Author: Jason Goroncy

Holiness According to Otto – 4

Whilst Rudolph Otto’s designation of ‘the holy’ as mysterium tremendum is not without its usefulness (as helpful descriptors of Isaiah 6 and Luke 2:9, and as a reminder that religion is more than disguised morality, for example), it is perhaps less helpful, as was foreseen by Barth and Brunner, than it has been considered in decades past. Otto has overstated his case. His understanding of holiness betrays an over-dependence, of which he is aware, on the residual rationalism of Kant and Fries. Also, although holiness certainly carries connotations of the mystery of divine power, it is far from the raw power that Otto describes. Not only does the biblical material point to a more christo-centric definition of holiness, but Otto’s notion of holiness is far too entrapped in a subjectivist framework to truly shed light on the broader spectrum of biblical teaching on holiness. Yet with all his Kantianism, Otto remains suspicious of Forsyth’s project of employing holiness as a moral category which serves to qualify the nature and goal of God’s love, accusing this route of narrowing and trivializing ‘the Holy’. Still, Otto has done us not a small service in bringing holiness onto the agenda of theological discourse.

That said, long before Otto, Forsyth was speaking of the ‘idea of the holy’ and challenging his romantic-love-besotted generation with the truth that ‘the holiness of God is the real foundation of religion’ and that the prime petition of the Lord’s Prayer is ‘Hallowed be thy name’. Indeed, the entire prayer is there to serve the holiness of God. Forsyth insists that concepts like love, grace, faith, and sin mean nothing apart from God’s holiness – as they arise from it, return to it, satisfy it, show it forth, set it up, and secure it ubiquitously forever. It is not enough that evil should be restrained. ‘Holiness had to be set up and secured in history.’

Holiness according to Otto – 3

In a number of passages Otto seems to be taking a direct stab at Ritschlianism, arguing that the delineation of ‘Jesus’ faith in the fatherhood of God … certainly misrepresents’ the New Testament. The New Testament Father, he asserts, is far more holy, numinous, mysterious than his Kingdom. ‘He represents the sublimation and the consummation of all that the old Covenant had grasped by way of “creature-consciousness”, “holy awe”, and the like.’ Not surprisingly, therefore, Otto identifies Jesus’ experience in Gethsemane as the ‘awe of the creature before the mysterium tremendum, before the shuddering secret of the numen’ rather than as the struggle of a Son who sees the painful implications of a loving Father’s will.

With regard to Luther, Otto argues that the non-rational in Luther’s religion has come to be ignored, even by Lutherans who have ‘not done justice to the numinous side of the Christian idea of God. By the exclusively moral interpretation [they] gave to the terms, [they] distorted [and rationalized] the meaning of “holiness” and “wrath”.’

The echoes of Otto in biblical scholarship are noteworthy. James Dunn recently noted that ‘wherever the concept of “holiness” appears in the biblical material, underlying it is a sense of the mysterious otherness and aweful power of the divine, of God.’ Von Rad describes this otherness and power as ‘the great stranger in the human world … a datum of experience which can never really be co-ordinated into the world in which man is at home, and over against which he initially feels fear rather than trust – it is, in fact, the “wholly other”’. Something of this ‘aweful power’ and ‘fear’ is recalled in the story of Aaron’s first day on his new job as Israel’s high-priest when he lost his two eldest sons, Nadab and Abihu (Lev 10:1-3). The story reminds us that ‘God has never lightly suffered the desecration of the holy’ and that ‘it is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God’. In Habakkuk’s experience, ‘I hear, and my body trembles; my lips quiver at the sound; rottenness enters into my bones; my legs tremble beneath me’ (Hab 3:16a).

Tozer describes ‘the moral shock suffered by us through our mighty break with the high will of heaven [which] has left us all with a permanent trauma affecting every part of our nature.’ Philosophically, this encounter with the ‘irrational’ results in a sort of ‘wonder’ as described by Josef Pieper:

‘The innermost meaning of wonder is fulfilled in a deepened sense of mystery. It does not end in doubt, but is the awakening of the knowledge that being . . . is mysterious and inconceivable, and that it is a mystery in the full sense of the word: neither a dead end, nor a contradiction, nor even something impenetrable and dark; mystery really means that a reality, the singular existing thing, is inconceivable because it is an inexhaustible source of light, and for ever unfathomable.’

