Musings on Grace

A couple of days ago I posted a question, brought up during my preparation of a sermon on Deuteronomy 9. The question ‘compared and contrasted’ two statements about salvation, one from the Rt Revd Tom Wright, the other from the Thirty-nine Articles.

Wright says, in clarification of his position on final salvation,

... by the Spirit those who are already justified by faith have their lives transformed, and the final verdict will be in accordance with that transformation, imperfect though it remains.

Article XI, ‘Of the Justification of Man’, says,

We are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith, and not for our own works or deservings ...

Wright’s own position, as I understand it, depends a lot on Romans 2 — that and an understanding that ‘justification’ is focussed on ‘being’ rather than ‘becoming’ a member of the people of God.

As I’ve said, however, I was studying Deuteronomy 9, not Romans 2, and sometimes narrative sheds light on things when we are finding the ‘doctrinal’ passages more difficult — and not just for us but for the first protagonists.

Thus I believe that Paul’s theology of grace rested ultimately on his Damascus road experience, and no matter what other factors he took into account, he knew that he was shown mercy when he was actually in the middle of persecuting Christ. He was not a seeker, or a well-doer, but an enemy of God (albeit not in his own mind!). This, then, was the fundamental meaning of the ‘grace of God’ to him.

Similarly, though, Israel was often reminded of the encounter with God at Mt Sinai (indeed, this is the general subject of the opening chapters of Deuteronomy). But what happened there was also an illustration of grace, as Deuteronomy 9 shows.

Having been told that they are about to go in and possess the land, they receive this solemn reminder from Moses:

... do not say to yourself, “The Lord has brought me here to take possession of this land because of my righteousness.” No, it is on account of the wickedness of these nations that the Lord is going to drive them out before you. It is not because of your righteousness or your integrity that you are going in to take possession of their land ... (Dt 9:4-5)

The lesson would seem clear: Israel is being given the land “not for [her] own workings or deservings”.

But there is more — much more! For what is the condition of Israel at Sinai and since then?

In ‘Wrightian’ terms, I take it, Israel is ‘justified’ — this is ‘the people of God’, without a shadow of a doubt. When he talks to ‘his people’ he talks to them. But what are they like? In v 8, Moses tells them:

At Horeb you aroused the Lord’s wrath so that he was angry enough to destroy you.

And from vv 9-12, Moses reminds them why. Whilst he was up the mountain receiving the Ten Commandments, they were making the Golden Calf, committing the very sin that the whole encounter with God so far had warned them against (cf 4:12,15-18).

In response, God’s words to Moses could hardly be more stark:

I have seen this people, and they are a stiff-necked people indeed! Let me alone, so that I may destroy them and blot out their name from under heaven. (Dt 9:13)

So this is the condition of the ‘justified’ people of God in Deuteronomy: resistant to correction (that is the meaning of ‘stiff-necked’), and worthy of utter and complete destruction (just like the nations who are being driven out because of their ‘wickedness’).

Israel’s lack of ‘righteousness’ (vv 4-5) is not a former condition which has changed now that they have been brought to God as Sinai. Nor is not something that lay outside the Covenant relationship. On the contrary, it persists even beyond Sinai. As Moses says in 9:22-24,

You also made the Lord angry at Taberah, at Massah and at Kibroth Hattaavah. ²³ And when the Lord sent you out from Kadesh Barnea, he said, “Go up and take possession of the land I have given you.” But you rebelled against the command of the Lord your God. You did not trust him or obey him. ²⁴ You have been rebellious against the Lord ever since I have known you.

This is the constant condition of God’s covenant people. Moses tells them, they were worthy of destruction then and they are worthy of destruction now. Compare this with what an important Qur’anic verse says about ‘God’s people’:

You are the best of peoples [or the best nation] ever raised up for mankind. You enjoin what is right, forbid what is wrong, and believe in Allah [God]. (3:110)

That is surely the natural way to think about the people God would choose — not necessarily perfect, but certainly the best in the sense of ‘better than all the rest’.

But we must simply ask, is that the message Moses gives to Israel? The answer is surely a resounding ‘No’. To them, God says (via Moses), “You are worthy of destruction, like all the rest. Indeed you are if anything worse — a ‘stiff-necked’ people resistant to correction, who never change, despite what happens to you.”

Israel is, by nature, a ‘covenant breaking’ nation, hence the symbolism of the broken tablets (9:17)

So why does God not destroy them? Deuteronomy 9 gives four reasons.

First, there is an effective intercessor. Moses recounts how he prayed for the nation and for Aaron for “forty days and forty nights”, and how the Lord listened to him (9:18-10).

Secondly, sin is decisively dealt with. Moses took “that sinful thing of yours” and utterly destroyed it (v 21).

But it was not finished there.

Thirdly, Moses appealed to the Covenant with the Patriarchs: “Remember your servants, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” (v 27).

Fourthly, he appealed to God’s own glory and honour:

Otherwise, the country from which you brought us will say, ‘Because the Lord was not able to take them into the land he had promised them, and because he hated them, he brought them out to put them to death in the desert.’ (v 28)

And hence he is able to say, finally,

But they are your people, your inheritance that you brought out by your great power and your outstretched arm. (v 29)

This is the grace of God shown in Deuteronomy. In the nature of Old Testament narrative, it is laid out ‘sequentially’ and in detail so that we get the point. But the point is that this ‘wicked and evil’ people is God’s people, not because of their own ‘righteousness or uprightness of heart’ before or since the making of the Covenant, but purely because of God’s grace and the provision of an intercessor, the destruction of sin, the formation of a Covenant with others and the upholding of God’s own honour.

It is this people that God gave the land to possess.

All that remains to observe is that if that is the case with ‘God’s people’ then, it is surely the case with ‘God’s people’ now. God does not look for a righteousness or uprightness of heart in us as the basis of his giving us the kingdom. We too have an intercessor for sin: “Christ Jesus ... is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us” (Rom 8:34). We too have had our sins dealt with decisively: “[Christ] cancelled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us ... nailing it to the cross” (Col 2:14). We too receive God’s grace because of a Covenant with ‘another’: “This cup is the New Covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you” (Lk 22:20). And in all this, God acts for his own honour and glory: “In love [God] predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will— to the praise of his glorious grace” (Eph 1:4-6).

Thus we must surely say to ourselves, as God said to Israel, “It is not because of your righteousness or your integrity”, either before or since we were made his Covenant people. On the contrary, we too are “a stiff-necked people”, not better than the rest of mankind.

Yet like Israel, it is also said of us:

... they are your people, your inheritance that you brought out by your great power and your outstretched arm.

Sola gratia, sola dei gloria — grace alone, and to the glory of God alone!

John Richardson
9 August 2011

(All quotations from The Holy Bible: New International Version 1996, c1984 (electronic ed.) Grand Rapids: Zondervan)

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Marriage and the Church's ministry - why women bishops don't work for me

This is an edited piece requested for The Guardian that didn't get published.

************

“With the Church,” wrote C S Lewis in his 1948 essay Priestesses in the Church?, “... we are dealing with male and female not merely as facts of nature but as the live and awful shadows of realities utterly beyond our control and largely beyond our direct knowledge.”

These words are a reminder that current debates in the Church of England have a longer history than many realize. And they are equally a reminder that the outcome may be more serious than many think.

But I cannot myself wholly follow Lewis, who rejected women priests on the basis of their exercising an ‘iconic’ rôle in the congregation. The priest, he wrote, “represents us to God and God to us.” Yet at these words my Protestant hackles rise, for does not the priesthood belong to all, both men and women? Martin Luther, no less, wrote that, “when women baptize, they exercise the function of priesthood ... and do it ... as a part of the public ministry of the church” (LW 40:23).

