Theodicy

Theodicy: The Justification Of God – 4

THE REDEMPTION OF CREATION

Study 4

A guest post by Trevor Faggotter

INTRODUCTION

In Christ Jesus, God has spoken, and is speaking. This speaking awakens hope. Some people prefer perpetual silence, and a lifetime of distractions, or even years of pessimistic mumbling and commentary, to a word, which breaks that silence, brings comfort – yet probingly so – and so, demands much more of us.[1]

We saw in Study 2 that a tragic guilt has come to the human race. Sin enters the world.

Communion has been broken on a large scale, with huge ramifications. Wholeness, unity and peace on a personal, and global scale have been shattered. However, as Christians we have, by faith, experienced the healing of our broken lives in Jesus Christ.

SELF-HEALING AND REPAIR

A marvel occurs when we cut our hand: immediately the body goes to work. An anaesthetic, and the great healing power of our own blood flows forth – spreading, congealing and eventually bridging and plugging the gaping gash in our skin, and finally healing over, with what can surely be described as a remarkable repair job! Similarly, some months after a scorching bushfire blackens the Australian scrub, we see small, power-filled green shoots emerging from charred stumps. What then of the whole world?

Is there a moral order a self-healing power, as nature overgrows in course of time catastrophes volcanic in violence and in area continental? Has it a Vis medicatrix,[2] a power of innate self-recuperation, corresponding to what we find in physical organisms? Is there in it an indwelling tendency, which moves to repair all damage at last, and a power to overbear those elements, which arrest its development?[3]

Creation does appear to have inbuilt dynamic powers of its own. Let the earth bring forth living creatures (Genesis 1:24), and it does; creatures themselves are blessed, commanded and equipped to be fruitful, and they are. Powers of procreation, medicines and powers of healing lie within creation. As we look to Scripture, and hear Christ speaking in it, we see that creation has a future. This future is however, always integrally bound up with the person – Jesus Christ. Scripture records that the earth shook at Christ’s crucifixion[4] and the whole creation now waits with eager longing for the unveiling of the future, the sons of God participating in the life of total liberty, where death and decay are no more;[5] this future is that which God has planned. But there is not merely an inbuilt self-directing powerful pressure for good that brings new life to the world. There is a Person! That person is the Redeemer.

THE PERSON

It is the personality and deeds of Jesus Christ, as Lord of creation, Lord of life, and Lord over death, which brings the future into being. Firstly, together with the eternal Father, as the eternal Son, he freely selects and sets out what the future goal of creation will be. And he brings this future into being in a way, which is truly moral (not moralistic), where moral actions matter. Forsyth says:

…we construe the universe in terms of its crowning product, soul, conscience, and society. It exists for the growing of personality, which is an end in itself, and, in so far as it serves, it serves only another personality, and grows men of God, who is the end for all ends.[6]

In Christ, God is:

… that One who has His universal end completely in Himself, who is identical with the end of the disordered universe – with its redemption. He is the Redeemer because He is identical with His own redemption.[7]

What does this mean for our lives? How does it affect our living? The following points outline the matter in brief:

  1. There is a Person – Christ – unifying all things, himself the guarantor of the goal.
  2. We are called to participate with Christ, as he takes us towards, and to the goal.
  3. As participants, we nevertheless, of ourselves, have severe limitations.
  4. Creation appears to have innate qualities of self-repair and healing, but in fact, all of these are contingent upon the Living Redeemer.
  5. Evil also has an inbuilt tendency to disorganise itself – to self-destruct.
  6. The atonement of the cross, flowing from a Holy God, however, is the only way of dealing fully with the moral situation of the human race. It is a moral Act that is required, and marks a new beginning for the human race. There is no other.

WE DON’T JUST FIND A SPOT TO PARK OUR CARAVAN

Christian faith is about willing participation in the workings of Christ. It is a moral struggle to do so (Ephesians 6:12). Many miss this fact. As such, some believers are virtually ‘still-born’, upon their new birth into God’s kingdom. Our lives, our actions have a direct bearing upon what shall be, in eternity. Moral or immoral action has significant bearing on the way in which history unfolds.

Faith in the Living Christ excludes the idea of fate, but includes the realisation of destiny:

We do not find our freedom and peace merely by finding ourselves, but by finding ourselves in a world Saviour. We do not reach rest merely by finding our place in an objective order, and reconciling ourselves to it. For that is rather resignation than reconciliation. What we find is a power rather than a place, a power working congenially in us both to will and to do. We do not merely win a fortitude, which accepts our niche in the universe, or takes the room assigned in the caravanserai[8] of life. We recognise … our own Master’s voice, the voice of One whose mastery of us is our own true self, true power, and true freedom.[9]

Hearing God, we begin to participate in his will – at first, and ever anew:

Moral power is, at the last, personality. That is the only form in which we know what power really is – our own sense of acting as persons, or of being acted on by persons.[10]

Our destiny, however, is always a gift, a grace, redemptive. It is only possible because there is a Living Redeemer. And this Redeemer carries out many repairs.

