Month: April 2008

April Book Notes – 2

This is my second list of book notes for this month. The first can be read here. It’s been a month of reading around themes of hope. To that end, few are better friends to turn to than Jürgen Moltmann, whose writings grow on me more every year. He seeks to give voice to many of the questions of existential bite that I wrestle with, and along the way creates the invitation for the kind of open and informed conversation that I believe theology ought to be having much more often. So, to the list of highlights:

Richard Bauckham, ed., God Will Be All in All: The Eschatology of Jürgen Moltmann (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001).

This is a valuable collection of 6 critical reflections on Jürgen Moltmann’s eschatology (and 8 responses by Moltmann) that arose from a conversation at St Andrews some years back between Richard Bauckham, Trevor Hart, Timothy Gorringe and Moltmann (there’s also a essay by Miroslav Volf, who was not present). Who would not have loved to have been a fly on the wall in that room! Anyone who wants to engage with Moltmann’s impressive vision – and contemporary theology more generally – could do little better than familiarise themselves with these indispensable interactions. I reckon it’s worth buying just to read Moltmann’s brilliant 5-page essay on ‘The Logic of Hell’. The main drawback is that Bauckham (who is the editor after all) spills more than his fair share of ink and it may have been preferable to have some other voices included, or just a shorter book. ♦♦♦½

Brian Hebblethwaite, The Christian Hope (Basingstoke: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1984).

In this study, Brian Hebblethwaite provides the reader with a helpful survey of the tradition of Christian hope in both its classical and modern dialects. While sometimes his brevity leads him to so simplify the facts that he distorts them, this book is a useful introduction to some of the key names and issues that have informed Roman and Protestant eschatological discourse. ♦♦♦

Jürgen Moltmann, In the End – The Beginning: The Life of Hope (trans. Margaret Kohl; Philadelphia: Fortress, 2004).

This was a re-read for me, and not for the last time. One of Moltmann’s best. ♦♦♦♦

Geoffrey Rowell, Hell and the Victorians: A Study of the Nineteenth-Century Theological Controversies concerning Eternal Punishment and the Future Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974).

I am aware of no more comprehensive – or important – study on nineteenth-century thinking concerning questions of heaven and hell than this one. That Rowell’s work remains a standard text after 30 years is testimony in itself to its abiding value. (The more-recent work by Michael Wheeler, Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology (along with its popular-level version, Heaven, Hell, and the Victorians (1994)) is also very valuable.) While Rowell’s study (too) largely neglects non-conformist voices and, to a lesser extent, voices from within evangelicalism (Anglican or otherwise), the treatment remains a valuable and encyclopaedic study! ♦♦♦♦

John Arthur Thomas Robinson, In the End, God.: A Study of the Christian Doctrine of the Last Things (London: James Clarke & Co., 1950).

Though pushing close to 60 years old (Forsyth did encourage us to ‘think in centuries’, after all!), and in parts showing its age, this short treatment remains a useful study, not least for the fact that herein Robinson outlines some critical contours in which the conversation regarding eschatology should take place. I found the chapters on the resurrection of the Body, and ‘The End of the Lord’, to be the most fruitful. Here’s a few tasters:

‘Indeed, every statement of Christian eschatology, whether of the end of the person or of the world, is an inference from some basic truth in its doctrine of God, and must be judged and tested accordingly. False ideas of the last things are direct reflections of inadequate views of the nature of God’. (p. 31)

‘The hope of immortality is a corollary of faith, but yet of a faith which knows no personal God. In consequence, it is a hope that can hold out no guarantee of the future as a life of personal communion’. (p. 79)

‘The sole basis for such a doctrine [of universalism], as more than wishful thinking, is the work of God in Christ’. (p. 108)

‘The recovered awareness is the “the Christian lives not at the End of Time, but rather from the End and in the End of Time” (Lambert). [The Christian] sees everything from an eschatological perspective. The Biblical world-view is not obtained by regarding all things under the form of a timeless eternity, nor as ideally they might be, but as they are already in Christ, the End’. (p. 125).

Covers an impressive amount of material in an easily accessible way. ♦♦♦♦

Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology (trans. Margaret Kohl; Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2004).

It is impossible for me to do justice to this book in a wee book note. Suffice it to say that there is a sense that in this book all that this great teacher has been saying previously – about God, creation, ecclesiology, hope, justice, christology, pneumatology, soteriology, mission, Sabbath, shekinah …everything – reaches its head. Like the best of muscats, this one is to drink slowly, and often. Here’s Moltmann on the fullness of God:

In order to grasp the fulness of God, we are at liberty to leave moral and ontological concepts behind, and to avail ourselves of aesthetic dimensions. The fulness of God is the rapturous fullness of the divine life; a life that communicates itself with inexhaustible creativity; an overbrimming life that makes what is dead and withered live; a life from which everything that lives receives it vital energies and its zest for living; a source of life to which everything that has been made alive responds with deepest joy and ringing exultation. The fulness of God is radiant light, light reflected in the thousand brilliant colours of created things. The glory of God expresses itself, not in self-glorying majesty, but in the prodigal communication of God’s own fullness of life. The glory of God is not to be found, either, in his laborious self-realization by way of his self-emptying, but follows upon that of the eternal day of resurrection (p. 336).

Amen, and Amen. ♦♦♦♦½

James Baldwin Brown, The Doctrine of Annihilation in the Light of the Gospel of Love (London: Henry S. King & Co., 1875).

J. Baldwin Brown was PT Forsyth’s pastor, and his influence on the young Forsyth is obvious in a number of areas, eschatology among them. This series of lectures was penned and presented at a time when conditional immortality was an even more richly debated topic than it is today in the post-Fudge world. While much of what Brown has to say in his critique of annihilationism is inadequately developed, his instincts remain valuable, and his pointing us to towards the broader scope of God’s redemptive purposes as the overflow of his own community of love puts the discussion at least on the right page. ♦♦♦½

The Pope and Jesus of Nazareth

The Centre of Theology and Philosophy and the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Nottingham are holding a workshop on ‘The Pope and Jesus of Nazareth’ on 19th and 20th June 2008 in Nottingham.

The publication of the book Jesus of Nazareth on 16 April 2007 was an unprecedented event: never before had a reigning Pope published personal reflections on Jesus. The book engages not just with New Testament scholarship but also with fundamental methodological questions related to historical criticism. Moreover, it resonates with wider questions of scriptural reading, Christology, ecclesiology and relations with Judaism and Islam. This workshop will be the first extended theological discussion in the UK on Joseph Ratzinger’s book.

Among the speakers, there will be Professor John Milbank, Professor Markus Bockmuehl, Professor emeritus Geza Vermes FBA, Archbishop Martínez, Fergus Kerr OP, Professor Walter Moberly, Olivier-Thomas Venard OP and Professor Mona Siddiqui.

For a booking form please visit Department of Theology and Religious Studies or e-mail Angus Paddison.

The event is being supported by the British Academy.

The Triumph of God’s Love in Jesus Christ

‘Christ, the gift of God’s present forgiving love to every man and woman, is the door through which alone we can enter into our provision of hope. Until we know the love of our Father’s heart to us, as manifested in Christ, the future must always be to us at best a dark and doubtful wilderness. But when we know that all that we have conceived of our Father’s love, is as nothing to the reality – that he is indeed love itself – a love passing knowledge – a shoreless, boundless, bottomless ocean-fountain of love, of holy, sin-hating, sin-destroying love, which longs over us that we should be filled with itself – and be by it delivered from the power of evil – then, indeed, we are saved by hope, for we know that love must triumph and fulfill all its counsel’. Thomas Erskine, The Brazen Serpent; or, Life Coming Through Death (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1879), 122.

Ah … grace!

A few weeks ago, I was invited to write a wee reflection for our church’s weekly devotion. Here’s a bit of what I wrote:

Jesus was not playing semantic games with us when he declared, ‘He who has seen me, has seen the Father’ (John 14:9). There is no God behind Jesus Christ. In Jesus, we see the full brunt of God’s attitude to us, and it is one of unbridled grace. There is no shadow side to God’s love, as if God might be schizophrenic, or somehow different from the one who ‘stretched out his hand and touched’ lepers (Matt 8:2), or healed the Centurion’s paralysed servant (Matt 8:13), or who gave a widow’s dead son back to his mother (Luke 7:11–17), or who had his feet washed with the tears of a prostitute (if this is what she was; Luke 7:38).

The incarnation of God into our broken and insolent world flows out of the undivided heart of a Father who has spared nothing in order that we might know his forgiveness, and so life. God did not have to be bribed or appeased into forgiving us. That’s not why Jesus died. Jesus died that God might treat sinners he loves as daughters and sons, seeing us free from all that keeps us entangled in our shame, pain, isolation and guilt. Jesus died that we might – by the same eternal Spirit through whom Jesus ‘offered himself without blemish to God’ (Heb. 9:14) – know the purification of our consciences from dead works and be set free to serve the living God.

Ah … grace!

Theodicy: The Justification Of God – 7

THE COMING EVENT IN HISTORY

Study 7

A guest post by Trevor Faggotter

ONE FAR-OFF DIVINE EVENT

Jesus said: Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Beware; keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come. (Mark 13:31-32).

The poet Lord Alfred Tennyson, concluded his poem, In Memoriam with these words:

That God, which ever lives and loves,

One God, one law, one element,

And one far-off divine event,

To which the whole creation moves.

Just as there was a day when the Messiah, and Saviour of the world, Jesus, was born into this world in a town called Bethlehem, so too there will be a day when Christ’s coming-appearing will be an actual event in our very real, daily human history. Tennyson described that occasion as “one far-off divine event, to which the whole creation moves”. The seeming delay in Jesus Christ’s coming-appearing – coupled with this expectation but non-arrival in every age since that of the early Christians – has driven some people to mistrust all such prophecy, and to doubt or deny the Christian story, and gospel.

This coming anew of the ascended, reigning Christ into human history, to put things right, and close off this age with finality, is an essential part of a biblical theodicy. It is one component, which is always lacking in a philosophical theodicy, where an understanding of the world is sought apart from the action of God in Christ. The difficult, or seemingly unanswerable questions of theodicy have often produced great doubt, and a kind of faithlessness in many people.

Only this week I noticed that a well-known University Professor in New Testament studies, by the name of Bart Ehrman has concluded that the questions of theodicy, and the unsatisfactory answers he has found, have forced him to take up the stance of an agnostic, rather than hold to his former Christian faith. He has now authored a book telling why.[1] One of the reasons given is his unbelief in much of the Christian creed – such as the resurrected, ascended, currently reigning Christ, and his coming appearing.

We should note that P.T. Forsyth draws our attention to the importance of faith, which looks forward to a teleology – God’s planned goal – arriving in history.

The faith of a teleology in history protects us from the vagrancy of soul, which dogs the notion that things are but staggering on, or flitting upon chance winds over a trackless waste. It saves us from the timidity, which so easily besets us before the incalculable.[2]

Praying and not losing heart are important qualities for a human being to have, and to wrestle to maintain, and sustain. Jesus asked a good question about this persistent, enduring approach, especially when living amidst human injustice and suffering: ‘When the Son of Man comes will he find faith on earth?’ (Luke 18:8).

LIVING IN THE MYSTERY

Jesus said… ‘To you has been given the mystery of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables’. (Mark 4:11).

He went on to say: ‘Then pay attention to how you listen; for to those who have, more will be given; and from those who do not have, even what they seem to have will be taken away (Luke 8:18).

Geoffrey Bingham has helped us to see that a mystery is not a problem to be solved, but a revealed reality in which one lives:

The Scriptures do not seem to us to be mysterious, since we can read and noetically understand every idea put forward, but in what we think we understand, there is, nevertheless, mystery. Christ said that in certain cases it has to be given to understand certain mysteries. That is, such mysteries cannot be understood by intellectual endeavour. Somewhere-and somehow-the heart and the will are involved in true comprehension. This is a baffling thought; namely, that such mysteries are not puzzles to be solved. God is Himself the great mystery, and He retains the right to open up Himself and all concomitant mysteries, or to close them off. This is a fearful thought-that mysteries may be shut off from us, and we from them![3]

Humility is especially necessary in the matter of theodicy, and in understanding the nature and origins and activity of evil. In our previous study we commenced by including these two passages from Scripture, concerning the matter of evil:

For the mystery of lawlessness (or mystery of iniquity) is already at work (2 Thessalonians 2:7).

And he (Jesus) said, ‘It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly (Mark 7:22).

Paul’s phrase in 2 Thessalonians 2:7 teaches and cautions us that sin, lawlessness or iniquity is a mystery. Aware of this one can consider carefully such questions as:

  1. The origin, cause or reason for evil, as well as, perhaps, a prior question about its essence or nature. What is evil? St. Augustine (354-430) denounced as absurd all efforts to reflect upon the origin of evil as long as one does not know what it is.
  1. How long O Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen? Or cry out to you ‘Violence!’ but you do not save? Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrong? (Habakkuk 1:2)
  1. What is Victory? And, when does it arrive, this Victory over evil? For a humanity that is overwhelmed by suffering (evil endured) and guilt (evil committed), that is the question that matters.[4]

Whilst we are reading and listening to Forsyth seeking understanding – especially of his exposition of the significance of the cross of Christ – we need to bear in mind that we are not merely searching for intellectual insights, but rather, gospel insight – which comes by hearing with faith as Christ speaks!

