Attitudes, methods, images and themes that make theology resonate

 Yesterday evening, my counselor asked, "Who do you agree with most, theologically?"

I said Gavin Ortlund.

Why?

Because he's irenic, hopeful, saying he wants to dedicate his life to translating the deep primary sources of church history for the ordinary people who are interested in finding solid answers based on something real.

My counselor said that's not content; that's method. 

So maybe I forgot about content. Is theology in my preference just about how it makes me feel -- smart, deep, historic, peaceful, hopeful?

This is a bit disturbing, because two years ago I was a constant fan of Preston Sprinkle for similar reasons -- he's a good listener, he respects his opponents, he reads deeply and widely and is open to changing his mind -- but now I've moved away from actively listening to him because I perceive that he's too squishy and not historically rooted enough, and I tried on his view of conditional immortality/annihilationism because it was daring, but couldn't quite square it with the portrayal of hell in Revelation. If I was attracted to Sprinkle because of his method and personal qualities but now am less than one hundred percent enthusiastic about his conclusions, where will I end up in the future?

So let's go beyond method and attitude and examine some theological instincts that I've picked up from favorite authors in recent years.

The Spirit in the sacraments

Let's start with Baptism and the Lord's Supper. I want to highlight the role of the Spirit in uniting us with Christ and the Father, in a tangible way through the words of institution and the action (being dipped in the water, or eating bread and drinking wine). It is not just a symbol, but a symbol enchanted by the Spirit, and yet the Spirit has perfect freedom and is not bound by our actions.

Free will and God's freedom and presence

And then on free will, I want to highlight the goodness of creation, the seriousness of our responsibility, and the mystery of how God accomplishes his will under, beyond, and through our willing and working and even empowering our willing and working -- God with us *and* God beyond us.

Praying to the Trinity

And I like Thomas Cranmer's collects (short written prayers) precisely because they pray to the Father, Son, and Spirit by name. Not a hazy spirituality, this. I know whom I have believed. For example, "All this we pray in the name of your dear Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen."

Personal, relational theology

I like it when a theologian presents God's working in the world as personal.

I first heard this in a lecture by Greg Bahnsen, who said that providence or the laws of nature are simply God's ordinary and regular and consistent way of working in the world -- it's not a clock wound up, but rather God himself moving the clouds.

Moving on now from nature to the process of salvation, Cornelis van der Kooi and Gijsbert van den Brink (Christian Dogmatics) present effectual calling as something like the personal calling of Jesus to Matthew that enabled him to leave his tax booth and his old life, and this same story is repeated in different ways in the life of everyone who becomes a believer.

Similarly, Oliver O'Donovan in his commentary On the 39 Articles, chapter 5 (on Articles 9-10), speaks of effectual calling through the analogy of a friend's personal influence -- it is indeed greater than this, but it's a more personal and relational analogy than a cold and clanking chain of causation.

And speaking of chains of causation, I prefer the view of Aristotle, filtered through Aquinas to the Reformed Orthodox scholastics (as explained in Richard Muller's dictionary of Latin and Greek theological terms) of four types of causation, so that God upholds all things and yet supports our freedom on a lower level. 

There's also a neat little bar-graph diagram in DA Carson's dissertation book Divine Sovereignty and Human Responsibility, which shows God's work as 100 percent and our work as 10 percent -- co-occurring action on different levels, with God mysteriously empowering our work. John MG Barclay has several articles on the same theme of "not monergism, not synergism, but energism", dwelling on Paul's phrases like "I yet not I", "Christ in me" and "the grace of God that was with me" (1 Corinthians 15:10; Galatians 2:20; Philippians 2:12-13) replacing "I yet not I" and "the sin that is in me" (Romans 7:17,20).

Again on the personal theme, there is a complex yet satisfying diagram on the work of the Spirit by Volker Rabens (in The Holy Spirit and Ethics in Paul) -- it shows that the Holy Spirit does not fill us up like water in a cup, as the Stoics taught, but rather the Spirit is a dynamic connector, sparking our connection with the Father, the Son, the Word, and other believers.

And again, Roger T. Beckwith, in his proposed supplement to the 39 Articles in his book with JI Packer, The 39 Articles: Their Place and Use Today, says that grace is not a substance poured out to us, but is rather the light of God's presence and favor.

Figurative speech

Let's move on to metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche -- figures of speech where a part represents the whole or where one member of a pair is spoken of in terms properly attributed to the other member of the pair because they are so closely associated.

Augustine in On Marriage and Concupiscence said that the evil inclination is not actual sin, but it is called sin metaphorically because it comes from Adam's sin and leads to actual sin when we obey it. (Augustine also did some fancy footwork in his letter to Boniface on the reason for infant baptism and the theory of metaphorically attributed infant faith via the faith of the sponsors and the church, and baptism being a "sacrament of faith", but I don't agree with that, so it just goes to show that not all metaphorical speech is legitimate or helpful in my opinion.)

Robert H. Stein ("Baptism and Becoming a Christian in the New Testament") says that baptism is attributed with all the benefits of salvation in the New Testament because it was meant to accompany faith, repentance, confession of Christ as Lord, and receiving the Spirit, so that the benefits of salvation that accompanied these is attributed synecdochally to baptism as a figural stand-in for the whole conversion-initiation process. 

The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646-1647) and the Consensus Tigurinus (1549, by John Calvin and Henry Bullinger), in their own way, also affirm this -- the Spirit works in baptism but is not bound in time by it, *and* by the "sacramental union" the effects of the (outer) sign are attributed to the (inner) thing signified, and vice versa -- and yet, we can speak of *both* an inner regeneration and a sacramental (symbolic, official) regeneration that are sometimes separated in time, if we are careful. (See WCF 27.2 and 28.6.)

The Consensus Tigurinus (Article 19) says, "Thus the sins of Paul were washed away by baptism, though they had been previously washed away. So likewise baptism was the laver of regeneration to Cornelius, though he had already received the Holy Spirit. So in the Supper Christ communicates himself to us, though he had previously imparted himself, and perpetually remains in us."

And then we can also speak of memory (anamnesis) in the Lord's Supper in an imaginative way, as the Jews were instructed to speak at the Passover (and the offering of first fruits every year)  *as if* they themselves had personally walked out of Egypt. It's more than a memory; it's immersive imagination at a corporate level. (See Doug Moo, A Theology of Paul and His Letters, p.591; Exodus 12:24-27, 13:14-16; Deuteronomy 26:1-11.)

Themes in theology

And so we see several themes develop:

1) personal relational theology,

2) theology concerned with careful distinctions but also open to speaking in metaphor as long as it is explained, and

3) theology that cares about language and the presence and work of the Spirit as both mystery and positive good with nuances and layers that can be clearly seen but not completely grasped.

Speaking hard truth through gritted teeth

I also have mad respect for the church I'm currently attending, in that the preaching pastors say hard things but through gritted teeth, reading from their manuscript so they don't misspeak -- full of anxiety and yet caring enough to speak the whole truth. Contrast this with another church I have visited, which does so many wonderful things with ethnic inclusion, and yet they passed a new doctrinal statement seven times longer than the old one, and forgot to mention hell, which was clearly explained in the old doctrinal statement.

