I have been reading John Bolt's book, Christian and Reformed Today (which is available free as a PDF here), and already in the first couple of chapters I have found some particularly important things regarding the trinitarian emphasis in Reformed theology. Bolt argues that, although most Christian traditions certainly claim to be trinitarian, they often focus on one person of the Trinity to the exclusion of the other two. Only in the Reformed tradition, Bolt asserts, can one find a fully trinitarian Christianity.
For the purposes of defintion, Bolt says, "A Reformed person is trinitarian in theology and catholic in vision" (21). Expanding first on the trinitarian aspect of his defintion, Bolt cites Herman Bavinck, who writes, "The essence of the Christian religion consists therein, that the creation of the Father, destroyed by sin, is again restored in the death and resurrection of the Son of God, and recreated by the grace of the Spirit to a Kingdom of God" (29). It is notable that though all three persons of the Trinity are equal, there is a logical flow that begins with God the Father and creation.
When Reformed trinitarian theology begins with the Father, this has some important implications. It means specifically that creation has priority over salvation, that salvation is not escape from or elevation above creation but the restoration of creation. It means that the most important question in life is not, "What must I do to be saved," but "How can I glorify God?" As the Westminster Catechism so beautifully states it, "The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever." It means that the Reformed tradition places a great deal of emphasis upon the idea of vocation or calling, upon serving God in this world rather than escaping from it (28).
So we see that a trinitarian theology begins and ends with God as Creator. This means that Christianity which is fully trinitarian will understand the end goal of the Christian life differently than a Christianity which lays more or less stress on one person of the Trinity. Most common in evangelical Christianity is the tendency to elevate the second person of the Trinity, thus making individual salvation the primary focus. As Bolt suggests, when the question, "What must I do to be saved?" becomes fundamental, the Christianity that emerges becomes too narrowly focused and fails to take into account the work of God to restore his creation and establish his rule as King. The biblical narrative is framed by creation and new creation, and our faith and theology must take this into account.
Bolt continues with an explanation of the second part of his definition:
The second part of the suggested definition has already been hinted at, namely that a Reformed person is catholic in vision. The Reformed view of life in the world is dominated by the idea of God's sovereignty over the entire cosmos. Abraham Kuyper in his Lectures on Calvinism put it this way: The dominating principle of Calvinism 'was not, soteriologically, justification by faith, but in the widest sense cosmologically, the sovereignty of the triune God over the whole cosmos, in all its spheres and kingdoms, visible and invisible.' That is what is meant by catholicity—the Reformed vision is cosmic or universal. The Reformed person is not satisifed with the salvation of his or her soul, as crucial as that is to being a Christian. The kingdom of heaven, the great Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck was fond of saying, is not only a pearl of great price, the treasure a man finds in a field and must obtain at all costs. It is that indeed, but it is also a leaven and a mustard seed which grows and expands. The gospel is a message for the world as well as for in the individual (29).
The stream of the Reformed tradition that has come to be known as the New Calvinism has a tendency to hear this and levy accusations both of transformationalism and a neglect of personal piety and holiness. That is a misunderstanding, however, and I think Bolt's emphasis on the trinitarian nature of the Reformed tradition is significant in correcting this misunderstanding. The focus of Reformed theology, as Bavinck notes above, is on the work of the triune God – not individuals – in restoring his creation and establishing the Kingdom of God. In turn, the people of God are called to embody the new reality that the coming of the Kingdom of God in Jesus Christ inaugurates. Holiness, then, is living according to the rule of the King in every part of life.
John Stott once said, "One of the major reasons people reject the Gospel today is not because they perceive it to be false but because they perceive it to be trivial." Because of that, he founded the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity in 1982 to be a resource to help Christians grow in their understanding of what it means for Christ to be Lord over all. The mission of LICC, according to their website, is "to envision and equip Christians and their churches for whole-life missionary discipleship in the world. We seek to serve them with biblical frameworks, practical resources, training and models so that they flourish as followers of Jesus and grow as whole-life disciplemaking communities."
