Schleiermacher and preaching

But what of the ministry of the Word?  Here we come to the heart of Schleiermacher’s theology of preaching.  Preachers, like Christ, exercise an efficacious influence on their hearers.  Their speech arises, as did the Redeemer’s, from the disparity in the strength of God-consciousness in themselves and others.  They are active in communicating, and others are receptive in being influenced by, their self-presentation.  While preachers truly speak of themselves – their own inner experience – they do no preach themselves or attribute the gifts that they communicate to themselves.  Rather, their communication is the transparent medium through which their hearers encounter the living Christ…  Christ, through his servants, communicates himself – the Word made flesh – through the efficacious influence of their self-presentation.

This is how Dawn DeVries characterises the theology of preaching held by the great 19th century liberal theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, in a fascinating study of Jesus Christ in the Preaching of Calvin and Schleiermacher.

It is terrifying.

Why, according to Schleiermacher, does the preacher preach?  Because the preacher has a stronger consciousness of God than the other members of the congregation.  This is what qualifies, and presumably motivates, the Christian preacher - the awareness that his own God-consciousness (note that this has a technical meaning for Schleiermacher, but basically is the awareness of dependence) outstrips that of his congregants, and that he is therefore able to help them my mediating God-consciousness to them.  Note that the preacher and the congregants all stand on a continuum with Christ here!  The preacher with his greater God-consciousness is just a bit closer to Christ as the ideal of total God-consciousness than are the congregants.

What, according to Schleiermacher, does the preacher preach?  His own inner experience.  This doesn't mean he shouldn't preach from the Bible; in fact Schleiermacher thought he certainly should.  But he must not preach anything from Scripture that does not resonate with his own God-consciousness.  It is not the Christ recorded in the Bible who really matters; it is the Christ present in the preacher's own heart (and therefore potentially in his hearers' hearts) that is important.  What this means in practice is that really the Bible illustrates Christian faith, rather than the latter resting on and deriving from Scripture.

This is terrifying to me as a preacher because it is both so possible and (therefore) so impossible.

It is, of course, possible that I have a deeper knowledge and experience of God than the people to whom I'm preaching.  It is possible that in my experience and understanding of faith there is something worth saying, something that will impart something of Christ.  It is possible that I might stand in such a position vis-a-vis the congregation that I can preach.

But then again - on any given Sunday, can I be sure that I stand in this position?  Am I definitely further up the continuum than all these people?  Aren't there weeks when I'm just empty?  Aren't there times when I have nothing useful to drawn on in my own experience of faith?

Far better to realise that the job of the preacher is quite impossible and therefore possible.

I don't stand in any different position than the congregation in front of me.  There is no continuum; there is just Jesus on the one side and all the rest of us on the other.  Whether I have greater spiritual experience or not is irrelevant, because what I am called to bring forth is not my own faith but Christ himself, with all his benefits offered in the gospel.  I am to deliver to the people the Word of God, which is to say the Lord Jesus.  And I cannot do it.  The congregation stands in front of me in need of Christ, and I am just the same.  I have nothing to offer.  It is impossible to preach.

And because it is impossible, I must rely on God, and in so doing I find that it is perfectly possible - in faith.  Christ must communicate Christ, and my preaching can only be the vehicle of this if and as he so wills.  But because he has promised, I can confidently attempt the impossible...

A final alarming thought: how often do we veer towards Schleiermacher, when we say things like 'the preacher can only truly proclaim what he has experienced?'  I mean, I get what this is trying to do, but it is so crucial that our confidence not lie in ourselves as preachers but in the Word who wills to be preached...

Heteronomy's back

Four steps in the history of ethics in Western culture:

1.  God gives the moral law, which you should obey because it comes from God.  Being moral means being subject to another, namely God.

2.  The moral law is objective, and should not be accepted on authority.  Rather, universal reason will bring us to the same moral conclusions, to which we must freely bind ourselves if we are to be moral.  Being moral means being subject to yourself as rational being.

