The Holy Innocents

Traditionally on this fourth day of Christmas the church has remembered the massacre of the infants of Bethlehem, which Matthew's Gospel reports after the story of the visit of the Magi:

After they were gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream, saying, “Get up! Take the child and his mother, flee to Egypt, and stay there until I tell you. For Herod is about to search for the child to kill him.” So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night, and escaped to Egypt. He stayed there until Herod’s death, so that what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet might be fulfilled: Out of Egypt I called my Son.

Then Herod, when he realised that he had been outwitted by the wise men, flew into a rage. He gave orders to massacre all the boys in and around Bethlehem who were two years old and under, in keeping with the time he had learned from the wise men. Then what was spoken through Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled:

A voice was heard in Ramah,
weeping, and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children;
and she refused to be consoled,
because they are no more.

I find this one of the most disturbing episodes in Holy Scripture.  Of course, the content is horrific - mass murder of babies and toddlers, driven by the king's paranoia and malice.  But it isn't just the content but the context.  This is the Christmas story, the story of the nativity of Christ.  It's a story full of light dawning, of salvation coming.  And yet right in the middle of the story is this darkest of episodes.

The way Matthew tells the story is striking.  The main perspective, if you like, tells the story of the deliverance of the infant Jesus from Herod's power.  It is primarily the story of God driving his salvific purpose despite the opposition of the wicked.  The flight into Egypt recalls the patriarchs journey to the same country - in their case not to escape persecution but to survive famine.  The main perspective is the thwarting of Herod's evil plan by God's providential care.  It's a story of the light continuing to shine against a terribly dark background.

But the citation from the prophet Jeremiah initially invites us to take a second perspective: that of the bereaved mothers of Bethlehem.  Herod's plan to murder the Christ is thwarted, but his malice is instead spent on unrelated children.  Taking this perspective is disturbing on two counts: firstly, could not the God who warned Joseph to flee also have preserved these other children? and second, was it not God's own salvation plan which led to this act of mass murder?  The text does not invite us to blame the evil on God, for it was Herod's sin which led to the massacre.  But if the Christ had not entered the world in Bethlehem, wouldn't the children have been safe from Herod?  They seem to have been collateral damage in the great war in the heavenlies, and that hardly seems acceptable.   I am reminded of Kirkegaard's question about Abraham: wouldn't it have been better for him not to be the chosen?  Would it not have been better for the little town of Bethlehem if the Christ had not been there?

The context of the Jeremiah quote points to a third perspective, to my mind even more challenging.  In its original setting, the first reference of this prophecy is to those bereaved by the catastrophe of the exile from Judah; and Jeremiah, on behalf of the Lord, promises comfort.  God's love for his children is still there, despite all appearance.  Indeed, the very exile is shown to be the work of his love, his discipline.  He will have a people for himself.  The best thing for them - the only true good - is to belong exclusively to him, and he will make it so, and in so doing he will turn their lament into joy.  Matthew, then, invites us to step back.  At the centre is the story of Christ, rescued and preserved.  On the periphery is the terrible story of the massacre and the suffering of Bethlehem.  But in the widest perspective, is there hope in the story?  Are we to see comfort for this grieving?  If so, for Matthew that comfort will come through the preserved child.

And here we perhaps hear another echo.  Long ago, another Joseph had been driven into Egypt by persecution.  And in time, that Joseph was able to say that although there had been evil intent on the part of the human actors, God had intended good through the evil.  We are invited, then, to see God's providence in the dark as well as the light in the story.  Not equally, not in the same way; not so that Herod is in any way absolved, not so that grief stops being grievous.  But that somehow, through this infant, even the evil will be turned to good and the darkness overwhelmed by the light.

Hope, despite everything

I've copied below a long paragraph from Church Dogmatics IV/3, on the subject of hope.  The wider context is the doctrine of reconciliation as that relates to Christ's role specifically as Prophet and therefore the one who bears witness to himself and brings his people to faith in him (and incidentally, it seems to me that in comparison with the roles of Priest and King, this part of Christ's triple office is typically neglected; it gets a brief paragraph in Letham's Systematic Theology, for example, compared to chapters on the priestly and kingly roles).  The narrower context is the work of the Spirit in awakening the church and the individual Christian to hope.  And the immediate context is the three great challenges to hope: firstly, that the Christian finds him- or herself outnumbered and the message of Christ sidelined in the world; second, that the Christian is confronted continually by his or her own continuing sinfulness, which stands in contradiction of the great hope; and third, that the Christian still awaits Christ's judgement, and so cannot pronounce on the righteousness or the fruit of his or her labours.  This paragraph addresses the first challenge.  I've broken it up and added some commentary.  If you want to read the context, you'll find this paragraph on pages 917-919.

What is hope, and what does it mean for the Christian who, since Jesus Christ has not yet spoken His universal, generally perceptible and conclusive Word, finds himself in that dwindling and almost hopeless minority as His witness to the rest of the world?

Barth is clear that Christ has spoken, but he has not yet spoken in such a way that everyone will hear; that awaits the final coming of Christ.  In the meantime, how is the Christian who looks around the world and finds himself, as someone who has heard that word of Christ, in a minority to maintain his hope?  What does gospel hope mean for the Christian in a world where that hope seems to reach so few?

If the great Constantinian delusion is now being shattered, the question becomes the more insistent, though it has always been felt by perspicacious Christians.  What can a few Christians or a pathetic group like the Christian community really accomplish with their scattered witness to Jesus Christ?  What do these men really imagine or expect to accomplish in the great market, on the battle-field or in the great mad-house which human life always seems to be?  "Who hath believed our report?  and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?" (Is. 53:1).

'The great Constantinian delusion' is the dream of a church triumphant in this world; of the normalisation of Christian faith as the pattern of this age.  If it was being shattered when Barth was writing this in the 1950s, it is well and truly gone now.  Christendom is in the past.  And yet, even at the height of Christendom, when it seemed the world was, or would shortly become, wholly Christian, there were those 'perspicacious Christians' who saw that all was not well - the reformers of the church, who regularly saw themselves as in a minority even though they were surrounded by professing Christians.  The point that Barth is making is that the church is, generally speaking, small and weak - too small to compete in the marketplace of ideas, too weak to triumph on the ideological battlegrounds, too insignificant to make much of a difference to the madness of the world.  That this was also the experience of the prophets and apostles (as shown by Barth's quotation from Isaiah) may not make us feel much better.

And what are we to say concerning the countless multitudes who either ante or post Christum natum have had no opportunity to hear this witness?

Perhaps the most acute form of this problem: how is gospel hope to be maintained for the world when so many have never heard of him - and many of those came and passed before his nativity?

Hic Rhodus, hic salta!  The Christian is merely burying his head in the sand if he is not disturbed by these questions and does not find his whole ministry of witness challenged by them.  He buries it even more deeply if in order to escape them, forgetting that he can be a Christian at all only as a witness of Jesus Christ, he tries to retreat into his own faith and love or those of his fellow Christians.  Nor is there any sense in trying to leap over this barrier with the confident mien of a Christian world conqueror.

Three useless responses to the problem: firstly, to pretend that is isn't there, to ignore the questions - a useless response, and a damaging one, because it exposes the Christian's hope to ridicule; second, to retreat into pietism, of an individualistic or a communitarian sort - a response which denies the Christian's character as a witness, and which smacks more of self-interest and self-preservation than hope; and third, to continue to imagine a revived Constantinianism, perhaps in a very different form, in which the church triumphant will indeed be seen in this life, to be a world-changer, a history-maker - a response which perhaps appeals to self-confidence or youthful exuberance, but which I would guess is often actually founded on insecurity rather than gospel hope, and a sense that we have to do Christ's work for him.

The meaningful thing which he is permitted and commanded and liberated to do in face of it is as a Christian, and therefore unambiguously and unfalteringly, to hope, i.e., in face of what seems by human reckoning to be an unreachable majority to count upon it quite unconditionally that Jesus Christ has risen for each and every one of this majority too; that His Word as the Word of reconciliation enacted in Him is spoken for them as it is spoken personally and quite undeservedly for him; that in Him all were and are objectively intended and addressed whether or not they have heard or will hear it in the course of history and prior to its end and goal; that the same Holy Spirit who has been incomprehensibly strong enough to enlighten his own dark heart will perhaps one day find a little less trouble with them; and decisively that when the day of the coming of Jesus Christ in consummating revelation does at last dawn it will quite definitely be that day when, not he himself, but the One whom he expects as a Christian, will know how to reach them, so that the quick and the dead, those who came and went both ante and post Christum, will hear His voice, whatever its significance for them (Jn. 5:25).

