A three-way fight

I spent some very profitable time last week discussing the work of Charles Taylor with people who are much more qualified to speak about him than I am.  For those who don't know, Taylor is primarily famous for his enormous book A Secular Age, in which he tries to answer one question: how have we moved from a point in 1500 when atheism was more or less inconceivable, to a point in 2000 where belief in God is enormously contested?  What changed in society and the intellectual world of the West to make atheism a live option, not just for isolated individuals, but for the mainstream of Western people?  The book is exhaustive, and exhausting, in its run through the history of the Western world in search of the answer(s) to this question - if you haven't read it and want a way in I'd strongly recommend James Smith's book How (Not) To Be Secular as a good introduction and guide before you dive in.

One particular part of Taylor's analysis struck me as having renewed importance in our current cultural moment.  Taylor suggests that there are not two great forces in our culture - the religious and the irreligious, say - but three: "There are secular humanists, there are neo-Nietzscheans, and there are those who acknowledge some good beyond life." (636)  By 'secular humanists', Taylor means those who restrict meaning purely to the 'immanent frame' - i.e., nothing transcendent, nothing spiritual that exists above and beyond our human conceptualism of the world - and yet remain optimistic about the power of humanity to shape its own existence to benign ends, and are invested in the project of human improvement.  Broadly, this would align politically with secular progressives.  Then there are the religious, or at least those who look beyond the world as we see it for meaning and direction; they are typically also progressive in some sense, in that they believe in the capacity for things to get better, even if the end goal of that 'better' is not found within the horizons of this world.  They will, of course, debate with the secular humanists as to what 'good' means, but they agree that there is good and that it is worth pursuing.

The third group Taylor calls 'neo-Nietzscheans', or "the immanent counter-Enlightenment". (636)  This group denies the progressive tendency in both other camps; there is no 'good' per se which can be pursued, and humanity as such is not reformable.  All we can do is harness the evil tendencies of humanity to something which will benefit the species.  Various species of political Darwinism belong here, and we might point to particular figures who represent this tendency - Andrew Tate, Tommy Robinson, and to an extent Donald Trump spring to mind.

Taylor's point is that this is a genuine three-way fight.  The secular humanists and the neo-Nietzscheans are agreed, against the religious, that there is no transcendent source of meaning or ethics, and that decisions have to be made purely on the basis of what we can see around us.  But on the other hand the religious often find themselves agreeing with the secular humanists when it comes to pursuing some good intention within the world.  (We might suggest that this is particularly the case in the contemporary West, where the supposedly neutral and universal values which secular humanism considers itself to be pursuing are heavily inflected with historic Christian thought).

But there is a third alliance which often pops up, for "neo-Nietzscheans and acknowledgers of transcendence are together in their absence of surprise at the continued disappointments of secular humanism, together also in the sense that its vision of life lacks a dimension." (637)  Both the immanent counter-Enlightenment and the religious see secular humanism as in a sense naive, and doomed to fail on its own terms.  They both want, for very different reasons, to shake the liberal consensus just to demonstrate that it is without foundation.

At the moment, I think the neo-Nietzscheans are on the march, and secular progressivism is in retreat across the West.  And I think we, by which I mean 'acknowledgers of transcendence' and specifically Christians, need to be careful.  Let's not rejoice too much at the woes of secular humanism.  Let's take care not to line up with the neo-Nietzscheans and think that we can turn our momentary agreement into a lasting alliance.  In the end, there is a lot in secular humanism with which we are in profound agreement; indeed, I would argue that there is a lot in secular humanism that actually belongs to us.  And I think that the forces of the immanent counter-Enlightenment will be very happy to turn their guns on us at the first opportunity.

Thoughts on New Year's Day

Liturgically, New Year's Day is the eighth day of Christmas, and therefore observed (where such things are still observed) as the festival of the Naming and Circumcision of Jesus.  I find that provides rich themes for reflection and contemplation as one year turns over into the next.