THE LIMITATIONS OF CREATURE AND CREATION

In answer to his own questions, (see the start of this paper), Forsyth thus reminds us:

The moral order is self-repairing only in the sense that it is repaired continuously and creatively by the Holy One whose end is in Himself, and who is its true self and more. (So that to love God is to love ourselves in the truest way).[11]

For the human race the fact of our mortality, limits any self-repair we may be given:

There comes a point when the power of physical self-repair ceases – in death.[12]

As to the renewal of this creation; we are not to expect evil to be a self-solvent[13]. Nor does the good make its slow and ebbless way through creation. The wicked are often caught in their own net (Psalm 141:10), and their evil deeds are turned to work together for God’s purposive good, as in Joseph’s life (Gen. 50:20). However, it is in the cross of Christ, (Acts 2:23) that God works Redemption – and in no other way, does history come to its appointed goal. The creature and creation need the Creator for Redemption!

Paul teaches that in the new creation, the old things have become new (1 Corinthians 5:17).[14] Revelation 21:1 shows the new heaven and new earth is the same heaven and earth, “but gloriously rejuvenated, with no weeds, thorns or thistles, and so on”.[15]

The following comment by Forsyth regarding the new creation is consistent with this:

The new creation must, of course, arise out of the first, for, though it is an absolute Act, it does not take place in an absolute way. But it is a more grave matter to regenerate the first creation into the second that it was to organise chaos into the first. The opposition of chaos, void and formless, was passive, but the opposition of the creature is active. It is a family quarrel, and they are the worst. It is not matter against force but will against will. It has behind it all the power of the freedom, which makes the first creation what it chiefly is. So that it is really more true ethically to speak of God’s goal as a New Humanity than as two stages or states of the old Humanity – so long as we do not put the old and the new out of all organic connection whatever … The Redeemer was not the mere agent of a process. He was the New Creator.[16]

WHAT IS REDEMPTION?

It is an Act, with a capital ‘A’. Redemption is not a process. Rather, it is a concentrated Act, with an eternal and universal bearing.[17]

Forsyth takes us on, into the cross, as that necessary and crucial Act of God:

Nothing offers a future for such a world as this but its redemption. But by redemption what do we mean? We mean that the last things shall crown the first things, and that the end will justify the means, and the goal glorify a Holy God. We mean (if we will allow ourselves theological language) an eschatology and a theodicy in it – a divine Heaven, a divine Salvation, and a divine Vindication in the result of history. But more. We mean a consummation, which can only come by way of rescue and not mere growth. We mean rescue from evil by a God whose manner of it is moral, which is the act of a moral absolute, the act of a holy God doing justice to righteousness at any cost to Himself. We mean rectification of the present state of things on His own principles; that is, not mere rectification, mere straightening of a tangle, but justification on a transcendent plane of righteousness, the moral adjustment of man and God in one holy, loving, mighty, final, and eternal act. We mean something more crucial than Meliorism.[18]

We will continue to explore and expound these things in the next study.

[1] Mark 8:34 Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me..”

John Piper has a thoughtful book title: What Jesus Demands From the World, Crossway Books, 2006.

[2] Vis Medicatrix naturae means the healing power of nature.

[3]P.T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, NCPI, 1988, p. 59.

[4] Matthew 27:51, 54 ‘The earth shook, and the rocks were split’, ‘… the centurion saw the earthquake…’.

[5] Romans 8:19 For ‘the creation wais with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God’.

[6] Forsyth, p. 63.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Caravanserai: an inn in some eastern countries with a large courtyard that provides accommodation for caravans.

[9] Forsyth, p. 64.

[10] Ibid. p. 65.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid. p. 66.

[14] Geoffrey C. Bingham, Creation and the Liberating Glory, NCPI, p. 144.

[15] William Hendriksen, More Than Conquerors, Tyndale Press, 1940, p. 198 says: ‘The word used in the original implies that it was a ‘new’ but not an ‘other’ world. Fn: The original has kainos, not neos.’

See also Geoffrey C. Bingham, Creation and the Liberating Glory, p. 73, 121.

[16] Forsyth, p. 68.

[17] Forsyth, p. 74.

[18] Meliorism: the belief that the world tends to improve and that humans can aid its betterment.

Theodicy: The Justification Of God – 3

TOWARDS THE CERTAIN GOAL

Study 3

A guest post by Trevor Faggotter

Prayer: Dear Lord, in your mercy and love, pour your Spirit upon us anew, and help us to love you with all our heart, strength and soul, and particularly in this study, with our mind. Enable us to apply our minds, that we might receive your blessing with joy, and faith – that our hope may be stirred, awakened, renewed. In Jesus name – Amen!

INTRODUCTION

At the outset of this study – lest we become perturbed by the difficult words and concepts in P.T. Forsyth’s, The Justification of God – let us consider carefully two important theological terms – revelation and teleology. Grasping them afresh should encourage us.

Revelation

Revelation: That which takes place when the hidden is unveiled, disclosed, revealed.

