The Triune God and the Threefold Nature of the Church
On Halloween many people wear false faces. No one is upset because everyone knows the false face is only a game. If, however, someone walked into a bank wearing a false face, it would be another matter. Everyone would know the false face is an occasion of evil.
Many of us ‘put on’ a false face, as it were, in different social situations in order to misrepresent ourselves and deceive others. I can hate you in my heart and yet ‘put on’ a face that suggests friendship. I can despise you in my heart and yet ‘put on’ a face that suggests admiration. In these situations (situations of sin, we should note) the face we wear contradicts the heart we possess. Plainly the person putting on the false face can never be known, and because she can’t be known she can never be trusted. If anyone is to be known and trusted, face and heart have to be one.
What about God’s face and God’s heart? If we think of Jesus Christ as the manifest ‘face’ of God, then the doctrine of the Trinity attests the face of Jesus and the heart of the Father to be identical. The face the Father displays in the Son is not and never can be a false face. Face and heart are one. God as he is towards us (the Son) is identical with God as he is in himself (the Father). This point is crucial, for otherwise God’s activity upon us and within us might be merely something God does, unrelated to who God is. If this were the case, God’s activity upon us and within us would be a manipulation that never acquainted us with the heart of God, with the result that we could never know God himself, and therefore we could never trust him.
The doctrine of the Trinity is crucial. At the very least it attests the truth that who God is in his dealings with us is who God is in himself; and no less importantly, who God is in himself is who God is in his dealings with us.
In other words, the doctrine of the Trinity witnesses to God’s identity: what we see in Jesus Christ is what we get; namely, God himself and nothing other than God himself. In addition the doctrine of the Trinity witnesses to God’s unity. What is done for us in Jesus Christ and what is effected in us through the Holy Spirit is an act of the oneGod: these two acts aren’t the activities of two different deities or two lesser deities or two non-deities.
What God does for us in the Son is called ‘Christology’; what God effects in us through the Spirit is called ‘Pneumatology.’ The arithmetic is simple: Christology plus Pneumatology equals Theology.
“Who is God?” Scripture never answers this question directly. Scripture answers this question indirectly by posing two other questions. “What does God do on our behalf? What does God effect within us?” The answers to these two questions add up to the question “Who is God?” God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This God is one. The doctrine of the Trinity attests the unity of God, and, as we have already noted, the identity of God.
While Scripture nowhere articulates a doctrine of the Trinity, the ‘raw materials’, as it were, of the doctrine are not hard to find. Everyone is familiar with Paul’s blessing: “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” (2nd Cor. 13:14) The same triune formula is found in narrative form in Luke’s gospel concerning the Christmas annunciation made to Mary: “The Lord (“Lord” is the name of God in the older testament) is with you….you will bear a son who will be called the Son of the Most High….the Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.” (Luke 1:28-35) In John’s gospel Jesus announces that the Father will send the Holy Spirit in the name of the Son. (Jn. 14:26)
It is no surprise that when heresy threatened the church repeatedly, the Council of Nicaea (325 C.E.) framed a doctrine of the Trinity that has worn well ever since, departure from which is deemed no less than denial of the gospel.
I: — Despite the fitting emphasis on the Triune being of God, different theological families within the church tend to emphasize one person of the Trinity. Their emphasis gives rise to a particular theology and particular church practice. Later we shall see how a one-sided emphasis fosters serious distortion. But for now let’s note how highlighting one person of the Trinity characterizes one theological family in the church as a whole.
(i) Let’s think first of the understanding of the church in classical Protestantism, the churches that come out of the Reformation, more-or-less what we call ‘mainline’ Protestant denominations today. Here the church is understood as those who gather to hear the Word of God preached. And there’s nothing wrong with this as far as it goes, since we should gather to hear the Word of God preached.
This understanding is reflected in interior church architecture. The pulpit is front and centre. The pulpit is elevated, always elevated above the communion table. The bible is placed on the pulpit and is read from the pulpit. Plainly the theological order is Scripture, sermon and sacrament. Scripture is the source and norm of the sermon, and scripture and sermon together are the content of the sacrament. Good! Our Reformation foreparents were correct (I am convinced) when they insisted that without Scripture the sermon is no more than gospel-less subjectivism, and without Scripture and sermon the sacrament is no more than superstition.
The order of service reflects the priority of preaching. The sermon is the single, largest item of worship. It occupies not less than one-third of the service, frequently more than one-half. When, in this understanding of the church, a pastoral relations committee is assessing candidates for the pulpit, the paramount question on everyone’s lips is “Can she preach?”
The presuppositions of this understanding of the church are noteworthy. One such presupposition is that the gospel has a precise content, and people have to be informed of this content just because the gospel isn’t an instance of humanistic self-help or religion-in-general or vague sentimentality. The content is precise; it’s God-given. It isn’t negotiable or substitutable or alterable.
The gospel’s precise content matters, and matters supremely since the gospel is ultimately the power of God for salvation. (Rom. 1:16) The hearer’s eternal destiny and temporal wellbeing hang on the preached Word and the hearer’s response.
The precedent for this understanding of the church is impressive. Moses spoke – to the people who assembled to hear him. His speaking imparted something the world will never be without. The socio-political shape of the Western world (at least) is unimaginable without the Decalogue. When Benjamin Disraeli, Prime Minister of Great Britain, was taunted repeatedly in the House of Commons on account of his Jewishness, one day he had had enough. Disraeli turned on his ridiculers, “Yes, I am a Jew. And when your foreparents were eating acorns in the Forest of Arden, my foreparents were giving laws to the world.”
Not only Moses preached; the Hebrew prophets preached. Amos cried, “God has spoken; who can but prophesy?” (Amos 3:8) In the same manner God exclaimed to Jeremiah, “I am making my words in your mouth a fire.” (Jer. 5:14) Either Jeremiah opened his mouth to let out the fiery word or he was consumed by it.
Jesus, we are told, “came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God.” (Mk. 1:14)
Not least, when Jesus sends out the seventy missioners he insists, “Whoever hears you, hears me.” (Lk. 10:16) There is no ‘as if’; “whoever hears you, it’s as if they heard me.” To hear the missioner preach Christ is to be confronted with Christ-in-person. To say the same thing, whenever the Word of God is preached, Jesus Christ acts – invariably.
The Protestant Reformers knew this. In his commentary on Galatians 3:1 John Calvin maintains that when the gospel is preached the “blood of Christ flows.” And in his commentary on Hebrews 9:20 Calvin writes, “When the gospel is preached, [Christ’s] sacred blood falls on us along with the words.” Imagine it: whenever the gospel is preached the saving blood drips onto and soaks into the congregation. In his commentary on Isaiah 6:1-5 Calvin reminds us that when Scripture is read today God-in-person speaks; then Calvin adds soberly, “When he speaks, we tremble.”
The living Word, Jesus Christ, surges over us as the inscripturated Word is expounded in the preached Word. This living Word we cannot acquire elsewhere or elsehow No one looking at the creation, however long and however intently, ever came to an understanding of redemption and righteousness and sin. No gazing upon the immensity of the universe informs us of the God who, for the sake of us who despise him, humbled himself in a manger and humiliated himself at a cross where he was publicly identified with the scum of the earth.
To say that the church consists of those who gather to hear preached the gospel with its precise content is to say that there’s no such thing as blind faith. To be sure, we have to trust God on days so dark as to be utterly opaque; but the God whom we trust on opaque days himself can’t be opaque or we wouldn’t know whom to trust or why we should trust. Unless we are schooled week-by-week in the precise content of the gospel, faith will erode and discipleship will disappear.
Any understanding of the church that highlights the gospel in its uniqueness will also emphasize correct doctrine. Doctrines are truths about Christ that point to him and describe him. He is Truth (in the sense of reality). Truth, reality, shouldn’t be confused with or reduced to provisional statements about him, truths. At the same time, as Truth he can’t be described or commended or communicated apart from the truths that speak of him. To belittle doctrine is to belittle him of whom it speaks.
The church as those who gather to hear the Word preached; this understanding is important and should be cherished.
(ii) — Yet there’s another understanding of the people of God in Scripture. It’s one that’s dear to the Catholic tradition: Eastern Orthodox, and the twenty-two churches that make up the Catholic family, chief among which is the Roman Catholic. This understanding highlights the church as the body of Christ.
There are 188 images of the church in the New Testament. Immediately all of us could name some: the bride of Christ, for instance. Others are less-known: the church as perfume, or a farmer’s field, or a letter delivered by U.S Postal Service. By far the dominant image among the 188 is the body of Christ. Jesus Christ is head of his own body, the church. Any assault on the body is at the same time an assault on our Lord. For this reason not to discern the corporate nature of the church, the body of Christ, is horrific.
In the Hebrew bible, as soon as you ask someone his name he tells you the name of his tribe, because he has no identity apart from his tribe. In the Hebrew mind the corporate identity of the people of God looms large.
We modern individuals have difficulty understanding the solidarity of Israel. The prophet Isaiah, commissioned by God to address a sharp word to the people; Isaiah doesn’t say, “I may be stuck living with degenerate people whom God is going to punish, but I know better than they and I’m not one of them.” Instead Isaiah, fully aware that he has a commission others lack, cries, “I am a man of unclean lips; and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.”
According to biblical understanding the church as body of Christ has everything to do with the church’s identity. You and I exist as Christian individuals only as we are related to Christ’s body, the corporate people. We like to think we can be related to Jesus without being related to the church, and we could be related to him without being related to them – if Christ were a severed head. But he isn’t a severed head. He is always and everywhere the head of his body. Therefore to be related to him at all is to be related to all of him, head and body.
Paul asks us to imagine a human body dismembered, the sort of spectacle we might find at an airplane crash or wartime bomb blast. There are detached arms and legs and torsos scattered everywhere, along with blood and guts and faeces and interstitial fluid and who knows what else. Repulsive? He wants it to be. He wants it to be so very repulsive that you and I will think twice about dismembering the Christian fellowship.
The second point the apostle has in mind is reflected in his question, “Of what use is a leg?” A leg is used to support and propel a torso. A severed leg can’t support or propel anything. Strictly speaking, therefore, is it a leg at all? Strictly speaking a severed ‘leg’ doesn’t exist; what exists is a chunk of putrefying flesh, nauseating and malodorous, that should be buried immediately.
It is only as you and I are members of the body that we share in the body’s ministry and mission. There is in truth only one ministry, the ministry of Christ in his body. To remove ourselves from his body is not to share in his ministry; which is to say, to have no ministry at all.
