Draw Nigh to God

New Blog Announcement!

2011-06-27T14:31:00.000-07:00

I am pleased to announce the launch of a brand new blog that I am a part of. Four Aberdeen systematic theology PhD students, myself, Jon Coutts, Justin Stratis and Darren Sumner will be contributing to Out of Bounds: Theology in the Far Country, a blog seeking to generate healthy and probing theological conversations. Jon Coutts has written a fantastic opening post articulating the kind of "gospel conversation" we are seeking to foster. Check it out!

This new blog will now be my primary blogging home. Draw Nigh will still be here, but will remain basically inactive for the immediate future.

Transitions

2011-06-26T08:46:00.000-07:00

Though nothing has been going on here at Draw Nigh for several months, quite a bit has been going on for me and its time I post an update. First, my family and I have moved from Aberdeen, Scotland back to our dear old Santa Cruz, Ca. It was crazy trying to get all our stuff between countries, especially since I came back with WAY more books than I went with. It was also very bittersweet as we knew we were coming back to so many friends and family we love in Santa Cruz, but were also leaving friends we love that had become our family in Aberdeen.

Now settled back in, I'll be splitting my time here between finishing my dissertation and working in ministry at Twin Lakes Church in Aptos, Ca., the church I grew up in and love as my family.

As for blogging activity, I'm working on a group blog with some friends and fellow theo-bloggers from Aberdeen which will hopefully be launching this week.

I'm also working on a personal web site which will just be a place to host my CV online and post updates about conferences and publications I'll be a part of.

As for Draw Nigh, it has been close to totally inactive for several months and will likely remain that way for a while, but I'm hoping to come back to it before to long. My hope is to use it as a forum to extend conversations taking place in my church ministry, discussing biblical and theological questions coming from Christians without much or any academic theological training and seeking to address those questions without technical jargon - a theology blog for the Christian layperson if you will.

Updates will be coming!

Evangelical Calvinism Book

2011-04-08T23:18:00.000-07:00

Here is what the table of contents to the Evangelical Calvinism book will look like. I just submitted the final final draft yesterday for my chapter, which is entitled "The Depth Dimension of Scripture: A Prolegomenon to Evangelical Calvinism", and am pretty excited about it. They are looking for a release date late 2011/early 2012. Be on the lookout!

Original Autographs

2011-03-24T10:22:00.000-07:00

So, I've been thinking. As a person who desires to make a living pastoring and teaching in the Evangelical world, I might be incredibly stupid to bring this up, but I don't like statements of faith that talk about the Bible being inspired "in the original autographs". So many churches and educational institutions have this line in their doctrinal statements, often as the first line of it. This doesn't sit right with me.

What don't I like about it? Well, I'll tell you.

I'm pretty sure this is what people mean by "original autograph".

First, the historical reality of something called an "original autograph" is entirely doubtable for many books of the Bible. What was the "original" version of the Psalms? Does "original autograph" refer to the first written version of each independent Psalm? The first time a collection of Psalms were brought together? The collection as we now have it in our Bibles? Statements which limit the scope of inspiration to original autographs show a lack of appreciation for the processes involved in bringing much of the Old Testament into the form we have it. Why limit the Spirit's inspiring work to a particular stage in the life of a text's production, especially when a term like 'original autograph' is so ill suited to specify which stage we have in mind?

Second, more importantly, and more in line with what Evangelicals really care about, explicitly limiting the inspiration of Scripture to a supposed "original autograph" calls into question the authority of Scripture as it is present in the church today. It makes Scripture's authority in the church today definitively dependent on the human work of text criticism rather than the divine work of the Holy Spirit. Our confessions need to be statements of faith in God in his work of revelation and reconciliation, while of course including his use of creaturely media to accomplish his will, among which Scripture is essential. That is to say, our confessions need to be biblical! Scripture speaks of no such things as original autographs, so why make them an object of confession? (If you say, "the Bible doesn't have the word 'Trinity' in it either", I'll seriously punch you.) New Testament writers appeal to the Old Testament as authoritative without ever grounding those appeals on a distinction between original autographs and anything else. In fact, they freely cite the Septuagint, a translation of the Hebrew Old Testament into Greek, obviously not original autographs, yet there is no qualifying of its authority. Likewise, if we are to confess the inspiration of Scripture, which we certainly must do, we need to define that inspiration in terms broad enough to see the Spirit's work include the whole range of processes by which the books of Scripture were composed, redacted, collected, and preserved through the ages. (Actually, we first need to see the composition of the biblical books in coordination with the redemptive acts God has done in the foundation and life of Israel and the church in which Scripture has its authority and is to be interpreted).

The questions brought up by the admission of stages of composition or redaction, questions such as "if there were several versions of a book along the way, which version is God's Word", make the mistake of thinking of divine revelation entirely in terms of the verbal form of Scripture rather than in terms of the living God continually speaking of himself through those verbal forms by his Spirit. In other words, anxiety over such questions manifests a view of the Spirit's work in history so narrow and punctiliar as to be nearly deistic. If the Spirit doesn't speak now through Scripture as he spoke through it as it was first received, then it is of no use to us. If he does speak now through it, then our statements of faith out to reflect such a trust in Scripture in the unity of its original reception (if it even makes sense to speak of such a thing) and its present reception.

That being said, I am still willing to sign statements containing language about original autographs. It is not that I hold suspicion about the inspiredness of Scripture in any earlier version than we have now, its just that I see no reason not just say that we believe Scripture to be inspired and authoritative for Christian thinking and living. I see no benefit gained by the inclusion of "in the original autographs", only problems. Am I missing something?

Some Worthwhile Rob Bell Reviews

2011-03-19T10:51:00.000-07:00

Updated: 6:51 pm GMT, 3/19/2011
Well, if you follow this blog you'll notice I've tried to step back from all the hoopla surrounding Rob Bell's recently released church bonfire fuel, Love Wins. But try to avoid it as I may, the onslaught of ridiculous things said about it on the web and the thoughtful things my friends in Aberdeen have said about it, especially since a few of them have now actually read it, has brought me to order it for myself: it'll be here on Tuesday and I'll read it by next weekend - expect some thoughts to follow, if I have any. In the meantime, I've also been encouraged that some thoughtful and respectful reviews have finally started to appear.

Fuller President Richard Mouw has a good one here.

Steve Holmes, senior lecturer in systematic theology at the U. of St. Andrews, has a great review series of it . So far there are three parts:

Part 1, arguing that though the book is flawed, it is nonetheless important and worth reading for its suggestions that what is wrong with what many Christians have been taught about salvation and life-after-death brings with it a quite unbiblical view of who God is, also that Bell is unambiguously not a Universalist.

Part 2, arguing that virtually all the pillars of Reformed Orthodoxy (Edwards, Hodge, Warfield, etc.) support Bell's contention that there will be vastly more people in heaven than in hell, though this is one of the most attacked claims in the book.

Part 3, arguing that Bell has taken an unfortunately reverted to the use of loaded questions, caricature, otherwise less than gracious tactics in this book, unlike his previous books. This entry seems a bit cut off, like he was in the middle of developing a larger point and accidentally hit the "publish" button.

David Congdon has done an expansive (over 13,000 words!) response to a review of Bell's book by Mark Galli, senior managing editor of Christianity Today. The review is broken into five parts; an index can be found here. I've just begun reading this one myself; the stated intent is to challenge Galli's characterization of Bell as a liberal in opposition to orthodox Evangelicalism.

Finally, though Bell doesn't call himself a Universalist, Robin Parry calls himself one and has a helpful article in the Baptist Times making clear what Christian Universalism is and what it isn't.

Though all the controversy will certainly die down before too long, my fear is that its primary legacy will be that of having caused a massive increase of acceptance of conservative Reformed theologies that compromise on the love of God for the sake of a contractual system that fits with our preconceptions and asserts our privilege. That is why I hope more thoughtful people actively engage the controversy so that the primary outcome might be one of growth in understanding rather than further entrenchment. If any of you are aware of other worthy reviews of Bell's book (let the reader understand), let me know in the comments.

Is Theology Totally Irrelevant to the Church Today?

2011-03-18T04:14:00.000-07:00

John Webster's editorial in the new issue of IJST has me a bit depressed. In it he discusses the conditions in which theological intelligence is most likely to thrive. His first point is that it is likely to flourish when it understands its vocation as "contemplative and apostolic", contemplative in that addresses itself to the deep things of God and apostolic because it commends these things to others - no problem there. Second, the whole enterprise of Christian theology is enhanced when it attracts godly and intellectually gifted people to its pursuit - no problem there either.

Its in points three and four I get bummed out.

Third, Christian theology flourishes when in some measure it enjoys favourable
institutional circumstances: some particular academic or religious form of life which
is hospitable to a work of the mind with little apparent impact, some happy gathering
of minds with sufficient rapport and energy that their unique talents combine to form
something like a school. (Webster, "Editorial", International Journal of Systematic Theology, vol. 13, no. 2, p. 128)

Those of us who have made the sacrifice to leave our normal lives and go to a theological school are blessed (if it is a good school) to temporarily live in a situation that satisfies this condition. I can attest that in Aberdeen we are abundantly blessed with a situation in which academic, spiritual and social life intertwine in an almost Edenic situation for theological pursuit. We read and think and write and talk (some of us even pray) all the live-long day. Those who have gone through this training for the spiritual life of the mind/intellectual life of the spirit and have returned to the real world have made, as Webster notes, "little apparent impact", no sales-record-breaking books, no mega-church ministries. Usually guys like us go into rather humble academic teaching or church ministry jobs. The question is whether we will be able to foster similar intellectual situations when we leave the academy and go back into the real world. Those of us who get university jobs won't have this problem, but those of us who go back to our homes and churches have this question in front of us: Will the insights we have gained and the patterns of reflection we have developed in our theological study benefit the life of the church for whom we toil, or will it all be filtered through ears who only hear the potential for church growth or other practical impact. This leads Webster's fourth point:

Fourth, Christian theology flourishes when it honours and is held in honour by the Christian community. Theology is ecclesial science, a work of reason pursued (whatever its precise institutional locale) within the community of election and faith. All its inquiries ought to hold that community in high esteem, as a servant glad to be about its tasks in such a company; and that company, too, should esteem this servant and expect good things of its service. ("Editorial", p. 128)

I've already alluded to my worry here: will the churches us theologians go to and serve, either as pastors or even on a volunteer lay level, welcome us as theologians, value our training and insights, be willing to hear and consider the sometimes difficult things we have to tell the church? Have Evangelical churches in America become so focused on the tangible (cars in the parking lot, butts in the pews, hands in the air, testimony of changed lives - all good things by the way) that it simply does not value the other kinds of good things theologians' service has to offer? Most of us love the church and want to serve it; the worry is that it doesn't love us and doesn't want our service.

Webster (who I should probably mention is my doctoral advisor, not that I otherwise wouldn't think he is right about everything, which he is), does go on to alleviate my depression in his fifth point which is that we get it wrong when we think these conditions are in fundamentally worse shape now than they were at some other point in history - "Theology is not exiled from its past but its future." The present is not depressing in light of the past but in light of the future in which sin is removed as an obstacle and theology is fully united to He whom it considers. The fifth condition is that we believe theology is actually possible, that in spite of the limitations imposed on us in our currently fallen context, we believe that "God is not hindered by our hindrances", that God speaks and enables us to hear and understand. On that basis, no matter what intellectual climate I find myself in in the future, I will pray with Habakkuk "I stand in awe of your deeds, O LORD. Renew them in our day, in our time make them known" (Hab 3:2), not that God would restore some notion of the past but that he would reach into the present from the future and give the church a love for himself and for thinking on the gospel greater than its present love for spectacle and novelty in his name. I pray this against my own fears that I make myself increasingly irrelevant to the church by pursuing disciplined thinking on the church's foundation.

(To get more people to be directed to this post from Google: Rob Bell, Hell, Universalism, Sex, Money, Murder - thank you).

Church and Gospel: Which determines which?

2011-03-16T04:37:00.000-07:00

Reading the first pages of prolegomena in Robert Jensen's Systematic Theology is refreshingly brisk and painless work. In situating the task of systematic theology within the self-understanding of the church, he gives a simple account of the church as the community formed by the expansion of the gospel from those who directly witnessed the risen Christ and who both recognized the universal import of what they witnessed and moreover were directly told by Christ to go and tell the nations, to the progressive expansion of people hearing that message and thereby becoming proclaimers of it to new hearers.

But fairly quickly he makes what I think is a problematic move:

It is the historically continuous community, which in this way began and perdures, that her own linguistic custom calls "the church." "Church" and "gospel" therefore mutually determine each other. Whether we are to say that God uses the gospel to gather the church for himself, or that God provides the church to carry the gospel to the world, depends entirely on the direction of thought in a context. (Jensen, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, pp. 4-5).

Is this right? Does the church determine the gospel in the same way or even to the same degree that the gospel determines the church? To say yes would seem to lead to all kinds of problems, most obviously the problem that since the church is a continuous community and therefore a community spanning generations, centuries, and even millennia of cultural change, as the church inescapably changes with the times we would have to say that the gospel itself changes.

Of course, if in reaction to this we decide that gospel and church must be conceived so that the gospel is entirely free vis-a-vis the church, able to promote itself through other means just as easily as through the church, then we would have to hold out the possibility of multiple churches, multiple communities that the gospel calls into being with no underlying unity obligating them to work toward making that unity visible.

It would seem that the solution is to hold gospel and church inseparably together but in a consistently ordered way so that the gospel is the determinant of the church and not the other way around. What the gospel is is the message of Jesus Christ through which the Holy Spirit gathers a people together for God, while the church is the Spirit's servant chosen to continue that message, but always under a unilateral conditioning by the message, not mutually conditioning it. The gospel and the Church are bound together in inseparable unity, but as a unity of master and servant, not substance and container. The master has chosen this servant and carries out his work uniquely through this servant's service, but this service is always freely chosen by the master. Conceived as a relation of substance and container, we would have to say that though it is the value of the substance that determines the need and worth of the container, the container is what actually gives shape to the substance. However, conceived as master and servant, it is the master's command that determines the servants's service; the servant's service does not determine the master's command.

A Damaging Ambiguity in Modern Worship

2011-03-09T03:10:00.000-08:00

After living in Scotland for about a year and a third, attending a Church of Scotland church where the worship music is primarily hymns and an organ, I spent most of December and January back home in Santa Cruz, Ca. It was great in those months to be back at my home church where my wife and I both grew up and have tons of friends and family, but something I had struggled with for years in the kind of modern worship we do at our home church was brought fresh to my mind in its contrast with more traditional hymnody. (Generalization alert: just go with it). Hymns are focused on who God is, what he has done, asserting the worshippers' faith in him and asking for God's blessings in faith. Modern worship is primarily concerned with the worshipper's (notice the different placement of the apostrophe) subjective response to God's being, presence and/or blessings. Where hymns sing things like...

See from His head, His hands, His feet, Sorrow and love flow mingled down! Did e’er such love and sorrow meet, Or thorns compose so rich a crown?

Modern worship sings things like...

The fullness of Your grace is here with me, The richness of Your beauty’s all I see, The brightness of Your glory has arrived, In Your presence God, I’m completely satisfied

There is an important difference here that I think causes a significant amount of spiritual anguish for many who participate in modern worship. The modern worship song is describing a state of mind that the worshipper is claiming for him/herself, one in which God's beauty is all they see so that they are completely satisfied. How does one sing that if what they actually see is the ugliness engulfing their lives leaving them anything but satisfied? A spiritual pressure is put on the worshipper to feel that way, to manipulate their own psychology to conform to that feeling. Some do. Some are somehow able to play that part with relative ease. I won't speak to their own spiritual situation because I simply can't relate to it, but I usually suspect that they are forcefully hiding something from themselves - I realize, however, that it really isn't my place to judge. Others are faced with a crisis. They are led to the conclusion that this kind of elevated feeling is what faith looks like, and they either need to drum up some good vibrations or deal with the fact that they might just not be capable of faith.

Notice how the hymn doesn't demand that kind of psychological conformity. It calls the worshipper to think about the gospel, not to feel a certain way but simply to recognize it. It is speaks of the grace, beauty and glory of God's presence in the creaturely realm and even elicits an emotional subjective response, at least from me, but the hymn isn't about that subjective response, it occasions it. The modern worship song is actually about the subjective response; one gets the sense that the feeling is the actual intent or object of the song.

There is a theological ambiguity at play here that I want to address. As biblical as it is to speak of the faithfulness of God and the satisfaction that comes in receiving it, we must pay constant attention to the lingering effects of sin. That we worship God as sinners means that his beauty will never be all we see until our redemption is made complete when Christ returns. We will never be completely satisfied in God's presence this side of Christ's return because we are not yet in his presence free of the entanglements of sin. We are in his presence in Christ and his presence is in us by the Spirit, but that reality is hidden with Christ in God for the present, the Spirit being present in us as the promise that we will one day be satisfied.

These thoughts have been brought to mind for me as I have been reading Karl Barth's commentary on Paul's Epistle to the Romans, a troubling book in many ways but nonetheless filled with theological insight. Speaking to my frustration over modern worship, Barth has this to say about people's assumption of experiencing God:

Whenever men suppose themselves conscious of the emotion of nearness to God, whenever they speak and write of divine things, whenever sermon-making and temple-building are thought of as an ultimate human occupation, whenever men are aware of divine appointment and of being entrusted with a divine mission, sin veritably abounds - unless the miracle of forgiveness accompanies such activity; unless, that is to say, the fear of the Lord maintains the distance by which God is separated from men.

Later, he quotes Calvin:

Everything by which we are surrounded conflicts with the promise of God. He promises us immortality, but we are encompassed with mortality and corruption. He pronounces that we are righteous in His sight, but we are engulfed in sin. He declares His favour and goodwill towards us, but we are threatened by the tokens of his wrath. What can we do? It is His will that we should shut our eyes to what we are and have, in order that nothing may impede or even check our faith in Him.

Calvin's call to place our faith in what we hear in the gospel rather than what we see in our experience brilliantly captures the heart of the gospel. If we are consciously aware that we are intentionally negating our experience of seeing ugliness and being unsatisfied in faith, then I think we can joyfully sing the modern worship song (though we'd still probably favor the hymn). I can sing it not as a description of how I feel, but as a statement of faith, faith in the reality of the new creation I am in Christ, the one that really does only see God's beauty and really is satisfied in God's presence. The problem is that I don't see modern worship services making this contradiction clear; I see them feeding the confusion, making the worshipper think that it is their job to drum up the feelings rather than having faith in the promise despite their feelings and perception.

The answer? I don't know, but I think getting more people in leadership in modern worship churches to read Barth couldn't hurt. Keeping the dialectic of God's faithfulness and our faithlessness as a more explicit theme in modern worship would be helpful as well. Your thoughts?

Colloquium on Theological Interpretation in NZ

2011-03-08T03:48:00.000-08:00

Anyone living in or able to get to NZ this summer interested in theological interpretation of Scripture should attend this colloquium.

Colloquium on Theological Interpretation

Vaughan Park, Long Bay, Auckland, New Zealand, 19-20 August 2011

Announcement and Call for Papers

Sponsored by Laidlaw-Carey Graduate School, Auckland, New Zealand and the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

Featuring Joel Green and Murray Rae as keynote speakers and respondents, two scholars who have been prominent in the development of theological interpretation as a discipline:

Associate Professor Murray Rae is head of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Otago. He has been involved in a number of initiatives concerned with the theological interpretation of Scripture, including the Scripture and Hermeneutics Seminar and the Journal of Theological Interpretation. He is a member of the editorial board of the JTI and is series editor of the JTI monograph series. He is also the chair of an International Colloquium on theology and the Built Environment and has continuing research interests in the work of Søren Kierkegaard, Biblical Hermeneutics, Christian Doctrine, and the development of Christian faith amongst Maori.

Professor Joel B. Green is Professor of New Testament Interpretation and Associate Dean for the Center for Advanced Theological Studies at Fuller Theological Seminary. He holds the Ph.D. in New Testament Studies from the University of Aberdeen (Scotland), as well as the M.Th. (Perkins School of Theology) and the B.S. (Texas Tech University). He has completed further graduate work in the neurosciences at the University of Kentucky. In the academic world of biblical scholarship, Professor Green is noted above all for his contribution to the theological interpretation of Christian Scripture, his work in Luke-Acts, and his commitment to interdisciplinarity. In the world of the church, he is known for wearing his scholarship lightly, for his concern with the mission of the church in the twenty-first century, and for his commitment to renewal.

Papers

This colloquium will explore the theory and practice of the theological interpretation of Scripture. The contributions by our two key note speaker / respondents will be supplemented by papers from scholars in New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific and from further afield. Potential papers might cover, but are not limited to, the following types of areas:

· Theological interpretation of particular texts.

· Issues relating to the practice of theological interpretation.

· Questions of method and theological interpretation.

· The history and landscape of the theological interpretation as a discipline.

· Cross cultural reflections on theological interpretation.

· Contemporary social, cultural and political reflections from a perspective of theological interpretation of Scripture.

· Theological interpretation, church and mission.

Papers should be designed to take 30-35 minutes to deliver with 10-15 minutes for discussion following. Abstracts of papers should be submitted no later than 31 March 2011, and should be sent to Tim Meadowcroft: tmeadowcroft@laidlaw.ac.nz. Our intention is to publish a book of essays on theological interpretation based on the offerings at the colloquium.

Attendance

There will be a fee of $50 for the colloquium (no charge for students enrolled in R133 for Friday, $15 for Saturday), with an additional $60 per night for accommodation if you wish to stay at Vaughan Park. If you would like to attend this event please register your interest via email to christina.partridge@laidlaw.ac.nz and further information will be forwarded to you in due course.

Vaughan Park Anglican Retreat and Conference Centre is a place of hospitality, conversation, theological encounter and refreshment at Long Bay on Auckland’s North Shore

T. F. Torrance Retreat

2010-11-19T01:25:00.000-08:00

I had the opportunity to participate in the first annual (probably) T. F. Torrance Retreat this week at the Firbush Retreat Center on Loch Tay (pictured) here in Scotland. It was an absolutely glorious experience. The setting was beautiful, perhaps more so for the horrific weather, the wind and rain beating down on the beautiful lake (loch) and mountains. There were spectacular, if wet and muddy, walks through forests and down by the lake. But more importantly and equally wonderful were the paper and discussion sessions. These were given by scholars and pastors intimately familiar with, and some related to, Torrance and his work. All were fantastic, as were the Q&A sessions due to the makeup of the group of about 25 people, roughly 1/3 doctoral students doing dissertations on Torrance, and the other 2/3 being pastors and professors of theology. Us students were eating up all the anecdotes about Torrance given by those who had personally known him.