Jesus said, ‘Whoever has seen me has seen the Father’ (John 14:9). The hidden God has been revealed. We only know God because he willingly comes to us, to unveil himself and his plan, in the incarnation – the birth, life, deeds, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus. The outpouring of the Spirit of the Father, and Son, now enables us to know:

“…what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him” – these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God (1Corinthians 2:9-10).

When we ponder the future of creation we are pressed, (yet confined), to the knowledge and understanding, which comes from God to humanity, through revelation. Although at present we see in a mirror, dimly (1 Corinthians 13:12), nevertheless, we do see! In Christ, God has revealed his will and plan, in sufficient detail, and the apostles have made more explicit, that which the Risen Jesus opened to them. For these things God has revealed to us. The creation waits with eager longing (Romans 8:21), for all that the new creation brings, namely, the renewal of all things when the Son of man is seated on the throne of his glory (Matthew 19:28). The regeneration! This is the telos.

Teleology

Teleology: The study of the telos, or goal, which God the Father, has set.

This goal is for the redemption of humanity in Christ, the glorification of all creation.

This was planned in Christ from before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4).

THE PROBLEMS: REVELATION AND TELEOLOGY

Forsyth conceded that the matters of revelation and teleology did continue to arise for the church, and the world. In an effort to explore how difficult it can be to comprehend history, and grasp what is to be understood of the future, and the coming appearing of Christ and to then to proclaim it, Forsyth asks many difficult yet probing questions (see pp. 43-47 of The Justification of God), after this brief introduction:

The radical questions of a belief are forced upon us anew by each crisis of the world. And the first task of the Church, before it go to work on the situation that a crisis leaves behind, is to secure the truth and certainty for its own soul of its faith in the overcoming of evil by good; an operation which may mean the recasting of much current and favourite belief.[1]

Here are some of his searching questions that follow:

1. Is there a divine government of such a world, a world whose history streams with so much blood, ruin, and misery as to make civilisation seem to many doubtfully worthwhile?[2]

2. That question means for its answer another, Is there a divine goal of the world?

3. Because if there is, God who secures it has the right to appoint both its times and its means; and a good government of the world is what helps best in our circumstances to bring us there. But is there such a goal, and where do we find it?

4. How shall we be sure of it?

5. Are we to believe in it only if we can sketch its economy, and trace the convergence of all lines, whatever their crook or curve, to that point?

6. Do I believe that all is well with my soul only in so far as I see that all goes well?

7. Can we be sure that all is well with the world only if the stream of its history run through no dreadful caves, nor shoot wild cataracts, nor ever sink to a trickle in the sand of deserts horrible?

8. Is there, in spite of all appearance, a divine teleology for the soul and for the race?[3]

A revelation will be great, universal, and final just as it does answer such questions, and pacifies even the soul it does not yet satisfy.[4]

In other words, the very doctrine of the goal, and the aim, and the destiny set for the creation by God, and being worked out in history – as it is set forth by Scripture, and proclaimed by the church to the world – has an important effect, even on a world who is as yet uncertain, unbelieving or unconvinced. We need to recall, that the blessed assurance we know in the Lord, the certainty of faith, comes to a person by faith. A person who has through revelation, through believing the gospel, met Christ, and come to faith, can say with an indescribable joy:

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see (Hebrews 11:1 – NIV).

Wherever our witness is humble and clear, this certainty has its beneficial effect upon the wider world. As Forsyth says, it pacifies even the soul it does not yet satisfy.

The searching questions continue:

1. Nature not only exists, nor only changes; it grows. It certainly grows in complexity. It grows, with all its order, more heterogeneous.[5] It is full of new departures. It grows in quantity and variety. But does it grow in quality?

2. Is the evolution process really progress? Is the complexity more than complicated, is it sublimated?[6] Is it all but a mode of motion, or does the long series rise to action? Is it really dramatic, or only spectacular? Is it a play or a tableau?[7] Does it work up to anything?

3. Does it work anything out?

4. Has it a denouement[8], a reconciliation?

5. Is there a teleology of nature’s living history?

6. Is there a growing organism of organisms from the mollusc to the man? And if it come to a head in man, does man come to a head in anything? He is an end – has he an end? Has he a chief end, a destiny? How do you know?

7. What is it, where, when? Does the human history in which nature issues crown the teleological side of nature or the dysteleological, the fitness of things or their ‘cussedness’? Does it seal the order or the ravage of nature?

8. Does war exist for peace, or peace for war? Which element is the natural selection of history?

9. Is there a drift in all things? And is it a torrent over Niagara, or a fine vapour steaming, like praise, to the hills and the heavens?

10. Is the world a whole? And, if it is, is it a whole marmoreal,[9] statuesque, and symmetrical, or organic, vital and moving. If it move, what is its goal? Has it a perfection, and is that perfection in itself?

