Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Reverend’ on the grace of God

‘They’s been more than one feller brought to the love of Jesus over the paths of affliction. And what better way than blind? In a world darksome as this’n I believe a blind man ort to be better sighted than most. I believe it’s got a good deal to recommend it. The grace of God don’t rest easy on a man. It can blind him easy as not. It can bend him and make him crooked. And who did Jesus love, friends? The lame the halt and the blind, that’s who. Them is the ones scarred with God’s mercy. Stricken with his love. Ever legless fool and old blind mess like you is a flower in the garden of God. Amen’. – Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark (New York: Random, 1968), 226.

On confession

One of the things that the so-called ‘Parable of the Two Sons’ teaches us is that as far as God is concerned, repentance is not principally about the admission of guilt or the acknowledgement of fault but rather is first and foremost about the confession of death. Another thing that the parable announces is that as far as Jesus is concerned, real confession is subsequent to forgiveness. Confession is not a transaction. Confession is not a negotiation in order to secure forgiveness. Confession is, as Robert Farrar Capon avers in The Parables of Grace, ‘the after-the-last gasp of a corpse that finally can afford to admit it’s dead and accept resurrection. Forgiveness surrounds us, beats upon us all our lives; we confess only to wake ourselves up to what we already have … The sheer brilliance of the retention of infant baptism by a large portion of the church catholic is manifest most of all in the fact that babies can do absolutely nothing to earn, accept, or believe in forgiveness; the church, in baptizing them, simply declares that they have it … And our one baptism for the forgiveness of sins remains the lifelong sacrament, the premier sign of that fact. No subsequent forgiveness – no eucharist, no confession – is ever anything more than an additional sign of what baptism sacramentalizes … We may be unable, as the prodigal was, to believe it until we finally see it; but the God who does it, like the father who forgave the prodigal, never once had anything else in mind’ (pp. 140–1).

‘What the Father Came to See’, by Paul Mariani

How old the story is, we have come to see, and yet how true.
The kid’s back home at last, knowing he’s lost everything
the old man gave him, spent on booze and one-night
stands, a sucker for every sob story his friends had found
to separate him from what they saw as their inheritance.
And, now, when the cash was gone, and the kid out on his own,

alone, reduced to doling out ripe slops to pigs, while his own
gut growled for what the swine had trampled on, true
to their indifferent boorish nature (the inheritance
all such pigs are born to), the kid kept thinking how everything
he’d ever needed the old man had always given him. And so he found
himself heading home at last, even as his sick soul’s dark night—

replete with hissing fevers—loomed ever larger. So, with one eye open night
after chilly night in some piss-soaked alleyway he longed to call his own
as he watched for snarling dogs and whistling perverts, he somehow found
himself at last back home, where his father—and this is true, true,
so help me God—ran out in ragged slippers to hold his lost son up, everything
forgiven, as the kid slumped earthward, believing his inheritance

had gone up in acrid smoke. But the father knew his real inheritance—
the only thing that mattered—was what the cold, indifferent night
had unwillingly given up: his boy kneeling there before him, the one thing
worth living for: his kid back home again, alive, his own
beloved son, chastened, yes, but somehow still alive. True,
the boy looked awful and he stank of shit, but the old man found

his deepest prayers were answered, that the one he’d lost was found
and home again. Time to celebrate, then, time to make a new inheritance
for his son—now sobered—something the kid would try to earn. True,
all of this would only come with the daily round of things. But that night
the old man meant to throw a party for everyone, serve up his own
best fattened calf, along with wine and cakes and song, oh, everything!

But then there was the other son, the good one, who’d done everything
the old man had ever asked of him, dutifully, and had even found
some satisfaction in doing it, if not much fun, and just then did not feel like own-
ing that he knew this ragged wretch who no doubt meant to eat up his inheritance.
You see him there, bigger than the kneeling son, truculent, the bleak night
shadows etched there on his face, and justified, if what we know about ourselves is true.

And the older son is right, it’s true, which the father knows as he knows day from night.
God knows the good son deserves the inheritance which for him means everything,
But these are his sons, his very own, of whom one at least was lost and has been found.

[Source: First Things]

(Some people, like Anne Stewart, literally live – or at least try to live – on the assumption that the kind of economy of relations witnessed to in Luke 15 might actually say something about how things are. The world is possible because of such saints. So is the Church. And just as I can no longer read the Book of Exodus without seeing Charlton Heston, I can no longer read Luke 15 without recalling Anne’s passion for divine irresponsibility. Thanks Anne. And thanks too for ragged slippers that move at such speed to hold up lost children.

‘The first thing that must strike a non-Christian about the Christian’s faith is that it obviously presumes far too much. It is too good to be true: the mystery of being, revealed as absolute love, condescending to wash his creatures’ feet, and even their souls, taking upon himself all the confusion of guilt, all the God-directed hatred, all the accusations showered upon him with cudgels, all the disbelief that arrogantly covers up what he had revealed, all the mocking hostility that once and for all nailed down his inconceivable movement of self-abasement – in order to pardon his creature, before himself and the world’. – Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 102.)

 

Preaching on God’s justice as free grace

‘Preaching on justice means speaking about God in the indicative. Faced with the demand which God’s commandment places on us, our task is to deliver “the message of the free grace of God to all people” (Barmen VI). Because, in the Bible, justice is first and foremost a summarized rephrasing of God’s own good works. The Psalms declare: “How wonderful are the things the Lord does … his righteousness endures forever” (Ps 111:2f.). Hence, “the heavens proclaim his righteousness” (Ps 97:6) “and from one generation to the next … shall sing aloud of [his] righteousness” (Ps 145:7).

God’s justice (i.e., righteousness) – that is, his active caring for his creation – is his attentive accompaniment of his people; that is, his saving deeds and his good guidance. Justice – that is, his constant listening to the cries of the suffering – is his strong arm that liberates the captives; and in all this is God’s passionate love for his people, which can rage terribly about their wickedness and stupidity, but which can do nothing else except be “merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love” (Ps 103:8). Where the justitia is blind, indeed inevitably must be blind to avoid being dazzled by the specific case at hand, it is said of the God of Israel: he watches, he listens and he yields – he applies the freedom of his love by doing justice to each of his creatures in a way that is conducive to his or her life in his or her particular situation. Justice: that is the way of our God through the time and space of his creation, the way on which he keeps his covenant and faithfulness to Israel unto eternity, and through Israel to the whole world, and never abandons the work of his hands. And hence: In the path of righteousness there is life (Prov 12:28a).

Also in the [Accra Confession], this prae of God’s justice takes precedence before all human endeavour. That is why the statements of faith always start with confessions of belief in God before going on to the rejections of economic injustice and ecological destruction.

In this context, I believe it is important to explicitly praise the confessional character of the Accra Declaration. For, in a very specific way, it corresponds to the fact that for us Christians standing up for justice is not a matter of political belief, but the response to God’s own words and deeds, through which we live and to which we, in faith, bear witness.

In order to make this clear, the sermon will, however, have to make the praise for God’s justice resound more clearly and comprehensively than the Accra Confession did or was able to do. I draw attention again to what was said at the beginning regarding the distinction between confession and sermon. Whereas the Accra Confession recalls God’s action in rather dry theological sentences, the sermon, guided by Bible stories, tells of the salvation work of God in such a way that it becomes clear: what happened at that time is also true today; the (hi)story of God with his people also embraces my world and my (hi)story. God is able to change my world and my life, and he will do so!

