The Westminster Confession of Faith

Today I discovered that the Westminster Confession of Faith, an English document which is Scottish in the same way that Crowded House and Phar Lap are Australian, is no more impressive – and hardly any less wordy – in comic form!

I’m looking forward to teaching on this later this year.

[Note: I reckon that we get Chris Tilling, who seems to like this sort of poppycock, to draw us up a better chart as part of his ecumenical service/penance to the reformed community. All in favour say ‘aye’ (another born-in-England-made-in-Scotland word). I have idea of the history of the word ‘pleas’, though it sounds kind of Flemish]

Felicem diem natalem, Martin

Today is Martin Stewart’s birthday. Martin is a wise friend of mine, a respected leader and compassionate soul who, despite every effort to stem the tide of inevitability, is ageing more rapidly than most. To celebrate, I decided to share a poem with Martin by one of my favourite poets, R.S. Thomas. The poem is titled ‘Ninetieth Birthday’:

You go up the long track
That will take a car, but is best walked
On slow foot, noting the lichen
That writes history on the page
Of the grey rock. Trees are about you
At first, but yield to the green bracken,
The nightjars house: you can hear it spin
On warm evenings; it is still now
In the noonday heat, only the lesser
Voices sound, blue-fly and gnat
And the stream’s whisper. As the road climbs,
You will pause for breath and the far sea’s
Signal will flash, till you turn again
To the steep track, buttressed with cloud.

And there at the top that old woman,
Born almost a century back
In that stone farm, awaits your coming;
Waits for the news of the lost village
She thinks she knows, a place that exists
In her memory only.
You bring her greeting
And praise for having lasted so long
With time’s knife shaving the bone.
Yet no bridge joins her own
World with yours, all you can do
Is lean kindly across the abyss
To hear words that were once wise.

By way of response, Martin, upon finding his reliable plastic turtle ink and quill set stashed away in the bottom of the bedside table and buried behind a half-finished bottle of whisky, a small tin of Revatio capsules (that he keeps forgetting to take), a well-worn copy of Robert Farrar Capon’s Between Noon and Three: Romance, Law, and the Outrage of Grace, a set of broken headphones, and a half-eaten packet of plain crisps, set about scribbling his own poem this afternoon. To be sure, when it comes to poetry Martin’s no Thomas, though he’s a tryer, so cudos to him for that:

There is a bad boy in the church – Goroncy,
a theologian, in his prime.
Should we be asking Mr Baker* to send in a Commission,
or do we leave it alone this time?

If I wasn’t so old, doddery and frail
I’d give Goroncy a little piece of my mind.
But alas ‘little’ is all I have left, and what’s there I’m fast loosing,
(along with my money, my hair, and my time).

So I will suffer in near silence
at the passing of my years
And while envying him that wee dram, (of which I’d like to share!)
I’ll humbly give God thanks, for this life,
and Goroncy’s good cheers.

Then, some hours later, and while innocently enjoying a few moments at the botanical gardens near home here in Dunedin, I was struck by this sign –

– upon which I turned to the kids saying, ‘OK, let’s go feed the ducks’.

A wee dram will be enjoyed tonight in honour of the birthday boy!

‘Otago Peninsula’, by Brian Turner

There, beneath a portcullis of rain
lie the bones of time-rent men and women.

They lie awash in the slush
that saddened and sometimes defeated them.

Scabby hedges cling to the slopes
of hills yoked by sky.

Here the whole range of earth’s colours
sprawl on paddock, stone wall and crumpled sea.

Nothing is left untouched by sparse sunlight,
slanting rain, fists of wind punching

the ribs of the land. Here, under tough grasses
and the crust of sheep and cattle tracks

crumble the fondest dreams and prophecies.
No one came who stayed to conquer, no one came

who was not beaten down
or turned away for another time.

– Brian Turner, ‘Otago Peninsula’ in Ancestors (Dunedin: John McIndoe, 1981).

Music and Theology in the European Reformations

The Katholieke Universiteit Leuven is planning to host a ‘Music and Theology in the European Reformations’ conference on 19–21 September 2012 at which theologians, historians, biblical scholars and musicologists will come together to consider the relationship between music and theology during the sixteenth century with a particular emphasis on the question of reformation in all its forms (Lutheran, Calvinist, Catholic, and Radical).

More information is available here, and short paper proposals can be submitted via here before 15 May.

‘Jesus Summons Forth’

Jesus saw Lazarus.
Lazarus was likely in heaven,
as dead as a pear
and the very same light green color.
Jesus thought to summon him
forth from his grave.
Oh hooded one, He cried,
come unto Me.
Lazarus smiled the smile of the dead
like a fool sucking on a dry stone.
Oh hooded one,
cried Jesus,
and it did no good.
The Lord spoke to Jesus
and gave Him instructions.
First Jesus put on the wrists,
then He inserted the hip bone,
He tapped in the vertebral column,
He fastened the skull down.
Lazarus was whole.
Jesus put His mouth to Lazarus’s
and a current shot between them for a moment.
Then came tenderness.
Jesus rubbed all the flesh of Lazarus
and at last the heart, poor old wound,
started up in spite of itself.
Lazarus opened one eye. It was watchful.
And then Jesus picked him up
and set him upon his two sad feet.

