Divine generosity

To begin with, a little Christmas quiz. Who wrote the following?

I am fully persuaded that the vast majority of the human race will share in the beatitudes and glories of our Lord’s redemption.

I’ve noticed a few Methodist friends who blog following a meme asking them to post five things they love about being Methodist. Obviously, we couldn’t do it as Baptists (how to get it down to only five?!), but it has struck me that they, and others they link to, all one way or another pick up on the Arminianism of the tradition, usually by contrasting the openness of Methodist soteriology with an imagined opposing view that salvation is limited to ‘the chosen few’.

Chatting with another Methodist friend, Tom Greggs, when he came up to give us an excellent paper on ‘pessimistic universalism’ last month, we began swapping notes on views on the extent of salvation amongst various Calvinists. It struck us that we could not, between us, think of a significant theologian in the tradition who was not convinced that those who God elects would far outnumber those who would finally be lost. Tom had done some research into Calvin’s own speculations about the number of the elect, which varied widely, but (he told me) in every case suggested a large confidence on Calvin’s part that there were many in his day beyond the nascent Reformed churches who God would save. I thought about the later tradition, where two factors – a dogmatic decision that all who die as infants are elect, and a postmillennial eschatology that saw a coming thousand-year period of such health and prosperity that the population of the world would vastly increase, and when virtually all would be Christian – led every theologian I know who asked the question to believe that the elect would significantly outnumber the reprobate.

This seems to me interesting, because it is a position that most dogmatic Calvinists today do not hold, and this different vision of God’s generosity (or otherwise) must seriously affect their theology and spirituality. To believe both in predestination, and that God’s election is limited to a few, seems to me enormously difficult to square with a Biblical presentation of God’s character, and with the seriousness and significance of Christ’s atoning work. If this were the only option, I could understand my Methodist friends’ commitment to their Arminianism (although I probably still couldn’t share it…)

The quotation I began with? A dangerous liberal revisionist theologian by the name of Charles Hodge. It is reported in his son Archibald Alexander Hodge’s Evangelical Theology, where AA acknowledges that much is uncertain about eschatology, but lists six points that he believes are certain and uncontroversial. The fifth begins:

Although heaven can only be entered by the holy, yet such, we are assured, is the infinite provision made for human salvation, and such the intense love for human sinners therein exhibited, that the multitude of the redeemed will be incomparably greater than the number of the lost. My father, at the close of his long life spent in the defence of Calvinism, wrote on one of his conference papers, in trembling characters, a little while before he died, “I am fully persuaded that the vast majority of the human race will share in the beatitudes and glories of our Lord’s redemption.” …(p. 401 of the Banner edition)

The five points of Dort can only be called ‘doctrines of grace’ if they assume this fundamental divine generosity; this is, to my mind, authentic Calvinism.

Finally: evangelical theology

This is a slightly embarrassing confession to make, but I have just last week come up with a definition of ‘evangelical theology’ which I find convincing. As I have written articles on the subject for significant reference works, intervened publicly in controversies over evangelical identity, and chaired the theological commission of the Evangelical Alliance for the past couple of years, this might seem slightly late in the day – hence my embarrassment. For reasons some will know, I have had to be thinking about defining the boundaries of evangelicalism once again in recent weeks, and I think that I have seen something new (to me at least) and helpful (to me at least).

Perhaps some story would help to explain this. I joined the Evangelical Alliance when I was a student, a recent convert to Christianity via a CICCU mission (if this starts sounding like a re-write of Phil. 3:5, apologies…). A friend was encouraging all of us to join, and I did so without much thought (I think I remember who it was, but he is now quite well known in academic theological circles, and probably not wanting to be reminded of this bit of his past journey). Quite quickly, I went to train for ministry at Spurgeons; for my time there, and for some years afterward, I kept up my Evangelical Alliance membership, but deliberately donated by cheque each year – I was conscious that this was something I wanted to be forced to think through every so often, mainly because I was not sure at the time what ‘evangelical’ meant. I became comfortable owning the label sometime around 2001; this was not, as far as I can see at this distance, any shift on my part, so much as a belief that  I did finally understand what the word meant, and was happy that it was a word I could identify with as describing my own spirituality.

