Understanding the real John Calvin II

I am slowly making my way through the biography. It is quite an achievement. Calvin is presented sympathetically but with a real awareness of his weaknesses. A regular theme seems to be Calvin's acute sense of his own intellectual superiority and his regular self-vindication both in personal correspondence and more public writing. Amongst the gems so far is this paragraph from page 147:

The enduring image of Calvin as an unyielding, moralistic and stone-faced tyrant who rejected all the pleasures of life has been his opponents' greatest victory. The iconography of the Frenchman has hardly helped matters, above all, the Reformation monument in Geneva, which casts him to look like some forgotten figure of Middle Earth. His sermons reveal a man whose attitudes towards material things were far more interesting and textured than his reputation suggests. The fruits of the world, according to Calvin, are not simply for subsistence, but rather to be enjoyed: good wine, good food, conversation, friendship, the pleasures of children and of marital relations. He was fond of wine and, indeed, when the nobleman Jacques de Bourgogne was preparing to come to Geneva Calvin purchased a barrel of fine wine for him in anticipation of his arrival. The drinking of a glass of wine was, for him, associated with the most pleasurable things of life — laughing with friends, sharing a meal with intimates, music and art. Naturally, he preached against gross consumption of worldly goods and immodesty; his own sense of style, however, allowed him to admire clean lines and simplicity. He liked what was tasteful. In his correspondence he could let drop a line that indicated an eye for beautiful buildings and a well-dressed woman. His painted portraits reveal his modest yet evident elegance — a good-quality cloak or gown with fur collar, nothing ostentatious or extravagant. The fine things of life point to a gracious God. Through the eyes of faith the elect enjoy these things not as momentary pleasures but as the revelation of God's love. The Christian life is not just about suffering, though there was enough of that in the sixteenth century. The wonders of creation and the joys of life, when viewed through the lens of faith, sustain and nourish the pilgrim along the journey.

Understanding the real John Calvin

I've just started to dip into Bruce Gordon's long awaited and acclaimed biography of Calvin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). It is a bit early yet to give an evaluation, but here is a teaser from the preface:

The location of Calvin's grave is unknown, and that was the way he wanted it. Fully conscious of his fame and the spell he cast over his supporters, he feared being made an object of veneration. Nothing would have horrified him more than the monument to the Reformation in Geneva with its enormous image of the Frenchman. He deliberately wrote next to nothing about himself and his life. In the preface to his 1557 commentary on the psalms he provided a spiritual autobiography, but to the modern eye it is conspicuously short on facts. This is hardly surprising as its purpose was to stress the omnipotence of God and Calvin's providential calling. (ix)

Augustine on the Trinity III

In Book 3 Augustine continues with the three questions he identified in Book 2. However, before he picks up where he left off he gives us a glimpse of his own hopes for this book and, indeed, for all his writing. 'What I desire for all my works', he insists, 'is not merely a kind reader but a frank critic'. He recognises the twin dangers of becoming 'my doting partisan' or 'a critic who is his own' (III.2). And it is to the first of these, the person tempted to be the uncritical partisan of Augustine and his theology that he warns:

Do not show my works the same deference as the canonical Scriptures (III.2)

The question Augustine is concerned with in this book is the nature of the Old Testament theophanies. Specifically, given that God's essence is beyond human perception, did God choose to appear to men and women in the Old Testament by means of pre-existent created entities or were these agents of divine revelation created specifically for this purpose?

The response to this question leads him to consider the difference between proximate and ultimate causes. 'God's will is the first and highest cause of all physical species and motions' (III.9) and yet, whether that will results in specific intervention or continuous involvement, created agency retains its own integrity. In his words,

It is one thing, after all, to establish and administer creation from the inmost and supreme pivot of all causes, and the one who does that is God the sole creator; it is another matter to apply activity from the outside, in virtue of power and capacities distributed by him, so that the thing being created turns out like this or like that ... For the world itself, like mothers heavy with young, is heavy with the causes of things that are coming to birth, but these things are only created in it by that supreme being in which nothing is born or dies, nothing begins or ceases to be. (III.16)

Augustine distinguishes God's involvement from that of secondary causes by insisting 'only he who fashions things in their principles is the creator' (III.18).

