In Relationship, At Risk

Think of a time you thought something would happen and it ended up not happening.

Given how many expectations we have, it's surprising how relatively few of them are not realised. When I go to sleep at night, I fully expect to wake up. So far I have not been disappointed. When I sit on a chair, I expect it to hold me without breaking. When someone says something to me, I expect to hear them.

Such expectations are almost always met. We don't even think about them as possibilities. As far as we are concerned, they are certainties. But of course they are not certainties, and every so often we get a stark reminder of that. A chair breaks. An illness affects our hearing. A friend dies.

It is relationships that cause the biggest and most frequent gaps between expectations and reality. Choosing to love another person puts you deeply at risk, because now your expectations are resting not on favourable probabilities but on complex persons who can make all sorts of choices. Of course as a relationship grows, so to do the percentage probabilities of certain outcomes, while the choices actually decrease. This is epitomised in the act of proposing, where the man eventually leaves the woman with only two choices - yes or no. Before he gives her that choice, of course, days/weeks/months/years have been spent putting the probability of a "Yes" in his favour. As risky as this yes or no question is, as risky as a positive answer to this question is, he would not ask it if he didn't expect a Yes.

But what if she says Yes, what if the marriage goes ahead, and then she proves to be unfaithful? Or what if the husband is the unfaithful one? An expectation is not met, a promise is broken, and a heart is shattered.

To be in relationship is to be at risk, in small ways and in the largest of ways.

Consider these words spoken by a person in the Bible who knows this full well:

And I thought, 'After she has done all this she will return to me', but she did not return...

The husband thought his wife to return to him, but she did not return. An expectation is not met, an imagined future is not realised. The husband loved, he put himself at risk, but all he got in return was disappointment and heart break.

This person in the Bible is YHWH.

If God's love for Israel put him so at risk, how much more at risk is he in the giving of his son for the sake of the world?

If God's greatest act of love is to be one with relational integrity, perhaps the real question isn't so much what happens to people who do not accept it, but what happens to God himself if his love is rejected?

Finally, if God's relentless love for faithless Israel is such that Paul can say "all Israel will be saved", what about the future of a faithless world?

Tense Hope

There is a tension to Christian hope. On the one side, we have the hope of new creation. The material world is a gift from God, and though at present it is experiencing labour pains, the hope of the world is similar to the hope of a pregnant woman: after the pains emerges an inexplicable gift that is cherished beyond all previous experiences.

What's more, it is humanity's hope of resurrection bodies that paves the way for the rest of creation to be redeemed. We are not waiting to cast off our physical bodies and join a non-physical reality of pure bliss. Rather, we are awaiting the redemption of our bodies, which -- along with the resurrection of Jesus -- is the definitive "Yes" to creation.

In short, there is a joyous material dimension to Christian hope that must not be overlooked.

But this material hope is counterbalanced -- even superseded -- by another hope: the hope not of new creation, but of the Creator. Ultimately, it is the Giver of material gifts that Christians put their hope in; it is His presence that is longed for more than anything else. Yes we earnestly desire the gifts, but the greatest gift is the Giver himself, and our hope is that he will one day make his dwelling place with human beings in such a way that deep, intimate knowledge of him will not only be possible, but inescapable -- "the whole earth will be filled with the knowledge of God, as the waters cover the sea". To quote Brueggemann for the umpteenth time, our hope is that "the human person may appear in the presence of YHWH naked, defenseless, unashamed, and unafraid." What a hope -- to walk unafraid with YHWH. The good doctor goes on to write that,

The promise of presence and communion is important because it tells powerfully against the commoditization of contemporary culture, as expressed in market ideology and as it invades the ecclesial community as well. If the promise concerns only God's gifts, then God becomes only instrumental to human hope, and the hoper lives in a world of commodities, which in the end give neither joy nor safety. Thus it is affirmed that YHWH is the true heart's desire of human persons, the true joy of human life, and the sure possibility of life lived in hope.

Now, let me tell you about a little thing I like to call a "God-shaped hole"...

A God in Relation: Unsettling

The film Amadeus portrays how quickly a relationship with God can disintegrate when bound to our "religious" ways of thinking and conducted on our terms alone. Consider Antonio Salieri's pious prayer as a boy:

Lord, make me a great composer. Let me celebrate Your glory through music and be celebrated myself. Make me famous through the world, dear God. Make me immortal. After I die, let people speak my name forever with love for what I wrote. In return, I will give You my chastity, my industry, my deepest humility, every hour of my life, Amen.

His prayer appears to have been answered initially with him enjoying success as the court composer in Vienna, but along comes Mozart, and everything changes. God's glory was to be celebrated all right, but it was not to be celebrated through the music of the chaste Salieri. Instead, the voice of God was to be heard through licentious Mozart, that despicable jar of clay gifted with all that Salieri longed for and more.



This he could not handle; this he had to renounce, and in so doing he was forced to renounce God himself:

From now on we are enemies, You and I. Because You choose for Your instrument a boastful, lustful, smutty, infantile boy and give me for reward only the ability to recognize the incarnation. Because You are unjust, unfair, unkind, I will block You, I swear it. I will hinder and harm Your creature on earth as far as I am able.

The tragic irony is palpable. Through Mozart's music, Salieri was confronted with the glory of God that he longed to see celebrated, but he could not look on it in awe and wonder. All he felt was disgust and injustice. The god he thought he knew was a fraud created by the religious mind. The real God -- the God "incarnated" in the music of Mozart -- was revealed to him, and the shocking revelation led him to turn away, knowing full well what -- or rather, whom -- he was rejecting.

An unsettling God indeed.

All Powerful and All Loving?

In a world not without its fill of pain and suffering, how can god be both all powerful and all loving?

This is the question that dominates a particular branch of theology known as Theodicy, which literally means “the justification of god” or something like that.

But more than that, it is a question most, if not all, of us grapple with it, be it often or be it when some kind of tragedy inevitably invades our small corner of the world.

