Trinity & Church VIII

Continued from Part VII

Falling in Two Directions at Once

If the Triune God created human beings to enjoy fellowship with himself and with one another, even to reflect the unity and love that existed between the persons of the Godhead, then we should expect to find (as Gunton hinted at above) evidence in the narrative of the fall not only of individual rebellion against God, but also of a disruption in the social fabric of human life as it existed in the paradigmatic pre-fall communal relations between Adam and Eve as husband and wife. Not surprisingly, this is exactly what we discover in Genesis chapter 3. The “community of love,” as Grenz described it, did not last very long.

A detailed exposition of the fall narrative is not possible here, but we can call attention to the fact that the fall was simultaneously a failure on the part of the first man and woman before God and in relation to one another. In disobeying God’s command, Adam failed to love his wife Eve. Eve also not only transgressed God’s explicit direction concerning the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, but she did so by communicating with and submitting to the Serpent rather than her husband “who was with her” (Gen. 3:5). One cannot say, as I recently heard a preacher assert, “This chapter [Gen. 3] is not about marriage but about man’s relationship with God.” These relations cannot be so neatly segregated one from the other—distinguished surely, but not separated. Adam fails in his relationship to God precisely as he fails his wife (“because you have listened to the voice of your wife,” Gen. 3:17). At the very least we should be able to acknowledge that integral to the multivalent account of Adam and Eve’s fall was their failure to fulfill their calling to image God in their relation to one another.

We can probably go further than this and approach an understanding of how Adam should have acted toward his wife by examining the Second Adam’s faithful relation to his bride, the Church. In order to see this here in Genesis 3, we have to be sensitive to how the rest of the Bible uses this material (2 Cor. 11:1-6; Eph. 5:22-33; Phil. 2:1-11). Jesus is the true Image of God (2 Cor. 4:4; Rom. 8:29; 1 Cor. 15:49; Col. 1:15). According to the analogy of Scripture, seeing how Jesus Christ, the New or Second Adam and Faithful Husband behaved, we can surely reason that the first Adam ought to have been jealous for his own wife’s purity (with a “godly jealously,” Eph. 5:26-27; 2 Cor. 11:2). Unhappily, he thought more highly of himself than he ought and did not esteem his wife as better than himself (Phil. 2:3). He did not look out for the interests of his wife (Phil. 2:4), but sought to insure his own limited liability in the rebellious deal brokered by Satan (Gen. 3:12), standing by silently, according to Gen. 3:5, with the full knowledge that his wife was being spiritually seduced (1 Cor. 11:2-3; 1 Tim. 2:14). He did not love his wife (Eph. 5:25a), which means that he failed to treat Eve as his own body (Gen. 2:22) such that he would “feed and care for her” (Eph. 5:28-30).

In so far as the New Testament links Adam with Christ and Eve with the Church (Eph. 5:25b), we should conclude that the First Adam ought to have laid down his life for Eve and for the destiny of the entire human race. The extent of the first Adam’s love for his wife, however, came nowhere near even his own discomfort, let alone his death. The first Adam ought have loved his wife sacrificially by guarding her from Satan to the point of sacrifice in defense of her purity. Adam’s rebellion against God was enacted in his failure to love and guard his wife. Thus, one cannot separate Adam’s behavior before God from his behavior with Eve. He failed to behave in a way that imaged God’s love, and in hating Eve he becomes an anti-image of the true Image of God, Jesus Christ. After all, the “love of Jesus,” that is Jesus' love for his bride, becomes paradigmatic for all human social relations, just as Adam’s love for his bride ought to have been.

Note: Cornelius Van Til argued very convincingly that Adam was something of the first “neutral” social scientist, performing an experiment to see whether what God had said would come to pass—his wife being the experimental guinea pig (see Van Til, Survey of Christian Epistemology [Phillipsburg, PA: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1969], pp. 18-22, and Defense of the Faith [2nd ed.; Phillipsburg, PA: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1953], pp. 91, 98-101). This detached way of relating to another human being is the antithesis of love and violates the core meaning of the imago dei.

