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'?

Austere worship

Preaching on the Second and Third Commandments yesterday - no to idols, no to taking the Lord's name in vain - I'm struck by the austerity of Israelite worship.  It must have been striking to the pagans as well.  No images of gods, no gorgeous statues.  Beauty, of course, and craftsmanship on display at the temple.  But no gorgeous shrines scattered throughout the land.  No imaginative myths, no constant development of the cultus.  It is a narrow way, the way of Israelite worship: a way defined by what God has revealed of himself and his will, not open to human interpretation or tweaking or addition.

In our culture of 'I like to think of God as...' there is a need to stress this again.  God has shown us himself.  We have his image - the one and only authorised image - in the Lord Jesus Christ.  We are baptised into his name, the name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and our whole lives are to be lived as conscious bearers of that name.  Worship is not an imaginative exercise in that sense, but an exercise in following in the path the Lord has laid out for us.

I don't think this austerity means no beauty.  I am in favour of beautiful church buildings, beautiful liturgies, beautiful hymns.  In fact, I think those things are required, since God has revealed himself to us as beautiful!  But there is always going to be a necessary strain of iconoclasm to Christian worship: as we receive God's word, we are involved in demolishing whatever idols, whatever false conceptions of God, have gained a foothold in our minds and purifying our thoughts of him.  The same should be true in our worship: constantly reforming, to guard us against accretions and idolatries and blasphemies which will always be a threat and to some extent a presence.

It is a narrow way, but it is the way that leads to (because it first leads from) the true God.  If we want a god of our imagining, we can afford to be creative in how we think of him and how we worship him; if we want God, the true self-existent God, we follow his way and ruthlessly reject any paths to left and right.

Who was, and is, and is to come

 God describes himself in Revelation as the one who was, and is, and is to come.  There are all sorts of things that could be unpacked out of this (about God's relationship with time, about the nature of eternity, etc.) but I have been thinking this morning about the importance for the Christian life of keeping these three dimensions in mind.

If we forget that God is the one who was, we will tend to lose touch with the objective, once-for-all, foundational works of God.  This is a particular danger in our culture, which lives very much in the present (and perhaps to an extent in the future) but tends to regard the past as dead.  For the Christian, the past lives - because the God who was also is.  Moreover, the past - unlike, in our human experience at least, the present and the future - has a fixed character, a decided shape.  (This is true despite whatever attempts at revisionist historiography we might make; revisionism only appeals because it claims to account for more of the actual shape of things, to incorporate more of the evidence).  As against the subjective moment of the now, and the necessarily somewhat imaginative view of the future, the past is laid down.  It is therefore a solid rock for our faith.

If we neglect that God is the one who is, there is a real danger of a sort of functional deism.  We will live as if God wound up the universe, and perhaps also the church, and then left it to run.  We will tend to forget that Christ is presently reigning, that God is presently active.  Our worship will become all about remembering, rather than receiving.  We will typically not expect much now from God.  We may well neglect prayer, particularly that important prayer in the NT for the giving of the Spirit in greater measure.  We will tend not to pick up on those little signs of the kingdom , the shoots of grace growing in a generally barren world.

If we neglect that God is the one who is to come, it is likely that we will over-invest in the present.  That may look like settled, comfortable, compromised Christianity, which replaces the future hope of the kingdom with a paid off mortgage and foreign holidays.  But it may also look very zealous, a life lived in expectation that the kingdom of God can be ushered in by our efforts, prayers, whatever.  If the former, there is a real danger that - when it comes to the crunch point of realising we cannot serve two masters - we will choose to serve comfort.  If the latter, there is a real danger that we will be disappointed, perhaps disappointed enough to abandon the life of faith.

Is it pressing things too much to align those three great aspects of Christian discipleship - faith, love, and hope - with these three temporal dimensions?  To think of faith based on who God has shown himself to be in the past; of love as driving communion with God in the present; and of hope as reaching out for his future coming?  Of course they don't map on perfectly, but it seems to me there might be something there.

The key thing - and it is perhaps the main point of the biblical use of these descriptions - is that he is the same God.  The God of the past, of creation and of incarnation, is God in the present, and it is the same God we await in the future.  He is himself, perfectly himself, at all times.  He has not changed, nor will he.  Whether we look back, or up, or ahead - there he is.  Great is his faithfulness.

Fierce love

Ezekiel 20 is one of the fiercest expressions of the love of God in the whole canon of Holy Scripture.  The majority of the chapter is given over to a narration of Israel's history, from the devastating perspective of the people's constant rebellion.  The Lord visited them in the land of Egypt, but they rebelled and would not listen (vv 1-8a); the Lord brought them out from there and taught them his good and life-giving laws, but they rejected his rules (vv 8b-13a); the Lord preserved them in the wilderness, but they turned after their idols (vv 13b-26); even after the Lord brought them into the land of promise, they filled the land with their idolatrous shrines (vv 27-31).  He has been good to them; they have been wantonly rebellious.

At each step along the way, the threat of destruction has loomed.  "Then I said I would pour out my wrath on them..."  But at each stage the Lord restrained his anger.  Why?  Because there was still something good about Israel?  Not at all!  There is no record of anything good here in Israel.  But God is good, and is determined in his love to have this people for his own.

