Solemnibus

In thinking through the foundational issue of humans representing God to the creation, I am very tempted by the view that graven images were prohibited simply because humans were already appointed as God’s images.

If I am right then perhaps the first 5 commandments have a logical flow. After Eden’s disruption, do they re-establish in Israel (the light to the nations, remember) the proper relationship between God and humans?

1. I am to be your only God
2. You are to be my only images
3. Bear my Name faithfully
4. Show your allegiance by observing Sabbath
5. Observe familial duties.

The first is obvious; the second flows from my observations about us as God’s only appointed image-bearers. The third should be obvious: if you appoint someone to go forth in your name, then you expect them to act faithfully with that name and to bear the sort of fruit you want. So, employers expect employees (and sports team managers expect their players), at the very least, not to bring the firm or the team into disrepute.

The fourth may be less obvious, but consider this: to copy God is a good sign of willingness to be His faithful image, to align oneself openly with Him. Copying God is the rationale for the commandment to rest on the Sabbath day, first given as Isreal leaves Egyptian slavery. But when Israel is about to enter Canaan, Moses changes the rationale to God’s display of strength during the Exodus event itself. This is significant because observing Sabbath weakens the agricultural and pastural nation of Israel, and highlights her dependence on God to supply their food, and to make the ground sufficiently productive.

This highlighting is even stronger with the command to observe Sabbath years – to leave the ground unworked every seventh year. Set against the Genesis background of cursed and unproductive ground, the regular prohibition of work therefore creates a basic question of trust that recapitulates the testing of Adam and Eve. Whose word would Israel rely on to understand their world? Sabbath declares their allegience.

The fifth commandment, requiring honour to father and mother, stipulates that the fundamental ethic of creation (faithful representation) must be practiced in every family structure (each with children being like a miniature new creation). The reason given is hugely significant. Israel is promised long life in the land if parents are honoured, so setting the blessing for faithfulness directly against Adam and Eve’s explusion for unfaithfulness. Once again, Eden is being recapitulated with Israel.

God wants disciples, not worshippers.

The first point of doctrine taught by the Church should be:

You humans are made as representatives of God.

And the unifying confession of faith should therefore be:

Jesus is King.

Systematics at its best.

The Christian Mind series, Between Liberalism and Fundamentalism continues, this Tuesday, at 5.30pm, in Ramsey House (8 Kelburn Parade – map).

This week, we’re thinking about Christian involvement in the world in light of our belief in Jesus’ return. What does it mean to say Jesus will come back? Is the idea of the rapture biblical? If Jesus is coming back, shouldn’t we just trash the environment and drive 4WDs anyway?

Previous posts #1, #2

[The two posts that began this series were written in 2004, but until now I have not had the words to express the conclusions I wanted to reach. For background, see the previous posts.]

In conclusion, then, it seems to me that we need to change our usual ways of speaking. If, as I have argued, God has done faith and been faithful, and that faith is centered in Jesus’ enthronment, then Christian salvation is about a re-ordering of political reality. It is a reworking of rule, and who has it, from ‘on high’, as we might say.

The apostlic announcement of ‘the gospel’ was very simple: Jesus is King! A descendant of David has been sat on David’s throne! God has begun to reign!

The indivisible unity between politics and religion expressed in that announcement changed an entire world and the religion of its mightiest empire. It should reach out and grab us, too (though we might not understand it until we come to better grips with the thought-world of our bibles). But we Gentile Christians, understanding it or not, live the reality of that indivisible unity. Despite being Gentiles, we have become part of God’s household. We have become subject to Jesus Christ as elder brother, and are now, in Him, true Jews.

And what would relationships in a territory over which Jesus ruled look like? Isn’t that the real question for us? How does Jesus’ reign affect the real world – our real world? What does it mean to be indwelt, as we say, by that recreating Breath that first created the whole cosmos? May I suggest that the answers will leap – leap! – out of any letter of Paul’s?

You see, we have to start thinking of the way we order our relationships – the art of living with each other, the world, and the creation – as totally central to our Christian identity. While holding as critically important a personal identification with Jesus’ death, we must nonetheless expand the horizons of salvation beyond our own skins. Because salvation did actually start out there – out beyond us, with a new King for the whole world!

