The distinction between the visible church and the invisible church plays various different roles in different theologies and ecclesiologies. Basically the idea is that the church as we see it in the world and in history, the empirical church, is not wholly identical with the church as it exists in the sight and plan of God, the spiritual church. This distinction may serve to justify the relative impurity of present churches - it sometimes functions, for example, as an argument for mixed congregations in which it is known that many are not living as disciples despite their attachment to 'the church'. It can also function as an apologetic for the ruined and divided state of the church catholic - the visible church is by schisms rent asunder, but the invisible church is nonetheless one and whole in Christ - which can unfortunately make efforts towards visible unity seem a waste of time.
At one level I think the distinction is certainly necessary. The New Testament seems to call for it, whenever it acknowledges that there will be eschatological surprises over who ultimately is found to belong to the church. And it seems inevitable conceptually - I am reminded of Screwtape's advice that the newly converted patient should be put off church by keeping his mind on the deeply unsatisfying reality of his neighbours assembled in church rather than on "the Church as we (demons) see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners."
But does this idea also have dangerous implications?
In The Trinitarian Faith Torrance suggests a particular genealogy for the distinction between the visible and the invisible church. For some of the early Fathers of the church - he particularly mentions Origen and Clement of Alexandria - there was a similar distinction between the physical/sensible gospel and the spiritual/eternal gospel. Influenced by Platonic dualism - with its rift between the visible/invisible, temporal/eternal, physical/spiritual, and its clear preference for the latter in each of these dualities - there was a tendency to see the incarnation, in all its visible/temporal/physical nature, as pointing towards a better invisible/eternal/spiritual gospel, of which it was a passing sign. The danger here for Christology is hopefully obvious, but what if - as Torrance suggests - this is also the source of the idea of a visible and invisible church? What would be the consequences?
Torrance suggests that this distinction "opened the door for the identification of the real Church with a spiritualised timeless and spaceless magnitude, and for the ongoing life and mission of the empirical Church to be regarded as subject to the laws that control human society in this world." (276) In other words, the visible church - being no longer regarded as itself the Body of Christ, but only at best as a rough approximation of or signpost to his spiritual Body - is run as if it were just another human society. The reality that the church - meaning the local congregation here and now - exists because its members have been baptised by one Spirit into the one Body of Christ, through whom they have access together to the Father: all that is lost, or is in danger of being lost. In practice, the presence and reality of the Spirit with(in) the people of God here and now is downplayed or neglected; human efforts to maintain and organise the church are substituted for a dependence on God's Spirit.
I don't know my Patristics well enough to know if Torrance's account is correct; I find it plausible from the little that I do know. I wonder what it would look like in our churches to resist this dualism. A higher doctrine of the church? Actually, I would guess, an understanding of the church that sees it not as an add-on to the gospel but as an intrinsic part of the gospel. And then a lived reality of church which leans much more heavily on the presence and work of the Holy Spirit uniting us to Christ in the here and now.
Thursday, June 27, 2019
Wednesday, June 26, 2019
The gentle God
One of the things about God that I wrestle with is his determination to make me into a human being, a person. It often seems like this great project of his leads down long, winding roads which surely don't get to the point, or at least don't get there very quickly, and involve me in lots of heartache along the way. I wish he would short-circuit the process.
Why, for example, does God not just kill off sin in us the moment we first turn to him? Why does he not make vocation blindingly clear to us the moment we first ask? Why does he let us, individually and collectively as families and churches, muddle through decision making processes and get it wrong more often than not, when he could just signpost the way clearly - with a voice from heaven perhaps?
I think at least part of the reason is that God will have his human creations as humans, as real relational counterparts to himself. This does not imply, as more liberal theology has always thought, that God gives human beings radical autonomy, that they stand outside his sovereignty, that they are able to ultimately defy his will. No, God is God. But he is God with us in a particular way.
T.F. Torrance commented on the Patristic understanding of the Holy Spirit thus: "If it is only the almighty who can be infinitely gentle, the Holy Spirit may well be characterised as the gentleness of God the Father Almighty." The way God governs his human creation is through the gentleness of the Holy Spirit.
When we think of the Spirit we usually reach for the dramatic things: Philip whisked away to Azotus, missionary endeavours directed by audible voices from God or prophetic words, healings, tongues of fire. That the Spirit did and does these things is undeniable, to those who take the Scriptures seriously. It is not for nothing that he is associated with fire.
