Monthly Archives: March 2016

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March 30, 2016

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Mere Fidelity: Out of the House of Bread w/ Preston Yancey

Mere FidelityOn this episode of Mere Fidelity, Matt, Alastair, and I are joined by our friend Preston Yancey. He’s just written a new book entitled Out of the House of Bread on the nature of the spiritual life and the spiritual disciplines. Also, it’s about baking bread. Aren’t you now quite curious how these go together? Possibly hungry for bread too? Well, listen to this episode as you drive to the market to buy bread and find out!

You can also follow the podcast on iTunes, or using this RSS feed. Listen to past episodes on Soundcloud.

*WE ARE CURRENTLY LOOKING FOR PEOPLE TO HELP US TO COVER THE MONTHLY EXPENSES OF THE PODCAST. PLEASE VISIT OUR PATREON PAGE*

Soli Deo Gloria

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March 29, 2016

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How Jesus Saves the World From Us (Review)

I tend to read different theological authors for various reasons. Some excel at putting into words my deepest, unarticulated beliefs better than I ever could. Others inspire me and provoke us to wonder. While still others are just generally informative—they tell me what I don’t know. Finally, there’s a special category that I’d put my friend Morgan Guyton in—he’s the kind who keeps me honest.

For those of you unfamiliar with him, he’s a Methodist college minister in New Orleans and a blogger at Patheos Progressive channel who gets featured at Huffington Post, Red Letter Christians, and other such periodicals. In other words, we don’t hang out at The Gospel Coalition conferences. AHow-Jesus-Saves-the-World-from-Usll the same, we’ve been blogging, chatting, and arguing quite vociferously back and forth for the last few years in such a way that I’ve been challenged, provoked, and (I think) strengthened in the faith. And this is even with some very significant, theological disagreements.

All that to say, I was pretty excited when I got my copy of his new book How Jesus Saves the World From Us: 12 Antidotes to Toxic Christianity. As you might expect given the title, it can appropriately be put in the recent spate of “progressive Evangelical” manifestos. That said, I was anxious to read it because I know Morgan to be honest, typically trying to eschew some of the sensationalism and invective that infects some of these kinds of works. Indeed, I know for a fact that he got turned down from some publishers precisely because he didn’t want to write the slash-and-burn anti-Evangelical screeds they thought would sell.

Instead, in How Jesus Saves the World From Us, Morgan attempts to put forward a more positive vision of a Christianity stripped from what he sees to be toxic attitudes, behaviors, and corruptions of a beautiful gospel. Each chapter is organized around a fairly clear binary with titles like, “Worship, Not Performance: How We Love God” or “Servanthood not Leadership: How We Follow Our Shepherd”, with the goal of presenting us with two clear paths. The point, then, is a constructive criticism of some of the deficiencies and pathologies of American Christianity with an eye towards a transformed Church. His goal is to call back or give hope to the many who have been burned out or disgusted by the many failures and excesses they’ve experienced at the hands of religious leaders and communities.

As much as I disagreed with some key chapters or sub-points, Morgan had plenty to say that I needed to hear. One of the most gripping chapters was his approach to gaining a holy body, “Breath, not Meat”—his translation of “Spirit, not Flesh.” His imagery of life lived to the flesh as bodies being turned into mere “meat”—dead life—is powerful and pastorally attuned. While, I’m not an anti-capitalist, Morgan’s section on the way our market-economy can play into our subtle commodification of persons and bodies is worth serious consideration. Overall, it’s a helpful dimension to consider in our all-too-thin “spiritual” accounts of sanctification and sin.

Given my recent forays into the theology of Leviticus and the Temple, I was also drawn especially to his chapter on “Temple, Not Program.” I really resonated with his suggestion that churches begin to recover that sense of the sacredness of time and space. Over and over again we’ve heard that the Church is a “people not a place”, but in our hyper-mobile, post-religious culture, that simply plays into the vacuous sensibility that since we can worship God “anywhere” there’s no real use to gathering somewhere with some people to meet in a special way with the Lord. And because we’ve lost that sense of the sacred space of the local church, we’ve increasingly relied on the hyper-programization of a flawlessly-executed program to gin up a sense of the divine in our people.

And, I’ll also mention his chapter on “Servanthood, not Leadership.” While I’d probably nuance his end-point about pastors seeing themselves less as shepherds than as fellow-sheep (I mean, “under-shepherd” is a biblical idea), so much of this chapter was a breath of fresh air compared to more technical models of pastoral leadership built on business-school models of success and platform-building. The professionalization of the pastorate is one of the greater tragedies of the last half-century.

I could go on like this about a number of the other chapters. But though Morgan is my friend, I will register one critical comment that sums up the various sub-points I’d make as a whole. While the format is a useful heuristic tool (“eat this, not that”), unless taken critically, the binary format often leads us to miss a possible third way between the option that Morgan is (rightly) critiquing, and his proposed positive vision.

To take an example, his chapter on “Poetry, Not Math: How We Read the Bible” gives you a nice, clean split. Either we misunderstand the Bible by trying to treat it like a problem to be solved, mastered, used, as a weapon, etc, instead of poetry to be savored and accepted with all of its mysteries and complexities. Which is good as far as it goes. But then (leaning on types like Enns and Rollins) he forwards a functionalist understanding of the Scripture’s authority and a pragmatic notion of its truth in terms of usefulness, ignoring some of the real challenges the original fundamentalists have, or current inerrantists worry about. I suppose my point is that much of the time, yes, the Bible is like poetry, and yet, sometimes it’s a little closer to math.

That’s typically how I felt about the sections I disagreed with. Morgan almost always has his finger on the problem and frequently he identifies issues I never would have thought up about coming from my location. And I really need to hear those different perspectives. But the question is about the way forward or the way we read the need to revise our understandings of certain doctrines like penal substitution or something, to fix what’s wrong.

