Author: Jason Goroncy

Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping

Having thoroughly enjoyed Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead some time ago, I’ve finally gotten around to ordering a copy of her Housekeeping. What spurred this huge plunge of a couple of pounds (33p +p/h) was this fan letter to Robinson posted in Sunday’s New York Times. Here’s a snippert:

There is something so familiar (and familial) in your book’s battle of chaos with humble order. There is a joy in its readiness to care and feed and rescue even the ghosted children. The house at its center reminds me of the house all children draw. There is the work’s certainty that Escape and Transcendence — across one suspended railroad tie at a time — is basically a normative day for most of us on earth.

What I find harder to describe … is how the novel “took” the colors of everyone’s recent struggles, their hard-won victories. Your book seemed to give back whatever a particular reader sought, and at whatever level of questioning could be offered during this reading of the novel. The work offers an un-saccharine promise: that struggle itself remains our sole guaranteed transcendence. A Protestant vision.

After much study, I don’t know how you did it. The book is so much about its making and yet all traces of construction seem obscured. “Housekeeping” seems the least autobiographical work I know and yet it’s also the one closest-in. It’s theological, but it always pertains as immediately as any fairy tale does. Harsh in its outcomes, it’s also a psychological work of such density, restraint. The limpid acceptance of death finds reflection in all its aqueous properties. There are few living males in it and little dry land. Somehow it starts with death and moves toward life, a reversal of most books I know.

I mention this because for the next fortnight, the NYT will be hosting a discussing of the book and some of my regular readers may be interested in getting on board. They’ve already posted the following links:

Eberhard Jüngel on Capital Punishment

‘To make natural death possible for all men means to scorn and threaten death in the world. To mock at death is certainly not to scorn life. To threaten death is to refrain from posing any threat to life. Since faith knows God and God alone as the boundary of man’s life, it is involved in social terms in a struggle against death. Hope in the God who in death shelters and surrounds us sets us free from egoistic concern about our own end. That which takes its place is a concern for the life of others. To every person a time is allotted so that in their own time they may also have their history. It is a matter for God and God alone to set life’s temporal limits. It is faith’s duty to protest openly against every attempt to claim the right to set temporal limits to human life. No man, no institution, no legal administration has the right to mark out the temporal boundaries of man’s finite life. The Christian has the duty to oppose actively every effort to gain control of death. In every sphere of life, to have death at one’s disposal is something thoroughly reprehensible. And if God has taken death upon himself in order to bind it to himself for ever, then death cannot any longer be regarded as a legal remedy. In the light of this, ‘capital punishment’ becomes a ‘crimen laesae maiestatis’, a ‘lèse-majesté’ against the crucified God’. – Eberhard Jüngel, Death: The Riddle and the Mystery (trans. Iain Nicol and Ute Nicol; Edinburgh: The Saint Andrew Press, 1975), 133-4.

Eberhard Jüngel on Salvation

‘Salvation … can only mean that it is the life man has lived that is saved, not the man is saved out of this life. The meaning of salvation is that God saves this life which we live. It involves the participation of this earthly, limited life in the life of God; the sharing of this temporally limited life in God’s eternity; the participation of a life which has incurred guilt in the glory of God. To share in God’s glory means that man in honourably acquitted of his guilt. It is as finite that man’s finite life is made eternal. Not by endless extension – there is no immortality of the soul – but through participation in the very life of God. Our life is hidden in his life. In this sense the briefest form of the hope of resurrection is the statement: ‘God is my eternity’. He will make everything whole; everything, including what we have been. Our person will then be our manifest history’. – Eberhard Jüngel, Death: The Riddle and the Mystery (trans. Iain Nicol and Ute Nicol; Edinburgh: The Saint Andrew Press, 1975), 120.

Jürgen Moltmann lectures

Andy Rowell recently made available two audio discussions featuring Jürgen Moltmann, recorded at the Society for Pentecostal Studies and the Wesleyan Theological Society 3rd Joint Meeting at Duke Divinity School, March 13-15, 2008. The recordings are not brilliant, but well worth persisting with.

