Saturday, April 25, 2009

Book Review of “Justice the True and Only Mercy: Essays on the Life and Theology of Peter Taylor Forsyth”


Justice the True and Only Mercy: Essays on the Life and Theology of Peter Taylor Forsyth. Edited by Trevor Hart. Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1995. 333 pages.

For the small but avid company of P.T. Forsyth admirers the arrival of a book of essays on his life and theology is very good news indeed, doubly so when the quality of the contributions is as high as it is in this volume. Justice the True and Only Mercy gathers up the papers presented at a colloquium on Forsyth's life and thought convened at the University of Aberdeen in June 1993. One hopes this volume will bring to light Forsyth's great theological gifts to a new generation of students, scholars and ministers. Although Forsyth has always had his circle of admirers there has been very little careful critical analysis of his thought and even less attempt to place him within a historical context. At mid-century there was a spate of dissertations and books about his life and thought, but they seldom looked below the surface of his published works to discern the influences that shaped his thought (he footnoted his writings very infrequently) and their biographical material was thin and over dependent on the charming but somewhat hagiographic memoir of his daughter Jesse, prefaced to his Work of Christ.

The rough outline of his life is this: Peter Taylor Forsyth was born in Aberdeen in 1848 to a family of modest circumstances, educated there through his university years, spent a year studying in Germany, and became a Congregationalist minister serving in five successive congregations in England. At the turn of the century he became principal of his denominational college in London and proceeded to produce 25 books and hundreds of articles until the time of his death in 1921. Clyde Binfield's historical article “P.T. Forsyth as Congregational Minister”, apparently gleaned from church and denominational minutes and records, fills in the gaps and gives some flesh and blood to the man. It is an engaging account of the day to day life of a minister serving suburban congregations. One gets a glimpse of both the life that shaped Forsyth's thought and the then vital Dissenting churches that were his ecclesiastical milieu. One meets learned lay people with whom Forsyth engaged in regular conversation about the arts and culture and politics, and understands how the first half of Forsyth's vocational life helped make the man we meet in his writings from his days as principal. We meet a scholar–pastor who doesn't condescend to his people. Whenever a voice from the pew accused Forsyth the preacher of preaching over their heads, the sure response from Forsyth the theologian was always “lift up your heads!”

Colin Gunton describes Forsyth as “the best kind of Christian intellectual, the one for whom nothing in heaven or earth is irrelevant to the theological task.” Such catholicity of interests is reflected in the breadth of the subjects of these essays. There are essays on Forsyth and the arts, politics, prayer and the Lord's Supper. Jeremy Begbie writes a critical but appreciative piece on Forsyth's life-long interest in art. Forsyth took the works of art on their own terms, taking the time “to stand and stare at (and listen to) specific pieces of art.” He resisted, for the most part, the kind of theological reductionism that uses art merely to illustrate a system.

Was Forsyth a political theologian in the way one might use that term today? That is the question Keith W. Clements addresses in his contribution. There is something anachronistic about such speculation, but Clements does discover useful social motifs in Forsyth's thought that prefigure some contemporary thought. Take for example Forsyth's insight that “whatever is the unity of a moral God must be the moral unity of Society. The unity of a Tri-personal God is the foundation for a society of persons.” That could have been written by Moltmann or any number of other contemporary ecumenical theologians addressing the social implications of the tri-unity of God. Like Karl Barth, Forsyth was interested in socialism, but resisted the temptation to identify the kingdom of God with any social system. He was critical of R.J. Campbell, the chief exponent of the “New Theology” of his day, who did identify socialism with the kingdom of God. Forsyth's assessment of Campbell's views can be fairly used of many of today's “new theologies”; he said they reminded him of poor photographs, “underdeveloped but overexposed.” The problem with the pale liberal humanism that often passed for theology in his day was that its notion of love was essentially sentimental and its ethic ameliorist. What was needed was “holy love”, a love that took the moral nature of God seriously and therefore took seriously the imperative for a moral society. Forsyth knew that justice is the expression of God's holy nature and was therefore “the true and only mercy.”

For Forsyth, authentic community, the true at-one-ment between God and humankind and among humankind, has already been established by God in the cross. Forsyth would reject those strands of liberation theology that see the cross as primarily a sign of negation. For him the cross doesn't show something, it does something: on the cross, Jesus the obedient Son, with and for the entire human race, confesses the Father's holiness and establishes the foundation of a just society. The cross is not a sign but rather the point at which the new creation begins in the midst of the old, the kingdom of God which has not to be produced so much as introduced. Clements is right in saying that Forsyth located the social significance of Christianity in the atoning cross of Christ and its proclamation, and that his contemporary significance will be decided by whether this cardinal point in his theology still offers us a challenge and resource in today's debate about political theology.

