Self-Deception, Self-Negation, and the Voice of the Living God

How do you know you are hearing from God? Because it “rings true” for you? Because the Bible tells you so? In a recent book of essays offering New Perspectives for Evangelical Theology there is a chapter by Simeon Zahl which examines the question of how evangelicals differentiate between the voice of the Holy Spirit and their own – particularly in the area of personal spirituality. Here I would briefly like to highlight his perceptive analysis of the problems involved, but also call into question his conclusion. In the process I hope to raise our awareness of the ways we can get things backward in worship and in devotion and to gesture in the direction of a more rounded – if less self-secure – alternative to his answer.

In this short essay Zahl takes us on a quick walk through Post-Reformational history to make some important observations. Beginning with Martin Luther’s challenge to the authority of the Church on one side and spiritual “enthusiasm” run amok on the other, he explains how Luther tried to solve “the problem of spiritual self-deception” by pointing to the authority of the preached Scriptures. Following this he uses the realities of the Pietist movement to show that the reading of the Bible itself one is not immune to enthusiastic self-deception, and looks to John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards to see how they “tested the spirits” (1 John 4:1) in this regard. With Wesley and Edwards, then, he notes the addition of the criterion of sanctification, which suggests that by discerning whether one is holy or unholy one can discern whether they are being deceived.

For similar reasons, Zahl finds that neither of these criteria fully suffice: The “holiness” criterion is open to self-deception on both the personal and the corporate level. History has shown that one can be right about the Scriptures and yet not be commonly perceived as holy according to wrongly perceived or disproportionately weighted moral standards. With it, the “Scripture principle” criterion is called into question as well: “Feuerbach, Marx and Freud would all critique Wesley and Edwards’ basic hermeneutical optimism in a similar manner. They would argue that although we think we are reading the Word [not to mention our own lives] objectively, really our conclusions are being determined unconsciously by projection, by issues of class and power, or by subterranean neurotic desires and mechanisms” (87).  Zahl doesn’t think we are hopeless against these critiques, however. Instead he rightly points to the faithfulness of God to His Word, namely in the presence of the Holy Spirit who secures the truth and guide us toward it. But how exactly?

Having pinpointed the above problems Zahl opts for a third criterion, which I’ll call the criterion of conviction. For this he borrows from Christoph Blumhardt, who said: “God’s primary way of [guiding people] is through “negative” experiences, in which our guilt and the true limits of our supposed autonomy are made manifest” (89).  The idea is beasically that negative “experiences are less susceptible to deception and co-option than are ‘positive’ personalistic experiences, because they contradict rather than conform to our wills and desires. We are not likely to make them up, to be forging them in our unconscious to meet some secret need, because the Spirit works against the forces unknown to us as well as those that are known” (89). The rule of thumb is that if it sets us in “a comfortable category or pattern of control” then true conviction will confront rather than affirm. The pithy catch-phrase is borrowed from Blumhardt: “Die, so that Jesus may live!”

There is great truth in there, but as a criterion it raises a few questions. For one, doesn’t it assume that we will only deceive ourselves positively, and never negatively? What about the observable realities of our own evangelical experiences where in both our personal devotions and pulpit altar calls we have become experts at conjuring up guilty and fearful self-negations in order to contrive our own positive results? Zahl acknowledges that there is such a thing as a “masochistic appreciation of negativity” which uses a negative self-assessment as “a veiled or indirect” route to a “‘positive’ experience” of our own making (89), but he wants to be clear that he is talking about “negative experiences of the Spirit” and not about mere self-negation. But that’s the thing: Doesn’t that beg the question he started with? How do we tell the difference?

The problem with an approach like this (which I think is rather common), is that it throws us back into introspection precisely where it proposes to transcend it. In order to tell if we are hearing from God we have to be able to discern if it goes against our will. Thus everything hinges on how well we know ourselves; on whether we can tell our corrupted will from our better inclinations. But we’re right back where we started! We have to figure out where we are self-deceived so we can hear God confronting our self-deception with the truth. We can even develop a kind of need for self-negation which itself can distort reality and become a self-help tool in our hands. Not only that, but with those hands we can also distort God’s self-revelation. After all, if God’s glory is seen in our negation, our picture of God begins to take the form of a film-negative. Good starts to mean little more than not bad. And to top it off we suggest that we need our sin and guilt to know this diminished god.

Zahl doesn’t mean to recommend this, of course. He himself notes that too often “preachers and pastors believe it is their role to be the “convictor” of sin,” and thus usurp most dangerously the role of the Spirit.” But I would argue that this is exactly where we end up when we turn to a negative criteria for hearing the voice of God. We rightly counter cheap grace with a focus on the cross, but in the process forget that Jesus rose triumphant over sin and death. So we say things like: “God is present personally and affectively in our life, but first and foremost in our darkness and our difficulties, because of the degree of our basic opposition to him and interest in ourselves that persists (to whatever degree) in the Christian life” (90, emphasis mine). There is truth there, but we get it twisted backwards. We make the darkness definitive for seeing the light when what we need (and what Zahl actually intends to recommend) is for the light to penetrate our darkness. Unfortunately, the imposition of a criterion for hearing God – even a negative one – dilutes the freedom and sovereignty of God’s Word in this regard.

So do I have a better answer? How do we differentiate the Spirit’s voice from our own? I think the problem with this article – besides that it looks for a criterion where only an ever-reforming faith will do – is that it stays on the level of the personal, and so throws out the “Scripture” criterion with the bathwater of individualism and delusional excitability. I would argue that a firmer location of Scripture reading and discernment in the life of the Church might be a way of re-harnassing the Bible’s proper mode of authority. History has certainly shown that a fixed institutional authority is as hazardous a criterion as any other, but that’s not the only option here. What we need is to render ourselves open and attentive to the living and active Word of God which is intent on being heard in the community. We need to come together to “test the spirits”, reform our readings, and commit to one another for the humble road of both discerning and obeying the voice of God in the day to day life of this world. Perhaps in this there is less personal certainty, but is that such a bad thing? Actually, one might argue that if this dynamic of mutual discipleship is allowed to settle into self-made criteria of any kind it might make us feel more secure in our convictions precisely at the expense of the Lord we aim to follow.

 

Barth on the Relative Authority of the Church

A curious aspect of the conservative Evangelical critique of Karl Barth concerns his views on ecclesial authority — particularly as expressed in the creeds and confessions of the ancient church. Of course Barth does not reject these, by any means. Indeed, he seeks to engage in the task of theology in the sphere of the church’s historical witness. But he does regard the confessions as bearing relative and not absolute authority. This gives us insight both into Barth’s doctrine of Scripture and an inconsistency in some Evangelical positions.

The authority of the church is mediate in relation to Holy Scripture, according to Barth:

It has and exercises it by refraining from any direct appeal to Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit in support of its words and attitudes and decisions, by not trying to speak out as though it were infallible and final, but by subordinating itself to Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit in the form in which Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit is actually present and gracious to it, that is, in His attestation by the prophets and apostles, in the differentiation from its own witness conditioned by its written nature. Therefore, it has and exercises it in the concrete humility which consists in the recognition that in Holy Scripture it has over it everywhere and always and in every respect its Lord and Judge: in the incompleteness of its own knowing and acting and speaking which that involves, in the openness to reformation through the Word of God which constantly confronts it in Holy Scripture. It is in this way, in this concrete subordination to the Word of God, that it has and exercises genuine authority. (Church Dogmatics I/2, p. 586)

Barth is often criticized for having a low view of the nature of Scripture — that it is “mere” witness to God’s revelation, and not revelatory itself. (See this post for a bit more on this topic.) What we see here is that Barth’s view of the function of Scripture (read: its authority for believers) is, in fact, quite high. From its sermons and teachings to its theology, from its worship to its sacramental practice and its mission in the world, the church stands under the authority of Holy Scripture. It cannot do an end-run around the Bible and appeal to Jesus Christ or the Holy Spirit in any form other than the one in which they present themselves to us.

