The order of doctrine

In principle I don't think too much ought to be read into the order in which doctrines are treated by various authors.  What matters is the conceptual core, the weight put on different doctrines, the organisational structure.  And that cannot be read off a contents page.  Some people, after all, save the best til last.  You have to actually inhabit a person's thought for some time before it becomes possible to discern the central pillar.  So I wouldn't want to give this little thought more weight than it warrants.

Still, it seems to me that order is not wholly insignificant.  Schleiermacher saved the doctrine of the Trinity for the end, and that is revealing.  More recently I've been reading volume 3 of Bavinck's Reformed Dogmatics, and I think it is somewhat significant that he begins his soteriology with a chapter on covenant before moving on to the Person of Christ.  It seems to me that this formal order affects the material content.  Salvation is a matter of a legal structure, and the importance of Christ is that he makes the legal structure work.  I think that is skewed away from the content of the biblical witness.  It is striking as well that the covenant idea is read back, in this stream of Reformed theology, into the Trinitarian foundation of the economy, something which I think ought to make us all uncomfortable.

So, without making too much of it, I think the order of theological presentation can matter.

Law, Reality, Gospel

I think it clarifies various aspects of Christian ethics to see the commands of God operating on three different levels.  This is more obvious in some cases than others, and may not hold true in every case at all, but the pattern of my thinking has been this.

At the first and most obvious level, a command of God is Law.  The Law says 'you must', or 'you must not'.  At the level of Law, the key consideration is the rightful authority of the One giving the command.  Because it is God the King who says 'you must' and 'you must not', the proper response of all who belong to God (and we all belong to God) is implicit obedience.

This is not the only way God's commands work on us, though.  At another level, the commands of God simply represent Reality.  That is to say, because God is the ultimate Reality, and all created reality depends upon him and is shaped by him, the command also says 'you can' or 'you cannot'.  There is a sense in which Christian ethics simply aims to describe the way things really are, and then to bring our lives into conformity with that reality.  (Note, by the way, that this must be a view of reality properly informed by God's own revelation; we as sinners are very bad at discerning what reality really is).

And then third, God's commands take the form of Gospel, good news.  Because he is our good and kind Father, the commands of God show the best way.  As well as 'you must' and 'you can', they tell us 'you may'; as well as 'you must not' and 'you cannot', they tell us 'you need not'.  The life of faith, the life that is founded on trust in God, brings us to green pastures and leads us beside still waters.  The commands relieve us of burdens - the burdens brought on by living wrongly in God's world, but also the great burden of having to define good and evil out of our own limited resources.

A worked example: the first commandment.  God says 'you shall have no other gods before me'.  At the level of Law, this commandment tells me that I must not worship other gods; this is a matter of loyalty to the God who has created and redeemed me.  At the level of Reality, the commandment tells me that there are no other gods to worship; not only am I told I must not worship other gods, I am also told that I cannot, since in reality there are none.  And finally, at the level of Gospel I am told that I need not worship other gods.  The one true God is all-powerful, and provides for all my needs, so that I need not placate or pursue other deities.  It is a liberation from the burden of polytheism.

Our culture tends only to think of the commands of God at the level of Law, and because it sinfully rejects God's right authority it hates his commands.  People imagine that doing away with the Law of God will bring liberty - no great authority telling us what we can and cannot do.  But here's the thing: in pushing away the Law of God it is increasingly clear that we have also lost touch with Reality.  If the point of escaping the Law is to allow me to be whatever I want to be, that of course must also involve pushing away from the way things are.  Reality, no less than Law, constrains my self-expression.  Therefore it must be rejected.  Just look at the treatment of gender for an acute example.

But what really strikes me is how we therefore lose commands as Gospel.  If you can really construct yourself, make your own meaning, rule the direction of your own life, decide your own values - well then, you must do those things.  Otherwise your life is without meaning, you  have no values (or value), and perhaps you do not even meaningfully have a self.  But this is to be as god - in terms of responsibilities, at least.  Can we fulfill those responsibilities, with our human resources?  Must we ourselves not become gods?

There is good evidence that young people today are increasingly unhappy.  Might not part of the reason be that they are carrying the intolerable burden of creating and sustaining themselves - and indeed the whole world, for what is a world but the projection of my internal consciousness out into the meaningless void?  Might it not be good to hear God say not only 'you must not be your own god', but also 'you cannot be your own god', and supremely 'you need not be your own god, for I will be your Father and will keep you to the very end'?

