Chinese Election

Themes: Doctrine, History

A friend of mine who spent 2008 in China tells me that my blog is blocked there by the internet censors. Honestly, I don’t know if I’m more saddened that a billion Chinese readers are currently being deprived of my wisdom and insight, or flattered that the Chinese Communist Party regards me as a potential threat to the country’s peace, stability and mental hygiene.

The up-side is that I now feel no obligation to refrain from publically commemorating the 20th Anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre (4th July 1989). As a 10 year old I remember watching the news through that period, old enough to remember the confusion about what was happening, hoping that someone, somewhere in the Chinese leadership would make it all right. In many ways, watching the news with my parents through the 2nd half of that year was my initial education in politics. I learned about ‘democracy’ because people were willing to face down tanks to experience it. I remember the tension as we all wondered whether the soldiers of the Red Army could bring themselves to shoot their fellow citizens.
Later that year, 9th November 1989, we watched the fall of the Berlin Wall. I remember the sledge-hammers, the graffiti, and the euphoria.

There was nothing internal to either of those events that could enable us, as they were unfolding, to foresee how they would be resolved. The Chinese State rolled over those lonely protesters with as little trouble as the tanks in the Square and today the Party appears stronger than ever. But Communist East Germany was ended and then a couple of years later, so was the whole Soviet Union.
But, maybe, it could have been China that was reborn. Maybe there could still be a wall through the heart of Berlin?

With hindsight comes the opportunity to trace out some of the historical causes behind the events. We reverse engineer the results and design models to account for the data. With hindsight we can see why what is, would always have been. Or at least, we think we can. We judge the actions and affairs of those who have gone before us, assign values to their struggles, weigh what we know of their motives against their outcomes. We are the teachers of history. We teach those of the past to know themselves.

But what then would you say to that single man staring down a Red Army tank? He was an evolutionary dead-end. He picked the spiky end of the historical pineapple. He chose his moment poorly. He did not know that history was against him. If he knew what we now know, he would not have done what he did. He would have stayed away.

How do you really love the Lost? How do you love and esteem something that has no future, that in itself was a terrible folly, that given the chance we would seek to prevent from ever coming to be?
Gallipoli or Changi or Tiananmen Square or the friend who commits suicide?
How do you really love it for what it is in itself, without denying the time or the person a substantial reality in themselves? How do you love this person without making his or her life just a symbol of some more substantial universal truth? (Mateship, Courage, Justice, etc).
Or is that really all they were or are?

I wonder if something like these questions are at the heart of the human aspect of the Christian doctrine of Election.

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What will not be?

Themes: Doctrine, The Future

We’ve been studying eschatology in our doctrine classes for this past term, normally that would mean lots of discussion about the end of the world: whether we all get RAPTURED before or after the TRIBULATION, whether the ‘MARK OF THE BEAST’ is some sort of barcode or RFID tag, and whether the UN is really paving the way for THE ANTICHRIST. You know, interesting Sci-Fi type stuff, like in ‘Left Behind’.
Hey, that’s what ‘eschatology’ meant when I was a kid.

There’s certainly plenty of material in the news at the moment to give a Rapture Watcher pause for thought: The Global Financial Crisis, the arming of nuclear Iran and North Korea (Gog and Magog anyone?), a pandemic of Swine Flu (can anything be more clearly a sign of judgement than a plague of swine flu? clearly the work of the Pale Rider). The RAPTURE INDEX must be well into the Red Zone.

(Seriously, you should check out the Rapture Index, bookmark it! You’ll be pleased to know that: “To help the site survive the crush of traffic that the staff assumes will follow the Rapture it has a number of mirror sites that include raptureme.com, tribulation.us, rr-rapture.com, raptureready.net, and anti-antichrist.com.” Because everyone will want to know what happened to all the Christians after the Rapture, see?)

