, or perfection, we were really able to handle. He wanted a relationship with us as first priority, and provided laws that would limit sin, and a sacrificial system that would atone for sin. This system has now been fulfilled in Christ, who not only does not need to be sacrificed again and again like the sacrifices of the Old Testament, but covers the sin that the Law of Moses didn’t, i.e certain forms of adultery, murder and idolatry. As Hebrews 8:6 states, Christ really does offer us better promises, and a higher moral system of the heart and well as of action, reflective of what God created in the beginning, rather than the limiting-sin Laws of the Old Testament.
Footnotes
1 Apologetics Study Bible, Holman Bible Publishers, p. 206
Simon Says
I've heard three profound things recently from friends of mine named Simon. Though all three men are in church leadership, their churches, gifts, areas of responsibility and philosophies of ministry are different in some significant ways. But they have at least two things in common: they love the Lord, and they have some great insights. Here are three of them.
Simon Elliott leads New Life Church in East Grinstead. He was insisting the other day that leaders, when setting and articulating vision, should make a clear distinction between fruit and goals. Fruit, he said, is all about the things that God does: saving people, stirring the hearts of people to give generously, working signs and wonders, causing people (and churches) to grow in numbers and maturity, and bringing new people and gifts into the church. Goals, on the other hand, are the things we do: invite people round for dinner, speak to people about the gospel, teach the church clearly about giving, communicate vision and values clearly, invite people to Alpha, and so on. And we absolutely must distinguish between the two.
Fruit, he explained, we need to pray for. We should pray for more salvation, more generosity, more people, gifts and maturity. But we don’t set goals for those things, for the simple reason that they are not in our control. We don’t set a church goal of “seeing ten people saved and added this year”, because it is God who saves. On the other hand, we might set a church goal of “inviting eighty people to Alpha this year”, because that’s where our responsibility lies. In fact, that’s not something we particularly should be praying about - we just need to do it! So leaders need to distinguish carefully between fruit and goals. We set goals, and pursue them; we pray for fruit, and trust God for it. Be careful of confusing the two.
Simon Holley leads the Kings Arms church in Bedford, and he has a whole host of profound things up his sleeve, but the one that struck me most recently was this. He was talking about the tendency of evangelicals to marginalise, and hence fail to learn from, people who aren’t on our “team” - so, for example, the people who have most to learn from signs and wonders Pentecostals, or conservative Bible expositors, are also the people least likely to ask them for help! - and he made a throwaway remark. Ever since the Reformation, he said, Protestant Christians have made a habit of uniting around truth, rather than uniting around the Father. So if people disagree with us, we find it hard to express unity with them in Christ, because our views of what constitute truth differ so much; in the New Testament, by contrast, Christians are united through their relationship to the same Father.
Obviously, if people deny the truth of the gospel, then we are not united in the Father at all. But the fissures within evangelicalism occur, as Simon rightly points out, over many issues that do not compromise the truth of the gospel: the age of the earth, gender roles, spiritual gifts, election, continuance in salvation, and dozens of other things that do not ultimately exclude us from relationship to our Father. So for all that we hold to convictions about these things, and we do (and should), we need to be careful about uniting over them. Our unity comes from somewhere higher, and deeper, than that: our Father.
Finally there is Simon Brading, who heads up the team of musicians and worship leaders at Church of Christ the King in Brighton. We were talking about what is sometimes referred to as the charismatic / missional tension: the challenge (if that’s what it is) of pursuing both deep spiritual experience for Christians, and evangelistic engagement for unbelievers, in the same corporate gathering (a subject that Adrian Birks has been commenting on recently). Simon explained that he thought the word “tension” was extremely unhelpful, because we should be pursuing both charismatic and missional meetings, and that the metaphor was rather a pair of jet engines that both need to be on full blast for the plane not to be blown off course, or for that matter fall out of the sky. Which was a helpful picture, but didn’t necessarily help with what exactly you do about it.
And then he said something very provocative. He said that he had often struggled to see how a corporate gathering could be both highly missional and highly charismatic - until he started to live like a missionary himself. When he began engaging seriously and thoughtfully with those who don’t follow Jesus, and when they began appearing at Christian meetings he was leading from time to time, he suddenly got it. Suddenly, being missional while remaining charismatic was not a paradox, but a necessity. Pursuing spiritual gifts in meetings was still important, but it verged on the unthinkable to do it such a way that would alienate his unbelieving friends. Explanation of what was going on in simple language - “God speaks to us” for prophecy, “languages” for tongues, and the rest - became thoroughly natural, because he was continually considering how his friends would process what was taking place; in contrast, he remarked, a few years previously, when he was enjoying charismatic worship but without really knowing any of the unbelievers in the meeting, he tended to make very little effort to contextualise and explain clearly what was happening. Consequently, we reflected, being a charismatic worshipper who lives as a missionary in normal life is probably the best way of preserving the balance.
So, Simon says: distinguish between fruit and goals, unite around the Father, and live like a missionary while pursuing charismatic worship. From now on, and at least until someone persuades me otherwise, I’m going to try and do all of those things. Any thoughts?
——
Andrew is the author of several books including, most recently, If God, Then What?.
First Word
"In the beginning was the Word..." - John 1:1
If you aren’t shocked by John’s opening verses, then it probably means you haven’t understood them. John writes them very carefully to capture your attention, regardless of how well or little you know the Bible.
Mark had connected with his Roman readers by starting his gospel in the thick of the action with the coming of John the Baptist. Matthew had connected with his Jewish readers by beginning with Jesus’ family tree back to Abraham and with King Herod’s shock discovery from a group of foreigners that the true King of Israel had just been born in his backyard. Luke had connected with his Gentile readers by beginning with a Roman census, with Simeon’s prophecy that Jesus would save many non-Jews, and with a family tree which traced his ancestry back to Adam. John didn’t think there was anything wrong with those beginnings. He just didn’t think that any of them went back far enough in Jesus’ story.
That’s why he starts his gospel with the words “in the beginning”. He knew that anyone familiar with the Greek Old Testament would instantly recognise them as the opening words of the Jewish Scriptures. They would know the Genesis account of God creating the universe from nothing – solely by the power of his spoken Word and of his Spirit.1 John tries to shock us by telling us that Jesus’ story started long before an angel appeared to Mary or she laid her baby in a manger. It started before the dawn of time because the baby born in Bethlehem’s filthy stable was the eternal Word of God.2 Jesus is the one who revealed himself to the Israelites as Yahweh, and there never was a time when he was not.
Not everybody knew the Greek Old Testament, of course. John lived in Ephesus, the vibrant capital city of Asia, where his mainly Gentile readers were more familiar with the thoughts of the pagan Greek philosophers.3 Accordingly, he chooses a word which he knows will shock them too. Heraclitus, the great Ephesian philosopher, had used the Greek word Logos, or Word, in around 500BC to describe the divine force of Reason which governs the universe.4 His teaching was so influential that we still refer today to biology, geology, cosmology and astrology, so John chooses this word to grab the full attention of the Greeks as he did the Jews. He tells them that the divine Reason which Heraclitus groped for in the darkness was not in fact an object but a person. Long before Jesus became a baby in a stable, the best Greek minds had sensed his presence as the ruler of the universe.5
We can see how shocking the Jews found this message by flicking forward a few pages to John 10:33. When the Jews grasped that Jesus was claiming to be Yahweh, they picked up stones and tried to lynch him for blasphemy. That’s why John tells them in verse 17 that Jesus is greater than their great leader and lawgiver Moses because he fulfils the Law with grace and truth. It’s why he tells them in verse 18 that what Moses saw on Mount Sinai was nothing compared to the way that Jesus has made God fully known.6 It’s why he takes the word for Moses’ Tabernacle in the Greek Old Testament (skênê) and uses it as a verb in verse 14 to tell them that God truly tabernacled (skênoô) on the earth in the flesh and blood of Jesus’ body. Remember, the Jews didn’t kill Jesus for healing people and telling pithy parables. They killed him because they knew he was telling them to look at him and see the Living God.
We can also see how shocking the Gentiles found this message by flicking forward a little further to Acts 14. The Lystrans liked Paul and Barnabas when they thought they were preaching that the gods were just like them. Things turned nasty when the Lystrans grasped that they were challenging their Greek idols and urging them to “turn from these worthless things to the Living God.” Epictetus, another great philosopher from the vicinity of Ephesus, summed up the Greek view that the spirit is good and the body is bad when he wrote that “You are a little soul, burdened with a corpse”,7 so the idea that the Living God had taken a human body was so offensive to the Greeks that they stoned them. They were happy with the inoffensive message peddled by the Gnostic false teachers that Jesus had merely seemed to be a human,8 but they angrily refused to surrender to a message about God’s incarnate Son.
We can be like the first-century Jews and Greeks if we let our own cultural baggage divert our gaze away from who Jesus really was. The villains in John’s nativity story aren’t Matthew’s jealous King Herod or Luke’s overworked innkeepers. They are the entire human race which wants to force-fit Jesus into the domesticated role of a mere prophet or good teacher.9 That’s why the Greek word katalambanô in verse 5 has a deliberate double-meaning – either to grasp in the sense of understanding a mystery, or to grasp in the sense of overcoming an enemy. John tells us that few people understand who Jesus is, but that none of those who oppose him can succeed in domesticating the Living God. He calls us to surrender to the fact that God has come to earth to save all those who will receive him as he really is.10
If you are prepared to look where John is pointing; if you are prepared to humble yourself and step out of the darkness into God’s light; if you are prepared to respond with faith to the crucified carpenter who called John to follow him on the shore of Lake Galilee – then John promises to guide your footsteps through his gospel. He promises to help you to look and see the Living God.
——-
This is one of a series of extracts from Phil Moore’s book Straight to the Heart of John. This and other books in the series can be purchased through his website.
Footnotes
1 Psalms 33:6 & 107:20 also talk about God’s Word being both our Creator and our Saviour.
2 Don’t be confused by the word monogenês, or only begotten, in verses 14 and 18, or by the fact that John uses the word more than the rest of the New Testament writers put together. Hebrews 11:17 uses it to describe Isaac, who was not Abraham’s only son, so it speaks about Jesus’ unique status, not about his birth.
3 We can tell that John wrote mainly for Gentiles from the way he translates Hebrew and Aramaic words for his readers in 1:38, 1:41, 1:42, 6:1, 9:7, 19:13, 19:17 & 20:16.
4 John deliberately echoes Heraclitus’ teaching that “all things come to be in accordance with the Logos” (fragment DK 22B1).
5 Paul argues this when he preaches the Gospel in Athens in Acts 17:23, saying Jesus is their “unknown God”.
6 The Greek word exêgeomai at the end of verse 18 means to declare or unfold fully, and is the root of the English word exegesis. Jesus repeats this claim later in 14:9
7 Epictetus was a Stoic and a contemporary of John. This quotation comes from his ‘Fragment 26’.
8 Since the Greek word for to seem is dokeô, the late-1st-century Gnostics who denied the full humanity of Jesus are commonly called Docetists. John insists repeatedly that the Word always was (ên), but that at a certain moment in verse 14 he suddenly became (egeneto) a real human being.
9 Ironically, Jehovah’s Witnesses twist this very passage to repeat the ancient heresy of Arius that “There was a time when the Son was not” (Socrates of Constantinople in “Church History”, 1.5.2). John uses something called an ‘incomplete predication’ in the Greek of verse 1 by dropping the definite article to clarify that he means “the Word was God” (one person of the Trinity) and not that “God was the Word” (in his entirety). JWs fail to understand this and mistranslate his words to mean merely that “the Word was a god”.
10 John tells us that the Gospel is for everyone in verses 7 and 9, but he qualifies this by saying that many will reject the salvation which could have been theirs.
The Theological Consequences Of Euphemisms
Euphemisms are fascinating things, at least in English. Some are wonderfully understated, like "take them out", or "sleep with". Some are lengthily convoluted, like "please may I visit the smallest room in the house?" Others are fascinatingly unnecessary: do we really need terms like "extraordinary rendition" or "correctional facility", or even "recycling centre"? Several sound utterly incomprehensible to the uninitiated: how on earth might someone guess what "powdering your nose" was? And some sound even worse than the reality they are intended to disguise, which I often think when I'm told how much washing powder to use for "heavy soiling". I don't know whether all languages have euphemisms, but my guess would be that English has more than most.
Some euphemisms, though, can have significant theological consequences. Consider death. I don’t know for certain what the most commonly used euphemism for death is amongst British Christians, but from personal experience I guess it’s either the secular favourite, “s/he passed away”, or one of the “gone to” variations: “gone to be with the Lord”, “gone to heaven”, “gone to glory” or “gone home”. And each of these expressions, however innocently used, contains and communicates an implicit theology of death - in several cases, a demonstrably unbiblical one. So every time we tell people in our churches that someone has died using one of these phrases, we risk reinforcing an inaccurate view of death that our churches may be at risk of swallowing, and our wider communities might never even think to question.
“Passed away” is obvious. Human beings do not “pass away” at death; that view is either pantheistic (the soul disappears into the ether, somewhere, and becomes one with creation) or materialistic (there never was a soul in the first place, so the entire human self has now ceased), but certainly not Christian. The quasi-Christian alternatives, however, are not always that much better. I can’t think of any biblical support, for example, for the idea that a recently deceased person is now “in glory”; New Testament writers talk like that about the resurrected state in the new creation, but not about the intermediate state between death and resurrection. (The faithful dead are not “walking on golden streets”, either). The same could be said of “going home”: paradise is not the final “home” of the Christian, and in the one passage where Paul addresses the issue in detail, he speaks of the resurrection body as his future “house” as opposed to the “tent” he lives in now (2 Cor 5:1-10). Perhaps to the consternation of all “How Great Thou Art” fans, Christ does not come to the earth to “take me home” with him to heaven.
I’m not even sure the scriptures talk about us “going to heaven” when we die, either. They do on one occasion speak of us “going to be with Jesus” (Phil 1:23), so that one is perfectly biblical, but the state of “being with the Lord forever” only really kicks in after Christ has returned (1 Thess 4:17). And I can’t think of a single text that talks about “heaven” as a destination for the Christian. (Have I missed one? The final line of “Away in a Manger” doesn’t count.) So many of the most popular Christian euphemisms for death are slightly off-key at best, and reflective of dualistic, world-denying theology at worst.
Interestingly, Jesus and the early Christians used a euphemism for death that avoids all of these difficulties, and in fact points forward very powerfully to the fact that the intermediate state, in which the body and the soul are temporarily separated, is just that: an intermediate state, to be followed by something else. They spoke, quite simply, of people “falling asleep”. What an inspired phrase! It is metaphorically appropriate: sleeping people do look rather like they are dead. It is gentle and inoffensive. It avoids being upsetting to those who have recently been bereaved. It is flexible, allowing clever theological puns like “Wake up, O sleeper, and rise from the dead!” (Eph 5:14). And most brilliantly, it points unambiguously to the fact that those who are currently sleeping will one day wake up. There is a resurrection coming, it says, and those who believe death is the end are backing the wrong horse. People sleep now, because it’s night time - but the morning is coming, the birds are starting to stir, the milk floats are out and about, and the coffee is percolating. As they say in The Lion King: “I know that the night must end. I know that the sun will rise; I know that the clouds must clear, and that the sun will shine.” Resurrection is coming, those who are asleep are going to wake up soon, and it’s good to have euphemisms that reflect that.
The only problem is, it’s a bit confusing (cf. John 11:13). If I say “my wife just fell asleep”, how do you know whether I mean it literally or euphemistically? (That said, I guess other euphemisms suffer from this too; what do you do if it turns out someone really does want to visit the smallest room in your house, which happens to be your baby’s bedroom?) One biblical alternative avoids this problem by adding further words for clarity – “then David slept with his fathers” – but that sounds to me uncomfortably like “Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes”, and may not catch on either. So “falling asleep” is biblical, and powerful, but it does run the risk of being baffling to the uninitiated.
Not half as baffling as “kicking the bucket”, though.
——-
Andrew is the author of several books including, most recently, If God, Then What?.
What’s Wrong with the World?
Many readers will be aware of Justin Brierley’s radio show Unbelievable?, an apologetics show that frequently pits Christians against atheists, with a view to exploring some of the key areas of debate.
Well recently, I debated Geoff Lillis, an Irish atheist and quite the friendliest man you could hope to get stuck in a glorified broom cupboard with, on the subject of “What’s wrong with the world?” You can download the talk here (and if this is your thing, you may also be interested by the Unbelievable? conference, held on 26 May in Clapham. John Lennox, Hugh Ross and Krish Kandiah are among the speakers, and it promises to be a good event.)
You should also look out also for Geoff’s debate with Craig Keener on miracles from a couple of weeks before. Some things every Charismatic should know.
——-
Andrew is the author of several books including, most recently, If God, Then What?.
Religion For Atheists
Alain de Botton is a crisp communicator with an appreciation for beauty and aesthetics. He loves art and pleads for happier architecture in his Channel 4 series.
In his book Religion for Atheists he turns his eye to the benefits of religion for the irreligious. Hardcovered, well laid out with photos on almost every other page it’s accessible and appealing. I long for more books that look this good. A book appealing for aesthetics needs to look this good.
The question is, whether it’s all style and no substance.
The idea is straight forward enough: he observes the obvious that there is no god and so no divine revelation within his opening paragraph and then moves on, sweeping aside the tirades of the new atheists as unnecessary.
All style and no substance, then.
Beg Borrow Steal
His idea is simple. We don’t have to believe in god but we jolly well need the trappings of religion. We need its emphasis on community and kindness and education and tenderness. Society needs those social constructs that have been the outworking of religion, and though obviously we don’t need religion anymore we do need its form.
De Botton’s vision of a big society for the godless world is one that wants all the beauty and love of a world with God but without God, obviously.
Early on he proposes that society needs Agape Restaurants where everyone is welcome to enjoy a meal together, with forms of conversation that can rise above trivia and truly engage us.
We learn from religion not only about the charms of community. We learn also that good community accepts just how much there is in us that doesn’t really want community - or at least can’t tolerate it in it ordered forms all the time. If we have our feasts of love, we must also have our feasts of fools.
Restrain yourself over his grouping of all religions into the same bag,de Botton won’t want to fight on that.
His hunger for such tasty life is a challenge to us as believers, because we so often and so easily seem to fall short of the things he’s attempting to steal from us. Do we value the bonds of friendship that we can enjoy? Do we value the aesthetics and benefits of architecture that our meetings could embody?
Hope
It’s idealistic, but could he really persuade us to abandon our suspicions of one another and turn up at such meals? Would we really be able to talk to one another freely? Would we share? Or might this be the kind of vision that you can only imagine if you’re used to the most polite and refined company? Seeing how difficult it is to get even Christians to really enjoy such fellowship meals together makes one a little cynical about doing it without the presence of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit to change people.
De Botton’s fervour for the things a Christian believes life is made to contain is a real challenge to us Protestants. More often de Botton has to draw on Catholicism in search of life-enriching beauty in art, architecture and meaningful ritual, the things many Protestants have chosen to flee, preferring instead to huddle in a hangar to read the Bible. I don’t want less than people around an open Bible, but there might be more to have.
Religion for Atheists remains, however, incredibly patronising and it would be tempting to get snooty about that. He is deeply naïve, though realistic, a suggestive rather than directive voice.
We could respond by saying that de Botton wants everything for nothing, but that might sound like saying he wants Christianity without the bad bits. Actually, he wants it without the good bits. He wants the life you can get with Jesus without having Jesus. The benefits without the benefactor. And one has to ask why?
The Christian is left to conclude that de Botton has altogether got the wrong end of the stick, and that his vision of a Big Society would eventually fall over for lack of foundations, and for lack of walls. Or it would seek to reclaim the substance and not just the style of ‘religion’. His vision of education that seeks not just to inform but to change lives will grasp for more substance in the end.
An Inconsolable Longing
What is intriguing is that here, and in his work on architecture, Alain de Botton longs for more. He’s not satisfied with utilitarianism. He wants us to lose god but not the forms and values that have accompanied belief in him in the past. He wants it all, and yet he wants none of it. And one has to ask why?
De Botton feels like a modern Pascal, calling for us to paint a vision that men would wish is true, but unlike Pascal who then demands that we prove it is true, he says ‘don’t worry, just live the dream’.
By comparison to modern secular society the world of Religion for Atheists is better, but it is not good enough. In the end it’s an empty shell, it’s what you can already find in liberal Christianity of the woolly variety, the kind of thing that is so often lambasted for its hypocrisy and abandoned for its lack of substance.
Alain de Botton is a thief, an honest thief, and a more thoughtful thief than Dawkins (who borrows beauty and poetry to talk about science). The curiosity is why he thinks beauty and art and community and kindness are worth having at all. Who is he to say that bland and ugly and selfish isn’t the more noble path? Or that it matters at all what quality of life we end up living?
When you know Jesus, you know these things really do matter, though not ultimately.
They matter because they reflect the Triune God, the divine community who lovingly and beautifully made us and this world in which we live.
The God who invites us not just to enjoy his world but to enjoy him, together. I’d love Alain de Botton to be able to really enjoy that too.
The Elephant in the Room
For all the invitation that de Botton makes to enjoy the forms of gospel community, one has to ask why his attentive eye has missed the person of Jesus who is standing at the centre of everything.
De Botton isn’t afraid to take examples from Jesus but has been deeply selective, which makes him sound like just another old fashioned established churchman, though one whose voice I enjoy hearing.
You can follow him on @alaindebotton and catch a short video version of the book here: TED Talk on Atheism 2.0
What’s Wrong with Inerrancy?
It's an oddity of the twenty-first century church that many people who have no problem affirming that the Bible is true, or reliable, or inspired or even infallible, have a big problem affirming that it is inerrant. Don't take my word for it: browse the theological blogs, pick up a few books on the doctrine of Scripture, talk to a few evangelical academics, and you'll see what I mean. Reformed, fundamentalist, charismatic or Pentecostal interpreters will usually affirm inerrancy, but a wide array of other evangelicals, though happy to speak of Scripture as divine revelation, God's word, truthful and authoritative, will be troubled by the word, and frequently regard inerrantists as wooden literalists, anti-intellectuals or worse. My question today is: why?
It is not hard to see why non-evangelicals might object to the idea of an inerrant Bible. But why would someone who has already bothered to affirm that the Bible is true, and God-breathed, struggle with the idea that it does not contain mistakes? Come to think of it, what does it even mean to say that something contains mistakes but is nonetheless true? If Scripture is a reliable record of what God said (which evangelicals believe), and if what God says does not contain statements which, when interpreted correctly, are contrary to fact (which evangelicals believe), then surely nothing in Scripture, when interpreted correctly, is contrary to fact. Right? So what’s the problem with inerrancy?
The most common answer I encounter is that the word “inerrancy” is a post-Enlightenment, positivist capitulation to a scientific age that wants everything tied down into neat boxes: a product of conservative American neuroses, as expressed in the Bible wars of the 1960s and 1970s. Inerrancy, it is said, makes the Bible sound like a textbook, an unstoried mass of data, a repository of doctrine and information that simply needs to be sorted by systematic theologians so we can know what to believe and what to do. People who believe in inerrancy generally miss the wood for the trees, quotemine for Reformed theology at the expense of the storyline of Scripture, and use their “inerrant” Bible to browbeat people into supporting young earth creationism, wars, infant baptism, capital punishment and limited atonement. Why do we need a word like that? We don’t even have the so-called inerrant manuscripts. Surely it’s enough to affirm that the Bible is divinely inspired, without it having to be correct in every last detail, with all the pedantry that causes? Have you ever heard the one about the cockerel crowing six times?
Well, let me say upfront that I don’t personally support young earth creationism, wars, infant baptism, capital punishment or limited atonement (although even if I did, none of those things would necessarily flow from a belief in inerrancy), and that I find the rooster’s sextuple-whammy as unlikely as the next man. I might also add that I don’t believe the word “inerrancy” to be the most helpful word available, as it can (and sometimes does) lead to precisely the textbook mentality its critics abhor, and that I think there are far more important things to affirm about the scriptures than that they were originally right about the age of King Jehoiachin. So I’m not the guy who thinks inerrancy should be the defining feature of our doctrine of Scripture, nor that it should be the litmus test of who is or isn’t “evangelical”. But at the same time, I’d urge people on all sides to appreciate that belief in inerrancy is simply a result of answering a very specific question: when interpreted correctly, does the Bible contain mistakes? Inerrantists say no; errantists say either yes or maybe. We might argue that it is the wrong question to ask, or that there are many questions that are more important - but given that it has been asked, and given that it has implications for how we study and understand God’s word, it would be churlish to chide inerrantists for answering in the negative.
Unless, of course, they are wrong. And that is the way that a second group of evangelicals respond to inerrancy: there would be nothing wrong with affirming that the Bible is without error if it was, in fact, without error - but it isn’t. There are all sorts of errors in the Bible: internal tensions or even contradictions (how old was Jehoiachin? how did Judas die? who was Jesus’ grandfather? talk me through the cockerel again?), discrepancies with external records (when was the Roman census? who on earth is Darius the Mede? how was Antiochus Epiphanes defeated?), and examples of ancient scientific beliefs that have since been debunked (how old is the earth? is it really built on pillars? does the rain live in storehouses? is infertility always the woman’s problem?) For many evangelicals, these problems do not undermine the reliability of the Bible’s witness to Jesus, since they simply reflect the ignorance of the original writers and God’s accommodation of his revelation to that ignorance; but they do mean that we should read the Bible Christologically, and hold on lightly to the (let’s face it, largely irrelevant) scientific and historical minutiae.
There are at least three types of response which need to be made to a position like this. The first is the slippery slope argument: overused, perhaps, but in this case important. It would be convenient if the scriptures could easily be divided up into the central and the peripheral, matters of faith and matters of detail, Jesus and the rest. But Luke, to take the most obvious example, stakes the reliability of his witness to Jesus on his meticulous historical research (1:1-4), and if we happily reject things which he affirms, like the historicity of Adam (3:38), the descent of Jesus from Nathan via Heli (3:23, 31), a census which brought Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem (2:1-3), Judas’ death by falling headlong (Acts 1:18), Herod’s death for accepting idolatrous worship (Acts 12:20-23), and so on - all of which are connected to the witness to Jesus - it is hard to know where to stop. Was Jesus actually rejected at Nazareth, or was the source who told him this as unreliable as the source who told him the other things? Did he really raise the widow’s son at Nain? Or weep over Jerusalem? Or ask forgiveness for those who crucified him, or pardon the dying brigand, or appear on the road to Emmaus? Did people really speak in other languages at Pentecost? Was Stephen really stoned, or might he have died of something else? And if he didn’t, and if the other early Christian writers were similarly blighted by sloppy historiography or a penchant for invention, then…what?
The second is to review all the alleged errors, and to consider them carefully. The internal tensions and supposed contradictions have been addressed frequently; a helpful, brief-ish paper by Jay Smith and others, addressing 101 “contradictions” cited by the Muslim apologist Shabbir Ally, can be found here. The disagreements with external sources are a far weaker basis for charging the Bible with error, because (a) ancient source material is scant enough to make gaps in the evidence inconclusive, which renders argument of the form “X did not exist” very dubious, (b) the extrabiblical source material we have is far from infallible, which means that where a tension exists between (say) Luke and Josephus, there is no reason to assume that Luke is wrong as opposed to Josephus, and (c) in many matters on which biblical writers were formerly assumed to have made mistakes, they have subsequently been vindicated by further research (politarchs, anyone?). An outstanding review of numerous Old Testament examples by a leading scholar is Kenneth Kitchen’s On the Reliability of the Old Testament; Craig Blomberg’s equivalent for the gospels is also worth a read. The point about ancient scientific beliefs requires a further post, but in advance of that it’s worth flagging up the importance of literary genre in the discussion; the texts that speak of storehouses for rain and pillars for the earth also speak of constellations having children, ostriches laughing and God having all sorts of body parts, none of which (we may safely assume) the ancient Hebrews intended literally. And the Shulammite didn’t have fauns for breasts, either.
The third response, however, is by far the most important, and that is to consider how Jesus viewed the scriptures. He quoted them frequently, so it isn’t actually that difficult to form a picture of whether or not he viewed them as containing mistakes. Quite clearly, he didn’t. Again and again, he based what he said or did on the simple words “it is written”; he affirmed in theological debate that “the scriptures cannot be broken” (John 10:35); he spoke of the everlasting validity of every minute detail of the Torah (in which, we may recall, many of the alleged “errors” appear) in Matthew 5:18; and he conducted his entire ministry on the basis that God had spoken in the scriptures, and that they were therefore to be submitted to regardless of the consequences (just do a search for “scripture” in a concordance). When he taught his disciples to do something other than what the Mosaic law had taught, he was careful to explain this in terms of fulfilment and not abandonment, and gave no indication whatsoever that the original commandments had been mistaken (as I posted in response to Steve Chalke last year). Frankly, if we asked the Jesus of the gospels whether he thought the scriptures contained mistakes or not - whether or not that is the right question! - it is inconceivable to imagine him saying that they did.
So I don’t see the problem with the inerrancy of Scripture. It’s not the main word I use to describe the Bible to people, but if someone asks - as, in our day, they often do - whether God’s word, when interpreted correctly, contains mistakes, I am delighted to respond with a resounding “no”. And a big grin.
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Andrew is the author of several books including, most recently, If God, Then What?.
Look and See the Living God
“These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” - John 20:31
John may have been the only one of Jesus’ twelve disciples not to die a violent death, but don’t let that fool you that his lot in life was easy. As the last surviving disciple by far, he was burdened by a barrage of unwanted attention.
The enemies of Christianity, particularly the Romans, had marked him out as a dangerous eyewitness to the life of Jesus. He had been there when Jesus healed the blind and fed the hungry, there when he was nailed to a Roman cross, and there when he left behind an empty tomb. John hadn’t stopped preaching about what he had seen for sixty years, and he knew that if old age didn’t claim his life soon then his increasingly agitated enemies surely would.1 In around 90AD, just before the Emperor Domitian exiled him to the Greek island of Patmos, John decided it was time to preserve his memories in a gospel.2 Irenaeus, who was taught by John’s young helper Polycarp, informs us that:
John the Lord’s disciple, the one who leaned back on his chest, published a gospel whilst living at Ephesus in Asia ... John made his permanent home in Ephesus until the time of Trajan.3
When John saw that his time witnessing on earth was nearly over, he wrote his gospel as a witness to generations yet to come.
John was also being watched by the many false teachers who had latched themselves onto the growing Christian faith like limpets to the hull of a mighty warship. Some of them played down Jesus’ divinity while others played down his humanity, but both groups found common ground in their resentment towards the aged apostle who refuted their theories with facts about the Jesus that he knew. Note the way John fills his gospel with vivid eyewitness descriptions,4 and with words like seeing and knowing and bearing testimony and the truth.5 John wants his readers to appreciate that he knew the real Jesus – fully God and fully man – and that his gospel exposes the speculations of people who try to reshape the Messiah in a mould of their own making.
Most concerning of all, John was troubled by the starstruck gaze of the many well-meaning Christians who hailed him as their hero. Note the way he writes his gospel in a manner which prevents us from placing him on a pedestal as a saint. Matthew, Mark and Luke mention John and his brother James a total of thirty-nine times in their gospels, but John never mentions himself or his brother by name at all!6 He might mention less famous disciples such as Philip and Thomas and Nathanael, but he purposely redirects his readers’ attention away from himself by making anonymous references to “the disciple Jesus loved”.7 As for the rumour among his fans that he might not die until Jesus returned in glory, he quashes their misguided hero worship in 21:23. In a world where too many people looked at John instead of Jesus, he wrote this gospel to plead with each of his readers to Look and see the Living God!
All of this makes John’s gospel essential reading for anyone who wants to know the real Jesus today. Like us, John had copies of the gospels which Matthew, Mark and Luke had written earlier, but he believed that we needed something more. They are known as the ‘Synoptic’ gospels because they all ‘share a common perspective’ on the life and ministry of Jesus, whereas the second-century church leader Clement of Alexandria explains that John’s gospel takes a different view: “John, perceiving that the outward facts had been set forth in those gospels, urged on by his friends and inspired by the Spirit, composed a spiritual gospel.”8 John doesn’t tell us that Jesus told parables, drove out demons, healed lepers, was transfigured or prayed agonised prayers in the Garden of Gethsemane. Instead, he duplicates as little material as possible in order to tell unrecorded stories which open our eyes to see the real Jesus in his untold glory.
In chapters 1-4, John uses fresh incidents from Jesus’ early ministry to encourage us to look at Jesus alone. In chapters 5-12, he uses more new stories to teach us to look at who Jesus really is. In chapters 13-17, he records Jesus’ handover teaching to his disciples and encourages us to look at what Jesus has given you. This leads into his conclusion in chapters 18-21, where he gives final reasons to look at Jesus and win. All along the way, he punctuates his gospel with frequent exhortations to “Look!” and “Come and see!” and “Open your eyes!” to see the Living God.
If you are unsure what you believe about Jesus of Nazareth, then this should all strike you as very good news. John wrote this gospel to give you a ringside seat from which to watch the Galilean carpenter whose message changed the world. Mark writes to tell us what Jesus did, and Matthew and Luke write to explain why Jesus did it, but John’s main concern is to help us discover who Jesus is and what it means for us to follow him today. He tells us in 20:31 that he wrote this gospel for you and me, so that “you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”
If you already believe in Jesus but want to know him more, then this should also strike you as very good news. The most accurate Greek manuscripts of 20:31 use a present tense which can be literally translated “so that you may go on believing that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by going on believing you may go on having life in his name.” Read that way, John is telling us that he wrote his gospel to turn our head knowledge about Jesus into genuine experience of new life through him.
So sit back and enjoy the life-changing message of John’s gospel. It was the message which the early Christians needed to hear in the face of Roman persecution, false teaching and hero-worship, and it’s still the message we need to hear amidst the pressures of today.
John therefore hands us his gospel, still as fresh as when he wrote it, and tells us to do the same as his first-century readers. He invites us to fix our eyes on the Jesus that he knew. He tells us to look and see the Living God.
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This is one of a series of extracts from Phil Moore’s book Straight to the Heart of John. This and other books in the series can be purchased through his website.
Footnotes
1 John had recounted these events so often over 60 years that, in conjunction with what he describes in 14:26, they were still as fresh in his memory as the events of the day before.
2 See Revelation 1:9. Despite John’s use of a present tense to describe Jerusalem in 5:2, his language and perspective backs up the united view of the Early Church leaders Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen and Clement that John wrote this gospel at the end of the 1st century.
3 Trajan became emperor in 98AD, and Irenaeus wrote in c.180AD in “Against Heresies” (3.1.1 & 3.3.4). Linked to John 21:20&24, this quote tells us the anonymous disciple in the gospel is John.
4 John describes scenes in particular detail in 6:10, 12:3, 13:23-25 & 18:10.
5 John uses five different Greek words for seeing, and also stresses he is an eyewitness in 1 John 1:1-3.
6 The closest he comes is when he refers to “the sons of Zebedee” in 21:2. No one but John himself could make such a glaring omission, which supports the unanimous Early Church view that John wrote this gospel.
7 John 13:23, 19:26, 20:2, 21:7, 21:20 & 21:24.
8 Quoted by Eusebius of Caesarea just after 300AD in his “Church History” (6.14.7). Since Luke 1:1-4 suggests that Luke had copies of the first two gospels, it is also fair to assume that John had copies of all three.
Butterflies and the Afterlife
Say the word ‘heaven’ and you will conjure up a range of ideas and images from the saccharine to the absurd. To some it’s a non-existent crutch for weak people. For others, an abstract place where the deceased experience disembodied bliss. Or as Harry Potter describes it, ‘It’s like St Pancras Station, but cleaner, and with no trains’ which I find baffling, since I have spent quite some time in St Pancras Station, and whilst I can confirm that a minute there feels somewhat like a thousand years, it feels to me less like heaven and more like ‘the other place’!
I was encouraged, therefore, to see a feature in Time Magazine this week entitled ‘Heaven can’t wait: Why rethinking the hereafter could make the world a better place’ in which the author explores some of the competing views of heaven and the afterlife, and the effects they have on life, the world and social justice.
Insofar as the article sought to draw lines between those who think heaven is our eternal destiny: clouds, angels and harps abounding, and those who think heaven is the place where God dwells and that our future will be in resurrected bodies in the New Creation, I know which side I fall on. I’m firmly with the Tom Wrights of this world. The Resurrection of the Son of God is an outstanding work, and despite its density, is one of the books I’ve most enjoyed reading and rereading over the past few years.
However, as is often the case when theology reacts against previous misconceptions and then gets popularised, it can end up becoming a little less honed, ill-defined, or downright confusing. A few times recently I have seen preachers and writers unpacking a Wrightian view of the afterlife in ways that have made me wince a little.
I remember years ago seeing a child learn the word ‘butterfly’ for the first time. He pointed with wide-eyed amazement at the creature and uttered the word, much to the joy of his parents. He pointed to another butterfly and again exclaimed ‘butterfly’, which elicited more congratulations and a round of applause. Then the excitement (and perhaps the desire for adulation) set in and he started pointing wildly to other objects around him: grass, leaves, pebbles, a dog, all of which he enthusiastically called ‘butterfly.’
You see, there is a great deal of difference between learning a new word and really grasping what it means and what it doesn’t. So often when careful, nuanced theology gets popularised, in the hands of its new owners it loses some of its precision. (Had the term not already been used, I would be tempted to call this ‘the butterfly effect’!) At an academic level, Wright has written a masterpiece book: for the most part carefully worded and provocative. But as the idea has trickled down into more popular forms like regular preaching, lighter mass-market pop theology books, art and articles like the one in Time (for all of which I’m grateful!) the new proponents, in their enthusiasm, have been less careful with their language.
So the article includes quotes like the following:
Heaven isn’t just a place you go – heaven is how you live your life
Is it?! Is that what the word actually means?!
Heaven thus becomes, for now, the reality one creates in the service of the poor, the sick, the enslaved, the oppressed. It is not paradise in the sky but acts of selflessness and love that bring God’s sacred space and grace to a broken world suffused with tragedy until, in theological terms, the unknown hour when the world we struggle to piece together is made whole again.
Really?!
I mean, I know what they’re saying and I think I agree with the sentiment, but is there not a danger of confusing questions of ontology, function and application to the point where we’ve redefined the term ‘heaven’ entirely beyond biblical recognition? To say that heaven is acts of service makes little more sense than saying the casual application of a plaster to a wounded knee is ‘hospital’.
We are not at liberty to redefine terms at will. Nor is it sensible to point to social action projects, good art, justice dispensed, the gospel responded to, relationships mended, and declare ‘heaven’ like a child with a new word. In some way each of those things might be a foretaste of heaven, or reflect the intentions and aims of the One who dwells and rules in heaven, but they are not in and of themselves ‘heaven.’
I applaud the fact that a biblical view of New Creation is trickling into the general water supply, but may I appeal for some careful thought, lest we wield loaded terms a little too casually. What does the word heaven strictly mean in Scripture? How is that different from the definition it’s come to have in preaching, theology and popular culture? How can we accurately delineate between the strict definition of heaven, the acts it motivates us towards, and the effects it has in the world around us? How can we educate our hearers to ensure that we are all operating with a common definition, and that heaven doesn’t mean whatever we want it to, which surely was one of the problems in the first place?!
Is There Too Much Grace in Your Gospel?
There was a fascinating exchange at Jesus Creed a few days ago between J. D. Greear, author of Gospel: Recovering the Power that Made Christianity Revolutionary, and Scot McKnight, author of The King Jesus Gospel, which could (crudely) be boiled down to this question: is there too much grace in your gospel? Comments sections on blogs are not always edifying places – fortunately, they have been at whatyouthinkmatters, for which thanks to all! – but the conversation between Greear and McKnight was outstanding, both for its tone and its theological depth. Here is a selective summary.
McKnight was reviewing Greear’s book, which he regarded as preaching what he calls a ‘soterian’ gospel rather than a ‘Jesus’ gospel: the gospel is in essence about how I get saved, rather than in essence about Jesus as King. In the midst of his review, he made an extremely thought-provoking remark:
Anyone who has to explain why commands are present in the NT has misunderstood something very seriously. The fact is, God speaks from Genesis to Revelation through commands and almost never says “but first you have to understand that this command stuff only works if you are grace-soaked so that you can obey them, and if you are grace-shaped you will do them, and really don’t even need them.” Jesus loads his teachings with commands; Paul loads his moral sections with commands; read 1 John sometime — or read James, which is soaked in commandments. My complaint here is that if one has to justify commands in the Bible, one has made some wrong turns. If commands make you uncomfortable you’ve got something wrong theologically. If you want to say preach only God and God’s grace and never commands… well, then, you’re telling God that he should have done things in another way.
Ouch! Consider that point carefully before rushing on. Greear then responded to that particular comment with reference to Paul’s letters:
It seems that in nearly every epistle in which Paul discusses the law he has to “defend” himself against the charge of antinomianism. As his gospel-logic develops, for example, in Romans, he has to stop and say, “Am I teaching that we can sin freely that grace may abound? God forbid!” This was not a gratuitous logical insertion. The reason he had to put it in there is that a one-sided view of the gospel can lead one to that conclusion. Or, in 1 Timothy, Paul had to explain why the law is still “good.” Thus, it seems that your critique would have to apply to most of Paul’s writings, as well. And if our explanations of the gospel do not lead people to the same question, or compel us to defend ourselves against the same charge, then how are we preaching the same gospel logic Paul employed?
McKnight insisted that the balance in many in the ‘gospel-centred’ movement, however, was still wrong:
I see something in you and Tullian [Tchividjian], and a few others, that concerns me: namely, a desire to be so focused on grace (gospel as you would call it in this book and what God has done) that a need arises as to why God would even have commands. In other words, the approach is preach and teach grace and one won’t even need to speak of commands — I’ve heard this one so many times from some in your crowd. If that adequately describes a meme, then I have a big question about such a meme: evidently Paul thought commands were the way to teach ethics. Of course, they flow from grace but I’m not hearing the biblical balance enough. I’m hearing, preach grace and what God has done and we won’t even need to speak of commands. I see that in your chp of having to justify commands.
Then Greear made a fascinating admission:
I would heartily agree that many in my “camp,” perhaps me, sometimes find ourselves in the precarious position of being more “gospel-centered” than Jesus. Paul frequently described the Christian life as a struggle, and the struggle implies commands that contradict our desires.
More gospel-centred than Jesus. Anyone getting bothered by this yet? McKnight continued, zeroing in on (what he regards as) the bigger problem:
Here’s a big one for me: in my view, many (I’m not saying this about you) see in the word “gospel” what amounts to “my theology, a rich theology of grace that is far more difficult to accept and is far more rigorous than others think and there are only a few of us who really believe it all and have the courage to take it all in.” In other words, “gospel” has become “high Calvinist theology.” Much of what I see in TGC’s gospel-shaped, gospel-focused, gospel-this-and-that, is for me mostly the same as high Calvinism. Remove it all and replace it with “Jesus, King Jesus, Lord, Savior” and now we’ve got the gospel.
