Life of the Word of God (8)

Psalm 119:57–64.

The Lord is my portion; I have promised to keep your words.
I beg your favour with my whole heart: be gracious to me according to your promise!
I consider my ways; and turn my feet to your ordinances.
I hasten and do not hesitate to keep your commands.
Though the wicked’s ropes ensnare me, your law I do not forget. 
At midnight I rise to praise you for the judgments of your righteousness.
I am the companion of all who fear you and so keep your precepts.
Of your steadfast love, O Lord, the earth is full; teach me your statutes!

The beauty of this stanza, I think, is the way it breaks down obedience into its component parts. We see that obedience involves:

1. Thought: I consider my ways; and turn my feet to your ordinances. Considering leads to correction. Obedience is not, you see, blind and thoughtless. It requires attention, not only to the command of God, but also to myself, my own ways, and what it means for me to be obedient.
2. Action: I hasten and do not hesitate to keep your commands. Obedience involves action, when the time for action has come. It cannot forever reflect and consider. Consideration must come to a moment of decision and commitment. I must act, and not hesitate.
3. Resolve: Though the wicked’s ropes ensnare me, your law I do not forget. Obedience confronts obstacles, inevitably. In this case, the snares of the wicked. But it is the mark of obedience to meet obstacles with resolution, with perseverance and enduring commitment.
4. Faith: The final three lines of the stanza show us that this obedience is anchored in and sustained by faith in the One who commands, the God whose love fills the earth, and whose justice is worthy of rising at midnight in praise. “The obedience of faith”, as Paul put it (Rom 1:5; 16:26), is not just the obedience that accompanies faith: it is the obedience that is empowered by and held up by faith.

 

Bonhoeffer on doubting God’s grace

Another gem from Bonhoeffer’s Spiritual Care:

The person who is puzzled about faith means to take God seriously when he doubts that God is gracious toward him. But God is not taken seriously when one’s own lostness is taken more seriously than the grace of God, which is able to take away and emerge victorious over that lost condition. It is also not taking God seriously when we elevate our concept of God as divine wrath above God’s essence, namely the reality of God’s grace. God is gracious above and beyond all our sins. Those who want to take God seriously should look upon Christ. In Christ God’s wrath is revealed as nowhere else, yet at the same time God’s grace is revealed as nowhere else. If you think you are under God’s wrath, then cleave to Christ! “For his anger is but for a moment, and his favour is for a lifetime” (Ps 30:5).

Photo by supakhit73.

A Holy-Spirit-of-the-gaps theology of ministry

I was recently sent a copy of an online interview with a currently famous and influential American church leader, in which he spoke about how he prepares sermons. The main bombshell was his comment that he generally prepares for about an hour. Now, this man is a very gifted preacher and I have no particular qualms with what he said. Some of his comments, though, reminded me of something I have heard elsewhere: a sense that less preparation somehow allows more room for the Holy Spirit to move.

We can very easily slip into a kind of Holy-Spirit-of-the-gaps theology of ministry, where what we really believe is that it is either me who works or the Spirit who works. What the Spirit does is to fill in the gaps, to make up for what I am not doing. This, I think, is a bad error.

It is certainly true that there are moments in which the Spirit “steps in”, so to speak. “Do not worry beforehand about what you are to say; but say whatever is given you to say at that time, for it is not you who speak, but the Holy Spirit” (Mark 13:11). But to generalise from this provision to a whole theology of preaching and ministry is, I think, a mistake. For it is not the case that the relationship of God’s agency and ours is only ever one of competition. On the contrary, God’s normal way of acting in our lives is through our fully-engaged agency. “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Phil 2:13). The Holy Spirit does not only work when I get out of the way: he works through me, through my thought, study, ideas, effort, perseverance, and so on. What we must not do is to confuse the promise that the Spirit will help us in our weakness (cf. Rom 8:26) with the idea that the Spirit only works when we are not meaningfully active. As Spurgeon said, “If we can study and do not, if we can have a studious ministry and will not, we have no right to call in a divine agent to make up the deficits of our idleness or eccentricity… God forbid that we should offer to the Lord that which costs us nothing”. (Spurgeon’s entire lecture on “The Faculty of Impromptu Speech” is well worth reading on this topic.)