“What is in your mind shall never happen—the thought, ‘Let us be like the nations, like the tribes of the countries, and worship wood and stone.’"

Israel wants to be free of God, despite all his blessings.  They want to be just like everyone else.  But God will not allow this.  Oh, he might let them chase after their idols for a time.  But in the end he will bring them into judgement (v 35), and bring them into the bond of the covenant (v 37).  It will happen.  He will be God to this people, and they will be his people.  Oh, their lives would be so much easier if he would just let them go.  But his commitment to them, his love for them, will not be denied.  It is a love that is not based in anything lovely in them - indeed, they have done everything to make themselves unlovely to him.  This is a love which depends wholly on the lover and not all on the beloved.  ("And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I deal with you for my name's sake, not according to your evil deeds..." v 44).  And therefore it is a love which endures.

It is also a love which burns (v 38, vv 45-49).  It is not weak.  It is not a devotion on the Lord's part which means that Israel can get away with anything, as if his love made him indulgent.  No, it is a fierce and determined love, the very fire of the Lord.

It is deeply comforting and frankly rather frightening.

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.

Good without God

The Guardian offers a (fairly bland) editorial on what it will mean to be a society in which people increasingly don't believe in God.  They don't really offer an answer, content instead to raise the question: "if organised mainstream Christianity is on the way out, what will replace it?"

I want to make two observations on the editorial, and point out one major error which runs through a lot of humanist and soft-atheist argument.

The first observation is that the Guardian, and others of this ilk, are noticing something which believers have actually been well aware of for a couple of generations at least: namely, that Christian observance and belief is dropping off, in fact has dropped off a cliff.  The editorial observes that "more than half of all British people now say that they have no religion; about two-fifths are Christians of one sort or another; 9% are Muslims."  The phrase which I have italicised is frankly very generous, and can only be reached through allowing a person's religious outlook to be defined entirely by their own self-identification.  Actually, those of us who believe and practice orthodox Christianity have known for some time that the real figure is much lower.  Some have estimated more like 3%.  This may be news to the Guardian, but it has been our reality for ages.

The second observation is that 'organised mainstream Christianity' may well be dying out, if by that is meant the liberal, compromised religion of cultural Christianity and traditional observance.  Far from that being of concern to orthodox Christians, the collapse of this horrible perversion of Christ's religion is in many ways welcome.  Yes, the disappearance of basic knowledge makes mission harder work, and the loss of moral consensus and community cohesion is painful, but on the other hand, it clarifies things.  Where the gospel is still preached, according to the Scriptures, it still works to bring new life and to gather God's people in; God isn't dependent on the structures of cultural Christianity to do his work.

The massive falsehood in the editorial is tucked away in the middle.  We are told that "theology and morality are only tenuously related."  This is so because "habits of kindness, decency and tolerance come from practice rather than belief."  This is demonstrable nonsense.  It depends on the naive Enlightenment view that morality is self-evident, that people simply using their reason unaided will be able to discern in the world a 'right' way to act, and will then be able to follow it.  It assumes a universal moral code, which people can just pick up by thinking right.  The editors of the Guardian should know better; they should have read their Nietzsche more attentively.

In fact, ethical systems and beliefs are particular, not universal, and are grounded in particular beliefs about reality.  You can mask this with bland talk about kindness, decency, and tolerance; but it gets much more difficult when you get into specifics.  We are morally obliged to care particularly for the weak and the helpless.  I guess the average Guardian reader agrees.  But is this a universal moral intuition?  It is not!  It is the ethical corollary of the theological belief in the dignity and sanctity of human life, derived from its Creator.  This belief burst onto the scene historically with Christian revelation and has not been arrived at in any other way.  If it seemed to the Founding Fathers of the American republic that these truths were "self-evident", they only showed thereby that they were steeped in Christian doctrine - without even realising the extent to which their moral intuition was determined by this framework.  More honest and percipient philosophers today - such as Luc Ferry - admit that they do in fact want to continue to hold ethical positions which are specifically derived from Christian belief without the accompanying beliefs themselves, and moreover admit that this is as yet something for which they have failed to derive a convincing reason.

The flipside of this falsehood at the heart of the Guardian's editorial is the assumption that religion basically only exists to make us good.  Can we not, in fact, be good without God?  How can people not see that this question cannot be answered without resolving the question 'what does it mean to be good?'  And one cannot begin to answer this question without dealing with the question of what reality is like.  If there is no God, then it may be possible to be good without God; although I am not convinced that a sound and compelling account can be given of what 'goodness' means in that worldview.  On some versions of theism, and most versions of deism, it may also be possible to be good without God.

But if the Christian revelation is actually true - that is to say, if God the Son really walked among us, died on a Roman cross, and rose to eat breakfast with his disciples - then goodness is inherently wrapped up in relationship with God.  In that case, one cannot be good without God, because being good is not merely about ethical behaviours ("habits of kindness, decency and tolerance") but about bowing before the Creator, accepting his Lordship - and most of all accepting his grace.  Because of course the point of the Christian religion is not to provide you with an ethical system to help you to be good, but to provide you with a Saviour to bring you to God.

The work done by a doctrine of creation

It can be easy for the doctrine of creation to function merely as a backdrop - establishing a baseline, as it were, to make it easier to see the effects of the fall.  Yes, God made the world, and yes, it was good; but that's all in the past, and this side of Genesis 3 what matters is just pulling souls out of the wreckage before the whole thing goes up in smoke.