Sin concealed and revealed

It seems a shame that the lectionary divides 2 Chronicles 34 in half; had the whole chapter been read this morning a powerful theme would have shown through all the readings, namely, the way in which the Law of God unveils sin.

Psalm 32 sets the overall context: it is a superlatively good thing, a blessed state, to be one who acknowledges and confess sin, and is consequently in God's grace cleansed of sin. To hide sin, from the world and from oneself, is deathly. There is a psychological aspect to this, of course, but the imagery of the Psalm goes further, into the physical and I think the existential. Not to acknowledge sin is to be in a fundamentally false position, towards God and towards ourselves. This is anguish.

Psalm 36, on the other hand, notes that the wicked simply have no dread of God. In apparent tension with Psalm 32, the sin-denying life of the wicked seems to be one of psychological and existential peace - until, that is, God himself brings them into judgement.

There is a sense in which 2 Chronicles 34 explains this tension. Under Josiah, the people of Judah were, for once, behaving reasonably well. The idols were destroyed, the temple was repaired. There was reason to feel good. But when God's Law is discovered, all of that is shown up to be desperately inadequate. In a sense the reading of the Law represents already God prosecuting sin. The righteous requirements of the Law reveal the people of Judah, even in the midst of their great reformation, to be guilty sinners. The only response is anguish and penitence.

Romans 7 really pushes this deeper. The person who genuinely loves God and his Law finds nevertheless that sin continually corrupts even their best endeavours. They are a person divided against themselves - in a deeper sense even than is envisaged in Psalm 32. The believer - and I take that is who we're seeing in this chapter - has accepted the judgement of the Law on their sin, specifically as it has been carried out in Christ, at the cross. Sin has been unmasked by the Law and the Gospel. The believer is made wholly new in Christ and his resurrection. And yet... In experience, they find themselves still entirely old. Day by day they know again just what it is to be sinful, in a way that nobody else can. Because they are really renewed, really made clean, the stain of sin shows out so clearly. The division against themselves which is revealed in the gospel goes deeper even than that revealed in the Law.

But thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

Because the movement of faith is to continually respond to each new unmasking of sin in my old self by looking to Jesus, in whom that old self really is already dead, and in whom I am already really given new life. Because he has, once for all, rescued us from this body of death, so day by day he can deliver us.

My prayer this morning has been that God will not let me be ignorant of my sin, even if having it unmasked is desperately painful. But my prayer is also that it will be in Jesus, gentle Jesus, and his gospel that the Law will be applied to me, revealed sin put to death and the deep blessing of the forgiven - new life! - breathed into me by his Spirit of Life.

Contra Parris

Over the Easter weekend, Matthew Parris published an article complaining that the exaltation of victimhood, based in the victimhood of Christ, is ruining society.  I do not think he was entirely wrong.  At the very least, I have big questions over the application of the word 'victim' to our Lord in his death; whilst the NT does present Christ as the sacrificial victim, the fact that it also presents him as the offering Priest rather heavily qualifies the sense of victimhood.  It seems clear to me, at least, that the contemporary use of victimhood cannot be applied to the Lord Jesus.  I think that in some cases where this language is used of Christ contemporary progressive politics rather than the gospel is setting the agenda, or perhaps it is just an over-egging of the Dominion thesis.  That Scripture shows God as being on the side of the weak and marginalised is certainly true; that it somehow makes weakness and marginalisation a virtue is false.

Anyway, Parris has now followed up with a second article, this time in the Spectator, in which he argues that "the whole atonement thing is a terrible muddle".  "Trying to make sense of it", he thinks, "is a waste of time".  And yet, many millions of people seem to think that it does make sense, that it is coherent and powerful as an idea, and moreover that it is a liberating and saving reality.  Parris advances very weak arguments for his position, but since they are in public it may be worth briefly taking the time to refute them, to which end I offer the following analysis.