As I said, the papers were great. Bob Walker, nephew and student of TFT and organizer of the event, gave three papers:

An introduction to the material in Incarnation and Atonement, the two volumes of Christology lectures Torrance gave at New College, University of Edinburgh edited by Bob.
Resurrection, Ascension and Eschatology
The Holy Spirit: The Completion of Atonement and the Apostolic Foundation of the Church

These papers were all outstanding and faithful restatements of TFT's thinking on each of these topics. The conversation after each was deep and engaging and Bob's extensive knowledge of his uncle's writings and thought was impressive as he interacted with the questions.

David Torrance, younger brother of T. F. and J. B. Torrance and a remarkable theologian and pastor in his own right, gave a paper on the Vicarious Humanity of Jesus and another on The Doctrine of the Church. These were unquestionably the highlight of the week for me, though I really cannot offer much of a helpful summary of either paper beyond what could be guessed by anyone with a knowledge of Torrance theology by the titles. David is very much a pastor with a profound theological mind. That is to say, he is not first a theologian who might be distinguished by a pastoral bent, but a minister of Jesus Christ who has a profound grasp of the inner coherence of God's love in the Gospel and an ability to articulate it in a way that is both intellectually satisfying but more importantly, spiritually potent. I have an ever increasing sense that T. F. Torrance was the same sort of man. Though David did not have the academic career of his brothers or nephews (Iain and Alan in particular), he very well could have, having been offered teaching jobs such as a chair in systematic theology at the University of Edinburgh but turning them down because of his calling to parish ministry. The papers he gave, the Q&A sessions afterward, and a few personal conversations I was able to have with him, all gave me a clear sense of the kind of theologian, or rather minister of the Gospel, I want to be.

Offering balance with a more traditional Calvinist perspective, Andrew McGowan, minister in Inverness and former principal and professor of Reformed Theology at Highland Theological College, gave a paper on Participation in Christ. While agreeing with TFT that Reformed soteriology needs to have a greater stress on the inclusion of the believer in the person and work of Christ than the Westminster Confession gave it, having itself a more exclusively forensic understanding, he then distinguished between four ways of understanding that inclusion: deification in the traditional Eastern Orthodox sense, theosis as differentiated from deification by Myk Habbets in his recently published dissertation (McGowan thinks Habbets characterizes TFT's position inaccurately on this point), participation in Christ as advocated by Julie Canlis, Bruce McCormack, and TFT (McGowan thinking TFT's position is better understood as participation than theosis), and communion with Christ, which McGowan advocates. The conversations that followed were lively. I greatly appreciated McGowan's willingness to be the sole voice of critique of TFT's understandings of election and soteriology as his clear thinking and commitment to his tradition made for a much more interesting discussion than would have been possible without him.

Last but certainly not least was Bruce Ritchie's remarkable paper on the Gospel and the Question of Universalism in Torrance's thought. This one might need its own post. It was intensely interesting. Ritchie acknowledged that Torrance's position here is explicitly and self-consciously inconsistent - Christ has reconciled all humanity to himself through his life, death and resurrection, accomplishing universal atonement, yet people may still end up in hell by rejecting the grace Christ gives them and thus falsifying its work for them. Ritchie told of being a student of Torrance's and hearing him answer the question whether anyone would end up in hell with a clear statement that yes, Scripture clearly teaches that those who deny the Gospel will end up in hell. But then, after gathering his things and preparing to leave the class, he grew a mischievous grin and said the Scripture also said in Revelation 20:14 that in the end death and hell would be destroyed, briskly leaving the room after saying this. Though Torrance apparently left open the possibility of eternal salvation, he didn't press this possibility explicitly in his more well known writings as Barth did at the end of Church Dogmatics IV.3.1 for example. More often he pressed the more clear biblical teaching that hell would be the ultimate destiny awaiting those who cut themselves off from the Gospel by refusing it. Ritchie explored three possible ways of reconciling Torrance's seemingly irreconcilable claims of Christ's universal atonement and the reality of hell for the reprobate. The first two don't really matter as they were dismissed, but the third was a development of one of TFT's most difficult but also most helpful themes, that of the primacy of existence-statements over coherence-statements in their necessary coordination as the church attempts to develop a consistent articulation of the inner logic of the Gospel of Christ as it confronts us in Scripture. When we speak of the mystery of humanity's lingering ability to reject our reconciliation to God in Christ, we come up against an impossible possibility, that is a reality we can speak of in existence-statements (statements that immediately refer to that which is objectively real) but cannot coordinate with our existence-statements about the grace of God through coherence-statements (statements that do not directly refer to objective reality but articulate the pattern by which these external realities are related to one another). Sin, when understood from within the logic of God's grace, has no rationality; it cannot be made sense of or integrated into a logical system. It is like a surd in mathematics, a number that can be expressed but is nevertheless irrational. Thus, the logic of grace does tend toward universalism, but our responsibility is to take in the whole testimony of Scripture, which clearly takes sin and hell seriously. While the task of theology is to seek and articulate the inner coherence of the biblical testimony in Christ, it must not do so at the expense of the biblical testimony itself, running roughshod over certain biblical themes in the interest of building a coherent system based on other biblical themes. This is what universalism does by extending the logic of grace to the point where it has no room to acknowledge the horrible impossible possibility of damnation. But this is also what limited atonement does by so trying to coordinate the reality of hell with the reality of grace that it seeks to make the two logically compatible, which is impossible, but ends up perverting the logic of grace so that God's love is not truly universal, God does not truly love the world (John 3:16) but only "the elect" - here once again the demand for logical consistency trumps Scripture. Like I said, this one might just need its own post.

At any rate, this retreat was a truly glorious experience. The fellowship, praying and taking communion together (rarities in university theology), the setting, the formal and informal conversations, and the spiritual and intellectual stimulation were all invigorating. I hope this is the kind of spiritual community the expansion of Torrance study will multiply.

Happily Ever Tales

2010-11-13T04:58:00.000-08:00

My amazingly talented (and beautiful) wife Rachel has started a new blog where she shares her own original children's stories, poems and illustrations, as well as children's book reviews. It is called Happily Ever Tales (http://happilyevertales.blogspot.com/). This is a great place to go with your kids and read stories!

Also, for those interested in offering us a little bit of financial support while we're living in Scotland and work on my PhD (which is crazy expensive!), there is a donate button. But feel free to just drop by and check out Rachel's stuff. Its beautiful!

Go Somewhere Else!

2010-11-12T03:16:00.000-08:00

I have been characteristically neglectful of the blog here lately. That has been due primarily to being busy writing my dissertation and conference papers (ok, a conference paper). I did attend AAR a few weeks ago and give a paper - I feel like I should give some kind of summary of the conference from my perspective, but I need to divert all brain power to dissertation at present. Here is a great summary from my new friend, Brad East, who very graciously arranged housing for myself a some friends during AAR. My own AAR experience was very tied up with questions about the nature of the Eucharist or Communion. I attended three seminars on the topic and though the paper I gave was on Scripture and had nothing to do with the Eucharist, it came up as a possible analogy for thinking about Scripture in the Q&A. My brain has definitely been spinning on the subject and I think I'm getting closer to a clear position. I will try to write something on this in the next few weeks, but don't hold me to it.

Rather than offer anything interesting of my own right now, I'll indulge in the cheapest kind of blogging I can think of - pointing you to interesting discussion going on elsewhere.

The previously mentioned Brad East is having a fascinating discussion over at his blog Resident Theology with "Theologian of Love" Thomas Oord on whether Oord's theological commitment to a the notion that God is "non-coercive all the way down" ought to lead him to a political commitment to pacifism.
David Guretzki over at Theomentary says using "incarnational" language about the church is blasphemous, citing a passage from Barth in CD IV.3.2, and I think he is absolutely right.
Daniel Kirk at Storied Theology has sparked a conversation way too long to follow, but interesting (and at times infuriating) to scan, by calling for a moratorium on the word "homophobic".

My Quiet Time

2010-10-07T02:17:00.000-07:00

I have maintained a habit of silently reading Scripture and praying each morning (more or less) for several years. I say this here to make it clear at the outset that what follows is not meant to be an attack on this practice (as I myself practice it) but some thoughts about how we might most helpfully think about that practice in a broader understanding of the place of Scripture reading in the life of the individual Christian and the Christian community. In particular, I want to say that while having "my quiet time" every morning is an immensely helpful and rewarding thing to do, it is best understood as secondary and supplementary to the corporate hearing of Scripture.

As I understand the prevailing historical scholarship (I'm a theologian, not a historian), reading in the ancient Mediterranean world was entirely an out-loud affair. People just didn't read silently. Even when reading privately, as in the case of the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8:26-40, people would read out loud so that Philip was able to hear the Ethiopian reading Isaiah in his chariot. That then means not only that "quiet time" as a reading practice would have been a foreign concept, but also that the privacy we associate with this practice ("my quiet time") would have been equally foreign. Philip could hear the Ethiopian and even butt in. Can you imagine sitting in your comfy chair reading the Bible out loud to yourself? Even if you knew no one was around to overhear you it would be weird, but I do my reading in my office at my desk with other people close by - that would just be way too awkward. But this just reinforces how privately we conceive of the spiritual practice of reading Scripture.

At a seminar I attended yesterday, a specialist in early Christian literature claimed that the Scriptures were not even intended primarily to be read but memorized and recited in public performance. He claimed that reading was just too mentally taxing to be thought of as something people would do regularly and for extended periods. That is true even in our culture where we have a language with clean type, word spacing, commas, periods and both an upper and lower case. The Greek and Hebrew languages Scripture was written in had none of these things. It was written in all caps with no spaces between words or punctuation of any kind. Hebrew didn't even have vowels - ppl wld rcgnz th wrds jst frm th cnsnnts nd cntxt. That kind of reading is hard to do, so often scholars would have someone read texts out loud to them, leaving their mind free from the duty of translating the visual text into spoken words and able to concentrate on the meaning of the words. That sounds awesome to me, thinking back to high school and how much I hated when it was my turn to read; I could understand what was going on fine when someone else was reading and I could just scan along, but when I had to read it out loud I had a much harder time both making the sounds and understanding their meaning. All of that to say that the original authors and recipients of Scripture didn't have in mind our notion of private quiet time - their alone time would have been for praying, as Jesus often does and tells his followers to do in Matthew 6:6, though I still doubt all of that was done quietly.

Why does any of this matter? Well, I think it matters for how we think about God and about the way Scripture reading is meant to form our thinking about God.

The second commandment says not to make an image to represent God, that is, an idol. John Calvin seized on the implications of this for how we conceive of God - He is inherently invisible and is to be thought of in entirely non-visual terms. Similarly, Martin Luther, pressing the point that we know God through his Word, told his congregation that if they wanted to see God they should put their eyes in their ears. We are to know God not through what we see, but through what we hear, through hearing the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the eternal Word that was with God and was God from the beginning.

As God made himself known in this way to Israel, Jewish culture developed in a very aural way, having their children commit huge portions of the Torah if not the whole thing to memory. The Bible came to be within that primarily aural way of thinking. I mean haven't you ever wondered why none of the Gospel writers says a single thing about how Jesus looked? However, we live in a very visual culture, quite like the Greco-Roman culture into which the Gospel went out from its Jewish roots. We are visual thinkers in ways we don't even really realize. We say things like "see what I mean?" or "look at it this way", framing conceptual communication in visual categories. We hear with our eyes. For us, seeing, rather than hearing, is believing.

Thus, reading for us is primarily visual. We think of the act of reading as going from seeing letters to thinking the thoughts that they signify. We take the thoughts from the page into our minds with our eyes. For the ancients, the visible function of letters was not to communicate directly but to preserve a record of what is otherwise a totally oral and aural affair. The visible letters were to be translated into sounds before they could serve the function of communicating events and concepts. I think the transition of the Christian faith and its engagement with Scripture from a primarily aural culture to a primarily visual culture may be behind much of modern the controversies surrounding Scripture. We have gone from understanding its aural content as the Word of God to conceiving of the visible letters of the "original autographs" as the Word (Letters?) of God.

One reason for that is control. When we think of reading the Bible in visual terms, we put ourselves in a position of control, making our own decisions about what to read, underlining what we find important (again not disparaging any of this, just wanting to set it in context). This corresponds to control we have over our vision in general, choosing where to point our eyes, what to focus on, even having eyelids that can shield us from things we don't want to see. Hearing is different. We don't have earlids. Sound comes to us and demands our attention in a different way than vision does. When we hear Scripture being read to us, we have far less control over it. It comes to us and determines our hearing. We can of course choose to tune out and ignore it, but we can't choose to skip what is being said when we don't like it and go to a passage we prefer. This better corresponds to our actual situation before God. God comes to us in his Gospel and calls us to respond. We can choose to listen or not to, but we can't make him what we want him to be.

So, what I am suggesting is certainly not that we abandon the long established and demonstrably fruitful practice of private silent Scripture reading, but that we think of it as supplementing our communal hearing of the Word. Our primary approach to Scripture ought to center around its public reading in community which we hear together as the Word of God addressing us and evoking our response of worship. Our private reading then helps fill in our knowledge of the broader sweep of the biblical story and its rich diversity of literature so that when we hear a passage in group Bible study or in Sunday morning worship we know what is going on. It also functions as a way we live our private lives in organic connection to our corporate worship, being in private who we are at church on Sundays. The point is that in this understanding, the corporate reading is primary and our private reading is a secondary extension from it.

Approaching Scripture like this helps us to think about God in a way appropriate to his invisible nature by building into us habits of thought that make room for conceiving of him through what we hear in his Word rather than what we see. God has come to us and made himself knowable to us not through the controlled private silence of visible text but by his Word in public and noisy proclamation.

Demons as Fallen Angles?

2010-08-13T02:02:00.000-07:00

Robin Parry over at Theological Scribbles has an interesting summary of a paper from Dale Martin on the history of demonology, tracing it through the Septuagint and New Testament and showing that the view that demons are fallen angels does not appear in a fully articulated form until Tertullian (2nd/3rd centurty AD).

Torrance on Knowing God as Sinful People

2010-08-11T06:46:00.000-07:00

In the preface to Theological Science, Torrance shares the following personal reflection on knowing God as a sinner:

If I may be allowed to speak personally for a moment, I find the presence of God bearing upon my existence and thought so powerfully that I cannot but be convinced of His overwhelming reality and rationality. To doubt the existence of God would be an act of sheer irrationality, for it would mean that my reason had become unhinged from its bond with real being. Yet in knowing God I am deeply aware that my relation to Him has been damaged, that disorder has resulted in my mind, and that it is I who obstruct knowledge of God by getting in between Him and myself, as it were. But I am also aware that His presence presses unrelentingly upon me through the disorder of my mind, for He will not let Himself be thwarted by it, challenging and repairing it, and requiring of me on my part to yield my thoughts to His healing and controlling revelation.

It is only in knowing God that we know we are sinners, that our prideful habits of thinking are the reason we are not able to know God on our own mental power, and thus that we know God only because of the power of his grace.

(PS - The artist that drew this picture of Torrance is HOT!)

Resurrection

2010-08-09T01:50:00.000-07:00

"If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men" 1 Cor 15:19.

Does this verse call into question the kind of preaching which addresses itself from beginning to end to those problems we're having with our spouse, kids, job, drug habit, porn addiction, indictment for murder, etc? Of course I see the need to address these concerns in preaching the gospel; Christ's triumph over death certainly has implications for those things we deal with while alive that make us want to die. But our teaching on these day-to-day topics needs to be always and everywhere explicitly tied to our future hope; otherwise all we have is over-hyped advice on how to feel better that usually just doesn't work. As Paul goes on to say,

"If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die" 1 Cor 15:32.

Hauerwas On What Ordained Ministers Actually Do

2010-07-28T02:05:00.000-07:00

I've got nothing new to say, but Jason over at Per Crucem ad Lucem posted some thoughts from Stanley Hauerwas on what those that work in professional church ministry are actually paid to do, and his answer is to teach people to speak the Christian language. I think it is worth a quick read for those, like myself, who are preparing for and pursuing the pastorate as a profession.

The Mystery Hidden for Long Ages Past

2010-07-15T06:04:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading through Romans. It'll be the rest of my life and more before I feel like I totally understand that book - not because of the complexity but because of the depth of the Gospel it presents in its shattering simplicity.

Paul ends the letter by giving glory to God for the Gospel, which he describes in a startling way for anyone interested in the theology of Scripture and its interpretation.

Now to him who is able to establish you by my gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past, but now revealed and made known through the prophetic writings by the command of the eternal God, so that all nations might believe and obey him - to the only wise God be glory forever through Jesus Christ! Amen. (Rom 16:25-27)

I understand Paul to be saying that the good news (proclamation) of Jesus Christ, God's provision of a vicarious righteousness in fulfilment of his promises given to Israel throughout its existence, is now revealed in the Old Testament Scriptures as a mystery that had been hidden for a long time before. It is striking to think of this mystery being revealed in Paul's time through Scriptures that had been written hundreds of years earlier. It is not that the revelation had been given earlier and was now illumined by the coming of Christ. Paul says in his introduction that the Gospel had been promised before hand through the OT(1:2), but in light of the letter's conclusion I have to think that the promise was given as mystery hidden until its fulfilment. Though the texts had been written long before, they only revealed that mystery at the resurrection of Christ (1:4). The coming of Christ truly opened the Scriptures to his followers and gave it meaning it could not have previously had. I take Paul here to be prohibiting us from imagining that if those Jews living prior to the resurrection of Christ had just read the relevant messianic texts from the Old Testament (passages from Deuteronomy, the Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, and a few smatterings from the Minor Prophets) more clearly, they would have understood that God was going to send his Son to provide a righteousness through faith in Christ's vicarious death and resurrection before it happened. No, this was impossible to conceive, and thus impossible for the Old Testament to reveal, until it happened. But when it did happen, these texts written long ago in ages past revealed what had now just recently happened. Staggering.

Barth on Scripture and the Legitimate Form of Apostolic Succession

2010-06-19T02:02:00.000-07:00

In between my regular diet of T. F. Torrance and books on theology of Scripture, I'm slowly making my way through Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics I.1. Barth is famous for being odd on Scripture, but I find him wonderfully odd. In fact, his oddness makes more 'normal' accounts of Scripture (by which I mean those that start from humanity's need for an infallible source of truth, e.g. Warfield) seem odd. In I.1, his approach to speaking about what Scripture is really took me by a wonderful surprise. Scripture comes in the middle of his introduction of the threefold form of the Word of God, which he briefly introduces in in I.1 in the order of knowing (Church Proclamation, Holy Scripture, Jesus Christ) and will largely expand in the opposite order of being (Jesus Christ, Holy Scripture, Church Proclamation) in I.2 - I'll get through it all eventually.

What I found wonderfully odd in its first appearance in I.1 is that Barth's way of getting to speaking of what Scripture is was in contrast to the Roman Catholic doctrine of apostolic succession. He makes a plea that Protestants be careful to reject the Roman doctrine for the right reasons; apostolic succession cannot be fully rejected as such, but only in its peculiar Roman form in which the manner of succession relates to formal office rather than spiritual service. That is, the spiritual service of the Roman pontiff is seen as included within and guaranteed by the possession of the formal office of the bishop of Rome. As wrong as this is, it is right, argues Barth, that we see the present Church as succeeding the apostles. The Church's proclamation of the Gospel, which is what makes the Church what it is, must rest on a basis external to itself; the Church does not contain its own Gospel, but points past itself to an expectation of a future revelation of God in Christ based on the decisive past revelation of God in Christ. This basis of the Church's proclamation in Jesus Christ is passed from Christ to the world by the apostles so that the Church cannot point to itself as the proper validation of its message but must point to the apostles and therefore seek to succeed them as proclaimers of Christ. However, this succession has to take the proper form. In Roman Catholicism, the current successor of Peter in essence replaces Peter so that in pointing to apostolic testimony for the validation of its proclamation, the Church merely points to itself as the apostolic Church. Barth, however, argues that the current Church in its succession of the apostles cannot seek to replace them but must stand always under them. Scripture is what allows us to succeed the apostles in this way.

Now that I've set it up, here is the paragraph that made me happy and I wanted to share:

The apostolic succession of the Church must mean that it is guided by the Canon, that is, by the prophetic and apostolic word as the necessary rule of every word that is valid in the Church. It must mean that the Church enters into the succession of the prophets and apostles in their office of proclamation, and does so in such a way that their proclamation freely and independently precedes, while that of the Church is related to it, is ventured in obedience on the basis of it, is measured by it, and replaces it only as and to the extent that it conforms to it. It must mean that the Church always admits the free power of their proclamation over it. As far as the idea of a living succession is concerned everything depends on the antecessor being regarded as alive and having free power over against the successor. But if, as here, the antecessor has long since died, this can happen only if his proclamation has been fixed in writing and if it is acknowledged that he still has life and free power over the Church to-day in this written word of his. On the written nature of the Canon, on its character as scriptura sacra, hangs his autonomy and independence, and consequently his free power over against the Church and the living nature of the succession.

Love it.

Hauerwas on Spontaneous Prayer

2010-06-10T01:08:00.000-07:00

I've been reading Stanley Hauerwas's recently published memoirs, Hannah's Child. This, I confess, is the first Hauerwas book I've read, but it certainly won't be the last. Throughout the book he goes back and forth between narrating the major events of his life and offering theological reflection on them. I found this short paragraph against spontaneous prayer worth sharing:

I do not trust prayer to spontaneity. Most "spontaneous prayers" turn out, upon analysis, to be anything but spontaneous. Too often they conform to formulaic patterns that include ugly phrases such as, "Lord, we just ask you..." Such phrases are gestures of false humility, suggesting that God should give us what we want because what we want is not all that much. I pray that God will save us from that "just." (255)

He goes on to explain that, because of his distrust of spontaneous prayer, he writes the prayers he prays before the classes he teaches and offers the following, a prayer he wrote for a class he would be teaching on Columbus Day, as an example:

Dear God, our lives are made possible by the murders of he past - civilization is built on slaughters. Acknowledging our debt to killers frightens and depresses us. We fear judging, so we say, "That's in the past." We fear to judge because in judging we are judged. Help us, however, to learn to say "no," to say, "Sinners though we are, that was and is wrong." May we do so with love. Amen. (256)

Book Announcement

2010-06-09T15:41:00.000-07:00

Check out this announcement for a book called Evangelical Calvinism: Essays Toward Ecclesia Reformata, Semper Reformanda, which I'll be contributing a chapter to!

