EMIL LUDWIG FACKENHEIM 1916-2003: Philosopher, Professor, Rabbi, Friend – And survivor of Sachsenhausen

(Touchstone, January 2008)

 

  I: As soon as the gnome-like professor entered the lecture hall the fourth-year philosophy class in 1965 fell silent. Other students had sat under his teaching in previous years. I had not.  Plainly he was deemed formidable.  At the same time he struck me as scrawny, wasted in some respects, but above all haunted. The veneration that the class afforded him reflected the reputation he had gained in two decades: he was a luminary in the University of Toronto ’s Department of Philosophy. (U of T’s philosophy department was renowned the world over, and was slightly smaller only than Oxford ’s.)

The course was devoted chiefly to the study of Hegel, a post-Kantian German idealist over whom Fackenheim had laboured for twenty years, the outcome of which would soon be his monumental The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought.   (This book inscribed his name in the international “Who’s Who” of the most erudite philosophers.)         While the course focussed on Hegel, it also investigated pre-Hegel thinkers in the German tradition such as Fichte and Schelling, as well as post-Hegel or “left-wing” Hegelians such as Kierkegaard, Marx and Nietzsche. The class concluded with a brief examination of Heidegger and Sartre. Quickly I perceived that philosophy would be done in this course with unparalleled rigour, intensity and profundity.

In class Fackenheim discussed philosophy only; theology was never mentioned, even though everyone was aware of his reputation as a Jewish thinker. Throughout the entire two-semester course no theological pronouncement was heard, with one exception.   Virtually as an aside, one day, Fackenheim amplified a philosophical point he deemed crucial by contrasting it almost casually with his “The characteristic of the living God is that God speaks.”   The comment embedded itself in me like shrapnel, and lurks in my psyche, where it reminds me constantly that because God speaks characteristically, any deity that has to be concluded or inferred or deduced, according to the logic of the Hebrew Bible, is ipso facto an idol.

 

II: Months later I tentatively called on Fackenheim in his office in order to discuss the essay I was to write in the course.   There he appeared much less intimidating.   With his feet on his desk, his chair tipped back and his glasses perched on his forehead, he scrabbled in his shirt pocket for one of the cigars of assorted shapes and colours, fired it up and rendered the few feet between us near-opaque. We had talked about my essay for only a few minutes (he approved the topic) when he declaimed with unmistakable warmth yet also with an authoritative emphasis that closed the door on further philosophical conversation, “Shepherd, enough about philosophy.  Let’s talk about GOD.” (Never having spoken with him before, I had no idea how he had learned of my interest in theology.) The instant he said “God”, the room filled with the Shekinah, the perceptible glory of the “Presence”.   By now his cigar smoke was nothing less than incense, akin to the incense in the temple that had engulfed Isaiah of old. And just as Isaiah was never going to forget the moment of divine visitation, together with utmost human sensitivity to it, I would never forget the man in front of me whose seemingly irreverent posture was no longer noticed on account of his transparency to the Holy One of Israel.

“Shepherd,” Fackenheim continued after another noxious exhalation, “modernity thinks God to be vague, abstract, ethereal, ‘iffy’. God, however, is concrete, solid, dense with a density beyond our imagining. There is nothing ‘iffy’ about God; but there is a great deal that is ‘iffy’ about you and me.” Dumbfounded at the spiritual assault (albeit benign) from a world-class philosopher, I was still reeling when he launched the next salvo. “Shepherd, in view of the

 

horrific depredations of our century – crowned by the Shoah – there are huge question marks above humankind.       But concerning God there is no question whatever.  Never forget”, he concluded, “We do not demythologize God; God demythologizes us as God exposes the groundless myths by which humankind is enthralled.” I staggered out of his office, the topic of my philosophy essay all but lost in the aura without, and the awe within, that have never evaporated and that continue to keep Fackenheim’s name fragrant.

 

III: Fackenheim was born in Halle , midway between Wittenberg and Berlin . Halle was the birthplace of Handel, immortalized by his oratorio, The Messiah. More significantly for the life and work of Fackenheim, Halle was also the birthplace of Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler’s assistant. (Himmler was head of the dreaded SS, the branch of the Nazi military machine charged with implementing Nazi ideology. The death camps were administered and policed by the SS.) When Czech partisans assassinated Heydrich, Hitler retaliated by liquidating every inhabitant of their town, then bulldozing and burying every building in sight, finally planting grass on the tree-less, human-less landscape, reminding everyone that the Fuehrer could not only kill but also blot out of living memory, leaving no trace that any human being had lived or worked or built in that place.

The above-mentioned incident was all the more jarring inasmuch as Germany had been “ Mecca ” for post-Enlightenment Jewry. Admittedly the town church in Wittenberg (where Johannes Bugenhagen, Luther’s friend from Greifswald, preached every week), only a few kilometres away from Halle, still had on its outer wall a frieze depicting a sow nursing her piglets while a Jew sat at the pig’s rump with his head in its anus (one of the offensive mediaeval myths maintained that Jews ate pig excrement.) The church had been erected in 1120. Much had happened since then. In 1743 the fourteen-year-old Moses Mendelssohn had walked into Berlin through the Rosenthaler Tor, the sole gate, among the city’s several, that admitted cattle and Jews.  In two decades Mendelssohn had become a literary colossus, to be succeeded by German Jewish dramatists like Schiller and poets like Heine. The ghetto had disappeared in Germany before it did anywhere else in Europe . When Fackenheim’s grandfather died, the entire town – thousands of people – turned out to honour the memory of the local rabbi.  All the more shocking, therefore, was the accession of Hitler in 1933, an Austrian interloper who could not even claim to be German. The gains for which German Jews had struggled for 190 years were rescinded in a heartbeat. In the same year Fackenheim’s high school teacher of Greek, at grave personal risk, invited Fackenheim to his home. He gave the seventeen year-old a signed copy of Martin Buber’s Kingship of God, published one year earlier, and charged the adolescent: “If you don’t leave now I shall never forgive you, for your help will be needed in the reconstruction of Germany .” Fackenheim thanked the man for the book even as he knew he had no interest in the reconstruction of the nation that had betrayed its Enlightenment heritage and now tormented his people.

Upon leaving high school Fackenheim enrolled in the Academy For the Scholarly Study of Judaism. Subsequently he studied at Halle ’s Martin Luther University , the last Jewish student permitted to enrol. Kristallnacht cut short his studies. On 9^th November 1938 synagogues, together with Jewish-owned stores and factories, were trashed and torched throughout Germany . The same night Fackenheim was arrested and incarcerated in Sachsenhausen. It was not an extermination camp; Hitler had not yet implemented the “Final Solution”. It was, however, a forced labour camp where inmates were worked to death. Fackenheim found friends in the camp, including Ernst Tillich, a Lutheran pastor and nephew of the renowned Paul Tillich. The latter had been expelled from Germany and was residing in the U.S.A. , teaching at Union Theological Seminary in New York City . Ernst Tillich, non-Jewish, had been arrested and imprisoned for his political opposition to Naziism. By Christmas Eve, seven weeks later, Tillich was manifestly depressed. Fackenheim asked him the reason for his woebegone mien, and Tillich replied lugubriously, “Today is Christmas Eve. It’s the biggest celebration in the Lutheran Church calendar. All day long I have been thinking of what I would preach to my congregation – if I had one.       But I don’t have one, and therefore I have no one to hear my sermon.” “I can fix that,” Fackenheim rejoined, and promptly rounded up all the rabbinical students in the camp. “Whatever it is you would say to a Lutheran congregation on Christmas Eve,” he continued, “you tell us, in Sachsenhausen, concerning the One whose mercy endures for ever.”

Several months later Fackenheim was released.  Hitler thought it less bothersome simply to have Jews out of the country. While awaiting a country that would receive him (several had declined), he was ordained rabbi in an underground seminary in Berlin . “It was,” he said years later with a twinkle in his eye, “like sitting on a powder keg while smoking a cigar.” Eventually Britain allowed him entry and he moved to Aberdeen . Once in the “ Granite City ” he immersed himself in philosophical studies, financing his academic work by preparing for Bar and Bat Mitzvah the children of the two-dozen Jewish families in the Reform synagogue.  It was an auspicious undertaking, for subsequently he would teach the confirmation class at Toronto ’s Holy Blossom Synagogue for forty years.

In September 1939 Britain , in response to Germany ’s invasion of Poland , declared war. Fackenheim, ironically, was now an “enemy alien”. Next day a police officer knocked at his door and informed him that he was to be deported.       He placed a few personal effects in his suitcase, saving room for his precious books, tomes on Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Mediaeval Philosophy (Christian, Jewish and Islamic), plus his Arabic dictionary – since he planned to write a thesis on Mediaeval Arabic philosophy.

Fackenheim landed in Sherbrooke, Quebec. Among the scores of German Jewish refugees there were, besides himself, two who would become widely known in Canada . One was Gregory Baum, a physicist who eventually embraced Roman Catholicism, who was ordained to the priesthood (and laicized decades later), and who taught at McGill University and the University of Toronto ; Baum was awarded the Order of Canada in 1990.  The other was Eric Koch, who liked to say he was deported to Canada because the British could not distinguish between a German refugee and a Nazi spy. He moved quickly to the highest echelons of CBC radio programming.

Sherbrooke ’s denizens did not know how to view the new arrivals.  One the one hand they were Germans, and therefore were citizens of the nation with which Canada was at war. On the other hand they were refugees from Hitler, the tyrant Canada was bent on defeating. A Canadian military officer lined up the inmates on the parade ground and barked, “Even if you are Jews you still have to wash every day.”   Next the detainees were told “There is to be no monkey business.” Fackenheim, possessing high school English, knew what a monkey was and what business was; he had no grasp, however, of “monkey business”.   Finally the inmates were told, “You play ball with us, and we play ball with you.” “Play ball” was no less mystifying.

The experience of being a refugee from Hitler, yet having to live behind barbed wire in a compound guarded by machine-gun posts, was a terrible experience. Campmates elected Fackenheim to speak to military officialdom about it all, hoping that a rabbi would prove least offensive and be able to gain a favourable hearing.  Fackenheim relayed his friends’ request to “Major Balls” (as they now spoke of the officer.) It availed nothing. Barbed wire and machine guns would remain daily reminders of the ambiguity of the refugees’ situation and of the ambivalence with which the townspeople viewed them.
In December 1941 Fackenheim was released.  He boarded a train in Montreal , sped to Toronto , and by early afternoon of the same day was standing in the office of the philosophy department chairperson, apologizing for the fact that he had only the rabbinic training his exposure to the Hochschule (the post-secondary Jewish educational institution) had given him.   The interviewer quizzed him briefly, saw that while he was self-taught he was remarkably erudite, and brilliant. Without prescribing any remedial work the University of Toronto admitted him to the PhD programme, halving the residence requirement as well. Fackenheim set to work right away, enrolling simultaneously in the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (St.Michael’s College.)   By 1945 he had been awarded a doctorate, his thesis Substance and Perseity in Mediaeval Arabic Philosophy with Introductory Chapters on Aristotle, Plotinus and Proclus.

Meanwhile he had become rabbi at Temple Anshe Shalom, a Reform congregation in Hamilton . He appeared to be more serious than the congregants; at least they and he were coming from different perspectives and were advancing different agendas for congregational life. He insisted on bringing to bear on the congregation the Word of the One who loomed before them and who was every bit as dense as the “thick darkness” that Moses knew and of which the Bible spoke repeatedly.  He exuded the conviction that God’s presence was palpable.   He exposed them to the Jewish theological giants who had been instrumental in his own spiritual formation: Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Leo Baeck. So far from quieting the grumbling of the disgruntled, everything he was about appeared to magnify it. In light of a “discerning of spirits” that occurred in 1948, the congregation dismissed him. Immediately Toronto ’s Department of Philosophy hired him.  His career as iconic philosopher and professor had been launched.

Preoccupied with the history of metaphysics, Toronto ’s Department of Philosophy had long insisted that there be at least one professor possessing expertise in the work of each major thinker.  No one had yet been found for German Idealism in general and Hegel in particular. Fackenheim volunteered, thinking it would be a way of rendering his teaching position secure.

He startled people from the start.   Always a Jewish theologian, his first published work was an article on Kierkegaard, a Christian philosopher.  He had already established his reputation concerning mediaeval philosophy. Soon he was publishing material and supervising doctoral students in Avicenna, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Husserl, Dilthey, Buber, Heidegger, Sartre and Arendt.

While his reputation swelled largely because of his work in the German idealist tradition, his earlier work in mediaeval thought gave him a versatility that Toronto treasured. Throughout his working life he supervised graduate students in mediaeval Jewish philosophy (Isaac Israeli, Judah Halevi, Abraham Ibn Daud, and of course Moses Maimonides.) No less time was given to mediaeval Arabic philosophers (Al Kindi, Al Farabi, Avicenna, Avenpace, and Averroes.)

In 1955 Fackenheim married a former student.   Rose was a Christian and a member of Bathurst Street United Church , Toronto . (The date is crucial. It is still whispered that he was fired from the Hamilton synagogue on account of his having married a non-Jew.  This is a myth that should be exposed and allowed to perish.)   Together they had four children.  The eldest, Michael, was born brain-damaged and now lives in the Ontario Provincial Hospital in Orillia . The youngest, Yossie, was born when Emil was 63 and Rose 45. Yossie was born on Yom Kippur. With yet another twinkle in his eye Fackenheim liked to say, “A male child born on Yom Kippur? According to Jewish legend, he could be the Messiah.”

The Fackenheims moved to Israel in 1986. Rose embraced Judaism. The children were confirmed in their Yiddishkeit by an orthodox rabbi. When she was 55 Rose was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease; she died seven years later.

Fackenheim died 19^th September 2003 . I was at my computer when a colleague relayed to me the notice from the Jerusalem Post.  I mourned the loss of someone whose stamp is on me everywhere, someone who exemplified simultaneously the radical detachment required of scholarship and the radical commitment required of biblical faith.  In the next instant I anticipated my eschatological reunion with the Abrahamic figure who convinced me 45 years ago that while there is much that is dubious about me and others, there is nothing that is dubious about the One whose glory leaves us prostrate, whose voice can crack rocks, and whose faithfulness to the people of God is never attenuated.

 

IV: Fackenheim was the acclaimed luminary in a philosophy department that was stellar even apart from him. The range of his philosophical competence was vast, as has been noted already.  Had Hitler not arrived on the scene, he said, he would have been a professor of ancient philosophy in a German university.   As it was, his expertise included ancient, mediaeval and modern philosophy (especially German Idealism), as well as existentialism. Analytical philosophy, he maintained, was something would-be philosophers had to “have under their belt”. In other words, those who wanted credibility with the philosophically sophisticated had to have mastered it.  At the same time analytical philosophy, he was convinced, could never be more than a tool in the service of a philosophical quest that was more substantive, more profound and, above all, life-altering.  The question Fackenheim constantly posed, implicitly where not explicitly, at the conclusion of much philosophising, was simple yet searching: “What difference is it going to make?”

Yet his greatest contribution, according to many, was not simply the exposition, amplification and criticism of major thinkers in the history of metaphysics. Rather it was his juxtaposing of the logic of philosophy and the logic characteristic of Hebrew thought. In this endeavour his Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy is priceless. The chapter headings indicate accurately what is going to be attempted – as reading the book confirms that faith in God, and the understanding inherent in faith, are vindicated. The first chapter, “Elijah and the Empiricists: The Possibility of Divine Presence” is followed by “Abraham and the Kantians: Moral Duties and Divine Commandments” and “Moses and the Hegelians: Jewish Existence in the Modern World.” In each case he exposes the strengths of a philosophical school, comments critically on the school’s deficiencies, and non-triumphalistically establishes biblical conviction concerning truth – better, concerning reality, the reality of the living God, together with reality’s claim upon humankind. In every case the God who is self-revealed at Sinai and who is continually self-bestowed through prophet and seer; the God who looms over and leans upon “the apple of his eye”, seeming to burden them unendurably yet also sustaining them when they are abandoned in world-occurrence; this God is re-presented to the reader as Fackenheim draws on the vast treasury of Midrash to highlight the dialectical nature of Jewish thought.

A similar approach is found in the book that many regard as his greatest, To Mend the World: Foundations of Future Jewish Thought.       Once again the chapter titles reflect the manner in which he exposes the most erudite philosophy to the most impassioned Jewish faith: “The Shibboleth of Revelation: From Spinoza beyond Hegel” or “Historicity, Rupture and Tikkun Olam (‘Mending the World’): From Rosenzweig beyond Heidegger.”

Fackenheim knew that argument is persuasive only if the parties to the argument stand on the same ground, admit the same presuppositions, share the same universe of discourse.  Where they do not, argument is unavailing; what is operative in this situation is witness. His own undisguised testimony appears throughout his writings, yet seems to shine with unusual radiance in the concluding lines of his “Elijah and the Empiricists”. Having exposed the shallowness of empiricism as a philosophy (i.e., having exposed the illegitimate move from science to scientism), and having exposed the indefensibility of its principal exponent; namely, A.J. Ayer and his Language, Truth and Logic, Fackenheim declares,

 

The believer, all along aware of subjectivist reductionism, embraces that position not when he ceases to hear but when he turns away from listening.  The unbeliever, too, may turn….For the author of Language, Truth and Logic to accept the voice heard at Sinai – or his urge to worship in the Messianic age – he would have to be converted.  But conversion is both a turning and a being turned. (Encounters, 29)

 

His book Jewish Philosophers and Jewish Philosophy anticipates a major shift in Fackenheim’s orientation.       The chapter on Leo Strauss relates a conversation he had with Strauss in New York City , when Strauss had remarked “We all know it is our duty to survive as Jews. Jewish philosophy will tell us why.” (105)

The shift occurred in 1967. For the past three weeks Egypt ’s Abdul Nasser had threatened the destruction of the state of Israel and the annihilation of every living Jew.  The Holocaust was on the point of being re-enacted.       The catastrophe was averted only as the Israeli air force devastated Egypt ’s air force before the latter’s planes could take off.   Neither a Zionist nor an anti-Zionist up to this point, Fackenheim announced that someone else could investigate the subtleties of philosophy for their own sake; from now on he would give his attention to the study of the Holocaust and what it, as a novum, portended for Jewish thought, faith and life.  In a word, while the Holocaust as radical evil cannot be understood (one aspect of radical evil’s evilness is its sheer incomprehensibility); while it is blasphemous to speak of “meaning” with respect to the Holocaust, it is imperative that there be a response.  The response is multi-faceted; and one facet, the maturer Fackenheim came to say, was the survival not only of the Jewish people but of the Jewish state. Not surprisingly he insisted, “Quite indefensible to me is the view that Judaism would be unaffected if the state of Israel were destroyed.” (What is Judaism?, 10)

While no Jew regards the Shoah (“catastrophe”) as insignificant or anything other than a challenge to faith, Fackenheim went farther. In his God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections he distinguished between “root” events/experiences and “epoch-making” events/experiences.   The latter were the Jewish response to occurrences that tested the faith; e.g., the destruction of the first Temple , the Maccabean Revolt, the destruction of the second Temple , the expulsion from Spain . Root events, on the other hand, are historical occurrences in which the faith originated; e.g., the deliverance at the Red Sea and the commanding presence at Sinai.       Here a past event – public, historical – can legislate to future generations. And such root experiences allow the present access to the past.  Root experiences are normative for the formation and continuation of Jewish faith while epoch-making experiences can only test the faith so formed and normed.

Undeniably the Holocaust is an epoch-making experience. Fackenheim, however, frequently appeared to lean toward regarding it a root experience. As soon as he “leaned”, the outcry reminded him that he had stepped outside normative Judaism.  And of course if the Holocaust was a root experience then it had to be revelatory. This notion, needless to say, was both absurd and offensive: absurd in that the content of revelation is a presence that guarantees a future, when the Holocaust appeared to attest an absence (a radical God-forsakenness that found Buber speaking of an “eclipse of God”) that guaranteed non-existence; offensive not least because the Nazis would then be said to be doing God’s work. Yet if it was merely epoch-making, had it been denied that the Jewish people were singled out at Auschwitz (albeit for destruction) no less than they were singled out at Sinai (albeit for life)? Fackenheim refused to move away from his conviction, regardless of the disagreement he mobilized, that the Holocaust was unprecedented not only in Jewish history but in human history. (In fact, he maintained that not only was the Holocaust the greatest disaster to befall the Jewish people; it was – albeit for a different reason – the greatest disaster to befall the church.) For this reason he agonized over the reputation of the Jewish community in Lublin , Poland , for of them it was said that with their dying breath they gave the Torah back to God.

In light of the foregoing Fackenheim maintained that while Jewish tradition has always maintained that 613 commandments were given to Moses at Sinai (this includes the oral Torah), there has latterly been added the 614^th: Jews are forbidden to deliver to Hitler the conquest that he coveted but was denied. For this reason Fackenheim asserted,

 

Jews are forbidden to hand Hitler posthumous victories. They are commanded to survive as Jews, lest the Jewish people perish.  They are commanded to remember the victims of Auschwitz , lest their memory perish. They are forbidden to despair of man (sic) and his world, and to escape into either cynicism or otherworldliness, lest they cooperate in delivering the world over to the forces of Auschwitz . Finally they are forbidden to despair of the God of Israel, lest Judaism perish.  A secularist Jew cannot make himself believe by a mere act of will, nor can he be commanded to do so….And a religious Jew who has stayed with his God may be forced into new, possibly revolutionary relationships with Him. One possibility, however, is wholly unthinkable. A Jew may not respond to Hitler’s attempt to destroy Judaism by himself cooperating in its destruction. In ancient times, the unthinkable Jewish sin was idolatry.  Today, it is to respond to Hitler by doing his work. (Fackenheim: German Philosophy and Jewish Thought,, 28)

 

Two days after Kristallnacht, one of the twenty-odd Jewish men in a jail cell meant for six railed at the twenty-two year-old rabbinical student, “You tell us what Judaism has to say to us now.”  Fackenheim, however, according to his own report, said nothing.

Ever since then he has said much.  He has even attempted to answer the question he declined to answer in the jail cell through several different vehicles directed towards differed readerships. His What is Judaism? An Interpretation for the Present Age is his love-letter to non-philosophers, amcha, ordinary Jewish folk.  Ordinary people (so-called) were always dear to him.  It was for them that he delighted in expounding the Midrash concerning the giving of the Torah at Sinai.   There it was said when the Israelites heard God say “I” (the first word of the Decalogue) their souls left them, as it says, “If we hear the Voice anymore…we shall die.” (Deut. 5:22)  Yet Rabbi Shim’on bar Yochai taught, “The Torah which God gave to Israel restored their souls to them,” as it says, “‘The Torah of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul.’” (Ps. 19:8) (What is Judaism?, 135)

 

Epilogue:

In 1985 The United Church of Canada commissioned me to write the denomination’s annual Lenten devotional book.  Since then the second and third editions of Ponder and Pray have appeared. The dedication of the current (third) edition reads

In gratitude for

Emil L. Fackenheim

philosopher, professor, rabbi, friend

-and survivor of Sachsenhausen-

from whom I learned,

“Prayer is the quintessential human act.”

 

In him I found intellectual brilliance combined with resilient faith in the Holy One of Israel. My debt to him is unpayable.

 

 

Victor Shepherd
January 2008

Reformers, Philosophers, Kierkegaard and the Akedah Yitzakh

Professor Victor A. Shepherd

Tyndale University College & Seminary

 

I: — Whether or not philosophy and theology are deemed irreconcilable appears to depend on where one stands in the theological spectrum.  The Papal encyclical, Fides Et Ratio, promulgated by the late John Paul II on 14 September 1998 , stated unambiguously the relationship between philosophy and theology that John Paul himself upheld and expected others in his denomination to uphold as well.  As a student of the Magisterial Reformation, on the other hand, I am aware that the Reformers regarded philosophy – by which they frequently meant Mediaeval scholasticism – as an encroachment upon theology that denied the gospel’s inherent integrity, militancy and efficacy.

Martin Luther, for instance, voiced this notion as nascent Reformer. In early autumn 1517 (perhaps earlier even than his putative nailing of the Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Schlosskirche in Wittenberg on 31^st October 1517 ) he published the ninety-seven theses of his Disputation Against Scholastic Theology. The anti-scholastic, anti-philosophic tone is unmistakable.  Discussing the understanding of the human will that mediaeval philosophers typically advanced, Luther writes “We are not masters of our actions, from beginning to end, but servants.  This in opposition to the philosophers.” [1]   The Disputation is replete with similar references. Consider the following. “Virtually the entire Ethics of Aristotle is the worst enemy of grace.  This in opposition to the scholastics.”[2]   “It is an error to say that no man can become a theologian without Aristotle. This in opposition to common opinion.”[3]         “The whole Aristotle is to theology as darkness is to light.   This in opposition to the scholastics.”[4]   Lest we think that Luther has targeted Aristotle only, we should hear Luther on someone in the tradition of Plato.   “It would have been far better for the church if Porphyry (233-303) … had not been born for the use of theologians.”[5]         (“Better…if [he] …had not been born” points unambiguously to the biblical reference to Judas; Porphyry is no less spiritually treacherous, with his philosophically compromised theology, than the one Christian tradition deems arch-traitor.  Philosophy is no little threat to faith in the gospel.)   Luther concludes his 1517 Disputation, “In these statements we wanted to say and believe we have said nothing that is not in agreement with the Catholic church and the teachers of the church.”[6]

Soon Luther rendered more specific his objection to philosophy as he developed his Theologia Crucis or “Theology of the Cross” in the years that remained to him.  Since Luther wrote no systematic theology, his Theologia Crucis is found in no single place but rather recrudesces in fragments throughout his work.[7]

Luther developed his Theologia Crucis in opposition to a Theologia Gloriae in its many forms. One form of it was the attempt at reading the truth and nature of God off the face of world-occurrence, off the face of history.         Another form was the attempt at arguing for the truth and nature of God from nature. Another form, perhaps more subtle, was the church’s triumphalistic self-promotion (which is to say, the church’s persecution of others) inasmuch as the church confused its triumphalism with the triumph or victory of the crucified one, the church having forgotten that the crucified one is raised crucified, with wounds still gaping.  When the church confuses its triumphalism with the victory of its Lord who suffers still, the resurrection ceases to be the effectiveness of the cross; instead the resurrection becomes the supersession of the cross, matched by the church’s superiority to its crossbearing.         While this distortion was a matter of ecclesiology, Luther insisted that ecclesiology is a predicate of Christology, and a distorted ecclesiology could therefore be traced to a Christology warped by philosophy.

All of which brings us to the last form of Theologia Gloriae, the identification of God with metaphysical speculation.   Here Luther has two principal objections in mind.

One objection is his insistence that the Holy One of Israel is qualitatively distinct from the God of the philosophers: being, being-itself, “ground of being”, etc.   The living God is to be understood not as the ens realissimum of the philosophers, the static “that which is”, but rather in terms of the dynamic personalism of the Hebrew bible: God is He who acts. (Thomas Aquinas’ reading of Exodus 3:14, where Moses asks for God’s ‘name’ and God replies “I shall be who I shall be”; Aquinas’ reading of this text as declaring the aseity or self-existence of God the Reformers found utterly wide of the mark and an instance of philosophical corruption.)

The second objection is Luther’s insistence that the God who acts is not the only actor; Satan acts too.  God, however, defines himself at the cross, and only at the cross. For this reason Luther maintained that apart from the cross God is indistinguishable from the devil.[8]

On account of its espousal of metaphysics, philosophy remains wedded to the Theologia Gloriae.  Metaphysical speculation never terminates in the God who humbles himself in the manger and humiliates himself at the cross.         Philosophy forever remains an aspect of that ‘wisdom of the world’ that the gospel has inverted.

Consider the discussion of power, including omnipotence.  At the cross God not only acts most characteristically (he loves to the uttermost, love exhausting his nature); at the cross God also acts most effectively (he reconciles a wayward world to himself.)   To say that the cross, therefore, is God’s mightiest work is to say that the cross alone determines the meaning of “almighty” or “omnipotent.” Since power is the capacity to achieve purpose, God acts “almightily” when he overcomes all impediments to the fulfilment of his purpose, and does so precisely where, from a human standpoint, he cannot do anything.  God’s power can never be understood by means of an argument that begins with finite, creaturely power and concludes with infinite, divine power. No philosophical argument for God – let alone for God’s omnipotence – terminates in the God-forsakenness of a bedraggled Jew (someone the world loves to hate) executed at a city garbage dump.  Luther has spoken.

What about John Calvin? Calvin, to say the least, is cautious concerning the theologian’s deployment of philosophy. In the course of expounding the doctrine of the Trinity he writes laconically, “Here, indeed, if anywhere in the secret mysteries of Scripture, we ought to play the philosopher soberly and with great moderation…..For how can the human mind measure off the measureless essence of God according to its own little measure….Indeed, how can the mind by its own leading come to search out God’s essence…?”[9]   More characteristically, however, Calvin speaks critically of the “Sophists”, scholastic writers whose hybrid theology has accommodated philosophy so as to distort the biblical message.   In this regard, when Calvin discusses the will of God (which for him is the will of God made manifest in Jesus Christ), Calvin contrasts this with “that absolute will of which the Sophists babble.”[10]

Not every philosophical predecessor is equally evil, however.  Calvin thought more highly of the “Schoolmen”, the older, more notable mediaeval thinkers, than he did of theological opponents temporally proximate to him. In his assessment of the distinction between operative grace and co-operative grace, for instance, Calvin writes “how far I disagree with the sounder Schoolmen [note that regardless of how sound these thinkers may be, Calvin still finds ample scope for disagreement] I differ with the more recent Sophists to an even greater extent, as they are farther removed from antiquity.”[11]   He has in mind here principally Ockham and Biel .

Regardless of Calvin’s approach to philosophy, and particularly Aristotle, the fact is that Scholastic theology never disappeared in the Reformation era. Alongside the Humanist flowering, which flowering had no little effect on most Magisterial Reformers (here we need only recall that Calvin’s first published work was a commentary on Seneca’s De Misericordia), Scholastic theology thrived in the “old church” even as Reformers denounced it. It was soon to thrive in the “new church” too as both Lutheran and Reformed Orthodoxy soon wrote theology in a scholastic mode.  It triumphed in the work of Jacob Arminius, the Remonstrant in whom philosophy looms much larger than his followers appear to appreciate. Indeed it is no exaggeration to say that Arminius is chiefly a philosopher whose Thomistic theology (Aquinas is the most frequently quoted thinker in Arminius’ work) happens to use a Protestant vocabulary.  And of course the English Puritans returned to a use of philosophy that was more than merely illustrative.  Jonathan Edwards, New-World Puritan theologian, remained the ablest philosopher in America until the advent of Charles Sanders Peirce.

Over the centuries the relationship between philosophy and theology has varied in the details of the respective disciplines, even as the disciplines sometimes appeared to wed each other, at other times act as necessary foil to each other (and therefore still need each other.) If theology announced itself divorced from philosophy, the divorce appeared not to last.

 

Hegel

In Hegel there occurred what may be regarded as one of philosophy’s larger-scale “takeover bids” of theology; namely, Hegel’s notion of the Absolute or Mind or Spirit.  Ultimate reality is Spirit, but such Spirit is not an exclusive or monistic claim to reality. Neither is Spirit that God of scripture whose Being is utterly distinct ontically from the being of the world, Creator and creation being linked only by grace. Spirit is not that God whose infinite self-transcendence is categorically distinct from the self-transcendence of philosophical thought.

Hegel maintains that it is possible, by means of philosophical thought, to rise to the Absolute Standpoint where the distinction between subject and object is overcome and the thinker becomes one with cosmic Mind, which Mind is nothing other than self-thinking thought, or Mind thinking itself. Mind thinking itself, it must be remembered, is not some sort of flight into solipsism or fantasy, let alone the self-referential world of the deranged. Mind thinking itself is the philosopher’s ascent to that standpoint, that of the Absolute or the Idea or God, in which all the dichotomies of the universe are acknowledged to be non-imaginary yet are overcome in a higher synthesis. Since philosophy aims at a rational apprehension of reality as a whole (and in Hegel’s opinion, his own philosophy has succeeded at this), evil, and that aspect of evil which is sin, have to be seen as aspects of or stages on the way towards that mediation which overcomes the ontic distance between God and humankind.  (In other words, evil has been denatured as evil; radical evil – evil for the sake of evil, evil subserving no good whatsoever, rendered inherently impossible.) The God of biblical faith who utterly transcends the creation is manifestly penultimately “God”, since such a deity is necessarily limited by what it precludes.  According to Hegel, then, God is most profoundly that which gathers up in a higher ontic unity what has heretofore been regarded as ontically distinct. In connection with this notion Hegel speaks of two forms of the infinite, one adequate and the other inadequate.   The inadequate infinite is simply the non-finite.         If the infinite is defined as the non-finite, however, then the infinite is limited by what it is not, and to this extent is not infinite at all. Then the adequate infinite must be that infinite which includes both the finite and the infinite.

Where has this development been illustrated?   (Note that the question is not “Where has this occurred?”)   It has been illustrated in the Incarnation, where the God who up to that time had been viewed as transcendent only – albeit infinite – is now acknowledged to include precisely what it had previously excluded. The infinite, in short, is the sum of infinite plus finite.

Who needs the illustration? Hegel maintains that Christianity is the pictorial representation of truth helpful for those who cannot, or to date have not, risen philosophically to the Absolute Standpoint. Hegel intends no disparagement. At the same time, what is depicted as biblically substantive – Incarnation, atonement, resurrection, Spirit-suffusion – are philosophically less than ultimate.    They remain pictorial representations of a reality that has moved beyond them even as it includes them.

 

 

Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard objects. He denies that there can ever be mediation of Hegel’s sort between God and humankind. He denies that the Absolute’s knowledge of itself and humankind’s knowledge of the Absolute are two aspects of the same reality.   He denies that the creature (if such a word is still appropriate) can rise by means of philosophical thought to the standpoint of the Absolute so as to render human self-consciousness ultimately the same as God’s self-consciousness. He insists that there is an “infinite qualitative distinction” between God and humankind that cannot be overcome.  The God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob is never to be confused with Hegel’s Spirit or Absolute.  We may encounter the God who forever remains GOD, but we are never ontically “one with” that God.