His soul dropped down from heaven.
Thank you, said Lazarus,
for in heaven it had been no different.
In heaven there had been no change.

– Anne Sexton, ‘Jesus Summons Forth’ in The Complete Poems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981), 341–42.

Bad sermons

Like most people who hang around churches, I hear a lot of bad sermons. Some of them are my own. And from time to time, I also read some bad sermons. I also read about what makes bad sermons. (Ironically, or perhaps not, these essays are often written by someone who themselves is a dismal preacher.) So when PT Forsyth suggests that ‘with its preaching Christianity stands or falls’, I hope like mad that he’s wrong, even while secretly acquiescing with his assessment of God’s strange ways with us. Anyway, I was recently reading Bonhoeffer’s novella titled ‘Sunday’ which appears in his Fiction from Tegel Prison material (I’m slowly making my way through Bonhoeffer’s works this year). Therein, he offers us one of the best expositions I’ve yet read on the bad sermon, and on the costliness of such. Here’s an excerpt:

Frau Karoline Brake sat upright on the park bench, her eyes lost in the red splendor of blossoms and in the dark green foliage. A few brimstone butterflies fluttered in the hushed stillness of shimmering sunlight. The birds’ soft rustling in the hushes, their voices now almost silenced by the fire of the sun climbing toward noon, the chirping of crickets, the mosquitoes’ fine, bright hum – all these sounds reached her ear, penetrating the stillness. Feeling happy and profoundly thankful, she breathed in the fullness of the summer air.

Suddenly a shadow passed across her face. She had heard another miserable sermon. She had walked out of church in a very bad mood, and only the radiant blue sky and nature’s summery light had made her feel better. But now she felt her rage rising once again within her. What rubbish she had been forced to listen to again. Could one blame the children and grandchildren who, for years now, had let her go to church alone? She could still hear her oldest grandson’s precocious words as he had accompanied her to church for the last time: “You know, Grandma, we’ve outgrown this kind of preacher wisdom just like we’ve outgrown our Latin teachers rattling off Ostermann’s exercises. I really can’t understand how you can bear to listen to it Sunday after Sunday.”

At the time she had replied, “Dear boy, what’s important is not that something is new, but that it’s right. And we need to hear what’s right again and again, because unfortunately we keep forgetting it.”

“I don’t understand,” he had replied. “I don’t forget it at all. On the contrary, I can recite all these sanctimonious clichés backwards and forwards.”

‘‘Yes, you know them in your head and your lips can rattle them off my dear, but the heart and the hand learn more slowly.”

She had said this and yet did not feel right about saying it, for what they had heard in the sermon was neither new nor right. It was sanctimonious prattle, and to her mind that was the worst thing that could happen from the pulpit. Perhaps she should have admitted that openly to her grandson. Perhaps she should have said to him: “You mustn’t confuse Christianity with its pathetic representatives.” But he was a smart boy and would not have spared her a reply: “Anything that has such pathetic representatives can’t have much power left; I’m interested in what is alive and relevant today, not in a dead faith of the past.”

How could one argue with that? To distinguish between original Christianity and the church today was really a feeble attempt to justify it. After all, what mattered was simply whether the Christianity in which Frau Brake had grown up and lived her life still existed today, and whether or not it lives in its current representatives. Every bad sermon was another nail in the coffin of the Christian faith. It could no longer be denied that here, in this suburb in any event, hot air had taken the place of God’s Word.

Frau Karoline Brake no longer saw the bushes in full bloom; she could no longer feel the pleasure of the warm July sun. Instead she saw her children and grandchildren before her mind’s eye and uttered a quiet “Oh, well!” In her voice was a little amazement about the ways of the world, a little worry about her own inability to change them, but also a good bit of that calm assurance with which older people entrust the future to hands stronger than their own. But, as if she had already let herself go too far with this little sigh, Frau Karoline straightened her body with a quick, rather indignant jerk, stood up, and strode resolutely through the park to the street that led to her home.

