Retired Pastor Ruminates: March 2010

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Can Judas be saved? Ruminations on his role in the drama of Redemption.

Judas Iscariot, one of the Twelve Apostles, and the one who betrayed Jesus with a kiss, has become a byword in English for a betrayer.

None of us is a stranger to betrayal. It is a particularly painful experience because it comes at the hand of someone we trusted; someone we thought would look out for us; someone we loved, and believed loved us. We must consider that one of the sufferings that constitute Jesus’ passion must have been that he was betrayed by one of his close friends, a member of his inner circle.

For my Holy Week devotions this year I have been reading At The Cross: Meditations on People Who Were There by Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart (IVP, 1999), two fine scholars from the University of St Andrews. I highly recommend it.

Their meditation on Judas is particularly insightful. Although they admit that Judas’ deed was a dark one (“there is no getting Judas off the hook”), they assert the paradox that his betrayal was a necessary act: “The structure of the Gospel plot demands it.”

And it is quite true that Jesus speaks repeatedly, not only that he will experience death, but that he will “be given up” to death. So Judas is the instrument of that happening, and therefore an important player in the narrative of the passion, what I like to call “the drama of redemption.”

But though Judas plays his part in the drama, the Christian tradition has pretty consistently painted him to be an utterly despicable character. I have been ruminating on this, since it raises many questions, some of which I will leave to others to address.

But with the help of Bauckham and Hart, I have two thoughts to share about his role.

The first is Judas’ solidarity with all of humanity. We are all, to some degree or another, betrayers. There are the big betrayals, of course, like marital infidelity or financial shenanigans like the recent ones by Bernie Madoff. But there are also the little daily betrayals where we break trust with those we love and care for, and in this case Judas is not so different from all of us. His sin is different in degree and not in kind.

My second thought follows from the first, and that is whether Judas can be saved? The Christian tradition has generally said no. Perhaps I have fallen under the spell of Karl Barth’s alleged universalism, but I believe in a God whose mercy is so vast that there might be a place for Judas in it.

I don’t make the move to dogmatic universalism, because the separating of the “sheep from the goats” is God’s job and not mine. I think I have also been influenced by a fine dissertation I read this summer by Jason Goroncy, in which he asserts convincingly that the trajectory of P. T. Forsyth’s theology should (but doesn’t) lead him toward dogmatic universalism, a belief that all will ultimately be saved. I still don’t know whether I am there yet, but I have been ruminating about the “love that will not let me go.” As a theologian of the cross and the atonement I would be the last to limit its power and scope. Who can say where the saving work of Jesus Christ ends?

Is this another scandal of the cross? It just might be. Have you noticed that in many of our theological discussions about who is in and who is out with God, we naturally gravitate toward the extreme cases: Hitler, Stalin, and, of course, Judas. This lets us off the hook. But it shouldn't. “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”

One of the most powerful and poignant moments for me every Holy Week is when I come to the line in the passion hymn Herzliebster Jesu where the congregation sings, “I it was denied thee, I crucified thee.” That pretty much settles for me the ever vexing question of who killed Jesus. Yes, the Romans, but they were stand-ins for all of humanity. Still, from the cross Jesus forgives his murderers, and by extension, us.

So if I can be saved, can Judas be saved? I am not the one to say, but I am intrigued by what Bauckham and Hart do in their meditation. They end with a poem that speaks to this very point, an “imaginative construal between Judas and Jesus in death, which ironically brought Judas much closer to his master than any of the other disciples, as they hung on their respective trees.” I am reassured that I am not the only one who sometimes has to turn to a poet when the language of theology reaches its outer limit:

The Ballad of the Judas Tree

In Hell there grew a Judas Tree
Where Judas hanged and died
Because he could not bear to see
His master crucified
Our Lord descended into Hell
And found his Judas there
For ever hanging on the tree
Grown from his own despair
So Jesus cut his Judas down
And took him in his arms
“It was for this I came” he said
“And not to do you harm
My Father gave me twelve good men
And all of them I kept
Though one betrayed and one denied
Some fled and others slept
In three days' time
I must return
To make the others glad
But first I had to come to Hell
And share the death you had
My tree will grow in place of yours
Its roots lie here as well
There is no final victory
Without this soul from Hell”
So when we all condemn him
As of every traitor worst
Remember that of all his men
Our Lord forgave him first

by D. RUTH ETCHELLS

These mediations are particularly significant to me since they were developed for a Good Friday service at St. Andrew's, St. Andrews, Scotland, very near to where we lived, and where we sometimes worshipped, during our sojourn there in the Spring and Summer of 1995. Alas, we left a year too early to hear them there, as they were done in 1996 and 1997.

(At The Cross: Meditations on People Who Were There by Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart, InterVarsity Press, 1999)

Monday, March 29, 2010

Why was Jesus' cross different? Ruminations for Holy Week

When I was a young boy in Sunday School, I somehow got the idea that Jesus' crucifixion was a unique event. I knew about the two brigands that were with him on Golgotha, because I had seen a particularly gruesome picture of the three men on crosses in a Bible picture book. But I thought this was the only event of its kind, and I didn't learn until sometime much later that crucifixions were a common occurrence in the Roman Empire during that time.

Crucifixion was the dark side of the Pax Romana, that period of political stability that for over a century kept the peace from Rome out to the edges of the known world. During that time there were tens of thousands of crucifixions by order of Roman authorities. Crucifixion was so common that poles were permanently set up in many public places so as to be ready when needed. When Jesus carried his cross on Good Friday, and later, when Jesus was too beat up to continue, when Simon of Cyrene carried it for him, it probably wasn't the whole cross they carried, but just the top cross bar. The upright poles were most likely there all the time, kept in readiness. In that world at that time crucifixion was a daily fact of life.

And yet, curiously, the accounts of the crucifixion of Jesus that we have in the Gospels, as brief as they are, are the most extensive accounts of crucifixion we have in ancient literature. If you stop to think about it, it makes a certain sense. Crucifixion isn't something one wants to talk about or write about. It just wasn't a topic for polite society. No, the upper classes of Roman society didn't want to think about crucifixion.

Nonetheless, they tolerated the practice as an expedient way to keep the masses in line, as you and I, to some degree, tolerate capital punishment in our country. Such punishments are always for others, not for us. And educated, literate Roman citizens need not fear crucifixion. Nobody they knew needed to fear crucifixion. Crucifixion was reserved for nobodies: slaves, bandits, rebels, and conquered enemies.

And so it was that, when Jesus was crucified on that hill in Jerusalem, he died the death of a nobody, the death of a slave. We can well imagine how this must have been profoundly disappointing to his followers. You get a hint of this almost wistful disappointment in Luke's story of the walk to Emmaus. The risen Jesus, unrecognized, is walking with two disciples and Cleopas starts telling Jesus about Jesus, “But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.” (Luke 24:21)

Those high hopes about Jesus were what the triumphal entry of Palm Sunday was all about. When Jesus came into Jerusalem the people put down their garments in his path and waved palms. It was a royal entrance. Every Jew knew that certain things had to happen before God came among them in his fullness. The Romans had to be driven out, the temple purified, and a descendant of David take the throne of Israel once again.

So on Palm Sunday Jesus comes into Jerusalem and gets a king's reception. The crowds shout “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highes theaven.” This is messiah talk. And messiah talk isn't just religious, it is political. The Romans must have been justifiably nervous. There were big crowds there for the Passover festival. A messianic pretender could only mean turmoil and unrest.

And to exacerbate things, the very first thing Jesus does after coming into Jerusalem is to cleanse the temple. This is more than just messiah talk now. This is a highly symbolic messianic gesture. I am sure there were many that day who sadly shook their heads, and saw a cross in Jesus' immediate future. They knew, as Tom Wright once said, “people who said and did the kind of things Jesus said and did usually ended up on crosses.” The Romans were not patient with insurrectionists and revolutionaries, even if their claims were wrapped up in religious talk.

So there seemed to be only two possibilities. Either Jesus was who he said he was, and he would drive out the Romans and take the throne as the anointed one of God, or he would end up on a cross. But what nobody anticipated is what actually happened. Jesus failed to conquer the Romans, and he was crucified, and that should have been the end of it.

But, as we know, it wasn't. If it had been we would never heard of Jesus. At best, he would have been a minor footnote in the history of ancient Palestine during the years of Jewish unrest under the Romans. Another messianic pretender who got himself crucified by the Romans and that was that.