Hence, the sermon should avoid speaking “gesetzlich” (which means mixing gospel and the law) about the gospel (Manfred Josuttis). This always happens when the impression is given that human deeds could/should take the place of God’s action, as in: “Easter occurs when we rise up against death…” This kind of sermon does not offer much comfort, for it leaves those hearing it on their own, when they would in actual fact be in urgent need of God’s healing action …

After Accra, our basic task in preaching, and simultaneously our unmistakable Christian contribution is to keep making new attempts to tell about the justice of God and to offer it to our listeners as free grace so that despite all their fears and hardship they will become aware of their wealth; despite all their weaknesses they will become aware of their God-given power (cf. 2 Cor 6:3ff.; 12:9) and so become willing and able to stand up to injustice’.

– Peter Bukowski, ‘Preaching on Justice: The Question of the Homiletic Implementation of the Accra Confession’, Reformed World 55, no. 3 (2005), 236–7, 238.

Alan Torrance on the Incarnation, grace and godly living

Grace Communion International regularly makes available a host of excellent interviews. The latest is a 31-minute interview with Alan Torrance by Mike Feazell in which Alan talks freely and movingly about one of his favourite topics – what the Incarnation means to us and how grace sponsors godly living. Also available as MP3, MP4 and wmv.

Advent IV: Weighing the virgin conception

Today’s New Zealand Herald ran this image and its accompanying story about an Auckland church’s (St Matthews’) new billboard. I’m not really interested here in engaging with the controversy around the offensiveness or cleverness or otherwise of the image, or about how I feel about its defacement some five hours after it was erected. I am interested, however, in taking up the image’s and St Matthews’ (both St Matthews in fact, the apostle’s and the Auckland church’s) invitation to enquire about the Christmas event of Mary’s virginal conception, and about the Church’s ongoing proclamation of that event as part of the Good News for which it exists to bear witness.

So here’s my response to that invitation: The miracle of the virgin conception is a judgement against the possibility of the creature producing its own word of revelation and reconciliation. It is a judgement against us thinking that we can know God apart from God’s initiative, and that we might save ourselves apart from God’s bloody intrusion into our situation. It is the proclamation of God’s gracious and free decision to be God for us, to unveil for us, to reconcile us. And it is the proclamation of God’s gracious and free decision to save us, and that by becoming personally involved – literally enfleshed – in the deepest depths of creaturely experience. This is why it is Good News. In PT Forsyth’s words, ‘The Virgin birth is not a necessity created by the integrity and infallibility of the Bible; it is a necessity created (if at all) by the solidarity of the Gospel, and by the requirements of grace’. (Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, 14).

Flannery O’Connor on fiction and grace

‘What offends my taste in fiction is when right is held up as wrong, or wrong as right. Fiction is the concrete expression of mystery – mystery that is lived. Catholics believe that all creation is good and that evil is the wrong use of good and that without Grace we use it wrong most of the time. It’s almost impossible to write about supernatural Grace in fiction. We almost have to approach it negatively. As to natural Grace, we have to take that the way it comes – through nature. In any case, it operates surrounded by evil’. – Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor (ed. Sally Fitzgerald; New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1988), 144.

The grace of judgement and the judgement of grace

Rembrandt van Rijn, 'Christ Crucified between the Two Thieves' (1653), drypoint and burin, National Gallery of Art, Washington

‘If a message of grace tell us there was and is no judgment any more, and that God has simply put judgment on one side and has not exercised it, that cannot be the true grace of God. Surely the grace of God cannot stultify our human conscience like that! So we are haunted by mistrust, unless conscience be drowned in a haze of heart. We have always the feeling and fear that there is judgment to follow. How may I be sure that I may take the grace of God seriously and finally, how be sure that I have complete salvation, that I may entirely trust it through the worst my conscience may say? Only thus, that God is the Reconciler, that He reconciles in Christ’s Cross that the judgment of sin was there for good and all’. – Peter T. Forsyth, The Work of Christ (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1910), 167–8.

Lent Reflection 4: TF Torrance on power

‘[The] movement of God’s holy love into the heart of the world’s evil and agony is not to be understood as a direct act of sheer almighty power, for it is not God’s purpose to shatter and annihilate the agents and embodiments of evil in the world, but rather to pierce into the innermost center of evil power where it is entrenched in the piled-up and self-compounding guilt of humanity in order to vanquish it from within and below, by depriving it of the lying structures of half-truth on which it thrives and of the twisted forms of legality behind which it embattles itself and from which it fraudulently gains its power. Here we have an entirely different kind and quality of power, for which we have no analogies in our experience to help us understand it, since it transcends every kind of moral and material power we know, the power which the Bible calls grace …’. – Thomas F. Torrance, Divine and Contingent Order (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2005), 136.

Grace: an ‘intensity of outward attention’

The NYT recently ran an interesting piece by Lee Siegel on George Steiner, a kind of follow-up/review piece of Steiner’s recently-released book George Steiner at The New Yorker. The article included one of the best definitions of grace that I’ve encountered: grace is ‘an intensity of outward attention — interest, curiosity, healthy obsession …’.

Christian theologians will no doubt want to further define grace – that is, to say something about how grace takes on fallen flesh and stubbornly refuses to be fallen in it, that this ‘intensity of outward attention’ takes place in a particular person, etc. – but Siegel’s definition goes a long way to bearing witness to something of grace’s existential motivation.

Want more? Read Real Presences; it’s absolutely brilliant.

‘Adam, where are you?’

‘God … has gone to search for Adam, our first father, as for a lost sheep. Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, He has gone to free from sorrow Adam in his bonds and Eve, captive with him … “I did not create you to be a prisoner in hell. Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead”‘. – ‘Ancient Homily for Holy Saturday’, ascribed to Epiphanius of Constantia, cited in Catechism of the Catholic Church (Homebush: Society of St Pauls, 1994), 165:

Christians on their best side

‘In invocation of God the Father everything depends on whether or not it is done in sheer need (not self-won competence), in sheer readiness to learn (not schooled erudition), and in sheer helplessness (not the application of a technique of self-help). This can be the work only of very weak and very little and very poor children, of those who in their littleness, weakness, and poverty can only get up and run with empty hands to their Father, appealing to him. Nor should we forget to add that it can only be the work only of naughty children of God who have wilfully run away again from their Father’s house, fond themselves among swine in the far country, turned their thoughts back home, and then – if they could – returned to their Father … Christians who regard themselves as big and strong and rich and even dear and good children of God, Christian who refuse to sit with their Master at the table of publicans and sinners, are not Christians at all, have still to become so, and need not be surprised if heaven is gray above them and their calling upon God sounds hollow and finds no hearing. The glory, splendour, truth, and power of divine sonship, and of the freedom to invoke God as Father, and therefore the use of this freedom – the Christian ethos in big and little things alike – depends at every time and in every situation on whether or not Christians come before God as beginners, as people who cannot make anything very imposing out of their faith in Jesus Christ, who even with this faith of theirs – and how else could it be if it is faith in Jesus Christ? – venture to draw near to his presence only with the prayer: “Help my unbelief” (Mk. 9:24). Mark well that this has nothing to do with Christian defeatism. It describes Christians on their best side and not their worst, in their strength and not their weakness (2 Cor. 12:10).’ – Karl Barth, The Christian Life: Church Dogmatics IV,4: Lecture Fragments (trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1981), 80.

A Challenge Towards Hospitality

‘Where welcoming gays and lesbians in congregations translates into a denial of their calling to ministry and a dismissal of same-sex partnerships; where welcoming the homeless means a remote corner of the church building may be reserved for “their” use; where extending hospitality to children means removing them from worship and whisking them away to a dingy and cluttered room, the hospitality of Jesus’ name is not extended … [T]o name Jesus in acts of hospitality and care is to be caught up in the entire trajectory of Jesus’ ministry. To speak his name is to be drawn into the way of Jesus Christ: away of vulnerable love made real in the flesh that opens us radically to others. This is not a way of privilege, superiority, and trumpeting exclusion, but covenant, vulnerability, and difference. To welcome in the name of Jesus means that others have a claim on us.’ – David H. Jensen, Graced Vulnerability: A Theology of Childhood (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2005), 132.