But again, this is why I say he keeps me honest and why I gained a lot from reading this book. And I think that’s probably fine with him. I don’t see Morgan needing conservatives to agree with all of his solutions. But forcing us to grapple with real issues, hurts, corruptions, and struggles within the Church faithfully from within our own frameworks? Getting us to hear the pained voices of the wounded so that we might strive present a more beautiful gospel and a more glorious Jesus to them? I think he’d be just fine with that. And that’s what Morgan’s done for me in this book.

Soli Deo Gloria

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March 28, 2016

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The Scapegoating of Batman V. Superman: A Theory of Criticism

Sad Ben Affleck

Don’t cry, Ben Affleck. You were just a Girardian Scapegoat.

I have a theory about Batman v. Superman. No, this is not a fan theory about how to pull everything together (as much as we all love those). Rather, it’s a theory about the somewhat astonishing level of critical vitriol and general “mehhing” (to coin a phrase) of the film.

Three caveats before I proceed:

First, the seriousness level of this thesis is about 50/50.

Second, I am not a film critic in any professional sense. I am a watcher of movies who can occasionally approach “being thoughtful” about such things. I generally understand why I’m supposed to like the movies I am supposed to like and vice versa. While I am not a populist (in general) and I appreciate good film critics, I have to acknowledge that, at times, my tastes veer into the pedestrian.

Third, you should know that I enjoyed Man of Steel and that my overall judgment about Batman v. Superman is that it is a “decent” to “pretty good” comic book movie. It is not The Dark Knight, or Iron Man, or Avengers, to be sure. But it’s certainly not a Green Lantern which is how so many of the critics are treating it. My biggest complaint about the film as a whole was the kind of choppy editing and a couple of plot points that strained my ability to suspend belief (though, I hear there’s a director’s cut with about 30 extra minutes which could change some of that).

That said, Affleck did a pretty, darn good job of being Batman, contrary to my earlier naysaying (you won me over, Ben). Actually, everybody’s acting was pretty solid. Wonder Woman legit. I’m curious about Snyder’s story-line to follow, etc. and I thought there was some very interesting interactions at the theo-political level. Could it have been better? Yes. Was it awful and not worth seeing again? Nope.

Alright, with these caveats/reminders-to-take-this-with-a-huge-grain-of-salt out of the way, I will proceed with my theory.

Here it is: Batman v. Superman is the Girardian Scapegoat of all “Comic-book Movies.”

If you’ve been paying attention to the reviews for the most recent spate of superhero flicks, especially since this last summer, there has been a general tone of exhaustion amongst large swathes of the critic class. They are tired of these things. The stories are so similar. They’re so CGI. They just keep coming and eating up budgets that could be used on other, more original stories, etc. One of the major reasons so many critics gave Deadpool high marks was precisely because its hyper-violence and vulgarity broke up the monotony and predictability for them.

In other words, there’s been an anger/frustration/angst building, brewing, waiting to be vented and aired out.

Add to that the fact that there has already been suspicion about the Batman v. Superman flick for some time. “Is Snyder just going to try to keep doing the Nolan thing? Aren’t we done with brooding heroes? Can Affleck really pull off Batman?”

Enter the thought of French social theorist Rene Girard. In his broader theory of desire and culture, Girard talks about the “The Power of the First Stone.” Without going into all the details, Girard argues for a particular view of desire and the imitative nature of our desires and actions. We want and do largely as we see others wanting and doing. Because of this, Girard says that “casting the first stone”, so to speak, is the most difficult bit of any event of Scapegoating, because it’s without any model. But, once it’s cast, if there is enough social unrest, contagion, etc. built up, the rest start to follow very quickly.

This is kind of what I think happened with Batman v. Superman. Going into it there was already a tilt against the film, and once the first round of criticisms rolled in it triggered this the great, cathartic scapegoating of all the build-up, frustration, and exhaustion with comic films, dark heroes, etc. starts pouring out in this cascade of bad reviews, each more over-the-top than the last (partially fueled by the drive to top the last negative review in an even more clever, witty, oh-so-devastating takedown.)

Now, hear me: I am not saying that nobody is justified in not liking the film. I can see many of the criticisms being reasonable, even if they don’t hit me with the same, persuasive force. I especially give space for purist, fan concerns.

I will say, though, that had this movie come out two years ago, we would not be seeing the same, widespread, critical reaction. I mean, the fact that Thor: The Dark World has something like a 75% on Rottentomatoes.com and Batman V. Superman has a 29% is just a bizarre discrepancy when looking at the films side-by-side.

But when you start to see Batman v. Superman as the sacrificial victim being expelled from society and offered up in a cathartic moment—a sort of collective, critical purge—then it starts to make sense.

So, there you go. That’s my theory about why way more critics seem to hate this film than they should compared to other superhero flicks they’ve liked.

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March 24, 2016

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Doctrine and Life Go Together–Mostly, but Sometimes Not

beliefs

Why Indiana Jones? Why not?

Paul’s injunction for Timothy to keep a close watch on his “life and doctrine” in order that he might save his hearers has rung in my ears ever since I realized I was called to the minsitry (1 Tim. 4:16). Life and doctrine go together–what the mind and heart believe, the hands perform. This is why sound doctrine leads to sound living. When we understand the truth of the world, ourselves, and God, how we live in the world will begin to be aligned and attuned to this realities.

Except when it doesn’t.

See, while I still believe that doctrine and life go together, I think there’s a bit of confusion more broadly about the connection between believing and living. People seem to have bought into a popular version of what economists call “rational actor theory”, where (on my dummy definition) people make their decisions in a goal-oriented, reflective, and maximizing way. In other words, there’s something of a clean link up between beliefs and behaviors. If you know one, you should be able to draw a straight line to the other.

This is the kind of folk theory you see at work in a lot of our conversations around politics, or in theology, and so forth. Joe believes in penal substitution, and he just punched Lou in the face, so clearly it’s his violent ideology at work. Jenny struggles with anxiety, so that must be her Arminian theology of providence crushing her with stress. Jake has been flirting with progressive theology lately, so we can expect him to acquire a harem soon. And so forth. Or, we’re shocked when someone who believes as we do acts in a manner we never would.

