There is no shallow end of the theological pool

Before I learned to swim I would always look for the shallow end of the pool.  When it comes to the doctrine of God there is no shallow end:

His judgements are unsearchable (Rom. 11:33)
His ways are inscrutable (Rom. 11:33)
No one has known his mind (Rom. 11:34)
No one has been his counsellor (Rom. 11:34)

His greatness is unsearchable (Psalm 145:3)

His understanding is unsearchable (Isa. 40:28)

Heaven, even the highest heaven cannot contain him (1 Kings 8:27)

He inhabits eternity (Isa. 57:15)

From everlasting to everlasting he is God (Psalm 90:2)

The depths of God are searched by the Spirit, and the Spirit comprehends the thoughts of God (1 Cor. 2:10-11)

No one has seen God, God the only begotten, who is at the Father's side, has made him known (John 1:18)

The love of Christ surpasses knowledge (Ephesians 3:19)

Until and unless the weight of God's infinite being is straining your thoughts to breaking point, until and unless you have felt the finitude of your mental powers in contemplating the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, you have not even begun to fathom the unfathomable depths of the One, Living, True, and Triune God.

When we say that Jesus existed "pre" his incarnation, we do not mean he preceded it by any finite amount of time.  The Son of God preexisted his incarnation the way that the Creator preexisted creation: infinitely.

Preexistence may be easy to say, but that one little syllable, pre-, is a quantum leap from Here to There, from time to eternity.  Before you have finished that syllable, you have left behind everything measurable and manageable.

Fred Sanders, Embracing the Trinity, p. 85

Speaking & Sending: Some textual trinitarian distinctions

A minimal framework for Trinitarian belief would include the following affirmations:

A. There is only one God

B. There are three distinct persons in the Godhead: the Father, the Son and the Spirit

C. Each of these persons is fully God

What should we consider to be the necessary and sufficient evidence to affirm these points?

1. That it can be shown from Scripture that there are distinctions between the persons, distinctions that show that the threeness of persons and oneness of essence are equally ultimate.

2. That it can be shown from Scripture that the titles, works, and worship that belong properly to the one true and living God, are given to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

3. That we read and interpret the biblical data conscious that the lens through which we view the Trinity is that of the economy of salvation (the Father sending the Son, the Son humbling himself and becoming incarnate as the last Adam, the Spirit of God coming to glorify Christ and apply his saving work). This lens is itself part of the biblical data.

On point (1) this evidence would include texts that speak of :

1.1. The sending of one divine person by another (e.g. Exodus 23:20-21; Isaiah 48:16; Malachi 3:1-2; John 15:26)

1.2. The work of one divine person in relation to another divine person (e.g. Isaiah 61:1-2; Hosea 1:7)

1.3. The ascription of divine titles and works to more than one person within the same literary unit (e.g. Genesis 19:24; Zechariah 2:9-12; Psalm 110:1; Joshua 24:2-12 cf. Judges 2:1-4; Malachi 3:1-2; John 1:1, 18; Galatians 1:3; Revelation 1:8, 17; 22:12-13)

1.4. Reference being made to more than one divine person within the same literary unit, to whom elsewhere in Scripture divine titles and works have been ascribed (e.g. Isaiah 48:16; 63:9-12)

1.5. One divine person speaking of another divine person (e.g. Exodus 23:20-22; Isaiah 48:16; Isaiah 52:13, cf. Isaiah 6:1, 57:15, Hosea 1:6-7; Mark 1:11; Mark 9:7; John 15:26)

1.6. One divine person speaking to another divine person (e.g. Genesis 1:26-27; Psalm 45:6-7; Psalm 110:1; John 17:5)

Some of the texts and categories above are obviously interconnected. Exodus 23:20-21 fits into 1.1./1.3./ and 1.5. The selection of passages above is only representative. As there is a superabundance of NT passages I have chosen more from the OT.

The Ascension of Christ

Enjoy the summary of the biblical teaching about the ascension of Christ in the Heidelberg Catechism:

46. What do you understand by the words “He ascended into heaven?”

That Christ, in the sight of His disciples, was taken up from the earth into heaven,¹ and continues there in our behalf ² until He shall come again to judge the living and the dead.³

¹ Mt 26:64; Lk 24:50-51; Acts 1:9-11; ² Rom 8:34; Eph 4:10; Heb 4:14, 7:23-25, 9:11, 24; ³ Mt 24:30; Acts 1:11, 3:20-21

47. But is not Christ with us even unto the end of the world,¹ as He has promised?

Christ is true man and true God. According to His human nature He is now not on earth,² but according to His Godhead, majesty, grace, and Spirit, He is at no time absent from us.³

¹ Mt 28:20; ² Mt 26:11; Jn 16:28, 17:11; Acts 3:19-21; Heb 8:4; ³Mt 28:18-20; Jn 14:16-19, 16:13; Eph 4:8; Heb 8:4

48. But are not, in this way, the two natures in Christ separated from one another, if the manhood is not wherever the Godhead is?