Sadly, that’s not what we’ve been doing in class. Instead, we’ve been working through the Lord’s Prayer as a framework for thinking about God’s purposes for this world and how, by the Spirit, they are brought to fruition in the person and work of Jesus. It’s been really good stuff.
David Höhne (our lecturer) is right to point out that the basic experience of prayer is eschatological. When we bring our prayers to God we are involving ourselves in the observation that this world has not come fully under the Lordship of Christ; we acknowledge that God has decisively acted against this condition; and we anticipate that God will bring his Kingdom to completion thus satisfying our deepest needs beyond all possible comprehension or desire. Every act of asking God for something is a gesture towards the End of the Age.
Every prayer is ultimately an elaboration on:

Our Father in heaven,
Your name be honored as holy.
Your kingdom come.
Your will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.

But that’s not really what we talked about today either…
Uncharacteristically, today our class discussion did stray heavily towards the topic of THE END OF THE WORLD, although strangely enough, the actual topic was meant to be the eschatological implications of the prayer for forgiveness…

So what can we say of God’s plans for this creation? On the one hand we have the unmistakable implication that the New Testament draws from the Resurrection: that God’s new creation is a redemption of the Old – the buying back of something which had been lost and enslaved. It is the redemption from the grave of a lifeless corpse – one dead body raised is the living, breathing evidence that God can and will act to overcome the power of sin and death that has held the old world captive.
That act, is not less that a fundamental refoundation of the world, a reconstitution, it is re-newed, but it would not be ‘redemption’, there would be no ‘re-‘ if the new-ness which God brings involved forgetting the old and leaving it behind. Such an act would destroy the concept of redemption: you don’t buy back a child from slavery by having another child.
When he promises to ‘make all things new’ this does not mean that the old things are forgotten and set aside. They are the seeds out of which he will cause a new garden to burst into flower.

But on the other hand, we shouldn’t avoid the strong language of 2 Peter 3, which talks about the world in these terms:

They willfully ignore this: long ago the heavens and the earth existed out of water and through water by the word of God. Through these the world of that time perished when it was flooded by water. But by the same word the present heavens and earth are held in store for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men. (2Peter 3:5-7 HCSB)

That is a promise of real destruction: before the resurrection came a real death. There is no path to the new creation that does not lead through violent destruction: what was true of Christ is true for all the world, it is true for us precisely because his death and destruction was for us.
Jesus, “who rescues us from the coming wrath” does so by suffering it for us, not by stopping it from coming. It is because we have already lived through the destruction of ourselves and our world in him, that we can speak now of being a ‘new creation’ in him. But there is no escaping the inverse conclusion that whatever is not in him has no future, or rather, its future is fire.

What is ‘in him’ and what is not? What will be, and what will not be, that is the question.

pic by siokaos

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The God of Hell

Themes: Doctrine, On Suffering, Selections

Someone I love has been deeply troubled lately by the thought of hell. It troubles me too.

Hell is an awful thing to believe in. It’s no wonder that most Christians, most of the time shy away from looking the doctrine full in the face. Does it mean that so many of the people sitting in the cafe with me, walking past on the footpath, pursuing their Saturday morning lives, are walking, shopping and sipping their way toward a place where they will be tortured forever? I can’t stand to watch even a dog being tortured, let alone allow myself to conceive of such horror.
I guess that’s why we tend to relegate Hell to our peripheral vision. The problem with such a stance is it’s easy to lose sight of the real Christian doctrine of hell, and get slipped a substitute instead.

There are all kinds of substitutes, lots of different ways of populating, depopulating, colouring, shading, and most importantly, relating God to Hell.

The worst kind of substitutes however, are those which leave nothing written upon the face of God other than hate and torture. That is a badly dehumanised God. It leaves him with nothing but naked violence, an emotionally dysfunctional cosmic sociopath. It leaves me afraid of his violence, like a child avoiding an abusive Father. How could he be so much less than us? That is a God with no glory. That isn’t God,
that’s a demon.

But is hell the absence of God? I used to think that, but no, that’s another inadequate substitute.