So the strong emphasis on grace, and the strong emphasis on Calvinist soteriology, appear to be closely connected (McKnight is an Anabaptist Arminian, which is probably relevant here). Greear’s final comment addressed this, and contended for the integration of the Christological and soteriological when understanding the gospel:
To separate “King Jesus” in any way from “substitutionary death Jesus,” as if they were not essentially integrated, would be unwarranted, as I see it. Also, I do not see what I am arguing as being “high Calvinism.” In the Reformation tradition, yes, but in the stream of many branches of the reservation, many of whom would not prefer to classify themselves as Calvinism. A unity around the substitutionary nature of Christ’s work and its apprehension by faith alone would be larger rubric I’d prefer to write under.
McKnight closed by affirming that he believed in substitutionary atonement (!), and that Greear’s book was not (for him) excessively Calvinist. But the wider question – as to whether a heavily grace-centred gospel, as typically preached from Calvinist pulpits, does not do sufficient justice to the commands in Scripture, to Israel and to the ministry of Jesus himself – remains to be answered.
What do you think? Is there too much grace in your gospel?
Reasons to Move to Cities: A Response
Confession: I love cities. I discovered this when I was living in a backwater town on the outskirts of Atlanta. Yes, the scenery was beautiful, the streets were safe, and it was easier to get to know one's neighbours, but I missed the buzz and the energy of the never-sleeping centres of art and culture, despite their attendant negatives.
I understand why some people don’t love cities, and I agree that there is a huge need for people in smaller towns and villages to commit to building vibrant churches in those communities. Not all Christians should live in the city.
That said, I take issue with a couple of Andrew’s points from yesterday’s post. It is true (Point 3) that just as much art, literature and music is produced per capita in Hither Green (and Prestatyn and St Ives) as in central London, but the real issue is that the cultural norms and expectations are set in big cities in general and London in particular.
Take the drive towards euthanasia, for example. Spend a while in London, and you’ll believe that the vast majority of the population is crying out for it and desperate for the law to be changed post haste. Those who have the power to make and overturn laws are primarily concentrated (at least for their working lives, though they do indeed often retreat to the leafy suburbs for evenings and weekends) in this environment. If all the voices they are surrounded with are promoting this agenda, as opposed to the more balanced, less urgent views found in the majority of the nation, their decisions will be made based on unreliable/skewed evidence. It is vital that Christians engage with speaking into this cultural agenda and lending their voice to the debate.
Yes, Tom Wright is able to do that from St Andrews, but he has also spent a considerable amount of time in larger urban communities engaging with the ways in which culture is created and disseminated and, importantly, building a name for himself. Even while he was Bishop of Durham he had to spend a lot of time in London meeting with and speaking to the people he sought to influence. Books can be written anywhere and read anywhere, and video conferencing may eventually replace the need for anyone to actually gather together in large, air-conditioned venues to ‘see the whites of each other’s eyes’ and really engage with each other, but there is still huge value in going to where the influencers are, rather than hoping they will come to you.
Again, that’s not to say that Christians in Pitlochry, Whitehaven and Betws-y-Coed should feel free to sit on their hands and let the culture flow over them, they’re just going to have a tougher challenge getting their voices heard by the people who can make a difference. The Welsh revival teaches us, though, that while it’s tough, it’s certainly not impossible.
In Point 4, Andrew suggests that because cities in Bible times weren’t as big as cities now, it is therefore fallacious to suggest that cities are “vitally important to the biblical story”, yet in the introduction to the piece, he notes that some UK cities today have as few as 2,000 inhabitants. Taken as a proportion of the global population, Jerusalem, Athens, Antioch and Nineveh were huge, bustling conurbations and also, importantly, the centres of thought, discussion and cultural engagement. Size, actual or relative, is not the only significant factor in forming a place of influence. Yes, Jesus conducted most of his ministry in fishing villages and small towns, and I’m sure part of his reason for that was to remind the urbanophiles among us not to neglect the talent, power and need of those in the rest of the world, but it is no accident that the turning point of history occurs in the city. Andy Crouch puts it far better than I can:
Cities intensify everything about what it is to be a human being. Which may be why cities show up again and again in the biblical story, even though most people lived in rural areas at the time Scripture was written. You have Babel, which concentrates human rebellion like nothing before or since. You have Nineveh, the city that Jonah is sent to, that provokes God’s particular attention and compassion and redemptive intention. You have, of course, Jerusalem, where worship happens in a way that it doesn’t happen anywhere else in the biblical story. And then you have this amazing new City that’s promised as the culmination of God’s whole redemptive mission.
Towns, villages and suburbs are indeed vitally important, and we do need to be wary of idolising cities (I know that’s a tendency of my own heart), but neither must we make the opposite mistake of neglecting the importance of cities (either those which are big or those which, like the university cities are disproportionately influential).
Perhaps our American friends can help us here. The tiniest towns, which would barely count as villages here – like the one I lived in outside of Atlanta – are usually designated cities for certain purposes, so perhaps when we are called to seek the peace or flourishing of the city, we should take that to mean the community where God has placed us, whatever size or apparent cultural significance it may have. That way perhaps we will achieve the flourishing of the whole nation.
Twelve Reasons to Move to Cities (and Why Eleven of them Need Rethinking)
Cities are the new black, at least in evangelical circles. Tim Keller, Mark Driscoll and company have convinced whole swathes of us that Christians need to have a disproportionate focus on cities. Those of us who interact with grass on a daily basis might be tempted to reject this call out of hand as the latest fad, were it not for the numerous reasons that are presented for taking it more seriously than that. Personally, I have frequently been prodded, poked and even challenged about the importance of moving to a city, so I thought I’d have a go at weighing up the reasons I’ve heard given – some of which are more compelling than others – and seeing which ones I think hold water.
Two quick points, in brackets, before we start. One, I’m speaking entirely into a UK context here, which means our many overseas readers will have to bear with me and/or contextualise what I’m saying, which you’re probably used to by now anyway. In the UK, there are sixty-six designated cities, ranging from seven million to two thousand inhabitants. (Don’t ask). Two, I love cities, love travelling in them, was born in London, lived in Islington and Southwark in my twenties, and count Rome, New York and Washington DC as my favourite places. My brothers and sisters all live in cities (in Pimlico, Peckham and Brighton), and are part of large city churches that they absolutely love. So I’ve got no axe to grind against cities. Just to get that clear.
With that said, here’s twelve reasons I’ve come across in support of the idea that Christians should prioritise cities – and some reflections on whether, and to what extent, they are accurate.
(1) The people live there.
Actually, in the UK, far more people live in towns and villages than live in cities. Population density is obviously higher in cities than elsewhere, but in this country, the total population is not. If, of course, the impact of an individual or church was limited to people who lived up to X miles away but not beyond, then churches in cities would reach more people than those elsewhere, because of population density. But these days, because of transport and communications, this isn’t the case; in fact, the chances are that the catchment area of my church in Eastbourne, in total population, is larger than the catchment area of many city churches, for the simple reason that most people can drive. My friend Martyn leads a church in a village just off the M27, and its catchment area - the number of people who could get there within, say, half an hour - is well over half a million people, and far greater than it would be in the centre of many cities. So yes, lots of people live in cities. But many more people don’t.
(2) They are under-represented by Christianity.
Well some are, and some aren’t. London isn’t; there are far more Christians, and churches, per head in London than in lots of rural parts of the British Isles. On the other hand, there are lots of cities, and more specifically lots of areas within cities, that are desperately under-represented by Christianity. If we want to live in areas where a clear Christian witness is most needed, though, I would suggest that the statistic we most need is the percentage of Christians in an area, not the total number of people who live there. It might even involve some people moving out of their church-saturated city to reach less churched rural areas (Welsh valleys, anyone?)
(3) Culture flows downstream, from cities to surrounding areas.
This one has become almost axiomatic over the past few years. A hundred years ago, you could divide society into important and unimportant according to whether they lived upstairs or downstairs; now, the split is not upstairs/downstairs, but upstream/downstream. Cities make culture and hence are ‘upstream’, while the rest of us live ‘downstream’, helplessly drinking in the cultural water flowing out from the cities. There’s got to be some truth in this: TV stations, major newspapers, galleries, universities, law courts and theatres are all concentrated in cities, so the cultural artefacts which the rest of us encounter are, inevitably, more concentrated there as well. But it has been enormously overstated. Universities, for sure, influence the nation, but many of our leading universities (Cambridge, Durham, St Andrews, Warwick, Sussex, Lancaster, Bath, Kent, and so on) are found in places that are barely urban, and only regarded as cities because they have universities. Other than that, a tiny group of cities - London, Manchester, Edinburgh - produce almost all the cultural capital in the UK; in fact, we could probably narrow it further to a handful of postcodes. Is there really that much more culture created in Tottenham, Hither Green, Neasden or New Cross than in provincial towns of equivalent size? So yes, cities produce the culture that affects a nation, but almost all of it is produced in postcodes that begin WC or EC, and almost none of the people who produce it actually live there. (Ever walked down High Holborn on a Sunday?)
(4) Cities are vitally important in the biblical story.
In modern terms, there is only one real ‘city’ in the Bible: Rome. No other city had a population anywhere near a million; Nineveh’s population when it ruled the world was roughly the same as that of Hastings (Jonah 4:11), and Jerusalem, Athens, Antioch and co would have been glorified market towns in our world. Having said that, cities are important in the biblical story, inasmuch as they represent nations, and two in particular, Jerusalem and Babylon, are practically personified as the people of God and the people of the devil. Whether that has anything to do with planting churches in UK cities today, though, is another matter.
(5) Paul targeted strategic cities in his mission.
Well, sort of, but not really, according to Eckhard Schnabel’s book “Paul the Missionary”, a brief (and very thought-provoking) summary of which is provided here.
(6) Jesus focused on the city of Jerusalem.
Jesus went to Jerusalem for religious festivals (John 2:13; 5:1; 7:10; 10:22; 12:12), and on the final occasion to fulfil Scripture by dying there (Luke 13:33). It had all-but-nothing to do with maximising strategic impact, or influencing culture - and he spent most of his time in Galilean villages.
(7) Influencers live there.
Again, some of them do, but a lot of them live in Godalming, and Tunbridge Wells, and Brentwood and Oxted and Amersham and Woking, because the rail links are good and it means they get a garden and a nicer school. And that’s just the ones around London. If we want to reach ‘influencers’ with the gospel, which we do, then we need good churches in every small and medium-sized town around our major cities, and not just (or even primarily) in the cities themselves.
(8) If you want to influence a nation, you need to be in a city.
This is a different point from the previous one, in that it concerns how Christians influence a nation, rather than how those who influence the nation encounter Christianity. And this, speaking personally, is the reason why I have been encouraged, from time to time, to move to a city. Can you really influence a nation from a backwater like the Sussex Coast? It’s the modern form of Nathanael’s question, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Well, yes. Rick Warren’s influenced quite a few people. So have Bill Hybels, Don Carson, John Maxwell, Joyce Meyer, Francis Chan, and (you get the idea). Maybe it used not to be true (although Martin Luther might disagree), but that’s the beauty of mass media: leaders can influence others around the world without leaving their church buildings, whether through preaching, writing, training, blogging or whatever. I’d read John Piper’s books if he was based in the Orkneys. I read Tom Wright’s, and he practically is.
(9) Cities make it easier to build big churches, and building big churches is important.
The first of these statements is generally true, so long as it is balanced by the point I made in (1). The second one I’m not so sure about, as I posted recently.
(10) Jeremiah called upon Judah not to live in the suburbs but move into the city.
Bunk. The verses in question in Jeremiah 29 are not urging city centres over suburbs, but insisting that the exile will be much longer than people thought, so they had better hunker down and get used to it (see the surrounding chapters and the summary of Jeremiah’s letter in 29:28). And to imply that the exiled Jews lived in the Babylonian equivalent of Chislehurst and should abandon it for Hackney is, in the light of what we know of ancient exile, somewhat implausible.
(11) Cities are the most multicultural parts of the UK.
This is uncontestable, although it can be misapplied. The bad way of applying it is to say that churches which are multiethnic are more biblical than churches that aren’t. Nobody bemoans a church in Pakistan that is full of ethnic Pakistanis, so why worry if a church in a middle class, white English village is full of white English people who drive Volvos and use table mats? The good way of applying it, though, is to say that if you want to influence nations, one of the best ways of doing it is to reach people from the nations on your doorstep, and then they in turn will reach others (which is how Newfrontiers in Ghana got started, and probably a good many other places I don’t know about). Oddly, though, some of the largest city churches in the UK are far less multicultural than my church in Eastbourne (which is no doubt the subject of another post).
(12) The greatest deprivation exists there.
This one is undoubtedly true, at least in Britain. As a reason for moving to cities, it appears to pull in the opposite direction to the previous reason, but statistically, it is much more evidently accurate (here’s a brief summary of some recent stats on it). If you want to be salt and light in the areas with the greatest social and material deprivation in the UK, then cities are your place.
So of these twelve, only the last one, in my view, deserves to be taken on board without reservation. But added to all these is the unspoken thirteenth reason, which I sometimes sense is lurking under the surface when I have conversations with city-dwellers, and it’s much harder to argue with than the others. Provincial readers, you can all wince with me:
(13) Cities are cool, and you know it.
Touché.
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Andrew Wilson’s new book, If God Then What? Wondering Aloud about Truth, Origins and Redemption, is out now, published by IVP who are offering a generous discount for readers of this blog.
Leading to University?
This is a response to Matthew’s recent post about how we define “leading” when it comes to theological study. It takes the form of a letter to a young person considering studying theology at university, and I hope provides some useful advice drawn from my own experience of studying theology at Cambridge and Oxford.
Dear Theology Applicant,
I am glad for this chance to speak to you before you start your studies in theology. To begin with, I am pleased about two things, first that you are interested in applying your intellect to the study of God and His revelation in history, choosing to love Him with all your mind, and second that you see the value of being well-prepared and have decided to seek advice. When I myself was applying to Cambridge to read Theology, a church leader who was then doing doctoral studies in New Testament came round and chatted with me for a while to help me make an informed decision.
It is not easy to know how to advise someone in your position, because so much of it depends on the individual’s experience and gifting. I have personally had a fantastic time studying theology at university, and it has worked to sharpen my understanding of the Bible and my ability to communicate its truth to others. On the other hand, I know of many people who came from strong evangelical families to study theology at university, but in the process either lost their faith completely or became lukewarm and thoroughly compromised in their trust in God’s Word, with the result that they are now either of no use to the church or even stumbling blocks for it.
Like Saul, I would not want to encourage you as an inexperienced youth to step into a dangerous environment for which you are poorly equipped. Yet unlike him, I do not want to burden you with heavy armour that would hamper you if you know God has called you there; it is not a time for fear but for courageous acts of faith. Universities are places where evangelicals are forced to achieve the highest standards of scholarship in order to demonstrate the trustworthiness of Scripture. An evangelical student who can hold on to the truth while dealing with opposition graciously will be a great asset to the church.
Though you may be a bold champion for God’s glory, like David you must remember that you are part of a bigger army. If you are to succeed it is essential that you find a vibrant church for spiritual growth, as well as academic advisors to mentor you, like Jonathan, and direct you towards the articles and books that present more conservative points of view. One place to look for the academic support is the Theology Network, where you can find resources and get involved in a local group at your university.
Even so, spiritual mentoring and academic advisors cannot make up for a lack in personal knowledge of the Bible. Almost all of the things we have grown up believing are questioned by academic theologians. There are the extreme liberals who deny that any of the Old Testament books were written before the time of the Greeks, or who think that Jesus said less than one fifth of the things recorded in the Gospels. However it is fairly standard to find the following views in contemporary scholarship:
- - Genesis 1-11 is entirely mythical
- - the Patriarchs were not real people but rather symbolise tribes or are simply folktales
- - Moses didn’t write any of the Pentateuch
- - the Exodus and Conquest, if they happened at all, were at most only a small group of slaves that escaped and joined disaffected Canaanites who later adopted their stories
- - David and Solomon were probably just local chieftains or tribal leaders, and Israel and Judah were only established as proper kingdoms around the time of Omri and Ahab
- - nearly every book of the Old Testament was composed over centuries, with the ‘core’ of the original prophet or author being changed and added to by scribes over many generations
- - the book of Isaiah was written by at least three different individuals over about two hundred and fifty years
- - Ruth, Jonah, Esther and Daniel are all fictional stories, the latter being written only around 165BC
- - Jesus may not actually have believed himself to be the Messiah, and ‘Son of God’ ideas were only introduced years after His death
- - Jesus’ death was entirely unexpected, even by himself, and Christianity as a religion was an attempt to come to terms with this loss
- - none of the Gospels were written by actual disciples of Jesus, and they were not written until between forty and seventy years after Jesus’ death
- - Paul ‘invented’ Christianity as a Gentile religion, and was probably opposed by various other of the original leaders including Peter
- - Paul didn’t write Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, 1&2 Timothy or Titus
- - Revelation wasn’t written by John the Apostle, but by an ‘elder’ of the same name who lived in Ephesus.
Please don’t be disturbed or shaken by these statements – I repeat them not because I believe them to be correct, and I have studied them in some detail, but because they represent standard views in modern biblical studies.
With all of the views in the above paragraph, you will find that it is not raving liberals who are arguing these points, but quite traditional, gentle, learned professors who are simply teaching you what the standard textbooks say. They will be able to point out things in the Bible that you had never seen in that way, and will quote very intelligent theologians of this and previous generations who proposed such ideas. You will be expected to be able to understand and reproduce these arguments in your weekly essays and your exams, and if you disagree with them (which you are entitled to do), you will have to do lots of extra reading and present carefully argued alternatives, so that you cannot be accused of basing your arguments on ‘faith’ alone.
There will be times when you are presented with views in lectures or in books you are reading, and you have absolutely no idea how to respond to such a position. The standard evangelical arguments you have read will seem rather weak in comparison, and you know that this scholar is a reasonable person who has clearly read far more than your parents or your church elders. It isn’t really a matter that affects salvation, and it surely can’t make that much difference to your personal relationship with God. At that point it will be too late to decide who you are going to trust. If your plan was to ‘go where the evidence leads’ and make your mind up when presented with all the facts, the ‘facts’ will all point in one direction.
However if you have decided from the start that God is trustworthy, His Spirit will bring to your mind those things He has said. If you have hidden His words in your heart, that you might not sin against Him, He will point out to you verses that don’t fit with what you are being taught. As you are browsing through books in the library or articles on the internet, He will lead you to read things that are exactly what you need to answer this question or address that issue. In conversations during supervisions or with fellow students, you will find yourself coming up with arguments that you had never thought of before, and He will give you the words to say.
If God is trustworthy then His words will be trustworthy, and we know that God has “made foolish the wisdom of the world” (1 Cor 1:20). “If you extract the precious from the worthless, you will become my spokesperson. They for their part may turn to you, but as for you, you must not turn to them.” (Jer 15:19) One of the things that I came back to most often during my undergraduate degree was that my dad (who never went to university) loves the Scripture and knows God personally far better than my professors, and if he wouldn’t accept something they were saying, I would be wise to disagree even if at the moment I had no idea why.
Obviously, if you are going to go into academic theological study, having to disagree so frequently with what you are being taught will take a lot of effort and extra study and prayer and graciousness with your lecturers. There are resources available to help with this (such as the IVP Dictionaries), but if you are going to enjoy your university experience, you will need (1) an unshakeable conviction in the trustworthiness of God and His Word, (2) a thorough knowledge of the Scriptures, (3) an enthusiasm for study and suitable intellectual ability, and (4) a capacity for graciously and respectfully disagreeing with others. I don’t know you well enough to say whether academic theological study is the thing for you, but please pray about it and perhaps chat it through with your parents and others in the church who know you well.
If you don’t feel that God is directing you to study theology at university, there are other alternatives for developing your understanding of the Scriptures and the biblical languages. I can understand the views of a respected church leader I know, who went to Bible college himself, that Bible colleges are the worst of both worlds – their confessional perspective may protect you from the full brunt of liberal scepticism, but it also means that your ability to make a difference in academia will be significantly impeded because of the negative reputation Bible colleges have there. On the other hand, studying in a Bible college usually means spending three years in a ‘Christian bubble’, sheltered from the friendship and questions of non-Christians rather than living differently within the student world.
If you have the ability to do academic theology, there is support available for helping you study at university; if not, the church will be better served by you choosing another career and doing personal study on the side. A calling for church leadership does not need you to be a skilled academic to feed your flock, but you must be “diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, accurately handling the word of truth.” (2 Tim 2:15) Personal study is by no means an ‘easy option’. Whatever you choose to do, you will need to work at it with all your heart.
I’m aware that most of my comments above have been focused primarily on biblical studies, and there are other areas of theological study such as church history, philosophy of religion, psychology and religion, other religions, and modern theology. Every battle is different in its challenges, but even if all you have is a slingshot, never doubt that our God is mighty; “in Messiah are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col 2:3). Go, and may the Lord be with you.
The Essence Of Emergent?
The emergent movement has always been a bit of a mystery to me, and there are probably a bunch of reasons for that. I’m a church leader, and emergent types don’t generally (other than a well-known guy in Grand Rapids) lead large or well-known churches, which makes understanding what they believe and do somewhat harder for me. Self-identified emergents are often hard to pin down, using slightly mysterious words like “fluid” or “natural” or “simple” to refer to the type of church they attend (if they even call it a church, as opposed a “community”).
The whole distinction between “emerging” and “emergent” helped muddy the waters further; which one was Driscoll and which one was Pagitt, again? And to top it all off, until very recently, I had never encountered anybody who was part of an emergent church, with the exception of someone I met once who said they were into “organic” church (the most baffling nomenclature of all, in my view. What does it mean? Carbon-based? Alive? Non-GM?) So the whole emergent thing was, as far as I was concerned, a mediated phenomenon, explained to me either by the enthusiastic (like Brian Maclaren) or the sceptical (like D A Carson). What ordinary emergent people did or said was beyond my ken, as they say.
Until two weeks ago, when as some of you know (thanks to our illustrious friend Saint Stuffed Shirt) I was mugged by a bunch of them on an American blog for being, among other things, “devious”, “manipulative” and “icky”. It was my first direct encounter with real emergent types, and it opened my eyes to something I had not picked up from all the things I’d read about the movement. As I had understood it, the distinctive features of the emergent church were mainly to do with doctrine: essentially leftie on all issues, from pacifism and social justice (hooray), through hell and gender (hmmm), to penal substitution and sexuality (boo). There were also distinctive features connected with church practice, like meeting format, terminology, missionary strategy and so on. But what nobody had ever told me was that at the very heart of the emergent movement was a grave suspicion, and often an outright rejection, of spiritual authority.
I had written a brief piece talking about the importance of asking questions when sharing the gospel with people – a concept that, I assumed, would be right up the street of the emergent types I had read about (and, of course, the basic focus of my new book). But I had made a number of mistakes. For example, the photo of me which appeared on the page had me smiling while speaking at a conference, with a collared shirt and a headset microphone clearly visible. Some commenters highlighted this as a cause of innate suspicion, since it made me look like I was used to telling people what to believe (which as an elder and preacher I am, of course; I have read the Pastoral Epistles, after all). Another commenter picked up on the fact that I had referred to readers of this particular blog as “well instructed” – for me, the phrase was innocuous, but to her, it connoted a heavy-handed authority lurking behind the webpage, as if the main blogger, a professor of New Testament studies, had the right to “instruct” people on anything. (I have since noticed that others who post on the blog generally use language like “participating in the community” to avoid this problem, but you live and learn.) Several were upset that I was asking questions about origins and the resurrection with a view to explaining the gospel to them; didn’t asking questions which I already had answers to imply a superiority and an arrogance? And so on.
Needless to say, I felt quite misunderstood and more than a little upset by all this, some of which was expressed in unhelpfully personal and slightly unpleasant ways. The point of this post, though, is not to air my grievances because my therapist thought it would help expunge the memories – I’ve been called worse by people in my own church! – but to draw attention to the common denominator of all those comments, and many more I have noticed since: a suspicion, or rejection, of spiritual authority. It doesn’t seem to matter whether it’s an expert “instructing” laypeople, an elder “teaching” or “governing” a church, or even a Christian “preaching the gospel to” a sceptic: emergents don’t have much time for authority within the church. Leave the a-word to the state, the army and (maybe) God. Christian brothers and sisters, engaged as we are in an ongoing peer-to-peer conversation about issues of faith, should have nothing to do with anything so autocratic and hierarchical.
Where does this all come from? After all, the Bible is stuffed full of leaders, called by God to lead and govern his people, whether patriarchs, prophets, kings, priests, apostles or elders/overseers, and three New Testament books look remarkably like leadership manuals for the early church, peppered through with instructions to “correct, rebuke, exhort”, “keep a careful watch on the doctrine”, “charge certain people not to teach”, “instruct”, “admonish”, and so on. Not only so, but the existence of church government offices in the first place, along with commands like “submit to them, for they keep watch over you as those who must give an account” and “respect those who are over you in the Lord and admonish you”, clearly indicate that the apostles expected some people to exercise an authority in the church that others did not. So what’s the problem with spiritual authority?
It would be easy to accuse all emergents of having swallowed the democratic spirit of the age, but I suspect there is more to it than that. Many individuals seem to me (and admittedly this is a very anecdotal point) to be coming from a place of pain when authority in the church is discussed – the assumption is often that anything authoritative is authoritarian – which suggests that they reject authority because somebody previously misused it. Heavy-handed, legalistic leadership has probably recruited many more emergents than anything Rob Bell or Brian Maclaren have said, and it’s helpful for those of us in church leadership to bear that in mind, and watch our steps accordingly. On the other hand, many emergents also seem to have a deeper problem with the authority of God himself, whether exercised through Scripture (many emergents believe the Bible has mistakes in it), through leaders (as we are discussing here) or even through the gospel (as one commenter I saw recently put it, “Oh, to be able to hang out somewhere and not be called to repent.”) And without wanting to sound too apocalyptic about it, challenging the authority of God is what got the human race into trouble in the first place.
So I feel like I’m getting a bit more of an idea of what makes emergents tick. My sample size, though, is still vanishingly small, so if anyone thinks the essence of emergent is to be found elsewhere, or knows of emergent people who think spiritual authority is wonderful, then please tell me contribute to the conversation.
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Andrew Wilson’s new book, If God Then What? Wondering Aloud about Truth, Origins and Redemption, is out now, published by IVP who are offering a generous discount for readers of this blog.
A Universe From Nothing?
If Richard Dawkins is to be believed, Lawrence Krauss has written a book which destroys the last trump card of the theologian. In his book A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing (no, it doesn’t scan very well), Krauss has apparently dealt a death-blow to supernaturalism, and done for cosmology what The Origin of Species did for biology, by providing an account of how the universe came into existence without the need for a creator, by the laws of quantum mechanics alone. In a convoluted nutshell, the idea is that there are such things as quantum field theoretical vacuum states (“nothing”), and that they are unstable, and therefore inclined to produce “something” out of them. Our universe probably came about like that, says Krauss, endorsed (with great fanfare in the Afterword) by Dawkins.
This may sound faintly familiar to those who have come across Stephen Hawking’s A Grand Design, and the conceptual thinking behind both books appears fairly similar (not to mention their triumphantly secular conclusions). If Dawkins, Hawking and Krauss are right, then the universe did literally “create itself out of nothing”, in Hawking’s notoriously muddled phrase, and I’m out of a job. But there are good reasons to think that they’re not, and their very confused use of the word “nothing” is one of them. Here’s what The New York Times had to say about Krauss’s book a few days ago:
Where, for starters, are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves supposed to have come from? Krauss is more or less upfront, as it turns out, about not having a clue about that. He acknowledges (albeit in a parenthesis, and just a few pages before the end of the book) that every¬thing he has been talking about simply takes the basic principles of quantum mechanics for granted. “I have no idea if this notion can be usefully dispensed with,” he writes, “or at least I don’t know of any productive work in this regard.” And what if he did know of some productive work in that regard? What if he were in a position to announce, for instance, that the truth of the quantum-mechanical laws can be traced back to the fact that the world has some other, deeper property X? Wouldn’t we still be in a position to ask why X rather than Y? And is there a last such question? Is there some point at which the possibility of asking any further such questions somehow definitively comes to an end? How would that work? What would that be like?
Never mind. Forget where the laws came from. Have a look instead at what they say. It happens that ever since the scientific revolution of the 17th century, what physics has given us in the way of candidates for the fundamental laws of nature have as a general rule simply taken it for granted that there is, at the bottom of everything, some basic, elementary, eternally persisting, concrete, physical stuff. Newton, for example, took that elementary stuff to consist of material particles. And physicists at the end of the 19th century took that elementary stuff to consist of both material particles and electro¬magnetic fields. And so on. And what the fundamental laws of nature are about, and all the fundamental laws of nature are about, and all there is for the fundamental laws of nature to be about, insofar as physics has ever been able to imagine, is how that elementary stuff is arranged. The fundamental laws of nature generally take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of that stuff are physically possible and which aren’t, or rules connecting the arrangements of that elementary stuff at later times to its arrangement at earlier times, or something like that. But the laws have no bearing whatsoever on questions of where the elementary stuff came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular elementary stuff it does, as opposed to something else, or to nothing at all.
The fundamental physical laws that Krauss is talking about in “A Universe From Nothing” — the laws of relativistic quantum field theories — are no exception to this. The particular, eternally persisting, elementary physical stuff of the world, according to the standard presentations of relativistic quantum field theories, consists (unsurprisingly) of relativistic quantum fields. And the fundamental laws of this theory take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of those fields are physically possible and which aren’t, and rules connecting the arrangements of those fields at later times to their arrangements at earlier times, and so on — and they have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story.
What on earth, then, can Krauss have been thinking? Well, there is, as it happens, an interesting difference between relativistic quantum field theories and every previous serious candidate for a fundamental physical theory of the world. Every previous such theory counted material particles among the concrete, fundamental, eternally persisting elementary physical stuff of the world — and relativistic quantum field theories, interestingly and emphatically and unprecedentedly, do not. According to relativistic quantum field theories, particles are to be understood, rather, as specific arrangements of the fields. Certain ¬arrangements of the fields, for instance, correspond to there being 14 particles in the universe, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being 276 particles, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being an infinite number of particles, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being no particles at all. And those last arrangements are referred to, in the jargon of quantum field theories, for obvious reasons, as “vacuum” states. Krauss seems to be thinking that these vacuum states amount to the relativistic—quantum-field-theoretical version of there not being any physical stuff at all. And he has an argument — or thinks he does — that the laws of relativistic quantum field theories entail that vacuum states are unstable. And that, in a nutshell, is the account he proposes of why there should be something rather than nothing.
But that’s just not right. Relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum states — no less than giraffes or refrigerators or solar systems — are particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff. The true relativistic-quantum-field-¬theoretical equivalent to there not being any physical stuff at all isn’t this or that particular arrangement of the fields — what it is (obviously, and ineluctably, and on the contrary) is the simple absence of the fields! The fact that some arrangements of fields happen to correspond to the existence of particles and some don’t is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that some of the possible arrangements of my fingers happen to correspond to the existence of a fist and some don’t. And the fact that particles can pop in and out of existence, over time, as those fields rearrange themselves, is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that fists can pop in and out of existence, over time, as my fingers rearrange themselves. And none of these poppings — if you look at them aright — amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing.
King Lear, it seems, was right. Nothing will come of nothing.
Wot, no Ferrari?
In my last post I wrote about rejoicing in the Lord even when your circumstances aren’t perfect, and about the existence of a bigger, wider reality than human eyes can see. I also talked about wrestling in prayer for something and not being given it.
As I’ve continued to ponder these issues, and to reflect on the familiar story of the events preceding Christ’s crucifixion, something struck me that I have never noticed before: Jesus’ will was different from God’s.
Think about it; in the Garden he prayed ‘not my will, but thine be done.’ Commenting on this verse, Calvin notes that “...in Christ there was a remarkable example of adaptation between the two wills, the will of God and the will of man, so that they differed from each other without any conflict or opposition.”1
Whenever I have heard teaching on Psalm 37:4 - “Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart” – I have always been told that it does not mean ‘If you delight yourself in the Lord, he’ll give you the Ferrari, big house or dream holiday you’ve always wanted’, but ‘when you delight in the Lord, your heart changes so its desires align with the things he wants for you.’ In other words, the person who is walking closely with God and delights in him will desire the things God wants and therefore will receive them.
This is mistaken on two levels. Firstly, wanting the things God wants doesn’t necessarily lead to getting them – even God doesn’t get everything he wants: “God our Saviour…wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:3-4), and unless every person in history has had a death-bed conversion of which no-one else is aware, this simply hasn’t happened.
Secondly, delighting in God doesn’t necessarily lead to wanting the same things he wants. If anyone on earth ever could be considered blameless in the ‘delighting in God’ stakes (as well as in any other stakes you want to mention), it was Jesus. He should surely have been wanting the things God wanted. Indeed, he certainly did: he wanted there to be a way for all people to be redeemed. He knew God’s plan to make it happen was through his death and resurrection. He came willingly to earth for that purpose. When push came to shove, though, he didn’t want to go through with it. He still wanted the same outcome, just not the same process to achieve it. He was still 100% behind the goal, just not the agreed action points.
I don’t know about you, but I find it incredibly encouraging that even Jesus wrestled with wanting God’s will in God’s way. Though we can’t fault his delight in the Father, and though he could see as we can’t what had to be done and why, the fully human part of him still felt the fear and the desire for safety, comfort, and the avoidance of pain.
How then do we reconcile Psalm 37:4 with Luke 22:42? On one level, I don’t know. There are godly people, delighting in the Lord, who live for years without being given the desires of their hearts. Hebrews lists a number of them who waited eagerly for things they had been promised, but died before they came to pass, and these weren’t just their desires but promises they had received from God. Sometimes people are given their desires in eternity not on earth, but other times not: the sick child dies, the much-prayed-for relative never gives his life to the Lord, the longed-for spouse or children never materialise.
Sometimes the desire is fulfilled in a different way than was looked for: the childless couple become surrogate parents to the neglected, a memorial fund is set up which raises the money that finds the cure that saves other children in the lost one’s name, the diligence in prayer leads to a depth and intimacy of relationship with God that may otherwise not have been experienced.
On a deeper level, though, the truth is that those who delight themselves in the Lord always do get the desires of their hearts. Just like Jesus, their desire, in the deepest part of their hearts, in the loneliest moment of the darkest night is that not their will but God’s be done. That’s a prayer he’s happy to answer, and through which he is able to work mightily.
Footnotes
1 John Calvin, New Testament Commentaries, Vol III, p151.
Series: If God Then What?
Andrew Wilson has written a three part series of extracts from his new book If God Then What? Wondering Aloud about Truth, Origins and Redemption. It is out now, published by IVP who are offering a generous discount for readers of this blog.
The series starts with a post on fairies and gardens.
You can view the whole series here.
Repainting God
If Jesus was raised from the dead, then a question arises that is very easy to ask but very tricky to answer. So what?
The earliest answers to that question came from the people who witnessed the resurrection in the 30s and 40s AD. They tended to say three overlapping things about what the resurrection meant, and they got into big trouble with the authorities for all of them.
First, they said it meant that Jesus was the Messiah (or ‘Christ’), the Jewish king they had been waiting for who would bring his rule of justice and peace to the whole earth, and cause the nations to worship Israel’s God. Secondly, they said it meant he was the ‘Lord’, which was the word the Romans used to describe the emperor (and this effectively amounted to the dangerous announcement that the world’s true ruler was Jesus, and not Caesar). And most radically, they said it meant that Yahweh, the God of Israel, had actually become a human in Jesus of Nazareth, so that the artisan-turned-prophet from Galilee, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate and who left an empty tomb behind him two days later, was the one through whom the world had been created in the first place.
At the time, the first two of those claims were the ones that made the most waves. Both of them were highly political, and they infuriated just about everybody. The Jews hated the idea that this crucified prophet was their true king, and the Romans often tortured and killed people who thought they could challenge Caesar’s authority. As a result, the early Christians spent the first few centuries regularly being persecuted from pillar to post for political troublemaking.
To me, though, the really shocking claim they made was the third one: that the Creator of the world had become human in Jesus. It took me a long time to grasp how bizarre this statement was, because it had become so familiar; but think about it. The early Christians were not just saying that this man was divine in some mysterious way, because of his inspired work of teaching and healing people. They were saying that there was only one God, and that he had revealed himself in this man, so if you wanted to know what God was like, you needed to look at Jesus. They were saying that the universe’s Creator was best understood through a human being who loved people and made friends, who ate meals and went to parties, who told jokes and cried when sad things happened, who built community, told stories, hated arrogance, welcomed losers and criminals and children, got betrayed, confronted hypocrites, healed sick people, forgave sins, died on behalf of his enemies, and conquered death.
No other monotheists, either then or today, had ever said anything even remotely like this. They were saying that Jesus was, among other things, repainting God for us. He was showing humans, with all our muddled conceptions of deity, what the true God was really like.
The uniqueness of that claim is matched only by its impact.
Writing this book has been something of a journey for me, literally as well as metaphorically. I first got the idea of doing something like this in the depths of winter in Atlantic Canada, when someone asked me how I had come to believe what I believed. I sketched out the chapter ideas in the Dordogne valley in France, sitting by a pool in the early evening while the rest of the family drifted around on inflatables, played cards or made dinner. I came face to face with religious fundamentalism in Kano, and saw some of its consequences at Ground Zero in New York, though I also saw some of its secular equivalents on my travels. I met with pastors in eastern Ukraine who had been forced underground by the militant atheists who ran the Soviet Union, and saw the industrial wasteland that their secular utopia had produced. I wandered around the streets of Paris before anyone was awake one autumn morning, and stared up at Notre Dame, remembering how the atheist revolutionaries had worshipped their new world order by naming it the Temple of Reason, and how Madame Roland had marvelled at the crimes committed in the name of the goddess Liberty, right before they chopped her head off. I peered into glass cases in Dublin, read academic tomes on first-century history in Oxford and Cambridge, reflected on what was wrong with the world in Zimbabwe, and daydreamed about what a redeemed earth might look like in Samoa, Tuscany and New Zealand. And in between times, I sat in coffee shops in Brighton and London, and wondered aloud about truth, origins and redemption.
Wherever I went, though, I couldn’t get away from the impact of Jesus. I discovered it was very difficult to find places on earth where he was irrelevant. Wherever I travelled, there were people who had heard of him, people who laughed at him, people who loved him, people who wanted to destroy anyone who followed him, people who swore by him, people who built exquisite buildings in which to worship him, people who said he was alive, and (pretty much everywhere) people who divided human history into the bits before and after him. It seemed strange that this man, who wrote nothing down, rejected violence and had just 120 disciples when he died – disciples who, for the first several centuries, were widely regarded as blasphemous, politically subversive oddballs – should have had such a global impact. Especially when you consider he told people that, if they wanted to be his followers, they had to give up their rights to money, sex, power, idol-worship and everything else they had. It doesn’t sound like a winning sales pitch to me.
Yet Jesus was successful in repainting God. He completely changed theology. I mean, you can travel to pretty much any country on earth, and you’ll find people there who use the word ‘God’ in the singular, to refer to a being who is loving, a kind of father, someone to whom people pray in expectation of an answer, who cares about creation and wants to fix it, who is high and exalted and yet can be known by human beings. You even find this use of the word ‘God’ shared by people who don’t believe in one. And it’s highly unlikely that, without Jesus, anybody other than Jewish people would think the word ‘God’ meant anything like that. Were it not for Jesus, we might all still be worshipping the gods of the sun and the moon, dancing around phallic symbols and offering sacrifices, like those disturbing islanders from The Wicker Man.
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This is an extract from Andrew’s new book, If God Then What? Wondering Aloud about Truth, Origins and Redemption. It is out now, published by IVP who are offering a generous discount for readers of this blog.
Jesus On Sex
One of the most common questions I get asked as a church leader is "where in the Bible does Jesus actually say that sex outside of marriage is wrong?" The follow-up question is usually "Why on earth does Jesus do so?" Let me be clear, it's not just people who don't want to follow Jesus who ask me that question. Non-Christian seekers and newborn Christians who are genuinely wanting to submit their lives to Jesus ask this question in all seriousness. And I think they need a serious answer.
First things first, Jesus doesn’t talk much about sex before marriage. If he did, you would begin to suspect that someone had doctored the text of the Bible because first-century Jews got married shortly after puberty (girls around 13 or 14, guys a little bit older). Consequently, sex before marriage simply wasn’t a major issue. In a sex-saturated culture like our own it’s hard to imagine 12 and 13-year-olds still acting like children and getting nervous rather than excited about their wedding night, but that’s how it was in the first-century Jewish culture which received Jesus’ firsthand teaching.
That said, adultery - sex outside of marriage - was definitely an issue. The flip side of parents marrying off their children young, often to relative strangers, was that not all first-century marriages were happy. They were as predisposed as we are to look for sex with other people’s husbands and wives, albeit without some of the easy outlets which exist in our own culture to turn desire into action. This means we have to apply the three golden rules of understanding Scripture to Jesus’ teaching on sex and ask firstly “What did Jesus say to his original hearers?”, then secondly “What is Jesus therefore saying to us today?”, and thirdly “How does Jesus want me to apply that teaching to my life?”
Perhaps the most obvious passage to start with is Jesus’ words in Matthew 19:1-12. Jesus is talking about marriage and divorce, so we need to study the passage carefully for our own context, but some of what he says is very relevant to the question of sex before marriage. Jesus asks his listeners in verses 4 to 6:
Haven’t you read that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said ‘for this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.
Let’s take a moment to consider what Jesus is teaching us here.
1) Sex is good
Why is it that Christians seem louder at talking about how not to have than how to have sex?! It’s like the Monty Python sketch in the movie The Meaning of Life, where the Protestant male rejoices that he isn’t repressed like the Catholics whilst completely ignoring his wife’s come-to-bed-with-me eyes. Tony Campolo puts it even more starkly, claiming that “We were taught that sex is a dirty, filthy thing, and you should save it for the person you marry!”
Jesus, in contrast, points us back to Genesis 1-2, where the Lord creates human beings male and female, tells them to go forth and multiply and then declares that everything he has made (including sex) is “very good”. It’s passages like this one that led the author of Hebrews 13:4 to write that “the marriage bed should be kept pure” (not made pure) because sex within marriage is a wonderful gift from our Creator. If your understanding of Jesus’ teaching on sex gives you a low view of sex, then you have misunderstood him. Go and read the Old Testament book of Song of Songs if you need any encouragement to believe that God says sex is good!
