Notes on "The Screwtape Letters"

Notes from C.S. Lewis's "The Screwtape Letters":

Transition from dreamy aspiration to labourious doing.

Prayer
� The best thing is to make sure that they don�t pray.
� Make them forget that what their bodies do affects their souls... thus make them think that bodily position/posture doesn�t matter in prayer. They like to forget that they are animals.
� Turn their gaze away from God to themselves, that they may hope to manufacture feelings... for example, to try to feel forgiven. When they pray for courage, they try to feel courageous.
� Teach them to estimate the value of each prayer by their success in producing the desired feeling.

Contented worldliness is a great weapon against them

�I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought or what I liked.�

Let him do anything but act. No amount of piety in his imagination & affections will harm us if we can keep it out of his will.
Active habits are strengthened by repetition.
The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.

Make them think that humility is not self-forgetfulness and devotion to God and others, but as a certain low opinion of himself & his talents.

Let him value opinion rather than truth.

God would have them be concerned with either the present (for the present intersects with the eternal) or eternity (that is, concerned with him). Thus, the they must be consumed with unrealities, the past (which is frozen) or the future (which is the most unlike eternity).

The more �claims on life� that a man has, the more bitter he will be when frustrated. For example, he sees his time as his own, and sees it as being stolen from him. Let them feel that their time is their own, their own personal birthright. Thus he sees �his� time given to his employer, and to worship. Do not let them see that time is gift.

A human cannot truly say �mine� about anything. Men think that they own their bodies and can do with them as they please. God would have men mean by �mine� �the recipient of affection in which I stand in a special relation to� but �that over which I rule.� God says �mine� of all things.

Work on the �horror of the same old thing.� God has endowed creation with both newness and sameness... he has endowed humanity with both a love of change and a love of permanence... it is called rhythm, which unites both. Thus, the change of seasons, for example, both new and the same. It is corrupted into a desire for absolute novelty.

A �false unselfishness� often leads to further sins such as holding grudges, feelings of self-righteousness and anger that their �unselfishness� was not recognized. If people were just open about what they wanted and then discussed their differing wants, there would be no problem. But people feign unselfishness by pretending to want what others want.

Encourage them to believe not because it is true, but for some other reason.

The greatest sin to be encouraged is spiritual pride.

God wants men to ask simple questions: is it righteous? prudent? possible? We prefer that they ask complex questions without answers.

We make them think of unchanged as being stagnant. We have trained them to think of the future as something to be attained, rather than something that every attains equally at 60 minutes per hour.

We condition historical scholars to ask all sorts or questions except whether it is true.

McKnight on New Perspective & Augustinian Anthropology

http://www.jesuscreed.org/?p=2687

NEW PERSPECTIVE
Scot McKnight

The crux of the fierce criticism of the New Perspective on Paul is what I will call an Augustinian anthropology. Here me out because I think this is behind nearly every criticism I�m hearing of the NPP, and many times I�m not hearing that it is this that is actually prompting the criticism.

Behind the Reformation is Augustine; behind much of modern evangelicalism, especially in the Reformed circles today, is the Reformation. Therefore, at the bottom of the evangelical movement in the Reformed circles is Augustine and his anthropology. The New Perspective, by and large, probably does not adopt a fully Augustinian anthropology but it is rare that such an issue arises in the discussion. At times I hear the NPP doesn�t have an adequate theory of sin � well, I think NPP would say �Neither does the Reformation. So there!� So, let�s dig into this just a bit today and see if we can shed some light on the NPP and help us all.

What is Augustine�s anthropology? (I�m no specialist on this, but this is how I understand it. Experts chime in.)
1. Humans are born in original sin.
2. Humans are bound to their sinful natures.
3. Humans have an incurable itch to justify themselves and seek merit.
4. But humans cannot please God because they are bound to those sinful natures that cannot please God.
5. Humans are therefore �naturally� condemned before God.
6. They are in need of God�s awakening grace and new life � through the Holy Spirit.
7. The only way out of this condition of self-justification and merit-seeking is to surrender that selfish, proud self-image and cast oneself on God in the mercy of Christ through the regenerating power of the Spirit.

[A friend and colleague, an Augustinian scholar, reworks my points into this:

I think Augustine would agree to some form of each of the statements you have listed. However, I don�t think it quite gets at the core of Augustine�s thoughts or concerns. or to put it differently, it identifies Augustine�s positions as they emerged in his debate with Pelagians and not so much with the rest of his thought.

I think he always remained a rhetorician rather than a systematic thinker, so the images he employs are often more fundamental than an abstract statement of his doctrine. In the Confessions, the guiding image is that of the prodigal son (kind of overlaid on some semi-Plotinian metaphysics). I don�t think Augustine�s first word in his anthropology is �sin�. I think it is �love.� Sin is just love gone bad � as evil is good gone bad. So maybe to rephrase it, using the vocabulary of the earlier Augustine.

1. Humans, like God, are lovers.
2 and 3. Humans though are bad lovers, redirecting their love from God to the good things God made. This creates in them disordered desires.
4. Humans have become incapable of loving God for himself (instead of themselves) and loving other things �in� God.
5. Humans are incapable of being happy, like the prodigal son who exchanged his father�s table for eating husks with the pigs.
etc.]

Each of these elements shapes the Reformers� perception of the gospel, salvation, and how to understand Paul. But there is more�

Standing next to Augustine�s anthropology is the way to attack the human [is this too strong?] in preaching the gospel: show that human that they are selfish, merit-seeking people who are in need of seeing their sinfulness and need of grace. Show them they need to trust and give up on their own works. The starting point for Reformed gospel preaching is an anthropology; that anthropology for many is Augustinian; that anthropology is pure selfishness.

The Law factors into this as far as I can tell in this way: the Law is how corrupted humans seek to earn favor with God; they climb the Law to find their way to God.

