Last words

In the last few months of his life Karl Barth was on a radio program which was a bit like Desert Island Discs ("Music for a Guest – A radio Broadcast"). The transcript can be found in the book Final Testimonies.

Near the beginning of the program he states that "What I hear in Mozart is a final word about life insofar as this can be spoken by man". Therefore, perhaps it is appropriate that he ends the program with this brilliant paragraph about God's Word about life in Christ, and Mozart's music addressed to the Word.

Grace itself is only a provisional word. The last word that I have to say as a theologian or politician is not a concept like grace but a name: Jesus Christ. He is grace and he is the ultimate one beyond world and church and even theology. We cannot lay hold of him. But we have to do with him. And my own concern in my long life has been increasingly to emphasize this name and to say: "In him." There is no salvation but in this name. In him is grace. In him is the spur to work, warfare, and fellowship. In him is all that I have attempted in my life in weakness and folly. It is there in him. I suggest then that we finish with Mozart as a sacred composer. I myself have always been very fond of the little Missa Brevis in D Major, again by the young Mozart... I suggest that we play the conclusion: Agnus dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis, dona nobis pacem: "O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us, grant us thy peace". This is what we shall now hear.

Enjoy!

Lutheran responses to Barth

This is a rather rushed attempt to share some thoughts on part of what Dan is saying in this post. I thought I ought to sum what I understand as the Lutheran response to Barth. My knowledge of such a weight of theological wisdom on both sides is hilariously small, but I thought I should try. Why, these things are important to Lutherans would take a lot of time and energy, so sorry for not being able to give that. There's more important things to do for a Christian layman.

1. We should give up worrying that we cannot force our knowledge of God into a unity

I believe it is good if in our present age we cannot imagine how the Creator God could also be Christ crucified, but have to stand amazed at God's unfathomable wisdom and love. To force all our knowledge of God into a unity by starting with one event, rather than one person revealed through a story full of twists and turns is to walk by sight instead of faith. It is to over-realise our eschatology as we do not yet see Christ face-to-face. Contrary to what some say, death is not equal to life and glory is not shame. Life is revealed through death, glory through shame, strength through weakness but that is a story of a surprise and not a neatly tied system. Death seems to go in an opposite direction to life, but by faith in Christ crucified and risen we believe that they don’t, even if we cannot see how that is the case.

2. The tension is often between ‘God’ and ‘God for us’, not false and true

Often when people see a tension between God known through experience, reason, creation etc and the God who loves the world so much that he sends his Son to die for us, they assume that this is because the former must be a false knowledge. Of course all our knowledge of God is a mixture of truth and lies to a different extent, but I would suggest that at its core the tension is actually between a knowledge of ‘God’ and ‘God for us’ (or 'law' and 'Gospel'). God owes us nothing, and as sinful beings we are due only wrath. So knowledge of ‘God’ is a terrifying thing on its own. It can be a true knowledge, but given God’s promises it is a strange knowledge and not proper knowledge.

The knowledge of ‘God for us’ seems to contradict the knowledge of ‘God’ we may have apart from his revelation of his love for the unlovely in Christ. But by faith we believe (i) that they resolve in the mystery of Christ who is both divine and future, even if we cannot understand how, and (ii) that ‘God for us’ is the proper knowledge of God, and ‘God’ is him hidden from us.

-------------------------------------------------

Here are some Lutheran quotes to chew over:

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)

If the cross and the resurrection are to retain their New Testament position at the centre of the message, then a revision of the opposition between transcendence and immanence must be brought about. The Lutheran dualism of law and Gospel in the Word performs just that very revising, anti-speculative function. God's work meets us, sub contraria specie ["under contrary appearances"], hidden under the work of death. It must be so, since we are in thrall to sin; when our sin, which insists on ruling in our being, is killed, we receive life but it seems as though it were death. The lifegiving function of the Gospel is indissolubly bound up with the condemnatory and punitive function of the law; the cross is fast bound with the resurrection. If this intrinsic duality of law and Gospel is abandoned and replaced, as in Barth, by a single 'Word' above the law and the Gospel, then there follows also a new metaphysical cleavage, so that within the single Word we discover a higher, transcendent sphere, the Word of God (Gottes Wort) and a lower sphere, the word of man (Menschenswort). Thereby the Platonic doctrine of two worlds becomes supreme in theology. What is specifically theological and Christian is introduced later in the thesis that 'God' and 'man' meet and are brought together in the Incarnation. But in that case the mere meeting between God and man becomes the centre of the New Testament, while struggle and victory in the death and resurrection have lost their place as the centre of the kerygma. This is the chief accusation that must be brought against Karl Barth's theology.

(p. 92, 1949, Gustaf Wingren, The Living Word)

[the law] must foster a proclamation which points to Christ…It must realize that the unity of law and gospel- that is , that the God of the law and the God of the gospel are one and the same-is something which can be grasped in the final sense only by faith…Theology, of course, asserts this unity, but faith does not consist ultimately in believing the assertions of theology, but rather in trusting in the Christ who alone makes it possible to believe the unity.”

(Gerhard Forde, The Law-Gospel Debate)

We cannot therefore accept a monistic doctrine of the word of God, as advocated by Karl Barth. In the midst of the contradictory and complementary ways in which God encounters us, which are laden with tension and conflict, the gospel stands out in its uniqueness as God’s decisive final word.

