Christ the Psalmist

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consider my affliction and trouble
and forgive all my sins. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apocalyptic news

Because US elections always happen around this time of year, the lectionary always has me reading the book of Daniel in the mornings.  I strongly recommend reading Daniel before reading the news; and then maybe reading it again after the news if you need to.  Daniel is a book of apocalyptic, which does not mean that it is all dramatic and disastrous - that wouldn't make it very much different from the BBC news website (or whatever other news source you're currently using).  Daniel is apocalyptic because it peels back the surface level of the apparent churn of human events to show the deeper spiritual significance of what is going on.  It doesn't deny the reality of the human level - as if history is just an illusion, or a mere mask for something else - but it gives a revealed insight into what is going on from the divine perspective, which is often very much at odds with the human perspective.

Perhaps the key revelation in Daniel is this: whilst there is constant flux in human affairs, and no human state has the stability and permanence to which it pretends, there is a divine plan which lies beneath everything and which will be brought to light as the meaning of it all.  So in chapter 2 this morning we were being reminded that kingdoms - even Nebuchadnezzar's apparently unmovable kingdom - will come to an end, the Most High is overseeing the succession of human states with the intention of bringing to eternal dominance the Kingdom of his own Son.  There is a lot going on at the human level, but when God desires he brings the whole thing - not just an individual kingdom but the whole succession, the whole constant movement of human rise and fall - crashing down, to be replaced by an unshakeable Rock.

I've been mulling some applications.  Firstly, it's so important to remember with Daniel that it is God who "changes the times and seasons; he removes kings and establishes kings."  I think we can be prone to imagining a sort of 'providence of the gaps', where the Lord is in charge of things we can't quite explain or quantify, but where there is a process, an ordered system which we can understand, for getting something done, God is an unnecessary hypothesis.  In an ordered democratic system, surely voters and not the Most High choose the leaders.  But the biblical vision of providence is much more thoroughgoing than this.  Nothing falls outside of God's control, even things which are eminently within our control.

Second, knowledge of providence does not blunt the horrors of history.  Consider that the whole book of Daniel happens within the context of exile, a result of brutal invasion and destruction.  The kings featured are not good characters.  They are brutal imperialists.  Even in chapter 2, Daniel and his friends live under the threat of a capricious death sentence.  Everything is bad.  And yet...  I think we need to be willing to face how bad things are (although a reading of Daniel does helpfully remind us that things could be and have been much worse), and still say 'and yet...' without flinching.  God is in control.  That he allows these things, these terrible things, may be incomprehensible to us, but he has shown us that he is good, and he is after all the God of the cross and resurrection, in that order.

Third, I think it is helpful to admit a very high degree of uncertainty when we're thinking about reading human history.  There is no manifest and obvious storyline to human history, and although it is probably inevitable that we will try to frame events within a plot that makes sense to us, we have to admit that we don't really know what is going on.  Even for Christians, who 'know' the big storyline, we need to be cautious about assigning particular events in 'secular' history a role in that story.  After all, when God establishes his everlasting kingdom that doesn't come from within the churn of human history, but from without, and takes down the whole human statue.

Tell Her Story

I've just finished reading Tell Her Story: How Women Led, Taught, and Ministered in the Early Church by Nijay K. Gupta.  I really liked some aspects of it, and found some others seriously lacking.  The following is not a full review by any means (though by your leave I'll label it as a review), but just a series of thoughts and reflections.  I would welcome push-back if you've read it and liked it more (or less) than I did!

Things that I liked:

The survey of women in the Greco-Roman world (chapter 3) is great at showing that there was significant variety to the experiences of women in the first century.  It is certainly not true that first century women were universally restricted to the house, or that they never had roles outside the domestic sphere.  If in your imagination the background to the New Testament is a world of very rigid gender roles, I think it's helpful to see that things were more varied than that.

One line of argumentation that I've never heard deployed in person, but have witnessed on the internet and therefore gather is current in American Evangelicalism, is the idea that "women can't perform such and such a role in ministry because they are too..." (10) - fill in the blank as you please.  This sort of argument, based on the (demonstrably false) idea that there are immutable traits which mark out all women (and all men) is never advanced in Scripture, and this book takes it apart rather well.

