eternal-victim-slain-july-august-1997

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EFORMATION VOLUME 6 NUMBER 4

ETERNAL VICTIM SLAIN

THE THEOLOGY OF THE CROSS AND THE CRISIS OF MODERN CONSCIOUSNESS

EFORMATION

Eternal Victim Slain THE THEOLOGY OF THE CROSS AND THE CRISIS OF MODERN CONSCIOUSNESS

A Publication of Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals Editor-in-Chief Dr. Michael S. Horton

FEATURES

Managing Editor Benjamin E. Sasse

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Michael S. Horton Using historical philosophical thought as a foil, Michael Horton shows the depth of what it means to say that God is with us.

Copy Editors Ann Henderson Hart Deborah Barackman Layout and Design Lori A. Yerger Production Coordinator Irene H. Hetherington

12 Fascinations that Lead Away from the Cross…

Proofreader Alyson S. Platt ACE Council Dr. John H. Armstrong The Rev. Alistair Begg Dr. James M. Boice Dr. W. Robert Godfrey Dr. John D. Hannah Dr. Michael S. Horton Mrs. Rosemary Jensen Dr. J.A.O. Preus Dr. R.C. Sproul Dr. Gene E. Veith, Jr. Dr. David F. Wells

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Michael S. Horton The current fascinations with miracles, morals and mysteries are shown as contemporary expressions of an age old problem— pitting a theology of glory against the theology of the cross.

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14 Is Anybody Home?

Robert Kolb An honest appraisal of life from the foot of the cross that leads us to live by faith.

Contributing Scholars Dr. S. M. Baugh Dr. D. A. Carson Dr. Sinclair B. Ferguson Dr. Timothy George Dr. D. G. Hart Dr. Carl F. H. Henry Dr. Arthur A. Just Dr. Robert Kolb Dr. Richard A. Muller Mr. Kenneth A. Myers Dr. Tom J. Nettles Dr. Roger Nicole Dr. Leonard R. Payton Dr. Lawrence R. Rast Dr. Kim Riddlebarger Mr. Rick Ritchie Dr. Rod Rosenbladt The Rev. Harold L. Senkbeil Dr. Robert Strimple Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals © 1997 All rights reserved.

ACE exists to call the church, amidst our dying culture, to repent of its worldliness, to recover and confess the truth of God’s Word as did the Reformers, and to see that truth embodied in doctrine, worship and life. For more information, call or write us at: ALLIANCE OF CONFESSING EVANGELICALS 1716 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103 (215) 546-3696

Hide Not Your Face

20 Suffering and Joy J. A. O. Preus Told from the perspective of a military chaplain, the suffering/ joy paradigm of ministry is seen as God’s good gift.

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DEPARTMENTS 2 3 18 31 32

In This Issue Letters Quotes In Print A Cloud of Witnesses 43 Footnotes 44 On My Mind

24 Divine Impassibility and Our Suffering God Peter D. Anders How does an immutable God identify with human suffering?

Peter Anders seeks to bring clarity to this often unaddressed issue.

34 The Altar of God’s Mercy Excerpts from plenary addresses delivered at the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology.

In This Issue…

By Michael S. Horton

Our Constant Struggle: The Theology of the Cross vs. The Theology of Glory n rare occasions, one stumbles on a topic that is not only a fascinating subject of theology, but a completely new way of seeing theology. For me, justification and election not only added to my beliefs, but rearranged all the furniture. A similar epiphany occurred concerning the theology of the cross. At least two important books (one by Walther von Loewenich, the other by Alister McGrath) are titled Luther’s Theology of the Cross, but Luther would be the first to tell us that it is Paul’s theology of the cross, and the message of the entire redemptive story. Once we see what this contrast means, suddenly the biblical plot is illuminated in some surprising ways. In the theology of the cross, both Christ’s cross and our participation in that cross throughout our lives, find a bond. It helps us understand the link between theology and life, between Christ’s redemptive work and our suffering. It doesn’t need to be made practical; it is practical from start to finish.

For Calvin, the theology of the cross is cast in the form of union with Christ and the antitheses of faith and merit, mystical encounters, and the mediation of God’s Presence through the ordinary means of grace.

“Now we see how many good things, interwoven, spring from the cross,” Calvin wrote. “For, overturning that good opinion which we falsely entertain concerning our own strength, and unmasking our hypocrisy, which affords us delight, the cross strikes our perilous confidence in the flesh” (Institutes, 3.8.3).

“The wisdom of the cross is today very much hidden in a deep mystery,” wrote Luther (W.V., 84, 10). It is “not only unheard of, but is by far the most fearful thing even for the rulers of the church. Yet it is no wonder, since they have abandoned the Holy Scriptures in favor of the unholy writings of men and the dissertations on finances instead” (W.V., 42, 8ff.). Hauntingly familiar in the light of the popularity of church growth and fundraising manuals over texts of theology, this message of

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the cross is in need of recovery once more.

Only a year after the nailing of the rather conservative Ninety-Five Theses in 1517, the German reformer began to clearly distinguish two antithetical theologies: glory and the cross. Just as Paul’s theology contrasts the cross as foolishness to the wise, weakness to the powerful, and suffering to the fit, and the Gospels emphasize the humiliation of the cross as our Savior’s way of securing future glory for us, so Luther found that throughout Scripture these two theologies struggled for dominance like Jacob and Esau in the church’s womb.