Christians who understand the church as the body of Christ have a wonderful sense of historical continuity. They know that humans are humans in any era, and therefore Christians today are not the first generation of Christians to face major issues. They smile when they are told that pluralism, for instance, is a new challenge to the church. New? Biblical faith took root in the midst of religious and cultural pluralism. Our Hebrew ancestors knew that God had spoken to Abraham and Moses and Malachi in an environment that included Canaanite religion and child sacrifice and sacral prostitution – all of which they had to resist. Christians in the apostolic era upheld Jesus of Nazareth as the Son of God, the world’s sole saviour and Lord, the Messiah of Israel and the coming Judge – and all of this amidst a sea of Gnosticism, mystery religions, and idolatrous worship of the Roman emperor. We aren’t the first generation of Christians to face pluralism. Neither are we the first generation of Christians to face multisexuality, the presence of which, we are told, ought to find us adjusting our convictions. The ancient world, and every era ever since, has been acquainted with multisexuality.
Aware of the 3500-year history of the church, our Catholic friends appreciate the cruciality of Christian memory. To be without memory, anywhere in life; to be amnesiac is no small matter. The tragedy of amnesia isn’t that someone can’t remember where she left her umbrella. The tragedy, rather, is that the person with no memory doesn’t know who she is. Lacking an identity, she doesn’t know what to do, how to act. Lacking an identity, therefore, she can’t be trusted – not because she’s uncommonly wicked – but rather because, not knowing who she is, she doesn’t know how to act in conformity with who she is. Anything she does can only be arbitrary, capricious, spastic, inconsistent.
The year 2013 is only a few years behind us. 2013 was the 450th anniversary of the Heidelberg Catechism (1563), a document some folk regard as the crown jewel of the shorter Reformation writings. The Heidelberg Catechism has sustained generations of Christians when shaken by assaults from without and upheavals from within. It begins magnificently. Its first question (of 129) is, “What is your only comfort in life and in death?” Answer: “My only comfort in life and in death is that I am not my own, but I belong, soul and body, to my faithful saviour, Jesus Christ.” Since 2013 was the 450th anniversary I looked in the Reformation churches everywhere in Canada for a celebration, or at least an acknowledgement, of this wonderful document. I looked in vain. Make no mistake: had the Heidelberg Catechism been written by Catholics it would have been visible that year in every church. Do we Protestants know who we are? Can our grandchildren trust us?
“The church as the perduring body of Christ; it all sounds good,” the
sceptic remarks, “but it must refer to some mythological church that exists
nowhere. It doesn’t refer to my church,
St Matthew’s by the Esso station, with its bickering, pettiness, and
power-plays.”
But it does refer to St Matthew’s by
the Esso station. Yes, the church is
like Noah’s Ark, Reinhold Niebuhr reminded us: if it weren’t for the storm
outside no one could withstand the stink inside. Or as Karl Barth liked to say, “If Christ
hadn’t been in the boat it would have sunk.”
The point is, Christ was in the boat – and still is.
For this reason those who understand the church as the body of Christ, with its identity and visibility and perdurability, are characteristically patient Christians. Is the church weak? God will strengthen it. Compromised? God will restore it. Confused? God will enlighten it. While we should always be concerned, we should never panic.
For as long as time remains Jesus Christ will be head of his body. Decapitation isn’t going to occur. Christ will always use his body to do his work in the world; and he, the head of his body, will always guarantee the efficacy of that work.
(iii) There is yet another understanding of the church highlighted by many Christians, the church as the community of the Spirit. While we might think first, in this regard, of our Pentecostal friends, the church as community of the Spirit is found in many of the smaller, more charismatic denominations and independent congregations.
While the Pentecostal denomination appeared early in the 20th century, its antecedents were found in the holiness movement of the 19th century, and in every century before that, all the way back to the 1st century church in Corinth.
Those who uphold this understanding of the church insist that we must choose to enter the kingdom; no one oozes into it. They are quick to remind us that while God loves the world and suffers on its behalf, the world remains the world; namely, the sum total of God-defiant, disobedient men and women tacitly organized in their hostility to the gospel. Repentance is not the same as remorse. Faith is not the same as ‘beliefism’. Cruciform discipleship is not the same as middle-class ‘yuppyism’. These people remind us that the gate which admits us to eternal life is narrow, and the way is anything but easy. There is a great gulf fixed between righteousness and condemnation, life and death, truth and delusion; in short, between God and evil.
They are quick to remind us that doctrine, however necessary, is an abstraction, while life in the Spirit is concrete; they tell us graphically that a body which lacks the Spirit is no better than a corpse.
When Paul, heartbroken and angry in equal measure, confronts the church in Galatia concerning its anti-gospel slide into legalism, he gets to the point in a hurry. “Tell me,” he writes: “Did you receive the Spirit through hearing with faith or by works of the law?” (Gal. 3:2) His reference to their receiving the Spirit is a reference to an occurrence in their Christian experience, an occurrence as vivid, memorable and undeniable as any occurrence in experience of any sort. It’s as if he said, “That raging headache you have right now; did you get it through concussion or through over-exposure to the sun?” What can’t be denied is that someone with a headache knows she has a headache. “Did you receive the Spirit through embracing the gospel with faith or through self-righteous legalism?” The apostle is trying to correct their theology by appealing to their experience of the Spirit.
The Christians in Rome are reminded that they have received the Spirit of sonship, adoption, with the result that the cry, “Abba, Father”, is drawn out of them. They utter it spontaneously. They can’t help crying, “Abba, Father,” as surely as someone in pain can’t help groaning, or someone tickled by a good joke can’t help laughing, or someone rejoicing can’t help beaming. The apostle isn’t asking them to expound the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God; he’s asking them to recall how they came to be ‘lit.’
The Christians in Thessalonica had undergone terrible persecution when Paul wrote them. Aware of their faith and their resilience he wrote, “You received the word in much affliction with joy inspired by the Holy Spirit.” (1st Thess. 1:6) The Lord whom they cherished had poured his Spirit into them with the result that they remained unbroken and undeflectable, and all of this without grimness but rather with joy, when they had no earthly reason to rejoice.
The apostle John, in his brief, five-chapter 1st epistle, uses the expression “we know” or “you know” or “I know” 34 times in one of the smallest books in Scripture. “We know that we have passed from death to life.” It’s all gathered up in “By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his own Spirit.” To be visited with God’s Spirit isn’t to wish or long for or hanker after or speculate; it’s to know.
In one of my seminary courses on homiletics we students had to preach to each other under the supervision of the professor. One of my classmates delivered a sermon in which he used the expression “I suppose” half-a-dozen times. When he finished, the class, and especially the student who had preached, waited on the professor for his evaluation. There was silence, painful silence. Then the professor looked at the student for the longest time and finally remarked, “You suppose? You suppose? Mister, when you ascend the pulpit steps on Sunday morning either you know or you don’t say anything.”
To speak of the Spirit is to speak of the immediacy and intensity and intimacy of God. The Spirit is God-in-our-midst acting, and acting upon and within his people so as to move them beyond doubting who he is, what he has done, and what he asks of them.
II: — Let’s return now to a discussion of the Trinity. Plainly any departure from Trinitarian understanding lands us in confusion, error, falsehood, even in personal distress. Yet despite Scripture’s insistence on a Trinitarian understanding of God and the church’s wisdom in framing the doctrine, a non-Trinitarian unitarianism always laps at the church. Such pseudo-Christian unitarianism can be a unitarianism of the Father, or of the Son, or of the Spirit.
(i) – A unitarianism of the Father depicts God as austere, even severe, even tyrannical. It renders God frigid and fearsome. It likes to speak of God as “in control.” It reiterates that God is sovereign, even as it confuses sovereignty with coercion. It speaks of God’s providence, even as it confuses providence with omnicausality. God is said to be “high and lifted up,” as Scripture maintains, even as unitarianism’s one-sidedness renders the exalted God inaccessible and unknowable.
(ii) There is also a unitarianism of the Son. Jesus is our pal. For this reason he and we can be palsy-walsy. He sympathizes with us in our pain and we sympathize with him in his. He’s our friend – and why not, since in John 15 he names us his friends. Forgotten, alas, in the unitarianism of the Son, is the complementary truth that while he is our friend, he ever remains Lord and Judge of the relationship. To be sure, Jesus is our friend, but he is always a friend to be feared.
We are quick to co-opt Jesus for our self-serving agenda, when all the while he claims us for his Kingdom-agenda. He may be our friend, but he will never be our ‘flunkie.’
(iii) Lastly, there is a unitarianism of the Spirit. Religious experience is now featured. Before long any experience is featured, as long as it’s vivid and intense. Forgotten, of course, is that only one Spirit is holy; all other spirits are unholy. Holy Spirit gives rise to holy living; unholy spirits give rise to something else, regardless of intensity or vividness. A unitarianism of the Spirit one-sidedly magnifies religion of the heart, conveniently overlooking two crucial Scriptural truths: one, the heart of humankind is “deceitful above all things and desperately corrupt, utterly beyond understanding,” says the prophet Jeremiah (Jer. 17:9); two, ‘heart’ (‘lev’ in Hebrew) always includes the mind.
III: — To no one’s surprise, any distortion concerning the Trinity; that is, any decline from a Triune understanding of God to a unitarian misunderstanding of God results in a deformed understanding of the church cherished by that particular church family which one-sidedly highlights Father or Son or Spirit.
(i) Let’s begin with classical Protestantism, with the notion that the church consists of those who gather to hear the Word preached. Before long the emphasis on preaching turns into an adulation of the preacher. Now the congregation is built around a personality cult, or hero-worship, or verbal glitz. “Our minister is a dynamic speaker” some people have boasted to me. I don’t doubt that he is. And I have heard many dynamic speakers whose rhetorical gifts were deployed in the service of a high-flown enunciation of nothing. Such speakers forged a lucrative career by craftily saying nothing, and skilfully saying it well.
Again, where preaching is emphasized one-sidedly, the congregation becomes a club of amateur, armchair philosophers who relish intellectual titillation. Since Sunday morning worship is now one-sidedly intellectualist, a mood of intellectual snobbery arises in the congregation. After all, not every Christian is as intellectually sophisticated as are they and their pastor.
Again, a one-sided emphasis on preaching will always highlight doctrinal precision, and the history of the church tells us that unnecessary intricacy promotes a wrangling that finds yet another Protestant splinter added to the thousands that exist already.
(ii) What about our apprehension of the church as the body of Christ? Here too a glorious truth will be distorted and deformed if it is emphasized one-sidedly, in isolation from the other two understandings. While it is correct to maintain that the body of Christ will perdure inasmuch as Christ the head will never be severed from it, too often it is forgotten that Christ ever remains the Lord and Judge of the body. As soon as the church forgets this truth it assumes that everything it does has Christ’s blessing when in fact much that the church has done calls down Christ’s curse. “‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?’ Then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; go away from me, you evil-doers’” – says Jesus himself. (Mat. 7:23)
Again, denominations that recall the promises Christ makes concerning the church – e.g., “The powers of death will never prevail against it” – assume that the survival of their denomination or congregation is guaranteed. The promise means nothing of the sort. When Christ pronounces the church irrefrangible he is promising that he will preserve the community of his faithful people; faithful people, faith-filled people – not membership rolls or baptism registers or Christmas and Easter drop-ins. History is littered with the dust of long-dead denominations and congregations. Christ’s faithful people can count on his promise; no one else should ever presume upon it.