Augustine attributes the principle agency in the divine appearances to angels. This angelic involvement was itself varied, sometimes being the direct manifestation of an angel, sometimes through some other means though 'engineered by an angel' (III.19). The angels might make use of a pre-existing body or object, adapting it for this use, or produce something ad hoc which 'dissolved again' once it had served its purpose (III.19).

Critical for Augustine (and later theology) is his insistence that whatever the means, the recipients were not given access to the divine essence:

Acting in and through these angels, of course, were the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Sometimes it was the Father who was represented by them, sometimes the Son, sometimes the Holy Spirit, sometimes just God without distinction of persons. Even if he appeared in visible or audible fashion, it was by means of his creation and not in his own proper substance. To see that substance, hearts have to be purified by all these things which are seen by eyes and heard by ears. (III.26)

Augustine is even willing to extend this latter principle to God's self-manifestation in the New Testament.

... when the Lord was born of the virgin, and when the Holy Spirit came down in bodily form like a dove, or in visible fiery tongues and a sound from heaven on the day of Pentecost after the Lord's ascension, what appeared to the bodily senses of mortals was not the very substance of the Word of God in which he is equal to the Father and co-eternal, nor the very substance of the Spirit of the Father and the Son in which he is co-equal and co-eternal with them both, but something created which could be formed and come into being in those ways. (III.27)

This leaves him to consider just what is different about the New Testament sending of the Son and the Spirit, to which he will turn in Book 4.

Augustine on the Trinity II

Book 2: After warning of the dangers of either presuming you know the truth already or of insisting you have the truth in the face of contrary evidence, Augustine begins Book 2 by outlining three interpretative 'rules': some statements of Scripture about the Father and the Son 'indicate their unity and equality of substance'; some, dealing with the humanity which the Son assumed, speak of him as less than the Father; and others speak neither of equality or ordered relationship but simply that the Son is 'from the Father' (II.3).

Once again a little excursus on the Spirit follows which demonstrates both his equality with the Father and the Son and an order reflected in the fact that while 'he glorifies the Son, who glorifies the Father', he is 'not himself said to be glorified by either the Father or the Son' (II.6).

Augustine then turns his attention to the divine missions, the sending of the Son and the Spirit (the Father is nowhere said to have been sent, II.8). In the incarnation, the Son takes on the form of a servant in the womb of Mary. Yet, critically for Augustine, 'Mary's conceiving and childbearing is the work of the three, by whose creative act all things are created' (II.9). This leads Augustine to a remarkable comment:

If the Son has been made visible in such a way that he ceased to be invisible with the Father, that is if the substance of the invisible Word, undergoing change and transition, had been turned into the visible creature, then we would have had to think of the Son simply as sent by the Father, and not also as sending with the Father. As it is, the form of a servant was so taken on that the form of God remained immutable, and thus it is plain that what was seen in the Son was the work of Father and Son who remain unseen; that is that the Son was sent to be visible by the invisible Father together with the invisible Son. (II.9)

Once again Augustine treats the Spirit and explores the way he too was sent (both at the baptism of Jesus and on the Day of Pentecost), which is significantly different from the sending of the Son: 'The Spirit did not make the dove blessed, or the violent gust, or the fire; he did not join them to himself and his person to be held in an everlasting union' (II.11).

This preliminary reflection leads Augustine to ask how the God who is immortal and invisible (1 Tim. 1:17) could be physically manifest in the midst of the created order. This introduces us to a consideration of the phenomenon of theophany throughout the Bible. Augustine proposes to do this by treating three questions:

1. Who is it who appeared? Was it the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit or in some sense the Three?
2. Were the creaturely means by which God appeared (human form, pillar of fire, dove, etc.) especially created for the purpose?
3. If the Son and the Spirit were sent prior to the incarnation or the Day of Pentecost, what exactly is different in these latter occasions?