Scripture as Spectacles

2010-06-08T06:58:00.000-07:00

Scripture, as the spectacles through which we perceive Christ (Calvin), must be attuned to Christ in order to present him clearly, but no matter how strongly we articulate that attuning, be it in terms of inerrancy, infallibility, clarity, or inspiration, it is not a power in Scripture that enables it to present Christ to us but a power in God through Christ in the Spirit. It was the work of the triune God that brought the Scripture into being in the first place and in light of that we must confess its fittingness to be the vessel Christ presents himself to us through, and, moreover, our statements about this fittingness ought not to be vague and abstract but concrete and literary, according to the nature of Scripture as text. Biblically, the chief given category in which to speak of this is inspiration, but we need other terms to clarify what we mean by inspiration. The terms ‘infallibility’ and ‘inerrancy’ are two of the most common descriptions of Scripture in Protestant theology meant to concretely clarify what we mean when we speak of Scripture’s inspiration. I would argue that the preference for, and in many quarters the demand for confessing, such terms is a product of modernist scientific epistemologies that stress the antimony between certainty and the possibility of error. Such categories are not thus wrong or wholly inappropriate, but it ought to be questioned whether they are the most helpful or important descriptions of Scripture as the spectacles through which we perceive Christ.

I question these terms collectively and individually: collectively because they are both morally neutral. Scriptures fittingness for Christ’s self-presentation might be described more adequately by terms like ‘faithfulness’ and ‘obedience’, terms that recognize the inherently moral-laden character of knowledge, than ‘inerrancy’ and ‘infallibility’ which fail to bring this reality to view. (‘Infallibility’ may escape this charge if it is seen as the Gospel that seeks the conversion of sinners to repentance and faith which is unable to fail.)

In regard to ‘inerrancy’ in particular, I do not question it because I think factual accuracy has nothing to do with being faithful and obedient in human testimony to Christ, but because a narrow focus on factual accuracy has often had the historical tendency to get people off on rabbit trails in quests to harmonize apparently conflicting accounts in Scripture or other such distractions. Of course being faithful and obedient to Christ must mean that the biblical authors testify in truth and not in falsehood, but the oft repeated notion that if it were proven that Scripture contained even one error we could not trust it is, whether or not such a statement is valid, quite unhelpful in the sense that it beckons us to read Scripture with an eye only to its factual accuracy and not to the Truth that calls us to repentance and faith. This is a subtle distinction and not a radical dichotomy I mean to make. We must trust the factual accuracy of Scripture because its authors were inspired by the Spirit to testify truthfully to Christ, not because its inerrancy is what it means to be inspired. Moreover, in regard to the statement about the Bible not having even one error, I think such language slips into stating the relation between truth and fact as identical where the relation might be a bit more complex than that. I’ve certainly encountered innumerable postmodern approaches to this in which truth and fact have seemingly no relation, and I adamantly resist such a position, but at the same time the fact that Matthew and Mark both have Jesus meeting with his disciples in Galilee after the resurrection while Luke and John have him meeting them in Jerusalem should force us neither to despair of the truth of Scripture nor to seek refuge in some convoluted harmony of the two accounts. There may be an inherent ambiguity and mystery here in the relation of truth and factual accuracy that simply eludes explicit articulation. We must hold firmly to the truth and accuracy of Scripture but in such a way that allows for such tensions and ambiguities. Personally, I am not uncomfortable speaking of some such tensions as errors, as long as we fully understand that in using such language we are consciously using it according to modern definition, that is, we are not foisting our standards on Scripture but simply acknowledging that if such accounts were to be composed within our modern context, we would regard at least one of them as in error. I have found that most conservative Reformed theologians, who as a category are those who tend to stress the inerrancy of Scripture most, are considerably careful in their definition of inerrancy to allow for such tensions and ambiguities, but in practice such care rarely transfers to the ministers whose training includes the reading of such theologians or even to the wider discussions about Scripture in the works of those theologians themselves. I find that when this approach trickles into ministerial contexts, the result is an overemphasis on factual accuracy which tends to produce the fruit of self-assuredness since a factually errorless book in my hands is a tool I can exploit in argumentation, rather than focusing on the Truth of the Gospel which relentlessly calls me to renounce myself in repentance and faith. Speaking of the ‘faithfulness’ and ‘obedience’ of Scripture, on the other hand, addresses not only what Scripture is but what I must be in order to understand it aright.

I question infallibility in particular because, as I said in the beginning, it is not a power in Scripture that makes us see Christ in it but a power in Christ. Spectacles do not make us see. If there is no light or if my eyes are shut, no glasses, no matter how clear, can make me see. It is the light objectively and the openness of my eyes subjectively that allow me to see – spectacles are lenses through which I am helped to see. Accordingly, that we see Christ in Scripture is due to his own divine infallibility that illuminates himself for us and opens our eyes to see him there. Scripture’s faithfulness and obedience to that infallibility allow it to share in it, but we must always recognize that infallibility is never a property which we can ascribe to Scripture in itself but only as it serves the Gospel which gave rise to it and is real independently of it.

Torrance mp3s

2010-06-04T14:45:00.000-07:00

Jason over at Per Crucem ad Lucem has links to 10 T. F. Torrance lectures plus Q&A from 1981 at Fuller Seminar. Check it out.

Torrance on the Appropriate Circularity of Christian Thinking

2010-06-02T02:10:00.000-07:00

I have again been quite negligent with you, my precious blog. Here is a bit of Torrance just to show I still care. This paragraph (yep, its a single paragraph) captures quite well what I was unable to say well to my friend Andy last night on the phone about why atheists prove that they just don't get it when they reject Christianity on the grounds that they find no evidence for God. Have a read:

Now it may be objected, quite understandably, that by claiming to interpret the resurrection within a framework of thought, of which the resurrection, along with the incarnation, is itself a constitutive determinant, I am operating with an essentially circular procedure. I agree, but reject the implication that this is a vicious circularity artificially intruded into the ground of knowledge. What we are concerned with here is the proper circularity inherent in any coherent system operating with ultimate axioms or beliefs which cannot be derived or justified from any other ground than that which they themselves constitute. It is the case, of course, that the primary axioms of any deductive system are held to be justified if they are included within the consistency of all the axioms and propositions of the system, but, as Kurt Godel has demonstrated, any such consistent formal system must have one or more propositions that are not provable within it but may be proved with reference to a wider and higher system. However, when we are concerned with a conceptual system or a framework of thought which includes among its constitutive axioms one or more ultimates, for which, in the nature of the case, there is no higher and wider system with reference to which they can be proved, then we cannot but operate with a complete circularity of the conceptual system. This must be a proper form of circularity, however, for the system must be one which is internally consistent and which rests upon the grounds posited by the constitutive axioms, without any alien additions, so that the conclusions we reach are found to be anticipated in the basic presuppositions. Such a system, of course, even if entirely consistent with itself, could conceivably be false, and must therefore be open to reasonable doubt: but that means that the system stands or falls with respect to its power as a whole to command our acceptance. And here another important factor must also be taken into account, the capacity of the system to function as a heuristic instrument in opening up new avenues of knowledge which could not otherwise be anticipated, and as an interpretative frame of thought to cope with a wider range of elements not originally in view. Nevertheless, in the last analysis we are thrown back upon the question whether we are prepared to commit ourselves to belief in the ultimates which are constitutive of the system. (Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection, pp. 14-15)

What adds difficulty to understanding this passage is that Torrance is otherwise a good Barthian and rejects the notion of a comprehensive theological 'system', so how is one to be persuaded by the Christian conceptual system as a whole if the Word of God is impossible to humanly systematize? That difficulty aside, I find this account of the inherent circularity in all conceptual systems built upon axioms having to do with ultimate reality very compelling.

In the paragraphs that follow (I considered including them, but I didn't want to overtax my loyal readership) Torrance draws on logic and physics as conceptual systems that fit the description he has given and then discusses what happens when an ultimate reality is newly recognized but cannot be fitted into the conceptual system in current use. In that context, says Torrance, 'we are faced with a serious dilemma, of rejecting what has thus become disclosed as absurd, or committing ourselves to a radical reconstruction of that conceptual system, indeed a logical reconstruction of the axiomatic premises of that system.' Such a reconstruction has occurred in the last century in the field of physics in its difficult transition from the Newtonian to the Einsteinian conceptual framework. Torrance argues that it was something similar to this which happened as the early Church came to acknowledge the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ. These were realities that could not be fitted into their current ways of thinking, indeed appeared ridiculous in their current ways of thinking, but because of their inherent persuasive power demanded that the Church revise its entire way of thinking around these new realities as its basic starting point. The new wine needed new wineskins.

A Defence of Christianese

2010-05-06T05:20:00.000-07:00

Since I haven't posted anything in a while, here's a quick thought. Anyone involved in Church culture is aware of a fear among Christians of using language that alienates outsiders because of its foreignness. We tend to call such language "Christianese". Reading T. F. Torrance's brilliant little book, The Mediation of Christ today, I came to a familiar passage in which he argues that there are certain concepts and words in the Old Testament that have permanent currency for the Church. These concepts and words have such permanency because they form the matrix through which Christ interprets himself to us through his apostles in the New Testament.

...only as we are able to appropriate and understand the Old Testament in its mediation of permanent structures of thought, conceptual tools, as I called them earlier, shall we be in a position really to understand Jesus even though we must allow him to fill them with new content and reshape them in mediating his own self-revelation to us through them.
Among these permanent structures let met refer to the Word and Name of God, to revelation, mercy, truth, holiness, to messiah, saviour, to prophet, priest and king, father, son, servant, to covenant, sacrifice, forgiveness, reconciliation, redemption, atonement, and those basic patterns of worship which we find set out in the ancient liturgy or in the Psalms. (Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, p. 18)

It seems like Torrance's lists here corresponds almost exactly with the 'Christianese' so many Christians are so desperate to avoid. But if Torrance is right, avoiding such concepts and language makes it impossible for us to speak the gospel in a meaningful way. Use of such language doesn't just make Christians awkward; it is part of what makes us Christians.

If this list of Torrance's really does correspond to the 'Christianese' we don't want to use, this might tell us something about Christianity's continuing discomfort with its roots in Judaism. This list, after all, represents the vocabulary Christianity inherited from Judaism. This language thus might be more appropriately called 'Jewishese' than 'Christianese'. Either way, the discomfort many Christians have today with the particular language we have inherited in the Church certainly mirrors Old Testament Israel's discomfort with their own cultural-religious-national peculiarity as the people of God.

We often speak of wanting to avoid 'Christianese' out of love for those we seek to reach with the message of Christ, and I'm not totally denying a measure of truth in this, but I am suggesting that the primary reason we seek to avoid 'Christianese' is because we don't like the peculiarity of being God's people, we don't like being different for God's sake. Somehow we got the idea that to be good representatives of God we should sound like everyone else; we certainly didn't get that idea from the Bible.

The Two Testaments pt 2: Christ and Preceding Jewish Tradition

2010-03-27T13:03:00.000-07:00

In part 1 of the Two Testaments, "Christ the Lord of Scripture", I argued that the Bible is the Word of God in a sense derived from its content, and that Jesus Christ, the eternal Word of God is the Bible's content. In other words, there are not two Word's of God, Scripture and Christ, but only one, Christ; the Bible can be spoken of as the Word of God to us only because that is where we meet and hear Christ, the incarnate Word of God, speaking to us.

In this post I'd like to try to speak about the difference the Old Testament and the New Testament. If you recall from last post, my reason for laying all of this out is to clarify why, while I'm predisposed to take everything in Scripture at more or less face value, I'm not compelled to take all the stories from the Old Testament, particularly those from its earlier parts, absolutely literally, while I take New Testament accounts basically literally.

In part 1 I wrote that Christ bound himself to the testimony of his apostles, as we see in Luke 10:16, a verse that is becoming more and more important to me theologically: "He who listens to you listens to me; he who rejects you rejects me; but he who rejects me rejects him who sent me." Christ spoke these words to a group of 70 (or 72) of his followers as he sent them out on a mission to towns he would be going through in Judea on his way to Jerusalem. In Luke's second writing, the book of Acts, just before Jesus ascends to heaven, he tells his apostles "you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth" (Acts 1:8). Thus Christ binds himself to the apostles' testimony about him as their ministry of testimony expands beyond Judea into the whole world. This sets the church and all of its tradition in motion. All of us who believe in Christ today and are thus a part of his church are a part of that ongoing tradition of speaking of Christ as Lord to the ends of the earth. (More on this in part 3.)

However, early in the church's life it recognized the need to set apart the first generation's testimony as uniquely authoritative. It saw that though Christ himself is our Lord and example for how we must live, in a certain sense it is the apostles that are really our model. Though Christ reveals both God and our true humanity to us, he is himself not a Christian; as a union of God and humanity in one man there is a sense in which he is something we cannot be. The apostles are the first Christians and establish the pattern for how subsequent Christians are to live. In this sense Christ's statements in Luke 10:16 and Acts 1:8 quoted above apply uniquely to the apostles; it is in their testimony to Christ that he is to be heard - he is heard in our testimony only to the degree that our testimony conforms to theirs. Thus the writings of the apostles were set apart by the early church as a recognition of their unique authority in order to guard the church's testimony to Christ from slipping into error by holding it up to the standard of the apostles' testimony. This is what the New Testament is. To read it is to read the first Christians proclamation of the gospel that took place before their eyes and in their lives. At least for us Gentiles, as we come to faith in Christ, we come to hear him in the apostolic testimony of the New Testament.

So what of the Old Testament? Why do we read it if it comes before Christ and doesn't explicitly testify to him by name? We read the Old Testament because Christ binds himself to it, but in a significantly different way than the New Testament. Christ doesn't come from out of nowhere. He doesn't come onto the scene of humanity and try to start over from scratch. He comes in fulfilment of promises God had been making to a particular people for thousands of years. We read the Old Testament because we recognize that Jesus is a Jew, and we cannot understand him as such unless we read the Jewish Scriptures he read and regarded as authoritative. Almost everything Jesus says about himself he appropriates from the Old Testament.

But whereas the New Testament is something like a time capsule, the testimony of a single generation frozen in time, the generation of those who were eyewitnesses of Christ's life on earth, the Old Testament is a collection of writings composed and edited over hundreds if not thousands of years. It is a sample taken from a very living tradition and most of it is probably taken from fairly late in that tradition's life. The stories it contains were told and retold generation after generation as a part of Israel's culture and tradition, a culture and tradition that God had bound himself to and promised to bless all nations through. Jesus, as the fulfilment of those promises, binds himself to that culture and tradition as the context he is to be understood in, as when he opens the scroll of Isaiah and reads vv. 61:1-2, pointing to himself as their fulfilment. In this light, we Christians must then read the Old Testament as God's preface to his Gospel, the introduction of appropriate conceptual and linguistic (to borrow some language from Torrance) and religious practices with which to understand God's Messiah when he was to come. The Old Testament is thus indispensable to us, as it was to Christ and his apostles.

The Old Testament thus stands as the promise and the New Testament testifies to the promise's fulfilment. Christ binds himself to the Old Testament by standing within its tradition and drawing it to its long awaited fulfilment. Christ binds himself to the New Testament by promising to be present in the apostle's testimony as they take his good news to the ends of the earth. Christ is thus Lord over both testaments and both exist to testify to him. The differences between the two, however, the centuries long tradition of the Old and the eye-witness time capsule of the New, must be borne in mind as we read of their varying testimonies to his coming and his having come. In this light, while the history of God's covenant of promise with Israel which the Old Testament enshrines must be understood as a real history with certain crucial and defining moments (the exodus of Moses, the kingly reign of David, the exile), it would seem right to suspend judgement about (not reject) the historicity of discrete narratives from particularly early in Israel's history.

The Two Testaments pt 1: Christ the Lord of Scripture

2010-03-20T13:37:00.000-07:00

What is the Bible? It is divine revelation. It is God's inspired Word. Certainly these statements separate me from all liberal theologies that reject from the outset the possibility of divine revelation and focus instead on the subjective religious experiences of humans. However, my aim in these posts will be to draw out how one can be faithful to these statements, faithful to the divine authority of Scripture, without being a fundamentalist.

A fundamentalist approaches the Bible in basically the same way a Muslim approaches the Qu'ran. Christian fundamentalism and Islam have essentially the same notion of divine revelation: God bestowing facts about himself and his will to human beings. Both of these religious movements claim that God has bestowed these facts, and thus revealed himself, through a book. My contention is that this notion of revelation is radically unbiblical.

It is unbiblical because it is impersonal. Revelation in Scripture begins with God's covenant with Israel, a relationship God establishes with a particular people that is to be one of love and trust (their trust in Him). God gives Israel the Law (Torah) not as a set of universal facts about his will but as the terms of their relationship, much like marriage vows, giving concrete expression of what it ought to look like for Israel to live a life of love and trust in Yahweh. But the New Testament goes further in the personal direction of revelation; we could even say that the New Testament radically personalizes the Jewish understanding of divine revelation.

Two classic texts help us to see how radical the New Testament notion of revelation is. The first is John 1:1-3, 14: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made...The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth." In Christ, the Word of God that is eternally with God and is God, God has not just given us facts about himself which could be contained in a book, but given us his very Self. God thus reveals himself to us through himself, himself made one of us, flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone. He took on a human existence and revealed himself as God in that form to his apostles ("We have seen his glory"). This kind of revelation cannot be understood simply as the giving of facts, but as fellowship, personal and intimate communion in which God reveals himself to us through his personal presence, much as a newly wed couple reveal themselves to each other through time spent in intimate personal encounter (we are the bride of Christ after all, Rev 19:7).

Second is Hebrews 1:1-3: "In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe. The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word." This gives us much the same picture as the one we saw in John, but here we see an emphasis on the superiority of the personal revelation of Christ as the Son over the previous "many ways" God had spoke to Israel through the prophets. I might be so bold as to paraphrase, "In the past God sent messengers to give us messages from him, but now he has personally come among us himself in the person of God the Son, making his glory known to us directly."

Taking these two passages together, what emerges is an understanding of revelation that is firmly tied to Christ as the Word and Son of God, the exact representation of God's being. So how is the Bible the Word of God if only Christ reveals God and thus only Christ is the Word? This is where fundamentalism gets off track. It basically believes in two Words of God, Christ and the Bible. By understanding the Bible itself as the Word of God in a direct and unqualified way, fundamentalism treats every word in the Bible as God's direct speech. It that understanding, no differentiation can made between any two parts of the Bible; no part of it stands over the rest as the having more importance because every word is God's Word. In effect, its authority is flattened out so that all of its historical narrative must be taken strictly literally. Questioning whether or not there really was a talking serpent in a literal garden of Eden or whether or not Samson's power was contained in his hair impugns the Christian faith exactly as much as questioning the deity of Christ or his resurrection from the dead. In fact, for fundamentalism, and this is its most serious crime, the reliability of Scripture replaces the Lordship of Christ as the foundation of Christian faith.

To illustrate, when a fundamentalist sings "Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so", when he/she ought to mean by that something like "Jesus loves me this I know because He tells me so through the Bible", what he/she actually means is "Jesus loves me, and the reason I know that is because the Bible tells me so, and anything the Bible says has to be true because its God wrote it." In other words, God has revealed everything we need to know about him and his will in a book, and that book happens to tell me that God wants me to believe in Jesus.

No, our faith is not in the Bible as such but in Christ, the incarnate Word of God. The Bible, however, is the Word of God to us because that is where Christ makes himself known to us. As we saw above, when we take the prologues of John and Hebrews together, we see that Christ, as the Word and Son of God, is the revelation of God. As such, he is both the promise of the Old Testament ("Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms" Luke 24:44) and the content of the New Testament, as he commits himself and his gospel to apostles who are its source ("He who listens to you listens to me; he who rejects you rejects me; but he who rejects me rejects him who sent me" Luke 10:16). Thus, the Bible has a definite center, a definite focus on Jesus Christ as its true content. The Bible can never be understood as God's Word apart from that central content; it is that content, Jesus Christ, the Word of God, that makes the Bible the Word of God. When we read the Bible, our faith does not stop at the words we read; those words point past themselves to the incarnate, crucified and risen Lord Jesus Christ. It is he who reveals God to us and he does this as we encounter him in Scripture. Christ stands behind the Bible as its essential message; we hear him when we hear its message. Christ is thus the Lord over Scripture and it is submissive to him; as he speaks through it to us, his church, we submit to Scripture because in it we hear the voice of our Lord. This is what my theological hero T. F. Torrance calls the "depth dimension of Scripture".

More to come.

Prayer and Children

2010-03-19T09:51:00.000-07:00

Dr. Myk Habets, lecturer in systematic theology at Carey Baptist College in Auckland, New Zealand, has graciously offered the following article originally published in New Zealand's The Baptist magazine as a guest post.

Prayer Sydney Style

During the day I teach systematic theology at Carey Baptist College and I publish books and articles on the doctrine of the Trinity and other related topics. Outside of work I am a husband and the father of two lovely little children – a three-year-old daughter named Sydney, and a one-year old-son named Liam. At bedtime my wife and I tuck Sydney in and then pray with her before she goes off to sleep. Early on in this routine I had to ask myself a question – How will I lead Sydney in prayer? Theology is produced by worship and worship is the product of theology, so prayer is an aspect of both theology and worship, something I lecture on all the time to adults. But how to inculcate in my three-year-old daughter good theological habits was the question. Now I don’t believe there is any one right answer to this question so what follows is not a ‘this is what you should do,’ or ‘this is the correct way.’ Rather, what follows is the way that I have adopted in teaching my daughter how to pray that is biblical, God-honouring, and theologically robust.

First some rules of Trinitarian theology the church has found to be faithful to Scripture. 1), God is one being, three persons. 2), each person has a distinct identity and yet each is fully God. 3), it is appropriate to think of the action of the triune God as one and undivided and yet to think of the work of the three divine persons as distinct. 4), Jesus is physically at the right hand of the Father. 5), God is Spirit and thus the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are everywhere present at all times.

That leaves us with prayer ‘Sydney style.’ This is what I did not want to pray, not because it is incorrect, but because it is ambiguous and teaches, in my opinion, bad habits which rear their ugly fruit in later life. ‘Dear God, thank you for…, Dear God, we ask for…’ The word ‘God’ is perfectly fine, but it lacks any specificity and is, at best, impersonal, at worst it is an idea or concept divorced from the triune God of the Bible. So this is what we pray. ‘Dear God the Father in heaven, and God Jesus Christ in heaven, and God the Holy Spirit who lives inside me. We thank you for…We ask you for…’ Now that Sydney is getting older, we pray the following, ‘Dear God the Father in heaven, and everywhere, God Jesus Christ who is in heaven, and everywhere by his Spirit, and God the Holy Spirit, who is in my heart and the hearts of those who love him. We thank you for…We ask you for…’

I trust it is obvious what I am doing but let me spell it out briefly for the sake of clarity. I am using the word ‘God’ in reference to the triune God who is intensely personal. This will (hopefully!) avoid Sydney having any ideas that God is an impersonal force, or energy or that he is static. I am using the personal names for God – ‘Father,’ ‘Son’/’Jesus Christ,’ ‘Holy Spirit’ – in personal ways and in differentiated ways, so that she develops the habit of thinking of God as three persons but one being (not that this language is available to her at present). And I am making it clear that the triune God is personally present to her and at the same time universally present in creation and beyond. I am hoping this will forestall any individualistic notions of her Christianity and yet develop within her an intimacy with the triune God of grace.