The detail of this sentence will not, of course, be acceptable to those who are committed to the doctrine of limited atonement, which is a shame for them; but the thrust of it is I hope broadly appealing.  Christ has spoken his word; astonishingly, by the power of the Spirit that word has reached even me; there is nobody who is therefore beyond the reach of this word, even in the passage of time and history in which we see such a small minority receive it; at the end of history Christ will speak his word in such a way that all will hear his voice 'whatever its significance for them' - and the context of Barth's reference to John's Gospel makes it clear we cannot prejudge what that significance will be.  I am reminded of the scene in The Last Battle when everyone comes face to face with Aslan, to head off to his left or right.  There is no need for anxiety about the progress of Christ's word; indeed, anxiety is ruled out by gospel hope.

This is what Christian hope means before that insurmountable barrier.  This is what the Christian hopes for in face of the puzzle which it presents.  But the Christian has not merely to hope.  He has really to show that he is a man who is liberated and summoned, as to faith and love, so also to hope.  And if he really hopes as he can and should as a Christian, he will not let his hands fall and simply wait in idleness for what God will finally do, neglecting his witness to Christ.  On the contrary, strengthened and encouraged by the thought of what God will finally do, he will take up his ministry on this side of the frontier.  He will thus not allow himself to be disturbed by questions of minorities or majorities, of success or failure, of the more probable or more likely improbable progress of Christianity in the world.  As a witness of Jesus Christ, he will simply do - and no more is required, though this is indeed required - that which he can do to proclaim the Gospel in his own age and place and circle, doing it with humility and good temper, but also with the resoluteness which corresponds to the great certainty of his hope in Jesus Christ.

To hope in this Christian sense is not a passive thing; it is not like hoping a bus will come along, just sitting and waiting for an event beyond one's control.  Rather, it is living as one called to hope.  Knowing that God has taken care of the end result, knowing that there is reason for absolute confidence - the Christian will bear witness to Christ.  Whether in the minority or majority, whether strong or weak, he will just do what can do in the place he is put; and all he can do is live and speak as a witness.  The humility in which this is to be done springs from the fact that nothing ultimately depends on his work as a witness, but everything rests on the One to whom he bears witness.

Safety, knowledge, faith

Sometimes you come across disagreements that seem to be totally intractable, things where the differences are so great that it seems almost impossible to discuss the issue.  Sometimes this is because we are emotionally invested in particular positions; sometimes, I think the disagreements cannot be overcome because we are not talking within the same epistemological structure.

For example, where Christian views of truth - which have of course been predominant in the West from late antiquity to the mid-twentieth century - think from the top down, beginning with God at the top and proceeding downwards via the concept of revelation, contemporary Western culture tend to think upwards, starting with the safety of the individual, and putting that at the centre of the epistemological world.  Whereas for the Christian view (which has its antecedents in, for example, Plato) there is inherent value in truth, a value which stands irrespective of the human effects of truth, for our culture certain opinions ought not to be held, certain beliefs are automatically invalidated, because they are considered to be harmful to the individual or society.

For Christians who are used to thinking primarily in terms of truth, real truth - what Schaeffer called 'true truth' - this can all be very disorienting, and can even appear so ridiculous as to be worthy only of mockery.  Truth, we know, does not bend to the individual; reality will not shift to make us comfortable.  But it really isn't ridiculous.  It is a move that is more or less required by the loss of faith in God.

If you don't believe in the Christian God, it takes immense courage to pursue truth, and it is not clear that it even makes sense to do so.

Christians have often tried to make the case that without the existence of God the very concept of truth is hard to maintain.  I agree with that, but it's not the point I'm making here.  What I'm saying here is that without the love of God, it probably doesn't make sense to pursue truth at all.  Because the Christian knows that God is love - and the Christian knows what that love means, because it has been demonstrated at the cross of Christ - it is possible to approach reality with a confidence that what is true is also good.  Truth may be hard to take; the truth may hurt me in many ways.  But I can be sure that ultimately the truth is good for me, because the Person who defines truth and creates reality is my Heavenly Father, the God of love.  Therefore the Christian can pursue the truth, with the knowledge that nothing ultimately harmful to me lies there.  I can be safe in the pursuit of the truth, not because every truth that I find will be comfortable, or because there will be no pain in the truth, but because behind every fragment of truth stands The Truth personified - Jesus Christ, the revelation of the love of the Father.

Now take away faith.  There is no reason to believe that truth and reality are good; there is no reason to believe that there is safety in the truth.  It may be that you nonetheless conclude that you want to know the truth.  You may decide to face the potentially very bleak reality.  But why?  What is the value of so doing?  In an atheistic world, what is at stake in pursuing the truth - why is it better to know than not to know?  If knowing the truth is harmful - and we have no reason whatsoever to believe that it will not be - why should we want it?  Shouldn't we value human comfort and safety, which are real, concrete things, which make life more bearable, over the abstract value of truth?

It is only the Christian, who knows that truth is not abstract but personal, who can therefore trust that truth is good, that Truth and Love are essentially the same - the same Person.  Out of this faith can come a genuine pursuit of the truth, in the confidence that however hard the truth is, we are ultimately safe with God.

Who was, and is, and is to come

 God describes himself in Revelation as the one who was, and is, and is to come.  There are all sorts of things that could be unpacked out of this (about God's relationship with time, about the nature of eternity, etc.) but I have been thinking this morning about the importance for the Christian life of keeping these three dimensions in mind.

If we forget that God is the one who was, we will tend to lose touch with the objective, once-for-all, foundational works of God.  This is a particular danger in our culture, which lives very much in the present (and perhaps to an extent in the future) but tends to regard the past as dead.  For the Christian, the past lives - because the God who was also is.  Moreover, the past - unlike, in our human experience at least, the present and the future - has a fixed character, a decided shape.  (This is true despite whatever attempts at revisionist historiography we might make; revisionism only appeals because it claims to account for more of the actual shape of things, to incorporate more of the evidence).  As against the subjective moment of the now, and the necessarily somewhat imaginative view of the future, the past is laid down.  It is therefore a solid rock for our faith.

If we neglect that God is the one who is, there is a real danger of a sort of functional deism.  We will live as if God wound up the universe, and perhaps also the church, and then left it to run.  We will tend to forget that Christ is presently reigning, that God is presently active.  Our worship will become all about remembering, rather than receiving.  We will typically not expect much now from God.  We may well neglect prayer, particularly that important prayer in the NT for the giving of the Spirit in greater measure.  We will tend not to pick up on those little signs of the kingdom , the shoots of grace growing in a generally barren world.

If we neglect that God is the one who is to come, it is likely that we will over-invest in the present.  That may look like settled, comfortable, compromised Christianity, which replaces the future hope of the kingdom with a paid off mortgage and foreign holidays.  But it may also look very zealous, a life lived in expectation that the kingdom of God can be ushered in by our efforts, prayers, whatever.  If the former, there is a real danger that - when it comes to the crunch point of realising we cannot serve two masters - we will choose to serve comfort.  If the latter, there is a real danger that we will be disappointed, perhaps disappointed enough to abandon the life of faith.

Is it pressing things too much to align those three great aspects of Christian discipleship - faith, love, and hope - with these three temporal dimensions?  To think of faith based on who God has shown himself to be in the past; of love as driving communion with God in the present; and of hope as reaching out for his future coming?  Of course they don't map on perfectly, but it seems to me there might be something there.

The key thing - and it is perhaps the main point of the biblical use of these descriptions - is that he is the same God.  The God of the past, of creation and of incarnation, is God in the present, and it is the same God we await in the future.  He is himself, perfectly himself, at all times.  He has not changed, nor will he.  Whether we look back, or up, or ahead - there he is.  Great is his faithfulness.

Outstanding questions

 As the Covid crisis enters what I guess we all hope will be its final act, I have various outstanding questions which I think need answering or at least exploring fairly urgently.  Here are some of the questions relating to churches and Christians in particular.

1. How should we think of our relationship with the state?  The big question is to what extent the state has a right to intervene in various areas of life, including the corporate worship of the church.  The acute version of the question is about when it becomes right to disobey or actively resist the instructions of the state.  To my mind, a great deal of the interaction on the big question has been naive about the state and its role, assuming that the state is basically and normally a force for good.  I am no libertarian - I believe in the necessity of a strong state - but biblically and theologically I think we need to consider the vision of the beastly state in Revelation 13, or the animalistic states of Daniel, or just the basic fact that the climactic encounter between God and the human state ends up with a weak Pilate signing off on the execution of the Messiah.  It is no coincidence, incidentally, that many passages to do with the state belong to the apocalyptic genre, where the human world is unmasked and its deeper spiritual dynamics are exposed (and is not Pilate the very picture of the unmasked state as he stands face to face with the Lord?)  In the big picture, the state is at best an ambiguous force.

