Little less conversation

"For the kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power."

In 1 Corinthians 4, Paul sees himself as up against people who talk a good game, especially when it comes to the kingdom of God and their part in it.  The position they seem to hold would probably nowadays be called 'over-realised eschatology' - they think they have all the blessings of the kingdom now, they think that they are reigning now, and (to pick up some hints from chapter 15 of the letter) they may even think that they have been resurrected now.

Paul's response to this and similar positions held in Corinth is the theology of the cross.  God displayed his power in the weakness of Christ crucified; God displayed his wisdom in the folly of Christ crucified.  Paul has modelled his ministry on Christ - perhaps not deliberately, perhaps just inevitably as he has sought faithfully to proclaim the gospel.  He hasn't been impressive, humanly speaking.  He hasn't come with strength or with glorious rhetoric.  He preached the weak and foolish cross, in a weak and foolish way, and God worked.

But within that context, Paul asserts that the kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power.

If there isn't a contradiction here, it must be a funny sort of power Paul is talking about here - a cruciform power, the power of God revealed in weakness.  But still, it's power.  It is all very well for these folk in Corinth to talk about their kingly enjoyment of the kingdom of God - which they seem to see displayed in exalted and lofty ideas, a refined spirituality, a liberation from the moral strictures of human society, a deliverance from the suffering that is the common lot of humanity.  But Paul has power, a power that will puncture all this talk.  The power of the gospel of Christ crucified, presented in a cruciform way, by the apostle whose ministry is shaped by the cross.

Here's what I wrestle with.  In the church as I know it, there's a lot of talk.  But there's not a lot of power.  And the temptation is to try to substitute more talk for what's missing.  The more we feel the gap between the NT description of the Christian life and our own experience of it, the more we're tempted to talk up the Christian life.  Papering over the weakness of our experience of the Spirit with words.  But that's not the kingdom of God.

Praying this morning for genuine power, not to bypass the cross or the weakness or the suffering, but to take the cross and the weakness and the suffering and make them the place where God's power is displayed.

On disliking John Frame

Periodically, I return to the writings of John Frame, even though I know they will frustrate me.  Partly that's because there are people I seriously respect who have a high regard for him as a theologian, and I am trying to understand just why that is.  Partly it's because he is the foremost representative, to my knowledge, of a particular way of doing theology, a way which claims to represent continuity with historic Reformed Orthodoxy.  But I just can't get on with him, and I think I've worked out why.

Most recently I've been reading Frame's Doctrine of the Word of God, and it has really brought to the fore where I think things go wrong.  For Frame, everything is revelatory of God; everything is a medium of God's word.  "Clearly, everything that God has made, and every event that takes place, reveals God in some way" (p. 76).  Now, this does not seem ever so clear to me.  The logic behind it is that since the word of God is God (this identification is important), and since God is providentially in control of everything, everything is a medium of the word of God.  Note that he is absolutely not saying that all things and events, being subject to God's providence, are potentially bearers of God's word; he is saying that in actual fact all things and events are media of God's revelatory word.

This means that Scripture is "one word of God among many" (p. 410), albeit a word which in some way corrects and refines our understanding of the other divine words.  Frame is keen on Calvin's analogy - Scripture is like spectacles.  Without it, we do not see clearly what is being revealed of God through nature and history; with Scripture, our blurry vision comes into focus and we can see God in all things.  Note that "this is not to say that Scripture is more authoritative than the words of God in creation" (p. 411) - this cannot be said, because the word of God is God, and therefore speaks with equal authority wherever it is spoken (and it is spoken everywhere and in everything!)  But Scripture does have the role of correcting our understanding and interpretation of God's word spoken in creation and history.

What does this mean for Jesus Christ, whom Frame acknowledges to be the living Word of God, as per John 1?  Well, explicit discussion of this doesn't kick in until chapter 42 (on page 304!), because Frame follows a schema of creation-word, verbal-word, person-word.  In the end, all that he seems to do with the idea of Christ as Word is to say that he is the mediator of all revelation - because he is the creator God and the Lord of Providence, as well as the teacher par excellence.  It is particularly telling that in the next chapter Frame goes on to say that all humans are revelatory of God; Jesus seems to me on this scheme to be just the best of us.

What I really miss here is any sense of the cross in Frame's epistemology.  Everything seems to sail on in smooth continuity: God in creation, God in history, God in Jesus, God in Scripture...  There is no sense of Jesus as the light shining in the darkness; no sense of the revelation of God as that which decisively contradicts and overturns human wisdom.  God is never hidden, he never veils himself.  In fact, he is so clearly revealed in everything that Frame maintains not only that people can know about God from creation, but that each and every individual actually does know God.  He bases this on an exegesis of Romans 1 which I reject.  In Frame, I think it just serves as a powerplay.