EVIL TOUCHING OUR NERVE

Forsyth recognizes that there is a greater problem than merely staggering on to nowhere:

But our worst trouble is not due to a mere tracklessness in the course of history. That is too negative to try us keenly. We are exposed to positive assault. The iron enters our soul. The worst question rises, and the chief protest, when the disorder in the world touches our nerve in the shape of positive pain, evil, or guilt; when our personal life is deranged by that alien invasion, or is crushed, instead of stayed, by our connection with the course of things; when conscience rises in protest at the fate of the good, or the falsity of ourselves. Questions then come home about the connection of evil and suffering, sin and sorrow, grief and goodness. Then it is that the desire for a teleology deepens into a passion for a theodicy. Has the teleology a moral end?[5]

Other writers reflecting upon the more horrendous crimes of World War 2, seem to keep looking at the issue of guilt, and the need for it to be attributed, acknowledged and dealt with. But how is guilt to be dealt with, if you have done such things? Is there any hope for a person who has committed gross evil? What about our own less than righteous lives? It is valuable, even if very painful to recount what has happened and keeps happening in human history. In searching for a theology for Auschwitz, Simon writes:

We are dealing with the deaths of millions, mostly non-combatant Jews, who had been rounded up and sent to various concentration-camps designed entirely for their extermination. Auschwitz was the largest but by no means the only place of infamy. At Treblinka, Maideneck, Ravensbruck, Dachau, Buchenwald, Belsen, Chelmo, Sohibor, Mauthausen and many lesser known places the same dimensions of sin and suffering prevailed. Auschwitz stands here for the whole guilt which has stained the earth, not only in Europe but also in Asia.

This guilt must in the first place be ascribed to Hitler, the German Chancellor from 1933 until his death by suicide, probably on April 30th, 1945, in Berlin. He appointed the men who carried out the task of extermination with ruthless efficiency.[6]

Our problem is evil as it affects our own lives, so terribly. Over Nyholm produced a film documentary entitled ‘The Anatomy of Evil’, in which he interviewed mostly the perpetrators of mass murder in World War 2 and the Balkans War. In setting out on his task, he said, “I have decided to confront heartlessness, heartlessness itself, face to face.”[7] The interviewer’s final conclusion is honest, as he asks about what he might have done in the same circumstances: “I cannot answer if I would do it; if I say I know myself it is not correct; I can’t predict if I can handle it; I no longer have certainty … from certainty to maybe – that is a profound loss. That is my condition!”

WHEN GOD TRUSTED MAN WITH FREEDOM

When a film documentary maker, cautiously, fearfully, and sadly concludes that virtually all human beings are capable of terrible evil, and many have exercised it in such an atrocious manner, then it seems clear enough that we have been given such freedom as to include even a terrifying capacity for genocide. What then are we to say of our Creator?

There was never such a fatal experiment as when God trusted man with freedom. But our Christian faith is that He knew well what He was about. He did not do that as a mere adventure, not without knowing that he had the power to remedy any abuse of it that might occur, and to do this by a new creation more mighty, marvellous, and mysterious than the first. He had means to emancipate even freedom, to convert moral freedom, even in its ruin, into spiritual. If the first creation drew on His might, the second taxed His all-might. It revealed His power as moral majesty, as holy omnipotence, most chiefly shown in the mercy that redeems and reconciles.[8]

In the light of the Cross’s power, Forsyth goes on the revel in God’s grand plan:

To redeem creation is a more creative act than it was to create it … The supreme power in the world is not simply the power of God but of a holy God, upon whose rule all things wait, and may wait long. It is no slack knot that the Saviour has to undo. All the energy of a perverse world in its created freedom pulled on the tangle to tighten it. And its undoing has given the supreme form to all God’s dealing with the world. But at the same time the snarl is not beyond being untied. Man is born to be redeemed. The final key to the first creation is the second; and the first was done with the second in view … The first creation was the prophecy of the second; the second was the first tragically ‘arrived’. There was moral resource in the Creator equal to anything that might happen to the creature or by him.[9]

The Cross is at once creation’s fatal jar and final recovery. And there is no theodicy for the world except for a theology of the Cross … No reason of man can justify God in a world like this. He must justify Himself, and He did so in the Cross of His Son.[10]

As Forsyth reflects upon the 1914-1917 war to end all wars, he urges us to see the greatness of the gospel of redemption, and the role the church has to know her Lord, and proclaim his Act of Redemption, accomplished, (and recounted), in the power of the weakness of the cross:

We are now in a crisis that no individual can measure, nor his piety deal with and it is beyond any philosophy or idealism of a time. In needs that faith of an agelong holy Church to grasp it. Would that the Church’s faith could always handle it in the true power of that crisis greater still which made the Church – in the power of the Church’s Cross and Gospel. An awful crisis of wickedness like war can only be met on the Church’s height and range of faith; and it forces us up to levels and aspects of our belief which our common hours or moral slackness too easily feel extreme. Nothing but the great theologies of redemption are adequate to the great tragedies of the world … Christ finished the world-work given Him to do. He brought the world home.[11]

Isaiah once said of the suffering servant to come – Jesus – that ‘He shall see the fruit of the travail of his soul and be satisfied’. (Isaiah 53:11 RSV). Forsyth takes up the same words and applies them to the whole creation, and its travail:

In Him the whole creation sees the travail of its soul and is satisfied. He who can take away the sin of the world has in His reversion the reason, completion, peace, joy, and glory of all things. The Destroyer of guilt pacifies all grief, the Reconciler of our enmity ends all question. To see the devastator a truly penitent thief would compensate any Christian victim. The Justifier of men is the one and only theodicy of God.[12]

Further reflection upon the sadness and horror of the war, brings Forsyth to describe the situation as elements of hell breaking through into the daily life of humanity, as judgment on the world, but also upon the Church’s failure to serve the world well:

After all, the present cataclysm is an acute condensation of what has been going on in nature, human and other, for millenniums. If faith could survive that, need it succumb to this? If the existence of hell is compatible with faith in God, and is even of His ordinance, must we lose faith when it comes through the earth’s crust in a volcano? … The dirty chimney needed to be fired … The present situation is a monument to the failure of the Church![13]

We are driven to a very personal involvement in the cross, where we can not consider it from afar, nor just talk about it – rather, by the Spirit, we are taken into its action, in the embrace of our Saviour, as he bears our sin, we say – I have been crucified with Christ:

The Cross is not a theological theme, not a forensic device, but the crisis of the moral universe on a scale far greater than earthly war. It is the theodicy of the whole God dealing with the whole soul of the whole world in holy love, righteous judgment, and redeeming grace.[14]

HOW WEIGHTY IS THE GLORY THAT IS TO COME?

Concerning the coming glory, Alister McGrath chimes in with a helpful word:

Some say that nothing could ever be adequate recompense for suffering in this world. But how do they know? Have they spoken to anyone who has suffered and subsequently been raised to glory? Have they been through this experience themselves? One of the greatest tragedies of much writing about human suffering this century has been its crude use of rhetoric. ‘Nothing can ever compensate for suffering!’ rolls off the tongue with the greatest of ease. It has a certain oratorical force. It discourages argument. It suggests that what has been said represents the distillation of human wisdom in the subject, and is so evidently correct that it does not require justification. It implies that anyone who disagrees is a fool. But how do they know nothing can compensate for suffering? Paul believed passionately that the sufferings of the present life would be outweighed by the glory that is to come (Romans 8:18). How do they know that he is wrong, and that they are right? Have they tasted the glory of the life to come, so that they can make the comparison? Have they talked to others who have been through the bitter experience of suffering and death, and have been caught up in the risen and glorious life of Christ, and asked them how they now feel about their past suffering? No. Of course they haven’t. The simple truth is that this confident assertion of the critics of Christianity is just so much whistling in the wind. Their comments are made from our side of the veil which separates history from eternity.’[15]

[1] Bart D. Ehrman, God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer our Most Important Question – ‘Why we Suffer’, HarperOne, 2008.

[2] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, NCPI, 1988, p. 120.

[3] Geoffrey C. Bingham, The Glory of the Mystery and the Mystery of the Glory, NCPI, Blackwood, 1998, p. xii.

[4] Henri Blocher, Evil and the Cross, Apollos, IVP, England, 1994, p. 12-13.

[5] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, NCPI, 1988, p. 120.

[6] Ulrich Simon, A Theology of Auschwitz, SPCK, London, 1967, p. 11.

[7] The following are comments made by men who once killed their civilian victims, so mercilessly:

Ø Many people will ask, is there no light in this murderous dark? The light in the darkness is the shame.

Ø Generally speaking I am not a good man at all. I am not a good Christian. I succumbed to instincts to do evil to others.

Ø I envy people who have normal lives BBQ and go to the beach. I envy tramps. I am no longer like them. Now I don’t belong anywhere, any particular place. I belong here (prison). I’ve lost what is most important – morality.

[8] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, NCPI, 1988, pp. 123-124.

[9] Forsyth, pp. 123-124.

[10] Forsyth, p. 122.

[11] Forsyth p. 126.

[12] Forsyth p. 127.

[13] Forsyth p. 129.

[14] Forsyth p. 133.

[15] Alister McGrath, Suffering, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1992, pp. 96-7.

‘The Triune God: Rich in Relationships’ – A sermon by Jürgen Moltmann

When we hear the names, Father and Son and Holy Spirit, we sense that in the mystery of God there must be a wondrous community. It is the one name of God in which “the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit” are so different that they are named successively, yet bound together with the conjunction “and.”

When we want to emphasize the oneness of the divine mystery we usually use the term “trinity;” when we want to emphasize their difference, we use “triunity.” Regardless of the terminology we use, we hold that God is no single Lord in Heaven who rules everything, as a temporal ruler would. Nor do we mean some sort of cold power of providence who determines all and cannot be affected by anything. Remember, the triune God is a social God, rich in internal and external relationships.

It is only from the perspective of the trinitarian God that we can claim that “God is Love,” because love is never alone. Instead, it brings together those who are separate while maintaining their distinct characters. From the perspective of the triune God, one can say, along with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “only a suffering God can help.” The God who is with us and for us in his suffering love can understand us and redeem us.

There are two classic Christian images of the Trinity which can prove useful both in sermons and in teaching. The first is the amazing icon done by Andrei Rublev in orthodox Moscow in the 15th century. The three divine persons are seated at a table. In the slight inclination of their heads toward each other and in the gestures of their hands, a deeper unity of the three is suggested. A chalice on the table symbolizes the sacrifice of the Son on Golgotha for the redemption of the world.

The painting originated in the story of Abraham and Sarah (Gen 1:18), who receive and richly entertain “three men” from whom they receive God’s promise of a son, in spite of Sarah’s (laughably) advanced age. A later interpretation claims that the three men were “angels,” while some claim Sarah and Abraham actually met the triune God. Rublev omitted Abraham and Sarah from the painting, leaving only the three “angels.” Thus in his rendition it is impossible to tell which is the Father, Son or Spirit. In this way, the painting expresses the ultimate unrepresentability of the triune God.

The other image of the Trinity is a “Gnadenstuhl” from the Latin Church of the Middle Ages. In it, God the Father, with an expression of deep sorrow on his face, holds the crossbar of the cross from which his dead son hangs. The Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove, descends from the Father onto the Son. Where in many paintings of this sort the eucharistic chalice stands in the midpoint of the three persons, here the cross stands in the middle of the triune God. It is the breathtaking image of Easter Saturday, after Christ was killed, but before his resurrection for the redemption of the world by the life-giving Spirit. This image of the Trinity can thus rightly be called the “Pain of God” or the “Death of God.”

The death of Christ and the eucharistic representation of its salvific significance is in both pictures the heart of the triune God. I know of no Christian image of the Trinity in which the cross is missing. The redemptive cross of Christ is always deeply involved in the divine mystery, but turns it into a revealed mystery. The ancient theo-paschite formula rightly exclaims: “One of the Trinity has suffered.” I would like to add “where one suffers , the others suffer along.” The Son suffers death in our God-forsakenness, the Father suffers the death of his beloved Son and the Spirit binds the other two together through unspoken sighs. It is only by comprehending the depth of this chasm as the “pain of God” that we can fuIly understand the incommensurable joy of the Easter celebration of the victory of life and the beauty of the new creation of all things.

The history of Christ is thus a trinitarian history, otherwise one cannot call the gospel the “Gospel of the Son of God” (Mark 1:1). The history of Jesus is first a Spirit-history. It is through his baptism by John in the Jordan that the experience of the Spirit of God upon him is revealed, and with it, the revelation of God: it was in the Spirit that he heard the voice “You are my beloved Son.” From that point on, he knew that he was the messianic child of God. In the Spirit it was possible for him to refer to God as “Abba, beloved Father.” It is thus in the Spirit that God and Jesus, the “Father” and “Son” are both bound together, yet also uniquely distinguished.