Catechesis as a concertina

I also value the pedagogical method of catechesis where it starts with the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Apostles' Creed, so that people can memorize these three key texts, and then use them as a framework for the rest of doctrine, prayer, and ethics. For example, like a concertina, the Ten Commandments can be reduced to two Great Commandments, that is, to love God (Commandments 1-4) and to love neighbor (Commandments 5-10), and then can be expanded outward into many different applications. The command to honor one's father and mother, in the Westminster Catechisms, is expanded to include instructions on how to treat and how not to treat our leaders, peers, and subordinates, both with our attitudes and our actions. This is a valuable insight, and a helpful teaching tool.

What is faith, and how does it lead to worship?

Finally, I want to close with a summary of what true faith is, partly drawn from Kevin DeYoung's Daily Doctrine and partly from Roger Beckwith's definition of faith in his supplement to the 39 Articles. I want to hint at faith as loyalty as Matthew Bates argues (The Gospel Precisely), but major on faith as an attitude of trust.

True faith is knowledge, assent, and trust, leading to treasuring Christ above all things, and loyalty until the end. This is evoked by the Spirit through the Word and nurtured in community. True faith always depends on Christ and his merits, not on oneself. But it works itself out through love, in response to the love of God that roots and grounds the believer.

True faith continually seeks to know God more, learning with the aim of closer personal union. (I find that this comes most naturally to me as I wrestle through tough intellectual problems.)

As faith works itself out through love, this always requires sacrifice. I hesitate to call it surrender, because surrender suggests passivity. Rather, I want to call it offering oneself, one's time and attention, one's work, and one's possessions to God and then to others as an expression of lifelong and daily worship of God.

To be sustainable, this often paradoxically requires solitude for resting and thinking, reading, writing, and praying. This is worship too.

A question for you

What about you? Do you find yourself drawn first to content, or attitude, in theologians? What attitudes, methods, themes or images have been most helpful for you?

Matthean creeds and confessions

 In my personal Bible reading, I'm journaling through the Gospel of Matthew. Every morning, I copy a pericope (short section) and then write a summary explanation, application, and a response in the form of a prayer or action item. Last night, since I've been wrestling with the current evangelical understanding of the gospel, and exploring liturgical renewal, I asked ChatGPT to help me create some creeds and confessions based on Matthew. 

The results were eye-opening -- there is more focus on the continuing story of God with Israel according to the scriptures, continued with the church, bringing in his kingdom, and there is more on our part in continually repenting of hypocrisy and giving up everything to take hold of Jesus' mercy and join him in his covenant community. 

Things like strict definitions of the trinity and inerrancy of scripture and the timing of the second coming, or passive formulations of receiving grace through faith gave way to an active view of living as Jesus' apprentices. 

It's not that I disbelieve in receiving grace through faith, but I believe that our current American conception of this takes an overly passive (lazy) and transactional understanding of some of Paul's words, and uses them to misinterpret the rest of scripture, when we should actually understand each biblical writer on their own terms to fill out the whole picture, which, as Michael Gorman, Matthew Bates, and Volker Rabens argue, is one of active trust in union with Christ, leading to bodily expressions of allegiance in daily worship and ethical living, with a growing understanding that this trust and obedience is a response to God's gift of kindness, and that our growth in trust-obedience, though it takes all our striving, arises out of that union and our union with the saints.

May more and more congregations submit their traditions to the words of scripture, not only their favorite verses, but the favorite themes of each of the biblical writers in turn, and see their faith renewed.

• The Matthean Declaration of Faith revises the Evergreen Bible Church declaration of faith using only content found in the Gospel of Matthew.
• The creed, and a shorter call-and-response version, were generated based on this, for congregational recitation.
• The Confession and Renewal Commitment fills the style and structure of the prayers of confession in Ezra 9 and Nehemiah 9 with the content of Matthew's Gospel. (I got the inspiration from Mark Boda's Return to Me: A Biblical Theology of Repentance, as well as my experience in Anglican churches.)

Take a minute to browse through the four liturgies below, and then ponder the questions at the end.

1. The Matthean Declaration of Faith

We believe the Scriptures reveal the Word of God
We believe that what is written in the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms bears witness to the purposes of God, and that Jesus fulfills all that was written. We receive the Scriptures as true, enduring, and authoritative for the people of God. (Matt. 5:17–19; Matt. 22:29; Matt. 26:54–56)

We believe in the one true God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
We believe in God, the Creator and Lord of heaven and earth, who is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. We confess the name into which Jesus commands His disciples to be baptized: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. (Matt. 5:45; 11:25–27; 28:19)

We believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God
We believe that Jesus, born of the Virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit, is Immanuel—God with us. He is the promised Messiah, the Son of David and Son of Abraham, who proclaims the kingdom of heaven, heals the sick, forgives sins, and lays down His life as a ransom for many. (Matt. 1:18–23; 16:16; 20:28; 26:28)

We believe that the Spirit of God is present and active
We believe that the Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus at His baptism, led Him in His mission, and empowers the people of God. Blasphemy against the Spirit is the gravest of sins. (Matt. 3:16; 4:1; 12:28–32)

We believe that all people have sinned and must repent
We believe that all must repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Without repentance, there is no escape from judgment. Jesus calls His followers to turn from evil, seek righteousness, and become perfect as their heavenly Father is perfect. (Matt. 3:2; 4:17; 5:48; 7:13–14)

We believe salvation is granted to those who trust and follow Jesus
We believe that those who come to Jesus, hear His words, and do them will enter the kingdom of heaven. Faithfulness to Jesus—shown in repentance, obedience, and perseverance—is necessary. Those who deny Him before others will be denied before the Father; those who endure to the end will be saved. (Matt. 7:21–27; 10:32–33; 24:13)

We believe in the resurrection of Jesus and the promise of His return
We believe that Jesus was crucified, died, was buried, and rose again on the third day. He is given all authority in heaven and on earth and will return as Judge and King. He will separate the righteous from the wicked, rewarding the faithful with eternal life and casting the lawless into eternal punishment. (Matt. 16:21; 28:5–7; 25:31–46)

We believe in baptism as a sign of repentance and allegiance to Jesus
We believe that baptism is the outward confession of repentance and commitment to follow Jesus. He commands His disciples to baptize all nations in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. (Matt. 3:11; 3:13–17; 28:19)

We believe in the Lord’s Table as a remembrance of Jesus' covenant
We believe that Jesus instituted a meal with His disciples, giving bread and cup as signs of the new covenant in His blood, for the forgiveness of sins. We partake in remembrance of Him, awaiting the day we shall feast anew with Him in His Father’s kingdom. (Matt. 26:26–29)

2. The Matthean Creed

We believe in God, the Maker of heaven and earth,
the Father who is perfect and merciful.

We believe in Jesus the Christ,
the Son of David, the Son of Abraham,
born of the Virgin by the Holy Spirit,
God with us, the Teacher of truth,
the Healer of the sick,
the Shepherd of the lost.

He called us to repent,
to follow Him,
to take up our cross,
to lose our lives that we might find them.

He was handed over, crucified, and buried,
and on the third day He rose again.

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Him.

We believe in the Holy Spirit,
who empowers us to obey all that Jesus commanded.

We believe in baptism into the name of the Father,
and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

We believe in the forgiveness of sins
through the covenant of His blood.

We believe He will come again
to judge the living and the dead,
to gather the righteous into His kingdom,
and to cast out all evil forever.

Until He comes,
we watch and pray,
we make disciples of all nations,
and we walk the narrow road that leads to life.

