Author: Jason Goroncy

The wounded healer …

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s heart.

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

The word ‘heal’ comes from the Old English word ‘haelen’ meaning ‘to make whole’. No healing, or cure, is complete unless it contributes to making us whole. Socrates, who ran one of the earliest, and best, fish ‘n’ chip shops in Athens in the 400’s, also had quite a few things to say about the medical theory of healing in his day. He said, ‘As it is not proper to cure the eyes without the head, nor the head without the body; so neither is it proper to cure the body without the soul.’ That healing does not happen apart from the man on the cross, in whom not only humanity was healed, but the entire moral order. But it was humanity, not as pathetic weaklings who needed that healing, but we with clubs in our sin-laden hands and proud hearts. That’s why Forsyth wrote: ‘The solution of life is not to be found in grappling with pain, but in conflict with sin. The strongest soul that ever lived was crushed by sins rather than by pains, by sins not his own, not by pains which were. Here lies the centre and secret of Christianity, not in the miracles of healing, but in the miracles of forgiveness, and in the cross, the greatest of them all.’ Forgiveness has come! Our healing is complete! Behold the man upon the cross, our sin upon his shoulders. Geoffrey Bingham expressed this beautifully in his song, O Cross of Christ, O place of bliss:


1. O Cross of Christ, O place of bliss,
Of man’s invective traitor’s kiss,
Of sin and shame, of wounds and fear,
O Cross of pain you call us near.
The world cannot escape Your Cross,
Its mind reject fore’er the loss,
The darkness of the limbo dread
From which You cried for us—the dead!


We cannot know the pain You bore,
Nor ever live the anguish sore
That tore that holy cry of shame
From hellish depths of dreadful pain.
In You the ancient evil met
The modern guilt, th’eternal debt,
The wrath of God, the curse of law,
The separation evermore.


2. The wounds that sin in us had wrought—
Unholy sickness that we caught
From evil’s madness, from the womb,
That led us to eternal doom—
These, these were there upon You laid,
You wounded were by wounds we made,
Our wounds were Yours upon the Tree,
That we into Your wounds may flee.


In You the sins of all the race
Distorted body, mind and face,
Until You seemed as man no more,
Destroyed—as Man—for evermore.
O Holy One, You suffered much
To free us from the doomful clutch
Of sin and Satan, wrath and law,
And liberate us evermore.


3. Sometimes when all the world’s asleep,
Sometimes when terror’s passions deep
Come stealing to us from their grave—
Those sins from which He came to save
Our race of doom and dreadful death—
We cry as though our latest breath
Had come at last, and we are lost,
Upon guilt’s storm forever tossed.


But grace comes throbbing through that night,
And sin’s forgiven, and holy light
Breaks to us from Your Cross and Tomb
As You come to our upper room.
O Christ now risen from the grave,
You gave Yourself ourselves to save,
And all the pains of memory
Are banished in that holy Tree.


4. The shame of guilt cannot return,
Nor fire of curse within us burn.
You sin and guilt and curse became
To save us from eternal shame.
Our spirits in Your Cross rejoice,
And with us all creation’s voice
Is lifted in the highest praise
For love and grace and all Your ways.


O Cross of Christ, O place of bliss,
Of man’s invective, traitor’s kiss,
Of sin and shame, of wounds and fear,
O Cross of pain and love so dear,
We praise our God for love that gave
As Son to die, as Son to save.
We lift our songs, our hearts adore
And worship You for evermore.

Check out the painting Resurrection, #1, The Wounded Healer Series, 1990, acrylic, cloth, gold leaf and mixed media on canvas, 72″ x 60″, at http://www.bethamesswartz.com/swartzpaintings5.html

Conscience – a poem by Grant Thorpe

Ah conscience tutored in the ways of
Rightness
Practised in the ways of
Rectitude
Raging still until each aberration
Is made good
And raging too until
Each thought is
Pure and steady

Ah conscience never satisfied
Working on until
The flesh is limp and
Mind exhausted
Urging on to kingdoms that will
Compensate and camouflage
The lack that still remains

Ah conscience
Meet your Master
Even God
Not with face all stern
And whip in hand
But in the face of Christ
Sin bearer

See there the
Thefts, adulteries and murders
And many lesser crimes
All lovingly embraced and borne
Before the Father’s holy love
Not one wild deed
Omitted
All atoned, all washed
Not one thing left to lurk or spoil
The reconciliation

Conscience
Meet your Maker
Who decreed that love
His love
Be motive all alone
Enough
To move the race to duty
And to zeal.

Make me acknowledge only
My great need of
Love
Exposure to the very heart of God
Pulsating with affections
Great and tender
Tell me when I err
In this respect alone

Do not
Stir up to
Greater deeds to
Compensate, annul or
Catch up with the past
It is against my God
I sin
‘Gainst him alone
And sin against
His loving me
And ‘tis to move against his love
To look for other
Things to change

Ah crime of deepest import
Ah deed of greatest shame
To have thought his love austere
His pleasure hard to gain
And to have turned
To idols
Enamoured so with idols
That his love laid
Unreceived

Tell me of this
Alert me at first sign
And turn your vigilance to
Any wandering from grace

Ah conscience
Be you tutored by the cross
Of Christ
Do not presume to have
A charter outside this
Call sin what God calls sin
That sin to death
Which spurns his grace

Alert me then alone
To seek outpourings of
That love—none else
What business do I have
With deeds which merely satisfy
Convention
Or my longing for
Relationships—patched up and thin
With no true love?
Require of me alone that
I ask, receive, be thankful for, and give
His love.

© Grant Thorpe, July 1991, August 2002

Censorship… don’t you just love it?

When you remember the Tiananmen Square massacre of ‘89, what do you think of? Well when you google images of ‘Tiananmen’, these are what Americans see and This is what the Chinese see. Interesting. Forsyth told us that certainty is at bottom no matter of intellect alone, nor of thought; it cannot be there without an act of will, an act of appropriation by the personality. A process of thought apart from an act of will would bring us to no conclusion, to nothing that could be called certainty. It would be but a mental panorama, a cinematogram played to a house of one. What is exhibited before us by thought must go through another process and must become our property. Thought, he said, is a work, an art, a duty, and not a mere process nor a mere spectacle. We are under obligation to seek and think the truth; we may not merely play with it, we may not loll in the stalls as it passes before us. It is a task, it is not a treat. And we do not legislate for truth; we have to see that the law of thought has its way with us. Our chief act of will is practically recognition of a gift. It is obedience to a grace, even in science. (Principle of Authority, 100-1). Now how true is that uncensored truth!