For starters, the Lord was given the name 'Jesus' - meaning God Saves - because he would save his people from their sins.  This invites two lines of reflection.  First at the level of salvation history, the coming of Jesus is the faithfulness of God to his covenant people.  The stories which accompany the presentation of Christ at the temple reflect the longing of faithful Israelites for the promised salvation of God.  Simeon sees in this child God's salvation, the rescue and therefore the glory of Israel, the revelation to the world of God's good purposes to and through his chosen people.  Anna speaks of the redemption of Jerusalem, no longer as a distant hope but as a present reality.  It is good at the beginning of a new year to be reminded that God's faithfulness to his purposes and his people runs like a golden thread through each and every year, even when that thread is sometimes hidden from view.  His faithfulness to Israel meant the forgiveness of Israel's sins; and that faithfulness is ongoing.

And then at the personal level, how good it is when reflecting on the last year, with all its many sins and failings, to be reminded that Jesus is God's salvation.  He is the one who is able to deliver us from our sins and the consequences of our sins - and he will deliver us.  That is his very name.

There is also the circumcision, which perhaps seems obscure but to my mind conjures up similar reflections.  Circumcision was the sign of the ancient covenant with Israel, and so when Jesus is circumcised we see God's faithfulness to a promise made to Abraham hundred of years before.  We are reminded again of his constancy through the turning years.  But then again, the circumcision of Jesus is not just the continuation of that covenant, but its fulfilment - in him, the covenant sign becomes a present reality, or perhaps we ought to say that he is the reality which always lay under the covenant sign and gave it life and power.  His circumcision is God's faithfulness to the old, but just as that faithfulness it is also the putting off of every old thing, so that it points to Christ's cross, on which the old man is put to death - not for Christ, but for us, who are circumcised in him.  In Christ, the old is really old and done away with, and the new year can open with a sense of real newness, just as every day is a day of fresh mercy and therefore new creation.

The years go on.  Jesus is the same - yesterday, today, and forever.  Always the one who saved his people from their sins, and will save his people.  Always the one who kept faith, and made us faithful in him.  Always the one who decides and judges what is really old and has to go, and always the one who brings in the genuinely new.

Happy new year!

Christ the Psalmist

Two great Psalms in my reading for Morning Prayer today - Psalms 25 and 26.  Great Psalms in isolation, but curiously contradictory when you read them side by side.

King David Playing the Harp
(Gerard van Honthorst, 1622)

Notice first of all that these are both presented as 'Psalms of David'; whatever exactly we think about the originality or significance of the headings to the Psalms, we are certainly being encouraged to read these together in some sense.  We can't say that these Psalms belong to different traditions, or represent different theological viewpoints, or belong at very different points in the history of revelation and redemption.  The Psalms seem to originate together and belong together.  And yet...

In Psalm 25 we have confessions of sin, pleas for forgiveness, expressions of dependence on God's mercy:

Do not remember the sins of my youth
or the acts of my rebellion...

Lord, for the sake of your name,
forgive my iniquity, for it is immense.

Consider my affliction and trouble
and forgive all my sins. 

 But then in Psalm 26 we have a rather different mood:

Vindicate me, Lord,
because I have lived with integrity...

I wash my hands in innocence
and go around your altar, Lord...

How do we hold together the frank admission of 'immense' guilt with the confident appeal to one's own innocence and integrity?  How do we join up what is essentially an appeal to God to forget David's behaviour (because it was sinful) with the appeal to God to remember David's behaviour (because it was righteous)?

There are of course a number of simple ways we might get around it.  If we take the Psalms primarily as expressions of human psychology, perhaps in connection especially with the life of faith, then it's not difficult to think of times from our own experience when we felt especially sinful and other times when we felt basically innocent.  Perhaps it's just that these two Psalms are given to us so that we can pray appropriately in the light of those different feelings.

Or we can construe a scale of relative righteousness - we could argue that David knows of course that in God's sight he is sinful, but compared to the enemies who oppress and harass him (and these enemies are prominent in Psalm 26) he is innocent.  Or we can imagine a situation in which David, without denying his essential guilt, could be maintaining his innocence in this particular case.  He hasn't done this one thing of which he is accused, and so he can appeal to God on the basis of this innocence.