I choose the word ’spirituality’ carefully: my conviction then was that evangelicalism was better understood as a cultural reality than as a theological system. The way I prayed, the songs I sang, the way we lived church, unspoken dress codes, patterns of speech, … I realised that I was (and am) evangelical in much the same way as I was (and am) English middle class – while both labels include some broad patterns of belief, most of the decisive things are more about patterns of living than about commitment to certain doctrines or concepts.

Since then, studying evangelical identity has been a minor, but repetitive, part of my research agenda. The most generally-accepted definition is the Bebbington quadrilateral of conversionism, activism, biblicism, and crucicentrism; of these, the latter two suggest, not specific doctrinal commitments, but areas of doctrinal concern; the former two are about spirituality: the narration of spiritual experience and patterns of devoted living. Mark Noll essayed a definition in terms of communities of conversation – an explicitly sociological/cultural account, which is very helpful in understanding some of the hard cases. Tim Larsen has recently (in the Cambridge Companion to Evangelical Theology) offered a five-fold list, which begins by asserting that an evangelical is ‘an orthodox Protestant’, but moves on to historical location (’stands in the tradition of the global Christian networks arising from the eighteenth-century revivals…’) and spirituality (‘has a preeminent place for the Bible in her or his Christian life…’) before returning to hover on the boundaries of doctrine and spirituality (’stresses reconciliation with God through the atoning work of Jesus Christ on the cross … stresses the work of the Holy Spirit in the life of an individual…’)

At most, these definitions gesture towards certain theological emphases as being necessary to, but not sufficient for, evangelical identity. A Calvinist is defined by the doctrines she believes; an evangelical not so. Until now, I have been fairly happy with this pattern of definition; now I think I can make an advance and sketch the broad shape of an explicitly evangelical doctrinal commitment. This requires, however, reflection on something a little more complicated than just belief in certain doctrines.

Theologies have a certain shape, as well as a certain content. Typically, the unreflective theology of (say) a new undergraduate student in the discipline is rather flat – more-or-less everything is equally important. This is dangerous and brittle; a particular view of church order (say) is just as much to be contended for as sola fide salvation; doubting the historicity of the Jonah narrative is as threatening to faith as doubting the historicity of the resurrection narrative. More mature theologies are shaped differently – they are not flat. Some things are foundational, or central; others are peripheral. And we can disagree as much about the shape of theology as about the content: Calvinists do not, historically, believe very differently (in content) about predestination to Catholics or Lutherans; but they regard the topic as far more central; today, debates of ordination (whether of women or of sexually active gay men and lesbians) are not just about who should be ordained, but about how much that matters. (Most conservative evangelical Anglicans were – and are – opposed to the ordination of women, but did not – and do not – see it as church-dividing; most of them do seem to see the gay debate as church-dividing, however.)

So, my proposal: the distinctiveness of evangelical theology is not so much its doctrinal content, as its shape. Evangelicals are people who see different things as central, when compared to other Christians. Let me offer some evidence.

In the eighteenth century, there are already debates about the shape of theology. Most people believed that a pattern of church order was central – presbyterians unchurched episcopalians, and vice-versa, for no other reason than this difference. In the historic denominations in Britain, there was disagreement over the centrality of doctrines of grace: the Baptists were formally divided over the issue, and Presbyterians were thoroughly committed to Calvinism, but the Church of England managed to tolerate both Calvinist and Arminian wings. Some denominations saw Trinitarian doctrine as unimportant; others took a stand on it.

Amongst the early evangelical leaders, there is debate also. The Wesleys are both very committed to episcopal government (when John finally at the end of his life gives in and ordains some preachers for the American mission, Charles’s response is astonishingly vitriolic), and to Arminianism; Whitefield is episcopal and Calvinist, but not very interested in either as defining points; Edwards is prepared to shift on church government (he is Congregationalist, but suggests he would be happy to become Presbyterian at one point in a letter), but is profoundly committed to Calvinism. For all of them, however, soteriology becomes a central doctrine, in particular, as it relates to sanctification. The Wesleys are convinced that the defining doctrine of their movement is punctiliar entire sanctification (see John’s, Plain Account of Christian Perfection, or Charles’s ‘Love divine, all loves excelling’ – a confident prayer for the gift of sinless perfection that seems to be sung remarkably often by people who would object quite strongly to that doctrine). For Jonathan Edwards, the defence of the Awakening turns on the visible lived experience of sanctification, as when he tells his wife Sarah’s story in Some Thoughts concerning the present Revival of Religion.