Thursday, March 13, Jürgen Moltmann – Sighs, Signs, and Significance: A Theological Hermeneutics of Nature

Friday, March 14, Jürgen Moltmann – Darwin, Theology, and Culture. Respondents: Ellen Davis, Frederick L. Ware (whose response is downloadable here, and Barry Callen.

Many thanks to Andy for making these available.

Growing up under militarisation

The Karen Human Rights Group has just released a 174-page report on the effects on children growing up in the context of violence – because of both ongoing armed conflict in Burma and Karen State (Kawthoolei; lit. ‘the land without evil’) and because of other more serious structural violence committed by the State. The report makes for sombre reading even while its very existence is a voice of hopeful protest; or, as Moltmann puts it, ‘There is already true life in the midst of the life that is false’. Here’s a blurb:

As the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), the military junta currently ruling Burma, works to extend and consolidate its control over all areas of Karen State, local children, their families and communities confront regular, often violent, abuses at the hands of the regime’s officers, soldiers and civilian officials. While the increasing international media attention on the human rights situation in Burma has occasionally addressed the plight of children, such reporting has been almost entirely incident-based, and focused on specific, particularly emotive issues, such as child soldiers. Although incident-based reporting is relevant, it misses the far greater problems of structural violence, caused by the oppressive social, economic and political systems commensurate with militarisation, and the combined effects of a variety of abuses, which negatively affect a far larger number of children in Karen State. Furthermore, focusing on specific, emotive issues sensationalises the abuses committed against children and masks the complexities of the situation. In reports on children and armed conflict in Karen State and elsewhere, individual children’s agency, efforts to resist abuse and capacity to deal with the situations they live in, as well as the efforts made by their families and communities to provide for and protect them, tend to be marginalised and ignored. Drawing on over 160 interviews with local children, their families and communities, this report seeks to provide a forum for these people to explain in their own words the wider context of abuse and their own responses to attempts at denying children their rights. With additional background provided by official SPDC press statements and order documents, international media sources, reports by international aid agencies, as well as academic studies, this report argues that only by listening to local voices regarding the situation of abuse in which they live and taking as a starting point for advocacy and action local conceptions of rights and violations can external actors avoid the further marginalisation of children living in these areas and begin to build on villagers’ own strategies for resisting abuse and claiming their rights.

The full report can be downloaded here as a pdf.

As for Burma’s ruling junta, that trinity of evil – Maung Aye, Than Shwe and Shwe Mann – convert or kill them Lord. How long, O Lord? How long?

James Fraser of Brae on Assurance

Every now and then (particularly for those of us who are committed to reading work from previous centuries) one comes across words that are as quotable and as edifying as – though shorter than – the title of the book from where they came. One example:

‘The Doctrine of the universal Extent of Christ’s Death doth yield a clear Ground and an infallible Evidence for the strongest Faith, so as to remove all doubting, and to fill the Heart with joy unspeakable and full of glory.’ These words were written by James Fraser of Brae in his A TREATISE on JUSTIFYING FAITH, Wherein is opened the GROUND of BELIEVING, or the Sinners sufficient Warrant to take hold of what is offered in the everlasting GOSPEL. Together with an APPENDIX concerning, the OBJECT of CHRIST’S DEATH, unfolding the dangerous and various pernicious Errors that hath been vented about it (Edinburgh: William Gray, 1749), 201. While lengthy titles like this are no friend of those working on a tight word limit, you just gotta love ‘em all the same!