For more on this theme, check out http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4088702.stm

Life is all about perspective

This site was just too awesome to pass up: http://www.impactlab.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=7567

It cries out for a theological reflection? Anyone want to offer one? Is it about living in a lie or redefining truth? Is it about being certain of the things you think you see? Funny thing faith … this believing in advance only what makes sense in reverse. Faith, of course is not primarily a sympathy, a trust in illusion, but it is, as Forsyth contends, an ‘absolute obedience, an attitude to One Who has a right over us high above all His response to us, One to be trusted and obeyed even amid any dereliction by Him and refusal of His response.’ (See Principle of Authority, 12-13). Such faith can only come as gift and is only truly known in the cut and thrust of trusting obedience.

On giving and receiving

Miroslav Volf contends that we are incapable of giving anything that obliges God to reciprocate. For what do we have that we did not receive? Obligation? God’s or ours? Here’s a thought from Volf: ‘But rather than receiving something God needs but doesn’t have, what God receives is delight – the lover’s delight at the sight of the beloved whose very existence is that lover’s gift. What God also receives is pain – the lover’s pain when love has been betrayed.’ The point is that we are incapable of offering God a gift in such a way that will move him to be other than he is already… totally towards us in grace.

Luther on the conscience

I spent some time over the weekend re-reading one of my all-time favourite books: The Assurance of Faith: Conscience in the Theology of Martin Luther and John Calvin by Randall Zachman (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993). In the section on Luther (97 pages), he outlines that for Luther, a bad conscience is that which lacks faith and peace because it fails to hear and receive God’s word of grace, and to go on believing that Word while experiencing and seeing the opposite. God’s blessing remains hidden under a curse. At the heart of what Luther is concerned with here is the fundamental distinction between the only two available theological alternatives: (i) a theologia gloriae, a religion of the conscience, and so of the flesh which calls evil good, judges according to what it feels, is ever motivated by self-invented good works in an effort to be at peace with God, and thus never attains confidence in God’s mercy, but rather is driven to indifference, presumption and despair, and (ii) a theologia crucis, a religion of revelation, which says and believes what a thing is in contradiction to feelings and appearances, which never trusts the conscience but rather submits its accusations and acquittals to the truth of the gospel (through which is the proper interpretation of the Law) as attested to in the Scriptures and comes under the form of the cross. In other words, in the context of theologia crucis, we believe that Jesus is the Son of God, even though all we see is a shamed and abandoned man hanging on a cross. And even though the believers’ conscience may testify to the contrary, we must believe that that word concerning our forgiveness and sanctification is true and resist every lie associated with a theologia gloriae. Just as ‘nature wants to feel and be certain before she believes, grace believes before she perceives’. I’m now looking forward to seeing how Forsyth draws on Luther (as well as Kant and Maurice) in how he understands the role of the human conscience.

 

For other excellent discussions on Luther see Gerhard O. Forde, On Being A Theologian of the Cross: Reflections of Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation, 1518 (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1997). A must read! and Alister E. McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1990).

Praying with soul

The worst sin is prayerlessness. Overt sin, or crime, or the glaring inconsistencies which often surprise us in Christian people are the effect of this, or its punishment. We are left by God for lack of seeking Him. The history of the saints shows often that their lapses were the fruit and nemesis of slackness or neglect in prayer. Their life, at seasons, also tended to become inhuman by their spiritual solitude. They left men, and were left by men, because they did not in their contemplation find God; they found but the thought or the atmosphere of God. Only living prayer keeps loneliness humane. It is the great producer of sympathy. Trusting the God of Christ, and transacting with Him, we come into tune with men. Our egoism retires before the coming of God, and into the clearance there comes with our Father our brother. We realize man as he is in God and for God, his Lover. When God fills our heart He makes more room for man than the humanist heart can find. Prayer is an act, indeed the act, of fellowship. We cannot truly pray even for ourselves without passing beyond ourselves and our individual experience. If we should begin with these the nature of prayer carries us beyond them, both to God and to man. (P.T. Forsyth, The Soul of Prayer, 11-12)

In prayer we do not so much work as interwork. We are fellow workers with God in a reciprocity. And as God is the freest Being in existence, such co-operant prayer is the freest things that man can do. (P.T. Forsyth, The Soul of Prayer, 57)

Face your special weaknesses and sins before God. Force yourself to say to God exactly where you are wrong. When anything goes wrong, do not ask to have it set right, without asking in prayer what is was in you that made it go wrong. It is somewhat fruitless to ask for a general grace to help specific flaws, sins, trials, and griefs. Let prayer be concrete, actual, a direct product of life’s real experiences. Pray as your actual self, not as some fancied saint. Let it be closely relevant to your real situation. Pray without ceasing in this sense. Pray without a break between your prayer and your life. Pray so that there is a real continuity between your prayer and your whole actual life. (P.T. Forsyth, The Soul of Prayer, 64)

We are not humble in God’s sight, partly because in our prayer there is a point at which we cease to pray, where we do not turn everything out into God’s light. It is because there is a chamber or two in our souls where we do not enter in and take God with us. We hurry Him by the door as we take Him along the corridors of our life to see our tidy places or our public rooms. We ask from our prayers too exclusively comfort, strength, enjoyment, or tenderness and graciousness, and not often enough humiliation and its fine strength. We want beautiful prayers, touching prayers, simple prayers, thoughtful prayers; prayers with a quaver or a tear in them, or prayers with delicacy and dignity in them. But searching prayer, humbling prayer, which is the prayer of the conscience, and not merely of the heart or taste; prayer which is bent on reality, and to win the new joy goes through new misery if need by – are such prayers as welcome and common as they should be? (P.T. Forsyth, The Soul of Prayer, 69-70)