Such are the questions that a world calamity brings home in passionate and tragic terms. Perhaps, if we survey them in our calm, we may find an anchorage ready in our storm. Through the clearer water we may discern a bottom that will hold when our old moorings drag.[10]

Are you clear what the questions are?[11]

Forsyth is probing the idea many may have in their minds in the face of a global crisis, which is so tragic, that is defies explanation: is history therefore only dumb?[12]

THAT POINT IS CHRIST

We must continually come anew to the purpose for which the Son of God appeared – to destroy the works of the devil (1 John 3:8) – to deal with our guilt as a race, and to so break the leverage that the devil has in blinding us to the way God gives for a genuine future. Forsyth asks: ‘Is there any divine visitation that puts us in possession, in petto[13], of the goal of all surmise?[14] Is there any divine gift and deed that fixes the colours seen by genius in the eternal purpose and Kingdom of God, where all earth’s hues are not mere tints but jewels – not mere perpetual gleams, but enduring, precious foundation stones?’[15]

To all such questions Christianity answers with an everlasting yea, however Christendom may blue or belie it. The eternal finality has become an historic event. There is a point of Time at which Time is no longer, and it passes into pure but concrete Eternity. That point is Christ. In Christ there is a spot where we are known far more than we know.[16]

[1] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, NCPI, 1988, p. 42.

[2] The 20th Century catalogue of Genocide is a frightening matter to contemplate:

http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/genocide/

The term ‘Genocide’ was coined by a jurist named Raphael Lemkin in 1944 by combining the Greek word ‘genos’ (race) with the Latin word ‘cide’ (killing). Genocide as defined by the United Nations in 1948 means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, including: (a) killing members of the group (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Recent to Past Occurrences

• Bosnia-Herzegovina: 1992-1995 – 200,000 Deaths

• Rwanda: 1994 – 800,000 Deaths

• Pol Pot in Cambodia: 1975-1979 – 2,000,000 Deaths

• Nazi Holocaust: 1938-1945 – 6,000,000 Deaths

• Rape of Nanking: 1937-1938 – 300,000 Deaths

• Stalin’s Forced Famine: 1932-1933 – 7,000,000 Deaths

• Armenians in Turkey: 1915-1918 – 1,500,000 Deaths

Adolf Hitler to his Army commanders, August 22, 1939:

“Thus for the time being I have sent to the East only my ‘Death’s Head Units’ with the orders to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish race or language. Only in such a way will we win the vital space that we need. Who still talks nowadays about the Armenians?”

[3] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, NCPI, 1988, p. 42.

[4] Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 43.

[5] Heterogenous means: completely different; incongruous; not homogenous.

[6] Sublimated means to make nobler, or purer.

[7] A tableau is a dramatic scene; in a play, an interlude where everyone freezes.

[8] Denouement means: the final resolution of a complex sequence of events.

[9] Marmoreal means: Like marble, in whiteness, hardness.

[10] Ibid. p. 44.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid. p. 45.

[13] In Petto means: In secret, or private.

[14] Surmise: An idea or opinion based on insufficiently conclusive evidence; to make a guess or conjecture.

[15] Ibid. p. 45.

[16] Ibid. p. 47.

Theodicy: The Justification Of God – 2

UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS

AND THEIR OUTCOME

Study 2

A guest post by Trevor Faggotter

WHY THEODICY IS AN ISSUE

Analysis and commentary upon the major problems in the world, nation, city, family or environment, can be heard daily on radio talkback segments across the globe. The blame, for our current or impending woes almost always rests with someone else. Cynicism abounds. Theology within the Christian church can all too easily become more a reflection of the popular, or dominant culture of the day, than a proclamation of the mind, and action of God – as revealed in Scripture. Only a thoroughly biblical theodicy can meet the world with the Word of grace, amidst dire judgments, as the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness (Romans 1:18).

From Genesis 3 we hear that ever since the entrance of sin into the world, human beings have sought to place the blame for their circumstances upon someone else – mostly God, but also other people and other creatures. Guilt is deeply at work in every human heart, provoking a skewed view of the truth, globally. This is especially so, as God draws near:

They heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. But the LORD God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?” He said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.” He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” (Genesis 3:8-11)

The reflex response to God’s simple, but probing, existential question ‘Where are you?’ finds expression in the deflecting the blame onto another. The man quickly pointed to the woman as the leading cause of his present fear. He also blamed God – who gave the woman to be with him. The woman in turn, blamed the ancient serpent, the devil:

The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.” Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent tricked me, and I ate.” (Genesis 3:12-13)[1]

Human beings will view God very differently, depending upon whether they have a pure or an impure heart. Where a person has a pure heart, or cleansed heart, God reveals himself to be pure. Where genuine faith is not present, God’s wrath acts against the conscience of the guilty person, so that God appears to be unjust, unkind and wrong.

…with the pure you show yourself pure; and with the crooked you show yourself perverse (Psalm 18:26).

Sinful human beings frequently view the world by placing God in the Dock[2] in order that he may give account of himself. In our humanly devised, God-blaming kangaroo court, we human beings exercise the self-appointed role of prosecutor, and judge. If God is creator, we reason, then he must answer for the state of the world he has created! However, the Lord sits in the heavens and laughs (Psalm 2:4).