And here's the heart of it: I think that what has happened in Frame is that the divine sovereignty has taken over from every other attribute of God.  Everything collapses into providence: God's authority and control.  It's no coincidence that Frame's multi-volume work is A Theology of Lordship, nor that he makes a slightly bizarre attempt to read concepts of lordship back into the divine name YHWH.  It seems to me that for Frame all theology boils down to this: God is in charge.  Now that's a truth, but unless it's read through the cross I think it's a truth which is hugely distorted.  And I see this not only in Frame but in many of the neo-Reformed across the pond.  In the end, it's a theology of glory, and not of the cross.

Oh, also, he says lots of nasty things about Karl Barth, which I understood much better after I read a bit about Van Til and how ridiculous he was.

Still too strong

I've been spending a lot of time in 2 Corinthians in the last few weeks, and have been struck and refreshed again by the gloriously good news that God delights to use the weak and incapable. But I've also been thinking: it's more than that. God uses the weak and incapable because they are the only people fit for his purposes. Only a clay jar can display God's glory, because only a clay jar is weak enough to make it clear that the container has no glory of its own.

You could learn the same lesson all over Scripture. Gideon is a prime example. He cannot take 32,000 people into battle; he cannot even take 10,000. Otherwise Israel might say 'my own hand has saved me'.

Sometimes I feel desperately weak. Sometimes I think our churches are desperately weak. But I wonder if we're still just a bit too strong - too capable in ourselves to display God's glory.

So I find myself praying: Lord, weaken us where we are strong in ourselves, so that we can be strong in you.

Why I am so stupid

There is no getting around the fact that we Christians believe all manner of stupid things.  Here is a sample of really dumb things that I believe to be absolutely true:  I believe that as I type this I may well be observed by invisible spiritual beings, some good and some evil; I believe that the world outside me exists purely for the sake of one Man; I believe that the death of one Person has completely changed the situation of every single person who has ever existed; I believe that a dead Man came back to life on the third day; I believe that the most glorious thing that can happen to a person is to die because of their faith.  And when I say 'believe', don't hear that as some sort of religious word.  I mean that I believe these things in much the same way that I believe that my laptop is in front of me as I type.

These things are stupid things to believe.

They are not stupid beliefs in and of themselves.  Only internally contradictory beliefs would be stupid in isolation.  They are dumb beliefs because they are impossible to fit within the frame of reference which we use to describe reality.  They are stupid because they are contradicted by the most fundamental axioms which we have adopted as arbiters of truth.  In particular, they are dumb because they are manifestly not derived from my experience or from any empirical judgement.  They are stupid, actually, because they could only work in our frame of reference as 'values', as myths which are in some sense true for me but certainly do not make any claim to actual, real-world truthfulness.

I believe all these stupid things.

I believe them because I have come to think that our frame of reference is all wrong.  I believe them because I think they reflect a higher frame of reference: the truth of the Creator.  These foolish beliefs are his folly, not mine. And his folly is wiser than my wisdom.

There is just one thing I am determined to do: to keep being stupid.  The danger is that I take these beliefs, see the profundity of them, glimpse something of God's wisdom - and adopt a position of superiority.  If I do this, I deny the very reality of the beliefs I profess; shape them into something strong and praise-worthy.

No, I will just carry on being dumb.  Nothing much ever depended on my cleverness anyway.

Bigger, Better, Stronger, Faster

Perhaps it is because we live in a technological age.  Around us there is constant technical progress, and that shapes our thinking about everything.  We believe very passionately in progress.  All the lines go upwards.  In a piece of very muddled thinking, we absorb at one and the same time the idea that progress is inevitable and the pressure that says we must make progress.  We are unable to be content with things the way they were.  Everything has to be bigger, better, stronger, faster.  We need more, we need improvement, we need power, we need efficiency.  That is who we are.

It is no surprise that this thinking affects the Church, and within it individual Christians.  Whether its our own walk with God or the shape of our Sunday services, we are constantly evaluating.  How do we grow?  How do we improve?  How do we exert more influence or just become more robust?  How we do become more slick and get more done?

Are we killing ourselves, spiritually, with monitoring, planning, changing?