With this, the Spirit-history of Christ becomes the Christ-history of the Spirit. The Spirit of Christ comes out of the Spirit of the Father and just as Christ is sent from the Father, so too is his own spirit sent to his own people and to the whole world (John 20:21-22). This change of subject in the history of salvation is described in a trinitarian manner in the so-called “departure speeches” in John’s Gospel: Jesus must “go forth” (die) so that the Paraclete may come. The Paraclete comes because Jesus asks the Father to send the Paraclete in his name (John 14-16). Good Friday and Pentecost are two sides to salvation: the redemption of the world out of God-forsakenness, and the new creation of all things.

We enter into the trinitarian history of Christ through baptism. It is for this reason that the first confessions of faith are baptismal confessions. The life “in the Spirit” and in “discipleship” is the practice of faith in the triune God. In both faith and in life, everything depends on the God-sonship of Christ. Those who lose sight of this lose their ability to be children of God. Those who forget this lose their future in God, which Paul states is a “hereditary right” of the future world. It is sonship that binds together God and Jesus and provides the foundation for trinitarian faith. If this connection were broken, then Jesus is merely one more good person and God is merely the unfeeling Lord of Heaven. In the 19th century, this led to a “Jesus-humanism.” Today it leads to an “Islamization” of Christianity. It is only through the recognition of the triune God that Christian dialogue with Jews and Moslem’s becomes interesting and dialogue-worthy.

Even more important, however, is the recognition that if Jesus were not “God’s son,” if God were not “in him,” then his suffering would have no divine meaning for the redemption of the world. It would disappear into the endless history of the suffering of murdered people. But, if “one of the trinity suffers,” then healing can come to wounded humanity and hope can enter a dying world.

Jesus’ prayer, “In this you may all be one, as the Father is in me and I in him that you may be in us” (John 17:21) calls for the unity of the Church and for ecumenism. John describes the communion of Jesus with the “Father” not merely as “with each other, ” or “for each other,” but “in each other.” “I am in the Father and the Father is in me.” Therefore, “whoever sees me, sees the Father,” for “I and the Father are one” (John 14: 9-11, 10, 30). It is a unity based in mutual indwelling.

The trinitarian unity of the Son and the Father through the Spirit is a model for the relationships of men and women in the Spirit of Christ. The unity of the Church resides neither in the monarchy of God, nor in God as a supreme, divine essence, but in the trinitarian communion of God. However, this trinitarian community is so wide and so open that the Church and the whole world can “live” within it. The prayer of Jesus that “you may be one in us” is a prayer that is answered. Whether we know it or not we not only believe in the triune God, but also “live” in the triune God.

This reciprocal, sometimes called mystical, “living in God” also belongs to the trinitarian life: “those who live in love, live in God and God in them” (1 John 4:6). “We in God and God in us” is not meant merely as some sort of fleeting, mystical rapture, but is a daily relaxing quiet and intimate “living.” I find this picture of a mutual indwelling ever more beautiful and convincing. The triune God is a “habitable” God: he allows us to become one within him. If the world becomes “inhabitable” for God, then the restless God of history comes to his rest. The Church is an icon of the trinity. Its community of freedom and equality illuminates the image of the triune God. This is best expressed in the base communities in Latin America and in some Pentecostal communities, communities of social justice and personal freedom, modeled on the communities of the early church which lacked nothing because they held all in common.

Finally, we can move beyond the human community and into the creation-community. The Spirit of Life holds everything together in that it enables the various creatures to live with each other, for each other and in each other, created through divine love and destined for eternal joy.

Ray Anderson on the ‘difference’ Christ makes

‘The kenotic community as an imperative which the Incarnation demands permits no distinction between the Christian and the non-Christian which resides intrinsically in the Christian (or the church) as such. When one ‘defines’ the church or the Christian, then, the distinctive must be solely in the ‘difference’ which has its source in the historical transcendence of God. The ‘difference’ is Christ, not that redemption is set over against creation, but so that man is liberated to participate in Christ’s ek-static fulfillment of all creaturehood through the life of the Spirit. The ‘difference’ is the centre (Christ) and not in distinctions drawn between men, or between the church and the world as entities’. – Ray S. Anderson, ‘Living in the World’, in Ray S. Anderson (ed.)., Theological Foundations for Ministry: Selected Readings for a Theology of the Church in Ministry. Edinburgh/Grand Rapids: T. & T. Clark/Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1979, 591.

Theodicy: The Justification Of God – 6

FAILURE OF THE CHURCH AS

INTERNATIONAL

Study 6

A guest post by Trevor Faggotter

CHURCH FAILURE

(readings: Mark 7:14-23; 2 Thess. 2:7)

It is, unfortunately, simple enough to recall our own failures. Small wholly geriatric congregations and the selling off of stacks of local church buildings – shout or whisper to us of congregational failure. In the New Testament local churches (Rev. 2-3), where failure was rife, Jesus gave severe warnings concerning their future. Many of the distinctive public failures of denominational or national churches have been well documented and evaluated; however, as far as I can see, it is not customary for church leaders to speak of the Failure of the Church International. However, P.T. Forsyth drew attention to this fact. The historical context of international relations was of course unique, and unrepeatable. During World War One he noted:

That the greatest and cruellest war in the world should take place between the two nations for which evangelical Christianity has done the most, and to which its history owes most…[1]

A general reading of history will show that prior to WWI the British Empire and Germany had both been greatly influenced for good, by the gospel.[2] But, how did people of the day grasp and interpret what was happening across Europe? Forsyth observed:

It is a staggering blow to a faith that grew up in a long peace, a high culture, a shallow notion of history, society, or morality, and a view of religion as but a divine blessing upon life instead of a fundamental judgment and regeneration of it. It is fatal to the piety of pony carriage, shaven lawn, or aesthetic tea.[3]

In the light of this, Forsyth raised the question as to whether the church had anything substantial to give to the wider world as it contemplated the significance of this war. What could it offer to the many perplexed people looked for understanding?

Can the Church give the ravaged and bewildered world a theodicy equal in power to the challenge? Or is its own faith but staggering on to its goal, with many falling out to die by world, which He has allowed to get unto such a state? Has He gone deeper than its the way? Is its God justified in expecting the trust and the control of a tragedy? Is the Cross He bore really a greater tragedy and monstrosity than war?[4]

Statistics for World War 1 reveal that there were some 37.5 million casualties, consisting of 8.5 million people killed, 21.2 million wounded, and some 7.75 million taken as prisoners or missing in action.[5] While Forsyth would not have had these grim statistics to hand when he wrote, he was nevertheless a fellow sufferer, together with all members of his own nation during these days. He writes as a preacher of the cross of Christ:

The war is a greater misery and curse than we know, greater than we have imagination to realise – even if we had more facts for imagination to work on. Are we quite sure that it is a greater cross to God than to us, that it is but a part of the tragic and bloody course of history whose sword pierced through His own heart also, and that His Redemption still is in command of all, and His Kingdom sure? His insight misses nothing of all the facts and His holiness none of the horror.

Forsyth earnestly wants people to consider, and then rediscover the power of the cross for the healing of the nations of the world. Of the horror and global grief brought about by the war, he asks, regarding the power of Christ:

does it unhinge Him? Or is the Word of His Cross a vaster salvation than we dream, who are blinded by fears and tears, and whose conscience is not equal to conceiving either the enormity or the salvation?

GRATUITOUS OPTIMISM

To be realistic as a person secure in Jesus Christ is to be neither unduly pessimistic, nor superficially optimistic. It has been said that someone who is unduly optimistic has a misty optic. Forsyth addressed the light and easy optimism of his day, which seemed to stubbornly persist – even during the war – within the church:

One reads appeals made sans gêne[6] by some whose measure of the situation is not equal to their good intention, and who even give the impression of meeting the Atlantic with a mop. We come across machine-made appeals to the Church to be getting ready to handle the situation when the war is over. As if a Church which could not prevent its coming about would have much effect on the awful situation when it is done! If the Churches so little gauged the civilization, which they had allowed to grow up, and which carried the war in its womb, are they more likely to grasp the case when the moral confusion is worse. If they were so impotent before, how are they going to be more powerful now? What new source of strength have they tapped?[7]

Clearly Forsyth believed the Church, globally had some more work to do in order to grasp the true authority and power which lies at the heart of their message and mission:

The Church reared the nations but it is not able to control them for the Kingdom of God. Why? What is missing in its message for adult peoples?[8]

He believed that the matter of real international power lay in integrating the peoples with moral and not merely political force.[9] The source of this moral force is ever the cross of Christ, where sinful humanity is crucified with Christ, and raised to a new dignity and vision for the world in him. Even national parochialism gives way to the larger vision of the purity of, and service to, the human race, and the present will and desire to speak to one’s own nation of such things, believing that a fresh hearing of the gospel is possible. Forsyth said somewhere in his writings, ‘that which goes deepest to the conscience goes widest to the world’. So he was keen to speak with global vision, about the matter of salvation, holy love, and its – at certain times in history – amazing effects.

A CALL TO REDISCOVER THE RADICAL METHOD

If the Church left such a war possible, what encourages us to think that it will discover the radical method by which ‘a recurrence of these experiences may be rendered impossible’? Democratic control! Who or what is controlling or instructing the democracy? The ideologues? A parliament of blue birds! If ‘it has been shown how inadequate the influence of the Churches has been to restrain the forces of international strife,’ it is not because the Churches have been inactive. They have been active even to bustle, not to say fuss. Is there something wrong or inept in the rear of their activity, in the matter of it, in their mental purview, spiritual message, and moral power? And is it more than fumbling with the subject to indulge in platform platitudes about ‘wielding a universal influence over the actions not only of individuals but of the whole community of nations’. This kind of speech does something to depreciate the value of language, and to lighten the moral coinage.

The Gospel is not primarily and offhand a message of peace among men, but among peace of men of goodwill. If the amateur advisers of the Church will realise that its first work, which carries all else with it, it not to lubricate friction but to create among men that goodwill, to revise and brace the belief which has failed to do it, to think less of uniting the Church and more of piercing to a deep Gospel that will; if they will distrust the bustling forms of activity, the harder beating of the old drums, the provision of ever more buns and beverages.[10]

Today there is much talk in churches of the importance of food and table fellowship. But it is still crucial that we open, and are opened time and again to the content of the gospel – Christ himself, and him crucified, bearing our evil away. A person I knew well, often said of potluck suppers, with little content of the Word: ‘The church is stuffing itself again’. We so quickly depart, and desert the one who called us in the grace of Christ, and turn to a different gospel (Galatians 1:6). Of Jesus, we must rediscover as nations, and as individuals: “He is King of Kings and Lord of Lords”, and King and Lord of the race!

THE BRITISH EMPIRE – AND PATRIOTIC PRAYER

It might be valuable to take in some of Forsyth’s historical reflections from our text book; and at the same time to bear in mind what has happened in the British Empire in recent years, particularly the advance of Islam into the very heart of British Society.

“February 8, 2008; LONDON – The archbishop of Canterbury called Thursday for Britain to adopt aspects of Islamic Shariah law alongside the existing legal system. His speech set off a storm of opposition among politicians, lawyers and others, including some Muslims. The archbishop, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, spiritual leader of the world’s Anglicans, said in his speech and a BBC radio interview that the introduction of Shariah in family law was “unavoidable”.[11]

One wonders how Forsyth, Wesley, and Churchill, to name but a few, would view this nation, Britain, today. We might ask, and observe again, with Forsyth:

  1. We of this country have indeed much to answer for. Some of our greatest leaders and policies have been but pagan. Much of our conduct is still. But we remember that twice we have saved the liberty of the world – in the Armada, and at Waterloo. Have we become unworthy to do it again?
  2. We sent forth the great free people of the West.
  3. There are those who think that Britain’s record in such things as Slave Emancipation, Catholic Emancipation, the emancipation of the workman, the woman, and the child; [… show a growing repentance].
  4. In the self-denying ordinance taking effect in the government of India by way of atonement for its acquisition.
  5. In the treatment of South Africa since the Boer War, and especially of our enemies there (a treatment of which no other country than England was capable).
  6. I say there are those who think that such and other like things show a growing repentance which only prigs could call Pharisaism, and a moral power which only pagans would call quixotic [i.e. idealistic].
  7. These things place us in another class, so far as God’s Kingdom goes, from a nationalism which is ostentatiously outside moral or humane regards, and is abetted by its Church in their neglect.
  8. We have at least begun to reverse our engines. The cause of the weaker nations has often owed us much …[12]

He went on to encourage patriotic prayer, in so far as victory in the war, would be “a means to continue a service to that Kingdom which other nations have not yet given.”