Salvation is already an external reality that invites us in, not something that, having begun inside us, we have to push out beyond ourselves – in our own strength, as it were. So, it seems to me that, in order to teach ourselves properly, we must stop speaking about salvation as something contained within our skins. We might speak of an exchange of my personal guilt for Jesus’ merit, or of a destiny in heaven when I die, or of a personal encounter with God. But that alone won’t cut it; that doesn’t do justice to the great apostolic cry, JESUS IS KING!

Says Ian Packer in an email:

…God’s highest act of justice is seen in Romans when he justifies/acquits/recitifies the ungodly… ie turns his enemies to friends… at the cost of his suffering Son… and then derivatively at the cost of his suffering brethren (”he is not ashamed to call them brothers”).

Is this right? I seem to have been taught that God’s highest justice is his due punishment of wicked sinners, on account of his own immutable holiness. This is the beginning of theological maths:

God’s justice + sin = damnation, but
God’s justice + sin + payment = salvation

And now the punchline: Payment for you is free. Do you want it?

(Christian theology and evangelism in 3 lines!)

God’s acquittal of sinners is not itself often described as ‘justice’ – although the substitutionary death of Christ to achieve it (the second equation) certainly is. It was just for Christ to have been punished for our sin, so it is said.

But, I like Ian’s thought. The foremost of God’s self-representations in Scripture is that he will, somehow, redeem the human race, and with it the creation that labours under our treacherous rule. And isn’t God’s word constitutive of everything? Therefore, isn’t God’s greatest act of justice to do his own word – to prove himself faithful?

This way of speaking about God’s justice involves his character and trustworthiness to fulfill the program he has set out for himself. And so it provides us a model, too. We represent God by also being faithful to creation-redemption, to his word, even at the cost of our lives. Why? Because fundamentally, we trust God. We affirm that he will do what he says. That is faith.

If God created our father Adam as his representative, to rule over in his image what he owns, then for Adam and his childern to act destructively, or treacherously, or faithlessly, is to embody falsehood about who God is. It is to tell lies with bodies, and lies of the most profound sort.

If, on the other hand, there has been a man after Adam, whom God has said is his Son, and with whom God said he was well pleased, then that man must have been a true man. He must have been the embodiment of God’s being, his representative image.

Furthermore, if this true man somehow shows God to be all that he ever held himself out to be – namely, loving, redemptive, gracious, and faithful to his promises – then God and man are united in truth. God has vindicated his own character, and man has faithfully represented it. Jesus and God are one, and share the same life.

As siblings of Jesus and the other children of father Adam, we have an unavoidable testimony to make. Still constituted in God’s image, how will we represent him? What relationship, therefore, will we have to our truly human elder brother?

Our choice is to be true or false.

I know of no more profound way to understand ‘true’ and ‘false’.

“Let God be true, though every man be found a liar.”

How should we, as Christians, offer public commentary – to the media or to our political leaders – about issues that concern us?

Someone suggested recently that answering ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ might give some cues. Well, we know what Jesus did – he spoke to the religious leaders of his day in the most inflammatory and abrasive of ways. But New Zealand’s political leaders are not religious leaders!

In making this distinction, I don’t want to continue the Enlightenment pretence that religion (what-we-worship) and politics (how-we-rule) are seperable. They are not. In fact, they’re inseperably intertwined.

Thus, the Pharisees and other religious leaders of Israel had been given an explicit politico-religious job description by the law of the Mosaic covenant. They were Jews, bound by God’s gracious choice to be the light of the world, and to be so in a particular way: lock, stock and barrel. They had accepted the job – and by Jesus’ time, used all sorts of methods to proclaim their righteousness in fulfilling it. And yet in reality, they were complete hypocrites and rebels against the law. That’s why Jesus spoke to them so harshly – as an Old Testament prophet representing God’s total anger.

Our politicians have not been chosen and commissioned by God to lead His kingdom. While they owe the same general allegiance to God as everyone does, they haven’t accepted the Christian job description via Jesus. Much less do they proclaim their righteousness in fulfilling it, and less still expect God to bless and vindicate them.

So I think that our mode of discourse with them or about them should not be patterned after the prophets, or after Jesus’ example in his time and place. The circumstances don’t fit.