The Living One

“When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he placed his right hand on me, saying, ‘Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and of Hades.” (Revelation 1:17–18)

A grammatical argument for the existence of God

German moral philosopher Robert Spaemann, whose work I am reading this year, believes in God. Interestingly, he does so partly because he believes in grammar. He makes this argument for the existence of God based on the future perfect tense:

The future perfect tense (e.g. “next wednesday, I will have been writing this blog post today”) implies the idea that the present is always true, in some sense. “If we are here today, then tomorrow we will have been here”. Moreover, that will still be true even in the distant future, when all traces of memory and effect have disappeared, and even the earth has vanished. Even then, this moment will still have been. But, argues Spaemann, this only makes sense if there is some absolute consciousness in which everything that happens is taken up; and this, as Aquinas would have concluded, everyone calls God. The fact that what has happened will always have happened requires that there be God. The idea of truth presupposes God. (“Rationality and Faith in God”, Communio 32, 2005, pp.635–36)

Hmmm.

Robert Spaemann on God

What does a person believe if he believes in God? He believes in an Unconditional, a Being that has its ground in itself, because it is Meaning itself, it is that which suffices unto itself. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity perfects the concept of God insofar as it thinks of God as almighty love. And, indeed, essentially as Love in himself, so that he has no need of the world and of human beings in order to realize his essence as love. In the latter case, that is, God would not be God; he would not already be in himself the whole, but instead God alone would be less than God and the world together, as if the mirror image of the candle were to add some brightness to the light of the candle itself. The world would then, moreover, not be God’s free creation. Instead, it would be necessary to God in order to supply a deficiency in him. God is Love in himself, which means: He reflect himself in himself, he has an adequate Image of himself in himself, a living interlocutor, the Logos. And the coming-together-as-one in love with the Logos, the Son, occurs in a gift, which is once again God himself, the Holy Pneuma, or as we say in the West, the Holy Spirit. The mystery of Christianity, once revealed, proves to be the fulfillment of that which reason can glimpse only darkly. (“Rationality and faith in God”, Communio 32, 2005, 627)

Nothing like a healthy dose of classical theism to finish the week!

Ben Myers on Barth’s Doctrine of God

Ben Myers has a fascinating article entitled “Election, Trinity, and the History of Jesus”, in the new book Trinitarian Theology After Barth (ed. Habets and Tolliday, Princeton TMS, 2011). In it, he argues that Rowan Williams strikingly anticipated Bruce McCormack’s argument that Barth’s trinitarian thought in IV/1 is very different, and very much superior, to his thought in I/1. Interesting. Ben argues that central to Barth “second” doctrine of the Trinity is the idea that the history of Jesus is constitutive of the being of God, in that, from eternity, God elects to be the God of Jesus Christ, in the full sense of that idea: the God who opens up a space within himself to bring reconciliation. Ben shows that this is different from both any classical Logos Asarkos doctrine of God, as well as from Moltmann’s understanding of the crucified God, which still presupposes a “God” who subsequently gets crucified. Ben writes:

For Barth… God’s triunity is always already a cruciform triunity. God elects the death of Jesus as the shape of God’s own life. God ‘is not untrue to himself but true to himself in this condescension’ (IV/1, 185). The crucified Christ is the perfect–the beautiful and terrible–realization of what it means for God to be God. The wound of the cross is a real wound; but this wound is already at the heart of that eternal communion, that love which is always in motion between the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit. (p.132)

I found Ben’s article clear and compelling. I’m worried about one thing, though, which is drawn from David Bentley Hart’s criticism of Moltmann and Jenson: if the wound of the cross is eternally at the heart of God, how can the implication be avoided that evil is eternally necessary for God’s being?

Webster on God’s attributes

I have been preparing talks on God’s attributes, or as Barth has it, perfections (yay Barth). I’m doing three talks: on God’s immutability or constancy, His holiness, and His goodness. I found John Webster’s Holiness moderately interesting on this front—I confess to being less excited about Webster’s work than others I know. But some of his comments about theological method, like this one, are very helpful:

Theological talk of the divine attributes is thus not primarily a matter of categorization but of confession; the attributes of God are conceptual glosses on God’s name, indicators of God’s identity. It was for this reason that the classical dogmatic tradition insisted that when theology enumerates a range of different attributes of God, it is not denoting different realities within the divine being; rather, each of the attributes designates the totality of the being of God under some particular aspect. That is to say, language about the different divine attributes must not compromise the principle which Augustine enunciated in saying that God is ‘simple beyond all comparison’. God’s simplicity means that God is beyond composition; different divine attributes do not, therefore, denote separate parts of God which, when assembled, together make up the divine identity. Rather, the enumeration of divine attributes is simply a designation of God’s simple essence. The attributes are not accidentia, accidental qualities in God by virtue of which God can be said to be, for example, holy or wise, for God is essentially holy and wise. ‘In God,’ as Augustine puts it, ‘to be is the same as… to be wise.’ Thus the range of divine attributes indicates nothing other than the divine essence in its purity and simplicity.