Monasticism is quite a mixed bag in the history of the Church. Nevertheless, a fresh reading of The Rule of St. Benedict has impressed me anew with an appreciation for the zeal of these men. What struck me most as I read was the way in which the monastic orders were politically subversive without being politically concerned at all. The Rule specifies that advancement in responsibility within the order is entirely dependent upon personal merit. Consequently, neither freemen nor serfs were to be treated differently – all were equal before the Rule. Likewise, when important decisions were to be made, the Rule specifies that the opinion of all the brothers – even the youngest – was to be sought out since the younger brothers frequently had good ideas. These notions, particularly the first, were quite revolutionary in their time. In a sense the monasteries created an alternative model of society within the larger society. As such they performed the valuable function of highlighting what life could be like if the broader society would cease its warlike depredations and give itself up to peaceful endeavors.
Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright
December 18, 2008 in Book Reviews, Easter, Postmillennialism, ResurrectionSurprised by Hope, written by the Bishop of Durham, N.T. Wright, is a superb analysis of the New Testament doctrine of the Christian hope. Not only does Wright discuss the biblical analysis of the future hope but also discusses how this hope should shape Christian thinking and conduct in the here and now. Few analyses of the future are as fresh, invigorating, and stimulating as Wright’s book.
Wright hammers again and again at the Gnostic tendency in modern Christendom which identifies heaven as our final dwelling. As a junior high school teacher, I often found it humorous and humbling while teaching early church history to query my students on various points of Christian doctrine. One of the issues most misunderstood was the resurrection of the body. Our churches simply are not teaching it! Whenever I would endeavor to convince the students that heaven is not our final destination, that in point of fact these bodies would be raised from the dead, one would think I was from the moon. Our children are simply not getting the message – and if our children are not getting the message it means that we are not teaching it.
As Wright argues so forcefully in this book, the New Testament has far less to say about life after death than about life after life after death. While acknowledging the blessedness of those who die in the Lord, the New Testament is much more concerned with the consummation of all things when our bodies shall be raised and we shall be transformed into the image of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ – not only in terms of our character but also in our bodies. These bodies will be raised immortal.
Further, Wright does a phenomenal job discussing the new heavens and the new earth. He insists that in Christ the power of the age to come, the power of the renewed creation, is present in the here and now. Through the Spirit, the resurrection life of Christ is alive in the Church. And so we are called as the people of God to live in light of what God has promised ultimately to do. We are to live in light of the promises of God to renew all things.
This entails both moral reformation and societal transformation. While I have problems with some of Wright’s analyses of how this societal transformation should flesh itself out, his insistence that the coming of the Kingdom of God produces a certain type of culture is a much needed corrective to the shallowness of Christian thinking on these matters. When Isaiah envisions the work of the Servant of God, he talks about the culture that the Kingdom of God creates (cf. Is 61). These are the types of things that Jesus is in the business of doing through His people.
While avoiding traditional millennial terminology, Wright’s book is very earthy and postmillennial. It does a great job emphasizing the meaning and implication of the Lord’s Prayer. If we really do pray, “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven“, then we need to expect that God will answer! We are praying for the growth of the Kingdom of God and the expanding impact of the will of God on earth. And these are the things which we as the people of God are to exhibit and incarnate.
Read and enjoy!
Well after much procrastination and delay, I finally picked up my copy of The Shack by William P. Young and read it. So where does one start with any kind of analysis?
One should always start, of course, with positive comments and attempt to be fair. So my attempt to be fair and appreciative: The story was in itself engaging. Young’s attempt to portray the dynamism in the relationship among the persons of the Trinity was ambitious. Perhaps the most insightful portions revolved around Mack’s failure to trust the goodness of God and the nature of emotions.
During a conversation in which Mack is wrestling with the injustice which has been perpetrated on his daughter, the Father figure “Papa” remarks: “The real underlying flaw in your life, Mackenzie, is that you don’t think that I am good. If you knew I was good and that everything – the means, the ends, and all the processes of individual lives – is all covered by my goodness, then while you might not always understand what I am doing, you would trust me. But you don’t.” To which I would only say, Amen. We frequently doubt the goodness of God displayed in the face of Christ – and this doubting is no piety but impiety.