Getting Kant out of my system

Having spent most of today reading that great father of modern thought – Kant – I confess that what I once discerned as a growing admiration for this Enlightenment thinker with ‘a good dose of Lutheran and Pauline scepticism’ is slowly being ebbed away. In fact, the more I read, it seems, the quicker the ebb ebbs. For example, consider this sample:

Because men are exceedingly frail in all acts of morality, and not only what they practise as a good action is very defective and flawed, but they also consciously and wilfully violate the divine law, they are quite unable to confront a holy and just judge, who cannot forgive evil-doing simpliciter. The question is, can we, by our vehement begging and beseeching, hope for and obtain through God’s goodness the forgiveness of all our sins? No, we cannot without contradiction conceive of a kindly judge; as ruler he may well be kindly, but a judge must be just. For if God could forgive all evil-doing, He could also make it permissible and if He can grant impunity, it rests also on His will to make it permitted; in that case, however, the moral laws would be an arbitrary matter, though in fact they are not arbitrary, but just as necessary and eternal as God. God’s justice is the precise allocation of punishments and rewards in accordance with men’s good or bad behaviour. The divine will is immutable. Hence we cannot hope that because of our begging and beseeching God will forgive us everything, for in that case it would be a matter, not of well-doing, but of begging and beseeching. We cannot therefore conceive of a kindly judge without wishing that on this occasion He might close His eyes and allow Himself to be moved by supplications and flatteries; but this might then befall only a few, and would have to be kept quiet; for if it were generally known, then everyone would want it so, and that would make a mockery of the law … [Man] cannot, indeed, hope for any remission of punishment for his crimes from a benevolent ruler, since in that case the divine will would not be holy; but man is holy insofar as he is adequate to the moral law; he can, therefore, hope for kindness from the benevolent ruler, not only in regard to the physical, where the very actions themselves already produce good consequences, but also in regard to the moral; but he cannot hope to be dispensed from morality, and from the consequences of violating it. The goodness of God consists, rather, in the aids whereby He can make up for the deficiencies of our natural frailty and thereby display His benevolence. – Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics (ed. P. Heath and J. B. Schneewind; trans. P. Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 114–5.

Ouch! It makes one wonder if Kant had ever read Galatians, or Romans! For what is absent in Kant here is not only any notion that the law of God is the law of God’s own being and so cannot be abstracted from God, but also any notion that in a world like ours holiness literally takes the form of grace.

This relates to something else that I’ve been thinking of today, namely Forsyth (as I do), whose deep indebtment to Kant is not without its criticisms. One of Forsyth’s greatest critiques of Kant is reserved for his discussion on prayer. He grants that Kant certainly represents ‘intellectual power and a certain stiff moral insight’, but he lacks ‘spiritual atmosphere, delicacy, or flexibility, which is rather the Catholic tradition’. It is in Kant’s treatment of prayer, Forsyth contends, that he most betrays an intellectualism that ‘tends to more force than finish, and always starves or perverts ethic’. This is because he treats prayer with ‘the equipment of his age’ rather than with the ‘practical experience’ that he would have gleaned if he had immersed himself in ‘the great saints or captains of the race’ like Paul, Thomas à Kempis, or even Cromwell and Gustavus Adolphus. If only Kant had gone to them, Forsyth conjectures, he would have ‘realized the difference between shame and shyness, between confusion at an unworthy thing and confusion at a thing too fine and sacred for exposure’.

God is for us!

Karl Barth once penned: ‘That man is against God is important and must be taken seriously. But what is far more important and must be taken more seriously is that in Jesus Christ God is for man. And it is only in the light of the second fact that the importance and seriousness of the first can be seen’. – Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II.2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), 154.

Yes! In Jesus Christ, God has shown not only that God does not want to be God without humanity, but also that God does not want humanity to be humanity without God. God’s will is that God might not be only for himself, but that God might be for humanity all that God is in his eternity. And in the action of the Holy Spirit, the Triune God is present and active among us to hear and answer prayers, to create and sustain life in every minum of creation, to empower human beings to keep saying ‘No’ to sin and ‘Yes’ to God, and to continuously bring home afresh the good news of the Father’s sanctifying action in Jesus Christ, guaranteeing humanity’s inheritance, and empowering us to live in the reality of being ‘holy and blameless’ before God (Eph 1:4). Because God is Holy Love (one of Forsyth’s great themes), humanity’s failure to participate in God’s holiness, is, at core, a denial of God’s love. It is to receive God’s grace in vain. 

Who would have ever thought? God is for us! Hallelujah!

[Image: Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, 'Jacob Wrestling with the Angel'. Oil on canvas (137 × 116 cm) — ca. 1659/60. Gemäldegalerie der Staatlichen Museen, Berlin]

Luther on taking refuge in grace alone

‘Before the judgment seat of the world I am content to be dealt with according to the law; there I will answer and do what I ought. But before thee I would appeal to no law, but rather flee to the Cross and plead for grace and accept it as I am able. For the Scriptures teach me that God established two seats for men, a judgment seat for those who are still secure and proud and will neither acknowledge nor confess their sin, and a mercy seat for those whose conscience is poor and needy, who feel and confess their sin, dread his judgment, and yearn for his grace. And this mercy seat is Christ himself, as St. Paul says in Rom. 3 [:25], whom God has established for us, that we might have refuge there, since by ourselves we cannot stand before God. There shall I take my refuge when I have done or still do less than is meet and done much more of sin according to the law, both before and after my sanctification and justification. There my heart and conscience, regardless of how pure and good they are or can be in the sight of men, shall be as nothing, and they shall be covered over as it were with a vault, yea, with a fair heaven, which will mightily protect and defend them, the name of which is grace and the forgiveness of sins. Thereunder shall my heart and conscience creep and be safe’. – Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Vol. 51: Sermons I (Edited by H.C. Oswald, J.J. Pelikan, H.T. Lehmann; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1999), 277.

‘Reflections on Grace’: A Review

Thomas A. Langford, Reflections on Grace (ed. Philip A. Rolnick, Jonathan R. Wilson; Eugene: Cascade Books, 2007. xi + 113 pages. ISBN: 978 1 55635 058 0. Review copy courtesy of Wipf and Stock.

‘God present is grace’. So begins this collection of brief, but rich, reflections on the most precious of realities – the inexhaustible grace of God. In under 100 pages, Langford shares with us his reflections – penned during the last years of his life and published posthumously – of what he has learnt over a lifetime of learning about grace as gift, as truth, and as the converse of disgrace. Ever interpreted christologically, and never divorced from its enfleshment in the realities of creation and in the nurturing and interpretation within the community of God’s people, Langford gently – graciously – invites us to catch glimpses of nothing less than the Triune God, and to believe that this God not only speaks in ‘the tongue of our time’ (p. 22), but that he holds nothing of himself back as he throws himself into the most despicable and hopeless of human situations in order to bring transformation. This is grace’s self-giving and cruciform ‘edge’; it is ‘as real as the conditions in which life must be lived’ (p. 29).

Grace, Langford argues, is not only God’s ‘way of being’, but – precisely because it is such – it establishes our way of being, and makes possible ‘the integrity of the faithful responder’ (p. 105). Rejection of this grace, therefore, issues in the malformation of life. This United Methodist minister reminds us that our attempts to live as though God were absent atrophies human possibility and being.

