Royalty

There have been various royal happenings this week, in Belgium and here.  These have been accompanied by the usual smattering of republican nay-sayers.  I saw a banner being waved by a Belgian fellow proclaiming that kings and princes belonged in fairy-tales.

And that is the point.  The protestor presumably thought he was expressing a republican sentiment, but I would say to him:

I don't want to live in your flat world, where 'everyone is special' (which means nobody is) and everything should be rational and sensible.  I don't want a political system that requires no imagination and leaves no mystery.  I don't want your revolution.

Some of the best and truest stories I know are fairy-tales.

God save the Queen.

Hermeneutics in Romans 10:5-10

Have a read.

The funny thing about this passage is that Paul pits two quotations from the OT against one another.  It's not made clear in the ESV, for some reason, but in verse 5 he quotes Leviticus 18:5.  The Leviticus verse is clearly attributed to Moses, and is used by Paul to represent the sort of thing legalistic righteousness might say - basically, do and live (with the unspoken flip-side, fail and die).  In verses 6 through 8, we have a mixed quotation from Deuteronomy - mostly from 30:11-14, with an introduction taken from Deut 9:4, and of course interspersed with Paul's commentary.  The Deuteronomy quotation is not attributed, but is used by Paul to represent the righteousness that is by faith - basically, trust and live.

What is odd about this?

Firstly, Paul knows full well that the Deuteronomy quotation is from Moses; it forms part of the finale of his long farewell sermon on the plains of Moab.  If he is really pitting Leviticus against Deuteronomy, this is a weird intra-Mosaic fight which would seem to be difficult within Paul's apparent doctrine of Scripture.  (He has, of course, no recourse to the easy tools of modern critical scholarship; one suspects he would not have used them if he did).

Secondly, in context - and we should never assume that we can ignore the context of Paul's quotations and allusions - both passages say much the same thing.  The whole point of the Deuteronomy passage is that Israel can and should keep the law - it is not a difficult of a distant thing.  And given that the verses cited by Paul are immediately followed by 'see, I have set before you life and good, death and evil', it would be hard to insert the thinnest of knife blades between this and the Leviticus quote.  On the other hand, the Leviticus passage itself, in the context of the book and of the whole Pentateuch, is hardly so legalistic as all that.  The law is given only to a people who have already been rescued from Egypt, something which is surely significant, and as Leviticus is continually reminding its readers, Israel is to be holy because YHWH their God - the God who has graciously made himself theirs - is holy.

So what is Paul doing here?

My suggestion would be that he is not pitting two Scriptures against one another, but two hermeneutics.  It is possible to read the OT and arrive at a legalistic conclusion.  It is possible to conclude that God requires you to establish your own righteousness, and that he has provided the law as a means to do it.  You can read it like that, and it will be broadly coherent.  Paul argues in 9:32 and 10:3 that this is exactly what Israel has done in his day.  This is their hermeneutic.

But it is equally possible to read the OT as teaching righteousness by faith.  The Deuteronomy quotation represents that option.  By interspersing the quotation with explicitly Christian emphases not present in the original text, Paul makes it clear why we should choose this hermeneutic over the other.  The facts of Christ's death and resurrection in our place as the culmination of the story of the OT decide once and for all what it was that Israel's story was all about, and it certainly wasn't about establishing our own legal righteousness.  We know the Old Testament was always about justification by faith because of Christ.

I (think I) believe in the Holy Spirit

I've been tying my reading into the calendar recently - I spent some time in Church Dogmatics IV/1 over Easter, especially looking at the section on the resurrection (which, incidentally, shows that Barth moves a long way from the existentialism of the commentary on Romans, and is not all the theologian that his opponents and many of his 'friends' consider him to be - but that is by the by); since Pentecost I have been re-reading Simon Ponsonby's book on the Holy Spirit, God Inside Out.  It is a good read, from a Biblical charismatic perspective, and I've enjoyed it as much this second time through as I did the first time.

But, if I'm honest, the closest I can come to a ringing confession of the faith of Pentecost which is expressed in Simon's book is something along the lines of 'I'm pretty sure about the Holy Spirit.  Most of the time, anyway'. Not a faith to move mountains.

Here's the thing.  When it comes to what God has done, then and there, I find my brain quite useful.  The more I look into it, the more I think it is as certain as anything in history ever can be that Jesus rose from the dead.  Okay, it takes faith to get from that to saying 'and it was for me', but still there is investigation I can do.  On top of that, I can view the problem from philosophical and theological points of view, and I can say: of course, the cross and resurrection of Jesus.  That is what we need.  It makes sense.  Even when it doesn't make sense, I can understand that the theology of the cross cuts across my understanding - crucifies it, as it were - to get me to the truth.  I get it, or it gets me, even when I don't really get it.  I have no problem, either, with saying that some things - the most important things - are taken on faith, and are not seen.  People who live under the sign of the cross must expect to live by faith and not sight; sight is for the resurrection, sight is for the time when we know as we are known.

