Imputation: a conversation

charles says:
the fruit of the cross is forgiveness
Steve says:
yes
charles says:
...some people contrast forgiveness and the imputation of His righteousness as if forgiveness is a merely a negative thing and the other is positive are you with me so far?
Steve says:
forgiveness is just 'getting off the hook'
charles says:
but that cannot be true; if forgiveness is real it must be positive and just be another way of saying that righteosness is credited to us etc etc
charles says:
you can't be cleansed and yet waiting still to be declared righteous
charles says:
are you with me?
Steve says:
no indeed.
Steve says:
by which I mean, yes I am with you!
Steve says:
so: even though there are very few imputation texts
it is implied in the notion of forgiveness
Steve says:
or, it is a corollory of forgiveness
charles says:
so: forgivenss is a sufficient way of talking about the effect of the cross
Steve says:
I would add union with Christ to forgiveness
charles says:
well what is union with Christ but the attrribution of all Christ's accomplishments to us?
Steve says:
well, it is much more!
Steve says:
Holy Spirit? adoption into the family of God?
Steve says:
participation in the divine nature (2 Peter)
Steve says:
life
charles says:
and that is precisely why the great Calvin begins the second part of theology with union with Christ even before we arrive at justification etc
Steve says:
(and Luther does too)
charles says:
my point is however. not that there are not many blessings through union
Steve says:
really?
charles says:
but that one of those blessings is the attribution of Christ's righteousness to us
Steve says:
got some text for me?
Steve says:
2 Cor 5 (though this is disputed)
charles says:
of course it is disputed because it proves the point!
Steve says:
well: it seems to me that the Tom Wright difficulty with imputation stems from a caricature
Steve says:
(surprise surprise)
charles says:
true ...
charles says:
start from the top: is righteousness imputed to us?
Steve says:
whose?
Steve says:
well, it ain't ours.
Steve says:
it is alien
Steve says:
so, yes
Steve says:
well, it depends on what 'righteousness' itself means of course
charles says:
does 1 Cor 1:30 help?
Steve says:
well, yes... though: can't you say
Steve says:
Christ was perfected in his obedience in order that he could be our perfect representative...
Steve says:
I mean, does the 'our' imply something actually given to us, or attributed to us?
charles says:
go back to union with Christ
Steve says:
ok. I am back there
charles says:
I presume we come into union with Christ through faith and not our own works
Steve says:
tick
charles says:
I presume eg that forgiveness redemption etc is a free gift to those who are unoted with Christ?
Steve says:
again, a tick
charles says:
i presume that this is made possible by the penal substitutionary death of Christ?
Steve says:
yes
Steve says:
though, explained carefully
charles says:
i am told in romans that although i lack any righteousness of my own i have now been creditied with righteousness
Steve says:
you are
Steve says:
credited with, or credited as
Steve says:
?
charles says:
it being on account of my faith ie the point being faith alone and not works
Steve says:
true
charles says:
am i not forced to say that this righteousness (alien) is a gift from God on the basis of the death of his Son?
Steve says:
I think so.
Steve says:
(I am not much of a Boso, to your Anselm, am I?)
charles says:
give it a break !
Steve says:
well: it depends a bit what you understand righteousness to be I guess. Can I substitute forgiveness or vindication for it?
Steve says:
as a word?
charles says:
no they are not synonyms and I wonder why we would do that in the light of Rom 4
Steve says:
well, what is it?
charles says:
start with Rom 3:19,20
charles says:
Forgiveness language works in the realm of the personal and is needed for a complete picture
charles says:
but righteousness language works in the realm of the public and legal
charles says:
thus law, accountability, sin = transgression
Steve says:
yes, all good, I mean, all bad
charles says:
bad and accountable
charles says:
therefore needing not merely forgiveness but righteousness
charles says:
hence necessarily he then talks aboiut the death of Jesus in redemptibve, sacrificial and legal terms
Steve says:
righto
charles says:
and vindicates the righteousness of God for acting in what may seem to be an unrighteouss manner
Steve says:
ah, yes, that is the brilliance of it
Steve says:
both. and.
Steve says:
that is, it is forgiveness without injustice
charles says:
now turn to 4:4-9
Steve says:
ah, I love the 'before he was circumcised' bit: it is a great rejoinder to Reformed people who want to make us all legalists
Steve says:
Abraham never observed the law!
charles says:
dont be diverted
Steve says:
oh sorry.
charles says:
if you look at his quote from the psalm
Steve says:
yes
charles says:
it covers forgiveness in the first part and righteosness in the second
Steve says:
'not count his sin'
Steve says:
= righteousness?
charles says:
that is not to have your faults counted against you is the freedom from accountability which is righteousness see 3:19, 20
charles says:
yes, righteousness is the word we are using when we think of the relationship bettween God and man (as we must) in legal or judgement terms
Steve says:
covenantal?
Steve says:
or this the point that much confusion enters?
charles says:
I think it does: I was always a bit disappointed that the NT was not more explicitly covenantal; I think that the attempt to read it in is confusing the categories
Steve says:
ooooooooooo yes
charles says:
he justifies the ungodly ie those outside the covenant without Gofd and without hope in the world
Steve says:
but 'covenant' is where Tom W smuggles in his ecclesiology of course
charles says:
true ...

(How does it finish?)

James K.A. Smith on evangelicalism

James Smith has an interesting, though I think debateable, post over at the Immanent Frame. He claims to be offering a theological reason why a sociological definition of evangelicalism should be prefered.

The argument amounts to:

1) theological definitions of evangelicalism can be too narrow (so, emphasise the division with Catholics).

2) theological definitions can be too broad (so, include Pentecostals). Smith talks of 'the demographic sleight of hand that enfolds Pentecostals, charismatics, and the explosion of “world Christianity” under the label “evangelical.” '

To which I say, 'well, perhaps, but neither of these constitutes an argument against the use of the term evangelical as a theological definition per se. If some people want to misuse the term then it is certainly worth discussing. But it just doesn't follow at all that the whole business of theological definition should be given up as a bad job. (This, by the way, is what Smith says is a 'theological argument' in favour of a sociological definition...)

Smith's suggestion is that 'evangelical should be seen to represent a tone. So, he says:

'evangelicalism represents a contingent style, a sort of accent within Christendom'. Yet, when he describes this accent or tone, Smith is (it seems to me) full of contempt for it:

It is a distinctly modern, post-Reformation configuration of Christian discipleship that engendered practices and institutions which closely mirrored the development of what Charles Taylor describes as “the modern social imaginary”—a focus on individual salvation, a valorization of the autonomy of the local congregation, an entrepreneurial spirit that fueled ambitious programs of church and parachurch expansion, a kind of Christian materialism that generated its own markets, and other distinctive features.

In effect, Smith denudes evangelicalism of its theology and reduces it to a set of practices... which is the way all sorts of post-liberals are reading doctrine/theology these days...and why so many young American Protestant thinkers have recently become Roman Catholics perhaps.

There's more to say, but enough for now.

Bernard of Clairvaux, on loving God

John Calvin's favourite twelfth century writer (and there weren't many on his list), Bernard of Clairvaux understood very well the fullness of what our love for God should be:


Admit that God deserves to be loved very much, yea, boundlessly, because He loved us first, He infinite and we nothing, loved us, miserable sinners, with a love so great and so free.

Theology as repentant humility...

Theology is an act of repentant humility…This act exists in the fact that in theology the Church seeks again and again to examine itself critically as it asks itself what it means and implies to be a Church among men…The Church, too, lives under the judgement of God, as does the world. So, it cannot be otherwise but that the Church must critically examine itself, not according to its own wishes and standards but according to the standard which is identical with its basis of existence which is God’s revelation, which, concretely, is the Holy Scriptures. It is this constant and ever-recurring necessity and demand for self-examination of the Church by the standard of the divine Word which is the peculiar function of theology in the Church.

Karl Barth, ‘Theology’ in God in Action (Edinburgh: T.&T. Clark, 1936), pp. 44f

Seitz, Barth and some notes on Blessing

From C. Seitz, Figured Out: Typology and Providence in Christian Scripture pp. 147-52

'Blessing is the language of God's address to humanity's forfeit.'In Genesis 1:28, blessing is tied up with expansion and spreading out.p. 148: '...whatever is marring God's creative intent, be it rebellion in the Garden, murder, evil human imagination, or projects for overextension and totalitarian unity, God is planning a different way forward, which he means to protect and superintend. Election is the means by which sinful creation receives the blessing originally intended for it, for all nations and people. Mission understood in OT terms, then, is the address of blessing to the deficit and forfeit brought about by rebellion in its many forms.'

p. 149: 'Blessing will come through election, and mission - God's word of blessing to the nations - will be the means by which God uses Israel to accomplish this in a special way vis-a-vis all peoples.'As von Rad notes, blessing concerns Abraham first, but then also includes those on the outside who adopt a definite attitude toward this blessing.God's blessing of Abram is a repeat of the charge to humanity in creation... it involves Abram getting what the race sought in tower building.... it also entails blessing for others.

p. 152 'If blessing is the means by which God restores and brings into proper relationship the families of the earth, it remains the case that he uses Israel for this purpose in ways neither Israel nor the nations fully comprehend. What is required of Israel is faith and obedience to the pronise, which constitutes its only ground of existence in the world. Obedience to this promise allows blessing to occur, but it does not ensure it.''for the church rightly to speak of 'mission'...it is necessary to comprehend the logic of key OT notions of blessing''Blessing' is drawing on God's goodness...and receiving it... it is the good God extending his goodness to the creation, filling the creation with his goodness...

