Not feeling it

One of the most helpful things, for me, in preaching through the Song of Songs is the corrective it gives to some of our undue stress on objectivity over subjectivity, and thinking over feeling.  This is probably, once again, one of those pendulum things - we've reacted to something unhelpful, and swung way too far in the opposite direction.

Let me give an example.  How might we respond to someone who doesn't feel like they are forgiven?  Or doesn't have any sense of Christ's love for them?  Because we're the truth people, we'd probably push in the direction of the objective.  Whether you feel forgiven doesn't change the objective truth that if you are trusting in Christ you are forgiven.  Whether you sense the love of Christ or not has no bearing on the objective truth that he does love you.  This objectivity is grounded in God's revelation, and supremely in the cross and resurrection of Christ.  It's true, regardless of feelings or experience.

That's not the wrong response.  It's half the right response.

It is impossible to read the Song without picking up on the delight and desire which stand at its heart.  That Christ is delightful, and that his people desire him; that remarkably - astonishingly, to the human mind and heart illogically and almost unbelievably - Christ also delights in his people and desires them.  This delight and desire play out in different moods through the Song.  There is pleasant desire, full of anticipation, and there is satiated delight; but there is also painful desire, responding to the absence of the lover, there is delight which is also almost agony because it is delight in the distant lover.  We do well not to flatten this out, or strip it down to make it fit into a theological scheme.  The Christian who has no sense of Christ's love ought not to settle for a bare assertion of objectivity, anymore than the woman in the Song should settle for the fact that she is objectively loved.  Feeling matters.  Reality matters as well as truth.

It seems to me that older Christian writers got this (and I should say at this point what a joy it was to read Julian Hardyman's book Jesus Lover of My Soul when prepping for the Song, which has the same sort of emphasis to it).  They encourage us to pursue Christ, not to be satisfied with a head-knowledge of the truth but to chase after...  After what?  An experience?  Yes, I think so.  And I think that matters because these older authors (and Julian, and I'm sure others) see clearly that the objective truth by itself won't transform us to live joyfully for Christ.  How can I love Christ wholeheartedly, passionately, if I have no sense of his great love for me?  How can I act like someone who is forgiven if I don't have an experience of my conscience being cleansed?

Delight in Christ - the subjective, emotional, experiential sense of his goodness and beauty - is the engine which drives sanctification.  And that is more than just objectivity.

Cultural Christians and Christianised Culture

As the census rolls around again, the usual kerfuffle kicks off around the question asking people about their religion.  And no doubt in the aftermath, as the results are made public, there will be the usual hand-wringing about the decreasing proportion of people in the UK who identify themselves as Christian.  What we are seeing is the continued, and now quite rapid, evaporation of the remaining influence of Christendom; the residual notion of a 'Christian country' is more or less gone, and the default option in the census box-ticking exercise is no longer 'Church of England'.

Christian responses here vary.  For many believers, it is a jolly good thing that nominal Christianity is fast disappearing.  It helps to draw clear lines.  It means that people are no longer kidding themselves that they are Christians when they hold no Christian beliefs and show no signs of personal faith in Christ.  For many Christians, mere cultural Christianity has long been seen as a buffer against the real thing; people are inoculated with a weak form of Christian belief, reduced usually to some naff songs from the 70s and a belief that people ought to love one another in some vague way, via school assemblies, and this makes them less responsive to the real thing.  They think they are already in.  The loss of cultural Christianity clears away one barrier to evangelism, which is that people think they already know our message and are either already onboard (despite their lack of belief, practice, or other commitment) or have already sampled enough to know they don't want to take this ride.  In one sense, fewer people ticking the 'Christian' box(es) on the census just reflects reality, and it's always helpful for people to see reality.

On the other hand, many Christians will see the decline in the numbers of people identifying with Christianity as an almost entirely negative thing.  From this perspective, the decline in nominal Christianity goes along with the decline in respect for ethical norms derived from the Christian gospel.  The loss of a general, even if rather vague, sense of accountability to God is to be bemoaned.  Children are raised in a culture which actively promotes, or worse just assumes, a completely different worldview.  The ignorance of the Scriptures, unimaginable even a couple of generations ago, makes communicating the gospel intelligibly that much more difficult.  The loss of a Christianised culture makes the normalisation of such horrific practices as in utero infanticide inevitable.  It threatens the undermining of values which would be considered important even by non-Christians, who haven't yet read Dominion and so don't know that those values derive from Christianity.

