Material, not just formal, unity

These are bewildering times for Christians seeking to live faithfully to Christ, under his authority.  I think they are times which require us to rethink our approach to a number of things, not least how we understand Christian unity.

The approach to Christian unity which has characterised evangelicalism rests, I think, particularly on a formal principle: the authority of Scripture.  We can unite with people who share our commitment to the authority of Holy Scripture.  There is a lot of sense in this.  Whilst we can have a conversation with all sorts of people, there is no likelihood of agreement where there is no common commitment to a way of knowing.  Disagreements between people who are equally committed to Scripture at least have some hope of resolution, and an agreed way (in principle) of reaching that resolution: we read and study and debate Scripture together.  Take away that formal agreement - either by taking away the commitment to Scripture, or by adding to it another authority - and material agreement becomes much more difficult, perhaps even impossible.  At the very least, we are having a different sort of conversation if we're talking to someone who isn't happy to follow us into the Bible for answers, and who isn't pre-committed to accepting and submitting to those answers if they're satisfied that they really are biblical.

And so the authority of Scripture is a sensible rallying point.  But it has never been the case that commitment to this formal principle alone is sufficient for Christian unity.  There have always been heretics who claim to hold to biblical authority, and even make an impressive show of deference to the Bible.  Leaving actual heresy aside, even amongst mutually acknowledged Christians there are limits to how much practical unity we can have purely on this formal basis.  And so we qualify our basis for unity: we have unity with those who take Scripture as their authority (the formal principle) within certain bounds (and here we are introducing material beliefs).  Normally for evangelicals that means there is a minimalist statement of faith which we look to as a standard; and so long as people subscribe our minimum standard,  and remain committed to the formal principle, we allow latitude on a whole bunch of issues.

And here's where it gets tricky.  Our minimum standards don't tend to address the hot-button issues of the day, like racism or human sexuality.  The latter in particular is becoming a significant dividing line amongst professing Christians, and it isn't addressed in our evangelical standards.  So what do we do?  Typically we fall back here on the formal principle: you have to believe what the Bible says about sexuality.  We turn it from a material issue (about theological anthropology, say) into a formal issue (about the authority of the Bible).  But this raises two issues.  Firstly, what do we do when people on the other side of the debate claim to be submitting to the authority of Scripture?  We can debate them, in that case, on biblical grounds, and hope to persuade them of our reading of Scripture, but in the meantime is this an 'agree to disagree' situation?  I don't see how it can be.  Second, if this is in fact a fracture point, do we understand why it is so significant?  Why must we divide over this disagreement about the interpretation of Scripture, but not over so many other things which we have (for the sake of unity) designated 'secondary issues', outside the scope of our doctrinal statements?

Here is a difficult thing: we don't want to divide over issues like baptism (who, when, how), or church government, or our understanding of eschatology, but we will divide over sexuality.  Doesn't it sound like we're just cherry picking issues?  Might it not seem as if this is driven basically by homophobia rather than doctrine?  Why, after all, pick this issue as the line?  It will not do to claim that sexual ethics is more important or central - more important than baptism, "which now saves you"?  (Elevating anthropology and ethics above the church and soteriology is not a great way to go, I think).  I am also not convinced it will do to claim that Scripture speaks more clearly on this issue - I think it is also perfectly clear on baptism!

It seems to me that the way forward is a renewed confessionalism, which will show that our formal principle is not merely formal, but carries material content.  That is to say, we need to be able to show that Christian doctrine does not proceed in two stages - first sorting out the source of doctrine in Scripture and then moving on to what the Bible actually says.  Rather, we need to show that our commitment to Scripture and its authority is part of a whole view of God's being and activity; that it already carries with it material content; that the nature of Scripture and its place within the dispensation of grace entails a particular way of reading.  We need a thicker, more substantial doctrine of Scripture, along with a broader confession of Christian truth that goes beyond the bare minimum.  Nobody wants to build higher fences unnecessarily, but I'm not sure we have any other option if we want to maintain Christian orthodoxy in our churches.

Witnesses

The prophets and apostles are witnesses in two different but complementary ways.  They are first of all natural witnesses.  That is to say quite simply that they were there, they encountered something of significance - namely, God's revelation.  This is the sense of 1 John 1, or 2 Peter 1.  Something happened, someone was there, and by virtue of their proximity to that event and that person, they became witnesses.

The fact that the prophets and apostles are natural witnesses has both apologetic and theological significance.  The apologetic significance is already recognised in Scripture - we did not make it up, we were there, we saw.  Appeal is sometimes made to the fact that in this sense the prophets and apostles stand in the midst of a much wider group of natural witnesses, that they are not bearing witness to something which happened hidden away, but to something which was at least in part a very public occurrence.  I can see no reason at all, beyond prejudice, why this status of the prophets and apostles as natural witnesses should not earn them a hearing at least.

The theological significance of these natural witnesses is even greater.  Their existence as witnesses in this way demonstrates that when we are talking about God's revelation we are talking about something - ultimately, someone! - historical, contingent.  An event which took place, a life which was lived, in proximity to other lives, a reality which became a factor in our space and time.  Revelation is a matter of history, of recollection and testimony, rather than philosophy or speculation.

The second way in which the prophets and apostles are witnesses is as legal or commissioned witnesses.  That is the sense in the prophetic call narratives of Isaiah and Jeremiah, or most clearly in the language of the great commission.  'You will be my witnesses' means much more than just 'you are those who have seen and heard', although it depends on that.  As those who are natural witnesses, they are claimed and sent to go and bear witness.  Their relation to what they have seen and heard is not that of neural observers; rather, they are governed and ruled by that to which they bear witness.  To be concrete, the Lord Jesus has become their Lord, in this particular way and for this particular service, their natural witness being taken into the service of his own testimony to his Person and work.

This legal witness is of huge theological significance.  To be sure, the prophets and apostles purely as natural witnesses warrant a hearing and a degree of human credence, but they do not warrant divine confidence, faith.  That can only rest in God's Word itself - in fact, in the very reality to which the prophets and apostles bear witness.  It is as Christ's own commissioned witnesses, empowered by his Spirit, that we have to listen as to Christ himself, because they are his ambassadors.  He continues to accompany and empower their witness as it is laid down in Holy Scripture; having commissioned his witnesses, he does not abandon them or their testimony.  Our doctrine of Scripture is, or should be, built on this foundation

Finally it is worth noting that all of us who are Christians are called to be witnesses - of necessity, secondary witnesses, who weren't there, didn't see or hear, and who are therefore bound to the prophets and apostles as primary witnesses.  Because of their witness, we can bear witness, that we have heard them and have found that in their witness we have heard the Word of God.

Reader Response: Church Dogmatics ch III (4)

In support of his sixth point about Scripture, Barth offers some brief notes on two key Biblical passages, 2 Timothy 3:14-17 and 2 Peter 1:19-21.  Since these passages feature prominently in much discussion of the doctrine of Scripture, it seems worth pausing to see what Barth does with them.  Note that he is not here offering a full exposition, but a reading of these two important Scriptures in support of his theological conclusions.

First, Barth points out that both passages have to do primarily with the Old Testament, "but according to the fundamental meaning of the two authors in whom they are found, the expressions can and ought and must be applied to all the witnesses of revelation and therefore to the New Testament witness as well." (504) It is helpful to have this stated up front; I think many treatments of these verses (especially the 2 Timothy passage) make this move surreptitiously, or perhaps just presuppose it.  But there is actually an important theological move being made when we class the NT witness alongside the OT - we are claiming that they are both the same thing, united in being a witness to Christ.  It is because both these passages speak of the OT in terms of its witness to Christ that it is possible to make this move here.

When it comes to 2 Timothy 3:14-17, it is obviously striking to Barth that the text has both a backward and a forward reference.  Timothy is pointed back to his childhood acquaintance with the Scriptures and reminded of their formative influence on him.  But then he is encouraged to look ahead, to what the Scriptures are able to do in terms of completing his formation and giving him all he needs to serve in the church.  "Scripture was able and it will be able..." (504) - that corresponds to Barth's motif of recollection and expectation.  Timothy is to continue in the Scriptures, in recollection of what they have shown themselves to be for him, and in expectation that they will show this again.

