Why don't the New Calvinists say anything about the US government's torture policy?

I posted this question on my facebook update, and the following (I think interesting) discussion ensued. I have reproduced it here. It could be that the New Calvinists - who I take it as representing a theological position as very close to my own - have said a great deal about torture, but I haven't read it. I choose them to pick on as a form of self-criticism.


Nat Smith at 23:57 on 17 May
because they have better things to care about; like people going to hell.

Michael Jensen at 04:18 on 18 May
On the contrary: Piper has a lot to say about abortion for example. It just seems to be a selective choice of political issues to care about.

Jim Wackett at 08:37 on 18 May
Selective indeed. It'd be good to see an application of a 'reformed' world view on those parts of life that exist between the possibility of abortion and euthanasia, and not just limited to same-sex marriage.

Nat Smith at 08:50 on 18 May
waterboarding is flogging a dead horse, abortion, sam-sex marriage and euthanasia are more relevant in obama's america. i guess for piper the priority might go like this; saving innocent lives from death > saving guilty lives from pain.

Jim Wackett at 09:24 on 18 May
Actually, I think Piper would hold that there is no such thing as an innocent life.

David Starling at 09:26 on 18 May
They do - e.g. here:http://theologica.blogspot.com/2009/04/defining-and-condemning-torture-what-it.html

Michael Jensen at 10:43 on 18 May
hmm, alas the links to the Mohler and Neuhaus papers is broken. Never mind. But I am glad to see it. Nat - I am staggered that you would come up with such an awful equation and attribute it to Piper. After all, he knows that Jesus died for the guilty... how we treat the guilty is litmus test of our own understanding of the gospel, isn't it?

Michael Jensen at 10:44 on 18 May
Still, the NC's are far more vociferous in defence of their trad 'family values' issues than they are on this, and that's a bit disappointing. It suggests that American nationalism dies very hard... no?

Roger Fitzhardinge at 11:01 on 18 May
@nat: interesting description of waterboarding ;)

David Starling at 11:07 on 18 May
Two quick thoughts: 1. I think it is entirely legitimate for an individual (e.g. Piper) to pick one or two big social/ethical issues and focus his campaigning on those, rather than issuing a thousand forgettable pronouncements on a thousand different issues. 2. I think it's a bit lazy to respond to Nat's point by playing the 'no such thing as an... innocent person' card. Before God, we're all guilty, of course (and even unborn children are part of a fallen race) but that doesn't mean that the categories of 'innocent' and 'guilty' are irrelevant in interpersonal ethics and public justice. [btw, this is not an argument for the legitimacy of torture, or, for that matter, for the assumption that all Guantanamo detainees were 'guilty' - just an argument against misusing theological categories]

Michael Jensen at 11:15 on 18 May
Well maybe. But I don't think torture IS a forgettable issue. Like abortion, it is an issue that strikes at the very soul of a society.How powerful would their criticism of the former Bush govt be if they preached against this woeful hypocrisy and the endorsement of evil by bureaucratic means! The laziness was Nat's in the first instance (no ... offence, Nat!). One shouldn't have to choose this over that. Neither should preaching the gospel of grace be sectioned off from the prophetic witnes to the egregious crimes of a rather smug society... no?

Jim Wackett at 11:25 on 18 May
David...1. Agreed. But the focus on particular issues can be understood and pursued with a little more integrity if they are placed within a broader context of a commitment to 'life' from cradle to grave. So yes, there should be NC types speaking out on abortion, euthanasia and same-sex marriage. There should also be NC types speaking out on ... poverty, human trafficking, torture etc. 2. Not lazy... just time-starved! ; ) I only sought to make a single, and relevant, point, not articluate an entire response. I don't believe I misued a theological catagory, just addressed that fact that what was being articulated as 'piper's priority' didn't seem to me to hold with his writing/preaching.

David Starling at 11:27 on 18 May
I didn't say that torture was a forgettable issue. What I said was that a thousand statements on a thousand different issues (all of which could, in themselves, be issues of enormous importance) all end up being forgettable statements. And I'm not sure that accusing Nat of "the laziness" (even if the accusation sticks) absolves the rest of us in the thread of the possibility of being guilty of the same crime!

Michael Jensen at 11:37 on 18 May
Yes, thousands statements yes yes. But it is interesting, and sad, that the issues of choice for the NCs are traditional 'right' issues - so therefore easy to dismiss as so much predictible white noise. I am also concerned by the militarism of some of things I hear and read... it'd be nice to hear a counterpoint to that.

David Starling at 11:40 on 18 May
Thanks Jim for the responses. On point 1: I agree that it's a good thing for NC types to be speaking out on poverty, human trafficking, torture, etc. Of course! It happens (eg. this post on Joe Carter's blog the other day:http://evangelicaloutpost.com/archives/author/lindsay-marshall) and maybe it should happen more. But I do think it's also fair to say that on the abortion issue there are very few voices in the public square, apart from conservative Catholics and evangelicals, who are speaking up for unborn children. And as Nat said in his second comment (with the unfortunate mixed metaphor) it's a bit late to be prophetic on the torture issue in Obama's America, but there's still plenty of opportunity to be prophetic on abortion.... On point 2: fair enough - time starved is not the same as lazy! But I still do see plenty of not-so-time-starved people making the sorts of arguments (e.g. the 'no such thing as an innocent person' argument used to flatten moral distinctions

David Starling at 11:58 on 18 May
Thanks Mike for the comeback, too! I agree that in some cases the clarity and gravity of the anti-abortion case can be almost completely obscured by a whole lot of predictable RW white noise. It's one thing to be a principled social conservative - it's another to be a captive to the GOP and the machinations of a Karl Rove.Mind you, the abortion issue can just as easily get lost in a forest of more politically fashionable LW concerns in the discourse of the Campolo/Wallis types as well.... Piper's case, I'm not sure he can be quite so easily pigeon-holed and dismissed as predictably right wing. (e.g. he's been prepared over the years to lose friends within the conservative evangelical constituency on issues like race and gun laws, and I don't remember him being a flag-waver for the 'War on Terror' or the invasion of Iraq).

Michael Jensen at 11:58 on 18 May
The reason it is a bit late to be prophetic on torture is that the government - at the highest level - has been telling porky pies!!! Torture is ALWAYS like this - especially in democracies. It is a secret evil. So when IS the right time to speak out on it?

David Starling at 12:15 on 18 May
Sorry - I think our comments crossed...So this really is the last comment from me. I agree that it's never the wrong time to speak out on torture. All I was saying was that it's no longer 'prophetic' to speak out on that issue. Thankfully, the torture issue is one on which we now have the luxury of swimming with the tide of (majority) public opinion and holding the Obama administration to account for the transparency and consistency with which they follow through on their pre-election rhetoric. That's not necessarily an easy task, bit I'm not sure it's 'prophetic' (in the popular sense of the word).... Unless I'm missing something?

Michael Jensen at 12:48 on 18 May
Well, I dunno about public opinion. You can see that Cheney's arguments are persuasive with a lot of people: the requirement for national security trumps over even the most basic sort of respect for human dignity...the ends is still justifying the means.The thing is - we shouldn't imagine that this is an end to torture. We have known about the use and practice of torture for many years - and that democracies, despite their self-congratulatory rhetoric, continue to practice it anyway.

Con Campbell on Union with Christ

Con Campbell on Union with Christ

Two must-reads

You just have to read Oliver O'Donovan's lecture on the Authority of Scripture, which riffs on The Jerusalem Declaration - including this:

'We shall be obedient to Scripture to the extent that we have learned and acted upon what Scripture has said of them. But Scripture does not provide us with the concrete act itself, which we must perform right now. Devising that act is precisely what practical thought does, and devising it faithfully to the norm is what obedience is all about....Obedience is never predetermined, it has always be thought through and sought after.'

I was also taken by this 'Theological Vision for Ministry' published by the Gospel Coalition. Their confessional statement is rather dull: but this 'vision' actually takes it all somewhere, addressing (among other things) epistemological and hermeneutical issues with an honesty and self-awareness rarely seen. It is still a creature of the American context, however...

Oh, and I killed a baby, by the way...

The Christian Life – a sketch for a lecture series

Thesis: The Christian life consists of acts that are a response to the new identity given to human beings by the Father, in Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit, performed in the world, in expectation of the renewal and judgment of all things.

Faith – the ground of the Christian life
1. hearing
2. testifying
3. watching
4. waiting

Prayer – the words of the Christian life
5. praising
6. confessing
7. thanksgiving
8. asking

Obedience – the works of the Christian life
9. leaving
10. living
11. loving
12. suffering

How to read theology - a guide for the perplexed

Let's face it - not everyone's a natural reader. Not everybody finds reading an easy or pleasurable task. And reading theology is not an exception.

In fact things may be worse. For one thing, even though the subject matter is glorious, writers of theology are not necessarily good writers. It is often translated from Latin or German. And it is also the case that, like its cousin philosophy, theological writing can be highly abstract, deploying a specialised vocabulary, and requiring the reader to juggle several mental items at once.

So: here's some help.

1 - Orient yourself to the writer and his or her work by using Wikipedia. It is not definitive, but it is very useful as an introduction.

