Christmas Theology

Five years ago I wrote a little piece on 'Advent Theology' - mostly trying to make the point that because our theology awaits Christ's final revelation, it is always provisional and subject to correction.  (I said other things too; it's only short, why not read it).

As this year's Advent season begins to fade into Christmas, I want to add something: as well as being Advent theology, all sound theology must be Christmas theology.

Christmas is the time of the baby in the manger, of the Word become flesh.  Christmas is the time of Immanuel, God with us, God as one of us.  Christmas is 'God draws near'; Christmas is 'our God contracted to a span' - not without his continuing to fill heaven and earth, of course!  At Christmas, we see his glory - the glory of the one and only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth.  Though no-one has ever seen God, the one and only Son has made him known.  Christmas is when God, in a miracle of grace, becomes an object in our history, our space and time, counted amongst us as one body alongside other bodies, to be heard, seen, touched.

Christmas is the miracle of how we come to know God.

(There is another side to this miracle, a subjective component to match this objective - but that will have to wait for Pentecost theology).

So Christmas theology must be confident, restrained, and simple.

Confident, because God has really walked amongst us.  We are not making stuff up, neither are we speculating about God on the basis of some element of human experience, or our understanding of the nature of reality.  We are not constructing a Babel-Tower of philosophy to reach up to God; rather, he came down to us.  It is noteworthy that there is essentially no philosophy, no metaphysics, in Holy Scripture - there is instead witness, witness to what God has said and done in our midst.  Because of Christmas, we stand on solid ground as we theologise.

Restrained, because if God has come to us and shown himself to us, we are not free to seek him elsewhere.  We need not engage in metaphysical speculation, but far more strongly than that: we must not.  If God gives himself to be known, if he tells us that to see Jesus Christ is to see the Father, that it is in the face of Christ that we are to seek and see the glory of God, then we are not at liberty to look around elsewhere.  Christmas, by giving us a real basis for theology, gives us the only legitimate basis for theology.

Simple, in two senses.  In the ordinary everyday sense of the word, simple because the story is simple.  God lay in a manger.  This is a truth a child can understand, and perhaps one of the great virtues of Christmas as an annual celebration is that in invites us to see as a child again.  There is no sophistication here, no complex intellectual scheme.  There is just God, present as one of us.  But as if to contradict that, Christmas theology is also simple in the technical sense.  Simplicity, as an attribute of God, tells us that since God is One, and is not made up of parts, wherever God is and under whatever aspect we consider him, the whole of God is there and the whole of God is implicated.  God is not partly mercy and partly justice, for example, in the way that we might be divided and potentially conflicted.  God is all God.  And so Christmas theology looks to the manger and expects to see - and does see - true and full God in the truly and fully human baby.  Christmas theology tells us that we don't need to worry that we're missing out on some deep and hidden things of God by focussing on the incarnate Word; no, rather the deep and hidden things are right there, mysterious and yet revealed, in Christ Jesus.

A word, briefly, to those who love theology.  I think Christmas theology is a rebuke to us when we get caught up in and enjoy the technical apparatus of theology; when we delight in the complex discussions of Nicene Trinitarianism or Chalcedonian Christology or whatever.  It is noteworthy that many of the greatest theologians are on record as wishing that none of this technical apparatus had to exist; they would have preferred simply to use the language of Holy Scripture to bear witness to Christ.  If the abuses of heretics forced them to construct a technical vocabulary, it was only to safeguard the approach to the manger.  Whilst I think we ought to have a grasp of these things, especially if we are teachers of the faith, let's not delight too much in the technicalities, but get inside the fence which they represent to see God in Christ.  And in particular, let's not make them a fence against simple Christian faith, which is far more value than any of our complex distinctions.  Perhaps for theologians, the chief emphasis of Christmas theology is that we need to bow before the baby - a test of our humility!

Walking in darkness

 Isaiah 50:10-11:

Who among you fears the Lord
and listens to his servant?
Who among you walks in darkness,
and has no light?
Let him trust in the name of the Lord;
let him lean on his God.
Look, all you who kindle a fire,
who encircle yourselves with torches;
walk in the light of your fire
and of the torches you have lit!
This is what you’ll get from my hand:
you will lie down in a place of torment.

I come back to these verses often, because it seems to me they are a standing rebuke to much of our contemporary culture, within and without the church, and because they describe an aspect of the life of faith which we would rather forget.  Isaiah is writing to the exiled people of Judah, to those who have suffered disgrace and who have no obvious earthly hope.  But his words in these verses reach even further across the centuries, to speak to us in the here and now.

The prophet describes two groups of people.  Both groups are in the midst of darkness, but they react to the darkness in very different ways.  One - perhaps from a human perspective the most sensible, practical group - set about making light.  Fire!  Torches!  Drive back the darkness!  The other, in a move which does not seem humanly speaking to be very wise, walks on in the dark.  We might expect that their ultimate destinies would reflect their choices, and so they do - but not in the way the image would lead us to expect.  It is not those who prudently make themselves lights who avoid danger; no, they will lie down in torment.  It is those who walk in the dark, leaning on the Lord, who avoid stumbling and falling on the way.

In a pragmatic, technological society like ours, the first question which naturally comes to our minds when confronted with an issue is 'what ought we to do?' - how can we address the problem?  How can we fix it?  Whether it's public health issues, or personal issues, this is just how we're wired to think.  This is just as true, I think, within the church as outside it.  How do I fix this feeling of being spiritually dry?  How do we reverse the decline in church attendance?  What do we do?

And there is a very real danger that in every case we are just scrambling around lighting torches.

It is hard for us to shift our sense that things just ought to work, and that there must be something we can do to fix it if they don't.  But this is not a sound instinct.  Life is not a machine.  The life of faith, in particular, does not mean relentless activity to drive back the darkness, as if it were some sort of strange intrusion.

Rather, our posture is to be: fear the Lord, listen to his Servant.

The Servant, of course, is the Lord Jesus Christ - and the rest of the chapter makes clear why it is that the life of faith must consist largely of walking in darkness.  It is because in this world Christ our Lord suffered, submitted himself to humiliation, walked the path of the cross.  He walked the way of darkness.  We ought to follow him.

It is not that we should never try to solve any problems or fix any issues.  It is just that that is not to be our first response.  First we bow before the Lord, acknowledge his sovereignty, hear again the message of the Lord Jesus, consider again that this is just the way of the cross.  Because sooner or later we're going to hit problems we can't fix - ultimately, death! - and we will not be ready to go into that great darkness unless we have become accustomed to walking in the dark, leaning on the Lord.

Why follow Torrance?

In my previous post I attempted to sketch out T.F. Torrance's approach to theological knowledge.  Here I just want to outline a few reasons why I think this, or something very like it, is a good model for thinking about how to do theology.

1. Christ is central.  It is a sound theological instinct to exalt the Lord Jesus Christ in every aspect of thinking about God, to take every thought captive for obedience to him.  In Torrance's structuring of theological science, Christ is the focus at every level, and indeed he is the link between doxological piety and theological reflection.  He is our assurance that we are dealing with a real, objective truth - he is God in his revelation.  He is the one who ensures that our thoughts do not fly off into ungrounded speculation.  It is all about the Lord Jesus Christ, all the way through.

2. It doesn't leave behind or disparage the pre-conceptual knowledge of God in Christ.  It can be easy for theologians, who have wrestled with 'the Trinitarian grammar', to look down on the 'simple faith' of the average worshipping community, and to regard the piety of the average Christian as something that needs to be supplanted by a refined conceptual apparatus.  There is no supplanting in Torrance; rather, it seems to me, his system rightly puts theological science at the service of doxological piety.  The real knowledge of God, if you like, does not happen only as we progressively ascend the levels of theological purity; it happens on the ground, in praise and worship and preaching and sacrament.  There is no superior knowledge of God open to the theologian; just the same knowledge expressed conceptually.

3. It maintains that we do have real knowledge of God in himself, but that we approach this knowledge through God's revelation.  I think this is key.  In Torrance's stratified model, knowledge of God is not restricted to knowledge of the economy - that is to say, the work of God toward us in creation and redemption.  Rather, through the economy, we are enabled to see and understand something of God's life in himself.  God is not collapsed into his works, but neither is his life separated from his works.  It is the fact that Christ himself is truly God as well as truly man which makes this connection possible.  We see, as we reflect on Christ, the real inner life of God - the processions which stand behind the missions.  But we are not encouraged to speculate about this; we are encouraged to learn about God where God has elected to teach us, in the face of Jesus Christ.

For these three reasons, and probably more, I think Torrance is helpful here, and I'd commend his scheme to anyone.

Theological science, with T.F. Torrance

T.F. Torrance sees theology as a science.  This does not mean that theology proceeds by a method analagous to the natural sciences; for Torrance, the essence of a true science is that it allows the nature of the object being investigated to determine the method of investigation.  A science is radically open to external, objective reality, to the point of allowing that reality to determine the very approach to knowledge.  Theological science, for Torrance, is at one level similar to natural science - it approaches an objective reality and makes enquiry about it - but on another level utterly distinct from natural science - because the nature of the object investigated in theology is unique, and therefore the approach must be unique.

