Author: Jason Goroncy

A new Scripture and Theology blog

One of the more exciting things about studying at St Mary’s College (University of St Andrews) is the rich interaction between biblical studies students and their dogmatic theology comrades. There may be lots of other smells around St Mary’s College, but there is little here that smells of ‘keeping the disciplines separate’. Some of my colleagues have now started a blog called Scripture and Theology in order to facilitate discussion beyond metropolis of St Andrews. It is well worth checking out.

Here’s a taster from Luke Tallon on Augustine’s reading of Genesis 1:

God did not create his creatures to live in the colorless borderland of the evening, but in the glorious light of the breaking dawn “when the creature is drawn to the praise and love of the Creator.” With this language Augustine certainly foreshadows the twilight following the fall and the rising of the glorified Son, but Augustine also has in view the progressive development of creation under the command of the creator. Thus, Augustine provides two comforts to his audience. First, just as God in his activity in the six days of creation moved towards the goal of the Sabbath, so too God is moving creation history to a climactic “seventh day” (note: towards the fulfillment, not the abolition of creation). Whether we see this in the morning light or it is hidden from us in the colorlessness of evening, this providential movement is happening. Second, although the twilight still lingers, the darkness will never come, and in God’s own time he will usher in an eternal morning. Thus, Augustine reminds us that it is both natural and right to yearn for the morning (cf. Ben Harper’s “Morning Yearning”).

Around the traps …

Dan has posted An Open Letter to Jürgen Moltmann.

Baxter Kruger shares a sermon On the Death of Jesus.

Jim Gordon draws our attention to Dora Greenwell who co-wrote a book on prayer with PT Forsyth, and offers a fine reflection on Holy Saturday.

Byron shares a great affirmation of materiality from Rowan Williams’ pen.

Travis has posted a review of Paul Nimmo’s Being in Action: The Theological Shape of Barth’s Ethical Vision.

The recent Balthasar Blog Conference has been helpfully summarised by David Congdon and I’ve just noticed that my mate Jon Mackenzie (who has all but disappeared from blogdom) will be kick starting the second Karl Barth Blog Conference in early June.

David Congdon’s contribution to the Balthasar Blog Conference is a stellar must-read critique of von Balthasar’s pseudo-universalism. He writes:

This is the basis for a true “hermeneutics of hope”: the person of Jesus Christ, the Crucified and Risen One, who reconciled the world to God. When we begin with christological hope, we can preserve anthropological existentialism; but when we begin with anthropological existentialism, we will never truly reach christological hope.

And for your listening pleasure …

Listen to John Dickson talk about historical Jesus research in this podcast.

Graeme Goldsworthy shares a talk on The necessity and validity of Biblical Theology, Graeme Goldsworthy at SBTS.

Paul Davies reflects on the question ‘Could the universe have been other than what it is?’ in this podcast entitled The Cosmic Jackpot.

And barrister and human rights advocate Julian Burnside QC gives the ninth Manning Clark lecture in which he speaks about anti-terror laws, children in detention, and compensation for the stolen generations.

Jacques Ellul on hell and the grace of God

‘I am taking up here a basic theme that I have dealt with elsewhere but which is so essential that I have no hesitation in repeating myself. It is the recognition that all people from the beginning of time are saved by God in Jesus Christ, that they have all been recipients of his grace no matter what they have done.

This is a scandalous proposition. It shocks our spontaneous sense of justice. The guilty ought to be punished. How can Hitler and Stalin be among the saved? The just ought to be recognized as such and the wicked condemned. But in my view this is purely human logic which simply shows that there is no understanding of salvation by grace or of the meaning of the death of Jesus Christ. The proposition also runs counter to the almost unanimous view of theology. Some early theologians proclaimed universal salvation but almost all the rest finally rejected it. Great debates have taken place about foreknowledge and predestination, but in all of them it has been taken for granted that reprobation is normal.

A third and the most serious objection to the thesis is posed by the biblical texts themselves. Many of these talk about condemnation, hell, banishment into outer darkness, and the punishment of robbers, fornicators, idolaters, etc. As we proceed we must overcome these obstacles and examine the theological reasons which lead me to believe in universal salvation, the texts that seem to be against it, and a possible solution.

But I want to stress that I am speaking about belief in universal salvation. This is for me a matter of faith. I am not making a dogma or a principle of it. I can say only what

I believe, not pretending to teach it doctrinally as the truth.