The second half of Book 2 is taken up with exploring the first of these three questions by looking at God's fellowship with the man and woman in the Garden (Gen. 1), the call of Abram (Gen. 12), Abraham's conversation with the three visitors prior to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 18), Moses confrontation with God in the non-burning bush (Ex. 3), the pillar of cloud/fire in the wilderness (Ex. 13), God's presence on Mount Sinai (Ex. 19), Moses' request to see God (Ex. 33), and Daniel's vision of the Ancient of Days and 'one like a Son of Man' (Dan. 7). In the midst of this is the brilliant, but ultimately unconvincing, allegorisation of Moses' encounter with God on Mount Sinai, where the Catholic church is the rock on which we now stand to view by faith the resurrection glory of Christ (II.29–30).

Augustine's own position on the first question is summarised at two points in this book:

... we say that God has never shown himself to bodily eyes, neither the Father nor the Son nor the Holy Spirit, except through some created bodily substance at the service of his power. (II.16)

... we should not be dogmatic in deciding which person of the three appeared in bodily form or likeness to this or that patriarch or prophet, unless the whole context of the narrative provides us with probable indications. (II.35)

Upping the Standard on Preaching

Like many people, I am concerned that the general standard of biblical preaching has been lowered in recent years. If we are still convinced that preaching is important (a discussion for another day) then we should be concerned that this preaching is effective. To my mind the greatest current danger is the loss of expository preaching in the wake of the massive web presence of entertaining, challenging but biblically light sermons. A lot of energy has gone into making the sermons of some preachers readily available. 

So I thought I might add some links to sites where you will find what I consider to be some of the best expository preaching around today. Why not click on, download and begin listening?

http://www.moore.edu.au/1076/ 

http://sthelens.audiop.org.uk/recenttalks?new_nav=y/

http://phillipjensen.com/ 

http://www.stebbes.org.uk/?s=talks

The Last Enemy

The Christian can make no accommodation with death. Not even a notional one. Certainly not a theological one.

There is pressure in some quarters to think of death as in some sense natural, an inevitable corrollary of our createdness. Death, we're told, predates the Fall. It is part of the cycle of life which God himself set in train with the words 'Let us make ...' We ought not to place too much emphasis on physical death as the judgement of God upon human sin. Death is not the real problem. It is a consequence of our rebellion but by no means the only or the most important one.

Yet where is the biblical warrant for this idea? To suggest death was a feature of life outside the Garden from the beginning is at best to argue from silence (biblical silence that is). What is more, it flies in the face of Paul's premise that 'by a man came death', which is an important part of the argument that 'by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead' (1 Cor 15:21). Paul, surveying the victorious consummation of God's purposes, makes clear, 'the last enemy to be defeated is death' (1 Cor 15:26).

The suggestion that death is not itself the last great enemy would seem also to run counter to Jesus' own attitude to death. He recognises its disruptive power, restoring Jairus' daughter to the grieving man and his wife (Lk 8:53–56), restoring to the widow of Nain the son whom she had lost (Lk 7:15), and restoring Lazarus to his two grieving sisters (Jn 11:44). But more than that, he weeps outside Lazarus' tomb (Jn 11:35) and is deeply moved by the way death has intruded into the holy structures of family life there in Capernaum (Lk 8). Death annoys him. It defies him. It stands against all he came to do.

The critical function of Christ's bodily resurrection in New Testament soteriology is tied to the seriousness of physical death. The body of Jesus was crucified and laid in a tomb. The point is almost laboured in the Gospels that he genuinely, irredeemably, died. And yet the same body which experienced death was raised to life and transformed in a way fit for glory. At the very point at which the judgement strikes most directly, the crucial victory is won.

Now of course physical death cannot be detached from the reality of giving an account of our lives. It cannot be completely separated from judgement and the prospect of final condemnation. Death seen in that light is most certainly an unrelenting darkness. And yet even when its sting is removed in the light of our union with the resurrected one (1 Cor 15:55), the one who holds the keys to death and hades (Rev 1:18), it remains unnatural, disruptive and just not 'very good' (Gen. 1:31).