Unlike that crippling and anxiety-producing theology of federal Calvinism which finally bids believers to turn towards themselves (and their works) for assurance, James Fraser of Brae (like Calvin and Knox before him) entreats us to look to Christ alone as the objective mirror of our election in whose incarnate person and atoning work we know liberating assurance, all doubting is removed, and hearts are filled ‘with joy unspeakable‘. Nearly 200 years later, that same evangelical Gospel would erupt from the lips and pen of another Scot, PT Forsyth:

Now for this tremendous certainty there is no other foundation than the historical revelation and salvation in Christ as the eternal and comprehensive object of God’s loving will and choice, the Captain of the elect. We have not sufficient ground outside that for believing or trusting such a God. We cannot start with a view of God reached on speculative or other similar grounds, and then use Christ as a mere means for confirming it or giving it practical effect. That would mean a certainty higher than Christ’s, and the superfluity of Christ when the end had been reached. Which is not the Christian Gospel, be that Gospel right or wrong. In that Gospel our final certainty can never be detached from what Christ did, what He is and does for eternity. The eternal election is in Christ, “Mine elect in whom My soul delighteth”; and only in Christ does faith at every stage realise it. Hence it has been well pointed out that we must not preach election to produce the certainty of Christian faith, but preach Christ and faith in Him to give us the certainty of our election. (The Principle of Authority, 353)

‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God’. (John 6:68-69)

Last Rites

Reno Lauro is a Texan mate of mine who is also writing a PhD at St Andrews University. Recently, Reno created a 5-min low-budget film, Last Rites, for a competition for The Doorpost Film Project.

The finalists are elected by judges (50%) and ratings of individual viewers (50%), so it would be great if you could watch the film and, if you like it, rate it favorably.

My comment: ‘Lauro instantly and faithfully draws us into a narrative – and meta-narrative – than has been going on long before the film starts, or ends. A snapshot of the kingdom … in 5 minutes! Brilliant!’

Loverd, thou clepedest me

Loverd, thou clepedest me,                       [Lord, you called me]
And ich noght ne answarede thee          [ich I]
Bute wordes slow and slepye:                   [Bute except]
“Thole yet! Thole a litel!”                          [Thole wait]
Bute “yet” and “yet” was endelis,
And “thole a litel” a long way is.

– Anonymous, ‘Loverd, thou clepedest me’, in Aspetti della letteratura latina nel secolo XIII (ed. Anastasia Pasquinelli; Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1986), 317.

Theodicy: The Justification Of God – 8

THE CROSS CRUCIAL FOR DESTINY

Study 8

A guest post by Trevor Faggotter

INTRODUCTION

There is a strange statement in the New Testament, where the Apostle Paul speaks of God the Father’s active involvement in the event of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, saying:

For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21).[1]

Given that human sin is not ‘but a remora[2], or drag, on Humanity’[3], but rather, ‘its death and hell’ – and given that, ‘the wrongest thing with the world is its sin’,[4] then the need to deal with sin finally and fully is the matter upon which the destiny of humanity, and the holy character of God, must centre. What it means for Jesus Christ, God’s Son, to be made to be sin lies at the heart of the gospel.

THE CRUCIALITY OF THE CROSS

In following P.T. Forsyth’s book, The Justification of God (1917), we now come in our series, to Chapter IX.  It is entitled ‘The Eternal Cruciality of the Cross for Destiny’, and it may remind you (if you know of Forsyth’s other books), of his work first published in 1909, entitled The Cruciality of the Cross. While we have much to read, digest, and study already, I would nevertheless like to include in this study some quotations (taken slowly), from the final few pages of The Cruciality of the Cross.

In being “made sin,” treated as sin (though not as a sinner), Christ experienced sin as God does, while he experienced its effects as man does. He felt sin with God, and sin’s judgment with men. He realised, as God, how real sin was, how radical, how malignant, how deadly to the Holy One’s very being.[5]

When Christ died at sin’s hands it meant that sin was death to the holiness of God, and both could not live in the same world. When He rose it meant that what was to live and rule in the world was the holy God.[6]

Dying as man, Christ placed His whole self beside man under the judgment of God. He was beside man in court but on God’s side in the issue, confessing God’s holiness in the judgment, and justifying His treatment of sin. Justifying God![7]

Forsyth then gives a poignant illustration, with a comment, which is pure theodicy:

