Cutting room floor, 18th Jan 26

Yesterday I preached from Colossians 1:15-23, an absolutely glorious passage and one in which you could easily spend multiple weeks without exhausting everything it has to say about the Lord Jesus Christ.  Here are a few issues and topics I would have liked to spend more time on that didn't make it into the sermon.

The firstborn over creation - verse 15

That's the way our church Bible (NIV) translates this phrase, in line with various other English translations (e.g., CSB).  I was aware, though, that people using other translations (e.g., ESV) might be reading 'firstborn of creation'.  Both legitimate translations.  Sometimes verses like this will be picked up by movements which subscribe to heretical views of Christ - for example, Jehovah's Witnesses, who hold something very like the ancient Arian heresy.  In this view, the Son of God is a created being, albeit the first and most highly exalted creature.  'Firstborn of creation' certainly sounds like it leans that way!  However, the very next verse makes it clear that every created thing was created in, through and for the Son - placing him very clearly with God the Father as the Creator.  Some of our English translations try to avoid the confusion by translating 'over creation'; this is not an attempt to be deceptive, but reflects the background to Paul's use of this title in, for example, Psalm 89:27, where the Davidic King of Israel is given the title of God's firstborn to reflect his rule as the greatest of the kings of the earth.  To be the firstborn of creation is indeed to be supreme over creation - not as the greatest creature but as the great Creator.

All the fullness - verse 19

All God's fullness dwelt in Christ - that, of course, makes sense, since Christ himself was the eternal Son of God.  But doesn't God dwell fully in every believer by the Holy Spirit?  Yes, he does - but not in this way.  In Christ, we see the personal union of human and divine nature; he is truly God in the flesh.  And in fact his humanity has no independent existence - it is not like there was a human being called Jesus, who was subsequently indwelt or taken over by the Son of God.  No, the fullness of God dwelt in Christ in an utterly unique way, such that his whole life was the life of the eternal Son lived out in our flesh.  On top of that, Christ in his human nature received the Spirit without measure, whereas believers, it seems, can be filled to a greater or lesser extent by the Spirit.  (It is hard to explain exactly what that can mean, since the Spirit can not be split up into parts, or be partially present; perhaps we should think of it in terms of the human experience?)  Moreover, our being filled with the Spirit is dependent on his fullness - he is the original and the ongoing power of our fullness.

The interplay between the universal and the particular

Christ is supreme over all creation (universal), but he is specifically head of his church (particular).  In Christ all things are reconciled to God, in heaven and on earth (universal), but to continue to enjoy that reconciliation in their own lives the Colossians believers must persevere in their trust in Christ (particular).  It seems very important to me that we not underemphasise one or the other of these angles.  If we lay all our stress on the universal, we might end up denying the importance of the church, and we may well end up teaching that everyone will be saved no matter what - a viewpoint which is at odds with the general perspective of Scripture.  If, on the other hand, we only talk about the particular, we run the risk of becoming quite narrow, missing the doctrine of creation (or at least missing its link to the gospel in Christ), and only valuing 'churchy' activities; we might also make the gospel quite individualistic, as if everything in the end depended on our decision.  We need to say both that Christ is universally Lord and reconciler, and that he is particularly Lord in his church and invites particular faith.

News and reflections at the close of 2025

Personal news

The big personal news at the end of 2025 is, on the one hand, that I think I'm very close to submitting my PhD Thesis, and on the other hand that from next week I will be serving part-time as an Associate Pastor at Magdalen Road Church here in Oxford.  I am enormously grateful to those who have helped me through this long period of study and writing, and also to the elders and congregation at Magdalen Road who have given me the opportunity to dip my toe back into the water of pastoral ministry.  Looking forward to that opportunity has also stirred up lots of reflections on the close of my last period of pastoral ministry, and I realise that when I wrote my reflections on that at the time I hadn't really grasped how deeply traumatic it had been.  Prayers appreciated as we as a family move into this new season.

