Christian Life Reading List

The possibilities for reading in this particular part of the course (that I am teaching on The Christian Life here at Moore) are enormously varied. This is because the division between ‘academic’ theological works and ‘spiritual classics’ is necessarily blurred more than at other points on the course. The key thing is to get reading- and thinking! Hopefully, this little list will help.

Reformed
It would be great to revisit Calvin’s masterful treatment in Book III of the Institutes – especially looking at how he treats topics like Prayer and Faith. From there, it would be good to dip into a major systematic theologian in the Calvinist tradition: someone like Charles Hodge or (my favourite) Hermann Bavinck. Look first at the table of contents. How do they organise their material? What are they communicating by the placement of the material on sanctification in this place, in this order? What do they say about prayer and the sovereignty of God, if anything? John Owen has much to contribute in his works Sin & Temptation: The Challenge to Personal Godliness and Spiritual-Mindedness. You will get a chance to read Jonathan Edwards’ The Religious Affections in 4th year, but Edwards is a hugely influential figure in the Reformed tradition of the thinking about the Christian life even to this day (John Piper is very very Edwardsian!). Karl Barth was also a Reformed thinker, and engaged critically with the tradition of Calvin. Read from his Church Dogmatics, IV.iv, , pp. 3-40 and the brilliant piece on Faith, Prayer and Obedience from III.iii, 239-288. Kevin Vanhoozer’s The Drama of Doctrine has some very exciting material on the Christian life – but use the indexes to find it. Finally, there’s Bruce Demarest’s work The Cross and Salvation – for a contemporary, textbooky approach.

‘Spiritual Classics’
As pastors, we neglect these to our peril – since they are often read by those whom we are seeking to teach. It is hard to go past Augustine’s Confessions for an earlier work – although the Sayings of the Desert Fathers give you something quite different. For the middle ages, you could read Bernard of Clairvaux’s On the Love of God. He was an abbot who had a huge influence of Calvin, believe it or not. You could read Thomas a Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ – a massively influential book even today. Teresa of Avila was a Spanish nun and mystic, and her book The Interior Castle you could easily dip into and be surprised by. On the Protestant side, you can’t go past The Pilgrim’s Progress. Or John Piper’s Desiring God. My own personal favourite is Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship. The trick with these works is to read with theological eyes well open.


Other traditions
It would be important to engage in some way with John Wesley – such a huge figure for the evangelicalism that has come after him, and in many ways the forerunner of the contemporary charismatic movement. He wrote enormous amounts of material – his sermons and other papers are easily available. You could trace the way in which he was influenced by the Moravian Brethren, and especially the pietism of Count Zinzendorf. Like Wesley, he is more interesting to read about than to read, and his influence has been transmitted through hymns as well as sermons and other writings.
It is fascinating to see what Roman Catholicism is doing too. Of course, the Eucharist looms large in the thinking of theologians on that side of the fence. You could dip into Hans Küng’s On Being a Christian ¬– he sounds strangely Protestant at times!

And finally...
David Peterson’s book Possessed by God is, for my money, the gold standard on sanctification from a biblical theological point of view.

Is Scripture Enough?

On Saturday, I was guest panellist at the St James' Institute's gathering entitled Is Scripture Enough?

My co-panellists were Rev Dr Dorothy Lee and Rev Prof Andrew McGowan, both from Melbourne's Trinity College. Being theologians, we all answered the set question by stroking our chins and saying "it depends what you mean."

In his address, Andrew in fact focused more the clarity rather than the sufficiency of Scripture. I think we found a sort of consensus in the fact that Article VI is pretty much normative for Anglicans - the sufficiency of scripture is to do with salvation. The regulative principle view is in fact that which Anglicans rejected. However, we are not to view a Classic Anglican like Richard Hooker as placing reason or tradition above or even alongside scripture - for him scripture is authoritive, though reason and tradition are instrumental in its reading (though this has been the reading of Hooker since the 19th century, it is actually inaccurate, as Andrew acknowledged. He never mentioned the three-legged stool!).