Nevertheless, Luther, Lewis and I would all oppose the admission of women to the Anglican episcopate. And for myself, this indeed relates to Lewis’ belief in the iconic significance of human gender. The place to see this exemplified, however, is not in the Eucharist but in marriage.

The Book of Common Prayer describes marriage as “signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church.” There is much that could be said about this, and one of the best accounts is by the Roman Catholic author, Edward Schillebeeckx. The title of his book, Marriage: human reality and saving mystery, identifies the close connection between what is increasingly treated as an incidental aspect of human experience and the entire structure of Christian theology, focussed as it is on the need for, and nature of, our salvation.

Here, Lewis is precisely right. Male and female are discovered to be not mere ‘facts of nature’ but ‘shadows of realities beyond our control’, for in the narrative of Scripture the physical (re)unification of man and woman in Genesis 2:24 is finally identified with the spiritual union of the Saviour and the saved: ‘as it is written, “The two will become one flesh.” But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him’ (1 Cor 6:16-17, ESV).

Indeed, this theme within Scripture has profound implications which are rarely considered in Christian theology. Nevertheless, for our present purposes, the consequences are relatively familiar and straightforward, and concern polity within the family, where the male and the female are both ‘iconic’: the man representing Christ towards his wife, and the woman representing the Church towards her husband.

This is most explicitly set out in Ephesians 5, where the relationship is described in terms of ‘head’ and ‘body’, from which has been derived a concept of ‘male headship’. But it is precisely here that we find within contemporary Anglican Evangelicalism both misconstrual and misapplication.

From the Conservative side, there is a misapplication of ‘headship’ from the specific context of marriage to the general context of the Church. Thus the pressure-group Reform speaks of ‘the divine order of male headship, which makes the headship of women as priests in charge, incumbents, dignitaries and bishops inappropriate’.

Yet this is theologically clumsy, for (Thomas Cranmer and Henry VIII not withstanding), the headship of the Church belongs only to Christ. Husband is to wife as Christ is to Church, but not as vicar is to congregation, bishop to diocese — or even monarch to national denomination.

On the ‘egalitarian’ side, however, there is misconstrual, for even where the parallel in marriage with Christ and the Church is admitted (and many of this persuasion find that difficult enough), its practical implications are effectively denied on the argument that the passage calls for a ‘mutual submission’ of all Christians to one another. The submission of a wife to her husband is thus ultimately rendered indistinguishable from the submission of a husband to his wife.

Such an interpretation, however, is hard to maintain. With regard not only to the specific verses but to the overall thrust of the New Testament Scriptures, the weight of evidence is with the Traditionalist view of marriage.

Nevertheless, the application of this to Anglican ecclesiology is not straightforward.

The Church in the New Testament was not so much an agglomeration of individual believers as a ‘community of communities’ — witness the prevalence of ‘household’ baptisms. Individuals there certainly were, but people belonged to households. (This was especially true for slaves, who ‘belonged’ in both senses of the word.) And the household was not just an economic unit but a faith-community in itself.

Arguably, it is this which lies behind the New Testament injunctions about the rôles of women in the Church. 1 Timothy 2:12, for example, famously forbids a woman ‘to teach or to exercise authority over a man’. Yet the underlying rationale is the example of Adam and Eve (vv13-14), who are treated elsewhere as not just individuals but the archetypal couple. As Christ himself is understood to be the new ‘Adam’ (1 Cor 15:45), so Eve is never just ‘a woman’, but is the primeval ‘wife’.

Moreover, it must be remembered that teaching, in this context, is not the mere imparting of facts, as one might teach English or engineering. Rather, it is the imparting of what ought to be believed and practised, and therefore includes reproof and correction (2 Tim 3:16).

If this is the issue, then the primary focus of the injunctions would be the preservation of the ‘iconic’ husband/wife relationships fundamental to the households of the Church, rather than a concern about who may or may not belong to a group which would later become a separate, and professionalized, ‘caste’ within Christendom, as did the priesthood.

The problem within Anglicanism, particularly for Evangelicals like myself, is that there is no simple overlap between our traditional orders of ministry (bishop, priest and deacon) and the biblical pattern of local elder-overseers and semi-permanent deacons alongside peripatetic Apostolic teams. The modern bishop’s rôle in particular, with all its administrative concerns, is almost completely unlike anything found in the pages of the New Testament.

Nevertheless, these orders are our way of providing the ministry which the New Testament prescribes for the health of the Church, and must not therefore conflict with that aim. Thus, as, David Broughton-Knox, the former principal of Moore Theological College, wrote, ‘relationships between men and women in the congregation should not contradict relationships of the home’.

And for my own part, I find it impossible to see how a woman can be a priest-in-charge, incumbent or (especially) a bishop, whilst maintaining with a husband at home the iconic relationship of the Church and Christ, let alone modelling this doctrine to others as the Ordinal says we should. This is especially so when we consider the authority conferred on those offices by the Anglican way of doing things.

It is on this basis that I believe Evangelicals should be conducting the debate about women’s ordination and ministry. Indeed, I understand there is an ‘Open Evangelical’ book in the making which addresses precisely some of these issues.

The one thing I cannot do, and would resist within the Church, is to dismiss the Bible at this point as merely ‘culturally conditioned’. The overarching theme of Christ and the Church is too profound for that. At the end of the Scriptural canon, in the book of Revelation, we read that the age to come is ushered in with a wedding: the New Jerusalem descends from heaven ‘as a Bride adorned for her husband’ (Rev 21:2), and the ancient marana tha (‘Come, Lord’, 1 Cor 16:21) of the early Church is echoed in the invocation of the Spirit and the Bride in Revelation 22:17.

Insofar as human marriage is called to reflect this understanding of the Church in the future, so it must inform, and where necessary control, our understanding of the Church in the present.

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Tabernacle, Creation and Sabbath -- building a 'rest home' for the people of God?

Recently I’ve been busy working on a long-term project to do with the opening chapters of Genesis. I’m encouraged by the fact that Augustine of Hippo wrote two volumes on this before he gave up, so I was thinking now might be a good idea to run a couple of things past the reading public.

The latest stage had me looking at where else the six days of creation are referred to in the Bible, apart from Genesis 1. And as far as I can see there are only two occasions, in Exodus 20 and Exodus 31:

Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. [...] For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. (Ex 20:8,11, NIV)

The Israelites are to observe the Sabbath ... for in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, and on the seventh day he abstained from work and rested. (Ex 31:16a,17b, NIV)

And that’s apparently it! The second occasion, however, had me particularly intrigued, because it comes at the end of five-and-a-half chapters of detailed instructions on how and why to build a Tabernacle (Exodus 25:1-31:11).

The ‘why’ is in 25:8, where God says to Moses,

Then have them [the Israelites] make a sanctuary for me, and I will dwell among them.

And then the details run on, page after page until chapter 31 where we hear about Bezalel son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, who is going to be filled with God’s Spirit to supervise the construction of what has been detailed in the previous chapters.

Then we get, almost out of the blue, the second reference to the Sabbath above (vv 12-17). Now my question was, “Why does this reference to the Sabbath come here?” And the answer I am exploring is that there are allusions throughout the instructions for building the Tabernacle to the situation described in the Genesis accounts of creation and the garden in Eden.