Before I briefly share my thoughts on this question, let me say this: It is never wrong to cry out with a “How?” or a “Why?” The Psalms (and plenty of other books in the Bible) are filled with the outcries of anguished souls questioning their god. The reality of painful human experience is not glossed over in Scripture in favour of glib theological musings and formulae.

And on that note, allow me to present you with some glib theological musings and formulae.

First things first - the question in question once more: In a world with so much evil, how can god be both all powerful and all loving?

There are a number of presuppositions brought to the table when this question is raised, which I think I’m right to be dubious about.

1 - That there is a contradiction between an omnipotent, all loving god and a world where bad things happen. Why can’t the two co-exist? The question is often asked in the same way that someone might ask “How can a room with no windows have one of its windows wide open?” but clearly it is not in that category of obvious contradiction. So from where is the contradiction derived? From how we think such a god ought to operate within his world?

2 - That we know who the word “god” is referring to. Which god are we talking about when we ask this question? Where did we get our ideas about what he is like? Talk to Richard Dawkins, and he is a fictional character, and a really horrible one at that. Talk to N.T. Wright, and he is the world’s loving creator who is intimately involved in putting his creation to rights. Talk to a deist, and god is some being who created the world and then left it to run by itself as he resides in a far away place. In short, the unknown in this question is not simply the answer to the paradox it poses; the unknown is perhaps god himself.

3 - That we know what godly power and godly love would look like if we saw it. We come to this question with our own definitions of power and love, and we perhaps remain unwilling for those definitions to be altered.

There are I’m sure other presuppositions that we all have, but those are some of the main ones I can think of.

I approach this question as a Christian, which means that I think the unknown god in the paradox is known through Jesus of Nazareth. This, for me, is highly significant when it comes to wrestling with the tension posed by the question. If we look at the question through the three lenses Richard Hays uses in his book on New Testament Ethics -- community, cross, and new creation -- the significance of Jesus becomes clearer.

Community

Jesus did not come and eradicate all of the evil in the world through powerful love. He began something transformative, but he then left the power (so to speak) into the hands of his disciples. They were to be his community which would be a light to the world, empowered by the spirit of god to manifest the kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. God -- in what might be considered foolishness -- has chosen this community to continue on from where Jesus left off. Perhaps if the church of today was more willing to be god’s healing agent in a broken world, the apparent contradiction between god and his creation would be rather hollow.

Cross

If I have made Jesus sound like simply the founder of some new human movement, then the cross will surely correct this. Christians see this as -- amongst many things -- god’s definitive solution to the problem of evil. It is the place where “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself”.

Moreover, the cross also redefines what we mean when we talk of power and love. It is the ultimate revelation of both. As Paul says in Corinthians, god’s power looks like weakness. Actually, it is weakness; it is power in weakness. When we talk of an all powerful god, this usually triggers images in our mind of some glorious being floating around on a cloud and zapping things in order to fix them (or perhaps smite them); rarely does it trigger the image of a man dying on a Roman cross.

Love also gets a make-over, seen now not to be a pain-free, happy-clappy thing, but something costly, something which feels hurt as well as joy. God’s love revealed on the cross is a love that runs deeper than him wishing us well, with his power then the power to make us well. It is a love that enters into the depths of human need and suffering; a love which can cry out “My god, my god, why have you forsaken me?” The real paradox is that god has experienced the feeling of god-forsakenness.

New Creation

Finally, the Christian knows that what we see now is not the way things will always be. There is hope. God has raised Jesus from the dead, and so though we suffer now, we can be confident that it does not and will not have the last word over our lives. This does not mean that suffering is to be ignored or trivialised. It is real and tragic. New creation has burst into life, but the old order of being lingers on, and we continue to feel its harrowing effects, and we continue to cry out to god “Why?” and “How long?” The tension of the question “how god can co-exist with evil?” is felt by the Christian, and is not supposed to be explained away. I hope I haven’t done that.

I only hope to have shown that god has not remained silent on the issue. As the Psalm which begins with “My god, my god, why have you forsaken me?” goes on to say,

You have answered me

Indeed, god has not hidden his face from us. He has heard our cries. Through Jesus of Nazareth he has dealt a devastating blow to evil, triumphing over it through the cross. Through his community of believers he intends to point back to what Jesus has accomplished, and to point forward to the consummation of his new creation. The present remains a time of tension and toil, but there also remains faith, hope, and love in the midst of it all, and the greatest of these is love. We are to re-enact in the present the powerful love of god that was made known on the cross, doing so by faith in Jesus, and in the hope that one day all wrongs will be made right.

Christian Theology

What then might a specifically Christian theology be? More, I take it, than simply an account of what Christians have believed in the past, or believe in the present, though those tasks will always be part of the whole. That whole includes a necessarily normative element. It will attempt not just to describe but to commend a way of looking at, speaking about, and engaging with the god in whom Christians believe, and with the world that this god has ceated. It will carry the implication that this is not only what is believed but what ought to be believed. To the relativist's response, that this will seem very arrogant, Christian theology will reply that it can do no other. If it is not a claim about the whole of reality, seen and unseen, it is nothing. It is not a set of private aesthetic judgments upon reality, with a 'take-it-or-leave-it' clause attached. Even the relativist, after all, believes that relativism is universally true, and sometimes seeks to propogate that belief with missionary zeal. Christian theology only does what all other worldviews and their ancillary belief-systems do: it claims to be talking about reality as a whole.

- N.T. Wright

And Justice For All

As I was listening to an online sermon and reading a blog, a weird case of simultaneity (my new favourite word, even though I can't pronounce it) occurred - both the preacher and the blogger were talking about God's justice and mercy in antithetical terms. "God is just" and "God is merciful" were put forward as mutually exclusive descriptions of God's character, and so the puzzle is how can He be both; how do we reconcile these two opposites?

In the above mindset, a simple definition of justice and mercy is the following:

Justice is getting what is deserved.

Mercy is not getting what is deserved.