Holiness according to Otto – 2

As a notion that describes God apart from his moral and rational characteristics, Otto’s holiness carries elements of Coleridge-like awe-fulness, overpoweringness, absolute unapproachability, fascination and urgency – a force which is most easily perceived in the ‘wrath of God’. A little more positively, it is the ineffable core of religion: the experience of which cannot be described in terms of other experiences.

Otto describes the numinous as that which ‘grips or stirs the human mind’. It is ‘the deepest and most fundamental element in all strong and sincerely felt religious emotion.’ It is found in ‘strong, sudden ebullitions of personal piety … in the fixed and ordered solemnities of rites and liturgies, and again in the atmosphere that clings to old religious monuments and buildings, to temples and to churches.’ Sometimes it comes ‘sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship’ whilst at other times it is ‘thrillingly vibrant and resonant, until at last it dies away and the soul resumes its “profane”, non-religious mood of everyday experience’. Its sometimes violent, deep eruptions of the soul ‘with spasms and convulsions’ can lead to the ‘the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy’.

Otto turns to the Scriptures, and to Luther, to illustrate that the rise of the rational in the Judeo-Christian tradition did not eliminate the non-rational numinous, citing examples of the continuing presence of the ‘aweful’ and dread-inspiring. He avows that the Old Testament describes a definite shift in tradition from an early YHWH who still bears traces of the ‘daemonic dread’ of the pre-god stage of the numinous who in his anger sought to kill Moses, to Elohim who displays the more mature ‘rational aspect’ which ‘outweighs the numinous’.

Otto also seeks to draw attention to the balance between non-rational and rational in the New Testament where the rational and human aspects of God which begin in the early Hebrew tradition reach their consummation, even whilst traces of the numinous remain. He identifies the numinous in Jesus’ teaching on God’s wrath, in Hebrews and in Paul, where the ‘non-rational’ notions of predestination and the flesh come under discussion. Otto suggests that the clearest example in the New Testament of the Old Testament YHWH is Romans 1:18ff where the ‘jealous, passionate Yahweh’ has ‘grown to a God of the Universe of fearful power, who pours out the blazing vials of His wrath over the whole world.’

Holiness according to Otto – 1

With a steady stream of new work coming out on Rudolph Otto’s notion of holiness, Otto, it seems, is as popular as ever. Over the coming week or so, I propose to post some reflections on Otto’s notion of The Holy and to contrast it with Forsyth’s (for who else would be up to the task!). First, some background.

Theodor Von Häring, a successor of Ritschl’s at Göttingen and himself a leading figure in the development and popularising of Ritschlianism, had in his class a young man name Rudolph Otto. In 1895, Otto travelled to Egypt, Palestine and Greece, later describing how the experience of Holy Week in Jerusalem, and participating in a Coptic liturgy in Cairo, had left a deep impression on him. But it was that experience that came to him at the Sphinx in Giza which left the deepest impression. He describes a ‘general feeling of the unfathomable depth and mystery of existence and universe’ overcoming him. 1911 and 1912 saw him journeying to North Africa, India, Burma, Thailand, China, and Japan studying religious traditions and experiences, all the time with a growing longing to articulate his experience of the ‘unfathomable depth’.

In 1917, four years before Forsyth’s death, Otto penned Das Heilige (dedicated to Häring), probably the most well known treatment on holiness available. Certainly no discussion of holiness can proceed without considering his ‘yardstick’ contribution which has ‘left its mark not only on the history of religions, but also on twentieth-century philosophy, psychology and aesthetics of religion, biblical studies, and theology’. Otto argues that the holy, what he terms ‘the numinous’ (Lt. numen, divine spirit), is encountered by the creature as the mysterium tremendum and the mysterium et fascinans. More concerned with human experiences of holiness – and the production of such experience in his readers – rather than with an ontology of holiness, Otto concludes that holiness both repels and attracts.

‘Its dual character, as at once an object of boundless awe and boundless wonder, quelling and yet entrancing the soul, constitutes the proper positive content of the ‘mysterium’ as it manifests itself in conscious feeling. No attempt of ours to describe this harmony of contrasts in the import of the mysterium can really succeed; but it may perhaps be adumbrated, as it were from a distance, by taking an analogy from a region belonging not to religion but to aesthetics.’

Word of God – A Hymn

1. We cannot live without His Word,
We cannot live without His Voice;
We dare not think the thoughts of men,
Or, in the words they give, rejoice.
The primal darkness fled the scene
When God gave utt’rance to the Word:
The Spirit moved across the deep
And all obeyed the Voice it heard.