Any or all of those things may have a grain of truth to them, but the deeper, and more Christian, reading of these Psalms is as expressions of the truth as it is in Christ Jesus.  Maybe David wrote these Psalms, but they belong nonetheless to Christ.  The Lord Jesus in his life took up the guilt and sin of humanity and made it his own; he identified with sinful humanity in his baptism, and he carried that identity through as far as the cross.  He can confess on our behalf the immense iniquity which we carry - indeed, he confesses it to such an extent that we no longer carry it.  But on the other hand, the Lord Jesus never sinned.  He, and he alone, could truly wash his hands in innocence.  The guilt which he bore, he bore guiltlessly.  The iniquity which he confessed, he confessed from a position of total integrity.  Jesus sings both Psalms.

And because he sings both Psalms, I can sing both Psalms.  Lord, forgive my iniquity, for it is immense.  In innocence I go around your altar and proclaim thanksgiving.  In Christ I sing.

Apocalyptic news

Because US elections always happen around this time of year, the lectionary always has me reading the book of Daniel in the mornings.  I strongly recommend reading Daniel before reading the news; and then maybe reading it again after the news if you need to.  Daniel is a book of apocalyptic, which does not mean that it is all dramatic and disastrous - that wouldn't make it very much different from the BBC news website (or whatever other news source you're currently using).  Daniel is apocalyptic because it peels back the surface level of the apparent churn of human events to show the deeper spiritual significance of what is going on.  It doesn't deny the reality of the human level - as if history is just an illusion, or a mere mask for something else - but it gives a revealed insight into what is going on from the divine perspective, which is often very much at odds with the human perspective.

Perhaps the key revelation in Daniel is this: whilst there is constant flux in human affairs, and no human state has the stability and permanence to which it pretends, there is a divine plan which lies beneath everything and which will be brought to light as the meaning of it all.  So in chapter 2 this morning we were being reminded that kingdoms - even Nebuchadnezzar's apparently unmovable kingdom - will come to an end, the Most High is overseeing the succession of human states with the intention of bringing to eternal dominance the Kingdom of his own Son.  There is a lot going on at the human level, but when God desires he brings the whole thing - not just an individual kingdom but the whole succession, the whole constant movement of human rise and fall - crashing down, to be replaced by an unshakeable Rock.

I've been mulling some applications.  Firstly, it's so important to remember with Daniel that it is God who "changes the times and seasons; he removes kings and establishes kings."  I think we can be prone to imagining a sort of 'providence of the gaps', where the Lord is in charge of things we can't quite explain or quantify, but where there is a process, an ordered system which we can understand, for getting something done, God is an unnecessary hypothesis.  In an ordered democratic system, surely voters and not the Most High choose the leaders.  But the biblical vision of providence is much more thoroughgoing than this.  Nothing falls outside of God's control, even things which are eminently within our control.

Second, knowledge of providence does not blunt the horrors of history.  Consider that the whole book of Daniel happens within the context of exile, a result of brutal invasion and destruction.  The kings featured are not good characters.  They are brutal imperialists.  Even in chapter 2, Daniel and his friends live under the threat of a capricious death sentence.  Everything is bad.  And yet...  I think we need to be willing to face how bad things are (although a reading of Daniel does helpfully remind us that things could be and have been much worse), and still say 'and yet...' without flinching.  God is in control.  That he allows these things, these terrible things, may be incomprehensible to us, but he has shown us that he is good, and he is after all the God of the cross and resurrection, in that order.

Third, I think it is helpful to admit a very high degree of uncertainty when we're thinking about reading human history.  There is no manifest and obvious storyline to human history, and although it is probably inevitable that we will try to frame events within a plot that makes sense to us, we have to admit that we don't really know what is going on.  Even for Christians, who 'know' the big storyline, we need to be cautious about assigning particular events in 'secular' history a role in that story.  After all, when God establishes his everlasting kingdom that doesn't come from within the churn of human history, but from without, and takes down the whole human statue.

Tell Her Story

I've just finished reading Tell Her Story: How Women Led, Taught, and Ministered in the Early Church by Nijay K. Gupta.  I really liked some aspects of it, and found some others seriously lacking.  The following is not a full review by any means (though by your leave I'll label it as a review), but just a series of thoughts and reflections.  I would welcome push-back if you've read it and liked it more (or less) than I did!

Things that I liked:

The survey of women in the Greco-Roman world (chapter 3) is great at showing that there was significant variety to the experiences of women in the first century.  It is certainly not true that first century women were universally restricted to the house, or that they never had roles outside the domestic sphere.  If in your imagination the background to the New Testament is a world of very rigid gender roles, I think it's helpful to see that things were more varied than that.

