Category Archive: Theology
Adam and the TOTKOGAE
Bill Wilder‘s fascinating article, “Illumination and Investiture: The Royal Significance of the Tree of Wisdom in Genesis 3″Â is now available online here.
It overlaps quite nicely with Jim Jordan‘s thesis that “the knowledge of good and evil” in Scripture is not, as some claim, experiential knowledge of sin or something like that, but rather is the wisdom kings need — the wisdom Adam would have needed — in order to rule well. God’s promise to Adam that he would eat of all the trees included the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which means this tree was off limits to Adam only at first.
I’m glad to see that the Westminster Theological Journal published this article, and I’m glad to see it available online.
“The Politics of Long Joy”
Alan Jacobs, whom I first encountered in interviews on the Mars Hill Audio journals, now has a regular column in Books and Culture. His first article, “The Politics of Long Joy,” draws on John Milton as interpreted by Stanley Fish. But don’t let that scare you. It’s worth reading.
Celebration
Part of learning to celebrate includes learning how to splurge and not be so tightly utilitarian. Our culture is so wicked in its neglect of savings and its slavery to plastic credit that we, with some right, run the other direction. but if your house is in order, it’s time to learn how to splurge at times. Beauty isn’t cheap, and neither are artistic meals and good wines. It may not be every week, but we need to learn to splurge with a pure conscience before God….
Feasting and lovemaking are only two examples of celebration; others abound, but these two are central. It is our besetting sin to forget God’s work for us. How often do we see miserable Christians wasting their half-lives in bitterness, their heads buried firmly in melancholic marriages or soulless busyness, almost enjoying their narrow nitpicking, molding insignificant faults into eternal weapons.
“Stand up. Grow up,” you want to say. “Life is too short!” and “You have forgotten all the important things in life.” Celebration, like good stories, puts things back in perspective. It reminds us of the important things.
So what is it to lead a whole life? How can younger persons live now so that they can look back when they are seventy or eighty and say in all maturity, whether rich or poor, “I have lived well.” Most of us, I’m afraid, will look back with decades of regrets, decades of waste, splintered lives. At that age we may finally “have time” to think about the good life, but it will be far too late.
The wisest man in the world taught us that “there is nothing better for a man, than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labour. This also I saw, that it was from the hand of God” (Eccl. 2:24). Nothing better. Nothing better. Eat, drink, and enjoy the fruit of your labor. “Make your soul enjoy” celebration — feasting on food and love.
But doesn’t this neglect purist doctrine, social injustice, and more time at the office? Yes, it certainly does. — Douglas Jones, “Worshiping with Body,” Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth, pp. 83-84, 86-87.
Animals and the Afterlife
Way back when I read Charles Williams’ The Place of the Lion, I mentioned that I wanted to blog sometime about the role of animals. Why did God create animals? Sure, I said, some of them are yummy, but not all animals are good to eat. Nor are all of them equally good companions. Not all of them are as useful and helpful for man as others. So what are they for? Williams’ novel doesn’t get into these matters, but it did raise these sorts of questions for me. But I didn’t ever get around to blogging on the subject.
It’s perhaps not the most obvious place to look, but C. S. Lewis has some helpful stuff along these lines in his discussion of animal pain in The Problem of Pain. He starts by discussing whether all animals are sentient and concludes that he doesn’t know. But there are some animals that do seem to have “a real, though doubtless rudimentary, selfhood,” and that is especially the case “in those we tame.” And so, he says, we have to think about their destiny. Do they simply die? Or will animals be raised again in some way in the new heavens and the new earth (which Lewis sometimes just calls “heaven”)?
In answering this question, we must avoid an error which Lewis thinks springs from a form of unbelief, a form, in fact, of atheism:
The error we must avoid is that of considering them in themselves. Man is to be understood only in his relation to God. The beasts are to be understood only in their relation to man and, through man, to God. Let us here guard against one of those untransmuted lumps of atheistical thought which often survive in the minds of modern believers. Atheists naturally regard the co-existence of man and the other animals as a mere contingent result of interacting biological facts; and the taming of an animal by a man as a purely arbitrary interference of one species with another. The “real” or “natural” animal to them is the wild one, and the tame animal is an artificial or unnatural thing.
