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!”

“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 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.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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!