2 - Ask 'what is the purpose or occassion of the work?' And 'who was this written to convince?' Much of the best theology is written out of controversy, or to suit the historical occassion. We need to know how important Pelagius was for Augustine, for example.

3 - Now - you want the potted version. So: look for where in the work the author summarises what they are trying to say. With a more modern work, find online reviews of the work that boil it down to a couple of paragraphs. This is not a substitute for reading of course!

4 - Try to get a sense of the outline of the argument or the structure of the work. Flip forward to passages that might stand out as offering this help - to headings, conclusion and introductions.

5 - Check the indexes. You get a really good sense of what is most important for an author this way - and you might be guided to some purple passages.

6 - Have to hand a work like Grenz's Dictionary of Theological Terms or McGrath's Christian Theology An Introduction, and don't be afraid to pause and clarify in your own mind what you don't get.

7 - Use a pencil and write all over the text. Go on! This helps with memory and with re-reading. And you have to decide what is important in the text. It is less effort than making summaries but increases your attentiveness.

8 - Join a reading group that is committed. There's nothing better than helping each other at the level of comprehension. Don't be afraid to invite an expert to share every now and then.

Addendum: 9 - you have to learn to read with your ears. That is, reading anything, not leasts theology, is about hearing the author's own distinctive voice. This isn't just a matter of their style: it is about picking up the shape of their thought, their favourite expressions, and the habits of their mind.

This Present Age?

I trotted off the following piece just before Easter. It was an attempt to subvert the usual process of public theology a bit, given that the appeal to the usual authorities doesn't seem to work. My hunch is, that given the choice, the inert masses will actually not choose atheism. Why not goad them into making a choice. The high enrolments in church-run schools I cite as evidence...

Anyhow, when I discussed it with some older, wiser heads, the feeling was that in fact this was a foolish piece to run. I publish it now here in the subjunctive form: here is what I might have written; here is what I might think...or, possibily not as the case may be... Love to have your thoughts.

This present age is an age of such spiritual inertia and cowardice that we don’t even believe in our own unbelief.

We haven’t the courage of our secularist convictions. Churches are still afforded protection by the law. Christian organisations are still exempted from all kinds of discrimination laws and given multi-million dollar tax breaks. Church schools receive government funding. We let Christians hold us to ransom on euthanasia laws and genetic engineering. And yet, most of us never go within coo-ee of the church (unless someone carks it, or gets hitched...).

So passionless are we that we think we can repudiate the Christian church and yet
cling to the bland middle-class morality called Christian ‘values’. This is a morality for the gutless, with its thoughtless (and godless) worship of hard work and the nuclear family. ‘Working families’, and all that guff.

So mindlessly nostalgic are we that we have forgotten to scrape off the sticky residues of Christian belief. In a recent survey published by the Centre for Public Christianity and reported in the Herald it was discovered that 45% of unbelievers still believe that Jesus rose from the dead! If this is really so, why are so many people sleeping in on Sunday mornings when they think that there is another world to prepare for?

Most of us – even the professed atheists among us - still hold to the essentially Christian teaching that human beings are special. But we have no idea why we think it, other than it is convenient. The atheist philosopher John Gray, of the London School of Economics, writes that ‘contemporary atheism is a Christian heresy that differs from earlier heresies chiefly in its intellectual crudity’. An atheistic humanism, he says, is plainly ridiculous. If unbelievers are going to embrace their unbelief, they had better leave such vestiges of Christian faith behind. We are still happy to let Christian churches pick up the slack of our welfare programmes, and let them do a large proportion of our educating and our health services. Are there no secular reasons to be committed to these things? Is it only those with views we consider pre-modern and pre-scientific that believe in community?

And we still want the holidays! We can’t yet rid ourselves of these unnecessary and inconvenient reminders of all that we have left behind us. We have to keep celebrating the death of the Christian saviour and his resurrection because some of us can’t get around to finally affirming that we don’t think it happened. Can’t we at least be consistent?

The unbelief of Australians is better described as non-belief. It has nothing to do with informed opinion. It is just couch-potato stuff, unthinkingly inherited from our parents. It has nothing to do with careful consideration of the claims of the faith we reject, let’s face it. I am sure we can find other more meaningful excuses for a long weekend. How about ‘when you’re dead you’re dead’ Sunday? Or ‘Philip Adams’ Friday?

These are blasphemies against our secular faith. There are in Christianity shocking contradictions of all we hold most dear as a community. We ought to live out the meaning of our unbelieving creed and have done with it all – at least for consistency’s sake. We ought to protect our public space from such blather – if that’s what we think it is - and do so with all the vigour we can muster.

Some links to follow

Here's my thoughts on human plasticity.

Mark Thompson has fired up his blogging engines once more and has a bit to say about John Webster and the Trinity.

David Hohne meanwhile gets all spiritual. Well, Jesus does.

Andrew Katay wants to stop hogging the leadership here.

The 10 most pressing issues for evangelical theology today

With a dash of hubris (why not, it's a Monday morning) - here are the issues on which I think evangelicals have some work to do. Not that individual evangelicals don't hold strongly to some of these - it is just that either the 'traditional' view is under challenge, or that there is a lack of consensus among evangelicals. This list is, like all lists, meant to provoke and challenge of course - it is meant (and I hope will be received!) in that spirit.


1 - scripture
How is inerrancy best to be understood and expressed - if indeed it is the most appropriate and useful word to express and uphold the highest possible commitment of the authority of scripture? Can we move beyond the use of the word as line in the sand and actually articulate what we mean by it in the midst of a post-biblical culture? Can evangelicals actually have a mature discussion about this? (I really like what The Gospel Coalition is doing with this, actually)

2 - God
Now that the 'openness of God' distraction has been overcome, there still seems to be a tension between the position known as 'classical theism' and the more 'biblical personalist' position. How are the attributes of God to be addressed, then, by the biblical Christian? Does classical theism help or hinder?

3 - election
Election is always a tough one. Double or single? Have new readings of Paul made a difference to what needs to be said about Israel? What is the purpose of the doctrine of election, dogmatically speaking?

4 - the atonement
Even between those who would agree that penal substitution is an indispensible part of the Bible's teaching on the atonement - what place does it have within the whole scope of the Bible's teaching? How does it relate to other elements?

5 - justification
The debate between Wright and Piper over imputation reveals some faultlines. Imputation seems a necessary corollory of an evangelical testimony to justification by faith. But what are its exegetical foundations? And will 'union with Christ' prove to be a more fruitful model to explain this teaching? (with much good work to come from Moore's own Con Campell)

6 - anthropology

I think theological anthropology is right at the missional cutting edge, and the more thinking evangelicals can do about it the better. That is not to fall prey to the temptation to collapse theology into anthropology, or to get distracted by all kinds of anthropologically interesting byways, but to give a full and rich account of the meaning and purpose of human life lived under the hand of the God who is mindful of man (to steal from Psalm 8).

7 - sin

Sin is a corollory of the doctrine of man... Once again it is a missionally urgent task to give an articulation of sin that is as full-orbed as we can make it. This is one instance where 'biblically faithful' and 'culturally aware' are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The mute incomprehension of our contemporaries as they hear contemporary preachers talk about sin highlights the problem... The answer is not in their hearts of course. The word of God is better than we think it is.

8 - philosophy & theology

Evangelicals seem genuinely undecided about this as a group. Is philosophy good, bad, or indifferent? A friend, or a foe? Is a philosophy-less theology simply naive? or is a philosophy in addition to theology a blasphemy? What have we to say about thinking?

9 - apologetics

A connected issue, then, is that of apologetics. Ought we to do apologetics at all? Many evangelicals have invested very heavily in apologetics. But to what end? Are the models of apologetics - evidentialist, presuppositionalist (does anyone actually understand what the heck presuppositionalist apologists are saying?) - enough for the needs of the day?

10 - church
Evangelicals have always prided themselves on being ecclesiology-lite. They have achieved far more in terms of ecumenical co-operation than other forms of Christianity as a result. Ecclesiology is secondary. However, there are numerous settings where this needs to be revisited, given the rapid realignment of denominations and the retreat of Christendom. So you see some pretty heavy church-speak from evangelicals these days: the Nine Marks ministry says some pretty particular things ecclesiology-wise. The Federal Vision movement is likewise (though very different) heavy on sacraments and covenant/church talk. This is not an isolated trend.

11 - hermeneutics
I don't mean hermeneutics in the sense of perspectival readings etc, but in the sense of asking the question: what makes the bible a unity? In what does a richly theological reading of Scripture consist? There are some very exciting developments on this front, building on the work of a previous generation - biblical scholars now collaborating with theologians on the matter of scriptural interpretation.

Blasphemy in Australia?

Well, maybe just perhaps...

