The Lord is One

Deuteronomy 6 contains one of the foundational statements of Jewish, and thereafter Christian, theology:

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.  You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might."

The first part - verse 4 - is the Shema, the central confession of the faithful Jew.  God is One.  I think that means two things. 

Firstly, God is unique.  This does not necessarily mean that Deuteronomy is teaching a rigorous monotheism here; in fact, the book seems to maintain the reality in some sense of other gods and spiritual powers.  Even when Moses affirms that "the Lord is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other" the context implies a comparison with other 'gods'.  The uniqueness of Yahweh, the God of Israel, is not simply a matter of alone-ness.  Rather it is that none of the other 'gods' or powers or whatever you want to call them are this God, the Creator of all and the Redeemer of his people.  He is unique.  What other 'god' has ever tried to save a people out from the midst of another nation?  What other 'god' has ever spoken to his people and entered into saving relationship with them?  As we move towards the New Testament, we have to add: what other 'god' has humbled himself to human flesh and Calvary's cross to redeem a people for himself?

Martin Luther in his Large Catechism asks: "what does it mean to have god?  Or what is God?"  His answer is: "a god means that from which we are to expect all good and to which we are to take refuge in all distress".  In other words, what you trust is your god.  I think this helpfully illuminates the meaning of Deuteronomy.  The Lord is God, the one and only; he is the one from whom we are to expect all to good, and in whom we are to take refuge in all distress.  He and he only, because he is the only real Saviour.

But second, God is united.  God is always himself.  He is not in any sense divided.  In this he stands in contrast with the ancient deities, who might appear differently in different sacred sites.  He also stands in sharp contrast with us.  We often find that we are divided against ourselves, hardly knowing what it is that we want or who it is that we really are.  Not so God.  He is always God.  That means that he is always dependable, always the same.  The Lord is One, and therefore he can be our God.

It's worth noting in passing that, theologically speaking, the fact that God is One is also the foundation of the church's doctrine of the Trinity.  Because God is One, we can take Jesus absolutely seriously when he says that to see him is to see the Father.  Wherever the Son is, there is the Father and the Spirit.  Therefore, in Jesus, we have a true revelation of God, God without remainder.

Between verse 4 - the theological affirmation - and verse 5 - the instruction to Israel - there is an implied 'therefore'.  Because God is One, you shall love him with all your heart, soul, and strength.  The logic is simple: because he is the only god, in the sense discussed above - the only source of good and only refuge of our souls - he is to receive absolute loyalty, love, devotion.  That could be terrifyingly totalitarian, and indeed it would be if any human being were to make such a claim on our loyalty.  But to love God wholeheartedly does not eclipse the love of other things.  Rather, it orders the love of created things, such that in loving God wholeheartedly we find ourselves loving other people and indeed all God's creation appropriately - and we find that our love for those created things flow back into love of the Creator.  Because God is really God, the source and fountain of all good, he is not a black hole sucking in all our devotion and love, but the one in whom we really learn what it is to love in the first place.

And then again, because God is united, wholehearted love of him is the only way to bring our fragmented and sin-shattered lives together.  "Unite my heart to fear your name", prays the Psalmist.  Take, O God, this bundle of contradictions that I call myself, and, by orienting it around your great self, bring it to order and sense.  God alone is great enough to be the sun at the centre of the solar system of your life.  This is why in Jesus we see the only real example this fallen world has ever known of true humanity - life properly oriented, lived out of a centre in God which makes the disparate whole and the complex simple.

More limits

As a brief post-script to yesterday's post, it is particularly encouraging in these troubled times to recall that God has also set limits for nations and temporal powers.  Both in time and in space, the nations are bounded. It seems to me that there are direct parallels to the way the sea is described in the Old Testament. The nations are always potentially chaotic, potentially anti-God and anti-creation. But they are restrained. And of course the nations are also a part of creation, potentially good and a blessing to those who live in them, and so within their constraints they are given time and space to flourish.

It is worth remembering with gratitude that the supreme limit against which the nations bump up is the enthronement of the Lord Jesus as the King of the universe. They cannot undo this, nor can any political arrangement (or lack of arrangement) threaten it. Therefore God's people are secure, no matter what.