If we learn to pray from the Bible, and avoid a mere cento of its phrases, we shall cultivate in our prayer the large humane note of a universal gospel. Let us nurse our prayer on our study of our Bible; and let us, therefore, not be too afraid of theological prayer. (P.T. Forsyth, The Soul of Prayer, 78)

Resist God, in the sense of rejecting God, and you will not be able to resist any evil. But resist God in the sense of closing with God, cling to Him with your strength, not your weakness only, with your active and not only your passive faith, and He will give you strength. Cast yourself into His arms not to be caressed but to wrestle with Him. He loves that holy war. He may be too many for you, and lift you from your feet. But it will be to lift you from earth, and set you in the heavenly places which are their who fight the good fight and lay hold of God as their eternal life. (P.T. Forsyth, The Soul of Prayer, 92)

God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost isn’t a consulting firm we bring in to give us expert advice on how to run our lives. The gospel life isn’t something we learn about and then put together with instructions from the manufacturer; it’s something we become as God does his work of creation and salvation in us and as we accustom ourselves to a life of belief and obedience and prayer. (E. Peterson, Leap Over a Wall)

People do not drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated. (D.A. Carson, For the Love of God)

A reflection on Vincent Donovan

In The Church in the Midst of Creation, Donovan builds on his previous work, Christianity Rediscovered: An Epistle from the Masai, and in many ways it really cannot be appreciated without having first read that book. I was particularly reminded of one part of his earlier work where he writes about what he is observing amongst the Masai, an observation that is pertinent for his later book. He observes:

There is no use arguing that it isn’t true happiness they have, or that they aren’t really happy – because they are, at least in that momentary escape from their loneliness and hopelessness while drinking the rich butterfat milk of their Zebu cattle, or striding across the Masai plains, or dancing the beautiful dances of the nomads. St. Paul says this happiness is a sign of God among them. He was here before we ever got there. It is simply up to us to bring him out so they can recognise him.

Writing from back home in the United States, Donovan, in The Church in the Midst of Creation, has, between the Preface and the Epilogue, nine chapters in which he peruses back and forth across history seeing the way that the Roman Catholic Church has became standardised, specialised, and centralised (he argues largely because of the industrial revolution), with a uniformity imposed by the Vatican and a Christ who has become a European Christ and has shackled the Spirit. Donovan responds by proposing a cosmic, or planetary, Christ.

There are echoes here of a response he offered to a review of his previous book, Christianity Rediscovered, where he wrote that

While we have to admit that Western Christianity has monopolized Christ, and has shackled Christ in the bondage of a single culture to such an extent that the Western Christ has become a stumbling block for the Holy Spirit, Christ will remain, I believe, the point at which Christianity and Hinduism will meet, the point at which Christianity and every religion and culture will meet. It will serve no purpose at all to water down the heart of the Christian message to make it more acceptable to the world of humankind. We must bring the full brunt of the gospel message to the religions and cultures of the world. The understanding of Christ will undoubtedly change, and expand and grow as a result of this process, perhaps even in a frightening and unfamiliar manner, but it should have grown long ago out of the narrow dimensions of the Mediterranean Christ.

He develops this thought further in The Church in the Midst of Creation where he advocates the need for the Western Church to embrace a planetary Christ, a world Christ. He writes:

We have to admit that after all this existence and scientific scholarship, after nearly two thousand years of Christianity, the Christ that is worshipped in our churches, the Christ that is the basis for our church and all its faith life and activity, is no more than a Mediterranean Christ. That is as far as Christ has grown. European and American theologians see nothing wrong with that, nothing wrong with the fact that we have not even begun to think of, or search for, the meaning of a planetary Christ, a world Christ. We continue to let all our efforts revolve around a Mediterranean Christ. We of the West have monopolized Christ…. There is surely more to be revealed about the Christ than is already known. But we, trapped in our own culture with its exact and measured scientific view of the world, with our lack of sacramental vision, may not be the ones to discover it. Like Mary Magdelene, we are afraid to let go of Christ, to let Christ out of our grasp, out of our control.

This kind of thinking raises serious questions about how we understand the nature of Church as Incarnational. In what sense are Christ’s people his form in the world? This is a different question than that of whether of not the Church is a continuation of the Incarnation. With Forsyth, I contend that it is not. However, Donovan’s question, one of many raised in his book, is one that I wish to consider in this post, albeit briefly.

I think that we need to respond to this question firstly by seeing the Church as a kenotic community. There is at the heart of reconciliation the solidarity with the world which the Church does not take on as an extra-curricula activity, but which is constituted of its very existence as the kenotic community. The kenosis of Christ is the ‘self-emptying’ (Phil 2) which constitutes the inner movement of condescension and humility which characterises the life of the Son to the Father. As Jesus drew his disciples into his own ‘self-emptying’ life and ministry of obedience and service to the Father on behalf of the world, he formed them into a ‘kenotic community’. As those who bare continuous testimony to the presence of Christ in the world following Pentecost, the Church exists as the community where the world can discover and experience its own participation, reconciliation and salvation in the kenosis of God in Christ. Karl Barth noted that ‘The world does not know itself. It does not know God, nor man, nor the relationship and covenant between God and man. Hence it does not know its own origin, state or goal. It does not know what divides nor what unites. It does not know either its life and salvation or its death and destruction. It is blind to its own reality. Its existence is a groping in the dark.’

All this serves as a sober reminder that the Church does not ‘possess’ Christ as its own. To this end, Bonhoeffer observed that ‘Everything would be ruined if one were to try and reserve Christ for the Church and to allow the world only some kind of law, even if it were a Christian law. Christ dies for the world, and it is only in the midst of the world that Christ is Christ.’ It is not as though the world needs the Church in order to have Christ; the Church also needs the world in order to know Christ. In this sense, Christ’s existence in the world is ‘non-religious’ or ‘worldly’. Thus there is a certain ‘boundary-lessness’ to the Church in the world. Because Christ is the true centre, there are no longer any boundaries by which one can determine or define the existence of God in the world. So there is a need for us to be able to speak freely of the reality of the world for the Church, and of the solidarity between the Church and the world. The latter because the true community of Jesus Christ does not exist esoterically and invisibly but visibly and exoterically, so that it may be noted by the world around. Otto Weber notes,

Seen Christologically, every rejection of the world by the Community would have to place in question “docetically” the incarnation of Jesus Christ. It would have to have been the case that God did not become “true man” in Jesus Christ if the Community were intended not to be “truly” in the world. But above all, the victory of the Resurrected One over the “cosmos” (John 16:33) would have to be disregarded if the Community were supposed to understand the “world” solely as a confusing, alien reality, to be held at a distance and excluded.