While not convincing at every point (he over-presses, at times, a strained disjunction between God’s love and his law, for example), this is a beautifully-written book and deserves to be read slowly. It would be a great book to work through in a small group.

What is Worship?

Those who have appreciated the ministry of James Torrance will be encouraged to take note of this wee reflection on worship by Worldwide Church of God minister, Dr. Joseph Tkach. Good news is always worth reading/watching/listening to … and then sharing with others. Tkach writes:

Christians around the world participate in an act of worship that is known by several names, including the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist, Communion, and even the New Testament Passover.

Whatever it may be called in any given Christian tradition, the eating of bread and drinking of wine is done in remembrance of Jesus as he commanded.

In Luke 22:19-20 (NIV), we read:

And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way, after the supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.

As we participate in this act of worship it helps to understand what Jesus meant in his command “in remembrance.” The Greek word used in the Gospel of Luke is anamnesis, a word of rich liturgical significance. It does not refer merely to recalling a past event. It points to remembering in such a way that we understand our actual participation in that past event.

And there is a specific reason for this kind of remembrance. Our own personal past, present and future are in fact fully enmeshed in the personal experience of Jesus Christ in his life, death, resurrection and ascension. Jesus Christ became human for our sakes, in our place and on our behalf. As our Creator and our Redeemer, he took up our cause in his own being by becoming human for us.

Authentic worship, therefore, does not originate with us, but rather with Jesus in whom every human being exists and has meaning.

Therefore our emphasis in worship is not upon ourselves, but upon Christ’s action on our behalf. As Scottish theologian James Torrance explained it: “Our response in faith and obedience is a response (this is “response” with a lower case “r”) to the Response (this “Response” is with an upper case “R”)already made for us by Christ…” (Torrance, J.B. The Vicarious Humanity of Christ appearing in The Incarnation, Torrance, T.F. (ed.) (Handsel Press, Edinburgh: 1981).

Our worship of God is authentic worship only because Jesus himself, as the representative human, the perfect human, in our place and on our behalf, worships God for us and in us.

Early Christian leaders made this same point. The fourth century church father Athanasius taught that there is a two-way movement in Jesus Christ. On the one hand, Jesus is God’s saving action toward us. He is the act of God the Father reaching down to deal with our sin and guilt and shame and emptiness. Jesus ministers the things of God to all humanity.

And on the other hand, Jesus is Man representing all humanity, responding perfectly to God on behalf of every human. He is not only God coming to man. He is man going to God, on our behalf and in our place.

Jesus is our perfect and permanent mediator and high priest. He is God acting for humanity, and he is the perfect human responding to God on our behalf. He offers to God on our behalf the perfect and complete Response of everything God wants and expects of humanity.

As the perfect human representing all humans, Jesus answers the Father not with rebellion, not with indifference, not with coldness or apathy, but with zeal and passion and obedience and sincere submission and true adoration. He is human for us, standing in for us, representing all humanity as he lives in true fellowship with God the Father and the Holy Spirit.

In other words, worship is really something we do with our lives as we live in Christ. It happens in every moment as we reflect Jesus Christ who lives within us. It happens when we read a story to our children, when we hug our parents, when we show kindness to another person.

And it happens whenever we eat and drink the Lord’s Supper. All this is participating in the very life of the Trinity and feeling the joy and love shared by the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Theodicy: The Justification Of God – 9

SAVING JUDGEMENT

Study 9

A guest post by Trevor Faggotter

As we pursue the study of P.T. Forsyth’s book, The Justification of God, we look at the matter of salvation – and the apostolic desire for all people, including the kings of the world, to come into the Kingdom of God, and be saved. As Forsyth says: The more we believe in the Kingdom of God the more we must believe in judgment.[1]

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings should be made for everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity. This is right and is acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour, who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself a ransom for all – this was attested at the right time (1 Timothy 2:1-6)

God our Saviour desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.  God saves his people. The Israelites groaned under their slavery in Egypt, and cried out to God (Exodus 2:23). They were rescued – or saved by passing through the red sea. Salvation involves coming out into a large place – a place of freedom and space. Salvation involves the joy of daily life within creation. Salvation involves liberty and the joy of community life; salvation involves the future glorious freedom, which is given from sin and death. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death (Romans 8:2). Salvation extends to the future of creation, set free from its bondage to decay (Romans 8:21). Salvation is eternal life in Christ Jesus.

SALVATION THROUGH JUDGMENT

Many people think that the cross of Christ is a sort of legal device designed for avoiding judgment. This is not so. Rather, salvation comes, not in bypassing judgment, but takes place by passing through judgment. The judgment of the cross cuts right through us, and we, by faith, pass through it, in Christ. I have been crucified with Christ is our true claim. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.

P.T. Forsyth says:

What is judgment but the setting out in true and full light (i.e. in just relation to the whole) of the actual state of things between the soul’s case and the ruling power of the world? Unless Christ be a dream or a dreamer, that power is God’s grace. That is our final judge. To it we stand or fall. The gospel of grace, in the Cross and its preaching, is the real ultimate judgment of the world, the real and final power at work now.[2]

Our salvation cost the Father his own Son. We may think this was but for a moment. That view would be a misreading of the gospel message. That Christ was utterly forsaken – is a fracture, or deep break, within the love-unity of the Triune God himself, and is of immense importance. Paul sees this action as a totally gracious giving to the human race.

He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all – how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? (Romans 8:32)

Forsyth presses us in the opposite direction in order that we might grasp something of the judgment process both in the cross, and in the course of human history. God who is prepared to forsake his Son, for the sake of humanity’s future, is also prepared to us the most dreadful of circumstances, to further his good purpose for creation. Forsyth is referring particularly to the tragic world war he was experiencing in 1917.

If God spared not His own Son He can bear to see, and rise to use, the most dreadful things that civilisation can produce. History is a long judgment process; but it is not in the course of history with its debacles that we find the last judgment of God, and fix our faith in it, but at a point of history, in the Cross of Christ. It is there that we find the justification of God at first hand, and His own theodicy.[3]

THE LOOSING AND BINDING ACTION OF LOVE

Hearing the gospel message is not a neutral exercise. It is a crisis, a moment of decision. It has consequences. The disciples understood their actions were not neutral, and learned this from their Lord, when Jesus said: ‘I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.’ Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah (Matthew 16:19). In John we read: ‘If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained’. (John 20:23)

Their power to forgive is of course ministerial only, and not magisterial. The disciples are heralds of the gospel, servants and agents of Christ. But only God, in Christ, as King has the right to forgive, and pardon. God acts in love, in sending Christ, to reveal this love:

In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. (1 John 4:10).

The great Christian message to the world is not simply love. That is too general, not to say vague. Christianity does not produce only love to God, but also hate.[4]

Our message is never neutral. Forsyth said of gracious loving, direct preaching:

It not only produces faith but it also deepens unfaith, and hardens impenitence. If it loose it also binds; and it can do the one only if it do the other – action and reaction being equal. If it draw some near to God, it repels others into distance and estrangement. There is such a thing as the repulsive power of a great affection.[5]

Perfect grace was and is final judgment. It is condemnation to ignore salvation. Full and final judgment is not something super-added to the Gospel. It is no corollary, no by-product. It is intrinsic to it. It is an element of Fatherhood, and not a device.[6]

John’s Gospel warns people not to ignore this salvation. Following on from the most used evangelical appeal from Scripture, is the warning sound as well. We should weigh it carefully in our minds and hearts.

‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not condemned; (John 3:16-18a)

but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgement, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.’ (John 3:18b-21)

Forsyth writes:

The same Church that evangelises the world in the very act judges it. It not only divides each soul, but all society, electing and rejecting.[7]

The Cross did not, indeed, come directly and expressly to judge (John viii. 15-16, xii. 47-48). It did so only in the course of exerting … God’s love, grace, and forgiveness. But judge it certainly did. It brought to a head for the world the sin of an elect nation – a nation whose sense of privilege and merit repudiated moral for national interests, scouted Christ’s word of mercy and His call to repent, and found no public meaning in His Word of love and humility. It thus became, more than Rome, incarnate Antichrist. It sinned against pure light.[8]

The Cross, which that nation inflicted filled up the measure of its guilt and brought it death. And this was not against Christ’s will but with it. He knew He was Israel’s doom. The Holy One knew that the soul of man or nation that chose to sin must go on to die, and that every word of greater love might become a word of more wrath. But He never judged them in the sense of avenging, far less of revenging. Their judgment was the reaction on them, from God’s holiness… [9]

THE PERSON OF CHRIST IS NOT KNOWN APART FROM HIS WORK

Sin is deceitful, as are the works of the evil One, which Christ came to destroy. Indeed, the powers of Satan and his minions are poorly considered, by our humanistic culture. As Geoffrey Bingham has pointed out: There is quite a bit of shoulder-shrugging in regard to this subject.[10] Forsyth describes deficient teaching in his day as:

‘… defective insight into the final nature and victory of the Cross over the diabolism and perdition in the world’.

It reflects a certain moral amateurism due to the abeyance of a theology of the Cross. Such religion, certainly, loves the person of Christ. It is in love with His love, and with His Cross as the summit of that love in self-sacrifice. But it has no room nor need for judgment there. It does not feel there God’s judgment on sin, and the crisis of the moral world and of a holy eternity. It needs moralising from a deeper experience of life – an experience older, more secular, more tragic. For want of a theology of conscience such souls do not know the world nor gauge its redemption. Their belief in Christ is impaired for want of a belief in the Satan that Christ felt it His supreme conflict to counter-work and destroy.[11]

The Son of God was revealed for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil (1 John 3:8b). And that he did by bearing our sins, dealing with our guilt, pronouncing God’s word of forgiveness and peace, thus saving humanity from Satan’s deadly accusations.

The grace of God is the greatest judgment ever passed on the world. That is the nature of the Cross – God’s grace (and not God’s law), in moral, saving judgment on man. When we have entered the kingdom through the great judgment in the Cross, we do not escape all judgment; we escape into a new kind of judgment, from that of law to that of grace. We escape condemnation, for we are new creatures, but chastisement we do not escape. Our work may be burned, to our grief, that we may be saved (I Cor. xi. 32). We are judged or chastened with the Church to escape condemnation with the world. And at the last must there not be some great crisis of self-judgment, when we all see Him as He is, and see ourselves as His grace sees us?[12]

We are afraid that if we find that moral ground and destiny of the world in the historic Christ and His Cross, and if we say ‘we see not yet all things put under righteousness, but we see Jesus,’ and rest, we shall be called Biblicists instead of historians, more theological than ethical. Well, we must take the risk. The judgment of the world accordingly is not the history of the world, but its Saviour.[13]

---

[1] P.T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, NCPI, 1988, p. 170.

[2] P.T. Forsyth, p. 184-185.

[3] P.T. Forsyth, p. 170.

[4] P.T. Forsyth, p. 170.

[5] P.T. Forsyth, p. 170.

[6] P.T. Forsyth, p. 171.

[7] P.T. Forsyth, p. 171.

[8] P.T. Forsyth, p. 171.

[9] P.T. Forsyth, p. 172.

[10] G.C. Bingham, The Clash of the Kingdoms, NCPI, 1989, p. 10.

[11] P.T. Forsyth, p. 175.

[12] P.T. Forsyth, p. 181.

[13] P.T. Forsyth, p. 186.

Ah … grace!

A few weeks ago, I was invited to write a wee reflection for our church’s weekly devotion. Here’s a bit of what I wrote:

Jesus was not playing semantic games with us when he declared, ‘He who has seen me, has seen the Father’ (John 14:9). There is no God behind Jesus Christ. In Jesus, we see the full brunt of God’s attitude to us, and it is one of unbridled grace. There is no shadow side to God’s love, as if God might be schizophrenic, or somehow different from the one who ‘stretched out his hand and touched’ lepers (Matt 8:2), or healed the Centurion’s paralysed servant (Matt 8:13), or who gave a widow’s dead son back to his mother (Luke 7:11–17), or who had his feet washed with the tears of a prostitute (if this is what she was; Luke 7:38).

The incarnation of God into our broken and insolent world flows out of the undivided heart of a Father who has spared nothing in order that we might know his forgiveness, and so life. God did not have to be bribed or appeased into forgiving us. That’s not why Jesus died. Jesus died that God might treat sinners he loves as daughters and sons, seeing us free from all that keeps us entangled in our shame, pain, isolation and guilt. Jesus died that we might – by the same eternal Spirit through whom Jesus ‘offered himself without blemish to God’ (Heb. 9:14) – know the purification of our consciences from dead works and be set free to serve the living God.

Ah … grace!

What Christ gives

There’s few things quite like a good dose of Luther to help one hear afresh that word which kills in order to make alive. Here’s two passages that I’ve been reflecting on today:

‘Christ gives grace and peace, not as the apostles did, by preaching the Gospel, but as its Author and Creator. The Father creates and gives life, grace, peace, etc.; the Son creates and gives the very same things. To give grace, peace, eternal life, the forgiveness of sins, justification, life, and deliverance from death and the devil—these are the works, not of any creature but only of the Divine Majesty. The angels can neither create these things nor grant them. Therefore these works belong only to the glory of the sovereign Majesty, the Maker of all things’. – Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Vol. 26: Lectures on Galatians, 1535, Chapters 1-4 (Edited by Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald and Helmut T. Lehmann; Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1999), 31.

‘Christ, however, declares here: “Let it be your one concern to come to Me and to have the grace to hold, to believe, and to be sure in your heart that I was sent into the world for your sake, that I carried out the will of My Father and was sacrificed for your atonement, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption, and bore all punishment for you. If you believe this, do not fear. I do not want to be your judge, executioner, or jailer, but your Savior and Mediator, yes, your kind, loving Brother and good Friend. But you must abandon your work-righteousness and remain with Me in firm faith.” – Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Vol. 23: Sermons on the Gospel of St. John: Chapters 6-8 (Edited by Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald and Helmut T. Lehmann; Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1999), 58.

Ah! Good news!

Jacques Ellul on hell and the grace of God

‘I am taking up here a basic theme that I have dealt with elsewhere but which is so essential that I have no hesitation in repeating myself. It is the recognition that all people from the beginning of time are saved by God in Jesus Christ, that they have all been recipients of his grace no matter what they have done.

This is a scandalous proposition. It shocks our spontaneous sense of justice. The guilty ought to be punished. How can Hitler and Stalin be among the saved? The just ought to be recognized as such and the wicked condemned. But in my view this is purely human logic which simply shows that there is no understanding of salvation by grace or of the meaning of the death of Jesus Christ. The proposition also runs counter to the almost unanimous view of theology. Some early theologians proclaimed universal salvation but almost all the rest finally rejected it. Great debates have taken place about foreknowledge and predestination, but in all of them it has been taken for granted that reprobation is normal.

A third and the most serious objection to the thesis is posed by the biblical texts themselves. Many of these talk about condemnation, hell, banishment into outer darkness, and the punishment of robbers, fornicators, idolaters, etc. As we proceed we must overcome these obstacles and examine the theological reasons which lead me to believe in universal salvation, the texts that seem to be against it, and a possible solution.

But I want to stress that I am speaking about belief in universal salvation. This is for me a matter of faith. I am not making a dogma or a principle of it. I can say only what

I believe, not pretending to teach it doctrinally as the truth.