Freedom and the good

David Bentley Hart writes:

Democracy is not an intrinsic good, after all. Where the moral formation of a people is deficient, the general will malign, or historical circumstance unpropitious, it is quite unamiguously wicked in its results...The only sound premise for a people's self-governance is a culture of common virtue directed towards the one Good. And a society that can no longer conceive of freedom as anything more than limitless choice and uninhibited self-expression must of necessity progessively conclude that al things should be permitted, that all values are relative, that desire fashions its own truth, that there is no such thing as 'nature', that we are our own creatures. The ultimate consequence of a purely libertarian political ethcs, if it could be take to its logical end would be a world in which we would no longer even remember that we should want to choose the good, as we would have learned to deem things good solely because they have been chosen... From 'In the Aftermath', p. 80

Hart puts his finger on something very real for Australian public discourse. The principles of political liberalism do not of themselves promote the good in the citizenry. Freedom is only beneficial when you have a culture of common virtue. Such a culture, if it ever existed (and actually, perhaps it certainly did), is but a distant memory... Moral outrage at pedophilia and Islamic terrorists are what we use to fill the blank space.

Hi everyone, I posted an episode to my podcast, The Common Room. Click this link to check it out: More on what theology is! - Michael

The Green Bible... yes, it's true

I have been receiving the brilliant magazine First Things. This month's edition has an absolutely brilliant piece by Wheaton scholar Alan Jacobs reviewing the freshly minted (sorry) Green Bible. Yes, it's true... contemporary piety has even come to the point of producing a Bible with creation passages printed in green. What a relief, says Jacobs, to discover that God is green, because we know that green must be good. Even the ubiquitous NT Wright has penned an essay for this tome.

But Jacobs makes some terrific theological observations, not the least of which involves the issue of continuity/discontinuity.

Some will argue that the Book of Revelation promises the complete destruction of this world and its replacement by 'a new heaven and a new earth'. I am not inclined to that view; I tend to agree with NT Wright that the vision points to a moment when the new creation is made 'not ex nihilo, but ex vetere, not out of nothing, but out of the old one, the existing one,' just as the resurrected body of Jesus is not a brand-new body but his old one glorified.

Even so, we must face the fact that God's interaction with his creation is not always constructive and restorative but is often shockingly destructive. It is true that the destruction always precedes some kind of renewal, but it is destruction all the same, and while we can come up with comforting scenarios in which we do the same kind of thing - controlled burns in forest management and farming, for instance - it would be best not to allegorize too readily. God loves his creation, but he deals with in ways that, to us, are sometimes indistinguishable from hatred. As he deals with us....

A great rejoinder to the environmental ideology which is coming pretty close to idolatrous... (I am no green-sceptic, by the way!)

Meanwhile, over at Same-same...

My Jerry Springer article gets a mention in the gay media.

It might have been better to keep my big mouth shut?

Ten or Eleven Propositions on Boredom

Over here.

David Bentley Hart on Theology as an academic discipline

This makes me feel so much better... David Bentley Hart points out that theologians should never have holidays, really:

...theology requires a far great scholarly range than does any other humane science. The properly trained Christian theologian, perfectly in command of his materials, should be a proficient linguist, with a mastery of several ancient and modern tongues, should have a complete formation in the subtleties of the whole Christian dogmatic tradition, should possess a considerable knowledge of the texts and arguments produced in every period of the Church, should be a good historian, should be thoroughly trained in philosophy, ancient, medieval and modern, should have a fairly broad grasp of liturgical practice in every culture and age of the Christian world, should (ideally) possess considerable knowedge of literature, music and the plastic arts, should have an intelligent interest in the effects of theological discourse in areas such as law or economics, and so on and so forth. This is not to say that one cannot practice theology without these attainments; but such an education remains the scholarly ideal of the guild...

He's right of course... theology is a meta-discipline in many ways. Very interesting to think about in the light of current debates about theological education.

Katay cranks up

Drum roll please...

This is a great moment! Moore graduate and rector of Ashfield Andrew Katay has begun a new blog called Gold, silver, precious stones... . His chief focus will be the building of churches... about which he has never had a dull thought. The guy has got GOLD to share, so go and make yourself at home over at his blog.

The Common Room episode 2

David Hohne and I have a gasbag about theology and what it is good for:

What is Theology?



We realised afterwards that we forgotted to say that theology is about God... oops.

Charles Taylor and the conditions of secularity

In the opening pages of The Secular Age Charles Taylor outlines something rather interesting about the contemporary shift to a culture of secularity - meaning specifically, an age in which religion has become very much an option.

It goes something like this:

Every society and every person lives with some conception of what human flourishing constitutes, or what a fulfilled life resembles. In religions, the best human living includes aiming at a final goal somewhat beyond ordinary human flourishing. In Christianity, loving and worshipping God is the ultimate end; though of course it is true that God wills human flourishing in Christianity. But, writes Taylor: the believer...is called upon to make a profound inner break with the goals of floursihing in their own case; they are called on, that is, to detach themselves from their own flourishing, to the point of..renunciation of human fulfillment to serve God...

This isn't just masochism (as it might be with the Stoics): for Christians, renunciation is only meaningful if the thing renounced (ie life itself) is worth having in the first place:

God wills ordinary human flourishing, and a great part of what is reported in the Gospels consists in Christ making this possible for the people whose afflictions he heals. The call to renounce doesn't negate the value of flourishing; it is rather a call to centre everything on God, even if it be at the cost of forgoing this unsubstitutable good...

So: flourishing is good, but not the ultimate goal of human life.

What Taylor is describing in his book is a humanism in which there are no final goals beyond human flourishing, 'nor allegiance to anything else beyond this flourishing'. Never before in human history has this 'self-sufficing humanism' become a widely available option. 'A secular age is one in which the eclipse of all goals beyond human flourishing becomes conceivable; or better, it falls within the range of an imaginable life for masses of people'.

This is an entirely new context: there is now no naive acknowledgement of the transcendent, or of goals that go beyond ordinary human flourishing. 'Naivete' says Taylor 'is now unavailable to anyone, believer, or unbeliever alike.'

The implications of what Taylor is saying for Christian missions are enormous. We live in a completely new context of believing/unbelieving. Arguably, in Australia this has been a development only since the 1960s! The is no precedent (if Taylor is right) for missions to a society in which, en masse, people do not see belief in some transcedent other as a necessity. Believing is entirely contigent for Mr and Mrs Average living in their cul-de-sac in the suburbs. The temptation of course will be to cast Christianity entirely in terms of human flourishing - and there are left and right-wing versions of this...

A good place to doubt

Reading of AN Wilson's recent conversion back to Christianity, this thought strikes me: Christianity is a better place to doubt from than atheism.

Wilson described how little by little he began to doubt the certainties of atheism: could they really be so convinced that they were as right as they pretended? Is materialism - which keeps proclaiming its own superior intelligence with the volume turned up to 11 - really as intelligent as it thinks it is? Can it really provide a credible basis for believing in the dignity of human beings AND also being sceptical of their inherent disposition to goodness? Does it really provide the complete explanation of things, as it promises? Isn't there a problem of evil for the atheist too - that there is no reason to use the term 'evil' at all?

Orthodox Christian belief doesn't pretend to offer comprehensive knowledge - of the world or of God. It asks us to believe in things we haven't seen, and to hope against hope that suffering and evil do not have the final word. Its biggest claim is that we now 'see in part'. The Bible itself is frustratingly reticent on questions of freedom and destiny, evil and suffering - though not silent. Not all the tangles are straightened, not all the discords resolved. It offers us witness, but not proof in the final, scientific sense.

And its great characters are doubters. Abraham, whose belief in the promises of God was the merest thread at times; Moses, who argued and pleaded with God; David, who sank in his own sins, and who as the Psalmist wrestled with God's apparent absence; Peter, who sank beneath the waves and betrayed the Lord. Even Jesus in Gethesemane does not appear as a superman of faith- but rather as a man in the grip of real existential terror. The cry of dereliction - though not his only word from the cross - is a cry of 'believing doubt', or 'doubting belief'. Believing doubt: I am thinking too of the words of the man in Mark 9:24: 'Lord I believe! Help my unbelief!'

We misrepresent Christianity if we present it an answer to all questions, or a solution to all problems. I have said this before, of course. Fundamentalism tries to make of Christianity an alternative to materialist atheism: an answer for everything. But it has to read the Bible as badly as the atheists do to get there. Liberalism, for its part, pretends to a kind of believing unbelief, but is really just a failure of nerve. It sits somewhere in the middle, neither believing, or sufficiently doubting.

Rather, biblical and orthodox Christianity keeps nagging away at us, challenging our human pride and upsetting our self-made securities. It turns us always to the twin wonders of a crucified messiah and an empty tomb... It gives us confidence, just enough, to live in the turbulence of the world.

AN Wilson returns to Christianity

Famous atheist A.N. Wilson has decided to become a Christian once more. See here and here. Extraordinary. And he always was an annoyingly good writer...

Here's some highlights:

Read Pastor Bonhoeffer’s book Ethics, and ask yourself what sort of mad world is created by those who think that ethics are a purely human construct. Think of Bonhoeffer’s serenity before he was hanged, even though he was in love and had everything to look forward to.

See, that's one for the martyrs...

... the real category mistake made by atheists is not about God, but about human beings. Turn to the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge – “Read the first chapter of Genesis without prejudice and you will be convinced at once . . . ‘The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life’.” And then Coleridge adds: “‘And man became a living soul.’ Materialism will never explain those last words.”