2) Sex is better than good
Now get ready for something shocking. Jesus tells us that sex isn’t just good, it also reflects something of the divine nature of God. He expects us to go back to the passage he quotes from Genesis 1:26-27 and read the whole verse: “God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our image and let them rule’ ... So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Now read that again more slowly. It says God made human beings male and female in order that we might reflect his own image - “our own image”, as he puts it, referring to the three-in-one Trinity. For mankind, it’s only two-in-one because we are not God, but it is two-in-one for a reason. Sex isn’t merely recreational and consensual. It is an act of worship through which two human beings reflect the image of God - a God who is more than one person and yet One.
You’ve got to understand this as a central plank of Jesus’ argument if you want to understand what he says. It’s why the Mosaic Law commanded the death penalty for relatively few offences compared to the other law codes of its day, and yet included sexual sin among the handful of crimes which were punishable by death. Jesus intervened to save an adulteress from being stoned to death in John 8, but he didn’t play down the seriousness of her crime when he warned her to “Go and leave your life of sin.” The Old Testament treated sexual sin as a form a of blasphemy, a vile parody of the Trinity, and Jesus endorsed and reinforced that view. Although he didn’t talk much about sex before marriage because it wasn’t much of an issue in his culture, he tightened up the Law when it came to adultery, declaring that even lusting after a person we are not married to puts us in danger of hell fire.
3) Sex doesn’t belong to us
Consequently, Jesus teaches in Matthew 19 that sex does not belong to us. That’s pretty controversial in our culture, where anything goes sexually (and the painful consequences are everywhere), but it stands to reason when we grasp that Sex Is Good and that Sex is Better than Good. If God is our Creator and he made humans male and female in order to reflect his glory to the world, then it stands to reason that he can tell us sex belongs to him. We are like renters who have been allowed to live in an apartment which belongs to God, not to ourselves, and God takes it very seriously when we start knocking down the walls of the apartment as if it all belongs to us.
That’s the bottom line when it comes to following Jesus’ words on sex. It’s a question of whether we believe our lives (sexual or otherwise) belong to him or to ourselves. If we want to live for Jesus, then he tells us that sex is even better than we thought. Not only can we enjoy it far better in its proper, God-created context, but we are also reflecting the glory of the Trinity when we do! But it also means that Jesus wants to be Lord of what we do in our bedroom (etc, etc!) in private, because our whole lives belong to him.
4) Marriage is God’s invention not ours
Jesus hasn’t finished. He has one more big thing to say. He doesn’t just talk about two becoming one, but starts to talk about a person leaving his parents and being united to his wife (note the order), and he tells us that when such a public marriage covenant takes place then God has joined the two marriage partners together in a way which human laws alone cannot separate. The disciples don’t know whether to be horrified that marriage is such a serious matter (they ask if it might be too holy a state to enter into at all in verse 10), or to be overjoyed that God’s plan for sex and marriage is so much better than the way these things are viewed in their culture (we can tell from the New Testament letters that this second option ultimately won their hearts). Jesus tells us that we have only understood what he says about sex if we are similarly overawed and overjoyed.
Conclusion
We have only looked at four short verses from one portion of Jesus’ teaching on sex, but what can we conclude? Jesus is clear that sex is reserved for lifelong marriage between one man and one woman, and that he created it to be incredible fun so that we would make love often and enjoy it - whilst reflecting the fact that God is far greater than a man or a woman. They are two-in-one, shining like the moon, whilst he is three-in-one, shining far more brightly like the sun.
If you are not living this way, then sex should not be a reason for you to reject Jesus but for you to accept him. Our culture is full of good reasons for bad sex, but Jesus promises that if we follow the Maker’s instructions then sex gets better. He also promises you forgiveness as he did the adulterous woman in John 8, telling you “I do not condemn you; now leave your life of sin.”
If you are not yet married but are trying to live Jesus’ way, then you should be encouraged. Jesus promises you that God greatly prizes your decision to remain celibate until you marry, and that he will bless you as a result. Perhaps he is already planning your reward. Proverbs 18:22 tells us that “He who finds a wife finds what is good and receives favour from the Lord.”
And if you are married, then please don’t focus more on Jesus’ prohibitions on sex than you do on his great invitation. He encourages you to go and make love to your husband or wife to the glory of God! He tells you that some of your best worship should not be sung in church on a Sunday morning, but enjoyed in bed on a Sunday afternoon! In fact, shouldn’t you stop spending time reading this blog and go forth to apply it for the glory of the Triune God?!
David Hume, On Loop
To my mind, there are only two ways of approaching the question of what happened on Easter Sunday (probably 9 April AD 30) that hold any water at all, and virtually every intelligent person I’ve come across takes one of the two. One is to say that Jesus of Nazareth rose bodily from the dead. The other is to say that, no matter what the evidence might suggest, you can’t talk about supernatural events in a historical enquiry like this, so there has to be another explanation. That’s pretty much it.
In Massachusetts, in March 2006, there was a debate between Bart Ehrman and William Lane Craig that sums up these two positions very well. I read the transcript online, and it makes fascinating reading, because the debate isn’t really about the historical data (the empty tomb and the appearances), but about whether or not historical evidence for the resurrection could ever be possible. As a Christian, William Lane Craig argued that the resurrection of Jesus was the best historical explanation for the evidence. Bart Ehrman’s response, rather than giving an alternative explanation, was to argue that historical evidence of a ‘miracle’ was by definition impossible, so no matter how unlikely the alternatives seemed – and he didn’t really propose any – they must be more likely than a supernatural event. In other words, he wasn’t so much saying that there wasn’t any historical evidence for Jesus’ resurrection, as much as he was saying that there could never have been. Supernatural events, Bart Ehrman said, can be theological conclusions, but not historical ones.
I thought that was a fairly clever strategy. What Bart Ehrman did that day was to define ‘history’ in such a way as automatically to exclude all God-things, including the resurrection, from being considered ‘historical’ – they were now merely ‘theological’ (which, if I’m not being unfair, basically means ‘you can believe them if you like, but if you do, it’ll be because of blind faith, not evidence’). At one point, someone asked him if he thought there could ever be historical evidence of a miracle, and to his credit, he admitted he didn’t. In other words, Bart Ehrman was saying, it doesn’t matter how much evidence you have for the resurrection, I still won’t believe it, because history can’t involve God doing anything. Or, more bluntly, I believe there’s no such thing as a God who is involved with history, so any accounts of God doing something in history must be wrong, no matter what the evidence.
The problem with all that, from my perspective, is what I was talking about in the first half of the book, especially chapter 5. You really can’t be sure that there isn’t a God – actually, there might well be one, for various reasons – and since God could presumably do anything he wanted, you can’t be sure that miracles don’t happen either. If I were to look at the Dublin display case with an unshakeable conviction that there is no God, then of course I’d have to find another explanation. (If I looked at Elizabethan literature with an unshakeable conviction that there is no Shakespeare, I’d end up in a similar position.) But if I went to the Dublin display case with an open mind about whether God existed or not, I might find that Bart Ehrman’s argument wasn’t that strong after all.
Once or twice, I’ve met people who think like Bart Ehrman. Conversations, if you strip out all the niceties, basically go something like this:
‘So tell me: why don’t you believe in a God who acts in the world?’
‘Because there’s no evidence for his existence.’
‘What about the resurrection of Jesus?’
‘It never happened.’
‘There’s lots of evidence for it, though, isn’t there?’
‘Maybe, but there must be another explanation.’
‘Why?’
‘Because supernatural events don’t happen.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘Because a God who acts in the world doesn’t exist.’
‘Ah.’
And round it goes again. It’s like talking to David Hume, on loop.
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This is an extract from Andrew’s new book, If God Then What? Wondering Aloud about Truth, Origins and Redemption. It is out now, published by IVP who are offering a generous discount for readers of this blog.
The Eucatastrophe of Easter
I’m sure the fact that Easter Sunday is fast approaching will not have eluded you entirely, but often if I’m honest, it can catch me off guard. There used to be a time when you could measure the approach by the appearance of Creme Eggs in the shops, but alas no more. Now they’re on sale from January, I’ve eaten too many by February and entirely forgotten about Easter by March. And given that I only loosely follow the church calendar, it is easy not to consider the Easter story until the very last moment… sometime around April!
This year, however, I have benefitted from having a long lead-in time to Easter. In February our church began a sermon series on the ‘I am’ sayings in John’s Gospel; considering the extraordinary claims that Jesus made about himself. That series will culminate on Easter Sunday. Last week I spent some time writing a series of daily devotionals for Easter week, looking at Palm Sunday, Judas’ betrayal, the Last Supper, Gethsemane, the crucifixion, and the pain and silence of Easter Saturday. For the first time, our church is running a Good Friday service, where we will focus on the crucifixion and consider Jesus’ final sayings from the cross.
So in different ways over the past few weeks, I have been building towards and growing in expectation of Easter Sunday. In fact, I would say I am aching for it! I can’t wait for it!
That’s the power of story. It primes you for a conclusion, it readies you for a resolution.
Tolkien, in his essay On Fairy Stories, teases out some of the key features of mythology and applies them to the Christian gospel. Whether you think of yourself as a fan of fantasy literature or not (Lord of the Rings aside, I would put myself firmly in the latter category!) it is well worth a read for the light that it sheds on storytelling.
He argues that all fairy tales must have a Consolation of a Happy Ending – in fact, that is the essence of fairy tale – the consolation is to fairy tale what tragedy is to drama. But since he can find no word to suitably describe this kind of ending he coins his own: the eucatastrophe – a good catastrophe – where through a sudden and unexpected turn, a miraculous burst of grace, which cannot be counted on to recur, darkness gives way to light; sadness to joy; death to life.
I appreciate this term, but it must be distinguished from the literary tool of Deus ex Machina, ‘God from the Machine.’ In Greek Theatre, actors playing gods would be lowered onto the stage by a crane in order to intervene in an otherwise irresolvable story. Thus misery could be solved in an instant by an entirely contrived appearance of a god, who has played little or no part in the rest of the plot, and is literally wheeled in for the sole purpose of rectifying the story (and getting the author out of a tight spot).
Deus ex Machina brings help from outside the story, eucatastrophe from within. Eucatastrophe doesn’t result in change apart from some catastrophic or traumatic event, but precisely through it. Eucatastrophe is no less miraculous than Deus ex Machina, it still requires intervention, but it does have the benefit of correlating with the logic of the story. The answer comes from something internal to the narrative, not external. One might almost say there is a prophetic element to it; it was always there though unperceived, weaved into the fabric of the story from the start (cf. John 20:9; 1 Corinthians 15:3-4; 1 Peter 1:10-12).
Imagine sitting down with someone who has no knowledge of Lord of the Rings and trying to explain in purely logical terms exactly why this small metallic object must be thrown into some lava, and why that will somehow defeat a devilish, fiery, hovering contact-lens and rescue the world. You can’t do it on principles alone. But once you begin to weave the story, it yearns for the eucatastrophic climax. I would venture to say that the story has to end the way that it does. There is an inner logic to the piece that compels it towards that ending. Hints and themes from the beginning of the story start to converge and give you hope for the climax, such that even when the evil takes over Frodo at the last moment, you know it won’t end there. It can’t. Fairy stories never do.
I wonder if part of the reason we sometimes struggle to make Easter connect with people is that we treat it too much like an abstract principle, and less like the culmination of a story. Perhaps we fail to give it the lead-in time it deserves, and don’t take sufficient steps to weave the whole story: the claims, the life lived, the deeds done, the adulation from the crowd, the anger from the religious leaders, and so on. I wonder if we do people a disservice by presenting the catastrophe to which the resurrection is the eucatastrophe as a principle rather than a story longing for its foreordained conclusion. And so our explanations seem abstract and incomprehensible, or like an invocation of a Deus ex Machina in order to explain away what would otherwise be a quite barbaric event.
On Sunday I get to preach on the eucatastrophe of Easter, and I cannot wait. I ride on the back of three months of examining the life of Jesus, of a week of building to the cross through the story of Holy Week, of a morning spent meditating on the cries from the cross, of a Saturday spent in quiet and doubt. And in a strange sort of way, I think that makes my job easier. The story contains an inner logic that compels me towards hope, and I get to show how that logic works itself out. After all we’ve seen and heard, how can the story not end in joy? How can it not end in life?
Tolkien puts it like this:
The Gospels contain a fairy story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels - peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: “mythical” in their perfect, self contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfilment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the “inner consistency of reality.” There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is of Creation.
Yet I Will Rejoice
It was one of those weeks, you know the ones, when you’re busy minding your own business and gradually become aware that Someone’s trying to tell you something.
First there was a familiar song lyric which jumped out at me afresh, then a casual comment from a friend, and finally Piglet.
He was all alone on a park bench, matted, water-logged and bedraggled from the weekend’s rain, and shivering slightly in the chill morning air. All his circumstances said he should be feeling awful. He’d been forgotten; dropped by someone he thought had loved him, kicked around in the mud, then left behind. It would have been perfectly reasonable for him to have hung his head and cried with despair. Yet he looked, in spite of everything, as cheerful as could be.
The apostle Paul experienced the whole gamut of human experiences, from being lauded, honoured and celebrated to being beaten, imprisoned and even shipwrecked, yet he was able to say that he had “learned to be content whatever the circumstances” (Phil 4:11). Centuries earlier, the prophet Habakkuk had written a similar sentiment:
Though the fig-tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will be joyful in God my Saviour. - Hab 3:17-18
How could they say these things? Were they just the human equivalent of stuffed toys, with their brains and emotions surgically (spiritually?) removed? Had they been brainwashed into thinking that all was well when it clearly wasn’t?
No. They were fully compos mentis, they just had extra information that wasn’t available to ordinary observers. First, they knew they had – and had learned to draw on – extra help: the next verse in the Habakkuk text says “The Sovereign LORD is my strength,” and Paul continues “I can do all this through him who gives me strength” (v13).
Secondly, they knew that they had never been promised a good and easy life. ‘Coming to Christ’ doesn’t mean leaving the reality of a fallen world. Although God can and does protect, heal and provide for his children, the reality is that he doesn’t always, and we shouldn’t expect him to, or doubt him when he doesn’t. In his moving book God on Mute: Engaging the Silence of Unanswered Prayer, Pete Grieg has quite a lot to say on this topic, and includes several examples of people who would, by normal standards, be perfectly justified in raging at God or doubting his goodness, or even his existence, given all they were going through. He asked one friend how he made sense of all the (very significant) challenges that had been thrown at his family over the last few years. The friend answered:
I guess I used to think that I had some divine right to happiness. I mean, obviously I knew there was going to be the occasional rough patch but…well, to be honest with you…these days I find it easier just to accept that life’s tough…than to feel sort of hard done by as if I’d been robbed. (pp. 149-150)
I like that. We live in a culture that tells us we can get whatever we want – in fact, we deserve whatever we desire. Add into the mix a loving, all-powerful God, and the fact that he delights to give good gifts to his children, and it is easy to come away with an expectation that a ‘true’ Christian will have an easy, happy, pain-free life; a blessed life.
This wasn’t the reality for the prophets, though. It wasn’t the reality for the Apostles – even the uber-apostle Paul. It wasn’t even the reality for Jesus – God didn’t take the cup from him, but allowed him to be abused, humiliated, tortured and killed.
I’m sure Jesus wasn’t grinning like Piglet while he hung on the cross. I can’t imagine that ‘content’ was an adjective he would have picked to describe his feelings in the darkest hour on that Friday, but the fact that he didn’t call down legions of angels to fight for him illustrates that he accepted the pain as being part of God’s will, and submitted himself to it, knowing there was a bigger picture than anyone on earth could see at the time.
I am living with an unanswered prayer at the moment. It’s something I want, and have been praying for diligently for a long time. It’s something I believe God has promised me. It’s something I believe will equip me to serve him more effectively. And it’s something he has not yet given me. It hurts. It’s hard to be told to ask him for something and not to receive it. It’s hard to see others who I (arrogantly) think are less deserving, and less appreciative than me being given the answers to their prayers while I’m still waiting. It’s hard not to feel that it must be something I’m doing wrong, that I must have disappointed God in some way, that he is withholding blessing from me until I earn it. It’s hard and frustrating and painful (and incredibly minor compared with what so many others have to go through). But just recently, the process of wrestling with God and pleading with him, and crying out to him and choosing to trust him anyway, and to praise him and to believe that he is good, just recently that has started to bear fruit. It’s not bringing the answer to prayer I’m looking for, but it has started to bring a depth of relationship with God that I have always wanted. I’m beginning – finally – to hear from Him consistently and to feel his presence, rather than just intellectually knowing he’s there.
Given the choice, I’d have opted to have my prayer answered years ago. It’s still tough; it still hurts, but through the process I’m learning what it means to say ‘the Sovereign Lord is my strength’ in a new and deeper way. Though my prayer is not answered and there is no fruit (so far as I can see) in my life, yet will I rejoice in the Lord.
We haven’t been promised an easy, pain-free life. We may get dropped in the mud and abandoned by those who were supposed to love us, but we are called to praise God and even, hard as it seems, rejoice in him whatever our circumstances.
And in case you’re wondering, when I walked past the bench later in the day, Piglet had gone. Perhaps he was reclaimed by his family, perhaps adopted by a new one. Wherever he is, I’m sure he’s rejoicing still.
Fairies and Gardens
When I was thirteen, I got really into Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. (If you haven’t read them, they’re a series of comedy books about an ordinary guy who gets caught up in space travel after the earth is destroyed to make room for a bypass, and they’re hilarious. Then again, if you haven’t read them, or seen or heard one of the radio or screen adaptations, you probably haven’t lived.) Before I read them, I don’t think I’d ever laughed out loud at a book before, but then a few people in my school got into them, and we started quoting them to one another all the time, laughing hysterically like thirteen-year-olds do when they’re in on a joke and you’re not. In the dormitory at night, someone would do the routine where the computer tells everyone that the meaning of life is forty-two, and everyone would fall about laughing. Or I’d walk down the corridor and say, ‘In the beginning, the universe was created,’ and Stewart Morris would say, ‘This has made a lot of people very angry, and has been widely regarded as a bad move.’ Then we’d both carry on to our lessons, giggling. Good times.
So far as I was concerned, Douglas Adams was a genius. Not just for The Hitchhiker’s Guide, although that was amazing. His little spoof dictionary, The Meaning of Liff, defined the word ‘Corriearklet’, which is really a place in Scotland, as: ‘The moment at which two people approaching from opposite ends of a long passageway, recognize each other and immediately pretend they haven’t. This is to avoid the ghastly embarrassment of having to continue recognizing each other the whole length of the corridor.’ The man was inspired.
I had dinner with him once, when I was at university, because he was the guest speaker at an event I’d been invited to. It was quite weird, because at one point I found myself in a conversation with him and Germaine Greer, which is pretty intimidating when you’re a teenager, and you’re not that funny, and you’re not a radical feminist – you find yourself making the most ridiculous conversation, just so you feel like you’ve got something to say, which (it sadly turns out) you haven’t. When we finally got to his speech, which was the reason I was there, I remember being a bit disappointed with it, because his main joke was an anecdote I’d heard loads of times which obviously wasn’t true, and which he could have pulled off the internet for all I know. I still count it a privilege to have met him, though, and I remain a huge fan of his writing.
But one of his most famous throwaway remarks – at least, famous since a friend of his quoted it while dedicating a book that sold a million copies – really bothered me when I first read it, and it sums up pretty well the mind/matter debate. He said, ‘Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?’
Douglas Adams called himself a radical atheist, and this was his way of saying that belief in a creator was unnecessary. If you come across a beautiful garden, then the right response is to appreciate its beauty for its own sake, rather than inventing all sorts of mythical creatures and pretending they live there. That, he argued, is what people do when they believe in God. They encounter a world that is very beautiful, filled with incredibly complex and magnificent creatures, and what they should do is appreciate it for what it is. But instead, they invent fairies – gods – to hide all over it, in the branches of the trees and under the toadstools, and then they worship these gods, when they should be focusing on the beauty. This, Douglas Adams was saying, is ridiculous. Why not just admire the garden?
You have to be careful with parables, though. They can backfire. Here’s what it made me think: of course a beautiful garden would not make me believe in fairies (which is probably why no sane adult in the world believes in fairies). But it might make me believe in a gardener. Wouldn’t you think? A beautiful garden might well make me believe that someone of intelligence and skill – in other words, some sort of mind – had given their time to planting, ordering and cultivating this particular patch of land, so that it became a beautiful garden rather than a tumbledown scrubland.
That’s the whole point. When we find matter in an unsorted, unproductive mess, we don’t tend to imagine that intelligent beings are responsible. Left to their own devices, things in nature tend to get more disordered: gardens grow weeds, snowmen melt, bedrooms become messy, bicycles rust, and so on. So when we find an ugly piece of land where the grass is overgrown and the flowers are dying, we generally conclude that nobody’s been looking after it. There is no mind supervising the matter.
Beautiful gardens, on the other hand, are a different story. They display such order and beauty that we immediately see a mind behind the matter. Nobody in their right mind walks through the gardens at Versailles and thinks they just happened to come about that way; we all know that a very skilled and intelligent gardener has been hard at work, trimming borders and arranging flowers, probably over many years. The Versailles gardens don’t make you believe in fairies, but if you saw them and said you didn’t believe in gardeners, you’d be laughed off the stage.
Perhaps it’s the same with the earth. If you came across a place that had bucked the trend towards disorder, a place where total chaos had turned into astonishing order and beauty, rather than the other way around – where, for instance, you started with a Bang and ended up with a brain – you might think that some mind, some sort of gardener, was behind it all. Maybe Douglas Adams spoke better than he knew.
Here’s another way I’ve thought about it. If everything in the universe began with some sort of supreme mind – and you don’t have to call that ‘god’, although lots of people do – then I would expect the world to be filled with things like beauty, thought, art, music and morality, since those things come about because of minds.
On the other hand, if at the beginning of everything there was nothing but matter, then I would find it extremely surprising if all of those things had come about. Not impossible, I guess – it’s possible that the mineral Mordor could produce life, cells, consciousness and the rest on its own – but it would be extremely surprising. If a few billion years back we had a lifeless jumble of minerals, then I’d expect us still to have a lifeless jumble of minerals, and I certainly wouldn’t expect there to be people who asked questions and wrote songs and read books.
I think that’s quite an important thing to bear in mind when we’re asking whether mind or matter came first.
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This is an extract from Andrew’s new book, If God Then What? Wondering Aloud about Truth, Origins and Redemption. It is out now, published by IVP who are offering a generous discount for readers of this blog.
Leading to What?
Andrew’s fascinating post about Doug Campbell’s reading of Romans made the aside that Duke Divinity School (rather than Harvard) “is probably the world’s leading Divinity School at the moment.” This observation raises the interesting question about how we define “leading” when it comes to academic institutions generally, and to the study of theology specifically.
Andrew, Liam and myself are the three “leading” contributors to this blog – in the sense that we post more regularly than anyone else. We are all also closely associated with the “leading” university of King’s College, London – I took an MA there and Liam is currently reading for his MA, while Andrew is pursuing a PhD. (King’s has always had a strong theology department, but the completion of my MA coincided with the death of leading theologian Colin Gunton, who had been head of department, and the departure of a number of other leading staff – a state of affairs that led to one academic making the rather snide remark to me that the previously “leading” faculty were being replaced by “school teachers and atheists.”)
This is the time of year in the UK when many 18 year olds are making decisions about which college to attend once they finish school, and there are plenty of league tables available which seek to quantify which are the leading institutions. (The THE and QS rankings are both good examples.) Competition to enter the top ranked colleges can be fierce, fuelled by the benefits in terms of educational standard and graduate employability. (And in all these rankings Harvard beats Duke – even if it’s divinity department is not so leading!)
But what of the 18 year old thinking about studying theology at degree level – how can they decide what defines “leading” for them? Or, for the rest of us, reading books (and blogs) by academics, what weight should we place upon where the institutions they work at rank in the league tables?
In the end, Paul’s advice to Timothy must be our model for what is most leading, because it is most faithful:
Set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity… devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching. Do not neglect the gift you have… Practice these things, immerse yourself in them, so that all may see your progress. Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers.
The world of academic theology can be immensely helpful and profitable, but it has also thrown up more heretical ideas and nonsense than you could shake a student loan at. Which means we should not reject academia, or be nervous of engaging with it, but neither should we feel intimidated by credentials which, while impressive in the league tables, speak little of true faithfulness.
So, should the 18 year old wanting to study theology go to a leading institution, even if it is staffed by atheists, or should they go to Bible College? I might do another post about that…
Why Did God Create Wasps?
This is a fascinating question, and has the potential to be quite confusing, depending on whether or not you write it in capitals. If we’re wondering why God created wasps, as in the small yellow and black creatures who have been making a nuisance of themselves for centuries and spoiling everybody’s fun, then we may come up with a very different answer than if we’re wondering why God created WASPS, as in the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants who ran America until a few years ago, and have been making a nuisance of themselves for centuries and spoiling everybody’s fun (although, admittedly, in a slightly different way). I’m going to assume, for the sake of this piece, that we’re talking about the flying, stinging, jam-loving insects. I have no idea why God created WASPS, anyway.
The serious component of this question, I guess, is about the goodness of God, creation and suffering. Why would an all-good God create an animal which looks very much as if it’s been designed to cause pain to other creatures? Doesn’t that cast doubt on his goodness? What’s the deal here?
To be honest, this question could be asked of pretty much every creature. The sting of a wasp, like that of a nettle, and the charge of an electric eel, is a survival mechanism: a weapon the creature has to defend itself, prolong its life and hence also its chances of reproduction. The rhino has horns, the acacia tree has spikes, skunks have scent, and the bombardier beetle has a 200 degree Fahrenheit blast from its rear end (which, while we’re on the subject, is the one I’d choose). All of these features, and many less obvious ones, are designed to help the creature survive (and that’s without starting on the carnivores). It just so happens that we find wasps more irritating than most, because skunks and rhinos don’t usually maraud around our gardens and sit on the jam scones.
Biblically, the struggle for survival, with all the defence (and attack) mechanisms it requires in animals, is part of the groaning of creation, the pining of a world that has been subjected to futility, desperate that it might one day be liberated into the freedom of the people of God (Romans 8:18-25). Human beings were commissioned to spread God’s image and kingly rule throughout the earth, subduing it and causing it to flourish as we went – but we rebelled instead, and creation is suffering the consequences (Genesis 1:27-28; 2:5-15; 3:17-19). Through our resurrected king Jesus, however, we have a certain hope of a resurrected world where there are no wasp-stings, no tornadoes or earthquakes, no pain or death, and where wolves and lambs hang out together (Isaiah 65:17-25). In that sense, wasps are a daily reminder that the world is not what it is going to be.
But I’m not sure that’s why God created them. I think God created wasps for three reasons. One, they look cool. Yellow and black look good together: just witness the way everyone wants yellowjacket wasps on their logos. Two, they keep humans humble. Without the wasp, we’d be all smug about being at the top of the food chain; wasps keep us in our place. And three, they make the Schmidt Sting Pain index possible – perhaps the most brilliant and eccentric scientific index there is (possibly apart from the Scoville Scale, for measuring the hotness of chillies). The yellowjacket wasp, for example, is given a pain index of 2.0 out of 4, with the following official description: ‘Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.’ Brilliant.
So that’s why I think God created wasps.
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(This article originally appeared in IDEA magazine).
Faceplanting in the Fallacy of Nothing Buttery
I haven’t read Sam Harris’s most recent book Free Will (which is about our lack of it), and to be honest, I doubt I will. But my namesake has, and as usual, he has some feisty and insightful things to say about it:
“In physical terms, we know that every human action can be reduced to a series of impersonal events” (p. 27). What that would be like is a trillion billiard balls rocketing all over an infinite plane of green velvet. If we look closely enough, some of those billiard balls appear to be writing a series of books. One of those books chides Christian billiard balls for bouncing around in the hidebound and superstitious way they do. Heh. Pardon me for not paying stricter attention.
I will no doubt develop this further later, but Harris has faceplanted in the fallacy of nothing buttery. In physical terms, what is there when I make a decision? There is “nothing but” atoms banging around. That is where the fatal step is taken. If the material world is all that is, then you have defined everything else right out of existence – immaterial things like souls and spirit, fairies in the garden, or minds (as opposed to brains). Not only have you exiled all such things, you have also banished a little something called information.
How much does information weigh? What color is it? How many square yards is it? What is its force? Velocity? Can you find it anywhere?
A sign on the wall says “no smoking”. A gentleman lights up a mundungus stogie anyway, and when the proprietor taps him on the shoulder, he defends himself by saying that the sign is “nothing but” paper and ink. He defies anybody to find anything else there. And you know—he can win that argument, but only so long as he is allowed by definition to exclude the only real thing that matters in the discussion. There is nothing but paper and ink if we drastically truncate the discussion in the ways of high silliness.
My paperback Hamlet is “nothing but” paper and ink. My promise at my wedding was “nothing but” disturbances in the air caused by sound waves. Girl with a Pearl Earring is “nothing but” paint and canvas. And my grandchildren are “nothing but” protoplasm. Some of us might be forgiven for thinking that a man shouldn’t dump out everything priceless onto the floor and then argue that all he has is an empty box. His feet are covered with treasures.
Indeed they are. You can read the whole thing here.
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Andrew Wilson’s new book, If God Then What? Wondering Aloud about Truth, Origins and Redemption, is out now, published by IVP who are offering a generous discount for readers of this blog.
Female Role-Models
Andrew Wilson has recently posted some well thought out, and interesting, articles on women in the church; the Complementarian/Egalitarian debate. Being a woman myself, I feel I have more licence, or perhaps it is just confidence, to comment critically on women’s issues. Therefore, I thought I would add some sociological observations to Andrew’s more theological posts: I have been thinking about the importance of female role-models in the church.
Peter writes:
Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as elaborate hairstyles and the wearing of gold jewellery or fine clothes. Rather, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight. (1 Peter 3:3-4)
I wonder how many women in the wider culture would think a gentle and quiet spirit is desirable? I’m not sure that many would. Gentle and quiet women are not something that is particularly sought after. In fact, I’m pretty sure that the opposite is true. We are expected to be independent women, emancipated and not just equal to men, but able to do everything that men do (audience of women cheers!). However, the women that come to mind when faced with these ideals can be some sort of Charlie’s Angels for younger women, or perhaps successful business women for us in our mid-twenties, and I guess beyond.
Michael Ramsden came to speak to our church in Brighton last year. He mentioned that he had been reading some feminist books that really troubled him, because of the abuses to women in our society. Afterward I got a chance to ask him for some references. As a result, I have recently finished reading Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture by Ariel Levy. It was a shocking confirmation of the debased and twisted view our culture has of female liberation. It is not a book I would encourage any man to read; it can be rather descriptive. Levy’s essential message was to undermine the assumption that women needed to try to impress men, or try to be ‘like men’. She comments on the increasing desire within the ranks of women to cast themselves in a masculine mould:
Why try to beat them when you could join them? There’s a way in which a certain lewdness, a certain crass, casual manner that has at its core a me-Tarzan-you-Jane mentality can make people feel equal. It makes us feel that way because we are all Tarzan now, or at least we are all pretending to be.1
It is a very interesting observation, and one which I agree can unfortunately be true within British society. As such, there is a need for women in our country to have good role models. This is also true in the church, and is evident from my church’s Exploring Church Membership sessions. There is a slot where we talk about women in the church, and there is almost always a question like: ‘What can women do in the church?’ I believe in a Complementarian view of gender roles, and believe that men should be elders, and therefore believe that men should often be the ones at the front of church, leading our corporate meetings. However, for women in the church it is easy to try to emulate the elders in more ways than one, and even start to believe that ultimate spiritual development is serving Jesus through preaching and leading the church, as this is the role model so readily displayed on Sundays.
Peter’s exhortation to build our identity as women on God, and develop our ‘inner self’ is beautiful and feels so right, but a male dominated ‘stage’ at church can leave women with few examples of how this is worked out in practice. This can be particularly true for younger women, who may not have developed friendships with older women in their church. With this vacuum in young women’s lives I have observed that they can increasingly, and often quite unconsciously, turn to the modern ideals of ‘independent women’ and being ‘like men’ as Levy has described. This can be compounded by a lack of female role-models in their church life, leaving them with male role-models within the church and female role-models in our wider society. Male church role models are great, but they may not help counter the pressure on young women to be ‘like men’. Certainly, non-Christian female role models won’t.
This is precisely why I have been so encouraged by the women’s work that has started running at Church of Christ the King (CCK) Brighton, and I’m sure in many other churches too. We aim to hold Women’s Days and events three times a year at CCK, and in the past they have been a great success. Personally, I have found it so helpful to be able to see women preaching and teaching other women. Not because I have a bee in my bonnet about ‘male only’ preachers, but because I have had the opportunity to be inspired by the spiritual lives of other women in my church. It really has been a great encouragement.
I’m aware that we will need to continue to grapple with these issues, such as women preaching and teaching. But while we do, it’s good to know that we are developing, not necessarily toward an increasingly liberal theology, but towards a system that best represents the Word of God and the caring of his people. We are developing by aiming to hold on to our complementarian conviction, while seeking to use the teaching and preaching gifts many women possess.
Women, we don’t need to beat men or try and compete with them. We also don’t need to feel that an egalitarian theology is the only way our dreams and aspirations for serving God can be fulfilled. There are many ways in which your gifts and calling are needed and can be used in the church. If there are changes to be made let’s seek new ways in which our gifting can benefit the body of believers, rather than seeking to dismantle complementarian theology to justify a culturally defined ‘equality’ in which Jane is indistinguishable from Tarzan.
Footnotes
1 Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture by Ariel Levy, p.93
Doug Campbell: Do You Read Romans Like An Arian?
One of the world's most brilliant New Testament scholars thinks your and my readings of Romans have been thoroughly infused with Arianism. (By the way, this post is at the most academic end of our spectrum at whatyouthinkmatters.org - if it was a curry, it would have three chillies next to it).
For Doug Campbell, Associate Professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School (which, sorry Harvard, is probably the world’s leading Divinity School at the moment), all mainstream ways of reading Romans, including the Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist and New Perspective ones, are thoroughly and unacceptably Arian. His proposal, articulated with striking originality and creativity in his massive book The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul, is (among other things) that we need to recover an Athanasian reading of Paul - and that as we do, all sorts of exegetical and practical weaknesses to the Arian reading will get sorted out. For those of us who, like me until recently, have always considered the Arian/Athanasian distinction to be essentially Christological, this will come as a surprise, since there is nothing in James Dunn’s or Douglas Moo’s exegesis of Romans that implies Jesus was a created being. But Doug Campbell isn’t using the word like that, and his protest is, if anything, at a deeper level.
Arianism, as Campbell understands it, is essentially about foundationalism, in contrast to Athanasianism, which is about apocalypticism. By this he means that Arius begins with the foundations we have in human experience and then works upwards to make judgments about the divine nature (hence “foundationalist”), whereas Athanasius urges the impossibility of doing things this way round, and the necessity of starting with revelation from God (hence “apocalyptic”). For Campbell, all mainstream contemporary readings of Romans, and particularly Romans 1-4, are foundationalist, and hence Arian. He thinks they should be apocalyptic, and hence Athanasian.
The contractual-legal reading of Paul in Romans 1-4, which Campbell says characterises almost all modern readings of the text, is basically foundationalist. It begins with the assumption that humans can know God simply by reasoning upwards from creation. Then it thinks in terms of an analogy for God, in this case as wrathful judge, and sees humans as morally free agents who can choose either good or bad, and who receive rewards or punishments accordingly. Judaism, in this reading, is one particularly clear example of the moral contract which man has failed to keep; God is the one who dispenses just punishments in a manner that suspiciously resembles the Constantinian state; and Christianity then comes in as the definitive, second contract between man and God, in which God gives justification in exchange for faith. This contractualism - we give faith, God gives justification - is at the heart of the Arian reading, and emerges (ironically) most clearly with Augustine and his ordo salutis, or what T. F. Torrance calls “the Latin heresy”. The result is that humans are contract-keepers, God is primarily a judge, and the gospel is not good news for anyone unless they (a) hear it and (b) believe it.
In contrast, Campbell proposes an Athanasian reading of Romans. Rather than beginning with natural reason and working upwards to God, he argues that Paul does not envisage anybody being able to relate to God without his prior apocalyptic activity in coming downwards; that is, his revelation of himself through Jesus Christ in the gospel. Athanasianism relies totally on revelation in Christ, and sees God as acting unconditionally and benevolently towards humans while still enslaved and unable to believe: “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” The atonement, in Romans, is not a penal act which freely choosing moral agents can decide to accept or reject, but an Exodus act which liberates those who could do nothing to help themselves (and hence there is no endorsement in Paul of the imperial iustitia, and the spectre of Constantinianism, that Campbell suspects to be at the root of the judicial-punitive view). God steps down and delivers us in Jesus, and there are no strings of contractual obligation (like faith) attached. Faith is not a condition of salvation, in fact; for Campbell, sola fide is a vulgar Protestant idea, since it is so based on the two contracts, and we should instead think of sola Jesus. We bring nothing to the party, he argues, not even faith. We are delivered solely and entirely by grace.
The argument for this reading of Romans as the best one takes a thousand pages of densely argued prose, and summarising it adequately here would be impossible. For Campbell, the chief strengths of his proposal are exegetical (he discusses over thirty exegetical weakness of the contractual-foundationalist view, which throughout he labels Justification Theory, that are resolved using his approach), and theological (since it views God as the indiscriminate dispenser of grace to all, rather than the contractual pedant who needs us to chip in our works and/or faith to experience his deliverance). His strongest point is that it provides a satisfactory answer to the age-old question about the relationship between Romans 1-4 and 5-8, an answer which Justification Theory in all its forms has so far failed to give (is God judge, or liberator? Is unbelieving humanity able to choose to follow God, or dead in sin? Is the Christ-event judicial, or participationist? Is salvation conditional or unconditional? And so on). But for a detailed explanation of why his view fits the evidence better than the alternatives, you’d have to get his book.
To many (if not all) readers of this blog, this reading of Romans will sound either incomprehensible or completely bizarre. How on earth can Romans 1-4 be read to indicate that, as Campbell affirmed recently, “we all are in Christ, so wake up and smell the coffee”? Well, this is where his reconstruction of the purpose, background and structure of Romans comes in. For Campbell, Romans is like Galatians in its purpose: a response to false Jewish teaching, and in fact contractualism in general. And the argument of Romans 1-4, though you always thought that most of it had just one speaker, should actually be read as a dialogue between two speakers, namely Paul and a Jewish teacher. And the bit that you knew had two speakers, 3:1-8, you’ve actually been reading upside down. It should instead be read like this:
Paul: “I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation.”
Teacher: “To the Jew first.”
Paul: “Also to the Greek, for in the gospel the righteousness of God is disclosed which is by fidelity and for fidelity, as it is written, ‘My righteous one [=Jesus] shall live by his faithfulness.’” (1:16-17)
Teacher: “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against the unrighteousness of men. Unbelieving humanity is justly being judged by a wrathful God for their idolatry, deviant sexuality and approval of evil. Fire, brimstone, and all that.” (1:18-32)
Paul: “Ah, but if that were true, then the Jews would be judged too, wouldn’t they? And then even you, O Teacher, could not be saved. So what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the value of circumcision?” (2:1-3:1)
Teacher: “Much in every way. To begin with, the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God.”
Paul: “What if some were unfaithful? Doesn’t their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God?”
Teacher: “By no means! Let God be true though every one were a liar, as it is written, ‘That you may be justified in your words, and prevail when you are judged.”’
Paul: “But if our unrighteousness serves to show the righteousness of God, what shall we say? That God is unrighteous to inflict wrath on us? (I speak in a human way.)”
Teacher: “By no means! For then how could God judge the world?”
Paul: “But if through my lie God’s truth abounds to his glory, why am I still being condemned as a sinner? And why not do evil that good may come? - as some people slanderously charge us with saying. Their condemnation is just.” (3:1-8)
Teacher: “What then? Are we Jews any better off?”
Paul: “No, not at all. For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin. Look at all this Scriptural evidence! But now the righteousness of God had been made known, apart from law, by the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah. All sinned, and now all are redeemed in Jesus.” (3:9-26)
Teacher: “Then what becomes of our Jewish boasting?”
Paul: “It’s excluded. God isn’t the God of the Jews only, is he? He’s also the God of the Gentiles.” (3:27-31)
Teacher: “What shall we say about Abraham, then?” (4:1)
Paul: “I’m glad you asked. He wasn’t justified by works. Nobody is. Contractualism is bunk.” (4:2-25)
OK, so I may have summed up Romans 4 a bit flippantly, but you get the idea. And if Campbell is right, then pretty much all of us have been reading Romans 1-4 upside down. In his view, this has led us into a smorgasbord of church problems including foundationalism (1:18-23), judgmentalism and gay-bashing (1:24-32), judgment by works (2:1-16), supercessionism (2:17-29), belief in total depravity (3:9-20), and contractualism, with faith as our side of the bargain (3:2-4:25). Oh, and Arianism. Yikes.
So I have to ask: is he right? Is Romans a response to Jewish false teaching? Is sola fide vulgar? And are you reading Romans like an Arian?
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Andrew Wilson’s new book, If God Then What? Wondering Aloud about Truth, Origins and Redemption, is out now, published by IVP who are offering a generous discount for readers of this blog.
Should Tongues be Abolished?
A brief look at 1 Corinthians 14:21-25.
Firstly, we should remind ourselves that spiritual gifts are given to the ‘the body of Christ’ for the building up of the church (12:12-20). Speaking in tongues is a God-ward and therefore prayer-like activity for the building up only of the individual since it is unintelligible to others (14:2), whereas the interpretation of a tongue is, like prophecy, for the building up of the church (14:4-19). There are then two assumptions behind this passage, namely that spiritual gifts will operate in church gatherings, and unbelievers will be present in at least some of these meetings.
In verse 21 Paul quotes Isaiah 28:11-12 which declares that Israel, after ignoring the warnings of the prophets, will go into exile and will only hear judgment against them in a foreign tongue, which only compounds their unbelief rather than bringing about repentance. The point he then draws from this in verse 22 is that un-interpreted and therefore unintelligible tongues only confirm unbelieving people in their unbelief but do nothing to bring them to faith and repentance. On the basis of this, he continues, an unbeliever in a Christian meeting will respond negatively to hearing un-interpreted tongues (v.23 ‘you are out of your minds’), whereas he will respond positively to prophecy (v.24-25 ‘God is really among you’).
However, Paul does not say that tongues do not benefit unbelievers but that they are a sign for unbelievers, and that prophecy is a sign for believers, and yet he goes on to say, you should therefore prophesy to unbelievers. Wayne Grudem concludes “such reasoning does not make sense” and then proposes (not particularly clearly!) that signs function as a display of God’s stance toward someone rather than being of direct benefit to them personally. So we might say, tongues is a sign for indicating unbelievers rather than for benefitting unbelievers, and prophecy a sign for indicating believers rather than for benefitting believers (although of course it does do that as well). In effect then, the sign works in the opposite way than might be supposed: speaking in tongues does nothing to bring about faith and repentance in unbelievers but signifies that they are apart from God’s kingdom, even driving them further away, whereas prophecy is a recognisable sign to unbelievers that God is with his people and present among them.