With the birth of pan-evangelicalism around 1800, however, comes a definite decision concerning the shaping of theology: questions of church order, including who may ordain or licence to preach, and the proper mode and subjects of baptism, and the Calvinist-Arminian debate, are alike consciously relegated to be secondary issues. The primary issues are the atonement of Christ, the primacy of Scripture, and the possibility and necessity of both personal and social transformation. The Bible Society, the Society for the Reformation of Manners, the Anti-Slavery campaigns, the London Missionary Society – and something like three dozen other organisations – are founded as a calculated and deliberate attempt to put to one side, almost as adiaphora, the then-decisive questions of church order and the doctrines of grace in order to embrace a shared focus on the power of a broad protestant theology to change society for the better.

So, an evangelical theology is not merely a conservative protestant one – in the eighteenth century there were many who were more conservative than the evangelicals, but who nonetheless opposed the ‘enthusiasts’. An evangelical theology is, within certain fixed limits, determinedly irenic and ecumenical, refusing to allow doctrinal differences to interfere with a shared commitment to mission aimed at personal and social transformation.

Scotland still knows extremely orthodox presbyterians who however have no evangelical spirit at all; indeed, the Evangelical Alliance has always been regarded with a certain suspicion within some sectors of the Scots churches, it seems, because it is explicitly soft on Calvinism (and on presbyterian government). But this softness is a decisive part of what it is to be evangelical, I think – to regard Calvinism as more important than personal conversion or social renewal is to espouse a non-evangelical theology.

On doing theology

Our research seminar here in St Andrews has started well this semester: John Webster on creatio ex nihilo followed by Lewis Ayres on Augustine on the Trinity. I look forward to Tom Greggs on ‘pessimistic universalism’ this week also.

John’s paper was characteristic, but struck a note I have not heard from him before, or at least not so forcefully: to speak of the mystery of creation, he argued, is to be in the realm where one’s speech and thought is inevitably tresspassing on the divine, and so there is a necessary spiritual preparation, an ascesis perhaps, without which one cannot hope to speak of these truths.

Lewis offered a summary of some of his forthcoming book on Augustine. The sheer breadth of the scholarship he has at his fingertips is repeatedly stunning. What I learnt most from the paper, however, was a new way of looking at De Trinitate: for Lewis, convincingly, it is in large part an intervention in a series of exegetical debates on well-worn texts. That is, the Arians simply routinely appealed to a certain set of texts as ‘disproving’ Nicene Christianity; Augustine, committed to orthodoxy, has read the standard Nicene attempts to deal with these texts, but finds them less than convincing; so he offers, at length, his own exegesis.

Spirituality and exegesis – neither is popular in contemporary academic theology, but popularity is hardly the issue. I am simply convinced that a well-ordered theology is built on a discipline of prayer and a submission of the mind to the text of Scripture. It is comforting to know, however, that people of the academic stature of John and Lewis can offer support to such a view.

Pushing the atonement to the limit?

(What follows is a summary of a paper I’ve been meaning to write for several years now, but never got around to. If anybody is interested enough to comment, I’d be happy to know if it would be worth actually doing…)

The doctrine of limited atonement seems largely forgotten by mainstream academic theology today. Actually, that is wrong – it is not forgotten, it is remembered with shame, derision, and sometimes amusement. Yet once this doctrine was seriously held by the majority of Reformed theologians. Why? They saw a theological advantage: they understood their claim about the atonement to be that it was definite, rather than limited. That is, on their scheme, Christ died to accomplish a certain fixed end, and that end is infallibly accomplished. Their basic reason for their position, however, was straightforwardly exegetical: they believed that there were Scriptures that could not be evaded that taught limited atonement. (And they believed that the Scriptures that seemed to teach universal atonement could be evaded.)

Let us praise them first – rightly, they took their stand on exegesis. But I suspect that they (and their early modern Arminian opponents) gave in too quickly to the insistent demands of logic: there were seemingly-compelling texts on either side of the argument, and Calvinists and Remonstrants alike assumed both could not be right, and so sought to evade the clear teaching of one set of Scriptures.

(Of course, one can believe in an atonement that is both definite and universal by becoming a universalist; this route became popular in many formerly-Calvinist traditions. The issue then becomes the need to evade the Scriptures that seem to teach clearly the reality of an eternal punishment awaiting the impenitent. Again, I suspect that exegesis too quickly surrenders to the claims of logic in these arguments.)