Apple Computers, Baby

I'm sick of hearing and reading about the iPhone. I want upgrades on Apple computers. I don't give a rip about the iPhone. I use my phone to make calls and talk to people. That's it. I use my laptop for everything else when I'm away from my office. If Apple OD's on the iPhone, it'll be bad, real bad.

The Biggest, Longest, and Baddest Stuff on the Earth

Well, did you ever wonder about. . .

. . . the tallest man made structure on the Earth?
. . . the strongest earthquake in history?
. . . deepest canyon on the earth?
. . . the windiest place on the earth?
. . . the tallest bridge on the earth?
. . . and more?

Check it out the Google Earth Extreme Series

HT: Digg

Trinity & Church VII - More on the Imago Dei

Continued from Part VI

The image of God cannot be reduced to the human individual possessing various faculties. Nor can the imago dei be individual humans as they are composed of "parts" (e.g., soul, spirit, body, or mind, will, emotions). Rather, humanity as a whole images God by mirroring God’s uncreated and eternal social life. Human life is theomorphic, and because God's being is irreducibly social so also humanity's being and life cannot but be social.

Long note: This social dimension of the imago dei was not absent from early church theologians. For example, although Augustine has been accused of reducing the image of God to faculties found in the individual soul, such a reading of Augustine is severely truncated. One might stop and consider whether a good deal of the theological angst over Augustine’s psychological analogies has more to do with modern Western readings of his work which assume that Augustine’s illustrative triads refer only to isolated individual (i.e., self-conscious) minds (Michael Hanby, “Desire: Augustine Beyond Western Subjectivity,” in Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward, eds. [London and New York: Routledge, 1999], pp. 109-126). At any rate, upon closer examination, Augustine does not appear to understand the “image of God” in a modern individualistic sense. Curiously, most systematic presentations of his trinitarian theology take no notice of his exegetical and polemic works, concentrating solely on his De Trinitate. Pursuing a broader spectrum of Augustine’s works, one discovers that he did indeed understand that the individual alone could not adequately image the fullness of God’s eternal relational life. Individuals per se are not created in the image of God, but mankind, human beings, “male and female” (Gen. 1:27) image God. One wonders if Augustine has become the theological-whipping boy simply because modern authors can only with great difficulty fashion readings of him that would support their own radical social or political agendas; see Charles Sherrard MacKenzie, The Trinity and Culture (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1987); David S. Cunningham, “What’s [Not] New in Trinitarian Theology,” Reviews in Religion and Theology (1997): 14-20; idem, “Trinitarian Theology since 1990” Reviews in Religion and Theology (1995): 8-16; and idem, David S. Cunningham, These Three are One: The Practice of Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998). After all, it is more than a little ironic that Augustine himself is chiefly responsible for the shift in antique culture from private, mystical asceticism towards an understanding of the indelible communal nature of human life, especially Christian ecclesial living. Robert Markus calls attention to Augustine’s communal monastic rules as well as the vision of the City of God in order to argue that Augustine transformed Greco-Roman culture by steering it away from its concentration on the isolated self. Augustine held that “the most insidious form of pride, the root of all sin, was ‘privacy,’ self-enclosure” (Robert Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990], pp. 73-83). Similarly, Charles Norris Cochrane argues that it was Augustine’s “discovery” of trinitarian personhood that revolutionized life in the ancient world (“Nostra Philosophia: The Discovery of Personality,” chapter XI in Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine [London: Oxford University Press, 1957], pp. 399-455).

This “image.” then, is both an ineradicable structural feature of created human life and an essential aspect of mankind in need of redemption. Every human being is inescapably related to God and other human persons, but these relations, as a result of the fall, are perverse and abnormal. What this means is that if the image of God is not merely “located” within the human individual possessing various faculties, but also in humanity in its social relations as it reflects God, then the church must be included in any consideration of the renewal of the image of God.