But that isn't what happened. Something else happened. The claim then and now is that God raised Jesus from the dead, and not just temporarily like Lazarus was raised from the dead to die eventually, but that Jesus was raised to never die again. Indeed, the claim then and now is that Jesus shares in the divine life, that to know Jesus is in some very real sense to know God.

And, as Ephesians 2:5-11 proclaims, it was his death itself that makes him worthy of the name “Lord,” a name previously reserved for God. As one of our hymns on that passage says, “T'is the Father's pleasure, we should call him Lord, who from the beginning was the mighty Word.”

(Photo; R. L. Floyd: Celtic cross at First Church, Pittsfield)

Saturday, March 27, 2010

More Palm/Passion Sunday Ruminations: Have we preachers asked people to believe too little?

This Sunday may be the best opportunity of the Church year for a preacher to get at the fundamental questions of Jesus's identity and its correlate Christian identity. Many Churches read the entire Passion Narrative tomorrow, and that should give the preacher plenty of grist for his or her homiletical mill. It is an opportunity not to be squandered.

The simplest answer to these big questions is to look to Jesus Christ, but like all simple answers there is more to be said. The variety of witnesses to Jesus in the Bible create a complex and intriguing portrayal for the serious inquirer. But it is more like a portrait gallery than a single portrait.

Where among the various portraits shall we look for our answer? Do we look to the Incarnate One, the baby Jesus in Mary's arms as the Word made flesh? Or do we look to the wise rabbi of the Synoptic Gospels who teaches his followers with wise and paradoxical parables? Or to the pre-existent Christ of St. John's prologue, the Son of the Father who was at the beginning of creation, and through whom all things were made? Or do we look to the healing Jesus who made the lame walk, and gave the blind their sight? Or to the prophetic Jesus who wept over Jerusalem, threw the money changers out of the temple, and said he came not to bring peace but a sword? Or to the “Alpha and Omega” the beginning and the end, the Son of man coming from the clouds to bring a new heaven and a new earth to our fallen world at the end of history, as Jesus is depicted in the book of Revelation?

And the answer is of course “Yes!” to all of these, for they are found in the church's book and all of them together with many other aspects give us our portrayal of this figure who is our living Lord and Savior, and who is more even than all these things, more than even the scriptures that witness to him, or the creeds, confessions and doctrines that give articulation to the truth about him, more even than all the experiences of the faithful who have known him in Word and Sacrament as well as in other experiences: in prayers, visions, dreams and high moments of personal revelation.

But who Jesus Christ is goes beyond all these. His is “the name above every name, the name before whom every knee should bend and every tongue confess that he is Lord.” And why is that?

Is it his teachings? There is a school of thought that says the thing that was the most distinctive about Jesus was his teachings and that we should regard him as a great teacher, indeed the greatest teacher ever, and that what he has left to posterity was his unique teachings. There is a partial truth here, for his teachings have their place in our hearts, but his teachings alone do not make him who he is for us. P. T. Forsyth puts it like this:

The difficulty we have to face, if Christ was mainly a teacher, or even but a personal influence, is this . . . He was a failure with those who came under him at first hand. His personal influence through his doctrine averted neither his unpopularity, his desertion, nor his cross. It did not prevent the people it was turned on from disowning him, nor the disciples from leaving him, nor the authorities from killing him. Indeed, it provoked all three.” (The Preaching of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ, p. 14)

No, it was not what Jesus said that makes him who he is, it is what Jesus did. It is not the words of Jesus, but the act of Jesus who is himself God's Word to us. It is above all else Jesus' obedience unto death, in short it is his cross, where he died for the sins of the whole world, including yours and mine, and where he unleashed a power that still today is changing the world, in fact the whole creation.

It wasn't the wisdom of his message or the eloquence of his preaching or the drama of his miracles that led his early followers to go out and change the world as if their lives depended on it, which in fact it often did.

No, it was the personal power of his cross, the cross that judged and redeemed their nation and indeed the whole world, the cross that set them free from bondage to sin and death, the cross that had made them right with God and with one another, the cross which had seemed to be the deadest of dead ends, but in fact turned out to be the divine strategy for overcoming the lost sin-sick world that could do nothing for itself.

Unfortunately the modern church has often been embarrassed by the cross and has sought to improve the manners of the Gospel so that it is an offense to no one. As long ago as 1915 Forsyth wrote,

We have gone too far . . . in the attempt to put Jesus into modern categories, and make him the grand agent and congenial denizen of modern culture . . . The present state of the Church, the poverty of its influence on the world . . . shows that we have gone much too far in the effort of liberalism to interpret Him as the expression and patron of what is best in the world, as the tutelar of civilization, at the cost of his work in renouncing, challenging, overcoming, and so commanding, the world. The Jesus of the cross has succumbed, even within the Church, to the Jesus of society, the Jesus of culture, or the Jesus of the affections. We are trying to act on men [people] with a Jesus of distinguished religion, or a Jesus the sanest of all the deep saints, with Jesus the historic character, or the fraternal, or the pietist, rather than with Jesus the Gospel power, the living dynamic of the Kingdom of God. And the result on the world is disappointing.” (The Preaching of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ, p. 43)

I am convinced that the problem is not that we have asked people to believe too much about Jesus. Rather we have asked them to believe too little. A good man, an inspiring preacher, a wise teacher, a moral example, even a martyr held up as the highest example of sacrifice; none of these will do to save us. None of these are deserving of our worship, and none of these do justice to the biblical story of what Jesus was all about. But in the cross of Christ we see both the power and wisdom of God, “For God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength.” (1 Corinthians 1:25)

Friday, March 26, 2010

“The Stones Would Cry Out!” Palm Sunday Ruminations on the Cradle and the Cross

At which end of Jesus’ life should we look for the reason we call him “Lord and Savor?” My friends in the Mercersburg Society put heavy stress on the Incarnation. Others, such as P. T. Forsyth, insist that we only can understand the Incarnation backwards in time, from the perspective of Christ’s death and resurrection. (See, for example, on this point, a great quote from Forsyth here.)

From my teacher and friend Gabriel Fackre, one of the early and still best narrative theologians, I have learned to be careful not to take any episode of the story to represent the whole.

But I must confess I do agree here with Forsyth, though he has sometimes been criticized as being so focused on the cross that he neglects other parts of Jesus' life and work.

So what is the relationship between the cradle and the cross? If one were to only read Marks’s Gospel, the answer is simple, since he has no infancy narratives at all and begins with Jesus’s adutlt ministry.

But for many of us, this is the year of Luke in our lectionaries, and it is well to remember that of all the Evangelists, it is Luke who includes the most infancy material: “the Annunciation,” “the Visitation,” shepherds and heavenly choirs, etc. It is no accident we all read Luke at our services on Christmas Eve. If we read Mark, we’d get home much earlier.

I heard somewhere, I can't recall where, that “the wood of the cradle is the same wood as the wood of the cross.” There is much theological truth in that.

So once again I turn to a poet to express deep truths that may elude the prose of the theologians.

Richard Wilbur (1921-) is one of my favorite poets (I have many), and although I have never met him, is my Berkshire County neighbor and a sometimes worshipper at the congregation where I now mostly worship.

A two time Pulitzer Prize winning poet and former Laureate, Wilbur has made a startling but brilliant connection between Christ’s Incarnation and Cross in his poem A Christmas Hymn.

It is often sung to one of several musical settings at Christmas, but the refrain is right from Luke’s Palm Sunday story, and the concluding verse reminds us of the reason for Christ’s vocation that led to Good Friday. Such a good reminder to keep the whole arc of the story in view when looking at the any of the parts:

A stable-lamp is lighted
Whose glow shall wake the sky;
The stars shall bend their voices,
And every stone shall cry.
And every stone shall cry,
And straw like gold shall shine;
A barn shall harbor heaven,
A stall become a shrine.

This child through David's city
Shall ride in triumph by;
The palm shall strew its branches,
And every stone shall cry.
And every stone shall cry,
Though heavy, dull, and dumb,
And lie within the roadway
To pave his kingdom come.

Yet he shall be forsaken,
And yielded up to die;
The sky shall groan and darken,
And every stone shall cry.
And every stone shall cry
For stony hearts of men:
God's blood upon the spearhead,
God's love refused again.

But now, as at the ending,
The low is lifted high;
The stars shall bend their voices,
And every stone shall cry.
And every stone shall cry
In praises of the child
By whose descent among us
The worlds are reconciled.

(A Christmas Hymn by Richard Wilbur, New and Collected Poems, 1988, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1988.)