Let me then pause at the level of exegesis: some texts seem clearly to teach that the atonement is limited in intent, and/or definite in application; others to teach that it is universal in intent, and/or indefinite in application. I take it that, for all our sophisticated advances in exegetical practice in the last three centuries, this basic impasse remains. Is there a way through it? Can we try to imagine that in fact both sets of texts are right? I do not want to propose embracing paradox, but I do want to suggest that exegetical responsibility is such that we should linger long, wondering whether the apparent logical either/or cannot be overcome, before we start our theological attempts to evade this or that part of Holy Scripture.

We have learnt in the last couple of generations learnt to embrace simultaneously divergent understandings of the atonement, at least at the level of mechanism. Using language of ‘metaphor’, ‘parable’, or similar, we see differing accounts as complementary rather than competing. This is fine, however, when we are talking about simply different explanatory systems – medicine vs law court vs slave market, say. But in the case of Calvinism vs Arminianism, and particularly in the case of limited vs universal atonement, we are not dealing with incommensurate explanations, but with directly competing claims. A warm and fuzzily inclusive appeal to ‘metaphor’ will not defuse the logical problem with which we are faced.

Thinking about the nature of metaphor might, however. The old story of the three blind men and the elephant springs to mind – each uses a helpful metaphor to describe the part of the truth that he has, quite literally in the case of that story, grasped. Could we begin to imagine an account of the saving work of Jesus which is in one sense universal, and in another particular, in one sense simply given by divine decree, in another made available to human response?

At least on the first of these pairs, it happens that the tradition offers a minority report as to how this might work. A number of late nineteenth-century British evangelical theologians (most famously, James Orr; most interestingly, perhaps, T.R. Birks) offered what Henri Blocher and Stephen Williams have variously described as a ‘fourth view’ on the nature of hell (alongside eternal conscious torment, annihilationism, and universalism). They suggested, one way or another, that all people were affected by the death of Christ – it was in one sense universal – but that not all were saved – it was in another sense particular. The reality of the eternal fate of the unsaved was decisively different, and better, because of what Christ has done, but a binary distinction remains.

This seems to me a fruitful thought, theologically. In fact, I would want to extend it further: there are accounts of the atonement that suggest that the whole of creation should be transformed by the saving act of Christ (I take Anselm’s logic as pushing fairly strongly in this direction); others that seem to suggest that every human life must be transformed (the physicalist accounts of the Greek Fathers); others that there is a transformation that applies sovereignly and without human effort to all those in the church (accounts linking baptism with salvation most obviously); others that there is a genuinely human role in the appropriation of salvation (Abelard). Might it be that all these things are true? That the saving act of Christ, particularly His atoning death, reconfigures the whole of creation in far-reaching and complex ways, with particular intensities of reconfiguration and salvation attaching to the concrete reality of the church, and perhaps to other places too (the heirs to the promise given to Israel?)? Working out a narrative of this saving act would be enormously complex, and would require patient and particular exegesis of texts that too often are lumped together and are assumed to say the same thing, but it should be possible.

(Note: even if it worked spectacularly, this scheme would not, unfortunately, offer any useful purchase on the Calvinist/Arminian (or the Banezian/Molinan) debates; in their interesting forms, Calvinists and Arminians (still more Banez and Molina) are united in believing that, to quote my line above, ‘there is a genuinely human role in the appropriation of salvation’; the interesting debates concern the extent to which genuine human action is possible without specific (rather than general) divine enabling.)

Theology and the Bible

I gave a paper on Calvin last week, picking up on the recent historical work (by David Steinmetz, Richard Muller, and others) that has given us a far better understanding of his context. One result of this is to revise our understanding of how to relate the Institutes and the Biblical commentaries. Roughly, an older way of reading Calvin saw the Institutes as the central text in his corpus, understood as some sort of proto-systematic theology, which everything else – including the commentaries – fed into; a better understanding of Calvin’s work sees his Biblical commentaries (and sermons) as central to his endeavour, with the Institutes not a systematics, but a text designed to aid Calvin in writing the commentaries, and his readers in reading the commentaries.