In the centre of this recollection and expectation stands the crucial sentence: all Scripture is inspired (or breathed out) by God.  Barth understands this to mean that "all, that is the whole of Scripture is - literally: 'of the Spirit of God,', i.e., given and filled and ruled by the Spirit of God, and actively outbreathing and spreading abroad and making known the Spirit of God." (504)  Or, in other words, "...the Spirit of God is before and above and in Scripture..." (504).  This is quite obviously a broader understanding of what is implied by the word usually translated 'inspired'.  On the one hand, Barth does not want to get pulled into a debate about the nature of inspiration - he sees the statement as "an underlining and delimiting of the inaccessible mystery of the free grace in which the Spirit is present and active before and above and in the Bible", and therefore not as something that can be parsed as a precise doctrine.  On the other hand, he is unwilling to restrict this description of the relationship between God and Scripture to a particular point, as if it had only to do with the production of the texts that we have -  he sees it as describing also (and the word 'also' is important here) the ongoing relationship of the Spirit to the Bible.  It is on the basis of this ongoing work that Timothy can approach the Bible with expectation that it will again be to him what it has been in the past.

The treatment of 2 Peter 1:19-21 is much briefer, and essentially makes the same points: we are called to continue to be attentive to the prophetic witness because of its relationship to the Holy Spirit.  To my mind, Barth does not engage as much as I would like him to with the fact that these verses clearly do lay great stress on the Spirit's role in the production of Scripture, which seems to push back a little on his emphasis in his notes on 2 Timothy 3.  The other fundamental point made here is about the exposition of Scripture: we must "allow it to expound itself, or... to control and determine our exposition" (505).  This is because it comes from the Spirit and not men, and therefore is not open to our manipulation - and here, perhaps, we see the link again to Barth's emphasis on the ongoing presence of the Spirit in Holy Scripture.

"The decisive centre to which the two passages point is in both instances indicated by a reference to the Holy Spirit, and indeed in such a way that He is described as the real author of what is stated or written in Scripture." (505)  Barth wants to be clear that this does not mean that the human authors were not real authors - "there can be no question of ignoring their auctoritas and therefore their humanity" - but nevertheless "they speak in the place and under the commission of Him who sent them" (505).  For Barth, the theopneustia, the inspiration, of these authors consists precisely in this commission.  In their human freedom, they think and speak and write in obedience to their commission, and therefore under the lordship of God.  They function, then, as true witnesses.  This is not to be restricted to their writing, but describes their being in so far as they are commissioned witnesses to revelation.  "In what they have written they exist visibly and audibly before us in all their humanity, chosen and called as witnesses of revelation, claimed by God and obedient to God, true men, speaking in the name of the true God, because they have heard His voice as we cannot hear it, as we can hear it only through their voices." (505-6)

It is in recollection that in their voices the voice of God has been heard, and in expectation that this will be the case again, that the people of God are called to be the people of Holy Scripture.

Reader Response: Church Dogmatics ch III (3)

I mentioned that Barth initially makes six points as he begins to navigate the meaning of 'Scripture as the Word of God'.  The first we looked at in detail, but can perhaps summarise it as follows:

1. We are directed to the canon of writings which has been recognised by the church.  However, the canon does not derive its authority from the church, but from the object to which it bears witness (God's revelation); for this reason, whilst we are to hear and respect the church in its description of the canon, ultimately we can only regard this description as having limited and relative authority.  The real and absolute authority belongs to God himself. (473-481)

Briefly, the rest of the list is as follows:

2. When we talk about Scripture, we are talking about the Old and New Testaments, which find their unity in the object of their witness (namely, God's revelation). (481-485)  This section deals in the language of expectation and recollection which is so important to Barth's doctrine of Scripture, on which more below.  The main point here, though, is about the unity of the Scriptures, which corresponds to "the unity and holiness of God in his revelation" (482), a unity which can only be perceived when one is grasped by revelation, which is to say, by Jesus Christ.  Barth is therefore suspicious of any and all attempts to present a schematic or system to display this unity.  It will be seen in encounter with Christ or not at all.

3. The Bible itself establishes the doctrine of Holy Scripture by reference to the prophetic and apostolic office held by the original witnesses. (485-492). Scripture bears a general and implicit witness to its own authority by virtue of the fact that here and here only do we find witness to God's revelation (this is not quite a circular argument; it requires the self-witness of God by the Holy Spirit).  But it also explicitly speaks of its own authority by reference to "certain specific men" who "stand within the Bible" (486).  Passively, these men saw and heard God's revelation; actively they were commissioned to proclaim it (490).  In them - by virtue of their office, and not any human quality they possess - the circle of revelation is already opened up to include humanity.  I found this really helpful; I think in my tradition the prophets and apostles are played down in importance, with the Bible as a book played up instead.  But actually it is the prophets and apostles in their relation to revelation who make the Bible, literally.

4. Because the Bible includes within its sphere the prophets and apostles, there can be no getting at the content of revelation except in the form of their witness. (492-495). It is no use trying to extract some sort of kernel of pure revelation from the husk of the prophetic and apostolic witness.  Nor can we somehow directly access the history of revelation that stands behind this witness.  Because revelation is contingent and genuinely historical, not some general principle, we can only receive it in the historical form of this first witness, in their words.

5. These original witnesses, because of their office and role, are distinctly set apart from the rest of the church, and their witness is really Holy Scripture because it stands over against the whole church as an authoritative foundation. (495-502). It is of course true that Scripture is a set of human documents, with all the historical, cultural, and personal contingency which that implies.  In this sense, the Bible stands in continuity with all other human documents.  But if we read it only in this way, we miss its essential character as witness.  By virtue of this witness, Scripture "too can and must - not as though it were Jesus Christ, but in the same serious sense as Jesus Christ - be called the Word of God: the Word of God in the word of man, if we are going to put it accurately." (500)  Barth explicitly develops the Chalcedonian parallel here: the Bible, without ceasing to be wholly a human book, is also wholly a divine book, by virtue of the revelation to which it bears witness.  This means there can be no question of a series of sources of revelation, or of the possibility of placing the Bible alongside other church documents or preaching.  It stands over against and above all of them, as genuine holy.  Incidentally, Barth has things to say to those who want to oppose a 'living faith' in the church to a 'dead letter' in the Bible: in fact, the church only lives and thrives when it is wholly under the Word of God in Scripture.  "Death usually reigns in the church" when this is absent (502).

6. Because the authority of Holy Scripture is ultimately the authority of God's own revelation to which Scripture bears witness, we cannot claim any control over this authority, but can only live as those who have heard and expect to hear again God's Word in these texts. (502-506)  For Barth, this derives from the structure of Scripture itself, which is characterised by expectation and recollection (see 2 above).  It also derives from the freedom of God in revelation, and the nature of the texts as witness.  They can only point to revelation, testify to it; they cannot in and of themselves bring it about that revelation occurs in the present.  Therefore the whole of theology, and indeed the whole preaching and worship of the church, "circles around" the event of God's revelation, unable of itself to make this revelation present but always living in memory and expectation of it.  This, perhaps, is the life of faith.

That last point is alarming to many evangelicals, who want Barth to give a straight answer.  They hold up the Bible and ask: well, is it the Word of God or not?  All of this talk about revelation coming or not, circling around - how does that not just muddy the waters, diminish our confidence in Scripture?

I hope that the rest of the context here shows that Barth absolutely does want to pin us to the Bible, to secure for Scripture the place of unique authority, the one place where God is to be sought and found.  But I think Barth's return question to the anxious evangelical might be: why do you need to pin this down in this way?  Do you not trust God - the faithful God to whom that Bible in your hand bears witness?  Why do you need to be in possession of God's Word, rather than always receiving it?

I think there are lots of things going on here which cause the different perspectives - it would be good, for example, to work in the doctrine of illumination here and the role of the Spirit, and see if we couldn't show that in slightly different conceptual ways both Barth and the conservative evangelical want to safeguard the same things.  But I think there is a lot in Barth that we could helpfully learn from here.

Reader Response: Church Dogmatics ch III (2)

The next subsection carries the title 'Scripture as the Word of God', and opens with a helpful summary of where we've got to so far: "If what we hear in Scripture is witness, a human expression of God's revelation, then from what we have already said, what we hear in the witness itself is more than witness, what we hear in the human expression is more than a human expression.  What we hear is revelation, and therefore the very Word of God." (473)  How is this the case?  Well, put a pin in that question.  First of all, Barth wants to clarify and expand our understanding of Scripture as a witness, and he initially does so in a list of (I think) 6 points.  We'll only get to the first one today, but hopefully the others will move along a bit faster!