After an initial complaint about the language of Christian doctrine, which he suspects is meaningless even to many believers, Parris makes his first substantial(ish) point, about authority.  "Where does the doctrine of atonement through Christ's crucifixion find its roots?"  Parris is surprised to find that Jesus said nothing on the subject; I am also surprised to hear this, since I find in my Bible that Christ clearly taught that he had come to offer his life as a ransom for many.  Matthew Parris, presumably not seeing this and similar verses, advances the tired old argument that it was really St Paul who invented the idea of atonement.  Now, I will cheerfully grant that some of the clearest teaching about the atonement in the Bible comes from the pen of the Apostle Paul, but this simply does not mean what Parris thinks it means.

The argument that 'Jesus never said anything about that', even granted it were true (as in this case it is not), will not carry the weight Parris puts on it, and it's worth thinking through why because of course this argument is used in other cases.  Christians do not treat the words of Christ as somehow a canon within the canon, as if it is the words of Jesus which have the real authority.  No, we see that the whole of Scripture bears witness to the work of Jesus.  So behind the gospel narratives stands the whole Old Testament history of sacrifice as a means to cover guilt and gain access to God.  It is inconceivable that when the gospel authors record the tearing of the temple curtain at the point of Christ's death that they are not thinking of his death in terms of sacrifice, propitiation, the removal of the sin and guilt which prevents sinful humanity from gaining access to God.  We do not need specific words of Jesus to draw this very clear inference.  And in fact that is all that St Paul is doing when he writes on the atonement; seeing Jesus as the Messiah, the fulfillment of all the Old Testament story, and drawing out the meaning of the death of Christ in that way.

Moreover, by way of an aside, I would point out to Mr Parris that in fact the church does teach that the Apostle, in his writing of Scripture, "could never have been wrong".  But even if it were not so, the understanding of Christ's death in terms of redeeming sacrifice is demanded by the events themselves as seen against the backdrop of the Old Testament.  So much for the question of authority.

The second part of the argument, if I've followed it correctly, is that Paul was essentially a salesman, and needed a hook to get the Gentiles interested in Jesus.  Salvation "from our own misdeeds" was the offer, and a powerful one, since everyone has conscience troubles.  But for Parris this means the crucifixion was not about justice, but about "rescue from justice".  This account ignores two things.  Firstly, that St Paul was not an obvious choice for salesman to the Gentiles.  How did he come to want them to believe in the first place?  The idea that this devout Pharisee just suddenly decided to break out of the bounds of Judaism is utterly implausible; the only possible answer is that Mr Parris is incorrect when he asserts that Paul never met Jesus!  Second, Parris ignores the Apostle's careful argument about God's justice in the Epistle to the Romans.  The point of the cross, according to Paul, is that by it God can be both just and the one who justifies those who trust in Jesus.  The crucifixion of Jesus upholds God's justice, and if that doesn't look like justice as Mr Parris imagines it, I suspect that the Almighty's notions will outlast his.

The third part of the argument returns to the question of meaning.  How does the ransom metaphor apply?  Is ransom paid to the devil?  What about propitiation?  Who is propitiated and why?  These are old questions, much kicked around in the history of Christian theology; but there are quite clear answers for anyone who wants to hear them.  Yes, ransom is a metaphor, and therefore of course it doesn't carry over to the reality one-to-one; it represents liberation at cost, and carried thus far is a powerful image.  No need to bring the devil into it; nobody owes him anything.  The logic of propitiation - of turning away wrath through substitution - makes perfect sense if one grasps both the doctrine of the Trinity and the holiness of God.  The holiness of God demands judgement for sin (that Parris thinks that "The God we've fashioned over the millennia is not like that" demonstrates that part of his difficulty is that he's trying to make sense of the atonement on the presuppositions of a very liberal theology, which is of course rather difficult; suppose we stick to the God who has revealed himself rather than the idol that we've spent millennia fashioning, everything will be clearer).  And once we grasp the nature of the Trinity, we can see the wonder of the cross: that God propitiates himself, the Son willingly taking on our nature and our guilt so that the wrath of God might be borne away in his Person.

Contra Matthew Parris, it all makes a lot of sense.  It is in fact our sinful notions of God, justice, and the nature of the human condition which constitute a hopeless muddle.  But certainly neither Jesus nor Paul can be blamed for that.