But a robust doctrine of creation - of the view that God made all this stuff and that it is therefore good, because it bears the mark of its Creator and serves his purposes - is so much more important than that.

Doctrinally, you can't make sense of Jesus without a sound doctrine of creation.  The idea that God the Son took on flesh makes no sense except in a scenario where God the Maker is still concerned for the stuff he has made.  The emphasis on stuff that pervades the gospel accounts - the physical healings, the miracles of food and wine, baptism and Supper - is inexplicable without a God who has not turned his back on his creation, or had second thoughts about the sheer physicality of the thing.  And then the resurrection - why all the insistence that it was with a real body that Jesus appeared after his crucifixion?  Why the eating of fish, the barbecue on the beach?  This is all such earthly stuff for the risen Son of God to be involved with, don't you think?  I wonder if a lot of the aversion which some people have to the idea of incarnation and resurrection actually comes from a sense that it just isn't spiritual enough for their idea of god.

The Christian hope also depends on our doctrine of creation.  Jesus rose in a physical body, and will return to raise our bodies and to renew the whole physical creation.  It is a new heavens and a new earth we're looking forward to, not an ethereal floaty existence as disembodied spirits.  Because God loves this creation he has made, he will redeem it.  All creation groans together in anticipation of that glory; it's a shame if Christians aren't excited at the prospect.

Ethically, there are a whole range of issues which Christians will tend to neglect without a firm doctrine of creation.  Environmental stuff, of course, but it goes a lot further than that.  I'm sure some of the debate a couple of decades ago about the right balance between evangelism and social action sprang in some measure from a deficient doctrine of creation: a sense amongst some that what matters is souls, not bodies or social systems or politics.  But if God is the Creator, all those things matter.

Most recently I've been thinking about how lack of a decent doctrine of creation makes our witness and evangelism harder.  It's easy for Christians to become interested only in 'Christian stuff', to the neglect of the world around.  Whether it's the person who can talk intensely about Christ and the need to be saved but has nothing to say about sport or art, or the person who sees value in reading theological tomes but has never enjoyed a good novel - it all serves to make Christianity seem anti-creation, anti-stuff.  Our lives are impoverished if we go even a little way down this road, and then who will want to join us in our impoverishment?

So anyway, God looked at everything he had made and saw that it was very good.

The Potter and the Clay

We reached Jeremiah 18 on Sunday at CCC.  Various commentators find the chapter puzzling.  It starts with Jeremiah at the potter's house, observing how he shapes a vessel - and then, crucially, re-shapes it when it goes wrong.  The message conveyed by the image is one of sovereignty.  God is the potter, Israel/Judah is the clay.  God is able to (re-)shape his people just as easily as the potter is able to (re-)shape the clay.  The emphasis here is on ability: the potter can shape the clay, he has the power.  In other passages in Scripture where the potter/clay image occurs (Isaiah 29:16, Isaiah 45:9, Romans 9) the weight falls on the idea of right: the potter has the right to shape the clay, and the clay cannot reasonably question the outcome.

This is a high account of God's sovereignty: always free in relation to his creatures; always in the right in relation to his creatures.

What puzzles commentators is that the application in Jeremiah doesn't seem to fit this picture.  To be sure, in verses 7-10 the potter is still the one shaping and re-shaping nations.  But in doing so he is responding to their actions; he is conditioned by their prior response to his word.  If a sinful people show themselves penitent, God will 'relent' of the planned judgement; if a righteous people do good, God will 'relent' of his planned blessing.

How do we read passages like this, which show God responding to his creatures?  Particularly when they come in such close proximity to such clear statements of unqualified sovereignty?

One time-honoured way is to deny one half of the picture.  We can define God's sovereignty in such a way that he is not in fact sovereign; the potter can only do so much, at the end of the day, with the clay he's got.  This is the route taken by classical Arminian and (semi-)Pelagian theology (and I am aware that Arminians don't want to be lumped together with semi-Pelagians, but I can't for the life of me see the difference).  In these models, God is understood as exercising a great deal of power and grace, but with the final say in the outcome resting on human decision.  It's hard to see how this fits with the image: the potter must respect the autonomy and free-will of the clay?

Or we deny the other half, as various strands of (Hyper-)Calvinism have tended to do, and as is (I thnk) implicit in Classical Theism more generally.  God is sovereign.  He only appears to relent in response to human action and decision.  He condescends to appear as a responsive God, when in actual fact he remains absolutely unconditioned by human decision.  The potter makes what he's going to make, and the clay simply has no influence on what happens.  This seems better to preserve some of the use of the potter image (especially in Isaiah and Romans), but ultimately doesn't seem to fit with the use made of the image in Jeremiah.

As is often the case, I think we tie ourselves in knots by starting in the wrong place.  If we start with the Unmoved Mover, the god of Aristotle, the Unconditioned Absolute, a god in the abstract - well then, how can this god possibly 'relent'?  In this model, it seems to me, god pretends to be relational, pretends to be responding to his human creation, but really he's just absolutely still, being all absolute, behind the scenes.  Great.