Well this is what I am doing and why I am doing it. So if you see Sydney around church or Carey, why not ask her where the Holy Spirit is (or the Father or Jesus) and see what she says? Perhaps a follow up article in a few years is required to see how my experiment is going. I do pray to the triune God that she develops the mind of Christ in worship and comes to know and love God for who he really is, despite my theological and parental limitations.

Don't Judge a Church By Its Website: "What We Believe" pt. 2

2010-02-04T01:55:00.000-08:00

Reading Torrance's article "The Deposit of Faith" this week put a thought in my head about church doctrinal statements. Among a few other things Torrance is doing in this essay, one of them is to contrast the early ecumenical doctrinal statements, particularly the Nicene Creed, with those of the scholastic Reformed tradition, particularly the Westminster Confession. The key difference he wants to draw is that the Nicene Creed in its brevity is meant for worship - it is not primarily intended to give precise definition to the nature of God in any of his three persons or the relations between them, but to humbly and worshipfully point to the reality of the triune God in a way which both acknowledges the basic ineffability of that reality but also explicitly rules out the heresy of those such as the Arians who insist on interpreting biblical statements in mythological and anthropomorphic terms. On the other hand, the Westminster Confession and others like it with their far more cumbersome length in attempt to give precise articulation to every matter of the Reformed faith, are, in Torrance's words, "of more use to the lecture hall than the Church", being "essentially constitutional documents rather than declarations of faith before God." His point seems to be that while both share the concern to guard against heresy in these statements, Nicaea approaches this task in the form of a statement of faith meant to be used in corporate worship, carefully but humbly and transparently (in the sense of pointing to a truth it cannot fully express or contain) professing belief in the one triune God of the Bible, while Westminster seeks to exhaust the truth content of the Gospel through precise and extended formulations of doctrine which contain that truth in themselves.

Now, whether Torrance is right in this charge is certainly up for debate. What I'm interested in at this point is using this discussion as a springboard to ask: What are we doing with our church doctrinal statements? I am convinced that it is a good idea for each church to have them, and I come from a church tradition that is prone to keep them fairly short, which I think is a good idea. My sense is, though, that the only real reason we have them, or at least the only real way we use them (apart from having applicants sign them) is to give prospective visitors a way to see if we are heretics. This isn't a bad thing, but the concern I have is how much we separate this aspect (doctrine) from worship. The Apostles' and Nicene Creeds are such great examples of celebratory doctrine, or if you like, propositional worship. Given the absolutely theologically destitute state of most of our modern worship, it seems like a great idea to bring these kinds of (or perhaps precisely these) statements of faith back into the life of the church, poetically and theologically rich statements of faith that we don't merely post on our church websites or keep copies of behind the secretaries desk in the church office, but adopt or craft with the explicit intention of use in corporate worship (and of course we can throw them up on the website too). Those reading this that come from a liturgical background are probably saying "duh!", but I'm hoping those that come from backgrounds like mine which were built on a negative reaction against the bells and smells of high church liturgy will recognize our need to take greater pains in centering our worship more explicitly around the God and Gospel of Scripture. I'm not sure singing "Jesus I am so in love with you" is helpful by itself either in guarding against heresy or even in specifically drawing our minds to the Jesus of the Gospels rather than the Jesus of our psychology.

Apostles and Inspiration

2010-01-23T07:17:00.000-08:00

I'm working on a paper right now on the relationship between Christ and the New Testament in Torrance. For Torrance, the inspiration of the New Testament is not dealt with in terms of the Spirit's operation in and through the apostles in the particular acts of composing their distinctively inspired and authoritative documents, but in terms of the whole sweep of revelation and reconciliation accomplished in Christ as including the preparation, empowerment, and authorization of the apostles to mediate the ongoing presence of the risen Christ through power of the Holy Spirit. The preparation and empowerment included learning from Christ as disciples under a rabbi, encountering Christ in his crucified and resurrected form as the firstborn of the new creation they were given to share in, and their baptism in the Holy Spirit in which their understanding of Christ was bound to Christ's own understanding of himself. Thus for Torrance, "the apostolate, expressly formed and created by Christ...as the human end of revelation, belongs to the once for all nature of the incarnation, and is caught up in its finality and authority" (Atonement, 329-330). Torrance's concept of "onto-relations", or relations that contribute to one's identity, seems at play here; a description of the historical Jesus Christ that does not include his relationship with the apostles, his calling of them and the struggle of teaching them, the drama of their being brought into more and more intimate union with him, would be so incomplete as to be false. Christ binds them into such intimate union with them that he can tell them "whoever listens to you listens to me, and whoever rejects you rejects me." Torrance's doctrine of the inspiration of the New Testament derives from this relation between Christ and his apostles, those he sends in his name.

As I follow Torrance through this narration of inspiration, I become aware that the doctrine of Scripture I grew up with puts far less emphasis on this relation between Christ and his apostles and far more on the work of the Holy Spirit in the particular moments of inspiration. Have any of you wrestled with a similar tension? Let me pose it as a question: do you believe the New Testament books are more inspired by God than their authors were when they weren't writing those books? Do you believe that the apostle's (or other writer's of the New Testament) were given temporary infallibility when writing the New Testament documents but then lost it as soon as they stopped writing/dictating? Or are the New Testament documents the product of an ongoing ministry in which Christ was in control of his Gospel in the mouths and lives of the apostles through the ministry of the Holy Spirit? Do we worry that this latter view makes human bias and corruption too much of an obstacle for God to reveal himself through? If so, doesn't reacting with a "higher" view of Scripture (one free of the human influence of the apostles) actually mean a lower view of God's self-revealing power?

Torrance on Time and the Resurrection

2010-01-08T06:17:00.000-08:00

Given Andy Snyder's argument that the roughly 2000 years since the resurrection makes it irrelevant by its historical distance, I thought I'd share this great paragraph from T. F. Torrance on the subject from his new book, Atonement.

The kind of time we have in this passing world is the time of an existence that crumbles away into the dust, time that runs backward into nothingness. Hence the kind of historical happening we have in this world is happening that decays and to that extent is illusory, running away into the darkness and forgetfulness of the past. As happening within this kind of time, and as event within this kind of history, the resurrection, by being what it is, resists and overcomes corruption and decay, and is therefore a new kind of historical happening which instead of tumbling down into the grave and oblivion rises out of the death of what is past into continuing being and reality. This is temporal happening that runs not backwards but forwards, and overcomes all illusion and privation or loss of being. This is fully real historical happening, so real that it remains happening and does not slip away from us, but keeps pace with us and, as we tumble down in decay and lapse into death and the dust of past history, outruns us and even comes to meet us out of the future. That is how we are to think of the risen Jesus Christ. He is not dead but alive, more real than any of us. Hence he does not need to be made real for us, because he does not decay or become fixed in the past. He lives on in the present as real live continuous happening, encountering us here and now in the present and waiting for us in the future. (Atonement, 246, emphasis his).

This is the kind of thing I am just not able to get across to the non-believer: the totally radical newness of God's act in Jesus Christ which makes all of our attempts to measure the likelihood or evidence for God's existence totally irrelevant. Jesus is risen! He is alive here and now and active among us. This cannot be deduced from other realities because it is God's new creation, transcending all old realities and recreating them according to God's redemption in Jesus. "But why? How do you know?" Why do the blind insist on staying blind?

Torrance on World Missions

2010-01-07T03:57:00.001-08:00

Since T. F. Torrance was the son of missionaries, I've found it strange that I rarely see him comment on the subject of missions. However, I came across this great paragraph on that subject today.

The very life process of the church is the resurgence and expansion of the new creation in Christ, right in the midst of the critical situation brought about by the cross in the world. Here that life process runs parallel to the expansion or the 'catholicising' of the person of Christ from a historical to a cosmic significance which took place at the cross where the redeeming love of God in him was at last universalised and made free to the whole world. It was the death of Christ, so to speak, that emancipated his gospel for the whole world. The cross catholicised or universalised Christ, and so it necessarily universalises or catholicises the believer at the cross and who by the cross becomes joined to Christ and therefore joined to a new universal humanity. Thus the cross introduces into the Christian outlook, the notion of universal expansion or world mission, in which all barriers of race and language are broken down, and the Christian is constrained to proclaim reconciliation to all and to live it out, for it is by that same motion of universal reconciliation that he and she have themselves been redeemed in the cross. That is why the Christian faith is necessarily missionary, because the word of the cross lodged in its heart is the word of an infinitely expanding redemption that must reach out to the uttermost bounds of the universe, embracing every tongue and tribe and people. (Atonement, 200)

Amen.

Grow on Walker on Torrance on Scripture (on Dancer on Prancer on Donner on Cupid)

2010-01-06T03:42:00.000-08:00

Bobby Grow has a great quotation from Robert Walker on T. F. Torrance's doctrine of Scripture over at his Torrance blog, Behind the Back.

International Hot Tub: Round 4 part 4

2009-12-28T06:50:00.000-08:00

(For newcomers, this is a debate between myself, a Christian, and my best friend Andy Snyder, a former Christian who is now an atheist. For a fuller introduction to the intent and explanation of the name of this series, please see the introduction. Though this is presented as a two party debate on one level, comments and responses are still fully welcomed to all posts in the comments section as a way to help extend the debate and bring other voices into it.)

I realize that by this point I've pretty much totally killed this discussion by cutting up my response to Andy's last argument into a bunch of pieces, making responding to me a laborious task. Let me here briefly respond to the last two paragraphs of Andy's last post, and then make a proposal for how to go forward.

First I'll deal with Andy's second to last paragraph:

“Of course there are other ostensibly plausible interpretations of these events. You've offered a common and compelling one, the one of the linear evolution of human understanding where we go from mythology, to religion, to naturalistic science. This story is forceful and persuasive, except for the fact that it offers no proof of itself. It is just as liable to the charge of total fabrication as is any meta-narrative of human or cosmic history.” So what do you make of the microwave background, Hubble’s constant, the fossil record (the Neanderthal, Lucy), spontaneous mutation, etc? These things certainly seem to be proof or at least evidence that the development of the universe proposed through the modern scientific worldview is valid.

I make no comment on any evidence for any theory of the development of the universe - that isn't really our topic. I'm fairly open minded and willing to listen to arguments for either young earth creationism (which I am admittedly not inclined toward for some of the reasons you've mentioned) or evolution over the course of billions of years, either through stable progression or intermittent leaps of mutation. However, the gradual evolution of the human species (which, again, I'm not married to) does not necessarily imply the evolution of world views from primitive (less true) to advanced (more true) states. Plenty of people are able to understand the universe scientifically on both the theist and atheist presuppositions, clearly debunking the idea that a scientific mind is an evolutionary step beyond the religious mind. Getting back to the issue at hand in this paragraph, your interpretation of people's claims of experiences of God along the lines of the human impulse to find patterns, and this evolving through mythology, to religion, to science, remains at rest on an untested presupposition of God's non-existence. The evidence for natural evolution offers no evidence for God's non-existence. Approaches to dealing with the question of God's existence by looking at theories of human biological evolution or psychology or sociology are all radically unscientific - they assume their conclusion, analyse totally irrelevant data according to this assumed conclusion, and then announce their victory. Its all a dodge. The validity of Christianity's claim that God reveals himself cannot be tested by appeals to any data outside of God (which is rather like testing Hubble's law by conducting Rorschach tests); God can only be known through God, and this only through repentance and faith in Christ by the power of his Spirit.

And, Andy's final paragraph:

On the final issue of worldviews being neutral, I propose there is a common underpinning in all cultural perspectives. Although it’s not neutral, it’s at the foundation of the human experience and is therefore a universal beginning point to evaluate any and all worldviews we might hold: humans are pattern-seeking. Whether it is Native Americans noticing the migration routes of the buffalo, ancient Athenian astrologers noticing the same shapes in the heavens reoccur year after year, or even a modern theologian looking for patterns in TF Torrance’s thought, our species universally takes notice of phenomena reoccurring and gives explanations for them. I propose that a worldview should be judged on how internally consistent its patterns to understand the world are. I not going to post my criticisms on the Christian perspective, but only want to offer this as a beginning point for comparative discussion of worldviews.

Indeed, humans are pattern seeking. As a Christian, however, I have to say that this pattern seeking activity is one of the many ways humanity seeks to evade God. The world views we construct are ways of keeping God at arms length, to be dealt with conceptually rather than personally. The more internally consistent my world view, the better insulated I am from God. This is the problem. There are several world views that are entirely internally consistent - how are we to measure them against each other? World views can really only be understood internally, so how are you, a proponent of scientific/naturalistic world view which values world views according to their utilitarian function of organizing data, going to evaluate the Buddhist world view? It too can only be understood internally and has its own set of values for world views (or so it appears from the outside). I fully grant that the "Christian world view", if such a thing there be, has the same problem - it insulates us from other ways of thinking and even from God. The answer must come from beyond humanity and all its pattern seeking; it must come from God, and it has. The cross of Jesus Christ is the final judgement on all insulating pattern seeking, revealing humanity's final inability to understand God through its own intellectual efforts and exposing all such efforts as fraught with ignorance and hostility toward God. To this end I do not propose any real or imagined "Christian world view" but only Jesus Christ as the total revelation of God, complete with patterns of thought that do not need to be sought, but are freely given by Christ in his teaching ministry as recorded in the Gospels. I am thus not interested in comparing world views but only in proclaiming Christ.

Now, as to how to go forward in this series, feeling that I might have killed it with the length of these last several arguments, let me propose the following options:

1) We consider these first 4 rounds (everything we've done so far) as our opening arguments and now proceed to pester each other with direct questions, one at a time. For instance, you pose a question briefly and succinctly; I answer it as briefly and succinctly as I can; you respond to my answer, commenting on whether or not I have adequately dealt with the question from your point of view; and then its my turn to ask you one.

2) We continue on as we have and you deal with everything I've said in my last four part response in whatever way you see fit and we just see if anyone keeps reading.

3) We proceed to final arguments.

I favour option 1 myself, but I'm open to any further suggestion you might have.

Torrance's Last Book

2009-12-22T04:44:00.000-08:00

I'm just beginning to go through T. F. Torrance's newest and last book, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, which is part two of two collections of his lectures on Christology and Soteriology at New College, University of Edinburgh. This is a quote from the introduction written by the editor, Torrance's student and nephew, Robert Walker.

For Torrance, faith is what happens when through the Spirit we are brought to see personally that Christ had and has faith for us, that therefore we do not need to have a new and different faith in addition to his faith for us, and when we understand this then we realize that the faith we have is in fact the very faith of Christ himself which is now in our hearts by the Spirit. (lxxix)

International Hot Tub: Round 4 part 3

2009-12-21T06:24:00.000-08:00

Andy, your third argument is made in three paragraphs. Here they are:

Third, even if I consider Christianity on its own terms, I would argue its subjects (God/Yahweh/Jesus/The Holy Spirit) have been suspiciously absent for quite some time. Simply put, theophanies have a shelf life and the resurrection of Jesus has long past its expiration date. There is biblical president for this: In John it is written,

“ ‘Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.’ Thomas said to him, ‘My Lord and my God!’ Then Jesus told him, ‘Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.’ ” (John 20:24-29)

Here Jesus reveals two things: the need for humans to experience tangible proof of his divine claims and the difficulty to marshal belief when humans don’t have that first hand experience. Most scholars date this gospel only 60 years after the time of Jesus. That the author included this saying of Jesus implies his audience, only two or three generations removed from the life of Jesus, was struggling with his claim to be God. It is infinitely harder to believe now, as we are thousands of years and generations removed from the last significant theophany Christianity attests to. Experiencing the story, the gospel, and Christ’s ethics expressed through his church 2000 years later is not a meaningful substitute for an unequivocal biblical theophany of God. You won’t apologize for this tension and that’s fine, but neither will I for claiming a victory here.

It is undeniable that the apostles were given a gift few others received by spending intimate time with Christ, hearing not only the teachings he gave to the masses, but also his interpretation of them, speaking explicitly about his identity and mission, and appearing to them in his resurrected body. I would wish for that as much as anyone.

I'll say only two quick things in response and in denial of your assumed victory. First, your argument here is entirely subjective. Theophanies have a shelf life? How long is that? You can only appeal to what feels like a long time. For me and plenty of other Christians, the resurrection of Christ is not a theophany but the unrepeatable and eternally significant Day of the Lord, his coming in judgment and forgiveness. Yes, he has ascended, withdrawn his bodily presence, but you know ,if you did truly consider Christianity on its own terms, that this is the gracious will of God to allow an interim before his final coming for the sake of the preaching of the gospel and repentance.

Second, you are not without tangible evidence and experience of God in this interim period. God is present in his church through the Spirit as he was present in the flesh of Christ. He is as perceivably real now in us, the church, as he was then in Christ's flesh. Your judgement against Christ is truly your judgement against us, against our truthfulness, clear mindedness, will against self-delusion, and faithfulness. You can certainly make this judgement, there is no lack of warrant for making it, but in making it you must certainly also make it against yourself. Do this. Judge me a self-deluded liar, but only if you are willing to judge yourself to the same degree. Then, in that state of solidarity in judgement with me and the church, tell me if God is not real in me and in the church in spite of, through, and above our weakness and sin. Put your fingers in Christ's wounds as you see them in us - are they not there? Do you truly see nothing of the Spirit of the risen Christ in me? I don't appeal to my own righteousness, but of the visible and tangible presence of God in me and in all the church despite our total unrighteousness. You are not without evidence.

I'll give the last word here to Peter:

2 Peter 3:3-18 3 First of all, you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires. 4 They will say, "Where is this 'coming' he promised? Ever since our fathers died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation." 5 But they deliberately forget that long ago by God's word the heavens existed and the earth was formed out of water and by water. 6 By these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed. 7 By the same word the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men. 8 But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. 9 The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. 10 But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare. 11 Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives 12 as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat. 13 But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness. 14 So then, dear friends, since you are looking forward to this, make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him. 15 Bear in mind that our Lord's patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. 16 He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction. 17 Therefore, dear friends, since you already know this, be on your guard so that you may not be carried away by the error of lawless men and fall from your secure position. 18 But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and forever! Amen.

One more post to come and then I'll hand it back to you.

Another Thought on Scripture

2009-12-18T03:06:00.001-08:00

In continuation of the conversation from yesterday about where a statement on Scripture should go in a church's "What We Believe" statement included on their website, I'd like to pose a question.

Specifically in contrast to Islam, to whatever degree those of us that are Western non-Muslims understand that religion, how does Christianity respond to this question: In God's love for humanity and desire to be known, loved, and obeyed by them, what has God given the world?

My interaction with many Christians suggests that they would say the Bible. Of course they would say that he has given us his Son as well, but this would be understood as God's way of satisfying his justice in forgiving our sins, not making himself known. To make himself known, much of evangelical preaching and teaching suggests, God has given us a divinely inspired and infallible book. If this is true, if the most important thing for us in knowing God is a book, then how is Christianity any better than Islam?

For me, our firm answer to this question must be that he has given us his very Self in coming to us as a man in Jesus Christ and uniting us to him through the Holy Spirit so that we are given to share in his humanity, including his mind so that we may know the Father as the Son knows the Father (1 Cor 2:6-16). Yes, the Bible is totally irreplaceable as the authoritative guide to knowing God in Christ, to test our thoughts and actions in light of Christ, and to guide our hearts to him through the proclamation of his acts of salvation within our history. However, we must say that without knowledge of Jesus Christ the Bible is utterly useless. It gives us absolutely no knowledge of God if we neglect its central exhortation while we read it, the exhortation to follow and worship Christ as Lord. Our reading of the Bible is only meaningful if done in pursuit of knowledge of Christ as Lord. Therefore, it seems to me that by every standard, Christ and his gospel must come first in any statement of Christian faith, whether ordered by importance, procession of logical argument, or protection of orthodoxy. Let Christ be our all in all. Let everything we do, including our reading of the Bible and acknowledgement of its authority, be only in service to him.

Don't Judge a Church by its Website: "What We Believe"

2009-12-17T08:37:00.000-08:00

I just did a quick survey of the web sites of 10 evangelical and pentecostal churches in Santa Cruz county, scanning their "What We Believe" pages for one factor: where did they put their statement on Scripture. Being honest, I was totally surprised. I expected to find it as the first item of belief, followed by the persons of the Trinity, and then usually something about sin and salvation, heaven and hell, the church, etc. The survey actually came out half and half; only about half of those churches put their statement on Scripture first, the other half putting something else, four of which had some kine of statement about God first (one of which was in the form of the Nicene Creed, which I think is rare and awesome for an evangelical Protestant church!) and one of which had something about the need for spiritual community.

Why is this important? Because there is something just totally wrong about a church putting its belief in the Bible above their belief in God/Jesus Christ. It borders on blasphemy. Yes, as evangelicals we are Christians committed to the Bible, yet we are not chiefly concerned with the Bible but with Jesus Christ; the Bible is not an end in itself, but the message about Jesus Christ.

So why are these churches putting the Bible first and what should they be putting first? It seems to me that they put it first because they believe that you have to deal with how we can know about God before you can deal with who God is and how he has saved us in Jesus Christ; that is, they believe you have to deal with theological epistemology before you can deal with divine ontology or soteriology. More important than that, putting the Bible first in a church's statement of beliefs reflects a belief that the question of how we can know about God isn't fully answered in Jesus Christ himself, the Word become flesh among us. For sure, the Bible needs to be in those statements, but I think it should below any and every statement about God himself, probably being somewhere in there with the church and sacraments/ordinances, which are just as integral to Christian faith as the Bible is (we could quibble on the sacraments, but I'll stand behind saying that the church is as important to the propagation and deepening of Christian knowledge as the Bible). This is my take on why the Bible is first for so many churches, but it might be partial or skewed. Anyone want to venture an alternative theory?

As for what should be first, I suggest following the historic creeds by going Father, Son, Holy Spirit and then proceeding with other matters (sin, salvation, Bible, church, baptism, communion, Christ's return). What do you think? Maybe I should craft a Draw Nigh "What We Believe" statement and offer to sell it to churches...