Highlighting the role of women in the narrative of salvation history - whether that's a character like Deborah in the Old Testament (ch 1), the women who encountered and often accompanied the Lord Jesus (ch 4), or the women named by Paul as co-workers (chs 5-9) has the potential to enrich our understanding of God's work.  There will also certainly be points at which meditating on these women and their stories will point to changes that need to be made in the thinking and practice of the church today.

Things that I found frustrating:

The chapter on Genesis 1-3 is seriously underdeveloped, given the importance of the contents for this whole discussion - and placing it after the portrait and discussion of Deborah seems a little tendentious to me.

Much of the proposed reconstruction of women's lives and ministries in this book is very speculative, and involves more reading between the lines than I think responsible exegesis can support.  I lost track of the number of times we were told that we couldn't be certain of something, but then that same something was used to develop the argument as if it were certain (or the other way around; we are told that "it is more certain" that Euodia and/or Syntyche held the title of episkopos or diakonos (104), but then later we find it is only "quite possible" - and even then no particular evidence is offered in support (106).  Was Phoebe tasked with reading the letter to the Romans publicly?  We don't know (124), but we're asked to imagine it anyway.  The three chapters on Phoebe, Prisca and Junia seem to me to be trying to do far too much with the scraps of relevant text that we have, and consequently I can't see them convincing anyone who didn't already want to be convinced.

There seems to be some indecision or confusion at one key point in the book's argument, relating to offices in the early church.  Gupta endorses Wayne Meeks' conclusion that "Acts and the Pauline letters make no mention of formal offices in the early Pauline congregations." (81)  The rest of this chapter, however, discusses the nature of the diakonos, episkopos, and presbyteros in some detail.  These are described as 'roles' rather than 'offices', but I'm not sure I see the difference.  This becomes of great importance when a central plank of the complementarian position is that women did not serve as overseers or elders in the early congregations.  (As an aside, I appreciated Gupta's clear evidence that women did serve as deacons - although this was somewhat undermined by the vagueness about whether this was a formal office or not - and also his insistence that 'deacon' was a leadership position, with significant authority and responsibility).  I think Meeks' conclusion is completely unsustainable, and overall the presentation here seems to fall into a slightly 19th century way of contrasting an informal, charismatic early church with 'early catholicism' emerging (to the church's detriment?) a little later.  Given Titus 1 and other passages, I think it is clear that the appointment of elders was a central part of the Pauline mission, and that these elders were genuine office holders.

There also seems to be confusion about the extent to which the apostles were able to break from their own sociological background.  So we are told that "I don't think it is the case that the apostles blindly followed 'culture' when it comes to sexual anthropology" (49), but the chapter on the household codes assumes that the authors of these texts couldn't have imagined a more egalitarian setup, and so were limited by their cultural horizons (195).  I'm not sure the latter perspective fits comfortably with the inspiration of Scripture.  It's a shame, because there's a lot in the reading of the household codes here which seems evidently correct to me.  There's a similar confusion going on about householders hosting church - they must have been elders, because sociologically it would have been impossible for them to play host and not be church leaders.  But sociologically, the criteria for eldership would have been largely different from those laid down by Paul, who is obviously not thinking in sociological but theological terms here.

Other thoughts and reflections:

The particular arguments and scenarios that this book is written against are not ones that occur directly in the context I know best, and I believe it is very important that complementarians distance themselves from the extreme forms of patriarchy that are, apparently, being endorsed in parts of the church.  (One is sometimes tempted to think cutting off all cross-Atlantic communication might be a blessing, to be honest).  I will say that careless language, and perhaps behind it careless thought, can sometimes give the impression that we hold positions we do not in fact hold, or at least are not consistent with our deepest convictions.

If the key question is 'ought women ordinarily to serve as elders in churches?', I don't think this book successfully proves the affirmative, and I don't think it is correct to insist that the burden of proof lies with the other side (91 and other places).  The reason, it seems to me, that Gupta thinks the burden of proof lies with the complementarian camp is that he doesn't offer any sort of theological anthropology in this book.  The Scriptures do tell us some things doctrinally about the nature of humanity, and specifically the nature of humanity as gendered, which are absent from this discussion, and which to my mind swing the burden of proof back the other way.

If it is correct that elders ought ordinarily to be men - and I haven't given any argument for that here, I know, but I think it's true - then one thing that is clear from this book is that ministry, including Word ministry, authority, and responsibility must not be limited to the elders.  The diaconate should be open to women, and should not be restricted to administrative tasks.  There should be leadership and ministry opportunities for women at every level in the church, notwithstanding the restriction of the eldership.  There is a dangerous tendency in some churches I know towards an increased focus on the elders as ministers - such that they do all the teaching, almost all the leading, etc. - which when combined with a male-only eldership ends up denying complementarianism and falls over into outright patriarchalism.  I think we also need to think hard about how the elders hear female voices, and what it looks like for there to be Mothers as well as Fathers in the church.