Again, a one-sided emphasis on the church as the body of Christ finds people assuming, perhaps unconsciously, that Christ has collapsed himself into the church; he now inheres the church and is a function of the church: whatever the church does, he does. Wrong! Jesus Christ is never the church’s possession to be manipulated or deployed or even relegated to the basement should he prove awkward and embarrassing. Alas, such a church has forgotten Peter’s startling pronouncement: “…it is time for judgement to begin at the household of God.” (1st Peter 4:17)
(iii) Lastly, a one-sided understanding of the church as the community of the Spirit will find the church’s one-sidedness distorting and disfiguring what it rightly tries to uphold. While a recognition of the place of Christian experience is legitimate, even necessary, a one-sided, unbalanced elevation of experience leaves people unable to distinguish between experience of God and experience of the world; unable to distinguish between experience of God and experience of anything at all; unable to distinguish between Christian righteousness and cultural refinement. Now the measure of spiritual authenticity is intra-psychic intensity, inner intensity of any sort arising from any stimulus. As a pastor of 50 years’ experience I have heard the silly, sad tale of those who insisted their extra-marital affair was God-willed and God-blessed; after all, the intensity of their affair was so much more thrilling than humdrum domesticity. Intensity, vividness, immediacy, we should note, can as readily describe a life of sin.
Ultimately, a one-sided emphasis on the church as community of the Spirit lends religious legitimacy to any community born of any spirit. At best there is the inability to distinguish the church from a neighbourhood club or social-service organization or humanistic association. At worst there is the inability to distinguish between the Holy Spirit and the satanic. Do I exaggerate? Recall the history of Germany in the 20th century. The German people claimed a spiritual sanction (specifically a Christian sanction) for a demonized state that German people today want only to forget.
Not least, a one-sided understanding of the church as the community of those whom the Spirit has ‘torched’ in the present moment overlooks the history of the church and the wisdom entrenched in its tradition. To be sure, no one wants traditionalism, the suffocating grip of the long-dead. Nevertheless, our Christian sisters and brothers who have moved from the church militant to the church triumphant have something tell us, and they should be allowed to speak. Remember: we are not the first generation of Christians, and it is the height of arrogance to think that we can see farther by not standing on the shoulders of our foreparents in faith.
Lastly, a one-sided emphasis on the Spirit and Spirit’s immediacy undervalues the mind. We are to love God with our minds, and it is impossible to love God unless we understand something of his nature and his purpose and his way with us. Unless we understand something of God’s nature and purpose and way with us, our worship is sheer idolatry.
IV: — Distortions of the church abound. Invariably they arise from a distorted grasp of God as Triune. Plainly a more profound apprehension of God is needed if the church is to be healed. Therefore we must turn once again to the God who is Father, Son and Spirit.
While we rightly speak of the being of the triune God as Father, Son and Spirit, when it comes to our knowing the Triune God the order is always Spirit, Son and Father. As the Spirit surges over us and frees us, we abandon our unbelief and embrace in faith the Son who has already embraced us; and having embraced the Son who has already embraced us we are rendered one with the Father. At this point God’s Triune incursion and the church’s threefold witness have borne fruit concerning us.
Then today may the Spirit ever join you and me to the Son in the Son’s obedience to and adoration of the Father. For then we shall know ourselves sealed upon the heart of God, and this for ever and ever.
Victor Shepherd Greenville University 2019
The Congregation’s Ministry to the Congregation: Four Essential Aspects
Ezekiel 36:22-26 1 Peter 1:23-2:3 Matthew 18:1-14
I: — First of all, the congregation is a nursery for the newborn. Peter writes, “Like newborn babes, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up to salvation; for you have tasted the kindness of the Lord.” (1 Peter 2:2-3) When Peter addresses certain Christians as “newborn babes” he isn’t finding fault at all. He isn’t saying that newborn babes shouldn’t be newborn or shouldn’t be drinking pure spiritual milk. In everyday life nobody faults a baby for being a baby; nobody faults the 3-month old because he isn’t 30 years old. It’s normal for a baby to be a baby and be treated like a baby; it’s wonderful to see a baby eager to drink pure milk.
Several times in Matthew’s gospel Jesus angrily denounces those who make things difficult for the “little ones”. “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin; it would be better for him if concrete blocks were tied to his feet and he were pitched into Lake Ontario.” Ten seconds later Jesus, still upset, lets fly again. “See that you do not despise one of these little ones…it is not the will of my Father in heaven that one of these little ones perish.” The “little ones” Jesus speaks of over and over and concerning whom he’s so very protective; these “little ones” aren’t 5-year olds; the “little ones” are adult men and women who happen to be new in the faith; the “little ones” are adults — 30, 45, 60-years old — who have only recently “bonded” with Jesus Christ. As old as they might be chronologically, they are yet spiritual neonates. They need milk, milk only for now, so that they may develop spiritually. Jesus never faults them for being mere “little ones”. On the contrary, he deems them so very precious that he guarantees the severest retribution to anyone who inhibits in any way the spiritual growth of the newest disciple.
The babes-in-Christ have to be nursed. And the church is the nursery for newborns.
What do we expect from a nursery, any nursery? What would we expect if we were taking our own child to a nursery?
[1] Safety; safety first of all; safety above everything else. Safety is so very crucial within the congregation if only because danger abounds without it.
Now what I have in mind here isn’t principally physical safety, bodily security. (Even though all congregations must be able to guarantee this. No one can be expected to be part of a congregation that tolerates harassment or molestation of people of any age.) What I have in mind here, principally, is spiritual safety: the integrity of the gospel, the substance and purity of “the faith once for all delivered to the saints.”
Think of the most elemental confession found on the lips of the earliest Christians; “Jesus is Lord.” But early-day “little ones” (and not-so-little ones) clung to this truth when “Caesar is lord” was being screamed at them every day. When political authorities sneered, “We’ll show you who’s lord. We’ll show you in the coliseum where wild animals haven’t yet learned that Jesus is Lord; we’ll show you in the mines in whose damp darkness you are going to spend the rest of your lives; we’ll show you on unpopulated islands where you are going to be exiled until you rot” — when this happened our Christian foreparents could only gasp out three simple words. And centuries later, when it was announced throughout Germany that “Hitler ist Fuehrer”, the same faithful cry went up from the same faithful few. What those who dislike saying “Jesus is Lord” seem not to understand is that to say “Jesus is Lord” is to say something about him, to be sure, but not only about him; it’s also to say something about us who utter it (by the grace of God we have been admitted to truth); it’s also to say something about the world (the world is not the kingdom of God but is riddled with falsehood, treachery and turbulence at all times).
In the midst of all the talk today about spirituality (how I wish we’d return to talking about faith, because “faith” always implies “Jesus Christ”) we must always remember that not all the spirits are holy. Unholy spirits are always ready to infest and infect. In many hymnals the words of the old hymn, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the bible tells me so” have been changed to “Jesus loves me, this I know, and the bible tells me so”. The change of wording indicates that scripture is no longer acknowledged as the source and norm of our knowledge of God; at best scripture can only reflect what we think we can learn of God elsewhere. This is paganism.
Therefore the members of a
congregation must ensure that there is safety in the congregation. It’s crucial that the congregation be a
nursery where “little ones” are safe; crucial that this congregation be a nursery where “pure spiritual milk” is kept
unsoured; crucial that this
congregation nourish — and never cause to stumble — those “little ones” who
have “tasted the kindness of the Lord” and who want only to become spiritual
adults.
[2] Speaking of nourishment, nourishment is plainly the second thing we look for in a nursery. After all, babes remain in a nursery for quite a while; they have to be fed while they are there or else they won’t thrive.
Babes don’t get fed once; babes get fed small amounts frequently; babes get fed small amounts so very frequently that “frequently” amounts to “constantly”. They absorb nourishment cumulatively; the more they are fed, the greater their capacity to absorb; the greater their capacity to absorb, the more they are fed. Plainly there’s an incrementalism at work in the nourishing of babes.
Let’s remember that however sophisticated most people are (and nearly everyone is sophisticated in at least one area of life), more often than not they are babes in Christ, “little ones”. The nursery has to ensure nourishment. Pure spiritual milk must always be ready-to-hand.
[3] As much as safety and nourishment must be found in a nursery, so must affection. Everyone knows of the experiments — and the conclusions of the experiments — concerning babies who were picked up and those who were left crying; babies who were cuddled and those who were isolated; babies who were caressed and kissed and cooed to and those whose physical needs were attended to unfeelingly. Everyone knows the difference it made to the babies at the time, and more tellingly, what difference it came to make to the same person, now an adult, years later. Everyone knows that affection warming an infant makes the profoundest difference to the adult’s self, the adult’s self-esteem, self-confidence, resilience and adventuresomeness.
It’s no less the case in the nursery of faith. The babes among us have to be safeguarded, yes; nourished, yes; but always and everywhere cherished. Affection is as essential as food.
II: — The congregation isn’t nursery only; it’s also a school where we are to be taught. Schools exist for teaching. Which is to say, someone has to be taught, and something has to be taught. Frequently we hear it said, “Faith is caught, not taught.” It’s said as though it were self-evidently the soul of wisdom. But it isn’t self-evident; neither is it the soul of wisdom. At best it’s a half-truth. The half-truth — “faith is caught” — is true in that faith is a living relationship with a living person, not an intellectual abstraction. “Faith is caught, not taught” is a half-truth true in that no relationship of person-with-person can ever be reduced to a teaching. But it’s only a half-truth in that unless something is taught — in fact, unless much is taught — the person whom the truths describe can never be known. Those who insist that faith is caught, not taught; why do they never ask themselves why Jesus taught day-in and day-out throughout his earthly ministry? Jesus spent more time teaching than doing any other single thing. Shouldn’t this tell us something?
At the very least it should tell us that events are not self-interpreting. No event in world-occurrence is ever self-interpreting. Jesus could never merely do something and then assume that everyone who observed him took home the correct meaning of what he had done. Quite the contrary: he always assumed that they weren’t going to take home the correct meaning of what he had done unless he told them. Prior to his death and after it Jesus taught any who would listen the meaning of his death. If he hadn’t taught them the significance of his death they would assume that his death meant no more than the deaths of the two criminals crucified alongside him; no more than the deaths of miscreants whom the state executes. Not only would people not take home the correct meaning of Christ’s activity; they would certainly take home the wrong meaning.
