Not Lost!

“Why did the Son of God become man, one of us, our brother, our fellow in the human situation? The answer is: In order to judge the world. But… in order to judge it in the exercise of His kingly freedom to show His grace in the execution of His judgment, to pronounce us free in passing sentence, to free us by imprisoning us, to ground our life on our death, to redeem us and save us by our destruction. That is how God has actually judged in Jesus Christ. That is why He humbled Himself. That is why He went into the far country as the obedient Son of the Father. That is why He did not abandon us, but came amongst us as our brother. That is why the Father sent Him. That was the eternal will of God and its fulfillment in time—the execution of this strange judgment. If this strange judgment had not taken place, there would be only a lost world and lost men.Since it has taken place, we can only recognize and believe and proclaim to the whole world and all men: Not lost!”

[Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1, 222]

The Love That Defeats Economy

“Simply by continuing to be the God he is, and through the sheer ‘redundancy’ of the good that flows from the infinite gesture of his love—which is a generosity in excess of all calculable economy—God undoes the sacrificial logic of fatality; his gift remains gift to the end, despite all our efforts to convert it into debt. This is the infinite gesture that traverses and judges totality, the love that defeats economy. This is the unanticipated grace of Easter. Whether one chooses to follow after Nietzsche and see the redundancy of Christ’s merit, inasmuch as it avails for salvation, as an infinite multiplication of debt, depends upon one’s prejudices regarding giving and indebtedness—which is prior to the other, which dissembles the other.…

In a sense, then, the kingdom will be eternal superficiality, the beautiful ‘surfacing’ of being, the endless liberation of difference into the light. Such is the promise in the doctrine of general resurrection: the creation, in which the glory of God is giving endlessly various and beautiful expression, is to be redeemed as such, as an aesthetic truth. In the general resurrection, says Augustine, God will be seen in the whole of created beings, in all the bodies of the saved (De Civitate Dei 22.29); the kingdom’s beauty will be this perfect loveliness of the resurrected state (22.30), this lifting up of the world out of all hidden depths. As Balthasar says of Augustine’s eschatology, ‘Only at the resurrection will the difference between frui and uti be abolished, will ‘enjoyment’ be permitted to include not just the spiritual God but also his material creation, in which he will henceforth be openly reflected.…” Creatures exceed, through their particularity, the similitude of every ideal reduction, and that excess is the open interval of analogy, of likeness in difference; every true path of return leads not to the primordial innocence of the ideal, but out into the free play of departing difference, which God will raise up on the last day.”

[David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, 372, 400]

Until We are Actively Caught Up

“Revelation is a movement that moves. Impelled into hearing and responsibility by that movement, the Christian is also authorized and empowered for interpretation. Because they have their place in the formative economy of the clear Word of God, interpretative acts are neither constructive nor creative. But they are work, a straining of our powers to follow, an attempt to discern and articulate the clear Word which does not simply lie before us but which sets itself in relation to us as an address which we do not really hear until we are actively caught up in the movement of which both it and we are part.”

[John Webster, “Biblical Theology and the Clarity of Scripture,” in Out of Egypt, 381]

Biblical In the Sense That Mattered Most

“Biblical theology begins with the text and leads back to the text. The systematic theologian is also concerned with discerning, clarifying and extrapolating the unitive patterns of Scripture, and with their articulation in forms accessible (not necessarily amenable!) to the contemporary church. The work of discernment and clarification is closely related to that of the biblical theologian. That of extrapolation may take a further step, but will still be identifiably rooted in the concerns and emphases of Scripture itself. The fourth-century doctrine of the consubstantiality of Father and Son and the fifth—century doctrine of hypostatic union are both evidently several stages down the road of christological development from the language and conceptuality of Scripture.

Yet, properly understood, each is securely rooted in the biblical testimony to Christ, and was offered to the church not as a philosophical complication of its faith, but precisely as a hermeneutical device to secure certain ways of reading key New Testament texts rather than other ways of doing so. No theological school was ever more wiling to cite biblical prooftexts than the Arians. The question which had to be decided in AD 325 was not what the Bible said, but how what it said was to be made sense of; and the NIcene theologians and their successors insisted that the wider pattern or ‘scope’ of scriptural testimony concerning the ‘Son’ of God was secured by the doctrine of the homoousion rather than some of the available alternatives. The key term was certainly unbiblical in one sense (not to be found in any reliable concordance), but thoroughly biblical in the sense that mattered most.”