Compare the following table I drew up:

Should we perhaps see a parallel between the creation of the world in Genesis, which leads up to the seventh day of divine ‘rest’, and the construction of the Tabernacle in Exodus, which therefore (logically) leads up to the Sabbath day of symbolic ‘creation rest’ (when not only people but animals ceased from their labours)?

I notice, incidentally, that in Genesis 2, the seventh day is not actually referred to as a ‘Sabbath’. Indeed, the word doesn’t occur until Exodus 16:23 (which precedes the giving of the Ten Commandments). Does this underline the symbolic nature of the human Sabbath-day?

BTW, simply observing, “They’re different traditions” isn’t what I’m looking for by way of help! And for what it’s worth, I’ve already read John Walton and Gregory Beale who have some interesting things to say on these topics.


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Quote of the Day

"I have encountered a form of church that does not offend me."

From here.

And isn't that ultimately the problem with Liberal Christianity?

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Now you see us, now you don't, or "Who knows where the time goes?"

Earlier in the week I posted a ‘musing’ about time.

I’ve been thinking about the issues raised there for quite a while, but more recently I’m inclined to suggest they have some bearing on our present-day intellectual battles.

I have just begun reading Keith Ward’s More Than Matter?, which makes the following point:

Most people ... accept a philosophy of common sense. They assume that things continue to be roughly what they are observed to be even when nobody is observing them. We live in a world of real objects in three-dimensional space, and we observe it more or less as it is (this is ... sometimes called naive realism, because many philosophers think it really is rather naive). (30-31)

That, I think, pretty much describes where most people are at. Indeed, I would go further and say that is pretty much where the public discourse encourages them to be at. We are encouraged to think of the world on a ‘what you see is what you get’ basis, within which we are marginalized as mere accidents, able to observe for a while but due to disappear quite soon, whilst the ‘reality’ of the universe continues as it has always done.

At the same time, however, we are also encouraged to regard human affairs as of mammoth importance — the state of the economy and the behaviour of governments, for example, are prominently headlined, even though, for the most part, most of what is headline news only affects us emotionally (and, indeed, is written up precisely to affect our emotions).

Thus one could say we actually live in a ‘Matrix world’, imagining we are busy with important things, but shielded from too much present awareness of the real reality.

Of course, those who understand much science (and especially physics), know the naivety of this ‘naive realism’ all too well. Matter is not matter ‘as we know it’. Nor, indeed, is time what we ‘know’ it to be. Indeed, our ‘real’ world of space-time is avowedly elusive, and, at the level of ‘common sense’ almost illusory.

One illustration of the latter, it seems to me, is the question of when ‘now’ becomes ‘then’.

Common sense says we live in the now — the present moment — which has an extension in time. My guess is that for most people ‘what is happening now’ is quite a flexible concept. Right now I am typing. Right now in Africa people are starving. It is now early evening in Perth — and so on.

Yet if we think about ‘now’ as ‘that which has not become the irrecoverable past’, it becomes contracted almost to the point of vanishing. By the time I finish typing this sentence, the production of the capital B is already ‘the irrecoverable past’. I can go back and correct a mistake, but I cannot go back in time and not make it in the first place.

Worse than that, however, by the time I have typed the w at the end of ‘now’, the n at the beginning is already in the ‘irrecoverable past’. And so it goes on, as we slice ‘now’ (both the action of producing the word, and the concept itself into smaller and smaller sections.

But, of course, it is not just the ‘time’ that is irrecoverable, it is also the matter — the physical reality that we think of as ‘permanent’.

And this realization can, I think, be somewhat mind-boggling. We are accustomed to think of the past in terms of millennia (or even ‘billennia’) that, by their sheer magnitude, establish it as something ‘real’. Yet it would seem that actually nothing ‘in the past’ exists. Certainly it existed, but only for that brief moment we call ‘now’. In our ‘now’, what is ‘then’ doesn’t exist at all.

More strangely still, the entirety of the universe is exactly the same. All the vastness, from here to whatever is the furthest point we can speak of as physically existing, is actually in existence only ‘now’. We may predict what vast swathes of it are going to be like in a moment’s time, or even millions of years time, but what we can predict nevertheless has no existence. And we can see what equally vast swathes of it were, and how that relates to the nature of things ‘now’. But what once ‘was’, now ‘is not’.

And this, I would suggest, has implications for the answer to the question, ‘Why are we here?’ For although the condition of the world ‘now’ results from its condition in the past, the existence of the world ‘now’ stands — it would seem — separated from either the past or the future.

And there I must leave it — for now.

John Richardson
16 December 2010

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Is there really "no time" like the present? A question about physics with a theological twist

I am looking for some help with understanding an aspect of physics which relates to something I want to consider theologically.

Basically, it is to do with the question of existence and time.

There’s a rather nice diagram which, I gather, sums up the present state of understanding in terms of time and space.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_line.svg 

Here, the past is ‘the region from which we can receive light’ and the future is ‘the region to which we can send light’.

Thus the longer ago a thing happened, the further the distance from which we can receive light from that event. Hence, the ‘past’ light cone contracts towards us, the observer, in the present, as we can only receive light from recent events that are correspondingly near to us in space, whereas we can receive the light of events that took place billions of years ago from equally immense distances away.

On the other hand, if we point a flash gun at the sky and set it off, the light will spread out (theoretically) throughout the universe, so the ‘future’ light cone expands away from us. After eight minutes it will have reached the Sun. After about four and a half years, it will have reached Alpha Centauri, and so on.

What I am really interested in, however, is that bit of the diagram labelled “hypersurface of the present”, and what the relationship is between ‘the present’, ‘the past’ and ‘the future’.

And here’s my key question: how can we speak of things that are not on the hypersurface of the present actually existing?

It would seem patently obvious (though I may be missing something!) that from a simply physical point of view, nothing on the ‘future’ side of the diagram actually exists at all, even if its ‘coming into being’ is both predictable and inevitable.

Does the same, however, apply to the past? If so, then the only realm in which we can talk about things actually existing is on the plane of the hypersurface of the present.

But then we have to ask the question, just how ‘thick’ is that plane? I believe some people suggest it is just a ‘Planck Moment’, but I’d be interested to know of other ideas.

I am aware that the question is complicated by aspects of Relativity theory, which mean that time is not ‘absolute’. In particular, there is the interesting, though hard to conceive, fact that events which appear simultaneous to one observer may be separated in time from the perspective of another observer.

Considered overall, then, the hypersurface of the present may be ‘wavy’ — a bit ahead for some observers, a bit behind for others, but how far might these ‘waves’ extend?

I am also aware that St Augustine of Hippo wrote a whole chapter on this subject in his Confessions. What he said is very interesting, but I’m trying to get at the physics in the first instance before looking at the theology.

What I am asking is whether it could actually be that, despite our memories of the past and our anticipation of the future, what exists, physically, is confined to a ‘micromoment’.

Thoughts and contributions would be welcome.

John Richardson
14 December 2010

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More on Tom Wright at ETS

Those who were following the discussion on Tom Wright's views (see here for the last and latest) may enjoy a snippet at Matt Reilly's blog about the meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society at which Wright spoke:

Wright surprised me as well. I somewhat expected him to dig his heels in and simply restate what he had said in the past; this, of course, is basically what he did in his last book on justification, which disappointed me. If one is going to take the time to write a book, then he ought to be sure to move the discussion forward. But Wright really answered some questions this time. Two particularly surprising moves were ...

... and you'll have to visit the blog to find out.