In his Foreword to our text, The Justification of God, Dean Carter exposes the heart of sinful humanity in asking erroneous questions. Dean writes – in brackets:

(after all, theodicy is only an issue where there is a rejection of the light).[3]

This comment reflects the teaching of Jesus, in John’s gospel, who said:

And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed (John 3:19-20).

Facing the plain truth concerning God, humanity and the world is terribly confronting, if ultimately gloriously liberating. In the day that you eat of it [the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall die. Yet, everyone who lives and believes in Jesus will never die.

MAN-CENTRED CULTURE INSTEAD OF GOD-CENTRED FAITH

Man-centred cultures and religions, rather than God-centred faith in Christ, seeking his Coming Kingdom, are at the heart of all human evil and mayhem. A world that ignores the redemptive gift and gracious will of the Living Father soon becomes addicted to the narcotic agendas of progress, technology, escalating wealth, cultural mysticism, religious escapism, substance and environmental abuse and a yearning desire for more power.

Everything has come to turn on man’s welfare instead of God’s worship, on man with God to help him and not on God with man to wait upon Him. The fundamental heresy of the day, now deep in Christian belief itself, is humanist.[4]

Humanism had a bitter outcome for those who had embraced it, in the years prior to and during World War 1, as Forsyth points out:

I say it is inevitable that world calamities should encourage the denials of those who denied before. Their shock also makes sceptics of many, whose belief had arisen and gone on only under conditions of fine weather, happy piety, humming progress…[5]

Elated by our modern mastery of nature and cult of genius, and ridden by the superstition of progress (now unseated), we came to start with that excellent creature, man, his wonderful resources, his broadening freedom, his widening heart, his conquest of creation, and his expanding career. And, as with man we begin, with man we really end. God is there but to promote and crown this development of man, if there be a God at all…. The Father is the banker of a spendthrift race. He is there to draw upon, to save man’s career at the points where it is most threatened.

He is Father in a sense that leaves no room for love’s severity, its searching judgment … He is Father only so long as He meets the instincts and aspirations of man’s heart.[6]

GOD ENTERS THE PULPIT AND CASTS US

UPON A GOD OF CRISIS

It takes enormous discomfort in order for humanity to come to grips with the necessity of the cross of Christ, and with the seriousness of the evil in our own human hearts, and the evil endemic among every nation. The sheer kindness and mercy of God, we so badly underestimate. Forsyth recounts something of the type of public conversation that took place prior to World War One. It sounds all too familiar. He says:

World calamity bears home to us the light way in which, through a long peace and insulation, we were coming to take the problem of the world, and especially its moral problem. ‘We do not now bother about sin’ was said with some satisfaction. The preachers protested in vain against that terrible statement – those of them that had not lost their Gospel in their culture. But they were damned with the charge of theology.[7]

He then goes on to include the war itself, as God’s way of dealing with the human race; it is the disaster that ends dainty and dreamy religion:

And now God enters the pulpit, and preaches in His own way by deeds. And His sermons are long and taxing, and they spoil dinner. Clearly God’s problem with the world is much more serious than we dreamed. We are having a revelation of the awful and desperate nature of evil.[8]

The task which the Cross has to meet is something much greater than a pacific, domestic, fraternal type of religion allows us to face. Disaster should end dainty and dreamy religion, and give some rest to the winsome Christ and the wooing note…. It is a much wickeder world than our good nature had come to imagine, or our prompt piety to fathom.[9]

We, who have known much of the grace of God in our personal lives, know that God has both spoken and enacted a great word of hope, for the nations of the world in the death and resurrection of Jesus. It is a great victory. It is a very great victory. It is The Victory. A godless world needs yet to hear this word, and respond. The church needs to rediscover not only the God of order, which Christendom has enjoyed, but also the God of crisis, who is God most chiefly in the chief tragedy of things.[10] He alone is the One who from the nettle of perdition plucks the flower of salvation.[11]

THE GLOBAL DIMENSIONS OF THE GOSPEL

It was World War One, which drew from Forsyth the rich insights he imparts. We too are faced with many a crisis, on a global scale. We are equipped with the same cross, and the same Christ, and the same gospel, to which we must make recourse. The gospel has always been of global proportions. We need a theodicy, which is adequate to the task. Let’s take Forsyth words slowly, again and tease out each of these important points:

We begin and end with a faith, not in Jesus simply but in His world work…[12]

We begin with the faith in which our own soul calls Him its Saviour from what seems an infinite and hopeless evil. He delivers us from a sin whose guilt lies on our small soul with a pressure from the reservoir of all the high wickedness of the world.[13]

It is not from our moral lapses nor from our individual taint that we are delivered, but from world sin, sin in dominion, sin solidary if not hereditary, yea, from sin which integrates us into a Satanic Kingdom … An event like war at least aids God’s purpose in this, that it shocks and rouses us into some due sense of what evil is, and what a Saviour’s task with it is.