But the church’s speech, including its historic creeds, is derivative of this.  In short, the church only speaks truth in the formulation of dogma insofar as it is faithfully explicating the Word of God in Scripture. The standard by which the rightness of doctrine — or “orthodoxy” — is to be measured is ultimately not the creeds but the Scripture to which they point. This was the view of the Reformers. The creeds and confessions of the tradition do play a regulative role, of course, but this role is largely sociological.

Barth, then, ought to be judged an “orthodox” Christian theologian insofar as he gets Scripture right, and finally on no other basis. Scripture in turn is to be read and interpreted in the community of faith, and so the question of Barth’s relation to the ecclesial tradition is an important question for students of his thought to consider. But the relation of these two authorities, Scripture and the church, must be properly ordered.

It’s curious that the way Barth has related these two, Scripture and creed (or tradition), further exposes an inconsistency in some conservative Evangelical viewpoints.  Those who reject Barth’s doctrine of Scripture often further criticize him as heterodox, as unfaithful to the confessions of the historic church — and instead “liberal,” an inheritor of Kant and Schleiermacher who simply dresses up his heterodoxy in the language of the ancient church.  In this way the critics themselves, however, betray the disorder in their own view of Scripture and ecclesial authority.  The confessions (whether Nicaea and Chalcedon, or Dordt and Westminster) are accepted as true to Scripture without further criticism — one must submit to them at all points — with the result that the Bible is read in their light rather than vice versa.

Only Barth’s position — that the confessions have a relative authority and therefore ought to be subjected again and again to a fresh hearing of the Word of God in the Bible — maintains the proper order between Scripture and tradition.  The creeds derive from Scripture and so are under the continual authority of Scripture, and they function in this order in their use by the church (including its task of theological reflection).  This requires that the church remain open to reformation, Barth says — i.e. a reconsideration of its creeds in light of the witness of the Word of God in Holy Scripture.  This is the church’s orientation of “concrete humility” to the Word of God.

 

Lazy Liberalism

It seems that the more enlightened we theologians get, the easier it becomes to dump criticism on the traditions from which we came/come. For the four of us here at Out of Bounds, that tends to be North American conservative evangelicalism, and on that score, it seems like there’s always something out there for us to complain about and/or modify to the satisfaction of our newly sophisticated theological palettes. Yet I was reminded recently that there’s more to theological criticism than publicly dealing with our daddy issues. In fact, if we deign only to open our eyes, we will surely discover that there’s a whole world of non-evangelical awfulness to criticise!

Case in point: at a church service I attended recently (church and preacher to remain anonymous), I was reminded that frustratingly bad theology comes in liberal varieties just as well as conservative ones. The text for the homily is incidental, but the basic gist of the message went something like this: What a shame that the church is so hopelessly fractured. The reason for this is biblical fundamentalism. The key to unity, then, is to expel fundamentalism from the church and to embrace instead an approach which locates ecclesial authority in “Jesus” rather than Scripture. Once this is done, we will finally realise that Jesus, unlike Scripture, affirms our deepest intuitions about what being a Christian should mean today (= accepting homosexuality).

Right. Well, not to mention the fact that this is actually one of the more divisive sermons I’ve heard, let’s pause for a moment and reflect on the completely a-theological reasoning present in this exposition. To be sure, I have absolutely no qualms about having a serious discussion about any of the topics raised here, for instance: the unity of the church, the errors of woodenly literal exegesis (and its practical consequences), the locus of ecclesial authority, the relationship between Jesus and Scripture, and human sexuality. But none of these issues were really treated in this sermon. Instead, the warrant for the “argument” is essentially this: the assumption that you are pretty much like the preacher. This, folks, is “lazy liberalism,” and it is perpetuated by gathering a bunch of like-minded contemporary people together and projecting their collective values onto this shadowy figure who supposedly preached in Galilee a couple of thousand years ago.

Lazy liberalism offends me on several levels. Obviously, as one who’s sat at the foot of Barth for several years, it offends me because there is simply no space for any kind of prophetic interruption. There is no judgment, no strangeness, and no encounter. In short, it’s just a big, Guardian-reading love-fest designed to make people feel good about themselves (here’s an experiment: if you are reading this and you are homosexual, try shooting a liberal preacher the thumbs up from your pew next Sunday—I guarantee it will make their year). To the contrary, however, it’s my belief that good preaching should ignite hope, and hope endures precisely because it promises something which is unlike anything we’re currently experiencing. It’s a vision of God’s future, and that future by definition interrupts the present. Consequently, good preaching should offer comfort by making us feel increasingly uncomfortable.

But there’s another reason why lazy liberalism offends me, and that is, it’s a blight to the fine tradition of genuinely Christian thinking once termed “theological liberalism.”

I’ve occasionally heard conservatives identify any theology as “liberal” which generally seeks “to culturally acquit” Christianity. But this idea is obviously much too broad (not to mention pejorative) because it enables people to class all manner of flaky contemporary liberals with some of the giants of the modern theological tradition. Yes, the classic liberals were acutely concerned to take stock of contemporary culture and learning, but this posture was a far cry from the type of passive accommodationism of today’s backyard garden liberal. So, for instance, when Albrecht Ritschl set himself to the task of reconfiguring Christian theology for his age, he didn’t simply commend his view as the “progressive option” over against a stodgy traditionalism. No, he produced a meticulously-researched three-volume work which seriously engaged Scripture and tradition before even getting to the matter of a contemporary statement. And when the work of construction actually did begin, the criterion for success was not simply Ritchl’s ability to produce a “Christianity for his age” (despite Barth’s incredulity on this point), but a genuine penetration into what he believed was the essence of the Christian religion. As he put it: “Theology has performed its task when, guided by the Christian idea of God and the conception of men’s blessedness in the Kingdom of God, it exhibits completely and clearly, both as a whole and in particular, the Christian view of the world and of human life, together with the necessity which belongs to the interdependent relationships between its component relationships” (The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, vol. III, p. 24).

Now that’s the kind of liberalism which invites serious interaction, both by fellow liberals and by conservatives. Whatever you make of Ritschl’s theology, you must at least agree that he was obsessed with an incredibly significant question, namely: what is the real meaning of the phenomenon of Christianity? But what can I say to this preacher whom I mentioned above? This preacher offered no argument, displayed no consistency of thought, and presented no means of access to his/her vision of Christianity other than simply being like him/her already. I mean, I’m an open-minded guy, and in truth, I can think of no reason not to listen carefully and charitably to all sorts of theologies. In fact, in my view, all of us Christians generally need each other if we’re truly interested in getting to the heart of this strange matter that seems to have gripped us each alike. But I simply can’t deal with this flaky liberal stuff. In fact, I’d be willing to speculate that it’s not so much the fundamentalists that have led to the current cultural stalemate in the church, but laziness. And laziness, unfortunately, is a malady which seems to have stricken fundamentalists and liberals in equal measure.

 

Actualism: Discussion On Barth and Theological Ontology

Yesterday’s post evaluating Cornelius Van Til’s criticisms of Karl Barth’s theology quickly led to a discussion on actualism and theological ontology, and how Barth’s very approach to the theological task differs from what has been called “essentialism” or “classical metaphysics.”  In the interest of preserving the other post’s comment thread for any conversation that might emerge on the post’s main points, I’m abusing my privilege as moderator to spin us off to a new thread.

To kick us off, David Congdon, PhD student in systematic theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, has allowed me to repost his explanatory comment. This follows on his December post on the topic at his blog, The Fire and the Rose. Thanks to David, and welcome to you as our first de facto guest blogger at Out of Bounds.

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It seems I need to write a much longer post on actualistic ontology (AO), since the confusion about it appears widespread and extreme. I’ll do what I can at the moment (and under a lot of stress regarding other responsibilities).