Redemption restores both God’s relation with humanity as well as the warped relations that exist within post-fall human communities. The ecclesial community is the locus of this social dimension of the renewed image of God. “The church is the place where the recreation of human personhood in the image of Christ is acknowledged in faith as the reconstitution of the created sociality of human being as redeemed sociality” (Christoph Schwöbel, “Human Being as Relational Being: Twelve Theses for a Christian Anthropology,” in Gunton and Schwöbel, eds, Persons, Divine and Human, p. 158). This is why God, from the first announcement and application of the Gospel in Gen. 3:15, has always acted to renew not simply individuals, but marriages, families, and communities. Stanley Grenz nicely summarizes what we have discovered thus far:

It is not surprising that ultimately the image of God should focus on community. As the doctrine of the Trinity asserts, throughout all eternity God is community, namely, the fellowship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who comprise the triune God. The creation of humankind in the divine image, therefore, can mean nothing less than that humans express the relational dynamic of the God whose representation we are called to be. Consequently, each person can be related to the image of God only within the context of life in the community with others. Only in fellowship with others can we show forth what God is like, for God is the community of love—the eternal relationship enjoyed by the Father and the Son, which is the Holy Spirit (Theology for the Community of God [Broadman & Holman, 1994], p. 179. See also his recent work on the subject of the image of God: The Social God and the Relational Self: A Trinitarian Theology of the Imago Dei (Westminster/John Knox Press, 2001).

God to Part VIII

The Trinity in Worship & Life

Over at the Ref21 blog Carl Trueman asks a few interesting questions:

Given the fact that the Trinitarian identity of the Christian God is the identity of the Christian God, how do the other bloggers on Ref21 (who are all ministers) ensure that the action of worship in their churches on a Sunday is truly Trinitarian? For theologians such as Gregory Nazianzus, John Calvin and John Owen, Christianity in all its aspects, theoretical and practical, was Trinitarian; yet the oft repeated comment of theologians such as Colin Gunton, to the effect that Western theology is modalist and functionally unitarian, seems well-made; and this surely renders worship more narrowly and the Christian life more broadly as both unChristian and vulnerable to syncretistic forces from Islam.

Or, from another angle, is the practical ignorance among church leaders of the first five centuries of Christian thinking having a damaging effect not simply on the catholicity of contemporary Protestant theology, but also upon its understanding of who God is and how we relate to him, both in the worship service and in the worship of everyday life?

Any thoughts?

It just so happens that I have a thought or two about these issues.

Covenant and sacrifice are ultimately grounded in God’s eternal tri-Personal communal life as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The eternal personal relations between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are covenantal. The mutual love, obedience, and self-sacrificial giving and receiving that characterizes the relations of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in eternity is the origin and ground of God’s covenant with us and our covenantal relations with one another. In other words, the bond of love between the three Persons of the Trinity has been graciously extended to embrace human creatures.

Reformed theology and worship has not always given careful attention to the fundamentally Trinitarian character of genuine Christian worship. This is made explicit in Ephesians 2:18, “Through Christ we . . . have access in one Spirit to the Father,” but it is embedded in the entire record of Scripture. I believe that it is precisely this trinitarian dynamic that is jeopardized in so much of what passes for Christian worship in modern churches.

Our liturgy must exhibit an explicitly trinitarian content and shape if it is be genuinely and recognizably Christian worship. I will take two chapters to unpack this. First, I will make a case for a deep, inexorable connection between the form of worship and our doctrinal confession. Next, in the following chapter I will unpack the significance of this nexus for the order and substance of our worship.

If worship is reduced to evangelism, education, experience, or even praise, the Persons of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit need not play a vital role except possibly as objects of worship. In contrast, Christian liturgical worship has the Father effectually calling his people into his presence by the Spirit and then renewing his church in Jesus Christ his Son.

