On doubt, and unbelief

Prompted by a number of different people I know wrestling with doubt in their Christian faith, I've been thinking a little bit about the role that doubt and uncertainty play in our understanding of faith today.  I have heard a lot of folk speaking very positively about uncertainty.  I have myself at points been tempted to think that doubt is the mark of a mature faith, a faith that doesn't shy away from the tough questions.  On reflection, though, I think that's just wrong.  In most cases, I've come to think, doubt is a bad thing; in many cases, uncertainty is actually the sin of unbelief.

There are at least two forces in our culture which predispose us to think positively about doubt.  One is the culture of suspicion.  There is a long philosophical backstory to this, but the result is that we have been taught to view authority as being usually a mask for some sort of power play.  Questioning everything therefore becomes a virtue.  To accept authority is to enter into ia kind of slavery, to give up the right and necessity of autonomous thought.  No authority can be immune from this, not even 'thus says the Lord'.  In such a culture, doubt and uncertainty naturally come to be seen as healthy and virtuous.

The other, related, force is the value of personal authenticity.  In our culture, your highest calling and your greatest responsibility is to be yourself, defined somewhat vaguely as the person you feel yourself to be.  Because we value authenticity so highly, we would much rather have someone who is wrong but true to their convictions than someone who does the right thing for bad reasons.  In a culture like that, a story of doubt and uncertainty just plays better.  It sounds genuine.  It is easy to assume that those who don't express doubts are just concealing them, being inauthentic.

These two forces are not wholly bad.  Often authority is a cover for a power play, and 'thus says the Lord' can be just a device for exercising control.  Sometimes those who seem most certain in their faith are indeed hypocrites, who teach others by their example to bottle up their questions.

But I can't help noticing how keen the New Testament authors seem to be that we have certainty about what we believe, that we be confident in the one we've trusted, that we have a clear and growing knowledge of the truth.  There is no praise for doubt and uncertainty in Scripture!

So here's what I think.  The reasons for doubt and uncertainty are broadly the same as the reasons for sin: weakness, negligence, our own deliberate fault.  Weakness because sometimes we cannot understand, or because we are carrying wounds from an authoritarian church background, or because we are caught in the storms of life and thrown off balance.  Negligence because sometimes we don't do the work, because the answers are there in Scripture but we don't seek them out, because the certainty is to be found in prayer but we don't pray.  Our own deliberate fault because sometimes we nurture doubt and uncertainty to avoid the implications for our lives of the truth, or because we like the sense of superiority our sophisticated doubts give us.

I also think a lot of the sting of doubt and uncertainty would be removed if the church took seriously it's calling to be merciful to those who doubt - if questions were met with sensitive efforts to understand the backdrop to the question and to apply the truth gently.  This requires a context in which it is okay to express doubts and questions - just as church should be a context in which it is okay to confess sins!  And that in turn requires a solid confidence that God's revelation is true and his gospel is good.

Counting the Cost of Planting

The FIEC have put out an episode of their podcast entitled When Church Plants Don't Work, with Dan Steel.  Dan has done a lot of work on church planting, and the ups and downs thereof, and I think has some really useful insights as a result.  For the sake of fair disclosure, it's worth pointing out that I was the pastor of the church plant from Dan's church that didn't work out - so I also have some thoughts on the subject.

One of the most useful things in the chat on the podcast is the recognition that church plants 'fail' for a variety of reasons, and whilst there are many mistakes that we can learn from and try to do better in the future, there are also situations in which - it just didn't work.  That has to be okay as an outcome.  If it isn't, we will become highly risk averse, and ultimately we won't plant churches in the places that need them most.  It would help a great deal, as the boys on the podcast point out, if we were prepared to tell the stories of 'failure' as well as those of 'success' - and let me just take a little swipe at the cheery triumphalism of much evangelicalism that makes that impossible.

There is just one supplementary point I'd add to that, which is that recognising that 'failure' is a possible outcome needs much more serious counting of the cost for all involved in church planting.

I hope we know that there is a cost involved.  If a church is remotely functioning, then it is a family, and it is the community around which life is structured.  To leave a church, then, even to go and do something potentially exciting like planting is really costly.  Relationships don't need to be completely left behind, but realistically they will be attenuated when we're no longer worshipping together on a weekly basis.  Valued programmes will be left behind - perhaps youth groups or other things that the plant is not of a size to run.  It is, and should be, a wrench to leave a church.