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Alister McGrath on the meaning of Justification

As this blog seems to have followed a line of discussion into 'New Perspective' issues and associated subject matter, I thought I'd post a paragraph from a book I read (or half-read!) almost eighteen years ago: Alister McGrath's Iustitia Dei. Be warned, though - the edition I have contains vast tracts of entirely untranslated Latin! At least with Google Translate, I now have the chance to go back over all the bits I previously had to skip.

I found his analysis of the origins of the terms used in biblical translation and Christian theology immensely helpful, especially the transition from ancient Hebrew to koine Greek to Vulgate Latin. I couldn't quite get all the transliteration he uses to work in HTML, but I've copied out a couple of paragraphs below in the hope they might be thought-provoking and useful.

Note especially his insistence that 'righteousness' must be understood within the framework of personal covenantal relationship. The bit that has consistently stuck with me, I have put in bold.

The oldest meaning of s^edāqâ, as judged by its use in the Song of Deborah (Judges 5.1-31), appears to be ‘victory’. [...] In this early passage ... God is understood to have demonstrated his ‘righteousness’ by defending Israel when her existence was threatened by an outside agency. Underlying this understanding of iustitia Dei is the conceptual framework of the covenant: when God and Israel mutually fulfil their covenant obligations to one another, a state of righteousness can be said to exist – i.e., things are saddîq, ‘as they should be’. Thus Israel’s triumphant victories over her enemies were seen as proofs of the sidqôt ’^adonay, the iustitiae Dei of the Vulgate. [...]

It is to the genius of [H] Cremer [Die paulinische Rechtfertigungslehre im Zusammenhang ihrer geschichtlichen Voraussetzungen (Guttersloh, 1899)] that we owe the fundamental insight that s^edāqâ, in its basic sense, refers to an actual relationship between two persons, and implies behaviour which corresponds to, or is consistent with, whatever claims may arise from or concerning either party to the relationship. The relationship in question is that presupposed by the covenant between God and Israel, which must be considered as the ultimate norm to which s^edāqâ must be referred. The Hebrew concept of s^edāqâ stands in a class of its own – a class which Cremer brilliantly characterised as iustitia salutifera [‘salvation righteousness’, as distinct from iustitia distributiva, ‘distributive righteousness/justice’, according to ‘dues’ or ‘merits’].

Alister E McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A history of the Christian doctrine of Justification, Vol 1, (Cambridge: University Press, 1986) 7-8

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Clarifying Wright - maybe!

Further to my blog post about understanding Tom Wright, someone sent me a link to this clarification by Justin Taylor of What N.T. Wright Really Said. I think this is worth reading in full for those who are trying to get a handle on Wright, and especially the last section which I reproduce below.

What I would note is that it is not just conservatives who seem to think that Wright has said what he roundly asserts he is not saying, ie that what we do contributes, per se, to whether we are saved 'on the basis of good works'. I have certainly got the impression from others who thought they were 'following Wright' that this is what they understood him to be saying.

Furthermore, Wright has indeed used the 'B' word ('basis') in reference to final judgement:

And we now discover that this declaration, this vindication, occurs twice. It occurs in the future, as we have seen, on the basis of the entire life a person has led in the power of the Spirit — that is, it occurs on the basis of “works” in Paul’s redefined sense. And near the heart of Paul’s theology, it occurs in the present as an anticipation of that future verdict, when someone, responding in believing obedience to the “call” of the gospel, believes that Jesus is Lord and that God raised him from the dead. (N. T. Wright, “New Perspective on Paul,” in Justification in Perspective: Historical Developments and Contemporary Challenges, ed. Bruce L. McCormack (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006): 260)

It is the use of basis which seems to be at the heart of the confusion, not only amongst Wright's critics at this point, but some of his supporters. Works are the 'basis' of final justification (the declaration that one is a member of God's people) in the same way, we might say, that having a passport is the 'basis' on which one is allowed into the country of one's birth. And this, I would suggest, is no different from the classical Reformed position expressed in Article XII: "[Good works] do spring out necessarily of a true and lively Faith; insomuch that by them a lively Faith may be as evidently known as a tree discerned by the fruit."

Here, then, is the final paragraph of the article in full.

4. What is the meaning and significance of Wright’s assertion at ETS that final justification is “in accordance with” and not “on the basis of” works?

We return now to our original question: has Wright changed his view by denying that final justification is “on the basis of” works?  In short, the answer is no. Nothing that he said indicated that he has changed his understanding of the meaning of “righteousness” language in Paul’s writings. Nothing that he said indicated that he has changed his understanding of the trial to which justification stands as a verdict. On the contrary, he reasserted his position on both of these points.

What then did the denial of “basis” as an appropriate way to talk about the relationship between final justification and Spirit-inspired works mean?  The most responsible reading of this statement is that Wright is denying the interpretation of his writings that insists that he equates the believer’s righteousness in final justification with Spirit-inspired works. I think that everyone in the room who has read his works carefully was probably stunned to hear him say that he did not remember using the language of “basis” in this way, but I think that his lapse in memory on this point demonstrates that the language of “basis” is so inessential to what Wright has always meant that he can dismiss it without realizing how frequently he has used it in the past. Basically, Wright’s shift in language simply means that he is using new wording to express what he has always been saying, but in a way that is less apt to be misunderstood than his previous statements. He still holds that Spirit-inspired works serve as the evidence that one is truly a member of God’s covenant people in final justification, and this corresponds to his understanding of the function of faith in present justification. He has not changed his view at all, but he has finally offered the clarification for which Piper hoped by denying that he understands works to be the “basis” of final justification in the way that Piper understands Christ’s righteousness to be the “basis” of final justification. One might wish that he had made this clarification clearer in his book-length reply to Piper (Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision), but we may all be grateful that he is now speaking in a way that perhaps fewer people will misunderstand. Also, perhaps the debate can now shift from this red-herring to the real points of disagreement: Wright’s understanding of the meaning of “righteousness” language and his construal of the question under consideration in the divine courtroom. On these points, Wright should be engaged and evaluated with an open mind, an open heart, and, not least, an open Bible. The discussion at ETS was a fine example of such engagement, and we should all be thankful to the panelists for modeling a charitable dialogue on this issue focused on the exegetical details from which the differences arise. May God give us wisdom as we continue to consider His Word together.

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Baffled by Wright - or maybe not!

Can anyone unpack this sentence by Tom Wright for me, which he posted as a ‘clarification’ in a blog discussion (adding that he doesn’t usually read or respond to blog posts)?

The point … is that by the Spirit those who are already justified by faith have their lives transformed, and the final verdict will be in accordance with that transformation, imperfect though it remains.

As it stands, Wright says that justification is, quite simply, “by faith”, that those who are so justified have their lives transformed by the Spirit, and that this transformation will be the basis of a “final verdict” on their lives.

Now I know that Wright wants to distinguish salvation (how we are saved) from justification (that we are saved). Nevertheless, he does not add a ‘plus’ to his statement about ‘justification by faith’, and I therefore take it he means justification is ‘by faith alone, through grace alone’. I may be wrong, but that is a legitimate inference from the sentence as it stands.

Allowing for the nuances between ‘salvation’ and ‘justification’, I cannot see how this differs from the classical Reformed position, even though Wright says this is based on a misunderstanding of Paul.

As to the ‘final verdict’, if one is justified (ie, in Wright’s terms, a member of the people of God), the content of this verdict can presumably only be with respect to how well, or badly, one has done in regard to living out one’s ‘calling’ into God’s people.