Amen.

3. The Matthean Creed: Call and Response Format

Leader:
Do you believe in God, the Maker of heaven and earth,
the Father who is perfect and merciful?

Congregation:
We believe.

Leader:
Do you believe in Jesus the Christ,
the Son of David, the Son of Abraham,
born of the Virgin by the Holy Spirit,
God with us, our Teacher, our Lord?

Congregation:
We believe.

Leader:
Do you believe that He called us to repent,
to follow Him, to take up our cross,
and to walk the narrow road that leads to life?

Congregation:
We believe.

Leader:
Do you believe that He was handed over, crucified, and buried,
and that on the third day He rose again?

Congregation:
We believe.

Leader:
Do you believe that all authority in heaven and on earth
has been given to Him,
and that He reigns as King and Judge?

Congregation:
We believe.

Leader:
Do you believe in the Holy Spirit,
who empowers us to obey all that Jesus commanded?

Congregation:
We believe.

Leader:
Do you believe in baptism into the name of the Father,
and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,
as a sign of repentance and new life?

Congregation:
We believe.

Leader:
Do you believe in the forgiveness of sins
through the covenant of His blood,
and the promise of the kingdom to come?

Congregation:
We believe.

Leader:
Do you believe that Jesus will return
to gather the righteous into His kingdom
and to bring all things to their fulfillment?

Congregation:
We believe.

Leader:
Until that day, will you watch and pray,
make disciples of all nations,
and live as children of the light?

Congregation:
By His grace, we will.

All Together:
Amen. Come, Lord Jesus. Amen.

4. The Matthean Confession and Renewal Commitment

(in the style of Ezra 9 and Nehemiah 9)

O Lord, our God,
You are the Blessed One, the Father who sent Your Son, Emmanuel, to save Your people from their sins.
You revealed the kingdom of heaven and called us to repent, for the kingdom is at hand.
You taught us the way of righteousness, mercy, and faithfulness.

But we have been slow to hear and quick to stray.
We have honored You with our lips, but our hearts have been far from You.
We have loved the treasures of earth more than the treasures of heaven.
We have judged others while neglecting the log in our own eyes.
We have been like foolish builders who hear Your words but do not do them.
We have been like the unfaithful servant who buried the Master's gifts in the ground.
We have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faithfulness.

O Lord, we confess:
We have been like sheep without a shepherd.
We have stumbled over the stone the builders rejected.
We have hidden our light under a basket, rather than letting it shine before others.
We have heard Your call to take up our cross and follow You, but we have clung to our own lives.

Yet You, O merciful King, are full of compassion.
You invite all who labor and are heavy laden to come to You for rest.
You do not break the bruised reed or quench the smoldering wick.
You forgive sins, heal diseases, and call sinners into Your kingdom.

Therefore we turn again to You, our Lord and Redeemer.
We repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.
We lay aside all hypocrisy and deceit.
We seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness.
We will love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, and mind, and we will love our neighbors as ourselves.
We will deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow You.

Blessed is the one who is not offended by You.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
Blessed be the name of the Lord, forever and ever. Amen.

Questions

1. What combination of scriptural texts would you like to try, if you were going to make a liturgy?

2. What do you notice about the shape of each liturgy? How does it guide your imagination or your emotions?

3. What are your feelings about using AI to generate ideas for liturgies? Does it help you see old truths more creatively? Does it feel cheap and artificial? Or something else? What boundaries would you like to set on your use of AI in this area and why?

Poems on the Trinity by Gregory of Nazianzus

Three poems on the Holy Trinity 

by Gregory of Nazianzus

Translated by Peter Gilbert, in On God and Man: The Theological Poetry of St Gregory of Nazianzus (Popular Patristics Series #21), pages 37-47. Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir's Seminary Press.

On the Father

I know we are as though making a great voyage on a raft,
or hastening towards the starry sky upon small wings,
when, with such poems, mind has moved to exhibit the Godhead
(which transcends the power of heavenly beings to worship as is due),
or the great Godhead's statutes, and the universe's helm.

Nevertheless, since God is often not as pleased by the gift
of the worse majority, as by that of the beloved few,
for this reason I take courage to break forth into speech. But flee
from afar, whoever is a sinner; my speech is directed
either to the pure, or to them that are being purified. But
infidels, like wild beasts, when on the high-peaked mountain
Christ shone forth and wrote the law for Moses upon tables,
were immediately overcome beneath the broken crags.

So much for the likes of these; thus also the Word expelled
the worst ones of our company, who had a heart opposed to God.

But as for me, I will set down this preface on sundry leaves, a voice
instilling an uncouth people with fear, uttered of old
by witnesses of words, men of godly minds,
Moses and Isaiah (I'll speak to those who have knowledge),
who gave the law, the one new-formed, the other when it was broken.

"Let the heavens give ear, and let the earth receive my words."

O Spirit of God, may you then waken my mind and tongue
as a loud-shouting clarion of truth, so that all
may rejoice, who are united in spirit to the entire Godhead.

There is one God, without beginning or cause, not limited
by anything existing before, or afterward to be,
encompassing the aeons, and infinite; the noble,
great, only-begotten Son's great Father; who had, in the 
Son, no suffering of anything fleshly, since he is mind. One other
is God, not other in Godhead, God's Word, who is
his living paternal seal, the sole
Son of him who has no origin, and most Unique from the Unique, equal
in might, so that, while the one remains the whole parent, the Son
is world-maker, lawgiver, the Father's strength and intellect.

There is one Spirit, God from God who is good. Be gone all of you
whom the Spirit has not sealed so as to show forth his Godhead,
but are either rotten to the core, or have a vile tongue:
half-shining, invidious, clever self-taught people,
a covered-up fountain, a lamp in a murky crevice.

On the Son

First of all we shall sing the Son, honoring that blood
that is our passions' cleansing. For we must come to the 
mortal's aid with those of heaven, due to
that tongue that wars against the divine: foul-minded, suicidal.

Before the great Father, nothing was. For he holds within himself
everything, and nothing higher than the Father exists. He who has sprung
from the Father is the great God's Word: eternal Son, 
the archetype's image, a nature equal to his parent.

For the Son so great is the Father's glory, and from him he shone forth,
as only the Father and he that shone forth from the Father understand.

For no one has come close to the Godhead; but this much 
is clear to everyone, just as it is to me:
I have no right to foist on the Godhead a birthday,
an emission, or some loathsome cutting. For though I do not reproduce
dispassionately, since I'm composite, not at all subject to passion 
is he who is wholly incomposite, unbodied. When things'
natures are remote, what wonder if their beginnings differ, too?

If time came before me, time is not before
the Word, whose begetter is atemporal. When the beginningless
Father was there, leaving nothing superior to his divinity,
then also was there the Fathers' Son, having in the Father a timeless beginning,
like the sun's great circle of overwhelming clear light.

And, while all ideas fall short of the great God,
so that nothing interposes between Father and Son,
eternally existing, we should distinguish the Lord the
Son from the Lord the Father. If something came prior to God,
whether time, or will, that would divide the Godhead, I think.

To be God, to be begetter, he must be the great begetter. And if the greatest
thing concerning the Father is that his treasured divinity has no origin,
it's no less a thing for the honored offspring of the great Father
to have such a root. So don't exclude God from God.