No, she was not the kind who gave up easily. You could tell from the way she walked that she was making decisions as she went along. She would see that this old windbag of a preacher left this pulpit, or that a second pastor, a preacher of the word of God, would be called to the parish.  She rejected the idea of speaking to the windbag again. She had made several attempts, but had been met with nothing but vain defensiveness and hollow officiousness. In fact, she had felt the pastor avoiding her glance since these visits, and she had heard by the grapevine that he had thwarted her reelection to the parish council [Gemeindekirchenrat]. Some said he emphasized that she must be spared because of her age; others said he thought her strange. He even went so far with some as to accuse her of intolerable presumption. There was no doubt about it; he was afraid of her because she saw through him. Despite these events she had continued to go to his church every Sunday, even when she had long since given up hope of ever hearing the word of God from him. She had taken this humiliation upon herself as a salutary discipline. But in the end she had had enough. It wasn’t so much for her own sake; she had learned through the years to ignore the talk and to focus on the few words which contained truth. She could have continued this way for the rest of her life. But more important things were at stake. The congregation, the whole town, her own family was deprived of the word of God and that meant that their whole life must sooner or later lose its center. This could remain hidden for a while yet; memory and tradition could postpone complete disintegration for a while yet.

But her grandchildren’s generation would need to find new ways of its own, and several things these young people had said had led their grandmother to recognize the first signs of protest, even of revolt. It was not the young people’s fault if things were as they were. Rather, the older people let things take their course so unperceptively, without insight or concern. That was the worst thing about it. Frau Karoline Brake had asked herself tacitly whether it could be God’s will to bring judgment over this generation by withdrawing God’s word from them. But even if it were so, she told herself, God would also want people to resist [widersetzen] this judgment, to take God at his word and not let him go until he blessed them. But why was she so alone with her ideas and opinions? Why did hardly anyone who had been in church today, except the old sexton, notice that all they had heard were hollow phrases and cheap clichés? Why did the educated, of all people, fail so completely in their discernment? To be sure, they hardly ever went to church, but when they had to attend a baptism or wedding they always found the “speech” [Rede], as they called the sermon, very lovely, very artistic, very modern, very relevant. The old woman shook her head dejectedly and was totally lost in her thoughts when she heard a voice behind her.

“Good morning, my dear Frau Bürgermeister, hasn’t the dear Lord blessed us with another beautiful day?” It was the neighbor, Direktor Warmblut’s widow, who was also walking home from church. She had already greeted two or three other women from the neighborhood on their way home and was now hurrying after Frau Karoline Brake to reach her before they arrived at their houses. It wasn’t easy for this short, rather plump woman to catch up to her neighbor, who was ten years her senior. Now she ran breathless with a shiny, red face beside the agile and stately figure, who presented a rare picture of moderation and dignity in her gray dress, gray silk parasol, gray hair, and the dry gray skin of her intelligent face.

“Good morning,” said Frau Brake with her quiet, clear voice. “Yes, the sun does us good; we need it, too.”

“Oh, I do hope things are going well with you. What wonderful health the dear Lord has given you! Well, of course, he loves you and why shouldn’t he? Such a blessed family life, and you their beloved grandmother, the idol of all the grandchildren. Oh, these charming children, and they’re growing up now. But they’re still good, cast in the same mold, and why shouldn’t they be? How fortunate for you, to be surrounded by your family – just think, my dear Frau Bürgermeister, I have had such trouble again the last few days. Oh, I know, the heavier the cross, the closer to heaven, and why shouldn’t it be so? But just think, my daughter Hilde’s husband has left the church and doesn’t want their child baptized. I’ve shed so many tears over it. What would my dear husband, God rest his soul, have said about it? And what will people think of us, and what will become of the poor little wretch? Yes, and I’m almost ashamed to admit it, my Hilde doesn’t seem to mind at all. She says the child can decide later on for herself what she wants. That really hurt me – and coming from my own daughter! And all this to the widow of a man of such an honorable position! I just can’t understand it. I always told her about the dear Lord and prayed with her. She always had to go to church with me, and even at her wedding the pastor gave her such lovely maxims to learn, and she always had the saying over her bed, “Do right and fear no one.” Believe me, dearest Frau Bürgermeister, I haven’t been able to sleep for nights fretting over my daughter. But during the sermon today all that blew over, and now I’m relieved and happy. Oh, and the dear Lord has given us our dear church and our dear pastor, too, who has such a beautiful way with words, so down-to-earth and close to the people. Forgive me, Frau Bürgermeister, I know you don’t always agree with him, but today, don’t you agree, today he outdid himself.”

“Yes, today he really outdid himself, Frau Direktor.”

“You see, you see, oh, I’m so happy that you agree. Didn’t he say it beautifully? Yes – uh, what did he say, anyway? It’s so lovely one could never convey it. But it really doesn’t matter at all, you can just feel it and it’s so uplifting and you don’t even quite know why, isn’t that right, dearest Frau Bürgermeister.”

“Yes, you really don’t quite know why.”

“Well, anyway, he said everyone should live the way they see fit and then it will be the right way, and it doesn’t matter that much to the dear Lord whether the little one is baptized or not, right, Frau Bürgermeister? And it really doesn’t matter that much at all whether my little Hilde goes to church or not. We’re all free people, after all, that’s how he expressed it. Oh, what a wonderful idea! So liberating, so deep, and why shouldn’t it be, right, dearest Frau Bürgermeister? In fact, he had a Bible passage. Now what was it about again?”