Given these definitions, it is quite natural to pit one against the other and therefore wrestle with God's embodiment of both. The problem, however, is that when it comes to justice, "getting what is deserved" (especially in the punitive sense) is not the entire biblical perspective. Far from it, in fact.

We tend think of justice almost exclusively as retributive justice - the criminal receives fitting punishment for his crime(s); he gets what's coming to him. But when it comes to justice as it is portrayed in Scripture, retributive justice is not the dominant form, both before Christ and most certainly after Him. Consider these passages from the Old Testament:

The LORD works righteousness and justice for all who are oppressed. - Psa. 103:6

It is well with the man who deals generously and lends; who conducts his affairs with justice. Psa. - 112:5

Hear my voice according to your steadfast love; O LORD, according to your justice give me life. - Psa. 119:149

Therefore the LORD waits to be gracious to you, and therefore He exalts himself to show mercy to you. For the LORD is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for Him. - Isa. 30:18

There are dozens of other verses that could be examined, but a quick look at these chosen few will lead to some surprising conclusions.

Psalm 103:6 describes God's actions towards the oppressed, whom He treats with "righteousness" and "justice". These two words crop up together numerous times, and are almost synonymous in some instances. For example, Amos's famous passage calling for justice to roll like waters and righteousness to flow like a stream. Therefore if we don't think of righteousness in terms of punishment befitting a crime, we shouldn't jump to that conclusion with regards justice. The psalmist is clearly not saying that God punishes the oppressed in a just manner, but that His justice brings healing and restoration to their desperate condition.

The next verse (from Psalm 112) equates dealing generously and justice. We think of dealing justly with people in a "balance the books" way, but here the psalmist says that generous giving is an act of justice; not grace, not mercy, but justice.

Psalm 149 brings justice together with God's steadfast love. The psalmist is pleading to God for life, and makes his plea on the basis of God's justice. To our ears this sounds foolish -- "Getting justice from God means getting what you deserve, and since you're a sinner you deserve death" -- but this particular writer did not possess our narrow-minded view of justice. For him, God's justice and God's steadfast love could be mentioned in the same sentence without any need for a reconciliation between the two words, and so he felt free to appeal to God on the basis of His life giving justice. This is all a far cry from our death-sentencing God of justice.

Finally, if it's not already clear, Isaiah does my job for me by actually saying that God's graciousness and mercy flow out of His justice. He declares that YHWH waits to show grace and mercy to His people "for (or 'because') YHWH is a God of justice", which wreaks havoc on our either/or approach to justice and mercy.

As I said, this is just a small sample of passages that deal with justice, but they help make the rather surprising point that God's justice and God's mercy are not to be thought of antithetically. Retributive justice should not be all we know of the subject. Scripture is pregnant with a "restorative justice" motif, whereby the lame are made to walk, the captives are set free and the broken-hearted are healed. Jesus brings to fulfillment God's vision and promise of healing justice, coming as He did not to condemn the world, but to "let justice roll down like waters" (Amos 5:24), to "proclaim justice to the nations" (Matt. 12), to "put the world to rights" as N.T. Wright might say. (Yep, I just equated what N.T. Wright might say with Scripture.)

An important question remains - How might all of this relate to the cross? I'm still scratching my head on this one slightly, because this is usually the place where justice and grace (or mercy) are pitted against each other, and there is certainly a case to be made for it. For example, Jesus got the punishment we deserve (thus God's justice is satisfied) and we are therefore able to receive God's grace. But is there another way of looking at the atonement in light of some of the above? Is this where Christus Victor comes in? To be continued, perhaps...

Seeing God Work

As far as the ordinary man in the pew is concerned, God is dead. His daily life runs its predictable, gilt-edged, humdrum course without reference to God. He would of course be scandalised by the suggestion that God is dead, but if it were true it would make no practical difference to his life. His work, his home, his sport, his politics, yes, and even his church life would all run on very much the same. They have no place for God; not practically, at any rate.

Rev. Dr R.T. France, 1970

These sober words were written almost forty years ago, and yet the “ordinary man on the pew” today would surely feel their conviction if he was honest with himself. As one such ordinary man, I can only utter a regretful “Amen” to France’s diagnosis.

As he says, we would be aghast and outraged at the mere suggestion that God is dead, and rightly so. Yet our surprise and anger would be founded on semi-believed theological propositions, and so would hold little weight with those making the provocative suggestion, and even with ourselves. We are trying to live in a world without gravity while simultaneously holding to Newton’s universal law of gravitation when debates about gravity emerge. We float to meetings about gravity every Sunday where we affirm its authority over our lives, and then float back home, further steeped in the theoretical knowledge of gravity (or perhaps not), but with its reality all but lost to us.

God is no theory to be proved. He is a reality to be experienced. The reality. “In Him we live and move and have our being” said Paul to the philosophers of Athens. The apostle to the Gentiles was under illusions about the necessity of God for all of life. Suggest to Paul that God is dead, and he would not have entertained the notion, as we wouldn’t either. But if one took a look at his life, it would be extremely difficult to even make such a suggestion - the dramatic conversion from violent opponent of the church to chief church-planter, the miracles, the Christian communities formed under his apostleship, the power of the Spirit in his life and ministry -- all of these things speak of a living God, active in the church for the sake of the world.

I recently co-lead a discussion at the youth group in our church where the topic was “Christianity; or, What have we gotten ourselves into and why should we stay in?” One of the questions was simply “What reason(s) did you have for becoming a Christian?” There were numerous answers given, but one in particular struck me: Seeing God work.

Note the present tense.

In giving due priority to the historical work of Jesus (or work of God through Jesus), we have surely been faithful to those first witnesses. But I think that in doing so we have neglected the present power of the living God in ways that were never intended by those who placed such great weight on the cross of Christ.

Without intending it to, this post ties in with those undeveloped thoughts on the gospel from a few days ago. We have in some circles a gospel of the past and the future: Jesus died for my sins, and so I get to go to heaven when I die. This is perhaps why that Southern Baptist panel was so dismissive of Tom Wright’s gospel summary that Jesus is Lord. It’s a present tense statement!