But he is also dove. He is also breath. He is gentleness.
The Spirit of the Creator God is not in the business of continually over-riding the will and the thought and the judgement of the creatures he made. He gave us those things! And he wills that we should use them, that we should be trained in life and godliness, not just magically transformed into the final product. He wants us to be people.
When faced with a difficult decision, I want God to take it out of my hands. Lord, just make it clear to me. Show me your will in a way that I can't dispute or question. Instead he usually leaves me to pray and think and chat it through with others - and then make a call. He wants me to be a human being. Part of that is using my created faculties. Part of it is also trusting him in a bigger, deeper way: not trusting him to signpost everything in my life, but trusting him to hold me whether I get it right or wrong, trusting him to gently weave even my nonsense into his greater story. To trust, I suppose, not just the fire of the Spirit's immediate and obvious leading and equipping, but also the Spirit brooding over the waters, the gentle breath of the Spirit in the everyday and the normal.
I feel the burden of responsibility that comes with being human. I would often prefer it if God would just over-ride my humanity. But instead he gently takes our very human processes and practices and faculties and softly but surely brings us into his way, through our mistakes and failings as often as not.
Why, for example, does God not just kill off sin in us the moment we first turn to him? Why does he not make vocation blindingly clear to us the moment we first ask? Why does he let us, individually and collectively as families and churches, muddle through decision making processes and get it wrong more often than not, when he could just signpost the way clearly - with a voice from heaven perhaps?
I think at least part of the reason is that God will have his human creations as humans, as real relational counterparts to himself. This does not imply, as more liberal theology has always thought, that God gives human beings radical autonomy, that they stand outside his sovereignty, that they are able to ultimately defy his will. No, God is God. But he is God with us in a particular way.
T.F. Torrance commented on the Patristic understanding of the Holy Spirit thus: "If it is only the almighty who can be infinitely gentle, the Holy Spirit may well be characterised as the gentleness of God the Father Almighty." The way God governs his human creation is through the gentleness of the Holy Spirit.
When we think of the Spirit we usually reach for the dramatic things: Philip whisked away to Azotus, missionary endeavours directed by audible voices from God or prophetic words, healings, tongues of fire. That the Spirit did and does these things is undeniable, to those who take the Scriptures seriously. It is not for nothing that he is associated with fire.
But he is also dove. He is also breath. He is gentleness.
The Spirit of the Creator God is not in the business of continually over-riding the will and the thought and the judgement of the creatures he made. He gave us those things! And he wills that we should use them, that we should be trained in life and godliness, not just magically transformed into the final product. He wants us to be people.
When faced with a difficult decision, I want God to take it out of my hands. Lord, just make it clear to me. Show me your will in a way that I can't dispute or question. Instead he usually leaves me to pray and think and chat it through with others - and then make a call. He wants me to be a human being. Part of that is using my created faculties. Part of it is also trusting him in a bigger, deeper way: not trusting him to signpost everything in my life, but trusting him to hold me whether I get it right or wrong, trusting him to gently weave even my nonsense into his greater story. To trust, I suppose, not just the fire of the Spirit's immediate and obvious leading and equipping, but also the Spirit brooding over the waters, the gentle breath of the Spirit in the everyday and the normal.
I feel the burden of responsibility that comes with being human. I would often prefer it if God would just over-ride my humanity. But instead he gently takes our very human processes and practices and faculties and softly but surely brings us into his way, through our mistakes and failings as often as not.
Tuesday, June 18, 2019
Our Triune God saves
I've been thinking a little bit this week, having preached from Romans 5:1-5 on Trinity Sunday, about the way that the Christian revelation of God as Trinity-in-Unity affects our understanding of salvation. A couple of things to note from the passage:
Firstly, it is God who saves, from first to last. We have peace with God through Christ, whom Paul has already described as having been put forward by God as a sacrifice of propitiation. The Father initiates, the Son carries through the plan of faithful obedience and sacrifice. And the Holy Spirit is described as given to us, pouring out God's love into our hearts. So from the initial and eternal plan, through its accomplishment in incarnation and atonement, right down to the subjective application of that plan into the hearts and lives of individuals - this is all God. Our God saves, from first to last.