But, Paul is interpreted to say that�s not the way; that way is legalism and death. The gospel, which this view tends to pit over against the Law in the severest of ways, is the way to redemption � through grace, by faith, and faith alone.

If the New Perspective teaches � rightly or not � that neither the opponents of Paul nor Jews in general were merit-seeking humans, then the central foil of the gospel � how to understand the human condition and how to attack human nature � is undercut and the entire framework of the gospel is changed. Thus, the critics of the New Perspective are aiming at the soteriological framework of the NPP that they (critics) have assumed to be right, that they have inherited from Calvin-Luther-Augustine, and which they believe was at the heart of Paul�s theology. I am not saying that all of the Reformed contention here is what I sometime ago called �grace grinding� (talking about grace but doing so only to grind a human into selfish dust), but what I am saying that the Reformed tradition operates with a self-conscious anthropology that derives from Augustine (who provided an interpretive grid for the NT texts).

Stendahl and Sanders laid blame on Luther for seeing in the Judaizers the Roman Catholic Church. That may or may not be the case. What to me is the case is that the real opponent of Paul for the old perspective is not the Catholic Church but Pelagius. NPP folks need to harp less on Luther and his Catholic polemic and start focusing on Augustine and Pelagius. Did Augustine get it right? Did Augustine get it right when he saw in Pelagius the human condition writ large?

The question is this: Was this the anthropology of Paul? Of Judaism? of the Old Testament? Was Paul�s gospel shaped by this anthropology?

There are, of course, other elements, and one of them is central and I�d beg you to listen to this one: if one finds an element or two in the NPP inaccurate that does not mean that the whole thing has to be tossed overboard. I�m seeing far too many �all or nothing� approaches to this issue � from both sides.

Bauckham on the Gospels

http://www.wscal.edu/newsevents/bauckhamreport.php

Richard Bauckham Speaks at Westminster Seminary in California about the Gospels

Notes:

(1) Narrative Gospels - like the four canonical gospels. Biographical gospels. (None of Gnostic gospels are of this kind.

(2) Infancy Gospels - never really competitors with the canonical gospels.

(3) Sayings Gospel - Thomas the only example.

(4) Post-resurrection dialogue or revelation. Most of the Gnostic gospels.

(5) Period before or at the crucifixion. Only two - gospel of Judas and the apocolypse of Peter.

(6) Theological treatises - Gospel of Truth & Gospel of Philip. Not stories about Jesus at all.

------

The Fourfold Gospel

Canon vs. collection: different options available: (1) the church could have opted for just one gospel (Marcion's edited Luke); (2) they could have chosen a harmonized, composite gospel from the four gospels (or more) (Tatian's Diatesseron); (3) more than four could have been accepted (as Gnostics did). The outcome was by no means clear. Irenaeus argued strongly for the four gospels and no more.

Liturgical importance: which gospels were to be read in worship? A "grass roots" approach as different Christian churches talked to others to find what was acceptable to read in worship.

Question: Was four gospel collection well established early in 2nd century prior to Marcion & the widespread circulation of Gnostic gospels? Or did Marcion & the Gnostics force the church to respond with the four-gospel collection?

Principle criterion for early church was apostolicity. This allowed the inclusion of Mark, which was not used much in early centuries, and most of which is also found in Matthew & Luke. This also prevented the Diatesseron

Meaning of apostolic: (1) chronological: had to come from the period before 100 AD, thus excluding the Diatesseron & the Shepherd of Hermas; (2) they come from the circle of the disciples of Jesus; (3) conformity with the church's teaching / the rule of faith.

Comparison of the four gospels & the gnostic gospels:
(1) the four are rich biographies vs. Gnostics which are not (Jesus completely supernatural teacher of timeless truths); (2) the four continue the OT story of Israel and see Jesus as its climax (historical) vs. the complete lack of such in the Gnostics--no fulfilled prophecy, etc. (mythical); (3) the four deeply rooted in Jewish monotheism vs. Gnostics which rarely if ever mention the name "God" because of Demiurge/Creator vs. the Father distinction; (4) the four are embedded in a historical context that can be verified vs. the vague Gnostics.

Literarly genre of the Gospels: ancient biography.

Enloe on (Warfield's dictum on) Augustine, the Medieval Theologians, a nd the Reformation

http://www.timenloe.net/?p=46

Augustine, the Medieval Theologians, and the Reformation
Saturday, November 11th, 2006

Reformed theologian B.B. Warfield (1851-1921) famously said, �The Reformation, inwardly considered, was just the ultimate triumph of Augustine�s doctrine of grace over Augustine�s doctrine of the church.� Paul Rorem, ironically the Benjamin B. Warfield Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Princeton, disagrees and develops an argument that both sides of Warfield�s dictum need serious corrective input from Medieval studies: �Warfield�s own perspective needs to be reassessed or even reversed regarding the Reformation as an Augustinian debate, not to mention his Protestant leap over all of the medieval theologians in appealing directly to St. Augustine.�[1]

The following is a brief summary of Rorem�s article, which contains much food for thought.

First, Warfield�s view of Augustine�s view of �the Church� needs to be qualified by the recognition that Augustine did not separate ecclesiology from sacramentology. But then, neither did his Medieval expositors who were the creators of the (perhaps surprisingly to many Reformed theologians) multifacted phenomenon of �Augustinianism.� From the Donatist controversy (4th century) to the disputes between Radbertus and Ratramnus (9th century) to the battle of Berengar of Tours with Lanfranc (11th century), widely divergent theologians who could in entirely legitimate senses all call themselves �Augustinians,� the nature of the Church was always related to the sacraments. Both Church and sacraments were considered objective realities and were objectively related to each other, whereas this was not true for the type of theology Warfield represented. Warfield�s anachronism consists in first assuming that Augustine�s idea of �the Church� was limited to Cyprian�s identification of it with the empirical-episcopal institution, and second, that it is possible to speak accurately of �Augustinianism� while simply jumping from Augustine to the Reformers.[2]