“And yet, and yet. The present judgment is one upon a whole egoist and godless civilisation, of which we also are a part, and whose end is public madness.”[13]

[1] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, NCPI, 1988, p. 99.

[2] German Composers: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Strauss, Wagner;

English Composers: Purcell, S. Wesley, Handel, etc. – all indicative of cultural achievement and success.

[3] Forsyth, p. 99.

[4] Ibid.

[5] http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWdeaths.htm

[6] Sans gêne: without embarrassment or constraint.

[7] Forsyth, p. 100.

[8] Forsyth, p. 101.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/08/world/europe/08canterbury.html?_r=1&ref=world&oref=slogin

[12] Forsyth, p. 77.

[13] Forsyth p. 103.

Volf on social reconciliation

‘If Cain and Abel were to meet again in the world to come, what will need to have happened between them for Cain not to keep avoiding Abel’s look and for Abel not to want to get out of Cain’s way? … If the world to come is to be a world of love, then the eschatological transition from the present world to that world, which God will accomplish, must have an inter-human side; the work of the Spirit in the consummation includes not only the resurrection of the dead and the last judgment but also the final social reconciliation’. – Miroslav Volf, ‘The Final Reconciliation: Reflections on a Social Dimension of the Eschatological Transition’, Modern Theology 16, no. 1 (2000), 94.

What Christ gives

There’s few things quite like a good dose of Luther to help one hear afresh that word which kills in order to make alive. Here’s two passages that I’ve been reflecting on today:

‘Christ gives grace and peace, not as the apostles did, by preaching the Gospel, but as its Author and Creator. The Father creates and gives life, grace, peace, etc.; the Son creates and gives the very same things. To give grace, peace, eternal life, the forgiveness of sins, justification, life, and deliverance from death and the devil—these are the works, not of any creature but only of the Divine Majesty. The angels can neither create these things nor grant them. Therefore these works belong only to the glory of the sovereign Majesty, the Maker of all things’. – Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Vol. 26: Lectures on Galatians, 1535, Chapters 1-4 (Edited by Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald and Helmut T. Lehmann; Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1999), 31.

‘Christ, however, declares here: “Let it be your one concern to come to Me and to have the grace to hold, to believe, and to be sure in your heart that I was sent into the world for your sake, that I carried out the will of My Father and was sacrificed for your atonement, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption, and bore all punishment for you. If you believe this, do not fear. I do not want to be your judge, executioner, or jailer, but your Savior and Mediator, yes, your kind, loving Brother and good Friend. But you must abandon your work-righteousness and remain with Me in firm faith.” – Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Vol. 23: Sermons on the Gospel of St. John: Chapters 6-8 (Edited by Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald and Helmut T. Lehmann; Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1999), 58.

Ah! Good news!

The view from here

‘The recovered awareness is that “the Christian lives not at the End of Time, but rather from the End and in the End of Time” (Lambert). [The Christian] sees everything from an eschatological perspective. The Biblical world-view is not obtained by regarding all things under the form of a timeless eternity, nor as ideally they might be, but as they are already in Christ, the End …

For when that word [of God] is heard, nothing appears quite the same. The fashion of this world looks different when seen from the End. The neutrality goes out of it. It is as though the beam of a searchlight has been turned upon it, immeasurably deepening the contrast between light and shade. The flatness is taken from living. A new edge and tone is given to it. The common round becomes charged with fresh moment and decisiveness.

It is precisely this gift that the modern world so desperately lacks. It is for this reason that it seeks an outlet in the man-made eschatologies of Fascism and Communism. It is for this reason that it creates the artificial stimulants of sensational journalism and football pools, and continually screws itself up to some new pitch of excitement and suspense. All these are attempts to recreate a lost sense of each moment as the day of decision, to restore that pinch of expectancy to a life which has became flat and dead and insipid.

But those who have breathed again the atmosphere of Christian eschatology, who in a tired and drab world have sniffed the clean, crisp air of the Advent message and the Advent hymns, have no need of such expedients. It is difficult to express in language the effect of this recovery.

There is perhaps one analogy which may convey to our contemporaries a little of its feel. For there was a moment in recent English history when something of the transforming power of apocalypse was sensed as a shared experience of the nation. In the summer of 1940 we felt everything become braced to a sudden tautness. The slack went out of life. The indecision vanished. Blurred outlines leapt into focus. For a flash all stood out sharp and clear-cut, pin-pointed as in an etching or as by moonlight on snow. There was nothing artificial about that. The issues of life and death confronted us: there was no shuffling, no shrugging them off.

It is in such a moment that the Christian life is eternally set. It is the very nature of the Christian community to be an eschatological reality. This is what is being rediscovered by many of our generation. And when this happens, the Church wears no longer the dull sub-lunary look which it has when the dimension of apocalypse is absent. It is seen essentially as “the place where … the Spirit, that element of the ‘last days’ is active” (O. Cullmann, Christ et le Temps, 109). It has its very existence “between the times.” It is the bridge which spans the “moment” between the Resurrection and the Parousia’. – John Arthur Thomas Robinson, In the End, God.: A Study of the Christian Doctrine of the Last Things (London: James Clarke & Co., 1950), 125, 126–8.

Theodicy: The Justification Of God – 5

FAITH AMIDST CATASTROPHE

Study 5

A guest post by Trevor Faggotter

Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock. (Jesus in Matt. 7:24-25)

‘…when historic progress seems to end around us in a social collapse and a moral anarchy … if the moral soul is anchored on the Gospel of the Cross and Kingdom of God in a historic crisis really greater than any war, it cannot be swept away by any currents or storms in history.’[1] (P. T. Forsyth)

INTRODUCTION

As we pursue our studies in The Justification of God, by P.T. Forsyth, it may be valuable to recall again what is at the core of our studies, namely theodicy. Theodicy has been called ‘Thee-ODD-I-see’. We do see much that seems ODD, particularly in terms of suffering and catastrophe. In many of the occurrences in our daily lives, things occur which can, and often do cause us to question, or at the very least, re-evaluate what we understand by the mercies and goodness of God.

Job had to work things right through, from his worship life as a praying, righteous man, to the onslaught of inexplicable evil, permitted by God to take place, through to the week long silence of his friends as they sat with him, while he suffered greatly; on to the inadequate words of his comfortless theological counsellors; and his own genuine protest; and his trust still – though he slay me, yet will I trust in him; yet finally God, the wonderful counsellor revealed himself as creator, and then acted as redeemer, blessing once again the suffering Job. Job repented. He changed his mind and his disposition.[2]

It was Epicurus (341-270 BC) who formulated the classic theodicy dilemma, which David Hume (1711-76) has subsequently expressed in the following way:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?[3]

It is the incarnation of God in Christ, however, in the very midst of human history, which ultimately shatters this philosophical formulation, rendering it untenable. For God, the Father, and Jesus the Son of God, reveal themselves, together with the Spirit, to be the God who suffers to the full – to the uttermost in abandonment and forsakenness.

About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?”-which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46)

At the same time, this is the God who is the only righteous enemy of all evil – human, demonic and satanic. This God comes in human flesh, to conquer evil, by holy love.

The Son of God was revealed for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil (1 John 3:8b).

We may give assent to such a biblical statement, and be glad of it, yet still find ourselves at a loss to respond to suffering and evil, when it arises in new, surprising and terrifying forms. Human suffering is so very unpleasant – in particular our own, or that of those near to us. Global suffering is so often tragic beyond comprehension (if we are not sedated and numbed by the sheer frequency of news updates, and the crass lack of reverence for life, often evident in TV programming). Global tragedy can confront us to Be Still and Know That I am God, and re-evaluate our own lives – when, in particular, faith is present.

C.S. LEWIS AND PAIN

In the film Shadowlands – the famous C.S. Lewis is giving a university lecture in which he addresses the great issues of life. In the movie (from my memory), he asks his students this question: ‘…and why does God allow us to suffer?’ There is a thoughtful pause, as the camera pans the lecture hall of students who are eagerly looking on. They brace themselves for the wisdom they have been seeking of late. Lewis proceeds confidently – providing the small beginnings of a profound answer to this age-old question. He has a note of certainty in his voice: ‘God lets us suffer because he wants us to grow up!’

Lewis is also well known for his comments regarding pain:

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.[4]

Pain is the flag of truth, planted in a rebel fortress.

Fast forward to a later segment in C.S. Lewis’s life. His young wife Joy has died, and Lewis is writing his thoughts, and expressing his emotions. He is engulfed in grief, deep grief. He acknowledges the hope of the gospel. But he is negating one significant aspect. To paraphrase (again from memory), he says something like: Speak to me of the sovereign God, and I will listen. But speak to me of the God of comfort, and I cannot agree. I feel no comfort. No consolation. Only numbness. But no comfort![5]

Many will identify with Lewis at this point. It is not so easy just to grow up when it is our turn to suffer, intensely. Lewis reveals his emotions and thoughts. He illustrates the daily human struggle of coming to terms with life as it really is. On occasions, the pain – Christian or not – is very acute. We can ponder the reasons for suffering. We can even set them forth in a lecture, given from a biblical perspective. We can talk about them. It is another thing however, to be on the receiving end of incidents, for which, discussion seems entirely inappropriate.[6] Words fail us. Doctrines fail us. We need the breast of the Living Jesus on which to lay our head (John 13:23).

Suffering and sadness at the death of a loved one under not uncommon circumstances, like cancer, can be very tiring, tearing and most difficult. However, when blatant human evil is in our face as the immediate cause of our pain, and when sinister powers seem to dominate and destroy human life, in murder, massacre and mayhem, then we are likely to ask, or to be faced with the most difficult and most probing of human questions.

FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY ON THEODICY

The Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky in his famous book The Brothers Karamazov[7] has a fictional character named Ivan Karamazov, who says of God and creation:

‘I accept God plainly and simply … I accept his divine wisdom and his purpose …  I believe in the underlying order and meaning of life. I believe in the eternal harmony into which we are all supposed to merge one day’. However, almost immediately he tells his brother Alyosha: ‘I refuse to accept this world of God’s … Please understand, it is not God that I do not accept, but the world he has created. I do not accept God’s world and I refuse to accept it’.

Ivan then proceeds to explain why he cannot bring himself to accept this world of God’s. He mentions a number of cases of extreme and gratuitous cruelty, in particular the report of an army general who fed an eight year-old boy to his hounds because the child had slightly injured his favourite dog with a stone. Ivan says:

‘Listen: if all have to suffer so as to buy eternal harmony by their suffering, what have children to do with it – tell me please?  It is entirely incomprehensible why they should have to buy harmony by their sufferings. Why should they, too, be used as dung for someone else’s future harmony?

Ivan then concludes:

I don’t want harmony … too high a price has been placed on harmony. We cannot afford to pay so much for admission. And therefore I hasten to return my ticket of admission … It’s not God that I do not accept, Alyosha. I merely most respectfully return him the ticket.

Ivan is not an atheist, but he finds it morally repugnant that God should (seem to) expect such a terrible price to be paid for the final bliss and harmony that he will bestow on humankind at the end of time. [8] Some suggest that too much freedom was given to Adam.

How are we to respond to this type of reasoning? Perhaps, with silence, prayer and trust in God? Is it true love to speak of Christ, in the face of tragic and terrible deeds? Is it usually best left for another day? What then do we say or do on another day? Have we merely theories of the cross to share, and mere words to offer, for the loss of a loved one? Or is there a time and a season for speaking even into the most difficult of objections, of God’s goodness? Is this all profoundly a matter of ‘soul making’, fitting us for glory? Do we not have a Person, to offer, a Redeemer, Jesus, the friend, glorified flesh and blood, who has been there in the deepest of suffering, made to be sin, in order to redeem?

What indeed has God given us in Jesus Christ?

What He has not given us is a scheme of rational optimism, or a visible process of good, dawning and spreading to its perfect day. He has given us no programme of happy things.[9]

What then?  It is said that we have nothing but the promises of God. But these are all:

For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future – all belong to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God (1 Corinthians 3:21b-23).

Forsyth always draws us back to God’s one moral Act of holiness, destroying sin’s guilt:

No reason of man can justify God for His treatment of His Son; but whatever does justify it justifies God’s whole providence with the universe, and solves its problem. He so spared not His Son as with Him to give us all things. The true theology of the Cross and its atonement is the solution of the world. There is no other. It is that or none.[10]

Our faith rose from ‘the sharpest crisis, the greatest war, the deadliest death, and the deepest grave the world ever knew – in Christ’s Cross’[11].

“The chief cause of our being unhinged by catastrophe is twofold”.

First, that we have drawn our faith from the order of the world instead of its crisis, from the integrity of the moral order rather than from the tragedy of its recovery in the Cross.

And, even if we start there, the second error is that we have been more engrossed with the ill we are saved from than with Him who saves us, and the Kingdom for which we are saved.  We are more taken up with the wrongs so many men have to bear than with the wrong God has to bear from us all – God who yet atones and redeems in giving us a Kingdom which is always His in reality and ours in reversion.