But the more I watch people, the less that seems correct. Beliefs matter, but humans aren’t consistent, believing machines. For one thing, not all of our beliefs are consistent with each other. Talk to the average person on the street (even the well-educated ones) for very long and it’s easy to find unresolved tensions and contradictions in their thought. In which case, they might act in such a way that deeply contradicts one belief they hold, because it is perfectly consistent with another, different belief and they just haven’t connected the dots.

What’s more, even when people do have consistent beliefs, they don’t always live them out consistently. This is the point of talking about weakness of will, or akrasia as Aristotle termed it. We just know that people often consciously act against their best or conscious beliefs under pressure, temptation, or desire. Or we rationalize and note the way we are exceptions to what we generally expect for others and so forth.

Or even further, we forget that there are usually a number of different conclusions you can draw from your collection of beliefs. Especially if you’re evaluating someone else’s position from the outside. I mean, if you can’t even keep all of your own beliefs straight (as is likely), it’s not surprising that you might have trouble with others’. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to explain that “no, point B is not what I believe, nor does it even plausibly follow from point A” to various non-Christian friends over the years on any number of issues.

Finally, (and we could keep going) we forget the way various psychological, emotional, social, and historical pressures influence us from moment to moment, in surprising ways. Traumas (or graces) from the way we were raised might create residual behavioral patterns at the level of habit in a way that isn’t simply dislodged by a good syllogism and a few propositions being switched around in your grey matter.

Theologically, a lot of this makes sense, right? Yes, we were created in the Image of God but that’s been broken such that all of our faculties (reason, will, etc) are damaged by sin. They don’t always function or connect up properly. Even after the grace of Christ comes into our lives, the Holy Spirit is at work to restore us progressively. In which case, there will be many times when our beliefs don’t match up with our living.

I mean, this is a lot of why Paul spends so much time reminding people of what they believe, but then also trying to connect the dots between that and how they live. Whether out of folly or rebellion, they weren’t drawing proper conclusions for living from the doctrine that they were intellectually believing.

More positively, this is part of why people will surprise us with how much better they live than we imagine their beliefs would lead them to. Tim Keller talks about the way the Holy Spirit’s work of common grace in the lives of unbelievers leads many to live more wisely and graciously in some respects than believers. Some of that happens, I think, by a happy disconnect between some of the more corrosive beliefs a person may hold and their instinctive behavior. Or, there are great behaviors produced by odious or harmful beliefs.

There are a number ways this can go.

One, I think, is to maybe slow us down from drawing too straight a line between the behaviors of our intellectual opponents and the beliefs of theirs we despise. Yes, again, I do think there is a connection between life and doctrine. There are beliefs that, held in the right way, change us for the better or for the worse in the long run. But in the mess of history, unless they come out and explicitly explain their behavior, it can be very difficult to interpret just what led someone do the dastardly thing they did. Or it could be that someone–under the pressure of desire, peers, etc.–actually betrayed their beliefs. I’m not saying we can’t draw the line between behaviors and beliefs–I am saying we need to be a lot slower and take more care with that argument.

Second, I think we need to be less surprised when large chunks of population don’t behave according to the model we think they should in our head. This is true when we’re thinking of the Evangelical electorate or any other group. We need to be careful about the kinds of causes or explanations we accept for behavior or the beliefs of people we disagree with. Single-cause/single-belief explanations are almost always wrong. People are complicated, so we need to slow down, weigh a variety of complementary or competing explanations for these sorts of things. So, give the other side the kind of charitable interpretation you’d love the to give you when people on your team are being terrible.

Third, on a personal ministry level–each person is their own person. You’re almost never dealing with a cookie-cutter version of the last person you talked to. Sure, you can begin to create “types”, or “patterns”. Stereotypes usually have some basis in fact. But as soon as you’re sitting across the table from one of those types, the mold will usually start to crack, so before you begin “dialoguing” with the robust arrogance of knowing “exactly who this guy is”, maybe slow down and listen to who he actually is.

There are more conclusions we could draw, but all this to say that doctrine and life are definitely connected, but it’s a complicated affair. Which is why the spiritual life and gospel ministry isn’t a simple matter of formulaic truth-dispensing. Preaching and teaching must take their place in the Church–a web of social and historical relationships in which the Spirit works on a person’s heart, mind, body, and soul over time.

Thankfully, the Spirit’s got plenty of it.

Soli Deo Gloria

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March 23, 2016

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Three Mistakes to Avoid in Good Friday Preaching

Preaching “Christ and him crucified” is core to the job description of any minister of the Christian gospel (1 Corinthians 2:2).  Good Friday drives this home more than any other day in the church calendar. On that day, the preacher’s task is to proclaim and explain why the bloody spectacle of the Son of God murdered upon Golgotha is “good news.” How is this moral rupture the center of God’s great act of atonement–of God reconciling the world to himself (2 Corinthians 5:19)?
Christ’s cross itself has always provoked hostility and scorn whether among pagan Greeks or Jews and is, in many ways, no easier to stomach now than it was then; it still confronts us with our sins and bids the old Adam to come, submit to death, so that the New Adam may rise to new life. But that’s not the only difficulty involved.
The fact of the matter is that many have rightly recoiled at some of the defective ways pastors have preached the cross–especially its penal and substitutionary dimensions–in the past. When we make mistakes in this area, it’s easy to give people a distorted and destructive view of both God and the gospel. This is tragic. Both because we deprive people of the beauty of the cross, but also because, as C.S. Lewis points out, the more powerful and good something is, the more destructive it can be if it goes wrong. Much as a doctor cannot be careless in wielding a life-saving scalpel, so preachers cannot treat the preaching of the cross lightly or carelessly lest we bring death instead of life.
While there are a number of ways preaching the cross can go wrong, here are three key mistakes to avoid in your preaching of the cross this Good Friday.
You can read the rest of the article over at Reformation21.
Soli Deo Gloria

 

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March 22, 2016

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Theological Theology: Essays in Honour of John Webster

theological theologyJohn Webster has long been known for practicing and advocating “Theological Theology.” The point is not, as some might rightly worry, to practice a form of theology that exists solely for itself–“academic” in the worst sense. Instead, it is to practice theology that is confident enough in the importance of the theological task that it doesn’t need to be constantly borrowing its thought-forms, programs, and methods from other disciplines in order to prove its relevance. It means doing theology in a theological way that proceeds in a manner that fits its transcendently, unique subject matter–the Triune God as he has revealed himself in his works in the economy of creation and redemption.

