‘The cross was the reflection (or say rather the historic pole) of an act within Godhead. The historic victory was the index and the correlate of a choice grid a conquest in Godhead itself. Nothing less will carry the fulness of faith, the swelling soul, and the Church’s organ voice of liturgy in every land and age. If our thought do not allow that belief we must reduce the pitch of faith to something plain, laic, and songless, and, in making it more homely, make it less holy, less absolute, less adoring. The adoration of Christ can only go with this view of Him in the long run. Nothing lower takes with due seriousness the superhuman value of the soul, the unearthliness of our salvation, and its last conquest of the whole world. It would reduce the unworldly value of the soul if it could be saved by anything less than a Christ before the worlds. It came upon me, as upon many at the first it must have mightily done, that His whole life was not simply occupied with a series of decisions crucial for our race, or filled with a great deed then first done; but that that life of His was itself the obverse of a heavenly eternal deed, and the result of a timeless decision before it here began. His emergence on earth was as it were the swelling in of heaven. His sacrifice began before He came into the world, and his cross was that of a lamb slain before the world’s foundation. There was a Calvary above which was the mother of it all, His obedience, however impressive, does not take divine magnitude if it first rose upon earth, nor has it the due compelling power upon ours. His obedience as man was but the detail of the supreme obedience which made him man. His love transcends all human measure only if, out of love, he renounced the glory of heavenly being for all he here became. Only then could one grasp the full stay and comfort of words like these “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” Unlike us, he chose the oblivion of birth and the humiliation of life. He consented not only to die but to be born. His life here, like His death which pointed it, was the result of his free will. It was all one death for him. It was all one obedience. And it was free. He was rich and for our sakes became poor. What he gave up was the fulness, power, and immunity of a heavenly life. He became “a man from heaven.”’ – Peter T. Forsyth, The Person & Place of Jesus Christ: The Congregational Union Lecture for 1909 (London: Congregational Union of England and Wales/Hodder & Stoughton, 1910), 270–2.
Love
Redeeming Bitterness – An Interview with Miroslav Volf
Miroslav Volf, director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, recently published The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World. As Volf calls Christians to remember with redemptive purpose, he recounts his personal struggle to cope with memories of interrogations by Communist officials in his native Croatia, then part of Yugoslavia.
What makes memory an especially urgent theological topic?
Part of the interest in memory is because we live in such a fast-paced culture, in which we have a hard time remembering what’s transpired only a few days or a month ago. We’re glued to this ever-shifting and changing present, so we feel that memory is slipping away from us. We want to hold onto memories, because we rightly believe that part of our identity is what we remember about ourselves and our interactions with others. Part of our identity as a nation depends on what has happened to us in the past.
Why is this topic especially important to you?
Much of the conflict in the world, whether between individuals or between communities, is fueled by memory of what has happened in the past. So on the one hand, we have to remember to preserve our identity. We have to remember in order not to allow similar violations in the future.
Yet when we remember, our memory is not innocent in our hands. I use the term “shield of memory.” But so quickly, the shield mutates into a sword. Memory played a significant role in the recent conflict in my native Croatia. My interest was to find ways in which we can prevent memory from mutating from a shield into a sword—indeed, finding ways in which memory can become a means of reconciliation. That’s why I’m interested not just in memory, but in remembering rightly.
The book is both theological and personal—why?
The narrative backbone of the book is my interrogations by the secret service of Yugoslavia and the Communist army. Immense suspicion arose from the sheer facts that I was a theologian, I studied abroad, and I was married to an American. They had to find out whether I was a subversive element. I narrate the story of my interrogations and my relationships with my interrogators in order to illustrate what memory does to us, how we can deal with memory, and what the light of Christ’s truth and Christ’s person can do to help us remember and reconcile in healing ways.
What is the biblical purpose of remembering?
God’s purpose with humanity as a whole is reconciliation with God and reconciliation with one another in a new heaven and new earth. Given that we have sinned, reconciliation is what needs to happen to get us there. That’s also the goal of remembering rightly. Memory ought to serve that grand vision of reconciliation God is working to create—as Jonathan Edwards has said, the “world of perfect love,” love of God and love of neighbor.
