The Trinity Against the Spirit of Unitarianism

(from The Trinity:  An Essential for Faith in Our Time, Evangel Publishing House, 2002)

 

Faced with cultural and religious pluralism the post-modern church in the west appears extraordinarily anxious or extraordinarily accommodating, depending on one’s point of view. The church regards its pluralistic setting as novel and is either tempted to panic and endeavour to preserve itself through a multi-faceted isolationism, or is tempted in its bold engagement with the world to squander the “deposit” (2 Timothy 1:12) which it has been charged to guard. Those prone to worry are more likely to insist on retaining a doctrine of the Trinity, if only to preserve continuity with their forebears in faith, not realizing that “if only” reduces the doctrine to an artifact in the museum of intellectual history. On the other hand, those eager to meet challenges are more likely to jettison any doctrine of the Trinity as an encumbrance which inhibits the church in its witness to the gospel and its exemplification of it in the common life of the world.

One issue facing the church, then, is this: is the doctrine of the Trinity baggage which is not only unnecessary but is actually a threat to the seaworthiness of the ship (church) as it appears to founder in the storms of modernity? or is it ballast in the ship’s keel apart from which the ship will capsize in even moderate winds?

I submit that apart from the doctrine of the Trinity “gospel” is rendered indistinguishable from religious aspiration or projection, while “Spirit” is reduced to a magnification of anything that the Fall-darkened heart and mind of humankind may conceive, and “church” becomes nothing more than one more social group (albeit in religious guise) which seeks to promote the agenda of its constituents. In short, without the doctrine of the Trinity the arch counter-miracle will occur: wine will be turned into water as the gospel is denatured.

In maintaining the doctrine of the Trinity to belong to the being of the faith rather than merely to its wellbeing I am not holding up as etched in stone the expression of any one thinker’s understanding; neither Augustine’s nor Aquinas’s nor Calvin’s nor Barth’s. Nonetheless, I am convinced that just as these thinkers were impelled to speak on behalf of the Triune God in order to forestall the acculturation of the gospel in their day, we must do as much in ours, all the while endeavouring to obey the fifth commandment; namely, to honour our parents (including our theological foreparents) in order that the days of the church may be long in the land which God gives us.

II: — I agree with those who maintain that a fully-articulated doctrine of the Trinity is not found in scripture. Nonetheless, the building blocks of the doctrine incontrovertibly are. Consider the following:

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. (Matthew 28:19)

This Jesus God raised up…. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this which you see and hear. (Acts 2:32f)

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. (2 Corinthians 13:14)

For through [Jesus Christ] we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. (Ephesians 2:18)

There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called in one hope that belongs to your call, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all…. But grace was given to each of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift.  (Ephesians 4:4-6)

…God chose you from the beginning to be saved, through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth. To this he called you through our gospel, so that you may obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. (2 Thessalonians 2:13)

Chosen and destined by God the Father and sanctified by the Spirit for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood. (1 Peter 1:2)

As scripture attests the incursion of the Word scripture impels us to an understanding that God is eternally Triune. A doctrine of the Trinity makes explicit what is everywhere implicit in the “the faith once delivered to the saints” and for which faith, the apostle tells us, we must ever “contend”. (Jude 3)

III: — Christian faith is rooted in the oneness of being between Jesus Christ and God the Father. In the gospel God has revealed himself to us as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. (Without the divine activity of the Holy Spirit we should not know of the deity of Father and Son.) In this self-unveiling God has revealed himself in such a way as to disclose that what God is in himself God is toward us, and what God is toward us God is in himself, throughout his saving acts in history. In other words, what God is eternally in himself, that is, in his internal relations as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, God is in his activity toward us through the Son and in the Spirit.

If the oneness in being between Jesus Christ and God the Father is cut, then the substance and heart of the gospel is lost. For if what Christ does is not what God does, then before God humankind’s predicament is unrelieved. Again, if God himself has not come among us in the Incarnation, then God’s love for us (despite God’s good intentions!) stops short of God’s full identification with us sinners; in truth it is not finally love (or at least is woefully deficient and defective love) and the redemptive activity of God is finally ineffectual.

Faith in this God is generated by God’s self-witness and self-interpretation (Holy Spirit) in God’s Word (Jesus Christ). In short, knowledge of God is the work of God himself. Since there is no intrinsic ontological similarity between the eternal being of God and the contingent being of us creatures, the fact of faith (that is, the presence of women and men who believe) attests the utter priority of God over all thought concerning him. We can think correctly about God at all only because God includes us in his self-knowing.

In conjoining “Spirit” and “Holy” scripture insists that God is the only fit witness to himself; only God can disclose God. And since God has given himself to us in the person of the Son or Word, then Spirit and Son (Word) are inextricably linked. Or in the idiom of the written gospels, Jesus Christ is the unique bearer and bestower of the Holy Spirit. This is but to say that one cannot pronounce “Spirit” except in reference to Jesus Christ. (In this way the apostles insist that while Christless spirits do indeed abound, they can only be less than holy!) This point is reinforced by scripture’s depiction of the Spirit as being sent from the Father in the name of the Son, never in the Spirit’s own name; the Spirit speaks only of the Father and of the Son, never of himself. Put simply, the Spirit is like floodlighting. Floodlights are positioned in such a way that one does not see the floodlight itself, only that which it lights up and to which it therefore directs attention. (Recall our Lord’s words, “He (i.e., the Spirit) shall glorify me”. John 16:14) The Spirit imports no new substance into faith’s knowing, but rather facilitates faith’s knowledge of the Son, who is the “substance” of the Father.

IV: — While the foregoing is formally espoused throughout the church catholic it is materially contradicted frequently in various “unitarianisms”, such as those outlined below.

(i) A UNITARIANISM OF THE FATHER This popular “unitarianism” certainly preserves the truth that God is exalted, “high and lifted up”; that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts nor our ways God’s ways. (Isaiah 6:1; 55:8) God is the sole, sovereign, eternal one. God is not an aspect of his creation-at-large (the cosmos) nor an aspect of his creation-at-small (humankind). God is irreducibly GOD, never one with whom we may trifle.

However, the God who is only “high and lifted up”, without differentiation, tends to be so exalted as never to humble himself, so far beyond us as not to render himself accessible, sovereign with more than a suggestion of severe, unknowable in the sense of arbitrary, a creator who is also (or may be) capricious.

Eighteenth century deism portrayed God as the creator who fashioned the universe and then effectively absented himself from it. Seventeenth century Protestant scholasticism portrayed God as capricious in its notion of double predestination. God, it said, has foreordained elect and reprobate as such even before they are born, and therefore before they have even had opportunity to sin. When confronted with the irrationality of this its proponents stated that there is a reason underlying the only-apparent irrationality of the decrees, but this “reason” is hidden inscrutably in the innermost recesses of God. Therefore it is not our place to enquire, only our place to adore. The more the hidden justice of this scheme was advanced, however, the more apparent the manifest injustice was to many. In view of the unqualified remoteness of God, or the arbitariness of God, or the injustice of God which a unitarianism of the Father seems to imply, this particular unitarianism, paradoxically, ends in the denial that God is parent in any sense.

(ii) A UNITARIANISM OF THE SON Undifferentiated transcendence is overcome as Jesus Christ is God-with-us. So far from disdaining the complexity of the human situation God has identified with it in its totality. Jesus Christ is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, is tempted at all points as we are (Hebrews 4:15), even becoming one with sinners, as his baptism attests, by “being made sin” for us.(2 Corinthians 5:21)

At the same time, to collapse God into God the Son distorts even the truth of the Incarnation. For then God-with-us is demeaned as pal. The saccharine Jesus finds no paradigm in scripture. No one who met Jesus Christ in the flesh ever spoke of him in this manner. The written gospels, rather, customarily depict him as one whom people do not understand and cannot domesticate. Even disciples, newly made aware in his presence of their systemic sinnership, can only plead with him to leave them alone. The apostles never confuse proximity with presumption. So far from being aider and abettor of human schemes, Jesus is the one who does not supply answers to questions, for he will not confirm the standpoint or the perception or the purpose of the questioner. Instead he poses his own question, therein showing the speaker to dwell in spiritual unreality; i.e., suffer from spiritual psychosis.

(iii) A UNITARIANISM OF THE SPIRIT It is the Spirit who imparts vitality and vibrancy in believer and congregation alike. It is the Spirit who supplies zeal, warmth, boldness, effectiveness. It is the Spirit whose gifts equip the congregation for ministry and whose fruits adorn the gospel, in all of this exhibiting the truth of God as the power of God and not mere ideation.

One New Testament word for the Spirit, ARRABON — “down payment” or “pledge”, (in modern Greek it means a woman’s engagement ring) — plainly means that there is more to come. While the Spirit satisfies the restless human heart the satisfaction it yields never satiates; believers, contented as never before and nowhere else, are nonetheless “hungrier” than ever even as they know that one day they will be fed so as to leave them hungering no more. The entire experiential aspect of primitive Christianity (e.g., “Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith?” (Galatians 3:2) plainly directs the attention of readers of the epistle to identifiable experience) is much undervalued in most expressions of the church today.

Notwithstanding, when the Spirit is magnified disproportionately and experience put forward unnormed, then “Spirit” ceases to be the power in which Jesus Christ acts himself and which he pours forth on his people. “Spirit” instead lends itself to frenzy, the suspension of the intellect, and the identification of God with powers which may be nothing more than the intrapsychic proclivities and pressures of the devotees themselves.

It appears that whenever the Trinity is denied through the aforementioned unitarianisms redemption is denied as well. In the first instance God’s transcendence is upheld in such a manner as to render God remote, distant, inaccessible, with the result that the creation is left unaffected. In the second instance God is so identified with the creation as not to transcend it so as to be free for it. In the third instance God is so identified with human intra-psychic processes as to leave them deified. It is the Triune God who alone saves, for it is the Triune God who alone can.

V: — In many areas of the church catholic today the doctrine of the Trinity is denied not merely materially but formally as well. Such a denial occurs whenever, for instance, the deity of the Son is impugned. “Son of”, in scripture, has the force of “of the same nature as”; to modify “same nature” is to deny what the church has always confessed in terms of the Incarnation.

Formal denial need not be blatant; in fact it is no less a formal denial for being subtle. Whenever the question, “Is Jesus the Son of God?”, is answered, whether waggishly or sincerely, “Of course he is; all of us are sons and daughters of God”, Incarnation is denied and therefore Trinity as well. And since the being of God is intrinsically related to the knowledge of God, any departure from acknowledging the Tri-unity of God imperils the knowledge of God. The current preoccupation with “Creation Spirituality” is such a subtle yet formal denial.

The question, “Who is God?”, is a question which scripture answers only indirectly. It answers this question by first asking and answering two others: “What does God do (outside of us, yet for our sake)?”, and “What does God effect (in us)?” We can know who God is only as we first learn what God has done on our behalf, for our sake, in the Son, and only as we become beneficiaries of this work on our behalf through the power of the Spirit. In sum, we know God as we are included in God’s work for us and as we are illumined concerning this work. To become acquainted with the living God is to learn that the creation is not God. It is too frequently overlooked that the non-divine status of the creation has to be revealed — or else why should the creation not be assumed to be divine, as in fact it often is? As it is only by grace (i.e., by the action of God himself) that we learn that the Triune one is God, so it is only by grace that we learn that the creation is not God but rather is creaturely. “Creation Spirituality”, on the other hand, is predicated on the postulate that the creation either is God or mediates God, both of which prophet and apostle reject. Since God is God and we are but creatures of God, the order or logic of revelation generates the order or logic of our knowledge of God. And since the creation does not reveal the Triune God, the creation (itself fallen and in bondage to death) is not the vehicle of that life which the Spirit (who is God) alone effects.

Any diminution of the Son as one with the being of the Father is an explicit denial of the Trinity. Such diminution of the Son invariably fosters an idolization of the creation.

VI: — Any sundering of Spirit from Son is a similar denial with similar consequences. Sundering the Spirit from the Son means that the “Spirit” ceases to be holy, ceases to be intrinsically related to the Word (as the reformers, following the apostles, were careful to note), and becomes instead the religious legitimation of human fancy or fantasy. Since, as was seen above, it is only through the truth that truth is known and non-truth recognized, only by reality that illusion is discerned, then only through revelation can we gain proper perspective on and understand assorted claims to truth, reality, godliness and goodness.

(i) RELIGION Despite its apparently ascendant secularism our era is startlingly religious. It is assumed that religion is good and that Christianity is religious. Christianity may indeed be, but is faith “religious”? Prophet and apostle attest that the gospel exposes religion as non-gospel, non-faith; i.e., unbelief. Elijah on Mount Carmel does not suggest to the Baal spokespersons that they are religious, he is religious, and therefore they should all pool their religiosity, seeking out a common denominator, maximizing convergence and minimizing divergence. On the contrary Elijah maintains that shortly Yahweh will act in such a way as to expose Baalism for what it is. This is not to say that Israel’s faith remained free of religion; the prophets continually deplore the religious invasion of Israel and continually recall Israel to the God who displayed his outstretched arm in delivering them from slavery and formed them his people at Sinai, and now nurtured them like a mother with her child at her breast.

It seems that the church today thinks itself to be meeting religious pluralism for the first time, when in fact the faith of Israel and of Israel’s greater Son came to birth and had to survive in the context of competing religious claimants. To be sure, this pluralism always encroached upon the faith of God’s people and threatened to dissolve them. Significantly, while Paul begins his sermon on Mars Hill (Acts 17) by acknowledging the phenomenon of religions (the Greek word he uses — DEISDAIMON — also means “superstition”, it should be noted), he quickly moves to an unambiguous declaration of Jesus Christ, his resurrection, and the coming judgement. Nowhere do the apostles counsel seeking commonalities with contiguous religious manifestations.

Unless the church recovers its discernment of how revelation discloses itself as distinct from religion, how will the church recognize — and repudiate — the religious accretions to the gospel, and even the most subtle (yet no less deleterious) psycho-religiosities which attach themselves to our own believing? How will it distinguish between the truth that God, for the sake of his glory and our salvation, has freely justified us of his own free grace, and religion as the insidious attempt at justifying ourselves before a god whose mercy and pardon we plainly doubt?

(ii) CULTURE Again, as soon as Spirit is sundered from Word (Jesus Christ is the one Word of God we are to hear and heed in life and in death, according to the Barmen Declaration), the “Spirit” is co-opted as the legitimization and even the divinization of culture. Aesthetic enjoyment is then spoken of as “spiritual experience”. All experiences of the creaturely order in its own mysterious depths are denoted “spiritual” and are confused with the work of the Holy Spirit of God. The obvious conclusion from this confusion is that cultured people are spiritually superior and that culture saves.

The Germans, as usual, have a polysyllabic word for it: Kulturprotestantismus. The culture-religion which had permeated the German church left people unable to distinguish between God himself and the awesome depths of God’s creation, between having “God’s love poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us”(Romans 5:5) and being moved by natural beauty or artistic talent. When Kulturprotestantismus went beyond viewing aesthetics as the vestibule to the kingdom and affirmed culture and kingdom to be synonymous, the nazification of the land of Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven — not to mention the world’s leading medical research — demonstrated that culture can readily cloak the conflict between Holy One and evil one. It demonstrates too that Kulturprotestantismus supplies neither the ability nor the urge to remove the cloak.

(iii) SELF-INTEREST The spectacle of most television religious programming, replete with references to “God”, “Holy Spirit” and “faith” raises the issue of narcissism. Narcissism is preoccupation with oneself, preoccupation with one’s own comfort, advantage, recognition, advancement and reward. The televised “gospel” offers this more often than not. It is only as the Spirit is known to be always and only the Spirit of him who had nowhere to lay his head, of him who summons followers to leave all and shoulder a cross if they are to be his followers, that the spiritual counterfeit of narcissism can be identified.

(iv) PATHOLOGY In the same way once the Spirit is divorced from the one who is the guarantor of the kingdom (i.e., the creation healed), once pneumatology is separated from Christology, people are theologically/spiritually defenceless against psycho-religious pathology. Jonestown need not be recalled; suffice it to recollect those whose “faith” has rendered them ill, or rendered them more ill.

VII: — When Jesus Christ is confessed as the unique bearer and bestower of the Spirit; when the Spirit is known as the power in which Jesus Christ acts, to the glory of God the Father, then distortions which bedevil the church are avoided and Trinitarian doctrine preserves proper balances.

Reference has already been made to the question Paul put to the Christians in Galatia, “Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith?”. The question directs his readers to recall and reflect upon an aspect of their life in Christ which they cannot deny, an event (however protracted), moreover, which is so common as to provide an indisputable beginning-point for his subsequent reasoning with them.

As the church today recovers experience of God (for experience of God is the only experience the Spirit of Jesus Christ facilitates) the theological content of the gospel will never be arid intellectualism. It is the Spirit who prevents the gospel (so-called) from becoming the preserve of the intellectually gifted, from degenerating into a western philosophy which happens to employ a religious vocabulary. The gospel must not become one more abstraction to be assessed along with other “world-views”, when in truth the gospel, ultimately, is the presence and power of the living Lord Jesus Christ in his person.

When the Spirit is honoured as the power of God which renders Jesus Christ forever contemporaneous then living faith will always triumph over traditionalism. “I’m a Lutheran”, when uttered in the apparent absence of throbbing faith in the living Word, usually means that the Lutheran Church is the one someone stays away from! The same phenomenon is seen in those whose Protestantism consists in their anti-Catholicism.

When “Spirit” and “Word” are acknowledged to imply each other then institutionalism will not supplant adventurous discipleship. No longer subserving itself or an un-gospel agenda, the institution will subserve the community which lives for the praise of God’s glory. The institution will resist calling for that obedience which is owed God alone. In trusting the promise that the powers of death shall not prevail against Christ’s people who, like John the Baptist, point to him, it will soberly remember that institutional remains litter the landscape of history.

Where the Spirit is recalled as the Spirit of him who insists that harlots and tax-collectors enter the kingdom of God ahead of the “righteous” the placebo of moralism will be detected and dropped. The Christian life will not be impoverished until it becomes precisely what the world misunderstands it to be: conformity to a code, success at which enterprise breeds self-righteousness while failure precipitates despair. Evident instead will be glad obedience to the living person of Jesus Christ, out of gratitude for the deliverance he has effected.

Where the Spirit is trusted to lend effectiveness to proclamation in Christ’s name evangelism will not give way to assorted techniques for proselytizing or garnering adherents. To evangelize is to set forth the gospel of the Son in reliance upon the God whose Spirit is sufficient to empower the saints’ testimony. In other words, the outcome of our evangelism can be left in God’s hands.

A church which does not trust the Spirit to honour witness borne to the Son is a church which confuses evangelism with conversion; which is to say, a church which cannot distinguish between its work and God’s work. Moreover, a church which thinks that conversion (rather than witness) is its responsibility is a church which coerces; the harassment can be physical, social or psychological, but it remains coercion. Paradoxically, the church which thinks that it has to generate the fruit of its diligent “God-talk” announces to the world that it does not believe in God, since it cannot trust God to vivify God’s own Word! To trust that the Spirit is the Spirit of the Son or Word is to be freed from anxiety concerning the results of mission and therein spared the fear of failure and the concomitant temptation to coerce.

VIII: — A recovery of the doctrine of the Trinity would do eversomuch to assist The United Church of Canada concerning the catholicity of its mission. Despite our denomination’s protestations that it sides with the victimized, the marginalized, the oppressed, and those disadvantaged in any way, it remains virtually exclusively an occurrence of the ascendant middle class. That segment of the socio-economic spectrum from which the UCC draws its people is becoming smaller as it also becomes more affluent: we are attracting fewer and fewer people, virtually all of whom are more and more wealthy. We attract no poor people, even remarkably few who are not socially ascendant.

In times of economic turbulence the rich are cushioned against material misfortune and remain rich; the poor are not cushioned, but neither do they have anything to protect, with the result that they remain poor. The rising middle class, however, is unrelievedly vulnerable. In times of economic dislocation it is precipitated downwards. It collapses into that segment of the socio-economic spectrum with which our denomination has no credibility at all. In other words, simply as a result of uncontrollable economic convulsions the UCC would be deprived of its constituency. A recovery of Trinitarian faith, especially with respect to the appointment of God himself in the person of the Son, would commission us to re-examine our socio-economic exclusiveness. The Word of God is baptized in dirty water at the hands of someone who will be forever out of place among the socially slick. The pronouncement heard at this baptism — “Thou art my beloved Son; with Thee I am well pleased” — is a conflation of Psalm 2 and Isaiah 42. Psalm 2 is God’s appointment of the royal ruler, the one possessed of genuine authority. Isaiah 42 speaks of God’s approval of the “Servant of the Lord”, commonly known as “the suffering servant”, the one who “was despised and rejected by humankind…and we esteemed him not”. The mission of God himself in the Son will ever be effective (God is sovereign), but its effectiveness will materialize through a servanthood which entails hardship and sacrifice and social rejection. Then to be Christ’s follower is to be commissioned to a ministry of service, not domination; of self-forgetfulness, not personal advantage; even of social rejection rather than public congratulation. Would not a new appreciation of the Son’s mission, when the Son is one with the Father himself, be the recovery of our identification with the Son who cherished the very people to whom we cannot relate? In that Son who is of the same substance and nature as the Father God effectively loved the world — not merely one aspect of the world, i.e., social aspirants whose psycho-social needs church-affiliation appears to serve.

The recovery of the doctrine of the Trinity will foster the recovery of Trinitarian faith; this in turn will mean a return to the catholicity of the gospel. And such a return will spell recovery of mission and service on behalf of the all the “far off” who have been “brought near in the blood of Christ”.(Ephesians 2:13) For “through him we both [i.e., Jew and Gentile, which is to say all human beings equally despite apparently insurmountable barriers] have access in one Spirit to the Father.” (Ephesians 3:18)

The tetragrammaton, , contains no vowels. Lacking vowels, it is unpronounceable. Because it is unpronounceable it is untranslatable; for this reason there can be no substitute for it. There can be no substitute for the name of the God who has named himself Father, Son and Holy Spirit. To know God, honour and obey and adore God, is to find that the doctrine of the Trinity is neither the museum-like security-blanket of the nervous nor the jettisonable baggage of the naive. The doctrine of the Trinity, rather, will ever orient us to the living God whose love for a dying world commissions us to love it no less.

Victor Shepherd

 

My Spiritual Debt to Martin Luther

in  THE CANADIAN LUTHERAN  October 2002

 

As a child, adolescent and university undergraduate student I had no exposure to Luther at all. Then in the course of preparing for ordained ministry within The United Church of Canada I immersed myself in the theology of John Calvin, where I heard Calvin described frequently as a “second generation Lutheran.” My work in Calvin found me reaching back to Luther to see where the Genevan was indebted to him and where he differed from him (e.g., on the manner of Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper.) Soon I found myself drawn to Luther not as background to Calvin but as a spiritual and theological giant himself. Always impressed by Luther’s grasp of the gospel, I was overwhelmed at the gospel’s grasp of Luther, at his heart, at the manifest “heart seizure” he had undergone at the hands of Jesus Christ.

Three words taken together describe Luther’s heart for me: truth, passion, compassion. Nothing ever eclipses the living Lord Jesus as truth and reality for Luther. To embrace Christ in faith is to love him, flooded by the love with which he first loved us, and in loving him find ourselves delighted and contented in him. And of course to embrace Christ in faith is to embrace as well all whom he embraces; which is to say, all of humankind in its sin, suffering, and self-contradiction. Luther’s heart broke as surely as his Lord’s at the sight of people whose wounds were undisguisable and undeniable.

Several years later I was appointed Professor of Historical Theology at Tyndale Seminary, Toronto. Here I teach a course in the theology of Luther every eighteen months. While I teach many courses in several different disciplines (e.g., philosophy), students tell me I’m at my best in Luther. I understand this, since Luther is the easiest Protestant thinker to love, and my love for him has admitted me to the deeper recesses of his heart. His influence upon me is inestimable, and my debt to him is unpayable.

Gospel definition

Luther’s definition of the gospel — “the promise of God fulfilled in our midst” — moves me as often as I reflect upon it. His way of putting the matter gathers particular associations around it and thereby creates a mood and an ethos that Lutheranism has always known and cherished. God has made promise after promise to his wayward creation; God gathers up his many promises in one grand, overarching promise to act for us and save us; God fulfills this grand promise amidst our earthliness and earthiness in such a way as to satisfy yet never satiate all who cling to the Son in faith. In other words to meet and know that Son whom God hasn’t withheld from us but has given up for us and now persists in giving to us; to meet and know this one is to want to look nowhere else. “At rest” in him, we are left plumbing riches we can never exhaust.

In the history of the Church few besides Luther have loved the living person of the Lord Jesus in such a child-like way. And for this reason few have unselfconsciously reflected the child’s wonder and excitement at Christmas. Like a child, Luther was awed that the Creator kept his promise of the gift, and is therefore a Father whom we can henceforth trust in dark days and difficult times. Before the Christmas gift (who, as the Incarnate One, is ultimately the giver himself) Luther stood speechless at the humility of the God who condescends to us as baby. Learning all of this through scripture alone, and knowing therefore that scripture is indispensable in the economy of salvation, Luther was yet aware that scripture and Incarnate One are categorically different. “Scripture is the manger,” he liked to say, “in which the child is laid.” Bible and baby ought never to be confused; yet they ought never to be separated, since it is only through the witness of prophets and apostles that we can apprehend the long-promised gift of God; better, only as we habitually revisit the manger do we find the Saviour apprehending us. Luther’s insight here — pithy, profound and memorable — would do much to spare the Church the family-quarrels over scripture that settle nothing yet scar everyone.

The babe in the manger thrived; he grew both in stature and in wisdom. As an adult the Son of God endured a humiliation in the cross that dwarfed the humility of the stable. Mesmerized by the cross, Luther gloried in the “exchange” (2^nd Corinthians 5: 16-21) as the crucified took on our sin, guilt, degradation and death only to clothe us in his righteousness, acceptance, honour and life.

 

Christ defined

The “exchange” motif lies at the heart of Luther’s Christology. The “Christ” who is chiefly teacher (as if the root human problem were ignorance) or chiefly exemplar (as if it were the absence of a model we can mimic) or chiefly law-giver (as if edicts could eliminate our fatal self-contradiction) is useless in the wake of the Fall. In light of the Fall Luther always knew the difference between deprivation and depravity; he knew that our predicament arises not from deficits and deficiencies but rather from incomprehensible yet lethal perverseness. Only the heaven-sent Saviour can address our depravity. He does so not as he tries to “fix up” humankind but as he exchanges our heart of stone for his heart of flesh (Ezekiel 36:26), our inconstancy for his faithfulness, the condemnation we deserve for the approval we can only receive. Every time he gazed upon the crucified Luther knew that a life-crushing burden had been exchanged for life-giving blessing. To be the beneficiary of this exchange was to be freed.

Freed from what? In his unforgettable tract, The Freedom of the Christian (1521), Luther insisted we are freed from the law, from sin, and from death; that is, we are freed from having to justify ourselves (or thinking that we can), from disobedience as the determinative truth of our life before God, and from expulsion from God’s presence. We are freed for love to Jesus Christ and service to the neighbour. Freed (paradoxically) by our bondage to Christ, we no longer live in ourselves, out of ourselves, for ourselves; instead we live “away” from ourselves by living in the “other.” Specifically we live in two others: we live in Christ through faith, and we live in the neighbour through love. Taken out of ourselves, we are liberated from that anxiety which always marks the self-preoccupied. Aware that our frantic efforts at reducing anxiety merely feed it, Luther knew that the profoundest cure for anxiety is self-forgetful self-abandonment to those in whom we now live.

 

Living in the neighbour

Since the arms of the crucified embrace the neighbour, genuinely to live in Christ is always to live in the neighbour as well. Never shallow, Luther insisted we live in the neighbour by sharing her need. This isn’t especially difficult, since we are meeting her scarcity with our abundance. In the second place we live in our neighbour by sharing her suffering. This is considerably more difficult, since proximity to another person’s pain is itself painful for us. At the same time, we may feel rather good about sharing our neighbour’s suffering in that we may feel somewhat heroic, virtuous; we shall likely feel even better if we are recognized and commended for this. In the third place we live in our neighbour by sharing her disgrace. So far from being commended now we find ourselves despised. We are told that we have compromised our standards. We are reminded that that you can always tell a person by the company she keeps. Our only comfort here, says Luther, is to continue clinging to him who was himself numbered among the transgressors. He, after all, knew no sin yet was made to be sin in order that we whose sin can never be excused may yet know it forgiven and know ourselves rendered the righteousness of God.

 

Theology of the cross vs theology of glory

Everything noted so far is generated by Luther’s Theologia Crucis or “theology of the cross.” By “theology of the cross” Luther understood first that the God who remains hidden to human gaze (both physical and philosophical) reveals himself where the world never thinks of looking for him. Faith alone knows this God. For this reason Luther liked to say, “The gospel is aural”; it can only be “heard.” (In other words, the Spirit-sensitized heart recognizes the gospel as it is proclaimed.) The gospel can never be “seen.” Luther knew that what we can all see every day everywhere in the world — crime, war, starvation, betrayal, natural disaster — never persuades anyone of the Father’s love. We apprehend God’s love for us and thereupon entrust him with our lives only as we “shut our eyes and open our ears.” For only the faith-quickening Word that we hear can get beyond the resistance to God aroused by the doubt-quickening sights that we see.

Luther contrasted the “theology of the cross” with a “theology of glory.” The latter has four principal features. First, it confuses the living God of self-willed suffering with the “God” that philosophy infers: power, aloofness, impassivity; in short, everything but the God who empties himself of every divine prerogative yet doesn’t empty himself of sin-absorbing love.

Secondly, a theology of glory relishes the triumphalism of the church’s institutional life. It glories in social privilege, economic power, the capacity to coerce, all the while disdaining self-renouncing service.

Thirdly, a theology of glory ignores the consistent testimony of scripture, “This is my beloved Son; hear him“, and prefers to read God off the face of nature. Overlooked, of course, is the fact that nature is at best impersonal and at worst “red in tooth and claw.”

Fourthly, the same theology attempts to read God off the face of history. Luther knew that one nation’s military subjugation of another acquaints us with nothing concerning God. Luther’s “theology of the cross” was his relentless conviction that God does his most characteristic work (love) and his mightiest work (the redemption of the world) precisely when he appears, from a human point of view, to be utterly helpless and useless.

In the light of his “theology of the cross” Luther maintained that life’s “trials” (Anfechtungen), unavoidable in any case, can be understood as the occasion of God’s refining the faith of his people, purifying it, strengthening it, ever rendering it more attractive and more useful. Since the world hates the gospel and those identified with it, Christians can escape the world’s hostility only by renouncing faith — and this they will not do. For indeed, said Luther, faith’s worst trial is to have no trial, since trial keeps faith alive and vibrant.

Luther himself never lacked trials. For twenty-five years, from the Diet of Worms in 1521 until his death in 1546, he lived with a price on his head. Heartbroken at the death of Magdalena, his fourteen-year-old daughter, the death of Elisabeth at eighteen months devastated him. Nevertheless, when he was dying in Eisleben and he learned that his beloved Katarina was fretting in Wittenberg, he sent to her a word that will ever be my comfort: “I have a caretaker who lies in the cradle and rests on a virgin’s bosom, and yet, nevertheless, sits at the right hand of God, the Father almighty. Therefore be at peace. Amen.”

Victor Shepherd
Tyndale Seminary, Toronto

 

Jewish-Christian-Muslim Trialogue Sponsored by Jewish-Christian Dialogue of Toronto

Reflection on “9/11”

Rev. Dr. Victor Shepherd

February 19,2002

 

In the course of discussing informally Sept. 11 with many people I have always insisted on the need to hear afresh and honour anew the 9^th Commandment of the Decalogue: “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour.” When Muhammad Ali was taunted with, “How do you feel in view of the fact that the Sept. 11 perpetrators belonged to your religion?” he replied smartly, “How do you feel in view of the fact that Hitler belonged to yours?” I think it better that we move away from all such efforts at religious or ideational one-upmanship, for all such efforts sooner or later involve bearing false witness.

In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11 I found myself not to be bent out of shape at all, while most people around me were. I hadn’t planned on preaching on the event the following Sunday, only to discover that I had to as parishioners wanted me to address their dismay. I wondered why I wasn’t distressed. It was not because I regarded the event as inconsequential; not because I was insensitive to the suffering it brought with it, especially the suffering of those who didn’t die immediately; not because I was unaware of what it portended in terms of public anxiety and financial downturn and rising unemployment and increased suspicion and even victimization for our Islamic fellow-citizens. Gradually I came to realize why other people were bent out of shape by the event and I wasn’t: their understanding of God had suffered a devastating blow that verged on a fatal blow, while my understanding of God had not.

The reason for this, I realized, is that unlike them I wasn’t surprised at the event, and wasn’t surprised just because such an event is congruent with the evil that I find surging over and coursing through the world at all times. I have long noted that I have a sense of evil that is far more vivid than most people’s. To be sure, I have always insisted that the goodness of the creation perdures despite the ravages of the Fall or the “yetzer ha-ra” or however we choose to speak of the fact that the goodness of the creation is contradicted. Nonetheless, the evil that now disfigures the creation is, in my opinion, hideously evil.

But not everyone agrees with me. My philosophy students, for instance, do not. Whenever my philosophy class comes to the work of Immanuel Kant I always find myself at odds with my students. I point out to my students that while the earlier Kant certainly admitted evil, albeit in terms of his rationalist ethic, and the later Kant admitted radical evil, his radical evil is never radical enough for me. While Kant may have been able to admit evil perpetrated out of woeful ignorance or misguided zeal or even the naïve assumption that evil may be a step toward a greater good, Kant seems unable to admit evil perpetrated for the sake of evil, evil perpetrated for the perverse pleasure of evil. My students aren’t Kantians, yet they too can’t admit radical evil, evil for the sake of evil. For years I have been puzzled at this and only recently have come to see the reason for their reluctance. They believe that God is great and God is good; therefore the world can’t be as evil as Shepherd makes it out to be. If it were, they would have to abandon their belief in the greatness and goodness of God. Myself, I too believe that God is great and God is good; for me, however, the evil of the world renders God not less believable but more. My students think that if radical evil existed it would leave God compromised; I think it leaves God magnified. My students continue to look for meaning in outbreaks of evil, seemingly unaware that part of evil’s evilness is its sheer irrationality. To the extent that evil could be understood it would thereby be less evil. Radical evil, then, will always be incomprehensible because necessarily incomprehensible. (Parenthetically, I think it should be asked, “If radical evil, unrelentingly horrific, were possessed of meaning, could any of us endure it?”)

The question in the hearts of so many people is “why?” It’s assumed that “why” is the profoundest question to be asked. But this question wasn’t deemed the profoundest in the biblical era, or in the patristic or mediaeval or early modern eras. Biblical thinkers didn’t first ask the question “why” just because they already knew the answer: the world lies in the grip of the evil one. The profounder question for biblical thinkers was “How long? You, God, have promised to resolve the contradiction we live with, and the contradiction is tormenting us, so how long will it be before you act definitively and relieve us?”

Then who raised the question “why”, and raised it, supposedly, as the soul of profundity? The French agnostics and atheists who came to the fore in the Enlightenment: they framed the question, and then the church, at least, took it over as the profoundest question, whereas Christians of an earlier era had asked an entirely different question. My reaction to Sept. 11 simply confirms that my Christian conviction maintains the pre-Enlightenment question to be profounder.

In view of what I have said concerning the presence and potency of radical evil, and in view of its magnification of the holiness of God, for me Sept. 11 magnifies God’s anger at sin (at the sin of all of us, I should add, not merely the sin of those who crumbled the World Trade Tower); it magnifies God’s mercy, for mercy is the form God’s love takes when his love meets our sin; it magnifies God’s heartbreak over a people that seems perversely bent on never being his “peculiar treasure”; it magnifies God’s patience (his patience, unlike ours, is immense; not infinite, as the fact of judgement attests, but immense nonetheless); it magnifies God’s persistence, without which his patience would be synonymous with indifference; above all it magnifies God’s faithfulness to the covenant he made with Abraham. The covenant with Abraham is foundational for everyone here tonight, regardless of religious persuasion. While we continue to advertise ourselves as covenant-breakers, he keeps faith with us who do not keep faith with him. It’s plain, then, that God’s covenant-keeping has found him not abandoning the world because it’s disgusting or renouncing it because it’s hopeless or dismissing it because it’s intractable.

I am aware that in the wake of Sept. 11 many people felt they that the understanding of God they had long cherished was no longer tenable. Once again I found that they and I were not of one mind. As I spoke with them I realized that they had had in mind a definite notion of what God can or cannot do, should or should not do. Myself, I have long ceased to ponder what God can/cannot do, should/should not do. I ponder now only what God has done, therein defining himself and rendering all speculation about him pointless. As a Christian I affirm that he has so thoroughly identified himself with us, our folly and our misery, our predicament, that he has given himself up in utmost vulnerability for our sakes; God’s omnipotence or almightiness means there is no limit to his vulnerability and no limit to the effectiveness of his vulnerability.

In light of my conviction here I am persuaded that what is required of us, in the first instance, isn’t that we pursue a solution to the perplexities that Sept. 11 may have raised for us. What is required of us in the first instance, rather is that we make a response. Regardless of what we think we can understand of Sept. 11 or fear that we can’t understand, the response we have to make is our first responsibility. All efforts at solution aim at an intellectual abstraction. Solutions are always of the order of disengaged, armchair abstraction, when what is required of us is committed, concrete response; a response, be it noted, that may require of us a vulnerability similar to God’s.

Our response may take many forms. There is a response we make to the victims of Sept. 11 and to any and all victims of like occurrences. There is a response we make to our Islamic neighbours lest they be victimized in a way no less evil. There is a response we make whenever and wherever we can do something, anything, about the injustices that wound and then fester and finally develop into raging systemic infections. For we agree with the prophets that peace without justice is no peace at all. Admittedly, not all inequities are iniquities, but some are, and therefore discernment is as essential as determination.

I have mentioned several times tonight that we like to put questions to God. There’s a question, however, that God has already answered: “Why?” There’s a question he delays answering: “How long?” There’s a question, finally, that he answers as often as we ask it, yet always answers by turning our question to him back upon us: “How can you allow this sort of thing to happen?”

Rev. Dr. Victor Shepherd

 

Article on
THOMAS ODEN
for
Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals

 

Oden, Thomas Clark (1931), Methodist minister and theologian, professor at Drew University, was born on 21^st October 1931, in Altus, Oklahoma. His father was a lawyer and his mother a music teacher. In 1949 he enrolled in the University of Oklahoma and graduated with a B.Litt. in 1953. He began studying theology formally at Perkins School of Theology (Southern Methodist University), graduating with his B.D. in 1956. Ordained by the Oklahoma Conference of the United Methodist Church (deacon, 1954; elder, 1956), he served in varied parish ministries. Beginning in 1956 he studied at Yale University, and was awarded his M.A. in 1958 and his Ph.D. in 1960. Hans Frei and H.Richard Niebuhr supervised his work. His doctoral dissertation, revised for publication, was published as Radical Obedience: The Ethics of Rudolf Bultmann. One year of postdoctoral study followed at Heidelberg.

In 1958 he began his professional teaching career as an instructor at Perkins School of Theology. From 1960 to 1970 he was associate professor and then professor at Phillips University. In 1971 he became the Henry Anson Buttz Professor of theology at Drew University, where he taught until his retirement.

Oden has also been a guest lecturer or visiting professor at Moscow State University, Oxford, Edinburgh, Duke, Emory, Princeton and Claremont. In addition he has been consultant to the Ethics and Public Policy Center of Washington, D.C., the White House Dialogue on Urban Initiatives (1985), and Public Information Office Briefings (1984-1986.)

Oden has published approximately forty books and 80 articles.

 

Following his Agenda for Theology (1978) republished as After Modernity, What? (1990) with four additional chapters and an introduction by J.I. Packer, Oden described himself as an “out-off-the-closet evangelical.” He has continued to distance himself from the ethos of the institutions, images and “isms” that earlier he wore as a badge. His Requiem: A Lament in Three Movements (1995) is anguished autobiography concerning the lethal stranglehold that totalitarian “liberals” have on denominational bureaucracies, church conferences, and seminary education. A former left-wing radical, he now affirms the genuine radix of the scripture-normed authority of the post-apostolic writers. His “new” radicalism, inspired and measured by the gospel, nevertheless finds him still espousing out-of-step causes, such as the utter unreformability of the seminaries unless the practice of tenure is overhauled.