Church reflections

One interesting phenomenon that seems to have ramped up in the last year is the influx into the church of people from the political/cultural 'right', at least some of whom seem to have become convinced that Christianity is an essential component of Western civilisation, and therefore a potential bulwark against what they see as the decline of that civilisation.  This mirrors the trickle of more liberal minded folk into the church over the last few years, who seemed themselves to have realised that only the Christian message could provide a philosophical ground and foundation for the liberal values they hold dear.  Both sides are right, of course, in the sense that the particular shape of Western civilisation and the liberal values of the early Twenty-first Century do owe a great deal to Christianity.  Both sides are wrong, though, in imagining that it will be possible to turn to Christianity purely to bolster social values or a political agenda.  As Lewis has one of his characters put it, one might as well try to use the staircase to heaven as a shortcut to the local chemists.

As for the church, she will just have to accept newcomers with a patient testimony to the reality of life in Christ, and a patient rebuke to those elements of ideology on left and right which are incompatible with that life.  The church needs to stand on her own ground, and speak clearly and even handedly to right and to left.

I wonder whether this means we will see more of the culture wars playing out inside churches, and I worry for what that might look like.  I think evangelicalism, on the whole, has no coherent theological vision for society and for political engagement, and in fact many evangelical leaders give the impression that the best we can hope for is a sort of benign, neutral secularism in the public sphere.  This is unlikely to satisfy culture warriors on either side, but more importantly seems theologically rather vapid.

Perhaps some of the responses to the news that there will be a UK version of The Gospel Coalition already reflect elements of this culture war.  Certainly the write up in Evangelical Times, which reflects the more conservative strand of the evangelical world, is extremely negative.  Personally, I think that write up scandalously misrepresents the people who are mentioned in it, and I wonder whether from the author's perspective it is possible to engage thoughtfully with the modern world without being accused of social liberalism.  On the other hand, I tend to think TGCUK is a bad idea; I am not sure we need more umbrella organisations, which seem to me to be a classic evangelical response to our lack of a distinct vision for catholicity.

Social reflections

Outside the church, political life in 2025 just became more fractured and depressing.  Government seems incapable of delivering.  Populist parties on left and right are growing, both equally disturbing to my mind, and it does indeed seem that the centre cannot hold.  Because I lean slightly right, I am particularly alarmed by the rise of non-conservative right wingers, and by the way some are embracing them simply to enjoy the sight of the liberal consensus taking a beating.  We should be wary of what might end up replacing that liberal consensus.

It seems pretty evident already that local services are failing, for lack of will or resource, and I wonder how local churches - already stretched pretty thin - might be able to fill some of the gaps.  We may need to review our programmes of activities, and ask ourselves more rigorously how our resources can be best used to testify to the reality of the world renewed in Christ.  Middle class evangelicalism might need to specifically ask about our ability and willingness to serve the poorest.

Goodbye to 2025

One of the questions I come back to again and again is that of time.  I agree with Augustine that time is an extremely difficult thing to understand.  As another present slips into the past, I continue to be very grateful that in Christ God has made himself a partaker of our time, and has shown himself able to gather up all the times of our lives to share in his own eternal life.  So, goodbye to 2025, but of course not quite goodbye; rather this year is laid down in the archives, to form part of the strangely glorious whole which for now we can only vaguely imagine.

The transparent Spirit

A belated Pentecost thought, courtesy of T.F. Torrance - quotes are all from "Theology in Reconstruction", 253-258.

The office of the Holy Spirit in the Church is not to call attention to himself apart from Christ but to focus all attention on Christ, to glorify him, to bear witness to his deity, to testify to his mind and will, and in him and through him to lead us to the Father.  He is God the Spirit by whom we know God, for he is God the Spirit by whom God bears witness to himself.  Transparence and self-effacement thus belongs to the very nature and office of the Holy Spirit, as the Spirit of the Father and the Spirit of the Son, who is known only as the Father is known through the Son and the Son is known in the Father, and who together with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified as himself very God.

It is worth tugging at some of the threads in this quote to make sure we've understood them.  Note that the Spirit is worshipped and glorified because he is himself God, true and full God; but he is not worshipped in the attention that we pay to him, but the attention that we pay by him to the Son, to Jesus Christ as he leads us to the Father.  The Spirit is known, and known as God; but he is not known in himself, but only as he himself makes known the Father and the Son.  Torrance summarises this by referring to the Spirit's transparence.  He doesn't mean to imply by this any sort of insubstantiality, as if the Spirit could be 'seen through' because of his weightlessness and lack of solidity.  We are dealing with the almighty, personal God when we are dealing with the Holy Spirit.  The point is simply that the divine office of the Spirit as he is revealed to us in the Gospel is to make Christ known, and through and in him the Father.  His almighty power is shown, not in itself, but in showing us the almighty power of the Father and the Son.