This volume takes a big step toward better understanding the intellectual influences on Forsyth. We have long known of his early indebtedness to Ritschl, with whom he studied at Göttingen, and of his later rejection of his mentor. We have known too that he was one of the few British churchmen of his day to have read Kierkegaard (translated then into German but not into English.) Donald M. Mackinnon, who died since the colloquium and for whom this volume is dedicated, explores some of the formative ideas behind Forsyth's theology, especially those of Kant, and assesses where they have aided Forsyth and where they have not. In discussing Forsyth's kenotic soteriology Mackinnon suggests that it is Forsyth's Kantian metaphysical agnosticism that led him to emphasize the divine emptying in dramatic rather than ontological terms. Stanley Russell discerns in Forsyth's writings a reliance on Hegel, as Forsyth utilized a Hegelian dialectic while rejecting the content of Hegel: “Hegel had made the fundamental mistake of considering human spiritual development in terms of a process rather than rising out of moral action.” For Forsyth this would never do; he resolutely resisted the progressive and evolutionary models that were so popular in the theology of his time.

Trevor Hart explores Forsyth's “ontology of holiness”, his belief in the moral order as the real as opposed to the actual empirical world. To say that ‘ultimate reality is moral’ is to say in effect that God is holy love. It is from this view that Forsyth's notion of atonement must be understood. Atonement is not addressed primarily to the moral or legal status of individuals or even to humanity as an abstraction but rather to the objective and universal order within which human beings exist. The death of Jesus on the cross is an act of God judging human sin. In the light of the cross the Christian must confess that we live in a saved world because we live in a judged world.

Colin Gunton's essay on authority concludes that Forsyth's theology is a theology of power and offers to the contemporary church a corrective against some of its false approaches. Specifically, Gunton is referring to the “theology of success” associated with John Wimber and the spate of theologies of the cross that posit a suffering God, “or at least one whose primary concern would sometimes appear to be the equality of the sexes or the economic development and /or ecological salvation of the world.” Forsyth's theology of power defined by love rejects both a theology of power without a cross and a theology of powerlessness with a cross. The cross is not merely a sign of divine sacrifice and God is not to be construed as an indulgent Father. The focus for Forsyth is not the suffering of God in Christ, which risks losing the meaning of the human act. Rather it is the saving action of God in the suffering of Christ that is decisive.. “It is Forsyth's theocentrism that is so salutary for an era of deities made in the image of man or woman.”

Did Forsyth understand the Lord's Supper in too narrow and exclusive a manner? That is the conclusion of Ian R. Torrance's essay Dominated by His Own Illustrations? P.T. Forsyth on the Lord's Supper. This intriguing article should invite new debate on Forsyth's sacramental theology. Gordon S. Wakefield's essay about Forsyth on Prayer shows Forsyth's ideas of prayer as congruent with his theology of an active God. No quiet mystical contemplation here, but prayer as importunity, petition, wrestling. Prayer is a cooperation with the divine will, often after a striving that may in some way change it. Prayer is theology not psychology, and not just any theology but a theolgia crucis. George Hall looks at Forsyth's work through the lens of the concept of tragedy, and finds a recurring emphasis not previously given close attention.

In his essay Stephen Sykes locates Forsyth's mature views on the church within the context of an English Nonconformity which was fast losing influence. In the face of that decline Forsyth looked for a new theology that would turn to “what makes the church the church,” and in so doing, Christianity will rediscover itself as it comes to understand the nature of God's righteousness in the world. Thus ecclesiology provides the way to social renewal.

When Sykes takes a critical look at Forsyth's understanding of the church he finds much to like but some things to question. Among the latter is an emphasis on redemption that excludes the wider creation and too narrowly restricts the activity of God to the church. Sykes writes that “the dangers of creation-immanentism and romantic spirituality have so strongly steered Forsyth away from any alternative to redemption–centred ecclesiology that a legitimate trinitarianism has been sacrificed.” Here Sykes is taking up Daniel Hardy's critique of Forsyth's negativity toward creation, and arguing for the existence of a created sociality, “a natural koinoinia productive of many forms of good.” Which is to say that Forsyth's debate with Anglicanism continues.

In his essay P.T. Forsyth as Unsystematic Systematician Alan P. F. Sell assesses the perennial charge that Forsyth is unsystematic. He concludes that Forsyth was not a systematic theologian in the technical sense and can not therefore be our intellectual refuge. But that is not, Sell insists, our greatest need. “Forsyth proclaims an eternal refuge, in the victory of whose holy love we may trust.” Forsyth's own words about Independency are true of his thought: “Its note has not been theological system but theological footing, not an ordered knowledge of divine procedure but an experienced certainty of divine redemption.”