So far so good, but how should this be applied? What kind of prophecy and tongues is Paul referring to? Is he referring to what we call ‘singing in the Spirit’ or something else? Furthermore, some seem to say something that Paul does not say in restricting these gifts to believers meetings alone.
The Message puts 1 Cor. 14:23-25 thus:
So where does it get you, all this speaking in tongues no one understands? It doesn’t help believers, and it only gives unbelievers something to gawk at. Plain truth-speaking, on the other hand, goes straight to the heart of believers and doesn’t get in the way of unbelievers. If you come together as a congregation and some unbelieving outsiders walk in on you as you’re all praying in tongues, unintelligible to each other and to them, won’t they assume you’ve taken leave of your senses and get out of there as fast as they can? But if some unbelieving outsiders walk in on a service where people are speaking out God’s truth, the plain words will bring them up against the truth and probe their hearts.
I appreciate the style of The Message but did you notice the subtle shift? Peterson moves from the plural ‘all praying in tongues’ to what could be an implied singular: ‘people speaking out God’s truth’ when in fact Paul uses an identical word for both: ‘all speaking in tongues’ and ‘all prophesying’. If this is referring to everyone speaking (or singing) in tongues at the same time then the same must be said of prophesying and it is hard to see how a large group of people prophesying aloud at the same time is any more understandable than tongues. What I would suggest is that Paul is referring to tongues or prophecies being brought by a succession of individuals to the church, not ‘singing in the Spirit’.
Furthermore, the context shows that Paul’s teaching is not that tongues are unhelpful but that if they are to be helpful then they must be interpreted. So, his point is not that we shouldn’t have speaking in tongues when unbelievers are present because they will think us mad, quite the contrary. Speaking in tongues is a normal part of church worship (as is presumed in vv. 26-28) but must be interpreted if they are to benefit others.1 To have a string of individuals bringing a tongue in succession without interpretation excludes rather than draws in the hearers, whereas prophecy is understandable and therefore helpful.
So, to exclude these supernatural gifts seems to me to be the wrong conclusion, ensuring tongues are interpreted seems to me to be the right one.
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This is part two of a series on the gift of tongues.
Footnotes
1 See David Prior, The Message of 1 Corinthians pp. 247-248
Vagabonds
Hardly anybody writes songs from the synoptic gospels. I don't know if you'd noticed that. Christian hymnody has known what to do with the Psalms, the prophets, the epistles and even apocalyptic writings, but rarely with narrative, and historically that has included the synoptic gospels. How do you write a song about a story, a particular miracle, or even a parable? If you do find a Christian song or hymn about the life of Jesus - which, one might have thought, ought to be a fairly central theme in our worship - it is almost certain to be about the first two years or the last two days, or perhaps one of the "I am" sayings in John (which are far more explicitly theological, and hence easier to sing about). Other than that, though occasional mentions will be made of what Jesus did or said, the story of Matthew, Mark and Luke has been virtually untouched by most Christian songwriters.
This only occurred to me recently, however, while listening to an album which bucks this trend completely. From a musical point of view, Stuart Townend’s The Journey is a slightly eccentric, eclectic mixture of folky pipes, drums and fiddles, hymns reinvented, church bells, and a delightfully lilting, Kate Rusby-esque guest vocalist. But from a lyrical perspective, it does something that almost no other album I have heard does, or even tries to do. It brings the story of Jesus - the story of the synoptic gospels, the parables and riddles and miracles of Jesus in first century Galilee and Jerusalem - to life, in beautiful and poetic colour.
How many songs, for instance, have the calming of the storm or the healing of Jairus’ daughter as their centrepiece?
See the stricken boat as it is tossed upon the sea;
Hear the fearful cries that wake the man from Galilee.
He stands before the raging, speaks peace and harmony;
Wind and waves obey - he is the man who calms the sea.
Out among the crowds, hear a father’s anguished plea:
“Heal my dying child!” he begs the man from Galilee.
With words that banish sorrow, “Don’t fear, but just believe!
Daughter, live again!” commands the man who calmed the sea.
And as she stands before him, what joy from agony!
He’s the master and the maker, he’s the man who calmed the sea.
There’s something deeply worshipful about that. Or how about the story of the rich young ruler? Somehow, this next song captures the radicalism of Jesus the man, and the sacrifice he demanded of people, in a way that few songs do:
A rich young man came to ask of Christ,
“Good teacher, will you tell me:
What must I do for eternal life?
I’ve kept your laws completely.”
“Sell all you have, give to the poor,
And heaven’s treasure will be yours.”
How hard for those who are rich on earth
To gain the wealth of heaven.
Now Jesus sat by the offering gate
As people brought their money.
The rich, they filled the collection-plate;
The widow gave a penny.
“Now she’s outgiven all the rest:
Her gift was all that she possessed.”
And then the kicker:
Not what you give, but what you keep
Is what the king is counting.
But pride of place goes to the song “Vagabonds”, which is an extraordinary exposition of the parable of the wedding feast in Luke 14:15-24. It might be the most inclusive song I’ve ever heard, in the best possible sense of that word:
Come all you vagabonds, come all you don’t-belongs
Winners and losers, come people like me;
Come all you travellers, tired from the journey
Wait a while, stay a while, welcome you’ll be.
Come all you questioners, looking for answers
And searching for meaning and sense in it all;
Come all you fallen, and come all you broken,
Find strength for your body and food for your soul.
Come, those who worry about houses and money
And all those who don’t have a care in the world,
From every station and orientation
The helpless, the hopeless, the young and the old.
Come all believers, and dreamers, and schemers,
And come all you restless and searching for home;
Movers and shakers, and givers and takers,
The happy, the sad, the lost and alone.
Come self-sufficient with wearied ambition
And come those who feel at the end of the road;
Fiery debaters, and religion haters,
Accusers, abusers, the hurt and ignored.
Come to the feast, there is room at the table!
Come, let us meet in this place
With the king of all kindness who welcomes us in
With the wonder of love and the power of grace.
I love that the writer of “In Christ Alone”, which proclaims a thoroughly biblical exclusivism (that is is only through Christ that we have hope), also wrote “Vagabonds”, which proclaims a thoroughly biblical inclusivism (that absolutely anybody is welcome). And my suspicion is that he only managed to do this by writing songs from the biblical texts which are simultaneously the most inclusive (“go out into the highways and hedges”) and exclusive (“Friend, how did you get in here without wedding clothes?”) in the canon: the synoptic gospels.
Any other good examples?
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Andrew Wilson’s new book, If God Then What? Wondering Aloud about Truth, Origins and Redemption, is out now, published by IVP who are offering a generous discount for readers of this blog.
Point taken
The other day Andrew posed the question, “Why are church leaders so obsessed with church size?” It is a good question. (Another good question is, “Why do Andrew’s posts always involve lists?!”)
As a pastor, leading a church, I recognise all the characterisations that Andrew makes, both good and bad. The “how big is your church?” question is so ubiquitous that it was actually quite noteworthy for me to meet another local pastor for the first time last week and for neither of us to ask it. However, let me give here a short list of my own, in defence of numbers:
- 1. Counting keeps you honest. In my experience most church leaders are consistently optimistic about the size of their congregation, typically claiming an attendance figure something like a third more than is the reality. In contrast to ‘evangelastic’ estimating, a regular, accurate, headcount gives a helpful reality check. This also helps prevent us from using our ‘boasting number’ to describe our church - i.e., the number who came to your carol service rather than the number who normally attend.
- 2. Counting enables you to measure your fringe. Not the length of your One Direction-style haircut (topical allusion there for the sake of my teenage daughter), but those people who are not yet really part of the church, but can be found loitering in your vicinity. A healthy church will have a large fringe, but you won’t know how large unless you count. Of course, this presupposes that you also count how many church members you have, and so can calculate the size of your fringe by subtracting the number of your members from your total numbers.
- 3. Counting enables you to plan. At Gateway we have taken a headcount every Sunday since I came here, which means we now have four years of data to look at. And this means I can reasonably accurately predict which Sundays will have high, average, or low attendance. And this means that I won’t plan to do something I want the maximum number of people to be there for on a Sunday when I can expect lots of people to be missing.
- 4. Counting enables an accurate measurement of growth. I have a conviction that healthy things grow, and in church life that means both a qualitative growth (increasing Christ-like-ness) and quantative growth – so I measure everything that can be measured, of which attendance is an important measure. My growing data set means these measurements become more and more helpful.
- 5. Counting helps you keep track of who is with you. When my family set off on a trip, I don’t simply assume the driving seat in the car and pull away – I do a headcount first: “1 wife, 4 daughters, 2 dogs, yep, we’re ready to go…” Doing a headcount at church is similarly sensible.
The scriptures exhort those of us who are elders to “Shepherd the flock of God that is among you” (1 Pet 5:2), and, as any shepherd will tell you, an important part of pastoring the sheep is to count them. Or, as Solomon puts it, “Know well the condition of your flocks” (Pr 27:23). How else would the shepherd have known he had 99 but was missing one?
The Sidelining of Spiritual Gifts?
In an increasing number of charismatic churches in the UK there appears to be a move away from encouraging the use of spiritual gifts (especially tongues) in public church meetings where unbelievers are likely to be present. This move is contrary to the historic position of the charismatic movement, including Newfrontiers, where contributions and the operation of spiritual gifts form a normal part of church gatherings in the expectation that unbelievers will have powerful encounters with God leading to salvation. The change seems to me to be based upon two main drivers:
1. Contributions disturb the flow of ‘worship’
2. On hearing tongues unbelievers will think Christians are mad
Therefore, (at least implicitly), if you want your church to grow you should restrict such contributions in public meetings. As this view is gaining momentum, a discussion seems ripe.
Style or Principle?
At the outset we must question the presupposition that churches which encourage spiritual gifts in their meetings will inevitably put unbelievers off rather than draw them in, because it is simply not borne out in history. A most obvious example (perhaps after Pentecost itself?) is the Pentecostal Church which was one of the largest and most influential Christian evangelistic (in contemporary jargon ‘missional’) movements in history and yet was built on the use of spiritual gifts. This at least demonstrates that the use of spiritual gifts do not inevitably deter unbelievers from the church. One might even argue from this evidence that the converse is true?
Moreover, out of a right desire to be ‘missional’, there is always the temptation to be the kind of church people want rather than being the church they need or that we should act according to scripture, regardless of whether it is ‘attractive’ or not. This is, of course, a fine line since we are passionate to reach the lost and bring them to Christ and therefore we want to be as accessible as possible to seekers, while at the same time not compromising who we are meant to be as the gathered people of God. For this reason, looking at which churches are growing (ie charismatic/non-charismatic) is a study which should be undertaken extremely carefully since there are no formulae for church growth, and attendance alone is not necessarily a measure of health. Might we even concede that changing our pattern of worship to attract greater numbers could be merely pandering to the consumer culture of our age? The key factor is whether contributions in church worship are a matter of Biblical principle or merely style.
In connection with this I would raise some questions:
i. Do our worship times have an individual or corporate focus? In my experience, many seem to assess worship times according to ‘how I felt’, whether I enjoyed the songs or whether God spoke to me, rather than whether we functioned properly as the community of God’s people. Therefore, contributions, especially ones which don’t involve me, are merely an interruption to my flow of worship, rather than an expression of togetherness as the body of Christ. I wonder if the appeal of some worship styles today simply reflects the individualism prevalent in modern society, and is therefore something to be confronted rather than conformed to?
ii. Are our worship times primarily musical times? It seems to me that worship and music are now almost synonymous to the point where contributions can be seen as an interruption. ‘Worship’ flows from one song into another, often without any musical break, and if there is room for contributions they typically have a musical accompaniment. Now, I love music and lead the worship team at our church and while I am not advocating a return to the ‘hymn-sandwich’ I wonder whether we have swung too far and much church worship is dominated rather than served by music?
iii. How does meeting size affect ‘charismatic worship’? In 1 Cor. 12-14 Paul is bringing teaching concerning the use of gifts when the church gathers together. However, how and in what ways are the practises here transferable regardless of meeting size? In what sense does ‘everyone have a… [contribution]’ if the meeting is 1000 strong? We cannot be sure of the sizes of church gatherings in New Testament times and while it is suggested that some churches numbered in their thousands, it is likely that they met in homes where gatherings were considerably smaller (although could still number up to 200). Of course, the question might be reversed: if contributions in worship are a fundamental NT principle, should this determine the size of our gatherings, before we plant out or go to multi-site?
So, I remain convinced that the Bible teaches spiritual gifts are for the church today, although I would acknowledge that we still have much to learn about the usage and handling of such gifts in our meetings, and I am concerned about the dominance of music in worship potentially to the exclusion of ‘body ministry’. In the second post in this series we will consider 1 Cor. 14:21-25 and explore whether Paul is really discouraging the use of tongues in seeker friendly meetings.
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This is part one of a series on the gift of tongues.
Guarding Against Materialism
I went for a walk the other day, and I looked down at myself, in my Hunter wellington boots, my Gap jeans and my Jack Wills hoodie, oh and my Karen Millen sunglasses, and I suddenly felt very dirty. What was this? Why was I dressed as a walking billboard? I honestly was someone for whom labels had never meant a thing. But I was suddenly aware that I was in real danger of developing a subtle, slow slide into materialism, and I had to get a grip on it.
In Matthew 25:31-46, Jesus makes it abundantly clear that we are to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, embrace the alienated and help the sick. In light of this very explicit instruction to help the poor, I do have to question why as Christians we are occupied with materialistic things. Is it really necessary to pay £70 for a Jack Wills hoodie? Or £50 for a Superdry shirt? Yet these are the labels I see in abundance amongst students and twenties in church and at Momentum and basically anywhere where the primary demographic is young/middle class. I am not building a case against ‘luxury’ brands – I see the case that they too form part of our economy and buying their goods supports the industry. But what I am challenging is what a preoccupation with image/brands may reflect – that is an inward looking, wilful ignorance of the suffering of those around us. Dressing a certain way is not in itself wrong. But choosing to direct your energy and resources primarily into selfish pursuits is. And yes, I will say that it is wrong for people of a comfortable, but not wealthy, life (a problematic category in itself, I know) to spend this kind of money first, and then protest that they have none left over to give to the poor. This just demonstrates how damaging materialism is, and how it prevents us from fulfilling one of the central tenets of the gospel, which is to remember the poor.
Even within the church, I realised I had to check that I was not becoming increasingly consumerist. Am I becoming more concerned with how slick a worship set is than with the plight of the poor? Do I care more about the image of the church than I do about building relationships, which is ultimately the thing that keeps people in the church, beyond the flashy website and promotional fliers? None of these things are in themselves wrong, but when they begin to receive disproportionate attention, at the expense of outreach, when they become more laudable than remembering the poor, then we probably need to take a step back and ask ourselves honestly if we are becoming materialistic consumers. I shouldn’t expect the church to entertain me and fulfil my own selfish needs, and I shouldn’t leave outreach to the poor to other people. As a Christian I should be concerned with what we as the church can do for society. How can we be that city on a hill? How can we be salt and light? How can we bless those around us with grace, love and charity?
In Matthew 5:16, Jesus instructs us to ‘let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.’ There is a clear link between helping the poor and evangelism, and helping the poor also glorifies God. It is our good deeds that will get the world’s attention, not how ‘cool’ we are, or how good we sound or how modern we look. And we as Christians should guard against taking our eyes off this mandate and putting other things, whether it’s worldly materialism or ‘Christian consumerism’, above it.
The God Issue
I am not renowned for my scientific prowess. I received my first school detention for juggling sheep eyeballs in a biology class! So I felt like something of a fraud this week, when I entered my local newsagents and bought a copy of New Scientist…
It’s not my regular magazine of choice, but this week’s edition caught my attention, since it bears the title ‘The God Issue’ (which is suitably ambiguous – either an issue dedicated to God, or an issue dedicated to the issue of God… or both) and purports to address questions of why religion may outlast science, why we have a God-shaped space in our minds, and whether God’s existence is scientifically verifiable.
It’s a mixed bag; probably worth a read if you’re regularly engaged in apologetics, but it was less fresh and provocative than I had hoped. The first article examines whether children are born with a propensity to believe in a deity. This was, for me, the most interesting of the articles (written by a Professor from Fuller Theological Seminary). Through a number of experiments, the author argued that babies are able to perceive the difference between objects and agents, even if the agent is invisible; they have an intuition that order requires an agent to bring it about and that they appear to presume that agents can have supernatural abilities. It gave no answer to the question of why children may have these inbuilt predispositions, but there were some thoughtful observations nonetheless (coming to a sermon near you soon!).
Having started strong, the rest of the edition was a little disappointing. The second article made some interesting observations about morality in civilisations where people live under the idea that ‘someone is watching,’ and demonstrated how some secular states are learning to engender moral behaviour without the need for a watchful God. The author then claimed that “Locke’s intuition – that atheists cannot be trusted to cooperate – is the root of intolerance” and that “while atheists think of their disbelief as a private matter of conscience, believers treat their absence of belief in supernatural surveillance as a threat to cooperation and honesty”, which I found a little peculiar. I’m not sure it is fair to paint atheists as mild-mannered types, happy to keep their personal views to themselves and not impinge on society as a whole (!) nor to suggest that believers mistrust atheists wholesale and thus are guilty of creating intolerance.
Victor Stenger’s article on science’s ability to address the God hypothesis is just disappointing. He offers a whole list of evidence for the existence of God which science ought to be able to find, but has failed to, without any discussion of what such evidence might look like, or how science is equipped to find and analyse it. Apparently there is no verifiable proof for fine-tuning, religious experiences, or answered prayer, which makes me wonder where he is looking and what he thinks he’s looking for?
The edition concludes with an interview with Alain de Botton on his new book Religion for Atheists, which is an apt summary of the thrust of the whole feature: secularists should not think of religious people as simpletons, but should feel free to take the best bits of religion, without the need for God. In a sense, there is little new or innovative in this edition, but perhaps the most interesting observation is the way in which the various authors (Stenger perhaps excepted) seem to want to distance themselves from the angry New Atheists, instead recognising that there is much good in religion, but that you can get it without God. Atheism 2.0: Theism without the Theos! Christian Apologists would do well to note this shift, and think how to reframe their arguments accordingly, lest we be left as the shrill voices, answering questions people are no longer asking.
The edition is out until the end of this week, in case you fancy a read. I don’t anticipate becoming a regular subscriber, but I may well pick up next week’s edition, if only to read the responses on the letters page!
Why Are Leaders So Obsessed With Church Size?
Why are so many church leaders obsessed with church size? It seems an inescapable reality, at least in the circles I move in, that the number of people who attend a church on Sunday is the most commonly accepted metric for appraising how well a church is doing, even amongst people who openly admit that numbers shouldn't be the main thing. Size of congregation is one of the first things leaders will ask other leaders about, when trying to gauge how things are going; it's one of the first things leaders will say about their own church, when trying to communicate faith or vision; it's an almost indispensable part of the mini-bio for leadership conference speakers ("Mr X leads a church with Y people attending on a Sunday"). Here I am writing about it, yet I still find it hard, when asked "how are things in Eastbourne and Seaford?" by a fellow leader, to stop our weekly attendance number from being part of my answer. Many readers may share my experience. Yet almost nobody I know actually thinks that church attendance figures are the best, or even a particularly helpful, barometer of church health. So why do we do it?
I’ve heard a number of theories, some positive, some negative. On the positive side, some say that it’s because numbers represent people, and people matter to God. Which they do, but that doesn’t explain why I assume a large congregation is more successful than a small number; gather five congregations in a town together and you’d have a much bigger number, but no more people overall, so I don’t think that can be it. Others make a very similar point about unbelievers getting saved, but that involves the assumption that the bigger you are, the more people get converted in your church, which both anecdotally and empirically doesn’t ring true (and why do people so rarely say, “X people have been baptised this year”?) When it comes to introducing leaders, some reason that church size is simply a way of establishing the leadership credentials and gift of the individual; but again, this ignores important dynamics like location and history (seeing a village church grow from 100 to 200 might require more leadership gift than maintaining a city congregation of 300, for instance), not to mention making it sound like Jesus wasn’t a very effective leader (120? Pah!) Not only that, but the sceptic would make the obvious point that there are church leaders who gather thousands by preaching a false gospel, so how can size indicate health? Tricky.
The sceptic’s explanations, however, are equally problematic. For a lot of observers, church size is all about ego: you want to believe that you’re better than others, so you count people (often, with an implicit or explicit “just like King David did, and look what happened to him”). But Luke counted people in the Jerusalem church, which doesn’t seem to have been about ego; lots of pastors of smaller churches quote numbers as a way of lauding pastors of larger churches, rather than their own ministries; and I also can’t help noticing that the people who throw this one around almost always base their accusations on reports of megachurch pastors they don’t know, and aren’t qualified to judge, rather than on interactions with people they do know. Alternatively, there’s the similar view that numbers are just a worldly thing that have crept in with the commercialisation, individualism, celebrity adulation and materialism of the culture (fascinatingly, here’s a rare issue on which many very conservative and very progressive Christians tend to agree). Aside from the awkward counterexample of Luke, though, there is also the (admittedly rather nebulous) point that many leaders of large churches fall over themselves to explain that numbers aren’t the main thing, and that spiritual growth matters much more, which doesn’t fit well with the “infected by worldly values” view. So I don’t think it’s that, either.
My suspicion is that our preoccupation with numbers is driven by four things, and that the fourth of them is the biggest. The first is that, in a group of churches where the size of congregation drives income and hence the staff base (which is not true in many more established denominations), larger congregations provide greater job security and opportunities to specialise for their leaders, two things which many (though by no means all) church leaders aspire to. When a leader first plants a church, their ability to work full time for the church in the first place requires the church to grow to (say) 80 people; if they get to 120, they may be able to take on another pastoral staff member; by the time 500 or more are gathering, a sizeable staff team with specialist skills will be in place, enabling the key leader to focus much more on what they do best. For many, this would be appealing, and would therefore be seen as “successful”.
The second is that a number is one of the most rapid ways of placing your church in some sort of context for people who have never been there. In fact, most church leaders in most denominations will be able to get an intuitive sense of what a church will “feel” like from just two words: the name of the denomination, and the number of people who attend the church. Try it: Methodist, 70. Newfrontiers, 350. Anglican, 1100. Pentecostal, 8000. More than almost any other shorthand, this enables the unacquainted church leader to get an idea for what the church in question is like: its meetings, its leadership challenges, its building(s), its staff, its flavour. In fact, as Tim Keller has argued, the number probably tells you more about what the church “feels” like, and the responsibilities of the leader you’re talking to, than the name of the denomination. But although this may explain why we talk about numbers so much, I doubt it can explain the sense of success that is associated with uttering a larger number rather than a smaller one. I suspect it’s a factor, but it can’t be the main one.
Thirdly, it is hard to argue with the fact that in general, and all other things being equal, more gifted leaders lead larger churches. All other things are often not equal, of course, which makes this statement fraught with risks (not least of which is the danger of suggesting that the guy who leads a church of eleven Muslim converts in Mogadishu is somehow “less gifted” or “less of a leader” than John Hagee or Joel Osteen). But this should not blind us to the fact that, on a level playing field, it probably requires a greater measure of leadership gift to lead a church of 2000 than a church of 20 (although the leader of 20 may well be more gifted in many other areas than the leader of 2000). The two most gifted out-and-out leaders of my acquaintance in Newfrontiers, P-J Smyth and Steve Tibbert, also lead our two largest churches, and those two facts are surely connected. So it is understandably tempting for church leaders to appraise the success of their leadership ministry by the number of people in their congregation. (Whether they should or not, of course, is an entirely different question!)
But I suspect that the main reason we are tempted to measure leadership success by church size is simple: it’s because it’s easy to count. Church leaders are subject to identity wobbles and the desire for career fulfilment like anyone else; we are often insecure; we want affirmation; we want to know that we are doing a good job. In our previous job(s), we were appraised, assessed, promoted, given pay hikes, and so on, and a tremendous sense of security came from knowing how we were doing, as measured by some apparently objective standard. Then we started working for the church, and almost all of this disappeared. Mostly, we were fine with that, because we knew that our security was in God, that he was the one who was building his church, and that he cared more about disciples than deliverables, and more about obedience than objectives. But the desire for a metric of some sort, a measurable way of telling us how we are doing, never quite left us. And the number of people who came to our Sunday meetings was the easiest one to count.
If that sounds far-fetched, consider this thought experiment. Imagine there was a universally accepted, easily identifiable measurement for doctrinal purity in your church: the Theological Accuracy Quotient (TAQ). Imagine, also, that there was a church equivalent of what financial analysts call Return on Net Assets (RONA): the spiritual growth the church had experienced, given the resources it had. Say there was a Worship Experience Index (WEI), and an Evangelistic Zeal Coefficient (EZC), and a Godliness and Prayerfulness Assessment (GPA). In this scenario, would the rather pedestrian “numbers on a Sunday” get a look in? I suspect we’d find that conversations in the toilets at leaders conferences quickly started including phrases like “Hi Mike, how’s your WEI at the moment?”, or “God has really blessed us; we have a GPA of 4.0 at the moment”. Attendance figures would be so last season.
None of which is to say, by the way, that we shouldn’t count people (at Kings, we do every week), or that leaders who do count are insecure, or that we should never ask people how big their church is for fear of feeding the beast. But it is to say two things. One, our attendance figures may be helpful to plan for the future, and helpful to orientate others, but not to measure our success, far less our personal value. And two, as the most successful church planter of them all pointed out, “with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. In fact, I do not even judge myself. For I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me” (1 Cor 4:3-4). Thank God for that.
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Andrew Wilson’s new book, If God Then What? Wondering Aloud about Truth, Origins and Redemption, is out now, published by IVP who are offering a generous discount for readers of this blog.
Series: Communion
This four part series looks first at the history of breaking bread in the church and the reason why it is so important for us to take communion together if we are seeking to be a New Testament church.
The series starts with a post on Breaking Bread.
You can find the entire series here.
“They Devoted Themselves to the Breaking of Bread”
We often like to think of ourselves as New Testament churches. Many of the first generation of Newfrontiers leaders and congregations came out of historical denominational churches because we felt them to be sub New Testament in some way. Maybe they were not open to the gifts of the Holy Spirit that we had rediscovered. Maybe they did not practice believers’ baptism which we had come to understand was the New Testament norm. Or maybe their ecclesiology was less than we might expect from a Biblical model.
Pastors and elders often lacked a mandate to govern the church because spiritual authority was vested in the church meeting or the deaconate. I would contend that all of those frustrations, and many more besides, were perfectly legitimate but that many of us, if we are not careful, are in danger of being hoisted by our own petard!
If we claim that we are trying to be “New Testament” and do not break bread on a very regular basis in our churches then we are simply not being true to what we say we believe. The Acts 2:42 church loved doctrine and Scripture, they loved the deep partnership they enjoyed in the Gospel and they loved to call out to God together in prayer. However, they also loved to eat together and, as they did so, to remember and celebrate through bread and wine all that Jesus had accomplished on the Cross.
Breaking bread is vital for at least three reasons: -
1) It keeps us focused on Jesus and the magnificent salvation He won for us at such huge expense on His part at Calvary. By breaking bread again and again and again we are reminded that the Cross is everything to us.
2) It reminds us of our need to live in right relationship with each other. There is a vitally important “one another” element to our breaking bread (see 1 Corinthians 12:27-34). I have been in contexts in the past when I have been breaking bread when I have come under conviction of sin because of a breakdown of relationship with somebody else in the church and I have felt compelled to go and put things right there and then.
3) There is an eschatological dimension to breaking bread; we do so “until He comes” (1 Corinthians 12:26). There is a day coming, praise God, when we will drink wine with Jesus in the kingdom at the Wedding Supper of the Lamb (Matthew 26:29 and Revelation 19:6-10)
For all sorts of reasons, however, breaking bread can so easily get squeezed out of church life. Some of our churches, I am sure, will be exemplary in this regard. From the surveys I have conducted on the various leadership training and Impact / Frontier Project courses with which I am involved, however, many are not. We can have lots of excuses: we have too many other things to do on a Sunday morning, we have lots of visitors on a Sunday, we don’t want to make visitors feel excluded, we expect the midweek small groups to be doing it and sometimes they are not.
It is not my intention here to be prescriptive in terms of how we break bread. It is down to local church elders as to whether they see it worked out in terms of Sunday mornings, small groups, prayer meetings or some other setting. However, I am being prescriptive in saying that the Bible does not give us leeway to more or less completely rule breaking bread out of the lives of those under our care. Personally, I was greatly challenged by discovering that at Mars Hill Seattle they break bread every Sunday and Mark Driscoll still manages to preach for an hour!
I would suggest that many of us as evangelicals have devalued breaking bread in our minds because we have unthinkingly and unwittingly adopted a Zwinglian Eucharistic theology. As I implied in my last blog, we can end up running so scared of an over-developed sacramental theology that our sacramental theology is way too under-developed. Of course, we all know that the bread and wine do not become the body and blood of Christ in any physical sense, but we should not end up at the opposite end of the scale where the bread and wine are purely a memorial. Hence we lead our people to believe that another couple of worship songs will have more power to enable our people to encounter the crucified and risen Lord Jesus than His explicit command to encounter Him through bread and wine.
The point is that when I hold a “memorial” service for a member of my church who has gone to be with the Lord, the person in whose honour the service is held is not there. They are with the Lord! We can so easily end up in the same mind set of some of the Reformers who were anxious to distance evangelicalism from the idea of the real presence and teach that Jesus is not there when we break bread because He is now ascended and seated at the Father’s side. All of this overlooks one crucial fact – Jesus has poured out His Holy Spirit. When we break bread Jesus is with us, not physically in the bread and wine, but by the power of the Spirit and He has confirmed and demonstrated His presence through bread and wine – physical signs of a spiritual not a physical presence. Is Jesus truly present when we break bread? Of course He is!
I will leave the final word on this subject to Calvin. Calvin is normally seen as a contentious, divisive figure in Church history. This is very unfair. He had a great concern for the unity of the body of Christ and was anxious to plough a mid-course between the excesses of Lutheranism and the excesses of Zwinglianism on the issue of the nature of Christ’s presence when we break bread. For Calvin, Jesus is present by the Spirit in the same way as the Spirit Himself was present at His baptism. The presence was a spiritual presence but the sign of His presence in the former case is in bread and wine and in the latter was in the sign of a dove:
Now, if it be asked whether the bread is the body of Christ and the wine His blood, we answer that the bread and wine are visible signs, which represent to us the body and blood, but that this name and title of body and blood is given to them because they are, as it were, instruments by which the Lord distributes them to us. This form and manner of speaking is very appropriate. For as the communion which we have with the body of Christ is a thing incomprehensible, not only to the eye but to our natural sense, it is there visibly demonstrated to us. Of this we have a striking example in an analogous case. Our Lord, wishing to give a visible appearance to His Spirit at the baptism of Christ, presented Him under the form of a dove. St John the Baptist, narrating the fact, says that he saw the Spirit of God descending. If we look more closely, we shall find that he saw nothing but the dove, in respect that the Holy Spirit in His essence is invisible. Still knowing that this vision was not an empty phantom, but a sure sign of the presence of the Holy Spirit, he doubts not to say that he saw it (John 1:32), because it was represented to him according to his capacity. - John Calvin, A Shorty Treatise on the Lord’s Supper (1540)
Let’s break bread regularly and, as we do so, let’s expect to encounter the crucified, risen and exalted Lord Jesus by the power of His Holy Spirit!
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This is the final part of a series on Communion.
Presupposing a Thing or Two
Everyone has presuppositions. Here are a few of mine: God exists; beauty and truth are real; wine is good, coke is bad.
Our presuppositions shape how we view the world, and can make the views of others incomprehensible. As I have argued previously, in the realm of politics one’s presuppositions are crucial, and difficult to shift; which is why politics tends to be so tribal. It is also why highly intelligent people can end up making political arguments that are no more rational than the arguments of a fervent sports fan about his favourite team.
As presuppositions are so important, communicating the gospel always requires recognizing what presuppositions are in play. Probably the two most oft-cited biblical examples of this are Peter’s Pentecost sermon in Acts 2 and Paul’s Areopagus sermon in Acts 17. In both cases it is interesting to observe the way in which the apostles both play to and cut against the presuppositions of their audience. Peter goes with the grain of the Jews in Jerusalem by quoting from OT scripture and showing how it ties into the story he has to tell. But he cuts against the grain by then claiming that Jesus is the Messiah. In similar fashion, Paul goes with the Athenian presupposition of the existence of god, but then clashes with them spectacularly by claiming there is one God, who has made himself known through the man Jesus, who was dead but is now alive.
Both these cases illustrate the importance of contextualisation and conflict when seeking to change someone’s mind. In order to gain a hearing it is necessary to contextualise, and this means it is necessary to understand the presuppositions that are in play. But while necessary, contextualisation isn’t in itself sufficient to the aim of persuading someone to change their thinking – inevitably this requires conflict as one presupposition is compared with another.
It is not difficult to see how this observation applies to the numerous ethical issues that 21st century western Christians are likely to find themselves debating with their non-believing friends. For example, our presuppositions about marriage and sexuality are likely to be different from many other people in our society; as are our presuppositions about when life begins, or how it should end; or our presuppositions about the exclusive claims of Christ.
If we are to have any hope of changing minds – of (and in the end this is what it must all be about, which is my ultimate presupposition!) making disciples - then just shouting our presuppositions will not be effective. Like the street preacher I saw recently yelling into empty space in a crowded street, we will be simply drowned out, and dismissed as cranks. But if we are so concerned with contextualisation and nuance that we fail to ever clearly spell out what our presuppositions are, and why we consider them to be superior to others, we will be rendered impotent and irrelevant – just a bunch of do-gooders rather than those transformed by “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”
When Paul spoke to the Areopagus some mocked, while others said, “We will hear you again about this.” (Acts 17:32) If Paul had used only conflict he would have been mocked and refused a hearing from the Athenians. If he had only contextualised he would not have been mocked, but there would have been nothing more for the Athenians to hear, or respond to. It would have been an empty message.
Each of us is likely to have an inbuilt bias towards either contextualisation or conflict. But here’s the thing: We need to do both – and that’s what I call a presupposition!
Series: Poverty
Matthew Hosier and Philip Whittal engage in a debate on poverty, equality and social fairness in this five part series.
The first post in the series is by Phil asking the question What Is Poverty Or: How Unequal Should The Poor Be?
You can find the entire series here.
A bit like Norway…
I’ve spent most of my efforts so far knocking the arguments of others, so it is about time I was more constructive and made my case for why God cares about material inequality.
I’ve twice been involved in the running of two small businesses and neither was a great success which is overstating it a bit really. Those more able and talented at business than me will do better financially and I’m OK with that because when I talk about equality I don’t mean everyone literally earning exactly the same amount of money and having the same things. Instead I mean a society where both governmental policy and individual charity ensure that everyone has enough and that as a result the gap between rich and poor is a narrow and not a wide one; a bit like Norway.
Most scholars I’ve read, rightly, focus on the powerful equalising force of the Jubilee in Leviticus 25 and its reminder in v23 that the land is not ours but God’s. Jubilee ensured that no family would be generationally in poverty and was intended to be the strongest of safety nets. It is the clearest example of governmental policy that seeks to create and sustain an equal society.
Examples of individual charity are also much in evidence in the Old Testament. The super wealthy Abraham and Job are also examples of generosity. Abraham allows Lot to take the best the land has to offer and he gladly tithes to Melchizedek. Job on the other hand in Job 31:16-28 has his record of generosity and compassion put to the test and just as importantly says that had he put his trust in wealth he would have been sinned and been false to God (v24-28).
This generosity is not to be overlooked; it is the voluntary redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor. It recognised that this pleased God and reflected His character. This theme of generosity is echoed in the New Testament in the Jerusalem church in Acts 2:44-45 and Acts 4:32-37.
This rejection of confidence in wealth is robustly proclaimed by Jesus in Mt 6:19-21 and repeated by Paul in 1 Tim 6:16-19. James makes plain that the religion God loves is one which cares for the poor and that we should ignore all earthly displays of wealth - a gold ring in his time - because it was evident that God chose “those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom, which he has promised to those who love him”. (James 2:5)
The message and the examples are clear: those who have more than they need give up their surplus to give to those who do not have enough. This is no Mugabe land grab or even big government tax grab, it is radically generous giving and the result was, “no poor among them”.
We’ll come back to the question ‘who is poor?’ in a moment.
As I hinted in my last post, the clues we get from Exodus are perhaps the most significant. When they were stranded in the wilderness, God stepped in to provide food for his people (Ex 16:16-21), and did so in a way that allowed people to have varying amounts but never too little nor too much. He also did it without compromising the importance of their worship. They didn’t need to gather on the Sabbath so the day could remain devoted to God.
Before picking up the manna theme, Paul reminds us that our example in all this is Jesus (2 Cor 8:9) who was rich, but became poor so we who were poor could become rich. While we can argue that it primarily talks about our spiritual poverty, Paul applies it in a decidedly material way by using it as an appeal before the offering.
Returning to the manna theme Paul uses it as an example of why we should share with one another, but I think it also addresses the question of relative and absolute poverty. For we must grapple with what is ‘enough’ in the country where we live? Those who don’t have enough, I would argue, are poor in a relative if not absolute sense. They cannot function in the way that those who do have enough can.
Relative matters because it’s the society I live in that defines me most. It doesn’t do me any good to know that I’m better off than the starving of Africa if I still can’t afford the school uniform for my kids, have to work three jobs to pay the rent and suffer from chronic insecurity because I happen to live in a crime ridden sink estate even if I do have a TV. As Matt wisely said, “we can fall into making subjective value judgments about who is or is not the ‘deserving poor’ – a relativism invariably based on our personal judgment of what constitutes necessity and luxury.”
Lastly and most intriguingly, for me, is reflecting on heaven. Everyone agrees that there will be no poverty in heaven and no means by which we could ever become poor – no death, no sickness, no war and I’m guessing no debt crisis. Add to that profound contentment, no greed or need to fulfil, no personal ambition that could be met by money and an awareness that everything there is belongs to the one who made it all make the new earth a profound antithesis to the consumer societies of today. As for those who have been rewarded differently, I believe they will be accorded greater honour and trust based on faithfulness and obedience not wealth and ability. Finally there will be equality as the ‘enough principle’ of this life is replaced by the abundance of the next.
‘Two things I ask of you; deny them not to me before I die: Remove far from me falsehood and lying; give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be full and deny you and say, “Who is the LORD?” or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God.’ (Pro 30:7-9)
Finally two recommendations for further reading, one theological and the other socio-political; the best treatment I’ve read on a biblical theology of possessions is Craig Blomberg’s Neither Poverty nor Riches, and for the political among you of whatever persuasion it’s worth engaging with the work of The Equality Trust.
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This is part five of a series on poverty.
The Wall Street Journal on Gay Marriage
At a time when gay marriage is becoming one of the key political talking points on both sides of the Atlantic, it's fascinating to hear the Wall Street Journal's exasperation with the double standards in the debate:
When Barack Obama was campaigning for president in 2008, he declared that marriage is between a man and a woman. For the most part, his position was treated as a nonissue. Now Rick Santorum is campaigning for president. He too says that marriage is between a man and a woman. What a different reaction he gets.
There’s no mystery why. Mr. Santorum is attacked because everyone understands that he means what he says. President Obama, by contrast, gets a pass because everyone understands—nudge nudge, wink wink—that he’s not telling the truth. The press understands that this is just one of those things a Democratic candidate has to say so he doesn’t rile up the great unwashed.
It’s arguably the most glaring double standard in American life today. It helps explain why candidates with social views that are fairly conventional among ordinary Americans—the citizens of 31 states including California have rejected same-sex marriage when put to a vote—find themselves depicted as extreme.
Whatever your politics, that’s worth thinking about.
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Andrew Wilson’s new book, If God Then What? Wondering Aloud about Truth, Origins and Redemption, will be released on 16 March, published by IVP, and is now available to preorder - with a generous discount for readers of this blog.
Apologetics is Boring
As Monday is my day off, I will often indulge myself by listening to Start the Week on Radio 4. It is often hugely frustrating, and has me shouting at the radio, but it can also be an intellectually stimulating tonic to start the week with. Recently Andrew Marr introduced a program by commenting on the current fight between fundamentalist atheists and fundamentalist believers – a fight he described as “frankly boring.”
I can already hear an “Oi!” coming from Wilson, but must admit to agreeing with Marr.
A significant part of the output of this blog is along the lines of what could broadly be described as apologetics, and I recognize the importance of having some good apologetic arguments up one’s sleeve, in order to be able to follow the apostolic instruction to, “always be prepared to give a reason for the hope you have.” But I’ve never really been a fan of apologetics. Partly this is personality – some people are just wired to be much more interested in apologetics than I am; I guess I’m more wired as a polemicist. It is also a reflection of Barth’s rejection of both apologetics and diastasis (ethics as a twofold enquiry – theological and philosophical): Apologetics because it seeks to justify theological truth on the foundation of general, non-theological, human thought. Diastasis because it equates God’s revelation as just another disputant in the debate; whereas (in Barth’s famous phrase) the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is “the final word of the original chairman.”
Like Andrew Marr, I’m afraid I find the new atheists more boring than alarming, more worthy of ignoring than engaging, targets for ridicule rather than philosophical debate. I’m glad other people feel differently than me, and are gifted differently from me, but please excuse me if I have to stifle a yawn.
I’d much rather spend my time proclaiming “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, in the face of Jesus Christ,” and wait for God to remove the veil of ignorance from those who are perishing. That gospel is never boring!
The New Perspective: A Duffer’s Guide
This is a post for people who prefer their theology oversimplified to overcomplicated, and who have heard of the so-called "New Perspective" on Paul and/or Judaism, but don't really know what it is. Which is to say: please don't judge me if I draw clear lines for the sake of making things clearer. This is a tube map rather than a street map, if you're British.
The New Perspective is a way of reading Paul, and his view of the Jewish law, that has become very widespread in academic circles over the last three decades. Though usually referred to as the New Perspective on Paul, its defining feature is primarily a new perspective on first century Judaism, which has resulted in a variety of new ways of reading Paul. (This is important, because many interpreters who embrace the new view of Judaism may not embrace the new view of Paul.) The key area of discussion has been the relationship between law-keeping and salvation in first century Judaism. Did first century Jews believe they could earn their salvation by keeping the law? Many Christians today will assume the answer is yes - surely that’s the whole point of Jesus’ disputes with the Pharisees, and Paul’s with the circumcision party? - but many modern scholars argue that the answer is no. This view, in a nutshell, is the New Perspective on Judaism.
There are, in broad outline, four main ways of understanding the relationship between law-keeping and salvation in first century Judaism:
1. First century Jews treated the law as a list of petty rules and regulations you had to keep to earn your relationship with God. The Pharisees, and the circumcision group who caused Paul so many problems, are classic examples. (This is the “old perspective” view critiqued by E. P. Sanders, and represented by Schurer, Bousset, Bultmann, Jeremias, etc.)