Recently Oden has become a contributing editor of Christianity Today. His position there magnifies his influence enormously, as this magazine is the most widely-read evangelical journal in North America.

Never backing away from rendering the judgements that he deems gospel-fidelity to enjoin, Oden has made the rare move of publicly faulting another denomination in another country. The United Church of Canada (Canada’s largest Protestant denomination, formed in 1925 of Methodists, Presbyterians and Congregationalists), Oden has pronounced devoid of ecumenical identity, “and is no longer thought properly to be called an ecumenical communion”; i.e., is no longer the church in that it has abandoned consensual teaching on creation, sin, covenant sexual fidelity and the blessings of marriage.

By his own admission every turn that Oden took on his way to the theological position with which he is now identified was a left turn. The “turn” that “righted” him, however, was not a right turn or series of compensatory right turns but rather a turn back into the Fathers. Startled at the shallowness and virulence of 1960s radicalism, he looked for theological resources and discovered that Patristic thinkers exhibited a profundity and pertinence that few modern authors could rival.

Oden describes himself as an “orthodox, ecumenical evangelical”, where orthodoxy “is nothing more or less than the ancient consensual tradition of exegesis.” His work aims at articulating, in the spirit of Vincent of Lerins, the faith of the universal church.

Its focus is the consensus of the first five centuries, since “antiquity is a criterion of authentic memory in any historical testimony.” His preoccupation with antiquity means he refuses to renounce his “zeal for unoriginality….the apostles were testy with revisionists.”

Its mood is evangelical, reflecting throughout the gospel’s particularity and inherent militancy. This mood contrasts sharply with a theological modernity whose treachery has rendered evangelism impossible and orthodoxy unrecognizable. An evangelical invitation suffuses his work as he urges readers to decide for Christ, warning them tenderly yet solemnly about the peril of procrastination: “One who neglects an opportunity at hand may not have another.”

Its centre is the rediscovery of ancient ecumenical theology and the recovery of classical Christianity in his evolving Wesleyan tradition.

Its target audience is the working pastor, since Christian teaching is healthy only where living tradition is embodied by an actual community. (Vide his several books on pastoral theology.)

Its orientation is that for which he commends Arminius and those after Arminius; viz., “the gradual Protestant retrieval of the ancient ecumenical consensus on grace and freedom.” In this regard Oden consistently disavows the predestinarianism of the later Augustine (even as Augustine remains one of the ecumenical giants) that emerged so very strongly in the Magisterial Reformers. Oden regards this deterministic misunderstanding of election as a departure and declension from the received faith. Characteristically the church has upheld the inviolability of the humanness of God’s covenant partners. At the same time Oden discerns and denounces the error of Pelagianism, together with the more subtle seductiveness of semi-Pelagianism. His work incorporates everywhere a nuanced discussion of gratia operans/gratia co-operans that, while strange to Protestants who are unacquainted with Patristic thought, is crucial in any approach to him.

Its most recent expression is the project he is masterminding, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture (forthcoming), whose purpose is the recovery of classical Christian exegesis. A major strength of this project, he maintains, is the reviving of texts so very old that they contain no trace of European imperialism (and therefore no inherent revulsion, for instance, for Asian and African Christians.) These texts will therein prove singularly significant as they are brought to bear on the cultural formation of both West and East. In addition ancient exegesis will expose readers to the intimate connection between prayer and study, to the relation of theology to vibrant Christian community, and to worship as the context in which scripture is read. Oden hopes that Protestants especially will peruse the Ancient Commentary. Their doing so will remedy the theological one-sidedness that arises on account of Protestantism’s neglect of pre-Reformation texts, and also reduce Pietism’s extreme vulnerability to modern consciousness. They can expect to be startled, for instance, by Nazianzen’s theological power and Jerome’s transparency to the Spirit’s energy.

Repeatedly Oden indicates why he has written polemically and prolifically. While theology as the inquiry into God is inherently the most engaging of all subjects, theologians have turned it “into a yawning bore”, boring just because it is so very destructive: heresy is treasonous, and when protracted, tedious. Aware, however, of the presumption that laps at anyone claiming to be a corrective, the stated motive for his three-volume Systematic Theology (1987, 1989, 1992) was an invitation for readers to test his own fallibility.

Everywhere Oden sees his work as setting a limit to the license of “guild” (i.e., academically appointed) theologians and exegetes whose perfidy has summoned him to be “someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again.” (Heb. 5:12) For this reason his work as a whole and his systematic theology in particular repristinate the elemental, doctrinal “building blocks” of the faith; specifically, theological matters that are articulated in the creed and that appear in the standard regulae fidei. (Precise studies of more detailed matters such as anthropology, liturgy and ethics will be developed in subsequent works.)

Throughout his writings Oden looks first to the four great Patristic thinkers of the east and west: Athanasius, Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, John Chrysostom, together with Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, Gregory the Great. These exegetes consistently clarify the mind of the believing church; “we are more indebted to these eight exegetes than any since the apostles.” While Oden cites other thinkers frequently (especially Thomas Aquinas, Luther and Calvin) they are invoked where they amplify the aforementioned consensus, not where their work is idiosyncratic. Other thinkers deemed non-consensual (e.g., Menno Simons) are scarcely mentioned at all.

Oden’s single largest work is his Systematic Theology (1500 pages, 15,000 references to classical writings.) Its purpose is “to set forth an ordered view of the faith of the Christian community upon which there has generally been substantial agreement between the traditions of East and West, including Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox.” Unlike virtually all systematic theologians, however, Oden insists that the exposition of the traditional theological topics in his work serves primarily as an introduction to the annotations; i.e., the annotations embedded in the text are more important than the text itself. True to scripture, to his native Wesleyanism, and to the Fathers, he regards God’s holiness as the linchpin of the entire theological enterprise.

 

Oden’s theological “journey” brought him to this point after earlier starts that if not false were hesitant at least.

He names five theological instructors who shaped his thought: Albert Outler, Rudolf Bultmann, H.Richard Niebuhr, Karl Barth and Will Herberg. Despite the apparent neo-orthodoxy of these men, Oden subsequently criticized neo-orthodoxy for its non-interest in worship, sacrament, pastoral care, the concrete tasks of ministry, and the holiness of the church. His “best” teacher was Outler, who introduced him to Augustine and Wesley. Although his Ph.D. dissertation was a comparative study of Bultmann and Barth, he soon repudiated the favoured Bultmannism that had first brought him to theological prominence and concentrated on Barth. In the 1960s Oden was concerned chiefly with the relation of theology to psychotherapy. Attentive now to the necessity, nature and integrity of human agency, he came to regard the Eastern church fathers as a corrective to Barth’s one-sidedness.

Upon Oden’s appointment to Drew University his friend and colleague, Will Herberg, persuaded him to ground his thinking in classical sources. Ironically, says Oden, a conservative Jew was his chief mentor in classical Christianity. With the arbitrariness and weakness of his earlier liberalism now exposed, and himself repulsed by his former support of the abortion platform, he abandoned situation ethics and with it the entire liberal worldview. Rejecting too his earlier notion that novelty is the task of theology, he jettisoned “creativity”, now convinced, thanks to J.H. Newman, that his responsibility was to listen to the deposit of truth already sufficiently given. Intrigued by the decisions of the ancient Ecumenical Councils, he plunged into patristics. Quickly he identified himself in terms of “paleo-orthodoxy”, an expression coined to indicate the distance now between him and neo-orthodoxy. By his own admission modern psychology had taught him to trust his experience, whereas ancient writers now taught him to trust that scripture and tradition would transmute his experience.

 

Oden has endeavoured to honour his theological parents by means of two books related to Wesley. Doctrinal Standards in the Wesleyan Tradition (1988) assesses the nature, place and function of normative doctrine in the United Methodist Church specifically and in the churches of the Wesleyan family generally. It aims at healing the doctrinal amnesia that has largely afflicted mainline North American Methodists.

John Wesley’s Scriptural Christianity (1994) expounds Wesley’s theology on all major points, beginning in the time-honoured way with God’s attributes and concluding with eschatology. It is a contemporary exposition and interpretation of Wesley’s thought, aiming always at fidelity to Wesley’s text. Its subordinate purpose is to convey Wesley to other branches of the Christian family in view of the fact that non-Wesleyans are much less acquainted with Wesley’s thought than are non-Magisterial thinkers, for instance, with that of the 16^th century Reformers.

Finding Wesley rooted in the patristic, Anglican, holy living and Puritan traditions, he sees Wesleyanism as a bridge between Protestants and Catholics, even as it has profound affinities with the Eastern Church tradition. He deems Wesleyanism’s characteristic resistance to co-optation at the hands of party or fad to be one of its major strengths.

Two areas that seem problematic for evangelicals are his seemingly uncritical espousal of the Fathers and an “ecumenical” view of baptism that some may find indistinguishable from sacramental regeneration.

Concerning the first matter Oden affirms repeatedly his agreement with the Fathers that in the “theandric” (sic) One the humanity suffers but never the deity. Specifically he denies that the Father suffers in the Son’s crucifixion. Nowhere does Oden acknowledge that the risen, exalted Lord continues to suffer. In the same vein the neo-Platonism of the Fathers is unchecked. Oden cites with apparent approval the patristic neo-Platonism concerning sexual matters, such as Nazianzen’s pronouncement that Christ’s birth “didn’t have its origin in weakness…for sensual pleasure did not precede the birth.” A similarly neo-Platonic argument is advanced as to why there will be no marrying in heaven. Circumcision is understood to consecrate “that organ…which…is most likely to be corrupted by idolatry and sin.” (His commentary on the Pastoral Epistles, relieved of uncritical support of the Fathers, upholds a more Hebraic understanding of sexuality.)

Concerning the second matter Oden, to be sure, insists “…it is not baptism of itself that saves”, yet he appears to undo this assertion throughout his discussion of baptism, as in his remark, “The Holy Spirit through baptism offers, calls forth, and elicits regeneration in a spiritually blessed water in which the whole triune God is by grace effectively present”, and “The Spirit remains in those who have received the grace of baptism, who remain indelibly known to God.” He appears impelled to speak this way inasmuch as the Fathers do.

Oden predicts that a sign of hope in 21^st Century Christian thought will be its preoccupation with the rediscovery of boundaries in theology: “I would love to find a seminary where a discussion is taking place about whether a line can be drawn between faith and unfaith.”

A diligent student and teacher of Kierkegaard for decades, Oden’s mature work can be summarized in an item cited in his Parables of Kierkegaard (1978.) Faith disrupts, says the Dane, and where public disruption isn’t observable, faith hasn’t occurred. If as “believers” we nevertheless protest that we have faith, we are theologians; if we know how to describe faith, we are poets; if we weep in describing faith, actors. But only as we witness for the truth and against untruth are we actually possessed of faith.

 

Dr. Victor Shepherd
Professor of Historical Theology and Wesley Studies
Tyndale Seminary, Toronto

 

A Christmas Meditation on Mary

Mary is a key figure in the Christmas story, yet we say nothing about her compared to innkeeper, wisemen, shepherds, even angels. Her place in the birth of the Messiah, and subsequently in the Christian story, is much larger than these.

Protestants, reacting against Marian excesses in the mediaeval church, say nothing beyond sentimental niceties. Roman Catholics and Orthodox say much more: Mary is in essence the church’s response to Jesus Christ; i.e., mother of the Son of God is also a beneficiary of the Son of God, and typifies the response of all such beneficiaries. In a word, hers is the paradigmatic response, model response, to the Incarnate One.

 

I: — Mary models the response of all believers concerning the address of the triune God.

Luke 1:26-38

In the annunciation Mary is addressed three times, and each time she responds not with idle speculation (all Prot. Reformers disdained speculation) but concretely, appropriately, devoutly.

(i) with respect to the revelation of the Father: she responds with alarm, that fear of God (“greatly troubled”) which reflects the approach of God everywhere in Scripture. “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favour with God.” And everywhere in Scripture “Fear not” is God’s command and assurance in the wake of that fear which his approach has rightly quickened in us.

She is ready for further response and any service she might be asked to render.

(ii) with respect to the revelation of the Son, the one she is to bear, and who will be God’s Son and David’s heir: “You shall call his name ‘Jesus'” — i.e., Yehoshuah, “God saves.” Mary is told what to do and she does it: she names the child she is to bear. (Name has the force of nature, person, presence, power, deserved reputation. The “name” of any person in S. is that person himself present in his nature or character, acting effectively.) She responds by asking a question of her visitor (as all God’s people interrogate him in Israel), “How shall this be?” As a result of her interrogating God she is given even greater revelation.

(iii) with respect to the revelation of the Spirit: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God.”

The episode concludes with that response which gathers up all her partial responses to date: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word”; i.e., she consents to the word and submits to it.

Note: Mary is addressed by the triune God. In this address she is acquainted with every person of the Godhead. Her response is threefold: she fears God, she reverently questions God where she needs further illumination, and she embraces God’s will for her, submits to it, and contents herself in it.

She honours the Word addressed to her by submitting to it, but not in the submission of servility or resentment or self-belittlement. Rather her submission is a glad, grateful, eager, welcoming self-renunciation for the sake of a vocation and a commission. She has been visited by and addressed by God, knows it, is made aware of God’s will for her, and gladly does it. Her vocation is to discern the will of God and do it. Her commission is to be a handmaid of the Lord.

The church consists of those who are modelled after Mary.

[a] our response bears witness to the triune God: we believers “body forth” God’s son by being the body of Christ; in the course of bodying him forth (as did Mary) we too are overshadowed by the Holy Spirit or else we’d long since have ceased to be the church.

[b] in it all we are to obey God gladly, willingly, cheerfully, non-resentfully (or else we don’t obey him at all), declaring in it all, “Behold I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”

 

II: — Mary models the church’s enrichment through recollection, the appropriation of memory.

Luke 1:29: “She was greatly troubled at the saying, and considered in her mind what sort of greeting this might be.”

-“considered in her mind”: diatarasso — to be agitated, troubled. Mary was agitated, troubled at the saying, but didn’t dismiss it or give up on it. She understood enough to know it was important, but not enough to understand it completely. She hid it in her heart.

Luke 2:19: “Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart.”

-sumballein lit. to throw together, to compare; i.e., to consider from all possible angles.

Luke 2:51: “Mary kept all these things in her heart.”

-diatereo lit. to keep continually, to keep carefully.

All three expressions point to the fact that Mary understood enough to grasp the rudiments of the point at issue and to be aware of its importance, but not enough to pronounce the definitive word about it.

Subsequently she could revisit what she had hidden in her heart, and in revisiting it find it ever richer, ever more fruitful, as she recollected it in different contexts. In other words, she doesn’t stumble ahead in total darkness; instead she is given a pinpoint of light, does what she can with that, and finds as she recollects, revisits memory, that ever greater light is shed upon what she first hid.

Mary is the model of the church’s nourishment and nurture and growth and illumination through recollection.

In the following I have found that revisiting something I learned years ago if not decades ago finds it yielding ever greater riches each time I recollect it. E.g.,

(1) Charles Wesley: “a charge to keep I have”

(2) Luther: the X’n lives not in herself but in another: in Christ through faith and in the neighbour through love (as she shares the neighbour’s need, suffering, disgrace.)

(3) Answer #1 to the Heidelberg Catechism (written in 1563, and surely the crown jewel of the shorter Reformation writings.) “I am not my own, but belong, body and soul, to my faithful Saviour JC”

(4) only ten years ago I came to understand that Jesus is raised wounded. The resurrection isn’t the transcending of the cross but the triumph of the one who remains in the reality of his crucifiedness.

(5) Martin Buber (Jewish philosopher and biblical scholar): to know another person is exactly to be altered through meeting him as person. (as opposed to gathering information about him.)

(6) Thomas Watson (my favourite Puritan thinker): “All Christian growth is finally growth in humility.”

 

 

III: — Mary models the church’s pain in giving birth to the Messiah and the church’s consignment to

the wilderness

Revelation 12:1-6

[1] Rev. 12:1-6 refers to Israel, who gives birth to the Messiah.

According to the psalmist the Messiah will rule over the nations absolutely: the Messiah’s power extends over the entire creation, over death, over every power, even over being swallowed by the dragon.

[2] Mary gives birth to the M. Her son is “caught up to God and to his throne” (12: 5), while she flees into the wilderness (12:6).

[3] Mary models the church as Messianic community. The church is always labouring to give birth to the Messiah in the sense that we are always endeavouring to render the visible the one we know to be within us. Yet in our turbulent, treacherous world the Messiah is seemingly always being snatched away by the dragon, and the Messianic community always finds itself amidst the harsh affliction and tribulation of the wilderness (the wilderness, in Scripture, being the venue of unclean beasts and unholy spirits.)

Then what are we to do as the church finds itself in pain in the wilderness? We are always and everywhere to render to God that Mary rendered and therein modelled for all of us:

Behold, we the church are the handmaid of the Lord;

let it be to us according your word.

Victor Shepherd

Advent, 2001

 

from an address at Woodbridge Presbyterian Church, 28October 2001

God and Gender: How Do We Address God?

 

I: — Prostitution is tragic under any circumstances. Prostitution is demeaning. Prostitution, however, that is enjoined as a religious act and defended by a religious argument is more than tragic and demeaning: it’s disgusting.

In the city of Corinth one thousand women were attached as religious prostitutes to the temple of Aphrodite. Needless to say the Christian congregation in Corinth stood out starkly against the backdrop of the temple and its sordid traffic in devotees who did obeisance to Aphrodite and all that the goddess represented. At least the Christian congregation in Corinth largely stood out starkly against the backdrop of sexual irregularities. We know, however, that the spirit of Aphrodite always lapped at the Christian congregation and occasionally infected a member or two of it.

Centuries earlier the Canaanite nations that surrounded Israel had trafficked in religious prostitution too. The word to Israel that had thundered from Sinai, however, had repudiated such degradation. The prophets in turn denounced it unambiguously. Even so, the spirit of sexual irregularity always hovered over Israel, always had to be guarded against, and occasionally had to be exorcised.

Throughout the history of humankind, whenever a goddess has been worshipped as the arch-deity, wherever “Mother-god” has been held up, the final result has always been religious prostitution and widespread sexual promiscuity. For this reason Israel refused to call God “Mother”, and refused as well to speak of the deity as “goddess”.

Throughout the history of humankind goddess-worship (Mother-god-worship) has been associated with the worship of fertility. The worship of fertility includes fertility of all kinds: agricultural fertility, animal fertility, human fertility. A key element in such worship, a key element in the chain of events, has been “sympathic magic”. Sympathic magic means that when humans are sexually active the god and goddess are sexually active too. The sexual activity of god and goddess in turn ensures the fertility of animals and crops.

When Israel was led to call God “Father”, Israel didn’t think for a minute that the God of Israel was equipped with male genitalia rather than female. Israel knew that the true and living God is not equipped with genitalia of any kind; God is not gender-specific in any sense. In calling God “Father”, however, Israel was deliberately refusing to call God “mother”; Israel was deliberately repudiating everything that the fertility cults around it associated with female deities. Israel repudiated the notion that the deity is sexually active, the notion that human sexual activity is sympathically magical, the notion that the entire enterprise is sacramentally abetted by sacral prostitution, the notion that the concomitant promiscuity has any place at all in God’s economy. Israel repudiated all of it.

Yes, Israel did occasionally use female imagery to describe God. In scripture God is said to be like a mother or a nurse or even a she-bear not to be trifled with. But while God is said to be like a mother, for instance, God is never said to be a mother, never called “mother”. On the other hand God is said to be a father and is called “Father”. Why the difference? — because of everything detailed above.

As soon as we name God “mother” and “goddess” we play right into the hands of Canaan and Aphrodite where sexual intercourse among the deities creates the universe. (In the creation stories of the bible there is no suggestion anywhere that the universe came into being as the result of sexual activity among the deities.) We also play into the hands of the old notion that when a worshipper is sexually joined to a religious prostitute, worshipper and prostitute themselves become the god and the goddess. In other words, to speak of “Our Father and Mother” lands us back into everything that Israel’s prophets fended off on account of the character of Israel’s God. A contemporary hymn exclaims, “Mother and God, to you we sing; wide is your womb, warm is your wing.” This hymn squares perfectly with the fertility cults of old, together with their sacral prostitutes and their religiously sanctioned promiscuity.

II: — All of this denies the transcendence of God. By transcendence we mean the truth that God is “high and lifted up”, as Isaiah tells us. Later a Hebrew prophet, knowing himself addressed by the holy One Himself, finds seared upon his own mind and heart, “…my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:8-9) God is radically different from His creation, radically other than His creatures.

The distinction between God and His creation is a distinction that scripture never compromises. “It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves”, cries the psalmist. This distinction is the heart of God’s holiness. The root meaning of “holy” is “set apart” or “different”. God is holy in that He is radically different. God is uniquely God. His creation is other than He, different from Him. To be sure, His creation is good (good, at least, as it comes forth from His hand, even though it is now riddled with sin and evil); but while God’s creation is good it is never God. The creation is never to be worshipped. Idolatry is a horror to the people of God. The creation isn’t God; neither is it an extension of God or an aspect of God or an emanation of God. God remains holy, high and lifted up. He and His creation are utterly distinct. He alone is to be worshipped, praised and thanked. We who are creatures of God are summoned to trust Him, love Him, obey Him, and therein know Him. We are summoned to know God (faith is such a knowing); but we are never summoned to be God. Indeed, the temptation to be God, to be our own lord, our own judge, our own saviour — this is the arch-temptation. Any suggestion that any human activity can render us divine (as is the case with sacral prostitution) is a denial of God’s transcendence. The old hymn known as “The Doxology”, “Praise God from whom all blessings flow/Praise Him all creatures here below…”, reflects God’s transcendence. A modern version of the Doxology has been altered to “Praise God from whom all blessings flow/Praise Him all creatures high and low…”. “All creatures here below” affirmed the truth that God is above us; “All creatures high and low” makes no such affirmation. In the mother-goddess mind-set God is no longer radically other than His creation; God is no longer discontinuous with the world; God and the world are a function of each other. Here God is an aspect of the world — which is to say, God (so-called) is useless to the world.

The loss of God’s transcendence is reflected in the near-disappearance of “LORD” from contemporary hymnbooks. The reason given for this disappearance is that “LORD” is hierarchical and therefore oppressive. The hymnbook committee is correct concerning one matter here: unquestionably “LORD” is hierarchical; God is above us; He is “high and lifted up”; he does transcend us infinitely. But does this make Him oppressive? So far from making Him oppressive, the fact that God is above us is the condition of His being able to bestow mercy upon us. Only if God is above us, only if God transcends us, is He free from us and therefore free to act for us.

The loss of God’s transcendence shouldn’t surprise us in view of the fact that the New Age movement has infected everything in our society, the church not excepted. The New Age movement endorses pantheism (that heresy, says C.S. Lewis, which always tempts the church). Pantheism insists that God is the essence of everything or at least that God is in everything. If God is in everything or the essence of everything, then there is nothing that isn’t God. However, if there is nothing that isn’t God, then evil doesn’t exist, since evil is that which contradicts God and aims at frustrating Him, that which He in turn opposes. And if evil doesn’t exist, then neither does sin, since sin is that expression of evil that has overtaken humans. In other words, the loss of God’s transcendence plunges men and women into a confusion, a maze, where such crucial bearings as sin and evil are lost too.

Yet we are plunged into more than mere confusion; we are plunged into hopelessness. When God’s transcendence is denied, God is unable to judge us (the New Age movement finds this convenient). However, the loss of God’s transcendence also means that God is unable to save us. Only He who transcends the world so as to be able to judge it is also free from the world so as to visit it with mercy. Only the “hierarchical” God can finally be for us. Hierarchy is the condition of God’s helpfulness. The God who isn’t LORD is the God who has been handcuffed.

III: — As soon as God’s transcendence is compromised, the foundational doctrine of the Christian faith, the doctrine of the Trinity, is undervalued. God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is no surprise. After all, if God isn’t to be called “Father”, then God certainly isn’t going to be known as “Father, Son and Holy Spirit”.

Why is the doctrine of the Trinity important? How is it foundational to the Christian faith? The question “Who is God?” is a question scripture never answers directly. By way of answering the question “Who is God?” scripture always directs us to two other questions: “What does God do?” and “What does God effect?” “What does God do?” refers us to God’s activity on our behalf, what he does “for us”. “What does God effect?” refers us to God’s activity “in us”.

What does God do for us? He incarnates Himself in Jesus of Nazareth. He redeems His creation in the death of Jesus, restoring its access to Him. He raises Jesus from the dead, vindicating Jesus and declaring him to be sovereign over all, Lord and Messiah.

What does God do in us? He visits us with His Spirit and seals within us all that He has done outside us. He steals over our spiritual inertia and quickens faith. He forgives the sin in us that He had already absorbed for us on the cross. He brings us to submit to the sovereign One whose sovereignty He had declared by raising him from the dead. In short, the God who acts for us in His Son acts in us by His Spirit so that all the blessings provided in the Son may become ours as well.

What God does for us in the Son is known, in theological vocabulary, as Christology. What God does in us through the Spirit is known as Pneumatology. Christology and Pneumatology add up to theology. Who God is is made known through what He does for us and what He does in us. God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

In place of the Trinity (“Father, Son, Spirit”) we are hearing increasingly “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer”. But the two expressions are not equivalent. “Father, Son, Spirit” speaks of God’s being, who God is in Himself eternally, as well as of God’s activity, what He does for us and in us in time. “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer”, on the other hand, speaks only of God’s relation to the world in time. According to scripture God’s relation to the world means that He is also judge, sovereign and inspirer. Then instead of “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer” we could just as readily say “Judge, Sovereign and Inspirer” — plus ever so many more. We could say them all with equal justification, even as we still wouldn’t be saying what is said by “Father, Son, Spirit”: namely, that God is for us and in us in time what He is in himself eternally, and He is in Himself eternally what He is for us and in us in time.

There is another point to be made here. “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer” is sub-personal. But God isn’t sub-personal. God is Person in terms of whom we understand what it means for us to be persons. Again, for this reason, we must call God “Father” even as for reasons already mentioned we mustn’t call God “Mother”.

There is yet another point to be made here. When we speak of God (or speak to God) as “Father, Son, Spirit” we are calling God by that name wherewith He has named Himself. My name is “Victor”. I always introduce myself as “Victor” because I expect to be called Victor. I don’t care to be called “Vic” or “slim” or “mack” or “You, there”. I think it’s only courteous to call me by that name wherewith I name myself.

Surely we can be no less courteous to God. Yet more than a courtesy/discourtesy is at stake concerning God. According to our Hebrew foreparents name means nature. A change of name means a change of nature. “Jacob” means “cheater”; his name is changed to “Israel” — “he who wrestles with God”. Why the name change? Because the man himself has ceased to cheat and has become someone who will wrestle with God for the rest of his life.

To change the name of God from “Father, Son, Spirit” to anything is to repudiate the nature of the true God and to pursue a false god. To trifle with the name of God at all is to reject the One who is our only God and Saviour.

IV: — It’s only fair to admit that there are some modern hymns are very fine. The puzzling feature, then, is why the fine and the wretched are mixed up together in many contemporary hymnbooks.

On second thought I don’t think there’s a puzzle. I think the mix-up is the result of the age-old temptation of syncretism. We human beings are exceedingly uncomfortable when we face a fork in the road anywhere in life. We prefer to “have our cake and eat it too.” We don’t want to have to say “No” to anyone or anything. It’s always easier to include all the options and endorse all the alternatives. We are syncretists in our fallen hearts.

Syncretism is a temptation that has always tempted God’s people. When Joshua, successor to Moses, confronted the people with his ringing challenge, “Choose this day whom you will serve. The deities of the Amorites? The deities of the region beyond the Jordan? Choose! But as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD!” — plainly Joshua knew that his people could serve either the LORD or the Amorite deities but not both.

As a matter of fact Israel wasn’t customarily tempted to repudiate God; Israel was tempted customarily to combine God and Baal, God and Ashtareh, God and whatever deity the neighbouring nation was extolling. The temptation is easy to understand. God promised His people His fatherly care and protection; Baal promised the people unrestrained licence. Why not have both? Why not have holiness and hedonism at the same time? Holiness guaranteed them access to God, while hedonism guaranteed them endless self-indulgence. Why not have both? Why not have God and mammon? Why not? Because Jesus said it’s impossible. Because the prophets before him said it’s impossible.

All of which brings us to a refrain that reverberates repeatedly throughout God’s history with His people. The refrain is, “I am a jealous God.” God is jealous not in that He’s insecure and He needs to have His ego strengthened; neither is He jealous in that He craves what someone else possesses just because He lacks it. God is “jealous”, rather, in that He insists on our undivided love and loyalty. He insists on our undivided love and loyalty for two reasons. One, since He alone is truly God, He alone is to be worshipped and obeyed. Two, since He alone is truly God, He wants us to find our true wholeness in Him. He knows that since He alone is truly God we shall fragment ourselves if we don’t worship Him alone. He cares too much for us to allow us to fragment ourselves. If we persist in gathering up the gods and goddesses and add the Holy One of Israel for good measure we shall fragment ourselves hopelessly.

Everybody knows that exclusivity is of the essence of marriage. To say that exclusivity is of the essence of marriage isn’t to say that husband and wife live in a universe of two people, ignoring everyone else. But it is to say that at the heart of marriage there is that which can be shared with no one else. Two married people who relish the marvel and the riches their union brings them don’t then say, “Since marriage is so rich with the two of us in it, let’s make it richer still by adding a third person.” So far from enriching a marriage, adding a third person annihilates the marriage. To the extent that exclusivity is of the essence of marriage, then, there is a kind of jealousy that is necessary to marriage.

Israel always knew that “God and…” , “God plus…” meant “not God at all”. Syncretism is fatal to our life in God.

Some contemporary hymnbooks combine fine hymns and terrible hymns on the assumption, apparently, that “nothing should be left out; no one should feel left out; there should be something here for everybody.” For this reason what we call the “Lord’s prayer” has been re-written, “Our Father and Mother.”

But the one God we are to adore knows that if our hearts go after Him and after some other deity then we shan’t have Him and we shall fragment ourselves utterly. Apart from the folly of our self-fragmentation, He insists on being acknowledged for who He is: the One alongside whom there is no other God, even as the Hebrew language reminds us that the word for “idols” is the word for “nothings”. He is a jealous God, knowing that adding another deity will affect the marvel and richness of our life in Him exactly as adding another party affects the marvel and richness of marriage: it terminates it.

V: — What’s at stake in all that has been discussed tonight? Is only a matter of taste at stake (some people like old-fashioned hymns while others don’t)? Is only a matter of poetical or musical sophistication at stake? What’s at stake here is a matter of life or death, for what’s at stake here is nothing less than our salvation.

As soon as we understand what’s at stake here — everything — we understand the intransigence of our foreparents in matters of faith. Jude insists that we are to “contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints.” (Jude 3) Why must we contend for it? Because the faith once for all delivered to the saints is under attack. It is assaulted from without the church and undermined from within the church. The assault from without isn’t unimportant; nevertheless, the undermining from within is far more dangerous. Unless we contend for, fight for, the faith once for all delivered to the saints, the truth of Jesus Christ will be cease to be known.

Peter cautions his readers against false teachers. Peter tells us that false teachers “secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them.” (2 Peter 2:1)

Paul accosts the Christians in Galatia who are already flirting with gospel-denial, “…there are some who trouble you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ….Who has bewitched you?” (Galatians 1:7; 3:1)

Jude, Peter and Paul aren’t horrified because an alternative religious opinion is being made known; they aren’t heartsick because disinformation is being disseminated; they react as they do inasmuch as they know that where the gospel is diluted, denied, compromised, or trifled with, the saving deed and the saving invitation of God can’t be known. Where the gospel is sabotaged through “destructive heresies”, the salvation of God is withheld from men and women whose only hope is the gospel.

We must be sure we understand something crucial. We don’t contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints because we are quarrelsome people who relish controversy. We don’t contend because we are ill-tempered people are annoyed with anyone who disagrees with us. We don’t contend because we are doctrinal hair-splitters who wish to make conceptual mountains out of molehills. We contend, as apostles and prophets contended before us, because we can’t endure seeing neighbours whom we love denied access to that truth which saves.

Then contend we shall. But of course we can contend properly only if we are discerning. For this reason John writes, “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world.” (1 John 4:1) Will our discerning, our testing, and our contending prevail, or are we going to be defeated? We shall prevail, for “faith is the victory that overcomes the world.” (1 John 5:4) Once again the apostle John writes, “…you are of God, and have overcome them [the false prophets]; for He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.” (1 John 4:4)

Victor Shepherd     October 2001

 

(to appear in HarperCollins’ “Religion in Canada “)

The Methodist Tradition in Canada

 

The Methodist tradition arose chiefly from the activity of John Wesley (1703-1791), born to Samuel Wesley and Susanna Annesley, Dissenters in the Puritan mould who affiliated with the Church of England in their youth. John was nurtured in Anglicanism, was ordained priest and remained a life-long member of it. At Oxford University he, together with several others, formed a group derisively labelled the “Holy Club.” It met to encourage study of the classics and the Church Fathers, frequent attendance at Holy Communion, and assistance to the poor and imprisoned.

Still groping spiritually after ordination, in 1736 Wesley moved to Georgia hoping that his work among English colonists and aboriginals would imbue him with spiritual vitality. Upon his return to England in the wake of an unsatisfying ministry in the new world he came to the assurance of saving faith and of sins forgiven on May 24, 1738. Thereafter his ministry, formerly a not uncommon 18^th century Anglican blend of mysticism and moralism, was grounded in the Reformation understanding of justification by grace through faith on account of Jesus Christ.

John recognized that “Scripture, from beginning to end, is one grand promise”; namely, salvation known and enjoyed as a present reality, as contrasted with the current Anglican understanding of blessedness in the life-to-come. With his theological emphasis on soteriology, John insisted that God had “raised up Methodism to spread scriptural holiness throughout the land.” Whereas his pre-1738 pronouncements (see his sermon, “The Circumcision of the Heart”) had declared that people became holy by means of humility, he now insisted — and never recanted — that holiness was a divine gift, owned in faith, and humanly exercised with unrelenting rigour. While classical Protestantism had stressed justification (pardon, remission of sins, free acceptance), Wesley retained this yet stressed deliverance: God could do something with sin beyond forgiving it; namely, release people not merely from its guilt but especially from its grip or power. In this vein he endorsed “Christian perfection”, maintaining that no limit could be set to the scope of God’s deliverance in this life. Herein he merged the Puritan emphasis on godliness that he found in his predecessors with the similar emphasis on sanctity found in the church catholic. Strenuously disagreeing with Calvinism’s notions of predestination and limited atonement, he maintained that Christ had died for all: all needed to be saved, could be saved, could know they were saved, and could be saved to the uttermost.

Since, Wesley insisted, “the New Testament knows nothing of solitary religion”, Methodism characteristically developed the communal dimension of its corporate life. Converts were expected to join in public worship weekly and to receive Holy Communion as often as possible. In addition they were formed into “societies”, “classes”, “bands”, and “select societies” in order to expose themselves to stringent examination from peers and thereby promote self-honesty, mutual correction, encouragement, edification, and service. The “societal” emphasis was marked too by a concern for every aspect of human well-being. To try to mitigate suffering Wesley wrote a textbook of primitive medicine, begged money to establish London’s first free pharmacy, developed schools for the disadvantaged children of coalminers, built houses for widows, gathered funds for start-up loans to Methodist entrepreneurs whom the chartered banks would not consider.

In all these endeavours John’s brother Charles (1701-1788) supported John, matching him in outdoor “field” preaching. Charles’ greatest contribution to Methodism, however, remained his hymn-writing (9,000 poems and hymns), as Scripture-saturated hymns rooted themselves in minds and hearts as often as Methodist people hummed the tunes amidst their daily work.

Following Wesley’s death, Methodism ceased to be “leaven” in the Church of England and became a separate denomination. One of its missioners, Laurence Coughlan, arrived in Newfoundland in 1766 and began working among Protestant English and Irish settlers. Five years later William Black, born in England but raised in Nova Scotia, commenced evangelizing in the Maritimes, his work falling under the supervision of British Wesleyans in 1800. In 1855 this body formed the Wesleyan Methodist Conference of Eastern British America.

Under the leadership of William Losee, meanwhile, the Methodist Episcopal Church (U.S.A.), established on Christmas Day in 1784, began work in 1791 among British immigrants to Upper Canada. By 1828 the Methodist Episcopal work in Canada had formally severed ties with the U.S.A. In 1833 most of it joined with the British Wesleyans to form the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Canada, adding to itself the Methodist people of Lower Canada in 1854. That part of it which absented itself from the union re-formed into the Methodist Episcopal Church of Canada (1834), eventually growing into the second largest Methodist body in Canada.

In turn the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Canada and the Wesleyan Methodist Conference of Eastern British America united in 1874, annexing as well the Methodist New Connexion Church in Canada (itself an amalgam of several small groups), thereby forming the Methodist Church of Canada.

In 1884 this body joined with the Methodist Episcopal Church in Canada, together with the Bible Christian Church of Canada and the Primitive Methodist Church in Canada, bringing to birth the Methodist Church (Canada, Newfoundland and Bermuda.) This lattermost union made the Methodist Church the largest Protestant denomination in Canada. It now included all Canadian Methodists with the exception of several very small groups: the British Methodist Episcopal Church (a development of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, serving chiefly people of colour), two German-speaking bodies (the Evangelical Association and the United Brethren in Christ), and the Free Methodist Church (a body that had begun in New York State in 1860 and extended itself into Canada.)

In 1925 the Methodist Church united with 70% of the Presbyterian Church in Canada and 96% of the Congregational Union of Canada to form The United Church of Canada.

 

Canadian Methodism distinguished itself on several fronts.

 

Methodists were committed to missions among aboriginals. The “first nations” had been exploited since the days of the fur trade, the exploitation manifesting itself in alcohol-abetted destitution. Eager to avoid paternalism, the Methodists sought to put mission leadership in the hands of aboriginals themselves. Peter Jones, Chief of the Mississaugas, was ordained the first aboriginal itinerant. Egerton Ryerson, soon to be the best-known Methodist minister, represented Canada in the Society for the Protection of Aboriginal Inhabitants of the British Dominions.

Missions overseas paralleled those in Canada. In 1873 the Wesleyans were the first of the Canadian Methodist “family” to begin working in Japan, concentrating on evangelism, medical assistance, post-elementary education and theological training for Japanese ministers. By 1884 Canadian Methodists had established a theological college in Azabu, supported by the Women’s Missionary Society’s efforts in training Japanese women for church work. Canadian Methodist missions commenced in China in 1891 amidst circumstances that were uncommonly dangerous.

In the meantime the social position of Methodists was changing in Canada. Earlier the Church of Scotland and the Church of England had formed social elites inaccessible to Methodists, the latter being poor and frequently despised. Zealous in evangelism and ardent in their pursuit of godliness, however, their sobriety, industry and thrift fuelled their social ascendancy. Some Methodist families became wealthy: the Goodherams from grain and railways, the Masseys from farm implements, and the Flavelles from meatpacking. By mid-18^th century they were able to challenge the Anglican monopoly on education and political power.

From this position Methodism was able to make its unparalleled contribution to the public good, a system of high-quality public education. Insisting that education subserved not only the evangelical cause in particular but also the human good in general and the social good more widely still, Methodism’s educational architect, Egerton Ryerson, undid the Anglican Church’s exclusive control over education. Ryerson implemented the system operative in Canada today: high quality education available to all, without a religious or doctrinal means test.

In addition the Methodists built Victoria College, offering instruction in arts and sciences, later expanding it under principal Samuel Nelles to a full-fledged university by adding faculties of law, medicine and theology, eventually moving the institution from Cobourg to Toronto in order to federate it with the University of Toronto.

Aware of John Wesley’s legacy, Canadian Methodists dedicated themselves to the alleviation of human distress on any front, their vision here being no less than social transformation. They exerted themselves on behalf of convicts and ex-convicts, prostitutes and impoverished immigrants, all the while campaigning for better housing, improved public health, unemployment insurance, pensions, compensation for injured workers, the eight-hour work day, humane working conditions and homemaking skills. Salem Bland and James Woodsworth were the most visible exponents of the Social Gospel movement in Methodism, the latter eventually leaving the ministry in order to co-found the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. The prosecution of social justice, it was thought, would largely eliminate the sources of social disharmony. At the same time leaders such as Samuel Chown continued to uphold the necessity of personal regeneration.