John Thompson, a former student of Karl Barth, carefully answers the often asked question, Was Forsyth a Barthian Before Barth? with a qualified “yes.” Both Forsyth and Barth have a high view of the scriptures but refuse a strict identification of the words of Scripture with the Word of God. Both understand Scripture to have an event character, and both center revelation in Christ whose life and work are consummated on the cross as an atonement. Both believed that God acts in grace and judgment within the historical process, and both were partisans in their respective world wars and saw them as God's judgment on nations and national sin. For example, Forsyth said during the First World War that the war was God preaching judgment, “And now God enters the pulpit, . . . and his sermons are long and taxing, and they spoil the dinner.”

Thompson concludes that the similarities are no accident but arise from a method that is scripture soaked, christologically focused, and respectful of the whole of tradition. Both theologians were “thoroughly engrossed in penetrating biblical exegesis which formed the basis and gave the content of their dogmatic works.”

The volume includes a comprehensive bibliography of works by and about Forsyth compiled by Leslie McCurdy, building on the magisterial research of Robert Benedetto in his 1981 work. One couldn't hope for a more useful volume about Forsyth. May it be widely used and lead many to Forsyth's own writings and to a deeper engagement with the Holy God to whom they always point.

(This review by Richard L. Floyd appeared originally in the Bulletin of St. Mary's College, University of St. Andrews, No. 38, Spring 1996)

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Where I Ruminate on My First Trip to Scotland Twenty Years Ago and My Introduction to Single Malt Whisky


Twenty years ago this summer, after spending a term in Oxford reading P. T. Forsyth, my family and I headed north to Scotland for a two week vacation, or a fortnight holiday as we had learned to say back then. My children were seven and five at the time, so we visited many battlefields (Bannockburn, Glencoe, Cullodan) and castles (Inverallochy, Urquhart, Craigievar, Eileen Donan) and, of course, Loch Ness, where the children had their picture taken in front of the replica of Nessie, a photo I recall captioning “3 monsters” (we had been in the car quite a bit!) That night we stayed in a family room at a youth hostel on the shore of Loch Ness and I recall awakening in the night and seeing the waters of the loch reflecting the full moon. I stared very long minutes, half expecting to see Nessie, but, although it would be a better story if I did, I didn’t.

We made the mandatory pilgrimage to Iona, which was a highlight of the trip. We crossed “over the sea to Skye” before the new bridge was put in, and we drove around Wester Ross, which was lovely the few times that the mists cleared enough for us to see anything but the road. From Inverness we drove East on our way to visit Aberdeen, “the Granite City,” and do the proper Forsyth hagiographic tour there of his hometown.

As we headed East from Inverness I spotted a signpost for something called the Whisky Trail, which piqued my interest. Finding about it in the guidebooks we resolved to visit at least one distillery before we left Scotland. The first one we came upon was Glenfarclas, a venerable Speyside firm, that’s been in the Grant family since 1865. I later discovered that several Grant families make whisky, but this is a different family and an independent distillery unconnected to any chain.

We had a tour of the distillery, and the customary wee dram in the tasting room, and such was my introduction to single malt whisky. Now today such whiskies are a commonplace in any respectably stocked bar, but 20 years ago considerably less so. You might have found a bottle of the widely distributed brands Glenlivet or Glenfiddich here and there, but single malt scotch was still pretty esoteric in the US. The Glenfarclas was smooth and rich, dark in color and full-bodied. It was delicious.

I was hooked. The next day we toured Glenfiddich, after which my seven year old said, “Daddy, do we have to go to any more distilleries, I know how they make whisky now?” At Glenfiddich I asked the tour guide to tell me his favorite whisky, and he said Balvenie, which was made by them just next door. So I bought a bottle in a distinctive brandy shaped flagon, and gently brought it back on the plane in the pre-9/11 days. I nursed that bottle of Balvenie for many a month as a reminder of the tastes and experiences of our time in Scotland.

Six years later we came back to Scotland to live in St Andrews, where I continued my research on the atonement and wrote my little book When I Survey the Wondrous Cross: Reflections on the Atonement. We had a lovely flat on Queens Gardens with a garden that abutted the grounds of St Mary’s College. We had neither a TV nor a radio, and it was a cold and damp spring, so the four of us would huddle around the electric fire and read. I had been reading all day of course, so often my evening reading would be Michael Jackson’s Malt Whisky Companion (1995). The late Michael Jackson (no relation to the one-gloved entertainer) wrote authoritative guidebooks to both whisky and beer. Single malt whisky is expensive so one must make a little bit go a long way. I discovered that my local drinks store had a wide variety of whiskies in miniature bottles, and so I worked my way through Jackson’s book tasting whisky and reading the tasting notes.

Over the years in my many trips to Britain, both to live and to vacation, I have shared a number of enjoyable evenings with friends tasting and talking about whisky. Often several bottles will be produced after dinner with various amounts remaining in them, and these will be shared and compared. And if you can get talking about theology, well that’s even better. I can’t afford to buy much single malt, but my children, who I am glad to say have grown up to be fine adults, often give me a bottle for Christmas or my birthday.