1. God Is love

My first simple thesis is that if God is God, the Almighty, the Creator of all things, the Omnipresent, then we can think of no place or being whatever outside him. If there were a place outside him, God would not be all in all, the Creator of all things. How can we think of him creating a place or being where he is not present? What, then, about hell? Either it is in God, in which case he is not universally good, or it is outside him, hell having often been defined as the place where God is not. But the latter is completely unthinkable.

One might simply say that hell is merely nothingness. The damned are those who are annihilated. But there is a difficulty here too. Nothingness does not exist in the Bible. It is a philosophical and mathematical concept. We can represent it only by a mathematical sign. God did not create ex nihilo, out of nothing. Genesis 1:2 speaks of tohu wabohu (“desert and wasteland” RSV “formless and void’) or of tehom (“the deep’). This is not nothing.

Furthermore, the closest thing to nothingness seems to be death. But the Bible speaks about enemies, that is, the great serpent, death, and the abyss, which are aggressors against God’s creation and are seeking to destroy it. These are enemies against which God protects his creation. He cannot allow that which he has created and called good to be destroyed, disorganized, swallowed up, and slain. This creation of God cannot revert to nothing. Death cannot issue in nothingness. This would be a negation of God himself, and this is why the first aspect seems to me to be decisive. Creation is under constant threat and is constantly upheld.

How could God himself surrender to nothingness and to the enemy that which he upholds in face and in spite of everything? How could he allow a power of destruction and annihilation in his creation? If he cannot withstand the force of nothingness, then we have to resort to dualism (a good God and a bad God in conflict and equal), to Zoroastrianism. Many are tempted to dualism today. But if God is unique, if he alone has life in himself, he cannot permit this threat to the object of his love.

But it is necessary that “the times be accomplished,” the times when we are driven into a corner and have to serve either the impotence of the God of love or the power of the forces of destruction and annihilation. We have to wait until humanity has completed its history and creation, and every possibility has been explored. This does not merely imply, however, that at the end of time the powers of destruction, death, the great serpent, Satan, the devil, will be annihilated, but much more. How can we talk about nothingness when we receive the revelation of this God who will be all in all? When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself also will be subjected to him who put all things under him, that God may be all in all (1 Cor. 15:28).

If God is, he is all in all. There is no more place for nothingness. The word is an empty one. For Christians it is just as empty as what it is supposed to denote. Philosophers speak in vain about something that they can only imagine or use as a building block, but which has no reality of any kind.

The second and equally essential factor is that after Jesus Christ we know that God is love. This is the central revelation. How can we conceive of him who is love ceasing to love one of his creatures? How can we think that God can cease to love the creation that he has made in his own image? This would be a contradiction in terms. God cannot cease to be love.

If we combine the two theses we see at once that nothing can exist outside God’s love, for God is all in all. It is unthinkable that there should exist a place of suffering, of torment, of the domination of evil, of beings that merely hate since their only function is to torture. It is astounding that Christian theology should not have seen at a glance how impossible this idea is. Being love, God cannot send to hell the creation which he so loved that he gave his only Son for it. He cannot reject it because it is his creation. This would be to cut off himself.

A whole theological trend advances the convenient solution that God is love but also justice. He saves the elect to manifest his love and condemns the reprobate to manifest his justice. My immediate fear is that this solution does not even correspond to our idea of justice and that we are merely satisfying our desire that people we regard as terrible should be punished in the next world. This view is part of the mistaken theology which declares that the good are unhappy on earth but will be happy in heaven, whereas the wicked are successful on earth but will be punished in the next world. Unbelievers have every reason to denounce this explanation as a subterfuge designed to make people accept what happens on earth. The kingdom of God is not compensation for this world.

Another difficulty is that we are asked to see God with two faces as though he were a kind of Janus facing two ways. Such a God could not be the God of Jesus Christ, who has only one face. Crucial texts strongly condemn two-faced people who go two different ways. These are the ones that Jesus Christ calls hypocrites. If God is doubleminded, there is duplicity in him. He is a hypocrite. We have to choose: He is either love or he is justice. He is not both. If he is the just judge, the pitiless Justiciar, he is not the God that Jesus Christ has taught us to love.

Furthermore, this conception is a pure and simple denial of Jesus Christ. For the doctrine is firm that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died and was willing to die for human sin to redeem us all: I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself (John 12:32), satisfying divine justice. All the evil done on earth from Adam’s break with God undoubtedly has to be judged and punished. But all our teaching about Jesus is there to remind us that the wrath of God fell entirely on him, on God in the person of the Son. God directs his justice upon himself; he has taken upon himself the condemnation of our wickedness.