But the thing with the Holy Spirit is that the Bible leads me to believe that I should be able to see him at work.  Ever noticed that in Acts the proof that people are converted is that they obviously receive the Spirit?  Think about Peter with Cornelius.  It is the visible reception of the Spirit that persuades him that these people have come to believe in Christ.  It would be very different in the churches I frequent.  We infer the Spirit - someone appears to believe, so they must have received the Spirit.  Peter's reasoning is the other way round - someone received the Spirit, they must believe.  Maybe this was a special case.  Maybe.

What evidence is there in conservative evangelical circles that the Spirit is at work?  Is it just that I find it hard to see it, and easy to explain it away?

How does the faith/sight dichotomy feed into this?

I'm not sure.  But in the meantime, I do believe in the Holy Spirit.  I'd just like to see him out and about more, that's all.

A holy sadness

Perhaps it is just the Lenten trek through Jeremiah, or perhaps it is something that has been growing over time.  Whatever the cause, I am developing a new appreciation for sadness.  There is something deeply real about sadness.  It is not grief, per se - it is not dragged out of you by a particular catastrophe.  It is the background awareness that much is not right (even if all is well in one's immediate surroundings), and that many are suffering (even if one's own life throws up only the most trivial inconveniences).  At its most basic level, sadness is a reaction - an appropriate reaction, although not the only reaction necessary - to a fallen world.

A man of sorrows.

There is a lot of sadness in the gospel.  It is not all joy and laughter, even if it is ultimately that.  "Then again Iluvatar arose, and the Ainur perceived that his countenance was stern; and he lifted up his right hand, and behold! a third theme grew amid the confusion, and it was unlike the others.  For it seemed at first soft and sweet, a mere rippling of gentle sounds in delicate melodies; but it could not be quenched, and it took to itself power and profundity,  [It became] deep and wide and beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow, from which its beauty chiefly came."  (Seriously, read the Silmarillion).

Surely he has carried our sorrows.

Thinking a lot at the moment about what it means to stand with the world of sadness, but still within the light of the gospel.  Not to feel the sadness - to pretend that the sadness is completely undone - is, I think, to betray the world.  It is not to walk the way of the cross.  To indulge the sadness, on the other hand, is to be unbelieving.  Is everything sad going to come untrue? asks Sam Gamgee.  No, and yes.  Untrue, but not unreal.  Frodo has to go to the havens; the saved world is not for him to enjoy.  Sadness, but not all tears are evil.  Sadness does not have the last word, but it has the penultimate word.

To be sad, to be low, not for oneself but for the world.  Vicarious sadness.  Feeling the sadness that we all ought to feel.  And knowing that it is through sorrow that God brings joy.

Ethics

I'm currently reading and loving Bonhoeffer's Ethics  Some obvious references to National Socialism aside, it seems to me that it could have been written in the 21st century.  Certainly, I keep coming across passages that strike me as astonishingly relevant.

One of the things I am loving about Bonhoeffer's approach is that he refuses to moralise about the world without bringing the church into the closest solidarity with the world.  It is not an ethics that points to the flaws that stand outside the people of God; at least, not without recognising that the church bears responsibility for those very flaws.  Hence there is a long passage of confession of sin, from the church's perspective.  The paragraph on sexual ethics particularly struck me:

"The church confesses that it has not found any guiding or helpful word to say in the midst of the dissolution of all order in the relationships of the sexes to each other.  It has found no strong or authentic message to set against the disdain for chastity and the proclamation of sexual licentiousness.  Beyond the occasional expression of moral indignation it has had nothing to say.  The church has become guilty, therefore, of the loss of purity and wholesomeness among youth,  It has not known how to proclaim strongly that our bodies are members of the body of Christ."

Tell me that couldn't have been written yesterday.  How have we still not found any guiding or helpful word - any strong or authentic message - to speak into the mess that is 21st century sexual ethics (or lack thereof) in the West?  What are we to do about it?

One thing we must not do (or perhaps, one thing that we must stop doing) is become fanatics,

"Fanatics believe that they can face the power of evil with the purity of their will and their principles.  But the essence of fanaticism is that it loses sight of the whole evil, and like a bull that charges the red cape instead of the man holding it, fanatics finally tire and suffer defeat" (my emphasis).

Every time we chase down the particular red cape issues of sexual ethics - most recently, for example, gay marriage - we risk missing the whole evil: we miss noticing that our culture stands estranged from God and fallen away from Christ.  Nothing, to my mind, captures the efforts of evangelical Christians to engage with ethical issues in wider society quite so well as the image of the bull charging here and there, always targeting the cape and never the man who stands behind it.  Always hitting the issues, and never The Issue.