First, let’s clear up some misunderstandings:

1. AO is not a system. It is not in itself a new philosophy or ontology alongside other philosophies and ontologies. The word “ontology” here is thus misleading.

2. AO is not the starting-point but the conclusion. Neither Barth nor Jüngel nor McCormack begins with AO. It is simply a way of describing the kind of theology implied in Barth’s explication of the gospel.

These misunderstandings aside, let’s try to establish what AO actually is:

1. AO is first and foremost an issue of theological epistemology. How do we come to a true knowledge of God? Barth here makes some axiomatic decisions that necessarily conflict with “classical metaphysics,” so there will not be mutual understanding about AO until there is first a mutual understanding about these axiomatic decisions. What decisions are these? Fundamentally, there is just one decision that takes multiple forms. I will describe this decision in the following way: “Jesus Christ is the sole and exclusive self-revelation of God.” Barth grounds this axiom in passages like the prologue to John’s Gospel, where the Son is understood as the only one who knows the Father and who has made the Father known. This axiom has a number of crucial implications for Barth, which we can list as follows:

(a) As self-revelation, God’s communication to the world is a personal event. It is not the communication of ideas about God, but rather the communication of God’s own being and reality. Revelation is self-communication.

(b) The object of theology is an event in history, i.e., the reality of God — and thus the reality of the gospel of our reconciliation — takes place as an event in the contingent historical occurrence of Jesus. (This is obviously a massive implication.)

(c) Knowledge of God is determined or normed by the event of God in Jesus Christ.

(d) Knowledge of God is also an event. Epistemology is the subjective correlate of the objective event of reconciliation. True knowledge of God happens as the Spirit of Christ awakens us to faith, which is a true knowledge of who God is and who we are in Christ.

Thus far, these implications set forth the basic conditions for Barth’s christocentric method in theology. Other than an implied aspect of (b), I have not yet made the explicit turn to AO. In order to make that move, we need one additional axiom: “God’s essence and existence are identical.” The essence=existence axiom is a classical aspect of medieval metaphysics. The crucial difference is methodological. Where the classical metaphysicians presupposed a definition of the divine essence (immutable, impassible, simple, etc.), Barth proposes to let’s God’s existence define God’s essence. Instead of trying to figure out how to connect what God has done in history with this assumed definition of what is divine (hence the convoluted mess of the Chalcedonian Definition), Barth proceeds by letting God’s self-revelation (i.e., God’s existence) determine what we can and cannot say about God’s being or essence. In short, God is what God does. Implications:

(a) God does revelation. Ergo: God is revelation.

(b) Revelation is (the event of) Jesus Christ. Ergo: God is (the event of) Jesus Christ.

(c) Ergo: actualistic ontology.

I’m sure this raises more questions than answers, but I hope this helps get at some of the issues at play here.

 

Revelation and History: Cornelius Van Til’s Critique of Karl Barth

This past November the crew at ReformedForum.org dedicated a pair of podcasts to discussing Karl Barth’s theology, its critique by Cornelius Van Til, and the new book that has emerged from the 2007 Barth Conference at Princeton Seminary — Karl Barth and American Evangelicalism (Eerdmans, 2011). (A third podcast on this topic was published a year earlier.) Thanks to Bobby Grow for pointing these out.)  Host Camden Bucey and guest James Cassidy (an OPC pastor and PhD student at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia) do a fine job of treating a delicate set of issues with tact and grace, and ask the right questions about how the decades-old conversation between Barthians and Van Tilians might move forward.

As convinced students of Van Til, however, they perpetuate a number of false understandings about Barth’s theological project.  I’d like to address the central issue they draw out in these two shows: Barth’s understanding of the relationship between divine revelation and history.  Cassidy is right in saying that everything hinges on this point: if Van Til is right about Barth, then Barth has divorced divine activity from creaturely history in a way that is disastrous for the whole of the Christian confession (and I’ll voluntarily turn in my Barth Badge and start reading Van Til and Vos).  But if the critique is wrong, and if Barth is right about the way in which God has disclosed Himself to creatures, then every theological locus as it has traditionally been done must be re-thought from the ground up.  To do so, of course, was Barth’s “christocentric” project.

A great deal rests on this debate, particularly with respect to Barth’s reception and legacy in American Evangelicalism. Van Til was one of Barth’s earliest interpreters in English, and his damning judgments continue to hold sway in some circles. In what follows I will begin with a very short discussion of Barth’s doctrine of Scripture with respect to Kant’s critique of knowledge, and then pick up Van Til’s critique that Barth effectively removes the Christ event from the sphere of human history.  (For the sake of this post I’m relying on Cassidy’s summary of Van Til.) I’ll have some things to say there about Barth’s actualistic ontology, where I believe Barth must be properly understood if any accurate account of his theology is to be rendered.  Finally, I will conclude with a modest suggestion on how disagreements over the accuracy of Van Til’s critique should be adjudicated.

Epistemology and Scripture

Cassidy is right that Barth took deeply seriously Immanuel Kant’s critique of knowledge.  As Barth read the liberal Protestant tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, theirs was largely an effort to account for the possibility of true knowledge of God — i.e. to find a way around or through Kant’s critique or, alternatively, to falsify it. The gauntlet had been thrown down, and Christian theology could not simply continue on its merry way without responding.  Kant had, I think, undercut the very epistemology to which the Van Til school is appealing: a pre-modern fideism of the Bible as a received, objective account of God.  (Here the underlying epistemology believes that it has escaped Kant’s critique by way of its doctrine of inspiration, that God Himself created a written document of revelation and passed it across the gap to us, so that we can know true things about Him. I’ll have to leave a full critique of the modern fundamentalist epistemology aside in the interests of the topic at hand.)

Barth saw Friedrich Schleiermacher as suggesting what he thought was the only viable way through Kant’s critique: feeling, the discovery of one’s God-consciousness as the presence of God with men and women.  “Knowledge” was, to put it crudely, relocated from the head to the heart.  Though schooled in this tradition Barth would ultimately come to reject it, as has been well documented.  But he still faced the problem of Kant: How can theologians say anything true about God?

Like Van Til’s school Barth, too, turned to Scripture. But because he was already thinking christocentrically, his doctrine of inspiration does not match that which is held by modern American fundamentalists.  Again, Barth’s doctrine of Scripture has been well documented, and Cassidy gets it broadly right: the Bible is a human witness to God’s revelation, which is singularly located in the event of Jesus Christ. But he is wrong to suggest that Barth thereby “denies that the Bible is revelation itself” — if by this he means that the Bible is not the authoritative Word of God that discloses God’s history, will, and plan for salvation.

What Cassidy’s brief account is missing is the agency of the Holy Spirit, by means of which Scripture becomes the Word of God (and Barth means that!) ever anew for us.  This is not mere pious rhetoric, hanging on to the Bible for sentiment or tactical expediency.  (Barth is explicating his doctrine of the Word according to Heinrich Bullinger’s three forms of the Word of God in the the Second Helvetic Confession — certainly some solid Reformed credentials.) Scripture really is the authoritative Word of God, and in this sense it is “revelation.” But it is revelation in a different way. Scripture is divine disclosure in that it tells us things about God, by means of the Holy Spirit’s accommodating use of the testimony of the prophets and apostles; but only the incarnation of the Son of God reveals God Himself.

But (and this is key) Scripture is revelatory in such a way that it never becomes a possession of the creature, as in a textual artifact to be objectively studied (for example, with the tools of historical criticism — which is why Barth finds the question of the “historical Jesus” theologically uninteresting).  Instead, though the words of the Bible are fixed, our relationship with it is one of “standing under” (profoundly so, pace Cassidy).  We do not have “direct” access to God’s revelation in this fashion, not because this is not to be found in Scripture, but because the pages of the biblical text do not “contain” it in the strictest sense of that word. The true Word of God is living and active, coming to us in Scripture and proclamation both to afflict us and to comfort us.

