The self-forgetfulness of love

In Dietrich Bonhoeffer's study of the Sermon on the Mount, he discusses the extraordinary quality of the Christian disciple's life and the seeming contradiction that the disciples are to be the light of the world but at the same time should not make their Christian life visible. How do these two ideas go together? In explaining this, Bonhoeffer says something profound about the character of love itself.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and confirmands, 1932

"From whom are we to hide the visibility of our discipleship? Certainly not from other men, for we are told to let them see our light. No. We are to hide it from ourselves. Our task is simply to keep on following, looking only to our Leader who goes on before, taking no notice of ourselves or of what we are doing. We must be unaware of our own righteousness, and see it only in so far as we look unto Jesus; then it will seem not extraordinary, but quite ordinary and natural. ...
     [Discipleship] means an exclusive adherence to him, and that implies first that the disciple looks only to his Lord and follows him. If he looked only at the extraordinary quality of the Christian life, he would no longer be following Christ. For the disciple this extraordinary quality consists solely in the will of the Lord, and when he seeks to do that will he knows that there is no other alternative, and that what he does is the only natural thing to do....
     The genuine work of love is always a hidden work. Take heed therefore that you know it not, for only so is it the goodness of God. If we want to know our own goodness or love, it has already ceased to be love. We must be unaware even of our love for our enemies. After all, when we love them they are no longer our enemies. This voluntary blindness in the Christian (which is really sight illuminated by Christ) is his certainty, and that fact that his life is hidden from his sight is the ground of his assurance...
    Genuine love is always self-forgetful in the true sense of the word. But if we are to have it, our old man must die with all his virtues and qualities, and this can only be done where the disciple forgets self and clings solely to Christ. When Jesus said: "Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth," he was sounding the death-knell of the old man. Once again, who can live a life which combines [Matthew] chapters 5 and 6? Only those who have died after the old man through Christ and are given a new life by following him and having fellowship with him. Love, in the sense of spontaneous, unreflective action, spells the death of the old man. For man recovers his true nature in the righteousness of Christ and in his fellow-man."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship 

(trans. R. H. Fuller. New York: Macmillan, 1963 [German: 1937]), 176-179.

Evangelicals and Universalism?

Is it possible for evangelical Christians to believe that all people will be saved? The question has been hotly debated ever since the publication last year of Rob Bell's book Love Wins. My friend Robin Parry has recently published a challenging article in The Evangelical Quarterly arguing that these two positions, being an evangelical and believing everyone will be saved, are not mutually exclusive, and that universalism is in fact "authentically evangelical." Whether or not he convinces everyone, his theological arguments are well thought out and worth listening to. Here is one short extract:

"Arminian evangelicals have always maintained that God loves all people, wants to save all people, and sent Christ to die for all people to achieve this goal. 'Evangelical' universalists agree. Calvinist evangelicals have always maintained that God will achieve all his purposes in salvation; that all for whom Christ died will be saved. 'Evangelical' universalists agree. But, of course, the Arminian belief-set and the Calvinist belief-set, when combined, entail universalism. Consider:
     1. God, being omnipotent, could cause all people to freely accept Christ.
     2. God, being omniscient, would know how to cause all people to freely accept Christ.
     3. God, being omnibenevolent, would want to cause all people to freely accept Christ.
(Premises 1 and 2 are Calvinist whilst premise 3 is Arminian.) Now 1-3 entail:
     4. God will cause all people to freely accept Christ.
From which it follows that
     5. All people will freely accept Christ.
My point in presenting this argument is not, in this context, to persuade readers to be universalists. Rather, it is simply to illustrate that widely accepted evangelical beliefs can, in certain circumstances, motivate universalism. Both the Arminian and the Calvinist belief-sets above are evangelical-compatible, so are 'evangelical' universalists unevangelical because they believe both? That seems odd. Or must evangelicals believe either (a) that God cannot save all without violating their freedom (Arminianism), or (b) that God does not want to save all (Calvinism)?"

Robin Parry, "Evangelical Universalism: Oxymoron?" Evangelical Quarterly 84 (2012) 16.

Even though Parry's article is appealing, the part of the argument I would like to see better fleshed out is how universalism can be motivated from the New Testament. In the same issue of The Evangelical Quarterly Derek Tidball responds negatively, that Scripture will not allow us to affirm universalism. After a quick survey of Jesus' teaching, Paul's teaching, and the teaching of the General Epistles and Revelation, Tidball concludes:

"Whatever our emotions may say concerning the lost state of the impenitent, it is very hard to find a doctrine of universalism in the New Testament, whether of a general variety or the more specific 're-educative' variety proposed by Parry. There are two distinct forms of universalism which the NT does teach and two only: (i) that the offer of salvation is universal in its scope in the present time and is available to all without distinction of race, gender, wealth or social standing, and (ii) that God will reign 'all in all' when the whole of creation is brought into submission, voluntarily or otherwise, to his rule at some future time....
     Universal homage will one day be paid to the King of kings and Lord of lords. Does that mean all will be saved whether they have gone directly into his presence or come into it via a temporary, if terrifying, detour in hell? The Bible presents no evidence to support the latter. Hell is presented as the final destination of the impenitent rather than a temporary deviation. To believe otherwise is to 'clutch at insubstantial straws'."