As Jesus taught in the parable of the sower, some will bear fruit thirty fold, some sixty fold and some a hundred fold. Or as Paul remarks in 1 Corinthians,

If any man builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, his work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each man’s work. If what he has built survives, he will receive his reward. If it is burned up, he will suffer loss; he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through the flames. (1 Cor 3:12-15)

According to this, then, the final verdict is on the quality of one’s Spirit-transformed life as a ‘justified’ member of the household of God.

Once again, however, I cannot see any tension between this and the classical Reformed position.

Is it just, then, that Wright and Luther reach the same position by (what Wright thinks ought to be) a different route?

I have a feeling I am missing something, but if Wright’s statement above is a summary of his actual position, I cannot work out what it is!

John Richardson
25 November 2010

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Why we are here (maybe)

Yesterday I posted a rather open-ended question as to why we are here, in which I admitted to my own ‘necessitarian’ view on creation and my relief on finding someone else who thought the same way.

I suspect, however, that both I and Norman Kretzmann are using this term in a somewhat specialized way. Neither of us, for example, is saying the world had to be the way it is. (This, I gather, is the more general understanding of ‘necessitarianism’.) In the passage I quoted, Kretzmann specifically repudiates this, insisting that God has freedom with regard to the ‘facts’ of how the world is.

Indeed, one could go as far as to say there is no feature of this world which is precisely ‘necessary’ in the form it takes, because there is nothing which could compel God to make it so, and nothing within God which requires that it be so.

Moreover, the ‘necessity’ here does not require that God lacks anything, for which he therefore needs to create something. This, I understand, was Aquinas’s objection to the whole concept, and it is one with which I (and Kretzmann) entirely agree. The same point is made tellingly in Paul’s speech to the Athenian Council:

God he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. (Acts 17:25, NIV)

The suggestion arises, however, when we consider, as much as we can, how God is within himself, and this takes us into the difficult question of time and eternity.

Augustine of Hippo was quite right when he identified time as a created ‘thing’ (see his Confessions). That being the case, however, we cannot conceive of God as existing in or experiencing any ‘temporal’ framework. As Augustine put it, God does not experience days coming towards him, or receding away from him, as we do. Rather, there is simply a ‘now’ — which is, of course, completely impossible for us really to comprehend.

To put it simply, God is unchanging in the sense that ‘change’ corresponds to a ‘before’ and an ‘after’. Time allows (or forces) us to experience God as if he were ‘stretched out’ along a time-line. So we can read in Scripture of God saying one thing, then ‘repenting’ and doing another. But we must no more read this as a change in God’s inward character than we should read references to his ‘face’ as indicating he has a head with a front and a back.

That being the case, however, ‘creating’ is not something which God one day ‘decided to do’. And yet God clearly has created (we are here!). Therefore God is a creator-God.

Kretzmann, if I have understood him correctly, attributes this to God’s goodness, and argues further that Aquinas should have allowed himself to reach the same conclusion. Creation is ‘of necessity’, not because God has to do it, but because God is ‘that sort of God’.

My own route was rather more simple, premised on the notion that God does not change and yet (self-evidently) creates. However, I would again agree with Kretzmann (and Aquinas in principle) that it is God’s goodness which is the source of his being the Creator.

But I would want to go on to say (and have said in my booklet The Eternal Cross) that God is also, therefore, a saviour-God, not as a result of a decision to create and then a realization of the need to save, but because the two — creation and salvation — go together.

Where this is leading, however, and where I found myself reading Aquinas and then Kretzmann, is to the idea that there is, in Creation and Salvation, an exitus et reditus — a ‘going out from’ and a ‘returning’ to. Or to put it another way, there is diversification from the Unity of God, and (re)union between God and that which is created by God. The phrase is attributed to Platonism, but the idea is there in Aquinas and — I want to argue — is also firmly there in a Christological reading of Genesis 2.

It’s a mouthful, I’ll admit. But I have to stop at this point (a meeting beckons) and will hopefully resume another time.

John Richardson
4 November 2010

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Is the Pope a Theologian?

Personally, I hold no animosity towards the Pope as an individual. Theologically, however, I have to say that I disagree with him, and I also have to observe that I belong to a Church which, to say the least, distances itself from his theology in its core formularies: the Book of Common Prayer, the Thirty-nine Articles and the Ordinal.

I mention this, because the reaction to the Pope’s visit within these shores seems, with the exception of the ranters (amongst whom we must now include Dr Richard Dawkins) to have ignored issues of theology almost entirely.

Thus, where there has been controversy, it has been almost entirely over matters of morality, and as we know, whilst theology and moral issues overlap, they are not at all the same thing.

I could not help, in the last few days, speculating as to how different this visit would have been had it taken place in, say 1860 rather than 2010. Of course, such a thing would have been impossible, but had it, in some parallel universe, nevertheless occurred, the reaction would surely have been quite different, not only from the Anglican church but from the lay leadership of the establishment.

We must remember that the Roman Catholic Relief Act would only have been passed comparatively recently (in 1829), allowing Roman Catholics full participation in the political process.

More importantly, however, parliamentarians and others possessed then a degree of awareness of and sophistication in religious matters which we would today find astounding (though those of us who are clergy might equally be gratified to encounter it amongst our congregations). Parliament was, in those days, quite capable of serious religious debate. Jumping forward half a century, we must recall that it was the House of Commons which twice rejected the 1928 revised Prayer Book on theological — and specifically Protestant theological — grounds.

Today, such a debate is unimaginable. It is not simply that most MPs are of vague or non-existent religious persuasion. More importantly, they lack the knowledge to be able to debate such issues. (We may be sure, incidentally, that when the Synodical Measure to introduce women bishops is finally brought to Parliament, the debate will be entirely about justice — with maybe a few side references to God not being ‘a man’ — and that few, if any, will stand up for theological principles on either side.)

To illustrate what this means, let us again imagine a different scenario — this time not one where a Pope visits an earlier Britain which still valued theology, but one where present-day Britain was visited by a Pope whose Church had an unblemished track-record on moral behaviour. In that case, we may have little doubt that he would have been welcomed with open arms. Indeed, the former Pope, John-Paul II, did receive such a welcome when he visited these shores in 1982, helped no doubt by the absence of scandal, but also by his being a likeable and popular figure whose previous name had not been as unattractive-sounding as ‘Ratzinger’.

In fact, as it turned out, the scandals surrounding the Catholic Church made little difference to the attitude either of the political or religious hierarchy towards Benedict XVI. The former were generally polite and the latter generally rapturous.

And yet one has to question the wisdom of both.

Going back to the hypothetical nineteenth century scenario for a moment, there is little doubt that the political hierarchy of the day would not only have questioned the Pope’s theology, but would have championed our own national Protestantism as one of the reasons for our national success. In other words, they would have said that we were what we were, and enjoyed the freedom and prosperity we enjoyed, precisely because we were not Roman Catholic. Specifically, they would, I have no doubt, have pointed to the personal freedom that flowed from this, particularly in the area of intellect.

Bishop J C Ryle, a firm but moderate Protestant, nevertheless opposed the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church for their social impact as well as their religious significance. Advocating private judgement in matters of religion, he wrote,

I ask you to remember that the greatest discoveries in science and in philosophy, beyond all controversy, have arisen from the use of private judgment. To this we owe the discovery of Galileo, that the earth went round the sun, and not the sun round the earth. To this we owe Columbus’s discovery of the new continent of America. To this we owe Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood. To this we owe Jenner’s discovery of vaccination. To this we owe the printing press, the steam engine, the power-loom, the electric telegraph, railways, and gas. For all these discoveries we are indebted to men who dared to think for themselves. (Prove All Things)

And ‘thinking for themselves’ was precisely what he felt that Rome inhibited! The Pope, therefore, would have been just as unwelcome on social as he would have been on religious grounds.