Whereas Hegel insists that “The Truth is the Whole”, Kierkegaard maintains that “Truth is subjectivity.”  This assertion, of course, has nothing to do with subjectivism or make-believe or even post-modernism’s denial of truth.         “Truth is subjectivity” means that the real is the relational. Whereas Hegel had insisted “The Real is the rational and the rational is the real” (presupposing his own carefully delineated sense of “rational”), Kierkegaard anticipates Martin Buber’s notion that the real is the “between”; the real is the existent’s encounter with, engagement with, the God who infinitely transcends us yet who accommodates himself to us and therefore whom we may meet and know.

To exist, insists Kierkegaard, is qualitatively different from to think – however pregnant Hegel’s notion of thinking may be and regardless of what it may include. For this reason, Kierkegaard does not hesitate to say “Existence cannot be thought.” Rejecting the “thought experiments” of metaphysicians as the approach to truth, Kierkegaard insists that the real is apprehended only by means of a commitment that forsakes all earthly securities and “leaps” in faith at incalculable risk.

The paradigm of such commitment is Kierkegaard’s “knight of faith”, Abraham of old; and the story concerning Abraham that overwhelms Kierkegaard is the Akedah, the “binding” of Isaac as Abraham offers up his son, his only son, in obedience to God’s command.

Abraham and Isaac

Abraham, the prototype of the person of faith, has been promised spiritual descendants as numerous as the sand on the seashore.  If the promise is to be fulfilled, two conditions must be met: Abraham must persevere in faith (or else he cannot be the foreparent of descendants-in-faith), and Isaac must survive (or else there will no descendants-in-faith.)   The dilemma is plain: If Abraham obeys God and offers up his son, then God’s promise is null and void, since Isaac has not survived; on the other hand, if Abraham second-guesses (i.e., disobeys) God and preserves Isaac, then God’s promise is null and void, since Abraham’s disobedience exemplifies unfaith.

 

In short, Abraham’s obedience and his disobedience nullify the promise alike. What is he to do? Abraham decides to stake everything on obeying God’s command, trusting God to fulfill God’s promise in ways that Abraham cannot foresee or even imagine.   He will obey God even though such obedience, from a human perspective, ensures the non-fulfillment of the promise.

Precisely at the moment of the knife’s descent God forbids the dreaded act. God’s unaffected awareness and candid acknowledgement, “Now I know that you fear God” ( 22:12 ), dovetails exactly with Abraham’s utter surprise at the provision of the ram. Abraham’s surprise is no more feigned than his intent to obey God at any cost.   Both dimensions must be underscored: it is true simultaneously that Abraham never doubts that “God will provide” (or else he has abandoned faith’s trust in the promise-fulfilling God) and that he is genuinely astounded at the appearance of the ram (or else the trial of faith was no trial at all, trial presupposing the inability to foresee in any way how promise can be fulfilled when faith must heed a command that guarantees cancellation of the promise.)

 

Kierkegaard and Hegel

Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling targets Hegel unambiguously.   Hegel’s understanding of religion, of course, includes his understanding of faith. And since philosophy “goes further” than religion, philosophy necessarily goes further than faith – only, says Kierkegaard, to turn wine into water.[12]

Philosophy, meanwhile, is not aware that it denatures faith, for philosophy insists that it comprehends faith even as it supersedes faith. In all of this, says Kierkegaard, theology is seemingly unaware that its mandate is theos, God. The result is that theology, or what’s left of it, “sits all rouged and powdered in the window and courts its favours, offers its charms to philosophy.”[13]    Theology has prostituted itself to philosophy while preening itself on an intellectual sophistication superior to the crudeness of Abraham and Isaac. After all, “it is supposed to be difficult to understand Hegel, but to understand Abraham is a small matter.”[14]   With mordant irony Kierkegaard turns the vocabulary of “further” back upon his opponent: overwhelmed at Abraham, Kierkegaard glories in the fact that in 130 years the patriarch “got no further than faith.”[15]   While “got no further” waggishly suggests that Abraham was stalled, Kierkegaard knows that Abraham, not the philosophical speculators, had alone moved ahead to existence.         Existence cannot be gained or entered upon by means of the “thought experiments” of the metaphysicians, but only as the detachment of “worldly understanding” is left behind in favour of radical commitment.[16]

The radical commitment is to God; not the “God” of philosophical constructs but the One who summons every would-be believer to Abraham trial. Such trial consists in enduring, in utter anguish, the contradiction between promise and command. This contradiction is nothing less than “absurd.”   As faith paradoxically embraces the absurd (in all of this the “this-worldliness” of Isaac and promised blessing must be kept in mind), faith is vindicated and confirmed not in an ethereal eternal but in the temporal. By way of reminder of the link between the absurd and the temporal Kierkegaard adds, “Only he who draws the knife gets Isaac.”[17]

Needless to say the loneliness of Abraham (and therefore of any believer) is his inability to make any of this understandable to even one other human being. Since no one can foster the understanding requisite for faith, no believer can help someone else into faith: “either the single individual himself becomes the knight of faith by accepting the paradox or he never becomes one.”[18]

In light of philosophy’s non-comprehension of all that Kierkegaard has said, together with the human horror that surrounds the particular absurdity pertaining to Isaac, he does not hesitate to say that not only is Abraham’s life the most paradoxical that can be thought; it is so paradoxical that it cannot be thought.[19]   Still, the foregoing must never be regarded as unique to Abraham.   He is prototype, to be sure, but as such is always to be imitated by those who have never settled for the cheap edition of him that the church is forever trying to sell. He remains the “guiding star that saves the anguished.”[20]

Kierkegaard’s point is that Hegel’s category of self-consciousness, even a self-consciousness that is one with an eternal self-consciousness is still only consciousness; it is not yet existence.  Faith alone embraces existence, and does so only by means of a “leap.” Such a radical commitment is always a qualitative transition that nothing can precipitate or effect incrementally.

The single individual knows that we can be saved only as faith, itself a paradox, grasps the absurd.   Such faith is forever the antithesis of the detachment of philosophy and forever the antithesis of the immediacy of the heart’s spontaneous inclination.[21]   Such faith is always the paradox of existence.

In light of all that has been said concerning the absurd, paradox, leap, existence – together with the fact that the single individual can be neither understood nor admired – Kierkegaard is correct when he contends that the believer is finally a witness, not a teacher.[22]    A teacher, after all, teaches what others with the requisite philosophical equipment can understand.   A witness, on the other hand, attests precisely what is found in common with nothing else. Existence, contra Hegel, is indeed “beyond” all philosophical thought-experiments.

 

A Reprise

And yet it appears philosophy will always be necessary – at least if theological impasses are to be dealt with.         One such impasse was the Christological dispute between Arius and Athanasius in the Fourth Century. In his understanding of Jesus Christ Arius had managed to combine the worst of two heresies, Ebionitism and Docetism.         While his Christology never hesitated to speak of Jesus as the Son of God, his “Son of God” was a tertium quid, something that was neither divine nor human.  For if the Son of God is less than God in any sense, then the Son is not God. And if the Son of God is more than human, then neither is the Son human.

When Athanasius attempted to rebut Arius he realized that both he and Arius were using the same biblical expression, “Son of God,” but were ascribing antithetical meanings to it.  Athanasius insisted that nothing less than the gospel was at stake here. While Arius insisted that the Son was homoiousios with the Father – of similar substance, Athanasius insisted that Son and Father were homoousios – of the same or identical substance.   The difference between homoousios and homoiousios is an iota, the smallest letter of the Greek alphabet (in Greek it lacks even a dot), and subscript as well. (How much hangs on such a distinction is indicated in English by the difference between asking someone to run your business and asking her to ruin it.) Athanasius understood that if the crucial difference between him and Arius was to be identified, he would have to resort to non-biblical, philosophical language. Homoousios is not a biblical word.  Athanasius defended his use of it by insisting that it exuded the spirit of scripture; in other words, homoousios locates the meanings of biblical words and the realities to which they point.[23]

What did Athanasius do for the church through his deployment of a non-biblical, philosophical expression?         No less a figure than Karl Barth maintained that the Athanasian homoousios was the most significant theological statement since the apostles.

It is not difficult to multiply instances where philosophical concepts and vocabulary are crucial in theological articulation.  Despite Calvin’s protestations against the divagations of schoolmen and sophists whose Aristotelian encroachment upon theology Calvin finds objectionable, Calvin resorts to Aristotle in expounding his understanding of justification.[24]  Concerning Romans 3:24, “[All who believe] … are justified by his [God’s] grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” (RSV) Calvin maintains this verse to be “perhaps the most remarkable place in the whole of Scripture for explaining and magnifying the force of this righteousness.”[25]   Here Calvin writes, “He [Paul] shows that the mercy of God is the efficient cause; that Christ, with his blood, is the material; that the formal, or instrumental, is faith conceived from the Word; and the final is the glory of the divine righteousness and goodness.”[26] Elsewhere Calvin readily acknowledges philosophy as servant of Christian understanding: “…we see that there was good ground for the distinction which the schoolmen made between necessity, secundum quid, and necessity absolute, also between the necessity of consequent and of consequence.”[27]

In none of the above is it suggested that the substance of philosophy determines the substance of theology.         It is to say, however, that theology appears to need philosophy – or at least to find it highly useful – to deploy philosophical concepts in theological exposition.

Karl Barth makes this point in his exposition of the doctrine of the Trinity. Barth regards as short-sighted those who are impatient with the doctrine on the grounds that it appears to rely for its articulation on the philosophy current at the time of the Council of Nicaea (ca. 325.) Barth acknowledges the

…indisputable connexion of the dogma [of the Trinity] with the philosophy of the age.  By proving philosophical involvement we can reject the confessions and theology of any age and school, and we can do his more effectively the less we see the beam in our own eye.  For linguistically theologians have always depended on some philosophy and linguistically they always will.  But instead of getting Pharisaically (sic) indignant about this and consigning whole periods to the limbo of a philosophy that is supposed to deny the gospel – simply because our own philosophy is different – it is better to stick strictly to the one question what the theologians of the earlier period were really trying to say in the vocabulary of their philosophy.[28]

Theology cannot be articulated apart from philosophical concepts and vocabulary. At the same time, the content of philosophy and theology are not identical.  Therefore theology must adapt its proper content to the forms of discourse in its immediate environment.  If theology fails to adapt then it speaks to no one, however rich its content may be. On the other hand, if in seeking to adapt, theology adopts the substance described by the forms of discourse in its immediate environment, it will find that however well it communicates it has nothing to say, theology now being able to do no more than reflect the world back to the world.

The line between “adapt” and “adopt” is finer than a hair and harder than diamond. In truth, most of the time Christian witness finds itself now on one side of the line and then on the other, trusting that on balance it tiptoes down the boundary. The option that theology never has is to “play it safe” and make no effort at adapting for fear of adopting, for to “play it safe” is to guarantee the disappearance of witness.

Kierkegaard knew as much. While remaining an unrelenting foe of philosophy’s disdain for Abraham who, unfortunately, “got no further than faith,” Kierkegaard concludes his criticism of Hegel and Hegel’s “Absolute” by conscripting Hegel as Kierkegaard tells the reader that Abraham – everywhere the prototype of philosophy-defying faith – is lost unless “…the single individual as the single individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute.”[29]

Since it appears philosophy will always be essential to theology, is the difference between philosophy and theology an irreconcilable difference? In some respects there may continue to be an irreconcilable difference.         Years ago my chief philosophical mentor, Emil Fackenheim, commented to me that radical evil, evil for the sake of evil, evil enacted for no other reason than perverse delight in evil, is precisely that surd over which metaphysics finally stumbles – “surd”, in mathematical parlance, being that which can never be made to fit an expression that is mathematically elegant.

At the same time, within the realm of truth or reality that theology acknowledges, might there be room for philosophy in the form of a re-formulated natural theology? Within this realm cannot philosophy argue from the creaturely order to its “silent cry” for a sufficient reason?   This is not a philosophical attempt at supplanting, for instance, redemption as the content of revelation.   But it is to argue, from within the realm established by revelation; it is to argue philosophically that the truth of theology is not inherently philosophically impossible.[30]

In this light Hans Urs von Balthasar, in discussing the relation between philosophy and faith, appears to grasp the challenge that has convened this colloquium when he writes

…Ought one not … to say that the Christian, as proclaimer of God’s glory … takes upon himself – whether he wants to or not – the burden of metaphysics?[31]

 

Victor A. Shepherd  March 2007

 

 

[1]Thesis #39, “Disputation Against Scholastic Theology”, Timothy F.  Lull, ed.; Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989) p.15. Luther’s point is that humans can never be more than mere servants of their will, since their will, coram Deo, is governed either by sin or by Christ-in-his-righteousness.

[2]op. cit., #41, p.16.

[3]op. cit., #43, p.16.

[4]op.cit., #50, p.16. By “whole Aristotle” Luther means not only Aristotle’s metaphysical writings but also Aristotle’s scientific writings, newly uncovered in the burgeoning scientific exploration in the Sixteenth Century, and just as newly exposed as false by telescope-aided astronomers.

[5]op. cit., #52, p.17.

[6]op. cit., p.20.

[7]See, e.g., Walter von Loewenich, Luther’s Theology of the Cross; Herbert J.A.Bouman, transl.( Minneapolis : Fortress, 1976, passim.

[8]cf. Gerhard O. Forde, The Captivation of the Will, ( Grand Rapids : Eerdmans, 2005)p.45.

[9]Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ( Philadelphia : The Westminster Press, 1960. J.T. McNeill, ed.; F.L. Battles, transl.) 1.13.21.

[10]op.cit., 1.16.7.

[11]op.cit., 2.2.6.

[12] Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, transls. and eds.; (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983) p.37.

[13] Kierkegaard, 32.

[14] Kierkegaard, 32.

[15] Kierkegaard, 23.

[16] When Kierkegaard speaks of faith’s leaving worldly understanding behind he is not advocating irrationality as such.   See C. Stephen Evans, Faith Beyond Reason: A Kierkegaardian Account, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998) chapters 6 and 7.

[17] Kierkegaard, 27.

[18] Kierkegaard, 71.

[19] Kierkegaard, 56.

[20] Kierkegaard, 53, 21.

[21] Kierkegaard, 47.

[22] Kierkegaard, 80.

[23]See T.F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1988) p.128,129.

[24]We might note that Calvin published his Commentary on Romans in 1540. Between 1532 and 1542 at least thirty-five commentaries on Romans were published, including many by Roman Catholic exegetes who disagreed with the Reformers’ reading of that epistle which Protestants cherish above all others.

[25]T.H.L. Parker, Commentaries on Romans: 1532-1542. (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1986) p.198.

[26]op.cit., p.197.

[27]Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Henry Beveridge, transl. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1953).

[28]Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, G.W. Bromiley, transl., (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1975) I,1, p.378.

[29]Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p.120.

[30]See Thomas F. Torrance, Karl Barth: Biblical and Evangelical Theologian, (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1990) chapter 5.

[31] Hans Urs von Balthasar, My Work in Retrospect, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993)p.85.

(American Academy of Religion, November 2006)
The Torrances and the Logic of the Reformation

Victor A. Shepherd

 

When I was asked to speak at the 2006 meeting of the Thomas F. Torrance Theological Fellowship, I indicated that I would speak on “The Torrances and the Logic of the Reformation.”   To this I planned to speak on David Torrance and his appreciation of the Israel, both biblical and contemporary, with respect to God’s covenant faithfulness, comparing his appreciation of Israel to that of the Reformers, especially Calvin; on James B. Torrance and seeming deficits in his theology with respect to faith, contrasting his under-attention here to the biblically-delineated understanding of faith found in the Reformers; on Thomas F. Torrance, with respect to extending to a consideration of the homoousion of the Spirit the theological trenchancy that Torrance displayed concerning the homoousion of the Son.

I began with TFT, only to find that with him alone I had exceeded the time-limit assigned me by the Theological Fellowship. For this reason I shall not speak on David or James B., but rather restrict myself to TF.

—————————————————-

Thomas Torrance has become notorious for his insistence on the homoousion as essential to any sound doctrine of the Trinity, arguing that the homoousion safeguards the Incarnation against Arianism and any of the ingredients of Arianism (e.g., Docetism and Ebionitism), even as it safeguards the Trinity against any form of sabellianism or modalism, and the doctrine of God against any form of unitarianism or polytheism.  While TFT’s insistence can be found somewhere, however fleetingly addressed or alluded to, in virtually everything he has published (not least his sermons), his major discussions of the homoousion appear in three overlapping books on the Trinity; namely, The Trinitarian Faith (1988), Trinitarian Perspectives (1994), and The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (1996).

Unrelentingly TFT has shown that without the homoousion of the Father and the Son the gospel is forfeited.         While the difference between homoousion and homoiousion is iota subscript, the smallest letter of the Greek alphabet, this difference, I tell my students, is precisely the difference between asking someone to run your business and asking her to ruin it; namely, the smallest letter of the English alphabet, with catastrophic outcomes in the balance.  The homoousion estops any suggestion that the being of the Son is like the being of the Father, however elevated the degree of likeness.  As TFT has made plain over and over, it matters not whether the being of Father and that of the Son are a lot like or only a little bit like. No degree of similarity can substitute for identity.   Absent identity of being of the Father and the Son, the gospel disappears, leaving behind no more than religious mythology (the “gospel”, so-called, is now no more than tales humans spin in order to try to make sense of their existence) or no more than a human construct (here we could think of the constructs pertaining to the never-ending “quest for the historical Jesus”) that leaves us doing what the apostles never urge us to do; namely, infer a deity lying behind Jesus as the latter is reduced to no more than a “window” by which we may apprehend the deity that he himself is not.         In other words, while all docetic Christologies leave us mythologizing in the pursuit of truth, all ebionite Christologies leave us deducing truth, when the gospel announces itself as truth, reality, since it is God’s incursion, self-bestowal, self-communication, and self-interpretation. Therein the gospel eclipses all mythological speculation and all inferential processes. (Incidentally, with respect to the lattermost, the process whereby the nature of God is inferred from a Son who isn’t quite God, present-day Ebionites – e.g., the questers of the historical Jesus seem not to understand that the characteristic of the biblical God, the Holy One of Israel, is that he speaks.   When he speaks, those addressed know that they have been addressed by an “other”, by the Other; they know what has been spoken and therein know as well who has spoken. According to the logic of scripture, any deity who is inferred or deduced or concluded is ipso facto an idol.   In other words, the quest for the historical Jesus appears to be able to yield no more than an idol.)

All that TFT has brought forward concerning the homoousion of the Father and the Son is pregnant concerning the homoousion of the Son and the Spirit.   TFT has admitted this in many places, not least in his most recent work, The Christian Doctrine of God. Here, for instance, he has written, “…we must think of our being in the Spirit in the incarnate economy of God’s saving acts in Jesus Christ as deriving from and grounded objectively in the homoousial Communion of the eternal Spirit and the eternal Son in the Holy Trinity.” (149) Plainly the homoousion of the Spirit is as crucial as that of the Son in any Christian understanding of God and the participation in God’s own life that constitutes the salvation of God’s people.  In the same way TFT has recognized the manner in which the homoousion of the Spirit protects God’s infinite transcendence against a human encroachment wherein it is assumed that because such terms as “father” or “generate” are used of God, humans can co-opt God or domesticate God or even comprehend God.  In this vein TFT writes, “Let us recall further here the fact that classical Christian theology placed the homoousion of the Spirit alongside the homoousion of the incarnate Son. While the homoousion of the Son expresses the truth that what God is in Christ Jesus he is antecedently and eternally in himself, the bracketing of it with the homoousion of the Spirit has the effect of excising from our thought any projection into God of the creaturely, corporeal or sexist ingredients in the terms ‘father’, ‘son’, ‘offspring’ or ‘generation’ into God. (158) Educing yet another implication of the homoousion of the Spirit, TFT writes, “If the ontological bond between the historical Jesus Christ and God the Father is cut, then the substance falls out of the Gospel, but if the ontological bond between the Holy Spirit and incarnate Son of the Father is cut, so that there is a discrepancy between the economic Trinity and the ontological Trinity, or between the saving activity of the love of God in history and the transcendent activity of God in eternity, then we human beings are left without hope and can have no part or lot in God’s saving activity in Jesus Christ.” (197)   While TFT and others have given no little attention to homoousion with respect to the Son, little work appears to have been done with respect to homoousion of the Spirit. The result is that while the deity of the Son has been highlighted in such a way as to forestall Christological speculation, projection and non-biblical deduction, neglect of the deity of the Spirit has allowed a non-Christologically normed, non-Christologically formed, non-Christologically informed notion of the Spirit to arise. It should be no surprise, then, that the Spirit is invoked to legitimize pantheism, panentheism, the salvific significance of “the world’s great religions” (even as greatness seems to be defined by no more than the number of adherents), the salvific significance of religiosity-in-general (as much of the current preoccupation with “spirituality” suggests), or the salvific significance of irreligion (even though such thinkers as Calvin would deny that humans can ever be irreligious, the fallen human heart and mind remaining a ceaseless factory of idolatry).

The question, then, “Do the Son and the Spirit possess the same nature or merely similar natures?” is no less urgent than the question concerning the Son and the Father. TFT has alluded to this briefly in several places of The Doctrine of God (e.g., pp. 61, 72, 148.) I wish now to propose several considerations concerning the homoousion of Son and Spirit that parallel, where possible, the points that TFT has made passim concerning the cruciality of the homoousion of Son and Father.

 

 

[1] If Son and Spirit are only ontically similar, then there is no protection against that rationalism which appears to be the Achilles heel of the Reformed tradition. The Christo-logic of the Reformation (which Christo-logic, we should note, always entailed a Pneumato-logic) maintained that as Jesus Christ surges over people in the power of the Spirit, this one action of God forges within them the capacity to understand God’s incursion, the categories by which to understand it, and the vocabulary with which to speak of it.  Reformation understanding of the nature of God’s action upon people rendered unnecessary, even counterproductive, any rationalist precursor that qualified the beneficiaries of God’s salvific action to understand it and speak of it. Herein the classic Sixteenth Century Reformers differed from what Calvin called the “schoolmen” and their rationalist apparatus.   Quickly, however, the logic of the Reformation gave way to the logic of Protestant Scholasticism. Aristotelianism returned and occupied the place in Reformed theology that it had occupied in late Mediaeaval scholasticism.   We need only recall the aftermath of Calvin wherein post-Calvinism, Arminianism, and Roman Catholic thought appeared incommensurable on the surface while more profoundly all were aspects of an Aristotelian commonality. While Arminius, for instance, was execrated by post-Calvin Calvinists, few of the latter appeared to understand that the most frequently quoted thinker in Arminius remains Thomas Aquinas, whose Aristotelianism is never in doubt. Post-Calvin scholasticism recrudesced in several manifestations: Roman Catholic and predestinarian (de Baie and Banez), Roman Catholic and non-predestinarian (Suarez and Molina), Protestant and predestinarian (Beza, Gomarus and Junius), Protestant and non-predestinarian (Arminius, Episcopus and Limborch). Regardless of apparent divergences or even apparent theological incommensurables, all of the aforementioned presupposed an Aristotelian substratum in their theology.

As the classic Sixteenth Century Reformers were aware, however, the logic of the substratum alters the logic of the stratum. Despite the theological differences between Arminius and his Calvinist neighbours (e.g., the doctrine of election and the reading of Romans 7), they were one in the foundation of their thought.

Rationalism remains the “default” position of the Reformed tradition (although not of the Reformed tradition only). Rationalism in some form arises when the homoousion of the Spirit is overlooked. While Jesus Christ is acknowledged to be the Son Incarnate without qualification with the result that the nature of the Father isn’t inferred or deduced from scripture’s portrait of the Son, now to be inferred is the effectual presence of this deity. Now effectual presence is what’s to be humanly supplied.  Now a deity lying behind Jesus of Nazareth isn’t concluded; rather, an activity of a spirit lying behind Jesus is concluded, which activity isn’t one with the activity of the Son, and therefore which spirit is less than holy. At this point speculation or mythologizing pertains not to the Son (as happened in the Arian controversy) but instead pertains to the Spirit.  Here there is an “orthodox” acknowledgement of the Son (acknowledgement but not understanding, since a proper understanding of the Son entails the homoousion of the Spirit) that is accompanied by a human projection of the Spirit’s work. Not infrequently one finds in the church an uncompromised acknowledgement of the Son – without qualification or hesitation – even as this acknowledgement is now co-opted for a purpose that diverges from the purpose of scripture. In this situation the Son Incarnate is conscripted to support aspects of liberation theology or feminist theology (or patriarchal theology) or ecological theology or religious pluralism or psycho-spiritual theses that fall short of scripture’s portrayal of the Spirit.

At this point the Spirit is the principle whereby the Incarnate Son is deemed to energize or empower an agenda of transformation where that agenda of transformation isn’t entirely congruent with scripture’s depiction of the definitive, eschatological transformation wrought by the Spirit as the effectual presence of God.  A formally correct acknowledgement of the homoousion of the Son now fuels social or sexual or religious programmes that bear some relation to that “new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells (2^nd Peter 3:13) – that is, the acknowledgement of Jesus Christ subserves the correction of what the church rightly pronounces unrighteous – even as, absent the homoousion of the Spirit, what Wesley called “the general tenor” or scripture is truncated. Often church members who resist all such agendas are disdained, subtly or frontally, as lacking theological sophistication when in fact (as TFT never tired of saying, thanks to his reading of Michael Polanyi, and not least the latter’s Personal Knowledge) these “simple” church members know more, vastly more, than they can articulate. In other words, without being able to state it precisely or defend it cogently, in fact that they have “scented” a newer unrighteous that is proffered as the proper redress of what is widely admitted to be an older unrighteousness or injustice. A properly articulated homoousion of the Spirit, needless to say, would strengthen immeasurably those who possess what TFT called a theological “instinct”, however little they are able to articulate it at present.

Where the homoousion of the Spirit isn’t operative, effectiveness in the church’s teaching, preaching, and evangelism are sought elsewhere; not only sought, but found to the detriment of church and world alike.         Frequently my students in Introductory Systematic Theology, rightly zealous for the gospel, protest, “But shouldn’t the church be concerned with converting people, concerned with seeing them converted?” These questions, however, are not identical.  Witness, proclamation, evangelism – this is always the church’s business. Throughout the book of Acts no one comes to faith apart from the mission and ministry of the Christian community.   And in Acts no one comes to faith apart from the ministry of the Holy Spirit, that activity of God whereby he alone renders the church’s ministry saintly effective just because he alone can.

Throughout its history the church has shown itself to lack the patience of God as well as an agenda-free grasp of the purpose of God, with the result that the church overreaches itself and attempts to do God’s work in the face of God’s unendurable slowness, even negligence. The result, as the world is aware where frequently the church isn’t aware, is that the church persecutes. Whenever the church upholds the homoousion of the Son but fails to uphold the homoousion of the Spirit, the church turns its unexceptionable recognition of the Son into a weapon that it wields against people whose recalcitrance has imperilled them spiritually, such coercion being able to move them along to a saving confession. The coercion can be physical, social or psychological; but it remains coercion, and it arises through a defective understanding of the relation of the Spirit to the Son, as the vulnerability of the crucified Son is contradicted by the non-vulnerability of a coercive church.

Tragically, pathetically, in the name of its Lord the church advertises its unbelief in its Lord, for plainly its resorting to coercion announces that it doesn’t trust God to do what God insists God alone can do; namely, quicken faith in the sin-ravaged heart by means of the Holy Spirit. Not to put too fine an edge on it, non-recognition of the homoousion of the Spirit issues in a seeming Christological zeal that merely publicizes the church’s atheism. To be sure, in his dispute with Erasmus on the bondage of the will Luther said that apart from Jesus [i.e., apart from the cross] God is indistinguishable from the devil. Luther was aware, without mentioning it in this one instance, that it is only as the Spirit renders us beneficiaries of the cross, only as the Spirit quickens faith in the crucified, do we know the God who is forever distinguished from the devil.

While much has been said about Luther’s theologia crucis and his disavowal of theolgia gloriae, little attention has been paid to the cruciality of the identity of the crucified and the Spirit.  Briefly, a theology of glory occurs whenever it is thought that God can be derived from metaphysical speculation, whenever it is thought that the truth and nature of God can be read off nature or read off the face of history, and whenever the church becomes triumphalistic. Concerning the church’s confusion between its triumphalism and the true triumph of the crucified (triumphant in that he is raised from the dead, as the church correctly notes, but is raised wounded, suffering still, vulnerable yet in the suffering of the world, as the church too often fails to note) enough has already been said.  Concerning the first point of Luther’s theologia crucis, the derivation of God from metaphysical speculation, Luther, eschewing all forms of rationalism (his vehement “faith seizes reason by the throat and strangles the brute” must be kept in mind), was always aware that only that Spirit whose activity is the action of God, and therefore the action of God the Son according to Luther’s conviction, could bring humans to a knowledge of God by means of the crucified. Beneficiaries now of the mercy of the crucified God, they can recognize assorted theologies of glory for what they are.  Apart from Spirit-wrought living faith in the crucified God, however, biblically orthodox theology remains an ideational construct and therein akin to philosophical speculation, from which one must infer or deduce God. The difference in content between biblically orthodox theology and philosophical speculation doesn’t of itself protect the former from an ideational construct whose lack of Holy Spirit renders its “miss” as good as a mile.

In a somewhat “softer” form of rationalism there isn’t a conclusion or inference to be drawn entirely naturalistically; instead the Spirit is said to facilitate illumination.   The Spirit operates at the level of mind, but at the level of mind only without reference to the heart.   Here the truth of God can be known without the knower herself being brought into the orbit of the “new creation”, without the knower herself being rendered a new creature within the new creation.  The Spirit is little more than the influence of a Deistic deity who provides the conditions for a humanly engendered knowledge of God; i.e., there is an outer structure of “grace” (admittedly a soft, dilute “grace” that is less than scripture’s understanding of grace as the living God’s uncompromisable faithfulness to his covenant). The outer structure of “grace” is complemented by an inner content of human possibility and human achievement. The Spirit, then, is the divinely-supplied condition by which human achievement occurs. This notion, of course, is epistemic semi-Pelagianism.

Where such Spirit-facilitated illuminationism is said to operate, “knowing” is closer to the outlook of the Enlightenment than to that of scripture. In scripture, to know God is to participate in the reality of God and therein, thereby, be rendered forever different.   Our knowledge of God is the precisely the difference our engagement with this “Other” has made to us when we meet this “Other” as Person.   Only as the Spirit is admitted to be God is the activity of the Spirit that act of God whereby God renders us participants in God’s own life. Only as the Spirit is God (i.e., homoousially identical with Father and Son) is the activity of the Spirit that act of God whereby the God who knows himself includes us in his self-knowing.

 

[2] In what follows I aim at tracing item-by-item with respect to the homoousion of the Spirit some of the points that TFT has emphasized with respect to the homoousion of the Son

[a] Whatever we say of the Son we can say of the Spirit except “Son”.   To deny this is to deny the deity of the Spirit, and therefore to deny the eternal Tri-unity of God. To deny the eternal Tri-unity of God is to deny the immanent or ontological Trinity. The result is that there remains only an economic Trinity, an economic Trinity ungrounded in an immanent Trinity. The problems that arise here are legion.   Whereas the non-identity of being between Father and Son means that we can no longer be certain that the “face” of God that we know by revelation is one with the heart of God in God’s innermost, intra-triune life, the parallel non-identity of being between Son and Spirit means that the “face” of God that we seen in the Son might not be one with the act of God whereby the Spirit supposedly brings us to Christ and Christ to us. What, then, is the work of the Spirit? Where might the Spirit be taking us? To what end? And how shall we be able to “discern” or test the spirits if the nature or being of the Holy Spirit is that which is most in question?   Plainly the denial of the homoousion of the Spirit is no less catastrophic than the denial of the homoousion of the Son. (Non-congruence between economic and immanent Trinities for any reason, i.e., whether on account of the Son or the Spirit, lands theology in all the problems Paul Molnar has discussed in his Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Trinity and David Lauber in his Descent into Hell.)

[b] TFT earlier pointed out that any detraction from the Son detracts from the Father; i.e., whatever the Father as giver might give, he doesn’t give himself, with the result that giver and gift aren’t identical.  The consequence of this has to be that while God gives, he withholds himself. The apostle’s cry “He didn’t spare his own Son” has the force of “God didn’t spare himself” – and this is now denied.

In the same way detraction from the Spirit detracts from the Son since the gift (the Son) is now willed by the Father yet fails to accomplish the purpose for which the Father gives it even as the Son longs to be given effectually.  (See John 12:27: “Now is my soul troubled.  And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’?  No, for this purpose I have come to this hour.”   Here the Father grants the Son’s profounder request [profounder, that is, than “If it be possible….”].)  In short, where the homoousion of the Son is upheld but that of the Spirit is denied, giver and gift are one but they remain ineffectual.  God can be said to be alive, even be said to merciful (he spares not his own Son) but ultimately ineffectual in that his Word “goes forth from [his] mouth” but in fact does “return to me empty”, since it did not “accomplish that which I purpose, and prosper in the thing for which I sent it.” (Isaiah 55:11)         Only as the disobedient sinner is brought to faith by God the Spirit, and rendered a new creature is the purpose of Incarnation and Crucifixion accomplished.