On Easter:

Easter does not answer such questions by clever-clever logic. Nor is it irrational. On the contrary, it meets our reason and our hearts together, for it addresses the whole person.
In the past, I have questioned its veracity and suggested that it should not be taken literally. But the more I read the Easter story, the better it seems to fit and apply to the human condition. That, too, is why I now believe in it.
Easter confronts us with a historical event set in time. We are faced with a story of an empty tomb, of a small group of men and women who were at one stage hiding for their lives and at the next were brave enough to face the full judicial persecution of the Roman Empire and proclaim their belief in a risen Christ.

Title for new e-journal?

Ok, you heard it here first... or maybe second. But anyways, I am in the process of setting up a quarterly e-journal for the purpose of 'showcasing' Moore College students excellent work in the fields of Theology, Church History and Ethics.

The idea would be that students submit for publication their revisions of their essay work (it has to have scored an HD level mark in the first instance). I/we would then select four pieces for uploading as PDFs each quarter. I wouldn't expect the revisions to make the work more palatable for a general readership, though the writing could be made more clear in the revision process. The purpose is to have some great academic work available on line. Other institutions like TEDS and Princeton and Regents do something similar.

ANYHOW: we need a name. I am leaning away from the Greek/Latin name idea, but I can be convinced.

Here are some suggestions:

Alignment/s (ie, Alignments, or Alignment)
Refinements
reSubmit
Mortar
Sentientes
Mindsets

got any others?

Test Podcast

Just a test.

The state of education... hmm...

Something has changed in our educational culture. When I say 'our', I suspect that this is true of most Western countries, but since what I am going to say is anecdotal and observational, I restrict myself to those systems with which I have some experience, namely, Australia and the UK. Some of these changes are undoubtedly for the better, or inevitable because of technological advances, so this is not a 'grumpy old man' list!

I am finding it hard to nail down, so this post is a necessarily inadequate attempt. I am hoping for responses which deepen this. So, here goes:

1. There seems to be a far greater expectation that educators are 'service-providers' and students (and, where relevant, their parents) are 'clients'. The economic paradigm is corrupting at almost every level - though it is understandable given the huge price of education.
2. Whereas in the past, students had to find their own articles and materials, and make their own way in attempting assignments, today there is an expectation that a task will be clearly spelt out with accompanying notes, and that specific articles will be provided direct to the student. Research in the library seems almost redundant.
3. Knowledge of 'learning styles' has led to great student/parent awareness of teachers not addressing the different learning styles. On occassion, students even refuse to learn if their 'learning style' is not catered to!
4. Teachers at secondary and tertiary level are weighed down with administration and reporting.
5. There has been a strong reaction against exams as a form of assessment. The advantage of exams is that they are the least labour-intensive form of assessment from the point of view of teachers - meaning they are free to care for students in other ways.
6. Vocational training has almost completely triumphed over the old, humanist-style (and Christian-endorsed) broad-based education in subjects which cannot be justified by appeal to 'relevance'. Like Latin, for example. Knowledge is almost never now seen as an end in itself. The complete victory of pragmatism?
7. The postmodern to turn to perspectival approaches to texts means that students no longer develop basic skills in interpretation and exegesis of texts in their own language. Year 12 students are taught how to give a Foucauldian reading of a website, but not how to read it. (And hey, I like some things about postmodernism!) They are equipped with suspicion, and not naivety: and I think the latter is essential for good reading. The former only gets in the way.
8. History is bunk, as far as contemporary education goes.
9. We don't put up with people who are bad teachers (on the face of it) but great thinkers. And yet some of the best educational experiences happen with such people.
10. The emphasis in high school on a final, standardised test/assessment has led to the dumbening down of educational standards, because of the need to compare apples with oranges. It also leads to very assessment-stressed students at tertiary level. Anxiety about assessment is palpable.
11. Memorisation of anything is now just not done.

Any more?

Stuff I have been up to...

I am sorry that there hasn't been much blogging of substance of late. No excuses, excuses are boring.

However, I haven't been idle.

I have been preaching some, at All Saints Petersham. I have been trying to do evangelistic sermons from the Sermon on the Mount.

Here's How to be really happy ;
and How to have a worry free life.
And How to get what you really need.

I have also been reading: David Malouf's new novel Ransom. I think Malouf is one of the best writers about the world of men that there is. This novel is pretty much the best thing I have read from him. His novels sometimes become rather twee: but not this one. Not for a second.
I have also been reading Steve Volz's A Fraction of the Whole. A sprawling comic epic of outlaws set in Australia. Marilynne Robinson's essays in The Death of Adam are amazing - including a stout defence of John Calvin from the usual Weberian cliches.

More to come: I am thinking about education, and more about Charles Taylor....

YOU on YOUTUBE!

YOU: An interview on the Radio

Listen here.

And go ahead and buy it here!

Jesus is the question to all our answers

Moore College students have been hard at it this week, coming out of their classrooms and into the community to talk to people about the Lord Jesus Christ.

You might have noticed the mission-related posts from the student bloggers on my blogroll...such as this one, this funny one, this one, this one (from the team I am with), and this one. Oh, and this one.

Actually it was at Dan's blog that I heard the story of the student who accidentally said to a classroom of teenagers 'Jesus the problem to all our solutions!'

The more I think about it, the more I think this is a piece of accidental genius. It is a far better and I reckon far more biblical way to preach the gospel I think! Jesus is the question to all our answers! What do you think?

Torture doesn't work

In a brilliant essay in the New York Review of Books, Mark Danner writes:

'The use of torture deprives the society whose laws have been so egregiously violated of the possibility of rendering justice. Torture destroys justice. Torture in effect relinquishes this sacred right in exchange for speculative benefits whose value is, at the least, much disputed'.

And yet, it appears, the US and its allies have been engaged in what can only be described as a regime of torture against its enemies in the last few years. Now, I am not particularly sorry for the terrorists on whom it was practiced. But, as Danner says:

'by choosing to torture, we freely chose to become the caricature they made of us'...

Luther’s Moral Theology

The accusation was from the first pressed against Luther's theological system that it was antinomian. If the individual was to be justified by faith and not by the merits of works, then what motivation could there be for good behaviour? This accusation lead Luther to write extensively on the issue – most particularly in his Treatise on Good Works (1520). Luther was concerned to show how his ethical teaching was not an addition to his theological thought, but actually formed a unity with it.

How would Luther expound the Ten Commandments, for example? If Law and Gospel were opposed, did the Law have anything to offer the Christian believer? Luther did not want to read the Decalogue as a moral code, distinct from ceremonial or civil laws. As he pointed out, no such easy division is possible. God's law is one. All the commandments derive from the first commandment. As he said: 'the first commandment contains in itself all the other commandments. Whoever keeps it, keeps them all, and who does not keep it, neither keeps them, for his heart clings to something other than God alone.' That is: only faith can keep the fulfil the first command – and thus all the commands.

But, more crucially, Luther would insist that the law was unintelligible unless read christologically. There were two aspects to this christolological conception of the law. Firstly, the Sermon on the Mount shows that external acts are not enough to fulfil the law if inner motives are not themselves righteous. Second, there is an exposition of the law as positive commands rather than merely prohibitions.

Luther was to insist that there was no two-tier level of performance in the Christian life – works of supererogation were not taught by the gospel. The commandments come to every person as a whole – or no commandment comes at all.

Luther was not as dualistic as usually supposed. While in soteriology he did push the opposition of law and gospel, in his Genesis commentary we find him making a more subtle use of the law. Law is already present in the garden as a means of providing Adam with a way of giving concrete form to his love of God in responsive obedience. The Christian life means dying to the pride and desperation of the external code and rising again to the law in its original sense – 'the law of the spirit of life in Christ' (Rom 8:2).

Neither does Luther's moral theology rest on a dualist anthropology (as many of his interpreters and critics have supposed). In The Freedom of the Christian Luther distinguished between the 'outer and the 'inner' man. By this distinction Luther did not mean to split the individual man in two – and thus bolster make the works (or not) of the outer man an unimportant matter. Rather both concepts refer to the whole individual – the one facing God [coram deo] and the other facing the world [coram mundo]. It is not as if faith belongs to the inner and love to the outer man. Rather, love is in need of being shaped by faith. 'Faith is the 'genetrix', the fertile soil of good will and just action, in that it give a specific shape to love by transforming the affective existence of the beliver, from the 'impious affections' towards the affects of the Spirit' (Bernd Wannenwetsch).

Reviews of YOU: An Introduction

*NEW* Nathan Lee

Brett Hall in Southern Cross

John Hundscheid in The Gadfly (US)

Arthur Davis

Matt Moffitt

Julian Gamble

Mark Barry

David Miers

A couple of things from Mark Meynell

Tim Vasby-Burnie (UK)

Peter Sanlon (UK)

Sam Allberry (UK)

More to come!

A new review of you!

http://nathanjameslee.wordpress.com/2009/03/31/you-an-introduction/

Getting things done

Here's my latest Defence Against the Dark Arts piece:

 

http://www.sydneyanglicans.net/life/culture/the_man_who_gets_things_done/

 

I am trying to apply justification by faith to the modern world…

Luther’s Theology of the Cross

As Luther explains it, there is no other true locus of the knowledge of God than the cross of Christ. And yet, in the cross of Christ God is both at the same time revealed, and paradoxically hidden from view just as he is revealed. Like Moses, the cross only grants a view of God from the rear – a posteriora. God in his revelation is also, strangely, hidden. He is deus absconditus just as he is deus revelatus. This distinction means that 'the holy, unapproachable majesty of God remains even in God's self-disclosure' (Lohse).