1. God Is love

My first simple thesis is that if God is God, the Almighty, the Creator of all things, the Omnipresent, then we can think of no place or being whatever outside him. If there were a place outside him, God would not be all in all, the Creator of all things. How can we think of him creating a place or being where he is not present? What, then, about hell? Either it is in God, in which case he is not universally good, or it is outside him, hell having often been defined as the place where God is not. But the latter is completely unthinkable.

One might simply say that hell is merely nothingness. The damned are those who are annihilated. But there is a difficulty here too. Nothingness does not exist in the Bible. It is a philosophical and mathematical concept. We can represent it only by a mathematical sign. God did not create ex nihilo, out of nothing. Genesis 1:2 speaks of tohu wabohu (“desert and wasteland” RSV “formless and void’) or of tehom (“the deep’). This is not nothing.

Furthermore, the closest thing to nothingness seems to be death. But the Bible speaks about enemies, that is, the great serpent, death, and the abyss, which are aggressors against God’s creation and are seeking to destroy it. These are enemies against which God protects his creation. He cannot allow that which he has created and called good to be destroyed, disorganized, swallowed up, and slain. This creation of God cannot revert to nothing. Death cannot issue in nothingness. This would be a negation of God himself, and this is why the first aspect seems to me to be decisive. Creation is under constant threat and is constantly upheld.

How could God himself surrender to nothingness and to the enemy that which he upholds in face and in spite of everything? How could he allow a power of destruction and annihilation in his creation? If he cannot withstand the force of nothingness, then we have to resort to dualism (a good God and a bad God in conflict and equal), to Zoroastrianism. Many are tempted to dualism today. But if God is unique, if he alone has life in himself, he cannot permit this threat to the object of his love.

But it is necessary that “the times be accomplished,” the times when we are driven into a corner and have to serve either the impotence of the God of love or the power of the forces of destruction and annihilation. We have to wait until humanity has completed its history and creation, and every possibility has been explored. This does not merely imply, however, that at the end of time the powers of destruction, death, the great serpent, Satan, the devil, will be annihilated, but much more. How can we talk about nothingness when we receive the revelation of this God who will be all in all? When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself also will be subjected to him who put all things under him, that God may be all in all (1 Cor. 15:28).

If God is, he is all in all. There is no more place for nothingness. The word is an empty one. For Christians it is just as empty as what it is supposed to denote. Philosophers speak in vain about something that they can only imagine or use as a building block, but which has no reality of any kind.

The second and equally essential factor is that after Jesus Christ we know that God is love. This is the central revelation. How can we conceive of him who is love ceasing to love one of his creatures? How can we think that God can cease to love the creation that he has made in his own image? This would be a contradiction in terms. God cannot cease to be love.

If we combine the two theses we see at once that nothing can exist outside God’s love, for God is all in all. It is unthinkable that there should exist a place of suffering, of torment, of the domination of evil, of beings that merely hate since their only function is to torture. It is astounding that Christian theology should not have seen at a glance how impossible this idea is. Being love, God cannot send to hell the creation which he so loved that he gave his only Son for it. He cannot reject it because it is his creation. This would be to cut off himself.

A whole theological trend advances the convenient solution that God is love but also justice. He saves the elect to manifest his love and condemns the reprobate to manifest his justice. My immediate fear is that this solution does not even correspond to our idea of justice and that we are merely satisfying our desire that people we regard as terrible should be punished in the next world. This view is part of the mistaken theology which declares that the good are unhappy on earth but will be happy in heaven, whereas the wicked are successful on earth but will be punished in the next world. Unbelievers have every reason to denounce this explanation as a subterfuge designed to make people accept what happens on earth. The kingdom of God is not compensation for this world.

Another difficulty is that we are asked to see God with two faces as though he were a kind of Janus facing two ways. Such a God could not be the God of Jesus Christ, who has only one face. Crucial texts strongly condemn two-faced people who go two different ways. These are the ones that Jesus Christ calls hypocrites. If God is doubleminded, there is duplicity in him. He is a hypocrite. We have to choose: He is either love or he is justice. He is not both. If he is the just judge, the pitiless Justiciar, he is not the God that Jesus Christ has taught us to love.

Furthermore, this conception is a pure and simple denial of Jesus Christ. For the doctrine is firm that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died and was willing to die for human sin to redeem us all: I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself (John 12:32), satisfying divine justice. All the evil done on earth from Adam’s break with God undoubtedly has to be judged and punished. But all our teaching about Jesus is there to remind us that the wrath of God fell entirely on him, on God in the person of the Son. God directs his justice upon himself; he has taken upon himself the condemnation of our wickedness.

What would be the point, then, of a second condemnation of individuals? Was the judgment passed on Jesus insufficient? Was the price that was paid-the punishment of the Son of God-too low to meet the demands of God’s justice? This justice is satisfied in God and by God for us. From this point on, then, we know only the face of the love of God.

This love is not sentimental acquiescence. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God (Heb. 10:31). God’s love is demanding, “jealous,” total, and indivisible. Love has a stern face, not a soft one. Nevertheless, it is love. And in any case this love excludes double predestination, some to salvation and others to perdition. It is inconceivable that the God of Jesus Christ, who gives himself in his Son to save us, should have created some people ordained to evil and damnation. There is indeed a predestination, but it can be only the one predestination to salvation. In and through Jesus Christ all people are predestined to be saved. Our free choice is ruled out in this regard. We have often said that God wants free people. He undoubtedly does, except in relation to this last and definitive decision. We are not free to decide and choose to be damned. To say that God presents us with the good news of the gospel and then leaves the final issue to our free choice either to accept it and be saved or to reject it and be lost is foolish. To take this point of view is to make us arbiters of the situation. In this case it is we who finally decide our own salvation.

This view reverses a well-known thesis and would have it that God proposes and man disposes. Without question we all know of innumerable cases in which people reject revelation. Swarms are doing so today. But have they any real knowledge of revelation? If I look at countless presentations of the Word of God by the churches, I can say that the churches have presented many ideas and commandments that have nothing whatever to do with God’s revelation. Rejecting these things, human commandments, is not the same as rejecting the truth. And even if the declaration or proclamation of the gospel is faithful, it does not itself force a choice upon us.

If people are to recognize the truth, they must also have the inner witness of the Holy Spirit. These two things are indispensable, the faithful declaration of the gospel, the good news, by a human being and the inner witness in the hearer of the Holy Spirit, who conveys the assurance that it is the truth of God. The one does not suffice without the other. Thus when those who hear refuse our message, we can never say that they have chosen to disobey God.

The human and divine acts are one and the same only in the Word of Jesus. When he told his hearers not to be unbelieving but to believe, if they refused then they were rejected. In our case, however, we cannot say that there is an act of the Holy Spirit simultaneously with our proclamation. This may well be the point of the well-known text about the one sin that cannot be pardoned, the sin against the Holy Spirit (cf. Matt. 12:31-32). But we can never know whether anyone has committed it. However that may be, it is certain that being saved or lost does not depend on our own free decision.

I believe that all people are included in the grace of God. I believe that all the theologies that have made a large place for damnation and hell are unfaithful to a theology of grace. For if there is predestination to perdition, there is no salvation by grace. Salvation by grace is granted precisely to those who without grace would have been lost. Jesus did not come to seek the righteous and the saints, but sinners. He came to seek those who in strict justice ought to have been condemned.

A theology of grace implies universal salvation. What could grace mean if it were granted only to some sinners and not to others according to an arbitrary decree that is totally contrary to the nature of our God? If grace is granted according to the greater or lesser number of sins, it is no longer grace – it is just the opposite because of this accountancy. Paul is the very one who reminds us that the enormity of the sin is no obstacle to grace: Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more (Rom. 5:20).