2. God spoke the Word that made the world,
He spoke the truth and Man was made;
In joy and peace and love they lived,
And walked with Him from day to day.
The serpent brought the word—deceit—
And spoke it to the primal pair.
Another word than God’s had come;
This word was death, and death to prayer.

3. Down through the ages our God speaks—
The primal couple heard the curse—
The prophets never ceased to tell
The Word in image, song and verse.
The might and holiness of God
In love and mercy present are
Where’er the Word is uttered forth
By sun and moon and furthest star.

4. The Word made flesh has come to dwell
And show in human modes our God.
That Word heals Man and makes him pure
By power of His flowing blood.
This Word is life to us who hear.
Our spirits by that life are fed.
We share this life with all mankind;
We offer them the Living Bread.

5. Ah, Word of God we weep with joy
To have Your Voice within our hearts,
To live afresh each time You speak
Your love to us in all our parts.
Ah, Father God—whose Word is power—
Ah, Spirit-Word that flows so free,
Ah, Living Word, ah, Son of God,
We worship—Word-in-Trinity.

This hymn is by Geoffrey Bingham. Music and overheads can be downloaded here.

On being a Christian

One of the books that I’m currently re-reading is Tom Smail’s, The Forgotten Father. I’d forgotten how remarkable this book is as it seeks to bring us to the heart of the Gospel in the Fatherhood of God. As Forsyth noted, we cannot put too much into that word ‘Father’ though we can, and do, certainly put too little into it. Smail begins his chapter on ‘The Father, the Son and the Cross’ by reminding us that it takes the Trinity to make sense of the atonement, and he ends the chapter by reminding us that it takes the Father to make sense of our humanity.

Here’s a quote: ‘To be a Christian is to believe that it is the Father who defines our identity and is to be believed against all inner and outer accusations to the contrary when he says to us, “This son of mine”. To know that is not to skulk in the back pew; it is to come forward with confidence to receive the inheritance. The robe which is the garment of sonship is accompanied by the ring which is the insignia of authority and the sandals that distinguish the free man from the slave. The son who comes home is invited back into his lost inheritance, to delight again in his father’s company and goodness and to rejoice.’ Thomas A. Smail, The Forgotten Father (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1980), 129.

The love of God

What ought we say about the love of God? In the cross, God’s love for himself, his name and his authority, and his love for his creatures, is taken up and met in one action wherein God exhibits the very nature of his being as unconditional Holy Love. That’s why not only is the doctrine of the Trinity necessary to make sense of the atonement, but the atonement is necessary to reveal the Trinitarian fellowship of God. The Holy Love that defines the perichoretic life of the Triune God has, by the grace of the Father in the action of the incarnate Son and by the mission of the Spirit, overflowed freely towards those outside of God’s community that creatures may enter into the Holy Love communion that the Triune God has ever known and spoke creation into being for participation in.

In Jesus Christ, God has shown not only only that he does not want to be God without us, but that he does not want us to be without him. And in the action of the Holy Spirit, the Triune God is present and active among us to hear and answer our prayers, to sustain us in all the happenings of life, and to continuously bring home to us afresh the good news of the Father’s sanctifying action in Jesus Christ, guaranteeing our inheritance, and empowering us to live in the reality of being ‘holy and blameless’ before God (Eph 1:4).

Given this statement, what ought we make of H R Mackintosh’s notion that ‘God loves us better than he loves himself’? I have often wondered about this statement. What is Mackintosh asserting here? Is he saying that there are different degrees of love in God? Is it any more than hyperbole to emphasise the extent and nature of God’s love? Is he here driving the wedge between God’s love for himself and his love for us that does not exist in Jesus Christ? Isn’t God’s love for us the overflow of his self-love in the trinitarian communion?


On God’s self-limitation, order and law

‘The limitation in God is due to God Himself. Self-limitation is one of the infinite powers of Godhead. If God were not personal, if He did not contain the mighty concentrative lines of personality, He would be less than God. He would be a waste, ineffectual force, without form and void. He could, indeed, hardly be force even, which must work in lines. He would be a dim essence, and empty substance, a gaseous abstraction without contents, without feature, interest, or life. He would be without order, for order is limitation. But surely order is the Divine presence in the world, not its absence. Law is His law, not another’s law laid on Him. And personality is law and order in their highest terms. Limitation is no more undivine or incompatible with infinity in the one case than in the other. Divine law, indeed, when we express it in moral terms, what is it other than God’s self-control?’ (PT Forsyth, God the Holy Father, 34)

Violence and the Cross 2

Recently, Michael Jensen responded to my post on violence and the cross asking me to speculate on what Forsyth might say to Girard. After discerning that this Girard is different to this one I confessed that my only reading of Girard has been vicariously through Volf, and Hans Boersma’s book Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross. While I am reluctant to comment on work where I haven’t read the primary sources, and I don’t normally like to reproduce stuff that is already on my blog somewhere else, I thought that this might be of interest to some who would otherwise miss it in the comments section. Perhaps any discussion that arises will also mean that I can learn some more about Girard and maybe even feel inspired/challenged enough to actually go and read the guy’s stuff.