Also profitable was his handling of emotions. When Mack asks for help understanding emotions, Sarayu responds, “Paradigms power perception and perceptions power emotions. Most emotions are responses to perception – what you think is true about a given situation. If your perception is false, then your emotional response to it will be false too.” Peter calls us to sanctify Christ as Lord in our hearts – and our hearts include not only what we think and what we do but also how we feel. Every area of our lives is to be subject to the Lordship of Christ, including our emotions. So, once again, Amen.
These were highlights for me from the book. Problems? Well there are many. The book is pervasively Arminian. As a good lover of Pauline and Augustinian election (cf. Eph 1), I find this troubling and ultimately an empty solution to the problems the main character faces. Young’s conception of the Trinity is problematic, verging on modalism. He has a hard time with masculinity and so begins his tale by presenting God in female imagery – something Scripture avoids intentionally. This problem with masculinity is pervasive throughout the book. These criticisms have been made compellingly and winsomely by Tim Challies and Doug Wilson.
The single most pervasive problem in the book was Young’s tendency to draw various dualisms between “relationship” and whatever phenomenon he doesn’t particularly like. So he has a dualsim between rules and relationship (198), between roles and relationship (148), between institutions and relationship (178), between hierarchy and relationship (124), between religion and relationship (179). While the last has been extremely popular in evangelicalism for many years, the other dualisms are related much more to modern American culture than to any sort of biblical wisdom.
Take, as one example, his dualism between rules and relationship. Frequently we find the author criticizing the notion of a rules based faith and insisting instead on the need for a relationship free from such shackles. A rule based faith is inherently anti-Christian and destructive.
Now on the one hand there is certainly a legitimate distinction to be made here. We are not to pursue the law of God, the statutes of God, the (dare we say it) rules of God with any kind of merit mentality. We do not keep the law of the Lord as some means to earn God’s favor. Rather as those who stand in a right relationship with God, we hunger and thirst for His commands.
Consider the way in which the Servant of the Lord approaches the commands of God in Isaiah 50:4ff. He listens to the Word of God, meditates upon it, and in faith obeys what the Lord has revealed. He obeys in the knowledge that the Lord will help Him, that he will not be ashamed. His labor is not in vain in light of the promises of God.
But The Shack proceeds far beyond this legitimate Scriptural insight and instead embraces the modern dualism between rules and relationships. Scripture embraces no such dualism. The Servant of Isaiah is characterized by being attentive to the teaching, the doctrine, the rules and laws of His Master. In addition, we find in verse 10 of the Song that we are exhorted to give ear to the Word of the Servant.
Note the attitude toward the law that is reflected in the calls of Isaiah to “Listen” after this Servant Song. Isaiah 51:4 declares
“Listen to Me, My people; And give ear to Me, O My nation: For law will proceed from Me, And I will make My justice rest As a light of the peoples.”
Law will proceed from Him (cf. Isaiah 2:1ff) – and this is a good thing. The Scriptures certainly do recognize that adherence to rules simply because they are rules is deficient and inadequate. It also confesses that the goal of piety is to move beyond the simple recitation of rules to the internalization of those rules. This is the whole point of Psalm 119. We also see it in the passage we are examining in Isaiah. Look at 51:7-8:
“Listen to Me, you who know righteousness, You people in whose heart is My law: Do not fear the reproach of men, Nor be afraid of their insults. For the moth will eat them up like a garment, And the worm will eat them like wool; But My righteousness will be forever, And My salvation from generation to generation.”
Rules and relationships are not contrary to one another, in other words, but complementary to one another. We experience this in any relationship. When a relationship is just starting or when it has been rocky and is beginning to recover, simple rules are where things start. “OK,” the counselor will advise, “don’t do that anymore, do this instead.” Obviously the relationship should not stop there – the knowledge should grow and deepen so that the laws become internalized, so that they become habits of behavior. But when you’ve got bad habits, the initial destruction of them comes via baby steps of obedience, putting to death old habits and giving life to new habits. Scripture knows no dualism between rules and relationship.
We could likewise analyze the various other dualisms that Young has established, demonstrating that each of them has far less to do with biblical wisdom than with modern American culture. The danger of this approach to “relationship” is that it makes “relationship” a new idol – and God is not particularly fond of idols. And this is my final critique of the book – the god displayed in its pages simply cannot deal with the portrayal of God in the Scriptures, especially the prophets. Young’s god is not sovereign, not holy, not just. He is all about “hanging-out.” But the God of Scripture? He is the High and Holy One, the Lord God is His Name.