While the Church cannot begin to measure the problem of evil, we need the assurance of its defeat in the cross. For evil affects and invades every area of human life, and the theology of the cross always applies as God’s Victory, and the only true victory:

Is the principle of the war very different from that of a general strike, which would bring society to its knees by sheer impatient force, and which so many avoid only as impolitic and not as immoral?[14] … It is impossible even to discuss the theodicy all pine for without the theology so many deride.[15]

[1] Rev. 12:9 … that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world…

[2] C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock, Eerdmans, 1970, is a book, which contains a series of short articles.

[3] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, NCPI, 1988, p. 4.

[4] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 24.

[5] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 24.

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

[7] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 28.

[8] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 28.

[9] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 28-29.

[10] Ibid. p. 30.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid. p. 30-31.

[14] Ibid. p. 34.

[15] Ibid. p. 37.

Theodicy: The Justification Of God – 1

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once opined that ‘The question of why evil exists is not a theological question, for it assumes that it is possible to go behind the existence forced upon us as sinners. If we could answer it then we would not be sinners. We could make something else responsible. Therefore the ‘question of why’ can always only be answered with the ‘that’, which burdens man completely. The theological question does not arise about the origin of evil but about the real overcoming of evil on the Cross; it asks for the forgiveness of guilt, for the reconciliation of the fallen world.’ (Creation and Fall, Temptation, 84-5). This is by way of introduction to the theme of the next few posts.

Trevor Faggotter is the pastor of Northwestern Community Church in Adelaide, South Australia. He recently gave a series of studies on Forsyth’s 1916 work, The Justification of God. This is a work that continues to speak volumes – perhaps more than ever – to a world as rife with war, suffering and evil as it was during that those years in which the ‘war to end all wars’ was fought out on the battlefields of Europe, and in the consciences of the men and women who lived and died under its smoke. Trevor has been kind enough to allow me to post his studies here, which I plan to do over the coming days. There are 11 studies altogether.

THEODICY: THE JUSTIFICATION OF GOD

Study 1

‘To justify God is the best and deepest way to fortify men’ – P. T. Forsyth[1]

A guest post by Trevor Faggotter

Prayer: Dear Father, we give you thanks for your great and amazing grace towards the human race, in Jesus Christ, our Lord. We praise you for the work of the Holy Spirit, deep in our hearts, revealing your nature, your love and your gift of redemption, through the Cross of Christ. We pray for a fresh hearing of the gospel, in our lives, in our day, and among the nations of the world, in Jesus name, Amen.

A STRANGE TITLE

Theodicy: The Justification of God! The title of this series of studies is unusual. Since the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit and Scripture, have given the human race a revelation of the grace of God, in the beauty of Jesus Christ, in his holy love and kindness towards us. For those of us who have come to know God, as Father – in and through his dear Son Jesus, the Messiah, we do now – in all our joy, as well as in our frailty and weakness – actually love God. We also love his world, his humanity. We love because he first loved us. We trust him concerning his plan for creation. We also seek to know God more and more, in all his ways – even his seemingly strange ways, in all his deeds and actions.

Many things, we barely understand. However, to a person stirred, gripped, moved and motivated by the grace of God, the very notion that God needs justification may now, in our renewed frame of mind, appear to be a foolish one. In many ways, it is. Just as it has been said: Defend Scripture? Defend a Lion! – it can also be said – Defend God? Defend the Lion! However, as responsible members of the human race, and of our present world, Christian people continue to wrestle with the difficult questions, which confront us – in order to more helpfully proclaim Christ, and all that he means to and for the world.

In the Foreword to the 1988 reprint of this book by P.T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, Dean Carter says: ‘God is justified in and by the crucified Christ’.[2] That is the premise, or basis, upon which the book proceeds, and concludes: ‘Christ crucified and risen is the final, eternal answer to the riddle of life’.[3]

The book is the gospel expounded – with a view to grasping something of the dynamics of evil, grace and holiness, outworking in human history. It has its roots deeply implanted in the Scripture, and is written amidst a time of global crisis.

THINK IN CENTURIES

Our studies are based upon the text of a book, which was first published in 1917. That is, it was written during World War One – ‘the war to end all wars’. It is important also to consider that New Creation Publications Incorporated reprinted this book in 1988, some 71 years later. If my maths is correct, the contents of this book are now 91 years old. A short comment once made by the author, P.T. Forsyth (in a different book), is prophetically coming to pass in our own day:

Theology simply means thinking in centuries.[4]

Forsyth thought deeply, and wrote works that have endured, and continue to speak to us today. It takes time to grasp his meaning, but it is well worth the effort. This is a difficult book. But I urge you to persist with its contents. For the reading of a book beyond our current ability can become a defining moment in the way of maturity.

Following the September 11th 2001 attack upon the New York World Trade Centre Twin Towers, like us all, I too needed steady insight. So, of all the possibilities open to me, I reached for this book. Apart from my own need, I was confronted once again, with:

  1. A shocking event – evil and terror
  2. The sudden death and suffering of everyday people – who seemed much like me,
  3. A barrage of political – and at times very shallow – media comment, and
  4. A pastorate, a community of people, and a world of nations that need wisdom.

I found here, valuable wisdom, which I have sought to share, as able. I trust others heard it too, and took heart.

WHAT IS THEODICY?