What is Christianity’s unique contribution to remembering rightly?
To remember rightly we need to put on certain glasses. We put on glasses of the memory of the Exodus of the people of Israel from their slavery in Egypt. Christians in particular remember the death and the resurrection of Christ. The apostle Paul says one has died for all. Now what does that mean for the wrong that a person has done to me?
Well, I have to remember it as a wrong of a person for whom Christ has died, even if that person isn’t receiving that redemption personally. Then I look at myself. Christ died for my sins, too. I can’t remember transgression against me as one who is purely innocent. It’s not as if I stand in the light and the other person [stands] in the darkness, and he or she has to do all the changing, while I bask in my self-righteousness.
So Christ’s death frames my remembering and reminds me of my own sinfulness and of the love of God toward a person who has injured me.
How do we remember without getting bitter?
In the present discussion about memory, we tend to emphasize remembering what has happened to us, what others have done to us, or if we are more virtuous, what we have done to others. But it’s not about our actions and our sufferings. Now, I don’t want to disregard our deeds and our sufferings, but in Exodus, the Israelites didn’t just remember what they had suffered at the hands of the Egyptians. That was the backdrop to remember what God did for them. It’s a hopeful memory of liberation, a memory of salvation. If you emulate that, then you can remember rightly.
How might right remembering affect church practice?
We have a ritual of remembrance, the Lord’s Supper. We break bread and remember Christ’s broken body. We drink from the cup and remember Christ’s suffering and his spilled blood. If we remember Christ’s suffering rightly, that liturgical act also can serve as a means of fostering reconciliation. I will celebrate the Lord’s Supper by remembering myself as a sinner and not as a saint. I will celebrate the Lord’s Supper by remembering my enemy not as this despicable person who has to be thrown into the pit of darkness, but as one for whom Christ has shed his blood. Therefore, I will be taken up into this action of Christ and hopefully emulate Christ in how I remember and treat the other person.
When can we forget the wrongs committed against us?
In a sense, forgetting is given to us as the gift of a healed relationship. It’s a gift of the new world, which God gives us. Then we can not remember. And then our experience is like a person who is sitting in a concert hall and listening to a wonderful piece of music. Even though just two hours ago she was experiencing hell at her job, she’s taken up into that music. It’s not that she tried to forget so that she could be in the music; it’s that the music took her out of the remembrance of the past. God gives us the gift of a healed self, healed relationships, and a reconstituted world, and then we can not remember.
This is taken from an interview by Christianity Today associate editor Collin Hansen posted here.
On being a Christian
One of the books that I’m currently re-reading is Tom Smail’s, The Forgotten Father. I’d forgotten how remarkable this book is as it seeks to bring us to the heart of the Gospel in the Fatherhood of God. As Forsyth noted, we cannot put too much into that word ‘Father’ though we can, and do, certainly put too little into it. Smail begins his chapter on ‘The Father, the Son and the Cross’ by reminding us that it takes the Trinity to make sense of the atonement, and he ends the chapter by reminding us that it takes the Father to make sense of our humanity.
Here’s a quote: ‘To be a Christian is to believe that it is the Father who defines our identity and is to be believed against all inner and outer accusations to the contrary when he says to us, “This son of mine”. To know that is not to skulk in the back pew; it is to come forward with confidence to receive the inheritance. The robe which is the garment of sonship is accompanied by the ring which is the insignia of authority and the sandals that distinguish the free man from the slave. The son who comes home is invited back into his lost inheritance, to delight again in his father’s company and goodness and to rejoice.’ Thomas A. Smail, The Forgotten Father (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1980), 129.
I Die Alive
O life! what lets thee from a quick decease ?
O death! what draws thee from a present prey?
My feast is done, my soul would be at ease,
My grace is said, O death! come take away.
I live, but such a life as ever dies;
I die, but such a death as never ends;
My death to end my dying life denies,
And life my loving death no whit amends.