McGrath outlines five features of the theology of the cross (theologia crucis):

1. It is a theology of revelation, not speculation. It is not based on the created order as we perceive it. Theologians ought to concern themselves with what God has revealed of himself, and not rely on preconceived understandings of God, which are ultimately idolatrous.
   
2. This revelation is indirect and concealed, even as it is revealed. Sound paradoxical? What Luther is trying to help us to see is that if we expect a direct revelation of the face of God, we will miss the way in which he has revealed himself, unexpectedly and shockingly, in the passion and cross of Christ. Faith is required to see that in the humility and shame of the cross is God's great power and glory.
   
3. God is not found in intelligent reflection on the nature of our moral being or the order of creation. True theology can only be found in Christ crucified. The cross shatters human reason's pride.
   
4. Knowledge of the God who is hidden in his revelation is by faith only.
   Only faith can see the cross as revelation of God. This is what Jesus taught his disciples, who sought a theology of glory – see, for example, Philip in John 14:8. This theology of glory bypasses the cross!
   
5. God makes himself known through suffering – primarily of course that suffering which is Christ's. But also, suffering and temptation are the way in which God acts to bring human beings to himself. In fact, he needs to humiliate us before we may be justified. 'God assaults man in order to break him down and thus to justify him' (McGrath). Both law and gospel are necessary to each other. This breaking down – the experience of Anfechtung - is a work that alien to God in order that the work that belongs most to his nature.
   

The theology of the cross can be regarded both as the substantive and the methodological principle in Luther's theology – and its impact is felt on all his theological work.

It meant for example a radical recasting of the nature of theological language. To simply somewhat - throughout the middle ages, it was held that 'the righteousness of God' was analogous to 'justice', as we understand it and encounter it in the world. The justice of God was to be understood after the pattern of, or in continuity with, the justice of man. But under the account Luther gives of the theologia crucis, this is no longer possible. For him, all theological talk must be related to the word of the cross. 'The cross is the test of everything' – crux probat omnia. It means that human theological intuitions are always suspect. The cross breaks down our preconceptions regarding everything about God – and, if we see with the eyes of faith, rebuilds them.

And that is the heart of justification. The individual finds himself under the judgement of God, with nowhere to turn, exposed terribly to his wrath. The only place to flee for safety from God's wrath – is to God! And there he finds the mercy that lies hidden under the terrible wrath. Christ the crucified one, who suffered on our behalf, became sin for us in order that his righteousness might become our righteousness.

Faith is really the only means by which the true significance of the cross can be perceived – faith alone. Faith is hearing the word of promise; and it is also the special bond that unites the believer with Christ – which means that the great exchange of Christ's righteousness for our wickedness is far more than a merely externalised transaction.

For Luther, then, the Christian life is lived in the middle of a tension between faith and experience. Our experience only serves to contradict our faith. This was something Luther expounded when he thought that he might be martyred. Where was God in this? Luther used the word Anfechtung – 'temptation', or 'assault' – to describe this experience. The devil, the world and death are allied in a war against man. But of course, it is a work of God too, to reduce man to utter reliance on him and him alone. The only way to grow in the Christian life is to return to the foot of the cross and start all over again.

To my alarm

To my alarm, it has come to my attention more than once that some readers think that in this post from last month, 'Missiological Assumptions', I was urging clergy everywhere to don their collars and dress up in their flowing white robes!

I was not.

I think a straight reading of the post will reveal that my intentions were quite otherwise: I was merely questioning some of the discourse that I have heard used to justify changes in church practices over the years, and also asking whether we really are as flexible as we think we are. It was somewhat of a thought experiment - and a useful one I feel.

Furthermore, in the discussion that followed a variety of views were expressed. Some people made my point more intensely than I had, I think, or pushed it further than I had done. The discussion was vigorous, but polite and thoughtful too.

A few points:

1) a blog post is not a definitive declaration of one's deepest convictions.
2) the owner of the blog ought not to be judged by the opinions of the commenters.
3) good missiology helps us to revisit our assumptions, doesn't it?

Piper on worship, emotion and so on.

I just went back to Piper's book Desiring God - Meditations of Christian Hedonist. This is Calvinism in the tradition of Jonathan Edwards, make no mistake. And it is full of purple passages about the emotions or affections that seem to ring true:

Where feelings for God are dead, worship is dead...
True worship must include inward feelings that reflect the worth of God's glory.

These are strong statements - but surely right! Piper says that the right affections give authenticity to the external acts of worship, performed as they are by the will. He turns to the Psalms, especially as they give expression to a genuine brokenness and contrition on the one hand, and to the hearts right desire for God himself on the other.

Review of YOU

http://allberry.blogspot.com/2009/03/getting-to-know-you.html

Moore Blogs

I have had a go at aggregating as many Moore College student and faculty blogs as I can, and you can see them over right on my blog list. I think they give a fascinating insight into Moore College life and its joys and trials. There is some quality theological discussion and some very funny stuff. There is also stuff about food, about living in Newtown, and about hobbies, like craft.

To those student and faculty bloggers - the challenge to you is to keep your blog ticking over at least!

I am also starting a select Moore graduates list - so if you are a Moore graduate and blogger, send me your url!

Wisdom of God at Him

A series on The Wisdom of God begins today at 'HIM: An Introduction'.

Luther on the Lord's Supper

In response to some discussion in class on Tuesday about Luther's view of the Lord's Supper.

It might be worth citing from the Smaller Catechism:

VI. The Sacrament of the Altar
As the head of the family should teach it in a simple way to his household.
What is the Sacrament of the Altar?
It is the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, under the bread and wine, for us Christians to eat and to drink, instituted by Christ Himself.
Where is this written?
The holy Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and St. Paul, write thus:
Our Lord Jesus Christ, the same night in which He was betrayed, took bread: and when He had given thanks, He brake it, and gave it to His disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is My body, which is given for you. This do in remembrance of Me.
After the same manner also He took the cup, when He had supped, gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Take, drink ye all of it. This cup is the new testament in My blood, which is shed for you for the remission of sins. This do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of Me.
What is the benefit of such eating and drinking?
That is shown us in these words: Given, and shed for you, for the remission of sins; namely, that in the Sacrament forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation are given us through these words. For where there is forgiveness of sins, there is also life and salvation.
How can bodily eating and drinking do such great things?
It is not the eating and drinking, indeed, that does them, but the words which stand here, namely: Given, and shed for you, for the remission of sins. Which words are, beside the bodily eating and drinking, as the chief thing in the Sacrament; and he that believes these words has what they say and express, namely, the forgiveness of sins.
Who, then, receives such Sacrament worthily?
Fasting and bodily preparation is, indeed, a fine outward training; but he is truly worthy and well prepared who has faith in these words: Given, and shed for you, for the remission of sins.But he that does not believe these words, or doubts, is unworthy and unfit; for the words 'For you' require altogether believing hearts.

Luther had made a strong attack on the Catholic understanding of the sacraments in The Babylonian Captivity of the Church. He was appalled by the pratice of communion in one kind, which he viewed as unscriptural. The doctrine of transubstantion was an absurd - an attempt to explain a mystery. To know that Christ is present - isn't that enough? Furthermore, the idea that the priest made a sacrifice on our behalf was equally unscriptural. Sacraments were for the nourishment and growth in faith of the people of God, not for accruing merit.

But Luther held onto the view that bread and wine really did become the body and blood of Christ. He did so not because it was traditional, but because it was (as he saw it) scriptural. This IS my body! The principle of the clarity of scripture seemed to be at stake here.

The controversy between the Reformers over this matter dominated the late 1520s. For Luther, the Word of God and the sacrament were inseparably linked. Both serve to mediate the power and presence of Christ. The sacraments, just like the word, could generate and support saving faith.

Furthermore, Luther asserted that Christ was 'ubiquitous': that is, the ascension of Christ 'to the right hand of God' did not mean that his presence was limited by space or time. Thus, he could be present in the sacrament in a saving way.

Schleiermacher, Newman, Warfield

In our Shapers of Contemporary Protestant Theology course here at Moore we have been reading sections from Schleiermacher, Newman and now Warfield. It is quite interesting to see the lines of concern and thought criss-cross in surprising ways. Having read Newman on the development of Christian doctrine, it is fascinating to see Warfield appealing to some of the same criteria in trying to defend the plenary verbal inspiration of Scripture. This doctrine, he argues, is early, ubiquitous and persistent.

Warfield claims:

Despite these attempts to introduce lowered conceptions, the doctrine of the plenary inpsiration of the Scriptures, which looks upon them as an oracular book, in all its parts and elements, alike, of God, trustworthy in all its affirmations of every kind, remains to-day, as it has always been, the vital faith of the people of God, and the formal teaching of the organized church.

Newman might have agreed with this as a method, if not an affirmation. The doctrine, he says, is not merely a matter of form alone, but is a necessary preservative of the lively faith of the church.