Rather the issue is clarity. Both Andrew and Dorothy were at pains to state that they did not hold to a kind of postmodern interpretative free-for-all. Nevertheless, Scripture contains some difficult places and some complexity and richness (which of course is what 2 Peter says about Paul!). These have to be acknowledged and addressed. For Andrew, 'the gospel itself is clear' in Scripture (he sounds a lot like Peter Jensen's The Doctrine of Revelation at this point!). This does not mean that an absolute textual clarity follows. In fact, Scripture itself describes itself as having an obfuscating role for some - it is even a judgement on them that this is the case.

So - the question is, for me: what is the corollory for the actual textual clarity of the words of Scripture of the Reformation teaching of the spiritual or evangelical clarity of scripture (as expressed in the Westminster Confession no less!)? And further: what hermeneutic can help us not give too much weight to the claims and counter-claims of historians, without becoming obscurantist?

These a major questions of course, and will lead to major differences. However, if the normative and authoritative role of scripture for the church can be agreed I think the ground has shifted in an interesting direction. Twenty or thirty years ago I think you might have heard a more magisterial view, or a more decisive authoritive role given to tradition, or experience, or perhaps a more optimistic view of human reason. The work - and let's not be under any illusions, this is a big task - remains to be done on the text of scripture itself. What is it actually saying? How are we to receive it?

7 reasons to sign up to Calvin@500 today

Moore College is holding its very own School of Theology in honour of John Calvin's 500th birthday. Why should you fork out the funds and book out the time?

1. Oliver Crisp. Oliver is one of the most interesting and prolific of a younger breed of evangelical theologians currently working in the UK. He has published on Jonathan Edwards and other figures in the Calvinian tradition.

2. Paul Helm. Paul Helm is already the author of a very, very good book on Calvin: John Calvin's Ideas. His intellect is formidible - his mastery of concepts extraordinary. Worth the price of admission!

3. Ashley Null. Ashley's expertise is in Tudor Anglicanism, and especially in the thought of Thomas Cranmer. One of the most exciting features of the conference (for me anyhow!) will be tracing the influence (or not) of Calvin on the faith that became Anglicanism.

4. Assessing the New Calvinists. Time magazine called 'the New Calvinism' one of the top ten ideas changing the world right now. Have the New Calvinists - much beloved of a younger generation of Christians world-over - got their hero right?

5. Calvin in Australia. Two papers, by Peter Jensen and Colin Bale, will assess Calvin's often unconsidered place in Australian history generally and in Australian church history especially.

6. Calvin as a theologian of the Holy Spirit. David Hohne's paper promises to lift the lid on Calvin's pneumatology! Calvin the charismatic?

7. Purchase the book of the conference AT the conference. The papers will be available in a hot-off-the-press volume entitled 'Engaging Calvin' (pub. IVP) at the conference.

My piece on Calvin in The Australian

Here!

Jesus was ... 'ill-advised'

From Matthew 5, the words of Jesus:

27"You have heard that it was said, 'Do not commit adultery.' 28But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

I heard recently a well-known media figure say of these words 'I think they were ill-advised'. It isn't often, even in secular Australia, that you hear the teaching of Jesus challenged as to its wisdom. I was too shocked to respond with quickness of wit I am afraid to say. Not that secular people shouldn't challenge or question Jesus' teaching directly - it is just that they rarely bother to do it...

Not that my conversation partner was without insight here of course. He understood quite well that in this teaching Jesus raises the stakes for moral discouse quite appreciably. For Jesus, it is not only external actions that count - action that can be calculated as to the hurt they cause to others. No: the inner world of thoughts and desires are part of the picture. My disposition and my mindset - my 'heart': these are not out of the game, as far as Jesus is concerned. In this he is reminding Israel of the 10th commandment, against covetousness - a prohibition against ill-directed desire rather than against an evil action.

Was this 'ill-advised'? Did it bequeath to the Christian tradition a tendency to inwardness that leaves a legacy of psychologically harmful guilt? Did it leave us unable to think healthily about desire, unable to seperate the 'harmless' secret contemplations of the 'normal' individual from the pathologically harmful deeds of the criminal or the adulterer? Did it leave us terribly afraid of depictions of nudity in art (for example), depictions that are in fact harmless and even beautiful?