“Yes, indeed, what do you think it was about, Frau Direktor?”

“Yes, what was it about, anyway? Oh – you’re getting me all confused, Frau Bürgermeister. But it really doesn’t matter at all, does it?”

“No, it really doesn’t matter at all, because it wasn’t about the Bible passage at all. He wanted to preach about plucking the ears of corn on the Sabbath and about the verse, ‘The Son of Man is lord of the sabbath.’ Instead of saying that Christ may do things because he is Christ, but that doesn’t give us the right to do them by any means, and that if Christ keeps the Sabbath by breaking it, then we first have to learn how to keep the Sabbath holy in earnest, by keeping it – instead of saying that, he babbled on about the freedom of all human beings, and that people may do whatever they think is right, and that we should spend Sunday out in nature rather than in church, and that it doesn’t matter so much at all because the dear Lord is so kind and sweet and good that he isn’t even capable of wrath. My dear Frau Direktor, did it escape you again that the pastor said what you wanted to hear; but didn’t preach the word of God?”

April Stations

Reading:

Listening:

Watching:

Abraham Kuyper resources

The Princeton Theological Seminary Library and the Historical Documentation Centre for Dutch Protestantism have hooked up to digitalise and to make available most of Abraham Kuyper’s published works as well as his unpublished archives. Both the Abraham Kuyper Bibliography and the Digital Library of Abraham Kuyper represent an important resource to the Church, and any who wish to see a prolific example of naivety birthed by a commitment to natural theology can do little better than dig into a little Kuyper.

Two poems

Two of my favourite places in Dunedin are the aviaries at the Dunedin Botanical Gardens and the Presbyterian Church’s Archives Research Centre. Weird birds seem to dominate both places. Yesterday, I visited the latter, a place from which it seems I rarely depart empty handed. I left with the following two poems. They were amusing enough to share:

‘The Ecumenicist’, by James Forrest

I caught an Ecumenicist
And kept him in a yard.
I fed him up on sugar-beet
With olive oil and lard.
I kept him effervescent
With the aid of sherbert-fizzers,
And snipped his budding principles
With ecumeniscissors.

In ecumenisentiments
His training was intense;
With ecumeniscience
And ecumenisense;
As he greedily devoured
All the Acts of Convocation
To stimulate the art
Of ecumeniquivocation.

I loved my Ecumenicist
And firmly hoped that he
Would one day ecumenicise
My darling C of E;
But every time I turned, occurred
Another cataclysm –
My Ecumenicist had bred
An ecumeniSCHISM!

Discouraged by experience
I felt it rather vain
An ecumenisysphus
For ever to remain;
My fervant ecumenical
Experiments had failed
And ecumenicynicism
Finally prevailed.

‘Little John Robinson’

Little boy kneels at the foot of the bed,
Droops on his little hands little gold head.
Hush, hush, whisper who dares –
Little John Robinson’s saying his prayers.

“God bless Daddy – I hope that’s right.
Hadn’t we fun with his book tonight?
The words are long, and the theme’s so odd,
But the title’s lovely – Honest to God!

If I open the pages a little bit more
I can see Alec Vidler just round the door.
He’s a beautiful beard, but I doubt if he should …
Oh, God bless Tillich and make him good.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer just writes in red
That the notion of ‘God out there’ is dead.
And John Wren Lewis finds God in all
Though Bultmann doubts if that’s true at all.

They’re so clever, and I’m just me;
And what it’s about I can’t quite see.
I said, ‘Bless Daddy, and Tillich and …’ oh!
While I remember, the Publishers too!”

Little boy kneels at the foot of the bed,
Droops on his little hands little gold head.
Hush, hush, whisper who dares –
Honest to God, he’s just saying his prayers!

(‘Little John Robinson’ appeared in The British Weekly, June, 1963)

With ink and quill: a note on some current projects

Trying to put to bed a number of outstanding writing commitments has meant that the regularity of posts here at PCaL has been somewhat sporadic of late. I make no apology for this. For those who may be interested, here’s what I’ve been working on instead:

  1. A book of sermons (about half of which are previously unpublished) by PT Forsyth. The book, which should be out later this year, is (provisionally) titled ‘Descending on Humanity and Intervening in History’: Notes from the Pulpit Ministry of P.T. Forsyth. It includes a Foreword by Professor David Fergusson and an Introduction by yours truly with the title ‘Preaching sub specie crucis: An Introduction to the Preaching Ministry of P.T. Forsyth’. It will be published by Pickwick Publications (an imprint of Wipf and Stock’s).
  2. Putting the finishing touches on an essay for a volume on Evangelical Calvinism (also to be published by Pickwick) which is being edited by Myk Habets and Bobby Grow. My contribution is titled ‘“Tha mi a’ toirt fainear dur gearan”: J. McLeod Campbell and P.T. Forsyth on the Extent of Christ’s Vicarious Ministry’.
  3. Mastering Indian cooking. No book or TV series on this topic has been planned as yet, but I’m open to offers from publishers and media producers.
  4. Editing a series of conference papers for the volume To Mend the World: A Confluence of Theology and the Arts (also to be published by Pickwick).
  5. Hallowed Be Thy Name: The Sanctification of All in the Soteriology of Peter Taylor Forsyth (formerly known as ‘my PhD thesis’ and which is currently undergoing a long-overdue light edit) will appear in T&T Clark’s Studies in Systematic Theology series … again, hopefully this year. The description reads:

This book fills a noticeable gap in Forsyth studies. It provides readers interested in the thought of Forsyth with a way of reading and critiquing his corpus, and that in a way that takes due account of, and elucidates, the theological, philosophical and historical locale of his thought. Goroncy explores whether the notion of ‘hallowing’ provides a profitable lens through which to read and evaluate Forsyth’s soteriology. He suggests that the hallowing of God’s name is, for Forsyth, the way whereby God both justifies himself and claims creation for divine service. This book proposes that reading Forsyth’s corpus as essentially an exposition of the first petition of the Lord’s Prayer is an invitation to better comprehend not only his soteriology but also, by extension, his broader theological vision and interests.

‘Death and Resurrection’

I am your double man, though first you will
Me one estate: this meadowed flesh my bones
Do comfort in; the blood’s warm brooks that hill
And waterfall me through; my browsing senses
Nostriled for adventure, five unicorns
That rampant in me run; the mind’s huge barns
All attic’d overhead with my pretenses,
All cellared underneath with my unknowns.

And here I landlord, jubilant a while,
To store up meanings in the bins and ricks,
A sundial farmer faithful to my rites
As morning robins: except my brother, sin,
Prides in the yards and warfares at the gates.
And then my countryside is stones and sticks
And straw, and death soon wooden fences in
The ruined body of my land all still.

Yet you recover me from my disgrace.
This little ground I am, this cipher earth
I corner in, this night that densely nights
Me down to stay; you mine-field with the sun,
The fuse as long as love, the burst a birth,
A second world after the blackout’s done:
And out of my debris you timber heights,
And into my despair you hammer grace.

– Arnold Kenseth, ‘Death and Resurrection’, in The Holy Merriment (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1963), 61.

March stations …

Reading:

Listening:

Watching:

‘The Sickness Unto Death’, by Anne Sexton

God went out of me
as if the sea dried up like sandpaper,
as if the sun became a latrine.
God went out of my fingers.
They became stone.
My body became a side of mutton
and despair roamed the slaughterhouse.

Someone brought me oranges in my despair
but I could not eat a one
for God was in that orange.
I could not touch what did not belong to me.
The priest came,
he said God was even in Hitler.
I did not believe him
for if God were in Hitler
then God would be in me.
I did not hear the bird sounds.
They had left.
I did not see the speechless clouds,
I saw only the little white dish of my faith
breaking in the crater.
I kept saying:
I’ve got to have something to hold on to.
People gave me Bibles, crucifixes,
a yellow daisy,
but I could not touch them,
I who was a house full of bowel movement,
I who was a defaced altar,
I who wanted to crawl toward God
could not move nor eat bread.

So I ate myself,
bite by bite,
and the tears washed me,
wave after cowardly wave,
swallowing canker after canker
and Jesus stood over me looking down
and He laughed to find me gone,
and put His mouth to mine
and gave me His air.

My kindred, my brother, I said
and gave the yellow daisy
to the crazy woman in the next bed.

– Anne Sexton, ‘The Sickness Unto Death’, in The Complete Poems (New York: Mariner Books, 1981), 441–42.

Ethics in the Presence of Christ

Christopher R.J. Holmes, Ethics in the Presence of Christ (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2012). ISBN: 9780567491732; viii+164pp.

Christian theology is always ethics. To be sure, dogmatics and ethics are not entirely the same thing, but there can be no responsible dogmatics that is not also concerned with ethics, and no responsible ethics that is not equally concerned with dogmatics. Unhinged from one another, both become retarded at best, and tyrants at worst. Put otherwise, ethics is part of the doctrine of God precisely because, as Barth noted, God makes himself responsible for us. So Barth’s decision to speak of ethics as a task of the doctrine of God in CD II/2, a paragraph he introduces thus:

As the doctrine of God’s command, ethics interprets the Law as the form of the Gospel, i.e., as the sanctification which comes to man through the electing God. Because Jesus Christ is the holy God and sanctified man in One, it has its basis in the knowledge of Jesus Christ. Because the God who claims man for Himself makes Himself originally responsible for him, it forms part of the doctrine of God. Its function is to bear primary witness to the grace of God in so far as this is the saving engagement and commitment of man. (§36)