It is not as if God first redeemed, and, having thus prepared the ground, brought in the Kingdom; but He redeemed us by bringing in the Kingdom, and setting it up in eternal righteousness and Eternal Life. The Cross of Christ is not the preliminary of the Kingdom; it is the Kingdom breaking in. It is not the clearing site for the heavenly city; it is the city itself descending out of heaven from God.[12]

[1] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, NCPI, 1988, p. 85.

[2] Job 42:1-6.

[3] Kenneth Surin, Theology and the Problem of Evil, Basil Blackwell, 1986, Oxford, p. 2.

[4] C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, Fontana, 1957, p. 81.

[5] C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, Seabury Press, 1961.

[6] Job 2:13 ‘They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great’.

[7] Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, (1880) 2003, Penguin Books.

[8] Quoted by Kenneth Surin, Theology and the Problem of Evil, Basil Blackwell, 1986, Oxford, p. 96-97.

[9] Forsyth, p. 79.

[10] Forsyth, p. 122.

[11] Forsyth, p. 57.

[12] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 76-77.

Drawings of Dafur Genocide

In June and July 2007, Waging Peace researcher Anna Schmitt conducted a three week fact-finding mission to Eastern Chad. The aim of the mission was to assess the humanitarian, human rights and security situation in the region and to collect testimonies from Darfuri refugees and Displaced Chadians.

While collecting testimonies from adults, women told Anna how their children had witnessed horrendous events when their villages were being attacked. This prompted Anna to talk to the children. She gave the children aged 6 to 18 paper and pencils and asked them what their dreams were for the future and what their strongest memory was.

When the children handed Anna their drawings, she was shocked to see the details of their memories of the attacks. While a handful of children had submitted drawings of daily life in the village or in the refugee camp, the majority of the drawings described the attacks on their village by Sudanese Government forces and their allied Janjaweed militia. Many of the drawings depict adult men being killed, women being shot, beaten and taken prisoner, babies being thrown on fires and Government of Sudan helicopters and planes bombing civilians.

The five hundred drawings collected by Waging Peace amount to a form of criminal evidence from silent witnesses. The killings, bombing and looting shown in the drawings directly contradict the Government of Sudan’s version of events over the last four years of bloodshed. The pattern that emerges from these drawings corroborates what we know has been taking place in Darfur and shows a worryingly similar pattern of attacks developing in Eastern Chad.

The drawings will be exhibited in London and throughout the world to raise awareness about the crisis in Darfur. They will also form part of a submission of evidence to the International Criminal Court which is investigating crimes taking place in Darfur.

Drawing 1:

This boy was 9 when his village in the area of Aishbarra, Darfur, was attacked in 2003 by the Sudanese Government forces and Janjaweed militia. The drawing shows houses burning, villagers being shot and even amputated. The villagers that are attacked are coloured in black, while the attackers have lighter (orange) skin – showing the ethnic character of the attacks (ie Arabs attacking ‘black Africans’ – in this case Massalit). In the bottom right of the drawing are two young men, attached by the neck, led away by a janjaweed fighter. These boys could be taken into slavery, or may become child soldiers.

Drawing 2:

This young boy was ten when his village in the area of Aishbarra, Darfur, was attacked in 2003 by the Sudanese Government-allied Janjaweed militia. The drawing shows fleeing civilians stopped by the Janjaweed. The civilian men are put in a row to be shot. One man is shot. This method is often used by the Janjaweed as a means of psychological torture, killing some of the men and not others, leaving the women to watch helplessly. One woman and one man are shown with tears falling down their cheeks. In the bottom left hand corner of the drawing, a Janjaweed is searching the men’s suitcases for belongings to loot. Once again, the skin colour of the victims and the attackers is different, reflecting the ethnic character of the attacks. The attackers are on worse-back and in machinegun-mounted pick up trucks, both widely used by the Janjaweed militia.

Drawing 3:

This young boy was 11 when his village in the area of Aishbarra, Darfur, was attacked by the Janjaweed in 2003. This drawing depicts a man shot to pieces by the Janjaweed militia.The attackers are on camel and horse backs, clearly identifying them as Janjaweed. They nonetheless are wearing Sudanese Government uniforms (red insignia on the shoulder and army outfits), showing the clear link between the Sudanese Government and the Janjaweed militia, which are armed, trained and equipped by the Sudanese Government. The skin colour of the attackers and the victim is yet again different, the Janjaweed having lighter skin than the attacked civilian.

Drawing 4:

This young boy was 9 when his village in the area of Aishbarra, Darfur, was attacked in 2003 by Sudanese Government forces and Janjaweed militia. In the drawing, two women and a boy are shown fleeing an attack by Janjaweed in two machinegun-mounted pick up trucks and Sudanese forces in a tank. Houses in the village are set ablaze. The Janjaweed and Sudanese forces are shooting at the three civilians and the boy is hit in the leg. The fact that these are women and children who are being shot at clearly shows that the attackers are targeting civilians. The use of a tank in the attack is particularily interesting as the Sudanese Government has consistently denied using such heavy weaponry in Darfur.

Drawing 5:

This young boy was 8 when he had to flee his village in Darfur. In this drawing he shows Janjaweed and Sudanese Government troops working together (bottom half of the drawing), and an SLA solider killing a Sudanese Government soldier (top half of the drawing). Interestingly, a Sudanese flag is drawn on the tank, clearly identifying it as from the Sudanese Government.

Drawing 6.1:

This young boy was 17 when his village was attacked in 2003. In this three panel drawing, he describes the attacker getting ready, the attack of the village (burning houses, dead bodies) and the displacement caused by the attack.

Drawing 6.2

Drawing 6.3:

Drawing 7:

This boy was 8 when his village in Darfur was attacked in 2004. His drawing describes this attack, where Janjaweed forces (drawn on horse backs) and Sudanese forces (in vehicles and tanks) worked together to burn his village, kill many civilians (shown lying on the ground) and lead to the displacement of the survivors).

Drawing 8:

This picture was drawn by a young Chadian boy in a camp for displaced persons in Eastern Chad. His drawing describes the attack on his village by Janjaweed militias from Sudan. On the top left hand corner of the drawing is written ‘ataque village’ (French for ‘attack of the village’). The attackers, wearing military uniforms and on camels are shooting civilians with machine guns and burning their houses. Bullets are coming from all over. Next to each civilian that is shot is the word ‘Morts’ which is the plural of ‘dead’ in French.

Drawing 9:

This young boy was 8 when his village in Darfur was attacked in 2003 by Janjaweed and Sudanese armed forces. He is now 12 and living in a refugee camp in Eastern Chad. In this drawing the attackers, on camel and horse backs and in armed vehicles, are setting the houses on fire and shooting at civilians from all corners (note how the bullets are crossing each others paths). The villagers are also fighting back with spears and arrow, while the Janjaweed and Sudanese forces are attacking them with machine guns. The skin colour of the attackers is lighter than that of the victims, clearly denoting the ethnic aspect of the attacks.

Drawing 10:

This picture was drawn by a young Chadian boy in a camp for displaced persons in Eastern Chad. His drawing describes the attack on his village by Janjaweed militias from Sudan. The whole village is set on fire and there are body parts scattered in the right of the drawing. Next to the body parts, the boy wrote ‘Mourire Jan de village’ (Mourir gens du village) which is the French for ‘the people from the village are killed’. Under the attackers in the left of the picture is written ‘janjinwite’, clearly identifying the attackers as the Sudanese-Government allied Janjaweed forces.

Drawing 11:

This young girl was 11 when her village in Darfur was attacked in 2004. The drawing, depicting an attack by the Sudanese government and the janjaweed forces, contains small explanations within the drawing. On the bottom left, she writes: ‘The Sudanese government soldiers entered the village on camels’. On the bottom write, under a tank: ‘heavy artillery’. Under the plane, she writes ‘the airplane bombs are dropped over the house’.

Drawing 12:

This young boy was 15 when his village in Darfur was attacked by Janjaweed and Sudanese armed forces in 2004. Houses are set on fire and civilians are shot dead and thrown into the river. Behind the drawing, he has written ‘Look at these pictures carefully, and you will see what happened in Darfur. Thank you’.

Drawing 13:

This boy was 9 when his village in Darfur was attacked by Sudanese Government forces and Janjaweed militias in 2003. This drawing describes in detail some of the exactions committed by the Janjaweed (on foot and on horses) and the Sudanese forces (in tanks, machine gun mounted vehicles and planes). At the top of the picture a boy is thrown into a fire. In the middle, a man has a bag over his head before being shot. A Soldier in a ‘technical’ shoots a civilian. At the bottom, a soldier appears to be cutting a man’s head off. Women, with hands tied behind them are being marched off at gun point. A woman with her possessions on her head leaves with her 2 children, pursued by 2 soldiers. A Government plane is bombing the village and setting the houses on fire.

Drawing 14:

The young boy was 10 when his village in Darfur was attacked in 2003. Sudanese Government forces in pick up trucks, helicopters and airplanes and Janjaweed militias on horsebacks are seen attacking a village.In the left of the drawing, an antonov is bombing the village, putting fire to the huts. Sudanese forces on the ground and perched in trees are targeting young women, men and children. Three women are tied up and taken away by a Sudanese soldier while men are killed and thrown into the valley.

Drawing 15:

This young boy describes the attack by Sudanese Government forces and Janjaweed militias on his village in Darfur. In the top of the drawing, a Sudanese helicopter is shown bombing the village, setting houses on fire and killing civilians and a donkey. Under the houses, the young boy wrote ‘village on fire’. A Sudanese soldier and Janjaweed forces are shooting and killing at fleeing civilians. Under the drawing of armed men on horseback, is written ‘Janjaweed’.

Drawing 16:

In this drawing, a young girl from Darfur shows the peaceful life in her village being disrupted by a violent attack by Sudanese Government forces and the Janjaweed militia. Some villagers are seen herding cattle and sheep or sitting under trees. But this sense of calm is contrasted by Sudanese airplanes and helicopters bombing the village and setting fire to the houses. Government forces in pick up trucks and Janjaweed on horse and camel backs are shooting at civilians.

Drawing 17:

This drawing clearly depicts an attack by Sudanese government forces on a village in Darfur. Three airplanes and a helicopter with Sudanese Government markings are hovering above the village, with one of the planes shown dropping a bomb. The huts are on fire as villagers are seen fleeing.

Drawing 18:

This drawing describes an attack by Sudanese Government forces on the village in Eastern Chad. Sudanese armed forces, identifiable by their berets and uniforms, arrive in the village on machinegun mounted pick up trucks and by foot. They shoot at the fleeing population that only has arrows to protect itself, while the houses are set alight.

Drawing 19:

This young boy drew an attack by Sudanese Government forces on his village in Darfur. Sudanese soldiers on foot, in elaborate pick up trucks and in tanks shoot at the village while three helicopters set fire to the houses. A mother and her two children are seen fleeing.

Drawing 20:

This young girl describes an attack on her village in Darfur. In this drawing the attackers (Sudanese army and Janjaweed militia) are drawn with a blue top and orange trousers, while the targeted civilians are dressed in green and purple. A Sudanese helicopter drops bombs on the village while armed men on horses, camels and by foot are shown shooting civilians, stabbing them and setting fire to their homes. Next to each dead person is a cross.

Click here to read the article in the Independent about ‘Drawings from Darfur’.

[HT: Waging Peace]

Theodicy: The Justification Of God – 4

THE REDEMPTION OF CREATION

Study 4

A guest post by Trevor Faggotter

INTRODUCTION

In Christ Jesus, God has spoken, and is speaking. This speaking awakens hope. Some people prefer perpetual silence, and a lifetime of distractions, or even years of pessimistic mumbling and commentary, to a word, which breaks that silence, brings comfort – yet probingly so – and so, demands much more of us.[1]

We saw in Study 2 that a tragic guilt has come to the human race. Sin enters the world.

Communion has been broken on a large scale, with huge ramifications. Wholeness, unity and peace on a personal, and global scale have been shattered. However, as Christians we have, by faith, experienced the healing of our broken lives in Jesus Christ.

SELF-HEALING AND REPAIR

A marvel occurs when we cut our hand: immediately the body goes to work. An anaesthetic, and the great healing power of our own blood flows forth – spreading, congealing and eventually bridging and plugging the gaping gash in our skin, and finally healing over, with what can surely be described as a remarkable repair job! Similarly, some months after a scorching bushfire blackens the Australian scrub, we see small, power-filled green shoots emerging from charred stumps. What then of the whole world?

Is there a moral order a self-healing power, as nature overgrows in course of time catastrophes volcanic in violence and in area continental? Has it a Vis medicatrix,[2] a power of innate self-recuperation, corresponding to what we find in physical organisms? Is there in it an indwelling tendency, which moves to repair all damage at last, and a power to overbear those elements, which arrest its development?[3]

Creation does appear to have inbuilt dynamic powers of its own. Let the earth bring forth living creatures (Genesis 1:24), and it does; creatures themselves are blessed, commanded and equipped to be fruitful, and they are. Powers of procreation, medicines and powers of healing lie within creation. As we look to Scripture, and hear Christ speaking in it, we see that creation has a future. This future is however, always integrally bound up with the person – Jesus Christ. Scripture records that the earth shook at Christ’s crucifixion[4] and the whole creation now waits with eager longing for the unveiling of the future, the sons of God participating in the life of total liberty, where death and decay are no more;[5] this future is that which God has planned. But there is not merely an inbuilt self-directing powerful pressure for good that brings new life to the world. There is a Person! That person is the Redeemer.