3.  The moral law is subjective, and can only be found within yourself.  There is no universal reason, and what is morally right for you may not be morally right for me.  Being moral means being subject to your own sense of morality and purpose.

4. The moral law is inter-subjective, and can only be discovered through social interaction.  There is no universal sense for what is right and wrong, but your action should be governed by whether it is likely to offend anyone else.  Being moral means being subject to literally everyone you come across.

Reflections on Desiring the Kingdom

Given that James K.A. Smith's book Desiring the Kingdom was released in 2009 - and given that it has since received two sequels, which I've not read - it hardly seems needed or appropriate for me to offer any sort of Jonny-come-lately review.  So this isn't that.  It's just some reflections on the book and the way it's disappointed me.  Because I really thought I'd like it, and I really didn't.

The book is subtitled Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation.  I think it has two main points, with one larger analysis sitting behind them.  The first main point is that many of the cultural activities in which we are encouraged to engage day by day are in fact deeply liturgical.  Smith gives an amusing look at a shopping centre (a 'mall', if you will) through the eyes of a Martian anthropologist (19f).  The conclusion is that the shopping centre is set up as a place of worship, designed to appeal to the deep desires of our hearts.  Smith considers the advertisers, who rather than trying to sell a particular product are trying to sell a whole life style (102ff.), indeed a life.  And the point is that these 'liturgies' of commerce are formative.  They subtly cause us to adopt particular patterns of thought and behaviour when it comes to satisfying those desires - and these go unnoticed, because they don't appeal to our conscious, critical minds.  We are gradually programmed to imagine that consumption is the way to satisfy our deepest desires.

The second main point is that Christian liturgy is also in the business of cultural formation.  The Martian anthropologist goes to church (155ff.) and sees people being inculturated into a different way of seeing the world - a different social imaginary.  More on this in a moment, but just note that the really useful thing about this analysis is that by telling us that things we typically think of as cultural are actually liturgical, Smith causes us to look differently and more critically at those activities; and the same is true in reverse - we look more carefully at the Christian liturgy when we are thinking of the church as a place of cultural formation.

The larger analysis sitting behind the two main points is a whole way of looking at humanity, an alternative anthropology.  Smith contends that by adopting whole-sale the 'worldview' way of interacting with the world, we in the church have also swallowed an unbiblical anthropology, thinking of people primarily in terms of their ideas or beliefs.  Smith contends that it would be better to think of "the human person as lover" (39), as "homo liturgicus".  Desire is primary.  It is not that there is no place for worldview talk, or discussion of ideas and beliefs; it is just that so much of what we think and do, and who we are, is shaped by non-cognitive forces.  Habits, enshrined in and enforced by liturgies and rituals, are key.  Physicality matters; in fact, repeated physical actions and reactions have a profound effect on how we approach or imagine (Smith uses 'intend', borrowing helpfully from 20th century continental philosophy) the world.

So, what's not to like?  Emphasis on the embodied nature of human existence?  Good!  Critique of the formative aspects of cultural engagement which often slip under our radars?  Good!  Encouragement to think of the ways in which the church's liturgy helps to counter-form us in a different culture?  Great!

But two particular points in the analysis jarred with me.  Here is the first: Smith suggests that sacraments (which, of course, sit well with his thesis) "are particular intensifications of a general sacramental presence of God in and with his creation" (141).  This cannot be right (and I am inclined to think that his reference to "the doctrine police" worrying about it [147] is a snide way of trying to head off the criticism).  Think about what it would mean for the Incarnation - was it just a particular intensification of a general presence of God in humanity?  Absolutely not!  The Incarnation represents the contradiction of all the possibilities inherent in human nature.  The entry of Christ is a new thing.  The gospel is News with a capital N.