According to Barth, a Christian account of dogmatics and ethics – both evangelical and catholic – begins with a particular person – Jesus Christ – and in his contemporaneous power, truth and love graciously made available to us by the ministry of the Spirit. This too is Chris Holmes’ claim in his delightful and eloquently written essay, Ethics in the Presence of Christ. Slaying the dragon of christological exemplarism (‘Exemplarism in Christian Ethics trades upon principles and a dead Jesus, a Jesus who lives only inasmuch as his example guides. Exemplarism is imprisoned by immanence, the idea that the resources we need for good conduct, for living humanly, are present within the matrix of our own experience, so that Jesus himself is called upon only inasmuch as he corroborates values and attitudes commensurate with our account of what it means to be “ethical”’) as a foundation for Christian and ecclesial existence, Holmes seeks to ‘draw the life of the Christian community into the orbit of the presence and ongoing ministry of Christ, its natural environment, and thus to explore the consequences of his presence for ethics and offer an account of the moral landscape of ethics that is dependent on its environment’.

Convinced that ‘ethics is a function of Christ’s “continually operative” reconciling and revealing intervention’, and that responsible ethics is as participatory as is life, prayer, worship, etc. – i.e., it takes place in the life of the Spirit and from the side of Jesus Christ – Holmes is concerned that we engage in conversations about ethics in light of the contemporary presence and determining ministry of Jesus Christ. He seeks to take with full seriousness the fact that ethics is a function of christology, the human counterpart to Christ’s vicarious obedience and faith. ‘Ethics’, he writes, ‘is simply action evoked by and participant in his saving action and saving obedience. Accordingly, ethics is behavior that recognizes “the pioneer and perfecter” of our faith’. Ethical acts, in other words, are acts aligned to the presence of a particular person, and to what that person – Jesus Christ – is now doing. Accordingly, ethics is not concerned with the good abstractly understood or indeed with any norm or concept apart from a particular living person. And Holmes calls upon Christians to continually turn to the person who speaks through his Word.

Ethics in the Presence of Christ, Holmes outlines in the introductory chapter, is concerned to ask and answer two basic questions: Is this One as narratively attested present? And if so, what is he doing? When ethics becomes attuned to how God’s rule in the world takes shape through the present Christ and how God intends his rule to take shape in us through patient hearing of the Word, it, Holmes insists, ‘becomes an enterprise that begins afresh each day, seeking to do God’s will, recognizing that the doing of God’s will is a matter of being rendered transparent to what God is already doing “to keep human life human in the world’”.

Drawing on the work of Lehmann, Bonhoeffer, TF Torrance, Webster, Hoskyns, Barth, Newbigin, and others, Holmes offers us a theological reading of three texts from John’s Gospel – 5.1–18; 18.1–19.42 and 21 – attending to the themes of the presence of Christ’s power, truth and love respectively. These three chapters form the heart of the book, and are introduced by a fine (though somewhat repetitive) chapter on ethics and presence. The final chapter offers a rich account on why Scripture construes ethical reality.  Holmes’ decision to attend closely to Scripture is premised on the fact that ‘a text on Christology and ethics cannot afford to be exegetically thin, precisely because Christology is a description of the person who acts as narratively depicted, and ethics an account of what the One who acts as Scripturally attested would have of us’. Would that more theologians followed Holmes’ lead here!

In his exposition of Jesus’ healing of the sick man in John 5, Holmes argues that ‘Christ is acting now among us no less powerfully than he did then; he is present among us by the Spirit in accord with the grain of the universe’. He suggests that Jesus’ gracious healing of the sick man is indicative of the fact that Jesus ‘does not will that life go on as normal for this man whom he encounters. The healing of the man is a sign, a sign of ‘the End’, namely the eschatological enfleshment ‘of God’s glory and presence to Israel’. Moreover, Jesus’ healing ministry attests his identity as ‘One in whom God’s life-giving rule is present and effective’. Drawing on E.C. Hoskyns’ claim (in The Fourth Gospel) that ‘In Jesus the world is confronted by the End’, Homes suggests that the end is already present and contemporary to us in Christ: ‘The End – that is, Jesus – is present, moreover, to all times, remaking them in accordance with the will of his Father whom he loves. The hour is no less present to the Jews who sought to kill him because he called “God his own Father, thereby making himself equal to God”, than it is to us (John 5.18). We too live in this hour; we too must hear the voice that is speaking to us and live’. He continues:

This is of course quite difficult for people to appreciate. We are used to and often at home in a world wherein we expect to hear nothing because we already ‘know’ what is real and what can be. But the joy of hearing Jesus is that we realize the extent to which our time is encroached upon by his time. Indeed, Jesus does speak and in so doing he calls ‘into question all the criteria by which – in normal affairs – I [we] judge what is possible, what is reasonable, what is admirable’. As late modern people we find it difficult to believe that the reign of God is present to us and impinging upon us … The gap between the then and there and the here and now is really not so large. In fact, there is not any gap.