A missionary to the North American Indians records that having seen his wife and children killed before his eyes, and being himself harried in bonds across the prairie amid his tormentors, he “justified God in this thing.” I do not know a sublimer order of experience than from the heart to bless and praise a good and holy God in despairs like these. It is to this order of experience that the work, the blood, of Christ belongs. And there is no justification of men except by this justification, this self-justification, of God.[8]

Never is man so just with God as when his broken, holy heart calls just the judgment of God which he feels but has not himself earned; and never could man be just with God but through God’s justification of Himself in the blood of Christ.[9]

In speaking here of atonement, Forsyth is keen to retain the word ‘satisfaction’:

We cannot in any theology which is duly ethicised dispense with the word satisfaction. It was of course not a quantitative replacement of anything God had lost, nor was it the glutting of a God’s anger by an equivalent suffering on who cares whom. It was no satisfaction of a jus talionis.[10]

But it was the adequate confession, in act and suffering, “Thou art holy as Thou judgest.” That man should confess this vicariously and victoriously in Christ crucified and risen is the re-establishment of God’s holiness in the world. We can only understand any justification of man as it is grounded in this justification-this self-justification-of God. The sinner could only be saved by something that thus damned the sin.[11]

In a far more nuanced manner, than is employed by many evangelicals today, Forsyth then speaks of what is not the Father’s action in the cross (punishing Jesus), as well as what is his action in the cross, (namely imparting unto Christ, the penalty upon sin).

The Saviour was not punished, but He took the penalty of sin, the chastisement of our peace. It was in no sense as if He felt chastised or condemned (as even Calvin said), but because He willingly bowed, with a moral understanding possible only to the sinless, under the divine ordinance of a suffering death and judgment which was holily ordained to wait on the sin of His kin.

The blood of Christ cleanseth from all sin. The metaphor denotes the radicality, totality, and finality of the whole action in the realism of the moral world which even high sacrifice, not resisting unto blood, only slurs or shelves-when it does not toy with it.

Forsyth notes that Jesus early teaching wholly relates to his suffering deeds in the cross:

It is notable that Christ speaks of His blood only at His life’s end, while during life He spoke only of forgiving grace without any such expiation (except in the ransom passage). Why was this so?

Two reasons are given:

1. Was it not, first, because His grand total witness, which death but pointed, was to the grace of God’s holy love; and the exposure of sin could only come by the light of that revelation?

2. And was it not, second, because His revelation and offer of holy grace without sacrifice and judgment failed of its effect; because even the great, uplifted, and joyful invitation, “Come unto Me,” failed till it was enacted from the mighty gloom of the cross; because only the uplifting of the cross, and not the uplifting of His voice, draws all men unto Him;

The cross draws people. It does so as the holy love of God breaks through to human beings by revelation. God’s very wonderful loving kindness is brought home livingly by the Spirit of God – the mystery of the cross is opened, and poured into hearts and minds.

THE CROSS AND GRACE

Forsyth saw the biblical relationship between the cross and grace, in a way, that many others failed, and fail still to see and proclaim (that is why many abandon atonement theology). Robert McAfee Brown followed Forsyth’s corrective theology well:

God is willing to go to the length of suffering and dying to enter into fellowship with man. There is a misunderstanding of the Christian doctrine of atonement that goes something like this: God is an angry God, angry at men because men have sinned, and he decides to condemn mankind; but Christ intercedes for man, and God’s vengeance is sated by punishing Christ instead. Although this is a travesty of the Christian position it has unfortunately been too often suggested by interpreters of the atonement as well as by their critics. But Forsyth, who said, “The doctrine of grace and the doctrine of the atonement are identical,” the true interpretation is that the atonement flows from grace, it does not “procure” grace. This extremely important insight means that our reading of the atonement is more like this: Because God loves men, he suffers on their behalf, bears himself the weight of their wrongdoing, and this restores fellowship, or reconciles. Grace is not something Christ earned for us from God; grace is rather something God gave us in Christ. “Do not say: ‘God is love. Why atone?’ Say: ‘God has atoned. What love!’[12]

SALVATION IS THE SOLUTION

We are not taught or argued by proofs, or theology into the kingdom of God. Rather we are transferred, by way of rescue. He has delivered us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the Son of His love, in whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins. (Colossians 1:13-14) The victory of the resurrected Christ is our salvation. The work of the crucified Christ is our forgiveness of sins, and it means the redemption of the world. We are not seeking our own solution. We are given one.