Karl Barth 'In all its otherness it is predestined to receive the divine good which has been revealed and communicated. This is what is ordained for man in the primal decision of the divine decree. the portion which God willed and chose for him was an ordination to blessedness. For to be able to attest the overflowing glory of the Creator is blessedness. God will man and elceted man with the promise of eternal life. Life as a witness to the overflowing glory of God is eternal life...' CD II/2 p. 169

But...
'Man was willed and chose by God with his limitations, as a creature which could and would do harm to God by the application, or rather the misuse, of its freedom. the danger-point of man's susceptibility to temptation, and the zero-point of his fall, were thus included in the divine decree.' II/2 p. 169

What need is there of theology?

…there is [among Biblical scholars] an unwillingness to accept the existence and the significance of theology as a discipline in its own right. One of several roots of this unwillingness is, perversely, the popular Protestant insistence on sola scriptura. When one has the Bible, what need is there for the subtleties and sophistries of theology?
Francis Watson, Text and Truth, p.4

Well, quite. I don't think it is a good understanding of sola scriptura that leads to this difficulty though...

More on the Second Chair

The Leading from the Second Chair book I was talking about lists three paradoxes of second chair leadership:

Subordinate-Leader - because assistant leaders are leaders, but also followers at the same time. There is responsibility given, but it is given according to set boundaries.

Deep-Wide - the assistant leader often has a specialty, but is often also called to be a utility player in the church organisation. And so, the assistant pastor has to be able to think in terms of his/her contribution to the whole church or organisation as well as develop his/her own patch. In fact, the demands of the whole might mean that the patch become overgrown or untended somewhat.

Contentment-Dreaming - the second chair leader can feel that their dreams are now continually being frustrated because they are subordinated to the dreams of another. And yet, without that freedom to dream, the second chair leader can become stale.

I wish the book had addressed some of the more tricky (and believe me, real, from what I hear) situations. How can the assistant minister help the senior minister who is underperforming, or depressed, or evidently lazy? What if he is treating the laity poorly? What about when you sense that the senior minister is feeling threatened? How can the second chair leader 'manage up'? To what degree is our obedience actually a spiritual discipline, as opposed to merely a matter of being an employee?

And, furthermore, how can senior ministers get the most out of their assistants? What does it take to lead a team of ministers? Why are we so bad at it? Who is actually good at it, and why?

Volf on divine violence

Here is Miroslav Volf, a pacifist himself, on why Christian nonviolence actually needs the vengeance of God to be coherent (not to mention Biblical):

My thesis that the practice of nonviolence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many Christians, especially theologians in the West. To the person who is inclined to dismiss it, I suggest imagining that you are delivering a lecture in a war zone...Among your listeners are people whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit. The topic of the lecture: a Christian attitude toward violence. the thesis: we should not retaliate since God is perfect noncoercive love. Soon you would discover that it takes the quiet of a suburban hom for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence corresponds to God's refusal to judge. In a scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die. And as one watches it die, one will do well to reflect about many other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind...

Exclusion and Embrace, p. 204

Leading from the Second Chair

Now, as one who is returning to the task of preparing other for ministry, I was intrigued to read recently a book called Leading from the Second Chair. It was put into my hands by my friend Ed Vaughan from Crinken parish in Dublin.

It is a very annoying book in several ways. It uses Joseph as a kind of model 'second chair' leader, which is just an annoying way to use the Bible in my book. It is based on interviews with American ministers, who tend to give very sunny and pragmatic descriptions of their ministries.
But I think it really touches on an issue for many ministers I know of: and that is, working as the assistant or the second in charge is really tough, and it is increasingly hard to find a leader-assistant relationship that works really well (in my experience). And they do have some good (and not just practical) advice.

Why is this relationship so fraught? Is it the pride thing? Is that leaders expect to be popes-in-their-own-parishes? Are we unable to live out submission in practice? Is there too much expectation of independence? Is it because the model we have was worked out when assistants were regularly in their early 20s, whereas now assistant ministers are often 30+ (and would be getting increased responsibility in secular work?)

Personal testimonies warmly received, but be careful with names and identities please.

Psalm 133 - The sweet taste...

The idea of unity is guaranteed to produce nausea in the tummies of our secular neighbours. All their lives have been conditioned, like Pavlov’s salivating dogs, to pursue individualism at all costs; to celebrate differences rather than the similarities; to speak as “I” not as “we”. The jewel in the crown of western democratic liberalism is: the freedom of the individual - in ethics, in religion, in economics. And capitalism thrives in this environment, as the consumers individualise their requirements and every person becomes a niche market: left handed, left leaning Lebanese lesbians from Lilyfield; or gardening grand-dads from Gordon. Living in community with other people is a compromise, a necessary evil rather than a joy. Even in families, fragmentation is in evidence: the latest family cars have headphones and separate CD’s for each seat – so you can have the Wiggles in one seat and Wagner in another. How sweet our freedom! How pleasant! As Jean-Paul Sartre said “hell is other people”.

This fear of community arises from a very real fear that the individual may be squashed by the bulldozer of conformity; that social institutions and bureaucracies may process us according to generalisations and expediencies; that power in human hands may be coercive or even abusive; that the bullies may rule the playground. There is something theological about this point – ultimately the oneness of God is held to be at the root of totalitarian or repressive forms of social order.

But cast off God as a source of unity and you will replace it with another. One of the ironies of western culture is that the more we claim to be free the more we are enslaved. This truth was beautifully captured in that moment from Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, when Brian looks out of his window at the masses of his followers and says “ you are all individuals” and they reply as one “Yes- we are all individuals”. If you have ever been to a high school on mufti day, you will know what I mean: released from the shackles of uniform, the students all turn up dressed exactly the same – all bare midriffs (girls) & baggy jeans (boys). How sweet and good our freedom!

This is not the vision of Psalm 133. One of that famous series of Psalms called the Songs of Ascents – the songs of '”goings up” – it celebrates the meeting together of the people of God on the Summit of God’s holy hill. This little haiku of a Psalm is an extra ordinary outburst of joy at the presence of others. It is delicious when the family of God lives together as one – it is one of the best things in life!

In fact, it is so good, it is like……..it is like………..

Well, the Psalmist produces two of the more bizarre similes, of the oil and of the dew. They are a pair of strikingly sensual and liquid images, aren’t they? And they invite us to contemplate just exactly HOW they are like the sweet unity of brothers and sisters.

What about the precious oil? Vs 2 unfolds in a away that reflects the slow trickling of oil itself, from the head to the beard on to the collar. The fragrant sweet oil of priestly anointing was poured on the head of Aaron back in Exodus, when Moses lovingly prepared the Tabernacle and the set up of the cult of sacrifice. Commentators argue about whether it is the beard or the oil that flows down over the collar – but that doesn’t matter a great deal, really. The point is that it is a picture of richness & delight.

Vs 3 compares the togetherness of the brothers and sisters to the den of Hermon. Hermon is a mountain in lush Syria that is covered daily in heavy dew. But this dew of Hermon is falling here on the hills of Zion – hundreds of kilometres to the south. How can this occur, the dew of fertile Hermon watering the arid slopes of Zion? Only by the blessing of God could it happen; only by grace flowing down from the Lord could there be an overflow of life together, “life forevermore” in the presence of God himself.

The two images have in common a verbal idea; a motion downwards: the word yrd is repeated – the oil is flowing down, down, down; the dew is flowing down, dropping gently from the sky. The blessing of God – that beautiful delicious unity, that preciousness togetherness – flows down from the Lord himself. It’s fluid, isn’t it? The anointing of he priest symbolises God’s determination to live with his people…who have now a means to live with him. The enriching dew is God’s blessing on the place he meets his people. As Shakespeare said of mercy “it droppeth like the gentle rain from heaven.” The song of going up is really a song of coming down. Sweet life together is only possible because of the coming down of God into the midst of his people – they share an address. It is a miracle of the first order.

