Annunciation and Nativitie

Two sonnets of John Donne, from the series of seven entitled ‘La Corona,’ each of which begins with the last line of the previous poem. Salvation to all that will is nigh; That All, which alwayes is All every where, Which cannot sinne, and yet all sinnes must beare, Which cannot die, yet cannot chuse but die, Loe, faithfull Virgin, yeelds himselfe to lye In prison, in thy wombe; and though he there Can take no sinne, nor thou give, yet he’will weare Taken from thence, flesh, which deaths force may trie. Ere by the spheares time was created, thou Wast in his minde, who is thy Sonne, and Brother; Whom thou conceiv’st, conceiv’d; yet thou art now Thy Makers maker, and thy Fathers mother; Thou’hast light in darke; and shutst in little roome, Immensity cloysterd in thy deare wombe. Immensity cloysterd in thy deare wombe, Now leaves his wellbelov’d imprisonment, There he hath made himselfe to his intent Weake enough, now into our world to come; But Oh, for thee, for him, hath th’Inne no roome? Yet lay him in this stall, and from the Orient, Starres, and wisemen will travel to prevent Th’effect of Herods jealous generall doome. Seest thou, my Soule, with thy faiths eyes, how he Which fills all place, yet none holds him, doth lye? Was not his pity towards thee wondrous high, That would have need to be pittied by thee? Kisse him, and with him into Egypt goe, With his kinde mother, who partakes thy woe. Happy Christmas to all!...

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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...

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Irish Evangelical response to civil partnerships

Glen posted a link to an interesting document produced by the Evangelical Alliance Ireland (an entirely separate organisation from the Evangelical Alliance UK) in response to the current Irish Civil Partnerships Bill. The EAI’s response is well-summed up in the phrase Glen highlights in his blog post: …as followers of a just and compassionate God we can recognise the justice and fairness of providing some legal protection for the reality of both same-sex and opposite-sex cohabiting relationships. As the rest of the document makes clear, the EAI is not softening its commitment to traditional Christian teaching on marriage at all, but arguing that, in a culture where other patterns of family life are now extremely common, it is a matter of justice that the law should recognise this. I find this heartening. Our culture (in Britain – maybe it’s different in Ireland?) seems increasingly to fail to recognise any distinction between ‘I think this is morally wrong’ and ‘I think this should be illegal’. This attitude seems to have infected much Christian commentary on matters of public policy in this country – we have demanded too often that the law be brought into accord with our moral intuitions, without exception or reserve. Evangelicals have probably been worse at this than most. But the Evangelical Alliance movement was born, in 1845-6, out of a desire to protect and extend liberty of conscience and, whilst undoubtedly it was the liberty of people to be evangelicals in majority Roman Catholic countries (such as Ireland) which mainly concerned them, they understood from the first that they could not deny to others the liberty they demanded for themselves. The intuition (first, I am proud to say, articulated by a Baptist, Thomas Helwys, in 1611) that it is the moral duty of government to maintain a studied neutrality on certain matters, and to offer space and protection for its people to live in the way that they might choose, is a natively evangelical one. (This also, incidentally, explains the concern Glen registers in his post – the desire to provide ‘some legal protection’; a standard problem in modern law concerns whose rights trump whose, and the EAI does not want legal protection for cohabiting couples to extend to the making illegal of the moral witness, and the expression of that witness in appropriate ways, of churches, mosques,...

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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...

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