2. Devout Jews kept the law as a response to God’s election, covenant and grace (“covenantal nomism”), not as a list of petty rules and regulations you had to keep to earn a relationship with God. The early church portrayed them as legalists, either because they didn’t understand Judaism, or because they wilfully distorted it for polemical purposes. (G. F. Moore, E. P. Sanders, Heikki Raïsanen, etc.)
3. Nobody thought anybody could earn their relationship with God by keeping petty rules and regulations. Devout Jews kept the law as a response to God’s election, covenant and grace, and the early church knew that. Jesus’ debate with the Pharisees, and Paul’s with the circumcision group, were therefore about something else. (Most advocates of the “new perspective on Paul” fit here: James Dunn, Tom Wright, Don Garlington, etc.)
4. Nobody thought you could earn your relationship with God by keeping petty rules and regulations. But first century Judaism was diverse in its attitudes to law keeping (“variegated nomism”), and lots of Jews saw works of obedience, in response to God’s electing grace in the covenant, as contributing to final justification. (Simon Gathercole, Doug Moo, Tom Schreiner, etc.)
There are very few truly “old perspective” scholars around these days, in the sense of those who would defend the depiction of Judaism we find in #1. That said, it still exists a lot at a popular level; I recently heard a pastor describe the Mosaic law as the equivalent of a set of health and safety regulations which got in the way of one’s relationship with God, and you frequently hear people use the words “law” and “legalism” interchangeably, as if there is no real difference between them. Needless to say, this is not the view of the law found in the Torah itself, or in the Psalms, the prophets, the words of Jesus or the apostles.
The new perspective on Judaism, in a sense, characterises all of #2-#4 above. First century Jews did not believe that they could earn their relationship with God, or their status in his covenant people, by keeping the law; election was a gift of God’s grace. But the appropriate response to God’s electing grace was obedience, particularly expressed through circumcision and observing the law of Moses. Interpreters disagree over the extent to which obedience to the law, for first century Jews, contributed to final salvation, but almost all modern scholars would agree that the Jews in the New Testament period were not trying to earn their way into God’s people by following rules and regulations. Hardly any of Jesus’ listeners were, as Tom Wright puts it, trying to pull themselves up by their moral bootstraps. Pelagius was (hence Augustine); some medieval Catholics were (hence Luther); first century Jews weren’t. That idea is almost universally accepted in modern scholarship.
So what, then, was Paul doing when he insisted that justification was by faith and not by works of the law? The three remaining groups (#2-#4) would answer that question in rather different ways.
(2) Paul misrepresented Judaism, whether deliberately or unintentionally. For Paul, the problem with Judaism was basically that it wasn’t Christianity, so Paul created a contrast - faith vs works, grace vs law - that wasn’t actually there. Jews regarded obedience to the law as an expression of faith in response to grace, but this didn’t suit Paul’s argument, so he either distorted it on purpose, or more subtly allowed himself to caricature it.
(3) Paul’s main problem with “works of the law” was racism, not legalism. “Works of the law”, for Paul, did not refer to “things humans in general do to please God”, but “things Jews in particular do to mark themselves off as God’s people.” So when Paul insisted that people were justified by faith and not works of the law, he was pushing against a narrow Jewish ethnocentrism that said people had to be circumcised, kosher and so on in order to qualify for entry into God’s people. He was making the point that Acts 15 and Galatians make: Gentiles don’t need to become ethnic Jews, but simply to have faith in Jesus. Legalism and merit-mongering had nothing to do with it.
(4) Yeah, but. Judaism was too varied to simply say, two thousand years on, “no first century Jews believed x”, particularly in the face of passages like Matthew 23, and there are indications that some strands of Judaism saw works as playing a key role in final justification. And the new perspective on Paul works much better with some passages than others. Galatians 1-3 is mainly about ethnocentrism; Romans 1-4 seems to be more concerned with the fundamental problem of sinfulness, and the inability of humans to boast before God; and some passages in Ephesians and the Pastorals are difficult to read in a “new perspective” way. Paul objected to Jewish exclusivism, for sure - but he also objected to boasting, self-justification and legalism.
Each of these positions could, obviously, be expanded, criticised and defended at more tedious length (and they often have been). But not here. That’s what research seminars are for.
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Andrew Wilson’s new book, If God Then What? Wondering Aloud about Truth, Origins and Redemption, will be released on 16 March, published by IVP, and is now available to preorder - with a generous discount for readers of this blog.
But How Will They Know?
Christians have no right to wear the cross at work, or so the Government is reportedly going to argue when defending itself in a case brought to the European Court of Human Rights by two British women who have lost their jobs in recent years over the issue. This is because it is not a requirement of the Christian faith, and thus is not protected by Article 9 of the European Convention of Human Rights.
Far be it from me to argue with the Archbishop of Canterbury, who condemned this position at the weekend, but they are absolutely right. What are the requirements of the Christian faith? Helpfully, the prophet Micah: set it out for us in words of no more than two syllables: act justly, love mercy, walk humbly with your God (6:8).
Or if that has been superseded by the new covenant, let’s take Jesus’ command: love one another (which includes our enemies and those who persecute us). Against such things there is still no law.
So why do people want to wear symbols of brutal methods of execution around their necks? For some it is to remind themselves of the sacrifice Jesus made for them, that they might remain grateful and follow his example of love which gives itself even unto death. For others it is a way of quietly and subtly informing others of their faith in order to start conversations and ultimately, they pray, to point some to Christ. It is an aide-memoire and a conversation-starter, nothing more.
Being asked to remove it does neither your person nor your faith the slightest harm. It is not a talisman against evil nor a guarantee of your passage to heaven. Bad things are no more likely to happen to you while not wearing it, nor will God forget that you are His.
If you feel your freedom is compromised by not being allowed to wear whatever you choose whenever you choose, then you haven’t grasped what freedom is all about. Wherever the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom (2 Cor 3:17), Paul said, and this after he had been imprisoned for a crime he did not commit. He of all people was qualified to know what liberty and injustice were all about. We have been set free by the ultimate judge of all things; to fight for our rights in human courts is, to borrow a metaphor from CS Lewis, like demanding the right to make mud pies in a slum when we’re already on holiday by the sea.
But if everyone knows who the Muslims, Sikhs and orthodox Jews are in any given office or classroom, why shouldn’t Christians be allowed to advertise their presence, too? They are; and in a way that cannot be hidden in the darkest prison or stripped away on the most exposed cross. They’ll know we are Christians by our love; the kind of love that is generous to all without expecting return, that prays for those who persecute us and that forgives them even as they rejoice in our pain.
It is good and right for us to seek justice for those who are genuinely being persecuted, downtrodden and abused, but seeking special privilege for ourselves in a land where we already have great freedom to assemble, to worship and to speak publicly about our faith does no favours for either Christianity or Christ himself. We need to re-assess what victory looks like – it doesn’t consist in proving we are the strongest party in the dispute and thus deserve special treatment and honour – that is not what God has called us to or promised us. Victory consists in showing that whatever is thrown at us, we will respond with love, grace and forgiveness. We may be cut down, sidelined and even genuinely persecuted, but we believe in a different system of honours and in One who judges justly. In his Kingdom we find greater reward than any fleeting accolades this world can give, and blessings and privileges above and beyond any temporary ‘rights’ dreamed up by fallen man.
Let us walk humbly and love extravagantly. That is of far greater value than any outward symbol of our faith.
Series: The Good God
This series takes short extracts from Mike Reeves’ book, The Good God: Enjoying Father, Son and Spirit which looks at just how amazing the loving relationship of the trinity is.
The series starts with Trinitarian Musings 1: Our Loving Father.
You can find the entire series here.
Follow @enjoyingtrinity
The Highest Beauty
What difference does the triune being of God make to the words we use about him? God’s holiness, for example: how does the Trinity shape what that means?
Holiness.
‘Oh dear!’ you might sigh – and I’d understand, for without the Trinity, holiness does have the smell of mothballs about it, the look of a Victorian matron administering castor oil. And much of what purports to be holiness has just that aura about it: all prickliness and prudery. People even say things like ‘Yes, God is loving, but he is also holy’ – as if holiness is an unloving thing, the cold side of God that stops God from being too loving.
Balderdash! Poppycock! Or at least, it is if you are talking about the holiness of the Father, Son and Spirit. No, said Jonathan Edwards,
Holiness is a most beautiful, lovely thing. Men are apt to drink in strange notions of holiness from their childhood, as if it were a melancholy, morose, sour, and unpleasant thing; but there is nothing in it but what is sweet and ravishingly lovely. ‘Tis the highest beauty and amiableness, vastly above all other beauties; ‘tis a divine beauty.1
What is holiness, then? The words used for holiness in the Bible have the basic meaning of being ‘set apart’. But there our troubles begin, because naturally I think I’m lovely. So if God is ‘set apart’ from me, I assume the problem is with him (and I can do all this in the subtlest, most sub-conscious way). His holiness looks like a prissy rejection of my happy, healthy loveliness.
Dare I burst my own bubble now? I must. For the reality is that I am the cold, selfish, vicious one, full of darkness and dirtiness. And God is holy – ‘set apart’ from me – precisely in that he is not like that. He is not set apart from us in priggishness, but by the fact that there are no such ugly traits in him as there are in us. ‘God is God,’ wrote Edwards, ‘and distinguished from [that is, set apart from] all other beings, and exalted above ‘em, chiefly by his divine beauty’ (for the connection between holiness and beauty, see verses like Psalm 96:9).2
Now the holiness of a single-person God would be something quite different. His holiness would be about being set apart away from others. In other words, his holiness would be all about aloof distance. But the holiness of the Father, Son and Spirit is all about love. Given who this God is, it must be. Edwards again:
Both the holiness and happiness of the Godhead consists in this love. As we have already proved, all creature holiness consists essentially and summarily in love to God and love to other creatures; so does the holiness of God consist in his love, especially in the perfect and intimate union and love there is between the Father and the Son.3
The holiness of the triune God is the perfection, beauty and absolute purity of the love there is between the Father and the Son. There is nothing grubby or abusive about the love of this God – and thus he is holy. My love is naturally all perverse and misdirected; but his love is set apart from mine in perfection. And so, the holiness of the triune God does not moderate or cool his love; his holiness is the lucidity and spotlessness of his overflowing love.
It all dramatically affects what it means for the believer to be holy, to be godly – in other words, what it means to be like God. Being like another God would look quite different. If God is a being curved in on himself, then to be like him I should be like that. If Aristotle’s eternally introspective God is God, then plenty of navel-gazing seems to be just what’s called for. For what we think God is like must shape our godliness, and what we think godliness is reveals what we think of God. So, what, for example, if love and relationship were not central to God’s being? Then they wouldn’t feature for me either as I sought to grow in God-likeness. Forget others. If God is all single and solitary, be a hermit. If God is cruel and haughty, be cruel and haughty. If God is the sort of oversexed, beer-sloshing war-god beloved of the Vikings, be like that. (Though please don’t.)
But with this God, no wonder the two greatest commands are ‘Love the Lord your God’ and ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’. For that is being like this God – sharing the love the Father and the Son have for each other, and then, like them, overflowing with that love to the world. Or look, for example, at Leviticus 19, where the Lord famously says ‘Be holy because I, the LORD your God, am holy’ (v. 2). What does holiness look like there? It means not turning to idols but coming to the Lord with proper fellowship offerings (vv. 4-8). That is, it means fellowship with the Lord. And it means not being mean to the poor, not lying, not stealing etc (vv. 10-16) – that is, it means ‘Do not hate your brother in your heart … but love your neighbour as yourself’ (vv. 17-18). Love for the Lord, love for neighbor – that is the heart of holiness and how the triune God’s people get to be like him.
The beautiful, loving holiness of this God makes true godliness a warm, attractive, delightful thing. It is not about becoming more mean and pinched, for this God is not mean and pinched. Holiness for God, said Edwards, ‘is as it were the beauty and sweetness of the divine nature’, and so ‘Christians that shine by reflecting the light of the Sun of Righteousness, do shine with the same sort of brightness, the same mild, sweet and pleasant beams.’4 And most essentially, to know and enjoy the God who is love means becoming, like him, loving.
This article is the last in a series of extracts from Mike’s book, The Good God: Enjoying Father, Son and Spirit which is out now.
Follow @enjoyingtrinity
Footnotes
1 WJE 10, 478
2 WJE 2.298, my emphasis
3 WJE 21.186, my emphasis
4 WJE 2. 201, 347
What are the “Greater Works”?
A few months ago on this blog, the question was raised over what exactly Jesus meant when he said that anyone who believed in him would do “greater works” than Jesus himself had done. Unusually, however, the question was left unanswered. Instead of a robust (foolhardy?) announcement that John 14:12 should be understood in a particular way, there was a cautious string of comments indicating that, for all that we could say what it didn’t mean, saying what it did mean was somewhat difficult. So here’s a robust (foolhardy?) attempt to figure it out. Let’s look at the options.
The first option is the most straightforward, which is that Jesus was saying that all who followed him would do mighty works that were even greater, in the sense of even more impressive, dramatic and wonder-inducing, than he had done. This would be a fairly standard Pentecostal approach, and has the huge merit of being the most obvious way of taking Jesus’ words in their context, which concerns the glorification of Jesus and the coming of the Holy Spirit, and the fact that all this should be a cause for rejoicing and not sadness. Yet it rarely gains traction within evangelicalism at large, for the simple reason that it is hard to imagine what these more impressive miracles might be. What could be more impressive than raising the dead, walking on water, and feeding 5,000 with a few loaves and fish? It doesn’t seem to fit with experience, either; even the most dyed-in-the-wool faith preacher would struggle to argue that everyday believers are characterised by more dramatic miracles than those of Jesus. Hmmm.
Perhaps not, the dyed-in-the-wool faith preacher might say, but that’s because we haven’t believed Jesus’ words on this one. After all, the phrase Jesus uses is “the one believing in me”, or “the one who has faith in me” – and let’s face it, lots of people from that day to this haven’t really excelled in the gift of faith. When Jesus said that people with a mustard seed’s worth of faith could move mountains, he was drawing attention to the mighty power of faith in God. Why couldn’t he be doing that here? The fact is, many would say, the ones with great faith in God really do see miracles like Jesus did, and even more so. Brother Yun teleported, and survived after fasting for significantly more than forty days. The specificity and detail of prophetic revelation given to some modern prophets goes beyond even that displayed by Jesus to the woman at the well. One friend of mine mentioned spontaneous, supernatural weight loss as an example of a “greater work” he had witnessed, among other things. And even if our track record doesn’t match up to Jesus’ at this stage, that’s not a reason to rationalise our failure to believe him, and lower our doctrine to meet our experience; rather, we need to raise our faith, and hence our experience, to the level Jesus taught in the scriptures. The problem here is that John uses the phrase “whoever believes [in me]” twelve times in his gospel, and in the other eleven he is clearly referring to saving faith. “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life”, he says. “Whoever believes is not condemned. Whoever believes in me has passed from death to life.” And so on. Given that elsewhere in John “whoever believes” means “all who trust in me and follow me”, it doesn’t seem at all likely that in this one instance, the phrase is used to mean “whoever has enough faith”. But that’s the second option.
The third option, whether or not it is combined with taking umbrage at the apparent impudence of the second option (“greater than Jesus? Who do you think you are?”), is to argue that Jesus was talking about works that were greater in quantity, but not greater in quality. This, I suspect, is probably the majority view within Newfrontiers churches, along with much conservative evangelicalism: the Holy Spirit has come upon all flesh now, so the works of Jesus are being done throughout the world, in far greater reach and number than they were when it was just Jesus and his twelve (somewhat slow-on-the-uptake) disciples. This avoids us having to make qualitative comparisons between Jesus’ works and ours, and it also avoids the cognitive dissonance that may follow from expecting ours to be greater and then noticing that they’re usually not; in the words of one elder I just spoke to, “I used to believe it meant that our miracles would be more impressive than Jesus’ – but then I learned from experience that it didn’t work.” However, as convenient as this interpretation is, it is simply not what Jesus said. There is a perfectly good way of saying, in Greek, that we would do “more” works than Jesus did, but this is not the word that Jesus, or John, used. What the text says is that our works would be “greater” than his: perhaps “bigger” or “more substantial” or “more significant”, but certainly not “more numerous”. Interpreting the verse in this way would be a glaring example of forcing our exegesis to fit our experience (and in any case, it doesn’t get us off the hook of pursuing miracles, because Jesus also said we would do the same works he did). We’re running out of options.
The fourth approach is to apply the promise to the twelve disciples who were listening, but not to extrapolate beyond them to the rest of the church age. This would be consistent with a cessationist hermeneutic: the apostles would do greater works (understood as miracles) than Jesus did, but that would cease at the end of the first generation, along with the apostolic and revelatory gifts. The strength here is that the apostles did some miracles that were so extraordinary that we could argue that they were greater than those of Jesus: Peter’s shadow healing people, handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched Paul causing demons and sicknesses to be cast out, and so on. The weakness, however, is insurmountable; as we have already seen, “whoever believes in me”, in John, simply cannot be credibly rendered “the eleven of you who believe in me now”. If Jesus had simply said “you”, as he does in 14:13-14, then this attempt might work. But he didn’t, so it doesn’t.
There are one or two other views that people could take - perhaps it was a prophetic statement that wasn’t intended to predict the future but to motivate radical obedience? perhaps Jesus was simply wrong? - but neither of these are likely to persuade anyone who has read this far. So what do we do? All of the above views appear to have significant weaknesses, the first for practical reasons, and the last three for exegetical ones. Rescuing or modifying the latter would require substantial exegetical gymnastics, the need for which would destroy the very faith that Jesus was trying to build; but the first option faces a common sense objection (what sort of miracle could possibly be greater than those of Jesus?) which has put it beyond the consideration of many interpreters.
But I’m persuaded that the first option is right anyway: Jesus was saying that whoever believed in him, from that day to this and irrespective of their possession of a particular spiritual gift, would do even bigger, grander and more impressive miracles than he had, because he was ascending to the Father and sending the Holy Spirit. I suspect that, when I said at the beginning of this piece that it was the most straightforward interpretation, few readers disagreed. Intuitively, in other words, it’s what most of us read it to mean, until we are mugged by our own experience and forced to change it. Exegetically, it is undeniably strong, because it takes each word in the normal Johannine sense, and doesn’t engage in lexical or grammatical tomfoolery to make the interpretation fit. It also passes the “what would the original hearers have thought he meant?” test with flying colours, not to mention the (often worth considering) “would critical scholars accuse me of trying to rescue Christianity from the Bible?” test. Jesus, I believe, was saying simply that his followers would do even greater works than he had.
Like what? Walking on air, rather than walking on water? Calming hurricanes, not just storms? Well, here’s where the wider context of John’s gospel is so helpful. Jesus talks about “greater works” or “greater things” in two other places in John, and they help us significantly when it comes to establishing what he means in this case:
1:50-51: Jesus answered him, “Because I said to you, ‘I saw you under the fig tree,’ do you believe? You will see greater things than these.” And he said to him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”
5:20-21, 24-29: “For the Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing. And greater works than these will he show him, so that you may marvel. For as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so also the Son gives life to whom he will ... Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life. Truly, truly, I say to you, an hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself. And he has given him authority to execute judgment, because he is the Son of Man. Do not marvel at this, for an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment.”
So in the two other places in John where Jesus (or anybody) speaks of greater miracles, the context is the vindication of the Son of Man, and his prerogative to judge the world and give eternal life to anybody who believes. To Nathanael, he says: seeing you under the fig tree when I wasn’t physically near you is nothing in comparison to my exaltation as Son of Man and judge of the world. To the Judeans, he says: I can only heal because it’s what my Father is doing, but what will really make you marvel is the greater works that are coming - the gift of resurrection life to anyone who believes in me. In other words, prophetic insight and physical healing are great works. But giving someone eternal life, so that they are resurrected to life on the last day, is even greater.
In saying this, Jesus isn’t disparaging miraculous healing or prophecy; far from it. It’s wonderful that Nathanael was known, the crippled man was healed and Lazarus was raised (and that we, as Jesus’ followers, get to do the same sorts of works between us). Throughout John’s gospel, great emphasis is placed on these things as “signs” of who Jesus really is. But it’s even more wonderful that those who believe in him, by our proclamation and embodiment of the gospel, are able to minister eternal life to people, such that they will certainly be raised up on the last day. That, I think, is the impact of his statement in John 14:12. “I’m telling you the truth, if anyone believes in me, they’ll do the sorts of things I’ve been doing - miraculous healings, prophetic revelation, feeding the hungry and laying their lives down for others out of love - and they’ll even do the “greater things” I’ve been talking about, like bringing resurrection life to people who are dead to the Father and dead to me, so that they pass from judgment to life. My works have repaired people temporarily, and that ministry must and will continue amongst my followers, as signposts to my glory and my love for them. But when the Spirit comes, those who follow me will repair people eternally, by transferring them from death to life through faith in me. That’s even greater.”
He was right, you know. He always is.
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Andrew Wilson’s new book, If God Then What? Wondering Aloud about Truth, Origins and Redemption, will be released on 16 March, published by IVP, and is now available to preorder - with a generous discount for readers of this blog.
Proverbs are not Guarantees
One of the most challenging things about reading the book of Proverbs is getting your head round exactly what sorts of statements proverbs actually are. Are they guarantees? If so, why do some children, trained in the way that they should go, depart from it (22:6)? Or are they absolute imperatives? If so, why are we told to answer a fool according to his folly, immediately after being told not to (26:4-5)?
Doug Wilson, as usual, has a more amusing take on it than most:
The book of Proverbs does not give us head-for-head commitments and promises. They are proverbs. A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and sometimes you wind up in Congress banning light bulbs for the rest of us. But as a general rule, hard work leads to wealth, and laziness to poverty, only not in every instance.
I couldn’t put it better myself.
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Andrew Wilson’s new book, If God Then What? Wondering Aloud about Truth, Origins and Redemption, will be released on 16 March, published by IVP, and is now available to preorder - with a generous discount for readers of this blog.
The not so Puritanical Puritans
If the Puritans are as warm-hearted as the picture painted by the preaching of Jeremiah Burroughs, why such a bad reputation for being mean-spirited and miserly?
Three observations:
1. We all fail to be who we might be.
If any generation were aware of their own failings to be all they wanted to be, it would be the Puritans. It was the Puritans who left us books like The Mortification of Sin. They knew their own sinfulness better than any.
2. Complex times lead to confusing events
The Puritan Era (late 16th and early 17th Centuries), and the preceding generation of the reformers fall in a time of great upheaval in the world and the church: the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the ending of the monopoly of the Roman Catholic church. There are earthquakes in these days and that leaves a lot of mess; all kinds of assumptions and worldviews are mushed together.
Protestants and Catholics alike martyred their heretics as their ideology rose to political power. This seems inexplicable in a liberal western democracy, and much of it should probably be frowned on - doubtless they would frown on many of the things we consider acceptable today: abortion, the breakdown of families and the cheapening of sex to name a few.
3. The divided house of the Puritans
As the doctoral research of Janice Knight1 and Ronald Frost2 shows, the Puritans lived in a divided house. The old order of Thomas Aquinas’ scholastic Roman Catholicism had been upset by the reforming Martin Luther and John Calvin and the next generation was left to pick up the pieces. Two groups emerged.
We find a revival of scholasticism, dressed (confidently) as a Reformed Scholasticism, claiming to be the heir to the reformers and championed by leaders such as William Perkins and William Ames with a great deal of dependence on the emphases of Aquinas and Aristotle against whom Luther protested.
Frost writes:
The division grew out of conflicting perceptions of grace. Perkins and Ames described a moralistic theology based on a view of grace developed by Thomas Aquinas. Sibbes (with Thomas Goodwin, John Cotton, John Preston and Philip Nye) in contrast relied on an affective model of grace taken from Augustine and held by Luther and Calvin, who defined grace in explicit opposition to Aquinas.
On the one had we have a return to the emphases of “The Dumb Ox” Aquinas producing a moralistic theology, with a focus on the will and change of mind and the absolute power of God. Alongside stands Richard Sibbes, with his affectionate Puritanism emphasising a change of heart as one comes to Christ and his Father in the Spirit.
Knight adds:
Sibbes was committed to a more emotional and even mystical theology stressing divine benevolence over power, emphasising the love of God.
Swimming in the waters of an experiential grace movement like Newfrontiers this sounds deeply familiar. Emotional and experiential, with a focus on the love of God. Yes please.
In New England the Affectionate Puritans were led by John Cotton (1591-1643) who said, “Let us hold the gospel forth in the language of Calvin, who speaks of purity of life and growth in grace…”3
Among his church was the remarkable Anne Hutchinson who gathered women in her home to expound the scriptures to them, and apply Cotton’s lovely and gracious teaching to their lives until, in The Antinomian Controversy4 of 1637/8, she was expelled from the colony.
The grace of God proves too hot for some to handle in every generation, and in many ways the Reformed Scholastics won the day, the label and the legacy, leaving the grace of God in the dark once more. But you can’t shut the Triune God away and constrain his grace. Within a century Jonathan Edwards, the Wesley brothers, George Whitefield and many others were raised up to sing the sweet melodies of the Christ once more.
Neither Sibbes, Cotton nor any of the other Affectionate Puritans were perfect. And it would be wrong to suggest that the Moralistic Puritans and the Affectionate Puritans were simply two distinct groups; their paths crossed as they breathed the same air. Nonetheless it would be our loss to dismiss the Puritans as puritanical relics. The emphases we find among the best of them, upon the heart, the love of God, and a tangible experience of God may go some distance toward rehabilitating the term “Puritan” or perhaps simply to drawing us to these Affectionate Christians whose friendship would be beneficial.
Footnotes
1 Janice Knight, Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism (1994)
2 Ronald Frost, The Divided House of English Reformed Theology, now published as Richard Sibbes: God’s Spreading Goodness (2012).
3 Quoted in Frost, ibid.
4 Antinomian = Against Law.
If God Then What?
I live in the same part of South West London as a prominent food critic. As soon as somewhere new opens locally he reviews it, which has led to some great culinary discoveries! So on the one hand it’s a blessing. On the other, it’s a curse; since no sooner has he reviewed it and the word is out, than it becomes almost impossible to get a reservation.
So a part of me – the deeply selfish part, which prioritises my own culinary escapades above those of my fellow man – wishes he’d not review them. Or maybe he could, but just tell me. Or perhaps just give me a fortnight’s head start on the rest of the nation…
Very occasionally I feel the same way about books. I recognise that they deserve to be widely known about; everyone should have a copy. But the selfish part just wants to keep them as my little secret, so I can devour, apply (and re-use!?) the material before the rest of the world gets a chance. Some books are just too good to review.
Andrew Wilson’s latest offering falls into that category.
If God, Then What?: Wondering aloud about truth, origins and redemption is a witty, creative, compelling and provocative book in which Andrew ‘wonders aloud’ about ten key questions, addressing issues like fundamentalism, the nature of knowledge, the origins of the universe, the possibility of the miraculous and suffering. His answers are never heavy-handed or dogmatic, but rather he leads you on a journey with each chapter; weaving together insights from personal experience (and it appears he’s had some pretty odd experiences!), popular culture, history and philosophy.
Stylistically, think Tim Keller’s The Reason for God written by a British version of Donald Miller. (Incidentally, both Keller and Miller also make my ‘too good to review’ category). Too often apologetics books produce stock answers to questions that nobody’s really asking! Not so here. Andrew tackles ten hugely important questions, which anyone and everyone regardless of their faith-position could and should be asking. His narrative style means that rather than being presented with a honed, well-packaged, but slightly soulless, off-pat selection of answers, you genuinely feel like you’re somehow eavesdropping on the inner workings of his brain, following a logical train of thought from beginning to end. As such, it feels very authentic and engages both the heart and the mind.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you won’t need me to describe Andrew’s ability to break down complex arguments into bite-sized, accessible chunks. Suffice it to say, he does this expertly in If God, Then What? We’ll be seeing a few excerpts here in the next couple of weeks, so I shan’t give too much away about the content, but a personal highlight was the seventh chapter, in which Andrew paints a beautiful picture of what a snippet of the world might look like in the New Creation.
If you are a Christian looking for a more robust understanding of the reasonableness of your faith, or a fresh way of articulating big and difficult concepts, or a book you can give to friends without cringing, then this is for you. And if you are not a believer but would like to read a book that will give you cause to think about life, the universe and everything perhaps for the first time, I would highly recommend this as a great place to start.
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Andrew Wilson’s new book, If God Then What? Wondering Aloud about Truth, Origins and Redemption, will be released on 16 March, published by IVP, and is now available to preorder - with a generous discount for readers of this blog.
Saved through Childbearing?
I can't say for sure which is the most baffling verse in the New Testament - "because of the angels", "impossible to renew to repentance", who knows - but any shortlist has got to include 1 Timothy 2:15. "But she [the woman] will be saved through childbearing - if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control." Huh?
Is Paul teaching justification by childbirth? Are women who cannot have children, or single women, not regenerate? Did my wife “get saved” the day our first child was born? What on earth is going on here? Well, almost to a man, interpreters have agreed that this verse is not intended to teach justification by childbirth, partly because of the clear emphasis on God’s grace and our faith as the only requirements for salvation in the Pastoral Epistles, and partly because it doesn’t make much sense of the rest of the verse (“if they continue in faith ...”). But what alternative explanations are offered? And are any of them at all credible?
Frankly, most of them aren’t. The view that this verse really means “she will be saved through the birth of the child”, namely Jesus, purchases theological convenience at the cost of an all-but-incredible translation of teknogonia, which elsewhere means simply giving birth to and raising children (as well as raising the awkward question: aren’t men saved through Jesus as well?) Similarly desperate, in my view, is the idea that Paul meant “she will express her salvation, which she already has, by bringing up children”; this stretches the grammar of the sentence to breaking point. An alternative is to render it “she will be kept safe through childbirth, if they continue in faith ...” This is slightly better, because the context of Eve’s transgression in 2:14 makes a reference to the curse (pain in childbirth) possible, but it suffers from both exegetical and practical drawbacks. Practically, it sounds like a guarantee that believing women will not be harmed while giving birth, which has obviously not always been the case in church history. Exegetically, it involves reading dia (“through”) to mean “in the process of” rather than “by means of”, and if this were Paul’s meaning, we might have expected him instead to use en (“in”). So overall, it does not seem likely.
The most convincing approach, advocated in slightly different forms by Andreas Köstenberger and Tom Schreiner, is to start by asking the question “saved from what?”, and then to study the rest of 1 Timothy to see whether any similar ideas are expressed elsewhere. The immediate context, and therefore the best starting point for establishing Paul’s meaning, is about the woman’s having been deceived by Satan in the garden (2:14), so initially we might expect the thing from which the woman needs to be “saved” to be the devil. Now it may come as a surprise to some modern readers, but 1 Timothy as a whole is actually very preoccupied with the preservation of God’s people from being tricked and trapped by the devil, which would make this concern perfectly natural for Paul in 2:15:
2:14: “Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.”
3:6-7: “He must not be a recent convert, or he may become puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil. Moreover, he must be well thought of by outsiders, so that he may not fall into disgrace, into a snare of the devil.”
4:1, 16: “Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons ... Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers.”
5:14-15: “So I would have younger widows marry, bear children, manage their households, and give the adversary no occasion for slander. For some have already strayed after Satan.”
That is, from the wider context of 1 Timothy, as well as the immediate context of 2:11-15, it would appear that Paul is concerned with the preservation of people (in this case women, but elsewhere men who are new converts or of bad reputation) from being ensnared by the devil. Read this way, he would be saying that women will be saved from the tricks and traps of the devil by giving birth to, and bringing up, children.
But why would he say this? How does bearing and raising children cause women to be saved from Satan? The parallels with 5:11-16 are very helpful here. Paul is urging Timothy not to enrol younger widows because of the temptations they will face, and he explains:
But refuse to enrol younger widows, for when their passions draw them away from Christ, they desire to marry and so incur condemnation for having abandoned their former faith. Besides that, they learn to be idlers, going about from house to house, and not only idlers, but also gossips and busybodies, saying what they should not. So I would have younger widows marry, bear children, manage their households, and give the adversary no occasion for slander. For some have already strayed after Satan. If any believing woman has relatives who are widows, let her care for them. Let the church not be burdened, so that it may care for those who are truly widows.
Young widows who don’t get married and raise children, Paul argues, are at risk of three things. Their sexual passions may lead them away from Christ to the point of abandoning their faith; their excessive free time (since they are neither working nor raising children) may make them idlers and gossips, and generally foster ungodly lifestyles; and Satan will attack them through either or both of these things, leading some to stray after him instead of God. Consequently, Paul exhorts younger women to get married, bear and raise children, and manage their households. This lifestyle will foil the adversary’s plans, and preserve them from his attacks. Women will, in a very real sense, be saved from the devil through bearing and raising children.
Which is exactly what Paul is saying in 2:15. Man was created first, and the woman was the one who was deceived by Satan - and this foundation in Genesis 1-3 is the basis for Paul’s insistence that women not teach or have authority over men - but Paul is eager to show that it’s not like women are going to blunder on through history, being tricked by the devil at every turn. Rather, giving birth to children and raising families is a defence against the enemy. It nips all sorts of temptations in the bud (sexual immorality, laziness, gossip and so on), which then means that the women in question are safe from the tricks and traps of the devil.
There may be another factor at work here as well. Bruce Winter’s work on the so-called “new Roman women” draws attention to the first century trend towards abortion, particularly amongst affluent and functionally independent women. For Winter, the whole passage (2:11-15) is directed towards these women - their subversive dress, their rivalry with men, and their preference for abortion over childbearing - and verse 15 is a response to the latter. Winter reads verse 15 as bound up entirely with physical preservation through remaining pregnant, which though ingenious, struggles to make sense of the connection with verse 14. But if he is right to see the trend towards abortion as an important piece of background to this verse, then it could provide an additional reason for saying that childbearing saves women from the devil. We may never know for certain, but this response would certainly fit with Paul’s likely view of unborn children, and his high view of marriage and family life.
Not that there are no other ways of being saved from the devil, of course. Women who are single, or cannot have children, have a high place in the scriptural story, and there are many things, other than raising children, that biblical women do to avoid laziness, gossip and so on (Proverbs 31 is a good place to start!) Nor does childbearing have magical powers, so that the woman is saved from the devil by the mere act of raising a family; that’s why Paul says it is only effective “if they continue in faith, love and holiness, with self-control”. Nor, significantly, is rescue from the devil’s trickery something that women need and men don’t, as is clear from the fact that the most satanically deceived people in the Pastorals are all men (1 Tim 1:18-20; 2 Tim 1:15; 3:1-9; 4:10). But having children, for most women, is a gracious gift of God which, if they combine it with faith, love, holiness and self-control, causes them to be kept safe from the devil. And that’s something to praise God for.
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Andrew Wilson’s new book, If God Then What? Wondering Aloud about Truth, Origins and Redemption, will be released on 16 March, published by IVP, and is now available to preorder.
“Do it in Remembrance of Me”
I don’t know whether you like to wrestle with puzzles and theological conundrums. I was set one in 1983 and finally solved it in 2010! Maybe I am just a bit slow or something, but this teaser set for me by my Ph.D. supervisor surrounding the imagery Zwingli uses to describe what happens when we break bread together really did have me perplexed for a while.
Ulrich Zwingli, the leader of the Reformation in Zurich, Switzerland, was one of those theologians who strikes me as rather pleased with himself. He was always just a little too keen to stress his originality and independence of thought. As we will see, Zwingli was anything but original on the issue of the Lord’s Supper although it is he who in evangelical circles who is usually regarded as the man who gave us a purely symbolic interpretation of what happens when we break bread.
The first spiritual or symbolic rather than literal interpretation of Jesus’ words “This is My Body” in the Reformation came through the teaching of Luther’s colleague and academic superior at the University of Wittenberg, Andreas Carlstadt. After the Diet of Worms (1521) Luther was taken into hiding for his own protection by Duke Frederick the Wise of Saxony. It was during this time that Luther translated the whole of the New Testament into German. Whilst Luther was removed from the scene, the leadership of the Wittenberg reform movement passed into the hands of Carlstadt. Carlstadt began to move the Lutheran Reformation in an increasingly radical direction. He allowed priests to marry and took a lead himself by marrying someone more than 20 years his junior! He encouraged the tearing down of statues and images of the saints in the churches and he initiated the first properly evangelical communion service where “lay persons” were given wine as well as bread, something which Luther had argued for but had yet to carry through. On the issue of the real presence Carlstadt taught a pretty nonsensical interpretation. When Christ spoke the words “This is My Body” he was not, according to Carlstadt, actually pointing at the bread but at His own physical body. Luther, never one to suffer a fool gladly, denounced this view as lunacy and as being against the plain text of Scripture. Somewhat amusingly, he says that this is the equivalent of saying “Take eat; here sits Hans in the little red jacket” (ie there is no basis for this whatsoever in the text).
This episode is important, however, because thereafter any spiritual interpretation of the Lord’s Supper was associated in Luther’s mind with the fanaticism of Carlstadt. Hence his comment addressed to Zwingli in 1527 that he would rather “Drink pure blood with the Pope than mere wine with the fanatics” (the German word here translated fanatics, schwarmer, is a particularly strong term of abuse). In 1524 Luther also rejected a much more scholarly view, that of a Dutch lawyer named Cornelius Hoen. Hoen actually wrote his views on the Lord’s Supper before Carlstadt (probably around 1521), but they did not begin to circulate until 1524-25. Hoen was an elderly man and so gave his writings to a friend named Hinne Rode who took them to various Reformation cities around Europe. Rode went first to Wittenberg where he was given very short shrift! From there he moved on to Oecolampadius in Basel, to Bucer in Strasbourg and finally to Zwingli in Zurich. If Luther hated Hoen’s views then Zwingli loved them. In fact, he loved them so much he published them under his own name in 1525 and so most people tend to come to the conclusion that it was Zwingli who was the theologian who gave us a “memorial” view of the Lord’s Supper.
In the final blog in this series I want to look at how Zwingli’s view of the Lord’s Supper essentially as a memorial short-changes us as evangelicals. He was so keen to reject the real (i.e. physical) presence of Christ in the breaking of bread that he ended up removing the presence of the Lord from breaking bread altogether. I would contend that many of our churches break bread far too infrequently, because we are unsure as to what we are doing or why we are doing it. We know we are supposed to break bread because Jesus commanded us to do so but we are very nervous of doing physical things (ie sacramental things) in our meetings and services. We know that the bread and wine do not “magically” become the body and blood of Jesus, so we are inclined to shy away from the practice altogether. I am not suggesting that we suddenly become highly liturgical or ritualistic when we meet together. Simply that we are obedient to Jesus’ command to break bread. Please hear me correctly on this one, I love contemporary worship songs as much as anyone but I think that many of the people in our churches really do believe that they can encounter Jesus more by singing the latest Matt Redman / Tim Hughes / Simon Brading song than by being obedient to the words of Jesus to “Do this in remembrance of me.”
Let me finish with my solution to the theological conundrum I was set back in the 1980s. In his letter on the Lord’s Supper Cornelius Hoen wrote the following words:
Our Lord Jesus Christ, promising many times to His own forgiveness of sins and wishing to strengthen their souls at the Last Supper, added a pledge to the promise, lest there be any uncertainty on their part; in the same way that a bridegroom desires to assure his bride, lest she have any doubts, gives a ring to her saying ‘Take this, I give myself to you.’ And she, accepting the ring, believes him to be hers and turns her heart from all other lovers, and, to please her husband, concentrates only on him. Just so, he who takes the Eucharist – the pledge of the Bridegroom which is proof of the giving of Himself – ought steadfastly to believe Christ now to be his, given for him, and His blood shed for him.
These are beautiful words and a very powerful image. My supervisor, however, asked me to find out where Hoen got the idea from. Obviously, the idea of Christ as the Bridegroom and the Church as the Bride is a familiar New Testament metaphor, but what about the ring as a sign of the covenant as a parallel of the bread and wine of communion? From where did Hoen borrow this idea?
It was only when I was preparing a sermon to preach at my son’s wedding in April 2010 that the penny dropped! I had read Martin Luther’s Freedom of the Christian (November 1520) many times before but, in reading it again before the wedding, as any responsible father would (!), I came across the following:
Let faith step in, and then sin, death, and hell will belong to Christ, and grace, life, and salvation to the soul. For, if He is a Husband, He must needs take to Himself that which is His wife’s, and at the same time, impart to His wife that which is His. For, in giving her His own body and Himself, how can He but give her all that is His? And, in taking to Himself the body of His wife, how can He but take to Himself all that is hers? In this is displayed the delightful sight, not only of communion, but of a prosperous warfare, of victory, salvation, and redemption. For, since Christ is God and man, and is such a Person as neither has sinned, nor dies, nor is condemned, nay, cannot sin, die, or be condemned, and since His righteousness, life, and salvation are invincible, eternal, and almighty,—when I say, such a Person, by the wedding-ring of faith, takes a share in the sins, death, and hell of His wife, nay, makes them His own, and deals with them no otherwise than as if they were His, and as if He Himself had sinned; and when He suffers, dies, and descends to hell, that He may overcome all things, and since sin, death, and hell cannot swallow Him up, they must needs be swallowed up by Him in stupendous conflict. For His righteousness rises above the sins of all men; His life is more powerful than all death; His salvation is more unconquerable than all hell. Thus the believing soul, by the pledge of its faith in Christ, becomes free from all sin, fearless of death, safe from hell, and endowed with the eternal righteousness, life, and salvation of its Husband Christ. Thus He presents to Himself a glorious bride, without spot or wrinkle, cleansing her with the washing of water by the word; that is, by faith in the word of life, righteousness, and salvation. Thus He betrothes her unto Himself “in faithfulness, in righteousness, and in judgment, and in lovingkindness, and in mercies” (Hosea ii. 19, 20).
Suddenly I realized that Cornelius Hoen had put 2 and 2 together and made 5! Like other evangelicals all over Europe, he would have read Luther’s Freedom of the Christian shortly after its publication and been hugely impacted by Luther’s teaching on justification by faith alone. He then, like most of us theologians if we are honest, took an idea from someone else (in this case “the wedding ring of faith”) and applied it into a different context (in this case an understanding of the Lord’s Supper). Of course, this also explains why the first thing Hinne Rode did was to take Hoen’s letter, not to Zwingli in Zurich, but to Luther in Wittenberg. It was the natural place to go. Hoen had come to his new understanding on breaking bread by reading and applying Luther. Of course, as far as Luther was concerned, Hoen was misapplying and misinterpreting and hence the Dutchman was condemned in no uncertain terms. As a result the Reformation became fundamentally divided and the Lord’s Supper became an issue of controversy not only between Catholic and Protestant, but between evangelical and fellow evangelical.
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This is the third part in our four part series on Communion.