Thursday, March 25, 2010

They'll Know Him in his Cross A sermon for Palm/Passion Sunday on Ephesians 2:5-11

When Jesus entered Jerusalem on that first Palm Sunday many who looked to him to overthrow the Roman oppressor. His entry not on a charger but on a donkey was a living parable that here was a different kind of power. And those who shouted “Hosanna!” on Sunday were quick to shout “Crucify him!” on Good Friday when he didn't show the kind of power that the world understands all too well.

Christ's cross confronts us still as the place where divine power and human sin collide. He took our sin to that cross, and it died there along with him. It is no accident that the cross is the symbol of our faith. Paul tells the Philippians:

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death–
even death on a cross.
Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.” (Philippians 2:5-11. NRSV)

Let us be very clear what is claimed here: that it is the fact of Jesus's death as a slave that makes him Lord, his death as a nobody that makes him exalted at the right hand of God. And if God, the Father Almighty, who created the heavens and the earth, and Jesus, the man of Nazareth, share a divine identity, what does the cross tell us of the identity of God?

It tells us first of all that what the world values is not what God values. The Roman Empire that crucified Jesus was constructed on power, violence, and might, all delivered with ruthless efficiency, and the cross was the supreme instrument ofRoman values. The cross was a slave's death, designed to dispose of the nobodies of the world, and put fear into the hearts of other nobodies so they wouldn't challenge Rome's power.

But the crucifixion puts God squarely on the side of the nobodies. The cross condemns the brutal social arrangements then and now that trample the poor, that put the concerns of the powerful ahead of the nobodies of the world. The cross condemns every injustice that treats people as expendable; every cynical deal that seeks gain at the expense of others.

The cross says God has different values, seeks a different way, a way of servanthood and humility, a way that seeks the good of others, a way that rejects violence and injustice, a way in which everybody is somebody. In God's values there aren't any nobodies, for God's own son was once regarded as a nobody and died a nobody's death, forgiving those who killed him even as he cried out in utter forsakenness.

This is the Christian God, the crucified God, who turns the world's values upside down. If you want to know about this God take a good look at Jesus. Notice how he befriends the poor, touches lepers, eats with sinners. There weren't any nobodies in Jesus's book. Only sinners to be saved, broken people to be made whole, dying people to be given new life, sorrowful people to be made glad, remorseful people to be forgiven.

Look to Jesus: that is where the Christian finds identity and purpose, from Jesus Christ and him crucified. And not just for our personal spiritual life, but for the whole world. For his cross redeems our sins, but also our politics, our marriages and families, our business practices, our churches and everything else about our world. 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.”

People have asked me why my theology is so centered on the cross of Jesus. Why should somebody as generally cheerful as I am want to focus on such a gloomy subject? The story of my coming to the cross is a story of coming to know God in a whole new way. Although I was raised in the church as a child, I decided to be a Christian as an adult, because the cross of Christ rang true for me, as an answer equal to the world's harsh truths. My mother died when I was eighteen, and mysunny childhood faith was tested and found wanting. We live in a world where people we love can get sick and die, where injustice is often done, where bad things happen to good people as well as bad, but in my young life I had never known this and I had a lot of trouble accepting it. At this vulnerable time in my life, the time when I was leaving home, my world was turned upside down, and I found myself in a darkness I had never known.

Some of you, probably most of you, have known such darkness, because the world brings it to us in time. There is, in such times, no light, no hope, no word of comfort. Nicholas Wolterstorff, who teaches theology at Yale, writes about such a time, when his son died suddenly at the age of twenty-five. Wolterstorff write this about his time of darkness:

“I am at an impasse, and you, O God, have brought me here, From my earliest days I heard of you. From my earliest days I believed in you. I shared in the life of your people: in their prayers, in their work, in their songs, in their listening for your speech and in their watching for your presence. For me your yoke was easy. On me your presence smiled.

Noon has darkened. As fast as she could say, “He's dead,” the light dimmed. And where are you in the darkness? I learned to spy you in the light. Here in this darkness I cannot find you. If I had never looked for you, or looked but never found, I would not feel this pain of your absence. Or is it not your absence but your elusive troubling presence?

Will my eyes adjust to this darkness? Will I find you in the dark—not in the streaks of light which remain, but in the darkness? Has anyone ever found you there? Did they love what they saw? Did they see love? And are there songs for singing when the light has gone dim? The songs I learned were all of praise and thanksgiving and repentance. Or in the dark, is it best to wait in silence?” (Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son, Eerdmans, 1987)

Wolterstorff asks whether anyone has anyone ever found God in the darkness? I did. It took time, and not a little waiting in silence. But as I look back at it I would say that it wasn't me that found God so much as God who found me. Found me in the darkness! And the God who found me was not a stranger to darkness. Here was a God who knew what I knew, who experienced what I had experienced. Who knew sorrow and was acquainted with grief.

And in this solidarity of suffering I recognized something I had never expected to know in the dark. I knew I was loved, loved by the crucified God, the God who,by some mystery, fully and passionately entered into human life to redeem and transfigure it. And not human life at its best, but human life at its very worst, at a state execution, where a man was beaten half to death and nailed to a tree to die a slow humiliating and painful death. “It was now about noon,” Luke writes of the crucifixion, “and darkness came over the land.”

In my time of darkness I finally realized that I didn't have the resources to fix the world, much less my own life. I couldn't even heal the deep grief and loss I felt. But I knew, believed, trusted, the presence of God in all my troubles and trials. Knew and believed in God's power to transform renew, heal and restore the broken suffering world.

And forty years later I still believe it. And when I look at the world today, in Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans, or even on North Street in Pittsfield, I see a world that cannot save itself and needs the redemptive power of God which is demonstrated in the cross.

And I try never to forget what I know, that the Risen Christ of Easter is the crucified Jesus of Good Friday. The Risen Christ of Easter still bears the marks of the nails that killed him. Because when I am happy and healthy and well fed, I want a God without a cross, a God who will prop up my life and maintain the things I want, and not cause me too much a trouble, a nice God who dwells in sunlight and doesn't trouble my conscience or demand too much of me. No elusive troubling presence, thank you, just God in his place.

And God's place, it is sad to say, is often the church, for even the church tries to domesticate God. Even the church tries to sell God like so much snake oil as a nostrum for being healthy and happy, but, if the truth be told, faith should come with a warning label. Maybe that is what the cross is, a warning label! Because those who look to Jesus Christ and his cross for their identity will find that they will invariably share his passion for this world, and his vocation to be the love of God for a fallen world, and like him go out to embody God whatever the cost. “Take up your cross,” he says, “and follow me!”

That doesn't make life easy, but it makes it interesting, and in the end deeply satisfying in a way that others can not know. For by some strange Gospel equation only the empty know what it is like to be filled, only the humble know what it is to be exalted, only those who have wept can know what real joy is, and only those who in some very real way have lost their lives will find the true life that comes from God. The Christian my start out as a consumer of religion, but will soon be called to be a servant, “just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give up his life as a ransom for many.”

Jesus gave up the form of God to take the form of a slave, even unto a slave's death on a cross. But now the slave is master, whom we call Lord! Now the humbled one is the exalted One who sits at the right hand of God the Father! Now by his cross we, nobodies in the eyes of the world and, too often in our own eyes as well, are raised up to new life in him and with him.

And someday, in the fullness of time, in God's good hour, the whole world will see and know Jesus as he is, no longer in darkness but in unspeakable light! They'll no longer view him as an executed slave, a loser and a nobody, dead on a cross, but as the Lord of time and eternity; the Lord before whom every knee should bend, and every tongue confess that he is Lord. And when they do they'll see that the risen Christ is still the crucified Christ, that the glorified Lord still bears the visible wounds on his hands and feet and side. Because the only way to really know Jesus, is to 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

( I preached this sermon at The First Church if Christ in Pittsfield. It was included in the Festscrift for my teacher and friend Gabriel Fackre, Story Lines. Edited by Skye Fackre Gibson. Eerdmans, 2002. The concluding poem is a hymn text I wrote in 2001. The picture is John The Baptist pointing to the Crucified Jesus from the Isenheim altarpeice by Matthias Gruenwald.)

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Are Bloggers Angry People? Or “How to Get out of Jury Duty!”

Last week I was thrilled that one of my blogposts got picked up and reposted by a big institutional blog. And so, in a fever of hubris and self-promotion, I fired off a bunch of e-mails with the link to anybody that I thought might be even remotely interested.

One of these people was an old college friend who is a defense attorney, and he wrote back the following:

“This morning, I attended a seminar on jury selection in death penalty cases. The point applies when defense counsel is deciding who to “thank and excuse” from juror duty.