Just finished reading Is Christianity Good for the World?, a stimulating dialogue between Doug Wilson and Chrisopher Hitchens. Both men do a fine job representing their positions. Doug in particular does a great job keeping to the main point and gradually expanding his discussion to point to the centrality of Christ for the world. His insistence on the inability of atheism to answer the most fundamental questions about life, ethics, reason, etc. was superb. He keeps coming back to this central dilemma of atheism again and again while Hitchens continues to beg the question again and again. By what means can we objectively classify one action as wrong and another as right unless we have a transcendent source of values that exists outside of space and time? Without such a standard we are doomed to folly – the very thing Paul tells us in Ephesians, “being darkened in understanding and in the futility of our mind.” Hitchens lashes out at Wilson a couple times for classifying atheists as “fools” and urges the reader to pooh-pooh such name-calling as unprofessional and perhaps unethical. Nevertheless, in his last rejoinder he resorts to he same type of name-calling and illustrates that the creation of such categories is inescapable. The question is simply who has the grounds on which to categorize accurately. Scripture maintains that God has such grounds and provides those who follow His wisdom with the ability to do the same. On the whole, the book was a delightful read.
Questioning Evangelism by Randy Newman was a profitable and engaging read. The title itself is stimulating and sufficiently ambiguous – forcing the onlooker to begin asking questions – what does he mean “Questioning” evangelism? The first section of the book, in particular, was stimulating. His discussion of the value of asking questions in the task of evangelism was eye opening and encouraging – both as a means of defusing anger and infusing knowledge. He has a number of concrete examples from his own experience as a campus minister that serve to highlight how it works. His questioning methodology is an important step toward making our evangelism more personal. The tendency to run over folks in the midst of trying to communicate our pre-packaged digest of the Gospel is disturbing at least and destructive at worst. Neuman’s insistence on the necessity of a personal encounter, listening to the other person and responding to their specific concerns was very rich. The second section of the book in which Neuman responds to a number of specific challenges is helpful but spotty. Some conversations, suggestions are far more helpful than others. The conversational format is helpful. Supplementing his material with Doug Wilson’s Persuasions fills up some holes and directs the conversations to the power of presuppositions in our reasoning process. Overall very worth reading.
“. . . the ideas of [Augustine] furnished the themes for the piety and theology of more than a thousand years. No one possessed the ‘whole’ Augustine, but all lived upon the fragments of his spirit . . .” Reinhold Seeberg
Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo from 396 to 430 AD, towers above his predecessors, contemporaries, and pupils. Few match his keen spiritual insight; few achieve his profound self-understanding; few approach the breadth of his theological vision. Phillip Schaff, the great 19th century church historian, remarked that Augustine “is a philosophical and theological genius of the first order, towering like a pyramid above his age, and looking down commandingly upon succeeding centuries. He had a mind uncommonly fertile and deep, bold and soaring; and with it, what is better, a heart full of Christian love and humility.”
A man of such merit deserves to be well known, and his writings to be well studied, within the Christian community. Unfortunatly, few have cracked any of his numerous works; and, worse still, some of those who have attempted to explore his writings have chosen the wrong place to begin. I remember as an undergraduate picking up a copy of Augustine’s On the Trinity, one of his most difficult treatises, and feeling at once confused, overwhelmed, and ignorant. I didn’t get far and gave up reading Augustine for several years–convinced that he was too abstruse and complex for my simple mind to comprehend. It is to encourage others to avoid such a mistake, and to prod others even to try to make such mistakes, that we have reviewed Augustine’s Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love.
Enchiridion is a Greek word meaning “handbook.” Augustine’s Enchiridion, then, is somewhat of an ancient Mere Christianity, an exposition of that which Augustine deemed most essential in the Christian faith. He himself claims that the book is neither so burdensome so as to load down one’s shelves nor so brief as to leave important questions unanswered. It is a tribute to Augustine’s genius that in the relatively short compass of 140 pages he is able to express his most mature theological convictions.
The immediate purpose for which Augustine wrote was the instruction of an educated Roman layman named Laurentius. Laurentius posed a number of questions to Augustine, desiring that Augustine might compose a short handbook for future reference. To make the book readily accessible, Augustine organized it around the three virtues of faith, hope, and love. Augustine reasoned that since these three virtues constitute the essence of the fear of the Lord, or true worship, one can discover the essence of the Christian faith by discussing each in turn. What are we to believe? What are we to hope for? What are we to love? These are the three questions Augustine sets out to answer.
