The Blog of Hobbes

Some time ago I stumbled across a great article by Randall Zachman, called “Believing Is Seeing: Proclamation and Manifestation in the Reformed Tradition” hosted at the Institute for Reformed Theology. Inevitably, there are some points where I would differ, but that doesn’t diminish the value of digesting this article. Here are a couple of paragraphs from the article:

The works of God we are to contemplate in the universe set forth what Calvin calls the ‘powers’ of God, such as wisdom, mercy, righteousness, and goodness. Since these powers are all good things, expressing in a visible way the invisible nature of God, our contemplation of them should lead to our feeling them within ourselves, and ultimately to our enjoyment of them. ‘For the Lord manifests himself by his powers, the force of which we feel within ourselves and the benefits of which we enjoy’ (Inst. I.v.9). In light of the self-manifestation of God in God’s works, Calvin can say that ‘the most perfect way of seeking God, and the most suitable order, is . . . for us to contemplate him in his works whereby he renders himself near and familiar to us, and in some manner communicates himself’ (Inst. I.v.9). If the understanding of faith related to proclamation emphasizes hearing, reading, and applying the true doctrine drawn from Scripture, the understanding of the knowledge of God related to manifestation emphasizes seeing, contemplating, feeling, and enjoying the powers of God portrayed before our eyes, in the realization that by such means God gently invites and sweetly attracts us to Godself.

The manifestation of God in the universe needs the proclamation of the Word to be fruitful, and the proclamation of Christ crucified needs the manifestation of the glory of Christ to be fruitful. Both manifestation and proclamation lead us to the true knowledge of God, both in creation and in Christ. The loss of manifestation and contemplation in our understanding of the Reformed tradition today has deprived us of an essential element of the knowledge of God according to Calvin and those who followed him, and has led to an unfortunate impoverishment of the life of piety, the experience of worship, and our relationship with the natural world. In what follows, I will show how the self-manifestation of God in the universe is made fruitful by the teaching of God in the Word, and how the proclamation of Christ crucified is made fruitful by the manifestation of God in Christ, who is ‘God manifested in the flesh’ (1 Tim. 3:16).

E. M. Bounds wrote:

“The prayers of God’s saints strengthen the unborn generation against the desolating waves of sin and evil. Woe to the generation of sons who find their own censers empty of the rich incense of prayer, whose fathers have been too busy or too unbelieving to pray, and who have inexpressible perils and untold consequences for their heritage! They whose fathers and mothers have left them a wealthy legacy of prayer are very fortunate, indeed.”

Such strong and provocative language only makes sense if we possess an exalted understanding of prayer. If prayer is just something that we do in order to be seen to be faithful in God’s eyes, then the language Bounds uses seems preposterous. After all, prayer that is inconsequential makes prayerlessness equally inconsequential. If it makes no difference if we do pray, then, conversely, it makes no difference if we don’t pray.

Bounds sees it quite differently. Prayer is the incredible grace of communicating with the living God - the prelude to powerful, world-changing acts of God. We do not have because we do not ask. And, we often only receive exactly what we request - sometimes nothing more - when more could have been asked for. If we are able to receive great things from God through prayer, then not to pray is to rob the world of those great things. Jeremy Taylor wrote:

“The prayers of holy men appease God’s wrath, drive away temptations, resist and overcome the Devil, procure the ministry and service of angels, rescind the decrees of God. Prayer cures sickness and obtains pardon; it arrests the sun in its course and stays the wheels of the chariot of the moon; it rules over all gods and opens and shuts the storehouses of rain; it unlocks the cabinet of the womb and quenches the violence of fire; it stops the mouths of lions and reconciles our suffering and weak faculties with the violence of torment and violence of persecution; it pleases God and supplies all our need.”

Therefore, if this is true, then not to pray for these things is equivalent to bringing a curse. If we do not pray for these things, then we might as well be against them. We must avoid the terrible consequences of prayerlessness.

“… do you seek great things for yourself? Seek them not…”, says Jeremiah, in 45:5. We must not assume that we are all called to greatness. We are not all destined to reach the highest level of our profession or skill. We must go further and say that, in certain situations, we should not even seek greatness, let alone achieve it. But, this kind of talk goes against the grain of our success-obsessed society. It is assumed that, given the opportunity, success and the attainment of our goals is achievable through self-belief and hard work.

But, this clearly fails to take into account the sovereign providence of God, who has given all of us a gift, and also a measure of faith and grace according to which we practice our gift. Paul says that, since we have been given “gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them “in proportion to our faith” (Romans 12:6). This implies that the level of attainment in any activity is limited by God’s bestowal of gift, grace and faith. It also implies that, to use our gifts at a level beyond the measure of our faith and beyond the grace given to us, we will lose the effectiveness and power of the gift.

It would be tragic to spend a whole life striving to attain greatness in a certain sphere, only to realise at the end that we never actually possessed the faith and grace to achieve it. Far better to teach nursery children in God’s grace, than to spend a life struggling vainly to become a philosophy professor. Far better to serve at tables while being full of the Spirit and full of wisdom (Acts 6:1-3), than to grasp at a platform ministry for which we are ill-equipped.