Not at all, for since the Godhead is incomprehensible and everywhere present,¹ it must follow that it is indeed beyond the bounds of the manhood which it has assumed, but is yet nonetheless in the same also, and remains personally united to it.²

¹ Jer 23:23-24; Acts 7:48-49; ² Mt 28:6; Jn 1:14, 48, 3:13, 11:15; Col 2:9

49. What benefit do we receive from Christ’s ascension into heaven?

First, that He is our Advocate in the presence of His Father in heaven.¹ Second, that we have our flesh in heaven as a sure pledge, that He as the Head, will also take us, His members, up to Himself.² Third, that He sends us His Spirit as an earnest,³ by whose power we seek those things which are above, where Christ sits at the right hand of God, and not things on the earth.⁴

¹ Rom 8:34; 1 Jn 2:1; ² Jn 14:2, 17:24, 20:17; Eph 2:4-6; ³ Jn 14:16; Acts 2:33; 2 Cor 1:21-22, 5:5; ⁴ Jn 14:3; Col 3:1-4; Heb 9:24

The Counsel of the Ungodly: Thomas Hardy & Horace Moule

As a teen the great English novelist Thomas Hardy was friendly with the Moule family and their seven impressive sons.  Mr Moule was vicar at Fordington, his son Charles became president of Corpus Christi in Cambridge, Handley became Lord Bishop of Durham, and two others went to China as missionaries.

Thomas Hardy was a year older than Handley Moule but became close friends with Horace Moule, eight years Hardy's senior.  Horace became 'Tom's special friend', he was 'the charmer, handsome and gifted' but also 'a tender-hearted son to his mother, writing to her almost every year on the anniversary of the death of the baby brother who had died before he was two'.

Horace had studied at Oxford and Cambridge but failed to gain a degree from either university.  Hardy's biographer, Claire Tomalin, describes the changes in Horace's thinking that put him at odds with his upbringing:

Horace introduced Hardy to the newest and cleverest of the weekly magazines, the Saturday Review, London based naturally, in which social issues were discussed and religion treated with small respect.  He bought himself books on geology and science that alarmed his father, because they cast doubt on accepted religious ideas, and handed them on to Hardy.

Horace's upbringing had been more robustly Christian than Tom's, but, making his way in metropolitan literary journalism, he could not miss the spread of scepticism, and he was too quick and intelligent to ignore it.

Tomalin also notes the impact of all this on the young Hardy:

Tom's situation was different and easier.  Christianity was something he had taken for granted as part of the fabric of everyday life, and Christian theory was never discussed in the family.  He read the Bible, he knew all the church services and most of the psalms by heart; indeed, the year was a sequence of church festivals quite as much as it was a sequence of the natural seasons for him.

And he remained a fully practising Christian into the 1860s, but his mind was on the move, and with Horace he began to see that there were questions to be asked and lines of thought to be followed that eroded the old faith.  As their friendship ripened, they read the notorious Essays and Reviews of 1860, religious pieces that offended the orthodox by their attacks on doctrine and by their textual criticism of the Bible.

Hardy also claimed to have been an early admirer of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, though it is not clear exactly when he read it, or how much it influenced his thinking at the time.  He could well have found his own way along the path towards free thought, but Horace was an encouraging companion on the journey, and with his access to books, guided his steps at many points.

Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man, pp. 54-55

I don't think that it is necessary for me to spell out the implications here.  It seems to me self-evident that this was a form of discipleship, and that it possessed many of the elements that we associate with and encourage in that type of relationship.  Tragically, in the case of Horace Moule and Thomas Hardy, it was a path along which the younger man was led to follow the counsel of the ungodly.

Concerning the impact of Essays and Reviews (1860), and the climate of plausibility that a new approach to Biblical scholarship brought in, Roger Beckwith made the following remarks:

The ‘accepted results’ of critical study tend to be taken for granted as a basis for one’s own further study, and radical questions are rarely asked about them. When they are asked, and in a public manner, the presumption is against those who ask them, and any attempt the questioners make to turn back the tide of critical opinion is disregarded, as self-evidently perverse. New ideas receive an open-minded reception, but attempts to revive old ideas are, not unnaturally, seen as simply reactionary.

There is more to the clash of orthodoxy and heterodoxy than learning.  There is also more to it than spiritual conflict in the lives of individuals.  There is also this sociological dimension, and the embedding of new orthodoxies in institutions, guilds and in the public mind.  All of which makes the championing of older, historic, mainstream views appear to be little more than a retrograde step, a recrudescence of ideas considered untenable, obsolete and unworthy of re-examination.