The gathered church, as it receives this service from the triune God, then responds by the enabling power of the Spirit with thanksgiving and praise in Christ directed to their heavenly Father. The Spirit has been sent by the Father to bring us to the Son, and with the Son, to the Father. A liturgy that embodies this reality will be ineradicably trinitarian in “both directions”—as God serves us and as we serve God. And as always, what is done in the assembly on the Lord's Day will affect the Christians way of living in the world.

Read more

The Scandal of Infant Baptism

Romans 9:6-16.

I believe that Luther was right when he insisted that the meaning of baptism is best revealed in infant baptism. Infant baptism is the norm. Adult baptisms are not. When the passive, utterly dependent infant is carried down the isle and has water poured upon her, this is a powerful reminder of the utterly free and sovereign grace of God. The sacrament is the work of God upon the child, not vise versa. Faith never comes first to be followed by God’s grace. God’s grace comes first and enables infants, children, and adults to believe. The sacrament of infant baptism is all about the free electing grace of God.

I believe this is the great scandal of infant baptism, which is so despised in America, the land that celebrates individual freedom and self-appointed destiny. Baptism reminds us that man is at the mercy of God and self-appointed destiny is a delusion. God freely saves helpless infant-like people. Baptism is not primarily the outward confession of the faith of the baptized. The action symbolized in this sacrament is not horizontal, but vertical, the movement from heaven to earth, from God to man. It is not a confession of what man has done or of the faith someone possess or of the experience that someone may have had. Infant Baptism is all about God in his Sovereign freedom acting upon a passive infant.

The infant has done nothing to merit such a covenant, such a gracious relationship. The infant cannot even exercise adult faith. There is nothing that the infant does to draw down the love of God. The love of God is freely given. With nothing foreseen or foreknown. This infant, in the all-controlling providence of God, was born by God’s precise appointment into this Christian family. And now God will formally enter into covenant with the child without asking the child’s permission. Without securing the child’s consent. The child is passive. The child does nothing.

The child by Adamic nature deserves eternal death. This is not a child dedication. As cute and as lovable as these children who are brought to the baptismal font are, unless we have abandoned the biblical faith, we must confess that they are dead in trespasses and sins. They are not to be paraded around the sanctuary before they are baptized as if this were some sentimental ceremony. Gee, God loves little babies so much doesn’t he? Well . . . he loves those who have been washed from their corruption and guilt. And he loves those babies who are united to his beloved Son Jesus Christ. And that is what we are about here at this font.

God will cleanse and deliver this little girl, even though she was born in sin. This is the meaning of the water being poured from above. Nothing and nobody - not the parents not the baby girl - nobody has any influence over God in the salvation of this child. No amount of Parental technique will assure her salvation. God decides her destiny. It comes from above, like the sprinkling.

This is the scandal of infant baptism. All baptism is infant baptism. Every adult who submits to baptism does so as a little child. Everyone enters the kingdom in the same way, as helpless children. Every baptism is a ritual reminder that God alone saves sinners. It is not a ritual display of the faith of the one being baptized, not for adults and certainly not for children. All baptisms are infant baptisms. “So then it is not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy.”

Trinity & Church VI - The Relational Image

Continued from Part V

Just as it was not an undifferentiated divine monad that created humanity, so also it was not merely the human monadic individual that was made in the image and likeness of God. Not only do we have the “let us” in Gen. 1:26-27, but at the end of that passage we read “in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”

The alternation between “him” and “them” as well as the “male and female” strongly supports an interpretation of the image that embraces man’s social life, the pairing of male and female being paradigmatic. Moreover, I agree with Francis Watson when he argues that Barth does not go far enough when he describes the image of God in a strictly dualistic fashion as male and female corresponding to Father and Son (Church Dogmatics 3/1, pp. 182-205). Watson argues that “it is preferable to speak of an open community at both the divine and human levels. The triune God seeks communion with the human other; correspondingly, male and female do not remain self-enclosed but are fruitful and multiply” (Text, Church, and World: Biblical Interpretation in Theological Perspective [Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1994], p. 150).