This reversal does, I tried to show, actually make a difference to how we understand Calvin’s theology. I ended the paper, though, with some freewheeling thoughts about the proper relationship of theology and Biblical studies. Here in St Andrews, we have been interested in this relationship for a while, of course – and mostly in the direction of how theology can influence Biblical studies. I can’t speak for my colleagues, who are far cleverer than I am, but it occurred to me in reading Calvin that I had always assumed that the final word was going to be dogmatic: after all our Biblical work was done, the final scholarly aim would be an ordered statement of Christian truth. The great texts of Reformed theology all seem to point in this direction (van Mastricht has his pars exegetica before moving on to the pars dogmatica; the great Leiden Synopsis invited the Biblical professors to feed in to a work of dogmatics, not vice-versa; &c.). This scholarship would then serve the pulpit and the pastoral visit, of course; but the basic intellectual aim was systematic and theological.

Calvin’s work suggests otherwise. The final academic task in Biblical exposition. Dogmatics is useful insofar as it serves exposition, and not otherwise. This is a surprising reversal, but one that, the more I think about it, the more I think it might perhaps be right. I have been thinking recently about the proper shape of evangelical theology, (in part because of my work with the Evangelical Alliance). It is obvious that an adequately evangelical theology ought to be determinedly Biblical, but what that looked like (having ruled out Grudem-like proof-texting as both intellectually inadequate and inattentive to the actual shape of the Biblical text) was something I struggle with. My new working hypothesis: it looks like Calvin.

Preaching, worship, and reality

(Further thoughts, relating both to my George Beasley-Murray memorial lecture, text available here in case anyone is interested, and to this post.)

Somewhere near the heart of the argument in my GBM lecture was the question, does preaching reflect reality or change it? To take the classic historical example, most of the Lutheran debates about the preaching of the law and the preaching of the gospel turn on the supposition that the preaching of the gospel is effective proclamation: an authoritative declaration that the hearer, merely by virtue of having heard the declaration, is now forgiven and reborn through the atoning sacrifice of Christ (which declaration, of course, demands the response of faith, and permits of no other response).

It seems to me that many of the recent ‘preaching wars’ have been between people who think preaching should reflect the realities of our lives as lived, and people who think preaching should reflect the reality of life as narrated in Scripture. (In Hans Frei’s terms, when preaching do we read the text into the world, or the world into the text?) I suspect that both are wrong: our life as lived is broken, fragmented, partial, unnarratable (‘fallen’) – it has no nameable reality. The only proper response to any proposed metanarrative is incredulity; we live in a theatre of the absurd, with no plot, no meaning, to interpret our various exits and entrances. In this context, preaching is an act of re-narration; it is a moment within God’s overarching salvific work of gathering up the broken pieces of life and world and, through Christ, weaving them into new creation, a moment in which the new story of life and world is written, and, by being told, is (at least potentially) actualised.

But this is not merely the announcement of the eternal reality, the unchanging truth, of things as revealed by the text of Scripture; as far as I can see, when it comes to created realities, Scripture is not very interested in unchanging truths. Rather, it is a series of announcements that God is doing a new thing – each new thing, of course, is perfectly congruent with what went before, but it is nonetheless, new, unpredicted, unexepected. The ongoing reality of salvation and sanctification is the weaving together of the broken fragments of our lives into a new story that can make sense. Preaching, thus understood, is a moment in which the Sovereign Lord is making all things new, it is the writing of names thus-far unspoken and unknown (Rev. 3:12) – the creation of hitherto-unimagined identities and meanings. It is, fundamentally, the effectual announcement that in and through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has determined that your life, also, will be changed decisively from this moment on.

(Theological aside 1: As some readers will realise, somewhere beneath all this is a particular account of the relation of created time to God’s eternity, such that election is something eternally real and so actual and happening at every moment in time. Call it ‘Barthian’ if you must, but it is splattered all over the earlier tradition if you bother to look for it (try tracing the doctrine of creatio continua for an extreme example) – as Barth well knew.)

(Theological aside 2: what, then, of Frei? He was, of course, describing an observed shift in hermenuetics when he came up with his memorable phrase (it’s somewhere early in Eclipse; I don’t have either book or precise reference with me); I suspect that the implicit ontology of the post-liberal theology developed by Frei, Lindbeck, and others might tend in the sort of direction I’m describing here, even if none of them would particularly locate the decisive re-narration in the ministry of preaching – Will Willimon has come closest to working it through in these directions, although with a more political slant than I’ve given here.)

