life towards God

This blog is now on ice. I’ll be shutting it down soon, but I’ll be blogging here from now on. Come and visit.

This is hilarious.

Note: The folks who put this online seem to be pro gay activists. Needless to say I don’t agree with them on the homosexuality issue but the parody of people like Fred Phelps is spot on.

From the Guardian…..

“This isn’t the Anglican split

A row over ‘theological extremism’ at an Oxford college seems little more than a personality clash

Jonathan Aitken
Thursday July 5, 2007
The Guardian

I spent two of the best years of my life as a student at Wycliffe Hall, the Oxford theological college recently in the headlines for “unholy rows”, bullying, homophobia, misogyny and staff intimidation, and mirroring the worldwide splits in Anglicanism. As these strongly denied allegations are likely to be repeated this weekend when the Church of England’s General Synod publicly discusses them during its equivalent of Question Time, perhaps it is a good moment to offer a fresh analysis of the controversy. Read the rest of this story here

Often ‘Justification’ is used as a relational term. Tom Wright has challenged what he no doubt sees as the traditional evangelical view of justification as being about a right relationship with God, and proposes instead a view of justiifcation that focuses on one’s membership in the covenant community. Now I’d like to say that Wright is knocking down a straw man here, but truth to tell, sometimes evangelicals have affirmed precisely this misunderstanding, using justiifcation language to speak about a relationship with God.

Classicaly however justification denotes, neither membership in the covenant community (Wright), nor a right relationship with God (broad evangelicalism). Rather, it denotes a right standing before the bar of God’s justice.

Perhaps a useful distinction would be to say that there is a real difference between standing in a relationship to something and having a relationship with something. As I type this I sit in a certain relationship to the doors and walls of my office. I am located in a certain spot relative to everything else. Justification is about my relationship to God’s justice. It locates me in a certain position with reference to the verdict of the divine righteousness.

On the other hand, adoption is about my relationship with God. It is expressly relational. I stand, in Chirst, adopted into the family of God. I am an heir of God and a co-heir with Chirst. I am His child. He is Abba Father to me.

Justification is not about my relationship with God, but my status at the bar of his justice. Adoption however is the doctrine that is all about my relationship with God.

I attended the PCRT at the end of April in Philadelphia and all in all I found it a fascinating window on American reformed Christianity- perhaps on certain strands of Reformed christianity in general.

I do not wish here to take cheap shots at the men involved in the PCRT or the Alliance of Confressing Evangelicals. Some of them are friends. I have profited from their ministries. I want to say nothing about their preaching, which I found useful and edifying.

I do, however, want to reflect a little on the grandeur of the whole event. It was an impressive musical tour de force, with astonishing classical compositions, sacred concerts and congregational praise. The speakers and their addresses were likewise powerful and dramatic. One speaker stood out for his fondness for Latin. Tenth’s large auditorium was packed and overflowing. The whole thing was grand. Impressive.

And therefore also terribly unreal and strangely disouraging.

As a pastor of a small reformed congregation in the heart of London the dramatic granduer of the PCRT felt artificial to me. It bore little resemblance to the realities of ministry where I am. At best it was an opportunity to hide from reality, to make believe along with a thousand or so others that the reformed faith is stronger than it is. At worst it sold me an illusion.

Luther’s famous distinction between the theology of glory and the theology of the cross was playing on my mind that weekend a great deal. Amidst all the grandeur, the sense of belonging to something that was solidly rooted, historic, biblical, and intelectually satisfying, I was very much aware of the danger of pride, of how terribly easy it would be to step from an approach that communicated the greatness of God and the glory of the truth into ostentation and display.

The PCRT reminded me that our worship and preaching, our demeanour and language must display the glory and greatness of God and his gospel AND that we see that glory and greatness best when we see the Cross and when our methods and manners are cross shaped.

I was moved to ask again how far my instincts in ministry are cruciform? Are they humble, unostentatious, and clear? Are they marked by simplicity? Are they resolutely opposed to generating an artificial sense of awe? Is my preaching dependant on the Spirit of Christ to speak the word of Christ which focusses on the Cross of Christ? Am I loking to evoke glory or am I looking to God who is glorious to display it? One path expresses a theology of glory the other a theology of the cross.

Crux probat omnia!