My favourite definition of humility is: “to accept the truth about ourselves, our circumstances and our God”. It may be true that God has given me the grace to teach at seminary. But, it may become evident that I have been given the grace to teach only Sunday School. Even so, if I perform this function according to the measure of faith given to me, then I will receive the same reward as a seminary professor who performs his function according to his faith. We are not called to greatness (in this sense) primarily, but to faithfulness in whatever sphere God places us.

I am very happy with the simple role of blowing the boredom out of people’s brains with long-forgotten, old-fashioned, faithful blasts of biblical truth.

http://www.desiringgod.org/Blog/1278_John_Piper_Is_Not_an_Innovator/

The Spirit of God works by inspiration upon and within the humanity that has been bestowed upon us. Such inspiration embraces the conscious and unconscious realms of the human person and produces effects. In the unconscious or psychic realm these effects may take unusual and dramatic forms as energies are unlocked. Because these are essentially human experiences, they are always potentially to be induced or evoked by other forms of inspiration, supremely by other human beings or groups. There is no particular need to resort to the category of the demonic at this point (although I would not want absolutely to exclude it) and it is usually unhelpful and high-blown to do so, just as it is to assess all unusual phenomena as being necessarily inspired by God. There is something much more human going on. However, humanly to induce such phenomena, intentionally or otherwise, is spiritually unhelpful, since it pushes people into their own subjectivity rather than into God and ultimately leads to spiritual emptiness.

[Nigel Wright, 'Does Revival Quicken or Deaden the Church?' in Walker and Aune (eds.), On Revival: A Critical Examination (Paternoster 2003), p130]

I think we should go further than Wright. Surely it is dangerous and harmful to humanly induce human phenmona while giving the impression that it is the Spirit who is causing such manifestations?

In Angus Kinnear’s biography of the Chinese Christian leader Watchman Nee, he records a period in the 1930’s during which there was an outpouring of the Spirit of God associated with Nee’s ministry and an emphasis over a year or two on spiritual excitement and subjective experience. This was expressed by means of ‘jumping, clapping, laughter, unknown tongues that conveyed no message to hearers or even speaker, and a flood of dramatic healings, some undoubtedly real but not a few mistaken’ (Kinnear 1973: 134). Kinnear adds Nee’s judgement in about 1935 that ’some revival methods … worked like spiritual opium. Addiction to them compelled an ever-increasing dosage.’ The loss of restraint led to Nee’s assessment after three years that ‘We find on looking back over this period that the gain has been rather trivial, the loss rather large’ (Kinnear 1973: 135).

[Nigel Wright, in Walker and Aune (eds.), On Revival: A Critical Examination (Paternoster 2003), p122]

For too long the caricature of revival and revivalism has drawn from the spectacular, the transcendent, the downright dotty. But in real terms, the power of revival is most empowering at the level of the mundane, the routine. This, if you think about it, makes sense. For, as Gunton reminds us, it is the Spirit who gives direction to the created order (Gunton 1998:86). As the Spirit recreates the divine intention for creation, it is in the slight, the insignificant, the menial and mundane that the true nature of God’s power is revealed… It is humanity at the margins that experiences the Spirit’s revivication, not humanity at the heights of its own glory.

[Graham McFarlane, in Walker and Aune (eds.), On Revival: A Critical Examination (Paternoster 2003), p53]

…a trenchant warning for any revivalistic tendencies [is]: the Spirit [should] not to be understood in terms of his own independent personality. Whilst danger bells may well be ringing at this point, the issue needs to be stated unequivocally: the Spirit never comes to us in his own name but in the name of another, whether Father and/or Son. As such, then, to focus attention on either the Spirit himself or on his effects is to miss the whole point. Whoever or whatever the Spirit is and does, it is for another. He is never and end in himself.

[Graham McFarlane, in Walker and Aune (eds.), On Revival: A Critical Examination (Paternoster 2003), p49]

…we suffer from what [Plascher] calls the ‘domestication of transcendence’ (Plascher 1996). God no longer comes to us strangely. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is no longer a startling figure. He is benign, friendly, overly familiar. Consequently, the Spirit who raised our Lord Jesus from the dead is no longer a Holy Spirit, that is, other, transcendent, different, or, to use Brueggemann again, evasive, irascible, polyvalen. Rather, this Spirit is a terribly familiar Spirit, whom we have made into our own family likeness: the evasive has been captured; the irascible has been broken and controlled; the polyvalent has been reduced to a single theology economy.

[Graham McFarlane, in Walker and Aune (eds.), On Revival: A Critical Examination (Paternoster 2003), p46]

…the problem is that revivalistic pneumatologies inevitably collapse into various forms of evidentialism. That is, revival is deemed to have occurred on the grounds that certain phenomena, usually charismatic, are evidenced. The problem with this, put bluntly, is that the phenomena inevitably becomes ends in themselves. In time, a vicious circle of cause and effect emerges, somewhat similar to the revivalist dog repeatedly chasing its own tail. In such instances, ‘revivalism’ becomes simply a catchword for the more insidious ‘human technology for producing “revival”‘ (Piggin 2000:1)

[Graham McFarlane, in Walker and Aune (eds.), On Revival: A Critical Examination (Paternoster 2003), p46]