Inspiring Kids to Become Christian Gumshoes : A Review of Cold Case Christianity For Kids by J. Warner Wallace

J. Warner Wallace is a cold-case homicide detective. As a detective Wallace was well respected and earned the nickname “the Evidence Whisperer.” At the age of thirty-five when Wallace was still an atheist, he turned his honed and careful mind toward the claims of Christianity. What Wallace found in his investigation surprised him; not only did the claims of Christianity appear plausible, but they were the best explanation of a variety of important facts, like the origin of the cosmos, the reality of the moral law, and the New Testament claims about the resurrection of Jesus. Wallace laid out his case for Christianity methodically as a homicide detective would in his book Cold Case Christianity, which has received numerous accolades, not least from my wife who, though acquainted with many well-known Christian apologists, found Wallace to be the most engaging and accessible. Wallace and his wife, Susie, have now translated that book into Cold Case Christianity: For Kids.

In this new book, Wallace aims to illuminate two ideas for children: how to think critically and the evidence for Christianity. Wallace tells the story of several young cadets who have entered cadet training under the supervision of wise Detective Jefferies. Wallace illustrates principles of critical thinking as the detective guides the children through the mystery of a missing skateboard.  Wallace breaks down tough concepts like abductive reasoning and induction masterfully. One might doubt that children could understand abstract concepts like these, but as Wallace applies them concretely to the skateboard case, they are easy to understand and ought to be within the grasp of most children. But Wallace does not talk down to his audience, either. Wallace employs terms that many adults would need a dictionary to understand. How many of us know what “abduction” is off the top of our heads? And yes, the term is actually in the book! Wallace also shows that discovering the truth is often not a simple process. It will take time to gather evidence and think through all the implications. This reticence to water down the content while simultaneously making the ideas understandable to children is the greatest strength of the book. Wallace expects his young audience to rise to the occasion of thinking deeply and critically about some of life’s most important questions. That’s not an easy balance to strike, but Wallace does it well.

Though the theistic arguments are not the focus of this book, one of the highlights is Wallace’s simple but effective summary of the cosmological, teleological, and moral arguments. The book also provides entertaining and informative pictures that will keep children engaged as well as provide clarity for them. Wallace further provides a simple but clear overview of some the primary issues relating to the resurrection of Jesus, and this is his main focus. Topics like “the chain of custody” of the New Testament documents, which I personally did not hear about until I was an undergraduate at a Christian college, are introduced and explained with ease.  Children who have read this book will be more prepared and aware of the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus than even many adults.

But it is the synthesis of critical thinking and the presentation of the evidence which deserves the most commendation. In a world that is increasingly pluralistic and challenges the central claims of Christianity, children will need more than simple articulation of Christian beliefs. They will need to learn to think critically, like Detective Jeffries. This book does not merely provide the evidence for the resurrection in a way that children can understand, it provides a model of intellectual virtues which its young readers will feel called to emulate.

This combination is the reason I will read and reread this book with my young son as he grows up. Wallace has provided parents an excellent tool that any parent concerned about teaching their children critical thinking and the truth of the resurrection should not overlook. Cold Case can help our children provide a reasoned defense for the hope that they have, and MoralApologetics.com gives it our highest recommendation.

Image: "Junior Detective" by Jessica Lucia. CC License. 

Election Reflections

A Twilight Musing

Along with many other citizens, I’m sitting here the morning after the election trying to sort out where the results leave us as a nation, and especially as Christian citizens.  I’m relieved, as are many others, that the long, shabby campaign is finally over and we’re no longer bombarded by political junk mail, phone calls, attack ads, and sleazy discourse.  It has been widely stated that this campaign has been more flawed and ignobly pursued than any in living memory, and many are disillusioned as to the future of our democracy.

But perhaps this is a suitable reminder for Christians that nothing in Scripture indicates we are to expect government to do more than maintain public order and curb criminal activity. According to Paul in Romans 13:1-7, The proper response of Christians to governmental authority is submission to it and obedience to its laws.

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.  Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.  For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer.  Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God's wrath but also for the sake of conscience.  For the same reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing.  Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed.

An additional duty of Christians toward government is stated in 1 Tim 2:1-3: “I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made . . . for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.”

Certainly submission to civil authorities, abiding by the law, and praying for political leaders are commands as applicable to us as to Christians of the first century; but it is also true that people of God who live in a democratic republic have broader opportunities to influence government than did our brothers and sisters in earlier times, and therefore we have more responsibility as citizens.  However, such opportunities and responsibilities can easily tempt us to place more emphasis on our own efforts than on seeking discernment from the Lord as to how to conduct ourselves politically.  In response to this or any other election campaign, we should not be elated in pride if the candidate we agree with wins, nor cast down in bitterness if our favored candidate loses.  Especially in the aftermath of such a heated and vituperous campaign as we have just seen, Christians need to rededicate themselves to being models of sincere concern for public officials, whether we voted for them or not; and models of mutual respect as we deal with our social and political differences.  The best testimony that Christians can give at a time like this is to be agents of healing, rather than strident voices of either self-righteousness in victory or bitterness in defeat.

Image: "election chalkboard" by Jeff Warren. CC License. 

A. Thornhill’s The Chosen People: Chapter 2: "God Chose Whom?"

Summary by C. P. Davis [su_dropcap]I[/su_dropcap]n this chapter, Thornhill, after drawing out the distinction between what he terms “individual” and “corporate” election, discusses individual election in Second Temple thought. He begins by first noting that there is a touch of artificiality to these two terms, inasmuch as neither of them is used within Second Temple literature. This, however, should not overshadow the fact that there is a distinction between these two concepts, whatever one might call them. The chapter is divided into four major sections and a summary. We will briefly overview each of the major sections.

The first section, “The Character of the Elect,” is devoted to showing that Jews from the Second Temple period did not necessarily think of election in terms of salvation. The evidence seems to indicate that salvation, though an important corollary, was still just a corollary to the main thrust of election. But if salvation is not the main point, what is? Thornhill argues that the character of the elect fills this spot. In regards to salvation as election, our author writes, “Jews did not necessarily think in those categories” (28). The first bit of evidence comes from Wisdom of Ben Sira, which is clearly not focused on “otherworldly” notions, but rather has an eye to the practical life here and now. Ben Sira is largely concerned with displaying the magnificent qualities of the elect before God. In a telling section of his work (Sir 44:1–50:29), Ben Sira highlights God’s choice of famous Israelites, all of whom have been selected because of some inherent quality each possessed. Moses, in particular, is said to be chosen because he was faithful and meek. Character clearly plays a role for Ben Sira, but what about others?

The idea that character is relevant to election is also found in a number of additional psalms of David, some of which were discovered at Qumran. Psalm 152 and 153 portray David as one that is holy and elect, the two terms being linked. This seems to indicate that election has to do with David’s character before God. This is supported further by Psalm 155 where David is seen pleading with God to save Israel, on the basis of the faithful whom God has chosen. All of these psalms share the common theme of linking personal piety with God’s choice. But there is even more evidence for this concept in 1 Enoch. In fact, it is frequent that one finds election attached to personal disposition in this work. Like the psalms, 1 Enoch links the terms “elect,” “holy,” and “righteous,” in such a way that it is hard to separate the notion of election from an individual’s piety.

  “Chosen for a Purpose” is Thornhill’s second section, and here the focus shifts from character to function. That is, election deals not only with the piety of an individual, but with the role that person is to fulfill here and now. For Ben Sira, Moses was clearly chosen. Now, if one stops there the picture is not complete; one must ask what Ben Sira had in mind with this choosing. Moses was not simply chosen for salvation, but was chosen “so that he might teach Jacob the covenant, and Israel his decrees” (Sir 45:5). Again, the additional psalms of David tell the same story, only here David, not Moses, is the chosen. David is actually said to be chosen against the natural choice of man. God had a preferred choice, and this choice was for the purpose of leading the flock of Israel. As Thornhill points out, this passage is eminently “office-oriented” (37). The situation is no different in the Psalms of Solomon. Here the focus is once more on David and God’s choice of him to rule Israel. Interestingly, Israel is rebuked in this psalm because its sin had effectively cast off blessings that come through submitting to the Lord’s chosen. The only way to fix the problem is to look for one in the line of David to rule Israel.

In the third section, “Corporate Representation,” Thornhill unpacks one final aspect of individual election. Though coming close to corporate election, the concept of representation focuses on the individual as a reflection of the masses. Under this aspect of election God might treat a group in accordance with the stance of an individual. Jubilees offers a number of examples. This retelling of the book of Genesis casts God’s choice of Jacob in terms of obedience and righteousness. It might be noted that character is once again brought to the fore. However, a new development can be seen here: Jacob becomes the paradigm for the covenant community. A similar insight may also be gleaned from Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. Specifically, the Testament of Simeon 5:1-6 indicates that Levi and Judah represent the remnant of God’s faithful, and both the Testament of Dan and the Testament of Naphtali, though not clearly making the same identification, elevate Levi and Judah in such a way that the same type of picture seems to be present. But perhaps the clearest instances of this corporate representation can be seen in 1 Enoch. Thornhill notes a number of locations that house this idea, among which 1 Enoch 39:6 makes clear that the “Righteous/Elect One ensures the salvation and blessing of the righteous/elect ones” (49).

The final section, “Paul and Chosen Individuals,” seeks to evaluate the writings of Paul in light of the preceding material. Again, the focus is upon Paul’s doctrine of individual election. In Galatians 1:15­–16, one finds Paul speaking of himself as one that was chosen for a specific task. Romans 16:13 portrays Rufus as one who had been chosen as a prominent member of the local church. Adam and Jesus are then presented as the paradigmatic individual representatives (in this case of the entire human race!) in 1 Corinthians 15:20–24. And in the case of Jesus, this issue becomes even more acute when thinking of the atonement (2 Cor 5:18–21). Needless to say, each aspect of individual election, as articulated above, can be found in numerous segments of Paul’s material.