If on the other hand we start with humanity per se, the Idea of the Human, the human in the abstract - well, the idea of the potter's power over the clay is humiliating.  It can't be accepted without significant qualification.  But the god who is leftover at the end of this process of thought doesn't seem like the potter at all - doesn't seem like a god, to be honest.  Just a god at the margins, a god who revolves around - well, me.  Great.

But if we ditch the abstraction, and read both God and humanity from the particular place where both are revealed - Jesus Christ - then whilst we don't get to jump over all the mystery of divine/human interaction, we do get an understanding of the dynamics involved.  What if the paradigm of potter/clay interaction is in fact the incarnation?  Consider the way the passion narratives are told.  Jesus is dragged around from here to there, and yet very clearly he is in control.  He responds to his people and their rejection of him, and yet this is exactly the eternal plan of his Father.  Is all this in appearance only?

When we start with Jesus, we can see that God is indeed absolute - but he is such as the loving, relational, immanent Father of the Lord Jesus Christ.  He does indeed respond to his people - but he does so as the sovereign Lord of Heaven and Earth.  We need him to be both.  He has revealed himself to be both.  This is not just a doctrinal knot to untangle; it's the very best news.

Jesus wept

On Sunday our series in Luke at CCC finally reached Jerusalem, as we tackled 19:11-48.  I was struck again, as I have been before, by the way Jesus reacts as he comes over the hill and the holy city comes in sight: he bursts into tears.  Jerusalem, the city literally named after peace, has not chosen peace; the city which looked forward to the coming of the Messianic King has not recognised him or accepted him.  So Jesus wept over Jerusalem.

In Luke's Gospel this is the second lament over Jerusalem.  The first occurs in 13:31-35, and is if anything even more startling.  Jesus grieves over the city which kills the prophets and stones those sent to it as divine messengers.  And then he expresses his own frustration: "How often I would have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, but you would not."  It seems clear that when Jesus expresses his frustrated desire here he is referring not to anything that has happened in his earthly ministry, but to his actions as the eternal Word of God, the one who sent those prophets.  In other words, this is a concise summary of the Old Testament: the Word of God repeatedly reached out to rebellious Jerusalem to save and gather in, but Jerusalem was having none of it.

Just two observations:

Firstly, however we state our doctrine of the sovereignty of God, we are on dangerous ground if we rule out the idea that sin in some sense thwarts or turns aside the will of God.  Some strong statements of the doctrine of God's sovereignty - a doctrine, by the way, which I love and will happily defend and proclaim - make it sound like God stands symmetrically behind good and evil, behind the gracious turning of the penitent and the grievous hardening of the sinner.  I  don't think that is compatible with what Jesus reveals of God here.  I think we need to be willing to hold in tension that God will work his purposes out, and that God's will is in some sense frustrated.  Again, that God is sovereign means that ultimately this also is not symmetrical; he will triumph, will have his people, will work out all his good pleasure.  But it's a denial of revelation to rush to that point, or to allow it to undo the tension.  (I wonder whether the desire to reset the gospel as a system and not a narrative, which ends up effectively stripping it of eschatological force and forward momentum, might not lie behind this somewhere.)

Second, Jesus reveals God.  We can never say this too much.  If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus.  If you want to know the heart of God, look at the tear-stained face of Jesus.  If we cannot read the character of God from the character of Jesus, then I do not believe we can know it at all.  That Christ weeps over Jerusalem - and he doesn't weep for himself, despite knowing what it coming, but he weeps over the city that has always rejected him and will finally hand him over for crucifixion - that Christ Jesus weeps over this city is a revelation of his love, and his love is the very love of God.

This particular God

Approaching Christmas, I'm pondering again what it means that God is revealed and known through the child in the manger.  I come back again and again to the particularity of it all.  The Christian claim is exactly this: that at a particular place and time, in principle a place which could be mapped and which stands in proximity to all sorts of other places which do not have this significance, and in principle a time which could be indicated on a clock and placed on a timeline with other moments, God the Creator was personally united to his creation in the person of Jesus Christ.

If the significance of that seems obscure, let me try to unpack it a bit.

When we say 'God' as Christians, we are not talking about a universal truth but a particular one.  That is to say, the meaning of 'God' is defined from this particular moment - with the human life which it began.  There is no generic god behind this event, no universal god, not even a god who - as one of the things which he decided to do - became incarnate at this moment.  No, God means this particular God.  No other.

That means that our knowledge of God must begin here, at the manger.  It's a scandal, because it means that knowledge of God is not generally open to everyone everywhere.  Knowledge of God is found in the face of Jesus Christ, as he lies in the crib and hangs on the cross.  There is no other way in.  Knowledge of God means knowledge of this particular history.  No other.

The implication is that God is a factor in our world.  The true God is not some sort of spiritual substrate, not a universal presence per se.  The God who exists is God-with-us, God in the particular history of Jesus Christ and therefore God in the particular history of my life and yours.  Living in the presence of God means living this particular life.  No other.,

But then there is also the fact that this particularity excludes other particularities.  A generic or universal god might be compatible with everything and anything, but this particular God excludes.  He is born in Bethlehem, and not elsewhere; the King of the Jews and not a generic monarch.  That means he excludes Augustus, and Herod.  His particular 'yes' is also a particular 'no'.  It means that justification before God means unity with this particular Saviour.  No other.

