The Blog of Hobbes

It was in August 1849 that the fifteen-year-old Spurgeon became a pupil assistant at a school in Newmarket in Cambridgeshire. There, he says, he had his first lessons in theology from the old lady who was a cook at the school. She was no mean theologian, obviously. Spurgeon says about her: ‘Many a time we have gone over the Covenant of Grace together… and I do believe that I learned more from her than I should have from any six doctors of divinity of the sort we have nowadays.’ That picture of a precocious adolescent and a Cambridgeshire domestic discussing the Covenant of Grace is illustrative of the depth of theological awareness and the doctrinal structure of evangelical piety a century and a half ago.

[Peter Golding, Covenant Theology: The Key of Theology in Reformed Thought and Tradition (Christian Focus Publications, 2004), p9]

I wonder what picture best illustrates the theological awareness and doctrinal structure of evangelical piety in our own day? I fear it wouldn’t be such an appealing picture as this one involving Spurgeon.

Let us be clear: school domestics in Spurgeon’s day did not possess a greater innate capacity to understand and grasp theological concepts than those today. The difference is the degree to which our culture stultifies intellectual capacity by a constant bombardment of crass advertising and vacuous entertainment. We are conditioned to feel and desire, not to think.

It’s appropriate to lament the lack of theological awareness around us - particularly in our churches. But, it is more appropriate to do all we can to emulate that old lady in order to satisfy the curiosity of a new breed of precocious adolescents that we may come across. Otherwise, they may just end up playing on their XBox.

Very few people are capable of writing profound blog posts. Everyone is capable of writing trivia. Consequently, it is wrong to assume that reading blogs will make you wise.

Neither does blogging make you wise. Only diligent, focused study will do so - of the Bible in the first instance, followed by study of good, relevant literature and scholarship. Blogging is merely an outflow of someone’s current understanding and thoughts - whether profound or trivial. Regurgitating these thoughts in a blog does not improve them.

Break the cycle of mediocre blogging: Study, and then blog. If you have any time left over, then read some good blogs.

Not posted for a while, mainly due to the birth of our second baby, Eliisa. It’s remarkable how an extra kid fills all available free time. Not that I’m complaining - she’s absolutely adorable.

Anyway, over the past couple of months I have been preoccupied with the gospel and issues relating to it. There cannot be more important questions than i) what is the gospel? and ii) how can I be saved? (If there are more important questions, then let me know what they are!)

More than anything else, every church must spend a serious amount of study time in order to establish a correct soteriology. If not, then every other dimension of the christian life will be distorted, sooner or later. The gospel must be given a pivotal and preeminent role among all other doctrines. The center of gravity of biblical theology, and the church, is the gospel.

However, many believers appear to be ignorant of the gospel, as biblically defined, yet are apparently fine, good-standing and active church members. But, where there is ignorance of the gospel, salvation is likely to be absent. To be frank: this terrifies me. A church that spends its time doing what churches do but without a clear, correct understanding and proclamation of the gospel is a deeply deceptive and dangerous church. Yet, how easily are many pleased and satisfied with merely “doing church”!

It comes down to this: Can you give a clear, correct account of the gospel and a testimony of your interest in it? If not, how can you be saved, no matter how deep your involvement in church life is?

Or have I missed something?

What is disturbing … is the way places like Brownsville and Toronto, themselves representing very different theological and spiritual motifs, are mimicked uncritically. Susceptibility to only the latest and the sensational demonstrates an adolescent spirituality; one that is demonstrably ill prepared for the vagaries and mundanities of normal Christian living. Moreover, it encourages a fascination with the novel that weakens the tenacity and perseverance required for the challenging missiological setting the charismatic-Evangelical church finds itself in.

[Ian Stackhouse, Revival, Faddism and the Gospel, in Andrew Walter and Kristin Aune (eds.), On Revival: A Critical Examination (Paternoster, 2003), p242]

Biblically, the theme of revival appears as a verb: the cry in Psalms 80 and 85 for God to revive his people, the work of his hands. This cry is elemental, visceral, and, given the propensity of the contemporary church to fade into mediocrity, an entirely legitimate one to adopt. Nothing is more common in the Christian church than spiritual atrophy, against which the prayer for the Spirit to revive his church is not only apt, but necessary. Once the verb becomes a noun, however, an important shift takes place in the collective consciousness. By dismissing a decent, robust and dynamic verb for a noun, which is what we do when we deploy the term revival, we enter a particular religious psychology, and arguably a consumer package, that has at its centre the hope and expectation of a large-scale evangelistic impact and church growth. We enter the world of altar calls, the anxious seat, and mood-inducing music. We enter the world not just of revival but revivalism.