God as a living, present, active reality makes us uncomfortable. We can handle knowing that Christ died for our sins. That’s good news that talks directly about us, and we like that very much. But Jesus is Lord? Well, that focuses on Jesus, and so the good news of such a reality is already lost to us since we are not the centre of attention.

Does seeing God work now fit into our gospel? Or are we willing to neglect this reality to the point where God, for all intents and purposes, is dead? The ordinary man or woman sitting in church needs to hear of the Lamb who was crucified. But they also need to hear of and experience the power the resurrected Lord whose reign has already commenced, and who exhorts us to bring every aspect of our lives -- our home, our sport, our politics, and yes, even our church life -- under His kingship.

“A God to be reckoned with”, says R.T. France. A “Transcendental Interferer”, says C.S. Lewis. What do we say?

Offensive to Our Minds

Thinking about Peter Enns' incarnational analogy has, coincidentally enough, got me thinking about the incarnation (you know the one I'm talking about). God didn't climactically, definitively, irrefutably reveal Himself as some otherworldly being; a majestic entity so far removed from humanity that its onlookers were forced to conclude that this must be God. No. God revealed Himself as a man. A Jew raised in Nazareth embodied the fullness of deity. Do you want to know what God is like? Look at Jesus. He is nothing less than God with us.

Perhaps I'm wrong on this, but the incarnation -- the enfleshment of God in the person of Jesus -- seems to me to be something many of us have a problem with. Not in the sense of not being able to fully wrap our minds around it, because lets face it, we're never going to solve such a mystery. The problem I think we have is more that it's rather offensive to our minds. It's like hearing that the inventor of the television is about to unveil the full power of his creativity and imagination on an unprecedented scale, only for him to come out from behind the curtain with a television, and one that looks pretty much like the others already available. We expect more from this brilliant inventor, and we certainly expect more from someone worthy of the title "God".

The humanity of Jesus certainly offended people of His day, some of whom were outraged at the way He talked and acted as if He were Jehovah Himself. They expected so much more from God, and so it is with many today who disbelieve, and dare I say, a few who do. To these (and I can include myself in the mix), Jesus' humanness is either proof that He ain't no God, or it is something not to be taken too seriously if one wants to think of Jesus as God. Some part of us (be it big or small) feels that the incarnation was inadequate as revelation, and we don't take Jesus at His word when He says that His disciples had seen the Creator simply by looking him.

Of course like all Christians I will affirm the incarnation, knowing that it was necessary for salvation. But this line of thinking makes it seem like what was going on in God's mind pre-incarnation was the following:

"Alright. So the humans have disobeyed me. The only way to sort this mess out is to die on their behalf, and I can only do that if I become human, so that's what I'm going to do. It won't be particularly God-like of me, but it's got to be done."

I don't know about you, but such thinking doesn't sit well with me.

What if, and bear with me on this, the incarnation was the most God-like thing to be done? What if becoming human was not only something God did out of necessity, but out of desire (and not only desire to save)? God's actions spring from Himself. He is not forced into action by any external system or law. To say God became man because it was necessary for our salvation is true, but does the truth go even deeper? And if so, does the incarnation begin to be less of a problem, less of an offense to our minds and hearts?

Discuss!

Theology And The Church

I love theology (which is code for I love sitting on my own reading books and forming thoughts). You don't read Best's International Critical Commentary on Ephesians before bedtime and not have a passion for this kind of stuff. However, the words of Richard Hays go close to the bone of a personality type like mine. For as Hays says of the Apostle Paul,

the constant aim of his theological reflection is to shape the behaviour of his churches. Theology is for Paul never merely a speculative exercise; it is always a tool for constructing community.

Theology and the church are, or at least should be, inseparable. Paul's theological thinking cut to the heart of church life, of human life. It interacted with issues ranging from what happens when we die to sleeping with prostitutes.

As Dr Autry said to me recently, the goal of theology is not to be the guy with the special reading of Second Timothy. The goal is the goal of the New Covenant: to know God, and to be His people. We separate theology from church life at our peril. This I need always to remember.

It's God's

There are probably as many definitions of the gospel as there are Christians. Each of us has our own unique way of telling the good news that is at the foundation of Christianity. The core elements should all be in place, but they never quite come out the same way from two different sets of lips.

I've heard and read many descriptions of the gospel. I've been in discussion groups where the gospel is the topic for the evening. I've heard people argue that so-and-so isn't the gospel, but that so-and-so is. There is so much squabbling over it's definition that I think we've (or at least I've) lost sight of it's source.

Perhaps we should approach the gospel not primarily with a "what?" question, but first and foremost with a "whose?" question. This isn't to downplay the importance of what is contained in the gospel. But I think in all gospel-speak, we are only on track when we are fully aware of the following: the gospel is God's gospel.

The gospel is told in human words, but it does not find it's source in humanity. It is not humanity's word about God, but God's word concerning Himself (and His righteousness, as seen in Rom. 1:17). The early church was very clear about this, as witnessed in the Book of Acts. In numerous passages Luke writes of "the word of God" spreading and causing change in communities (6:7, 8:14, 11:1, 12:24, 18:11). The apostles knew that it was not their words that were being preached, but God's words.

Paul makes this explicit in his letter to the Galatians. He writes quite emphatically that,

I did not receive it (the gospel) from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.

Whatever we denote as "the gospel", we ought to be careful yet encouraged that we are claiming to be speaking God's word. Careful because it is our duty to faithfully pass on what has ultimately been passed down from God Himself; encouraged because the power is not in our words, but God's. By the power of God's word the world was made, and He has promised that,

as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall My word be that goes out from My mouth; it shall not return to Me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it (Isa. 55:10-11).

Whose gospel is it? It's God's.