Image: King David in Prayer By Pieter de Grebber (circa 1600–1652/1653) - Web Gallery of Art:   Image  Info about artwork, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15144058

Power, Holiness, and the Ark

The Ark of the Covenant was created according to God’s specifications to house three items: the two stone tablets on which were written the Decalogue; a container of God’s miraculous manna from the wilderness wanderings; and Aaron’s rod that budded as evidence of his divine appointment as High Priest.  The Ark was the center of God’s Presence in the Tabernacle (and later the Temple), and therefore it was to reside in the Holy of Holies where only the High Priest could enter.  However, during the period of the Judges, the Ark was lost to the Philistines, and when they returned it to Israel, it came to rest in Kiriath-jearim, not far from Jerusalem.  It was still there when David was made King of Israel, and one of his earliest acts (I Chron. 13:5-14) was to move the Ark to Jerusalem in anticipation of the building of the Temple.  The attempt proved to be abortive, and David’s experience in that failure marked a significant turning point in his understanding of God and his relationship to Him. During the period of David’s life before he was made King, he was on the run from the first king of Israel, Saul.  When Saul was rejected by God because of his disobedience, David was anointed King secretly while he was still a boy.  He experienced a brief ascendency when he came forward to slay the giant Goliath, and then was made a commander of Saul’s army.  But when he incurred Saul’s jealousy and wrath, he was forced to flee and became the leader of a rag-tag group of malcontents and lived as an outlaw in caves and wilderness areas.  During that period, he wrote such Psalms as the 18th, which focuses on God’s powerful deliverance of David from his enemies (including Saul, according to the heading).  This reflects the understandable focus of David on God’s power and might, an emphasis that was still there when he proposed to move the Ark to Jerusalem.  Consequently, he made some major errors that forced him to adjust his focus to recognize the importance of God’s holiness.

The Ark was designed with metal loops at each lower corner, so that poles could be inserted through them to enable the Ark to be carried without its being touched, a procedure which God had specified to underline the holiness of this special artifact that represented the very Presence of God.  In disregard to this command about how to transport the Ark, it was put on an ox-cart, and when the oxen stumbled at one point in its journey, Uzzah, one of the men driving the cart, quite naturally put out his hand to steady the Ark and keep it from falling.  Although Uzzah seems not to have had any active intent to show disrespect toward the Ark, he was struck dead by the Lord for committing sacrilege.  Indeed, God’s judgment was on the whole situation wherein David and the leaders of Israel had either forgotten God’s command as to how the Ark was to be carried, or thought it unimportant.  David acknowledges his great error when he makes a second, successful effort to bring the Ark to Jerusalem (I Chron. 15:1-16:1).  After specifying that only the Levites could transport the Ark in the way prescribed by God, David observed: “Because you did not carry it the first time, the Lord our God broke out against us, because we did not seek him according to the rule” (15:13).  So “the Levites carried the ark of God on their shoulders with the poles, as Moses had commanded according to the word of the Lord” (v. 15).

But David’s immediate response to the slaying of Uzzah is not submissive (“David was angry because the Lord had broken out against Uzzah” [I Chron. 13:11]), and he obviously had to work through that anger to realize the enormity of his offence against God’s holiness.  A part of his coming to that understanding was a feeling about God that he had probably not experienced before: “And David was afraid of God that day” (13:12).  All of David’s experience of God before this point, from his being given the power to defeat Goliath to divine deliverance from his enemies in the wilderness, seems to have evoked love for the Lord and gratitude toward Him, but not fear.  Why was it important for David both to love and thank God and to have fear evoked by radical exposure to His holiness?  The answer is akin to the reason that we must understand and accept not only God’s generous grace and mercy toward us, but also embrace the fact of His wrath toward sin, His judgment.  To see only God’s mercy and goodness is to ignore what it cost Him to overcome His righteous wrath and judgment toward sin and sinners and to be oblivious to His inherent holiness that makes it impossible to allow sin in His presence.  Impossible, that is, unless God Himself does something to make it possible.  And the ultimate Good News is that God sacrificed a part of Himself to pay the price demanded by His wrath.

Only a shadow of this truth was available to David under the Old Covenant, and his crucial experience with the Ark drove him to the immediate acceptance of the fact that God’s holy Presence in the Ark could be accommodated only by the yearly sacrifice of atonement within the Holy of Holies that was the Ark’s ordered dwelling place.  When it finally came to rest in the Tabernacle tent David provided for it in Jerusalem, David had finally come to realize that God’s holiness properly evoked fear and trembling, as well as gratitude that God had provided a way for His holiness to dwell with His people without destroying them.  Herein was the seed of the complete Good News that a full, final, and eternally sufficient sacrifice had been made through the death of God’s own Son so that God in the integrity of His holiness could dwell among His people through the Holy Spirit without destroying them.

What relevance does David’s experience with the Ark have for us?  Perhaps it is that like him, we must come to recognize, fully accept, and deal with the wrathful side of God.  It is common for modern-day Christians, in their zeal to present God in the most attractive terms, to ignore or minimize the fact that He has a terrifying side that insists on keeping the reality of sin and judgment vividly in our consciousness.  If we succumb to the temptation to minimize the presence of evil and sin in this fallen world, we cheapen what it cost God to bridge the gap between His holiness and our captivity to sin.  Without the application of what Christ did, God has no choice but to exercise His wrathful judgment on sin.  God’s love and mercy can overcome the effects of sin only when we fully acknowledge it to be what it is and confess that because of His inviolable holiness it separates us from God.

Thanks be to God that under the New Covenant of the blood of Christ, God’s holiness is no longer embodied in an untouchable box of death, but now makes its redemptive dwelling within us.  What a terrifyingly wonderful manifestation of God’s grace!

image: By Domenico Gargiulo - http://entertainment.webshots.com/photo/2276876770037029906rWGmjt, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2291904

Some Things I’ve Learned by Living this Long

A Twilight Musing

Occasionally at this stage of my life, I think perhaps I’ve lived this long because there were things God wanted me to know that I wasn’t ready to accept when I was younger.  Perhaps you would like to know what a couple  of those things are.

Lesson 1: No amount of beating up on myself will compensate for my imperfections.  Early in my life, I was so full of my own virtues that I was too insensitive to feel guilty.  In my middle years, although I was increasingly and disappointedly aware of my failings, open admission of guilt was dangerous to my self-image; so I suffered the pain of my self-indictment privately, for the most part, seeking somehow to turn my guilt itself into an exonerating virtue.  As I edged into my mature years, I began to realize that in spite of my being a nominal believer in the unique efficacy of Christ’s sacrificial death to cover all my sin, I also harbored the unstated conviction that I could earn more of God’s love and favor than I already had by compiling a record of good behavior sufficient to forestall or minimize guilt.  Of course, I failed, and then I was ensnared in guilt again.

The solution, I found, is to embrace and rejoice in the process that John presents in his first epistle: “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.  If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (I Jn. 1:8-9).  I had always read this process of confession and forgiveness as a kind of emergency medical care to cover those moral cripples who just could not make progress in the New Life they had been given.  But I now think that this process of confronting our sin, confessing it, and experiencing forgiveness is an integral and ongoing part of our maturing relationship with God.  Embracing this daily process (not achieving behavioral perfection) is what John means when he admonishes us to “walk in the light,” for it is there that “we have fellowship with one another [as fellow sinners] and the blood of Jesus . . . cleanses us from all sin” (I Jn. 1:7).  There is freedom in that light to fully accept that being redeemed is an ongoing process that absorbs our sins so thoroughly that we continually stand pure before Him.  So the  continual recognition of our sinfulness is not a source of perpetual shame, but a source of marvel and rejoicing, because we are walking miracles of God’s grace.  There is no longer any need to cover up or deny our lapses, for now our struggle with weakness is an ongoing opportunity to relinquish the attempt to glorify ourselves and to glorify God instead.  As Paul says in II Cor. 12: 9-10, I can “boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me . . . .  For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

Lesson 2: Waning strength provides new focus for my life.  In the energies of my youth, I had the luxury of being able to devote attention to a number of significant activities and goals, such as graduate school, church activities, and maintaining and enjoying my marriage.  In my late twenties I started my first full-time faculty position, children were added to the mix, and I even managed to participate in a boys’ mentoring group and sing in a community choir.  I didn’t always get my priorities right in the distribution of my time among these activities, but that difficulty arose from my having enough mental and physical resources to pursue multiple applications of my energies.  This prime of life ability to attempt doing an amazing number of things was exciting, but it sometimes prompted pride if I was successful in one or more of these areas.  When in later middle age I began to experience the diminution of some of my skills and the opportunities to display them, I discovered just how much pride I had invested in getting recognition for them.  Therefore, I did not accept that diminution gracefully, and I somewhat bitterly lamented my losses, particularly the decrease in quality of my singing voice.

But at least that forced acceptance of reality made me better oriented when real old age set in to be content with the opportunities that were left to me, some of which I wouldn’t have known how to appreciate earlier in life.  My writing of these Musings is a prime example of a new opportunity that God opened up as a surprise at just the right time in my life.  I spent a lot of time in my earlier life trying to find things I thought God wanted me to do, probably putting more emphasis on my ego-pleasing choices than on God’s will and direction.  Now that I have less energy to seek out areas of service, He has shown me that when I wait on Him, He brings things to me.

So, as one old preacher was reported to have said when asked how he was doing, “I’m just repentin’ and praisin’.”

Random Ruminations on Spiritual States of Mind

Rumination 1 - What is the answer to the question of why humans should feel guilt?  Why should one not just accept his mistakes, remedy those he can, and not worry about the others?  The answer lies in an analogy:  One whose sensitivities to music have not been developed may be satisfied with a mediocre performance; he feels insufficiency in a musical rendering only when his sensibilities are enhanced to show him what is possible.  In the same way, only divine perspective can show sin, because it is an offense against God.  If one is content to limit his view of things to this world, he may very well not feel guilt, since the consequences of his wrong actions in that light are only practical, not spiritual.

Rumination 2 - It is indeed true that one can tell no difference between trying to be “good” by his own will power and obsessively seeking to be made “good” by God’s power; because in both cases one is primarily concerned with an image of himself, rather than with his being an instrument of God to bless others.  He is concerned with his own goodness rather than God’s, and his prayers are for God to help him be “good” in the eyes of others in order to glorify himself, rather than God.

Rumination 3 - A major barrier to yielding to God and the work of His Spirit within us is that it’s initially humiliating.  It’s hard to admit that we need Someone Else to chart our course, and that the good we do is the result, not of our righteousness, but of His formative power.  But a consoling corollary is that God also takes on Himself, through Christ, even our bad actions and their consequences.  Thus, we can give Him all of our actions with the confidence that He understands their nature and their outcomes even better than we do.  We should not make it our primary goal to “be” virtuous, but to let His power—which we freely choose and seek to understand—produce virtue within us.