But a Christian must not think so. Man was appointed by God to have dominion over the beasts, and everything a man does to an animal is either a lawful exercise, or a sacrilegious abuse, of an authority by divine right. The tame animal is therefore, in the deepest sense, the only “natural” animal — the only one we see occupying the place it was made to occupy, and it is on the tame animal that we must base all our doctrine of beasts.
Now it will be seen that, in so far as the tame animal has a real self or personality, it owes this almost entirely to its master. If a good sheepdog seems “almost human” that is because a good shepherd has made it so.
I have already noted the mysterious force of the word “in.” I do not take all the senses of it in the New Testament to be identical, so that man is in Christ and Christ in God and the Holy Spirit in the Church and also in the individual believer in exactly the same sense. They may be senses that rhyme or correspond rather than a single sense.
I am now going to suggest — though with great readiness to be set right by real theologians — that there may be a sense, corresponding, though not identical, with these, in which those beasts that attain a real self are in their masters. That is to say, you must not think of a beast by itself, and call that a personality and then inquire whether God will raise and bless that. You must take the whole context in which the beast acquires its selfhood — namely “The-goodman-and-the-goodwife-ruling-their-children-and-their-beasts-in-the-good-homestead.”
That whole context may be regarded as a “body” in the Pauline (or a closely sub-Pauline) sense; and how much of that “body” may be raised along with the goodman and the goodwife, who can predict? So much, presumably, as is necessary not only for the glory of God and the beatitude of the human pair, but for that particular glory and that particular beatitude which is eternally coloured by that particular terrestrial experience.
And in this way it seems to me possible that certain animals may have an immortality, not in themselves, but in the immortality of their masters. And the difficulty about personal identity in a creature barely personal disappears when the creature is thus kept in its proper context. If you ask, concerning an animal thus raised as a member of the whole Body of the household, where its personal identity resides, I answer “Where its identity always did reside even in the earthly life — in its relation to the Body and, specially, to the master who is the head of that Body.” In other words, the man will know his dog: the dog will know its master and, in knowing him, will be itself (pp. 126-128).
That sounds about right to me. I’m particularly fascinated by the claim that because man was given dominion over the animals, they are to be considered in relation to man. And the tame animals are the ones who are being most themselves.
I don’t know if that’s always true. Leviathan is presented as pretty untamable in Job. But I do think it’s true that my two cats are most themselves as my pets; they owe their personalities, in large measure, to my wife and me. Their taming doesn’t detract from their true nature as cats and it isn’t interference on our part; it’s what makes them more truly themselves.
And, as part of our household, they have a bond with us and we with them, a bond which God uses in this life for good and which may continue into the next life. That’s not something I can be dogmatic about, but it’s something I like to believe.
Lewis goes on to discuss wild animals, about which we know less. Still, they are also to be related to man in some way Lewis isn’t sure if they attain to “selfhood” the way tame animals do.
But if any do, and if it is agreeable to the goodness of God that they should live again, their immortality would also be related to man — not, this time, to individual masters, but to humanity. That is to say, if in any instance the quasi-spiritual and emotional value which human tradition attributes to a beast (such as the “innocence” of the lamb or the heraldic royalty of the lion) has a real ground in the beast’s nature, and is not merely arbitrary or accidental, then it is in that capacity, or principally in that, that the beast may be expected to attend on risen man and make part of his “train.”
Or if the traditional character is quite erroneous, then the beast’s heavenly life [which Lewis, in a footnote says is “its participation in the heavenly life of men in Christ to God”] would be in virtue of the real, but unknown, effect it has actually had on man during his whole history: for if Christian cosmology is in any sense … true, then all that exists on our planet is related to man… (pp. 129-130).
In the resurrection, then, Lewis says, we’ll see the full glory of the lion:
I think the lion, when he has ceased to be dangerous, will still be awful: indeed, that we shall then first see that of which the present fangs and claws are a clumsy, and satanically perverted, imitation. There will still be something like the shaking of a golden mane: and often the good Duke will say, “Let him roar again.”
Shades of Aslan! And shades of Charles Williams! (The Place of the Lion was the first Williams novel Lewis read and it was written well before The Problem of Pain, which is dedicated to the Inklings, Williams included).
I don’t agree about the “satanic” part here: I don’t believe there’s anything perverted about a lion’s present fangs and claws. But it does seem likely to me that, since God created animals for this present heavens and earth, He may raise them in glory in the new heavens and new earth, allowing us to see their created glory clearly for the first time, recognizing in them what we only catch glimpses of now, the kinds of glimpses that make us identify lions with royal majesty.