Our studies focus on the matter of Theodicy. That is, the attempt to justify God in the face of all the evil, misery, suffering and all injustice in the world. Theodicy seeks to answer the question: How can the justice of a sovereign God be defended in the face of evil – especially human suffering, particularly the suffering of the innocent? Our society and indeed all nations need to be equipped to grapple more fully with such questions. For our world is blessed with so many benefits of modern technology, and advanced medicine, that we have often become fixated upon the idea of endless ‘progress’ – as if that is all there is, and all that matters. When something like a Tsunami in the Indian Ocean, or a complex, volatile war, shatters the settled domestic lives of millions, and touches our own lives, we are easily prone to erroneous, foolish or unhelpful responses. We just react.

N.T. Wright identifies three things that characterise much of our current day inadequate approach to problem of evil:

Firstly, we ignore evil when it doesn’t hit us in the face. Second, we are surprised by evil when it does. Third, we react in immature and dangerous ways as a result.[5]

AN OUTLINE OF THE CHAPTERS

Foreword

Overture and Outline

I. The Expectations of Popular Religion and their Fate. Religion as centred on God and centred on Man

II. The Problems: Revelation and Teleology

III. Metaphysic and Redemption

IV. What is Redemption?

V. Salvation Theological but not Systematic

VI. The Failure of the Church as an International Authority

VII. Teleology Acute in Theodicy

VIII. Philosophical Theodicy

IX. The Eternal Cruciality of the Cross for Destiny

X. Saving Judgment

XI. History and Judgment

XII. The Conquest of Time by Eternity

Bibliography

P.T. FORSYTH – A WORD ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Taylor Forsyth was born in 1848, and studied at the universities of Aberdeen, Göttingen and New College, London. He served various Congregational Churches in England, and became Principal of Hackney Theological College, Hampstead – a position he retained until he died, in 1921. He was a member of the theological faculty of London University, and also a one-time chairman of the Congregational Union of England and Wales. He wrote over 30 books and many other pamphlets and articles, championing in his writing, The Cruciality of the Cross. Reading Forsyth will undoubtedly deepen one’s understanding of God as holy love, and of the gospel as the power and weakness of God.

WHAT IS FORSYTH ON ABOUT?

Forsyth’s concern is for the nations, but his eyes are set upon Christ:

In many forms my belief will appear that the site of revelation and the solution of history it to be found, not in the moral order of the world, but in its moral crisis, tragedy, and great divine commedia; not even in the conscience. But in its Christ and His Cross. It seems quite certain that it is only a living faith in the right kind of unity, unity with power that can bring to the race public peace and concord.[6]

The focus of the race is moral, in the conscience. ‘Morality is the nature of things.’ Guilt is therefore the last problem of the race, its one central moral crisis; the Cross that destroys it is the race’s historic crisis and turning point. Were there no sin, there would be no war. Were there no world sin, there would be no world war. War makes at least one contribution to human salvation – it is sin’s apocalypse. It reveals the greatness and the awfulness of evil, and corrects that light and easy conception of it, which had come to mark culture and belittle redemption.[7]

This book is a coming to terms with the very fact of evil, and of its enormous effects and impact upon the world.[8] It comes to grips more closely with its remedy, its nemesis and doom, in the Man Jesus, the Lord Jesus. His triumphant Cross, we pray, will open to us in ways which will deepen us, and so bless our proclamation.

DEPTH NEEDED FOR OUR OWN DAY

Our own culture in Australia in 2008 has emerged from a mixture of many peoples, nations and historical factors, for good and for ill. We live this peaceful side of two world wars, and a strange war in Vietnam. We live amidst other global conflicts, which we witness nightly on our TV screens. We live this side of the rebellious 70’s where many values, foundations and institutions were questioned, challenged, rejected, replaced or ignored. However do we now have the wise insight we need to approach the future?

Many Christian people in our land laid excellent foundations in their love for Christ. We benefit from their good work. However, as churches today, we are prone to live by image, rather than substance. It won’t do. So many nations are such a long way away from the things of Christ, and his gospel. It is depth and substance that is needed, and not the creating of impressions and the projecting of images. Only a profound understanding of the depths of the cross can produce anything more than a shallow culture. And only the Spirit searches the deeps of God and reveals them to people like us. ‘… for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God (1Corinthians 2:10).

This being the case – and given that the Spirit comes to us – we can embark upon a deep and profound and difficult book, with great expectancy. God reveals himself through his Word, written, preached, expounded and imparted by his servants, such as Forsyth.

And so the first work before the Church is to set her own house in order, … to acquire that note of moral authority which gives practical power and historic weight to all her mystic insight and her sympathetic help. It is not help that either the Church or the world needs most. It is power. It is life. It is moral regeneration. If the greatest boon in the world is Christ’s Holy Father, the greatest curse in the world is man’s unfilial guilt. Whatever, therefore, undoes the guilt is the solution of the world. Everything will follow upon that peace and power.[9]

May the Spirit of the Lord impart to us, that which is most needful in our day, that we might share his gospel with others, with conviction.