The text is therefore a tool in the service of the on-going work of the Holy Spirit, who uses it to disclose to us God’s authoritative self-revelation in Jesus Christ.  But we rely on the Spirit for that nourishment, and never objectively possess it of ourselves.  In both Scripture and the proclamation of the church that Spirit is encountering us — and the revelation of God is in the encounter, the present event of giving, and not the medium itself. Therein lies all the difference between Barth’s doctrine of Scripture and that of conservative American Evangelicalism.

The result is that Barth has a view of Scripture that matches the fundamentalists in the authority and reliability it ascribes to the Bible (though one may wish to give a different reckoning of the nature and source of this “authority”).  He simply gets there by another route.

Revelation In History

The central critique of Barth’s theology leveled by Van Til that Cassidy still believes sticks relates to the historical nature of revelation.  If Barth identifies God’s self-disclosure strictly with the Christ event (rather than in the plurality of creation, Jesus Christ, and Holy Scripture), just what does he mean by that?  What is the “event” and where does it take place that we might have access to it?

It seems a given that God’s self-disclosure must take place in history (what Cassidy calls “real, calendar time” — not just “history” as some abstract concept, as it has been construed and reappropriated by some German idealists).  It must touch our reality at some point, in other words.  If, as creatures, we are to receive and to recognize God in God’s acts, they must take place in the sphere of our created existence — i.e. in history.  Otherwise we can only be told about them — in which case it is this disclosure of the acts of God, and not the acts themselves, that are revelatory.  Because fundamentalists (I use that term generally and not pejoratively) hold to the Bible as “direct revelation,” and because they affirm natural theology (God’s self-disclosure in the created order, such as the imago Dei), Cassidy suggests, they are able to affirm the requisite historicality of revelation.  The life of Jesus, the authorship of the Bible and the church’s inheritance of it, and the imprint of God upon creation all take place in history.

According to Van Til, however, Barth cut this cord.  Revelation does not take place in history, but above and outside of it.  The event of Jesus Christ, as the event of God’s self-disclosure, is a “transcendent event,” as Cassidy puts it.  The man Jesus Christ precedes even Adam — not only as the eternal Son of God, but as a man.  Thus the eternal Jesus has already been given and received in God’s time for us — outside of and before human history, and therefore apart from us.  The work of Christ in atoning for sin and reconciling creatures to God, and the application of that work to individuals, is collapsed into a single, transcendent event.  This event, says Cassidy, “is not history.  It’s not our time, not our calendar time.  It’s not God’s eternal time.  But it is some kind of transcendent in-between — [a] tertium quid.  It is a tertium quid.” (Cassidy is working with what Barth says about God’s time and our time in CD I/2, §14.1.)

As Cassidy writes further in the comments thread following the podcast, for Barth “the creator and the creature not only do not meet at any point, but they cannot meet at any point. … We are still rendered separate from Jesus Christ. The best we can hope for is a witness to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. But Jesus Christ is himself inaccessible to us.”  Barth does not account for any “direct revelation” from God to creatures — natural theology is flatly denied, Scripture is relegated to the status of mere witness, and Jesus himself remains historically inaccessible, available to us only in a transcendent moment beyond history. And so Barth finally can’t trust the Bible sitting before him as a revelatory text.  The theologian must fall back on his own rational intuition to say anything about God, but because he has no direct source of revelation he cannot know if what he says is right.  God remains transcendent and we are unable to know Him.

This is a catastrophically false reading of Barth’s mature theology.  It would be akin to calling Martin Luther a Papist or Charles Hodge a raving Schleiermacherian liberal.  The notion of an ahistorical Christ event is deeply opposed to Barth’s most basic theological commitments.

Like the tradition before him, Barth insists that the life and work of Jesus Christ took place in the sphere of human history — an act of God not only with us, but as one of us.  This is “the Christ event” — the history in which God the Son entered into time, was born of the Virgin Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate, dead and buried, and raised from the dead.  This took place in history and had to take place in history.  In describing “eternity,” Barth says, we should be careful not to de-historicize it; eternity is not timelessness, nor infinite time, but instead comprehends time (without being exhausted by it):

If we try to cling to the idea of a divine eternity that is purely timeless, we must be careful that we are not compelled to deny both God’s revelation and reconciliation in Jesus Christ, and also the triune being of God revealed and active in them.¹

Barth is aware, then, of the sort of pitfall into which Van Til is convinced he falls. Revelation and reconciliation take place in time, even if the divine decision of election to which they correspond is eternal. The incarnation is an historical happening, as the orthodox tradition has always confessed:

If we say Jesus Christ, we also assert a human and therefore temporal presence. Every moment of the event of Jesus Christ is also a temporal moment, i.e., a present with a past behind it and a future in front of it, like the temporal moments in the sequence of which we exist ourselves. ‘The Word became flesh’ also means ‘the Word became time.’ … [Revelation is] a temporal reality. So it is not a sort of ideal, yet in itself timeless content of all or some times. It does not remain transcendent over time, it does not merely meet it at a point, but it enters time; nay, it assumes time; nay, it creates time for itself.”²

The issue for Barth is not whether this event is historical, but whether it is accessible to us, and if so, how. According to Barth, revelation “does not become a predicate of history in that God reveals Himself through the medium of history. God remains ontologically distinct (or ‘other’) than the various media He takes up in revealing Himself.”³ One result of this is that the event of Jesus Christ is not subject to the control of historical-critical inquiry.  (The distinction Barth makes between Historie and Geschichte, as well as his use of Saga and his relationship with Rudolf Bultmann, commonly lead his unsympathetic critics in the wrong direction — particularly when reading him uncarefully and in translation.)  This is the problem of Gotthold Lessing’s “broad, ugly ditch” — that historical events are so remote from us today that we cannot trust that we really know about them with certainty. Where history is taken to be the sphere of God’s self-disclosure (as in Christianity), the problem diagnosed by Lessing becomes all the more acute.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries this problem prompted fundamentalists to dig in and defend the accuracy of the Bible on historical grounds.  The ditch is overcome, Evangelicals suggest, by virtue of 1) the historical proximity of the witnesses to the events; 2) divine inspiration of the accounts rendered, since God is not subject to the same divide between historical events and our contemporaneity; and 3) presumably, the preservation of these accounts by means of the Holy Spirit’s interaction with redactors, copyists, and finally the church and her ecumenical councils that established the canon.  With respect to Holy Scripture as God’s “direct revelation” the fundamentalist account is not so simple and straight-forward, then, but requires these dominoes to be set up in precisely the right way and to remain standing. Otherwise, the reliability of the Bible as a point of direct divine encounter is suspect (granting, for the moment, that the very presence of redactors, copyists, and a canonizing church do not count as mediating factors between the speaking God and His hearing people).  This is because fundamentalists accept Lessing’s critique as a real problem (unlike that of Kant), though the event of revelation is not just historical but historically past (revelation takes place as the books of the Bible are written down under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and not — or not so much — in the more subjective moment of the church’s hearing of Scripture).

There is an interesting aside in Bucey and Cassidy’s discussion with respect to the revelation that does take place in Jesus Christ. Cassidy suggests that, for the Van Til school, this revelation has an eschatological character. I could be misreading between the lines and would appreciate a fuller explication of this point, but my guess is that this is an attempt to retain Christ as a locus of divine revelation while still accounting for the problem of historical remoteness suggested by Lessing. How can this man, who lived 2,000 years ago, be an objective source of the knowledge of God for you and me today? Of course, we believe that what the authors of Scripture recorded about him are true. But this encounter between us and this “direct” revelation in Jesus is mediated by the text (that is, by a different form of revelation). How can we have a direct, unmediated encounter with Jesus Christ? In the eschaton, when we see him face to face, when we know him even as we are known by him (1 Cor. 13:12). If this is indeed the explanation Cassidy or Van Til would give for the fact that Jesus is a direct revelation now absent from our immediate access, I would ask: Is this what Calvin and the Reformers believed? Is our personal encounter with God in Jesus Christ strictly an eschatological reality? Or is it also mediated through the church and the work of the Holy Spirit, here and now? Does the Spirit not unite us to Christ? Does He not raise us up in the sacrament to where Christ is? This existential communio Christi is the only true “transcendent” quality of the Christ event, and it is the real locus of our encounter with the Lord.