Who but the Scots could take a few of their simple resources, good water, peat for the fires for malting, and barley on ground that can’t grow much else, and turn it into a luxury item sought throughout the world? I raise a glass to them.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

“Heaven, a World of Love”

For those whose only exposure to the sermons of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) is his infamous “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” I recommend his brilliant and moving sermon, “Heaven, A World of Love.”

Reading it today we can see that the Puritan had more weapons in his homiletical arsenal than merely frightening his congregation with images of a fiery future. In “Heaven, a World of Love” his exquisite portrait of heaven, and the way people interact with one another there, might have made the faithful squirm every bit as much as his image of the spider over the flame in “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”

Notice the image of community as a musical ensemble, praising God together. What might we in the church on earth learn from this? Here’s an excerpt:

“And oh! what joy will there be, springing up in the hearts of the saints, after they have passed through their wearisome pilgrimage, to be brought to such a paradise as this! Here is joy unspeakable indeed, and full of glory - joy that is humble, holy, enrapturing, and divine in its perfection! Love is always a sweet principle; and especially divine love. This, even on earth, is a spring of sweetness; but in heaven it shall become a stream, a river, an ocean! All shall stand about the God of glory, who is the great fountain of love, opening, as it were, their very souls to be filled with those effusions of love that are poured forth from his fullness, just as the flowers on the earth, in the bright and joyous days of spring, open their bosoms to the sun, to be filled with his light and warmth, and to flourish in beauty and fragrancy under his cheering rays. Every saint in heaven is as a flower in that garden of God, and holy love is the fragrance and sweet odor that they all send forth, and with which they fill the bowers of that paradise above. Every soul there, is as a note in some concert of delightful music, that sweetly harmonizes with every other note, and all together blend in the most rapturous strains in praising God and the Lamb forever. And so all help each other, to their utmost, to express the love of the whole society to its glorious Father and Head, and to pour back love into the great fountain of love whence they are supplied and filled with love, and blessedness, and glory. And thus they will love, and reign in love, and in that godlike joy that is its blessed fruit, such as eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath ever entered into the heart of man in this world to conceive; and thus in the full sunlight of the throne, enraptured with joys that are forever increasing, and yet forever full, they shall live and reign with God and Christ forever and ever!”

Monday, April 20, 2009

Bicycle Touring in the Berkshires

It's that time of year again when the ice is off the road, the bikes come out of the garage and we pull on our cycling shorts to find that once again they have shrunk over the winter. Here in the Berkshire Hills we have an active cycling club called the Berkshire Cycling Association, which organizes and sponsors a number of events, from road and mountain bike races to time trials.

For those who prefer not to go so fast there is a also series of weekly touring rides beginning this week and continuing into September. The oldest of these rides is the venerable Thursday Night Ride, which has helped many a new rider to learn how to ride in a group. Ably led by Shaun Weigand the ride attracts 20 to 35 riders on any given Thursday night. The rides begin in different locations and over the course of the season cover most of Berkshire County, with an occasional foray into adjacent Vermont, New York, or Connecticut.

A newer and smaller touring ride that meets during the day is the Wednesday Morning Ride, which regularly attracts about 15 riders. This ride, which I help to found four years ago and led for three years, is now led by Margie Safran.

Both rides are pretty leisurely, with friendly, helpful people. One needs a safe working bike, a helmet (always!), and knowledge of how your bike works, the highway laws, and how to ride safely on the road. (Photo above from left: R.Floyd, Marge Cohan, and John Yuill in front of the Monterey Genreral Store)

Saturday, April 18, 2009

Spring Comes Slowly to the Berkshire Hills


I believe that spring will finally come to my corner of the world because two weeks ago I was down in Princeton (about three hours south of here) and saw green lawns, apple blossoms, and tulips. To use the language of Christian eschatology, I wait in hope for the future to break into the present.

Here in the Berkshires we must wait until early May for real spring to arrive. Later in the summer when the city dwellers descend on us for our cool nights and lovely days we are thankful for our geography, but this time of year we experience first hand T. S. Eliot’s observation that “April is the cruelest month.” (The Wasteland, 1922)

But here and there I spy glimpses of things to come. I have some crocuses (croci?) popping up around the edges of my house, and my lawn shows hints of green and begs to be raked. The days grow longer and each one, if closely observed, yields signs and portents. I recently read the children’s classic The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, and though it was the dead of winter, shared in her rich descriptions of the garden’s daily changes.