Concern for education and social transformation naturally gave rise to a commitment to publishing. Books, magazines and pamphlets were produced in ever-greater numbers; even by 1884 the circulation of Methodist-backed publications stood at 160,000, excluding the materials produced for overseas missions. Under William Briggs and Lorne Pierce, Methodists became instrumental in promoting a Canadian literary tradition, producing vast quantities of Canadian fiction, poetry, history and textbooks for schools.

Since 1925 much smaller denominations such as the Wesleyan Church, the Free Methodist Church, the Standard Church, the Church of the Nazarene (extensions of American bodies), and The Salvation Army have endeavoured to maintain the spiritual tradition of Wesley. Collectively, however, these groups do not have the influence in public life that the Methodists exerted prior to church union.

Victor Shepherd June 2001

 

 (from Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals, Inter-Varsity Press)

Jacobus Arminius

 

Arminius, Jacobus (c.1559-1609), Dutch Remonstrant Reformer, was born Jacob Harmenszoon in Oudewater near Utrecht. His middle-class family was devastated when his father, a maker of kitchen utensils, died during Arminius’ infancy and his mother, together with all his siblings, were slain during his adolescence in the Spanish massacre of Oudewater in 1575. Thereafter family friends raised him. Like most classically trained humanist scholars of his era, he eventually Latinized his name, recalling the “Arminius” who had been a 1^st century Germanic leader noted for his resistance to the Romans.

In 1574 he began his studies at Leiden, venue for a tradition reaching back into the pre-Reformation ferment of the North Netherlands. The atmosphere included a biblically-informed piety, a sacramentarianism that viewed medieval sacraments as largely superstitious, and a humanist perspective that identified Roman Catholic corruption of the church. It would be anachronistic to speak of this movement as (proto-)Lutheran or Zwinglian, as these latter descriptions entail a doctrinal specificity that was not operative in what had flowed from the 14^th and 15^th centuries. Studies followed at Geneva, Basel, and Geneva again, culminating, after years of leadership in city, church and university, in a doctorate from Leiden in 1603.

Leiden accommodated the older reform as well as the precise Calvinism that Reformed refugees had brought with them. The ensuing conflict was less concerned with predestination (albeit never far from the surface) than with the relation of Calvinist consistory (an ecclesiastical court in Reformed churchmanship) and the city (reflecting the less doctrinally exact, humanist-informed piety indigenous to the Low Countries.) The consistory, for instance, in the spirit of Calvinist rigour, opposed observing Christian festivals (e.g., Christmas and Easter) that happened not to fall on Sundays.

Financed by Amsterdam merchants, Arminius began studying under Beza at Geneva on New Year’s Day, 1582. Beza, Calvin’s 62-year old successor, was venerated in Reformed constituencies everywhere. By rearranging Calvin’s emphases Beza largely retained the major tenets of Calvin’s theology while significantly altering its spirit. While Calvin, for instance, had spoken of the grandeur of God and the majesty of God but not of the “sovereignty” of God, Beza thrust into the centre of his thought a sovereignty that was to appear to Remonstrants indistinguishable from the arbitrary assertion of naked power. And where Calvin had focussed on the believer’s life or participation in Christ, with predestination merely the means whereby sin-deadened people come to be “in Christ”, Beza made predestination a controlling principle. Calvin’s emphasis on the living person of “Christ clothed with his gospel” gave way to assorted decrees and a preoccupation with their respective priority.

Having been graduated from Geneva, Arminius studied next at Basel, and then at Geneva once more. A trip to Italy in 1587 found him accused of compromising himself with Roman Catholic potentates and also of having “lost his [Calvinist] faith” through exposure to Jesuits.

Upon returning to Amsterdam he was ordained pastor to the “Old Church”, the focal point of church life in the city. In 1590 he married Lijsbet Reael, an aristocrat who thereafter ensured that he orbited among the most influential merchants and leaders of the city. Like all the Magisterial Reformers before him, Arminius would remain a pastor for virtually all of his working life, spending 15 years in the Amsterdam pulpit and six in the Leiden. (It is interesting to note his conviction that exercising the pastoral office, rather than theological wrangling, facilitates the holiness of the minister.) From 1603 until his death in 1609 he was professor of theology in Leiden, where he was also elected Rector (president) of the university even as a theological minority opposed him. In Leiden he gathered up the fruit of his writing in behalf of earlier controversies and in 1608 published his most mature work, Declaration of Sentiments.

While the notions pertaining to the name “Arminius” are commonly thought to suggest exclusive rejection of all things Calvin, his appreciation of Calvin’s Commentaries is noteworthy. They occupy, he said, second place only to Scripture: “I recommend that the Commentaries of Calvin be read…. For I affirm that in the interpretation of the Scriptures Calvin is incomparable, and that his Commentaries are more to be valued than anything that is handed to us in the writings of the Fathers — so much so that I concede to him a certain spirit of prophecy in which he stands distinguished above others, above most, indeed, above all.”

His preaching through Romans became the occasion of a theological controversy that he was never to escape. His first opponents were humanists who denied original sin. Uncompromisingly he replied to them, “I believe that our salvation rests on Christ alone and that we obtain faith for the forgiveness of sins and the renewing of life only through the grace of the Holy Spirit.” Opposition arose next from the Calvinists who differed from him on his insistence that Romans 7 describes the pre-Christian. Immediately he was accused of Pelagianism, Socinianism (unitarianism) and non-compliance with the Belgic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism. Not trusting the Calvinist clergy of the church courts, he defended himself on charges of doctrinal deviation only in the presence of civic officials whom he recognized as his assessors. They acquitted him.

Differing from Gomarus, his principal opponent in his latter days as professor in Leiden, he continued to claim that the “wretched man” of Romans 7 is not the apostle speaking autobiographically but is rather the unbeliever. He added in support:

– this viewpoint has been defended through the church’s history and has never been deemed heretical;

– no heresy, including Pelagianism, can be derived from it;

– the viewpoint of modern theologians (e.g., Beza) that Romans 7 speaks of the Christian is a viewpoint that none of the Church Fathers upheld — including Augustine, the Father dearest to the Calvinists;

– to say that Romans 7 describes the Christian is to slight the grace of God (grace appears impotent in the face of sin) and to foster wanton behaviour (even the regenerate cannot help doing the evil they do not want to do).

– the pre-regenerate person can possess an awareness of sin.

In his detailed exposition of Romans 9, another major area of protracted controversy, Arminius articulated a doctrine of grace that recognizes the irreducible humanness of the beneficiaries of grace and that unfailingly honours then as human agents, certainly not synergistic contributors to their salvation and therefore co-authors of it, yet just as certainly God’s covenant-partners made in God’s image. The “co-operation” implied in his understanding of faith as covenant-dialogue recalls the Patristic subtleties around the Fathers’ repudiation of co-redemption and their affirmation of gratia operans/co-operans. Arminius protested any suggestion that even sinful humans are entities like sticks and stones to be manipulated mechanically. Fallen humans, admittedly “dead in trespasses and sins”, are nonetheless fallen humans, and as graced by God, “response-able” and therefore “response-ible”. This notion underlies Arminius’ distinction between the act of believing as belonging to grace and the ability to believe as belonging to nature.

Concerning Romans 9 Arminius insisted

– the question that his opponents said predestination answered, namely, “Why do some individuals believe and others do not when all alike are dead coram Deo?”, is neither asked nor answered in the chapter;

– the chapter does not discuss individuals but rather classes of people: those who affirm righteousness by faith in the Righteous One and those who seek to merit God’s recognition;

– to speak of the predestination of individuals before they have been created, and therefore to speak of the reprobation of individuals before they could have sinned, is to render God monstrous;

– to postulate both a hidden and a revealed will of God is to falsify the New Testament’s declaration that in Jesus Christ (whom everyone admits to be God’s revealed will) “the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily;” (Col. 2:9 RSV)

– God’s command and God’s promise are co-extensive. It is not the case that God commands all to repent and believe but visits only some with the mercy that quickens both repentance and faith. God does not predestine who will or will not believe; rather God predestines to salvation in Christ all who believe in Christ;

– the position of Beza and his supporters can only mean that God is deemed to be the author of sin. (Cardinal Bellarmine agreed with Arminius, adding that the high Calvinist position rendered God the only sinner.) This notion undercuts human culpability and renders God’s judgement pointless.

Arminius’ chief writing during his pastorate in Amsterdam, Examination of Perkins’ Pamphlet, has often been judged his single best contribution to theological discussion. Perkins (1558-1602), the major spokesperson for English high Calvinism, maintained as a strong supralapsarian that creation and fall are (merely) the means whereby the decree of election or reprobation is implemented. Arminius’ arguments here are those found throughout his works. However, their exposition is more detailed and more nuanced in the Examination than anywhere else. Most pointedly Arminius insists that grace is the love of God meeting humankind as sinful; grace is not a synonym for “decree” or “will” or “sovereignty”; i.e., grace is God’s love addressing humans in their depravity rather than “affecting” them as creatures without reference to their sin.

While Perkins maintained that Christ died only for the elect, the parameters of the atonement being identical with the parameters of faith, Arminius countered that Christ had died (and thereby gained salvation) for all, but only some are saved; i.e., the cross is sufficient for all but effectual only in believers. Arminius’ distinction here reflected his convictions concerning the bondage of the will. He insisted that the will of fallen humans was “bound” in that of itself it can will only its depravity. He insisted too, however, that the fallen will is never merely “of itself”; grace attends all fallen creatures, with the result that the graced will is enabled to affirm or endorse the grace that has elevated it beyond mere (fallen) nature. The graced will is “free” in that it is the non-coerced act of a genuine human agent. In other words, the graced will does not contribute to its salvation yet necessarily concurs in it, or else it is not a human creature that is saved.

Consonant with his understanding of the free will, Arminius eschewed the notion of the Christian life as the “state” of grace (and therefore static), preferring to understand it as dynamic: graced concurrence acknowledges and appropriates greater grace in an upward spiral that also finds the believer advancing in godliness through greater immersion in grace. Whereas Perkins had denounced this position as Pelagian, Arminius maintained that Pelagianism predicated the will’s response to grace entirely of nature or partially of nature (in the case of semi-Pelagianism), whereas the will’s response to grace is grace-wrought without being grace-wrenched. A concomitant of his position is that believers can “make shipwreck” of faith. Yet they need not fear doing so, paradoxically, in that the gift of grace (and therefore of faith) includes a gift of filial fear that renders believers non-presumptuous and non-cavalier but ever spiritually vigilant and therein “kept” by the power of God.

While those who esteem Arminius frequently do so on account of his views concerning predestination, he must not be thought to be a one-issue thinker. Unlike the 1^st and 2^nd generation Magisterial Reformers, Arminius is a scholastic evincing immense affinities with the scholastic “family” whether Roman Catholic and predestinarian (Banez and Baius), Roman Catholic and non-predestinarian (Suarez and Molina), Protestant and predestinarian (Junius and Gomarus) or Protestant and non-predestinarian (his successors, Episcopius and Limborch). While the non-predestinarian, biblical humanism of the older North Netherlands is found in Arminius, it does not typify him. Rather he is indebted to late medieval and Renaissance Aristotelianism.

Like all scholastics Arminius has a metaphysical concern foreign to the earlier Reformers, and unlike the latter, a debt to Thomas Aquinas. In fact Aquinas is the most frequently quoted thinker in Arminius’ works, and the only scholastic whom he names as an ingredient. Certainly not a Jesuit, Arminius nonetheless preferred the Jesuit reading of Aquinas to the Dominican reading with its Augustinian cast of Thomas.

None of this is to suggest that Arminius is crypto-Roman Catholic. Still, he stands squarely in a tradition indebted to Thomistic metaphysics and Aristotelian logic (despite an appreciation for the bifurcationist logic of Ramus). Protestants typically are unaware that these features characterize the theologies of the 17^th century.

Whereas the Reformed schools differed markedly on the issue of supra- or infralapsarianism, Arminius differed from both with respect to his understanding of God’s will and foreknowledge. Here he owed much to Molina’s scientia media: God foreknows future contingencies without thereby determining them. Molina furnished him with a matrix that included God’s foreknowledge, the efficacy of grace, and a freedom of the will that is genuine rather than seeming. In short, Arminius adopted the Jesuit-Thomistic tradition of scientia media that denied divine determination yet preserved the infinitude of the divine intellect and the scope of human freedom.

Arminius’ life unfolded amidst relentless conflict. Denied external tranquility, he was never distracted from the practical, non-speculative understanding of theology he absorbed from his reading of the medieval Duns Scotus, and credibly stated that his sole ambition was “to inquire in the Holy Scriptures for divine truth…for the purpose of winning some souls for Christ.”

Dr Victor Shepherd
Professor of Historical Theology and Wesley Studies
Tyndale Seminary
July 2001

 

(address to the graduates of Tyndale Seminary, May 2001)

Running the Race in the Pursuit of Excellence

 

I: — You have asked me to speak to you about excellence, the pursuit of excellence. I am glad to do so, for I relish excellence as much as I abhor mediocrity (mediocrity here defined as contentment with less than our best.)

Yet in eschewing mediocrity I am not advocating perfectionism. Perfectionists fall into two classes: those who neurotically pursue perfection yet bewail their inability to achieve it (these people can’t live with themselves); and those who neurotically pursue perfection and boast that they have achieved it (no one else can live with them.) Perfectionism, deep-down, is self-rejection born of self-contempt, even where the self-rejection masquerades as self-importance. Let me say it again: when I say I abhor mediocrity, I am not advocating perfectionism.

In the same way, in rejecting mediocrity I am not rejecting ordinariness. We should shun mediocrity; but we should cherish ordinariness. We should pursue excellence, but we should never aspire to be extraordinary. Extraordinary people are those think they have transcended their humanness, think they no longer put on their trousers one leg at a time, think they have risen above the earthbound humanness of inferior mortals. I’m convinced that people who want to be extraordinary, or think they are, are dangerous. Virtually all the damage wrought in the world is wrought by those who want to be extraordinary or think they are extraordinary.

We should aspire after humility. “Humility” is derived from the Latin word humus, “earth.” We are created earth-creatures and therefore glorify God by our earthliness, which earthliness, I am convinced, should always include more than a little earthiness. When I speak of excellence I never mean extraordinariness. I mean rather the utter repudiation of mediocrity, for mediocrity is sin.

II: — Let’s think for a moment about someone whose entire life bespoke excellence of many sorts, not the least of which was intellectual excellence, particularly intellectual excellence as it pertains to books. I speak now of the apostle Paul.

“I know a man”, says Paul, “who, 14 years ago, was caught up to the third heaven…. and this man heard things that cannot be told, which no one may utter.” The apostle is talking about himself. He was caught up to the third heaven. The “third heaven” was an ancient way of speaking of the most intimate, most intense, most vivid apprehension of God. At that moment, 14 years ago, the apostle wasn’t “seeing in a mirror dimly”. (1 Cor. 13:12) At that moment, rather, he was bathed in splendour and scorched by fire. Simultaneously he was transfixed by the purity of God and prostrated by the enormity of God and irradiated by the grandeur of God.

Isn’t it odd, then, that the fellow whose experience of God is so intense that he can’t speak of it then writes to the young man, Timothy, and asks for books? “When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, also the books, and above all the parchments.” (2 Timothy 4:13) “Be sure to bring me the books.” Books? Why would he need books? What could a book do for him?

Paul’s experience of 14 years ago wasn’t the only time he had had an astonishing encounter with God. Three years before he was “caught up to the third heaven” he had been crumbled on his way to Damascus when the risen Lord had arrested him. In addition to the Damascus road experience Paul had had a vision of the man from Macedonia who had pleaded with Paul to go there with the gospel. In addition to the Macedonian episode Paul had fallen into a trance while praying in the Jerusalem temple, and while in the trance had been told unmistakably to get out of Jerusalem. The apostle’s experience of God had been vivid over and over.

And now he wants books? Compared to his experience of God, reading a book sounds so flat, so pedestrian, simply so dull. Yet he wants books! Obviously he thinks he needs books. Books are essential to his discipleship as a Christian as well as to his vocation as an apostle. Obviously he thinks that his vivid experience of God doesn’t render books unnecessary; his startling apprehension of God doesn’t render reading superfluous.

In his novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell depicted a society crushed in the tentacles of cruel totalitarianism. One feature of such a society, Orwell insisted, was the banning of books. The oppressor would continue to oppress his victims by many means, not the least of which was the banning of books.

Aldous Huxley, in his novel, Brave New World, didn’t fear a society where books were banned. He feared something worse: a society where books weren’t banned simply because no one wanted to read a book.

Do we want to read one? read many? Some people who lived a long time before us, and who are foreparents in faith, certainly wanted to.

Like the Jewish people, in whose house all Christians are guests of honour. On Christmas Day in the year 800 Charlemagne was crowned emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. At the coronation he was supposed to sign his name to a document. But he couldn’t write — or read. However, he remembered having seeing his name written in Latin: CAROLINUS. He recalled that one letter (“U”) had two vertical strokes in it. Whereupon Charlemagne grabbed an instrument of some sort and made two crude strokes on the document. Meanwhile, the Jewish people were 100% literate. In whose house are Christians guests? Abraham and Sarah are our foreparents in faith, not Charlemagne.

And then there are the Puritans. Don’t listen to those who defame them wickedly! When persecuted Puritans left the old country and settled in New England, every Puritan minister was given 10 pounds with which to start a church library. Between 1640 and 1700 the literacy rate among men in Massachusetts and Connecticut was 93% — while it was only 40% in England. (The rate of literacy among Puritan women in the new world was 62%, 10% in England.) Six years after these people landed in Massachusetts they voted 400 pounds “towards a school or college.” The “school or college” they built was Harvard (1636).

By 1650 virtually all New England towns had developed grammar schools. As people there learned to read, the effect of the printed page was immense. People were released from the domination of the immediate and the local. People who don’t read live in a very small world, a world of the immediate (in time) and the local (in space). Books are vehicles that convey us to a different era, a different history, a different culture. Books free us from the domination of the immediate and the local. They free us not only from the domination of the horizontally immediate; they free us as well from the vertically immediate. On the one hand they free us for a deeper immersion in creaturely riches; on the other hand books — at least those which speak of the gospel — free us for a deeper immersion in the riches of the Creator himself.

Books have to do with a word-culture rather than an image-culture. The difference between a word-culture and an image-culture is huge. The word encourages critical reflection; the image encourages uncritical absorption. Words present us with ideas for thoughtful evaluation; flitting images provide for titillation and amusement. As soon as the politician goes on TV what he says is of no importance; what matters is how he appears. Is his tie knotted properly? If it isn’t, he can’t be elected. When Menachem Begin sought political office in Israel his media advisors told him he had to stop wearing shirts with oversized collars, since a shirt with an oversized collar makes a man appear terminally ill. John Turner’s media advisors told him he had to break his habit of licking his lips. Night and day they hammered him, “Who is going to vote for a man who looks like an anteater at a picnic?”

The word encourages thinking; the image, by and large, encourages emoting. Words present us with arguments that we have to assess; images present us with impressions that we merely blot up. Visual stimulation is a shabby substitute for thought, just as emotional manipulation is a shabby substitute for verbal precision.

A society given to mediocrity despises excellence. In resisting all mediocrity I am making a gospel-plea for intellectual excellence; particularly intellectual excellence fostered through books.

III: — Yet I should never want to suggest that intellectual excellence is the only kind. In fact it isn’t even the chief kind of excellence. What is? John Henry Cardinal Newman knew what is. Newman tells us that when he was a young scholar he realized one day that he had almost succumbed to the liberal heresy, namely, “prizing intellectual excellence above moral excellence.” Now when Newman speaks of “moral excellence” he doesn’t mean “moralistic” or “legalistic.” By “moral excellence” he means the excellence of a human being who is a spiritual/ethical agent. Our life in the Spirit is lived, lived out, in the integrity of our honouring Christ’s claim upon our obedience. This is the excellence.

The excellence of that life which has been apprehended by truth and thereafter aspires to do the truth; this excellence has an inherent winsomeness, attractiveness, appeal.

Have you ever pondered the Greek wording of our Lord’s self-description in the fourth gospel, “I am the good shepherd”? Ego eimi ho poimen ho kalos. “I am the good shepherd.” “Good”? There are two Greek words for “good”, agathos and kalos. Agathos often has the force of “correct, proper, upright.” It has the force of “good” in the sense that Mark Twain has Huckleberry Finn pray that God will make all the bad people good and all the good people nice. This isn’t quite the sense in which Jesus speaks of himself as the “good” shepherd.

Kalos, on the other hand, has the force of “good” in the sense of all that agathos includes PLUS attractive, winsome, appealing, compelling, comely, desirable, endearing, inviting, prepossessing, fine. That’s it: “I am the fine shepherd.” Malcolm Muggeridge found himself ravished by the comeliness of his Lord, and discovered the same comeliness in Mother Teresa of Calcutta. For this reason he titled his book about her, Something Beautiful for God.

What seized Muggeridge is precisely what has startled and moved the Israelite writers who speak of “the beauty of holiness.” Among our more recent spiritual foreparents no one grasped this, or was grasped by it, more profoundly than Jonathan Edwards. When Edwards has in mind what our Hebrew ancestors called “the beauty of holiness” he rarely uses these exact words. Instead he speaks of the “excellence” of God. And when he speaks of the excellence of God he is careful to distinguish those predicates which describe who God is from those which describe what God is.

What is God? God is spirit. But what if this spirit were demonic? God is infinite. But what if God were infinitely malicious? God is immense, omnipresent, inescapable. But what if God were everywhere lupine?

Who is God, on the other hand? God is infinite, yes, and infinite in mercy. God is eternal, and precisely eternal love. God is omnipresent, which is to say his judgement is inescapable; and his judgement is the only judgement in heaven or earth administered by a judge who is first and last our saviour.

Without any suggestion of saccharine sentimentality Edwards speaks of “the loveliness of God.” It is a sign of Christian maturity to love God for the sake of God’s inherent, compelling, irresistible loveliness. Edwards insists that when we are newer in the faith we love God because he first loved us; we love God on account of all that he has done for us and continues to do for us. Yet the day comes when the incomparable excellence of God transfixes us; our apprehension of it mesmerizes us and in turn reshapes our love for God. Now our love for God is transmuted as it assimilates to itself the excellence of God himself. The point to which Edwards returns endlessly is this: to apprehend God’s intrinsic beauty and glory is not only to love him out of gratitude for his mercy but even to love him out of self-forgetful adoration of his inherent worthiness.

In light of all that Edwards says in this regard we shouldn’t be surprised when he insists, “Holiness is the only virtue.” Why is holiness the only virtue? Edwards knows that any virtue (so-called) — chastity, for instance — can cloak and will cloak ever so much that has nothing to do with godliness unless holiness is its ground and guide. Am I a chaste person? Yes. Do you know why I am chaste? It might be because I’m afraid of contracting an S.T.D. It might be because sexual impropriety could issue in me, a clergyman, being defrocked. I might be chaste inasmuch as I’m neurotically averse to sex. Or I might be afraid my wife would otherwise leave me and thereby deprive me of access to her schoolteacher’s pension. It might be because I’m a moralist who, qua moralist, wouldn’t know Jesus from a gerbil. It might be because my distorted theology has left me believing that chastity merits “justification” before God.

There is only one adequate reason for being chaste, as there is only one ground and guide: an apprehension of a splendour in God that finds his winsome holiness fostering in me a holiness that I welcome. Holiness is the only virtue. There is a singularity to excellence, a singularity that is the profoundest simplicity.

Now I am as put off as you by an unrealistic simplicity that refuses to admit the enormous complexity of everything human. When genuine complexity is denied (likely because complexity is threatening) we speak of such simplicity as simplistic inasmuch as we know it’s false. Then we shouldn’t succumb to the simplistic. And I maintain that any simplicity “this” side of complexity is artificial and merely simplistic. But I want to maintain with equal force that on the “other” side of complexity there is a genuine simplicity that is the simplicity of the gospel.

According to two superb philosophers, Emil Fackenheim and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the greatest thinker to arise in Christendom is Soren Kierkegaard. Plainly Kierkegaard can never be accused of being simplistic. Yet just as plainly Kierkegaard knows the simplicity born of the gospel when he writes, “Purity of heart is to will one thing.” One thing. Simplicity and singularity ultimately coalesce.

While we are speaking of singularity and simplicity we should also speak of elegance. Elegance — plainly a manifestation of excellence — doesn’t mean here what it is usually taken to mean: showy, gaudy, ostentatious, pretentious. In the realm of mathematics or logic “elegance” describes an argument whose conclusion is generated from the fewest possible premises. If a conclusion is generated from three premises rather than from four, elegance is emerging. (Obviously the most elegant argument is one that generates a conclusion from one premise only.)

In this sense there is an elegance to excellence just because there is an elegance to simplicity.

“Purity of heart is to will one thing.”

“This one thing I do.”
“Where is your brother?”

“My sin is more than I can bear.”
“Once I was blind; now I see.”

Elegance, simplicity, excellence is found in many dimensions and expressions of the Christian life. In the early 1800s a French priest, from the town of Ars, a priest noted for his pastoral diligence, Jean Vuillamy, remarked, “If we knew, really knew, what it is to be a pastor, we couldn’t endure it.” I was a pastor for 30 years, and in that time I found pastoral work — excellent with all the meaning that only Jonathan Edwards could lend to “excellent”; I found such excellent work simple. I didn’t say easy. I said simple. “If we knew, really knew, what we pastors mean to people in their suffering and bewilderment and sin as we are transparent to the comfort and consolation and mercy of God, we couldn’t endure it.”

 

IV: — Remember, I said simple; I never said easy. Pastoral work isn’t easy. The Christian life isn’t easy anywhere at any time. Then for how long are we going to pursue excellence? “Pursue” suggests diligence, ardour, perspicacity. For how long are we going to maintain all this?

The author of Hebrews tells us that the Christian life isn’t a sprint that ends in 9.97 seconds; it’s a long distance race. A sprint ends so quickly that no runner has time to get discouraged. But discouragement can take any long distance runner out of the race.

In the Christian life all of us face disappointment, frustration, betrayal, unforeseen potholes and pitfalls and pit bulls. Who wouldn’t become discouraged amidst all these? Then our discouragement is as understandable as it is excusable.

“Not so!”, shouts the author of Hebrews. “Understandable, yes; excusable, no. What would be the excuse?” Then in Hebrews 12:3 this writer points us to what will always render our discouragement inexcusable. “Consider him, Jesus, who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or faint-hearted.” Or as J.B. Phillips puts it in his splendid paraphrase, “Think constantly of enduring all that sinful men could say against him, and you will not lose your purpose or courage.”

The Christian life, the pursuit of excellence, is a particular kind of long distance race; it’s a relay race. Each generation of believers passes on the baton to the next. The one thing we mustn’t do is fumble the baton. In the 1992 Olympic Games two women were running side-by-side in a relay event when suddenly one jabbed the other with a sharp elbow. The elbowed woman, in pain now, gasped and slowed up slightly; whereupon the nasty runner surged ahead; whereupon the victimized woman lost her temper and threw her baton at the woman who had fouled her. As soon as she threw her baton she threw the race away; she disqualified herself and her team. Years and years of preparation and training and sacrifice; it was thrown away in an instant. And it all happened because she allowed victimization to deflect her from her pursuit.

In our pursuit we are going to be victimized endlessly. But if it is ever the occasion of our quitting the race we had better not offer it as an excuse, for we are mandated to keep on looking unto Jesus lest we lose our purpose or courage.

The writer of Hebrews tells us that the relay race of the Christian life is an unusual relay race in that Christians throughout the centuries who have already run their leg of the race go to the finish line in order to cheer on those who are still running. These people, having run valiantly, make up “the great cloud of witnesses.” You and I and all God’s people have been appointed to be added to the great cloud. We shall be added as surely as we run with perseverance. For then it will be said of us as it was said of another Christian, now himself in the great cloud, “…fought the good fight; …finished the race, …kept the faith. “

Victor Shepherd    May 2001

 

It isn’t the size of the dog . . . .

 

Since I was only eight years old when the guest teacher spoke to my Sunday School class I can’t remember all the details. Still, I shall never forget Rufus Spooner, the tall, lean, fiery fellow who touched me and torched me that afternoon. He claimed to stand in the tradition of John Wesley, and he was telling us stories of how Christians in the Methodist heritage continued to “fight the good fight of the faith.” (1 Timothy 6:12) The gist of his story was that we must never waver on account of discouragement or capitulate in despair or surrender through fear. The illustration that gripped us was his vivid depiction of a gentle, small dog dragged unwillingly into contending with a slavering Doberman. The conclusion that climaxed it all and thereafter seared itself upon my mind and heart was, “Remember! What counts isn’t the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog!” And I have remembered.

When John Wesley was asked what he needed to unleash the mission for which he believed God to have raised up Methodism (the mission being “to spread scriptural holiness throughout the land”) he replied, “I need only a dozen people who hate nothing but sin and fear no one but God.”

Only a dozen? Would so very few be enough to spread, or even begin to spread, scriptural holiness throughout the length and breadth of England? The people who gathered around him worked and witnessed and sometimes wept; still they won. The story of how they leavened English life and laws and church and populace has been told in history texts beyond number. When I was a teenager and beginning to read of the eighteenth century Awakening I thrilled to the accounts of the diminutive Englishman forthrightly addressing crowds that exceeded twenty thousand. Naturally enough I imagined the numbers gathered into the burgeoning movement to resemble a tidal wave. Decades later I learned that by 1750 the Methodist people totalled no more than 10,000 amidst Great Britain’s ten million. In other words, even after twelve years of unrelenting love and labour (he began in 1738) his people were only one-tenth of one percent of the general population.

“Only”? It’s the size of the fight in the dog! By 1790, one year before Wesley’s death, Methodist membership had swelled to 71,463 in a population of twelve million. On the one hand they were proportionately six times larger at six-tenths of one per cent. On the other hand, they were still far less than one per cent. Was Wesley dismayed? I have never read that he quit or ever thought of quitting. Did he abandon his convictions or sell his soul or hide the hardships of discipleship in order to attract hordes and allow him to boast a howling success? On the contrary he never slackened in his insistence on “doctrine and discipline.” His Journal tells us that when he visited the Methodist communities in Newcastle or Leeds or Bradford or Bristol he sat down with local leaders, queried them concerning the spiritual condition of the people, and then proceeded to delete names from the rolls. Members who had made a profession of faith at one time but who were never found now at worship or who flaunted their dissolute ways or who sneered at the gospel and its spokespersons — these people Wesley unhesitatingly pronounced as “no longer walking with us.” To be sure, upon repenting they would be welcomed without qualification. Until then, however, he would not use their names to pad rolls dishonestly. The truth is, as small as the Methodist movement was, Wesley never worried about making it smaller. In the wake of his visit, however, the same community was always stronger and more effective.

 

There are other Sunday School lessons I remember, especially the oft-told story of God’s rescuing the Israelite people from slavery in Egypt and bringing them safely through the Red Sea. The old flannel-graph lesson board always depicted the Red Sea waters piled twenty feet high like snowbanks in the Rocky Mountains. The portrayal was so very dramatic that those beholding the event would have to be startled, know that God alone had done it, and forever suspend their unbelief in the Holy One of Israel. Actually, the event appeared so very ordinary to the Egyptians that their annals record no more than that a relatively small group of slaves escaped during a storm and were never missed since they were never going to accommodate themselves to Egyptian ways in any case. Then what did happen? Something happened apart from which our civilization is unthinkable. Can you imagine our civilization without the Ten Commandments? Can you imagine public institutions or our social environment or our society’s “illumination by indirect lighting” in such areas as care for the marginalized or the value of the individual or the nature of the criminal justice system apart from what Israel has always called the “Ten Words”? And all of this from a handful of recalcitrant slaves so few in number and so despised in any case as never to be missed!

During the eleven years my father lived in Edmonton he visited the Fort Saskatchewan Penitentiary every Sunday afternoon in order to provide piano accompaniment at a service of worship and also to address the convicts. Years later when I was a temporarily frustrated clergyman I asked my dad if he had ever seen any fruit of his eleven-year sacrifice. “I didn’t do it because I expected to see fruit,” he corrected me, “I did it because it was right.” But of course there was fruit. (An ex-convict thanked him on an Edmonton streetcar in front of my mother.) And of course a vastly greater reward awaited him the day he was “sent home.”

Elijah came to know that there were far more than he once thought who had neither bowed their knee to Baal nor kissed him. (1 Kings 19:18)

“It isn’t the size of the dog in the fight, but the size….”

 

Victor Shepherd
(written for the Community of Concern Newsletter, March 2001)

 

(presented November 4 , 2000 at the Annual Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, Cleveland)

Hope as the Reconciliation of Command and Promise

Concerning the account of the akedah (“binding”) Gordon Wenham comments, “No other story in Genesis, indeed in the whole OT, can match the sacrifice of Isaac for its haunting beauty or its theological depth.”. With respect to its beauty von Rad maintains that “the narrative [is]…the most perfectly formed and polished of the patriarchal stories”, and cites this as evidence that the story existed independently long before it was gathered up into the redacted work. In other words, its literary beauty helped keep the story in the forefront of the people’s consciousness even as its theology informed and formed Israel for centuries throughout the people’s engagement with its God and the surrounding nations.

Yet the story does more than haunt. It overwhelms, and none more thoroughly than Soren Kierkegaard in his preoccupation with Abraham as the “knight of faith” (which knight is to be contrasted everywhere with the ethical hero, even the tragic hero.) Stricken by the story of Abraham and Isaac, Kierkegaard can only conclude, concerning the faith which any believer exemplifies, that “faith begins precisely where thought stops.” Just because thought stops at the inception of faith, no advice can be proffered those children of Abraham — believers — even at the outset of their journey. For in the nature of the case advice is not so much useless as impossible with respect to those whose faith is incomprehensible: “he who walks the narrow road of faith has no one to advise him — no one understands him.” Anyone who has pondered the story of Abraham and Isaac, the paradigm of scriptural faith, and still thinks she understands faith; anyone who thinks her new-found understanding enables or even impels her to “explain” it is no better than a “pious and accommodating exegete who by dickering in this way hopes to smuggle Christianity into the world.”

But of course only an ersatz Christianity can be smuggled into the world. Faith as exemplified by Abraham can never be. And since Abraham’s faith is not only the model for that of his spiritual descendants but also the condition for theirs as well (see section V), Abraham’s faith elicits unbounded admiration from Kierkegaard (“in a certain demented sense I admire him more than all others”), even as it elicits unprecedented horror as well (“he also appalls me”.) Kierkegaard knows that the faith that Abraham exemplifies and to which all others are summoned entails a confrontation with unprecedented horror and therefore the need for unparalleled courage in the face of it: “I have seen the terrifying face to face, and I do not flee from it in horror, but I know very well that even though I advance toward it courageously, my courage is still not the courage of faith and is not to be compared with it.”

I: The Story

Courage befits a test so very extreme. The “test”, of course, is not “temptation” in the sense of seduction into sin. It is Anfechtung (Luther), trial, that occasion of torment which discloses the nature, depth and scope of one’s faith; in a word, what is undeniably the state of one’s heart. In many respects the command is stupefying. Isaac, after all, has been granted to Abraham and Sarah when realistically no child could be expected. More to the point, Isaac’s survival is essential to the fulfillment of God’s promises to Abraham. Having cut himself off from his entire past — “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you” (12:1) — Abraham must now renounce his future, and with it the future of his people, including not only the future of his descendants but also that of innumerable nations who are to be blessed through his descendants.

The crux of the story is this. Abraham, the prototype of the person of faith, has been promised spiritual descendants as numerous as the sands 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 not be descendants-in-faith.) Abraham, then, is racked with this dilemma: if he obeys God and offers up his Son, then God’s promise is null and void, since Isaac has not survived. If, on the other hand, he second-guesses God and preserves Isaac, then God’s promise is null and void, since his disobedience exemplifies unfaith. Abraham’s obedience nullifies the promise as surely as his disobedience nullifies it. Abraham decides to stake everything on trusting God to fulfil God’s promises in ways that Abraham cannot imagine at this point. He will obey God even though such obedience, from a human perspective, ensures the non-fulfillment of the promise.

God tests Abraham. By means of the definite article (lit. “the God”) the text forbids the reader from finding relief in such vagaries as “Perhaps Abraham merely thought he heard God speak, merely projected an intra-psychic oddity.” While “God” (without the article) is used in the story wherever the narrator refers to the deity, the article is added whenever God himself addresses Abraham. It is the one and only, true and living God who speaks to Abraham, the God whose address is as undeniable as it is unmistakable. It is little wonder that the text obviates all sought-after speculations concerning all reductionist psycho-religious “explanations”: the story has point and force only if the God has spoken unambiguously and Abraham has heard unambivalently.

Testing as such is nothing new for Abraham. He has been tested before; e.g., with respect to the famine (12:10ff) (at which he behaved ingloriously), and again with respect to the three visitors (18:1ff.) New here, however, is the agenda of testing in the very first verse of the story, as well as the severity of a test that appears wantonly destructive.

Yet the severity of the testing does not preclude sensitivity on God’s part. “Take (your son)” has the force of “Please take.” The enclitic (“please”) is rare in a divine command, and lends the force of entreaty to the command. God manifests his awareness of the outrageous nature of his request.

As jarring as the outrageous request is, the terrible tension it engenders is heightened yet again as Abraham is told to take “your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love.” By now the narrative has slowed to a crawl as the reader is forced to linger over the perseverated detail, Isaac who is loved unspeakably, and therein forced to reflect on a command whose ever-narrowing specificity fosters ever-increasing anguish. “Whom you love”, exquisitely drawn out, precludes any “escape-suggestion” that Abraham’s love for his son was deficient in any case.

The content of the test pertains, as already noted, to the promise and its (apparent) nullification. The context of the test is Abraham’s unsurpassable love for Isaac. Both are needed. Nowhere is it implied that Abraham’s love for Isaac is inordinate. God approves its intensity. Apart from a love as intense as it is proper, the dilemma concerning the promise would be but a cold abstraction devoid of human significance. Apart from the dilemma concerning the promise the story would not be trivialized (the loss of a child can never be trivial), but it would none the less lack the creation-wide significance it is meant to have.

Abraham is to give up Isaac as a “burnt offering.” Later Levitical ritual will designate this particular offering as the only one to be completely consumed. While the reader’s awareness of the conclusion of the story — the provision of the ram, God’s staying Abraham’s knife-wielding hand, the promises of God promulgated as a result of Abraham’s obedience — mitigates the story’s horror and incomprehensibility, for Abraham himself the instant of the command’s enunciation finds nothing mitigated. The test remains consummate test only if horror and incomprehensibility perdure.

The earlier command, “Go from your country, your kindred, and your father’s house to the land that I will show you” (12:1) was undoubtedly heart-wrenching for Abraham. As difficult as this command was, that of 22:1 is qualitatively different. The earlier command included the promise of a rich future, new land, numerous descendants, blessing for all nations. The most recent command includes no such promise. In fact, obedience to it precludes future, land, descendants, blessing — for all of these presuppose Isaac’s survival.

Was Abraham in torment? He cut the wood for the holocaust after saddling the asses. Surely it would make more sense to cut the wood first. Is he trying to conceal the nature of the test from those looking on? Is he postponing the most painful part to the last? Plainly he is distraught. One would expect servants to prepare animals and split wood. Yet Abraham wants to elicit no questions since he has no answers. His sole involvement in the ordeal means that it cannot be shared in any way; no relief can attenuate his pain.

No word is spoken throughout the journey to Moriah. Father and son arrive on the third day, “on the third day” being a Hebrew idiom indicating the elevated significance of an unusually dramatic moment. Abraham lifts up his eyes and sees the place “afar off.” To lift up one’s eyes before seeing similarly suggests throughout Genesis that what is to be seen is of momentous import. Abraham can recognize it, of course, in that it is the place “of which God had told him.” The reader is not made privy to what God has told him. Still, Abraham has plainly been told as much as he needs to know in order to identify the place. The fact that the reader is not told focuses attention all the more pointedly on Abraham’s determination to obey God at all costs; i.e., the details Abraham needed to know for the test to occur are extraneous to the test itself. If included, such details would only sidetrack the reader.

The drama takes a remarkable turn when Abraham, intending nothing but that resolute obedience which undeniably includes the death of Isaac, departs for the site with Isaac alone and, upon leaving the servants behind, adds, “[we]…will come again to you.” (22:5) On the one hand Abraham releases the servants in that he cannot endure seeing anyone else behold the ghastly event. On the other hand he indicates that he expects to return with Isaac, however illogical or inchoate his expectation here. Even now, then, Abraham is trusting God to fulfil the promise in a manner wholly unforeseeable yet not to be doubted. Paradoxically, the narrator speaks in such a way as to leave the reader understanding that Abraham intends nothing but the slaughter of Isaac and is therefore beside himself, even as he is relying on the promise fulfilled, an event that presupposes Isaac’s being spared.