These two responses are not, strictly speaking, incompatible.  However, I reckon people lean heavily one way or the other.  I have flip-flopped, but at the moment I'm coming down on the latter perspective.

In Bonhoeffer's terms, I think those who are glad to see the end of cultural Christianity are thinking in terms of ultimate things - that is to say, salvation and eternal life.  Will a vague nominal Christianity help anyone ultimately?  Nope.  Will church-going as a mere cultural phenomenon in and of itself save souls?  Nope.  A Christian ethic?  Nope.  In ultimate terms, cultural Christianity is useless and possibly worse than useless if it allows people to delude themselves.

But what about penultimate things?  Don't they matter at all?  What Bonhoeffer saw, which I think some of our contemporaries are missing, is that ultimate and penultimate are related, and the relation between them is not entirely one-way.  For those who are pleased at, or at least indifferent to, the end of cultural Christianity, the ethical challenges and cultural issues thrown up by that loss (penultimate problems) and only to be dealt with by evangelism and conversion (ultimate solutions) - you can't, after all, expect non-Christians to live as Christians.  But the traffic doesn't all flow that way.  Making the penultimate suited to the ultimate - trying as much as possible to make the ordinary stuff of life and society conform to God's Kingdom - is the way in which we prepare the way of the Lord.

So what then?  The culture war again?

I used to feel that this was unwise, and we were better off staying out of it.  More recently I've tended to think that we're in it whether we like it or not, and all we can do is try to navigate it well.  I think that many of those Christian leaders I see trying to stay out of the culture war have essentially privatised the faith, and made God's laws the rules for the dwindling Christian club rather than the absolutes which govern and direct a human life well lived.

Most of all, I think the answer is more church, and better church.  Church which carries with it a 'thick' Christian culture, not just an hour of light worship or intellectual stimulation on a Sunday.  (I wonder if there is another dividing line here: between those who see the great need as more action at the edges of the church, in evangelism and mission, and those who see the great need as renewal at the centre of the church, in liturgy and worship).  I think we as Christians need to realise more and more how much we are isolated in our culture; we need to feel less at home here.  For the sake of the culture, we need to repudiate the culture.  For the sake of the world, we need to be those who don't love the world or the things of the world.

Secularism and the Sabbath

I preached on the Fourth Commandment yesterday - you can get the video and audio online if you feel so inclined.  As I prepared the sermon, I was struck by how little I've heard about the Sabbath in recent years, and how truncated a view of Sabbath has been presented in what I have heard.  As far as I recall, most of the teaching I've heard on the Sabbath has gone along these lines: as Christians we're definitely not obliged to keep the Sabbath anymore; but the Commandment is still useful for us, because it enshrines the wisdom of taking time off and rest; so it's not in force as a Commandment per se, but it definitely still holds as a piece of advice (from the Creator, so properly wise advice which you ignore at your peril) about the limits of humanity and how to avoid burnout.

But the Sabbath can't be primarily about the need for human rest, for a couple of reasons.  One is that the model for Sabbath is God's rest.  It is God's rest into which the people are to enter by keeping Sabbath, the rest which we see at the end of the first creation account in Genesis.  God was not weary; God was not in danger of burn out.  Neither, in fact, did God entirely cease his activity (or the creation he had so recently called into being would have collapsed back into nothingness).  If the Sabbath is modelled on God's rest, it cannot be primarily addressing the problem of human exhaustion.  Then again, to make the Sabbath primarily about human rest ignores the positive content of the Sabbath - it was to be a sacred assembly, a day holy to the Lord.  It had positive content, not just negative.  Not just stopping work, but seeking worship.