With those two digressions registered, let’s move forward with the debate over whether or not Barth believes that God reveals Himself in history. The quotations above clearly show that he does. Cassidy also recognizes that Barth scholars are arguing that Barth does, in fact, believe just this — that God reveals Himself in history, and not in some transcendent sphere.  Specifically, he’s interacting with Bruce McCormack’s afterword on Van Til in Karl Barth and American Evangelicalism. McCormack argues that the distinction Van Til draws between history and a transcendent “primal history” is not present in Barth but is a distinction largely of Van Til’s own creation.⁴ Yet, in the face of this sharp claim, Cassidy only manages to reiterate the Van Til line:

But we have to remember that according to Karl Barth revelation did not take place between the years 1 and 30 A.D. Revelation takes place … in the transcendent event of Jesus Christ. And Jesus Christ is not ‘Jesus of Nazareth,’ understand. Jesus Christ, according to Karl Barth, existed before Adam. Jesus Christ is the revealing God and the receiving man [in the 'tertium quid' that is neither God's time nor our time, but God's time for us].

For Karl Barth, revelation does not take place in real, calendar time. That’s his whole point. Karl Barth is concerned to take God out of our grasp, as it were.

Cassidy has thus read and dismissed the analysis of one of the world’s leading Barth scholars⁵ because he is already convinced that he is wrong. While McCormack’s essay sets out to prove Van Til’s interpretation false, the response is that McCormack must be wrong because Van Til’s reading is right. Not because McCormack has misunderstood Van Til, or because Van Til has a critical insight that Barthians have not engaged. Revelation is ahistorical for Barth, therefore when a Barth scholar claims that the opposite is true, it is he who must be missing something.

Christocentrism and Jesus’ Relation to Time

Finally, Cassidy derides Barth’s radical christocentrism on the grounds that, because Barth regards the existence of the man Jesus Christ as eternal (and thus true man, existing before Adam), the theological loci of creation, humanity, etc. are reduced to zero.  There is no doctrine of man as a creature of God, only man as Jesus Christ — and no doctrine of creation, only of Jesus Christ as creator and creature.  This Cassidy identifies as Barth’s “christo-monism.”  Thus Barth’s greatest strength is also his great weakness: when everything is interpreted in the light of Jesus, other doctrines are left with no autonomy.

There is an important critique here with respect to the systematic ordering and balance of doctrines.  But the way in which Cassidy makes it, I believe, rests upon a failure to understand the nature of what McCormack has identified as Barth’s actualistic ontology.  Barth regards the eternal ‘moment’ of God’s decision and the historical moment of its realization as existing in a dialectical relationship; so the promise of God to enter into covenant and save men and women from their sin is eternally true (it will take place), and as it is enacted it is temporally true (it has taken place).  Are we therefore saved by God in eternity, or in time?  This is somewhat like asking a good Calvinist when she was “saved” — the day she accepted Jesus, or 2,000 years ago on the cross (or when God predestined her in Christ before the foundation of the world, Eph. 1:4-5)?  Barth’s ontology suggests that both statements are true, but more accurately they are true only together — in their relationship of promise and fulfillment.

Actualism is also a post for another day. The point is that a proper understanding of Barth’s ontology clarifies a great deal of that to which Cassidy (via Van Til) is objecting.  God does not relate to time in the same way that creatures relate to time. As the Son of God, Jesus Christ relates to time from the eternal point of view — that of the Creator; and as Son of Man, we might say that his relation to time is “temporally determined.” The sense in which Jesus Christ is “before Adam” is not as the Logos incarnatus or ensarkos but as the Logos incarnandus — that is, in the mode of anticipation of the incarnation that takes place in time.  This is real for the being of the eternal Son — but it is not so without the corresponding moment of its actualization. With respect to revelation, then, because God is its subject it must come into history from without.⁶

We see, then, that Barth’s Christology and the theological ontology that undergirds it are not “transcendent” and do not exclude history, or include it only incidentally.  Rather history — our real, calendar time — is fundamentally necessary to Barth’s thought because it is the sphere in which the very being of God is actualized according to God’s free intention.  History, with the rest of creation, is the outer basis of the covenant, the sphere of God’s work of redemption, and without it God would not be the God He is.

Not only, then, are we to reject the thesis that on Barth’s reckoning the Christ event is not historical — but, in fact, it is more radically historical than perhaps anything that had come before (including federal Calvinism).

Interpretive Disagreement and the Legacy of Karl Barth

It is clear that a great deal of the impasse between these two sides stretches across matters of theological epistemology, the nature of history, and the doctrine of inspiration and the ontology of Holy Scripture.  Further work needs to be done in this area with respect to both Barth and Van Til, and the one’s criticisms of the other.  Will Van Tilians be able to acknowledge that Barth’s views in this area — even if they differ radically from their own — do not exclude him from the boundaries of Christian orthodoxy?  What is it that Barth has anchoring his theological epistemology, if he does not have an inerrant text handed down by God? Can revelation remain indirect, veiled, and still be God’s authentic self-disclosure? And does Barth actually use Scripture in a different way in engaging the task of dogmatics?

There is a way forward for conversation between the students of Van Til and Barth, as Cassidy and Bucey suggest. They rightly observe at the close of the discussion that the central issue here is simply whether or not Van Til’s critique of Barth is right or wrong.  Clearly my argument is that he is wrong. But beyond other texts I could muster from the Church Dogmatics to make my case (in a much, much longer post), the fact remains that no serious Barth scholar I have ever encountered, English- or German-speaking, has reaffirmed Van Til’s reading as accurate — outside of the fundamentalist tradition that is predisposed to oppose Barth (primarily because of his doctrine of inspiration).  Barth’s theology is vulnerable at a number of points, and there are significant disagreements among Barthians themselves; but the Van Til critique is not one of them. That this critique has now reached a third generation of students unchecked is a serious pedagogical oversight.

How does one judge whether one theologian’s critique of another is right or wrong?  Most obviously, read the figure whose work is under scrutiny carefully and as much without prejudice as we can manage — on his own terms, as Cassidy says — and see if the claims stack up.  Then secondarily, I suggest, see what the experts on that figure think.  If the overwhelming consensus in the secondary literature is that the critic is misreading his subject, that ought to count for a lot in a world of peer-reviewed scholarship.  (Cassidy suggests at the end of the second discussion that there is a lot in Barth scholarship today that does vindicate Van Til’s reading.⁷  This bibliography needs to be put forth and subjected to scrutiny.) The very best examples of theological understanding take place where each side can say, “They understand what we believe. They don’t agree with it, but at least they have shown that they understand it rightly.” I hope that as much can be said about my evaluation here. Those who continue to maintain Van Til’s critique of Barth without engaging the critical scholarship within Barth studies embody the opposite ethic.  When the world’s leading scholars agree that Van Til simply didn’t understand Barth, that should be taken seriously and engaged on the textual level.

I’m calling on students of Cornelius Van Til, then — and particularly on the faculty and students at Westminster Theological Seminary — to read Barth and sympathetic Barth scholarship alongside Van Til, and to include this in classroom assignments and bibliographies; to work toward an understanding of Barth’s theological project more nuanced than Van Til himself accomplished, which includes reading across the entirety of Barth’s corpus (in particular, redressing a neglect of CD III and IV) and attending to his theological development as well as to the current secondary literature; and to subject these findings to scholarly peer review and allow them to be altered.

Karl Barth does, in fact, have a rock-solid anchor to his epistemology. Unlike Van Til, it isn’t the event of God’s inspiration of texts — it is God’s revealing and reconciling appearance in history in Jesus Christ.  This is the truth to which those inspired scriptures themselves attest. And it is a gospel no Christian should be ashamed to confess.

