"One cannot coerce the summer into corning, one must wait for it"

The relation of the human to the created world around him is characterized in the first place by the fact that the human receives. God gives, we receive: that is the melody which Luther is always playing, in constantly new variations.

[...]

We must assert that it is God, not we or our neighbor, who is at work in the workshop which nature constitutes. The one who is at work in nature without interruption is God, and he is creating. The concept of nature belongs primarily to dogmatics, not to ethics. What God's work in creation demands of us is not first action, but faith. This is declared already in the Sermon on the Mount. The lilies of the field and the birds of the air instruct us, according to Jesus, about "care-free-ness" as the only completely natural attitude in life. Be not anxious for clothing or for food! God cares for you, he knows what you need.

(Gustaf Wingren, "The Doctrine of Creation: Not an Appendix but the First Article" in Word & World 4/4, 1984)

Extending the sanctuary

God created the cosmos to be his great temple in which he rested after his creative work. Nevertheless, his special revelatory presence does not fill the entire earth yet, since it was his intention that this goal be achieved by his human vice-regent[/priest], whom he installed in the temple sanctuary to extend the garden boundaries of God's presence worldwide [Gen 1:28]. Adam, of course disobeyed this mandate, so that humanity no longer enjoyed God's presence in the Garden, and the entire earth became infected with sin and idolatry in a way it had not been previously, even while yet in its still imperfected state.

Therefore, the statements about God's inability to dwell in any structure on earth not only refers to the Creator's transcendence but plausibly includes reference to the necessity for purification and re-creation before God's Shekinah presence, formerly restricted to heaven and the earthly holy of holies, can dwell universally throughout creation together with his multitudes of worshippers.

(p.138, Greg Beale, The Temple and the Church's Mission)

This is a summary of a large part of the argument of Beale's book. Unfortunately the book is a classic example of a great thesis buried in poor writing and then insufficiently and unimaginatively explored. A very frustrating mixture. I would recommend it, but wish someone could write another book with the same thesis.

Thielicke on interpreting creation

Listening to: Schubert: Symphony No.9

Hi everyone. In case you didn't know I've been away for a week in the Lake District, so sorry for the blog-silence. I had a good time, and read a fair bit which should mean lots of blogging coming up, but I probably won't have time to get any thoughts down so maybe it won't.

Last night I started a book of sermons by Helmut Thielicke on Jesus' Parables. By way of a preface he discusses the idea of the parables as "God's picturebook", and how the world can also function in this way. It has some baring on one of the niggling thoughts of this year - the gospel in creation - so I thought I'd post it at length:

For anybody who does not see the world from the point of view from which Jesus Christ, the teller of the parables, sees it, the whole profusion of parabolic images turns into a confused labyrinth; for him the doors are shut instead of opened. Are the birds of the air and the lilies of the field really nothing more than pointers to the Lord of creation, who cares for all his creatures? Or are they not also figures of a world of nature that is dumb, nature that is silent to me, that goes on its way, careless of my concerns and my loneliness. Are the stars just symbols of an eternal order or are they not also a sign of orderly processes that go on quite indifferent to my lot? May they not chill me with the cold of cosmic space rather than make me feel the pulse-beat of a Father's heart? And one thing more; may not the picture language of this world lead us to gods and idols instead of to God? Do not all the pseudo absolutes and all the isms, the hubristic attempts of philosophy to attribute to a single phenomenon - whether it be spirit, matter, or an idea - the prerogatives of ultimate reality - do not all these have their source in this same attempt to interpret the picture language of this world and derive its favorite symbols from it?

[...] In the parables of Jesus the opposite way is taken. He first shows us his Father and points to the "heart of all things." Then from there the things themselves gain their meaning. We start with God and then learn to discover the world anew; but anybody who tries to discover God through the world sees only the distorted reflections of created things, a reflex of his own mind.

That is the reason why the picturebook of created things is in itself of no use at all. Indeed, it confines and limits us to this introverted creation. The mystery of our temporal and eternal destiny is disclosed to us only in the great textbook of God - the Word in which he speaks to us and tells us who he is and what his purposes are. But it is of the mercy of his condescension that in doing so he employs the images and figures of our world. And these images are helpful and comforting; they find us where we are at home. They are so homely that they make us feel at home and give us the certainty that God is not in some remote, inaccessible beyond, but that he gives to everything around us a relationship that leads to his heart, not only grain and fruit, but also the far country and the father's house, summer and winter, lamps and night, money and clothing, weddings and death.