So here's the thing.  I think we've secularised the Sabbath.  I don't think we should be observing a Jewish Sabbath; I do think the New Testament changes things.  (Listen to the sermon if you're curious to know how).  But what the NT doesn't do is remove the God-centred, worship-centred vision for human life which is presented to Israel.  To enter into God's rest is not merely to cease working; it is to be in God's presence, to worship, to delight in God.  I wonder if we react so much to the Roman emphasis on holy places, holy days etc. that we end up removing part of the biblical emphasis.  I wonder if we might be well advised to desecularise our Sabbath.

True truth

If evangelicals know anything about themselves, it is that they are the truth people.  Evangelicals have fought the good fight against the postmodern assault on the very concept of truth.  They have enlisted cheerfully in the struggle against relativism.  They have contended for the truth in battle after battle.

But I wonder if in the midst of all the battles, we've neglected to fight the war.

I've expressed concern before about the number of evangelicals who responded to the restrictions on public worship by saying that we could not expect HMG to understand the importance of worship.  We, of course, believe that worship is important, but we shouldn't try to make that case to secular authorities; those who don't share our worldview will not be open to persuasion.  Similar arguments are sometimes expressed around ethical issues - of course we as Christians hold that position, but there is no point trying to argue this publicly, and certainly not to attempt to legislate (even in matters of life and death).  It is not to be expected that non-Christians will behave like Christians.

In each case, you seem to end up saying: this is objectively true, but I wouldn't expect anyone to be able to see that, nor would I consider it worthwhile contending for it.  Of course we would contend for it within the church - if there were those in our churches who thought that worship was unimportant, or that abortion was fine, or whatever, we would certainly argue, and we would do so on the grounds of truth.  God's truth is true regardless of our opinions.  But that doesn't seem to hold in the world outside the church.

Stepping back, it seems to me that something has gone wrong with our concept of truth.

We believe in objective truth, but it seems like that objective truth is private, only true for believers.  I understand the logic, I think - given the interconnectedness of truth claims, we are unlikely to persuade people of second order things if they don't share our commitments to high level truths about reality.  Sure.  But when we don't think it's even worth advancing those truth claims, or publicly stating them, what is happening?  Has our 'objective' truth actually become objective truth only within the church, and not in the world at large?

Is the gap between 'we can't expect non-Christians to believe this' and 'I have my truth and you have yours' all that big?

It seems to me they're practically the same.  The upshot of both positions is that I hold my truth claims without any expectation that they will be shared.  I worry that they are psychologically the same.  How long can you hold a belief that this claim is both true and important, and yet not to be advanced universally, without slipping into relativism?  And I can't for the life of me see any ethical difference.  If we allow people to pursue false beliefs about issues of human goodness and flourishing without a protest, because we can't see why we should hold non-Christians to Christian standards, how does our stated belief in objective truth help those who suffer as a result?

If the truth is true, it is true everywhere and for everyone.  If the standards of righteousness and goodness revealed in Scripture are from God, they are universal.  If we won't make the claim, are we really the truth people anymore?

Austere worship

Preaching on the Second and Third Commandments yesterday - no to idols, no to taking the Lord's name in vain - I'm struck by the austerity of Israelite worship.  It must have been striking to the pagans as well.  No images of gods, no gorgeous statues.  Beauty, of course, and craftsmanship on display at the temple.  But no gorgeous shrines scattered throughout the land.  No imaginative myths, no constant development of the cultus.  It is a narrow way, the way of Israelite worship: a way defined by what God has revealed of himself and his will, not open to human interpretation or tweaking or addition.

In our culture of 'I like to think of God as...' there is a need to stress this again.  God has shown us himself.  We have his image - the one and only authorised image - in the Lord Jesus Christ.  We are baptised into his name, the name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and our whole lives are to be lived as conscious bearers of that name.  Worship is not an imaginative exercise in that sense, but an exercise in following in the path the Lord has laid out for us.

I don't think this austerity means no beauty.  I am in favour of beautiful church buildings, beautiful liturgies, beautiful hymns.  In fact, I think those things are required, since God has revealed himself to us as beautiful!  But there is always going to be a necessary strain of iconoclasm to Christian worship: as we receive God's word, we are involved in demolishing whatever idols, whatever false conceptions of God, have gained a foothold in our minds and purifying our thoughts of him.  The same should be true in our worship: constantly reforming, to guard us against accretions and idolatries and blasphemies which will always be a threat and to some extent a presence.