Some areas where, in my estimation, we who are critical of the Federal Vision theologies, ought to express thankfulness for genuine insights and correctives from that movement, and some others where we are right to be concerned (Continue reading…)

Looks like the PCA have adopted the controversial report censuring the Federal Vision and new Perspectives on Paul.

It will be interesting to see how the dust settles now that this decision has made.

This is the most telling commentary on the contemporary church I have ever seen. It is so awful it must be a spoof. If you watch it long enough it breathes out a ghostly ‘why?’ Click on the face and it follows you around! *Shudder*

The Ad Interim Committee on Federal Vision, New Perspective and Auburn Avenue Theology brings its report to the PCA General Assembly this year.

This report is a crucial document and will have wide repercussions for the whole reformed scene in the US if it passes. It has, needless to say received huge blog coverage. The most important repsonses to the Report are here by Jeff Myers, and another, called ‘Reformed news has stuff here . Both of these blogs are, what may be called Federal Vision friendly.

A recent reply has been posted here.

I do not feel competent to judge the debate over the technical and proceedural issues regarding formal competency and Robert’s Rules etc. It may also be true that this committee could be more representative. Moreover it may be that the PCA is heading for a split eventually over this issue.

Nevertheless my view, for what its worth, is that to deny the imputation of the righteousness of Christ, described as the acomplishment of his active and passive obedience in our place as representative and susbtitute, strikes at the very heart of the gospel and thus at the foundations of reformed evangelical Christianity. For me this is the most serious issue involved here. Other issues are the efficacy of the sacraments, the benefits enjoyed by non-elect covenant members, the most felicitous use of language and confessional/scriptural terminology etc. Many of these are important points. But in my view none are as serious as the issue of the imputation of the moral righteousness of Christ to the believers account by God’s grace through faith in Christ alone.

FV proponents are concerned about the language of ‘merit’ (though understanding the historical uses of the term within the mainstream of Reformed orthodoxy ought to allay fears here. In fact it seems to me that so much inveighing against ‘merit theology’ is really tilting at windmills.) and the failure in the above representation of justification to give due regard to the Resurrection as the justification of Jesus by which we are justified in union with him. In both of these areas they make good points, and the Reformed need to excercise care in the way we represent these truths.

Some FV proponents deny the language of imputation altogether, regarding it as a dangerous concession to a pernicious ‘merit theology’ that has crept in privily among the reformed. All we need, we are told, is union with Christ. We are in Him, therefore his righteousness is really ours. But as Mark Garcia has recently argued in the latest Westminster Theological Journal, the reformed doctrine of Union with Christ has always maintained the union of the believer with Christ without simultaneously confounding their identity with Christ’s. We are in him but we still remain distinct from him. We do not become Christ when we are in Christ. What is properly his remains his. What is properly ours remains ours. Without imputation to explain the way in which Christ’s righteousness is ours, in union with Christ, we cannot help but stray into categories to describe the union that sound to me more rooted in Constantinople rather than Geneva.

Errata: Mark Horne has pointed out in the comments that it is not true that FV proponents deny the language of imputation. He is quite right so far as I can see, although Don Garlington, in his response to Piper’s Counted Righteous in Christ seems to do just this. He writes “It is the contention of this paper that the free gift of
righteousness comes our way by virtue of union with Christ, not imputation as classically
defined.” (p1) And again, “It has been the
contention of this paper that exegesis will steer us away from imputation to union with
Christ” (p 38). Garlington may not be a Federal Vision proponent as such but there are certainly robust lines of connection between his own thought and others.

Nevertheless Mark is probably right. What is at stake is not the term so much as the content of the term. Is the active obedience of Christ imputed to the believer? Is imputation properly understood as a book keeping metaphor? What, precisely, is imputed? Those are the issues as I understand them. Mark, do come back on this if I have not quite grasped the variety of senses the term is being employed under. (For useful responses to the PCA report and various statements of so called ‘Federal Vision Theology’ Mark’s own site is a good place to start.)

Having posted on the much misunderstood term ‘catholic‘, and having had some recent debate with Carl Trueman on the issue of psalmody in the Church, I thought it might be useful to link to Carl’s excellent article on his Reformation 21 column The Wages of Spin.

This is a helpful Protestant appreciation of areas of common ground with post-Vatican II Roman Catholicism, and as such models what I was trying to say about being genuinely ‘catholic’. Check it out.