What would be the point, then, of a second condemnation of individuals? Was the judgment passed on Jesus insufficient? Was the price that was paid-the punishment of the Son of God-too low to meet the demands of God’s justice? This justice is satisfied in God and by God for us. From this point on, then, we know only the face of the love of God.

This love is not sentimental acquiescence. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God (Heb. 10:31). God’s love is demanding, “jealous,” total, and indivisible. Love has a stern face, not a soft one. Nevertheless, it is love. And in any case this love excludes double predestination, some to salvation and others to perdition. It is inconceivable that the God of Jesus Christ, who gives himself in his Son to save us, should have created some people ordained to evil and damnation. There is indeed a predestination, but it can be only the one predestination to salvation. In and through Jesus Christ all people are predestined to be saved. Our free choice is ruled out in this regard. We have often said that God wants free people. He undoubtedly does, except in relation to this last and definitive decision. We are not free to decide and choose to be damned. To say that God presents us with the good news of the gospel and then leaves the final issue to our free choice either to accept it and be saved or to reject it and be lost is foolish. To take this point of view is to make us arbiters of the situation. In this case it is we who finally decide our own salvation.

This view reverses a well-known thesis and would have it that God proposes and man disposes. Without question we all know of innumerable cases in which people reject revelation. Swarms are doing so today. But have they any real knowledge of revelation? If I look at countless presentations of the Word of God by the churches, I can say that the churches have presented many ideas and commandments that have nothing whatever to do with God’s revelation. Rejecting these things, human commandments, is not the same as rejecting the truth. And even if the declaration or proclamation of the gospel is faithful, it does not itself force a choice upon us.

If people are to recognize the truth, they must also have the inner witness of the Holy Spirit. These two things are indispensable, the faithful declaration of the gospel, the good news, by a human being and the inner witness in the hearer of the Holy Spirit, who conveys the assurance that it is the truth of God. The one does not suffice without the other. Thus when those who hear refuse our message, we can never say that they have chosen to disobey God.

The human and divine acts are one and the same only in the Word of Jesus. When he told his hearers not to be unbelieving but to believe, if they refused then they were rejected. In our case, however, we cannot say that there is an act of the Holy Spirit simultaneously with our proclamation. This may well be the point of the well-known text about the one sin that cannot be pardoned, the sin against the Holy Spirit (cf. Matt. 12:31-32). But we can never know whether anyone has committed it. However that may be, it is certain that being saved or lost does not depend on our own free decision.

I believe that all people are included in the grace of God. I believe that all the theologies that have made a large place for damnation and hell are unfaithful to a theology of grace. For if there is predestination to perdition, there is no salvation by grace. Salvation by grace is granted precisely to those who without grace would have been lost. Jesus did not come to seek the righteous and the saints, but sinners. He came to seek those who in strict justice ought to have been condemned.

A theology of grace implies universal salvation. What could grace mean if it were granted only to some sinners and not to others according to an arbitrary decree that is totally contrary to the nature of our God? If grace is granted according to the greater or lesser number of sins, it is no longer grace – it is just the opposite because of this accountancy. Paul is the very one who reminds us that the enormity of the sin is no obstacle to grace: Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more (Rom. 5:20).

This is the key statement. The greater the sin, the more God’s love reveals itself to be far beyond any judgment or evaluation of ours. This grace covers all things. It is thus effectively universal.

I do not think that in regard to this grace we can make the Scholastic distinctions between prevenient grace, expectant grace, conditional grace, etc. Such adjectives weaken the thrust of the free grace of the absolute sovereign, and they result only from our great difficulty in believing that God has done everything.

But this means that nothing in his creation is excluded or lost’.

Jacques Ellul, What I Believe (trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 188-92.

Dostoevsky on Social Conventions

‘I tell you what, my poet, I want to reveal to you a mystery of nature of which it seems to me you are not in the least aware. I’m certain that you’re calling me at this moment a sinner, perhaps even a scoundrel, a monster of vice and corruption. But I can tell you this. If it were only possible (which, however, from the laws of human nature never can be possible), if it were possible for every one of us to describe all his secret thoughts, without hesitating to disclose what he is afraid to tell and would not on any account tell other people, what he is afraid to tell his best friends, what, indeed, he is even at times afraid to confess to himself, the world would be filled with such a stench that we should all be suffocated. That’s why, I may observe in parenthesis, our social properties and conventions are so good. They have a profound value, I won’t say for morality, but simply for self-preservation, for comfort, which, of course, is even more, since morality is really that same comfort, that is, it’s invented simply for the sake of comfort.’ – Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Insulted and Injured (Translated by C. Garnett; Melbourne: William Heinemann, 1915), 234.