Beckwith's conclusion is fitting:

All things considered, therefore, the revolution in Biblical study which began in England with Essays and Reviews, and the similar revolution which preceded it in Germany a hundred years before, is a revolution which did more harm to the Church than good...in so far as it taught us to approach the Bible unbelievingly, it has hindered the mission of the church ever since. It lies at the root of many of the calamities which have afflicted the church in our own day, and from which, until we repent of unbelief, the church will never recover.

Thomas Hardy and the doctrine of providence

"What has Providence done to Mr Hardy that he should rise up in the arable land of Wessex
and shake his fist at his Creator?"

Edmund Gosse (1896)

As with all of his novels, Thomas Hardy's magisterial Tess of the D'Urbervilles is replete with allusions and references to the Bible.  The beauty of Hardy's prose only partially conceals the splinters in the text intended to wound traditional Christian belief in the public mind.

Yet, for all his invectives against the doctrine of providence, invectives that lie in the text like sermons in miniature, for all his widening of the fissures in Victorian Christianity, for all his undermining of confidence in the God of the Bible, the name of the malevolent deity who causes Tess Durbeyfield to suffer so much at the hands of men is of course none other than Thomas Hardy.

As the author of the tragedy, Hardy is both the primary cause of all the events and the determiner of how the secondary causes fall out.

The following three examples from the novel bear this out:

When Tess joins in with the laughter directed toward Car Darch, the Queen of Spades, Car singles her out for retribution.  Tess, says Hardy, "could not help joining in with the rest" but "It was a misfortune -- in more ways than one."  The confrontation is soon followed by the untimely arrival of the would-be rescuer Alec D'Urberville.  As they ride off Car's mother remarks that it is "Out of the frying pan into the fire!"  Tess will soon be "Maiden no more."

As the narrative unfolds, Hardy's prose, laden with biblical imagery, presents us with a sermon in miniature against the doctrine of providence:

Darkness and silence ruled everywhere around.  Above them rose the primeval yews and oaks of The Chase, in which there poised gentle roosting birds in their last nap; and about them stole the hopping rabbits and hares.  But, might some say, where was Tess's guardian angel? Where was the providence of her simple faith?  Perhaps, like that other god of whom the ironical Tishbite spoke, he was talking, or he was pursuing, or he was on a journey, or he was sleeping and not to be awaked.

Later in the volume, Tess's attempt to reveal her past to Angel Clare, before their marriage, is thwarted by a trivial occurrence.  Having slipped her written confession underneath the door of his den at Talbothays she finds it unopened a few days later having "in her haste thrust it beneath the carpet as well as beneath the door."  With the revelation still sealed, Hardy comments that "The mountain had not yet been removed."

Hardy's own explanation for invoking the "President of the Immortals" whose work of sporting with Tess ends with her execution, was that it was not uncommon in imaginative prose and poetry for "the forces opposed to the heroine" to be "allegorized as a personality."  The offering of the explanation was one thing, the plausibility of the explanation another.  Many of the principle characters suffer at the hands of the author.

The observations of Hardy's critic Irving Howe are worth noting:

Because Hardy remained enough of a Christian to believe that purpose courses through the universe but not enough of a Christian to believe that purpose is benevolent or the attribute of a particular Being, he had to make his plots convey the oppressiveness of fatality without positing an agency determining the course of fate...The result was that he often seems to be coercing  his plots...and sometimes...he seems to be plotting against his own characters.

A similar assessment has been made by Claire Tomalin in her biography of Thomas Hardy:

To suggest that readers should see that "the President of the Immortals" is meant only to symbolize the forces of society that brought Tess down will not do as a defence.  There is something more there, something that makes sport with her sufferings, and making sport with suffering is cruelty.

Given the opaqueness of his bleak fatalism, even though he regarded himself as a meliorist, Tomalin offers the following summary:

Neither Hardy nor anyone else explained where his black view of life came from.  I have suggested that something in his constitution made him extraordinarily sensitive to humiliations, griefs and disappointments, and that the wounds they inflicted never healed but went on hurting him throughout his life.  In a sense he never got over his loss of Christian belief, which removed hope.

Let the reader understand: Theology, History & Literature

In his prodigious volume A Theology of John's Gospel and Letters, Andreas Kostenberger has the following helpful schema for biblical interpretation:

Interpreters of Scripture are faced with three inescapable realities they need to address in their interpretive practice:

(1) The reality of God and his revelation in Scripture (theology)(2) The existence of texts containing that revelation that require interpretation (language and literature)(3) The reality of history...the fact that God's revelation to humans...conveyed by the biblical texts, took place in human history.