I don't think it was 'ill-advised' (of course). I think there is a terrible naivety - exposed by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount - in imagining that we are capable of such self-mastery that we can nurture ill-directed desire without it affecting our outer world of relationships. Can a wife fantasise about another man while sleeping with her husband and imagine that there be no ill-effects - quite apart from the shattering inauthenticity and hypocrisy of the act, an act which is meant as an expression of desire for a particular other, and turns out not to be? Can we really leave lying around in the supposedly private chambers of our heart the desire that another fail, or be harmed, or even die, without resulting damage in the public world? Can we - ought we - live in such a two-faced way, that our inner and outer worlds are completely different? Is that what makes for whole and healthy, authentic people?

This IS the word of the Lord - and thanks be to God...

We have been very happy in our new church home, All Saints' Petersham. Today in church we had one of those moments that church attending ought to give you - a moment of real discomfort and dissonance. Frankly, if your church isn't making you uncomfortable some of the time, then change. Well, I mean, if your church doesn't allow the word of God to make you feel uncomfortable...

You see, we had a reading and a sermon from 1 Corinthians 11:2-16. And I am not just going to trot out the old line about how this challenges our cultural assumptions blah blah. That is a device used by complementarians to avoid being themselves listening too carefully to the text. (Mind you, at least they are listening to the text...)

No: this text is a test to see if we really do hold to the authority of the Scriptures. Do we really believe it when the reading is finished and the reader says 'this is the word of the Lord'? Can we really say 'thanks be to God'? This text, it seems to me, refuses to be mastered by the knowing exegete. It is teasing and mysterious and confronting and awkward. What can 'on account of the angels' mean? What does Paul mean by 'nature teaches us' (phusis)? It's the Bible at its best - turning our worlds upside down. Judging us just when we thought we were going to judge it. It can only be preached - and heard - with fear and trembling (and full marks to our preacher, Antony Barraclough, for not flinching).

Let me be honest: I don't like what this text is saying. I don't see how it makes sense (yet). It seems offensive and it is embarassing. But shouldn't the word of God - if it really IS the word of God spoken into the dark world - get precisely that reaction from me? And doesn't this word prove trustworthy and true again and again?

Theologian at work

The Riddle of Christian Subjectivity (and my 1000th post!)

Who is the Christian?

In what, of what, does the Christian life properly consist? If we have given an Augustinian and Reformed, and so Pauline, account of the depravity and death-ward-ness of human nature apart from grace, and then if we have given complete supremacy and initiative to God in the reconciliation of human beings to himself, then in what sense has the Christian any life left to live that may properly be called theirs? In what sense can we understand that the Christian is an acting subject, a person with a task to do which is properly his or her own, and a unique and distinctive voice with words to say that are not merely a piece of ventriloquism on behalf of God, and an individuality? Is the Christian still so corrupt, so shot through with sin, that they cannot properly be called the agent of any good whatsoever? Furthermore, if ‘it is no longer I that liveth, but Christ that liveth in me’ (Gal 2:20) – if even my identity, myself as an ‘I’ wanes, while he waxes – then have ‘I’ not utterly dissolved? Am I not in fact a non-entity? If faith means the giving up of any claim I might have had at asserting myself as a someone before God (coram Deo) – self-justifying, in other words - and receiving instead the life that emanates from Jesus as a gift, justified by grace, through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ, then in what sense am I still an ‘I’? If even faith is ‘the gift of God...so that no-one can boast’ (Eph 2:8-9), then how is it that this faith, which must surely involve my will and affections, is really mine? Is the freedom for which Christ set me free (Gal 5:1) really no freedom at all, because I am in no sense the agent of my own actions?

And yet of course, if we read the New Testament we find that, yes, the Christian is enabled to step out on the journey. The blind see, the deaf hear, and the lame leap for joy. The dim eyes, the stopped-up ears, the withered and useless legs – these are now used for seeing, hearing and leaping. The creature who is faithless, and false, and even aptly described as dead in sin, is now faithful, and true, and alive to God. She who was unable to respond, now responds. She who was active only in wickedness is now an agent of righteousness. She now labours not in vain (1 Cor 15:58) – not merely as the conduit or channel for some divine will, but as a free subject whose will is co-ordinated to the divine will.

We have then not available to us the option of denying the reality of Christian agency and identity. These, if we are to read the Bible, are givens. But so is the priority of God in redemption from beginning to end. We cannot either consider a co-operative model in which man on his own strength completes an action initiated by God, or replicates in his own life the model given to him by God in Jesus Christ. These explanations are on every side altogether too tidy.