But then if we're going to throw ourselves into planting, we need to be all in.  We need to build relationships in the plant on the assumption that we're going to be together for the rest of our lives.  We need to build rhythms of liturgy and discipleship that are intended to bed in over decades.  We need to build outward looking relationships with people in the local area which we hope will bear fruit, perhaps in many years.  What we can't do is keep our lines of retreat open.  If you allow awareness of the fact that the plant might not make it to cause you to keep one foot in the sending church, I think you probably make the 'failure' of the plant a self-fulfilling prophecy.  You have to be all in.

But that means that if it doesn't work out, it will be hugely painful.  It will be like the wrench of leaving the sending church, but worse, because instead of being the pain of being sent out into an exciting horizon, it will be the pain of dissolving a community you loved, a return tinged with disappointment and perhaps bitterness.  There will be wounds.  We need to count the cost of those wounds before sending people out - the cost of sending, but also the potential double cost of receiving back.

Who elected him?

A man was, briefly, arrested in Oxford yesterday for heckling during the proclamation of the King.  In response to the proclamation, he shouted a question: who elected him?  For this he was briefly detained and driven home.  I don't intend to comment on the rights and wrongs of this situation.  Not least, I am aware that the only account I've read is that of the republican in question, and it's quite likely there is another side to the story.  If you want to read a defence of his protest, from the point of view of freedom of speech absolutism, Steve has an article for you.  I don't entirely agree, but it might be a good place to start from.

I was thinking that I would instead write a little piece about how this protest in many ways captures the spirit of the age.  This is, after all, a deeply democratic age, in the sense that we want to believe that all power and authority starts with us, the demos, and is then passed on to whomever we choose.  That is why you get people saying 'not my king!' - they mean, I think, I didn't choose him, and I can't imagine any other grounds of legitimate authority.  This attitude does, of course, get us into trouble even with the democratic elements of our politics.  Some want to disown political leaders they disagree with (not my PM!) in the same way that others would disown the Monarch.  This is just the individualistic version of the democratic impulse - nobody can have power or authority over me unless I chose them.

There certainly is an extent to which this is the spirit of the age, but as I've thought about it I've been struck that this is really just the spirit of humanity.  The obvious verbal parallels in the story of Moses jump out at me - who made you a ruler and judge over us?  The deacon Stephen makes it very clear that this attitude was a rejection of the one whom God had chosen, and sees it as the archetypal reaction of Israel to God's authority.  Psalm 2 shows us that it's not just Israel, but all of humanity.  We will be in charge of our own destiny.  I will be my own ruler and judge.  Isn't this just the spirit of sinful rebellion?

I am not suggesting that there is a one to one relationship between political republicanism in the UK and spiritual rebellion in the human race!  There are all sorts of reasons (none of them good, in my view, but that's by the by) why one might be a republican.  After all, the answer which the proclamation gives to the protester's question - God, by whom kings and queens reign - is in the case of earthly leaders open to question.  But I do think there is something in the attitude that we ought to be wary of.

In the end, a King has been elected - by Almighty God.  The rule of King Jesus does not depend on our choice, or even our assent.  God laughs at our attempts to be 'spiritual republicans'.  Every knee will bow.

Witnesses

The prophets and apostles are witnesses in two different but complementary ways.  They are first of all natural witnesses.  That is to say quite simply that they were there, they encountered something of significance - namely, God's revelation.  This is the sense of 1 John 1, or 2 Peter 1.  Something happened, someone was there, and by virtue of their proximity to that event and that person, they became witnesses.

The fact that the prophets and apostles are natural witnesses has both apologetic and theological significance.  The apologetic significance is already recognised in Scripture - we did not make it up, we were there, we saw.  Appeal is sometimes made to the fact that in this sense the prophets and apostles stand in the midst of a much wider group of natural witnesses, that they are not bearing witness to something which happened hidden away, but to something which was at least in part a very public occurrence.  I can see no reason at all, beyond prejudice, why this status of the prophets and apostles as natural witnesses should not earn them a hearing at least.

The theological significance of these natural witnesses is even greater.  Their existence as witnesses in this way demonstrates that when we are talking about God's revelation we are talking about something - ultimately, someone! - historical, contingent.  An event which took place, a life which was lived, in proximity to other lives, a reality which became a factor in our space and time.  Revelation is a matter of history, of recollection and testimony, rather than philosophy or speculation.