The theology of glory rests on the premise that we can find God by climbing ladders of religious or philosophical speculation, mystical experience, or moral achievement. At the end of the “seeker’s” ascent is God alright, but this “naked God” is not salvation, but the “consuming fire” (Heb. 12:29). “Truly,” Isaiah declared, “You are God, who hide yourself, O God of Israel, the Savior!” (Isa. 45:15). While we hide ourselves in order to conceal something, says Luther, God hides himself in order to reveal something. If we were to encounter God directly (as the theology of glory urges in its various forms), we would be turned to ash. But God wants to have a saving relationship with us through the Mediator, Jesus Christ, and has graciously devised a way of clothing himself in flesh, clothing us in his righteousness, and then raising our bodies as the victorious fruit of his own physical resurrection. One day there will be glory, but for now, the cross. “For now we see in a glass darkly, but then face to face!”

We are also pleased to announce that this issue marks the first of David Wells’ regular column of comment, “On My Mind.” This will doubtless improve the content and it is just one step in a plan to improve the quality of this magazine.

MODERN REFORMATION

L ETTERS QUESTIONS ABOUT “MINISTRY” As usual, I have read my modernReformation within twenty-four hours of receiving it. Again, it was stimulating and thought-provoking. Unfortunately, it left me with more questions.

I share your concerns and views regarding the ministry of the church and those called to the ministerial offices. But I am now more than a little confused about what constitutes the ministries of the church. Yes, I agree that first and foremost ministry of the church is right use of the Word and Sacraments. But where do other so-called “ministries” now fit in. Where does Sunday School (or Christian education within the church) fit in? Do we do “youth ministry?” What about our activities that engage men (I don’t mean Promise Keepers, per se), women, et al. Do we not have soup kitchens or aid the poor from our church? Or are some of our church “ministries” swept up under the category of the right proclamation and use of the Word?

Outside of the Word and Sacraments, what else does the church engage in that we would know as ministry?

Again, I agree with the fundamentals of your teaching. But I am trying to understand how this works out in the week-to-week of the church.

Craig Hartranft Ephrata, PA In Michael Horton’s article, “What About Bob?”, Horton wrote about church discipline, quoting 2 Cor. 10:8 and Matt. 13:29. Does Horton think Matt. 13:29 applies to the sphere of the church? The weeds that the Lord forbids to be plucked up are not the weeds in the church, but the weeds in the world (Matt. 13:38). The weeds in the church should not become members, take Communion, vote, or feel comfortable listening to polemical (read: clear) preaching of the Law and the Gospel.

My question concerning church discipline is the proper reading of I Cor 5:11. When it says not to associate with “anyone named a brother” or “anyone who is called a brother,” does this refer only to those that we determine to be Christians who also are one of the things mentioned later in verse 11, or does this verse also refer to those who wrongly think or call themselves Christians?

Frank Bernard Seattle, WA

THANKS I wanted to write to let you know how much enlightenment and help modernReformation has brought to me. You have, through these various pages, been used of God to make the Reformation sola’s come alive to me, and as a result, I have been able to understand and experience the grace of God in ways I never did before.

I’ve been a Christian since the spring of 1973, and God has steadily led me in spiritual growth. But just in the last year or two, God has really opened my eyes to the truth of Scripture, his sovereignty and grace, my place in his heart and love, and how to live in this world as his child with faith. This has largely come about because of reading your writings and those of others such as David Wells, James Montgomery Boice, Gene Veith, Mark Noll, and the various authors in MR. Dan Rhone Via America Online WHAT ABOUT THE UNREFORMED REFORMED CHURCHES? How is it that now, after all of this time, you have decided to point out the obvious er rors of evangelicalism, while your churches have been spiritually dead for years? My conviction is that all of the “stuff ” that happened in the 1970’s is a judgement of God on dead orthodoxy within the so-called “orthodox” churches. Having come out of evangelicalism to a PCA church, I rejoice in the work that ACE is doing, but my concern and confusion is that you have never addressed the deadness, and liberalism, that exists in the Lutheran and Presbyterian ranks. Instead, you attack evangelicalism (not without merit!). Why have you neglected your own flock with its liberalism? In my last ten years of attending a reformed church, I have yet to hear preached and expounded the solid teachings of the Reformation! I think that judgement should begin in our own unreformed reformed churches! Agree?

Monte Reamer Via Internet modernREFORMATION: Letters to the Editor 1716 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103 Fax: (215) 735-5133 www.remembrancer.com/ace JULY/AUGUST 1997

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Hide Not Your Face MICHAEL S. HORTON

Passing through the Wall into the last East Berlin train station on a characteristically grey day over a decade ago, I made my way to various sites, arriving finally at the Bundesmuseum, which housed some of Germany’s finest paintings. In each room

new tragedy, whether flood victims in the Midwest, unrest in the Middle East, inter-tribal holocausts in Rwanda and Bosnia, and the everyday disasters in which each of us offers up that familiar lament, “Why me, God?” Either God is too close, or too far away. Either way, he is a problem and not an answer. That is how we often feel, whether we express it or not.

a guide was positioned who could explain each Is Anybody Up There? piece.