In essence, therefore, the interpretive task consists of considering each of the three major elements of the "hermeneutical triad" in proper balance: history, language or literature, and theology, with the first two elements being foundational and theology occupying the apex. (p. 42-44)

Theology is mediated through history and literature, through the events of history recorded and interpreted in the text of Scripture. But that same theology is also communicated by, among other things, the specific genres, literary devices, word choice, and structure of each book in the canon. The implications of this are considerable for interpreters be they readers in the pew or preachers in the pulpit.

Let the reader understand.

Agnus Victor: Satan defeated through the substitution of the Lamb

The first question of the Heidelberg Catechism views the atoning work of Christ as dealing with the satisfaction made for all our sins (penal substitution) and his redeeming us from all the power of the devil (Christus Victor).

What is your only comfort in life and in death? 

That I, with body and soul, both in life and in death, am not my own, but belong to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ, who with His precious blood has fully satisfied for all my sins, and redeemed me from all the power of the devil; and so preserves me that without the will of my Father in heaven not a hair can fall from my head; indeed, that all things must work together for my salvation. Wherefore, by His Holy Spirit, He also assures me of eternal life, and makes me heartily willing and ready from now on to live unto Him.

Thus the Catechism holds together what ought never to be separated. Here we have the God-ward dimension of the atonement (satisfaction) and the polemic dimension (conquest). The latter, however, is dependent on the former.

When Scripture explicates how Christ conquers the devil, the reality of which is anticipated in the proto-evangelium (Gen. 3:15), it views the power of the devil as the power of deception and accusation.

Our legal position before God, in view of Adam's breaking of the covenant of works (Gen. 2:15-17), and our own sins, has rendered us guilty, cursed, and under the sentence of death (Rom. 6:23).

How does Christ redeem us from the power of the devil?

By dying for us (1 Peter 3:18). By taking our curse and punishment (Gal. 3:13). By enduring the wrath of God (Rom. 3:25-26). By taking the full penalty of the law (Gal. 3:10).

The legal accusations of Satan are silenced by the blood of the Lamb that has brought us forgiveness for all our sins (Col. 2:13-15; Eph. 1:7; Rev. 12:10-11; Rom. 8:1, 33-34).

How has Christ conquered Satan?

By his active and passive obedience, by making atonement and justification. And now without God's law to condemn us, Satan has no power to accuse us (1 Cor. 15:56).

What truth then will he seek to overthrow with all his might? The truth that the blood of the Lamb saves, the doctrine of penal substitution.

The Lamb slain saves us.

The Lamb slain silences Satan's accusations.

Satan has been defeated through the substitution of the Lamb.

It is seeing this connection that will stop the pendulum from swinging from penal substitution to Christus Victor. As Henri Blocher argued, in a much neglected essay, these doctrines are seen in the biblical proportions and glory together. It is really Agnus Victor, not what is commonly understood as Christus Victor, that best explains the conquering of Satan.

The Condemned King: Penal substitution and the narrative of Mark 15

In order to establish the doctrine of penal substitution we are not dependent on a few isolated proof-texts here and there in Scripture. The doctrine is woven indelibly into the very fabric of the account of the crucifixion, with numerous threads drawn from the Old Testament.  Rather than instinctively looking to the gospels to provide the facts about the crucifixion, and to the letters to supply the meaning of those facts, we must turn to the Old Testament as the vantage point from which we are to survey the cross.  Antecedent Scripture provides us with all the categories we need to understand the cross.
  
This is the apostolic approach in 1 Corinthians 15:1-11.  The Apostle Paul records the Church's testimony about the gospel that was universally proclaimed and believed.  Paul states the facts. Christ died, was buried and was raised on the third day. He then gives the meaning of those facts. That Christ died for our sins.  Thirdly, he tells us where that meaning is to be found and authoritatively interpreted for us: Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures. 

In Mark's Gospel we find a compelling unity of fact and meaning, of event and interpretation.  The factual details of the crucifixion speak to us about the nature of Christ's death. They are much more than a bare description of the events, merely "bare" facts that are open to different interpretations. The historical details have been interpreted in advance for us.  

Once we look below the surface, and specifically in terms of the Old Testament background, we will see that the details of the narrative in Mark 15 testify that Jesus is dying under the wrath of God, and that he is doing so as a substitute for sinners.  

Mark shows us six signs that Jesus died under God's judgement. Some of these signs are well known to Bible readers, others less so.  Taken together they speak clearly and powerfully to us about the sin-bearing, wrath averting, substitutionary nature of Christ's death.