For you've not known the Child distanced from the Father. The terms
"unbegotten" and "begotten of the Father" do not make
two kinds of Godhead. Someone has alleged about this that
each is foreign to the other, but the nature is inseparable, if you ask me.

Then, though the Word is begotten, he is not fleshly,
since his Father, it will be admitted, is fleshless (and no man's mind
is ever so corrupt as to think otherwise).

And so you have God the Son, his parent's worthy pride and joy.

But if, rendering offerings to the great Father's Godhead
worthlessly, and gravening in your heart a hollow fear,
you'd deny this thing, and would hurl Christ out amongst creatures,
you insult, O nitwit, the divinity of them both:
you filch the Son's, who's not God if created.

For all that once was not is but a creature, even if a thing
perdures, and stands as fixed, through God's great reasons.

And why, bold sir, when your starting point was this,
that, through Christ's sufferings, you may become god hereafter,
do you then make him go in chains, and call him your co-slave,
honoring him with gifts for slavery, instead of for being God?

If the great God formed him later, as a fine tool
(as a smith forges a hammer for the sake of a cart),
so that, by his Firstborn's hand, God might make me,
then far worthier than the celestial Christ would be
the creature, if for its sake the Word exists,
not it for Christ. Who would maintain such a thing?

But if it's that, to rescue you from your passions, he took on a body,
would you therefore set a yardstick on his great-famed Godhead?

Has he sinned, in pitying you? To me, rather, he's the more amazing.

For he didn't shave off any bit of Godhead, and still he saved me,
stooping as a doctor over my foul-smelling passions.

He was a man, but God. David's offspring, but Adam's
Maker. A bearer of flesh, but, even so, beyond all body.

From a mother, but she a virgin. Comprehensible, but immeasurable.

And a manger received him, while a star led
the Magi, who so came bearing gifts, and fell on bended knee.

As a man he entered the arena, but he prevailed, as indomitable,
over the tempter in three bouts. Food was set before him,
but he fed thousands, and changed the water into wine.

He got baptized, but he washed sins clean, but he was proclaimed
by the Spirit, in a voice of thunder, to be the Son of the One Uncaused.

As a man he took rest, and as God he put to rest the sea.

His knees were wearied, but he bolstered the strength and knees of the lame.

He prayed, but who was it who heard the petitions of the feeble?

He was the sacrifice, but the high priest: making an offering, but himself God.

He dedicated his blood to God, and cleansed the entire world.

A cross carried him up, while the bolts nailed fast sin.

But what's it for me to say these things? He had company with the dead,
but he rose with the dead, and the dead, the bygone, he raised up:
there a mortal's poverty, here the incorporeal's wealth.

Don't you dishonor, then, his divinity on account of his human things,
but, for the divine's sake, hold in renown the earthly form
into which, thoughtful towards you, he formed himself, the incorruptible Son.

On the Holy Spirit

Soul, why delay? Sing also the Spirit's glory,
and don't separate in speech what the nature did not leave out.

Let us quake before the great Spirit, who is my God, who's made me know God,
who is God there above, and who forms God here:
almighty, imparting manifold gifts, him whom the holy choir hymns,
who brings life to those in heaven and on earth, and is enthroned on high,
coming from the Father, the divine force, self-commandeered;
he is not a Child (for there is one worthy Child of the One who's best),
nor is he outside the unseen Godhead, but of identical honor.

Now, if someone seeks to understand the heavenly Spirit's divinity
through the pages of divinely-inspired Law,
he shall see many ways, close-packed, collected into one,
if he has yearned, and gathered something of the
Holy Ghost with his heart, and if his piercing mind has perceived.

But if he seeks a plain assertion of his beloved divinity,
let him know this, he seeks unsensibly. For it wouldn't have been right,
when Christ's own hadn't yet appeared to most of humankind,
to lay on feeble hearts a weight of doubt.

For, with beginners, it's not the time
for more consummate language. Who shows a fire's whole glow
to still-dim eyes, or gorges them with light insatiable?

It's better if, bit by bit, you bring on the fiery glowings,
lest you even hurt some way the springs of a sweeter light.

For, as of old the Scriptures displayed the whole deity
of the royal Father, and Christ's great fame began to dawn,
disclosed to men of little understanding,
so also, later when the Son's shone more distinctly,
the brightness of the Spirit's deity glowed.

Now to them he gave a small illumination, while most he left to us,
even distributing himself to us later in tongues of fire
betokening divinity, after the Savior had gone up from the earth.

For I, too, have known God to be as fire to the wicked, and as light to the good.

There, I have gathered up the Godhead for you. But if you're left speechless,
hearing how a Son and one who's not Son share one Godhead,
as though being swayed two ways, by two good arguments,
God himself, I trust, shall come forth next to give a reason.

From the one first father sprang a wife and Seth,
she a half-slice, he a second child by marriage bonds,
one not by birth, the other by birth, but both being equally human.

Remembering these, don't you belittle any within the Godhead,
putting this one above, this one below. One is the nature, immeasurable,
uncreated, a-temporal, excellent, free, and co-venerable,
one God in three refulgences, making the world go round.

By these I am awakened, another new young man, when in the font
death gets buried, and I come back racing to the light.

For the threefold Godhead made me rise out a light-bearer.

No, beloved cleansing, I won't falsify you. If, having been washed
in the divinity, I should divide the bright divinity,
it would have been better if ... but I shudder to complete an evil sentence,
by my hope in the divine gift, and in the baths.

If he has fully cleansed the whole of me, the whole God then is 
venerable, so I feel. But whatever man's a sinner can assert the inequality,
cutting himself asunder from God's gift, his own divinity.

And if we hear some words about either the Child or the good
Spirit, in divine words and from God-bearing
men, as, that they hold a second place to God the Father,
I charge you so to understand this, by words of wisdom's untold depths:
that it refers to the unoriginated root, it doesn't split
the Godhead, so that you've got one sole power, not worshipped severally.

From unity is the Trinity, and from Trinity again the unity
not as a source, a spring, a mighty river, sharing a single current,
in three separate manners traverse the earth;
nor as a torch, taken from a pyre, converges again into one;
nor like a word, both going out from the mind and remaining in it;
nor like some shimmering of dancing sunbeams off the waters,
a restless gleaming, wavering on the walls,
approaching, then fleeing, then drawing near.

For God's nature is not restless, nor flowing,
nor again coalescing; but what is God's is steadfast.

But you might make a pure offering privately, thinking thus.

In threefold lights the one nature is established,
not a numberless unity, since it subsists in three excellencies,
nor a Threesome worshipped severally, since the nature is inseparable.

In the Godhead is the unity, but they whose Godhead it is are three in number.

Each is the one God, if you should talk of them singly.

Again, there is one God, without beginning, whence comes the wealth of Godhead
whenever the word refers to all three, so that, on the
one hand, it might reverently proclaim to men the threefold lights, and
on the other hand, that by it we might extol the strong-shining Monarchy,
and not content ourselves with a pluralist marketplace of gods.

For, by me, polyarchy and an utter brawling anarchy are
one and the same. Division is strife, and hastens to
dissolution. For this reason, polyarchy is far from the Godhead, as I take it.

Some might call them "three gods" if he had divided them
by times, intellect, power, or will,
where none, without brawling, would be identical even with 
itself.

But one is the might of my Trinity, one the knowledge,
one the glory, one the power. So, again, the unity cannot dissolve,
being greatly honored in the one harmony of divinity.