If all this is right, then what of worship? Clearly, there is a liturgical place for both the narratings of reality that I have rejected: in worship we do recall and celebrate the eternal truths of God’s deity; and in worship we also hold the contingent and fractured reality of the world before God in intercession and petition. But is that all we do? Does worship change reality also?

The tradition of charismatic hymnody which was one half of the soundtrack of my Christian formation assumed, quite emphatically, that it does: ‘By the power of His blood we now claim this ground’; ‘Come and sing this song with gladness, as your hearts are filled with joy…’; and so on. There are strands of declaratory pronouncement in all traditional liturgy as well: the declaration of forgiveness following the confession; the epiclesis (in the Eastern tradition), or Eucharistic prayer (in the more Catholic end of the Western tradition); almost paradigmatically ‘I now pronounce you husband and wife’. In each case, the saying of the words is liturgically assumed to effect a difference in reality. Presumably petitionary or intercessory prayer assumes something similar. A properly-pronounced benediction also tends in the same direction (‘The Lord bless you and keep you…’ as opposed to ‘May the Lord…’).

In worship, the community brings the fragments of its several partial and shattered lives before the Lord, not because those fragments are interesting, or even nameable, but because in God’s presence and by God’s Spirit they may and will be made into something new. And so worship ends with dismissal: ‘As God’s redeemed people…’; ‘Go into all the world…’; ‘Our worship is ended; our service begins.’

UPDATE: The link to the GBM lecture text is now fixed. Apologies.

The ecclesiological bottom line

Talking to Cid Latty of the cafechurch network, the question of ecclesiology came up. Like many successful evangelistic ventures, cafechurch are finding some of their gatherings being viewed/used as the primary location of church for some of those who attend, rather than as a stepping-stone for people to find their way into the church congregations that began them. (I know of Alpha courses, youth groups, pensioners’ groups, and other places where the same thing has happened.) Cid, responsibly, asked the question, if the cafechurch is becoming church, what does it need to be?

A cafechurch meeting typically involves an element of teaching, probably with some presentation of a Bible text, although it might not be straightforwardly read. It involves discussion and engagement over issues, and majors on real human relationships. It might not involve any corporate – or perhaps even individual – prayer, and probably wouldn’t involve any sung worship. Does this prevent it from being ‘church’?

Surprisingly, the standard theological answer would seem to be ‘no’. The church in ecumenical confession is ‘one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.’ The meaning of those terms will be disputed, but I can’t off-hand think of an account that demands corporate prayer or sung worship. In Reformation confession, the church is marked by the pure preaching of the Word, the right adminstration of the (two) sacraments, and (possibly) the exercise of Biblical church discipline. Cafechurch meetings might not have much in the way of sacraments, but if a newcomer were baptised somewhere on profession of faith (if not already baptised as an infant…), and if twice a year (say) a special meeting involving the celebration of the Eucharist (with bread and wine, of course – not lattes and belgian waffles) were held, the gathering would be ‘church’ by those theological definitions that the tradition supplies.

So what? Well, perhaps this highlights the gaps in those traditional definitions (whose authors and defenders surely assumed that when the church gathered, God’s name would be praised, if not necessarily in song, and prayer would be offered). But the English nonconformist, and Scots Presbyterian, traditions developed in that way during the nineteenth century, sometimes, with the set-piece sermon as the absolute heart of the service of worship, and all else brief and perfunctory (and sometimes referred to as ‘the preliminaries’!)

It’s a good question, though, and a live one missiologically, as Cid demonstrates: what does a gathering need to be to be adequately ‘church’?

Living in the real world

I’ve commented fairly often in conversation that the only downside of having moved to St Andrews is, when faced with the most irritating comment that comes to pastors and academics alike, ‘But you don’t live in the real world, do you?’ I now simply have to admit, no; this strange and marvelous town is many things, but it is just a little too like fairyland to be ‘the real world’.

The thought came back to me when I noticed that several friends (including Andy and Craig) had launched an initiative at the recent BUGB/BMS Assembly called Real Life Worship. The stated aim (in a post by Andy) is this:

It is an attempt to connect real life to worship. Worship that forms us relationally, politically, socially and economically.