THE PERSON

It is the personality and deeds of Jesus Christ, as Lord of creation, Lord of life, and Lord over death, which brings the future into being. Firstly, together with the eternal Father, as the eternal Son, he freely selects and sets out what the future goal of creation will be. And he brings this future into being in a way, which is truly moral (not moralistic), where moral actions matter. Forsyth says:

…we construe the universe in terms of its crowning product, soul, conscience, and society. It exists for the growing of personality, which is an end in itself, and, in so far as it serves, it serves only another personality, and grows men of God, who is the end for all ends.[6]

In Christ, God is:

… that One who has His universal end completely in Himself, who is identical with the end of the disordered universe – with its redemption. He is the Redeemer because He is identical with His own redemption.[7]

What does this mean for our lives? How does it affect our living? The following points outline the matter in brief:

  1. There is a Person – Christ – unifying all things, himself the guarantor of the goal.
  2. We are called to participate with Christ, as he takes us towards, and to the goal.
  3. As participants, we nevertheless, of ourselves, have severe limitations.
  4. Creation appears to have innate qualities of self-repair and healing, but in fact, all of these are contingent upon the Living Redeemer.
  5. Evil also has an inbuilt tendency to disorganise itself – to self-destruct.
  6. The atonement of the cross, flowing from a Holy God, however, is the only way of dealing fully with the moral situation of the human race. It is a moral Act that is required, and marks a new beginning for the human race. There is no other.

WE DON’T JUST FIND A SPOT TO PARK OUR CARAVAN

Christian faith is about willing participation in the workings of Christ. It is a moral struggle to do so (Ephesians 6:12). Many miss this fact. As such, some believers are virtually ‘still-born’, upon their new birth into God’s kingdom. Our lives, our actions have a direct bearing upon what shall be, in eternity. Moral or immoral action has significant bearing on the way in which history unfolds.

Faith in the Living Christ excludes the idea of fate, but includes the realisation of destiny:

We do not find our freedom and peace merely by finding ourselves, but by finding ourselves in a world Saviour. We do not reach rest merely by finding our place in an objective order, and reconciling ourselves to it. For that is rather resignation than reconciliation. What we find is a power rather than a place, a power working congenially in us both to will and to do. We do not merely win a fortitude, which accepts our niche in the universe, or takes the room assigned in the caravanserai[8] of life. We recognise … our own Master’s voice, the voice of One whose mastery of us is our own true self, true power, and true freedom.[9]

Hearing God, we begin to participate in his will – at first, and ever anew:

Moral power is, at the last, personality. That is the only form in which we know what power really is – our own sense of acting as persons, or of being acted on by persons.[10]

Our destiny, however, is always a gift, a grace, redemptive. It is only possible because there is a Living Redeemer. And this Redeemer carries out many repairs.

THE LIMITATIONS OF CREATURE AND CREATION

In answer to his own questions, (see the start of this paper), Forsyth thus reminds us:

The moral order is self-repairing only in the sense that it is repaired continuously and creatively by the Holy One whose end is in Himself, and who is its true self and more. (So that to love God is to love ourselves in the truest way).[11]

For the human race the fact of our mortality, limits any self-repair we may be given:

There comes a point when the power of physical self-repair ceases – in death.[12]

As to the renewal of this creation; we are not to expect evil to be a self-solvent[13]. Nor does the good make its slow and ebbless way through creation. The wicked are often caught in their own net (Psalm 141:10), and their evil deeds are turned to work together for God’s purposive good, as in Joseph’s life (Gen. 50:20). However, it is in the cross of Christ, (Acts 2:23) that God works Redemption – and in no other way, does history come to its appointed goal. The creature and creation need the Creator for Redemption!

Paul teaches that in the new creation, the old things have become new (1 Corinthians 5:17).[14] Revelation 21:1 shows the new heaven and new earth is the same heaven and earth, “but gloriously rejuvenated, with no weeds, thorns or thistles, and so on”.[15]

The following comment by Forsyth regarding the new creation is consistent with this:

The new creation must, of course, arise out of the first, for, though it is an absolute Act, it does not take place in an absolute way. But it is a more grave matter to regenerate the first creation into the second that it was to organise chaos into the first. The opposition of chaos, void and formless, was passive, but the opposition of the creature is active. It is a family quarrel, and they are the worst. It is not matter against force but will against will. It has behind it all the power of the freedom, which makes the first creation what it chiefly is. So that it is really more true ethically to speak of God’s goal as a New Humanity than as two stages or states of the old Humanity – so long as we do not put the old and the new out of all organic connection whatever … The Redeemer was not the mere agent of a process. He was the New Creator.[16]

WHAT IS REDEMPTION?

It is an Act, with a capital ‘A’. Redemption is not a process. Rather, it is a concentrated Act, with an eternal and universal bearing.[17]

Forsyth takes us on, into the cross, as that necessary and crucial Act of God:

Nothing offers a future for such a world as this but its redemption. But by redemption what do we mean? We mean that the last things shall crown the first things, and that the end will justify the means, and the goal glorify a Holy God. We mean (if we will allow ourselves theological language) an eschatology and a theodicy in it – a divine Heaven, a divine Salvation, and a divine Vindication in the result of history. But more. We mean a consummation, which can only come by way of rescue and not mere growth. We mean rescue from evil by a God whose manner of it is moral, which is the act of a moral absolute, the act of a holy God doing justice to righteousness at any cost to Himself. We mean rectification of the present state of things on His own principles; that is, not mere rectification, mere straightening of a tangle, but justification on a transcendent plane of righteousness, the moral adjustment of man and God in one holy, loving, mighty, final, and eternal act. We mean something more crucial than Meliorism.[18]

We will continue to explore and expound these things in the next study.

[1] Mark 8:34 Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me..”

John Piper has a thoughtful book title: What Jesus Demands From the World, Crossway Books, 2006.

[2] Vis Medicatrix naturae means the healing power of nature.

[3]P.T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, NCPI, 1988, p. 59.

[4] Matthew 27:51, 54 ‘The earth shook, and the rocks were split’, ‘… the centurion saw the earthquake…’.

[5] Romans 8:19 For ‘the creation wais with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God’.

[6] Forsyth, p. 63.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Caravanserai: an inn in some eastern countries with a large courtyard that provides accommodation for caravans.

[9] Forsyth, p. 64.

[10] Ibid. p. 65.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid. p. 66.

[14] Geoffrey C. Bingham, Creation and the Liberating Glory, NCPI, p. 144.

[15] William Hendriksen, More Than Conquerors, Tyndale Press, 1940, p. 198 says: ‘The word used in the original implies that it was a ‘new’ but not an ‘other’ world. Fn: The original has kainos, not neos.’

See also Geoffrey C. Bingham, Creation and the Liberating Glory, p. 73, 121.

[16] Forsyth, p. 68.

[17] Forsyth, p. 74.

[18] Meliorism: the belief that the world tends to improve and that humans can aid its betterment.

Theodicy: The Justification Of God – 3

TOWARDS THE CERTAIN GOAL

Study 3

A guest post by Trevor Faggotter

Prayer: Dear Lord, in your mercy and love, pour your Spirit upon us anew, and help us to love you with all our heart, strength and soul, and particularly in this study, with our mind. Enable us to apply our minds, that we might receive your blessing with joy, and faith – that our hope may be stirred, awakened, renewed. In Jesus name – Amen!

INTRODUCTION

At the outset of this study – lest we become perturbed by the difficult words and concepts in P.T. Forsyth’s, The Justification of God – let us consider carefully two important theological terms – revelation and teleology. Grasping them afresh should encourage us.

Revelation

Revelation: That which takes place when the hidden is unveiled, disclosed, revealed.

Jesus said, ‘Whoever has seen me has seen the Father’ (John 14:9). The hidden God has been revealed. We only know God because he willingly comes to us, to unveil himself and his plan, in the incarnation – the birth, life, deeds, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus. The outpouring of the Spirit of the Father, and Son, now enables us to know:

“…what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him” – these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God (1Corinthians 2:9-10).

When we ponder the future of creation we are pressed, (yet confined), to the knowledge and understanding, which comes from God to humanity, through revelation. Although at present we see in a mirror, dimly (1 Corinthians 13:12), nevertheless, we do see! In Christ, God has revealed his will and plan, in sufficient detail, and the apostles have made more explicit, that which the Risen Jesus opened to them. For these things God has revealed to us. The creation waits with eager longing (Romans 8:21), for all that the new creation brings, namely, the renewal of all things when the Son of man is seated on the throne of his glory (Matthew 19:28). The regeneration! This is the telos.

Teleology

Teleology: The study of the telos, or goal, which God the Father, has set.

This goal is for the redemption of humanity in Christ, the glorification of all creation.

This was planned in Christ from before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4).

THE PROBLEMS: REVELATION AND TELEOLOGY

Forsyth conceded that the matters of revelation and teleology did continue to arise for the church, and the world. In an effort to explore how difficult it can be to comprehend history, and grasp what is to be understood of the future, and the coming appearing of Christ and to then to proclaim it, Forsyth asks many difficult yet probing questions (see pp. 43-47 of The Justification of God), after this brief introduction:

The radical questions of a belief are forced upon us anew by each crisis of the world. And the first task of the Church, before it go to work on the situation that a crisis leaves behind, is to secure the truth and certainty for its own soul of its faith in the overcoming of evil by good; an operation which may mean the recasting of much current and favourite belief.[1]

Here are some of his searching questions that follow:

1. Is there a divine government of such a world, a world whose history streams with so much blood, ruin, and misery as to make civilisation seem to many doubtfully worthwhile?[2]

2. That question means for its answer another, Is there a divine goal of the world?

3. Because if there is, God who secures it has the right to appoint both its times and its means; and a good government of the world is what helps best in our circumstances to bring us there. But is there such a goal, and where do we find it?

4. How shall we be sure of it?

5. Are we to believe in it only if we can sketch its economy, and trace the convergence of all lines, whatever their crook or curve, to that point?

6. Do I believe that all is well with my soul only in so far as I see that all goes well?

7. Can we be sure that all is well with the world only if the stream of its history run through no dreadful caves, nor shoot wild cataracts, nor ever sink to a trickle in the sand of deserts horrible?

8. Is there, in spite of all appearance, a divine teleology for the soul and for the race?[3]

A revelation will be great, universal, and final just as it does answer such questions, and pacifies even the soul it does not yet satisfy.[4]

In other words, the very doctrine of the goal, and the aim, and the destiny set for the creation by God, and being worked out in history – as it is set forth by Scripture, and proclaimed by the church to the world – has an important effect, even on a world who is as yet uncertain, unbelieving or unconvinced. We need to recall, that the blessed assurance we know in the Lord, the certainty of faith, comes to a person by faith. A person who has through revelation, through believing the gospel, met Christ, and come to faith, can say with an indescribable joy:

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see (Hebrews 11:1 – NIV).

Wherever our witness is humble and clear, this certainty has its beneficial effect upon the wider world. As Forsyth says, it pacifies even the soul it does not yet satisfy.

The searching questions continue:

1. Nature not only exists, nor only changes; it grows. It certainly grows in complexity. It grows, with all its order, more heterogeneous.[5] It is full of new departures. It grows in quantity and variety. But does it grow in quality?

2. Is the evolution process really progress? Is the complexity more than complicated, is it sublimated?[6] Is it all but a mode of motion, or does the long series rise to action? Is it really dramatic, or only spectacular? Is it a play or a tableau?[7] Does it work up to anything?

3. Does it work anything out?

4. Has it a denouement[8], a reconciliation?

5. Is there a teleology of nature’s living history?

6. Is there a growing organism of organisms from the mollusc to the man? And if it come to a head in man, does man come to a head in anything? He is an end – has he an end? Has he a chief end, a destiny? How do you know?

7. What is it, where, when? Does the human history in which nature issues crown the teleological side of nature or the dysteleological, the fitness of things or their ‘cussedness’? Does it seal the order or the ravage of nature?

8. Does war exist for peace, or peace for war? Which element is the natural selection of history?

9. Is there a drift in all things? And is it a torrent over Niagara, or a fine vapour steaming, like praise, to the hills and the heavens?

10. Is the world a whole? And, if it is, is it a whole marmoreal,[9] statuesque, and symmetrical, or organic, vital and moving. If it move, what is its goal? Has it a perfection, and is that perfection in itself?