So much radiance has the Trinity revealed to my eyes,
from the wings and the veil within the divine temple,
beneath which God's royal nature lies hid. And if something extra is
for the angelic choirs, let the Trinity know what this extra is.

Poetry in Job

I wanted to share with you something I read this morning about the poetry in Job. Scholar Robert Alter says there are three levels of poetry in Job -- the three friends have one level, with some high points but ultimately repetitive and uninspiring. Job has another level, more passionate and creative with its attention to the details of nature. And finally, you have the poetry of the Lord's response, which surpasses them both. 

See below: 

The third—and, ultimately, decisive—level of poetry in the book is manifested when the LORD addresses Job out of the whirlwind.

Here, too, the Job poet’s keen interest in nature is evident, but in an altogether spectacular way that, one might say, trumps Job in the game of vision. 

The poet, having given Job such vividly powerful language for the articulation of his outrage and his anguish, now fashions still greater poetry for God. 

The wide-ranging panorama of creation in the Voice from the Whirlwind shows a sublimity of expression, a plasticity of description, an ability to evoke the complex and dynamic interplay of beauty and violence in the natural world, and even an originality of metaphoric inventiveness that surpasses all the poetry, great as it is, that Job has spoken. 

Many readers over the centuries have felt that God’s speech to Job is no real answer to the problem of undeserved suffering, and some have complained that it amounts to a kind of cosmic bullying of puny man by an overpowering deity. 

One must concede that it is not exactly an answer to the problem because for those who believe that life should not be arbitrary there can be no real answer concerning the good person who loses a child (not to speak of ten children) or the blameless dear one who dies in an accident or is stricken with a terrible wasting disease. 

But God’s thundering challenge to Job is not bullying. 

Rather, it rousingly introduces a comprehensive overview of the nature of reality that exposes the limits of Job’s human perspective, anchored as it is in the restricted compass of human knowledge and the inevitable egoism of suffering. 

The vehicle of that overview is an order of poetry created to match the grandeur—or perhaps the omniscience—of God. 

The visionary experience that this poetry enables for Job is of a vast creation shot through with unfathomable paradoxes, such as the conjoining of the nurturing instinct with cruelty, where in place of the sufferer’s longing for absolute darkness the morning stars sing together and there is a rhythmic interplay between light and darkness. 

Source: Alter, Robert. The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary: Three-Volume Set (pp. 5889-5890). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition. 

I thought that was really cool how, even through the levels and styles of poetry and dramatic-descriptive vision, the Holy Spirit working with the writer of Job can let us pour out our complaint, and then when we've exhausted our ability to speak, He shows us something wider and more mysterious than we knew to look for, lifting our eyes off ourselves to see the Creator's vision of the whole creation. 

 Hope this encourages you today.

Does loving marriage mean hating singleness?

Today I listened to a podcast by Ben Woodring [BW] and Jeff Wright [JW], entitled "The Virtue of Hate". It was the December 4, 2023 episode of Backwoods Belief. In the segment below, they argue that sometimes in order to show love to one thing, you have to hate the thing that threatens it. They then apply this to Christian teachings on marriage and singleness. Take a look:

[46:08]

BW: Um, so I guess as we're sort of turning towards the- the more, how- how do we apply what we're talking about, that would be the encourage- one of the encouragements I would have is to- and this is something A. D. [Robles] said on the- the video that I was watching. You gotta learn to hate. And that doesn't mean to hate indiscriminately. You gotta learn to hate what is evil, and in order to do that, you gotta know what is good, you gotta fear the Lord, you gotta know your Bible, um, and in so far as you are cultivating those good positive affections towards what is good, if you're not also seeing negative affections, and I don't mean negative as in bad, but- uh, a- a- a proper disgust for what is evil, you may not be cultivating those positive affections in the way you think you are.

JW: Yeah. Yeah. And I do think that's a- you know, if you're like, man, maybe, maybe I've been negligent on this front, probably the best way to- to, uh, to start self-examining is like, what do I truly love, what do I love because I'm self-conscious it's a gift of Christ, to me, what do I experientially love, that's a gift of Christ to me, and then the next- yeah, once you've identified those things, is to kind of follow up by going, okay, what things would destroy this? What forces out there would, um, corrupt this, remove this- 

BW: What- what opposes it?

JW: Oppose it, uh, label it this thing that is a gift of Christ, evil, right? Call- calling evil good and good evil? Um, and that- that's where you should start being like, okay, when I run into that stuff, it's getting- it's getting every bullet I have, fired at it.

BW: Yeah. Yeah. S- so, a great example of this is, I absolutely despise when I see people out there who are selling singleness as a positive good for society- 

JW: Sure.

BW: or for Christians. 

JW: Yeah. 

BW: I- It- it makes me angry, like, and it's righteous anger. Uh, it makes me mad when I see that stuff and I- it- I just despise it, because it's such a lie, and it is- it is telling people that their good, godly desire for a spouse, or a husband or a wife, is wrong, and not to be desired, and I love marriage, and I love my wife so much that I hate the people who tell me that I ought not- 

JW: Hear, hear. Hear, hear. 

BW: To me- this is the most visceral example that I can think of personally for myself. It just drives me crazy when I see people talk about that kind of thing. It, it- it's such a lie, um, and I- I hate it. And that's right, like, it's good to hate that.

JW: That is Matthew Lee Anderson.

BW: Uh-huh. Yeah.

JW: It- it is The Gospel Coalition. It- it is a hatred of the human race.

BW: Yeah.

JW: In Out of the Silent Planet, Weston, I think, is rebuked for loving the human race only in idea, that some descendant of ours might crawl across some foreign planet someday. We're more debased than that. We hate the thought of offspring.

BW: Yep. Yeah. Its, it's vile. And it- the- the appropriate- not just, like, mindset toward it, but the appropriate emotion toward it is disgust, and hatred, because, God hates it too. And, you know, we're to- to think in Van Til's terms, you know, we're supposed to think God's thoughts after Him. Well, if the Psalmist writes that, you know, "I consider them my enemies and I hate them with a complete hatred," I ought to do that too, about the things which God hates. 

JW: Mmhmm. Yeah, if I can reference earlier, you- you have to be aware, be wary of, being nicer than Jesus.

BW: Yeah.

JW: Um, you- you've made no gains, if you're nicer than Christ.

BW: Yeah. Because it isn't a true kindness. 

JW: Yep.

BW: It is, it is an actual cruelty, no matter how nicely it's dressed up. 

JW: Yep, that's right.

[50:21]

I admire this kind of strong reaction because it shows how much Ben and Jeff value marriage. At the same time, I think they are using a mental model that imagines marriage to be a gift, and singleness to be a curse, rather than, as Paul viewed it, both the status of marriage and the status of singleness are equally gifts.

"I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has his own gift from God, one of one kind and one of another." (1 Corinthians 7:7)

I remember C. S. Lewis, in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (p.190) wrote the following about William Tyndale's writings against the Catholic Church:

In all this we may be very sure that what Tyndale is attacking is a mere travesty of what his best opponents held; as what they attack is also a travesty of his own view. In these controversies each party writes best when he is defending what (well considered and in a cool hour) the other did not really deny. But it is important for us as historians to see how the Roman system appeared to Tyndale and to numbers of Englishmen in that century. It seemed to them the religion of gloom and anxiety, the service of a hard taskmaster... But, equally, it seemed to them the religion of self-righteousness.