Don't Judge a Church by its Website

2009-12-16T01:48:00.000-08:00

Since leaving California for Aberdeen my interest in and passion for church ministry has continued to grow. Feeling the distance from my home, I've spent some time looking around the church web sites of several churches, my own and many of the others I know of through friends who go there or work there, mostly churches in Santa Cruz county, but several in the San Francisco Bay area. I've made and continue to make several observations about these web sites I'd like to share in a new series I'm calling "Don't Judge a Church by its Website".

Before I start, however, I feel the need to establish that I don't mean to be overly critical here, but I also don't think my job as a theologian is necessarily to congratulate the church for how well its doing all the time but to challenge it in light of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

That being said, I'll start with a positive: for most churches I know, their website is probably the worst thing about them. That really is a positive. It means that what is actually going on among the people as they fellowship and learn together through the Holy Spirit is most likely far more biblical, healthy, and Christian than their websites might lead one to believe. So many church web sites, especially those of churches in Santa Cruz and other coastal towns, are so desperate to appear relevant, hip, and life changing that I have a difficult time taking them seriously. I'll talk more about this under specific topics as this series progresses, but at this point I want to re-emphasize that I think the shallow spirituality exhibited on so many of these web sites is not fully indicative of the level of understanding, commitment, fellowship, and practical living of the Christian faith at most of the churches these web sites represent. This comes from much experience at my own church, which I think has an amazing vitality and commitment to the gospel despite its blind spots, which are serious and fairly openly exposed on its web site, but also from interaction with several pastors and friends in other churches. As this series progresses I will take aim and challenge the way these churches represent themselves (without naming any names of course) on their web sites, and I do believe these representations tell us something at least about the thinking, strategy, and values of these churches, but ultimately it is the Spirit that is giving life to our Christian communities, not our thinking, strategies, or values. Therefore, we ought to have a freedom to challenge the thinking, strategies and values thrown up on these web sites without fearing that we are in any way impugning the spiritual vitality, Christian commitment or orthodoxy of the churches.

These thoughts are works in progress so please feel free to offer your own input.

Barth on Human Resistance to Truth

2009-12-12T12:17:00.000-08:00

Reading Barth, this paragraph (yes, this is a single paragraph) struck me as speaking powerfully to recent discussions in the Hot Tub. Its a lot to wade through, but it speaks powerfully of the real obstacle to knowing the truth in God: us.

"What is truth?" It certainly cannot be expected to encounter man as a phenomenon which is immediately and directly illuminating, pleasing, acceptable and welcome to him. He would not be who he is if the promise of the Spirit came to him easily and smoothly. The gate through which it comes to him, if at all, is not wide but strait, and its way to him is not broad but narrow. Basically, it is in harmony with him and it speaks to his innermost self. For it tells him about the reconciliation of the world to God which has taken place in Jesus Christ, about this as his own justification and sanctification, about the new birth which it implies for him, about the freedom and peace of his true being as a new man in Jesus Christ. Yet telling him of these things, it is a new and strange and unsettling message compared with what he is in himself apart from this being of his in Jesus Christ, and with what he thus regards as pleasing, acceptable and true. It lacks the brightness and radiance which might cause it to seem true and acceptable. Indeed, the new man in Jesus Christ of whom it tells seems to be wrapped in obscurity compared with the old whom we know so much better and with whom we are naturally well acquainted. We need to pierce the obscurity, to penetrate the alien, threatening and uncomfortable aspect under which the truth draws near to man, if we are really to see it as the truth. We need to do something which is not at all self-evident, namely, to become other people. In the first instance, it does not address us; it contradicts us and demands our contradiction. Hence it does not commend itself. It is not welcome but unwelcome. It would certainly not be the truth if it did not have the tendency and power to pierce that obscurity, to penetrate that first aspect, to change us and therefore to open us to itself. It would not be the truth if the newness and strangeness in which it first encounters us were no more than the hard shell of a sweet and very precious kernel, if its aim and impulse were not to make perceptible and accessible to us the joy and peace of our true being as new men in Jesus Christ. But it would also not be the truth if it won us for itself by any other way than that of a powerful Nevertheless and Notwithstanding, if it did not encounter us in that hard shell, if it served up that insight on a platter, if it disclosed itself to us cheaply and otherwise than in a desperate conflict of decision. Things gained in this easy and self-evident way might well be kindly and good and even true within the sphere of a creaturely life, but they would certainly not be the truth of God. And they would be distinguished from this by the fact that they would entail no unmasking of man, no exposure of him as a liar, and therefore no summoning of him to a knowledge of the grace of God, to faith and obedience. That this is so in the case of the truth of God is grounded in the fact that this is identical with the true Witness Jesus Christ as the revelation of God's will and work for man enacted in Him. The glory of this Mediator, however, is a glory which is concealed in its opposite, in invisibility, in repellent shame. This Witness does not encounter man in a splendour which wins him easily and impresses him naturally. Raised from the dead by the power of God, He encounters him in the despicable and forbidding form of the Slain and Crucified of Golgotha. It is as the One whose way leads and ends there that He is the Reconciler of the world to God, the justification and sanctification of man. It is with Him as this One that our life is hidden and secured in God. And it is as this One that He comes again, revealing Himself in the world which moves to this end and goal and therefore in our sphere of time and history. The Word of the cross is thus the light of life, the saving revelation of God, the promise of the Spirit, in which He visits and accompanies and encounters man. It is as the Word of the cross that it has and exercises this power, and therefore primarily in this context the power to unmask the man of sin as a liar. To whom could it possibly appear welcome, acceptable or even tolerable? As it is this Word from which we think we can only turn away in rejection in view of the menace of its form, it is obvious that we should try to escape from it in falsehood, accepting instead a truth or untruth which it is easy to hold and affirm and which has the advantage that it enables us to think that we can avoid exposure. We can only think this. For in face of this Word there is for man, no matter what he thinks, no possibility of escape or concealment.

International Hot Tub: Round 4 part 2

2009-12-10T17:04:00.001-08:00

Now lets tackle your second paragraph. Here it is:

Second, even if I’m open to the supernatural, I see no reason why Christianity should be given special consideration above all other claims of the supernatural. Couldn’t your second paragraph just as easily ended with “Enter the prophet Muhammad” “Enter Buddha” “Enter Apollo” etc? All religions are realities presented as both sensible and intelligible; I don’t understand why we should skip straight to Christianity and ignore other major claims to the supernatural.

Why should Christianity be given special consideration? This seems at first a daunting question because it implies a few corollary problems. Either we should give full consideration to each and every religious claim in the history of mankind, which no one has time for, or we should consider none. After all, if one was right, shouldn't it stand out in an obvious way so we don't have to waste our time with all the others? We might devise some kind of filter to thin it down a bit, like only deal with religions which claim at least 10 million adherents; this would reduce it to about 6 religions, but that standard arbitrarily presuppose that a true religion will be big and modern. Why shouldn't the one true religion be ancient and forgotten? But then, what exactly is a religion anyway? We all assume we mean the same thing when we say the word so that statements like "All religions are realities presented as both sensible and intelligible" can have meaning, but do they?

I am convinced that the word "religion" is useless and basically meaningless (Steve Holmes, lecturer in Systematic Theology at the University of St. Andrews, has a great discussion of this here). It seemingly allows us to assert that different "religions" can be held parallel to one another and compared, but these comparisons, at least when comparing Christianity to something like Buddhism, invent and impose alien categories that neither Christianity nor Buddhism holds internally, In the hands of post-modernism, the notion of a daunting plurality of religions has created a smoke screen where Christ doesn't have to be dealt with because there are so many other Christ's applying for the same job that to pick just one would be totally random. I think this is basically what you're doing with this question. You have to deal with Christianity because you have been raised as a Christian and because I and tons of others around you testify to the truth of Christ. Deal with the claims of Buddhism when the lives and wisdom of Buddhists around you compel you to, rather than take on a seemingly infinite set truth claims which all exist merely 'out there'. Is this an arbitrary standard? I don't think so. It just means that we don't deal with abstractions of concepts, but the beliefs of people we can know and walk alongside and ask. However, even though I think the question you pose here is a fabricated dodge of the real issue, I'll deal with it anyway.

Assuming such a plurality of supernatural claims, why should Christianity be given special consideration? First, I'll throw my hat in with C. S. Lewis and others who are careful to insist that to be a Christian does not mean one thinks all other religions, if such a thing there be, are necessarily wrong about everything. I myself do find some of the teachings of the Buddha, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Ghandi, Malcom X, and even Carl Sagan to be helpful and true; however, they offer truths revealed by human insight, observation, and intuition, rather than the Truth of God's self-revelation, found only in Christ.

Second, and this may seem a technical point but its important, it is not Christianity per se but Christ, who reveals himself as Lord over all humanity and thus all religions, including Christianity, that must be given special consideration.

So rephrasing the question, why should Jesus Christ be given special consideration over possible christs? Could the second paragraph of my last post just as easily end with "Enter Muhammad, Buddha, or Apollo"? Only by blindly assuming the legitimacy of the word "religion" and thus ignoring what makes Christ totally different from the rest. For the sake of argument, I can see 5 categories of what we'll call religious figures, though I remain convinced that these categories are of seriously limited usefulness. In the first category are those like Moses, John the Baptist, Muhammad, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Joseph Smith, and Tom Cruise. None of these men ever claimed to be God. Actually, all were insistent that they were not God. They presented themselves as mere men who either brought a message from God or had discovered something true about the supernatural somehow. Much of what some of these men has taught is true and good, but it doesn't make them a replacement for Christ.

In the second category are those like Apollo, Ra, Thor, and Ganesha. These are mythological figures who fill a perceived gap between some higher, prior god who is their ancestor, and our world. Their significance to those who believe in them is not historical, that is, they are not seen as coming into human affairs within history and substantially changing anything, but explaining certain cosmic, agricultural, political, or personal cycles in a distinctly timeless way.

In the third category are those like Gilgamesh, Hercules, Romulus and Remus. These are demigods, or supposedly historical figures who are born of the union of a human and a god. Some have made comparisons here to Christ, but they are ridiculous. None of these presents himself as the final union of God and man; they are better spoken of as half-man, half-god than as fully man and fully God as is true with Christ. There is also the serious deficiency of historical testimony to be considered in these cases. They are myths that you don't believe in any more than I do and for totally different reasons than you don't believe in Christ.

In the fourth category are the Hindu avatars of Vishnu, particularly Krishna and Rama. The literature telling of these heroes, the Mahabharata and Ramayana respectively, give us plenty of reasons to assume these figures are not historical or if they were, their memory has fallen prey to the exaggerations and fabrications of myth and legend. (palaces with millions of windows, armies with millions of elephants, and monkeys that talk, fight, and can leap from India to Sri Lanka). There are significant theological differences between them and Christ, such as their not taking the curse of human weakness and death on themselves to free us from it, and their not accomplishing a once and for union between God and humanity in their flesh, but the similarities seem more important here. They represent a recognition that gods are unhelpful to humanity if removed from us in some metaphysical realm, something the Buddha recognized too, though he concluded that we just don't need them. Instead, the Hindu stories of these avatars represent the need and longing of humanity for the gods to get off their clouds and come among us.

Enter Jesus Christ, uniquely, supremely, and gloriously among all of the other so-called religious figures. He belongs with those in the first category as one who is unquestionably historical, but against them as one who sets himself over them as not merely bringing a message about God or the supernatural but as one who is God among men and women, the Supernatural invading the natural. Unlike those in the second category, he is not remote but near to each one of us. Unlike those in the third and fourth categories, he is not the product of human imagination or longing, but of God, seen above all in his resurrection from the dead into an incorruptible body, ascended and sitting at the right hand of the Father, a claim made of no other figure. The combination of these historical claims with the remarkable historical proximity of the documents recording the events, their publication coming within a generation of Christ's life, testifies to Jesus Christ's uniqueness against other supposed christs. He alone has brought God into the intelligibility and sensibility of our human sphere by being God in his very flesh, making the imperceptible perceptible to us, and speaking as God of himself in human words, making the transcendent and inconceivable conceivable to us. There is no other like Christ.

Let me say a bit more about sensibility and intelligibility. By the sensible I mean realities that are approachable through sense perception, and by the intelligible I mean realities that approachable through reason or intellect. Thus the chair I'm currently sitting in is sensible while 'chairness' is a solely intelligible concept. Deism presented God as wholly intelligible, not sensible. There is some good reason for this; God is totally beyond the physical universe he has created and therefore it is faulty to search for him within it. Rather, its lack of inherent explanation for itself ought to point our minds, not our eyes, beyond it. The problem here is how do we know that the god we thus come to believe in does not exist only in our minds? This seems to be the god you're attacking, the god of the gaps, the god who is arrived at through questions like "how did we all get here?" or "do you know where you'll go when you die?". Christianity cannot have this god (though it often does); the God of the Bible created everything, the sensible AND the intelligible out of nothing and therefore cannot be arrived at through the use of either faculty. The God of the Bible is only known because he has by grace alone chosen to reveal himself to humanity, to make himself both sensible and intelligible by taking human flesh and human reason on himself through Incarnation (again, I see no other "religions" making this claim). When his disciples beheld his physical human presence and heard his voice, they beheld and heard the voice of God in a unique unity of the sensible and intelligible mediating knowledge of the imperceptible and unintelligible. That is to say, God actively makes himself known within our sensible and intelligible sphere, though he himself is neither sensible nor intelligible, being totally beyond our reach.

One final point. Everything I have said about the uniqueness of Christ above takes for granted the legitimacy of "comparative religions" which I previously denounced. As a Christian, that is as a believer in Christ, I am bound to say that these comparisons are all shaky at best and the real reason Christ should be given special consideration is that he alone is Lord. I have given you some distinctions between him and central figures of other so-called religions according to the assumptions of the field of study known as comparative religions or cultural anthropology, but this cannot ultimately be why he is Lord and the others are not. He is Lord because he is Lord. That is the only way it could be. We can only know him as he reveals himself to us, and in revealing himself through grace he judges all of our attempts to find him on our own terms apart from his grace by constructing comparative criteria and setting him alongside other christs. He reveals himself to us all as King of Kings and Lord of Lords. He has to be dealt with because he presses himself upon all of us to be dealt with as no one else does. He knocks on the door of our hearts even now.

More to come. Next time I'll deal with what the unity of the sensible and intelligible in the historical Jesus means to us now, removed from him by two thousand years.

International Hot Tub: Round 4 part 1

2009-12-07T09:40:00.000-08:00

(For an introduction to the intent and explanation of the name of this series, please see the introduction. Though this is presented as a two party debate on one level, comments and responses are still fully welcomed to all posts in the comments section as a way to help extend the debate and bring other voices into it.)

There is simply too much here to deal with in a single post, at least one anyone would want to wade through. So I'll do a few separate posts. On with the first.

Openness to the supernatural ought to be the natural result of recognizing our limitations. By supernatural we mean what is beyond nature, or more explicitly, what is beyond the physical universe that we are all contained within and a part of. Within the universe we can describe all kinds of relationships and experiences, tangible experiences that indicate objective realities. But the universe gives no explanation for itself. It can't. No self-contained field of relationships can explain its own existence; it can only explain the realities within it. To explain the field itself, reference must be made to something beyond it. As I understand it, this relationship is reflected in the fact that arithmetic, while working fine internally, can not be used to prove its own legitimacy but must defer to algebra to validate it, which then must defer to calculus to validate it. Thus each self-contained field of math is open upwards to levels of reality beyond its nature (super-natural) for its own justification. Likewise, it is the fact that your tangible experiences and the universe they rely on offer no explanation of themselves that ought to lead you to a profound sense of their limitations, which in turn ought to produce an openness upward to a reality beyond the physical universe from which it must derive its meaning. (To clarify, this is NOT the classic cosmological or 'first cause' argument for the existence of God because I'm not here arguing the existence of God, only a basic openness to allow God to reveal himself.)

On the other hand, I think abstract arguments like this are a bit of a dodge and a waste of time. What ought to produce openness to the supernatural is your personal experiences of your limitations, the struggle with your personal nature which we all endure, our inability to fully determine ourselves, to do what we know is right and not do what we know is wrong. It is in our sin that God really finds us, not in our intellectual recognition that he might actually be there.

But even here there is a problem; ultimately it should not be either our abstract reason or personal experience that leaves us open to God, but God himself that opens us up to him. The attitude that demands a reason to be open to this is the very pride and arrogance God must save us from, and judge in the saving. This attitude reduces God to a concept to be considered rather than the Almighty who must be faced. Accordingly, I cannot give you an argument for why you ought to be open to God; the only alternative is to be closed and no truth can come from that.

The claim that taking Jesus' teachings seriously is anachronistic and fails to take seriously the modern scientific world view is faulty because this very claim fails to take seriously the fact that the modern scientific world view changes nothing about Jesus' teaching. Let me say that another way: Jesus' teachings had to do with the relationships of humanity to God, to each other in their personal, political, economic, moral, and familial dimensions, and to the world God has placed us in; he didn't teach physics except the scientifically foundational principle of creation out of nothing, ex nihilo. The progress of modern science can make no judgement on Jesus' teachings because it does not and cannot address them; they have entirely different subject matter, methodology, and authority; the progress of modern science has no corollary in something like a progress of modern morality or civility or culture.

You are formally correct in saying that Jesus never directly addressed himself to atheism; however, materially, Jesus was constantly addressing himself to those who had no real experience of God, giving true objective experience of God in his very presence and address as God. As I've said earlier, he taught his disciples the reality of the kingdom of God and poured out his Spirit on them, enabling them to do the same for others. I am hopeful to do the same for you. In my presence (being on another continent not withstanding) and friendship in the Spirit of faith in Christ, it is my hope that God will open you up to his presence and activity in your life and yours in His. Either way, the reality of millions upon millions of lives who have been changed and brought into contact with the living God up to this very day through the teachings and deeds of Christ read in the Gospels overwhelms your claim of their irrelevance and anachronism.

More to come...

Torrance on Knowing God

2009-12-02T07:20:00.000-08:00

In my excitement that the new 2nd volume of T. F. Torrance's posthumously published lectures on Christology, Atonement, will be out soon (in the UK - I think its already out in the US), I'm re-reading the 1st volume which came out last year, Incarnation. Here is a choice selection to mull while I procrastinate in responding to Andy in the International Hot Tub:

We must learn here to think with God always in the centre. God speaks in such a way as not to be brought under our rubrics and estimates. He meets us as the Lord. He saves us and we know we are in his presence. Here our knowledge of God, our theological judgments are not self-centered, but are called out of us as matters of acknowledgement and obedience. We are confronted with the majesty of God and surrender ourselves to him in adoration and devotion. That is why faith insists that what believers do is to let themselves be told by the Word, by Christ himself, allow themselves to be determined by Christ who confronts us in his word, and acts upon us – so that the judgments of faith are not those which believers make according to what they already know, but those which are formed in them as they are obedient to what is presented to them. God summons us, and we obey. He authenticates himself to us and we acknowledge him. He confronts us with a divine act of majesty which creates and forms in us a perception appropriate to what he is, and we are controlled by it. He establishes himself in our human knowing in a way according to his nature, and does not allow our knowing of him to be halted by our normal limitation and capacities – for he upholds us from below and enables us to know what is beyond our natural capacities, and what we acknowledge is an act of adoration and glorification of God. But it is as sinners that we encounter Christ, and as sinners that we are summoned to hear his word and to yield to it the obedience of our minds, so that when we know and obey him, that is a reversal of our disobedience, and involves a decision against ourselves, contrary to our self-will. (35-36)

International Hot Tub: Round 3

2009-11-30T00:32:00.000-08:00

Guest Post by Andy Snyder:

Sorry this is so late; life happened. I’ll try to get the following responses up within a week of Adam’s posts.

My first issue here is why my complaint should be expressed “openly” at all. You said, “By ‘expressed openly’ I mean within the limits of human finitude but without excluding the possibility of the objectivity and freedom of God beyond those limits.” I understand you to mean the argument for Christianity can proceed if one is open to the possibility of the supernatural. I see no argument presented here which would make me open to the supernatural or any concept of God. The argument that I need to consider Jesus’ claims on his own terms is anachronistic and doesn’t take seriously the modern scientific world view. Jesus presented himself to a culture that assumed theism of one sort or another. This gave an inherent shape to the presentation of his message, as the majority of the ancient world believed in the divine. Back then the question was not, “Do you believe in God?” but was instead “What God do you believe in?” My problem of struggling with the existence of God was not something Jesus addressed in his message; therefore his gospel cannot be considered meaningfully until the bigger abstract issue of the existence of God is dealt with first.

Second, even if I’m open to the supernatural, I see no reason why Christianity should be given special consideration above all other claims of the supernatural. Couldn’t your second paragraph just as easily ended with “Enter the prophet Muhammad” “Enter Buddha” “Enter Apollo” etc? All religions are realities presented as both sensible and intelligible; I don’t understand why we should skip straight to Christianity and ignore other major claims to the supernatural.

Third, even if I consider Christianity on its own terms, I would argue its subjects (God/Yahweh/Jesus/The Holy Spirit) have been suspiciously absent for quite some time. Simply put, theophanies have a shelf life and the resurrection of Jesus has long past its expiration date. There is biblical president for this: In John it is written,

“ ‘Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.’ Thomas said to him, ‘My Lord and my God!’ Then Jesus told him, ‘Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.’ ” (John 20:24-29)

Here Jesus reveals two things: the need for humans to experience tangible proof of his divine claims and the difficulty to marshal belief when humans don’t have that first hand experience. Most scholars date this gospel only 60 years after the time of Jesus. That the author included this saying of Jesus implies his audience, only two or three generations removed from the life of Jesus, was struggling with his claim to be God. It is infinitely harder to believe now, as we are thousands of years and generations removed from the last significant theophany Christianity attests to. Experiencing the story, the gospel, and Christ’s ethics expressed through his church 2000 years later is not a meaningful substitute for an unequivocal biblical theophany of God. You won’t apologize for this tension and that’s fine, but neither will I for claiming a victory here.

“Of course there are other ostensibly plausible interpretations of these events. You've offered a common and compelling one, the one of the linear evolution of human understanding where we go from mythology, to religion, to naturalistic science. This story is forceful and persuasive, except for the fact that it offers no proof of itself. It is just as liable to the charge of total fabrication as is any meta-narrative of human or cosmic history.” So what do you make of the microwave background, Hubble’s constant, the fossil record (the Neanderthal, Lucy), spontaneous mutation, etc? These things certainly seem to be proof or at least evidence that the development of the universe proposed through the modern scientific worldview is valid.