Luther thought much about death. During his life-time he heard people seek to domesticate death or try to transform it into a friend:

I do not like to see people glad to die. I prefer to see them fear and tremble and turn pale before death but nevertheless pass through it. Great saints do not like to die. The fear of death is natural, for death is a penalty; therefore it is something sad. According to the spirit one dies willingly, but according to the flesh the saying applies 'Another will carry you where you do not wish to go' (Jn 21:18) [Table Talk #408 Dec. 1532, LW 54, p. 65]

Calvin, though he saw the point did not quite agree. The unnatural and contradictory nature of death ought not to be denied, but there is a greater, more important reality:

For if we deem this unstable, defective, corruptible, fleeting, wasting, rotting tabernacle of our body to be so dissolved that it is soon renewed into a firm, perfect, incorruptible and finally, heavenly glory, will not faith compel us ardently to seek what nature dreads? [Inst. III.ix.5]

In the twentieth century, Karl Barth put these twin concerns quite succinctly:

The New Testament Christian does not fear death. But he never hopes for it. He hopes for the One who has delivered him from death. [CD III/2, 640]

There may still be unanswered questions, of course. For instance, just what can we imply from the fossils of dinosaurs so many million years ago? And yet the Bible is not the slightest bit interested in such things. Its concern is the death of human beings in the light of God's own nature and his purpose borne out in creation.

Death is more than an inconvenience, more than just a 'transition'. It remains the unnatural contradiction of God's creative purpose. It is the negation of life, and life is always God's gift. It is right to resist it, to defy it, to refuse to give in to it. But it is always right to trust the one who knew its seriousness, bore its brutal physicality and triumphed. He can carry his own through death to share his victory. 'For as by a man came death, so by a man has come also the resurrection from the dead.'

Death has no light about it, nothing to commend it. But death cannot, does not win. God wins.

Augustine on the Trinity I

I have begun to work my way through Augustine's De Trinitate once again, this time using the relatively recent translation by Edmund Hill (New York: New City Press, 1991). It's a clear, engaging and at times idiosyncratic translation produced with an extensive introduction and a useful set of notes. The only frustration is the decision to vary the chapter divisions from that of older editions (they were never original to Augustine anyway) which makes cross referencing just that little harder.

I thought it might be worth trying to distill his argument in each book and perhaps highlight one or two purple passages. Augustine has been the target for considerable attack from some quarters and so it is worthwhile hearing the man himself. Perhaps we can postpone evaluation until we have heard what he has in fact said.

So here is the first installment.

Book 1: Augustine begins by insisting on the propriety of using words to speak about God while at the same time acknowledging the otherness of God (in terms of his essential immutability and immortality, drawn from 1 Tim 6:16). He acknowledges the priority of Scripture in treatments of this subject and even the usefulness of many different treatments so that a wider audience can be reached.

Turning to the subject itself, he summarises the catholic tradition and makes special reference to the principle of inseparability. The three must not be confused or interchanged, but 'just as Father and Son and Holy Spirit are inseparable, so do they work inseparably' (I.7).

Augustine then turns his attention to those biblical texts which some have taken as evidence against the equality of the three. John 14:28 ('The Father is greater than I') may be understood with the help of Philippians 2:7 and 1 Corinthians 15:28. His basic answer to the dilemma he poses for trinitarian theology is more strictly Christological, drawing attention to the two natures of the Christ: 'what the Father is greater than is the form of a servant, whereas the Son is his equal in the form of God' (I.15). At the end Christ's mediatorial role is fulfilled but his divinity is in no way diminished or relinquished.

This provides Augustine with an important hermeneutical principle: in texts speaking about the Son the resonances must be observed. Some are 'tuned to the form of God in which he is', others are 'tuned to the form of a servant which he took' (I.22). The book concludes with a meditation on how John 12:47 ('It is not I that judge him') can be reconciled with John 5:22 ('The Father ... has given all judgement to the Son') using this principle.

As I read this first book I was reminded again of the criticism that Augustine has an inadequate doctrine of the Spirit. In that light the following excerpt may seem surprising:

In the same way testimonies have been collected on the Holy Spirit and copiously employed by previous expositors of the subject to show that he too is God and not a creature. And if he is not a creature then he is not only God—for even men have been called gods (Ps 82:6)—but also true God; therefore absolutely equal to the Father and the Son, and consubstantial and co-eternal in the oneness of the three. (I.13)

Right at the start of De Trinitate, Augustine includes the divinity, equality, consubstantiality and co-eternity of the Spirit in his treatment of the doctrine.