One line of argumentation that I've never heard deployed in person, but have witnessed on the internet and therefore gather is current in American Evangelicalism, is the idea that "women can't perform such and such a role in ministry because they are too..." (10) - fill in the blank as you please.  This sort of argument, based on the (demonstrably false) idea that there are immutable traits which mark out all women (and all men) is never advanced in Scripture, and this book takes it apart rather well.

Highlighting the role of women in the narrative of salvation history - whether that's a character like Deborah in the Old Testament (ch 1), the women who encountered and often accompanied the Lord Jesus (ch 4), or the women named by Paul as co-workers (chs 5-9) has the potential to enrich our understanding of God's work.  There will also certainly be points at which meditating on these women and their stories will point to changes that need to be made in the thinking and practice of the church today.

Things that I found frustrating:

The chapter on Genesis 1-3 is seriously underdeveloped, given the importance of the contents for this whole discussion - and placing it after the portrait and discussion of Deborah seems a little tendentious to me.

Much of the proposed reconstruction of women's lives and ministries in this book is very speculative, and involves more reading between the lines than I think responsible exegesis can support.  I lost track of the number of times we were told that we couldn't be certain of something, but then that same something was used to develop the argument as if it were certain (or the other way around; we are told that "it is more certain" that Euodia and/or Syntyche held the title of episkopos or diakonos (104), but then later we find it is only "quite possible" - and even then no particular evidence is offered in support (106).  Was Phoebe tasked with reading the letter to the Romans publicly?  We don't know (124), but we're asked to imagine it anyway.  The three chapters on Phoebe, Prisca and Junia seem to me to be trying to do far too much with the scraps of relevant text that we have, and consequently I can't see them convincing anyone who didn't already want to be convinced.

There seems to be some indecision or confusion at one key point in the book's argument, relating to offices in the early church.  Gupta endorses Wayne Meeks' conclusion that "Acts and the Pauline letters make no mention of formal offices in the early Pauline congregations." (81)  The rest of this chapter, however, discusses the nature of the diakonos, episkopos, and presbyteros in some detail.  These are described as 'roles' rather than 'offices', but I'm not sure I see the difference.  This becomes of great importance when a central plank of the complementarian position is that women did not serve as overseers or elders in the early congregations.  (As an aside, I appreciated Gupta's clear evidence that women did serve as deacons - although this was somewhat undermined by the vagueness about whether this was a formal office or not - and also his insistence that 'deacon' was a leadership position, with significant authority and responsibility).  I think Meeks' conclusion is completely unsustainable, and overall the presentation here seems to fall into a slightly 19th century way of contrasting an informal, charismatic early church with 'early catholicism' emerging (to the church's detriment?) a little later.  Given Titus 1 and other passages, I think it is clear that the appointment of elders was a central part of the Pauline mission, and that these elders were genuine office holders.

There also seems to be confusion about the extent to which the apostles were able to break from their own sociological background.  So we are told that "I don't think it is the case that the apostles blindly followed 'culture' when it comes to sexual anthropology" (49), but the chapter on the household codes assumes that the authors of these texts couldn't have imagined a more egalitarian setup, and so were limited by their cultural horizons (195).  I'm not sure the latter perspective fits comfortably with the inspiration of Scripture.  It's a shame, because there's a lot in the reading of the household codes here which seems evidently correct to me.  There's a similar confusion going on about householders hosting church - they must have been elders, because sociologically it would have been impossible for them to play host and not be church leaders.  But sociologically, the criteria for eldership would have been largely different from those laid down by Paul, who is obviously not thinking in sociological but theological terms here.

Other thoughts and reflections:

The particular arguments and scenarios that this book is written against are not ones that occur directly in the context I know best, and I believe it is very important that complementarians distance themselves from the extreme forms of patriarchy that are, apparently, being endorsed in parts of the church.  (One is sometimes tempted to think cutting off all cross-Atlantic communication might be a blessing, to be honest).  I will say that careless language, and perhaps behind it careless thought, can sometimes give the impression that we hold positions we do not in fact hold, or at least are not consistent with our deepest convictions.