Torrance maintains that the object of theological science is primarily Jesus Christ, 'God in his revelation'.  It is in Christ that God makes himself objective for us, in our human sphere, in our space and time and history.  Theological science, then, must allow Christ to shape its investigations.

Theological knowledge, Torrance maintains, occurs at three levels; he is drawing here on the work of Michael Polanyi.  At the most basic, but also most important, level, God is known in personal experience, through the believer's encounter with Christ and through the liturgical and ecclesial life.  This knowledge of God is not conceptually refined, being rather lived than analysed, but it is profound - the person who encounters God in Christ by the work of the Holy Spirit is caught up in a deep, albeit implicit, knowledge of who God is.  The focus here is Christ, and the awareness of genuinely seeing God in Christ.

Christ remains the focus at the second level.  Here the believer's experience of Christ is analysed and clarified conceptually.  For Torrance, the process of doctrinal development which culminated in the Counicll of Nicaea represents the paradigmatic move to the second level.  Aware that in Christ she encounters God himself, the church moves to conceptualise this knowledge.  The homoousion - the genuine identity in being between Christ and the Father - is central here.  It allows a movement from an informal knowledge that God was at work in Christ to a conceptual understanding of the missions of the Son and the Spirit in the Triune work of redemption.  That is to say, through the homoousion the believer is able to conceptualise the work of the economic Trinity clearly, and what was implicit in the experiential knowledge of the first stage is made explicit; an experiential knowledge of the Trinity becomes a doctrine of the Trinity.

At the third level, further conceptual clarification takes place.  Once again, the homoousion is central and the person of Christ is the focus, but at this level we are driven to understand that it is not simply God in his relations to us that is revealed in Christ, but that if Christ is truly of one being with the Father then we are shown God in himself.  The immanent life of God must be the ultimate foundation of God's work towards us; the processions of the Son and the Holy Spirit are revealed as the ontological ground of the missions in the work of redemption.  A further clarification of our concepts occurs at this level, and indeed a simplification as we move through the works of God to consider their ultimate ground in the very being of God.

Two things are particularly critical for Torrance in this account.  Firstly, Christ is central throughout.  For Torrance, the homoousion is the central commitment of Christian metaphysics.  It is through the genuine oneness of Christ with God the Father that we can be confident that our experience of Christ leads to true knowledge of the real God.  We are not, in the Lord Jesus, having to do with a reality outside of God which may or may not point towards God, but with God himself in his revelation.  It is because of the homoousion that we can move from the evangelical experience of God's presence and work in Christ to the conceptual clarity that is provided by the doctrine of the Trinity, both economic and ultimately immanent.  The homoousion means that we are not speculatively reaching up toward God in our conceptual analysis, but we are (as genuine theological scientists) following the nature of the object presented to us.

Second, the three levels of theological knowledge strengthen and support one another.  They are interrelated through Christ, who is central at every level.  In particular, the 'higher' levels do not leave behind the pre-conceptual, doxological knowledge of God in Christ; in fact, this basic experiential Christianity remains the most important level of theological knowledge and the most profound.  Whatever conceptual clarifications may take place, they cannot displace or undermine the life of faith and the implicit theology expressed in piety and worship.  Perhaps we might say that whilst the third level provides the ultimate conceptual grounding for the other levels, there is a sense in which the first level provides the existential ground for the others.  Ontologically, of course, the ground for all three is the Lord Jesus Christ in his reality as the revelation of God.

I want to unfold some of the implications of this approach in another post.  If you want to dig into Torrance more in the meantime, this little sketch is heavily reliant on 'The stratification of knowledge in the thought of T.F. Torrance' by Benjamin Myers (Scottish Journal of Theology 61(1): 1-15).

Look to him

"We don't mainly mortify sin by looking at it... We suffocate sin by redirecting our gaze to Christ."

Thus Dane Ortlund, in Deeper, p 139.

It is a strange kind of fight we're in, the fight against sin.  In pretty much every other war, the essential dictum is 'know your enemy'.  There is something of that in the fight for holiness - we are not unaware of the devil's schemes - but knowing our enemy is not going to take us to victory.  Doing reconnaissance, getting to understand sin and our own dark hearts better, is not going to get us there.

The only thing that will bring victory over sin is looking to the Lord Jesus, gazing at him, seeing his beauty and glory and goodness, delighting in him.

This is a battle of loves.  The problem with focussing on the enemy is that at some level, even as Christian believers, we love the enemy.  There would be no temptation to sin if we did not love sin.  But we do.  All human beings love sin; in certain circumstances we also hate it, and as Christians that hate becomes a real and significant force in our lives by the Holy Spirit.  But we still love sin.

So it is all well and good to assess what our chief idols are, or to pick up what false beliefs we might be holding.  But those things won't make us holy.  We fight the sin that we still love by seeing Jesus and loving him more.

Can I make a particular appeal to preachers and pastors?  It is common to hear McCheyne quoted from the pulpit - "for every look at yourself, take ten looks at Christ".  Great, that's wisdom.  But can I encourage you to look at your sermons, your counselling sessions, your Bible studies - is there ten times as much time going into describing and depicting and verbally delighting in the goodness and grace and glory and love of the crucified and risen Lord Jesus?  Please, don't just set this as homework ('this week let's try to look at Jesus more') but actually devote sermon time to it.  If we're meant to be looking at Jesus, show us Jesus.

And for those of us who are not preachers and pastors, think about what the main goal of your private devotions is - how much time is spent in just looking at Jesus?  And how do we respond to our sin, whether temptation or actual failure - is it to look to Jesus?

Love elicits love, you see.  Do you see the Lord Jesus, suffering the agony of the cross?  Then you see love, deep love, love for sinners who hated him.  When he prayed for the forgiveness of those who crucified him - that was love, the eternal love of God displayed in mercy and grace to his enemies.  And you and I were just such enemies.  We weren't there, but it was our sin that he bore.  We can stand before the cross of Calvary and say with the apostle "the Son of God loved me and gave himself for me".  We can sing of that love vast as an ocean, loving kindness like a flood - and know that it reaches me, even me.  His love has no beginning - he is the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world, the one who has always been devoted and committed to your good even at the cost of his life, at the cost of cross and hell - and his love will have no end, because the crucified One is risen and now lives to intercede for you before the Throne.

Let the love of the Lord Jesus for you draw out your own love for him.  And then follow what you love, and that will suffocate sin.

On death and Christmas parties, or How to inhabit time

The office Christmas party - more likely in my experience to be the office meal out - is a standard fixture of December, and often the only occasion when colleagues will socialise together.  I've been out of the office environment for a number of years, and this is one of the things I've really missed.  But this year I've noticed that it doesn't seem to be really happening.  I know people whose 'Christmas' meals have already happened; others who will delay having lunch together until January.  The festive period is just too busy already, perhaps with work or perhaps just with the preparation for Christmas proper.  So the office do gets moved, one direction or the other.

At one level this is just perfectly sensible pragmatism, and it really doesn't matter at all.  But on another level I wonder what it says about the way we view time.  I think we are used to being able to rearrange time around ourselves.  It doesn't suit me for it to be Christmas right now, so I'll move the date.   This picture - the individual sovereign over time - really doesn't sit well with the biblical picture of time at all.

Consider the structure of the biblical account of time.  The first creation account in Genesis 1:1-2:3 is built around the seven days of the week; it is a time focussed account of creation.  (The second, in the rest of chapter 2, is space focussed.  One of the reasons I think it is a mistake to try to harmonise them is the loss of these two crucial perspectives on created life).  Time is given, according to Genesis, by God as the gracious framework for human life.  That time is a gracious gift is underlined by the institution of the Sabbath, a day of holy rest, for worship and the enjoyment of God - not to be filled with the strivings or the pleasures of the individual, but to be entered into as a thing prepared by the Creator.  The Sabbath gift shapes and defines the rest of the week.

This pattern continues through the history of Israel.  The weekly Sabbath, along with the annual festivals, define time as something which relates the history of the nation with God, and therefore as a means of living into the relationship established in that history.  Israel is not to claim mastery over time, but to live in its God-given rhythms.  It is only as part of the covenant curse that the relationship with time becomes fraught and desperate.

This matters for two reasons.  Firstly, in a big picture theological sense, time is the created echo of God's own eternity - his gift to us to allow us, finite beings, to enjoy relationship and being-in-sequence, analagous to his own eternal Being and Trinitarian relationship.  So to inhabit time properly matters.  Time, with its proper structures, is to be received and entered into as a gift, not regarded as a resource to be infinitely manipulated for my convenience.  Time is about knowing God and relating to him.  The church, I think wisely, has followed the example set by the Lord for Israel and related time to salvation history through the calendar of fasts and feasts, and I see that as an important way to reflect this approach to time.  It isn't necessary to do it this way, but it is important to do it some way.