For those about to lead worship

Jesus Christ is our worship, the essence of it and the whole of it, and we may worship God in Spirit and in Truth only as we are made partakers of his worship.

Thus T.F. Torrance, in Theology in Reconstruction, 249.

Torrance's point has at least a two-fold application.  Firstly, we cannot make an acceptable offering to God by ourselves.  All our worship is soiled by our sinfulness, and inadequate as a response to God's greatness and his grace.  We cannot possibly come of ourselves to appear before God and honour him.  Remember Nadab and Abihu?  Outside of Christ, our very worship of God deserves and attracts his wrath.  So if you're about to lead worship, please remember that you cannot do it - that you depend on Christ to pour out the Spirit so that what you do might be real, genuine, acceptable.  Worship is not within your powers, and leading others in worship is something that should make you tremble.

But second, an acceptable offering to God has been made, in our human nature, by our Brother the Lord Jesus Christ.  Because he appears in heaven before God, as our great High Priest, there is human worship which is sinless and holy, and which genuinely honours the Father.  And because that worship exists, we can come to worship - not as if we were offering something alongside Christ's offering, but as we are joined to him by the Spirit in faith our own inadequate worship is clothed in his great act of worship, and made to participate in it.  There is nothing for us to add, because he has done it all; but we may participate, because he has gone ahead of us.  So if you're about to lead worship, remember that what that means is directing people to Christ, who is the real worship leader, and resting in him and his perfect worship yourself as you lead others in doing so.

The joyful voice of the creature

In Church Dogmatics III/1, Barth discusses 'creation as justification'. Creation is good, really good, because it is good in God's sight. But why is that so? Barth is clear that we do not find the goodness, the rightness - the justification - of creation in our experience of the world, not even our good experience:

Created order has what we may call its brighter side. But its justification by its Creator and His self-disclosure is not bound up with this brighter side. It is not connected with the fact that the sun shines, that there are blossoms and fruits, pleasing shapes, colours and sounds, realities and groups of realities which preserve and foster life, purposeful relationships and order, intelligible and serviceable elements and powers, which enlighten the created mind of man, speak to his heart, and in some way correspond with his will for life and foster it.

This brighter side of creation is not enough to justify the creature, to render it really good. After all, we acknowledge in referring to a brighter side that there is a darker side, which might push us to exactly the opposite conclusion. But this not mean that the beauty and order of creation is meaningless. It simply means that its meaning can only be really understood, and placed on a secure foundation in our knowledge, in the light of God's revelation, the covenant brought to fulfillment in Jesus Christ:

An affirmative judgement on creation has its foundation and rightful place. The recognition of its direct and immanent goodness is demanded from the man whom the Creator in His revelation has confronted with Himself. 

Note that it is really the immanent goodness of creation which is to be recognised here. The beauty and order that we see in creation really do speak of its goodness in God's sight. Creation speaks goodness in itself, and thus witnesses to God's goodness all the time; this voice, however, is only heard and heard rightly when God is known in Christ, and the covenant is known as the meaning of creation. 

The joyful voice of the creature rings out where the self-revelation of God has been apprehended.

Quotes from CD III/1, 370-1.

The knowledge of the Holy Trinity

The lectionary prescribed Luke 10:21-24 as part of the reading yesterday, and I'm struck by how beautifully trinitarian this passage is.  It begins with the Lord Jesus rejoicing in the Holy Spirit and praising the Father - so there already you have the three divine Persons.  Why is the Lord rejoicing?  At first glance it appears to be because God has concealed the truth from the wise and intelligent and revealed it to those who are, metaphorically, infants - the low status folk, the ones with nothing special to offer.  And that is surely part of it: God's plan is playing out, as the disciples see the Kingdom drawing near in Christ and their eyes begin to be opened to his identity and what that means, whilst other seemingly more likely candidates see nothing.  So Jesus praises his Father.