On Marriage and Christ

If you've escaped the recent controversy surrounding The Gospel Coalition and their publishing of an article on sex as an icon of the gospel, well done.  This post is a very limited response to a part of that controversy, but should make sense even if you didn't follow it at all.  The point I want to respond to is the claim by a number of people that the problem with the article was that it over-extended a metaphor.  That is to say, it is true that Scripture draws a metaphorical connection between marital union and the spiritual union of Christ and his people, but by reflecting explicitly sexual language the article had stretched that metaphor beyond its biblical usage, and thus invalidated it.

My response here is simple: I do not think the Bible presents marriage as a metaphor for the gospel.  As I understand it - and I confess freely that I am no literary theorist - metaphor is a way of relating two things or concepts which have no (or at least no necessary) real (that is, ontological or conceptual) connection; it is allusive, linking two things which are not directly linked in order to shed light on one or the other.  Metaphor is limited in what it implies, and is essentially linguistic.  It does not imply or establish any real or ongoing link between the two items.  Rather, it uses language to appropriate one thing or concept as a means of 'opening up' another.

My contention, then, is that this is not the sort of link Scripture envisages between human marriage and the gospel.  In Ephesians 5, the apostle Paul is not casting around looking for a great illustration of the gospel and arriving at marital love.  Nor is he looking about for some justification for the institution of marriage and chancing upon the gospel - that direction of thought would be impossible for him.  Look at the way he uses the quotation from Genesis.  His argument depends on there being a real link between human marriage and the relationship between Christ and his church.  It depends, in fact, on finding the primary application of the "one flesh" saying from Genesis in the gospel, with the obvious historical sense of the saying in its Genesis context becoming a secondary application.  This makes sense in a world where primary ontology is about God and his actions, and creation represents a kind of secondary ontology, a derived, contingent being which is dependent on the Lord God for both existence and meaning.  This latter is crucial.

The question, then, is this: is created reality inherently ordered towards the gospel?

There is another way of approaching this which asks a question which is similar, but in the end totally different: does created reality have inherent meaning and structure?  If we're asking this question, we're in the territory of natural law, and perhaps in territory which envisages a natural end to human life and created existence apart from the gospel.  I don't want to go into this territory.  I don't think it's a good place to be.  I am proceeding on the assumption that the heart of created reality is the Incarnation of the Son of God, and the underlying reason of human existence and indeed the whole created order is the gospel of Jesus Christ.

What is at stake here?

On the one hand, the grounding of Christian ethics is at stake.  I mean this is in a very particular way.  The essential ground of Christian ethics is the command of God.  As believers we ought to wholeheartedly commit ourselves to being impaled on one horn of the Euthyphro dilemma - the morally good is determined by the will of God, and God himself is bound by no external standard of goodness.  In that sense, when we are asked about sexual ethics and why we hold particular positions we can simply respond 'God says so', and point to the relevant commands in Scripture.  But the doctrine of creation means that we can say something more about the particular way in which Christian ethics is grounded.  The divine commands do not hang in the air, because the God who commands is also the God who structures reality.  What he commands is morally good because he determines moral goodness, but we can also say that this goodness reflects the structure of created reality - or more accurately, perhaps, that it is reflected in the structure of created reality.  Once we pull in the doctrine of redemption - that the God who commands and creates is also the God who save - we can argue that the divine command is reflected in creation which is itself oriented toward the gospel.  The gospel, then, reveals the significance of created reality, and thus of the divine commands.  Far from being arbitrary rules, they reflect both creation and redemption, because God is one and his goal and purpose is one.

Grounding Christian ethics in this way binds it together with the gospel, in a way which seems to me central to New Testament thinking.  The Christian sexual ethic is good news because it signifies The Good News.  We joyfully submit to this ethic and call others to do so because the end goal of created reality is the marriage supper of the Lamb.

On the other hand, our ability to think and speak about the Christian life in a way which reflects the full richness of Scripture is at stake.  When Scripture tells us that the 'one flesh' relationship of husband and wife is oriented towards the relationship between Christ and the church, that opens up the reading of - for example - the Song of Songs as a beautiful representation of spiritual communion with Christ.  The question 'is this about marriage or is it about Christ' is, in the end, a non-question if human marriage is itself always related to Christ and his gospel.  We can read the Song in a perfectly natural way as a collection of beautiful human love songs, and indeed as a celebration of erotic love, and therefore as having reference to the relationship between Christ and his people.  And in fact we can see this latter as in a sense primary for a canonical reading of the book.