One older There is a real sense in woman, whose face which God is not there. mirrored a whole history, Long before medieval approached me and theologians were invited me to discuss the speculating about the painting I was enjoying.

Deus absconditus (the Once she realized I was Hidden God), and an American and that radical theologians were what little Ger man I announcing the alleged knew caused her great “death of God,” the anguish to hear, I gave up prophet Isaiah declared, the attempt and we spoke “Truly You are God, who in English. It was a hide Yourself, O God of painting of the Garden Israel, the Savior!” (Isa. of Eden in its pristine 45:15).

If Israel’s state. “What does this experience in exile left mean to you?”, she her wondering whether inquired. “What once God had turned his face was, but was spoiled from her, leaving her because of our rebellion desolate and without his against God,” I replied. presence, surely the sense “Our rebellion?”, she of alienation from God demanded in an offended is justly experienced by tone. “Where was this the modern person. In ‘God’ when I was a little the Tractatus, the great girl and Hitler was in philosopher Ludwig Veil & Mirror, Ruth Naomi Floyd power, while our homes Wittgenstein writes, “God were left in ruins by the does not reveal himself in bombs?” Caught off-guard by her superior life the world” (6.432). Whether philosophical speculation experience, I spent more time gathering my composure or personal experience (or, more likely, a dialectic than evangelizing. Her question was a good one. I know between these), God’s presence is not taken for granted in the answer in part, but it was—and is—a good question. our age.

Before long, there will be few people who can tell us Even before the Holocaust, the “enlightened” age stories about their experience during that horrific anticipated the despair that no longer surprises or chapter in Western history. But there will always be a dismays, but is simply there, like an open wound one 4

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must learn to bear with no expectation of cure.

In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Friedrich Nietzsche introduces us to the classical myth of the gods Apollo and Dionysius. Apollo is a god of light, order, sanity; Dionysius a god of darkness, chaos, and insanity. While the former was the god of the heavens, the latter was the god of nature. While Apollo behaved himself—and expected everyone to do so as well, Dionysius was the ribald and intoxicated deity who devoted himself to music and revelry. Identifying with Dionysius rather than Apollo, Nietzsche and his disciples looked forward to the day when a superman would arrive, a Dionysian hero whose will to power would conquer the world, in sharp contrast to the biblical God who, as a remnant of “inferior” Jewish mythology, has taught us to be weak and to accept our fate in this world. “The god on the cross is a curse on life, a signpost to seek redemption from life.”

But “Dionysius cut to pieces is a promise of life; it will be eternally reborn and return from destruction.” 1 In Nietzsche’s writings, it is the madman who, first having sought God, is the one who announces his death: “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now?

Whither are we moving? Away from all suns?

Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning?”2 In the modern age, Plato’s dualism between the world of reality and the world of appearances was revived with g reat vigor. For the g reat Greek philosopher, to the realm of the Real belonged the eternal and changeless forms and ideas, reached only by rising above the senses and the ever-changing realm of Appearances. Our observable world of history, of rocks and trees, sunsets and crashing waves, is a shadow, a vain and passing—not to mention, misleading—chimera that mocks us. Only by pure reason, speculating our way above the world we encounter with our senses can we ever hope to attain true knowledge and salvation from our temporal, physical, historical existence.

First in the modern age to revive this vision was Rene Descartes (1596-1650): “I will consider myself as without hands, eyes, flesh, blood, or any of the senses,

and as falsely believing that I am possessed of these.”3 Doubting everything he possibly could, Descartes was determined to come to mathematical certainty about whatever he could not doubt. That indubitable certainty, he concluded, was the existence of his mind: “I think; therefore, I am.” G. E. Lessing (1729-81) followed in tow, contrasting the imperfect knowledge that can be gained from the senses with cer tain knowledge gained by pure speculative reason. Since history belongs to the ever-changing world of appearances, it cannot yield genuine knowledge. Thus, in commenting on the Christian claims, Lessing confessed that even if Jesus rose from the dead, this fact of history would be insufficient to command his allegiance. “That, then, is the ugly, broad ditch which I cannot get across, however often and however earnestly I have tried to make the leap. If anyone can help me get over it, let him do it. I beg him, I adjure him. He will deserve a divine reward from me.”4 This “ugly, broad ditch” haunts the modern mind.

In fact, contemporary Cambridge theologian (and former evangelical) Don Cupitt declares, almost repeating Lessing verbatim, “How can we depend upon the uncertainties of historical tradition for knowledge of, and our power to attain, a history-transcending truth?”5 Immanual Kant (1724-1804) did not seem troubled by this Platonic dualism that had created an unbreachable chasm between the two realms. Like Plato, he held that the realm of reality was the noumenal (eternal forms, ideas), accessible to pure reason alone, while the realm of appearances, the phenomenal, consists of empirical facts. God cannot be known except as the presupposition for morality. Thus, the only significance of the life of Jesus of Nazareth lies in his example of the ideal moral life. In modern theology, this meant that somehow knowledge of God had to take place either in the mind (rationalism/idealism) or in the heart (pietism/romanticism), since history was no longer God’s playing field. Denying the historicity of the Resurrection, Friederich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) located the essence of religion in “the feeling of absolute dependence.” Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55) argued that the only way to get across the chasm is to close one’s eyes and simply leap. The key question is not whether one has reasons for doing so (he followed Tertullian’s maxim, “I believe because it is absurd”), but whether one will make a decision in the moment of crisis. Thus, for Kierkegaard and his existentialist followers, the point of contact was not in history, the mind, or the heart, but in the will.