But as the passage goes on a deeper foundation is revealed.  How is it that God is made known through Jesus?  It is because all things have been entrusted to him by the Father, and "no knows who the Son is except the Father, and who the Father is except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son desires to reveal him."  The foundation of the revelation of God accomplished in Jesus is the relationship between the Father and the Son from eternity.  Because the Father knows the Son, and the Son knows the Father, the Son is really able to make the Father known, and it is the Father's good pleasure that he do so.

To put it another way, nobody truly knows God except God - how can a creature really know the Creator?  But God really does know God - the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit know one another, and know in one another the fullness of Deity which they equally and together possess and are.  God knows God.  But in the incarnation, that divine knowledge of God - the only knowledge of God which can be true - has been repeated as human knowledge.  The Son knows the Father now as a human being knows, but as the same Person and in the same relationship of total knowledge that he always had.  And when anyone else comes to know the Father through Jesus, or to see who Jesus is in relation to the Father, it is the opening up of that relationship of knowledge through the Holy Spirit so that more human beings can now truly say they know God - not in themselves, but by virtue of and in dependence on the human knowledge of the Father incarnate in the Son.

Jesus tells his disciples - just one verse before this passage - not to rejoice in the success of their mission but in the deeper truth that they belong to the kingdom.  I think here, perhaps, we see the Lord rejoicing not just in the fact that God is being made known, but in the deeper truth of his relationship with the Father - and therefore truly rejoicing in the Holy Spirit, the Person who represents most deeply the communion of Father and Son within the Godhead.  And how we should rejoice when we realise just what relationship of knowledge and love it is that we are drawn into when we glimpse something of the glory of God in the fact of Jesus Christ.

Celebrating hungrily

The celebration of Pentecost is a bit different from all the other gospel feasts that make up the church year. Like all those feasts - Christmas, Easter, Ascension - Pentecost looks back to something that happened, a foundational event in the ministry of Christ for his church. In this case, we recall the way in which the ascended Lord Jesus poured out the Holy Spirit on his followers in Jerusalem, thus constituting them his new earthly body, his witnesses. We remember, and we celebrate with gratitude because without that event the good news of Jesus would never have reached us, the community of the church would never have come to be.

But the difference lies in this: Pentecost is celebrated with an edge of hunger and desire to it. That first giving of the Spirit is an unrepeatable, unique event, in one sense, but in another sense as we read the narrative and remember the event we are caused to long that it might happen again. Of course it can never happen again for the first time, in the foundational way in which it happened there and then; but because the outpouring of the Spirit is an ongoing ministry of Christ, there is a definite sense in which it could happen today, here and now. In some way it definitely is happening - otherwise the church would long since have died out of the world - but don't we want to see it happen in power, as it did? Wouldn't we love to see the Spirit at work bringing thousands at once to new life through the gospel? Don't we want the dramatic transformation which came over the Lord's fearful disciples? 

So we celebrate the then-and-there with a distinct eye on the here-and-now, and pray: come, Creator Spirit.

Holy Saturday, forwards and backwards

We can reflect on Holy Saturday, the day the Lord Jesus spent in the tomb, in two different directions.  Both are instructive, and each brings out a different emphasis.

Firstly, we can think our way into the story, and work forwards in time through the events.  Friday has happened.  The Lord is crucified.  Everything about Friday screamed finality.  Jesus breathed his last, gave up his Spirit.  "It is finished" - think about how you might have interpreted that on the Friday, before you knew what was going to follow.  The spear, the blood, the water.  And then the dead body laid out in the tomb, the heavy stone rolled across the doorway.  The last light disappears.  That's the end.

Reading the final verses of Lamentations at Evening Prayer yesterday, I was struck by the fact that it might really have been the end:

Lord, bring us back to yourself, so we may return;
renew our days as in former times,
unless you have completely rejected us
and are intensely angry with us.

It might be all over.  The mercy of God is new every morning - but...  Karl Barth asks at one point whether the mercy of God might not have taken the form of making a final end to us.  Would it not have been mercy for Christ to bear away our sin - remove the threat of eternal judgement - and yet just draw a line under the whole existence of humanity?  Like the mercy of expelling Adam from the garden, so that he would not eat from the tree of life and become an eternal sinner...

Thinking forwards from Friday into Saturday, we hold our breath.  Is it all over?

But second, we think backwards, from our position after Resurrection Day.  We know that Saturday is not the end.  Thinking forwards has taught us not to take the resurrection for granted, but thinking backwards we nevertheless know that it is coming.  Tomorrow will be Easter Sunday.  The Lord Jesus is alive, and reigns with the Father and the Spirit in the unity of the One God.  Though he was dead, he lives.