The second way in which the prophets and apostles are witnesses is as legal or commissioned witnesses.  That is the sense in the prophetic call narratives of Isaiah and Jeremiah, or most clearly in the language of the great commission.  'You will be my witnesses' means much more than just 'you are those who have seen and heard', although it depends on that.  As those who are natural witnesses, they are claimed and sent to go and bear witness.  Their relation to what they have seen and heard is not that of neural observers; rather, they are governed and ruled by that to which they bear witness.  To be concrete, the Lord Jesus has become their Lord, in this particular way and for this particular service, their natural witness being taken into the service of his own testimony to his Person and work.

This legal witness is of huge theological significance.  To be sure, the prophets and apostles purely as natural witnesses warrant a hearing and a degree of human credence, but they do not warrant divine confidence, faith.  That can only rest in God's Word itself - in fact, in the very reality to which the prophets and apostles bear witness.  It is as Christ's own commissioned witnesses, empowered by his Spirit, that we have to listen as to Christ himself, because they are his ambassadors.  He continues to accompany and empower their witness as it is laid down in Holy Scripture; having commissioned his witnesses, he does not abandon them or their testimony.  Our doctrine of Scripture is, or should be, built on this foundation

Finally it is worth noting that all of us who are Christians are called to be witnesses - of necessity, secondary witnesses, who weren't there, didn't see or hear, and who are therefore bound to the prophets and apostles as primary witnesses.  Because of their witness, we can bear witness, that we have heard them and have found that in their witness we have heard the Word of God.

Reader Response: Church Dogmatics ch III (4)

In support of his sixth point about Scripture, Barth offers some brief notes on two key Biblical passages, 2 Timothy 3:14-17 and 2 Peter 1:19-21.  Since these passages feature prominently in much discussion of the doctrine of Scripture, it seems worth pausing to see what Barth does with them.  Note that he is not here offering a full exposition, but a reading of these two important Scriptures in support of his theological conclusions.

First, Barth points out that both passages have to do primarily with the Old Testament, "but according to the fundamental meaning of the two authors in whom they are found, the expressions can and ought and must be applied to all the witnesses of revelation and therefore to the New Testament witness as well." (504) It is helpful to have this stated up front; I think many treatments of these verses (especially the 2 Timothy passage) make this move surreptitiously, or perhaps just presuppose it.  But there is actually an important theological move being made when we class the NT witness alongside the OT - we are claiming that they are both the same thing, united in being a witness to Christ.  It is because both these passages speak of the OT in terms of its witness to Christ that it is possible to make this move here.

When it comes to 2 Timothy 3:14-17, it is obviously striking to Barth that the text has both a backward and a forward reference.  Timothy is pointed back to his childhood acquaintance with the Scriptures and reminded of their formative influence on him.  But then he is encouraged to look ahead, to what the Scriptures are able to do in terms of completing his formation and giving him all he needs to serve in the church.  "Scripture was able and it will be able..." (504) - that corresponds to Barth's motif of recollection and expectation.  Timothy is to continue in the Scriptures, in recollection of what they have shown themselves to be for him, and in expectation that they will show this again.

In the centre of this recollection and expectation stands the crucial sentence: all Scripture is inspired (or breathed out) by God.  Barth understands this to mean that "all, that is the whole of Scripture is - literally: 'of the Spirit of God,', i.e., given and filled and ruled by the Spirit of God, and actively outbreathing and spreading abroad and making known the Spirit of God." (504)  Or, in other words, "...the Spirit of God is before and above and in Scripture..." (504).  This is quite obviously a broader understanding of what is implied by the word usually translated 'inspired'.  On the one hand, Barth does not want to get pulled into a debate about the nature of inspiration - he sees the statement as "an underlining and delimiting of the inaccessible mystery of the free grace in which the Spirit is present and active before and above and in the Bible", and therefore not as something that can be parsed as a precise doctrine.  On the other hand, he is unwilling to restrict this description of the relationship between God and Scripture to a particular point, as if it had only to do with the production of the texts that we have -  he sees it as describing also (and the word 'also' is important here) the ongoing relationship of the Spirit to the Bible.  It is on the basis of this ongoing work that Timothy can approach the Bible with expectation that it will again be to him what it has been in the past.