On the present scene, we have not surpassed these modern options inherited from Plato’s false dilemma.

Rudolf Bultmann may construct his dualism between Geschichte (redemptive events) and Historie (actual JULY/AUGUST 1997

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historical events), peeling away the “husk” of Christianity’s historical myths from the kernel of universal, rational truths to which those sagas point, but this is the Platonic-Kantian dualism of the realms of ideas (the noumenal) and appearances (the phenomenal).

Even Barth may frame his dogmatics, as he himself says, on Kierkegaard’s “infinite qualitative distinction” between God above and us here below, so that what is required is a “leap of faith,” but neither of these great modern theologians has challenged the underlying assumption: “the ugly, broad ditch” itself. All of modern theology assumes that it is still there and must somehow be crossed by us.

We must reason, work, feel, or decide our way across it.

Or there are those who have tried to merge the two realms into one absolute rational entity. Hegel (1770-1831) tried to do this in his day, as Wolfhart Pannenberg is attempting to do it in our own. But it is done at the expense of God’s transcendence, his distance and hiddenness apart from Christ.

It’s no wonder, then, that Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72) announced that “Religion is the dream of the human mind,” with God as nothing more than the projection of humanity.6 For him, each of the doctrines of Christianity was an obstacle to humanity realizing its power and glorious destiny. “The Christian theory of justification by faith,” he wrote, “is rooted in a cowardly renunciation of moral effort” and belief in the hereafter nothing more than “an escape mechanism.” “Religion,” he said, “is as bad as opium.”7 Thus, he anticipated Karl Marx (1818-83), arguing that religion is “the opiate of the people.”8 But it was Nietzsche (1844-1900) who actually felt the burden to bring humanity the news of God’s demise.

After Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) turned this critique into a pseudo-scientific theory, insisting that religion is nothing more than an illusion, a coping mechanism in the face of life’s traumas.

So, you see, long before the tragedies of our century, the modern age has been preparing itself for life without God.

giving of the Law, God warned Moses to place limits around the mountain, “lest the people break through to gaze upon the LORD.” So terrified were they of God’s Word, with the lightning, thunder, and smoke, that they begged that God speak no more. Instead, they decided to fashion a golden calf, a more “seeker-friendly” version of God, one that they could create and therefore control. The essence of idolatry is the fear of dealing with the true God whose presence in holiness fills us with fear because of our own sinfulness.

Thus, throughout biblical history (and history in general) there is this flight from the “I AM,” the God of power and glory. Our consciences testify to this God, but this awareness is something that we try to suppress in our wickedness.

Instead we build suitable “projections” of gods who will not threaten us, gods who are not far away—or, if they’re friendly and useful enough, gods who are close at hand, gods who do not judge. Indeed, they are projections of ourselves (Rom. 1 and 2). To that extent, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud have more on the ball than many modern theologians. Religion is a projection of our own “felt needs,” fig leaves of our inner life to cloak our guilt, a golden calf of our own imagination to hide us from the God of blinding glory.

After Israel’s disobedience at Sinai, there remained the problem of God’s presence. If God maintains his presence among his sinful people, he will very likely break out in wrath against them. Yes, Moses says, but if God does not lead them, the world will say that God led Israel out of Egypt only to let his people die in the desert. So God maintains his presence, but “outside the camp,” in a pitched tent where his glory is hidden behind a curtain.

Eventually, when God leads his people into the promised land, Solomon builds the majestic temple and the Glory Cloud filled this earthly sanctuary of God’s presence. Once a year, the high priest would enter with the sacrificial blood and sprinkle it on the Mercy Seat, laying his hands on the head of a scapegoat to transfer Israel’s guilt to the animal, sending it into the wilderness.

But as Israel’s sins grew greater and she turned from Yahweh to the gods of the nations, the Glory Cloud left the temple as it had in Eden, and once again God’s sanctuary was taken back up into heaven. He hid his face from Israel and she was immediately sent into captivity.

I need a promise, and not a

general promise, but a particular promise, addressed to me: “I have forgiven your sins, so come unto me.

Do not be afraid.”

Hide Not Your Face From Us, O LORD God warned Moses when the patriarch asked to see God’s face, “No man can see Me and live.” In fact, as the people of Israel arrived at Mount Sinai for the 6