[Update: James Jordan comments: “All animals are God’s pets. He cares about sparrows. Lewis doesn’t quite go far enough.”]
Sin and Time
We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. I have heard others, and I have heard myself, recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood as if they were no concern of the present speaker’s, and even with laughter. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ: if we have repented these early sins we should remember the price of our forgiveness and be humble. — C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, p. 49.
Vices and Virtues
We imply, and often believe, that habitual vices are exceptional single acts, and make the opposite mistake about our virtues — like the bad tennis player who calls his normal form his “bad days” and mistakes his rare successes for his normal. I do not think it is our fault that we cannot tell the real truth about ourselves; the persistent, life-long, inner murmur of spite, jealousy, prurience, greed and self-complacence, simply will not go into words. But the important thing is that we should not mistake our inevitably limited utterances for a full account of the worst that is inside. — C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, p. 48.
Inns and Home
The Christian doctrine of suffering explains, I believe, a very curious fact about the world we live in. The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy. It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with our friends, a bathe or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home. — C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, p. 103.
Biblical Spirituality
There’s more that could be added to the list, of course, but Mark Horne‘s “How to Be Spiritual According to the Bible” is a good start.
The Corporate Image of God
Though we often think simply of individuals being created “in the image of God,” Herman Bavinck reminds us that the image is also corporate. More than that, that corporate imaging of God becomes richer and deeper through time.
Adam was not created alone. As a man and by himself he was incomplete. He lacked something for which no lower creature could make up (Gen. 2:20). As a man by himself, accordingly, neither was he yet the fully unfolded image of God. The creation of mankind in God’s image was only completed on the sixth day when God created both man and woman in union with each other (cf. ‘wtm, Gen. 1:27), in his image.
Still even this creation in God’s image of man and woman in conjunction is not the end but the beginning of God’s journey with mankind. It is not good that the man should be alone (Gen. 2:18); nor is it good that the man and woman should be alone. Upon the two of them God immediately pronounced the blessing of multiplication (Gen. 1:28). Not the man alone, nor the man and woman together, but only the whole of humanity is the fully developed image of God, his son, his offspring.
The image of God is much too rich for it to be fully realized in a single human being, however richly gifted that human being may be. It can only be somewhat unfolded in its depth and riches in a humanity counting billions of members. Just as the traces of God (vestigia dei) are spread over many, many works, in both space and time, so also the image of God can only be displayed in all its dimensions and characteristic features in a humanity whose members exist both successively one after the other and contemporaneously side by side.
But just as the cosmos is a unity and receives its head and master in man; and just as the traces of God (vestigia dei) scattered throughout the entire world are bundled and raised up into the image of God of humankind, so also that humanity in turn is to be conceived as an organism which, precisely as such, is finally the only fully developed image of God. Not as a heap of souls on a tract of land, not as a loose aggregate of individuals, but as having been created out of one blood, as one household and one family, humanity is the image and likeness of God.
Belonging to that humanity is also its development, its history, its ever-expanding dominion over the earth, its progress in science and art, its subjugation of all creatures. All these things as well constitute the unfolding of the image and likeness of God in keeping with which man was created. Just as God did not reveal himself just once at the creation, but continues and expands that revelation from day to day and from age to age, so also the image of God is not a static entity but extends and unfolds itself in the forms of space and time. It is both a gift (Gabe) and a mandate (Aufgabe). It is an undeserved gift of grace that was given the first human being immediately at the creation, but at the same time the grounding principle and germ of an altogether rich and glorious development.
Only humanity in its entirety — as one complete organism, summed up under a single head, spread out over the whole earth, as prophet proclaiming the truth of God, as priest dedicating itself to God, as ruler controlling the earth and the whole of creation — only it is the fully finished image, the most telling and striking likeness of God (In the Beginning, pp. 212-213).
I’m not sure Bavinck is entirely right about the image itself here. It sounds as if he’s saying that a man by himself really can’t do justice to the image of God, and yet Jesus, as a man, was the perfect image of God.
But I do think Bavinck is right that God’s intention for humanity was that it would grow up, as his image and as his individual images, to a maturity that better and better reflects his likeness. My quibbles with some of what Bavinck says here don’t take away at all from my appreciation for his history-long, humanity-wide scope.
Erotic Imagination
Rich Bledsoe writes about the need to develop a biblical erotic imagination.