Second, one day you will die.  Time, you see, is not infinitely malleable.  There is a date and a time marked in the calendar - not in your calendar, not on your personal timetable - when the last bit of time (as far as you are concerned, at least) will befall you.  (The only way this will be avoided is if Christ returns first, in which case your last bit of time will be everyone's last bit of time; at least, time as we know it).  Pretended sovereignty over time in the day to day of our lives does not prepare us well for the fact that we will one day hit an appointment we can't shift.  It certainly doesn't prepare us to receive that appointment as coming from the hand of the gracious Lord of our time and all time.

So anyway.  Have your Christmas party as and when, I guess.  But don't kid yourself that you are master of your time.  It is a gift; enter into it with joy, and perhaps then you will leave it when you have to with contentment.

Some disconnected thoughts on All Saints Day

1. I'm guessing not many people in my ecclesiastical neck of the woods will be celebrating All Saints Day, and there are good reasons for that.  However, if we carefully observe that in biblical usage a 'saint' is not a believer of superior rank, but simply anyone who is sanctified (saint-ified) by union with the Lord Jesus through faith, that removes most of the theological objections.  All Saints Day is a day to remember the believers who have gone before us.

2. In our day, there has been a lot of helpful pushback against talk of 'heaven' as the Christian's ultimate destiny, with the more biblical emphasis on 'new creation' coming to the fore.  That is all to the good, but it would be a shame if in the recovery of the great Christian hope we lost something of the penultimate hope, which is to depart and be with Christ.  It is true that we will not all sleep, and we cannot say whether we are the generation that will not die but will see Christ's return - but many of our brothers and sisters have slept, have gone to be with the Lord, and it's right that we bear in mind that they are safe in heaven.

3. It is a huge encouragement to know that there are those who now enjoy something of what we will one day rejoice in forever.  It seems to me that the New Testament does not say that departed believers currently enjoy the vision of God which will captivate them for all eternity; there is a sense in which they cannot yet see the Lord as he is, because they are not wholly themselves - they await the resurrection at the Lord's appearing.  They currently rest in peace; they will rise in glory.  Like us, they do not yet know what they shall be.  But what a blessing to be in the presence of the Lord, even if it means being away from the body!  Better to be a doorkeeper in the house of our God...

4. There is real and living fellowship between those who have gone before and those of us who still labour on earth.  I don't think we have immediate access to the departed saints - I don't think we can or should pray to them, for example - but we have something in a sense more intimate than immediacy.  We are joined to Christ, and they are joined to Christ.  We are one body with them, united by the one Spirit.  They pray and praise above, we pray and praise below, and it is all taken up in one great worship service, presented before God as the offering of the whole church in Jesus.  When we gather we worship, we gather into their presence, because we gather to Christ and to the heavenly Zion.

5. All of this answers, with a firm and unsentimental reality, the dim groping after hope that we see in so much funeral mawkishness.  They are not dead, but have simply gone nextdoor - that sort of thing.  For the dead in Christ, how gloriously true it is that they are not really dead!  How we can rejoice in their comfort and joy!  In Christ they all live.  Alleluia.

Some reading

Here are some brief thoughts on three books I read recently - they're not particularly connected, except to say that they are all books which take things seriously, and I appreciated that.  All three are good reads, and I'd recommend them to you.

Firstly, and most substantially in terms of both volume size and intellectual depth, I got around to reading Carl Trueman's The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.  The book is itself a triumph, albeit a painful one.  Here we get a reasonably detailed look at how the West got to be where it is today - framed by looking at how it came to pass that a statement like 'I am a man trapped in a woman's body' came to be taken as both serious and important, rather than considered to be nonsense, as it would have been until relatively recently.  In short, Trueman shows how the self became psychologised (that is to say, my internal reality defines who I really am), the psychological became sexualised, and the sexual became politicised - broadly, those movements correspond to the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries in the intellectual history of the West.  I found the analysis compelling, and I would say the book needs to be the starting point for any attempt to address, from a Christian perspective, the descent of our culture.  Trueman only begins to hint at a potential answer t the question of what should be done, but there is material here to build on in the future.

Second, a much briefer book: Mike Reeves' Gospel People.  Subtitled A call for evangelical integrity, this book falls into the genre of 'appeals to evangelicals to be more evangelical'.  Against the backdrop of debates over whether the very term 'evangelical' has become too tarnished to be of use - especially given the political associations the term has picked up in the US - Reeves shows the theological priorities at the heart of historic evangelicalism and calls the church to return to its roots in the gospel.  His summary of the heart of evangelical identity, in terms of theological markers, is very helpful, rooted as it is in the doctrine of the Trinity.  The only disappointment in the book, for me, is that Reeves repeats the old Stott line about adhering to compromised denominations.  I understand his point that evangelical unity is not primarily institutional but spiritual and doctrinal, but I can't understand why institutional expression of that unity should be so quickly dismissed as a desirable goal, nor why it should be okay for evangelicals, given their beliefs, to be institutionally bound up with heretics.  But the reason that sticks out for me is that the rest of the book is so clear on gospel priorities.  I commend it to you, particularly if you've been troubled about the future of evangelicalism as a movememt.

Third, I've been reading Deeper by Dane Ortlund.  I'll be honest, I've not finished this one.  I've had time, and it's a short book, but it does demand slow reading, and so that's what I've been giving it.  The question of how we go deeper in the Christian life is perennially important, and from my perspective half-way through, this book is a good answer.  It is by pressing into Christ, continually repenting of sin and looking to him, that we grow as believers.  Our great need is not a technique, but the Lord Jesus himself.  This one would be good for anyone, even or perhaps especially if you don't particularly feel the need for it at the moment.

Take up and read!

On doubt, and unbelief

Prompted by a number of different people I know wrestling with doubt in their Christian faith, I've been thinking a little bit about the role that doubt and uncertainty play in our understanding of faith today.  I have heard a lot of folk speaking very positively about uncertainty.  I have myself at points been tempted to think that doubt is the mark of a mature faith, a faith that doesn't shy away from the tough questions.  On reflection, though, I think that's just wrong.  In most cases, I've come to think, doubt is a bad thing; in many cases, uncertainty is actually the sin of unbelief.

There are at least two forces in our culture which predispose us to think positively about doubt.  One is the culture of suspicion.  There is a long philosophical backstory to this, but the result is that we have been taught to view authority as being usually a mask for some sort of power play.  Questioning everything therefore becomes a virtue.  To accept authority is to enter into ia kind of slavery, to give up the right and necessity of autonomous thought.  No authority can be immune from this, not even 'thus says the Lord'.  In such a culture, doubt and uncertainty naturally come to be seen as healthy and virtuous.

The other, related, force is the value of personal authenticity.  In our culture, your highest calling and your greatest responsibility is to be yourself, defined somewhat vaguely as the person you feel yourself to be.  Because we value authenticity so highly, we would much rather have someone who is wrong but true to their convictions than someone who does the right thing for bad reasons.  In a culture like that, a story of doubt and uncertainty just plays better.  It sounds genuine.  It is easy to assume that those who don't express doubts are just concealing them, being inauthentic.

These two forces are not wholly bad.  Often authority is a cover for a power play, and 'thus says the Lord' can be just a device for exercising control.  Sometimes those who seem most certain in their faith are indeed hypocrites, who teach others by their example to bottle up their questions.

But I can't help noticing how keen the New Testament authors seem to be that we have certainty about what we believe, that we be confident in the one we've trusted, that we have a clear and growing knowledge of the truth.  There is no praise for doubt and uncertainty in Scripture!

So here's what I think.  The reasons for doubt and uncertainty are broadly the same as the reasons for sin: weakness, negligence, our own deliberate fault.  Weakness because sometimes we cannot understand, or because we are carrying wounds from an authoritarian church background, or because we are caught in the storms of life and thrown off balance.  Negligence because sometimes we don't do the work, because the answers are there in Scripture but we don't seek them out, because the certainty is to be found in prayer but we don't pray.  Our own deliberate fault because sometimes we nurture doubt and uncertainty to avoid the implications for our lives of the truth, or because we like the sense of superiority our sophisticated doubts give us.

I also think a lot of the sting of doubt and uncertainty would be removed if the church took seriously it's calling to be merciful to those who doubt - if questions were met with sensitive efforts to understand the backdrop to the question and to apply the truth gently.  This requires a context in which it is okay to express doubts and questions - just as church should be a context in which it is okay to confess sins!  And that in turn requires a solid confidence that God's revelation is true and his gospel is good.

Counting the Cost of Planting

The FIEC have put out an episode of their podcast entitled When Church Plants Don't Work, with Dan Steel.  Dan has done a lot of work on church planting, and the ups and downs thereof, and I think has some really useful insights as a result.  For the sake of fair disclosure, it's worth pointing out that I was the pastor of the church plant from Dan's church that didn't work out - so I also have some thoughts on the subject.

