Monthly Archives: October 2006

John Ball says what every other orthodox Protestant would say…

Good works of all sorts are necessary to our continuance in the state of justification and so to our final absolution, if God give opportunity: but they are not the cause of, but only a precedent qualification or condition to final forgiveness and eternal bliss.

John Ball was highly influential through his “A Treatise on the Covenant of Grace,” on the Westminster Assembly. The above quote comes from pg. 20 of that work.

Of course, there is nothing unique about Ball. One finds the same stuff in John Owen, or Jonathan Edwards, or Francis Turretin, or Benedict Pictet or any number of other theologians. The Reformation did, of course, reject that Roman Catholic formulation about works in their relationship to justification and the final verdict at the Day of Judgment. But, of course, as Bible believers, the Reformed theologians never questioned the necessity of obedience to justification before God (since faith is commanded, how could they even do so logically, let alone Scripturally?).

What John Gerstner said of dispensationalists made the same point. They

do not see the elementary difference between non-meritorious “requirements,” “conditions, necessary obligations,” “indispensable duties,” and musts, as the natural outworking of true faith, in distinction from faith in the Savior plus meritorious works as the very basis of Salvation.

This is the Protestant position.

National conference on the missional Church

With all the attention WTS is getting for their conference on the Emergsomething (viral marketing here, here, here, and here) I thought I should point out another conference is coming up.

I haven’t found a pdf of the brochure yet, but on November 3 and 4, John Armstrong, David Dunbar and John Franke will be speaking on the missional Church at First Reformed Church in South Holland, Illinois.

Here is where you can get more information. I think very highly of John and wish I could attend.

If anyone knows of a more informative (or colorful) link, please let me know.

Barely a week passes…

…and I’m already coming back to the table.

All right, sorry about that. I’m too much in love extravagent gestures perhaps. I suspect blogging will be kind of light for the next couple of months for reasons I don’t want to get into.

In the meantime, the Horne family could use your prayers (and would appreciate the well-wishing of those who don’t have any) right now. Also, someone could at least test and see if my donate button works…. or more.

Self-garverizing

I’m at one of those points where my finger is itching to push the delete button on this blog. But I’ve done that before and restarted so it doesn’t hold the same significance any more. Still, no more entries until at least January. Life is just not bloggable at this point, and I’m not sure if or when it will be.

Those who don’t understand the title of this post, if anyone doesn’t, should click this link.

Incarnation & contextualization

What’s really odd about the incarnation and Christology is how much the form it takes in Scripture does not provide a basis for “contextualization.” One is much better off going to Acts and the epistles to ground the need for and duty to contextualize.

As N. T. Wright has reminded us, Jesus did not come as “everyman.” He came as a first century Jew. Not a chinaman. Not a native American. He incarnated himself among a people who had been called and chosen by God thousands of years earlier and continually nurtured and challenged by God’s covenantal administration.

In other words, Jesus did not “find” and “join with” an alien culture. He came to a culture he had started and developed at the right moment in that culture’s history.

And even Acts isn’t as “contextualizing” as one might hope for. The Christians go and bear witness in the synagogues which have been planted all over the world. The preach to Jews and god-fearing Gentiles. There has been generations of work done in many (not all) locations where Paul preached.

I’m not against contextualization. I’m just saying…

Why bother writing down agreements?

First of all, there is a content warning to what you might find via links or googling (as there is with almost any media matter ever mentioned on this or any blog, but I feel like reminding readers on this one).

The word “dooced,” if you look it up, has come to mean fired from one’s job for blogging about work. It comes from the name of Heather Armstrong’s blog. Frankly, I don’t have much immediate sympathy with the victims of such a verb. People don’t want to work with people who badmouth them or who they think might be badmouthing them. Of course, in many cases there are reasons to think the fears of badmouthing are unfounded. But, in a free country, the same right to speak one’s mind (or whatever) entails the right to associate with people who you don’t fear will say things about you. So, one can expect reactions and over-reactions in the messiness of life. Not always happy about it, but not willing to campaign for job security for bloggers.

But now “dooced” is about to mean something else. It is about to mean that a publisher can sue you for not wanting to write books for them. “What?” you say. (If you’re in the spirit of Dooce you might say something more colorful.) “When did publishers get authorized to send out press gangs in the streets looking for keyboardist to nab?”

Well, it is like this. The publisher can’t come out and claim the stature of the robber gang eighteenth-century British Navy. What they do is talk to you and reach the point that they send you a contract to sign. And what does that mean? It apparently means you are already legally bound to the terms of the contract and obligated to sign it. Heather Armstrong, by changing her mind about publishing, has broken a “binding oral agreement” with Kensington Rebel Base Books.

I’m sure that publishers hate it when something they thought was certain suddenly vaporizes. And I wouldn’t be surprised if authors with money and reputation do sometimes get away with breaking written contracts. But taking one’s frustrations out on the potential authors without the needed largesse required to have any chance in our crime syndicate legal system is not a just way to deal with those issues.