The incarnational solidarity between Christ and the world binds the Church to the world and the world to the Church in a critical but positive tension of judgement and reconciliation, of sin and grace. As Barth says,

Solidarity with the world means full commitment to it, unreserved participation in its situation, in the promise given it by creation, in its responsibility for the arrogance, sloth and falsehood which reign within it, in its suffering under the resultant distress, but primarily and supremely in the free grace of God demonstrated and addressed to it in Jesus Christ, and therefore in its hope…. Solidarity with the world means that those who are genuinely pious approach the children of the world as such, that those who are genuinely righteous are not ashamed to sit down with the unrighteous as friends, that those who are genuinely wise do not hesitate to seem to be fools among fools, and that those who are genuinely holy are not too good or irreproachable to go down “into hell” in a very secular fashion…. since Jesus Christ is the Saviour of the world, [the Church] can exist in worldly fashion, not unwillingly nor with a bad conscience, but willingly and with a good conscience. It consists in the recognition that its members also bear in themselves and in some way actualise all human possibilities.

Given this, there is an obligation placed upon the Church towards the world. This obligation is the responsibility for the world, or to the world, which Christ assumed in coming to the World as the Word. So one cannot discharge obligation to God and at the same time be irresponsible toward the world.

But at the same time, there is a necessary contradiction which must be borne within the ‘same body’, a contradiction that Donovan, in my opinion, fails to take seriously enough, and which Hauerwas and Willimon bear witness to when they write:

The challenge facing today’s Christians is not the necessity to translate Christian convictions into a modern idiom, but rather to form a community, a colony of resident aliens which is so shaped by our convictions that no one even has to ask what we mean by confessing belief in God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The biggest problem facing Christian theology is not translation but enactment. No doubt, one of the major reasons for the great modern theologians who strove to translate our language for modernity was that the church had become so inept at enactment. Yet no clever theological moves can be substituted for the necessity of the church being a community of people who embody our language about God, where talk about God is used without apology, because our life together does not mock our words. The church is the visible, political enactment of our language of God by a people who can name their sin and accept God’s forgiveness and are thereby enabled to speak the truth in love. Our Sunday worship has a way of reminding us, in the most explicit and ecclesial of ways, of the source of our power, the peculiar nature of our solutions to what ails us.

Returning back now to our earlier discussion regarding that necessary contradiction between Christ and the world, we might deduce that the reconciliation of the world to God produces and sustains the contradiction for the sake of its healing. Thus, the ‘kenotic community’ exposes the contradiction by virtue of its solidarity with the world. Barth discusses the problem between the reconciliation actualised in Christ and the contemporary situation of the Christian in the world as the ‘divine problem’, and says that God takes up this ‘problem’ and solves it in the presence and action of the Holy Spirit.

Thus there remains a ‘difference in solidarity’. ‘In Jesus Christ the community and the rest of humanity constitute a differentiated, yet in this differentiation firmly integrated, whole.’ This leads to a three-part conclusion: (i) the world would be lost without Jesus Christ and his word and work; (ii) the world would not necessarily be lost if there were no Church; and (iii) the Church would be lost if it had no counterpart in the world. The ‘difference’ is the presence of Christ – ‘For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them’ (Matt 18:20).

With this theological horizon, and motivated by his conviction that God is still creating and calling the Church to participate in what is its ontological purpose for being, Donovan appeals for the people to “refound” the Church. His experience with the Masai, and what this experience has helped him to discover in Scripture, has clearly played a significant role in shaping his sense of creation’s direction. Writing out of a post-Vatican II context, he finds Scripture pointing to an ecclesiastical model with increased simplicity in its lifestyle, with less oppressive hierarchy, with less space between leaders and people at all levels, and with a keener awareness of the pressing needs of a close-by world. In his last chapter, he gives us a glimpse at how such a congregation could look. He also espouses an approach to evangelism whereby both parties are changed by God during their communicative interchange. It is with this awareness that he argues for “evangelization of culture” which includes genuinely mutual dialogue with the other major faiths of the world. His argument is interesting: that convert-making is geared to individuals and its success is measured numerically, when what is required is to evangelise the whole culture.

Unfortunately, he falls victim, I believe, to contemporary culture’s addiction to “new age” expectations. Citing as his gurus Sorokin, Rahner and Toffler, he argues that our time (written in 1989) is a time of significant change to the point where we are “an age in the process of breaking up”. His discussion is helpful in that he argues for the need for the Church to ‘grow-up’ to meet these changing conditions, but I wish that his grounding in Scripture reminded him that the new age is God’s gift in Christ and is not a pseudohistorical concept.

In light of this, NT Wright, in a discussion of Romans 9-11, offers some poignant insights into the Church’s ontological nature as that which issues from the Cross – that place/event which serves as the passionate concern of the Church, led by the Spirit, as the loving justice of God to all the world in real space and time. He writes,

And when the church really turns to face this task, as it must if it is to be true to its vocation, it will find (as Paul saw in 2 Corinthians particularly) that its role is Christ-shaped: to bear the pain and shame of the world in its own body, that the world may be healed. And with this we realize (in case it were not already apparent) that there is no room in this hermeneutic for a Christian or ecclesial triumphalism, which is precisely what Paul is opposing in Romans 11. The church is called to do and be for the world what the Messiah was and did for Israel … The church must find out the pain of the world, and must share it and bear it.

Another issue that is raised by Donovan, moreover, raises this issue of the Church community’s place in time and space. In other words, in what sense is the Church an eschatological community? Surely the Church is the community that is determined by its final destiny, the resurrection of the Incarnate Word-Son of God, Jesus Christ. The Church’s ‘now-life’ is lived in this realised sense as Christ’s presence in the Church and world is as the Coming or Last One, and it’s in this sense that his ministry is one of reconciliation, liberation and hope.