[3] Just as the Father isn’t Father in that he is the Father of believers (therein requiring something creaturely in order to be who he is) but rather is Father in that he is the Father of the Son and is therefore eternally, intrinsically Father, so the homoousion of the Spirit means that God is eternally, intrinsically the ceaseless activity, the “doing”, of the Father loving the Son and the Son reciprocating that love in the bond of the Spirit. In other words, the homoousion of the Spirit is essential if love as “doing”, act (rather than mere attitude) is to remain operative. This truth is freighted concerning Christian discipleship. For instance, Leviticus 19:2 can be defended as the “root” commandment of scripture (in contrast to the “great” commandment): “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.”   One the one hand, God’s holiness is his unique Godness and therefore he alone is holy. On the other hand, God’s people are commanded to be holy, the “root” commandment of scripture gathering up all others.  Since God is love eternally in the sense of ceaseless activity or “doing”, God’s people are holy inasmuch as the “root” commandment is seen to be related to the “great” commandment”: we are to love the Lord our God, together with our neighbour. We love God and neighbour alike, however, not through adopting an attitude or assuming a posture; we love God and neighbour by being “doers of the Word” (James 1:22 ). We are not to “love in word or speech but in deed and in truth.” (1^st John 3:18)   What’s real is not merely to be apprehended; what’s real (ultimately God and his claim upon us and our concrete obedience in the sphere of his love and in fellowship with him) is to be done. (John 3:21) Love as ceaseless activity expressing one’s nature characterizes God’s people inasmuch as it first characterizes God himself.

[4] The homoousion of the Spirit is a bulwark against all forms of unitarianism.  Absent the Spirit, a unitarianism of the Father arises wherein the God who is infinitely transcendent is one-sidedly “high and lifted up” so as to be inaccessible – and unknowable, since if God were only infinitely transcendent, humans couldn’t even know this much.  Absent the Spirit, a unitarianism of the Son arises wherein Jesus is rendered our “chum”, lending himself to all our agendas, never challenging us or correcting us. Absent the homoousion of the Spirit, a unitarianism of the Spirit arises wherein God is indistinguishable from a subjectivism that has surrendered all appreciation of truth and has elevated religious “inwardness” uncritically.  The homoousion of the Spirit means that the Spirit is Holy Spirit only in conjunction with the Father and the Son.  A profounder grasp of this point would do much to spare the church charismatic distortions that arise from a unitarianism of the Spirit, even as the charismatic dimension of the church has highlighted the frigid unitarianism of the Father and the naturalistic unitarianism of the Son.

Similarly the homoousion of the Spirit is a bulwark against polytheism, for the Spirit isn’t a second deity or a different sort of deity or a subordinate deity. The Holy Spirit is simply God.

And of course the homoousion of the Spirit is a bulwark against dependency on the church.  Earlier it was noted that the Father needs nothing creaturely in order to be Father. In the same way the Spirit, whose activity is related much more closely to the church than to the creation, needs nothing ecclesial in order to be Spirit. (This point is to be noted with respect to those theologies that suggest the Spirit to be tied to the church or to inhere the church or to be anything other than lord of the church.)

 

[5] In his discussion of the homoousion of Father and Son TFT has highlighted its gospel-significance by asking “What is implied if Father and Son are not of one being?” The same question must be put concerning the homoousion of Son and Spirit: What is implied if this latter truth ceases to remain embedded in the church’s consciousness?

[a] God is utterly unknowable. Arius had said that no creature (e.g., the Son) can mediate knowledge of God.  If the Spirit isn’t God, without qualification, then God isn’t known in the biblical sense of “know”, where knowledge isn’t characteristically the acquisition of information by means of mastery but rather is transformation through engagement with an “other” who is person, and all of this by means of surrender.  If the Spirit isn’t God, our knowledge of God is no more than a matter of “reading off” God from the face of Jesus, not necessarily “advancing” to a God behind a Jesus who is no more than a window to him but nonetheless confusing everyday knowledge as the accumulation of information with that biblical “knowing” which is transmutation.  Human knowledge of God, it must be remembered, is precisely the difference, the transformation, arising in the knower through her self-abandonment to the Person of God.  Where the homoousion of the Spirit is neglected, knowledge of God (so-called) is a one-sided cerebralism or “informationism” where orthodox truths (abstractions by definition) are assimilated even as the heart remains unaltered by the concreteness of that Truth which is reality.

It can reasonably be proffered that an operative denial of the homoousion of the Spirit underlies evangelicalism’s preoccupation with apologetics. Few Christians would object to the heuristic apologetics that helps doubters past those matters that appear to impede people from embracing the gospel (e.g., naturalistic, reductionist arguments against faith, which arguments can readily be exposed as lacking cogency).  Entirely different is the apologetics that establishes, and maintains there needs to be established, the conditions for the possibility of God, then for the possibility of incarnation (for instance), then for the possibility of faith, the actuality of faith, and finally for the assurance of faith.  In its commitment to apologetics has much contemporary evangelicalism tacitly denied the homoousion of the Spirit, assuming that philosophical demonstration can do what the Spirit ought to do but seemingly fails to do?   In the same vein, does the preoccupation with apologetics deny that the integrity (albeit not the structure) of reason is compromised in the Fall? All of this is undercut by the efficacy of that Spirit who is God; specifically God working to bring the human putative knower into the sphere of God’s self-knowing. None of this can be accused of countenancing faith as no more than an exercise in irrationality. Faith reasons as surely as faith trusts. It is, however, to admit that while the structure of reasoning survives the Fall, the integrity of reasoning concerning God and humankind’s relationship to God is compromised by the Fall.   Such compromised integrity can be restored only by means of grace, in faith. In other words, grace/faith restores reason to reason’s integrity.  (Hans Urs von Balthasar’s articulation here is a salutary reminder:

“…the word of God is not of this world and hence can never be discovered in the categories  and accepted patterns of human reason.”(Prayer p. 61)

“I was appointed by God from all eternity to be the recipient of this…eternal

word of love, a word, which, pure grace though it be, is…more rational than

my reason, with the result that this act of obedience in faith is in truth the

most reasonable of acts.” (p. 62)

 

[b] TFT has pointed out that absent the homoousion of the Son it can’t be held that there is oneness between what the gospel presents as the revelation of God and God himself.   Absent the homoousion of the Spirit it can’t be held that there is oneness between what the gospel presents as the revelation of God and that appropriation without which “revelation” as such hasn’t occurred, since revelation is revelation only if there is a human participant.  Absent the homoousion of the Spirit, “revelation” would be no more than rationalistic ideation or non-rationalistic emotion stimulated by human proximity to a depiction of the Son, however orthodox.  In other words, apart from the homoousion of the Spirit the apostolic portrayal of Jesus Christ becomes the stimulus to concepts and affects to which the Holy Spirit is applied as a means of sanctifying what the apostolic depiction of Jesus Christ arouses naturalistically but doesn’t in truth generate as a concomitant of apprehending Christ as the One who bears and bestows that Spirit who magnifies him. In short, it appears that to overlook the homoousion of the Spirit is to find even scripture, and specifically its depiction of Jesus, advancing a religious paganism within the church.

[c] TFT has stated that absent the homoousion of the Son the gospel can’t be God’s self-bestowal or self-communication; i.e., God may be said to bestow and communicate, but now necessarily something less than, other than, himself – and all of this on account of a deficiency in the Son.  Absent the homoousion of the Spirit the gospel can’t be God’s self-bestowal, God’s self-communication. Here there is a frustration in God in that what God wills in himself and accomplishes in the Son, God can’t effect in us.  Such divine “frustration” leaves the church looking elsewhere for effectiveness.

The Protestant Reformation, aware of the deity of the Spirit, didn’t undervalue the experiential dimension of faith; indeed, the Magisterial Reformers, concerned with the correction and re-articulation to be sure, nonetheless gave far greater place to “the Word in the heart” than they are commonly thought to have done. One need only read Luther, where he speaks of “hearing the voice” together with grasping the doctrine; the bridegroom saying ‘you are mine’, and the bride saying ‘you are mine’; etc., or read Calvin and the latter’s use of “feel” (Calvin’s Institutes and Commentaries abound in “feel” and similar terms as Calvin ever remains a theologian of the heart.) The Reformation’s concern for assurance, the assurance of faith (i.e., the assurance of one’s salvation) is attestation enough.  For this reason the Reformers acknowledged the experiential aspect of crucial biblical texts; e.g., Galatians 3:2 – “Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit [an unambiguous reference to an event in their lives whose vividness was undeniable and therefore could serve as the foundation of the point Paul wanted to make with them] by works of the law or by hearing with faith?”   In other words, was the startling vividness of their Spirit-wrought immersion in Christ the result of their appropriating the gospel in faith or the result of having endeavoured to conform themselves to a lifeless code? What they could never deny or forget was the vividness of the Spirit within them.

In light of the normative place of scripture in the thought of the Magisterial Reformers, there is no stepping around, e.g., the force of Paul’s experience: the Damascus Road arrest, subsequent visions and voices and trances.   And then there are his “revelations”.  On the hand he doesn’t preach them, content to preach only Christ crucified. On the other hand, apart from his revelations, he wouldn’t be an apostle at all and therefore would have nothing to say.         The apostle candidly admits the “abundance of revelations” (2^nd Cor. 12:1, 7; cf. Gal. 1:12 ; 2:2). They have all left him as one of those who “love our Lord with love undying.” (Eph. 6:24)

In the history of the church Roman Catholics appear to have visions while Protestants do not.  Does a tacit neglect (to say the least) of a homoousion of the Spirit result in large areas of scripture remaining closed to Protestants?         Abraham is the prototype of faith in older and newer testaments.  We are told “…the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision” (Gen15:1). To be sure, the vision was given to convey the word. Still, the vision can’t be discounted. Yet Protestants, rightly Word-oriented, do little with other scriptural depictions of God’s approach and self-impartation.         Why? (Recall Jean Brebeuf, Jesuit missionary to the Huron aboriginal people of Georgian Bay . Just as visions had been crucial in the spiritual formation and vocation of Loyola one hundred years earlier, vision would be no less crucial in the spiritual life of missioner and people, for Jean de Brebeuf was privileged to “see”, one night amidst his comfortable life in France, a flaming cross suspended above the Huron encampment in the New World.         Thereafter he never doubted what he was to do or why.  How is his vision/dream different from mere fantasy or wishful thinking?

Jonathan Edwards spoke much of “Religious Affections”: a felt response to an object grounded in an understanding of the nature of that object. Edwards distanced all such affection from emotion or passion. Emotion presupposes no understanding whatever of anything supposed to have aroused it. Passion, said Edwards, is problematic in that its passivity contradicts the act and event that faith and obedience are; in addition, passion entails loss of self-control, whereas the fruits of the Holy Spirit include self-control. Nonetheless, while religious affection (Edwards’ way of speaking of faith) presupposes an understanding of the nature of God, affection ever remains affective, as Edwards never tired of pointing out in his exploration of the phenomenon of Spirit-wrought faith.)

Similarly John Wesley, in his landmark tract “The Almost Christian”, maintained that unbelievers are characterized by lack of faith in God, while believers are characterized by – faith in God?   By love for God, insists Wesley, even as he immediately goes on to speak of their faith. Wesley can never be read hereby as upholding justification by love.         From the moment of his Aldersgate awakening he never ceased to insist on justification by faith, even as he praised the Book of Common Prayer for insisting on it and faulted Quakerism for neglecting it.  Wesley’s point, rather, is that faith in Christ and love for Christ presupposed and imply each other.  Without love for Christ, faith in Christ degenerates into “beliefism” where the assimilation of doctrine is equated with living engagement with the living Lord.  Without faith in Christ, love for Christ denies the necessity of the atonement and hinges justification on the quality of the believer’s love.

The Pauline corpus is where Protestants customarily look first; certainly where the Magisterial Reformers looked first – even as their descendents, post-Reformation Protestant scholastics, overlooked a major dimension of Paul himself.

What can be vouchsafed to the apostle can be vouchsafed to anyone. The question the church must ask is “How are genuine revelations to be distinguished from religious ‘boilovers’?” In truth, the Spirit-formed, Spirit-informed, Spirit-normed affective or experiential aspect to faith is a matter the church neglects only at is peril, for deficits in the church spawn the sects.

As a pastor (for 36 years) I have come to see that people suffer enormous affective deprivation; specifically, Christians suffer from affective deficits related to faith.  It is little wonder that needy, vulnerable people are thereby exposed to the blandishments of psycho-religious nostrums that don’t deliver what they hold out. Always to be kept in mind are two facts: human affective need, both natural and spiritual, and the affective, experiential dimension of genuine gospel faith.

[d]         TFT had intimated that absent the homoousion of the Son, then in Jesus Christ God has not condescended to us, and his love (so-called) has stopped short of becoming one with us.  TFT’s point is incontrovertible.   The Father would have given us something to fix us, even given us the “fix-me-up” out of love, but it would have remained a fix that allowed him to fix us at arm’s length – not unlike a surgeon who remedies a patient, to be sure, yet who always does so by not undergoing himself the surgery he prescribes for the patient.  (Here we need to recall psychiatrist Gerald May’s insight: “Something deep inside us knows we can’t love safely; either we love defencelessly or we don’t love at all.”)

Absent the homoousion of the Spirit none of the foregoing would apply, in that God would have loved us defencelessly; but this time his love would have stopped short of saving us as his self-giving remained finally ineffective.  Self-giving to the point of self-immolation would have remained self-inhibiting, even self-defying as the self-giving failed to result in a people that lives for the praise of God’s glory. (Eph. 1:12)

[e] Once again, TFT insisted that absent the homoousion of the Son, there is no ontological, and therefore no epistemological, connexion between the love of Jesus and the love of God. God could be said to love us in Jesus even as God isn’t actually that love in himself.  This being the case, there might be a dark, unknown God behind the back of Jesus Christ. (Surely this is one problem with Calvin’s doctrine of reprobation: there is an act of the Father that isn’t an act of the Son.) The giver of grace and the gift of grace are not the same. In other words, while God can be said to love us, does his love exhaust his will and way and work concerning us?  Or does God love us as an act of his even as there remains (or might remain) some other attitude/act wherewith God visits us, whose nature or purpose we don’t know, even can’t know?

Absent the homoousion of the Spirit, there is no ontological connexion, and therefore no epistemological connexion, between the Son and that “spirit” which may infuse us and inspire us to lofty human heights, even as that spirit has to be less than holy, since such a spirit has to be less than God, creaturely by definition.  While giver and gift may remain one, the “giving” of grace isn’t one with giver and gift. Then who or what effects the giving? And what are the implications of this for giver and gift?   Plainly “another spirit” has to be operative.  Then what is ultimately the nature and purpose of such a spirit?  Spirits abound, to be sure, yet absent the homoousion of the Spirit we can only regard them as self-defined (rather than, as is the case of the Holy Spirit, the power that Jesus Christ bears and bestows and therefore the power in which Jesus Christ acts); we can only plead our ignorance of what such spirits intend or what they achieve.

It must never be forgotten that spirits abound not only in the world but in the church, perhaps especially in the church, since the idolatry of religion appears to be a greater problem in the church, given the church’s chronic difficulty in distinguishing religion and faith. In addition, in light of the greater problem religion poses for the church, the spiritual discernment needed in the church is now inherently impossible. Martin Buyer’s perceptive remark – “Modernity is open to religion but closed to faith” – appears to go unheeded in the church, if it is even understood. Not only is the lack, now the impossibility, of such discernment in the church tragic, it is puzzling in that the book of Acts depicts discernment as the principal manifestation of the Holy Spirit in the nascent church – which discernment, of course, is possible only if the Spirit is homoousially identical with Father and Son.

[f]         TFT has indicated that absent the homoousion of the Son the acts of Jesus Christ are not the acts of God, and there is no final authority for anything he said or did.   Absent the homoousion of the Son “spirituality” can’t be distinguished from self-indulgence. Faith always presupposes Jesus Christ as author, as he acts in the power of the Spirit; faith also always presupposes Jesus Christ as object, as he effects in the spiritually inert both the capacity and the desire to embrace the One who has first embraced them.   Apart from the homoousion of the Spirit, faith is reduced to a natural, intrapsychic capability that we “choose” to vest here or there.  Such a notion renders the Holy Spirit entirely superfluous.   (The church today, intoxicated with “spirituality” and its inherent naturalism, hasn’t yet seen that the contemporary church’s deity is bi-une and its soteriology pelagian.)   The result of viewing faith as a natural, human capability is to render faith a human virtue, to render faith in Christ a subset of “faith-in-general”, and to say that it is faith as contribution, albeit faith correctly vested, that saves.

Stung by the world’s accusation regarding its putative narrowness, the church attempts to redress its reputation by means of a non-Christic Spirit. It forgets that the effectiveness of a knife depends on the narrowness of its cutting edge, and therefore only a precisely delineated Christology and Pneumatology add up to an effective theology.         That surgery required for the most profound heart transplant (Ezekiel 36) can’t be performed with something as broad and therefore as blunt as a crowbar. In addition, the church today appears in danger of forgetting that only a Christological exclusivity is Pneumatologically comprehensive and therefore salvific. If faith ceases to be quickened only as the risen, victorious Crucified acts on people in the power of the Spirit, and if faith is thereby reduced to a natural talent or virtue, then the predicament of those lacking such a talent is hopeless. To say the same differently: if Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, brings with him a renewed cosmos and therefore a renewed humanity, and if this is ours only as we are rendered participants in it through the power of the Holy Spirit, then only the exclusivity of Incarnation, Cross and Pentecost are salvifically inclusive.

[g] TFT maintains that absent the homoousion of the Son we shall be judged by a God who is arbitrary in that he bears no relation to Jesus Christ and all that the latter stood for.

Absent the homoousion of the Spirit we shall be judged by a God who made provision for us, admittedly, but merely made provision for us; in the course of which made himself proximate to us in our fallen humanness, but merely made himself proximate. By whom, then, are we to be judged? Plainly by someone who left it to creaturely spirits, left it to us to “make the connexion”. We shan’t be judged by a God who is arbitrary in that he bears no relation to Christ, but rather now by a God who in effect teased us, tantalized us with the sufficient provision he made and placed before humans with their “freedom of choice” that, of course, is no freedom at all but simply the randomness of indeterminism as the fallen creature continued to flounder.

—————————————–

The last word today has to be given to Thomas F. Torrance himself: “…unless the Being and Activity of the Spirit are identical with the Being and Activity of the Father and the Son, we are not saved.” (The Christian Doctrine of God, 169)

John Calvin on the Life of Prayer[1]

 

[1]         What do you believe?   What do you really believe?   Please note that I haven’t asked you to tell me what you say you believe. We all like to think that there’s no discrepancy between what we say we believe and what in truth we do believe. But as a matter of fact there exists in all of us a discrepancy – smaller in some people but larger in most – between what we believe and what we say we believe.

For a long time now I’ve been convinced that what we really believe about God, about the gospel, about ourselves is indicated by what we pray for. If others could peer into our heart they would see immediately how we understand God, what we expect from him, what we hope for concerning ourselves and the church and the world.

Many of Calvin’s prayers have been preserved.   They admit us to his heart. What we are privileged to see of Calvin’s heart through perusing his prayers we find reflected repeatedly in Calvin’s head.   In other words, Calvin’s theology of prayer and his practice of prayer are far more consistent than we find in most Christians.

There’s something else we should know about Calvin and prayer: our beloved foreparent in the Reformed expression of the faith has written more on prayer than anyone else in the history of the church.  While no one has written as much, many have written at length.  Few, however, come close to him in sensitivity and profundity.         This shouldn’t surprise us, in view of the inner and outer situation from which Calvin wrote everything; namely, the situation of the refugee. From the time of his conversion in 1534 until his death in 1564 Calvin was haunted by his awareness that he was a refugee.   Like any refugee, he knew that life is precarious; political rulers are treacherous; betrayal at the hands of the church is ready-to-hand. Above all, the refugee is possessed of an inner and outer homelessness that will disappear only in the eschaton as the City of God , long promised God’s people, is made theirs eternally.

 

[2]         “Prayer”, writes Calvin, “is an intimate conversation of the pious with God.”  Intimate, yes, but never presumptuous; intimate, yes, but never sentimental or saccharine. “An intimate conversation of the pious with God”? Yes, but the piety of the pious isn’t religiously “smarmy” or sickly sweet.  While “piety” is a pejorative term today, it’s one of Calvin’s richest words, for everywhere in his theology piety is “that reverence [or fear] joined with love of God which the knowledge of his benefits induces.”[2]   In other words, just because we are the beneficiaries of all that God has wrought on our behalf in the cross of his Son, we are constrained to love God in gratitude, and reverence (fear) God in adoration. Piety, then, has nothing to do with religious sentimentality or “palsy-walsyness.”         At the same time, the force of “intimate” should never be reduced: through prayer believers do meet God himself – “in person”, says Calvin. Thereby they “experience” (another rich word in Calvin’s vocabulary that the Reformed tradition reads past too quickly in its headlong flight into near-rationalism); they “experience” that God’s promises are more than a verbal declaration. Categorically Calvin states that “prayer is the chief exercise of faith”, and by means of this chief exercise believers “receive God’s benefits.”

Calvin knew that we shall ever need God’s benefits or blessings, for we are “destitute and devoid of all good things.”   When Calvin speaks of “all good things” we must be sure to understand that he isn’t speaking moralistically.         He’s always aware that fallen humankind, “totally depraved” for sure, nonetheless remains capable of that moral good essential to the preservation of the social order.  Not speaking moralistically, Calvin everywhere speaks theologically: he denies that fallen humans are capable of the good, Kingdom-good, the righteousness that is nothing less than right relationship with God, which right relationship pleases God and glorifies him.   For these “good things,” says Calvin, we must go “outside ourselves” and receive them from “elsewhere.”

“Elsewhere,” of course, is Jesus Christ.  Christ alone is that “overflowing spring” given us for our eternal good. Since Christ alone is this, the “good things” of which Calvin speaks aren’t things at all. Rather they are all the promises of God vouchsafed to believers, which promises are gathered up in the one, grand promise that comprehends them all and guarantees them all. This one, grand promise, of course, is Jesus, the One who has fulfilled God’s covenant with humankind on our behalf.  Believers can count on “good things” through prayer in so far as they continue to acknowledge that Jesus Christ is the good, the blessing, who comes to his people as the fulfilment of all the Father’s promises.

While Calvin characteristically insists that Christ is the overflowing spring and therefore sheer gift, the fact that Christ is gift never diminishes our need to seek in him what we have learned through the gospel to be stored up in him. Calvin is unyielding here. While Christ remains gift, prayer is anything but lackadaisical passivity or cavalier sleepiness. Believers must resolutely “dig up” by prayer the treasures of God’s promises as surely as someone, informed of treasure buried in a field, will profit from such treasure only if she pursues it.  While “dig up” never has, for Calvin, the force of pry out of or coax from a grudging and reluctant deity what desperate people need and crave, prayer nonetheless remains a human activity that believers must undertake with unrelenting ardour.  To be sure, we don’t badger God or pester him; still, we must importune him relentlessly – otherwise it can only be concluded that we aren’t serious. Reflecting yet again the seriousness of persistent prayer, Calvin speaks of prayer as a “sacrifice of worship,” insisting prayer to be what the God-appointed sacrifices of old were; namely, a human activity that is yet the vehicle of God’s blessing descending upon us.   Unless we importune God unrelentingly, says Calvin, our faith can legitimately be suspected of being “sleepy or sluggish.”

Calvin, as is his custom, reads scripture so very closely as to note that while prayer is God’s appointed means of meeting our needs, our needs are never the ground of prayer.  Prayer is grounded in the command of God.         Ultimately we are to pray not because we are ceaselessly needy, but rather because God’s command and claim are ceaselessly operative.   Moreover, since the God who commands us to pray is never a tyrant or an ogre but is rather “easily entreated and readily accessible,” not to pray is simply to advertise ourselves as disobedient and distrustful.

In addition, not to pray would also be the height of folly in light of our frailty and fragility in the midst of a turbulent world.   Any slackness in prayer could only mean that we had stupidly imperilled ourselves. Such peril, Calvin notes, has to be intuited or sensed rather then taught, since “words fail to explain how necessary prayer is.”         As is the case with mystery of any sort, words may point to a profundity whose depths forever find such words insufficient, but words can never do justice to the profundity they attempt to describe.   The peril of prayerlessness, then, is a peril sensed by the spiritually alert rather than a peril taught by the verbally adept.  A refugee like Calvin characteristically sensed the peril of prayerlessness, and for this reason could write, tersely and plaintively in equal measure, “The only stronghold of safety is in calling upon [God’s] name.”

Whenever we do call upon God’s name we “call upon him to reveal himself as wholly present to us.”  Calvin’s expression here is intriguing as he struggles to persuade us of prayer’s efficacy.  Since God is omnipresent, could he ever be absent?  Since God is indivisible, could he ever be partially present?   What Calvin is struggling to say, however awkwardly, is that we may be assured that as we pray, God will become startlingly vivid to us, and more vivid to us through prayer than through any other means, however vivid. The outcome of our vivid awareness of God’s presence will be nothing less than “an extraordinary repose and peace to our consciences” – in the midst of all the insecurities and treacheries, it must be remembered, that continue to harass God’s people.

 

[3]         We have seen Calvin ground prayer in the command and promise of God. We have seen Calvin highlight the human frailty and fragility that renders slackness concerning prayer folly. We have noted Calvin’s insistence that the heart senses or intuits the folly of indifference concerning prayer before the head reasons about all of this. At the same time, Calvin is never one to neglect the head.  And so now we turn to the six reasons Calvin brings forward concerning the place of prayer in the Christian life.

Reason One: We are to pray in order “that our hearts may be fired with a zealous and burning desire ever to seek, love and serve [God], while we become accustomed in every need to flee to him as to a sacred anchor.” Plainly Calvin regards prayer as a habit to which all believers should aspire.   And plainly there is but one anchor, the sacred anchor, despite the plethora of human needs.

Reason Two: We are to pray in order that our hearts, preoccupied with the Kingdom and its righteousness, might never be distracted or deflected, might never be co-opted for anything less than the King himself. As long as our hearts desire him, says Calvin, our hearts will desire nothing that would render us ashamed before God.

Reason Three: We are to pray in order that our hearts may ever be attuned to thanksgiving, since we know that every blessing comes from God (and since, of course, we are grateful above all for the blessing, our eternal salvation given to us from the One who didn’t spare his own Son.)

Reason Four: We are to pray in order to enhance our spiritual alertness as we are increasingly enabled to recognize answers to prayer. What’s more, as we recognize answers to prayer we shall subsequently come to meditate “more ardently” on the kindness that alone supplies our need. (“More ardently,” of course, underlines Calvin’s insistence that prayer is a vigorous activity requiring resilience, perception and persistence; anything, in other words, but a “Now I lay me down to sleep” thoughtlessness undertaken at day’s end when we are too fatigued to do little more than mumble mindlessly before weariness renders us unconscious.)

Reason Five: We are to pray in order that we may delight still more in all that we know our praying has obtained for us.   (Once again, delighting in God is a feature of Calvin’s theology that has found its way into his Puritan successors but has not found its way, it would appear into his successors in many other areas of the Reformed tradition. Two hundred years after Calvin, John Wesley maintained that of all the privileges that unbelievers forfeit, one of the greatest privileges they renounce is sheer, simple, delight in God. If Calvin had been heard characteristically promoting believers’ delight in God, the word “dour” wouldn’t come to mind as soon as the word “Presbyterian” is heard; and if Calvin had been heard characteristically promoting our delight in God, a more charismatic expression of the faith would have found a home in the Presbyterian tradition, and such charismatic expression would thereby have been preserved from an inherent tendency to unbiblical one-sidedness and shallowness.)

Reason Six: We are to pray in order that we may confirm God’s generosity and care for us “by use and experience.”         Here Calvin means that our heart-discerned and heart-owned experience of God’s answer to prayer, together with the use we make of our experience of God; all this in turn authenticates and endorses the efficacy of prayer and the promises of God, even as it confirms us in the truth and reality of our being “in Christ.”

Calvin sums up the six reasons for prayer by insisting that as we pray, even amidst circumstances dreadful enough to find us groaning (in other words, amidst circumstances that allow for no natural conclusion that God loves us), our praying becomes the occasion wherein we are persuaded afresh – all “evidence” to the contrary – that God loves us more than we can say but not more than we now know.

 

[4] Having articulated the six reasons for prayer, Calvin proceeds to develop his four “rules” of prayer.

Rule One: When we pray we must be reverently single-minded. Calvin, of course, is always realistic (refugees, we must remember, aren’t permitted the luxury of fantasy or escapism of any sort.)   Realistically, then, Calvin is aware that God’s people are attacked by assaults from without and by anxieties from within.  He’s aware that we can never rid ourselves of all anxieties and distractions, only thereby and only then creating “open space” wherein we may contend with God. Our inescapable assaults and anxieties will have to become the “stuff” (or at least part of the “stuff”) of our daily prayers.  Even so, our minds should aspire to a “purity worthy of God” as we endeavour to contemplate him.  Such contemplation is possible only if the mind is “raised above itself.”

The mind can’t raise itself above itself, however, in light of the assaults and anxieties that harass us – unless we behold the “majesty” or grandeur of God. As we apprehend the grandeur of God we are taken out of ourselves, above ourselves. So very realistically and profoundly are we lifted above ourselves that it’s entirely appropriate for us to lift our hands in prayer, says Calvin in a Pentecostal recognition the Reformed tradition appears not to admit, for raised hands help us in turn to raise our mind yet higher to him whose holiness is enthralling and whose grandeur frees us from our captivity to our mundane predicament with its relentless pain, even as all this occurs without neurotic denial of our pain.

What Calvin has just stated we should linger over; we should savour its cumulative dynamic. We who are God’s people cry out to God in our burdened state, pleading with him to fulfill in us the promises he has made to us and guaranteed for us in Christ. As God answers prayer, we are moved to greater eagerness and ardour in seeking him. Our newly intensified zeal and fortified confidence find him in turn dealing with us “more generously.” It all swells into an upward spiral that leaves believers ever more ardent, blessed and grateful.

At no time, however, are we ever to think that we have God on a string, that prayer is a ready-to-hand means of manipulating God, that we have discovered the tool whereby we can render God the means to our end. God doesn’t answer prayer simply on account of our petition; he answers prayer, rather, only in conformity to his name (that is, his nature) and in accord with our need for sanctity. God never confirms his people in those desires that are childish or ungodly.

Calvin, we have seen already, always maintains prayer to be a vigorous human activity; he always deplores any suggestion of passivity, indolence or inertia. For this reason he maintains that our engagement with God presupposes “keenness of mind” followed by “affection of heart.”   Several matters are to be noted here.

[a] Keenness of mind is essential since prayer is an exercise of faith, and faith presupposes an understanding of the gospel, some understanding of the gospel, however elemental.  “Faith” so-called, that is devoid of understanding is no better than superstition or idolatry.   What’s more, keenness of mind is crucial with respect to our awareness of the nature of God’s promises and our discernment of answers to prayer.

[b] Affection of heart is no less needed than keenness of mind, for without affection of heart “faith” so-called will be reduced to ideation, something that Calvin quaintly says “flits about in the top of the brain”, the mere shuffling of intellectual furniture, however doctrinally correct. Our heart must always be “affected” or else the mere assimilation of doctrine (doctrine being abstract by definition) will become a substitute for the concreteness of loving God “in person.”

[c] Affection of heart, we must note, can only follow keenness of mind. If affection of heart were to precede keenness of mind, “faith” so-called would be no more than sentimentality.  God can be loved (love being the affective dimension of faith) only as God’s nature is apprehended, however rudimentarily.

Calvin’s insistence on this exquisitely fine balance of mind and heart anticipates one of the strengths of the Seventeenth Century Puritan movement even as it exposes the one-sided cerebralism of post-Calvin Reformed Scholasticism and the equally one-sided romanticism of Reformed Neo-Protestantism (specifically, the theological liberalism of Schleiermacher, who, we should remember, was Reformed, not Lutheran, and who spawned an ever-burgeoning theological liberalism that reduced the church to nothing more than the world talking to itself albeit with a religious vocabulary.)

Calvin admits that if our mind is to be “raised above itself” with appropriate keenness and the heart is to be genuinely affected, the Holy Spirit must come to our aid. Calvin, as noted earlier, never loses touch with the harshness of human existence, and therefore he is always quick to acknowledge that the godliest people, when afflicted with atrocious suffering, are overcome with “blind anxieties” that so consume them as to leave them unable to voice in prayer what God’s people should be articulating.  Even when they “try to stammer they are confused and hesitate;” their pain beclouds their understanding and stifles their cry. Only the Holy Spirit can help them – even though the Holy Spirit never substitutes for them.

Calvin is adamant on this point.  The Holy Spirit is God; the saints are human; however Spirit-assisted prayer may be, prayer is always our activity. In short, while the assistance of the Holy Spirit can be counted on to foster and facilitate in us what we can’t achieve ourselves, the Spirit is never given so as to “hinder or hold back our effort.”         Once again the picture Calvin gives of the Christian at prayer is anything but a hands-folded hibernation.  Rather it’s the picture of Abraham, of Job, of Jacob contending with God, wrestling in such a way as to exemplify the patriarch’s “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” (Genesis 32:26)

 

Rule Two: When we pray we must be aware of our insufficiency. How aware must we be? Calvin says we must possess “a burning desire to attain” what we most sorely lack.  Calvin’s vocabulary here says much: his use of “burning” in the second rule and “groaning” in the first reminds us of the ardour and anguish found in true prayer. Calvin’s vehemence is telling. Whether prayer be free or liturgical, it must never be casual or indifferent or perfunctory “as if discharging a duty to God.”    Merely “discharging a duty” is light-years removed from prayer’s characteristic intimate conversation with God in person.   Calvin simply abhors the non-reverent, tuned-out practice born of a “cold heart” and an equally non-reverent mindlessness wherein people “do not ponder what they ask.”         In other words, slackers may recite prayers frigidly and thoughtlessly but they fall short of praying.

Such slackers, Calvin is quick to point out, may possess a vague sense of their need, but they lack the gospel-quickened focus to target “the relief of their poverty.” He illustrates his point by referring to ersatz worshippers who ask for pardon for sin while secretly thinking that they aren’t sinners – or while not thinking that they are sinners.         Calvin’s subtlety here is noteworthy: both spiritual ignorance (‘thinking they aren’t sinners’) and spiritual drowsiness (‘not thinking they are sinners’) are alike reprehensible, and reprehensible to the same extent.