Of course it is in the role of the church that they will differ. Newman appeals to the need for an authorised interpretive magisterium and the providential care of God. Warfield will put the church - and he DOES have an ecclesiological concern - is the role of a hearing, listening and obeying church, the church that recognises rather than authorises the authority of scripture....

Teach us to pray?

The trouble with most evangelistic courses or programmes is that they focus on imparting information. That isn't bad in itself - and the ones like 'Simply Christianity' which introduce you to a text of the Bible and to the person of Jesus, which is great.

However, I wonder if it would be possible to construct an evangelistic course around the idea of teaching people to pray.

The basis for this idea is firstly that people think of themselves as 'spiritual', and like the idea of praying, but have no idea how one might do this - 'in the Christian/Anglican tradition'. Secondly, it is less confronting than an out and out 'investigating Christianity' course. But, thirdly, you can't explain Christian prayer without explaining the gospel. That is, Christian prayer is very much shaped by the nature of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. You can't avoid talking about topics like forgiveness and confession of sin and God's soveriegnty and his Father-heart - topics that bring you into the gospel itself.

And while you might focus on some specific practices that have helped Christians pray - kneeling, praying over Scripture, some famous Christian prayers - you would also try to subvert the idea that Christian prayer is a technique, or a means of somehow accruing greater religiosity. Christian prayer is specifically not about grandiloquent words, or about goading God into action. You could very usefully talk about prayer in other faiths as a way of doing comparative religion in a gentle way, as well.

Of course, the Sermon on Mount would be a key text. But Paul's prayers prare so attractive that it would be great to show them to non-Christians...

Is it a go-er?

Propositions on Emotions and the Christian life - a preliminary sketch?

1 - To apprehend God in Christ requires/produces an emotional response - reverent fear! 1 Peter 2:17 (and many other NT references as well). It is a response it is appropriate to command, even. 'Requires' in this sense is not a pre-condition of justification.

2. There is also an expectation of joy - an emotion that is often linked to the Holy Spirit. 1 Thess 1:6, Gal 5:22.

3 - It strikes me that we distinguish falsely if we separate the emotions from reason/rationality. The emotions are an epistemological or apprehensional tool as much as the mind is. And, if we fear that a speaker may manipulate the emotions, how much more ought we to fear that a speaker may manipulate us by using rational argument? Impeccable logic can lead to absurd conclusions, indeed. We ought not to avoid or downplay the emotions because the mind is more trustworthy, surely...

Nostalgia

Here's my article having a go at nostalgia.... a malignant cultural tendency?

How near?

Despite the great gulf between human beings and God being crossed in Christ - a crossing that we can truly call, with the New Testament, reconciliation - despite that, there is no sense in which the holiness of God collapses into the ordinary. God remains in his godness God - the incarnation and the atonement don't change this. We are purified and brought into his presence, inhabited by the Holy Spirit and granted a place in the divine fellowship (2 Pet 1:4) -but though the matter of sin has been dealt with, our union with God does not mean that the creature is no longer a creature and the divine no longer divine. God's holiness is still awe-inspiring. (I don't quite want to be the Orthodox doctrine of theosis, here, if it means the divine-human is collapsed. I think there can be union, and reconciliation, but it is without loss of the transcedent.)

We can see this from the prominence given to the idea of 'reverent fear' in the NT as an absolutely appropriate emotional response to an encounter with God - even for those who have been reconciled with God. The people of God are both confident to walk into the heavenly throne room and trembling at the prospect.

Take Hebrews 12:28-29, for example

28 Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us give thanks, by which we offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe; 29 for indeed our God is a consuming fire.

The people of God know better than anyone that God is to be truly and deeply revered. God is not in anyway tamed by the incarnation.

Will this be the case in the eschaton? I think so - God is visibly near, but not even then visible, no?

Over at HIM

At Him: An Introduction I have started a series entitled Is God Laughing?

A penny for your thoughts.

Is it possible to please God?

Is it possible to please God? I raise the question because I suspect the common answer to be 'no'. Indeed, I read of someone saying recently '“I think a lot of people have the misunderstanding that going to church is going to please God by virtue of our activity.”

I think what the speaker was trying to avoid is the possibility that people think they are gaining justification by coming to church - that somehow church going is a work that enables sufficient merit to be accrued in order that God smiles upon it. But there are a great number of scriptures which teach precisely that Christians are able to please God. Indeed, this is one of the great freedoms of the Christian life. And, what is more, they can please God when they gather together to praise him.

Of the passages in the NT which talk about pleasing God, two stand out. Firstly, Romans 8:6-9:

6 To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. 7 For this reason the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God's law-- indeed it cannot, 8 and those who are in the flesh cannot please God. 9 But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him.

Now, there is only a negative here from which the positive is implied: the mind to which the Spirit is given, and the individual in whom the Spirit of Christ dwells can indeed please God. Is this just on account of Jesus's righteousness vicariously applied to us? Is there an imputed pleasing of God (as we can assume an imputed righteousness by which we are justified?) Was is not Jesus with whom God was 'well pleased', after all? Well all that is true, and the prior action of God in the spirit is assumed here; but it is also true that the context (see Romans 6 and 7) is talking about the wrestle to offer the members of the body to God as weapons of righteousness. The fleshly man of Romans 7 cannot please God, certainly; the spiritual man of Romans 8 apparently can, in the power of the Spirit. Paul will go in Romans 14:18 to speak of the one who serves Christ being pleasing to God...

The second text is Hebrews 13:15-16

15 Through him, then, let us continually offer a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that confess his name. 16 Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.

Here, the Christian is called on to offer sacrifices that are pleasing to God! Not cultic sacrifices. Not atoning sacrifices - but then, the OT sacrifices werent all atoning sacrifices either. But still - here are acts of sharing and praising - which we do when we meet together, in which God delights...

My piece on the financial crisis

... is here.

Thanks to Laurence, Justin, and Bruce for their help at various times.

In praise of difficult children

Adam Phillips has a brilliant piece in the latest London Review of Books about difficult children! He asks 'When you play truant you have a better time. But how do you know what a better time is, of how do you leanr what a better time is?'

He argues that you have to be bad in order to discover what good is - a kind of self discovery through sin. Adults who look after adolescents are in the vexatious position of wanting them to behave badly, so that they can learn, and of wanting to stop them. In order to do this we need to have 'traunt minds' - to see the value of the experiment, the experience and the trespass. The adolescent is 'the person who needs to experiment with self-betrayal, to find out what it might be to betray oneself.'

If a child is never really difficult, then, or is difficult and has adults who just cave in, he never really grows into adulthood, because he never finds the limits. And he always envies the adolescent his freedom to tresspass...

Phillips makes an intriguing reference to Romans 7 in which Paul noted the function of the law was to increase the trespass. The rules are an invitation to find out what sort of person you are... only for Paul of course (and Phillips misses this) the transgression of the rules actually 'unself' him. They don't lead to his self-discovery at all; or, they do, and it is a complete mess. Which means that true self-discovery is the realisation that grace is needed...

Missiological assumptions?

Born in 1970, I am a post prayer-book Anglican. That is, I grew up in the era when formal liturgies and distinctive clergy dress were become a sign of the moribund and alien past. The outsider (so the argument ran) was alienated by such things, which were at best mysterious and at worst signs of a theology we wanted to repudiate. Formality in and of itself was part of everything that was wrong with the church of the 1960s which so many people had decided to...well, not attend.

When I was a Chaplain at the Cathedral school, following this logic, and with 90% of the kids unchurched, I moved school chapel services out of the Cathedral building itself and into the hall next door. I very rarely wore my collar. The services were informal, the music contemporary and the prayers spontaneous. The Christian students were especially supportive of this, because it was like the churches they went to. Surely the non-Christians would love it too...

But one day, one of the unchurched kids came to me and said 'look, why are you trying so hard to be like our culture? Surely the best thing you have going for you is your difference. The old thing is the thing you do best - that makes sense to me. And I can't stand your contemporary Christian songs'. (well that was the gist of it...)

Here's the thesis I am running, anyhow: The reason we eschewed formality in church services was because that was what WE on the inside wanted (or some of us, anyway) - the missiological reason was in fact only a justification for it.

There were some mistaken, or at least challengeable, assumptions here -

1 - that the outsiders prefered us to look like TV shows, and not like 'church' as they knew it
2 - that familiarity is always good, dissimilarity is always bad
3 - that formality equals insincerity and pomposity (it certainly can do, but not always)
4 - that formality equals impersonal, bumbling and ineffectual
5 - that church meetings/services should be attractional (as opposed to church communities)
6 - that a prayerbook service with a robed clergyman will be understood by an outsider as a sign of Tridentine catholic theology of the priesthood and sacraments

So - what's the evidence?

Top Theological Research Centres?

A colleague wrote:

I need a list of the top theological libraries / research centres in the world. This does NOT refer to the building but to the collection and resources and facilities for research.

I would appreciate it if, just off the top of your head, you would list what you understand to be the best 10 in the world. No need to try and put them in order of importance, just a list. You do not need to try and justify the selection as all I need now is a list of possibilities.

I replied (in no particular order):

Oxford
Cambridge
Princeton
Aberdeen
Tubingen
Vatican
Yale
Duke
Durham
Edinburgh
King’s College, London

What would you say? My ignorance of the European scene is quite profound of course...