What really strikes me about the way that Torrance utilises this concept is that he sees the transparence of the Spirit as in some sense a transferrable quality.  In thinking and speaking of God, we utilise human forms and concepts, which in themselves "are quite opaque as far as their reference to God himself is concerned."  We simply don't have the ability to stretch our language up to God.  "This is where the transparency of the Spirit comes in, for to be genuine our witness must be shot through and through with the uncreated light of God's self-revelation."  We need the Spirit to make our words transparent to God's reality, to make them bearers of God's own light - something we can't do by ourselves.

Torrance extends this description of the transparency of the Spirit to Scripture - the perspicuity of the Scriptures means the fact that the Spirit causes the biblical witness to be transparent to divine reality - and baptism - in which we are meant to look "through the rite to Christ and his Gospel... Without Sacramental transparence Baptism becomes blind and meaningless."

We need - desperately need - the work of the Holy Spirit to make anything that we do with reference to God genuinely valuable and meaningful.

We recall too that this transparence comes from the Holy Spirit, from his own self-effacing nature and office in hiding himself, as it were, behind the Face of the Father in the Son and behind the Heart of the Son in the Father, yet revealing the one Triune God by letting his eternal light shine through himself to us.

A Bonhoeffer index

Dietrich Bonhoeffer has been incredibly influential on my thinking about a range of topics, especially how to do Christian ethics.  On the 80th anniversary of his death, here is a list of things I've written about him:

• Thoughts on the decline of nominal or cultural Christianity, processed with the help of Bonhoeffer's distinction between ultimate and penultimate things.
• Thoughts on divine mandates, and the different spheres of human life, prompted by the Covid-19 crisis.
• A brief thought on ethics as obedience to God, and the implications for church fellowship.
• An exploration of two key concepts from Bonhoeffer - nature and vicarious representation.
• Thoughts on the famous contrast between cheap and costly grace,
• Learning to pray, drawing on Bonhoeffer's work on the Psalms.
• A series of posts working through Bonhoeffer's (sadly unfinished) Ethics:
• Part 1 - Christ, Reality and Good
• Part 2 - Ethics as Formation
• Part 3 - Heritage and Decay
• Part 4 - Guilt, Justification, Renewal
• Part 5 - Ultimate and Penultimate Things
• Part 6 - Natural Life
• Part 7 - History and Good (1)
• Part 8 - History and Good (2)
• Part 9 - God's Love and the Disintegration of the World
• Part 10 - Church and World I
• Part 11 - On the Possibility of the Church's Message to the World
• Part 12 - The "Ethical" and the "Christian" as a Topic
• Part 13 - The Concrete Commandment and the Divine Mandates
• A brief application of Bonhoeffer to the question of abortion.
• Some critical thoughts on Bonhoeffer's understanding of the church. This was ten years ago, and I'm not sure now that I agree with myself!
• An appreciation of Bonhoeffer's emphasis on corporate, common prayer in the church.
• Thoughts on how the gospel addresses people who are good.
• A reflection on confession of guilt as the precursor to good ethical thinking.

There are a couple of others which I haven't linked, but which you can find if you look; they deal with my reading of Metaxas's biography of Bonhoeffer, which I liked at the time but feel more ambivalent about now.

A three-way fight

I spent some very profitable time last week discussing the work of Charles Taylor with people who are much more qualified to speak about him than I am.  For those who don't know, Taylor is primarily famous for his enormous book A Secular Age, in which he tries to answer one question: how have we moved from a point in 1500 when atheism was more or less inconceivable, to a point in 2000 where belief in God is enormously contested?  What changed in society and the intellectual world of the West to make atheism a live option, not just for isolated individuals, but for the mainstream of Western people?  The book is exhaustive, and exhausting, in its run through the history of the Western world in search of the answer(s) to this question - if you haven't read it and want a way in I'd strongly recommend James Smith's book How (Not) To Be Secular as a good introduction and guide before you dive in.