Funding Equality
Last week the Socialist favourite in France's presidential election, Francois Hollande, said that top earners should pay 75% of their income in tax: "Above 1m euros [£847,000; $1.3m], the tax rate should be 75% because it's not possible to have that level of income." (I’m sure he meant “it’s not fair to have that level of income”, as clearly it is possible – but perhaps that was just a glitch in translation.) This pronouncement caused immediate consternation among Mr Hollande’s colleagues, and also caused the Swiss to look forward to welcoming more French millionaires across the border.
In the same week a survey revealed the tax contribution made by the highest earners in the UK. According to the Daily Telegraph:
an analysis of official figures shows tax contributed by the 300,000 highest earners in the UK is now the equivalent of half the annual running costs of the NHS or a third of the bill for the entire welfare system… The research also reveals the highest earning half of the population is contributing nine pounds out of every ten in income tax.
Unlike manna from heaven, social provision in liberal democracies is provided by the taxes of those who are able to generate the most income. Which means good government is concerned with encouraging those with high revenue generating potential to do so – and means that policies such as those espoused by Francois Hollande are counter-productive when it comes to actually increasing the tax-take a government can make.
Because the doctrine of total depravity is true, no human political or economic system can ever be entirely fair. Neither can any human society be completely equal, and to try and impose equality only results in other inequalities. Yes, let’s work for equality of opportunity, but let’s not villify those who pay for it.
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This is part four of a series on poverty.
Let’s try to be fair
Matt posed some good questions in his response to my last post, “When we talk about ‘income inequality’ do we mean a lack of equality or a lack of fairness? In building a ‘fairer society’ are we aiming for equality of opportunity, or equality of outcome? And how do we define what is fair anyway?”
Good questions, but first let me introduce Wayne Grudem to the debate. In his defence of business and more broadly American free-market capitalism in Business for the Glory of God, (a book I reviewed in 2008) Grudem includes a short chapter on inequality and makes some similar points to Matt. Why respond to one protagonist when you can respond to two?
Grudem opens with this headline statement, “Some inequality of possessions is fundamentally good and provides many opportunities for glorifying God, but also many temptations to sin; and some extreme inequalities are wrong in themselves.”
When I first read this I was slightly shocked, I had no problem identifying with the second half of that statement but I hadn’t considered that there could be a biblical argument for the first. Here is his case in a nutshell.
First, in heaven there are degrees of reward, some will be put in charge of ten cities and some merely five (Luke 19:17,19) and we’ll each receive a reward according to what we’ve done (2 Cor. 5:10). Not even the angels are equal what with archangels and everything so there’s inequality of authority and stewardship in heaven.
Secondly, moving from heaven to earth Grudem makes the same point that Matt made in reference to Usain Bolt, some of us are just born lucky. When it comes to abilities not everyone is born equal. For some their genes and brains mean they can cope with leadership, responsibility and wealth and some, well, can’t. In the arena of sport, as Matt demonstrated, it seems patently obvious that not everyone should get a gold medal, but what about in the rest of life? According to Grudem not everyone should be rewarded the same, ‘those with larger abilities will naturally gain larger rewards’ and that he says is only fair (p. 52).
Thirdly, ‘God has never had a goal of producing equality of possessions among people and he will never do so.’ To support this view he goes to the Year of Jubilee (Lev. 25), Corinth (2 Cor. 8) and Jerusalem (Acts 2:44-46) basically demonstrating that the early church weren’t communists but liberated free-marketers. ‘We should not think of all inequalities of possessions as wrong, or as evil. In fact, inequalities of possessions provide many opportunities for glorifying God.’
To his credit, like Matt, Grudem sees poverty as a result of the fall and that poverty will not last forever, there will be no poor in heaven. However, ‘the evils of poverty and excessive self-indulgent wealth must not cause us to think that God’s goal is total equality of possessions, or that all inequalities are wrong. Inequalities in abilities and opportunities and possessions will be part of our life in heaven forever, and they are in themselves good and pleasing to God, and provide many opportunities for glorifying him.’
Let me hit the easy targets first. Those with larger abilities should get larger rewards and that’s only fair. Hmm, I’m not so sure.
First you only have to look at the indolent children of many of the rich and famous to prove that larger rewards do not always come to the most able, or just watch X-factor. Fair? Hardly. For a biblical response just ask the older brother in Luke 15 if you think different. His basic complaint is that his useless younger brother was not deserving of his blessing in the first place and the fact that he got that and the party was, well, very unfair.
Secondly, according to Jesus, Paul and James there are two systems of reward at work right now. One is temporary and the other eternal and they are often not connected. So what gets you a huge reward now may not get you a huge reward in heaven and vice versa. So while the world values the invention of iPods and iPads and richly rewards those who create them, heaven’s rewards are based on rather different criteria; such as generosity, sacrifice and service. ‘Accumulate the right sort of treasure’ is the most basic point.
But let’s get to the heart of the issue. It seems to me that Grudem reads Leviticus 25, Acts 2 and 2 Corinthians 8 as saying because we don’t all have the same amount of stuff and the Bible doesn’t say we should, then it’s clearly not for equality. But that’s not the Biblical vision of equality, which offers perhaps the more intriguing picture of manna from heaven (Exodus 16). Everyone gathered different amounts and yet everyone had enough and no one could store more than they needed. Heaven limited greed and created equality (2 Corinthians 8:15 a verse Grudem doesn’t quite get to).
I read those same passages as a consistent, systematic and repeated desire to limit inequality. Leviticus achieves that end through the means of the law and the church gets the same end through the agency of the Spirit. One institutes a radical equalising system and the other creates radically generous hearts.
So will there be inequality in heaven? Even granted that there will be varying levels of responsibility I’d be surprised if there was inequality of opportunity. Opportunity to do what, make your fortune? If first will be last and the reverse is also true then perhaps those who enjoyed their rewards in this life will be content with less in the next. So the master in his millionaire mansion may find that his eternal mansion not quite as roomy as his former servants and no one will be able to say that’s not fair.
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This is part three of a series on poverty.
The Bhagavad-Gita and the Bible: An Observer’s Comments
I like studying other religions. In the past I have found that I have grown in my understanding of the grace of Christ and the relevance of Biblical ethics when comparing them to other religions. I also find it is a great way of learning to love your neighbour, especially when your neighbour might not be a part of the mainstream British culture.
It’s also very interesting to discover the points of tension between other religions and our own. The tensions are often very different to the ones we are used to arguing with our secular humanist friends.
Last year I was invited to a Hare Krishna (Hindu) meeting by a friend. I decided to go, explaining to the leader of the temple that I was a Christian, and would he be happy if I just observed? Over the months I met with the leader of the temple to dialogue about our respective faiths. I bought a Bhagavad-Gita and read it in order to facilitate discussion. As the leader of the temple said he had formerly been a Christian missionary, he didn’t need to acquaint himself with the Bible!
I thought I would share some of my thoughts. Here is an extract of the Bhagavad-Gita. The context: Arjuna is a mighty warrior who is travelling in a chariot with Krishna. On both sides of the battle Arjuna can recognise friends and family. Arjuna turns to Krishna in turmoil that friends and family are lining up to fight to the death.
1: Seeing Arjuna full of compassion, his mind depressed, his eyes full of tears, Krishna spoke the following words. 2: Krishna said: My dear Arjuna, how have these impurities come upon you? They are not at all befitting a man who knows the value of life. They lead not to higher planets but to infamy. 3: O son of Pritha, do not yield to this degrading impotence. It does not become you. Give up such petty weakness of heart and arise, O chastiser of the enemy 4:; Arjuna said: O killer of enemies, O killer of Madhu, how can I counterattack with arrows in battle men like Bhishma and Drona, who are worthy of my worship? 8: I can find no means to drive away this grief which is drying up my senses. I will not be able to dispel it even if I win a prosperous, unrivaled kingdom on earth with sovereignty like the demigods in heaven. 7: Having spoken thus, Arjuna, chastiser of enemies, told Krishna, “Govinda, I shall not fight,” and fell silent 11/12: Krishna said: While speaking learned words, you are mourning for what is not worthy of grief. Those who are wise lament neither for the living nor for the dead. Never was there a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor all these kings; nor in the future shall any of us cease to be. 33: (Krishna cont …) If, however, you do not perform your religious duty of fighting, then you will certainly incur sins for neglecting your duties and thus lose your reputation as a fighter. 37: O son of Kunti, either you will be killed on the battlefield and attain the heavenly planets, or you will conquer and enjoy the earthly kingdom. Therefore get up and fight with determination. 38: Do thou fight for the sake of fighting, without considering happiness or distress, loss or gain, victory or defeat—and by so doing you shall never incur sin.
I think the advice of Krishna can be quite shocking to Westerners, both Christian and non-Christians, as we highly value physical life. But, logically, if one believes in reincarnation, what Krishna says does make sense. Therefore, it seems, not all religions can neatly fit into the traditional ethical codes of the West.
Here are some of the points I discussed with the leader of the temple, which you might find interesting:
1. The last verse quoted above, 38, alludes to an important doctrine for the Krishna Consciousness: detachment. Detachment from the material world, the consequences of your actions and ego. We discussed the concept of God, because for the Temple leader detachment drew him closer to God. I explained that the Bible did not cause us to see the material world as evil, and therefore attachment to it was in fact healthy as ‘the heavens declare the glory of God’. This discussion also could be applied to the value, or non-value, of physical life. Jesus cried when Lazarus died. Very different to what Krishna is suggesting.
2. Personality. Was the Hindu God personal or impersonal? If Hare Krishna worshipers are asked to detach from the physical world and from ‘happiness or distress, loss or gain, victory or defeat’ then does this also include human relationships? Or even relationship with God? The Temple Leader confirmed that relationship with God was very important to the followers of Krishna, but this was not true of a great many Hindus. On the other hand, Jesus is very personal. He came to earth once as one man, a personality that can be known and relied upon.
3. Morality. What effect do these forms of detachment have on morality? Does it mean that it is ok to kill? That is what the Bhagavad-Gita seems to say; or at least that there is no room for sentimentality. However, the Temple leader assured me that they would never teach that such a crime was permissible. This is also confirmed in Ranchor Prime’s commentary: ‘Killing brings its reaction for the perpetrator’1. However, I still have questions about whether these conclusions can be drawn from the text. Admittedly they are from a time of war. But to ‘fight for the sake of fighting’ cannot be reconciled with any form of Just War theory, in my opinion. This would be in stark contradiction to Jesus’ command “Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword.” (Matt 26:52)
I’m sure that Krishna worshipers have other answers to these questions than those I have recorded here. The above is only the result of a few conversations with one man. But isn’t it interesting!? The tensions between Christianity and Krishna Consciousness are vastly different to the ones we face in the main stream British culture. It helps me see Christ’s teaching from another angle, and makes me appreciate it even more.
Footnotes
1 Prime, Ranchor. Bhagavad Gita: Talks Between the Soul and God, p. 19
The “Evil God” Challenge
For many atheists today, the best argument available against the existence of the Christian God is the "evil God" challenge, as posed by philosopher Stephen Law. For Law, the standard arguments for the existence of God, like the cosmological and teleological arguments, could serve equally well to support an "evil God" hypothesis - and if the evil God is incoherent, as Christians believe it is, then so is theirs.
Law writes:
“The challenge is to explain why the hypothesis that there exists an omnipotent, omniscient and all-good god should be considered significantly more reasonable than the hypothesis that there exists an omnipotent, omniscient and all-evil god.”
There follows an extended imaginary conversation with the inhabitants of a far-flung planet, in which everyone believes in an evil God. The sceptic asks them why they believe in an evil God when there is so much good in the world, and they respond using the standard Christian responses to the problem of evil, only in reverse. For many, this article, and the thought-experiment behind it, constitutes a serious and compelling challenge to Christian theism.
Some responses to Law have failed to grasp his argument, or have suggested Law’s argument fails to challenge Christian theism (Edward Feser is the clearest example). From my perspective, this is incorrect, and Law’s challenge should be taken seriously. More reasonable responses to Law have appealed to the fact that Christian theism has other arguments in addition which move us toward a specifically Christian God (such as the moral argument). While there is clearly some value in such approaches, I think there is a better approach, which is to argue against the evil god hypothesis on the basis of an a priori argument, rather than a string of a posteriori responses.
As soon as we look at the proposal in detail, we find a problem with Law’s challenge. Whereas Christian theists have been very specific with their definition of a good God, Law is quite vague about what the exact nature of this evil God is. In describing the evil God, he continues:
“Imagine that he is maximally evil. His depravity is without limit. His cruelty knows no bounds. There is no other god or gods – just this supremely wicked being. Call this the evil-god hypothesis.”
However, I am going to argue that such a being is logically incompatible with the very fact of our existence. As I noted earlier, since Law is ambiguous about the specific attributes of an evil God, one has to think he means a God with completely opposing attributes to the broadly traditional monotheistic God: maximally cruel, unjust, selfish, and so on. And as a maximally selfish being, this evil God would have to be exclusively concerned with itself. Not only would it be exclusively concerned with itself, but it would have to be concerned only with itself to the logically maximum degree possible. So far, so uncontroversial.
My argument, then, runs as follows:
1. Any maximally logical great being (MLGB) in any possible world would need to have all their characteristics to the logical maximum.
2. An evil MLGB in any possible world would have selfishness to its maximum extent.
3. An evil MLGB in any possible world would not be willing to share anything at all being maximally selfish and completely self-absorbed.
4. An evil MLGB in any possible world would be capable of not creating anything else.
5. An evil MLGB in any possible world would not have the will to create anything due to its supreme selfishness.
6. An evil MLGB in any possible world would not create anything.
However, if the last proposition follows, and logically it appears to, then our very existence appears to contradict the proposal of any logically possible evil God. In fact, we could take step 6 further, and add that any evil MLGB would not even have the thought of considering the creation of anything else since that would be, even in some small sense, to think of others, which would be a good. For an evil MLGB to have a good thought is illogical.
The response to the evil god hypothesis is, therefore, that it is completely unreasonable that such a being should exist. We can now show an evil God to be an illogical concept by adding:
7. Something other than an evil God exists.
Two lines of attack might be made upon step 5. Some might posit that an evil god could create something else for purely evil intentions, merely in order to create more opportunities to be evil. However, this premise can be defended against this point by stating that this creation of torture and sadism, whilst consistent with the evil God’s evilness, is not consistent with his supreme selfishness. With selfishness to the absolutely logically maximum possible degree, such a being could never give any thought whatsoever to anything else, let alone creating any other creature. Creation, as such, is incompatible with being maximally selfish. Thus our mere existence remains completely incompatible with the evil God hypothesis.
Another possible reply would be to insist that in order for an evil God to maximize his evilness, this might require some lack of maximal selfishness, to accommodate for the fact that we do exist. In this scenario, the evil God is unable to be completely self-consumed, and thus the atheist must make some case for a coherent evil God who is no longer maximally selfish. Perhaps the evil God sacrifices some selfishness in order to be maximally evil, in terms of the suffering it causes to something outside itself. However, if evilness itself requires some object which it can be evil toward, then this God cannot be a necessary being, but must be contingent; it could not be maximally powerful, since its very existence would depend upon the existence of something other than itself. This reply, then, would open up a host of philosophical problems for the evil God theory, and the atheist would open himself up to the charge of moulding the evil God ad hoc. In contrast, the notion of a good God is not logically incoherent, and thus Law’s challenge falls.
I have taken the evil god challenge seriously, as I think is necessary. However, since I have given good reasons for thinking the notion of an evil God is completely illogical, and since I reject the empirical experience of good and evil as pointing toward either a good God or an evil one, I would suggest I have met the challenge as given by Law. Any thoughts?
Matthew Parris on “The Only Question”
Here's an article that I guarantee will find itself quoted in evangelistic messages up and down the country within a month or two. It's by the brilliant writer and well-known atheist Matthew Parris, writing in The Spectator, and it's one of the most insightful articles on anything I've read in years. The last three paragraphs are particularly stirring:
Beware (I would say to believers) the patronage of unbelievers. They want your religion as a social institution, filleted of true faith. It is the atheists, who think this God business matters, who are on your side.
As an unbeliever my sympathies are with fundamentalists. They seem to me to represent the source, the roots, the essential energy of their faiths. They go back to basics. To those who truly believe, the implicit message beneath ‘never mind if it’s true, religion is good for people’ is insulting. To those who really believe, it is because and only because what they believe is true, that it is good. I find David Cameron’s remark that his faith, ‘like Magic FM in the Chilterns, tends to fade in and out’, baffling. If a faith is true it must have the most profound consequences for a man and for mankind. If I seriously suspected a faith might be true, I would devote the rest of my life to finding out.
As I get older the sharpness of my faculties begins to dull. But what I will not do is sink into a mellow blur of acceptance of the things I railed against in my youth. ‘Familiar’ be damned. ‘Comforting’ be damned. ‘Useful’ be damned. Is it true? — that is the question. It was the question when I was 12 and the question when I was 22. Forty years later it is still the question. It is the only question.
Put that in your Alpha supper and smoke it.
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Andrew Wilson’s new book, If God Then What? Wondering Aloud about Truth, Origins and Redemption, will be released on 16 March, published by IVP, and is now available to preorder.
Series: Hosea
Dave Bish has written a three part series on the book of Hosea and the Puritan movement and gives a taste of Jeremiah Burroughs book on Hosea called Of Lovers and Whores.
The series starts with The Reason for God.
The entire series can be found here.
Singing Leads to Reformation
For some it seems easy to cite the charismatic movement as a triumph of style over substance, and the same might be said of the Wesleyan revival, the Great Awakening experienced around Jonathan Edwards and probably almost every other significant move of God. When God moves, people’s hearts are moved and new songs are written. The church exudes a new hymnal to express her new found delight in God. This, it turns out, is always the plan.
Jeremiah Burroughs, in Of Lovers and Whores4, writes on God’s promise to take Israel back to the days of her youth, back to the moment on the far side of the Red Sea where Moses led them in a great song of salvation:
As a poor prodigal, who, having left his father’s house, and become reduce to lack, misery and slavery, sits beneath a hedge, wringing his hands, lamenting the loss of his father’s house, and considering what he had in that father’s presence, exclaims at his own folly and madness.
If one should then come and say to him, your father is reconciled to you, and sends for you to come home, and promises to put you into as comfortable a condition as ever; what heart-music would this cause! God promises this to his people, to restore them to their former singing condition.
The Puritans were a singing people, and Burroughs goes on to give seventeen reasons for Christians to be a singing people including:
#17 God raises the spirits of people to rejoice in his mercy.
When He warms, inflames and enlarges their hearts with his goodness then is the time if ever to set upon a thorough reformation, to cast out all the remainders of superstition, and every species of false worship. This observation is derived from the connection of these words to what follows. “And it shall be in that day that you shall call me Ishi and not Baali, and I will take away the names of the Baal’s from her mouth, and they shall be remembered no more.” There shall be a most glorious reformation, and so complete that they shall be delivered from all the remainders of their idol worship, and not even remember the very names of their false gods.
“You shall weep no more,” Isaiah 30:19, the Lord promises abundance of mercy. And, verse 22, “you shall defile the covering of your graven images of silver and the ornaments of your molten images of gold.”
2 Chronicles 30:26, you find “there was great joy in Jerusalem” on the celebration of their Passover, such joy as was not “since the time of Solomon.” Mark then the beginning of the next chapter; “Now when all this was finished,” that is, when they had celebrated a Passover so full, and had such abundance of joy as had not been in Jerusalem since Solomon, all Israel that were present when out to the cities of Judah and broke down the idols.
When wicked men get together drinking, at feasts and in taverns, and their lust become inflamed, they make desperate resolutions to do evil. So when God’s saints are exercised in his ordinances, and refreshed with the sweetness of his love, when that lies glowing at their hearts, how resolved they are for God, they can then do anything for him. Now the very names of the Baal’s must be taken away.
Seeing leads to singing; singing leads to reformation.
A change in the worship of a church might seem like a cosmetic change, a style change – but if its origin is in a fresh sight of Christ then it is the seed of a wholesale reformation and renewal of the church. Salvation makes people sing, because our God is a singing God, a delighted God, an overflowing fountain of love. And whilst love can be conveyed in prose it’s better expressed in poetry, and effective as the spoken word is, song expresses the heart more suitably.
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1 Of Lovers and Whores, Jeremiah Burroughs (Edited by Dave Bish, 2012) available here.
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This is the final part of a short series on Hosea.
What’s Wrong With Denominations?
For years, I've assured people that Newfrontiers is not a denomination. I've taught Joining the Church courses and laboured the point; I've tried to explain to my friends that I'm non-denominational; I've deliberately left hospital forms blank in the "denomination" box. But I've been wondering recently why I do those things. And I'm not sure I've got a very good answer.
By any dictionary definition, Newfrontiers is a denomination. (This isn’t to say that people can’t use words with anything other than their dictionary definition, but it is to say that we should make it clear when we aren’t. If words only mean what we want them to mean, and the listener has no way of knowing what that is, then we end up like Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland, and that confuses everybody). The dictionary says a denomination is “a religious group, usually including many local churches”, or alternatively “a name or designation”, which is the meaning most connected with its etymology. Both of these definitions, very obviously, apply to Newfrontiers: it’s a name we give to a religious group including many local churches. So unless we avoid the word “religion” altogether, which I’ve already argued we shouldn’t, the folks at Chambers and the OED think we’re a denomination.
Personally, I was never really comfortable with that, and I’m now becoming curious as to why that was. Clearly, the word evoked (to me, at least) a whole world of ideas that I didn’t want Newfrontiers to be associated with, so I resolutely resisted applying the word to the family of churches I was a part of. Significantly, I didn’t simply prefer a different word, like “family” or “network” - which I still do, because I find their connotations so helpful - I also actively objected to having the D-word used with reference to me or my church. Presumably, I was taking the word to have connotations that were almost entirely negative, even though the mainstream usage is inoffensively neutral. But what were those connotations, and why did they bother me so much?
At one level, the word “denomination” simply sounded hierarchical: it made me think of a group of churches in which decisions emanated from a board, or committees or subcommittees, rather than through authentic Christian relationships. But I’ve since noticed that all organisations have to operate with small groups of people who make big decisions, and the fact that we tend to call them “apostolic teams” (or, formerly, “regional teams”), instead of boards or committees, doesn’t necessarily make us more relational or less hierarchical. I hope we are; but I’m sure there are self-identified denominations built on warm and meaningful relationships, just as there are undoubtedly some apostolic networks in which a hierarchical structure has displaced friendship as the way in which things are held together. That’s not a basis to reject the D-word, anyway.
At another level, it sounded confessional, by which I mean it sounded like unity came from a doctrinal statement rather than from shared mission. Again, though, I’ve since noticed that almost all movements/families/networks/denominations of churches are confessional to some degree, whether or not such a confession is explicit. The range, depth and amount of consultation of the confession can vary dramatically, but ultimately the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Baptist Confession are very similar types of statements to the Newfrontiers seventeen values: they express what is believed, what is not believed, what is of primary importance, and (by omission) what is of secondary importance. Even in groups of churches where none of this is written down, it is very rare to find no shared set of values or theological convictions; groups that try to avoid doctrinal commitments altogether end up compromising their mission, and usually fragment within the first generation.
One other thing that grated with me about using the word “denomination” was the connotation of establishment. Denominations, I felt, were old, established, set in their ways, stuffy, officious, dusty; movements, families and networks, by contrast, were fresh, radical, challenging, forward-thinking and flexible. This assumption was far easier to unravel. After all, the distinction I had made here was entirely one of age - new good, old bad - and had nothing to do with whether one self-identified as a denomination or a network. Not only that, but the underlying assumption of the superiority of novelty is becoming less plausible to me as I get older (and I’m only thirty-three). There is something very powerful about praying in a section of a cathedral, as I did recently in Chichester, where daily prayer meetings have been held for eight hundred years. There is also rather more merit to lots of things that Christians have done for centuries - the sacraments, keeping silence, liturgy, confession, lectionaries, hymns, creeds and so on - than I used to think, and it’s not clear that our modern replacements are quite as effective, or quite as innovative, as I liked to believe. So the superiority of novelty, as a reason for disowning the word “denomination”, didn’t seem to hold water.
(Interesting side note at this point: it’s remarkable how many Newfrontiers churches are reintegrating the old and the new at the moment. I keep hearing of places where breaking bread has become regular practice again, and where reading Scripture or prayers together has re-entered church life. Silence has made a comeback in certain circles, as has greeting people in the church during the meeting. Newfrontiers leaders have recently been heard to extol the virtues of the creeds, or even the Reformed confessions, as worthy of study. And a surprising number of our churches are even meeting in old church buildings, particularly in global cities. Who’d have thought it?)
So there’s three reasons why I wanted to avoid the word “denomination”, and three explanations of why I don’t think those reasons were very good. In short, I think that any gathering of local churches that shares a name and a set of values or doctrinal commitments - even if they call themselves a network, a movement, a family or even a fellowship of independent evangelical churches! - is functionally a denomination as far as the English language is concerned. And personally (I’m clearly not speaking for the whole movement/network/family here), I don’t think denominations are anything to be ashamed of. Except, that is, for the fact that the word is an anagram of ‘not made in Sion’.
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Andrew’s next book, If God Then What? Wondering Aloud about Truth, Origins and Redemption, will be released in April, published by IVP.
Hair-shirts and iPhones
Yesterday Phil posed the question, “What is poverty?” To illustrate one of his points, I was walking through town recently with one of my daughters who, as we passed a rough sleeper, with his ‘collection’ bowl in front of him, asked, “How come he’s got an iPhone if he’s out begging?” I had clocked the man (and his phone) before my daughter, and my immediate gut reaction was to ask that same question. However, in an effort to be gracious, and non-judgmental, it was a question I pushed back down into my guts, while my more naïve, but honest, daughter vocalized it.
Poverty is complex. On the one hand it is easy to be patronizing about ‘those poor people in Africa’ and do our bit for charity. As a result we may feel better about ourselves but in reality fail to make any substantial difference and end up headed down the wide road of pharisaical moralism (“God, I thank you that I am not like other men…” Luke 18:11). On the other hand we can fall into making subjective value judgments about who is or is not the ‘deserving poor’ – a relativism invariably based on our personal judgment of what constitutes necessity and luxury; so the rough sleeper is entitled to his dog, but not his iPhone, while I – as someone who is a respectable tax-paying member of society (rather like that Pharisee again) – am clearly entitled to both my dog and my phone.
I guess we can all agree that poverty – real, dollar-a-day, dirty water poverty – is bad. But things become more complex when we move from that baseline to the question posed by Phil, “Is equality a ‘good’ that we should care about? If so, how much equality should there be and is this what Paul was talking about in 2 Corinthians 8:13-14?”
It is interesting how different Bible translations handle this passage. The NIV uses ‘equality’ while the more conservative ESV plumps for ‘fairness’. These two words can mean quite different things according to context. When we talk about ‘income inequality’ do we mean a lack of equality or a lack of fairness? In building a ‘fairer society’ are we aiming for equality of opportunity, or equality of outcome? And how do we define what is fair anyway?
Consider an non-economic example: At this year’s London Olympics equality would be to give every competing athlete a gold medal – that would demonstrate unarguable equality, but it would also be grossly unfair! Fairness at the Olympics is guaranteed by every athlete being assessed under the same conditions in their event – there is equality in athletes being measured by the same timing mechanism, the same track, and so on. Fairness is demonstrated by the results – that some athletes are objectively better than others, and the very best ones come away with the prizes. In this sense the whole point of the games is to demonstrate and celebrate inequality – which is just how we like it! I want to see Usain Bolt doing something extraordinary and run away with the prize. The games would be ruined if they were not fair, and Bolt was made to give all the other athletes a 20 metre head start. Equally, they would be ruined if they were equal, and both Bolt and the slowest competitor were given a gold medal.
But, to push this example further, we might want to look at the systemic causes of one athlete succeeding while another fails and ask questions like these: Is it fair that the Americans have more money than anyone else and so can invest more scientific expertise into their athletes? Is it fair that the Kenyans live at altitude and run ten miles to school each day so that they produce the best distance runners? Is it fair that the Brits have a strong cultural heritage in sports that can be won sitting down? At the games there is equality of conditions, and fairness of results, but arguably neither fairness or equality were at play in the chain of events that led to those particular athletes being at the games in the first place. Is this fair? No. Should we try to do something about it? Well, there’s a question! The thing is, even if one were to take an American, Kenyan and British baby and raise them under exactly the same conditions (equality of opportunity) they would not end up equal in their abilities (equality of outcome) – genetics simply wouldn’t allow it. Is that fair? Well, maybe not, but it is diversity, which is meant to be another of our chief cultural values!
Back to 2 Corinthians 8:13-14…
The only other place in the Bible that the word translated here as equality/fairness is Colossians 4:1, which helps provide a reference point for what fairness might look like in practice: “Masters, provide your slaves with what is right and fair, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven.” (NIV) Clearly, there is a lack of equality between master and slave, yet Paul’s expectation is that there can be fairness in the relationship. In practical terms this would mean the kind of things that we now expect in employer-employee relations: appropriate remuneration, health and safety at work, and so on. If there is this fairness, should the slave/employee then feel resentful towards their master/employer if there is a great inequality of wealth between them? What if the master lives in multi-million pound house and the slave on the other side of the tracks? Biblically, I think it’s hard to make the case. And that means I am more sympathetic towards Doug Wilson’s thought experiment than is Phil. To put it another way, it would be unfair for a master to give his slave an iPhone while expecting him to sleep on the street, but not necessarily unfair for the master to live in a multi-million pound house while his slave had one worth £200,000.
Poverty – real, dollar-a-day, dirty water poverty – is bad. Absolute poverty is a horror. At the church I lead we are planning to take part in the Live Below the Line Campaign in May – feeding ourselves on just £1 per day for five days, as hundreds of millions of people have to do every day of their lives. We’re not doing this to guilt trip anyone, or because we like hair shirts, but as a way of expressing solidarity with the poor, and as an exercise in learning more about gratitude for the abundance we normally enjoy, whatever our personal economic and political views. I think Phil would approve!
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This is part two of a short series on poverty.
What is poverty? Or: How unequal should the poor be?
Just before Christmas Andrew Wilson posted a thought experiment from Doug Wilson which provoked, if not quite fury, then a seething response in my lefty soul. But what was it that upset me, given that D Wilson said in his magical world that his proposal ‘leaves the poor undeniably better off’?
The problem for me was that his solution also meant that ‘the divide between the rich and poor will widen’ and dramatically so. Doug argued that a refusal to agree with his solution implied that instead of loving the poor, what really gets the goat was the mere presence and existence of rich people.
I made the sophisticated comment that increasing the amount of inequality in a society was ‘a bad thing’ and so here we are discussing it in a bit more length. There’s no disagreement that there is absolute poverty (with people living on something around $1-2 a day); that somewhere in the region of 2.5 billion people face a daily struggle to get the basic necessities of food, water, clothing and shelter. I’ve seen it first hand and it’s horrible.
There is rather more disagreement on what caused the poverty in the first place and still further disagreement on how it should be dealt with. Yet none of those compare with the rift that is caused by a discussion about relative poverty or in current terminology, income inequality.
In the next year, expect to hear a lot more about income inequality, not least because President Obama just put it in his State of the Union speech and there will be a presidential election where every candidate is at least a millionaire. Inequality was recently a topic of conversation amongst the rich and powerful at Davos and it’s a big part of the beef of those occupying, wherever it is they are now occupying in financial centres all over the western world. For years now everyone has been happy that the rich have been getting richer as long as everyone else does too. Now everyone else isn’t but the rich still are and somehow that doesn’t seem fair any longer.
Inequality in western societies gets the heckles up in other ways too. For example as the UK government changes how benefits work, we can expect to read stories of benefit scroungers with iPhones and flat screen TVs, and stories of hard working families that just can’t quite make the sums add up. But in a country where nobody starves, what is poverty?
Last summer saw London and other places caught up in the consumer riots, but in a consumer society where virtually everyone gets ‘want’ and ‘need’ horribly confused and where personal debt is dangerously high, what is fair anyway?
For Christians there are a number of questions:
In a wealthy society who is the poor? Inequality says something about how we measure and value certain jobs and work, yet often those who do the most important things get paid the least. Just talk to any mother if you disagree with that one.
Is equality a ‘good’ that we should care about? If so, how much equality should there be, and is this what Paul was talking about in 2 Cor 8:13-14?
So having asked a lot of questions without giving any answers, let me finally make my position clear. I believe that not only does the Bible articulate a vision of a society (past, present and future) where absolute poverty is wiped out but that it also paints a compelling portrait of a world where income inequality is at worst irrelevant and at best incomprehensible.
I believe that the customs of Israel, the teachings of Jesus, the values of the early church and the vision of the new heavens and earth all point towards this kind of world.
I believe that in the light of this, the societies Christians should strive for and the policies Christians should support are ones that lead to more and not less equal societies and where the gap between rich and poor is narrow. After all, the best paths are narrow ones.
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This is part one of a short series on poverty.
Life in the Trinity
Through the giving of the Spirit, God shares with us – and catches us up into – the life that is his. The Father has eternally known and loved his great Son, and through the Spirit he opens our eyes that we too might know him, and so he wins our hearts that we too might love him. Our love for the Son, then, is an echo and an extension of the Father’s eternal love. In other words, through the Spirit the Father allows us to share in the enjoyment of what most delights him – his Son. It was his overwhelming love for the Son that inspired him to create us in the first place, and all so that we might share in that highest pleasure of his.
This, in fact, is the heartbeat of what it means to be godly, to be like this God. It is why Jesus says ‘If God were your Father, you would love me’ (John 8:42). The Father’s very identity consists in his love for the Son, and so when we love the Son we reflect what is most characteristic about the Father. It is the prime reason the Spirit is given. The Puritan theologian John Owen wrote that ‘therein consists the principal part of our renovation into his image. Nothing renders us so like unto God as our love unto Jesus Christ’.1
But the Spirit not only enables us to know and love Christ; he also gives us the mind of Christ, making us like him. Now before anything else, what is most characteristic of the Son is his relationship with his Father, that he knows and enjoys receiving the love and life of the Father, ‘that I love the Father and that I do exactly what my Father has commanded me’ (John 14:31). At the heart of our transformation into the likeness of the Son, then, is our sharing of his deep delight in the Father. In our love and enjoyment of the Son we are like the Father; in our love and enjoyment of the Father we are like the Son. That is the happy life the Spirit calls us to.
It is the Spirit who unites us to Christ, like the oil flowing down onto the body of High Priest, he imparts the blessings of Christ the Head to his Body, the church. He takes what is Christ’s and makes it ours (John 16:14) so that in the beloved Son we might be the beloved children of God. How great and lovely, then, is the work of the Spirit! He unites us to the Son so that the Father’s love for the Son also encompasses us; he draws us to share the Father’s own enjoyment of the Son; and he causes us to share the Son’s delight in the Father. What could be more delicious than to keep in step with a Spirit whose purpose is that?
Jonathan Edwards wrote that:
the divine principle in the saints is of the nature of the Spirit: for as the nature of the Spirit of God is divine love, so divine love is the nature and essence of that holy principle in the hearts of the saints.2
It is by the Spirit that the Father has eternally loved his Son. And so, by sharing their Spirit with us, the Father and the Son share with us their own life, love and fellowship. By the Spirit uniting me to Christ, the Father knows and loves me as his son; by the Spirit I begin to know and love him as my Father. By the Spirit I begin to love aright – unbending me from my self-love, he wins me to share the Father’s pleasure in the Son and the Son’s in the Father. By the Spirit I (slowly!) begin to love as God loves, with his own generous, overflowing, self-giving love for others.
This article is the fourth in a series of extracts from Mike’s forthcoming book, The Good God: Enjoying Father, Son and Spirit.
Follow @enjoyingtrinity
Footnotes
1 Works, 1.146
2 Works of Jonathan Edwards, 21.191
When a Miracle is Not What You Need
At our recent Theology Forum meeting, Mick Taylor led us through a short devotional time in which he demonstrated that miracles are not always good news. When he finished there was a moment of awed silence, followed by a general exclamation of “Wow!” from all in the room. Mick gives outstanding leadership to the Forum, but is, as yet, a reluctant blogger, so I thought I’d write his thoughts up for him; and add a few of my own.
Those of us who are convinced charismatics, who believe in the present reality of gifts of the Spirit, like miracles! But sometimes miracles can be second best. We see this in the temptation of Jesus recorded in Matthew 4. For Jesus to have worked a miracle in response to the devil’s tempting would have been second best – actually, it would have been a long way short even of second best; it would have been a disaster. Jesus could have conjured bread from the stones, but that very miracle would have been a denial of his trust in the Father.
In this demonic encounter there is a replaying of the scene in Israel’s story when the people grumbled for lack of water. In this case, God works a miracle, but it is not a miracle born of faith. Instead, it is a response to the people’s testing of and grumbling against God (Ex 17:2). In this sense, the miracle actually stands as evidence against them, not as a sign of blessing to them.
We see something similar in Jesus’ calming of the storm. When Christ rebukes the wind and the waves there is also an implicit rebuke of the disciples in their lack of faith. They seek a miracle, but the miracle demands God’s action in order for them to have faith, rather than their faith seeking a miracle.
The ultimate example of this disbelieving appeal for a miracle is at the cross, when the abuse hurled at Jesus was, “Save yourself – come down – work a miracle!” For Jesus to have worked such a miracle would have been impressive, amazing even, but it would also have been defeat, not rescue.
The desire for a miracle can be a sign of unbelief rather than of faith: “Do this God, and then I’ll really believe in you!” By contrast, true faith believes even if it never witnesses a miracle.
I have often mused on the account of Paul and Barnabas at Lystra (Acts 14). Here they perform a mighty miracle, healing a man who had never walked. We might expect this miracle to lead to the mass conversion of the town, but instead what we see is that at first the crowd tries to worship Paul and Barnabas as gods, before growing disenchanted (perhaps there had been no more miracles?) and stoning Paul. The miracle in this case doesn’t do the town of Lystra much good – instead it stands in judgment against them.
Should we all become cessationists then and give up on any pursuit of spiritual gifts? Of course not! But in our desire for the miraculous we must be clear that we are responding in faith to the completed work of Christ at the cross, not making our faith conditional on the miracle. We also need to avoid the naïve assumption that when miracles happen it will always result in people responding positively to the gospel. Sometimes it simply hardens them. And that must mean that we do all we do from “faith, hope and love” and not seek miracles simply for the sake of the miracle - because that kind of miracle is not the kind we need. Our salvation is far too miraculous for that.
Of H&M, Ben & Jerry’s and HDTV
The world is full of alluring things. That was true in the days of the Puritans in the 16th and 17th Centuries just as it is today and was in the days of Hosea. The world has been populated with attractive things since the day it was made, since the Triune God made fruit good to look at and juicy to taste, since he made the “hairless bipeds”1 with all their curvy gangly bits that fascinate human eyes and captivate our hearts. Beauty leads our hearts in all kinds of directions but what should most win us?
Preaching from:
“Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her.” (Hosea 2:14 ESV)
Jeremiah Burroughs, in Of Lovers and Whores2, writes:
The Hebrew word translated “allure” signifies to entice. It is often used to mean deceive by subtle enticing. Some have translated it, “I will deceive her” (LXX) or “I will seduce her” (Vulgate). God uses the word to express the sweet and gracious ways in which he intends to deal with them from his gracious affection towards them.
The Allurement Of The Gospel
What God means by alluring his people, when he has been reconciled to them, may be expressed in these three things:
Unfolding beauty
Firstly, I will unfold the beauty and excellency of the infiniteness of my goodness and loving-kindness and set in array before their souls the exceeding glory of the riches of my grace.
Outbidding all others
Secondly, whereas before they went whoring from me because their hearts were allured by their lovers, giving to them various contentments, and so subtly beguiling their minds; I will dwell with them in a more powerful manner than their lovers possibly could, and outbid them all. Did their lovers offer to them comfort? I will bid more than they. Did their lovers offer gain? I will bid more gain. Did they offer more honour and respect? I will outbid them in this too; so that I will persuade their hearts that they shall enjoy more in me, than they possibly could in all that their lovers could do for them.
Today we might translate this: “My people pursued their lovers: They went after KPMG, PwC and Lloyds TSB, for money offered comfort and control. They went after celebrity gossip, social media status and pornography for they offer intimacy. They went after H&M and Ben & Jerry’s and HDTV for retail therapy, over-priced ice-cream and Brian Cox talking Science on the BBC break the numbness of life.”
And indeed, then the gospel has the true, full and gracious work upon the heart of a sinner, when it yields to its invitations, finding that all that the world can bid is now outbidden and that there is more gain in Christ than in all else besides. You know, when one comes to offer so much for a commodity, and another outbids him, he carries it away. So when the world and sin offer to the soul such and such contents, if God comes and outbids all, the bargain is made and God carries away the heart.
Heart-winning
Thirdly, I will come upon them even unawares, and as it were, steal away their hearts, with a holy guile. Paul tells us that he caught the Corinthians with guile (2 Cor. 12:16). I will secretly insinuate myself and draw their hearts in such a sweet and hidden way that I will take them before they are aware. God deals thus with many a soul, taking it before it is aware, and the soul afterwards comes to understand some of the dealings of his grace.
Can you imagine the impact of hearts won, wooed, drawn out after Christ? Quickly harassing people to change their ways, beating them with instructions and threats might bear more immediate fruit, but changed hearts truly change lives.
Footnotes
1 CS Lewis’ Screwtape bemoans that “The Enemy really loves those hairless bipeds”. The LORD really does love us!
2 Of Lovers and Whores, Jeremiah Burroughs (Edited by Dave Bish, 2012) available from: http://thebluefish.org/p/sibbesian.html
This is part two of a short series on Hosea.
Does God Give and Take Away?
You've got to admire Ben Witherington. Not many evangelical academics have his range of learning, or his insight, and almost none have written commentaries on every book in the New Testament. But what really makes him exceptional is that when his daughter died of a sudden pulmonary embolism on January 11th, he put pen to paper within two weeks and wrote a moving, thoughtful and challenging series of eight blog posts on the whole thing, which are now going to be turned into an e-Book. By anyone's way of reckoning, that's impressive.
Much of what he writes in this series is extremely helpful. He reflects on the theology of death, how to grieve, how to pray, what not to say as a comfort, and even how to preach a funeral sermon. The most immediately striking theme in his series, however - it occupies the whole of the first post and the start of the second - is Ben’s belief that God did not take his daughter. The words of Job 1:21, “the Lord gives and the Lord takes away”, he views as theologically wrong at best, and pastorally devastating at worst. We cannot take comfort in the idea that God is the author of death as well as life; Job was wrong to say what he said in the first place; we cannot and should not, therefore, sing Matt and Beth Redman’s song, “Blessed be your name”. If God is good, when someone faced with a tragedy responds “God did this and we don’t know why”, our response to them must be, “No, a thousand times no!”