[Trevor Hart, “Systematic—In What Sense?” in Out of Egypt, 348–9]

Made Capable of Hearing

“Reading Scripture is inescapably bound to regeneration; only after a drastic reworking of spiritual psychology can the language of virtue have its place. What is therefore fundamental in giving an account of hermeneutical conversion is not a theory of moral virtue or the reader’s ‘character,’ but a soteriology and a pneumatology. Through the incarnate Word, crucified and risen, we are made capable of hearing the gospel, but only as we are at one and the same time put to death and raised to new life. Through the Spirit of the crucified and risen Christ we are given the capacity to set mind and will on the truth of the gospel and so read as those who have been reconciled to God.”

[John Webster, Holy Scripture, 89]

By Allowing Himself to Be Made Son

“The thrilling part is that this triumph of Yahweh, whom all the nations now adore, took place in the utter humiliation of the Cross. In order to explain how this could be so, the hymn opens up that perspective on humanity as a whole which has been our topic. Verse six, alluding to a version of the Adam myth in the book of Job reminds us that man wishes to be God. Nor is this desire of his entirely misconceived. Yet man pursues it in the style of a Prometheus, hunting the prey which is equality with God, taking it by violence. But man is not God. By making himself like unto God he sets himself over against truth, and so the adventure ends in that nothingness where truth is not. The actual God-man does just the opposite. He is God’s Son, his whole being a gesture of gratitude and self-offering. In reality, the Cross is but the definitive radicalization of that gesture which the Son is. Not the grasping audacity of Prometheus but the Son’s obedience on the Cross is the place where man’s divinization is accomplished. Man can become God, not by making himself God, but by allowing himself to be made ‘Son.’”

[Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology, 64–65 (w/ a reminder about the Posting-Is-Not-Total-Agreement policy of this little blog)]

An Inheritance Far Greater

A quick thought engendered by a PBS documentary on the royals of Windsor and (gasp!) Downton Abbey.

Whether it comes in a republican or a modern key, the song sung about the monarchy and nobility in Britain always comes with a sneer. Everyone is made equal; why should that wealth get passed down to people who haven’t earned it? How can they think they’re better than the rest of us? It’s all an outdated farce. It is “the humiliation of a Hanoverian state’s smothering our best democratic impulses.” Nobles are “dull and talentless plutocrats with nothing remarkable about them.” Lastly,

It is a joyful confirmation of the wonder of the human gene pool that talent, brains and charm spring up at random. These faculties are no more bred out of a fictional “underclass” than they are bred into a fictional “royal blood”, though social circumstance conspires to knock it out of some at a young age, while promoting others with no attributes to heights they would never reach on merit. If royals have any value, they are the living, breathing negation of the myth of genetic superiority.

Alright then. 

Let me be clear: I am in no way defending any particular monarchy, especially the one I saw portrayed by PBS on Sunday evening. Much of the criticism of Britain’s monarchy and peerage system is accurate. A sinful king is just as wicked as a sinful president or a sinful Congress or Parliament. What I am saying is that there is something important to be lost here: the typological illustration of a key part of what it means to be an adopted son or daughter of God the King thru the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Queen Elizabeth II, Lord Grantham, Matthew & Mary Crawley all simply walked into the exquisite estates, copious leisure time, expensive tea sets, fine clothing, sumptuous feasts, wonderfully aged wine, noble titles, and the power, influence, and prestige that accompanies them without lifting a finger. It is all gift.

These “dull and talentless” royals are not self-made, they are not risk-takers, they are not the subjects of inspirational stories of overcoming adversity to rise to the top. They simply inherited the fortune which someone in the past had won for them. 

What is closer to the biblical description of our entry into the much-discussed “kingdom of God”—modern, Western capitalism in which each person is on her own to construct an identity and fortune only to have it taken away, or the continued existence of a royal family? Which helps us understand what it is that we “…having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is given as a pledge of our inheritance, with a view to the redemption of God’s own possession, to the praise of His glory.”? Or the fact that the Apostle prays that “the eyes of your heart may be enlightened, so that you will know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the surpassing greatness of His power toward us who believe.”?

