Two thoughts on the sacraments

The Rutherford House Edinburgh Dogmatics conference this week, which is always a highlight. Amongst many good things, I came away with two passing comments which might yet between them change the way I think about the sacraments. The first was from Bruce McCormack. Bruce simply pointed out in passing in a paper that there is no obvious NT linkage between baptism and Eucharist – they are not described using the same word, or spoken of together, or… There is thus no good reason for us to assume that we can deal with them under a common head, ‘sacramentology’ – it might turn out to work, but we should not assume a priori that it is the best way forward. The second was from Henri Blocher, who suggested the key question to be asked of baptism and the Supper is ‘what do [they] give us that we cannot obtain otherwise?’ This seems to me a great question, which takes us helpfully to the heart of the issue, and maintains a useful experimental and soteriological...

Read More

Trying to understand John Piper

John Piper’s recent blog post, which offers an interpretation of a surprising tornado as God’s providential warning to the ECLA convention during its discussion of a denominational statement on sexual ethics, has attracted a fair amount of – I think the best word would be ‘derision’ –  from theological bloggers. I have not seen, however, any attempt to explain why Dr Piper should have come to this interpretation. I tend to the view that a large part of the task of theology is to probe the connections between ideas. I know that attempting to understand patiently, rather than to condemn loudly, is unfashionable, particularly in online theology, and it is certainly no way to attract readers to a blog, but allow me my idiosyncrasies. As far as I can see, John Piper’s various public positions have at least a degree of intellectual coherence. In general, he belongs to a recognisable tradition of American Evangelical Calvinism. His attempts to interpret providence, however, are decidedly unusual within the modern exponents of that tradition. However, he has repeatedly, albeit usually humbly and hesitantly, suggested that we may be able to guess, on the basis of Biblical guidance, God’s reasons for permitting this or that natural disaster. Given that this is unusual within his own tradition, it seems reasonable to ask why Piper thinks this. (A question, incidentally, which is distinct from the question of whether he is right – if he happens to be, why is it that no-one else has seen the same truths? What is it about Piper’s thinking that gives him the ability to see something here that most others in the same tradition cannot?) Piper assumes that we can ‘think God’s thoughts after Him’ in the area of divine providence, and so interpret a natural disaster. An ill-informed commentator might dismiss this strand of Piper’s public platform as ‘medieval’; such a dismissal gestures towards something significant, but is ultimately wrong. The significance first: I believe that one of the most far-reaching and decisive dividing lines between pre-modern and modern (and now late- or post-modern) Christianity is the modern loss of confidence in doctrines of active providence. We could probably trace this to an earthquake in Lisbon of course, but for whatever reason, our ancestors in the faith prior to November 1, 1755 (to pick a date at random…) had no difficulty believing that the events of the natural world, and the course of human history, were alike actively guided by God to secure certain providential ends. We find this much more difficult, at least on a scale beyond the personal. It remains a staple of Evangelical piety that God uses at least some circumstances to guide and teach us in our own personal, family, and perhaps congregational, lives, but few of us would find a divine word addressed to our nation in war or flood. (In the UK, in the last two decades or more, I recall some suggestion that a lightening strike on York Minster was a sign of divine displeasure at the then-Bishop of Durham’s (as it happens, misreported) views on the resurrection, and one Anglican Bishop coming to notice for suggesting that the floods of 2007 might be understood as a warning of divine judgement; both positions were treated with mere embarrassment by the churches.) Why then would describing Piper’s comments as ‘medieval’ be wrong? I think because they are made with a confidence and a specificity that medieval and early modern theologians (I will not speak of popular piety, as I know little about its normative patterns in the pre-modern period) would have found troubling. To speak of the period I know best, the Puritan fast-day sermons are striking for their lack of specific criticism of particular events: drought or famine is confidently interpreted as a sign of God’s displeasure on the nation, and a wide-ranging denunciation of the various sins of the people would follow, but claims that this event was specifically related to that error were not, as far as I am aware, at all common. In the Puritan tradition this began to change in New England. Initially this seems (to me – I am conscious that this older historiography has more recently been challenged) to stem from a strong identification of the settlers with Israel venturing into the wilderness. God guided His children through Sinai with special providences of nature, and so the invitation to read the (presumably exceptionally puzzling, because different from old England) events of the natural world as signs of God’s evaluation of the colonists’ lives was strong. This particular theme perhaps declined as history went on, but a willingness to read nature...

Read More

Culture, guilt, and Lockerbie

Local news today is full of the debate over whether Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, should be freed on compassionate grounds. He is dying of cancer, and my understanding is that it would be normal practice in Britain to allow any prisoner who is terminally ill to die at home (indeed, another very high-profile convict, Ronnie Biggs, was freed on such grounds just last week). His crime, of course, affected families and the wider community in the USA as much as in Britain. The news reports I have heard suggest that the notion that he might be freed is being greeted with simple incredulity in the USA. The breadth of condemnation from across the Atlantic is striking: it is not confined to (families of) victims, or to social conservatives, but seems to be almost universal (Democratic senators have intervened publicly, and Hilary Clinton has been reported to have been involved). Is Britain – specifically in this case Scotland – just more liberal than the USA? Actually, probably it is, but I don’t think that this is the reason for the divide in this case. Rather, our understandings of what words like ‘guilt’ and ‘justice’ mean are culturally-determined, and somewhat different. To us, dying in prison seems a cruel and unusual punishment, and so essentially unjust; it seems that the default assumption in the USA is that sentences should be served, and so that any relaxation is unjust. My own instincts are, unsurprisingly, fairly straightforwardly British. Is this right or wrong? I don’t know; being exposed to different cultural understandings at least allows me to ask the question, though, rather than simply assuming that what I have grown up with must be right. What is the theological point here? Simply this: words like ‘guilt’ and ‘justice’ are rather central to at least some accounts of the atonement (‘justice’ has wider theological application, of course, not least in theology proper and in discussions of providence). It is rather easy to use these words assuming that we all agree what they mean. We don’t, and if we are to understand each other’s attempts to speak adequately of the salvation of Christ, we need to realise that, and to be sensitive to...

Read More

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...

Read More
get facebook like button