This is the key statement. The greater the sin, the more God’s love reveals itself to be far beyond any judgment or evaluation of ours. This grace covers all things. It is thus effectively universal.

I do not think that in regard to this grace we can make the Scholastic distinctions between prevenient grace, expectant grace, conditional grace, etc. Such adjectives weaken the thrust of the free grace of the absolute sovereign, and they result only from our great difficulty in believing that God has done everything.

But this means that nothing in his creation is excluded or lost’.

Jacques Ellul, What I Believe (trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 188-92.

Regained: A Poem

Light

Not overcome

Good gifts taken

Naked – unashamed they were

Could it ever be regained?

Stripped, bearing shame vicariously

Holy wrath extinguished

Father’s love

New

           New

© Jason Goroncy, 2008

Forsyth and Barth on Judgement

In the current of my work on my ‘christology chapter’ for my thesis, I have been struck afresh just how much Forsyth anticipates some of Barth’s best moments, and how both of them have an important word to speak into the renewed debate on penal substitution. Of course, many of Barth’s greatest words are in the small print. This, of course, ought be no suprise: it is the small print that makes up the bulk of his Dogmatics it seems. (On that, is someone able to confirm, or otherwise, for me that Barth once said that the reason that he wrote so much was in order to ‘get the Enlightenent out of my system’?).

One thing (among many) that I love in both Forsyth and Barth is their relentless insistence that neither the divine-human reconciliation, nor its attendent judgement is the work of a third party. The issue here is the primacy and triumph of God’s grace – God’s grace. All satisfaction of the Father flows from God’s grace and love; it does not procure it. As Forsyth insisted, ‘Procured grace is a contradiction in terms. The atonement did not procure grace, it flowed from grace’. Forsyth contends that the judgement work of the Cross is not the work of a ‘pardon-broker’ – God does not hire someone else to do his dirty work! – but is the summit work of the gracious God whose grace is ‘unbought and unpurchaseable’. Here’s the same tune in Barth’s wee print. It just grips my heart and sends me a singing:

Jesus Christ, in His solidarity with “human nature which has sinned could pay the penalty of sin” (Heid. Catech. Qu. 16), and at the same time, in the power of His divinity, could “bear the burden of the wrath of God in His humanity” (17). Without any diminution of His divine majesty, in the exercise of the divine majesty of His love He could enter into this “likeness of sinful flesh” to bear, in the same majesty, the judgment of divine wrath without annihilation, to be and to reveal Himself supremely as divine majesty even in His humiliation, to rise from the dead as conqueror of the judgment to which He had subjected Himself, the first fruits of all who were to follow in His steps. He could drink the cup which had to be drunk. Because He was God Himself, He could subject Himself to the severity of God. And because He was God Himself He did not have to succumb to the severity of God. God had to be severe to be true to Himself in His encounter with man, and thus to be true also to man. God’s wrath had to be revealed against the ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. But only God could carry through this necessary revelation of His righteousness without involving an end of all things. Only God Himself could bear the wrath of God. Only God’s mercy was capable of bearing the pain to which the creature existing in opposition to Him is subject. Only God’s mercy could so feel this pain as to take it into the very heart of His being. And only God’s mercy was strong enough not to be annihilated by this pain. And this that could happen only by the divine mercy is just what did happen on the cross of Golgotha: that double proof of omnipotence in which God did not abate the demands of His righteousness but showed Himself equal to His own wrath; on the one hand by submitting to it and on the other by not being consumed by it. In virtue of this omnipotence God’s mercy could be at one and the same time the deepest and sincerest pity and inflexible and impassible divine strength. He could yield to His own inexorable righteousness and by this very surrender maintain Himself as God. He could reveal Himself at once as the One who as the servant of all bore the punishment of death which we had deserved, and the One who as the Lord of all took from death its power and for ever vanquished and destroyed it. In this twofold sense God’s righteousness triumphed in the death of Jesus Christ. (Church Dogmatics II/1, 400)

Dies Irae, John Donne and Luke 7:36–8:3

Over the past few weeks, I have posted some thoughts (here and here) on one of the lectionary readings for the coming Sunday. For those preparing sermons on Luke 7:36-8:3 for this Sunday, here’s a few thoughts.

Luke’s retelling involves three main characters: Simon the Pharisee (the inviter), Jesus (the invited), and a woman (the party-crasher). At the heart of the story is the issue of hospitality. Simon is a lousy host who has publicly humiliated his guest in failing to wash his feet, anoint his head, and to acknowledge his equal rank of rabbi by offering a kiss. The woman—the only one in the room who understands Jesus’ pain and his embarrassment by the Pharisee’s rudeness—realises that in Jesus the Shekinah has moved and now resides in a person. She alone shows the expected grace of a host. Jesus is an impolite guest who does the unthinkable, especially in a Middle Eastern culture—he attacks the quality of the hospitality. Even though he is probably embarrassed by the party-crasher’s gesture, he accepts it, and her, because he understands her motive. By the time Jesus finishes his parable, Simon and his mates are no longer angry with the woman. Their rage has turned towards Jesus. Upon him was the chastisement that brought her peace. In what is a foretaste of the cross, Jesus offers her a costly demonstration of unexpected love. In the words of William Williams, ‘What power has love but forgiveness?’And in that one action, he welcomes Simon and all who have ears to hear, into his own life.

There are a number of paintings that depict Luke’s homely scene. Julius Schnorr’s ‘Mary anoints Jesus’, and James Tissot’s ‘Mary anoints Jesus’ feet’ both serve as fine examples. There’s also Julius Schnoor’s moving woodcut, ‘Jesus Anointed by Sinful Woman’ originally printed in Das Buch der Bücher in Bilden. But it is some poetic reflections of this episode at Simon’s house that move me most. In her poem ‘In the Midst of the Company’, Janet Morley powerfully uses poetic license to recreate Luke’s painting from Jesus’ perspective.

In the midst of the company I sat alone,
and the hand of death took hold of me;
I was cold with secrecy,
and my God was far away.
For this fear did my mother conceive me,
and to seek this pain did I come forth?
Did her womb nourish me for the dust,
or her breasts, for me to drink bitterness?
O that my beloved would hold me
and gather me in her arms;
that the darkness of God might comfort me,
that this cup might pass me by.
I was desolate, and she came to me;
when there was neither hope nor help for pain
she was at my side;
in the shadow of the grave she has restored me.
My cup was spilling with betrayal,
but she has filled it with wine;
my face was wet with fear,
but she has anointed me with oil,
and my hair is damp with myrrh.
The scent of her love surrounds me;
it is more than I can bear.
She has touched me with authority;
in her hands I find strength.
For she acts on behalf of the broken,
and her silence is the voice of the unheard.
Though many murmur against her, I will praise her;
and in the name of the unremembered,
I will remember her.

The well-known thirteenth–century poem ‘Dies Irae’, thought to be written by Thomas of Celano, describes the day of judgement. Until about 35 years ago, the poem was used as a sequence (a chant sung or recited before the proclamation of the Gospel) in the Requiem Mass, and so, unsurprisingly, finds its way into the Requiem’s by Verdi and Mozart.

Stanzas 12-13 of the ‘Dies Irae’ express something of what might be going on here for Luke’s readers where Jesus’ welcome towards this woman encourages us to hope that as we move towards Jesus, we will discover one who has already moved towards us in and for grace.

I groan, as one guilty;
my face is red with shame;
spare, O God, a supplicant.
You who forgave Mary,
and heard the plea of the thief
have given hope to me also.