Second, Warfield�s view of Augustine�s view of �grace� needs similar qualification from Medieval sources. Gottschalk of Orbais and Hincmar of Rheims, who fought over predestination in the 8th century, were both mistaken about Augustine�s own understanding of �foreknowledge.� As well, a key source for understanding �Semi-Pelagianism,� the decrees of the Second Council of Orange in 529, were unknown to most Western theologians until the time of Thomas Aquinas. Further controversies, involving such worthies as Wycliffe, Bradwardine, Gregory of Rimini, and Gabriel Biel, made it extremely difficult to know exactly what �Augustinian��let alone �Pelagian��meant. A measure of the difficulty in working one�s way through the maze of Medieval �Augustinianism� and trying to distinguish it from Augustine himself may be seen in the fact that both the Protestant Luther and his Catholic opponent Cardinal Seripando believed the great Saint fully supported their own contradictory causes.[3] As Rorem puts it, �Despite Warfield�s implication, Augustine�s doctrine of grace was not so easily identified and was certainly not so captive to a Protestant monop0ly.�[4]

Rorem concludes with two points. First, he revisits Gottschalk VS. Hincmar on predestination in order to demonstrate that Gottschalk�s view of Augustinian teachings on the subject completely ignored Augustine�s understanding of mediated grace. Second, Rorem again notes that Warfield�s dichotomous understanding of grace and the Church simply is not present in Augustine, and thus, on its most basic level, even without descending into the deep waters of Medieval divergences within �Augustinianism,� Warfield�s dichotomy is false. The Reformation, rather than �setting Augustine�s (Protestant) doctrine of grace over against his (institutional) doctrine of the church,� might be better called a failure than a success�namely, �the failure to keep a Protestant or low-Augustinian doctrine of the Church together with the Tridentine-Augustinian doctrine of a healing or transforming grace.� Rorem thinks this reversal would be just as flawed as Warfield�s initial reductionism, but the point of raising it is to observe that �In both oversimplified caricatures, however, the linkage of grace and the means of grace, of election and the sacraments, is lost.� Warfield�s dictum tends to unravel the multifaceted nature of Augustine�s views. For this reason it must come under the careful scrutiny that can only be afforded by a more detailed examination of the development of �Augustinianism��and this means a more detailed look at the Middle Ages.
Linknotes:

1. �Augustine, the Medieval Theologians, and the Reformation,� in The Medieval Theologians: An Introduction to Theology in the Medieval Period, ed. G.R. Evans [Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001], pp. 365-372. This quote is from pg. 365. ↩
2. Ibid., pp. 368-369. ↩
3. Ibid., pp. 370-371. ↩
4. Ibid., pg. 371. ↩

Enloe on Barth & the Reformed Scripture Principle: Platonic Nominalism ?

http://www.timenloe.net/?cat=36

The Reformed Scripture Principle: Platonic Nominalism?
Friday, May 26th, 2006

[Continuing notes on Karl Barth, The Theology of the Reformed Confessions, trans. Darrell L. Guder and Judith J. Guder (Louisville and London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002)]

After describing the difference between the Reformed and Lutheran churches as consisting in the Reformed being the church of the Reformation formal principle (sola Scriptura) and the Lutherans being the church of the Reformation material principle (sola fide) (pg. 39), Barth intriguingly suggests that the Reformed Scripture principle is fundamentally Platonic (pg. 45) precisely in its concept that Scripture always stands above everything else as an ideal to a shadow:

It should not be forgotten that behind Reformed theology, as especially clear in Calvin, stands Plato�s philosophy. This is no mystical Neoplatonism but rather rigorous and critical classical Platonism with the hard and inexorable lines of his doctrine of distance and relations, which in the Reformed world has entered into an unusual connection with the spirit of the Old Testament, which in this regard is oriented similarly. We shall often stumble upon this unmentioned background. There can be no doubt that the relation between Scripture and confession is both positively and negatively the same formally as Plato�s relation between the idea and the things. The strictest and most indissoluble relation between here and there is simultaneously the impassable polar region that divides here from there once and for all. This is fundamentally different from the catholic �continuous succession� [�continua successio�], as well as from the stairstep or background relation in which Scripture and confession are, in the Lutheran view, oriented to each other. (pp. 45-46)

At the same time, like the paradox earlier noted wherein the Reformed attach the quality of �biblical� to their views while at the same time admitting that their views are always open to revision, Barth sees the Reformed Scripture principle immediately making a paradoxically un-Platonic twist on its Platonic commitment:

It is, of course, completely unplatonic when then in Reformed theology the regulative idea is replaced by the regulative codex of the Old and New Testaments. The feeling is quite justified that this is not just an erratic stone that lies on the field but rather a meteoric rock. The Word of God is not the general truth of the relation between time and eternity, human and deity, nor is it the human�s indelible character of being in the image of God and in fellowship with God, nor the law of nature written at creation in the
human heart�All of that must be actualized by the Word of God, must be enacted by it. (pg. 46)

At the same time as the Word of God is �not the revelation of the relationship to infinity of human consciousness but of God�s thoughts become finite, of Jesus Christ� (pg. 46), the Bible is fundamentally isolated from the rest of the world precisely because it stands above all other authorities. Thus, unlike the Lutheran confessions, which are more accepting of external authorities, the Reformed confessions take an active interest in the issue of the biblical canon. For obviously they must identify the contents of the regulative codex if they expect to have one to set up as the above-all-else judge (pg. 49).

The paradox continues as the Reformed confessions lay out the absolute necessity of the guidance of the Spirit to administer the Bible as a self-contained, self-interpreting work of God. By invoking the Spirit in relation to understanding the self-contained words of Scripture, says Barth, �The positivist style of the Western European peoples in particular collides here with an unheard of supranaturalism, and merges with it into a unique totality; for the extremes touch each other.� (pg. 53). Furthermore, when it comes to grounding the Scripture principle, the Reformed answer �is an answer that, when examined in terms of synthetic thought, does in fact lead to emptiness, to nowhere. For it is nothing other than the repetition of the thesis for which grounds were sought, the acknowledgement that this thesis is an axiom whose content is established, or better preestablished by God.� (pg. 57). The Reformed justification for the Bible as the regulative codex is nothing other than �the Holy Spirit here (in the reader) connects to the Holy Spirit there (in the Scriptures� (ibid.).