Hell is full of God.

However, we don’t start our thinking about Hell by reading whatever terrifying passages we might discover in Revelation or Isaiah. The Christian doctrine of Hell, like all our knowledge of God, starts with Jesus and finds its centre in The Cross.
There is a God in Hell, because first and above all else, Jesus went to Hell.

Whatever the wrath of God tastes like, Jesus has drunk that cup all the way to the end because that was his Father’s will (there’s no good God/bad God here).

Yes, he did that to substitute himself for us. He did it so that in his death those who trust him would have life. But that means that Jesus experienced something on the Cross that those who trust in him never will. He shared with those in Hell the truth of God’s wrath. He was abandoned by God and set among the sinners. He was their brother in death, just as he was their friend in life.

There is nothing more true, in life or death, than this:

God loves the damned.

He has demonstrated his own love for us in this, whatever hell there is, in this world or the next, whatever world of torment, you cannot suffer in a way that God has not already suffered. Even in Hell he has suffered with you and for you. You cannot escape him, you cannot go beyond him. NEVER EVER will you be greater than his love.

That is his glory.

Do not worship any other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God. (Ex 34:14 NIV)

Your problem is that, probably because you’ve been a Christian for too long, you think that God loves you because you’re saved. But that’s not the gospel which you first heard. God saved you because he loves you with a love that’s entirely from within himself, and ultimately beyond comprehension. His love comes long, long before the saving. It was while we were still sinners, that Christ died for us.

That’s why I can believe in the God of Hell.

And that’s why I can keep holding on to hope for our family.

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Zen Bishop

Themes: Doctrine, On Suffering

The news has come rattling over the wires in the past week that a diocese of The Episcopal Church (part of the Anglican Church in America) has elected a Buddhist as Bishop-elect of the Diocese of Northern Michigan. The reality is probably not quite as exciting, here are his words,

I am quite honored, as an Episcopal priest, to have been trained in the art and practice of Zen meditation. I am not an ordained Buddhist priest. I am an Episcopal priest eternally grateful for the truth, beauty and goodness, experienced in meditation.
Kevin Thew Forrester, My Christian Faith & the Practice of Zen Buddhist Meditation, 25 February 2009

I have to admit being rather attracted to the idea of a Zen Bishop, particularly if he has awesome ninja skills, but that’s probably not the point.
So what is the point? (Other than that the Episcopalians are crazier than a crate-full of coconuts, which we already knew).

I’m interested because I’ve been thinking about the Christian understanding of suffering, and addressing suffering is at the heart of Zen practice. If being a Zen Christian really just meant embracing a series of meditation practices designed to promote focussed attention, I’m not sure that we shouldn’t all get on board. Retaining focussed attention and ‘slow consciousness’ (I made that up!) are fundamental challenges to those of us who live wedded to the endlessly branching and thus dissipating interweb.
I definitely need more Zen in my day.

The Zen Bishop again,

Literally thousands of Christians have been drawn to Zen Buddhism in particular because, distinct from western religions, it embodies a pragmatic philosophy and a focus on human suffering rather than a unique theology of God. “Lay ordination” has a different meaning in Buddhist practice than in the Christian tradition. The essence of this welcoming ceremony, which included no oaths, was my resolve to use the practice of meditation as a path to awakening to the truth of the reality of human suffering. Meditation deepens my dwelling in Christ.

Here is the problem: thinking that we can plug a Zen conception of suffering and its solutions into a Christian theology. It won’t work because the space isn’t vacant. Christianity already has a theology of suffering, more importantly, it has a theology of suffering that is an integral aspect of the Christian doctrines of God, humanity, and salvation, and is a key co-ordinate in Christian ethics. Further, the Zen conceptions of suffering, and the Christian understanding, while actually quite similar in their diagnoses of the problem, are worlds apart in their solutions.