Not only can God solve the world, He has solved it, in His own practical way of solution, by saving it-by an act done, and not a proof led, nor a scheme shown. His wisdom none can trace, and His ways are past finding out; but His work finds us; and His grace, His victory, and His goal become sure.[13]

The message of the apostles was always of what God had done, in the death and resurrection of Christ (see Romans 5-8). And yet, Forsyth identifies good reasons why God’s ways in revelation, are unsearchable; Drawing upon apostolic insight – O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! (Romans 11:33) – Forsyth comments:

If we saw all His scheme our faith would be compelled, and not free. It might do more to overwhelm us than to raise or fortify. It would be sight-something too satisfactory to a merely distributive justice; it would not be faith creative and constitutive for the holy soul. The faith we keep means more for our soul than the views we win.[14]

Faith in receiving the truth of God in the cross is an absolutely essential factor. Faith is not some well-reasoned conclusion. Faith is at once a gift from God, and an action of personal trust, of belief, of receptivity.

Job’s friends had sounder views on some points than he, but they did not receive the reward that his desperate faith had. In the Cross of Christ we learn the faith that things not willed by God are yet worked up by God. In a divine irony, man’s greatest crime turns God’s greatest boon. O felix culpa![15] The riddle is insoluble but the fact is sure. The new man, remade in Christ and not simply impressed by Christ, is sure amid a world of strident problems. We know what God has done for the world in redeeming it; we have tasted that in our soul; but we do not know why He took the way with it that He did, why it must mean the Cross. He speaks not an all-solving but an all-liberating word.[16]

THE FATHER AND SON CARRY AND SUFFER THE MISERY OF THE AGES

Jesus said: the Father and I are one (John 10:3). He also said, the Father is in me and I am in the Father (John 14:10). When we see the Cruciality of the Cross, we see the action of the Father giving up his Son in love, and the Son honoring the Father. God, the Father, was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. We are often made aware of the sufferings of Christ. However, Forsyth draws our attention to the depth of the Father’s suffering too, saying: ‘And the Father suffered in His Son even more than the Son did’.[17]

There is an Eye, a Mind, a Heart, before Whom the whole bloody and tortured stream of evolutionary growth has flowed. We are horrified, beyond word or conception, by the agony and devilry of war, but, after all, it only discharges upon us, as it were from a nozzle, a far vaster accumulation of such things, permeating the total career of history since ever a sensitive organism and a heartless egoism appeared.[18]

The war is an occasion, to turn anew to the sufferings of God throughout human history:

This misery of the ages, I have said, vanishes from human thought or feeling, till some experience like war carries some idea of it home. But there is a consciousness to which it is all and always present. And in the full view of it He has spoken. As it might be thus: ‘Do you stumble at the cost? It has cost Me more than you-Me who see and feel it all more than you who feel it but as atoms might. “Groanings all and moanings, none of it I lose.” Yea, it has cost Me more than if the price paid were all Mankind. For it cost Me My only and beloved Son to justify My name of righteousness, and to realise the destiny of My creature in holy love.[19]

Forsyth spotlights the love of the Father, for the Son, and calls us to consider this. (We are often very self-centred when we ask questions concerning theodicy). He continues, along the lines that the Father, might say, concerning his Son, Jesus:

And all mankind is not so great and dear as He. Nor is its suffering the enormity in a moral world that His Cross is. I am no spectator of the course of things, and no speculator on the result. I spared not My own Son. We carried the load that crushed you. It bowed Him into the ground. [20]

