A Poem

October

October sunlight falls in unexpected places

Reflection shimmers, surprises, shows

Life, she's lost not all her graces

For Grace, her fount, delight he knows.

"Deserve not I," the protest rings

"Such beauty befalls so unworthy a soul."

Yet over protest, Behold! There sings

A voice so pure, so lovely, so whole.

Like bliss at birth in wake of pain

New creation dawns, and with it, joy

For trespasses past are remebered not, Refrain!

Now employ your all, and again I say, Employ.

Two Thoughts In One

DeYoung, Duncan, Mohler: What's New About the New Calvinism from The Gospel Coalition on Vimeo.

I'm not a Calvinist, and I don't think anyone should be. Paul would be horrified to know that anyone's identity as a Christian is wrapped up in a human being other than Jesus of Nazareth, be it Calvin, Luther, Arminius, Apollos, or even Paul himself.

There will be strong objections to the above paragraph, but I think much of them will rely on a devastatingly false presupposition: That Christian unity is acheived through shared doctrine. If this presupposition were true, then it makes perfect sense for us to label robust bodies of doctrine and identify ourselves with one of them. That would be the most effective way of making people feel united to something. But if this is the kind of unity that we crave, then we of all people are to be most pitied.

I say this not to destroy the importance of shared doctrine. That would make me an idiot. So what am I trying to get it?

If you watched the video clip, did you notice anything missing? 

Consider this small body of doctrine:

...salvation is accomplished by the sovereign grace of God, operating through the death of Jesus Christ in our place and on our behalf, and appropriated through faith alone.

The person who wrote this says that there is not one syllable in this summary that he disagrees with, and I imagine all three of the men featured above would say the same. "But there is something missing", the author goes on to say. Worringly, this something -- or someone -- is actually the source of real Christian unity: the spirit.

Christian unity is a unity of the spirit. And for all of popular Calvinism's talk of "robust" theologies, there is a death-dealing dearth of spirit language that undermines the whole. It is as if a group of people have been given 1959 Gibson Les Paul's, the value of which they know, but with the problem being that they don't actually know how to play the guitar.

Calvinism -- though I question the term itself -- isn't the problem. The problem is with how it is played.

Mohler, Duncan and DeYoung may be right in what they say about the New Calvinism. But I think they are blind to other factors involved in Calvinism's resurgence. Modern Calvinism has embraced a term floated around quite a bit in Irish politics recently - knowledge economy. In this economy, information is power, information is product, information is prestige. He (and I use the masculine deliberately) who can answer the most questions wins.

In short, this is not merely a "religious" movement. There are political, economic, social, theological, philosophical and psychological factors involved that need to be examined. That in itself is okay. Christianity should touch all of these spheres. But it is my hunch that when these factors are examined, Calvinism, like many other expressions of Christianity, will find that the gospel is not being allowed to grow holistically; its light is not being shone on the dark forces at work in our world.

N.T. Wright says that "you can't simply add the spirit on at the end of the equation and hope it will still have the same shape". The spirit not only calls into question what we know, but also calls into question how we know what we know and how we use what we know. Unity goes deeper than shared doctrine. It is a Spiritual thing that finds its expression not only in knowlege but in love.

Reimagining "The Fall"

In Israel’s Gospel, John Goldingay writes, “It is the essence of Israel to be a people with a story….The Old Testament tells us who God is and who we are through the ongoing story of God’s relationship with Israel.” While Goldingay’s assertion is well-founded, I find it striking that Israel’s Scriptures do not begin by telling the story of  God’s relationship with Israel. They begin, rather, with a much broader scope – God’s relationship with humanity, as told in the story of Adam and Eve. Is there a deep connection between the two stories? Does the story of Adam shape the story of Israel, and vice-versa? An imaginative reading of the text suggests so.

In our module "The Biblical Story", one of our assignments is to pick an act from the Bible's narrative and write an essay on it. I chose The Fall, with the above being a little taste of where I went with it. There were many conclusions that I was unable to explore due to lack of space, but one of them is that the story of Adam is best read from a post-exilic context. It was told to "catch the conscience" of Israelites in exile, and in doing so it created deep connections between the story of Israel and the story of non-Israel. The chief connection was not merely that both parties are human beings, but that both parties of human beings are partnered to Yahweh. Moreover, the destiny of non-Israel is contingent on the destiny of Israel - but like non-Israel (as represented by Adam), Israel has been "driven out" from Yahweh's special presence due to disobedience.

It turns out that non-Israel is actually Israel, or perhaps that Israel is actually non-Israel. Their stories parallel up to a devastating exile. What next? *broad strokes conclusion alert*

During Israel’s exile a new story was told amongst the people: The story of a Servant. Would Adam’s story of “falling short of the glory of God” – a story embedded not only in the conscience of the nations, but in Israel herself -- be put to rights through a righteous Servant?