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It was in this exile that Isaiah was raised up as a If we were inherently righteous, faithful in all ways prophet. Although God has hidden his face from the to God’s holy will, the announcement of God’s house of Jacob, Isaiah and the remnant will hope in him omnipresence would be good news. But Adam and Eve (Isa. 8:17). “‘With a little wrath I hid My face from didn’t see it that way. After they had sinned, they fled you for a moment; but with from God’s presence, that localized everlasting kindness I will have presence they used to enjoy as the mercy on you,’ says the LORD, your Holy of Holies was the whole Redeemer” (Isa. 54:8). God’s garden itself, without a curtain to near ness and distance are separate the royal couple from their metaphorically revealed in spacial Creator. Their sinfulness caused the ter ms, but the point is the Israelites at Mount Sinai, at first qualitative distinction between curious to catch a glimpse of the eye Creator and creature: “‘For My of the storm (God in his majestic thoughts are not your thoughts, nor glory), to beg God to be silent. are your ways My ways,’ says the News of God’s majesty, power, LORD. ‘For as the heavens are glory, holiness, and justice only higher than the earth, so are My comforts those who are not guilty. ways higher than your ways, and My This is why God denies Moses the thoughts than your thoughts,” (Isa. request to see the divine Majesty, 55:8-9). Israel must learn that her but condescends to show him his “hidden God” cannot be seen. “For “backward par ts”: that is, his Adam and Eve receiving instructions from God. no one can see Me and live.” If they 17th century. Museo de Navarra, Pamplona, Spain goodness and mercy, by preaching a are to be saved, they must learn to sermon: “I will proclaim my name, receive God as he reveals himself through his Word.

Yahweh. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy.”

Turning away from the false religions, Israel must ignore As Adam and Eve were redeemed only after God, the her own imaginations, speculations, and experiences as only true Seeker, caught up with them and proclaimed the ground for her faith and practice, relying only on the the Gospel, stripping them of their fig leaves only to promise of the Gospel. Thus, even in exile, far from the clothe them in sacrificial skins, so the Israelites were Temple and the land of promise, the remnant that heard only calmed and comforted by the Holy Presence when and accepted this Word enjoyed God’s merciful presence they knew that the high priest was interceding on their in far greater measure than the adulterous generation behalf with the blood sprinkled on the Mercy Seat. had known in Israel.

The theologian of glory, said Luther, sees God everywhere and in everything. Now, that doesn’t mean that we deny God’s omnipresence if we are to reject a But Why Is God Hiding? theology of glory. What Luther meant was this: For God is everywhere, isn’t he? Don’t we believe in his those who seek an unmediated, direct encounter with omnipresence? To be sure, God is Spirit and the cosmos cannot contain him (2 Chron. 2:6). But does that really the God of Glory, it is enough that “the heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps. 19:1). They can contemplate the help us where we are right now? This is equivalent to trying to prove God’s existence. So what if we are able majesty of God without fear, because they do not really to demonstrate God’s presence? Again let us listen to know themselves very well. But for the person who Nietzsche, a most unlikely (and unwitting) biblical knows herself to be a helpless sinner, guilty and under commentator: God’s just sentence, this is hardly comforting. Calvin makes this point in the very beginning of the Institutes.

One can do absolutely nothing with it, not to All of the star-lit nights, summer breezes, moving speak of letting happiness, salvation and life symphonies, dramatic demonstrations, and visible depend on the gossamer of such a possibility. testimonies to God’s glory only confirm our conscience For one could assert nothing at all of the in its verdict against us. There is no comfort in knowing metaphysical world except that it was a beingthat God is nearby unless I know that he is nearby for my other, an inaccessible, incomprehensible beinggood, and not in order to bring me to trial. Until that is other ; it would be a thing with negative settled, no general knowledge of God from his visible qualities. Even if the existence of such a world works will bring me to any place except despair. The were never so well demonstrated, it is certain glory of God testifies to God’s existence and perfection, that knowledge of it would be the most useless but it does not testify to God’s interest in saving me. For of all knowledge.9 that, more than the visible realm of nature is needed. I JULY/AUGUST 1997

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need a promise, and not a general promise, but a particular promise, addressed to me: “I have forgiven your sins, so come unto me. Do not be afraid.”

Although he will meditate on God’s works in creation and redemption, the psalmist confesses, “Your way was in the sea, your path in the great waters, and your footsteps were not known” (Ps. 77:19). Mystics and rationalists revel in this abyss. Instead of regarding it as God’s hiddenness, into which God warned the Israelites not to gaze, they invest great energy and enthusiasm in probing, speculating, opining, experiencing, imagining.

As Luther reminds us, however, the God they meet at the other end is the “consuming fire.”

God hides those who trust in him under the shadow of his wings (Ps. 17:8), but he also hides his face from his enemies (Ps. 10:11). After his great sin, the psalmist begs God, “Do not hide your face from me” (Ps. 55:1).

He is a hiding place (Ps. 32:7), and yet when he comes in wrath, the inhabitants of the earth will cry out for the rocks to fall on them in order to hide them from his glorious appearing (Rev. 6:16). From Genesis to Revelation, there is this struggle—this awkwardness— ranging from indescribable joy to utter terror, when we talk about God’s presence. This is far indeed from the modern triviality with which we treat God’s presence.

We assume that God is near, and that is necessarily good news, without needing to hear anything more said. But that is because we do not really know either God or ourselves. How do we know we will not hear the same Word spoken through Amos? “Woe to you who desire the day of the LORD! For what good is the day of the LORD to you? It will be darkness, and not light.

It will be as though a man fled from a lion only to meet a bear! Or as though he went into his house for safety only to lean his hand on the wall, and a scorpion bit him! Is not the day of the LORD darkness, and not light? Is it not very dark, with no brightness in it?” (Amos 5:18-20). What makes us think that God’s appearing is good news for us? At least Nietzsche knew himself, better than most of us know ourselves today. He knew that someone had to go: either God or himself. He would not enter tain the third possibility: that God was present to save, so he could only conclude that God’s presence meant death for himself. Nietzsche conceded that this was the cause of his madness, and he did, in fact, die insane, but there was nowhere else to hide.