Boersma writes:


‘One of the main reasons that [Girard’s] theory continues to increase in popularity is that he helps Christians avoid the embarrassment of having to acknowledge that God is involved in violence, even as he expresses his most hospitable self on the cross. This gain carries the cost, however, of the denial of a good creation. Desire, as something underlying all cultural endeavor, is inherently mimetic and thus must lead to violence, Girard insists. But is it true that mimetic contagion explains all desire and that it accounts for all violence? Girard fails to acknowledge that we often desire certain objects because of their inherent value rather than simply because other models desire them. A theology of creation that affirms its inherent goodness will insist that desire can function in wholesome ways and stems not first of all from imitation but from the positive value of the created order. Girard’s atonement theology is built on an ontology of violence that leads to a negative view of culture and is thus unable to function as a solid foundation for a positive politics of hospitality. Not only does Girard regard violence as the basis of human culture, but he also finds much of the Old Testament unworthy of the nonviolent God that we have come to know in Jesus Christ. The continuity between the two Testaments gets stretched to the breaking point.’

My sense, regarding Forsyth’s response, is two fold.

Firstly, he would have never attacked Girard by name. He felt that when we we ought to expose error, we should expose the error and not attack the person. That’s the easy bit.

That said, Forsyth would see in Girard’s thinking a failure to understand not only the nature, scope and purpose of God’s atoning activity in Christ, but the nature and depth of sin and evil and the threat that sin poses not just to the world, but to God’s own being.

Whilst violence is the fruit of humanity’s angry rejection of the future intended for it by God, it also serves as part of the ‘tools’ that God uses to bring about his good purposes. So for example, Forsyth’s significant support of Britain’s role in WWI.

Forsyth insists that sin is so violent that it took the almost boisterous expression of violence (a clash of violence) to overcome it. Whenever grace and guilt collide, war it out, there will be violence – even in prayer. But it was not the violence of it that saved. It was the obedience in the midst of violence that did that. That said, Forsyth asserts that ‘it would have mattered a whole world if Jesus had met His death naturally, by accident or disease. Everything turns, not on His life having been taken from Him, but on its having been laid down. Everything, for His purpose, turns on the will to die. But, none the less, for that purpose, it had to be a death of moral violence (inflicted, that is, by human wickedness and the wresting of the law), to give its full force to both man’s sin and Christ’s blood. “Men of blood,” in the Old Testament, were not mere killers but murderers. So that we say it would have mattered a whole world if the death had not been violent and wicked, if Jesus had died of disease in His bed, or by accidental poison.’

He asserts that we feel the pain and disappointment of death as impugning the moral goodness of God. To us pain and death seem a moral outrage, a violent injustice done to the good. And it was moral outrage on God’s holiness that gave the sting and the mean misery of death for Christ. Only a great difference remains: The taste of death makes us think that it is a moral outrage on us – a tyranny; whereas Christ tasted it as the fruit of a moral outrage by us – a treason. ‘How prompt we are to accept Christ as a sympathizer with our oppressions’, he said, ‘and how slow to take Him as the accuser of our sins!’

Whether or not Girard sees more divine irony and inconsistency here than he can cope with, well I guess that that’s God’s problem – a problem that he has already taken up and answered violently in the obedience of Jesus Christ.

PS. Apologies to MJ for this being less than an ‘ideal blog entry’. See item 4 here. Learn to scroll … it’s not hard mate. You can do it. I know you can …

I Die Alive

O life! what lets thee from a quick decease ?
O death! what draws thee from a present prey?
My feast is done, my soul would be at ease,
My grace is said, O death! come take away.

I live, but such a life as ever dies;
I die, but such a death as never ends;
My death to end my dying life denies,
And life my loving death no whit amends.

Thus still I die, yet still I do remain;
My living death by dying life is fed;
Grace more than nature keeps my heart alive,
Whose idle hopes and vain desires are dead.

Not where I breathe, but where I love, I live;
Not where I love, but where I am, I die;
The life I wish must future glory give,
The death I feel in present dangers lie.