There’s a story about Francis of Assisi that warms everyone’s heart; it may or may not be a true story about St.Francis, but in any case it’s a story that I don’t like. A fellow-friar asked Francis to join him in preaching outdoors throughout the city. Francis consented, and then added, “But before we preach we are going to walk through the city.” When they had finished walking through the city the fellow-friar asked him, “But when do we preach?” “We just did”, replied Francis, “we just did.” Oh, it’s a honey-sweet story dripping with sentimentality, but it’s only half-true. The half-truth, of course, is that the preacher’s utterance and the preacher’s life ought to be consistent. Fine. But no person’s life, not even a saint’s (Francis’), not even Jesus Christ’s unambiguously declares the gospel. If Christ’s life had bespoken the truth unambiguously, why would he have bothered to teach?
The mistake Francis is said to have made in Italy Mother Teresa never made in India. When Mother Teresa was awarded a Nobel Prize a Yugoslavian journalist (Mother Teresa was Yugoslavian herself) asked her why she rescued throwaway babies every night from garbage cans and took them to the Sisters of Charity orphanage. Mother Teresa didn’t say, “Need you ask why?” She didn’t say, “Isn’t why I do it obvious? The meaning and motive of what I do; isn’t it all self-evident?” Instead she replied in her trademark, measured manner, “I rescue throwaway babies for one reason: Jesus loves me.” To be sure, it was only a one-sentence reply. None the less, she knew she had to say something to interpret her action to the journalist.
We always have to be taught. We have to be taught answers to life-questions inasmuch as the answers are important; crucial, in fact. And if the answers are crucial, so are the questions. Think of the questions, of some of them:
*Who is God? He’s the creator. However, scripture insists much more frequently that God is also the destroyer. What does this mean?
*Why is it that Jesus describes his most intimate followers as possessed of the tiniest faith?
*Why do Christians regard as normative for faith and life an “older” testament that is four times longer than the “newer”? Why do we need the older at all? What would happen if we set it aside?
*Why is it that the only physical description of Jesus that the apostles furnish is the fact that he was circumcised? (It matters not to our faith what Jesus looked like; it matters everything to our faith that he was, is and ever will be a son of Israel.
*Why did our Hebrew foreparents regard idolatry, murder and adultery as the three most heinous sins? Why do we modern degenerates regard murder as criminal, adultery as trivial, idolatry as nothing at all, and none of them as sin?
Jesus assumed that truth isn’t self-evident. Jesus assumed, in other words, that the meaning of the most obvious event isn’t obvious at all. Jesus assumed that we always have to be taught. The congregation is a school in which Christ’s people are taught.
III: — The congregation is also an army that fights. Christians today aren’t ready to hear this. We don’t mind being a nursery or a school; but an army, an army that fights? Aren’t we followers of the Prince of Peace? Aren’t we called to be peacemakers?
I have noticed that those who are repelled by any suggestion that the congregation is an army are repelled by the notion of fighting. I have noticed too, however, that the same people who abhor any Christian reference to fighting will fight instantly if Canada Revenue Agency gets their income-tax assessment wrong (or is suspected of getting it wrong). They will fight instantly if their child is awarded a low grade on a school-project. They will fight instantly as soon as they hear that their employer has plans to alter working conditions or compensation or holidays. After all, their cause is right and therefore righteous.
How much more is at stake when the truth of Jesus Christ collides with the falsehoods of the evil one. How much more is at stake when someone is victimised and rendered a casualty in the midst of that spiritual warfare she was never even aware of — or may have been aware of. No wonder Paul picks up the metaphor of soldiering and urges the congregation in Ephesus to put on the whole armour of God: shield, shoes, helmet, breastplate, sword. (Eph. 6:10-17) There’s nothing God-honouring about being an unnecessary victim.
No wonder too that Paul reminds young Timothy that soldiering entails hardship, sacrifice, singlemindedness, “training in godliness”. No wonder he gathers it all up by urging the young man always to “fight the good fight of the faith.” (2 Tim. 2:3-4; 1 Tim. 6:12; 4:7) We can’t fight unless we have first trained!
Training? Many church-folk today see no point to training just because they see no virtue in fighting. They think that conflict is always and everywhere sub-Christian because non-loving. And they are wrong.
(i) In the first place our Lord leaves us no choice: if we are going to be disciples then we are going to be soldiers in that conflict which erupts the moment his flag of truth is planted in the citadel of a hostile world. Since the master was immersed in conflict every day, what makes his followers think they won’t be or shouldn’t be?
(ii) In the second place those who regard all conflict as sub-Christian because unloving fail to see that spiritual conflict arises on account of love’s energy. God is love; Jesus is the Incarnation of God’s nature; Jesus is immersed in conflict every day just because love is resisted every day, love is contradicted every day, love is savaged every day. What kind of love is it that won’t persist in the face of opposition? won’t contend to vindicate the slandered and relieve the oppressed? won’t fend off every effort of lovelessness to victimise and abandon? Love that won’t persist and contend; love that refuses to fight is simply no love at all.
(iii) In the third place the most love-filled heart knows that there is a place for godly resistance. There is a time and a place to dig in our heels and stiffen our spine in the name of Jesus Christ. When Martin Luther, grief-stricken at the horrible abuses in the church of his day, finally stopped weeping and decided to do something, he discussed what he planned to do with Professor Jerome Schurff of Wittenberg University. Schurff was professor in the faculty of law. He was one of the brightest stars in the Wittenberg U. firmament. Professor Jerome Schurff agreed with Luther that the abuses were dreadful. Schurff, however, was aghast at what Luther planned to do. “Don’t do that!” he cried, “You’ll renders us all targets here; we’ll all be in trouble in Wittenberg. The authorities will never put up with it!” “And if they have to put up with it?” Luther replied, “if they have to?”
To live in the company of Jesus Christ is never to relish conflict for the sake of conflict; but it is to share his conflict. To live in the company of Jesus Christ is to share love’s struggle in the face of un-love’s aggression.
IV: — The congregation is also a hospital for the wounded. When the apostle Paul discusses the different ministries to be exercised in any one congregation he mentions healing. (1 Cor. 12) If healing is to be exercised within the congregation, then the congregation is a hospital.
We must be sure to understand that there is no shame in being hospitalised just because there is no shame in being wounded. The fact that we are wounded simply confirms the truth that we are soldiers in Christ’s army and have recently been on the front lines. Spiritual conflict is no less debilitating than any other kind of conflict.
One military facility for the battle-worn is the Rest and Recreation Centre. “R&R” centres are not merely for military personnel who have broken a leg or fractured a skull; “R&R” centres principally accommodate those who have been under immense stress, are frazzled, and need to move behind the front for a while in order to recuperate. During World War II all submarine crews were given as much time off to recuperate as they spent on patrol. A month-long patrol at sea was always followed by a month’s rest ashore. No one ever suggested there was something shameful in the men’s need for rest.
Rest. Jesus invites us, “Come to me, all who labour and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.” (Matt. 11:30) “Rest”, however, has a special force in scripture; “rest” in scripture doesn’t have the modern sense of “vegging”, utter inactivity. Rest, rather, has to do with restoration. “Come to me, all who are bone-weary and worn down and frazzled and fractured and frantic; come to me, for with me there is restoration.”
We should note that our Lord’s winsome invitation, “Come unto me…”, isn’t an invitation at all; it’s a command. “Come”, “you come”, “you come now” — it’s plainly an imperative; he commands us to come to him for restoration. To say that it’s a command is to say there’s no option here. We must go to him for restoration, just because he knows that his soldiers are beaten up, and once beaten up aren’t much use until restored.
In other words, providing hospital care for Christ’s wounded is as much the congregation’s ministry to the congregation as is being a nursery where newborns are nurtured, and a school where learners are taught, and an army where soldiers are trained and in which they fight the good fight of the faith until that day when we say with the apostle,
I have fought the good fight,
I have finished the race,
I have kept the faith.
Victor Shepherd
Greenville University
2019
On the Privilege and Joy of Being a Pastor
1st Thessalonians 1:2-7; 2:1-8
A few years ago I was standing at the end of a cottage-dock chit-chatting with the cottage owner, Bob Giuliano. (Bob used to be the pastor at the congregation of my denomination closest to my home.) While we were chatting, a woman in a motorboat offshore suddenly altered course and veered toward us. She began waving and shouting, “Victor, Victor”. I didn’t recognize her. I didn’t expect anyone to recognize me, since I hadn’t told anyone I was going to be visiting Bob at his cottage. As the boat came closer I saw that it was a woman from my congregation. She docked the boat, hugged me ardently, talked for a minute or two, and then motored off. When she had left I saw that Bob seemed startled, preoccupied and wistful all at once. I asked him what he was thinking. “In thirty years in the ministry,” he replied, “I have never seen such joy upon running across one’s pastor; never.”
Karl Barth is the single most significant theologian of the Twentieth Century. In fact he is the most significant theologian of the past 500 years, the most significant since the Reformation. (Barth, of course, claims to be Reformed.) He is the only theologian since the Reformation whom the Roman Catholic Church has named Doctor Ecclesiae, teacher of the church.
Barth has written fourteen large volumes in his Church Dogmatics; he has published hundreds of shorter articles. His written output is thousands upon thousands of pages and millions of words. And when Barth was interviewed in 1963, five years before his death (by this time he was 77 years old), he insisted, “I wrote the [Church] Dogmatics for pastors. I am in the strictest sense a professor for pastors. I was a pastor myself for twelve years, and as a professor, I said to myself, ‘I must be faithful to the pastorate.’ At bottom, everything that I have written concerns the work and practice of pastors.”
Hans Urs von Balthasar I deem to be the profoundest Roman Catholic theologian of the Twentieth Century. When he died only a few years ago, Pope Benedict, who conducted the funeral service, pronounced him “the most learned man in Europe”. Balthasar loved Mozart’s music. He had all of Mozart’s music in his head, and he could re-play any Mozart composition he wished to hear, whenever he wanted to hear it. Since he was able to summon up any Mozart piece whenever he wanted to hear it, he gave away all his Mozart recordings.
Balthasar, like Barth, produced over a dozen huge volumes of the most learned theology. And Balthasar said his massive output in theology was the third most important thing he had done in his life.
The second most important thing he had done was the twenty years he spent studying the poetry of Paul Claudel and Charles Peguy. (French, we should remember, was not the first language of Hans Urs von Balthasar.)
And the single most important thing he had done? Balthasar said the most important thing he had done was his work as a pastor in Switzerland.