Our inheritance is far greater than those of the Granthams or the Windsors, and our deserving of it is far lesser than they of theirs. 

The Most Telling Instance

“The redefinition of the interests and scope of philosophical inquiry which resulted when ‘analysis by quantitative elements broke loose from the subordinate role it had played within an ontological scheme’ was, on [Kenneth] Schmitz’s account, immense and immensely damaging. The history of modern Protestant theology and biblical hermeneutics betrays similar features, their advance retarded but not finally resisted by the flowering of scholastic divinity in the post-Reformation era: a privileging of the elements of the biblical economy, and a reluctance or inability to trace those elements to their cause in the fullness of God’s own life. The reluctance left Protestant theology exposed to the naturalization of those same elements when viewed in detachment from their principles, of which the steady secularization of biblical science is only the most telling instance.”

[John Webster, The Domain of the Word, vii–viii]

Radiant in Enduring Glory

“The substance of the city of God is present in this creation. Just as the caterpillar becomes a butterfly, as carbon is converted into diamond, as the grain of wheat upon dying in the ground produces other grains of wheat, as all of nature revives in the spring and dresses up in celebrative clothing, as the believing community is formed out of Adam’s fallen race, as the resurrection body is raised from the body that is dead and buried in the earth, so too, by the re-creating power of Christ, the new heaven and new earth will one day emerge from the fire purged elements of this world, radiant in enduring glory and forever set free from ‘the bondage to decay.’”

[Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics vol. 4, 720]

Absolved of His Transcendence

“Immutability, impassibility, timelessness—surely, many argue, these relics of an obsolete metaphysics lingered on in Christian theology just as false belief and sinful inclinations linger on in a soul after baptism; and surely they always were fundamentally incompatible with the idea of a God of election and love, who proves himself God through fidelity to his own promises against the horizon of history, who became flesh for us (was this not a change, after all, in God?) and endured the passion of the cross out of pity for us. Have we not seen the wounded heart of God, wounded by our sin in his eternal life, and wounded by it again, even unto death, in the life of the flesh? This is why so much modern theology keenly desires a God who suffers, not simply with us and in our nature, but in his own nature as well; such a God, it is believed, is the living God of Scripture, not the cold abstraction of a God of the philosophers; only such a God would die for us. At its most culpable, the modern appetite for a passible God can reflect simply a sort of self-indulgence and apologetical plaintiveness, a sense that, before God, though we are sinners, we also have a valid perspective, one he must learn to share with us so that he can sympathize with our lot rather than simply judge us; he must be absolved of his transcendence, so to speak, before we can consent to submit to his verdict (and, after all, in this age we are rather bourgeois about such things and very jealous of our ‘rights’).”

{David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, 159]

His Pity For the Guilty

“Trained, too, by a protracted discipline in the school of affliction, He knows the temptations of our race – He knows what it is to weep, He knows the burden of a heavy heart. It was, perhaps, one design of the varied scenes of trial through which He passed to give Him that experience of our state which should call into the liveliest exercise the exquisite sympathy of His soul. In generous natures common troubles and afflictions have a tendency to knit them together; it is only where the heart has been seared by sin and immersed in selfishness that it can look with indifference upon struggles of others similar to those through which it has passed. The Apostle assures us that Jesus was tempted in all points as we are, that He might be a merciful and faithful High Priest. And those who have felt His presence in their trials can appreciate the priceless value of His sympathy. He has gone before us through every path of sorrow, and we cannot utter a groan nor heave a sigh which does not go to His heart. His pity for the guilty is as tender as His sympathy with the saints.”

[ James Henley Thornwell on the priesthood of Christ, Works, vol. II; via Carl Trueman]

The Most Impressive Coup of Modern Science

“About this time each year, I survey my theology students on the question, “Does the sun rise?” Most say, No. This year, one said it’s “super-obvious” that the sun does not rise. They fall into nervous silence when I insist that it does. The occasion for my survey is an annual discussion of Galileo’s famous 1615 letter to the Grand Duchess Christina. …

When my students tell me that the sun doesn’t rise, I ask how they know. Not a one of them can reproduce Galileo’s arguments or evidence. (They’re liberal arts students, so I’m not too hard on them, and besides I can’t reproduce the argument myself.) The “super-obvious” of the heliocentric system is the super-obviousness of scientific and cultural consensus. It’s the super-obvious of expert testimony. …