Like all able theologians, Calvin is thoroughly acquainted with human psychology. He knows that moods fluctuate in God’s people as much as in others.  Therefore our constancy in prayer is governed not by our mood but rather by our recollection that however strong we may appear to ourselves at times, in truth we are weak; we never get beyond the neediness that forever keeps us beggars before God.   If we are prone to doubt this, we need only recall the dangers that beset us on all sides, not to mention the temptations that never cease to molest us – including the temptation to slacken in prayer.   If we quibble over the necessity of praying constantly we are most surely exposing ourselves to “hypocrisy and wily falsehoods before God” – if we haven’t already succumbed to such hypocrisy and falsehood.

One feature of the burning awareness of our insufficiency is our awareness that new creatures though we are in Christ, the “old” man or woman still clings to us. In light of the truth that we are new creatures in Christ definitively even as the old creature still haunts us, we need always to repent.  And in fact, says Calvin, only the repentant can rightly be said to pray. Self-examination, then, born of Spirit-quickened self-perception, can bring us to that penitence which Calvin maintains to be both the preparation for prayer and the commencement of prayer.

 

Rule Three: When we pray we must ever recall our residual depravity (the “old” creature of sin who continues to dog the “new” creature in Christ); and recalling our residual depravity, we must divest ourselves of our own glory.         We must cast away all notions of our own worth.  We must give glory to God alone.   Putting aside all self-assurance, we must content ourselves with the one assurance of God’s never-failing care for us.

At this point in his major exposition of prayer Calvin returns to a theme found in Rule Two; namely, confession of guilt and the forgiveness from God by which we are reconciled to God.  For only as we are reconciled to God shall we receive anything from God; only as we are pardoned shall we find God propitious.

“Propitious”: few words in Calvin’s theology loom larger than this word. When Calvin speaks of God as propitious he means that God is fatherly, benevolent, merciful. Believers know God to be propitious inasmuch as we have benefited from propitiation. Propitiation, a word sadly out of fashion in the church today despite its frequent occurrence in scripture, is simply the averting of God’s wrath at God’s initiative. Propitiation must be distinguished from expiation, the bearing of sin and the bearing of it away. Expiation presupposes propitiation. Or to say the same thing, propitiation grounds expiation.  God can bear sin away only because his anger has first been dealt with. Calvin never suggests anything else. In his major exposition of prayer Calvin repeats a theme that is found everywhere in his theology; namely, Christ’s death has “appeased” the Father.  Calvin’s theology is steeped in the nature and force of propitiation, and his Commentary on Hebrews is a sustained amplification of it.

In this regard Calvin maintains that as often as we, Christ’s people, pray, we should recall before God not only the atomistic sins we’ve committed but even the sinnership that continues to infect us systemically. Quoting Psalm 51:5 – “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me” – Calvin insists that only God’s mercy, received and enjoyed, allows us to approach God confidently and plead with him as Father instead of cowering before him as just judge.  The forgiveness of sins underlies our commerce with heaven at all times. Only our conviction of God’s mercy – his propitious fatherliness born of propitiation – assures us that our prayers are going to be heard.

 

Rule Four: Knowing that God is propitious, merciful, fatherly, we must always pray with confident hope.  Once again, our confidence here has nothing to do with an unrealistic and therefore ridiculous denial of the upheavals that harass us. While Calvin insists that prayer isn’t prayer unless it is undertaken in confident hope, he never pretends that Christ’s people are to work themselves up into pretending that suffering hasn’t engulfed them.  Calvin is too wise ever to hint, however slightly, that confident expectation in prayer means that people are left expecting themselves to be superhuman – a psychological burden, we know today, that keeps therapists and pharmacists forever employed.  Calvin admits that believers can be “troubled by the greatest unrest;” so very troubled, in fact, as to be “almost out of their senses.” Even here, however, our apprehension of God’s goodness fosters hope for our deliverance. In fact godly prayer arises from the twofold awareness of both our predicament and God’s promised provision. Not only does prayer arise from this twofold awareness, all genuine prayer contains this twofold awareness: honestly we lay before God our predicament in its perplexity and horror, while expectantly we look to God to “extend his helping hand.”

Scoffers, of course, are always nearby.  Scoffers relish pointing out that prayer must be pointless since the results appear meagre when compared to the ardour and expectation of those who pray. Wisely Calvin avoids being drawn into playing any game on the territory that scoffers have staked out. Instead he insists there to be no point in disputing with the “empty imagination” of detractors. There is simply no common ground between believer and scoffing sceptic that can serve as the starting point of an apologetic argument for prayer.  To be sure, all believers have undergone apparent frustration in prayer. While unbelievers shout “Reason enough to abandon the entire economy of faith,” such apparent frustration merely finds believers praying still, and praying with undiminished expectation.

Always a theologian of the heart (a feature of Calvin’s thought too readily overlooked not only by foes but even by friends who one-sidedly depict him as a theologian of the head), Calvin maintains that believers “perceive the power of faith” just because they “feel it by experience in their heart.”   More to the point, believers feel the power of faith by experience in their heart more deeply than they feel the seeming contradictions of faith. Because their experience of God’s promise and fatherly care is deeper than their experience of outer torment at the hands of the world and inner torment at the hands of sin, an apologetic argument for prayer would only be superfluous for believers and unpersuasive for unbelievers.   While prayer is rightly such only if it is “grounded in unbroken assurance of hope”, Calvin points out that assurance of hope is precisely the orbit and atmosphere in which Christ’s people live and struggle, look to God and rejoice in him.  Absence of hope, Calvin concludes, would only point to absence of faith; which is to say, absence of hope would only mean that prayers, so-called, are “vainly cast upon air.”

 

[5] Is there any Christian, anywhere, who claims to exemplify everything that Calvin prescribes for Christ’s people?         Can even the godliest claim that their praying displays a confident expectation without trace of secretly harboured dubiety?   While Calvin, following scripture, insists that the line distinguishing believer and unbeliever is absolute (albeit known only to God), Calvin also insists that the prayers of even the godliest are in truth “a mixture of faith and error.”   Our apprehension of God and his way with us, while certainly real and adequate, is never exhaustive. Our apprehension of God, in other words, while trusting and true, never approaches comprehension (as if we had mastered God and his way with us.) Our repentance, while certainly sincere (i.e., as sincere as we can make it), remains riddled with self-interest; and in any case, our repentance is never commensurate with our depravity. While Spirit-sensitized believers “feel the depths of evil” within them, in truth the sin that still lurks in us more hideous than we can imagine. In short, even the godliest person’s faith remains shot through with unbelief.         Therefore it is a singular instance of God’s mercy that he promises to hear us even when finds in us “neither perfect faith nor repentance.”

Plainly even the most ardent believers can present themselves to God only as they cling to Jesus Christ as advocate and mediator.  Only the propitiating mediator can “change the throne of dreadful glory into the throne of grace.”   More specifically, says Calvin, “the power of [Christ’s] death avails as an everlasting intercession in our behalf.…[Christ] alone bears to God the petitions of the people.”

In the mediator all the intercessions of Christ’s people are gathered up and rendered effectual. He who is the promise of God and in whom all God’s promises are fulfilled is the sole, sufficient guarantor that these promises are now operative among God’s people.   Not surprisingly, then, Calvin climaxes his exposition on prayer with the insistence that the saints must ever embrace Jesus Christ “with both arms.”

 

A Prayer of Calvin’s on the Matter of Prayer[3]

Grant, Almighty God, that as you not only invite us continually by the voice of your gospel to seek you, but also offer to us your Son as our Mediator, through whom an access to you is open, that we may find you a propitious Father, – O grant that relying on your kind invitation we may through life exercise ourselves in prayer; and as so many evils disturb us on all sides and so many wants distress and oppress us, may we be led more earnestly to call on you, and in the meanwhile be never wearied in this exercise of prayer; until having been heard by you throughout life, we may at length be gathered to your eternal kingdom where we shall enjoy that salvation which you have promised us, and of which you also daily testify to us by your gospel, and be forever united to your only-begotten Son of whom we are now members; that we may be partakers of all the blessings which he has obtained for us by his death.  Amen.

 

 

Rev. Dr. Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                                                                     July 2006

 

[1] Unless indicated otherwise, all quotations are from Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960) 3.20.16.

[2] Ibid, 1.2.1.

[3] Devotions and Prayers of John Calvin, Charles E. Edwards, ed., [ Grand Rapids : Baker Book House, 1976] p. 39

What are the essential beliefs that Evangelicals hold in common?  Faith Today asked Victor Shepherd to look at the seven doctrines of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada’s Statement of Faith.

The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada believes:

	The Holy Scriptures as originally given by God are divinely inspired, infallible, entirely trustworthy, and constitute the only supreme authority in all matters of faith and conduct.
	There is one God, eternally existent in three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
	Our Lord Jesus Christ is God manifest in the flesh; we affirm his virgin birth, sinless humanity, divine miracles, vicarious and atoning death, bodily resurrection, ascension, ongoing mediatorial work, and personal return in power and glory.
	The salvation of lost and sinful humanity is possible only through the merits of the shed blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, received by faith apart from works, and is characterized by regeneration by the Holy Spirit.
	The Holy Spirit enables believers to live a holy life, to witness and work for the Lord Jesus Christ.
	The Church, the body of Christ, consists of all true believers.
	Ultimately God will judge the living and the dead, those who are saved unto the resurrection of life, those who are lost unto the resurrection of damnation

 

Hospitality and Friendship: Wesleyan Perspectives in an Ecumenical Setting

Dr Victor Shepherd
Meetings of Wesleyan Theological Society
Kansas City , Missouri
4^th March 2006

 

We can exercise hospitality, and the sort of friendship that pertains to hospitality, only to the extent that we have been freed from self-preoccupation, only to the extent that we have been freed from living in ourselves, from ourselves, for ourselves.  The ecumenical figure who has probed this truth most profoundly is Martin Luther. Luther stated that Christians have been released from the anxieties of living in themselves, the anxieties of trying to justify themselves before God and establish themselves before their neighbours, insofar as they live in “another”; specifically, live in two others: Jesus Christ and the neighbour. Christians, said Luther, live in Christ by faith and in the neighbour by love.

While there is only one level or dimension to living in Christ by faith, there are three levels to living in the neighbour by love. At level one, we share in the neighbour’s need.  Specifically, we address the neighbour’s need by meeting her scarcity with our abundance. Luther points out that this is very important, likely isn’t done as often as it should be, but at the same time isn’t difficult and requires little of us. After all, our abundance means we can address the neighbour’s scarcity and still remain privileged. Even so, we shall likely be commended for our generosity.

At level two (i.e, the matter has been “notched up”) we share the neighbour’s suffering.  Doing this is considerably more difficult, since proximity to someone else’s suffering entails our own suffering.  In other words, the difference between level one and level two is evident: sharing the neighbour’s suffering entails a suffering on our part that sharing her need does not.  At the same time, society recognizes the kind of self-renunciation required of intentional proximity to suffering, recognizes the freely-adopted suffering of the helper herself, and rewards it. Society congratulates those who share in the neighbour’s suffering.

At level three (now “notched up” yet again) we live in the neighbour by sharing the neighbour’s disgrace.  The difference between levels one and two is quantitative; that between two and three, qualitative it would seem, for at this level the self-renunciation couldn’t be greater, while at the same time societal recognition has disappeared. To share the neighbour’s disgrace is to be identified with her disgrace, and therefore, in the eyes of the society, to be in disgrace oneself.  No one is congratulated now.  Instead the helper is “numbered among the transgressors” herself. In the eyes of the public she is in disgrace. There will be no social recognition for her sacrifice, no congratulation, no public adulation. There will be, however, contempt and ostracism.  Nonetheless, said Luther, we exercise the most helpful hospitality and self-forgetful friendship; we live in the neighbour by love most profoundly when we move from sharing her need to sharing her suffering to sharing her disgrace.

While Wesley doesn’t develop the same theme in the same way, he would disagree with nothing that Luther has said.         However Wesley would, and did, ask why Christians are so very reluctant to do all this.  He hints at his own answer in his 1768 Sermon, The Good Steward. He asks why we spend so much time, energy and anguish acquiring what is going to crumble or rot but in any case disappear, only to answer in effect, “Because we think we have to establish our ‘self’, preserve our ‘self’, forge our own identity.”   He recognizes that this is no more than unbelief, however religiously cloaked or legitimized.  In the final part of the sermon he makes three points that aim at having us rethink the notion of having to forge a self, live out it, and struggle to maintain it. Wesley’s three points are: [1] Today is all we have; i.e., life is short, death is sure, and we should be about something else.   [2] All of life is spiritually significant; in other words, what we do by way of sharing everything about us with the suffering neighbour and absorbing everything about the suffering neighbour into ourselves – this is what matters ultimately.  [3] We are servants who owe God everything and therefore can claim nothing. Plainly, if we can claim nothing in the first place, we lose nothing finally.

The question must still be asked: since Wesley’s people were aware in 1768 of the points just made (aware, that is, after the Awakening had been at full flood for 30 years), why were they still reluctant to extend the self-forgetful hospitality that he not only commended but required for himself in the course of his itinerating?   Why do Christians in any era “ice up” when faced with human need that hospitality and friendship could relieve?   Wesley appears to answer this question, albeit implicitly, in his 1781 Sermon The Danger of Riches.   There he states that while the love of money is insanity, more than a few are insane concerning an appetite that, unlike lust and gluttony, isn’t a God-given appetite run amok but is rather a preoccupation unnatural and so very bizarre as to defy all understanding. While the appetite for riches may defy understanding, he stresses, what this appetite does is readily understood: the aspiration to affluence begets and exacerbates other unholy and unhelpful desires.   “Tasting”, for instance, is a “genteel, regular sensuality” that undoes one’s head and heart.   While such “tasting” is indiscernible to the world, it is deadly in the Christian. Soon the Christian apes genteel society and everything about it, including its respectability (forget sharing the neighbour’s disgrace) and its spiritual inertia. Desire for riches, continues Wesley, issues in a desire for ease, and the latter crowns itself in avoidance of crossbearing.  Amplifying the lattermost point Wesley contends that as we become more affluent we acquire greater self-importance; in turn we are more easily affronted (i.e., there’s a super-sensitivity related to snobbishness); and as we are more easily affronted, we are more prone to revenge. Affluence, in other words, kills self-forgetful hospitality.

The cure for all this – which is to say, the recovery of hospitality and friendship – is to possess Wesley’s awareness of the scope of human suffering, his zeal to address it, and his Spirit-wrought deliverance from the love of money, ease, and self-important social ascendancy.

There’s one thing more.  As a pastor for thirty-six years, I have noted that Christians are often slow to exercise hospitality simply because they are afraid. Afraid of what? Afraid simply of meeting and engaging strangers; afraid of becoming known; afraid of having privacies rendered public – simply afraid.  In other words, perfect fear casts out love.  Wesley’s beloved 1^st Epistle of John, of course, reminds us that perfect love casts out fear.   Then hospitality and friendship are going to be recovered only as love is perfected in Christ’s people; which is to say, as our awareness of the neighbour’s suffering is more vivid than our anxiety over risking self-exposure to a stranger.

 

What’s An Evangelical?

The Cruciality of the Cross

 

What’s an evangelical? Better, who is an evangelical? Simply put, evangelicals are those who glory in the cross of Christ.  Our faith arises from it; our thinking converges on it; our life radiates from it.

Evangelicals are aware that the cross has made atonement for all humankind as God made “at one” with Himself disobedient, defiled sinners who were otherwise hopelessly separated from Him by a gaping chasm they were never going to be able to bridge.

Evangelicals know that while God is love [1^st John 4:8 ] and can therefore do nothing but love, when God’s love encounters human sin his love “burns hot”, as Luther liked to say.  God’s anger or wrath, then, is never the contradiction or denial of his love. (Indifference is always the antithesis of love. After all, the people with whom we are angry we at least take seriously; the people to whom we are indifferent we’ve already dismissed as insignificant.) God’s anger “heats up” only because He loves us so very much and so very relentlessly that He can’t remain indifferent to us and won’t abandon us. Profoundly He loves sinners more (or at least more truly, more realistically) than we love ourselves, since our self-love, perverted by sin, issues only in self-destruction. And as the cross on which He “did not spare his own Son but gave Him up for us all” [Romans 8:32 ] makes plain, He longs to spare us torment more than He longs to spare Himself.

We must make no mistake. Because God is holy, sin breaks His heart. More than merely break His heart, however, sin also mobilizes His anger and provokes His revulsion. Then what is God to do with women and men whose ingratitude and insolence have grieved Him, angered Him and disgusted Him?  One option is to resign them to what they deserve – except that it’s no option at all, since love is all God is and therefore all He can do. For this reason He sets about recovering and restoring those who were created in His image.  Meant to mirror his glory, they now glorify themselves, therein rendering His image unrecognizable.

If the predicament of sinners is to be relieved, then those living in the “far country”, so very far from the Father as to be pronounced “dead, lost” [Luke 15: 24 ] have to be reconciled to Him.  Since they are currently in the far country, why don’t they just get up and “go home”? There’s more to it than this. In point of fact they are where they are not on account of their sin (a misunderstanding heard too often) but on account of God’s judgement. Our foreparents, we should recall, didn’t cavalierly sashay out of the Garden of Eden or confusedly stumble out or defiantly parade themselves out. They were driven out. Who drove them out?   God did. He expelled them by a judicious act. Sin, contrary to much popular thought, does not estrange us from God. Sin mobilizes God’s judgement, and God’s judgement ensures our alienation from Him. Therefore the invitation to be reconciled to Him can’t be issued until His judgement has been dealt with. The cross is that love-fashioned deed of mercy wherein the just Judge absorbs His righteous judgement upon sinners, thereby allowing them to “come home” without in any way “fudging” His holiness or compromising His integrity or submerging His truth.  Only because “in Christ God was reconciling the world to Himself” can the apostle urge, “We beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.” [2^nd Corinthians 5:19, 20]

God’s tireless pursuit of people who persist in fleeing Him culminates in the cross, wherein He finally overtakes them and wraps them in the arms of the crucified.  But of course the cross doesn’t appear out of nowhere and insert itself in the year 27 C.E. It was anticipated through the God-appointed sacrificial system of the Older Testament. For centuries God had been schooling a people, Israel , in the necessity, meaning and ethos of sacrifice, always preparing for the Advent of Israel’s greater Son.

Reflecting the outlook of the Older Testament, the Newer reflects the priority of the cross on every page.         One-half of the written gospels is given over to one week of Jesus’ life, the last week wherein His cruciform earthly ministry (John Calvin maintained that the shadow of the cross fell on Jesus’ life and ministry from the day He was born) crescendos to the climax of the cross. The first half of the epistles announces the gospel of the cross; the second half unfolds the nature and pattern and rigour of Christian discipleship in the light of the cross. All evangelical understanding, then, emanates from the cross, as do all evangelical faith and obedience.

Evangelicals, then, are those who cherish the “word of the cross”, grounded in the atonement, as the “word of truth, the gospel of your salvation”. [1^st Corinthians 1:18 ; Ephesians 1:13]

 

The Place of Proclamation and the Necessity of Decision

Evangelicals characteristically find themselves constrained to proclaim this message just because the message itself is inherently missiological.  In other words, the proclamation isn’t an “add-on” or an after-thought. Proclamation remains an aspect of the message itself: “gospel” defines itself as “gospel announced”.  So far from resembling proselytizing or even propaganda, the proclamation of the gospel belongs to the logic of the gospel.  Evangelicals, then, are aware that mission is to God’s people as burning is to fire. Burning characterizes fire; apart from burning, fire has no existence.  Mission establishes the church and characterizes it, for God’s people are created by the revelation of the cross.  We cling to it. We exist for the purpose of announcing a crucified and risen Lord who “fills all things” [Ephesians 4:10; 1:23] Indeed, since Christ “fills” every nook, crevice and corner of the universe; since Christ therefore laps everyone’s life at all times, evangelicals understandably continue to point to and point others to the One whose coming to them spells only blessing.

Such proclamation, needless to say, isn’t announced in a “Who cares?” attitude, as if the hearer’s response were of no significance, or at least of no eternal significance. What’s at stake in any announcement of the gospel is always more than a “response” that is little more than whim or preference or even prejudice. What’s at stake is nothing less than the hearer’s salvation.  For this reason the declaration of the gospel always elicits a particular decision from the hearer, that “U-turn” which scripture labels repentance. With appropriate sobriety and suitable solemnity – yet also with unrestrained joy – the decision the gospel elicits is an “about-face” from darkness to light, from indifference or hostility to love, from death to life. The lattermost point must be given its full weight: the decision to which the gospel summons the hearer has everything on earth and in heaven hanging on it.

This decision, we should note, need not be made in an instant; in fact more often than not it isn’t made in an instant.   The fact that the process of deciding is protracted in most cases doesn’t detract in the slightest from its veracity.   Nevertheless, at some point the decision needs to have been made as the rebel surrenders, the icy heart is thawed, and the spiritually inert is resurrected and Love is loved.

 

Covenant Faithfulness and Lifelong Repentance

The God who has promised ever to be our God, God for us, never rescinds His covenant with us.  In turn He longs for us ever to be His people as we own our covenant with Him. Finding us to be covenant-breakers with Him, however, He gives us His Son and directs us to the Nazarene as the one instance of human covenant faithfulness to the Father. For this reason the decision of faith and obedience that we make, we must make not once only; rather the decision has to be renewed every day.  Every morning we must recommit ourselves to our Lord, to His truth, to His way, and – no less, even perhaps hardest of all – to His people. In Luther’s famous tract, The Ninety-Five Theses that he nailed to door of the Wittenberg church in 1517, the first thesis sets the tone for all that follows and suffuses it. Luther’s first thesis will ever remain the “bass note” for all of us: “The Christian life consists of daily, lifelong repentance.” In other words, every morning we have to re-orient ourselves to our Lord, determined to identify ourselves with Him and follow Him today amidst all dangers, deceptions and distractions.

Yet the decision we make, while it’s unquestionably the inception of the Christian life, isn’t the termination of that life. Much arduous discipleship lies between commencement and completion.  More than a few trials will have to be resisted.  Barnabas and Paul, eager not to misrepresent the rigours of discipleship, are found “strengthening the souls of the disciples, exhorting them to continue in the faith …saying that through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God .” [Acts 14:22 ] If evangelicals uphold justification by faith as the beginning of the Christian life and its stable basis, no less ardently do they insist that sanctification, holiness of heart and life, must be pursued at all times and in all circumstances.

Holiness

Holiness is simply the believer’s conformity to the will and way of the Master.  Holiness is God’s purpose for His people.  While the word-group in scripture referring to election or predestination occurs approximately fifteen times, the word-group pertaining to holiness occurs 833 times.  Plainly the category of holiness dominates scripture and should therefore be the Christian’s preoccupation.

Cherishing the Great Commandment (“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength….” [ Mark 12:30 ]) as well as the Great Commission (“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations….” [Matthew 28:19]), evangelicals remain convinced of the “Root” Commandment: “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” [Leviticus 19:2] This “root” commandment reverberates like a bell throughout the length and breadth of the bible. Like all commandments, however, the predominant commandment is at the same time the predominant promise: not only must God’s people be holy; God will see to it that His people are holy. God will guarantee for people consecrated to Him everything that He requires of them.  Then God’s people may and must obey Him in matters great and small as they are conformed to that “… holiness without which no one will see the Lord.”   [Hebrews 14:12]

Such holiness, John Wesley liked to say, pertains to “heart and life”. Holiness of heart (i.e., a supposedly grace-wrought disposition) not giving rise to holiness of life is no more than a religious self-indulgence, a pietistic trip “inward” that sceptics rightly see to be rationalized selfism. Holiness of life not grounded in holiness of heart, on the other hand, is no more than self-righteous legalism, and exhausting as well.  Holiness of heart and life together attest a simple yet glorious truth that evangelicals will never surrender: God can do something with sin beyond forgiving it.  What can He do?   Not only can He relieve us of sin’s guilt; He can also release us from sin’s grip. Deliverance from both the guilt and the power of sin remains a vivid conviction in the evangelical consciousness.

 

Constant Conversion

The decision for faith, then, with concomitant inner and outer holiness, might appear to be an end in itself.  In truth it is and it isn’t.  It’s an end in itself in that faith binds us to Jesus Christ, and our union with Him is an end in itself.  Any utilitarian consideration or motive here merely attempts to use Him, rendering Him a means to end, a tool we can exploit for some “goody” apart from Him.  He is our greatest good, our eternal good.  He gives us His unique gifts only in the course of giving us Himself.  Therefore He can never be a means to anyone’s end.  At the same time, the decision for faith invariably binds us not only to Jesus Christ but also to that body of which He is head; namely, the church. Since believers are bound to Jesus Christ, head and body, we must daily renew our commitment to Christ’s people even as we admit with our Puritan ancestors that the church is a “fair face with an ugly scar”. And since in Christ God has “so loved the world” [John 3:16 ] as never to abandon it, the conversion of which evangelicals speak must be a daily-renewed conversion to Christ, His people and the world.

 

Kingdom of God

To say we must love the world as Christ loves us it is to say that we shan’t adulate it uncritically or fawn over it or seek to profit from it; rather we shall long for the full manifestation of its redemption.   To this end Christians understand that they have been commissioned to render visible that kingdom which Jesus Christ brought with Him in His resurrection from the dead.  When we pray “Thy kingdom come…” we are praying for the coming manifestation of a kingdom that has to be in our midst just because the King is in our midst.  A king – anywhere – without a kingdom is no king at all.  Jesus Christ, risen from the dead and present with His people, meets us again and again, not infrequently startling us as He acquaints us with Himself afresh. Since He has promised to abide with us until history is concluded, His kingdom has to have arrived. While it is discerned through the eyes of faith to be sure, it remains invisible to all others. Then one of the church’s tasks is to render indisputable and undeniable that kingdom which is simply the entire creation of God healed.  Not surprisingly, then, evangelicals have been at the forefront of the abolition of the slave trade, the amelioration of working conditions in factories and mines, the expansion of literacy, the providing of medical assistance, ministries to the incarcerated, the elevation of women, and the relief of human distress of every kind.   Believers’ holiness of heart and life lends visibility to a world from which Christ’s victorious cross has already seen “Satan fall like lightning from heaven”, heaven being the invisible dimension of the creation. [Luke 10:18]

 

Evangelicalism’s Vulnerability

Honesty compels us to admit that evangelicalism is susceptible to distortion and prone to unravel. Rightly emphasizing Christian experience as the gospel “opens the heart” (as happened with Lydia , Acts 16:13 ], the evangelical consciousness is always in danger of confusing experience of the Spirit with experience-in-general, especially where experience-in-general is riddled with romanticism or nostalgia or religious sentimentality. In other words, despite evangelicalism’s insistence on orthodoxy (correct thinking about God and the proper glorifying of Him), evangelicalism remains susceptible to heterodoxy (i.e., false belief and erroneous glorifying of an other-than-Christ).  Evangelical zeal must always be balanced by the tested wisdom of Christians who lived and learned, suffered and witnessed before us.   This great weight of Christian wisdom, found in the church’s tradition, is commonly known as “catholicity”.

 

 

Evangelicalism and Catholicity

Two things are to be noted here. One, the word “catholicity” is spelled with a lower case “c”.         Upper case “C” normally refers to Roman Catholic. Roman Catholicism is one denomination within the Christian family.   The catholicity of the church, however, is the accumulated wisdom of Christian memory that is found in all denominations.

Catholicity preserves both identity and universality.[1]   Identity is that which distinguishes the church from the world; universality, that which impels the church to give itself for the world. Needless to say, only that church which is self-consciously different from the world can ever exist for the world.

The missionary enterprise of the early church attests its catholicity. (We should note here that the missionary thrust of the church isn’t the church’s invention, the church somehow arriving at an insight that the church’s Lord somehow lacked. While Jesus told the Canaanite woman, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel ” [Matthew 15:24 ], unquestionably the seeds of the Gentile mission are found in Jesus’ ministry, particularly in His appearances to His followers during the “forty days” between His resurrection and His ascension.)   At first Peter opposed this expression of catholicity, Peter maintaining that all Gentile Christians first had to become Jews.         Plainly Peter thought that the church’s universality threatened its identity – and he had to be helped to a new perspective.

From a different angle of vision, it’s evident that the unique message of the church guarantees its identity; the assorted converts to the church guarantee its universality.   Both identity and universality have to be held in exquisitely fine balance if the catholicity of the church is to be preserved.  Evangelicals who are properly catholic balance evangelism with training in discipleship and Christian nurture.   We balance outreach with worship.  We balance contemplation of our reigning Lord and commitment to the world’s grief.

Evangelicals who are aware of their catholic heritage balance justification (a new standing before God) and sanctification (a new nature from God); the decision for faith and growth in faith; the call to repentance and the call to sainthood; the Reformation (doctrinal restatement) and revival (the Spirit’s flooding over large numbers of people who have not yet welcomed the gospel offer). Evangelicals who know the true meaning of “catholic” embrace both specially endowed leaders and ordered ministry; both spontaneous exclamations of praise and sacramental practice.

In all of this, theologians (including those who amplify the doctrinal statements of such bodies as the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada!) preserve catholicity by defining the faith so as to combat heresy arising from within the church, and also by defending the faith so as to combat misinterpretation arising from outside the church.  By defining the faith, theological statements preserve identity; by defending the faith, theological statements preserve universality.  The first sentence of the Apostles’ Creed exemplifies both.  “I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth” plainly speaks of universality; “and in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord…crucified under Pontius Pilate” speaks of identity.   Doctrine, adequately articulated, always fulfils both purposes.

 

 

[1]I am glad to acknowledge my debt to Jaroslav Pelikan, The Riddle of Roman Catholicism, and Donald Bloesch, The Future of Evangelicalism.

Jacques Ellul – The Judgment of Jonah

 

Repeatedly Ellul’s brief book reflects his characteristic love/grief relationship with the church, the church’s lack of discernment, and an ecclesiastical agenda that finds the church somnolent, feckless and desultory. As sad as he is scathing, Ellul notes, “A remarkable thing about even the active Christian is that he (sic) never has much more than a vague idea about reality.   He is lost in the slumber of his activities, his good works, his chorales, his theology, his evangelizing, his communities.   He always skirts reality….It is non-Christians who have to waken him out of his sleep to share actively in the common lot.” (p.31)

More foundationally Judgment exudes Ellul’s characteristic conviction concerning the effectual pre-eminence of Jesus Christ. While the book of Jonah is deemed “prophetic” among Jewish and Christian thinkers, Ellul understands prophecy strictly as an Israelite pronouncement fulfilled in Jesus Christ, this pronouncement henceforth subserving Christ’s unimpeded militancy throughout the cosmos.

As readers of Ellul know from his other books (e.g., Apocalypse and The Political Illusion, extended comments on the books of Revelation and 2^nd Kings respectively), Ellul has little confidence in the expositions of the “historical-critical” guild of exegetes insofar as their preoccupation with speculative minutiae blinds them to the substance of the text; namely, the service the text renders the luminosity of Him who is the light of the world.  Unlike the exegetical guild, Ellul sees the risen, sovereign (but not controlling) One proleptically present in the Older Testament, manifested to the apostles, and surging effectually everywhere now.  More to the point, Ellul regards the guild’s preoccupation with the history of the formation and transmission of the text as a nefarious work wherein the guild “dissects Scripture to set it against Scripture”.(p.74) Exegetes typically perpetrate this abomination, therein deploying their “expert” misuse of Scripture exactly as the tempter deployed his in his assault on Jesus in the wilderness.  In other words, Ellul regards the work of most commentators, in their Christ-ignoring and world-denying “scientific” approach, as nothing less than Satanic. In light of this it’s no surprise that only three-quarters’ way through Judgment Ellul left-handedly admits that the book of Jonah was “rightly composed to affirm the universalism of salvation” (p.77), when exegetes customarily insist that the sole purpose of the book of Jonah was to protest the shrivelling of post-exilic Israel’s concern, even to protest the apparent narrowness, exclusiveness and concern for self-preservation found in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah.

If what is crucial to most is peripheral to Ellul, then what is the epicentre of the book of Jonah?  It is certainly not a compendium of moral truths, let alone a test of credulity (which test Christian apologetics paradoxically attempts to eliminate). Neither is the book an extended allegory; nor even an instance of the prophetic literature found in Scripture, since the book shares few of the concerns of the prophetic books (e.g., no prophetic address is spoken to Israel) while features of the book aren’t found in prophetic literature (e.g., the books named after Jeremiah and Amos don’t feature biographical portrayals). The core of the book lies, rather, in its depiction of Jonah himself as a figure, a type, of Christ. Having argued for this position, Ellul brooks no disagreement: “If one rejects this sense, there is no other.” (p.17)

As Judgment unfolds it reflects the major themes of Ellul’s social and theological thought as well as aspects of his own spiritual development. With respect to the latter, Ellul’s understanding of Jonah’s vocation – “Everything begins the moment God decides to choose….We can begin to apprehend only when a relation is set up between God and us, when he reveals his decision concerning us” (p21) – pellucidly mirrors Ellul’s self-effacing, autobiographical statements in In Season, Out of Season and What I Believe.

As for characteristic aspects of Ellul’s thinking, Judgment re-states and develops them on every page.         For instance, those whom God summons are freed from the world’s clutches and conformities in order to be free to address and spend themselves for a world that no longer “hooks” them even as the same world deems them “useless” to it.  In this regard Ellul writes of Jonah, “The matter is so important that everything which previously shaped the life of this man humanly and sociologically fades from the scene….Anything that might impel him to obey according to the world has lost its value and weight for him.” (P.21) In other words, any Christian’s commission at the hand of the crucified is necessary and sufficient explanation for taking up one’s work and witness.