So while being as sensitive as possible to Ben Witherington’s pain, and as aware as possible of the fact that I haven’t shared his experience, it is worth asking whether or not he is right. It’s not just Ben, of course; many argue that we should not apply Job’s words this way in the new covenant, since Christ has taken up our diseases and carried our sorrows (a position which we don’t have space for here). But Ben’s position is interesting because he is arguing, not just that we shouldn’t talk like that, but that Job shouldn’t have. From his perspective, Job was wrong to attribute his sufferings to God, since they were actually from the devil, and as the story progresses we see Job revising his opinion. That position, it seems to me, is problematic, both exegetically and pastorally.
Here’s what Ben said about Job in his first two posts:
The words “The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away,” from the lips of Job, are not good theology. They’re bad theology. According to Job 1, it was not God, but the Devil who took away Job’s children, health and wealth. God allowed it to happen, but when Job said these words, as the rest of the story shows, he was not yet enlightened about the true nature of where his calamity came from and what God’s will actually was for his life — which was for good, and not for harm.
When a person suffers the devastating loss of a loved one, you should — however well-intentioned you might be — keep your mouth shut. Or at the very least, you should think long and hard before you say anything. Here are some of the things I recently heard that did not help, and frankly were not true. (1) “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away.” Not a saying from God, rather it’s from the poorly-informed Job, who was later forced to revise his opinion. As it happens, it was Satan who devastated Job’s life and family.
Three observations on these two paragraphs occur to me. Firstly, Ben writes as if it is inconceivable for both God and Satan to be responsible for the same event: “not God, but the Devil”, and “as it happens, it was Satan”. (He may not have meant this, but I think it reads that way). Yet in several places in Scripture, we have the same event ascribed to both Yahweh and the devil, without any apparent inconsistency. The census that David took is said to be incited by Yahweh (2 Sam 24:1) and also by Satan (1 Chr 21:1). Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus because of both Satan and God, at different levels (Luke 22:3; Acts 4:24-28). Paul was afflicted by a messenger of Satan, but this mysterious entity was given him to stop him from being conceited, which sounds like the sort of thing God would do (2 Cor 12:7-9). The biblical writers, it seems, see the sovereignty of God in such a way that makes his intentions, and the intentions of even the most evil of his creatures, compatible (Isaiah 10:5-19 is a particularly clear passage on this idea). So the fact that something is the action of Satan, or Judas or the wicked kings of Assyria or Babylon, doesn’t mean it can’t also be the action of God.
Secondly, it’s far from clear that the revision of Job’s opinion within the story of the book, in as much as it happens at all (note that Yahweh actually rebukes Job’s friends in 42:7-8 for failing to speak of him “rightly, as my servant Job has”), involves the correction of his view that God gives and takes away. In context, Job’s repentance in 42:1-6 is not likely to be about what he said in chapters 1 and 2, in which he moves immediately to worship God, but about the content of his complaint against God in chapters 3-31, in which he demands answers from God concerning his suffering. So to say the story of Job shows that, when he spoke 1:21, “he was not yet enlightened about the true nature of where his calamity came from” is to miss the point slightly. If anything, God’s lengthy response to Job indicates that the very natural phenomena which killed Job’s children, like lightning bolts and mighty winds, are themselves sovereignly directed by God (38:24-25). And it is surely an overstatement to say that Job had to revise his opinion about the Lord giving and taking away; to be honest, it is hard to interpret the final chapters as having anything to do with this.
Thirdly, and most significantly, the writer of the book of Job does not agree with Ben’s interpretation. Immediately after Job’s beautiful statement about the sovereignty and praiseworthiness of God in all things - “the LORD gives, and the LORD takes away; blessed be the name of the LORD” - the writer says this: “in all this, Job did not sin or charge God with wrong” (1:22). Had Ben been right, that Job was “poorly informed” or guilty of “bad theology”, Job would indeed have been sinning and charging God with wrong, for he would have been attributing to God what should actually be attributed to the devil. Yet instead, the writer affirms Job’s statement, and repeats his verdict in 2:10 (“in all this, Job did not sin with his lips”). According to the writer of the book, in saying that Yahweh was responsible for the loss of his health, wealth and even children, Job was neither sinning nor accusing God falsely.
That’s not the whole story, of course. The devil was to blame, and God wasn’t. The devil meant it for evil, and God meant it for good. God’s ultimate intention is never for suffering, death or judgment, but always for blessing and life. And so on. But we don’t actually give people real comfort if we imply that because of those truths, God has nothing to do with the deaths of their loved ones. Comfort, in the long run, comes from knowing that God is in control, that he works all things for good, that nothing can separate us from his love, that for those who are in Christ, to die is gain, and that grief for those we have lost is a vital and very biblical reaction. So even when things happen which we find painful, which we don’t understand and which we know that God could have prevented, we can still, ultimately, affirm joyfully that God is sovereign, and that God is good, all the time.
That is not to say that we should say any of these things to someone who has just lost their daughter. I wouldn’t, and I would hate someone to say them to me; Ben’s advice, that the best thing we can do is (as Job’s friends did originally) to sit with them and weep, is a far better response, and frequently I’ve found that comforters are at risk of trying to process their own grief by sharing theological reflections with the bereaved person too soon. Nonetheless, if we teach one another a robust vision of God’s sovereignty and goodness, fuelled in part by the reflections of Job - who, I guess, ought to know - they will be far better prepared for bereavement when it comes, as it surely will. “You give and take away / you give and take away / My heart will choose to say / Lord, blessed be your name!”
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Andrew’s next book, If God Then What? Wondering Aloud about Truth, Origins and Redemption, will be released in April, published by IVP.
Luther on Breaking Bread
“In the first part I have overthrown the devil’s ungodly un-Christian priesthood and also proved that the mass may not be called a sacrifice. I have stopped up the mouths of the opposition so that they can bring up nothing in the way of counter-argument but their own dreams, customs, human wickedness and violence, all of which, as everyone knows, are worthless in divine matters and in establishing faith. In addition, I have consoled those whose consciences are weak and have instructed them so that they may know and recognize that there is no sacrifice in the New Testament other than the sacrifice of the cross (Hebrews 10:10) and the sacrifice of praise (Hebrews 13:15) which are mentioned in the Scriptures; so that no one has any cause to doubt that the mass is not a sacrifice.”
- Luther, The Misuse of the Mass (1521)
The whole idea that the mass was a sacrifice was nothing short of blasphemous for Luther and this was the prime focus of his thinking and writing on the subject up until 1524. The words of Christ at the Last Supper, he argued, contain nothing about the idea of sacrifice, rather they refer to a testament, that is, to the promise of forgiveness of sins through Christ’s death at Calvary. The very first martyrs of the Reformation, two Augustinian monks from Antwerp who were burnt at the stake on 1st July 1523 died, amongst other things for this belief: -
“The mass is not a sacrifice but a remembrance of the death of Christ. Therefore, it is not an offering for the dead or for the living.”
The other major focus of Luther’s thinking on breaking bread at this point was his insistence that it should be done in its entirety by all who partake. In his Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (August 1520) Luther argues passionately for the priesthood of all believers, citing 1 Peter 2:9 and Revelation 5:10 as his proof texts. Since all Christians are priests, Luther saw no theological justification for the Church’s practice at that time of denying wine to the laity. It must have been an amazing moment when the first evangelical communion services were held and ordinary lay persons drank from the cup!
Luther also rejected the Catholic Church’s doctrine of transubstantiation during this early phase of his ministry. In the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520) he dismissed it as a piece of medieval scholastic mumbo jumbo. Transubstantiation, the Catholic Church’s explanation of the doctrine of the “real presence”, the idea that the bread and wine literally becomes the body and blood of Christ when the priest says the words “Hoc est corpus meum” was, in fact, a relatively recent addition to the Roman Catholic theological armoury. It had been decided upon at the fourth Lateran Council of the Church in 1215 as a way of explaining the miracle of transubstantiation. A distinction was made (based on Aristotle’s philosophy) between “accidents” and “substance”. Thus, the bread and wine’s external properties or “accidents” remained bread and wine but the internal properties or substance became flesh and blood. Luther was ruthless in his dismantling of this late medieval nonsense.
However, it is important to remember that Luther did not at this, or any other stage in his ministry, ever reject the idea of the real presence – the idea that the bread and wine literally becomes the body and blood of Christ. He only ever went as far as rejecting the way the Roman Church sought to explain the miracle of what took place at communion (ie transubstantiation). To be fair, he went quite close to a spiritual or symbolic interpretation. In 1520 he wrote A Treatise on the New Testament, that is, the Mass in which he said:
“In all His promises… God usually gives a sign, for the greater assurance and strengthening of our faith. Thus he gave Noah the sign of the rainbow. To Abraham he gave circumcision as a sign. To Gideon he gave the rain on the ground and on the fleece. So we constantly find in the Scriptures many of these signs, given along with the promises. For in this way also worldly testaments are made; not only are the words written down, but seals and marks of notaries are affixed, so that it may always be binding and authentic. This is what Christ has done in this testament. He has affixed to the words a most powerful and most precious seal and sign: his own true flesh and blood under the bread and wine.”
Why then did Luther step back from the trajectory on which he was headed and ultimately reaffirm his commitment to the doctrine of the real presence? Why was he so vehemently opposed to the “symbolic” interpretation developed by Ulrich Zwingli in Zurich in 1525? The answer to these questions lies in the conflict that was about to break out between Luther and his colleague and erstwhile most enthusiastic supporter Andreas Carlstadt.
To be continued…
This is part 2 of a four part series on Communion.
Brian McLaren Nails It
Brian McLaren and I disagree on quite a few things - the authority of Scripture, hermeneutics, the atonement, hell, homosexuality, gender roles, and so on - but I heard an insightful one-liner of his the other day in which he absolutely nails it.
He was referring, as he often is, to the perils of fundamentalist Christianity, and he made the acerbic observation: “no group can exist without a devil.” His point was that fundamentalists (a catch-all category that in his understanding of it, I suspect, would include me) define their sense of self, identity and purpose in part by what they are against, not just what they are for. This sense of rallying people to fight a common foe, McLaren pointed out, is almost essential to any group - armies, businesses, charities, football teams - and it is a pity that the “foe” amongst Christians is so often other Christians. Spot on.
Ironically, of course, Brian McLaren also seems to need a devil, which in his case is probably conservative evangelicalism (as a brief perusal of his recent books would indicate). Needless to say, dialogue between groups or individuals who both regard each other as the enemy is tricky, and not always loving or illuminating. But one response to his remark, from Kevin DeYoung, made me laugh happily and reflect thoughtfully in equal measure. “No group can exist without a devil, McLaren says at one point. This is probably true. In which case I suggest the best devil is the devil.”
Good call.
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Andrew’s next book, If God Then What? Wondering Aloud about Truth, Origins and Redemption, will be released in April, published by IVP.
As Loved As The Son
John 1:18 describes God the Son as being eternally ‘in the bosom or lap of the Father’. One would never dare imagine it, but Jesus declares that his desire is that believers might be with him there (John 17:24). That, indeed, is why the Father sent him, that we who have rejected him might be brought back – and brought back, not merely as creatures, but as children, to enjoy the abounding love the Son has always known.
J. I. Packer once wrote:
If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God’s child, and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means he does not understand Christianity very well at all.1
Indeed, for when a person deliberately and confidently calls the Almighty ‘Father’, it shows they have grasped something beautiful and fundamental about who God is and to what they have been saved. And how that wins our hearts back to him! For the fact that God the Father is happy and even delights to share his love for his Son and thus be known as our Father reveals just how unfathomably gracious and kind he is.
And it really is with ungrudging delight that he gives us that privilege. When someone comes to faith, Christians often smile and say (with an allusion to Luke 15:10) that the angels will be rejoicing in heaven. But what Luke 15:10 actually says is that there is joy in heaven before the angels of God over one sinner who repents. Who is before the angels of God in heaven? God. It is God, first and foremost, who rejoices to lavish his love on those who have rejected him.
Knowing God as our Father not only wonderfully gladdens our view of him; it gives the deepest comfort and joy. The honour of it is stupefying. To be the child of some rich king would be nice; but to be the beloved of the emperor of the universe is beyond words. Clearly the salvation of this God is better even than forgiveness, and certainly more secure. Other gods might offer forgiveness, but this God welcomes and embraces us as his children, never to send us away. (For children do not get disowned for being naughty.) He does not offer some kind of ‘he loves me, he loves me not’ relationship whereby I have to try and keep myself in his favour by behaving impeccably. No, ‘to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God’ (John 1:12) – and so with security to enjoy his love forever.
Think of just who the Son is: he is the one eternally and utterly loved by his Father; the Father would not ever moderate or renounce his love for his Son – and the Son comes to share that, as the Father wanted. Because Jesus is not ashamed to call us brothers (Hebrews 2:11), his Father is not ashamed to be known as ours (Hebrews 11:16). Nothing could give greater confidence and delight in approaching the heavenly throne of grace. ‘How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!’ (1 John 3:1)
Now imagine a God who is not Father, Son and Spirit: never in its wildest dreams could it muster up such a salvation. If God was not a Father, he could never give us the right to be his children. If he did not enjoy eternal fellowship with his Son, one has to wonder if he has any fellowship to share with us, or if he even knows what fellowship looks like. If, for example, the Son was a creature and had not eternally been ‘in the bosom of the Father’, knowing him and being loved by him, what sort of relationship with the Father could he share with us? If the Son himself had never been close to the Father, how could he bring us close?
If God was a single person, salvation would look entirely different. He might allow us to live under his rule and protection, but at an infinite distance, approached, perhaps, through intermediaries. He might even offer forgiveness, but he would not offer closeness. And, since by definition he would not be eternally loving, would he deal with the price of sin himself and offer that forgiveness for free? Most unlikely. Distant hirelings we would remain, never to hear the Son’s golden words to his Father ‘you have loved them even as you have loved me’.
But this God comes to us himself, the Father rejoicing to share his love for his Son, sending him that in him we might be brought back into the Father’s bosom, there by the Spirit to call him ‘Abba’.
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This article is the third in a series of extracts from Mike’s forthcoming book, The Good God: Enjoying Father, Son and Spirit.
Follow @enjoyingtrinity
Footnotes
1 J. I. Packer, Knowing God (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1973), 224
Under the Spotlight
It was with great glee that Richard Dawkins this week revealed the results of a survey he had commissioned into ‘Census Christians’ – those who self-identify on the census and other polls as Christians, even though they may not attend church, read the Bible, pray or engage in any other ‘Christian’ activity from one year to the next.
He wanted to find proof that ‘Christian’ was just a label people chose more out of habit than because of any genuine faith, and the proof was there for the picking:
- Three quarters (74%) strongly agree or tend to agree that religion should not have special influence on public policy, with only one in eight (12%) thinking that it should.
- When asked why they think of themselves as Christian, the research found that fewer than three in ten (28%) say one of the reasons is that they believe in the teachings of Christianity.
- The majority (60%) have not read any part of the Bible, independently and from choice, for at least a year.
- Over a third (37%) have never or almost never prayed outside a church service, with a further 6% saying they pray independently and from choice less than once a year.
- Apart from special occasions such as weddings, funerals and baptisms, half (49%) had not attended a church service in the previous 12 months.1
Anticipating the inevitable criticism from ‘the religious community’, Dawkins went onto the Today programme on Tuesday defending his findings and, amongst other things, stating that ‘an astonishing number’ (65%) could not name the first book of the New Testament.
How the twitter-sphere crowed when, in response to a question from Giles Fraser, his interlocutor on the programme, he stumbled over the full title of the seminal work of Darwinism, most commonly known as The Origin of Species. If the ‘High Pope’ of Darwinism as Fraser dubbed him, couldn’t recite it fluently, presumably ‘an astonishing number’ of those who self-identify as ‘believing in evolution’ would be unable to do so either, the former Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral suggested. Doesn’t that put Dawkins’ secularism and evolutionism on as shaky a footing as he sought to claim for religion?
Of course, as both Dawkins and Fraser are well aware, the recitation of creeds or book titles doth not a Christian, nor an atheist, make. Attempts to teach Christianity by rote are doomed to failure, trivialising the power both of the words and of the God to whom they point.
What of the other pillars of Dawkins’ scepticism? First, he revelled in relating the fact that 50% of his respondents said they did not consider themselves to be religious.2 Surely, the professor thought, the minimum requirement for being a Christian is to be religious, isn’t it? Yet as Andrew noted recently, for some time it has been widely taught by evangelicals that we are not ‘religious’. Religion, it is said, is about rules and regulations, about man trying to get to God, whereas Christianity is substantively different; Christianity is about relationship. I go to church every Sunday, serve in a ministry team, regularly attend Life Group and would, along with a surprising 22% of the survey sample, agree with the statement ‘I have accepted Jesus as my Lord and Saviour’, but would I have answered ‘yes’ if asked if I was religious? Probably not.
Secondly, what about the relationship of faith to public life? Aside from the fact that the news coverage has tended to leave out the word ‘special’ from the findings (wanting to have an influence on public policy is very different from wanting to have a special influence on it), the use of the word ‘religion’ could have again skewed his results. Many people don’t want to see a blanket permission for all faiths to have a special (or strong, or significant) influence on public policy. If you are afraid of radical Islamism seeking to impose Sharia Law, then of course a question asking ‘Should religion have a special influence on public policy?’ will elicit a negative response.
This is not, however, to say that if all those respondents thought carefully about it, they would allow that Christians ought to be able to sway the decisions of elected leaders. I am quite sure that most of them would still say no, and quite rightly. Even the Christians working in government are not, for the most part, seeking a privileged place for their political views – not least because there are committed Christians on all sides of most of the policy debates on any given day. They are not seeking some kind of political trump card, as this question implies, but simply a seat at the table, at which their views are accorded as much respect as those of a secularist, a Muslim or anyone who has entered the debate without a clear understanding of how his worldview has influenced his position. Most Christians seeking influence in the public square do it for precisely the same reasons that most other people do – because they believe they know how to make this country a better place.
‘Ah’, Dawkins and co. would say, ‘but what about Bishops in the House of Lords and prayers before Council meetings?’ Again, neither of these issues is a Shibboleth guaranteed to identify the sheep from among the goats. I know I don’t speak for all Christians – or even all contributors to this blog – when I say I would want to retain prayer before Parliamentary sessions and Council meetings, and retain seats in the Lords for those who have no political affiliation, but have devoted their lives to the spiritual life of our nation. Our positions on these and many other issues may be diametrically opposed, but one thing on which we will all agree is that neither guarantees an entry in the Lamb’s Book of Life.
So am I complacent about the findings? Do I think Dawkins is wrong and we are in fact a robustly Christian country, it’s just people are answering census questions wrongly (or are being asked the wrong questions)? No. The findings don’t tell us Christianity is flourishing any more than they tell us it is floundering. What they do tell us is that people in the UK still, despite the social, sexual and scientific transformations of the last century, retain a sense that God exists and that belief in Him is a good thing.
They also tell us, though, that the connection between that sense and its implication for daily life is weakening, even among churchgoers (29% of respondents attended services once a month or more). It seems, then, that we have a window of opportunity in which to demonstrate the reason for our faith. We have Dawkins and his fellow ‘angry atheists’ to thank for this – without him, discussions about faith, its role in public life, and what it really means to be a Christian (or an adherent of another faith) would likely be conducted on a small scale, far from the public eye, but his militancy and determination to strip any suggestion of faith from the public square has, ironically, landed those discussions at the forefront of public discussion. There is scope and space to discuss apologetics and theology on prime time TV, on national radio and in every newspaper. There are debates and books and articles and plays seriously considering what it means to believe in God in the 21st Century, and the culture of toleration means every voice can be heard, but the opportunity will not last forever.
So keep reading this blog, not purely for your own intellectual stimulation, but in order that you may be able to answer the tough questions as they are put to you at church, at work, or down the pub. Familiarise yourself with apologetics resources until you are confident in your faith, your ability to articulate it, and your certainty of its reasonableness. And think about the place of faith – of Christianity – in public life. What role should we as Christians have in shaping public policy? What role should you play?
The window of opportunity will only be open for a short time. Let us use the time wisely, and “always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks [us] to give the reason for the hope that [we] have. But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against [our] good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander.”3
Footnotes
3 1 Peter 3:15-16
The Trouble With Trajectories
You have to be careful with trajectories. Just ask anyone who has to predict things: economists, politicians, weather forecasters. The general rule is, the fewer data points you have, the more cautious you have to be. So if you have loads of data, you can predict things fairly confidently, but if you try to draw trajectories off the back of two or three snapshots, you can end up making a real pig's ear of things. I used to be a management consultant, so I ought to know.
You have to be especially careful when there are underlying causes of a trend that may subsequently change. Imagine, for instance, that you are appraising a company that has been growing its turnover by 20% for five years. You might predict, on the basis of the existing trajectory, that it would continue to grow by 20% for the next five years. But if that growth had been caused by buying other similar companies in its sector, and the list of available similar companies was running out, you could make some very bad forecasts if you didn’t realise that. The progression, in that scenario, was not a trajectory at all, in the sense of a trend which could be extrapolated forwards, but a series of step changes in the company’s story which weren’t going to be repeated - so when those step changes stopped, so did the growth.
Biblical interpreters should take note. There are all sorts of theologians arguing that there are “trajectories” in Scripture - particularly with reference to ethical issues that contemporary culture finds unpalatable (slavery, gender roles, smacking children, divorce and remarriage). But frequently, these progressions are not trajectories at all, but the results of step changes in the biblical story which won’t be repeated. So when those step changes in the biblical story stop, as our view of the shape of God’s story indicates they have - there is no change in covenants/dispensations/‘acts in the play’ between Acts 28 and the 21st Century - then extrapolating the trend forwards becomes very tenuous.
Slavery often carries the load for this type of approach. In a trajectory hermeneutic, much is made of the gradual progression from slavery being permitted in the Torah, through to being challenged in the New Testament period, and then finally abolished in the nineteenth century. But as I’ve argued before, this very neat description is not really accurate. The New Testament (1) bans enslaving others, (2) encourages slaves to take their freedom if given the opportunity, (3) tells slaves who don’t get that opportunity to serve their master as if serving the Lord, (4) tells many Christian masters to treat their slaves in a way that subverts the institution of slavery altogether, (5) and tells one, Philemon, to manumit his former slave - and none of these instructions has been superseded by the passing of time. On the contrary, they all remain applicable to the modern, global church, just as they were when Paul first wrote them, even if those of us in the UK can often forget that.
I’ve written plenty on gender recently, and don’t really want to wade into the choppy waters of smacking children or divorce and remarriage at this point, so I won’t go through the equivalent process for each issue where there is said to be a “trajectory”. For now, it should be enough to raise awareness of the trouble with trajectories, and suggest that whether we operate within a covenantal, dispensational, or five act play framework, we should not see the changes between the first and twenty-first centuries as analogous to those between (say) the Mosaic and New covenants. Imagine if we did. First no adultery, then no looking lustfully, then…no looking at all?
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Andrew’s next book, If God Then What? Wondering Aloud about Truth, Origins and Redemption, will be released in April, published by IVP.
The Reason For God
What if ‘Puritan’ started to be a word you’d want to claim for yourself? What if it turned out that they were actually less cold and austere and more a generation of the warmest most gospel-hearted believers the church has known? The Puritans suffer from a bad image but that quickly fades when you begin to read some of their writings. I’ve been editing and modernising the language of some of the best of the Puritans’ work to make it freshly available for the church. This short series will give you a taste of Jeremiah Burroughs on Hosea, in a book Of Lovers and Whores.
“Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her.” (Hosea 2:14 ESV)
The first word is therefore. English comprehension alone teaches us to ask, “what is the therefore there for?” When the Puritan Jeremiah Burroughs preached on this verse in the early 17th Century, he found great treasures of grace. Known simply as ‘the gospel preacher’ Burroughs said, in Of Lovers and Whores1:
If God is pleased in the riches of free grace to make such an inference, let us take care that we do not cross the mind of the Spirit, by dwelling on the greatness of our sins, instead of the infiniteness of God’s grace.
God reasons this way: “you have followed your lovers, you have forgotten me (v13). Therefore I will allure you”.
An unbelieving heart would make this inference: “I have followed my lovers, I have followed after vanity and folly, and therefore God has rejected me, God will have no mercy upon me, I am undone, the gates of mercy are shut against me.”
O unbelieving heart, do not sin against the grace of God: he says: you have forgotten me, therefore I will allure and speak comfortably to you. Do not say, I have forgotten the Lord, and therefore the Lord will forever reject me. Such discouraging, despairing “therefores” are very grievous to the Spirit of God, which would have us all entertain good thoughts of God and not regard him as a hard master.
It is an excellent saying of Martin Luther that the whole Scriptures principally aim at this:
“that we should not doubt, but that we should hope and trust and believe that God is a merciful, bountiful, gracious and patient God to his people.”
John Bradford in one of his letters, expresses this:
“O Lord, sometimes I think I feel as if there were no difference between my heart and the wicked, a blind mind as they have, a stout, stubborn, rebellious spirit, a hard heart as they have; shall I therefore conclude that you are not my Father? No! I will rather reason otherwise; because I do believe you are my Father, I will come to you that you might enlighten this blind mind, that you might soften this hard heart, and sanctify this unclean spirit.”
This is good reasoning and worth of one who professes the gospel of Jesus Christ. Again, as the inference of the unbelieving heart is grievous to God’s Spirit, as it draws its “therefore” from the greatness of sin rather than from God’s mercy; so the profane heart taking its therefore from the greatness of God’s mercy, to the hardening of itself in sin, “treasures up for itself wrath against the day of wrath.”
Shall God make his therefore from our sin to his mercy, and we make our therefore from his mercy back again to our sins?
Puritan attention to detail turns out to reveal the beauty of the gospel of Jesus. The gospel hangs upon the right answer to the question, ‘what is the therefore there for?’ Non-Christian worldviews reason that God remains against those who sin, but the cross of Christ tells a different story. In the face of sin God moves out to offer us salvation. If He reasons this way it would be very strange to reason against Him. If as we run away from Him His heart moves out after us, why would we continue to run from Him?
Footnotes
1 Of Lovers and Whores, Jeremiah Burroughs (Edited by Dave Bish, 2012) available from: http://thebluefish.org/p/sibbesian.html
Was there Death Before the Fall?
Wherever I turn at the moment, I find myself being asked about death before the fall. Did it happen? If so, what do we make of God looking at everything he had made, and pronouncing it ‘very good’? Does that mean hurricanes and viruses were part of creation in the first place – and if so, will they be part of the new creation? What do we make of Paul’s affirmation that death entered the world through sin? Or that as in Adam, all died, so in Christ, all will be made alive? Or that creation has been subjected to bondage and decay, in hope that it will one day be liberated? Does death before the fall mean we lose the gospel?
If there was no death before the fall, though, we still have lots of questions. How do we understand the age of the earth? Or fossils of creatures that look to have been around a long time before humanity? Or that Alpha course favourite, dinosaurs? Are we saying they lived alongside people? Were they on the ark? Or what about hominids: are we denying their existence? Do we end up believing, or even stating, that sheep and puffins were created immortal, and only died because of Adam’s sin? Or that lions and dinosaurs were originally herbivores, but their mouths and digestive systems dramatically changed somewhere in the fifth millennium BC?
All in all, it’s a great example of the conversation between reason and Scripture that we posted on a few months back. And right at the outset, I have discovered how important it is to ask one question, to which many assume the answer is obvious, but in fact is anything but, and which has to be disentangled before progress can be made. The question is this: what is ‘death’, in this context?
It sounds silly, but it’s vitally important. Taking together conversations I’ve had, English dictionaries, and some knowledge of biblical languages, I’ve discovered it’s possible to give one of at least five different answers to that question:
1. ‘Death’ as the cessation of life of any living organism: plants, animals, bacteria, etc.
2. ‘Death’ as the cessation of life of any animal, whether measured by the heart stopping, brain death, or equivalent.
3. ‘Death’ as the termination of life by violence, involving the letting of blood. “For the life of every creature is its blood; its blood is its life” (Lev 17:14).
4. ‘Death’ as the cessation of life of a human being, whether measured by the heart stopping, brain death, or equivalent, and involving the separation of the body and the soul/spirit. “And as her soul was departing, for she was dying, she named him Ben-Oni” (Gen 35:18).
5. ‘Death’ as the spiritual separation of human beings from God, as a consequence of sin. “When the commandment came, sin came alive, and I died” (Rom 7:9).
Even this list, to be honest, is over-simple, because it misses out uses of the word that are figurative, whether for renouncing something completely (‘dying to self/sin/flesh’), eternal destruction (‘the second death’), or whatever. Within the context of Genesis 1-3, however, it is probably safe to say that one of these five meanings is always believed to be in view. But which?
If the answer is #1, then we can safely say: yes, there was death before the fall. In Genesis 1:29-30, animals and humans were given seeds, fruits, and every green plant for food – and that means at least some things were created to die before the fall. (I once got into a lengthy discussion with a Leadership Training class about whether plants actually ‘die’ when you eat them; whether or not you think grass ‘dies’ when it’s eaten, we can presumably get together on the fact that turnips do. And seeds. And apples.) So at one level, the answer is obvious. There was, Genesis tells us, death before the fall.
If we go to the other extreme and consider #5, we can say with equal confidence: no, there was no death before the fall. Human beings were created in the image of God with the possibility of eating from the tree of life – but we chose the knowledge of good and evil instead, and consequently we died. When God warned man about the tree, he said, “on the day that you eat of it, you will surely die” (Gen 2:17), and it’s obvious that God is talking about #5 here rather than #4, for the simple reason that Adam physically lived another 900 years after this. So understood spiritually and relationally, there was no death before the fall.
With #4, it seems almost certain that the answer is no, because the first physical death, that of Abel, does not take place until after the fall. The only reason I say ‘almost certainly’ rather than ‘certainly’ is that it is possible that God created other human beings apart from Adam and Eve, and it is possible that when Paul says things like ‘death entered the world through sin’ he is talking about spiritual death (#5) rather than physical death (#4), so it is possible that in between the creation of humans and the fall, another human being whom we are not told about physically died. But this would seem an extremely remote possibility, on the basis that the connection between physical and spiritual death is so strong in the scriptures (the writer of Genesis hammers home the impact of the curse in chapter 5, with his metronomically depressing ‘and he died … and he died … and he died.’) It seems all-but-certain that human beings, bearing the image of God, with the breath of life in their nostrils, and formed into living souls, did not physically die until after the fall.
For #2 and #3, many would argue that there was no death before the fall (with some arguing that animals died in sense #2, but not in sense #3). The chief arguments for this position are (a) Paul’s argument about death entering the world through sin (Rom 5:12-21; 1 Cor 15:21-22); (b) the statement that the world God created was ‘very good’ (Gen 1:31), which is said to be incompatible with animals dying and, in many cases, being killed by other animals; (c) the notable absence of a commission to animals to eat meat in Genesis 1; and (d) the shape of the biblical story, in which the new creation involves the restoration of the world as it was, and the liberation of all creation from corruption and slavery, not just human beings (Isa 65:17-25; Rom 8:18-25; etc). From my perspective, however, these arguments are inadequate. Briefly:
a. I cannot see any exegetical reason to support the idea that Paul was talking about the death of animals in Romans 5 or 1 Corinthians 15. His point was that separation from God (#5), and the physical death of human beings (#4), entered the world through sin.
b. Why should the death of animals be incompatible with creation being ‘very good’? Why should it be more incompatible with ‘very good’ than the death of plants? On what basis do we think it is acceptable for figs to die, but not lizards? Why turnips, but not termites, or terns, or Tyrannosaurs? God pronounces creation ‘very good’, but he doesn’t say it is ‘perfect’, or ‘complete’, or ‘without death of any kind’. If Jesus ate fish in his resurrection body (Luke 24:42-43), and if there’s going to be rich food full of marrow in the new creation (Is 25:8), why should we think eating meat can’t be ‘very good’? (Isaiah wasn’t talking about vegetable marrows, by the way).
c. This is probably the best argument of the four: no mention is made of a commission to eat meat in Genesis 1. God speaks to humans and allows them to eat all plants, and then says that the animals have also been given this gift by their creator (Gen 1:29-30). The problem is, God nowhere in Scripture specifically commissions animals to eat meat: yet there they all are, chasing the rabbits and harassing the wildebeest. God doesn’t give them that permission in Genesis 3, when the thorns and thistles are cursed, nor in Genesis 9, when he allows humans to eat meat. The fact is, we just don’t know when animals started eating each other – so I don’t think we can use it as an argument that animals never died before the fall.
d. I can’t wait for creation to be liberated from captivity to bondage and futility, as Paul says. I’ve written about it, I preach about it, and I anticipate it more and more as I go on. But I don’t think that involves a return to the world as it used to be. I think the trajectory of Scripture is onwards and upwards – the story of God’s presence starting in a garden, then gradually going out to fill the earth through people who bear his image and bring beauty and life wherever they go, first through Israel in the tabernacle and temple, then pivotally in Jesus, then through the church, and culminating in the redemption of the whole universe – rather than down and then back up again to where we started. In my view, and I got this idea (although not this phrase) from Greg Beale’s book The Temple and the Church’s Mission, the story of Scripture is shaped like a staircase, not a hammock.
So I’m not persuaded (yet!) that there’s a good biblical reason to say that animals didn’t die before the fall. From Genesis and the other texts which touch on the issue, plants did; humans didn’t; animals may have. And that means that, if I’m reading God’s world alongside God’s word and I discover an animal that looks like it lived a long time before humans ever sinned, I won’t freak out, or argue that the premises of geology are completely flawed. I’ll usually just pause, marvel at the God who created it, and look forward to the day when I’ll find out how he did it.
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Andrew’s next book, If God Then What? Wondering Aloud about Truth, Origins and Redemption, will be released in April, published by IVP.
Blessings and Woes in the Theology of Karl Barth
A number of times in posts on this blog the Swiss theologian Karl Barth has been referenced. Barth has been hugely influential in academic theology during the 20th Century, but has probably not been high on the reading list of many busy Newfrontiers pastors, so I thought it might be helpful to spell out some of the things we might learn (or wish to avoid) from his thought.
I would suggest that there are some elements in Barth’s theology that are of immense value. Here is one suggestion (that covers lots of areas):
A blessing: Moving away from the abstract God in the sky
I really do think that Barth provides a helpful movement away from talking about God in abstract and opaque terms. What I mean by this is that Christians often use quite overly philosophical language in relation to the doctrine of God. Terms like omniscience, omnipotence and impassibility are often used to describe God’s attributes. Barth does not say that there is anything wrong with these terms as such. He does suggest, though, that there are probably better and maybe more biblical places to start with regards to describing God. God, he suggests, should primarily be spoken about in the way that he has chosen to reveal himself. And he has revealed himself to us first and foremost through Jesus Christ. This is of course biblical and Jesus’ words ‘whoever has seen me has seen the Father’ (John 14:9 ESV) are within the mind-set of many Christians. But Barth is saying something really important and fairly radical. Rooting everything in God’s self-disclosure means that we are disciplined to think about God in response to his primary revelation to humanity. Indeed when we do try to move beyond this, Barth would say, we so often tend to just project a better version of ourselves into the sky. Hence the provocative quote from Barth: ‘You cannot speak about man by speaking about God in a loud voice.’1 Christ, as it were, is not man in a loud voice, but God in a human voice.
This moves us on to the next way that Barth wants to talk about God. Christology is evident throughout his Church Dogmatics, but Barth is also radical in placing the doctrine of the Trinity in the first volume of this great work. Much liberal theology of the 19th century had begun with trying to establish God’s existence based on rational description, or, alternatively, by talking about human experience before proceeding to talking about God. Conversely, Barth sought to ground theology in God’s own revelation. He is in part very much responsible for bringing the Doctrine of the Trinity back to the forefront of theological discussion in the 20th Century. One might say that Barth is not being all that radical here, but again I think he is right on it. Sometimes we still struggle to have a truly Trinitarian understanding of God and this often shows up in Church life. Take many modern worship songs, for example, where the Trinitarian dimension seems to be lacking. What I mean by this is that many of our songs refer to ‘God’ and maybe the work of Christ, but they don’t tend to identify God in truly Trinitarian language. (It’s encouraging that some within Newfrontiers are trying to amend this). Why is this important? Because, Barth would say, God is Trinity. We shouldn’t have any other understanding of God than as Trinity. In practice we might ask the following questions: Who are we referring to when we are speaking about God? Do we mean an abstract force in the sky? Do we simply mean the Father? If we don’t use Trinitarian language we can just make God sound like a cosmic power rather than the relational God of the Bible. Further, as is often the case in some of the public debates between Christians and the new atheists, the existence of God should not just be defended purely on the basis of rational argument. The God at the end of rational argument is often not the Trinity and therefore not worth rationally arguing for. This isn’t anti-reason, but rather places the emphasis on revelation, or as Anselm’s famous dictum would have it: Faith seeking understanding.
Having said all this, there are also areas of concern with Barth’s theology that should not be taken lightly:
A woe: Scripture and History
One concern that many evangelicals have with Barth is that he doesn’t hold scripture to be inerrant. Ultimately I am not convinced about Barth’s understanding of scripture. However, I do think that he is misread and that in not defending inerrancy he saying something quite important. God, he would argue, has primarily spoken his word to us in the Word; that is, in Jesus Christ. Scripture, Barth says, derives its authority not from something internal but from the fact that it testifies to this Christ. It is the primary witness to Christ and cannot be moved beyond in terms of our speech about God and as a rule of faith. But none of these things make it inerrant. It is a human word as well as a divine Word. Barth is not so much advocating a theological liberalism – far from it, but he is saying that God primarily reveals Himself through Himself. The biblical authors are primary witnesses to this revelation, but not the revelation itself. There are certain points here that we might agree with and Barth’s careful language, I think, avoids the pitfalls of certain types of fundamentalism.
One of the reasons why Barth abandons inerrancy is probably down to a negative influence of some of the forms of biblical criticism that were taking place at around his time. The Enlightenment had been very hard on scripture, and many liberal theologians questioned its ability to stand up to scientific and rational criticism. In response to this, contemporaries of Barth, like Rudolf Bultmann, had moved away from talking about the historical literalness of the New Testament texts and advocated a reading of scripture that made the meaning, rather than historical particularity, the important part. I would suggest that Barth bears the influence of Bultmann and isn’t as confident as he should be about the historical reliability of scripture; seeking instead to affirm its importance as the primary witness to God’s revelation. But the thing is, history matters; it’s not that Barth ignores this, but Christ’s context is so important to an understanding of him that it cannot be downplayed.
So here again I think that Barth does have something useful to say to us: take our preaching, do we seek to allow scripture to point towards Jesus Christ, or do we look in scripture for answers to riddles from our own experience, or the experience of the congregation? Barth would always encourage us to let scripture point toward Christ. But the woe would be to not make matters of faith and meaning so important that matters of Jesus’ actual history cease to be important. Jesus’ history is of immeasurable worth and has so much to say about our history.
Footnotes
1 Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man, Hodder, 1928 p.195)
A Thorn on the Rose
Ok, I'm breaking the rules on this one - one rule of this blog being that all material posted here should be box fresh and mint, rather than recycled. However, I thought we should make a nod to Valentines Day, and this post on the subject which appeared on my own blog a couple of years ago is a piece of writing I am fond of. It annoyed and pleased people in equal measure when I posted it before; I wonder what kind of response it will generate here...?
Valentine’s Day drives me nuts. It seems to me to be a day driven almost entirely by greed, guilt and fear – and those three make very bad drivers.
Greed, because the price of flowers (especially roses) is hugely inflated for the day, and restaurants also cash in on the occasion by putting on ridiculous ‘romantic’ menus, again at inflated prices.
Guilt, because the only reason that men (and it is men – whatever happened to equality?!) feel browbeaten into paying said exorbitant prices for roses and dinners is guilt if they don’t, which means that greed is rewarded.
Fear, because it is fear that produces guilt. Fear that one’s partner will cut up in a seriously unpleasant manner should she not be rosed and dined sufficiently, or that one will not be regarded as sufficiently romantic or will be regarded as cheap (and quite possibly be denied sex as a result). And many men do feel guilty that really they do not love their partners as faithfully and fully as they should. So fear feeds guilt feeds greed and we get suckered by the whole nonsense.
It is nonsense you know.
Valentine’s Day is completely arbitrary, and any pressure to observe it is purely external. Real days of significance such as a birthday or wedding anniversary are one thing, but an externally imposed, arbitrary date is quite another.
Fortunately Mrs Hosier feels as strongly about this as I do, so we ignore Valentine’s Day for the commercial imposition that it is.
I would urge all other sane couples to do the same.
Men, rise up and claim your manhood! There is something rather pathetic about the sight of guilty, fearful men emptying their wallets at a florists to buy overpriced roses in order to appease their otherwise unappeasable better half. Men, if you are in Christ, you are free and don’t need to stoop to these pitiable depths! You will not love your wife more by bowing to the pressures of social convention.
Women, rise up and claim your femininity! You don’t need to exert control over your man by imposing guilt and fear on him. This only unmans him and makes him less of a man for you to respect. As a free daughter of Christ you don’t need to conform to societal pressures and pretend that there is something special about this date over any other.
Man, buy your woman flowers and take her for dinner because you love her, and as an imitator of Christ are to lay down your life for her. Do it for her birthday, do it for your anniversary, do it any day of the week you like, but don’t do it because commercial interests tell you you must.
Woman, make passionate love to your man, because you respect him and as an imitator of the Church you are to serve him and bring him pleasure. Don’t manipulate him or impose guilt on him over whether or not he buys that sadly wilting rose that the hustler in the restaurant tries to sell him.
The problem with Valentine’s Day is that it makes relationship all about the day, when really our focus should be about making all the days about relationship. For those of us who believe in God’s involvement in everything, and the supremacy of Christ in all things, our relationships should reflect this. This means that those who are married will seek to live out their married lives in reflection of the everything of Christ’s love for his church. Each and every day is an opportunity for husband to love his wife and wife to respect her husband. Every day is an opportunity for sacrifice, and purity. Every day is a day to celebrate.
This will mean that there will be moments of particular celebration. Just as the Church of Jesus Christ lives every moment in the grace of the cross but remembers this most particularly when we break bread and drink wine together, so the married couple should live each day in the grace of their wedding vows but remember these most particularly on their wedding anniversary. For the church everything is shaped by the cross, which is why we must proclaim His death at the communion table. For the married couple everything is shaped by their wedding vows, which is why they must celebrate their wedding anniversary.
When we see the all encompassing significance of our relationships, the greed and guilt and fear of Valentine’s Day is revealed as rather tawdry.
Of course, true love and real relationship only come at a cost, and this is seen most clearly at the cross. At the cross Jesus paid the ultimate cost for the bride he loves, in order to unite in relationship with her for ever.
It was at the cross that Jesus destroyed greed, because his was an entirely selfless act. It was at the cross that Jesus destroyed guilt by taking all the penalty for our sin and failure on to himself. It was at the cross that Jesus destroyed fear because by defeating our greatest enemy, the enemy of death, he has liberated us to walk in freedom before him.