How we answer the big-picture version of the question has, of course, an impact on how we view the acute version.  It has been depressing to me to see how often Christian leaders have reached instantly to Romans 13 as if the few verses there on obedience to the state constituted everything that Holy Scripture had to say on the subject; as if thinking theologically about the role of government just meant reiterating the content of these verses.  It isn't so.  Of course it has been generally recognised that there are instances where we ought to disobey: the two most commonly cited would be if the state asks us to sin, and if the state becomes a persecutor of the church.  But this is so narrow.  To me this represents the interests of a sect, not of a group of people who see themselves as the firstfruits of a new humanity.  It basically winds up being 'I'm all right, Jack', on a grand ecclesiastical scale.  The church should always stand up for the human over against the merely political.

2. What is gathered worship all about?  The general impression I've got is that the majority of us don't know.  We can get sermons online, we can meet up with fellow Christians for encouragement in the park; what are we really missing?  It seems clear that for the majority of Christians in the UK right now there is a view of the Christian life which begins with the individual, and sees church as a helpful add on.  This is not the historic Christian vision.  For historic Christianity (whether Roman, Orthodox, Lutheran, or Reformed) the corporate and sacramental life of the church comes first, and the individual enters into that life.  Viewed from that perspective, the suspension of corporate worship and of the sacraments becomes rather more tragic.  I wonder whether opposition to lockdown - especially the prolongation of lockdown - has been stiffer amongst those who hold to the historic Christian orthodoxy than it has amongst the majority of evangelicals.  I think so.

Coupled to this, I've noticed that Christians who disapprove of churches meeting illegally (on which, see question 3) often start their criticism with some variation of the phrase 'I'm looking forward to being with my church community as much as the next person...' as if church were essentially about human community.  Don't get me wrong, clearly a church is a human community, and the relational aspect is important.  But do we really just gather on a Sunday to be with people, to share common interests, to participate in shared traditions on a purely human level?  The vertical dimension in all this seems to have gone missing completely, and instead of the church, where Christ is offered from pulpit and table and his people are lifted up in the Spirit to be together with him as they offer their praises, we're left with a club, the Jesus Club.  I am not keen to be a member.

3. How can we disagree well?  I realise I've been rather strident above, and that might cut against my third point.  Oh well.  I am not one of those who thinks that disagreeing well means endless fudge and a desperate effort not to offend anyone.  There are those who can speak in mild tones about things they think are crucially important; I'm afraid I am not one of those people.  But there is one particular instance of disagreement which I have in mind: the public critique of people who are trying to follow their Lord.  If a church in good conscience, and after due consideration, thinks that the dominical command to gather together trumps the current regulations from HMG - by all means argue with them, by all means say they are wrong.  But at the same time, you ought to be saying: I commend these brothers and sisters for seeking to be faithful.  Rather too much of the response I have seen seems to have been intended to distance ourselves from those we fear the world may look on with disapprobation.  That's not right, surely?  Shouldn't we disagree robustly with orthodox believers whilst still being clear that we are with them, even if it damages our reputation in the eyes of the world?

4.  Speaking of reputation, I believe there is an ongoing question along the lines of: how do we bear witness?  My suspicion is that we have got used to a model of commending the gospel by being good neighbours and good citizens; I think that lies behind a lot of the critique levelled against churches meeting despite regulation to the contrary.  And of course, this is a genuine strand in the New Testament.  We are to be good neighbours and good citizens.  But the NT also points to the fact that no matter how good we are in this regard, we will still have a poor reputation, because we follow Christ.  It wasn't possible in the ancient world to decline to worship the pagan gods and still be regarded as a good citizen.  You had to choose.  I think the time of choice is upon us.  You can't be regarded as a good neighbour or good citizen and hold orthodox Christian teaching on sexuality, for example, or a host of other ethical issues.  But more fundamentally than that, you can't bear witness without being weird, without pointing to a whole different value system.  I was trying to express something about that in this post about worship.  I've tried to sum it up on Twitter: the difference between reputation management and witness is that the former requires us to do what the world expects, whilst the latter requires us to expect a new world.

Those are my big four questions.  I don't think we've collectively got answers to them.  As Covid-tide draws to a close over the next six months, I wonder whether we shouldn't pay some attention before the next crisis hits.

Standing on our own ground

There has been a bit of mostly good-natured debate amongst Christians around how churches ought to react to lockdown restrictions recently.  There are those who feel very strongly that churches should be open, and have lobbied for this; there are those who feel very strongly that churches should be acting for the common good and closing for the sake of public health.  I guess I've made it clear I'm with the former, but that's not what this particular post is about.  I want to make some wider observations about how we make these sorts of arguments and what that means for our engagement with the world.

A line which I've seen a number of variations on is this: 'of course, I believe that church services are more important than pubs or shops, but I don't expect the Government or society at large to agree with me'.  Sometimes this line comes from a place of resignation - we simply cannot expect people who do not acknowledge Christ to take Christian positions, so why bother?  But more often I think it is driven by strategy - it doesn't make sense, strategically, to advance arguments and positions which are so thoroughly grounded in a uniquely Christian perspective that they will simply be rejected out of hand by those who don't share that perspective.

Evidence that this strategy is being pursued can be found in the sorts of public presentations church leaders make.  In general, there is a great effort to persuade people that we are good for society - that we do a lot of social work, that we are essential to support people's spiritual and emotional health, and even that we contribute indirectly to the economy.  This is all a strategic effort to set out the worth of churches and Christianity in terms which the non-Christian world is more likely to understand and accept.

I have two concerns about this approach.  The first is that I think it is disingenuous.  The reason Christians value churches and Christianity is not because these things are beneficial to society.  We value Christianity because we think it is the absolute truth about the universe and the way of redemption.  We value church because here is the gathered community of the redeemed, here is the preached Word which gives us life, and here is the Table at which we feed on Christ.  I think we are in danger of presenting an untruth, or at least performing a bait and switch: trying to persuade society to let us meet or whatever on the grounds that we run food banks, and then when given freedom putting most of our efforts into preaching sermons.

The second, and deeper, concern is that we divide ourselves.  In general, people think they're just moving on to this ground - this perceived shared ground of common values - in order to make a strategic argument, whilst in our hearts maintaining the priority of Christian truth.  But I don't think we can internally stand on the ground of the gospel whilst externally occupying a different position for strategic reasons - or at least I don't think we can keep it up.  A stance taken up for reasons of strategic engagement is likely to become our ultimate stance before long.  It seems to me, for example, that we can trace the descent of someone like Steve Chalke into heresy from an initial commitment to a place of strategic engagement - certainly the first hint I saw of his declension revolved around changing our doctrine of sin to fit better with an understanding of human nature which played better in development circles.

I think we are better to stand on our own ground, even if it means not being understood; better to lose the argument than to lose our souls.  This is not an argument for obscurantism - we ought to try to translate and contextualise our message, but at the end of the day we still need to be sure that it still is our message.  In the public sphere, we ought not to be scrambling to occupy come sort of common ground; we ought to be saying with the Psalmist 'pay homage to the Son or he will be angry'.

On the use of the Creed

 Steve Kneale has published a piece entitled Five reasons reciting creeds is unhelpful - a title which surely warrants a rebuttal!  For the record, my own church background is in 1689 Baptistry, but I now pastor a small church which takes the Nicene Creed as its basis of faith, and I am a strong advocate for the use of the Creed in public worship (and I like the Apostles' Creed as well, just not quite as much).  So, here's why I think each of Steve's reasons is wrong, and sometimes dangerously so.

1. Sola Scriptura.  For Steve, it seems, the use of creeds undermines the unique authority of Scripture in the church.  "We want people to have confidence in the Word of God" - yes, absolutely!  So, why not just always go to the source?  Why not just read the Bible instead of the Creed?  Well, firstly it's not an either/or.  Read both in your services!  Recite the Creed and recite the Psalms.  Yes, a thousand times yes, to more Bible.  But why then the Creed?  Because when Steve goes on to say that "when people state what they believe, I would prefer they pointed directly to the Bible and affirmed it, rather than a statement drawn up after it" this is exactly the argument an Arian would have made in the fourth century.  It is possible to mis-read the Bible - Jesus highlights the possibility - and in so doing miss or distort the life-giving message.  Biblicism will not help us here; the heretics themselves claim the Scriptures to be on their side.  The Creed functions as a distilled statement of the essential truth, and therefore as a guide to Scripture reading.  Putting it into our worship, reciting it together, helps to ensure that we are all on the same page on such essentials as the deity of Christ.  It is not vital that we recite it, but it is helpful.

2. The creeds require explanation.  No doubt.  I preached a series on the Nicene Creed not too long ago to provide some of that explanation for our crew.  But everything, including Holy Scripture, needs explaining.  Often the hymns we sing need explaining.  Explanation is no bad thing.  But also, the creeds do some explaining of their own.  The Nicene Creed explains what we mean when we talk about the deity of Christ.  It explains, in fact, what the Scriptures mean when they talk about Jesus as the Son of God.  In explaining the Creed, I've found myself simply preaching the gospel.  And that can't be so bad.