This flowing down of God’s blessing of life together we experience not in the cult or the temple or the Aaronic priesthood, but by the coming of the Holy Spirit. This spirit is poured into us in order to unite us, as Christ’s body, as the temple of the Holy Spirit. As Ephesians 4 puts it: “There is one body and one Spirit, just you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is above all and through all and in all”.

It is a far cry from the splendid isolation of modern life. The family of God is constituted from on high and brings delight, deeply involved with one another.

But can we say that our experiences of life together is sweet? Do we know the sheer pleasure in life with each other expressed in this psalm?

If not, it could be because we try to impose visions of our making on the community of God’s people. It could be that our ideals are not his, at all. It could be that we want a unity of our ascending and not of God’s descending. It could be that we haven’t understood life together as a great blessing of God himself, a great realisation of his real presence among us by his spirit dropping down on us from above. It could be because we have not entered into common life with other Christians as thankful recipients but as demanders.

In our enthusiasm we may create conformities that we have nothing to do with the fellowship created by the Gospel. We may impose cultural or generational or gendered expectations on the people of God that are entirely our own. We may demand that people be unified to our programme, agree with our views to the minutest degree and conform to our plans for them. This is not the flowing down unity of Psalm 133; or of Ephesians 4. We forget that the whole basis for our unity is not a human category that we all belong to o a human work, some demographic we have in common, but Christ: as I am one with Christ and you are one with Christ so are we one with each other. And the basis for that is of course as forgiven sinners: that is really the thing we have in common.

Let us make our passion to pursue the gentleness and forbearance that enhances unity.

What issues threaten your oneness in Christ? Perhaps that is something only you can answer. However, some of the issues that are common in churches are:
1 – disagreements about the aesthetics of church, from the music to the colour of the carpet. These matters we have to handle with great care and mutual generosity because they arouse such passions. And yet they are actually relatively unimportant.
2 – disappointment at church not meeting your needs. This may be a genuine feeling of hurt at the way other people or even the minister have behaved; or it might reflect real feelings of spiritual dryness that aren’t being met in the church community. We need to be careful about these feelings: they can be real and powerful, but it is worth asking – are our expectations wrong? Are we expecting to meet more than a group of forgiven sinners?
3 – feelings of spiritual inferiority. Sometimes it feels as if the other people at church are streets ahead of me spiritually: their bible knowledge is amazing, they actually do a quiet time, they are serene and patient. And yet once again we need to remember we are united as forgiven sinners who have been reconciled to the father in Jesus. Even the most apparently spiritual person is only that.

But how delicious is the taste of unity among brothers & sisters!

How great it is to receive prayerful support & encouragement. How sweet it is to be appreciated as a contributing to the community, How beautiful it is to receive a freezer full of meals when your baby is born. How pleasant to be able to kick around issues in an atmosphere of trust. How sweet to know that I can receive help when I need it from a fellow believer without condescension. How great to know that others want me to succeed in serving God. How wonderful to sing like we do, together. How beautiful to share meals together. How great to know that God has rescued other sinners as well. These things come to us flowing down from above: they are unity that is a gift from God.

The Sola Panel | How new will the new creation be?

I have been participating in an interesting (I think) discussion on 2 Peter 3 and eschatology over at the Sola Panel, found here:

The Sola Panel How new will the new creation be?


Two features of discussion are frustrating: on the one hand, the use of Tom Wright as a bogey man (though the original poster says he didn't intend this, this is certainly how some of the posters have run with it) - 'if Tom Wright believes it, it must be suspicious'. This is no way to have a serious discussion about an important issue.
On the other hand, I think at one point we reached a consensus that discontinuity/continuity are a false alternative, and that the proper biblical/theological picture is both of a destructive judgement and a remarkable renewal - but then people kept on insisting that no, there is NO continuity between this creation and the new creation. This despite all the other texts (Rom 8, Col 1 and others) that do teach continuity. AND in spite of a raft of conservative commentators who see that 2 Peter 3 is not utterly discontinuous (Bauckham, et al). I am not quite sure what is at stake...though for me I think that utterly discontinuous view leads to a denigration of the created order and a rather Gnostic eschatology against which orthodox Christianity has always fought...
See what you think.

On Rowan Williams...

I notice that Wipf and Stock have listed On Rowan Williams on their forthcoming titles list

http://wipfandstock.com/forthcoming_titles

This is a book edited by Matheson Russell from the University of Auckland and which contains essays by Ben Myers, Andrew Cameron, Greg Clarke, Byron Smith, Matheson Russell and me, among others. Oliver O'Donovan has kindly penned a foreward!

Unconditional Love?

You hear it often said that God loves us unconditionally. I guess people are trying to tie the idea of grace into God's love. And also to remind themselves that our own unloveliness is no obstacle to the love of God.

It seems to me that this is a really inadequate way to describe the love of God. The two characteristics of God's love as we encounter in the OT are his steadfastness on the one hand and his jealousy on the other. How can the two be reconciled? Well, Hosea 11 picks up some of the apparent tension in the heart of God - how can I keep loving you? how can I give you up? The two lines meet of course on the cross - where God shows that it possible for himself both to love steadfastly AND jealously. He maintains the detemined purity and sanctity of his love AND makes it possible for himself not to withdraw his own love. He reveals his own self-consistency as a lover.

I would rather say: God's love is conditional, but God meets the conditions..

Being Loved - not as easy as it sounds...

How do we respond to the love of God? Well, to modify Baz Luhrmann:

The greatest thing you'll ever learn/ is to be loved and just love in return.

At this point we make it far to complicated. It is very hard to just accept the love we are offered; we always feel like we should be giving something back. Or worse, we cannot put aside our pride.
Ephesians 5 is interesting here: if Christ takes the husbandly role of sacrificial love, what role is the church to take? She is to take the wifely role of submission: which is not much more than allowing yourself to be loved. This might be harder than we think. We have to surrender ourselves to him.

I was talking to a female friend of mine who asked me: "is it hard to relate to this as a guy, because I reckon it'd be heaps easier as a chick [her word!] to desire these kind of attributes?" It was a really good question. We are dealing in stereotypes of course, but males on the whole do find help hard to accept, let alone love; especially when there is such an imbalance in a relationship like there is with God. We like to feel we are independent, or at least contributing.
But a response to the God who dies to love you requires us setting aside our futile, petty male (or female) independence, and allowing Christ to husband us. It may seem frustratingly passive. But we need this husband more than we can ever know. Let him love you.

Bible Teaching?

Off on holidays for a couple of weeks tomorrow - here is something to be getting on with.

I was speaking with a prominent English conservative evangelical not so long ago, and we were talking about preaching. He had a gripe: the phrase 'bible teaching' (and the idea of 'bible churches', too). It has crept into the evangelical vocabulary to describe what used to be called 'preaching'. A church is great, we will say, because 'the bible teaching is excellent'. But, he said, the vocab change is significant: it represents a shift to a more cognitive, flat and explanatory style of discourse. The hearers will not be exhorted or edified so much as 'taught'. What's more, and perhaps more seriously, we talk less of preaching Christ, but of teaching the Bible. A subtle but significant difference perhaps?

Is this vocabulary to be encouraged, or is the English preacher right?

Notes on the nature and significance of community as a theological concept

Humankind was created for communion, but is everywhere divided. [1]

The human individual is, as a matter of theological datum and observable fact, made for sociality and collaboration with others in the world. ‘Community’ is a term that recognizes this unquenchable aspiration amongst people. In community with others we hold things in common rather than in private: sharing is the heartbeat of community. In community, things are communicated between two or more people.

This may of course mean material things. But community also involves the sharing of a common understanding of the significance of shared things.[2] An example is the sharing of food: in human communities the eating of meals is not merely functional, but given a representative function as well – who I eat with, and what, and when mean something. What is more, communities share in, or aspire to share in, an identity – a shared self-understanding. Various signs and ceremonies and practices mediate this self-understanding to the individuals within a community. They facilitate recognition of other members of the community.

There is then, for human community the necessity of effective communication of this identity - of ascribing significance to our shared possessions. The narration of our shared history, on the one hand, and the creation of works of art, on the other, combine to make a community a tradition that can be passed on. In this way, human community can feel itself secured somewhat against the ravages of time and the inevitability of death.

Again, this description is a matter of anthropological observation and of the way in which the Pentateuch describes the proper development of a particular human community. Community is a good that human beings need for their proper flourishing as individuals. In Scripture, however, the ideal human community is not just human. The Lord himself intends to live in community with people – to make for himself a people with whom he will dwell. Adam and Eve live with God in the garden.