Here is the thing: the Best of us - the only one of us who could be called in any unqualified sense Good - went to death on a cross.  In so doing, he shut the door for ever to bigger, better, stronger, faster.  He chose the way of the remnant, the way of the failure, the way of the weak, the way of delay and obstruction.  We cannot be his disciples and walk the road of improvement.  We cannot follow him on the track of high performance.  He just didn't walk those roads.

The tragic thing is that we struggle to hear this as gospel.  We are so immersed in the ways of bigger, better, stronger, faster that closing the door on these things feels hard.  We are being forbidden, prevented.  What we can't see is that this is liberation.  We must not  walk the way of performance and technique, but that means we need not do so.  It is not required of us, either in our individual spiritual lives or our community life as Christians, to perform.  We don't need to be on the curve, let alone ahead of it.

The gospel - the way of Christ - wins for us the ability to be quiet, the permission to be slow, the precious and vital space to fail and be picked up again.  This is where life happens, ironically: on the long and winding road of the cross.

Questions (and answers?)

I've been mulling over the relationship between the Church and the world when it comes to questions and answers.  I think I see two models which dominate our thinking.

In the first model, the world is thought of as having questions, whilst the Church has answers.  The job of the Church, then, is to supply the answers to the questions the world is asking.  This assumes a few things.  Firstly, it assumes that the world is asking questions, and indeed not just any questions but the right questions.  Secondly, it assumes that the Church is in a position of superiority vis a vis the world, as the possessor of answers.  Thirdly, it assumes that the world, when seeking answers to its questions, is likely to come to the Church, or at least that the world will be willing to listen to the answers the Church provides.  I think this model may have been useful, at some point in the past, when the big questions being asked in the world were in fact largely shaped by the Church, and therefore the Church genuinely was seen as the place to go for answers.  I'm not at all sure it is very useful today.

In the second model, the world is thought of as having answers, while the Church has questions.  The job of the Church on this model is to question the assumptions of the world, and attempt to make the world think more deeply about the genuineness of its answers.  This model is probably more useful to us today, and underlies a lot of our apologetic strategy.  Note, however, that this still puts the Church into a position of definite superiority; our questions come from a place of security and power.

I've been wondering what an ecclesiology that is deeply shaped by the cross looks like.  I wonder whether in this instance it means not taking a position of authority.  I've been wondering whether the role of the Church in the world might be to ask questions of God and of itself, and to be asked questions by God, so that the Church is able to stand in solidarity with a confused world and encourage the world to ask the questions it hardly dares to ask for fear of a lack of answers.

I wonder whether we in the Church could be a community of comforted questioners, and the comforted questioned.  Might we not be able to say to the world: we too have questions and doubts, we too would like to ask God a thing or two, we too are confused and baffled by existence and terrified by non-existence, but we are comforted in the face of our questions and our fears by Jesus Christ, who asks the question with us - "my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"  And then we might be able to say to the world: like you, we find our very existence thrown in doubt, we are forced to question whether anything means anything, and indeed we find ourselves standing under the great question of whether our being can possibly be justified, but we are comforted in these questions by Jesus Christ, who asks us a bigger question which leads us to hope - "who do you say I am?"

Anyway, I was just wondering what that might be like.

Apologetics

A break from Kant, although we'll be back to him at some point, to discuss apologetics. I'm going to assume you know what I mean by that, and that you have some familiarity with different types of apologetic strategies. If not, Wikipedia is a useful starting point.

A bit of autobiography: I have always been sceptical of a lot of apologetics. In my younger days, I wondered whether there was any point in it - shouldn't we just proclaim the gospel? Over my time at Uni, I moved to a more appreciative position. I began to see that reasoning and persuading went hand in hand with proclamation in the New Testament. As my thinking on the subject matured a little, I discovered presuppositionalist apologetics, and the semi-presup apologetic of Francis Schaeffer. All of this was very useful to me. I started to bash evidentialism in apologetics as a failure to understand the epistemological effects of sin. More recently, though, I've started to doubt the presup position. Mainly because it is so strong.

The thing about presuppositionalism is that it is an unassailable position. It is a closed circle position. On Christian presuppositions, Christianity is true and reasonable. On other presuppositions, not so. The strength of the position is that it does not expose the gospel to the twisted logic and arationality of unbelief. The presup apologist is clear that there is no neutral ground from which the truth claims of the gospel can be evaluated. And this is surely true - everyone brings their own worldview to the party.