(p. 125, Oswald Bayer, Theology the Lutheran Way)

While the distinction between Schleiermacher and Barth may be ever so great, they agree with each other in their thinking about unity. While Schleiermacher, of course, thinks of unity anthropologically, as the one fundamental state, Barth approaches it Christologically, by holding that Jesus Christ is the one Word of God. If we criticize Barth’s thinking about unity, we will have to ask ourselves whether the unity of God is something that we can only confess, as when we confess Jesus to be the one and only Lord, or whether it is something that we can conceive with our minds. But this can happen only in the sense of 1 Corinthians 9:4-6 and of the prayer of the Isaiah Apocalypse: “O Lord our God, other lords besides you have ruled over us, but we acknowledge your name alone” (Isa. 26:13; cf. Micah 4:5)…

The unity of God that we confess can only be believed. It cannot be conceived… If we speak of a "unity" in connection with law and gospel, life and death, judgment and grace, it must be clear that this is meant in a strictly eschatological sense"

(pp.197-198, Oswald Bayer, Theology the Lutheran Way)

The distinction between what is involved in the teaching about the Trinity and "general" teaching about God [...] is encountered in faith and in the hope that this distinction will be removed, along with the distinction between law and gospel, in the eschaton. The the triune God - he alone - will be all in all (1 Cor. 15:28). Then we also will no longer be assailed by the oppressive, incomprehensible hiddenness that weighs us down even to the point of our death. It will be consumed by open love which itself cannot be comprehended, which will free us from its power and which comes to us conclusively already now in the gospel.

The end that we believe in and hope for, because of the love that has come to us and has been promised to us - the consummation of the work of creation by the triune God - is misinterpreted with regard to its true character when it is claimed that it exists as a timeless principle of knowledge and existence. Its universality cannot be demonstrated in the abstract, not even with theoretical means linked to the Trinity; one cannot apply its truths to every circumstance one can postulate and treat it as an a priori.

(pp.339-340, Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther‘s Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation)

"For Bayer, theology is not done to integrate all knowledge, either theoretical or practical, into an abstract unity, but to limit reason to its proper fields. It is the art of discerning what God is saying to us, not peering into the divine"

(p.149, Mark Mattes, The Role of Justification in Contemporary Lutheran Theology)

The security of God's love

Where do we find security in our relationships of love? I'd suggest that there are usually two places:

1. A high view of ourself - we think we've got something so attractive about us that love is the natural way people should relate to us. We are good looking, we're witty we're intelligent or we know the right people. In short we have something to offer.
2. A low view of others - we think that they need us. Perhaps we trust that our girlfriend will never dump us because she can't deal with being alone, or that a friend will always be happy to meet up because they have a constant need to talk to someone... anyone.

I think we apply these human ways of thinking to God. They manifest themself like this:

1. Some kind of legalism. Either human beings in general are basically lovely, or if everyone doesn't merit love, at least we do by virtue of who we are or what we've done.
2. Some kind of doctrine of divine necessity. In order to be true to who he is, he had to love us. Perhaps he needed an object to love, perhaps he needed to display his glory. It is probably less common that legalism, but it is out there as an idea.

In contrast to both of these the Bible says that God loved us totally freely. We don't deserve his love and he didn't need to give it, but still he set his love on us.

As Susanna Wesley says:

[God] is being itself, and as such must be infinitely happy in the glorious perfections of his nature from everlasting to everlasting; and as he did not create, so neither did he redeem because he needed us; but he loved us because he loved us

(cited in p. 61, Fred Sanders, Embracing the Trinity)

That final phrase is almost lifted from Deuteronomy 7 where, if you follow the logic through, Moses says the same thing:

It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the Lord loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers (Deut 7:7-8)

Speaking to a friend today he confessed that there is something slightly terrifying about that. God seems to leave us nothing to grasp hold of in order to give us security of his love. We can't point to something in ourselves or in the rules of logic. He simply asks us to trust him personally.

Except, he does do more than that, as the verse in Deuteronomy suggests. He makes an oath. As the author of the letter to the Hebrews says:

"when God desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable character of his purpose, he guaranteed it with an oath, so that by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us." (Heb 6:17-18)

He voluntarily ties his love into his unchangeable nature. In the past he wasn't bound to love us, but now he has freely bound himself to love us in his word of promise.

And when you heard 'word' in that last sentence, I hope you know where you need to go!

This promise is supremely found in the incarnate Son, Jesus Christ, who suffers in our place and is raised again for our justification. All so that we can be adopted and joined into the divine life. So now if we are 'in Christ' God cannot cease to love us without denying his own self, and God's love for us is even more secure than the universe.

As Karl Barth says:

He loves them with the same eternal love with which He loves the Son (Jn. 17:23 ["I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me."])." (my bold, CD IV, 2, 758)

Picking up on the distinction I made in a previous post, God the Father's freely placed love-for-the-unlovely church becomes bound, by the Son's mission in the Spirit, to his love-for-the-lovely Son; and that love-for-the-lovely is so integral to his being that it is as secure as his existence!

Amazing love! How can it be,
That Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?

Let the witnesses correct our notebooks

I'd want to say more, but this is well put:

[the modern theologian or ordinary Christian] is not justified in comporting himself in relationship to those [biblical] witnesses as though he knew more about the Word than they... Still less is he a high-school teacher authorized to look over their shoulder benevolently or crossly, to correct their notebooks, or give them good, average, or bad marks. Even the smallest, strangest, simplest, or obscurest among the biblical witnesses has an incomparable advantage over even the most pious, scholarly, and sagacious latter-day theologian From his special point of view and in his special fashion, the witness has thought, spoken, and written about the revelatory Word and act in direct confrontation with it. All subsequent theology, as well as the whole of the community that comes after the event, will never find itself in the same immediate confrontation... For this reason theology must agree to let them look over its shoulder and correct its notebooks.

(pp. 31-32, Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology)

God against God

Bobby Grow comments:

A doctrine of salvation that pits God’s justice against God’s love and mercy — what Karl Barth called a theology of "God against God" — is bad theology. This posits a rift in God's being and preaches a God that is inauthentic to the "good news" of Holy Scripture. This is not to deny that wrath and judgment are vital aspects of Christian soteriology. But we have to make sure that (in Barth’s words, again) we are not proclaiming that the No of God is the first word or the last word to men and women.