Simone Weil points out that real things exist in three dimensions, and can therefore be viewed from different perspectives.  If there is a real, ontological link between human marriage and the gospel, then it becomes legitimate to look from different perspectives at both.  I think the Song legitimates us in seeing the sexual as one such perspective.  The 'one flesh' union of marriage is enacted in sexual intercourse; the spiritual union of Christ and the church also has moments of 'enacted' reality, most notably perhaps in the sacraments.  I don't intend to particularly develop this here, but just to note that the real link between marriage and the gospel enables and perhaps even mandates this sort of reflection, whereas a metaphorical link would shut this down.

One warning: we must always continue resolutely to say No! to natural theology.  (Should we so desire, we can say it in German).  That means that revelation, the Word of God, Christ as witnessed by the Scriptures, remains in control.  I take it this was one of the key complaints against the TGC article: that the direction of thought which is so obvious in Paul - from the gospel to marriage first, and only subsequently and indirectly from marriage to the gospel - was in danger of being reversed.  Revelation interprets created reality, not vice versa.  Wherever spiritual reflection on marriage and sex approaches this line - and it must in a sense approach it - we need to be on our guard that the line is not crossed.  If it is appropriate to describe marriage as an icon of the gospel - and I think it is - we need to be careful that we are looking 'along' the icon to the reality and not stopping short at the content of the image, or worse projecting aspects of the image into our thinking about the reality in an uncontrolled way.

Another warning: we know marriage and sexuality only in a fallen mode.  There is a sense in which everything we experience of it is tainted.  This introduces a sad requirement for theology: just at the point at which we would like to speak rapturously of Christ and his love for his people, we must stress very carefully the limitations of our thoughts.  We know it is easy for people to abuse the Scriptures - to take, say, the teaching in Ephesians 5 and twist it to abusive ends.  How much more so our secondary spiritual reflections on marriage and sexuality!  In one sense this is just the movement of all theology: we draw analogies, show that Christ is like something in our experience, but then immediately have to qualify it, because he is also unlike anything in our fallen world.  This is also true of the icon of marriage.

All of which is to say, these are dangerous waters - but beautiful to sail if navigated carefully!  What a wonderful bridegroom is our Lord Jesus.  What grace it is that he should welcome us, sanctify us, call us his bride.  What a high privilege it is to enjoy spiritual communion with him.  (And husbands should love their wives).

An update on what I'm doing

 An excerpt from the newsletter I've sent today - if you'd like to get regular updates, please let me know and I can add you to the distribution list.

At the beginning of February, I officially started a full-time PhD with Union School of Theology. The project I am undertaking looks at a systematic theology of preaching.  There are lots of books out there about how to preach, but I want to look more carefully at the why and the what of preaching, starting from the doctrine of the Trinity and the Word of God as the second Person of the Godhead, and working through the earthly ministry of Christ as the supreme Prophet of Israel, the Scriptures and their role as God’s word written, and finally the situation of the preacher in the local church today.  I want to think carefully about how God communicates himself to his world and particularly his assembled people, and how preaching fits into that.

I’m excited about the project; it’s something that has come out of my experience of preaching weekly, and feeling the need to understand more deeply just what it was I was doing, or trying to do.  I’ve also had a chance to run my ideas past some people who really know what they’re talking about on preaching and on theology, and it’s been encouraging to hear that they also think this is a worthwhile piece of research.  There is certainly a gap in the market, so to speak, and it seems like one worth filling.

In the evangelical church generally there is, it seems to me, a need to recover a vision for preaching which clearly links it to God’s activity and communication.  We need preachers with confidence and authority.  The New Testament calls those who speak to do so as if speaking God’s own words (the very oracles of God!) - but how do we do that when we know our weakness as preachers?  We also need preachers who step up into the pulpit with fear and trembling, understanding the awesome weight of their task, knowing that they are called to speak from and for God.  No method or formula can bring God’s word to God’s people, and if our confidence rests in those things perhaps we need shaking up!

I hope this project might be a small contribution to a deeper understanding of what preaching is, and therefore to a greater expectation of what God is able and willing to do through the preaching of the gospel.  At some point I hope the research will turn into a book, but even before then I am looking for opportunities to share what I’m learning, particularly with pastors.