Rumination 4 -  Habitual melancholy is such a luxurious feeling, because it is egotistically romantic, connoting (in some distant way, above logic) one’s isolation from ordinary people.  Occasional melancholy may be only thoughtful sadness, but perpetual melancholy is likely to feed a scornful outlook (all the more dangerous because often veiled).  If melancholy shields us from the world, it can also hide us from ourselves.

Rumination 5 - Only the pure in heart will see God.  One is indeed responsible for his actions, but his ultimate responsibility is for what, from the depths of his heart, he wants.  The choice that is wholly his is whether or not he will desire something more than his “heart of darkness.”  He can either nurture that dark heart, or cry out beyond it.  Worst of all, he may choose to pretend it doesn’t exist.

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 3, “Eudaemonism,” Section 3.3.4: The Fourth Defense: Agent-Transcendent Eudaemonism

Finally, the Aquinas-Porter argument can be revised in a way that is not liable to the objections to the first step and the second. Suppose we say that the agent’s encompassing good is not some more general good, like the good of the polis or of the natural world or of God’s friends, that necessarily includes her individual good, but the divine itself, which is by its own nature self-transcending. For Scotus, the end for human beings is to enter into the love that the persons of the Trinity have for each other, or to become co-lovers. This means that the highest activity is one of will, prepared by intellect, since Scotus accepts the principle that nothing is willed except what is previously cognized. This view should be distinguished from a view that happiness involves both the intellect and the will, but the activity of the will (the loving) is consequent on the highest activity, which is the beatific vision in the intellect. On Scotus’s view we can say that, of faith, hope, and love, the greatest is love both here and in heaven. On the other view, love may be the greatest of the three down here on earth, but in heaven the greatest will be a state of the intellect. The proposal we are now considering is that the agent identifies her happiness as entering into a kind of loving that is itself self-transcending. Such divine self-transcendence can be seen within the Trinity.

The proposal we are considering would appear to overcome the difficulties with the two steps of the Porter-Aquinas argument. First, it doesn’t beg the question about motivation. It allows that we have both a self-perfecting and a self-transcending love. But it holds that the second comes out of the first, because we identify in perfecting ourselves with a being that is itself self-transcending. Second, it does not hold that there is a necessary harmony between the self-indexed interests of an agent and the wider groups in which she is included.

The proposal has been stated in theistic terms, but can also be found in non-theistic terms. It might seem that if you identify the best (the most perfect) state of yourself as loving, then there will no longer be a tension between perfecting yourself and spending yourself for others. But there’s a difficulty here, which discloses itself in the following dilemma: either this is a single-source theory (deriving all motivation from my own happiness and perfection) or it is not. We have interests that do not reduce to virtue, or to conforming our lives to the Categorical Imperative for its own sake, and it’s completely appropriate for beings like us to have these interests. The point was made earlier that Kant should have allowed that self-indexed motivation includes more than the satisfaction of sensuous inclination. Now a single-source theory can to some extent accommodate such motivation. Aristotle, for example, can insist that self-love of the right kind is consistent with various forms of self-sacrifice. But he also insists that these are forms of self-love. His picture of motivation is that, if the agent were to ask herself “Why am I doing this?” the fundamental answer would be “because I am assigning myself the best thing.” Scotus and Kant would say that this answer is unacceptably self-regarding. But there is a dilemma here. Some followers of Aristotle disagree with his point about self-love and say the virtuous person should be called “good-loving.” This is unobjectionable, but now we no longer have a single-source theory. In Scotus’s terms, God will be loved both for God’s own sake and for the sake of the union. So either we stick with a single source theory that seems objectionably self-regarding, or we allow that self-indexed motivation properly remains, and then we have a double-source theory again, like that of Kant and Scotus.

The point is that the self-indexing of some goods needs to remain. An attempt to get rid of all such goods is Maimonides’ notion we’re absorbed into God. But surely there’s a sense in which we lose ourselves on that view; we lose, in Scotus’s term, our haecceity. One way to put this is that the fourth defense of eudaemonism paradoxically ends up compromising the aspiration to happiness.

So there is a dilemma for this kind of “agent-perfective” account of eudaemonism. It is the best form of eudaemonism; one free from many of the objections raised in this chapter. But it still faces the present dilemma. Suppose we think that an agent should be motivated by the desire to perfect herself, and suppose that being perfected is becoming the kind of person who is not always motivated by self-indexed goods. Do we now have a form of eudaemonism that is not “unacceptably self-regarding”? The problem is that we need to know whether this is a single-source account of motivation. If it is, and this account does not retain motivation toward goods that are self-indexed and necessarily so (such as the particular way of loving God that is unique to an individual), goods that could be (counterfactually) in tension with God’s own good, then the account is, we might say, “unacceptably self-neglecting.” But if it keeps these goods, then it is no longer a single-source account. By the definition at the beginning of this chapter, this means it’s no longer a form of eudaemonism. But what we need in our substantive theory is an account that gives us both kinds of goods.

The Tragedy of Solomon

A Twilight Musing

Recently I reread the account of King Solomon’s reign (I Kings, chapters 3-11) and was once again impressed with the tragic story of a man who began exceedingly well but ended disastrously. The story of his rise and decline is marked by the three appearances of God to him at the beginning, middle, and end of his long life as king. These messages from the Lord to Solomon occur at the humble and noble beginning of his reign (3:3-14), at the vulnerable middle when he was at the peak of his success (9:1-9), and at the shabby end (11:9-13), after he had succumbed to the temptations of lust and self-indulgence. God’s very best blessings to Solomon turned out to be snares to him. Therein we have the essential elements of a literary tragedy: the story of a man with heroic virtues whose gifts are pursued to excess and lead to the destruction of both himself and the people who have benefited from his virtuous actions.

The seeds of Solomon’s fall are there even before God appears to him the first time. In I Kings 3:1, we read, “Solomon made a marriage alliance with Pharaoh king of Egypt. He took Pharaoh’s daughter and brought her into the city of David until he had finished building his own house and the house of the Lord and the wall around Jerusalem.” This youthful marriage to a pagan bride is a foreshadowing cloud the size of a man’s hand that eventually matures into a veritable storm of apostasy by Solomon. It is ironic that reference is made to it just before the heart-warming story of the initial appearance of God to the young king, in which he pleases God by humbly asking only for “an understanding mind to govern your people” (3:9). God then assures him that he will receive not only what he has requested, but riches and honor as well (3:13), and his marriage outside of God’s people is pushed to the background.

The effect of this act works away like a dormant disease which will break out to pollute Solomon’s great achievements. Even though he must have known that he had violated God’s command not to intermarry with pagan foreigners, perhaps he rationalized that by bringing her to Jerusalem to live, her exposure to the holy project of building the Temple would temper her pagan upbringing. But far from being influenced for good by Solomon, his Egyptian wife progressively separated herself from him. First, he built her a house attached to his own, but separate (7:8), and afterward she moved even farther away, going “up from the city of David to her own house that Solomon had built for her” (9:25). The building of a separate house by Solomon for his Egyptian wife prefigures his building pagan shrines for the 700 wives and 300 concubines who led him astray at the end of his life (11:1-8).

But there is no direct reference to this shadow in the account of the celebratory events (8:1-11) leading up to the Lord’s second appearance to Solomon. The wise king is at the height of his glory and success, having just completed the building of the Temple and being at rest from all of Israel’s enemies. The whole tone of the occasion was triumphal, with the procession of the priests carrying the ark of the covenant to the Holy of Holies in the Temple, accompanied by all the treasures accumulated by David in his preparations for the building of God’s house. Moreover, there were sacrifices of “so many sheep and oxen that they could not be counted or numbered” (v.7). These actions were followed by Solomon’s magnificent dedicatory prayer (8:12-61), which stands at the peak of his success and constitutes the crux of his career, looking both backward to what has been accomplished, and forward to what will come.

It begins by acknowledging that the God who enabled Solomon to build the House of God is too great to be contained within it (in contrast to pagan idols); but embedded in the prayer were repeated references to the future sins of the people and their need for forgiveness. The primary focus in the prayer was not, as might be expected, on the physical splendor of the edifice, nor even the acts of worship that would be carried out daily there, but on the various circumstances by which the Israelites in the future would be separated from the Temple and would need to repent and pray for forgiveness. I suspect that Solomon did not realize that he was prophetically projecting the future rebellions and infidelities of God’s people, nor that these would spring from his own turning away from the Lord.

Solomon begins the body of his prayer (8:22) with three positive petitions, based on God’s faithfulness to His promises and His covenant with David and the people of Israel: (1) that God will perpetuate the placing of a descendent of David on the throne of Israel; (2) that God will honor His promise to manifest His Presence in the Temple built for Him according to His specifications; (3) and that God would always hear the prayers of His people toward this Temple, wherever they may be. This first section of the prayer is concluded by the general request, “And listen to the plea of your servant and of your people Israel, when they pray toward this place. And listen in heaven your dwelling place, and when you hear, forgive” (8:30). This concern with God’s forgiving the sins of the people is echoed repeatedly in the following seven specific requests for God to hear and respond to the people’s prayers, four of them explicitly mentioning sins against God and His covenant that require God’s forgiveness before the people can be restored. (The remaining three reaffirm God’s intent to defend the righteous among His people and to punish those who mistreat them.) Thus, Solomon’s petitions are weighted toward the likelihood that God’s people will need to pray for and receive forgiveness for straying from God’s covenant.

In view of this cautionary tone of Solomon’s prayer, what the Lord says to the king when He appears to him a second time (9:1ff) is especially poignant, for Solomon is then at his maximum vulnerability to pride, having just completed both the Lord’s house and his own magnificent palace (the building of which, by the way, took twice as long as for the Temple; see 6:38-7:1). He is renowned for the wisdom God gave him, and he has been freed from any threat from his enemies (see I Kings 4). He has every human reason to assume that he is in good standing with the Lord. At this point,

“the Lord appeared to Solomon a second time, as He had appeared to him at Gibeon. And the Lord said to him, “I have heard your prayer and your plea, which you have made before me. I have consecrated this house that you have built, by putting my name there forever. . . . And as for you, if you will walk before me, as David your father walked with integrity of heart and uprightness . . . , then I will establish your royal throne over Israel forever . . .. But if you turn aside from following me . . . and do not keep my commandments . . . but go and serve other gods and worship them . . . then I will cut off Israel from the land that I have given them, and the house that I have consecrated for my name I will cast out of my sight . . . .” (9:2-7).