Notes:

1. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1, p. 618.
2. Barth, CD I/2, p. 50 (emphasis mine).
3. Bruce L. McCormack, “Afterword: Reflections on Van Til’s Critique of Karl Barth,” Karl Barth and American Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2011), p. 373.
4. See ibid, p. 377.
5. In his review of McCormack’s Orthodox and Modern Cassidy himself states that “McCormack has time and again proven himself a deft interpreter and pedagogue of a system of theology that evades the comprehension of even the most astute and sympathetic disciples of the dialectician.” Westminster Theological Journal 71 no 1 (2009), p. 236. McCormack, says Cassidy, is one Barthian who allows Barth to be Barth in all his radicalness.
6. McCormack, p. 374.
7. A hint of this thesis is also in Cassidy’s review of Orthodox and Modern, where he suggests that McCormack agrees with a thesis put forth by Van Til in The New Modernism (1946) that Barth’s theology is in continuity with Schleiermacherian liberalism and did not, in fact, make a break with it. See Cassidy, pp. 236-7. That Cassidy has McCormack in mind with these comments is also evident in an October 1, 2010 podcast, where he shows simply that McCormack and Van Til agree that Barth was influenced by the “modern epistemology” of Kant. This Cassidy takes as a vindication of Van Til’s critique as a whole, as if the modernist quality of Barth’s thought was alone sufficient to justify fundamentalism’s reconciling him to the dust bin of theological history.

While it is true that Barth is engaged with the challenge presented by Kant’s critique (as is the whole of contemporary theology, save those who simply ignore it), and that McCormack demonstrates elements of Barth’s thought that locate him in a “Schleiermacherian tradition” broadly construed, it is false to caricature this simply as the sort of “liberalism” opposed by Van Til. See further: Bruce L. McCormack, “What Has Basel to Do with Berlin? Continuities in the Theologies of Barth and Schleiermacher,” Orthodox and Modern (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), pp. 63-88; and “Revelation and History in Transfoundationalist Perspective: Karl Barth’s Theological Epistemology in Conversation with a Schleiermacherian Tradition,” ibid, pp. 21-40. The content of McCormack’s essay on the Van Til thesis (see n. 1) is sufficient evidence that he cannot be counted as one Barth scholar who countenances Van Til’s reading.

Nevertheless, though I disagree with many of its interpretive conclusions, I should also point to Cassidy’s 2009 essay as a first step forward in an engagement with the Van Til thesis viz. what Barth and contemporary Barth scholars actually say. See Cassidy, “Election and Trinity,” Westminster Theological Journal 71 (2009): pp. 53-81. This provides plenty of conversational fodder for future engagement. Cassidy’s central thesis in the more recently published podcasts, however — that Barth removes the Christ event from history — is not (overtly) presented or defended in this essay.

 

Tinker, Tailor, Complementarian, Egalitarian: Looking at our Labels Again

As my denomination approaches yet another bi-annual General Assembly in which the biblically debatable question of gender roles may be brought to the table (this time in the context of a re-assessment of ordination policies), I find myself thinking a great deal about how to encourage mutual understanding (and even reconciliation) in this debate. Today I am asking specifically about the helpfulness of contemporary position-labelling: Namely, to what extent do the labels “complementarian” and “egalitarian” hinder discussion rather than enable it? Along with others before me I wish to contend that these labels are not properly descriptive, distort our perspective, and tend to divide us into two ‘camps’ when we are closer than we think.

If one were to visualize all human societies on a spectrum, until relatively recently the majority of them would have taken a basically “patriarchal” structure when it came to gender roles. Where religion gave support to this it would have been assumed that there were divinely-intended norms at play in the societal structures that prevailed. In societies where this developed, women would be nurtured for certain roles and the idea would perpetuate itself that they were less “fit” for other roles. Depending how crucial this was to the fabric of the society it might have been more or less ready to handle or even to imagine any fluidity in this regard. In any given society we can definitely find many cases of outright abuse which took place as a result, but if we look closely we might also find cases of rather redemptive engagement between women and men within the structures that prevailed.

We may (and I’d say should) have our retrospective objections to pariarchalism, but we need not be so anachronistic that we pass wholesale judgements on past societies based on the advantaged situations we find ourselves in today. We might (and I’d say should) frown upon patriarchalism as a rule while still recognizing that in some tribal subsistence societies it may have been healthier for women to live in that system rather than some idealized system we might invent for them but which was not realistically available. Christians in particular need to note that in the Old and New Testaments God saw fit to develop a “complementarianism” of sorts within the patriarchal norm rather than to either recommend a carbon-copy of the predominant norms or to totally interrupt them and plunk in a new system as if from another world. Were these God’s redemptive accommodation to the survival needs of the time or were they God’s perpetuation of a universal created order to be obeyed in all times and places?

This brings us the situation (in the West at least) today, in which we are more and  more accustomed to an “egalitarian” approach which  at least strives for equality of value and opportunity for all regardless of gender, ethnicity, and so on. As a  cultural trend this is relatively new in human history. This is easy to forget, but some of our own grandparents will be able to tell us of a day when women did not have the right to vote in elections. This is important to remember, however, because those who debate gender roles in the church tend to use the word “egalitarian” to refer to only one ‘camp’ when in fact both of the main ‘camps’ within evangelicalism will only make sense within this relatively recent egalitarian scenario.

The word “complementarian” can mean a lot of things, but it has historically been meant in terms of “complementarian equality” because it is all about describing the mode of differentiated equality which is believed to be biblical. The notion is that within the equal worth and and mutual dominion of the genders there are different roles which were created to complement one another to the other’s advantage. We might debate aspects of this, of course -such as whether this differentiation ends up nullifying the actual equality, or whether the creation order in fact recommends this to us at all – but my main point is that “complementarianism” is actually less than 100 years old (see Alan Padgett). So it is a bit of a misnomer that this is the tradition and “egalitarianism” alone is the new development; lured by culture down a slippery slope.  The “egalitarian” label is not very helpful because it plays into this misconstrual and fails to signify its main point of difference.

There are different strains of “egalitarianism” as well. Some are more attached to systems of power than to mutual submission, and in my denomination it is pretty clear that in the 80s when this was hotly debated (see Alex Meek) the perception was that all egalitarians were attached to a sort of “secular egalitarianism” (a.k.a “radical feminism”) that was perceived to speak the language of power, revolution, and militancy without regard for biblical exegesis . This judgement was often unfair at the time, but 30 years later it is even more unfair. Egalitarianism has had a lot of time to mature, and just because there are different types of egalitarianism doesn’t mean that any form or egalitarianism is a slippery slope into the other ones. Those who hold to what I’ll call “mutual-submission equality” don’t discount the fact that there are differences between sexes, they just want to be attuned to the wide variety of ways those differences might work out in self-giving relationships and mutually-attentive roles according to personality, circumstance, gifts and calling where they are not confined by a previous culture’s norms.

Those typically known as “egalitarians” get the reputation for not being attuned to differences between genders and for being way too influenced by culture, but both views have arisen from cultural situations–they just have differing views on how the church has engaged with culture and on what the Bible’s norming norms are in this regard.  When “mutual submission egalitarians” read the difficult biblical texts in their cultural context and submit them to greater norms of self-giving love they certainly make contestable exegetical decisions, but despite what common rhetoric will tell you they are credible, defensible and – in an secularly egalitarian society especially – even rather constructive ones.

In sum, while it is true that all discussion has to have some form of short-hand for the positions being debated, my suggestion is that we choose our words more carefully not only in order to keep perspective and promote accuracy but also to recommend further thought rather than short-circuit it. It is with that in mind that I offer the above suggestions, although I would be very happy to entertain objections to any of the moves I have made.

 

Who are the Daughters of Zelophehad today?