This is really at the heart of what I read as many Lutheran critiques of Barth. Many Lutherans seem to see in Barth a denial that we are always in relationship to God, even before the preached word. This is a relationship with what Forde calls the God-not-preached, or the hidden God. The God-not-preached is the same loving Creator God, but his primary word to a sinful world is "No". The God-preached however is the God of the Gospel who says "Yes" to us.

I'm not 100% convinced by either Barth or Forde but it is KEY that the God-not-preached, is NOT the God we should be preaching. On this both Barth and Forde agree, although Forde recognises the importance of acknowledging the experience of the God-not-preached.

But experientially, I do appreciate what Forde (and other Lutherans in the same line) has to say, even if it causes me more headaches:

From Luther's perspective, the question about whether we in our Angechtungen wrestle with God, and do not solely experience God as gracious, is quite plausible. Believers and non-believers deal with this hidden God in their various life experiences, precisely in their attempts to master the world and their fate. It is the role of the gospel to turn us to the "preached God," who through Jesus Christ as sacramentum gives us assurance with regard to God's disposition toward us. The person of faith holds this "hidden God" accountable to the promise, even appealing to God against God!

(p. 40, Mark C. Mattes, The role of justification in contemporary theology)

This post is a bit of a 'first thoughts' post. It is really a marker for future discussion. If I ever get time to read some proper theology again, I would like it to be Barth and Lutherans on just this topic.

Theological prolegomenon

This is all a bit niche interest, although it is pretty sweeping in its scope. It is a useful survey of two different responses to the Enlightenment critique of natural theology:

Prior to the Enlightenment, Lutheran scholastic orthodoxy used the concept of the natural knowledge of God to demonstrate God's existence. The Bible, by way of contrast, was regarded as a supernatural source of supernatural revelation. When this scheme was subjected to the critique of the Enlightenment, the consequence was that language about God became irrelevant to genuine knowledge, and the pathway was cleared for modern secularity. But Luther's theme of the law as the antithesis of the gospel had the potential of escaping the Kantian critique. Thus Lutheran theology would have in the category “law” a prolegomenon to the gospel which could make the transition from pre-modern to modern culture without giving up its essential proclamation. If "law" means whatever calls us into question before God, then we can see it functioning as prolegomenon in theologians as diverse as Theodosius Harnack (d. 1889), Werner Elert (d. 1954), and Paul Tillich (d. 1965), as well as in the work of contemporary Lutheran theologians Gerhard Forde and Robert Jenson.

Karl Barth's response to the critique of the Enlightenment and to the Liberal theology of the 19th Century was to reject the idea of prolegomenon altogether. If grace is revelation and revelation is grace, then the antithesis between law and gospel simply disappears. The revelation of God, whether law or gospel, is gracious.

(pp. 414-415, Walter R Bouman, "The Concept of the 'Law' in the Lutheran Tradition" Word & World 3/4 (1983))

The whole article is fairly good. I think the author is right that there are strengths and weaknesses in both responses.

Dissecting a frog, and Karl Barth

Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it." (EB White)

I had a rather surreal conversation with a friend the other day about whether God had a sense of humour. I didn’t really come to a firm conclusion, but I tried to think through what humour actually was and think that it must be something like:

1. An awareness of incongruity

built upon

2. A foundation of optimism

I feel that things don't fit and surprise us because as finite beings we are always engaging with a world much greater than we can ever comprehend fully. Even our own bodies and minds surprise us and amuse us (especially if you are a dad, or slowly becoming your dad, at Christmas).

Good humour is attractive in someone because it shows a combination of both humility (on account of their finitude) and cheerfulness (on account of their optimism). Sadly, often as people we are either humble and afraid, or happy and arrogant.

I was prompted to post on this when reading TF Torrance describing the importance of Karl Barth's sense of humour:

"He was able to laugh at himself, and therefore to criticise himself, and hence to direct even ruthless critique at others in such a way that he could appreciate their intention and respect their persons and their sincerity. In this respect he stood out in marked contrast to the seriousness with which nineteenth century man took himself [...]

The Christian church has no right to despair of 'this weary world' or to be afraid it will crumble away into nothing. Christ is risen! [...] In him we can lift up our heads and laugh in the face of disaster and death… The Christian is the only one with a genuine message of hope and is the one true optimist." (pp.12-13, 23, TF Torrance, Karl Barth: Biblical and Evangelical Theologian)

PS The Wikipedia article on the theory of humour is interesting.

PPS For what it’s worth I tentatively think that while God is full of joy and he tells countless jokes in his creation/redemption, he doesn’t actually have a sense of humour for himself because it is a creaturely characteristic. As the infinite creator the only thing that doesn’t fit in his world is sin, so God laughs at sin (Psalm 2:4 etc) but at nothing else I’m aware of. Although I don’t think that is because he finds sin humourous in the truest sense of the word (which I admit is beyond my grasp!). However theoretically, perhaps as the initiator within the Trinity the Father can surprise the Son, so the Son laughs at jokes told by his Father. But I am far beyond my knowledge. Does anyone know of anything in the Bible to give more of a clue?

PPPS more on comedy try CS Lewis (who I think I got the idea of incongruity from) and Glen Scrivener.

Forcing into a unity

Many arguments about theology, and particularly apologetics seems to be about where we start. For example, when talking about God do we start with the Trinity because the concept 'god' we come with is a Procrustean bed which will prevent us ever having a true understanding of God, or can we start with our flawed concepts and refine and reshape until we get to a correct understanding?

Oswald Bayer summarises the alternative we are often presented with:

Does theology start with a particular concept in order to demonstrate its universality, or does it begin with a general indeterminate concept in order to fill it with a specifically Christian content?