One particular part of Taylor's analysis struck me as having renewed importance in our current cultural moment.  Taylor suggests that there are not two great forces in our culture - the religious and the irreligious, say - but three: "There are secular humanists, there are neo-Nietzscheans, and there are those who acknowledge some good beyond life." (636)  By 'secular humanists', Taylor means those who restrict meaning purely to the 'immanent frame' - i.e., nothing transcendent, nothing spiritual that exists above and beyond our human conceptualism of the world - and yet remain optimistic about the power of humanity to shape its own existence to benign ends, and are invested in the project of human improvement.  Broadly, this would align politically with secular progressives.  Then there are the religious, or at least those who look beyond the world as we see it for meaning and direction; they are typically also progressive in some sense, in that they believe in the capacity for things to get better, even if the end goal of that 'better' is not found within the horizons of this world.  They will, of course, debate with the secular humanists as to what 'good' means, but they agree that there is good and that it is worth pursuing.

The third group Taylor calls 'neo-Nietzscheans', or "the immanent counter-Enlightenment". (636)  This group denies the progressive tendency in both other camps; there is no 'good' per se which can be pursued, and humanity as such is not reformable.  All we can do is harness the evil tendencies of humanity to something which will benefit the species.  Various species of political Darwinism belong here, and we might point to particular figures who represent this tendency - Andrew Tate, Tommy Robinson, and to an extent Donald Trump spring to mind.

Taylor's point is that this is a genuine three-way fight.  The secular humanists and the neo-Nietzscheans are agreed, against the religious, that there is no transcendent source of meaning or ethics, and that decisions have to be made purely on the basis of what we can see around us.  But on the other hand the religious often find themselves agreeing with the secular humanists when it comes to pursuing some good intention within the world.  (We might suggest that this is particularly the case in the contemporary West, where the supposedly neutral and universal values which secular humanism considers itself to be pursuing are heavily inflected with historic Christian thought).

But there is a third alliance which often pops up, for "neo-Nietzscheans and acknowledgers of transcendence are together in their absence of surprise at the continued disappointments of secular humanism, together also in the sense that its vision of life lacks a dimension." (637)  Both the immanent counter-Enlightenment and the religious see secular humanism as in a sense naive, and doomed to fail on its own terms.  They both want, for very different reasons, to shake the liberal consensus just to demonstrate that it is without foundation.

At the moment, I think the neo-Nietzscheans are on the march, and secular progressivism is in retreat across the West.  And I think we, by which I mean 'acknowledgers of transcendence' and specifically Christians, need to be careful.  Let's not rejoice too much at the woes of secular humanism.  Let's take care not to line up with the neo-Nietzscheans and think that we can turn our momentary agreement into a lasting alliance.  In the end, there is a lot in secular humanism with which we are in profound agreement; indeed, I would argue that there is a lot in secular humanism that actually belongs to us.  And I think that the forces of the immanent counter-Enlightenment will be very happy to turn their guns on us at the first opportunity.

Thoughts on New Year's Day

Liturgically, New Year's Day is the eighth day of Christmas, and therefore observed (where such things are still observed) as the festival of the Naming and Circumcision of Jesus.  I find that provides rich themes for reflection and contemplation as one year turns over into the next.

For starters, the Lord was given the name 'Jesus' - meaning God Saves - because he would save his people from their sins.  This invites two lines of reflection.  First at the level of salvation history, the coming of Jesus is the faithfulness of God to his covenant people.  The stories which accompany the presentation of Christ at the temple reflect the longing of faithful Israelites for the promised salvation of God.  Simeon sees in this child God's salvation, the rescue and therefore the glory of Israel, the revelation to the world of God's good purposes to and through his chosen people.  Anna speaks of the redemption of Jerusalem, no longer as a distant hope but as a present reality.  It is good at the beginning of a new year to be reminded that God's faithfulness to his purposes and his people runs like a golden thread through each and every year, even when that thread is sometimes hidden from view.  His faithfulness to Israel meant the forgiveness of Israel's sins; and that faithfulness is ongoing.

And then at the personal level, how good it is when reflecting on the last year, with all its many sins and failings, to be reminded that Jesus is God's salvation.  He is the one who is able to deliver us from our sins and the consequences of our sins - and he will deliver us.  That is his very name.