Isaac, meanwhile, is aware that he and his father are on their way to worship, and aware, of course, that worship entails sacrifice. Unsuspecting, he calls out, “My father.” Abraham replies, “Here am I, my son.” Abraham’s heart remains knit to Isaac’s as strongly as it was the day he received the baby from Sarah. The iron-fast bond of affection only magnifies the tension as Isaac, not suspicious but certainly bewildered, notes that all is on hand for the sacrifice except the victim. “Where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” Isaac’s trust in his father is one with his father’s trust in God.

While much religious art depicts Isaac as a child, if not still an infant, the story makes plain that Isaac is strong enough to carry wood sufficient for that conflagration required to consume his remains. He is also sophisticated enough to apprehend the accoutrements of sacrifice. Not surprisingly, then, Jewish tradition deems Isaac to be 37 years old. Then Isaac can only be willing to be sacrificed. A vigorous young adult could readily overpower a very aged father. The test for Abraham is therefore a test for Isaac as well. Isaac, after all, could not be bound unless he complied.

When an animal was on the point of being sacrificed it was not bound; rather its throat was cut, it was dismembered, and then burnt. Since Isaac submits to being bound he is not mere piacular victim. He is as much an agent in the event now as his father. To the extent that Abraham is ready to obey God at all cost, Isaac is ready to obey his father — and therefore obey God through his father — at all cost. Lest the subtlety of all such considerations distract the reader from the shock-aspect of the deed, the narrator comments, “Abraham …bound Isaac his son.” (22:9) In addition, the “knife” that Abraham poises above the prostrate Isaac is the “knife” used elsewhere to dismember a ravished concubine into twelve pieces. (Judges 19:29) The event at Moriah remains grisly. Nothing can reduce the bizarreness, horror and enormity of what is about to happen.

Precisely at the moment of the knife’s descent God (I am reading “angel of the Lord” as a circumlocution for “God”) calls, “Abraham, Abraham.” The name repeated is a Hebrew way of denoting urgency, typically a way of stopping an action that someone is on the point perpetrating. God’s forbidding the dreaded act is now as pressing as his command was heretofore persistent. God has “seen enough.” Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice is sufficient proof of his undeflectable obedience to God and unalloyed trust in him. God’s unaffected awareness and artless acknowledgement, “Now I know that you fear God” (22:12), dovetails exactly with Abraham’s utter surprise at the provision of the ram. Earlier (22:8) Abraham had attempted to remedy Isaac’s bewilderment with “God will provide a lamb”, and then had moved ahead in obedience to God on the assumption that there were no this-worldly grounds for such intervention (the proof of Abraham’s mind and heart being his raising the knife over Isaac), when the ram was brought forth. 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 he has abandoned faith’s obedience to the uncompromising claim of God.) Abraham is genuinely surprised, profoundly surprised, that the promise has been fulfilled in this manner.

Abraham names the place “The Lord will provide.” In naming the place he does not mention himself. He does not seek to exalt himself, never mind memorialize himself. He wants only to magnify the act of God wherein God’s mercy and wisdom are enlarged. Nothing in the story suggests that Abraham understands himself to be anything more than an “unprofitable servant.”

The second address of the “angel of the Lord” to Abraham (22:15-18) is by no means an “add-on”, let alone embellishment, but is rather an integral aspect of the story itself. Indeed the angel’s words “are the last and most emphatic statement of the promises given to Abraham.” For nowhere else does a divine oath, “By myself I have sworn” (22:15), occur in the patriarchal stories. Again, the singularity of the divine oath (emphasized by “by myself”) is matched by the divine acknowledgement of Abraham’s singular obedience: “Because you have done this”; “[because you] have not withheld your son, your only son”; “because you have obeyed my voice.” On account of Abraham’s obedience blessing will abound. “I will indeed bless you, really bless you” (22:17), the infinite absolute of “bless” being used here alone in Genesis to underline the truth that this promise surpasses all others.

As enormous as the ordeal has been, the blessing is “super-immense.” Abraham himself will be blessed, as will his descendants, as will (by his descendants) all the nations of the earth. The content of the blessing is specified in the case of his descendants. They will be uncountable (“as the stars of heaven and as the sand which is on the seashore”), victorious (“shall possess the gates of their enemies”), and used of God in his prospering others (“shall all the nations of the earth bless themselves.”) Abraham’s faithfulness is the occasion, under God, of a divinely ordained beneficence whose scope and profundity are inestimable.

In all of this one must be careful not to undervalue the unsubstitutably human. Abraham’s faithfulness and obedience and unwavering trust are a human event/act/affirmation upon which the blessing of the whole world hangs. The thrice-uttered “because you…” can only mean that the human “dialogical partner” of God conditions God’s response. What God will do (can do?) for all the nations turns on the integrity of a human agent. Heretofore the promise of God has been grounded in the will of God; now it is grounded in both the will of God and the will of Abraham. Not only has the test found Abraham unbroken; the test has been the occasion of the crown and climax of his walk with God. And the test has permitted God to bless the whole Gentile world.

It is little wonder, then, that the oath God has sworn to Abraham will be recalled repeatedly throughout scripture (e.g., Luke 1:55), for this oath gathers up and guarantees all God’s promises to the patriarch.

II: Luther

Luther knows what is at stake in the akedah: Isaac “had the promise of God concerning the future blessing of the entire world.” Yet the command of God, in light of the promise of God, has issued in a “contradiction with which God contradicts himself.” It is humanly impossible to understand this, for we should “inevitably conclude that God is lying — and this is blasphemy — or that God hates me — and this leads to despair.” Whereas God formerly seemed to be Abraham’s friend, God now appears to have become “an enemy and a tyrant.” Confronted by the God who is enemy and tyrant, Abraham is unable to believe that he is merely being tested, since he would know that in the face of Anfechtung he must recall, cling to and declare the promise of God — and this Abraham appears unable to do, no longer having “remained sure of the promise.” As profoundly discomfited as Abraham is by the ordeal, the episode is recorded for our comfort “in order that we may learn to rely on the promises we have.”

The dialectic Luther suggests here seems bizarre. Since the promise is now the occasion of logical contradiction, Abraham cannot be sure of the promise. Yet the purpose of the story of Abraham is to teach us that we must ever rely on the promise. Notwithstanding the oddity, Luther knows that Anfechtung does not arise ultimately in the face of “woman, gold, silver, life or death”; it arises, rather, when God “shows himself differently from the way the promise speaks.” Anfechtung overtakes us when God’s self-disclosure contradicts God’s self-utterance. When faced with contradiction (apparent or real) between God’s self-disclosure and the promise, what are we to do? Luther’s answer is unambiguous: we are to cling to the promise. And yet Luther appears to contradict himself immediately as he declares that “Abraham’s faith shines forth with special clarity in this passage, inasmuch as he obeys God with such a ready heart when He gives him the command.” Here Luther identifies faith as obedience to command rather than as trust in promise. At once, however, Luther adds, “And although Isaac has to be sacrificed, he nevertheless has no doubt whatever that the promise will be fulfilled even if he does not know the manner of its fulfillment.” “No doubt” can only mean “faith.” Here, then, faith is confidence in the promise fulfilled.

Nowhere in his commentary on Genesis concerning the matter under discussion does Luther speak of the command of God in terms of the law of God, and then contrast it sharply (as is his custom) with the gospel (promise.) Were he to do this, of course, he would have to relegate the significance of the command to fostering in the hearer that despair which drives one to the gospel (promise.) Were command to be understood as law, however, the tension in the incident would disappear and the “trial” would evaporate. Throughout his exposition of Genesis 22 Luther presupposes promise and command as the one gospel of God seen from two different angles. While the law/gospel distinction is crucial in Luther’s thought as a whole and therefore characteristic of him, it is plain that so far as Abraham is concerned the command is not to be understood in terms of law but in terms of gospel. When Luther probes the three-day journey to Moriah he notes that Abraham’s reliance on the command “strengthened and preserved him.” Everywhere in Luther the law, so far from strengthening and preserving, breaks people down for the sake of that which does: the gospel. Plainly Luther relates obedience to command even as he implies promise (rather than law.) The obedience he has in mind, of course, is that obedience which pertains to (promise-quickened) faith. Obedience “does not exist where this is no divine promise.” Clearly there is a subtle mutuality between promise and command. While from a human perspective promise and command may appear to contradict each other, ultimately the promise is the meaning of the command.

Obedience to the command is no small matter. For when Abraham heard the command of God “he hastened without hesitation to carry it out. This is an extraordinary example of a description of perfect obedience.” Unlike Adam, Luther notes, Abraham does not ask why. Adam’s Anfechtung, whatever else it may have involved, did not involve contradiction. Then how did Abraham manage to meet it? He met it only “through the power of the command of God.” Although, from a human perspective, Abraham “did not have a heart of iron but was of a very tender nature…emotions undoubtedly were accompanied by inexpressible groans, sighs, sobs, and fatherly tears”, his obedience “extended to his innermost being”, there being no room in him for doubt, let alone defiance. The resilience of his obedience, insists Luther, was attributable to the fact that the command “rules and lives in him.”

Immediately the reader recalls the New Testament insistence that Jesus Christ (i.e., the gospel) alone rules and lives in believers. Once more, then, Luther is relating obedience (to the command) to gospel- (promise-) quickened faith. In this context it should be noted that Luther maintains faith to arise as we open our ears and shut our eyes. Ears (metaphorically) receive the Word of God; eyes behold what is everywhere a contradiction of the Word of God. Abraham “hears” the (promise-grounded) command, and “sees”, as it were, Isaac slain — and then proceeds to slay Isaac, trusting God to fulfil the promise.

Reason, Luther rightly sees here, is helpless before the conundrum: “If Isaac must be killed, the promise is void; but if the promise is sure, it is impossible that this is a command of God.” Reason aside, Abraham cannot doubt that God has announced both promise and command.

At this point Luther brings forward a theme that will recur throughout his discussion of the episode; viz., the sacrifice of Isaac, and Isaac’s subsequent restoration (necessary if Isaac is to have descendants) is an anticipation of the resurrection of the dead. Within a few lines, however, Luther recognizes that to rely on Isaac’s being resurrected after he has been slain is to denature the event as incomparable trial. If Isaac is to be resurrected and thereby rendered the progenitor of a people, then strictly speaking there is no trial. There remains psychological tumult for Abraham (he must still slay his son), but no theological/spiritual conundrum, no trial with respect to faith in the promise of God and the future blessing of the world. Admittedly, God can continue to “try” Abraham’s trust in and love for One who visits assorted afflictions on Abraham, but appealing to the resurrection of the dead undercuts the nature of that trial which tries faith in the promise of the God whose promise has become an impossibility; i.e., tries faith in the God who has himself become an “impossibility.” Luther maintains that the Word of God is “equal to God”, as is God’s “spoken word” (i.e., God’s self-utterance.) The contradiction between the spoken utterance (command) and the Word (promise) renders God self-contradictory. God is an impossibility.

In reflecting on the akedah Luther reminds us that the Word of God and faith in that Word are correlative, and wherever “these two are, there follows the third, namely, the cross and mortification. These three make up the Christian life.” And what is the extent of mortification? Mortification entails self-denial, to be sure, yet a self-denial so far-reaching as to involve the cancellation of everything and everyone whose significance is connected to the “self” undergoing trial. Mortification, self-denial, is nothing less than utmost deprivation. In this regard Luther comments, “Abraham has now [i.e., upon hearing the command] nothing more, so far as the promise is concerned, than he had before Isaac was born; and yet, because of God, he is ready to give up not only his son, Sarah, an inheritance, his house and his church, but even his own life. Isaac’s death included all of this inasmuch as the promise was attached to Isaac.” Isaac’s death entails an obliteration that is nothing less than total. And since, as was noted earlier, a self-contradiction in God renders God an impossibility, obedience to the command of God will not only cancel the promise of God but thereby effect the ultimate nihil. Abraham, faced with an obedience to God that effects the ultimate nihil, finds a sympathizer in Luther who suggests why Abraham told no one of his trial: no one would have understood it (the same conclusion Kierkegaard was to arrive at independently centuries later.)

As Isaac’s initial bewilderment (“Where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”) gives way to his awareness that he is to be the offering, Luther highlights the obedience of father and son. On the one hand Luther maintains that so profound, so moving, is this development that nothing is said about it in that “the subject matter is greater than can be expressed by any eloquence.” On the other hand, he does manage to say something: “With the exception of Christ, we have no similar example of obedience.” With his subtle grasp of so very many ramifications Luther points out that Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac is not only Isaac’s self-sacrifice but also Abraham’s as well. For “death has a soul and a body”, and to die “in the truest sense of the word” is not to undergo biological cessation but rather “to feel the violence of real death.” In this sense “both are killed, since they see and feel nothing but death.” And while Abraham is everywhere commended for his faith in the promise, Isaac’s faith is no less remarkable. For at the moment that the knife is held to Isaac’s throat, Isaac insists, “I am the son of promise. Therefore I must beget children even if heaven collapses.” God’s promise is so very sure, and so very sure is Isaac’s faith in the promise, that heaven will “collapse”, the cosmos will de-create, before the promise fails — even as obedience to the command precipitates the ultimate nihil.

Plainly Luther views the Abraham-Isaac story as having cosmic significance. It is no surprise, then, that he ruminates, concerning the appearance of the ram that dies in place of Isaac, on two possibilities: the animal could have been brought to the site or been brought into existence at the site. He prefers the latter. For Luther God’s provision is not a providential rearranging of what already exists; God’s provision is nothing less than creatio ex nihilo. The Abraham/Isaac promise/command matrix, together with the blessing soon to be pronounced, means that the world’s life can begin again.

The resolution of the trial finds God swearing by himself. Such singular swearing has the force, says Luther, of God’s saying, “I desire so greatly to be believed and long so intensely to have my words trusted that I am not only making a promise but am offering myself as a pledge….If I do not keep my promises, I shall no longer be who I am.” The promise made to Abraham must be fulfilled or God has annihilated himself. That God does not (cannot) annihilate himself is God’s pledge that this promise is not merely something that God has said and now makes good; i.e., as related to the faithfulness of God this promise is integrally related to the being of God. This promise, then, is like no other. For this reason Luther rhapsodizes that by the aforementioned pledge God “enlarges His promise to such an outstanding extent that it surpasses all thinking and faith.” In other words, this promise transcends thought so as to leave us unable to comprehend it, even as the enlarged promise dwarfs our faith. Yet since promise and faith are internally related, an enlarged promise must issue in enlarged faith. For precisely this reason Luther adds, “What could be said or thought that is surer and more powerful for increasing faith?”

With respect to the scope of the blessing spreading out from Abraham, Luther speaks first of David. David apprehends (Psalms 89:35; 132:11) that by God’s oath the promise “has come into my [i.e., David’s] tribe, into my line, person and body….I am he to whom the promise is attached, just as it was attached to the person of Abraham.” In short, David is now the embodiment of the original promise. But then David’s enemies must have been anticipated in Abraham’s enemies and those of Abraham’s immediate descendants. Not unexpectedly, then, Luther comments that regardless of however “powerful and violent” the enemies of Abraham’s descendants might be, victory “will be with the sand and the stars, but especially with the Son.” With the Son? Luther’s final word concerning the scope of the ever-expanding boon could not be stronger: “The blessing promised Abraham is eternal.”

III: Calvin

In his Institutes Calvin admits that Abraham’s trial concerning Isaac is quantitatively different from all tests and afflictions (the greatest of which was childlessness) visited upon Abraham earlier, since “for a son to be slaughtered by his father’s hand surpasses every form of calamity.” All such tests, however, have merely facilitated Abraham’s mortification. Now, however, Abraham is pierced by a wound that is qualitatively different, “a wound far more grievous than death itself.” Here Abraham is tormented not merely at the prospect of bereavement, but rather at a faith-obedience wherein “the whole salvation of the world seemed to be extinguished and to perish.” The exercise of faith issues in “the destruction of faith.” It is little wonder that Abraham finds his “piety” a consuming “distraction.”

Calvin’s reference to “piety” is significant. For him pietas is a noble word and carries none of modernity’s pejorative freight; viz., a saccharine, cloying, ethereal, self-indulgent and meritorious religiosity. Pietas, rather, is “that reverence joined with love of God which the knowledge of his benefits induces.” In his earlier catechism, written more expansively than the compressed Institutes, Calvin had said, “True piety consists rather in a sincere feeling which loves God as Father as much as it fears and reverences Him as Lord, embraces His righteousness, and dreads offending Him worse than death.” Paradoxically it is Abraham’s piety that is now ultimate spiritual threat. To adore God is now one with abhorring him. Previous tests presupposed the veridicality of the promise; this test ensures its cancellation, and with it even the possibility of humankind’s salvation. The cancellation here, moreover, entails an inconsistency in God that renders God thoroughly opaque and therefore utterly untrustworthy. If trusting a treachery “proves” faith, what is the nature of the faith proved thereby? If to exercise faith is to be left with none, and not to exercise faith is to be left with none, then what is meant by “faith?” Lest the reader think that Abraham might be “hearing things” in all of this, Calvin, reading the text with exquisite attentiveness, insists Abraham cannot doubt that God has spoken.

In view of the fact that Calvin is notorious for insisting that word and faith cannot be sundered, he displays his own “distress” when, in the context of proving faith, he speaks uncharacteristically of the “disappearance of the word.” While Calvin everywhere else maintains that the word can no more disappear than God vanish, here he magnifies the uniqueness of Abraham’s test by insisting that God tries Abraham’s faith by drawing Abraham into a contest with God’s own word. Amplifying this, Calvin avers (again uncharacteristically) that “God would shake the faith that Abraham had placed in His word, by a counter-assault of the word itself.” In short, God would test Abraham by juxtaposing word as promise (previously vouchsafed to Abraham) and word as living voice of the One whom Abraham knew with undeniable immediacy, “since all occasion of doubt is removed.”

It is impossible to exaggerate the manner in which Calvin has heightened, in expounding this narrative, the tensions in his own theology. Calvin rigorously maintains that the word alone is the author and object of faith. “Word” and “faith” always imply each other. Any deviation here bespeaks the “fanaticism” of the 16^th Century radicals. Since the word is now self-contradicted, no human reasoning can reconcile the immolation of Isaac (word) and the promise concerning his descendants and the salvation of the world. This singular simultaneity of self-contradiction has the force of making “full trial” of Abraham’s faith. Such a trial is “full” not in the sense of “not partial” but rather in the sense of a novum, unprecedented, categorically different from the trials that have tested Abraham and all believers. Whereas temptation to disobey God is normally “shaken off” by recalling and clinging to the promise, such recourse now appears impossible, since “God, in a certain sense, assumes a double character.” While word-quickened faith is kept constant as we “apply all our senses to the word of God”, such application is now useless since the word itself (God himself) has become the problem, God now being two-faced. God’s “forked tongue” can only bespeak a Jekyll-and-Hyde monstrosity. Calvin reminds the reader that when believers are assaulted they are always to arm themselves with the word, “the sword of the Spirit.” Now, however, he asks rhetorically what the predicament of believers must be if God at this moment attacks believers with that weapon wherewith he had previously protected them. While the predicament cannot be untangled at the level of thought, the predicament can still be lived. Abraham, forswearing the futility of immobilizing himself before it or speculating beyond the concrete occurrence of the unmistakable summons, wrestles with the test by faith. In it all he remains the paradigm of the person whose faith keeps him fixed on the immediacy of the command of God. Faith, in moments of dreadful testing, fixes itself to the immediacy of the command, obeying the command while trusting the promise. Calvin exalts the obedience of Abraham by pointing out that while believers of less rigorous faith are prone to be carried off “in whatever direction the breath of a doubtful vision may blow”, Abraham resolutely obeys God when, from a human perspective, he is faced not by a doubtful vision but by undeniable nightmare; and when from a believer’s perspective, he is faced with a command incomprehensible in itself, ruinous for his family, and catastrophic for the wellbeing of the world. As if the “double character” of God were not enough, horrible on account of the confusion it engenders, God appears to gloat in his torturing Abraham by mocking him: God’s requiring Abraham to exercise faith by obeying the command to wield the knife becomes itself the knife that dismembers the promise. As a result Abraham is commanded, as an act of faith, to “cut in pieces the charter of his salvation” — and that of the whole world’s.

Then is Abraham’s faith anything more than irrationality or impulsiveness? Is he merely a self-negating inverted romantic? Little if anything could be said to spare Abraham (and therefore Calvin) this accusation were Genesis 22 the whole history of Abraham’s engagement with God. While the test with Isaac is certainly unparalleled, it is not the only test or the first. In light of Abraham’s decades-long, rich acquaintance with God and his understanding of God arising from this intimacy, Abraham, Calvin insists, concludes, notwithstanding the present crisis, that God “could not be his adversary.” Abraham’s having concluded this much, however, still does not permit him to see “how the contradiction might be removed.” All of this is to say that Abraham, not yet permitted to walk by sight, must continue to walk by faith; he can reconcile promise and command only “by hope.” Again, however, such hope is never wishful thinking; Abraham’s history of “walking” with God saves hope from the charge of irrationality, impulsiveness or romanticism even as it allows Abraham to affirm the fact of such reconciliation, content to leave the manner of it with God.

At this point in his amplification of the narrative Calvin appears to have said as much as he wants or needs to say. Apparently mesmerized by the story, however, and unable to let it go, he circles back relentlessly upon the contradiction between command and promise and all its consequences for a world unaware. Having already told his readers that God has contradicted himself by reason of his word (something Calvin will admit here in light of the intractable text of Genesis 22 yet something he will deny as absurd everywhere else in his theology), Calvin now directs our attention to a similar problem: Isaac is the only pledge of grace. This sole pledge is now to be taken away, leaving — leaving a graceless God? (Again, such an implication occurs nowhere in Calvin outside the Abraham/Isaac story.) Admittedly, in view of the age-facilitated infertility of Abraham and Sarah, the occasion of the conception of Isaac was one of human impossibility. The destruction of the only pledge of God’s grace, however, is the occasion of a divine impossibility, for the pledge and he of whom it is pledge cannot be separated: destruction of the pledge is the self-willed destruction of God. Whereas the promised conception of Isaac had required Abraham to trust God in a way that redounded to Abraham’s praise as well as God’s, now Abraham is to trust God in a situation that renders God, promise, faith and blessing a farrago of inconsistency and incomprehensibility. Still, says Calvin, in all of this there remains the fact of a promise whose meaning is affirmed in the face of what appears to void the promise of meaning. Abraham’s test, Calvin adds laconically, is the prototype of test for every believer: God “reduces all their senses to nothing, that he may lead them to a complete renunciation of themselves.” With self renounced and understanding immobilized, Abraham suspends trying to “measure, by his own understanding, the method of fulfilling the promise.” Instead Abraham relies on the “incomprehensible power of God.” He will cling to the promise of God not only in the face of human impossibility but even divine.

At this point it is important for the reader to understand, in view of what Calvin has said already, that God’s power is “incomprehensible” not in the sense that God is to be counted on for a mighty act whose mightiness is beyond human comprehension; rather, God’s power is “incomprehensible” in that God is to be counted on to resolve his “double character.” He whose nature is mercy now wills the disappearance of his only pledge of mercy (grace.) Since “pledge” and “promise” imply each other, God’s power is “incomprehensible” at present in that the promise is to be vindicated (and Abraham’s faith with it) precisely where promise (and therefore pledge) wills its self-obliteration.

Still mesmerized, Calvin circles back yet again, examining the story from yet another angle of vision. Isaac is the “mirror of eternal life and the pledge of all good things.” “Mirror”, one of Calvin’s commonest metaphors, is never mirror only. When Jesus Christ, for instance, is said to mirror God, Calvin never means that those beholding the Nazarene are given a substance-less reflection. Similarly, when the sacraments are said to mirror Christ, Calvin never suggests that believers receive elements that somehow deceptively depict Christ but are devoid of him. The purpose of a mirror, for Calvin, is to render substance accessible. Then the death of Isaac as “mirror” can only mean the disappearance of eternal life. And since “eternal life” is uniquely the life of God, the death of Isaac entails the death of God. It is this human opacity and divine impossibility, “incomprehensible”, according to Calvin, that God’s power can remedy.

Unable to let the matter go, Calvin returns to it once more, stating that the death of Isaac does not merely wound Abraham’s “paternal heart”; it tramples upon [God’s] own benevolence.” Everywhere in Calvin God’s “benevolence” is his inmost nature turned outward salvifically upon the world. If God’s benevolence has been “trampled” (i.e., pulverized), then God himself has been de-natured.

Still haunted, Calvin comes back to the conundrum, this time stating that Isaac “was not a son of the common order but one in whom the person of the mediator was promised.” Calvin insists in Institutes and Commentaries alike that there is no knowledge of God (i.e., no participation in God’s life) apart from the mediator. Then the death of the person of Isaac plainly implies the non-existence of the mediator. Abraham’s obedience incontrovertibly deprives humankind of its sole saviour and thereby dooms it.

Calvin is so very reluctant to move past the perplexity he needs to point out only once in that he is evidently aware of its inherent shock: the person who embraces all of the foregoing embraces it as an act of faith. Calvin appreciates the correlation between an affirmation of the “incomprehensible” and a risible instance of the ludicrous, for he maintains that Abraham left the servants behind, on his way to Moriah, lest they find him “a delirious and insane old man.” While Calvin is speculating here, the speculation is none the less profound. Abraham is “insane” in that he is about to do what only psychotics do; “delirious” in that Calvin assumes Abraham to be hysterical. Abraham is understandably hysterical, for Isaac’s cry, “My father”, is a “new instrument of torture.”

Like Luther before him, Calvin maintains that Isaac is no infant but rather is middle-aged. Isaac “voluntarily” surrenders himself, and does so, says Calvin, only because he is “acquainted with the divine oracle.” In view of Isaac’s willing collaboration, therein rendering his death self-sacrifice, Isaac is bound not lest he change his mind and bolt at the moment of immolation but rather lest anything extraneous impede his act. Again like Luther before him Calvin states that the sight of Isaac slain would be enough to kill Abraham. In other words, Isaac’s willing submission renders Abraham’s obedience a joint perpetration on the part of father and son, even as it renders father and son joint victims. Abraham’s unalloyed obedience in faith destroys faith, son and Abraham himself. There is no other conclusion. And in view of Calvin’s understanding of the person of God inherent in all the acts of God, the destruction of the promise (act) is also the destruction of the promiser.

As a result of Abraham’s unvarying obedience God has come to know that Abraham fears him. Did God not know as much already in light of earlier tests? Yet as Calvin has averred repeatedly, this test is categorically distinct; this text exposed a “double character” in God and summoned Abraham to obey and trust the God self-exposed as such. Isaac’s release completes and terminates Abraham’s “true trial.” Verus, (“true”) has the force of real, actual, genuine. The concrete actuality of the akedah has become the reality of Abraham’s life, even the reality (albeit hidden) of the world, since the akedah lends the world its unacknowledged but no less real truth and substance: a divine blessing whose ramifications are inestimable.

Yet something can be “estimated”, even counted on: (i) even though Israel’s enemies will overrun her occasionally, Israel’s enemies can never defeat her definitively; (ii) the victory promised to Israel is fulfilled in Jesus Christ and his people “so far as they adhere under one head.” Calvin, it should be noted, adduces both without indicating any inconsistency or even tension in the two-fold outcome. Israel will never be exterminated; neither will the church (Christ and his people.) While Calvin does not develop at this point in his Genesis commentary anything approaching Paul’s treatment of Israel and the church in Romans 9-11, or even his own understanding that Jesus Christ, the one and only mediator, was salvifically present to Israel under the economy of the torah, his unelaborated conclusion to the story that preoccupies Israel to this day (no ram appeared at Auschwitz) is as sobering as it is pregnant.

In his examination of Genesis 22 Calvin says nothing about the relation of Isaac and the church. Yet the reader may legitimately ask after and probe this relationship, for in his exposition of Genesis 21:1 Calvin writes, “in his [Isaac’s] very birth God has set before us a lively picture of the church.” What does Isaac’s birth portend for the church, even as the arm of the sacrificer is stayed, but only at the moment of the church’s unconditional willingness to give itself up to death in demonstration of its trust in the promise? And how firm is the church’s confidence that “God never feeds men with empty promises”?

IV: Kierkegaard

Throughout Fear and Trembling‘s sustained reflection on Abraham Kierkegaard appears always to have two adversaries in mind: philosophical speculation (especially Hegel’s metaphysics) and ethics.

Hegel maintained that Christianity was merely a pictorial representation in concrete, colourful images of a truth that the philosopher could apprehend by means of rising to the standpoint of the Absolute through pure thought. To say this, Kierkegaard knew, is to say that the philosopher can apprehend a supposed higher unity in which God and humankind have been brought together, “God” now being no more than the essence of humankind.

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. Similarly, a society popularly imbued with Hegel’s dilution is unable to comprehend the significance of Genesis 22 even as it disdains the biblical narrative as no more than “bourgeois philistinism.”

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 theology is seemingly unaware that its mandate is theos, God. Instead theology “sits all rouged and powdered in the window and courts its favours, offers its charms to philosophy.” 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.” 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.” While “got no further” waggishly suggests that Abraham was stalled, Kierkegaard knows that Abraham, not the philosophical speculators, had alone moved on 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.

The radical commitment is to God; not the “God” of philosophical constructs but the One who summons every would-be believer to Abrahamic trial. Such trial has nothing to do with the glib summaries of those who “recite the whole story in cliches: ‘The great thing was that he [Abraham] was willing to offer him the best.'” Neither is such trial the facile escape into religious ethereality of those who speak offhandedly of a post mortem resolution to Abraham’s conundrum. The trial, rather, is enduring 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: Isaac, having been given up, is given back in this world. Isaac lives, and the promised blessing is operative in the temporal. For this reason Kierkegaard underscores, for the benefit of philosophers and romantics alike, “Abraham had faith for this life…specifically for this life.” By way of reminder of the link between the absurd and the temporal Kierkegaard adds, “Only he who draws the knife gets Isaac.”

The second major adversary for Kierkegaard is the realm of ethics. Everywhere in this part of Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard relentlessly contrasts the “single individual” (or the “knight of faith”) with the universality of the ethical.

To act ethically is to embody a universal principle. Put more sharply, to act ethically is for the agent to “annul his singularity in order to become the universal.” From an ethical standpoint a father ought always (i.e., universally) to love his son more than he loves himself. For this reason a legitimate ethical protest would be Isaac’s crying out, “Do not do this: you are destroying everything.”

In light of the legitimacy of the ethical protest, why does Abraham set off with fire and knife, one thing only in mind? He does so for God’s sake and for his own sake; i.e., he does it because God has commanded it, and he does it inasmuch as faith exists only as faith is exercised, it being impossible for faith to be “thought” philosophically.

As different as faith and the ethical evidently are, they remain frequently confused. Such confusion is manifest whenever it is argued that since the ethical is universal, the ethical is also divine. The argument here traces duty back to God, since ethical duty (e.g., with respect to neighbour) is “essentially duty to God.” Perceptively Kierkegaard draws our attention to the crucial consideration here: “in the duty itself I do not stand in relation to God.”

Commensurate with the aforementioned contrast Kierkegaard distinguishes the ethical hero from the knight of faith. In giving up himself for the universal the ethical hero enjoys the security of knowing that others understand him and admire him; and if his heroism is tragic too, others will weep over him as well. No one, on the other hand, understands or admires the knight of faith. It would be preposterous to suggest that anyone would weep over Abraham. Instead Abraham can be approached only with a horror religiosus, akin to that with which Israel approached Sinai. At the same time there is a singular privilege vouchsafed to the knight of faith: she alone says “you” to God, whereas the ethical hero, related ultimately to a principle (the ethical universal), merely speaks of God in the third person. This lattermost point is pivotal: in the realm of ethics we do not meet, engage, or contend with the living God himself; we can do no more than speak about him at the level of hearsay.

None of this must be taken to suggest that the ethical is unimportant. Kierkegaard’s point, however, is that since faith alone is “an absolute relation to the absolute”, the single individual determines his relation to the universal by his relation to the absolute, never vice versa. The single individual may be summoned to what ethics forbids (e.g., the slaying of Isaac), but the single individual is never summoned to stop loving. Abraham loved Isaac — or else Isaac’s death was no sacrifice but simply murder — for Abraham was no Cain. Needless to say, however, 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.”

All that Kierkegaard has said to this point about the ethical, the universal, faith, and absolute relation to the absolute yields his notorious assertion concerning the “teleological suspension of the ethical.” With the regularity of a tolling bell Kierkegaard avers throughout the latter half of Fear and Trembling that either there genuinely is such a suspension, either Abraham does exist in an absolute relation (higher than the category of the ethical) to the absolute (God), “or else Abraham is lost.” In light of philosophy’s incomprehension of all that Kierkegaard has said about the suspension, 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. 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.”

Kierkegaard repeats several times over that what passes for faith in Christendom in fact is not; viz., “infinite resignation.” Infinite resignation is a movement prior to faith; in fact it is the last stage before faith, but never faith itself. Infinite resignation, it must always be understood, is a movement in thought not in existence. It is born of a concentration of the person in a goal or purpose which integrates that person. Infinite resignation gains the person an eternal consciousness; specifically an eternal consciousness “in blessed harmony with my love for the eternal being.” Kierkegaard’s point (contra Hegel) is that even an eternal consciousness is still only consciousness; it is not yet existence. Faith alone embraces existence, and does so only by means of a “leap.” This leap is always a qualitative transition that nothing can precipitate or effect incrementally. Again, infinite resignation yields peace and rest, the irreducible pain of life being yet the occasion of a peculiar kind of comfort. The pain of existence (i.e., of faith), on the other hand, can never be lessened.

While infinite resignation is the last stage before faith, it is not for that reason to be slighted. Indeed, in infinite resignation we become aware of our eternal validity, without which we could not “grasp the whole temporal realm”, albeit only by virtue of the absurd. Aware of our eternal validity, at the point of infinite resignation we resign the infinite (here I am convinced that Kierkegaard is distancing himself from Hegelian metaphysics with its preoccupation with the infinite as well as from a popular religious romanticism that likes to speak languorously of the infinite); we resign the infinite precisely in order, as knights of faith, to inherit the finite. Finite Isaac, it must be said again, once given up is given back, with untold blessing for a finite world. At the point of infinite resignation we are convinced that the impossible is just that: impossible — and hence the resignation. Faith, on the other hand, moves “beyond” infinite resignation (here Kierkegaard turns Hegel’s vocabulary back on Hegel himself) and “passionately acknowledges” (i.e., endorses or owns) the impossible. 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. Such faith is always the paradox of existence.

 

In light of all that has been said concerning the absurd, paradox, leap and existence, and 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. A witness to what? A witness to grace, certainly, and also a witness to faith. For it is the single individual who alone can affirm, in the face of the absurd, Jehovah-Jireh, “God will provide.” And Abraham’s total existence, says Kierkegaard, is gathered up in that one Hebrew word. Existence, contra Hegel, is indeed “beyond” all philosophical thought-experiments.

Kierkegaard’s exclamation remains challenging, profound, and dismaying all at once: “No one is as great as Abraham. Who is able to understand him?”

V: Comment
A

Martin Buber, likely the Jewish thinker of greatest influence on the church in the 20^th century, watched with sadness and horror as the best of his philosophy students at Berlin University in the mid-1930s appeared in class wearing swastika armbands. Soon these students were telling Buber that the horizon-filling goal of serving Naziism’s restoration of Germany’s glory was the telos that asked of them the suspension of all ethical considerations. Shortly they were highly-placed officers in the dreaded SS.

While the concept of “the teleological suspension of the ethical” may have much or little credibility in the context of Kierkegaard’s exposition of Abraham’s existence and therein that paradigmatic faith whose nature cannot be subsumed by either metaphysical thought or popular romanticism, in the context of Nazi ideology such a “suspension” has none. Grave danger attends any claim to such a suspension in any context. If a telos can suspend ethics, then the question has to be asked if any telos can suspend any ethical consideration. If not, then there have to be specified both those tele that do effect such a suspension and the reason for the suspension.

Imagine someone announcing in church that she has received a divine summons to slay her offspring. It is inconceivable that fellow-congregants would nod knowingly, all the while telling her they understood why she must proceed and assuring her of their support throughout it. Instead they would insist she undergo psychiatric assessment, thinking her to be psychotic. Now imagine that she submits to such assessment and is shown to be non-psychotic. It is still inconceivable that anyone would agree that, horrific as the deed appears, she must proceed as an act of faith. Most likely assertions would tumble out of many that God does not ask such hideous things of his people. If the woman in question were to reply, “Why not?”, then likely it would be said that God would not or cannot, on the grounds of the character of the God we apprehend through his self-disclosure. Willful slaying of one’s offspring is not the sort of thing that the God known in the church asks of his people, not the sort of thing that can be regarded as bringing honour to him in any way. This being the case, the question must be asked concerning Abraham: why would anyone concur that Abraham was divinely summoned to slay Isaac? If God’s character forbids such today, why would it not have forbidden it then? Conversely, if God’s “voice” rendered sacrifice non-murder then, why would it not do as much today?

A clue to coming to terms with the aforementioned question is suggested by Luther and Calvin in their insightful discussion of the akedah: in view of Isaac’s consensual complicity, the son is as much sacrificer as the father; and in view of the fact that Isaac’s death is tantamount to a fatal knife-thrust in the heart of Abraham, the father is as much the sacrificed as the son. Father and son are one in offering up and in being offered up; father and son are one in their obedience, their suffering and their trust.

I am convinced that a fruitful way ahead, in light of the critical comments adduced already in this section, is to consider the simultaneity of Father and Son with respect to the Atonement, presupposing as it does the homoousion as reflected in the apostolic confession of Jesus Christ and articulated in Athansius’s assertion at the Council of Nicaea. In the context of the Arian heresy, Athanasius insisted, following the apostles, that the Son was of the same nature as the Father, not merely of a similar nature. If Father and Son were merely of a similar nature, then the Father’s appointing the Son to the cross on behalf of humankind would be no more than the Father’s appointing an innocent yet hapless third party to misery in the interests of appeasing a wrath the Son did not share. Yet precisely because Father and Son are of the same nature, same substance, same identity and being, the Son’s free, self-willed identification with sinners is the Father’s; the Son’s sinbearing love is the Father’s; the Son’s cry of dereliction is the Father’s heart-cry of self-alienation for the sake of sinners that demonstrates Father and Son to be one in their judgement of humankind, one in their determination to redeem it, one in their self-identification with it, and one in their pain suffered for its restoration.

The Son’s God-forsakenness (not merely his feeling he was) for the sake of humankind, together with the Father’s self-same “God-forsakenness” means that no human being is — or can be — God-forsaken. Looked at from a different angle, the cross means that that to which God appointed himself at Calvary no human being will be appointed to now: namely, the sacrifice of one’s offspring.

Abraham and Isaac are together a prolepsis of God the Father and Son. The prolepsis, however, having been fulfilled in actuality in the event of Good Friday, is thereafter rendered impossible as prolepsis; i.e., any slaying of one’s offspring could thereafter be regarded as murder only, never as sacrifice. Abraham and Isaac are not an instance, or even the instance, of the “teleological suspension of the ethical.” They are, rather, an instance of the unity of Father and Son in the event of the cross, no subsequent “anticipation” ever being possible in the light of this anticipation’s definitive fulfillment. What Father and Son did in the cross is nothing less than that “one oblation…once offered, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world.” Such an act needs no supplementation or duplication; neither does it permit one.

B

The force of Genesis 22:1-19 is that hope alone reconciles promise and command of God. Such hope, however, must always be distinguished from wishful thinking. Wishful thinking is but “dead” hope; “living” hope, on the other hand, is rooted in the event of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. (1 Peter 1:3) From a biblical perspective, hope is always a future certainty grounded in a present reality. Any lessening of hope as certainty merely denatures “hope” and moves it in the direction of wishful thinking. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is that reality which is ultimately the fulfillment of the promise of Exodus 3:14: “I shall be who I shall be.” In the resurrection of his Son, God definitively resolves any suggestion or imputation of a “double character” (Calvin) in his kingdom-establishing event. The resurrection is that act of God whereby promise and command are reconciled; hope is the human counterpart that finds promise and command reconciled in the believer. Accordingly, the resurrection of Jesus Christ is ultimately the truth and reality that gave Isaac back; hope, that which gave him back to Abraham, the resurrection beings the guarantee of all the promises of God to all believers. Because Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead; because his resurrection and all it implies is the truth of the world (albeit hidden and therefore unacknowledged), as well as the truth of the church (an “open secret” and therefore acknowledged in faith), hope can never finally disappoint God’ s people. The future certainty of what is hoped for pertains to all the promises of God, whether now only partially fulfilled or not yet fulfilled at all. They will be fulfilled, and will be seen to be such.

