The March edition of Comment magazine—yes, I'm a little late in picking up on this—has three articles dealing with each aspect of the biblical story: creation, fall, and redemption. Understanding the biblical narrative in this way is characteristic of the school of thought known as neocalvinism, which Comment roots itself in. All the pieces in this three-part series are excellent, and all worth your time (as is Comment as a whole—incidentally, Comment publishes five times more material online than in print if you wanted to read it on a regular basis). A taste of each piece follows.

First, Al Wolters writes on a biblical view of creation:

The first thing most people think of in connection with creation is the so-called 'natural world'—that is, the physical and biological world. We think of stars and galaxies as well as molecules and atoms, of trees and flowers as well as birds and beasts. But that is a very limited view of creation. In the biblical view, creation is everything which God has ordained to exist, what he has put in place as part of his creative workmanship. To be sure, this includes the great variety of physical entities and processes, and the enormous diversity of flora and fauna that God has created 'according to their kind,' but it also encompasses much more. Creation includes such human realities as families and other social institutions, the presence of beauty in the world, the ability to appreciate that beauty, the phenomena of tenderness and laughter, the capacity to conceptualize and reason, the experience of joy and the sense of justice. An almost unimaginable variety of objects, institutions, relationships and phenomena are part of the rich texture of God's creation.

Then David Naugle addresses the consequences of the fall:

[The fall] is the second 'act' in the overall narrative of the Scriptures, the next major theme in a biblical view of life and the world. First, there is the good news of creation, but now we have the bad news of the fall. It introduces fundamental conflict into the biblical drama, which must be resolved before God's story ends. It shows, contrary to other worldviews, that evil is not rooted in creation itself, but in the moral rebellion of the human race against the divine authority of the holy God. I sometimes call this episode the 'uncreation' because of the damage it did to God's very good world: how it twisted his intentions for humanity, for our knowing and loving and culture-making, and for all the earth.

And finally Jamie Smith paints a wonderful portrait of God's all-encompassing redemption:

Our good Creator has not left us to our own devices. While we ruptured the plenitude of creative love, our condescending God has also ruptured our brass heaven, along with our desire to enclose ourselves in immanence, appearing in the flesh—our flesh—as the image of the invisible God. Jesus of Nazareth appears as the second Adam who models for us what it looks like to carry out that original mission of image-bearing and cultivation. The Word became flesh, not to save our souls from this fallen world, but in order to restore us as lovers of this world—to (re)enable us to carry out that creative commission. Indeed, God saves us so that—once again, in a kind of divine madness—we can save the world, can (re)make the world aright. And God's redemptive love spills over in its cosmic effects, giving hope to this groaning creation.

So our redemption is not some supplement to being human; it's what makes it possible to be really human, to take up the mission that marks us as God's image bearers. Saint Irenaeus captures this succinctly: 'The glory of God is a human being fully alive.' Redemption doesn't tack on some spiritual appendage, nor does it liberate us from being human in order to achieve some sort of angelhood. Rather, redemption is the restoration of our humanity, and our humanity is bound up with our mission of being God's co-creative culture-makers.

Be sure to read all of the articles in their entirety. It is this three-part framework (alternatively construed as wonder, heartbreak, and hope) that forms the point of view from which Comment looks at the world, a point of view which, my friend and the magazine's editor Gideon Strauss writes, manifestly reveals the love of the triune God. This love "evokes—from our whole person and in unity with the whole people of God—a life of worship, a love of our neighbours, and a respectful caring and disclosure of all of creation. Lives ordered by the love of God are ordered well, and can be lived well."

Abraham Kuyper, in that oft-quoted dictum, rightly declares that all of life is to be lived under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Our worldview needs this truth as its foundation. We do not begin to live our lives well, to borrow Gideon's words, unless we begin with the recognition of His total claim over all of creation and His holistic work of redemption. Indeed, as Cornelius Van Til once said, "Man cannot be man unless God is God."

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If you are not familiar with Lesslie Newbigin's story, he grew up in Britain and studied at Cambridge, where he was converted and trained for the ministry. After getting married, he spent nearly forty years in India as a missionary. When he was in Britain as a child and a student, it was still something of a "Christian" society, but upon his return in 1974, he discovered a country that he could describe as nothing less than pagan.

Michael Goheen, in his doctoral dissertation on Newbigin's missionary ecclesiology (which is available online for free!), writes that Newbigin had come to understand the church's relationship to the culture as a missionary encounter because "the church embodies the gospel as an alternative way of life to the culture in which it is set and thereby challenges the culture's fundamental assumptions" (365). Newbigin borrowed language from the sociology of knowledge to express this notion of a missionary encounter in his book, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. He writes,

The gospel gives rise to a new plausibility structure, a radically different vision of things from those that shape all human cultures apart from the gospel. The Church, therefore, as the bearer of the gospel, inhabits a plausibility structure which is at variance with, and which calls into question, those that govern all human cultures without exception (9).