Karl Barth wrote that “We must understand that God is the measure of all reality and propriety, understand that eternity exists first and then time, and therefore the future first and then the present.” In this sense the Church is simultaneously the ‘kenotic community’ and the ‘ek-static community’. The ek-static dimension of the Church’s life is its orientation toward the ultimate destiny, by which it ‘stands out’ (ek-stasis) of its existence in solidarity with the world toward the source of its life and being in the Christ who is coming.

A brief story. Imagine that geese could talk, Kierkegaard once said, and that they arranged things so that they too could have their Church services and their worship:

Every Sunday they would assemble together and a gander would preach. The essential content of the sermon was the exalted destiny of the geese, the exalted goal for which the creator had destined geese (and every time his name was named all the geese curtsied and the ganders bowed their heads). With the help of their wings they could fly away to far countries, blessed countries, where they really were at home; for here they were just like exiles. And so every Sunday. Then the gathering broke up, and every goose waddles home. Then the next Sunday off they went to the service again, then home again. That was all. They throve and grew fat, they became plump and tender… that was all. For while the sermon sounded so exalted on Sundays, on Mondays they would tell one another of the fate of the goose who wanted to take his destiny seriously, with the help of the wings the creator had given it. And they spoke of the horrors it had to endure. But they prudently kept this knowledge among themselves. For, of course, to speak of it on Sundays was most unsuitable, for as they said, in that case it would be obvious that our service would be a mockery both of God and of ourselves. There were also among the geese some that looked ill and thin. Of them the others said, “You see, that’s what comes from being serious about wanting to fly. It is because they are always thinking of flying that they get thin and do not thrive, and do not have God’s grace as we do. That is why we get plump and fat and tender, for it is by God’s grace that one gets plump and fat and tender.

So it is with Christians, added Keirkegaard: they conclude that the domesticating grace of God is not meant to take seriously the wings of the Spirit, for to do so emaciates one’s well-being and destroys one’s peace as an earth-bound creature. Whereas, in fact, the wings are meant to be used – humans have Spirit, and thus are destined to live a transcendent life of ek-statis, the content of which is love.

Forsyth’s Moral Humanity

Human beings, says Forsyth, ‘were made with a moral nature for supremely moral issues’. To deny or disguise this with some kind of Hegelian idealism, or to seek to explore this reality within the scope of empirical science, is to fraud human nature as it truly is and to rob human persons of obligation, responsibility, and freedom of soul, which is ‘the real spring of human progress and the real condition of glory’, and to give them over to ‘the vagrancy of the moment’s appetite and the slavery of chance desires.’ To ignore this is not only to live in unreality, ‘severed from the great moral whole which gives [us our] reality’, but is to undermine the whole economy of the human soul and its created freedom, and to cheat faith, even Jesus’ faith, of its ‘one creative, authoritative, life-making, life-giving, life-shaping power.’ That is why ‘the man of mere culture is shut out from the best it is in him to be.’



For P. T. Forsyth 1848–1921

Eternal God, supreme in holiness,
whom all our self-made goodness must betray:
from your great majesty
pour out your light, expose our emptiness
and by your judgement, snatching pride away,
give us humility.

What but your holy love’s stupendous grace,
Which knew the outcome, could have left us free,
in disobedience,
to break away, to turn from your embrace,
and choose the shackles of sin’s slavery,
the death of innocence?

Your holy love condemns us all, it slays
the self-claimed virtue that insults your name,
the worthless pride we wear;
your holy love alone has power to raise
our self-inflicted souls from death and shame,
to save us from despair.

Christ, lifted on the Cross for us, you died
to bear the judgement of love’s holiness;
there, having heard Love’s call.
you offered up, in being crucified,
Love’s sacrifice of true obedience,
That would redeem us all.

The unspoiled bliss of Eden could not lift
the heart so high as these dead souls you raise,
nor could we ever grow
to reach the holiness we have as gift,
in which we share a depth of joy and praise
that angels never know.

– Alan Gaunt, May 1997

The Killing Tree

Arms bare
bloodied sap,
stripped of all pretense,
simplicity giving way to strange beauty.
Alone, yet koinoniaed
Violence, yet concord
No form to desire this ugly tree
yet satisfied
the satisfaction of misplacement.
Its white crooked limbs stretch laboriously upward,
Longing …

A germ so long ago planted
out of season, yet for a time.
Once being about a business
Now being about a business … aching
forlorn and isolated,
rootedness in desiccated ground … and waiting …
Will it spring again?

© Jason Goroncy, 3 March 2006. (NB. The first stanza of this poem is a reworked version of an awesome piece at http://trinitarianlife.blogspot.com/).

‘The Logic of Hell’ by Jürgen Moltmann

Unknown - Resurrection of Christ and the Harrowing of Hell (Russian, early C16th)The logic of hell is nothing other than the logic of human free will, in so far as this is identical with freedom of choice. The theological argument runs as follows: ‘God whose being is love preserves our human freedom, for freedom is the condition of love. Although God’s love goes, and has gone, to the uttermost, plumbing the depth of hell, the possibility remains for each human being of a final rejection of God, and so of eternal life’. Does God’s love preserve our free will, or does it free our enslaved will which has become unfree though the power of sin? Does God love free men and women, or does he seek the men and women who have become lost. It is apparently not Augustine who is the father of Anglo-Saxon Christianity; the Church Father who secretly presides over it is his opponent Pelagius.

The first conclusion, it seems to me, is that it is inhumane, for there are not many people who can enjoy free will where their eternal fate in heaven or hell is concerned. What happens to the people who never had the choice, or never had the power to decide? The children who died early, the severely handicapped, the people suffering from geriatric diseases? Are they in heaven, in total non being, or somewhere between, in a limbo? What happens to the billions of people whom the gospel has never reached and who were never faced with the choice? What happens to God’s chosen people Israel, the Jews, who are unable to believe in Christ? Are all the adherents of other religions destined for annihilation? And not least: how firm must our own decision of faith be if it is to preserve us from total non being? Anyone who faces men and women with the choice of heaven or hell, does not merely expect too much of them. It leaves them in a state of uncertainty, because we cannot base the assurance of our salvation on the shaky ground of our own decisions. If we think about these questions, we have to come to the conclusion that in the end not many are going to be with God in heaven; most people are going to be in total non being. Or is the presupposition of this logic of hell perhaps an illusion the presupposition that it all depends on the human being’s free will?