Barth thinks it interesting that this fundamental aspect of the Reformed position seems in our own day to have been almost totally eclipsed by external arguments for the veracity of the Bible (pg. 58)�arguments which, although the Reformed confessions do note them they do not make primary. The fundamental grounding of the Scripture principle, in the doctrine of inspiration and its corollary that the Scriptures are autopistia (self-authoritative), means neither �the presence or the recognition of a historical fact as such,� nor �a subjective inward experience as asserted by the Enthusiasts back then and by the Romantics today,� nor �the self-evident character of a mathematical or other rational axiom� (pg. 63). It is instead �the revelation of God as a sovereign act, grounded solely in God, and emerging from God in freedom� (ibid.).

To me, this last sounds like the Nominalist insistence on the radical freedom of God, so it�s interesting that Barth has already identified the foundation of the Reformed principle in Platonism, a form of Realism. Furthermore, Barth argues that as the Reformed moved deeper into providing other reasons for the Scripture principle, �the recognition that we are known by God before we know him� disappeared, leaving them vulnerable to Lessing�s �ugly ditch� gaping between �eternal rational truth and contingent historical truth� (pg. 64). And a result of this was that �the Reformed formal principle had to become as opaque and unbelievable as the Lutheran material principle had become.� He thinks that after two centuries of biblical criticism, the only hope for Reformed Protestantism�and in fact Protestantism more generally�is to return to the �radical and paradoxical grounding through non-grounding� of the original Reformed position.

Enloe on Wycliffe and Huss: Dangerous Revolutionaries

http://www.timenloe.net/?p=132

Wycliffe and Huss: Dangerous Revolutionaries
[See edit below]

I noticed something interesting today while reading a variety of sources on Wycliffe and Huss in final preparation for my thesis defense tonight. (I have been told that I will be asked some questions about those two men relative to the condemnations of the Council of Constance). Here�s what I noticed: all three Protestant sources I worked through (Schaff, Milman, Creighton) continually exalt Wycliffe and Huss as having brought �freedom� to the masses, who had long been �enslaved� by �superstitions� and entrenched Church power structures apparently interested only in their own aggrandizement. Yet, of those three Protestant sources, Schaff, though seemingly unable to control his admiration for Wycliffe relative to the �freedom� he brought the masses, is also known for having been a vigorous critic of the excesses of the masses in 19th century Protestantism.

Granted, these three Protestant works (late 19th-early 20th century) were all written in the heyday of celebrating Modern �liberties� as opposed to past �tyrannies,� so some of the enthusiasm of the authors must be understood to be merely the authors being in synch with the spirit their times�as all authors ordinarily speaking are. Nevertheless, I find myself increasingly suspicious these days of our typical Protestant rhetoric about the religious �liberty� that the Reformation (and, before it, the Great Heroes Wycliffe and Huss) helped to create for �the common man.� Consider Schaff�s withering comments elsewhere about the �theological vagabonds� who peddle their recently-invented novelties without any kind of regulation in 19th century America, creating �a host of sects� that leaves the whole future of Christendom in doubt. In this light one sees with different eyes the dangers of enthusiastically celebrating the individual man having been freed from �prelacy� and �religion� so that he can now clutch to his very own personal bosom his own private copy of the Bible in his own language, and from it, the supposed SOLE source of religious authority, derive those principles of religion which he himself finds best suited to his own soul.

The Magisterial Reformation, after a brief period of seeming not to understand the terrible dangers of loosing the Bible-armed, yet unlearned �common man� upon society, eventually took a more catholic position about the authority of the Church to publicly regulate doctrinal disagreements and cases of conscience. The Peasant�s Revolt woke Luther up bigtime to the consequences of his earlier rash rhetoric about Scripture�s �clarity.�

Now here�s the kicker for our typical Protestant hagiography and apologetics: the same realization about the dangers of putting powerful weapons, like the Bible, in the hands of autonomous individual �common men� is exactly why Wycliffe was censured in his day and why Huss was burned by the Council of Constance as a heretic. Both of these men (Huss following Wycliffe) held to extremely radical views of society, which can be summed up by the phrase �the doctrine of the dominion of grace.� What this means is that no one claiming to have authority over another actually has authority if he is in a state of sin, particularly mortal sin. This doctrine had a profound levelling effect�we might call it the prototype of American egalitarianism. Wycliffe claimed that he derived this from the Bible, and consequently, as his bands of itinerant preachers went throughout England preaching this �clear� doctrine of Scripture in the vernacular, the �common men� responded by revolting against their lawful superiors. The same thing happened in Huss�s day, and his advocacy of �dominion by grace� is exactly why the Council of Constance could not do anything but condemn and execute him�his whole theory of society, and especially of the Church, totally undermined the conciliarist case against the papacy by levelling all authorities. Emperor Sigismund at last abandoned Huss when he realized that Huss�s logic would mean that even the secular authorities were not legitimate if some zealous would-be reformer decided to brand them �sinners.� And of course, after Huss�s death the Bohemians rallied to his cause and engaged in several decades of extremely bloody civil war against all who tried to �subvert� their private communion with God. Remember the Peasant�s Revolt in the next century, and, if I may be permitted to draw the line of revolutionary fervor a bit farther, the French Revolution several centuries later.

I can�t continue this entry right now due to pressing time commitments. But let�s just say that all of this provides a great deal of food for thought about how we Protestants today think about our own history, and about our place in the world today relative to other Christian traditions. Given that Wycliffe and Huss were essentially dangerous revolutionaries, how enthusiastically do those of us who wish to be faithful to Magisterial Protestantism want to praise these men? Do we want a �Donatist� like Wycliffe as our �Morning Star of the Reformation�? Emperor Sigismund sternly admonished Huss on the floor of the Council of Constance, �John Huss, no man is without sin.� To what extent do we want to follow Huss, if his views mean that only �pure� people have authority?