A jury consultant spoke and told us she would always recommend kicking off from the jury panel anyone who blogs. “They're angry people,” was her explanation. “Unless they blog about gardening or the symphony, get rid of them.”

I wonder if she thinks theology and ministry are safe subjects? So now you know how to get out of jury duty. Just start a blog!

Ironically, I have been called to jury duty a number of times, but have never been chosen. When the prosecution finds out that I am clergy they “thank and excuse” me. I am guessing they imagine that my mercy might temper (or subvert) their justice. The funny thing is I have always thought it would be interesting to be on a jury and witness a trial. So the blogging ploy has no utility for me. Besides, I think it is my duty as a citizen to serve on a jury.

But maybe she is right about the anger. I’ve noticed that even facebook has been getting a little testy lately over the health care bill. Any of you other bloggers out there feel like you might be an angry person?

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

The Work of Christ in the Thought of P.T. Forsyth: Kenosis and Plerosis Revisited

To talk of “the work of Christ” in the theology of P.T.Forsyth is not to refer to merely a section of his systematic theology, but to point to the heart of his theology. Forsyth's entire theological project looks to the cross of Christ as the decisive act of the Holy God. It mattered little what subject Forsyth approached in his writings, be it marriage, the arts, war and peace. He always returned again and again to the cross as his fixed point, his north star, his magnetic north. He used this navigational image himself: “The church must always adjust its compass at the cross.” (The Atonement in Modern Religious Thought, 62)

The term “the cross” functions as theological shorthand for Forsyth, as it did for Paul, to mean the whole dramatic activity of Christ culminating at Calvary and vindicated by Easter. “I desire to keep in view the Cross, the organic crisis of Christ's whole life, earthly and eternal, as God's one kerugma, as the burthen, key, consummation and purpose of Christ's whole person and mission . . .” (The Preaching of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ, 83)

The cross for Forsyth is never merely an emblem of who God is, it is something God does, an act of the Holy God. It is constitutive for salvation rather than illustrative. It is the instrument that puts into effect God's holy love rather than a symbol that only shows God's love. Christ's death on the cross is nothing less than God acting:

He (Christ) was God, therefore, and His death was God in action. He was not simply the witness of God's grace, He was its fact, its incarnation. His death was not merely a seal to His work; it was His consummate work. It gathered up His whole person. It was more than a confirmatory pledge, it was the effective sacrament of the gracious God, with His real presence at its core. Something was done there once for all, and the subject doer of it was God. The real acting person in the cross was God.” (Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, 358)

We can see here that Forsyth's theology focuses on God as a personality, as one who acts, who is best understood not for who he is but rather for what he does, therefore not in metaphysical but moral categories.

And in the same way Forsyth's Christology focuses on what Christ does rather than who Christ is; his person is known in his work, which is the work of God. Soteriology controls Christology. It is only Christ in his cross that does justice to New Testament Christianity; his teachings alone do not make him an object of faith and worthy of worship. Forsyth inists that:

Faith is an attitude we can take only to God. God is the only correlate of faith, if we use words with any conscience. Faith in Christ involves the Godhead of Christ. Faith in Christ, in the positive Christian sense, means much more than a relation to God to which Christ supremely helps us. It is a communion possible not through, but only in Christ and Him crucified. It means that to be in Christ is to be in God. It means that the experience that the action of Christ with us is God's action, that Christ does for us and in us what holy God alone can do, and that meeting with Christ we meet with God.” (Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 6)

So in Forsyth's theology a two–nature Christology is replaced by a two–act Christology, with an act from the divine side and a corresponding one from the human side. The divine kenosis, or self-emptying, coincides with the plerosis, or self-fulfillment, of Christ.

Kenosis with a difference: Moral not metaphysical

But if Forsyth holds to a kenotic theory it is a kenotic theory with a difference. It is construed in moral rather than in metaphysical language; it is dramatic and active rather than static, in keeping with its object, the free God who acts in the man Jesus Christ. The term kenosis is derived from the Greek heuton ekenõsen, “he emptied himself,” which the King James Bible of Philippians 2:7 renders “he made himself of no reputation.’ As a substantive it is used, in the technical sense, of the Christological theory which sets out “to show how the Second Person of the Trinity could so enter into human life as that there resulted the genuinely human experience which is described by the evangelists.” (H.R. Macintosh, New Bible Dictionary; See also N.T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant, for a comprehensive rehearsal of the history of the interpretation of Philippians 2.)

In the late nineteenth century Kenotic theories of the atonement had been popular among German Lutherans (ie. Gottried Thomasius, W.F. Gess, F.H.R. von Frank) and with some British Anglicans, notably Charles Gore who gave the Bampton Lectures at Oxford in 1889. Kenotic views of Incarnation or Atonement put forth the idea in one way or another that, in Christ, God relinguished some aspect of his divinity.

The kenotic approach was criticized for a number of reasons: that it was pantheistic, blurring the line between God and humanity; that it undermined the doctrine of divine immutability; that it jeopardized the Trinity, for a humanized Son empty of divine attributes could be no part of the Trinitarian life; that it failed to recognize the proper relationship between divine existence, divine attributes and divine essence when it claimed the former can be separated from the latter; and, finally, that the kenotic Christ is neither God nor Man and therefore doesn't solve the problem it sets out to solve. The popularity of the kenotic approach was already waning by Forsyth's day. This he no doubt knew, as well as the criticisms and difficulties. “Many difficulties arise readily in one's own mind” he wrote, “It is a choice of difficulties.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 294) He takes pains in places to separate himself from some of the more vulnerable of the kenoticist's views.

Nevertheless, he does not shy away from the kenotic language as long as it is in his distinctive moral vocabulary. Although Forsyth's full treatment of kenosis will wait until 1909 with The Person and Place of Jesus Christ we see a kenotic emphasis already by 1895 in a sermon on Philippians 2: 5-8 entitled “The Divine Self–Emptying” (later to appear in the anthology God the Holy Father) In that earlier treatment Forsyth already has in outline the the two–act Christology which will be spelled out in the kenosis/plerosis scheme of The Person and Place of Jesus Christ. Where the critics of kenotic theories worry about loss of divinity Forsyth wants to view kenosis as constitutive of Christ's divinity. He understands Christ's self–emptying as the very act which makes him Lord. It is only because of his Godhead that Christ can empty himself and in so doing He fufills his Godhead. So in this case limitation is understood as a power rather than a defect: “Well, notice here that Christ's emptying of Himself is not regarded as the loss of His true Godhead, but the condition of it. Godhead is what we worship. Christ's emptying of Himself has placed him at the centre of human worship. Therefore He is of Godhead. We worship Him as the crucified—through the cross, not in spite of the cross.” (God the Holy Father, 32)

One of the traditional objections to a kenotic theory is that if the divine nature is given up how can the subsequent human act be an act of God and therefore a saving act, since only God can save? But Forsyth's view of kenosis doesn't involve the loss of divinity so much as its self–retraction or self–reduction. This is language about a free personality who chooses to act and is known by his acts, rather than language about a deity known by his attributes.

From Kant Forsyth acquired a metaphysical agnosticism; this keeps him away from using the language of two natures to understand how the human Jesus relates to his Godhead. Rather than thinking about Christ in the language of two natures, Forsyth wants more active categories. He refers at times to “two modes of being” and elsewhere to “two moral movements:”

Let us cease speaking of a nature as if it were an entity; of two natures as two independent entities; and let us think and speak of two modes of being, like quantitative and qualitative, or physical and moral. Instead of speaking of certainattributes as renounced may we not speak of a new mode of their being? The Son, by an act of love's omnipotence, set aside the style of God, and took the style of a servant, the mental manner of a man, and the mode of moral action that mark's human nature.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 307)

This “setting aside” is the language one would use of a personal subject, and this is what Forsyth presses for, a move away from the terms of entities and their substance to the terms of personalities and their freely chosen moral acts. So:

As the union of wills we have in Christ, therefore, the union of two moral movements or directions, and not merely their confluence, their mutual living involution and not simply their inert conjunction. Much that may seem obscure would vanish if we could but cease to think in terms of material substance or force, however fine, and learn to think in terms of personal subjects and their kind in union; if our minds gave up handling quantities in these high matters and took up kinds. It is the long and engrained habit of thinking in masses or entities that makes so unfamiliar and dark the higher habit of thinking in acts.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 346)

