Honouring Aung San Suu Kyi

Spain Honors Suu Kyi and Dr Cynthia Maung

A leading Spanish honor has been awarded to Burma’s pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and Dr Cynthia Maung, who runs a clinic for Burmese refugees and migrant workers at the Thai-Burmese border. They will share the 2007 Catalonia International Prize, consisting of the sum of 100,000 euros and a sculpture. The prize is awarded annually by Spain’s regional government of Catalunya to persons judged to have decisively contributed through their creative work to the development of cultural, scientific or human values around the world. Catalunya’s prime minister, José Montilla, will present the award at a ceremony in Barcelona in November.

Suu Kyi ‘Honorary Citizen’ of Canada

The Canadian government will grant honorary citizenship to Burma’s detained dissident leader Aung San Suu Kyi on Monday in recognition of her long struggle for democracy, during a ceremony on parliament hill. Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier will present the honorary citizenship to Suu Kyi’s cousin, Sein Win, the Washington-based prime minister of the Burmese exile government.

Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, has spent almost 12 years of the past 18 years in detention under house arrest in Burma. The honorary Canadian citizenship is a testament to Canada’s long-standing respect and admiration for Aung San Suu Kyi’s struggle for freedom and democracy in Burma. Suu Kyi will become the fourth person, and the first woman, to be granted honorary citizenship-after Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama and Raoul Wallenberg.

Source: The Irrawaddy

A sombre afterword: With the catastrophes in Burma (and China), let us not forget that the only voice that Rangoon seems to listen to is that of Beijing who again seem to blocking UN Security Council action and failing to use all its influence to press the junta to open up Burma to relief efforts. Perhaps Rangoon can host the next Olympics.

Theodicy: The Justification Of God – 9

SAVING JUDGEMENT

Study 9

A guest post by Trevor Faggotter

As we pursue the study of P.T. Forsyth’s book, The Justification of God, we look at the matter of salvation – and the apostolic desire for all people, including the kings of the world, to come into the Kingdom of God, and be saved. As Forsyth says: The more we believe in the Kingdom of God the more we must believe in judgment.[1]

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings should be made for everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity. This is right and is acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour, who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself a ransom for all – this was attested at the right time (1 Timothy 2:1-6)

God our Saviour desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.  God saves his people. The Israelites groaned under their slavery in Egypt, and cried out to God (Exodus 2:23). They were rescued – or saved by passing through the red sea. Salvation involves coming out into a large place – a place of freedom and space. Salvation involves the joy of daily life within creation. Salvation involves liberty and the joy of community life; salvation involves the future glorious freedom, which is given from sin and death. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death (Romans 8:2). Salvation extends to the future of creation, set free from its bondage to decay (Romans 8:21). Salvation is eternal life in Christ Jesus.

SALVATION THROUGH JUDGMENT

Many people think that the cross of Christ is a sort of legal device designed for avoiding judgment. This is not so. Rather, salvation comes, not in bypassing judgment, but takes place by passing through judgment. The judgment of the cross cuts right through us, and we, by faith, pass through it, in Christ. I have been crucified with Christ is our true claim. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.

P.T. Forsyth says:

What is judgment but the setting out in true and full light (i.e. in just relation to the whole) of the actual state of things between the soul’s case and the ruling power of the world? Unless Christ be a dream or a dreamer, that power is God’s grace. That is our final judge. To it we stand or fall. The gospel of grace, in the Cross and its preaching, is the real ultimate judgment of the world, the real and final power at work now.[2]

Our salvation cost the Father his own Son. We may think this was but for a moment. That view would be a misreading of the gospel message. That Christ was utterly forsaken – is a fracture, or deep break, within the love-unity of the Triune God himself, and is of immense importance. Paul sees this action as a totally gracious giving to the human race.

He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all – how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? (Romans 8:32)

Forsyth presses us in the opposite direction in order that we might grasp something of the judgment process both in the cross, and in the course of human history. God who is prepared to forsake his Son, for the sake of humanity’s future, is also prepared to us the most dreadful of circumstances, to further his good purpose for creation. Forsyth is referring particularly to the tragic world war he was experiencing in 1917.