It’s a singular honour to be a pastor. No other work is to be envied. I am moved every time I recall the remark of Jean Vianney, an early-Nineteenth Century Roman Catholic priest from the city of Ars in post-Napoleonic France, when France was both demoralized and de-moralized. “If we really knew what it is to be a pastor”, Vianney said, “We couldn’t endure it.” What did he mean, “We couldn’t endure it”? I think I have glimpsed what he means. For in the course of my pastoral work, especially in situations of distress and anguish, grief and pain, I have staggered home stunned at how eager people are to see their minister and what comfort they derive from his presence. I have slowly learned why they are eager and how they derive comfort: it’s because they are trusting the pastor’s faith to support their own faith when their own faith is assaulted by tragedy or turbulence or sin. They are counting on the pastor’s heart-knowledge of God—God’s mercy, God’s wisdom, God’s way, God’s triumph, God’s faithfulness. They are casting themselves on the pastor’s throbbing acquaintance with God. They want to lean on the pastor’s faith, borrow from it (as it were). They are hoping the pastor’s assurance concerning God’s truth and triumph will restore their assurance that God hasn’t abandoned them despite shocking evidence to the contrary, will restore their assurance that God will never forsake them even though he seems to have. And therefore while a pastor who appeared to be a know-it-all would be a nuisance, a pastor who never exuded unselfconscious intimacy with God would be useless. What is it, then, to be a pastor? It’s to have the conviction of God’s truth and reality so deep in one’s bloodstream that the suffering person will feel the foundations of her life to be in place once more. It’s to be unselfconsciously a conduit of the Spirit so that the same “current” will be induced in the person whom mishap has made to feel unplugged. Every high school student knows that if a current is passing through electrical wire and another wire is laid alongside it, the current in the first wire will induce a current in the second. This is what it means to be a pastor.
Alexander Whyte, a Scottish pastor 120 years ago, used to say to young ministers, “Be much at deathbeds”. Whyte wasn’t morose. He simply knew where people most need the pastor’s quiet confidence. Whyte also knew that it’s at deathbeds that the fewest words are used; it’s also at deathbeds that the pastor’s spiritual authenticity is most evident or spiritual vacuity most exposed.
Robert Coles is a paediatric psychiatrist who taught for years at Harvard. I first came upon him when I read his book reviews in the New York Times. In addition to psychiatry he taught “Great Literature” to Harvard medical students. (He said he was anxious lest medical students leave school with a full head and a shrivelled heart.) In one of his video-taped lectures Coles branches out into a discussion of painting, especially the work of Edward Hopper, an American artist. Coles points out that the people depicted in Hopper’s paintings sit close to each other but never look at each other. They share the same space geographically but are humanly remote. Coles points out that it’s easy for people to be proximate to each other physically, to chatter, even to meet conventionally; yet it’s exceedingly rare — because exceedingly difficult — for people to communicate intimately, heart-to-heart, spirit-to-spirit, deep-to-deep. Coles is correct: such communication is rare because difficult.
But not so difficult and therefore so rare as to be non-existent in congregational life. For I have found many people in all five congregations I have served who have admitted me to their innermost heart, even as I trust I have admitted them to mine. Some of my congregations have been larger, and a couple smaller. And even in the smallest I have found more suffering than I could have thought possible. I’m always amazed at ministers who tell me their congregation is small and therefore they don’t have much pastoral work to do. A congregation of even one hundred people is afflicted with enough pain and perplexity and distress to give a minister no rest.
Then regardless of what else we need in the midst of life’s contradictions (certainly we need wisdom and patience and persistence and ever so much more), above all we need courage. We always need courage. Few books in scripture speak as much about courage as the book of Hebrews. It likens the Christian life to a race, a relay race. Those who have run their leg of the race ahead of us (i.e., Christians of an earlier era who have predeceased us) are awaiting us at the finish line. They remained courageous throughout their leg of the relay race. They remained courageous: that’s why they finished (rather than quit) and are awaiting us at the finish line. The unknown author of Hebrews cries, “Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses…let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith…. Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself…. Therefore lift up your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees.” Because any congregation is surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, we can lift up our drooping hands and strengthen our weak knees.
It’s the cloud of witnesses—fellow-believers past and present—that becomes for us a vehicle of the grace of God. One such witness in the great cloud is John Calvin. Calvin was a giant (some would say the giant) among the Protestant Reformers. Calvin spoke characteristically of the grandeur of God, the glory of God, the majesty of God, the sufficiency of God. Calvin always insisted too that the being of God must never be confused with the being of God’s creatures. God is irreducibly God. God isn’t humankind talking to itself with a loud voice. God isn’t a projection, unconsciously disguised as divine, of our overheated imagination. God is uniquely God, and must never be confused with that which isn’t God. And yet when Calvin pens a comment on Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonian congregation he writes what we should never expect him to. Paul has written, “We give thanks to God always for you all”. In other words, the apostle thanks God for the congregation. Calvin comments, “Is there anything more worthy of our love than God?” Of course there isn’t. But here comes the surprise. “There is nothing, therefore, which ought to make us seek the friendship of men (and women) more than God’s manifestation of himself among them through the gifts of the Spirit”. How startling! The Reformer who insists that God is uniquely God and insists elsewhere that God is the only fit witness to himself here maintains that our friends in the congregation mirror God to us. Our friends in the congregation aren’t friends chiefly because we get along with them or they like us; our friends in the congregation are those whom we are to cherish just because they mirror to us the mercy and patience and persistence of God himself.
Calvin was born in 1509 in the town of Noyon, fifty miles outside Paris. At age eleven he went to Paris to begin university studies. His father steered him into law, having noted (he said) that lawyers never starve. Calvin graduated with a doctorate in legal studies at age twenty-three. Soon he left behind the technical details of the law for the riches of Renaissance humanism. Then in 1534 the gospel seized him. Concerning his about-face coming-to-faith Calvin would only write, “God subdued me and made me teachable”. He moved to Geneva, Switzerland, and quickly became known for his first major work in theology, The Institutes of the Christian Religion. The first edition had only six chapters; the final edition, eighty. It had grown into a two-thousand page primer for preachers. Subsequently Calvin became the leading thinker of the Reformation outside German-speaking lands, a prolific writer, and a diligent worker on behalf of the citizens of the city. (He drafted the city’s first constitution, for instance. Although he didn’t practise law he was still the ablest lawyer in the city). His written French did as much to establish modern French as Shakespeare’s English did for modern English. He was humanist, linguist, theologian, biblical commentator, city advisor. All of this, however, he understood as subordinate to the one task that was before all other tasks and above all others and permeated all others: pastor.
Before Calvin died in 1564 he had written commentaries on most books of the bible, including 1st Thessalonians. I am moved every time I open it, for here Calvin speaks so very warmly of the pastor’s life with that congregation which the pastor serves. In 1st Thessalonians the apostle Paul speaks of the style of his ministry with the congregation in the city; Paul writes, “We were gentle among you, like a nurse taking care of her children. So, being affectionately desirous of you, we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us.” Calvin comments on this passage, “A mother, in nursing her child, makes no show of authority and does not stand on any dignity. This, says Paul, was his attitude, since he willingly refrained from claiming the honour that was due him [i.e., as an apostle], and undertook any kind of duty without being ruffled or making any show. In the second place, a mother, in rearing her child, reveals a wonderful and extraordinary love…and even gives her own life blood to be drained…. We must remember that those who want to be counted true pastors must entertain the same feelings as Paul—to have higher regard for the church [i.e., the congregation] than for their own life.” When Paul maintains that one mark of an apostle is his willingness to make any sacrifice for the edification of the congregation, Calvin adds, “All pastors are reminded by this of the kind of relationship which ought to exist between them and the church”.
Calvin always knew that a dictatorial, tyrannical pastor is a contradiction in terms. The pastor is to lead the congregation, not hammer it; he is to plead, not whip; she is to model the gospel, not hurl it. When Paul says to the congregation in Thessalonica, “we beseech you”, Calvin adds, “His beseeching them, when he might rightfully command them, is a mark of the courtesy and restraint which pastors should imitate, in order to win their people, if possible, with kindliness, rather than coerce them with force.” The pastor is always to plead rather than pummel. Calvin summarizes this issue: “Those who exercise an absolute power that is completely opposed to Christ are far from the order of pastors and overseers”.
To be sure, Calvin speaks of two kinds of pastors who give the ministry a bad name. Class one: “stupid, ignorant men who blurt out their worthless brainwaves from the pulpit”. Class two: “ungodly, irreverent individuals who babble on with their detestable blasphemies”. Any minister who reads Calvin here must search his own heart. I search mine, and trust that you have never found me blurting out worthless brainwaves or babbling detestable blasphemies.
Calvin had the highest estimation of the ministry. Such work, he said, is “…the edification of the church, the salvation of souls, the restoration of the world[!]…. The excellence and splendour of this work are beyond value”. It is a privilege to be a pastor, isn’t it.
Yet Calvin also knew that pastoral existence could be difficult, even dangerous. He had seen congregations ruin ministers. When he reflects on the disputes and feuds which make life miserable for a minister he writes something which is certainly true of too many congregations: “So we see daily how pastors are treated with hostility by their churches for some trivial reason, or for no reason at all.” Not in any congregation I have served, for which I thank God.. Not only has a congregation never treated me with hostility for trivial reason or no reason; no congregation has ever treated me with hostility at all.
One day in May, 1954, Stan Musial, the superb right fielder for the St. Louis Cardinals, hit five home runs in a single game. A few years later Musial was in the twilight of his baseball career. His legs no longer ran fast, his arm was no longer a cannon, and pitchers with even a mediocre fastball were starting to sneak it past him. He knew he could now play only occasionally as a pinch-hitter. “Even if I know I’m going to sit on the bench for most of the game”, he told a sportswriter, “every time I go to the ballpark and put on my uniform I still get a thrill”. I too am in my twilight years. Nonetheless, every time I stand in front of a congregation I get a thrill. Whether it’s when I step into the sanctuary on Sunday morning and see the expectant faces of the congregation, or whether it’s when I’m meeting people whom life has clobbered, or whether it’s when I sit by myself and intercede for those who are especially needy, I still get a thrill.
It mystifies me and saddens me that other clergy don’t get the same thrill. One of the professors alongside whom I teach has told me several times that when he left the pastorate he vowed never to return. “On-call seven days a week; being telephoned at any hour; having to go somewhere night after night; no sooner finished preparing one address than having to prepare another. When I left”, this fellow tells me, “I knew I’d do anything before I ever went back.” Compare that attitude with Jean Vianney: “If we knew what it is to be a pastor, we couldn’t endure it.”
I relish teaching in a seminary, and relish it for several reasons. One reason is that it keeps me probing the work of the giants in theology. Another reason is that it keeps me acquainted with men and women (younger than I) who are preparing for ordination. Entirely too often a student tells me that after his first degree in theology he plans to do a second and third degree—i.e., a doctorate—in that a doctorate is the ticket out of the pastorate and into a professorship. The first degree in theology lets one into the pastorate; a doctorate lets one out. The truth is, I heard as much when I was a seminary student myself fifty-plus years ago. Whenever I hear this I tell the students most emphatically that the real Doctores Ecclesiae, teachers of the church, were pastors first. Luther worked as a pastor every day in addition to teaching, writing, travelling, and wrestling with vexatious problems in church life; e.g., the predicament of nuns who left the convent in response to the message of the Reformation and then had no means of support. Calvin preached ten times every two weeks. His writings are so vast that his 2000-page Institutes represents only 6.8% of his written output. (65% of his written output is found in his commentaries on Scripture. And in his commentaries Calvin is always better than he is in the Institutes). In addition he sat with the dying, married the living, visited the sick, sorted out conflicts in the wider church (rural pastors, for instance, complained vociferously that they should be paid the same as urban pastors in Geneva.) He ordered provisions for the city hospital. And he had to endure the shame of his sister-in-law’s repeated adulteries.