He says both alternatives, epitomised by Barth and Schleiermacher respectively, share in common the belief that there is a unified reality that we can know now. Bayer argues that on the contrary God encounters us now in distinct ways which cannot be overcome except in the Eschaton. He lists these as:

1. "through the opposition of the law that points its accusing finger at me, convicts me of sin, and hands me over to death;"
2. "through the promise of the gospel, in which God himself speaks for me, indeed take my place in Jesus Christ;"
3. "through the assault of God's incomprehensible, crushing hiddenness that radically contradicts the gospel and is more than merely an effect of the law";

As human beings we are constantly trying to create an all-encompassing unity in God, or our theological system, but while this unity must "be believed [it cannot] also be conceived" by the mind.

If we speak of a "unity" in connection with law and gospel, life and death, judgment and grace, it must be clear that this is meant in a strictly eschatological sense"

... of course, where Barth is correct is in recognising that the Eschaton has been brought forward in the person and work of Jesus Christ - so we can look for unity in him, as well as at some indeterminate point in the future.

Which antithesis?

I'm reading The Living Word: A Theological Study of Preaching and the Church by Swedish Lutheran Gustaf Wingren. A wonderful £3 buy second-hand. I'm loving it.

It seems a shame to first blog some quotations from it in criticism of Barth, but I think his criticism is of far-reaching proportions. In short he sees Barth as locating a fundamental antithesis between God and humanity that he should instead find between God and the Devil, life and death, Gospel and law. I think this is of enormous importance.

for Barth God and man are opposed to each other, and the question with which he is faced is where the emphasis is to be placed. Liberal theology, against which Barth reacted, emphasized man's significance and put him centre. Barth's alternative is to emphasize God's significance and to put him in the centre. Negatively it is of fundamental importance that Satan and sin play a very uncertain and minor role in Barth's theological system. Thus in no way is the approach of the theology that preceded it corrected, but instead the speculative antithesis between man and God remains unchanged [...] It is striking that time and again in his writings Barth reiterates his criticism, most consistent and clear, of Luther's doctrine of the unity of human and divine in Christ, the doctrine of communicatio idiomatum ["sharing of attributes"].

The meaning of the communicatio idiomatum remains obscure until it is seen against the background of man's subjection to the Devil. God and man do not stand opposed to each other as two incompatible and parallel forms of being, but God and the Devil stand opposed as enemies. Man is God's creation who has been brought into captivity by the enemy of God. Christ's task is to enter human life, destroy Satanic might and free man. Christ's humanity is no limitation of the majesty of God, as Barth argues. Christ's humanity is the conqueror's - God's - presence on the field of battle where Satan is to be laid low in the conqueror's death and resurrection and forced to let go his grip on men [...]

The centre of gravity of the preaching of the Early Church was in Christ's death and resurrection, not in the incarnation [...] If the cross and the resurrection are to retain their New Testament position at the centre of the message, then a revision of the opposition between transcendence and immanence must be brought about. The Lutheran dualism of law and Gospel in the Word performs just that very revising, anti-speculative function. God's work meets us, sub contraria specie ["under contrary appearances"], hidden under the work of death. It must be so, since we are in thrall to sin; when our sin, which insists on ruling in our being, is killed, we receive life but it seems as though it were death. The lifegiving function of the Gospel is indissolubly bound up with the condemnatory and punitive function of the law; the cross is fast bound with the resurrection. If this intrinsic duality of law and Gospel is abandoned and replaced, as in Barth, by a single 'Word' above the law and the Gospel, then there follows also a new metaphysical cleavage, so that within the single Word we discover a higher, transcendent sphere, the Word of God (Gottes Wort) and a lower sphere, the word of man (Menschenswort). Thereby the Platonic doctrine of two worlds becomes supreme in theology. What is specifically theological and Christian is introduced later in the thesis that 'God' and 'man' meet and are brought together in the Incarnation. But in that case the mere meeting between God and man becomes the centre of the New Testament, while struggle and victory in the death and resurrection have lost their place as the centre of the kerygma. This is the chief accusation that must be brought against Karl Barth's theology.

(pp. 31f, 92, 1949, The Living Word)

Any thoughts on whether Wingren is reading Barth rightly?

I think that even if the critique doesn't stick to Barth, it sticks to much less sophisticated theology.

Bad Barth

Listening to: David Ford: I Sincerely Apologise for All the Trouble I've Caused

Just about the worst thing I ever have read from Karl Barth:

Unquestionably, the resurrection narratives are contradictory. A coherent history cannot be evolved from them [...] The witnesses attended an event that went over their heads, and each told a bit of it. But these scraps are sufficient to bear witness to us of the magnitude of the event and its historicity. Every one of the witnesses declares God's free grace which surpasses all human understanding. God alone can prove the truth of that history since he himself is the subject. Fortunately, God has never ceased to work in men's hearts and send the faith needed to see those things.

(p. 92, The Faith of the Church: A commentary on the Apostles' Creed)

But its a quote worth thinking about some more, so I'm posting it for my future reference. There are a lot of interesting and important things to think about both in what he says that is correct and what he says that is wrong. What was wrong with his thinking that allowed him to get to the point of making an argument like that, and think it made sense?

Is there such a thing as wordless prayer?

These are some snippets from a email conversation I've been having on contemplative, or wordless, prayer. It may all seem a bit disjointed and rushed. That is largely due to lack of time. But I hope they still make some kind of sense.

I must confess that wordless contemplative prayer is something I don't really 'get'. This may be down to my personality which has some trouble contemplating and meditating about anything. Although, it is also because I think prayer is about communication and specifically about petition.

It is unusual be in someone's presence and not talk to them, and it is unusual to be in the presence of someone who loves to give of his riches when you are deeply poor and not ask them for things.