Here is Mark Greene, the institute's director, talking a bit more about their mission:
This is very encouraging. It's always exciting when Christians really understand that Christ's Lordship extends over all of life.
Numerous times I have expressed my concern for escapist theology on this blog, by which I mean the theology that anticipates complete destruction of the physical world and for God to take the souls of his people away to live with him for eternity in some sort of disembodied, spiritual existence. Aside from the fact that there is explicit biblical teaching to the contrary, it occured to me today that there is also a pattern in God's redemptive work in history that defies this all-to-common theological error.
God comes to us.
All throughout redemptive history, God comes to his people. It is never the reverse. God is the Creator, and we are the creatures, and we have no access to God unless he first reveals himself to us. An infinite gulf separates man from God, a gulf that only God can bridge.
God creates man, and comes to him to make a covenant with him (Gen. 2). When Adam and Eve fall into sin, God comes to them with a promise of redemption (Gen. 3:15). God comes to Abraham to make a covenant with him and to call to himself a people, Israel (Gen. 12:1-3; 17:1-8). The nation of Israel is led into slavery in Egypt, but God comes to bring them out Egypt (Ex. 20:2) and lead them through the desert into the Promised Land. God comes to dwell with his people in the tabernacle and later the temple (1 Kings 8:10-11), and in the most significant act of human history, God comes to dwell among his people in the person of Jesus Christ (John 1:14). After Jesus' ascension into heaven, God comes again in the Holy Spirit to be with his people (Acts 2:1-41). The pattern is the same, over and over: God comes, God comes, God comes.
The eschatological implications for this should be obvious – in the final act of redemptive history, Christ returning to consumate his Kingdom, God again comes to us. He comes to us that we might dwell with him forever. He comes to us to cleanse us from all sin and unrighteousness, to make us holy. He comes to us, as Paul writes in Philippians 3:21, to 'transform our lowly [bodies] to be like his glorious body.' He comes to us to make us complete in him, to be everything we are intended to be as images of God.
But there is more. Because Christ's return is the pinnacle of redemptive history, his salvation will then be complete and extend as far as the curse is found. His creation 'will be liberated from its bondage to decay' (Romans 8:21) – renewed, restored, and glorified. God comes to earth to reclaim his good creation, to free it from the strangling grip of sin and death, and to make all things new (this is beautifully portrayed in so many parts of Scripture, but particularly notable are Amos 9:11-15, Isaiah 62; 65:17-25, and, of course, Revelation 21-22).
God comes to us. Understanding this pattern is key because it impacts all aspects of our theology, our worship, and so much more. We serve a sovereign Lord, the Creator of heaven and earth. Let us rejoice in a God who comes to us, calls us his own, and dwells among us.
A couple of weeks ago, Ryan Stander pointed me to a story about Kathleen Folden, who drove 690 miles from Kalipsell, Montana, to Loveland, Colorado with the sole purpose of destroying a work of art she, as a Christian, considered deeply offensive. The piece, called "The Misadventures of the Romantic Cannibals," had drawn protesters for the duration of its exhibition who claimed the work was blasphemous and pornographic.
Christians have long had a contentious relationship with art; many find themselves without a framework for how to even think about art in the first place and so turn to embracing kitsch, rejecting anything they cannot understand, or protesting (in Folden's case, violently) against something they consider to be an attack on their faith because, after all, most art is anti-Christian.
Stories like this raise all kinds of issues and questions. In the first place, for some Christians any type of art dealing with the person of Jesus immediately requires consideration of the second commandment. What was the artist, Enrique Chagoya, intending to convey with this piece? Was his intention to provoke Christians, and is he afforded the right to do so? In a pluralist society, where is the line drawn between protecting the freedom of artists to express themselves and protecting against religious persecution (I think it would be fair to assume that Folden felt this was an act of persecution)? Is an act of protest against an artist's work ever legitimate, and what should that protest look like?