I think it's a bit of a mug's game to try to discern exactly what is going on out there from the point of view of providence. But the certainty that providence rules, and that God has already allotted the times and spaces of the nations, is encouraging to me - precisely because he is the good God, who is for us in Jesus.

Limits

Been thinking a bit about limits and limitations this week.  The first 'limits' in the Biblical story are found right back in Genesis 1, when God separates light from dark, the earth from the heavens, the land from the sea.  The anti-creation forces of darkness and chaos are driven back to within specific limits, in order to create space for life.  And according to the unfolding story, God maintains these limits - consider specifically the boundaries of the sea in Jeremiah 5:22.  The limits which make life possible were established by him in his Wisdom and are preserved by him so that life itself may be preserved.  (Consider the story of Noah's flood as an example of what happens when God in his wrath declines to preserve these borders!)

The counterpart to the limits of Genesis 1 are found in the story of the Garden.  There is, of course, the boundary to the Garden itself, but actually this is not the real limit in the story; there seems to be some expectation that the Man will increase the size of the Garden, cultivating the earth and making it all a place fit for human life.  The real limit is found in the centre of the garden, where the two trees stand: And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”

This is the first personal, ethical limitation that we find in Scripture.  The limits of Genesis 1 were established by fiat; this limit is delivered by command and requires obedience.  Here the Lord deals with his animate, rational creature, rather than the impersonal darkness and sea.  But the purpose of the limitation is the same - life.  God limits the darkness and the sea because he wills the life and flourishing of humanity.  The world without form and void is not habitable.  It is death.  In the same way, 'life' outside the commandment of God is not life, but death.  This continues to be underlined throughout Scripture.  Wherever humanity is confronted by God's command, the options are life and good or death and evil.  There is only life in his will.  The limit is good.

To rail against our limitations seems to be the most human thing in the world - and perhaps it is.  Human, all too human.  But if God is for us - if he is on our side - then the limits he has imposed are good for us.  He has given me these gifts and skills and not those.  That limits me.  He has given me this level of energy and not that.  I am limited.  I cannot, contrary to the mush which passes for a contemporary worldview, be whoever and whatever I want to be.  I must accept these limits as the good provision of God.  They provide the borders, the negatives, within which God wills to give positive shape to me.  I can only exist as the person I am here.

And similarly, the commands of God which limit me, which tell me what I may and may not do - these are good.  They set out the boundaries of human flourishing.  It is not possible to transgress them with impunity - not in the end, and if it seems like you're getting away with it, it just isn't the end yet.  Actually, just as I can only really be me within the physical/psychological/cultural/etc. limits that God has set for me, so I can only really be me within the limits of God's commandments.  God's commandments, which seem so narrow from the outside, turn out from the inside to establish a broad space within which I can live.

The most challenging limitation of all is of course death, when God returns me to dust.  I think about that a lot, and this week I marked another birthday, which makes me think about it more.  But to accept this limitation too as in some way good - not perhaps good in the sense of the first design of creation, but good for me as a sinner, as one who is fallen, just as I believe it was mercy which set up the flashing sword at the gate of Eden - that is a challenge.  But one to be embraced in Christ Jesus; as the limit which also carries the promise of a glorious resurrection, the boundary which makes life - real life - possible.

Locating the doctrine of Scripture

A lot of evangelical and Reformed confessions of faith place the article on the doctrine of Scripture near the start of their documents.  For example, the doctrinal basis of the FIEC puts it second, after the doctrine of God; the Westminster Confession puts it first.  Presumably the idea here is to be up front about your authority for what is going to follow (although if that is the case, the Westminster arrangement is more logical), and perhaps there is an implicit recognition that the confession can be revised in the light of Scripture - something which is made explicit in, for example, the Scots Confession of 1560 when the authors ask "that if any man will note in this our Confession any article or sentence repugning to God’s holy word, that it would please him of his gentleness, and for Christian charity’s sake, to admonish us of the same in writ; and We of our honour and fidelity do promise unto him satisfaction from the mouth of God (that is, from his holy Scriptures), or else reformation of that which he shall prove to be amiss."  (But note where the full article on Holy Scripture is placed in this confession: right down at 19, after the doctrine of the church!)