This suffering however, achieved the Father and the Son’s shared purpose for the world:

On the third day He rose with a new creation in His hand, and a regenerate world, and all things working together for good to love and the holy purpose in love. And what He did I did. How I did it? How I do it? This you know not how, and could not, but you shall know hereafter. There are things the Father must keep in His own hand. Be still and know that I am God, whose mercy is as His majesty, and His omnipotence is chiefly in forgiving, and redeeming, and settling all souls in worship in the temple of a new heaven and earth full of holiness.[21]

THE SUPREME THEODICY IS ATONEMENT

As we have been saying in other studies ‘that day’ – the coming close of history as we know it, the telos – is an essential part of God’s plan, through the cross and Christ’s resurrection; this is a continuation of what Forsyth, understands the Father is saying to us.

In that day the anguish will be forgotten for joy that a New Humanity is born into the world.[22]

However, the matter is never just hoping for heaven. It is the holy name of God fully honoured, through atonement. It means leaving no room or place for sin, eternally.

But all this is groundless if in the Cross of Christ we have but the love of God shown in sacrifice and not its holiness secured in judgment; if the Cross be but to reconcile man and not atone to God, to impress many and not first to hallow the holy name.[23]

In hallowing the Father’s holy name, Christ is doing more than being obedient unto death he is being obedient unto judgment, the final judgment of holiness. Paul says, ‘For just as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.’ (Romans 5:19) Others who have studied Forsyth have also pointed out that he saw Christ’s obedience as of prime importance:

The important thing is not the “wounds of Jesus”, but the fact that in going to the cross he offered a perfect obedience to the holy will of God. This has never been sufficiently emphasized.[24]

As this series of studies is looking at this whole matter of theodicy, it is appropriate that we close this study, with Forsyth’s closing words for the chapter:

Christ was the new Humanity doing the one needful and right thing before God. God’s justification of man, therefore, was by His justification of Himself in man. The last theodicy is a gift of God and not man’s discovery nor an achievement. It is not a rational triumph but the victory of faith. Christ is the theodicy of God and the justifier both of God and the ungodly. The supreme theodicy is atonement.[25]

[1] Luke also draws attention to the Father’s involvement in the cross, saying that Jesus was handed over to the Israelites, ‘according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God ‘ (Acts 2:23); In Acts 8:32-33 Luke shows how Isaiah 53 is a prophecy including the Father’s involvement in the cross – the Lord has laid upon him the iniquity of us all (Isaiah 53:6); similarly Matthew 26:31 takes the prophecy of Zechariah 13:7, I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered, indicating the Father’s sovereign activity.

[2] Remora – a suckerfish – which attaches itself to sharks, whales, sea turtles or the hulls of ships.

[3] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, NCPI, 1988, p. 146.

[4] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 167.

[5] P. T. Forsyth, The Cruciality of the Cross, NCPI, (1909), 1984, p. 212.

[6] P. T. Forsyth, The Cruciality of the Cross, p. 213.

[7] P. T. Forsyth, The Cruciality of the Cross, p. 213.

[8] P. T. Forsyth, The Cruciality of the Cross, pp. 213-214.

[9] P. T. Forsyth, The Cruciality of the Cross, p. 214.

[10] Jus talionis: an eye for an eye; quoted from P.T. Forsyth, The Cruciality of the Cross, p. 214.

[11] P.T. Forsyth, The Cruciality of the Cross, p. 214.

[12] Robert McAfee Brown, P. T. Forsyth: Prophet For Today, Westminster Press, 1952, pp. 82-83.

[13] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 154.

[14] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 154.

[15] Felix culpa – Blessed fault or fortunate fall’, or “O happy fault”.

[16] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 154.

[17] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 169.

[18] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 164.

[19] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 164.

[20] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 164.

[21] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 164.

[22] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 165.

[23] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 165.

[24] Robert McAfee Brown, P. T. Forsyth: Prophet For Today, p. 83.

[25] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 169.