As is typical in literary tragedy, the hero is given warnings that, if they had been seen and heeded, would have enabled the great man to avoid the errors that led to his downfall. The writer of I Kings has revealed these warnings to the reader, but they are unperceived by the hero, for he is caught up in the apparent security of his successes and is ripe for his fall. In the aftermath of God’s second appearance to Solomon, a good deal of text is devoted to picturing the opulence and glory of Solomon’s reign, including the visit from the Queen of Sheba, who further fuels Solomon’s blind pride by declaring that his wealth and wisdom exceeded all that she had heard about him (10:6-7). All of this description of Solomon’s magnificence makes abruptly shocking what comes next in the narrative.

By the time God appeared to Solomon the third time (11:9-13), he had fallen into the twin pits of lust and degenerate idolatry. We are told that “when Solomon was old his wives turned away his heart after other gods, and his heart was not wholly true to the Lord his God,” for he built high places for the worship of abominable deities “for all his foreign wives” (I Kings 11:1-8). The story of this most favored king of Israel coming to so wretched an end, in spite of his great God-given wisdom, should raise the elements of pity and fear that great tragedy evokes: pity that Solomon allowed his blessings to become pitfalls, and fear lest we do the same.

Image:Idolatry of Solomon by Sebastiano Conca. Public Domain.

A. Thornhill's The Chosen People: Chapter 1: "The Missing Link in Election"

No, this chapter is not discussing the problems with the political election cycle in the United States. Instead, A. Chadwick Thornhill focuses upon the doctrine of election, and how the Jewish mindset most certainly affected its formulation in the New Testament. Specifically, Thornhill narrows his topic to the way in which the apostle Paul’s concept of election was formed. Thornhill begins by discussing the New Perspective on Paul (NPP), and how certain elements of this theory should be retained. His main contention is that most scholars who deal with the NPP never deal directly with the concept of election. It is his goal to remedy this situation.

Thornhill begins by defining three theories of election: “national and unconditional,” “national and cooperative,” and “remnant-oriented and conditional.” The first theory develops election along the lines of a once-saved-always saved mentality. Specifically, it views the election of Israel as a holistic enterprise, whereby God chose this people for salvation. Anyone who is an Israelite is therefore saved by the nature of his covenantal relationship with Yahweh. Supporters of this theory (e.g., Sanders) often seek to adjust the common view that salvation in Israel was based upon works-righteousness. The second theory views Israel’s soteriological position as a tension between two poles: obedience and election. This is the least clearly defined category of the three. The third position argues that unconditional election of the nation Israel was never the point of the covenant. Instead, by studying Qumranic material and Pseudepigraphical works, it becomes clear that a conditional view of the covenant was the predominant Jewish view. Developing this third theory, then, is the major focus of the present book.

    The first major question addressed deals with how Second Temple Jews viewed their election. This is an important area of study because it leads to a second question: how might this understanding have affected the apostle Paul’s writings? He was, after all, a Jew of this time period. Thornhill believes that it is inappropriate to assume that Paul necessarily stood against the tide of all Jewish thought, just because he argued against some ideas. It is illogical to assume that due to a few instances of disagreement, Paul would have denied all of his Jewish background. Indeed, if this concept were taken to its logical conclusion then one would have to argue that Paul stood even against the Old Testament! At the same time, Thornhill is cautious not to overstate this point. He is clearly aware that Jewish thought at this time was rather amorphous. Nevertheless, there are certain widespread characteristics that he will seek to illustrate in subsequent chapters.

With this in mind, our author establishes a criterion by which he will proceed: each work from Second Temple Judaism that he will analyze will be addressed on its own merits and only then will it be compared with Paul’s material. The hope is that this methodology will offer a necessary safeguard against reading a preconceived notion of Paul’s theology into surveyed material and vice versa. The goal is to develop a picture of the zeitgeist of the Second Temple Jewish world, in relation to the doctrine of election. This goal is to be reached by analyzing three sources: the Dead Sea scrolls, the Apocrypha, and the Pseudepigrapha. In each case, an attempt will be made to expose those ideas that seem to be held by a broad sector of the Jewish world.

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 3, Section 3.3.3, “The Third Defense: Thomist”

The third defense of eudaemonism is drawn from the picture of Aquinas’s account of the relation between morality and happiness described by Jean Porter. She starts with a difficulty about understanding Aquinas, which is that he seems both to affirm eudaemonism and to assert that charity loves God for the sake of God and the neighbor for the sake of the neighbor, and not for our own sakes. Porter tries reconciling these. Aquinas expresses his eudaemonism by saying we all act with the goal of happiness, which sounds like a denial of the picture Hare attributed to Scotus and Kant featuring two fundamental motivations behind human action. But Aquinas also says that the love of God for God’s own sake is the distinctive mark of charity, and that charity towards the neighbor requires us to promote the neighbor’s good for the neighbor’s sake and not our own. There’s a paradox here. Porter tries resolving it in two steps.

The first step is to say that whatever overarching good the agent loves as her final end, she must regard it as in some way a meaningful goal for her own actions. But the Kantian would say this begs the question. For Kant and Scotus there are two fundamental sorts of motivations. For Aristotle and Aquinas-Porter, just one. For Aquinas the actualization of one’s final end is natural, but for Kant it’s free, not in this sense natural. Scotus says if an angel had the affection for advantage but not for justice, it wouldn’t be free. It begs the question to assert that we know, just on the basis of understanding human agency, that there is just one final end.

It might be thought almost unavoidable to say any action of mine must be directed at my own good, but recall some distinctions here. The first, from Butler, is that there are two senses in which every good aimed at by an agent might be a good for the agent, and the first does not imply the second. The first sense is that the good aimed at is good for the agent just because it is aimed at. In the second sense, the good for the agent is an object whose definition includes internal reference to the agent. Now, the moral law occasions in the agent a feeling of respect. Respect is my feeling, but it is not occasioned by a self-indexed object. Rather, it is occasioned by the moral law, which has no reference to me at all. The second distinction was between cases where the explicit description under which the object is loved is self-indexed and cases where it is not. Here Aquinas-Porter and Scotus-Kant would share common ground in saying that the self-indexed description need not be present to the mind of the agent. But what is at issue between the two positions is the former question: must the object be self-indexed if it to be intelligible to an agent? Aquinas-Porter says yes, and Scotus-Kant no.

Aquinas-Porter gives a second step in the proposed solution to the apparent contradiction of asserting both eudaemonism and the thesis that we should love God and the neighbor for their own sakes. The solution is to point to the fact that the individual belongs in a nested series of comprehensive general goods: the political community, the natural world, and God’s friends.

Both sides agree God brings virtue and happiness together, but the anti-eudaemonist insists this is not a necessary connection, but one due to God’s providential care. This makes a difference to the kind of gratitude we have to God. It also reminds us of the possible conflict, and the need for a ranking. Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these other things shall be added unto you.

Is it the case that the interest of the individual necessarily coincides with the true interests of the polis? Not necessarily, for what the polis might need is for me to hand the reins over to another, yet that might not be in my own interest. Even if we leave the Aristotelian framework, the possibility of tension between the true interests of the individual and of the state arises in the so-called problem of dirty hands. The state needs in its leadership people who are willing to compromise moral standards in a way that is inappropriate for private individuals. Moral compromises need to be made, and this is a cost to moral character that our leaders have to bear. Or consider surgeons who have to cut into living tissue on a regular basis, and who have to develop a certain kind of hardness of heart if they are going to do their jobs. This, too, is a kind of sacrifice of moral sensitivity they make. Or take the case of soldiers who have to be willing to become hardened to some degree about killing other people. It seems likely that there is some conflict between the interests of the state and of the individual. Remember the modal claim of Porter-Aquinas that there can’t be a conflict. For Kant divine assistance is needed to ensure there’s no conflict.

The second level in the nested series is the level of the natural world, or cosmos. Can we say that the interests of all the individuals who suffer and die in the course of evolution are somehow realized in the development of human beings? It seems doubtful that the whole created order exists for our sake. Kant’s own position is one that sees no natural coincidence of interest, but he agrees that humans can’t survive or flourish without the laws of nature in place.

The third level in the nested series is the community of the redeemed, the “friends of God.” Is it possible that the loss of salvation by some persons might be to the glory of God, and that charity might therefore require them to accept damnation? In previous generations, Calvinist congregations would regularly contain people who thought they were among the reprobate, but nonetheless attended divine worship with devotion, and no doubt tried to do their duties recognizing them as divine commands. Is such a frame of mind incoherent? If not, then surely there is not a necessary coincidence between my greatest good, in this case my salvation, and the glory of God. This mere possibility is enough to reject the necessary connection of the modal claim.

The point is just that God is not constrained here by necessity any more than we have necessity at the other two levels of the nested series. (I think I disagree with Hare here.) About all three levels we can that, if there is a harmony, it is a contingent harmony established because God is both, in Leibniz’s terms that Kant also uses, sovereign of “the kingdom of nature” and sovereign of “the kingdom of grace.”

Random Ruminations about God

A Twilight Musing

How presumptuous of me to think that I can love mankind more than God does!  And such a presumption is the basis of my difficulty in accepting the uniqueness of salvation through Christ.  I assume that it is my respect and regard for other people which makes it difficult to consider the possibility that good people can be lost, even if they are sincerely moral and religious by their own lights.  But my reluctance is really an unwillingness to relinquish my own finite viewpoint for God’s infinite one.  It is a refusal to admit that if there are spiritual realities, they are not going to be changed by my not accepting them.  It is foolish to refuse a physician’s services because you consider your illness unfair.  By the same token, if sin is a mortal illness and God’s grace is the answer, my view of whether human beings ought to be held responsible is irrelevant—this aside from the fact that God has not obligated me to make the leap from believing that “good” people can be lost to figuring out who is going to be damned.