While vocation is sufficient explanation for taking up their appointed work, Christians cannot pretend their summons may be ignored or laid aside, for in their particular vocations all Christians have been appointed to “watch” in the sense of Ezekiel 33. Disregarding one’s vocation is dereliction, and all the more damnable in that the destiny of the world hangs on any one Christian’s honouring her summons: “Christians have to realize that they hold in their hands the fate of their companions in adventure”.(p.35)

Readers of Ellul have long been startled at, persuaded of, and helped by his exploration of the “abyss”, the virulent, insatiable power of evil to beguile, seduce, and always and everywhere destroy. (See Money and Power and Propaganda. It should be noted here that Ellul’s depiction of evil in terms of death-as-power – rather than in terms of “a kind of lottery…turning up as heart failure (p.51) — finds kindred understanding and exposition in the work of William Stringfellow and Daniel Berrigan.)  The “great fish” sent to swallow Jonah (God uses evil insofar as he is determined to punish) is a manifestation of such power. While in the “belly of the great fish” Jonah is subject to God’s judgment upon his abdication as he is confronted defencelessly with the undisguised horror of the abyss. Awakened now to his culpable folly, Jonah understands that even as he is exposed to “absolute hell”(p.45) he hasn’t been abandoned to it.  At no point has he ceased being the beneficiary of God’s grace.  Now Jonah exclaims, “Thou hast delivered me” – i.e., before the “great fish” has vomited him to safety.  Deliverance for all of us, Ellul herein announces characteristically, occurs when we grasp God’s presence and purpose for us (and through us for others) in the midst of the isolation that our vocation, compounded by our equivocating, has brought upon us.  Percipiently Ellul adds, “[T]he abyss…is the crisis of life at any moment.”(p.52)

Typically Ellul points out ersatz means of resolving the crisis: we look to “technical instruments, the state, society, money, and science…idols, magic, philosophy, spiritualism….As long as there is a glimmer of confidence in these means man prefers to stake his life on them rather than handing it over to God.”(p.57) While these instruments can give us much (especially as anodynes), they can’t give us the one thing we need in the face of the all-consuming abyss: mercy.  No relation of love exists between these instruments and us; they merely possess us. The person who “loves” money, for instance, is merely owned.  The crisis is resolved incipiently when we “beg in any empty world for the mercy which cannot come to [us] from the world.”(p.58)   The crisis is resolved definitively as we hear and heed the summons to discipleship and thereafter obey the one who can legitimately (and beneficently) claim us inasmuch as he has betaken himself to the abyss with us. Here Ellul’s Christological reading of the book of Jonah surfaces unambiguously: “The real question is not that of the fish which swallowed Jonah; it is that of the hell where I am going and already am. The real question is not that of the strange obedience of the fish to God’s command; it is that of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and my resurrection.”(p.63)

Just because the book of Jonah is a prolepsis of Jesus Christ, the book is fragrant with hope and quickens hope in readers.  To be sure, signs of grace come and go in all of us – even as grace never disappears. (Recall the gourd given to provide shade for Jonah, even as the gourd soon withered.) While God’s people frequently and foolishly clutch at the sign instead of trusting the grace therein signified, the day has been appointed when the sign is superfluous as faith gives way to sight and hope to its fulfilment.  At this point the “miracles” that were signs of grace for us will be gathered up in “the sole miracle, Jesus Christ living eternally for us”.(p.67)

The note of hope eschatologically permeating the book of Jonah (and Ellul’s exposition of it) recalls the conclusion to The Meaning of the City. There Ellul invites the reader to share his vivid “experience” of finding himself amidst a wretched urban slum in France yet “seeing” the city, the New Jerusalem.

 

While Ellul’s “exegesis” of the book of Jonah will be regarded as idiosyncratic in several places, its strength is its consistent orientation to the One who remains the “open secret” of the world and of that community bound to the world.

 

For decades Ellul’s own life illustrated a statement he made in Judgment concerning the prophet Jonah: “Everything circles around the man who has been chosen. A tempest is unleashed.”(p.25) Ellul’s writings indicate passim that as much characterizes all who discern their vocation and pledge themselves to it without qualification, reservation or hesitation.

 

Victor Shepherd
Professor of Systematic and Historical Theology, Tyndale University College & Seminary, Toronto
Professor Ordinarius, University of Oxford

John Paul II: An Assessment

John Paul’s resilience was exemplary. He saw first-hand the Nazi occupation of his beloved Poland , only to witness, without letup, the Communist takeover and brutal suppression of his people. Throughout the decades of totalitarian savagery visited upon the nations of Eastern Europe he never softened in his recognition of and resistance to a godlessness no less wicked because it came from the political left. (Many people naively assume that the left is less monstrous than the right.) Amidst it all he continued to hope for the day, in God’s own time, when Communism would finally expose itself as unambiguously cruel and deceptive. His support of Lech Walesa and of the Polish populace leavened public awareness and fortified private conviction until Marxist leaders had to admit they could no longer manage the people.

Even as he discerned evil in the world-at-large when other appeared not to, John Paul was just as quick to discern sin in the “heart-at-small” as he confessed the arrears of sin in himself and repented it. No one questioned his outpouring to the priest he named his confessor and through whom he sought to hear the Word of pardon from the crucified. No one regarded as poor taste, or worse, poor theatre, his protracted periods of lying prostrate, face-down, when he deplored the innermost shame and guilt he never attempted to deny.

Yet while he knew the church to consist of penitent sinners, he was always aware that the powers of death will never prevail against the church (Matthew 16:18 ) not because of the church’s inherent virtue (he had no illusions here) but because of God’s promise and patience. God has pledged himself to the people who are his “peculiar treasure”. (Exodus 19:5 KJV) Only by grace, yet assuredly by grace, the church remains a “chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people” – and all of this precisely for the purpose of declaring the truth and mercy of the God who still calls us out of darkness and into his marvellous light. (1^st Peter 2:9) Trusting God’s faithfulness to God’s own promises, John Paul exhibited a patience that always found him diligent in his work with an appropriate urgency, yet never frenzied or frantic. He rooted himself in the church, that ship that could ride out the worst storms of sin, treachery and disgrace.

Disgrace trumpeted itself during his tenure. The sex-scandals involving priests, all of whom were sworn to celibacy, became increasingly notorious as clergy betrayal and exploitation of children surface first in Newfoundland, was heard of in many venues (including aboriginal schools in Canada’s north), and came to most concentrated attention in Boston , where dozens of historic Roman Catholic church buildings had to be sold in order to defray the lawsuits of disillusioned and outraged families. John Paul was unyielding; resolutely he insisted that there is no place in the priesthood for sexual exploiters. Whereas ecclesiastical officialdom had falsified itself shamefully in a vain attempt at keeping skeletons closeted, John Paul frankly owned the perfidy of fellow-priests and pledged assistance to their victims.

No less movingly he recognized victims of a different sort with a different history; namely Jewish people. As a pole he was singularly equipped in this regard, for Poland had had the highest concentration of Jewish people of any country in the world, only to have ninety percent of them liquidated (4.5 million). In addition John Paul’s detailed reading of history allowed him to grasp what few North Americans have yet; namely, that for the Jewish people the Middle Ages was one, dark, endless, night of suffering visited on them by Christians both ignorant and learned, indifferent and devout. His frank acknowledgement of the church’s centuries-long abuse gained him the admiration and affection of Jews around the world. His overture in this area continues to bear fruit as Roman Catholic Christians have re-owned the Jewish root of the faith, as well as the place in God’s economy of the Jewish people as Jews (i.e., not merely as potential converts to the church). The pope built bridges between church and synagogue that continue to bring blessings to both.

A learned theologian and philosopher (see his encyclical, “Faith and Reason”), he had additional gifts that erudite people frequently lack. One such gift was an ability to handle the media. Never gullible concerning the “power of the press” and its capacity for misrepresentation, John Paul knew that his “management” skill concerning the print and electronic vehicles was an opportunity for him to commend gospel, kingdom, church and papal office.

His ability to relate to young people was a similar gift. Whenever he spoke, wherever he appeared, young people “fell” for him. No one can forget the aged man winsomely attracting and addressing young people in Toronto on the steamiest day of the summer while radio and TV interviewers sought (unsuccessfully) to dilute young Catholics’ ardour by interjecting reminders of the church’s shadow side.

Yet there is “another side” to John Paul that has to be noted. Whereas Pope John XXIII had spoken of Protestants as “separated brethren”, John Paul never acknowledged us to be brothers of any sort. He never recognized us as part of the body of Christ.

While his stand against homosexual behaviour and abortion was encouraging, his intransigence on the ordination of women was not.

While Protestants of orthodox conviction uphold the virginal conception of Jesus, John Paul’s Mariology threatened the sole, saving sufficiency of Jesus.

Worst of all, his Millennial Indulgence, promulgated in 2000, recalled the occasion of the Sixteenth Century Reformation in Germany when Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the church door in Wittenberg (1517), challenging readers to his “Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences”. Luther gave ninety-five reasons why he deemed it utterly anti-gospel to think that temporal punishment for sin is remitted in exchange for a fee. In 2000 John Paul’s Indulgence decree, signed by a subordinate cardinal, confirmed Protestants in their understanding of the battle-cry of their Reformation ancestors: Ecclesia Reformata Et Semper Reformanda. The church – reformed by the gospel, ever stands in need of being reformed at the hands of the selfsame gospel.

God is to be praised for the witness of the late Pope John Paul II, even as Protestants will invoke that gospel whose purity alone can – and will – fashion the church, the Bride of Christ, whose splendour is ultimately “without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.” (Ephesians 5:27)

 

 

Victor Shepherd

Reflections on Paul Molnar’s Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity

Dr Victor Shepherd

 

INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

M speaks everywhere of the need to root the Economic Trinity (e.t.) in the Immanent Trinity (i.t.).

 

E.T.: Father, Son and Holy Spirit are interrelated forms in which divine revelation functions.

I.T.: F, S and HS constitute the being of God eternally, regardless of creation or revelation.

 

Background: God is known to Israel as the transcendent one. He is not a human projection.

This God is one; i.e., unique among the deities. Eventually Israel recognizes God to be one in the sense of sole: there are no other deities. God is one eternally.

 

The Nazarene appears, and repeatedly makes at least an implicit claim to do what are prerogatives of God: e.g., forgive sins (when only God can since God has been victimized), provide definitive interpretation of the God-given Torah (which Torah pre-existed the world), be the judge at the last day, satisfy the human heart as God alone claims to do, speak to his Father in an intimacy he recognizes in no-one else, accept worship as his right.

In all of this the transcendent one remains transcendent; i.e., God hasn’t collapsed himself into the Nazarene (as in pagan incarnations).

 

The God ‘above’ and God ‘among’ is recognized to be God ‘within’ as well. What God has done extra nos, pro nobis in Christ is now done in nobis as well. The result is that God manifests himself to us as giver, gift and the act of effectual giving. Giver, gift, and effectual giving are identical. [F, S and HS are alike God.]

 

Question: Is this merely how God manifests himself, or is this who God is in himself? Do we need to move beyond the e.t. to the i.t.?

Question (the same): is God’s revelation merely the “face” God wears as he turns to us, or is it who God is in himself? Is his face something he merely displays, or does his face unambiguously disclose his heart?

 

Humans frequently wear false faces. The face, e.g., can be benign when the heart is treacherous. God’s face and God’s heart are always one: he is as he manifests himself, and manifests himself as he is. There is no dissimulation or inconsistency in him. Otherwise the economic t. isn’t a faithful and true revelation of the transcendent communion of F, S and HS – which transcendent communion the eternal being of God is in himself.

 

The i.t. is the e.t. – or else God himself is ultimately unknowable (and therefore can’t be known as eternally F, S and HS.)

The e.t. is the i.t. – or else the e.t. is an act of God that may be merely what God has done without in any way reflecting who God is, his “heart” or identity; that is, an act of God unrelated to the eternal purpose of God.

 

The e.t. and the i.t. interpenetrate each other and regulate each other.

 

MOLNAR: (preface)

ix: the purpose of the doctrine of the i.t. is to uphold God’s freedom. Note the understanding of “freedom” here: there is no impediment, inner or outer, to God’s acting in accord with his true nature. (This understanding of freedom has nothing whatever to do with philosophical indeterminism, “freedom of choice.”) As will be shown later, God is eternally self-sufficient: God is love in himself, requiring nothing creaturely to love in order to be love. God is life; he lives in the ongoing dynamic of F, S and HS as the Father eternally begets the Son and the Spirit. God needs nothing creaturely to be who he is.

 

While we can speak of God only in terms of human categories (they are the only categories we have), it isn’t our human experience that prescribes who God is or what he is toward us. I.e., while we know God only in faith (faith is unquestionably a human event) we can’t read our experience and concepts of God back into God. [Rather, as Molnar will say later, once we are admitted by grace/faith into the orbit of God’s self-knowing, we thereafter think God from a centre in God, not from a centre in ourselves.] Athanasius, therefore, is sound when he says it is more devout and more accurate to signify God from the Son and call him “Father” than it is to signify God from the creation and call him “Unoriginate.”

 

x: We speak of God ultimately as “F, S and HS” rather than as “Creator, Mediator and Redeemer” since God is F,S and HS even if he never creates anything. [“Creator, Mediator and Redeemer” describes God’s relation to the creation.]

 

xi: Grace, faith and revelation therefore always remain grounded in God and not in (a compend of) God and the creation. We know God only by God. The Holy Spirit (that by which we know God) is God.

 

xii: Where the e.t. isn’t seen to be grounded in the i.t., one-sided attention is given to the e.t. and this in turn gives rise to the following distortions:

[1] God is made dependent on history and (at least in part) is indistinguishable from history.

(E.g., the surge of history is the power of God, and God never fully – if at all –                    transcends historical process.)

[2] A naturalistic Christology arises wherein humans have a natural capacity to apprehend              the truth and reality of Jesus Christ. (Needless to say, the “Christ” therein                            apprehended is never exactly the Christ whom the apostles confess.)

[3] The Holy Spirit is rendered indistinguishable from human spirit.

[4] The human phenomenon of self-transcendence becomes the starting point and the norm                       of theology, wherein God is “allowed” to be, do and speak only in conformity with                 the human experience of finite self-transcendence.

(Molnar maintains that the rest of the book discusses the aforementioned four points.)

 

 

Chapter One

1: Kaufman and McFague illustrate the declensions found in a theology that doesn’t think God from a centre in God but rather from a centre in ourselves, and doesn’t allow the nature of God to determine what can properly be said of God (and what not.)

K and McF insist that speech about God is reducible without remainder to our attempt at giving meaning to human existence; i.e., theology is no more than a way of describing human depths.

2: When they speak of theology as an “imaginative construction” [Shepherd they have confused “imaginative” with “imaginary.”] K. is obvious: God is not an extra-human reality of which our theological language speaks, however ineptly. What is real is the meta-myth that theological language articulates.

4: LaCugna maintains that the doctrine of the Trinity says nothing about God but rather about our life in God and our life with each other. [We can’t speak of ‘our life in God’ unless we know the nature of God.]

5: When she speaks of “divine life as all creatures partake and literally exist in it” she is thoroughly pan(en)theistic: she has blurred the ontic distinction between God’s being and the being of the world.

6: McF. makes the same error in speaking of God as dependent on the world and intrinsically related to the world.

7: Ultimately McF’s theology indicates we can’t know God at all; we can know only our own experiences.

8: Result: unknowingly she’s sabotaged human freedom, since human freedom presupposes God’s freedom. [Unless God is free from the world – i.e., is ontically distinct from it – then “humans”, so-called, are emanations from God or extensions of God and therefore lack human freedom.]

Feminist Theology: God is named from the matrix [=womb] of women’s experience. They forget something crucial: nowhere in the Christian tradition does God’s self-declared name – F, S and HS– mean that God is male.

13: Molnar’s warning: whenever the humanness of Jesus is set aside as essential to revelation, God is defined not by himself [i.e., in the Son] but by our experience. Rather, God is to be defined by himself, albeit through our experience [since revelation is known only in faith, and faith is a human act/event/affirmation/experience.] Lost here is the logic of scripture: God can by known only by God.

15: Warning: the error of thinking God from a centre in ourselves – Karl Rahner will later be seen to have written this error LARGE. [1]

16: Elizabeth Johnson confuses the mystery of human (creaturely) depths with the mystery of God. Result: the experience of one’s self is the experience of God. [God is women’s experience of themselves projected onto a cosmic screen.] E.g., conversion is self-acceptance.

19: Johnson maintains that Jesus is the paradigm of “Christ” for many, but can (and should) be substituted; modernity must be allowed to adopt multiple redemptive role models.

[In all of this a redemption myth replaces the sole mediatorship of Jesus of Nazareth.]

20: Result: the door is opened to gnosticism, dualism, pantheism, polytheism. (22: Women can represent Christ because they are other Christs.)

 

 

Chapter Two

27: Barth: to think accurately about revelation is to begin neither with our own ideas nor with our own experiences. Beginning with our ideas yields a Docetic Christology (wherein history is ignored); with our experiences, an Ebionite Christology (wherein God as the Lord of history is ignored).

28: Still, Jesus’ humanity as such doesn’t reveal [since history doesn’t yield a knowledge of God]. While Jesus’ humanity is essential to revelation, it isn’t sufficient: only the Holy Spirit, the power in which the Resurrected One acts, can acquaint us with the truth and reality of the Incarnate One. I.e., revelation is the unveiling of the God who remains veiled to all but the eyes of faith. Revelation therefore is always and everywhere a miracle.

29: Molnar contrasts Barth with Moltmann, Pannenberg and Jenson, for whom Jesus is Lord not because this is who he is but because God raised him from the dead. [This entails adoptionism.]

30: Barth maintains that the Resurrection doesn’t give something new to the Incarnate One, but it does make visible what is proper to him: his glory. [JC is the Son regardless of any impression he makes on us.]

31: Moltmann commits the [Bultmannian] error of denying the Resurrection to be an event in the life of Jesus and affirming it to be (only) an event in the lives of the apostles, a “visionary” episode.

33: MacQuarrie: ‘Christ’ shouldn’t be restricted to Jesus of Nazareth; it should be predicated of the ‘Christ event’ – Jesus and the community. [This, of course, makes humankind its own redeemer and the church its own Lord.]

35: Barth’s point: the power of the Resurrection is the power of the Word and Spirit evident in Jesus from Christmas to cross to Easter to Ascension – a power over which we have no conceptual, existential or ontological control. [If true, this point ends all attempts at rendering God’s acts, ultimately God himself, human extrapolations or projections or aspirations.]

36: Barth: the Resurrection discloses who Jesus is. Molt, Pann, Jen: the Resurrection constitutes Jesus’ being as eternal Son. [See above comment re: Adoptionism.] Pann advances another distortion: thanks to the Incarnation, Christ’s Sonship must be perceivable in his human existence. [This renders the truth and reality of JC naturally intelligible – thereby rendering rev. superfluous.] Little wonder Barth viewed Pann “with horror.”

 

In Docetic Christology Jesus’ historicity is dispensable – leaving only his [discarnate] deity? No. The God-man is the only true deity. The core of the NT isn’t incarnation (found everywhere in paganism) but rather that Jesus of Nazareth is the eternal Son of God Incarnate, and that the Son of

God Incarnate is Jesus of Nazareth.

41: To say this is to say that God can be known only where God ‘tabernacles’ with us and acts: J of N. To say this is to say that God can be known only by grace, never by us alone. Therefore God can’t be known on the basis of an analogy with something already known to us. Therefore ransacking human experience of self-transcendence yields neither the knowledge of God nor the possibility of it. [This point will loom huge in Barth’s repudiation of the analogia entis and Molnar’s recognition of the a.e. throughout Rahner’s work.]

45: Those who deny this affirm myth; e.g., John Hick: “Incarnation” speaks not of the truth re: Jesus but rather of our ascription and attitude concerning him.

48: In the same way ‘Christ’, says Kaufman, points to the complex of events that grew up around J of N. Christians were wrong in using “Christ” to speak of J as the God-man, and Jewish/Muslim critics were correct in faulting Christians for it. J of N is not “the only begotten Son of God.”

50: Rahner is famous for reorienting Roman Catholic theology to the doctrine of the Trinity. Yet he doesn’t begin thinking about it from a centre in God but rather from humankind’s transcendental experience. All experiences of human hope, fear, goodness, aspiration, wonder, mystery, love are unthematic experiences of God. [This is paganism.]

51: To confess Jesus Christ is ultimately to confess the mystery that human beings are. Theology is reducible to anthropology. Jesus is the ultimate instance of self-tr’ce. [Schleiermacher: Jesus is the most elevated instance of God-consciousness.]

Note what is forfeited here:

F1: revelation as God’s act, and therefore miracle.

F2: the R’n of Jesus as that which governs our theology. The tra’l exp. of hope does. (54: The R’n         is “the realisation and crystallisation of man’s deepest aspirations.”)

F3: the biblical truth that rev. causes offence. [How could it?]

F4: the biblical notion of faith. Faith [that by which we have fellowship with God] is ‘owning’     one’s experiences of mystery, wonder, etc; i.e., all the experiences of creaturely mystery        and depth.

F5: the Immanent Trinity as the God who is for us. [God is now the world in its aspirations.]

F6: redemption as the content of revelation. [Since revelation is knowledge of ourselves,                         redemption is ultimately self-wrought.]

 

 

Chapter Three

Logos asarkos: the notion that the Word is the eternal second person of the Trinity. To be contrasted with the notion that the Word occurs as it is enfleshed; i.e., an e.t. isn’t grounded in an i.t.

62: McCormack: if election is an eternal decision, then election is part of God’s being.

Molnar: God exists eternally as F, S and HS. Therefore the covenant of grace can’t be the ground of God’s triunity. God’s essence in no way depends on his works ad extra. [Q: Has Molnar read McCormack correctly? Q: Would McCormack question whether election is only ad extra?]

64: Molnar maintains that according to McC God is triune only because of God’s self-determination to be our God. There i.t. and e.t. are the same. For this reason we always need the logos asarkos to preserve the eternal, ontic triunity of God.

 

66: Farrow: “That he {Jesus} goes {ascends} makes him the way {to the Father.} “Makes”? Molnar: The Son is homoousion with the Father apart from the Ascension. Therefore logos asarkos must be upheld.

67: Concomitantly Farrow omits any affirmation of Christ’s active Lordship, wherein the Ascended One encounters his people now. If this is lost then so is human freedom, for our freedom is being claimed for and freed by this One for obedience to him.

 

70: Jenson: Jenson appears to blur the distinction between events in history and acts of God, with the result that history is deemed able to reveal the Incarnate One. Once again e.t. and i.t. are identical. Molnar rightly recognizes that if history can reveal JC, then the truth, reality, presence and significance of God are naturally intelligible.

72: Once l.a. is rejected, history constitutes God’s eternal being, and God is dependent on history.

73: Once the eternality of the l.a. is denied, God becomes the process of divine self-realization. [Here we have Hegel’s understanding of God as the Infinite that ‘others’ itself in nature and history and returns to itself as Absolute Spirit. Incarnation is a stage in the process of God’s self-realization.] Molnar denies Jenson’s Hegelian presupposition and with it the notion of God’s becoming anything in the course of Incarnation and Ascension.

76: Molnar also disagrees with Jenson concerning Jesus’ own glorified body. For Jenson, church and sacraments are that body; i.e., Jesus rose into the church and its sacraments. Jenson’s omission of the HS here is crucial [the HS binds Christ to his people], with the result that Christ needs the church to be who he is.

79: Molnar disagrees when Jenson maintains that God’s eternity isn’t his self-sufficiency as F, S and HS but his faithfulness to history. For Jenson God isn’t eternally self-sufficient but is becoming [Hegel] who he will be because of his relation to the world.

 

 

Chapter Four   (Rahner)

84: R develops his doctrine of God from his concept of mystery. [This is idolatry.] The human self is the point of departure for knowing God. [“God” is no more than a projection of human experiences, replete with pagan immediacy. Note how seldom R speaks of faith.   There is no need for the Mediator, since God is apprehended through human experiences of self-transcendence.]

86: R’s assumption is that an experience of one’s ‘horizon’ is an experience of God.   This assumption is rooted in a prior assumption: 88 – Humans are “a being oriented towards God.” [In the wake of the Fall, humans are oriented away from God.]

[Forfeited: any notion that God is the sole originator of our knowledge of God; that God ever remains Lord of his own revelation.] Here the transcendence of God, and therefore the freedom of God, is abandoned.

88: “Man is forever the articulate mystery of God.” [This reduces all theology to anthropology. Jesus Christ alone is the articulate mystery of God, and this is because he is God.]

95: The God who is identical with our experience of mystery [is posited] as identical with the i.t.

97: Result (says Molnar): R can’t distinguish between philosophy and theology, reason and revelation, nature and grace. [There is no theology or revelation or grace.]

107: R synthesizes creator and creature under the phil’l category of “absolute being.” [Herein God is subordinate to metaphysics, God being ontically indistinct from the creaturely.]

[In speaking of aspects of human experience w.r.t. the “infinite” R has confused indefinitely large with infinite.      True God, utterly transcendent, alone is infinite. The ‘horizon’ of our experience is indefinitely large and          impenetrably mysterious, but forever creaturely. Creatio ex nihilo – always to be distinguished from creatio ex Deo       – preserves the truth that God is LORD over the creation, not on a continuum with it.]

112: R: Christ is the ‘pure form’ of an experience of God that all religions describe.   [This contradicts scripture on so many fronts there’s no point in listing them. Cf. Elijah and Baal.]

113: R: God’s ‘universal will to save’ is a constitutive element in human experience. [God’s will is God himself (willing.) God is never a constitutive element in the human.>> pan(en)theism]

 

 

Chapter Five

— an illustration of what happens to Trinitarian thinking when “relationality” is substituted for the Triune God.

126: once the i.t. is denied as the ground of the e.t., then humankind’s relationship with God is one of mutual conditioning. Result: [see xii.]

128: La Cugna: persons in communion are substituted for Jesus Christ, and the HS is an aspect of creaturely relationships. Result: 130 — an ontology that includes both the being of God and the being of the human. [See 8 and 107.]

132: Molt: The Spirit is God’s immanence in human experience and the transcendence of humans in God. [paganism]

132: Kaufman: God and Christ are symbols [mythological constructs] that we invent to help us transform or ‘humanize’ our society. [paganism]

139: Peters: “God is the process of becoming Godself through relationship with the temporal creation.” [To be sure, how God achieves his purposes is affected by the world’s evil and human recalcitrance; but the nature of God is not. The manner in which God achieves his purposes is flexible; his essence is not. What could God ‘become’ except non-God?]

144: All such notions suggest that God’s relations ad extra eventually become God’s relations ad intra. [God is in the process of becoming what he isn’t at present through the relationships he undertakes. Since the e.t., in this model, becomes the i.t. in the eschaton {if there’s still point to using these terms}, then who God is going to turn out to be remains in doubt.]

160: R: “Man is the event of God’s absolute self-communication.” [Hegel is unmistakable here.]

162: R: “Wherever man posits a positively moral act in the full exercise of his free self-disposal, this act is a positive supernatural salvific act.” [Overlooked (1) religion and morality as antithetical to faith in the gospel – see 191, where to be a person of “morally good will” is to exist in grace, (2) self-salvation (Grace has been made the condition by which we can thereafter save ourselves; grace facilitates self-salvation.) (3) “free” – what became of the bondage of the will?]

 

 

Chapter Six

172: TFT: the r’n is the “primal datum” of theology and can’t be abstracted [i.e., into something symbolic or mythological.]

173: neither nature nor history produces the r’n. The r’n in turn is its own validation.(194)

174: while our concepts concerning God don’t allow us to speak of God exhaustively (TFT says elsewhere) they do allow us to speak of God truly and adequately. A concept-less knowledge (experience) of God is impossible.

175: w.r.t. the NT, theology is interested in the different layers of tradition only as they are correlated and controlled by God’s self-revelation. [Here TFT opposes “Q fundamentalism,” the latter being the notion that a NT stratum – neither Mark nor M nor L but merely a ‘sayings’ source (and only hypothetical at that) yields a knowledge of God.]   [Note the Jesus Seminar.]

178: TFT’s disagreement with liberal theology and with R: TFT’s ‘repentant thinking’, wherein such thinking submits to God’s self-rev. Such thinking is not found 1^st in experience but first in Jesus Christ and subsequently in experience.

180: On account of the r’n of JC and the eternal Sonship of JC, our human nature is set in the F-S relation. [i.e., there is no natural knowledge ultimately of what it means to be a human being. Our knowledge of the human is a predicate of our knowledge of the humanness of JC. Here TFT opposes R on all fronts. R, beginning with an unthematic human exp. of mystery, longing, hope, etc. has a deity that can never be more than projected or inflated or religionized humanness. It never seems to occur to R that such humanness is fallen as well.]

193: TFT doesn’t deny we have the experiences of which R speaks. [Who would want to deny this?] TFT does deny that we can build a logical bridge from these to rev., since only God can reveal God.

 

 

Chapter Seven

198: Moltmann begins with Rahner and then moves beyond him. Note Barth’s criticism that Molt’s Theology of Hope reduces God to the principle of hope, indistinguishable from Marxist Bloch’s principle of hope.

199: Molt’s deity is mutually conditioned by and is never completely independent of human beings – as attested by the fact that God and the world are involved in a cosmic redemptive process (208). [Since both God and the world are on their way to redemption, Molt’s God is never LORD of the creation, but rather is finite and as needy as any creature.]

200: Molt’s theology of suffering renders human suffering the measure of God. The fact that God needs to suffer explains [somehow] the how of Trinitarian self-revelation. Father and Son couldn’t be selfless unless they suffered (211). [F and S are utterly selfless eternally in their self-giving to one another. This does not entail suffering. God’s suffering arises only through God’s self-giving to a tormented world.]

202: Note: Barth regarded panentheism as more dangerous than pantheism. [In pantheism God is the essence of everything. If God is of the essence of everything (panentheism) it becomes impossible to distinguish what is of God from what is not.]

204: w.r.t Molt’s panentheism, God’s indwelling makes “the whole creation the house of God.” [JC is where God ‘houses’ himself.]

208: Molt insists that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity “integrates the truth in monotheism and pantheism.” [What is the truth of pantheism? Monotheism as such is idolatry.]

209: Molt: “a non-creative God would be imperfect.” [Then God creates out of inner necessity and God’s creating is not a free act.]

221: Molt’s assertion that God’s love logically entails suffering eliminates the i.t.

222: Once God’s Spirit is identified with cosmic spirit, the doctrine of sin is lost.

231: In short, God needs creatures in order to be God. God is no longer sovereign as the catholic tradition understands the term; God’s sovereignty is “his sustaining fellowship with his creatures and his people.” [God’s sovereignty as his non-dependence on his creation has been forfeited. Only the God who is free from the world can act upon the world in love.]

 

 

Chapter Eight

Alan Torrance

235: recapitulation: the distinction between the i.t. and the e.t. means that God’s works ad extra are not necessities grounded in our transcendental experience or a principle of relationality (communion.).

237: Alan Torrance thinks that Rahner made explicit problems that are implicit in Barth. Molnar disagrees.

240: AT’s strong point: grace draws us into the Trinitarian relations by the Spirit so that Christ living in us doesn’t cancel or compromise the fact that we are agents in our own thinking and doing, even as our own thinking and doing are brought to completion in Christ.

242: AT’s criticism of Barth: Barth’s “revelation model” obscures our communion with God.

243: Molnar’s criticism: AT fails to grasp that for Barth knowledge (of God) and fellowship (with God) are inseparable. For B, knowledge of God is born of fellowship with God (i.e., faith in God.) [Bible passim] [When AT speaks of “communion” he appears to mean “continuity”.]

247: M’s criticism: AT’s und’g of our inclusion by grace in the Son’s eternal communion with the Father is rendered constitutive of our personhood. [Doesn’t this divinise us? Isn’t this a reappearance of the nature-grace continuum?]

248: M: “ Torrance finds the continuity between God and the creatures in semantic thought forms that he believes have become integral to the Christ event.” [Could any thought form be the continuity between God and creation? Is there such a continuity at all?]

248: Such a continuity occurs in that communion takes primacy over revelation. [Redemption is always the content of revelation. Therefore communion [=fellowship, not continuity] between God and [sinful] creatures can never take primacy over rev. We know God only as we are reconciled to God in faith. Note the absence of a discussion of faith in AT.]

250: AT’s notion of communion obscures God as the acting subject in his relations with us. Result: AT has reintroduced a form of the analogia entis.

251: AT’s description of revelation as “epistemic atonement” distorts the meaning of revelation; i.e., revelation is a result of communion rather than of God’s act. This in turn suggests that Christ’s humanity as such reveals.

 

Jungel

262: Jl seems to understand God not merely from revelation but also from the human context of theological statement; e.g., an experience of gratitude is at the same time an exp. of God [[Rahner has returned.] Jl herein blunts experience of God as our knowledge of God born by the Spirit’s ‘introducing’ us to the Son – and all of this as God’s soteriological act.]

264: One problem arising from this: humanity is part of the Godhead. [Human love is not an aspect of God’s love. [Hegel]]

268: A FATALITY: the i.t. is merely the summarizing concept of the e.t.; i.e., the i.t. is merely a way of speaking of the e.t. This renders impossible the i.t. as the ground of the e.t.

 

 

Chapter Nine

274: Note Gunton’s warning that we understand the e.t. as scripture does [revelationally/soteriologically] not as the foundation of an agenda for socio-political alteration wherein Christ becomes a principle subserving, e.g., cultural transformation.

277: M’s disagreement with Gu: Gu undervalues the noetic damage of the Fall [w.r.t. God], and therefore Gu undervalues the extent to which revelation is offensive. E.g., rev. doesn’t merely “liberate energies that are inherent in created rationality.” [M’s implicit point: fallen rationality needs to be restored to its integrity (since Fallen reason is devastated with respect to knowledge of God), not merely ‘released.’ In this context M points out that “faith” appears infrequently in Gu’s theology of the Trinity.]

278: Barth doesn’t undervalue the noetic damage of the Fall.

270: M on Gu: the Virgin Birth doesn’t suggest that Jesus isn’t fully human.

295: Note M’s detection of a naturalistic element in Gu: relationality as such – “the relations in which we stand” (Gu) – acquaint us with who we are. [Human self-knowledge is a predicate of our knowledge of God – and therefore must be revealed.] [Shepherd finds a naturalistic element in many places throughout Gunton’s work; e.g., Gu’s insistence that humans need to be perfected, rather then redeemed/corrected and then perfected. What lurks here once again is the nature/grace continuum.]