Derek Tidball, "Can Evangelicals Be Universalists?" Evangelical Quarterly 84 (2012) 29-30.

"We have this treasure in clay jars to show that the power is from God and not from us"

Charles Williams was one of C. S. Lewis' closest friends after he became a Christian. Williams wrote a little book on forgiveness during the Second World War, and the encouraging insights in this passage on how we perceive our own progress in sanctification are well worth reading. Interestingly, Dietrich Bonhoeffer had been writing similar things just a few years earlier.

"The virtues, owing to the laborious detail in which they have to be pursued by us...are apt to be subdued to our own niggling style. But in themselves they are not so; they are gay and princely; and so they are seen when they are recognised in others simply because we are in a state of love towards others. We can admire them in their freedom in others when in ourselves they must seem, if not in servitude, at least only just escaped from servitude, sore from the manacles, bleeding from their effort at freedom, lame, purblind, unheavenly. it is our business to admire them heavenly whenever they can be so seen; the opportunity is in such states as marriage and friendship, and we do very well to take it whenever it is found. "This ought ye to have done, and not to have left the other undone." We must not ease from our own labour because the glory is seen free in another; but neither must we cease to admire the glory because the labour is all that we can feel in ourselves."

Charles Williams, "The Technique of Pardon," The Forgiveness of Sins (London: Bles, 1942)

"Taste and see that the Lord is good"

This morning I stumbled across these words by Jerome (c 347-420) against Pelagius on our need for divine aid to do what is good.

St Jerome in his study (1480)

"He is always a giver, always a bestower. It is not enough for me that he has given me grace once; He must give it me always. I seek that I may obtain, and when I have obtained I seek again. I am covetous of God's bounty; and as He is never slack in giving, so I am never weary in receiving. The more I drink, the more I thirst. For I have read the song of the psalmist: O taste and see that the Lord is good (Psalm 34:8). Every good thing that we have is a tasting of the Lord. When I fancy myself to have finished the book of virtue, I shall then only be at the beginning."

St Jerome, Letter 133 (AD 415)

Frank Thielman on the Center of Paul's Theology

This spring I used Frank Thielman's Theology of the New Testament as a textbook when teaching in Ethiopia, and was impressed with his argument that  the center of Paul's theology is best described as God's grace.

"If one theological theme is more basic than others in Paul's letters, ... it is this notion that God is a gracious God and that he has shown his grace preeminently in his arrangement of history to answer the problem of human sinfulness in the death and resurrection of his Son, Jesus Christ.
     This is "the truth of the gospel" that Paul passionately defended against those who threatened it in Jerusalem and Antioch. When false brothers at the Jerusalem council tried to insist that a right relationship with God was defined not only by faith in Christ but by conformity to the Mosaic law, Paul "did not submit to them even for a moment, so that the truth of the gospel might remain intact" (Gal 2:5). When Peter, under pressure from Jewish believers from Jerusalem, tried to force Gentile Christians in Antioch to conform to the Mosaic law, Paul told him that he was out of line with "the truth of the gospel" (Gal 2:14).
     The problem in both instances was that by insisting on conformity to the Mosaic law as a means--however partial--of bringing people into a right relationship with God, both the false brothers and Peter had "set aside the grace of God" and implied that "Christ died for nothing" (Gal 2:21). Here, then, Paul answers for us the question of the "center" of his theology. It is an answer given in the passion of the moment, but as the importance of this concept throughout the Pauline corpus demonstrates, it was an answer that arose from Paul's deepest convictions."

Frank Thielman, Theology of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), 479.

How to avoid antiquarianism and self-congratulation

Alasdair MacIntyre's words about the value of the history of philosophy are equally true for the history of theology and biblical interpretation.

"It is important that we should, as far as it is possible, allow the history of philosophy to break down our present-day preconceptions, so that our too narrow views of what can and cannot be thought, said, and done are discarded in face of the record of what has been thought, said, and done. We have to steer between the danger of a dead antiquarianism, which enjoys the illusion that we can approach the past without preconceptions, and that other danger, so apparent in such philosophical historians as Aristotle and Hegel, of believing that the whole point of the past was that it should culminate with us. History is neither a prison nor a museum, nor is it a set of materials for self-congratulation."

Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics: A History of Moral Philosophy from the Homeric Age to the Twentieth Century (2nd ed. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), p. 4.

Higher Criticism and Winnie the Pooh

What happens when New Testament Form Criticism and Redaction Criticism are applied not to the New Testament but to Winnie the Pooh? The following excerpt is from Richard Bauckham's brilliant, unpublished lecture, "The Pooh Community" (the entire lecture is available on Richard Bauckham's home page).

