The Scottish Baptist Theological Society…

…was launched last night. Andrew Rollinson has made this happen, for which we are very grateful. The intention is to meet three times each year, in Glasgow, Edinburgh, & ‘one other’ (I’m guessing it won’t be Kirkwall very often …), with the centrepiece of each meeting being a lecture from one of the members or an invited guest. The Society is founded on four core values: * A desire to explore Christian truth with integrity and honesty *A commitment to having a particular focus on renewing Baptist identity in a Scottish context *A freedom to debate, doubt and disagree without our unity in Christ ever being questioned *A willingness wherever possible to attend, prepare for and contribute to each debate I had the enormous honour of giving the first paper, and explored some aspects of a (British) Baptist doctrine of Scripture. In (many of) our seventeenth-century confessions, and in our current Declarations of Principle (both BUS and BUGB), the doctrine of Scripture is located under Christology. This struck me as interesting, and I tried to explore a little of what it might mean. It was good to see some old friends, and to meet some new ones. Driving through the middle of Glasgow at rush-hour in the snow was less good, but worth it for what...

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Swinburne Evolved

We had Richard Swinburne in town on Wed, offering an interesting seminar paper, the stated thesis of which was ‘it is impossible to offer scientific explanation of the evolution of humanity’ – he did pause to reassure us that he is very happy with a (neo-)Darwinian account of evolution by natural selection, &c., to account for speciation. So why the problem? The basic argument relied on a particular take on the philosophy of science. We may usefully divide properties/events into ‘physical’ and ‘mental’, according to Swinburne, and science necessarily deals with only physical properties/events. (He defined an event as ‘a substance having a particular property at a particular time’.) However, what it is to be human (and, by supposition, a member of various species of the higher animals) involves a series of mental events/properties, and so is necessarily opaque to science. A ‘mental’ event/property is one to which ‘the substance in whom it is instantiated necessarily has privileged access’ (quoted from Swinburne’s handout). This gets us into a hard mind/brain distinction: the chemical state of my brain is a physical event: I have no direct access to it, and anyone can in principle investigate it. However, my feeling interest, excitement, or fear, is a mental event: no-one else has access to those feelings. Of course, it is almost certainly the case that many – perhaps all – mental properties either cause or are caused by certain physical properties, but they remain different events. I can know that I feel fear without knowing anything about my brain chemistry; you can know something about my brain chemistry without knowing anything about how I am feeling. The essence of science is repeatable observation; this is, by definition, impossible, for mental properties and events. Science is remarkably successful at investigating the physical world, but does so often precisely by replacing language of mental events (‘heat’), which is necessarily opaque, with language of physical events (the random motion of particles, or electromagnetic radiation) which is susceptible to scientific investigation. Therefore, if it is of the essence of being human to be possessed of certain mental properties, there is no available scientific account of what it is to be human, or of how humanity appeared on earth. Swinburne suggested five such properties: the possession of mental properties simpliciter; the occurrence of intentional events; the two-way interaction between mental events and brain events; the possession of moral beliefs; and the possession of libertarian free-will (which he acknowledged to be contested). This is all very neat, and difficult to criticise as a piece of logic. What of the premises? It seems to me that the crucial assumption is that only I am able to observe my own mental processes. Presuming that the universe is less hospitable to telepaths than many of our sci-fi novelists have imagined (which seems to me a reasonable presumption), this assumption is still, it seems to me, straightforwardly false. God knows me better than I know myself, and this would seem to include my mental properties. I suspect that the argument could be re-written to take account of this point: God is, after all, not your average scientist (I will resist any of the obvious rude comments…). If my criticism stands, then two potentially interesting results follow. The first is that Swinburne’s assumption of libertarian free will becomes decisive for his argument. If I am possessed of libertarian free will, then there might in principle be aspects of my mental life to which God has less immediate access than I do (which seems to me another in a long list of fairly devestating arguments against libertarian free will, but…). Second, Swinburne’s argument could be taken as a demonstration that it is impossible to believe in evolution if one happens to be an atheist, which would be a pleasing conclusion to be able to demonstrate in the present cultural...

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The Ecclesiology of a Pilgrim

Talking with a student about Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress reminded me of the old canard about the basic problem of the book being its lack of ecclesiology. For all Bunyan’s brilliance, he paints a picture, the complaint goes, of a solitary Christian, working out his own salvation, with no mention of the church at all. This is a gross misrepresentation. There are images of the local congregation in the text: House Beautiful, for one. But the centrality of ecclesiology to the book is not found there. Throughout the text, Christian hardly walks a step of his way alone. His pilgrimmage is constantly shared with, and guided by, other pilgrims, notably Hopeful and Faithful, but also Evangelist, The Interpreter, Watchful, the Shepherds, the House Beautiful maidens, &c., &c. It would be fair to say that there is little sacramental theology in Pilgrim’s Progress, although Bunyan goes some way to correcting that in the second part, when Christiana and her children go through the garden bath in House Beautiful. For Bunyan, however, the essence of ecclesiology is not sacrament or ministry, but Christian fellowship, believers walking together and aiding each other as they walk in the way. It might not be your doctrine of the church, but please don’t pretend it isn’t a doctrine of the church, and a strong one at...