Just as God is essentially a relational being, so also man is ineradicably relational. Adam and Eve are who they are in relation to God and to one another. Walter Brueggemann notes, “On the one hand, mankind is a single entity. All human persons stand in solitary before God. But on the other hand, humankind is a community, male and female. And no one is the full image of God alone. Only in community of humankind is God reflected. God is, according to this bold affirmation, not mirrored as an individual but as a community" (Genesis [John Knox Press, 1982], p. 34).

Colin Gunton gives the following answer to the question, “In what sense are we like the triune God, while being ontologically totally other than he?”:

Likeness to God consists in the fact that human beings are persons while the remainder of the created world is not. We are in certain ways analogous to the persons of the Trinity, in particular in being in mutually constitutive relations to other persons. Who and what we are derives not only from our relations with God, our creator, but to those others who have made and continue to make us what we are. Just as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit constitute the being of God, so created persons are those who, insofar as they are authentically personal—and we shall return tot his matter—are characterized by subsisting in mutually constitutive relations with one another. . . . Just as to be God is not to be an individual, so to be man, as male and female, is to be created for life in community (The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study [Eerdmans, 1998], p. 208).

How to Read Augustine's The City of God

In order to get acquainted with the overall argument of Augustine’s City of God begin by reading the entire first book, then read these chapters in the order listed: 2.1—2.4, 3.1, 4.1—2, 5.1, 6.1, 9.1, 11.1, 12.1, 14.28, 15.1, 17.1, 19.1 (first paragraph), 19.17, 20.1, 21.1, 22.1, 22.30.

Reading these selected chapters will prove to be a better overview than reading any “Introduction” written by someone else; you’ll get a feel firsthand for Augustine’s style and concerns without the interference of the interpretations of a reviewer. Reading these selections instead of jumping right in and plodding through the entire book will give you a fine overview of the major themes of the various books without having to struggle through the complexities of Augustine’s argument.

After reading these, if you feel like you would like to read more, look over the lists below and choose a chapter. If you begin to read a book and find yourself in the middle of some discussion about which you know nothing (nor care), then move on.

Only be careful, some of Augustine’s more brilliant arguments, the kind that upon finishing call for “oohs” and “aahs,” often concern questions or objections from pagans that may not be directly applicable to our situation, but which, in the process of Augustine’s analysis, often yield some very important insights. For example, consider Augustine’s extended refutation of the objection from scoffers against eternal death to the effect that the material body could not possibly suffer pain eternally without being destroyed (Bk. 21.2-8). This argument is simply brilliant and affords lots of meat for meditation.

Overview of The City of God: Augustine’s Own Words

Part 1 (Bks 1-10): “From this world’s city there arise enemies against whom the City of God has to be defended, though many of these correct their godless errors and become useful citizens of that City” (1.1).

Books 1—5: “I write against those who maintain that the worship of the gods—I should rather say, of evil spirits [daemones]—leads to happiness in this life” (Letter to Firmus).

Books 5—10: “. . .we shall answer those, who, in spite of being disproved and refuted by unanswerable proofs, persist in the assertion that the gods are to be worshiped not with a view to any advantage in this life but with a view to the life after death” (1.36).

Part 2 (Bks 11-22): “My task is to discuss, to the best of my power, the rise, the development and the destined ends of the two cities, the earthly and the heavenly, the cities which we find, as I have said, interwoven, as it were, in this present transitory world, and mingled with one another” (11.1).

Books 11—14: The origin of the two cities.

Books 15—18: “Since I have said enough about the origins of these two societies [Bks 11-14] . . . it seems to me that I should undertake to describe their development from the time that the first pair began to produce offspring up to the time when mankind will cease to reproduce itself. For the development of these two societies which form my subject lasts throughout this whole stretch of time, or era, in which the dying yield place to the newly-born who succeed them” (15.2).

Books 19—22: “It is clear to me that my next task is to discuss the appointed ends of these two cities, the earthly and the heavenly” (19.1).