‘Gregory MacDonald’ enters blogdom

‘Gregory MacDonald’, the pseudonymous author of The Evangelical Universalist (which I have written a wee note about here) has started a blog with a view to fostering discussion about Christian universalism. Those who have not yet read ‘MacDonald’s’ book really ought to get their hands on it and READ it … especially if you’re planning on contributing anything meaningful to the discussion over at ‘Gregory’s’ blog, The Evangelical Universalist.

Some time ago now, Chris Tilling and Jason Clark posted some helpful discussion on the book too.

On Indigenous Theology

“The ‘Programme for Theology and Cultures in Asia’ exemplifies the view that ‘indigenous theology’ is best carried out by considering the spirituality immanent in the symbols of a particular culture. If the symbols of Scottish culture are taken to be its indigenous, national drink (whisky), its national recipe (the haggis), and its famously indigenous musical instrument (the bagpipes), this would seem to suggest that indigenous Scottish theology should be characterized by spirit, guts … and large quantities of wind!” – Alan Torrance, ‘Being of One Substance with the Father’, in Nicene Christianity: The Future for a New Ecumenism (ed. Christopher Seitz; Brazos Press, 2001).

[HT: Mel]

Commending Jesus Ascended

An enthusiastic plug: I’ve just finished reading Gerrit Scott Dawson’s Jesus Ascended: The Meaning of Christ’s Continuing Incarnation (London/Phillipsburg: T&T Clark/P&R Publishing, 2004). While I don’t have time to write up a review of it at the moment (though I hope to at some stage) I want to highly commend this excellent and very accessible study.

This is theology as it should be done: formed by scripture, with gratitude for the best of the tradition, and with eyes directed towards the church’s praxis in the world. A must read for pastors, worship leaders, missiologists, and anyone who prays – or wishes they did … and theologians! A taster:

Rejecting the story of Jesus at any point after his crucifixion completely skews the understanding of the church … A Christ who did not ascend has not established our primary identity in heaven, and he is not returning to bring in the new heavens and the new earth. (p. 149)

[Those interested may also like to read my review of a collection of papers edited by Dawson entitled An Introduction to Torrance Theology: Discovering the Incarnate Saviour]

April Book Notes – 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen, and Amen. ♦♦♦♦½

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

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

The Pope and Jesus of Nazareth

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

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

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

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

The event is being supported by the British Academy.

The Triumph of God’s Love in Jesus Christ

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

Ah … grace!

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

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

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

Ah … grace!

Theodicy: The Justification Of God – 7

THE COMING EVENT IN HISTORY

Study 7

A guest post by Trevor Faggotter

ONE FAR-OFF DIVINE EVENT

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

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

That God, which ever lives and loves,

One God, one law, one element,

And one far-off divine event,

To which the whole creation moves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

LIVING IN THE MYSTERY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EVIL TOUCHING OUR NERVE

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHEN GOD TRUSTED MAN WITH FREEDOM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HOW WEIGHTY IS THE GLORY THAT IS TO COME?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[9] Forsyth, pp. 123-124.

[10] Forsyth, p. 122.

[11] Forsyth p. 126.

[12] Forsyth p. 127.

[13] Forsyth p. 129.

[14] Forsyth p. 133.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ray Anderson on the ‘difference’ Christ makes

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

Theodicy: The Justification Of God – 6

FAILURE OF THE CHURCH AS

INTERNATIONAL

Study 6

A guest post by Trevor Faggotter

CHURCH FAILURE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GRATUITOUS OPTIMISM

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

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

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

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

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

A CALL TO REDISCOVER THE RADICAL METHOD

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

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

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

THE BRITISH EMPIRE – AND PATRIOTIC PRAYER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[3] Forsyth, p. 99.

[4] Ibid.

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

[6] Sans gêne: without embarrassment or constraint.

[7] Forsyth, p. 100.

[8] Forsyth, p. 101.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

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

[12] Forsyth, p. 77.

[13] Forsyth p. 103.