On the final issue of worldviews being neutral, I propose there is a common underpinning in all cultural perspectives. Although it’s not neutral, it’s at the foundation of the human experience and is therefore a universal beginning point to evaluate any and all worldviews we might hold: humans are pattern-seeking. Whether it is Native Americans noticing the migration routes of the buffalo, ancient Athenian astrologers noticing the same shapes in the heavens reoccur year after year, or even a modern theologian looking for patterns in TF Torrance’s thought, our species universally takes notice of phenomena reoccurring and gives explanations for them. I propose that a worldview should be judged on how internally consistent its patterns to understand the world are. I not going to post my criticisms on the Christian perspective, but only want to offer this as a beginning point for comparative discussion of worldviews.

Thus endeth the response…what say you?

The Humiliation of Testifying

2009-11-27T05:51:00.000-08:00

"But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect," (1 Pet 3:15). I know I'm not the only one who would say I'm not very good at following the advise of the last part of this verse. In the course of debates over faith (as will soon resume in the International Hot Tub series after the Thanksgiving intermission is over) or points of theology, I can often be overzealous and thus less than gentle or respectful. But lately I'm realizing that part of this failure stems from not following the first part of this verse, setting apart Christ as Lord, in the context of explaining and defending my faith.

The problem comes from equating certainty with demonstrable proof. A Christian can be "sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see" (Heb 11:1); that is, a Christian can have certainty of their faith, but only by not having it in him/herself but by faith in Christ. In other words, as a Christian I am certain of something I absolutely cannot prove to others or even to myself. It is Christ that proves himself, both to me and to those to whom I testify about him. Christ has and does prove himself to me by constantly reforming my life and thought (there is a lot to reform; its taking a while) and therefore I must speak of him. But I cannot repeat to others the proof of himself he has given to me; he must prove himself to them also. This is humiliating to me.

When I testify not only of the existence of God in Christ, but of his infinite goodness and faithfulness in him, I constantly put myself up to questioning. It is my impulse as a man, an "intellectual", an American, a human, for crying out loud, to answer these questions with overwhelming logic and clarity. But this can only fail, and failure is humiliating. We make huge claims as Christians. Can we really offer no proof, no evidence? Of course, we can point to the historical evidence and the evidence of our own changed (however minimally) lives, but certainly the person questioning cannot find these things, especially on our frail lips, sufficient evidence to become a Christian. But this usually only goads me on to pile the rhetoric higher, push the logic farther, make the case, make the sale. I'm usually totally unaware of the point where it stops being about Christ and becomes about me winning the argument. Someone would have to be an idiot to become a Christian because I won an argument, but this kind of apologetics presupposes that they should. But what CAN I do? I must give an answer for the hope that I have. How do I do that without making it about my superior argumentative skills? I am learning that the answer is to constantly and ruthlessly point away from myself to Christ.

Christ must always be the justification for my faith in him; it cannot reside in me or be put into my control. This is a part of justification by grace alone; all of us can only know Christ by the grace of God, not by reason alone or empirical observation alone. Thus I can only answer everyone who asks me to give the reason for the hope that I have by setting apart Christ as Lord in my heart, by pointing away from myself, and all of my logic and certainty, to him; he is the reason. Only he can be the reason for others to hope as well. I cannot give them faith; I can only point to the grace that has given me faith and gives it freely to all who ask in Christ's name.

When I understand this, gentleness and respect for others is a necessary byproduct. I assume this is coming; God isn't through with me yet.

International Hot Tub: Round 2

2009-11-13T01:50:00.000-08:00

Your position, "God is not real because I cannot sense God as I sense the rest of reality," is quite well and boldly expressed. As an open question, it brings us as humans right to the point at which the gospel speaks. As a final conclusion, it blindly assumes victory after having slain only a straw man.

By "expressed openly" I mean within the limits of human finitude but without excluding the possibility of the objectivity and freedom of God beyond those limits. We can't intelligently say, "God doesn't exist because I can't touch him", while you could say that apart from Christ "God is not real to me because he has not made himself real for me within the limitations that my knowledge is necessarily bound to." For me as a human to know something or someone is real, that reality must present itself as both sensible and intelligible. Enter Jesus Christ.

The Gospel tells us that God, who cannot be touched or fully comprehended, has condescended to make himself known to us within the physical and intelligible limitations of human life and speech by becoming incarnated in Jesus Christ. God made himself knowable by presenting himself within our touchable and intelligible realm. However, even this is still not on the terms you describe. To touch Jesus' skin and hear his words was not to touch God directly or hear him directly, but to touch and hear that in which God had made himself fully present and through which he made himself known. In other words, one can take a position of doubt, saying Jesus was merely a man, his words merely human words. No overwhelming logical argument can fully refute this doubt. But for those, as Jesus said, "with ears to hear", God made and continues to make himself fully knowable in the sensible and intelligible reality of the man Jesus Christ.

"Did you just say 'continues to make'? Jesus isn't walking the earth today!" Yes, but God's taking human form and human speech in Jesus Christ as the Incarnation of his eternal Word has forged a new knowledge of himself in humanity that perpetuates itself through those who know it, the church. You can see and hear the church, understand its proclamation of the risen and everliving Christ; these are sense experiences you cannot deny having, it is just a question of your willingness to receive them as communicative of knowledge of God. How do we know God is communicating himself through the church's proclamation? You must approach God through them and see if he is there to be found. How? Through the means appropriate to him: prayer and worship.

This is the message of Christianity. Your fundamental argument, "God is not real because I cannot sense God as I sense the rest of reality," has met a counter claim. If you have made your argument "openly", you must consider the church's proclamation of Jesus Christ, God come among us in our sphere of observability, and make your judgement. As it is, your argument, if expressed in a closed way, is a rejection only of a straw man, something other than the Christian God who is defined by untouchability but has nevertheless taken on touchability for you and for me. This seems to be your complaint though: God is too untouchable in his eternal nature and too touchable in his human mediation. This is just complaining that God is too God.

At this point, the first two categories of tangible experiences of God you mentioned I would consider dealt with. Christians, having heard the voice of the eternal God in the proclamation of the gospel and thus having learned to correlate events and realities in this world, both fantastic and mundane, with their source and meaning in the eternal love and will of God for us in Christ, interpret both fortuitous synchronicity and pretty sunsets as the Creator speaking in his creation. Of course these things cannot prove the validity of this theological interpretation; that can only be validated by a prior encounter with God in his gospel. Of course there are other ostensibly plausible interpretations of these events. You've offered a common and compelling one, the one of the linear evolution of human understanding where we go from mythology, to religion, to naturalistic science. This story is forceful and persuasive, except for the fact that it offers no proof of itself. It is just as liable to the charge of total fabrication as is any meta-narrative of human or cosmic history. Just as the Christians' interpretation works perfectly well if God exists, so does yours if God doesn't exist. But this does nothing by way of offering any evidence for or against God's existence. Lets come back to that shortly.

Your point about Christians not believing in the God of the Bible I found totally compelling and convicting. You're right; most Christians don't really believe in the God of the Bible. The Bible presents us with something quite alien to our experiences, what Karl Barth called "a strange new world". Liberal Christianity explains all this away and repackages the Christian message as human progress, or social or personal enlightenment (God-lite). On the other side, fanatical Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity seems to deny the tension and convince themselves that they see pillars of fire and so on. Really, though, both are doing the same thing; reducing the Creator to the sphere of the created. The rest of us fall feebly somewhere in between. For myself, I seek to believe and be faithful to the God of the Bible, but I'm constantly faced with my incompetence in this regard; I can't help but feel a serious conflict between the world the Bible depicts, one in which God is seemingly ever present, active, and articulate, and my own world which feels much less spectacular. But this tension is necessary. If the Bible and the God whose revelation it mediates to me weren't so wholly other from the world of my experiences and expectations, it could not call me out of myself to a faith whose center is another Being entirely. It is a tension that seizes me, calls me to repentance for trying to resolve, and produces faith and hope in the man at the center of that tension. If the story of that man were pure mythology, I could easily dismiss it and there would be no tension. If it conformed to my experience and expectation, it would reveal nothing to me. This tension you have so well named here I will not apologize for leaving unresolved. God speaks in that tension and moves to resolve it himself in the fulfillment of history yet to come in Christ's return.

Let me finish by coming back to the issue of the equal footing of internally consistent worldviews. Both Christianity and atheism provide ways of looking at the world that accord fairly well within themselves. Their starting points, however, cannot be arrived at neutrally, but are bound up with the view of the world they provide. You have spoken of the experience of others from a worldview of unbelief; you answered Jesus' "who do they say that I am?" from a standpoint hostile to faith. Now he asks you "who do you say that I am?" This question cannot be answered neutrally. It calls your self and everything you think into question. You cannot evade the question with appeals to presuppositions about sense or evidence. If Christ confronts you, it is he and he alone on whom your answer must be based. Is Christ a liar? Is the proclamation and fellowship of his church a fraud? If you would answer yes, it cannot be because you can't touch God. You need to reject the actual message as it presents itself to you, not a caricature of it.

International Hot Tub: Round 1

2009-11-12T08:38:00.000-08:00

(For an introduction to the intent and explanation of the name of this series, please see the introduction).

EDIT: Though this is presented as a two party debate on one level, comments and responses are still fully welcomed to all posts in the comments section as a way to help extend the debate and bring other voices into it.

Guest Post by Andy Snyder:

Like Adam said in the intro, we are starting from the beginning here. I’ve moved on since we’ve started this discussion and would not call myself an atheist, agnostic, theist, or a Christian; confused is the best word to describe me these days. At any rate, I hope this discussion can bring more clarity to me and anyone else who reads it. For now I will play devil’s advocate and put forward the argument I originally brought to Adam a year and a half ago. That said; let’s begin with my basic complaint.

Here is my foundational argument: the existence of God is suspect because I don’t have experience of God; I have not seen, heard, touched, tasted, or smelled the thing called God. Given that the senses are the tools I posses to bring reality to my mind, and that none of these senses have brought me unequivocal information of the reality of God, the existence of God is doubtful. Simply put, God is not real because I cannot sense God as I sense the rest of reality. This is the same line of reasoning I would put to the existence of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or the tooth fairy; I don’t experience them, therefore they are not real. Nonetheless, three arguments are often put forward for peoples’ tangible experience of God: supernatural provision, natural revelation, and direct revelation. Let’s deal with each in turn.

We’ve all heard accounts of God’s supernatural provision, stories of synchronicity and the miraculous. If you’ve attended an Evangelical Church for any length of time you’ve heard these sorts of tales (money provided at the right time, an illness cured, etc.) all of which are understood as divine provision. These claims seem to be nothing more than a theological mode of interpreting reality rather than divine experience. I believe this because the same people who attribute the good in life to God have a similar theological understanding when bad things happen. When someone dies it was God’s time to take them, or when a family loses their home God is opening new doors for them. What’s more likely, that a supernatural being arbitrarily blesses some and denies others, or that good and bad things happen to everyone and those that assume God’s existence have a theological understanding for both situations? The occurrences of so-called supernatural provision are nothing more than attributing the good that happens in life to God, not tangible experiences of God.

Another argument put forward as experience of the divine is natural revelation: the encounter of the divine through the natural world. Sam, a surfer friend of mine, told me he experiences God when he is out on the ocean among the waves, taking in the seemingly infinite horizon, and in general being in awe at the size and beauty of nature. We’ve all had similar experiences. Whether we were taking in the immensity of the Grand Canyon or staring open mouthed at the uncountable stars in the night sky, we’ve all been made to feel small and been humbled by the immensity of the natural world. I argue the appropriation of this bigness to God finds its cause in the human inclination to categorize and give meaning to the world around us; what I mean is our species doesn’t deal well with ambiguity and has a natural tendency to give fanciful explanations when truth is not self-evident. For example the old Norsemen needed an explanation of this awe inspiring thunderous sound that came from the sky, so they told each other it was the god Thor smashing his hammer in the heavens. We now know that the exchange of electrons between the atmosphere and the earth happens in the event of a lighting strike, which sends pressure through the air making thunder; the explanation of a seemingly incomprehensible event has been given language through science and thus we discarded the theological explanation. Likewise the Jews gave us a story of the origin of humanity in the first chapters of Genesis where Yahweh created the heavens and the earth, fashioned mankind from dirt, and breathed into them life. We now know that Yahweh had nothing to do with our origins, the world exploded into existence through the big bang, and we evolved slowly and painfully over millions of years. As science continues to give us language and empirical truth about reality, fewer and fewer humans will have a need to attribute the awe-inspiring complexity of the world to God. Theological explanations are reflexive and traditional, meaning it’s what we’ve always said; as science more completely permeates our culture with its explanations, we will eventually abandon the theological explanations all together. Simply put, natural revelation is not evidence of God, but rather evidence of the great lengths humans will go to make sense of a complex world.

The final category of divine experience is direct revelation: this is the category where people claim to have directly seen, smelled, tasted, heard, and/or touched God. We can subdivide this into two smaller categories: direct revelation of the bible and direct revelation of today. In the bible we read of a God who from time to time would reveal himself to humanity in extremely tangible ways: as a the pillar of fire in the desert, as blinding glory revealed to Moses on Mt. Sinai, as risen from the grave bearing mortal wounds, as tongues of fire descending on the early church, etc. The only point to make here is the most obvious: God doesn’t do this sort of thing anymore. How many people reading this post have seen Yahweh, the risen Christ, or had tongues of fire descend on them? I think it’s very telling that Pentecostals (the denomination that claims to receive direct revelation from the Holy Spirit in the form of prophecy and divine utterance) are generally treated as a crazy sect by the rest of Christianity. Why? Because, unlike the Pentecostals, most followers of God don’t believe in the God they read about in the bible; they believe in a mitigated God, or “God light”. “God light” behaves much differently than the God of the bible: God of the bible parted the Red Sea, “God light” gives fuzzy warm feelings when the lighting and music are right; God of the bible sent fire from heaven burning water soaked bulls proving he was the one true god, “God light” helps us make decisions in a way that is hardly distinguishable from our own autonomy, morality, and common sense. The point is Christians’ expectation of the reality of God has lessened considerably from the God expressed in the bible because they know he is not real in the way they read in scripture. This is a step in the right direction; I’m simply taking it a bit further and saying he never manifested himself in any way whatsoever, because he was never real in the first place.

On the issue of direct revelation of today, it’s fairly commonplace to hear the phrases, “I think the God is telling me…” “The Holy Spirit is teaching me…” in Evangelical circles. On the surface this can sound like God is whispering in his followers’ ears. From my own experience, when I pressed people making this claim to explain what they meant (including a couple prominent pastors of a local churches) all they really mean is they are following a gut-feeling, or an intuition. Like I said before this so-called “leading of the Holy Spirit” seemed hardly discernible from what these people knew to be right anyways. On the issue of those who have claimed to have seen, smelled, tasted, touched, and/or felt God through some theophanic encounter: most of them are locked up in padded rooms or are the lead pastors of Pentecostal congregations. That is all.

Introducing International Hot Tub!

2009-11-09T00:55:00.000-08:00

My friend Andy Snyder and I are starting a new series here on Draw Nigh in which he and I will debate the existence of God. The title I have (unilaterally) chosen for this series is International Hot Tub. Allow me to explain:

Andy and I have been friends for about 12 years, since I joined a punk band he helped start called Craig's Brother. Since then, he and I have been in two other bands together, Too Bad Eugene, and Thrush. Thrush practiced at my parents' house and after practice we would often hang out in my parents' hot tub (in a totally platonic and hetero way). As Andy and our drummer Kyle started questioning the Christianity of their upbringing, and actually belief in God in general, this topic began to be a dominating theme of our hot tub conversations. These hot tub sessions ended up outlasting the band. But now, alas, I have moved to Scotland to pursue my possibly deluded understanding of God and the hot tub has gone cold...

This series is intended to internationalize and digitalize the hot tub. We want to open our discussion up to others to participate so we will basically start the debate over, which is pretty much what we did every time we got in the hot tub. Please join in with comments if you resonate with either position, if you want to further an argument, or if you think both of us are missing something.

Andy will go first sometime in the next day or so and then I'll post a response in the following couple of days, and then we'll proceed back and forth this way until we feel like stopping. Though both of us have a background in biblical and theological studies, we're aiming to keep this readable and understandable for anyone no matter what their background. Neither of us intend to make our entire case all at once; hopefully we'll build through the ongoing discussion to our full arguments over time. The reason for this is that I think it would put a lot of people off to read a comprehensive argument from either one of us all at once, so we'll try to make it like a live debate, keeping our opening statements and responses to reasonable lengths. Maybe we can get some of the other guys in the band to chime in once the conversation gets going. I can just picture us all in our underwear, I mean bathing suits, drinking Pacificos and getting philosophical. Ah, memories.

So get ready for some lively discussion. Round 1 coming soon.

Symphony of Science

2009-11-05T01:03:00.000-08:00

If you haven't seen this, be prepared to be swept away into the cosmos. The guy that made it has a website here.

Holding Scripture Together

2009-11-03T02:09:00.001-08:00

My Christian college and seminary experiences revealed to me an alarming tendency in academic biblical studies to split the Bible apart. The use of the "analogy of Scripture", or the practice of interpreting Scripture with Scripture, holding a clear passage up to help shed light on an obscure one, is falling into more and more ill regard by professional biblical scholars, particularly when applied across authors. I grant that it is good interpretive practice to allow each author of Scripture, and indeed each individual book, to express its own voice and to be interpreted according to its own internal semantic activity without having outside theological notions foisted on it before it is done speaking. I learned this the hard way in my first semester as a biblical studies major in college when I cited a passage in the Gospel of John in an exegesis paper on a passage in Acts. I've never seen red ink scream so loudly. But in seminary in particular I noticed the growing popularity of resisting all attempts to synthesize or harmonize not just historical accounts (like having Jesus cleanse the temple twice because of the chronological discrepancies between the synoptic gospels and John, which I agree should be rejected) but even theological or ethical contradictions. It appears to be fashionable to speak of "New Testament theologies" and to even celebrate the apparent "pluralism" found in the New Testament communities.

For example, the tension the church has long wrestled with between Paul's emphasis on grace and James' emphasis on works, one I had long before learned to understand in terms of different rhetorical situations, Paul addressing Christian identity (Romans and Galatians) and James addressing Christian ethics, were dealt with in one of my seminary classes as an actual contradiction that neither could nor should be harmonized. When asked the obvious question, "so which one is right?", the professor just shrugged his shoulders and said something like "we need to adjust our understanding of Scripture to make room for contradictory positions."

This is wrong, and not for the reasons a fundamentalist might claim like "the Bible cannot have contradictions." Its wrong because the professor thought he had come to an appropriate end of the conversation with this comment, like his task was merely to lay bare what each biblical author thought was true and then show, with profound post-modern hipness, how they didn't agree about what was true. It is wrong because the real task of biblical interpretation, though it certainly involves appreciating tensions in the biblical text, is to go beyond them, coming to understand what each biblical author is telling us about God and then to move on to a direct understanding of that reality within God, a movement we are enabled to make through the Self-revelation of God in Christ and the regeneration of the Spirit. Since there is only one God, we cannot be satisfied with the conclusion that the biblical authors disagree - we must penetrate into the cohesion of the biblical testimony to be found within the singular objective reality of God Himself.

T. F. Torrance writes,

A great deal has been made in modern biblical scholarship of what is called the 'pluralism' manifest in the New Testament writings, and that is understandable once they are subjected to critical analysis apart from the basic framework of the New Testament in which they are set. But a very different picture emerges when we attend to the actual scope within which they have arisen and taken shape. Then for all their rich diversity they are found to have a deep underlying unity in Jesus Christ the incarnate and risen Lord, who is the dynamic center and the objective focus of their creative integration. But that calls for a way of interpretation in which the images or patterns at the linguistic and theological levels are stereoscopically coordinated in our viewing, for it is through the scope of their conjoint reference that real meaning and coherence come to light (Divine Meaning, 106).

Torrance offers exactly this kind of interpretive approach in his brilliant book, Divine Meaning. In it he speaks of coordinating the semantic function of biblical statements with their syntactic function (by which he means the intertextual organization and focus across the whole canon, pointing to the sovereign organization of the revelatory events in the whole history of Israel and Christ) so that a common exegetical framework emerges, which then becomes the controlling center of biblical interpretation - this framework he rightly takes to be the incarnation, life (teachings and deeds), death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ (113-118).

It is precisely this kind of exegetical framework (disparagingly spoken of as "creedal", which sounds like a compliment to me) which is enthusiastically rejected by so many biblical scholars, even those employed by educational institutions with an evangelical mission. It is rejected because it is perceived to be forcing the Bible into an agreement based on external theological decisions made by later church councils. It is rejected so that "the Bible can speak for itself." But the Bible can only speak for itself if it is listened to, which is exactly how those creedal frameworks emerged (particularly the Apostles and Nicene Creeds, to Torrance's mind and my own). Interpreting the Bible according to the analogy of Scripture and regula fidei (the rule of faith, i.e. the early catholic creeds) is not forcing the Bible to agree but discerning its objective internal agreement. Rejecting this will inevitably lead to focusing on peripheral and even exegetically forced disagreements. In this case the bible cannot be authoritative for Christian thinking. How could it? How can one submit his/her mind to the authority of contradictory thinking? One is then left wondering why these biblical scholars who have freed themselves from creedal thinking are given jobs in evangelical education institutions. How are they helping the church by teaching fractured interpretation techniques of a book that cannot wield any authority?

Give Me a god I Can Idolize

2009-10-29T12:52:00.000-07:00

Jesus is not an idol. Let me explain.

I have a few friends who are questioning their Christian faith at a fairly basic level. If God is even there, why isn't he more obviously real and present to me? In a conversation with one such friend in a hot tub, I objected that because God's being is so unlike ours or anything else that we know, it requires an entirely different mode of knowing, closer to the way in which we know a beloved parent than the way we know algebra (I realize now that this analogy is more problematic than helpful). His response was that though he understands that a personal mode of knowledge is required for him to truly know his mother, she presents herself as objectively real to him prior to all demands of personal knowledge; in other words, he might neglect her and therefore fail to come to know her on a personal level, but he would not easily be able to deny her plain existence since he can see, hear, and touch her (all Freudian comments will be deleted). Why isn't God more like this, he asks? This friend claims he would understand having to humble himself, take up his cross, lay down his life, whatever, as long as first he had solid reason to believe he wasn't deluding himself into acknowledging God's existence.

Another friend, in an online chat type discussion, said something like this: "I don't need theology; I need a God I can see and touch, who can hold me when I'm distressed, speak to me and kiss me."

These types of comments are beginning to make the problem clear to me. They're just asking for what the church we've grown up in, the seeker-sensitive evangelical church, has told them to expect. We've been told that God will meet all our needs, without being told to repent of our need to control everything. We've been told that God will answer all our questions, without being told not to put God to the test. We've been told Aslan IS a tame lion and this is the kind of god these guys want. They want a god who will hop up on their examination tables so they can see and touch him while he, in his infinite patience, might ask for a few token observances, but won't demand that they surrender everything, especially their thinking ("otherwise how would I know I wasn't deluding myself?"). The god they want doesn't need them to renew their minds. They want an idol.

