Adiaphora

Thus far, Webster has made it clear that ‘revelation’ is the umbrella term that must overarch all the other Christian talk about Scripture, etc., and he gradually narrows the discussion. The narrowest of the first chapter is ‘inspiration’ (on that more later), and the middle term is what he calls ‘sanctification.’ He admits the strangeness of using the term to describe Scripture, but I think he works it out very well.

“In its broadest sense, sanctification refers to the work of the Spirit of Christ through which creaturely realities are elected, shaped and preserved to undertake a role in the economy of salvation: creaturely realities are sanctified by divine use. But it is important to emphasize that the divine ‘use’, though utterly gratuitous, is not simply occasional or puctiliar, an act from above which arrests and overwhelms the creaturely reality, employs it, and then puts it to one side. The sanctity of creaturely realities is certainly unthinkable without reference to the event of sanctification, for the creature’s holiness is God’s ‘living work, the fruit of his intervention and the effect of his presence … the event of his coming, the personal and decisive gesture corresponding to his love and freedom.’

But precisely in its free transcendence of that which it employs in its service, divine use has a properly ‘horizontal’ dimension as well as a sheerly ‘vertical’ dimension. There is an election and overseeing of the entire historical course of the creaturely reality so that it becomes a creature which may serve the purposes of God. Sanctification is thus not the extraction of creaturely reality from its creatureliness, but the annexing and ordering of its course so that it may fittingly assist in that work which is proper to God.”

[John Webster, Holy Scripture, 26]

“As that [older] overarching framework crumbled, Christian theological teaching about revelation became at one and the same time desperately unworkable and desperately necessary: unworkable because of what was feared to be irrefutable philosophical and moral challenge; necessary because any possible response to that challenge seemed ultimately to require a defense of Christian claims by a reconstruction of the possibility of revelation, a reconstruction in which the guiding hand was very often philosophical rather than dogmatic.…

Most tellingly, these reduced accounts of revelation were seriously under-determined by the specifically Christian content of Christian teaching about God. ‘Revelation,’ that is, was transposed rather readily into a feature of generally ‘theistic’ metaphysical outlooks. As such, it could be expounded generically, without much by way of concrete material reference to those aspects of the Chrisitan apprehension about God which mark out its positivity: Christology, pneumatology, soteriology and—embracing them all—the doctrine of the Trinity. Understood in this dogmatically minimalistic way, language about revelation became a way of talking, not about the life-giving and loving presence of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ in the Spirit’s power among the worshipping and witnessing assssembly, but instead of an arcane process of causality whereby persons acquire knowledge through opaque, non-natural operations. In short: failure to talk with much by way of Christian determinacy about revelation—whether on the part of its opponents or of its defenders—left the doctrine pitifully weak, and scarcely able to extricate itself from the web of objections in which it was entangled.

Yet at the very same time that the doctrine was eviscerated in this way, the demands placed up on it increased to a point where they became insupportable. Perhaps the most significant symptom of this is the way in which Christian theological talk of revelation migrates to the beginning of the dogmatic corpus, and has to take on the job of furnishing the epistemological warrants for Christian claims.…

If this unhappy process is to be countered, what is required is not more effective defense of the viability of Christian talk about revelation before the tribunal of impartial reason: the common doctrinal slenderness of such defenses nearly always serves to inflame rather than reduce the dogmatic difficulties. The doctrinal under-determination and mislocation of the idea of revelation can only be overcome by its reintegration into the comprehensive structure of Christian doctrine, and most especially the Christian doctrine of God.”

[John Webster, Holy Scripture, 11–12]

“Dogmatics lies at the periphery of modern Anglo-American Protestant divinity, and I am acutely aware both that what many of my contemporaries regard as self-evident I find to be puzzling or unpersuasive and that matters which I regard as self-evident make many of my contemporaries feel bewildered. I console myself with the fact that I can find good company in some of my forbears. In 1935, Günther Dehn, who two years previously had been ejected from his chair in Practical Theology in Halle, gave a rather startling set of Dale lectures in Oxford under the title Man and Revelation. His hearers were certainly startled: in his preface to the published version, Dehn remembers the gentle head-shaking of the audience, and goes on to say:

I have endeavored to deal with certain questions of Christian thought and life, not as a free scholar but as a theologian bound to the Church. This must seem strange to those who are told that theology is to be ranked among the branches of general knowledge, and that its problems can be treated in the same manner as those in other branches of spiritual knowledge, i.e. in accordance with the cultural consciousness of the age. The theologian most assuredly participates in the cultural consciousness of his time, but for his work this has none but formal significance. Theology is not promoted by culture but by the belief in God’s revelation as an event beyond all human history, to which Scripture bears witness and which finds confirmation in the Confessions of our Church. Only a theology that clings inexorably to these most essential presuppositions can help build up a Church that really stands unshaken amidst all the attacks of the spirit of the age. And such a Church alone will be the salt of the earth and the light of the world; any other Church will perish along with the world.”

[John Webster, quoting Günther Dehn, in Holy Scripture, 2]

A few folks have posted this excerpt from Nate Wilson’s Notes from the Tilt-A-Whirl, and I do the same since it is right on the money:

“Nietzsche published The Anti-Christ in 1888. Along with many other things, he had this to say about pity: ‘Pity thwarts the whole law of evolution, which is the law of natural selection. It preserves whatever is ripe for destruction; it fights on the side of those disinherited and condemned by life; by maintaining life in so many of the botched of all kinds, it gives life itself a gloomy and dubious aspect.’

One year later Nietzsche entered into madness. True or false, the story is that he was overcome by the sight of a horse being whipped. Unhinged by pity. He wouldn’t die until 1900. For a decade he was kept alive and maintained through his insanity, strokes, and incapacitating illness. At the age of fifty-five, partially paralyzed, unable to speak or walk, he discovered what life waited for him beyond the grave. Nietzsche lashed out at his Maker with his tongue, the only notable muscle he had—his greatest gift. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord.

There was little that Nietzsche loathed more than the heritage of his Lutheran father. I have never been irritated by Nietzsche, never annoyed. At his most blasphemous, at his most riotously hateful and pompous, I have only ever been able to laugh.

But even then, there is something bittersweet about the laughter. I know his story. I know how his bluff was called, how he was broken. Again from The Anti-Christ: ‘The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. And one should help them to it.’ Spake the paralytic. The man fed with a spoon by those who loved him.

‘What is more harmful than any vice—Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak—Christianity….’ And yet, because I see the world through my eyes and not his, I have sympathy for Nietzsche himself. Bodies and minds are not all that can be botched in a man. Souls can be hollow, twisted, thrashing, more bitter than piss.”

Colophon

The title of this collection, adiaphora, is an old theological term that was used to describe lower-order points of theology that were not essential to the primary truths of the faith, e.g., the Gospel. These were things neither commanded nor prohibited by Scripture. Concisely, “things indifferent.”

This site then, with a bit of a wink and a nudge, aims to be a stream of such things that are either truly indifferent to life, or widely perceived as being so. Which bucket each item falls into is the task of the reader, as it is in daily life in the real world.

The design is a modified version of the “Light City” theme by Adam Lloyd, and it is set in Arno Pro, Georgia, and Lucida Grande at the top of each style cascade. The site is powered by Tumblr, of course.