So on a warmer sunny day this week I climbed on my bike for the first time in 2009 and hit the Ashuwilticook Rail Trail. I had to take the snowshoes out of my trunk to make room for my bike bag and floor pump, surely another sign of the changing season. It was a bit chilly alongside Cheshire Lake, but after all, the ice has been out of the lake for only a few weeks. There was no ice on the trail, but still a few stubborn chunks clinging to the shady cliffs alongside the Hoosic River at Cheshire Harbor, and some remaining big sandy piles of snow in the parking lot of the Berkshire Mall near the head of the trail.

The Canadian geese were in abundance, some lazy ones now never migrate and have become pests and foul the trail. We had one white swan for a few days several weeks ago but he or she is gone now.

Over the years of riding the trail I have seen a black bear, deer, snapping turtles as big as a lawn mower, and numerous other animals and birds. This week, though, I didn’t see much besides the geese and ducks.  

The buds are getting red, and here and there some begin to show the gold that precedes the green, reminding me of Robert Frost’s little poem, Nothing Gold Can Stay:

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

It’s been a long, cold winter here with lots of snow. But spring is slowly coming to the Berkshire and soon we can share in Solomon’s song:

”For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth:
The time of the singing of birds is come,
And the voice of the turtle-dove is heard in our land.”
(Song of Solomon 2:11-12)

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Abraham Kuyper on Glorifying God with your Intellect


In one of threads on our Confessing Christ internet conversation we recently discussed the role of emotion versus intellect in Christian faith. It was agreed that these are not mutually exclusive domains, but that different figures have put more emphasis on one or the other.

Under the influence of my friend and fellow Confessing Christ blogger Clifford Anderson of the Princeton Theological Seminary Library I've started reading Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920). A fascinating figure, Kuyper was a Dutch pastor, theologian, author, editor and politician, who served from 1901 to 1905 as Prime Minister of the Netherlands. He also founded the Free Univeristy of Amsterdam.

Last night I was reading his 1898 Stone Lectures at Princeton, published as Lectures on Calvinism, and I was struck by this passage:

“If everything that is, exists for the sake of God, then it follows that the whole creation must give glory to God. The sun, moon, and stars in the firmament, the birds of the air, the whole of Nature around us, but, above all man himself, who, priestlike, must concentrate to God the whole of creation, and all life thriving in it. And although sin has deadened a large part of creation to the glory of God, the demand,—the ideal, remains unchangeable, that every creature must be immersed in the stream of religion, and end by lying as a religious offering on the altar of the Almighty. A religion confined to feeling or will is therefore unthinkable to the Calvinist. The sacred anointing of the priest of creation must reach down to his beard and to the hem of his garment. His whole being, including all his abilities and powers, must be pervaded by the sensus divinitatis, and how then could he exclude his rational consciousness,— the λογος which is in him, the light of thought which comes from God Himself to irradiate him? To possess his God for the underground world of his feelings, and in the outworks of the exertion of his will, but not in his inner self, in the very center of his consciousness, and thought: to have fixed starting –points for the study of nature and axiomatic strongholds for the practical life, but to have no fixed support in his thoughts about the Creator Himself,—all of this was, for the Calvinist, the very denying of the Eternal Logos.” Lectures on Calvinism, P. 52. Eerdmans, 1931

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Some Fun for the Pastor's Family after Easter

Friend and theological humorist Chris Anderson put me on to this hilarious spoof of Willie Nelson’s Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.

It’s called Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Pastors. It was produced by a church in Orlando, FL.

I showed it to my daughter, who will be starting seminary in the fall, and she particularly was amused by the the little girl baptizing her dolly in the bathtub. If you are a pastor, pastor's spouse or a PK, you may find some of this a little close to home. But still really funny.

Where I Ruminate on why a Blog is like Sourdough Starter: A Parable


After about a month of blogging it has occurred to me that keeping a blog is like maintaining sourdough starter. Let me explain. Thirty years ago in our newlywed Maine days our friend Alison gave us a small batch of sourdough starter, which is a fermented batter of flour and water. This particular starter, Alison told us with reverence, was reputedly more than a hundred years old. The starter is used, in lieu of other yeast, to make sourdough bread.

Martha and I were young and countercultural and this sounded very cool, and it was kinda cool for a time, but there was a problem. You have to feed the starter! If you don’t feed the starter it gets funkier and sourer by the week and eventually turns dark brown and poisons your refrigerator (did I mention it takes up room there?)

You have to feed the starter every week. First you drain off the alcoholic liquid that has accumulated on the top (it’s called, appropriately enough, “hooch.”) Then you put in some flour for the living colony of organisms that is your starter to munch on.

So as time goes on the thing in the refrigerator grows, which is fine if you are a professional baker or an avid amateur that makes bread several times a week. But we were neither. We made sourdough bread a couple times, and found the feeding to be a chore, but still somehow felt loyalty to this heirloom starter in the fridge, so it just took up residence there. The starter wasn't really useful to us anymore, but we had been feeding it for so long we were invested in its survival.