And it is that which makes every day a day of love and relationship for the Christian, whether or not we are ‘in a relationship’. And it is why I feel absolutely no guilt or fear about failing to buy a Valentine’s Card for my wife – and the fact that she feels just the same makes me love her all the more!
What Can We Learn From The Death Of Whitney Houston?
Quite a few things, says Trevin Wax, in a thought-provoking piece.
The one which struck me the most was Whitney Houston’s own comment, when asked by Diane Sawyer in 2002 which drug was her “biggest devil”. She replied:
That would be me. It’s my deciding. It’s my heart. It’s what I want and what I don’t want. Nobody makes me do anything I don’t want to do. It’s my decision. The biggest devil is me.
A tragic yet beautiful description of the problem of evil. She was right, of course.
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Andrew’s next book, If God Then What? Wondering Aloud about Truth, Origins and Redemption, will be released in April, published by IVP.
Giles Fraser, Mr Justice Ouseley and Christus Vicarious
Last week I spent a couple of days with the Newfrontiers Theology Forum – a team of a dozen or so who are recognized as having some kind of teaching ministry within Newfrontiers. We get together once a year to review the papers that then appear on this website, and we are also responsible for this blog. Our first day together was spent reviewing a paper on hell – a challenging and sobering experience – while the second paper was concerned with how we can best help believers to be faithful disciples whatever their life and work context.
As we were coming to the end of our deliberations I happened to check the BBC news website and saw that the High Court, under Mr Justice Ouseley, had supported a case brought by the National Secular Society and ruled prayers being said before sessions of Bideford Council to be unlawful. This was an interesting intersection: a discussion about Christians and culture, whether the Church had been culpable in not preventing the passing of the Abortion Act in 1967, the enduring example of Wilberforce, and so on, and then the stark fact of prayer being declared unlawful in a setting where it has been routine for the past 500 years. The BBC’s religious affairs correspondent made the pithy observation that, “The tide has been flowing pretty firmly against Christianity in public life.”
A couple of weeks earlier, on Radio 4’s Thought for the Day, that staple of middle-class, middle-England, Giles Fraser, recently ‘retired’ canon of St Paul’s Cathedral launched into an attack on substitutionary atonement. Fraser resigned from his post following the furore over the Occupy movement occupying St Paul’s, and is now occupying himself by writing comment pieces for The Guardian. (About which I refrain from comment.) The context for Fraser’s critique of orthodox doctrine was comments made by David Lammy MP that the riots of last summer might not have happened had parents not been afraid of administering smacks (that’s ‘spanks’ Stateside) to their offspring.
Fraser’s objection to smacking is grounded in his own experience,
I was beaten a lot as a child - not by my parents, I hasten to add - but at the boarding school I went to from the age of 8. Pretty much all I remember about that school was the beatings: with the cane and the slipper and the table-tennis bat. I remember the blood in my underpants. I remember seething with injustice when my little brother got the same treatment a few years later.
This experience of what I would describe as abuse rather than smacking has – understandably – led Fraser to the place where he believes all physical chastisement to be unacceptable. It has also coloured his theology, so that he sees penal substitution as twisting “a religion of compassion and forgiveness into one that’s dangerously accommodating of violence.”
There are a number of non sequiturs in the Reverend Doctor’s argument, but I’m not particularly interested in defending the practice of smacking here. Rather, what interests me is the connections between the theological grid Giles Fraser represents, the High Court decision about Bideford Council, and the cultural influence of Christians.
How the views and values of any particular group gains cultural ascendancy is a matter of considerable academic study and disagreement, and the reality is that even when popular opinion is very strong in a certain direction, a determined Government with a big enough majority in the House of Commons can decide what it likes. We saw striking examples of this a few years ago when a million people took to the streets of London in protest at the Governments plans to ban hunting with dogs, and then a few months later when another million protested about the war in Iraq. Both protests were ineffective.
One of the passages of scripture we considered at the Theology Forum was 1 Peter 2. In this passage Peter instructs Christians to live such good lives that they “silence the ignorance of foolish people.” The context here (and in Paul’s similar instructions in Romans 13) seems to be that the Empire anticipated trouble from this strange new sect, but the believers were instead to prove themselves as model citizens. What is interesting is the way in which Peter then links this to the Cross. Yes, we are to follow the example of Christ suffering (1 Peter 2:21), but we are also to see how he was judged justly, as he took our place, bearing our sins in order “that we might die to sin and live to righteousness” (v24). Without Christ’s substitutionary atonement, following his sacrificial example would be hollow, as it would lead us merely down the path to moralism, and not to salvation.
So, the tide is flowing firmly against Christianity in public life? Yes it is, but, in a sense, so what. If a million of us took to the streets to protest this shift would it make any difference? Who knows. What we do know is that we are to live as faithful citizens now, even when (especially when!) that means we feel pressure or persecution for our beliefs. The reason we can know compassion and forgiveness is because extreme violence has been meted out against sin, in the body of Christ on the cross. Se we can be confident in the belief that Christus vicarious means the certainty of Christus victor. Or, as Andrew recently expressed it, we can go to bed and sleep “the sleep of the saved and thankful.”
Trinitarian Musings 2: Being Single in Heaven
Single god, non-smoker, seeks attractive creation with good sense of humour…
Imagine for a moment that you are God. I’m sure you’ve done it before. Now think: would you in your divine wisdom and power ever want to create a universe, and if so, why? Because you feel lonely and want some friends? Because you like being pampered and want some servants? It is one of the profoundest questions to ask: if there is a God, why is there anything else? Why the universe? Why us? Why might God decide to have a creation?
One of the earliest attempts at an answer can be seen in ancient Babylon’s creation myth, the Enuma Elish. There, the god Marduk puts it bluntly: he will create mankind so that the gods can have slaves. That way the gods can sit back and live off the labour of their human workforce. Now Marduk is more plain-speaking than most other gods, but whatever the religion, most gods since have tended to like his approach. And who can blame them? His reasoning is profoundly attractive. If you are a god.
In fact, the reason most gods follow Marduk’s lead is not just a matter of personal preference. Imagine a god who is the origin and cause of everything else. He brought everyone and everything into being. Now before he caused anything else to exist, this god was all alone. He had not made anyone yet. Solitary for eternity, then. And so, for eternity this solitary god can have had nobody and nothing to love. Love for others is clearly not his heartbeat. Of course he would probably love himself, but such love we tend to think of as selfish and not truly loving. By his very nature, therefore, this lonely, single god must be fundamentally inward-looking and not outgoingly loving. Essentially, he is all about private self-gratification. That, therefore, is the only reason why he would create.
There is a fascinating tension at just this point in Islam. Traditionally, Allah is said to have ninety-nine names, titles which describe him as he is in himself in eternity. One of them is ‘The Loving’. But how could Allah be loving in eternity? Before he created there was nothing else in existence that he could love (and the title does not refer to self-centred love but love for others). The only option is that Allah eternally loves his creation. But that in itself raises an enormous problem: if Allah needs his creation to be who he is in himself (‘loving’), then Allah is dependent on his own creation, and one of the cardinal beliefs of Islam is that Allah is dependent on nothing.
Therein lies the problem: how can a solitary God be eternally and essentially loving when love involves loving another? In the fourth century BC, the Athenian philosopher Aristotle wrestled with a very similar question: how can God be eternally and essentially good when goodness involves being good to another? His answer was that God is, eternally, the uncaused cause. That is who God is. Therefore he must eternally cause the creation to exist, meaning that the universe is eternal. This way God can be truly and eternally good, for the universe eternally exists alongside him and eternally he gives his goodness to it. In other words, God is eternally self-giving and good because he is eternally self-giving and good to the universe. It was, as always with Aristotle, ingenious. However, once again it means that for God to be himself, he needs the world. He is, essentially, dependent on it to be who he is. And, even though technically ‘good’, Aristotle’s god is hardly kind or loving. He does not freely choose to create a world that he might bless; it is more that the universe just oozes out of him.
Such are the problems with non-triune gods and creation. Single-person gods, having spent eternity alone, are inevitably self-centred beings, and so it becomes hard to see why they would ever cause anything else to exist. Wouldn’t the existence of a universe be an irritating distraction for the god whose greatest pleasure is looking in a mirror? Creating just looks like a deeply unnatural thing for such a god to do. And if such gods do create, they always seem to do so out of an essential neediness or desire to use what they create merely for their own self-gratification.
Everything changes when it comes to the Father, Son and Spirit. Here is a God who is not essentially lonely, but who has been loving for all eternity as the Father has loved the Son in the Spirit. Loving others is not a strange or novel thing for this God at all; it is at the root of who he is.
Think of God the Father: he is, by his very nature, life-giving. He is a father. One has to wonder if a barren god, who is not a father, is capable of giving life and so birthing a creation. But one can have no such doubts with the Father: for eternity he has been fruitful, potent, vitalising. For such a God (and only for such a God) it seems very natural and entirely unsurprising that he should bring about more life and so create.
This article is the first in a series of extracts from Mike’s forthcoming book, The Good God: Enjoying Father, Son and Spirit
Should We Regret?
I have often been asked what I learnt from my rebellious years in my late teens and early twenties by Christians and non-Christians alike. It often starts a very interesting conversation.
There is a perspective on my rebellious years from both Christians and non-Christians that does not sit comfortably with me. Let me unpack this a little. Since I have now come back to the Lord and decided that I want to serve Him with my life, both Christian and non-Christian friends say ‘you should not regret’. This is stated, of course, after I have said that I do indeed regret some of the things that I did. The main reasons that both camps say I should not regret are as follows. The first two points are the result of predominant Western morally-liberal individualism. The other two are more common in Christian circles, but I believe have been affected in application by the first two:
1. I would not be who I am today if I didn’t ‘go through’ those things. (Christians and non-Christians)
2. I have learnt things I wouldn’t have done otherwise. (Christians and non-Christians)
3. I can now be a great witness to those in a similar position. (Christians)
4. Jesus has taken my shame, and therefore I should feel as if I am spotless like Christ. (Christians)
There are elements of truth in many of these. The problem is that they are often stated as absolutes, implying that one should not regret time away from the Lord. Often in these conversations 2 Corinthians 7:10 is brought to the table: “Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret”. But the question about this verse is to do with definitions. If one believes that regret means mournful sorrow over previous actions that are still felt to affect the self image then, yes, I agree that that type of regret is not helpful nor an appropriate reaction to the truth. But if regret means thinking that if one could one would change the events of the past, but also understanding that God has forgiven the past, then I believe this type of regret is healthy.
Some have thought this understanding of ‘appropriate regret’ in relation to 2 Cor. 7 is bad theology. But the question one needs to ask is: What is the alternative? The answer that has been given to this question is that “God works all things for the good of those that love Him”, which is of course true. But should Romans 8 be used as justification that sin somehow ‘makes me who I am today’, and therefore should not be regretted? Because that is the alternative mentioned above; it means thinking of sin as somehow a part of one, as defining. Sin never develops people, though, rather God heals as a result of it, and can develop you. The sin itself should not be seen as doing this. As James 4:8-10 states:
Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.
Therefore I will regret the sin, but love the God who heals and teaches me.
Let me explain this in another way. You are married. But you decide to be unfaithful and separate for a few years. Later you come back to your spouse and say that you are very sorry and that you would like to work on the marriage again. Your spouse forgives you totally and accepts you back. Does that acceptance mean you think ‘because I am forgiven, I will not regret what I did because it has made the relationship what it is today’? I would be shocked if that were the case. I rather think, although the marriage may be now stronger by the grace of God, the guilty party would regret the pain that they caused the other. But they would do so in the knowledge that their spouse had completely forgiven them. They would regret, but from a position of security in the spouse’s love and forgiveness.
The purpose of this article is to articulate my thoughts on the subject as a result of numerous conversations. I’d be interested to get anyone’s thoughts on the issue.
Winston Churchill And Christus Victor
I wonder whether one reason that Christus Victor is an underappreciated aspect of the gospel is the difficulty we face in explaining the "now and not yet" of Jesus' victory.
Within evangelicalism generally, forensic pictures of the atonement, like penal substitution, the great exchange and justification by faith alone, are more popular when explaining the basics of the gospel than the metaphors of victory or redemption; it is hard to imagine ransom or conquest terminology popping up in the “bridge to life” diagram or the “four spiritual laws”, and I wouldn’t want to speculate how many Alpha courses have been completed without anyone mentioning either of them. But I suspect a major reason for that is the difficulty of explaining them simply. With the more forensic metaphors, it is relatively straightforward: God punishes Jesus instead of you; Jesus takes your sin and you take his righteousness; God the judge sentences Jesus and lets you go free. (Whether these constitute accurate simplifications will have to be a subject for another day). An equivalent summary statement for Christus Victor is more tricky, though, because the now and not yet is so readily apparent to anybody. So you say, “Jesus conquered sin and death”, and someone replies, “Really? So why do people, including Christians, still sin and still die?” Or, more likely, “but my granny was a Christian, and she died, and my neighbour is a Christian, and he’s one of the most unpleasant people I know.” Fair enough.
The now and not yet of salvation is an integral part of all the models of the atonement, of course, not just victory. Though I’ve never heard him use this terminology, I would say that one of the great strengths of Tom Wright’s view of justification - and, I suspect, one of the reasons that Tom Schreiner has more in common with it than you might have thought - is the way it makes sense of justification as inaugurated eschatology, as a now and not yet reality. (Translation: justification refers to a future verdict of “in the right” which God pronounces over all who have been righteous - that’s the “not yet” - but it is brought into the present on the basis of faith, so those who believe can know the result of that verdict in advance, which is the “now”). But the “not yet” of Christ’s victory is much more obvious than the not yet of justification, for the simple reason that you can’t see a verdict, but you can see death. So if Christus Victor is to reclaim its rightful seat at the table of atonement metaphors, a clear way of explaining this tension is desperately needed.
Several good metaphors for inaugurated eschatology have come from the Second World War, of which the D-day one (D-day represents Calvary and VE-day represents the return of Jesus) is the best known. But the problem with the D-day one is that those who were there, it seems, had no certainty at all that their final victory was assured; for our grandfathers, on the cliffs of Normandy at sunset on 6 June, victory may have seemed more likely, but they weren’t singing “When I survey the wondrous beach on which the hopes of Germ’ny died” or anything. What is needed is a picture of the now and not yet that has a bit more celebration in the now, and a bit more confidence in the not yet.
So I was thrilled to discover, sitting in Mick Taylor’s hallway, the words of Winston Churchill when he heard about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. Here’s what he wrote:
I do not pretend to have measured accurately the martial might of Japan, but now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! ...We had won the war. England would live; Britain would live; the Commonwealth of Nations and the Empire would live. How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end no man could tell nor did I at this moment care. Once again in our long Island history we should emerge, however mauled and mutilated, safe and victorious. We should not be wiped out ... As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force ... No doubt it would take a long time. I expected terrible forfeits in the East; but all this would be merely a passing phase. United we could subdue everybody else in the world. Many disasters, immeasurable cost and tribulation lay ahead, but there was no more doubt about the end ... Being saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful. (The Second World War, 3:477)
Saturated with emotion, satiated with sensation; facing temporary tribulation, but utterly certain of final victory; sleeping the sleep of the saved and thankful. Me too.
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Andrew’s next book, If God Then What? Wondering Aloud about Truth, Origins and Redemption, will be released in April, published by IVP.
Breaking Bread
One of the greatest changes wrought by the Reformation was the destruction of the sacramental system of the Roman Catholic Church. Martin Luther’s Babylonian Captivity of the Church (September 1520) really was theological dynamite!
When Luther stood before Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, at the Diet of Worms in April 1521 there were some things that could be forgiven him in the minds of more liberal Catholics. Jean Glapion, Charles’ confessor-priest was trying to cobble together a compromise right up to the eleventh hour. If Luther had limited himself to criticism of indulgences or even to justification by faith alone then compromise would have been possible. This is surprising to many since it was justification by faith alone that was at the very heart of the new evangelical faith. However, Luther’s teaching on the subject could not be deemed “heretical” in the eyes of the Church since the Church had never established a definitive viewpoint on this subject. Only in response to Luther did the Roman Church at the Council of Trent (1547) decree that man is saved by faith and by works. In the 1520s and 30s it was perfectly possible for a loyal son of the Catholic Church such as Cardinal Gasparo Contarini to hold a virtually identical justification theology to Luther.
It was Luther’s sacramental theology that placed him beyond the pale in the eyes of virtually all Catholics. In the Babylonian Captivity, Luther redefined what a sacrament was and having done so he consequently reduced their number from 7 to 2. A sacrament, in Luther’s eyes, was not a ceremony of the Church that conveyed grace, but a ceremony given specifically by Christ to the Church which involved the use of physical and material things to convey spiritual truths. Marriage, extreme unction, confirmation and holy orders were rejected out of hand as sacraments. Penance was re-defined and massively scaled down in its importance. In effect, this left Luther and his supporters with two sacraments – baptism and breaking bread.
Luther’s critique of the Mass (the Catholic Church’s word for the service where Christ’s death on the cross was celebrated through bread and wine) was devastating. He rejected the Church’s teaching that the Mass was both a “good work” and a sacrifice. He insisted that communion should be in two “kinds” for all who partake, that is, that both the bread and the wine be given to the “laity”. Normal practice at this time was to give only the bread to the lay persons and only the “priest” would drink the wine. Finally, Luther rejected the doctrine of transubstantiation, the Church’s doctrine to explain philosophically the miracle of bread and wine becoming the body and blood of Christ.
Within a year or two of the writing of the Babylonian Captivity, other evangelical theologians were going still further than Luther, rejecting the whole idea of the doctrine of the “real presence” (the idea that the bread and wine becoming the body and blood of Christ). Luther had rejected transubstantiation but not the idea of a literal interpretation of Jesus’ words “This is My body”. This was to lead to a fundamental division in the newly formed Protestant Churches. By 1527 Luther was writing a pamphlet aimed at Ulrich Zwingli the leader of the evangelical Church in Zurich entitled Against the Fanatics (1527) in which he said he would “Rather drink pure blood with the Pope than mere wine with the fanatics”.
Over the next few weeks I am planning to take another look at this deeply divisive and controversial subject which was to prove so damaging to the unity of the evangelical movement. What was Luther really trying to say? Why was he so intransigent in his insistence on the real presence? How did Zwingli arrive at his “memorial” viewpoint? We should not think for a moment that all this is part of some merely arcane historical debate. Nearly 500 years later our churches are still dogged by this theological controversy. We are so keen to distance ourselves from the Roman position that we unthinkingly adopt a Zwinglian position which robs breaking bread of much of its power and significance. Hence, if we break bread at all, many of us do so formulaically or clumsily. As is so often the case, we shall find that it is John Calvin who gives us some penetrating insightful perspectives that ought to transform how we break bread together.
This is part 1 of a four part series on Communion.
I Love Tim Keller But I Don’t Hate Religion
Religion gets a bad press these days, and not just from secular people. Everywhere you turn, there seem to be Christians lining up to denounce religious people, and to explain why Christianity isn't a religion at all. Jesus wasn't religious, we're told. The problem with the Pharisees was that they were too religious. A couple of weeks ago, a YouTube video went viral which began with the words, "what if I told you Jesus came to abolish religion?" In many circles, the word "religion" is increasingly being used interchangeably with "legalism", and assumed to be referring to something that is "dead". And so on.
Well, the push back is on. Kevin DeYoung, at the Gospel Coalition, wrote a very insightful response to Jeff Bethke (the young guy who made the video), and then Jeff replied in a wonderfully humble way, admitting that aspects of his poem were not well-expressed, giving a tremendous example of how to handle correction, and living out the exact ethics his video was designed to encourage. The essence of Kevin’s critique was that Jesus was not really anti-religion - he went to synagogue, observed Jewish festivals, founded the church, inaugurated sacraments, preached a message and summoned people to follow him, urged the discipleship, teaching and baptism of his followers, and so on - and that religion is a neutral word in Scripture, which can have positive or negative connotations depending on the context. It’s easy to see why people might want Jesus to hate religion (it puts clear blue water between him and something our culture finds tedious or judgmental, and it paints Jesus as the ever-fashionable anti-establishment radical), but unless we are going to distort the meaning of the word altogether, so that it basically means “self-righteousness” or “justification by works”, then it’s hard to argue from Scripture that he did.
The puzzle for me, then - given how much I respect him as a preacher, writer and thinker - is why Tim Keller says this sort of thing so much. I was reading a chapter of King’s Cross this morning, and in just a handful of pages encountered the following statements:
Jesus declares not that he has come to reform religion but that he’s here to end religion and replace it with himself.
[The Jewish leaders] are tribal, judgmental, and self-obsessed instead of caring about the man. Why? Religion.
One paradigm is religion, which - as we observed before - is fundamentally advice.
In religion the purpose of obeying the law is to assure you that you’re all right with God.
[Christianity is] no kind of religion at all.
That’s just a few examples; there are many more. In comparison with Tim Keller, to be honest, Jeff Bethke has been low-balling it.
I say this is a puzzle for two reasons. Firstly, it seems to get Jesus wrong, as I noted just now. Jesus engaged in Jewish religious observances, initiated Christian ones, and his brother spoke highly of practices common to both; “religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world” (James 1:27). For James, and Jesus, it is not religion that causes tribalism, judgmentalism and self-obsession, but the far more basic sin of pride. Keller knows all this, of course, but this leads me to wonder why he uses this word, “religion”, when it isn’t really what he means (he could have replaced it with the words “self-righteousness” or “legalism” in the above quotations and it would have expressed his meaning far better). In fact, given that Keller is likely to be far more influential amongst pastors and leaders than Jeff Bethke, you might expect more reviews of Keller’s book, and his (generally outstanding) preaching ministry, to have pointed this out.
Secondly, it also seems to get Judaism wrong. You don’t have to be a signed up member of the New Perspective to have concerns about the statement, “in religion the purpose of obeying the law is to assure you that you’re all right with God.” Again, unless religion is defined as “self-righteousness” - which is not how either the Bible or the Dictionary defines it - this is simply not true. For Moses, David, Isaiah, Daniel and many others, the purpose of obeying the law and keeping other religious observances was not to assure themselves that they were right with God (and they certainly didn’t see the law as “fundamentally advice”), but to live faithfully in response to the covenant that God himself had made with them, by grace. When the Psalmist says, “Oh, how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day” (Psalm 119:97), he is not trying to assure himself that he is in the right before God; he is delighting in knowing God’s will, and living according to it out of gratitude and joy. So unless we are to define religion in such a way as to exclude both ancient Judaism and Christianity, which would seem both counterintuitive and rather bizarre, there are significant difficulties with Keller’s description of “religion” as the problem, borne out of introspective self-righteousness and leading to parochialism, pride and navel-gazing. At best, this Jesus vs Religion approach reinforces a common distortion of Judaism of the type Moore and Sanders rightly critiqued; at worst, it can (and, in my experience, frequently does) lead to a new sort of Pharisaism, whereby individuals and churches thank God that they are not like those religious people over there, not to mention a disdain for works in general, and a muddled message to unbelievers (“this lot gather weekly, worship, catechise, use sacraments, and call themselves a church, but they say Christianity’s not a religion? It sure looks like one.”)
I am a big fan of Tim Keller. I’ve read his books, been to his church, downloaded his sermons, blogged and done seminars on his way of doing apologetics, and I’m writing this post while my Leadership Training students study his church growth paper all around me. As a man and as a minister, I give him a huge thumbs up. But I think that an uncritical acceptance of what he says about Jesus, the law and religion risks causing people to misunderstand all three. As Jeff Bethke might otherwise have said, I love Tim Keller, but I don’t hate religion.
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Andrew’s next book, If God Then What? Wondering Aloud about Truth, Origins and Redemption, will be released in April, published by IVP.
Show Me!
I’ve been enjoying Andrew’s series on the comp/egal debate, and was pleased that in his most recent post he ended up pretty much where I told him he should when he rang me for advice last summer!
Andrew is doing a great job of unpicking some of the arguments, and lancing some of the boils that tend to surround this issue, and I hope he begins to make an impact beyond the current readership of this blog. However, what Andrew has been writing gets me thinking not so much about the nuances of exegesis of those scriptures concerning the roles of men and women, but about ecclesiology more generally.
A couple of weeks back I read Stephen King’s On Writing (HT: Justin Taylor) in which King makes the point that for a story to be effective readers need to be shown it, not just told it. And this is where ecclesiology comes in. We do need theological tellings – the setting out of arguments and the fruit of diligent exegetical labour – but this will only get us so far. Crucially, we also need to be shown how something works out; and in the case under consideration, that means we need churches where a healthy and holy and biblical expression of men and women being and doing what they are called to be and do is demonstrated.
My contention would be that often the debate over the roles of men and women has raged so fierce because church life has been so poor. By definition, almost, my observation would be that this debate hardly features in those churches which are flourishing and focussed in their mission and purpose – even if the way their leadership is structured shows considerable diversity.
So the task must be (and I know Andrew would agree with this as he serves in a great church) to build great churches – where saints are being edified and sinners are coming under the sound of the gospel and Jesus is being worshipped, and where men and women, both, are experiencing the amazing grace of God.
Trinitarian Musings 1: Our Loving Father
The most foundational thing in God is not some abstract quality, but the fact that he is Father.
Again and again, the Scriptures equate the terms ‘God’ and ‘Father’: in the Exodus, the Lord calls Israel ‘my firstborn son’ (Exodus 4:22; see also Isaiah 1:2; Jeremiah 31:9; Hosea 11:1); he carries his people ‘as a father carries his son’ (Deuteronomy 1:31), disciplines them ‘as a man disciplines his son’ (Deuteronomy 8:5); he calls to them, saying:
As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him (Psalm 103:13)
And
How gladly would I treat you like sons and give you a desirable land, the most beautiful inheritance of any nation. I thought you would call me ‘Father’ and not turn away from following me. (Jeremiah 3:19; see also Jeremiah 3:4; Deuteronomy 32:6; Malachi 1:6)
Isaiah thus prays ‘you are our Father… you, O LORD, are our Father’ (Isaiah 63:16; see also Isaiah 64:8); and a popular Old Testament name was ‘Abijah’ (‘The LORD is my father’). Then Jesus repeatedly refers to God as ‘the Father’ and directs prayer to ‘Our Father’; he tells his disciples he will return ‘to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’ (John 20:17); Paul and Peter refer to ‘the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ’ (Romans 15:6; 1 Peter 1:3); Paul writes of ‘one God, the Father’ (1 Corinthians 8:6), of ‘God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ’ (1 Corinthians 1:3); Hebrews counsels ‘God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father?’ (Hebrews 12:7 ).
Since God is, before all things, a Father, and not primarily Creator or Ruler, all his ways are beautifully fatherly. It is not that this God ‘does’ being Father as a day-job, only to kick back in the evenings as plain old ‘God’. It is not that he has a nice blob of fatherly icing on top. He is Father. All the way down. Thus all that he does he does as Father. That is who he is. He creates as a Father and he rules as a Father; and that means the way he rules over creation is most unlike the way any other God would rule over creation. The French Reformer, John Calvin, appreciating this deeply, once wrote:
we ought in the very order of things [in creation] diligently to contemplate God’s fatherly love… [for as] a foreseeing and diligent father of the family he shows his wonderful goodness toward us… To conclude once for all, whenever we call God the Creator of heaven and earth, let us at the same time bear in mind that… we are indeed his children, whom he has received into his faithful protection to nourish and educate… So, invited by the great sweetness of his beneficence and goodness, let us study to love and serve him with all our heart.1
It was a profound observation, for it is only when we see that God rules his creation as a kind and loving Father that we will be moved to delight in his providence. We might acknowledge that the rule of some heavenly policeman was just, but we could never take delight in his regime as we can delight in the tender care of a father.
This article is the first in a series of extracts from Mike’s forthcoming book, The Good God: Enjoying Father, Son and Spirit
Footnotes
1 Calvin, Institutes, 1.14.2, 22
Twelve Words, Twelve Interpretations: 1 Timothy 2:12
There are at least twelve ways of understanding and applying 1 Timothy 2:12. That’s nothing if you compare it to Hebrews 6:4-6, for which there are at least eighteen, but it’s quite formidable considering the disputed phrase contains only twelve Greek words. Here’s what it says, with a word-for-word translation underneath:
Didaskein de gunaiki ouk epitrepō oude authentein andros all einai en ēsuchia.
To teach
and
a woman/wife
not
I permit
and not
to exercise/assume authority over
a man/husband
but
to be
in
quietness.
So what does it mean, and how should it be applied today? In fact, should it be applied today at all? What is ‘teaching’? What is ‘exercising/assuming authority’, and what is that mysterious forward slash doing in there? Does ‘I permit’ mean that Paul was only expressing a personal opinion, rather than the words of God? Does this mean women can’t speak on Sunday mornings in church? Or explain the Bible to men at all? Or (as one female friend of mine at University was told) pray scriptural prayers in the presence of men? Are we only talking about married couples here? Are we saying that women can teach in the kids and youth work, but have to stop when the guys turn eighteen? Can women be in jobs where they need to manage men? And so on and so on.
Here are twelve ways of answering those questions. They are not mutually exclusive, but they do reflect generally different approaches to the text and its application. The first three involve arguing that Paul was not trying to prevent women from teaching or exercising authority in the church at all:
1. The word authentein should be understood in a negative sense: to usurp authority. Paul is urging women in Ephesus not to take authority which is not rightfully theirs. All proper use of authority is fine.
2. The key phrase, didaskein oude authentein, is a hendiadys, a construction in which one idea is expressed by means of two connected words, and should be understood like this: ‘I do not permit a woman to teach, and thereby to exercise authority over a man.’ When combined with #1, this interpretation sees Paul as prohibiting women from teaching in a way that usurps men, and nothing else.
3. Paul is speaking specifically to marriages here: wives are not to teach or be in authority over their husbands.
The next three read the text in a more traditional way – that in this particular verse, Paul is saying that he does not want women to teach or exercise authority over men – but do not see this as a restriction for the whole church, for all time. Rather, there are particular cultural circumstances which prompt Paul to bring this restriction, and since those cultural circumstances no longer exist, Paul’s prohibition need not be observed today:
4. First century Ephesus was the centre of the worship of the goddess Artemis, and this explains why women in this church would have been particularly likely to throw their weight around and boss men around. This is what Paul was objecting to; where this specific situation does not exist, Paul would have no problem with women teaching men.
5. Women in the first century were largely uneducated, and therefore were not to be given the role of teaching and governing the church. Now that women are as educated as men, Paul’s restriction does not apply any longer.
6. Patriarchal culture was a fact of life in the first century, and to challenge it too overtly would have undermined the progress of the gospel. Paul, therefore, continues to operate within a patriarchal social structure (as he does here and in Ephesians 5, Colossians 3 and so on), but he sows the seeds elsewhere for its abolition. The redemptive trajectory of biblical ethics leads us to move beyond restrictions like this one.
Finally, there are those who believe that Paul’s restriction continues today (like the first three), and that he is restricting women from teaching and exercising authority over a man (like the second three). It then becomes a question of how this particular instruction is to be applied in modern church life:
7. ‘To teach or have authority’ means to be an elder in a local church, since teaching and governing are the two main things elders do. Women are restricted from being local church elders, but not from anything else.
8. ‘To teach or have authority’ refers to preaching from the Bible when the church is gathered on Sundays. Women may teach in all other areas of church life (seminars, books, conferences, downloads, articles, small groups, etc), but not when the whole church comes together on Sundays.
9. ‘Teaching’ means defining doctrine for the church: ‘this is what must be believed, and this is what must be done’. Women may speak publicly, instruct, exhort, explain Scripture, preach the gospel and so on, but defining doctrine for the church, and exercising spiritual authority over the church, are for male elders.
10. Paul is restricting women from teaching men with authority. They may teach men, but not in an authoritative way.
11. Paul is limiting Bible teaching to men. Women can teach on subjects which do not involve expounding Scripture – life skills, parenting, marriage, and so on – but not on the Bible. This restriction applies not just to Sundays, but in all situations in church life.
12. Women are not to teach or instruct men on anything, or to exercise authority over them in any way. This applies in all contexts, and therefore women should not manage men, teach them how to do things better, and so on.
Exegetically, the first three above have substantial problems, and are rarely supported in commentaries and scholarly journal articles. Andreas Köstenberger’s argument concerning didaskein oude authentein has largely won the day – Paul either sees both as positive or both as negative, but he didn’t think teaching was positive and authentein negative – and the grammatical arguments in favour of seeing the clause as a hendiadys are weak. The argument that Paul’s comments only apply to husbands and wives, when the whole of chapter two seems to address men and women in general and not just married people, is likewise improbable. Consequently, most egalitarian scholars gravitate to one of the second group of three.
Here, however, there are hermeneutical problems, as I have argued previously – it is a good rule of thumb to do what the New Testament says, unless there are clear reasons not to – as well as exegetical and historical ones. Exegetically, Paul’s argument is not grounded in the culture of the day, the quirks of Ephesus or the lack of educated women, but in creation (2:13-14), and it therefore seems that whatever Paul is restricting, he is restricting on the basis of the way men and women were created (which would correspond to the way he invokes Genesis 1-3 throughout his letters). Historically, it is simply not the case that all women were uneducated in the Greco-Roman world, nor that Paul was unwilling to challenge the patriarchal culture of the day to give women far more status and responsibility than they would otherwise have been granted; both of these things are apparent from the number of times women appear in key roles in Paul’s letters. Frankly, there is a ‘have your cake and eat it’ quality to some egalitarian arguments at this point: Paul was both a liberationist visionary who encouraged women as deacons and apostles (Rom 16), and a man hidebound by his patriarchal culture to the extent that he never reached the stage of liberation that we, many generations later, can (1 Tim 2). It therefore seems best, for exegetical, historical and hermeneutical reasons, to assume that (as with almost every verse in the NT epistles!) we are dealing with an instruction that believers today are intended to follow, and to sit somewhere in the third block of interpretations.
But where? We can surely rule out #12 as being miles away from Paul’s purpose in the passage (which, as he says in 3:14-15, concerns how people conduct themselves in the church), and #11 would mean Paul banning here what Priscilla clearly did in Acts 18:26 (which is possible, but unlikely). #10 involves the grammatically improbable appeal to a hendiadys (see above), and is also at risk of seeing ‘authority’ as nothing more than tone of voice and manner: it would be a mixed blessing, I suspect, for a woman to be asked to teach, but in a non-authoritative way! #8, which is where a good many churches I know tend to sit, inserts a concept, that of the main talk from the stage in a Sunday meeting, which is both anachronistic – did the early church really do it like that? (1 Cor 14:26) – and not mentioned by Paul.
I tend to think that Paul’s use of didaskō and didaskalia favour #9, and that #7 involves talking about something Paul doesn’t (eldership) and not talking about something he does (teaching) – but I suspect that, when all is said and done, there is not much practical difference between the two anyway. Defining doctrine, exercising spiritual authority and serving as elders/overseers are all part of the same package (1 Tim 5:17), and Paul limits both this function and this office to men (see also 1 Tim 3:1-7; Titus 1:5-9). Outside of this restriction, all other people in the church, whether male or female, can function and flourish in all other areas of ministry.
Not all would agree with the position I’ve sketched here. (In fact, most wouldn’t!) But here are two little thoughts that some might find helpful. Firstly, there is John Piper’s response to the supremely awkward question, ‘I’m a guy. Is it wrong for me to listen to Beth Moore?’ He answers no, but explains that it could be if you became dependent on her as your pastor (which coheres well with #7 and #9: it’s not explaining the Bible to men, but functioning as the authoritative elder/overseer/pastor and definer of doctrine for men, that Paul is restricting). Secondly, there is the analogy of marriage: it’s not inconsistent for a husband to be head of his family, but to defer to his wife on all sorts of issues where she knows more than he does. In fact, when Paul talks about the role of women at home, he uses the strong verb oikodespotein (to rule the household), which he does not see as incompatible with submitting to their husbands. By analogy, we might suggest, elders/overseers can define doctrine for and exercise authority over the church, but still release women to instruct the church on pretty much any topic where they are more qualified or gifted to speak. I find that argument fairly compelling.
As to the flashpoint question - whether forty minute Sunday morning sermons in a local church necessarily involve defining doctrine (Teaching with a capital T), or whether they involve the sort of teaching that all of us are called to do (teaching with a lower case t, as in Col 3:16) - churches need to make up their own minds, mindful of the fact that the way we do Sundays today is likely to be very different from the context of the early church. My assumption is that most people in our world, and in my church, would assume that the preacher of the sermon is speaking with a God-given authority to declare what should be believed and what should be done in that local church, and therefore that a full-length Sunday morning message in my church involved Teaching, not merely teaching. But that doesn’t mean this would always be the case. And it’s not like I have any verses to prove it, or anything.
Anyway, that’s where I’ve got to, and where we are as a church in Eastbourne. May the discussion commence!
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Andrew’s next book, If God Then What? Wondering Aloud about Truth, Origins and Redemption, will be released in April, published by IVP.
Series: Why I Am A Little Bit Reformed
This series looks in depth at the history of the reformation and the lessons that can be learned from it.
It starts by looking at Why I am a little bit reformed at least.
You can find the entire series here.
Why I Am A Little Bit Reformed: Conclusions
So, in conclusion, why am I Reformed? There is much more I could have said (and may do at a later date) about Calvin’s theology and about other Reformed pastors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but I am a great admirer of Calvinism within Calvin’s lifetime for three reasons already outlined in this blog over recent weeks:
1. Calvin’s total commitment to a Biblical theology and philosophy
Calvin’s entire frame of thought was shaped by his submission to Scripture as the very word of God. At the very heart of this was, as we have seen, a preoccupation with the glory and honour of God Himself. Calvin believed in predestination and election because he saw those doctrines clearly in the Scriptures and because they exalted God in showing salvation from a theocentric rather than a man-centred perspective. But we should never view predestination and election as the be all and end all of Calvin’s theology.
2. Calvin’s model of Church-building
Calvin provided us (admittedly with quite a lot of help from Bucer) with a workable model for Church planting and building. We may choose to nit-pick on the detail, but the fourfold ministry of pastors, teachers, elders and deacons was a genuine attempt to submit ecclesiology to the authority of Scripture in a contemporary context.
3. Calvin’s Church planting
Calvin planted dozens of churches across France by training future pastors at the Genevan Academy. In turn, this inspired others to plant hundreds of churches across France and eventually to go to the ends of the earth to do likewise.
And finally…
Calvin was not perfect by any means. Indeed, he was acutely aware of the sinfulness of the human race and therefore of his own sin in particular. He made mistakes. I would contend that his greatest mistake, that of an unnecessary and unhelpful entry into the political arena, has been largely overlooked. In the years immediately after his death, Calvin was (somewhat ironically for a Reformed Protestant) virtually canonized by his successor Theodore Beza. In his efforts to defend the doctrine of predestination Beza sought to dot every i and cross every t and, as a result, went beyond the explicitly Scriptural boundaries that Calvin laid down. Beza’s extrapolation of points of doctrine on the grounds of human logic is not ground on which Calvin would ever have felt comfortable. Calvin cannot be blamed for the mistakes of his successors.
However, for reasons of expediency, pressure and politics, towards the very end of his life Calvin caved in to his aristocratic supporters on the issue of active political resistance. Maybe his supporters would have taken up arms in any case in 1562, but they did so knowing they had his permission. In the final definitive 1559 edition of the Institutes Calvin wrote:
“But we must… be very careful not to despise or violate that authority of magistrates,,, which God has established by the weightiest decrees… I am speaking all the while of private individuals. For if there are now any magistrates of the people, appointed to restrain the wilfulness of king…, I am so far from forbidding them to withstand, in accordance with their duty, the fierce licentiousness of kings.”
For me, this is a valuable lesson for us to learn. Sometimes it is hard to stand against the prevailing tide of contemporary public opinion – especially if, as in Calvin’s case, that tide appears to be flowing in our direction. But stand we must if the tide of opinion is at variance with the word of God.
Footnotes
This post forms the final part of the series Why I am a little bit Reformed.
Why it Matters That Paul Wrote the Pastoral Epistles
It has become increasingly fashionable in the last generation, particularly in academic circles, to argue that Paul was not really preaching a message of personal salvation, but of corporate rescue for Israel as part of his plan to renew creation. It has also become increasingly popular to say that Paul did not major on salvation by faith as opposed to works, or that if he did, he simply meant that salvation was not restricted to Jewish people. Both of these positions, in my view, contain large elements of truth and some necessary correctives to traditional interpretations (God's purpose is even bigger than the rescue of individuals; books like Galatians are more preoccupied with the inclusion of Gentiles in God's people than the danger of legalism). But expressed like this, they also represent significant overreactions that are in danger of minimising vitally important components of Paul's (and our!) gospel, or even denying them altogether.
It is also commonplace in academic circles to argue that Paul did not write the Pastoral Epistles (1&2 Timothy and Titus) - that is, either the letters are pseudonymous (written under a false name) or allonymous (written by someone representing Paul, with the readers knowing it wasn’t really him) - and this is sometimes accompanied by the claim that it doesn’t really matter whether they were or not. (I’m never sure what the original recipient, under this view, was supposed to make of the command to fetch Paul’s parchments, but there you go).
These positions are more closely related than you might think.
If we believe Paul didn’t write the Pastorals, or if we regard it as academic career suicide to argue that he did, then we cannot invoke them to help us decide how concerned Paul was with personal salvation and/or salvation by faith as opposed to works. (When coupled, as this often is, with the belief that Ephesians and Colossians were not by Paul either, the problem gets compounded; you can’t rip Eph 2:1-10 out of the Pauline corpus and not expect consequences). But if you believe that he did, then when faced with modern controversies about Paul’s meaning and his gospel, you have a whole raft of material to help you, written in a period of Paul’s life during which he was clearly wanting to ensure that his gospel and his doctrine were transmitted accurately to the next generation. And scattered throughout the Pastorals are the “trustworthy sayings”, brief statements which encapsulate key aspects of Paul’s teaching, two of which bear an almost spooky resemblance to the questions scholars are asking.
Did Paul’s message about Jesus focus on personal salvation? Let’s ask him:
The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. But I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life. (1 Tim 1:15-16)
When Paul talked about “works”, is he simply referring to ethnic boundary-markers around the Jewish people, or did he have in mind a deeper contrast between self-reliance and the unmerited, transforming favour of God? Well:
But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Saviour appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Saviour, so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life. The saying is trustworthy, and I want you to insist on these things ... (Titus 3:4-8)
This doesn’t mean, before I get handbagged for implying it does, that the gospel is all about me, or that the New Perspective on Paul and/or Judaism is wrong. But it is a reason to believe that it matters Paul wrote the Pastorals.
Plus the fact that he said so, of course.
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Andrew’s next book, If God Then What? Wondering Aloud about Truth, Origins and Redemption, will be released in April, published by IVP.
A question and exclamation mark of jigsaw puzzle pieces By Horia Varlan
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