This is Our God

Hillsong have done it again! Wishy-washy verses leading into a great chorus. After numerous readings I'm still struggling to understand the content of either of the verses in the song This Is Our God, but they contain solid Christian words such as the ever popular "grace" and "Jesus" and the not quite as popular but still important "word" and "Spirit", so I'm willing to overlook the lack of coherency.

And, needless to say -- but I'll say it anyway -- the first person singular pronoun takes its regular place throughout a Hillsong song. Why not just put in "we" and so forth? Given that the chorus takes on a plural scope ("Freely you gave it all for us", emphasis mine) it actually makes more sense to keep the song corporate throughout. Perhaps the songwriter switched to "us" only because it (sort of) rhymes with the word "cross" which is used on the subsequent line:

"Freely you gave it all for us
Surrendered your life upon that cross"

If the writer was really intent on being all personal, there was an available alternative:

"Freely you gave it all for me
Surrendered your life upon that tree"

Hey, I didn't say it was a good alternative...

Anyway, enough about what I'm not too keen on. Like I said, the verses aren't great (but still singable). The chorus is excellent though. Especially because it ties in with something I've been reading/writing about over the past few weeks, namely, we know God through the cross. Who is our God? He is the One who chose to make Himself human and die a humiliating death in our place. He is the God of power in weakness, the God who can bring life out of death. All of these wonderful truths are incorporated into a climactic chorus that celebrates the resurrected crucified Lord Jesus. Listen to it at 3:00+ on the clip below (by the way, isn't there a hint of "Fix You" by Coldplay throughout the song?)

Anyway, here are the lyrics to the chorus:

Freely you gave it all for us
Surrendered your life upon that cross
Great is the love
Poured out for all
This is our God

Lifted on high from death to life
Forever our God is glorified
Servant and King
Rescued the world
This is our God

Dare I ask, any thoughts?

God is Cruciform

There has been much talk around these parts recently of knowing God primarily through Jesus. However, within that primary means of knowledge lies a further primary revelation of who God is. We do not primarily know who God is through an examination of Jesus' prayer life; we do not primarily know who God is by wrapping our heads around Jesus' ethical teaching; we do not primarily know who God is by marveling at Jesus' many miracles. As important as these things were to His life and ministry, it is the Cross to which we must look if we are to have a revelation of who Jesus is, and therefore who God is.

In his book with the snappy title, Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification and Theosis in Paul's Narrative Soteriology, Michael Gorman makes the simple and yet profound point that God is cruciform. That is, God is shaped like a cross. Through this Ancient Roman method of capital punishment we find a definitive revelation of God breaking through.

We don't -- or at least I don't -- often think of the cross in such a way. Usually the cross is seen by Christians as an event -- the event -- through which sins were once for all dealt with. It is of course nothing less wondrous than that, but there is yet more. There is revelation to be seen at the foot of the cross. The character of God -- indeed the heart of God -- is on display every time we survey the cross of Christ. There on Calvary He showed power in weakness, glory in humility, love in pain. Moreover, this is what genuine divinity looks like. Jesus' call for His disciples to follow His example of servanthood in Mark 10 was nothing less than a call to theosis - conformity to the image of God.

"You shall be cruciform, for I am cruciform" is how Gorman paraphrases God's call for His people to be holy, because holiness is now to be understood in the light of the cross. Our response to this revelation is emulation, not merely by our own efforts of course, but by the power of the cruciform God who works within us.

My problem is that I don't always want to be cruciform. And yet in my clearest moments I realise that there is nothing more beautiful, nothing more powerful, than a life lived for the sake of others. This is the life of the Kingdom, and we see it no more manifestly than on the cross where the Son of God loved us and gave Himself for us.

A New Body

In a sort of belated nod to Pentecost Sunday, here is a Charles Price quote which is quite provocative on first hearing. The context is that according to Price, two things happened on the day of Pentecost. The first and most obvious things is that the disciples received the Holy Spirit, as Jesus promised they would. But, as Charles Price goes on to say,

"...a second thing happened on the Day of Pentecost that is equally important and that we must understand. And it is this: Jesus Christ received a new body. God gave the Spirit to those waiting disciples and He gave to His Son a new body."

The key to understanding this is to understand that these aren't two distinct happenings. The Holy Spirit is elsewhere called the Spirit of Christ. This is why Paul could say in Galatians that "it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me". Paul understood this reality very well, for it was the risen Jesus who asked Saul the persecutor of the church, "Why are you persecuting me?" Not, "why are you persecuting my followers?" but "why are you persecuting me?"

The consequences of this are such that we'd rather not believe any of it to be true. We'd rather separate Christians from Christ, because that makes it easier to treat them in whatever way takes our fancy. We may not articulate it, but in our minds Jesus is up in the clouds somewhere waiting for God to let Him out of the traps and come back to earth again, but in the mean time we just have to get by with some abstract notion of the Holy Spirit -- the lesser person of the Trinity.

This is obviously untrue, but do we really know what the truth is? And not just in words, but in experienced reality? Do we even want to know? Do we want the responsibility of truly being a member of Christ's body? Do we want to be the ones to carry out His purposes? Do we want to look at our brothers and sisters in the church with the knowledge that what we are doing and saying to them is what we are doing and saying to the Messiah?

Cast your mind back to the first verse of the Book of Acts. Luke tells Theophilus that the Gospel he wrote was an account of what Jesus began to do and teach. The implication is that the second volume -- Acts -- is what Jesus continued to do and teach through His new body empowered on the Day of Pentecost.

There are some pitfalls to be avoided of course. I am not the Messiah; I'm a very naughty boy. It's not like the climax of the film Spartacus, where all Christians stand up and say "I'm Jesus". There is a sort of paradox, where we point away from ourselves and towards the risen crucified Lord, and yet we are intimately united with this Lord and thus members of His body and empowered by His Spirit.


ps - I love paradoxes. I think I'm going to write a book on theological paradoxes some day.

Revealed in Jesus

"Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son..." - Hebrews 1:1-2a

The word 'God' is loaded with baggage. When someone hears it, they instantly recall a set of ideas about God that were handed down to them, or that they read in a book, or that they just conjured up in their own minds; most probably that set of ideas is some concoction of the three. N.T. Wright tells an amusing story related to this 'God confusion' (although I've cut out the amusing part, so now it's merely a story).