Finally, two things happened that led us to abandon the starter. First, we had a child, who actually really needed to be fed regularly, which took away some of the starter’s leverage. And, secondly, we each admitted to the other that we didn’t really like sourdough bread. “Those who have ears let them hear.”

Saturday, April 11, 2009

A Hymn for Easter


On Easter Day, on Easter Day
     The angel rolled the stone away.
Let all good Christians sing and pray
     On Easter Day.

On Easter Day, on Easter Day
     A new creation came to stay
 To take the sting of death away
       On Easter Day.

On Easter Day, on Easter Day
     Christ came among them, so they say,
And shared his story on the Way
     On Easter Day.

On Easter Day, this Easter Day,
     We come to worship, sing and pray,
And share his presence, come what may
     On Easter Day.


©Richard L. Floyd, 2004

Friday, April 10, 2009

Thoughts for Good Friday II


Mary C. Boys, Professor of Practical Theology at Union Theological Seminary, wrote, “Like all symbols, the cross evokes more than one can explain. It condenses life and death into one symbol. It enfolds some of the deepest fears of humanity—vulnerability, betrayal, pain, forsakenness—and transfigures them into expressions of hope. When Christians proclaim the power of the cross, they are voicing their confidence that death is not the end, that the grip of evil has been broken, and that the powers and principalities who seem to control this world have been banished. When Christians proclaim the power of the cross, they are declaring, albeit often with tremulous voice, that at times one must simply endure suffering, that certain things in life must be borne. And they are declaring that in the passion of Jesus we find a model for our fidelity.

The cross is a symbol Christians have been given to image their hope that God is with them even in pain and tragedy and ambiguity. It is a symbol of the longing to give themselves over to a project larger than their own self-interest, and of the faith that pouring out one's life for the sake of another brings new life. It is a symbol that enables Christians to name the hard things of their lives, to express anguish rather than to repress it. . . .”

With the very ambiguous history of the interpretation of the cross in mind Boys concludes, “Just as a church building that has been profaned by a violent or blasphemous deed needs rededication, so too, the symbol the church carries must be purified by its people's repentance. Only then can the cross embody the power of reconciliation for which Jesus lived and died.” (Cross Currents, Spring 1994. . p 22-23)

Thoughts for Good Friday I


Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote, “Either I determine the place in which I will find God, or I allow God to determine the place where he will be found. If it is I who say where God will be, I will always find there a God who in some way corresponds to me, is agreeable to me, fits in with my nature. But if it is God who says where He will be, then that will truly be a place which at first is not agreeable at all, which does not fit so well with me. That place is the cross of Christ.” (Meditating on the Word, p 44–45).

Thursday, April 9, 2009

Tom Wright Answers the Caricatures of the Cross


One of my persistent vocations is answering the critics of the cross. See for example, my The Cross and Violence, Is the Word of the Cross Good News, or is it Bad News?, a paper I gave at last summer's Craigville Colloquy on Cape Cod.

So I was gratified to find this piece by N.T Wright, Bishop of Durham, in Fulcrum, from 2007, The Cross and the Caricatures. Here's a sample:

“We must of course grant that many Christians have spoken, in effect, of the angry God upstairs and the suffering Jesus placating him. Spoken? They've painted it: many a mediaeval altarpiece, many a devotional artwork, have sketched exactly that. And of course for some late mediaeval theologians this was the point of the Mass: God was angry, but by performing this propitiatory sacrifice once more, the priest could make it all right. And it was at least in part in reaction against this understanding of the Eucharist that the Reformers rightly insisted that what happened on the cross happened once for all. They did not invent, they merely adapted and relocated, the idea of the propitiation of God's wrath through the death of Jesus. We must of course acknowledge that many, alas, have since then offered more caricatures of the biblical doctrine. It is all too possible to take elements from the biblical witness and present them within a controlling narrative gleaned from somewhere else, like a child doing a follow-the-dots puzzle without paying attention to the numbers and producing a dog instead of a rabbit.

This is what happens when people present over-simple stories with an angry God and a loving Jesus, with a God who demands blood and doesn't much mind whose it is as long as it's innocent. You'd have thought people would notice that this flies in the face of John's and Paul's deep-rooted theology of the love of the triune God: not 'God was so angry with the world that he gave us his son' but 'God so loved the world that he gave us his son'.”

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Where I Ruminate on the Perils of a Palm Sunday Faith in a Good Friday World


There is a kind of decaffeinated Christianity that wants to quickly slide by Good Friday and get right to Easter, as if Good Friday is a morbid and somewhat unfortunate episode that is dwelt upon only by the morbid and masochistic.

Or to put it another way, we are tempted to have a Palm Sunday faith, a faith based on a misunderstanding of who Jesus is. Like the crowd at the first Palm Sunday we are tempted to see Jesus not as he is, but as a projection of our own hopes and desires.