It is a narrow way, but it is the way that leads to (because it first leads from) the true God.  If we want a god of our imagining, we can afford to be creative in how we think of him and how we worship him; if we want God, the true self-existent God, we follow his way and ruthlessly reject any paths to left and right.

The principle of sin

The Scriptures give us a number of ways in which sins can be distinguished and classified.  Numbers 15 gives us the distinction between unintentional sin and sinning with a high hand (translated here 'defiantly').  That same distinction crops up throughout the Pentateuch.  Perhaps 'unintentional' is not the most useful translation; it is more like sin which is wandered into, sin which is not deliberately premeditated.  To sin with a high hand, by contrast, is to sin with a knowing disregard for the will of God.  There is sin into which we are almost surprised - in the aftermath we think 'where did that come from?' - and there is sin which is planned, sin which despises the threat of God's judgement.  In Numbers 15, the former is to be dealt with by sacrifice; the latter results in excommunication and perpetual guilt.

Something similar to this distinction is perhaps at work in Psalm 19, where the Psalmist prays to be delivered from 'hidden faults' and kept from 'wilful sins'.  This seems to envisage sins of which the Psalmist is even unaware, which makes sense - sometimes when someone confronts you with your sin, it's the first you consciously knew of it.  (And of course, that doesn't make it any less sin).  Wilful or presumptuous sins, on the other hand, are committed knowing them for what they are, either in defiance of God or on the assumption that his forgiveness will be cheap and easy to obtain.

Psalm 32 gives another distinction - between sin kept secret and sin openly confessed.  The former is destructive and ultimately leads to death, but confession can bring forgiveness and healing.  We don't know when this Psalm of David was composed, but it is interesting to note that the categories introduced here cut across the others - unintentional sin could be hidden and therefore deadly; by contrast, high handed sin could be confessed and forgiven, as with David's terrible sin against Bathsheba.

Some of the Scriptural distinctions between sins are less easy to understand - for example, 1 John 5 introduces a distinction between sin which leads to death (which should not be [or perhaps need not be] prayed for) and sin which does not lead to death, for which a brother or sister can intercede for forgiveness.  Taking the whole of Scripture into account, it is tempting to map this on to the unconfessed/confessed paradigm from Psalm 32 - but that doesn't seem obviously correct to me from the scant context of 1 John.  I'm not sure I know for sure what this means.

Perhaps the most troubling New Testament distinction is between all the sins and blasphemies which can be forgiven, and the blasphemy against the Spirit which will never be forgiven (see Matthew 12 and parallels).  I think we do here have to see the distinction between sin of which one repents and sin in which one (wilfully) persists - with the added burden that this is sin against light, sin in the face of the Holy Ghost.

Outside Holy Scripture there have been various other attempts to distinguish between sins.  The classic division of sins into 'mortal' and 'venial' tries rather too hard to classify wickedness by acts rather than attitudes, and therefore seems to me to miss the target aimed at by the Biblical distinctions.  The well-known confession speaks of sinning 'through weakness, through negligence, through our own deliberate fault', which seems a more helpful classification.

Anyway, the point is: sins are not all the same.

That seems an important point to make in the current climate of evangelicalism, where the egregious sins of prominent leaders are being dragged into the light.  Sins are different.  There are sins into which all people by weakness stumble from time to time, and there are sins which call into question one's salvation.  There are sins into which even leaders can be expected sometimes to fall and yet not be beyond recovery, and there are sins which disqualify from ministry.  There are patterns of 'minor' or unintentional sin which speak to the ongoing need for sanctification, and there are patterns of deliberate sin which indicate gross hypocrisy and an unwillingness to repent and come to Christ for life.  There are sins, and there are sins.

We have to recognise that so that in the face of Christian leaders who turn out to be abusers we don't just shrug our shoulders and say 'hey ho, everyone sins'.  Not like that they don't.

But there is another point which I fear we're in danger of missing, perhaps because we're rightly trying very hard to make the distinctions evident.  There are sins and sins, but all sin is sin.