Such might be a description of ‘community’ in a state of innocence. But Christian theology cannot be happy with this description as it stands. We have already hinted that another function of community is that of protection and security. As Scripture narrates it, human beings huddle together because humanity is vulnerable to nature; and because they need protection from other human beings. If there is a good in community, then it needs to be secured. There are other communities whose significations and representations may cut across the path of mine. Each community is a community among other possibly competing, possibly threatening communities. The protection of the city wall is needed – or, more effectively, the creation of a self-understanding which means that membership in community X means hatred of community Y. If I am Tutsi, I am not Hutu.

What is more, the self-communication and self-representation of a community may strengthen its bonds, and appear to benefit its members, but actually be deeply hubristic. Protection gives way to pretension. Without God, a community, whether as small as a family or as large as a nation, may develop the illusion of its own totality and sufficiency. It may come to believe in its own transcendence, and in its own destiny. The besetting sin of communities is, then, idolatry. The story of Babel (Gen 11) is offered as a restraint against just this sort of over-weening pride: the Lord scatters the people and confuses their languages in order to restrain the possibility of an idolatrous belief in the power of human community. The will make a ‘name’ for themselves, and thereby not recognise the name of the Lord from whom true authority stems. Thus, the plurality of communities is both a protection of humans from their own power-hunger and an ongoing question against the promise of human community to fulfill human longings.
In the Biblical narrative we see both God’s judgement on human communities and his determination to redeem human beings in community (Gen 12).[3] The election of Israel was both a choice for them over against the nations that surrounded them, and a sign of God’s determination to bless all the families of the earth. The torah was intended to insure that the character and actions of God were at the heart of Israel’s communal life, just as it was absent from the other nations.

The gospel of Jesus Christ marks the formation of a new community whose shared ‘possession’ is Christ himself. Unlike other human communities, this one is not marked by fear but rather love; by peace, not enmity; and by fellowship, not competition for scarce resources. In the new community, quite remarkably, a plurality of identities is included without being at the same time dissolved. Thus, though I am a citizen of the heavenly kingdom, my identity as an Australian is not erased. However, it is certainly relativised, and even transformed. I can be, in Christ, Australian in a new way, and understand Australian-ness as it might be expressed in service of the divine ruler. In particular, the coming of Christ signifies the breaking down of barriers between peoples (Eph 2), such that communities need no longer be understood as mutually exclusive of one another. Here is then the possibility of unity without the dissolution of plurality.
The gathering of this new community is for the purpose of extending God’s blessing to all peoples. Not only are the disciples of Christ called to follow after him: they are also sent by him into the world. They are not to creep unobserved into the corners of the world; Christ rather calls them to preach the gospel and make disciples of all nations, ‘in Jerusalem, Samaria and to the ends of the earth’ (Acts 1:8) – which activity is most certainly for the public sphere and for the public good.[4] The churches thus are rightly addressed by Peter as a diaspora (1 Peter 1:1-2): they are a scattered gathering, with a shared task of the further gathering and building of God’s community throughout the earth.

Christians are certainly enjoined to preserve and uphold the communities in which they find themselves, insofar as they are in the business of restraining and punishing wickedness and rewarding good (Rom 13). They are to honour and uphold rule insofar as it administers God’s justice. In the NT, this especially refers to retributive justice; but may fairly also be applied to the challenges of distributive justice. But Christians also continue to witness to the immodesty of the claims of human communities, by reminding human communities of the ultimacy of God’s rule in Christ. A true secularity (that is, an understanding of the divine authorization but not the divine right of forms of human power) is needed in order to break the idolatrous self-deception of communities as absolute and self-sufficient. As we have been suggesting all along, ‘community’ alone is an insufficient term to describe a good, because community itself may be perverse or idolatrous, or serve perverse and idolatrous ends. A criminal gang might provide its members with a remarkable degree of fellowship, but still be obviously a corruption or misuse of community. While human sociality is needed for human flourishing, there are forms of sociality which are in themselves destructive.

We recognize that in the late-modern world, the chief problem for many people is exclusion from the goods offered by human community. The individualism which is so characteristic of the age has resulted in the disconnection of many people from the forms of human community that they need in order to flourish. If community means sharing, it is precisely the case that some individuals are unwilling or unable to share in what is common that is most problematic – anti-human, even. However, it is also the case that access to a human community is not, in and of itself, sufficient to meet the human need.


Michael P Jensen
July, 2008





[1] W.T.Cavanaugh, “The City – Beyond secular parodies”, in John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward, Radical Orthodoxy : A New Theology, Radical Orthodoxy Series. (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 182.
[2] For this and much of what follows, see Oliver O'Donovan, Common Objects of Love : Moral Reflection and the Shaping of Community : The 2001 Stob Lectures (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Pub., 2002)..
[3] not as community, but in community, note: community remains the means by which God redeems individuals.
[4] Hence the NT language of ‘light/salt of the world’, or the ‘royal priesthood’ of the church.

Anonymous comments...

Apologies for the loss of my blogging mojo of late... can't explain it. Must be the warm weather here in England...

Is there ever a case for making commenting anonymously on blogs/discussion boards and the like?

I admit, I have done it once or twice. But, as a rule, I think it is something a Christian person would not do. I think I am committed to the view that words attach to persons, and detached from them they lose their truth - or, at least, the reader of those words loses the opportunity to evaluate the truth of the words by the character and actions of the writer. Words are of their nature personal, and by anonymity become depersonalised, and unanswerable - a status no human word should really have.

The same would hold for writing anonymous letters: what is the case for ever writing one? What circumstances would justify it? How does anonymity transform it as a speech-act?

The counter argument would be that anonymous comment allows the vulnerable and the fearful to have a voice where they might not have. But even so, I would call these exceptional circumstances.

Boosters or knockers?

As Charles Taylor puts it, there are those critics of contemporary culture who cast themselves in the role of 'knockers' - ie, they have a gloomy outlook on the contemporary world and chart a decline in moral standards since the 1960s. The opposite outlook belongs to the 'boosters', who are characteristically more optimistic about the progress of humanity in the current era.

Now, it is customary for evangelical preachers to be 'knockers': they will, without fail, offer a social analysis that is very negative. In trying to contrast the biblical view to the current world view, they characteristically talk about the decline in standards, about modern individualism and so on. The contemporary world is cast as one in which something valuable has been lost.

Like Taylor, I want to say that things are more complicated than either the boosters or the knockers realise. Sociologically, I think it is inaccurate to be either optimistic or pessimistic. I think standards have changed to some degree - and in some ways definitely for the better (contrary to what you hear from evangelical pulpits).

Theologically, I want to say that human beings have not become MORE evil in recent decades - the pre 1960s past was not a golden era of human morality and we would be greatly mistaken to read it as such, or to portray the gospel as a nostalgic hankering after a society that never existed anyhow. It is right to try and discern what the particular evils of our times are: but not to see them as charting a decline necessarily.

There's more to say, but - I'd love to hear what you think.

Genesis 12:1-3
Now the LORD said to Abram, "Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. 2 And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed."

What does 'blessing' mean? It contrasts so obviously with 'luck', which is the usual channel by which expect to receive good things. Blessing indicates that God is the source of good things. But it is also an act of speaking, not merely showering good things upon the person. A blessing is a promissory note, or, perhaps, an invocation of the goodness of God. It is something said, as well as something done.

Blessing all the families of the earth is the point of God's election of Abram. His purpose in selecting is to include; though this is not without its exclusionary impact either. In this key passage, Abram is singled out not only for blessing but that he might 'be a blessing', through the making great of his name. The greatness of his name seems to be part of the blessing, but also the means by which the blessing goes out to ... well, whom? God will 'bless those who bless him'. Reactions to Abraham as the holder of the divine promise and the bearer of the divine favour are a signal of how it may go for a person vis a vis the Lord.

But here, already, is an apparent tension between the universal scope of the blessing to be introduced through Abram, and the fact that not all will accept it. Through Abram, all of the families of the earth will be blessed. But, there will indeed be some who curse him, who God will curse in turn. This is, of course, a part of the blessing to Abram - his protection and vindication against his enemies. The blessing is not without its cursing: it is universal, but not all-inclusive.

Gafcon and stuff

Well, GAFCON certainly got the internet buzzing with rage and outrage.

I have been pretty disappointed with Tom Wright's responses though. They are full of cheap shots, over -heated rhetoric and unsubstantiated accusations about the motives of those responsible. It is pretty clear that for him, the real villains of the piece are the conservative evangelicals in England, backed by the Archbishop of Sydney apparently, who don't share his optimistic view of the state of the CofE. He implies that the real motive for the whole thing is a sinister power agenda. So, his message is: we don't want GAFCON in England, we don't need it. The situation here (the UK) is not the same (he argues) as in the USA. The group pushing for this is very small, he keeps saying. So, why is he so worried?