Thus still I die, yet still I do remain;
My living death by dying life is fed;
Grace more than nature keeps my heart alive,
Whose idle hopes and vain desires are dead.
Not where I breathe, but where I love, I live;
Not where I love, but where I am, I die;
The life I wish must future glory give,
The death I feel in present dangers lie.
Robert Southwell, ‘I Die Alive’, in The Poetical Works of the Rev. Robert Southwell (London: John Russell Smith, 1856), 68.
Geoffrey Bingham has written a great little book opening up the idea of love as true living. It can be purchased or downloaded from here.
God as whore and church as brothel
Imagine what it would be like if you got married, and from that day onwards you saw your spouse down the street with her new boyfriend, or new girlfriend. You hear all the gossip. You know where they are. And the only time you really ever saw your partner was when they came around for sex … or they might occasionally wave to you up the street. What would it feel like? Hosea 1-2 depicts how God’s people used God when it suited them. God had brought them into a covenant relationship with him but they just treated God like a whore. This is graphically illustrated in Hosea’s own marriage. But O how great is God’s mercy. Even in the midst of all that he still won’t let go. He still won’t forget his covenant. He still does not want to be God without us!
This watercolour (c. 1888) by James Tissot (1836–1902) depicts the Prophet Hosea.
Mercy
‘How much more precious a thing to us is the mercy of God than the love of God. If the love of God is unspeakable, what must His mercy be? If the love of God is precious to us, what must His grace be?’ P. T. Forsyth, ‘Majesty and Mercy.’ Christian World Pulpit 79 (17 May 1911): 305.
The Gospel According to the Beatles
In the latest CT, LaTonya Taylor reviews Steve Turner’s latest offering, The Gospel According to the Beatles. Here ’tis:
Veteran music journalist Steve Turner explores the spiritual paths of the Beatles—both collectively and as individuals—in this deftly and densely reported combination of cultural history, comparative religion, and biocritical insight. “The gospel of the Beatles is not found in their conformity to an orthodox creed,” he notes, “but in their hunger for transcendence.”
Turner begins by reporting the furor that erupted over John Lennon’s infamous (and widely misunderstood) 1966 comment that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus now,” then compares the Fab Four to magical, shamanistic storytellers who shared the insights they gained through their spiritual explorations with an audience enmeshed in political, cultural, philosophical, and religious upheaval.
Turner wisely avoids the temptation to force the Beatles’ hope for freedom, unity, and peace into a Christian mold. Indeed, Turner focuses heavily on their use of drugs and forays into Eastern religion and the occult in search of enlightenment and spiritual insight. Still, Turner thoughtfully demonstrates ways the Beatles’ search reflects the continuing influence of Christianity: “They were skeptical and even dismissive of the church, yet many of their core beliefs—love, peace, hope, truth, freedom, honesty, transcendence—were, in their case, secularized versions of Christian teachings.
Can anyone who has read this book tell me if it is worth reading?
Holy Love conquers all things
Michael Jenson is experimenting with a new book idea here. It’s called YOU and aims to be a a popular level book that carefully and sensitively addresses questions and contributes a Christian theological voice into the discussion. His latest post is on Leviticus 15 and is entitled ‘The Ooze’. It invited a lengthy response from me that I’ll reproduce here for the sake of my blog readers but moreso to encourage you to go on to read and contribute to Michael’s project. I wrote:
It seems to me that Leviticus 15 serves, among other things, to remind us that because God is love, and because his love is holy love, when he sees anything that defiles his creation he must do something about it. It must be judged and ultimately either sanctified or destroyed. And when he sees evil in us it is no different. God is not squeamish.
The problem is that we don’t see our own evil to be as evil as he does. It’s only when we see ourselves at the cross that we see the enormous horror and hideous, deceitful, evil of our own hearts. Karl Barth once said, ‘God’s attitude in (his fellowship with us) is characterised by holiness, exclusiveness, the condemnation and annihilation of sin. The holiness of God thus involves peril to the man with whom he has fellowship…. As sinful man he cannot stand before God. He must perish’ (Church Dogmatics II/I, Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1985, 364).