Having indicated that I might do a series on gender roles this past fall, with apologies I thought I’d take a brief and belated look at Numbers 27 instead. I want to talk about this passage because I refer to it more often in debate than I’ve seen in the literature and I wonder if I’m wrongly seeing something illustrative and informative here.

In Numbers 27 we join Moses in the midst of preparing the Hebrew tribes for the promised land and we see five great-great-great-granddaughters of Manasseh approach him a problem. Their father Zelophehad died in the wilderness and left them no brothers, and this was a problem because according to custom the family rights and property were passed on through sons. Here they were on the cusp of the promised land and at the long end of deliverance and their father was now tragically destined to have his line disappear from Manasseh’s clan. His daughters would not receive the inheritance promised to them despite their sin; the promise that he and they had together been hoping toward.

It is left to the imagination whether this son-less death had happened before, but for whatever reason in this case the deceased’s five daughters – Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah and Tirzah – feel compelled to bring their case before Moses. What is interesting to me is that in their short presentation (v. 3-4) the daughters seem to anticipate objections which have nothing to do with the gender constructs of the time but rather with the question of judgement.  The women are bold before Moses because their father “was not among Korah’s followers, who banded together against the LORD, but he died for his own sin.” They seem willing to grant that perhaps their family name might disappear if it was because of a specific act of judgement by God in the desert, but Zelophehad died like everyone else and so they feel led to seek an exception to the rule of male-inheritance rights. It doesn’t hurt to ask, right?

But here’s the thing that I wonder in light of prevalent interpretations: If a created rule of “male headship” exists then it would  hurt to ask, wouldn’t it? If they are questioning a divine order, shouldn’t the answer to their question be a sympathetic “no”?  Instead, Moses inquires of the Lord and learns that “what Zelophehad’s daughters are saying is right. You must certainly … turn their father’s inheritance over to them.” Not only that, Moses is directed to make a new rule out of this provisional case: If there are no sons the inheritance goes to daughters; if no children at all then it goes to the brothers, uncles, or nearest relatives  of the deceased. Certainly we see in these latter provisions that the pattern of male-inheritance rights is generally upheld (see also Num. 36!), but doesn’t this also make the daughter-clause unnecessary? Why weren’t they given into the care of their relatives rather than given responsibility for their father’s inheritance of promised land? The relative innocence of Zelophehad and the circumstances of impending entry into the promised land combined to compel his daughters to question the gender norms, and they were not turned away.

I do not want to build an argument from silence, but when we combine this with a fuller account of the relative fluidity of some of the gender roles in the Bible (see for example Deborah, Priscilla, Junia, the prophetesses of Corinth, the husbands of Ephesus and the trainees of Timothy’s church) I’d like to suggest that we do get the sense that the oft-supposed universals of male headship may not be all they are sometimes made to be. It would of course be presumptuous to claim that Moses’ ruling in the daughters’ favour necessarily opens up all other roles that might otherwise be reserved for men, but it at least lends credence to the question. Even if Moses ends up affirming a general pattern of male headship he nonetheless seems to undermine the notion that such a pattern is to be universally enforced.

Where gender studies talk about nature (i.e., “sex”) and nurture (i.e., “gender”), biblical studies will also talk about created order and legitimate variations of male and female faithfulness in different contexts. Much of the debate has to do with what are the universals and what are the contextual variants, of course, but I find it illustrative that on this occasion there was at least a small degree of variance provided by the Creator when it came to the generally assumed gender-role pattern. So might a drastically different situation show an even greater degree of variance? More specifically: Do we not see in the life, death and resurrection of Christ an even greater extenuating circumstance than the death of Zelophehad?

When Jesus comes not only are our family arrangements  declared no longer definitive (see Luke 14:26) but our new-found standing in the family of God is also re-ordered to transcend the roles of ethnicity, class, and gender (see Gal. 3:26-4:7).  (There are those who argue that this is merely a matter of “salvation,” but to me this pretty clearly entails the gifts and service opportunities that come with it.) When the Spirit comes it is indicated in Joel 2 and Acts 2 that both the sons and daughters prophesy in Jesus’ name. (There are those who argue that they had in mind a kind of prophecy that is distinct from leadership and teaching, but I think this splits hairs against the grain of Testaments Old and New.) So in Paul’s epistles are we seeing the maintenance of universal gender roles or are we seeing the gender norms of the time relativized and submitted to something more definitive, namely the reconciling rule of Christ? I think it is the latter, and while Numbers does not provide this point for us, to me it begs the question: Who might be the daughters of Zelophehad today?

To be clear, it would not be my argument that Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah and Tirzah were early radical feminists. They submitted to Moses’ ruling and they also eventually submitted to their husbands. But within patriarchy we see typically “masculine” things submitted to them, and this seems canonically significant. A crass version of secular egalitarianism might argue for “equal opportunity to power” – and this may have some of our sympathies – but in our Christian churches and families we are making an egalitarian claim on the basis of other premises. In Christ both the provisional norms of creaturely context and the perverted subordinations of the fallen world are subverted not in the name of “equal opportunity” but in the name of mutual submission out of reverence for Christ (Eph. 5). So it is that our encultured gender norms and roles will often come into play as we seek to be faithful in our time, but it is the law of love (1 Cor. 10) which is universally binding and it is under the headship of Christ that men and women proceed together in that regard.

 

Church Music: Simultaneously the Bane and the Heart of Worship

I have joked (in partial seriousness) for quite some time that the best thing the church could do for lent would be to fast from singing in church. I think we have an unhealthy obsession with expressing ourselves in this way. I don’t even think this is a controversial statement. Matt Redman’s incredibly popular “The Heart of Worship” was written as the result of just such a fast, and the song and its background story have been fully embraced by every evangelical church in the universe (indeed, playing the song may actually now be one of the marks of evangelicalism). The irony, of course, is that “embracing” it usually means a moment of silence to “get your heart right” (a reverent frenzy of introspection we usually reserve for communion) before singing the song full-on with multiple choruses and tags and a double-rainbow to seal the deal. I’m not trying to pick on anybody here or call entire worship services into question. If you’re wondering, I’m the guy who has done this. All I mean to say is that I find the quick liturgical mimic of Redman’s fast kind of telling.

Look, I’ve led plentyof these worship services myself, so I know the bind. People are looking at you to lead them in worship, and the music is the best way to meet most of them in a relatively recognizable way and get a good number of them to participate. Try something else and you get what feels like tumble-weeds. You wonder if you might be doing your people a disservice for all your good intentions. Music helps. So you put your best into it and it isn’t bad. I get it. But let’s not kid ourselves. Today’s evangelical worship routine was in part a reaction to rigid liturgy, but now it is one. And if we count up the scripture readings from the year and notice a disproportionate amount of times we read the “sing a new song to the Lord” Psalms then we should probably ask ourselves who we are trying to convince.

This sounds pretty cynical, and maybe it is. So, in true Out of Bounds form maybe I should let Karl Barth talk me off my soapbox. Here’s the Swiss theologian, writing in the early 1960s on the act of church singing, the trappings that become involved, and what they might say about us:

The praise of God which constitutes the community and its assemblies seeks to bind and commit and therefore to be expressed, to well up and be sung in concert. The Christian community sings. It is not a choral society. Its singing is not a concert. But from inner, material necessity it sings. Singing is the highest form of human expression. It is to such supreme expression that the vox humana is devoted in the ministry of the Christian community. It is for this that it is liberated in this ministry.

It is hard to see any compelling reason why it should have to be accompanied in this by an organ or harmonium. It might be argued that in this way the community’s praise of God is embedded by anticipation in that of the whole cosmos, to which the cosmos is undoubtedly called and which we shall unquestionably hear in the consummation. The trouble is that in practice the main purpose of instruments seems to be to conceal the feebleness with which the community discharges the ministry of the vox humana committed to it. There is also the difficulty that we cannot be sure whether the spirits invoked with the far too familiar sounds of instruments are clean or unclean spirits.In any case, there should be no place for organ solos in the Church’s liturgy, even in the form of the introductory and closing voluntaries which are so popular.