Forsyth believes that construing the act of God in Christ in dramatic and moral terms is truer to the witness of the New Testament than the metaphysical language of Greek Philosophy and the Fathers of the early centuries. It is also truer, he is convinced, to the Christian experience of an atoning, saving Christ. There is a decidedly experiential dimension to Forsyth's understanding of Christian authority: “It is the evangelical experience of every saved soul that is the real foundation of Christological belief anywhere. For Christ was not the epiphany of an idea, nor the epitome of a race, nor the incarnation, the precipitate, of a metaphysic—whatever metaphysic he may imply.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 9)

The Holiness of God

Kenosis is a moral necessity for the God who is holy love. The holiness of God requires the divine intervention of the atoning cross against human sin. For Forsyth God's holiness is his defining attribute, God's very nature. He writes:

The holy law is not the creation of God but His nature, and it cannot be treated as less than inviolate and eternal, it cannot be denied or simply annulled unless He seems false to Himself. If a play on words be permitted is such a connection, the self-denial of Christ was there because God could not deny himself.” (The Atonement in Modern Religious Thought, 79)

Here again we can see how Forsyth's understanding of God in moral rather than in metaphysical terms leads him to the logic of the cross. Human sin requires a real atonement. For Forsyth the wrath of God is not some arbitrary anger, but the response of the holy God to the very antithesis of holiness, which is sin. Divine holiness reacts to human sin with wrath and judgement. Forsyth's theology takes sin and evil with utmost seriousness. God can not tolerate sin. It threatens his very being:

God is fundamentally affected by sin. He is stung and to the core. It does not simply try Him. It challenges His whole place in the moral world. It puts Him on His trial as God. It is, in its nature, an assault on His life. Its vital object is to unseat Him. It has no part whatever in His purpose. It hates and kills Him.” (Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, 366)

So God is not just love, but holy love at war with sin. Liberal theology knows only a benign mercy that overlooks sin without overcoming it. That is why it can do without an atoning cross. But a theology that takes God's holiness seriously must also take sin and evil seriously too andrealize that they are at war. God must not only forgive sin, but destroy it by an atonement. During the First World War Forsyth wrote these words to describe the holiness of God and the power of His holy cross:

The great Word of the Gospel is not God is love. That is too stationary, too little energetic. It produces a religion unable to cope with crises. But the Word is this—Love is omnipotent for ever because it is holy. That is the voice of Christ—raised from the midst of time, and its chaos, and its convulsions, yet coming from the depths of eternity, where the Son dwells in the bosom of the Father, the Son to whom all power is given in heaven and on earth because He overcame the world in a cross holier than love itself, more tragic, more solemn, more dynamic than all earth's wars. The key to history is the historic Christ above history and in command of it, and there is no other. (The Justification of God, 227)

The Necessity of the Pre-existence of Christ

The phrase “the historic Christ above history” points to Forsyth's high Christology. If Christ truly shares in the Godhead, then he cannot have been created or arrived in time, but must have been God from before the beginning. The idea of a pre–existent Christ is, of course, seen here and there in the New Testament, most notably in John 1 and in Colossians 1:15ff, and portrayed in the art and hymnody of the church, as in this verse from a hymn:

Low within a manger lies

He who built the starry skies

He who throned in height sublime

Reigns above the cherubim. (McGrath, Christian Theology, 293)

Forsyth's Christology requires such a pre–existent Christ if the atoning cross is to truly be an act of the God who in the beginning created the heavens and the earth. Against the claim of “the history of religions school” that such passages reflect Gnostic influences Forsyth wants to argue that the earthly career of Christ requires that he has been part of the Godhead from before the beginning:

He could never be king of the eternal future if he was not king from the eternal past. No human being was capable of such will. It was Godhead that willed and won that victory in Him. If it was God loving when he loved it was God willing as He overcame. The cross was the reflection (or say rather the historic pole) of an act within Godhead. The historic victory was the index and the correlate of a choice and a conquest in Godhead itself. (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 270)

An important passage for Forsyth is Matthew 11:27: “All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and know one knows the son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 81) He cited this text against liberal critics to show that it was not just in the Gospel of John but also in the Synoptics that a high Christology was present. He argues that pre-existence is not some add–on to the Gospel, but an intrinsic feature of the Christ who is God.

The Gospel requires a pre–existent Christ and Christian experience confirms it. For example he suggsts that Paul's affirmation of the pre-existence of Christ came from his experience, that he “worked back from the faith that all things were made for Christ to the conviction that, as the end was in the beginning, all things were made by Christ; and by a Christ as personal as the Christ who was their goal. (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 269)

So Christ's kenosis is not just an act in time but an act that was established from beyond time:

Christ's earthly humiliation had to have its foundation laid in heaven, and to be believed but as the working out of a renunciation before the world was.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 270) His emergence on earth was at is were the swelling in of heaven. His sacrifice began before He came into the world, and his cross was that of a lamb slain before the world's foundation. There was a Calvary above which was the mother of it all.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 271)

The Divine Self–Emptying

What does the kenosis involve? What is given up? Forsyth speaks of the self-reduction of God's attributes rather than their destruction, they go from being actual to potential. It is not so much limitation as concentration. They are drawn in. He says that God's attributes, such as omniscience, are not destroyed but are reduced from the actual to the potential. “They are only concentrated. The self-reduction, or self-retraction, of God might be a better phrase than the self-emptying.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 308)

He gives a series of examples of how a personality might freely choose to limit himself: a wise vizier to a foolish young sultan who voluntarily takes a cup of poison meant for his master and dies a prolonged and debilitating death; a musical genius in Russia who knowingly chooses to dedicate himself to political associations that cause him to be deported to a life in Siberia where he can never play the violin again; a university student brilliant in philosophical pursuits who, upon the death of his father, gives up his career to take over the leadership of the family business. (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 296–298) In each case a conscious choice, motivated by love, is made which limits the personality. In each case, something precious is lost, but more is gained, and love is the motivation of each choice.

In Christ's case the free obedient act of the cross is not just love, but holy love concentrated at one point. Forsyth argues that since holy love is the supreme category of the Almighty, and the object for which His omnipotence exists, how could His omnipotence be imperilled by its own supreme act? “The freedom that limits itself to create freedom is true omnipotence, as the love that can humble itself to save is truly almighty.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 314) Far from imperiling the Godhead of Christ, the kenosis of incarnation culminating in the cross is the most powerful act of Godhead, even more powerful than the creation of the world:

To appear and act as Redeemer, to be born, suffer, and die, was a mightier act of Godhead than lay in all creation, preservation, and blessing of the world. It was only in the exercise of a perfect divine fullness (and therefore power) that Christ could empty and humble himself to the servant he became. As the humiliation grew so grew the exaltation of the power and person that achieved it. It was an act of such might that it was bound to break through the servant form, and take at last for all men's worship the lordly name.” (Person and Place, 315)

So it is fitting that “at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth, and under the earth, and every tongue confess the Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” (Philippians 2:10,11 NRSV) Here in praise and confession are represented the whole of creation according to the cosmology of the day.

So kenosis leads to plerosis, self-emptying to self-fulfillment, and not just at the final vindication but as a process throughout the life of Christ. Kenosis by itself is inadequate Forsyth says:

What we have chiefly in view is the sort of uniqueness in the man Jesus which is required for the final and personal gift of Godhead in him. Now for such a purpose a Christ merely kenotic is inadequate. We have already seen that all revelation is God's self-determination. For any real revelation we must have a loving self-determination of God with a view to His self-determination and self-communication; and this self-determination must take effect in some manner of self-divestment. We have examined the kenotic, or self-emptying theories of such an act, and we have found them either more helpful or less. But whether we take a kenotic theory or not, we must have some doctrine of God's self-divestment, or His reduction to our human case. Yet, if we go no farther than that, it only carries us half-way, it only leads us to the spectacle of a humbled God, and not to the experience of a redeeming and royal God. For redemption we need something more positive. It is a defect in kenotic theories, however sound, that they turn only on one side of the experience of Christ, viz., his descent and humiliation. It is a defect because that renunciatory element is negative after all; and to dwell on it, as modern views of Christ do, is to end in a Christian ethic somewhat weak, and tending to ascetic and self-occupied piety.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 328-9)

The Self-fulfillment of Christ

If kenosis by itself is inadequate what must be the corresponding plerosis? The question that Forsyth wants to address in his two–act Christology is how is the humanity of Jesus related to his Godhead? Forsyth want to take seriously both the historic Christ and his Godhead. He turns aside the liberal view that Christ is the apex of the spiritual evolution that emerges into a divine height in humanity, the divine blossom of thee race, or its “heaven–kissing hill.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 33)

No, the historic Christ comes to save humanity and not to exhibit humanity's salvation. “The King makes the Kingdom, and not the Kingdom the King.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 334) It is an invasion not an evolution. “Man does not simply unfold to God but God descends and enters man.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 334)

It is not that divinity and humanity share in being, rather they meet in action. There are two movements, God to man and man to God:

God and man meet in humanity, not as two entities or natures which coexist, but as two movements in mutual interplay, mutual struggle and reciprocal communion. On the one hand we have an initiative, creative, productive action, clear and sure, on the part of the eternal and absolute God; on the other we have the seeking, receptive, appropriative action of groping, erring, growing man. God finds a man who did not find Him, man finds a God who did find Him.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 336, The capital “h” on the last word is either a misprint or, more likely, Forsyth's subtle way of saying that God finds man only in Christ.)