The Secret Things Belong to the Lord The preacher says, “Do not be rash with your mouth, and let not your heart utter anything hastily before God. For God is in heaven, and you on earth” (Ecc. 5:2). Some bold souls who forget this try to storm heaven’s gates and search God’s secret chambers.

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“God told me to move to Kansas,” “God gave me a revelation for you”: this is the sort of thing about which God commanded Jeremiah to warn Israel. Even when we discuss God’s gracious election, our natural curiosity leads us to inquire beyond the sacred page.

After discussing predestination, the Apostle Paul cries out in praise instead of speculation: “Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out! ‘For who has known the mind of the LORD? Or who has become His counselor?’ ‘Or who has first given to Him and it shall be repaid to him?’

For of Him and through Him and to Him are all things, to whom be glory forever. Amen” (Rom. 11:3336). Calvin reminds us, “Human curiosity renders the discussion of predestination, already somewhat difficult of itself, very confusing and even dangerous. No restraints can hold it back from wandering in forbidden bypaths and thrusting upward to the heights. If allowed, it will leave no secret to God that it will not search out and unravel” (3.21.1). This is why Calvin insisted that instead of seeking out God’s secret predestination, we must contemplate Christ, in whom we are chosen. We do not know what God has decided in his deep and mysterious hiddenness, and we can only know that which God condescends to reveal to us as he “cloaks” his unapproachable light in humility and weakness.

Earlier Calvin wrote, “When a shameless fellow mockingly asked a pious old man what God had done before the creation of the world, the latter aptly countered that he had been building hell for the curious” (1.14.1). While human curiosity tempts us to pry into the private thoughts and plans of God, he refuses to be known except as he condescends to reveal himself to us. Like mystical experiences or meritorious deeds, we only speculate our way to hell, never to heaven.

It is God who must take initiative to reveal himself.

He does this in creation, but in this natural revelation he is still hidden. We can know him as Power, Majesty, Governor, Wise Creator, Providence, and Judge, but of what good is this knowledge to us when we are in the grip of our personal and collective sinfulness, living this side of Eden?

To question God’s presence in manifestation is not to question his ontological existence, but his relation to us. Cardinal Newman reminds us that the “Conscience is the faculty to which natural revelation is directed. As I must use my own lungs and not another’s, so I must use my own conscience. I cannot adduce incorrigible arguments in support of this, but I cannot live without exercising it. In fact, says Newman, “Conscience is nearer to me than any other means of knowledge.”10 But what kind of knowledge does conscience provide with respect to God’s presence or absence? “In consequence, MODERN REFORMATION

the special Attribute under which it brings Him before us, to which it subordinates all other Attributes, is that of justice—retributive justice. We learn from its informations to conceive of the Almighty, primarily … as a God of Judgment and Justice; as One, who, not simply for the good of the offender, but as an end good in itself, and as a principle of government, ordains that the offender should suffer for his offense.”11 It follows, then, “that the aspect under which Almighty God is presented to us by Nature, is (to use a figure) of One who is angry with us, and threatens evil.”12 Hence, Newman infers, the world’s universal sense of sin and the need for atonement.

Wherever one looks across the vast horizon of polymorphous and diverse religious forms, these two elements reign. The Epicurean poet Lucretius laments the “heavy yoke” of religion, although in their evolution most religions discover ingenious ways of replacing their immediate intuitions with more positive representations of the divine. Even the need for a substitutionary sacrifice is ubiquitous, “for wher-ever there is a priest, there is the notion of sin, pollution, and retribution, as, on the other hand, of intercession and mediation.”13 Thus, we learn in natural revelation that there is a God who has made us and the world, that “we are personally responsible for what we do, that we have no means of shifting our responsibility, and that dereliction of duty involves punishment.”14 Although amendment may be attempted, the conscience knows that this is not the same as reparation. If Hitler could have come to see the error of his ways and, in his later life, served the happiness and good of the subjects of his cruelty, the world would nevertheless have been dissatisfied. Our innate sense is too powerful and our conscience too definite to admit the justice of substituting repentance for reparation. If that is true in the case of the unjust (ourselves), how can God accept our feeble attempts at restitution? Although Newman would not have taken the point this far, Scripture clearly does: we sin in the very act of presuming to offer our righteousness as meritorious. What we see as glorious, God sees as shameful; what we see as shameful, God sees as glorious. This is true at least with respect to the theology of the cross.

Thus, “what strikes the mind so forcibly and so painfully is, [God’s] absence (if I may so speak) from His own world,” says Newman. “It is a silence that speaks … Why does not He, our Maker and Ruler, give us some immediate knowledge of Him?”15 This is where natural religion leaves us, staring into the abyss. It is this awareness of our own culpability that transforms the initial delight in God as creator of the world and author of beauty into despair. Even Kant, for whom God was unknowable by pure reason, famously remarked, “Two things move the mind with ever increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.”16 This is hardly “foolishness to Greeks,” for everyone knows that God exists by observing the natural world. But what is foolishness to Greeks is what God was doing at Calvary. Even the “starry hosts” on a clear night cause us to tur n the positive contemplation of the greatness of God into the dark realization that this is merely a measure of terror, dread, hiddenness, and the fearful expectation of judgment. Doesn’t David’s contemplation of the starry heavens intoxicate him with the question, “What is man, that you are mindful of him?” (Ps. 8)?