He will be King

Preparing for yesterday's sermon at CCC on Daniel 2, I was struck by how important it is that we talk in the future tense, especially when we're talking about God's reign over the earth.

In chapter 1 of Daniel, the author has established that God is certainly still King, despite the catastrophic events of the exile.  It was Yahweh who gave Jehoiakim into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar, and it was also Yahweh who enabled Daniel and his friends to flourish without touching the king's food, and Yahweh who gave these young men wisdom and skill.  The God of Israel is King in Babylon, King in spite of Nebuchadnezzar in all his pomp and strength, and perhaps most strikingly King in spite of his people's sin and fall.

So we can and should say: our God reigns!  He is King, in the midst of the muddle and mess and confusion of history.  He is King over the nations.  Remove the surface froth, the churning of human endeavour and wickedness, and underneath is the deep, clear water of God's sovereignty.  This is a comfort, and can surely be applied not only to the affairs of nations but also to the turmoil of our personal lives.  In spite of it all, God reigns.

But Daniel 2 says something a bit different.  In Nebuchadnezzar's dream, we certainly see the froth and the churn: one kingdom follows another, splendour comes and goes, strength and unity are mingled with weakness and division.  Nothing human lasts, and what, in the end does it all mean?  And of course the fact that God can reveal to Nebuchadnezzar, through his dream and through Daniel's interpretation, that this is the future state of his kingdom shows once again that God reigns.  But there is more.

In the dream, a rock - something fairly unspectacular to look at, compared to the glories of the statue representing the human kingdoms of the earth - appears.  It was not cut out by human hands; in other words, the origins of this rock are divine.  And it is flung at the statue, utterly destroying it, pulverising it.  The rock itself becomes a mountain, growing until it fills the whole earth.  Because God will be King.  He is not merely King-in-the-background, the undercover Sovereign, in control despite it all.  He is the King-who-is-coming, the King who will reign over all the earth, the King who will be acknowledged by every tongue and every heart.

So we must say: our God will reign!  Though the visible beginning of his Kingdom is just a little rock - the stone rejected by men, but in the sight of God chosen and precious - it will fill the earth.  And this matters.  We are not saying to the world, or to our own troubled hearts, merely that God is in control of all the mess and evil that we see (and commit!); we are also saying that he will end it, and will himself be all in all through his Christ whom he has installed on his holy hill.  It is not just that God's sovereignty limits evil; God in his coming sovereignty will overcome evil.

He will be King.

Where is God?

When terrible things happen, people ask 'where is God?' - and I find it helpful to take the question extremely literally.  What does the witness of Holy Scripture tell us about the whereabouts of God during a tragedy?

1.  God is in heaven.

When we say that God is in heaven, we affirm that he is absolute king of his creation.  Heaven is the place of sovereignty.  "Our God is in heaven; he does whatever pleases him."  That can be hard to hear in the midst of tragedy, but the alternative is worse: our god is powerless, there was nothing he could do.  When we say God is in heaven, we say that nothing - not even this terrible thing - happened outside of his control.  Nothing shakes his rule.  Now, we can and should qualify this by saying that God rules in various ways, and his will is not fate: he does not bring evil in the same way that he brings good, or will tragedy in the same way that he wills salvation.  But he is in control.  He is in heaven.

2.  God is right here.

God is never a victim, but neither is he a stranger to suffering.  The Son of God became incarnate in order to suffer, and specifically in order to suffer with us and for us.  When events are more than we can understand or bear, we can be sure that the God who in Christ suffered for us on the cross is with us in our sufferings here and now - and not only ours, but the sufferings of the world.  He doesn't miss a single tear or a single injustice.  He is right here.

3.  God is coming.

Crucially, God is on his way.  The witness of Scripture is not to a static God, who remains in heaven, but to a God who comes, who approaches, who draws near to save.  When tragedy comes, we can remember that God is coming to judge the world.  As far as the biblical authors are concerned, that is very good news.  Judgement means the rectifying of everything that is wrong, the final end of suffering and injustice, the wiping away of every tear.  It means salvation, for all those who will lift their heads and look for salvation.  When terrible things happen, we can be sure that it will not always be this way.  He is coming.

Cast me not away from your presence

We've just started preaching through Leviticus at CCC for Lent - last week: many sacrifices, much blood.  Some of the keenest vegetarians in the church were absent, I assume not deliberately.

I take it that the whole of Leviticus is the answer to Exodus 33:1-3.  The setting is the foot of Sinai, after the incident with the golden calf.  Having relented from his initial threat to destroy Israel, God responds to the intercession of Moses by declaring that he will send the people up to Canaan - but he himself will not go with them.  They are just too sinful.  If God were in their midst, he would destroy them.  For Israel, this is a disastrous word, and Moses gets back on his knees: if your presence won't come, don't send us at all!  Better to be without the promised land than to be without God's presence.

So Leviticus is the answer: the formation of a strict world of symbol and sacrifice which is designed to keep Israel God-centred and holy.  The sacrificial system, in particular, is geared towards ensuring that Israel's sin is acknowledged and then (symbolically) dealt with, so that God can be with them without breaking out against them in judgement.

But I guess it's not hard to see how this could be misunderstood.  As soon as the focus stops being on God and his presence, the sacrificial system - with the rest of the Levitical code - could become just a treadmill of self-righteousness.  It becomes about dealing with my guilty conscience, or demonstrating that I am in the right.  Look at all the sacrifices I made!