It’s only fitting, then, that when R. David Nelson, Darren Sarisky, and Justin Stratis arranged a festschrift for him, it should take the title Theological Theology: Essays in Honor of John Webster. But it’s not only the title that matches Webster’s programmatic judgment about the nature of theology–the whole of the work itself exhibits theological sensibility that Webster has cultivated over the years.  The volume really is a treasure-trove of theological theology precisely because its contributors are theologians of the highest caliber who, by and large, have managed to avoid the faddish nature of so much contemporary reflection.

And really, the line-up is quite impressive, including top shelf theologians across a variety of disciplines, theological traditions, and methodologies. Luminaries include: Robert Jenson, Stanley Hauerwas, Kevin Vanhoozer, Matthew Levering, Katherine Sonderegger, Bruce McCormack, and many more.

With over twenty essays and a biographical chapter on Webster himself, the book is impossible to review if we were to do a thorough engagement with each piece included. Instead, I’ll simply note a few of the essays I enjoyed most.

First, I’ve never had the pleasure of reading any of Ivor Davidson’s work previously, but his essay on “divine sufficiency” exhibits an elegance and judiciousness that makes me want to go dig through the archives for more. Davidson reflects on the reality that the theologians context is primarily in the presence of the all-sufficient God. Due to the perfection of the divine life, the Triune God is not only sufficient in and of himself, but is sufficient for us, making us sufficient for the theological task as we find ourself caught up in his sufficiency in the great things of the gospel.

Katherine Sonderegger has a tight little essay on the sinlessness of Christ (which was engaged profitably here), well worth the time. In it she engages the tradition broadly, ranging from Aquinas’ rather nosebleed conception, to modern “fallen” humanity interpretations we find in Karl Barth and Edward Irving, to liberation interpretations.

If you want a good primer/example on the “theological interpretation of Scripture”, in his chapter, Kevin Vanhoozer presents a lively engagement with the Acts 19. Through it, he presents a vision for a non-reductionistic, multi-faceted approach to the interpretation of Scripture which takes its unique ontology, cosmology, and teleological end into account in such a way that begins to responsibly bridge the gap between systematic theology and biblical studies.

A fantastically provocative (yet unfortunately brief) piece by Francis Watson challenges the notion that there even is such a thing as historical criticism. In brief, one of our age’s most renowned biblical interpreters takes the notion of “historical criticism” to task by exposing its history and the ideological and rhetorical function it plays within the academy, beyond its presentation as an interpretive best practice. I’ll likely return to this piece at greater length in a future post.

Francesca Murphy delivers an erudite and insightful entry on the way Aquinas’ appropriation and modification of Aristotle informs the shape and content of his section on the life of Christ in the Summa. In many ways, Murphy demonstrates the surprisingly modern shape of Aquinas’ life of Christ, especially the attention Aquinas pays to its historical structure, contrary to what we might expect in a scholastic treatment.

Again, I can’t begin to do justice to the variety of essays in the volume except to say that this is a valuable addition to any theological library–especially those of seminaries, since it’s quite pricey until the paperback comes out. More importantly, it is a fitting tribute to a theologian of Webster’s caliber.

Soli Deo Gloria

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March 21, 2016

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Mere Fidelity: The Last Supper and the Last Week of Jesus

Mere FidelityThis week on Mere Fidelity, Alastair, Matt, and I tackle the subject of the Lord’s Supper. We try to set it in the context of the last week of Jesus, while moving around to the various Gospels and the canon of Scripture as a whole. This one–I think–had some particularly appropriate insights as we enter Holy Week heading towards Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. We hope you are as edified as we were.

Feel free to share.

Soli Deo Gloria

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March 20, 2016

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The Fickle Crowd Can’t Stop the Resurrection

donkeyWhen Jesus entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, it was to the acclaim of the crowds. “Hosanna! Hosanna!” they cried. It must have been an inspiring sight to see for the disciples. “These people get it”, they must have thought. Now, finally, Jesus was getting the right recognition that he deserved. He is the coming King and his people have recognized it.

But that was Sunday. And as we all know, the crowds were screaming for his blood on Friday. How could they turn on him like that? How could it all go to hell so fast? Were they really that fickle? Can they really have changed their minds about him that quickly?

The answer is, “yes”, “no”, and “kinda.” I mean, to be fair, Jesus gets pretty aggressive in the Temple and the courts the next few days in his preaching, teaching, and condemnation of the religious practices of Israel at the time. So there’s some understandable shift in popular consciousness that can be accounted for.

But even with that, you begin to see that it’s not so much a matter of people being simply fickle, or changing their mind about Jesus, but rather coming to understand they hadn’t understood him in the first place.

Many had a Messiah box and had slid Jesus into that, without really checking the fit. They were excited that the liberation, salvation, the good life they had desired for so long was coming because Jesus was bringing it. But then they saw, they heard, they understood–he’s up to something else–he had a different vision. And so they changed their minds about Jesus precisely because they wouldn’t change their minds about the kind of kingdom that really mattered to them.

When they saw what Jesus was really about, they decided it was not in their rational, self-interest to identify with this sort of Messiahship. And so, they handed him over to be crucified by the Gentiles.