My choice is whether to accept the fact that God is Love.  If He is, then He only is the measure of real concern for others; if He is not, He is either not worthy of consideration, or merely a construct of human ideals.  I cannot presume to show God’s love apart from God’s truth; I cannot consider the eternal good of my fellowmen apart from God’s perspective.  The last and most stubborn stronghold of myself is my determination to maintain my own sense of fairness rather than God’s.  If our warfare is spiritual, the weapons and the tactics are no more of my choosing than is the battle itself.  If it isn’t, the “life of the Spirit” is a psychological illusion and a distraction from the concerns of the “good life.”

Rumination 2 -  God absolutely IS, but He is also BECOMING.  He will not stand still for us to analyze Him, nor will He permit us to stand still while we seek Him.  Only that which is in motion lives; stagnation does not belong to God. There is infinite variety in God, but it is variety with an unchanging core.  Only when we see Him as He is will we fully realize how that which is Immutable is also an endless chain of newness.  Until then, we must be content to accept even that which appears to be mutable as an integral part of His design.  That He is always one step ahead of us assures us that the unknown is His; we need beware only that which we know.

Rumination 3 - It is difficult for humans to put God’s wrath in perspective, because we see wrath only as we ourselves exercise it to fulfill a need.  God’s wrath is absolute, springing from His absolute Holiness, and not something needed to build up His image or as an emotional outlet.  Man understands only his own self-satisfying wrath and is confused because he imputes that kind of wrath to God.

Rumination 4 - The mind of God, it seems to me, is more analogical than logical.  Mere logic is too neat and tempts one to believe that he has reached the limits of consideration.  God prescribes from absolute, unconstructed wisdom; humans can prescribe (be dogmatic) only by the artificial frameworks of logic applied to the supralogical  Word of God.  God’s absolute edicts are probably altered when they are put into human language; at any rate, humans should be careful not to dilute them even further by trying to enclose them completely by logic.  Logic can systematize truth in a limited way, but it must be tempered by a more spiritual way of understanding God.

Summary of Love of God: A Canonical Model: Chapter 9: “Who Is the God Who Loves?”

In chapter nine of The Love of God: A Canonical Model, Peckham summarizes the five key aspects of the foreconditional-reciprocal model of divine love that he has developed in the book and then focuses on key questions concerning God’s essence in light of how he loves. God’s love is volitional, evaluative, emotional, foreconditional, and ideally reciprocal. These features highlight the “give-and-take relationality” that exists in human-divine love. God’s choice to love means that he allows himself to be affected by the disposition or actions of his creatures and to engage with humans in profoundly emotional ways. God’s love for humans is undeserved but not without conditions in that it is only those who reciprocate God’s love that enjoy a particular love relationship with him for eternity. God works toward a bilateral love relationship with humans but does not unilaterally determine who will reciprocate his love. Such coercion is incompatible with genuinely loving relationships.

Is Love God’s Essence?

The bulk of this final chapter focuses on ontological issues that are key to determining what God must be like if he loves in this particular manner. The first of these issues is the relationship of divine love to God’s essence. In light of 1 John 4:8, 16 (“God is love”), many have postulated that love is God’s essence. Because of the mysteries associated with divine essence, Peckham takes a more cautious approach in asserting, “God’s character is love, and God is essentially loving” (p. 252). All that God is and does is congruent with divine love. The members of the Trinity have enjoyed an eternal love relationship with each other, but this “essential intra-trinitarian love relation does not extend to creatures” (p. 253). God is not morally or ontologically bound to love his creatures but voluntarily chooses to do so. This explanation preserves divine freedom in contrast to pantheistic conceptions that view God’s love for the world and his creatures as necessary to his being.

Divine Love and Perfection

Peckham next examines how the foreconditional-reciprocal model of divine love accords with a proper view of God’s perfection. Some forms of the transcendent-voluntarist model often view God’s enjoyment of the world as a defect that impinges on divine perfection, but Peckham argues that while God is ontologically independent from the world and self-sufficient, he also finds enjoyment in the world’s goodness and takes displeasure in evil. Because of his abundant love for humans, God has “voluntarily bound his own interests to the best interests of his creatures” so that the quality of his own life is interwoven with the course of human history (p. 256).

God has also extended significant creaturely freedom to humans, allowing them the choice to reciprocate his love or not to do so. The fact that humans act in ways that either positively or negatively impact God reflects that God himself is not the causal agent of these actions. God’s will is not “unilaterally efficacious,” evidenced by the ways in which “free beings actually affect the course of history, often in ways that are not in accordance with God’s ideal decisions” (p. 258). Peckham provides a helpful distinction between God’s “ideal will,” referring to what would occur if all agents acted in perfect conformity to his desires, and his “effective will,” which refers to what God evaluatively wills after taking into account the wills and actions of his significantly free creatures. God allowed Adam and Eve to not obey his ideal will in favor of granting them this creaturely freedom. The death of Jesus was “God’s will,” not in the sense that he desired it to happen but because it was part of his larger plan of salvation. We clearly see numerous instances in Scripture where God’s desires are not fulfilled (cf. Ps 81:11-14; Isa 66:4; Ezek 18:23; Matt 23:37-39; Lk 7:30), and such occurrences are necessary as a means of securing genuinely reciprocal divine-human love relationships.

Peckham’s distinction between “ideal will” and “effective will” contrasts to how more deterministic models distinguish between “desired will” and “decretive will.” In this, God genuinely desires that all be saved but has not decreed that all would be saved. Peckham raises the question, “If God’s will is unilaterally efficacious and God wants to save everyone, why does he not do so?” (p. 262). God ought to be able to determine every individual to accept his love and be saved, but the reality is that God acting in this way would be incompatible with the biblical ideas of significant human freedom and the bilateral nature of divine-human love.

Divine Love, Passibility, and God’s Constancy

Peckham also addresses how passibility and constancy can both exist within God’s person. Reiterating from his fuller discussion in chapter six, Peckham affirms that God is affected by the disposition and actions of his creatures and argues that explaining the strongly emotional language used to describe God in the Bible as anthropomorphic lacks a clear canonical rationale. God’s relational nature is reflected in the give-and-take aspects of his interaction with humans as he calls for response to his initiatives and then relents, rewards, or punishes based on what those responses are. Peckham is careful to qualify that his view of passibility does not deny divine immutability when understood as the constancy of God’s character and promissory purposes. God has voluntarily chosen to enter into the joys and sufferings of the world and does so “evaluatively and voluntarily but not essentially” (p. 269). God allows himself to be affected by others while also maintaining “ontological independence from the world.”

Divine Love and Theodicy

Lastly, Peckham examines divine love in relationship to the issue of theodicy and argues that the foreconditional-reciprocal model has advantages over the other models in outlining why there is evil in the world if God is good, all-powerful, and all-loving. The determinism of the transcendent-voluntarist model asserts that God predestines all evil but does no evil himself in that God wills these actions for different reasons. Peckham contends that this perspective is unsuccessful in attempting to avoid making God culpable for evil, asking how God could be good if he could have unilaterally willed to prevent evil without hindering his purposes and why God did not unilaterally determine that he be fully glorified before his creatures without evil. The pantheism of the imminent-experientialist model goes in a different direction, positing that God is not responsible for evil because he was unable to prevent it. This view offers an impoverished view of God and also raises the question of whether or not evil will ever come to an end.

The foreconditional-reciprocal model explains that God is omnipotent but that possession of all power does not require the exercise of all power. God freely grants power to other agents whose choices he does not unilaterally determine. God’s voluntary allowance of evil testifies to his loving nature. Since love must be free and cannot be determined, the necessary context for genuine love requires the possibility of evil and the rejection of God’s ideal will. Peckham writes, “God allowed evil, while passionately despising it, because to exclude its possibility would exclude love” (p. 274). Though creatures suffer greatly, God suffers more, and the voluntary suffering of God on the cross ensures that evil will be eradicated in the eschaton and that the universe will continue in “unceasing love and uninterrupted goodness.”

Summary of Love of God: A Canonical Model: Chapter Eight: “The Reciprocal Aspect of Divine Love”

Chapter eight of John Peckham’s Love of God: A Canonical Model focuses on the ideally reciprocal nature of divine-human love. While God has a universal love for all persons, he “enters into and enjoys a particular, intimate relationship only with those who freely reciprocate his love” (p. 220). Humans must choose to respond to God’s love in order to enjoy its blessings and benefits, and this reciprocity is necessary because of the nature of love, which involves the free and mutual giving of the self to the one who is loved. This discussion of reciprocity in divine-human love overlaps in many ways the previous discussion of the foreconditionality of God’s love in chapter seven.

God has foreconditionally bestowed love on every person, enabling a reciprocal response by humans to that love. God seeks these relationships because he is by nature love (1 John 4:8), and the revelation of God’s triune nature reflects that the Father, Son, and Spirit have eternally enjoyed a reciprocal love relationship. God is not in need of relationship with his creatures, but he desires and seeks relationship with humans. He expects that humans will reciprocate his love and responds with love and special intimacy to those who do so. In the Old Testament, God shows his “lovingkindness” (hesed) to those who “love” (’ahav) him and keep his commandments (Exod 20:5-6; 34:7; Deut 7:9; Neh 1:5; Jer 32:8; Dan 9:4). Similarly, the New Testament teaches that both God and Jesus respond with love toward those who love and obey the Son (John 14:21-23; 16:27). Followers of Jesus enjoy an intimate friendship with him because of this reciprocal love (John 15:14), but must remain in that love (John 15:9-10).

The Biblical Evidence for Reciprocity in Divine-Human Love

The reciprocity of divine-human love is especially reflected in the covenant and kinship relationships that God enjoys with his people. God initiates covenant relationships through calling and election prior to any human response, but those in covenant with him are expected to love him in return and to keep his commands. Providing a corrective to the sharp distinction between promissory and obligatory covenants in the Old Testament, Peckham rightly emphasizes that all covenants between God and humans contain elements of conditionality that place obligations upon those in covenant with the Lord. Even promissory covenants like the Abrahamic and Davidic covenants that guarantee the ultimate fulfillment of God’s promises place conditions of loyalty and obedience upon those who wish to personally experience their blessings  (cf. Gen 18:19; 22:16-18; 26:4-; 1 Kgs 2:3-4; 8:2; 9:4-9).