[Edit] Thanks to Doug Wilson for pointing out that the Hussites actually split into two different groups, one of them radical and the other moderate. Wilson also rhetorically (and I think correctly) points out that the answer to Sigismund�s statement to Huss is �Especially not abusive kings!�]

Robert Jenson on the Point of Trinitarian Theology (from Leithart)

http://www.leithart.com/archives/003418.php

Jenson's article "What is the Point of Trinitarian Theology?" in Chrisoph Schwobel's Trinitarian Theology Today offers one of the most succinct statements of Jenson's theology.

He begin with the observation that "theology" and particularly "Trinitarian theology" is not second-order discourse at base, but first-order discourse, reflected in addresses, prayers, and worship. From this perspective, "Trinitarian theology does not have a point, it is the point." The liturgy of worship of the triune God is an anticipation of the end, and the end is to glorify this God, to speak for and to this God: "I must first evoke the life of the church as address to God; and this life and address simply is an anticipation of the End, in which Trinitarian discourse is the point and does not merely have one."

From there, he makes "two somewhat more prosaic points . . . about Trinitarian speech to God." First, he claims that Trinitarian statements first take the form of doxology. "The Son is begotten by the Father" arises from "O, Christ our Lord, only Begotten of the Father." This observation is often accompanied by the claim that Trinitarian discourse, being doxological, is not cognitive, and is more aesthetic than rational, and as such subjective. On the contrary, Jenson says, if the reality of the God addressed is beauty, then that is an argument wholly in favor of the objectivity of statements about God, because, Jenson argues following Jonathan Edwards, beauty is precisely the place where subjectivity is overcome. He affirms "the perhaps mostly implicit correlation of the Spirit, as the glorifier of the Father and Son, with beauty," and then goes on to note that God is Spirit. In God's life and ours, "the Spirit illumines, and thus founds, what [Edwards] calls the 'sense of the heart.' This 'sense' is the apprehension of beauty and therefore is the transcendental unity of the person."

Second, defending his intuition that "Father, Son, and Spirit" is an unrevisable proper name, Jenson compares the Triune name for the sacraments. We could no more revise the Triune name than we can decide on another rite than baptism for initiation into the church. We can't do either because in neither case do we "know the rules by which they were instituted." Citing Thomas's view that the scientia of theology is the scientia of God and of the blessed, he says that we can know God's name only by overhearing the conversation in heaven.

Turning to the function of Trinitarian theology more directly, he notes that the triune name is "simply the biblical account in drastic summary, construed as an account of God's own reality," that is, the biblical account of God's actions in history. In contrast to all Hellenistic religion ("and irreligion," Jenson nicely adds), Christians say that the story of the Bible is really true of God Himself, that He is not motionlessly impassible. Theology does not move from the story to some un-narrated ontological depth. God identifies Himself with and by His story.

If this is so, "then God's eternity cannot be the simple absence of time. Then God's eternity must be for him something like what time is for us." Religion, he suggests, is "the cultivation of eternity," eternity understood here as whatever it is that joins the poles of time "to knit future and past into a coherent fabric." Eternity is inherent in every human action; with ever action we are attempting to bracket moments to "rhyme remembrance and anticipation into lived present meaning." The question for a religion, though, is how God is eternal. Eternity need not simply be the negation of time; even tribes that look to ancestors don't believe that eternity is simply the evacuation of time. He summarizes this point by saying that the Bible tells a story about God, tells it in a way that we can't transcend the story and attempt to get at a "real" God without saying that the story is false, presents a story with three agents, and tells the story in which each agent is identified by self-distinction from the others.

This leads him to this formulation: "Christ refers all homage from himself to the one who 'sent' him, to his 'Father,' just so accomplishing our salvation and appearing as the Son. This God is the Father only as the one so addressed by the Son; and he then appears in the story centrally as he turns over divine rule to the Son and indeed at the cross 'abandons' his role as God, leaving the Son to suffer the consequences of godhead by himself. And the Spirit glorifies as God and testifies to as God the Father or the Son, exactly so enabling the proposition 'God is Spirit.'"

Jenson also relates the persons to tenses. The Father is the "whence" of every divine event, the Spirit is the "whither," the "divine self-transcendence, insofar as God does not depend upon what is not God to be the referent or energy of this coming to himself. The 'whither' of divine events is not their passive aiming point, but their agent in this mode." He suggests that in addition to processions the church must also talk about the "liberations" of Father and Son as "constitutive of the identity and reality of God."

He ends this discussion with this formulation: "The life of God is thus constituted in a structure of relations, whose contents are narrative. This structure is constrained by a difference between whence and whither, that one cannot finally refrain from calling 'past' and 'future' and that is identical with the distinction between the Father and the Spirit. Thus this difference is not measurable; nothing in God recedes into the past or approaches from the future." Citing Barth's claim that evil is ontologically what is "left behind," he concludes that "the difference [of whence and whither] is also absolute; there is no perspective from which to see evil as future or the Kingdom as past." We live and move and have our being in God, and thus time is not "extrinsic to God," but rather the "accommodation God makes in his living and moving eternity, for others than himself."

Jenson concludes this brief essay with a discussion of the narrative priority of the future. Stories are ordered by outcomes, and the story is "a power of the future to liberate each successive specious present from mere predictabilities, from being the mere consequences of what has gone before." He asks, "Is there such causation in God? Is his life in straightforward fact ordered by an Outcome which is his outcome, and so in a freedom that is more than abstract aseity? The theology of Mediterranean antiquity thought there could be no such causality in God; the gospel much teach us that there is." Jenson says that the Spirit is the specific locus of this liberation: "The Spirit is God as the Power of his own and our future; and it is that the Spirit is God as the Power of his own future, as the Power of a future that is truly 'unexpected' and yet connected, also for him, that the Spirit is a distinct identity of and in God." This is one way that Trinitarian theology "says how God has time, and how God's life is like a good play according to Aristotle."

[posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, November 06, 2007 at 04:14 PM]

Alastair on Problems with Evangelical Preaching

While lamenting the state of much preaching and asserting the importance of preaching, Alastair traces the effects of the primary focus on preaching in evangelicalism, which he argues actually can undercut the rest of the church's ministry, which tends to elevate man's word over God's Word, its effects on the role of the pastor and the congregation, etc.

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http://alastair.adversaria.co.uk/?p=707

From time to time I hear people lamenting the current state of evangelicalism and particularly of the loss of an appreciation for preaching. I couldn�t agree more that there is a lot of bad preaching around. Fortunately, I don�t have to sit under such preaching too often, but the fruits of it are not hard to see.

However, although I see a big problem, I am not at all convinced that traditional evangelical preaching is the answer (perhaps people would appreciate preaching more if we only had it once a month, like the Lord�s Supper�). I believe that there are deep problems with many of the traditional paradigms for preaching in evangelicalism and elsewhere. Preaching has become the event of the weekly gathered worship of the Church, which seems to me to be a serious departure from the biblical pattern. Even when Paul speaks until midnight at Troas, the Eucharist is spoken of as the reason for gathering (Acts 20:7). In the context of the weekly gathered worship of the Church, preaching should essentially be �tabletalk�.

While the Scriptures certainly teach about the importance of preaching, they also say a lot about aspects of the service that evangelicals tend to downplay as a result of their emphasis on preaching. The Scripture says a lot more about the institution of the Eucharist than it does about Christ�s institution of the Sermon as an essential element of gathered worship.

Such a focus on preaching has created new concepts of the Church. The Church becomes defined primarily around ideas and ever more sharply defined theological positions, rather than around community, which is something that the Eucharist retains the centrality of. The Church has also become organized more and more around one man�s activity (and, as James Jordan comments, that man is not Jesus Christ). Evangelical congregations are often more passive in gathered worship than medieval ones were and this is a serious problem. The service becomes something that the preacher does, rather than the shared activity of the body of Christ.

Worship becomes a mere preface and epilogue to preaching. Scripture-rich liturgies are abandoned and in some churches the congregation only open their mouths for the singing. Pastors do not prepare the liturgy. The liturgy is an after-thought, hastily thrown together, while most of their effort is put into crafting the rhetorical masterpiece which is the Sermon.

The pastor becomes increasingly defined by his role as the �preacher�. Rather than letting the father-like leadership that the pastor exercises over the congregation condition our understanding of the role and practice of preaching, other dimensions of the pastor�s role have been forgotten as his preaching becomes all-important. In actual fact I am not at all sure that preaching is the most important task committed to the pastor. One does not have to look far in evangelicalism to find good examples of the way in which preaching can eclipse all else, reducing churches to preaching centres. Far from building up the Church, such preaching undermines it.

Scripture reading in the service is often reduced to the reading for the sermon. Contrast this with the Eastern Orthodox liturgy. For instance, Robert Letham lists the readings in the EO liturgy for Good Friday � John 13:31-18:1; John 18:1-28; Matthew 26:57-75; John 18:28-19:16; Matthew 27:3-32; Mark 15:16-32; Matthew 27:33-54; Luke 23:32-49; John 19:25-37; Mark 15:43-47; John 19:38-42; Matthew 27:62-66 and, quite literally, these are just starters. There are probably a couple of dozen more Scripture readings in addition to those already mentioned.

This brings to light one of the deepest problems with preaching as understood and practiced within conservative evangelicalism. This problem is the priority that it tends to give to our own words in worship, over God�s words. Our words gradually squeeze out God�s words. Rather than letting preaching be the handmaid of God�s Word, we will reduce the Scripture readings far sooner than we will cut down the length of the sermon.

The responsive and receptive character of Christian worship becomes downplayed and our words become less and less controlled by God�s Word. The Scripture content of the liturgy and prayers plummets, to be replaced by evangelical clich�s. The texts for sermons become ever shorter. Some evangelical preachers pride themselves on preaching huge sermons on a couple of words in a text. This often has the effect of leaving preaching largely uncontrolled by the Scriptures. For many sermons the �text� is merely a pretext or springboard to explore a dimension of systematic theology or the like.

Evangelical worship is full of the noise of our own voices. We continually speak at God but don�t take the necessary time to attend to and to digest what He might be saying to us. Having more times of silent response to readings of the Word of God, for instance, would be a huge step in the right direction, as would having more lengthy readings that are not preached on (throwing out the technology that eclipses the simplicity of worship would also be helpful). Sometimes we need to resist the urge to continually rush to say what the Scriptures mean and just allow them to work on us, practicing the art of listening to Scripture together (which means that we do NOT read along in our own Bibles). Contemporary evangelical worship, with all of its technological bells and whistles, provides us with dozens of distractions from the simplicity of the Word of God and from the terrifying silence that might actually lead to personal or theological epiphanies.

Preaching has come to be understood as a great rhetorical event. I believe that significant changes in popular evangelical preaching styles would have to take place in order to bring them more in line with Scripture. Calm Scriptural exposition should replace many of the impassioned rhetorical displays that one hears from evangelical pulpits (rhetorical displays that often disguise a depressing lack of content). The pastor should teach the congregation as a father teaches his children. This means that the ideal position is sitting, not standing, and that shouting and the raising of voice for rhetorical effect is generally unnecessary.

The pastor should also remember that he is like a father teaching children, something that many evangelical preachers forget. If unbelievers attend worship they are eavesdroppers; the gathered worship of the Church is not for their benefit, but is about the relationship between God and His people. The fact that preaching in the Church is for children means that preaching is for the converted. Sin and unbelief are still addressed, but they are addressed as issues in the lives of the children of God � the baptized.