Point 1 clarifies that when we are talking about Holy Scripture, we are talking about the canon of books acknowledged in the church.  It is not for us as private individuals to go around making judgements about the scope and extent of the canon; rather, we receive and acknowledge the canon that our spiritual forebears have recognised.  Barth is at pains to point out, however, that this certainly does not mean that the church historically had the right to decide the canon.  The church cannot "give the Canon to itself." (473). It can only recognise that which is given it by God, and therefore all its decisions on this matter, whilst important, are nonetheless merely human and therefore to some extent provisional decisions.  We do well to listen to the judgement of the church in this matter, but we don't believe the Scripture because of the church's judgement.  "When we adopt the Canon of the Church, we do not say that the Church itself, but that the revelation which underlies and controls the Church, attests these witnesses and not others as the witnesses of revelation and therefore as canonical for the Church." (474)

For those unfamiliar with the Church Dogmatics, just to note that if you ever read it you'll find some in a normal typeface, and some sections in a much smaller font.  The main line of thought is presented in the larger and more accessible text, but the detailed argument, exegesis, and citations in the smaller text.  The small text parts of this section are largely historical.  Barth notes that "the establishment of the Canon has a long and complicated history." (473)  Certainly it was controversial in the early centuries, and became so again at the Reformation.  Against the Roman view that the authority of Scripture derived from the church - Barth notes that some Roman apologists even argued that Aesop's Fables would be Scripture if the church so declared (475) - the Reformers saw the role of the church as like the Samaritan woman of John 5, who merely directed those in the town to Jesus; the church directs people to the canon, but does not make the canon.  However, at the same time, the Reformers almost unanimously wanted to remove the Apocrypha from the canon, and some wanted to reopen the question further: Luther had serious doubts about various New Testament books (Hebrews, James, Jude, Revelation), and he was far from alone (476-7).

Barth notes helpfully that even where the question of the canon is not regarded as open, there can be - and perhaps almost always is - a functional 'canon within the canon', where greater stress is laid on one part of the Scriptures than another.  Perhaps the New Testament is privileged over the Old, or the Gospels over the Epistles (think of the treatment of the Gospel Book in liturgical churches).  It is useful to repeatedly ask "whether we do not neglect essential parts of the witness of revelation to the detriment of our knowledge of the Word of God" (478) even when the whole canon is formally acknowledged.

Nevertheless, for Barth the question of the canon must remain at least in principle open.  He considers that the attempts of Protestant Orthodoxy in the 17th Century to definitely close the question end up circling around to the old Roman answer: that the church has the authority to decide the canon.  For Barth this will not do.  Whilst there may be no question of the church - and certainly no question of any individual - actually changing the canon, to preserve the truth that its authority derives not from human pronouncements but from the Word of God to which it bears witness, the question must not be in principle closed.

What is Barth trying to do here, and why this disturbing conclusion?  I think here, as throughout volume I of the Church Dogmatics, Barth is trying to walk a narrow path of Reformed theology, with a deep and dangerous ditch on either side: to the one side, Roman Catholicism; to the other, Neo-Protestantism, what we might call liberal theology.  To say that the church defines the canon will lead us off to Rome; ultimate authority then shifts from the Word of God in Scripture to the church as an institution.  For Barth the great peril here is that the church ceases to listen to God, and becomes merely engaged in a conversation with itself.  On the other hand, the individual may decide the functional canon for themselves, or perhaps a group of individuals or congregations will do so.  This is Neo-Protestantism in the sense that it makes human beings the judge of what must be received as God's Word.  Whilst the one ditch is institutional, and the other feels very free and individualistic, they are basically the same error.  In both cases, authority derives from somewhere other than God.  That is why Barth has to leave the question open: to demonstrate that the only person who can close the question is God, just as the only person who can cause the witness of Scripture to decisively rule in the church and in the individual life is God himself.

Reader Response: Church Dogmatics ch III (1)

Just a reminder that we're in Church Dogmatics I/2, and numbers in brackets are page numbers.

The heading of the first section of the chapter is 'Scripture as a witness to divine revelation'.  For some, alarm bells will already be ringing - is this not what we've heard about Barth?  That he pries apart Scripture and revelation, such that the Bible is merely a witness to revelation rather than revelation itself?

Well, try to quiet the alarm bells briefly, and let's consider what it is that he means by this.  Essentially, it is a question of the appropriate hermeneutic to bring to Holy Scripture.

Firstly, let's put this section in context.  Barth reminds us that the purpose of theology is to ask whether the proclamation of the church corresponds to God's revelation, "or, concretely, the question of the agreement of this proclamation with Holy Scripture as the Word of God." (457)  The preceding sections have looked at God's revelation as the presupposition of both Scripture and proclamation - its objectivity in Jesus Christ, its subjective opening by the Holy Spirit - but this has already been drawn from the Scriptures.  That is to say, for Barth there is no getting behind Scripture to an idea of revelation that does not itself derive from Scripture.  The Bible is established as a sign that points beyond itself to "a superior authority confronting the proclamation of the Church" - and that authority is the Word of God.  The Bible "has attested to us the lordship of the triune God in the incarnate Word by the Holy Spirit."

So when Barth says that the Bible is a witness to divine revelation, he means first of all that the existence of the Bible points to the God who stands over and above the preaching of the church.  It is on this basis that theology can, and indeed must, continually ask the central question of church proclamation: does your preaching conform to Scripture?  Does it attest, therefore, the lordship of the triune God?

But there is an "undoubted limitation" introduced here in Barth's view of Scripture: "we distinguish the Bible as such from revelation.  A witness is not absolutely identical with that to which it witnesses." (463)  Now here we see a classic Barthian move, a piece of dialectical theology.  Because within a few lines of writing that we distinguish the Bible as such from revelation, he is able to write that "in this limitation the Bible is not distinguished from revelation.  It is simply revelation as it comes to us..."  What is going on here?  Essentially Barth is calling us to pay attention to the way in which the Bible is revelation to us.  It is a human word, multiple human words in fact, which attest to something beyond themselves.  The Bible is not revelation as it came once to the prophets and apostles; but as the word and witness of those prophets and apostles, the Bible is nonetheless revelation to us who were not there.

At this point I can sense the impatience. Why all this 'yes, and no'? Why not just be plain and unequivocal in declaring that the Bible is God's word?

I think there are a number of things going on here, although only one is really developed in this context. Briefly, I think Barth is seeking to safeguard the doctrine of Scripture against what we might call the Quranic error.  For Muslims, the Quran is eternal, timeless - and this causes some theological difficulty in describing its relationship to God.  In Christian theology, it is not the Bible but the Lord Jesus who is the eternal Word of God, and he is this because and as he is himself fully God.  So in a sense Barth's position is about the uniqueness of Christ.

A second point, again more my reflection than anything Barth explicitly discusses here, is that redemptive and revelatory history really matters for our view of God.  Barth does not want revelation so bound up in the pages of Scripture that it is no longer about what God has done and said in the history of the covenant, and especially in the Lord Jesus Christ.

But the main point he actually develops here is, as noted above, a hermeneutical one.  Because Scripture is a human word, Barth insists, it must be read as a human word, in all its historical and cultural specificity.  And yet, because it is witness, it must be read not as an enclosed artifact, but for the sake of the subject matter to which it bears witness.  Here he clearly has in view much of the critical, academic reading of Scripture, which wants to ask all sorts of questions about the prophet Isaiah, or the apostle Paul, and their times and circumstances, and even the nature of their faith - but does not want to ask or to be answered about the one thing Isaiah and Paul et al actually want to talk about, which is God in Christ.  Barth is making the point that because the Bible as a human word is a word of witness to God, we are not genuinely reading it as a human word unless we allow it to tell us about God.  Paying attention to the Bible means paying attention to the God of whom the Bible speaks.

For Barth this is not some special biblical hermeneutic.  It is just hermeneutics in general.  To listen to someone is to listen to what they are saying, and to allow what they are saying to take control.  We do not respect anyone if we receive what they are saying as material to think about their character or whatever but don't allow the subject of which they are speaking to have any impact upon us.  It is perhaps characteristic of us sinners that we typically hear "as though we know already, and can partly tell ourselves what we are to hear.  Our supposed listening is in fact a strange mixture of hearing and our own speaking, and in accordance with the usual rule it is most likely that our own speaking will be the really decisive event." (470).  It is only if we really pay attention to the subject that we can even partly escape this sinful hermeneutic, and that is equally true of any human word.

The unique thing that is brought by the biblical witness to this hermeneutic is not, then, that it requires a special way of reading.  Rather it is that it demands the attentive reading which is actually due to every human word - and unlike every other human word, it does not only demand or request our attention.  "God's revelation in the human word of Holy Scripture not only wants but can make itself said and heard." (471). In the Bible, human witnesses show themselves to have been utterly overcome by the subject matter; they do not in fact speak of themselves or their circumstances, but they only bear witness to God in Christ.  And in our reading of the Bible, this same 'gripping' can occur, when God himself causes us to see and hear his revelation in the words of the prophets and apostles.