Right now, day to day study looks like trying to read everything I can get my hands on to do with preaching, especially anything that approaches it from a systematic theology perspective.  It is important to get a solid understanding of the current state of research in the field, and this will form part of the literature review at the beginning of the study.  So far I have been confirmed in my initial impression that there isn’t that much material out there which tackles preaching in a systematic way from a theological point of view.

Material, not just formal, unity

These are bewildering times for Christians seeking to live faithfully to Christ, under his authority.  I think they are times which require us to rethink our approach to a number of things, not least how we understand Christian unity.

The approach to Christian unity which has characterised evangelicalism rests, I think, particularly on a formal principle: the authority of Scripture.  We can unite with people who share our commitment to the authority of Holy Scripture.  There is a lot of sense in this.  Whilst we can have a conversation with all sorts of people, there is no likelihood of agreement where there is no common commitment to a way of knowing.  Disagreements between people who are equally committed to Scripture at least have some hope of resolution, and an agreed way (in principle) of reaching that resolution: we read and study and debate Scripture together.  Take away that formal agreement - either by taking away the commitment to Scripture, or by adding to it another authority - and material agreement becomes much more difficult, perhaps even impossible.  At the very least, we are having a different sort of conversation if we're talking to someone who isn't happy to follow us into the Bible for answers, and who isn't pre-committed to accepting and submitting to those answers if they're satisfied that they really are biblical.

And so the authority of Scripture is a sensible rallying point.  But it has never been the case that commitment to this formal principle alone is sufficient for Christian unity.  There have always been heretics who claim to hold to biblical authority, and even make an impressive show of deference to the Bible.  Leaving actual heresy aside, even amongst mutually acknowledged Christians there are limits to how much practical unity we can have purely on this formal basis.  And so we qualify our basis for unity: we have unity with those who take Scripture as their authority (the formal principle) within certain bounds (and here we are introducing material beliefs).  Normally for evangelicals that means there is a minimalist statement of faith which we look to as a standard; and so long as people subscribe our minimum standard,  and remain committed to the formal principle, we allow latitude on a whole bunch of issues.

And here's where it gets tricky.  Our minimum standards don't tend to address the hot-button issues of the day, like racism or human sexuality.  The latter in particular is becoming a significant dividing line amongst professing Christians, and it isn't addressed in our evangelical standards.  So what do we do?  Typically we fall back here on the formal principle: you have to believe what the Bible says about sexuality.  We turn it from a material issue (about theological anthropology, say) into a formal issue (about the authority of the Bible).  But this raises two issues.  Firstly, what do we do when people on the other side of the debate claim to be submitting to the authority of Scripture?  We can debate them, in that case, on biblical grounds, and hope to persuade them of our reading of Scripture, but in the meantime is this an 'agree to disagree' situation?  I don't see how it can be.  Second, if this is in fact a fracture point, do we understand why it is so significant?  Why must we divide over this disagreement about the interpretation of Scripture, but not over so many other things which we have (for the sake of unity) designated 'secondary issues', outside the scope of our doctrinal statements?

Here is a difficult thing: we don't want to divide over issues like baptism (who, when, how), or church government, or our understanding of eschatology, but we will divide over sexuality.  Doesn't it sound like we're just cherry picking issues?  Might it not seem as if this is driven basically by homophobia rather than doctrine?  Why, after all, pick this issue as the line?  It will not do to claim that sexual ethics is more important or central - more important than baptism, "which now saves you"?  (Elevating anthropology and ethics above the church and soteriology is not a great way to go, I think).  I am also not convinced it will do to claim that Scripture speaks more clearly on this issue - I think it is also perfectly clear on baptism!

It seems to me that the way forward is a renewed confessionalism, which will show that our formal principle is not merely formal, but carries material content.  That is to say, we need to be able to show that Christian doctrine does not proceed in two stages - first sorting out the source of doctrine in Scripture and then moving on to what the Bible actually says.  Rather, we need to show that our commitment to Scripture and its authority is part of a whole view of God's being and activity; that it already carries with it material content; that the nature of Scripture and its place within the dispensation of grace entails a particular way of reading.  We need a thicker, more substantial doctrine of Scripture, along with a broader confession of Christian truth that goes beyond the bare minimum.  Nobody wants to build higher fences unnecessarily, but I'm not sure we have any other option if we want to maintain Christian orthodoxy in our churches.