[Ian Stackhouse, Revival, Faddism and the Gospel, in Andrew Walter and Kristin Aune (eds.), On Revival: A Critical Examination (Paternoster, 2003), p239]

[Jonathan] Edwards’ analysis of the correlation between physical responses and lasting inner change also remains pertinent. Some showed strong reactions and enjoyed lasting change; some, strong reactions and no significant change; some, no reactions, and no change; and some, no reactions and lasting change. Edwards’ observations invite two conclusions. Firstly, the revival phenomena are neutral in themselves, neither proving nor disproving an authentic work of God. Secondly, the phenomena neither guarantee nor preclude significant inner change. In short, while revival phenomena were initially endorsed by Edwards with some enthusiasm, his later conclusions suggest that the church is wise to move beyond ecstatic spirituality as soon as pastorally appropriate. Such eruptions may be spontaneous and authentic, but placed centre stage they tend to generate inauthentic conformity, exhaustion, disillusion and unreality.

Even when genuine, such phenomena matter little and are of no lasting consequence. Ecstatic spirituality is a so-what spirituality, deserving neither the hysterical denunciations of Chauncy nor the hype of its indiscriminate devotees. Edwards scrupulously sought to distance himself from both polarities.

[Rob Warner, 'Ecstatic Spirituality and Entrepreneurial Revivalism: Reflections on the "Toronto Blessing"' in Walker and Aune (eds.), On Revival: A Critical Examination (Paternoster 2003), p226]

Well, I think there are some “manifestations” that clearly disprove an authentic work of God. For example, gratuitous physical violence.

If God had put us to find out a way of salvation when we were lost, we could neither have had a head to devise, nor a heart to desire, what God’s infinite wisdom had found out for us. Mercy had a mind to save sinners, and was loath that the justice of God should be wronged. It is a pity, says Mercy, that such a noble creature as man should be made to be undone; and yet God’s justice must not be a loser. What way then shall be found out? Angels cannot satisfy for the wrong done to God’s justice, nor is it fit that one nature should sin, and another nature suffer. What then? Shall man be for ever lost? Now, while Mercy was thus debating with itself, what to do for the recovery of fallen man, the Wisdom of God stepped in; and thus the oracle spake:- Let God become man; let the Second Person in the Trinity be incarnate, and suffer; and so for fitness he shall be man, and for ability he shall be God; thus justice may be satisfied, and man saved. O the depth of the riches of the wisdom of God, thus to make justice and mercy to kiss each other!

Thomas Watson, A Body of Divinity (Banner of Truth, 2002), p 72-73

I have greatly enjoyed D.A.Carson’s review of three books on the bible, posted at the Reformation21 website. As ever, Carson writes with penetration, clarity and grace. It is a long article, so it has taken me some time to work my way through it. But, it’s been well worth it. Along the way, I enjoyed the following insight from Carson’s overview of the third chapter of John Webster’s book Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch:

Webster’s third chapter, “Reading in the Economy of Grace,” is a penetrating and sometimes moving contrast of two theologies of reading, or, more precisely, two anthropologies of reading. On the one side stands Schopenhauer, who embodies attitudes to reading that dominate today’s culture; on the other side stand Calvin and Bonhoeffer, with quite different approaches to reading Scripture. Schopenhauer contrasts reading with “thinking for yourself”: too much reading may so swamp the mind that the mind’s originality is squashed. The summum bonum, then, remains the human mind, the mind’s autonomy, its originality. By contrast, Calvin and Bonhoeffer insist that thought must be subordinate to the Word. For the Christian, reading Scripture “thus involves mortification of the free-range intellect which believes itself to be at liberty to devote itself to all manner of sources of fascination” (90). Or again:

For Calvin, the counter to the vanity, instability and sheer artfulness of the impious self is “another and better help”, namely “the light of his Word” by which God becomes “known unto salvation.” God counters pride by self-revelation through Scripture. Scripture is on Calvin’s account “a special gift, where God, to instruct the church, not merely uses mute teachers but also opens his most hallowed lips. Not only does he teach the elect to look upon a God, but also shows himself as the God upon whom they are to look”. . . . This does not entail wholesale abandonment of any appropriation of the tools of historical inquiry, but raises a question about their usefulness by asking whether they can foster childlike reading of the text (77).

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.