1. He was handed over to the Gentiles 

Six times in Mark 15 we are told that Jesus is the King of the Jews (2, 9, 12, 18, 26, and King of Israel in 32). This King of the Jews has been handed over to the Gentiles. At one level this is the fulfillment of what Jesus said would happen. Consider his words in Mark 10:33-34:

"See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death and deliver him over to the Gentiles. And they will mock him and spit on him, and flog him and kill him. And after three days he will rise."

At another level being delivered over to the Gentiles is a traumatic sign of being under God's judgement. Psalm 106:40-41 speaks of God's people being handed over to the nations as a consequence of being under judgement:

Then the anger of the LORD was kindled against his people, and he abhorred his heritage; he gave them into the hand of the nations, so that those who hated them ruled over them.

The same idea is expressed by Ezra as he acknowledges the guilt of the people of God that led to the exile. Ezra 9:7b reads:

And for our iniquities we, our kings, and our priests have been given into the hand of the kings of the lands, to the sword, to captivity, to plundering, and to utter shame, as it is today.

In the OT being handed over to the nations was a sign of God's anger. This was happening to Jesus in Mark 15. 

2. He was silent before his accusers 

We know that the charges brought against Jesus by the Jewish leaders were both unjust and incoherent (Mark 14:55-61). Before Pilate, as again Jesus is falsely accused, he remains silent. Why does Jesus not speak up in his own defense? Why does he not silence the lies of his enemies? Pilate is amazed at this (Mark 15:3-4). But the silence of Jesus is spoken of in the words of Isaiah 53:7:

He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth.

The silence of Jesus before his accusers is a confirmatory sign that he is the suffering servant who will bear the penal consequences of the sins of others by substitutionary atonement (Isaiah. 53:4-6, 10). 

3. He was hung on a tree 

The very instrument of execution spoke of the nature of Christ's death. In the words of Deuteronomy 21:22-23:

If a man has committed a crime punishable by death and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day, for a hanged man is cursed by God.

Jesus was not personally guilty of any crime that could issue in his death. His death therefore was as a substitute for clearly it was a death that showed him to have been "cursed by God."  This point is drawn out of course in Galatians 3:10-13:

For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, "Cursed be everyone    who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them." Now it is   evident that no one is justified before God by the law, for "The righteous shall live by faith."    But the law is not of faith, rather "The one who does them shall live by them." Christ    redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us--for it is written, "Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree." 

The significance of this was not lost upon the framers of the Heidelberg Catechism:

 Q. 39 Is there anything more in His having been "crucified" than if He had suffered some other death?  A. Yes, for thereby I am assured that He took upon Himself the curse which lay upon me, because the death of the cross was accursed of God.

4. He was mocked by his enemies 

When Hollywood wants to portray the death of Jesus it does so by focussing our attention on the physical details of his sufferings. The graphic nature of his beating and execution is brought to the forefront. Mark, however, places that in the background. Mark places minimal attention on the act of crucifixion; he simply says "and they crucified him" (15:24). 

Mark draws our attention not to the wounds of Jesus but to the words of his enemies. He goes into great detail to record the taunts and verbal abuse that Jesus suffered (15:29-32, 35). Why does he do this? Why do we need to know about this mockery of Christ? Because this too is a sign that Jesus is dying under God's judgement. Consider Psalm 89:38-42 (in context this is about God's king from David's line):

You have cast off and rejected; you are full of wrath against your anointed. You have renounced the covenant with your servant; you have defiled his crown in the dust. You have breached all his walls; you have laid his strongholds in ruins. All who pass by plunder him; he has become the scorn of his neighbors. You have exalted the right hand of his foes; you have made all his enemies rejoice.

In Psalm 89 being scorned by his enemies was a sign that God's king was under God's judgement for his sins. And here in Mark 15? King Jesus is scorned by his enemies. He is the condemned King.  The King of the Jews is bearing God's judgement, not for his own sins, but as a substitute for sinners. Similarly compare Lamentations 2:15 with Mark 15:29. 

All who pass along the way clap their hands at you; they hiss and wag their heads at the   daughter of Jerusalem: "Is this the city that was called the perfection of beauty, the joy of all    the earth?" (Lamentations 2:15)    And those who passed by derided him, wagging their heads and saying, "Aha! You who     would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself, and come down from     the cross!" (Mark 15:29-30) 

The suffering city of Jerusalem, under God's wrath, scorned by her enemies, has been replaced by the suffering Saviour.  

5. He died in the darkness 

We are surely meant to recall the darkness that fell upon Egypt during the plagues as we see Jesus plunged into the darkness in Mark 15:33. This too was what God threatened Israel with in Deuteronomy 28:29 "and you shall grope at noonday, as the blind grope in darkness." Amos also warned of this sign of judgement (Amos 8:9):

"And on that day," declares the Lord GOD, "I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight."As Jesus dies even the very elements testify to the presence of God's judgement at the cross. 