There is much to discuss about this incident, but in the end I found it interesting that all the commentary focused on Folden's act of destroying the work. In part this is not surprising—society likes stories that portray Christians as nut-jobs and Folden did act in a rather outspoken way. But when I looked at a photograph of Chagoya's piece, I wondered why this did not raise more questions about art itself.
In the Fall issue of Comment magazine, Bruce Herman has an excellent article discussing a pendulum swing in the world of art. In recent times, he notes, art has been all about what is novel, strange, and provocative, moving away from what used to be a focus on meaning and substance. He writes,
Since the Renaissance, the servant role of the artist—with craftsmanship as its central value—has been gradually waning and the intellectual-poetic aspects of art have steadily risen. Historians and critics during this period have hailed the 'breakthrough' mentality, and some have even equated art with the cutting edge and the avant-garde... One result is that in the past several decades, artists of every discipline have been trained with the primary expectation that they shall produce new and sometimes shocking objects; choreograph daring dance movements; compose provocative musical pieces or poems—and in many cases, skill has been moved to the margins or completely off-stage.
We cannot get inside Chagoya's head and determine what motivated him to create the piece, and further, I am not an art critic by any stretch of the imagination, so to offer a critique of his piece is really beyond what I am qualified to do. Nonetheless, from my cursory glances at the work Folden attempted to destroy, I think Herman's words ought to be taken into consideration here. In one sense, Folden's negative reaction to the piece as a Christian is understandable. But perhaps this should elicit a further discussion about bad art—is Chagoya's piece the skilled work of a craftsman, or merely something to shock and provoke?
Herman notes that the responsibility of the artist is to employ skilled craftsmanship in the act of creating something beautiful. In large part, these two things have been missing from the world of art in the recent past. It is the question of what constitutes beauty that should be at the center of discussions on art and craft, but modern artists often eschew this conversation because, Herman notes, "beauty was largely exiled from art for nearly a century, being held suspect since Kantian philosophy equated it with superficial pleasure." But the fact is that beauty is something intrinsic in our Creator's nature. God's creative work is shot through with true beauty and skilled craftsmanship, and our artistic work, whatever form it takes, must aim to reflect this skill and beauty. Herman says,
Though we value the new and surprising in art, we can never wholeheartedly let go of craft for the simple reason that it is seated in the deep human desire to reflect glory to God in and through the arts of the beautiful. We were made by a Maker of beauty, and are restless until we too manage to make something beautiful, something purposeful and lasting. It is not enough to make something 'striking' or 'interesting'—certainly not something merely shocking. The ultimate result of placing lesser qualities like these at the centre is often a movement toward the extreme novelty of the perverse, in which case 'interesting' crosses over into the peculiar and finally into the taboo. Images are no more neutral than words, and yet there is a great resistance to legislating imagery of placing prohibitions on art the way we do on speech.
This incident, then, leaves us with a lot of questions. Was Folden justified in her attack on Chagoya's art? I don't think so. Was she right to protest something she considered blasphemous? Surely, although it could have taken a much more productive form. But perhaps the discussion should focus more on the nature of art. Is Chagoya's piece a skilled work of beauty? Must we accept modern art's propensity to make beauty a subjective standard in the mind of the artist or beholder, or must we judge it by a higher standard? If Chagoya's work is an act of provocation against Christians, can it also be seen as an implicit rejection of God's standards of beauty, and thus his sovereignty over all spheres of life? How do we determine what constitutes God's standards of beauty, and what role does common grace play in bring this beauty to fruition in the work of those who do not know God?
Since I am not artistically-minded, these are only musings. What do you think?
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.
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.
[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."
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.