One of the most useful things in the chat on the podcast is the recognition that church plants 'fail' for a variety of reasons, and whilst there are many mistakes that we can learn from and try to do better in the future, there are also situations in which - it just didn't work.  That has to be okay as an outcome.  If it isn't, we will become highly risk averse, and ultimately we won't plant churches in the places that need them most.  It would help a great deal, as the boys on the podcast point out, if we were prepared to tell the stories of 'failure' as well as those of 'success' - and let me just take a little swipe at the cheery triumphalism of much evangelicalism that makes that impossible.

There is just one supplementary point I'd add to that, which is that recognising that 'failure' is a possible outcome needs much more serious counting of the cost for all involved in church planting.

I hope we know that there is a cost involved.  If a church is remotely functioning, then it is a family, and it is the community around which life is structured.  To leave a church, then, even to go and do something potentially exciting like planting is really costly.  Relationships don't need to be completely left behind, but realistically they will be attenuated when we're no longer worshipping together on a weekly basis.  Valued programmes will be left behind - perhaps youth groups or other things that the plant is not of a size to run.  It is, and should be, a wrench to leave a church.

But then if we're going to throw ourselves into planting, we need to be all in.  We need to build relationships in the plant on the assumption that we're going to be together for the rest of our lives.  We need to build rhythms of liturgy and discipleship that are intended to bed in over decades.  We need to build outward looking relationships with people in the local area which we hope will bear fruit, perhaps in many years.  What we can't do is keep our lines of retreat open.  If you allow awareness of the fact that the plant might not make it to cause you to keep one foot in the sending church, I think you probably make the 'failure' of the plant a self-fulfilling prophecy.  You have to be all in.

But that means that if it doesn't work out, it will be hugely painful.  It will be like the wrench of leaving the sending church, but worse, because instead of being the pain of being sent out into an exciting horizon, it will be the pain of dissolving a community you loved, a return tinged with disappointment and perhaps bitterness.  There will be wounds.  We need to count the cost of those wounds before sending people out - the cost of sending, but also the potential double cost of receiving back.

Who elected him?

A man was, briefly, arrested in Oxford yesterday for heckling during the proclamation of the King.  In response to the proclamation, he shouted a question: who elected him?  For this he was briefly detained and driven home.  I don't intend to comment on the rights and wrongs of this situation.  Not least, I am aware that the only account I've read is that of the republican in question, and it's quite likely there is another side to the story.  If you want to read a defence of his protest, from the point of view of freedom of speech absolutism, Steve has an article for you.  I don't entirely agree, but it might be a good place to start from.

I was thinking that I would instead write a little piece about how this protest in many ways captures the spirit of the age.  This is, after all, a deeply democratic age, in the sense that we want to believe that all power and authority starts with us, the demos, and is then passed on to whomever we choose.  That is why you get people saying 'not my king!' - they mean, I think, I didn't choose him, and I can't imagine any other grounds of legitimate authority.  This attitude does, of course, get us into trouble even with the democratic elements of our politics.  Some want to disown political leaders they disagree with (not my PM!) in the same way that others would disown the Monarch.  This is just the individualistic version of the democratic impulse - nobody can have power or authority over me unless I chose them.

There certainly is an extent to which this is the spirit of the age, but as I've thought about it I've been struck that this is really just the spirit of humanity.  The obvious verbal parallels in the story of Moses jump out at me - who made you a ruler and judge over us?  The deacon Stephen makes it very clear that this attitude was a rejection of the one whom God had chosen, and sees it as the archetypal reaction of Israel to God's authority.  Psalm 2 shows us that it's not just Israel, but all of humanity.  We will be in charge of our own destiny.  I will be my own ruler and judge.  Isn't this just the spirit of sinful rebellion?

I am not suggesting that there is a one to one relationship between political republicanism in the UK and spiritual rebellion in the human race!  There are all sorts of reasons (none of them good, in my view, but that's by the by) why one might be a republican.  After all, the answer which the proclamation gives to the protester's question - God, by whom kings and queens reign - is in the case of earthly leaders open to question.  But I do think there is something in the attitude that we ought to be wary of.

In the end, a King has been elected - by Almighty God.  The rule of King Jesus does not depend on our choice, or even our assent.  God laughs at our attempts to be 'spiritual republicans'.  Every knee will bow.

Witnesses

The prophets and apostles are witnesses in two different but complementary ways.  They are first of all natural witnesses.  That is to say quite simply that they were there, they encountered something of significance - namely, God's revelation.  This is the sense of 1 John 1, or 2 Peter 1.  Something happened, someone was there, and by virtue of their proximity to that event and that person, they became witnesses.

The fact that the prophets and apostles are natural witnesses has both apologetic and theological significance.  The apologetic significance is already recognised in Scripture - we did not make it up, we were there, we saw.  Appeal is sometimes made to the fact that in this sense the prophets and apostles stand in the midst of a much wider group of natural witnesses, that they are not bearing witness to something which happened hidden away, but to something which was at least in part a very public occurrence.  I can see no reason at all, beyond prejudice, why this status of the prophets and apostles as natural witnesses should not earn them a hearing at least.

The theological significance of these natural witnesses is even greater.  Their existence as witnesses in this way demonstrates that when we are talking about God's revelation we are talking about something - ultimately, someone! - historical, contingent.  An event which took place, a life which was lived, in proximity to other lives, a reality which became a factor in our space and time.  Revelation is a matter of history, of recollection and testimony, rather than philosophy or speculation.

The second way in which the prophets and apostles are witnesses is as legal or commissioned witnesses.  That is the sense in the prophetic call narratives of Isaiah and Jeremiah, or most clearly in the language of the great commission.  'You will be my witnesses' means much more than just 'you are those who have seen and heard', although it depends on that.  As those who are natural witnesses, they are claimed and sent to go and bear witness.  Their relation to what they have seen and heard is not that of neural observers; rather, they are governed and ruled by that to which they bear witness.  To be concrete, the Lord Jesus has become their Lord, in this particular way and for this particular service, their natural witness being taken into the service of his own testimony to his Person and work.

This legal witness is of huge theological significance.  To be sure, the prophets and apostles purely as natural witnesses warrant a hearing and a degree of human credence, but they do not warrant divine confidence, faith.  That can only rest in God's Word itself - in fact, in the very reality to which the prophets and apostles bear witness.  It is as Christ's own commissioned witnesses, empowered by his Spirit, that we have to listen as to Christ himself, because they are his ambassadors.  He continues to accompany and empower their witness as it is laid down in Holy Scripture; having commissioned his witnesses, he does not abandon them or their testimony.  Our doctrine of Scripture is, or should be, built on this foundation

Finally it is worth noting that all of us who are Christians are called to be witnesses - of necessity, secondary witnesses, who weren't there, didn't see or hear, and who are therefore bound to the prophets and apostles as primary witnesses.  Because of their witness, we can bear witness, that we have heard them and have found that in their witness we have heard the Word of God.

Reader Response: Church Dogmatics ch III (4)

In support of his sixth point about Scripture, Barth offers some brief notes on two key Biblical passages, 2 Timothy 3:14-17 and 2 Peter 1:19-21.  Since these passages feature prominently in much discussion of the doctrine of Scripture, it seems worth pausing to see what Barth does with them.  Note that he is not here offering a full exposition, but a reading of these two important Scriptures in support of his theological conclusions.

First, Barth points out that both passages have to do primarily with the Old Testament, "but according to the fundamental meaning of the two authors in whom they are found, the expressions can and ought and must be applied to all the witnesses of revelation and therefore to the New Testament witness as well." (504) It is helpful to have this stated up front; I think many treatments of these verses (especially the 2 Timothy passage) make this move surreptitiously, or perhaps just presuppose it.  But there is actually an important theological move being made when we class the NT witness alongside the OT - we are claiming that they are both the same thing, united in being a witness to Christ.  It is because both these passages speak of the OT in terms of its witness to Christ that it is possible to make this move here.

When it comes to 2 Timothy 3:14-17, it is obviously striking to Barth that the text has both a backward and a forward reference.  Timothy is pointed back to his childhood acquaintance with the Scriptures and reminded of their formative influence on him.  But then he is encouraged to look ahead, to what the Scriptures are able to do in terms of completing his formation and giving him all he needs to serve in the church.  "Scripture was able and it will be able..." (504) - that corresponds to Barth's motif of recollection and expectation.  Timothy is to continue in the Scriptures, in recollection of what they have shown themselves to be for him, and in expectation that they will show this again.