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‘A debate belonging more to grammar than theology…’

…such was the judgement of Sergius of Constantinople on the monoenergist controversy. I don’t want to argue the rightness or wrongness of Sergius’ case here, but reflect on a more recent discussion. There is little doubt that Stuart Townend is one of our more gifted writers of worship music at present. His masterpiece thus far is probably ‘In Christ Alone’, which succeeds in offering a full and striking re-telling of the narrative of salvation in four stanzas (I also like his ‘From the Squalor of a Borrowed Stable’, in a similar vein, and unjustly unknown, in my opinion). One phrase in the lyric, however, has achieved a certain level of controversy, and become something of a touchstone in popular-level debates over penal substitution. As almost always in these debates, I end up convinced that both sides are equally wrong. ‘And on that cross as Jesus died / The wrath of God was satisfied’. Now, it seems to me that theology needs some concept of divine wrath, whatever that might look like – it’s a rather too common biblical motif to be merely swept under the carpet. ‘Satisfaction’ is a less immediately biblical term (the underlying Lt terms satisfactio, &c. occur about three times in the Vulgate, but never in a sense to do with the atonement, as far as I can see), and of course a little controversial just now. And so a debate arose, was this line appropriate, or not, and the battle-lines seemed to be clear: if you supported penal substitution, this was a clear and lucid expression of the gospel, if you didn’t, this was a dangerous distortion. But … surely the primary problem with this line is not theology, but grammar? If I had any idea what it meant, I could come to a theological judgement about it, but as written, it verges on nonsense. I can see no meaning of the two words ‘wrath’ and ‘satisfy’ that allows them to be combined like this – and that is not a theological judgement, it is a grammatical one, informed by nothing more (and nothing less) than the OED. To ‘satisfy,’ I discover there, has several meanings. They cluster around the sense of an obligation being fulfilled. Thus, in atonement theology, we speak of Christ making satisfaction in terms of paying a debt, or suffering a required penalty, and so justice is satisfied. ‘Wrath,’ however, cannot be construed as an obligation; it is an attitude. As such, wrath might be appeased or averted or mollified or changed – the former pair being more theologically interesting than the latter pair – it cannot be satisfied in any meaningful sense of that term. Of course, we might claim with sense ‘At the cross, God’s justice was satisfied, and so God’s wrath was averted.’ That may or may not be good theology, but it at least means something. But ‘wrath’ cannot be ‘satisfied,’ if the two words retain any recongisable meaning. This does not make ‘In Christ Alone’ a bad song – it remains quite excellent in my view, with a problem in one line. (Compare ‘Rock of Ages’: Toplady wrote ‘When my eye-strings break in death’ in the third staza; various editors have tried to find a better version, recognising that the high standard of poetry exhibited elsewhere in the hymn dips on this line; it remains a truly great hymn.) As with ‘Rock of Ages’, the various attempts to rewrite the hymn have found no happy solution (I hear that Tom Wright suggested ‘The love of God is satisfied,’ which is a concept I can just about make sense of, and am completely horrified by: somewhere near the heart of the gospel is the conviction that God’s love is never satisfied!) However, I think the debate, and the misconstrual of the line, on both sides of it, is indicative of a common and unhelpful entanglement in recent evangelical discussions over the atonement. It seems to me clear that belief in God’s wrath, and belief in penal substitution, are logically distinct ideas, with no mutual entailment. This simple point has been missed on both sides of the debate, and much confusion has arisen as a result. God may be full of wrath towards sinners until atonement is made, but that atonement be made in a hundred non-penal ways. More strikingly, attitudes of wrath have no place in a law-court. Judges are not called to be angry with offenders, but to dispense impartial justice. If we narrate the atonement in penal terms, it is actually rather important to bracket or exclude God’s wrath for the story to make sense – but I’ve written about...

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Preaching of the people, to the people, with the people

I have just finished a short course on homiletics, a subject I always enjoy teaching on. During it, a thought crystalised, a thought that I do not recall seeing developed in any homiletics text I have read. Discussion of the primary pronouns used by a preacher is fairly common, but it always seems related only to rhetorical style. This is of course not wrong: there is a great gulf between developing and declaring the thesis ‘you are all sinners’ and developing and declaring the thesis ‘we are all sinners’, and a preacher really should instinctively feel that difference, and make a conscious choice which voice she will adopt. But the choice goes deeper than that; it betrays the preacher’s theological convictions about the nature of the preaching ministry. If, as the Second Helvetic Confession insisted, praedicatio verbi Dei est verbi Dei (can we take as read the learned footnote that acknowleges that this is a heading added later, but defends it as an accurate exegesis of the article?) – if the preaching of the Word of God simply is the Word of God addressing the congregation in recreative grace, then the preacher needs to know which side of that address she stands on. Do I enter the pulpit – well, no I don’t very often, but metaphorically speaking – do I enter the pulpit to speak God’s word with God’s voice to the congregation (and so say ‘you’), or am I a member of the congregation hearing and repeating God’s word which is addressed to us all (and so say ‘we’)? Do I preach to the people, or with the people? And then what is the place of the singular ‘you’ in preaching? Is the preacher called to speak with the congregation’s voice back to God, wrestling with the word spoken (‘preaching of the people’?) or should the people receive God’s word in submissive...

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