Purgatory Help

This post is a solicitation for help. One of Forsyth’s more interesting and contentious notions is what fundamentally amounts to a Protestant reappraisal of purgatory. He suggests that ‘We threw away too much when we threw purgatory clean out of doors. We threw out the baby with the dirty water of its bath’, and he remains convinced that ‘there are more conversions on the other side than on this’.

In the coming months, I plan to do some thinking about this conviction of Forsyth’s , and about purgatory and its Protestant versions more generally.

I am aware of, but have not yet read, Hendrikus Berkhof’s, Well-Founded Hope (I’m keen to hear from anyone who has read this), and Jürgen Moltmann’s discussion in The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology. I am also conversant with the fine study by Geoffrey Rowell, Hell and the Victorians, and some of the support for at least a modified version of the doctrine by George McDonald, Donald Bloesch, Gabriel Fackre, Stephen Davis, and a spattering of odd references here and there.

But what else (books/articles) should I be reading?

‘On the next day, as had now become necessary, Judas and his men went to take up the bodies of the fallen and to bring them back to lie with their kindred in the sepulchres of their ancestors. Then under the tunic of each one of the dead they found sacred tokens of the idols of Jamnia, which the law forbids the Jews to wear. And it became clear to all that this was the reason these men had fallen. So they all blessed the ways of the Lord, the righteous judge, who reveals the things that are hidden; and they turned to supplication, praying that the sin that had been committed might be wholly blotted out. The noble Judas exhorted the people to keep themselves free from sin, for they had seen with their own eyes what had happened as the result of the sin of those who had fallen. He also took up a collection, man by man, to the amount of two thousand drachmas of silver, and sent it to Jerusalem to provide for a sin offering. In doing this he acted very well and honorably, taking account of the resurrection. For if he were not expecting that those who had fallen would rise again, it would have been superfluous and foolish to pray for the dead. But if he was looking to the splendid reward that is laid up for those who fall asleep in godliness, it was a holy and pious thought. Therefore he made atonement for the dead, so that they might be delivered from their sin’. (2 Maccabees 12:39-45)

(Electronic) Church Dogmatics is on its way

I am excited to report that Logos Bible Software have announced that they are finally ready to proceed with their long-awaited fully integrated electronic edition Karl Barth’s 14-volume Church Dogmatics, after having received the required final approval from the publisher. And there’s more:

‘Behind this delay is some very exciting news! The issue that was holding up production was whether we’d be producing the current edition or the forthcoming new edition. We are thrilled to let you know that the Logos edition will be the new edition! What’s new with the new edition? It offers the classic translation of T. F. Torrance, G. Bromiley and others, revised by a team of leading experts from the Center for Barth Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary. The text is presented in a new, user friendly format. Greek and Latin passages are now given in English translation alongside the original to make the work more accessible for students without a working knowledge of the ancient languages. Simply hover over or click the asterisk after any untranslated text to see its translation’.

Additionally, they’ve also made available 2 volumes of secondary literature in their Studies in Karl Barth Collection: Sung Wook Chung’s Karl Barth and Evangelical Theology: Convergences and Divergences, and Regarding Karl Barth by Trevor Hart.

More information here.

Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward

Let man’s Soule be a Spheare, and then, in this,
Th’intelligence that moves, devotion is,
And as the other Spheares, by being growne
Subject to forraigne motions, lose their owne,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in a yeare their naturall forme obey:
Pleasure or businesse, so, our Soules admit
For their first mover, and are whirld by it.
Hence is’t, that I am carryed towards the West
This day, when my Soules forme bends toward the East.
There I should see a Sunne, by rising set,
And by that setting endlesse day beget;
But that Christ on this Crosse, did rise and fall,
Sinne had eternally benighted all.
Yet dare I’almost be glad, I do not see
That spectacle of too much weight for mee.
Who sees God’s face, that is selfe life, must dye;
What a death were it then to see God dye?
It made his owne Lieutenant Nature shrinke,
It made his footstoole crack, and the Sunne winke.
Could I behold those hands which span the Poles,
And tune all spheares at once, peirc’d with those holes?
Could I behold that endlesse height which is
Zenith to us, and to’our Antipodes,
Humbled below us? or that blood which is
The seat of all our Soules, if not of his,
Make durt of dust, or that flesh which was worne
By God, for his apparell, rag’d, and torne?
If on these things I durst not looke, durst I
Upon his miserable mother cast mine eye,
Who was God’s partner here, and furnish’d thus
Halfe of that Sacrifice, which ransom’d us?
Though these things, as I ride, be from mine eye,
They’are present yet unto my memory,
For that looks towards them; and thou look’st towards mee,
O Saviour, as thou hang’st upon the tree;
I turne my backe to thee, but to receive
Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave.
O thinke mee worth thine anger, punish mee,
Burne off my rusts, and my deformity,
Restore thine Image, so much, by thy grace,
That thou may’st know mee, and I’ll turne my face.