In the centre of this recollection and expectation stands the crucial sentence: all Scripture is inspired (or breathed out) by God.  Barth understands this to mean that "all, that is the whole of Scripture is - literally: 'of the Spirit of God,', i.e., given and filled and ruled by the Spirit of God, and actively outbreathing and spreading abroad and making known the Spirit of God." (504)  Or, in other words, "...the Spirit of God is before and above and in Scripture..." (504).  This is quite obviously a broader understanding of what is implied by the word usually translated 'inspired'.  On the one hand, Barth does not want to get pulled into a debate about the nature of inspiration - he sees the statement as "an underlining and delimiting of the inaccessible mystery of the free grace in which the Spirit is present and active before and above and in the Bible", and therefore not as something that can be parsed as a precise doctrine.  On the other hand, he is unwilling to restrict this description of the relationship between God and Scripture to a particular point, as if it had only to do with the production of the texts that we have -  he sees it as describing also (and the word 'also' is important here) the ongoing relationship of the Spirit to the Bible.  It is on the basis of this ongoing work that Timothy can approach the Bible with expectation that it will again be to him what it has been in the past.

The treatment of 2 Peter 1:19-21 is much briefer, and essentially makes the same points: we are called to continue to be attentive to the prophetic witness because of its relationship to the Holy Spirit.  To my mind, Barth does not engage as much as I would like him to with the fact that these verses clearly do lay great stress on the Spirit's role in the production of Scripture, which seems to push back a little on his emphasis in his notes on 2 Timothy 3.  The other fundamental point made here is about the exposition of Scripture: we must "allow it to expound itself, or... to control and determine our exposition" (505).  This is because it comes from the Spirit and not men, and therefore is not open to our manipulation - and here, perhaps, we see the link again to Barth's emphasis on the ongoing presence of the Spirit in Holy Scripture.

"The decisive centre to which the two passages point is in both instances indicated by a reference to the Holy Spirit, and indeed in such a way that He is described as the real author of what is stated or written in Scripture." (505)  Barth wants to be clear that this does not mean that the human authors were not real authors - "there can be no question of ignoring their auctoritas and therefore their humanity" - but nevertheless "they speak in the place and under the commission of Him who sent them" (505).  For Barth, the theopneustia, the inspiration, of these authors consists precisely in this commission.  In their human freedom, they think and speak and write in obedience to their commission, and therefore under the lordship of God.  They function, then, as true witnesses.  This is not to be restricted to their writing, but describes their being in so far as they are commissioned witnesses to revelation.  "In what they have written they exist visibly and audibly before us in all their humanity, chosen and called as witnesses of revelation, claimed by God and obedient to God, true men, speaking in the name of the true God, because they have heard His voice as we cannot hear it, as we can hear it only through their voices." (505-6)

It is in recollection that in their voices the voice of God has been heard, and in expectation that this will be the case again, that the people of God are called to be the people of Holy Scripture.

Climate change, responsibility, and the sovereignty of God

The last couple of days in the UK have been pretty grim for ginger people.  We are not constitutionally well suited to temperatures above, say, 18 degrees.  One of the things that we've had to do - and I confess I've not done it very well, partly due to enervating heat and total lack of sleep - is manage our kids' concerns about climate change.  They are, of course, taught a fair bit about this at school, and they have an acute awareness that their broiling in their rooms when they should be sleeping is at least partly traceable to human actions and inactions.  They have been alternately, and understandably, angry, afraid, and in despair.  How ought I to have responded, as a Christian dad?  What should I say if the subject comes up again when I'm feeling a bit compos mentis?

Well, I know some Christians would say: just tell them it's all made up and they don't need to worry about it.  Hasn't the Lord promised that seedtime and harvest will continue until he returns?  In the face of that promise, how can we think that human beings have the ability to so desperately damage our planet?  I'm not buying this - it seems to me that the evidence for human impact on climate is pretty solid, and from my position as a non-specialist that's as close as I can get to certain.  But also theologically this just seems desperately naive.  Granted that the Lord does not intend to wipe out all life again in a flood, does that completely preclude the possibility that he might allow our acquisitiveness and greed to be followed by some pretty painful consequences?  It seems dangerous to me to teach the sovereignty of God in a way that strips humanity of responsibility.  We are moral agents, with the ability to make bad choices which have consequences.

On the other hand, I don't want to wholeheartedly embrace the frankly rather panicked reaction which is so widespread in the world (and also therefore the church).  I do think it is hubristic to claim that we can destroy the world; though doubtless we have the ability to make it more or less pleasant to live in.  We are stewards of creation, but that does not mean that the Lord of creation is absent or inactive.  God is sovereign.  Moreover, he is the sovereign God of the resurrection; the end of this world is new creation, not destruction.  We can have confidence in the goodness of this God, and whatever action we might need to take in response to the threat of climate change can be taken calmly and without fear.

So I guess what I should have said is something like:
God is in control, and he is able to preserve the world;
we are stewards, with a responsibility to do what we can to care for the world;
and in the end the Lord Jesus is coming back to renew the world.

Reader Response: Church Dogmatics ch III (3)

I mentioned that Barth initially makes six points as he begins to navigate the meaning of 'Scripture as the Word of God'.  The first we looked at in detail, but can perhaps summarise it as follows:

1. We are directed to the canon of writings which has been recognised by the church.  However, the canon does not derive its authority from the church, but from the object to which it bears witness (God's revelation); for this reason, whilst we are to hear and respect the church in its description of the canon, ultimately we can only regard this description as having limited and relative authority.  The real and absolute authority belongs to God himself. (473-481)

Briefly, the rest of the list is as follows:

2. When we talk about Scripture, we are talking about the Old and New Testaments, which find their unity in the object of their witness (namely, God's revelation). (481-485)  This section deals in the language of expectation and recollection which is so important to Barth's doctrine of Scripture, on which more below.  The main point here, though, is about the unity of the Scriptures, which corresponds to "the unity and holiness of God in his revelation" (482), a unity which can only be perceived when one is grasped by revelation, which is to say, by Jesus Christ.  Barth is therefore suspicious of any and all attempts to present a schematic or system to display this unity.  It will be seen in encounter with Christ or not at all.

3. The Bible itself establishes the doctrine of Holy Scripture by reference to the prophetic and apostolic office held by the original witnesses. (485-492). Scripture bears a general and implicit witness to its own authority by virtue of the fact that here and here only do we find witness to God's revelation (this is not quite a circular argument; it requires the self-witness of God by the Holy Spirit).  But it also explicitly speaks of its own authority by reference to "certain specific men" who "stand within the Bible" (486).  Passively, these men saw and heard God's revelation; actively they were commissioned to proclaim it (490).  In them - by virtue of their office, and not any human quality they possess - the circle of revelation is already opened up to include humanity.  I found this really helpful; I think in my tradition the prophets and apostles are played down in importance, with the Bible as a book played up instead.  But actually it is the prophets and apostles in their relation to revelation who make the Bible, literally.

4. Because the Bible includes within its sphere the prophets and apostles, there can be no getting at the content of revelation except in the form of their witness. (492-495). It is no use trying to extract some sort of kernel of pure revelation from the husk of the prophetic and apostolic witness.  Nor can we somehow directly access the history of revelation that stands behind this witness.  Because revelation is contingent and genuinely historical, not some general principle, we can only receive it in the historical form of this first witness, in their words.

5. These original witnesses, because of their office and role, are distinctly set apart from the rest of the church, and their witness is really Holy Scripture because it stands over against the whole church as an authoritative foundation. (495-502). It is of course true that Scripture is a set of human documents, with all the historical, cultural, and personal contingency which that implies.  In this sense, the Bible stands in continuity with all other human documents.  But if we read it only in this way, we miss its essential character as witness.  By virtue of this witness, Scripture "too can and must - not as though it were Jesus Christ, but in the same serious sense as Jesus Christ - be called the Word of God: the Word of God in the word of man, if we are going to put it accurately." (500)  Barth explicitly develops the Chalcedonian parallel here: the Bible, without ceasing to be wholly a human book, is also wholly a divine book, by virtue of the revelation to which it bears witness.  This means there can be no question of a series of sources of revelation, or of the possibility of placing the Bible alongside other church documents or preaching.  It stands over against and above all of them, as genuine holy.  Incidentally, Barth has things to say to those who want to oppose a 'living faith' in the church to a 'dead letter' in the Bible: in fact, the church only lives and thrives when it is wholly under the Word of God in Scripture.  "Death usually reigns in the church" when this is absent (502).

6. Because the authority of Holy Scripture is ultimately the authority of God's own revelation to which Scripture bears witness, we cannot claim any control over this authority, but can only live as those who have heard and expect to hear again God's Word in these texts. (502-506)  For Barth, this derives from the structure of Scripture itself, which is characterised by expectation and recollection (see 2 above).  It also derives from the freedom of God in revelation, and the nature of the texts as witness.  They can only point to revelation, testify to it; they cannot in and of themselves bring it about that revelation occurs in the present.  Therefore the whole of theology, and indeed the whole preaching and worship of the church, "circles around" the event of God's revelation, unable of itself to make this revelation present but always living in memory and expectation of it.  This, perhaps, is the life of faith.

That last point is alarming to many evangelicals, who want Barth to give a straight answer.  They hold up the Bible and ask: well, is it the Word of God or not?  All of this talk about revelation coming or not, circling around - how does that not just muddy the waters, diminish our confidence in Scripture?