Instances without end can be recited with respect to promises that appear to remain unfulfilled, as well as of commands that seem to perpetuate the non-fulfillment. One such promise/command appears to be the promise that the powers of death will not prevail against the church (Matt. 10:18), even as the church, defined by the gospel and charged to live by the gospel, must announce Jesus Christ with no little urgency in season and out of season. (2 Tim. 4:2) Related to the command to announce the gospel is the promise that God’s word does not return to him fruitlessly (Isaiah 55:11), as well as (among others) the promise that whoever hears the herald of the Lord hears that selfsame Lord himself. (Luke 10:16)

Yet the command appears to vitiate the promise, as the church dwindles numerically (at least in the west) week by week. The gospel has been promised to be fruitful beyond our imagining, while the command to declare it appears to ensure the church’s fruitlessness. After all, the gospel appears too narrow in an age of inclusiveness, too sharply-defined amidst the blurred vaguenesses of pluralism, too confident of its effectiveness in a time of polite opinions, too real for an era that prefers romanticism, too specific for those who like generalities, too precisely parameterized to suit the taste of those who want no boundaries. It appears that insofar as the church attempts to live by the gospel it will die by the gospel. Then what is the church to do?

Like Abraham of old it can trust God to fulfil promises in ways that the church cannot see at present. It can obey the command of God even though its obedience must render all such fulfillment hope. Or it can second-guess God and attempt to ensure the fulfillment of the promise by “improving” on the command as it resorts to gimmicks, entertainment, sure-fire techniques, agendas that “work” with other institutions and whose “success” the sociologist can explain.

For those who have agonized with Abraham there is only thing to be done: live in hope, confident that hope will see, in God’s own way and in God’s own time, the reconciliation of promise and command.

Victor Shepherd      January 2000

(delivered at Knox Presbyterian Church, Toronto, August 2000)

The Cross of Christ

“For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and
him crucified.”
1 Corinthians 2:2

 

“I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified”, the apostle Paul wrote to the Christians in Corinth. “I’ve got only one sermon in my briefcase. It’s about the cross. If you don’t like it, too bad, because you won’t hear anything else from me.” Why did he tell them they’d hear about Christ crucified only as long as he had breath? Paul knew how prone the Corinthian Christians were to disdain the cross of Jesus, and having disdained their Lord’s cross to disregard their own cross and instead embrace the “glitzy”, the sensational, the showy, the self-indulgent. He knew that unless they were reacquainted with the cross their faith would erode (since faith is always faith in and faith quickened by the crucified himself). Unless they were reacquainted with the cross their understanding would unravel until it became no more than a caricature of Christian truth. Unless they were reacquainted with the cross their discipleship would cease to be cruciform as cross-bearing was forgotten and self-indulgent ease took over. The Christians in Corinth were undoubtedly Christians; Paul never denied that they were. He was also convinced, however, that their spiritual life had declined and was in danger of sinking even lower. Their faith was at risk; their understanding was at risk; their discipleship was at risk. Only the word of the cross could correct them. Then the word of the cross was the only word they were going to hear from him.

 

I: — If we are going to understand the cross as it is attested in scripture, then we must begin where scripture begins. Scripture begins with God’s holiness.

God’s holiness is God’s own Godness, that which constitutes him uniquely God. In the first place God is holy in that he is utterly distinct from his creation. God is not to be identified with any part of his creation or any aspect of it.

In the second place God’s holiness means that he can’t be measured or assessed by anything other than himself. God is the absolute standard of himself.

In the third place God’s holiness means that God’s character is without defect or deficiency. God’s character is free from taint of any sort. God’s love is free from sentimentality; God’s anger is free from ill temper; God’s judgement is free from arbitrariness; God’s patience is free from indifference; God’s sovereignty is free from tyranny.

In the fourth place God’s holiness means that all the aspects of God’s character just mentioned are gathered up into a unity. Just as every shade of the spectrum from infrared to ultra-violet is gathered up into what we call “light”, so every dimension of God’s character and God’s transcendence is gathered up into God’s holiness.

God’s holiness is what scripture is actually about from cover to cover. To be sure, scripture is also about the holiness of God’s people, but always about this derivatively, secondarily. Primarily scripture has to do with God’s resolute assertion of his uncompromised holiness.

 

This lattermost point is important, for in our era the cross isn’t seen to be about God’s holiness. In our era the cross is viewed simply as one more instance of human virtue. The world has never been without its martyrs, for instance, and the cross of Jesus bespeaks his martyrdom. The world has never been without those possessed of the courage of their convictions, and Jesus plainly possessed the courage of his convictions. The world has never been without those victimised by political and religious power brokers, and Jesus is one more victim.

But the apostles never speak like this of the cross of Jesus. John the Baptist was victim; John possessed the courage of his convictions; John was a martyr; yet the apostles never speak of the death of John as they do of the death of Jesus. The cross of Jesus has a force, a significance that the beheading of John doesn’t approach.

What’s more, the cross of Jesus is that one, singular event that looms over everything in scripture. While the public ministry of Jesus lasted up to three years, over 50% of the written gospels concerns one week only (the death-week) of Jesus. The apostles see that the older testament anticipates the cross on page after page, from the story of Abraham and Isaac to the pronouncements of the prophets. They insist, together with Paul, they will preach only “the word of the cross.” They understand the resurrection of Jesus to seal the sacrifice of the cross; they understand the Holy Spirit to vivify the preaching of the cross. Then what it is about the cross that renders it the event in human history, the event in the drama of salvation, the event in the life of God himself apart from which, say the apostles, there is no possibility of life eternal for us?

Here we return to the centrality of God’s holiness. In view of the centrality of God’s holiness, everything about him and us must be understood in terms of his holiness. Sin is our defiance of God’s holiness. God’s anger (his reaction to our sin) is the reaction of his holiness. God’s patience with us is the persistence of his holiness. And his love? God’s love is his holiness refusing to compromise itself even as it refuses to abandon us. If God’s holiness refuses to compromise itself even as it refuses to abandon us, where does it all come to expression? What is the outcome? It all comes to expression in the cross. And the cross, the outcome of it all, is the triumph of God’s holiness.

Let us be sure we understand something crucial. Because God is holy, he is jarred by our sin. Jarred? Sin does more than assault him; sin offends him. He is repulsed by it. He finds it loathsome, so very loathsome, in fact, that he can’t tolerate it. Since there’s no sin apart from sinners, God finds sinners loathsome and can’t tolerate them. Then he has only two choices: either he annihilates sinners, or he remedies their sinfulness. It’s plain that God has chosen not to annihilate sinners (for the time being, at least.)

To be sure, he has every right to annihilate us. For we are ungrateful, defiant, insolent people who owe him our existence and our every blessing, even as we persist in ignoring him, never thinking that our ignoring him is an insult to him as life-giver and a slander upon his goodness.

Our society assumes that to ignore the God whose holiness is his very Godness; our society assumes that to ignore him is merely an option, a preference, a taste. A few people seem to relish “religion”; most do not. But in any case there’s no disputing taste. Fools! To ignore the one to whom we owe our existence and our every blessing is colossal ingratitude, inexcusable ingratitude, as offensive as it is unreasonable. Such ingratitude, however, is never mere ingratitude; it is also contempt. Yet our contempt of God is also folly for us. To perpetuate such folly when God sustains us moment-by-moment, and sustains us despite our folly; this is more than folly; this is folly-induced blindness. In view of our ingratitude, insolence and self-willed blindness it shouldn’t surprise us that God finds us loathsome. Anything else would mean that his holiness had disappeared; which is to say, that he himself had ceased to be God.

Revulsion, we should note in this context, is an affective reaction to human sin: it’s how God feels about us. Anger, on the other hand, is a volitional response to sin: it’s what God does about us. What does he do? He debars us; he denies us access to him. He can’t pretend that we are glad, grateful, obedient sons and daughters when we aren’t. He can’t pretend that we are fit to enjoy his presence when we are no more fit for him than the tone-deaf person is fit to enjoy a concert or the person whose voice resembles a dial-tone is fit to be an opera singer. God’s holiness has brought us to this point: either in his holiness he has to banish us or he has to remedy us.

Because God’s love is holy love he is going to provide what the apostle John calls “the remedy for the defilement of our sin.” To say that God’s love is holy is to say that his love is neither sentimental nor petulant. Because his love isn’t sentimental his love won’t let us off; yet also because his love isn’t petulant his love won’t let us go. In other words, not only is God’s love righteous, it is also resolute. His holy love will provide the remedy for the defilement of our sin.

The reason that the cross dominates all of scripture is that in the cross God’s holy love absorbs his holy anger and his holy revulsion. In the cross the judgement of the holy God is enacted and displayed. In the cross of Jesus the judgement of the holy God is borne by the Son of God — which is to say, borne by the Father himself, for Father and Son are one in nature, one in judgement, one in the execution of that judgement, and one in its absorption. The cross is the triumph of God’s holiness in that God’s relentless opposition to sinners and his unending love for them; his revulsion before sinners and his patience with them; his authority over sinners and his self-willed humiliation beneath them; all of this is concentrated in the cross and finds pin-point expression there.

I have said that in the cross the judgement of God is seen to be operative: his face is set against sin, and sin must issue in alienation from him. Were there no judgement upon sin, God would cease to be holy. Were God to remain unaffected by our sin; were God to be aware of our sin but indifferent concerning it; were God to know of our sin yet not react to it, all the while remaining stolidly impassive, he would be possessed of the grossest character defect. Our sin provokes God’s wrath. His wrath in turn mobilises his judgement. Then in the face of our sin there has to be anger-fuelled judgement.

Yet if there were judgement only, the wrath of God would be fulfilled but the purpose of God would be frustrated, for now God would have given up that for which he made us in the first place, people dear to him who live for the praise of his glory. In the cross, however, God honours all that his holiness entails even as he fulfils his purpose in fashioning holy people who love him, obey him, serve him and lend glory to his name.

I am a clergyman in The United Church of Canada. Which is to say, I serve in a denomination whose moderator, Rev. William Phipps, has denied the fact and significance of the incarnation not once but many times, not inadvertently but knowingly, not in isolation but supported in his denial by officials and dignitaries throughout the denomination. What Phipps and his supporters appear not to understand is this: the incarnation is essential to the cross, to the atonement. We can be made “at one” with God only as God the judge does two things: one, as God the judge exercises his judgement on sin and the penalty (alienation from him) is enforced; two, as God the judge absorbs that judgement in himself. Without the first, God’s character would degenerate and he would cease to be holy; without the second, God would remain holy but our predicament would remain hopeless. God can condemn sin and absorb that condemnation himself only if the human bearer of that judgement is also the divine bearer. Apart from the incarnation the cross is nothing less than monumental injustice: Jesus is punished undeservingly by a God who is simply unfair. Apart from the incarnation the cross has nothing more to do with our destiny and our future than has the death of John the Baptist. In the light of the incarnation, however, the just judge whose holiness will not permit him to wink at sin is also the loving father whose absorbing his judgement in himself creates a future and a hope we should otherwise never have. This is the point Phipps never gets.

In the cross God’s judgement is unmitigated, as our Lord’s cry of dereliction makes plain. In the cross too God’s love is undiminished, for how much more could he love us than to submit himself to humiliation, torment, and self-alienation in the Son?

To deny the incarnation isn’t to get rid of excess baggage, an intellectual encumbrance in the 20th century. To deny the incarnation, rather, is to cut the nerve of faith, for the only God there is to believe in is the one whose holiness can’t be compromised; and the only future we sinners can have depends on the God who in the Son incarnate bore his own judgement on us and bore it away. No incarnation, no atonement; no atonement, nothing but condemnation for humankind without hope of reprieve.

The atonement, the cross, is the triumph of God’s holiness in the face of human sin as God’s character is unimpugned and his truth is unaltered and yet his purpose is fulfilled and his people are recovered to be and remain the apple of his eye.

In biblical Hebrew there is no word for “doubt.” There is no word for “doubt” just because God’s inescapable holy presence, charged with his power and purpose, renders doubt groundless. In Hebrew thought God is the omnipresent, inescapable, immeasurably weighty reality. Doubt here, however understandable in terms of human psychology, is in reality as unsubstantial, groundless, as doubt of the presence of air, doubt of the fact and significance of breathing, when all the while the “doubter”, so called, is breathing air. While there is no word in biblical Hebrew for “doubt” there are, however, many words in biblical Hebrew for “wonder.” There are many words for “wonder” just because God’s inescapable holy presence, charged with his power and purpose, calls forth no end of wonder.

We hear such adoring wonder in the hymn, “How Great Thou Art”:

And when I think
That God, his Son not sparing,
Sent him to die,
I scarce can take it in.

And in a hymn older still Isaac Watts exclaims, “When I survey the wondrous cross” only to conclude,

Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.

God’s holy love is brought to effectual focus in the cross. The cross in turn is the triumph of God’s holy love over sin and ingratitude and unbelief. Then the one thing we must do is suspend our unbelief. We should suspend our unbelief, especially since unbelief is as groundless, as unsubstantial, as the psychotic person’s raving about an imaginary world that doesn’t exist. More to the point, we should suspend our unbelief since God hasn’t suspended his mercy but rather prolongs the day of grace.

Faith is our grateful surrender to God’s holiness, therein to be rendered holy ourselves and made fit to glorify him and enjoy him forever.

 

II: — Yet it isn’t enough to be possessed of that faith which glorifies him and enjoys him. Faith always seeks understanding, and therefore we who are the beneficiaries of the cross must have our understanding refined in the crucible of the cross, for then our understanding will be purified as dross is melted out and discarded.

Think, for instance, of how we understand power. In my 1^st year SystematicTheology class I always ask the students about the Christian meaning of such words as “power” or “almighty” or “sovereignty.” I always ask the students, “In Calvin’s Institutes, the 2000-page magnum opus that is Calvin’s single largest work, how many times does the expression ‘the sovereignty of God’ occur?” The answer is “none.” Nowhere in the Institutes does Calvin speak of God “the sovereignty of God.” Since the post-Calvin Calvinist tradition has virtually identified Calvin with this expression, the fact that he doesn’t use the expression ought to make those of us who love him pause and think.

Now I am not denying that Calvin believed in the sovereignty of God. Of course he did, as all Christians do. The crucial point here, rather, is what is meant by God’s sovereignty? How is that sovereignty exercised? Next I tell my students that since the cross dominates scripture, we must understand sovereignty in the light of the cross.

Now to be sure the cross means ever so much. (Part of the meaning of the cross we have already examined tonight.) Yet it can never be denied that the cross means too that there is no limit to God’s vulnerability. God’s wrestling with Israel throughout Israel’s history highlighted God’s vulnerability again and again. God is Israel’s creator and sustainer yet is treated as if he were an intruder. God is Israel’s judge yet is mirthfully dismissed. God is Israel’s lover yet his love is thrown back in his face, wrapped in insult and ingratitude. God stands by Israel when Israel is assaulted, yet Israel doesn’t stand by God when God is affronted. The history of God’s engagement with Israel is God’s self-exposure to contempt and ridicule and abandonment. Yet in all of this God’s vulnerability hasn’t reached its zenith. His vulnerability will expose him ultimately to a cross. The cross means there is no limit to God’s vulnerability.

And the resurrection? The resurrection means there is no limit to the effectiveness of God’s vulnerability. (And here is where I pick up again those 1^st year students who had given up on me, thinking, no doubt, that their beloved professor of theology didn’t believe in God’s sovereignty.) God’s sovereignty is the triumph of his vulnerability. God’s sovereignty is his vulnerability rendered everywhere victorious.

We must never think that because God has given himself into the hands of evil men and women he has given himself over to them. We must never think that because God is willing to suffer for those he loves, and suffer immeasurably, God is therefore useless. On the contrary, just because his suffering is effective his suffering can save us.

Most Christians, I have found, look upon the cross as an episode in Christ’s life, an episode he put behind him in much the same way that he put his infancy behind him and then his childhood and then his adolescence. His public ministry, another episode, was unfolding (not without difficulty) when one day (a Friday, it so happened) he had a bad day, a really bad day, the worst day he’d ever had. But never mind, he got over it as Easter Sunday followed; things have been looking up ever since.

But the cross of Christ isn’t an episode in his life. It isn’t a bad day that he put behind him as things took a turn for the better. Let us never forget that the crucified one is raised wounded. Our Lord is not raised healed; he is raised wounded. Let us never forget that the ascended Christ suffers yet. Scripture is perfectly clear on this matter. The hymn writer knew whereof he spoke when he wrote, “Rich wounds, yet visible above.”

Since the ascended, glorified, omnipotent Lord suffers yet, it’s plain that his rulership of the cosmos is a rule he exercises from the throne of his cross.

No one grasped all of this better than Martin Luther. Over and over in his writings Luther speaks of the “theology of the cross”, theologia crucis.

When the world beholds the crucified it sees only shame. The apostle John, however, rightly discerned the cross to be the “hour” of Christ’s glory.

The world sees the cross as weakness so weak it couldn’t be weaker. The apostle Paul, however, knew the cross to be God’s strength, a strength so effective it couldn’t be stronger.

The world sees the cross as nothing more than folly. (Imagine the folly of someone who identifies himself so thoroughly with condemned men and women that their condemnation spills over onto him.) Yet the church knows the cross to be that wisdom of God which only the Spirit-illumined can recognize as wisdom.

The world sees the cross as that hideous moment when death gloats. Disciples know that the cross yields life, life eternal.

Luther knew that the cross is the crucible of all Christian understanding. For this reason Luther knew that in the crucible of the cross the world’s understanding is transmogrified as the resurrection renders the cross victorious and therein renders Christian understanding truth.

Luther knew that while the world regards the cross as proof of God’s uselessness, the cross in fact is the venue not only of God’s mightiest work but also of his characteristic work.

 

III: — Did I say “characteristic work?” I did. But if the cross is where God acts most effectively because most characteristically, then our discipleship is characteristically Christian and therefore effective only if it is cruciform. Then vulnerability for the sake of Christ’s kingdom has to characterise our discipleship. And such vulnerability will always be invigorated with the selfsame resurrection that rendered our Lord’s vulnerability victorious.

I want you to form in your mind’s eye the following picture of an old man.

He is age 81.
He has been trudging from door to door for four consecutive days, begging money.
It is wintertime, and as he tells us himself, his feet have been immersed from morning
to night in ice-cold slush.
He stops begging at the end of the fourth day inasmuch as he has been overtaken by
what he calls a “violent flux.” (Today we should say “uncontrollable diarrhoea.”)
By this time he has garnered 200 pounds wherewith to purchase food, clothing and
coal for poor people who are very dear to him.
He is not a stupid man. In fact he has written 35 tomes, including a textbook on logic.
Let me say it again: he is not a stupid man. In addition to his native English he knows
thoroughly eight other languages: Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, German, Dutch,
Italian, and Spanish. In fact he knows these eight languages so very thoroughly that
he has written a grammar in seven of them. He reads comfortably in more languages
than Luther, Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, Joseph Butler or Immanuel Kant.  Still, in his
transparent humility he will undergo any humiliation and endure any suffering for
the sake of a cruciform ministry modelled after the cruciform ministry of his Lord.
His name is John Wesley.

Discipleship is always cruciform. Take the simple matter of forgiveness. It is a simple matter. Simple, I said; I didn’t say easy. Forgiveness is never easy. Is a cross ever easy? Remember, what we forgive is precisely what can never be excused. Most people confuse these two matters. Most people, I have found, assume that to forgive is to find an excuse for something or accept an excuse for something. In any case, they think that to forgive is to excuse. But in fact forgiving and excusing are mutually exclusive. We excuse the excusable. We forgive, on the other hand, what is inexcusable, utterly inexcusable. We forgive precisely what can never be excused. It can only be forgiven. But will it be forgiven? Only those people forgive who have been seared and stamped with the cross. Forgiveness entails vulnerability before an offender when this offender has wounded us more than she will ever know.

All discipleship is cruciform. All Christian service is cruciform. I was a pastor for 30 years. I know how difficult, understandably difficult, it is to have people commit themselves to arduous tasks of major inconvenience over a long time. Long before I became a pastor I learned that my late father, during the 11 years our family lived in Edmonton (where I was born); my late father visited Fort Saskatchewan Penitentiary every Sunday afternoon for 11 years. As soon as we moved to Winnipeg my father began spending Sunday afternoons (he was in his own church Sunday morning and evening) at the Stony Mountain Penitentiary. He visited penitentiaries weekly to befriend and conduct worship for convicts who were as dear to him as the poor were to Wesley.

Let’s come back to Luther. Luther said that the Christian never lives in himself. The Christian lives in another. He lives in Christ by faith, and he lives in the neighbour by love. Living in the neighbour by love: what does this entail? How much love is love? What does it cost?

In the first place, said Luther, we live in our neighbour by sharing her need. This is not especially difficult. Out of our abundance we share our goods with our neighbour in her scarcity.

In the second place we live in our neighbour by sharing her suffering. This is considerably more difficult, since proximity to another person’s pain is itself painful for us. (Here love has been “notched up”, as we like to say today.) At the same time, we feel rather good about sharing our neighbour’s suffering because we feel somewhat heroic, virtuous; we feel even better if we are recognized and commended for this.

The cost of love can be “notched up” still more, we should note soberly. In the third place, said Luther, we live in our neighbour by sharing her disgrace. Now no one commends us for it. In fact people despise us for it. They whisper that we’ve compromised our standards. They wag their heads all-knowingly and repeat the supposed, self-evident truth that those who lie down with dogs get up with fleas. They remind us that you can always tell a person by the company she keeps.

Have they lost sight of the one who was numbered among the transgressors? Yes, they have. Was he a transgressor himself? No, he was not. He who knew no sin was made to be sin in order that inexcusable sinners like you and me yet might be forgiven and therein be rendered the righteousness of God.

But those people of shrivelled heart and acidulated spirit; they don’t grasp the logic of a love that finds us living not in ourselves but in the neighbour for the sake of the neighbour. Not grasping the nature of such a love, they also fail to grasp the cost of a love that becomes ever costlier as we move from sharing the neighbour’s need to sharing her suffering to sharing her disgrace.

All discipleship is cruciform.

 

IV: — The apostle Paul told the Corinthian Christians that the one sermon they were going to hear from him concerned Jesus Christ crucified. Just because the cross — sin-absorbing mercy — preoccupies prophet and apostle alike, the cross must preoccupy us as well.

For the cross is that event in which the holiness of God is recognized even as the wrath of God is averted and the love of God is visited upon disobedient men and women.

The cross is the crucible in which our understanding is transmogrified so as to reflect the truth and reality of him who acts most effectively and most characteristically precisely where he is most derided as useless.

The cross is the pattern of our discipleship, for no servant is ever going to be greater than his master, just as no one who now bears her own cross in the light of the master’s will ever fail to be crowned.

The cross is, and ever will be, that act of God whereby his holiness remains uncompromised and his love unimpeded, as holy love fashions

a people that is the apple of his eye,
a people that lives for the praise of his glory,
a people that reflects his goodness.

This people, as stark as it is strong, is a city set on a hill. It may be harangued; it may be harried; it may be harassed; but in any case it can never be hid.

 

Victor Shepherd    August 2000

published in Theological Digest & Outlook (Burlington, March 2000)

How Did We Get Here?

or

The Origins of the Operative Theology of The United Church of Canada

I

In 1990 Bishop Donald Bastian of the Free Methodist Church in Canada gave me a copy of Rev. Wayne Kleinsteuber’s book, published in 1984, More than a Memory: The Renewal of Methodism in Canada. In the course of reading the book with relish and profit I was startled to find myself quoted in the text. I had no recollection of saying what was imputed to me. When I checked the endnotes, however, and saw the reference to the CMHS meeting of 1978, I recognized immediately the context and content of my assertion.

In the “question and answer” period following my CMHS address in 1978 I had been asked, “Which has had the greater influence in the theological formation of The United Church of Canada: the Calvinist tradition or the Wesleyan?” And I had responded, without reflection or hesitation, “Neither. Schleiermacher, the German romantic liberal, has been the determining influence…..”

I was reading in 1990 a book published in 1984 that quoted my comment from 1978. In 1978 several developments that continue to haunt the United Church had not occurred: the publication of In God’s Image (1980), the distribution of Sexual Orientations, Lifestyles and Ministry (1988), the decisions of the General Council later in 1988, the adoption of Membership, Ministry and Human Sexuality (1990). These pronouncements and promulgations reflected the United Church’s theological understanding underlying its statements concerning sexual conduct deemed to conform to a profession of faith. The theology of John Wesley was evident in none of this. Apart from Wesley’s doctrinal standards (the Sermons, Articles of Religion, and Notes on the New Testament), one would need to read only the single largest tract Wesley penned, that concerning original sin, to see that a chasm loomed between his theological tenor and that of United Church documents and developments.

Once the denomination’s highest court had rendered the “sexual revolution” denominational policy, other theological pronouncements followed, all of which were similarly remote from anything Wesley would have owned. I speak now of Membership, Ministry and Human Sexuality (1988), The Authority and Interpretation of Scripture (1992) (where the most that could be said of Jesus is that he is “mentor and friend”), Mending the World (1997), Voices United: The Hymn and Worship Book of The United Church of Canada (1996), Renewed Understanding of Ecumenism (1995), and not least the response of the executive of General Council to Moderator Phipps’ interview with the Ottawa Citizen (1997). When Phipps publicly announced, defended, and was supported officially in a Christology that was manifestly non-apostolic, and when Phipps’ declaration and defense were located in a succession spanning the last two decades, it could only be concluded that liberal theology of the late 18^th century and the entire 19^th century had become the operative theology of the denomination.

I am not pretending that liberal theology is monochrome. Undeniably there are significant differences in the work of Ritschl, Harnack, and Troeltsch. None the less, in many respects they all stand on the shoulders of Schleiermacher. The lattermost thinker is the progenitor of the theological movement.

Can my thesis (that Schleiermacher is the inspiration of the operative theology of the United Church) be supported? The thesis can be tested only as Schleiermacher himself is examined.

 

II

Early in his adult life Schleiermacher (1768–1834) became aware of the contempt that cultured (but not necessarily snobbish) people poured on the contemporary articulations of the Christian faith. He insisted that these people were held off faith not because of the offense of the gospel but rather because of the offensiveness of its current, less-than-sophisticated expression. Knowing that these people were part of that world which “God so loves”, he maintained that the church, and especially its theological spokespersons, were to love them no less. To love them meant at least to take seriously the reason they found faith repugnant (S. said it was merely the crude way faith was voiced that these people found unacceptable), and to address their objections sincerely.

Moreover, S. knew that the Christian mission is never served by the church’s deliberately refusing to relate the gospel to human reflection at its profoundest and human achievement at its loftiest. Here he could only recall God’s word to Jeremiah millennia earlier, “Seek the welfare of the city [i.e., Babylon, the place of exile where Israel was thoroughly despised], for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” (Jeremiah 29:7) The church is never to huddle inwardly in attempted self-survival; it must always face outwardly, forever wrestling with the connection between the substance of the gospel and the thought-forms of the culture. To fear for the gospel in its engagement with society is only to declare one’s lack of confidence in the gospel’s inherent integrity and vitality and militancy. In a word, not to adapt “the faith once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3) to modernity is to render the church and its proclamation museum pieces that nostalgically recall a bygone era but lack all relevance to the world around us.

Schleiermacher was born in Breslau, Germany, where he was schooled at the hands of Moravian Pietists. S.’s philosophical brilliance, however, soon transgressed the intellectual boundaries of the Pietists, and he found himself studying modern philosophy and classical Greek at the University of Halle. Here he supported himself by tutoring aristocratic families who in turn exposed him to the higher reaches of German culture, his exposure issuing in his epoch-making Addresses on Religion to it Cultured Despisers. At the University of Berlin he taught several hours per week in every subject of the theology curriculum (apart from the Older Testament), published volume after volume, and never skimped on the preparation for his weekly sermon. He remained a much-loved pastor at the same time that his intellectual gifts found him appointed to the highest echelons of the Academy of Berlin. His misshapen body, ill health and near-chronic pain never found him bitter or resentful.

From 1880 to 1930 S. was studied more than any other theologian in Europe (Luther excepted.) His thinking dominated the church in the 19^th century and continues to dominate most of it in the 20^th.

Schleiermacher begins his theology by identifying the nature of religion. Religion isn’t morality. (People can be moral without being religious. Furthermore, the truly free person doesn’t submit to an external moral law.) Neither is religion the rational apprehension of doctrine. (People can finesse doctrine yet remain unacquainted with God.) Neither is religion philosophical insight. The seat of religion is neither the will (as with moralists) nor reason (as with philosophers) but feeling. The religious consciousness is the “feeling of absolute dependence.” Did S. mean “the feeling of absolute dependence upon the Absolute“? Alas, he never resolves the ambiguity that surrounds him here, often speaking of “God” and “nature” interchangeably. Pantheism (the notion that God is the essence of everything) or panentheism (the notion that the essence of everything includes God) haunts S.’s theology throughout. Since religion consists in the feeling of absolute dependence, doctrine is virtually insignificant. S. assigns no weight to any statement we formulate concerning God. We can merely represent God to ourselves pictorially, imagistically, as shepherd, king, father, etc., without every saying something true of God himself.

Not surprisingly, S. everywhere reinterprets Christian vocabulary, with the result that biblical distinctiveness is forfeited and the substance of the faith evaporates. While S. retains the word “redemption”, for instance, his doing so appears pointless (even misleading) when his understanding of “sin” bears virtually no resemblance to what prophets and apostles and the church have always understood.

In the same way all the major building blocks of the Christian faith are recast. Convinced that the particularity of Jesus’ Jewish background is simply something that the “universal” Jesus must repudiate (and no doubt aware too of virulent anti-Semitism in Berlin), S. denies that Jesus is the Messiah of Israel. His denial of Jesus’ messiahship is matched by his silence concerning the Incarnation. Instead of the Incarnate “God-with-us”, Jesus happens to one who possesses intensified God-consciousness. To be sure, all humans possess it in some degree; Jesus, however, more than anyone else. Jesus’ mission is to stimulate our God-consciousness until it becomes the determining influence in our life. Whereas the apostles everywhere confess Jesus of Nazareth to be the Son of God, and are careful to distinguish the Son as begotten from sons and daughters who are made such by faith, S. is content to speak of Jesus as quantitatively superior in terms of God-consciousness.

Insisting on the feeling of absolute dependence (God-consciousness) as the focus and origin of all theological expression, S. draws attention to the fact that no reflection upon religious awareness yields anything remotely resembling the church’s historic statements concerning the Trinity. The Trinity too is an instance of antiquated theological “baggage” that now understandably occasions the contempt of the cultured. Then the Trinity must be jettisoned. (Needless to say, as soon as S. forfeits the doctrine he forfeits what the doctrine always preserves; namely, the bedrock truth that what God is in himself eternally he is toward us, and what God is toward us he is in himself eternally.)

Since Incarnation is the presupposition of atonement, pivotal distortion in the former can be expected to garble the latter. S. omits any understanding of atonement as God’s making “at one” with himself those who are unable to “rightwise” their relationship with God. Reconciliation with God isn’t primarily wrought by God and owned by believers in faith. Rather, it’s something we effect as our God-consciousness frees us from self-rejection. Where scripture speaks of propitiation and expiation, the averting of God’s wrath and the sacrifice which effects this, S. says nothing. His silence here is one with his silence on other matters that loom so very large in the bible: the forgiveness of sins or justification. S. never acknowledges that sinful men and women are exposed to the judgement and condemnation of God.

In view of the fact that S. has set aside as non-essential all the historically-affirmed building blocks of the Christian faith (the election of Israel, the Incarnation of Israel’s greater Son, and the Incarnation’s raison d’etre, Christ’s atoning death — the cross being the one “word” that the apostles insist gathers up all that God as ever said or will ever say) we can only ask where S. appears to have set out on the wrong path. Most elementally he went wrong when he set aside the Older Testament. (Recall he taught every subject except the Older Testament.) This omission was his Achilles’ heel. When he denied that Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s promises to Israel; when he denied that Jesus’ relationship to Israel’s scriptures differs in any way from Jesus’ relationship to pagan religion; when he insisted that Jesus even contradicts the Hebrew bible (since the Hebrew bible is essentially legalistic(!) while Jesus is not), modern theology was undone.

The Hebrew bible provides the unsubstitutable grammar and logic of faith in Jesus Christ. Whenever it is rejected the Newer Testament is invariably skewed to the point of being falsified. Whenever the Newer is read without the Older, the Newer becomes merely a collection of moralistic teachings (the teacher himself rendered superfluous as soon as his teachings are appropriated), or merely the depiction of a model to be imitated (imitation of the person now superseding the claim of his teachings), or merely a popularized, pictorialized illustration of existential philosophy.

S. enormously undervalues the significance of the sole physical description we have of Jesus: he was circumcized. For the apostles, plainly, it’s crucial for Christian faith that Jesus is a son of Israel. For S., however, the Jewish provenance of Jesus is an impediment to the faith of us Gentiles — and therefore must be erased. The resulting de-judaized Jesus isn’t the fulfillment of God’s centuries-long struggle with Israel. This “universal” figure is now “ideal manhood (sic) achieving itself under the conditions of history.” Religious reality isn’t the result of God’s incursion in Israel; instead it’s the product of human achievement, world history ultimately generating Jesus’ God-consciousness.

Everything in S.’s theology, every aberration in 20^th century liberal theology, unravels from this point. According to scripture faith in God begins (and continues) with the fear of God — fear of the One who transcends his creation and is never to be identified with it, whether in whole or in part, or be viewed as an extension of it. S., however, illogically makes his understanding of the creation (specifically, of the contents of humankind’s consciousness) the “whence” and “whither” of his understanding of God. (Here he anticipates the “creation spirituality of the 1980s.) S.’s anthropology everywhere controls his understanding of God (so-called.) He could have avoided the disaster that overtook his theology (even as he never perceived it) if he had begun with theoanthropology, the Incarnation. If he’d begun with a full-orbed Christology he would have found himself emerging amidst the riches of the 16^th Century Protestant Reformers, for whom theology ultimately is Christology — as it is in scripture. When he began, however, with anthropology alone (albeit anthropology of religion), he couldn’t avoid the abyss into which he fell, taking all of 19^th and most of 20^th Century Protestant theology with him. Man, even man at his noblest, is simply not the measure of God.

Victimized by his failure to grasp the Holy One of Israel’s uncompromised “Otherness”, S. appeared to confuse God with nature or at least with some aspect of nature. Not surprisingly, S. characteristically confused an experience of the admittedly awe-full, mysterious depths of the creation with an experience of the mystery of God. “God” was simply the exclamation of someone moved by the creation’s inherent beauty and depth. The confusion, while easy to make and easy to understand, wasn’t thereby rendered any less idolatrous.

S.’s misunderstanding with respect to the creature leads to his misunderstanding with respect to sin. For him sin appears to be the arrears or residue of biological primitivism. He maintains (correctly) that God ordains the conditions of human existence; he goes on to say (incorrectly) that sin arises from these conditions. Plainly he’s confused sin with creatureliness, depravity with finitude. To be sure, creatureliness is the human condition (we aren’t divine), but the human condition as created, not as fallen. Moreover, it’s human creatureliness that God fashions uniquely for dialogical partnership with him. (In scripture God clearly loves all his creatures but he speaks only to men and women. His speaking to us renders us “response-able” and therefore “response-ible.”) Sin doesn’t arise from this! S. fails to grasp the essence of sin. It’s not a carryover from biological primitivism; rather it’s disdainful, disobedient rebellion against and perverse defiance of the One to whom we owe everything. With sad but appropriate consistency S. never deploys the appropriate (biblical) categories for discussing the remedy for sin: reconciliation rooted in atonement and issuing in regeneration.

Displaying his era’s the immense confidence in the outcome of historical processes, S. regarded process as progress. And just as obviously the Hebrew mind doesn’t. S. denied that Jesus is the Son of God Incarnate according to the purpose and act of God, and affirmed instead that Jesus is someone whom history inexplicably spawned as extraordinarily God-conscious. His affirmation concerning historical processes contradicts the logic of scripture. Biblical thought, illuming this point through the Virgin Birth, insists that history cannot generate the redeemer of history. History’s redeemer must be given to it. History’s prideful insistence that it can redeem itself is reduced to absurdity by history’s oft-repeated horrors, as the genocides of our era alone attest.

Perhaps the nature of S.’s theology is most evident in his discussion of doctrine. He maintains that doctrine says nothing about God; doctrine merely reflects an aspect of human consciousness. For this reason he can say virtually nothing about truth. In scripture “truth” is used as a synonym for “reality”, and also as a predicate of statements that express this reality. Doctrine, then, is the articulation of the truth of God on the part of those who have been included, by God’s grace, in God’s self-knowing. Doctrine is the human expression of the truth of God vouchsafed to believers through God’s self-disclosure. Since it’s a human expression, any doctrinal expression is provisional; there’s no formulation concerning the being or activity of God that is beyond re-articulation. To say this, however, isn’t to say that all such formulation is dispensable with respect to the church’s life and mission. Neither is it to say that all such formulation is presumptuous. S. appears to have thought that either doctrinal statements are purely speculative (guesswork) or such statements presumptuously and prematurely (even preposterously) claim to comprehend God, humans taking it upon themselves to speak “the last word” about God. He appears not to have understood that doctrinal statements are the grace-wrought apprehension of God. Believers are admitted, by God’s grace, to a genuine knowledge of God without claiming an exhaustive knowledge of the One whose depths can never finally be plumbed. While it’s plain that knowledge of God born of an encounter with him can never be reduced to any statement about God, it’s also plain that the truth of God and faith in him can never be commended as true (i.e., real) apart from such statements. S.’s failure here meant he could never commend Jesus Christ as truth; S. could only attempt to foster the emergence of a God-consciousness that he assumed somehow to be contagious.

Yet even the crux of S.’s approach overlooked a simple point. Since nothing can be articulated of God himself, said S., and since what is commonly affirmed to be the Holy One of Israel is no more than religious primitivism that cultured people rightly despise, exactly who is the “God” of whom we are supposed to be conscious? of whom Jesus was conscious? It can’t be the God of whom the prophets spoke and whose Son the apostles recognize Jesus to be. Then “God-consciousness” is a vacuous term.

S.’s approach to doctrine (at best, undervaluation; at worst, out-and-out dismissal) continues to characterize much liberal theology, while the vacuity of his major item appears undetected.

S.’s attempt at “adapting” was commendable; his unwitting move from adapting to adopting, however, was fatal. For in adopting the assumptions of the world he de-natured the gospel, turning wine into water, when all the while water can be found everywhere and wine nowhere. Here the gospel was reduced to little more than a mirror reflecting the world’s self-understanding back to the world, even as the world’s aching spiritual need remains unaddressed because unnoticed. In moving from a commendable “adapt” to a fatal “adopt”, S. ultimately confused the offensiveness of a less-than-cultured expression of the Christian faith with the irremovable offense of the gospel itself. S. assumed the truth of the world’s postulates. Liberalism always does. These postulates are (a) the world has an accurate and adequate understanding of its own condition, (b) this condition, while perhaps needing adjustment or even correction here and there, isn’t grievous, let alone both grievous and blind, (c) if the gospel is to be heard, the church must fit its proclamation to the world’s self-understanding.

Surely the horrors of our century alone have exposed the liberal theology of the last two centuries to be intellectually shallow and substantively dilute. Then why does it continue? Why is some variant of it still the dominant theological ethos of mainline North American churches and seminaries? The reason is, liberal theology doesn’t challenge the assumption that the world has access to the ultimate truth about itself. It doesn’t question the facile confidence that the eyes through which the world sees itself have no need of corrective lenses. It doesn’t show that the presuppositions of the world contradict those of the kingdom of God. It doesn’t highlight the truth that morality and religiosity (and much “spirituality” today) are neither the same as the kingdom and therefore the solution to the world’s ills, nor even the vestibule to the kingdom. Rather they are monuments to humankind’s defiance of God and barricades behind which it attempts to hide from God. It leaves unchallenged the biblical conviction that the worst consequence of sinnership is blindness to one’s sinnership, and in the wake of such ignorance of one’s sinnership, further immersion in it.

The most chilling aspect of S.’s theology, and that of the theology of his offspring, is this: S.’s God doesn’t so transcend the world as to be able to visit it with mercy. Chilling or not, this aspect of his theology only magnifies the tenacity of those for whose theology mercy would be but an alien category. Liberal theology dominates the ecclesiastical landscape in that the majority of humankind, including the church, remains unaware that in light of the undeflectable judgement of God mercy is the one thing needful and humankind’s only hope.