If ultimately, after God’s final judgment on human decisions of will, all that is left is ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’, we still have to ask ourselves: what is going to happen to the earth, and all the earthly creatures, which the Creator after all found to be ‘very good’? If they too are to disappear into ‘total non being’, because they are no longer required, how can there then be a new earth’?

The logic of hell seems to me not merely inhumane but also extremely atheistic: here the human being in his freedom of choice is his own lord and god. His own will is his heaven or his hell. God is merely the accessory who puts that will into effect. If I decide for heaven, God must put me there; if I decide for hell, he has to leave me there. If God has to abide by our free decision, then we can do with him what we like. Is that ‘the love of God’? Free human beings forge their own happiness and are their own executioners. They do not just dispose over their lives here; they decide on their eternal destinies as well. So they have no need of any God at all. After a God has perhaps created us free as we are, he leaves us to our fate. Carried to this ultimate conclusion, the logic of hell is secular humanism, as Feuerbach, Marx and Nietzsche already perceived a long time ago.

The Christian doctrine of hell is to be found in the gospel of Christ’s descent into hell, not in a modernisation of hell into total non being. Our century has produced more infernos than all the centuries before us: The gas ovens of Auschwitz and the atomizing of Hiroshima heralded an age of potential mass annihilation through ABC weapons. So many people have experienced hells! It is pointless to deny hell. It is a possibility that is constantly round about us and within us. In this situation, the gospel about Christ’s descent into hell is particularly relevant: Christ suffered the ‘inescapable remoteness from God’ and the ‘God forsakenness’ that knows no way out, so that he could bring God to the God forsaken. He comes ‘to seek that which is lost’. He suffered the torments of hell so that for us they are not hopeless and without escape. Christ brought hope to the place where according to Dante all who enter must ‘abandon hope’. ‘If I make my bed in hell thou art there’ (Ps 139:8). Through his sufferings Christ has destroyed hell. Hell is open: “Hell where is thy victory?’ (I Cor 15:55).

For Luther, hell is not a place in the next world, the underworld; it is an experience of God. For him, Christ’s descent into hell was his experience of God forsakenness from Gethsemane to Golgotha. In the crucified Christ we see what hell is, because through him it has been overcome. The true universalitv of God’s grace is not grounded in ‘secular humanism’. It is on that humanism, rather as the logic of free will shows that the double end is based: heaven hell, being non being. But the universality of God’s grace is grounded on the theology of the cross. This is the way it was presented by all the Christian theologians who were criticized for preaching ‘universal reconciliation’, most recently Karl Barth. In his ‘confession of hope’ the Swabian revivalist preacher Christoph Blumhardt (who profoundly influenced modern Protestant theology in Germany) put it this way: ‘There can be no question of God’s giving up anything or anyone in the whole world, either today or in all eternity. The end has to be: Behold, everything is God’s! Jesus comes as the one who has borne the sins of the world. Jesus can judge but not condemn. My desire is to have preached this as far as the deepest depths of hell, and I shall never be confounded.’

Judgment is not God’s last word. Judgment establishes in the world the divine righteousness on which the new creation is to be built. But God’s last word is ‘Behold, I make all things new’ (Rev 21:5). From this no one is excepted. Love is God’s compassion with the lost. Transforming grace is God’s punishment for sinners. It is not the right to choose that defines the reality of human freedom. It is the doing of the good.

Some thoughts on reconciliation from The Work of Christ
  • ‘And Paul has a word of his own to describe Christ’s work – the word ”reconciliation”. But he thinks of reconciliation not as a doctrine, but an act of God.’ (p. 44)
  • ‘The most important thing in all the world, in the Bible or out of it, is something that God has done – forever, finally done. And it is this; reconciliation.’ (p. 45)
  • ‘… this reconciliation, this atonement, means change of relation between God and man – man, mind you, not two or three men, not several groups of men, but man, the human race as one whole.’ (p. 57)
  • God ‘was not trying, not taking steps to provide means of reconciliation, not opening doors of reconciliation if we would only walk in at them, not labouring toward reconciliation…but ‘God was in Christ reconciling’ actually reconciling, finishing the work. It was not a tentative, preliminary affair. Reconciliation was finished in Christ’s death. Paul did not preach a gradual reconciliation. He preached what the old divines used to call the finished work. He did not preach a gradual reconciliation that was to become the reconciliation of the world only piecemeal, as men were induced to accept it, or were affected by the gospel. He preached something once for all – a reconciliation which is the base of every soul’s reconcilement, not an invitation only.’ (pp. 85-6)
  • ‘What you have face to face with God in the Old Testament, is a collective nation, Israel. We shall never read the Old Testament with true understanding until we realise that … that the visà-vis of God in the Old Testament is Israel, and not the individual Jew.’ (pp. 94-5)
  • ‘We must, therefore, avoid every idea of atonement which seems to reduce it to God’s dealing with a mass of individuals instead of with the race as a whole.’ (p.96)
  • ‘To reduce the reconciliation merely to the aggregate of individual conversions would be a total misrepresentation of New Testament reconciliation, which is both solidary and final.’ (p. 100)
  • ‘What we are tempted to think of in our common version of Christianity is a mass of people, great or small, a mass of individuals, each one of whom makes his own terms with God and gets discharge of his sin. It is salvation by private bargain. In conversion every individual makes his own peace with God through Jesus Christ, so that the work of God becomes a mere change of attitude, feeling, or temper on the side of man after man. That is not the New Testament idea.’ (pp.106-7)
  • ‘Reconciliation is not the result of a change in God from wrath to love. It flows from the changeless will of a loving God.’ (p. 180)
  • ‘What we have in Christ’s work is not the mere pre-requisite or condition of reconciliation, but the actual and final effecting of it in principle. He was not making it possible, he was doing it.’ (p.182)

A proposal…

Peter Taylor Forsyth has been a subject of a number of studies of which the focus has been mostly, and understandably, on issues of christology, atonement, sacraments, homiletics and pastoral ministry. More recently, Leslie McCurdy has done us a great service in his project of understanding and interpreting Forsyth’s theology under the guise of God’s ‘holy love’ as the key ingredient in Forsyth’s atonement theology. Wanting to further broaden this trend, my project explores whether Forsyth’s theology might best be understood through the grid of a massively broad vision of the sanctification of all things to the glory of God. If the answer is ‘Yes’, how is this sanctification achieved? And by whom? And how does creation participate in such a work, if at all?