Reading Jeremiah 7 this morning, I'm struck by another way it could and did go wrong.  When the people forget that God's presence is problematic for them - or rather, when they forget that their sin is problematic in the presence of God! - they assume that the temple-presence of God is just automatic.  They can sin and sin, and it will still be okay because God's temple is right there.  He will surely rescue them, even if they basically ignore him and his word.

Either way, God's presence is not prized.  In the one case, God's presence becomes a theoretical side-issue in a quest for personal righteousness and security; in the other, God's presence becomes a tool to secure a safe and happy life.  In both cases, you imagine people would jump at the chance of going to the promised land without God!

Forgiveness of sins

It's amazing the capacity we have to forget stuff, including for Christians the absolutely central stuff of our faith.  I don't mean that things are completely expunged from the memory.  I just mean those times when for a long stretch the stuff that we know lies dormant and dusty in the mind.  It is a curse, this forgetfulness, requiring us to constantly discipline our memories.  But in a weird way, out of the curse of forgetfulness comes the blessing of remembering.  Because the truth has lain there hidden by all the day to day junk and precious treasure of life, when we see it again it is almost like the first time - but better than the first time, because it comes with that joyful sense of recollection: 'I remember this!'

Take, for example, the forgiveness of sins.

I bet you have from time to time been functionally forgetful of the fact that God in Christ forgives sins.  In my experience this sometimes happens when I go for a period without being conscious of any great transgression.  Without really thinking about it, the forgiveness of sins gets shoved into the mental attic, to be retrieved when needed.

And then, one morning, maybe I'm reading the Bible, or maybe I'm praying, or maybe I'm just reflecting on the past week, and suddenly, BAM!  The forgiveness of sins.  God my Father, in and through the Lord Jesus Christ, shows his great love to me by wiping out the record of my wrong, by looking at me as someone who is eternally separated from my own sin and therefore eternally welcomed by him as a son along with his Son, and a co-heir with him of the eternal kingdom.

He forgives our sins!

And suddenly I'm conscious that sin is the one word which accurately describes so much of my life and my character.  The forbidden and unwise done, the commanded and beneficial undone, self put before others, even the occasional appearance of selflessness shot through with concern for image.

And just like the first time, I am amazed that all of this is forgiven.  But unlike the first time, I remember that this is how God my Father has treated me again and again, bringing me to this point of turning my back on the me that he has also turned his back on, and embracing the me he calls me and allows me to be.  Sin really forgiven.

I'm almost glad I forgot it, for the sheer joy of remembering.  O felix culpa..?  But mostly just thank you.  Thank you, my great and good God, for remembering and reminding me.

Why argue about sex?

This is a post for people who don't understand why Christians are always arguing about sexuality.  To be honest, we're not always arguing about it - I devote a fairly small amount of my time to arguing in general, only a small chunk of that to arguing with other Christians, and a relatively ickle proportion of that arguing about sexuality - but it does get reported a lot, and not just in the fake news.  I want to explain to people who don't know Christianity from the inside why it is that we Christians are having an argument over something that most people think is a matter entirely for individual consciences, where it isn't so blindingly obvious that anyone ought to see it.  I'm not going to particularly argue for a position.  This is just an introduction to why we feel the need to take up a position in the first place.  It may be patronising, in which case my apologies.  It's just some stuff that to me seems to get missed in the translation of inter-Christian arguments into the secular press.

So here goes.

First thing to note is that Christians believe that everything has meaning.  This is based on the notion that ultimate reality is personal (God), and that every part of contingent reality (i.e. everything else) stands in some sort of relationship to that ultimate reality, and that relationship defines what this particular part of contingent reality is all about.  This is very different from a view of reality as ultimately meaningless.  Meaningless is what everything ultimately is if, at bottom, there is no personality.  There are two ways of thinking about an ultimately meaningless reality - the optimistic way and the pessimistic way.  If you take the optimistic route, you will think that the ultimately meaningless reality is like a blank canvas, onto which we can project whatever meanings we like; we are meaning makers.  If you go down the pessimistic road, well, meaningless is meaningless.  Perhaps the best we can do is live with some sort of authenticity, but even that is, at the end of the day, without meaning.  We are lost, accidentally endowed with a desire for meaning and incapable of genuinely finding or making anyway.

If everything is ultimately meaningless, whether you are optimistic or pessimistic about our ability to make some sort of meaning within that, it is obviously a waste of time to argue about what things mean.  Either it's like arguing about which flavour of ice cream is best - it's clearly a personal choice - or it's like arguing about whether cheese is snurg - it's total nonsense.  But if reality is at bottom personal, and if contingent reality therefore has meaning, it may be possible to find meaning in each part of contingent reality - by which I don't mean some variation on the optimistic view above, where I project meaning into something, but something more like digging for gold: there might actually be meaning in there, and I might find it.  And in that case we can have a genuine conversation about what it is that we've found: we could argue about what something means, and it wouldn't be obviously nonsense.