And yet he really was dead.  That needs to be remembered.  The one who lives for us really died for us.  That is gloriously good news!  He died bearing my sin; he died to put my old self to death.  And he really did.  There is no doubt about it.  His body lay still in the tomb.  My sin - my liability to judgement, my corruption, my uncleanness - is dead with him.  I can live now free of that, by the Spirit of the living Lord Jesus.  The stone that rolled across the door of the tomb is the final goodbye to my old sinful self.

Thinking back from Sunday to Saturday, we say: yes, it is all over.  And now everything is new.

Anti-intellectualism

Every now and again, the critique is raised of evangelicalism that it is anti-intellectual.  I think that critique is in some ways fair, and in others not so much.  Here is a little exploration of anti-intellectualism with some thoughts on how we can renew a Christian intellectual culture in our churches.

Firstly, I want to point out that there is a good, justified, and theologically well-founded anti-intellectualism which rests on two distinct grounds.  The first is that God's wisdom is not the wisdom of the world.  "Since, in God's wisdom, the world did not know God through wisdom, God was pleased to save those who believe through the foolishness of what is preached."  The message of the cross contradicts the wisdom of this age; the deep-thinkers of the world stumble over the apparent foolishness on display in the crucified God.  When the Apostle tells us that Christ Jesus "became wisdom from God for us", he is not only establishing where wisdom is, but also telling us where it is not.  Christ became wisdom for us by going to the cross, by demolishing everything that the human intellect would naturally think about God.  This demolition job goes to the foundations of natural thinking about God.  It is not that we mostly had God right, but were surprised by this one thing that he has done.  Christ who becomes wisdom for us in the incarnation and supremely at the cross is in himself and from eternity the Wisdom of God.  The apparent foolishness of the cross goes to the heart of who God is, and the fact that the cross appears foolish to us when in fact it is wisdom which reflects the eternal Life and Being of God is a sound rebuke to human intellect.

The second ground for anti-intellectualism is grace.  I think this is where a lot of evangelical anti-intellectualism comes from.  God doesn't expect us to climb up to him, either morally or intellectually; he comes down to us.  The message of the cross is devastatingly simple.  An infant can begin to understand it.  There are no theology exams for salvation; simply, child-like trust is all that is required.  Wherever an intellectual barrier is erected which seems to threaten the simplicity of the gospel, a certain amount of anti-intellectualism is justified and indeed required.

However, anti-intellectualism is not itself a good thing.  From the fact that God has created us with brains and the ability to engage in more or less complex reasoning, we really ought to assume that he wants us to use them - and why, if we are called to use them in life generally, would we not be expected to use them in understanding God and his works?  In fact already in the Scriptures and then in the Tradition of the church we see plenty of rigorous intellectual work, grappling with the reality of God's revelation, seeking to describe it and trace out its implications.  What puts people off that sort of work in the church?

To an extent in evangelicalism I think it is, as already mentioned, the desire to keep the simple gospel simple.  Fair enough, as far as it goes.  But we do our own faith, and our appeal to outsiders, no favours if we decline to engage in thought about what we believe.  The danger looms of a purely subjective faith - I believe it because I believe it - with so little intellectual content, so little concern to explain what we believe and why, and so little effort to connect this faith to a general view of the world, that it becomes unassailable but also inexplicable.  The gospel is simple, but it is also huge in its claims and its implications, and really the church does need to take up the task of exploring and explaining these.

There is also, if I read things correctly, an unhelpful biblicism at work.  Of course evangelicals are Bible people; that's the whole big idea.  But when the Bible is used as if answers can just be read off the surface of the text, and as if any attempt to reflect more deeply on how those answers join up, whether certain parts of the text might be key for interpreting and applying other parts, whether the text might imply a metaphysical hinterland (and perhaps foreground) - well, then I think we're in trouble.  Holy Scripture doesn't work that way.  If we insist on just sticking to the words and formulations of the Bible, we may well end up in heresy - many heretics have been very keen on the text of Scripture! - but at the least we will miss the depths of what is being portrayed in Scripture.