Christ embodies these two movements in which God and humanity meet. Forsyth says that in Christ we have two things: we have the action of the Godhead concentrated through one hypostasis (or mode of being) within it, and we have the growing moral appropriation by man's soul moving Godward of that action as its own. This is the two–act Christology which is the heart of Forsyth's project. It has God entering our world: “We have that divine Son, by whose agency the world of souls was made, not know creating another soul, but himself becoming such a soul.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 338) And he enters it to bring man to God as Christ acts in his humanity to be obedient to the will of the Father. Christ never ceases to be what he has always been, but grows in consciousness of his divinity through the unfolding moral crisis which he enters in the world:

. . .the history of Christ's growth is then a history, by gradual moral conquest, of the mode of being from which, by a tremendous moral act, he came. It is reconquest. He learned the taste of an acquired divinity who had eternally known itas a possession. He won by duty what was his own by right.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 308)

Christ in his humanity shares the human reality of growth. Human life does not begin as a finished article. “It begins with certain possibilities, with a destiny engrained in the protoplast; but it only passes from a destiny into a perfection through a career.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 345) So Christ grows by moral struggle. He is tempted, but without sin. Again and again he must freely choose the way to go. Throughout his life he grows in his consciousness of what he was, although not in Godhead itself, which he always had. Here Forsyth is able to speak of a progressive incarnation, although in very qualified language:

We may speak of a progressive incarnation within his life, if we give it a kenotic basis. He grew in the grace in which he always was, and in the knowledge of it. As his personal history enlarged and ripened by every experience, and as he was always found equal to each moral crisis, the latent Godhead became more and more mighty as his life's interior, and asserted itself with the more power as the personality grew in depth and scope. Every step he victoriously took into the dark and hostile land was an ascending movement also of the Godhead which was its base. This ascent into Hell went on, from His temptation to His tomb, in gathering power. Alongside his growing humiliation to the conditions of evil moved his growing exaltation to holy power. Alongside the Kenosis and its negations there went a corresponding Plerosis, without which the Kenosis is a one-sided idea.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ. 349)

Kenosis and Plerosis together constitute two movements of a single act of God. The more Christ laid down his personal life the more he gained his divine soul. “He lives out a moral plerosis by the very completeness of his kenosis; and he achieves the plerosis in resurrection and ascension.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 300)“

The moral struggle that Christ was involved in was the struggle to be obedient to the Father's will. It is the struggle to become a servant. What does Christ's becoming a servant mean? It means that he took on a state of subjugation in which he was called upon to render obedience. What Christ becomes by his kenosis is a servant, and it is the free moral act involved in his obedience to the Father's will that is decisive for his Lordship.

It is not his suffering, but his obedience, that makes him Lord. Forsyth rejects the idea that what is satisfied in the atonement is God's wounded honor or God's justice:

We have further left behind that the satisfaction of Christ was made either to God's wounded honour or to His punitive justice. And we see with growing and united clearness that it was made by obedience rather than suffering. There is a vast difference between suffering as a condition of Atonement and suffering as the thing of positive worth in it, what gives it its value.” (The Atonement in Modern Religious Thought, 67)

But although Christ takes on full humanity there is a limit. He remains without sin, and must for only the sinles one can acomnplish the work of the Holy God against sin. Forsyth counters the argument that this somehow makes him less than human. He argues that Christ was indeed tempted in every way that humans are, and that his struggles were real. “Because Christ was true man he could be truly tempted; because he was true God he could not truly sin; but he was not less true man for that.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 302)

What if kenosis involved the limitation of his knowledge of the impossibility of sinning? Clearly his struggles as recorded in the Gospels pursuede us that he took the possiblilty of sin seriously. In the Garden of Gethsemene Christ struggles with whether the cross is truly the Father's will. Forsyth says that he chose not to knowthat for him sinning was impossible, and in doing so, shared the full human experience of temptation:

. . . to his own experience the moral conflict was entirely real, because his self–emptying included an oblivion of that impossibility of sin. As consciousness arose he was unwittingly protected from those deflections incident to inexperience which would have damaged his moral judgement and development when maturity came. And this was only possible if he had, to begin with, a unique, central, and powerful relation to the being of God apart from his own earthly decisions. So that his growth was growth in what he was, and not simply to what he might be. It was not acquiring what he had not, but appropriating and realising what he had. It was coming to his own unique self. I have already said that I am alive to the criticism to which such a position has been exposed, in that it seems to take him out of a real moral conflict like our own. And the answer, you have noted, is three-fold. First, that our redeemer must save us by his difference from us, however the salvation get home by his parity with us. He saves because he is God and not man. Second, the reality of his conflict is secured by his kenotic ignorance of his inability to sin. And third, his unique relationship to God was a relation to a free God and not to a mechanical or physical fate, or to an invincible bias to good.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 342)

For Forsyth the death of Christ is really a sacrifice, but it is not to a sacrifice made to God as much as a sacrifice made by God. “Atonement to God must be made, and it was only possible from God.” (Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, 365) Christ became sin for us, and took the penalty for that sin on himself. So the cross is penal but God doesn't punish Christ:

He was made sin. God did not punish Christ, but Christ entered the dark shadow of God's penalty on sin. We must press the results of God's holy love in completely identifying Himself with us. Holiness is not holiness till it go out in love, seek the sinner in grace, and react on his sin by judging it. But love is not divine identification with us until it become sacrifice. Nor is the identification with us complete till the sacrifice become judgement, till our Saviour share our self–condemnation, our fatal judgement of ourselves on Christ's name. The priest, in his grace, becomes the victim, and completes his confession of God's holiness by meeting its acting as judgement. To forgive sin he must bear sin.” (Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, 362)

This makes for a priestly Christ, a priestly religion and a priestly church. (See my “The Cross and the Church: The Soteriology and Ecclesiology of P.T. Forsyth” ):

New Testament Christianity is a priestly religion or it is nothing. It gathers around a priestly cross on earth and a Great High Priest Eternal in the heavens. It also means the equal priesthood of each believer. But it means much more. That by itself is ruinous individualism. It means the collective priesthood of the Church as one. the greatest function of the Church in full communion with Him is priestly. It is to confess, to sacrifice, to intercede for the whole human race in Him.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 12)

The atonement did not procure grace, it flowed from grace.” (The Cruciality of the Cross, 41)

Atonement is substitutionary, else it is none. Let us not denounce or renounce such words, but interpret them. they came into existence to meet a spiritual necessity, and to seep them away is spiritual wastefulness, to say no worse. We may replace the word substitution by representation or identification, but the thing remains. Christ not only represents God to man but man to God. Is it possible for nay to represent man before Holy God without identifying himself in some guiltless way with human sin, without receiving in some way the judgment of sin? Couldthe second Adam be utterly untouched by the second death? Yet if the Sinless was judged it was not His own judgment He bore, but ours. It was not simply on our behalf, but in our stead . . . .” (The Atonement in Modern Religious Thought, 83)

The atonement is penal but not penitential. The punishment of sin fell on Him:

The suffering was penal in that it was due in the moral order to sin. It was penal to Christ's personality, to His consciousness, but not to His conscience. It was not penitential. There was no self–accusation in it. He never felt that God was punishing Him, though it was penalty, sin's Nemesis that He bore. It was the consequence of sin, though not of His sin.” (The Atonement in Modern Religious Thought, 85)

Forsyth offers this illustration:

Schamyl was the great religious and military leader of the Caucasus who for thirty years baffled the advance of Russia in that region, and, after the most adventurous of lives, died in 1871. At one time bribery and corruption had become so prevalent about him, that he was driven to severe measures, and he announced that in every case discovered the punishment would be one hundred lashes. Before long a culprit was discovered. It was his own mother. He shut himself up in his tent for two days without food or water, sunk in prayer. On the third day he gathered the people, and pale as a corpse, commanded the executioner to inflict the punishment, which was done. But at the fifth stroke he called, “Halt!” had his mother removed, bared his own back, and ordered the official to lay on him the other ninety-five, with the severest threats if he did not give him the weight of each blow.