Karl Barth says of pray that "in the first instance, it is simply asking". "It is the fact that [a person] comes before God with his petition which makes him a praying man" (CD III/3, p.268, cited on p. 49, Tim Chester, The Message of Prayer). Tim Chester, who shaped my thinking on this a great deal, comments:

"I have been frustrated by members of my congregation who could not be exhorted to focus on the praise of God or on confession without moving on to petition. It is an attitude of which I now repent. We too easily think of those who move into contemplative modes of praying or those who make worship or confession the focus of their praying as those who are advanced prayers. It is not so. We must recognize that it is the 'unsophisticated', simple prayers who truly express trust in divine Majesty., who truly acknowledge their own need before God, and who have truly grasped the freedom of the Father-child relationship. Many books on prayer exhort us to search for deeper experiences in prayer or more sophisticated modes of prayer that breed a sense of inadequacy in some and of superiority in others. The Bible invites us to find the model of prayer in the simple petitioning of a child before a father. This leads to freedom and peace."

(ibid)

Nevertheless, I think there is a place for stillness and silence which can help in calming your spirit. But I think that is not what I would call prayer, and can only really happen knowing that you have brought your cares and worries to a Father who has the says he will deal with them and has the ability to do so. If it is not in that context it contains the danger of being an act of escaping reality and burying your head in the sand. Much better is a faithful resting in the Father's promise to hear prayers offered in the name of his Son.

[...]

I do most of my thinking out-loud, in conversation, or while reading. That is the way I work, for good or ill. So I love this sort of discussion, but it does make me less receptive to the idea of wordless prayer. That may not necessarily be a good thing though. 'That is my personality' is not a good reason for very much, so it is good to be challenged.

You are right that a lot of our communication is not by words. Although I think they are more important than the commonly repeated statistics would suggest. But whether or not that is true, can we then just apply our experience of human relationships to our relationship with God? If I am communicating by telephone I can't communicate visibly, and if by letter then words are my only option. We walk by faith and not by sight in our relationship with God, and faith comes by hearing. I think it is fair to say that words are fundamental to our relating to God. That may even be why Jesus is called 'The Word'. I don't think that is a permanent state of affairs because we will see him eventually, but that is the way things are now.

That may sound an awfully restricted view of our relationship with God. N may well argue that it is. But I would tend to think that it is good news.

If God is invisible and intangible to us people waiting between his ascension and his second coming then the only avenue that he can communicate to us except through external words (spoken or visible, e.g. sacraments) is through internal words or feelings. If God is communicating to me through those internalised words and feelings then I'm in big trouble. I am creature committed to self-deception. Much of the time my inner thoughts tell me that God approves of me being thoughtless, cruel and selfish. My internal god (because in practice it is a separate deity) serves to make me more and more complacent in my sin, instead of forming me into the likeness of his Son. Other times my inner thoughts may remind me of how deeply ingrained is sin in my life. It tells me that there is no hope of me forming a relationship with God because I'm unworthy. It tells me that I'll never change because I never really have in the past.

In contrast the external word of God tells me I'm more sinful than we could ever know, but more loved than I could imagine. It tells me that, no matter what I feel, I deserved to be hung on a tree but I am now an adopted son of the Father in Christ who died for me.

There are two different ways we can relate to God. One is outward looking and the other is inward looking. One listens to external words and responds in kind, the other listens to internal words (which is really our own voice) and responds in kind. But, doesn't God live in me? Of course we are told that if we are Christians he does. We are told that the Holy Spirit dwells in us and that Christ lives is in us. But it is notable that it doesn't say that the same of the Father, and in almost every New Testament instance of prayer it is the Father whom we address.

So that is a bit more of a broad-brush picture of where I'm coming from. I can see how it could be criticised that it is quite a restricted conception of our relationship with God, but I think that it adds more colour and shape to our understanding. It is more solid and reliable, and I need my relationship with God to be as solid and reliable as his promises are when times get tough.

But as I've said earlier, I think there is a place for wordless quiet in our lives. I just think that it is secondary to, and dependant on, words.

The chicken and the egg

1. Law and Gospel or Gospel and Law?

(a) In the discussion about the so called Covenant of Works, or Adamic Administration, Reformed theologians may ask: Was Adam under law or gospel? If you read Michael Horton & Co they would argue that it is traditional Reformed position to say he was under the law. Horton argues that 'it is anachronistic to require grace or mercy as the foundation of creation and covenant in the beginning, as Karl Barth and many recent Reformed Theologians do' because Adam was 'entirely capable of maintaining himself in a a state of integrity' (p.84, Michael Horton, God of Promise).

But this is considering law/gospel only in the realm of redemption. What about the realm of creation?

(b) As creatures we merit nothing and so even our existence is an act of grace and mercy.

But creation and redemption are not unconnected as Isaiah and Paul so often remind us. The Reformed tradition has always been strong on this and so you find when biblical theologians from the Reformed tradition like Tom Wright or Graeme Goldsworthy get involved they stress New Creation, and they also place the gospel first. You often see this in discussions about the Mosaic law. Graeme Goldsworthy comments:

'The heart of the [Mosaic] law is the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20) which are prefaced by the significant phrase, 'I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.' These words should govern our understanding of the Sinai law. Here we see that God declares that he is the God of his people, that he has already saved them. What follows then cannot be a programme aimed to achieve salvation by works since they have already received it by grace.' (p.62, Gospel and Kingdom)

2. Problems with the either ordering

(a) When law is placed before the gospel it can be seen as only bad. Or only functionally good (because it leads to the gospel) not good in itself. So it can be forgotten and dropped as soon as you've got to the gospel.

(b) When the gospel is placed before law then the two are usually mingled. Karl Barth explicitly does this:

'Gospel and law are not to be separated; they are one, in such a way that the gospel is the primary thing, that the glad tidings are first in the field and, as such, include the law. Because God is for us, we may also be for Him. Because He has given Himself to us, we may also in gratitude give Him the trifle which we have to give.' (p.19, Dogmatics in Outline)

I'm going to have to think some more, but I think the solution maybe not to choose between gospel-law or law-gospel, but recognising the bible story-line and choose gospel-law-gospel.

Any thoughts?

Theocentric or anthroprocentric?