– John Donne (1572-1631) –

[HT: Andrew for alerting me to this poem]

Marie Magdalen’s complaint at Christ’s death

Sith my life from life is parted:
Death come take thy portion.
Who survives, when life is murdred,
Lives by meere extortion.
All that live, and not in God:
Couch their life in deaths abod.

Seely starres must needes leave shining,
When the sunne is shaddowed.
Borrowed streames refraine their running,
When head springs are hindered.
One that lives by others breath,
Dieth also by his death.

O true life, sith thou hast left me,
Mortall life is tedious.
Death it is to live without thee,
Death, of all most odious.
Turne againe or take me to thee,
Let me die or live thou in mee.

Where the truth once was, and is not,
Shaddowes are but vanitie:
Shewing want, that helpe they cannot:
Signes, not salves of miserie.
Paynted meate no hunger feedes,
Dying life each death exceedes.

With my love, my life was nestled
In the sonne of happinesse:
From my love, my life is wrested
To a world of heavinesse.
O, let love my life remove,
Sith I live not where I love.

O my soule, what did unloose thee
From thy sweete captivitie?
God, not I, did still possesse thee:
His, not mine, thy libertie.
O, too happie thrall thou wart,
When thy prison, was his hart.

Spitefull speare, that breakst this prison,
Seate of all felicitie,
Working thus, with double treason,
Loves and lifes deliverie:
Though my life thou drav’st away,
Maugre thee my love shall stay.

Robert Southwell (1561?-1595)

Image: ‘Mary Magdalene’, by Anthony Frederick Augustus Sandys; ca. 1860

The Shack

A few weeks ago, I loaded up the car with a stack of articles by Forsyth, some great Aussie Merlot, a bottle of Laphroaig, some warm clothes, and a new novel, The Shack by William P. Young, and headed off for a few days on the beautiful Isles of Lewis and Harris. Every time I have a wee holiday I take a novel, and I am yet to be disappointed. To be sure, the book (which has its own website) does not live up to the hype on the cover, and Young is certainly no Dostoyevsky, or Bunyan, but what it lacks in artistry it makes up for with odd flashes of theologically-insightful prose which paints the divine perichoretic life as you’ve never seen it before.

Now I won’t spoil the plot, so here’s just a wee taster:

‘In seminary he had been taught that God had completely stopped any overt communication with moderns, preferring to have them only listen to and follow sacred Scripture, properly interpreted, of course. God’s voice had been reduced to paper, and even that paper had to be moderated and deciphered by the proper authorities and intellects. It seemed that direct communication with God was something exclusively for the ancients and uncivilized, while educated Westerners’ access to God was mediated and controlled by the intelligentsia. Nobody wanted God in a box, just in a book. Especially an expensive one bound in leather with gilt edges, or was that guilt edges?’

‘I suppose since most of our hurts come through relationships so will our healing’.

‘Forgiveness in no way requires that you trust the one you forgive’.

Forsyth on sanctification

‘Sanctification could not be so directly and deliberately worked at without the blight of self-consciousness. Seek first for the kingdom and sanctification will be added; care for Christ and He will take care of your soul; sail by the Cross and you will sail into holiness. Religion became much more miraculous than evolutionary; but it was a miracle worked on the will, and not on the nature or substance of the man. And within the soul’s agonised extremity there was revealed the new authority in the moral form and nature of an absolute and universal Redeemer. Christ becomes the new conscience and the new King. The Cross and not the Church becomes the new seat of His authority – the Cross as Christ crucified afresh in the evangelical experience of the desperate soul, and rising anew in its new trust and new life.’ – Peter T. Forsyth, ‘The Cross as the Final Seat of Authority’, Contemporary Review 76 (1899), 597-8.

