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."