I am curious as to why he takes such an isolationist view all of sudden. Surely, if there is such a thing as the Anglican Communion, the problem in the American church necessarily involves the UK church. At present, he argues, the CofE is not a church that has authorised unscriptural practices - granted. But is he so naive as to think that this agenda will not be pursued with full vigour in the next few years? Is the day when the CofE will most certainly authorise unscriptural sexual ethics really so far away?

And if you read John Richardson's report of Peter Jensen's speech in London, you will get the feeling that Tom has got the wrong end of the pineapple. Are we talking about the same speech? The one that says:

You have to find English solutions to English problems. This is not a ‘Cargo Cult’ where the Americans are going to bring the solution.


Andrew Goddard, on the other hand, seems much more measured and reasonable.

Sydney's a long way away...

...from Newcastle, Northern Ireland!

gafcon - Abp Orombi

Blogging...

If you are any sort of blogger, you will have moments when you wonder about the medium and where it is all going... I admit to a faint embarassment when I admit off line that I have a blog. It is like admitting that you like to smoke... Because for some people contempt for blogs is stock in trade.

It is true that blogs contain some of the freshest ideas going... it is amazing what you can learn from reading blogs...but, also: I have never seen such undigested rubbish as I have seen on blogs. I have never encountered such nastiness as I have seen on blogs. In the old world, your average nutter was happily isolated. In the blogging world, your average nutter can actually find a whole community of nutters out there. Seeing some of the blogs that are out there reminds me that having a blog is no great achievement...

Stephen Edmonson writes:

‘These developments [ie, historical criticism et al] over the last four centuries have shut off any direct approporation of Calvin’s scriptural hermeneutic for contemporary interpreters concerned with the historical sense of the text. …it is problematic at this point to offer an historical reading of Scripture that is either unitive or generally theological, much less one that roots the unity of the narrative in a robust Christology. Calvin’s history is not our history.’

Hmm... So, what is the way forward for biblical theology? The genie can't just be put back in the bottle - can it?

Bible read by Aussies?

In my investigations about audio bibles it struck me that there is no Aussie audio bible available. Does this matter? Would it be a powerful thing for Australians to hear the bible in their own language? Ought it not be a key component of Connect '09?

And: who would be a good actor/reader? And, which version would you choose?

Lectures - for or against?

A while back I wrote about what makes a good lecturer.

I have been thinking - and reading - again about lectures and their place in tertiary education, and especially in the preparation of Christian ministers. Most seminaries I know of have a very heavily lecture-based programme, with few tutorials or seminars, if any. In contrast to university teaching, which is usually a rather sparsely arranged timetable of lectures, seminaries crowd their days with alloted teaching hours. Partly, I speculate, this is because of a view of theology as not only a method to be demonstrated but a body of knowledge to be passed on in an authoritative way by recognised teachers. Also, theology is such a composite of disciplines - language, history, text-interpretation, philosophy - that it is hard to leave anything out of the programme, or to allow for an option-based course of study.

But, speaking from my experience as a student, I found lectures a largely very frustrating and slow way to learn, unless the lecturer was peculiarly good. It is particularly inefficient if the lecturer feels he/she has to cover everything in a particular course, because the lectures are replacing the role played by a text book. Further, a lecturing style that depends on the questions of students loses impact with large classes. And, frankly, I am not interested in the ignorance of my fellow students (and neither are they in mine!). In theological colleges, lecturers are often too nice (believe it or not!) to students and pander too much to their worst vices (especially by catering to their passivity in learning...).

So: lectures - for or against? What are lectures good for? When do they work, when do they fail? What can a lecture give that you can't get from a book in less time?

Andrew Cameron on Homophobia

beyond homophobia

I have been waiting a long time for someone to say this, and to say it so well.

This one's better?

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A Wordle of my Thesis

Things Fall Apart - a sermon on Judges 19-21

I preached this sermon at St Mary's Maidenhead, 16 June, 2008. Apologies for posting it in full like this, but it helps me to have it here. Broughton Knox famously used to begin his sermon classes by saying 'where did this sermon fail?' I think I could make several suggestions! No doubt my friends in the blogosphere will be happy to add to my list.

"I want to start by turning with you to the last verse of the passage:

In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit.

Being able to do as you see fit, or to being given the right to determine what is right for yourself sounds great, doesn’t it? One of the most famous graffiti slogans of the May 1968 student revolutions in France – that moment in recent which has proved incredibly influential in Western culture – was it is forbidden to forbid. That could be a motto for today: to find yourself as your own moral yardstick is exactly what we 21st century people think of as maturity and freedom. It is mature because determining what is right in your own eyes is taking responsibility for yourself and your own actions, isn’t it? It is freeing yourself from having moral training wheels and riding the full size adult bike. And it is the freedom to be true to yourself, not beholden to moral standards that are imposed on you from outside – whether that is in the name of God or someone else. Ultimately, what matters is being true to your own vision of what is right and wrong – acting according to your own deeply-held convictions and intuitions, being an authentic and individual person because you answer the call of the voice within you, in your heart, and because you reject the rules and regulations that come from without, imposed on your life by others. What is right for me is right for me, in my perspective – this at least I know, whether or not it is right for you or not. This is what we want our children to learn: an independence rather than a conformity in choosing right and wrong, an ability not to accept everything there are told. It sounds like the height of civilisation.

But what is it like to live in such a world? Can human beings live like this, with every doing as he or she sees fit? In Judges 19-21 we have a ghastly reminder of what life is really like when everyone in a society becomes his or her own judge. Even a society with a claim to be the people of God himself is capable of terrible cruelty. In reality, men and women – and especially men concerning women, it seems – are only too ready to be completely barbaric, given the opportunity. No matter how enlightened are our minds, the heart of humankind is dark.
The chapter we heard read for us is just the beginning of a series of events that are a blot on Israel’s history and show that the high hopes for Israel’s future are completely in tatters. Just as last week you saw that Israel had chosen to worship God not in the way he commanded but according to their own choices, they are now choosing to determine right and wrong for themselves. Noticeably missing from this episode is … a Judge. No redeemer is sent by God to liberate Israel from her captivity to another nation, the Philistines or whoever. And this is mainly because Israel is not invaded in this episode. She doesn’t need saving from the grip of another nation; here, she is in captivity only to her own corruption.

The story unfolds in three stages. First, in chapter 19 we have the strange episode of the Levite with no name and his concubine. It starts, as you heard, with the man pursuing his runaway girl to her father’s place. And no matter what the argument was between the couple, the father-in-law and the husband seem to get on famously, and so it is with some effort that the Levite actually makes to leave to go home. And that is what causes the problem, because they are caught out on the road as night approaches; and they are somewhat afraid of seeking hospitality among foreigners in the city of Jebus. The man says (look at vs 12) "No. We won't go into an alien city, whose people are not Israelites. We will go on to Gibeah." Of course – among fellow Israelites we will be safe.

It is a horrible error of judgement – though an understandable one. The old man takes them home from the city square in Gibeah; but the mob still gathers, and demands the visitor so they can rape him. Of course it reminds us very strongly of another incident in the Old Testament – the story of Lot entertaining the angelic visitors in the city of Sodom, whose citizens also demanded that he send out the men so that they could have sex with then. Now, make no mistake: in the old story, these were pagans, non-Israelites, and this was a story that showed how disgusting and barbaric they were. And this episode is the reason that God destroys the city utterly.

What is different now? The mob in question are from Israel, and so are their would-be victims. Israel has become as bad as ever Sodom was… that is the extent of their distance from the God who had redeemed them.

And just as Lot offered his virgin daughters to the mob instead of his visitors, here too, a misguided sense of hospitality reigns: the old man offers his own daughter and the concubine as substitute victims for the Levite (vs 24). In the end it is the Levite who pushes out his concubine to mob, so that they can gang-rape her.

In the morning, there she is on the step. Is she dead at this point? We don’t know: but her humanity has been taken – utterly betrayed and unprotected by her husband, she has been treated like a piece of meat by the mob. As if to underscore that she has been destroyed as a person by this terrible night, her husband – who clearly had a talent for grand public statements – hacks her into pieces and sends her in twelve grisly packages to the tribes of Israel. And, after they got over the surprise and the smell no doubt, verse 30 explains that Everyone who saw it said, "Such a thing has never been seen or done, not since the day the Israelites came up out of Egypt. Think about it! Consider it! Tell us what to do!"

Well this then is the beginning of the second phase of the terrible tale; for the Israelites gather in response to the Levite’s call to work out what they ought to do about this terrible mob in Gibeah. Notice that Levite’s story tends to gloss over his own role in the death of his girl. It is self-justifying stuff – and our sympathy for him ought to drain away at this point. And so begins a terrible and destructive campaign of civil war, in which Israel, like the concubine, ends up being dismembered. There is death and destruction on a massive scale, even by today’s standards.
In this episode there is some inquiring after the Lord’s decision: but only as to which tribe is to go up first against the Benjamites (see vs 18). At the very opening of the book of Judges (1:2) is was the tribe of Judah who was to be in the vanguard against the Canaanites in winning the land. Once again, Judah is go ahead of the others: but this time, it is to their defeat.