“I Belong to God”
It may be easy for people to forget today, but in the time of the Reformation (and for some time after) the Reformed churches didn’t all subscribe to one confession of faith or one catechism. Local pastors produced catechisms, not intending them to be the final statement of theology for their congregation but simply intending them to be good teaching tools for the congregation and, in particular, for its children.
Those days are largely gone. Today, in Reformed circles, the catechism is the Heidelberg Catechism. In Presbyterian circles, it’s the Westminster Shorter Catechism. I can’t say I care much for the latter, though I do appreciate the way it begins (“The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever”). I do have a great love for the former, and especially the first question and answer (“What is your only comfort in life and in death?”). But at the same time, I wish that men were still writing confessions of faith and producing catechisms today, correcting some errors in previous ones, incorporating some more recent insights, and warmly instructing today’s young people.
One man who is tackling that job (perhaps in the spirit of Jordan translating Leviticus: see the previous blog entry) is Rich Lusk. Here’s his catechism: “I Belong to God: A Covenantal Catechism.” I haven’t read it in detail, but it looks good and I particularly appreciate its attention to redemptive history and its inclusion of typology, even in its explanation of the Lord’s Supper. Good stuff. I look forward to spending some more time with it in the near future.
Reform & Resurge 2
A long time ago, so long ago that most of you have forgotten about it already, I attended the Reform and Resurge conference hosted by Mars Hill Church in Seattle. I started blogging about it when I got back home, but then life interrupted me. So here’s a somewhat belated review of some more of the conference.
The second speaker was Anthony Bradley. Bradley himself seems disappointed with his talk. I will admit that I was disappointed by the beginning, where he appeared to be trying to hard to seem hip and funny, and the end, where he presented a rather strange interpretation of being the “salt of the earth.”
But in between, he said some very good things. His title was “Beyond Brokenness: How Jacked-Up Punks Will Change the World,” and he painted a powerful picture of the brokenness in our world. I was particularly struck by his remark that men are frequently trying to answer the question “Am I okay?” and they answer it by turning to work or even entering the pastorate so that they can hear people tell them that they’re okay (“Pastor, you have changed my life! I’ve never heard anything like that before!”). Ministers wreck their churches by trying to manipulate peple into making them feel validated as men.
I also appreciated Bradley’s statement that people are more than just sinners; they’re also broken and in need of healing. I was struck by the same thing in Harvey Conn’s Evangelism: Doing Justice and Preaching Grace. Conn talks about working with prostitutes in Korea.
At first, he said, he simply approached them as women who were sinning. But then he learned more of their story. He learned how they came to the cities with no money, hoping to find work to support their families at home, but instead were caught by men who promised them a place to live but who raped them instead and then told them that they owed them room and board and could only pay off the debt through prostitution.
Were the women sinning? Perhaps. But they were also victims, broken and in need of rescue and healing.
So it is with people in the world around us. Are they sinners? Yes. But they are also broken people, people whose lives are (to use a phrase I heard often at the conference) “jacked-up.” Many of them have been seriously hurt by divorce. (Bradley recommended The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce, based on a 25-year study of people involved in divorces). Divorce leaves people (husbands, wives, children, and others) broken and fearful.
Our world is full of brokenness. But it is precisely broken people that God takes and uses to change the world. Isaiah 61 is a familiar passage because it’s the passage Jesus quoted at the outset of his ministry in Galilee (“The Spirit of Yahweh God is upon me, because Yahweh has anointed me”). But what we often miss, and what I hadn’t noticed until Bradley pointed it out, is that the focus of the passage is not strictly on what the Anointed One is going to do.
That’s where Isaiah starts. The Anointed One is going to proclaim good news, heal the brokenhearted, announce liberty to captives, and so forth. He’s going to comfort and console people and dress them in praise. He’s going to give them a new identity so that they will no longer be junk, identified by their abuse, but will become new creations in Christ.
But that isn’t where the passage stops. It goes on to say that these people, the very ones who were broken, will be the ones who rebuild the old ruins and repair the ruined cities (Isa. 61:4). Jesus heals broken people. But he heals them in order to make them into agents for healing.
Bradley himself may be disappointed with his talk and parts of it were disappointing. But at the heart of it was a great encouragement and a good summons to what Mark Horne calls “cruciform dominion,” God’s use of broken people to bring salvation to the world.