When he was chaplain at an Oxford college, he used to make it a goal to briefly meet each of the first year students; it was a sort of "I'm the chaplain, and feel free to come to me at any time" kind of meeting. Of course with many of the students attending the college being learned folk, they used to quip, "I'm afraid you won't be seeing much of me. I don't believe in god, you see." N.T. Wright would then respond with a question: "Which god don't you believe in?" This would take the students by surprise, so they would stutter out a few phrases about the god they didn't believe in: a being up in the sky, looking down on the world disapprovingly, waiting to punish bad people and reward good people, and occasionally intervening for the odd miracle or two. To this Wright would say, "Well, I'm not surprised you don't believe in that god. I don't believe in that god either. Rather, I believe in the God I see revealed in Jesus of Nazareth".

When Christians use the word 'God', who are we talking about? How do we know who God is? I think that too often we bring to the table the "spy in the sky" theology mentioned above, or some other notions of God that we have derived from a book, a television program, or even a misreading of Scripture. We then try and fit Jesus into that theology. The trouble is, He doesn't fit. Jesus of Nazareth simply doesn't conform to many of our ideas about God.

I'm only echoing Wright when I say that this needs correcting. That opening verse in Hebrews, along with numerous others in our New Testament, tells us that Jesus is the definitive revelation of God. If you want to know who God is and what He is about, look at Jesus. Don't try and fit Jesus into some other concept of God that you have developed. Start with the man born in Bethlehem and raised in Nazareth. Start with the witness of the Gospels.

We will only understand the word "God" as a Christian should when we understand Jesus. The Father has chosen to speak to us through His Son made flesh, and it is to Him that we must listen. Jesus, through His words and through His deeds, reveals the Father to us, and when this is our starting point we are a million miles removed from any "spy in the sky" theology.

When I use the word "God", I need to be clear who I am talking about, because I too easily create a god who is far removed from the One exposed in Jesus. And also, when people like those in Oxford say they don't believe in God, I need to be sure that the God they don't believe in is the God I believe in. I need to be sure that they are not rejecting some abstract notion of God, but that they are rejecting the God revealed in the person of Jesus. I regret that too often, through my words and deeds, I have done the Christian understanding of the word "God" a disservice. I need to get back to basics and affirm with Wright, "I believe in the God I see revealed in Jesus of Nazareth".

Increase Faith

What does it mean to have faith? And if you don't have a lot of it, what does it mean/look like to build up your faith? Specifically, what does one do if one finds their faith in Christ lacking to the point where one is unsure if they have any faith at all?

I sometimes find myself faced with these questions, which leave me looking within in order to try and muster up some more "faith" as if it's some kind of power in and of itself, all the while ignoring the reality that faith is nothing without an object. Nobody simply "has faith". We all have faith in something or someone. It's similar to love, in that you don't just have love. Your love must have an object, a person or thing which you can say you love or that you are in love with. And in much the same way that love grows, one of the sure ways to increase faith is intimate knowledge of the trusted object. This is how it should be with regards "faith in Christ". Christ is the object, and faith in Him grows through deep, piercing knowledge of His person, character and work.

This truth is beautifully articulated by Clement Read Vaughen in a letter written to theologian Robert Lewis Dabney (a text I came across in the book Why Johnny Can't Preach). Dabney became blind and weak in his latter years, and knew that death was imminent. He wrote to Vaughen, wondering if he would have faith strong enough to face his end. Vaughen replied with an illustration of a traveller encountering a chasm over which a bridge crossed:

What does he do to breed confidence ion the bridge? He looks at the bridge; he gets down and examines it. He don't stand at the bridge-head and turn his thoughts curiously in on his own mind to see if he has confidence in the bridge. If his examination of the bridge gives him a certain amount of confidence, and yet he wants more, how does he make his faith grow? Why, in the same way; he sill continues to examine the bridge. Now my dear old man, let your faith take care of itself for a while, and you just think of what you are allowed to trust in. Think of the Master's power, think of his love; think how he is interested in the soul that searches for him, and will not be conforted until he finds him. Think of what he has done, his work. That blood of his is mightier than all the sins of all the sinners that ever lived. Don't you think it will master yours?...

Now, dear old friend, I have done to you just what I would want you to do to me if I were lying in your place. The great theologian, after all, is just like any other one of God's children, and the simple gospel talked to him is just as essential to his comfort as it is to a milk-maid or to a plow-boy. May God give you grace , not to lay too much stress on your faith, but to grasp the great ground of confidence, Christ, and all his work and all his personal fitness to be a sinner's refuge. Faith is only an eye to see him I have been praying that God would quiet your pains as you advance, and enable you to see the gladness of the gospel at every step. Good-bye. God be with you as he will. Think of the Bridge!

Your brother,
C.R.V.

Deep-seated knowledge of the Messiah whom Paul claims is in you is a sure way to increase faith in Him, but of course the necessary knowledge is not merely information held in the head. To extend the bridge illustration, it's no good examing the bridge every which way possible, concluding that it is a well built bridge, but then deciding to stay on the same side of the chasm. There must be an experiential knowledge of the bridge's trustworthiness for the knowledge to be incarnated and complete. This is where a cerebral person like me falls down. I want the knowledge without the experience, the reception without the response, but that just won't do.

When encouraging others in faith, we would do well to remember the strategy employed by the author of Hebrews. Relate to others:

Who Jesus is
What Jesus has done
How we should respond - with confidence, but not with complacency

The God of the Bible

If the God you serve is a God unwilling to dine with prostitutes and scoundrels, then yours is not the God of the Bible.