Now this is an unexpected twist; why do they get defeated in this? Isn’t their cause right? Aren’t the Benjamites an awful crew of gang-rapists who need swift and sever justice? Isn’t the Lord behind that kind of thing? But this story isn’t as simple and straightforward as that. That Judah gets defeated here shows that in some way all Israel compromised, and that God won’t be manipulated by groups of human beings for their own purposes – especially in war.

We have to pass over the details of the civil war: it is enough to say that, like all civil wars, the consequences were devastating, the violence horrendous and the destruction enormous. The flower of Israel – all the best warriors and fighting men - are killed. By the end of the chapter, not only Gibeah but the whole tribe of Benjamin has been ruined. Only 600 men are left, even the women and children having been slaughtered in the struggle.

And now we reach the third part of the story: because the other tribes in Israel get caught in a bind here. See verse 1 - they make some rash promises – there are a few of those in Judges, aren’t there? – and then realise that they are dooming Benjamin to death. That they are hacking off one of their own limbs, because they are guaranteeing that Israel will never be whole again. And this, they realise effects them, because they will not truly be able to be Israel without Benjamin, yet they have promised not to provide them with wives. Here’s the dilemma, from vs 15ff:

15 The people grieved for Benjamin, because the LORD had made a gap in the tribes of Israel. 16 And the elders of the assembly said, "With the women of Benjamin destroyed, how shall we provide wives for the men who are left? 17 The Benjamite survivors must have heirs," they said, "so that a tribe of Israel will not be wiped out. 18 We can't give them our daughters as wives, since we Israelites have taken this oath: 'Cursed be anyone who gives a wife to a Benjamite.'

So, wives have to be found, and in large numbers… This leads to two mass abductions of women – firstly, of 400 virgins from Jabesh Gilead; and then 200 women of Shiloh are seized. This all because the Israelites are sticklers for their vows. Once again, their moral compass seems to be off: they are justifying the rape, en masse, of 600 women, because of their dutiful observance of their own promises. They have got things out of proportion... it is fair to say that here Israel is trying to do the right thing, trying to calculate the way forward through some very difficult problems. But in doing so it is coming up with some very tenuous and problematic solutions. In one sense, the behaviour of the mob in Gibeah – who are not trying to do good – is compounded by people who are trying to do good – to bring about restitution and righteousness. They only make it worse.

And so, by the end of the chapter the gap that the Lord in Israel made seems to be filled; but if you are a sensitive reader you won’t be feeling as if balance has been restored and all is right with the world and everything is tied up with a bow once again at this point. Something deeply troubling has occurred. The writer doesn’t shove it down our throats, mind you: he doesn’t have to. We can see that Israel looks as if it has completely unravelled. And so, we get to that strange ending of this blood-sodden book:

In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit.

The results of Israel’s lack of attention to the word of God and their stubborn insistence in deciding what was right for themselves are plain to see. At this point, Israel is not different to the nations around. And we ought to pause here to remember just how contemporary this story is. It would be easy to see this story, and the other stories of the book of Judges as being part of another world. We don’t recognise the place names, and the customs. It can feel more like Mordor than here. But we can only think that with a wilful blindness to what we 21st century people are like. We think because of our technology that we are more civilised and less prone to this kind of outrageous behaviour, less willing to condone the mistreatment and rape of women, less liable to go to war for trivial or misplaced reasons. Only someone without access to a newspaper could think that this is so. The story of the concubine could have happened today. If there is anything the history of the 20th century has taught us, it is that the animal brutality of human beings is not far from the surface. As the scholar George Steiner once said:

We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.

Being cultured or sophisticated or educated doesn’t protect us from ourselves.

And not even being Christian does: the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, in which people hacked each other to death with machetes, involved professing Christians. In fact, before the genocide, Rwanda was called the ‘most Christian country in Africa’, with a strong evangelical church. And yet this did not prevent an orgy of murder and rape. The book of Judges serves as warning to us that being inattentive to the word of God can only lead to moral and social chaos. That moral independence we so desire, that we think is a sign of our maturity and freedom, that we think can be attained by superior education and advanced knowledge of science or even by correct and true religion, is in fact a dangerous temptation. Christians like us are just as capable of becoming blind to our faults as anyone else. Being told to look inside our hearts to discover there what is right and wrong is a frightening idea, if you know the true nature of the human heart.

So what are we to do? Let’s look again at that last verse:

In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit.

Is this a suggestion that in fact Israel had its political system all wrong? That the answer to this chaos is to institute a centralised and powerful system of government capable of bring about some order, or exercising some decent authority? Is that what is needed?

It should only take you a minute to think through the later history of Israel to realise what a crock that suggestion is. You couldn’t have sat down in the dust, with the nation collapsed around you in the period of the exile and thought, well, yes, having a king was what we needed all along. Obeying the king who was intent on accumulating his own wealth and on providing shrines for all the other gods was not really any better than everyone doing as he saw fit, according to his own heart. What Israel really needed was not a systematic change of the style of government, but a king after God’s own heart – a ruler who would rule as God would rule, not in the interests of his own power, but for the good of all; and the people of Israel themselves needed a change of their own hearts.

This is where the book of Judges shows that it raises more questions than it answers. We can’t read it well without remembering that it is part of a bigger story – a story that tells of God’s faithfulness to his own promises as much as it tells of Israel’s repeated faithlessness. God alone fulfils his promises in this case despite of not because of his people. In fact, the two tribes that survived until the time of Jesus were… guess which? This is a huge encouragement at this point, of course: you might have thought at the end of the book of Judges that the whole Israel idea was dead and buried – or at best badly tainted. But God, the Lord of Israel, is not finished. And, he has provided for us in Jesus a king after his own heart: a true leader and Lord; and he has sent his Holy Spirit into our hearts so that we might respond to him in faith and obedience, as Israel failed to do.

We may well look around today and see that God’s people are in disarray. We can see deep uncertainty, even amongst avowed followers of Jesus Christ, as to what is right and what is wrong. We hear even Christians appealing to what their hearts are telling them over and against what the Bible plainly teaches. We are under tremendous pressure to conform to the culture around us, and in many ways we do just that. We are divided by multiple disagreements over things that are great and small. We are tempted to engineer our own solutions, or to trust in our own techniques and stratagems for building the church. And yet we need not be dismayed; because if Israel got this low and this corrupt and yet still God remained true, then we need not doubt him today.

God is working His purpose out as year succeeds year,
God is working His purpose out and the time is drawing near;
Nearer and nearer draws the time, the time that shall surely be,
When the earth shall be fill'd with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.

Sacha Wittgenstein

Now, don't get me wrong, I am not about to make this a 'how cute is my kid' blog, but:

Sacha, aged 5, says to me the other day -

Opposite is opposite of same

I am still thinking about it...

Audio Bibles

Hey - does anyone have any advice on audio bibles?

I would like to get one I can listen to in the car - so either one I can burn onto CDs, or one that is already on CDs.

I don't much like cheesy synth music in the background, but if that's the way it comes, so be it... NIV or ESV.

Let me know!

Richard Muller, and the uses of tradition accounts/genealogies in theology

I have finally started reading Richard Muller's The Unaccommodated Calvin. And a scholarly work with a more authoritative tone I have yet discovered. Muller knows his stuff, and knows he knows his stuff. In a nutshell, his thesis is that Calvin needs to be understood in his own context and on his own terms, and that this yields a more complicated picture than the one we usually get. Calvin must not be accomodated to any latter-day matrix or theological system, whether Barthian or even 'Calvinist'. Furthermore, you cannot see him as utterly divorced from the intellectual context that preceeded him, even when he differed from it. And again: you can't conclude from a simple reading of the later edition of the Institutes that 'Calvin's doctrine of XYZ was...'. His writings are more complex and variegated than that. He showed more development and more subtlety.

So, is it possible to learn from Calvin, or indeed any figure from history, without the historian always blowing the whistle? Muller concludes, nicely that

A clever theologian can accomodate Calvin to nearly any agenda; a faithful theologian - and a good historian - will seek to listen to Calvin, not to use him. p. 188

But I want to know: how? Given all the caveats that Muller has laid down, is there any way of accessing Calvin for today? How would he have us do this?