This shows why it's important to step into someone else's context and see how an idea feels to them emotionally, given their background and circumstances and the conversation in their circles of society. 

For me, as a single, I've been greatly encouraged and felt "seen" by recent writings by Dani Treweek, Matthew Lee Anderson, Barry Danylak, Ed Shaw, and others praising godly singleness and encouraging more community in church. 

But for Ben and Jeff, it seems that these kinds of writings sound too much like secular anti-family rhetoric, which may be discouraging to them as they want to see more Christians starting families and having kids amid an aging population. Pro-single theology might even make them feel marginalized for their choice to be married and have kids.

I get it -- my parents changed churches when I was young because people expected them to put me in children's church rather than have me in the main service. They felt out of place. Later, when our family had eight kids, we joined a church with mostly homeschoolers like us, and it felt great -- there were kids our own ages, and we made lots of friends. Then later, a lot of Bible college students (both single and newlywed) started attending the church, and this changed the dynamic again, as there were two different kinds of population awkwardly coexisting. 

Now that church has planted, disbanded, and planted again, and many of those Bible college students are now elders with large families of their own.

In conversations with others -- and the internet isn't the best place for this -- it's best to listen for people's emotional reactions to ideas, because that's where you really connect or disconnect with their values. 

I do think it's possible to value marriage and kids, and also value singles in a church. But it will be easiest to feel it in person-to-person relationships and gatherings. For me recently, this has looked like living in a house with Christian roommates, attending a young-adults group comprised of both singles and married couples, buying gifts for the children of prisoners as part of the Angel Tree project, and participating in a men's group where both married and single men encourage each other in their spiritual disciplines and relationships.

We still have a long way to go.

Multiple Metaphors in Sexual Recovery

On February 21, 2015, I attended a men’s workshop in Chiang Mai, Thailand led by Christian counselors Chad Loftis and Sørin Joensen called “Sex, Women and Manning Up”. The thing I remember most was a discussion on metaphors for describing our sexuality. After showing us a clip of military reenactments from Pure Desire’s Conquer Series, they asked us what we thought of the idea that our struggle against lust is a constant battle. We decided that the battle metaphor helps us take sin seriously and to connect to one aspect of our male identity as warriors, but it also tends to evoke stress, fear, and anger, and could wear us down in the long run. Then they asked us to consider our sexuality and life as a garden. The garden metaphor can give us a more peaceful and long-term outlook, and is also connected to our male identity, as Adam, the first man, was given the mission of tending the garden of Eden as his corner of the world. By viewing our sexuality as both a battle to win and a garden to cultivate and weed, we got a more complete and life-giving picture.

Let’s consider how the multi-perspective idea is expressed in books of the last ten years. Mike Wilkerson in his book Redemption: Freed by Jesus from the Idols We Worship and the Wounds We Carry (Crossway 2011) says that recovery is a combination of dealing with sin, rooted in idolatry, and suffering, which is often trauma caused by others. Jay Stringer relates sin with addiction as two concepts that "dovetail beautifully" in his book Unwanted (NavPress 2018), saying "the more I understand what the Bible says about sin, the more I understand the nature of addiction, and the more I understand what science reveals about addiction, the more I understand the nature of sin." Joe Rigney, in More Than a Battle: How to Experience Victory, Freedom, and Healing from Lust (B&H 2021), puts all three themes together as complementary lenses. In his analysis, lust and sexual brokenness can be viewed simultaneously as sin to be conquered, addiction to get freedom from, and brokenness to be healed. His preferred theme is the first, but he says all three are needed in order to get a complete picture.

Recent debates on concupiscence (latent sinful desire or pre-desire) in relation to same-sex attraction have got me thinking about metaphors again. Authors such as Denny Burk and Heath Lambert (Transforming Homosexuality), Matthew P. W. Roberts (Pride), Rosaria Butterfield (Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age), and Jared Moore (A Biblical and Historical Appraisal of Concupiscence with Special Attention to Same-Sex Attraction and The Lust of the Flesh), have argued stridently that homosexual attraction patterns are sin to be repented from. Moore, in particular, in chapter 2 of his dissertation, points back to Augustine's controversy with the Pelagian apologist Julian of Eclanum, in order to support the position that latent desires for sinful things, even if not consented to, are morally culpable sin because they come from original sin.

Meanwhile, I was also reading Craig Keener’s book The Mind of the Spirit, which I found cited in Susan Grove Eastman’s Paul and the Person, which was mentioned in a talk on sexuality at a friend’s church! (I’m a sucker for book recommendations and footnotes.)

Anyway, Keener (pp.22-23), citing historian Richard Sorabji’s book Emotion and Peace of Mind, explains how Stoic thinkers such as Seneca attempted to master their emotions through mental processes similar to modern-day mindfulness or cognitive behavioral therapy. 

Keener says these exercises were helpful, but the Stoics underestimated the power of latent emotions and how they are intimately connected with rationality. However, Seneca did recognize ways in which the body started to become aroused as an emotion was arising, such as nostrils flaring and cheeks getting hot when we’re starting to get angry, or when the face becomes pale as we start to become afraid, or when the male organ becomes erect during the beginnings of sexual arousal. Seneca taught that we can recognize these signs in our body (called propatheia or pre-passions) and redirect our emotions through rational thinking in order to become calm again (a state of apatheia). (This line of thinking is picked up by modern neuroscience in books like Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow and the idea of the lizard brain vs the rational brain.)

Keener, again citing Sorabji, says that Seneca’s observations about the body and preliminary mental disturbances were misunderstood by early church thinkers Origen and later Augustine, so that the Stoic language about pre-passions was eventually reappropriated from a term for blameless proto-feelings that can be redirected, into a doctrine focused on different degrees of sin in its latent desire form, leading poor tempted medieval monks and their mentors to ask questions like "Did you put yourself in the way of it?", “Did you enjoy it?” or “Did you let it linger?” Keener says that these kinds of questions can help us practice self-control, but also tend to make us obsessed with sin in an unhealthy way “that Romans 7 parodies.”

Additionally, Augustine's most extreme statements on concupiscence were made in the heat of controversy with Julian of Eclanum, a young follower of Pelagius who antagonized Augustine just as the latter had earlier antagonized Jerome -- Augustine died with his massive point-by-point refutation of Julian still unfinished.

So was Augustine wrong? And did countless doctrinal statements in church history, which recycled his conclusions, simply pass on his error? Maybe, but there’s more to it than that.

Continuing my hunt, I got a copy of Sorabji’s book – I read only a few pages, then got distracted by a book review by historian Peter Brown, who as a young man had read through Augustine's works in the original Latin, created the field of late antiquity studies, and become a history professor at Berkeley and Princeton on the strength of his Augustine biography without ever getting a PhD! 

Brown (pp.188-191) says that Sorabji partly misses the point which Origen and Augustine were getting at. They did misunderstand and re-appropriate the language of the Stoics, but in this reappropriation, they were drawing from a Hebrew tradition that focused on the heart. 

According to Brown, the Stoics lived in the upper strata of Roman society as advisors to powerful leaders who needed to recognize and defuse their anger and other strong emotions before they made rash decisions and killed innocent people. 