The use of marriage and parent-child metaphors to portray the covenant relationship particularly highlights the bilateral “give and take” involved in divine-human relationships. God has an enduring and patient love for his people, but he also expects the love of his people in return (cf. Ezek 16:8-13; Jer 2:2). God’s compassionate love for his people surpasses that of a human parent (Isa 49:15), but humans can also reject God as husband or parent and thus sever the kinship relationship (Isa 50:1; Jer 3:8; Hos 2:2). In the Old Testament, Israel’s repeated apostasy brought a rupture of their special relationship with Yahweh so that they forfeited their claim to be his “wife” (Jer 3:1) and “children” (Hos 1:6, 9; 2:4). God gave his wife a certificate of divorce (Isa 50:1) and sent her away into exile. God’s love for Israel was enduring so that he called for their repentance and return even in the midst of their apostasy and he promises to make a new covenant with those who seek him and return to him (Jer 31:31;36; Ezek 16:60-62; Hos 2:19-20; 14:3-4). In the New Testament, only those who respond by faith in Jesus Christ are allowed to be called children/sons of God (John 1:12; Rom 8:14; 1 Jn 3:1-2).

Regarding the human reciprocation of divine love, Peckham makes two important clarifications.  Reciprocal love does not mean that humans can love God equally or that the relationship between God and humans is symmetrical, but it does mean that a relationship between God and humans is possible in which “God’s love is responded to positively so that humans become conduits of divine love” (p. 231). The second is that the reciprocal nature of divine-human love also means that human love for God is not the result of God’s unilateral action. While God is the prime agent and initiator of divine-human love, he does not unilaterally cause humans to enter into a love relationship with him. Peckham states that “humans possess the divinely granted freedom to reciprocate or reject God’s love” (p. 231) and views this understanding to be in line with the numerous exhortations in the Bible for humans to love God and statements in the Bible concerning human love for God. He argues that “the divine exhortations for human love would be superfluous and misleading if human love were unilaterally determined by God such that those who do not love God could not love God” (p. 231). The numerous passages that speak of the reward given to those who love God “strongly imply genuine contingency and significant human freedom” (p. 231).

God’s Universal and Particular Love

Peckham’s view of divine-human love as ideally reciprocal necessitates a distinction between God’s universal and particular love. There is a universal invitation to all, but God’s relational love can be rejected and forfeited. There is a special “insider love” for those who respond to God, but those on the outside who reject God’s love could have been insiders as well but were not willing. Humans do not earn God’s love by responding to his initiatives because their response “is no more meritorious than the acceptance of a gift from a benefactor” (p. 234).

Pekcham rejects universalism in all of its forms, because God’s love ultimately can be rejected and resisted. He also rejects the idea that God’s particular love reaches only those whom God as chosen as his elect. Peckham, in agreement with Walls and Olson, finds it problematic to say that God truly loves those whom he has unilaterally chosen not to save. He also raises the question of why God does not save all if he truly can unilaterally impose his love on humans.  A reciprocal view of divine-human love instead asserts that God does all he can “within the bounds of bilateral significant freedom” to bring about the salvation of all, but ultimately each individual must choose to accept or reject the offer to enter into relationship with God.

A Further Canonical Perspective to Consider

Peckham’s model of the reciprocal nature of divine-human love accords well with the canonical interplay between the divine initiative to enter into relationships with humans and the contingency of human responses to those initiatives. Peckham also raises important questions regarding how divine-human love can be genuine and mutual if unilaterally imposed on humans. At the same time, there appears to be a canonical movement in Scripture that perhaps does not receive enough attention in Peckham’s treatment. In the new covenant that God would make with Israel, there is a greater emphasis on the circumcision of the heart, writing the divine law on the heart, or the giving of a new heart that would serve to override Israel’s unbelief and that would guarantee the nation’s fidelity to the Lord (cf. Deut 30:16; Jer 31:31-34; Ezek 11:19). Walter Brueggemann writes of this movement from a “Deuteronomic model,” stressing human repentance as a condition for Israel’s restoration, to a “Prophetic model,” in which restoration occurs without Israel’s repentance. This movement does not eliminate reciprocity, because human repentance/response remains a part of the equation, but Peckham could devote more attention to this greater emphasis in the new covenant on divine initiative in securing the human responses that God desires. Peckham states that “those privy to God’s particularly relational love allow God to love them forever” (p. 243), but it seems that there again needs to be greater emphasis on the indwelling of the Spirit (also a new covenant reality) that seals the believer in this love relationship and that secures the believer’s enduring love in relationship with God. The power of God that acts to hold the believer in this reciprocal love relationship once it is initiated is also an important part of the canonical presentation concerning divine-human love.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

You may recognize the title above as alluding to the 1967 movie with Spenser Tracy, Katherine Hepburn, and Sidney Poitier, in which a daughter stretches social acceptability at the time by bringing home her black fiancé to meet her parents. The experience is awkward for mom and pop, because their theoretical racial tolerance is put to the test by a live challenge. A new guest for dinner brings with him or her the potential for the hosts finding out things they would just as soon ignore.

In his book The Jesus I Never Knew, Philip Yancey observes that when Jesus was invited to a meal, He often defied “all rules of social propriety” (p. 150). Even at the ones where he didn’t either offend His host or associate with questionable people, He caused a stir. At the marriage feast in Cana, he astounded the master of the meal with the wine He made out of water. The first time He visited Mary and Martha for a meal, He had to set Martha straight about putting meal preparation ahead of listening to Jesus. After His resurrection, Jesus joined two disciples on the road home from Jerusalem to Emmaus. Concealing His identity, He remonstrated with them that they should not be puzzled either by their Master’s death or by eye witness reports that He had subsequently been seen alive. They invited Him home for dinner, and they must have felt rather silly when He opened their eyes “in the breaking of the bread” (Luke 24:30-31, 35) to know who He was.

In two instances Jesus went home with disreputable people and their companions (Matthew and Zacchaeus, both despised as tax-collectors), and was roundly criticized for the company He was keeping. The Master put down those observing Matthew’s feast with the observation that if one wishes to be a spiritual minister, one goes where the need is greatest, to “those who are sick” (Luke 5:31). And of the “sinner” Zacchaeus, He says that sharing a celebratory meal together is quite appropriate when salvation comes to the house of a repentant “son of Abraham,” for “the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:9-10).

But Jesus’ most scathing and confrontive remarks occurred when He was invited home by prominent Pharisees. These hosts and their guests were called out for their elitist self-righteousness in showing contempt for those Jesus saw as the primary targets for His compassion and ministry. Such challenges were often followed by parables that underlined His lessons to His fellow-diners. When He was the guest of a ruler of the Pharisees (who invited Jesus in order to catch Him in word or deed), He obliged them by openly healing a man on the Sabbath (Luke 14:1-6). Then followed three parables, the object of which was to show that God’s social order and evaluation of people is quite contrary to the way humans exalt themselves at the expense of others.

On another occasion, he was at table as a guest of a Pharisee named Simon, and during the meal a woman of ill repute came in and washed Jesus’ feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair, a kind of public intimacy that was regarded as scandalous, causing His Pharisee host to say to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner” (Luke 7:39). Knowing Simon’s thoughts, Jesus poses a question to him under the guise of wanting to know his opinion about a hypothetical situation; but the Master uses it to make an incisive point: that one’s ability and motivation to love God are measured by the person’s acknowledgment of his deep need and by the corresponding realization of God’s generosity in meeting that need. Moreover, Jesus points out that Simon has failed in hospitality by not providing for Jesus’ feet to be washed, in contrast to this poor woman who resorted to tears and hair as instruments for washing Jesus’ feet, and then added the tribute of applying ointment to His feet afterward. Thus are the tables turned on the censoriousness of Simon and his fellows.

The most poignant occasion where Jesus challenged those He was eating with was just before His death, in Bethany. During the meal, a woman (John’s account says it was Mary, sister of Martha and Lazarus) comes in with a vial of precious and expensive ointment which she applies to both His head and His feet (to conflate the accounts: John 12:1-7; Mark 14:1-9). The critics are quick to say that this was an extravagant gift that more appropriately could have been sold and the money given to the poor. Jesus sees the woman’s act quite differently, and actually prophesies that because she has anointed His body beforehand for burial, “what she has done will be told in memory of her” John 14:9).

Sometimes people fantasize having a meal with Jesus, perhaps not anticipating that it might not be an entirely comfortable experience. When Jesus ate His last meal with His disciples, He gave them a disturbing lesson in humility by washing their feet, and He told them some other things that they didn’t understand at the time. When we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, we are challenged to recognize His presence in the wine and the bread, as if He were there in the flesh; and if we fail to do so, it will be to the peril of our spiritual and physical health. In the book of Revelation Jesus says, “Behold I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me’ (Rev. 3:20). This invitation comes at the end of Jesus’ plea to the church at Laodicea to realize that they are morally destitute and blind and need to receive healing from the Lord, to accept His discipline. So when He comes in and eats with them, their communing together will be both humbling and gratifying. If we presume to ask Jesus to dinner, just remember that inviting Him to our house doesn’t mean we know exactly what we will experience when He arrives. It’s worth the risk, though.

Eight Meals Jesus was invited to:

• Wedding at Cana (John 2:1-11) • First meal with Mary and Martha (Luke 10:38-42) • At the house of Matthew (Luke 5:27-32) • At the house of Simon the Pharisee (Luke 7:36-50) • At the house of another Pharisee (Luke 14:1-24) • At the house of Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1-9) • Later meal with Mary and Martha in Bethany (John 12:1-7; see also Mark 14:1-9, Matt. 26:6-13) • On Road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35)

Image: By Jan Cornelisz. Vermeyen (circa 1504–1559) - Web Gallery of Art:   Image  Info about artwork, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7439391

What’s Really New?

A Twilight Musing

We Americans are fascinated with all things new, largely because both the word and the idea of “new” are at the center of promoting products, from cereals to automobiles. I heard just this morning in a newscast (as you can see, the word is even embedded in the media) a report about how Apple can get away with marketing a new iPhone every couple of years: people want and eagerly await the next new thing, especially in communications technology.