This account will be developed further as we go.  But already I hope we are seeing, whatever we think of Barth's account in detail, something of the powerful expectation of encounter with God in the Scriptures.  That for me is the most exciting thing about his explication of this doctrine, and it has certainly shaped by own understanding and practice in beneficial ways.

Thoughts? Questions?

Reader Response: Church Dogmatics ch III (intro)

Some years back (checks number of years, slightly shocked to find that it's 6 years) I ran a couple of series of posts engaging in a bit more detail than I normally do with some big books.  I looked at Bonhoeffer's Ethics, and chapter VII of Barth's Church Dogmatics, the chapter which looks particularly at the doctrine of election.  I called the series 'Reader Response' to try to highlight that, although I would be attempting to explain what the 'big book' was actually saying, I was also going to include some of my own response to it, and thoughts about how it might inform church, theology, and Christian life today.

I'm going to try to resurrect that concept, albeit with significantly less time for reading at the moment than I had back in the day.  So whereas the previous series was a weekly effort, this one will be more irregular, and might sometimes end up looking at quite small chunks in each post.  We'll see how we go.

I'm going to be reading Church Dogmatics chapter III, which you'd find in volume I/2.  It is Barth's main treatment of the doctrine of Scripture.  Now, if conservative evangelicals know anything about Barth, it is that he is dangerously weak, if not actually heretical, on Scripture and its authority.  I think one of the things that gives this impression is the sheer size of Barth's treatment.  This chapter occupies nearly 300 pages, and is situated in an even larger discussion of the nature of revelation which takes up the whole of volumes I/1 and I/2.  There is a suspicion, I think, that anybody who needs to take this many pages to explain their view of Scripture is probably making things deliberately complex.  After all, doesn't it just boil down to the question of whether it's the Word of God or not?

Interestingly, for Barth that simply isn't the question, or even a question.  He takes it for granted that the dogmatic theologian, standing within and for the church, stands on the acknowledged reality of the word of God in Scripture.  To ask the apologetic question - is the Bible the word of God? - is to remove oneself from this position, if only hypothetically and for the purposes of discussion.  That isn't what Barth thinks he is doing.  For many contemporary evangelicals, the apologetic question is acute, and it is therefore hard to imagine a doctrine of Scripture that does not really engage with it.  But perhaps Barth can push us here to see things we wouldn't otherwise see.

For Barth the question is more 'how is the Bible the word of God?', boiling down into the practical question of what it looks like to live under the authority of the word of God in Scripture.  I hope that over the next few weeks we'll be able to see whether Barth's answers have anything to teach us.

The Bible preserves the church

The church is desperately fragile and vulnerable.  It could be destroyed at any time.  Karl Barth, dwelling on this theme in Church Dogmatics IV/2, reflects on the multiple threats to the church: from the outside, the threat of outright persecution and also the threat of just being ignored; from the inside, the threat of secularisation (where the church becomes alienated from its own basis in Christ) and sacralisation (where the church assimilates to the methods of the world and seeks to glorify itself).  Given it's vulnerability to the world and to its own sin, how is it that the church has not in fact disappeared?

The big answer that Barth gives is that the church is upheld.  But how is it upheld?  Barth's first answer is that the Bible has continued to speak within the church.  The Scriptures "have continually become a living voice and word, and have had and exercised power as such."  (673)  The Bible has, of course, often been submerged beneath church traditions, "or proclaimed only in liturgical sing-song", or contradicted by philosophy and ideology.  "But they have always been the same Scriptures and the community has never been able to discard them."  (674)

So what is it, then, that has upheld the church?  "A mere book then?"  No, says Barth.  The Bible is "a chorus of very different and independent but harmonious voices."  It is "an organism which in its many and varied texts is full of vitality within the community."  The Bible is "something which can speak and make itself heard in spite of all its maltreatment at the hands of the half-blind and arbitrary and officious."

Barth expects the Bible to speak afresh, again and again, recalling the church to itself.  As the chorus of voices which harmoniously witnesses to Christ, the Bible is able to call the church again and again to him.  This cannot be prevented by the church, even when with its traditions and speculations it wants to keep the Bible under control.  Neither, actually, can Christians manufacture this "by their own Bible-lectures and Bible-study or even by the Scripture principle".  Rather, "it is something that Scripture achieves of itself" - and for Barth, that points to the fact that Scripture is the sword of the Spirit (Eph 6:17), the word by which the Spirit works in the church and the world.

This does not mean, of course, that it is a matter of indifference whether churches maintain a reverence for Scripture, or whether they hold the Scripture principle, or whether they strive to keep the Bible central in their common life.  It is critical that the church do this.  But where it is done, the church is nevertheless dependent on the Bible as the Spirit wields that Bible, not its attitude to the Bible or its arrangements concerning the Bible.  "The preservation of the community takes place as it is upheld by this prophetic and apostolic word, or as it is led back as a hearing community to this word."

"And so we can only say to Christians who are troubled about the preservation of the community or the maintaining of its cause that they should discard all general and philosophico-historical considerations... and hear, and hear again, and continually hear this word, being confronted both as individual and united hearers by the fact that the community certainly cannot uphold itself, but that all the same it is fact upheld, being placed in the communion of saints as this continually takes place in the hearing of this word."  (674-5)

Hear, and hear again, and continually hear this word.

Locating the doctrine of Scripture

A lot of evangelical and Reformed confessions of faith place the article on the doctrine of Scripture near the start of their documents.  For example, the doctrinal basis of the FIEC puts it second, after the doctrine of God; the Westminster Confession puts it first.  Presumably the idea here is to be up front about your authority for what is going to follow (although if that is the case, the Westminster arrangement is more logical), and perhaps there is an implicit recognition that the confession can be revised in the light of Scripture - something which is made explicit in, for example, the Scots Confession of 1560 when the authors ask "that if any man will note in this our Confession any article or sentence repugning to God’s holy word, that it would please him of his gentleness, and for Christian charity’s sake, to admonish us of the same in writ; and We of our honour and fidelity do promise unto him satisfaction from the mouth of God (that is, from his holy Scriptures), or else reformation of that which he shall prove to be amiss."  (But note where the full article on Holy Scripture is placed in this confession: right down at 19, after the doctrine of the church!)

A couple of conversations recently have got me thinking again about what difference this makes, and where it would be best to place the article on Scripture.

I do think that the place this article holds in your confession is likely to both reflect and shape your doctrine more generally.  Clearly this could be the case if the article were relegated to an unimportant position; that may well mean that the recognition of the authority of Holy Scripture within the church is on the wane.  But I think putting it first (or worse, second) also has effects.

If you put the doctrine of Scripture first, I think there is a danger of an almost Quran-like doctrine: this book was revealed from heaven, and in it we see a timeless revelation of God.  This tends to be wedded, in contemporary evangelicalism, with the desire to answer one of the big questions of modern thought: where can we find a foundation for thought?  Scripture here is asserted as the foundation, behind which nothing can be found.  I worry about this on two counts.  Firstly, I don't think it does justice to what Scripture says about itself, or its function as a witness to Christ and not merely a compendium of true facts about God and the world.  Second, I think marrying your doctrine of Scripture to this sort of modernist foundationalism produces a brittle faith, which doesn't stand up well to questioning.  And third, I think it risks leaving us philosophically adrift, expressing our doctrine in a philosophical mode which has been largely left behind by the world at large (and not without reason).

If you put the doctrine of Scripture second, after the doctrine of God, I think the big danger is that Scripture becomes the functional mediator between God and man - something which Scripture itself does not claim to be.  The effect is to minimise the ongoing work of Christ and the Spirit.

I think you need to put the doctrine of Scripture after the article on the incarnation: to make clear that in fact the reason we believe in the authority of Scripture is not primarily because it is a book from heaven but because the living Word of God has stepped down into our history in the person of Jesus Christ.  Scripture derives its authority from the historicity of the gospel, and not vice versa.  This is true even though, from our perspective, we may only come to know the historicity of the gospel from Holy Scripture.  We believe that God speaks to us because he has spoken to us in his Son.  It is Jesus, not Scripture, which is the fundamental communication of God to man.

Then again, it's probably best to delay further, and place the doctrine of Scripture after the article on the Holy Spirit.  That way we make it clear that the Scriptural witness to Christ is itself breathed out by God, that its authority is his authority.  A strong filioque (that is to say, an understanding of the relationship between Word and Spirit which binds them closely together) will underline the fact that through Scripture God speaks by his Spirit, and the word he speaks is the Word he spoke, namely Christ Jesus.