Modern professors of theology who are full-time teachers are not the descendants of the Reformation giants; scholarly pastors are. Why did the real giants of theology persist in shouldering such a hugely variegated work, doing so very much more than just the scholarship for which they will never be forgotten? Calvin spoke for them all when he wrote 500 years ago, “My ministry is dearer to me than life.”
The church of Jesus Christ has allowed me both to pastor and to teach. For this I am endlessly grateful. For both pastoring and teaching are aspects of my vocation to the ministry. Calvin spoke for all zealous ministers when he said, “My ministry is dearer to me than life.”
Victor Shepherd
Greenville University
February 2019
“A Safe Stronghold Our God Is Still”
In 1530, Martin Luther lived in Coburg Castle for five and half months under the protection of Elector John the Steadfast. It was during this time that Philip Melanchthon represented Luther at the Diet of Augsburg, which Luther could not attend as an outlaw of the Holy Roman Empire.
“A Safe Stronghold Our God Is Still”
[A] “And then all hell broke loose”, many people are fond of saying in everyday English. “And then all hell broke loose.” We can use the expression frivolously to speak of something ultimately insignificant, as some do when the Toronto Maple Leaf hockey team is leading by three goals only to lose the game by giving up four goals in ten minutes.
Or we can use the expression profoundly, as war compels us to do when we describe the air-raids on London or Coventry in World War II, or when we speak of the ‘Final Solution’, the Shoah, that Nazi perpetrators unleashed on hapless victims.
When we use the expression profoundly we mean that horror has been unleashed. In the wake of unprecedented horror, our language fails, abysmally fails, to describe what is unfolding.
When Luther said, in so many words, “All hell has broken loose”, he was speaking most profoundly of all. For Luther was aware that cosmic assault was operative. The evil one himself, with all the powers the evil one can co-opt and concentrate; this one has turned upon Luther in person, as well as upon all that Luther upholds concerning Jesus Christ, his kingdom, his truth, and his people, not to mention Luther’s family and friends. In the aftermath of this assault Luther will speak for the rest of his life of Anfechtung as he is overtaken, time after time but never permanently, by an appalling sense of God’s absence together with an inability to find in his heart any awareness of God’s love and mercy, any evidence that God still loves him, holds him, and honours him.
I find today that Christians, especially younger Christians, have a shallow sense of evil. Not Luther: he found evil to be monstrous, hideous. He found evil to be subtle, sneaky, disguised, like a spy-informed commando raid. He also found evil to be a frontal assault without dissimulation, nothing less than death-dealing brutality.
Whether subtle or frontal, Luther insisted, “The ancient prince of hell hath risen with purpose fell…on earth is not his fellow.” Evil, finally, is a power greater than anything humankind can bring against it.
[B] Then who or what can defeat such a power, secure the victory achieved, and render God’s people beneficiaries of it? Only the “proper Man”, Christ Jesus, can.
Jesus Christ is the “proper” man in that this man isn’t man only; this man is God incarnate. Because this man is God incarnate, he can gain that victory which humankind otherwise has no hope of seeing. And because this man is God incarnate, this man is our elder brother who ensures our adoption as sons and daughters of the Father.
Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ alone, is the “safe stronghold” or “mighty fortress” within which God’s people are protected from lethal assault and in which they are secure in the company and arms of their elder brother.
‘Stronghold’: the word occurs repeatedly in the Palms. “The Lord is a stronghold for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble” (Ps. 9:9) “The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, my God, my rock in whom I take refuge, my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.” (Ps. 18:2)
Luther’s first published writings were his expositions of the Psalms (1513-1515). While many Christians today find the Psalms puzzling at best and off-putting at worst (except, of course, for a few favourites like Ps. 23), Luther found the gospel, no less, everywhere in the Psalms.
Let’s linger over Psalm 18:2. The Lord is my rock. Rock is solid ground. It suggests a refuge from floods that otherwise sweep away everything. (Flood or turbulent water, everywhere in Scripture, is a metaphor for the chaos that laps at us at all times and threatens to engulf us.) The Lord is my fortress. A fortress is that to which marauders cannot gain entry, that which whose walls render would-be invaders futile and frustrated. The Lord is my deliverer. It’s wonderful to be secure on solid rock; it’s wonderful to stand within the fort and see attackers repelled. But so far all we are doing is standing within the fort, passive. We need to be moved beyond passivity; we need to be delivered from our enemies so that we can join the God-man in his active campaign against all that mocks him and mobilizes against him.
And even if Christ our captain conscripts us into his army; even if we are equipped to fight alongside him in his campaign against all forms and forces of wickedness, we shall never last if we are panic-stricken. We must finally be delivered from the fear that otherwise drains us and dispirits us. For this reason the Psalmist once more cries, “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” (Ps. 27:1)
[C] Did Luther have anything to fear? Did Luther have anyone of whom he had reason to be afraid? We must remember that Luther wrote his best-known hymn between 1527 and 1529. He wrote it to reassure his people that they could rely on, trust in life and in death, the One who remains victorious in the face of evil’s most concentrated assault. What were the features (at least some of them) of the assault?
One was Luther’s medical problems, such as the onset of kidney stones, an agony no sixteenth-century treatment could relieve. Another was his heart problems. Another was his grief over the death of Elisabeth, his eight-month old daughter who succumbed to pneumonia. Another was the outbreak of the plague in August 1527. (One hundred and fifty years before Luther’s era, we should remember, the Black Death or Bubonic Plague had carried off 40% to 50% of Europe.) Luther’s political ruler, Elector John Frederick, evacuated Wittenberg University and reconvened it in Jena until spring 1528. Luther, however, refused to protect himself self-servingly but rather, like the diligent pastor he was, remained behind in Wittenberg to attend the sick and the dying. The Turks (the sixteenth-century’s version of Islamic threat) had been moving westward relentlessly, and by 1529 had laid siege to the city of Vienna. In addition, the Second Diet of Speyer (1529) had overturned the first (1527), with the result that Evangelicals were no longer tolerated (and, we should note, for the first time in history were known as ‘Protestants’). In 1529 Luther published his Large Catechism. In his exposition of the sixth petition of the Lord’s prayer he reflected on the danger surrounding his people: “This is what ‘lead us not into temptation’ means: ‘We cannot help but suffer attacks and even be mired in them, but we pray here that we may not fall into them and then drown.’”
And then there were the threats Luther had lived with for years. The pope had pronounced him a heretic in 1520, and then had excommunicated him. The emperor had condemned him an outlaw. Anyone assisting the outlaw would be deemed treasonous; anyone caught assisting Luther would be executed.
Luther had much to fear. Still, what rang in his heart was the Psalmist’s gospel-insistence, “The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” “Christ Jesus is his name, the Lord Sabaoth’s son; he, and no other one, shall conquer in the battle.”
[D] Jesus Christ has indeed conquered; he has gained a victory apart from us, extra nos. This victory, achieved without our help, extra nos, has been won on our behalf, for us, pro nobis. Essential as this is (it is, after all, the ground of our salvation), we shan’t benefit from it unless what has been achieved extra nos, pro nobis, is finally applied in us, in nobis. Luther, like all the Reformers, carefully balances pro nobis and in nobis, the work of God for us wrought in Christ and the work of God in us, owned in faith. Christology must always be balanced with pneumatology. All that Christ has gained for us benefits us only as we ‘put on’ Christ in faith. As much as Luther’s heart sings whenever he speaks of Christ, his heart sings no less whenever he upholds that faith which is God’s gift, to be sure, yet always a gift that we must own and exercise.
Like all the Reformers, Luther understood faith as notitia, assensus and fiducia; understanding, assent and trust. When we confess “I believe”, something must be understood or else faith is indistinguishable from idolatry. Something of the gospel must be understood or else faith is no different from superstition. Something of the gospel must be understood or else saying “I believe” is substantively no different from saying “I don’t believe”.
In the second place, what the mind understands of the gospel, however elementary, the will affirms; and what mind and will uphold the heart trusts (fiducia). To say that trust is the crucial element in faith is to say that we cannot save ourselves or inform ourselves or protect ourselves; we can only trust, entrust ourselves to, the “proper Man” who includes us in his victory.
While trust is the determining element in faith, Luther insists that the One whom we trust is also the One whom we are to love. It is unthinkable that we might trust someone we found repulsive. For this reason, Luther, in several places, discusses faith in terms of marriage, Scripture’s favourite metaphor for God’s covenant faithfulness with his people and theirs with him. In this regard Luther likens faith to that event wherein the bridegroom, Jesus Christ, embraces the bride and says, “I am yours”, while the bride, the believer, embraces the bridegroom, saying, “And I am yours”.
[E] With his close reading of Scripture, Luther is aware that Paul speaks in Ephesians 6 of the ‘armour’ that Christians are to put on as they contend with principalities and powers. One aspect of such armour is the ‘shield of faith’. Consider again the first two lines of Luther’s hymn: “A safe stronghold our God is still, a trusty shield and weapon”. While God is named the shield, everywhere in his writings the Reformer insists that faith renders the life-saving shield effective. In the same vein, Luther is aware that when the apostle Paul maintains we are justified by faith, ‘justified by faith’ is shorthand for ‘justified by God’s grace through our faith on account of Jesus Christ’. Looking at the matter from a different angle, Luther is aware that while we are justified by grace, we are never justified apart from faith, since grace forges within us that faith by which grace becomes effectual. To say, then, that God is our shield is to say that faith is our shield.
Luther, like all the Magisterial thinkers, came to the Reformation only after years of intense immersion in humanism. Having studied at Erfurt University, the major north-German centre of Renaissance humanism, Luther maintained that his humanist studies were a major ingredient in his theological development . “I am convinced”, wrote Luther as early 1523, “that without humanist studies, untainted theology cannot exist, and that has proved true…. There has never been a great revolution of God’s word unless God has first prepared the way by the rise and flourishing of languages and learning.”
For this reason, as soon as Luther read in Paul’s Ephesian letter that the shield of faith is able to nullify “all the flaming arrows of the evil one” he would have recalled a major incident in Roman military history.