Forsyth concludes this story by saying, “this is a case where his penalty sanctified her punishment both to herself and to the awestruck people. Every remission imperils the sanctity of law unless he who remits suffers something in the penalty foregone; and such atoning suffering is essential to the revelation of love which is to remain great, high and holy.” (The Atonement in Modern Religious Thought, 88)

In Conclusion

His hermenteutical daring. “Criticism is a good servant but a dangerous master.”

How would we assess Forsyth's kenosis/plerosis proposal? Its purpose is twofold: 1. to safeguard the full humanity of Christ against a docetic view, and 2. to assert against liberal theology the full participation of Christ in the Godhead. If doctrine is the conceptual redefinitions of the biblical narrative than Forsyth has tried to keep scripture clearly in view. He depicts Christ as one engaged in a mighty moral struggle, freely acting finally in obedience to the Father's will at the expense of his own life. The human struggle is not passed over lightly, yet the whole action is seen as an act of God.

Forsyth is right to insist that any theology that does justice to the New Testament must involve some sort of kenosis, for the Gospel is quite clear that God does enter our world to engage sin and evil. As Donald M. MacKinnon has rightly noted:

If the atonement shows God himself profoundly engaged with human evil, it is an engagement (even when its authenticity is affirmed by Jesus' resurrection) that leaves many questions unanswered. And this most certainly Forsyth acknowledged through his insistence on the reality of the divine kenosis. Jesus enters on the climactic stage of his via dolorosa, suddenly and traumatically unsure that this is the way for him. If, unlike the Anglican kenoticists, who were his contemporaries, Forsyth in an indifference to metaphysics interprets the divine self–emptying in dramatic terms, at this point he rejoins those for whom the incarnate's limitedhuman knowledge was a central theological concern. For the most part, his Kantian metaphysical agnosticism enabled him to avert from ontological exploration, and emphasize the cruciality of dramatic action. But the realities of Gethsemene refuse to allow him to neglect the extent to which the passion was suffused by a kind of terrible uncertainty. (Hart, Justice the True and Only Mercy, 108)

Forsyth's captures this uncertainty and the powerful moral drama that is the passion. There is great rhetorical power to Forsyth's theology as he addresses issue after issue returning always to the cross as the center.

Forsyth speaks of the subordination of Christ to the Father, risking subordinationism, although his other statements make it clear he does not believe by this in the Son's generation from the Father. Again Forsyth is more concerned with the describing the flow of God's activity in the biblical narrative than with metaphysical assertions, and by the standards of Nicene orthodoxy, even the New Testament itself is subordinationist in tendency.

If “doctrine is the conceptual redefinition of the biblical narrative” (Frei) then has Forsyth done justice to the biblical narrative? Here, too, Forsyth has been successful for he has successfully kept Scripture clearly in view throughout. He deals with both the high Christology of John and the epistles and the human Jesus of the Synoptics, the one who went through the full experience of the pas-sion. Donald MacKinnon wrote that “the realities of Gethsemane refuse to allow him (Forsyth) to neglect the extent

to which the passion was suffused by a kind of terrible uncertainty” (Hart, Justice the True and Only Mercy, p. 108). Forsyth's captures that "terrible uncertainty" and the powerful moral drama that is the passion.

There is great rhetorical power to Forsyth's theology as he addresses issue after issue returning always to the cross as the center. In The Person and Place of Jesus Christ he offers a highly nuanced theological interpretation that tries to make sense of the meaning of the cross. His kenotic Christology attempts to explain the mystery of the incarna-tion and the inner workings of the atonement without using the metaphysical language of which he was so suspicious.

Both Donald MacKinnon and Colin Gunton have criticized Forsyth for eschewing metaphysical language, particularly ontological language, and for his too easy dismissal of the truths of Chalcedon. I have to agree in part with Colin Gunton's charge that Forsyth imported a metaphysic through the back door; after all, when you talk about “modes of being” you are pretty close to metaphysics if not already there. Gunton is right when he says: "Forsyth's kenotic the-ory of the incarnation . . . . is essentially an attempt to make logical sense of the incarnation conceived as something that really happened in human history. It thus belies his pro-claimed lack of interest in metaphysical theories" (see Gunton's critique of Forsyth in Yesterday and Today, pp. 168- 173).

Having acknowledged the charge, let me say that I think Forsyth's attempt to articulate a Christology outside the usual metaphysical framework is part of what gives his writings such rhetorical punch and dramatic power. He is a good theologian, but he never stops being a preacher, which may account for his continued popularity with preachers.

In some respects he anticipates the various canonical and narrative approaches that are associated with the "Yale theology" of Hans Frei, George Lindbeck, and their students. Like them (and like Karl Barth) Forsyth's theology is thoroughly exegetical and takes the final form of the canon as the decisive text. He doesn't eschew historical criticism, but recognizes that it is “a good servant but a dangerous master.”

Yet, unlike at least some interpretations of the Yale School, he insists that the Gospel is more than a cultural-linguistic narrative which sets norms for a community, the church. For Forsyth it is also God's truth for the whole world. In this he remains decidedly evangelical, and his hermeneutic has an important experiential dimension.

But this is not just any experience! Forsyth would have under-stood “experience” more along the lines of Jonathan Ed-wards' view of Christian experience than that of those to- day for whom autonomous personal or group experience is authoritative. He would have had little use for the idea of “re-imagining” God in light of our experience. “See to the Gospel,” he said, “and experience will take care of itself.” For Forsyth it is not human religiosity that matters. Rather, the primary actor in the drama of human redemption is al- ways God in Christ, known chiefly by his great act on the cross.

Let me conclude with a Forsythian doxology:

“And now may he who so emptied himself that he was filled with all the fullness of God dwell fully in us; may he raise, rule, and perfect us in all holiness; to the end that, bowing before him with every knee both in heaven and upon earth, and ever more calling Him Holy, Holy, Holy Lord, we may be, in Him, to the praise and glory of the Father's Grace Who made us acceptable in the Eternal Son, world without end. Amen.” (The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, p 357.)

Works Cited:

Trevor Hart, Editor, Justice the True and Only Mercy. Edinburgh: T&;T Clark, 1995

P. T. Forsyth:

The Atonement in Modern Religious Thought. New York: Whittaker, 1901.

The Cruciality of the Cross. London: Independant Press, 1948.

God the Holy Father. London: Independent Press, 1957.

The Person and Place of Jesus Christ. London: Independent Press, 1948.

The Preaching of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ. Blackwood, South Australia: New Creation Publications, 1987.

The Work of Christ. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1910.

(This is the original paper that I presented at the United Reformed Church Centre at Windermere, England in May of 1998, at a conference: P.T. Forsyth: Theologian for a New Millennium. It was gathered with the other papers into a book by the same name edited by Alan P. F. Sell. It later appeared also as a chapter in my book When I Survey the Wondrous Cross: Reflections on the Atonement. Pickwick, 2000, Wipf and Stock, 2010.

Monday, March 22, 2010

Dispatch from America: Yes, we got a Health Care Bill, but we are still a hurting country!

I stayed up last night to watch the vote, and was relieved when Congress got the 217 it needed to pass the long-awaited (and much-contested) health care bill. It’s been a long time coming, and hats off to President Obama and Speaker Pelosi for accomplishing something that no President or party has been able to do in a century. We now join the rest of the wealthy industrial nations in enabling our citizens access to affordable health care. It’s about time.

And our citizens sorely need it. We trail many nations in life expectancy, infant mortality and other such indicators, yet we have the best medical resources in the world. If you had access to this care you were charmed. All the members of Congress have it, all rich people have it, and when they get ill they don’t have to make choices between seeing a doctor and going without food.

But many don’t have it. My wife, a public health nurse who serves the underserved in our community, sees the results every day, and it isn’t pretty. Estimates have been around 18,000 unnecessary deaths a year because of lack of access to health care. I have seen it in my congregations for over 30 years; I have seen it in my own family.

When people lose their jobs they lose their health care, and often they lose their tenous grip on the middle class. Often they lose their homes. Many stay in jobs they hate because they can’t afford to lose their health care. You could have great health insurance, and then when you got ill or injured, your company could (and often did) drop you. If you had a pre-existing condition you could be denied care. Everybody except the most benighted and clueless among us agreed our system was broken.