Idolatry rests on the confusion of the transcendent and the creaturely, making the divine openly available to the creature to be seen and touched. These guys don't want the transcendent God of the Bible; they want the god we talk about at church.

One of these friends of mine, who holds a degree in biblical studies and theology, often comes back to the signs motif in the Gospel of John. In John, Jesus performs numerous miraculous signs with the explicit intention of their serving as signs toward belief in him. This guy claims that if he could have been one of that select group who were lucky enough to live in Galilee or Judea in that three year or so period when Jesus walked around turning water into wine, he would believe. Of course I raise all the classic objections that plenty of people did see these things and didn't believe, but he comes back with the honest enough self appraisal that he truly thinks he wouldn't be one of them, that he would be one of the few to put his whole trust in Christ if he saw that kind of objective proof. Isn't the whole point of the incarnation after all to bring God within our observable sphere so we CAN see and touch him?

Two things seem important here. First, Jesus' divinity is never objectively observable. It is objective, but its objectivity stands in total authoritative lordship over us, opening us up to investigation, not itself. It is Jesus' humanity that is on open display in his incarnation; his divinity, despite all the miraculous signs to it, is still only known through faith. The signs, for all their impressiveness, do not establish his divinity but point past themselves to it; they are, after all, miracles performed by a human and this can never be proof that this human is God. Even in Christ's incarnation, there can be no proof for God's existence. This is why so many can see the miracles and disbelieve while Anna and Simeon are able to believe seeing only the unimpressive infant Jesus with no external objective proof of his divinity (yes, I know thats in Luke, but its still valid).

Second, and probably more importantly, we must consider the theological implications of Christ's ascent into heaven. It is on purpose that so few saw the historical Jesus and so many more see the church in all its fallibility. Jesus was not an idol in his historical earthly life, but his ascension only establishes that fact more plainly. God never gave us any reason to expect any epistemological control over him; we can always only know him through faith. But won't we see him directly in heaven? Yes, when our minds are raised incorruptible from the dead. For now, they must be subjected to death. Our minds must be renewed and there is no undoubtable Cartesian basis for this to convince us in our fallen state that this must be so. We must relinquish control, repent of attempts to epistemologically control God and put him to the test. We must respond to the transcendent Word of God present in Jesus' humanity in faith for its own sake, not because we find it reasonable. To know God in Christ we must totally start over, including starting our thinking over from a totally new starting point, outside ourselves in Christ; we must be born again in him. A god that presents himself as fully reasonable to our fallen minds cannot be God; likewise a god that presents his full being to our eyes without destroying us can only be an idol.

Why Liberalism and Fundamentalism Both Suck

2009-10-28T06:34:00.000-07:00

I'm beginning to go through T F Torrance's Reality and Evangelical Theology and love it already having only read the preface. There he makes, as this post's title indicates, a scathing critique of both theological liberalism and fundamentalism for plunging the church into confusion about matters it wrestled with unto understanding long ago. He starts with this claim: "The ultimate fact with which we have to come to terms in all theological and biblical interpretation... is that while God is who he is in his self-revelation, that divine revelation is God himself, for it is not just something of himself that God reveals to us but his very own Self, his own ultimate Being as God" (14).

He then traces how the Church has had to contend for this truth in history at two points (attributing this insight to Karl Barth). First, in the 4th century Arian controversy, the church, in the face of subordinationist heresy, was driven by rigorous study and contemplation of Scripture to clarify that "what God is toward us in Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit he is in himself in his own eternal Being as God" (14). Thus his Act toward us not only reveals but actually is his Being. Second, in the 16th century Reformation, the church, in the face of rank ecclesial abuse justified by a perverted judicial logic, was driven to clarify that "grace is to be understood as the impartation not just of something from God but of God himself" (14). Thus it is God's eternal, loving, healing, person-making Being that constitutes his Act toward us, Himself the content of the Gift he gives to us.

Liberalism and fundamentalism together have brought the 4th and 16th centuries back into the 20th and 21st centuries. Liberalism plays the part of Arianism, "stumbling", in Torrance's words, over the identity between the historical man Jesus Christ and the eternal triune God so that Jesus is seen merely as man, an expression of the religious spirit of humanity. Fundamentalism, less obviously perhaps but thus more interestingly, plays the part of medieval Roman Catholicism, stumbling before the continuous Self-giving and Self-revealing of God the Father through the ministry of His Son by the power of the Holy Spirit. Instead, fundamentalism substitutes a static notion of revelation as localized and fixed forever in the closed canon of Scripture for the more biblical notion of God's continuous active revelation by the living Word and Spirit through Scripture and the church's ongoing proclamation, worship, and service.

Thus while medieval Roman Catholicism understood God's gift as merit, rather than as God's meritorious Self, which was then localized in the hierarchy and sacraments of the church where we all need to go to get it, fundamentalism understands God's gift as truths, rather than God's Self who is the Truth, which are then localized in the Bible where we all need to go to get them. It must be understood that neither of these critiques, against Romanism or fundamentalism, are meant to deny the integral place of the church or the Bible within God's economy of salvation, but neither the church nor the Bible ought ever to be confused with God Himself. These are God's chosen vessels through which his Word is proclaimed, but both medieval Roman Catholicism and modern fundamentalism fail to acknowledge that God mediates Himself in a direct way through their proclamation.

Divine Meaning pt. 6

2009-10-26T03:43:00.000-07:00

Continuing through T. F. Torrance's Divine Meaning, chapter 9 marks a significant departure from the rest of the book so far. Here, Torrance deals with a recent attack by Rudolf Bultmann upon belief in the central events that the Bible and early Christians creeds speak of, particularly the incarnation, resurrection and ascension of Christ. Bultmann called for the dymythologisation of the proclamation of early Christianity because of its commitment to a three-storied vertical cosmology. In other words, Bultmann doesn't like the New Testament's and early creeds' talk about God in spacial terms, coming down, going up, and so on. He claims that though the society in which Chist and the early church lived was bound to speak that way of God because of its primitive worldview, moder man can no longer see the universe as the early Christians did.

Torrance challenges these claims by conducting a study of the Greek conceptions of space and God's relation to it, beginining with Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, moving then to Middle Platonists Plutarch, Albinus, Apuleius and Atticus, and then tracing the influence of these upon Philo, as the first to coordinate Platonism with OT exegesis, and finally Clement of Alexandria as a representive early Christian to refute Bultmann's caricature of them. The conceptions and comparisons between these thinkers that Torrance articulates here are quite difficult for someone without a serious background in metaphysics (such as myself) to get their head around, but the general movement is fairly clear. Torrance sees the Athenians beginning with a notion of space as a container, so that whatever is in a particular place (used as a synonym for space in some philosophers, in distinction by others) is contained within it. This leads one to see God as either bound to and contained within the univserse, the universe being seen as eternal and uncreated, or to be seen as occupying the void beginnig at the boundary of the created universe (or something like that). The movement through Middle Platonism, particularly Atticus, and then Philo and Clement opens up an understanding of God creating the universe, both its matter and the ideas that give it form, out of nothing, giving God a non-spatial relation to creation so that He is both utterly beyond it and active within it. A quotation from Clement serves to clarify how Torrance sees at least this early Christian as free from the limiting mythological notions Bultmann sees all early Christians bound to:

God is a Being difficult for us to grasp and apprehend, for he always recedes out of reach and draws away from those who pursue him. But the ineffable wonder of it is that he who is distant has come very near. 'I am a God who draws near, says the Lord.' Distant, that is, in respect of his essential being for how can the creature ever approach the Creator? 'But he is very near in respect of his power by which he embraces all things'. 'Will anyone do anything in secret', he says, '- without my seing him?'. Now God's power is always present in dynamic interaction with us in our meditation, service and instruction. Hence Moses, convinced that God could never be known by human wisdom, said, 'Shew me thy glory' and strove to enter into the darkness where God's voice was, that is, into the inaccessible and invisible conceptions as to his Being. For God is not in darkness or in place, but above and beyond both space and time and the properties of created things. Therefore he is never found located in some region, either as containing or contained, by way of limitation or by way of division. 'For what house will ye build me? says the Lord.' On the contrary, he has not even built himself one, for he cannot be contained. Even if the heaven is said to be his throne, not even thus is he contained, but he rests delighted in his creation. (339-40)

Bultmann - 0; Early Christian kerygma - 1.

"Athanasius was no Biblicist": Divine Meaning pt. 5

2009-10-22T07:28:00.000-07:00

Chapter 7 and 8 of Thomas F. Torrance's Divine Meaning give what amount to a small book's length introduction to Athanasius's trinitarian theology of revelation and redemption (7) and then apply this theology to theological hermeneutics (8). I want to key in on one particular issue: Torrance locating Athanasius as a biblical interpreter between a Biblicist, or one who takes the meaning of biblical statements from their immediate sense in all cases, and an allegorist, or one who sees all statements of scripture pointing to an eternal truth totally beyond their immediate sense and context.

The trouble with allegorical interpretation of Scripture for Torrance is that it doesn't take history seriously as a medium in which God may reveal Himself. Commenting on Clement of Alexandria's regrettable slide into allegorical interpretation earlier in Divine Meaning, Torrance says "the literal and historical meaning of biblical statements was made to be itself a symbolic reflection of a purely intelligible reality in a timeless world beyond" (177). The problem with this, with relativizing the historical claims of Scripture and forcing them to refer to something other than history, to something completely beyond the created order, is that it destroys the revealing power of God's acts in history, in Israel and Jesus Christ, and leaves us with no epistemological access to God. In Athanasius's theology, however, though God is utterly different from His creation and is therefore not revealed by history as such in a Hegelian way, God has entered into history through His Word/Son becoming incarnate in the man Jesus Christ. This is an historical event, in fact THE historical event that is the supreme focus of the Bible. Therefore, the biblical interpreter must take the historical claims of the Bible seriously - otherwise, we have no real access to knowledge of God.

On the other side, Torrance does want to say that "Athanasius was no Biblicist" (274), that he pushes past the words of Scripture in another way. This is what Torrance calls "depth exegesis" where we do not read the reality of God off the surface of the biblical texts but penetrate through them to the "deeper level" where we have to do with the reality of God Himself. Torrance says, "It is of the utmost importance therefore to penetrate through the words and statements of the Scriptures to their real meaning which is rooted in the Word himself" (238). Does this not fall prey to the same possibilities of distortions as allegorical interpretation? If the problem with allegorical interpretation is that statements aren't seen as meaning what they seem to mean, what is different about depth exegesis? What controls it and keeps it from running into the same speculative conclusions as allegorical interpretation? Torrance's answer is (that Athanasius's answer is) the trinitarian economy of salvation rooted in the person and work of Jesus Christ in human history. Thus while allegorical interpretation is ruled out because it refuses to take history seriously, typological exegesis is affirmed because it actually heightens our awareness of the continuity of God's acts of redemption in history, the covenant with Israel in the OT reaching its telos in the history of Jesus Christ in the NT. Thus, while biblical statements are seen through to their true referent, they are not discarded; indeed, they are correlated to their ultimate referent, put in their proper soteriological context, seen through the scope of Christ.

We have already established the problem with allegorical interpretation. Now we can also see the problem with Biblicism from Torrance's perpsective. By not keeping Christ as the center of the Bible's attention, it treats the Bible as a book about virutally everything, allowing surface readings of passages to direct our attention in any of a million directions. But the Bible is really about one thing, God's self-revelation and redemption of all creation in his incarnate Son Jesus Christ. Certainly this is a reality with implications for literally everything, but everything, especially every biblical statement, must find its true meaning in its relation to Christ. We must see through the words and statements not to some timeless idea, but to Christ Himself, the Word made flesh in history and still present among us through the Holy Spirit. Torrance summarizes, "interpretation has to be in accordance both with the words of Scripture and with what has taken place in Jesus Christ, and must be kept within the limits set by the nature of the things signified" (238).

Scripture as the Incarnation of the Holy Spirit? Torrance on Warfield

2009-10-21T11:47:00.000-07:00

Since I am doing my current research on T. F. Torrance's doctrine of Scripture and am interested in how it differs from such Reformed perspectives as those held by B. B. Warfield in his accounts of verbal inspiration and inerrancy, I was exceedingly thankful today to be informed by my friend David Gibson that Torrance wrote a review of Warfield's The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible when it was reissued back in 1954 (SJT, Vol. 7, 1954, pp. 104-8). After searching high and low in the library, I eventually found it and had myself a gander.

Torrance's review can be divided into two basic parts which we'll refer to as "pre-scathing" and "scathing" (There is really also a third section in which Torrance comments on Cornelius Van Til's introduction, which I would call "uber-scathing"). In the pre-scathing section Torrance lauds Warfield's "sober and scholarly" contribution to a serious study of the Scripture's teachings about itself. Even here, however, Torrance accuses Warfield of "reading too readily time-conditioned philosophical categories and nuances into NT terms which are actually alien to them." Nevertheless, Torrance gives Warfield praise for the far reaching insight that the word inspiration is not itself exactly biblical in its meaning. The Greek word (theopnuestos) rendered "inspiration" by the KJV should not be understood as something originally human that is subsequently breathed into (in-spired) by God, but as being instead breathed out by God in its entirety. (Torrance and Warfield might have been more pleased with the NIV's rendering, "God-breathed"). Indeed, we must understand God to be sovereign over the production of the Bible so that he does not only move the authors by the Holy Spirit in the moment of writing, but previously guides human history, the history of salvation in Israel and in Jesus Christ, and the lives of the biblical authors themselves right up to the moments of writing and beyond - all under the Holy Spirit's guiding hand.

Torrance cites a metaphor Warfield uses in which one objects that just as light coming through a stained glass window is discolored by the glass, so any word of God that came through a man must be tainted by the mind of that man. Warfield responds that just as the architect of a cathedral designs the stained glass windows to give the incoming light just the effects that they give it, so God has formed the personalities of the biblical writers so that they express His words just the way the do so that they are in fact His chosen words. Up to this point Torrance raises no objection to Warfield's account, but don't hold your breath.

About the midpoint of the review Torrance changes his tone to that of "profound disagreement" by announcing that "It is clear that his whole doctrine of revelation and inspiration is bound up with a philosophical doctrine of predestination, in which Biblical eschatology is ousted for an un-Biblical notion of rational causation." This is a curious feature of Warfield's, and as far as I know virtually all of the old Princeton and Westminster theologians' understanding of biblical inspiration: it totally doesn't work outside of a fully determinist understanding of divine providence. Seeing that Torrance holds strong views of the reality of freedom, not just for humans, but for all of the creation as its contingent orderly structures open up to higher and higher levels of order, its understandable that he would be aghast at the notion of tying biblical authority to a determinist view of the universe.

Torrance also has a problem with how Warfield's understanding of inspiration has God's influence totally overwhelm the affects of sin in the authors' minds as they write. Here we get into the discussion of the analogy between Christ and Scripture. Torrance insists that the Bible's dual nature, that of God's Word and men's words, derives from Christ dual nature as the God-man. The first important thing here is that Christ, though always sinless, nevertheless binds God's eternal holy nature to humanity's fallen sinful nature; Christ takes sinfulness upon himself. In Torrance's view, Warfield just does not take this full reality of Christ's assumption of a sinful human nature seriously because he cannot take the full reality of a human Bible seriously but instead overwhelms the human with the divine in a kind of Apollinarian biblicism.

The second important thing to note here is that there are two important differences between Christ's two natures and the Bible's two natures. The first difference is this: there is a divine drama in the life of Christ in which the eternal holy God takes the sinfulness of humanity into himself by becoming a human, taking on the full curse of sin and death for us and then coming back to life as the first fruits of a new perfected humanity, free from the taint of sin. This divine drama is unrepeatable because it accomplishes once and for all God's eternal plan of redemption. The Bible itself is not like this. Its union of divine and human action cannot repeat Christ's overcoming of sin but is instead a part of the as yet still fallen world. The Bible is God's Word to us, but, Torrance says, "only in conditions of imperfection and limitation, in eschatological suspension." Torrance goes on,

But the miracle is that even now in spite of sin and imperfection and the limitations of a fallen humanity, in spite of the earthen vessel which mediates to us the Word of Life, we are given to hear the living Voice of the Lord Himself, and to see the Light Eternal.

The second difference is that in Christ God and Man are related in a unique way: the Word of God is incarnate. The Bible is not another incarnation. The meaning and authority of Scripture must rest in the one true incarnation of the Word in Christ. But Warfield, as Torrance sees it, will not put Scripture in its proper place subordinate to the incarnate Savior, but instead elevates it alongside of Christ by seeing it as the incarnation of the Holy Spirit:

The basic error that lurks in the scholastic idea of verbal inspiration is that it amounts to an incarnation of the Holy Spirit. It is only strictly christological theology which can obviate that heresy, but Dr. Warfield's theory of inspiration neglects the christological basis of the doctrine of Scripture, and fails therefore to take the measure of both the mystery of revelation and the depth of sin in the human mind.

What do we make of Torrance's treatment of Warfield's doctrine of Scripture?

Athanasius on the Righteousness Requirement

2009-10-20T05:16:00.000-07:00

Here is a short passage from Athanasius, Torrance's favorite theologian, on the righteousness required to correctly interpret scripture:

For the investigation and true knowlege of the Scriptures there is needed a good life and a pure soul, and that virtue which is according to Christ, in order that the mind, guiding its path by it, may be able to attain what it yearns for, to comprehend it, and as far as it is compatible with the nature of men to learn about the Word of God. For apart from a pure mind and an imitation of the life lived by the saints, no one would be able to understand their statements...He who wishes to comprehend the mind of the divines must first purify and cleanse his soul by his way of living, and approach the saints themselves by emulating their actions, so that through assimilation with them in a common mode of life, they may understand what has been revealed to them from God. (Athanasius, De Incarnatione, 57, quoted in T. F. Torrance, Divine Meaning, 244.)

Divine Meaning pt. 4

2009-10-15T10:16:00.000-07:00

This time around, TFT goes after Clement of Alexandria. Torrance has a surprisingly balanced view of Clement (pictured), crediting him for contributing to the development of both a "scientific" approach to biblical hermeneutics (which Torrance likes) and "gnostic" approach to scripture dividing the plain historical reading from the mystical meaning, resting on an epistemological dualism between the sensible world and the intelligible word (which Torrance likes not so much).

This chapter was sizable and I don't want to spend a lot of time on it because the same themes keep coming into play. The contribution Clement makes to the history of hermeneutics that Torrance approves of are described in much the same way as Torrance's treatment of Clement's contemporary, Irenaeus. The deficiencies are comparable (and, Torrance argues, somewhat attributable) to Philo, an earlier fellow Alexandrian. Thus, I'll make some comments on the chapter, and then I'll springboard to some reflections of mine on what Torrance has done here.

First, Clement (in Torrance's description) understands faith to be "a divine power deriving from the force of the truth itself" (131). It originates in the encounter of the Word, creating in us "the new eye, the new ear, and the new heart which we need to apprehend what is given." In short, faith is neither blind nor depending on some prior knowledge; it is the establishment of an entirely new knowledge on the basis of God's revealed Truth. Clement then proceeds in terms of Aristotelian logic by employing faith as a first principle on which we can then build a scientific knowledge of God, calling into question presuppositions derived from sources other than the revealed truth known through faith. (Though faith is called into being by God's Word, it is not done so irresistibly. Torrance highlights Clement's awareness that faith "has a voluntary relation to the truth", claiming that "we are persuaded and not just compelled to believe" 133.)

What really struck me and knocked me on my donkey here is when Torrance begins to describe Clement's distinction between theology (the science that begins with faith in the way just described) and natural science and philosophy. This paragraph is worth quoting in its entirety:

The reality with which philosophy or science is concerned is passive, whereas the reality that gives rise to theology is active and dynamic. This means that in faith we have to do with a self-operating wisdom mediated to us through the Word. Faith is the strength and power of the truth , or a grace from God. Hence in interpreting the truth we have to do with a truth that interprets itself. The primary reason for this difference is that God himself is the truth of theological knowledge, God in his Word and Son revealing himself and saving us, God who is known only by his own power. (135)

There isn't much in this paragraph that I hadn't previously read in Torrance elsewhere and in Barth, but that very first sentence made something click in a new way. Let me briefly describe my former understanding of God's Word as I picked it up somewhere between church, Christian school and Bible college: after Israel got everything wrong by focusing on law, Christ came and made a way for us to be saved through by grace through faith. God has given us His Word (ie, the Bible) to tell us about this. He has also given us His Spirit to help us understand what the Word says. This understanding sees the Word as an external object which is basically passive, while the Spirit is active internally helping me to understand what I read when I pick up my Bible.

The distinction Torrance (via Clement) draws here shatters that picture. God's Word is not like a fossil that lays passively as the scientist approaches it to study it. If we take the prologue to John's gospel seriously, we must understand the Word of God in a radically personal way; "the Word became flesh". Since the Word is the risen and ever-living Lord, He is actively seeking to impart knowledge to us human beings. This is certainly done only through the historical Jesus Christ as attested by the prophets and apostles of the Old and New Testaments, but my reading of those fixed texts (though in the power of the Spirit) cannot be all we mean when we speak of approaching the Word of God; we encounter the risen Christ, the living and active Word of God in those texts. To put it another way, when I read the (passive) Bible, I encounter the (active) Word of God, (actively) pressing upon me, calling me to repent of my pride and ignorance and yield to Him, while at the same moment the Holy Spirit quickens my spirit, internally enabling me to say "Yes!" to God's Word addressed to me. Thus the Word and the Spirit work in tandem, the Word in an external objectivity and the Spirit in what Torrance has elsewhere called an "inward objectivity" (rather than subjectivity) leading people to knowledge of the Father.

This kind of trinitarian understanding of God's Word (aka Barth's understanding as furthered by Torrance) is a helpful corrective to many aspects of Evangelical theology, particularly its doctrine of Scripture. The Bible is God's Word in that it testifies to the eternal/incarnate Word of God, but we are led into trouble if we aren't careful in how we talk about scripture - the Word is a person of the triune Godhead; we cannot speak of the Bible as a person of the triune Godhead, but we can speak of it as divinely inspired servant of the eternal triune Lord and testimony to God's work of creation and redemption within human history.

Righteousness Requirement?

2009-10-07T02:49:00.000-07:00

One thing you come up against quite a bit in Torrance's theology is the idea that revelation and reconciliation go hand in had. That is, one cannot be said to know God who is not drawn by Christ into conformity with his perfect obedience and love of the Father. Knowledge and holiness affect each other.