Second thing is that Christians believe in revelation.  In the Christian context, that means one particular thing (and lots of other things which depend in one way or another on that one thing).  It means that we believe that the ultimate reality - the personality at the bottom of it all, by relationship to whom the meaning of everything else is defined - this ultimate reality has appeared within contingent reality.  This has a pretty substantial effect on the quest for meaning.  If it's true that the meaning of contingent reality comes from its relationship to ultimate reality - well, that might mean that everything has meaning, but it wouldn't necessarily mean that we could discover what that meaning was.  In fact, it seems unlikely that we would discover it.  The sort of ultimate reality we're talking about it transcendent, which is to say that although it undergirds all of contingent reality, it does not appear in the way that contingent reality does.  If you catalogued everything in the universe, ultimate reality wouldn't appear in the catalogue, because it is what stands behind and beneath everything else.

But the claim is that ultimate reality has appeared in the midst of contingent reality, and in fact has appeared as contingent reality in some sense.  Of course, what Christians are referring to is the incarnation, the idea that the God who stands behind everything became a human being - became the Jewish carpenter and itinerant preacher Jesus of Nazareth - and lived and died in our world, in our history, at a point on a normal map that I could point to right now.  If that is true - and that of course is a huge if  - then the story of Jesus of Nazareth is the centre point around which everything else revolves.  If everything in contingent reality derives its meaning from its relationship to ultimate reality, and if ultimate reality is revealed in the life story of Jesus of Nazareth, then the meaning of everything in contingent reality can be seen in its relation to this life story.  That is a great big claim, but for the Christian it means that the question of what everything means is not a vague philosophical one, but a concrete and yet very personal question about what this particular chunk of contingent reality has to do with Jesus.  That is something about which we could argue, you see, because there is an answer, and the answer is not in principle hidden away.

Thirdly and finally, what does this have to do with sexuality?  Well, in the general sense, obviously human sexuality is an aspect of contingent reality, and so we can ask what it means, and we can try to work out the connection between it and the life of Jesus, just as we can for every single 'thing' in the universe.  But there is something more specific than that.  We've already said that the Christian thinks that reality is ultimately personal, and indeed relational.  That makes human beings uniquely important - apart from angels and demons (which are a complex part of the Christian view of the world) we are as far as we know the only contingent personalities in existence.  And it makes the relational aspect of human beings particularly significant.  We could view the fact that ultimate reality became human in Jesus as the confirmation of this particular importance and significance.  But sexuality lies very near to the heart of who we are as relational persons.  Which should lead us to expect that when we are talking about sexuality, we are talking about something that is absolutely charged with meaning.

That is what we are arguing about, and that is why the arguments are heated.  For Christians, sexuality has meaning, and its meaning stands in close relation to ultimate meaning.  The Bible - which for Christians is the first and authoritative record of God's communication to the world, and therefore the means of his communication to the world in the present - suggests that human marriage, particularly in its sexual component, is a picture of the ultimate story of reality; the story of God's coming into the world in Jesus to unite humanity to himself in loving relationship.  So the nature of our understanding of sexuality is closely related to our understanding of God.  There is meaning, really important meaning, in there.  So we discuss it.

There's rather more to say than that, and of course I take a definite view of where the discussions (or perhaps better, arguments) ought to end up.  But I hope that helps to explain why we're having the discussion in the first place.

This will not stand

It matters how we engage with current affairs.  I'll be honest and say that I'm finding it all rather tricky right now.  I sort of miss the days when all we had to deal with was the news, rather than the constant online cocktail of news, informed opinion, less informed opinion, and social media displays of anger and hate on all sides.  I'm going to need to restrict my diet of internet, because honestly it's making me sick to my soul.

But the thing which distresses me most is that I see very little difference between the responses of Christians and others.  It's all anger and despair.  Now, Holy Scripture gives us some precedent for expressing anger and despair about the situation of the world.  I note, though, that the anger and despair in Scripture is mostly directed toward God himself.  Perhaps counter-intuitively, I think God would rather have us hurl abuse and accusations at him than at the people with whom we disagree.

What I miss at the moment is evidence that we're paying attention to another stream of the Biblical witness which is an essential complement to the anger and despair: a calm, straightforward trust in the sovereignty of God and the truth of the gospel.

Of course we need both the sovereignty of God and the truth of the gospel.  A sovereign God who is not the God and Father of the crucified and risen Jesus Christ is of small comfort to us - he could have any plans, any goals, and who knows how many of us he'd throw under the bus to achieve them.  But if the God of the gospel, the God of Calvary and the empty tomb - if that God is sovereign, there must be some comfort.  He has told us what he is up to, and it is salvation and hope and life.  He threw himself under the bus, as it were, to secure it.  He isn't backing down now.

There is something absolutely right about the instinct to protest manifest evils - to cry out 'this will not stand!'  But it matters whether that proceeds from the starting point of a certain knowledge that, no, it will not stand - because the only place that evil ultimately has left is captive in the train of the glorified Christ.  To put it another way, is your protest a witness to the gospel?  And would this be clear to anyone glancing through your Facebook feed?

On being real

A couple of days ago, I argued that one thing we can take away from the doctrine of the Trinity is its concern for the God who is.  That is to say, the doctrine treats God as having real existence, and therefore particular existence - he is in this way, and to fail to acknowledge that is simply not to know him.  This is a property of real things: they occupy space, physically or conceptually, and we bump up against them, literally or metaphorically.  Whilst they can be (must be) interpreted - which is to say, there must be some interaction between my understanding and the real existing thing - they cannot be simply reimagined without denying their reality.