With this bill, which is by no means perfect, and certainly not socialized medicine as some of the rhetoric of its overheated critics have called it, all that will change, although not right away.

I honestly didn’t think it would happen.

Just over a year ago President Obama was beginning his term, and hopes were high. After all, he had won the election with 53% of the vote.

But then it didn’t happen. There was endless debate, and the Democratic Party (mine, but not with much enthusiasm usually) seemingly bumbled their chances away. Then Ted Kennedy died, and my own state elected a Senator who was against the health care bill, so the Democrats lost their super-majority, and the pundits said health care was dead. And I believed them. Just how the President and the Speaker pulled this particular rabbit out of the hat at the last minute still mystifies me.

I am happy today that we got it, but I am deeply troubled for my country. This was not a bi-partisan bill, although it is almost identical to the one that my former governor, Republican Mitt Rommney, put into place in Massachusetts. But not one, NOT ONE, Republican member of Congress crossed the aisle to vote for it. There were some “profiles in courage” on the Democratic side for members who knew that their vote will mean that they will not get elected, but there were no profiles in courage on the Republican side, only profiles in shame. Where were the people I used to admire from the opposition? Where was Olympia Snow? Where was Susan Collins?

I’ll tell you where they were. They were with the rest of their party in deciding that the best strategy in dealing with the Obama victory a year ago was to do nothing to help him in any way. The GOP (the Grand Old Party) became the PON (the Party of No).

So I am happy we got the bill, but we are not a healthy nation.

Now the Republicans are claiming they weren’t consulted. That is an out and out lie. We have never had a President so intent on developing a bipartisan approach to solving our country's ills as this one. They thought they could wait him out and make him look bad, and it almost worked. Some of this is politics as usual, but in past historic votes like the Voting Rights and Social Security Acts there were a handful of dissenters from their party that saw it was the right thing to do and crossed the aisle.

Not this time. Do you think this is a coincidence? No. It was a party-wide strategy of obstruction, and although I generally like to see a good opposition party, I hope they take a beating at the polls for their cowardice and mean-spiritedness.

The debate on the floor of Congress last night had some awful moments. Congressman Nunes of California called this modest bill totalitarian and likened it to Soviet-style Communism. One “honorable gentlemen” yelled out “baby killer” at the most pro-life Democrat in the Congress.

After the vote, a visibly tired President Obama tried once more to reach out to make it look bi-partisan, and to sell it to the American people.

I grieve that my country is so divided. I grieve that so many are motivated by fear and self-interest. And I grieve that we have become so heartless toward the poor and needy among us. And I especially grieve that so many who feel this way are my fellow Christians.

I am glad we got the bill, however modest. It will make the country a less heartless place. The Old Testament prophets used to judge the health of the nation by how it treats “the last, the least, and the lost” among us. By that measure we as a nation still stand under judgement.

Last night we did a little better, but we are still a country greatly divided, a country still hurting.

Sunday, March 21, 2010

A Prayer for the Common Good on The Fifth Sunday in Lent

O Lord, by all your dealings with us, whether of joy or pain, of light or darkness, let us be brought ever closer to you. Let us not value your grace simply because it makes us happy, or because it makes us sad, because it gives us or denies us what we want, but because all that you send us bring us to you. Let us realize that in knowing your perfection, we may be sure in every disappointment that you are still loving us, that in every darkness you are still enlightening us, and that in every bump in our journey's road you are giving us life, just as in death you gave life to your Son, our savior Jesus Christ.

O Lord, our whole world is in the midst of struggle about our future, and there is great fear and uncertainty among us. We worry about war and peace, about terror and trouble, about the environment and the economy. Calm us down and let us speak to each other as those who have a common stake in our life together, as neighbors rather than as adversaries.

Keep us from rancor and strife, from rumors and accusations. Let us seek the truth as best we can know it, and the common good above our own particular interests. Deliver us from the need to build ourselves up by cutting others down. Let us listen more than we talk, and think before we speak, and realize that we are all in this together,

O Lord, you alone can control the days that are gone and the deeds that are done; remove from our burdened memory the weight of past years, that being set free both from the comfort of complacency and the paralysis of remorse, we may reach forth to those things which lie before us, and press towards the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Jesus Christ. Amen.

(Photo: R. L. Floyd)

Saturday, March 20, 2010

George Hunsinger: Answer to a Question About Baptism

Recently I was so impressed with George Hunsinger's “Are The Gospels Reliable? A Letter to a Young Inquirer,” which I saw on Ben Myers' site, that I asked him if he had other such helpful catechetical resources.

Dr. Hunsinger, who teaches systematic theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, is not only a first rank academic theologian, but a faithful Christian concerned with the catechesis of the faith at every level, witnessed to by his guiding involvement in the most recent (1998) Presbyterian Catechism.

Years ago, he was my first advisor for what became my A Course in Basic Christianity, a project subtitled “Remedial Catechesis for Adults.” I often call it “Everything you should have learned in confirmation, but probably didn't because you had other things on your mind.”

As always he keeps ecumenical concerns in view. Here he addresses a thoughtful letter on Christian baptism with the same clear and careful thinking that he brought to the earlier letter on the scriptures, and also to his most recent book on The Eucharist and Ecumenism (Cambridge, 2008).

I quote both the letter and his response in full with his permission:

“Dear Dr. Hunsinger,

I've recently been stymied as to how to understand baptism theologically. As a "good" Lutheran I've always understood baptism as a means of grace, through which the spirit both quickens and awakens faith in the baptized, with the old Adam drowned and the New Creation raised to New Life in Christ.

However, I'm currently in a course on the Radical Reformation, in which we've been reading the anabaptist, Balthasar Hubmaier, who argues for a different, though biblically defensible understanding, with Baptism a human response to grace already received, a profession of one's desire to live according to "the Rule of Christ."

These conflicting notions of baptism demanded further reflection, and so I turned to Barth's IV/4, with only greater confusion ensuing.

All this is to say, I'm unsure of how to locate baptism in terms of justification. If Christ is the one in whom we are elected, if he is our justification, and the one in whom we are crucified and raised to New Creation, where do we locate baptism?

Is it simply the awakening of the believer, through faith, to our already present justification? Can we be said to play a role in this, perhaps passively, but a kind of consent to what has already been accomplished for our sake? At any rate, the issue seems to be an incredibly confusing one, and I'm unsure how to think about this. Any guidance you might provide would be appreciated.”

“Dear N,

I agree that this is a difficult and confusing question. Furthermore, I don't find Barth's views in IV/4 to be entirely convincing. In the end, his position seems more nearly Anabaptist than Reformed.

You might want to read what the Catechism of the Catholic Church says about baptism. It at least takes adult baptism as the norm from which to understand infant baptism. I think this is an advance over traditional Reformational views (e.g., Lutheran and Reformed).

Infant baptism complicates the matter enormously. To make sense of it, I think we need a Christ-centered eschatology of participation. On these grounds we can posit an objective participation in Christ that anticipates its fulfilment in subjective (conscious and active) participation at a later date. We could then see the baptism of an infant as somehow being "proleptic." Baptism would be the means by which the infant is included, objectively, in Christ and his community by grace, but this grace would need to be fulfilled when the infant later responds to the Gospel with faith. So there is an "already" here and a "not yet." In baptism the faith of the parents and the community would function vicariously for the infant until confirmation.

The grace of baptism would be the grace of participatio Christi. This grace would precede conscious faith on the part of the baptized infant, and it would be fulfilled only when the infant affirms Christ by faith later in life.

This view would not quite amount to "baptismal regeneration." I don't really know what to do with this idea. I'd like to work something out that would not be church-dividing. Perhaps we could use the same conceptual pattern that I have been suggesting here. It would be a pattern of moving from precondition to fulfillment. We could see baptism as an objective precondition for the justification and regeneration that will later be actualized, confirmed and fulfilled by faith. What was once actual objectively becomes actual, in a new and essential form, subjectively.

Is baptism necessary for salvation? Catholics think so. Protestants often don't. I think we could probably resolve this one by asking, "necessary in what sense"? "Absolutely" (simpliciter), or only "in a certain respect" (secundum quid)? I think baptism could only be "necessary" in a certain respect. It is always fitting and necessary unless certain obstacles intervene to prevent it (as sometimes happens).

I wrote an article about baptism about 10 years ago for the International Journal of Systematic Theology. I would revise it along the above lines if I were to re-print it today.

With best regards,
Dr. Hunsinger”