Rather, I suggest that we should be evangelistic – seeing our leaders and the public at large as ordinary people who need every help in coming to understand the God of Scripture. They need to grasp what it means for Jesus to have been made King by that God. They need to know that this King is forming a new people. This people participate in Jesus’ risen life by his Spirit, and therefore are a new type of humanity. And our leaders and public are invited to be part of this people, to see themselves in terms of it and so to accept a new job description.

The leaders and public need to understand that because the religion of God’s new humanity is different, so its politics is different. The persons of this humanity are servants of their neighbours, life-givers and nurturers. They live quietly and mind their own business, and work hard so that they may give to others. They form faithful and loving families, respect and care for one another, and compensate for each others’ weaknesses. They sacrifice for each other in extraordinary ways. They have a strong ethic of self-denial – shaping their characters against the norms of selfish indulgence and the unbounded pursuit of pleasure, whether gained by sex, money, or power. They are not divided by race, status, age, gender, or wealth, but united in the name and love of this Jesus, whom they follow completely. They are as a large extended family, with a common life, common ancestry, and communal care.

I suggest that this body of people has the loudest voice of all. It speaks by being. Let’s bend all our efforts toward its articulation. Let the politicians, let the media, let the public see and hear it!

So, how should we speak? Well, using words only if absolutely necessary. But above all, in a winning way – attractive and engaging.

The first object of communication is to be understood by the audience; the second, to gain the right of another hearing. Let us speak in such a profound way as to be understood by people’s hearts – as they yearn for the newness and peace of the new creation that God’s worship brings – and let us speak in such a winning way that they cannot wait to hear us again!

1. The question of what the New Testament authors had in mind with their ‘end-time’ prophecies can be answered one of two basic ways.

They may have been concerned with the immediate effects of Christ’s enthronement as true King, and the repudiation of national Israel as the covenant people – and hence with the way YHWH structured his relationship to creation. Their description of the consequences would make the immediate future clear (that is, the destruction of the old covenant with Jerusalem/the Temple, and the passing of creation into a newness of earth and heaven under Christ alone) but leave a final consumation an unspoken certainty.

Or, they may have been concerned with a final consumation, describing this in symbolic detail meant for a time far removed from the original readers/hearers. In that case, the distant future (although always described as close) would be clear, but the immediate future of national Israel, Christ and new Israel (the Christ-followers) would be murky and unresolved.

There are of course some compromises to be made between these extremes. It may be that a majority of passages have one focus while a minority have the other. Or, the concept of ‘double-fulfilment’, ‘telescoping’ may bridge the gap. However, the problem with the first compromise is that any suggested division between the passages seems so often arbitrary with respect to the actual language of the text. The interpretative rule should be that if the same phrases/words are used, and the same imagery invoked, then prima facie the same thing is being spoken of. The problem with the second compromise (the better one, in my view) is that all too often, the original meaning – how the original audience heard it – is completely forgotten in the rush to assert that the text casts another, more distant, shadow.

2. *warning: the terms postmodern & relative are loosely used here* A year ago Matt quoted Mike Goheen giving a postmodern creed, which said in part:

I don’t believe there is one story that gives meaning to the world.

I like this phrasing. I understand it to mean: “there is no one story by which the world is moved and shaped and has its being”.

Goheen accurately pinpoints why postmodernism and relativism are popularly reviled in Christian circles. For instance, Chuck Colson’s How Now Shall We Live evinces horror at the lack of ‘absolute truth’ on offer from postmodernism/relativism. But in my view, Colson et al are guilty of so completely dressing Christianity in the garb of modernism that one must learn to love modernism before one can learn to love a biblical faith.

On the other hand Goheen’s statement doesn’t deny that there are many stories on offer – many (attempted) meanings in the world. This is a true insight of postmodernism/relativism. Some meanings are able to take good shape within God’s world. The methods and language of postmodernism are useful to deal with these. Other meanings are continually rebuffed by God’s world. The rebuff’s locus classicus is the Fall – God says one thing, the serpent says another, and Adam chooses the story of false gods by which to try and shape the world. And he dies, just as God said he would. Postmodernism wrongly ignores this.