Such are the questions that a world calamity brings home in passionate and tragic terms. Perhaps, if we survey them in our calm, we may find an anchorage ready in our storm. Through the clearer water we may discern a bottom that will hold when our old moorings drag.[10]

Are you clear what the questions are?[11]

Forsyth is probing the idea many may have in their minds in the face of a global crisis, which is so tragic, that is defies explanation: is history therefore only dumb?[12]

THAT POINT IS CHRIST

We must continually come anew to the purpose for which the Son of God appeared – to destroy the works of the devil (1 John 3:8) – to deal with our guilt as a race, and to so break the leverage that the devil has in blinding us to the way God gives for a genuine future. Forsyth asks: ‘Is there any divine visitation that puts us in possession, in petto[13], of the goal of all surmise?[14] Is there any divine gift and deed that fixes the colours seen by genius in the eternal purpose and Kingdom of God, where all earth’s hues are not mere tints but jewels – not mere perpetual gleams, but enduring, precious foundation stones?’[15]

To all such questions Christianity answers with an everlasting yea, however Christendom may blue or belie it. The eternal finality has become an historic event. There is a point of Time at which Time is no longer, and it passes into pure but concrete Eternity. That point is Christ. In Christ there is a spot where we are known far more than we know.[16]

[1] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, NCPI, 1988, p. 42.

[2] The 20th Century catalogue of Genocide is a frightening matter to contemplate:

http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/genocide/

The term ‘Genocide’ was coined by a jurist named Raphael Lemkin in 1944 by combining the Greek word ‘genos’ (race) with the Latin word ‘cide’ (killing). Genocide as defined by the United Nations in 1948 means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, including: (a) killing members of the group (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Recent to Past Occurrences

• Bosnia-Herzegovina: 1992-1995 – 200,000 Deaths

• Rwanda: 1994 – 800,000 Deaths

• Pol Pot in Cambodia: 1975-1979 – 2,000,000 Deaths

• Nazi Holocaust: 1938-1945 – 6,000,000 Deaths

• Rape of Nanking: 1937-1938 – 300,000 Deaths

• Stalin’s Forced Famine: 1932-1933 – 7,000,000 Deaths

• Armenians in Turkey: 1915-1918 – 1,500,000 Deaths

Adolf Hitler to his Army commanders, August 22, 1939:

“Thus for the time being I have sent to the East only my ‘Death’s Head Units’ with the orders to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish race or language. Only in such a way will we win the vital space that we need. Who still talks nowadays about the Armenians?”

[3] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, NCPI, 1988, p. 42.

[4] Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 43.

[5] Heterogenous means: completely different; incongruous; not homogenous.

[6] Sublimated means to make nobler, or purer.

[7] A tableau is a dramatic scene; in a play, an interlude where everyone freezes.

[8] Denouement means: the final resolution of a complex sequence of events.

[9] Marmoreal means: Like marble, in whiteness, hardness.

[10] Ibid. p. 44.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid. p. 45.

[13] In Petto means: In secret, or private.

[14] Surmise: An idea or opinion based on insufficiently conclusive evidence; to make a guess or conjecture.

[15] Ibid. p. 45.

[16] Ibid. p. 47.

Theodicy: The Justification Of God – 2

UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS

AND THEIR OUTCOME

Study 2

A guest post by Trevor Faggotter

WHY THEODICY IS AN ISSUE

Analysis and commentary upon the major problems in the world, nation, city, family or environment, can be heard daily on radio talkback segments across the globe. The blame, for our current or impending woes almost always rests with someone else. Cynicism abounds. Theology within the Christian church can all too easily become more a reflection of the popular, or dominant culture of the day, than a proclamation of the mind, and action of God – as revealed in Scripture. Only a thoroughly biblical theodicy can meet the world with the Word of grace, amidst dire judgments, as the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness (Romans 1:18).

From Genesis 3 we hear that ever since the entrance of sin into the world, human beings have sought to place the blame for their circumstances upon someone else – mostly God, but also other people and other creatures. Guilt is deeply at work in every human heart, provoking a skewed view of the truth, globally. This is especially so, as God draws near:

They heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. But the LORD God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?” He said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.” He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” (Genesis 3:8-11)

The reflex response to God’s simple, but probing, existential question ‘Where are you?’ finds expression in the deflecting the blame onto another. The man quickly pointed to the woman as the leading cause of his present fear. He also blamed God – who gave the woman to be with him. The woman in turn, blamed the ancient serpent, the devil:

The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.” Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent tricked me, and I ate.” (Genesis 3:12-13)[1]

Human beings will view God very differently, depending upon whether they have a pure or an impure heart. Where a person has a pure heart, or cleansed heart, God reveals himself to be pure. Where genuine faith is not present, God’s wrath acts against the conscience of the guilty person, so that God appears to be unjust, unkind and wrong.

…with the pure you show yourself pure; and with the crooked you show yourself perverse (Psalm 18:26).

Sinful human beings frequently view the world by placing God in the Dock[2] in order that he may give account of himself. In our humanly devised, God-blaming kangaroo court, we human beings exercise the self-appointed role of prosecutor, and judge. If God is creator, we reason, then he must answer for the state of the world he has created! However, the Lord sits in the heavens and laughs (Psalm 2:4).

In his Foreword to our text, The Justification of God, Dean Carter exposes the heart of sinful humanity in asking erroneous questions. Dean writes – in brackets:

(after all, theodicy is only an issue where there is a rejection of the light).[3]

This comment reflects the teaching of Jesus, in John’s gospel, who said:

And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed (John 3:19-20).

Facing the plain truth concerning God, humanity and the world is terribly confronting, if ultimately gloriously liberating. In the day that you eat of it [the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall die. Yet, everyone who lives and believes in Jesus will never die.

MAN-CENTRED CULTURE INSTEAD OF GOD-CENTRED FAITH

Man-centred cultures and religions, rather than God-centred faith in Christ, seeking his Coming Kingdom, are at the heart of all human evil and mayhem. A world that ignores the redemptive gift and gracious will of the Living Father soon becomes addicted to the narcotic agendas of progress, technology, escalating wealth, cultural mysticism, religious escapism, substance and environmental abuse and a yearning desire for more power.

Everything has come to turn on man’s welfare instead of God’s worship, on man with God to help him and not on God with man to wait upon Him. The fundamental heresy of the day, now deep in Christian belief itself, is humanist.[4]

Humanism had a bitter outcome for those who had embraced it, in the years prior to and during World War 1, as Forsyth points out:

I say it is inevitable that world calamities should encourage the denials of those who denied before. Their shock also makes sceptics of many, whose belief had arisen and gone on only under conditions of fine weather, happy piety, humming progress…[5]

Elated by our modern mastery of nature and cult of genius, and ridden by the superstition of progress (now unseated), we came to start with that excellent creature, man, his wonderful resources, his broadening freedom, his widening heart, his conquest of creation, and his expanding career. And, as with man we begin, with man we really end. God is there but to promote and crown this development of man, if there be a God at all…. The Father is the banker of a spendthrift race. He is there to draw upon, to save man’s career at the points where it is most threatened.

He is Father in a sense that leaves no room for love’s severity, its searching judgment … He is Father only so long as He meets the instincts and aspirations of man’s heart.[6]

GOD ENTERS THE PULPIT AND CASTS US

UPON A GOD OF CRISIS

It takes enormous discomfort in order for humanity to come to grips with the necessity of the cross of Christ, and with the seriousness of the evil in our own human hearts, and the evil endemic among every nation. The sheer kindness and mercy of God, we so badly underestimate. Forsyth recounts something of the type of public conversation that took place prior to World War One. It sounds all too familiar. He says:

World calamity bears home to us the light way in which, through a long peace and insulation, we were coming to take the problem of the world, and especially its moral problem. ‘We do not now bother about sin’ was said with some satisfaction. The preachers protested in vain against that terrible statement – those of them that had not lost their Gospel in their culture. But they were damned with the charge of theology.[7]

He then goes on to include the war itself, as God’s way of dealing with the human race; it is the disaster that ends dainty and dreamy religion:

And now God enters the pulpit, and preaches in His own way by deeds. And His sermons are long and taxing, and they spoil dinner. Clearly God’s problem with the world is much more serious than we dreamed. We are having a revelation of the awful and desperate nature of evil.[8]

The task which the Cross has to meet is something much greater than a pacific, domestic, fraternal type of religion allows us to face. Disaster should end dainty and dreamy religion, and give some rest to the winsome Christ and the wooing note…. It is a much wickeder world than our good nature had come to imagine, or our prompt piety to fathom.[9]

We, who have known much of the grace of God in our personal lives, know that God has both spoken and enacted a great word of hope, for the nations of the world in the death and resurrection of Jesus. It is a great victory. It is a very great victory. It is The Victory. A godless world needs yet to hear this word, and respond. The church needs to rediscover not only the God of order, which Christendom has enjoyed, but also the God of crisis, who is God most chiefly in the chief tragedy of things.[10] He alone is the One who from the nettle of perdition plucks the flower of salvation.[11]

THE GLOBAL DIMENSIONS OF THE GOSPEL

It was World War One, which drew from Forsyth the rich insights he imparts. We too are faced with many a crisis, on a global scale. We are equipped with the same cross, and the same Christ, and the same gospel, to which we must make recourse. The gospel has always been of global proportions. We need a theodicy, which is adequate to the task. Let’s take Forsyth words slowly, again and tease out each of these important points:

We begin and end with a faith, not in Jesus simply but in His world work…[12]

We begin with the faith in which our own soul calls Him its Saviour from what seems an infinite and hopeless evil. He delivers us from a sin whose guilt lies on our small soul with a pressure from the reservoir of all the high wickedness of the world.[13]

It is not from our moral lapses nor from our individual taint that we are delivered, but from world sin, sin in dominion, sin solidary if not hereditary, yea, from sin which integrates us into a Satanic Kingdom … An event like war at least aids God’s purpose in this, that it shocks and rouses us into some due sense of what evil is, and what a Saviour’s task with it is.

While the Church cannot begin to measure the problem of evil, we need the assurance of its defeat in the cross. For evil affects and invades every area of human life, and the theology of the cross always applies as God’s Victory, and the only true victory:

Is the principle of the war very different from that of a general strike, which would bring society to its knees by sheer impatient force, and which so many avoid only as impolitic and not as immoral?[14] … It is impossible even to discuss the theodicy all pine for without the theology so many deride.[15]

[1] Rev. 12:9 … that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world…

[2] C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock, Eerdmans, 1970, is a book, which contains a series of short articles.

[3] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, NCPI, 1988, p. 4.

[4] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 24.

[5] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 24.

[6] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 25.

[7] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 28.

[8] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 28.

[9] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 28-29.

[10] Ibid. p. 30.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid. p. 30-31.

[14] Ibid. p. 34.

[15] Ibid. p. 37.

Barth’s ‘Rules for Older People in Relation to Younger’
Here’s some advice about relating to ‘younger people’ from Karl Barth to his friend Carl Zuckmayer:

  1. Realize that younger people of both sexes, whether relatives or close in other ways, have a right to go their own ways according to their own (and not your) principles, ideas, and desires, to gain their own experiences, and to find happiness in their own (and not your) fashion.
  2. Do not force upon them, then, your own example or wisdom or inclinations or favors.
  3. Do not bind them in any way to yourself or put them under any obligation.
  4. Do not be surprised or annoyed or upset if you necessarily find that they have no time, or little time, for you, that no matter how well-intentioned you may be toward them, or sure of your cause, you sometimes inconvenience and bore them, and they casually ignore you and your counsel.
  5. When they act in this way, remember penitently that in your own youth you, too, perhaps (or probably) acted in the same way toward the older authorities of the time.
  6. Be grateful for every proof of genuine notice and serious confidence they show you, but do not expect or demand such proofs.
  7. Never in any circumstances give them up, but even as you let them go their own way, go with them in a relaxed and cheerful manner, trusting that God will do what is best for them, and always supporting and praying for them.
– Carl Zuckmayer, A Late Friendship: The letters of Karl Barth and Carl Zuckmayer (Translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), 45.
[HT’s: Travis; Image is of Carl Zuchmayer with his family, Berlin 1928]

Theodicy: The Justification Of God – 1

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once opined that ‘The question of why evil exists is not a theological question, for it assumes that it is possible to go behind the existence forced upon us as sinners. If we could answer it then we would not be sinners. We could make something else responsible. Therefore the ‘question of why’ can always only be answered with the ‘that’, which burdens man completely. The theological question does not arise about the origin of evil but about the real overcoming of evil on the Cross; it asks for the forgiveness of guilt, for the reconciliation of the fallen world.’ (Creation and Fall, Temptation, 84-5). This is by way of introduction to the theme of the next few posts.

Trevor Faggotter is the pastor of Northwestern Community Church in Adelaide, South Australia. He recently gave a series of studies on Forsyth’s 1916 work, The Justification of God. This is a work that continues to speak volumes – perhaps more than ever – to a world as rife with war, suffering and evil as it was during that those years in which the ‘war to end all wars’ was fought out on the battlefields of Europe, and in the consciences of the men and women who lived and died under its smoke. Trevor has been kind enough to allow me to post his studies here, which I plan to do over the coming days. There are 11 studies altogether.