6. He was forsaken by God

Here we come to the words of Jesus in Mark 15:34:

And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?" which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

Was God present at the cross when Christ was forsaken? He was spatially as present in Jerusalem then as he is today. Nevertheless in a way that we cannot comprehend but which is the cause of all our hope in time and eternity, we believe that the Son of God knew all the torments of a condemned sinner, and all the relational distance that guilty sinners will endure.

Christ's experience of being forsaken was not imagined (Mark 15:33-34). In that cry of dereliction he knew abandonment.  Jesus of Nazareth, the only true and perfect covenant keeper, bore the full weight of the covenant curses (Gal. 3:10-13). This was not separation from God that could be measured in space, rather it was the separation felt by the Son as he endured the curse that should be borne by sinners.  What was happening to Jesus on the cross? He was bearing sin, its full penalty, in the place of his people.   

Were these six threads to be unravelled we would be left with a totally different crucifixion narrative.  The handing over to the Gentiles, the silence, the tree, the mockery, the darkness, and the cry, all belong to history.  They cannot be undone.  Furthermore, they cannot be separated from the verbal revelation that preceded their occurrence and explained them in advance.  Let me conclude with two doctrinal statements about the atonement.  The first is from the Free Church theologian George Smeaton (1814-1889) who powerfully expressed the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement in vivid and memorable words:

 Jesus was visited with penal suffering because he appeared before God only in the guise of our accumulated sin; not therefore as a private individual, but as a representative; sinless in himself, but sin covered; loved as a Son, but condemned as a sin-bearer, in virtue of that federal union between him and his people, which lay at the foundation of the whole. Thus God condemned sin in the flesh, and in consequence of this there is no condemnation to us. 

The second is from the much neglected Larger Catechism which summarizes the traumatic nature of Christ's humiliation in death as follows:

Q. 49. How did Christ humble himself in his death?

A. Christ humbled himself in his death, in that having been betrayed by Judas, forsaken by     his disciples, scorned and rejected by the world, condemned by Pilate, and tormented by his persecutors; having also conflicted with the terrors of death, and the powers of darkness, felt   and borne the weight of God's wrath, he laid down his life an offering for sin, enduring the    painful, shameful, and cursed death of the cross.

Why do they hate Aslan so? Polly Toynbee on the repugnant notion of substitutionary atonement

One from the archives:

The columnist Polly Toynbee wrote an article in The Guardian on 5th December 2005 with the rather acerbic title “Narnia represents everything that is most hateful about religion.” 

I will spare you the full extent of her invective against the Christian imagery found in C.S. Lewis' children's stories. The following extract exposes the thin veil between Aslan and the One he represents:

Children are supposed to fall in love with the hypnotic Aslan, though he is not a character: he is pure, raw, awesome power. He is an emblem for everything an atheist objects to in religion...Without an Aslan, there is no one here but ourselves to suffer for our sins, no one to redeem us but ourselves.

But among her numerous thorny remarks this sentence stands out: 

Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in agony to save our souls. Did we ask him to?

Perhaps the most obvious thing to say by way of explanation about her choice of adjective, is that it is indicative of a heart wedded to the wisdom of this passing age. It is as straightforward a statement of aversion and distaste at the very notion of a substitutionary atonement as one could wish to find. And yet, to those who hold to the presuppositions laid out by Paul in 1 Corinthians 1:18-2:8, it hardly comes as much of a surprise.

It stands in marked contrast to the expression of the regenerate heart that sees in the cross both the wisdom and power of God. Of all the great confessions of faith perhaps it is the Belgic Confession (Q. 26) that best verbalizes the sentiments of the regenerate mind:

If, then, we should seek for another mediator who would be favorably  inclined toward us, whom could we find who loved us more than He who laid down His life for us, even while we were His enemies? 

And what should we make of her question? Of course we did not ask Christ to die for us. None of us wanted him to. 

This is a point underlined, as it were in thick marker pen, time and again, on the pages of the Bible. From Isaiah's description of Christ as despised and rejected by men (Isaiah 53:3) all the way to Paul's retrospective description of Christian believers as being ungodly and enemies toward God (Romans 5:6, 10). 

Take a further example of this antipathy we feel towards the God-who-comes-to-the-rescue from the pages of the Old Testament. In the book of Judges there is the pattern of apostasy, oppression from enemies, and cries to God for relief from this misery. In his grace, God raises up judges who save the people of God from the hands of their oppressors. Judges 13 seemingly opens with this same pattern. Israel has turned from God to their evil ways, and God has handed them over to the Philistines. But the pattern ends there. Just when we expect to hear a cry to God for relief and rescue there is nothing but silence. 