So Goheen does something quite unusual. He pinpoints with theological accuracy the problem with postmodernism/relativism, but without prostituting Christianity to the singularities of modernism – and so allows appreciation of the genuine insights postmodernism delivers. There are many stories on offer. There are many meanings to be had and to be developed in God’s wide world, full of his re-creating images – us. Some of these meanings are genuinely different from one another, and yet also genuinely true: they each comport with the story by which God moves this world.

‘A wise man’, I once heard Douglas Wilson say, ‘allows the world to rebuke him.’ Laziness, for instance, produces want. So stop being lazy. That sort of lesson is an excellent application of Genesis: the world moves according to God’s story. Get with the program.

But a Colson-esque dismissal of everything that may sound ‘postmodern’ is unfortunate. Christians should be taught to understand the philosophical and linguistic milieu in which they move, so that they can speak appropriately to it. Not only that, but they should not be fooled into thinking that Christianity is really a particular baptized philosophy, while everything else is evil. That will only set them up for a new idolatry. Rather, God is God and we are His representatives. All is God’s by origin; all is ours in delegation. There are many meanings, but only one Meaning.

Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son…

God summons, as it were, the nations (not just Abraham!) to a smoking firepot that passes around the crucified body of His Son, and gives them the covenant. Not with self-maladictory oaths that promise self-destruction for breach, but with actual self-destruction demonstrating unprecedented love. “Now, circumcise your hearts, be baptised, and obey.”

There is no more Jew and Gentile.

I think I’m only starting to grasp how unbelievably revolutionary that was. Imagine it! Every nation in covenant with God!!

From Hebrews 4:

Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience. For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.

I suddenly realised in church on Sunday morning that, contrary to what I’d always thought, this is not Paul’s timeless characterisation of ‘the bible’ – our 66 books between two black covers. That didn’t even exist.

Rather, Paul is describing historical events: the gospel of Jesus Christ being preached around Judea and Asia Minor as the final covenant word – first to Jews, then to Gentiles. The word of God actively dividing; sheep on the right, goats on the left. Hence, as always with one eye on the inevitable judgement, his exhortation not to be found without obedience.

Currently I see Matt 25-31:46 fitting within the general expectation that YHWH would come and judge between Israel and the Gentile nations, as they had always expected He would.

Notice that Jesus in 31-46 speaks in terms of the ethnos, the peoples or nations, rather than of individuals as such. This is not a picture of an individualised end-of-history judgment.

As such, it flows beautifully with the previous context, beginning in Matt 24 with the disciples’ question and Jesus’ account of how the temple would be destroyed.

As the last prophet to Israel (the vineyard owner’s son come to his unrulty tenants – remember the parable?), Jesus is announcing the master’s very close presence.

This coming has an ancient context, going right back to the covenant curses and blessings of Deut 29-30, forward through the prophets, and most especially through Malachi. Echoing Malachi’s (then far-off) prophecy, John the Baptist brings news that it is near: the axe is at the root of the tree and bad braches about to be burned. And John goes out to the desert, re-enacting the exodus and deliverance by water with baptism in the Jordan. He symbolically turns Israel into Egypt, and excoriates the curious Pharisees: “Who told YOU to repent? Produce the fruit of it!” John points to Jesus as the one around whom this new exodus revolves – and therefore the one whom Israel, and the Pharisees, need to trust and follow.

Jesus in Matt 25 is telling the disciples what the times look like for Israel. It is the culmination of her covenant history with YHWH, because her borders are about to be re-drawn and her constitution re-written through Jesus himself, who would welcome all the nations into God’s new family. I repeat, this is not an idividualised judgment, but one concerning the covenant relations of the nations to YHWH.

Read Paul in Ehpesians 1-2ff and you can see him speaking on exactly these themes: God in Jesus made one new man out of two, Jew and Gentile, bringing a new household into being and therefore peace between them. In terms of biblical history this is the most revolutionary thing since creation. It is, in fact, a new creation.

The ‘eternal’ spoken of at the end of Matt 25: 31-46 is simply a way of speaking about the permanance of the new convenant life that will be established in Christ. He is the Adam – the new man – who cannot fail or fall, the Son in whom the whole creation, and especially the Gentiles, are guaranteed their redemption and future. Israel, however, was on the cusp of being denied entrance to this new life, being threatened with destruction for her rebellion. She, of course, was part of the old Adamic order, the old Adam who’d fallen. Rather than trust in her marks of circumcision, those done according to the Law, she needed to start obeying God as if her hearts were circumcised (read Paul in Romans 1-3), so entering the new order with Christ. Christ came crying “Repent and follow me!”.