I hope that the rest of the context here shows that Barth absolutely does want to pin us to the Bible, to secure for Scripture the place of unique authority, the one place where God is to be sought and found.  But I think Barth's return question to the anxious evangelical might be: why do you need to pin this down in this way?  Do you not trust God - the faithful God to whom that Bible in your hand bears witness?  Why do you need to be in possession of God's Word, rather than always receiving it?

I think there are lots of things going on here which cause the different perspectives - it would be good, for example, to work in the doctrine of illumination here and the role of the Spirit, and see if we couldn't show that in slightly different conceptual ways both Barth and the conservative evangelical want to safeguard the same things.  But I think there is a lot in Barth that we could helpfully learn from here.

On liturgy, for the non-liturgical

It seems to me that the renewal of our corporate worship ought to be a priority for evangelical churches in the UK.  I think so many of our problems can be traced back to weakness here - whether it's a lack of joy in the gospel (and therefore a lack of joyful witness), a leadership that doesn't stand in awe of the Lord (and therefore abuses authority in the church), or a weak discipleship (and therefore ethical compromise with the world).  We need liturgical renewal (amongst other things) because worship stands at the very centre of our church life, of the outworking of God's redemption in the community life of God's people.

But I know that whenever you start talking about liturgy, there is a group of Christians immediately turned off.  If you think that liturgy means ritualism, dressing up, reciting everything from a script, and inaccessible choir performances in place of congregational singing - well, in that case I can see why you might not be thrilled at the thought.  For many who grew up in traditions which had, perhaps, beautiful liturgy and shiny vestments and ancient sanctuaries, but little to nothing in the way of living faith, I completely understand the negative associations.

Suffice to say that when I'm agitating for liturgical renewal, I'm not aiming for any of those things (although some of them might do more good than harm, if done well).  What I'm talking about is simply making our Sunday gatherings appropriate, or fitting, to the immensity of what is happening in the gathering of God's people - in tone, structure and content.

Tone is perhaps the most difficult thing to pin down, but essentially I mean this: does this feel like we are coming into the presence of Almighty God?  The book of Hebrews tells us that, whereas Israel came to the burning mountain of Sinai, we come to the heavenly mountain of Zion, gathered into the presence of innumerable angels and the assembly of the saints who have gone before, into the very throne room of God through the Mediator, our Lord Jesus Christ.  Does the tone of our worship reflect that?  The tone we're going for is reverence and awe with cheerfulness, a sort of serious joy.  This tone will be set by the nature of the greeting, by the voice and posture of the service leader, by the choice of hymns, and perhaps preeminently by the way we are led in prayer.  Does it feel like we are meeting with God?

Structure helps to underline what it is that we are doing.  If we are coming to God through Christ in the Spirit, it is helpful to have some narrative structure, a movement, to what we are doing.  The imagery of spatial movement is useful and thoroughly biblical here: we draw near, we enter, we come.  The sense of movement and direction fosters the sense of encounter, as we approach the Lord.  This is not a manipulative thing; we're not trying to manufacture something that isn't there.  Rather, we are trying to make the outward structure fit with the inner spiritual reality.  When God calls his people together to worship, he does meet with them, and we want to show that.  And of course the particular narrative structure for our worship is the gospel.  That is the story we retell and in a sense relive each Sunday.

Content is actually much more flexible from my perspective, but it has to serve tone and structure.  A jokey little sketch is inappropriate tonally (and can't be justified by the bad excuse of talking to kids!); a lack of Scripture reading and preaching is inappropriate in terms of narrative, missing the central place of God's speech in the gospel story.  A participatory liturgy - the congregation doing more than just singing the hymns! - helps with that sense of coming together to worship.  Responses, confessions, corporate prayers - all good.  As an aside, in the sorts of churches I'm most familiar with, this is often hindered by too much talking from the front; there is no need for an explanation of each Bible reading, or an extra sermon before Communion!  And speaking of Holy Communion, this should ideally be a weekly feature of our worship, the highpoint of our time together.  Giving it this place will help with tone and structure as well.

There are lots more specifics that we could get into, but I imagine the more specific we are the more likely it is that there will be disagreement.  I have strong opinions on all sorts of minor details!  But in the end I'm convinced that what really matters for our spiritual health as believers and as churches is that we be able to come week by week, with serious joy, to rehearse the gospel as we come into the presence of God to worship him.

Reader Response: Church Dogmatics ch III (2)

The next subsection carries the title 'Scripture as the Word of God', and opens with a helpful summary of where we've got to so far: "If what we hear in Scripture is witness, a human expression of God's revelation, then from what we have already said, what we hear in the witness itself is more than witness, what we hear in the human expression is more than a human expression.  What we hear is revelation, and therefore the very Word of God." (473)  How is this the case?  Well, put a pin in that question.  First of all, Barth wants to clarify and expand our understanding of Scripture as a witness, and he initially does so in a list of (I think) 6 points.  We'll only get to the first one today, but hopefully the others will move along a bit faster!

Point 1 clarifies that when we are talking about Holy Scripture, we are talking about the canon of books acknowledged in the church.  It is not for us as private individuals to go around making judgements about the scope and extent of the canon; rather, we receive and acknowledge the canon that our spiritual forebears have recognised.  Barth is at pains to point out, however, that this certainly does not mean that the church historically had the right to decide the canon.  The church cannot "give the Canon to itself." (473). It can only recognise that which is given it by God, and therefore all its decisions on this matter, whilst important, are nonetheless merely human and therefore to some extent provisional decisions.  We do well to listen to the judgement of the church in this matter, but we don't believe the Scripture because of the church's judgement.  "When we adopt the Canon of the Church, we do not say that the Church itself, but that the revelation which underlies and controls the Church, attests these witnesses and not others as the witnesses of revelation and therefore as canonical for the Church." (474)

For those unfamiliar with the Church Dogmatics, just to note that if you ever read it you'll find some in a normal typeface, and some sections in a much smaller font.  The main line of thought is presented in the larger and more accessible text, but the detailed argument, exegesis, and citations in the smaller text.  The small text parts of this section are largely historical.  Barth notes that "the establishment of the Canon has a long and complicated history." (473)  Certainly it was controversial in the early centuries, and became so again at the Reformation.  Against the Roman view that the authority of Scripture derived from the church - Barth notes that some Roman apologists even argued that Aesop's Fables would be Scripture if the church so declared (475) - the Reformers saw the role of the church as like the Samaritan woman of John 5, who merely directed those in the town to Jesus; the church directs people to the canon, but does not make the canon.  However, at the same time, the Reformers almost unanimously wanted to remove the Apocrypha from the canon, and some wanted to reopen the question further: Luther had serious doubts about various New Testament books (Hebrews, James, Jude, Revelation), and he was far from alone (476-7).

Barth notes helpfully that even where the question of the canon is not regarded as open, there can be - and perhaps almost always is - a functional 'canon within the canon', where greater stress is laid on one part of the Scriptures than another.  Perhaps the New Testament is privileged over the Old, or the Gospels over the Epistles (think of the treatment of the Gospel Book in liturgical churches).  It is useful to repeatedly ask "whether we do not neglect essential parts of the witness of revelation to the detriment of our knowledge of the Word of God" (478) even when the whole canon is formally acknowledged.

Nevertheless, for Barth the question of the canon must remain at least in principle open.  He considers that the attempts of Protestant Orthodoxy in the 17th Century to definitely close the question end up circling around to the old Roman answer: that the church has the authority to decide the canon.  For Barth this will not do.  Whilst there may be no question of the church - and certainly no question of any individual - actually changing the canon, to preserve the truth that its authority derives not from human pronouncements but from the Word of God to which it bears witness, the question must not be in principle closed.

What is Barth trying to do here, and why this disturbing conclusion?  I think here, as throughout volume I of the Church Dogmatics, Barth is trying to walk a narrow path of Reformed theology, with a deep and dangerous ditch on either side: to the one side, Roman Catholicism; to the other, Neo-Protestantism, what we might call liberal theology.  To say that the church defines the canon will lead us off to Rome; ultimate authority then shifts from the Word of God in Scripture to the church as an institution.  For Barth the great peril here is that the church ceases to listen to God, and becomes merely engaged in a conversation with itself.  On the other hand, the individual may decide the functional canon for themselves, or perhaps a group of individuals or congregations will do so.  This is Neo-Protestantism in the sense that it makes human beings the judge of what must be received as God's Word.  Whilst the one ditch is institutional, and the other feels very free and individualistic, they are basically the same error.  In both cases, authority derives from somewhere other than God.  That is why Barth has to leave the question open: to demonstrate that the only person who can close the question is God, just as the only person who can cause the witness of Scripture to decisively rule in the church and in the individual life is God himself.