Now, I understand the point, and I support it wholeheartedly (and I love the prayer that forms the first substantial blog post), but I find the language odd – and actually slightly disturbing. What is ‘real life,’ or ‘the real world’? If we interrogate the use of the terms, it tends to end up in one of two places: either finance, or a place of naked suffering. (To their credit, Andy, Craig, and friends seem not to have fallen into either of these traps; rather they are aiming at something like ‘the rest of life’ or ‘ordinary living’).

The notion that there is something ontologically basic (‘real’) about finance is merely ridiculous. Like all idols, money is a fiction, one which we once found useful but now have imbued with so much authority over our lives that it has the ability to destroy us. (This concept of idolatry from 1 Cor 8.) Money may be powerful, but it is in no way ‘real’. It makes promises that it is unable to keep (‘I promise to pay the bearer on demand…’ – the notes I current have in my wallet carry this promise from RBS, and it seems a little hollow), on which we choose to build our lives (and so we have reconstructed our society in far-reaching ways to protect me, and RBS, from their defaulting on that promise). Our choice does not make it ‘real’ – it merely makes us foolish.

Alternatively, ‘the real world’ is the place where struggle and suffering is most visible and desperate. There is something more ‘authentic’ about life on an urban estate (or in the face of urban poverty) than in the comfortable suburbs. This idea is more explicable than the previous one: human reactions in contexts of suffering and poverty are generally more immediate and direct, less covered over by the mores of polite society. But still, is this ‘real’?

I presume that God is real. Our reality is the truth of our being as intended and determined by God. It would be tempting to become slightly Buddhist at this point, and claim suffering as illusion, but that would be wrong. East of Eden, God’s determination of human life is gospel shaped, following the pattern of cross-and-resurrection. Suffering is real, but only within this wider narrative.

What, however, of where I started: pastoral ministry; academic life; the practice of worship?

I claim no privilege for the academy, but I’m not sure that I am prepared to accept any necessary deficit, either. A particular moment of  academic life, or a whole academic career, may proceed at some disconnection from reality, but there is nothing necessary or even likely about that. We are as capable as surrending to the idol of financially-driven priorities, and so living unreal lives, as anyone else, but not more so, as far as I can see; we are capable of devoting ourselves to chasing irrelevancies, but so are many others.

Pastoral ministry I do claim privilege for. The calling of the pastor is, by the ministry of Word and sacrament, to be a constant reminder of the real world in the lives of those who chase idols or illusions, and to fit them for reality.

Worship, finally, and back to Andy’s language: ‘connecting real life to worship’? How can we imagine worship that is not connected to ‘real life,’ the life God is forming within us and fitting us for? Worship is real life, pretty much; all other life is ‘real’ only insofar as it is ordered by worship.

(Of course, I realise that the ‘Real Life Worship’ folks know this, and are precisely aiming to find modes of worship that usefully order the rest of life so it becomes real – an urgent and necessary task; I’m not trying to criticise what they are doing, only reflecting on a chance turn of phrase.)

What does it mean to be ‘Reformed’?

I have always been fairly comfortable describing myself as ‘Reformed’. The sort of theology I have found most energising and informative for my own ministry, prayer, and thinking has been recognisably within a Reformed tradition; the denominational tradition which has formed me finds most, at least, of its roots in the recognisably Reformed tradition of the English separatists and Puritans; and so on.

The tag, like any other, carries the potential of misinterpretation: for a while British Evangelicals were apparently  supposed to decide whether they were ‘charismatic Evangelicals’ or ‘Reformed Evangelicals’. I have always wanted to tick both boxes (for those who have seen Rob Bell’s Everything is Spiritual, this is the moment to grab a marker pen and say ‘Yup!’). ‘Reformed’ is at least well-defined theologically, however, and so less available for misinterpretation than many other labels.

A couple of years back, I became gradually aware that it was becoming fashionable to be ‘Reformed’ again. In the States, John Piper and Mark Driscoll, amongst others, were (in different ways) creating a re-energised Reformed Evangelicalism; in this country a certain species of Anglican evangelical found in the tag a rallying call for a more defined and aware self-identity; younger leaders in my own denomination found a cause and an identity in some mixture of these various renewed traditions. The old ‘Reformed’ vs ‘charismatic’ distinction is thankfully more-or-less collapsed; others, equally unhappy, have sprung up in its place (Reformed evangelical vs ‘open evangelical’; Reformed vs emergent – where’s my marker pen…)

Colin Hansen’s Young, Restless, and Reformed captured a mood well. It was a mood that I found puzzling – there is so much that is good about it, at least from where I am sitting. People were beginning to understand again that the doctrine of election is pretty central to the gospel; were committed to serious, doctrinally-informed Biblical preaching; were wanting to combine theological seriousness with fervent worship and a commitment to evangelism. As some of my American friends would put it, ‘what’s not to like?’ And I got on well with the folk I met who self-identified with the tradition. But something niggled; something wasn’t quite right.