Victor Shepherd

published in Theological Digest & Outlook (Burlington, March 2000)

The Educational Ministry of the Church

 

 

The problem with the person suffering from amnesia isn’t that he can’t remember where he’s left his umbrella and will have to spend another $15 to replace it. The problem isn’t even that he’s going to get wet and will be inconvenienced before he arrives home. The problem with the amnesiac, rather, is that he doesn’t know where home is and therefore will never find his way there. More tragically, the person with no memory doesn’t know who he is. No less tragically, the person with no memory can’t be trusted. This isn’t to say that the amnesiac is unusually nasty. It is to say, however, that the person with no awareness of his identity behaves erratically, and behaves erratically just because he has no sense of anything that might be “out of character.”

The church’s educational ministry seeks to prevent a similar development from overtaking the church. A congregation or denomination that suffers from collective loss of Christian memory lacks a Christian identity. Lacking Christian identity, it can only behave erratically, all the while thinking itself to be the soul of consistency. Once again, this isn’t to say there’s treachery here born of mean-spiritedness, but it is to say that without a Christian memory people meander without knowing themselves to be meandering, forever losing their way without knowing the way.

Concerning the church’s educational responsibility, the Protestant Reformers liked to speak of the church as “the school of faith.” While “school” may call up “schoolish”, replete with associations that many find dull if not distasteful, our Reformation predecessors were at least aware that the church’s educational ministry has to do with truth, with substance, with elementary beginnings that develop cumulatively with the result that “everyone may be presented mature in Christ.” (Colossians 1:28) Our foreparents knew, as did the Hebrew prophets before them, that the living God is anything but ephemeral, vague, “will-o’-the-wispish”, abstract. The Holy One, rather, is concrete, denser than the utmost density we can imagine, opaque, solid, substantive. And not only dense but so very immense too – filling all space – that God is the one prophet and apostle know to be inescapable. God can always be fled, to be sure, but not escaped. Then who this God is whom we can’t escape and who – thanks to the Son’s absorbing in himself the God-forsakenness of Gethsemane and Golgotha – will never forsake us; who this God is is the “Other-with-us” in which the church endeavours to school its people from the youngest to the oldest.

Mind and heart must be steeped in the truth of God as relentlessly as a youngster learns the alphabet, then assembles words and phrases, then grasps something of the grammar that orders human discourse and without which what is known can never be communicated profoundly. That’s it! It’s only as grammar is learned too can we commend to others what we’ve come to comprehend for ourselves. And of course we soon discover that to commend what we comprehend is to find our own comprehension gaining depth and breadth. “Force-feeding”, however, is like “cramming” for exams: the momentary glut disappears as quickly as it was acquired. Better by far is the gradualist approach that Isaiah cherished when he spoke of “teaching knowledge” and “explaining the message”: “For it will be precept upon precept…line upon line…here a little, there a little.” (Isaiah 28:10) Surrounded as he was by Canaanite nations, Isaiah knew that that as surely as the unique substance of Israel’s faith thinned out through dilution, distraction and detraction, “faith” would become indistinguishable from the idolatry that faced his people wherever he looked.

It is God who is to be loved with the mind. Apart from the church’s ceaseless effort at educating its people, the Holy One won’t be loved with the mind; which is to say, won’t be loved at all.

With respect to children, I still think Northrop Frye’s advice to be sound: there’s no substitute for scripture’s delight in story telling. The stories are to be told and re-told at every age and stage of the younger person’s development. Needless to say, this doesn’t mean that the stories are to be regurgitated year after year in mind-numbing monotony, devoid of subtlety, sophistication and application. Neither does it mean that these stories only are to be told. But it is to say that regardless of pedagogical technique, and regardless of the much-needed variety in the content and manner of presentation, somehow the ongoing educational task of the church always manages to recycle the “old” stories. For to recycle the stories is to find them newly pertinent to the newly-recognised problems and perplexities besetting humankind. Northrop Frye argued that only as these stories sank down to the bottom of the English student’s mind and remained embedded there – but not buried “out of sight, out mind” – would that student have any chance of understanding the tradition of English literature and of western culture in general. How much more is it the case that only as these stories remain embedded in the developing Christian’s mind can they be revisited at any period of that person’s life and be found to speak with ever-fresh relevance. More to the point, because they speak with conclusive relevance they are acknowledged to speak authoritatively.

Admittedly, at first the youngest child won’t be able to make much of many of the stories, despite the best efforts of parent or Sunday School teacher. Still, as long as the stories remain part of the hearer’s mental (and cardiac!) furniture, the stories can be probed in ever-greater depth as the hearer is granted ever-more intimate access to the One of whom they speak.

Think of the story of Abraham and Isaac on Mount Moriah. For the many the story’s grotesqueness will be bizarre at best; for others, repulsive at worst. Still, for good or ill, the story is a vivid aspect of the church’s memory. Abraham, the prototype of the person of faith, has been promised spiritual descendants as numerous as the sands on the seashore. If the promise is to be fulfilled, then two conditions must be met: Abraham must persevere in faith (or else he can’t be the foreparent of descendants-in-faith), and Abraham’s son, Isaac, must survive (or else there won’t be descendants-in-faith.) Abraham, then, is wracked with this dilemma: if he obeys God and offers up his son Isaac, then God’s promise is null and void, since Isaac hasn’t survived; if, on the other, hand, he second-guesses God and preserves Isaac, then God’s promise is null and void, since his disobedience exemplifies his unfaith. Abraham’s obedience nullifies the promise as surely as his disobedience nullifies it. With an anguish that the old story heightens by means of such literary devices as “Take your son, your only son…” (Genesis 22:2), Abraham decides to stake everything on trusting God to fulfil God’s promises in ways that Abraham can’t even imagine at this point. He will obey God even though such obedience, from a human perspective, ensures the non-fulfilment of the promise.

Years later, the child-become-adult, now part of a church growing ever smaller in a secular society, understands with fresh comprehension the force of Christ’s promise concerning the inviolability of the church before the powers of death. (Matthew 16:18) The child-become-adult is equipped, able to assess assorted responses to the church’s retraction. Some responses, of course, are gospel-generated; other “solutions” are little more than techniques, tools, gimmicks of one kind or another. Of all the proffered programmes for assisting the church today, which are to be endorsed and which declined? The person possessed of Abraham’s faith will continue to uphold the gospel, even though it is fidelity to the gospel that appears to be shrinking the church in an era and a society that insists the gospel to be obsolete. The dilemma, again, is Abraham’s: do we obey God, counting on God’s fulfilment of the promise concerning the church, or do we second-guess God, assuming we “know better”, preferring to do what we think will ensure the church’s future, even though this latter approach entails forfeiting the gospel? Abrahamic faith means that we trust God to fulfil God’s own promises in ways that we can’t imagine now.

While it’s one thing to speak of the need to preserve biblical substance in the church’s educational ministry, finding the vehicle for this is another. Twenty-five years ago, in one of my postgraduate courses, James D. Smart, well-known bible scholar, theologian, translator and Christian educator, commented that any minister would be fortunate to find 10% of the worshipping congregation in an adult study group. The 10% of 25 years ago has shrunk, I fear, to 5% in 1999. Still, there remains a place for the small group. Streetsville congregation had a C.S. Lewis reading group that met monthly for four years, reading its way through all of Lewis’s popular writings. Alpha and Bethel courses in our congregation continue to help many. Again, our congregation has had a bible study that meets one Sunday evening per month, or meets Sunday morning before worship for six consecutive Sundays only. (People will commit themselves to a study programme with a predetermined conclusion when they often won’t to one that remains ongoing.) I have found that the latter arrangement (Sunday morning) attracts far more people, since they were coming to worship on Sunday morning in any case. (Modernity’s busyness finds even Sunday evening too much for many to manage.)

While not unappreciative of the vehicles I’ve just mentioned, I have yet found, over a 21-year ministry in the same congregation, that the Sunday morning sermon remains a most effective “delivery system.” Each autumn for over a dozen years now I have placed a small insert in the bulletin, “I should like a sermon on….” Worshippers fill in the insert and place it on the offering plate. These requests are gathered up and become the roster for my preaching throughout the following spring. In addition to providing “fodder” for sermons, the requests tell me where people are living, what they are thinking, how they are suffering, and why they are perplexed or angry or anxious. The requests vary from the expected (the struggle for faith in a world riddled with evil) to those that I didn’t foresee (the neurophysiology of endogenous depression.) By means of this vehicle I’ve found myself schooling the congregation in such matters as euthanasia, the sin against the Holy Spirit, whether the bible should be censored, the nature of psychopathy, angels, life-as-relationships, gossip, the meaning and timing of confirmation, the ethics of organ transplants, and even “revival and Jonathon Edwards.”

The opportunities here for deepening a congregation as contemporary issues are related to the “old, old stories” and such stories are seen to be normative; such opportunities are limitless. The congregation also prints each sermon for pick-up the following week. With the chance to read the sermon at their leisure, people find they absorb far more than they do when they hear it from me once only at 130 words per minute. Frequently the vehicle of the sermon fosters another vehicle; namely, formal and informal conversations on the same topic.

Evidently the educational ministry addresses two kinds of needs: the perennial human need rooted in the human condition, as well as contemporary needs arising from the modern-day situation. The human condition – we are fallen creatures, alienated from God on account of our defiance and disobedience – is the deeper of the two. In other words, the human condition always underlies the human situation, while the situation, changing from era to era, finds symptomatic expressions that vary kaleidoscopically. Still, in addressing the situation the educational ministry has every opportunity to address the human condition.

Yet in all of this we must take care to understand that the educational ministry of the church isn’t one-sidedly cerebral. (I say “one-sidedly” rather than “over”: since God is to be loved with the mind and is never honoured by slovenly thinking, we can’t be over-cerebral, whereas we can always be one-sidedly so.) Jesus both taught and healed. His teaching rendered his healing intelligible, while his healing embodied his teaching. If he had merely taught, his kingdom would have remained unembodied, a “head-trip” for amateur, armchair philosophers who like to muse on religious themes. If he had merely acted, his action would have remained ununderstood with respect to the kingdom. The kingdom of God (which is to say, the whole creation healed), is found in the singular fusion of his head, heart and hand. Throughout Christ’s public ministry the person healed (or in need of healing) was related to the community and restored to the community, as was the case with the Gadarene demoniac, now found not only seated and right-minded but clothed; i.e., he belonged to that community to which he had been readmitted. (Mark 5:15) Community ever remains essential to the educational ministry of the church. Without community and the suffering found in it, the educational ministry of the church will inevitably slide from a much-needed reasonableness into a dry-as-dust rationalism. If this happens a Christian anthropology is denied, for then reason, rather than spirit, has come to be regarded as the essence of humankind; and reason, rather than spirit (Spirit too), has come to be viewed as both ultimate reality and the access to it. The community ever remains the venue of the church’s educational ministry; which is to say, human suffering is always the context that lends the educational ministry of the church as much credibility as it will ever need.

The collective memory of the church is like the ballast in a sailing ship’s keel. The ballast consists of lead, isn’t particularly pretty, and is found below the waterline in any case. Without ballast, however, the ship, top-heavy with sail, capsizes in the first squall. Everyone knows that the more sail a ship carries above the waterline, the more ballast it needs below it. A ship with no sails never leaves the docks. Herein it resembles Admiral Nelson’s Victory: the brass is polished every day, the ceremonial cannon is fired for reasons of nostalgia, people even pay significant sums of money to climb on board – but the ship never goes anywhere. A ship with no ballast, on the other hand, naively thinks it can best the sea, only to find that the first storm leaves it foundering. The lesson here for the church is plain.

The church today is eager to hoist sails to catch the wind of the Spirit (not always recognising, however, that some spirits are less than holy) while disdainful of adding weight to the ballast. The educational ministry of the church, however, always pertains to both sails and ballast. And in our era, impatient with history and tradition and anything substantive, renewed attention must be given to ballast. For the neglect here has been long and persistent. We aren’t the first generation of Christians. Appreciating the wisdom of those who ventured before us will ensure that our immediate parents in faith weren’t the last.

Victor Shepherd

May 1999

A Comment on Postmodernism

Victor Shepherd

 

I: — What is postmodernism or postmodernity? Plainly we have to know what is meant by “modernity” before we can grasp “postmodernity.”   Some people maintain that modernity begins with the French Revolution with its explicitly secularist, anti-religious outlook.  Others date modernity from the Enlightenment with its development of science. Others still (here I include myself) date modernity from the Renaissance with, among other things, the rise of market-capitalism, the development of transnational banking, the nation-state.   Modernity, then, runs from mid 15^th century to mid 20^th century, or from 1450 to 1945.

Let’s think first of modernity.   There are several features of modernity that we all recognise as soon as they are mentioned: technoscience, for instance.   Think of how the telegraph was followed by the telephone, followed in turn by the wireless, followed yet again by satellite communication, and so on.

Mass production is another feature of modernity. At one time goods were produced in what were known as “cottage industries.”   Someone with a few sheep spun wool in her living room and then wove it, eventually having a garment of some kind she could sell.  When mass production arrived a newly-invented mechanical loom hummed night and day in a factory, producing wool far more quickly, and thus permitting a vastly more efficient means of manufacturing and distributing huge quantities of woollen goods.  Horse-drawn carriages used to be made by one or two men who spent weeks building one carriage completely before beginning another.  With the advent of the horseless carriage, the automobile, Henry Ford developed the assembly line. The number of units manufactured per week skyrocketed.  Not only did the factory-housed loom and the automobile assembly line speed up the manufacturing process, they also lowered the price per unit so that the manufactured goods were affordable to large segments of the population.

Developments in industrial efficiency, we should note, created what economists call “real wealth” and distributed it in such a way that a middle class arose and mushroomed.  Prior to modernity there were two classes: the noble or aristocratic class (very few in number) and the rural peasant class (very large.) In other words, there were a few rich land-owners and hordes of poor land-workers. The few possessed immense wealth and power; the many possessed neither wealth nor power. Industrialisation, a major feature of modernity, gave rise to a middle class that was larger than either the rich or the poor.  And of course together with the expansion of the middle class there occurred the representative democracy we all cherish.

The nation-state was a feature of modernity. The purpose of the state is to subdue lawlessness, punish evildoers, promote the public good. At the close of the Middle Ages it was noted that a people that had much in common could band together and thereby promote the public good much more efficiently. At the close of the Middle Ages there were 300 fiefdoms or principalities in Germany , with a prince presiding over each.  It was obvious that if many German-speaking peoples forged themselves into a single German-speaking people, a nation-state would arise possessed of a domestic and international power that 300 fiefdoms could never hope to have.

By far the most readily recognised feature of modernity, I think, is what I mentioned first: technoscience.         “Labour-saving devices” are only a small part of it.  The devices that we now take for granted weren’t merely labour-saving (a tractor that ploughs in an hour what a horse ploughed in a day.)    The technoscience we admire had to do with vaccinations, inoculations, surgeries (chest surgery was virtually impossible prior to the invention of the heart-lung machine).   As well as the technoscience that provided safety: radar, electronic navigation, weather-predicting.   As well as the technoscience that “greened” large parts of the world with wheat that was impervious to rust, corn impervious to blight, fertilisers that multiplied crop yields a hundred fold, and methods of transportation that were quicker, safer, cheaper, more comfortable than anything our foreparents could have imagined.

Modernity was characterised by a belief in progress, a manifest mastery over nature, and the magnification of efficiency everywhere.

 

II: — Then what about postmodernity?   What are its features? Let’s begin here where we left off: technoscience.         There is now widespread loss of confidence in technoscience as a blessing. While nuclear science generated electricity more efficiently than steam turbines, nuclear science has spawned nightmare after nightmare.   (Not to mention propaganda to cloak the nightmare: there are on average 500 major nuclear accidents per year, most of which are never reported to the public.) As for nuclear weaponry, we entered the cold war, seemed to pass out of it in 1989, and now appear to be on the edge of it again.  At the height of the cold war (1945-1989) the USA and the USSR were aiming at each other nuclear weaponry that guaranteed what the military-industrial complex called “Mutually Assured Destruction”: MAD. Conventional weaponry had been used to win wars; nuclear weaponry would guarantee loss on all sides.  Yet nuclear weaponry proliferated.

Developments in electronics were hailed as glorious. Electronic surveillance has eroded privacy already and brought depersonalisation and dehumanisation in its wake. And we haven’t seen anything in this regard compared to what we are going to see.

In the postmodern era pharmacology has become suspect. Drugs to relieve pain are one thing; what about drugs that don’t merely relieve pain, don’t merely elevate moods (from depression to contentment), don’t merely subdue agitation or compulsiveness, but alter personality? If drugs can alter personality, then what do we mean by “personality?”   Since personality is intimately connected to personal identity, has personal identity evaporated? Then what has happened to the person herself?    What do we mean by “self?”   Is there a self? Furthermore, if self and personality are related to character, what has become of character?

While we are speaking of character we should be aware that the United States Armed Forces have developed drugs that eliminate fear. Courage, of course, is courage only in the context of fear.  Drugs that eliminate fear therefore also eliminate bravery.  No American combatant need ever be awarded a military honour!   More to the point, drug-induced fearlessness renders someone a robot; robots are never afraid, robots are never brave, robots are never human. That’s the point: the drugged soldier is no longer human.

What modernity called progress postmodernity deems anything but progress.  Where is the progress in ecological damage so far-reaching that air isn’t fit to breathe or water to drink, while ozone-depletion renders our skin irrecoverably cancerous?   Where is the progress in schooling that finds university-bound students unable to write or comprehend a five-sentence paragraph?

To no one’s surprise, postmodernity has suffered widespread loss of confidence in reason.  We may call postmodernites cynics or we may call them realists; in any case postmodernites see human reasoning as a huge factor in the postmodern mess. They see reason (so-called) as simply a means to an end that isn’t reasonable itself.

One feature of the collapse of confidence in reason is the disappearance of truth. Truth is now reduced to taste. Postmodernity denies that there is such a thing as truth, or denies that we can access truth. Instead of knowing truth we express opinions, or we indicate preferences, or we “go with our gut.” Truth?   What is truth, anyway?  And if it existed, what makes us think we could know it?   And even if we could know it, how would we know when we had found it? Truth?  You have your opinion and I have mine.  Who or what is the arbiter between you and me?

Needless to say the disappearance of ethics is related to the disappearance of truth. Postmodernites don’t speak of ethics; they speak of values.  Everyone knows that different people hold different values.  But this isn’t to say one value is superior to another.  What any one person values is up to him or her.  No one is to be told his values are defective or inferior.  Lest we feel sorry for ourselves, thinking that the newness of this feature of postmodernism is brandnewness, we should read again the concluding sentence of the book of Judges: “In those days there was no king in Israel ; every man did what was right in his own eyes.” (Judges 21:25 ) We aren’t the first to reduce what is right to matters of taste.   Three thousand years ago there were those who regarded themselves and their fancies as the measure of the universe.  As Israelites, they had even made themselves and their fancies the measure of God. It all came down to taste; and, as everyone knows, there’s no disputing taste. Taste, preference, opinion, whatever – it all adds up to the sufficiency of the subjective.

If someone, nervous about all of this, speaks up, “But shouldn’t opinions or preferences be grounded in something, grounded in reality?”, such a person will be reminded, “Asking whether they should be grounded in reality is pointless when no one knows what reality is or how it might be recognised.” “But can’t the smorgasbord of opinions be considered and weighed rationally?” Raising this matter is pointless when reason is already suspect.  Besides, to challenge someone else’s values or opinions is to excite emotion, and everyone knows that when emotion and reason meet, reason always takes second place.

Another feature of postmodernity is the weakening of the nation-state in the face of tribalism. All over the world tribalism is reasserting itself.  It is especially strong in Africa . Quebec ’s growing self-advancement, however, is a form of tribalism too, as is the United Church ’s all-aboriginal presbytery. The most vicious form of tribalism (“vicious”, of course, is a value-laden term, my value) is ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing is on the increase. Internally the nation-state is fragmenting; externally the nation-state is increasingly the pawn of international finances and multinational corporations.

Another feature of postmodernity is the mushrooming of consumerism, consumer-driven everything.  In the modern era economics were producer-driven; in the postmodern era, consumer-driven. Consumerism determines what church-congregations offer, what pulpits declare, what school boards program. Reginald Bibby, sociologist at the University of Lethbridge , maintains that there’s a huge demand throughout the society for religious consumer-products. “If the church wants to survive”, says Bibby, “it should meet consumer demands.” In other words, the church should forget what it believes to be the truth and substance of the gospel. The church should merely prepare the religious buffet that allows consumers to pick and choose according to taste, whim, preference.  It must never be forgotten, of course, that it’s consumers who fund the church. Consumerism?   My daughter Mary has just finished her B.Sc.N. program at McMaster University . When she began the course she was told that patients are no longer patients; what used to be known as patients are now clients. Patients are sick; clients are consumers who are purchasing a service.

My wife, Maureen, came upon three Grade one students writing obscene graffiti. She deemed this to be an “actionable” offence, and action was taken.  Next day the parent of one of these three children came to see Maureen. The parent remarked, “How unfortunate it was that my daughter signed her name to the graffiti she wrote.” “It wasn’t unfortunate that your daughter signed her name, thereby giving herself away”, Maureen replied; “It wasn’t even unfortunate that she wrote the obscene graffiti in the first place.  It was simply wrong; wrong.” The category “wrong” has no meaning for that parent.  The parent has already disavowed everything that might be logically related to the word “wrong.”   Her attitude encapsulates postmodernity.  Besides, as a taxpayer she’s a consumer who is purchasing a service for her child. And since consumers are paying the piper, they are now calling the tune.

 

III: — Is postmodernity all bad? Has the sky fallen on Chicken Little? Is our situation hopeless? No.  Think of something familiar to all of us: the writing of history.  We all studied history in school.  We all studied it thinking it to be the soul of objectivity.  History dealt with facts, unarguable facts.  Postmodernites tell us (and tell us correctly) something different. A few years ago I addressed a group of curriculum planners at the central office of the Toronto Board of Education. I was speaking about prejudice in general, racism in particular.   I told the group that while racial segregation had always occurred spontaneously in Ontario , it had been mandated by law in one institution only: the school system. Yes, schools were segregated along black/white lines beginning in the 1850s.   (Most of the curriculum planners were completely unaware of this.) Then I asked them, “In what year was the last racially segregated school in Ontario closed?” Two planners shouted, “In 1965.” They were correct. They were also black. The black educators knew about racially segregated schools in Ontario ; the white planners had never heard of it and were aghast to learn of it. When I was studying Ontario ’s history, I was never informed of this matter.  Were you? The postmodernites are going to keep asking us, “Who writes history?   Whose viewpoint is reflected?   Whose interests are advanced?   And what despised group is silenced?”   Here postmodernism is doing us a favour.

Is postmodernity all bad?  No. Before we deplore the hastening demise of the Church of Scotland (to name only one denomination sick unto death); before we lament the morbidity of the Kirk we should remember that many people are already ambivalent about it. My earliest Old Testament professor, Scottish himself but belonging to a denomination other than the Church of Scotland, told me that when he was a young man in Scotland you couldn’t get work in the post office, a bank, or schoolteaching unless you were a member of the Kirk.  You didn’t have to attend; you didn’t have to worship; you didn’t have to believe anything. But your name had to be on the roll. No one today laments the disappearance of such an arrangement.

Is postmodernity all bad?  No. Admittedly confidence has collapsed in technoscience as something that can promote the human good. (Technoscience, of course, can always promote the technically efficient.   But the technically efficient is a long way from the human good.)  While technoscience has done much to ease physical toil and bodily discomfort, done much to promote longer life and reduce the likelihood of sudden death, Christians are aware that technoscience was never going to promote the human good.  Then the public loss of confidence in technoscience is loss of confidence where Christians had none in any case.

Is postmodernity all bad?  No. So what if postmodernites insist that reason (reasoning) is suspect, reasoning being little more than rationalisation serving any number of subtle or not-so-subtle ends. Christians have always known that sin blinds so thoroughly as to blind humankind to the speciousness of its reasoning. Christians have always known that only grace, God’s grace, frees reason and restores reason to reason’s integrity.  Then postmodernity reminds us all of a human predicament that Christians know the gospel alone to be able to cure.

Is postmodernity all bad?  No. While tribalism is to be deplored, the radical relativising of the nation-state isn’t to be deplored. Surely the development of hydrogen warheads rendered the nation-state obsolete.  Surely the nation-state has been a reservoir of old wounds and resentments and recriminations and national aggressions that we’re all better off without. Surely we don’t need a cess-pool whose toxic wastes seep into neighbouring aquifers.

 

IV: — Then what are Christians to do about postmodernism?   Specifically, what are the concrete challenges that postmodernism brings to the church?

 

First of all we are challenged to remember at all times and in all circumstances that “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.” (Psalm 24:1)  “The Lord of hosts is the king of glory.”   He is; he alone is. Christians aren’t dualists. We don’t believe that the cosmos is stuck fast in an interminable struggle between two equal but hostile powers, God and the evil one, neither able to defeat the other. We don’t believe that the Fall (Genesis 3) has obliterated the goodness of God’s creation. Yes, Jesus says that the creation lies in the grip of the “prince of this world”. But the prince is only that: prince, never king.  The earth is the Lord’s, and no one else’s.

The gospel of John, the anonymous epistle to the Hebrews, and Paul’s letter to the church in Colosse; all these documents declare that the whole world was made through Christ for Christ. He is the agent in creation, and the creation was fashioned for his sake.   He is its origin and end. He is its ground and goal. And no development in world-occurrence can overturn this truth.

We are told in Colossians 1:17, “In Jesus Christ all things hold together.”   However fast, however violently, the world spins (metaphorically speaking), it can never fly apart. “In him all things hold together.” Why doesn’t the creation fly apart (metaphorically speaking)?  Why doesn’t human existence become impossible?   Why don’t the countless competing special-interest groups, each with its “selfist” savagery, fragment the world hopelessly?  Just because in him, in our Lord, all things hold together.  What he creates he maintains; what he upholds he causes to cohere. “Hold together” is a term taken from the Stoic philosophy of the ancient Greeks.  But whereas the ancient Greek philosophers said that a philosophical principle upheld the cosmos, Christians knew it to be a person, the living person of the Lord Jesus Christ.  He grips the creation with a hand large enough to comprehend the totality of the world. In other words, the real significance of postmodernism can’t be grasped by postmodernites; the real significance of postmodernism can be grasped only by him whose world it is and in whom it is held together.  The real significance of postmodernism, its bane but also its blessing, can be understood only by those who are attuned to the mind of Christ. The sky hasn’t fallen down.

 

Another challenge, the second challenge, that postmodernism brings to the church: we are to meet everyday challenges and opportunities each and every day.  Many Christians think that the first thing to be done is a philosophical rebuttal of postmodernism’s tenets.  I’m a philosopher myself (or like to think I am), and I agree that a philosophical critique, a philosophical rebuttal, is entirely in order. At the same time, there are relatively few people with the training and the equipment for this sort of thing. All Christians, however, can meet everyday challenges and opportunities each and every day.

You must have noticed that Jesus doesn’t merely illustrate his ministry with everyday matters (a homemaker sweeping the house clean in order to find her grocery money); he directs us to everyday matters as the occasion of our faith and obedience, trust and love. I mentioned earlier the concluding verse of the book of Judges: “In those days there was no king in Israel ; every man did what was right in his own eyes.” (Judges 21:25 ) In a postmodern world that is therefore postchristendom as well, Christians must exemplify the truth that there is a king in Israel ; there is a Lord whose claim upon the obedience of us his subjects we neither dispute nor deny nor disregard. We who are Christians must embody our conviction that we don’t do what is right in our own eyes. We are preoccupied, rather, with what is righteous, and what is righteous reflects the heart of the Righteous One himself.  Everyday matters remain the occasion, the context, the venue of everyday obedience. Discipleship isn’t suspended until philosophers can dissect postmodernism; discipleship is always to be exercised now, in the context of the ready-to-hand. We trust our Lord and his truth right now (or we don’t); we grant hospitality right now and discover we’ve entertained angels unawares (or we don’t); we uphold our Lord’s claim on our obedience in the face of postmodernism’s ethical indifference (or we don’t).  We recognise the approach of temptation and resist it in the instant of its approach, or we stare at it like a rabbit staring at a snake until rabbit-like, we’re seized.  We forgive the offender from our heart and find ourselves newly aware of God’s forgiveness of us, or we merely pretend to forgive the offender and find our own heart shrivelling.  The apostle John insists that we do the truth. We have countless opportunities every day challenging us to forthright faith and obedience and trust regardless of whether or not we can philosophically rebut postmodernism’s philosophical presuppositions.

 

The third challenge postmodernism brings to the church is as profound as it is simple: Christians must recover the Christian truth that human existence is relational.  A few minutes ago I mentioned, for instance, that one feature of modernity’s modulation into postmodernity was the shift from production economics to consumer economics.         We should note, however, that neither form of economics impinges upon a Christian understanding of human profundity.  God intends us to be creatures whose ultimate profundity is rooted not in economic matters but in relations.

Think of the old story concerning the creation of humankind. “God created man in his own image.   In the image of God created he them.” (Gen. 1:27) Adam is properly Adam; Adam is properly himself, only in relation to Eve. To be sure, Adam isn’t a function of Eve or Eve a function of him.  Neither one can be reduced to the other; neither one is an aspect of the other. None the less, each is who he or she is only in relation to the other.

I am not reducible to any one of my relationships or to all of them together.   I am not an extension of my wife or an aspect of my parents or a function of my daughters. I am me, uniquely, irreplaceably, unsubstituably me.  Still, I am not who I am apart from my relationships.

Every last human being is a dialogical partner with God. This isn’t to say that everyone is aware of this or welcomes this or agrees with this. It isn’t to say that everyone is a believer or a crypto-believer or even a “wannabe” believer. It isn’t to say that everyone is going to become a believer or be considered one.  But it is to say that the God who has made us all can’t be escaped; can’t be escaped by anyone.  God can be denied, he can be disdained, he can be ignored, he can be unknown, he can be fled, but he can’t be escaped.  Not to be aware of this truth is not thereby to be spared it.   To ridicule this truth is not thereby to be rid of it.  The living God is always and everywhere the dialogical “Other”, the relational “Other” of everyone’s life, even as there are many creaturely “others” in everyone’s life.

Decades ago the Jewish biblical thinker Martin Buber wrote, “All real living is meeting.”   He was right: what isn’t profoundly a “meeting” isn’t living; it’s death. What isn’t a “meeting” isn’t real; it’s illusory.  Reality, said Buber, is the “between”; the “between” between person and person, the “between” between person and the Person. Jean Paul Sartre, the French existentialist philosopher, complained that the mere existence of another human being diminished the individual’s freedom.  The existence of God, Sartre continued, suffocated the individual, so suffocating was God in his immensity compared to the human individual gasping to exist. Therefore, said Sartre, God had to be denied if humankind was to thrive humanly.  Buber (who always maintained that Sartre was a novelist who thought himself a philosopher) correctly saw that Sartre had inverted the picture: the relation of “I-it”, how we approach things, isn’t bedrock reality, the “I-thou” relation being no more than an ethereal fantasy. It’s the other way around: “I-thou” is bedrock reality; “I-thou” is the primordium of the cosmos, “I-it” being a mere abstraction.         Postmodernity is suspicious and cynical and bitter all at once, and often for good reason. It denies the category of the real. Right here there is challenge and opportunity a-plenty for Christians: the real is the relational.

 

The fourth challenge postmodernism brings to the church: we have to work out much more thoroughly what we understand to be the human, the quintessentially human.  Our society is beset on all sides with depersonalisation and dehumanisation. We are now facing the technological novelty known as “virtual reality” or “synthetic reality.” Soon we’ll be sitting in front of our TV screens with a contraption on our head that allows us to experience the sensations of touch, smell, taste, sight. When so much of the human can be counterfeited electronically, what does it mean to be human? Surely Christians have something to say and do here.

 

The fifth challenge postmodernism brings to the church: we must reappropriate the category of the holy.   Here postmodernity forces us to come to terms with something the church has considered too slightly if at all: the polar opposite of evil isn’t good, not even the good.  The polar opposite of wrong isn’t right, not even the right. The polar opposite of evil, rather, is the holy.  The polar opposite of wrong is the holy.  Plainly the holy and the good are not exactly the same.   The holy and the right are not exactly the same.  Wherein lies the difference?

In order to answer this question we must spend a few minutes refreshing our understanding of God’s holiness.

God’s holiness is God’s own Godness, that which constitutes God uniquely God.   In the first place God is holy in that God is utterly distinct from his creation. God is not to be identified with any part of his creation or any aspect of it.

In the second place God’s holiness means that God can’t be measured or assessed by anything other than himself.         God is the absolute standard of himself.

In the third place God’s holiness means that God’s character is without defect or deficiency.  God’s character is free from taint of any sort.  God’s love is free from sentimentality; God’s anger is free from ill-temper; God’s judgement is free from arbitrariness; God’s patience is free from indifference; God’s sovereignty is free from tyranny.

In the fourth place God’s holiness means that all the aspects of God’s character just mentioned are gathered up into a unity. Just as every shade of the spectrum from infrared to ultra-violet is gathered up into what we call “light”, so every dimension of God’s character and God’s transcendence is gathered up into God’s holiness.

When we are faced with evil in any of its manifestations we must find ourselves driven ultimately not to a consideration of good, even the good, for even the good is but a philosophical category, not the living person of the Holy One himself. When we are faced with wrong we must find ourselves driven ultimately not to a consideration of right, even the right, for even the right is but a moral category, not the living person of the Holy One himself. Instead we must find ourselves driven to contemplate afresh and own anew the One whose uniqueness and awesomeness and splendour left our Hebrew foreparents in faith prostrate and adoring. For God alone is that to which (to whom) the deficits of postmodernism point us: God.

And if postmodernism is used in God’s inscrutable providence (Calvin’s description) to turn the hearts and minds of many to him, then even postmodernism is a harbinger of hope: hope for the church, to be sure, but hope as well for that world which God so loved as to pour himself upon it without measure and bind himself to it without end.

The Lord is a stronghold for the oppressed,
a stronghold in times of trouble.
And those who know thy name put their trust in thee,
for thou, O Lord, hast not forsaken those who seek thee.

Psalm 9:9-10

Israel of old always insisted that the first responsibility of its king was not to preen himself or increase the lustre of his court or even triumph splendidly in feats of military prowess or political wizardry. The first responsibility of its king was invariably to safeguard the poor.

And who were the poor? They could be the financially deprived, of course. Yet they were also those whose finances were adequate but who had been rendered unusually vulnerable for any number of reasons: reversals, illness, defamation, conspiracy, enemies manifest and hidden. Who spoke up on behalf of the oppressed? Who succoured them? Who endeavoured to provide “armour” where they were most exposed? It was Israel’s conviction that God did. Yet regardless of God’s capacity to act as he had promised, regardless of his eagerness to, the oppressed would entrust themselves to him only as they knew his “name”; that is only as they were acquainted with God’s nature, character, person, presence. (Plainly “name” is a very rich notion in Hebrew.) Just as it was the vocation of the king to safeguard the vulnerable in the service of the King, so it was the vocation of the prophet to acquaint the people with the heart of the King himself. Then, and only then, could needy people be expected to abandon themselves to the One whom they now knew would never abandon them.

Will God abandon us? Why wouldn’t he, in view of the fact that he abandoned even his Son precisely when his Son needed him most? Paradoxically, it is just because the Son was forsaken for us that no human being anywhere, at any time, in any predicament, is ever God-forsaken now or can be. Because the Son was left so thoroughly derelict, and because the pang of that dereliction pierced the heart of the Father, God has taken upon himself that dereliction which we sinners deserve, which we should otherwise have, and which we should rightly fear yet could never fend off. In other words, the anguish endured by the Son and absorbed by the Father now spares us that anguish which we are sure we feel even as our feeling is in fact without foundation or substance. “I will never fail you nor forsake you” (Joshua 1:5; Hebrews 13:5) is now the cry of God’s heart to us.

Then entrust ourselves to him we must. For from the perspective of cross and resurrection we understand that what Father and Son together did for us, they did so that it never need be done to us. God is a stronghold for the oppressed. We know his “name” and will therefore put our trust in him.

The truth of the psalmist’s word I have proven time and again. And as surely as I have proven it for myself I know that I am called to be an icon of it for you. Because God doesn’t abandon, neither do I. And neither must you. For just as the king’s vocation was to reflect the characteristic behaviour of the King himself, so our vocation is to exemplify the Stronghold himself. He who provides refuge for the oppressed commissions us to do as much for each other in any and all circumstances. We, then, shall not fail or forsake one another.

 

Victor Shepherd

 

This paper appeared as an article entitled “Has The Church A Future?”
in Horizons (Toronto, The Salvation Army, November, 1997).

 WILL THE 21ST CENTURY BE AN AGE OF CHRISTIAN REVIVAL?

 

I think so. Mainline liberal Christianity is declining rapidly. Having joined itself naively to the spirit of one era, it found itself bereft in the next. Theological liberalism assumed the world’s self-understanding to be true, and therefore adopted it as the starting point and controlling principle of Christian reflection. Eventually theological liberalism came to be seen for what it was: the world talking to itself about itself, albeit while deploying a Christian vocabulary. As a result the liberal churches have spent untold resources and energies mirroring what the world already knew — and often what it had tried, found wanting, and left behind as it moved on to other aspects of its ideational orbit.

The Christian revival will stand out starkly against the aforementioned in several respects.

* There will be a recovery of classical Christian foundations. The Incarnation, for instance, will be cherished anew as the underpinning of Christian faith and life. (The Word becoming flesh is qualitatively distinct from the Word becoming words.) In the same way the doctrine of the Trinity — who God is is known by what God does on our behalf and what God effects within us — will be honoured again as the matrix within which Christian existence and activity unfold, in accordance with the eternal being and creative activity of God.

* There will be a recovery of the meaning, burden and privilege of discipleship, as discipleship reflects afresh biblical convictions concerning service and sacrifice. Christian discipleship will be much more intentional, self-renouncing and self-forgetful. As Christians become an even smaller minority there will be added to them only those who are serious about imitatio Christi in a recalcitrant world. The church will consist of those who both identify and identify with the victimized, the marginalized, the voiceless, the defenceless — and more widely, with the creation’s frustration and self-contradiction. Sustained by the triumph of Jesus Christ over the powers of death, such discipleship will eschew any notion or display of triumphalism, knowing that the resurrected Lord still suffers (according to apostolic testimony), and being reminded every day that the society of the 21st century permits it no opportunity for triumphalism in any case.

* In light of the hunger for the transcendent, the mood and style of Christian worship will be increasingly charismatic. While it is impossible to be over-cerebral, it is certainly possible to be one-sidedly cerebral. This latter imbalance, rendering the church lop-sided for too long, will be redressed as community-life and personal devotion are re-equilibrated: head and heart, understanding and effusiveness, doctrine and dancing, ardour and affection. The worship, self-understanding, and service of the Christian community will be formed and informed, moved and driven by the “ballast” of the Catholic and Anglican tradition, the “sails” of Pentecostal exuberance, and the careful “charting” of Reformation conviction.

* As denominations disappear (they were often centuries-old imports from European political squabbles in any case), church-bureaucracies will collapse. A nineteenth century church leader (William Booth) was not without insight when he spoke of bureaucracy as “mediocrity in purple.” The autonomous church-community will see readily that mediocrity is an impediment, while purple is mediocrity’s face-saving disguise. Autonomous churches will be in touch with their constituency and their service-opportunities in ways that bureaucracies neither apprehended nor assisted.

Throughout history there have been fresh incursions of the Spirit of God and, called forth by such incursions, new manifestations of the people of God. While the 21st century will not see a replication of 19th and 20th churchmanship, it may indeed see a manifestation of the people of God in their unity, uniqueness (holiness), and catholicity — thanks to a fresh appropriation of the prophetic/apostolic testimony to the One whose victory means that his continuing vulnerability remains effective within a world that he refuses to abandon.

 

Victor Shepherd
September 1997

This paper first appeared in The Free Methodist Herald
(Mississauga, Free Methodist Church in Canada, December, 1997)

Repentance and Life

 

Breast-beating, tears, dredging up spiritual sludge — isn’t this what “Repent!” brings to mind? It’s little wonder that our society shuns the word and disdains what it things the word represents. People understandably shy away from rubbing their nose in their personal garbage pail, especially when guilt and depression and self-belittlement are expected to effervesce.