And the Pharisees and their scribes grumbled at his disciples, saying, "Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?" And Jesus answered them, "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance." - Luke 5:30-32

Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes go into the kingdom of God before you. - Matt. 21:31

The Witnesses of Old

I may not be an apologist, historian, or scientist, but I am a communist creationist. For me, either life starts with an Other with the power of being (someone eternal), or there is no life at all. And more specifically, that Other is the God of the Bible. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and the God who stepped into His creation in the person of Jesus. I don't intend to give a rigourous proof for these statements, but there is one thing to note when confronted with the Bible's dramatic opening line, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" and what immediately follows.

This account of creation was not written in a vacuum. Not according to Jewish tradtion anyway (whether you want to believe what Jewish people have to say is another matter entirely). Moses didn't write about God as Creator because of some philosophical musings that popped into his wandering mind one day. Moses wrote about God as Creator because he witnessed this God turn water into blood, bring a plague of locusts upon Egypt, and lead His chosen people to freedom by parting a sea. Moses and the children of Israel experienced God the Creator in dramatic fashion, which is why it ain't no thang for Moses to begin the chronicles of God's dealings with His creation by stating the fact that God is the Creator of everything. I mean they claim to have seen Him manipulate creation in all manner of ways, and their existence as a nation is at least some kind of evidence that they might just be telling the truth.

The upshot of all of this is that one can't ignore the witnesses of old when drawing conclusions about creation. Some of these witnesses claim to have seen God control creation in miraculous ways. Other witnesses claim to have seen the same God begin a new creation through the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Isn't there a chance that they might actually be telling the truth?

Geeky Christian Circles

Imputation is one of those words you generally only come across in theology. It and its cognates are used in the context of how one is justified before God. The theology of justification (I'm boring you already, aren't I?) most Christians who read this blog have been brought up on is something not unlike the following:

We have The Law, but no matter how hard we try to keep it we will never be made right with God in that way. God's standard is perfection, and all fall short of it. Therefore in order for us to be made right with God, Jesus lived the perfect life, died on a cross, which led to this exchange: Our sin was laid on Him so that by faith His "righteousness" or perfection could be laid on us.

This exchange is what is known in geeky Christian circles as double imputation: Our sin is imputed (or attributed) to Christ, and His righteousness is imputed to us. For those of you still with me, this sounds reasonable, right? Perhaps you would use different words, but I imagine you'd be describing the same process as the one I have outlined when talking about our justification.

Up until just over a week ago I'd have signed up to this description of justification without a second thought. Me bad. Jesus good. Jesus gives me His goodness meaning me not considered bad anymore. All done by faith. Yay.

That all sounds rather lovely (and it is, don't get me wrong), but as Tom Wright (aka N.T. Wright) shows in his book Justification (I know - a whole book on Justification), this notion of imputation does not appear to be as scripturally sound as those sola scriptura Reformers once thought, and as sound as most of the Protestant Church thinks today. This may appear to be pointless theological sparring, but if so then why not just erase the first half of most of Paul's letters, which deal almost exclusively with Christian doctrine? Because pointless theological sparring is sometimes important. Of course I don't pretend that any of what I say on the matter is interesting or correct, but surely these theological debates have a purpose, right?

Anyway, I think one of the most obvious places where double imputation falls down is the entire New Testament, which doesn't once mention "the righteousness of Christ" or the "righteousness of Jesus". Surely if Jesus' righteousness or moral perfection was imputed to us we would see the phrase somewhere, but alas, it is conspicuous by its absense.

The theory of double imputation also runs the risk of presenting God as somewhat of a legalist, which is ironic since legalism is what Luther battled so hard against in coming up with this divine exchange. In this view, what God requires of us is perfection. Since we couldn't deliver, God, out of sheer grace, decided to send someone to earth who could. Therefore we stand before God on the basis of Jesus' moral perfection and our gettin' some of that by faith in Him and His sacrificial death. Perhaps that's an unfair caricature, but when I boil my own thoughts on the matter down I end up with something not disimilar to it, and it just doesn't seem to fit with the metanarrative of Scripture.

In this line of reasoning, the story of our justification starts with our inability to keep the Law. I don't deny that inability for a second, but as Scot McKnight says and as N.T. Wright implies, God is a covenant maker before He is a Law maker. Therefore the basis on which we are justified was never intended to be on the Law, but on the covenant. It's not a case of the Law not working, therefore God coming up with plan B instead. There is no plan B. God's dealings with us are based on plan A: His covenant with Abraham in which He promised that He would bless all the nations of the world through Abraham's seed. This is where double imputation -- while not completely wrong -- again falls down, or at least short. For me, it's emphasis is still on Law, and our standing before God is seen in terms of moral perfection, albeit Christ's and not ours. As Wright says however, the basis for our justification is God's covenantal faithfulness, which he basically equates with "the righteousness of God".

Therefore what is revealed in the gospel (Rom. 1:16-17) is not primarily the moral perfection of Christ made available to us by faith, but the faithfulness of God to the covenant He established with Abraham, which finds its fulfilment in the Messiah Jesus, who remained faithful even unto death so that God's plan A -- His plan to reconcile the world to Himself through the seed of Abraham -- might be accomplished.

A third issue I have with double imputation is the distance it creates between the Messiah and His people. I've seen it illustrated through the use of two circles, with our sin being shown to hop over to Jesus' circle and His righteousness coming over to ours. Almost like the equivalent of swapping Ricardo Scimeca for a "shiny" in the Merlin Premiership Sticker Collection of yesteryear. As Wright argues however, it is our being "in Christ" that justifies us. Transferal of merits doesn't quite do justice to the relational nature of our justification, whereby we are declared right with God on the basis of our intimate connection with His Son.

I'm only scratching the surface of a topic which has produced countless books over the years and quite a few recently. And what's more, I'm still thinking through this stuff myself, having been fed on double imputation for so long. I know there is a paucity of Scripture references in this post, but believe me - Wright's book is full of them. I'd be interested to know what others think. Does any of this matter when it comes to Christianity? Clearly Tom Wright and John Piper think it matters, since they've dedicated books to proving the other misguided. And what's more, they approach the topic as pastors as well as scholars, indicating concern for the sheep God has given them to look after. I'm not quite sure of the pastoral implications of all of this, but when I find out I'll let you know. I'm sure you'll be thankful for another post on double imputation [?].