When we read the parables we are surrounded by the scenery of a world that is very near, our world. But everything depends upon our finding the right entrance from which their meaning is discovered [...] The heart of all things discloses the things themselves; but the things themselves do not reveal the heart.

(pp.11-12, The Waiting Father: Sermons on the Parables of Jesus)

As an aside, does anyone feel that this kind of "God is the key"/"God must be the starting point" argument you find in Barth, Forsyth and so many others often seems to assume that if you just start with the right intellectual starting point all will work out ok? I.e. dump natural theology and start with the concept of the Crucified Lord and all becomes clear.

Perhaps this misses the need for repentance and faith and for the work of the Holy Spirit. Only with the Gospel preached as wisdom of God, accompanied by the Spirit, and grasped by faith, will the world open up to us.

PS for an fascinating story about the encounters of Helmut Thielicke, Karl Barth and Billy Graham have a read of this post.

Do everything to the glory of God

"whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God" (1 Corinthians 10:31)

So how exactly do you do that?

Perhaps its by constantly having God in mind as you munch on your fish fingers and thanking him for providing you with this food. Perhaps its not quite as 'spiritual' as that and simply enjoying munching on that marmite on toast as it fills a hole. But perhaps its not even as conscious an activity as that.

The sermon at church this evening was on Psalm 148 where the Sun and Moon are called on to Praise God.

Our pastor pointed out that given all creation is called to worship God, there is a problem with a definition of worship which limits it to human beings (e.g. Don Carson who defines worship as: "the proper response of all moral sentient beings to God, ascribing all honor and worth to their Creator-God", p.26, Worship by the Book).

But given that all creation should worship God, have you ever thought how the Sun and Moon worship God? I don't think I really have. I think I've always just skimmed over those statements as hyperbole, but you do come across it remarkably often in Scripture don't you? I can understand how the Sun and Moon witness to his magnificent creative power and so give him glory that way; but praise him? A bit too far perhaps?

It struck me this evening that the only way God can be praised by a lump of stone hanging in the vacuum of space is by it being what it is. It not only doesn't have intelligent thoughts, you couldn't even say it has feelings. It simply exists. It is what it was made to be.

I suppose our worship is the same really. Our worship is just living life as we were made to live life as human beings made in the image of God. God designed us to eat and drink to sustain ourselves, so we eat and drink and that is worship. Of course we are also made to be in relationship with him, to serve each other, etc. But the act of eating and drinking is pure worship in and of itself. It doesn't need anything else adding. Similarly, sleeping is worship, it doesn't become worship because its sleeping in order to do something in the morning. So having already eaten and worshipped God that way, in a couple of hours I'm going to go to sleep to worship God.

That all seems banal perhaps. But I think its actually quite important.

Creation without the promise

In what I thought was the most controversial post I have written this year, but that generated no comments, I suggested that without the word of the Gospel creation just communicates the law. I explained that while creation can witness to its creator, it cannot witness to how we are to relate to him (through Christ) and so only condemns. I didn't really explain how if functions as law even if you do not see the witness to God in it. Oswald Bayer describes how:

If the world is not believed as that which is promised, then it will be experienced as a "fearful natural realm" [Arnold Gehlen], as a relentlessly necessary, oppressive law, which says: you must squeeze some sense out of this chaos, this fearful natural realm in all its uncertainty; you have to be in charge of making sense in this and out of this chaotic world; you yourself have to establish its order! If the world is not believed to be that which is promised, then it becomes, as Nietzsche aptly observed, "a thousand deserts, mute and cold." In such muteness and such coldness I experience God's wrath - admittedly so anonymously that I simply cannot even identify it as God's wrath.

(p. 102, Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther's Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation)

Justification as Creation; Creation as Justification

I think we have rediscovered in recent years that our salvation is our new creation. We are picking up and emphasising all those NT and Isaianic images of creation when describing our redemption. This is great. Lets celebrate it.

However, somehow in the process there seems to be a desire to shift justification to one side as one metaphor among many. Drawn from the legal context justification can be preferably pushed aside to make way creation which is more fundamental.

Oswald Bayer will not buy into this because to him what God says is fundamental to everything. Justification is what God declares in grace over us, it is also what he declared in grace over the whole of creation.

justification is not simply an isolated topic, next to which other topics can exist; it has essential importance and is connected with every topic. Justification does not affect just my individual life, not even just the history of the world, but impacts the history of nature as well; if affects all things. It is thus not sufficient to speak of the article on justification solely as the articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae - as the article on which the church stands and falls. Instead, the meaning of justification must be taken seriously in its breadth, with ramifications that have application for a theology of creation and for ontology. In a prominent position in the Smalcald Articles Luther says: "One cannot go soft or give way on this article, for then heaven and earth would fall." "Without the article on justification the world is nothing but death and darkness."