There is also the circumcision, which perhaps seems obscure but to my mind conjures up similar reflections.  Circumcision was the sign of the ancient covenant with Israel, and so when Jesus is circumcised we see God's faithfulness to a promise made to Abraham hundred of years before.  We are reminded again of his constancy through the turning years.  But then again, the circumcision of Jesus is not just the continuation of that covenant, but its fulfilment - in him, the covenant sign becomes a present reality, or perhaps we ought to say that he is the reality which always lay under the covenant sign and gave it life and power.  His circumcision is God's faithfulness to the old, but just as that faithfulness it is also the putting off of every old thing, so that it points to Christ's cross, on which the old man is put to death - not for Christ, but for us, who are circumcised in him.  In Christ, the old is really old and done away with, and the new year can open with a sense of real newness, just as every day is a day of fresh mercy and therefore new creation.

The years go on.  Jesus is the same - yesterday, today, and forever.  Always the one who saved his people from their sins, and will save his people.  Always the one who kept faith, and made us faithful in him.  Always the one who decides and judges what is really old and has to go, and always the one who brings in the genuinely new.

Happy new year!

Christ the Psalmist

Two great Psalms in my reading for Morning Prayer today - Psalms 25 and 26.  Great Psalms in isolation, but curiously contradictory when you read them side by side.

King David Playing the Harp
(Gerard van Honthorst, 1622)

Notice first of all that these are both presented as 'Psalms of David'; whatever exactly we think about the originality or significance of the headings to the Psalms, we are certainly being encouraged to read these together in some sense.  We can't say that these Psalms belong to different traditions, or represent different theological viewpoints, or belong at very different points in the history of revelation and redemption.  The Psalms seem to originate together and belong together.  And yet...

In Psalm 25 we have confessions of sin, pleas for forgiveness, expressions of dependence on God's mercy:

Do not remember the sins of my youth
or the acts of my rebellion...

Lord, for the sake of your name,
forgive my iniquity, for it is immense.

Consider my affliction and trouble
and forgive all my sins. 

 But then in Psalm 26 we have a rather different mood:

Vindicate me, Lord,
because I have lived with integrity...

I wash my hands in innocence
and go around your altar, Lord...

How do we hold together the frank admission of 'immense' guilt with the confident appeal to one's own innocence and integrity?  How do we join up what is essentially an appeal to God to forget David's behaviour (because it was sinful) with the appeal to God to remember David's behaviour (because it was righteous)?

There are of course a number of simple ways we might get around it.  If we take the Psalms primarily as expressions of human psychology, perhaps in connection especially with the life of faith, then it's not difficult to think of times from our own experience when we felt especially sinful and other times when we felt basically innocent.  Perhaps it's just that these two Psalms are given to us so that we can pray appropriately in the light of those different feelings.

Or we can construe a scale of relative righteousness - we could argue that David knows of course that in God's sight he is sinful, but compared to the enemies who oppress and harass him (and these enemies are prominent in Psalm 26) he is innocent.  Or we can imagine a situation in which David, without denying his essential guilt, could be maintaining his innocence in this particular case.  He hasn't done this one thing of which he is accused, and so he can appeal to God on the basis of this innocence.

Any or all of those things may have a grain of truth to them, but the deeper, and more Christian, reading of these Psalms is as expressions of the truth as it is in Christ Jesus.  Maybe David wrote these Psalms, but they belong nonetheless to Christ.  The Lord Jesus in his life took up the guilt and sin of humanity and made it his own; he identified with sinful humanity in his baptism, and he carried that identity through as far as the cross.  He can confess on our behalf the immense iniquity which we carry - indeed, he confesses it to such an extent that we no longer carry it.  But on the other hand, the Lord Jesus never sinned.  He, and he alone, could truly wash his hands in innocence.  The guilt which he bore, he bore guiltlessly.  The iniquity which he confessed, he confessed from a position of total integrity.  Jesus sings both Psalms.

And because he sings both Psalms, I can sing both Psalms.  Lord, forgive my iniquity, for it is immense.  In innocence I go around your altar and proclaim thanksgiving.  In Christ I sing.