Upcoming Moore Chapel series

I am planning a three part series for Moore College Chapel on, well, God.

1. The Oneness of God
2. The Glory of God
3. The Wisdom of God

These are putative chapters of HIM: An Introduction.
What texts spring to mind?
What are the implications for us of the oneness, glory and wisdom of God?

Help me out here.

Another YOU review

Peter Sanlon

An interesting one, this.

On Sorry day

Sorry, we really are...

More on Calvin’s Hermeneutics…

...Awareness of the context of our reading allows us also to undermine the apparent dominance of the historical-critical approach. If contemporary interpreters must be aware of the way in which the intellectual and political context shaped Calvin's reading of scripture, then we must also be aware of the way in which intellectual and political history shaped historical-critical readings – and indeed, shape ours. These intellectual decisions about the meaning and nature of history were no less determined by historical context and cultural forces than in Calvin's time, and in ours. This is not to reduce ideas to their historical contexts, or so utterly to historicize them as to empty them entirely. But the point has particular force given the claims to objectivity and universality that attend historical-critical scholarship. The apparent threat to the unity and historicity of the Bible is itself not above proper contextualisation.

The proof of the pudding is in the discovery that its ingredients taste good in combination. Is Calvin's exegesis, which treats Scripture as a unity, but does not ignore the human differences between authors, convincing? Is it rash or speculative? Having taken a Pascalian wager on the unity of Scripture, it is readily apparent that the coherences and correspondences between its different parts proceed to flow. Calvin's exegesis is a reminder that the unity of Scripture is a theological discernment in the first instance, and only secondarily a literary one; but that we need not suppose that the diversity and plurality of the human voices of scripture threaten it. On a literary or textual level, Scripture may indeed present us with a number of valid and Christological ways of conceiving of its own unity. Calvin's lesson for modern interpreters, which Krauss notes well, is that the presumption that Scripture is unified remains for us the basis on which theological interpretation of Scripture may proceed.

HIM continues

Don't forget to help me out at:

http://himanintroduction.blogspot.com/

I'd love to have your thoughts. Vent your spleen if you like!

My article at ABC online - for Valentine's Day!

LOVE, THE LAST GOD STANDING?

Latest Defence Against the Dark Arts entry

Is Postmodernism Passe?

Rudd in the Monthly

I have just finished Aussie PM Kevin Rudd's essay on the financial crisis in The Monthly. In it, he mounts a strident attack on 'free-market fundamentalism' which he blames for our current woes - positioning himself as a pragmatic 'social democrat' in the meantime. It is interesting to see such an ideological turn from an Aussie politician - usually we steer clear of that stuff. It is a rather turgid read I have to say - but he lays the challenge out there to neo-liberals: how has your ideology done anything but expose us to this terrible danger?

I have never been fully persuaded that by the small govt mantra of the neo-liberal/Reaganite. I can understand some apects of it, but my theological appraisal of human nature (that we are unusually evil AND stupid) means that I don't trust the free market to produce just outcomes anymore than I trust government not to become corrupt and self-serving. Neo-liberalism has its own utopian vision - a dream of unfettered market forces aligning to produce prosperity and security for all. This is just as dangerous as the utopian vision of the socialist of course, with a completely planned and fixed economy. The trouble with neo-liberalism is that it hopes that a human vice - namely, greed - will produce much virtue.

The Pauline account of the role of the state focuses on justice - the restraint and punishment of the wicked (Rom 13). That is, in its own way, minimal - a 'small' government. Does it square with Rudd's view of the role of the state? -

Government is not the intrinsic evil that neo-liberals have argued it is. Government, properly constituted and properly directed, is for the common good, embracing both individual freedom and fairness, a project designed for the many, not just the few.

Well, I think so: here is a vision for the adminstration of justice - with the government taking its proper role of serving the people and not itself. The state is after all 'God's servant to do you good'. The language of 'fairness' echoes a kind of Rawlsian philosophy of justice, perhaps - and that could be debated, certainly. Rudd here speaks of 'the creative agency of government' - a phrase that could alarm neo-liberals and Reaganites, but which, in the current circumstances is prbably justified.



As Sarkozy says: Le laissez-faire, c'est fini.

Religion

Religion is great experiment to see if the human body can be mastered. It can't.

Defence Against the Dark Arts

I am doing a weekly blogspot now for Sydney Anglicans, called Defence Against the Dark Arts. The title is meant to be ironic-ish, if you hadn't guessed...

Here is my opening post.

I'd love you to comment there - but also, I'd love some feedback as to how the posts are coming out.

What will this mean for The Blogging Parson? I am not sure, but I tend to do 'recreational' blogging here (if you hadn't noticed). Some ideas tried out here will definitely be recycled - but that's a secret!

Five reasons that Calvin was a postmodernist - well not quite

1. Calvin thought author's intentions were not decisive for interpretation, though not irrelevant. You can't understand biblical prophecy if you are wedded to author's intentions! In fact, it was the Enlightenment that was obsessed with origins and psychological states, not the Reformation. The text is to be understood with reference to its self, primarily.
2. Calvin recognised that texts produced a multiplicity of possible meanings depending on context and purpose - because he believed that the text was speaking to us today, and had spoken to people in the past. The text has a tradition of interpretation that is not irrelevant to understanding it.
3. But Calvin's not an allegorist - he believes in history, of which we are a part. He doesn't seek 'eternal spiritual truths' from the text. Rather, he is aware of its time-boundedness. So, NARRATIVE is really important for him
4. He thinks hermeneutics has a context - ie, it serves an interpretative community. 'Who is this for?' is a question that really matters for the interpreter.
5. He was French -so must have been a postmodern!

Calvin’s Hermeneutics Today?

Having offered both an overview of Calvin's hermeneutics and a sample of it in full flight, it is now opportune to return to the questions I posited in the opening section. I asked in what sense it might still be possible for contemporary interpretation of Scripture to trail in Calvin's wake, given the differences between then and now. We live in the aftermath of historical criticism. We have become used, in the last two centuries, to understand 'history' as a reconstruction of the facts in as an objective and disinterested manner as possible. While, like Calvin, we understand the need to trace the causes of events, it is not a matter of connecting analogous events by resort to a doctrine of providence; modern practice has been to scrape away at the evidence, removing the overlayers of interpretation and bias, until the causes of events are laid bare, to be linked in a great chain to other causes and other events. We live, too, on the other side of the era in which the Bible itself has become the subject of academic study, rather than the book of a people of faith – read in the seminar as much as the sanctuary, in the service of that great encyclopaedic vision that built the modern university.

This is where Calvin's pre-critical hermeneutics start to show their value for post-critical interpreters. As we have seen, Calvin approached the Bible believing that it was saying something for the contemporary believer. He was an exegete in the service of the believer and of the church – because he believed that the Bible was speaking to those people today. This was the proper context of biblical interpretation. He was not part of an independent academy, beholden only to the principles of higher learning. It was to believers that the Bible was addressed – and so the interpreter's task was to show how what the ancient text said was now the God's word for the present time. This message was not to be located behind the text, or by dismembering the text; it was not something to which the text referred. It was gleaned from reading the text itself.

The endeavours of historical critics cannot be merely set aside. However, interpretation in the service of the church and its members is never merely an analysis of the text. It is always an exercise of listening to the text. Calvin positions himself as the servant of the text, and not its master. This posture is not an empty rhetorical move, or a false humility on the part of the exegete. It is actually a decisive condition for biblical interpretation if it is to be interpretation of the Bible, and not of some other thing to which the bible is apparently a conduit.

If Calvin was ever aware of the context in which he carried out his biblical interpretation, then we should not be embarrassed as his putative heirs to discover that our context is somewhat different. That is: if in Calvin's day he read the Scriptures as being addressed to the sixteenth century reader, so then might we read the Scriptures as if we are being addressed in our time. How is that different? The believer of the twenty-first century lives in a context in which even belief in God is not at all a given. The 'Secular Age', as Charles Taylor calls it, is in some ways the step-child of Calvin's thought. The task of biblical interpretation now takes place in a context in which its value as a task is very much under question. The authority of Scripture is not taken for granted by our contemporaries, or even those within the churches.

There is then a need for greater awareness of the evangelical heart of the Scriptures. Christology is not sufficient, unless it is understood as a soteriological motif. The motifs of promise and fulfilment, so prominent in Calvin's exposition of the text, need to be understood as propelling the missiological task of the churches of Jesus Christ. Calvin was aware of this of course; but he could not have been aware of the extent to which secularism would roll back Christian belief five centuries after his birth, or of how full the earth would be of people who need to hear the message of the Jesus Christ of the scriptures. Exegesis must not be an intramural activity; and hermeneutics must insist on this. Its sphere of reference cannot be ecclesial only – because the Bible is not merely
addressed to the church, but also to the world.

Reviewing Tom Schreiner's New Testament Theology

I have been asked to write a review of Tom Schreiner's New Testament Theology: Magnifying God in Christ. It is an interesting and well-considered work.



Schreiner wants to argue that the anchoring theme of NT Theology is something like:



God magnifying himself through Jesus Christ by means of the Holy Spirit.



That is, God's concern for God's own glory is the driving heartbeat of the NT witness and mission. His self-referencing self-regard is what perpetuates his plans and his interaction with his creatures.