Reading Tom Torrance is great because he gets how exciting and shocking it is that God became man in Jesus Christ. He has taught me to see that this is central to everything, while never losing what PT Forsyth says is 'the true seat of Incarnation — a Christ made sin' ("Immanence and Incarnation"). This post is a bit of an application of that...

Listening to a recent discussion on Wright and Piper's debate I was reminded about how both see much contemporary Christianity as too anthroprocentric, and not theocentric enough. I've never been completely happy with drawing a sharp distinction between the two as humanity is made in the image of God. Therefore to be truly anthroprocentric is to be theocentric.

But we can go further in rejecting this dichotomy.

Both Wright and Piper are part of the Reformed tradition and so this also reminded me of John Halton's post quoting Herman Bavinck saying that 'the Reformed Christian thinks theologically, the Lutheran anthropologically' (RD 1:177). John says that he would like to say that 'the Lutheran thinks Christologically' and to be Christocentric is to combine the two in the God-man.

In Christ the true God is revealed, but we are less familiar with the idea that he also reveals our true humanity. For some reason we have focused on all the NT statements that Jesus is the image of God (e.g. 2 Corinthians 4:4; Colossians 1:15; Hebrews 1:3, cf. John 1:18; 12:45; 14:9) as just referring to his divinity and missed the implication that this shows his humanity as well.

As Tom Smail comments:

Christ is both the divine prototype that is stamped on to our humanity and so imparts to it the divine image, and is also the human being who has received that image and is the perfect expression of it. In the rest of us, in our over-flexible human nature, that image has been eroded and distorted but in Christ it is fresh and new, authentic and complete.

(p. 59, Like Father, Like Son)

So if we want to be free to be ourself we have to look to Christ. But not by following his example, because we cannot be the image of God, but by being in the image of God by his gracious identification with us in our sinful twisted humanity.

Adam is, as is said in [Romans 5:14], the type of Him who is to come. Man's essential and original nature is to be found, therefore, not in Adam but in Christ. In Adam we can only find it prefigured. Adam can therefore be interpreted only in the light of Christ and not the other way round.

(p. 29, Karl Barth cited in Tom Smail, Like Father, Like Son)

My real history

when we repeat the words, "I believe," which introduce the Creed, we affirm our participation in that history and we confess that we are figures drawn into involvement in that history. The history of Jesus Christ, precisely, that is my history! It is closer to me than the various events of my own life.

(p. 83, Karl Barth, The Faith of the Church)

Bruce Waltke had something similar to say as he embarks on a lecture series on Judges:

To a large extent your definition of yourself is your memory ... history is memory. It is our memory. Every sociological community has both a memory and a destiny for its own self-identification. Now there is something more important than your memory, and that is your spiritual commitment.... You and I have made a spiritual commitment to Jesus Christ. This memory of the Old Testament, is his memory. It shaped him. And when we were baptised into Christ we became Abraham's seed, and this whole history is our history. So this is your history you are going to be learning. It is skeletons in the closet for the most part; but it is a tremendous testimony to God's grace. And I am suggesting therefore to you that as a result of this course, and through this gift of memory, you will know yourself better as a Christian

(MP3 lecture, A01, Course Introduction, Light from the Dark Ages: An Exposition on Judges and Ruth)

Karl Barth points us to where we can have hope. If we look at ourselves and our own lives we often see little to be hopeful about. Death appears the end, and a justified end of a short brutish life. But if Jesus' history is ours then his resurrection and justification is ours too.

But even then you may have a nagging doubt. I may identify with Jesus, but if Jesus doesn't identify with me then the union on which all our hope rests breaks down. However, when Jesus makes Israel's history his own, and identifies with the representatives of humanity who again and again went away from him and 'did what was right in [their] own eyes' (Judges 17:6; 21:25), then our hope is a certain one.

Freedom!

Alister McGrath believes that Atheism as a living idea lived 200 years. He argues it was born in 1789 with the Storming of the Bastille and died in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. What gave Atheism strength and life was the experience of the church as oppressive, and what killed it was the experience that Atheist institutions were no different.

That the church should be an enemy of freedom should shock us when we read the bible and discover that freedom is a important description of our salvation. In the Exodus we see literal freedom from slavery, and in the New Testament we learn of our freedom from sin and the law.

But when Christians say they are free who are they kidding? To many they seem to have willingly restricted their freedom. When we think of freedom we understand it as freedom-to-do-this-or-that. I have heard Christians sometimes uncritically take over the same understanding and so when they read that we are free from sin, they read that as we are free to sin or not to sin, where as previously we could only sin.

But if that is our understanding of freedom how can we say that another fall is impossible in the New Creation? Even more importantly how can we say God is free, when we say he cannot sin?

I have recently heard/read John Stott and Karl Barth both address freedom. They both define it positively, and both start from God's freedom and work out human freedom from that.

Karl Barth first of all, doing what he does best, starting from God:

God's freedom is not merely unlimited possibility or formal majesty and omnipotence, that is to say empty, naked sovereignty. Nor is this true of the God-given freedom of man. If we so misinterpret human freedom, it irreconcilably clashes with divine freedom and becomes the false freedom of sin, reducing man to a prisoner. God Himself, if conceived of as unconditioned power would be a demon and as such His own prisoner. In the light of His revelation, God is free in word and deed; He is the source and measure of all freedom, insofar as He is the Lord, choosing and determining Himself first of all. In His own freedom, as the source of human freedom, God above all willed and determined Himself to be the Father and the Son in the unity of the Spirit.

(p. 67, The Humanity of God)

From this foundational understanding of freedom as defined by God, Barth is 'bold to say' four things about human freedom:

(1) Human freedom as a gift of God does not allow for any vague choices between various possibilities....

(2) Human freedom is not realised in the solitary detachment of an individual in isolation from men. God is a se (for Himself), but He is pro nobis (for us). For us!...

(3) Human freedom is only secondarily freedom from limitations and threats. Primarily it is freedom for.