The treatment of 2 Peter 1:19-21 is much briefer, and essentially makes the same points: we are called to continue to be attentive to the prophetic witness because of its relationship to the Holy Spirit.  To my mind, Barth does not engage as much as I would like him to with the fact that these verses clearly do lay great stress on the Spirit's role in the production of Scripture, which seems to push back a little on his emphasis in his notes on 2 Timothy 3.  The other fundamental point made here is about the exposition of Scripture: we must "allow it to expound itself, or... to control and determine our exposition" (505).  This is because it comes from the Spirit and not men, and therefore is not open to our manipulation - and here, perhaps, we see the link again to Barth's emphasis on the ongoing presence of the Spirit in Holy Scripture.

"The decisive centre to which the two passages point is in both instances indicated by a reference to the Holy Spirit, and indeed in such a way that He is described as the real author of what is stated or written in Scripture." (505)  Barth wants to be clear that this does not mean that the human authors were not real authors - "there can be no question of ignoring their auctoritas and therefore their humanity" - but nevertheless "they speak in the place and under the commission of Him who sent them" (505).  For Barth, the theopneustia, the inspiration, of these authors consists precisely in this commission.  In their human freedom, they think and speak and write in obedience to their commission, and therefore under the lordship of God.  They function, then, as true witnesses.  This is not to be restricted to their writing, but describes their being in so far as they are commissioned witnesses to revelation.  "In what they have written they exist visibly and audibly before us in all their humanity, chosen and called as witnesses of revelation, claimed by God and obedient to God, true men, speaking in the name of the true God, because they have heard His voice as we cannot hear it, as we can hear it only through their voices." (505-6)

It is in recollection that in their voices the voice of God has been heard, and in expectation that this will be the case again, that the people of God are called to be the people of Holy Scripture.

Climate change, responsibility, and the sovereignty of God

The last couple of days in the UK have been pretty grim for ginger people.  We are not constitutionally well suited to temperatures above, say, 18 degrees.  One of the things that we've had to do - and I confess I've not done it very well, partly due to enervating heat and total lack of sleep - is manage our kids' concerns about climate change.  They are, of course, taught a fair bit about this at school, and they have an acute awareness that their broiling in their rooms when they should be sleeping is at least partly traceable to human actions and inactions.  They have been alternately, and understandably, angry, afraid, and in despair.  How ought I to have responded, as a Christian dad?  What should I say if the subject comes up again when I'm feeling a bit compos mentis?

Well, I know some Christians would say: just tell them it's all made up and they don't need to worry about it.  Hasn't the Lord promised that seedtime and harvest will continue until he returns?  In the face of that promise, how can we think that human beings have the ability to so desperately damage our planet?  I'm not buying this - it seems to me that the evidence for human impact on climate is pretty solid, and from my position as a non-specialist that's as close as I can get to certain.  But also theologically this just seems desperately naive.  Granted that the Lord does not intend to wipe out all life again in a flood, does that completely preclude the possibility that he might allow our acquisitiveness and greed to be followed by some pretty painful consequences?  It seems dangerous to me to teach the sovereignty of God in a way that strips humanity of responsibility.  We are moral agents, with the ability to make bad choices which have consequences.

On the other hand, I don't want to wholeheartedly embrace the frankly rather panicked reaction which is so widespread in the world (and also therefore the church).  I do think it is hubristic to claim that we can destroy the world; though doubtless we have the ability to make it more or less pleasant to live in.  We are stewards of creation, but that does not mean that the Lord of creation is absent or inactive.  God is sovereign.  Moreover, he is the sovereign God of the resurrection; the end of this world is new creation, not destruction.  We can have confidence in the goodness of this God, and whatever action we might need to take in response to the threat of climate change can be taken calmly and without fear.

So I guess what I should have said is something like:
God is in control, and he is able to preserve the world;
we are stewards, with a responsibility to do what we can to care for the world;
and in the end the Lord Jesus is coming back to renew the world.

Reader Response: Church Dogmatics ch III (3)

I mentioned that Barth initially makes six points as he begins to navigate the meaning of 'Scripture as the Word of God'.  The first we looked at in detail, but can perhaps summarise it as follows:

1. We are directed to the canon of writings which has been recognised by the church.  However, the canon does not derive its authority from the church, but from the object to which it bears witness (God's revelation); for this reason, whilst we are to hear and respect the church in its description of the canon, ultimately we can only regard this description as having limited and relative authority.  The real and absolute authority belongs to God himself. (473-481)

Briefly, the rest of the list is as follows:

2. When we talk about Scripture, we are talking about the Old and New Testaments, which find their unity in the object of their witness (namely, God's revelation). (481-485)  This section deals in the language of expectation and recollection which is so important to Barth's doctrine of Scripture, on which more below.  The main point here, though, is about the unity of the Scriptures, which corresponds to "the unity and holiness of God in his revelation" (482), a unity which can only be perceived when one is grasped by revelation, which is to say, by Jesus Christ.  Barth is therefore suspicious of any and all attempts to present a schematic or system to display this unity.  It will be seen in encounter with Christ or not at all.