And here's the second: Smith asserts the "priority of liturgy to doctrine" (138).  Doctrines, he thinks, emerge from reflection on the practice of liturgy, not vice versa.  "Christians worship[ped] before they got around to abstract theologizing or formulating a Christian worldview" (139).  Note the poisonous use of 'abstract' here!  What about concrete theologizing?  Did Christians start to worship Christ, for example, and then on reflecting on the practice decide that he must be in some way divine?  Absolutely not!  Again, what is lacking here is the news, the gospel.  It is not just that Christians found themselves adopting certain liturgical practices and worked backwards to what God must be like.  They received news of what God was like and what he has done, and that news evoked their liturgical response.

So here's the thing: I think for Smith the God-stuff, the Christian-stuff, is just there, and all we need to do is inhabit it.  We just need to be formed by the liturgy into this always-present awareness of God and his works and ways.  What I want to know is: where is revelation here?  Where is the good news as news?  Christian worship will always revolve around the cognitive and not merely the affective, because it is through our brains that we receive and process news.  And isn't that a more biblical way of thinking about (trans)formation?  Don't the apostles encourage us to think that the shaping of our moral character will come through the renewal of our minds?  Don't they proclaim our new identity in Christ as something that must first be thought and then enacted?

Owen on Spiritual gifts

Prepping for a sermon series in 1 Corinthians 12-14, I've been re-reading John Owen on the gifts of the Spirit (end of volume 4 of his Works, if you're interested).  There's lots of good stuff in there, but there are some big negatives which are interesting in and of themselves.  It can be instructive to see, at a few centuries' remove, the errors made by theologians, and to think how these ideas might have had an impact on the course of church history!

Here are the two biggest problems with Owen's account of spiritual gifts:

1.  He ties gifting almost exclusively to the ordained ministry.  Although there are occasional hints that the Spirit gives gifts to the average layman, Owen has almost no interest in those gifts.  He sees Spiritual gifting and ecclesiastical office as almost completely correlated.  This has some definite positive effects: he is pretty damning when it comes to the appointment of persons not clearly gifted for Christian ministry to ecclesiastical office.  Without the gifting of the Spirit, nobody can be legitimately appointed to a church office, no matter what human calling they receive, and the human attempt to construct a ministry independent of the Spirit's equipping represents a revolt against the authority of Christ.  But negatively, where is the body?  Where is every-member ministry?

I think we can trace this problem to Owen's historical situation.  The Magisterial Reformation never did quite escape the clericalism of the mediæval period.  Moreover, Owen was concerned, in the face of various groups of 'enthusiasts', for the maintenance of order in the church - a concern which he read from 1 Corinthians.  But for the 17th century Englishman, order meant constitutional order, and that meant officers.  One wonders how the over-reliance on church officers which this view implies has affected church life in the English speaking world for the last 300 years.

2.  He doesn't think the church is on mission.  That might be stating it too baldly, but one of Owen's arguments for the cessation of the 'extraordinary' gifts (prophecy, healings, miracles, tongues etc.) and some of the 'extraordinary' offices (prophets and evangelists) is that they were necessary during the initial period of mission, when the gospel was new to the world and much opposed.  When the churches are planted, there is no more need for such things.  The regular work of the ministry is upbuilding within the church, not mission.  The churches, being established, have in the Word written and preached by Spirit-empowered ministers everything that they need to maintain (and if lost, recover) their identity and life in Christ.  There is no need for miracles anymore.

Owen had other reasons for cessationism, but this one at least will hardly stand up to scrutiny.  The church, in so far as it is true to its given identity according to the witness of the NT, is always being sent.  One could say it is always being established.  The gospel is always new to the world, even if the world has been hearing it for centuries.  Even if the whole population of the world were nominally Christian, the church would still be sent by her Lord - would still be on mission.  I wonder how the loss of this perspective contributed to the inner weakness of the churches and their vulnerability to a rising secularism.

The night is far gone

A few decades after the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, the Apostle Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome telling them that their salvation was nearer now than it had been when they first believed.  There is a set day of redemption, and with each passing day it gets closer.  Only the Father knows when that day will be, but the Spirit functions as an alarm clock, waking up God's people before the dawn.  With the Word of God ringing in our ears, we know what time it is.