(4) Human freedom is not to be understood as freedom to assert, to preserve, to justify and save oneself. God is primarily free for; the Father is free for the Son, the Son for the Father in the unity of the Spirit. The one God is free for man as his Creator, as the Lord of the covenant, as the beginner and perfecter of his history, his Heilsgeschichte. God says "Yes." Only once this "Yes" is said, He also says "No." Thereby he reveals Himself to be free from all that is alien and hostile to His nature.

(italics original, pp.74-75, ibid)

I cannot help wondering whether John Stott had read this when a few years later he gave some addresses on freedom and said:

Christian freedom is fundamentally positive and not negative as a concept. That is to say, it has to be defined in terms of what we are free for, not in terms of what we are free from. True freedom is freedom to be one's true self. God alone, the Creator, enjoys perfect freedom, because he alone is invariably himself; he never denies himself. God's creatures are free only when they fulfil their Creator's purpose for them ....this Christian freedom (freedom for God as his children) presupposes freedom from all those tyrannies which prevent us from being what God made us and meant us to be.

(from MP3 address, "Freedom ... From the opinions of men", 1 Jan 1971)

Stott is particularly good at analysing how all the contemporary calls for freedom are calls for freedom for something, even when they are presented as being freedom from something. Calls for freedom from foreign colonial power was a call for freedom for nationhood. Calls for free press were calls for truth to be published without restriction. He quotes Malcolm X in his autobiography who calls for a free society in which black people would be free to be who they were - human beings:

Human rights! Respect as human beings! That’s what America's black masses want. That's the problem. The black masses want not to be shrunk from as though they are plague-ridden. They want not to be walled up in slums, in the ghettoes, like animals. They want to live in an open, free society where they can walk with their heads up, like men, like women!

Let's pray for the church to be seen as a place of freedom, and celebrate ourselves the freedom that we have to serve one another and worship God (not considering these things as burdens). After all, as Barth summarises it 'freedom is being joyful.'

Self-validating dogmatics

Karl Barth on 19th century theologians:

It did not enter their minds that respectable dogmatics could be good apologetics.

(p.18, The Humanity of God)

How being creatures gives us dignity

A recent realisation for me has been that the unbridgeable divide between Creator and Created, between God and Human, does not just honour God as God but also gives human beings dignity.

Karl Barth comments:

It is only the heathen gods who envy man. The true God, who is unconditionally the Lord, allows him to be the thing for which He created him. He is far too highly exalted to take it amiss or to prevent it.... There can be no doubt that with an autonomous reality God does give to man and to all His creatures the freedom of individual action

(CD III/3, p. 87, HT Colin Gunton)

The key thing in that quote is that human dignity is a gift. Because it is not ours, then the gift can be a massive as the giver can afford and as permanent as the giver is unchangeable in his attitude towards us.

The dignity of any human being lies in the indissoluble intertwining of element and instituting word. It is attributed to him or her — bestowed, given on loan — by the One who promises and gives himself unconditionally to humankind: namely, God. Thus, my dignity as a human being is attributed to me "without any merit or worthiness on my part". This dignity is at the same time categorically withheld from me and categorically granted to me; it is given to me totally without merit—and precisely because of this, it cannot be taken away from me by any other human.

(p.279, Oswald Bayer, "Self-Creation? On the Dignity of Human Beings" Modern Theology 20:2 April 2004)

Because all that we have is from God he is not going to jealously want back what he has given us. He does not resent our creative activity but encourages us in it.

the figure of Prometheus, who epitomizes the very notion of self-creation, is often played off against the creator-God of the Christian creed. But this is unjust because the "Prometheus" of the young Goethe revolts against a jealous and merciless Zeus and not against the One who—as the Almighty and at the same time Merciful One—grants the dominium terrae to humankind, entrusting them with it, all the while remaining himself free from envy.

(ibid, p. 276)

Because we are "acknowledged as a person prior to invoking any language of merits or qualities" (p. 280) we have dignity whether we are bright or stupid, pretty or ugly, physically strong or weak. This understanding should "utterly revolutionize the bio-ethical debate" (p. 280) but it should also encourage me and enable me to be creative without fear, and love without evaluating the worthiness of those I love.

Can God be known?

'Can God be known? Yes, God can be known, since it is actually true and real that He is knowable through Himself. When that happens, man becomes free, he becomes empowered, he becomes capable - a mystery to himself - of knowing God. Knowledge of God is a knowledge completely effected and determined from the side of its object, from the side of God. But for that very reason it is genuine knowledge; for that very reason it is in the deepest sense free knowledge. Of course it remains a relative knowledge, a knowledge imprisoned within the limits of the creaturely. Of course it is especially true here that we are carrying heavenly treasures in earthen vessels. Our concepts are not adequate to grasp this treasure. Precisely where this genuine knowledge of God takes place it will also be clear that there is no occasion for any pride. There always remains powerless man, creaturely reason within its limitations. But in this area of the creaturely, of the inadequate, it has pleased God to reveal Himself. And since man is foolish in this respect too. He will be wise; since man is petty, He will be great; since man is inadequate, God is adequate. 'Let my grace suffice for thee. For my strength is mighty in the weak' holds good also for the question of knowledge.'

(p.24, Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline)

I really, really love that quote. The only think I don't quite understand is quite what Barth means by it being 'free' knowledge.

The challenge is to ask how I am rejecting that revelation and the promise of knowing God it contains, and choosing to 'know' God in other ways?

Stumbling around in my head

I'm currently reading Like Father Like Son: The Trinity Imaged in Our Humanity by Tom Smail. It is a good book, and I'm seeing the truth of Jason Goroncy's statement about Tom Smail that 'If only he didn't write so clearly then perhaps he might be taken more seriously as a theologian'.