"... The [Winnie the Pooh] stories afford us a fairly accurate view of some of the rivalries and disputes within the community. The stories are told very much from the perspective of Pooh and Piglet, who evidently represent the dominant group in the community - from which presumably the bulk of the literature originated, though here and there we may detect the hand of an author less favourable to the Pooh and Piglet group. The Pooh and Piglet group saw itself as central to the life of the community (remember that Piglet's house is located in the very centre of the forest), and the groups represented by other characters are accordingly marginalized. The figure of Owl, for example, surely represents the group of children who prided themselves on their intellectual achievements and aspired to status in the community on this basis. But the other children, certainly the Pooh and Piglet group, ridiculed them as swots. So throughout the stories the figure of Owl, with his pretentious learning and atrocious spelling, is portrayed as a figure of fun. Probably the Owl group, the swots, in their turn ridiculed the Pooh and Piglet group as ignorant and stupid: they used terms of mockery such as 'bear of very little brain.' Stories like the hunt for the Woozle, in which Pooh and Piglet appear at their silliest and most gullible, probably originated in the Owl group, which used them to lampoon the stupidity of the Pooh and Piglet group. But the final redactor, who favours the Pooh and Piglet group, has managed very skilfully to refunction all this material which was originally detrimental to the Pooh and Piglet group so that in the final form of the collection of stories it serves to portray Pooh and Piglet as oafishly lovable. In a paradoxical reversal of values, stupidity is elevated as deserving the community's admiration. We can still see the point where an anti-Pooh story has been transformed in this way into an extravagantly pro-Pooh story at the end of the story of the hunt for the Woozle. Pooh and Piglet, you remember, have managed to frighten themselves silly by walking round and round in circles and mistaking their own paw-prints for those of a steadily increasing number of unknown animals of Hostile Intent. Realizing his mistake, Pooh declares: 'I have been Foolish and Deluded, and I am a Bear of No Brain at All.' The original anti-Pooh story, told by the Owl faction, must have ended at that point. But the pro-Pooh narrator has added - we can easily see that it is an addition to the original story by the fact that it comes as a complete non sequitur - the following comment by Christopher Robin: "'You're the Best Bear in All the World," said Christopher Robin soothingly.'..."

Richard Bauckham, "The Pooh Community." Unpublished lecture.

Christ makes every one a debtor to all those for whom Christ died

Paul S. Minear, 1906-2007

It may be said, then, that as Paul sees it, Christ makes every man a debtor to all those for whom Christ died. He thereby creates a fabric of mutual interdependence which defies the usual method of computing obligations in proportion to tangible, direct contributions. This new interdependence is not two-sided but triangular. For example, Paul teaches that Gentiles are indebted to the Jews because Christ became a servant to the circumcised for the sake of the Gentiles (15.7-12). So, too, Paul magnifies his ministry to the Gentiles for the sake of the Jews (11.13f.). This triangular logic also lies back of his injunction to the ‘strong in faith’ (who were predominantly Gentile) that they should honour their obligation to the ‘weak in faith’ (who were predominantly Jewish, 14.1ff.). This obligation was incurred when Christ chose not to please himself but to accept as his own the reproaches which in all justice should fall on others (15.1-3). In Christ, therefore, each man becomes a debtor to every man.

Paul S. Minear, The Obedience of Faith: The Purposes of Paul in the Epistle to the Romans (Studies in Biblical Theology, Second Series 19. London: SCM, 1971), pp. 104-5.

(with apologies for the non-inclusive language)

Moltmann on God's future for the earth

When the Eternal One comes to "dwell" on the earth, the earth will become God's cosmic temple, and the restless God of hope and history will come to his rest. That is the great biblical -- Jewish and Christian -- vision for this earth. It is the final promise: "Behold, the dwelling of God is with [human beings]. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people" (Rev 21:3 RSV, following Ezek. 37:27). The ultimate Shekinah, this cosmic incarnation of God, is the divine future of the earth. In this expectation we shall already treat the earth as "God's temple" here and now, and cherish its creatures as sacred. We men and women are not "the masters and possessors" of the earth, but perhaps we shall one day become its priests and priestesses, representing God to the earth, and bringing the earth before God, so that we see and taste God in all things, and perceive all things in the radiance of his love. That would be a sacramental view of the world which would be able to take up and absorb into itself the worldview held at present in science and technology.

Jürgen Moltmann, "Progress and Abyss: Remembrances of the Future of the Modern World," p. 26 in The Future of Hope: Christian Tradition amid Modernity and Postmodernity, Miroslav Volf and William Katerberg, eds. Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2004.

BS 505 Pauline and General Letters and Revelation

The above link takes you to the syllabus for BS 505 "Pauline and General Letters and Revelation," which I will teach this term beginning Wednesday, 25 January, at Ethiopian Graduate School of Theology in Addis Ababa.

More information, literature lists and power point presentations are available on the EGST network drive. These will be updated as the course progresses.