We can do this in a number of ways. We can turn Jesus into the supporter of our personal goals, or the upholder of our national ambitions, or our politics, or other ways where he becomes who we want him to be instead of who he really is. “Palm Sunday faith” is when we want a Jesus without a cross so we can have a faith without a cross, a faith without challenge or sacrifice, a faith without testing or struggle. When we do that we turn God into a kind of talisman or lucky charm to bless our projects and our aspirations, when in fact the God of the Bible is a God with his own sovereign purposes.

The problem with a Palm Sunday faith is that we live in a Good Friday world. I believe that Christian faith is essentially a joyful enterprise, but it is a joyful enterprise that doesn't turn or flinch from the hard truths of the world's harsh brutalities. So Christian faith without a cross does not show God's full power to deal with human sin and death. And a faith without a cross will be found feeble and wimpy when the chips are really down.

What do I mean when I say it is a Good Friday world? There is a certain heartbreaking aspect of living that comes to us all. Often we only see it from a distance, as in the war in Iraq, where we have seen pictures both of dead and injured civilians and dead servicemen and women. But to the families of those individuals that heartbreak has come “up close and personal.”

And some heartbreak comes to every human life sooner or later. It is not just in wartime that the powers of sin and death do their heartbreaking work. Which is why there is so much comfort for us in worshipping a God who himself “became a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.”

And that is exactly it. Our God knows the whole truth about human life. Knows not just the Sunday veneer and the masks of propriety but the dark and sad parts of it all. Knows that life is not a bowl of cherries. And this God not only knows the worst the world has to offer, but he has done something about it. His love is not sentimental love; it is holy love, a love that moves and acts to deal with love’s enemies. A God who merely comforted the afflicted and bound up the wounded would not be a God who takes on the power of sin and death and evil. That is what the cross of Jesus is all about. God himself confronting human life at is very worst, at its most irredeemable, at a pitiful state execution, where the most powerful forces in the world humiliated and destroyed this humble innocent man.

He took it all on himself, the whole weight of the world’s hate and violence, its guilt and shame, all of it there on the hill at Golgotha. For us: you and me, and not just for us, but for everyone, across the ages. And not just for humans, but for himself, because his own holiness could not tolerate the world’s sin without atonement. And so he made it, not with the blood of rams at the temple, but making the sacrifice himself, spilling his own life out.

And why? Because that is what love does. By its very nature love spills itself out. In the letter to the Philippians Paul says that Jesus even gave up his own rightful claim to divinity, emptying himself, taking the form of a slave, for the cross was a slave’s death.

And because of this humble obedience the Father has highly exalted him, and has given him God’s own name. Because “Lord” is the name Israel gave to their God, and to no one else. But now Jesus is called “Lord.”

When we call Jesus “Lord” and take the full measure of his love we will be moving toward a faith that can meet life’s darkest hours and toughest spots. A faith that is able to stand at the foot of the cross. And the world desperately needs people like that with faith like that: faith in Jesus, and in the power of his cross.

Sunday, April 5, 2009

“Jesus was not Crucified in a Cathedral between Two Candles”

George Macleod, the founder of the Iona Community, once wrote,
“I simply argue that the cross be raised again at the center of the marketplace as well as on the steeple of the church. I am recovering the claim that Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves; on the town garbage heap; at a crossroads so cosmopolitan that they had to write his title in
Hebrew and in Latin and in Greek . . .  at the kind of place where cynics talk smut and thieves curse, and soldiers gamble. Because that is where he died. And that is what he died about.”

Saturday, April 4, 2009

Confessing Christ


The other place I blog is the Web Site of Confessing Christ. Here is A Brief history of Confessing Christ by Pastor Frederick R. Trost:

“In August of 1993, a Convening Committee for Confessing Christ was on the phone, composed of pastors and teachers of the Church and a graduate student in American Church history. Might there be a way of gathering others in the United Church of Christ who love the Church and are devoted to its ministry, to talk about our "life together" for the sake of our mission as Christians and our commitment to social justice, liturgy, and pastoral care?

From the beginning there was agreement on the necessity for solid, joyous, theological work in the Church, for Biblical study and conversation with our varied, rich, and living theological heritage in the United Church of Christ. We took as our theme the words of the First Article of the Barmen Declaration:

"Jesus Christ, as he is witnessed to us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we must hear and which we ought to trust and obey in life and in death."