 

Chapter Ten: Conclusion

311: M’s book has been (i) a sustained protest against the tendency to allow experience “to dictate the meaning of theological categories”; (ii) a sustained insistence that while our experience of God gives rise to our articulation of the e.t., the same experience directs us away from experience to the Word and Spirit (i.t.) as the source of our theological knowledge.

 

311: Recapitulation: the four indicators of contemporary theology’s failure to discern the need for a doctrine of the i.t.:

i) God is made dependent on and indistinguishable from history;

ii) the humanity of Jesus itself reveals [implicit denial of the Incarnation and Holy Spirit;
explicit marginalizing of faith.

iii) Holy Spirit is confused with human spirit;

iv) experience and self-transcendence are made the origin and substance of theology.

 

313: M: “God sets the terms for theological insights.” [=God is the author and object of revelation. As God acts upon us he forges within us the capacity and desire for knowing him and the categories whereby we may speak of him.]

313: If Trinitarian life is no more than our life, we are doomed. However – our real life is hidden with Christ in God.

The bottom Line: Either the Immanent Trinity – or We Are Still in Our Sins.

 

[1] Rahner in nuce: “Rahner explores human self-transcendence assuming that we have an obediential potency for revelation and a supernatural existential which identifies revelation and grace with our transcendental dynamisms.     But these very assumptions blur the distinction between nature and grace.” P.165

This article appeared in “Pathway in Process”, the magazine of New Direction for Life Ministries. www.newdirection.ca/home.htm

Pursuing freedom in the Body of Christ

Forward Dr. Shepherd, a former professor of mine at Tyndale Seminary, has been an enthusiastic supporter of the work of New Direction. When he offered to help the ministry, I immediately knew what to ask of him: “Please write an article for our newsletter.” As you read it, I trust you will understand my request. In Dr. Shepherd’s exposition of John Wesley’s development of the integration of holiness and community we see some of the foundational principles that undergird our work here at New Direction. Those who struggle with homosexuality need to discover the authentic hope, practical application, and tangible results that Wesley’s adherents found. In our support groups we seek to apply the same principles: to love the same-gender attracted struggler unconditionally, and to create a safe, trusted environment of confidentiality, where strugglers can be transparent and truthful. The goal of our ministry is to support same-gender attracted individuals “to obey that command of God, ‘Confess your faults one to another, and pray for one another that ye may be healed.”. Some of our readers who are same-gender attracted may reconsider their need for consistent support and accountability after reading this article. If you live in Ottawa , Windsor , Guelph , St. Catherines, Sarnia , Winnipeg or Toronto we can get you connected with a support group. If you are too far from these cities, contact us anyway. We are increasing our contacts throughout the country. We would be honoured to explore with you the best place to get connected and to begin experiencing new freedom, healing and growth. Don’t go it alone. God gives you the gift of His Body – the Body of Christ. wg

I shall never forget the man who found the courage to pour out before me his heart-wrenching confession of sin. He was able to articulate it despite his shame and humiliation only because he trusted me to help him. Aware of his predicament and his fragility, I summoned up all the pastoral wisdom I could find within me and pressed upon him as persistently, patiently and convincingly as I could that forgiveness of God whose immensity comprehended the length and breadth, height and depth of human self-contradiction. After all, if God’s people are to forgive “seventy times seven,” would God himself ever do less? To my dismay the fellow remained unaffected. After a few seconds of anguished silence he blurted, heart-brokenly, “I don’t want forgiveness; I want deliverance.” The man meant, of course, that he didn’t want mere forgiveness. John Wesley would have concurred. For Wesley knew that the early-day Methodist communities thrived on a truth that had lain dormant too long in the church at large; namely, God can do something with sin beyond forgiving it (as glorious as forgiveness is.) Specifically, God can release people from its power over them. Forgiveness or pardon relieves us of sin’s guilt, Wesley insisted; newness of life releases us from sin’s grip. Wesley knew that to offer people relief now, only to tell them that release awaited them at life’s end (all Christians agreed that release was guaranteed post-mortem) was to consign them to despair for this life. He insisted that there was no limit to the scope of God’s deliverance in this life. Years later he noted that where this truth was upheld the Methodist communities flourished; where it was submerged they withered. The addictiveness of sin At the same time Wesley’s people were anything but naïve concerning sin’s grip. They knew that all sin is addictive. (If it were less than addictive wouldn’t all sinners – which is to say, everyone – have long since given it up?) And they had in their midst people whose addiction was notorious: public, pronounced, undeniable and undisguisable. Either such people would find the gospel merely a pronouncement of pardon that meanwhile left them victims to their addiction or they would come to know that there is indeed One “who can break every fetter” – and do so now. Since Wesley insisted there to be “no holiness but social holiness,” he gathered his people into small groups or “bands” of four or five individuals; these bands were the context for and occasion of his people’s deliverance. These bands were effective only if people were utterly honest at the weekly meeting, withholding nothing. For this reason, then, the bands were segregated by gender. Since there were temptations and traps peculiar to people in particular jobs, there were bands for coalminers, bands for shopkeepers, bands for homemakers, bands for soldiers, and so on. In addition there were bands for those struggling with a particular habituation: bands for “drunkards,” for “whoremongers,” for abusers of drugs such as laudanum and opium. In addition there was a group for people who were afflicted with no notorious, besetting sin but whose spiritual maturity had brought them to see that darkness of every sort still lurked in them, and had brought them as well to crave deliverance from it as they single-mindedly craved nothing else. You shall be holy…. In all of this Wesley had in mind the “root” commandment of scripture: “You shall be holy as I the Lord your God am holy.” (Leviticus 19:2) Yet in the wake of his Puritan ancestry (both his paternal and maternal grandfathers had been outstanding Puritan ministers) he knew that all God’s commands are “covered promises:” what God requires of his people God will unfailing work in his people. Linking the “root” commandment of Israel (and the church) with the “great commandment” of Jesus – “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and your neighbour as yourself” – Wesley’s “band” aimed ultimately, for everyone regardless of the expression of one’s sin, deliverance from every impediment and inhibition right here. In other words, the bands aimed at a deliverance that began in release from one or another, more or less dramatic, addiction, only to end in release from a “selfism” that found someone self-abandoned in self-forgetful love of God and neighbour. Wesley knew this alone to be the “freedom” that the gospel promises. Never naïve about the grip with which sin grips us, Wesley was aware that several things were essential if the bands were to operate effectively. (Needless to say, if the bands weren’t effective they would disappear overnight.) In the first place, those who tentatively, tremblingly stepped into one had to know they were loved and would continue to be cherished. In the second place they had to know that those before whom they disburdened themselves could be trusted – trusted not to be affronted by what they heard, trusted not to ridicule the suffering of someone whose habituation was as painful as it was embarrassing, and above all trusted not to betray anyone by blabbing on the street what had to remain in the meeting. In the third place band-members themselves had to be without disguise and without dissimulation but rather transparent and truthful. Rules of the Band Societies On Christmas Day, 1738, Wesley drew up the “Rules of the Band Societies.” He stated the band’s purpose unambiguously: “The design of our meeting is to obey that command of God, ‘Confess your faults one to another, and pray for one another that ye may be healed.” Then he specified the “rules.” For instance, Rule #1: To meet once a week, at the least.” Rule #4: To speak, each of us in order, freely and plainly the true state of our souls, with the faults we have committed in thought, word or deed, and the temptations we have felt since our last meeting.” Then Wesley wrote, “Some of the questions proposed to every one before he is admitted amongst us may be to this effect:” – and proceeded to list some such questions. For instance, Question #6: “Do you desire to be told of your faults?” Question #7: “Do you desire to be told of all your faults, and that plain and home?” Question #11: “Is it your desire and design to be on this and all other occasions entirely open, so as to speak everything that is in your heart, without exception, without disguise, and without reserve?”Wesley, however, wasn’t finished. While the preceding questions “may” be asked, the “five following [must be asked] at every meeting.” For instance, Question #4: “What have you thought, said or done of which you doubt whether it be sin or not?” Question #5: “Have you nothing you desire to keep secret?”Plainly the self-disclosure asked of the band-members was stark and startling. Wesley knew, however, that only such searing honesty and accountability in a context of pledged support would suffice as the environment for the One who could and did “break every fetter.” Small groups thrive on self-disclosure The “small group movement” in the church today owes everything to Wesley. And so do the para-church groups, such as Alcoholics Anonymous. They thrive on the frankest self-disclosure, self-abandonment to the group and the group’s “Higher Power,” accountability that is near-brutal in its confrontation, and a willingness to endure any inconvenience at any hour for the sake of a fellow-sufferer whose pain has become unendurable and who cries out desperately for a deliverance whose alternative is despair. At one point in my theological education I studied under a psychiatrist who related to the class a simple experiment that has been documented many times over. Ten people are placed in a room. Nine people have been “clued in” beforehand as to what’s going on. The tenth, however, has been told nothing. A box is brought forward containing twenty marbles. Everyone is asked to count the marbles. Then each person is asked to state how many there are. One after the other says “Nineteen; exactly nineteen.” The “not-clued” person, having carefully noted that there were twenty, begins to doubt himself. Soon he capitulates, admits he must have miscounted, and agrees: nineteen. My psychiatrist-instructor pointed out that sooner or later everyone capitulates; we differ only in how long it takes different people to capitulate. Then the experiment is changed slightly: there are two people in the “game” who haven’t been clued in. When they count the marbles and announce “Twenty” they hold out far longer in the face of those who insist “Nineteen.” When a third person is added, the three together don’t capitulate. The experiment, of course, operates merely at the level of the natural. How much more is promised a group of sufferers when the power of “Our great God and Saviour” is added. Victor Shepherd

 

 

Egerton Ryerson

 

“No community can thrive without a journal,” insisted Mahatma Gandhi as he led his followers in shedding their British overlords and the “glass ceilings” that Britain ’s class system had reinforced among India ’s people. Ryerson knew that the Methodist people of early Nineteenth Century Upper Canada needed their own journal if they were to forefend discouragement, fragmentation and ultimate capitulation to the financial, social and religious tyranny of the “Family Compact.” Agreeing with their young leader (he was 26 years old) the Methodist Conference of 1829 established the Christian Guardian, a weekly paper Ryerson was elected to edit. It first distributed 500 copies. In three years it was producing 3,000. Soon it was the most widely read and influential paper of any in the province. The Guardian articulated Methodist theological concerns, religious issues of everyday life, discussions of the nature of the public good and the sort of government needed to advance it, educational reform (always a priority with Ryerson), and practical advice in household economics. (While the Methodists opposed the production and consumption of distilled spirits, one issue at least of the Guardian informed readers of the subtleties of beer-brewing.) The paper’s circulation eclipsed the official Upper Canada Gazette. The foreparent of The United Church’s Observer was campaigning militantly.   Ryerson had known it had to be effective if shocking social inequities that were nothing less than cruel iniquities were to be overturned.

Ryerson was born March 24, 1803 in Vittoria (near Port Dover,) Ontario . His parents, Dutch Protestants who had wearied of the suffocation born of Europe’s social confinement, had migrated to the New World for the sake of the opportunities it afforded. His oldest New World ancestor, Martin Reyerzoon, had landed in New Amsterdam before the British conquest renamed the settlement New York in 1664. With the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, the “United Empire Loyalist” family, Anglican now, migrated once more.

Egerton farmed and studied until he was eighteen, when he identified publicly with the Methodists, the movement through which he had been spiritually awakened. “Leave them or leave home,” his outraged father fumed. Ryerson left home, supporting himself as a student teacher in the local grammar school.

Moving from school teaching to the ministry, the Methodist Probationer managed to absorb both the best of classical literature, theology and contemporary philosophy. Now qualified for ordination, Ryerson was appointed to the Yonge Street Circuit, a triangle that gathered up far-flung people from Pickering to Weston to the south shore of Lake Simcoe . It took him a month to visit all the preaching points within it. Sunday alone found him riding thirty miles, preaching three times and addressing two classes.

Then it happened: the event that brought him unprecedented opportunity, altering forever his public image and fixing his name in Canadian history.

In 1825 Toronto ’s Bishop John Strachan preached at the funeral of a fellow-prelate. The sermon adulated the Church of England while vilifying the Methodists. For years Strachan had been the power broker of the Family Compact, a handful of rich families who monopolized business, finance, and education. It aimed at perpetuating the social stratification that allowed the privileged to exploit the New World’s version of Britain ’s class structure, the worst in Europe . Strachan sought to punish any who didn’t support the Compact’s constellation of power, piety, prestige and privilege.

Strachan accused the Methodist people of being crypto-republicans whose zeal for democracy amounted to mob-elevation. He sneered at their preachers (only Anglicans could be called “clergy”) as intellectual mediocrities unfit to announce the gospel. He supported the legislation that forbade Methodists to solemnize marriages or hold title to church buildings, parsonages and cemeteries.

Ryerson, now 25 years old, championed his people and penned their reply. The pseudonymous riposte voiced Methodism’s disgust at the Anglican Church’s political prostitution. It listed the academic rigours required for Methodist ordination. It recalled John Wesley’s insistence that all Methodist preachers study five hours per day. It pointed out that the Wesleyan Methodist Church (one of the two major Methodist bodies in Upper Canada ) had never known an American root, while the Methodist Episcopal Church (admittedly of American origin) had virtually no American-born preachers.

However Ryerson has become a household name in Canada , with churches, streets and schools named after him, on account of his colossal achievement concerning public education. Heartbroken to see one-half of school-aged children with no formal education and the remaining half averaging only a year’s, and horrified at the poor training and brutal disposition of the “teacher” in too many villages, Ryerson crusaded to establish high-quality public education that required no means tests, whether religious or monetary. Thinking ill of a British school system that preserved the worst class division in Europe, he visited public schools in Holland , Italy and France , twice examining the education system that the Protestant Reformer Philip Melanchthon had implemented 300 years earlier in Germany . As early as 1524, when only 27 years old, Melanchthon had pioneered the pedagogical methods in which teachers were trained.

Recognized now, Ryerson’s sphere of influence ballooned when he was appointed at age 41 as Chief Superintend of Common Schools for Canada West (1844,) and two years later promoted to Chief Superintendent of Education, an office he occupied until his retirement.

As expected, the socially privileged objected. George Brown, editor of Toronto ’s Globe newspaper, ranted that Ryerson had imported “Prussian” education into Ontario . Most people knew, rather, that Ryerson had elevated teaching from a miserable job to a calling akin to that of the ordained ministry.

Ryerson knew that the life of the mind was a good in itself. Still, he never denied education’s utilitarian significance. The public good would always be served by better quality public education. Not to be overlooked was his conviction that public education was essential to social democracy. While political democracy – each citizen is allowed to vote – was easy to achieve, social democracy occurred only as all citizens had equal access to opportunity. Apart from social democracy, class stratification would deny people all socio-economic mobility and freeze them in frustrating private and public “prisons.” Different clusters in the society would then turn inward for support and subsequently outward in hostility.

Ryerson’s educational vision, then, entailed vastly more than schooling: it entailed a vision for a nation, its people and its future.

On the 500^th Anniversary of the Birth of Heinrich Bullinger, Reformer

1504 – 1575

Unlike the first generation of Reformation “pioneers” (e.g., Martin Luther, born 1483 and Ulrich Zwingli, 1484) Bullinger was a consolidator. While adding his own perspective to Protestant theology it was his genius to be less an innovator than someone who could gather up and “package” the gospel riches that hungry people craved in Switzerland and elsewhere. Apart from him the theological “shape” of late Sixteenth and early Seventeenth Century England is unimaginable. Without him the first waves of English Puritans wouldn’t have thrived.

His output is prodigious. Luther’s written work fills fifty-five large volumes. Calvin’s 2000-page Institutes of the Christian Religion (penned as a primer for first-year students of theology) represents only 6.8% of the Genevan’s output. Bullinger’s writings are greater than both Luther’s and Calvin’s together.

Born in Bremgarten, a town twenty kilometres west of Zurich , Bullinger was raised for the priesthood. His father, a priest sworn to celibacy, followed scores of other clergy in Switzerland in living common-law with the woman who bore him five sons. Heinrich sr. annually paid the area bishop whatever it took to have ecclesiastical officialdom look the other way.

Like the majority of Protestant thinkers, young Bullinger knew that a humanist education was important for anyone pursuing ordination; essential if one was to provide both theological and institutional leadership in the church. Departing from his father’s Catholicism, Bullinger moved to the University of Cologne ( Germany ) where he would be immersed in the work of Erasmus and Melanchthon. Erasmus was regarded as the paragon of the Renaissance. Melanchthon, the first systematic theologian of the Reformation and “packager” of the riches that the Lutherans had mined, was deemed the best Greek scholar in Europe upon the death of Erasmus.

Graduating with his B.A in 1520 and his M.A. in 1522, Bullinger was invited to teach at the Cistercian monastery in Kappel. In the mixed-up state-of-affairs that riddled so very much of Reformation-era Europe , the young instructor brought the monastery into the fold of the Reformed expression of the faith, even as the abbot encouraged and assisted him.

In 1523 the nineteen-year old met Zwingli, the brilliant inaugurator of Reform in Switzerland . Glad of the opportunity to be Zwingl’s theological apprentice, Bullinger left the monastery and plunged into his mentor’s intellectual orbit. The older man recognized Bullinger’s ability and invited him to accompany him to the major disputation at Berne in 1528. Tragically Zwingli would die defending his homeland at the Battle of Kappel in 1531. The eight-year apprenticeship would soon bear immense fruit.

Soon much unfolded quickly. In May 1529 Bullinger (still officially Roman Catholic, bizarrely) replaced his father as priest in Bremgarten. In June 1529 the town sided with the Reformation. Since the Protestant expression of the faith was now government-sanctioned, the clergy could marry instead of lurking in the clandestine relationships wherein they had sought connubial comfort and consolation. Bullinger lost no time: two months later he married Anna Adlischwyler – whereupon his father espoused Reformed doctrine and married the woman he had known for decades. In 1531 Bullinger moved to Zurich in order to succeed Zwingli as Cathedral preacher.

Bullinger’s “stamp” is evident principally in a major confession and a theology that underlies everything he wrote. The theology is marked by the notion of covenant, and after him Protestant thought, when faithful to the gospel, has always exemplified “Covenant Theology.” (See the work of Karl Barth.) God’s covenant is his promise to us that he will ever be our God. He has pledged himself irrevocably to us, and asks us to pledge ourselves to him: “I shall be your God and you shall be my people.” God unfailingly keeps the covenant he makes. We sinners, however, are inveterate covenant-breakers. In Jesus Christ, the Son Incarnate, there has appeared that one (the only one) who is the human, faithful covenant-partner with the Father. As Christians are bound to Jesus Christ in faith we are identified with our “elder brother” and therefore are recognized as covenant-keepers with him.

The major work bearing Bullinger’s handprint is the 1566 Second Helvetic Confession. ( Helvetia is Latin for “ Switzerland .) Knox’s Church of Scotland endorsed this document without qualification. It is Bullinger’s single greatest triumph. Over sixty pages long, it articulates comprehensively and comprehensibly that Word-fostered faith which attempted to shed the non-gospel accretions that past centuries had accumulated. While the Second Helvetic Confession is a model of theological succinctness and profundity, its best-known line is Bullinger’s Praedicatio verbum Dei verbum Dei est – the preaching of the Word of God is itself the Word of God. In other words, when the gospel is preached by fumbling, stumbling humans, the risen, sovereign Jesus Christ adopts the event, owns it and vivifies it by the power of the Spirit so as to loom before hearers and acquaint them with himself as surely as he “leaned” on hearers during the days of his earthly ministry.

There was more to Bullinger. He corresponded with leaders throughout the Protestant world. Archives currently hold 15,000-plus letters to and from him, including 300 that Calvin alone addressed to him. Preaching at least six times per week, he distilled his sermons into an “essence,” several Decades (so named in that each Decade contained ten items) that fuelled Reformation lighthouses guiding those otherwise on theological shoals. The Latin Decades were immediately translated into Dutch, German, French and English. They helped immensely English clergy struggling to understand and expound the Reformed faith. Eventually they were reprinted seventy-seven times.

A pastor first (as were all the Reformers,) Bullinger’s House Book, a treatise on pastoral theology, was reprinted 137 times. The pastor and his wife extended hospitality to several leaders among the Marian exiles, those men and women whom “Bloody” Mary (1553-1558) had hounded out of England . Steeped now in Bullinger’s theology and ecclesiology, as soon as Elizabeth allowed them to return they infused the nascent Puritan movement and the Presbyterianism that emerged from it.

Bullinger ministered in Zurich for forty-four years (1531-1575,) a period that “bookends” the whole of Calvin’s theological existence. His contribution to the Reformation is immense.

Fellowship Magazine is right to recognize Bullinger and therein fulfil the Fifth Commandment. For it is no small matter to honour our parents – including the theological.

Victor Shepherd

(address given at Knox Presbyterian Church, Toronto, 21 July2004)

Psalm 30: The God Who Restores

 

I: — Prosperity: is it bane or blessing? Scripture speaks with one mind: prosperity is blessing. Abundance is good. Scarcity, on the other hand, is evil. Poverty is a curse. The Messianic Age will see the end of poverty and the conditions that promote poverty; it will see as well the end of the consequences of poverty; namely, the shrivelling of the human good that occurs in the wake of distress and destitution.

God, who is good himself, fashions a creation that is only good itself. God’s creation is fashioned so as to bring forth everything needed to sustain the creaturely good; sustain it, enhance it, magnify it. Only in the wake of the Fall does scarcity occur. Such scarcity is a blight in nature that leaves its victims blighted humanly.

For this reason our Lord Jesus Christ, everywhere in his earthly ministry, overturns the evil one’s molestation of the creation. He restores those who have been victimized by a creation that hasn’t fostered the human good God intends for them. It’s no wonder, then, that Jesus feeds hungry people. He knows that hunger is more than a physical problem. Hunger warps people’s thinking quickly and pervasively; hunger distorts the human psyche hideously. Famine is a horror, scripture recognizes, that could scarcely be more horrible.

How horrible? And what horror does it work in the human heart? We are told [2^nd Kings 6:25 ] that because of a military siege there was a great famine in Samaria . People were scrambling to eat the head of a dead donkey or a handful of bird poop. Two women, out of their minds on account of their hunger, made a pact with each other: “Today we’ll eat your baby; tomorrow, we’ll eat mine.” Whereupon they boiled an infant and ate it.

Silly romantics may sentimentalize poverty, but as I learned a long time ago, they can romanticize poverty just because they’ve never been poor themselves. No poor person has ever thought poverty glorious.

When our Lord commands us to pray, “Give us today our daily bread,” no doubt there are many layers of meaning to his pronouncement. But in our haste to find many subtle layers we shouldn’t overlook the most obvious meaning: “daily bread” means exactly what it says: bread, the physical sustenance we need, and without which we can’t do anything else; can’t work, can’t think, can’t worship, can’t pray. To be sure, we don’t live by bread alone; just as surely, without bread we don’t live at all.

Jesus unlocks paralysed limbs. He comes upon a woman who’s been bent double for eighteen years. For two decades the horizon of her life has been filled with dirty feet. What kind of a perspective on God’s good creation is that? Jesus doesn’t speculate blasphemously about “God’s will.” He knows that her condition contradicts God’s will. Angrily he hisses, “Satan has done this.” And then he frees her as she lives henceforth in the abundance of her restoration. Deprivation is bane. Prosperity is blessing.

 

II: — And yet prosperity, paradoxically, is the occasion of temptation. Prosperity readily gives rise to spiritual complacency. Having pleaded with God for daily bread, and having been granted daily bread, we are preoccupied now with bread, cake and cream puffs as we cease to pray at all. We become spiritually indifferent, complacent, even presumptuous. Prosperity quickly finds prosperous people gloating in their fancied superiority. The psalmist knew this. In Ps. 30:6 he recalls that he became prosperous even as he confesses to us, “I said in my prosperity, ‘I shall never be moved.’”

“What arrogance,” we say; “What folly. ‘I shall never be moved.’” Plainly the psalmist thought himself invulnerable. “I’ve got it made. I’ve arrived. And now I’m untouchable, impregnable. I couldn’t be toppled in view of the security my prosperity provides me.”

In the entire history of the church I think there are few people who consistently reminded each other of the dangers of prosperity as much as the Seventeenth Century Puritans did. They were uncommonly prosperous people. They sensed their uncommon vulnerability. They knew they had to keep before them the danger their prosperity brought them.

The Puritans had judiciously distanced themselves from other Christian traditions that idealized poverty. They knew, for instance, that poverty is never spiritually meritorious. They never thought poverty to be an instrument of sanctity. They were aware that scarcity, so far from promoting sanctity, more frequently fostered envy, bitterness, hopelessness. The Puritans believed that God commanded work and blessed it. They regarded gainful employment as a form of stewardship.

Yet they were never naïve concerning wealth. On the contrary they knew that prosperity brought temptation as little else did. John Robinson (widely known for his aphorism, “God has yet more truth and light to bring forth from his holy Word”) wrote, “Both poverty and riches have their temptations. And of the two states the temptations of riches are the more dangerous.” The Puritans recognized an inverse relationship between wealth and godliness: the more prosperous people became the less zealous they were for God.

The Puritans saw three great dangers in prosperity. (i) In prosperous people there is a tendency for wealth to replace God as the object of ultimate devotion. (ii) Prosperity leads people to rely on themselves instead of on God. (iii) Prosperity is lethal because addictive: prosperity generates an appetite that prosperity can never satisfy. In other words, prosperity, so far from satisfying people, leaves them profoundly discontented. At the same time it fosters a mood of self-sufficiency and invulnerability. Exclaimed the psalmist, “I said in my prosperity, ‘I shall never be moved.’”

One hundred years after the Puritan era John Wesley rode forth. Wesley picked up where his Puritan foreparents had left off. (I want to say in passing that there is much, much more Puritanism in Wesley than most Wesleyans are aware of.) But whereas the Puritans had been careful and cautious concerning prosperity, Wesley was scathing. He was scathing because he had to witness first-hand over and over how prosperity sapped his people’s spiritual ardour and attenuated their kingdom-commitment and turned sacrifice into selfism.

Here’s what Wesley saw.

Stage one. His people had been drunken and dissolute, impoverished and suffering from all the ills that poverty brings.

Stage two. His people had heard the gospel and had abandoned themselves to Jesus Christ as the Holy Spirit torched them. Now they were sober. Because they were sober they were employable. Because they were industrious they profited. Because they no longer gambled away money or boozed it away or whored it away or simply frittered it they accumulated money. As their bank account swelled their social position rose. Wesley and his people agreed with the psalmist in Ps. 30:6: “By thy favour (what greater favour is there than the gospel?) thou hast established me as a strong mountain.” In other words, like the psalmist their new-found strength and stability came from the gospel, came from God’s favour.

Stage three.   As their social position rose their spiritual zeal fell. Now they were indifferent to matters of the kingdom. They no longer made any sacrifice for the cause of Jesus Christ. They no longer inconvenienced themselves in assisting the suffering neighbour. They gave up their pursuit of holiness.

Wesley’s frustration drove him near-mad. He was frustrated inasmuch as his people had prospered on account of the gospel. But then their new-found abundance blunted their spiritual hunger. Whereas Wesley had said to them, “Earn all you can; save all you can; give all you can,” he now lamented that his people were very good at the first two and woefully deficient at the third. In his frustration he wrote nine tracts, each one sharper than the one before.

In 1781, at the age of 78, Wesley addressed this issue yet again. He noted that when his people had been drunken and dissolute they had an appetite for vulgarity. Now they had a taste for refinement. This taste for refinement Wesley called “genteel sensuality.” There was nothing gross or lurid about it; on the contrary it was the soul of social sophistication. Whereas at one time they had lacked bread, now they were discussing the merits of caviar. Whereas at one time they had stupefied themselves on gin, now they were comparing notes on flavours of tea (tea was frightfully expensive in Eighteenth Century England and was sipped by the socially elevated.) Wesley noted that spiritual inertia invariably accompanied a taste for refinement.

Then, in his 1781 “scorcher,” he put his finger on something I have read nowhere else. He traced a horrifying process:

-as we become more affluent we assume greater self-importance;

-as we assume greater self-importance we become more easily affronted (in other words, snobbishness invariably gives rise to touchiness 😉

-as we are more easily affronted we are more prone to revenge.

In other words, prosperity magnifies our self-importance; and this increases our touchiness; and this renders us cruelly vindictive.

“As for me, I said in my prosperity, ‘I shall never be moved.’’ “I’m a mean-spirited, super-sensitive snob who can’t be shaken. Just try shaking me.”

 

III: — And that is exactly what God did. The psalmist couldn’t be moved? What an arrogant, cocksure, self-important fool – as he was soon to admit himself to be.

We do think ourselves Herculean, don’t we. But it takes only a nerve, finer than a hair, pinched between two vertebrae and our arm will dangle uselessly or our leg will drag lamely, all of this accompanied by excruciating pain. We think ourselves impregnable, don’t we. But it only takes a bacterium, too small to be seen with the naked eye, and we are sick unto death. We think ourselves invulnerable, don’t we. But it takes less pressure than we imagine to break us psychologically.

In Ps.30 the psalmist had become ill.   Since he thanks God for healing he must have been ill. And it was when he’d been brought low through his illness that he floundered. No longer did he crow, “I shall never be moved.” Now he was fragmented and was wondering if he could ever be put back together. Wholly vulnerable now, wholly defenceless, he looked in God’s direction, as it were, only to discover that there was no one to be seen. “Thou didst hide thy face.” (Ps.30:7) When his cocksureness had given way to desperation (it had never occurred to him to look to God when he was self-important) and he was floundering he decided he should look to God and find comfort in God’s face, since everywhere in scripture God’s face reflects God’s heart, a heart of mercy. To his horror he looked, and didn’t see God’s face; didn’t see anything – for, he tells us himself, God had hidden his face. If he had been able to voice his desperation in the words of Charles Wesley he could have cried out,

Oh, disclose thy lovely face.

Quicken all my drooping powers.

Gasps my fainting soul for grace

As a thirsty land for showers.

 

If he had had Wesley’s words wherewith to voice his desperation he might have cried out, “Lovely face? I can’t find any face.” “Thou didst hide thy face,” he laments in Ps.30, and then adds, “I was dismayed.”

Dismayed. The English word “dismayed” is derived from the Latin, dis-magare, to be denied all strength. Debilitated, destitute, defenceless. Invulnerable? He is nothing but vulnerable now. Can’t be moved, shaken, jarred or crushed? He’s pulverized now.

The psalmist’s suffering, and only his suffering, has brought him to his senses. His sickness has made him aware of his fragility; more importantly, his sickness and its attendant suffering has made him aware of God’s wrath, God’s judgement upon him. “Thou didst hide thy face.” Until he was sunk in suffering he never cared a whit about God’s face. Now he’d give anything to see God’s face, for if he could see God’s face he’d know God’s heart, know how things stood between him and God, know whether God was going to embrace him or flick him off, know whether God was going to smile upon him or grimace at the mention of his name. And at this moment God’s face is nowhere to be seen. His external affliction (whatever it was that had made him sick, together with the suffering this entailed) is now matched by an internal horror. Looking for God’s face, he sees nothing.

How bad was it? He tells us in verse 3: he had gone all the way down to Sheol, all the way down to the Pit. Sheol is the Hebrew expression for that realm of deadliness, deathliness, vacuity, so grim it couldn’t be grimmer. Sheol, the Pit, is “the pits.” It’s the sphere of icy, isolated bleakness so very icy, isolated and bleak that words can’t speak of it; just to think of it chills one. Sheol is that realm of existence where someone who used to think himself substantial now knows he’s but a shadow, no substance at all. He used to think himself clever; now he knows, if he knows anything for sure, that he knows nothing. He used to face life confidently; now he dreads the dregs of what used to be “life.” When the psalmist had sunk down into Sheol, the Pit, he was aware that he was so very low he couldn’t sink lower. He had hit bottom. His life lacked all brightness, all warmth, all vibrancy. It wasn’t even worth calling “life.” Now the psalmist was so very miserable that he feared he might not die.

 

IV: — There and then he blurted out, he tells us in verse 8; blurted out to the God whose face he couldn’t apprehend. Perhaps we are unimpressed by his “outblurt” since he wailed, “What profit for you is there in my death? How are you going to gain, God, by my everlasting misery? Is my sentence going to benefit you in any way? What will it do for you to leave me unrestored?” There’s something about the psalmist’s outblurt that irks us just because he appears not to be contrite yet; he appears to be a country mile away from genuine penitence. He says he’s in Sheol; he says he couldn’t be more devastated; he says he couldn’t sink lower, and yet there remains in him that residual pride that still thinks it can bargain with God somehow. He appears not to be like the publican in Luke 18 who can only plead, “God be merciful to me a sinner.” And yet so vast is God’s mercy, so incomprehensible his kindness, that God will accept any and all who turn to him out of any motive at all. William Temple, former archbishop of Canterbury and an acknowledged spiritual giant, used to say that God’s mercy is such astounding mercy that his mercy pardons even those who turn to him out of shabby motives still riddled with self-interest.

On second thought maybe we shouldn’t be too hard on the psalmist, because for sure he has one thing right: “If I go down to the dust (he’s starting to hear “dust to dust”,) will the dust praise thee? Will it tell of thy faithfulness?” What does he have right? He knows that the purpose of life, everyone’s life, is to praise God. The vocation to which all humankind is summoned is the vocation of bearing witness to God’s faithfulness. On the surface the psalmist is saying, “You’ve got to restore me, God, or else your own cause won’t look good and your own purpose will remain unfulfilled. If you restore me then you and I both gain.” On the surface he seems to be saying something as crass as this. More profoundly, however, in his suffering he has recalled what he’d forgotten in his prosperity; namely, that only as he is restored will he be able to do once more what he should never have ceased doing: praising the God who is creator and redeemer, bearing witness to the unimpeachable faithfulness of God, announcing to any and all that there is none like the Holy One of Israel who cherished him the moment he was conceived and will watch over him for ever. The psalmist climaxes his cry to God with the plea, “Hear, O Lord, and be gracious to me. O Lord, be thou my helper.”