In Mark 7, the Pharisees criticise Jesus’ disciples for eating without going through the proper hand-washing rituals. They seem to have forgotten what purpose these laws served, and turned them into a system of trying to get right and then stay right with God. And so Jesus lets rip. He calls them hypocrites and accuses them of nullifying the word of God for the sake of their traditions. And then Jesus redefines uncleanness (Mk. 7:20-23). Isn’t that a great thing … that Jesus knows exactly what our hearts are like! So how can unclean people like that, people like us, people under the wrath of God, approach a Holy God not only without being struck down on the spot but approach the throne of grace with confidence?
Mark 5:24b-34 recalls the story of a woman. This woman dashes onto the NT stage for 10 verses. She’s got no name. She’s got no idea of who Jesus really is. He represents for her the last straw in a long line of doctors and miracle workers that she has spent all of her money on and over a decade seeing. She has been treated like a leper in her community for 12 years. She has been tormented by guilt and anxiety. She has been untouched … and untouchable. She has been unable to hug her kids. She has been unable to make a cup of tea for a friend. No one has invited her to their home in 12 years. Now she doesn’t want to know Jesus. She’s not seeking a relationship with him, but she wants to be healed. She wants to be restored to her community. She wants to be able to go to her kids’ birthday party and make love with her husband. She wants to be able to prepare a meal for her family and enjoy a day out with her friends. And she hears reports of this guy in town who heals people and so she goes along to check it out, and she moves in on Jesus from behind … anonymously in a crowd. This is the man who deliberately touched unclean lepers and corpses. This is the man who made a point of eating with prostitutes and calling ‘sinners’ his friends. This is the man who deliberately went out of his way to do almost everything that the OT prohibits us, and especially priests, from doing. But would he allow this woman to touch him (remember Lev. 12), to pollute him, to make him unclean? Would he allow this woman to place him under the wrath and judgement of God?
C.S. Lewis said, ‘Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the self-righteous, are in that danger’ (Quoted in Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995, 152). To hear the Word of God takes a miracle. It takes God! It takes the gift of a new heart! And so if we’re proud, if we’re self-righteous, if we can look at our life and see ourself as someone who is not only bleeding but dead, then we are going to find it very hard to know that God has touched us and healed us and indeed made us alive in Christ.
Helmut Thielicke once said, ‘There is no wilderness so desolate in our life that Jesus Christ will not and cannot encounter us there … There is no depth in which this Saviour will not become our brother … He comes for us wherever we are … For that is his majesty’ (How To Believe Again, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974, 60, 63). In Jesus Christ, God bore all our sins, all our uncleanness, and all the wrath of the holy God in his own body on the tree. Do we believe that? Do we believe that from the moment we’re born right up until the moment of our death, that on that Cross he entered into our history, into our mind, into our conscience, into our memory, into our acts, and he took into himself all the judgement, the pain, the shame, the loneliness, the burden, the confusion, the guilt, the fear, the darkness, the hypocrisy, the terror? Do we know that on that Cross he actually experienced our life, and that he left nothing undealt with? And that as God’s High Priest he sanctifies everything that he touches… and that he has touched us? Do we know that? Do we know that as far as the east is from the west he has removed our sins from us, and he will remember them no more because there is nothing for him to remember.
Strange love
‘It would be a strange love that was satisfied with the mere existence and nature of the other, then withdrawing, leaving it to its own devices.’ (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 3/1, p. 95)
The real test of love
‘The real test of the love of man does not come until we love our enemies. The love of our enemy is only the love of our neighbour true to itself through everything … And there is only one source in the world to feed it and keep it alive – which is God’s love of His bitter enemies, and His grace to them in repaying their wrong by Himself atoning for them on the cross’ (P T Forysth, The Cruciality of the Cross, 166-7)
Revelation, Old and New – Part 1
REVELATION, OLD AND NEW
(delivered under the auspices of the Guilds of St Cuthbert’s Parish Church, Edinburgh, 1911)
“But God commendeth His own love to us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” (Rom. v. 8.)