Nonetheless, our Lord Jesus Christ, who comes only to impart healing, help and wholesomeness — life — summoned people to repent every day of his public ministry. His summons was always urgent. “Don’t put it off for a minute. Can’t you see it’s the only sensible thing to do? The kingdom of God, his end-time restoration of a world in bondage to sin and evil ever since the Fall, is upon you. Abandon yourself to God’s deliverance!” The urgent summons to repent is one of the major building-blocks of our Lord’s ministry. Pull it out, and his ministry would be unrecognizable.

In view of the good news of the kingdom, an about-turn is needed. Repentance is this about-turn. To make an about-turn is plainly to return. And in fact everywhere in the older testament to repent is to return. To turn into the kingdom of God is to return to the God made us, who grieves over our defiant departure from him, and who longs for our return to him.

When our Lord cries, “Repent, return”, he has in mind three startling pictures painted by the Hebrew prophets before him.

(i) The first image is that of an adulterous spouse returning to wife or husband. Adultery is horrific at any time. For adultery is the betrayal of the most intense intimacy; adultery is the violation of a promise; adultery is personally degrading; and adultery is a public humiliation of the faithful partner.

To repent, then, is to return to God and recover that intimacy with God which we were created to know and enjoy as covenant-partners with him. To return is to uphold the promise we have made to him on countless occasions throughout our lives. To return is to leave off our self-degradation (for make no mistake: however much our society ridicules a doctrine of sin as “Victorian” or Puritan” or even “mediaeval”, sin remains invariably degrading.) To return is to turn from publicly humiliating God to publicly praising him for his incomprehensible patience.

(ii) When the prophets, in the name of God, urge their people to repent, they speak of pagan idol-worshippers returning to the worship of the true and living God. The Hebrew word for “idols” is literally “the nothings.” At the same time, only a fool would pretend that “nothing” is inconsequential. A vacuum is nothing, yet a vacuum has immense power: it sucks down everything around it. A lie is nothing, for a lie is a statement without substance. Yet lies destroy people every day. Delusions are nothing, for a delusion is without foundation. Yet deluded people are at best utterly misled and at worst out-and-out insane. Most tellingly, perhaps, is the fact that we are inevitably conformed to what we worship. To worship any of the “nothings” is to become nothing ourselves.

Since stubborn refusal of the kingdom of God is self-annihilation, why don’t we repent, return, and become someone, that child of God created in his image and impelled to cry, “Abba, Father”, eternally? When our Lord pleads with is to repent he is pleading with us to renounce our pursuit of nothing (the lie, the delusion, the spiritual vacuum) only to find ourselves plunged into truth and reality, the kingdom of God.

(iii) The third prophetic picture of repentance is that of rebel subjects returning to their rightful ruler. The rebel subjects have thought they could rule themselves, only to find that their inept attempts at self-rule have left them chaotic and fragmented. Their rebellion was born of ignorance of themselves, and their ignorance was born of ingratitude to their sovereign. Grateful now to that rightful ruler who alone can subdue disorder, and possessed now of the self-knowledge that without him they will be forever self-destructive, they return. Then the only sensible thing to do is suspend foolish rebellion and fall at the feet of the king himself.

As the meaning of “Repent!” permeates informed hearts, the command is understood as invitation: “Come unto me….” And repentance itself is now known to be nothing less than resurrection and life.

 

Victor Shepherd
October 1997

Published in The Free Methodist Herald,
(Mississauga, Free Methodist Church in Canada, Feb. 1998)

 PREDICAMENT AND PROVISION

“God gave them up!” These have to be the most chilling words that describe the human predicament. Three times in five verses (Romans 1:24-28) Paul reiterates, “God gave them up.” He means that God has handed us over. Handed us over to what? Handed us over to what we keep telling God we want. We don’t want him? We don’t have to have him. He’ll give us exactly what we want. (Satan, we should note, is never this generous; Satan invariably gives us what he wants.) We don’t want God’s truth? We don’t have to have it — which is to say, of course, we’re going to be left with falsehood and illusion. We don’t want God’s claim on our obedience? Then we shan’t have to obey him. But then we’re going to have a pretender claiming us, and this claimant won’t be the slightest bit benevolent. At bottom humankind keeps telling God it doesn’t want him. Then Godlessness is what we want. Godlessness is what we have. God gives us up to it, hands us over to it, abandons us to it.

Needless to say, there are consequences to what we have or want, anywhere in life. Not to want God is to be stuck with the consequences of not wanting, not having him. Paul lists the features (or at least some of them) of the human self-expression that displays itself as God hands us over to the Godlessness we crave: slander, murder, ruthlessness, covetousness, boasting, gossip, deceit, parent abuse, sexual perversion, and so on. (Rom.1:28-32) This is the sorry state to which God “gives us up, gives us up, gives us up….” It reverberates like a bell tolling the death knell of the entire human race.

But it isn’t the death knell! By God’s mercy it’s the wake-up call. It’s the huge electric shock administered to jar the heart-patient back to life. Because God is love, because love exhausts God’s nature (1 John 4:8), God can never be indifferent. (Indifference is the opposite of love, not hatred, contrary to what most people think.) While God abandons us to what we want — together with its consequences — he doesn’t abandon us. In fact he “gives us up” just because he has never given up on us. God gives us up to the miserable consequences of our disobedience and defiance just because he’s never ceased loving us and wants to bring us to our senses. At no point in the downward spiral has God given up on us. To be sure, our predicament is evidence that God’s anger has been aroused. But since his anger is only his love burning hot, his anger is simply his love shaking us awake. (We must always remember that since God is love, his every attitude and act are actually expressions of his love for us.)

If God were indifferent, the human predicament would now be hopeless, since indifference would simply not bother with us henceforth but simply leave us alone in our self-willed mess. An angry God, however, plainly cares; his caring means that he bothers; he bothers in that he not only shakes us awake to our predicament, he also awakens us to the provision his love has made for us. He has given us his Son, given us himself in his Son. In the words of the Anglican Prayerbook, our Lord was given us to make “by his one oblation of himself once offered a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world.” God’s provision blesses all humankind in that atonement which Jesus Christ has wrought as he makes “at one” a wayward human race and the God who can’t bring himself to give up on us, and can’t bring himself to give up on us inasmuch as he can’t will himself out of his nature, love.

As eager as God is to bless us, however, he won’t bulldoze us, won’t tyrannize or coerce. Everywhere in his provision for us his self-giving sounds the note of the tender, the wooing, the winsome. Centuries before the event of Incarnation and Atonement the prophet Hosea overheard God, whose wrath had just flayed the people Israel, sobbing in God’s own innermost heart, “How can I give you up?” Centuries later provision would be made for us just because he who has already given us up to all that our depraved hearts crave has never given up on us — and can’t. In Hosea’s era God had said to Israel, his wayward people, “I will allure her…and speak tenderly to her.”(Hos. 2:14) It is love’s plea. “I will betroth you to me in faithfulness, and you shall know the Lord.”(Hos. 2:20)

The human predicament is remedied in love’s provision, the crucified Son. The spiritually quickened see him now and are destined to glory in him eternally.

Victor Shepherd
December 1997

Published in The Free Methodist Herald
(Mississauga, Free Methodist Church in Canada, June, 1998)

 

WHAT ARE WE?

All of us glow every time we read the question and answer. Q: “What is man that thou art mindful of him?” A: “Thou hast made him little less than God, and dost crown him with glory and honour.” (Psalm 8:4-5) We should glow every time we read it. All men and women are the pinnacle of God’s creation, only slightly less than God himself. Because we are crowned, all of us, without exception, are meant for the royal family; before God there are no commoners. We are crowned with an honour that no one else can snatch from us, an honour we can’t even forfeit ourselves.

Yet this isn’t all we are. When the psalmist asks the same question again, “What is man? woman?”, the answer is different this time: “Man is like a breath; his days are like a passing shadow.” (Psalm 144: 3-4) Our “glow” has given way to sobriety as we are reminded that we are short-lived creatures for whom life passes speedily. In addition we are vulnerable creatures for whom life unfolds perilously.

When Job provides yet another answer to the same question our sobriety gives way to disagreement or disgust or even simple bewilderment. What is man? “A maggot! A worm!” (Job 25:4-6) Before we settle into bewilderment or seethe with disgust, however, we should examine the context of the question. “How can a man be innocent (NEB) or clean (RSV)?” Can a man be righteous in God’s sight? pure?” (NIV) “Maggot! Worm!” It’s the writer’s way of reminding us that we sinners are defiled in God’s sight.

Now I’m the last person to belittle what the psychologists tell us about the importance of positive self-image and self-confidence and ego-strength. The person whose self-confidence has eroded utterly or who has never had any is a truly pathetic creature. Then what are we to make of “Maggot, Worm!”, especially when we all know that maggots frequent rottenness and worms frequent excrement? Is scripture simply fostering a negative self-image, destroying what little self-confidence we have, and ruining the ego-strength we’ve struggled for years to build up?

Not at all. When scripture pronounces us “Maggot, Worm!”, it’s reminding us that sin defiles; we are defiled before a holy God. Defilement is always loathsome. Our sin repulses him. Specifically sin’s defilement deprives us of our access to God; sin’s defilement disqualifies our acceptance with God.

Yet the marvel of God’s grace is that as loathsome as our sin renders us to him, he has made provision for us in the cross of that Son who identifies himself with the loathsome. The paradox of grace is that the more loathsome we are to God the more he longs for us. The glory of the gospel is that while we can (and do) sin our way into God’s mercy, there’s always more mercy in God than there is sin in us!

“Maggot, worm!” So far from being a putdown, an ego-crusher, it’s the most positive thing that can be said of humankind. It’s positive in the first place because it’s the truth about us, and no falsehood, however sweet-sounding, is ultimately helpful or positive. It’s positive in the second place in that such a pronouncement is riddled with hope: sinners can be salvaged and restored.

Years ago I came to see that the most positive thing to be said about human beings is that we are sinners. The alternatives are unrelievably negative. If instead we say that humankind’s root problem is that we are uninformed, we make ourselves the ready victims of propagandists. If instead we say that we are socially maladjusted, we welcome the cruelty of social engineering. If instead we think our root problem to be our material deprivation, we embrace a statist economy; and statist economies, we have seen repeatedly in our century, are human horrific. It’s supremely positive to say that we are sinners: there’s hope for us!

To be sure, it’s the creature crowned with glory and honour that is also the sinner whom the Hebrew writer pronounces “Maggot, worm!” Yet it’s we maggots who, despite our best efforts at doing our worst, cannot forfeit the glory and honour in which we are created. What’s more, the provision God has made for us in his Son declares God’s unqualified longing to have us rid of our defilement and to have our inalienable glory and honour displayed in full splendour.

This is God’s intention for all of us. Some people have recognized it, now affirm it, and are stepping ahead in it. Others continue to scorn it and thrust it away. Yet the invitation and summons remain. And therefore we are to look upon every man and woman as urgently summoned and warmly invited to the fellowship of that Son in whom humankind’s destiny is realized. For God aches to see everyone the beneficiary of it.

As is so often the case, Charles Wesley gathers it all up most compellingly: “O let me commend my Saviour to you.”

 

Published in Theological Digest & Outlook,
(Burlington, September, 1998)

THEOLOGY OF LIFE

“Sunstroke” and “moonstroke” are alike dreadful, albeit each in its own way. Yet the psalmist (Ps.121) insists that the Lord, helper and keeper of his people, has guaranteed that the “sun shall not smite you by day nor the moon by night.” When our foreparents in faith spoke metaphorically of sunstroke they had in mind the frontal assaults that crumble people: war, rape, torture, intra-family savagery. “Moonstroke”, however, was something else. To be “moonstroked” was to be submarined insidiously by what we do not see, cannot anticipate, and against which therefore we aren’t forearmed. To be moonstroked was to be victimized unknowingly, victimized helplessly, victimized utterly. It was also the conviction of our foreparents that the same Lord who safeguarded his people against “sunstroke” and “moonstroke” alike would also “keep them from all evil”, “keep their life.”

Our foreparents’ conviction notwithstanding, we can’t help asking, “Are people “kept” in the face of evil? What does it mean to say they are kept when they manifestly aren’t kept alive? How are the 1.2 million unborn children aborted each year in the U.S.A. kept? And the brain-damaged daughter of Robert Latimer, the Saskatchewan farmer, on the day her father killed her?

We can move toward answering such questions only as we patiently probe the witness of scripture to the truth. God can “keep our life” only because God is the author of life; and he is the author of life inasmuch as he is the “living God” himself. God’s very nature is life. For this reason alone he is able to impart life to his creatures, and it is his sole prerogative to do so. God “breathes” the breath of life into his creatures, who thereby are rendered living themselves.

We are not to think that the God who lives “makes alive” by sharing his deity with his creatures. (This would be but an anticipation of New Age pantheism); neither is it the case that creatures possess life as an immanent creative principle. God alone has life in himself; all others have life on a loan. The God who lives himself and makes creatures distinct from himself alive too ever remains sovereign sustainer. While God’s sustaining of life is not episodic or spasmodic and can therefore be trusted, any presumptuousness on the part of beneficiaries is inappropriate. The king of Israel knew as much when he replied to Naaman’s messengers when they sought help, “Am I God, to kill and make alive?” (2 Kings 5:7)

Since life belongs to God, individuals do not have the right to destroy their own life or wantonly take the life of others. In short, since God is uniquely “living” and sovereignly imparts life to the work of his hands, the older testament everywhere esteems life as the supreme earthly good, particularly since life is meant to be fulfilled in intimate communion with God. This latter point needs to be underlined, for it is precisely what distinguishes humankind from the animals. The animals, after all, possess life too. Created on the same “day” as humankind, and possessed of “soul” as well (according to Genesis), they are yet not the crown of creation and are not made in the image and likeness of God. While God loves the animals and protects them (as environmentalists rightly remind us), God speaks to men and women alone. God’s addressing us, however, is never idle chit-chat. His Word is freighted with his gift of salvation and his claim upon our obedience. The Hebrew word for “word” (dabar) means both “word” and “event.” By his Word God summons the creation into being; by his Word he renders us alive; by his Word our obedience is voice-activated. The event that all this is is meant to issue in the event of communion with God. Since such communion with God is the goal or purpose of human life, only the life of grateful, loving obedience is ultimately satisfying. While life is “life” by definition (i.e., by God’s decree, lest we etherealize life and undervalue bodily existence), biblical thought consistently insists without fear of contradiction that only the life that is shaped by obedience to the Word is properly called “life.”

What does it mean to say we are created “in the image and likeness of God”? God’s free resolve, “Let us make man in our image”, indicates once again that no power inheres the creaturely in such a way that the creation itself can give rise to human existence. (Any power inhering the creation that could originate humankind independently of God could also annihilate us similarly; and this the sovereign One does not permit — for our blessing.) Instead, nothing can ever deprive a human being of humanness just because we have our existence by God from God. Succinctly put, man is “of” the creation (because forever creaturely, never divine) but not “from” it (because God-fashioned for a particular relationship with him and therefore especial.) At the same time bible-readers have long noticed that scripture nowhere specifies in what the “image of God” consists. Is the image a stamp or impression engraved upon us, or is it that pulsating relationship with God, unique in the creaturely realm, to which all are called? If the latter only, then we can only conclude that all who repudiate this relationship, frustrate it, even forfeit it are accordingly devoid of the image. If the former only, then with equal rigour we must conclude that the image, without reference to a relationship and to this extent “thingified”, doesn’t have to do with the profoundly personal. In both cases the uniquely human has been lost. The witness of scripture is plain: having being created response-able (to God), we are thereby rendered response-ible. We may honour God’s intention for us or disdain it, fulfil God’s purposes or frustrate them, love God or remain indifferent. What we can’t do, however, is escape it all! While we may attempt to flee our vocation as covenant-partners of God (and the Fall means, among other things, that everyone without exception attempts such a flight), the attempt is forever futile. And precisely here is our blessing, our hope, and the only ground of our dignity and ultimate inviolability! The “substantial” aspect of the image is that God unfailingly knows us and loves us, thereby giving us our identity and our worth, together with our capacity and desire for knowing and loving him. The “relational” aspect of the image is that fully human now on account of the Creator, we can (paradoxically) become “fulfilledly” human only as we abandon ourselves to our Redeemer. While we can and do stumble with respect to our vocation, we cannot rid ourselves of its glory.

It all means that we fallen creatures are “bent in on ourselves” (as the Protestant Reformers speak of us), and because “bent” in this manner find ourselves going ’round in circles instead of stepping ahead on that way which is also truth and life. Still, God has set a limit to the disaster we bring upon ourselves: we can’t fall so as to plunge ourselves beneath our human status and render ourselves animal or even demonic. However depraved we might be, we can’t cease to be the crown of God’s creation, singularly identified for an especial bond with him and destined for a glorious future in him. It all means too that no human being, however temperamentally vicious, psychologically twisted, physically malformed or intellectually disadvantaged; none of these is to be viewed as sub-human. It also means that no one can deprive others of their God-ordained identity, preservation and protection. Regardless of how terribly people are abused, they remain what they are (human) and who they are (their identity) before God. In view of the unspeakable horrors of the twentieth century, it must be emphasized that the worst violation of a human being cannot overturn that person’s ultimate inviolability. Because of the image of God, our reality as human beings and our identity are guaranteed.

This is not to say that sinful men and women cannot and do not deny this truth in themselves and others. We need only call to mind the commandants and their S.S. assistants in the death camps of the Nazi era. Lest the victims slated for execution appear to have been murdered, they were first degraded and made to appear as less-than-human. (Only human beings are properly described as having been “murdered.”) Camp-bosses cleverly sought to preface the destruction of detainees with the latter’s self-destruction. Such self-destruction need not have entailed suicide; self-destruction as humans was fostered by the “Catch-22” of insisting that prisoners maintain personal and communal cleanliness by defecating only in specified areas and at the same time forbidding prisoners to absent themselves from work or roll-call. This “excremental assault” (the title of Chapter three of Terence des Pres’s, The Survivor) aimed at a humiliation and degradation so thoroughgoing as to relieve guards of the last twinge of conscience. For who would ever be conscience-stricken at disposing of sub-human vermin? Even the victims’ death was to be deprived of any significance for the victims themselves and their peers: the extermination of vermin bespeaks only sanity and sanitation! And of course the treatment meted out precluded even the consolation of martyrdom. Martyrs, we know, choose to die for their faith, and these people had no choice. Moreover Jewish camp-victims were slain not because of their faith but merely because of their ancestry: they happened to have had at least one Jewish great-grandparent Now at least one-eighth Jewish, they “qualified” for inhuman treatment as sub-humans.

Just as others may deny any person’s humanness (but never deprive him of it), so any one person may contradict her own humanness. We admit as much in everyday speech when we say to someone whose conduct is deplorable, “Be a man!” We never say to an alligator, “Be an alligator!” Because an alligator can be only an alligator, anything it does perfectly reflects its nature. “Be a man!”, on the other hand, means that someone is falling short of what he is created to be. He is contradicting himself; his conduct fails abysmally to reflect his nature. The glorious, humanity-saving paradox is that the imperative,”Be a man!”, lefthandedly suggests that someone can fail to be human even as the fact of the address means that he can’t! The subtle ambiguity here is grounded in the twofold significance of the image of God.

 

G.K. Chesterton was surely correct when he said that the Christian doctrine of the Fall is the only doctrine that is verifiable! In view of the world’s ongoing violation of defenceless humans, Christians aren’t inclined to lose sight of the truth of the doctrine. Christians often are inclined, however, to lose sight of the complementary truth that God wills to preserve a fallen world, and wills to preserve it with a view to its redemption and its eschatological renewal in Christ. In other words, God’s judgement on a fallen world includes his determination not to let it sink so far into evil that it becomes uninhabitable, his determination not to turn his back on it in disgust or abandon it as hopeless. In the wake of the Fall the creaturely, unqualifiedly good as it came from God’s hand, is now known as the “natural”; i.e., the “natural” is the creaturely warped by the Fall. On the day of “the new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells” (2 Peter 3:13) the natural will be rid of its Fall-imported frustration and futility, distortion and disfigurement. In the meantime the natural remains the means whereby God providentially protects the creaturely good whose goodness he hasn’t allowed to disappear completely. To say the same thing differently, God’s providential care for a fallen world is exemplified as we see how the natural safeguards life against the unnatural. To be sure, the unnatural can prevail for a time; in the long run, however, the natural reasserts itself and prevails by its providentially-lent strength. Adolf Hitler spoke of his “Thousand-Year Reich” that was to usher in a wholly new humanity, the race of “supermen.” The result? The Reich lasted only a decade, and fifty years later the unnatural horrors of the Nazi era continue to fill even the most convinced atheist with loathing. The depredations of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, the cruelties of Mao Tse Tung and the Cultural Revolution, the throat-cutting of children and the raping of women in Bosnia, the genocide in Rawunda; the unnatural is as unmistakable as it is undeniable. At the same time the Nuernburg war-crimes trials, public outrage and economic sanctions and military interventions and international correctives: these are the reassertion of the natural in the face of the unnatural, the ever-watchful providence of God preserving the life of a fallen world for its ultimate liberation in Christ.

All that has been said concerning the natural as the means whereby God preserves life in a fallen world has specific application to the right to bodily life. It is incontrovertible that God wills human life to be bodily life. While the human person cannot be reduced to the body, the body must none the less be preserved for the sake of the person. Human beings (persons) are neither disembodied spirits nor bodies only. Yet since the body is essential to the person (no one has ever seen, met or known a person apart from encountering that person’s body), the preservation of the right to bodily life grounds all other rights. The importance of this is incalculable, particularly when the Hemlock Society speaks of the “right” to kill oneself and totalitarian societies speak characteristically of the “right” to sacrifice individuals for the sake of the collectivist good.

Then is the life of the body an end-in-itself or only a means to an end? To say only that the body is an end-in-itself is to reduce persons to bodies and to invoke the pagan cult of the body. Yet to say, on the other hand, that the body is only a means to an end (e.g., only a means to one’s personhood), is to suggest that the means can be ignored as soon as the end is obtained. If, again, the body is only a means to an end, then we have no right to bodily joys (a misapprehension that scripture corrects on page after page.) And of course if the body is only a means to an end, then any injury done to my body isn’t an injury done to me. This needs only to be stated in order to be set aside.

As the gospel-story of the rich man and the socially-useless Lazarus makes clear, life is good regardless of its utility. (Luke 16:19-31) To arrogate to ourselves the capacity to distinguish between life that is worth living and life that is not is to “Nazify” our society and welcome the unnatural. As often as I hear it suggested that we should do this I think of the severely physically disabled people, known to me, who relish life; and of the severely mentally ill people whose faith I have found radiant. And in view of the sanctuary afforded the defenceless through the many “L’Arche” communities, no more than a moment’s reflection is required to imagine Jean Vanier’s comment on the arrogance of those who take it upon themselves to “select” those whose life is deemed worth living and those whose is not.

Running throughout scripture’s nuanced discussion of life is the eschatological goal of life. Jesus Christ claims all of life as he reclaims it from the disfigurements of sin, evil and death. God protects and preserves natural life in that he has always intended its redemption and fulfilment. Scripture accordingly uses “life” of both bodily existence and this existence fulfilled in that relationship with God which Jesus Christ effects. The writer of Proverbs records the unembroidered assertion, “He who finds me finds life.” (Prov. 18:35) While God is said to have animated humans by breathing into them the breath of life, the business of humans thus rendered able to breathe themselves is to praise God. (Ps. 150:6) Over and over scripture speaks of life as an unqualified good just because there hovers above all such discussion the conviction that life is really life only as God’s purpose for it is realized: a bond with him that nothing will break. Typical is the older testament’s insistence both that life-as-such is of inestimable value and that God summons us, “Seek me and live.” (Amos 5:4) In the same vein, while God puts life and death before people who are bodily alive now and bids them choose, he doesn’t proffer life and death as if each were weighted equally. Instead God urges us, pleads with us, warns us, woos us, “Turn [i.e., repent] and live.” (Ez. 18:32) God’s pronouncement over the valley of dead bones is that people who are alive at present will yet live only as God puts his Spirit within them. (Ez. 37:14) In numerous places throughout scripture “life” means “relationship with God.” In the newer testament “life” has this meaning virtually exclusively. In the same vein “image” in the older testament speaks of our inalienable humanness; in the newer testament “image” speaks of our transformation in Christ, who is himself “the image of the invisible God.” (2. Cor. 3:18;4:4)

Jesus insists that he is life. (John 11:25) The essence of life is not to be expressed simply as biological or intellectual activity, but expressed rather as indissolubly linked to his person. Jesus never says that he has life, only that he is life. The question, “What is life?” therefore gives way to the question, “Who is life?” We must be careful, in our psychology-conscious age, lest we subtly psychologize our Lord’s insistence, as happens when people remark, “Were it not for Jesus Christ, my life would lack meaning” or “Were in not for my Lord, life wouldn’t be worth living.” While these psychological assessments are unobjectionable in themselves (because no doubt true), they are not what the apostles have in mind when they bear witness that Jesus Christ is life (John 14:6) and that he is our life. (Phil.1:21 and Col. 3:4) Despite the fact that the spiritually unquickened do not know this, affirm it or celebrate it but rather direct themselves against it, it remains the hidden truth of their existence. In the proclamation of the gospel they are summoned and equipped to “see” it, own it, confess it and praise God for it. As the definitive reversal of life’s enemy, death, the resurrection of Jesus Christ grounds the God-ordained goal of all human existence. Believers, united to their Lord who is life, know and enjoy “eternal life” now. For them, future life can only be greater intimacy with God’s “steadfast love.” Here the psalmist’s profound acquaintance with “life” — intense intimacy with his Lord — is so very rich that in contemplating its becoming richer still he finds language inadequate; he can only say, blissfully oblivious to verbal inconsistency, that God’s steadfast love (i.e., life) is even “better than life.” (Ps. 63:3)

If the nature of God’s safeguarding is to preserve us against “sunstroke” and “moonstroke”, what is the scope of God’s keeping? The psalmist says that God can be trusted to keep our “going out and coming in.” This is a rich Hebrew expression with three distinct meanings.

“Going out and coming in” is a Hebrew way of expressing entirety or totality; it comprehends every eventuality. Nothing that befalls us will ever undo God’s keeping; nothing will ever handcuff God so as to leave him unable to keep us. He who wasn’t handcuffed by the death of his Son won’t be handcuffed by anything now.

“Going out and coming in” refers to the important ventures, efforts and undertakings of life. To have these kept is to have our diligent efforts rendered fruitful. Psalm 126 promises, “He who goes out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come in with shouts of joy, bearing his sheaves with him.” We may have seen little fruit to date for the energy we have poured out, the sacrifice we have made and the prayers we have pleaded. Still, it all isn’t finally going to dribble away!. It’s going to be crowned.

“Going out and coming in” refers also to the early and sunset years of life, infancy and old age, when we are helpless, frequently voiceless, and always vulnerable. At he beginning of life and at the end we are kept. The child who dies in infancy, the still-born child, the aborted child, the brain-damaged child — all are kept inviolate before God, by God. The most senile person in the nursing home whose befuddlement has left her virtually unrecognizable, the most “scattered” schizophrenic whose inner torment wasn’t relieved for decades; the humanity and identity of these are kept inviolate before God as well.

It is “our great God and Saviour” (Titus 2:13) who will ever keep our life.

Published in The Free Methodist Herald,
(Mississauga, Free Methodist Church in Canada, March/April, 1998)

 

Modern Saints and Prophets?

Recently I was asked if there are modern prophets and saints. To answer the question we need to ask more questions. “Is God alive?” “Does God speak?” “Does God still call, equip, commission and appoint?”

Let’s think first about the prophets of the biblical era. The Hebrew prophet is summoned before God, addressed by God, and appointed by God to a specific task. When the prophet is singled out (Amos said he was singled when he was a mature adult, a shepherd in Tekoa; Jeremiah, in his mother’s womb), the prophet is brought before the “heavenly council”, as it is called. Once admitted to God’s deliberations with himself, the prophet is allowed to overhear God talking to himself out loud, or even addressed by God directly. Now the prophet has been given (burdened with!) a specific word reflecting the mind and heart, the will and way and purpose of God.

But haven’t all God’s people been made aware of the mind and heart of God? Yes. All God’s people know that God has disclosed his will and way and purpose at Red Sea and Sinai, at Calvary and empty tomb. Then who needs a prophet? To be sure, Red Sea and Sinai, Calvary and empty tomb form the people of God and inform them after God’s heart. Yet in the pilgrimage of God’s people from deliverance to promised land they need specific directions for specific crises or opportunities in the midst of specific developments. Sometimes the prophet’s word is directed to the people as a whole, as was the case when the Israelites were exiled in Babylon and floundered in the midst of foreigners who taunted them and tempted them. At other times the prophet’s word is addressed to an individual, as was the case when the prophet Nathan told David, after David’s violation of Bathsheba and murder of Uriah, that the king of Israel was nonetheless a “creep.”

In all of this the prophet is different from the teacher. The teacher expounds and interprets the whole body of the truth of God. The teacher mines the rich deposits in the goldmine of the gospel. A modern teacher will expound the Sermon on the Mount or the Ten Commandments or the message of the Psalms or the parables of Jesus.

While the prophet must never contradict the whole body of the truth of God (if he does, he’s manifestly a false prophet), he has yet been called and equipped to speak God’s special word to a special development.

Since life is punctured only occasionally by special crises, since life unfolds ordinarily most of the time, it’s obvious that teachers have to be many while prophets are few. Teaching is common while prophecy is unusual. Yet both are essential. The teacher acquaints God’s people with their identity and self-understanding as God’s people; the prophet imparts specific direction in the midst of unique developments. Both are essential.

Are there modern prophets? Of course there are.

In the same way there are modern saints. “Saint” translates hagios, holy. In the New Testament saints or holy people aren’t super-spiritual Christians; all Christians — even weak or immature or sin-riddled Christians — are called “saints” without exception.

The root meaning of “holy” is “set apart.” To be sure, Christians are set apart to do much: to do the kingdom-work that obedient subjects do gladly, to labour and struggle while it is still day. Yet before they do, Christians are set apart to be. We are to be light, salt — just be.

Whenever I think of what it means to be set apart, a saint, I think of Paul’s graphic images in his Corinthian correspondence. We are to be an aroma, the fragrance of God. (2 Cor. 2:15) Now I’m exceedingly fond of perfume. I’ll even stop on the sidewalk and continue sniffing after a woman fragrant with perfume has walked on down the street. As fond as I am of perfume, I loathe stenches — and would loathe even more being a stench. We shan’t be, however, for we’ve been set apart to be an aroma, the fragrance of God, rendering God attractive.

Paul says too that Christians are God’s letter. (2 Cor. 3:23) We are the letter that God sends to others. The purpose of a letter is to convey information — and of a love-letter, to disclose the letter-writer’s heart as well. We are God’s letter, “written not with pen and ink but with the Spirit of the living God on the tablets of the human heart.”

The apostle insists too that the saints are set apart to be God’s garden, God’s plantation. (1 Cor. 3:9) A garden is meant to feed people; God’s garden is feed them ultimately with him who is the bread of life.

Saints today? All who have embraced our Lord in faith have been set apart to be — saints! And among them will also be found those prophets the church needs to hear in every era.

Victor Shepherd
February 1998

A WEDDING HOMILY

I: — “Marriage”, says the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, “is not to be entered into lightly”. Indeed it is not, for marriage is the most significant human relationship any man or woman will ever enter upon. So momentous is marriage, so telling, so pervasive is it that it penetrates to our innermost core as no other human bond can. God deems marriage the most pertinent metaphor for his most intimate relationship with his people. Throughout scripture marriage is the commonest analogy for faith. The apostle Paul draws an explicit comparison between marriage and the life Jesus Christ lives with and in his people. So momentous is marriage, so telling is it, that adultery, everywhere in scripture, is the commonest metaphor for idolatry — where idolatry is that violation of the first commandment which entails the violation of all others. So momentous is marriage, again, that both it itself and that faith of which it speaks metaphorically are described as “mystery”. Mystery, according to our Hebrew foreparents, is never something vague or abstract or spooky; rather it is everyday concrete reality, even as this concreteness remains profound — so profound that while it can be pointed to, experienced, commended, and described it can never be explained, much less explained away. No words can finally do justice to mystery.

 

II: — Jesus insists that marriage involves both leaving and cleaving. “Leaving” implies this: while we are not to neglect, despise, abandon or forget our families once we marry, nonetheless we must understand, as they must understand, that they are no longer the chief source of our human comfort and consolation: our spouse is and ever must be. In the same way we must understand, as they must understand, that they no longer have first claim upon us: our spouse has and ever must have.

And “cleaving”? Jesus insists that as we leave others and cleave to spouse we become “one”, “one flesh”. “One flesh” means one, unitary organism of body, mind and spirit. It does not mean that we become clones of each other or mere functions of each other. It does not 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 they bring forth fruit in a splendour and munificence they otherwise could not.

When two trees are grafted together each is first slashed sharply. The slash exposes what has been heretofore hidden; it lays 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, risk of and exposure to 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.

 

III: — Yet while all Christians aspire after such a union the ubiquity of the Fall finds anyone’s marriage molested by sin. We ourselves are fallen creatures in whom the image of God is now partially obscured and defaced (even as its lineaments remain recognizable). Individually and collectively our humanity is distorted by depravities within and dangers without. Then marriage will remain resilient, in the face of such depravities and dangers, only by grace, God’s grace. Which is to say, marriage thrives as it aspires to reflect God’s resolve to be faithful to his promises declared to us in Christ Jesus. And since when God’s faithfulness meets our sin it assumes the form of forgiveness, marriage thrives as we extend that pardon which has been quickened by the greater pardon we have received. We must recall the foundation of God’s covenant-faithfulness whenever our proximity to each other fosters friction and magnifies irritability.

Marriage endures by faithfulness. The current myth that has left so many people tasting dust and ashes 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 do not 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 utterly destructive; it betokens not so much silliness as folly.

 

IV: — Finally we must remember that while marriage promises a most intimate, rich, and satisfying communion it cannot provide what it was never meant to provide; namely, that profoundest contentment found only in God. To expect husband or wife to provide what no human partner is able to provide; to expect husband or wife to give what only God can is to burden marriage unrealistically. Then we shall 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.

What God joins together let none of us put asunder — ever.

Amen

Victor A. Shepherd
November 1993

 

 

I: — “I have been crucified to the world, and the world has been crucified to me,” the apostle Paul declares in his Galatian letter. (Gal. 6:14) Is he boasting? Is he putting himself forward as a spiritual super-achiever whom we are to recognize and congratulate?

On the contrary, he insists it’s by the cross of Christ he’s been crucified to the world and the world to him. He claims no credit at all for whatever has happened to him. The crucified One has turned him from Saul to Paul, from persecutor to apostle, from someone who bragged “blameless” in terms of the law to someone who shamefully acknowledges he’s the “chief of sinners” in light of the gospel. Boasting about himself is the farthest thing from his mind. If he’s going to boast at all he’s going to boast in – that is, extol – the cross of Christ and this only.

Crucifixion always has to do with rejection. At the cross our Lord was rejected by religious authorities and civil authorities alike. He was even rejected by uncomprehending disciples. Not least, he was rejected by his Father – “Why have you forsaken me? – even as Father and Son alike owned the Just Judge’s judgment on sin and alike absorbed the Just Judge’s condemnation of sinners, thereby pardoning all who cling to the Son in faith and find themselves at home with the Father. Crucifixion always entails rejection of some sort.

When Paul exclaims that the world has been crucified to him he means he’s rejected the world’s tinsel and trifles and toys. None of it appeals to him. The world’s superficiality, its tawdriness, its hollow promises; he craves none of it.

What doesn’t appeal to Paul can’t ‘hook’ him. Since there’s nothing in the world Paul craves there’s nothing in the world that can seduce him or seize him. He can’t be ‘hooked.’

At the same time Paul insists he has been crucified to the world. The world has rejected him. The abuse he’s received over and over amply attests the world’s rejection of him. To say he’s been rejected by the world is to say there’s nothing in him the world wants. Therefore there’s nothing in him he can sell. There’s nothing in him the world can co-opt.

Think about it. There’s nothing in the world the apostle craves and by which he can be ‘hooked.’ There’s nothing in him the world wants and by which he can be co-opted. If he can’t be ‘hooked’ and he can’t be co-opted then he’s free. It’s only as we are crucified to the world and the world crucified to us that we are free. As long as there’s something in the world we crave we risk being enslaved by it. As long as there’s something in us the world can co-opt we risk being swept up into schemes that aren’t God-honouring. But insofar as we are beyond such risks we are free.

“Am I not free?” Paul cries to his detractors in the church in Corinth. “Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?” It’s his sight of the crucified One and his transformation by the crucified One and his public identification with the crucified One: this has made him free. He is free by the cross of Christ.

II: — What is freedom? Most people think of freedom as the capacity to choose among alternatives; i.e., we are free if we can choose to watch TV or study Hebrew grammar or attend an event at Tyndale. Choosing among alternatives, however, is mere non-determinism. Non-determinism has nothing to do with freedom.

According to Scripture to be free is to be freed from every impediment that hinders us from acting in accord with our true nature. When Paul declares in Gal. 5 “For freedom Christ has set us free” he doesn’t mean that Christ has made us able to choose between obeying him or disobeying him, honouring or not honouring him. Paul means only that Christ has removed every impediment to our obeying him; therefore freedom is obeying Christ. Christ has removed every impediment to our honouring him; therefore freedom is honouring Christ.

Think of it this way. If a de-railing switch has been placed on railway tracks, a train running over the switch will come off the tracks and stop. However, if someone removes the derailing switch, the train will be free to run along the rails. Now if someone says “But is the train free to fly like a bird?” we must hasten to answer that it isn’t a train’s nature to fly like a bird; it’s a train’s nature to run on rails.

You and I were created as sons and daughters of God. Our nature is to obey God and love him and love all whom he has made to live with us. On account of our depravity, however, we don’t obey and we don’t love. We are self-absorbed. Our self-absorption is a giant impediment to our acting in accord with our true nature. The impediment has to be removed. Only Jesus Christ can remove it. For this reason the apostle John exclaims, “If the Son makes you free you will be free indeed.” (John 8:36)

Because Paul is the beneficiary of Christ’s cross he and the world are crucified to each other. He is free. He has been freed from every impediment to acting in accordance with his true nature: he is a child of God called to be an apostle.

Who called him into the company of Jesus Christ? Who called him to be an apostle? God did. Not deity-in-general; not one deity among others. The God who called him is the God who is unique, comparable to no one; the God who admits no rivals and whom no one else approximates; in a word, the God who called Paul is the God who is holy.

III: — To say that God is holy is to say that God is incomparably himself. He belongs to no class. He is predicated of nothing. He isn’t one among several deities; he isn’t even one among several deities albeit the best or the greatest or the most important. He, Yahweh, alone is God.

Everyone is aware of how crucial Deut. 6:4 is to Israel’s faith: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” If this text (“…the Lord our God…”) is read by itself, however, it might suggest that Yahweh happens to be Israel’s God but Shiva could be no less the deity of Hinduism and Devas of Buddhism. In order to avoid this misunderstanding we must always read Deut. 6:4 alongside Zech. 14:9: “And on that day Yahweh will be king over all the earth. On that day Yahweh will be one and his name one.” Yahweh isn’t a deity among the deities or even the highest of the deities. Yahweh alone is God. Foundationally God’s holiness is God’s uniqueness. The Holy One of Israel alone is God.

[i] Because God’s holiness is God’s unique Godness; because God’s Godness is derived from nothing else and is shared with nothing else, God is not to be identified with his creation as a whole or with any part or dimension or aspect of his creation. While pantheism maintains that God is the essence of all that is, prophet and apostle insist that God is not the essence of anything God has made. The being of God is divine. The being of the creation is creaturely. There is a qualitative discontinuity here, an ontological discontinuity that can’t be compromised. The being of God is infinite and necessary. The being of the creation is finite and contingent. Any suggestion that a creaturely item is divine is an affront to the holiness of God.

A minute ago I spoke of pantheism, the notion that God is the essence of all that is. Panentheism, a near relative, insists that God is in the essence or of the essence of all that is. If God is the essence or of the essence of all that is, then there’s nothing that isn’t divine. And if there’s nothing that isn’t divine, then by definition sin and evil can’t exist. (Now we understand why our secularite ‘yuppie’ friends flirt with or are even devotees of the New Age Movement. The New Age Movement, pantheistic or at least panentheistic, legitimates, even divinizes, all human behaviour while denying any human behaviour to be sinful or wicked.)