Anyway, just a thought for anyone writing future confessions of faith.  If only there were such people out there.

He has spoken

I'm re-reading a bit of John Owen at the moment (On the true nature of a gospel church - volume XVI of his Works, for those following along at home).  Owen is very definitely of his era: a scholastic theologian, meaning that he pushes for precision in every point and is very careful in his analysis; in particular, he milks the Scriptures for every drop of truth he can see in them, and works hard to bring those truths into relation with one another.  It sometimes makes for tedious reading (okay, okay, John - you've made your point), but I basically like it.  There is something in the scholastic instinct which to my mind honours God, by seeking the coherence of his words and works.  "Fear of scholasticism is the mark of a false prophet", as Barth remarks in CD I/1.

Behind Owen's rigour there lies the conviction that God has spoken, and still speaks through the Scriptures; and therefore whatever question is raised in the church it is to the Scriptures that we ought to turn.

I think we've lost that conviction a little bit, or perhaps a lot depending on what circles you move in.  My guess is that it happened like this, although I freely admit I've made no effort to check whether history maps on to this analysis.

In the olden days (that is to say, the 16th and 17th centuries), the three convictions that (1) God has something to say on all points of Christian doctrine, that (2) it is in principle possible with the aid of the Spirit to hear what he says from Scripture, and that (3) it is our absolute duty to listen to, trust, and obey God in every detail of what he says led to the long confessional documents that characterise that era.  These confessions reflect a belief that God has something clear and certain to say about, for example, the extent of the atonement, the precise mode of church government, the proper administration of baptism (to whom, when and how), even the role of the civil magistrate and the limits of state power.  They are, as I mentioned long documents.

The failure to come to a consensus on many of these points in Protestantism, with the multiplication of church associations and the writing of ever more lengthy doctrinal statements, undermined over time the central convictions.  Of course no Protestant - no Christian! - could easily sell out point 3: we certainly have to hear and obey God in everything he says.  But convictions 1 and 2 begin to waver, or at least to function less vitally in the church: perhaps God has not spoken to every detail, perhaps it is not possible for us to reliably read off every detail of what he has said from Scripture.  Of course some theological positions were never committed to these assumptions - to be an episcopalian, for example, you have to assume that the church is given wide latitude to form its own church government, and that means assuming that God has not given direction on the matter (or at least, that he has not done so in Scripture).

Modern evangelicalism is characterised by, amongst other things, its desire to bring Christians who are committed to the Bible together.  This is often achieved by drawing a dividing line through theological issues, splitting them into primary and secondary.  The aim of this division was not, originally, to undermine the claim that God speaks into all sorts of doctrinal questions; the aim was to clarify which doctrines came so close to the heart of the gospel message that to distort or abandon them was to ruin the church's faith and witness.  Those doctrines are classified as primary.  Others, judged less close to the heart of the matter, were judged secondary.  We can talk and argue about them, but we shouldn't divide over them, at least not completely.  (Everyone accepts that practically it is difficult to run a church without agreeing on, for example, who are the proper subjects of baptism; but congregations which disagree on this could still co-operate in mission organisations and local outreach, for example).

This is helpful and commendable; nobody wants to go back to the divisiveness of early modern confessionalism, I hope.  But I suspect that over time it has undermined further our already wobbly convictions.  If we're working with these people, worshipping with these people, it becomes harder to think that their disagreement with us over 'secondary' issues is a matter of them not hearing properly what God says on the topics in question.  It is easier to say that God has not spoken, or at least that he does not speak clearly, on these subjects.  That gives us latitude to fudge them without any sense of disobedience on our part, or any apprehension that our good co-evangelical friends are disobedient.  But this naturally leads to the idea that these 'secondary issues' don't really matter: if they did, God would speak clearly on them.  So rather than work hard (and scholastically) to hear God, we shrug and let everyone go his own way on these things.

The fundamental problem here is that we have stopped listening to God.  That means, in practice, that we are doing what lies in us to prevent the Lord Jesus from governing his church.  (Thankfully, what lies in us is really not very much).  Out of fear of awkward chats, and a disinclination to work hard, think carefully, and be precise, we have done our best to shut out the voice of God.

But he has spoken, and because he has spoken he is speaking; and no topic is beyond the scope of his sovereign speech.  Might it not be better to try to hear and obey him?  If it leads to us having to acknowledge frankly that we think others, whilst we see them as in many ways faithful brothers and sisters, have failed to hear and obey - would that be the end of the world?  And might it not even be helpful if it exposes us to the same sort of critique from them?  Might we not together expect to hear God speak more clearly as we mutually rebuke and exhort each other?

I hope for a future with more scholasticism in this sense, more rigour, more fiery theological debate between people who acknowledge one another to belong to Christ's faithful.  I hope for a future in which God's word rules God's people.  I hope for a future in which the Lion's roar is heard clearly again.

Preaching everything

The FIEC recently published an article with an interesting look at which parts of the Bible we (meaning 'conservative' type evangelicals) typically preach - and which we typically avoid.  There is apparently not a lot of love for 1 and 2 Chronicles, or 2 and 3 John.  Jonah, on the other hand, attracts attention out of all proportion to his canonical importance.

So how do we decide what to preach, and when?  Karl Barth suggests that you can pursue three methods: you can follow a set lectionary, you can preach through whole biblical books, or you can just select passages as you go.  He doesn't recommend the latter, because it gives you - the preacher - too much control of the agenda.  Most evangelicals, of course, will go for the consecutive-through-books approach, but that raises the question: which books, and when?  It's still possible that the preacher rather than the Scripture is setting the agenda.  So what to do?

My guess is there's no perfect method.  Here's what I do.

1.  I maintain a spreadsheet which breaks down all our sermons by testament and genre (or sub-genre; it is useful to separate Paul's letters from others, for example).  That means I can tell you that in Cowley Church Community between January 2016 and August 2019 (for my spreadsheet extends into the future), we will have preached 32% of our standard sermons from the OT, and 55% from the NT.  (That leaves some others, to be explained below).  Fully 25% of our sermons have been from the gospel of Luke!  A glance at the spreadsheet helps me to see if we're preaching the balance of Scripture.

2.  The 'balance of Scripture', however, does not mean treating all books equally.  I think we have to take a theologically informed approach here, getting ourselves into that virtuous cycle of allowing our reading of Scripture to shape our theology and then allowing our theology to shape the way we approach Scripture.  So yes, the New Testament predominates.  I'm okay with that; I think it reflects the theology of revelation which is made explicit in, for example, Hebrews 1:1-2.

3.  Sharpening that up a bit, I think the understanding of revelation in the NT means that we should always have one of the four gospels on the go.  Jesus is the Word of God, to whom the OT points forward, to whom the NT points back.  The way we do it is to return regularly to our series preaching through Luke; when (if??) we finish Luke, I'd be keen to move on to another gospel.  (Incidentally, odd that the stats seem to show Mark as the least popular gospel for preaching; why on earth would that be?  Makes me want to preach it next.  Would take less time than Luke, anyway.)

4.  Having said that, it's useful to recognise that you, the preacher, like preaching some things more than others.  Perhaps you enjoy preaching an argument rather than a narrative, or vice versa.  Keeping an eye on the balance helps you not to fall into a pattern that just reflects your own preferences.  I suspect it also helps to keep preaching more interesting - preaching narrative as narrative and argument as argument, for example, makes for a much more varied approach; and that's before you even throw in the Psalms etc.

5.  At CCC, we also try to shape the preaching around seasonal celebrations; taking time in the Christmas season to preach about Christmas, taking a couple of weeks after Easter Sunday to reflect further on the resurrection.  That seasonal preaching makes up slightly less than 10% of year, and has the advantage of keeping us further focussed on the central things of the gospel.  We would also usually try to make some of our more 'standard' expository preaching fit the mood of the seasons; we're heading into Jeremiah at the start of Lent, for example.

6.  One problem with the setup of churches nowadays is that the preaching has to do quite a lot.  When I were a lad, everyone went to a 'bible study', which was in reality a biblical or theological lecture, every Wednesday night.  That was a place to do some catechesis.  Nowadays, most of the teaching has to happen on a Sunday if it's going to hit a decent proportion of the church.  So sometimes we feel the need to interrupt our expository preaching to preach some doctrine - still sticking very close to Scripture, but taking a more theological tack.  We did a series on sacraments recently.