It is into the yoked stories of Adam and Israel that Jesus of Nazareth fits. Indeed, he forms the climax of these stories and in turn weaves one new story for all of humanity to participate in: the story of cross-resurrection; the story of “new creation”. Israel’s Messiah becomes the “second Adam”. The exile is over. Access to the “tree of life” is once more available (Rev. 22:2). The Father is calling for his sons and daughters to return home.

Has Israel’s faithlessness nullified the faithfulness of God? Me genoito! Through the faithful Israelite Jesus, “God’s single-plan-through-Israel-for-the-world” is brought to fulfilment. Blessing triumphs over curse.

Under An Illusion

Leadership is the aspect of life that Christianity has gotten the most wrong. Where we should look so different ("but not so among you") we have simply reproduced the power structures of the world and applied some Christian finishings to ensure we are under an illusion. I have much to learn about what leadership looks like, but here is my starting point:

Relate to people, or your ministry will die; or worse, it will flourish.

Deserve?

It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the LORD set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the LORD loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers, that the LORD has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.

In the words of theologians Will Munny and Snoop Pearson, Deserve got nothing to do with it.

Culturally Conditioned Gospel

The following passage from Lesslie Newbigin's book Foolishness to the Greeks is taken from a post at the Harvard Ichthus.

In speaking of ‘the gospel,’ I am, of course, referring to the announcement that in the series of events that have their center in the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ something has happened that alters the total human situation and must therefore call into question every human culture. Now clearly this announcement is itself culturally conditioned. It does not come down from heaven or by the mouth of an angel…Neither at the beginning, nor at any subsequent time, is there or can there be a gospel that is not embodied in a culturally conditioned form of words. The idea that one can or could at any time separate out by some process of distillation a pure gospel unadulterated by any cultural accretions is an illusion. It is, in fact, an abandonment of the gospel, for the gospel is about the word made flesh. Every statement of the gospel in words is conditioned by the culture of which those words are a part, and every style of life that claims to embody the truth of the gospel is a culturally conditioned style of life. There can never be a culture-free gospel. Yet the gospel, which is from the beginning to the end embodied in culturally conditioned forms, calls into question all cultures, including the one in which it was originally embodied.

- Lesslie Newbigin

This passage is eating me alive...in a good way. Note to self: read more Lesslie Newbigin.

One For the Football Lovers

It has been a week of breathtaking cynicism and opportunism seldom exceeded when it comes to exposing so much that is wrong and morally bankrupt about modern-day footballers and a grubby industry where the rich are so obsessed with getting richer it can feel like money is how we must now keep the score.

To read the rest of Daniel Taylor's wonderful article click here. 

When it has sufficiently depressed your spirits, watch the following video to renew some hope. This is the theology of Michael Laudrup in 11 minutes. The thought "Andres Iniesta...but better" comes to mind, which is big for me.

Permitted To Play

From the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy:

Inasmuch as all Scripture is the product of a single divine mind, interpretation must stay within the bounds of the analogy of Scripture and eschew hypotheses that would correct one Biblical passage by another, whether in the name of progressive revelation or of the imperfect enlightenment of the inspired writer's mind.

From Scripture:

"You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you."

There's something wrong with our doctrine of Scripture when Jesus (along with Paul and most other New Testament writers) would be castigated if they applied their hermeneutical methods today.

Note also an instance of "regressive revelation" found in the Scriptures:

And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, "Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?" He answered, "Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, 'Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate." They said to him, "Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?" He said to them, "Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so."

I'm tired of a lot of things in Christendom today, but one my of chief grievances is its need to protect and defends docrtines in such a way that actually silences the text of Scripture. This deep-seated desire for the Bible to be what we say it is is yet another instance of our wanting a god who thinks like us. He doesn't. In speaking briefly about the gospel in his essay "Reading the Scriptures Faithfully in a Postmodern Age," William Stacey Johnson makes this clear in arguably the best sentence I've read all week:

The gospel is not a "foundation" to render our tradtional notions of rationality secure but a remaking of everything, including rationality itself.

I'm convinced that the majority of people under the Christian umbrella have a concept of God that has been largely formed without relation to Jesus or to the Scriptures, and this concept has then been read into said Jesus and Scriptures...with disastrous effect. I include myself in this majority.

The Bible is not a safe place for our wall of presuppositions. It dismantles them, brick by brick. But it does not leave us defenseless. When it is read as it ought to be read, we are introduced to a living person  who is so unlike us yet who is with us and for us. He is at once unknowable yet known, though only in part. He is unsafe, and yet the source of our greatest security and comfort (which, by the way, should utterly redefine what we mean by such words). He does not dwell in temples of stone or in books of systematic theology. He is free, and in Him we also are free. This is the "strange, new world" that the Bible transports us into. We ought to read it as inhabitants of this world. Raymond Brown captures this hermeneutic well:

After all, in the Scriptures we are in the Father's house where the children are permitted to play

N.T. Wright's Theology In Under 9 Minutes

Breath-taking.