His change of heart is evident: he is a self-confessed sinner standing in the need of a grace he can never merit. Only God’s undeserved mercy can restore him. Only God’s sovereign kindness can resurrect him. “Nothing in my hand I bring” a hymnwriter was to pen for him centuries later, “Simply to thy cross – mercy – I cling.” “We have no other argument,” sang Charles Wesley, “We have no other plea; it is enough that Jesus died, and that he died ‘for me.’” Regardless of how self-serving the psalmist might sound to us, his outcry, “Be gracious to me,” means “I have nothing to plead, no excuses to make; ‘Nothing in my hand I bring.’”

“O Lord, be thou my helper.” Contrary to what the English might suggest the psalmist isn’t asking for help, assistance, aid. Help is just that: help, boosting, abetting. “Be thou my help” doesn’t mean “Give me a hand and I can do the rest myself.” “Be thou my help” means “I am utterly helpless, and as long as I am helpless my predicament is hopeless.” “Be thou my help” doesn’t mean he needs a hand; it means that like Lazarus his fellow Israelite he needs nothing less than resurrection, resurrection from the dead. After all, he’s in Sheol, isn’t he?

 

IV: — What was the result of his cry to God? The psalmist tells us in the exuberant exclamations that begin and end Psalm 30. The section of the psalm we began with tonight – the blessing and bane of prosperity – is found in the middle of the psalm. This middle part is “book-ended” by his praise and gratitude. Myself, I’m convinced that the horror of his dismay was so very horrible that he dares to think about it only if “book-ends” a recollected dismay with a present awareness, throbbing awareness, of God’s mercy and patience, of God’s effectual restoration. “I will extol thee, O God” (verse 1), “for thou hast drawn me up.” (RSV) More simply, “You lifted me.” (NIV) His imagery here is that of a bucket being drawn up from a well.   To be drawn up from a well is to be delivered from a predicament which we can’t escape by ourselves; it’s also to be delivered from a predicament that threatens to engulf us.

The psalmist knew his prosperity-quickened cocksureness had plunged him into the well. He had only himself to blame. He knew just as surely that while he alone had gotten himself in, he couldn’t get himself out. He had to be drawn out, lifted, as surely as our Lord Jesus Christ had to raise Lazarus from the dead and was himself resurrected from the dead for our sakes. The primary result of the psalmist’s cry is that God reached down into the Pit and lifted him up.

Accompanying this event were three collateral results.

[1] The psalmist becomes aware that God’s anger is but for a moment, while his favour is for a lifetime. We mustn’t misread these words and trivialize them, as if the psalmist were saying, “Do you know what I found out? God’s anger is real to be sure, but he’s over it quickly. All we have to do is let him blow off a little steam for a few seconds and we’ll find him as benign as ever. He storms up quickly, but the storm blows over just as quickly.” The psalmist is more profound than this. He means, “God’s favour is his eternal purpose. His anger – real, severe, never to be trifled with; his anger always serves his favour.” In scripture the purpose of God’s anger characteristically is to educate and correct. Luther used to say that God’s anger is his love burning hot. In other words, God’s anger is the expression his love takes when God wants to get our attention and therefore needs to shake us up, all for the sake of correcting us.   This is what the psalmist means by “His anger is but for a moment, his favour for a lifetime.”

With the same force he says, “Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.” Weeping is what God quickens in us when we need to repent but see no need to repent, until his anger gives us reason to weep. But weeping is never God’s ultimate purpose for us. He causes us to weep only for the sake of his ultimate purpose: to make our hearts rejoice.

[2] Another collateral result: because God has restored him the psalmist’s enemies haven’t been allowed to gloat over him. He is sure, as is the older testament as a whole, that our ultimate enemies aren’t the people who are hostile to us; our real enemies are those who are hostile to God and who endeavour to subvert his kingdom. Elsewhere the psalmist cries (Psalm 139) “Your enemies are my enemies.” Please note this carefully. The psalmist doesn’t say, “My enemies are your enemies; therefore please clobber them for me.” Instead he knows that real enmity is defined by the kingdom of God . The psalmist’s real enemies are first God’s enemies and are the psalmist’s enemies only because they are God’s enemies.

When the psalmist says that God has drawn him up from the Pit; God’s stabbing him awake, bringing him to his senses and thereby inducing his repentance; God’s doing this prevents God’s enemies from gloating over the fact that they now have the psalmist in their clutches and in fact have captured him forever. In restoring the psalmist, God has defeated God’s own enemies; in defeating his own enemies God has defeated the psalmist’s enemies. The real force of “Thou hast not let my foes rejoice over me” is “In restoring me, O God, you have deprived your enemies of all grounds for snickering and sneering at you. In restoring me you have vindicated yourself. And because you have vindicated yourself, your enemies can’t rejoice at you. And since I am your child, the same enemies, now mine as well, can’t rejoice at me.”

[3] A third collateral result: the psalmist’s restoration gives rise to his elation, and as his elation overflows in thanksgiving and praise the entire community is summoned to thank God and praise God together with the psalmist. To be sure, it’s the psalmist specifically whose prosperity took him down and it’s the psalmist specifically whom God seized and shook and restored. Nevertheless, the entire community should understand that it is as vulnerable as the psalmist was vulnerable. Moreover, the entire community is always in danger of being infected through the sin of one its members. Therefore the psalmist’s repentance and restoration can only have farthest-reaching consequences for the entire community. “Sing praises to the Lord, O you his saints [plural – ‘All of you!’], and give thanks to his holy name.”

True faith never claims experiential privilege. True faith never says, “I have been spiritually where you haven’t been, even where you can’t come, and I’ve been admitted to spiritual intimacies and wonders that you know nothing of. Therefore I can glow and you can’t.” True faith, rather, is always aware that any one individual’s engagement with God has profoundest implications for the entire community. Yes, Moses alone ascended Sinai and endured for forty days a visitation from God that was appalling and appealing in equal measure, an immediacy whose intimacy and intensity no vocabulary could ever capture. Nevertheless the Sinai event is pregnant for the entire community. For when Moses descended the mountain the Sinai event (together with the Exodus that preceded it) thereafter became the “root” event in Israel ’s life in which every last Jewish person remains rooted to this day. And when Moses descended the mountain he brought with him the Ten Words without which the subsequent history of the world is unimaginable.

The apostle Paul was admitted to the “third heaven,” as he puts it, where heard things “that cannot be told, what man may not utter.” There was vouchsafed to him an “abundance of revelations.” Vouchsafed to him simply for private enjoyment? Never. This intense intimacy with God wasn’t an experiential privilege devoid of significance for anyone else. His admission to the “third heaven” has everything to do with his apostolic commission. His immersion in “what cannot be told” equips him and fortifies him for that apostolic work which is undertaken in the cruciform “weakness” that Paul was stuck with all his life and in the midst of which he had to prove over and over that God’s grace was sufficient for him. Ultimately, of course, it’s the entire Gentile church that joins with Paul in thanking and praising God as surely the entire community joined with the psalmist.

Only Peter, James and John were with Jesus on the mount when they were admitted to wonders and mysteries and ecstasies that no vocabulary can comprehend. But the point wasn’t that they were merely to glow in it as if inwardly lit by a never-failing Duracell battery. Rather by it they were equipped to descend the mountain and immerse themselves in human strife and suffering, not the least of which was a young man whose convulsions deranged him repeatedly, threatened to kill him, and tormented his helpless father.

The psalmist, in Psalm 30, knows that his restoration impels his thanksgiving and praise to God, even as it impels the same response from the entire community. For the psalmist, now restored, is thereafter commissioned a witness to God’s power to restore. And the community, now a witness to the restoration of one of its members, is also commissioned a witness to God’s power to restore.

 

V: — The last point to be made tonight: as we ponder together the theme of restoration, and think particularly of the God who restores, we must probe the relation between restoration and rest. Prior to the Fall of humankind “rest” was rest. God rested on the Sabbath. Even so, prior to the Fall, we mustn’t think that “rest” thereby meant “vegging,” utter inactivity. We are often told (incorrectly) that God created the universe in six days. At the end of day six he was finished creating, with the result that on the seventh day he did nothing. This notion is wrong. The creation story in Genesis one tells us that God finished creating on the seventh day. God finished creating on the Sabbath, not prior to the Sabbath. God completed his work of creating on the seventh day. God climaxed and crowned his work on the seventh day, and for this reason hallowed the Sabbath. In other words “rest” in scripture never means “vegging;” “rest” never means “doing nothing.” “Rest” means “completing, crowning, bringing to fulfilment.”

In the wake of the Fall, however, it isn’t a good creation, unqualifiedly good as good from God’s hand, that is to be completed. In the wake of the Fall a good creation now devastated on account of sin has to be restored. Therefore in the wake of the Fall “rest” means “restoration.” “Rest” is now “fulfilment by way of restoration. “Rest” means a restoration that is essential if the creation’s God-intended fulfilment is to be recovered.

In Matthew 11 Jesus says, “Come unto me all who are weary and worn, sick and tired, frazzled and frantic and fed up; come to me and I will give you rest.” Give us utter inactivity? Give us room to “veg?” “Come to me and I will restore you so that God’s intention for you, the fulfilment of his purpose for you; all of this will be recovered.

In Hebrews 4 we are told, “There remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God.” God has promised his people that restoration which is nothing less than the fulfilment of his purpose for us recovered in the wake of our fallen condition. If such restoration is his promise to us and is therefore guaranteed; if this is what we are awaiting, why not anticipate it? Why not begin to live in it and delight in it now?

The psalmist’s suffering brought him to his senses. Now “smartened up,” he sought and was granted that restoration which left him and his congregation rejoicing, praising, singing. Then you and I should pray that God will seize us and shake us until we too come to our senses. For in our prosperity have not you and I said, and said more than once, “I shall never be moved”? And in God’s merciful providence, haven’t we been dismayed? And shouldn’t we now look to God and plead his help?

As we do, we shall find ourselves exclaiming with our 3000 year-old friend, “You have turned my mourning into dancing,” even as we invite the entire congregation to which we belong to join us in the praise and adoration of our great God and Saviour who invariably does all things well.

 

The Reverend Dr. V. Shepherd                                                                                               July 2004

 (FAITH TODAY October 2003)

Marriage

 

“Is it a boy or a girl?” The first question asked concerning a newborn seems pointless since we do nothing with the answer but immediately discuss something else about the babe. But in fact the question is profound, for everybody knows, deep-down, that gender-specificity is essential to our humanness. If the question, “Boy or girl?”, were answered, “Neither”, the questioner would wonder if the neonate were actually human.

A careful reading of Scripture’s creation narratives informs us that the distinction between male and female is the only distinction (among all that differentiate people today) that God has embedded irrevocably in the creation itself. Other distinctions — alienating differences, for instance, of economics, learning, social position — can be overcome and should. For this reason the distinction between learned and ignorant is overcome by socially-sanctioned public education; that between rich and poor by government-mandated income tax and financial redistribution.

In the Genesis accounts the creation of land, water, vegetation, planets and animals is pronounced “good”, whereas the creation of man and woman is pronounced “very good” and is “blessed.” In other words, the man-woman complementarity (“complementarity” by definition restricted to two, and therefore always different from a “mutuality” that accommodates more than two persons of the same gender) is built into the creation, cannot be eradicated, and must not be denied or disdained. This complementarity isn’t an accident of history or a social convention.   Neither is it evil or inherently inhibiting. Marriage, rather, is a God-ordained relationship that can’t be duplicated. It penetrates to our innermost core as no other human bond can. Its companionship is uniquely our creaturely comfort and consolation.

According to God’s plan and purpose marriage is the union of one man and one woman in a lifelong bond that death alone terminates. Marriage is God’s provision for that utterly intimate and intense, consistent and constant human community that humankind craves. Many alternatives for this community may be pursued unwisely even as no substitute for it can be found. While married people are certainly part of a wider community (church, friendships, society) that presupposes inclusivity, exclusivity remains essential to marriage: “open” marriage is a contradiction in terms, since “complementarity”, unlike mutuality, permits only “two” to become “one”, “one flesh.” (“Trial marriage”, like “trial parachute jump”, is a contradiction in terms. The parachutist is either still in the plane — in which case she hasn’t jumped at all — or else she’s in the air — in which case “trial” is inappropriate. “Trial marriage” is simply no marriage at all. As much could be said about common law “marriage.” Marriage entails a legal bond that is publicly attested.)

In a mystery that, like all mysteries, is a commonly experienced reality so very profound as to be beyond explanation, sexual intercourse between a man and a woman not merely expresses such a union but effects it. Scripture’s horror at sexual promiscuity is rooted in its conviction that sexual intimacy is far more than appetite and its relief; sexual intimacy pertains to the binding of two persons to each other, not simply to the linking of body parts. Scripture, of course, concomitantly recognizes the absurd yet sad polygamy/polyandry that promiscuity occasions. For this reason marriage requires an exclusivity apart from which there is no “coupled” unit that simultaneously participates in the inclusivities that God has ordained.

“One flesh” means one, unitary organism of body, mind and spirit. It doesn’t mean that we become clones of each other or mere functions of each other. It doesn’t mean that personality and individuation have been surrendered. Yet neither does it mean that our new union can be likened to two blocks of wood now glued together. For regardless of how tightly glued they might be they never interpenetrate each other. A “one flesh” union, rather, must be likened to a tree-graft. The graft occurs when two living organisms are opened up to each other, are allowed to pervade and suffuse each other, immerse themselves in each other — and thereafter are fused forever. As this occurs a fruitfulness appears that otherwise never would. (Lifelong friendships may appear similar but of course lack crucial features: gender-complementarity, public attestation, legal sanction, and “one flesh” specifically.)

When two trees are grafted together each is first slashed sharply, thereby exposing what was previously hidden and laying bare the innermost substance of each. In this development what each possesses uniquely is made available inimitably to the other. At the same time the slash undeniably renders each tree vulnerable. Plainly, vulnerability is the condition of any union worthy of the description, “one flesh”. If two people are to be married in that union of which our Lord speaks then there must be defenceless openness and self-forgetful self-exposure, together with the sober recognition that the fearsomeness of this rent is the condition of the fusion’s fruitfulness. And at the same time it must be recognized that once a tree-graft has occurred, separation of the parties to the graft is nothing less than dismemberment. Divorce, even when necessary, remains a manifestation of death.

  Everyone’s marriage is molested by sin. Individually and collectively our humanity is distorted by depravities within and dangers without. Then marriage remains resilient, in the face of such depravities and dangers, only as it “borrows from” God’s undiscourageable, undeflectable love for Israel, which love God speaks of as “marriage. Christ himself speaks of his self-renouncing bond with the Church as the model and inspiration of marriage. And since when the faithfulness of the Triune God meets our sin it assumes the form of forgiveness, marriage thrives as we extend a pardon that has been quickened by the greater pardon we’ve already received. We must recall God’s covenant-faithfulness to us whenever our proximity to each other fosters friction and magnifies irritability.

Then marriage endures by self-renouncing faithfulness. The current myth is that it endures by sentiment. Marriage must continue to thrive even on those occasions — whether short-lived or protracted — when two people are feeling less than enraptured.

A corollary to faithfulness is patience. When grass turns brown in the summer sensible people don’t tear up the lawn; they know that in another month the heat will pass and the lawn become green again. Impatience here is not only inappropriate but destructive; it indicates not so much silliness as folly.

   Finally we must remember that while marriage promises what is to be found nowhere else in the creation it cannot provide what it was never meant to; namely, that profoundest contentment found only in God. To expect husband or wife to provide what no human partner can; to expect husband or wife to give what only God supplies is to burden marriage unrealistically.

And we should remember too while unmarried people are deprived of marital intimacy, their deprivation of this creaturely intimacy in no way disadvantages them before God or renders them less usable in his kingdom. Their singleness, offered to God in the spirit of self-renunciation, is a sacrifice he most surely honours.

The truth is, all of us, married and unmarried, always need to hear and heed and cling to him whose burden is light, whose yoke is easy, and whose name is the only name given to us whereby we may be saved.

 

       Funeral Address

                                                                                                      for

                                                                       The Reverend Mr. Brian Robinson

 

   – I –                                                                        

Earlier this week I arrived home from teaching at Tyndale Seminary, after supper, and Maureen informed me of the death of my friend and fellow-minister, Brian Robinson. I was stunned. Because of the way the intra-psychic grooves are worn in my “noodle” I found myself thinking immediately of the untimely death of George Whitefield, the powerful 18^th Century evangelist and colleague of John Wesley. Wesley was born in 1703, Whitefield in 1714. Wesley would die by slipping away quietly, over several days, at the age of 88. Whitefield would die very suddenly of heart trouble at age 56.

Whitefield had crossed the Atlantic thirteen times. The odd number — thirteen — tells you that he died in the New World and was buried there. He went to his reward on September 30, 1770. Because Whitefield died in the New World (Newburyport, Massachusetts) Wesley didn’t learn of his friend’s death until November 10 — six weeks later. Wesley was asked to preach at a memorial service in England; at three of them, in fact.

Finding myself thinking of Wesley’s reaction to the news of Whitefield’s death, I turned up Wesley’s “funeral” sermon (as he called it) for his friend. I was startled, upon reading it again after not having read it for several years, at how much it gathered up exactly what I wanted to say in commemoration of Brian Robinson.

In order to prepare his “funeral” sermon Wesley retreated from his itinerant ministry and secluded himself for a week, writing in his journal, “It was an awful season” — in every sense of “awful.”

The day of the funeral Wesley appeared, sermon in hand, and told the congregation that a major purpose of his address was to “inquire how we may improve (18^th Century English for “profit from”) this awful providence, George Whitefield’s sudden removal from us.”

As I re-read Wesley’s address I noted that his depiction of Whitefield fitted Brian Robinson over and over.

[1] Wesley’s first point: although in the pulpit Whitefield didn’t shrink from reminding hearers of the “whole counsel of God,” including the judgement of God, still, said Wesley, “George had nothing gloomy in his nature, being singularly cheerful, as well as charitable and tender-hearted.” Cheerful (I never met Brian when he wasn’t cheerful), charitable, tender-hearted.

[2] “George had a heart susceptible of the most generous and most tender friendship.” I met Brian in 1988, knew him for fifteen years, and counted him a tender, generous friend.

[3] Whitefield’s demeanour was “frank and open,” but not frank with the frankness that is simply rude, said Wesley; yet frank and open so as never to be cunning or false.

[4] Whitefield’s frankness and openness, continued Wesley, were the both the fruit and the proof of his courage. Brian and I stood shoulder to shoulder in the most turbulent days of our denomination, and I noted that Brian never lacked courage.

[5] Whitefield was flexible, insisted Wesley, pliable, accommodating — but “immovable in the things of God”, immovable in matters of “conscience.”

[6] The foundation of George’s “integrity, sincerity, courage and patience” wasn’t his education (although he was educated;) and it wasn’t his friendships (although he benefited from many); rather it was, said Wesley, “no other than faith in a bleeding Lord.”

Having said this much about Whitefield (as I have said in equal measure about Brian), Wesley asked his hearers, “But how shall we improve (profit from) this awful providence?” — and answered, “By keeping close to Whitefield’s doctrines, and by keeping close to Whitefield’s spirit.”

What were Whitefield’s doctrines?

1. humankind’s total inability to save itself, its total lack of merit by which it would deserve to be saved.
2. Jesus Christ as the sole meritorious cause of our blessing, “in particular of our pardon and acceptance with God.”
3. Justification, by which we are given new standing before God and are restored to God’s favour.
4. The New Birth, by which we are given a new nature from God and are restored to God’s image.

Don’t Whitefield’s doctrines square with Brian’s? They certainly do with the Brian I knew and loved.

Still, said Wesley, if we keep close to Whitefield’s doctrines only we merely increase our condemnation. Therefore we must keep close to Whitefield’s spirit as well. And Whitefield’s spirit, said Wesley, was catholic love. For decades Whitefield had embraced Christians who were zealous for their Lord and his gospel regardless of denominational affiliation. Whitefield was an Anglican, but he was always at home among Presbyterians and Congregationalists and Baptists, at home among any and all who loved their Lord “with love undying”, in the words of Paul. Wesley spoke of Whitefield’s “catholic love” as “that sincere and tender affection which is due to all those who, we have reason to believe, are children of God by faith; in other words, all those in every persuasion who ‘fear God and work righteousness’…of whatever opinion, mode of worship, or congregation.”

Only two weeks ago Brian contacted me concerning his visit to the USA on behalf of the Association of Church Renewal, the organization whose meetings he had attended for years and in which he cherished and was cherished by Christians from every branch of the church catholic.

                                                                          – II –

I met Brian at an early meeting of the community of the Community of Concern in May, 1988, in the wake of the single largest crisis to come upon The United Church of Canada. He won my heart instantly, for Brian knew that conflict, both theological conflict and institutional conflict, couldn’t be avoided however distasteful conflict always is.

If conflict is inevitable for all Christians at some point then the most important matter facing the Christian is the matter of armour. With what are we to arm ourselves? The apostle Paul discusses the armour suitable for Christ’s people in Ephesians 6. The only offensive weapon he mentions is “the sword of the Spirit.” He lists several items of defensive armour, one of which is the “shield of faith.” This shield, he insists, is able to nullify “all the flaming arrows of the evil one.”

In Paul’s day arrows were dipped in tar and then ignited. A soldier without a shield would be skewered and burnt immediately. The apostle knew that life hurls countless “flaming arrows:” we are exquisitely vulnerable creatures. “Flaming arrows”?   We need think only of sudden and intense affliction, protracted illness, crushing disappointment, betrayal, knee-shaking temptation. In all of this faith, and faith alone (i.e., our bond to Jesus Christ in his presence and power) is our defence, our security, our life.

All of us have had to contend with major stress or threat looming at us from one direction only to be speared and seared by something coming from another direction. We weren’t looking for the second assault, didn’t expect it, and weren’t equipped for it on account of our preoccupation with the frontal adversity. Confusion and disorientation — panic even — were soon upon us.

Yet, exclaims the apostle, faith is the shield that nullifies all flaming arrows. He has in mind the Parthian army’s defeat of a Roman army in 53 B.C.E. The Parthians, under General Surenas (a military genius), fired arrows in a high trajectory upon their Roman foes. The Roman soldiers held their shields above their heads while the projectiles rained down upon them — at which point the Parthians fired a second salvo straight ahead, chest high. While their opponents were still reacting to the second salvo, a third, in a high trajectory, fell down on them once again. Their shields couldn’t protect them against attack from two directions simultaneously. Moreover, because all these arrows had been dipped in pitch and then ignited, as soon as an arrow stuck in a shield it set the shield on fire. Attack from above, attack from in front, the soldiers’ protection aflame: they were helpless, and their situation was hopeless. Demoralization soon guaranteed one of the worst military defeats Rome would ever know. With this item of recent history in mind the apostle repeats yet again, “Faith in Jesus Christ is sufficient in the face of all life’s flaming arrows.”

When the apostle spoke of the shield of faith he was drawing even more from his treasure-store of military lore. As a Roman army advanced, each soldier’s shield, carried on the left arm, protected two-thirds of his own body and one-third of the body of the man on his left. Every soldier counted on the man on his right to protect the right-most one-third of his body that would otherwise be fatally exposed. How many people profited from the spiritual protection that Brian’s faith-shield afforded? And what a privilege it was for some of us to afford him the protection we were commissioned to provide.

There is one thing more we need to know about the shield of faith. When the mothers of Sparta sent their sons off to battle their last word was, “Come home with your shield, or come home on it; but don’t come home without it.” If their soldier-son came home without his shield then plainly he had surrendered. In disgrace now, it would be better for him not to come home at all. If, however, he came home with his shield, then he had triumphed gloriously. And if he came home on it, then he had fallen nobly in battle and was now borne home with honour. The same shield that equipped the soldier in life brought him home, with honour, in death. Faith is the shield on which Christ’s soldier is carried home.

 

– III –

When I learned of Brian’s death earlier this week I had been thinking of Easter Sunday and what I was going to say then. Several weeks ago I had decided that I was going to preach on the text from 1^st Corinthians 15: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished… and we are of all men most to be pitied.”

Paul’s logic is faultless. If Christ hasn’t been raised, then death has the last word; death is the last word, for everyone. Romantics may disguise death romantically and pretend any number of silly things about death, but such people are mere romantics: they invent groundless fantasy.

But Christ has been raised from the dead. The trust that you and I have placed in him isn’t misplaced, can’t be misplaced. We can entrust our departed loved one, Brian, to the care and keeping of God who now preserves him as surely as he has preserved his own son.

Christ has been raised from the dead. We are not deluded folk living in an illusion. We live in truth, and will never have to be pitied, let alone pitied above all others.

 

– IV –

Wesley again. At the service where he spoke of his departed friend, Wesley reminded hearers that his own heart had been drawn to Whitefield 35 years earlier as he came to love Whitefield with uncommon affection. Wesley’s terse comment on the love that Whitefield had awakened in him was, “Can anything but love beget love?”

Years earlier Whitefield himself had anticipated his own passing. His remark concerning his own death and that of others was equally pithy and profound: “For the Christian, instant death means instant glory.”

Anticipating both Wesley and Whitefield and all who love Jesus Christ with love undying the apostle Paul had cried, “Be sure to take the shield of faith.”

Faith is still the shield on which the saint is taken home, taken home with honour. And taken home how quickly? “Instant death, instant glory.” And what has brought you and me to this service today? Love. Love for Brian who also loved us. Above all, love for our Lord who first loved us. For — “Can anything but love beget love?”
Victor Shepherd        April 2003

IN THE HIGH COURT OF NEW ZEALAND
AUCKLAND REGISTRY

                                                                                              CP NO. 183/SW01

BETWEEN     VILIAMI ‘AKAU’OLA

First Plaintiff

AND                VILIAMI PALU

Second Plaintiff

AND               THE PRESIDENT OF THE CONFERENCE OF THE METHODIST CHURCH OF NEW ZEALAND

First Defendant

AND               THE BOARD OF ADMINISTRATION OF THE METHODIST CHURCH OF NEW ZEALAND INCORPORATED

Second Defendant

AND                REVEREND PESETI TUKUTAU

Third Defendant

 

 

OPINION OF VICTOR SHEPHERD

 

 

VALLANT HOOKER & PARTNERS
Barristers & Solicitors
Ponsonby, Auckland

Solicitor Acting: R J Hooker
PO Box 47 088; DX CP30015, Ponsonby
Ph:   (09) 360 0321
Fax: (09) 3609291

l:\docman\docbase\shepherd.opinion.doc

I, VICTOR SHEPHERD state:-

1. I was instructed by Counsel for the plaintiffs in these proceedings to provide expert testimony to the court on one of the issues before the Court namely whether  a decision by the conference of the New Zealand Methodist church to admit a person into full connexion as a minister  a person who was a practising homosexual is to alter or change the doctrines of the Methodist Church of New Zealand as found in the standard sermons of John Wesley and his notes on the New Testament. For the reasons set out in this opinion I conclude that the decision of the New Zealand Conference is to change or alter doctrine.
2. I was provided with the following passages of the Laws and Regulations of the New Zealand Methodist Church :-

“AUTHORITY
1.1       The Conference is the governing body of the Methodist Church of New Zealand and has vested in it final authority on all matters of the
Church.  Its decisions are accordingly final and binding on both Ministry
and Laity.

1.2       Notwithstanding the provisions of Sections 5-1.1  Conference shall have no power:-
(a)        To revoke, alter or change any doctrines of the Church as
contained in the Standard Sermons of John Wesley and his notes on the New Testament, nor to establish any new doctrine contrary thereto;
(b)       To revoke “The General Rules of the Societies”;
(c)       To make such changes in the discipline as to do away with the
itinerancy of the Ministry;
(d)        To do away with the right of trial and appeal of Members and
Ministers of the Church;”

Property
3.2(h) Seeing that the property in the Parish is not used for
any purpose forbidden by the Laws if the Church or for any purposes,
entertainments or amusements which conflict with the purpose for which the Church was called into being, or contrary to what is contained in the Standard Sermons of John Wesley and his Notes on the New Testament.”

 

  BACKGROUND & EXPERTISE

  3.    I currently occupy the Donald N. and Kathleen G. Bastian Chair of Wesley Studies, Tyndale Seminary, Toronto . It is the only Chair of Wesley Studies in Canada . At Tyndale Seminary I am also Professor of Historical Theology. I am also Adjunct Professor, Toronto School of Theology, University of Toronto . I attach my full curriculum vitae. I have been accepted by a Court in Canada as an expert witness on the doctrines of the Methodist Church found in the writings of John Wesley.

 

REFERENCES

4. In formulating my opinion it is necessary to have regard to the following notes sermons and writings of John Wesley:-

ROMANS 1:26-28

Therefore God gave them up with vile affections; for even their women changed their natural use to that which is against nature: (27)And likewise also men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust toward each other, men with men working filthiness, and receiving in themselves the just recompense of their error. (28)And as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them up to an undiscerning mind, to do the things which were not expedient: Filled with all injustice, fornication…….

Wesley comments on Romans 1:26 , “Therefore God gave them up to vile affections—To which the heathen Romans were then abandoned to the last degree; even the emperors themselves.”

Here Wesley is plainly referring to the well-attested fact that several Roman emperors behaved sexually in a way that was not exclusively heterosexual (if at all). Their behaviour was known and noted among Christians in that Christians were notorious for an understanding of human sexuality that repudiated any and all sexual expressions except marital intercourse. Wesley mentions women as well as men, since any non-marital (and therefore non-heterosexual intercourse) was understood throughout the Church as falling outside what God has ordained as proper sexual expression and therefore pertaining to the human good. Note that Wesley speaks of same-gender genital intimacy as “vile” and an instance of “filthiness”(27).

Wesley comments on 1:27 , “Receiving the just recompense of their error—Their idolatry: being punished with that unnatural lust, which was as horrible a dishonour of the body, as their idolatry was to God.”

“Unnatural lust” plainly refers to same-gender sexual craving, and Wesley maintains that it dishonours the body (implying that it thereby dishonours the Creator of that body) and as such dishonours god. Here he associates idolatry with “men with men working filthiness”. “Working” indicates what these men do. In calling it “error” he does not mean that it is non-culpable or a trifle or an inadvertence.

Wesley comments on Romans 1:28 , “God gave them up to an undiscerning mind (treated of, ver.32)to things not expedient–Even the vilest abominations: treated of, ver.20-31.”

Then Wesley continues, in his exposition of 29-31, to list “Every vice contrary to justice”. He mentions fornication first. “Fornication here includes every species of uncleanness.” Plainly the “vile affections”(26) and “that which is against nature”(26) and “men…burned in their lust toward each other, men with men working filthiness” is gathered up in “uncleanness”.

Romans 1:28 he discusses in his comment on Romans 1:32 , “But have pleasure in those that practise them — This is the greatest wickedness. A man may be hurried by his passions to do the things he hates. But he that has pleasure in those that do evil, loves wickedness for wickedness’ sake; and hereby he encourages them in sin, and heaps the guilt of others upon his own head.”

Here Wesley, with pastoral wisdom and sensitivity, distinguishes between the unguarded person whose surge of desire overtakes him in the very thing he knows he should hate and the person who finds pleasure in others who do evil, loves the wickedness itself, thereby encourages perpetrators in their wickedness, and brings the guilt of others upon himself. To be sure, Wesley is not restricting the application of his comment to “uncleanness”, but he certainly includes such “uncleanness”.

– – – –

In his Sermons Wesley amplifies Romans 1:26, wherein same-gender genital intimacy is referred to, “The will…was now seized by legions of vile affections”. [4:298]

ROMANS 2:14

For when the Gentiles, who have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these not having the law, are a law to themselves;

Wesley comments, “Do by nature–That is, without an outward rule; though this also, strictly speaking, is by preventing [i.e., prevenient, anticipatory] grace. The things contained in the law–The ten commandments being only the substance of the law of nature….”

By “Being only the substance of the law of nature” Wesley means “not less than the substance of the law of nature.” (For Wesley’s understanding of relation of the ten commandments to Jesus Christ, see V.Shepherd’s document below.) Wesley is aware that the ten commandments explicitly forbid adultery. He insists too (see V.Shepherd) that the ten commands are but the “heads” of the law of God; i.e., the commandment forbidding adultery comprehends all of the Old Testament precepts pertaining to sexual behaviour, including those that forbid homosexual genital intimacy. (E.g., “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.” Leviticus 18:22 RSV) Wesley’s understanding of the ten commandments as but the “heads” of the law or God precludes any suggestion that adultery is forbidden but homosexual intimacy is not.

In his comment on Romans 1:28 Wesley speaks of any and all “uncleanness” as “vilest abominations.” He cannot be understood to endorse or even permit homosexual behaviour.

ROMANS 2:16

In the day when God will judge the secretes of men by Christ Jesus, according to my gospel.

Wesley comments, “According to my gospel–According to the tenor of that gospel which is committed to my care. The gospel also is a law.”

His lattermost remark, “The gospel also is a law”, is crucial. The gospel is the good news of salvation, and as such exercises no less a claim upon people than the explicit claims of the law. Since the gospel aims at saving humankind from every kind of uncleanness, the gospel has the same force here as the promulgation of the law. Accordingly, all references to “gospel” or “Jesus Christ” in the Wesley corpus carry with them the implicit claim that all beneficiaries of the gospel (i.e., all who make a profession of Christian faith) repudiate all expressions of “uncleanness”.

1^ST CORINTHIANS 6:9

Know ye not that the unjust shall not inherit the kingdom of God ? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolators, nor adulterers, nor the effeminate, nor Sodomites.

Here Wesley explicitly mentions sodomy as disqualification for the kingdom of God . To be sure, he reads “effeminate” idiosyncratically as those who “live in any easy, indolent way, taking up no cross, enduring no hardship”. His point is that these latter people are no less disqualified than “idolators and Sodomites”.