Goheen adds that "all cultures exhibit a plausibility structure that embody and transmit the fundamental beliefs of its inhabitants. Those fundamental beliefs stand in opposition to the gospel and if there is to be a missionary encounter, the church itself must be a community that embodies an alternative set of foundational beliefs" (365-366). If the church is faithful in doing this then three things will result: first, the foundational beliefs of a culture will be challenged; second, the church will offer the gospel as a credible alternative way of life; and third, the church will call the culture to radical conversion and invite it to live and understand the world through the lens of the gospel. At that point, the culture is left with the choice of accepting or rejecting the gospel and the lordship of Jesus Christ. As Newbigin expresses it in his little book, The Other Side of 1984: Questions for the Churches, the church that embodies the gospel

must necessarily clash with contemporary culture. It must challenge the whole 'fiduciary framework' within which our culture operates. It must call unequivocally for radical conversion, a conversion of the mind so that things are seen differently, and a conversion of the will so that things are done differently. It must decline altogether the futile attempt to commend the biblical vision of how things are by seeking to adjust it to the assumptions of our culture (53).

The fact that Newbigin would say something this provocative in the context he did was significant, for he was speaking about a culture that, to some degree, still believed it was a Christian culture, much like America today. But Newbigin understands that just because a certain percentage of a culture's population professes belief in God or attends church regularly does not mean its underlying worldview is shaped by the gospel.

Further, he rightly recognizes that the worldviews that give shape to a culture are religious in nature. Religion, in Newbigin's view, is not just a cultural form, and "it is more than an institution that embodies beliefs and practices concerning God and the destiny of the soul. It is a set of ultimate commitments about the nature of the world that gives shape, direction, and meaning to life and demands final loyalty" (Goheen, 367).

And here, then, is the reason the gospel needs to challenge the foundational beliefs of a culture—because all of life is religion, and everything we think, say, and do is either in service to God or an idol. Christ is Lord over all of life, and the church is called to proclaim and embody this truth. As witnesses to Jesus and the presence of his kingdom and rule, we cannot be satisfied to accept a sacred/secular divide and leave our culture to let its presuppositions inform certain areas while challenging its assumptions in other areas. All of life belongs to the Lord and our calling as the church is to unapologetically call to the world to recognize that truth.

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As I mentioned in the previous post, Eugene Peterson is coming to speak at RTS this week. A good friend of mine is picking him up from the airport tomorrow morning, and Peterson will be delivering two lectures tomorrow and then another two on Thursday. It promises to be very good. The overarching theme for his lectures is that prayer must be at the very root of the Church's life, and he will be taking us through Ephesians to explore that.

Peterson has a five-book series on what he calls spiritual theology, and when I came across the term the other day I was not quite sure what he meant by it. But it did not take long to find a definition—within the first few pages of the introduction to the first book in the series, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, Peterson writes this:

Spiritual theology is the attention we give to lived theology—prayed and lived, for if it is not prayed sooner or later it will not be lived from the inside out and in continuity with the Lord of life. Spiritual theology is the attention that we give to living what we know and believe about God. It is the thoughtful and obedient cultivation of life as worship on our knees before God the Father, of life as sacrifice on our feet following God the Son, and of life as love embracing and being embraced by the community of God the Spirit.

Spiritual theology is not one more area of theology that takes its place on the shelf alongside the academic disciplines of systematic, biblical, practical, and historical theology; rather, it represents the conviction that all theology, no exceptions, has to do with the living God who creates us as living creatures to live to his glory. It is the development of awareness and discernments that are as alert and responsive in the workplace as in the sanctuary, as active while changing diapers in a nursery as while meditating in a grove of aspens, as necessary when reading a newspaper editorial as when exegeting a sentence written in Hebrew.

Some may want to simplify things by keeping the spiritual and throwing out the theology. Others will be content to continue with the theology as usual and forget the spiritual. But the fact is that we live only because God lives and that we live well only in continuity with the way God makes, saves, and blesses us. Spirituality begins in theology (the revelation and understanding of God) and is guided by it. And theology is never truly itself apart from being expressed in the bodies of men and women to whom God gives life and whom God then intends to live a full salvation life (spirituality).

The former president of RTS Orlando, Frank James, once said to our church history class, "Doctrine means nothing if it is not followed by doxology." The point, of course, is that there cannot be a disconnect between what we believe and how we live, something Peterson would wholeheartedly affirm. In the end, then, we are talking about nothing less than recognizing the Lordship of Christ over all of life. Our beliefs and convictions, insofar as they are faithful to God's revelation, are to bring about holistic transformation of our hearts and minds such that we begin to live in a manner that reflects a complete devotion and allegiance to our sovereign God.

If that is what spiritual theology is all about, count me in.

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Eugene Peterson will be here at RTS next week for the annual Kistemaker Lectures. I don't know too much about Peterson, aside from having read an article or two by him in the past, but I'm looking forward to hearing him. He has a reputation for possessing a great deal of wisdom in regards to pastoral concerns and various issues that arise in ministry.