May I at the outset be a little theological? I must be, to be fair to my text. I promise to be quite religious and quite humane before I am done. But theology is to religion what principle
is to life.
First, I would say, Revelation is really Redemption. The light was the life of men. The new light was the new life.
Second, Redemption is a thing of heart and soul and will and mind. Our thought of it must be humanized to the hungry heart, and it must be moralized to the guilty conscience.
I. First, then, Revelation is really Redemption.
And here note three things.
1. GOD IN CHRIST DOES HIS OWN LOVING, GIVING, SACRIFICING, AND SAVING.
Two mistakes are made about Revelation. It is treated either as mere display of God or as mere statement of Him. We think of God either as allowing Himself to be seen or as allowing Himself to be explained. We think of Revelation either as a picture of God or as a truth about Him. He is regarded either as an object of contemplation or as an object of discussion, as a beatific vision or a dialectic theme, as the object either of a mysticism or of an orthodoxy. We are agreed that, if there be a revelation, it is God’s gift, but we are not agreed about what He gives; whether it is a theophany of Himself or a declaration about Himself or something else. Some say Christ came to show us the Father, to show us His portrait, or sketch His character; others that He came to tell us of the Father, to give us His truth, His theology. In either case we have but portrayal. And it is hard to say which mistake has done more mischief—the notion that God’s great gift is a picture of Himself to be admired, or the notion that it is a truth about Himself to be credited.
What God gave us was neither His portrait nor His principle; He gave us Himself—His presence, His life, His action. He did more than show us Himself, more than teach us about Himself—He gave us Himself, He sacrificed Himself. It is ourselves He seeks, therefore it was Himself He gave, life for life and soul for soul. He asks us for life–committal, because it was His life He committed to us. He gave us love by giving us Himself to love. He does not make His love and goodness just to pass before us in a panorama; nor does He lay it out parcelled so that we may readily just take it or leave it. Where would then be the urgency of Christ–His final and awful dilemma put to us? God carries His love home to us. He will not let us alone with it. He invades us with it. He “commends” it to us–not in the sense of praising it, but of committing it ‘into our hands. He takes the last pains to get it home to us; nay, He carries it home Himself, does it all Himself. He “commends His own love”. He does not woo us by proxy. Christ was no mere messenger, but present God. The divine Lover is His own apostle. He did not simply send His Son; He came in His Son, and in His Son’s cross. God was in Christ’s reconciling. He did not simply make use of death, of His Son’s death He died. Surely what the Son suffered cost the Father even more. When Paul spoke to the Galatians about his preaching of Christ, he says he “placarded Christ” before them (Gal. iii. I).
I made a great exhibition of Him, writ Him large, made a show of Him, and glorified Him openly. That was an apostle’s work. He depicted Christ, and pointed to Christ, and commended Christ. He said “Hear me,”—not, “Look to me”, but “Look to Christ … Receive Christ.” He preached not himself. No apostle did. They preached Christ, and were Christ’s apostles. But Christ did say “Look to me.” In Christ God was His own apostle. God directed Himself, nay, sped Himself, to the human heart in Christ. He did not employ another. God was not to Christ as Christ was to Paul. Paul was sacramental to us for Christ, but Christ was mediatorial to us for God. Christ is not vicarious for God as He is for us. He was continuous with God as He is not with us. He did not represent God to us on the same principle as He does us to God. Christ dying therefore was God commending His own love to us. The Cross was no mere assurance of God’s love, but its action. Christ was the love of God giving itself to us, the grace of God bestowing, spending, pouring itself out on us, the holiness of God reclaiming us to holiness, not turning us toward it, but replacing us in it. God does not love us by deputy; He does not give us by deputy; He does not save us by deputy. He brings and wings His own love. His holiness takes its own consequences in an evil world. He does His own suffering and saving. He is a Jealous God. None but Himself shall redeem us for Himself. He is a monopolist of sacrifice. He does not part with the agony and glory of the Cross to any creature. None shall outdo Him in sacrifice. No creature has a right to sit with God on the throne of the Cross. It was no created being that died for us. Creatures as we are, it is in no created Spirit that we can live. Our Redemption is too costly for any but our Creator, and a creature must let it alone for ever.