But that doesn't seem to fit with the way God acts in history. He seems to make himself weaker than this - to base his claim to his people's loyalty on actual events in history. Think about the OT. How often do you get a phrase like "then you will know that I am the Lord"? Answer: quite often, directed both at Israel and at others (notably Pharaoh in the Exodus narrative). God stakes his reputation on contingent facts, and expects human beings to be able to discern from those facts that his reputation has been vindicated, regardless of their initial worldview. God exposes himself to the critique of a watching, sinful world - most notably in Christ.

Presup apologetics is too strong for the gospel. I think evidentialist apologetics is also too strong, for different reasons - it tries to make the evidence unambiguous, clear, solid. I always find it unconvincing. Too strong a claim is being made - did people find Jesus unambiguous, at the end of the day?

So am I retreating, setting the clock back to my 'apologetics = bad' days?

Well, no. Because I note that the answer of many in the no apologetics camp is to disengage, to stop trying to communicate, to just repeat the words of the Bible again and again until people are convinced. It is just as much a power play as sophisticated arguments of the apologists.

Is there an apologetics of the cross?

The invisibility of God

We more or less write into our definition of God that he is the one "whom no one has seen or can see", and that must be right. But I dare say you've noticed the problems it causes our generation, raised to believe that what you can't see simply doesn't exist.

Sometimes I've tried to side-step this problem. I have said something like "if you'd been in Palestine in the early first century AD, you could have seen God face to face". And I think that's true, theologically and historically. If you had come face to face with Jesus Christ, you would have seen God.

But recently I've become profoundly uncomfortable with that answer, and I don't think I'll give it anymore. Because another question has come up in my mind.

Was God ever more invisible than when he was the man of sorrows? Was the invisibility of God ever more evident than at Golgotha - a felt invisibility, like a shadow, or a dark spot where you know you should be able to see something?

Might the invisibility of God be a vital part of life on this side of the day when I will see him as he is? Might the only visibility available to us now be that by the Spirit's power, through faith and not sight, we can "see" the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ?

Theolgia Crucis

In lieu of anything profound from me, please do look at Michael Jensen's excellent summary of Luther's theology of the cross. I am particularly excited by his conclusion:

For Luther, then, the Christian life is lived in the middle of a tension between faith and experience. Our experience only serves to contradict our faith. This was something Luther expounded when he thought that he might be martyred. Where was God in this? Luther used the word Anfechtung – 'temptation', or 'assault' – to describe this experience. The devil, the world and death are allied in a war against man. But of course, it is a work of God too, to reduce man to utter reliance on him and him alone. The only way to grow in the Christian life is to return to the foot of the cross and start all over again.

Please do read the whole thing. Everything I want my theological thinking to be is encapsulated in this one theme of Luther's.

I wanted to write something more here about the doctrine of Scripture, but I find that as much as I want it to, a blog cannot be a place for test-driving unfinished thoughts. Hopefully I'll come back to that later.

Theology of Glory

A theology of glory sounds like a good thing; it isn't, at least not in the sense that Luther talked about it. The theology of glory is opposed to the theology of cross. The theology of glory is essentially theology exactly the way any human being would naturally write it. It has a high view of humanity and human capacities to reason and to know God. It imagines that God would act as a human being would, and therefore tries to side-step the shame and stigma of the cross - after all, why would the ultimately powerful God serve and suffer? No human being would. And the theology of glory has a high view of morality, being committed to the idea that human beings can improve themselves (although perhaps only with God's help). When it comes to the church, the theologian of glory dislikes the shame of the foolish and weak congregation, and argues for powerful hierarchies and the right of the church to impose its edicts on society at large. Perhaps in these more modest days, the theologian of glory will simply demand that the voice of the church be listened to on an equal footing with all the other pressure groups in society.

The problem is, the theology of glory makes sense to us. The other problem is that is has no place for Christ and him crucified.

Satan is the ultimate theologian of glory. He is continually tempting us to take this view of things, just as he tempted Christ. I am beginning to learn to read the account of Christ's temptation as an antidote to this type of thinking.

Whenever I start to think the Christian life should be easier than this - where are all the blessings?, it's as if I hear Satan say command these stones to become bread.

Whenever I start to think if only the church looked more impressive, or the CU could put on more spectacular events, it's as if I hear the voice of Satan: throw yourself down from the temple - surely an angelic rescue will impress the watching crowds!

And whenever I feel dismayed at the lack of influence the church has in society and think where is the rule of Christ in all this?, I hear the tempter whisper All these I will give you, if you bow down and worship me.

But Christ is not a theologian of glory. He will take the shameful, sorrowful path to Calvary instead. Will I take up my cross and follow?