Second, though, it seems to me that understanding Trinity makes this salvation relational, and preserves the reality of humanity in the whole carrying through of the process. If God were not Triune, if he were the monad God of monotheism, then it would be a supremely grotesque thing to say 'God saves, from first to last', because it would imply a puppet show. Here is God, pulling the strings of salvation, and his human marionettes dance out their involuntary lives of praise. But God is Triune - he is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He is not only the Father - God above us, transcending us, sovereign from his throne in heaven; he is also the Son - God with us, our brother, taking on and sharing our nature, sovereign in our place, even the place of the cross; and then again, he is God the Holy Spirit - God within us and behind us, the God in whom we all live and move and have our being, sovereign in and through our real human lives, actions, and freedoms. He is God who saves, in every way, from first to last; but he is the Triune God who saves, and that makes a great difference.
It also means that when we say 'God saves' what we primarily mean is 'God welcomes us, even us sinners, into the eternal relationship and love which he is in himself, the love of the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father within the unity of the Holy Spirit'. And that is really something.
Firstly, it is God who saves, from first to last. We have peace with God through Christ, whom Paul has already described as having been put forward by God as a sacrifice of propitiation. The Father initiates, the Son carries through the plan of faithful obedience and sacrifice. And the Holy Spirit is described as given to us, pouring out God's love into our hearts. So from the initial and eternal plan, through its accomplishment in incarnation and atonement, right down to the subjective application of that plan into the hearts and lives of individuals - this is all God. Our God saves, from first to last.
Second, though, it seems to me that understanding Trinity makes this salvation relational, and preserves the reality of humanity in the whole carrying through of the process. If God were not Triune, if he were the monad God of monotheism, then it would be a supremely grotesque thing to say 'God saves, from first to last', because it would imply a puppet show. Here is God, pulling the strings of salvation, and his human marionettes dance out their involuntary lives of praise. But God is Triune - he is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He is not only the Father - God above us, transcending us, sovereign from his throne in heaven; he is also the Son - God with us, our brother, taking on and sharing our nature, sovereign in our place, even the place of the cross; and then again, he is God the Holy Spirit - God within us and behind us, the God in whom we all live and move and have our being, sovereign in and through our real human lives, actions, and freedoms. He is God who saves, in every way, from first to last; but he is the Triune God who saves, and that makes a great difference.
It also means that when we say 'God saves' what we primarily mean is 'God welcomes us, even us sinners, into the eternal relationship and love which he is in himself, the love of the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father within the unity of the Holy Spirit'. And that is really something.
Thursday, June 13, 2019
The Spirit and the spirits
You know that when you were pagans you were led astray to mute idols, however you were led. Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking in the Spirit of God ever says “Jesus is accursed!” and no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except in the Holy Spirit.
1 Corinthians 12:2-3
Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already.
1 Corinthians 12:2-3
Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already.
The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit who delights to exalt Jesus. His mission in this last age is to bear witness to Christ, to open eyes to the reality of who Jesus was and is - and in this way to bring people to faith and into unity with Christ (and to reveal the reality of sin and judgement in those who will not believe). Always his focus is Christ Jesus.
Sometimes people ask me 'how do we balance Jesus and the Spirit?' - meaning, how do we take seriously the objective revelation of God in Christ as Scripture bears witness to him, and also take seriously the mysterious subjective revelation of God in the Spirit? The answer is that we don't. Taking the Holy Spirit seriously means setting our spiritual eyes, our hearts, our minds on Christ Jesus. Any spirit which distracts from Jesus, any spirit which does not exalt him, and spirit which does not confess his incarnation - his death, resurrection, and ascension - as the central reality of human history and each individual human life: that is not the Holy Spirit, but is the spirit of antichrist.
This can be subtle. There is teaching which makes much of Jesus, but not quite enough. There is teaching which makes Jesus the noblest of human beings (but not God, at least not in the fullest sense) - this is implicit in a lot of liberal teaching (and there is a lot of it masquerading as evangelicalism at the moment, but that's another matter); and there is teaching that makes Jesus divine in some sense (but not a real human being) - although this side of the equation is perhaps less popular in the current cultural moment.
But the Holy Spirit says 'Jesus is Lord' (that is, the LORD), and the Holy Spirit says 'Jesus came in the flesh' (that is, in genuine humanity, in which he suffered, died, and rose).
Test the spirits, and listen to the Spirit.