What we can and must say quite confidently is that the community which does not sing is not the community. And where it cannot sing in living speech, or only archaically in repetition of the modes and texts of the past; where it does not really sing but sighs and mumbles spasmodically, shamefacedly and with an ill grace, it can be at best only a troubled community which is not sure of its cause and of whose ministry and witness there can be no great expectation. In these circumstances it has every reason to pray that this gift which is obviously lacking or enjoyed only in sparing measure will be granted afresh and more generously lest all the other members suffer. The praise of God which finds its concrete culmination in the singing of the community is one of the indispensable basic forms of the ministry of the community (Church Dogmatics IV/3.2, 866-867).

A good portion of this pretty much goes against everything I said! Good. And yet I find some of my inclinations validated at the same time as they are chastised. For instance, lest we skim over that dated-sounding part about the organ and the ‘unclean spirits’, let’s note that Barth is not giving the scare-them-off-of-rock-music speech, nor merely expressing a distate for instrumentals (although I do think he is being a bit of a fuddy-duddy). In the lines I’ve bolded we find his real point: He is keying in on the tenor of our music and suggesting that we reckon seriously with our predilection to use this powerful medium to conceal our feebleness precisely when we claim to be coming ‘just as we are’ to worship.

This explains the part about the ‘spirits’ being ‘invoked’ as well. We all know that music can evoke feeling and rally a crowd. This is great. It captures something great in the human spirit. But worship is meant to invoke the Holy Spirit, and where it settles for motivating, expressing or (at worst) even manipulating the human spirit, well, it may be something, but we might have to ask ourselves what makes it particularly Christian.

But I need to heed Barth’s biblical claim that the church must sing. It must give the voice of the people the opportunity to raise in harmony to the praises of God in Christ. But in that regard it must also heed the charge to “really sing” lest it actually become “a troubled community which is not sure of its cause.” In that regard let me leave us with a constructive exhortation from James B. Torrance’s excellent little book entitled Worship, Community and the Triune God of Grace:

But who can make that perfect response of love, that perfect act of penitence, that perfect submission to the act of guilty? …. It seems to me that in a pastoral situation our first task is not to throw people back on themselves with exhortations and instructions as to what to do and how to do it, but to direct people to the gospel of grace–to Jesus Christ, that they might look to him to lead them, open their hearts in faith and in prayer, and draw them by the Spirit into his eternal life of communion with the Father…. Jesus takes our prayers–our feeble, selfish, inarticulate prayers–he cleanses them, makes them his prayers, and in a ‘wonderful exchange’ he makes his prayer our prayers and presents us to the Father as his dear children, crying ‘Abba Father’ (55, 45-46).

I guess that’s what I’m after. I highly recommend picking up Torrance’s book or engaging in the comments if you want to explore the constructive vision of community worship which has me on edge for something more. In the meantime, lest nothing but my inner scrooge has come through, I invite you to imagine the four of us at Out of Bounds robustly singing “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” with egg nog on our faces.

 

Out of Bounds at AAR and ETS (2011)

This week your Out of Bounds bloggers are taking on San Francisco, and we’d love to see you turn up at one of these papers. Please say hello, offer an insightful question or witty remark, or just fill a chair.

EVANGELICAL THEOLOGICAL SOCIETY

Adam Nigh: “One With God and One With Us: T. F. Torrance on Jesus Christ as the Only Way to Know the Father”
(Wednesday – 8:30 am to 11:40 am)
Group: Systematic Theology: T. F. Torrance

Adam Nigh: “Depth Exegesis: T. F. Torrance on Interpreting Scripture”
(Thursday – 3:00 pm to 6:10 pm)
Group: Method in Systematic Theology: The Theology of Thomas F. Torrance

AMERICAN ACADEMY OF RELIGION

Jon Coutts: “Relative Grit: Masculinity in Flux on Film”
(Monday – 1:00 pm to 3:30 pm)
Group: Men, Masculinities, and Religions

Several of our peers from the University of Aberdeen will also be presenting at the conferences this year.  You’re likely to find at least one or two of us in any session with Barth, Torrance, Schleiermacher, or McGarry in the title (or on the presenter’s list). Hey, wouldn’t it be great if Friedrich Schleiermacher rose from the grave and gave a paper deploring the current state of Christianity in the West?

See you in San Francisco!

 

Law-Gospel or Gospel-Law: Does the ‘Romans Road’ Run in the Wrong Direction?

'Saint Paul Writing His Epistles' (17th century)

I’m currently helping out at church with a session of Christianity Explored, a curriculum meant to introduce new believers and those with questions about the Christian faith to the story of Jesus and the basic theological high points.  Overall it seems to me to be a well thought-out and put-together course.  But as the other leaders and I puzzle through the conversations that the material provokes with unbelievers who come along on Thursday nights, I’m left with a theological question of a “practical” nature:

Does the “Romans Road” run in the wrong direction?  Is it a better strategy for evangelism — and is it more faithful to the gospel of Jesus Christ — to begin with sin and lead to grace, or to begin with God’s love and lead to the reality of sin?

The “Romans Road” is a traditional tool of evangelism, where one sits down with an inquirer and shows key moments in Paul’s letter to the Roman Christians.  It begins with the fact that all of us are sinners and fall short of God’s standards (Romans 3:10-12, 23), that none of us is righteous and so we are subject to God’s wrath and judgment (1:18-32).  The wages rightly due to our sins is death (6:23).  But wait … there is good news! Jesus died for our sins, because God loves us (5:8)! And so He made it that we can confess Jesus as Lord and believe that God raised him from the dead, and thereby be saved (10:9-10).  As a result, we may have great confidence that we have been made right with God (5:1) and are no longer condemned (8:1).  Nothing can ever separate us from God and God’s love again (8:38-39).

It’s a fantastic presentation of the gospel, and really demonstrates the theological depth and thoroughness of Paul’s letter.

But isn’t it designed for those who come to Jesus already with a sense of their own brokenness, of shame or guilt, knowing that on their own they cannot measure up to God’s will for their lives?  What about the (so very) many women and men who still believe they are basically good?  How does one convict them of sin, and of the reality of hell and divine judgment, in order to cultivate a ground where the good news of Jesus Christ can take root?

This is the CE curriculum’s approach to introducing the gospel — moving from sin and hell to forgiveness and salvation.  How does one preach God’s deliverance, after all, until the hearer knows that from which she is being delivered?  The strategy of moving from the Law to the Gospel seems good for those who are already believers but want to understand how it all “works,” as well as those who feel convicted of their sinful lives and are looking for good news.  But for others, I wonder if the message is simply splintered against their own hard hearts.  I’m not a sinner, and I don’t believe in hell. How do you get past that when trying to share the gospel of Jesus Christ?

“Sin,” in this case, too often winds up being defined as breaking those many rules that the church has for its members — drinking too much, having sex outside of marriage, gambling, cheating, lying, et cetera (even if that’s not how the doctrine of sin is being presented).  So how can I be called a ‘sinner’ when I’m not a part of your group and don’t follow your rules? It sounds like I only become a ‘sinner’ if I join up and make myself accountable to you …

With a false definition of sin, the conversation goes completely off the rails … and we haven’t even gotten to the love of God and the cross yet.

A counter-approach would move in the other direction, theologically — beginning with God’s great love for us as His children, and His desire for fellowship with us, that He will never let us go, and only then begin to talk about why that fellowship has been broken.  I wonder if such a “soft” approach would make those hard hearts more receptive to the message.

Perhaps I’ve answered my own question in the course of writing this: perhaps there is no “one size fits all” method of sharing the gospel, but rather the evangelist is responsible for coming alongside the person and figuring out if she needs a little gospel to sooth her sinful heart, or a little love to soften her self-sufficiency. What do you think?