All this is fairly standard Palm Sunday sermon material, but as I was reflecting on it this morning, I began to think of our current social situation in the church. It’s easy for those of who care about the health of the Church to get discouraged about the how much the popular imagination of church-goers or self-identified Christians seems match worldly, distorted, fun-house visions of the kingdom, politics, and the good life.

Christians who chant Jesus’ name on Sunday seem to hand Jesus over to be crucified in a million different ways all throughout the week.

But the reality is, for 2,000 years the crowds have been chanting “Hosanna!” one day, and calling for Jesus’ crucifixion just a few days later. But Easter came all those years ago, despite the infidelity of the crowd.

Take heart this, then, this Palm Sunday. No matter the temporary woes of the Church today, the fickleness of the crowds, or the narrowness of their vision, the humble King who came riding on a donkey is even now seated at on the throne in glory, ruling the cosmos, salvation securely in hand. There is always hope, always resurrection life at work in the Church just around the corner.

Soli Deo Gloria

 

 

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March 16, 2016

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atonement, book review

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The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ by Fleming Rutledge

crucifixion rutledgeWhy the cross? Why this particular, bloody, grotesque means of execution? Why was this the necessary mode of the Savior’s redemption of the human race? Why not a life, leading into old age and peaceful death leading into resurrection? Why the seemingly Godforsaken horror of it all? This is the motivating question at the heart of Fleming Rutledge’s masterful tome The Crucifixion: It’s Meaning and Significance. After over twenty years study, research, and meditation, Rutledge has delivered a stunning piece of theological and pastoral reflection on the cross of Christ.

I originally intended to work through it for my Lenten readings every morning (being far too addicted and Protestant to give anything up for Lent), and found myself running far ahead of my intended, daily page-count. It’s really a beautiful piece of theology.

Aimed at reinvigorating the dying tradition of “Good Friday” preaching of the Church, Rutledge sets herself the task of examining the cross of Christ in its various biblical, theological, historical, and social dimensions. In other words, while she engages at a fairly academic level at points, she’s not so much concerned with the academy, but with the pulpit—which is why the book is rich with illustrations and reflective sections interacting not only with historical and biblical theology, but with literature, poetry, and newspaper headlines. Essentially, it’s a work aimed at pastor-theologians.

In what follows, I’ll simply highlight what I take to be some of the significant features (both positive and negative) of the work and hope that gives you something of a feel for the whole.

Sin and sins

One of Rutledge’s chief concerns is to get her audience to reckon with the reality of sin. Coming out of the Episcopal mainline, this is unsurprising given the theological trajectory much of the church has taken over the last forty years or so. Rutledge is not dour, or morbid, but after years of preaching, teaching, advocating for justice (especially on social and racial fronts), she is not naïve about the pervasive wickedness and corruption of both human nature and human cultures. As one of the blurbs put it, she wants us to “get real” with ourselves, open our eyes and truly look at the world as it is, and reckon with our dire need for redemption. Her work is a bracing antidote to any last vestiges of cheap sentimentalism in our doctrine of humanity that would blind us to our need for the kind of salvation only a bloody cross can bring.

Connected to this, Rutledge doesn’t simply want us to recognize personal culpability and “sins”, but rather the Power of Sin. This is partially due to her heavy leaning on the “Apocalyptic” school associated with J.L Martyn, De Boer, and the Union School. For Rutledge, we need rescue from the Powers of Sin, Law (used by Sin), and Death. We are not only culpable, but captives, sold and bound under the dark dominion of evil that overwhelms us and keeps us oppressed in sin.

Deliverance AND Substitution

It is this sense that gives shape to Rutledge’s main argument, which I take to be the resituating of the “substitution” motif within an Apocalyptic understanding of the Christus Victor motif. Because she takes both sins and Sin seriously, she wants to take both of those master motifs and develop them as well.

When it comes to substitution, Rutledge does a fantastic job slowly, carefully, and piercingly drawing our attention to the problem of injustice in the world. Whether to apartheid in South Africa, the struggle for racial equality in the Civil Rights movement, child abuse scandals in the Catholic church, to the millions of petty, untold sins in our own lives, she forces us to deal with both the biblical and the theological need for satisfaction, for an atoning sacrifice, for a judgment that says no to a culture of impunity, to cheap grace, or the sort of “forgiveness” that makes a mockery of the victims of violence throughout history. What’s more, she does it in such a way that is appealing, not so much to theological conservatives, but to those with more progressive and liberal sensitivities. You might say that as someone who has taken the social gospel seriously, Rutledge knows that you need a more classic theology to undergird it.

But, of course, we need not just sacrifice but redemption. The Exodus is a good model here. In the Exodus, the Israelites received both atonement in the slaughter of the lambs at the Passover, but also redemption from the social, political, and yes, spiritual, powers of Pharaoh and the gods of Egypt. Rutledge forcefully argues that the cross of Christ (and his resurrection) were at the heart of a liberation, a deliverance from the powers of Sin, the Law (as used by sin), Death, and the Devil. In him, we have a liberating “Lord”, who transfers us from the kingdom of darkness to the Kingdom of the Son, who frees us for his glorious service.

And these two halves point to the broader concept of righteousness and justification she embraces. Following much 20th Century scholarship, for Rutledge, God’s righteousness is his saving justice that is more than forensic, but also transformative and liberative. She translates “justification” as “rectification”—God’s justification of the ungodly, then, is not merely their forensic vindication, but their total deliverance from the Powers and their “setting right.”

This “rectification”, though, that comes by way of the cross and resurrection of Christ is not merely individualistic in nature. In this regard, she joins the choir of many other recent voices in proclaiming a “cosmic” salvation, in which God sets the whole world to rights through the Son in his cross, bringing about a New Creation, while the rectification of individual comes within that broader schema. Indeed, over and over again, Rutledge emphasizes the “cosmology” implied in Paul’s theology (because this is a heavily Pauline work), in regards to both the aim and the characters involved.