Early Christians, on the other hand, lived in small, tight-knit communities at the margins of Roman society, and they were concerned about group unity – they would test their own hearts, trying to see if there were any hidden motives of self-will "like a snake hidden in the dung" (John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent 15:79) that might grow up to make them antisocial and so disrupt the group, interfering with love for God and neighbor. Early monks and their mentors, meditating on Psalm 139:13 ("you have possessed my inward parts") and Acts 4:32 ("the multitude of believers had one heart and one soul, and none of them said that anything that he possessed was his own, but all things were common to them"), strived for integrity and selflessness even in their dreams and fantasies at night. (For more on this theme, see Brown's book The Body and Society chapters 2 and 11, where he traces singleness of heart vs double-souledness from the Old Testament to the Desert Fathers.)

Brown encapsulates the two views with two metaphors: "Stoic therapy was like the brisk defusing of a ticking bomb. The therapy favoured by the Desert Fathers, by contrast, was concerned to measure the force of a coiled spring—the power of self-will in the depths of the heart." (p.191.)

On November 9, 2023, I heard Andy Robinson speak on a LivingOut webinar called “Theological, Pastoral, and Cultural Reflections on Concupiscence”. He said two insightful things: first, that same-sex attraction and other kinds of disordered desires are signs of a heart problem, and second, that we mustn’t emphasize that Jesus’ temptations were different from ours due to our original, indwelling sin nature, because that goes counter to the whole thrust of the New Testament, which is to comfort us by showing that Jesus understands.

The admission of a “heart problem”, I think, is key. It is ambiguous enough that it doesn’t condemn someone who is struggling with internal temptation, but also acknowledges the wisdom of those who want us to take heart-level struggles seriously, including the wisdom of those early Christians. This lets us drink from many different streams...

1. Codependency, or believing we need certain specific people more than we need God, is related to idolatry. (See Ed Welch, When People Are Big and God Is Small; David Powlison, Making All Things New; Kelly Needham, Friend-ish)
2. Gender dysphoria, a felt incongruence between one's biological sex and one's mind, could stem from or lead to envy of the opposite sex. (See Rosaria Butterfield, Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age)
3. Desire for someone else’s spouse is related to envy of that married couple. 
4. Dissatisfaction with singleness is related to ungratefulness for the gift of one’s present status.
5. Forming our identity around our experience of same-sex attraction runs the risk of eclipsing our identity as God’s children. (See Andrew Bunt, Finding Your Best Identity)
6. Our particular pleasure palate might have been formed in part by the desire to relive or gain power over childhood trauma when we felt violated or powerless. (See Jay Stringer, Unwanted)
7. Fear of the opposite sex, desire for intimacy with the same sex, or desire to disidentify with our birth sex might be maladaptive coping mechanisms related to trauma or unhealthy childhood roles in our family of origin, although this is not the case for everyone.

We are complex beings, and it would be obtuse and unkind to diagnose someone else with the above, especially without knowing them well. But I recognize myself in each of them. 

Laurie Krieg and Matt Krieg unpack some of these heart issues in their book Journey Well. I appreciate their diagram with the heart composed of concentric circles from triggers on the surface, down to behaviors, feelings, beliefs, and finally core needs related to past experiences and inborn sin nature. There is no guarantee that addressing these things will completely remove internal temptations; the more important goal is to write a new story that puts God at the center, opens us up to receive his love, and makes meaning out of these conflicts.

I think there’s a place for both the time bomb metaphor at the trigger level, and the coiled spring metaphor at the core need level. With the former, in times of temptation, it is comforting to realize that the Tempting Voice or "the thoughts" (logismoi in Evagrius's system) are not our true self, even if they feel like us.

• we can recognize "it's not me, it's just my brain" (Jeffrey Schwartz and Rebecca Gladding) 
• we can say with Paul that the tempting thought "is no longer I ... but [S]in living in me..." (Romans 7:20), but the new reality is that "I no longer live, but Christ lives in me" (Galatians 2:20)
• we can "say it, separate it, and stare at it", and "stop, challenge, choose" (Craig Blanchette, building on Wayne Scott Andersen's Habits of Health).
• we can "surf the urge", knowing that soon it will dissipate (Alan Marlatt), since "the world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever" (1 John 2:17)

This is the value of the Stoic model, and it's a first step toward ceasing to obey tempting thoughts. 

However, once the heat of temptation has passed, we can consider that coiled spring of errant self-will, and start to do the deep work of knowing our hearts and seeking the roots of our desires. Here we can take another helpful thread from Augustine, viewing all our desires as disordered loves which we can continually redirect back to God, our true joy and delight, with the help of the Holy Spirit, the Word of God, and prayer. 

As we build habits of reordering our loves and our thoughts, eventually it may be possible to see another person's beauty and give thanks to God for this fellow image-bearer, without obsessing over them. (See John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent 15:60.) If we're not there yet and need to simply avert our eyes, walk away, and redirect our thoughts, it's good to realize our present limitations. (See The Shepherd of Hermas Vision 1, Ch.1 on opposite-sex attraction, and Barsanuphius's letter #258 to Dorotheos on same-sex attraction, also mentioned in The Body and Society p.234.)

For example, I might feel a desire to get the attention of someone I'm attracted to. If this person is married, or of the same sex, or an unbeliever, or just not right for me to focus on at this time, then trying extra-hard to get them to notice me might be unwise -- in Martin Buber's terminology, I am currently in I-It mode, rather than I-Thou mode. And yet there is at its root a God-given core need for being seen and known -- maybe just not by this particular person. So I have to take a breath and maybe write out my thoughts in my journal, or pray and ask God to show me that he sees and knows me. I can open my Bible and meditate on Psalm 139 or the story of Hagar, who said "I have now seen the one who sees me." Then I can ask for help from other believers who I'm not attracted to, and let God show me his care through a variety of spiritual sibling and parent relationships.

And at the same time, as Paul says, I must “put to death” whatever belongs to my earthly nature. So when that fantasy of the perfect flirty conversation with the wrong person starts to rear its head, I can push pause, and tell myself, "The Tempting Voice wants that, but that's not for me. God has something better in store for me." And then try to realize that I'm not the most important thing in that person's world, and that's as it should be, because I have other good things to focus on today.

Put to death, redirect, nurture, cultivate, focus our vision, walk in the Spirit… all of these are metaphors for different aspects of our “journey” and “growth process” (which are themselves metaphors). Taking a multi-perspective view in this way is more helpful, in my opinion, than assuming that all of Scripture, or all of church history thought one way about sin. There are a million metaphors for sin, and a million metaphors for salvation. Let’s take the good from all of them and see which ones the Holy Spirit wants to use with us today.