Robert Southwell, ‘I Die Alive’, in The Poetical Works of the Rev. Robert Southwell (London: John Russell Smith, 1856), 68.

Geoffrey Bingham has written a great little book opening up the idea of love as true living. It can be purchased or downloaded from here.

God as whore and church as brothel

Imagine what it would be like if you got married, and from that day onwards you saw your spouse down the street with her new boyfriend, or new girlfriend. You hear all the gossip. You know where they are. And the only time you really ever saw your partner was when they came around for sex … or they might occasionally wave to you up the street. What would it feel like? Hosea 1-2 depicts how God’s people used God when it suited them. God had brought them into a covenant relationship with him but they just treated God like a whore. This is graphically illustrated in Hosea’s own marriage. But O how great is God’s mercy. Even in the midst of all that he still won’t let go. He still won’t forget his covenant. He still does not want to be God without us!

This watercolour (c. 1888) by James Tissot (1836–1902) depicts the Prophet Hosea.

Chesterton on crime

‘You may think a crime horrible because you could never commit it. I think it horrible because I could commit it. You think of it as something like an eruption of Vesuvius; but that would not really be so terrible as this house catching on fire.’ – G. K. Chesterton, G. K. The Penguin Complete Father Brown (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 587.

Violence and the Cross

‘The violent may take, but it is the meek that inherit and the just that keep. The spirit which possesses the earth and keeps possession is inspired at the folly of the cross … “The weakness of the cross” is the greatest pitfall on earth, and it mocks the empire makers as it establishes its power upon their wreck, and thrusts its fine spells through the crevices of their untempered walls. This is all very ridiculous, of course, but they laugh best who laugh last. One sits in the heavens and laughs.’ – PT Forsyth.

On Gospel, Historical Criticism and Faith

‘It is the Gospel that must save the Church and its beliefs; it is not the Church that can ever save the Gospel. The historic Gospel saved everything at the Reformation; it saved the Church from itself, and it must go on doing so. We must not come to the Gospel with the permission of the critics, we come to criticism in the power of the Gospel. Faith does not wait upon criticism, but it is an essential condition of it. The complete critic is not a mere inquirer, but a believer. It was to believers, not critics, that the things appealed which are criticised most today. Critical energy is only just and true when it is in the hands of a Church whose heart is full of evangelical faith. The passion of an apostolic missionary faith is an essential condition to a sound criticism and a safe; and by “sound” I don’t merely mean sound to the Confessions, I mean sound to the mind; and by “safe” I do not merely mean safe for the Church, but safe for the soul. I mean that faith in the Gospel, evangelical faith, is essential for that full complete view of the case upon which sound results are based; it is essential in order to be fair to all the facts. It must enter in, not to decide whether we shall expect proved results, but to decide the results which we are to count as proved. Faith is not only an asset which criticism must include in its audit, but it is an organ that criticism must use. The eye cannot say to the ear, “I have no need of thee.”‘ PT Forsyth, ‘An Allegory of the Resurrection’, Christian World Pulpit 61 (14 May 1902): 314.

Mercy

‘How much more precious a thing to us is the mercy of God than the love of God. If the love of God is unspeakable, what must His mercy be? If the love of God is precious to us, what must His grace be?’ P. T. Forsyth, ‘Majesty and Mercy.’ Christian World Pulpit 79 (17 May 1911): 305.

On Annihilationism

It seems to me that one of the problems with the traditional doctrine of hell is its inability to provide for us a vision of creation which in its finality is without evil. Despite all God’s best efforts to sanctify the creation and turn rebels into enchanted sons and daughters, hell, at least in its more popular presentations, remains as the big black line across a page that God has made clean.

The alternatives of universalism and annihilationism raise problems as well. Although I remain convinced that the case for the later, on the basis of biblical exegesis alone, remains the stronger of the two, both reveal a theology deplete of all the revealed ingredients. Whereas the Scriptures seem to rule out the portrait of a final salvation for all, the door of possibility, and of God’s hope – a possibility and hope grounded in the nature of God’s very own being as revealed in Jesus Christ and in the Scriptures that bear witness to him – finally remains open. Despite the initial attraction of the annihilationist position as that which, at least at the end of the day, leaves every room of the universe without spot or blemish, it does so at the expense of granting evil a final victory. If annihilationism is to be defended, it must face the demon it creates, which is, in the final analysis, that evil has claimed a victim in the creation.

I confess that this topic is an ongoing wrestle for me. ‘For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.’ I welcome, as always, your thoughts.