More on being confessional
It seems to me that most people who claim to subscribe to the Reformed symbols today fail in both excess and defect. There is an excess in that the symbols are elevated to some sort of timelessly normative standard which appears to rival Scripture. It is not difficult to find language of the symbols as ‘defining’ the Reformed faith. This is, bluntly, rubbish. Scripture alone defines faith for anyone who can hope to pretend to the title ‘Reformed’. Certain symbols may be welcomed insofar as they are judged to express the true teaching of Scripture. They are, to repeat myself, norma normata, not norma normans. This is not an abstruse or difficult distinction, but it is a vital, and routinely forgotten, one. (An illustration might help: my university has various policies to which I am required to adhere, on such matters as health and safety of employees and students, a refusal to discriminate on ethnic or gender lines, &c. These policies exist largely as interpretations of certain legislative acts of the Westminster, Brussels, and Holyrood parliaments. If at any point the policy could be demonstrated to contradict the legislation, it would be the (legal) duty of any employee of the university to disregard the policy and to obey the legislation. The policies are thus rather precisely norma normata, subordinate to the norma normans which are the laws of Scotland, the United Kingdom, and the European Community. Just so, the symbols have real, but subordinate and potentially revocable, authority over those churches which have adopted them as helpful interpretations of Scripture.) There is also a defect, in that no-one seems prepared simply to grant the symbols authority. This was the point of my previous post. Finally, a perhaps interesting historical side-note: in the discussion over the Enns affair, everybody has been throwing around the term ‘The Westminster Confession’. As far as I can see, though, no-one has paused to specify which document they are referring to. Westminster Seminary California, according to its own website, does not hold to the 17th century Westminster Confession; it holds to the 1787 Philadelphia revision (it doesn’t tell you this; it just publishes the 1787 version under the heading ‘Westminster Confession’) the main WTS website links to an outside site which publishes the text that is usually referred to as ‘The Westminster Confession,’ a text that has no ecclesial validity at all that I can determine, in that it adopts parts (mainly the Scripture proofs) of the 1648 edition (the one edited at the request of the English parliament), whilst ignoring other parts of that edition (the Erastian ammendments of articles XX, XXIV, XXX and XXXI). The Scots parliament received the original edition in 1648; after Cromwell’s death, the English parliament chose in 1659 to accept the original articles XX and XXIV, but still refused XXX and XXXI. And so on. Various other American Presbyterian groups hold to the 1799 revision, the Cumberland revision, the 1858 revision, &c. In most cases the differences relate to the role of the civil magistrate as governor and protector of the church; the Westminster standards teach unambiguously the unity of church and state (there are other changes: in some of the later American editions the pope is not identified as the antichrist; in others all who die in infancy are saved, rather than just ‘elect infants’). There are a couple of small American denominations that hold to the original Westminster Standards, which are interesting case-studies in what it is to be confessional. The Reformed Presbyterian Church held to the original standards, and so maintained a principled political dissent, refusing to participate in the US political process, into the nineteenth century (they seem now to have weakened this witness). Other groups, believing (arguably rightly) that they have no right to edit the work of a synod, receive the confession as written, but then add riders to the effect that they have chosen to demur on certain points–in our Baptist language, the Lord has been pleased to grant more light and truth, and so the confession needs amending. So what? Well, perhaps four comments. First, none of the revisions affect Article I, which is what the Enns affair is allegedly about, so all this confusion might not matter. But, second, the confusion is perhaps slightly worrying. Do WSC and WTS really hold to different confessions (1787 and 1647-ish)? If not, which one has been sufficiently sloppy on its website to publish the wrong confession? If WTS really holds to the confession it links to, how do its faculty and students deal with the unambiguous teaching of the unity of church and state? (The RPC was right,...