But the religious opposition back then would have been just as strong, which is why it is significant to see the Pope welcomed today by all but the hottest of the Protestant fringe! The reason, of course, is partly that our own Anglican hierarchy has all the vim and vigour of blancmange. We simply lack anyone who can act as a similar rallying point because we lack anyone of comparable stature. As a result, it seems that anything, even from the Vatican, is better to reignite the theological debate than the nothing with which we are otherwise left.

Yet we must not forget that theology matters, even when those with whom we disagree may be members of the Church Universal. Indeed, it is arguable that the recent scandals involving Roman priests were exacerbated by a wrong theology of priesthood, which isolated the perpetrators from public censure and which created an imbalance of power in their relationships with others in the Church.

Again, in welcoming a Christian critique of social policy, we must not forget that Roman Catholic social teaching is the outworking of Roman Catholic theology, and that this, too, is therefore not above theological criticism. Indeed, Andrew Hartropp offers just such a critique in his solidly-researched What is Economic Justice? (Paternoster, 2007, 134-146), beginning in 1891 and looking at some recent pronouncements by the American House of Bishops. He concludes,

One fundamental inadequacy is the lack of a Christological understanding of the Good News. Christ is mentioned as the one who brings the Good News, and who is proclaimed by it, but no further Christological content is given. The consequence, in terms of justice, is that the relationship of Christ himself to oppression, and to the bringing of justice, is simply not addressed. (140)

Undoubtedly there will be those who would want to answer Hartropp’s objections. But we must not overlook the seriousness of the accusation that a purportedly-Christian social theology is not centred on Christ!

And this is precisely the kind of debate that was lacking in the past few days. What should have been said by our Protestant (and therefore Anglican) religious leadership was that the Pope is undoubtedly a very nice man and that the followers of Roman Catholicism are undoubtedly very sincere people, but that he and they are both in error and thus in darkness, and need to come into the light of understanding properly all that Christ is and has done for us.

Had this been 1860 instead of 2010, this message would have undoubtedly have come from many segments of society — albeit, perhaps, without sufficient grace towards the recipients. We have undoubtedly benefited from an improvement in manners in this regard, but we must not let good taste blind us to bad theology.

John P Richardson
22 September 2010

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Fiddling with God

It has been a long time coming, but a mainstream denomination in these islands has finally authorized the elimination from one of its liturgies gendered language referring to God.

The body in question is the Scottish Episcopal Church, and the changes, which affect its 1982 Eucharist liturgy, have been permitted by its College of Bishops, pending a complete revision currently in hand.

The list of alternatives is quite short:

“God is love and we are his children” may become, “God is love and we are God’s children”.

“We love because he loved us first” may become, “We love because God loved us first”.

“Heal and strengthen us by his Spirit” may become, “heal and strengthen us by the Holy Spirit”.

“Peace to his people on earth” may become, “peace to God’s people on earth”.

“It is right to give him thanks and praise” may become, “it is right to give God thanks and praise”.

“Give thanks to the Lord for he is gracious” may become, “Give thanks to our gracious God”.

“And his mercy endures for ever” may become, “whose mercy endures for ever.”

Moreover, references to the Father have been allowed to remain. Nevertheless, this covers every usage of gendered language for the godhead as a whole. And though the changes may seem small, we should be in no doubt as to their significance.

There will be those who would regard this as no more remarkable than the ‘de-gendering’ of language for humankind (which is also addressed by the same permissions). However, whilst undoubtedly arising for much the same reasons, the two issues ought not to be confused, for in the one case we are talking about ourselves, in the other we are talking about God.

And the differences between the two are not merely of scale, or even of theological importance. Rather, first and foremost, I would suggest they are differences of what may be known and how we may know it.

If we say something about anything we ought first to establish that we have a reason for doing so — that, in simple terms, we know what we are talking about. In this regard there is some justification for saying that we are more aware today of the equality of men and women than were previous generations, and that we seek to reflect this awareness in the language we use. (I happily concede there is room for debate, but I simply wish to establish the correlation between language and understanding.)

But on what grounds can we say that we know something about God in this regard that was not known, for example, by the compilers of Scottish liturgies way back in 1982?

Can we point to new knowledge? And if so, where, and from what source does it arise?

One of the first appeals in such cases tends to be to the Holy Spirit. Indeed, the Holy Spirit is being credited today with many innovations in the church’s understanding and practice. (I am not saying that this is what drove the findings of the Scottish bishops. Actually they seem to have gone more on what was said by their clergy in response to a questionnaire.) Yet I am unaware of any means by which the Spirit may verify that these claims are true.

Surely we are entitled to know how we can know what the Spirit is saying to the churches, most especially if it seems to differ from what the Spirit formerly said.

There are others who will say that the difference between using “his” and “God’s” is trivial. Yet if that is the case we must ask why it would then be necessary. Still others will say it reflects our greater awareness of feminine imagery used for God in Scripture. To them I would say both that this imagery is rare and that Scripture nevertheless uses unrelentingly ‘masculine’ language about God, from which we can only deviate by consciously distancing ourselves from Scriptural usage.

Above all, we must recognize the fact that the masculine language Scripture uses about God does actually say something. Indeed, the fact that language says something is surely the whole point of this innovation. What the language currently says is no longer regarded as adequate. Instead, it is felt we must be saying something else.

The problem, which scarcely seems to be recognized by the Scottish College of Bishops is that if we say something else we are either saying something more than Scripture or making a contradistinction from Scripture.

Either way, we are into fundamentally serious theological territory, and therefore we may, once again, ask how this is justified.

The real danger is that God is being refashioned into something which we — or at least the clergy and bishops in Scotland — find more agreeable than God as previously made known. There is a word for this. It is ‘idolatry’.

John P Richardson
21 August 2010

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Painful - in a good way?

The other day, rather to my surprise, I cracked the eight minutes per mile barrier for a middle-distance run — an achievement which, at sixty years of age, I’d honestly begun to think was forever beyond me.

However, I nearly didn’t. Most of the route I’d been with my running mate Ross, which had helped keep the pace up, and at the five-mile mark I noted we were on 40' 08" — just a fraction above what was required. But my legs were going, so I told Ross I thought I’d slow down for the last bit.

As soon as I’d said it, though, I realized this was my best opportunity all season, and perhaps the last chance I’d get ever, for the magic sub-8 minute pace. So instead of slowing down, I speeded up.

The next half mile actually wasn’t too bad. It was the last bit that really hurt. I’m glad no-one was with me at this stage, because the noises I was making were pretty strange! On this particular route, there’s a downhill and then a very steep uphill at the end. On the downhill, I felt physically sick. On the uphill I must have looked and sounded like a man in labour.

But despite everything, I did it. And very satisfying it was, too.

Yet here is the question I asked myself later in the week: If it hadn’t been so horrible, would it have been so satisfying?

In other words, was the pain of the moment a necessary part of the pleasure of the achievement?

And the answer I have to give, for myself in this particular situation, is that without the pain, there really would have been no gain in terms of the satisfaction achieved. Indeed, the more I have reflected on this, the more it seems to me that there is some ‘pain’ which is most definitely a good thing.

Now in case anyone gets the wrong idea, let me immediately say that most pain — and here I am talking about physical pain — is decidedly unwelcome and unpleasant. To give a trivial example, the other day I stubbed my toe whilst walking round the house bare-foot. It hurt like stink, the toe turned green and it is still sore now.