(p. 98, Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther's Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation)

God's word is 'the creative Word of God that justifies' (p.97, ibid). 'Creation is speech act' (p.103).

I should really comment more but I haven't got time. By the way, I have quoted Oswald Bayer before the fundamental nature of justification before.

The fate of the Unevangelised

I hesitate to post on this. It is not something you should talk about lightly and without feeling the weight of what you are discussing. We are all aware of it and so usually when Christian's are asked about it they tend to be tentative in their response and emphasize how we don't know the fate of anyone, and it is not our place to judge. Instead we rightly emphasise that we know the one who judges and he is just and merciful and we want to leave it with him.

Nevertheless, I have come to the conclusion that the reason why we have become uncertain about this question is because we have forgotten two points of massive importance. You may want to disagree with the two points I make, but I think it is helpful at least to identify that our response to these two questions determine your answer to a question about the fate of the unevangelised.

1. Creation only communicates the law and not the Gospel

The law is true knowledge of God, and Creation communicates this to us. It presents us with God as he is loving, kind, just and powerful. However, it just presents us with him, and tells us nothing of how we should relate to him - especially as we then look at ourselves. Because of this we create our own ways of relating to him. Our own 'gospels'. We may ignore him because we cannot imagine how we could relate to him. We may bring him close by worshipping created things. We may try and work our way to a place where we can approach him by good works or acts of contemplation. All of these work only by suppressing the knowledge of God that we have through Creation. They work by downplaying the demands of the law, or making them the 'gospel'. Either way we are left without excuse.

Because the distinction between law and Gospel has been forgotten in much contemporary Christianity, we think there is only one kind of knowledge of God. Because of this we merge or confuse law and Gospel and make them both communicated through creation. Therefore the hypothetical unevangelised man alone on an island in the Pacific has the same kind of knowledge as the well-taught Christian in England, just a different amount. In fact there is not just a quantitative difference between the knowledge of God, but a qualitative difference as well.

Classically, when considering the difference between general and special revelation we go to Calvin's Institutes. We would benefit from listening to Luther as well:

Everyone naturally has a general idea that there is a God [...] But someone may object: "If all people know God, why does Paul say that before the proclamation of the gospel the Galatians did not know God?" I reply that there is a twofold knowledge of God [duplex est cognitio Dei], general and particular. All people have the general knowledge, namely that God exists, that he has created heaven and earth, that he is righteous, that he punishes the wicked, etc. But people do not know what God proposes concerning us, what he wants to give and to do, so that he might deliver us from sin and death, and to save us - which is the proper and true knowledge of God [propria et vera est cognitio Dei]. Thus it can happen that someone's face may be familiar to me but I do not really know him, because I do not know his intentions.

(from 1535 Lectures on Galatians, in p.99, The Christian Theology Reader ed by A McGrath)

2. The Holy Spirit can only be received through the specific word of the Gospel

Constantly we are tempted to have the persons of the Trinity acting separately from one another. One way in which we do this is through a concept of a free-floating Spirit who acts apart from the Word - that is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Of course all of creation is sustained by God's Word and the action of his Spirit. In that sense the Spirit does operate even where the Gospel is not preached but he does not indwell believers apart from it.

In what way, then, does the Holy Spirit come to us? How and in what way does he impart himself? The Spirit works faith in the human being inwardly, but never apart from means, never without the external "physical Word" [...]

Luther would formulate the central thesis for his understanding of the Holy Spirit as "The Holy Spirit has called me through the gospel." This means: although the Holy Spirit cannot be apprehended, he is not an incomprehensible fluidity, but comes in a clearly specific Word that can be heard [...]

If the Holy Spirit calls only "through the gospel," but the gospel is gospel only as it is distinguished from the law, then the distinction between law and gospel is decisive with respect to the teaching about the Holy Spirit, about pneumatology, as well. Thus the work of the Spirit is, first of all, to sharpen the law and to bring about God's judgment against sin; only then does the Spirit work through the second and final Word of God, the gospel, in that he forgives sin and creates faith [...]

Whoever agrees today with Luther's understanding of the Holy Spirit, according to which he binds himself to the external Word, and is in agreement with it, muct be ready for the hard task of a fundamental critique of modern subjectivism.