He comments on this verse, “But why are these good-natured, harmless people ranked with idolators and Sodomites? To teach us that we are never secure from the greatest sins, till we guard against those which are thought least; nor indeed till we think no sin is little since every one is a step towards hell.”

Evidently he intends here the following: [1] all self-indulgence is sin; [2] only vigilance against lesser sin will safeguard us against the “greatest sins”; [3] every sin is a road whose destination is hell.

Notwithstanding his idiosyncratic reading of “effeminate” he states [1] sodomy is sin, and (among) the “greatest”; [2] lesser and greater alike, undiscerned, unrepented of, unrepudiated will issue in eternal loss.

1^ST CORINTHIANS 6:11

And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.

Wesley comments, “And such were some of you: but ye are washed from those gross evils; and inwardly sanctified, not before, but in consequence of, your being justified in the name, that is, by the merits of the Lord Jesus, through which your sins are forgiven; and by the Spirit of our God, by whom ye are thus washed and sanctified.”

Wesley includes adultery and sodomy as “gross evils”. He emphasises, “not before, but in consequence of”, the fact that the cleansing of the sodomite Corinthians presupposes and in fact is intrinsically related to their having been justified (for Wesley, this means pardoned or forgiven). Pardon, of course, always presupposes guilt; forgiveness always presupposes relief from merited condemnation. The person who is pardoned has already been pronounced guilty. In his “through which your sins are forgiven” Wesley obviously includes sodomy as sin.

– – – –

In his Sermons Wesley amplifies 1^st Corinthians 6:9, “And we know that not only fornicators and adulterers, but even the ‘soft and effeminate’, the delicate followers of a self-denying master, ‘shall have no part in the kingdom of Christ and of God’.” [3:150]

Elsewhere in the Sermons Wesley, again amplifying the biblical text mentioned above, faults the abuse of “the imputed righteousness of Christ” wherein someone who stands indicted by the catena of sins in 1^st Cor. 6:9 claims the righteousness of Christ “as a over for his unrighteousness. We have known this done a thousand times. Such a person “…replies with all assurance, ‘…I pretend to no righteousness of my own: Christ is my righteousness”…. “And thus though a man be as far from the practice as from the tempers [Wesley characteristically uses this word to mean “dispositions’] of a Christian, though he neither has the mind which was in Christ nor in any respect walks as he walks…”. Again, Wesley regards all non-heterosexual expression to be inconsistent with Christian discipleship (“walk”). [1:462]

In speaking of life-change effected in the Corinthians through gospel as they repudiated their former behaviour, Wesley comments in the Sermons, “So the Corinthians were. ‘Ye are washed,’ says the Apostle, ‘ye are sanctified:’ namely cleansed from ‘fornication, idolatry, drunkenness’, and all other outward sin.” Wesley regards what the Corinthians had been about to be sin. [1:326]

1^ST TIMOTHY 1:8-10

(8)We know the law is good, if a man use it lawfully; (9)Knowing this , that the law doth no lie against a righteous man; but against the lawless and disobedient, against the ungodly and sinners, the unholy and profane, against killers of their fathers or their mothers, against murderers, (11)Against whoremongers, sodomites, men-stealers, liars, perjured person, and if there be any other thing that is contrary to wholesome doctrine.

In his comment Wesley says nothing about “whoremongers” and “sodomites”, in his taste to denounce the practice of slavery (“men-stealers”). Still, his comment on verse 8 is noteworthy: “We grant the whole Mosaic law is good, answers excellent purposes, if a man use it in a proper manner. The ceremonial is good, as it points to Christ; and the moral law is holy, just and good, and of admirable use to convince unbelievers, and to guide believers in all holiness.” It is to be noted here that [1] the moral law includes the prohibition against sodomy; [2] sodomy is a sign of unbelief; [3] since sodomy is a contradiction of holiness, those aspiring to holiness repudiate it by using the law lawfully. (1:8)

In his comment on 1^st Timothy 1:9 Wesley says, “The law doth not lie against a righteous man, (doth not strike or condemn him,)but against the lawless and disobedient — They who despise the authority of the Lawgiver, violate the first commandment, which is the foundation of the law, the ground of all obedience. Against the ungodly and sinners, who break the second commandment, worshipping idols, instead of the true God. The unholy and profane¸ who break the third commandment by taking his name in vain.” Wesley includes sodomy in the “lawless and disobedient”, and he goes on to show that the perpetrators mentioned in 1:10 violate the first three commandments. Sodomy is an instance of lawlessness, disobedience, ungodliness, unholiness and profanity.

In his comment on 1^st Timothy 1:11 he insists that the gospel, so far from voiding the law, establishes it. In other words, anyone who claims to be a beneficiary of the gospel (i.e., a Christian) is thereby pledged to uphold the law.

JUDE 7

Even as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities about them, which in the same manner with these gave themselves over to fornication, and went after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.

Wesley comments on Jude 7, “The cities who gave themselves over to fornication — The word here means, unnatural lusts: are set forth as an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire — The vengeance which they suffered is a type of eternal fire.” “Fornication” means “unnatural lust”. What this denotes is not in doubt in light of his comment on Romans 1. (See above.) The vengeance the cities suffered they suffered inasmuch as God avenged himself; i.e., judgement was rendered and enacted. Prefatory to all of this is Wesley’s comment on Jude 6: “…eternal displeasure toward the same work of his hands…because he ever loveth righteousness and hateth iniquity.”

2^ND PETER 2:7-10

And delivered righteous Lot , grieved with the filthy behaviour of the wicked…them that walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness.

Wesley translates the Greek word “aselgeia” as “filthy behaviour. Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament puts forward “sensuality”, “indecency”, “vice”. The same Greek word is used in several places, together with similar descriptors: e.g., “uncleanness and wantonness” (Romans 13:13 , Wesley’s translation), “uncleanness, and fornication and lasciviousness” (2^nd Corinthians 12:21 , Wesley), and “adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness” (Galatians 5:19 , Wesley).

– – – –

In Galatians 5:19 Wesley uses “aselgeia” again, and adds in the Sermons concerning this text, “‘They who are of Christ’…abstain from all the works of the flesh: from ‘adultery and fornication’; from ‘uncleanness and lasciviousness’;…from every design, and word, and work to which the corruption of nature leads.” [1:236]

Still amplifying Galatians 5:19 Wesley adds, “It is by him [the Spirit] they are delivered from anger and pride, from all vile and inordinate affections.” Wesley’s use of “vile” here denotes every expression of sexual “uncleanness”.

In his exposition of the Sermon on the Mount Wesley refers to Galatians 5:19 and therein speaks of the Christian, “This is only the outside of that religion which he insatiably hungers after…the being ‘purified as he is pure’ — this is the righteousness he thirsts after.”

REVELATION 22:11,14,15

He that is unrighteous, let him be unrighteous still; and he that is filthy, let him be filthy still….Happy are they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in by the gates into the city. Without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and every one that loveth and maketh a lie.

Wesley speaks of “dogs” as “fierce and rapacious men, even as the term is widely taken, following Old Testament precedent, to mean “homosexual”. It is to be noted that the people spoken of in 22:15 are denied access to the tree of life and are not admitted to the city [the new Jerusalem].

EPHESIANS 4:19

Who being past feeling, have given themselves up to lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness.

Here Wesley translates “aselgeia” as “lasciviousness” and “akatharsia” as “uncleanness”. Elsewhere in his New Testament Notes Wesley deems “uncleanness” to include sodomy.

 

THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS AS WESLEY’S CURE FOR ANTINOMIAN AND MORALIST ALIKE

See “Appendix 2”

5. IT should be noted that Wesley dreaded antinomianism (the notion that the moral law had been relaxed for Christians) as he dreaded little else. His denunciation of antinomianism and his caution to Methodists concerning it are found in his Works passim. One particular instance of his concern here is illustrated by his three sermons printed consecutively in his Fifty-two Standard Sermons (numbers 34,35, 36):-

            The Original, Nature, Properties, and Use of the Law,

            The Law Established through Faith, I,

            The Law Established through Faith, II.

Note his insistence in the lattermost tract, “`We establish the law’…when we so preach faith in Christ as not to supersede but produce holiness: to produce all manner of holiness, negative and positive, of the heart and of the life.”(p.38, Volume 2, Wesley’s Works.) It should be noted too that Wesley everywhere regarded “enthusiasm” (the elevation of experience above scripture) as the godless parent of its godless offspring, antinomianism. It is no surprise, then, to see him follow his three sermons on the Law of God with The Nature of Enthusiasm.

It should be noted in this regard that John Wesley explicitly condemned homosexual behaviour in his longest tract, The Doctrine of Original Sin (1757). The “pederasty” of which he spoke includes homosexual sodomy between adult males as well, more specifically, that between adult and juvenile males. In his Notes on the New Testament (one of the standards of Methodism) Wesley comments on the reference to homosexual behaviour in Romans 1:26-27, “Receiving the just recompense of their error — Their idolatry, being punished with that unnatural lust, which was as horrible a dishonour to the body, as their idolatry was to God.” Concerning the “base fellows” of Judges 19:16-30, men who were bent on homosexual indulgence, Wesley, following the English text of the Authorized (King James) Version of the bible, speaks of “sons of belial”, and adds, “Children of the devil, wicked and licentious men.” With respect to Jude 7, “Even as Sodom and Gomorrah , and the cities about them, which in the same manner with these gave themselves over to fornication…” (“the surrounding cities, which likewise acted immorally and indulged in unnatural lust…” RSV), Wesley comments on “fornication”: “The word here means unnatural lusts: are set forth as an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire — That is, the vengeance which they suffered is an example or a type of eternal fire.” The passage from the “Holiness Code” of Leviticus (“You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination” — Lev. 18:22 ) Wesley addresses by referring the reader to his comments on Romans 1:26 -27. He does as much with a similar passage in Lev. 20:13. He plainly thought that a point he had made unambivalently once he could make thereafter by referring the reader to it without the bother of rewriting it.   Several points need to be made here:- =

(i)              While Wesley says relatively little about homosexual behaviour, scripture as a whole says only enough to remind readers of what everyone is supposed to know: homosexual behaviour is an abomination to God and is to be shunned by men and women. (Jesus nowhere comments on spouse-abuse. No one would conclude, given the silence of Jesus on this matter, that he was in favour of it. Everything that Jesus says in the course of his earthly ministry militates against it. In other words, the explicit teaching of Jesus himself, together with his endorsement of the wisdom of Israel (he said he came not to abolish the law and the prophets [the Old Testament] but to fulfil them), provides the context that interprets not only what Jesus says but what he does not bother to mention in that it is indisputable. It cannot be imagined that in the primitive Christian communities a spouse-abuser could expect to be exonerated on the grounds that his Lord had not explicitly forbidden it.);

(ii)             In Wesley’s era it would not be contested that homosexual behaviour was immoral, even perverse, falling outside what God pronounces “good”, and therefore to be eschewed;

(iii)            Wesley’s civility and good taste (deemed desirable in an Oxford-educated, 18th century Anglican clergyman) would prevent him from amplifying a matter in which he knew everyone in the church catholic to agree with him in any case;

(iv)            There is nothing in Wesley’s theology or hymns or correspondence that suggests he approved in the slightest or regarded as permissible same-gender genital contact;

(v)             As someone ordained in the Church of England (and as someone whose Holy Orders were neither revoked nor surrendered), and as someone who always insisted that the theology, liturgy and governance of the Church of England were the finest to be found in Christendom, Wesley would unquestionably have rejected as a candidate for ordination or as a leader in local congregations anyone who engaged in homosexual behaviour;

Wesley’s laconic comment must be heard: “I allow no other rule, whether of faith or practice, than the Holy Scriptures.” (Wesley, Works, Vol. XIX, p.73).

 

DATED at Auckland this                 day of                                     2002.

 

……………………………………….

VICTOR SHEPHERD

Eight Canadian Martyrs

 

Protestants who are quick to defend the Sixteenth-Century Reformation leaders — Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Bucer, Bullinger, Beza — are equally ready to explain why these theological giants seemed completely unconcerned with mission. The usual explanation is that they were preoccupied with forging doctrine, doctrine that demanded to be re-written in view of some Roman Catholic teaching, at least, that appeared to obscure the gospel.

Everyone today admits that the Church urgently needed reforming. The extent to which doctrinal re-articulation had to match institutional cleansing, however, is a matter of opinion. Beyond dispute is the fact that other “families” within the Church at this time, such as the Anabaptists (whose descendants are Mennonites, Hutterites and Amish people), as well as Roman Catholics whose Counter-Reformation found them as concerned with doctrine as the most zealous Reformer; these groups never allowed controversy to eclipse their conviction concerning their Lord’s mandate. Always aware of Christ’s claim upon them and his command to “Go and make disciples of all the nations”, and newly aided by improvements in navigation, Anabaptist and Catholic went obediently to bear witness to their Lord.

It appears, then, that mainline Protestants can only admit and lament the puzzling blind spot that their Reformation foreparents alone possessed amidst all the parties who staggered through the Reformation’s upheavals. The Mennonites sent missioners into Central and South America. The Roman Catholics sent them everywhere, westward to the Americas and eastward to India, even farther to Japan. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order (“Society of Jesus”), had prepared his men to be the leading edge of the Church’s mission to areas that were always difficult, frequently dangerous, and occasionally lethal.

Just as visions had been crucial in the spiritual formation and vocation of Loyola one hundred years earlier, vision would be no less crucial in the spiritual life of missioner and people, for Jean de Brebeuf was privileged to “see”, one night amidst his comfortable life in France, a flaming cross suspended above the Huron encampment in the New World. Thereafter he never doubted what he was to do or why.

Modern anthropologists think it likely that the Hurons were originally an Iroquois tribe, albeit isolated from the five tribes comprising the Iroquois confederacy: Cayugas, Oneidas, Onanadagas, Senecas and Mohawks. Eventually the Iroquois and Hurons were at war.

When Etienne Brule, the eighteen-year-old who was the first Caucasian to visit the Hurons, came upon them in 1613, they were 30,000-strong. Slaughter at the hands of the Iroquois and devastation through European disease had reduced their number to 12,000 in 1639, the year the Jesuit missions commenced.

Unordained missioners (donnes) who devoted themselves to assisting the Jesuits erected Ste. Marie, the compound consisting of a chapel, a storeroom and a hospital. Soon the gospel radiated from Ste. Marie to four other mission outposts, the farthest, St. Jean de Baptiste, adjacent to Orillia. The work was exacting; the black flies and other pests oppressive; the summers hot and the Georgian Bay winters biting; and of course the threat from the Iroquois relentless. On account of the latter, the trip to Quebec City, the capital of New France, saw paddlers labouring upstream, north to French River, east to the Ottawa, then down the Ottawa and St. Lawrence. A one-way trip took 22 days.

Rene Goupil was the first of the eight Christian martyrs. Trained in medicine and surgery, Goupil withdrew from the Jesuit training program in France on account of his deafness. Offering himself as a lay missionary, he found himself assigned to Huronia. While returning from Quebec City he and his party were overrun at Trois Rivieres. Most of the men perished on the spot. The Iroquois took the remaining few to upstate New York and tortured them for days. A tomahawk ended his life in September, 1642.

The best-known missionary martyrs are Jean de Brebeuf and Gabriel Lalemant. Born in Normandy in 1593, Brebeuf began studying for the priesthood in Rouen, France. By 1626 he was ministering to aboriginal people in a village on Penetanguishene Bay (Ontario.) On account of treaty disputes between the French and the English he had to return to France, only to find himself, five years later, among the Huron people once again. Blamed for crop failures and Iroquois victories, Brebeuf was beaten repeatedly by the people to whom he had given himself. In March 1649, twelve hundred Iroquois capture the mission station at St. Louis (ten kilometres from Ste. Marie.)

Lalemant, born to the scholarly world of Seventeenth Century Paris, entered the Jesuit novitiate as a teenager and was ordained nine years later in Bourgues. His intellectual brilliance gained him a position as Professor of Philosophy at Moulins. Not content with academic life, however, the slightly built man begged his superiors to send him overseas to join his two uncles, Fathers Jerome and Charles, who were in charge at that time of all Roman Catholic missions in New France. An uncle posted him to Quebec City, eventually succumbing to Lalemant’s importuning and moving him to Huronia. Lalemant had been working alongside Brebeuf for only one month when he too was captured by the same raiding party. Both men were tortured repeatedly, one torment being a “baptism” in boiling water. In March 1649 the two men found release in death. As soon as the Iroquois returned home, French traders gathered up their remains and buried them at Ste. Marie.

None of what has been written above suggests in any way uncommon cruelty among the First Nations People. None of it denies the manner in which Europeans subsequently victimized the native people. It does confirm, nonetheless, a truth that Scripture announces on every page: all humans are alike creatures of the Fall. All are possessed of murderous hearts — as history attests time and again. The martyred missionaries knew something more: all without exception are beneficiaries the One whose outstretched arms embraced eight brave men, and through them embraced without reservation Huron, Iroquois, French, English; all who may now call, “Lord, remember me.”

Victor Shepherd

 

(in  TOUCHSTONE, Sept. 2002)

Adolphus Egerton Ryerson

1803-1882

 

Egerton Ryerson was born March 24, 1803, in Vittoria (near Port Dover, Ontario), one of nine children of Joseph Ryerson and Mehetabel Stickney. His parents were descendants of Dutch Protestants who had wearied of the suffocation born of Europe’s class confinement and craved the opportunities the New World afforded. His oldest New World ancestor, Martin Reyerzoon, had landed in New Amsterdam before the British conquest rendered the settlement New York (1664.) In the wake of the British victory the family name was Anglicized to “Ryerson.” Joseph Ryerson, Egerton’s father, forsook Dutch Calvinism and embraced the Church of England.

In 1815, at the close of the War of 1812, Ryerson’s three older brothers, George, William and John, underwent that precisely demarcated shift “from darkness to light” by which Methodism had come to be identified. Soon the twelve year-old Egerton was listening with similar intensity to Methodist preachers. One such, a former blacksmith, unashamed to be known now as “The Old Hammer”, became the means whereby the youngster’s heart was heated white-hot and forged forever.

Ryerson continued farming and studying until he was eighteen, when he thought he should identify publicly with the movement through which he had been spiritually awakened. His father, upon hearing that Egerton had joined the Methodists, responded swiftly and surely: “Leave them or leave home.” Ryerson left home, supporting himself as a student-teacher in the local grammar school.

Rescinding the expulsion, Ryerson’s father pleaded with his son to return. Egerton’s prompt return indicated that he was now as unembittered and unresentful and as he had earlier been courageous — character traits would mark him throughout the struggle and strife soon to surround him for the rest of his life. Labouring on his father’s farm for one year, he left home for good, this time with Joseph’s blessing.

In August 1824 he began studying Latin and Greek with assistance from a near-by schoolmaster. Then in the midst of protracted, serious illness he found himself “addressed” once again in a manner no less turbulent than his spiritual awakening. This time he acknowledged not a summons to discipleship but a vocation to the ministry. One month later he was astride a horse, itinerating throughout the Niagara Peninsula as a Methodist Probationer. Although his formal education was restricted to a few months of instruction in the Classics, he immersed himself in Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke was the principal English philosopher of the Enlightenment), Paley’s Moral and Political Philosophy and Blackstone’s Commentaries. (Ironically, the man who was to design and inaugurate public education in Ontario and whose work would be copied throughout the Canadian nation was almost entirely self-taught, and would continue to school himself for the rest of his life.)

Ryerson preached his first sermon in Beamsville, Ontario. (This village has become dear to many United Church clergy and their families on account of its Albright Gardens and Manor, the final earthly residence for ministers who retire without the means to house themselves.) Before long he was minister of the Yonge Street Circuit. The circuit gathered up the people in the triangle whose outermost points were Pickering, Weston and the south shore of Lake Simcoe. It took him a month to visit all the preaching points within it. On a typical Sunday the twenty-two year old Ryerson found himself riding thirty miles, preaching three times, and addressing two classes.

Then there occurred the momentous event that brought him unprecedented opportunity, altered forever his public image and fixed his name in Canadian history. In 1825 Bishop Mountain of Quebec died. Toronto’s Bishop John Strachan preached on the occasion of Mountain’s death, turning the sermon into both a panegyric lauding the rise and riches of the Church of England in Canada and a poniard aimed at the heart of all who declined the denomination, but with especial denunciation reserved for Methodists.

For years Strachan had been the power broker of the Family Compact, the “Compact” consisting of a handful of rich families who exercised a monopoly on business, finance and education. It aimed at petrifying the social stratification that allowed the privileged to exploit the New World’s version of Britain’s class structure, the worst in Europe. Earlier Strachan had candidated for the ministry of the Church of Scotland. Rejected by the Presbyterians, he had turned to the Anglican Church and then had turned on all who didn’t belong to it. Rising to episcopal pre-eminence, he sought to punish any who didn’t’ support the Compact’s constellation of power, piety, prestige and privilege.

Strachan denigrated the Methodist people, faulting them for a putative American origin and accusing them of American leanings. The Methodist clergy, however, he more than denigrated: he ridiculed them, his scurrility stooping to sneer at them as irremediably ignorant in view of their having inflated themselves into preachers when their intellectual mediocrity should have chained them to plough and shop. Following up his sermon with concrete designs to suppress Methodists, Strachan asked the government for exclusive Anglican access to the Clergy Reserves (the Clergy Reserves being land and the income it generated reserved for the sole use of the church), in addition to a large grant, thereby assuring a Britain made nervous by the nation to the south that Upper Canadian Anglicanism was loyal to the crown. In addition, of course, the inequity of withholding from Methodists the right to solemnize marriages as well as to hold title to church buildings, parsonages and cemeteries; this was to be perpetuated.

Methodists were outraged at Strachan’s vilification of their clergy and his accusation of political treachery and his enforced injustice. They looked around for someone to champion them. Ryerson, only twenty-five years old, penned Methodism’s reply. The pseudonymously written “Review of a Sermon, Preached by the Honourable and Reverend John Strachan” appeared in William Lyon Mackenzie’s paper, The Colonial Advocate. Ryerson voiced Methodism’s disgust at the Anglican Church’s political prostitution. Stressing again that he had no complaint with Anglican doctrine or liturgy, Ryerson noted that Strachan appeared unaroused on matters pertaining to the gospel yet implacably vehement and venomous when finances were at stake. Replying to Strachan’s assertion that a Christian nation without an established Church was inherently self-contradictory, Ryerson reminded readers that the gospel had thrived in the hands of the apostles even though the latter had been without state support. As for the “ignorance” of the Methodist clergy, Ryerson listed the books mandated for Methodist candidates for ordination, and recalled John Wesley’s insistence that all Methodist preachers study five hours per day. Concerning the imputation of American origin, Ryerson noted that the Wesleyan Methodists had never known an American root, while by 1825 there were scarcely any in the Methodist Episcopal Church (a denomination that had originated in the United States) who were American-born. He reminded his accusers that his parents had been United Empire Loyalists who had left the Republic out of loyalty to the British Crown. He argued conclusively that Strachan’s sly slander concerning “U.E.L.s” (they were not to be trusted since they might have absorbed unknowingly the worst of republicanism with its rejection of tradition and its elevation of the masses and its affinity for a government that Strachan’s echelon regarded as little more than mob rule); this innuendo was groundless. Methodists weren’t American sympathizers infested with republicanism.

Furthermore, why should the state favour the Church of England when only thirty-one of 235 clergy in Upper Canada were Anglican? George Ryerson, brother to Ryerson, weighed in with his written comment that non-preferential treatment shouldn’t be accorded the “temple of spiritual tyranny.” Father Joseph, now aware of his sons’ role in the dispute, cried, “We are all ruined.” Egerton himself relished none of this, finding that controversy, however necessary, issued in “leanness of soul.” Notwithstanding his fear of spiritual enervation, Ryerson’s gospel-engendered polemics bore incontestable fruit: within four years legislation appeared that permitted Nonconformist denominations to own land and their ministers to marry and baptize. The dissolving of the Clergy Reserves took another twenty-five years, when the land was sold off with revenues returning to the government, most of which were redistributed for education.

Ryerson’s concern to counter the Family Compact’s ascendancy, however, never acidulated his spirit or eclipsed all other aspects and implicates of the gospel. After the Methodist Conference of 1826 in Hamilton, he began living among the aboriginal people on the Credit River. Introduced to Peter Jones at a camp meeting of Mississaugas and Mohawks, Ryerson found a spirit-mate in the young native Methodist preacher who had evangelized his people and whose father (Augustus), like Ryerson’s, had been a United Empire Loyalist and whose mother (Tuhbenahbenahneequay), was an Ojibwa. Able now to elicit the help of the aboriginals who trusted him, and recognized precocious besides (within months he could preach to the people in their language), Ryerson’s linguistic ability saw him commissioned to produce a grammar and lexicon of the Mississauga dialect. Immediately he set himself to raising money to build a school and chapel for the natives. Knowing that the Credit River people could furnish few funds for the project, Ryerson returned to his former circuit and old friends, unashamed, like Wesley before him, to beg from door-to-door for an undertaking whose worth neither he nor they ever doubted. The structure was completed in six weeks. Drawing on his agricultural expertise he convinced the natives that fenced land and cultivated fields produced vastly more than either bartering hand-made goods or hunting and gathering in the wild. Their chief, understanding the restless nature of the Methodist itinerancy, dubbed him “A Bird-on-the-Wing.”

The Anglican hierarchy recognized the young minister’s talent and offered to finance a fine formal education if he consented to honour his vocation within the Church of England. Characteristically neither envying nor toadying, he graciously declined the offer, convinced that only crass opportunism would see him leave the people among whom he had come to know God for the sake of self-advancement. He insisted he believed the “Articles of Religion” of the Methodists; he agreed with their constitution; and he never doubted that they were “church” as depicted in Scripture. Never hostile to the Church of England, he would nevertheless remain immovably opposed to its efforts to get itself “established” (thereby making it an aspect of the state), its attempts at preserving its endowments, and its prerogatives that demeaned those less privileged. (When he came to marry, for instance, he and Hannah Aikman had to travel twenty miles to find a Presbyterian clergyman to preside, Presbyterians from the Church of Scotland being allowed some of the privileges denied all Methodists.)

By now the Methodists knew that they had to have their own journal if they were to forestall fragmentation. The Methodist Conference of 1829 minuted the founding of a weekly paper, the Christian Guardian. (All papers in Upper Canada at this time were weeklies.) Ryerson was elected its first editor. Initially distributing 500 copies, in three years it swelled to 3,000. In no time it was the most widely read paper and the most influential of any in the province. The Guardian gathered up Methodist theological concerns, religious issues in everyday life, discussions of the sort of government the people currently had or ought to have, educational reform (always a priority with Ryerson), as well as practical advice in household economics. (While the Methodists opposed the production and consumption of distilled spirits, one issue at least of the Guardian informed readers of the subtleties of beer-brewing.) The paper eclipsed the official Upper Canada Gazette.

Methodism’s successful venture into journalism expanded into book publishing. The Guardian‘s first editor opened a bookstore, selling chiefly books imported from Britain and the U.S.A. The seed was small yet the yield, as in the parable, unforeseeably huge as the Methodist Book Concern metamorphosed into the largest printing and publishing enterprise in Canada. Its sales of imported books underwrote the publishing and distribution of indigenous writers, among whom were Charles G.D. Roberts and Catherine Parr Traill. Renamed The Ryerson Press in 1919 in honour of its founder, it continued to support the work of Canadian writers, including that of two famous poets, Earle Birney and Louis Dudek. Surviving until 1970, it did much to shape the Canadian identity in the twentieth century through the novelists, poets, biographers and historians whose works it made available across the land.

Ryerson’s contribution to the Canadian people through literature developed into a related contribution through a major academic institution, Victoria College. Bishop Strachan had long campaigned for a charter for “King’s College” (later to become the University of Toronto), replete with Anglican privileges. All its professors, for instance, would have to endorse the Thirty-Nine Articles (Anglicanism’s normative doctrinal statement), while veto power over the institution’s council would rest with the Bishop of Lower Canada (Quebec.) The Methodists countered with their own college, situating it in Cobourg, Ontario, at that time the hub of Methodist strength in the province. (Non-Anglican “dissenters” of Calvinist persuasion supported Ryerson in his efforts to end Anglican hegemony in higher education.) In 1836 the Methodists erected Upper Canada Academy, expanding it into Victoria College (1841) and Victoria University (1865, when faculties of law and medicine were added.) Named Victoria’s first principal, Ryerson announced a curriculum as broad as it was deep. In addition to Classics (a mainstay at any university at this time), he added a science department offering courses in chemistry, mineralogy and geography, as well as new departments of philosophy, rhetoric and modern languages (French and German.) Always eschewing one-sidedness anywhere in life, he insisted that each student pursue a balanced programme of the arts and the sciences.

Indisputably, however, Ryerson became a household name, with churches and streets named after him in scores of cities and towns, on account of his colossal achievement concerning public education. Dismayed to see one-half of school-aged children with no formal education and the remaining half averaging only a year’s, and horrified at the poor training and brutal disposition of what passed for “teacher” in too many villages, Ryerson’s people had mirrored the prophet’s word, “precept upon precept…here a little, there a little” (Isaiah 28: 13) as they had pried open the grip of the Family Compact. Ryerson himself was handed unparalleled opportunity the day he was appointed Chief Superintendent of Common Schools for Canada West in 1844. (A “common” school was the social opposite of the elitist private schools.) He was only forty-one. Two years later he was promoted to Chief Superintendent of Education, an office he occupied for the next thirty years, leaving it only to retire. Ryerson persuaded the provincial government to assume responsibility for education. Soon common schools, aided by government grants, appeared wherever twenty students could be gathered. The arrangement was a quantitative leap over the log cabin schoolhouses whose instructors were frequently minimally literate themselves.

Thinking ill of a British school system that perpetuated the worst class divisiveness in Europe, Ryerson visited Continental common schools in Holland, Italy and France, “bookending” his trip with visits to Germany where he could observe the education system that Philip Melanchthon had implemented 300 years earlier.

Melanchthon (1487-1560) had been the first systematic theologian of the Magisterial Reformation. While Luther had penned theological tracts to respond to exigencies in church and society, Melanchthon had “bottled” Luther’s rich “geysering”, scripting his Loci Communes (“Commonplaces”) into a theological textbook that had seen eighteen Latin editions in a few years, as well as numerous German printings.

Yet Melanchthon had wanted to be relieved of his teaching responsibilities in theology in order to concentrate on the humanities. Superbly trained as a humanist (he was recognized the best Greek scholar in Europe following the death of Desiderius Erasmus), he was enormously gifted as linguist and philologist, yet equally at home in philosophy. He had always maintained there to be no substitute for schooling in the humanities and the sciences. (Physics, said Melanchthon, illustrated the harmony of the creation.)

As early as 1524 (he was then only twenty-seven years old) Melanchthon had begun developing public schools throughout Germany; he had reorganized the universities; he had fashioned the pedagogical methods in which hundreds of teachers were trained; and he had written school textbooks, subsequently used by countless pupils.

Germany’s system of public education seared itself upon Ryerson as holding greater promise for Canada than that of any other European nation. Upon his return to Canada he wooed the provincial government into marrying education and tax revenues, thereby providing free education for all. Of course the rich objected, arguing that they shouldn’t have to support the schooling of their social inferiors. Ryerson triumphed. His free education was soon compulsory as well. In it all he elevated teaching from a miserable job to a calling akin to that of the ordained ministry.

George Brown, editor of Toronto’s Globe newspaper, ranted that Ryerson had imported “Prussian” education into Ontario. Ryerson, cultured where Brown was crude, quietly immersed himself in French literature, having taught himself the language so well that he and the pope had conversed in it during his visit to Italy. (Ryerson was prescient in his awareness that all public figures in Canada would have to be conversant in French. In addition he was aware that everywhere in Europe — and therefore why not in Canada — French was the language of culture. No educated person boasted of being unilingual, and no one who aspired to the world of letters was inept in French. Earlier, while principal of Victoria College, he had taught himself Hebrew.)

Ryerson always knew that the life of the mind was a good in itself. The life of the mind was its own justification. Furthermore, it was his conviction that people are commanded to love God with their minds. While it wasn’t sin to be ignorant, it was sin to be more ignorant than they had to be. And it was sheer wickedness for a society to relegate the relatively disadvantaged to lifelong ignorance.

While Ryerson knew that the life of the mind was an end in itself, he also knew that the life of the mind was useful; it had utilitarian significance. People with greater education in fact could do more of greater social usefulness than those who had been unable to gain adequate education. Ryerson knew, then, that the public good was always served by better quality public education.

He knew something else; namely, education didn’t merely equip people to know more, it expanded the universe in which they lived. Education equipped them to live in a different world, a richer world, a world of greater complexity and greater wonder. Deprived of adequate schooling, people would be confined to a much smaller world outside and a commensurately smaller world inside.

Ryerson knew too that public education was essential to social democracy. Political democracy was relatively easy to achieve: each citizen was given the right to vote. Social democracy, however, occurred when all citizens had equal access to opportunities within a society. Ryerson knew that apart from a vibrant public education, social gains couldn’t be retained. The cruel class stratification, with its “invisible ceilings” that precluded socio-economic mobility and frustrated people in private and public “prisons”, would reappear as surely as Strachan and his supporters wanted it to reappear. Like any nineteenth-century thinker apprised of the French Revolution, Ryerson knew that if public education didn’t thrive and with it the release of resentment engendered by the limitations of the place on the social spectrum where one had been born, then different clusters in the society, now frozen into immobility, would turn inward for support and then turn outward in hostility. His educational vision entailed vastly more than schooling: it entailed a vision for a nation, its people and its future.

Ryerson struggled to give birth to, refine, and expand public education with his second last breath. His last breath, of course, was reserved for what was incomparably dear to him and his educational mentor, Philip Melanchthon. “Next to the gospel“, the multi-talented German reformer had exclaimed, “there is nothing more glorious than humanistic learning, that wonderful gift of God.”

Victor Shepherd, Th.D

Professor of Historical Theology and Chair of Wesley Studies

Tyndale Seminary, Toronto