Computer Monster

Leviticus I - Correcting the Terms

The words we traditionally use to translate Hebrew terms in the "sacrificial" system are confusing and often convey the wrong ideas. If we are going to understand Leviticus and the old world system of sacrifices and offerings, the first thing we have to do is get the words right.

We use English words to translate some of the Hebrew terms in Leviticus that are not helpful, but are in fact loaded with all sorts of unfortunate connotations. The book of Leviticus is a book of rituals (mostly) and the language used is extremely precise. I believe our Bible translations make these rituals obscure because of traditional, but inappropriate designations.

I hope I'm not sounding arrogant. Once you get the words right, the sacrificial rituals are much easier to understand and can be better appreciated for their practical instruction.

Take for example, the noun "offering" and the verb "to offer." I look at my English translation (it doesn't matter which one) of Leviticus chapter one and see the word "offering" used over and over again (16 times). The verb "offer" also occurs over and over again throughout the book of Leviticus. Offering and offer. What's the problem?

What does the word "offering" mean to you? Well, an "offering" is something "offered" to someone else, right? It's something we hope to give to someone either as a gift or maybe to patch things up? A husband "offers" his wife flowers to help mend things after a fight. A boss "offers" an employee an opportunity. If I offer you something, you have to reach out and take it or at least accept it. Two people make some sort of exchange when something is "offered." The essential idea of an "offering" is that something is given, a present or gift given to another. Something passes from one person to the next: "I offer you this . . ."

Now, you might think that this word "offering," as we have explained it above, occurs all over the book of Leviticus. After all, aren't all the "sacrifices" named "offerings"? No, they are not. The Hebrew word that comes closest to meaning what our English word "offering" denotes is minchah. This word is often translated "grain offering" because it usually involves the fruit of the ground (but not always). You can find the word all through Levitus chapter 2, for example. Even so, the word minchah is never used in the Hebrew Bible to refer to any of animal "sacrificial" rite. For instance, the word is not found in chapter one, even though the English word "offering" is used there repeatedly.

Here's a standard translation of Levitus 1:1-3a (ESV):

The LORD called Moses and spoke to him from the tent of meeting, saying, “Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, When any one of you brings an offering to the LORD, you shall bring your offering of livestock from the herd or from the flock. If his offering is a burnt offering from the herd, he shall offer a male without blemish. . .

Notice that how the words "offering" and "offer" dominate the last sentence. This translation, I believe, creates the wrong impression about what is being prescribed here.

The Hebrew word translated "an offering" is qorban. It is related to the verb qrb, which means "to draw near, to approach." It's not too hard to figure out. A qorban is something that is brought near, something that or someone who approaches something or someone else. The word does not have anything to do with "offering" someone something or exchanging gifts. It's about someone or something approaching or drawing near.

What Yahweh says to the people is: "When a man draws near to Yahweh with something that is brought near from the livestock or from the flock. . ."

That's rather literalistic and wooden, but it brings out the meaning of the Hebrew nicely. The worshipper is not "offering" something to Yahweh. At least that's not the idea here. The worshipper is "drawing near" (qrb) with a "something brought near" (qorban). The entire emphasis here is spacial. It's about coming near to God. It's about being invited to draw near to God. Yahweh speaks from "the tent of meeting" (Lev. 1:1) and gives instructions to the sons of Israel through Moses about how to visit his house. This is one of the most important points to learn about the "sacrificial system": it's about drawing near to God. It prescribes the manner in which one is to enter Yahweh's personal space, his house. A qorban is not an "offering" to God, rather it's "a nearbringing," if we can invent a neologism.

Every time that something is described as an "offering," it is almost always really a "nearbringing" (qorban). They are not "burnt offerings" or "sins offerings," rather, they are "things that are brought near" to Yahweh. Indeed, as we shall see, these "nearbrinings" represent the worshipper, who himself is drawing near through these ritual acts.

If I had the opportunity to go back and edit my book The Lord's Service, this is one of the corrections I would make to the terminology I use throughout the book. I'll explain a little more about that later on.