(pp.242-251, Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther's Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation).

What is good about Creation? (Part 2)

I'm constantly challenged at the moment by someone in our church who doesn't really buy the line that we can enjoy a trip to the cinema to the glory of God. He is more acutely aware than most that 'friendship with the world is enmity with God' and reminds me that we can often shape our understanding of what is sinful by what suits us.

I'm still thinking through how we rightly enjoy creation to the glory of God. One way that has been helpful to my thinking through the issues is to think about my brother.

My brother is an artist. Relationships people have with my brother and his work can fit into several categories:

1. They love my brother but don't care about his work.

These would tend to be my brother's non-arty friends. It is a good relationship, but it is not quite as good as it could be.

2. They love my brother's work but don't care about him.

These would be people who have never met my brother, but bought his art. The person who made the art is an irrelevance. They have a relationship with the art but not my brother.

3. They love my brother because of the work he produces.

These are fair-weather friends. They would think my brother is cool and interesting because of what he makes. They are constantly dropping hints that he could give them bits of his art. Not a good relationship.

4. They love my brother's work because it is made by him.

This would be my mother. Everything my brother produces is great, because it is made by him. She sees no value in the thing itself but only because it is made by her son. This intensely annoys my brother, because to him she may as well ignore the art because her reaction to it is irrelevant.

5. They love both my brother and his work relatively independently.

This is the best relationship you could have with my brother. It is hard to represent diagrammatically. This is what I think we should be seeking for in our relationship with Creation. We should love walking through the dales for what it is in itself - beautiful. However, it is difficult to imagine doing this without setting up an rival to God. The only way I can think we can avoid doing this is if we remember:

1. It is not a zero-sum game. Loving creation does not mean we have less love to give to God.
2. Creation is not independent of God. It is his creation and is sustained by his power.
3. Creation is God's gift to us. It is an act of his overflowing love.
4. Creation speaks of God.

Nevertheless, I think I need to work through more of what it looks like to love both God and Creation, but in a way which gives God all the glory.

Any thoughts?

PS Apologies for the diagrams. They were done in haste.

What is good about creation? (Part 1)

In 'The Weight of Glory' CS Lewis states that:

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things - the beauty, the memory of our own past - are good images of what we really desire ... they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune wee have not heard.(italics original)

I have two concerns about this.

1. It seems to give creation a position of mediating God.
2. It downplays the goodness of creation.

Maybe I'm being too harsh on Lewis with my first point. I want to be able to say with the bible that the heavens declare the glory of God, but I don't want to use the word 'through' like Lewis does. How can you do this?

Bizarrely, after criticising him for having too 'high' a understanding of creation in one breadth, my second concern comes from him having too low a understanding of creation's goodness.

By making creation a mediator of God's beauty he actually turns it into an obstruction. It becomes instrumental and so disposable. He looks forward to a day when creation passes away and there is just us and God:

When all the suns and nebulae have passed away, each one of you will still be alive. Nature is only the image, the symbol...We are summoned to pass in through Nature, beyond her, into that splendour which she fitfully reflects.

In contrast I would like to say:

1. Christ is the only mediator between God and man.
   Because Christ is not an imperfect image, but God himself, he is not a mediator who serves his purpose until we pass beyond him to a more intimate relationship.
2. Creation is good in itself.
   But this is not because of any worthiness inherent in Creation as a rival to God's worthiness. Instead it is a gift that Creation receives because of the declaration of God (see previous post).

The heavens declare the glory of God

...any work of art bears the impress of the artist who made it. The music of Beethoven does not sound like the music of Josquin. The Apostle Paul's writing style is not the same as the Apostle John's. We can hear and detect these differences, even if we lack the particular expertise to explain what accounts for them.

But suppose that the only composer who ever lived was Johann Sebastian Bach. There is no music in this world except that of Bach. Whenever we hear music in this world, it sounds like Bach's music. It maybe played well or badly but the fundamental raw material is always Bach, only Bach, nothing but Bach. Now, since there is no other music to compare this music to, would we be able to "hear" Bach's personality in the music? Or would it be easy for us to forget about Bach, and assume that "music simply is"?

The problem with hearing or detecting God's authorship of the world is just like this. There is no other world to compare God’s world to. There is no "music" except God's. It can be "played" well or perversely, but there are no other raw materials at hand. God's personality is fully displayed in the world, but it is easy for us to become deaf to this fact. (p. 21, James B. Jordan, Through New Eyes: Developing a biblical view of the world)

What a great illustration of the need for new eyes!