In a word Revelation is Redemption. The new light is new life. God reveals His own self to us sinners in that Christ dies for us. We are not sages, we are sinners. Already by its intelligence the world knew not God. And there is no other way of revealing God to sinners but by redeeming them. We must be redeemed into the power of understanding a holy revelation. Does it not come to that? The Revelation is not a glorification of love as a poet might do it. it is not an illustration of it like a parable. The Son of God was not a mere symbol of God, an illustration. God’s revelation of love is the bestowal of love as a lover does. It is not a show but a sacrament. Nay, it is more. It is not the donation of love as a thing—as something which God could detach, hand over, pour out, and part with. God’s love is God loving. It is the gift of Himself who is love, given in the only way that love could give itself to loveless men, by the way of death. God’s answer to us is the word of reconciliation. And we answer it not by being impressed, and not by being convinced, but by being conciliated, by being reconciled,—by an eternal life of communion. For it was a revelation once for all and for ever. Do I carry you with me?
2. LET US MOVE ANOTHER STAGE FORWARD.
Revelation to sinners must be redemption, not chiefly because it is love, but because it is holy love. “His own love.” God Himself, I have said, does His own revealing of Himself as Saviour without prophet or deputy. But that word “His own” has another shade of meaning. God’s love in Christ was not only not vicarious: it was His own in another sense. It was unique in kind. There was, there is, nothing like it anywhere. It is holy love, a love peculiar to Him. God so loved–not so intensely but so peculiarly, in such a special way, so holily. He did not come with even the best human love lifted and made infinite. That is sacred but not holy. He came with another kind altogether, of which the love of mortals, however intense and tender, is but a symbol.
Do you ask what love is when it rises as high as God?
Here it is. Herein is love, not that we loved passionately, but that He loved holily. Do you want to know what love really is and does at its height? You must not go to love in sinful men who, being evil, know how to give good gifts to their children, but to love in holy God, who gives His native holiness. You must not go to lovable men and women, nor to those who are the great lovers of each other in fact or ‘in romance, but to the love of the evil world by the holy historic God. You want to know what fatherhood is? You must not magnify and cast upon the heavens the image of the best of mortal fathers. You must not go to a deduced fatherhood–deduced from man and imported into God. You must not –import fatherhood into God, nor goodness, patience, pity, sacrifice. That would be working in quite the wrong way, moving in quite the wrong direction for religion. Religion begins with a revelation that comes clown, not a passion that goes up. We must not reverse the divine current. It would be what is called anthropomorphism. It is imposing man on God instead of revealing God through man. Our love is God’s speech but not His Word.
No. We do not understand God from religion but religion from God. But where is He, you say, if not in my heart? He is in history. We must go to history, to Christ, and find the fontal Father there, the absolute Father, from whom all fatherhood is named in heaven and earth. He is in our experience but not of it. We must go to Christ’s Holy Father. Christianity is not fatherhood but holy fatherhood. We must go to the Father whose love is holiness going out to love men back to itself, and whose grace is holiness going down to love them up to itself His own love means it is holy love.
3. AND ONE STEP MORE
How is holy love to be revealed to unholy men? How is the outgoing holiness to reach them? How but by death God knew what He had to expect when He committed His holy self among evil men. It was shame and death. There is no way but the Cross of committing a holy love to such a world as this. The gospel of a holy God is not soon popular. The holier your love of men is the more you will suffer and be rejected with it. God Almighty knew, for Himself even, no way but the Cross to the hearts and wills of evil men. Nature is to be sanctified by no genial grace, by no loving charm, but by suffering grace. It only sanctifies because it redeems, it only redeems because it atones, it only atones because it dies in holy obedience, it only dies to rise, and it rises, as it died, by the spirit of holiness (Rom. i. 4). God’s holiness makes in Christ its own atonement, commends its own love as grace, does its own justification, and redeems us into its own communion.
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