[1] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, NCPI, 1988, p. 14.

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

[3] Ibid.p. 221.

[4] P. T. Forsyth, The Work of Christ, NCPI, 1993, p. 144.

[5] N. T. Wright, Evil and the Justice of God, SPCK, 2006, p. 8.

[6] Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 16-17. As you might expect, many of our studies, will include a good sprinkling of quotations from Forsyth.

[7] Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 19.

[8] For a biblical theodicy, see also Martin Bleby, Where Was God on September 11th 2001, NCPI, 2001.

[9] Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 22.

Gabriel Fackre on Theodicy

Always stimulating, theologically-rich and pastorally-informed, Gabriel Fackre is always worth reading. Earlier this year he posted the following thoughts on theodicy:

‘Smuggled into the conventional answers to the problem of evil is the notion of power along the lines of an oriental potentate who is in absolute dominating control over every event, a kind of John Wayne writ large. However, biblical power has to do with ‘God’s weakness [that] is stronger than human strength’ (1 Cor 1:25), one defined as such by the empty cross. This is a divine power mighty enough to hold back divine power. It is an almightiness that leaves room for the world to go its own way, yet works tenderly, patiently and persuasively ( a note struck by the early church fathers), and only prevails after long struggle at the very close of history, the End of time. Almighty power is in the future tense.

Because the biblical story of God’s power is a real struggle that means that wherever we can join in it and ‘resist the powers of evil’ … , we do so. Instead of assuming that every evil that happens is God’s will, we ‘come to grips spiritedly with it’ (see Barth’s Letter To Great Britain from Switzerland in 1941), in the confidence that its power has already been broken on Calvary and will finally be totally defeated in the world to come.

This is the faith Job, finally, arrived at when he said, ‘I know that my redeemer lives and that at the last he will stand on the earth’ (19:25), the declaration we make so joyously when we sing it in Handel’s Messiah. Just how God will right every wrong and mend every flaw is not for us to know, but that it will be so is our confidence. And it is the faith we express at Christian burial, one in Paul’s future tense, in the very face of suffering and death:

‘Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril or sword? … No in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Romans 8:35–39)’.

In the ensuing discussion, Fackre presses that ‘we are able to live with evil in the present because grace makes is possible to do so. That grace includes our knowledge from the cross of God’s own vulnerabilty. God is sharing in that very suffering with us and thereby we are participating in God’s own suffering (Bonhoeffer), so graced by a Companion with us “in whatever happens.” But, finally, it is our Romans 8 confidence that has the last Word’.

Richard Floyd, who incidentally has written a most helpful introduction to Forsyth’s doctrine of the atonement entitled When I Survey the Wondrous Cross, enters in and reminds us that any attempt at theodicy requires, if not a complete rejection of the task, at least a certain humility about its limits.

Fackre’s post creates some very interesting discussion, not least because of the introduction of Forsyth into it.

Suffering, Evil and the Existence of God

In today’s New York Times, Stanley Fish gives us a heads up on two soon-to-be-published books on the theodicy question. The two authors are Bart D. Ehrman (a theist turned agnostic) whose book is entitled God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question – Why We Suffer, and Antony Flew (an athiest turned theist) whose book is entitled There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind. While both come from opposite directions they meet, or rather cross paths, on the subject of suffering and evil.

Fish suggests that while ‘Flew is for the moment satisfied with the intellectual progress he has been able to make … Ehrman is satisfied with nothing, and the passion and indignation he feels at the manifest inequities of the world are not diminished in the slightest when he writes his last word’. Fish asks, ‘Is there a conclusion to be drawn from these two books, at once so similar in their concerns and so different in their ways of addressing them? Does one or the other persuade?’ Fish contends that while the odd reader may have their mind’s changed as a result of reading either book, ‘their chief value is that together they testify to the continuing vitality and significance of their shared subject. Both are serious inquiries into matters that have been discussed and debated by sincere and learned persons for many centuries. The project is an old one, but these authors pursue it with an energy and goodwill that invite further conversation with sympathetic and unsympathetic readers alike’.

Fish concludes: ‘In short, these books neither trivialize their subject nor demonize those who have a different view of it, which is more than can be said for the efforts of those fashionable atheist writers whose major form of argument would seem to be ridicule’.

While these two books testify to humanity’s ongoing quest for a theodicy (or an atheodicy), Forsyth was right to press that the real question is not the justification of evil – as any attempt at a theodicy is ultimately to retreat into an ideology, which is the one thing we must not do – but the justification of God for whom there can be no rational vindication, as the Cross bears witness. I am reminded here of Bonhoeffer’s assertion in Creation and Fall, Temptation (pp. 84-5), that the question of why evil exists is not a theological question, for it assumes that it is possible to go behind the existence forced upon us as sinners. If we could answer it then we would not be sinners. We could make something else responsible. Therefore the ‘question of why’ can always only be answered with the ‘that’, which burdens humanity completely. The theological question does not arise about the origin of evil but about the real overcoming of evil on the Cross; it asks for the forgiveness of guilt, for the reconciliation of the fallen world.