Reformed and Always Reforming

Scot McKnight has begun a new series of reflections on Roger Olson’s new book, Reformed and Always Reforming. He summarises Olson’s list of 10 common tendencies among conservative evangelicals:

1. Tendency to treat correct doctrine as the essence of authentic Christianity.
2. Tendency to treat revelation as primarily propositional.
3. Tendency to elevate some tradition to the status of a magisterium. This closes off fresh study and theology.
4. Tendency to be suspicious of constructive theology and to be defensive and to patrol evangelical borders.
5. Tendency to see evangelicalism as a bounded set instead of a centered set.
6. Tendency to see the “evangelical tent” as a “small” tent. (Here he brings up inerrancy as one defining line.)
7. Tendency to be suspicious of modernity and postmodernity, even if many postconservatives think they are caught up in modernity too much. Doctrinal pluralism is a threat and here he uses Carson as an example in his The Gagging of God.
8. Tendency to think their theology is uninfluenced by history and culture. They look for the transcultural and see it as permanent.
9. Tendency to remain close to the fundamentalist roots. Many, Olson argues, are moving toward fundamentalism. He says, “I admit this is a matter of opinion.”
10. Tendency to do theology in the grip of the fear of liberal theology.

This is a helpful list. What else could we add?

1. Its rampant individualism.

2. (In Britain at least), its preferencing of penal substitutionary accounts of the atonement at the practical expense of all other truths about God’s atoning work. (I have posted on this here).

3. Consider Bloesch’s critique: ‘I believe that modern evangelicalism is hampered by being pre-critical, pre-Kantian and pre-Barthian. Helmut Thielicke refers to a Cartesian way of doing theology, in which the credibility of theology is made to rest on rational consistency and clarity of ideas rather than fidelity to biblical revelation’. – Donald Bloesch, “Donald Bloesch Responds,” in Evangelical Theology in Transition: Theologians in Dialogue with Donald Bloesch (Downers Grove: IVP, 1999), 189.

But it’s also quite a negative list. Is there nothing positive that can and ought be said about conservative evangelicals?

What else could we add?

Peer Gynt and the journey to hell

Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt remains my all-time favourite play. At one of the crossroads toward the end of his journey, Peer meets Button Molder, whose commission it was to melt down souls in preparation for death; and more particularly, those whose sins hadn’t been significant enough to qualify them for Hell but significant enough to disqualify them for Heaven. Peer, who was on Button Molder’s list, was challenged by the latter in the very thing that Peer had prided himself on all his life – being himself – which was, Button Molder contended, ‘just what you’ve never been’. Preparing to melt Peer down, Peer hysterically concluded that he’d rather go to Hell than become a non-entity boiling in a vat, and pleaded for time to locate witnesses to testify how iniquitous and worthy of hell his life had been. His search was unsuccessful, Peer finding that none of his past enemies would testify against him.

At the next crossroads, Peer testified against himself, desperately seeking to convince Button Molder that his kidnapping, his slave-trading, his cheating and lying, his drowning of another to save his own life indisputably qualified him for Hell! ‘Mere trifles!’, Button Molder replied. In desperation, the humbled and frightened Peer asks, ‘What’s it mean, to be yourself?’ The reply: ‘To be yourself is to destroy your Self.’ – Henrick Ibsen, Peer Gynt (trans. K. McLeish; London: Royal National Theatre/Nick Hern, 1990), 95.

On Penal Substitution

That Christ died for our sins is foundational for Christian faith and theology. Faithful witness to this fact is, therefore, of the most crucial order.

To speak about the cross in a way that is faithful to the biblical witness requires harnessing a broad range of metaphors that the Bible and the best of the tradition employs to bear witness to the reality of what God has done in Christ. One such metaphor and an indispensable metaphor at that is that of penal substitution. Clearly, the Scriptures teach that there is a penal element within Christ’s substitutionary sacrifice. Equally clear, however, is that penal substitution is not the sum of what the atonement is about. Consequently, when taken alone (or given over-amplified voice) in describing the action of the cross, there is a danger of distorting the witness to that action, of painting appalling illustrations of the Father-Son relationship, and of positing an unbiblical shift in the divine-human relation from one primarily filial and ethical to one predominantly legal. If the story of penal substitution has been told shockingly and distortedly in the past and it sometimes has, pitting an angry Father against an innocent Son, for example, or positing that ‘Jesus came to save us from God’, then rather than abandon the story we need to find ways of telling it better, that is, ways that are more faithful to the whole of the Scripture’s story and which also account for the fact that this story needs to be told alongside others.