It seems to me that the road to real ethical engagement with society is a road that must begin with our own confession of guilt, and not only ours but that of our society - because their guilt belongs to us as those who did not speak a strong message, the message of Christ.  This is a burden, but not an unbearable one, because guilt confessed is judged and borne away in Christ - and in Christ there is new life to be had and shared and proclaimed.

Congregationalism, and reading the Bible

I think congregationalism is the Scripturally mandated form of church order.  To clarify, by congregationalism I mean that way of ordering a church whereby ultimate decision making is vested in the local congregation, guided and led by its elders and served by its deacons.  There are two types of argument I would advance in favour of this position, and since they are the two types of argument which I think are important in any theological discussion, I wanted to outline how they work.  I'm only hinting here at the structure of the particular arguments themselves; mainly I'm trying to show how theological argument needs to work.

The first sort of argument is called 'the Bible says...'  This sort of argument is not difficult to understand.  In the case of congregationalism, it would consist of pointing out a few key passages which describe church order in the first congregations.  We could point out that Scripture describes and prescribes the appointment of elders and deacons, and mentions no other church officers.  We could also point out that in several instances Scripture points towards the whole congregation being involved in decision making - for example, church discipline in Matthew 18:17.  I would also want to go to Acts 20, and see how Paul, foreseeing his absence, commits the churches to the word of God and not to any other officer or group of officers standing above the local congregation.  In short, the Bible says that churches are run congregationally.

For many Christians, I guess that's the end of the conversation.  But I do not think that any solid case can be built this way.  It is one thing to be able to quote the text of Scripture, and quite another to be able to show how it applies today.  There is a need to show why the Bible says what it does, and for that we have to go behind the apostolic teaching to see how it relates to the central concerns of the gospel.  I am assuming here that the Biblical authors are theologians, and I am assuming a particular understanding of how they thought and wrote.  I do not think we are to imagine all of the Bible being direct oracles, written down.  I don't think Paul got his teaching about eldership directly from heaven.  I think it is a reflection on the gospel - on the birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus.  So what the Bible says hangs together.  It is all related to the gospel, and understanding how it is related will help us to understand how it applies now.  The connection is not always spelled out, or sometimes even hinted at.  But we can try to think from the starting point - Christ - to the end point - this specific teaching - and work out what goes in between.

As an aside, this is why it is very hard to work out how to apply passages of the NT which seem to have no connection to the gospel, or a connection which is now obscure.  I am thinking of women covering their heads, for example.

When it comes to congregationalism, I think there is a Christological and a Pneumatological point to make.  The Christological point is that Christ runs his church.  Jesus the King governs his church.  This has implications for how we understand church order.  For starters, we can't make it up - it is not up to us to derive structures which Christ has not mandated.  Moreover, we must have structures that reflect the fact that Christ is actively involved in the church, and leave us open to his guiding.  I think congregationalism makes sense in this context.  The Pneumatological point is that every Christian has the Spirit.  The officers of the church do not have a monopoly on wisdom, or on hearing from God.  Congregationalism seeks to reflect this.

It is the combination of the two arguments that wins me over.  The Bible says it, and I can see that what the Bible says makes sense in the light of the gospel.  The application in this case is straightforward; since nothing important has changed in the circumstances surrounding the question, the Biblical guidance and instruction stands as it is.

Located Church

"..it will be a community that does not live for itself but is deeply involved in the concerns of its neighbourhood.  It will be the church for the specific place where it lives, not the church for those who wish to be members of it - or rather, it will be for them insofar as they are willing to be for the wider community.  It is, I think, very significant that in the consistent usage of the New Testament, the word ekklesia is qualified in only two ways; it is "the Church of God" or "of Christ", and it is the church of a place.  A Christian congregation is defined by this twofold relation: it is God's embassy in a specific place.  Either of these vital relationships may be neglected  The congregation may be so identified with the place that it ceases to be the vehicle of God's judgement and mercy for that place and becomes simply the focus of the self-image of the people of that place  Or it may be so concerned about the relation of its members to God that it turns its back on the neighbourhood and is perceived as irrelevant to its concerns."

Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

If the former neglect is the danger faced by Anglican congregations in particular (although not by any means exclusively), the latter is the great danger for free churches.  We tend to be drawn from wider areas, made up of people who have opted out of the parish system for theological or personal reasons.  The temptation is to say that it doesn't matter - geographical location is less important to people nowadays   That is certainly true, but the question is whether it is a trend we should be fighting.  I suspect that Newbigin is right.  Without a geographical focus, our churches become private members clubs, which attract people like us.  Our evangelism begins to be directed only to our friends and colleagues, and large numbers of people whose lives do not throw themselves in the way of a Christian are overlooked.

I don't know how much longer the Church of England as we know it will be with us.  I do know that in many parishes the gospel is not preached.  We in non-conformity will need to be more than just the alternative.  We will need to be churches for places.