If we want to avoid anti-intellectualism in our churches and foster a thoughtful theological culture, I think we need to consider a few points.  Firstly, those of us who like theology and read big books for fun need to rein it in.  It is very easy for theology enthusiasts to give the impression that they have graduated from the simple gospel to something more profound.  In reality, there is nothing more profound.  Those who have done the most intellectual work need to be able to speak the language of simple faith in church, even as they hope to guide people deeper into that simple gospel.  Even as we go deeper, it should be very evident that we are going deeper into the same message, and certainly not moving on from it.  And this should be clear not only in what gets said, but where the focus and the enthusiasm are.  I get nervous when people seem more excited about metaphysics than they are about Christ crucified.

Second, the links between the Bible and theology need to be clearly spelt out, and it needs to be absolutely clear that the Bible is in the driving seat.  I have no time for that approach that says you need the Nicene Creed or whatever in order to properly understand the Bible.  Rather, I want to show that the Bible itself teaches Nicene Trinitarianism, because that is how God has revealed himself.  There is a temptation for theologians to scorn those who just want to stick to the Bible; instead, why not help people to see that sticking with the Bible is exactly what we want to do, and that the way to do it is to think through the nature and identity of the God revealed in the Bible?

Finally, we need to be clear that the intellectual work of the church is not intended to make the message of the cross appear wise to the world.  Clever folk who are converted to Christ will need to keep on putting to death their natural wisdom in order to start thinking on the basis of God's wisdom - in order to have the mind of Christ, to think on the basis of Christ in the wisdom which the Spirit displays.  Thinking that starts from Jesus and returns to Jesus, making much of him - that is what we need.

The Theological Task

 A sentence from John Webster that deserves some unpacking:

The primary theological task... is the dedication of intelligence to devout indication and description of Christian verities, whose goodness, once known and loved, dispels anxiety and draws both intellect and affections to satisfaction.

This is from God Without Measure Vol 1, page 100.  In the immediate context, Webster is discussing the doctrine of creation, but the description of the theological task seems to be more generally applicable.  I wanted to try to expand some of the phrases.

The primary theological task...

That immediately indicates that there are also subsidiary or secondary aspects to theology.  Webster mentions polemics and elenctics, both of which might be generally classed as apologetics.  We might add ethics, liturgics, and other branches of theological knowledge.  All these things are important.  They are all part of the theologians job description.  But they are not primary, and they won't be done well if they are allowed to take the primary position.  The primary task is not argumentative but descriptive.

...is the dedication of intelligence...

The theological task is an intellectual endeavour.  In my experience the church does not like this fact.  Intellectual tasks feel elitist.  People like the (biblical!) idea that the gospel is simple enough for anyone; they are less keen on the (biblical!) idea that there are depths in the gospel to stretch the brightest mind.  Theology doesn't always help itself.  It is easy to turn this intellectual endeavour into intellectualism, with accompanying intellectual arrogance.  But it doesn't have to be this way.  Intellectual endeavour is to be in the service of the church.

...to devout indication and description of Christian verities...

The subject and method of theology are dealt with here.  Theology is about Christian verities, the truths which are given in revelation, and the primary job is to indicate and describe these verities.  Because they are objective truths - things that are really real - the first job is simply to point toward them.  This is true of the metaphysical and the historical realities upon which the faith depends.  Theology ought to be very obviously not spinning theories but drawing attention to realities.  A second aspect to this is to describe these realities.  The key thing here is objectivity.  Theology is tied to reality, and therefore it can only follow reality.

...devout...

Just to highlight that one word.  Theology is an intellectual task, but it is also a task to be undertaken with devotion and worship.  This is not just an ideal; it is of the essence of the theological endeavour.  One cannot think right thoughts about God unless one's heart is humbly inclined to worship.

...whose goodness, once known and loved...

The description of Christian truth includes, necessarily, the display of the goodness of this truth.  This is not, or at least not yet, apologetics.  It is not necessarily conscious effort to persuade people to love the truths of the Christian faith.  It is just recognising that unless the goodness and beauty of these truths has been shown, the description of them is not yet complete.  God is goodness and beauty.  You cannot rightly indicate or describe anything about him without describing it in its goodness.

...dispels anxiety and draws both intellect and affections to satisfaction.

Theology seeks to satisfy the mind and the heart, and its task is not complete until the realities which it describes and indicates have taken root and brought out the fruit of delight.  Again, this flows from the subject matter: God is the eternal fountain of goodness and love.  Such a fountain is not accurately described without conveying something of that goodness and love.  Theology can provide genuine satisfaction, not in itself as a description, but insofar as it genuinely points to the source of satisfaction.  Webster's point about dispelling anxiety is important here.  Far too much theology, particularly in this age of cultural pressure on Christian faith, is undertaken from an anxious or defensive stance - it is, in a sense, already apologetics.  The primary task of theology, though, is to be undertaken with a calm attention to the subject matter which rules out anxiety.