There are a number of things I would want to affirm in the context of any discussion on penal substitution. These include: (i) that the notion plays an indispensable role in the New Testament’s witness about the cross; (ii) we must maintain the distinction between penalty and punishment. While the Crucified Christ bore sins’ penalty, there is no sense in which he was being punished by God. The Father was never anything but ‘well-pleased’ with his beloved Son; (iii) to be sure, the chastisement of our peace was certainly upon him who entered the orb of our penalty, but the whole of Christian experience ought tell us that we ought not infer from this that there is no chastisement left for us when we are in him, a chastisement with finds the truest, deepest, and bitterest repentance throughout the course of the Christian life; (iv) there was nothing arbitrary about the penalty meted out on sin as if God was concerned with mere clamant justice or abstract wrath; (v) a biblically-faithful atonement theology must adequately account for the forward-looking aspects of the atonement as well as the backward ones. Hence the need for additional models or metaphors of atonement other than only penal ones. Paul Fiddes’ contribution in Past Event and Present Salvation is a valuable study here.

The message of penal substitution remains an important and relevant one to teach us about the nature of God’s love, about the costliness of forgiveness, and about justice for both victims and perpetrators. Penal substitutionary accounts of the atonement instruct us that justice matters, that justice cannot and will not ever be set aside.

That a stream within British evangelicalism has chosen the issue of penal substitution as its defining marker is particularly disturbing for at least four reasons:

1. It represents that some evangelicals are failing to hear and receive the Bible’s own rich account of, and commentary on, God’s action in the cross, an action that all the doctrines in the world (let alone one) could not contain nor bear full witness to.

2. The new enemies of evangelicalism are now fellow evangelicals. It is a very disturbing day when people like Colin Gunton and Steve Holmes (see my review of Steve’s book The Wondrous Cross: Atonement and Penal Substituion in the Bible and History) are targeted by evangelicals as ‘the enemy’.

3. If Holmes is right that the first full account of the doctrine of penal substitution comes with Calvin, then British evangelicals are again in danger of cutting themselves off from the large majority of the Church and its history. Of course, the evangelical community has its own long tradition of being constantly in search of shibboleths by which to define itself.

4. Not only does it represent a shift in British thinking towards a more North-American way of defining Christian community (rarely a particularly helpful thing in itself), but it fails to recognise that evangelicalism is as much (if not more) a sociologically-defined reality as it is a doctrinally-defined one. Even when some issues seem to move to the fore (as, for example, in some particularly tight definitions concerning the authority of Scripture), it remains that largely cultural phenomenon have traditionally defined how evangelicals have seen themselves (and each other) and others.

Jeremy Begbie moves to Duke

Professor Jeremy Begbie will be concluding his role as Associate Director of the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts (St Andrews)  in order to take up an appointment as Thomas A. Langford Research Professor at Duke Divinity School, Duke University from July 1st 2008.

I’ve been informed that he’ll continue to teach half time at Ridley Hall, Cambridge,  until December, while also starting his work for Duke half time from July, and then he’ll be resident at Duke for their Spring Semester from January 2009. He is not moving permanently to the United States but will be resident at Duke for part of the time, and then residing in Cambridge for most of the year. Although the UK will lose him as a full time teacher, he plans to remain theologically active in the UK, doing research, and also planning and running some new theology and the arts ventures. I wish Jeremy all the best as he undertakes this juggle.

For a taste of what Duke is in for, check out this lecture from my vodpod.

Holding On

 

Seven days since the storm
snowed itself out and moved east, and still
the fat clots of white lodge themselves
in the twig forks. How cold holds!
This snow fruit crotched in place
by the black dogwood, snared by
a relentless frost that won’t
let go, won’t give in, even to the sun.
I fixed it in my camera’s eye.

On my dining table, in a wood
bowl, wait the five dried pomegranates
I saved for a friend. Decay has
forgotten them, their red skin
dried to tough brown leather,
the little teeth of sepals crimped
in a crown of sharp kisses that guards
the secret seeds, dark purses
for a blood that will never be spilled.