Psalm 110 and the cross of Christ

Psalm 110 is one of the most cited passages from the Old Testament in the New, and its popularity continued through the first centuries of the church.  It is not hard to see why.  For one thing, the Lord Jesus quoted it in reference to his own identity.  But even without that, the picture of the triumphant Priest-King, seated in victory at the right hand of God speaks powerfully of the Messiah and his glory.

For us, the Psalm can feel harder to appropriate.  There are elements of the structure which are confusing, and in particular it is not immediately obvious who is speaking at each point.  I think this can be cleared up relatively easily, just by noting the difference between LORD (a placeholder for the divine name, YHWH) and Lord (the Messianic King-Priest).  In verses 1 to 4, David reports the address of YHWH to the Messiah (who is David's lord); YHWH tells the Messiah that he will have victory and eternal priesthood.  In verses 5-7, David sings to YHWH, celebrating the fact that (just as YHWH promised in verse 1) the Messianic King-Priest is indeed at God's right hand, and is indeed accomplishing victory.

Probably the toughest bit for us, though, is the end.  "He will crush kings on the day of his anger.  He will judge the nations, piling up corpses..."  The image of the nations filled with the slain is of course deeply unpleasant, but more than that it sits uneasily with our vision of Christ and his victory.  Isn't this, in fact, the polar opposite of the gospel?  Christ suffered death to deliver his enemies from death, right - not to inflict it on them in vast numbers!  So what do we do with this end of the Psalm?

I think the answer, at least in part, is in passages from the New Testament like 2 Corinthians 5.  This passage is all about the Apostle Paul's missionary motivation.  What is at that drives him out to preach the gospel, at such cost?  One part of the answer to that, it seems to me, is that Paul sees humanity around him through the lens of the history of Christ.  That is to say, he doesn't look at the people around him and then try to work out how the gospel is relevant to them; rather, he considers Christ's story to be the central story of all humanity.  He has reached this conclusion, on the basis of his knowledge of Christ: "that one died for all, and therefore all died."  All died.  Paul, realising that Jesus truly is the Christ, sees his death as an event which has validity and reality for all humanity.  All died.  This is so because Christ took the place of sinners ("[God] made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us...") and suffered the judgement of God on sin - and in so doing, executed the judgement of God on sinners.  Sinners were put to death in him.

And so the Apostle, looking out across the nations, sees them filled with corpses, those slain by the judgement of God executed by - and miraculously, marvellously, in - the Messiah.  This is why the nature of his victory requires a Priest-King, after the order of Melchizedek: his great Kingly triumph over the nations is a Priestly sacrifice of himself.

Because Paul knows that Jesus is risen, he also knows the story doesn't end here.  Psalm 110, after all, envisages the Messiah's enemies coming to serve him; how can they do so if they are all slain?  But Christ died for all so that those who trust in him might rise with him; he put an end to their sinful humanity so that they might share with him in the new humanity, by foretaste in the outpouring of the Spirit ("he will drink from the brook by the way") and then finally in the physical resurrection.  Paul's missionary motivation, then, is that all the people around him are dead, really dead, because of the cross; they just don't know it yet.  But this judgement carried out in Christ is not the final word for humanity.  To submit to this judgement, to accept (in baptism) the death executed on sinful humanity in him, is to find the door opened to resurrection life, and to have a certain hope that as our King and Priest is seated at the right hand of God, so we will be seated with him.

Reader Response: Church Dogmatics ch III (1)

Just a reminder that we're in Church Dogmatics I/2, and numbers in brackets are page numbers.

The heading of the first section of the chapter is 'Scripture as a witness to divine revelation'.  For some, alarm bells will already be ringing - is this not what we've heard about Barth?  That he pries apart Scripture and revelation, such that the Bible is merely a witness to revelation rather than revelation itself?

Well, try to quiet the alarm bells briefly, and let's consider what it is that he means by this.  Essentially, it is a question of the appropriate hermeneutic to bring to Holy Scripture.

Firstly, let's put this section in context.  Barth reminds us that the purpose of theology is to ask whether the proclamation of the church corresponds to God's revelation, "or, concretely, the question of the agreement of this proclamation with Holy Scripture as the Word of God." (457)  The preceding sections have looked at God's revelation as the presupposition of both Scripture and proclamation - its objectivity in Jesus Christ, its subjective opening by the Holy Spirit - but this has already been drawn from the Scriptures.  That is to say, for Barth there is no getting behind Scripture to an idea of revelation that does not itself derive from Scripture.  The Bible is established as a sign that points beyond itself to "a superior authority confronting the proclamation of the Church" - and that authority is the Word of God.  The Bible "has attested to us the lordship of the triune God in the incarnate Word by the Holy Spirit."

So when Barth says that the Bible is a witness to divine revelation, he means first of all that the existence of the Bible points to the God who stands over and above the preaching of the church.  It is on this basis that theology can, and indeed must, continually ask the central question of church proclamation: does your preaching conform to Scripture?  Does it attest, therefore, the lordship of the triune God?

But there is an "undoubted limitation" introduced here in Barth's view of Scripture: "we distinguish the Bible as such from revelation.  A witness is not absolutely identical with that to which it witnesses." (463)  Now here we see a classic Barthian move, a piece of dialectical theology.  Because within a few lines of writing that we distinguish the Bible as such from revelation, he is able to write that "in this limitation the Bible is not distinguished from revelation.  It is simply revelation as it comes to us..."  What is going on here?  Essentially Barth is calling us to pay attention to the way in which the Bible is revelation to us.  It is a human word, multiple human words in fact, which attest to something beyond themselves.  The Bible is not revelation as it came once to the prophets and apostles; but as the word and witness of those prophets and apostles, the Bible is nonetheless revelation to us who were not there.

At this point I can sense the impatience. Why all this 'yes, and no'? Why not just be plain and unequivocal in declaring that the Bible is God's word?

I think there are a number of things going on here, although only one is really developed in this context. Briefly, I think Barth is seeking to safeguard the doctrine of Scripture against what we might call the Quranic error.  For Muslims, the Quran is eternal, timeless - and this causes some theological difficulty in describing its relationship to God.  In Christian theology, it is not the Bible but the Lord Jesus who is the eternal Word of God, and he is this because and as he is himself fully God.  So in a sense Barth's position is about the uniqueness of Christ.

A second point, again more my reflection than anything Barth explicitly discusses here, is that redemptive and revelatory history really matters for our view of God.  Barth does not want revelation so bound up in the pages of Scripture that it is no longer about what God has done and said in the history of the covenant, and especially in the Lord Jesus Christ.

But the main point he actually develops here is, as noted above, a hermeneutical one.  Because Scripture is a human word, Barth insists, it must be read as a human word, in all its historical and cultural specificity.  And yet, because it is witness, it must be read not as an enclosed artifact, but for the sake of the subject matter to which it bears witness.  Here he clearly has in view much of the critical, academic reading of Scripture, which wants to ask all sorts of questions about the prophet Isaiah, or the apostle Paul, and their times and circumstances, and even the nature of their faith - but does not want to ask or to be answered about the one thing Isaiah and Paul et al actually want to talk about, which is God in Christ.  Barth is making the point that because the Bible as a human word is a word of witness to God, we are not genuinely reading it as a human word unless we allow it to tell us about God.  Paying attention to the Bible means paying attention to the God of whom the Bible speaks.

For Barth this is not some special biblical hermeneutic.  It is just hermeneutics in general.  To listen to someone is to listen to what they are saying, and to allow what they are saying to take control.  We do not respect anyone if we receive what they are saying as material to think about their character or whatever but don't allow the subject of which they are speaking to have any impact upon us.  It is perhaps characteristic of us sinners that we typically hear "as though we know already, and can partly tell ourselves what we are to hear.  Our supposed listening is in fact a strange mixture of hearing and our own speaking, and in accordance with the usual rule it is most likely that our own speaking will be the really decisive event." (470).  It is only if we really pay attention to the subject that we can even partly escape this sinful hermeneutic, and that is equally true of any human word.

The unique thing that is brought by the biblical witness to this hermeneutic is not, then, that it requires a special way of reading.  Rather it is that it demands the attentive reading which is actually due to every human word - and unlike every other human word, it does not only demand or request our attention.  "God's revelation in the human word of Holy Scripture not only wants but can make itself said and heard." (471). In the Bible, human witnesses show themselves to have been utterly overcome by the subject matter; they do not in fact speak of themselves or their circumstances, but they only bear witness to God in Christ.  And in our reading of the Bible, this same 'gripping' can occur, when God himself causes us to see and hear his revelation in the words of the prophets and apostles.

This account will be developed further as we go.  But already I hope we are seeing, whatever we think of Barth's account in detail, something of the powerful expectation of encounter with God in the Scriptures.  That for me is the most exciting thing about his explication of this doctrine, and it has certainly shaped by own understanding and practice in beneficial ways.

Thoughts? Questions?