Forgetting what is behind

In the lectionary reading for Morning Prayer today, we find the Apostle Paul's determination to 'forget what is behind and reach forward to what is ahead'.  That kicked off some reflections for me.

What is Paul determined to forget?  In the context of Philippians 3, I think two things.  Firstly, he is determined to forget all of those marks of his identity and achievement which might seem to be a sound basis for confidence before God.  He is an Israelite, he is - in the legal terms of the Mosaic covenant - blameless.  He has lived zealously for God.  All that is behind him now, and to be forgotten.  What he had once considered to be to his credit, he is now happy to regard as loss - because of "the surpassing value of knowing Jesus Christ".  At his conversion - which the church celebrates today - Paul sees clearly that all this stuff is worthless.  I take it there is more than this, though.  He is also committed to forgetting his achievements since his conversion.  He hasn't yet been made perfect or achieved his goal, but he sees Christ ahead of him, and runs toward him with all his might.  There is no time for constant retreading of the course already run.  What matters is to keep running to Christ.

There is a second thing beside his achievements that Paul must be forgetting, though.  When he speaks about his zeal for God before his conversion, he includes the fact that he persecuted the church.  Paul's pre-Christian zeal was misdirected; his understanding of God and his works and ways was faulty.  There is not only achievement in his past, but also sin and error.  That, too, he has to forget, in order to strain forward to Christ.  He is not meant to be endlessly caught up in guilt or regret.  The past has been decisively put in the past by the work of Christ.  Therefore it is to be forgotten, so that with both eyes fixed on the Christ who is ahead of him Paul can respond to the heavenly call of God.

An appropriate forgetfulness seems critical to the Christian life.  It is a part of repentance, which genuinely puts off the sins of the past and turns to face Christ.  It is a part of faith, which genuinely entrusts whatever was good in the past to the care of the Lord, seeing it as his work in and through us, and turns to face Christ.  The surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus our Lord renders everything else... forgettable.

Nature, Grace, and Herman Bavinck

The relationship of nature and grace is a key theme in the Reformed Dogmatics of Herman Bavinck.  For Bavinck, "grace restores nature".  This is, according to his editor, "the fundamental defining and shaping theme of Bavinck's theology".  It leads Bavinck to a robust doctrine of creation, and a holistic vision for discipleship and the Christian life.

So far so good.  But I can't help feeling that the way this plays out in Bavinck's thought is rather skewed.  Consider this (from volume 4, 395):

The gospel of Christ never opposes nature as such.  It did not come into the world to condemn but to save, and it leaves the family, marriage, and the relationships between parents and children, masters and servants, and governments and people intact.  The gospel, finding nothing reprehensible in itself and everything created by God as good if it is received with thanksgiving and consecrated by the word of God and by prayer, allows everyone to remain in the calling in which one was called... Still, while averse to all revolution, it is all the more committed to reformation.  It never militates against nature as such but does join the battle - always and everywhere, in every area of life and into the most secret hiding places - against sin and deception.

So Bavinck takes an extremely conservative social position, on the grounds that nature is good, and grace does not come to overturn nature but to restore it.  The gospel will slowly "reform and renew everything", but it will not be revolutionary; it will not upset the apple cart, so to speak.  I am not sure this fits with the more apocalyptic strand of the New Testament - with the teaching of Jesus, for example, that seems to dramatically relativise the natural family (e.g., Luke 14:26, Matt 12:48-50), or with the teaching of Paul about marriage and singleness.  The gospel seems, in Bavinck's view, to sanction human authority, but I am missing something of the radical question mark which it also puts to all human authority.  Consider the Magnificat, and the upending of human society which it envisages.  Is Bavinck's conservatism really compatible with this vision?

Earlier in the volume, Bavinck argues that the practice of infant baptism "maintains the bond between nature and grace".  That is to say, in the baptism of infants a close link is displayed between the natural family and the spiritual family, between natural birth (into the covenant community, as Bavinck would see it) and spiritual birth into the family of God.  As a baptist, I found reading this section alternately humorous and painful, as Bavinck tries very hard to square this with the New Testament.  Suffice to say: the church is not a natural family; grace is not tied to nature in this way.  That is the whole point of Romans 9-11, alongside many other passages.  Grace disrupts the natural order of things - the Lord Jesus came to divide families, to turn children against their parents, etc.