Kuyper on Calvinism and the Arts: A Theological Reflection

Kuyper on Calvinism and the Arts: A Theological Reflection

Jason Goroncy, February 2006

Unless otherwise stated, references are to A Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1931).

Why didn’t reading Kuyper on the arts inspire me to go and write a song?

Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920), the founder of neo-Calvinism (or Kuyperianism), worked as a pastor, theologian, newspaper editor (for two newspapers), and politician in the Netherlands, organising the Netherlands’ first political party. In his spare time, he also started the Free University of Amsterdam, and served as Prime Minister.

In his chapter on Calvinism and Art, Kuyper makes plain his three-pronged agenda: (i) Why Calvinism was not allowed to develop an art-style of its own; (ii) What flows from its principle for the nature of art; and (iii) What it has actually done for its advancement. The chapter follows this structure.

Many who were both inside and outside Calvinism saw it as merely a doctrinal and ecclesiological position, but Kuyper was resolute that Calvinism be understood as a comprehensive worldview, and argued that ‘Calvinism made its appearance, not merely to create a different Church-form, but an entirely different form for human life, to furnish human society with a different method of existence, and to populate the world of the human heart with different ideals and conceptions’ (p. 17).

Under the umbrella of an emphasis on divine sovereignty, Kuyper’s Calvinistic vision called people to thoughtful, active, artistic, engagement with – and in – the world precisely because the world, and all that is in it, is God’s. According to Kuyper, there is no such thing as truly secular, or religiously independent, art. This is to say more than simply that no one works in a vacuum. It is to state that all art is ultimately derived from Religion – Christian or otherwise – although this may come via political ideology, the latter illustrated in Roman and Byzantinian architecture (pp. 149-51). How could it be otherwise if God is indeed ‘the deepest root’ (p. 151) of all human life? With the secular-sacred divide abolished, human creatures are those ‘who, priestlike, must consecrate to God the whole of creation, and all life thriving in it’ (p. 52). This gives all of life a purpose that Christian dualism cannot deliver. All of life is entirely meaningful to God and must be lived for His glory. It was in this, Kuyper argued, that Calvinism freed art, and artists, from the shackles (and pockets) of the Church and gave art back to the world.

Kuyper’s doctrine of common grace, ‘by which God, maintaining the life of the world, relaxes the curse which rests upon it, arrests its process of corruption, and thus allows the untrammelled development of our life in which to glorify Himself as Creator’ (p. 30), empowers God’s people – indeed all people – for engagement in the world. Because of this common grace, Kuyper concludes that ‘the life of the world is to be honoured in its independence, and that we must, in every domain, discover the treasures and develop the potencies hidden by God in nature and in human life’ (p. 31). In Kuyper’s vision, monastic withdrawal from the world is not an option. More importantly for our purposes here, Kuyper affirmed Calvin’s insistence that human artistry is a gift given by, and pleasing to, God, whether or not the artist is a confessing Christian (p. 160-61).

But here there is an important inconsistency in Kuyper’s thought. When it came to science, education and, arguably, politics, Kuyper called for a distinctively Christian expression on the basis of the antithesis between Christian and non-Christian worldviews. However, on art, Kuyper leaned much more heavily in the direction of emphasising common grace: ‘Aesthetic genius, if I may so call it, had been implanted by God Himself in the Greek, and only by hailing again, amid loud rejoicings, the fundamental laws of art, which Greek genius had discovered, could art justify her claim to an independent existence’ (p. 159; cf. p. 162). Why did he not allow his emphasis on common grace enough command in the spheres of science and education? According to Kuyper, the Greeks had discovered God’s fundamental law for art, and as such provided the foundation upon which all art should be built. This conclusion is not only inconsistent with his view of science and education, but guts the arts of their true foundation in the incarnate life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Kuyper never makes it clear why science needed to be built on a Christian foundation, but art did not. One gets the impression that, for Kuyper, Athens is good enough for art, but for more serious (in his view) human endeavours, one must go to Geneva. Is it because he fears that art makes a more dangerous master than a willing servant and is much harder to harness after it has been freed by reformation faith? Or is it because at the end of the day, i.e. despite his comments regarding the necessity of art to permeate the whole of human life (p. 163), he considers art an ‘optional extra’, a luxury, of human being. (On this see PT Forsyth, Religion in Recent Art, 145-6; cf. pp. 2-4)

But why is Athens good enough for art? Surely religion has done more for art than art has done for it. Did art make or break Athens? If Kuyper is right in affirming this for other human pursuits, why not for art?

On a related note, Kuyper states that the reason that Calvinism did not develop its own architectural style was because it was committed to a ‘higher principle’ (pp. 145-6) and because it had ‘reached a so much higher stage of religious development’ (p. 152), though one is left to wonder exactly what this ‘higher principle’ and ‘higher stage’ might be. Again, Kuyper notes that ‘Calvinism was neither able, nor even permitted, to develop an art-style of its own from its religious principle. To have done this would have been to slide back to a lower level of religious life. On the contrary, its nobler effort must be to release religion and divine worship more and more from its sensual form and to encourage its vigorous spirituality’ (p. 149). Again, what is this ‘vigorous spirituality’ that Calvinism sets one free for, and why are the arts (materiality?) seemingly excluded? Furthermore, why is art, which Kuyper refers to as ‘one of the richest gifts of God’ (p. 143) to humanity, identified with immaturity? Is Kuyper too shackled to Hegel at this point?