Heliocentricity triumphed because scientists convinced the rest of us to distrust our senses. When my students ask why I believe the sun rises, I state the obvious: I see it. The sun peeks over the horizon early in the morning, rises to a higher position in the sky during the morning, and then reverses direction during the afternoon. Perhaps you have seen it too. On the same basis, I believe solid matter is solid. With Johnson, I kick a rock, but physicists tell me that the rock’s solid matter is, in the vernacular, “mostly empty space.” Though it often buttresses its authority by empirical appeals, science secured its hegemony by inculcating skepticism about everyday experience.
The most impressive coup of modern science, though, is the success of its imperialist claim that science provides not only a true but an exclusively true description of how the world goes. Since Copernicus and Galileo, we have a twinge of conscience about trusting the evidence of our senses. We are convinced that it is somehow “not true” that the sun rises, even though we can’t stop ourselves from saying so. We know that, in reality, in real reality, solids are not solid. Our everyday descriptions of natural phenomenon are perpetually enclosed in inverted commas.”
[Peter Leithart, “Does the Sun Rise?”]

How Sing to Him the New Song?

“For how absurd, and in truth how unjust, and in both respects how unworthy of God, for one substance to do the work, and another to reap the reward; that this flesh of ours should be torn by martyrdom, and another wear the crown; or on the other hand, that this flesh of ours should wallow in uncleanness, and another receive the condemnation! Is it not better to renounce all faith at once in the hope of the resurrection, than to trifle with the wisdom and justice of God? … For it cannot be believed that the mind, or the memory, or the conscience of existing man is abolished by putting on that change of raiment which immortality and incorruption supplies; for in that case all the gain and fruit of the resurrection, and the permanent effect of God’s judgement on soul and body, would certainly fall to the ground. If I remember not that it is I who have served him, how shall I ascribe glory to God? How sing to him ‘the new song’, if I am ignorant that it is I who owe him thanks?”

[Tertullian, On the Resurrection of the Flesh, ¶56

Hope Is Neither a Fantasy Nor a Gesture of Defiance

“Hope is that creaturely disposition which corresponds to the fact that all occasions of human history, including its future, are caught up within the economy of the triune God’s mercy. Because God is to the depths of his eternal being triune, and because he acts in the world as the one he is in himself, then the entire scope of human history and action is embraced by God’s purpose. God is not simply originator (setting the creation in motion), nor simply end (tying up the loose ends of history at its terminus). Rather, as Fathers, Son and Spirit, God is infinite – no time or space is apart from or beyond his presence and action – and so steadfast – his purpose has been is and will be at all times constantly and reliably at work. And it is as this one that God is the ground of hope, for hope trusts that, because the Father’s purpose has been accomplished in the Son and is now at work in the world in the Spirit’s power, then human history is God’s economy. Within the space which the triune God creates, hope is neither a fantasy nor a gesture of defiance, but a fitting, truthful attitude and shape for action. In short: hope rests upon God’s faithfulness, and God’s faithfulness is triune.”

[John Webster, “Hope,” in Confessing God, 199]

One Inch From That Path

“Yet a problem remains and, as has been suggested from the outset, it is trinitarian. In this realm, there are two ways of diverging from the strait and narrow. They are represented on the one side by Calvin’s tendency to separate the divine and human reality of the one Christ and on the other by Barth’s to assimilate the two. Trinitarianly, two features must be maintained: that the Son does indeed do the Father’s work, so that, first, to know him is truly to know the Father; and yet, second, not to know him in such a way that his work is indistinguishable from that of God the Father. The Father sends, and the Son obeys, not merely as God obeying God, but as the incarnate and fully human Jesus obeying, in the power of the Spirit, the will of the one who sent him. The heart of the doctrine of substitution is not God as God simpliciter standing in his own dock, as in the truly memorable treatment by Barth, but God the Son bearing as man the weight of the Father’s holy wrath against sin. One inch from that path, and we are in the objectionable realms of either penal substitution or a mere exemplarism. But the dangerous path must be trodden, for unless we tread it, as Calvin did, we shall fail to articulate either the depth of the human plight or the divine and human cost of our redemption.”

[Colin Gunton, “Some Unscholastic Themes from Calvin’s Institutes,” IJST Vol. 1:3, 1999]