Some slightly disconnected reflections:

1. Bavinck sees very strong continuity between the world as originally created and the world as it exists now.  "Substantially and materially the creation after the fall is the same as before the fall". (436)  I'm not sure we can be so confident as that.  I tend to think that Bonhoeffer had a better understanding of the natural.  That is to say, there is much about what appears natural to us which does not necessarily reflect created design.  Nevertheless, the natural is good, in that it preserves creation at God's will.  I just don't think it's as absolute as Bavinck seems to think it is, perhaps because I see it as one step removed from creation per se.
2. I worry that for Bavinck the gospel seems to be merely an episode in the restoration of creation.  It is creation he is really excited about, it seems to me, and the natural life; the gospel seems to function as a necessary response to sin, but not as the highpoint of created purpose.  "The gospel is temporary;" Bavinck writes "the law is everlasting and precisely that which is restored by the gospel."  He means that "in heaven all its inhabitants will conduct themselves in accordance with the law of the Lord" - and the gospel seems to just be the means to get them to that state.  I do not agree.
3. I wonder whether Bavinck's position at the tail-end of Christendom (not that he knew it was the tail-end, of course) allowed him to see lots of things as 'natural' and as open to natural reason which in fact spring from the gospel and its long influence on European culture.  I wonder whether he is in some ways able to draw such a tight connection between nature and grace because he lived in a culture which had been so saturated with the gospel.  I wonder whether we can do that today.
4. Connected to this, it interests me that Bavinck's social positions seem quite radical today - in an anti-authoritarian, even anarchist, age, the idea that the gospel legitimises the family, the state, etc etc. is very appealing.  But as I try to read it with late 19th century glasses on, it seems rather bourgeois.  I worry that people who are appealing to Bavinck and others like him are actually sometimes missing the radical nature of the gospel and focusing on social implications of nature instead.  There is a lot of talk about the family from those who identify Christian ethics with conservative social positions, but less talk about the way in which the New Testament radically relativises the family!

I have more thoughts that I can't quite make choate right now.  Bavinck feels very alien to me, compared to most of the theology I've read, and uncomfortably at home in this world.  Maybe I'm misunderstanding him?  Or maybe I just don't agree.

Fulfilled time

It is a pretty commonplace observation, but perhaps one that strikes home in this season, that the more years you have under your belt, the faster they seem to accumulate.  How can it be the new year again, already?  I'd barely got used to 2023, and there it is, in the rear view mirror.  All so fast.  Increasingly it is hard to pinpoint memories in time - what year was that exactly?  The annual celebrations merge into one, and come around more quickly than seems possible - remember how long it took to get to Christmas when you were a child?  And of course, there is the awareness that in all likelihood there is more road behind than there is ahead...

I find the liturgical year a comfort in the face of the rapid slipping by of the years.  Yes, this Christmas celebration looked a lot like the last one; yes, Easter will roll around very rapidly.  But the point is that at these key points I am taught to look for the Lord Jesus in time, and in fact to see time not as the empty road flashing by, but as full of Christ.

The great mystery of the Christian faith is that time was inhabited, for 33 years or so, by eternity.  The eternal Son of God lived a succession of human years, one after the other.  The full life of God was lived not only in eternity, but in time.  The love of the Father and the Son in the unity of the Holy Spirit took place in human history as well as from eternity past to eternity future.  There was a time, two millennia back, when eternity was also, and without any loss, now.  And in the exaltation of Christ to the right hand of God, time was in a sense gathered up into eternity.

The recurring celebrations and commemorations of the Christian year keep us in touch with the fact that time and eternity are thus related: that by entering our time, the Son of God has sanctified it, healed it, lifted it up into the eternal life of God.  All time is about Christ.  It always was - time before him awaited him - and it always will be - in him time has found its meaning.  The successive years exist in relation to those years, those years in which Jesus walked amongst us.  And because he is alive now, those years are not just distant history: he is with us, our time has been claimed for him, for our relationship with him.

Time slips by, but it isn't lost.  Jesus is Lord of time.  Yesterday, today, forever: he is the same.  The rolling years can't separate us from him as we celebrate him in faith.  And one day those years will give way to the eternal day of glorious sight.