Holmes argues that in meeting the power at work in Christ, one encounters God’s knowing and willing – the grain of the universe, to use a phrase popularised by Hauerwas. Power, Holmes insists, is never to be isolated from a determination – namely, that of peace with God himself. It is precisely this determination which is the reality-indication ingredient in the person of Christ. What Scripture testifies to is that this determination is an omnipotent determination which withstands the world’s rebellion. So Holmes:

If the movement in ethics ought always to be from God to humanity, inclusive as it is of the movement of humanity to God, one must take a moment to reflect upon the eternal basis of such a movement. To talk about the eternality of Christ as what grounds his always ‘working’ matters precisely because without such an account we risk talking about the presence of Christ in purely interventionist terms (John 5.17). The power of this One as the presence of God’s power ‘working’ is his immanent life. That is not to take away from the unsubstitutable character of these accounts, but it is to say that we are not beholding in them a reaction. Instead, in the Gospels, we are witnesses to the enactment of an eternal determination: that ‘all things have been created…for him’ (Col. 1.16). It is the Son of God’s eternal determination which is manifest here: the eternal determination of Son and Father to guarantee for the creature their participation as creatures in the blessings of covenant fellowship with themselves. To be sure, the way in which this eternal purpose is realized is shaped by the fact that we have sinned. But our sin and its fruits do not determine God’s will. God’s will – indicative as it is of God’s being – is to humanize. The surety of the reconciliation Jesus is, enacts and reveals is rooted in his person as the eternal Son. An account of the eternality or immanent life of the Son whose ministering presence in Jesus Christ effectively confronts illness is thus necessary if the divine character of the work be granted. Without it, the Gospels can be read only as interventions, not descriptions of the grain of the universe which is the outworking in time of the life of the trinity, specifically the life of the eternal Son.

The implication for ethics is clear:

We do not need by our activity – principally belief – to extend the power at work in Jesus’ ministry into the present or try to make it relevant to our contexts. ‘This is because the question of Christian ethics itself remains malformed unless and until set firmly within a wider acknowledgement that “God has founded the church beyond religion and beyond ethics” by the graciously vicarious fulfillment of the law in the person of the savior.’ Ethics is to be taken up in light of the person of the Son as subjectivized in us through the work of the Spirit. That is, law or command does not describe resources for conduct internal to the self or of the Christian community, a story, or various pressing contingencies or contexts. Rather, ethics understood Christologically is a destabilized ethics. It is destabilized precisely because it is an inherently revelational undertaking. What is given in Christ – the fulfillment of Moses’ law – ‘subjectively takes shape in the mind of the church through the unique enshrining of Christ’s gospel’. Ethics understood theologically is thus a destabilized or ever relativized ethics because it is not a matter of implementing a moral program of sorts, but rather a question of being formed by the One – by the objective Person – who truly fulfills himself in us via his faith. By believing in his fulfillment of his will, we too are made participants in him who claims us for faith. And his life – his faith, what he is doing, his present ministry – is done into us. Most importantly, we do not then live as those in a kind of vacuum of our own making. Instead, our life is formed by Jesus who is present in the Spirit’s power to us, whose present ministry claims us, so that we too might fulfill the law of our being by believing.

‘A biblical person is one who lives within the dialectic of eschatology and ethics, realizing that God’s Judgment [sic] has as much to do with the humour of the Word as it does with wrath’. So penned William Stringfellow in A Simplicity of Faith. Translated otherwise, we might simply say that the person of faith is the person who is living in Jesus Christ, God’s eschaton and ethic incarnate, and reigning in his freedom as he who, in the words of the Book of the Revelation, is walking and speaking ‘in the midst of the lampstands’ (i.e., his people). This is the metaphysic that Holmes seeks to bear witness to in this essay. Clearly, his thesis is grounded on the claim that ‘metaphysics governs ethics’, a thesis strengthened and made all the more stimulating by a sturdy commitment to the doctrine of creatio continua – a corollary of the church’s claim that in Christ ‘all things hold together’ (Col 1.17), and that in the person of the mediator ‘that which constitutes our world and indeed our lives is present in such a way that our descriptions of the way things are must be subject to a “going on”’.

Each of the three chapters engaging with specific texts from John’s Gospel are a highly stimulating read, sermonic in parts, informed by a maturing dogmatic mind, and laden with pastorally-valuable insights.