I'm not sure I could trace this historically, but I'm confident that logically the lack of belief in a real existing God leads to a loss of belief in real existing humanity.  Real existing humanity - both in the general sense and in the more acute sense in which I am myself an instance thereof - has a genuine shape, occupies genuine space.  It cannot be reimagined without denying its reality.  But we must reimagine humanity; we must claim for ourselves total sovereignty over our own humanity.  Do we notice than in claiming this sovereignty at this level we destroy (in so far as it lies with us) the very thing we want to rule over?  We become kings and queens of dreams, and more often than not of nightmares.

Of course we see this is in the arena of sexuality and gender, but the most extraordinary and terrible example I can think of relates to abortion.  Behold the power of imagination!  The joyfully expectant mother carries a baby; the unfortunate woman with an unwanted pregnancy has nothing but a collection of cells.  The longed for baby is not a foetus but a person, already loved; the undesired ball of matter is nothing but an excrescence, to be removed.  We have become sovereign over our own reality, and can decide what should live and what should die.

A big caveat: I have to put this starkly and horrifically, because that is the shape of the reality.  But I know that this is not how it feels for people going through this sort of thing.  I suspect that the decision to abort more often than not feels like helplessness and not sovereignty.  I know that it is pain and anguish and not at all the simple choice painted here.  I know that.  But if we step back: what allowed these choices to become choices at all, however anguished?

But the bitter truth is that human beings are real.  We are real.  I am real.  I cannot reimagine myself without denying myself.  In reality, I cannot be absolutely sovereign over myself or anyone or anything else.  I, and all other real things, are to some extent given; I am not a dream or a nightmare, but a created person.  At some point, we will bump up against the reality of humanity - our own and that of others.  And at some point, even if it is not until the Judgement, we will bump up against the reality of the God who is there and who gave us all of our reality.  Then what will we say?

The God who is

The Athanasian Creed is long and repetitive.  Its insistence again and again that God is like this and therefore isn't like that can get a bit boring.  It feels like a product of a fastidious age, when people spent far too long defining the finer points of theology and probably didn't spend enough time being 'practical' and perhaps neglected things like 'mission' and 'worship' because they were tied up credalising (not a real word).

In fact the point is simple, and highlights the major blind spot of our own age.  God really exists, and because he really exists (rather than being a construct of a human mind), he exists in a particular way.  If something is made up, you can think of it in any way you like; if something is real, then unless you conform your thoughts about it to the reality then you simply don't know it.

The God who is has revealed himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - the three, and yet still the one God; in fact, the one God just as and only as he is the Three.  Insisting that we think of God in this way is simply insisting that we treat God as a real. existing thing.  In other words, it is a ridiculous demand if God is made up - and that God is made up is the first article of faith of the modern world.

Giving Yourself

The good news is that God gives himself to us.  He gives himself in the sacrifice of his Son; he gives himself in the outpouring of the Spirit.  He gives himself as price, ransoming the lost, and he gives himself as presence, drawing near to the ransomed.  It is God himself who is given, and no lesser gift.  But...  God does not give himself away.  There is no risk of him losing himself in all this giving.  He is not conditioned by his giving; rather, the recipient of the gift is conditioned by his receiving of the gift.  Even as he goes to the cross, God gives himself, does not give himself away.  He remains the giver, not the one from whom anything is taken.

In Trinitarian terms, perhaps we might say that God the Father is supremely the guarantee that God does not lose control over his giving.  He gives himself in his Son and his Spirit, but he, in his own Person, remains always the giver even in his given-ness.

It is different for us.  We can hardly give ourselves without giving ourselves away.  To give ourselves is to lose ourselves; ultimately, the martyr loses himself - gives himself away.  But it is so in every little act of love.  We give ourselves, and in giving we lose ourselves.  We give ourselves away.  We are conditioned by our giving.  We diminish.

That is why the only key to radical self-giving is the remembrance that we are in the hand of the God who holds onto us even as we give ourselves away, and regathers all of the pieces of us that we have - at his command! - freely distributed and scattered throughout our lives in acts of self-giving love (and indeed without his command, in sinful acts of illegitimate attachment).  Without the promise that he, the giver who is not given away, holds onto us, how can we dare to give ourselves away?

Without the resurrection, how could we dare to let go of ourselves?

Electing love

"As this freely electing love the love of God for us is unconditional, strong and victorious.

It is a burning fire which cannot be quenched.

It is wholly trustworthy.

It is a rock to which we can cling without fear of its crumbling.

It is a refuge to which we can flee without doubting whether it will stand.

It is nourishment which is always prepared for those who hunger and thirst for love, and never withheld from them.

We have only to see that we are not worthy of it, that we have forfeited it, that we cannot secure it of and for ourselves, that we can only receive and accept it.  We can only long and trust that God is the freely electing God for us, and that we ourselves are freely elected by Him.  We then participate already in the unconditional nature and strength and victory of the love of God, in its sovereignty which consists in the fact that God is absolutely free to love man first irrespective of what he deserves or does not deserve.

We then find that we are loved by Him, and therefore genuinely, basically and effectively."

CD IV/2, p 767 (with my formatting)