It wasn’t any particular doctrinal position: I could and do wish one or another of these folk thought differently (or even just more…) about this or that, and I object strongly to the focus on denying the preaching ministry to women which seems endemic within the movement, but that wasn’t the problem I felt; it was more about tone that content – a sense that it wasn’t what was being said, but the way it was being said, that disturbed me.

At a conference this week, I think I put my finger on it (the conference was a colloquium of the excellent Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism in Britain project, and so circled around some of these areas, but it was really a matter of thoughts coalescing in my mind, not any particular paper or comment, that got me thinking this way). In published writings and public pronouncement, these people too often feel (to this reader/hearer at least) just too convinced of their own rightness. In my experience, it is rarely true when you meet them one-to-one, but in public, the tone is just somehow wrong – too brash; too self-confident; not, strangely, Reformed enough.

At the heart of the classical Reformed tradition, perhaps particularly in its Baptist expressions, is an intense and intrinsic self-criticism. As the great slogan has it, ecclesia reformata semper reformanda. A slogan, incidentally, too-often mistranslated. The participles are both passive: the church has been reshaped and remade (by the agency of God), and always will be reshaped and remade (by the agency of God).

Because of this, true Reformed Christianity necessarily sees all its pronouncements and conclusions as provisional. Its confidence – and it should be confident – is a humble confidence, based not on a conviction of its own rightness, but on an awareness that, in the good sovereignty of God, honest efforts may be used for good even if misguided. God has spoken; but our words are not His words, and our unshakeable belief in His truthfulness can never become an unshakeable confidence in our correctness.

The classical accounts of Reformed faith parse this carefully: it is not because there is new revelation, but because our sinfulness and blindness will constantly need correcting; the faith is delivered once for all to the saints, but we constantly distort and warp it. The necessary ongoing correction and repair of the church is not our work (if it were there would be no hope), but God’s. God will carry out this work by His Word through His Spirit, and so every encounter with Scripture in a Reformed church is potentially a moment of judgement and recreation (with the minister called to the task of preaching the words that will undermine her authority and reconstruct her calling).

When the (apparently impeccably Reformed) Lords of the Scots Congregation met with Oliver Cromwell, demanding a commitment to impose presbyterian polity as the price for their support in war, his reply was, famously, ‘I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ – think it possible you may be mistaken.’

It remains good advice to anyone who is confidently Reformed.

Yet more on being confessional

In a recent discussion with some local Baptist ministers, someone mentioned the idea of writing a confession of faith for a particular church congregation. This seems a popular idea at the moment (presumably someone famous and American has insisted it is the only way to be a properly Biblical congregation somewhere?).

My immediate response was ‘Don’t do it!’ Analysing the thought later, there are actually some convictions underlying this response, some good Baptist convictions about not imposing confessions on people. If you want to bring a church together around a confession, then perhaps; to suggest imposing a confession on an already-existing church appears to me to be a fairly basic breach of Baptist church order. We once went to prison, and worse, rather than accept such impositions. Assuming you could get 100% agreement (not just a vote nem. con. at a meeting, but informed, detailed acquiescence) it may be permissable, but…

The visceral response came from somewhere else, however. I was involved in the tail-end of the process of revising the EAUK basis of faith, and I realised then that it is astonishingly difficult to write a good symbol. Three years, and at least thirty pairs of eyes – many of them highly gifted theologians – in to that process, the late and lamented David Wright gently pointed out to us that we had managed to choose a phrase, entirely by accident, that actually contradicted a core Reformation conviction about the atonement.

A Baptist church doesn’t need a doctrinal basis (it might need a written covenant; that’s rather different); if it did, why not just use the EA one? The chances of producing anything better, or even one tenth as good, are about as remote as my chances of winning the National Lottery (and, yes, I am a good enough Baptist to refuse to buy lottery tickets…)