When C S Lewis wrote his classic The Problem of Pain, it was these sorts of pains he addressed — the sorts of pains from which we understandably shrink, the pains for which painkillers and anaesthetics were invented, the pains which cause us to question the existence (or at least the character) of God.

Such pains range from the mildly irritating (as with my toe) to the utterly devastating. Yet even the most bearable is a blot on our experience. As to extreme pain, it is hard to comprehend its having any point or purpose.

Yet would my recent running achievement have been the same for me if it had involved no discomfort at all? The answer is clearly no.

The same thought crossed my mind when reading a review of a book about a disastrous expedition on K2. Why, I found myself asking, would anyone put themselves through such an experience? Why not just sit at home in the warm and watch telly? But ask yourself this: Which would you rather be, the person who stayed at home, or the person who climbed K2?

Now of course the problem is, you might just wind up as the person who fell off K2 and died. But isn’t that the whole point? You can only be ‘the person who climbed K2’, if you can also be ‘the person who might have fallen off K2 to a horrible death’.

On a much smaller scale, I can only be the ‘me’ that cracked the 8-minute mile because it was thoroughly uncomfortable doing so. I could have run the same route at a much slower pace and still be as physically fit (indeed arguably fitter, given the injury possibilities), but I’m not, and I’m glad for it.

And this brings me to the theological point.

There is, as the market for Lewis’s book shows, an almost universal assumption that pain is bad. This assumption, moreover, is found as much (if not more so) amongst the irreligious as amongst the faithful. To the unbeliever, the existence of pain is a disproof of the existence of God, and if there is any acceptance of pain by those who believe, it is generally couched in terms of pain being something that may edify us through being endured, but which is an aberration which is ultimately to be transcended.

Yet I find myself convinced that this is much too simplistic. Of course I don’t want to be in pain. Much less would I want anyone else to be in pain. Yet pain which is embraced for the sake of achievement, pain which is voluntary — though none the less real for all that — enables us to become something which would otherwise be impossible for us, something which, without pain, we simply could not be.

And that raises the question of pain and eternity. Admittedly, the book of Revelation speaks of the coming kingdom as a place where there are no more tears, crying or pain. And that is surely to be welcomed. But will this be a situation where there is no more room for effort — where we cannot ever be faced with the choice to go on or go back? Actually, I hope not.

To those who are thinking at this point that this is to trivialize pain, let me simply invite you to join me on a run. Or if that sounds too much (or too easy), find something else which challenges your physical capacity. Believe me, the pain is real enough! Of course it is voluntary. Of course you can choose it or not. But have you ever wondered why, if it is such a light thing, so few people make that choice? And have you ever wondered if maybe there’s a lesson there somewhere?

Chris Rea’s Tell me there’s a heaven is, I think, one of the most powerful and moving demands for a theodicy ever penned. And I am not suggesting that the answer is simple. But I am suggesting that the apparently obvious alternative — that a world without any pain would be a better place — is itself simplistic.

It is not true to say, in an absolute sense, ‘No pain, no gain.’ Yet it is, I would argue, undoubtedly true that there are gains which are impossible without pain, and that therefore the pain in such cases, whilst real, cannot simply be dismissed as bad.

John Richardson
19 August 2010

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Some (slightly rushed) thoughts for Trinity Sunday

(What I will be preaching later)

The Trinity — an embarrassing doctrine?

In the Church of England’s calendar, today is Trinity Sunday, but time was when the Church of England seemed to become a bit embarrassed about this.

Indeed the calendar was re-written so that Sundays after Trinity, which run from now until the run-up to Christmas became Sundays after Pentecost.

Pentecost seemed much more in keeping with the new mood of the Church. Pentecost was about experience — present experience of the Spirit in the life of the Church and the believer.

Trinity seemed to be about an obscure doctrine rooted in the Church’s past.

Pentecost was also up to date because of the charismatic movement. The Trinity was just old-fashioned.

On top of that, the Church had been through a period of academic doubt in the 1970s, with the publication of books like The Myth of God Incarnate, to which several prominent Anglican theologians had contributed.

This suggested that Jesus was never meant to be regarded — and certainly never thought of himself — as anything other than a human being, albeit one with an extraordinary sensitivity towards God.

But if Jesus was not God incarnate, then at least one person of the Trinity simply disappeared.

And then on top of that, the Trinity was so hard to explain, as anyone who’d ever invited Jehovah’s Witnesses into their living-room could testify. The evidence for the Trinity seemed to be obscure, and as anyone who has ever recited the Athanasian Creed would know, it all gets a bit tortuous and convoluted.

So for a time, the doctrine of the Trinity became something about which the Church was almost embarrassed. Certainly no-one was in a rush to take on the preaching slot on Trinity Sunday.

Not mathematics ...

One of the reasons for our problems with the Trinity was that the doctrine was always approached in terms of mathematics.

Hymns like ‘Three in one and one in three’ illustrate the problem. If God is one, how can God be three? If God is three, how can God be one?

One of the delights of Trinity Sunday was the various ways in which sermon illustrations would try and get round this. There was the Trinity as shamrock — three leaves on one plant. Or the Trinity as water, steam and ice — three forms of the same substance.

The basic problem with all these illustrations was that they overlooked one important factor — the Trinity is nothing like anything else. The Trinity is one of the things that is definitively ‘of God’ — something where you can’t compare God with anything else.

We should really save ourselves the effort of trying to find something like the Trinity, or trying to make it possible to understand the Trinity by comparing it with anything else.

... but relationship

There is, however, one important way in which we can begin to understand the Trinity in terms familiar to us.

This is something which actually comes from the Eastern churches. In recent years, people have begun to think about the Trinity less in terms of mathematics, more in terms of relationship.

We have to ask, why would anyone come with the doctrine of the Trinity in the first place. As we’ve already seen, it is a very complicated doctrine — unnecessarily complicated, we might say.

The answer lies in the revelation of Jesus — both what he was like and what he said. We get an idea of this from the prayer in John’s gospel that takes up John 17, and it begins with the very first verse:

After Jesus said this, he looked toward heaven and prayed: “Father, the time has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you.”

The ‘father-son’ relationship points us towards the existence of the Trinity, and to its nature.

The eternal son

The idea of ‘son of God’ isn’t unique to the New Testament. In the Old Testament, the Messianic king was spoken of as God’s ‘son’. So the phrase in itself meant nothing more than someone in a special relationship with God.

But the way Jesus spoke about the father, clearly suggested a relationship beyond this. So in v 5, Jesus speaks to the Father about ‘the glory I had with you before the world began.’

This already hints at an eternal relationship — one that exists outside time. But it is not just the duration of the relationship that is special, but the quality. So twice in this passage, in vv 11 and 22, Jesus talks of himself and the father being ‘one’. And in v 21 he says to the Father, ‘you are in me and I am in you.’

To put it crudely, it is not just that the Father and the Son have been together a long time, but that they are intertwined. They are ‘one together’.

Perichoresis

The technical theological term for this is ‘perichoresis’. I think I’m right in saying it derives from a term meaning ‘dancing round’, but the core idea is that the identity of the persons in the Trinity arises from the relationship with the other persons.

It is easiest to understand this — if we can understand it at all — in the way we speak about ‘father’ and ‘son’.

You can be a person without needing other people. You can be a person on your own, and if the whole world were wiped out whilst you were up in a satellite orbiting the globe you’d still be a person.

But you cannot be a father without a child. You cannot be a son without a parent. So in the godhead, the father actually cannot be the father without the son, and vice versa. The persons of the Trinity are who they are because of the other persons.