The night, you see, is old.  It has been night for so long, but now - in this time between the times, this epoch that commences with an empty tomb within which the women seek him in vain and hastens toward the day when every eye shall see him - now the day is at hand.  The Morning Star is in the sky, and dawn is just over the horizon.  And it is closer, now: closer than when Paul wrote.  Soon it will be day.

So wake up.  Live like a daytime person.  Shake off sleep, stop living like the night is endless.  Don't indulge in behaviour that makes sense only in the darkness, but prepare yourself.

It will be soon, even if that means another thousand years of waiting.  The night is far gone, even if it stretches for millennia to come. The day is at hand.

Classical Theism

This is a tentative post - and if it doesn't read like it, that's just because I like to make strong arguments!  It's tentative because this is a set of some of my problems with classical theism, a position held by almost everyone in the history of Christian theology prior to the twentieth century.  So I'm up against the consensus, and that is not a safe place to be.  So I invite contradiction and argument.  I would be happy to return to the fold if anyone could show me biblically why it is right to be there.  In the meantime, this is, I guess, where I stand.

1.  Classical theism starts with the distinction between Creator and creature.  God is fundamentally 'other'; he is 'unlike' us at an ontological level.  There will be no disagreement from me regarding this distinction.  My only question is whether it is the right place to start.  I think it serves very well as a conclusion, but rather less well as a presupposition (this will be a recurrent theme).  When Scripture talks about God's 'otherness', it is not advancing a metaphysical position, but saying something about God's character.  Isaiah 55:8-9 is a great example: God is not like us - but what does that mean?  In context, it means that God forgives his people's sin!  He is unlike us, because he forgives.  In fact, the way in which God is most unlike us, according to the NT, is that whereas we grasp, from our lowly position, at power and prestige, he lays aside his glory to come near.  When we stand before the Son of God in his triumphant humiliation on the cross, then we can surely say that God is utterly unlike us.  Never would this have entered into our minds.  Here - and I would suggest only here - do we see that there is a distinction in being between Creator and creature that we could never bridge.

2.  Classical theism in its evangelical mode, ironically, doesn't make enough of the Creator-creature distinction.  When it comes to thinking of God, evangelicals who are committed to classical theism want to make sure that we are disciplined in continually observing the distinction between Creator and creature.  "...[W]e can think about God in an appropriately different manner only with considerable self-conscious effort", suggests Peter Sanlon in Simply God: Recovering the Classical Trinity.  This is a theme which recurs throughout that book.  It will be hard work to think of God as uniquely other.  It stands behind the whole understanding in classical theism of analogical language: when we attribute qualities like 'love' to God, we do so analogically, purifying them of the imperfections which naturally attach to human love.  But is this work really sufficient to get us over the infinite divide?  Despite the talk about the importance of revelation in evangelical versions of classical theology, I am reminded of Pseudo-Dionysius or Bonaventure, who both envisage an ascent to knowledge of God by way of denial and purification of concepts.  That is not a compliment: apart from the fact that this idea of an intellectual/spiritual ascent sits very uncomfortably with the gospel of grace, the God these two figures arrive at is essentially defined in the end as a nothingness.

3.  Classical theism assumes too much knowledge.  When, for example, we are instructed to purify our concepts of whatever smacks of imperfection, or when we are told that God could not have certain attributes in certain ways because this would imply imperfection, where is the idea of 'perfection' coming from?  How can you or I know what perfection looks like?  One hears a lot from classical theists about how we fail to attain to the lofty classical vision because we intuitively think God must change, or must be passible, or whatever, if he is to be love. But to my mind, the classical God looks just how I would intuitively imagine God to be, if it weren't for his revelation in Christ: big, aloof, utterly beyond.  What is counter-intuitive is the God of weakness, God in the manger, God on the cross.  Classical theism seems to know what God must look like before it sees what God does look like.