The assumption of the superiority of the new is also deeply woven into the fabric of modern Western thought. It is intricately connected to the idea of progress, undergirded both by ever-expanding scientific and technological knowledge and by the application of Darwin’s theory of biological evolution to human social development. Arising out of these elements of thought is the rather arrogant assumption that the present age is by definition more advanced than any that has preceded it, merely because it is the latest. This is the state of mind described by C. S. Lewis as “chronological snobbery.” In this context, it’s not surprising that modern theological opinions are considered superior to old ones. If doctrines and moral standards clearly stated in the Bible conflict with modern, enlightened, “scientific” understandings, then we must cast the old aside and embrace the progressive new.

However, the God of the Bible is actually the source of all things new—is, in fact, the only source of the New. The conflict is not primarily between the old and the new in a chronological sense, but between mankind’s “new” and God’s “New.” God demonstrated the archetypal New when He “created the heavens and the earth.” No such thing had ever existed before; it was unique, completely original, and God “saw that it was good.” When sin corrupted this perfect new world, God provided a lesser but sufficient way for the human race to survive on earth until God’s redemption of the fallen world could be worked out. For Adam and Eve, newly banished from the Garden, He balanced the penalties of pain in childbirth and painfully tilling the ground for food by providing them garments and promising that the Serpent who had deceived them would one day be bruised (fatally and finally, it is implied) by one of their offspring. (See Gen. 3:14-21.) We now know that the “offspring” referred to was Jesus Christ, Messiah and Incarnate Son of God, whose heel was bruised by the Serpent Satan when Jesus died on the cross. But before the culmination of that divine plan in the Incarnation, there was a very long period of progressive New Things, beginning with the purging and purifying of the earth through the Flood; the calling of Abraham to be the father of God’s nation, Israel; the institution of a Covenant with that nation, based on the Law given to Moses; the blessing of Israel with a land to live in; the apostasy of the nation leading to their being exiled from that land; and their return from exile to rebuild Jerisalem and the Temple. Thus, over long years, the way was prepared for the coming of God’s Son, the Newest Thing ever seen.

Jesus’ appearance in the world marked the creation of a New Adam, a being who, like the original creation, was unique and without precedent. The first Adam was created from the earth, and God breathed into his physical form the breath of life; but the Second (or New) Adam sprang from the very Spirit of God and was only temporarily clothed in a perishable body (see I Cor. 15:45-49). When Jesus arose from the grave after being struck to death by Satan, He became the source of a New Covenant, established through the shedding of His perfect blood to remove forever the curse invoked on mankind because of sin. With this New Covenant came a New definition of the people of God. No longer was His people merely physical Israel, but a unification of Jew and Gentile into “one New Man” (Eph. 3:15, my caps, and so throughout), so intimately identified with Christ as to be referred to as His Body. The people of God are made up of all those who have accepted Jesus as Lord and have experienced the transformation from death to life, putting off the “old self” and being “renewed” so that we can “put on the New Self” (Eph. 4:21-24), which is actually Christ in us (Col. 1:27). As Paul says, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20-21). All of this is preparation for our being ushered into the New Heaven and New Earth with which God will replace the flawed universe in which we now dwell. (See Is. 65:17-18; II Pet. 3:11-13; Rev. 21:1-8.)

God’s New is obviously glorious and benevolent, greatly to be desired and joyfully to be embraced. And yet, as I indicated above, we in this fallen world easily fall prey to the glittering temptation of the temporal new. Scripture has many examples from which we can profit in this regard. One of God’s repeated accusations against Israel was that they went after “new gods” and “forgot the God who gave [them] birth” (Deut. 32:17-18). The jaded old man whose voice we hear in Ecclesiastes is so satiated with his pursuit of the ephemeral “new” that he concludes “there is nothing new under the sun” (Eccl. 1:9-10). And he is right, for what is under the sun is not God’s New, but mankind’s flawed new. Nevertheless, God is at work in His people of every age providing spiritual renewal in the midst of our weariness. Inserted into the middle of the book of Lamentations (3:22-24) we find the beautiful affirmation: “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. ‘The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘therefore I will hope in him.’" In Isaiah 40:31, those who “wait for the Lord” are promised that they will “renew their strength” and “run and not be weary . . . walk and not faint.”

Nevertheless, perverse beings that we are, we not only are easily lured by the glitter of the world’s fleeting “new,” we often are frightened and threatened by God’s ‘New,” even though he makes it readily available to us for the asking. But to receive God’s New, we must put off the old that would hinder us from growing in our walk with Him. I once wrote a New Year’s poem that expresses this ambivalence, and I present it here by way of conclusion.

A Reluctance for New Wine

The fabric of threadbare hope

Stretches toward year's end.

Pieces of frayed ambition extend

To cover the old wineskins

That many disclaim But few set aside.

Like children clutching tattered dolls,

We hug in vain security

The rags of the past,

Because in some degree

They are accommodated to our wills.

The outworn selves we cling to

Can be our own

The more as time goes by:

We patch and mend In order to possess.

The New Stirs something deep within—

But I would not willingly admit it.

--Elton D. Higgs (Dec. 31, 1977)

Image: "Beginning" by Uzzaman. CC License. 

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 2, “What is a Divine Command?” Section 2.3.1: Six Implications of Our Being Commanded by God

This discussion is taken from Barth’s discussion in Church Dogmatics III/4. From the premise that God gives commands, we can learn, first, that we and God are different; we are not, that is to say, part of God. This is because commands are not addressed to oneself, except in an extended sense in which one is treating oneself as another.

Second, commands are given to responders of a certain kind; those who can obey. This is explained in the four points that follow, called subsequently “the four Barthian constraints.” One, the commands are given to centers of agency, to responders whose obedience consists in acting and living in a certain way. These are individuals, though we can speak in an extended sense about the agency of collectives. This point about the nature of the responders is one Ockham relies on in his discussion of the question of whether God can command us not to love God. His view is that the command to love God, though its content is possible in itself, is pragmatically incoherent (a practical consideration) because it can’t be disobeyed; this is because to disobey it is already to love God. Recall that loving God entails obedience. See Ockham, Quodliberal Questions III.14. A content can be non-contradictory in itself, but contradictory as commanded. A content can also be non-contradictory as commanded, but contradictory as commanded by God. See Lucan Freppert’s The Basis of Morality according to William Ockham, who argues that this view is different from that of Scotus discussed in ch. 1.

Two, commands are to centers of agency whose obedience consists in changing how things are, or in resisting change. So they are in time, since, as Aristotle says, time is either change itself or the measure of change. They have to persist, in order to be obedient, through the hearing of the command to the obeying of it. Three, commands are given to free beings, in the sense of beings who are not under external causation in their obedience. Four, the responder has to be part of a language community. Commands are standardly addressed to the responder in language, and language is a communal enterprise.

So we and God are different is the first implication of our being commanded by God; the four Barthian constraints are the next four. All of those have been points about human beings. The sixth point is about God:

If God gives us commands, and the function of commanding as a speech act is to change the world through the agency of the responder to whom the command is addressed, and if the command is an expression of the desire that the world change in this way, then we can attribute something like desires (in the broad sense) to God. More usually, theologians would say God has a will. Again, that we have a God who commands is distinctive of the Abrahamic faiths, and distinguishes them from, for example, Aristotle’s religion. Since God’s creation is also a command, it’s reasonable to say that command is the characteristic fashion by which, in the Abrahamic faiths, God relates to us, either by creating or by telling us how to live inside creation. Behind this difference with Aristotle is an even more significant one. God is not, for Aristotle, in a personal relationship with us, but the Abrahamic faiths make our relation to God personal, and mediate that relation by God’s command to us.

It’s true that God’s will and God’s command can diverge, as in the famous case of Abraham and his son. When they do, are we bound (according to DCT) by God’s will or by God’s command? We should hold ourselves bound by the command, taking it as an expression of God’s will, but this assumption can, in certain cases, be overridden by another command.

Image: By Wolfgang Sauber - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42826104

Unexpected Consequences

A Twilight Musing

The dramatic confrontation in John 8, between Jesus, an accused woman, and the Scribes and Pharisees who were her accusers, turned out quite contrary to the expectations of both the woman and her accusers. The catalyst for this complete reversal was the piercing words of Jesus directed at the accusers: “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” This saying has borne the fruit of many a reference to someone’s being disqualified from “casting the first stone,” referring to the vulnerability of those who self-righteously indict others. It’s fairly easy to picture the accusers drifting away one by one, since their leaving is described in the passage. But since we have no information about the adulterous woman’s departure from Jesus, we can only imagine it, and I have tried to do so in the first of the two poems below. The strongest set of inferences to be drawn about the woman from this passage is that when she was hauled by the Scribes and Pharisees before Jesus, she must have feared for her life; and that after the episode she felt great relief at departing not only physically unharmed, but spiritually delivered. Like so many who encountered the Master, He had more to give than she knew how to expect. But I have gone beyond those reactions on her part to postulate how she felt at having now not only to continue living, but to redefine what it meant for her to live after Jesus told her to “go, and from now on sin no more.”

Depicting what the defeated and deflated accusers must have felt as they left is of course from a perspective quite different from the woman’s, and I have attempted that in the second poem below. I have assumed that shock and wounded pride would have been at the core of their feelings and thoughts, but I have also hinted at the possibility that there may have been a glimmer of acquired self-knowledge. Common to both poems is astonishment at the unexpected outcome of the encounter.

Reprieve (John 8:3-11)

Out of the circle of death I walk, Alone at the center when I came, Alone with Him when I left. Bereft of hope, I stood accused By all but the Teacher. Accusers became the accused, Standing, stones in hand, triumphant In night-time raid and dawn indictment, Then melting away in single shame, Till none remained when the Master looked up. Only when He spoke did I meet His eyes, Full of beautiful severity. As ugly the sin as it was before, But condemnation gone! Reproach was swallowed up In “Go, and sin no more.”

No backup plan for being stoned, I walk toward home to find my way again. Old way of life must now be buried, As--rising from forgiveness— His love replaces carnal lust. Unjust escape from penalty say those Who hide behind the Law, But blissful boon to her who heard The quieter voice Replacing heartless rage.

Convicted (John 8:3-11)

We slink away, heads hung in shame, With tongues and hands disarmed By flash of sin reversed; Not one of us had conscience clear Enough to start the slaughter. We came to trap him in his words, Yet our words became our snare. He turned on us the double-cutting sword Of Law-based righteousness, And bleeding now we leave the field, Our cleverness in ashes.