The final chapter, ‘On why Scripture construes ethical reality’, betrays Holmes’ deep indebtment to Webster’s and Krötke’s work (Holmes’ doctoral dissertation was on Barth, Jüngel, and Krötke), and engages, I think convincingly, with the likes of Hauerwas, O’Donovan and Wannenwetsch, identifying some achilles in their use of Scripture for theological ethics. A couple of passages are simply worth repeating in full:

To begin ethics with Christ is not enough: ethics is to stay with Christ, to seek to be present to Christ.25 I am not interested in only a Christological starting point for ethics: that is, Christology as only a beginning but not also the middle and end point of ethics. Ethics involves our being continually schooled by the prophets and apostles. To not only begin with but to stay with Christ, which is ethics’ task, is to yield to Scripture. By yielding, the church hears and obeys Scripture’s prophetic and apostolic testimony. The church is where ethical agency is nourished, insofar as it is in the church that we are baptized into Christ by the Spirit and nourished by the proclaimed Word and holy table.

Scripture is first and foremost an address that needs to be heard as the discourse of One who unceasingly speaks or shows himself through its pages. Its authority does not lie in its ability to speak to our situations, or arise to the degree to which it resonates with us, its hearers. Biblical commands such as the particular command spoken to Peter – ‘Follow me’ – are not commands that he or we as those addressed in Jesus’ address to Peter need apply. We need, rather, to hear so as to obey. The Bible’s moral authority is inextricably bound up with the present and ministering Christ. Talk of the Bible’s authority – particularly its commands – is derivative of an authoritative presence: namely Christ present as the appointing, calling and commissioning Word, and so the upholding, gathering and sending Word. He in his person is command: Christ is God’s command, what God wills … Faith is a matter of perceiving, then, of acting in agreement with he who is there and at work: the ‘incessant redeemer’. The present tense, the self-giving of the Son in the Spirit, is crucial to acknowledge if the context be properly elucidated. It means that the more important question becomes, I think, ‘What does the “situation” ask of me in light of Christ’s very definite presence and concrete activity in relationship to it?’

There are a number of places where Holmes makes (over?)statements that demand, at the very least, further clarification or explanation. So, for example, Holmes’ claim that the natural post-Fall world is no longer able to function as a ‘theatre of life’ (a claim, prima face, I think, which is undermined by this very book), or that Scripture’s display of what is really going on in the world is ‘especially the case with respect to John’s Gospel’ (a claim that requires some further argument; it certainly betrays the fact that in writing this book Holmes has been living in John’s Gospel). More significant and obvious by their omission are any sustained discussions on prayer, and on the sacraments. These would, I think, have made this a more satisfying book, building on the already-significant exposition of Christ’s immanent reign among and over his people in his prophetic, priestly and royal ministry.

Still, these really are minor quibbles about what is a tremendously-important and well-overdue book. Holmes’ attempt to discern the present reign of the Word is among the best introductions to theological ethics that I have read. I commend it warmly and enthusiastically.

Training for the Christian life

Whenever the body of Christ eats together in Eucharist on Sundays, it does so in the hope that it will have its eyes opened to and participate in what God is up to in the world, not only on Sundays but on Wednesdays too. The claim, made by Stanley Hauerwas and others, that living in a deeper awareness of the story of Jesus and of the Church does, in the freedom and grace of God, ‘do’ something is deserving of a hearing. While there is no magical change of status, and while these graces do not turn the gathered people of God into liturgical automatons nor automatically make them more ethically-consistent or mature, the Church’s gospel-shaped practices are, I suggest, the means by which the Head (i.e., Jesus) immerses his Body (i.e., the Church) in the way of ordinary gospel-posture. Specifically, they are means by which Christ trains us. This is true whether we are talking about something like the Church’s calendar, its fasting, or its weekly praying of the Lord’s Prayer, and it is particularly true when it comes to the Lord’s Supper. Every time we come to the Table, which is where the entire Church’s story is enacted in concentrated form, we are offered training in how to live sacramentally in the world, to unearth its idolatries, and to expose what William Stringfellow calls the ‘transience of death’s power in the world’.

Sacraments of the good news

It is my understanding that the Church sponsors no such thing as ‘sacraments’ in and of themselves. There are only sacraments of the good news, i.e., signs or proclamation activities which direct us – like John the Baptist and the Scriptures themselves – to see and proclaim the truth about Jesus who is the Sacrament of God. To refer to the Church’s sacraments as ‘signs’ is to say something about the way that sacraments work, that they work through what they say, and what they say is communicated in language apposite to us. In other words, the sacraments work as signs because we can read them. It is because we know what it looks and feels like to wash away dirt from our bodies, for example, that the Church can describe baptism in terms of washing away sins (so Acts 22.16; Eph 5.26; Tit 3.5). It is a sign that looks somewhat alike. Beating someone over the head with a hammer, on the other hand, could never become a sacramental sign of forgiveness because that would contradict its normal meaning. It would point in the wrong direction. This point is well made in Timothy Radcliffe’s Why Go to Church?: The Drama of the Eucharist (London/New York: Continuum, 2008), p. 189.

‘The Bright Field’, by RS Thomas

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give up all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

– RS Thomas, ‘The Bright Field’, in Collected Poems, 1945–1990 (London: Dent, 1993), 302.