Whch leads me to a methodological point. It is standard practice in theological (and some philosophical) thinking to give an account of the tradition in which you stand, and also to show how you are correcting a tradition that went wrong at point X with thinker Y. It's a rhetorically powerful move, of course. Theology does this much more than other disciplines, because it believes in continuity as essential: even Luther and Calvin were at pains to show that they were not merely innovators, for example. And yet, this is a process that is evidently fraught with danger. We can give a wry smile now at the neo-orthodox accounts of 'Calvin against the Calvinists', for example, which have been proven to be simplistic. John Milbank has been taken to task for his sloppy readings of Dun Scotus (Milbank cites Scotus as the point at which theology got it all wrong and it has been downhill ever since).

But, under Muller's method, is such a process even possible? Is it possible to narrate the tradition in the way that theologians of all colours do as a matter of course?

Thanks are due...

My interest in the topic of human identity – and the thought that Christian martyrdom might have some bearing on it – was provoked in the first instance by my daily encounters with the teenage skeptics that inhabited the classrooms of St Andrew’s Cathedral School in Sydney, Australia, where I was School Chaplain from 2000-03. They were adamant that they were not going to accept a thin gruel of moralism from me as an alternative to the freedom to choose who to be on their own terms. Clearly, different ways of being a self were at issue. Thanks are due to them for not allowing their resident theologian to be happy with the glib answers that came immediately to mind.

I have been richly blessed by having, in Professor Oliver O’Donovan and Dr Bernd Wannenwetsch and more latterly Professor Nigel Biggar, teachers of the finest calibre in the field of moral theology. I am grateful in particular for the direction and stimulus given by my supervisor Dr Wannenwetsch throughout the writing of the thesis; and for his scholarly and personal example.

I would not have been able to consider coming to Oxford at all if not for the remarkable generosity of Mr Vanda Gould. In addition, he has been a source of prayerful encouragement and pastoral care to the whole family in his regular visits, emails and phone calls. I would like also to thank the Trustees of the Joan Augusta Mackenzie Travelling Scholarship, and the Principal, Bursar and Council of Moore Theological College, Sydney, for the Roberts Prize and other discretionary funds that were made available to us during our time in the UK. We have been truly blessed in this regard.

Friends new and old have been an integral part of the mostly solitary experience of writing a thesis. In particular, Kosta Milkov, Christopher Barnett and Guido de Graaff have been magnificent fellow travellers, along with Russ Dawn, Jonathan Brant, Matheson Russell and Charles Byrd. Reading new theological texts with the members of OXCAT on Friday afternoons has kept me going; and it was a joy to rediscover Calvin and more with Sam Allberry. We will never forget the welcome and support of the staff and members of St Ebbe’s Church of England. Justin Moffatt and David Höhne kept chivvying me along; Alan Lukabyo and Stephen Jacobs kept writing real letters, on actual paper. Bec Watson and Karen Beilharz sent Campos coffee beans. My sister, Anna Cox, and her husband Matthew brought me a new computer when the old one died. There were people I hardly know - and some I do - who stopped by my blog to give me helpful advice or pointed me to an overlooked reference.

My parents-in-law, Richard and Jackie Wallder, did not live to see the end of this project, though they were instrumental in it coming to pass. We miss them. To my own parents I owe an inestimable debt of gratitude. My mother, Christine Jensen, made more than one trip from Australia to keep us all going. My father, Peter Jensen, has read and re-read my work, often telling me what it was that I was trying to say when it had become unclear even to me. I don’t know what I would have done without him.

These years, though not without trials, have been happy ones for a young family. The joy of my life continues to be that I share it with my four intriguing and wonderful children, Simon, Sacha, Matilda, and our very own English rose, Freya; and with Catherine, who bore the load more than anyone, and to whom this thesis is dedicated, with love.

Handing in, today

Today's the day I hand in my thesis.

I am sure it will be an anti-climactic feeling... and then the waiting to have it assessed...

I am sure that I will discover a typo minutes after collecting it from the printers.

But, it is finished...

Princeton Seminary Youth Lectures

When I was a School Chaplain, way back in the day, I found this series of lectures on Youth Ministry just about the most stimulating thing going. I didn't always agree, but this was such a change from the usual shallow, technique-driven stuff that is around about youth ministry. Here is actual theology.

A particular highlight was this one, by Kenda Creasy Dean:

'Holding on to our Kisses: A Hormonal Theology of Adolescence'

but you can check out lectures from Miroslav Volf and Jurgen Moltmann among others.

Billy Graham in Australia 1959

My relatives went forward at the crusades in Sydney in the same visit to Australia.

Locke's tolerance - its limits

'Promises, covenants and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon the atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all.'

John Locke, Letter on Toleration


The father of modern liberal politics shows his true colours...

Anne Lamott

I have been reading two wonderful books by Anne Lamott:

Bird by Bird - a terrific book about writing;

and her spirutual memoir

Traveling Mercies.

I won't review them or anything: but they are books to change your life by.

Keller - the Gospel in all its forms

H/T to Stephen:

an interesting article by Tim Keller from New York, on how he preaches the gospel.
He sums up:

Today there are many who doubt that there is just one gospel. That gives them the warrant to ignore the gospel of atonement and justification. There are others who don't like to admit that there are different forms to that one gospel. That smacks too much of "contextualization," a term they dislike. They cling to a single presentation that is often one-dimensional. Neither of these approaches is as true to the biblical material, nor as effective in actual ministry, as that which understands that the Bible presents one gospel in several forms.

'.

or

.'

?

Churchman article

This Summer's Churchman has hit the shelves of theological colleges and pastor's studies everywhere and it includes the first in my series of three articles entitled The Christian Revolution. This issue contains 1. Liberty.

Lee Gatiss has an interesting article on Richard Baxter, too. And Tony Wright concludes his two-parter on Death, the Dead and the Underworld in Biblical Theology.

Frightening Children?

Jason cites a very interesting quote from CS Lewis about frightening children...

Personally, I find children terrifying.

[it's a joke]

In Praise of Teachers Meme

Back in September last year, I wrote a post in praise of teachers.

In it, I listed ten of my favourite teachers selected from the whole spread of my educational career (20+ years and still going...). I gave a brief explanation in each case.

Now, I am not much one for memes - but could this one work? I need your help.

Here goes:

List FIVE of your favourite teachers, and tell us what made them great. Then tag some people whose blogs you read...

I tag:

Justin, Karen, Ruth, Jason, Byron, Guy, Nicole and Sam

Songs of Sydney - 11

The Cicada that ate Five Dock, would you believe...

Why Christians are not people of principle

I read a terrific book by Stanley Fish once, called The Trouble with Principle.

That was a while ago; but for some reason I was thinking about it again this morning. Principled people - and there are Christians among them, granted - are some of the most dangerous people there are. That is: everything in moral reasoning becomes ordered to a set of ideals (or even a single ideal). That means, in practice that anything is justifiable in the name of these ideals or principles. You can invade Iraq and torture prisoners in the name of freedom, for example. In the name of fairer and better government with more integrity you can knife your political opponents in the back. Do evil, that good may result. It is (so the calculation runs) a lesser evil than the evil that may result if the ultimate good is not defended.

There is, naturally, a deal of suspicion of these kind of principles, too. What alternative is there to them is the problem - to be unprincipled?

But Christian discipleship is not the following of a set of principles. It is discipleship: it is following a master, imitation of an example (while at the same time being spiritually united to this master). It isn't a set of truths (though it is TRUE, and it trades in TRUTH, for sure) from which all else must be deduced in some process of ethical calculation. Even 'love' can't be held as a mere principle: it must be worked out in the light of the example of love given to us and worked in us.

Away then with principles!

Songs of Sydney - 10

The Skyhooks, and Somewhere in Sydney

Songs of Sydney - 9

The best of the lot: Gotta Love this City...

'my city is a whore...'

indeed.

Songs of Sydney - 6

Sydney, nights are warm, daytime telly, blue-rinse dawn..



At least, you won't have time to be bored...

Songs of Sydney - 4

The Miracle of Marrickville!

Songs of Sydney - 8

King St - well, now, this is the King St of my youth... Coles New World is now the Dendy cinema.

On King St, I'm a king...

Songs of Sydney - 2

Songs of Sydney - 3

Endnote trouble shooting

Does anyone know what you do in Endnote when you want to cite a work by a Pope?

It always comes out as II, John Paul...

Songs of Sydney - 7

Where else could this come from?

Songs of Sydney - 5

The sweat, the desperation, and the lure of a better view of the harbour...

Songs of Sydney - 1

Ah, Sydney: I can already smell the dog pee evaporating from your footpaths, and the rage of the drivers of a million cars on a February afternoon, and the dust blowing in from the drought...

The Short Abstract

Ok, we are down to the nitty gritty now, and I need help refining and clarifying this abstract. Remember, be CONSTRUCTIVELY critical and help protect my oh-so-fragile ego...