In Martin Luther’s words, we rediscover that ‘Thou art my righteousness and I am thy sin’. Our confidence rests, neither in our tears or in our zeal, but only in the gracious God. In Jesus Christ, we discover that grace is bloodied, despised and rejected, crushed for the iniquities of, and laden with punishment for, those who hide their faces from it. Never abstract or cheap, grace is a man groaning on a cross, dying, not only for those who would anoint him with precious perfume, but also for those who would stand by to hypocritically condemn; for those who know what they do and for those who don’t. Grace is God in his holy action, bearing the shame of desperate women and proud Pharisees on the killing tree.

Arms bare
bloodied sap,
stripped of all pretense,
simplicity giving way to strange beauty.
Alone, yet koinoniaed
Violence, yet concord
No form to desire this ugly tree
yet satisfied
the satisfaction of misplacement.
Its white crooked limbs stretch laboriously upward,
Longing …

A germ so long ago planted
out of season, yet for a time.
Once being about a business
Now being about a business … aching
forlorn and isolated,
rootedness in desiccated ground … and waiting …
Will it spring again?

Here I conclude with John Donne’s ‘A Hymn to God the Father’:

Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
And do run still, though still I do deplore?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.

Wilt thou forgive that sin which I have won
Others to sin, and made my sin their door?
Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year or two, but wallow’d in, a score?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.

I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by thyself, that at my death thy Son
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And, having done that, thou hast done;
I fear no more.

Published in the June edition of Lectionary Homiletics.

No grace without art

While I would frame the argument rather differently, I enjoyed reading this recent piece by Steve Stockman. Here’s a taste: ‘Without art there can be no grace! … Grace is not a cold creedal confession but the energy that interrupts our lives with an alternative way to live … When we are locked into the malaise of our culture whether it is materialism, racism, sectarianism, environmental catastrophe or war then grace comes alive in alternative possibilities. Grace is more valued with those who need its interruption. But when grace interrupts those who receive its benefits, it should cause those who are turned upside down to start using it, not for their own selfish ends but for the good of others; it is the fruit of grace’s interruption. For followers of Christ who aim to bring God’s Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, the respect that they give art in their community will deem whether they make any impression in interpreting how it is on earth to conjure how it is going to be in heaven. Grace is a thought that can change the world but it is also an imaginative engine to propel the change. Demean the artist at the cost of the Kingdom.’ Read the whole article here.

On another note, Dan has posted a worthwhile piece on ‘A Few Theses on Christianity and Patriotism‘. It reminded me of Peter Leithart’s great little book Against Christianity.

Moberly, Jews, Christians, John 14:6 and Grace

I heard a stimulating paper this morning by Walter Moberly on Scripture and the Relationship between Christians and Jews. Apart from the paper itself, it was just great to witness a rare miracle – an OT specialist break out into exegesis on an area not of their ‘specialty’ (in this case the NT and John 14:6 in particular). In the name of ‘epistemological humility’, he suggested that in place of questionable language about worshipping ‘the same God’ it is better to speak of Jews and Christians, and Muslims, as respectively worshipping ‘the one God’. He then suggested that there is a difference between experiencing grace and experiencing grace as grace. Somehow, somewhere, in the discussion, I was reminded of Barth … as you do:

‘Grace is the presence, event, and revelation of what the human cannot think or do or reach or attain or grasp, but of what is, in virtue of its coming from God, the most simple, true and real of all things for those to whom it is addressed and who recognise it. Grace is the factual overcoming of the distinction between God and humanity, creator and creature, heaven and earth – something that cannot be grasped in any theory or brought about by any technique or human practice…. Grace is God’s sovereign intervention on the human’s behalf. The work and gift of this grace of his is the freedom of the children of God – their freedom to call upon him as Father.’ Karl Barth, The Christian Life: Church Dogmatics IV/4 Lecture Fragments (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), 72.

Eucatastrophe

J.R.R. Tolkien first coined the term ‘eucatastrophe’ to refer to the sudden turn of events at the end of a story which result in the protagonist‘s well-being. He formed the word by affixing the Greek prefix eu, meaning good, to catastrophe, the word traditionally used in classically-inspired literary criticism to refer to the “unraveling” or conclusion of a drama’s plot. For Tolkien, the term appears to have had a thematic meaning that went beyond its implied meaning in terms of form. In his definition as outlined in his 1947 essay On Fairy-Stories, eucatastrophe is a fundamental part of his conception of mythopoeia. Though Tolkien’s interest is in myth, it is also connected to the gospels; Tolkien calls the Incarnation the eucatastrophe of “human history” and the Resurrection the eucatastrophe of the Incarnation.’ From here.

If by ‘Incarnation’ we mean the whole action of the Incarnate Son, then I agree. Forsyth speaks of grace as ‘Nature’s destiny.’ For while ‘nature cannot of itself culminate in grace, at least it was not put there without regard to grace. Grace is Nature’s destiny’ Apart from grace, nature becomes abstruse, unreal and inhuman. Apart from nature, the physical stuff of the world too dust-bound to satisfy metaphysical enquiry, grace tends to despair and absurdity. ‘Nature, if not the mother, is the matrix of Grace.’ But that grace is bloodied, despised and rejected, crushed for the iniquities of, and laden with punishment for, those who hide their faces from it. Grace is never an abstract thing. Nor is it cheap.

Grace is a man groaning on a cross, dying on a ‘bitter tree,’ not only for his friends but also for those who would wish him and his Father dead. Grace is a person redeeming in holy love. Grace is God in his eucatastrophic action in the face of Nature’s catastrophe. Grace is God taking seriously the scandalous nature of sin’s offence, and himself going down into the experience of nothingness and dread, into hell, into death, into the furnace of his own wrath, into the radical depths of its wound, in order to save. There can be no higher gift. Moreover, such grace alone satisfies the human (and divine) conscience, which requires not merely an explanation of the Cross, but its revelation. This grace alone, the grace of the initiating Father, carries humanity home and brings peace to the human spirit.

Death’s Duel

I have spent this morning re-reading John Donne‘s last sermon, preached in 1631. It was a meditation on Psalm 68:20, ‘And unto God the Lord belong the issues of death (i.e. deliverance from death).’ It was so good for my soul. For those who are interested in reading the sermon, read on (apologies for a lengthy post but I just didn’t know where to cut it, and those guys knew how to preach!). BTW, the image is from the National Portrait Gallery in London.

BUILDINGS stand by the benefit of their foundations that sustain and support them, and of their buttresses that comprehend and embrace them, and of their contignations that knit and unite them. The foundations suffer them not to sink, the buttresses suffer them not to swerve, and the contignation and knitting suffers them not to cleave …

To read in, click here.

On being a Christian

One of the books that I’m currently re-reading is Tom Smail’s, The Forgotten Father. I’d forgotten how remarkable this book is as it seeks to bring us to the heart of the Gospel in the Fatherhood of God. As Forsyth noted, we cannot put too much into that word ‘Father’ though we can, and do, certainly put too little into it. Smail begins his chapter on ‘The Father, the Son and the Cross’ by reminding us that it takes the Trinity to make sense of the atonement, and he ends the chapter by reminding us that it takes the Father to make sense of our humanity.

Here’s a quote: ‘To be a Christian is to believe that it is the Father who defines our identity and is to be believed against all inner and outer accusations to the contrary when he says to us, “This son of mine”. To know that is not to skulk in the back pew; it is to come forward with confidence to receive the inheritance. The robe which is the garment of sonship is accompanied by the ring which is the insignia of authority and the sandals that distinguish the free man from the slave. The son who comes home is invited back into his lost inheritance, to delight again in his father’s company and goodness and to rejoice.’ Thomas A. Smail, The Forgotten Father (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1980), 129.