3. Use of the creeds in worship confuses the church about authority.  Steve asks 'is the creed authoritative?' - if it is, doesn't that undermine the authority of Scripture?  If it isn't, why are we using it in worship?  Again, there is a really unhelpful biblicism here.  The Bible is, and must be seen to be, the ultimate authority in all matters of doctrine; but it is not the only authority.  We don't come to the Bible as if nobody had ever read it before.  Yes, ultimately we believe and use the Creed because we are convinced it has behind it the authority of Scripture; but we also acknowledge that others have gone ahead of us, that we are part of the catholic church which spans the centuries, within which there are subordinate authorities like creeds.  They are not ultimate, but they are not lightly put aside if we want to be sure that we stand in some continuity of faith with our spiritual forebears.  In our teenage culture, which thinks it needs to reinvent everything all the time, it is good to recognise the (subordinate) authority of our fathers and mothers in faith.

4. Alien to outsiders.  Reciting creeds feels weird to visitors.  This is weak.  Almost everything we do in worship feels weird to outsiders.  So what?  As to encouraging people to chunter along to words they don't and can't mean - presumably Steve still has songs in church, and presumably they are full of lyrics a non-Christian can't really sing?

5. Creeds are alien to the Baptist tradition.  Steve finds the recitations of creeds to be Anglican, and he suspects that behind that lurks Catholicism.  In fact, the Nicene Creed is regularly recited in worship in Orthodox, Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, and Presbyterian churches.  It is catholic, in the good old sense of basically and universally Christian - both as a statement of doctrine and as a building block of liturgy.  There is something peculiar about British non-conformity here, by the way.  I was once chatting with an American Presbyterian minister who asked whether British evangelicals would find it weird that his congregation crossed themselves during the Gloria Patri.  I had to say yes - they would find the manual action weird, and they would find the Gloria Patri weird!  The fear of 'catholicism' - perhaps caused by the proximity to Anglo-Catholicism in particular - has distorted the view of what is just 'normal church' for many British evangelicals.  If the creeds are alien to the Baptist tradition, the Baptist tradition is (at that point) alien to the universal belief and practice of the church.

So, to summarise my argument: biblicism is bad, weird is okay, Baptists should get with the programme.

Divine mandates and the present crisis

In the tragically unfinished Ethics manuscript entitled The Concrete Commandment and the Divine Mandates, Dietrich Bonhoeffer begins to investigate what a well-ordered human society might look like.  The first thing he wants to be clear on is that in a well-ordered society we are always faced with the one concrete commandment of God "as it is revealed in Jesus Christ".  There can be no neutrality on this point; Christ Jesus rules in every sphere of life.  (Bonhoeffer pushes back here against the Lutheran understanding of the two kingdoms; indeed, he does not consider this to be authentically Lutheran teaching at all).  But the one commandment encounters us in particular circumstances, particular spheres.  Bonhoeffer talks about the four divine mandates of church, marriage and family, culture (or sometimes 'work'), and government.

In each of these four mandates we come up against the concrete commandment of God; each is ordered from above, from heaven, and is not merely an outgrowth or development of human history.  The four mandates are envisaged as co-existing: "None of these mandates exists self-sufficiently, nor can any one of them claim to replace all the others."  They are with-one-another, for-one-another, and over-against-one-another; that is to say, they are limited by one another even as they exist to support one another.  The obvious target here for Bonhoeffer is the encroaching Nazi totalitarianism, which wants to subordinate all spheres of life to the state.  In fact, each of the divine mandates finds itself limited in two key ways in a well-ordered society: from above, because it is constrained to serve God's commandment and not its own ends, and from all sides, because it cannot arbitrarily encroach on the territory of the other mandates.

This is Bonhoeffer's version of a theory which has been commonplace in Christian thinking about politics and society.  Whether it is the high mediæval assertion of the church's liberties against the crown (think Beckett), or the Lutheran two kingdoms doctrine, or the Barmen Declaration railing against totalitarianism in the 1930s, the goal is the same: to understand, on the basis of God's creation and Christ's universal Lordship, what it means for human institutions to exercise legitimate authority within their particular spheres.

This is a peculiarly Christian approach.  Because God sits above every sphere, and because each of the mandates finds it authorisation in him and his providential arrangement, it is not possible for any to usurp the place of the others.  Family is not dependent on the state for its authorisation; the church is not dependent on the culture for its authorisation; etc. etc.  Each mandate operates with divine authorisation within its own sphere.  The mandates are oriented towards each other - they are not hermetically sealed against each other - but they cannot arbitrarily claim an authority to interfere in other spheres.  If the church is to interfere in the state, it must not be to usurp the state, but to establish the state in its independence within its own sphere.  If the state wishes to be involved in regulating family life, that can only be for the sake of the independence of family life from the state.

To my mind, this is what has been missing from a lot of Christian debate about the response to Covid from Her Majesty's Government.  Many of the responses I've seen have relied on a biblicist citing of Romans 13 to suggest that we must always submit to the Government's whims.  Most have jumped straight to the practical question 'when should we disobey?'  But the background questions which urgently need working through are: is the state currently operating within its legitimate sphere, or has it usurped the place of other mandates; and, where the state has impinged on other mandates, has it done so with the legitimate aim of strengthening those mandates in their independence?  These are the questions which are raised by the historic Christian tradition of political and social thought.  I'd like to see some more work done on them.  We ought not to take it for granted that the state has the authority which it claims for itself, nor should we short-circuit the theo-political thinking that needs to happen here by a quick appeal to a Pauline proof-text.

The church is uniquely well placed to offer constructive critique here.  This sense of a divine division of powers has largely faded in our society; we are ripe for totalitarianism, even if it does turn out to be democratic totalitarianism.  The church, though, is still able to see Christ on his throne above it all, limiting but also authorising the various human institutions in their particular spheres.  The church can and should speak out - not only when her own sphere is threatened, but also to speak up for the rights of family, and of culture, and, yes, even of the state where those rights are threatened.  Because we see each sphere as established by God, we cannot be content to see them dissolved into one another.

The present crisis is the time to think this through, to work out what we are called to say and do.  Crisis is always the time when institutions threaten to overflow their banks.  Legitimate crisis response easily becomes illegitimate accumulation of powers.  We should not take it for granted that when the crisis passes things will return to 'normal'; it is far more likely, I think, that the crisis reveals what has been really going on for years.

The dangers of under- and over-analysing

One of the things which has been thrust upon pastors in particular by the arrival of Covid-19 has been an increased urgency in trying to read our situation.  What is going on in our culture?  How are people thinking?  Granted that the Word we need to speak never changes, how do we speak that Word into this particular 'here and now'?  It has always been part of the job to try to answer these questions, but the present moment has made it more pressing; no longer are we asking about long-term trends, but instead we are asking what is happening now, right now in these tumultuous weeks and months.

I think there are two dangers we need to avoid as we go about this task.

On the one hand, there is a danger of under-analysis.  At its worst, this is naivety - taking everything at face value and declining to look below the surface at all.  If the Government says it is doing something, that must be what it's doing.  But it needn't be that extreme.  Sometimes it is just viewing the particulars without any context.  Pursuing a cure and/or vaccine for the virus must be good.  Sure.  But if we don't look at the context, we'll miss bigger points about our society's approach to health, and the conceptualisation of death which is common amongst those around us.  Why do they talk like this?  What is revealed by the particular response to this threat to our health about our underlying habits of thought?  I think if we don't do this work we'll end up like the bull, chasing the red cloth around without ever coming within touching distance of the real target.

The danger of over-analysis, on the other hand, is at its most extreme the conspiracy theory.  Nothing is taken at face value; everything conceals a hidden pattern, which only those with the key can see.  (Paradoxically, this is often accompanied by scorn for all those who have not been enlightened and cannot see what is 'really going on').  But it needn't go that far.  Some of us naturally see patterns, naturally integrate things into a bigger whole - and there is a danger in so doing that we impose a conceptual scheme rather than perceiving the facts.  In particular, we can end up telling people that they really believe one thing even though they say they believe something else.

All of us would like to think we hit the happy medium here.  My guess is that all of us are wrong, and we all naturally lean to one side or the other.  (I am an instinctive over-analyser, for what it's worth).  I think the task at the moment is made more difficult by a cloud which hangs over the whole situation, something which I tend to analyse (!) as a spiritual attack.  But the task is vital if we're to speak the gospel into the here and now - which is to say, to the real people in the world around us.  Perhaps knowing our natural tendency might help us to correct it.  Certainly listening carefully to others will help.  Above all, prayer and being soaked in Scripture must be the key.