She would not. Therefore Israel as a covenant entity was destroyed, rather than being transformed in Christ. It is a historical fact that the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple at the hands of the Romans under Titus in AD70 was so complete that the Jews were unable to continue observing Torah, because the records of genealogical descent were utterly lost. The priesthood ended and sacrifice stopped. God removed even the appearance of covenant identity from his former people. In this way Israel as a nation was excluded from the life of God, while the gentile nations were welcomed.

Thus, it is now the case that particular Jews can enter Christ’s domain only as Gentiles – by renouncing the old covenant! How ironic.

So the language of Jesus in Matt 24-25 fits very well indeed with the entire old covenant history of Israel, and with the drawing to a climax of that history in himself, with judgment as the consequence of his own appointment as God’s true Son, the real and faithful Israel.

Paul, speaking to the Greeks in Acts 17, reflects this cause-and-effect: if there has been a man raised from the dead, then Israel’s God has demonstrated His willingness to finally judge the whole world. Through resurrection, the creation has been exposed to and begun an utterly new phase: a complete re-ordering of old relationships and states.

The question facing Jesus and the disciples in Matt 24-25 is what will happen to old ‘fleshly’ Israel, the one that will not obey God and is stuck in old Adam’s unfaithfulness.

And in 31-46 Jesus gives the answer: exclusion from the life to come. Which, historically, happened in AD70: Israel as a covenant group did not continue in the grace established under Jesus’ kingship.

The ancients believed that the way to depict the cosmos was with a Temple. In it, the gods and men meet, on certain terms and conditions.

Isreal believed this, too. She carried the picture of the beautiful Edenic future around in the Ark of the Covenant, and looked for the land in which the Garden might be re-established. Torah supplied the terms and conditions.

Paul says that the Christians become God’s new Temple, being united to Christ. Christ is the real Temple. He is the future, the resurrection and the life. He is the new Torah.

By the Spirit, you (we) are the picture of the future, walking around in Christ, in the present. You (we) depict the future.

Grasp this by faith. Live the resurrection.

And do not play the harlot or the false prophet. The Temple of the cosmos is not dedicated to sex, or money, or power. They are not its gods, but YHWH alone.

Living the biblical story, we are simply waiting for time to catch up the the reality already accomplished in Christ.

I noticed tonight that in 3 quick introductory verses John delivers three strident blows for the identity of Jesus:

1. “He surpassed me…because he was before me”

It’s hard to miss the connection to Jesus’ own claim, recorded later by John, that he stood with YHWH’s own identity: “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.”

2. “From the fullness of his grace we have all recieved one blessing after another. For Torah was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ”

Torah (the very constitution of Israel’s relationship with God!) was both gracious and true, and the Jews knew it well: but John completely relativises it in comparison to Jesus.

3. “No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known.”

John’s Jesus is not only elevated to YHWH’s right hand, but reveals Him whom nobody has ever seen. Jesus, then, becomes the public face of God.

This triple-barrelled blast constitutes as trenchant and high a claim as any made for Jesus’ vocation and identity by the NT writers. John has embarked on such a high Christology that Jesus must be identified with YHWH, right from the opening of the gospel. This is polemical stuff!

John bore witness about him, and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.’” And from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known. (ESV)

It would be interesting to see whether these verses are programmatic – whether John goes on to expand and illustrate each of them (pre-existence, superiority to Torah, and revealer of God). Also, in a surprising twist, this puts me very much in mind of Hebrews’ opening assertions that Jesus is the final revealer of God – superior to Moses, angels and Torah.

By the way, I should really thank Gavin Drew, whose efforts have restored my ability to see such high Christology in the NT. I was, I admit, getting a bit flaky on it.

Faith and Theology

And, while about it, consider what inspiration means. I believe Ben’s point (which is exegetical, btw) fits with what Brueggemann said in the excerpt quoted below.

Systematic theology is the grammar that instructs us how we may re-tell the biblical story.