Sunday, June 09, 2019
Knowledge in the Spirit
"In Jesus Christ God has embodied in our human existence the mutual knowledge which the Father and the Son have of one another and in the Holy Spirit he gives us communion in the mutual relation of the Father and the Son and thus makes us share in the knowledge which the Father and the Son have of one another."
Thus T.F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 55.
That's a pretty dense sentence, and in urgent need of some punctuation, but there are two truths here that Torrance is getting at which are of vital importance for us.
Firstly, in the incarnation of the Son, God has given us a point of access, a way in which we can truly know him. In the context of his discussion, Torrance is making the point (drawn from Irenaeus and particularly Athanasius) that God can only be known from himself. An attempted knowledge of God that began from created things would not get far; it could only really be speculative. But there is a problem: we can't know God in himself. Because he is beyond creation, beyond our way of being, he is also beyond our knowing. God overcomes this problem (for we surely can't overcome it) by making himself present in Christ. Now we have, within the human world of space and time, a genuine way in - not to an abstract knowledge of God as Creator, but to the relational knowledge which Father and Son have of one another in the eternal Godhead. Jesus relates to his Father as he always has done eternally, but now he does so as a man, and in so doing establishes the 'objective' knowledge of God for us all.
Secondly, the out-poured Holy Spirit unites believers to Christ, such that they share in that relationship between the Father and the Son. They know themselves to be alongside Christ as brothers, adopted as the children of the Father. Being involved in this relationship, believers necessarily have knowledge of God. But note again: this is knowledge of God which is also knowledge from and through God. The Spirit, if you like, establishes the 'subjective' knowledge of God for us who believe, by involving us in the relationship between the Father and the Son.
The central thing, I think, which is implied by the incarnation on the one hand and Pentecost on the other, is that there is no second hand knowledge of God. To know God is to be involved in God's own self-knowledge. This is very clear biblically in 1 Corinthians 2:6-16. Only the Spirit knows the deep things of God, and he knows them in the way that a human's spirit knows the deep things of that human person. And yet, we have the mind of Christ; we are made, by the Spirit, to participate genuinely in this self-knowing of God.
What we celebrate at Pentecost is not just power, not just mission, not just the church, but God catching us up into genuine relational knowledge of himself, into the very relationship and knowledge of the Father and the Son in the eternal Godhead.
Good news.
Thus T.F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 55.
That's a pretty dense sentence, and in urgent need of some punctuation, but there are two truths here that Torrance is getting at which are of vital importance for us.
Firstly, in the incarnation of the Son, God has given us a point of access, a way in which we can truly know him. In the context of his discussion, Torrance is making the point (drawn from Irenaeus and particularly Athanasius) that God can only be known from himself. An attempted knowledge of God that began from created things would not get far; it could only really be speculative. But there is a problem: we can't know God in himself. Because he is beyond creation, beyond our way of being, he is also beyond our knowing. God overcomes this problem (for we surely can't overcome it) by making himself present in Christ. Now we have, within the human world of space and time, a genuine way in - not to an abstract knowledge of God as Creator, but to the relational knowledge which Father and Son have of one another in the eternal Godhead. Jesus relates to his Father as he always has done eternally, but now he does so as a man, and in so doing establishes the 'objective' knowledge of God for us all.
Secondly, the out-poured Holy Spirit unites believers to Christ, such that they share in that relationship between the Father and the Son. They know themselves to be alongside Christ as brothers, adopted as the children of the Father. Being involved in this relationship, believers necessarily have knowledge of God. But note again: this is knowledge of God which is also knowledge from and through God. The Spirit, if you like, establishes the 'subjective' knowledge of God for us who believe, by involving us in the relationship between the Father and the Son.
The central thing, I think, which is implied by the incarnation on the one hand and Pentecost on the other, is that there is no second hand knowledge of God. To know God is to be involved in God's own self-knowledge. This is very clear biblically in 1 Corinthians 2:6-16. Only the Spirit knows the deep things of God, and he knows them in the way that a human's spirit knows the deep things of that human person. And yet, we have the mind of Christ; we are made, by the Spirit, to participate genuinely in this self-knowing of God.
What we celebrate at Pentecost is not just power, not just mission, not just the church, but God catching us up into genuine relational knowledge of himself, into the very relationship and knowledge of the Father and the Son in the eternal Godhead.
Good news.
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