This thesis asks: what kind of self is the Christian, as it is discovered in Christian martyrdom? It will be argued that Christian martyrdom provides a coherent and compelling narration of the self in terms of the narrative of the life and death of Jesus Christ: a narrative that orients the self in hope towards the good and turns the self towards recognition of and sacrificial service of other selves. It is established (following Balthasar) that martyrdom is the external representation in the lives of some of the inner reality of all Christian disciples. A number of modern secular accounts of selfhood and identity recognize the importance of martyrdom as a key point in the conflict of the meaning of human identity. However, as is shown from the work of Salman Rushdie and Charles Taylor, these accounts do not successfully describe the self as it is revealed in Christian martyrdom. Rushdie even questions the authenticity of a religiously-construed self. The thesis then (chapters 3-6) offers a description and an analysis of self-identity as it is informed by martyrdom, in conversation with T.S. Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral. Christian discipleship is not the path of establishing oneself through security, pursuing the good made possible through collaboration with earthly power, making oneself an identity through action according to some ideal, or even seeking earthly or heavenly renown. Christian selfhood is (rather) narrated against the experience of peirasmo,j (temptation/testing) and with reference to providentia dei. Both themes are explained Christologically (chapter 7). Martyrdom is not a witness to the innocence of the martyr, but rather to her vindication by the divine judge on account of Jesus Christ. Finally, it is argued that the Christian self is offered to others as an act of suffering persuasion.

Augustine, our contemporary

Augustine, in giving voice to Roman hedonism, could be speaking of modern liberal Westerners:

"But the worshippers and admirers of these gods delight in imitating their scandalous iniquities, and are nowise concerned that the republic be less depraved and licentious. Only let it remain undefeated, they say, only let it flourish and abound in resources; let it be glorious by its victories, or still better, secure in peace; and what matters it to us? This is our concern, that every man be able to increase his wealth so as to supply his daily prodigalities, and so that the powerful may subject the weak for their own purposes. Let the poor court the rich for a living, and that under their protection they may enjoy a sluggish tranquillity; and let the rich abuse the poor as their dependants, to minister to their pride. Let the people applaud not those who protect their interests, but those who provide them with pleasure. Let no severe duty be commanded, no impurity forbidden. Let kings estimate their prosperity, not by the righteousness, but by the servility of their subjects. Let the provinces stand loyal to the kings, not as moral guides, but as lords of their possessions and purveyors of their pleasures; not with a hearty reverence, but a crooked and servile fear. Let the laws take cognizance rather of the injury done to another man's property, than of that done to one's own person. If a man be a nuisance to his neighbor, or injure his property, family, or person, let him be actionable; but in his own affairs let everyone with impunity do what he will in company with his own family, and with those who willingly join him. Let there be a plentiful supply of public prostitutes for every one who wishes to use them, but specially for those who are too poor to keep one for their private use. Let there be erected houses of the largest and most ornate description: in these let there be provided the most sumptuous banquets, where every one who pleases may, by day or night, play, drink, vomit, dissipate. Let there be everywhere heard the rustling of dancers, the loud, immodest laughter of the theatre; let a succession of the most cruel and the most voluptuous pleasures maintain a perpetual excitement. If such happiness is distasteful to any, let him be branded as a public enemy; and if any attempt to modify or put an end to it let him be silenced, banished, put an end to. Let these be reckoned the true gods, who procure for the people this condition of things, and preserve it when once possessed. Let them be worshipped as they wish; let them demand whatever games they please, from or with their own worshippers; only let them secure that such felicity be not imperilled by foe, plague, or disaster of any kind."

He even has a role for the religious!


City of God, II.20

Iris Murdoch

Just a note this morning:

I have been reading the excellent novels of Iris Murdoch. They are shot through with her post-God attempt to find a moral ideal, a conception of the Good that will be tenable in the contemporary world. The themes? Well, love, sex, God and death of course! What else is worth talking about? It reminds me that the best moral thinking these days is done by novelists. The narrative form is such an advantage.

I have read thus far:
The Bell
Bruno's Dream
A Severed Head (read it ages ago)
The Time of the Angels

and I am reading

The Black Prince.

Next: Henry and Cato
and then -

The Sea, The Sea.

Sin in the Life of the Believer - 3

But ... don’t forget that Paul is stern with the sinful believer, too. In 1 Corinthians 6 he reminds the Corinthians that the Kingdom of God does not belong to the rampant sinner. Ephesians 5:5 is equally strong: “For of this you can be sure; no immoral, impure or greedy person…has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.” The message for the sinful Christian is not, “well, we all sin sometimes, but “stop it and repent!”

Hebrews is even stronger. On the one hand, the author enthusiastically explains how the Christian has absolutely free access into the presence of God himself through the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. There is every reason to be confident of our salvation. But, he is also uncompromising about sin. “If we deliberately go on sinning” writes the author, “no sacrifice for sins is left!” To the Christian who said “I sin all the time”, he would say “Don’t!” 1 John backs him up: “I am writing this so you will not sin” he says, “but if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father.”

Not bad advice, actually. Christians (well, I, at least) do love to wallow in guilt. But maybe that’s not good enough. If I am to think more biblically I might instead remember who I am on account of Christ. And I might have courage to tackle my sin (with the Spirit’s help) and kill it off. It has no place in my life, after all.

However, I still live in a warzone, for the time being. I still live life in the weak flesh, I still live under the effects of sin, I still live (for now) on the wrong side of eternity. In Romans 8, Paul tackles exactly this state of affairs. (Before you read it, cross out “sinful nature” in the NIV and replace it with “flesh”.) The Christian continues to live in a sinful environment – even in a weak and sinful body – but is now controlled by the Spirit. The Christian experiences first hand the rot of the sinful era: but also yearns with the Spirit for the future redemption of the body. Most reassuringly of all for the overwhelmed believer, there is no condemnation for those in Christ. If God is for us, who can be against us? We are more than conquerors…

Sin in our lives is a contradiction of our very identity: an absurdity, given our destiny. It isn’t who we are any more.

Some Perspective

A poster on Ruth Gledhill's blog shared this:

"This is to let you know the sad news that David Mohamed Ali, a Somali Christian evangelist and a long-standing member of St Matthew's, was shot dead last week by two Islamist terrorists in Badoia, Somalia, because of his Christian faith. He had been sent to Badoia by Ethiopian and Somali borderpolice, for reasons that are not clear.

David was an intelligent and gifted evangelist who thought deeply about hisf aith. For a while he ran a website for Christian Somalis. I had recentlygiven him a reference to do a Degree in Theology at ETC (EvangelicalTheological College), Addis Ababa. He was single man, aged about 35, who was based in Addis Ababa but travelled widely sharing his faith.

We thank God for his life and courageous witness, and pray for his mother,sister and other members of his family. We also pray for the Somali Christian community, that they may be comforted and strengthened at thistime when Christians are under great pressure in Somalia.
David's death comes just two weeks after four Christian teachers (2 British Somalis and 2 Kenyans) were killed in Beledwayne, Somalia."



[Ruth has been running an excellent series on persecution - really different stuff for a major newspaper. ]

Someone is wrong

See my earlier post on The Joy of Being Cross.

Sin in the Life of the Believer - 2

So, what to do then?

One favourite strategy of Christians down the centuries has been to take a minimal definition of sin. “Lowering the bar” in other words. You define sin using a set of rules or behaviours, and then you design your life so to avoid transgressing. Live in a nice tree-lined suburb. Talk to nice people about nice things. Work hard, never offend anyone. Keep away from attractive members of the opposite sex. Go to church, pay your taxes, recycle. Do not count as sin the more alarming topography of your inner world. Thank God that you are not like other people. Neat, huh?

There are two problems with minimalism. Firstly, Jesus seems to have a maximal definition of sin. His Sermon on the Mount convicts me on the basis of my intentions as well as my deeds; and it also urges me to take radical action against sin. True righteousness is not a matter of merely avoiding sin. It is active.

Secondly, if I am to pursue the path of love commanded by Jesus, I will risk sin in my interactions with other people. Other people are so hard to love, but you can’t be loving without them! No wonder the monastics used isolation in their quest for purity.

But how does the Bible address sin in the life of the believer? It is good to remember the robust conscience of the New Testament writers on the one hand; and the severe warnings they give against sin on the other. Paul does not write to “the sinners in Corinth” but to the “church of God…to those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be holy”. He calls the church the “temple of the Holy Spirit”, and “the body of Christ”. His strategy for handling sin in the life of the believer is to remind Christians of their radical change in status. “ Your life is hid with Christ”; “ You are dead to sin, alive to Christ”; “ you are all sons of God”; “now you are light in the Lord”; “you are not your own…you were brought at a price”; “you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified”; “we…have the firstfruits of the spirit”. The Christian is a home for the Holy Spirit and lives by that Spirit.

Do we doubt the power of God’s Spirit to change us?