Law and Gospel

'The witness of the Law and the Prophets to the righteousness of God is not merely, as Christians have sometimes strangely supposed, a witness concerning a severe retributive justice; it is a witness concerning God's gracious saving power, as Psalm 143 demonstrates.'

As I read Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul by Richard B. Hays I am continually beaten over head with this one truth: I don't have a clue how to read and interpret the Old Testament. Up until recently I wasn't too concerned with this. The Old Testament is, well, old, and large chunks of it don't apply anymore. I don't have to have bulls and goats sacrificed on my behalf, nor am I forbidden from eating my favourite of the meats - pig meat.

And yet as obvious as this sounds, the Old Testament was the only Bible the apostle Paul and all of the other Jewish Christians of his time knew. They had "the Scriptures" (what we call "the Old Testament"), and that was it. The Law, the Prophets and the Writings were Paul's bread and butter. He didn't have the Book of Hebrews to chew on, nor could he open up his Bible and read Romans. I mean he wrote Romans! And what's more, he didn't even write it thinking he was writing Scripture. Paul wasn't looking to render the Scriptures as he knew them obsolete by writing a "New Testament". Paul was writing a letter to the church in Rome in effect saying "This is what the gospel of God as found in the Scriptures is about. This is its fulfilment." That is why he could say in Romans 3:21,

"But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it..."

This sounds rather paradoxical, but what Paul is saying is that the Scriptures are like a signpost. You don't arrive at the signpost and think "I'm here. I've arrived." The signpost and the destination are not one and the same. They are necessarily "apart". However, they are by no means unrelated, and yet as Hays rightly points out, we as Christians draw lines between the signpost (the Law and the Prophets) and the fulfilment/destination (the righteousness of God found in Christ) and force people to pick sides. In our caricature, the Law and the Prophets bear witness to a capricious God who is fond of punishing people who disobey Him, but the New Testament? Well, God had a change of heart, and lets just be thankful for that.

For Paul, such a reading and interpretation of the beloved Scriptures he grew up on would have deeply offended him. His gospel was not plucked out of thin air. It was founded on 2,000 years of salvation history. It reverberated with echoes of the Old Testament, from the story of Abraham, to the prophetic writings of Habbakuk to the lyrics of the Psalms. All of these witnessed to the righteousness of God, which has demonstrated itself in Christ and is credited to us through faith in Christ. This is why Hays can say that Paul's gospel "does not annihilate the Law but establishes it".

There is much more to be said on this, and much much more to be mulled over from Hays' excellent book. To close this particular musing out, here is the Psalm which Hays says is echoed in much of Romans 3:

¹Hear my prayer, O LORD;
give ear to my pleas for mercy!
In your faithfulness answer me, in your righteousness!
² Enter not into judgment with your servant,
for no one living is righteous before you.

³For the enemy has pursued my soul;
he has crushed my life to the ground;
he has made me sit in darkness like those long dead.
⁴Therefore my spirit faints within me;
my heart within me is appalled.

⁵ I remember the days of old;
I meditate on all that you have done;
I ponder the work of your hands.
⁶ I stretch out my hands to you;
my soul thirsts for you like a parched land.
Selah

⁷ Answer me quickly, O LORD!
My spirit fails!
Hide not your face from me,
lest I be like those who go down to the pit.
⁸ Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love,
for in you I trust.
Make me know the way I should go,
for to you I lift up my soul.

⁹ Deliver me from my enemies, O LORD!
I have fled to you for refuge!
¹⁰ Teach me to do your will,
for you are my God!
Let your good Spirit lead me
on level ground!

¹¹ For your name’s sake, O LORD, preserve my life!
In your righteousness bring my soul out of trouble!
¹²And in your steadfast love you will cut off my enemies,
and you will destroy all the adversaries of my soul,
for I am your servant.

Faith, Works, and Salvation

I've been thinking a lot recently (uh oh) about faith and works and salvation and all of that. I haven't finalised my thoughts by any means, but a couple of things have occurred to me.

(1) I, and probably many others, am probably more of a Paulian than a Christian. I wrote a piece about Jesusanity a while back which tackled the issue of promoting Jesus' ethical teaching while neglecting His atoning sacrifice on the cross and such. Well, what I fear many of us are guilty of is being members of Paulianity, where we promote the doctrine of "Saved by grace through faith" and neglect almost everything else Paul said, and everything all the other NT writers and Jesus said. Would Paul be happy with this? I doubt it.

(2) As a result of my Pauline focus, I think I may have missed what salvation is all about. Sounds kind of drastic, but for the most part I think it's true. For me, good deeds done out of love have always been "evidences" of salvation. Faith saves me, faith in Christ means I have peace with God, and my (theoretically) increasing Christlikeness is the evidence of that. The more and more I think about this, the more flawed I think it is. Well, not so much flawed as incomplete. I wrote something down along the following lines, but I can't quite remember where. Anyway, it was something like,

"Good works are not the evidence of our salvation; they are the goal."

Salvation is not mere intellectual assent. The essence of being a Christian isn't just thinking like a Christian should think; it's becoming like Christ in both character and conduct. When we reduce our good deeds to proof that we are saved, we really miss the point of salvation. And what's more, we end up selling Christ's salvation as being something purely cerebral and fideistic, thus losing its redemptive, reforming, life-altering aspect. Of course our works should point people to something else, namely the lordship of Christ and the glory of God the Father. We are to preach not ourselves to people, but Christ.

That said, God's purposes in salvation are much greater than we might dare to think, and they very much include our good deeds which are born out of our new character. What's more, the apostle Paul would certainly agree:

"For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them." - Eph 2:9-10

and

"For those whom He foreknew He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, in order that He might be the firstborn among many brothers. " - Rom. 8:29

Christlikeness is the goal, and yet so often I settle for so much less.