A letter I signed

 Last week I was asked to sign a letter to the Prime Minister and First Ministers of the devolved administrations offering a Christian reflection on the current governmental response to Covid-19.  I was glad to sign.  You can read the full text of the letter here.  Since the letter itself, and the media reporting of it over the weekend, has aroused a little controversy, I wanted to offer my own thoughts - an apologia pro signatura mea if you like.

What does the letter say?

To me, there seem to be two points to the letter.  One is the negative consequences of lockdown and other restrictions which we have seen on families, on lonely people, and on society more generally.  These are concerns which I think are broadly shared within and beyond the Christian church, and they are concerns which ministers of the gospel ought to voice.  The logic in the letter - that Christ came to give fulness of life, and therefore we cannot settle for a course which preserves bare existence at the expense of the very things that give life value and enjoyment - seems sound.  It is biblical and gospel-grounded, but has the potential also to appeal to those who do not accept the presupposition.  If you don't believe that Christ came to give life in its fulness, you may still think that bare existence is not much worth preserving.  As I say, many people are making this point, but we Christians ought also to make it, and louder; we ought to take a stand for the common societal good.

The second point is narrower, and stresses the crucial importance for our society of Christian worship.  This, of course, is unlikely to appeal beyond the church, but it bears saying anyway.  Life cannot be lived to the full without the gathered worship of the Triune God.  The corporate worship of God's people is what everything exists for.  This should be uncontroversial in the church, and if the world at large can't understand it, so be it.  We ought not to yield to a perspective that is not rooted in Holy Scripture.

So what does it mean?

The Sunday Times reported the letter under the headline Churches vow to stay open this time.  This is a silly headline.  I certainly didn't make any sort of vow when signing, nor am I committed to the idea that as a church we would not comply with any further restrictions.  As a point of fact, I don't have the power or authority to make that decision!  Logistically, CCC meets in a community centre, and if they close then de facto so do we, at least as far as public worship goes.  More importantly, within our church that sort of decision would not be mine alone to make; the elders would have to agree, and in fact it would be such a momentous step that I think we would need a congregational vote.  How I would advise the congregation to vote in that case I don't yet know; it would depend on the circumstances.

As I read the letter, what the signatories are asking is that we not be put in the position of having to make such a decision.  We do not want to have to ask our churches to choose between obedience to God and obedience to the secular authority.  This is not a threat of disobedience - it is a request that we not be moved in a direction where disobedience might be necessary.  Personally, I would have worded it somewhat more strongly.  I think the government is operating outside its legitimate sphere of operations in restricting individuals, families, and churches as it has done for so long - on which more later in the week.  But that is not what is at issue here.  The letter is simply an appeal that the harms done by lockdown be recognised, and that the importance of Christian worship be recognised in any future decision making.  I guess we will have a more ready audience for the former point, but the latter could not go unmade if we are to be faithful to the gospel.

I imagine that amongst signatories to the letter there is a broad spectrum of approach.  I know that some - as reported over the weekend - are already ignoring guidelines related to singing, for example.  I am not doing that, nor will I be in the near future.  Others are content that current restrictions are sensible and legitimate, but don't want to see anything further.  I personally can't see that they are either sensible or legitimate.  There is a range of opinion - I know from speaking to a few people - but we should be able to agree on the two key points: lockdown has been harmful in many ways (and this is not to prejudge whether it has also been essential); and Christian worship is essential.

Where do we go from here?

It seems clear to me that we need some more robust theological work on the place of the state.  A fair amount of the commentary seems to be biblicist in its quick jump to Romans 13 as if that settled all issues.  We have a couple of millennia of thought on this topic which we ought to be bringing to bear.  We also perhaps need a clearer view of the value of corporate worship; many people seem to think we're not missing much by streaming or being on Zoom.  I think Zoom church is church on life support.  Now is the time to do this theological work - the best theology always emerges under the pressure of events.

We need to continue to speak into issues that go beyond the immediate rights and concerns of the church.  If I'd been writing the letter, I might have put more stress on the first point, or at least developed it more.  We don't just speak out when they come for us - we should have learnt this at least from the Confessing Church.  But - and again we should have learnt this from the Barmen Declaration - we must speak on our own ground, on gospel ground.  We don't disconnect the societal needs from the gospel need.

Perhaps above all, we need to avoid making our opinions on Covid or on Her Majesty's Government a mark of righteousness.  Personally, I haven't been singing in church and have worn a mask as required - but I am not thereby justified.  On the other hand, I have signed this letter, and have written somewhat critically of the restriction regime - but I am not thereby justified.  We can and should disagree well on these things, both within our churches and between them.  A stress on the centrality of the gospel, a willingness to go slower (and faster) than we are personally comfortable with in order to show love to others, and a willingness to hear other sides empathetically and sympathetically ought to mark our approach.  We should do everything we can to avoid distancing ourselves from brothers and sisters who hold the gospel, even whilst clearly expressing our disagreements as necessary.

I was glad to sign the letter.  I was encouraged to see so many others sign it.  I hope that many who didn't feel able to sign it still feel able to speak into the legitimate concerns expressed.  I hope this represents the beginning of a new boldness and engagement for the church in the UK.

Fog of War

Chatting through the general situation yesterday, the image of fog pressed itself powerfully on my mind.  It does seem as if everyone, from government downwards, is blundering about in a thick murk.  Objectives are unclear.  The very situation is unclear.  What is really happening?  What are we trying to do?

The Government prolongs a state in which normal human activity is criminalised.  There is growing evidence that this is doing great harm to society and to the health of individuals, and yet we press on with it.  Does anyone know why?  The stated reasons for introducing restrictions way back were to do with 'flattening the curve', ensuring the health service is not overwhelmed.  Those reasons seem to have gone by the wayside.  What are our objectives now?  It's all been swallowed up by fog.  It is hard to avoid the conclusion that HMG is lost in the cloud.

Of more desperate concern, for me at least, is that our Christian witness seems to have got lost in the fog.  We - who believe in a hope that goes beyond this life, who trust in a sovereign God - surely we ought to have something powerful to say in this situation?  But we proceed with such uncertainty.  I don't hear people speaking with assurance and authority on behalf of Christ.  it's like we're just not quite sure where we are or where we need to go.

I'm not talking about other people.  It's in my mind, the fog.  I wander through my days in a state of distraction, wondering what is really going on and where we really are.  I get stuff done, I talk to people, I write sermons.  But am I saying the right things?  What's the word for the moment?

I'm sure there are lots of potential causes for this feeling of being lost in a fog.  I am sure that at least one of them is spiritual.  We are in a spiritual battle, and I am quite sure that keeping us muddled is one of Satan's key ploys.  It's relatively easy right now.  We lack the key thing which allows us to see clearly: gathered worship.  When we come together as God's people, one of the things that happens is that we together lift up our hearts to the throne of heaven, where Christ is seated.  From that vantage point we see what is really going on.  The fog disperses as we sing the truth, as we pray the truth.  Taking the Holy Supper together orients us on the most important reality: that Christ has died and risen, that sin and death are vanquished.  We orient ourselves, locate ourselves in God's great plan of salvation.

In the absence of gathered worship - or even in the practice of gathered worship that is weakened and attenuated by restrictions and regulations - we are lost.

Send your light and your truth; let them lead me.
Let them bring me to your holy mountain,
to your dwelling place.
Then I will come to the altar of God,
to God, my greatest joy.
I will praise you with the lyre,
God, my God.

Liberty as a human good

I know lots of people are vexed over current restrictions on our lives.  For myself, the frustrations fall into a number of categories: that the rules seem arbitrary; that there seems very little evidence base for many of them; that they show a basic misunderstanding of most of the elements of life they are intended to regulate; that they change in unpredictable fashion for no very obvious reason; that they are inconsistent; that they have been imposed without due scrutiny in Parliament...

I could go on, but I guess that makes it clear where I stand.

I know that we will all have different perspectives on this, and many people will feel that the rules are basically justified even if the detail isn't great; others will feel there should be no rules at all, or perhaps just voluntary guidelines.  I get it.  I have to keep reminding myself that although I try to be informed I am really no expert.  Probably neither are most of you.  So my opinion is just that, and there is no reason it should carry a huge amount of weight, and I won't offer any further comment on it.

Where I do want to comment is at the intersection of church and society, and therefore of theology and politics.  Like many people, pastors have been scrambling to understand the new regulations (and given the constantly moving target, this is an ongoing task).  We've been asking each other questions about how the 'rule of six' affects people arriving at worship services; we've been looking for loopholes that would enable our homegroups to meet for fellowship.  On the whole, what we've found is that the regs make it extremely difficult for us to do anything approaching 'normal church'.