If God spared not His own Son He can bear to see, and rise to use, the most dreadful things that civilisation can produce. History is a long judgment process; but it is not in the course of history with its debacles that we find the last judgment of God, and fix our faith in it, but at a point of history, in the Cross of Christ. It is there that we find the justification of God at first hand, and His own theodicy.[3]

THE LOOSING AND BINDING ACTION OF LOVE

Hearing the gospel message is not a neutral exercise. It is a crisis, a moment of decision. It has consequences. The disciples understood their actions were not neutral, and learned this from their Lord, when Jesus said: ‘I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.’ Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah (Matthew 16:19). In John we read: ‘If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained’. (John 20:23)

Their power to forgive is of course ministerial only, and not magisterial. The disciples are heralds of the gospel, servants and agents of Christ. But only God, in Christ, as King has the right to forgive, and pardon. God acts in love, in sending Christ, to reveal this love:

In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. (1 John 4:10).

The great Christian message to the world is not simply love. That is too general, not to say vague. Christianity does not produce only love to God, but also hate.[4]

Our message is never neutral. Forsyth said of gracious loving, direct preaching:

It not only produces faith but it also deepens unfaith, and hardens impenitence. If it loose it also binds; and it can do the one only if it do the other – action and reaction being equal. If it draw some near to God, it repels others into distance and estrangement. There is such a thing as the repulsive power of a great affection.[5]

Perfect grace was and is final judgment. It is condemnation to ignore salvation. Full and final judgment is not something super-added to the Gospel. It is no corollary, no by-product. It is intrinsic to it. It is an element of Fatherhood, and not a device.[6]

John’s Gospel warns people not to ignore this salvation. Following on from the most used evangelical appeal from Scripture, is the warning sound as well. We should weigh it carefully in our minds and hearts.

‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not condemned; (John 3:16-18a)

but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgement, 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. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.’ (John 3:18b-21)

Forsyth writes:

The same Church that evangelises the world in the very act judges it. It not only divides each soul, but all society, electing and rejecting.[7]

The Cross did not, indeed, come directly and expressly to judge (John viii. 15-16, xii. 47-48). It did so only in the course of exerting … God’s love, grace, and forgiveness. But judge it certainly did. It brought to a head for the world the sin of an elect nation – a nation whose sense of privilege and merit repudiated moral for national interests, scouted Christ’s word of mercy and His call to repent, and found no public meaning in His Word of love and humility. It thus became, more than Rome, incarnate Antichrist. It sinned against pure light.[8]

The Cross, which that nation inflicted filled up the measure of its guilt and brought it death. And this was not against Christ’s will but with it. He knew He was Israel’s doom. The Holy One knew that the soul of man or nation that chose to sin must go on to die, and that every word of greater love might become a word of more wrath. But He never judged them in the sense of avenging, far less of revenging. Their judgment was the reaction on them, from God’s holiness… [9]

THE PERSON OF CHRIST IS NOT KNOWN APART FROM HIS WORK

Sin is deceitful, as are the works of the evil One, which Christ came to destroy. Indeed, the powers of Satan and his minions are poorly considered, by our humanistic culture. As Geoffrey Bingham has pointed out: There is quite a bit of shoulder-shrugging in regard to this subject.[10] Forsyth describes deficient teaching in his day as:

‘… defective insight into the final nature and victory of the Cross over the diabolism and perdition in the world’.

It reflects a certain moral amateurism due to the abeyance of a theology of the Cross. Such religion, certainly, loves the person of Christ. It is in love with His love, and with His Cross as the summit of that love in self-sacrifice. But it has no room nor need for judgment there. It does not feel there God’s judgment on sin, and the crisis of the moral world and of a holy eternity. It needs moralising from a deeper experience of life – an experience older, more secular, more tragic. For want of a theology of conscience such souls do not know the world nor gauge its redemption. Their belief in Christ is impaired for want of a belief in the Satan that Christ felt it His supreme conflict to counter-work and destroy.[11]

The Son of God was revealed for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil (1 John 3:8b). And that he did by bearing our sins, dealing with our guilt, pronouncing God’s word of forgiveness and peace, thus saving humanity from Satan’s deadly accusations.