Read MoreA meditation on the indicative mood
I won’t name the liturgical resource, because it is a good one, a very good one, and does not deserve to be vilified for one slip, but I was glancing through it, and lighted upon the Pentecost service. ‘Consider,’ it invited us, ‘Jesus’ command in Acts 1:8…’Acts 1:8 reads: ἀλλὰ λήμψεσθε δύναμιν ἐπελθόντος τοῦ ἀγίου πνεύματος ἐφ ὑμᾶς καὶ ἔσεσθέ μάτυρες ἔν τε Ἰερουσαλὴμ καὶ [ἐν] πάση τῆ Ἰουδαία καὶ Σαμαρεία καὶ ἔως ἐσχάτου τῆς γῆς. (‘But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you will be witnesses in Jerusalem,and in all Judea, and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth’–my tr.) Forgive the grammarian in me, but this is all in the indicative mood, not the imperative mood; there is no ‘command’. Jesus is here stating realities, not issuing instructions. I suspect that the most common way of eviscerating the gospel in our churches is this: making indicatives imperatives. We turn promise into command; gospel into law. I know why we do it: anyone who has been a pastor does. We struggle with people who take the gospel for granted, and we want to illustrate to them the radical claims of Christ on their lives. I won’t even say that the instinct is wrong (although I will confess to giving in to it far too often and far too readily in my own ministry); but turning Biblical promises into demands is no way to deal with it. When Jesus says ‘you will…’ he means–you will. Not ‘you might’, or ‘you should’, or even ‘if you do x you will’, but ‘you will’. And so for the rest of Scripture. And so Acts 1:8: the promise, to the eleven at least, and I suspect to all Christians (I take it that all who have come to Christ in penitence and faith, been baptized and received into the church have received the gift of the Spirit here promised), is that they will be witnesses. This is not an instruction that we should evangelise, but a promise that, somehow, at some level, in some way, despite so much of what we are and do, when people encounter us, they will see a glimpse of Jesus. I wonder if we took this promise seriously as a promise, believed that Christian people will witness to Jesus regardless, whether our evangelistic strategies would look...
Read MorePastoral eschatology
More thoughts on eschatology… I am fully convinced–and became so in pastoral ministry, performing funerals–that we cannot and should not speculate about the eternal fate of any particular person. God will judge, and (my other Spring Harvest soundbite) when we see God’s judgement we will be astonished by the depths of His mercy, and by the heights of His justice. The NT offers many chillingly serious warnings about the reality of God’s eschatological severity (the main reason I find universalism too easy a way out), but will never speak of any named human person in hell. (In a parable, Lazarus is received into Abraham’s embrace, ‘a certain rich man’ is condemned to suffer; the most the New Testament will say of Judas is that he will ‘go to the place prepared for him’.) Those condemned to torment are classes of people–‘the idolaters, the sexually immoral, …’–and of course any class can potentially turn out to be empty. If the NT will not speculate about the particular inhabitants of hell, nor should we. At the trivial level, this is no more than the old ‘we never know what went on in someone’s heart in the minutes before death,’ which remains true as far as it goes. But I want to take it much further than this. Too many Evangelical accounts of personal eschatology are simply Pelagian: I make decisions, and God responds to them. This has to be wrong. If salvation always coincides with visible faith, then it is because God decides to save, and as a result grants faith (see Edwards’s sermon on justification by faith for some very close analysis of this), not because I decide to have faith and thereby force God to do something different. (Almost no-one ever held that salvation always coincides with visible faith, though; the 10-20% mortality rate amongst infants in pre-penicillin Europe & America saw to that.) What determines the outcome is not what goes on in my heart, but what goes on in God’s heart, and what God does to my heart. All of which is to say that my hope of salvation for myself, or any other human being, is primarily based on what I know of God, not on what I believe to be true about me, or about them. If our level of eschatological questioning is ‘where’s grandma?’, this will not be a helpful perspective, but–as I want to keep saying–that is almost certainly not the right place to start. (How, though, in pastoral ministry to answer it? Point to the gospel promises, of course; point to the passages of Scripture that speak of God’s desire that all may be saved; and then stand with Abraham in the face of the deadly serious threats of God’s severity and ask ‘will not the judge of all the earth do justly?’ – Abraham understood doing justly as showing an astonishing level of...