So here's the thing: what is a homegroup?  Well, it's an attempt to create community, to share life, in the particular context of the church.  But community and life-sharing are not activities unique to the church.  In fact, in its community and fellowship the church, in so far as it understands itself, will be aware that it is just being human.  Christ is the Creator, and the Lord of the Church.  In the church, he brings his human creation back to itself, back to normality.  So the church's activities are, in the specific context of the community of faith, just being human.  Which means that we need to realise that if we're being restricted from running our homegroups - and assuming we're not being particularly targeted, which we're not - then something fundamentally human is being restricted.  I think our response then needs to be not looking for loopholes to try to maintain our particular activities, but speaking up for the common human need for community and togetherness.  We need to think more broadly than 'government is getting in the way of our programmes and structures' to see that government is getting in the way of being human.  The liberty to come together as people is a human good.

None of this is to prejudge the question of whether and to what extent government is currently justified in restricting that liberty.  People will have different views on that.  I get it.  I just think we need to consider those views in the broader context.

Theologically, I've seen a lot of people rolling out Romans 13 to argue that we must submit to the state - until or unless the state particularly targets Christians to prevent their witness (in which case, Acts 4:19 kicks in).  I think that represents a truncated view of the biblical stance on the state - it is, perhaps, biblicism, in the sense that it does not take into account the whole of God's revelation in Holy Scripture or the way in which the church has wrestled with the question of the state over the centuries.  In this context, I want to point out that it tends to limit the church's interventions on questions of liberty to those which directly affect us and our activities.  What about a wider, creational concern for humankind?  Does Romans 13 mean we can never protest an unjust decree?  Our theological forebears thought it just to part a king from his head over the question of liberty - and whilst I'm not sure they were right, I don't think we can just quote Romans 13 to say they were wrong.

Again, I want to stress that I'm not saying you ought to come down on one side or the other in terms of the particular justice of the current regulations.  I guess my view is clear, but I know my limitations and I don't expect everyone to agree with me.  All I'm really asking is that we have the conversation in an expanded context.

Leadership

I've written before about my concerns with the preoccupation with leadership in the evangelical constituency of which I am a small part.  I'm seeing a lot floating around on the subject again, much of it a healthy response to the presence of abusive leadership within the churches.  That's good, in so far as it goes, but I do wonder whether the problem runs deeper.  I wonder why we're so obsessed with the idea of leadership in the first place.

I think there is a language problem here, which probably has a conceptual problem behind it.  If I turn to older authors, I find much about ministry, but very little about leadership.  Pastors and elders do not seem to be conceived of as leaders, or at least that is not the main way in which they are conceived.  That broadly reflects the balance of biblical language, where leadership occurs rarely in relation to the church (Hebrews 13 is the main collection of 'leader' words; there is also 'rule' in 1 Timothy 5:17).  We ought perhaps to be asking why we talk so much about leadership when neither Scripture nor Tradition make this a major theme.

Where does it come from, this emphasis on leadership?  My guess is that much of my constituency is based in University towns, and many of the pastors I know cut their teeth in student ministry.  In Christian Union circles, the question of who will lead is often acute; I know that as a UCCF Staff Worker I was often preoccupied with questions of who would lead the committee next year.  'Raising up leaders' in these contexts becomes very important.  I wonder whether 'leadership' models make more sense in parachurch organisations than they do in the church as the household of God; I wonder what that says about parachurch.  Similarly, in large churches with rapid turnover of people (i.e., student churches), the need to find and equip people to lead in the various established programmes of the church makes 'raising up leaders' a constant task.  And of course when you're working with students you are often (but not always) working with people who will, humanly speaking, be leaders in their various spheres.  Why not also in church?

There is a need to invest in next generation of ministers and servants of the church - no doubt.  But I wonder whether the constant talk of leadership, and leadership training, doesn't distort our view of ministry and of church.  Of ministry, of course, because we start to view pastors and elders through a conceptual lens which is not the one primarily employed by the inspired authors; of church, because so much of our energy is directed towards a minority of people.  After all, most people in our churches will never be 'leaders'.  If 'raising up leaders' is a preoccupation, then will we bother with those people?  What does it say to the 'average footsoldier' in the church if our primary goal seems to be raising and equipping leaders?  What does it communicate about their value, the worth of their service?

Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me that our efforts to root out 'bad leaders' will always be hampered by the fact that the very notion of leadership as we have employed it is bad from the start, and the ecclesiology - and indeed theology proper - that stands in need of such a notion of leadership is seriously wonky.

Navigating the Culture War

 A few years ago I wrote about some of my anxieties about the concept of 'culture war'.  At that time, it seemed like the culture war was a uniquely American conflict.  It seemed broadly good to me that we weren't fighting a culture war.  It seemed particularly good that the church wasn't implicated on one side of a culture war as it tends to be in the US.

Well, time moves on.  The culture war has reached the UK.  Perhaps it has been brewing for a long time, but now it seems much more out in the open.  Increasingly, 'normal' politics has been suspended in favour of a battle over what British culture is and what it ought to be.  We have almost reached the point where remaining a non-combatant is only possible by not engaging at all in public life.  That is the way I see it, anyway.

Here are a few 'thinking out loud' pointers on how to navigate the culture war:

1.  Remember that in the UK, the church is not a major player in the culture war.  In the USA there are enough evangelical Christians that their opinion matters to politicians.  Leaders in the culture war want the church on their side; either because they think the church supports their values, or just because they need the church's votes.  Nobody in the UK very much cares what we think.  It would be a mistake, then, to read the UK version of the culture war through an American lens which makes the role of religion and the church look much larger than it really is.  The war between 'conservatives' and 'liberals' over UK culture is only tangentially related (via history) to Christianity.

2.  Keeping that in mind, we should refuse to allow the culture war to become absolute.  We should refuse to identify one side or the other with the kingdom of God.  We should not speak or act as if one side or the other embodied 'Christian' values.

3.  This doesn't mean we shouldn't engage.  Human culture is a natural - which is to say, a created - good.  We should be concerned about our culture.  We should endeavour to influence our culture, with whatever little influence each of us has individually, in ways that we deem to be good.  We should not sit secure in our knowledge that the real Kingdom endures no matter what goes on in the world (which is true), and therefore not care about what happens in the world.  We should aim to do good.

4.  When we engage, we should resist picking a side.  We need to think through each individual issue and avoid seeing things as a slate, where we are forced to accept everything that is said by one side or the other.  Because you agree with one side on the value on life does not mean you have to agree with them on economics.  Because you agree with one side on refugees does not mean you have to toe their particular line on sexuality and gender.  One thing this will mean is that we will probably end up looking like the baddies to everyone.  Such is the Christian life.

5.  We need to be careful to distinguish Kingdom issues from culture issues.  Sometimes this is easy.  Whether patriotic songs should be sung at the Proms is a culture issue.  Whether people should be allowed to kill other people in utero is a Kingdom issue.  This does not mean the Kingdom has nothing to say about the Proms, or that issues of abortion aren't influenced by culture; it is simply to say that some things are clearly and directly related to a Christian ethic, and others are much more open to disagreement.  Sometimes it is more complex: on gender issues, I think there is a Kingdom issue at the heart of things - the created difference between men and women - but a cultural issue around how this is expressed.  We need to think this through because some issues will be a matter of repentance and discipleship, and others of agreeing to disagree, within the church.  If someone in your church thinks abortion is okay, it is a matter of Christian discipleship to set them right and call them to repentance; if someone in your church wants to sing Land of Hope and Glory, fine - whether that is to your taste and consonant with your politics or not.

6.  How we engage is as important as the substantive issues.  We can be enthusiastic exponents of left or right wing politics, but we can't let those things trump the Gospel.  We can witness to the reality of the other Kingdom, the true Kingdom, by caring as much about our culture as anyone else, but expressing ourselves with a godly gentleness born out of a confidence that God is in control whatever happens.  In particular, we witness to the reality of the Kingdom by committing to a church community where not everyone will agree with our stance on cultural issues.

The diminished capacity of language

 Reading theologians and pastors of previous centuries, it is rare to find a bare reference to 'Jesus' or to 'the Trinity'.  It is always 'the Lord Jesus'; it is always 'the Holy Trinity' or 'the Blessed Trinity'.  These are not just decorative adjectives.  They are, it seems to me, part of a whole way of using language to express reverence.

Problem: if I use language like that, I just sound pompous.

I think it's clear that linguistic usage has shifted, in the direction of more casual language, more off-hand use of words.  I imagine that follows our culture in general, which has become much more casual - and presumably it circles around to reinforce that tendency.  The question is: can we be reverent when our language no longer has the capacity to carry the weight of reverence?

I think the same probably applies to the use of (what seems to us) extravagant language of love to the Lord Jesus.  Our cynical culture struggles to take this seriously; I find myself that reading Owen or Bernard on the Song of Songs is difficult.  Our language doesn't seem to possess any longer the capacity for this sort of expression.