A couple of conversations recently have got me thinking again about what difference this makes, and where it would be best to place the article on Scripture.

I do think that the place this article holds in your confession is likely to both reflect and shape your doctrine more generally.  Clearly this could be the case if the article were relegated to an unimportant position; that may well mean that the recognition of the authority of Holy Scripture within the church is on the wane.  But I think putting it first (or worse, second) also has effects.

If you put the doctrine of Scripture first, I think there is a danger of an almost Quran-like doctrine: this book was revealed from heaven, and in it we see a timeless revelation of God.  This tends to be wedded, in contemporary evangelicalism, with the desire to answer one of the big questions of modern thought: where can we find a foundation for thought?  Scripture here is asserted as the foundation, behind which nothing can be found.  I worry about this on two counts.  Firstly, I don't think it does justice to what Scripture says about itself, or its function as a witness to Christ and not merely a compendium of true facts about God and the world.  Second, I think marrying your doctrine of Scripture to this sort of modernist foundationalism produces a brittle faith, which doesn't stand up well to questioning.  And third, I think it risks leaving us philosophically adrift, expressing our doctrine in a philosophical mode which has been largely left behind by the world at large (and not without reason).

If you put the doctrine of Scripture second, after the doctrine of God, I think the big danger is that Scripture becomes the functional mediator between God and man - something which Scripture itself does not claim to be.  The effect is to minimise the ongoing work of Christ and the Spirit.

I think you need to put the doctrine of Scripture after the article on the incarnation: to make clear that in fact the reason we believe in the authority of Scripture is not primarily because it is a book from heaven but because the living Word of God has stepped down into our history in the person of Jesus Christ.  Scripture derives its authority from the historicity of the gospel, and not vice versa.  This is true even though, from our perspective, we may only come to know the historicity of the gospel from Holy Scripture.  We believe that God speaks to us because he has spoken to us in his Son.  It is Jesus, not Scripture, which is the fundamental communication of God to man.

Then again, it's probably best to delay further, and place the doctrine of Scripture after the article on the Holy Spirit.  That way we make it clear that the Scriptural witness to Christ is itself breathed out by God, that its authority is his authority.  A strong filioque (that is to say, an understanding of the relationship between Word and Spirit which binds them closely together) will underline the fact that through Scripture God speaks by his Spirit, and the word he speaks is the Word he spoke, namely Christ Jesus.

Anyway, just a thought for anyone writing future confessions of faith.  If only there were such people out there.

Reasonable, because real

On Sunday I preached from the opening part of Acts 17, and amongst other things noted that Luke reports that the apostle Paul "reasoned", "explained", and "proved" the content of the Christian message in the synagogue.  A noble response to the message, according to Luke, was not so much to just take Paul's word for it, but to "examine the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so".  Because he was in the synagogue, Paul was able to make use of the Scriptures as an acknowledged authority, in a way that we mostly won't be able to do in our context, but the broader point I was making was this: the gospel is the sort of thing that can be discussed, argued over, reasoned.

To put it another way, the gospel is reasonable, because it is real.  Contemporary Western culture wants to put a hard border around a world of 'facts' which can be debated, and to put religious claims outside that border, in the world of 'opinions' and 'beliefs'.  Some people think they're doing religion a favour here - putting it outside the grubby world of argument and within a transcendent realm where you can hold your beliefs in a mystical way without being bothered.  Others think, more accurately, that they're defending the secular order against dangerous religion - it neuters religious opinion by making it the sort of thing which one can't really discuss.  Either way, the point is that religion may be a nice interpretive story that people tell themselves to find meaning in the world, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with truth (not, at least, the everyday sort of truth which concerns the way things are), and therefore can't be argued over, except in ways unrelated to truth: we can argue, for example, about whether religion is helpful or harmful, but not about whether it is real.