I’ll come back to this but here’s a taster from the First Epistle of Peter. Peter is writing to a group of people who have likely been expelled from Rome by the Emperor Claudius. They are refugees, probably ethnically and religiously distinct from their host community (and thus a prime target for vilification and persecution). In the middle of the letter he begins to address particular groups within the Christian fellowship, he begins with the Slaves. You can’t get much lower down the food-chain than a homeless, ethnic, weirdo-religious Slave in the Roman empire.
And for their comfort and encouragement he writes:

For you were called to this, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in His steps. (1Peter 2:21 HCSB)

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Propositional Revelation

Themes: Doctrine, On Knowing God, On Language

I remember sitting in my Dad’s car a few years ago and having a ding-dong theological argument with him over the question of propositional revelation. He was telling me about something that he had been reading which suggested that restricting God’s revelation of himself to a merely propositional form was overly reductive. I was stirred to the heights of undergraduate fervour and waded in to defend the Truth of The Gospel.
“How could there be such a thing as non-propositional revelation?” I demanded. “If it is not propositional then it is nothing, it is not intelligible, it is not a revelation.”

Interestingly, propositional revelation was the subject of our doctrine class today, and I find that I’m not completely on the same page that I used to be. Sometimes my whole life seems to be a process of working out what my Dad was talking about.

Our class today was a strong defence of the primacy of propositional revelation. In fact, I’m being generous – there were definite points at which it was claimed that there is no revelation other than propositional revelation. The discussion was heavily guided by D. B. Knox’s article entitled, Propositional Revelation, the Only Revelation. (Have a read).

It was an interesting, stimulating class. It’s always more interesting to be lectured by someone with whom you’re not sure you agree. As I sat and chewed over what we were being taught I had to conclude that I simply cannot agree with that statement, as expressed in the title of Knox’s article, if it is given its normal sense.

Put down your stones…

It turns out I’m not alone, Michael Jensen wrote a helpful blog post about the issue a couple of years ago, I wish more notice had been taken of his point.

There’s a couple of things I would add to Michael’s article.

First, the continued use of the phrase ‘propositional revelation’ with a idiomatic definition of ‘propositional’ fosters poor critique of other theories of revelation. In our class it was suggested that, ‘propositional’ in ‘propositional revelation’ should be “understood in the less rigorous sense, of truthful communication” (yes, that’s a quote). Surely, most people would agree that, on a charitable understanding, ‘truthful communication’ describes revelation per se. The addition of the adjective ‘propositional’ is intended to characterise the form of that truthful communication. If you are allowed to define your position this broadly, you can say whatever you like about competing theories, without really grappling with the questions a rival theory is trying to solve.

Someone like Pannenberg, or Brunner, would be a staunch defender of propositional revelation, if by this you simply meant, ‘truthful communication from God’. When they attack propositional revelation they are attacking a particular understanding of the form of that truthful communication. Either we hold the view they are attacking, or we do not. At least we should be clear.

Secondly, the problem we might have with Pannenberg, Brunner or others, in their attempts to understand revelation ‘non-propositionally’, is not really that they think the concept of ‘revelation’ is broader than ‘propositions’. We’ve already conceded that much. It is that they appear to be seeking a way around (or behind) the Scriptures for a kind of essential revelational bedrock.
As I understand it, Pannenberg wants to find the bedrock of revelation in the public history of Jesus, focussed upon the resurrection; Brunner, in the Divine-Human encounter.
Pannenberg and Brunner both appear to make Scripture a contingent element of revelation. Someone committed to ‘propositional revelation’ (in Knox’s sense) objects to this conclusion. The commitment to ‘propositional revelation’ is really the commitment to the essential role of the Scriptures in God’s revealing of himself.

The long and short of it is this,
I think my Dad was right, in that God’s communication of himself is not reducible to true or false statements about himself. And yet, God in his sovereign freedom communicates himself in an essential relation to the text of Scripture. I’m still working out what I think that means – intelligibly, linguistically, and?
But of this I’m pretty sure:

I believe in scriptural revelation.

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