Resolved: in a casual, throw-away culture, in which language has become thin and diminished, to wrestle to use words with care, in order to preserve and perhaps restore their capacity to express and encourage great thoughts and emotions.

The light of Christ

One thing that Ike Miller's book on illumination has brought out very clearly for me - and it's something I've thought about before - is that the gospel binds together word and experience, the objective and subjective.  The last chapter of the book in particular discusses illumination as a human experience.  Illumination that doesn't actually illuminate is not a thing.  The Divine Light of the Father, shining in the face of Christ, has to reach human hearts and minds in the enlightening power of the Holy Spirit.  The work of the Blessed Trinity has to bless actual human lives in their real experience; only then are we really talking about illumination as we see it in Scripture.

But putting it in those Trinitarian terms helps to explain what Christian experience is.  It is a genuine experience of God, but what that means is seeing by the Spirit the light of God in the face of Jesus Christ.  It means having the eyes of one's heart opened by the Spirit of God so that in Jesus we see God's glory.  Miller does a great job of showing how this means, for us, concretely an encounter with Christ mediated by the Scriptural witness.  The word of God written is the place where we meet the Word of God in person.  The light in the face of Christ comes to us in the light of the sacred page.

(As an aside, I am regularly struck by this prayer in the CW liturgy for Morning Prayer: 'As we rejoice in the gift of this new day, so may the light of your presence, O God, set our hearts on fire with love for you...'  It is a prayer which directly prefaces the reading of the Scriptures!  Of course it is.  Where else do we see the light of his presence?  I don't have Miller in front of me, so I can't be sure on this, but I don't think he particularly discusses how this would extend to the word of God preached, the proclamation of the church; but certainly on Barthian terms we would want to construe that in an analagous way to the use of Scripture).

Here's the thing: it's the same light - the Divine Light of the Father, the Light of the World in Christ Jesus, the Enlightening Holy Spirit who sheds light abroad in our hearts.  The same light.  The light which dawns in the heart is the same light which shone before there was a first dawn.  ("God, who said 'let light shine out of darkness' has shone in our hearts...")  And it is the light of Christ!  There is no divine light that reaches this world which is not mediated by Christ Jesus and carried to us by the Holy Spirit.

Christians from time to time talk as if you could separate spiritual experience from content; as if there were some access to God which did not have cognitive content.  I do not think that will fly.  We encounter God in his Word - in Christ as he is brought to us in Holy Scripture and biblical preaching - by the Spirit.  There is no chasm between the taught content of the gospel and the felt experience of the gospel, just as there is no gap between Christ and his Spirit.  We tear them asunder at our peril.

Seeing by the Light

 Part of my holiday reading was Seeing by the Light by Ike Miller, subtitled Illumination in Augustine's and Barth's Readings of John.  This is the first book I've read in the Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture series, published in the UK by IVP under the Apollos imprint, but the aim of the series - to promote constructive contributions to systematic theology from an evangelical perspective through faithful Scriptural engagement and engagement with the tradition of the church - definitely appeals.  This particular book fits the vision perfectly, exploring the important theme of illumination - that is to say, how it comes about that certain people are enlightened, enabled to see the truth of the gospel.

Miller tackles his subject in three sections.  The first two look at Augustine and Barth respectively, and in particular the readings of John's Gospel in Augustine's sermons and Barth's lectures of 1925-6.  In both cases, Miller takes us first to the systematic/dogmatic statements of the theologian in question, to show us their general thoughts about illumination as a topic.  He then turns to their treatment of John's Gospel to see these principles worked out in exegetical practice.  For Barth, in particular, he highlights the contemporaneity between the lectures on John and the writing of the Gottingen Dogmatics.  We can be confident that 'theory' and 'practice' were being developed together.  Both historical sections of the book were fascinating, even if I did get a little bogged down in some of the discussion of Augustine reception.  I have always found Augustine pleasantly straightforward to read; books about Augustine less so!  But Miller helps us to navigate certain critical points around the influence of Neo-Platonism on Augustine's thought as it touches on the subject of illumination, clarifying especially that for Augustine light is not a faculty of human reason, but is a divine gift.  It will come as no surprise to the regular reader here that I was particularly interested in the section on Barth.  What comes across clearly here is that, whilst Barth does not devote much space to discussions of illumination within his dogmatic works, this is largely because he subsumes the topic under the heading of revelation.  This is not incidental; for Barth revelation has not occurred unless it has gone all the way, so to speak.

The third section of the book is devoted to turning these historical exercises into a constructive theological proposal.  Here Miller draws on the resources offered by Augustine and Barth, but is not afraid to supplement and correct them.  By offering first some Biblical Theology - an attempt to draw out the doctrine of illumination presented in John's Gospel (and Epistles) - he ensures that his work is not merely a reflection on past theological constructions, but a positive contribution to theology now.  The proposal proper is offered in two chapters, dealing with the theological nature of illumination and illumination as a human experience.  The latter in particular draws heavily and positively on Barth's Church Dogmatics II/1.

You'll need to get the book to see the full proposal, but here are a few things that I'm taking away from it.  Firstly, if we're going to treat the theme of illumination in a way which conforms linguistically and conceptually to Holy Scripture, we need to avoid making illumination merely an annexe of Pneumatology.  The 'Spirit as spotlight' version of illumination is not consonant with John's Gospel as a narrative of Christ entering the world as its light.  Second, we need to see the doctrine of illumination as what Miller calls 'an economy of light'.  Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are working in their distinctive but united ways to shed the divine light abroad in the world and in human hearts.  Third, we need to recognise that the experience of illumination is one which simply may not be explicable in human terms, because it is grounded firmly in God himself and his action.  That is to say, illumination is something that happens to human beings; it comes from without.  Fourth, it is helpful to see illumination in terms of participation.  The Spirit enables us to participate in Christ's own knowledge of the Father.

The topic of illumination is surely of critical importance, particularly in this cultural moment.  At a time when Christianity is very definitely a minority interest, and belief can no longer be taken for granted, it becomes more important than ever that believers be able to give an account of how they come to be believers.  This matters for us, in terms of having a secure basis in our faith; and it matters for our witness to the world.  So as I got to the end of the book, I wanted another couple of chapters.  I want to think about what the Biblical doctrine of illumination means for apologetics and evangelism; and I want to think a bit more about whether what is being proposed here is necessarily a version of fideism - and what that means for those who struggle in their faith.  But maybe that is all somewhat beyond the scope of this volume, and is stuff I will need to think through for myself.  When I do so, I think Miller will have provided me with plenty of theological fuel for my ponderings.

Bouncing back

I recently bought a pillow.  It turns out that normal pillows are very bad for me, and I need something a bit different; so now I have a memory foam pillow.  Memory foam is funny stuff.  The pillow came screwed up into a tiny box, and when it was taken out looked frankly pathetic.  Far too thin to be a useful pillow; no discernible shape to it.  The instruction was to leave it for up to 72 hours before use, to allow it to regain its shape.  With no previous experience of memory foam, I was a bit sceptical, and wondered if I'd been scammed.  But lo and behold, a couple of days later the pillow looked just as it was meant to, and I have slept better and had less neck pain ever since.

So, in case you've not already worked out where this parable is going, and perhaps think I'm just telling you an anecdote about a pillow for no reason, let's assume that being in lockdown has been a bit like being shoved into a small box for quite a long time.  We are all naturally bigger than this, but we've compressed, shrunk down, adapted to a more confined way of life.  And now we're being gradually let out of the box, and there is some pressure to bounce back, to get back to normal as much as possible, to get everything restarted.

But for some of us - certainly for me - we still feel flat, thin, unshaped.  It's going to take some time to decompress.  It is, hopefully, possible to recover our former shape, but we're not there yet.

Sleeping on the pillow before it was properly decompressed, according to the instruction booklet (and I have to say, I've never had a pillow that came with instructions before!), would have resulted in it never recovering its right shape.  My pillow would have been flat and useless forever because I was impatient.

You see where this is going.

We need to take this slowly and allow ourselves (and others) the time needed to grow back into shape.  We need to recognise this will happen more slowly for some than others.  Patience will be needed all round.  We should probably also take the time to just check ourselves for damage - maybe we're not just going to recover naturally, even over a long time, but have taken spiritual, emotional, even physical hurt during this period which will need attention.  (I think at this point the pillow analogy has broken down, as all good analogies must at some point).

Anyway, take it easy.  You are more valuable than many pillows.

Resting and Running

Here is a normal Christian narrative about legalism: if you're relying on your own works to establish your righteousness, you'll be continually aware of your shortcomings, always anxious about whether you've done enough.  You'll have to work harder and harder to make sure that you're okay, without ever knowing for sure if you've made it or not.  But then, when you become a Christian and realise that the gospel offers you a righteousness that is not dependent on your own efforts, you'll find rest.  You won't have to be constantly striving.  You can just receive God's gift.