I'm not sure how others take this, but I think its awesome, and therefore true. What is interesting is when he applies this to biblical interpretation. I mentioned this briefly in point 4 of the Divine Meaning pt. 1 post, but I wanted to return to it and see what anyone else thinks about it. To allow Torrance to speak for himself,, "The Word of God comes to us in the Bible and can be heard as such only within our experience of God's saving activity in the Lord Jesus Christ" (p. 9). This implies, and Torrance makes this explicit in regards to theology in general in The Mediation of Christ, that a wicked, unrepentant person will be unable to mentally understand the gospel, let alone live according to it, no matter how much training they have had in biblical interpretation.

Any thoughts on this? It seems both healthy and dangerous to me. Healthy in that it locates the revealing power of God in the Word that became flesh and is living and active, rather than in the Word that became text and can parsed and argued until kingdom come with no increase in understanding. It seems dangerous on the other hand in that it may allow for spiritualized, subjective interpretations under the supposed authority of some direct personal revelation anyone might claim to have. Torrance is keenly aware of this danger and guards against it by marrying this need for "our experience of God's saving activity" with the need for an objective "scientific hermeneutic" that gives our understanding of the gospel some objectivity. I guess I just always saw the Bible and even our ability to understand it rightly as a universally objective given that enabled the possibility of subjectively experiencing God's saving activity. Thinking about it, though, Torrance really isn't introducing a subjectivity into biblical interpretation, but saying both that the objectively human word of scripture must be approached by a scientific hermeneutic and the objectively divine Word speaking through the Bible must be approached by what Torrance elsewhere calls the inner objectivity of the Spirit enabling faithful hearing, for the Bible as a unity of human word and divine Word to be rightly understood.

Divine Meaning pt. 3

2009-10-06T07:06:00.000-07:00

I skipped a few chapters in T. F. Torrance's Divine Meaning to the chapter "Early Patristic Interpretation of the Scriptures", though I've since promised my advisor that I will go back and read the earlier chapters. This is a long (perhaps longer than it needed to be) essay tracing the development of a scientific exegesis of scripture from Justin Martyr through Melito of Sardis to Irenaeus. The meat of it is that because the Gnostics could justify any teaching they wanted by appealing to scripture through the use of sloppy interpretation (eisegesis), these early Church Fathers perceived the need to develop ways of interpreting scripture that arose from the nature of scripture itself so that the pure proclamation of Jesus Christ, the kerygma, could be preserved from heresy.

One point of note is Torrance's interest in distinguishing typological interpretation of Old Testament passages as fulfilled in the history of Jesus Christ, a practice Torrance cautiously affirms, and allegorical interpretation of passages from the Old and New Testaments depicting ostensibly historical events as finding their real meaning in timeless esoteric truths, a practice Torrance vehemently denounces as rooted in Platonic dualism between the sensible and intelligible, aka the boogie monster.

The practical difference seems to be that allegory can get you anywhere, while typology always points you to Christ; allegory has the potential to break up the Truth of the gospel into truths, or even to break reality into, yes Torrance, a dualism between the sensible and intelligible, while typology holds together all of scripture in the one truth of Jesus Christ. Torrance puts it this way:

Typology of this kind, which must not be confused with allegory, was an important part of early Church exegesis, for it was a reflection of the deep connections between the Christian Gospel and the ancient past, and an important tool in its battle against gnostic and Marcionite attempts to cut it away from its historical sources and its ground in the fulfillment in space and time of God's creative and redemptive acts. Patristic typology had its roots in Palestinian Judaism. It had its significance within the inseparable relation of word and event and the dramatic images that it involved, and it arose through the use of cultic patterns to point ahead to the enactment and fulfilment in decisive events within the history of the covenant people of God. It was the fulfilment of the ancient promises and figures in the birth and life and death of Jesus Christ that brought it into prominence in early Christianity, for with that fulfilment it was possible to interpret the history of Israel as the pre-history of the Incarnation, and to see how the patterns of Israel's life, manifested in the great events of its history and reflected in the cult, partially realised in the ordeal of suffering, and interpreted by the prophets, all converged in the fact of Christ. Such interpretation of the Old Testament which set forth an account of the acts of God in the old and new economies of Israel and the Incarnation as the fulfilment of the one saving purpose became essential from the start of the Church's life, for it not only assimilated the Old Testament revelation with the New Testament revelation but preserved the unity of the doctrine of God.

This typological way of interpreting the Old Testament seems to be finding renewed popularity. I myself find it helpful and edifying. Torrance seems to as well, but he also sees how easily it slid into allegorical readings that enabled the Gnostics. This necessitated a stronger framework within which to interpret scripture that would not be so prone to fanciful perversions.

This he finds in Irenaeus, in whose hermeneutics Torrance detects three active principles at work. First is the rule of truth, which seems similar to the Reformers' doctrine of the perspicuity of scripture, though Irenaeus ties it to the perspicuity of reality and God's purposes for all of reality in the Gospel. The driving idea here is that though there are parables and other passages of scripture in which the meaning might not be immediately clear, the historical reality of what God has done through Israel and supremely in Christ, to which all of scripture points, is abundantly clear. This clarity lays an obligation on the interpreter of the Bible to interpret it in all its parts according to that clear historical truth.

Second is the body of truth, which refers to the order and connections in the history of God's work in Israel and Christ. One cannot read scripture in a blind way so that they are not mindful of whether they are reading the Old or the New Testament, whether a passage is referring to Christ's first or second coming, or other such distinctions. Since God has acted and revealed himself in history, that history has an important order of events that must be borne in mind when interpreting scripture.

Third and finally is the rule of faith, by which Irenaeus means that scripture must always be interpreted according to the proclamation of the historic Christian faith. This may seem circular (we interpret scripture according to the proclamation of the gospel which we find in scripture), but it is merely an acknowledgment that the Bible came about and is to be interpreted within the history of the proclamation of the gospel so that no generation has the right to break itself off from that history of proclamation and decide that the Bible means something entirely new. We must interpret scripture not privately or without regard to history, but as the church and within the ongoing and millennia old life of the church, giving deference to the weight of agreement on essential matters from the time of the early fathers to now.

In this way, Torrance argues, we can allow scripture to open its truths to us in a clear and objective way. As I read this, I couldn't help but imagine every small group Bible study I've ever been to where once the passage is finished being read, after an awkward pause, someone asks the group, "So what does this passage mean to you?" Torrance, by pointing us to the wisdom of the ancients, can help us do better.

Karl Barth Weighs in on Scripture

2009-10-02T02:34:00.000-07:00

In my continuing pursuit of a deeper knowledge of the nature and function of the Bible, I came across this intriguing paragraph in Barth's Church Dogmatics:

...we are speaking of the Jesus Christ attested in Scripture. The One of whom we have said that He lives in the sense described, is not then the creation of free speculation based on direct experience. He is the One to whom the history of Israel moves from the very first as to its goal, and from whom the history of His community springs. He is the One whose own history is the end of the one and the beginning of the other. He is the One who is visible, who makes Himself visible, in the documents of this whole historical nexus. He, this One, lives in the figure and role, in the being, speech, action, passion and death, in the work, which are all ascribed to Him in these documents, in the features which constitute the picture of His existence as delineated and represented in these documents. The fact that this One lives, and what it means that He lives, are not things invented or maintained of ourselves. If we say them responsibly, our own responsibility is only secondary. We really draw on the biblical attestation of His existence. For in this attestation He Himself lives, certainly as its origin and theme, but even as such only the mirror of the picture which is offered. It is He who lives, not the picture. But He Himself lives only in the form which He has in the picture. For it is not a picture arbitrarily invented and constructed by others. It is the picture which He Himself has created and impressed upon His witnesses. When we say that Jesus Christ lives, we repeat the basic, decisive, controlling and determinative statement of the biblical witness, namely, that He, very son of God and Son of Man , the Mediator between God and man, the One who lives the life of grace, the Lord and Servant, the Fulfiller of the divine act of reconciliation, that He, the One, has risen from the dead, and in so doing shown Himself to be who He is. He lives as and because He is risen, having thus shown that He lives this life. If there is any Christian and theological axiom, it is that Jesus Christ is risen, that He is truly risen. But this is an axiom which no one can invent. It can only be repeated on the basis of the fact that in the enlightening power of the Holy Spirit it has been previously declared to us as the central statement of the biblical witness (CD IV.3.1 p. 44).

Divine Meaning pt. 2

2009-10-01T04:51:00.000-07:00

Chapter 1 of Thomas F. Torrance's Divine Meaning is called "The Complex Background of Biblical Interpretation" and it is an appropriate title. It traces pre-Christian and early Christian developments in hermeneutics (interpretation). His chief aim is to expose the nasty effects of Hellenistic modes of thought on Biblical interpretation as these modes of thought found expression in Hellenistic hermeneutics, particularly those of Zeno and the Stoics, Jewish hermeneutics, particularly those of Philo, and finally Gnostic hermeneutics, particularly those of Marcion. Once again, the big bad guy he wants to slay is dualism, the split between mind (spirit, God) and matter (time, space) cemented by Plato into Western thought.

(If you'd prefer to avoid my attempt to squeese Torrance's reading of this history into one paragraph, go ahead and skip this paragraph and go straight to Torrance's conclusions about how the Gnostic Marcion's interpretations of scripture have had a lasting effect on Christian hermeneutics.) The narrative he traces looks (briefly) like this: early mythology presents the gods, the ultimate beings, existing under the limitations of time and space -> Plato rejects myth by seperating the timeless world of the mind and spirit from the temporal world of matter -> Stoicism tries to bring these worlds back together by seeing the rationality of the material world as a window into the eternal so that timeless truths of cosmology and ethics can be discerned even in the older myths through the use of a new hermeneutic, allegory, in which a literal reading of the myths is set aside in favor of a moral or philosophical one -> allegorical interpretation finds its way into Jewish interpretation of the Old Testament through Philo who sees certain texts depicting God acting within human history as needing to be interpreted in a non-literal (ie. allegorical) way in order to preserve God's transcendence over the creaturely realm -> early Gnosticism widens the gap between God and humanity even further by cutting God off even from the rational activities of humanity, seeing the only path to God as transcending this world altogether through some kind of non-rational intuitive grasp of eternal truth -> this leaves Gnostic hermeneutics of scripture in utter ruins, seeing the final referent of all statements of truth as being totally cut off from the statement itself, limited as it is by its context in time and space, and therefore any text can be interpreted in almost any way -> the Gnostic Marcion, though denounced as a heretic, leaves a lasting negative impact on Christian interpretation of the Bible in the following two ways (and here we need to slow down a bit):

1. Marcion draws a sharp antithesis between creation and redemption, removing redemption totally from time and space to some other world. The effects of this are a Jesus seen as alien to our humanity and an interpretation of biblical texts that speak of salvation and redemption in terms of human history as actually pointing to some otherworldly paradise. Is this perversion still exerting influence on our Christian thinking and spirituality? I think so. Whenever a Christian defines salvation as going to Heaven when you die, this perversion and reduction of the gospel, whether owing to Marcion or not, seems to be at play. They are cutting what God can do, has done and is doing off from the life He has actually given to us and in which He speak to us.

2. Marcion draws a sharp antithesis between the Old Testament and New Testament, Law and Gospel, Israel and Church. This is certainly still crippling our understanding of scripture. This not only taints our ability to see God's justice and mercy as essentially unified, but also, Torrance stresses, it taints our ability to see Jesus as he truly is. Us Gentile Christians have an enormous difficulty seeing Jesus in his Jewishness. We tend to see it as incidental, like Jesus might just as likely (maybe more likely) have been born to a Saxon virgin as a Jewish one. Do we see the same God at work in the Old and New Testaments? Do we see the work begun by God with Abraham and completed in Christ as the same work? If so, can we legitimately think of Christ in a completely Gentile (dualistic) way? Comments are welcome.

Divine Meaning pt 1

2009-09-30T06:39:00.000-07:00

I have now been in Aberdeen for a week and am trying to hit the ground running. My doctoral dissertation topic is (for now) T. F. Torrance's doctrine of scripture. This is not normally considered a major theme in Torrance's work, but I think his perspective on the topic, when he does occasionally tackle it, is quite helpful.

To get started, I'll be going through Torrance's book, Divine Meaning, which is a collection of essays on patristic hermeneutics originally published primarily in the 70's and 80's in various journals. The introduction is one of the few places I have found so far where Torrance addresses himself directly to the doctrine of scripture. There, he makes the following claims about scripture:

1. Because scripture presents itself to us as the written form of God's Word, and it is thus God who is in control of it, no formal theoretical argument can be made to prove that it is God's Word. Torrance says,

At no point can we bring God under the compulsion of our theoretical demonstrations or constrain him to yield answers to us in accordance with our empirical stipulations. Our inquiry will necessarily take a self-critical form in which we seek to allow the Word of God to be its own evidence in declaring itself to us, and to call all our presuppositions into question before it, so that we may listen to it and seek to understand it without imposing ourselves upon it. Because it is the Word of God that we encounter, we approach it in humility before its divine majesty, and with receptiveness before its divine Grace, thus yielding to it as is proper precedence and ascendancy over us in all our knowing and interpretation.

For Torrance, God's speaking in scripture, as is the case in all of His other acts, cannot itself be proved because whatever criteria one might set up to test it would necessarily be exercising a greater authority. Since there can be no greater authority than God, God himself must validate his own acts and they must be used as the criteria we employ to judge our acts; God's acts must be our starting point, not a conclusion we derive from other, prior data.

Is Torrance merely echoing Barth here, or is he saying something new?

2. The Bible is at the same time a human book and God's book. The Bible is a book written by men, yet in their words we hear God's Word. This union of human word and divine Word is thus analogous to the hypostatic union of human person and divine Person in Jesus Christ, though not strictly alike. Torrance sees the human word and divine Word as being united in the Bible only "through dependence upon and participation in Christ, that is, sacramentally," (p. 7). Dualism, Torrance's arch enemy, is thus overcome totally and solely through Christ's incarnation, the Word becoming flesh, and its overcoming is evident in the ability of a human book, the Bible, to bear God's Word to us. Penetrating deeper, Torrance says, "for Christians, the real text with which we have to do in the New Testament Scriptures is the humanity of Jesus Christ, for it is in the humanity of the Word of God incarnate in him, that we meet and are addressed by the Word of the living God" (p. 7).

3. Torrance next makes an interesting move. He begins with Christ's assumption of our fallen humanity in order to redeem it and applies this principle to scripture. First, a word about fallen humanity. Torrance is an outspoken advocate of this position because, operating under the patristic maxim that what is unassumed by Christ is unhealed, he perceives that if Christ had taken on only a pre-fallen Adamic humanity, then he would only be united with that humanity, which none of us possess. Since Christ has come to save us, he must take on the full reality of humanity, including its fallen nature, even its final consequence of death and alienation from God, and bend it back into conformity and unity with God by living a perfect life of obedience, love and sacrifice to the Father. By taking on our humanity, Christ simultaneously judges it as sinful and redeems it by living a sinless life.

Now Torrance draws on the analogy of scripture's dependence and participation in the person of Christ previously established to speak of scripture in the same way:

...so we must think of the Word of God in the Scriptures not only as accommodating himself to us in our weakness and littleness but as condescending to enter into our alienated and contradictory ways of thought and speech in order to reach us with his message and to restore us to converse with God in truth. Thus the Word of God comes to us in the Bible not nakedly and directly with clear compelling self-demonstration of the kind that we can read it off easily without the pain and struggle of self-renunciation and decision,but it comes to us in the limitation and imperfection, the ambiguities and contradictions of our fallen ways of thought and speech, seeking us in the questionable forms of our humanity where we have to let ourselves be questioned down to the roots of our being in order to hear it as God's Word. It is not a Word that we can hear by our clear-sightedness or mastery by our reason, but one that we can hear only through judgment of the very humanity in which it is clothed and to which it is addressed and therefore only through crucifixion and repentance (p. 8).

This seems to me to imply an accusation of docetism to the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. Does inerrancy make the divine nature of scripture squash the human? Torrance's view of scripture does seem to help make sense of the constant arguments that go on over biblical interpretation even amongst the most conservative inerrantists - perhaps such difficulties should point us to the full reality of the Bible's dual nature, rather than challenge its divine origin.

4. Finally, Torrance applies to scripture the idea that in all of God's activities with humanity, revelation and reconciliation always accompany each other. Just as we cannot personally know Christ without being conformed to his likeness, so we cannot properly hear and understand God's voice in scripture without yielding to it and obeying it. Torrance here makes the unpopular (amongst some biblical scholars) claim that use of the proper exegetical methods does not guarantee proper understanding of scripture, though on the other side of this he does insist that because the Bible is a human book no less than a divine book, scientific hermeneutics must be learned and rigorously employed. He concludes with a discussion about the relationship between general hermeneutics and biblical hermeneutics, arguing that they must not be separated, that attending to God's Word in scripture will teach us how to interpret each other more faithfully.

Any thoughts?

Church Doctrine at Church: Introduction Part 2

2009-09-17T19:52:00.000-07:00

I've had several Bible and theology professors over the years that went straight from getting their PhDs to teaching without ever doing any significant work in a church setting. I don't think there ought to be any hard rule against this, but it does seem to me kind of like getting a business degree and then turning around and teaching business without ever having run or even worked in an actual business. In retrospect, I can think of several OT, NT and theology professors I've had both in college and in seminary that fit this description who were far more prone to wander off into discussions that were either distractions or of only marginal significance to the life of the church than those professors who did their work from a primarily pastoral perspective.

This has become very important for me. A few years ago I heard the late Dr. Ray Anderson (what a loss!) say in a class lecture that there are certain theological truths in scripture that are only available to those who are involved in the ministry of preaching the gospel to real people. This rocked me. Since first switching majors to theology in college, I was horrified at the idea of becoming a pastor; I wanted to teach theology, not listen to people's problems. Dr. Anderson's words called me to repentance, but even more they opened up to me the real reason I was studying theology: to be, and to help others to be, more effective ministers of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

My academic interest is in systematic theology, dogmatics, Christian doctrine, not practical theology or spiritual formation or soul care. However, I'm approaching my doctoral work in systematics not exclusively as preparation for teaching, though I do want to teach, but as preparation for the pastorate. I intend this to be a controlling factor in the development of my own theology and therefore of this blog.

Introduction

2009-09-17T10:08:00.000-07:00

This blog will really get under way in a few weeks when I'm all set up in Aberdeen. At this point, however, I'd like to offer a brief introduction of myself and the intention of this blog in order to orient future readers to my theological background.

My name is Adam Nigh (hence the blog title). I am a theology student and this is a theology blog. For friends of the Nighs who want to catch up on our adventure in Scotland but are bored to death by the cumbersome profundities dispensed here, my wife Rachel has a blog you might like a bit better.

A bit of an introduction of my self: I am a father of two and a husband (of one). I have grown up and lived almost my whole life in the Santa Cruz, California area, a "weird" (liberal) beach and college community. I got my BA in Biblical and Theological Studies from Bethany College (now its Bethany University?) in 2002 and just finished my MA in the Theology from Fuller Seminary at the Northern California campus in Menlo Park. From 2002 through 2009 I was a Bible teacher at Monte Vista Christian High School. 5 days from now, I and my family will be traveling to Aberdeen, Scotland, where I'll be doing my PhD at King's College, University of Aberdeen, in Systematic Theology under Dr. John Webster.

My theological background is a little complicated. My church home since I was born is Twin Lakes Church in Aptos, California, a fairly large seeker-sensitive conservative Baptist church.
Early in college, whilst a business major, I discovered Reformed theology in the form of the book Chosen by God by R. C. Sproul while I was working stocking books at a local Christian bookstore. This triggered a major reading frenzy, mostly of Sproul, but also John Piper and a few others. I had been struggling with my conceptions of the tension between divine sovereignty and human freedom since high school and hadn't encountered any satisfying answers or even discussion of the topic until then. I promptly became a vocal and belligerent "5 point Calvinist", arguing with all my friends and family.

I soon decided to switch majors to study the Bible and theology. At that point, I was married with no kids, but we didn't want to move away from the Santa Cruz area. I knew there was a Christian college nearby (Bethany), but I didn't even know where it was. Being that it was Pentecostal (AOG), I was hesitant as a good Baptist, but I went anyway. Virtually everything about my theology and spirituality was under attack at Bethany. My conservative Baptist background was unpopular with the highly experiential charismatic spirituality of the students, and all forms of Reformed theology (with the slight exception of Barth) were despised by all of my professors. My professors seemed to like me ok anyway since I was one of the rare students there who did their homework.

After graduating from Bethany, I spent 7 years as a high school Bible teacher and 6 as a masters student at Fuller. This was a time of more gradual, though no less significant and radical theological change for me. For the first half of this period, I was growing more and more influenced by the emerging church movement and my theology accordingly grew soft and squishy. After having repressed intuition and sentiment when I first became a "Calvinist", I now began to put reason in the back seat and let sentimentality run rampant in my theology. I read Donald Miller and Brian McLaren with bright eyed enthusiasm about how palatable the gospel could be made to our oh so spiritual postmodern culture.

In the last three years or so of that period, however, things started to change again. First of all, I took a course on christology by the late great Ray Anderson who introduced me to T. F. Torrance. Reading Torrance's The Mediation of Christ woke me up with a shock. Here was a robust, christocentric Reformed theology quite openly critical of the doctrine of limited atonement (I didn't even know that was possible!), but not lapsing into sentimentality in critique of harsh doctrine. Torrance was rigorously holistic, taking the hypostatic union of the divine and human natures of Christ as the starting point for all Christian thinking. This holism also brought back together mind and heart in my own theology, rooting love of God and of his image bearers in the profound rationale of God's love for us in the incarnation. I was hooked.

The other major influence on my theology in the last couple of years has been a reading group, called the Moot, made up mostly of other teachers at Monte Vista. Most of these guys go to a local Christian Reformed Church and are fairly hostile to the emerging church and postmodern Christian movements. This has had a healthy balancing effect on my thought. In all honesty, my theology was strengthened and challenged to grow more there, reading theologians as diverse as Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, David B. Hart, and G. K. Chesterton, and paying no tuition, I might add, than in the seminary classes I was paying more than $1,000 each for.

That pretty much brings us to the present. I guess I would now describe myself as a Baptist with significant Reformed leanings. I am very much looking forward to continuing my theological development in Aberdeen. I have been spending this summer reading more Torrance, John Webster, Athanasius, and Calvin. I'm thirsty for more. My current chief theological interests which I plan to devote myself to in my doctoral work are christology, doctrine of Scriputre, and the relation between the two as Word of God. Expect several future posts on these topics.