7.  There are some issues with our approach.  A series tends to be broken up, with only 6-8 weeks or so given to each part.  That can make it easy to lose the thread of a big book (like Luke!) - but to be honest, patterns of attendance mean you have to regularly recap anyway.  We don't always go in for preaching through a book consecutively; we did I think five weeks in Leviticus, for example, getting an overview of the big themes; I think it was good, but obviously there is stuff you've missed.  I wonder, as well, whether we always help people to read the Bible for themselves, or whether we give the impression that you need to get it all cleared up for you by a professional.

I dare say it's not perfect, but overall that's my approach.

So, how do you do it?

Dropping Grudem

For pretty much as long as I've been a Christian, Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology has been the standard textbook of conservative evangelical theology.  I have often noted that sadly many people have not taken seriously Grudem's warnings that his book is intended to be introductory (I mean, it's subtitled An introduction to Biblical doctrine, which should be a clue) and have treated it as the final word.  I'm thankful that a wise pastor encouraged me early in my Christian life not to let my theology rest with Grudem but to press on to deeper things.  (That is not to say Grudem wasn't helpful to me - I'm grateful to those who gave me a copy.  It helped me especially to begin to think through positions on baptism, spiritual gifts, Scripture...  But I didn't end up resting with him.)

Anyway, this week Grudem has declared that the building of a border wall in the US is morally good, on the authority of the Bible.  Read the article.

My conclusion from this is that we ought to stop using Grudem's Systematic Theology, or at least demote it from its current position as go-to.

In case you're wondering, this is nothing to do with the politics of the article.  I'm not one of those people who thinks we should boycott people's works because they don't agree with us politically.  I don't even have a very strong opinion about the wall, to be honest.

My concern is for exegesis and theology.

Grudem's argument for the morality of the wall boils down to: the Bible often speaks positively about walls, so building walls is good.  This is of course backed up by a plethora of quotes from Scripture.  But that is all there is to it.

I really don't think this is how the Bible works.  For starters, Scripture does not intend to answer this question, and therefore to read it as if it contained a straightforward answer to a question which it doesn't raise is pretty rash.  It's a flat reading of Scripture, which doesn't seem to recognise that Old Testament references to the walls of Jerusalem can't be crated up, transported over the centuries into a wholly different culture, and then unpacked and used just as they are.

I also don't think it's how theology works.  If we wanted to apply Scripture to this question, we'd have to do more than pile up references to walls from the Bible.  Scripture bears witness to Christ.  That is what it is for: to show us the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.  And then of course that witness has implications for all sorts of areas of life and ethics.  But we would need to do the work.  In what way do those references to walls bear witness to Christ?  They do!  Surely the security of Jerusalem throughout the Old Testament, and the walls which are described as encircling the New Jerusalem in Revelation, are images of the eternal security which the people of God have in Christ.  Well then, we have a fair bit of work to do if we're going to work out what the ethical implications might be for nations in the modern world.

And here's the thing: when you go from this article and look back into Grudem's Systematic Theology, something which I've had cause to do recently, you realise that this is the method throughout.  We need a better textbook.

Don't mine the Bible

When I was a younger man, and learning how to read and teach the Bible, there were always particular warning signs posted around those sections which were classified as 'narrative'.  One had to be particularly careful when reading narrative, and especially when drawing doctrinal affirmations or practical applications from it.  Narrative was slippery, capable of multiple readings, uncomfortably open.  The common wisdom seemed to be: 'never make a doctrinal or practical point from narrative which is not found explicitly taught elsewhere in Scripture'.

"Like gold from a mine, so the truth of faith has to be extracted from Scripture by the exertion of all available mental powers."  Thus Herman Bavinck, with an image also utilised by Hodge and Warfield.  It is interesting to pick at some of the assumptions behind this metaphor.  One obvious one is that the purpose of Holy Scripture is to teach doctrine; the gold which Bavinck envisages being extracted from the mine of Scripture is a set of true propositions about God and man.  Then there is the idea that these truths have to be excavated.  The stuff of value is hidden in there.  The thing with a mine is that most of the stuff that comes up from it is just rock.

Now, I don't want to push these theologians on a particular metaphor; I do understand that one cannot in one image say everything that one would like to say on a particular subject.  But I do think that this notion of what the Bible is and how it works leads fairly directly to that practical approach to Bible reading which makes the story of Scripture very definitely secondary to the more straightforward 'teaching' sections of, for example, the Pauline epistles.  I think it's no coincidence that the NT epistles are privileged in many evangelical churches.  I think people who think that this is what the Bible is will obviously relegate the narrative sections - and let's be clear, that's most of the Bible - to the status of 'illustrative material', adding some colour to the real business of the doctrinal matter.

The way we typically use Scripture in our lives and in our churches backs this up.  Normally we have a fairly small chunk of Bible in front of us for our morning devotions, or read to us for exposition in the sermon.  And because this is our shot of Bible for the day or the week, we want fairly immediate pay-off: a take-away that we can meditate on or take action on during the long hours and days of secularity.  We want to know what the point is.  Now, when we read doctrinal or ethical statements from the NT, that seems straightforward.  But when we read narrative, we naturally start to try to boil it down: what am I mean to think, believe, do?  In other words, what propositional truth or practical instruction is hiding in this story?  What is the gold, and how do I mine it?

This has an effect on our theologising as well.  We construct a view of God based on the propositional statements we see made in parts of Scripture, and then explain the narrative (dare I say it, often explain it away) in light of these.

But what if the story is the point?

A simple reflection on the gospel should tell us that this is absolutely correct.  The gospel is a narrative.  And yet - wouldn't some evangelicals be fairly happy if the Gospels went missing from their Bibles, so long as they could still construct a doctrine of the atonement from Paul?

So, here's the plan: let's just read the story, in bigger chunks, with less attention to immediate application and more determination to just accept that this is the story.  And let's shape our thinking about God around the fact that he is the God who made this story.  When we make our systematic theologies - and please don't hear me as saying anything negative about this process! - let's make sure that our ideas and our vocabularies are shaped by Holy Scripture as the witness to what God has done - that is to say, by the story.

I suppose if I were to offer a different metaphor, I'd say: let's be in the Bible like we might be in a river, being carried in a particular direction, 'at the mercy' of the current.

It's more exciting than digging.

How to ignore the Bible

1.  Consider that there are people out there who interpret this passage differently; some of those people probably have advanced degrees, and may even have written books.  Bearing this in mind will have numerous beneficial effects.  Primarily, of course, you will be able to ignore what the Scripture says.  But you can do it without being forced to arrive at any particular conclusion - you can't be pinned down, and others will find it very hard to dispute your position.  Note that this doesn't involve nearly so much work as you might imagine.  There is no need to actually engage with any scholarship, or check whether the alternative interpretations being offered are more plausible.  Just knowing that there are people out there who read things differently enables you to effortlessly render the passage of Scripture in front of you innocuous.

2.  Consider that there is a background, a Sitz im Leben if you will, to every part of the Bible.  It is a truism accepted by all that Scripture was not written from, or addressed to, a vacuum.  But you can use this simple fact in two ingenious way to get around any part of Holy Writ which doesn't suit you or the current zeitgeist.  Firstly, you can note that we don't the details of the situations of the Biblical authors or the original recipients.  Surely this lacking information is essential to reading the Bible properly?  Without it, the meaning of the passage in question remains indeterminate, and once again, without having to advance any sort of argument or do any intellectual work, you have successfully neutered Scripture.  However, if you want to be a bit more creative, you can pursue a second route: that of constructing a more-or-less plausible background for the passage at hand, and then insisting that Scripture can only be read with your (admittedly imaginary) backdrop if it is to make sense.  With a little work, this sketchy background can make the Bible mean exactly the opposite of what it appears to mean at first reading.  In fact, the creative student of Holy Scripture can make it mean literally anything at all by this method.

3.  Consider that the Bible is a human as well as a divine book.  Again, this is accepted by all, at least in theory.  The personalities of the human authors, along with their assumptions about society, their limited horizons, and their basic ignorance, were not completely overwritten in the process by which God brought about the witness of Holy Scripture.  It is child's play to assign any objectionable aspects of the passage at hand to the limitations of the human author, leaving only the parts which are more acceptable to be ascribed to divine inspiration.

4.  Consider that there is a trajectory to the teaching of the Bible.  Making use of the theologically unobjectionable idea of progressive revelation, it is easy to argue that later parts of the Bible show a deeper understanding of God and his purposes than earlier parts.  All that is then necessary is to extend this upward line beyond the close of the Canon.  Surely one must conclude that even the Apostles, with the benefit of twenty centuries reflection, would in fact have written what you would prefer them to have written, rather than the words they actually wrote.