The reason people sign contracts is to enter into accountable relationships. I highly doubt the publisher had already sent Armstrong her advance or that she was refusing to return it. This was a nasty rapacious thing for the publisher to attempt. The fact that they appear to have gotten away with it is bad news for everyone.

Perhaps the next time you try to buy a car you might find yourself in court because you led the salesman on and then decided against the purchase. Imagine how this precedent might transform real estate.

You can find some links through Chris’ entry.

A theopaschite gut response

This is interesting. Of course, I would need to read the actual article to have any real opinion on the argument for divine impassibility from the book of Hebrews. However, I will express a provisional reaction to Pastor Ryken’s summary:

First, the very nature of the incarnation entails a change for the Son of God. It is clear from Hebrews 2 and elsewhere in Scripture that he took on human flesh and blood in order to do what what he could not do as God, namely, suffer.

Second, according to the theological principle of the communication of idioms, the suffering that Jesus experienced cannot be predicated to his divine nature, but only to his human nature.

Third, the sufferings of Christ were not revelational but eschatological. That is to say, they were not intended to show us something about the divine nature that we could not otherwise see, but to accomplish the work of redemption unto eternal life. DeYoung writes: “His sufferings tell us nothing about the eternal suffering heart of God and everything about the completion of the plan of salvation.”

Finally, as someone acquainted with human suffering, Jesus Christ can sympathize with us in our own sufferings. This properly satisfies one impulse of those who deny impassibility, which is to find comfort in God. God offers us this comfort in Christ.

The first and second points, however, all depend on the credibility of the third. The “change for the Son of God” (I assume “for” instead of “in” is a needful protection of immutability) may well have been in order for God to be more clearly visible. If God became man in order to better reveal God then the change is accounted for without leaving any argument for divine impassibility but rather leaving clear evidence for theopaschites to point to.

And the third point needs to be argued. I hope that no one thinks that the great truth that the sufferings of Christ were eschatological counts as evidence that they were not revelational? The most that can be said is that, if his sufferings were eschatological (as they were), then denying that they were revelational does not leave us with purposeless suffering. But that’s not a positive argument that his suffering were not, in fact, both.

The second argument about the communication of idioms assumes what it is supposed to prove. Certainly Christ’s human sufferings were the sufferings of the human nature. That is not in question I don’t think. The question is: Did his human sufferings reveal anything about the divine nature? Does God suffer with those who suffer? Was this some new thing with the incarnation or has it always been true? Did God assume a human nature to gain new abilities to have solidarity with his creation, or did he assume a human nature (in part!) to reveal what sort of God he is and how he has always been in solidarity with his creatures?

In other words, if the second argument is supposed to be a positive case of divine impassibility, then it fails. It can be used as a defeater argument for passibility at most. But the persuasive case needs to be made in some other way.

Finally, I agree that God offers us comfort in Christ, but is this only the comfort of Arianism? Didn’t Athanasius argue that, if Arianism was true, that we are left without any real knowledge of God? [edit: In case anyone wants to impute things that I did not say here, the only point in this paragraph is that we orthodox Christians (everyone involved in the discussion) should be able to offer more comfort than Arians and offer a firmer basis for the knowledge of God.]

I don’t have any off the cuff thoughts tied particularly to Hebrews, but I don’t understand how Jesus could so insist that he did all that he saw the Father doing, and yet be innovating at the essential point of his vocation. Was God on the cross imitating God or not? His onlookers thought not. They thought God’s king, the son of God, could only be revealed in his descending from the cross. But the real God stayed there.

And what does Paul say? To take one representative example: “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” Imitating Christ in his humiliation and sacrifice (from which I find it hard to conceive of removing his suffering) is identical to imitating God himself.

Oddly, I’ve been planning to blog about this for awhile, not with any Christian in mind, but with the new TV show Heroes. Naturally, I find the X-men lite device quite intriging and entertaining (though the material with the cheerleader needs to stop being so darkly comedic and voyeuristically gruesome). But the monologues are pure torture. If I wasn’t intent on being entertained, however, and wanted to engage in pretentious world view analysis, I think I would find them interesting. In the first episode we find a young professor blathering on how the cockroach is made in the image of God, but not people. Why. Because the cockroach is a great survivor. But there is hope for the human race. Maybe we’ll acquire the divine image after all. How? By growing the ability to fly or time travel or regenerate or do some other superhuman miracle. Then, when we’re more than merely human, then we will deserve to be considered to bear the image of God.

There is no doubt in my mind that the divine image does entail a future of glory much like “superman.” But when that gift is given, it will be a verdict on our humanity now, as we see it in the life of Jesus and even his death on the cross. That was truly Jesus’ baptism and on the cross God was saying “This is my beloved son.” The resurrection was not a denial of the cross, but a proof of what God thought of it and how he saw himself reflected in it, properly for once. The ones claiming the son of God would only leave the cross, were thinking of a fake god.

In my opinion, the cruciform revelation of God is a really important and essential feature of Christianity. With miltant Islam and in many other religions, we see what happens when it is not affirmed.

When Jesus was sweating blood in the Garden of Gethsamane, was it only Jesus’ human nature that was troubled and crying out to God, or was the divine person of the Son of God speaking to the divine person of the Father?