There is a lot of truth in this narrative.

But preaching from Philippians 3 over the last couple of weeks, I notice this isn't the story Paul tells.  Back when Paul was relying on a righteousness of his own, from the law, he seems to have been happy and confident.  "Blameless" is his own verdict on himself in that era.  Pre-conversion Paul was undoubtedly a busy guy - church ain't gonna persecute itself - but he doesn't seem to have been driven by anxiety about his status.  He was secure and apparently at peace.

It is actually post-conversion Paul who describes himself as not having obtained, as not being complete, as straining forward, making every effort to take hold, pressing on like an athlete in a race.  I don't think there is anxiety here, either, but there certainly is effort, running, striving and straining.  There has to be, for Paul.  He now knows that what matters is only Jesus.  Being performatively righteous is no longer the big concern.  Being in and with Jesus - that is the thing.  And Paul is very aware that he does not yet know Jesus as he wants to know him, that he is not with Jesus (and indeed, it would be far better from his perspective to die in order to get to him).

I imagine different people have different stories, pre-conversion.  Relying on the flesh, on your own efforts, could make you confident, or it could make you anxious, depending perhaps on how high you set your standards and how close you came to meeting them.  But post-conversion, the story is always Christ Jesus, the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus our Lord.  And whilst that certainly means resting from both anxiety and boasting, it also means running.  Running like someone who wants the prize.

Running like Jesus is waiting for us on the finishing line.

Righteousness, received and lived

I preached from the first half of Philippians 3 on Sunday, with its absolutely glorious statement of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus our Lord.  Compared to that value, compared to the greatness of knowing Christ, everything else is rubbish.  Whatever we might have placed our confidence in, whatever we might have seen as our identity and security - all rubbish.  Even the good stuff is junk, by comparison to Jesus.

In Philippians the apostle Paul is making this argument against those who are advocating circumcision for Gentile Christians.  They don't seem to have been a present threat in Philippi, but since they seem to have turned up in all Paul's churches after a while it is not surprising that he warns the Philippian Christians to be on their guard.  Specifically, they are to be on their guard by rejoicing in the Lord.  By remembering that they worship by the Spirit and that they are able to boast in Jesus Christ, the Christians will be able to rebuff any temptations to put confidence in the flesh - that is to say, they will not be tempted to rest their identity, their security, their righteousness, in anything merely human, but will look solely to Christ and the huge privilege of knowing him.

Of course the folks advocating circumcision would probably not have seen themselves the way Paul saw them.  They almost certainly didn't think that they were seeking to put their confidence in the flesh!  They surely maintained, at least in their teaching, that righteousness was received by faith in Christ and not otherwise; had they not done so, it is hardly likely that they would have won a hearing amongst Paul's converts.  So what were they saying?  Here's my best guess at a reconstruction.

I think the circumcision guys would have agreed that righteousness - understood to mean a righteous status before God - was received by faith, on the basis of the work of Christ and particularly his death and resurrection.  But then there arises another question - how does that received righteousness translate into a pattern of life?  For the circumcision guys, the answer is circumcision - and presumably observance of other aspects of the Mosaic Law.  Righteous status received by faith translates into a righteous walk shaped by law.

And that is not absurd.  Couldn't they have pointed to the Old Testament for examples of this sort of shape?  Israel was rescued from Egypt - they received liberation.  But then they went to Sinai - the Law told them what a liberated life looked like.  You can - and from an OT perspective, you should - keep both these moments in mind, receiving liberty from God alone, and yet diligently seeking to live out that liberty via the Law.  So what's wrong with it?

You won't get the full story from Philippians 3 - you'd have to go to Galatians to see why that the unfolding of salvation history has made this understanding obsolete.  But in Phil 3 we get one aspect of it: Paul doesn't think they can do what they are doing.  In point of fact, those who require circumcision for 'lived out righteousness' will end up placing their confidence for 'received righteousness' in fleshly things.  Paul sees that underneath their apparent zeal to see a righteous behaviour (lived out) that corresponds to a righteous status (received), there is the desire to possess righteousness, for it to be something that belongs to me.  Paul does not have a righteousness of his own; it is all Christ's - whether righteousness received or righteousness lived out, all is Christ.  That is why conformity to the cross and suffering of Christ is so important for Paul.  Lived out righteousness does not look like achievement or possession; it looks, in fact, like shame and poverty.  It looks like that because this is the way of Jesus.  Righteous living is following in his footsteps.

But the circumcision party want something that belongs to them, a righteousness of their very own.  What could imply possession more fully than carving righteousness into your own body?  But having done so, how could you avoid placing confidence in the flesh - see righteous status as dependent on that fleshly work?  And that would mean losing Christ.

No, far better to admit that we will never possess righteousness, to ditch as junk every possible source of confidence, and to have only Jesus.

History and revelation, or Wright and Barth

I hugely appreciate the work of N.T. Wright, and particularly the first three volumes* of his Christian Origins and the Question of God.  I've written before about the importance of volume 3 - The Resurrection of the Son of God - to my own faith.  Wright's work is all about locating the New Testament witness within its historical context, and interrogating it using historical tools.  The emphasis is on the fact that this stuff really happened and is therefore in principle open to all.  I like that.

On the other hand, I am a great fan of Karl Barth, whose methodology is often thought to be the exact opposite.  For Barth, although the events to which the New Testament bears witness did indeed occur in history#, in their character as revelation they are emphatically not available to all.  Revelation, for Barth, is always God's action.  He talks about it as a door, which can only be opened from the other side - i.e., God's side.  The historian, qua historian, has no access whatsoever to this.

Polar opposites?

Well, actually, no.  Wright does take fairly regular pops at Barthians in TRotSoG, but he is usually wisely careful to blame the followers and not the master.  Some followers of Barth have certainly ended up in what is basically a Christianised existentialism, where the history of Jesus is basically inaccessible and we just have to take a leap of faith into the (hopefully) waiting arms of revelation - but that isn't Barth's position.

In three paragraphs (Church Dogmatics IV/2, 149-150), Barth summarises his position on the historical accessibility of knowledge of God through Christ.  "Is there", he asks, "a 'historical' knowledge of this event" - he is speaking of the event of revelation, by which he means specifically the life, death, and resurrection of Christ - "which can be maintained neutrally and with complete objectivity?"  The first answer is 'no', not if we're talking about real knowledge of God, which necessarily overflows in love.  That sort of knowledge - we might call it relational knowledge - can of course never be objective in that sense, nor is it in any way neutral.  And for Barth knowledge of God is necessarily relational knowledge.  So, no, if we're talking about "knowledge in this decisive sense", there is no generally available historical revelation.

But...  "neutral and objective - 'historical' - knowledge is its presupposition".

In other words, historical knowledge is necessary, but not sufficient, for relational knowledge.

He offers two clarifying statements.  Firstly, this historical knowledge will mean "the most impartial and painstaking investigation of the texts which speak of this event."  To try to go around the New Testament and its witness is not to seek historical knowledge of these events, but to import one's own understanding.  To seek historical knowledge of an event without reading the texts which witness to this event - well, its sufficiently nonsensical to call into question the motives.

Second, the historical investigation "must really be impartial."  That is to say, it is no use if the historian has already decided what can and can't happen in history, or what is to qualify as historical knowledge.  Impartiality means at the very least hearing the texts on their own terms.  (And not, for example, ruling out their witness to the resurrection because resurrections don't happen, or designating such witness as beyond the scope of historical enquiry because dealing with matters of faith rather than history).

I think Barth is absolutely in agreement with Wright here; the difference of emphasis between them is complementary and not contradictory.  In TRotSoG Wright effectively endorses this perspective.  Historical investigation can lead us to the conclusion that the most reasonable explanation for the rise of the church is the empty tomb and the physical resurrection of Jesus from the dead.  It cannot get us from there to God.  But surely knowing historically that Jesus rose is the essential presupposition for seeing in him the revelation of God.

Some 'Barthians' I know would object that this is to put the Word of God on trial.  If God has spoken to us, then we should receive his Word and not question.  I agree, but it seems to me that what God has said, he has said in history.  His Word is the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.  To hear that Word in faith is more than, but it is absolutely not less than, to hear it in history.

* I don't think the enormous fourth volume, on Paul, is quite so good, although there's a lot of valuable stuff in there if you have the time to search for it and the strength in your arms to lift the book.

# If you have ever been told that Barth did not believe in the historicity of, say, the resurrection of Jesus - well, that is just plain wrong. It can only be maintained through either ignorance or reading and reasoning in very bad faith. But that's another topic for another day.