Read MoreOn the lack of eschatological regret
In a public conversation with Ian Coffey (at this conference), I hit upon a phrase, quite by accident, which I’ve been musing on since. A vital theme in Christian eschatology is an adequate account of ‘the lack of eschatological regret’. That is, it seems to me a necessary part of the experience of eternal life that there is nothing we–or indeed God–look[s] back on and thinks ‘I wish it had been different’. One consequence of this, of some pastoral importance, is the suggestion that I will not regret God’s sovereign decisions concerning the final fate of my parents, wife, children, … A universalist stance is acceptable on this canon, it seems to me (even if not on several others); the older Reformed orthodoxy which suggested (on the basis of a reading of Lk 16:19ff.) that the saints in heaven would see the sufferings of the damned, and rejoice at the display of the glory of God’s justice also makes sense in these terms (and is also unacceptable for various other reasons). Most of the recent ‘soft conservative’ eschatologies just fail, however. Whether perdition is annihilation, or some form of conscious torment that is quietly ignored in heaven, unless I simply forget the relationships that have made me who I am on earth (and I don’t find Volf convincing on this point), I will still regret God’s decisions. And an eternity of regret is indistinguishable from hell, as far as I can...
Read MoreHow to be confessional
Ben, at Faith and Theology, has posted on the documents made public by Westminster Seminary that led to the suspension of Peter Enns, which has already generated a lot of discussion (Ben’s post and the ensuing discussion is here; the documents themselves can be found here). I have not read Enns’s book; nor, I imagine, will I. (I am a devotee of Dr Johnson on such matters: ‘Whenever anyone publishes a new book, you should immediately go out and read an old one.’) I have, I confess, only glanced through the WTS statements. The discussion around the case, however, highlights something that has been of concern to me for a while: I fear that we no longer know how to be confessional. I teach a course from time to time on ‘Christian Symbolics’. The fact that the title needs explanation is symptomatic (‘symbols’ are creeds, confessions, catechisms and other ecclesially-authorised expressions of the faith). In that course I spend quite a lot of time discussing notions of authority, how symbols function as subordinate, but real, authorities (norma normata, as opposed to Scripture, which is the norma normans, in the classic scholastic formulation). I devoted a chapter of a book once to arguing that the real, and irreversible, authority of the ecumenical creeds could be established from a commitment to sola scriptura, and to exploring the particular authority of the confessions of a divided church. These seem to me to be important topics, that we need to understand better than we do. What should we say of the Enns case? First, it seems to me that WTS cannot be criticised for being a confessional institution. It is open and honest about its stance, Enns and everyone else knows about it. Should confessional institutions exist? Seminaries exist to prepare ministers to serve particular church communities, and expecting staff and students to teach and act in accord with the basic decisions of those communities is surely reasonable. John Francke, who gave an interesting paper here yesterday, commented in passing that Princeton (the seminary, of course) has recently refused to admit a student on doctrinal grounds (s/he was non-Trinitarian). Further, WTS has not attempted to re-write its doctrinal standards after the fact in order to exclude (a procedure which is not unknown in recent or ancient church history, and is despicable); it has not invoked shadowy unwritten standards. Enns has been accused of denying Article I of the Westminster Confession. Whether he did or not is a matter of judgement, but the charge is clear and meaningful. But… …glancing through the published material, my overwhelming sense is that the real problem is that WTS was not confessional enough, or at least not secure enough in its own confessional status. What was needed was a paragraph, at most two, saying ‘Peter Enns published the following statements which we judge to contradict such-and-such an article of the Westminster Confession of Faith,’ which could then have been argued over by interested parties. Instead, there are long explanations why Inspiration and Incarnation (Enn’s book, which led to the controversy) is a bad book, a dangerous book, wrong, unclear, &c., and even longer defences of the same points. All these things are, of course, entirely beside the point. It is possible to write an astonishingly bad and dangerous book which is wholly in accord with the Westminster standards (or the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church, or Baptist Faith and Message, or whatever); equally, had Enns’s book been universally hailed as the best thing ever written on the subject, it could still have contradicted the Confession. Being confessional means you have chosen not to argue about what is right or wrong in abstract, only about what is in conformity or not in conformity to your confessional basis. When John McLeod Campbell was expelled from his ministry in Row by the General Assembly of the Kirk, it has always seemed to me that both sides were right: I have read (some of) McLeod Campbell’s Row sermons, and it seems clear that he was teaching that the atonement of Christ was universal in its effect: on this point, I think it is theologically necessary to think that he is right (I think limited/definite atonement doctrine can be rescued–indeed, I have a paper half-written making the attempt–but, for reasons I once explored in relation to Jonathan Edwards’s doctrine of reprobation, I cannot accept that there is any portion of the human race for whom Christ’s atoning death is not a decisive event). Equally, and again having read the sermons, the Kirk was right to judge that his teaching contravened the Westminster Standards, and so was right...
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