[ii] In the second place God’s holiness means that God can’t be measured by or assessed by anything other than himself. God is the absolute standard of himself.

[iii] In the third place God’s holiness means that God’s character is without defect or deficiency. God’s character is free from taint of any kind.
Whereas human love is often mixed with sentimentality, God’s love is devoid of soppiness of any sort.
Whereas human anger – even genuinely righteous anger, the sort of anger that God mandates – nonetheless remains mixed with irascibility or petulance, God’s anger is devoid of ill-temper of any sort.
Whereas human judgement, however just, is never without bias, God’s judgement is devoid of arbitrariness at all times.
Whereas human patience can masquerade indifference or detachment, God’s patience is never disguised detachment or disguised indifference.
Whereas human sovereignty is usually little more than coercion, God’s sovereignty is utterly devoid of tyranny. (What, after all, is less tyrannical, less coercive than God the Son dying between two criminals at the city garbage dump, abandoned by friends and Father?)

[iv] In the fourth place, God’s holiness means that all aspects of God’s character are gathered up into a unity. Just as every shade of the spectrum from infrared to ultraviolet is gathered up into what we call ‘light,’ so every aspect of God’s character and God’s loftiness and God’s lordship is gathered up into God’s holiness.

IV: — The God who is holy insists that his people be holy too. Needless to say, we can’t be holy with God’s Godness, since God’s Godness he shares with no one. Nonetheless we are appointed to reflect God’s holiness, to reflect God’s character, in a way that is appropriate to us whom he has made in his likeness and image. To say we are made in God’s image is to say we are to mirror God in such a way that when people look at us they see God imaged in us.

It should surprise no one, then, that from cover to cover Scripture is preoccupied with holiness. Scripture is preoccupied, we have to admit, where the church hasn’t been. For instance, Christians have contended vociferously over predestination. We should note, however, that the predestination word-group occurs approximately fifteen times in Scripture, while the holy/holiness word-group occurs 835 times. Scripture is obsessed with holiness, both God’s and ours.

I am convinced that the overarching, all-inclusive theme of Scripture is two intertwined matters: God’s re-assertion of his holiness in the face of our denying his, and God’s re-establishing our holiness in the wake of our contradicting ours. We deny God’s holiness and we contradict our own. According to Scripture God is ceaselessly at work to re-assert his holiness and re-establish ours. The holiness of God and the holiness of God’s people are Scripture’s preoccupation.

Both these concerns are gathered up in what I call the ‘root’ commandment of Scripture. The ‘root commandment’ is found in Lev. 19:2 and repeated elsewhere: “You shall be holy as I the Lord your God am holy.” This commandment is heard over and over throughout the bible. It’s the bass note; it’s the downbeat; it’s the refrain; it’s the pulse: “You shall be holy as I, the Lord your God, am holy.”

The ‘root’ commandment, I have called it? But look at the grammatical form: “You shall be….” “You shall be” can be read as command or as promise. Read as command it means “You ought to be holy, you had better be holy.” Read as promise it means “One day you will be rendered holy; I guarantee it: you will be found holy.”

It is our friends, the seventeenth-century Puritans, who insist that all God’s commands are “covered promises.” The Puritans always knew that what God requires of his people God gives to his people. What God commands his people to exemplify God promises his people will display. Put another way, “You shall be holy as I, the Lord your God, am holy” is the command of God underlying all Scripture and no less the promise of God crowning and adorning all Scripture.

V: — Holiness is both God’s gift and humankind’s task. What God gives us, we are to exemplify. Holiness is both by grace and by grit. How gritty is the grit? Very gritty, according to the single most protracted discussion of holiness in all of Scripture. The single most protracted discussion of holiness is found in Leviticus, chapters 18-27. Leviticus 18 begins, “And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, ‘Speak to the people of Israel, and say to them I am the Lord your God. You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you.” Plainly holiness has everything to do with our doing. It doesn’t matter how we feel or what we intend or what ecstatic religious experiences we have undergone if we fail to do.

Do what? Holiness, so far from being so heavenly as to be of no earthly good, is startlingly mundane, according to Lev. 18-27. Consider the following. We are never to disrespect the elderly but rather to stand up when we meet them in order to honour them. We are to treat the stranger (the stranger is always vulnerable, lonely and anxious) as one of us. If we are merchants we are to use just balances and weights and measures. If we have to go to court we mustn’t attempt to bribe the judge. And if we happen to be the judge then we must judge justly, favouring neither the rich nor the poor.

We mustn’t offer up our children to pagan deities. Surely the discussion of holiness in Leviticus is irrelevant right here, for who would sacrifice their own children today? As a matter of fact millions offer up their children to pagan deities every day. How many parents are there in Thailand who have consigned their children, more or less twelve years old, to a horrific sex-trade catering to wealthy Europeans and North Americans while the Thai government looks the other way, so incomparably lucrative is the tourist sex-trade for the Thai economy?

Do you think children today aren’t offered up to pagan deities? Surely a child is sacrificed to a pagan deity when the little boy is told from infancy that he must become an NHL player, and everything in the family is given over to this all-consuming preoccupation.

Do you think children today aren’t offered up to pagan deities? Then why is it a handicapped child has the right to special education and the right to social assistance and the right to special access in public buildings and, not least, the right to her own toilet – but she doesn’t have the right to be born? The government of Canada (the people of Canada) will ensure that she has her own washroom but won’t ensure that she gets to use it.

Leviticus says more. God’s people aren’t to reap a field of grain right to the border or gather the gleanings after the harvest. Why not? Food has to be left for poor people and sojourners (resident aliens) lest they go hungry. Employers must pay the worker his wages at the end of the day (not next morning or next week) since the worker needs money the same evening in order to feed his family. The deaf aren’t to be cursed or a stumbling block put in the way of the blind. Vengeance is not be exacted upon the offender and no one is to bear a grudge. In short, “You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but…you shall love your neighbour as yourself.”

Lest we think that such down-to-earth holiness is a peculiarity of the book the church manages to avoid (when is the last time your pastor preached on Leviticus?) we should look at holiness in the book of Exodus: “You shall not boil a kid (young goat) in its mother’s milk.” (Exod. 23:19) Why not? A she-goat would never be aware that her offspring was being boiled in her milk.

There are two considerations here. One, even though the goat isn’t aware that it’s her offspring being cooked in her milk, anyone who has watched a mammal nurse her offspring tenderly and defend it fiercely would be utterly insensitive if he did what the command of God forbids. In the second place, in the ancient world to boil a young goat in its mother’s milk was to invoke a foreign deity. If God forbids us now to boil a kid in its mother’s milk then God is forbidding his people now to call upon foreign deities.

Tell me: what deities, so-called, are invoked right now? What deities are invoked when a baseball player who fails to get a hit seven times out of ten is guaranteed ten million dollars per year for the next five years while homemakers are selling daffodils on street corners because cancer patients needing treatment have been told there’s a six-month waiting list for the equipment?

And while we are talking about earthly holiness we might as well talk about earthy matters, like sex. Everywhere in Scripture it is deemed ludicrous to speak of holiness in any respect if sexual integrity is lacking. If you read the Newer Testament carefully you will find that sexual integrity is found in all the apostolic discussions of the holiness of God’s people. Think, for instance, of the apostle’s statement in Colossians 3: because Jesus Christ is the life of any follower of Christ, any follower is by definition a new creation in Christ. The old man or woman has been slain at the cross as surely as Christ was slain. Yet the old man, Martin Luther reminds us, doesn’t die quietly: the corpse still twitches. For this reason, says Paul, we have to keep on putting him or her to death. On the one hand, it makes no sense to speak of slaying what’s already been slain. But Luther, like his Lord before him, relishes paradox. And for this reason Luther glories in Paul’s insistence that we who have already put on Christ must continue to put him on (every morning, in fact), while we whose old man has already been slain must continue to slay him.

When Paul renders more specific what’s involved in slaying the old man/woman he begins with “fornication, impurity….” In case we think his insistence in Colossians 3 no more than Paul’s intrapsychic oddity he says the same in Ephesians 5: “Walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us….but fornication and impurity….Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.”

Here Paul is accurately reflecting the Master who electrified him on the Damascus road and scorched him forever. For when Jesus says that nothing going into us makes us unclean; what makes us unclean is what comes out of us, out of the heart – when Jesus speaks of this matter he cries, “What comes out of a man is what defiles a man. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, fornication….” (Mark 7:1-23) To aspire to holiness without aspiring to sexual integrity is oxymoronic.

Yet we mustn’t become one-sided, lopsided, in our understanding. In one and the same sentence Paul speaks in Ephesians 5 of both fornication and covetousness, even pronouncing covetousness to be idolatrous (something he doesn’t predicate of fornication.) And when Jesus speaks of what defilements come out of the human heart, he follows “fornication” immediately by “theft.” It’s obvious that our integrity concerning money says as much about holiness as our integrity concerning sex.

In a discussion of the holiness of God’s people we need to remember that Jesus says more about money, in the written gospels, than he says about any other single topic. Jesus says more about money than about anything else (sex included) for one reason: money is a graver spiritual threat than anything else. In the synoptic gospels money is mentioned in one verse out of ten; in Luke’s gospel, one verse out of eight. (And in the epistle of James, one verse out of five.) Money, we should note, receives an attention in Scripture that it appears not to receive in the contemporary church’s conversation.

Let’s ponder money and its spiritual force. According to 1st John 3:8 the purpose of Christ’s coming is to “destroy the works of the devil.” According to Hebrews 2:14-15 the purpose of Christ’s coming is to “destroy him who has the power of death…and to deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage.” And then in Luke 16:13 Jesus says briefly and bluntly, “You cannot serve God and mammon.” In other words, according to Jesus the power of God and the power of mammon (mammon isn’t merely a commodity; it’s a spiritual power) are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. God and mammon are rival powers who will agree to no truce in their seeking to win the loyalty of everyone they touch.

John opposes God and the evil one. Hebrews opposes God and the power of death. Jesus opposes God and mammon. Plainly the devil, the power of death, and mammon are related; they are three different angles of vision pertaining to the one actuality, the looming actuality that strives to loom larger than God in his immensity. These three powers – devil, death and mammon – how do you think these three powers are related?

To speak of the devil is to highlight the Christian life as spiritual conflict. To speak of death and bondage to death is to highlight Jesus Christ as resurrection and life. To speak of mammon is to highlight Christ’s exposure of mammon as the chief vehicle that the death-dealing, evil one deploys. In other words, the devil deals out death; and the devil deals out death chiefly through mammon.

If you think me overstated let me refer you to someone wiser than I, John Wesley. So very profoundly had Wesley observed the connection among the three powers that he pronounced mammon to be the talent that gathers up all other talents (intellectual gifts and athletic gifts, for instance, are different kinds of talent. Don’t most people sell their talent to the highest bidder?) Mammon is the temptation that underlies all other temptations; mammon is the snare, “a steel trap that crushes the bones,” Wesley wrote graphically, having in mind an eighteenth-century bear trap. Mammon is the poison that kills the most ardent discipleship. In Scripture money is related to holiness as money isn’t related to holiness in today’s church.

VI: —  Yet in our discussion of the holiness of God’s people we must beware at all times of why so very many people are nervous as soon as they hear the word ‘holiness.’ They are nervous because they have seen first-hand, and seen first-hand too often, an uninformed zeal for holiness pursue the holy (so-called) at the price of the human. It’s as though a zeal for holiness were inherently dehumanizing. We must renounce all such nonsense. The truth is, the purpose of God’s sanctifying grace is to render us authentically human. Some people have foolishly spoken of God’s sanctifying grace in terms of their becoming superhuman. But to aspire to be superhuman is to aspire after sin. To want to be superhuman is to disdain God’s gift of humanness. And not to put too fine an edge on it; to aspire to be superhuman is to behave like a subhuman. It is the purpose of God’s grace to render us authentically human.

What does this mean? A few minutes ago I spoke of the ‘root’ commandment of Scripture: “You shall be holy as I the Lord your God am holy.” Now recall the great commandment, “You shall love the Lord your God without qualification or reservation or hesitation, and you shall love your neighbour with total self-forgetfulness.” How is the root commandment related to the great commandment? The connection is plain: holiness is freedom to love. To be holy is to be human (authentically human); to be authentically human is to be free to love.

We must be sure to grasp that the great commandment mandates we love God and neighbour, not that we understand God or neighbour. To be sure, we must understand something of God or else it’s nonsensical to say we love him. It’s ludicrous to say “I love x, and I don’t have a clue as to who or what x might be.” At the same time, we can understand relatively little of God yet love him profoundly. And, regrettably, we can understand a great deal about God yet not love him at all, thanks to our sin-shrivelled heart.

Don’t misunderstand me: I never belittle understanding. God isn’t honoured by human ignorance, and above all never honoured by ignorance of the truth concerning him. In case anyone needs to be reminded, I have spent my entire working life teaching Christian doctrine; that is, I have always endeavoured to help people understand the truth of God. After all, the more we understand of God the greater our capacity to love him. Yet we must never think that the ‘A’ student in systematic theology loves God exceedingly well by virtue of the grade she received in the theology course.

In the same vein I’ll never be found decrying the place of the will in Christian discipleship. I’m saddened to see people who have a wishbone where they ought to have a backbone. Yet I’m aware that love governs willing as surely as love governs understanding. Just as we understand most thoroughly what we love most profoundly, so we do most consistently what we love most profoundly.

In the short run we can always will what we don’t love. If we don’t love studying Greek but we do love basketball, in the short run, tonight, we can always study Greek anyway instead of watching the Raptors’ basketball game because there’s a Greek test tomorrow and if we don’t study we won’t pass. But what happens in the short run never happens in the long run. In the long run we always end up willing, doing, what we love; and in the long run we always come to understand most profoundly what we love. In other words, what we love integrates our understanding and our willing; which is to say, what we love integrates us. For this reason the great commandment isn’t that we understand God; the great commandment isn’t even that we obey him. The great commandment is that we love him, for if we genuinely love him we shan’t fail to understand him and obey him.

What about holiness and love of the neighbour? Once again, we are called to love the neighbour, not understand her. Regardless of what we might understand of her there remain oceanic immensities in her that we don’t understand and never will. When people tell me they can’t understand me, I remind them they should try loving me. In our depravity we prefer to understand the neighbour, and prefer this for two reasons: one, if we understand her we think we’ll have legitimate reason not to love her; two, if we understand her we’ll be able to manipulate her. But the great commandment forbids us to excuse our lovelessness and forbids us to manipulate. We are mandated to love.

Thomas Chalmers, a nineteenth-century Church of Scotland minister, spoke often of “the expulsive power of a new affection.” He meant that only a qualitatively new affection – Holy Spirit-quickened love of God and neighbour – could expel the old affections and passions that haunt us and hurt others. What’s involved in a new affection I have learned most profoundly from my friends who are addicts. The men and women of Alcoholics Anonymous distinguish between someone who is chemically sober and someone who is contentedly sober. The chemically sober person is the addict who is alcohol-free at this moment, in the short run, thanks to his short-run force of will. But everyone knows he’s going to relapse in the long run, still in bondage to his addiction. The contentedly sober person, on the other hand, can continue to will his sobriety just because he’s intimately acquainted with “the expulsive power of a new affection.”

Holiness is finding through God’s grace the integration of the affections together with the integration of affect and understanding and will.

VII: — We began tonight with Gal. 6:14. We noted that to be crucified to the world and to have the world crucified to us means there’s nothing in the world we crave and by which we can be hooked, at the same time that there’s nothing in us that the world can use and by which we can be co-opted. We said too that to find ourselves in this situation is know ourselves free because freed by Jesus Christ.

As we are freed by Jesus Christ we are free from the world and its blandishments precisely in order to be free for the world in its need. Over and over the psalmist insists that God is for us. God is for the world. God so loved the world – and continues to love it – that he embraced the world so as never to disdain it or spurn it or abandon it.

Next we probed the nature of God’s holiness, God’s unique Godness wherein his being is free from the being of the creation in every respect. Now, however, we must be sure to grasp that God as God is free from the world in order to be free for the world. The God whose holiness means he must never be confused with the world is the God who so loves the world as never to fail it or forsake it.

By God’s grace you and I have been freed from our bondage to unbelief. Freed from our unbelief and its attendant self-absorption, we are freed for our immersion in God and our immersion in God’s world. It is God’s holiness that renders him singularly helpful to the world. It is no less our holiness that renders us salt and light in the midst of the world.

In a word, as we are crucified to the world and the world is crucified to us we are profoundly holy and pervasively a blessing to that world which we now love with a love that mirror’s God’s.

VIII: — The Newer Testament characteristically speaks of Christ’s people as hagioi, ‘holy ones,’ ‘saints.’ Saints aren’t spiritual super-achievers of any sort. Saints are simply exemplary human beings. Saints are human beings, restored by God’s grace to human authenticity, who exemplify him who went about doing good inasmuch as he knew that One alone is good, and this One alone is good just because this One is Yahweh, and Yahweh alone is God.

Victor Shepherd 7 June 2012

 

 

I (i) —  “Why does God allow bad things to happen to good people” – this is the question I have been asked to address tonight.  I’m somewhat bothered by the question.  After all, since all of us are sinners – “No one is good but God alone”, says Christ Jesus our Lord – surely the question should be “Why does God allow bad things to happen to anyone?”  Since the ‘bad things’ by which we are assaulted are ‘bad’ insofar as they inflict suffering upon us, we could as readily ask, “Why does God allow people to suffer dreadfully?” or even “Why does God allow people to suffer at all?”

When we ask the question, “Why suffering?”, we may be assuming that God, good and powerful in equal measure, should be able to program a universe and design human beings in such a way that suffering would never occur.  In asking the question we are assuming that we human beings who are asking the question could remain who and what we are  — persons whose intellectual nature is what we know it to be — even if we were redesigned so as to be unable to suffer.

But is this the case?  To ask the question, “Why suffering?  Why does God permit suffering?”; such a question requires a high level of abstract thought.  The capacity for high level, abstract thought presupposes a very sophisticated brain and neural structure.  Neurobiologists remind us that as a creature’s neural complexity increases so does that creature’s level of consciousness.  A monkey has a spinal cord and brain vastly more complex than that of a toad. As neurological complexity increases, the level of consciousness increases and intelligence increases.  Neuroscientists are aware too, however, that increasing complexities in neural structure are quantitative: the shift from consciousness to self-consciousness, from percept-awareness to concept-awareness; this shift is qualitative.  Therefore while the human creature is the only instance in the animal world of self-consciousness, the only instance of abstract thought, our capacity for such can’t be reduced to unparalleled neural complexity.  But while our capacity here can’t be reduced to unparalleled neural complexity – that is, neural complexity isn’t sufficient to yield the capacity for abstract thought – neural complexity is necessary for abstract thought.  After all, a toad doesn’t ask questions like the question in tonight’s address.  Neither does a robin.  A robin isn’t distressed over the matter of slaying a worm, even though the writhing of the worm indicates that the worm resists being stretched and slain and eaten.  The robin merely kills and eats instinctually, as instinctually as the worm itself does whatever worms do to stay alive.

We human beings, however, are different. We don’t act instinctually; we ask questions.  To ask the question, “Why suffering in a world governed by God?”; simply to understand that there’s an issue here, simply to be able to formulate the question: all of this requires an exceedingly complex neural structure.  The complex neural structure that allows us to understand the problem and formulate the question is the same complex neural structure that gives us our extraordinary capacity for pain; not merely our capacity for physical pain, but also our capacity for emotional pain.
In asking the question we are assuming that we can have the extraordinary privilege, as it were, of being able to reflect as we do without our extraordinary vulnerability to suffering.  But – let me say it again – the neural complexity that supports advanced thinking is the same neural complexity that supports increased suffering.  Whenever we ask the question, “Why does God allow us to suffer?”, we are asking, in effect, “Why doesn’t God create us so that we can think profoundly enough to ask the question about suffering even as he creates us so that we have no capacity for suffering itself?”  In asking for this has it ever occurred to us that we might be asking for something that is logically self-contradictory?  If we were to ask, “Why doesn’t God make a square circle?”, we’d recognise immediately the silliness of what we’ve proposed; we’d never fault God for not making a square circle, since a square circle is a logical impossibility, an instance of nonsense, non-sense.  No one faults God for not creating non-sense.  When we ask the question that has motivated today’s sermon we should pause; we might be asking for non-sense; we might be asking for a logical impossibility.

(ii) In the second place, since we are creatures with enormous sensitivity to suffering, we must admit that some sensitivity to pain is essential to our self-preservation.  Sensitivity to physical pain is essential if we are going to survive in a physical world.  The elderly person who has lost sensitivity in her hand places her hand on a stove element to steady herself.  She burns her hand.  Then the burn infects. Now she has blood poisoning in her arm.  Because she has diminished sensitivity to pain she can’t protect herself; unable to protect herself, she can’t preserve herself.

In the same way it’s our capacity for mental anguish that facilitates our self-preservation.  The person who is working too hard, too long, under too much stress finds himself exhibiting telltale signs that he is close to collapse.  The telltale signs he exhibits are in fact different instances of suffering that are nothing less than a ‘wake-up’ call.  He’s been warned.  The warning signs (his suffering) tell him that he has to make changes for the sake of self-preservation.

(iii) In the third place, our capacity for suffering is also our capacity for pleasure.  To be without any vulnerability to pain would mean that we should never know delight.  Once more, to fault God for not making us able to experience pleasure without exposure to pain might be faulting him for not creating a logical impossibility, non-sense.

(iv) In the fourth place, when we think beyond our private vulnerability to suffering to our capacity to cause others to suffer, to harm them, the question then becomes, “Why is the universe so arranged that people can be made to suffer terribly on account of someone else’s cruelty?”  When we ask this question we forget that that arrangement of the universe which makes it possible for others to harm us also makes it possible for others to help us. (Such help we shall always need in a fallen world.  In heaven, however, we shall delight in our Lord and in each other without the capacity for pain, and because we shall lack nothing we shall neither need to be helped nor have the capacity to be harmed.)

(v) In the fifth place, we must never forget what C.S. Lewis holds up before us: “God whispers to us in our pleasures, shouts at us in our pain.”  Elsewhere the thoughtful Englishman has said, “Pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”  Most often we don’t even recognise sin’s consequences to be consequences of sin until pain has pierced us.  Our suffering here is God’s attempt at getting our attention.  (I say God’s attempt at getting our attention, since it’s obvious his previous attempts have failed).  As fallen creatures self-absorbed in folly we tend to get serious about our sin only as its consequences pain us.
“Why does God allow people to suffer so dreadfully?  Why does God allow people to suffer at all?”  I trust that what I have said so far provides reason for some suffering at least.

II: — At the same time I admit that when we have reflected upon the five considerations mentioned in the last few minutes we don’t have reason enough for the great weight of suffering afflicting humankind.  There is suffering so intense, so relentless, that it’s of no use at all.  It doesn’t further our self-preservation in any way.  It is vastly greater suffering than appears to be needed for anything.

The Great War (World War I) set a record, an infamous record: never before had nation slaughtered nation on such a hideous scale.  Twenty million people perished in World War I, that is, twenty million over the course of four years.  Virtually all of them, we should note, were military combatants waging war.
World War I was immediately followed by an outbreak of influenza.  The Great ’Flu Epidemic began in October 1918 and lasted until May 1919; the Great ’Flu Epidemic lasted only seven months.  In those seven months between 50 million and 100 million people perished.  Were those whom the ’Flu Epidemic consumed chiefly the very youngest and the very oldest, those with the least resistance to sickness?  On the contrary, those who perished in the epidemic were chiefly young men and women aged 20 to 45.  In other words, the ’Flu Epidemic slew young parents whose orphaned children would never recover psychologically or materially.

III: — In all our discussions concerning evil we had better be sure always to insist that evil is evil, unalterably evil, invariably evil.  We had better never be found mouthing the ridiculous platitudes that evil (what some ‘merely’ call ‘evil’) is actually a good in disguise.  A good in disguise is still good, however unrecognized.  Evil, however, can never be good.  We must never say that evil is a latent good, for a latent good is unarguably good.  Neither is evil good-on-the-way, or the potential for good.  Of itself evil is never the potential for anything except more evil.

My aunt’s grandson (my cousin’s son) died at age seven.  The little boy was born a normal child and developed normally until age two when he was diagnosed with a neurological disease.  His condition deteriorated thereafter.  His facial appearance changed — became grotesque, in fact; his mobility decreased; and his intellectual capacity decreased.  When I spoke with my aunt at the funeral parlour I said to her, “There’s no explanation for this.”  (I didn’t mean there was no neurological explanation; of course there was a neurological explanation.)  I meant, rather, “Given what you and I know of God, there’s no explanation for this.”  My aunt told me later it was the most comforting thing anyone had said to her at the funeral parlour, for virtually everyone who spoke with her put forth an “explanation”; such as, “Maybe God wanted to teach the parents something.” What were the parents supposed to be taught by watching their son suffer and stiffen and stupefy for five years?  “Maybe God was sparing the little boy something worse later in his life.”  It would be difficult to imagine anything worse.  These aren’t explanations; these are insults.  As long as God is love, unimpeded love, there isn’t going to be an explanation for this.

We must always be careful and think 25 times before we conclude we’ve found the meaning (or even a meaning) to such a development.  Think of the one and one-half million children who perished during the holocaust.  Their parents (four and one-half million of them) were first gassed to death, whereupon their remains were burnt.  The children, on the other hand, were never gassed; they were thrown live into the incinerators.  If anyone claims to be aware of the meaning of this event I shall say, among other things, “Meaning for whom? for the barbequed children? for their parents? for their survivors? for their executioners? for the shallow pseudo-philosophers who think their question is worth the breath they spend to utter it?”  What meaning could there ever be to such an event?

We can ask the same question in the midst of Toronto’s newest: a hospice for children afflicted with incurable, neurodegenerative diseases.

IV: — In light of what I’ve just said I have to tell you how unhappy I’ve been with Harold Kushner’s bestselling book (now twenty years old but still referenced), When Bad Things Happen To Good People.  I’m disappointed in the book for several reasons.  In the first place there’s virtually no discussion of God’s love in Kushner’s discussion of God.  In view of the fact that God is love, that God’s nature is to love, the book is woefully deficient right here.  In the second place, because God’s love isn’t discussed, the rest of the book is skewed.  Kushner writes, “Let me suggest that the bad things that happen to us in our lives do not have a meaning when they happen to us.  [I’ve no problem with this.]  They do not happen for any good reason which would cause us to accept them willingly.  [No problem here either.]  We can redeem these tragedies from senselessness by imposing meaning on them.”  I object to this statement.  We redeem them by imposing meaning on them?  Any meaning that is imposed can only be arbitrary.  An arbitrary meaning, something imposed, is just another form of “make-believe”, and no less “make-believe” for being adult “make-believe.”  My cousin and his wife whose seven-year old son died of neurological disease; what meaning were they supposed to impose on the event?  And why impose that meaning rather than another?  And how would the imposition of such arbitrary meaning redeem the tragedy?

Harold Kushner’s book is yet another attempt at theodicy.  Theodicy is the justification of God’s ways with humankind, the justification of God’s ways in the face of human suffering.  All attempts at theodicy left-handedly put God on trial, so to speak, and then develop arguments that acquit God, allowing us to believe in him after all, allowing us to believe that he really is kind and good despite so much that appears to contradict this.  All theodicies assume that we know what should happen in the world; as long as there continues to happen what shouldn’t, God (we think) is on trial; we have to develop arguments and marshal evidence that will acquit him if we are to go on believing in him.

Let me say right here that theodicy, or something approaching theodicy, is a theme of the book of Job.  Job, or perhaps more pointedly Job’s friends, ask the question ‘How can bad things happen to good people?’  We must be sure to notice two things about this question.
(i) The book of Job doesn’t answer the question in the sense of giving an explanation.  Instead of explaining anything God thunders at Job, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?  Tell me, if you have understanding.” (Job. 38:4)  In other words, Job’s question, a question he regards as perfectly sensible, appears not to be sensible at all.

(ii) The second thing we must notice is this: Job’s question is a marginal question in scripture.  It isn’t scripture’s typical question; it isn’t the profoundest question; it’s a marginal question.  It’s marginal just because the logic of Job’s question doesn’t reflect the logic of scripture as a whole.

V: — Having brought this matter to our attention I want to move on to my next point; namely, our assumption that the questions we think to be obvious and obviously correct are the right questions.  The question, for instance, “If God is all-good, he must want to rectify the dreadful state of affairs so often found in people’s lives; if God is all-powerful, he must be able to rectify such a state of affairs.  Since such a state seems not to be rectified, then either God isn’t all-good or he isn’t all-powerful – right?”  Next we set about trying to remove the suspicion that surrounds either God’s goodness or his might.  We think our question to be the right question, even the only question.  But in fact the question we’ve just posed didn’t loom large until the 18th century, specifically the 18th century Enlightenment.  The question we’ve just posed was raised by Enlightenment thinkers who weren’t even Christians.  Eighteenth century Enlightenment atheists raised the question, and Christians took it over in that they thought it to be a profound question.  But this question didn’t loom large in the Middle Ages where physical suffering, at least, was worse than it is today.  This question wasn’t pre-eminent in the ancient world; neither was it front-and-centre in the biblical era.  The pre-eminent question in the biblical era wasn’t “Why?” or “How?” or “How come?”, because those people already knew why: the entire creation is molested by the evil one.  The pre-eminent question in the biblical era was “How long?  How long before God terminates this state of affairs?  What’s taking him so long?”

Think for a minute of the biblical era; think of John the Baptist.  John and Jesus were cousins.  Not only were they related by blood, they were related by vocation.  John began his public ministry ahead of Jesus.  John’s ministry ended abruptly when a wicked woman, angry at his denunciation of her sexual irregularities, had him slain.  What did Jesus do when he learned of John’s death and the circumstances of John’s death?  Did Jesus say, “We need a theodicy.  We need a justification of the ways of God.  We need an explanation of how John’s terrible death could occur in a world ruled by a God whose love is mighty.  And if no explanation is forthcoming, then perhaps we can’t believe in God.” — did Jesus say this?  Jesus said no such thing.  When John’s head was severed Jesus didn’t cry to heaven, “You expect me to trust you as my Father; but how can I believe you’re my Father, for what Father allows his child to be beheaded?  In view of what happened to cousin John, I can’t be expected to think that I’m dear to you.”  Jesus said no such thing.  When he was informed of the grisly death of John, Jesus said, “It’s time I got to work.”  Whereupon he began his public ministry, and began it knowing that what had befallen John would befall him too, and did it all with his trust in his Father unimpaired.

My point is this: that question which we suppose to be a perennial question, “How can we continue to believe in a mighty, loving God when terrible things keep happening in our world?” — wasn’t the most pressing question in the biblical era or the ancient church or the mediaeval church.  It was shouted chiefly in the 18th century Enlightenment, and was shouted by atheists.  Having heard the atheists’ question, the church took it over thinking it to be the soul of profundity.

Susannah Wesley, mother of John and Charles, had 19 children.  Ten of them survived.  As the other nine died (eight of them in infancy), Susannah’s heart broke.  Never think that she didn’t care; never think that her heart wasn’t as torn as anyone’s heart would be torn today.  Read her diary the day after a domestic helper accidentally smothered Susannah’s three-week old baby.  Infant death was as grievous to parents then as it is now.  What was different, however, is this: even as Susannah pleaded with God for her babes while they died in her arms she never concluded that God wasn’t to be trusted or loved or obeyed or simply clung to; she never concluded that as a result of her heartbreak God could only be denounced and abandoned.
Until the 18th century Enlightenment there was no expectation of living in a world other than a world riddled with accident, misfortune, sickness, disease, unrelievable suffering, untimely death.  There was no expectation of anything else.  It was recognized that the world, in its fallen state, is shot through with unfairness, injustice, inevitable inequities, unforeseeable tragedies.  When John the Baptist was executed Jesus didn’t say, “If honouring God’s will entails that then I need a different Father.”  Instead Jesus said, “I’ve got work to do and I’d better get started.”  Susannah Wesley didn’t say, “If I bear children only to have half of them succumb to pneumonia and diphtheria, I should stop having them.”  Instead she had twice as many.  If today our expectation is so very different on account of the Enlightenment, then what did the Enlightenment cause us to expect?

VI: — The Enlightenment brought us to expect that humankind can control, control entirely, the world and everything about it.  The Enlightenment brought us to expect that we are or can be in control of every last aspect of our existence.  Specifically, the Enlightenment brought us to expect that the practice of medicine would smooth out our lives.  And with the new expectation of physicians there arose as well a new agenda for physicians.  Whereas physicians had always been expected to care for patients, now physicians were expected to cure patients.  Until the Enlightenment physicians were expected to care: they were to alleviate pain wherever they could, they were expected to ease the patient in every way possible, and above all they were expected to ease the patient through death, which death everyone knew to be unavoidable in any case.  But cure?  No one expected physicians to cure, at least to cure very much.  Nowadays physicians are expected to cure everything.  I’m convinced that people unconsciously expect physicians to cure them of their mortality. When physicians can’t cure people of their vulnerability to death, blame for such failure is unconsciously transferred from medicine to God.

A minute ago I said that we creatures of modernity assume (arrogantly) that the questions we ask are the questions that people have asked in every era; our questions are perennial questions, and our answers are the only answers.  It’s not so.  If people today are asked how they’d prefer to die, they nearly always say, “Quickly.  I want to die quickly.  I’d like to slip away quietly in my sleep.”  During the Middle Ages, however, no one wanted to die quickly; people dreaded sudden death.  Why?  Sudden death gave them insufficient time to make adequate spiritual preparation for death.  What we regard as human expectations as old as humankind are actually very recent.  What’s more, these recent expectations weren’t fostered as we reflected on the nature and purpose and way of God; they were fostered by atheists who, at the time of the Enlightenment, came to think that there was nothing humankind couldn’t control.

VII: — Let’s come back to the situation of the young person afflicted with a lingering illness and about to die all too young.  Why are we especially upset at this?  I think we’re upset in that we feel the young person to have been cheated.  The 85-year old who dies has had a life, a complete life (or at least what we regard as complete.)  The eight-year old, we feel, hasn’t; she’s been cheated.  The elderly person’s life can be told by means of a story; the young person, on the other hand, has virtually no story to be told.  I am 69 years old, and if I die tonight others will gather up my life in a story and tell the story.  Hearers will identify me, the real “me”, with my story.  But let’s be honest: they will regard “me” and my story as identical in that my story is fit to be told (I’ve never been publicly disgraced); my story is positive (I’m a ‘winner,’ a highly successful professional); my story is rich (supposedly).  No one would hesitate to tell my story.  But if my story were one that couldn’t be told; if my story were bleak or disgraceful or shocking or simply incomprehensible, others would like to think that the real “me” was somehow better, somehow grander, than my shabby story or my incomprehensible story.

It isn’t only the eight-year old child with leukaemia or neurodegenerative disease whose story seems to be sad and sorry and miserable.  There are many, many adults whose stories are longer, to be sure, but no better.  One Sunday, several years ago, a man wearing a clerical collar sat in the gallery of my church in Mississauga, accompanied by a lawyer-friend of mine.  The man with the collar was an Anglican clergyman.  He was also a plastic surgeon with a practice in one of the wealthiest areas of Toronto.  He was at worship, that Sunday, as he awaited trial.  He and his estranged wife had had an altercation, in the course of which his wife was struck, the result of which was that her skull was fractured.  Several weeks after the service he attended in Mississauga the fellow was convicted and sent to jail.  Upon his release from jail the College of Physicians and Surgeons restored his licence, thus permitting him to do plastic surgery again.  The Anglican Church, however, didn’t reinstate him as a clergyman.  A year later the man committed suicide.  What’s his story?  Is it a grand story?     Is it a story anyone would envy?  Or is it a story better left untold?

Maureen and I were asleep on a Friday evening when the phone rang at midnight.  The caller was a man I’ve looked out for for 35 years.  He’s paranoid schizophrenic.  I’ve followed him around to restaurants, hospitals, jails, and numerous shabby “digs.”  Last autumn he was in Vancouver and got into a “discussion” (as he tells his story) with a motel clerk.  The clerk phoned the police, and Eric spent the next three months in a provincial psychiatric hospital.    A week or two before Christmas I took him to Swiss Chalet for lunch.  We had been seated for only a few seconds when he leapt out of his seat and shouted, “It’s bugged.  It’s bugged.  There’s a tape-recorder under my seat.”  I took the shaken waitress aside, told her my friend was deranged, promised her I’d see that no harm befell her, and asked her to find us seats in an area that was free of hidden tape-recorders.  A few months after this incident Eric phoned me again.  In the afternoon he’d gone to a barber shop, only to have the barber “butcher” his hair.  And why had the barber “butchered” his hair? Because the barber too is part of the conspiracy that is putting foreign substances in Eric’s drinking water and causing his urine to stink.  Eric had come home; while making supper his sister had burnt the toast; Eric had decompensated and smashed the toaster.  His sister had fled the house; the police had been called; Eric had refused to open the door to them – and was now in a great deal more trouble.  Eric was phoning me at midnight.  He wasn’t angry and he wasn’t violent: he was frightened, terribly frightened.  He feared he was going to be sent back to a provincial hospital.  Eric is 75 years old.  He was diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic when he was a 20-year old university student.  Eric has suffered atrociously since then.  He hasn’t had one torment-free day in 55 years.  What’s Eric’s story?  Do you want to hear all the details?  Would anyone want his story (all of it) told at his funeral?  Tell me: are Eric and Eric’s story identical?

The truth is, none of us is identical with our story.  Our story isn’t big enough, comprehensive enough, grand enough.  None of us has a story (whether tellable or untellable) that does justice to who we are truly in ourselves because of who we are truly before God.  Our story is small and feeble and miserable and frustrated.  Often our story, so far from reflecting who we truly are, contradicts who we truly are.  Our story has to be taken up into a much bigger story.
Then what’s the bigger story, grander story, for Eric?  It’s the story of a man who once lived in a cemetery. (Mark 5:1-20)  He was violent, anti-social, and an inveterate “streaker.”  One day Jesus came upon him and asked, “What’s your name?”  “My name?”, the fellow replied, “I’ve got lots of names.  I’m your local nut-case; so why not call me ‘Peanut, Pistachio and Pecan’, ‘P-cubed’ for short.”  Some time later the townspeople saw the same man seated, clothed and in his right mind.  By God’s grace that gospel-story has been appointed to be Eric’s story, Eric’s true story.  That story is the final story into which Eric’s story is taken up and in which Eric’s story is transfigured.

And the eight-year old who has just died of leukaemia?  Her story too is bigger, grander than most people know.  A distraught man cried to Jesus, “My daughter is sick unto death.  Won’t you come with me?”  Our Lord is delayed by a needy woman who is distressed herself.  While he’s delayed, the daughter dies.  Now all the relatives are beside themselves.  Jesus declares, “The little girl isn’t dead; she’s asleep.”  The relatives scorn him.  Plainly she’s dead; anyone can see she’s dead.  But you see, in the presence of Jesus Christ (only in the presence of him who is himself resurrection and life, only in his presence but assuredly in his presence) death is but sleep.  The girl is awakened shortly — as the eight-year old has been appointed to be awakened.  This is the story into which the leukaemia patient’s story is taken up and in which it is transfigured.

VIII: — If you ask me why such things as leukaemia and neurodegenerative disorders mental illness happen I shall not attempt an answer.  When tragedy befell John the Baptist Jesus didn’t say, “I can’t figure out why these things happen; therefore I can’t trust my Father.”  Jesus knew that in a fallen world such things happen and will continue to happen until God’s patience, finally exhausted, ends the era of the fall and with it forecloses the day of grace.  Jesus didn’t explain John’s wretched death; Jesus responded to the news of his cousin’s death by launching his public ministry.

Let me conclude by recalling Aaron, my cousin’s little boy who was diagnosed with a neurological disease at age two and who declined hideously for the next five years.  Our Lord offers no explanation.  (What help would an explanation provide?)  Our Lord, rather, whose risen life is grander even than his life from Bethlehem to Golgotha; his risen life is that larger, grander story in which Aaron’s story is transfigured.  Furthermore, our Lord is the occasion of a response: the response of Aaron’s friends and relatives and neighbours and congregation.  The response we make to all such developments is an expression of our caring.  (Not an expression of our curing; ultimately I can’t cure you, you can’t cure me, and medical practice can’t cure any of us, ultimately.)  Such a response will be caring enough until that day when we see our Lord face-to-face, the sight of whose face will transfigure our face, for the sight of his face will be enough to wipe away every tear from every eye.

Victor Shepherd                                                                     Westminster Chapel 2013