Multiple Motifs

Within those two broader motifs, Rutledge does a good job at trying to give voice to the broader range of New Testament motifs surrounding the death of Christ. Sacrifice, justification, ransom and redemption, Apocalyptic war, and the descent into Hell. In many ways, this is one of the chief strengths of the work. I would say, though, in comparing it to Jeremy Treat’s similar project The Crucified King, Rutledge’s treatment could have benefited from a more synthetic, redemptive-historically organized account.

While she is no Marcionite (she makes fantastic use of the Old Testament, connecting it to the New), there is something of an atomism, typical of much of the critical scholarship she draws on, at work in the treatment of the themes that could be integrated to greater effect. That seems to be something of a side-effect of her Apocalypticism which makes less use of unifying, covenantal themes, and places a greater emphasis on the disjunctive, in-breaking work of God. Again, though, overall, she’s got a very sensitive eye for the diversity of the New Testament witness to Christ’s work. There’s nothing reductionistic about it. And this, I think is probably because she’s not exclusively “Apocalyptic” in her orientation, but has a strong regard for certain traditional, Western exponents such as Anselm, Calvin, and others.  Still, I would probably add Treat’s work as a complementary one, in this regard.

The Problem of Theodicy

Given her concern with the necessity of the cross, justice, and sin, it’s no surprise that the question of theodicy is a running theme throughout the work. Indeed, much like the great theologian of “holy-love” P.T. Forsyth, Rutledge connects the cross with the issue of the “Justification of God.” There is much to commend in this regard. I will say, I had my qualms about this thread in her work, though, as it drinks quite deeply from the Dostoyevskian/Hart-style anti-theodicy. There seem to be some equivocations at work with respect to thinking about evil as “purposed” by God, or “part of God’s purposes” because of a failure to distinguish different senses of the will of God, the decree, and so forth.

Again, though, she does tap the breaks on the cheaper, hasty work of theodicy that we see all too often from the pulpit and the counselor’s office. So there is much benefit in the section.

Defending Substitution

One of the major sub-themes of Rutledge’s work is defending the substitutionary motif both against critics and misguided supporters. I have to say, her work here is simultaneously some of my favorite and least favorite segments. Connected to the themes of justice and God’s rejection of a culture of impunity, Rutledge has excellent discussions of the pastoral use of the doctrine of the wrath of God. She does fantastic work defending the different, mutually supporting elements of substitution and representation in Christ’s work. Also commendable is her repeated, careful emphasis on the perfectly and beautifully Trinitarian character of the Son’s cross-work. And I especially appreciated her exposition of Karl Barth’s contribution to the subject and the way his work can help us think more carefully about the notion of God’s agency in the cross, guarding against some of the more ham-handed expositions we’ve all heard.

That said, there were moments I thought she gave too much ground to the critics of “cruder” expositions of “penal substitution.” While there’s plenty right about those criticisms, I think there are not as many as Rutledge credits, or they don’t have quite the force she accords them. Also, her tendency to beat on the Post-Reformation Orthodoxy and their schematizing, propositionalizing, depersonalizing, etc. ways, grew a bit tiresome, but that’s probably just some of the Post-Barthian influence.

Overall, for those of us in more Reformed, Evangelical circles, it’s a very helpful exercise reading Rutledge’s defense of substitution within a church context that in many ways has left it by the wayside long ago.

Indeed, this could probably said about many of her discussions. Yes, there are tell-tale marks of the liberal tradition she’s engaged with that I just won’t agree with. For instance, Rutledge will follow Riceour on the nature of the Adam narrative (no historical Adam), and gesture towards either annihilationism or universalism in her discussion, all the while giving us a discussion of both radical evil and the realism of hell that’s still quite useful in pastoral conversations and preaching about the issues for those rejecting some of her premises. This is particularly relevant for more conservative readers since many of the theological tendencies Rutledge is speaking to are still with us and more widespread than simply the mainline.

Conclusion

Instead of wrapping up with my words, I figured I’d give you a taste of Rutledge’s own work drawn from her concluding summary:

The power of God to make right what has been wrong is what we see, by faith, in the resurrection of Jesus Christ on the third day. Unless God is the one who raises the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist, there cannot be serious talk of forgiveness for the worst of the worst—the mass murderers, torturers, and serial killings—or even the least of the worst—the quotidian offenses against our common humanity that cause marriages to fail, friendships to end, enterprises to collapse, and silent misery to be the common lot of millions. “All for sin could not atone; thou must save, and thou alone.” This is what is happening on Golgotha.

All the manifold biblical images with their richness, complexity, and depth come together as one to say this: the righteousness of God is revealed in the cross of Christ. The “precious blood” of the Son of God is perfect sacrifice for sin; the ransom is paid to deliver the captives; the gates of hell are stormed; the Red Sea is crossed and the enemy drowned; God’s judgment has been executed upon Sin; the disobedience of Adam is recapitulated in the obedience of Christ; a new creation is coming into being; those who put their trust in Christ are incorporated into his life; the kingdoms of “the present age” are passing away and the promised kingdom of God is manifest not in triumphalist crusades, but in the cruciform witness of the church. From within “Adam’s” (our) human flesh, the incarnate Son fought with and was victorious over Satan—on our behalf and in our place. Only this power, this transcendent victory won by the Son of God, is capable of reorienting the kosmos to its rightful Creator. This is what the righteousness of God has achieved through the cross and resurrection, is now accomplishing by the power of the Spirit, and will complete in the day of Jesus Christ. (610-611)

That’ll preach.

