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.