In 53 B.C.E, the Parthians, under General Surenas (a military genius), fired flaming arrows in a high trajectory upon their Roman foes. The Roman soldiers held their shields above their heads while the projectiles rained down on them — at which point the Parthians fired a second salvo straight ahead, chest high. While Roman soldiers were still reacting to the second salvo, a third, in a high trajectory, fell down on them once again. Their shields couldn’t protect them against attack from two directions simultaneously. Moreover, because all these arrows had been dipped in pitch and then ignited, as soon as a flaming arrow stuck in a wooden shield it set the shield on fire. Attack from above, attack from in front, the soldiers’ protection aflame: they were helpless, and their situation hopeless. Demoralization soon effected one of the worst military defeats Rome would ever know. With this item of recent history in mind the apostle repeats yet again, “Faith in Jesus Christ is sufficient in the face of all life’s flaming arrows.”
When the apostle spoke of the shield of faith he was drawing on yet another aspect of military lore. As a Roman army advanced, each soldier’s shield, carried on the left arm, protected two-thirds of his own body and one-third of the body of the man on his left. Every soldier counted on the man on his right to protect the right-most one-third of his body that would otherwise be fatally exposed. The shield of faith protects the Christian as well as her fellow-Christian.
Luther’s Renaissance education integrated ancient military history concerning flaming arrows and the apostolic word concerning the efficacy of the shield of faith.
[F] “And though they take our life, goods, honour, children, wife.” We have already discussed the manner in which Luther’s life was threatened. His goods? Enemies accused him of profiting from the colossal sales of his books. In truth, Luther refused all royalties, and died dirt-poor, poorer than Erasmus. His children? Elisabeth’s death, we have noted, broke his heart. His heart was broken again when 13-year old Magdalena, afflicted with tuberculosis, died in his arms. His wife? Luther’s enemies smeared him with accusations of lust and lechery on account of his having married at all, and having married an ex-nun. No matter. He cherished Katharina as a singular gift of God.
At the end of it all he was found singing what he sang in the 1520s, “The city of God remaineth”. Luther knew that while creation begins in a garden, it ends in a city, the city of God – which city has to be “let down” since humans are incapable of building it. How was Luther to get to the eternal city? By faith, of course.
Let’s think once more, therefore, of the shield of faith. There is one additional matter we need to know about the shield of faith. When the mothers of Sparta sent their sons off to battle, their last word was, “Come home with your shield, or come home on it; but don’t come home without it.” If their soldier-son came home without his shield then plainly he had surrendered: disgrace! If, however, he came home with his shield, then he had triumphed gloriously. And if he came home on it, then he had fallen nobly in battle and was now borne home with honour. The same shield that equipped the soldier in life brought him home, with honour, in death.
Faith is the shield on which Christ’s soldier, Martin Luther, has been carried home, with honour, to that city of God which is nothing less than a kingdom that cannot be shaken.
2017 Sept. 16
Lyrics to A Safe Stronghold Our God is Still
1 A safe stronghold our God is still,
a trusty shield and weapon;
he’ll keep us clear from all the ill
that hath us now o’ertaken.
The ancient prince of hell
hath risen with purpose fell;
strong mail of craft and power
he weareth in this hour;
on earth is not his fellow.
2 With force of arms we nothing can,
full soon were we down-ridden;
but for us fights the proper Man
whom God himself hath bidden.
Ask ye who is this same?
Christ Jesus is his name,
the Lord Sabaoth’s Son;
he, and no other one,
shall conquer in the battle.
3 And were this world all devils o’er,
and watching to devour us,
we lay it not to heart so sore;
they cannot overpower us.
And let the prince of ill
look grim as e’er he will,
he harms us not a whit;
for why? his doom is writ;
a word shall quickly slay him.
4 God’s word, for all their craft and force,
one moment will not linger,
but, spite of hell, shall have its course;
’tis written by his finger.
And though they take our life,
goods, honour, children, wife,
yet is their profit small;
these things shall vanish all:
the city of God remaineth.
Source: Church Hymnary (4th ed.) #454
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Open in new tab The Role of Faith Communities in the Treatment of Mental Illness “The Story Of Our Life: Written By The God Who Suffers For Us And With Us”
I: — In my final year of theology studies (1970), University of Toronto, I enrolled in a course, “The Human Person in a Stressful World”. The course instructor was Dr James Wilkes, a psychiatrist connected with the Clark Institute of Psychiatry (now part of Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health). Until then (I was 25 years old) I had apprehended no more of psychiatry than the silly caricatures and stupid jokes that popularly surround ‘shrinks’ and ‘wig-pickers’. Months later I emerged from the course not merely with medical information I had heretofore lacked; I emerged with a new world. Wilkes hadn’t simply added several items to my mental furniture; he had admitted me to a world I hadn’t known to exist.
What was the world? It was the complexity of the human person together with the multidimensionality, pervasiveness and relentlessness of human suffering. It was the configuration of the stresses, frequently swelling to distresses – intra-psychic, social, biological, historical, religious – that bear upon people, together with the configuration of responses to such stresses. (Some responses are individual – stress stimulates some people to greater achievement, while stress effects breakdown in others; other responses are social – institutionalization, whether in hospital or prison, is one such social response.)
My debt to Dr Wilkes is unpayable. Not least, he introduced to me the Diagnostic Statistical Manual; as a result I gained even deeper appreciation of the scope, profundity and versatility of human suffering. He spared me lifelong shallowness born of ignorance; spared me a simplistic, unrealistic approach to the people I would see every day for the next forty years in my work as a pastor.
II: — One month after the course had concluded I was ordained to the ministry of The United Church of Canada, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. In no time I was living and working in north-eastern New Brunswick, one of the most economically deprived areas of Canada. And just as quickly I found myself face-to-face with people whose difficulties were the ‘common cold’ of the psychiatric world; e.g., mood disorders, anxiety disorders, schizophrenia. I also witnessed suffering less commonly seen in the Twentieth Century: hysterical paralysis (episodic leg immobility in someone devoid of a physical impediment) and even hysterical blindness when someone was ‘put on the spot’ in a troubling social situation only to find her vision disappearing and returning repeatedly.
III: — My work as pastor on behalf of psychiatric sufferers found me conversing with family physicians and psychiatrists. Both groups, but especially psychiatrists, frequently appeared suspicious of clergy, even occasionally disdainful. Soon I learnt why: too many clergy (at least of that era) tended to a facile, one-sided pronouncement concerning psychiatric patients as possessing inadequate faith and defective trust in God; psychiatric sufferers were haunted by a guilt they were supposed to have; in addition they were self-absorbed. The clergy-proposed cure was simple: all such spiritual problems could be shed through a combination of ‘positive thinking’, ‘exercise of the will’, and ‘greater faith’. The medical fraternity appeared to think the clergy only worsened the sufferers’ predicament in that to their anguish were now added guilt (they were manifest spiritual failures) and anxiety (they feared they lacked the spiritual resources for rising above their pain).
Thanks to Dr Wilkes I was spared such simplistic glibness. Equipped with what I had gained from him, I revisited my theological formation, now keeping in mind the subtleties and complexities of human distress, determined to avoid naïve assessments and subtle accusations of personal deficiency if not personal failure; determined to avoid, in short, a false spiritualization of someone’s suffering.
IV: — As I revisited my theological understanding I developed a constellation of key spiritual themes found in the Abrahamic tradition. This constellation of key spiritual themes formed the matrix of my ministry to psychiatric sufferers.
[A] The first is elemental: God is for us. Three thousand years ago the Psalmist exulted, “This I know, that God is for me.” (Ps. 56:9) This conviction is the bass note, the downbeat, the ever-recurring throb. It remains the stable basis and the governing truth of everything else: God is for us. It’s picked up again in the apostle Paul’s letter to the church in Rome: “If God is for us, who is against us?” (Roman 8:31). The force of the assertion is, “If God is for us, who could ever be against us ultimately, regardless of all appearances to the contrary?” Since ‘appearances to the contrary’ abound in anyone’s life and especially in the ill person’s life, it cannot be insisted too often that God is for us.
To be sure, those who belong to any of the Abrahamic traditions arising from ‘The Book’; that is, those belonging to the Jewish, Islamic and Christian communities are always aware that ‘The Book’ says much else about God: God is judge, God is wrathful, God’s face is set against evildoers, and so on. Ill people tend to fasten on these texts, convinced that their illness is the result of God’s anger concerning them and God’s judgement upon them.
The general tenor of ‘The Book’, however, is wholly different. To be sure, God is judge (isn’t any person who lacks judgement anywhere in life to be pitied?). Unlike our judgement, however, God’s judgment is always the converse of his mercy. God bothers to judge us only because God has first resolved to rescue us and restore us. (If God didn’t intend the latter he wouldn’t bother with the former: he would simply ignore us.) God’s judgement, then, is always and only the first instalment of our restoration and the guarantee of its completion.
Since, according to ‘The Book’, God is love, love isn’t merely something God does (the implication being that God could as readily do something else if he wished; namely, not love); rather, since God is love, love is all God is and therefore all God can do. God can never not love, never act in a way that contradicts his character. God’s wrath, said Martin Luther, is God’s love burning hot – but always and everywhere love.
Mentally ill people, let me repeat, tend to assume their illness is the result of God’s displeasure with them. Two comments have to be made here: one, their illness isn’t the result of God’s displeasure; two, if elsewhere in life they have mobilized God’s displeasure (ill people like to remind me – correctly – that though they may be ill they are still sinners) God’s judgement is only his love setting us right. God’s judgement is God’s mercy beginning its work of restoration.
God is for us. This note has to be sounded relentlessly, for this note determines the rhythm of human existence.
[B] The second item in the constellation of key spiritual themes: God shares our vulnerability; shares our vulnerability not least because God is vulnerable himself. Ill people, I have found, fault themselves remorselessly for not being invulnerable; for not being strong enough, able enough, competent enough, resilient enough; in short, for not being inviolable. They assume that finitude, limitation, weakness isn’t or isn’t supposed to be part of our humanness. They fault themselves for not being invulnerable in the face of life’s assaults. (I have noticed, by the way, that psychiatric sufferers who fault themselves for their fragility would never fault themselves if they suffered a broken leg in a car accident. Without hesitation they would fault the driver whose car struck them. In other words, when they are physically incapacitated, they can legitimately blame others; when they are psychiatrically incapacitated they can only blame themselves.)
There has arisen in our society a miasma that continues to settle upon and soak into the populace at large; namely, we are, or are supposed to be, invincible, devoid of fragility, frailty and finitude. We are, or are supposed to be, nothing less than titanic in our capacity to withstand assaults. We are, or are supposed to be, possessed of an omnicompetence amounting to omnipotence. Worse, such omnipotence is deemed to be an attribute of God and therefore a property of those made in God’s image.
Omnipotence, however, understood as unmodified, unconditioned power, is terrible. A moment’s reflection should assure us that power for the sake of power; power unqualified by anything; sheer power is sheer evil. Then why attribute it to God?