The whole Bible stands against this point of view.  Everything in the Christian faith stands or falls with the reality of Christ's resurrection, in history, at a particular place, in reality.  If Christ didn't rise, Christians are pitiable fools.  The book of Acts stresses again and again that the message proclaimed by the apostles has to do with public, accessible events: these things were not done in a corner.

If this is true, it is possible to argue, to reasonably engage in a demonstration of the truth of Christianity.  (I don't mean here the sort of Enlightenment reasoning, as if a person sat down with nothing but their intellect and the world around them ought to be able to arrive at Christian conclusions; I mean that given God's revelation in Christ in history, it is in principle possible to discuss the reality or otherwise of the Christian faith).

I argued on Sunday that there is one thing in particular that it is incumbent on Christians to know about: why do they believe that Jesus rose from the dead?  There are some good resources out there on this question.  N.T. Wright's big book on The Resurrection of the Son of God is the very best, in my opinion, setting the question in its historical context and showing that there really is no other plausible explanation.  Some of the arguments are summarised in the first part of his more popular level Surprised by Hope, which might be more manageable.  It doesn't seem to have got the attention it deserves, but Daniel Clark's little book Dead or Alive? is a helpful introductory presentation of the evidence for the resurrection set in the context of a gospel presentation, and would be a good one to have on hand to give away.  And of course there is still the classic Who Moved the Stone.

On the broader question of the rationality of faith, a good introductory run through many of the questions that people ask about Christianity can be found in But is it Real? and Why Trust the Bible? by Amy Orr-Ewing.  I continue to find the argument of C.S. Lewis in Miracles to be deeply convincing, though I'm aware it has its detractors.  The Reason for God by Tim Keller is excellent.  I would warn against many more philosophical works, for example those by William Lane Craig, not because there is nothing useful in them but because in my view they ultimately depend too little on God's revelation in Christ.

Have others found particular books (or other media; I'm aware that I don't really engage much with audio or video presentations, just because I like books better...) helpful in thinking through the rationality of faith?

On running the church, then and now

One of the interesting things about reading John Owen on the question of church is picking up some of the similarities and differences between his situation and ours.  When it comes to the role of elders, Owen has three main things to argue: firstly, that churches should have elders(!); second, that elders should not be put over people without their consent; and third, that elders have real authority to rule and manage the church.  I think it would be fair to say that his stress falls on the first two points, without neglecting the third.

The backdrop, presumably, to this arrangement is a prevalent clericalism and authoritarianism in religious matters.  The semi-reformed state of the Church of England before the Civil War - and in many ways the worse situation after the Restoration - meant that the most familiar form of running the church would have been episcopalianism.  The break with the Roman understanding of the clergy/laity divide had not been made with anything like the decisiveness or clarity required.  So one of Owen's main targets is the parish church, to which a person is legally assumed to belong purely by virtue of their habitation within the boundaries of the parish.  This brings a person of necessity under the rule of a pastor (vicar, priest, whatever) who derives his authority from a bishop - and moreover it does so without the person's consent.

Owen regards this as a form of spiritual tyranny.  Both the singular nature of the pastor - Owen devotes a great deal of space to the importance of having 'ruling elders' alongside him - and the lack of consent make the arrangement entirely illegitimate.

On the other hand, against those on the radical wing - remember that Owen had significant and very negative encounters with Quakers during his time as VC at Oxford - Owen has to assert that elders really do rule (1 Tim 5:17) and have a responsibility for managing the church (1 Tim 3:4-5).  They do this as ministers and not as absolute rulers - they can appeal to people's consciences, but they have no coercive power - and nothing they do is legitimate if it isn't ultimately designed to display Christ's authority and not their own.  Owen maintains that there is no ultimate authority in the church save that of Christ, and elders can only act under him.  Their authority is not inherent in them, but is simply the ministerial exercise of Christ's authority.  (Neither is their authority delegated to them by the congregation; rather, the church, in endorsing elders, recognises Christ's gifting of them and his appointment of them to office).  The limits of their authority are made most obvious for Owen by the fact that anyone can freely withdraw from a local congregation if they judge the elders not to be ruling in Christ's name for the good of his people.  Still, the (delegated, limited) authority of the eldership is maintained.  It is established as a sign of the authority of Christ himself.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.  The clericalism of the past is largely dissipated, and the parish structure has long been bereft of legal force and is now in complete breakdown - the most lively Anglican churches are functionally 'gathered churches' rather than parish churches.  The radicals of Owen's day have largely wandered over the centuries further and further away from orthodoxy, and their heirs barely claim to be Christian anymore.  But the threats to a biblical form of church government haven't gone away: on the one hand, an authoritarianism (usually, let's face it, promoted - perhaps unconsciously - by ministers, but more often that not with the connivance and cooperation of congregations) which exalts the 'man of God' over the congregation, neutering whatever 'lay elders' there may be and leaving all the reins in one pair of hands; on the other hand, a democratisation, which (often by an appeal to the Holy Spirit - cf. the old Quakers) denies the form and order of the church as it is prescribed in Scripture in favour of a kind of free-for-all.