From the beginning [that] summer and in our many conversations since, our purpose has been neither to "weep bitterly" over the Church (which would be theologically irresponsible) nor to pound upon others (which would be uncharitable), but to take our place alongside the publican to the temple, to acknowledge with those who have "confessed Christ" in every generation that we live, as the Reformers insisted, by grace alone, through faith, and that the prayer "Be merciful unto me, O Lord." is meant to be found on the lips of the whole church. In the struggle for theological re-formation, as in all else, "there is none that is righteous, no, not one!" (Romans 3:10) 

We've said the most important thing is to recommit ourselves to theological work that takes Scripture, ecumenical creeds, the confession and covenants upon which the United Church of Christ was founded (see the Preamble to the UCC Constitution), 
  • with joyful seriousness, 
  • not as a kind of hobby, 
  • not with any desire to settle down in the sixteenth century
but to honor our baptism, to see how dialogue with one another and with those who believed before we were born, can reform the life of the Church for the sake of its vocation in the world.

There are times when we have to face the fragile state of our life together. We believe this is one of those times. There are moments when the question "What is truth?" won't go away. This is one of those moments. There are hours when the ancient query "What think ye of Christ?" cannot be avoided. We believe this is one of those hours.

Friday, April 3, 2009

They'll Know Him in His Cross








He died upon the lonely tree
     forsaken by his God.
And yet his death means all to me
     and saves me by his blood.

The world will never know his worth,
     the wise will never see,
But those forsaken, broken, bowed,
     will recognize that tree.

And know that there God's love does reign,
     and conquers sin and death;
Thwarts hate and evil, comforts pain,
     gives hope while there is breath.

The nations grasp at wealth and power,
     while wars like tempests toss,
But finally in God's good hour,
     they'll know him in his cross.

Then wars will cease and weapons fall,
     and fear will melt away.
For Christ will be their all in all,
     from day to endless day.

© 2001 Richard L. Floyd

Thursday, April 2, 2009

Gabriel Fackre on The Life Everlasting

On Gabriel Fackre's blog he has been doing a series on Hope. The most recent one is on The Life Everlasting. Here's some of it:

“The ancient creeds—Nicene and Apostles—are really dramas in three acts—creation reconciliation, redemption, the acts being the sequential missions of the three Persons as the “economic Trinity,” albeit as immanent Trinity all are involved in every act as this is the drama of the one triune God. With biblical specificity in mind, the theatre metaphor can be transposed to that of literature and conceived as a narrative with 7 chapters. I have tried to do this in the various volumes of The Christian Story series as creation, fall, covenant, Christ, church, salvation consummation. Whatever the genre we are now at the end of the final act or chapter, the finis that fulfills the divine telos. Using the language of the Apostles Creed, we have to do with the bold Christian affirmation of “everlasting life.”

The portrayal in Scripture —yes through a glass darkly—of this final state is rich and varied. Sometimes it is described in cosmic terms as “a new heaven and a new earth.”(Rev.21:1) At other times it is visualized politically and socially as the Kingdom of God come to earth (Matt 6:10). And yet other times, the focus is on persons and their fulfillment. And in every case it is clear that the alienations that mark our fallen world of Now are overcome with a reconciliation of all the broken and separation parties to God’s purposes. Thus what God finally wills and achieves is the very reflection of who God is: an everlasting life together that mirrors the eternal Life Together.

At the very center of Things to Come is the Person through whom the triune God will make such possible.”

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Book Review of “Who Do You Say That I Am?”

Who do you say that I am?”: Christology and Identity in the United Church of Christ, edited by Scott R. Paeth. United Church Press, Cleveland. 2006. Paper. 221 pages.   (This book review is from Joy in the Word, Spring 2008)

A few weeks after my ordination back in 1975, I heard Robert Moss, then president of the United Church of Christ, preach a sermon in which he told a humorous anecdote about Kenneth Teegarden, the president of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), who upon his retirement opened his morning Indianapolis Star to read this headline: “Disciples of Christ seek leader!” And we thought we had an identity crisis in the United Church of Christ!

But even though we confess that “Jesus Christ is the sole head of the church” (Preamble to the UCC Constitution) it does not mean we have settled the questions of who Jesus Christ is, and what it means to be the church of which he is the head.

These are the big questions addressed in Who do you say that I am?” Christology and Identity in the United Church of Christ. This is an ambitious undertaking, given the dizzying diversity of views in our church, and the multiplicity of heritages in our history.

Lee Barrett, sums up the challenge succinctly when he writes, “At times this variety may seem more like a curse than a blessing, leading to the suspicion that “Jesus Christ” has become nothing more than a blank screen upon which the proudly autonomous individual can project anything that tickles one’s fancy. Frequently, it seems that the Christ who was supposed to be center of the United Church has become the “wax nose” feared by Luther that could be twisted any way one wants, leaving the denomination centerless.” (p.42-43)

Or as editor Scott Paeth puts it in his introduction: “Talking about Christology in the United Church of Christ is akin to wrestling an octopus.” (p. 9) He describes the purpose of the book as making a contribution to “the task of interpreting Jesus Christ in the United Church of Christ.” (p. 16)

Read more of this Book Review