If the key question is 'ought women ordinarily to serve as elders in churches?', I don't think this book successfully proves the affirmative, and I don't think it is correct to insist that the burden of proof lies with the other side (91 and other places).  The reason, it seems to me, that Gupta thinks the burden of proof lies with the complementarian camp is that he doesn't offer any sort of theological anthropology in this book.  The Scriptures do tell us some things doctrinally about the nature of humanity, and specifically the nature of humanity as gendered, which are absent from this discussion, and which to my mind swing the burden of proof back the other way.

If it is correct that elders ought ordinarily to be men - and I haven't given any argument for that here, I know, but I think it's true - then one thing that is clear from this book is that ministry, including Word ministry, authority, and responsibility must not be limited to the elders.  The diaconate should be open to women, and should not be restricted to administrative tasks.  There should be leadership and ministry opportunities for women at every level in the church, notwithstanding the restriction of the eldership.  There is a dangerous tendency in some churches I know towards an increased focus on the elders as ministers - such that they do all the teaching, almost all the leading, etc. - which when combined with a male-only eldership ends up denying complementarianism and falls over into outright patriarchalism.  I think we also need to think hard about how the elders hear female voices, and what it looks like for there to be Mothers as well as Fathers in the church.

For those about to lead worship

Jesus Christ is our worship, the essence of it and the whole of it, and we may worship God in Spirit and in Truth only as we are made partakers of his worship.

Thus T.F. Torrance, in Theology in Reconstruction, 249.

Torrance's point has at least a two-fold application.  Firstly, we cannot make an acceptable offering to God by ourselves.  All our worship is soiled by our sinfulness, and inadequate as a response to God's greatness and his grace.  We cannot possibly come of ourselves to appear before God and honour him.  Remember Nadab and Abihu?  Outside of Christ, our very worship of God deserves and attracts his wrath.  So if you're about to lead worship, please remember that you cannot do it - that you depend on Christ to pour out the Spirit so that what you do might be real, genuine, acceptable.  Worship is not within your powers, and leading others in worship is something that should make you tremble.

But second, an acceptable offering to God has been made, in our human nature, by our Brother the Lord Jesus Christ.  Because he appears in heaven before God, as our great High Priest, there is human worship which is sinless and holy, and which genuinely honours the Father.  And because that worship exists, we can come to worship - not as if we were offering something alongside Christ's offering, but as we are joined to him by the Spirit in faith our own inadequate worship is clothed in his great act of worship, and made to participate in it.  There is nothing for us to add, because he has done it all; but we may participate, because he has gone ahead of us.  So if you're about to lead worship, remember that what that means is directing people to Christ, who is the real worship leader, and resting in him and his perfect worship yourself as you lead others in doing so.

The joyful voice of the creature

In Church Dogmatics III/1, Barth discusses 'creation as justification'. Creation is good, really good, because it is good in God's sight. But why is that so? Barth is clear that we do not find the goodness, the rightness - the justification - of creation in our experience of the world, not even our good experience:

Created order has what we may call its brighter side. But its justification by its Creator and His self-disclosure is not bound up with this brighter side. It is not connected with the fact that the sun shines, that there are blossoms and fruits, pleasing shapes, colours and sounds, realities and groups of realities which preserve and foster life, purposeful relationships and order, intelligible and serviceable elements and powers, which enlighten the created mind of man, speak to his heart, and in some way correspond with his will for life and foster it.

This brighter side of creation is not enough to justify the creature, to render it really good. After all, we acknowledge in referring to a brighter side that there is a darker side, which might push us to exactly the opposite conclusion. But this not mean that the beauty and order of creation is meaningless. It simply means that its meaning can only be really understood, and placed on a secure foundation in our knowledge, in the light of God's revelation, the covenant brought to fulfillment in Jesus Christ:

An affirmative judgement on creation has its foundation and rightful place. The recognition of its direct and immanent goodness is demanded from the man whom the Creator in His revelation has confronted with Himself. 

Note that it is really the immanent goodness of creation which is to be recognised here. The beauty and order that we see in creation really do speak of its goodness in God's sight. Creation speaks goodness in itself, and thus witnesses to God's goodness all the time; this voice, however, is only heard and heard rightly when God is known in Christ, and the covenant is known as the meaning of creation. 

The joyful voice of the creature rings out where the self-revelation of God has been apprehended.

Quotes from CD III/1, 370-1.