The grace of God is the greatest judgment ever passed on the world. That is the nature of the Cross – God’s grace (and not God’s law), in moral, saving judgment on man. When we have entered the kingdom through the great judgment in the Cross, we do not escape all judgment; we escape into a new kind of judgment, from that of law to that of grace. We escape condemnation, for we are new creatures, but chastisement we do not escape. Our work may be burned, to our grief, that we may be saved (I Cor. xi. 32). We are judged or chastened with the Church to escape condemnation with the world. And at the last must there not be some great crisis of self-judgment, when we all see Him as He is, and see ourselves as His grace sees us?[12]

We are afraid that if we find that moral ground and destiny of the world in the historic Christ and His Cross, and if we say ‘we see not yet all things put under righteousness, but we see Jesus,’ and rest, we shall be called Biblicists instead of historians, more theological than ethical. Well, we must take the risk. The judgment of the world accordingly is not the history of the world, but its Saviour.[13]

[1] P.T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, NCPI, 1988, p. 170.

[2] P.T. Forsyth, p. 184-185.

[3] P.T. Forsyth, p. 170.

[4] P.T. Forsyth, p. 170.

[5] P.T. Forsyth, p. 170.

[6] P.T. Forsyth, p. 171.

[7] P.T. Forsyth, p. 171.

[8] P.T. Forsyth, p. 171.

[9] P.T. Forsyth, p. 172.

[10] G.C. Bingham, The Clash of the Kingdoms, NCPI, 1989, p. 10.

[11] P.T. Forsyth, p. 175.

[12] P.T. Forsyth, p. 181.

[13] P.T. Forsyth, p. 186.

More Chomsky

Chomsky in the news

Chomsky on video

Chomsky interviews

When asked: ‘Should US officials be held accountable for war crimes committed by Sadaam Hussein against Iran while receiving US support? What would have to happen before such jurisdiction could be enforced and accused individuals brought to justice?’ His reply:

If we accept the elementary moral principle of universality then there is no doubt that US officials should be held accountable for their conscious support for horrendous crimes, and even more so, for the crimes they commit themselves. We may recall, in this connection, the eloquent words of Justice Robert Jackson at Nuremberg, cited in Interventions, which explicitly address this quesiton. What would have to happen before we could apply to ourselves the principles we sternly apply to others? Something like a moral revolution. That’s by no means impossible. There has been considerable progress in these respects over the years, though there is still a long way to go …

Forsyth on old energies in new and higher forms

(Charles) Silvester Horne (1865-1914) was a Congregational minister and politician, and a dear friend of PT Forsyth’s. As part of his tribute to Horne around the latter’s grave, Forsyth offered the following insightful reflection: ‘In the lives of true saints and great wrestlers with God (yea, and of some who know themselves to be neither!) there come times when they wish to pray no more. It is not weariness, nor impatience, nor despair. It is the other way. It is fruition. “In that day ye shall ask Me nothing.” It is not even repose. It is the old energy in a new and higher form. It is praise. It is adoration. We just worship’. – W.B. Selbie, ed., The Life of Charles Silvester Horne, M.A., M.P. (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1920), 304.

Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping

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

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

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

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

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

Eberhard Jüngel on Capital Punishment

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

Eberhard Jüngel on Salvation

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

Jürgen Moltmann lectures

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

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

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

Many thanks to Andy for making these available.

Growing up under militarisation

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

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

The full report can be downloaded here as a pdf.

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

James Fraser of Brae on Assurance

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

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

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

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

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

Last Rites

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

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

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

Loverd, thou clepedest me

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

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

Theodicy: The Justification Of God – 8

THE CROSS CRUCIAL FOR DESTINY

Study 8

A guest post by Trevor Faggotter

INTRODUCTION

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

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

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

THE CRUCIALITY OF THE CROSS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two reasons are given:

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

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

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

THE CROSS AND GRACE

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

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

SALVATION IS THE SOLUTION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE SUPREME THEODICY IS ATONEMENT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Gregory MacDonald’ enters blogdom

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

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

On Indigenous Theology

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

[HT: Mel]

Commending Jesus Ascended

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

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

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

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

April Book Notes – 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen, and Amen. ♦♦♦♦½

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

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

The Pope and Jesus of Nazareth

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

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

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

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

The event is being supported by the British Academy.

The Triumph of God’s Love in Jesus Christ

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