Where Bill Gothard followed and didn't follow Stephen Olford

Bill Gothard said in one of his Christian living seminars that when he was young, a mentor invited him over and had him listen to a tape recording of the sermon "Social Relationships" by Stephen Olford, an African-born English evangelist, recorded at Moody Bible Institute in 1955 or 1956 (and re-presented by Olford many times since). The message profoundly influenced Gothard, and he incorporated much of Olford's message into his Basic and Advanced Seminars. Chief among these ideas were:

• distinguishing different levels of friendship
• yielding one's sex life to the Holy Spirit for sublimation into creative and spiritual power
• avoiding "defrauding" others, that is, stirring up desires in them that can't be righteously satisfied

An area where Gothard did not follow Olford, however, was in the area of music appreciation. In a 1958 book entitled Christianity and You, Olford set out several tests for whether a particular amusement was permissible for a Christian: Do these pleasures positively encourage, endanger, or enrich my Christian life? (p.46) He also quotes with approval (pp.44-45) a section from Arthur Porritt's 1920 book The Strategy for Life: A Book for Boys and Young Men, which I have set out in full below, with my emphasis in bold:

Music is an amusement, but it is much more than an amusement. It is an educational and spiritualizing art which, in one form or another, a young man should cultivate in his own highest interests. A wit has said that music is the most expensive form of noise, and another humorist has observed that classical music is that form of music which is so much better than it sounds. However economical of his leisure a young man may be, time should be found to master the elements of music, to learn to sing, or play a musical instrument, and to hear good music rendered. Ears and tastes differ, and in music one man's joy is another's anathema. A devotee of Sullivan may squirm under Bach, and a votary of Beethoven's sonatas may yawn even over the honeyed sweetness of Handel's Messiah. Avoid affectation and follow your bent is the best advice as to music that I can offer a young man. Do not praise Debussy if you really prefer Balfe, nor pretend to be ecstatic over Tschaikovsky's "1812" if "There's a long long trail a-winding" is more to your fancy. Be honest in your tastes, but cultivate them. Your joy in jazz-tunes may end in appreciation of the "Moonlight Sonata." (Porritt 1920, pp.137-138)

 Olford and Porritt's moderate stance towards jazz contrasts with Gothard's hard line against rock & roll in the 1960s, which was more along the lines of Anne Shaw Faulkner's 1921 article "Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?" 

Popular music as a carrier of sexual license or rebellion or communism was a common theme among mid-20th century evangelists such as David Noebel and Bob Larson, so Gothard was not alone here. And the more you read their literature and listen to their talks, the closer it gets to racism or at least ethnocentrism, since jazz and rock had their roots in African-American music traditions. 

This really shows that different styles of music can symbolize different things to different cultural groups, over and above the individual tastes that Porritt noted. 

We get a taste of this culture clash in the two following stories, the first one by Wisconsin Baptist musician Alan Ives in a talk called "The difference between good and bad music", whose teaching is promoted by Illinois Baptist pastor Sheron Mark Davis. (Davis's teaching was in turn promoted by Gothard.)

In Africa, the heathen are able to play "poly rhythms." Poly, of course, means many. They have all these drums and other percussion instruments, rhythm instruments, that all make different sounds, and they can hear them. They can make one rhythm with their feet, another with their torso, some more with their arms, and some more with their fingers and wrists, some more in their heads; and they can dance six or seven different rhythms at one time. It is an amazing thing; however, it is all sensual; it's all for the body; and it's all created by their ability to hear and put into their bodies those dance rhythms that were created specifically to make their bodies move in ways that are not polite. They make the body move to draw attention to parts of the body in a way that is improper.

That is all that is happening in the rock scene today. They are catching up to some of these African rhythms. And, of course, the Satan worshipers have just turned the amplifiers up to the fullest degree, and many of them do not know, musically, what they are doing anymore. They are just making a lot of noise. Some of them are not even really playing chords; there is not even any harmony or melody there, just a lot of noise. There is nothing for the spirit, nothing for the soul; it is all for the body. Now we have Rap music. What happened to the melody? It is gone. What you don't know is that they have been doing this type of thing in Africa for thousands of years, and there are recordings of that. They will go on sometimes for hours. You talk about dance marathons! They dance until they drop over and are possessed by devils, and then they get back up and they dance again.

...Now let's say we add just a little bit of sensual rhythm to a song. We make it just one degree away from truly spiritual, holy music. It will appeal to a lot of Christians. Then we have some other music that really is boogie, but we call it Southern gospel; and that will appeal to a lot of Christians. They excuse it by saying it is just "down home" music. No, it isn't. It's boogie woogie, but some Christians still think it is O.K. Then there is the Contemporary Christian Music, which sounds like it is being sung in a nightclub. Of course it is big business today, and it is farther still away from painting a proper picture of our Lord.

...A pastor once told me, "You know, those black folks really have it; why don't you stick some of those rhythms into your music. With your voice and your talent..." I thought, "Get thee behind me." I didn't say that, but I just shook my head. The evangelist that was there said, "Brother Ives, don't change your music."

Contrast Ives's story above about misgivings toward "sensual rhythm" infecting white people's music with the following account by African-American anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston's in her 1928 essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me".

[W]hen I sit in the drafty basement that is The New World Cabaret with a white person, my color comes. We enter chatting about any little nothing that we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen--follow them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter something--give pain, give death to what, I do not know. But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly. 

"Good music they have here," he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips. 

Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.

Whereas Ives worried about giving in to the body with danceable rhythms, Hurston worried that her white friend didn't feel what she felt. This is a culture clash rather than a spiritual problem.

After this long discursus, I just want to say that the music wars didn't have to be this way. Even in the thick of it there were reasonable people like Olford and Porritt and even Hurston, whom Gothard could have drawn from -- and he did draw from Olford in the matter of social relationships. I just wish he'd done the same with music.

Note: This post is a result of an ongoing interest in the sources that influenced Bill Gothard (and who influenced them), in order to map out the history of the spread of ideas through Evangelicalism in the 20th century, and ultimately to my family and the social and religious groups I grew up in. Which led me to transcribe Olford's talk on "Social Relationships" -- downloadable here.

Calvin on overcoming perfectionism

These days I'm listening to the audiobook for Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make -- and Keep -- Friends by Marisa Franco. She talks a lot about vulnerability and testing out how much to take risks with revealing our true selves to those around us. Her words, and a comment I heard last night by Joel Burnell on Bonhoeffer, reminded me of an extended quote from Jean Chauvin (John Calvin in English).

In the following excerpt, Calvin makes an important point about vulnerability overcoming fear and perfectionism as we realize that we are God's children. I would paraphrase it as, "God takes even our most pitiful works and puts them on his fridge." (I think this paraphrase itself may be borrowed from a sermon by Gregg Harris.)

Jean Chauvin (John Calvin), Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 3, Chapter 19, "Of Christian Liberty", Section 5.

See how our works lie under the curse of the law if they are tested by the standard of the law. But how can unhappy souls set themselves with alacrity to a work from which they cannot hope to gain any thing in return but cursing?  On the other hand, if freed from this severe exaction, or rather from the whole rigor of the law, they hear themselves invited by God with paternal levity, they will cheerfully and alertly obey the call, and follow his guidance. 

In one word, those who are bound by the yoke of the law are like servants who have certain tasks daily assigned them by their masters. Such servants think that nought has been done; and they dare not come into the presence of their masters until the exact amount of labour has been performed. 

But sons who are treated in a more candid and liberal manner by their parents, hesitate not to offer them works that are only begun or half finished, or even with something faulty in them, trusting that their obedience and readiness of mind will be accepted, although the performance be less exact than was wished. Such should be our feelings, as we certainly trust that our most indulgent Parent will approve our services, however small they may be, and however rude and imperfect. 

Thus He declares to us by the prophet, “I will spare them as a man spareth his own son that serveth him,” (Mal. 3:17); where the word spare evidently means indulgence, or connivance at faults, while at the same time service is remembered. This confidence is necessary in no slight degree, since without it every thing should be attempted in vain; for God does not regard any sock of ours as done to himself, unless truly done from a desire to serve him. But how can this be amidst these terrors, while we doubt whether God is offended or served by our work?