Soli Deo Gloria

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March 3, 2016

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The Uncontrolling Love of God, Part Deux (Causality, “Reformed Theology”, etc)

Uncontrolling loveI’ve already given something of a full review of Thomas Oord’s book The Uncontrolling Love of God over at Christianity Today. Oord has very charitably responded to it and I’ve responded briefly in the comments. I wanted to follow that up, though, because there were a number of important points that I couldn’t make given reasonable space and genre constraints at CT. I want to be clear, though, that this is not about ill-will or picking on Oord’s work. He seems like a fine man and who can fault his pastoral instinct? But the work of theology is often carried out through critical engagement–indeed, Oord himself is quite sharp in his critique of many theological traditions in order to forward his significant revision of the doctrine of God. It seems necessary and appropriate, then, to engage it in this fashion. In the rest of this, I’ll assume knowledge of my prior review and the thesis of the book. Also, this will be far more of a ramble.

Experience and Compatibilism

First, a small point. Oord makes great hay about the intuitive nature of our possession of a certain form of libertarian or “genuine” free will against determinism. He notes that free will is key to our general self-understanding as responsible agents able to choose right and wrong, and so forth (55-56, 60). We experience ourselves as free and make many judgments in the moral life on that basis, so why doubt it on the basis of faulty brain science and so forth?

All of this is fine as far as it goes. Actually, much of it is quite helpful. What I’d simply like to point out is that the arguments in these sections might work well as a defense of genuine freedom against physicalist conceptions of determinism, where biology, physics, and so forth, are in the metaphysical driver’s seat. That said, they’re not much in the way of evidence against a theologically compatibilistic understanding of genuine freedom. On that view, God’s foreordination of all that passes isn’t dependent on physicalist determinants.

Actually, if you really think through a compatibilist view of freedom, our experience of reality would feel pretty much the same. God’s sovereignty isn’t thought to be experienced as some outside compelling force, “pushing on us”, so to speak. So, the “powerful” argument from experience or the phenomenology of freedom doesn’t tell that strongly against theological determinism.

Mistaking Physics and Metaphysics

On that note, I’d also like to register a complaint about Oord’s fairly constant quick movement from physics to metaphysics. Though he affirms the distinction between the two disciplines, things can get slippery in the midst of the argument. For instance, after reviewing a number of lines of evidence for randomness and chance in the physical universe from chaos theory, etc. as a way of refuting the idea that it’s a closed, causal system (34-41), he says, “If dominant views in science and philosophy are correct in their affirmation of randomness and chance, theologians such as Augustine, Calvin, and Sproul are wrong. God does not control all things; randomness is real.”

At that point, I just scratch my head and think, “You do realize that none of these classical theologians ever based their theological determinism on whether the universe was a closed, causal (in the physicalist sense) system, right?” That may have been the case with certain philosophers or theologians in the Modern period when Enlightenment rationalism began to creep in, but read any classic Augustinian theologian of the Medieval, Reformation, Post-Reformation Scholastic period, and down into the contemporary period, and you’ll see that most are quick to deny any kind of physicalist necessity or Stoic fate. Providence has never been something you can put under a microscope or measure using computer models.

Oord’s description of most of these theologians, then, is guilty of a category mistake, treating God’s activity as if it were one cause among others, on par with natural causes, only bigger, and invisible. But on their view, God’s causality is not just one cause among the others. God’s causality is in its own category, non-competitive with ours. God is the logically and metaphysically prior, creating, maintaining, and sustaining cause of all of our activity. In other words, God isn’t on the same, metaphysical playing field with us. Many of those theologians would affirm randomness as a physicalist level, all the while denying it with respect to God’s decree. Failing to appreciate the way that the Creator/creature distinction informs the relationship between God’s activity and natural and human causality is like imagining Shakespeare’s pen-strokes and Hamlet’s sword-thrusts are occurring on the same plane of activity.

Bavinck, Turretin, and the “Reformed” Omnicausal View

Which brings me to a point about Oord’s explanation of the “Reformed” view of providence. He labels it “omnicausality” and says this is the view where: “Although humans may seem to act freely and other creaturely causes exist in the universe, in some unfathomable way, God totally causes every event” (84). Now, admittedly, the term “omnicausality” has been used, but Oord’s description is simply not the traditional Reformed view. Most classic Reformed theologians operate with a notion of primary and secondary causality, or concursus, which means that while God is a necessary sustaining cause of all acts, he is not the only necessary cause for all things. He does not, then, “totally cause” everything in every way. That would be to think of monocausality or sola causa. God exercises his causality through secondary causes like human free choices, natural laws, and so forth.

While this might not be as apparent in the less technical, but pastoral Heidelberg Catechism he cites, it’s explicitly articulated in the equally (if not more) prominent Westminster Confession 3.1:

God, from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass: yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures; nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established.

One may disagree with this, but not by caricaturing the Reformed view, for it is abundantly clear that the freedom, contingency, and secondary causes are all affirmed. This is not a crass, blatantly illogical “omnicausality” as Oord paints it. Again, you may find it illogical in the end, but I think you at least have to do a lot more work than Oord does to show it.

What’s more surprising about this is that he cites both Herman Bavinck and Francis Turretin as representatives of the “omnicausal” view (84) where other causes and humans only “seem to act freely” and have efficacy, but God really “totally causes” everything. In point of fact, they both clearly operate with careful distinctions of primary and secondary causality, permission, and complex, scholastic distinctions in the will of God and so forth. Bavinck, for one, goes on for pages distinguishing providence from the sort of physicalist, divine determinism taught by some of his liberal, theological contemporaries. Heck, even on the couple of pages Oord does cite, Bavinck is in the process of explicitly affirming secondary causes as “true and essential causes”, not “inanimate automata”, but with their own “nature, vitality, spontaneity, manner of working, and law of their own” (RD, Vol. 2, 614). In which case he’s saying something almost exactly the opposite of what Oord is citing him for. Passages like this could be multiplied ad nauseum in Bavinck, and Turretin does so as well, explicitly delineating the various senses in which contingency in creation and the human will could and should be rightly affirmed.

When Oord somewhat dismissively writes off the Reformed view as “making little if any sense” (85), then,  despite the citations, it appears he made little if any effort to make sense of it.