The oratory model of preaching tends to place orator and audience at different poles. The model presumes an initial distance between orator and audience that needs to be overcome by rhetoric. Standing behind the lectern, the orator tries to win over his audience with clever rhetoric and artificially exaggerated emotion. Preaching becomes drama; preaching becomes an �act� in which the preacher adopts an affected style of speech.

The pastor should address the congregation as one who already has a relationship with them. The father or the pastor should not have to �win over� their hearers in the way that the orator does. They �win over� their hearers differently, by powerful truths plainly and lovingly spoken and by teaching with a gracious authority. The pastor should teach the congregation entrusted to him much as Jesus taught His disciples. He speaks naturally to his hearers and does not employ an affected style. The passion and emotion that arise are natural and not exaggerated or affected.

Many of the problems of emotionalism and rationalism in evangelical circles arise from distorted models of preaching. If pastors were more concerned with plainly addressing the truths of the gospel to the consciences of the saints in the context of the gathered �family meal� of the Eucharist I suspect that we would not have the same problem with the rationalism and intellectualism that arises from the rather silly idea that the intellect is primary, for instance.

Garver on Signs

http://sacradoctrina.blogspot.com/2007/10/signs.html

Signs

According to the Westminster Standards and wider Reformed understandings of Scripture, sacraments are �signs and seals� of the covenant of grace. For some of us, those words may be so familiar, we gloss over them without really thinking about them. But what do they mean?

In following, I will focus on the notion of a �sign� in hopes that it will help us better understand these important signs of God's covenant.

Signs in General

First of all, what are signs? While the Scriptures refer in various places to the �signs� of the covenant, what does that mean? What does it mean for anything to be a sign? Pictures, actions, events, gestures, and so on can all be signs. So what exactly is one? And what, in particular, is a covenant sign?

Perhaps I should make a note at this point. In the following remarks I will be using the term �sign� in an exceedingly broad and loose way, so that the category includes all manner of things: acts, events, words, sacraments, images, rituals, gestures, and indeed the entire created order insofar as it is a symbolic disclosure of the divine. Nonetheless, a more careful discussion would require that we distinguish between various sorts of signs since the differences between, say, words and sacraments, are as important as their similarities, even if both are, broadly speaking, �signs.�

So, back to �signs.� What various sorts of signs do we encounter in the the course of a day? Sometimes we see the sort of signs that point to something else, somewhere else.

For instance, we are driving on the interstate, attempting to arrive eventually at our destination: Columbus, Ohio. Overhead we may see a sign that indicates that we should remain in this lane in order to get to Columbus. The sign itself, obviously, is not the city of Columbus. Indeed the sign might be many miles from Columbus. Yet it refers to Columbus and directs our minds - and hopefully our automobiles - towards Columbus, rather than Chicago or Memphis.

Another example. We sometimes say, �Where there�s smoke there�s fire.� In this case smoke signifies the presence of fire. There is a natural, causal connection between smoke and fire so that smoke isn�t simply a sign that points to a fire that is absent or somewhere else. Rather, smoke typically signifies the immediate presence of fire and there is a tight connection between the two, not just conceptually or by way of reference or similarity. The connection, when present, is causal and direct.

Still another example. In interpersonal relationships we often use signs to communicate our feelings, commitments, and desires. Thus, we might say that a hug is a sign of affection or a handshake is a sign of greeting or sitting by a sick person�s bedside is a sign of concern and care. In all these instances, however, it is not simply the case that there is a close connection between the sign and the thing signified or even that the sign points to something present and immediate. Those things are true, of course.

But in these interpersonal cases, the sign actually communicates what is signified so that the thing signified is internal to the sign and the sign itself partly constitutes the thing signified. Part of what it means to love someone is to hug that person, not merely as a sign that points to a love that lies somewhere else. Rather, even though the love is bigger and more extensive than simply the hug, the hug itself is one part of what that love consists in and is important to making that love what it is. Hugs carry that love forward, reinforcing it and giving it embodied form. Similar things might be said about handshakes, sitting at bedsides, exchanging gifts, taking vows, spending time together, sharing in material goods, and so on.

In each of these cases, the �sign� isn�t simply a symbol pointing to something else, somewhere else, or at some other time. Rather, the sign itself helps express, make present, communicate, and, indeed, constitute what is signified.

Part of the question, then, in discussing �signs of the covenant� is how those signs function. When we consider covenant signs such as circumcision, ritual washings, offerings at the tabernacle, baptism, the Lord�s Supper, and so on, do they function as signs like those on the interstate, like smoke where there�s fire, or like those used in interpersonal communication?

A Theology of Signs

Before addressing that question, however, let's back up. Let's ask the question of why it should be fitting for God to use signs at all? If God is a spiritual being, without body, parts, or passions, why would he even think to use signs in the administration of the covenants and in the economy of salvation? Couldn�t God�s self-communication have come in the form of some kind of direct experience of the divine or immediate awareness of his truth and will for us?

Perhaps so, but that is not, in fact, how God has revealed himself to us or brought us to salvation or chosen to administer his covenants. Rather, God uses signs, whether those are words, stories, events, material symbols, rituals, or what-have-you.

Sometimes this is explained in terms of God�s condescension or accommodation to human weakness, our finitude, and our bodily nature. Sometimes it is even implied that apart from sin and the darkness and blindness of our stubborn hearts and minds, such use of signs would be unnecessary.

But such suggestions can be problematic.

With regard to the effects of sin, we can observe that even before the fall God had created the heavenly bodies for signs and seasons, he had created humanity in his own image and likeness, and he had set apart the two trees in the garden as sacramental signs of his covenant with humanity in Adam. Moreover, it is clear from the opening chapters of Genesis, taken in the wider context of Scripture, that the entire created order functioned from the start as a symbolic disclosure of God, as a sign and image of who God is, of his dimension of reality, and of his future purposes for the creation. Thus, God�s use of signs cannot be attributed to the limitation introduced by sin.