Regeneration, for Herman Bavinck, is not a matter of something entirely new being created within us, but instead is a re-formation of human nature to what it was originally intended to be. There is no new substance added to what is already there, he writes in the first chapter of volume four of his Reformed Dogmatics. He then extends the discussion to creation, and makes this profoundly important point:
Finally also the re-creation that will take place in the renewal of heaven and earth (Matt. 19:28) is not the destruction of this world and the subsequent creation out of nothing of another world but the liberation of the creature that is now subject to futility. Nor can it be otherwise, for God's honor as Savior hinges precisely on his reconquest from the power of Satan of this human race and this world. Christ, accordingly, is not a second Creator, but the Redeemer and Savior of this fallen creation, the Reformer of all things that have been ruined and corrupted by sin. Neither, for that matter, is sin a substance, but consists in lawlessness (άνομια); it is an actualized privation (privatio actuosa) that has indeed violated the form (forma) of the entire created world but did not and could not destroy its substance or essence. Hence, when the re-creation removes sin from creation, it does not deprive it of anything essential, nothing that was essentially and originally characteristic of it (though it was "by nature") and belonged to its essence. For sin is not part of the essence of creation; it pushed its way in later, as something unnatural and contrary to nature. Sin is deformity. When re-creation removes sin, it does not violate and suppress nature, but restores it.
This point cannot be made strongly enough, especially in evangelical circles where creation is often not of great concern. But the fact is, as Bavinck so clearly states, that if creation is not restored, sin gains victory and the Lordship of Christ is rendered null and void.
When exploring the relationship between the Old and New Testament, we tend to pay lip service to the idea of continuity, while in reality we conceive of it more in terms of discontinuity. That modern evangelicalism tends to be one-dimensional does not help, nor does the great chronological distance between the era of Old Testament Israel and our own time.
But there are many important parallels to draw between then and now. Andy Crouch, in his recent book, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling, explores the significance of place in terms of the location God chose Israel to occupy. The nation of Israel was at the center and heart of the Ancient Near East and was surrounded by a number of different larger and more powerful nations, each of which had direct contact and interaction with Israel. Crouch points out that
Israel's location...ensured that its unique cultural vocation would be lived out in 'public,' we might say, among the great nations of its day. As much as Israel might have been tempted to withdraw from the larger cultural currents over the centuries of its history, it simply never had that option (128-129).
To complicate matters, these larger, stronger, pagan nations exerted a great amount of cultural pressure on Israel, which found its faith constantly put to the test. God could have chosen to isolate them instead, Crouch says, perhaps in a remote valley of the Swiss Alps or the Brazilian rainforest, "but in such a location, neither would have Israel's extraordinary claim to worship not just its own local god, but the world's very Maker and Lord, made much of a difference in the wider course of history" (129). God's design and purpose for Israel required it to be center stage, for
it was only in 'public,' in the context of tremendous political and economic pressure, that Israel's cultural creativity could be made available to the neighboring nations big and small: its legal code with its keen sense of justice and responsibility toward the weak; its poetry of praise, thanksgiving and lament; its Scriptures bearing witness to the character of the one true God. Indeed, without those cultural pressures Israel's culture might have been substantially less creative in the first place. The exile into Babylon was the most devastating blow Israel suffered, an attempt at cultural eradication comparable to the Holocaust of the twentieth century. But the exile forced Israel to grapple with the implications of its faith beyond its borders, to ask what faithfulness looked like in a diaspora where neither kings nor priests had majority power, to cry, 'How could we sing the Lord's song / in a foreign land?' (Ps. 137:4) and begin to find an answer (129).
The implications and parallels for us are clear; Crouch has a way of stating the obvious without ever actually saying it. Although God's people find themselves in a radically different time and place today, our calling and purpose remains the same as Old Testament Israel's—to bear witness to the sovereign King of the Universe, and bring His rule to bear on all of life. Our place, living in the midst of this world and its various cultures, does not allow us to passively withdraw.
No less than Israel, we are to be a light to the nations. We live our lives in public.