– Luci Shaw

Rowan Williams on Writing

Anyone who has read Grace and Necessity, or On Christian Theology, or Tokens of Trust will know that Rowan Williams is one of the most creative and mature writers of our time; and in this recent talk, he offered some reflections on the craft:

‘I started out as a theologian thinking that it would be fairly straight forward to write large books about Christian doctrine. I’d spent quite a few years reading them as a student and, you know, it looked fairly straight forward. You started at page one and you went on until you stopped and in some cases, as with the work of the great Karl Barth, it was a very long time between the beginning and the end. And somewhere along the line, I suppose, I wouldn’t say I lost my nerve as that’s not it, but I began to realise some of the dangers of writing large books about Christian doctrine is in the risk of supposing that when you have done it you might think that you’ve done it. My doctoral research was on Vladimir Losky, the great 20th century Russian émigré theologian who lived in Paris, and Losky was somebody who instilled in his readers and his students a very strong conviction that you needed to be restrained in what you aimed to say about God. There was always going to be more that you could be saying and you needed to be very keenly and very acutely aware of that “more”, and if that meant that you said less, well, good. And as the years went by, I found myself, yes, writing a fair bit about theology but never really being able to go very much beyond writing relatively short essays on the subject because of this – I hope its a – godly fear of rabbiting on too much with the fantasy of thinking you’ve got it wrapped up.

… the action of writing is an action of discovery. The very look of a word, sometimes, when you have got it down, will tell you something about what you can and can’t do. The very look of a line will tell you what you can and can’t do and of course that other act which is reading what you have written out loud will tell you something about what you can and can’t do …

With poetry obviously you don’t write a poem just to flex the muscles. You write it because something is asking to be said and that doesn’t happen in quite the same way when you are writing prose but I have found writing some theological essays and lectures and short books that there may be at some early stage a very strong sense that there is one thing here, which I have got to get over somehow or got to get in somewhere. When I used to take sermon classes in the days gone by for theological students, having listened to some apprentice sermons, I’d say, “Perhaps what you need to do is ask yourself: what would you say in a burning house? What would you say if you had forty-five seconds? What do you absolutely have to say about this text or this subject or this festival? Start there and work around it, rather than starting by saying: I’ve got to fill up twelve minutes. And you just keep pouring and mixing and the sludge slowly stirs around but start with “Is there one thing” and sometimes – not always – but sometimes when I’m writing an essay or a lecture there may be one thing like that which I feel I need to say, so yes there is an element of compulsion there’.

Full post here.

Two Conferences

The Society for Continental Philosophy and Theology has published what looks to be an interesting programme for their 2008 Conference (April 11-12) entitled ‘Postmodernism, Truth, and Religious Pluralism’. The conference will be held at Gordon College and the programme can be downloaded here.

Also Ben has posted some information on an exciting-looking conference on ‘Saint Paul’s Journeys into Philosophy’ (4-6 June 2008). More information available from the conference website.

Knud Jørgensen, Talal Asad and Noam Chomsky

Knud Jørgensen, director of the Areopagos Foundation in Norway/Denmark, assistant professor at the Norwegian School of Theology, and member of the Lausanne Theology Working Group has posted an essay ‘Escaping from the Prison of a Westernized Gospel’.

And Michael has posted an interesting reflection from Talal Asad on why we in the West find suicide bombing horrific.

Also, Chomsky fans will be keen to know that three new Chomsky articles and two new interviews have recently been posted:

The Wisdom of Ignorance (or, the Art of Not Knowing)

‘There is a kind of ignorance which is a matter of true wisdom and real art. To be sure, we are often ignorant by mere neglect or by lack of opportunity. But there is a kind of ignorance which should be studied and cultivated by any modest man (sic), to say nothing of the humble … There is an art of not knowing, ars nesciendi. And there is an old Latin verse which says: “To be willing not to know what the supreme teacher does not want to teach is the wise ignorance of real knowledge”. So it is in the Bible. Half the art of reading it is the art of ignoring what the book was never put there to teach. And endless harm has been done to the Bible by making it an authority on what it never existed to convey’. – Peter T. Forsyth, ‘The Efficiency and Sufficiency of the Bible’, Biblical Review 2 (1917), 23.

The Idolisation of Theology

The Apostle John concluded his first epistle with the warning, ‘… keep yourselves from idols’ (1 John 5:21). This word to the Christian community in general extends to those who seek to undertake the specific task of Christian dogmatics. It is a reminder that we must resist at every point the temptation of becoming bewitched by the mere form that faith takes, and with the grammar of its enquiring landscape. To do so is to turn our gaze from the sun itself towards mere shadows, as fascinating as those shadows might be. Such a move threatens to cast and then bow down to an idol called ‘theology’ and allows that god’s agenda – whether of the academy, or of the Church, or of that system the Apostle John calls ‘the world’ – to determine what the triune God has and has not revealed about himself, about his people, and about the world.