Part of the reason I'm looking forward to the lectures is because of Peterson's commitment to Christian formation and discipleship (his title while at Regent was Professor of Spiritual Theology), and his recognition that the church is to be intimately involved in the lives of believers. The American church, both historically and presently, has demonstrated a great interest in saving souls and seeing people converted, but has not often invested in their lives as they subsequently learn what it looks like to have a life transformed by the gospel. Peterson addresses this in the introduction (and presumably the rest of the chapters) of his latest book, Practice Resurrection: A Conversation on Growing up in Christ:

We cannot overemphasize bringing men and women to new birth in Christ. Evangelism is essential, critically essential. But is it not obvious that growth in Christ is equally essential? Yet the American church has not treated it with an equivalent urgency. The American church runs on the euphoria and adrenaline of new birth—getting people into the church, into the kingdom, into causes, into crusades, into programs. We turn matters of growing up over to Sunday school teachers, specialists in Christian education, committees to revise curricula, retreat centers, and deeper life conferences, farming it out to parachurch groups for remedial assistance. I don't find pastors and professors, for the most part, very interested in matters of formation and holiness. The have higher profile things to tend to.

Americans in general have little tolerance for a centering way of life that is submissive to the conditions in which growth takes place, quiet, obscure, patient, not subject to human control and management. The American church is uneasy in these conditions. Typically, in the name of 'relevance,' it adapts itself to the prevailing American culture and is soon indistinguishable from that culture; talkative, noisy, busy, controlling, image-conscious.

Meanwhile, what has in previous centuries and other cultures been a major preoccupation of the Christian community, becoming men and women who live to 'the praise of God's glory,' has become a mere footnote within a church that has taken on the agenda of the secular society—its educational goals, its activity goals, its psychological goals. By delegating character formation, the life of prayer, the beauty of holiness—growing up in Christ—to specialized ministries or groups, we remove it from the center of the church's life. We disconnect growth from birth, and, in effect, place it on a bench at the margins of the church's life. Wendell Berry, one of our most perceptive prophets of contemporary culture and spirituality, wrote, 'We think it ordinary to spend twelve or sixteen or twenty years of a person's life and many thousands of public dollars on "education"—and not one dime or a thought on character.'

It takes a serious amount of effort to invest that much in someone's life, but Peterson obviously stands as an advocate for the essentiality of this fully-involved discipleship. And the Bible, of course, is replete with examples of this—one only need look to the three years Jesus spent in forming his disciples.

If we truly believe that all of life is to be lived under the Lordship of Jesus Christ, we as the Church need to ensure that we become fully invested in each other's lives as we learn together what that looks like.

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The words that follow belong to David J. Bosch, the renowned South African missiologist, who initially had them published in the December 1979 issue of the Journal of Theology for Southern Africa. This is the kind of thing that simply electrifies me.

As Lord, Jesus was given 'all power in heaven and on earth' (Matt. 28:18). He is therefore repeatedly referred to as 'Saviour of the world' (John 4:42; 1 John 4:14). 'All things were created by him, and all things exist through him and for him,' says Paul (Rom. 11:36). It is the purpose of God to bring all creation together, everything in heaven and on earth, with Christ as head (Eph. 1:10).

All this means that the Kingdom of God (or the Lordship of Christ) is without boundaries. Christ is Lord of all. Naturally, his Lordship his not yet openly and finally manifested. The ultimate is yet to come. We live in the penultimate. We still wait for the day of which Rev. 11:15 speaks, when, as it affirms 'the kingdoms of this world are to become the Kingdom of God,' when God 'will be all in all' (1 Cor. 15:28). For the time being Christ's Lordship over the universe is anonymous; he is not recognised and acclaimed as Lord.

We should, however, not deduce from this that God has handed the universe over to the counter-forces. He is not an absentee Lord whose estate is being ransacked by his enemies during his absence. To be sure, the enemy is active in God's world, extremely active, but we should never allow ourselves to accept that this world belongs to the enemy. If areas of the universe indeed appear to be enemy-occupied territory, let us never for one moment forget that they are occupied illegally, by a usurpur. Satan does not belong in this world. The earth is the Lord's.

If we forget this we commit the same mistake as those Christians who argue...that we had better withdraw from the world into a religious enclave. The terrible thing these Christians are doing is to grant legality to the spurious claim of the enemy that this world belongs to him, not to God! And when Jesus said to Pilate, 'My Kingdom is not of this world', his words should not be understood as meaning that his Kingdom is entirely other-worldly. It should rather, within the context of John's gospel, be understood to mean, 'My Kingdom does not operate according to the rules of this world which have been adulterated by Satan. My Kingdom is unique. But this does not make it other-worldly.' Did Jesus not, after all, teach his disciples to pray, 'Thy Kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven?' Therefore, if we Christians surrender this world to Satan, we play right into his hands. And we betray the Lordship of Christ.

I will leave you to draw out the practical implications of Bosch's excellent words. They are legion.

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