When the Angel of the Lord announces the birth of Samson, who will begin to save Israel from the Philistines, it is therefore clear that this is an act of sheer grace on God's part. God sent them a Saviour, even though they did not ask him to. The span of time between the book of Judges and that column in The Guardian may have spread over several millennia, but chronology does not cover up the similarities that exist. 

The very glory of the atonement is that Christ died for his enemies. We were not seeking after a Saviour from heaven, but running and hiding from our Maker. As Paul reminded the Colossians, it was for those who were hostile in their minds toward God that Christ hung on the cross. It was by that death that he made peace and effected reconciliation with God (Colossians 1:19-22). 

Like Polly Toynbee, I never asked him to do this. But that is grace for you. Unexpected, undeserved, uncalled for, and offered in the teeth of hostility.  

Making him known

Stunning parallelism in John's Gospel:

The Son at the Father's side/in the bosom of the Father, making him known John 1:18

The disciple-author at Jesus' side/leaning on his bosom, during the Supper in John 13:23, and making him known John 21:20, 24 

4th Century Wisdom for 21st Century People

Sanity and spirituality from Hilary of Poitier's De Trinitate.

First, some 4th Century wisdom for 21st Century people:

For he is the best student who does not read his thoughts into the book, but lets it reveal its own; who draws from it its sense, and does not import his own into it, nor force upon its words a meaning which he had determined was the right one before he opened its pages. 

Since then we are to discourse of the things of God, let us assume that God has full knowledge of Himself, and bow with humble reverence to His words. For He Whom we can only know through His own utterances is the fitting witness concerning Himself.

Secondly, married to that, some 4th Century spirituality to sweeten and guide 21st Century exegetes:

We shall bring an untiring energy to the study of Thy Prophets and Apostles, and we shall knock for entrance at every gate of hidden knowledge, but it is Thine to answer the prayer, to grant the thing we seek, to open the door on which we beat.

Our minds are born with dull and clouded vision, our feeble intellect is penned within the barriers of an impassable ignorance concerning things Divine; but the study of Thy revelation elevates our soul to the comprehension of sacred truth, and submission to the faith is the path to a certainty beyond the reach of unassisted reason. 

And therefore we look to Thy support for the first trembling steps of this undertaking, to Thy aid that it may gain strength and prosper. We look to Thee to give us the fellowship of that Spirit Who guided the Prophets and the Apostles, that we may take their words in the sense in which they spoke and assign its right shade of meaning to every utterance.

Fides quaerens intellectum

Fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding) is a famous phrase of Anselm's.  It is a fitting expression for that central vein of faith's quest for intellectual understanding, as fleshed out here by Augustine:

No one believes anything unless one first thought it believable...Everything that is believed is believed after being preceded by thought...Not everyone who thinks believes, since many think in order not to believe; but everyone who believes thinks, thinks in believing and believes in thinking.

Augustine, The Predestination of the Saints, 44:962-3, cited in Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, p. xiii-xiv

The sanity of grace

"There is hardly a page of Scripture on which it is not clearly written that God resists the proud and gives grace to the humble" 

Augustine, Reply to Faustus

Unless we understand the freeness and sheer magnitude of the grace of God in the gospel, and the workings of grace in the life of the believer by the ministry of the Holy Spirit, we will be left with either a warped view of our own works or a distorted view of God's gracious work. In all likelihood, it will be both.

Grace restores our sanity and our sight.

We see our sin, in greater measure, from God's perspective.

We see his grace, the gift and the Giver, in true perspective too.

Unless we have this vision we will descend into the insanity of trusting in works righteousness, either from believing that our best works merit the favour of God, or in despair because in unbelief we lament our lack of them, as if the free gift of God were not what it is, the giving of eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

At root, to despair because of sin is still to be looking within for the cause of God's acceptance of us.

To look away from ourselves, to the Father's love in Christ, to the Son's death in our place and to his resurrection from the grace, to his finished work on our behalf, is to see things as they really are.

Woe even to those of praiseworthy life if you put their life under scrutiny and remove mercy.

If anyone lists his true merits to you, what is he enumerating before you but your gifts?