4.  Classical theism seems to hide God behind his revelation.  Here I want to tread especially carefully.  I am aware that classical theists would see what I am about to say as a distortion of their thinking.  I am aware that classical theists do not hold, and indeed explicitly disavow, the conclusions which I think follow logically from their starting point, so let me be very clear: I do not think that classical theists believe that God's characteristics and attributes as described in Scripture float above, and are ultimately not connected to, the real, simple God sitting underneath them.  It is just that I am not sure they can really avoid such a picture in practice.  The doctrine of analogy is an attempt to get around this problem, by saying that the attributes of God are analagous in some way to those attributes as we know them in humanity.  So, that God loves means that there is something in God which is analagous to human love.  Great, but what does that mean?  Given that the classical concept of God requires us to drop almost everything that usually makes up the concept of love - and requires us to somewhat explain away those aspects of the biblical story which look most like love to us - what are we really able to say about God?  It seems to me that the language of the attributes becomes a smoke-screen, behind which there sits a God who bears no relation to the concepts used to describe him.  I think it would be reasonable to extend this critique even to the Persons of the Trinity.  Again, I don't think classical theists think this, but I think their starting position makes them incapable of effectively overcoming the gap (created by them!) between God's revelation and God as he is.

There is other stuff - for example, I think classical theism only makes sense on an Aristotelian metaphysic, which makes it a philosophical cul-de-sac of the sort which Christian doctrine must avoid - but those are my main problems.

What would be the alternative?  Is our thought about God to be less disciplined than the admittedly rigorous system of classical theism demands?  Is God in fact more like us than we thought?  Where should we start?

Our thought about God must indeed be disciplined: strictly disciplined.  The discipline is: look only where God has revealed himself.  Learn God only from the place where God is seen.  "A Christian ought not to seek or find God otherwise than in the Virgin's lap and on the cross", said Luther.  It is in the face of Christ that we see God.  It is in the history of Christ's birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension that we are to see who God is and what God is like.  Here God has come down to us.  We are far safer taking our language for God from his coming down, than from any attempt spiritually or intellectually to climb up to him.  I would encourage my friends who are committed to the classical vision to consider carefully what it means when Paul discourages the Roman Christians from seeking to ascend or descend to bring Christ down or up, rather than focusing on the word of faith which is near to us.  I want to encourage them to take seriously Christ's rebuke to Philip: has he been with us so long, and yet we don't know him?  Don't we know that we are to see the Father in him, and him only?

Advent theology

Recent conversations I've been having with people around the merits (or demerits) of classical theism have driven home to me again that theology, like everything the church is called to do, is an advent discipline, which is to say, it's grounded, provisional, and eschatological.

Theology is grounded because it is based in the original advent of Christ.  We in the church have seen something of God, and therefore we must speak.  Because it matters that we speak faithfully - that what we say conforms to what God has revealed - we have theology, a discipline which aims to critique our talk about God so as to achieve that faithfulness.  What that means is that theology is far from being an anything-goes affair.  The real God has really revealed himself, and it matters that when we speak of him our speech reflects his revelation.

Theology is provisional because we live between the times.  We look back to Christ and rejoice in what he has done, but we acknowledge that we still await our redemption.  That means that we have to recognise two things.  One is our own continuing sinfulness and weakness.  Everything that we say is open to critique, and nothing that we say will perfectly express God's being and action.  The other is the movement of history.  Things that were said in the church yesterday cannot just be repeated today as if they definitely still made sense.  Human speech which was faithful to God's revelation yesterday may be unfaithful if simply repeated verbatim today.  It is not as if God has changed!  But in this between-the-times world, nothing stands still for long.  Words change their meaning, cultural resonances shift, philosophies rise and fall.  We must speak today, knowing that the church of tomorrow must speak again and afresh.

Theology is eschatological because we look forward to seeing Christ.  On that day, theology will become defunct, as we will know even as we are known.  Or, to put it another way, the human discipline of theology will give way to the divine theology, which will once and for all correct our faulty notions and purify and complete our stumbling efforts to speak.  Faithful theology looks forward to its own dismissal, its service done and no longer required.  The goal, after all, never was theology as a discipline, but knowledge of God as a relational reality.