Reader Response: Church Dogmatics ch III (intro)

Some years back (checks number of years, slightly shocked to find that it's 6 years) I ran a couple of series of posts engaging in a bit more detail than I normally do with some big books.  I looked at Bonhoeffer's Ethics, and chapter VII of Barth's Church Dogmatics, the chapter which looks particularly at the doctrine of election.  I called the series 'Reader Response' to try to highlight that, although I would be attempting to explain what the 'big book' was actually saying, I was also going to include some of my own response to it, and thoughts about how it might inform church, theology, and Christian life today.

I'm going to try to resurrect that concept, albeit with significantly less time for reading at the moment than I had back in the day.  So whereas the previous series was a weekly effort, this one will be more irregular, and might sometimes end up looking at quite small chunks in each post.  We'll see how we go.

I'm going to be reading Church Dogmatics chapter III, which you'd find in volume I/2.  It is Barth's main treatment of the doctrine of Scripture.  Now, if conservative evangelicals know anything about Barth, it is that he is dangerously weak, if not actually heretical, on Scripture and its authority.  I think one of the things that gives this impression is the sheer size of Barth's treatment.  This chapter occupies nearly 300 pages, and is situated in an even larger discussion of the nature of revelation which takes up the whole of volumes I/1 and I/2.  There is a suspicion, I think, that anybody who needs to take this many pages to explain their view of Scripture is probably making things deliberately complex.  After all, doesn't it just boil down to the question of whether it's the Word of God or not?

Interestingly, for Barth that simply isn't the question, or even a question.  He takes it for granted that the dogmatic theologian, standing within and for the church, stands on the acknowledged reality of the word of God in Scripture.  To ask the apologetic question - is the Bible the word of God? - is to remove oneself from this position, if only hypothetically and for the purposes of discussion.  That isn't what Barth thinks he is doing.  For many contemporary evangelicals, the apologetic question is acute, and it is therefore hard to imagine a doctrine of Scripture that does not really engage with it.  But perhaps Barth can push us here to see things we wouldn't otherwise see.

For Barth the question is more 'how is the Bible the word of God?', boiling down into the practical question of what it looks like to live under the authority of the word of God in Scripture.  I hope that over the next few weeks we'll be able to see whether Barth's answers have anything to teach us.

A theology of self-service checkouts

Karl Barth said that 'in its basic form, humanity is fellow-humanity' (CD III/2, 285).  This claim is not difficult to defend from Scripture.  The creation narratives point out that it is not good for the man to be alone; human being, it seems, requires other human being in order to make it whole.  This is a point which goes well beyond the context of marriage, although that is a particular example of 'fellow-humanity'.  For Barth, of course, the primary evidence that humanity simply is fellow-humanity is derived from the Lord Jesus.  Christ came to be with us.  If real humanity is seen in Jesus, and only in Jesus, then what we see is humanity as being-with, humanity as fellow-humanity.

We see more than that.  If true humanity is seen in Jesus, then true humanity is being-with-in-service.  Christ's service of his people, his sacrificial love for them, was not something extra added to his humanity; it was a display of true humanity as that true humanity can only fully exist when energised by the presence of God.  Real humanity is not whole and entire to itself, but is oriented in service towards others.

Note that this is, for Barth, the 'basic form' of humanity.  We tend to think of the individual first, defining him or her within his or her own limits.  Only then do we look outward.  Being-with becomes something the human, complete in himself, does (or does not do); it is extrinsic.  This is doubly the case when it comes to being-with-in-service.  But this is not a true representation of humanity as we are taught to think of it in Jesus.  In actual fact, the self-complete human of our imagining is barely human at all; I said that we think of him or her within his or her own limits; but in fact in a crucial way this imaginary human - the human we like to think of ourselves as being - is free of limits.  He is whole and entire in himself.  He is a sphere which may come into contact with other spheres.  Whereas the true human is limited, and thus defined; he has shaped edges, and those shapes are contoured to the shapes of others.  Being-with is not a thing he chooses (or declines to choose); it is who and what he is.

Which brings me to self-service checkouts.  Self-service checkouts, and other self-service machines, are everywhere now.  It is very difficult to see a human being in my bank - the robot will deal with you.  Our local Sainsbury's has just taken out half it's old (manned) checkouts to replace them with more self-service machines.  Part of the motivation for the current rail strikes in the UK is apparently the threat that ticket office staff will be replaced with machine.

I confess, I make use of self-service checkouts.  They are quick and convenient (except when they aren't, because they go wrong, or the person in front of you in the queue doesn't understand the system).  But to a theological view of humanity, the self-service checkout is at the least an unfortunate development.  Anything that removes an element of being-with from our everyday tasks, usually in the name of efficiency, helps to conceal from me a central truth about myself: that I need other people, not merely to help me achieve my goals, but to be human.  The same sort of thing could be said about other trends in working life at the moment - the increase in remote working, for example.  Something important about being human, that sense of being-with-in-service is diminished.

Two arguments are usually advanced in favour of self-service checkouts.  The first is efficiency.  The business is viewed here as if it were a machine.  Why not cut out some unnecessary cogs?  Why not make the whole thing flow a bit faster?  But this assumes that the goal of human life is to get things done, and that anything that makes getting things done easier and quicker is therefore a good thing.  I can easily think just the same: anything that speeds up my weekly shop must be good.  But what if the snippet of conversation with a cashier is actually one of the most valuable things that can happen in the shop - more valuable than the goal-oriented act of shopping, because oriented towards another human being, a little slice of being-with that goes to the heart of our mutual humanity as created in the image of God?

The second argument is that this sort of automation removes low quality jobs, freeing people to do better things.  The idea is that we get rid of drudgery.  But I wonder whether this has a lot to do with our faulty perspective on service.  Sure, if we treat the shop like a big machine, and the people like parts of the machine, this might make sense.  But if they are actual human beings, whose basic existence is being-with-in-service, whose deepest reality is shaped by Jesus Christ as the one true Human, isn't there a huge dignity in serving in this way?  And doesn't the encounter at the checkout offer a brief opportunity for mutual service as you recognise one another's humanity?  I hope that if you're a Christian you always make some effort to chat with the cashier!

So anyway, I'm not proposing that we all be Luddites and resist every technological innovation in the sphere of work.  I'm just suggesting that we try to think Christianly about what these innovations do to us, in terms of our view of humanity.  Maybe sometimes that will mean resisting societal and technological change, but I suspect more often it will mean resisting the cramping effect on our own hearts and minds which these changes bring along, so that whatever is going on out there, I can still be an exhibit of real humanity, pointing to Christ the great Servant of his people.

Three reasons to meditate on the doctrine of the Trinity

On Trinity Sunday, here are three reasons (many more could be given) why it is good to think long and hard on the doctrine of the Trinity:

1. To know God.  Most basically, if you want to know God, you need to think about the Trinity.  God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, from eternity to eternity.  This is not an extra, deep and ultimately optional piece of knowledge about God; it is not something obscure which is only for advanced believers.  The doctrine of the Trinity describes God's name - Father, Son, Spirit - and somebody's name is perhaps the first and most basic thing you learn about them.  In one sense the whole of redemptive history can be read as God introducing himself, over the course of thousands of years, as Father, Son, Spirit.  It is his name.  And whereas for us a name is a fairly arbitrary label - many names have meaning, but they don't really relate to who we are - God is wholly himself in every presentation of himself: his name conveys the depths of his reality.  Knowing God as Trinity is both basic knowledge - his introductory name - and deep knowledge - because God is not divided, does not hide behind his name but is his name.  To know God, meditate on the doctrine of the Trinity.

2. To understand the gospel.  I take it that the gospel is essentially the good news that Jesus Christ has given himself up to death on the cross and been raised to new life.  His broken body and shed blood are given for the life of the world, for the forgiveness of sinners, for the redemption of the nations.  But how, and why, does this work?  How does the death of one man atone for the sins of countless millions?  Why can death not hold him?  The answer is manifold, but at root it is this: it is the human life of the eternal Son of God which is offered up on the cross and raised up from the tomb.  It is God himself, God the Son, who offers obedience to God the Father, taking up our cause.  And then again, how is it that this comes to affect us?  How does what Christ did there and then come to mean something for me here and now?  It is because the same God, God the Holy Spirit, lives in me and causes me to live.  One God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit: this is at the foundation of the gospel history.

3. To delight in our blessings.  The gospel tells us that we are invited in to share the love that has always existed between Jesus and his Father; it tells us that we are given the life which Jesus has in himself, having been granted it from his Father.  The doctrine of the Trinity helps us to see that we are beckoned, indeed welcomed, into the life of God himself.  As we are joined to Christ by faith and by the Holy Spirit, we share in the love which the Father eternally has for his Son in the unity of the Spirit.  We are given by grace to share in the divine life of God.  The Spirit poured out on us, enabling us to pray and to praise, is nothing other than God himself - a God who is close at hand as well as far away, inhabiting our own hearts.  To meditate on the Trinity is to gain deep insight into the manifold ways in which we are blessed as believers.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit -
as it was in the beginning, is now, and shall be forever.
Amen!