By these four methods, it should be perfectly possible to avoid ever being challenged by Holy Scripture.  So, rest easy in your presuppositions, mes amis, and go with the flow.  Properly interpreted away, even the difficult parts of the Bible can become proofs that you and people like you were absolutely right all along.

The transubstantiation trap

Transubstantiation is a very sensible and coherent way of expressing Roman Catholic eucharistic doctrine - or at least it was in about 1250.  The classic formulation, in Thomas Aquinas, explains that in the mass the essence or substance of the bread and wine is genuinely changed into the essence of the body of Christ.  The bread and wine still appear to be bread and wine to us, because their accidents are unchanged; that is to say, all that appears to the senses is still exactly as it was before.  Faith is required here: not to make the change (this is thought to be objective), or to receive the changed host (this is done, whether to judgement or salvation, by everyone who partakes), but to perceive the host as genuinely being the body of Christ, since the senses won't help.

As I said, this all makes sense in 1250.  Aquinas leans heavily on Aristotelian philosophy for the language of substance and accidents.  For Aristotle, accidents or properties of things reside in their substances.  The substance is the thing proper, and the accidents are, if you like, the presenting face.  Of course, for Aristotle these things couldn't be separated.  The idea that you could have a table that presented as a chair whilst remaining a table would have seemed bizarre to him.  Aquinas would appeal to miracle here, again not unreasonably.

Now, there are all sorts of reasons not to follow Roman eucharistic theory at this point.  The general thrust is wrong.  But granted the basic direction of Roman Catholic theology, this made sense.  Unfortunately, because at the Counter-Reformation the Catholic Church rather painted itself into a corner in terms of doctrinal change and the impossibility thereof, this is still the way the mass is explained today.  And it makes no sense.  Nobody believes in substances and accidents in this way anymore; nor should they.  It is certainly not inconceivable that the doctrine of the mass could be re-expressed in a way which kept its essentials intact without relying on an obsolete philosophy - but Roman Catholicism has closed that path to itself 500 years ago.  It's stuck with Aquinas, and therefore with Aristotle.

The reason I mention all this is because there is always a danger that Evangelicals, who are in theory open to their doctrine being continually reformed by the word of God, actually fall into the trap of holding on to formulations that no longer make sense, and in so doing losing the heart of the doctrine they're trying to defend.  As an example, I was reading someone recently who, when challenged that the evangelical doctrine of inerrancy is a species of philosophical foundationalism, simply gave the verbal equivalent of a shrug - we are apparently committed to epistemological foundationalism.  That would be an error.  Foundationalism has, in my view rightly, been found wanting philosophically.  And if our doctrine really springs from Scripture, we'd hardly want to wed ourselves completely to a philosophical doctrine that emerged with the Enlightenment!  Surely we can express our commitment to the authority of Scripture in a new way - without losing it?  Because my worry is that we will surely lose it - or at least, lose adherence to it - if we continue to express it in terms of an obsolete philosophy.

This is not about compromising with the spirit of the age.  It's about recognising that we have always used the language and concepts of the day to express what we think we're hearing in Scripture.  That is both inevitable and right - how else would we communicate today?  But yesterday's formulations must be open to re-expression if we're to make sure that it is God's revelation attested in Scripture that is driving our doctrine, and to avoid getting stuck in philosophical cul-de-sacs.

Authority in Galatians 1

I've been doing some work in Galatians 1 ahead of the beginning of our new preaching series at CCC.  Rather than being introductory, the chapter plunges straight into the substance of Galatians, and especially the apostle's astonishment that the Galatian Christians are already in danger of abandoning the good news about God's grace in Jesus.  The focus of the chapter is the issue of authority - perhaps the new arrivals in Galatia have questioned Paul's standing as an apostle and his authority to preach, or perhaps Paul is moving to counter their own claims to authority.  Regardless of the cause, Paul is very clear: he has a divine commission to preach, and the message he preaches comes from heaven and was not learnt from any other human being.

What has particularly struck me from this chapter, though, is a little phrase in verse 8:

But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed.

Even if we.  This is as radical a disavowal of personal authority as could be made.  If Paul, the commissioned apostle, returned to Galatia preaching a message which varied even by a hairbreadth from that which he had preached before, the Galatians should not only ignore him, but should regard him as cursed.  This makes sense: Paul's authority is his commission, and his commission is to preach this gospel, and not another.  If he switches his message, he loses his authority.  The authority goes with the message, not the messenger.

I've been thinking a little about what that means for our understanding of authority.  I suspect there is always a danger in the church of establishing church leaders and then assuming that they have authority by virtue of their office.  But this is not so.  Church leaders are appointed as ministers of the gospel; the authority goes with the gospel, not the people.  That means that the authority of the church leaders is very much curtailed: they have authority only in so far as they are serving the gospel.  It also means that, as with Paul, the authority of church leaders is much greater than we often think: in so far as they restrict themselves to their legitimate sphere, they minister to the church with the authority of heaven, of Christ himself.

I do also wonder whether this ought to have an impact on our doctrine of Scripture.  You sometimes hear expositions of this doctrine where the authority is vested in the formal, and thence flows to the material.  I mean something like this: the Bible is God's word and therefore has authority; therefore everything the Bible says is true.  Would this be parallel to Paul saying: I am God's apostle and therefore have authority; therefore everything I say is true..?  And would Paul say something like this?  Doesn't the rhetoric of Galatians 1 indicate that he would instead begin with the content - the good news of Jesus' death and resurrection - and then declare the Scriptures authoritative on the basis that they bring this message?

The difference, of course, is that Paul genuinely could have turned up in Galatia preaching another gospel, whereas the content of Scripture is established and fixed, meaning that the question mark raised by Paul over his own authority never applies to the Bible.  Still, it does make a difference to see things this way.  It overcomes the felt apologetic need to prove the formal authority of the Bible before looking at its content.  It breaks the 'because the Bible says so' circular reasoning.  And perhaps it helps us to remember that the authority of Scripture is the authority of Christ, because it witnesses to him.

Being orthodox

Loosely based on the first chapter of T.F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith.

Because God makes himself known in Christ, to whom the Holy Scriptures bear authoritative witness, there are definite boundaries to our knowledge of God - if we stray beyond the witness of Scripture and the person and work of Jesus Christ (which I have deliberately made co-extensive in the diagram), we do not truly see God; we are heretics.  But if we are orthodox - looking to the Scriptures to see Jesus, expecting that in him we will see God revealed - then we gaze into the infinite depths of the being of God.  We can know him truly, but in knowing him truly we see that we can never know him exhaustively.  There will always be more to know, and yet we don't look to one side or the other to find it: the 'more' is in the depths, not to the sides, and we must continue to focus our gaze on Jesus Christ through the Scriptures.

Orthodoxy is closed to anything that departs from the Biblical Christ, but infinitely open to the God revealed in Jesus as we see him in the Bible.

On disliking John Frame

Periodically, I return to the writings of John Frame, even though I know they will frustrate me.  Partly that's because there are people I seriously respect who have a high regard for him as a theologian, and I am trying to understand just why that is.  Partly it's because he is the foremost representative, to my knowledge, of a particular way of doing theology, a way which claims to represent continuity with historic Reformed Orthodoxy.  But I just can't get on with him, and I think I've worked out why.

Most recently I've been reading Frame's Doctrine of the Word of God, and it has really brought to the fore where I think things go wrong.  For Frame, everything is revelatory of God; everything is a medium of God's word.  "Clearly, everything that God has made, and every event that takes place, reveals God in some way" (p. 76).  Now, this does not seem ever so clear to me.  The logic behind it is that since the word of God is God (this identification is important), and since God is providentially in control of everything, everything is a medium of the word of God.  Note that he is absolutely not saying that all things and events, being subject to God's providence, are potentially bearers of God's word; he is saying that in actual fact all things and events are media of God's revelatory word.

This means that Scripture is "one word of God among many" (p. 410), albeit a word which in some way corrects and refines our understanding of the other divine words.  Frame is keen on Calvin's analogy - Scripture is like spectacles.  Without it, we do not see clearly what is being revealed of God through nature and history; with Scripture, our blurry vision comes into focus and we can see God in all things.  Note that "this is not to say that Scripture is more authoritative than the words of God in creation" (p. 411) - this cannot be said, because the word of God is God, and therefore speaks with equal authority wherever it is spoken (and it is spoken everywhere and in everything!)  But Scripture does have the role of correcting our understanding and interpretation of God's word spoken in creation and history.