I'm still trying to thrash over in my head what Tom Smail describes quite well:

'One of Karl Barth's central theological axioms was that when we are talking of God, it is the actuality that determines the possibility and not the other way round. We do not limit our openness to what God has done by prior notions of our own about what he could do; rather, our basis for recognizing what he can do is what he has already done' (p.27)

Karl Barth himself explains how this has massive implications for our understanding of the nature of God:

'If in faith in Jesus Christ we are ready to learn, to be told, what Godhead, or the divine nature is, we are confronted with what is and always will be to all other ways of thinking a mystery, and indeed a mystery that offends. The mystery reveals to us that for God it is just as natural to be lowly as it is to be high, to be near as it is to be far, to be little as it is to be great, to be abroad as it is to be at home.' (p. 152, CD IV:1 The Doctrine of Reconcilliation, 1956; quoted in p.77, Smail)

I keep on thinking over Philippians 2 and this idea. I am far from decided. My difficulty is that Jesus gave up what was naturally his in his incarnation ('though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor'). And also that though he was crucified, he was also resurrected. Although the NT is clear that Jesus' glory is his cruxifiction as well as his resurrection (e.g. John 12) and that he is glorified because of his cruxifiction (e.g. Phil 2:9 and Rev 5:12). It is difficult for me.

Also difficult for me is understand is precisely how the Son reveals the Trinity. Tom Smail describes how he has two icons of Jesus. One depicting him alone looking out, and one of Jesus with the other two members of the Trinity looking at the Father (he has Rublev's famous one).

Smail comments that 'It is impossible to make any sense of the Jesus of the gospels if we treat him as a solitary individual whose significance is in himself' (p. 67 - which begs the question why you have such an icon - I hate icons). My difficulty is understanding whether we should see the Trinity revealed in Jesus as that solitary individual dying on the cross and rising to new life, or in Jesus as he dies in broken relationship toward his Father, and whom the Father restored by the power of the Spirit. The second option would seem to be right, but does that alter Barth's conclusion that for God it is 'natural to be lowly', when our Father is, and always has been, in heaven. Having said that God the Father obviously suffered seeing his Son crucified, and has throughout human history endured his name being blasphemed. All very difficult for me to make my head around!

And as an aside, listenining to their podcast, Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo have both introduced me to the wonderful phrase 'pharisaic cadre', and to the fact that Richard Nixon was a Quaker.

Random Law and Gospel things

1. Hosea

Reading Hosea 1 last night I was painfully aware of my whoring after other gods. That I didn't believe Jesus was the source of all good and went looking for it elsewhere. That word of judgment felt so real, and so final, because I could see that the rest of my life I would just not stop repeating. But then God said "I will have mercy on No Mercy, and I will say to Not My People 'You are my people'" (2:23). That word would have no comfort if you were not called Lo-ruhama ('No Mercy'). If God has mercy on you before then there is no word of mercy for you now. That is law and Gospel in action.

2. The cross drawing threads together

One thing that has always struck me about the OT is the finality of many of the pronouncements of punishment. So often it seems that this is not just discipline, this is judgment. It is not a warning of what may happen, but it is a dark promise of what is going to happen. And yet contradictions to these dark words always surface. This has always caused me a little bit of a problem. The doctrine of law and Gospel has helped sort this out for me. Mark Seifrid tends to put it better than most when he comments that there are different and contridictory words from God in the bible to us, but no resolution of them apart from in the event of Jesus' death and resurrection. For example in commenting on the Sander's characterisation of Second Temple Judaism as Covenantal Nomism he argues that Sanders' has actually reduced Second Temple Judaism to Covenantalism without the Nomism. In contrast in the past scholars have focused on the Nomism without the Covenantalism. "In other words in the rabbinic materials, 'covenantalism' (Sanders' 'covenantal nomism') stands alongside 'nomism' without the overarching synthesis which Sanders has proposed". "Rather than striving to produce a system in which all contradictions were eliminated, the rabbis view salvation from (at least) these two independent perspectives". Only in Jesus is there synthesis when "the election of Israel and the demand of the Law meet in Christ, the crucified and risen. The tension within early Jewish thought between grace and demand was resolved in an event, not a higher idea" (pp. 5-6, 'The "New Perspective on Paul" and Its Problems', Themelios, Issue 25-2

3. Law and Gospel as uses or effects

Something that has also helped me understand the doctrine of law and Gospel is the realisation that the same words in scripture can function as both. Stephen D. Paulson provides some helpful examples in a great essay (if you can get hold of it):

The two classic examples of this in Luther are his use of the first commandment and the proclamation of the cross and resurrection. "I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods before me" produces both fear and love, and in one word or phrase gives both law and gospel grammatically. Its function will depend upon the receiving of faith or the hearing apart from faith. One hears the "I am" as the basis for the "you shall," and the other vice versa.

By the same token, the proclamation of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, though one sermon or word, has very different effects. When Peter says, "let all the house of Israel therefore know assuredly that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified" (Acts 2:36), the hearers "were cut to the heart." A short time later, and in very different circumstances, the same sermon is preached and, "While Peter was still speaking, the Holy Spirit fell on all who heard the word" (Acts 10:44), and the hearers were heard extolling god in tongues.

(p.174, 'Law and Gospel: Two Preaching Offices", Dialog, Vol 39, No.3, Fall 2000)

4. Barth's Gospel-Law

One thing I have gathered in my limited reasoning is that Barth famously reversed the traditional order of law and Gospel. I have for the first time come across a hint of why, in his brilliant little book Dogmatics in Outline that I am reading:

Gospel and law are not to be separated; they are one, in such a way that the gospel is the primary thing, that the glad tidings are first in the field and, as such, include the law. Because God is for us, we may also be for Him. Because He has given Himself to us, we may also in gratitude give Him the trifle which we have to give. (p.19)

So the reversal comes from one of Barth's primary concerns that God reveals himself to us, and before that we can have nothing to do with him. God is gracious to reveal himself and so obviously before he does that the law doesn't come into it.

I am glad that I have the first inkling of what Barth was trying to get at.