THEODICY: THE JUSTIFICATION OF GOD

Study 1

‘To justify God is the best and deepest way to fortify men’ – P. T. Forsyth[1]

A guest post by Trevor Faggotter

Prayer: Dear Father, we give you thanks for your great and amazing grace towards the human race, in Jesus Christ, our Lord. We praise you for the work of the Holy Spirit, deep in our hearts, revealing your nature, your love and your gift of redemption, through the Cross of Christ. We pray for a fresh hearing of the gospel, in our lives, in our day, and among the nations of the world, in Jesus name, Amen.

A STRANGE TITLE

Theodicy: The Justification of God! The title of this series of studies is unusual. Since the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit and Scripture, have given the human race a revelation of the grace of God, in the beauty of Jesus Christ, in his holy love and kindness towards us. For those of us who have come to know God, as Father – in and through his dear Son Jesus, the Messiah, we do now – in all our joy, as well as in our frailty and weakness – actually love God. We also love his world, his humanity. We love because he first loved us. We trust him concerning his plan for creation. We also seek to know God more and more, in all his ways – even his seemingly strange ways, in all his deeds and actions.

Many things, we barely understand. However, to a person stirred, gripped, moved and motivated by the grace of God, the very notion that God needs justification may now, in our renewed frame of mind, appear to be a foolish one. In many ways, it is. Just as it has been said: Defend Scripture? Defend a Lion! – it can also be said – Defend God? Defend the Lion! However, as responsible members of the human race, and of our present world, Christian people continue to wrestle with the difficult questions, which confront us – in order to more helpfully proclaim Christ, and all that he means to and for the world.

In the Foreword to the 1988 reprint of this book by P.T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, Dean Carter says: ‘God is justified in and by the crucified Christ’.[2] That is the premise, or basis, upon which the book proceeds, and concludes: ‘Christ crucified and risen is the final, eternal answer to the riddle of life’.[3]

The book is the gospel expounded – with a view to grasping something of the dynamics of evil, grace and holiness, outworking in human history. It has its roots deeply implanted in the Scripture, and is written amidst a time of global crisis.

THINK IN CENTURIES

Our studies are based upon the text of a book, which was first published in 1917. That is, it was written during World War One – ‘the war to end all wars’. It is important also to consider that New Creation Publications Incorporated reprinted this book in 1988, some 71 years later. If my maths is correct, the contents of this book are now 91 years old. A short comment once made by the author, P.T. Forsyth (in a different book), is prophetically coming to pass in our own day:

Theology simply means thinking in centuries.[4]

Forsyth thought deeply, and wrote works that have endured, and continue to speak to us today. It takes time to grasp his meaning, but it is well worth the effort. This is a difficult book. But I urge you to persist with its contents. For the reading of a book beyond our current ability can become a defining moment in the way of maturity.

Following the September 11th 2001 attack upon the New York World Trade Centre Twin Towers, like us all, I too needed steady insight. So, of all the possibilities open to me, I reached for this book. Apart from my own need, I was confronted once again, with:

  1. A shocking event – evil and terror
  2. The sudden death and suffering of everyday people – who seemed much like me,
  3. A barrage of political – and at times very shallow – media comment, and
  4. A pastorate, a community of people, and a world of nations that need wisdom.

I found here, valuable wisdom, which I have sought to share, as able. I trust others heard it too, and took heart.

WHAT IS THEODICY?

Our studies focus on the matter of Theodicy. That is, the attempt to justify God in the face of all the evil, misery, suffering and all injustice in the world. Theodicy seeks to answer the question: How can the justice of a sovereign God be defended in the face of evil – especially human suffering, particularly the suffering of the innocent? Our society and indeed all nations need to be equipped to grapple more fully with such questions. For our world is blessed with so many benefits of modern technology, and advanced medicine, that we have often become fixated upon the idea of endless ‘progress’ – as if that is all there is, and all that matters. When something like a Tsunami in the Indian Ocean, or a complex, volatile war, shatters the settled domestic lives of millions, and touches our own lives, we are easily prone to erroneous, foolish or unhelpful responses. We just react.

N.T. Wright identifies three things that characterise much of our current day inadequate approach to problem of evil:

Firstly, we ignore evil when it doesn’t hit us in the face. Second, we are surprised by evil when it does. Third, we react in immature and dangerous ways as a result.[5]

AN OUTLINE OF THE CHAPTERS

Foreword

Overture and Outline

I. The Expectations of Popular Religion and their Fate. Religion as centred on God and centred on Man

II. The Problems: Revelation and Teleology

III. Metaphysic and Redemption

IV. What is Redemption?

V. Salvation Theological but not Systematic

VI. The Failure of the Church as an International Authority

VII. Teleology Acute in Theodicy

VIII. Philosophical Theodicy

IX. The Eternal Cruciality of the Cross for Destiny

X. Saving Judgment

XI. History and Judgment

XII. The Conquest of Time by Eternity

Bibliography

P.T. FORSYTH – A WORD ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Taylor Forsyth was born in 1848, and studied at the universities of Aberdeen, Göttingen and New College, London. He served various Congregational Churches in England, and became Principal of Hackney Theological College, Hampstead – a position he retained until he died, in 1921. He was a member of the theological faculty of London University, and also a one-time chairman of the Congregational Union of England and Wales. He wrote over 30 books and many other pamphlets and articles, championing in his writing, The Cruciality of the Cross. Reading Forsyth will undoubtedly deepen one’s understanding of God as holy love, and of the gospel as the power and weakness of God.

WHAT IS FORSYTH ON ABOUT?

Forsyth’s concern is for the nations, but his eyes are set upon Christ:

In many forms my belief will appear that the site of revelation and the solution of history it to be found, not in the moral order of the world, but in its moral crisis, tragedy, and great divine commedia; not even in the conscience. But in its Christ and His Cross. It seems quite certain that it is only a living faith in the right kind of unity, unity with power that can bring to the race public peace and concord.[6]

The focus of the race is moral, in the conscience. ‘Morality is the nature of things.’ Guilt is therefore the last problem of the race, its one central moral crisis; the Cross that destroys it is the race’s historic crisis and turning point. Were there no sin, there would be no war. Were there no world sin, there would be no world war. War makes at least one contribution to human salvation – it is sin’s apocalypse. It reveals the greatness and the awfulness of evil, and corrects that light and easy conception of it, which had come to mark culture and belittle redemption.[7]

This book is a coming to terms with the very fact of evil, and of its enormous effects and impact upon the world.[8] It comes to grips more closely with its remedy, its nemesis and doom, in the Man Jesus, the Lord Jesus. His triumphant Cross, we pray, will open to us in ways which will deepen us, and so bless our proclamation.

DEPTH NEEDED FOR OUR OWN DAY

Our own culture in Australia in 2008 has emerged from a mixture of many peoples, nations and historical factors, for good and for ill. We live this peaceful side of two world wars, and a strange war in Vietnam. We live amidst other global conflicts, which we witness nightly on our TV screens. We live this side of the rebellious 70’s where many values, foundations and institutions were questioned, challenged, rejected, replaced or ignored. However do we now have the wise insight we need to approach the future?

Many Christian people in our land laid excellent foundations in their love for Christ. We benefit from their good work. However, as churches today, we are prone to live by image, rather than substance. It won’t do. So many nations are such a long way away from the things of Christ, and his gospel. It is depth and substance that is needed, and not the creating of impressions and the projecting of images. Only a profound understanding of the depths of the cross can produce anything more than a shallow culture. And only the Spirit searches the deeps of God and reveals them to people like us. ‘… for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God (1Corinthians 2:10).

This being the case – and given that the Spirit comes to us – we can embark upon a deep and profound and difficult book, with great expectancy. God reveals himself through his Word, written, preached, expounded and imparted by his servants, such as Forsyth.

And so the first work before the Church is to set her own house in order, … to acquire that note of moral authority which gives practical power and historic weight to all her mystic insight and her sympathetic help. It is not help that either the Church or the world needs most. It is power. It is life. It is moral regeneration. If the greatest boon in the world is Christ’s Holy Father, the greatest curse in the world is man’s unfilial guilt. Whatever, therefore, undoes the guilt is the solution of the world. Everything will follow upon that peace and power.[9]

May the Spirit of the Lord impart to us, that which is most needful in our day, that we might share his gospel with others, with conviction.

[1] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, NCPI, 1988, p. 14.

[2] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 4.

[3] Ibid.p. 221.

[4] P. T. Forsyth, The Work of Christ, NCPI, 1993, p. 144.

[5] N. T. Wright, Evil and the Justice of God, SPCK, 2006, p. 8.

[6] Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 16-17. As you might expect, many of our studies, will include a good sprinkling of quotations from Forsyth.

[7] Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 19.

[8] For a biblical theodicy, see also Martin Bleby, Where Was God on September 11th 2001, NCPI, 2001.

[9] Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 22.

April Book Notes – 1

While there certainly remains a place for more lengthy book reviews, I thought it might be useful to just pen a few very brief book notes (and give some scores – ♦ – out of 5) on some of the more significant books I read each month. So here’s a few from April so far. As you can see, I’ve been following a definite theme.

Geiko Müller-Fahrenholz, The Kingdom and the Power: The Theology of Jürgen Moltmann (trans. John Bowden; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000).

This is one of the most helpful introductions to Moltmann’s thought available. Appreciative, but not uncritical at key points, Müller-Fahrenholz introduces us to the big themes in Moltmann’s major works. Recommended. ♦♦♦

Nigel M. de S. Cameron, ed., Universalism and the Doctrine of Hell: Papers Presented at the Fourth Edinburgh Conference on Christian Dogmatics, 1991 (Carlisle/Grand Rapids: Paternoster/Baker, 1993).

Like most collections of essays, this one is a bit hit and miss. The better essays are those by Trevor Hart, David Powys, TF Torrance and Henri Blocher. ♦♦½

Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God (Boca Raton: Universal, 1999).

See my review here. ♦♦♦

Robin A. Parry and Christopher H. Partridge, ed., Universal Salvation? The Current Debate (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2003).

This is a well chosen collection of essays and authors on a timely and important topic for evangelicals. It seeks to engage with Talbott’s thesis of dogmatic universalism which Talbott outlines in the first 3 chapters. His chapter on ‘Christ Victorious’ expands on what I believe is an underplayed theme in his The Inescapable Love of God, and so I was encouraged to see it included here. Biblical, philosophical, theological and historical responses are then offered. Talbott responds briefly in the final chapter. The best responses are those offered by Eric Reitan, David Hilborn and Don Horrocks. Overall, it’s a helpful discussion. It needs an index, but the book is worth buying for the bibliography alone. It’s 18 pages! ♦♦♦

Gregory MacDonald, The Evangelical Universalist (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2006).

This is the most well argued exegetical treatment on the subject of universalism currently available. It’s well written, and the combination of ‘MacDonald’s’ cogency of argument, respect for the Biblical texts, and personal humility as to his claims makes his advocacy of evangelical universalism most attractive. Those who disagree with his position will find here a case worthy of as humble response. Good bibliography, but no index. ♦♦♦♦

Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2007).

A beautifully-written reflection – it’s almost a poem – that deserves the widest readership. ♦♦♦♦

Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved”? With a Short Discourse on Hell (Fort Collins: Ignatius Press, 1988).

While this wee book is not particularly well written (it may be better in the German), it’s almost impossible to put down, and it really does have not a few flashes of magnificent insight. Von Balthasar’s overall thesis regarding a hopeful universalism is attractive, even if not at every point convincing. His aggregating of quotes reminded me of Bloesch’s work (which I love). A good read. ♦♦♦½

Lindsey Hall, Swinburne’s Hell and Hick’s Universalism: Are we free to reject God? (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).

This is a helpfully lucid outline and critical response to important themes in the theology of Richard Swinburne and John Hick. While her own position is considerably more Hickian than perhaps most evangelical universalists will be comfortable with, Hall is to be commended for avoiding stereotypes and for offering a cogent contribution to an increasingly voluminous discussion on the question of Christian universalism. ♦♦♦

Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart, Hope Against Hope: Christian Eschatology at the Turn of the Millennium (Grand Rapids/Cambridge: Eerdmans, 1999).

Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart pair up again for this project that arose out of number of conferences and the result is a stunning collection of six essays on Christian hope – its context, its value, its basis, its power, its praxis, and its goal. Bauckham and Hart set out not merely to expose modernity’s myth of inevitable progress and postmodernity’s Nietzschian anti-metanarrative and deconstruction of mimetic imagination, but do so by laying before our eyes the broad and graced vision of God’s promises begun in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and fully realised in the new creation. Inspired by the work of Jürgen Moltmann (to whom the book is dedicated), this is a book that requires careful and reflective reading, stopping regularly to view the terrain, and then returning to again and again to grapple with its implications. This is one to buy, read, keep and re-read. [NB. This may be a biased note as Trevor is my doctoral supervisor]. ♦♦♦♦