The lion’s share of the Enchiridion, 105 of its 122 chapters, is devoted to the question, “What are we to believe?” To answer, Augustine works his way through the Apostle’s Creed beginning with our knowledge of God the Creator and ending with the nature of heaven and hell. Clearly and affirmatively, yet without mentioning any of them by name, Augustine refutes the heresies of Arianism, Apollonarianism, Manichaeism, and Pelagianism by demonstrating the necessity of the Trinity, the goodness of the creation, the sinfulness of humanity, and the priority of divine grace in redemption.
Augustine repeatedly urges the necessity of the Trinity upon his readers. “It is enough,” Augustine says when explaining the opening confession of the Apostle’s Creed, “for the Christian to believe that the only cause of all created things, whether heavenly or earthly, whether visible or invisible, is the goodness of the Creator, the one true God; and that nothing exists but Himself that does not derive its existence from Him; and that He is the Trinity–to wit, the Father, and the Son begotten of the Father, and the Holy Spirit proceeding from the same Father, but one and the same Spirit of Father and Son.”
In addition to defending the Trinity, Augustine safeguards his readers from a distorted view of the created world. Because God is the Creator, the created world is in itself good. Evil, for Augustine, has no separate being but, like a parasite, is dependent upon goodness for its existence. Augustine explains:
“Accordingly, there is nothing of what we call evil, if there be nothing good. But a good which is wholly without evil is a perfect good. A good, on the other hand, which contains evil is a faulty or imperfect good; and there can be no evil where there is no good. . . . Therefore every being, even if it be a defective one, in so far as it is a being is good, and in so far as it is defective is evil.”
While Augustine’s defenses of the Trinity and the goodness of creation are exhilarating, nothing equals his vigorous attack upon the notion of free will and his robust vindication of the priority of divine grace in redemption. Augustine demonstrates that while Adam possessed free-will when first created, he lost it for himself and all his descendants by rebelling against God. “For,” he explains, “ it was by the evil use of his free-will that man destroyed both it and himself. For, as a man who kills himself must, of course, be alive when he kills himself, but after he has killed himself ceases to live, and cannot restore himself to life; so, when man by his own free-will sinned, then sin being victorious over him, the freedom of his will was lost.”
Because of this bondage, Augustine argues that we are unable to rescue ourselves from our fate of death and damnation. And it is this dismal picture which highlights, both in Scripture and in Augustine’s theology, the wonder of divine grace. Our entire salvation, he maintains, is an outgrowth of God’s mercy. God chooses us, gives us life, enables our wills, prompts us to holiness. Augustine’s summary is well worth quoting:
“After the fall a more abundant exercise of God’s mercy was required, because the will itself had to be freed from the bondage in which it was held by sin and death. And the will owes its freedom in no degree to itself, but solely to the grace of God which comes by faith in Jesus Christ; so that the very will, through which we accept all the other gifts of God which lead us on to His eternal gift, is itself prepared of the Lord, as the Scripture says.”
Expanding on the same theme later, Augustine demonstrates the way in which this renewal of will inevitably leads to a godly life.
“This is our first alms,” he declares, “which we give to ourselves when, through the mercy of a pitying God, we find that we are ourselves wretched, and confess the justice of His judgment by which we are made wretched, . . . and praise the greatness of His love, of which [Paul] says, ‘God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us:’ and thus, judging truly of our own misery, and loving God with the love which He has Himself bestowed, we lead a holy and virtuous life.”
The Trinity, the goodness of creation, the destructiveness of the Fall, and the beauty of divine grace are only a smattering of the topics Augustine addresses under the head, “What are we to believe?” In the remainder of the book, Augustine briefly addresses the two questions, “What are we to hope for?” and “What are we to love?” The answers? Hope in God not in man who is ever fickle and changeable. Love the Lord and love your neighbor as yourself, for this is the law and the prophets.
The Enchiridion, then, lives up to its name: it is truly a handbook of essential Christianity summarizing as it does the profoundly biblical theology of Augustine, that man who “furnished the themes for the piety and theology of more than a thousand years.” So curl up in your favorite chair, grab a glass of Chablis, crack The Enchiridion, and enter into one of the great classics of Christian literature.