Image: Vasily Polenov "A Depiction of a Woman Caught in Adultery" Public Domain. 

The Messiness of Power

A Twilight Musing

My wife and I recently watched “Gods and Generals,” a movie about the American Civil War. It is a very rich and thought-provoking portrayal of some of the commanders on both sides of the conflict, whose comments on war are profound and sobering. Both sides had idealistic justifications of their resorting to war, but the wisest men among them also realized that war is, at best, an evil used to combat an even greater evil, or to achieve a goal whose good outweighs the terrible price of war in human life and resources. At one point, Robert E. Lee is shown saying, “It is a good thing that war is so horrible; else we should grow to love it too much.” Lawrence Chamberlain, a Northern commander who gained fame for his company’s heroic defense of a key hill in the battle of Gettysburg, explained to his brother Thomas that war is an extreme form of coercion, and only the moral necessity of ending slavery could have motivated him to leave the quiet halls of academe to engage in the directed chaos of war. No thinking person is ever easy with organized slaughter, however worthy the cause behind it.

Although fighting a “just war” is the most graphically focused example of “messy” power to maintain a larger ideal, every exercise of power in a fallen world involves moral ambivalence. There are many less charged situations in which we humans are faced with the necessity of determining how to use power or authority so that it is an instrument more for good than for evil. Actually, this difficulty has its roots in the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden. If it is true that Satan, as depicted in Milton’s Paradise Lost, was led astray by his lust for more power, it is easy to see the temptation of Eve and Adam as a seduction into the exercise of their wills to gain more power. So far as we can infer, the prelapsarian world required no conscious exercise of power by mankind, except to rule over non-sentient nature according to God’s commission. Jahweh’s overall power insured the order of the universe, and until humans were confronted with the apparent attractiveness of increasing their power by eating the forbidden fruit, there was no thought or desire to go beyond the established order. With the eating of the forbidden fruit, the use of power by human beings became problematical at best, and disastrous in its potential.

That is why there are so many cautions in Scripture about the use and exercise of power, and why the final, restorative consummation of all things through God’s sovereign power is preceded by His sweeping away the flawed and risky world of human power. But in the meantime, we have no choice but to engage, guided by the Word of God, in the application of power and our responses to it. The core of all moral instruction within God’s Covenants, Old and New, is that we govern our relationships with one another by turning our wills toward applying the principle of love, rather than trying to control others. The Law of Moses repeatedly addresses ways that the strong must act with gentleness and compassion toward the weak and the disadvantaged, not misusing power to oppress and exploit the powerless. At the same time, rulers of God’s people are expected to use their power to administer justice and to enforce the observation of God’s laws.

Some of these general principles of just governance are spoken of in the New Testament, as in Rom. 13:1-7, where Paul legitimizes even secular government as instituted by God to maintain good order and to punish evil-doers. However, the New Covenant pays more attention to the obligation of Christian citizens to submit to established governmental powers, and even to pay taxes to them willingly. This spirit of submission is even more radically presented in instructions about personal relationships between believers. The foundation is laid in the Gospels, which show the heart of Jesus, the Son of God, to be with the most vulnerable people of society. However, His ambitious disciples were not quick to pick up on this emphasis, and He had to instruct them that if they wished to be great (that is, in a position of power), they must learn to be servants (see Mark 10:42-45). He exemplified this lesson in washing the feet of His disciples just before he was tried and sent to the cross (John 13:1-17); as He said to them then, “You call me Teacher and Lord, and you are right for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet” (vv. 13-14).

This admonition is reinforced in the epistles. Paul admonishes the Ephesians to submit “to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Eph. 5:21) and then proceeds to speak of submission in particular relationships: “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord” (5:22), followed by a call to husbands to subordinate their own welfare to the care and enhancement of their wives (vv. 25-33). Children are to honor and obey their parents, but parents are also admonished not to exercise their power in ways that are not consonant with “the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (6:4) and therefore merely provoke their children to anger. Church leaders are held responsible for disciplining false teachers and those who would disrupt the Body of Christ, and church members are to respect those who have spiritual authority over them (I Tim. 5:17-21). But these leaders are also admonished to exercise their authority gently and by example, not by “domineering over those in your charge” (I Pet. 5:1-3).

All of us who have experienced much of life can testify that it is often problematic to exercise power, even by divine assignment; and that submission to authority must always be ready to discern when that puts us into conflict with God’s clearly revealed moral laws. But there is no escape in this fallen world from making decisions about the responsible use of and response to power, and no escape from the messiness of doing so. With the best intentions I may anger my children unnecessarily, or fail to encourage my wife, or do something unfair to an employee. And if I’m on the receiving end of the exercise of power, it’s not easy to submit to someone with whom I disagree, or to someone who is not showing concern for my welfare.

All of this highlights the fact that the only way to have peace of mind about either exercising power wisely or submitting to it willingly is to recognize that both the power-wielder and the one who submits to power are answerable together and individually to the Lord of all. It behooves us, then, to conduct ourselves with humility, recognizing that the grace either to submit to authority or to exercise it for good has to come from the One to whom we must all submit. Until we reach that place where God takes back all power to Himself and delivers us from the ambiguity of using tainted power to achieve imperfect good, we persevere in trust that He will empower us with discernment.

Image: "Throne" by R. Panhuber. CC License. 

Perspectives on the Lord’s Supper

A Twilight Musing

A Lutheran friend of mine recently visited our church on what happened to be the once-a-month Communion Sunday. This was the first time she had participated in a “low-church” Communion service, and she was shocked and taken aback by the comparative casualness with which the elements of the Lord’s Supper were distributed and partaken of. The bread was tiny squares in a tray to be picked up with the fingers, and the grape juice (not wine) was in tiny plastic cups set in a tray, and both elements were passed down each row. I gave her some whispered explanation of these procedures during the service, and after the service she pursued the conversation further. “I couldn’t believe we were passing the Blood of Christ down the row,” she said. Her own Lutheran way of having Communion was much more formal, with communicants going up to the altar rail to partake from special wafers and a shared cup of wine (not grape juice), both held by an officiating clergyman or his assistant and presented to each communicant. Underlying her reaction was the Lutheran conviction that the bread and the wine, though not physically changing into the Body and Blood of Christ (as Catholics believe), are nevertheless invested with the mystical Presence of Christ.

All of this led me to some consideration of the differences between “low church” and “high church” customs of worship, particularly in regard to the Lord’s Supper (the common “low church” term for it), or Eucharist (most usual “high church” designation). Evangelicals may be seen as typifying the “low church” end of the spectrum, and Catholics as representing the other end. I think that the contrast between the two can be understood in reference to Paul’s recap of Jesus’ establishment of the Communion service and the Apostle’s comment on the church’s observance of it in I Cor. 11:17-34.

In Jesus’ words of institution, He made statements and gave commands. The statements were, “This is my body which is for you” and “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” The command in regard to both of these statements was, “Do this in remembrance of me.” In general, I think, the low church approach to the Lord’s Supper emphasizes the command, and the high church approach emphasizes the two statements concerning the elements. The low church focus is on the clearly understandable, intellectually uncomplicated instruction, whereas the high church takes Jesus’ two statements as the primary and most basic truth in understanding the act of Communion. To put the contrast another way, the low church interpretation and practice centers on the rationality of the command, whereas the high church focuses on the mystery of Christ’s supernatural Presence in the elements used in the observance. So we can see how the variance in modern observances of the Lord’s Supper reflect these two kinds of starting points in understanding its meaning and significance. High church communicants regard Communion as a mystical experience; low church communicants see it as primarily carrying out the command to remember.

What are we to say about the relative validity of these two approaches to the meal that we all see as one of the required corporate observances of the church? When presented with two poles of perceived truth, it is usually best to see the strengths of each of them and see how they can perhaps be complementary to each other and not merely an endless source of argument. As one who grew up in a low church setting, I appreciate that an informal observance of the Lord’s Supper has a sort of leveling effect, with minimal distinction between those who administer the elements and the rest of the congregation. This may be seen as practicing both the letter and the spirit of Paul’s instructions in I Cor. 17 that the Supper must show no distinction in the status or wealth of those who participate, for to partake in that manner would show that we “despise the church of God” (v. 22). At the same time, I have noticed over the years the hazards in the low church approach to the Lord’s Supper. In most evangelical Protestant congregations, it gets deemphasized by practicing it only once a month, or even once a quarter. On the other hand, even when it is observed weekly, the time and effort put into preparing for a meaningful presentation of it in worship tends to become secondary to other elements of worship, particularly the sermon.

There is no gainsaying the deep seriousness with which the high church participates in the Communion, or Eucharist, and Evangelicals need to observe and learn from their expectation that communicants will experience a special kind of connection with Our Lord as they partake of the bread and the wine, which Jesus Himself said are, in some sense, to be regarded as His body and blood. The chief danger in the high church practice is that to one extent or another it divides the laity from the people who administer the elements. This difference is most stark in churches in which only priests can officiate for a Eucharist, since they alone are empowered to speak the words by which the substances of the Supper are turned literally into the Body and the Blood of Christ.

I came away from the discussion with our guest about the Communion at our church with a renewed conviction that our congregation needs to have a deeper respect for the Lord’s Supper, manifested in the way it is prepared for and presented. In the absence of an established liturgy that typically uses set prayers and comments on the Communion to put it in context, Evangelical churches need to make sure that the planning of any service in which the Lord’s Supper is to be observed provides for sufficient time and a lead-in that show understanding of and respect for what is being done. High churches can profit from understanding that the observance of the Supper referred to by Paul was probably a gathering in a home, with all of the informality that would be expected in such a setting.

Since Communion is meant to testify to our unity in Christ as we “proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (v. 26), it behooves us to seek for common ground that brings together all of us who observe it in honor of Christ. If we eat and drink without humility before each other and without discernment of our Master’s Presence, we are “unworthy” and risk eating and drinking judgment on ourselves (vv. 27-34). Let it not be so among us.

Any Questions? Jude 3 Project Interviews Dr. David Baggett

Recently, Dr. David Baggett was interviewed by Cameron Hodge of the Jude 3 Project. Hodge asks some tough questions about some of the most difficult moral issues facing Christians today. You can find the interview here.

Image "Any Questions" by Marcello Maria Perongini.