We either push God into a totally tran-scendent, un-knowable realm (as did Kant), or identify him with our own selves, as an “inner spark” or universal principle of reason and experience. Or we kill him.

Natural religion leaves the human race in the tension between respect and hatred of the divine, a tension from whose release is sought through the device of appeasement, propitiation, atonement. How to cross this abyss is the subject of special revelation, but natural revelation attempts its own strategy, a fumbling in the dark toward often ingenious methods of redemption. At this edge, the natural person will generate special revelations and redemptive schemes, but the Christian faith maintains that natural revelation issues universally in idolatry and selfredemption. Only in Christ is the abyss crossed, by divine descent rather than by human ascent. For all of this, the conscience is ill-equipped. It can lead us to the abyss, but it cannot lead us across. Here we must be confronted by divine movement to us from the other side.

In Jesus Christ, the God-Man,

the true Temple is rebuilt after its destruction. It is his body torn, like the veil of Herod’s temple, from top to bottom, that gives us access through his blood into the Holy of Holies.

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The history of philosophy, whether eastern or western, is as much the history of the abyss as is religion. Whether discovered in dogmas about the release from samsara or in the dualisms of Wester n thought (the world of for m and appearances, noumenal and phenomenal, ideas and matter, mind and world, Historie and Geschichte), this sense of the abyss pervades the historical consciousness of the human race, however multifarious its forms. That philosophy, especially metaphysics, has been so long preoccupied with crossing the chasm attests to its abiding significance as a legitimate interest.

Although its religious identity has been concealed in sophisticated schema which often (at least in the modern age) discount religion as speculative prejudice, our age is finally beginning to come to terms with the fundamentally theological basis of these questions. Even the trajectory beginning with Feuerbach, Marx and Nietzsche, leading up to Martin Heidegger’s and Jacques Derrida’s progressive critique of religion, points to this.

The Summer Is Past, the Harvest Has Ended, and We Are Still Not Saved In the fullness of time, “the Word became flesh and dwelt [literally, “pitched his tent”] among us” (John 1). In the Incarnation, that same Word who spoke from the unapproachable mountain of smoke and tempest became a man in history. Instead of coming in power, glory, judgment, and blinding light, he came in weakness, humiliation, and suffering. In Jesus Christ, the God-Man, the true Temple is rebuilt after its destruction. It is his body torn, like the veil of Herod’s temple, from top to bottom, that gives us access through his blood into the Holy of Holies. Both the High Priest and the Victim, he is God’s Presence in mercy toward us rather than in judgment and destruction.

But still we can say in our exile, with Israel, “The summer is past, the harvest has ended, and we are still not saved” (Jer. 8:20). Peter writes, “Beloved, I now write you this second epistle...that you may be mindful of the words which were spoken before by the holy prophets, and of the commandment of us, the apostles of the Lord and Savior, knowing this first: that scoffers will come in the last days, walking according to their own lusts, and saying, ‘Where is the promise of His coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation …

The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is long-suffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance” (2 Pet. 3:1-4).

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Reflection #1, Ruth Naomi Floyd Even the apparent “absence” of God in this “inbetween” time is the very opposite of what it appears to be to the world. Faced with injustice, rapacity, poverty, cruelty, suffering, and unrelenting news of crisis, our age thinks that God, if there is such a being, has taken a long vacation. But let us remember that when the world saw God at his weakest moment, the Father hiding his face from the humiliated and guilt-laden Son, God was performing his greatest act of redemption, beside which the exodus pales in comparison. And so, even now, where the world can only see God’s absence, we, by faith, see God’s strength. As Jesus told Paul, “My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9). So Peter tells us that while the world sees only an opportunity to scoff at God’s apparent absence, the church sees this as God’s saving presence. The world should not long for God’s presence, because when he does appear this time, it will be in glory and judgment. But the church sees God’s presence hidden under the form of absence, bringing the lost to a saving sight of the Crucified by the preached cross. “For Jews request signs and wonders, and Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness …”

(1 Cor. 1:22-23). Just when it looks like God has taken a long vacation from the world, he is actually busy MODERN REFORMATION

building his kingdom and even the gates of hell will not be able to withstand this mighty work.

Thus, Feuerbach’s conviction that in religion “To enrich God, man must become poor; that God may be all, man must be nothing,”17 is turned on its head: “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that you through His poverty might become rich” (2 Cor. 8:9). The Father hid his face from his Son on Good Friday so that we could see his face forever.

Is this story of God’s triumph through tragedy, power through weakness, wisdom through foolishness not sufficient to comfort us when our conscience, heart, and mind condemn us? And if God’s presence in saving mercy is so powerful in weakness, so active in the very moment it looks as if there is nobody up there when we see the God-Man on the cross, surely we can trust God to be most present in our own lives when everything within us would convince us that he is the least present: when we are suffering, being treated unfairly, when we fail God miserably, and when we are tired and lonely in the world. Like their Greek forebears, the philosophers of our age may find such a message “foolishness,” a crutch for the weak, “the opiate of the people,” “but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1 Cor. 1:24-25). Those who seek to hold onto their life will lose it, while those who give up their life will find it.