God of the Gaps 2.0: Just as “Mysterious”, but in a New, Pocket-Size

Continuing in this vein, when Oord does get around to discussing the primary and secondary causality distinction advocates by Barth and Aquinas (his representatives), he eventually writes it off as an elaborate appeal to mystery because, in the end, everybody who deploys it can’t give an adequate account of how God is at work in these causes. In response, I’d note two points of defense: First, some actually have recently tried to give an account of sorts along the communicative dimension. Second, trying to pin down the causal joint has been a problem for most of the theological tradition throughout the whole of church history. Again, at times, I think an appeal to mystery makes sense.

(Oh, and on this point, I’d like to clarify something about my comments on mystery. In his response, Oord has charged that I seem quite certain without an appeal to mystery on a number of things like the Trinity, miracles, etc. and so I am being inconsistent in my criticism of his allergy to mystery. But I have to say I think that largely misses my point. I believe that God has revealed those various truths I reference in Scripture, so I am confident in them–though not ruling out mystery around them. That said, I also think that God has actually revealed that his ways are mysterious in respect to the issue of providence and suffering. In that regard, I think Oord’s allergy to mystery is also a failure to pay attention to revelation. I see not inconsistency there, since both my confidence on some issues and my appeal to mystery on this issue is grounded in revelation. I think that Oord’s drive for one explanation to rule them all, causes him to reject the variety of answers, including some mystery, that the Scriptures give on this issue. )

But even coming back to causality, more positively, I’d point out that I think Oord’s own account of divine agency is just as fuzzy as that of the primary and secondary causality distinction. For instance, in his section on nature miracles, instances of God’s active power in the world, Oord speaks of God being present and introducing creative possibilities, new forms of creation, and so forth, in places where there are instances of quantum randomness, and so forth. Now that might seem promising and even “scientific” at first, but try as I might, searching high and low throughout the text, I couldn’t locate a clear explanation of how God does this introducing or what that even means. Those gestures I did find could easily be co-opted by advocates of a primary-secondary causality distinction. This is no advance over the earlier apophatic distinctions of Barth or Aquinas.

In other words, Oord’s account is just as “mysterious” as any primary and secondary causality account. Indeed, the only advantage it has is of reducing God’s agency so as to squish it into the randomness gaps that interrupt or coexist with the law-like regularities that God dare not cross or interrupt on pain of being labeled an “interventionist” in his own creation. I have to admit, this feels like something of a God of the gaps 2.0. Only here, if you find some cracks in the interstitial spaces of the universe and you just might find some room for God to work.

And while we’re on the subject of miracles, I’ll be honest, while a couple of his attempts to reconcile the big nature miracles with his non-interventionist God were helpful, others strain credulity as exegesis. For instance, take Moses leading the Israelites through the Red Sea. That seems like a fairly big interruption of the natural order of things. An intervention, if you will. Oord will have none that, though. Instead, what he speculates that what possibly happened is that God—because he’s omnipresent and knows the natural flows of wind, waves, and so forth—knew that the sea was going to be parted at that time. Then, he, in a still small voice, whispered for Moses to lead the Israelites to the Red Sea at just the right time when it was naturally splitting open (210). God’s mighty act of deliverance of the Nation of Israel through the waters of Chaos through to the dry ground freedom is reduced to instance of God’s great timing and some quirky wind patterns.

Now, I have no doubt that sometimes God’s providence looks like a still small whisper at the right time, but that is simply not how Exodus 14-15 depict the event, both in prose and song (go ahead and read the account here).

Adventurous Non-Assurance

Finally, I briefly touched on this, but I really want to expand on the eschatological point. Oord touts his view as an “adventure model of providence” that “fits our world”, but this isn’t an assuring doctrine of providence. The God who is unable to fully and finally put his foot down and stop evil, stop rape, stop war, stop tyranny, and all the horrors of this world, cannot fulfill the visions of John the Revelator who promises that God will wipe every tear from our eyes after he has made war on the Beasts who devour the saints. The God who has trouble healing cancer sometimes because our genomes are uncooperative, cannot usher in the New Jerusalem into a world that is as corrupt, non-responsive, and recalcitrant as ours. Biblical eschatology hangs or falls on the God who is the Lord of history, not one of its subjects. A God with enough metaphysical flex to intervene.

To put it another way, Pannenberg criticized certain forms of voluntary kenoticism as threatening our ultimate faith in God alone. What goes for voluntary kenoticism applies a fortiori to involuntary kenoticism. Because the limited God Oord proposes is not the only being or reality on which our hopes must lean. Instead, we have to hope in “God + the right set of cooperative circumstances for him to coordinate.”

Some Better Options

I could keep going, but I’ll just wrap-up by offering a couple of alternatives. First, on the problem of evil, suffering, and providence, I’d commend J. Todd Billings’ book Rejoicing in Lament. Written in the midst of his struggle with cancer, the work is at once more pastoral as well biblically-saturated and theologically-careful. He also has a very helpful discussion of a Reformed view of the doctrine of permission, which, contrary to some reports is compatible with Reformed theology. (Incidentally, I’m always nonplussed when I read criticisms of Reformed doctrines as immediately crumbling in the face of life. It’s as if they’re under the impression no Calvinist in history has ever suffered and been comforted by their doctrines, or even adopted them precisely because of suffering). In any case, I reviewed it here, but I can’t praise it enough.

Second, on the general issues of providence, the doctrine of God, and so forth, Kevin Vanhoozer’s big book Remythologizing Theology is very generous in his engagement with varieties of open theism, panentheism, and process theisms (and now in a cheaper paperback that is totally worth it). Actually, Vanhoozer critiqued related, nearly-identical versions of this sort of involuntary, relational, kenotic theism in the book some five years ago. What’s more, he engages the issue of the nature of love extensively, which I have not done, in a way that addresses some of Oord’s presuppositions and proposals.

I’ll wrap up by saying, even though I really do sympathize with Oord’s instincts and pastoral care, I remain unconvinced that this is a helpful way forward in the doctrine of providence.

Soli Deo Gloria