3. The Bible itself establishes the doctrine of Holy Scripture by reference to the prophetic and apostolic office held by the original witnesses. (485-492). Scripture bears a general and implicit witness to its own authority by virtue of the fact that here and here only do we find witness to God's revelation (this is not quite a circular argument; it requires the self-witness of God by the Holy Spirit).  But it also explicitly speaks of its own authority by reference to "certain specific men" who "stand within the Bible" (486).  Passively, these men saw and heard God's revelation; actively they were commissioned to proclaim it (490).  In them - by virtue of their office, and not any human quality they possess - the circle of revelation is already opened up to include humanity.  I found this really helpful; I think in my tradition the prophets and apostles are played down in importance, with the Bible as a book played up instead.  But actually it is the prophets and apostles in their relation to revelation who make the Bible, literally.

4. Because the Bible includes within its sphere the prophets and apostles, there can be no getting at the content of revelation except in the form of their witness. (492-495). It is no use trying to extract some sort of kernel of pure revelation from the husk of the prophetic and apostolic witness.  Nor can we somehow directly access the history of revelation that stands behind this witness.  Because revelation is contingent and genuinely historical, not some general principle, we can only receive it in the historical form of this first witness, in their words.

5. These original witnesses, because of their office and role, are distinctly set apart from the rest of the church, and their witness is really Holy Scripture because it stands over against the whole church as an authoritative foundation. (495-502). It is of course true that Scripture is a set of human documents, with all the historical, cultural, and personal contingency which that implies.  In this sense, the Bible stands in continuity with all other human documents.  But if we read it only in this way, we miss its essential character as witness.  By virtue of this witness, Scripture "too can and must - not as though it were Jesus Christ, but in the same serious sense as Jesus Christ - be called the Word of God: the Word of God in the word of man, if we are going to put it accurately." (500)  Barth explicitly develops the Chalcedonian parallel here: the Bible, without ceasing to be wholly a human book, is also wholly a divine book, by virtue of the revelation to which it bears witness.  This means there can be no question of a series of sources of revelation, or of the possibility of placing the Bible alongside other church documents or preaching.  It stands over against and above all of them, as genuine holy.  Incidentally, Barth has things to say to those who want to oppose a 'living faith' in the church to a 'dead letter' in the Bible: in fact, the church only lives and thrives when it is wholly under the Word of God in Scripture.  "Death usually reigns in the church" when this is absent (502).

6. Because the authority of Holy Scripture is ultimately the authority of God's own revelation to which Scripture bears witness, we cannot claim any control over this authority, but can only live as those who have heard and expect to hear again God's Word in these texts. (502-506)  For Barth, this derives from the structure of Scripture itself, which is characterised by expectation and recollection (see 2 above).  It also derives from the freedom of God in revelation, and the nature of the texts as witness.  They can only point to revelation, testify to it; they cannot in and of themselves bring it about that revelation occurs in the present.  Therefore the whole of theology, and indeed the whole preaching and worship of the church, "circles around" the event of God's revelation, unable of itself to make this revelation present but always living in memory and expectation of it.  This, perhaps, is the life of faith.

That last point is alarming to many evangelicals, who want Barth to give a straight answer.  They hold up the Bible and ask: well, is it the Word of God or not?  All of this talk about revelation coming or not, circling around - how does that not just muddy the waters, diminish our confidence in Scripture?

I hope that the rest of the context here shows that Barth absolutely does want to pin us to the Bible, to secure for Scripture the place of unique authority, the one place where God is to be sought and found.  But I think Barth's return question to the anxious evangelical might be: why do you need to pin this down in this way?  Do you not trust God - the faithful God to whom that Bible in your hand bears witness?  Why do you need to be in possession of God's Word, rather than always receiving it?

I think there are lots of things going on here which cause the different perspectives - it would be good, for example, to work in the doctrine of illumination here and the role of the Spirit, and see if we couldn't show that in slightly different conceptual ways both Barth and the conservative evangelical want to safeguard the same things.  But I think there is a lot in Barth that we could helpfully learn from here.