There is a principle to sin, a heart to it.  The heart of sin is rebellion against the Lord.  The heart of sin is turning away from the gracious Creator to serve other things.  The heart of sin is elevating self to the place rightly occupied by God.  When we see terrible sins - sins committed seemingly with a high hand and without repentance, sins which have hurt so many and brought disgrace to the cause of Christ - when we see those sins, we recoil.  Here is sin in its full ugliness.  Here is sin shown for something like what it is, in its true colours.  Sin is foul and vile.

But without making the mistake of flattening the distinction between sins, without implying that 'this is just like that', we do need to see that the principle which is operative in those great and terrible sins is also at work in the small and 'inoffensive' sins of our everyday.  No, these sins are not like those sins, not in their severity, nor in their consequences for victims, nor in the reactions which they ought to call forth from God's people.  But whilst there are sins and sins, all sin is sin.  The little sinful habits we indulge, the character defects we choose not to curb or rectify, the minor lapses and falls - they are not those sins, but they are of the same species.  This is what sin would like to make of us.  Those great sins are what these little sins would like to be.  They are not the same, but they are energised by the same principle.

Therefore, fight sin.  Therefore, pursue accountability and repentance.  Fear sin; fear it appropriately.  Have a horror of it.  Detest it.  Look what it would do to you if it could.  Get that sin into the light; it will wither and die there.  Better to be shamed now for your sin than to carry it to the Judgement Seat of Christ.

Whoever thinks he stands must be careful not to fall.

Lent 2021

The season of Lent begins today, marking the period leading up to Easter.  Lent is 40 days (plus Sundays, which aren't counted), reflecting the 40 days the Lord Jesus spent in the wilderness after his baptism.  The themes of the season are communicated powerfully in the words spoken to each worshipper at a traditional Ash Wednesday service:

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ.

Lent is a time to particularly reflect on our mortality and frailty - we are dust, we are weak, our time is passing.  And Lent is a time to particularly reflect on our sinfulness in the light of our mortality - we will die and stand before Christ, therefore we should repent now.

This year, Lent feels strange.  For starters, at some level I feel like we never really got out of Lent 2020!  Of course we celebrated Easter as well as we were able in the circumstances, but the year since last spring has felt, to me at least, like one long reminder of the Ash Wednesday liturgy: you are dust, and to dust you shall return.  Look how frail we are.  See how limited we are, how vulnerable.  These are not bad things to be reminded of - one of the reasons we observe Lent is to remind ourselves of them - but boy, it's been a long year of reminder.

Are we really going to do Lent all over again?

My suggestion is that Lent 2021 is a good time to lean hard into the second theme of Lent: that we are sinners, that we need to repent, that we are clinging to Christ for forgiveness, that we are dependent on his Spirit to live in faithfulness.  I think there is a danger that in the midst of the pandemic, with its accompanying loss of freedoms and pleasures, we could recognise our frailty and seek God for help, but forget our sinfulness and neglect to seek God for mercy.  What I mean is that the big problem right now seems to be disease, and the big need seems to be deliverance from disease (and the painful precautionary measures taken to prevent the spread of disease).  But Lent could be a good reminder to us that the Big Problem - the problem that is really insurmountable for us as human beings - is sin and guilt.  There are no vaccine programmes or treatments for this one.  Only the Lord in his mercy can help us here.

Customarily, Christians have observed Lent by fasting and self-examination.  Fasting means temporarily giving up something which is good and lawful, in order to pursue that which is better.  Perhaps you want to fast this year - perhaps in particular it would be good to remind ourselves that we can voluntarily give up good things because Christ is our Great Good Thing.  But perhaps this has felt like a year long fast and giving up something else now feels like too much.  I can understand that.  So maybe this is a time for self-examination.  To ask ourselves - and perhaps each other - some hard questions about what we really value, what we're really trusting, where our hope is.  At CCC, our preaching series will take us through the Ten Commandments as a way of helping with that.

All that being said, let's not forget Christian liberty.  None of us is under any obligation to do anything for Lent, except the ongoing and joyful obligations to trust the Lord and love one another.  Maybe the way you need to mark Lent 2021 is by simply allowing yourself to rest in the grace of the Lord Jesus after a hard year.  And that, too, will be a good preparation for celebrating the resurrection at Easter.