Kuyper scraped the bottom of the barrel to find support in Calvin’s references to art. In the Institutes, the only references to art/ists are largely negative, discussed in the context of idolatry in 1.11.12, and the Creator/creature distinction in 1.5.5. There is a brief mention of artistic expression as evidence of the imago dei, particularly when accompanied by the ministry of the Holy Spirit in 2.2.14-16 (cf. Tracts 1:352). Calvin’s commentaries are little fuller with references, as is betrayed by Kuyper himself in the need to resort to the example of Jubal and Tubal-cain in Genesis 4:21-22. This is not to say that Calvin’s theology does not offer a rich canvas on which the artist can begin. On the contrary, despite his seemingly personal indifference to art (as opposed to Luther), the landscape and depth of Calvin’s theological vision, not least his doctrine of a ‘big’ God, and of creation, makes human artistry both inevitable and glorious.

What Calvinism brought to the arts was:
(i) a positive doctrine of creation;
(ii) a grown up God big enough to handle the world He had made;
(iii) a ‘profound conception of religious liberty’ (p. 147);
(iv) the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers (p. 168);
(v) the release of it being the exclusive domain of the rich and powerful (p. 165-8);
(vi) a sense of the importance of human vocation;
(vii) a God-honouring alternative to the Renaissance;
(viii) a God-honouring secularism;
(ix) an affirmation that human artistry is a gift given by, and pleasing to, God, regardless of any religious commitment;
(x) a broad vision of human society; and
(xi) the means through which artistic expression was freed from its ecclesiastically controlled chains (p. 167).

A final comment: Roy Attwood has helpfully reminded us that the Creator of the aesthetic sphere calls His image bearers to be busy doing faithful aesthetic acts: ‘While the world may be busy pursuing “art for art’s sake” or treating aesthetics like it rested on the bottom of the food chain, Christians should adorn their lives, their homes, their worship with humble acts of aesthetic faithfulness because they know the Creator and Lord of Aesthetics delights in them.’ In God’s first act of creation, God gave those who bear His image the capacity to also be creators, to offer back to Him – everlastingly – faithful, and new, aesthetic acts for His glory and for the delight of our fellow creatures. From the very beginning, the Lord of Aesthetics called His covenant children to be busy aesthetically. But it awaited the ultimate revelation of God’s creativity which concerned not the calling forth the creation in an act of creative love, but in calling it back as a new creation in grace, to give art its true meaning. In other words, Art matters not primarily because the creation has been created by God, (‘No Art is possible to a religion which begins with a text like “Cursed be the ground”.’ Forsyth, Art, 144) or even because it has been enfleshed by Him, but because it has been redeemed by Him in His most creative act. Only a world not merely enfleshed but crucified and re-created in a Holy Redeemer can offer to the arts any stable footing.

I wish that Kuyper saw and emphasised that this, too, is something that the reformation rediscovered.

Some discussion starters:

§ How accurately does Kuyper reflect Calvin/ism?

§ ‘What is the world that art takes for granted?’ (Rowan Williams, Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love. Harrisburg: Morehouse, 2005, 135) If, as Williams puts it, ‘art helps us to understand creation’ (Ibid., 161), what sort of creation does Kuyper present to us via his views on art? Is Kuyper’s world a world in which we are invited to look through or to enjoy and affirm the integrity of for its own sake?

§ ‘Would a world without art lose one of its ideal spheres?’ (p. 152)

§ How does one ‘use’ art prophetically to name the truths that (i) the creation is good, (ii) sin is a reality, (iii) sin does not have the last word, i.e. hope is certain?

§ Has Protestantism removed the arts from the cathedral only to place it in a gallery?

§ How does art ‘not merely … observe everything visible and audible, to apprehend it, and reproduce it artistically, but … discover in those natural forms the order of the beautiful, and … produce a beautiful world that transcends the beautiful of nature’ (p. 154; cf. p. 156-7, 163)? Is there genuine newness involved here, or merely the disclosing of what is hidden? Does art exist to name what is? To create something truly new, i.e. that wasn’t before? To surprise God? To hallow the ‘ordinary’? To spiritualise the material? How are artists able not only ‘to produce a beautiful world that transcends the beautiful of nature’ but also to perfect Nature (Forsyth)? Is this precisely not the very activity of the Sabbath day, thus linking it to both creation and redemption?

For, don’t you mark? we’re made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;
And so they are better, painted – better to us,
Which is the same thing. Art was given for that;
(Robert Browning, Fra Lippo Lippi, 1855)

If, as Browning states it, the point of painting something is not to reproduce it exactly (which is impossible anyway), but rather to represent it in such a way that it enables others to see the reality of that which is represented for the first time, (‘Art is interpretation’, Forsyth) in what sense might it be fair to envisage human creative activity as ‘unreal’? Are reproductive prints art?

§ What are we to make of Kuyper’s comment concerning the prophetic necessity in art itself to refuse to accept the world as it appears, i.e., that ‘art has the mystical task of reminding us in its productions of the beautiful that was lost and of anticipating its perfect coming luster’ (p. 155)? What does one think that Kuyper thinks that artists will do in the new creation?

§ Affirming that ‘the world after the fall is no lost planet’ (p. 162), Kuyper goes on to say that ‘the world now, as well as in the beginning, is the theater for the mighty works of God and humanity remains a creation of His hand, which, apart from salvation, completes under this present dispensation, here on earth, a mighty process, and in its historical development is to glorify the name of Almighty God’ (p. 162). In what sense can human artistry be said to contribute to creation’s completion, or continuation?

§ Does the particular doctrine of election, as expressed by Kuyper on pp. 166-7, still offer the same liberating power for artists?

§ Are we convinced of Kuyper’s argument (pp. 165f.) that had the Reformation not touched Europe so deeply, Rembrandt (if he painted at all) would have painted differently? Why? Why not?

§ Is Kuyper’s argument sufficiently ‘Christian’? What difference would a more intentionally (i) Trinitarian, (ii) Incarnational, and (iii) Soteriological theology, make to Kuyper’s argument and justification for the arts?

§ In light of the ugliness, and hidden beauty, of the Christian gospel, Jüngel writes: ‘Beauty and art are both welcome and dangerous competitors with the Christian kerygma, for in the beautiful appearance they anticipate that which faith has to declare, without any beautiful appearance and indeed in contrast to it: namely, the hour of truth’ (Theological Essays II, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000, 81). How can this tension be overcome so that art can be considered not as an ‘optional extra’ of human being, or of the telling of good news, but as the constraining means of that being and telling?