What does this mean for Jesus Christ, whom Frame acknowledges to be the living Word of God, as per John 1?  Well, explicit discussion of this doesn't kick in until chapter 42 (on page 304!), because Frame follows a schema of creation-word, verbal-word, person-word.  In the end, all that he seems to do with the idea of Christ as Word is to say that he is the mediator of all revelation - because he is the creator God and the Lord of Providence, as well as the teacher par excellence.  It is particularly telling that in the next chapter Frame goes on to say that all humans are revelatory of God; Jesus seems to me on this scheme to be just the best of us.

What I really miss here is any sense of the cross in Frame's epistemology.  Everything seems to sail on in smooth continuity: God in creation, God in history, God in Jesus, God in Scripture...  There is no sense of Jesus as the light shining in the darkness; no sense of the revelation of God as that which decisively contradicts and overturns human wisdom.  God is never hidden, he never veils himself.  In fact, he is so clearly revealed in everything that Frame maintains not only that people can know about God from creation, but that each and every individual actually does know God.  He bases this on an exegesis of Romans 1 which I reject.  In Frame, I think it just serves as a powerplay.

And here's the heart of it: I think that what has happened in Frame is that the divine sovereignty has taken over from every other attribute of God.  Everything collapses into providence: God's authority and control.  It's no coincidence that Frame's multi-volume work is A Theology of Lordship, nor that he makes a slightly bizarre attempt to read concepts of lordship back into the divine name YHWH.  It seems to me that for Frame all theology boils down to this: God is in charge.  Now that's a truth, but unless it's read through the cross I think it's a truth which is hugely distorted.  And I see this not only in Frame but in many of the neo-Reformed across the pond.  In the end, it's a theology of glory, and not of the cross.

Oh, also, he says lots of nasty things about Karl Barth, which I understood much better after I read a bit about Van Til and how ridiculous he was.

What should evangelicals REALLY make of Karl Barth?

Earlier this week, the Gospel Coalition carried an article by Justin Taylor, reporting some brief comments of Don Carson's on the theology of Karl Barth, particularly as it relates to the doctrine of Scripture. There is a lot to like about Carson's comments, especially the fact that the major misunderstandings that seem to characterise a lot of American conservative reading of Barth (I'm thinking of Van Til, Schaeffer, Frame) seem thankfully absent. Even the disagreement is done in an irenic style, as one would expect from Carson. This is all good.

Having said that, I did (of course) have a few thoughts, and since it is good to share, here they are.

Firstly, let me say something about contradictions. Sometimes reading Barth it feels like his thought is heading off on two parallel lines, and it is difficult (impossible?) to see how they will ever be brought into contact. I think the doctrine of Scripture is a clear example of this: Barth insists strongly on the mere humanity of Scripture; he insists equally strongly that Scripture is the place we turn to hear the authoritative word of God. Is it just that Barth is being unduly 'extreme' about either of these positions? I don't think so. As far as I can see from my reading of Barth, this sort of structure springs from the fact that his theology is genuinely 'eccentric', meaning simply that it has its centre outside itself - in the reality of God himself. When it comes to the doctrine of Scripture, the humanity and divinity of the witness it bears are genuinely contradictory from a human point of view, and at no point can they be logically brought together or co-ordinated; they are brought together only in the act of God himself working to bring them together. In other words, if God doesn't exist, Barth's theology will be self-contradictory - but then, of course, it will also be meaningless.

I think this sort of structure can be seen in various aspects of more traditional theology without causing any disturbance. Consider, for example, the Biblical truth that God is a god who punishes evil, and the equally Biblical truth that God is a god who forgives. These are two parallel lines stretching to infinity, apparently without ever touching. They are brought into contact only at the cross of Christ; the action of God makes two apparently contradictory statements to be in fact identical (in the sense that they have an identical referent). If this is "dialectical thinking", it is more Biblical than Hegelian, and I don't think we need to feel threatened by it.

Secondly, it is true that Barth affirms that there are errors in Scripture, although he does say at one point that Scripture's errors are more illuminating than the truths of other books (can't find the reference for this one right now). It is not clear to me that Barth ever makes use of the idea of errors in Scripture; he doesn't build anything on it. It feels to me that he thinks himself obliged to affirm the presence of errors in order to assert the true humanity of the Scriptures, against what he regards as a dangerous fundamentalism which overlooks this aspect of Scripture or at least minimises it. I think he is right to see this danger, but wrong in his defence. Although to err is human, not every human errs in every single thing they do. It should be entirely possible for Barth to affirm that Scripture is free of error in what it affirms (propositionally), but that it is still a human book, not in itself divine revelation unless God brings the human and divine together in the event of the Spirit's illumination.

I suspect this is related to Barth's Christology. Barth claims that Christ's human nature is thoroughly Adamic, that is to say fallen - it is like our nature in every way. This is a substantial departure from mainstream orthodoxy, but it is worth noting that he is also clear that Christ did not take on our fallen nature in order to do in that nature what we ourselves habitually do - i.e. he did not actually sin, but carried our sinful nature in obedience to God. Might he not, in parallel, have affirmed that the humanity of Scripture meant it was thoroughly capable of error, without in fact erring?

Thirdly, it is worth highlighting that perhaps Barth's greatest concern in all his theology, and certainly in his doctrine of Scripture, is that the church must continue to rely absolutely on God, and on his present day activity. There is no sense in which God, having acted in the past in Christ and in the inspiration of Scripture, now leaves his revelation in the hands of the church and the world. No, revelation is always God's personal activity. Although Scripture and preaching (and even the human nature of Christ?) constitute the locus of revelation, they are not themselves revelatory unless God acts by the Spirit to make them such. God is in control, always the subject of his own becoming object. In practice, that means whenever we turn to Scripture, or stand up to preach, or sit to hear a sermon we are genuinely driven to prayer, that the impossible would happen in the grace of God, and the words of men would be to us the true and living word of God .

Always learning

I think theological progress (and regress) happens broadly like this.  There is a new and powerful insight into some theological locus, or into the whole scheme of Christian doctrine.  'New and powerful' does not always mean true and helpful, so there will be and should be a debate about whether this insight is in fact an improvement on what has gone before.  Depending on how this debate goes, this new insight may become the new orthodoxy, generally accepted as the best way, or at least a good way, of expressing Christian doctrine in the here and now.  Over time, though, this new orthodoxy becomes brittle.  It is perhaps explained and explained until the kernel of the original insight is lost behind scholastic definitions, or it is defended and defended until the keep of the original insight is almost invisible behind the curtain walls of apologetics.  At that point people start to question, start to look for new insight...  And the cycle begins again.

I see this as a virtuous cycle, if - and only if - at the stage of looking for new insight the church looks to, and determines to be reformed by, the word of God in Holy Scripture.  If it does so, and if individuals within the church who are asking questions are looking to Scripture for answers, there can really be nothing to fear.  The old orthodoxies may have become clouded by time; they may simply have been valid and necessary expressions of the gospel in their context which no longer communicate as they used to.  In that case, the central concerns of the old orthodoxies themselves demand that the schemes and ideas be revisited and questioned.

So, always learning.  The church should not be afraid of doubters and questioners. They have the potential to help us to understand and express the gospel better than we would otherwise.

But there is a worry.  Today we seem to have broken the cycle, or rather we have got stuck in one part of it.  We are questioners and doubters.  The old orthodoxies do not speak to us or to the world around us as they once did.  We long for authenticity, something which does not just repeat the words our forefathers used, but speaks in our voice, addresses our concerns.

So far so good.  But are we going back to Scripture for answers?

I think for many of us the questioning and doubting has come to have value in itself.  We have become convinced that authenticity requires us to be always questioning, always holding opinions lightly, always doubting.  To poke holes in the old orthodoxies has become commendable for its own sake, and those who do it best are applauded.

Always learning, but never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth.

This is a problem of reaction.  The old orthodoxies have become oppressive to us.  For many people, their doubting and questioning is a response to a Christian upbringing which squashed questions, denied doubts, simply asserted the old truths in the old ways.  In the name of authenticity, we cast them off.  This could have been a glorious moment, if only we had gone back to the Word.  If authenticity had been the first word in a conversation which had Jesus Christ as its final word, this could have been a reformation.  But instead authenticity became the first and last word.  Authenticity is certainly a human virtue, but to exalt a human virtue into the place of the word of God is idolatrous.  No surprise that we are left applauding those who, by teaching anti-gospel ethics in the name of authenticity, have subjected themselves to the Scriptural malediction that it would have been better to be weighed down and thrown overboard.