More profoundly, power, properly understood, is the capacity to achieve purpose. What is God’s purpose? – a people who love him and honour him as surely as he loves and honours us. How does God achieve such purpose? – through God’s own vulnerability. The Abrahamic traditions refer alike to the One who repeatedly, characteristically suffers at the hands of his people yet never abandons them. God’s suffering, in these traditions, is likened to many things, but likened most often to a woman in end-stage labour whose child, conceived in pure joy, has brought her greater distress than she could have imagined yet who will not renounce the struggle but must see it through, until the child who is her delight is in her arms and on her lap.
So it is with God. From a Christian perspective specifically, the cross attests God’s limitless vulnerability (he hasn’t spared himself anything for our sakes), while the resurrection attests the limitless efficacy of limitless vulnerability.
Not only are we humans unable to escape our vulnerability (regardless of the messages advertisers beam upon us); to want to escape it is to want to be titanic. And to think we can escape it is to fancy ourselves gigantic and to ignore our Creator who renders himself defenceless before us for our sakes.
Psychiatric sufferers should be helped to see that their fragility isn’t a sign of moral weakness or personal failure or uncommon ineptitude or unusual folly. They should be helped to see that owning their vulnerability, rather than denying it or attempting to flee it, might just be essential to their recovery. Sufferers should be helped to see that their vulnerability is the leading edge of their triumph.
[C] The third item in the constellation of spiritual themes: God alone is the ‘story-writer’ who can render the negative, seemingly opaque developments and details of our existence a story rather than a chaotic jumble that ultimately defies comprehension.
Imagine a line in the middle of a novel; e.g., “The man who had waited for hours finally walked away, dismayed that the woman hadn’t noticed him.” If the question were asked, “What does it mean?”, the obvious rejoinder would be, “It all depends; it all depends on what preceded this event in the narrative; and no less it all depends on what follows this event; ultimately, it all depends on how the narrative turns out; that is, it depends on the last chapter. The mentally ill person persistently comments, “I don’t know why I’m ill; I don’t understand what it’s supposed to mean; I can’t make any sense of it.” Lack of meaning is a stress in anyone’s life, yet lack of meaning is something that confronts us all whenever we are face-to-face with evil.
We should admit that one aspect of evil’s evilness is evil’s sheer meaninglessness. To the extent that evil could be understood, it would be rational event, its evilness reduced by the explanation. What is evil is finally inexplicable and will always lack meaning, not least the evil of illness.
In the face of the stress of that meaninglessness which makes the burden of illness all the more burdensome, the ill person is always prone to try to reduce the burden by positing a meaning, by ‘finding’ a meaning (as it were) that actually isn’t there but the ‘finding’ of which is easier to endure than no meaning. The problem here, however, is that the ‘meaning’ the ill person posits is arbitrary, unrealistic, and worst of all, self-deprecating. Now she thinks the meaning of her illness is that it was ‘sent’ to teach her a lesson, or to remind her of personal failure, or to make major changes in her life, or to confirm her inherent wickedness. In the interest of reducing her burden she has only increased it.
The truth is, the meaning of any one event in anyone’s life depends on several factors. In the first place it depends on what has preceded the onset of illness. In the second place it depends on what is yet to occur in that person’s life. Above all, it depends on the meta-narrative that gathers up and determines the ultimate significance of all the events, good and bad, in that person’s life – which meta-narrative no one, ill or not, can write inasmuch as no individual is the author of her own meta-narrative.
All of us like to think we understand how life is unfolding and how life’s ingredients are connected until – until a negativity occurs that is nothing less than a ‘surd’ (in the mathematical sense); i.e., a development that doesn’t fit anywhere and can’t be seen to fit or be made to fit; a ‘surd’ development that defies the logic by which we had understood our own existence up to this point. Yet since the meaning of a story depends on the last chapter, and since the last chapter hasn’t been written nor can be written by us, we must admit that for the present illness remains a surd: we cannot determine its meaning at this time nor its place in the conclusive narrative that is anyone’s life. People from the traditions of ‘The Book’, however, maintain that the ultimate meaning of anyone’s life can be entrusted to the One whose meta-narrative gathers up our self-determined, myopic narratives and transmutes them into something whose meaning, truth and splendour we can only await at this time but which we need not doubt.
Let’s change the metaphor. Instead of an author or master narrator let’s think of a master weaver. A weaver weaves loose threads into a rug whose pattern is recognizable and pleasing; more than pleasing, desirable – why else would anyone find the rug attractive and want to purchase it? Two comments are in order here. One, what goes into the rug are hundreds of loose threads of assorted lengths and diverse materials. Two, even while these threads are being woven into a rug, anyone looking at the rug from underneath would see something that wasn’t recognizable, wasn’t attractive, and would seem little improvement on loose threads. And yet, when the weaver has finished and we can look at the rug from above we recognize a pattern, a completion, an orderliness that is comely and convinces us that the rug is a finished work, elegantly concluded. Only as we are brought from looking up from underneath to looking down from above do we recognize what the weaver has accomplished.
Right now all of us are on the underside of the rug looking up at it; and while the apparent lack of order and attractiveness may puzzle us or even amuse us, the mentally ill person is never amused and is more than puzzled: she is dismayed, fearing that her life, seemingly a jumble now, will never be more than a jumble. Lacking coherence now, it will always lack coherence. The Abrahamic traditions, however, maintain that ultimately no one’s life is meaningless; no one has to posit an arbitrary meaning in order render life endurable, fictively endurable. Instead, we affirm that the weaver gathers up all the elements of our existence, including the most painful and incomprehensible, with the result that our life, our concrete existence, finally is and finally is seen to be coherent, meaningful, attractive, useful, a finished work brought to completion.
[D] The fourth item in the constellation of key spiritual themes: a community has to embody the truth it claims to cherish. In short, a community has to embody, exemplify, the constellation of spiritual themes discussed to this point. Since the communities of the Abrahamic traditions maintain, for instance, that there is no human being, anywhere, in any predicament, who is ever God-forsaken, the community that upholds this truth has to embody it.
Note: I didn’t say there is no human being who doesn’t feel God-forsaken. Neither did I say that people have no reason to feel God-forsaken. They manifestly have. Nonetheless, since it remains true that God doesn’t abandon, despise or reject, there has to be a community that doesn’t abandon, despise or reject.
Our concrete embodiment of this truth takes at least two forms.
(a) Most simply, the community shares its material resources with those who are especially needy. Everyone is aware, of course, that there is a government-enforced, non-voluntary sharing of our material resources with the needy. This enforced, non-voluntary assistance is found in the combination of graduated income tax and social assistance and health-care. While this arrangement isn’t an explicit aspect of the life of church or synagogue or mosque, it is the indirect illumination arising from the witness of biblically-informed communities. We ought never to sell it short, and we should continue to ask ourselves what might be the social texture of our society if secularism succeeds in extinguishing the indirect illumination of biblically-informed peoples.
The Mississauga congregation I pastored for 21 years partnered with the local synagogue and Baha’i fellowship in developing two affordable housing projects (value: $35 million). This housing accommodated needy people, among whom were always many who were in psychiatric difficulty, and more than a few whose psychiatric condition was chronic. Quickly we noticed that many of the people we housed were undernourished; whereupon we developed Mississauga’s first food bank. It still operates, and every year it distributes food whose market value is $12 million. Next we noticed that many children were so poorly fed they were underachieving at school; whereupon we fashioned a ‘breakfast club’ in order to give them a nutritious start to the school-day. The ‘breakfast club’ was headed-up by the rebbitzin, the rabbi’s wife. She served unstintingly for 25 years. At one point there were 44 people from my own congregation serving in the ‘breakfast club’.
The most elemental level of community is serving the neighbour’s material scarcity through our material abundance.
(b) The second expression of community is sharing the neighbour’s suffering. To share the neighbour’s suffering where mental illness is concerned is at least to befriend that person and thereby at least reduce the suffering person’s isolation and loneliness.
The mentally ill person suffers what every human suffers in terms of frailty, disease, bodily breakdown through accident, sickness and aging. In addition the mentally ill person suffers from her particular psychiatric problem, indeed lives, lives out, that problem, as the non-psychiatrically afflicted do not live that problem, at least. And in the third place, the mentally ill person suffers the social stigma visited upon the psychiatrically troubled. The community has to be aware of all three levels of such suffering, and remain aware that such suffering, cumulatively, is an appalling burden.
When I was a pastor in Mississauga my wife and I invited back to lunch each Sunday a different family from the congregation. Several matters need to be noted here.
One, the unmarried person was still a family, and should not be overlooked in a society almost exclusively couple-oriented.
Two, in a congregation of 400 families there were always several people who had been diagnosed with assorted psychiatric problems.
Three, the mentally ill person is not only suffering atrociously herself; her family is suffering too, in a different manner to be sure, but suffering nonetheless.
Four, while these people had been invited to lunch, if they were still sitting in our living room at 5:00 p.m., they were invited to supper. I came to see that loneliness is an enormous problem, not least loneliness among those one would think least likely to be lonely since their lives outwardly seemed devoid of social deficit; loneliness especially in those whose mental illness heightened their isolation; and of course loneliness in those whose ill family-member found others avoiding the family.
In the course of our simple hospitality we welcomed to our home and table the bipolar person, the obsessive-compulsive, the phobic, the schizophrenic, the substance-addicted, and those afflicted with personality disorders. Among these were the ‘dual-diagnosed’; e.g., the mentally ill person who is also blind or in trouble with the law.
The role of the community of faith isn’t to mimic the mental health professional; certainly it isn’t to suggest that medical intervention is superfluous. The role of the community of faith is to render concrete its conviction that ill people matter and shouldn’t be ignored. Not least, the role of the community of faith is to hold up – for the sufferer herself but also for the wider society – the truth that the troubled of this earth have been appointed to a future release and recovery more glorious than their pain allows them to glimpse at this time.
Address to the American Psychiatric Association May 2015
Dr. Victor A. Shepherd
Why Should a Christian Study Philosophy?
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and enter Shepherd, Victor in author name boxes
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s Jesus the Only Way to God?
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Is Jesus Both God & Man?
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and enter Shepherd, Victor in author name boxes
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Hans Urs von Balthasars “Prayer”: A Theological Investigation
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Why Should A Christian Study Philosophy?
Victor Shepherd
Publisher: Regent Audio
Product Number: RG3041A
Is Jesus the Only Way to God?
Victor Shepherd
Publisher: Regent Audio
Product Number: RG3151
Is Jesus Both God & Man?
Victor Shepherd
Publisher: Regent Audio
Product Number: RG3152
Hans Urs von Balthasar’s “Prayer” A Theological Investigation
Victor Shepherd
Publisher: Regent Audio
Product Number: RG3154S
Balthasar’s “Prayer” is a theological investigation that approaches the topic from several angles: the doctrine of the Trinity, liturgy, the “encounter” understanding of Martin Buber, the place of mysticism and the role of reason. Protestants may be surprised at the Word-orientation of his discussion. All Christians are indebted to this thinker who exemplified expertise in liturgy, philosophy and theology, yet was most “at home” on his knees in adoration of his Lord.