I suspect that in today's climate Owen would have found that he had to lay more stress on his third argument.  So used have we become to democratic mechanisms - and so thoroughly has democracy come to be equated with goodness in our culture - that it is hard to argue for the authority of elders without sounding like you're arguing for authoritarianism.  It's a fine line to tread.

So, in answer to the question 'who runs the local church?' I think I'd want to say something like this:

The Lord Jesus governs his church, being enthroned in heaven and present by the Holy Spirit, and he has established within his church elders, who are to govern as his ministers, with the consent and counsel of the whole congregation.

Plural eldership.  Congregational consent - and counsel, active involvement (Owen doesn't have much to say about this; he is also a product of his time, and has not totally shaken off clericalism).  All in recognition of the fact that Christ rules, in the present, by his Spirit, and that this is the form which he has directed for the government of his people.

Loving the church

If we love Christ, we must love the church.  But how?

The main way in which we are called to love the church is in love towards the members of the particular congregation to which we belong.  (This is obviously to take for granted the very first act of love towards the church, which is to join yourself to a particular congregation!)  That means practical care, and spiritual care - not one without the other!  And spiritual care includes the duty to pray for one another, to encourage one another, and, yes, to rebuke one another where necessary.  All of this is part of love.  We are called to love each member of the church, not because they are lovely, but for the sake of the Lord Jesus, to whom they are united just as we are by faith and the Holy Spirit.  That includes the awkward ones, the ones who wind you up something chronic, and the ones from whom you can expect little return.  That is the calling.

Although this is the front line of love, the place where our love for the church is most tested, I want to suggest that it is not the whole of the duty.  We are to love the members of the church, but the church is more than a group of individuals.  The church is a body, the body of Christ; and that body is manifest both in individual congregations and in the whole of the church throughout space and time.

To love the church as body is to love the church in the things that it does corporately - to love worship, to love the preaching of the word, to love the sacraments, yes, even to love business meetings.  And in the same way that loving an individual does not mean popping into their life when you feel like it, to love the body of the church means to be committed to coming together, not to give up meeting together.  And in the same way that loving an individual does not mean just loving the things about them that you find lovely, to love the body of the church means to participate in those activities that you personally find less attractive, to sing the songs you don't like, to turn up to the prayer meetings that you really struggle with.

And to love the body as it is catholic, that is to say, as it extends throughout time and space, is to love the church in all its messy history and all its messy present.  Not, of course, to love every detail of that history, or that present; there is much sin there.  But to love the church, despite its brokenness and, often, wickedness; to see the church, despite those things, as it is loved by the Lord Jesus.  In practice, to lift our eyes beyond the confines of our own congregation and denomination, and to love the church as it exists in traditions which seem alien to us; to lift our eyes beyond the boundaries of our own culture, and to love the church as it exists in languages and forms which are foreign to us; to lift our eyes beyond our time, and to love the church as it stands in history as the monument to God's faithfulness and constant grace.  To learn from ancient and alien forms, to sing the old hymns and the new songs and the songs from far away.  To consciously stand in union and communion with those who have gone before on the road and those who walk the same road in very different places.

"As for the saints in the land, they are the excellent ones,

in whom is all my delight."