Nevertheless, one might still suggest that such signs are granted by God in virtue of our finitude and bodily nature, a form of condescension to our weakness. There is some truth to this, of course, insofar as the signs God actually employs, in their particular character, partake of created finitude and materiality. Moreover, what God reveals to us through signs goes beyond what we might know simply in virtue of our creaturehood in his image, and thus is graciously gifted to us. But to explain signs in terms of condescension or accommodation might still be problematic if that's taken to mean that God, having chosen to unveil himself and his purposes, might have found some other, better way to reveal himself or administer his covenant, apart from signs.

We can venture further into God's use of signs by stepping back a bit and looking at the big picture, in fact, at the biggest picture of all: who God is as Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

In whatever manner we explain our theology of biblical covenants, by the time we get to the end of the biblical story, it is clear that the reality of �covenant� has its ultimate origins in God. In particular, it has its origins in a God who created human beings in his image and likeness in order that they might share together in his own life through faith - a life of union and communion within God, among the Persons of the Trinity.

Thus, whether we see the Trinity itself as covenantal in some analogical sense or whether we see the Trinity as the source and origin of God�s covenantal dealings with his creatures, it is nonetheless the ordered bond of love between Father, Son, and Spirit that is the ultimate ground of covenant theology. It is within the life of God as Trinity that we first find Persons committing themselves one to another in self-giving goodness, truth, faithfulness, and love.

If this is so, however, then it is significant that within the life of the Trinity the Second Person is not only the �Son� of the Father, but also, according to the Scriptures, he is the Word (or logos) of the Father and the Image (or ikon) of the Father. That is to say, the Son is the sign and symbol who communicates the Father in the Spirit, not only to us, but likewise within life of God himself.

If that is so, then God himself is never without signs. Thus, it should be no surprise that it is in and through signs that God makes himself known and communicates himself to his creatures. Any other, supposedly �better� way in which God might reveal himself would not, it turns out, be an adequate revelation of the God who is the Trinity of Persons who created heaven and earth. Thus we should not be astonished in the least that God�s self-communication in and through the biblical covenants involves the giving and receiving of signs.

An Ecclesiology of Signs

We can also note at this point that the biblical covenants are inherently social in character.

Adam was never simply an isolated individual, even before the creation of Eve, but also the covenantal head of the human race whom he represented. Indeed, when we first read of God�s creation of human beings in Genesis 1, created in God�s own image and likeness, we are immediately alerted to the fact that God created not just an individual, but a humanity - and not just a humanity, but a humanity divided into male and female. This establishes from the start that the human race was to exist both as a single humanity, imaging and reflecting God, and further that this humanity was always already one designed to include multiplicity and difference. God�s first command to humanity confirms this: be fruitful and multiply, that is, spread out and fill the earth in an ever expanding and diversifying human community.

As with the previous point about signs, none of this should be the least bit surprising from the standpoint of our own place in the biblical story in which we know God definitively as Father, Son, and Spirit, a community of Persons existing eternally in both absolute difference and complete unity. To be created in the image and likeness of this God necessarily involves being created as a single race of beings in natural and covenantal solidarity while nevertheless embracing diversity and difference.

If, however, the Trinity involves the eternal procession of the Son as the �Word� and �Image� of the Father, so that the life of God himself is eternally mediated through a Sign, then we would expect that part of what it means to exist in community must involve a sharing together in signs. To be a family, for instance, is not merely to have a biological connection (since, after all, families can be established by other means), but primarily to share in the exchanging of vows and commitments established and mediated through signs: shared stories, traditions, rituals, places, property, events, and so on. If this is true of even families, how much more it is the case with the life of communities, neighborhoods, tribes, ethnicities, and nations.

In this context we should note that God�s purposes in salvation do not involve merely the saving of isolated individuals, but the establishment of a new humanity in and through Jesus Christ by the Spirit, bringing the human race to the eschatological end for which he created us - and to do so precisely as a community of persons sharing together in God in a covenantal solidarity. That is to say, the church is not just a collection of saved people. Nor is it merely a means by which we receive salvation through the preaching and teaching of the Word and the administration of the sacraments, received in faith. Rather, the church as the renewed people of God, a new humanity bearing God�s glorified image, is the very goal of salvation.

As Robert Letham puts it, �Salvation therefore takes place into the church, in the church, and in connection with the church. Both the church and the salvation it proclaims and bears are together grounded in the saving efficacy of the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. From all this, it is clear that soteriology and ecclesiology are integrally connected, both being outflows of the accomplishments of Christ�� (The Work of Christ 217).

Letham continues, �this connection should be given renewed expression in our own day. One way of doing this is to pay close attention to the biblical doctrine of Covenant as it comes to fruition and full expression in the work of Christ. In the covenant of grace, the individual finds his or her place in the community of the people of God. Corporate solidarity is most prominent, yet it is a solidarity that does not run roughshod over individual liberty. The Godly person, by definition, belongs to the community� (219).

Much more needs to be said here, but if we accept this overall perspective as fundamentally correct, then it helps us explain God�s use of signs in administering his covenants. As both Thomas Aquinas and Francis Turretin note, the place of sacraments in the economy of salvation is fitting and necessary because human communities cannot exist apart from the sharing of signs and the community of the church, in turn, is necessary for salvation since it is both the means and goal of salvation.

It also follows from these points that the signs shared together within the covenant community must be the sort that partly constitute what it is that they signify since part of their significance is the identity of the church herself. Moreover, since the church is the place where the Spirit dwells and works - bringing men and women to faith and salvation through the preaching and teaching of the Word and, indeed, through every aspect of the ministry of Christians one to another - then the signs shared together within the church not only point to and partly constitute what they signify, but they also communicate salvation and make it present to us.

These observations, I hope, help set the context in which we should consider, discuss, and explain the biblical signs of the covenant.