Augustine, Confessions, Book IX:xiii (34)

Fragments on Scripture and Subordinate Standards

Some fragments on Scripture and subordinate standards:

Scripture is the norma normans (the norming norm, the rule that rules)

Confessions are the norma normata (a norm that is normed/a rule that is ruled)

Christian faith begins with a confession of faith by the individual (e.g. Rom. 10:9) and the reception of confessed truths by the Christian community (e.g. 1 Cor. 15:1-3)

A Confession of faith is not an arbitrary, unnatural, or purely cerebral artefact, that is somehow foreign to normal Christian life and experience, but (as the texts above indicate) belongs to the very essence of Christian existence

A Confession is a corporate ecclesiastical statement of Christian belief and practice

A Confession of faith is a verbal affirmation of truth and implicitly, or explicitly, a verbal denial of error

A Confession is composed out of biblical and extra biblical language, the latter out of necessity in order to distinguish orthodox appeals to the teachings of Scripture from heterodox ones

A Confession is a subordinate standard

As a subordinate standard a Confession is derived in whole and in part from Scripture

A Confession is accepted as authoritative insofar as it is in agreement with Scripture and faithfully represents the content of what the Scriptures teach

When the teaching of a particular Confession is denied, by an appeal to Scripture, a new Confession (personal or corporate, written or unwritten) has been posited in place of the old one (in part or in whole)

It is impossible to be Non-Confessional, even if a church body, or network of churches, has an aversion to written Confessions

Without a written, or unwritten, no fellowship, unity, or co-operation is possible within or between churches

Confessions can be maximal (think Westminster Confession) or minimal (think Apostles' Creed or parachurch statements of faith)

Minimal confessions are implicitly maximal is their exposition as they rely on more comprehensive statements and definitions to clarify, explain, define and defend their brief propositions

And to round off, here is a helpful and thought provoking comment by R. A. Finlayson:

A Confession is referred to as a Church's 'subordinate standard' because it is in very fact subordinate to the Scriptures, the fountainhead of all revealed truth. This subordination, however, does not affect its authority in matters of faith, but rather serves to emphasise the fact that it is derived from Scripture.

When a Confession is accepted, therefore, it is accepted as in accordance with the truth of Scripture, and we profess that we have examined both the Scripture and the Confession and that we have found them in agreement.

For that reason we cannot appeal from the Confession to Scripture in a way of repudiating the Confession, without thereby withdrawing our subscription to it as agreeable to the Scripture and the Confession of our Faith.

To set aside its doctrine in favour of some other interpretation of Scripture is manifestly to abandon the Confession altogether.

"The Significance of the Westminster Confession" in Reformed Theological Writings, p. 231-2

Against Heresies: Local and Global

In tracing out Augustine's labours in responding to and refuting the Pelagian heresy, B. B. Warfield makes the following comment:

All heresies do not need an ecumenical synod for their condemnation; usually it is best to stamp them out locally, and not allow what may be confined to a corner to disturb the whole world.

From 'Augustine and the Pelagian Controversy', in The Works of Benjamin B. Warfield Vol. IV: Studies in Tertullian and Augustine, p.381

In our day the distinction between global and local has been blurred both by the ubiquity of the internet as a means of communication and also by the re-sculpting of the in-scape of communicators and their expansive audiences by social media.  The size, nature, and location of the audience has altered permanently.

In our day it is hard to imagine that any contemporary error could be classified as strictly 'local'.  Perhaps it is even harder to imagine anything resembling an 'ecumenical synod' as the means of assessing and rejecting contemporary errors. Although historically speaking, error has been dealt with not only corporately, but also by the individual skills of brilliant theologians (e.g. an Athanasius or an Augustine).

Augustine on the alluring grace of God

God turns resistance to his will into delight. The fact of it is a great mystery, the reality no less so. As Augustine wrote:

Do not think that you are dragged to God against your will. The mind is drawn by love which is a source of inexpressible pleasure. There is a pleasure of the heart whose sweetness consists in the bread of heaven.

Give me a lover, he feels what I am talking about.

Give me a man in a state of desire, of hunger, a traveller thirsty on a desert road who is sighing for the spring at his eternal home.

Give me a man like that, he knows what I mean.

But if I address myself to a cold person, he has no notion what I am speaking of.

Tractatus in Johannis Evangelium, 26.4

The Augustinian Quest

Henry Chadwick:

Without illusions about himself, he draws his readers into his personal quest for happiness as he feels himself driven to believe that there is nothing to keep the soul from starvation other than truth, beauty, and goodness; and they can be reached only by love, a purified and sublimated love, the beginning, middle, and end of all things.

Augustine of Hippo: A Life, p.2

Augustine on Substitutionary Atonement

Some remarkable extracts from the pen of Augustine when he defended the substitutionary atonement of Christ as the fulfilment of OT prophecy against Faustus the Manichean:

Christ, though guiltless, took our punishment that he might cancel our guilt, and do away with our punishment.

Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree; not this one or that but absolutely everyone. What? The Son of God?  Yes, assuredly.

While ever blessed in his own righteousness he was cursed for our offences, in the death which he suffered in bearing our punishment.

He [Moses] knew that the death of sinful man, which Christ though sinless bore, came from that curse "If you touch it you shall surely die"

Moses speaks of him as cursed, not in his divine majesty, but as hanging on the tree as our substitute, bearing our punishment.

Answer to Faustus, a Manichean, Book 14