And for them to be who they are eternally, the relationships have to be eternal. The father is only the eternal father if there is an eternal son, and vice versa, whilst the Spirit is also caught up in this.

Augustine thought of the Trinity as the eternal love between the Father and the Son. And he is certainly the Spirit who proceeds from the father through the Son.

The centrality of relationship

The Trinity, then, is to be understood relationally, and that lifts the Trinity out of being dry theory to vibrant practice, for if the Trinity is relationship, then relationships are of eternal and fundamental significance.

And this is something else we see in the prayer in John, for at the heart of it, Jesus is praying for his disciples to be caught up in the relationship of the Trinity.

The Trinity is a relationship of ‘oneness in many’, and so Jesus’ prayer is for oneness for the many disciples. In v 11 Jesus prays:

I will remain in the world no longer, but they are still in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name —the name you gave me —so that they may be one as we are one.

This is much more than a ‘prayer for Christian unity’. It is a prayer for the divine character — the disciples are protected by the divine name given to Jesus and used, v 12, to protect them:

While I was with them, I protected them and kept them safe by that name you gave me.

Mission

The church is to be a community in which the divine character — the name of God — is present and recognized. And so this ‘oneness in many’ is also central to mission. So in vv 20-23, we read:

My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, ²¹ that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. ²² I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: ²³ I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

Oneness in many is to be the outcome of mission and the evidence of the truth. And all one can say to that is how very far the church has therefore fallen from the truth!

Transcending ourselves

I began by saying that the character of the Trinity is unique to God, and that is true. We cannot explain the Trinity because there is nothing to explain it by.

However, that is not to say that the character of the Trinity is therefore irrelevant to the world. On the contrary, I have tried to show briefly that it is of the very essence of the world in which we live.

At heart, the Trinity is relational — it is about the eternal interrelationships of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, each being what each is because the others exist as who they are.

But the other thing we can say about the Trinitarian God, because God has revealed it to us, is that he seeks out other relationships, to draw others into oneness with one another and with himself.

In other words, the character of the Trinity drives both creation and salvation — it drives the mission of the Church. And so throughout the prayer of John 17, Jesus speaks of being sent by the Father — in 3,8,18,21,23 and 25, and therefore he sends the disciples, who remain in the world (vv 13-18) to continue what Jesus came to do.

And Jesus also speaks of returning to the Father, not in isolation, but preceding the disciples who will also be drawn into the relationship of the Trinity. So although he is no longer remaining in the world, he prays in v 24,

Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.

And v 21 expresses this same hope. The prayer is for all the disciples, present and future (and we may certainly add, past), that:

... all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us ...

The indescribable, indefinable Trinitarian relationship is ultimately to be shared. That is the what flows from the nature of that relationship, and that is what should inspire us in our mission for God.

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Help me get NT Wright

(This has got buried as a comment on this post, so I'm moving it to a post of its own in the hope that it might get a response.)

I wonder if anyone reading this bit of the blog can help me out? I haven't read a great deal of Wright first hand on this topic, but what I have read leaves me confused as to what he is saying that is genuinely new and what he is suggesting is wrong about the Reformation understanding of justification.

I have been going back over Alister McGrath's account in his Iustitia Dei - something made difficult by swathes of untranslated Latin - and the first thing I would say is that as far as I can see the mainstream Reformers conceived of the Christian's righteousness as 'declarative' in 'courtroom' terms.

Now my impression is that this is what Wright is saying - that the 'courtroom' is a key concept in Paul, and that God's 'righteousness' is the declaration that we are 'righteous' members of the covenant community. If that is the case, however, he and the Reformers are singing from very similar hymn sheets at this point. Am I right in this, or am I missing something?

Secondly, from McGrath, the mainstream Reformers distinguished between 'imputed' and 'imparted' righteousness. The righteousness of Christ, according to this view, remained an 'alien', 'external' righteousness, located in Christ, not the believer. This was contrary to Augustine, who looked for a righteousness in the believer.

Now it seems as if Wright is supposed to be saying that the mainstream Reformers believed in a kind of 'transferred' righteousness, from Christ to the believer, which according to McGrath they did not.

Yet at the same time, it seems as if Wright is saying that, according to his understanding of Paul, justification is based on something intrinsic to the believer - which looks, at first glance, like Bucer's system of 'double justification' (by Christ and by 'regeneration' - for want of a better word). In that case, it would seem Wright has, by whatever route, gone back to a 'mid-Reformation' view - rather than discovering something new.

Certainly what I'm hearing about Wright (and what I've read) doesn't look like Luther or Calvin's ordo salutis - but I'm also wondering if Wright's account of Luther and Calvin is accurate.

Can anyone enlighten?

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Paul Helm on Tom Wright's "Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision"

There are four articles providing an extensive review of Tom Wright's new book on justification (which is bound to be important to Evangelicals) at Helm's Deep, the blog written by Paul Helm, Professor of Theology, Highland Theological College.

This gives a flavour of Helm's approach to Wright:

[According to Wright] Are believers justified now? Or are they only justified at the last, on the basis of a whole life? In the new book he writes that the 'future judgment.... corresponds to the present verdict which... is issued simply and solely on the basis of faith’ (165) See also 179, 207-12, 223. But it has to be admitted that Wright wobbles on this, as in 166-7 ‘the verdict on the last day will truly reflect what people have actually done’. The vagueness of the language irritates: 'corresponds to', 'anticipate', 'reflect'. How corresponds to, anticipates, reflects?, one vainly asks.

Nevertheless, despite the wobbles in stating his position, wobbles that could be given a good and a bad sense, this is a change from his Edinburgh paper on justification in which he was clearly striking a different note. There justification was reserved for the final judgement, giving his account a moralistic flavour, which invited one to draw a comparison with Richard Baxter. (See here) [And see also my own post here and the internal links] But this has to be said: the relation of faith to actions badly needs a clarificatory word from the Bishop’s cathedra to settle this vital question: are Spirit-imbued virtues a sign of faith (à la Epistle of James)? Or do they complete faith, supplement it, fulfil it? These questions cry out for an answer, but answer is there none. A clear sentence of two would have done it. It is this sort of gap that holds up the discussion and the meeting of minds. So where, according to the Bishop, (one is left to wonder) does Paul stand on this issue? And where does the Bishop himself stand?

The four articles are at these links:

Wright in General
Why Covenant Faithfulness is not Divine Righteousness (and cannot be)
Wright and Righteousness
Wright and the Reformation

Here is a quote from Helm's conclusion:

While holding to a law-court view of justification Wright has at the same time failed to recognize that the Reformed view of Christ’s alien righteousness is also a law-court view. Because of this his historical analysis, such as it is, is flawed, and his exegetical tour de force of Paul’s view of justification is largely beside the point, for the Reformed outlook expresses its main claims: the law-court point, the central position of the Abrahamic covenant, and the counting of the believer as righteous for Christ’s sake.

This is where Wright’s competitiveness, his insistence of always having the last word, and his failure to provide a clear theological framework, or even to write clearly, saying what he means and what he does not mean by certain terms such as ‘moral righteousness’, and ‘legalistic’ and ‘impart’ and ‘infuse’, prove to be so frustrating.

Ouch! But then his last words are these:

Were Wright to follow through the logic of his position then, I believe, it would approach even more closely to the classical Reformed view than it has already.

So there is hope of reconciliation! There's some heavy reading here, but (given the Evangelical divisions of the present) it is important to try to understand the issues involved.

John Richardson

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