Of course, accusing this God of narcissism is beside the point: he is God after all. But is this really a true depiction of the Biblical God? Isn't God - the who God who is love - fundamentally other-regarding?

Bird on imputation

Michael Bird's excellent short book 'A Bird's Eye View of Paul' is really a very good piece of work - especially to a non-Pauline-specialist like me. Pauline studies has really suffered from a plethora of disagreeing experts in the last twenty years, which leaves trials of confusion.

One area on which I have felt particular disorientation is that of the imputation of Christ's righteousness. In the teaching of a John Piper, this teaching becomes a crux. But, as NT Wright points out - where is the NT on this subject? Where is it explicitly taught? Even if we decide that imputation is a necessary inference from the theology of the NT, it is surely the case that it can't be as focal as Piper seems to make it.

Anyhow, here's Bird:

...what about the imputation of Christ's righteousness as the basis of justification? That is the notion that God imputes the obedience and merits of Jesus to believers and in turn imputes their sins to Jesus on the cross. Well, the fact of the matter is that we cannot proof-text imputation. If we think we can cite 2 Cor 5:21, Rom 4:1-5, 1 Cor 1:30, Phil 3:6-9 and find the entire package of the imputation of Christ's active obedience and the imputation of our sin to Christ embedded in all of these texts, we are sadly mistaken...

At the level of the text, then, Paul argues that we are justified by union with Christ through what I have called 'incorporated righteousness.' Jesus is justified in his resurrection, and by faith we have union with him so that we share in his justification. Through incorporation into Christ by faith, what is his becomes ours and what is ours becomes his...

The imputation of Christ's righteousness is a necessary and logical inference to make, as it allows us coherently to hold together a number of ideas and concepts in Paul's story of salvation. Although no text explicitly says that Christ's righteousness is imputed to believers, nonetheless, without some kind of theology of imputation a lot of what Paul says about justification does not make sense. Imputation is a synthetic way of holding together a number of themes...

I concur with Leon Morris, who said that imputation is a corollory of the identification of the believer with Christ. (p. 96-8)

Marilynne Robinson on sermons

I have been reading a truly excellent novel, Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson. It is about an old pastor from the mid-west - and so it is a novel imbued with theological thinking and scripture. Anyhow, I found this comment on sermons from an interview with Robinson:

A sermon is a form that yields a certain kind of meaning in the same way that, say, a sonnet is a form that deals with a certain kind of meaning that has to do with putting things in relation to each other, allowing for the fact of complexity reversal, such things. Sermons are, at their best, excursions into difficulty that are addressed to people who come there in order to hear that. The attention of the congregation is a major part of the attention that the pastor gives to his or her utterance. It's very exceptional. I don't know anyone who doesn't enjoy a good sermon. People who are completely nonreligious know a good sermon when they hear one.
One of the reasons that I think that a sermon is a valuable thing now and so impressive when you do hear a good one -- and there is a lot of failure in the attempt; it's a difficult form -- is because it's so seldom true now that you hear people speak under circumstances where they assume they are obliged to speak seriously and in good faith, and the people who hear them are assumed to be listening seriously and in good faith. This is a kind of standard of discourse that is not characteristic of the present moment. I think that it makes a sermon, when it is a good sermon, stand out in anyone's experience.

She also has this to say about 'The Protestant Imagination':

Protestantism, of course, is much more explicitly divided into different traditions -- the Pentecostals, the Anglicans. But there is the main tradition of Protestantism that comes out of the Reformation and that produced people like Kant and Hegel and so on, who are not normally thought of as being people writing in a theological tradition, although Hegel, of course, wrote theology his whole life. I think, frankly, that his PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT is theology, too.When the Reformation became established, one of the things that was a question between Catholicism and the Reformation traditions was whether there was a hierarchy of being. If you look at Thomas Aquinas, for example, you have hierarchies of angels and all the rest of it, and hierarchies even of saints and then subsaints -- people who aren't quite there, that sort of thing. The Reformation rejected all of that and created a new metaphysics, in effect, that is not hierarchical. The idea that the universe itself is physically structured around hierarchy was sort of an integration of earlier science and theology that was made by people like Thomas Aquinas, that was assumed doctrinally in that tradition. The Reformation rejected that model of reality and created a highly individualistic metaphysics in the sense that it located everything normative that can be said about reality in human perception, there being, of course, no other avenue of knowing. There is Scripture, there is conscience, there is perception itself. If you read Calvin, for example, he says, How do we know that we are godlike, in the image of God? Well, look at how brilliant we are. Look how we can solve problems even dreaming, which I think is true, which I've done myself. So instead of having an externalized model of reality with an objective structure, it has a model of reality that is basically continuously renegotiated in human perception. I think that view of things is pretty pervasively influential in Protestant thought.

10 Really bad reasons to stop having the Lord's Supper

1. Jesus said nothing about it. When he said 'Do this in remembrance of me' in Luke 22:19 and 1 Corinthians 11:24, he clearly meant something else.
   
2. In 1 Corinthians, the Christians were clearly having a full meal, not just a bit of bread and wine.
   
3. Why say with a symbol what you can say with words?
   
4. Outsiders will think that we think that we are offering a sacrifice to God that takes away our sins.
   
5. People will think the minister is a sacerdotal priest with special powers.
   
6. People will think we are Roman Catholics.
   
7. We haven't had it for so long that now it is weird.
   
8. We will have to explain everything and that will take too long.
   
9. The scary words about eating the supper unworthily in 1 Cor 10 and 11 mean that we are probably better not to do it and so keep out of trouble.
10. Having done away with the old formal ways of doing the Lord's Supper, we can't decide on a new, less formal way of doing it that isn't awkward and weird.

The Ten Worst Habits of Preachers

My assumption in this list is a culture that values the preaching of scripture very highly. This of course should not be assumed at all! There are actually worse crimes than these that include doing violence to the text of scripture, or ignoring it altogether, or waffling and calling it 'spirit-led'.

1. Merely 'explaining/teaching the Bible' and not preaching the living Word of God. (I think we should ban the phrase 'we are now going to hear the Bible explained'. I don't need it explained. I need it preached.)

2. Introducing us to the text and not to the issue addressed by the text.

3. Providing overelaborate explanations of the biblical-theological background to no great end.

4. Moralising from the Old Testament.

5. Reading every OT text immediately in terms of Christology without regard to its own particular context and meaning and purpose.

6. Speaking down to the congregation; assuming we are simpletons and do not read or think for ourselves. That our questions just need better information in order to answer them.

7. Getting Penal Substitution (or whatever the hot-button issue is for your church!) from every single text.

8. Illustrations that confuse more than illuminate. That's...most of 'em.

9. Never referring to self and own Christian faith in sermon. (Of course, the opposite is worse: using the pulpit for autobiographical purposes. Yuck.)

10. Making ill-informed generalisations about culture/sociology from a knee-jerk conservative standpoint.

11. (sorry) Pop-psychologising.

Preaching like...Peter Roebuck

How do you train preachers?

Preaching is not a technique or a method, though of course it makes use of techniques and methods. To think you have taught preaching because you have given students a workable outline of how to go about preparing a sermon is utterly mistaken.

Teaching preaching is like teaching a creative writing class. You will have tips and suggestions - but what is really needed is for the person to find their own voice, and to be capable of real insight and wisdom. The getting of wisdom takes an array of skills, to be sure, but it takes personal courage; and the development of one's own voice requires an ear for the language.

The reason that a preacher needs to find his/her own voice is because sermons (as Alan Lukabyo says) must be true, clear, and real. Giving real sermons is much more complicated and intuitive than giving merely true and clear ones. And it takes the development of a whole person in a Godward direction.

An analogy: in the Sydney Morning Herald there are two cricket writers with clear tasks. Chloe Saltau is the reporter. Her job is to give a descriptive account of the day's play, informing the reader of its significant events and scores. She has to integrate information from the teams as well as what she sees before here eyes, but though she is involved in a level of interpretation, she is not venturing her own opinions in doing so. Her style is very unembellished and direct. She may have played the game for years, but in a sense that is irrelevant to her work. Salthau could go and become the crime reporter and still do the same kind of writing. She does what she is supposed to do very well.

Peter Roebuck on the other hand provides a world class level of analysis and insight into the game. He himself was a first class player for many years; and he has coached cricket all over the world. He is deeply imbued in the very spirit of the game - a man formed by its challenges and attracted to its joys. He brings to his articles (which are some of the best loved in the whole newspaper, of any kind) a level of insight and wisdom that he achieves by integrating at a very deep level his insights developed over his years of study of the game. He can opine believably about Zimbabwe because he has been there and he knows Zimbabwean cricketers. He is fascinated by the characters who play the game and what the game brings out of them, or what the game does to them. He ventures opinions about cricket that are sometimes controversial, and sometimes he gets it wrong by his own admission - such as when he called for Ricky Ponting to resign in early 2008. He takes that risk, the risk of giving his opinion - and I assume it did not make him popular in the Aussie dressing room - because that is the nature of his task.

My point? Preachers are to be more like Roebuck than Salthau.

(Which is why Moore College is by far the best college for the preparation of preachers in Sydney, btw ;-) )