At last, “the broad, ugly ditch” is breached. God has built a bridge to us in the person and work of the God-Man. While we cannot leap across it or pull God down out of heaven by our rational, moral, or emotional strength, God has come down to us. Not only has he become human, suffered in our place, and been raised to life as the down payment on our own resurrection; he comes to us now in the ministry of Word and Sacrament. “But the righteousness that comes by faith speaks in this way, ‘Do not say in your heart, “Who will ascend into heaven?”’(that is, to bring Christ down from above) ‘or, “Who will descend into the abyss?”’ (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). But what does it say?

‘The Word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart’ (that is, the word of faith which we preach): that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved” (Rom. 10:6-9).

At long last, God’s presence among us is forever only good news, filling our hearts with delight instead of terror. Comforted by the cross, let us turn away from the theologies of glory we find all around us: in the signs and wonders so many demand, in the clamor for success, numbers and popularity in this world, in the

speculative, mystical and subjectivist trends of our time, and in the triumphalism that so marks the contemporary church. Content to die with Christ, let us be raised in his new life. Christ’s “will to weakness” is stronger than modern humanity’s “will to power,” and that which the supermen of our age regard as “opium for the masses” is “the power of God unto salvation for everyone who believes …” (Rom. 1:18). MR

Dr. Michael Horton, a member of the Council of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals (ACE), is a research fellow at Yale Divinity School and co-pastor of Christ Reformed Church (CRC) in Placentia, California.

GOD IN THE WASTELAND David Wells

It’s no secret that the American evangelical church has gone astray. In God in the Wasteland David Wells charts the way back, calling for a new radical emphasis on revealed biblical truth. He gives a powerful answer to the problems in today’s church—to return to preaching about the sovereign and holy God. To order call (800) 956-2644.

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FASCINATIONS THAT LEAD AWAY FROM THE CROSS…

THE MIRACULOUS, THE MORALISTIC, AND THE MYSTERIOUS Martin Luther opposed the “theology of the cross” to all “theologies of glory.” The latter can be generally placed into three categories: three types of “ladders” we try to climb in order to see “God in the nude,” as Luther put it. These ladders were mysticism, speculation, and merit. I would like to suggest a few contemporary expressions of the theology of glory along these lines.

Fascination with the miraculous As in our Lord’s day, few today who seek miracles are interested in that to which signs point. “A wicked generation seeks for signs,” Jesus said, followed by Paul’s reminder that his fellow Jews were so busy looking for miraculous wonders that they stumbled over the Gospel of Christ crucified. Seeking direct experiences with God without the mediation of Scripture, preaching, and sacraments is a theology of glory. Longing for “power encounters,” we trip over the weakness of the cross.

This is also true of our triumphalism, long a problem of evangelical revivalism. With its vision of conquering and reigning, the cross-bearing life of Christ which our Savior graciously allows us to share with him is traded in for a crown before the appointed time. Often, we behave like the disciples during our Lord’s ministry.

Philip saw Jesus as a means to an end: “Now, just show us the Father and we’ll be satisfied,” he said. “Philip, have you been with me so long and you still don’t get it?

He who has seen me has seen the Father!” Those looking for God in demonstrations of power miss the tr ue appearance of God in the humiliation and weakness of the Suffering Servant.

His disciples never did understand him when he said he must suffer and die, and whenever he brought it up, they tried to ignore it. Or, as in Peter’s case, they rebuked him: “Surely this will never happen to you!”

As Satan had offered Jesus a crown without a cross, so 12

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even Jesus’ own brothers, impressed with his success as a miracle-worker, anxiously offered a tour of the major cities. Similarly, James and John wanted to call down fire on their enemies, and their mother came to Jesus to ask him to allow her sons to sit on his left and right hand in his kingdom. Everyone was planning for glory, but Jesus was planning for the cross. “You do not know what you are asking,” Jesus told their proud mother.

“Can they drink the cup that I am about to drink?” “Of course we can!”, they eagerly replied. Triumphalism ignores the cross, and when the hour of trial (sin, failure, loss of popularity, shame, and abuse) comes, we, like the disciples, flee for cover instead of sharing in Christ’s suffering. The triumphalism of theologies of glory can be discerned in much of today’s popular Christian music. Here the realities of life are replaced with platitudes and sentimentalism, a far cry from the emotional and moving words of the psalmist. Contrast much of contemporary Christian music with the depth of the classic hymns of the Moravians, Lutheran and Reformed hymn writers, Charles Wesley, and the old African-American “spirituals.”

Fascination with the moralistic Sadly, evangelicals and liberals often read the Bible in a similar way these days. While the former may be more conservative in their interpretations, both tend to read (and preach) the Bible moralistically: that is, either as positive tips for better living or as scolding for not being what one should be. Thus, the key biblical characters become heroes to imitate rather than figures in a redemptive-historical plot centering around Jesus Christ.

Jesus told the Pharisees that in spite of their ostensive devotion to the Scriptures, they did not really understand what they were reading, since he (Jesus) is the point of all of Scripture. Similarly, after his MODERN REFORMATION

undoes himself in what he endeavors, and goes to hell by resur rection, he rebuked his disciples for not striving to go to heaven.” understanding how his death and resurrection were foretold. So “beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he expounded to them in all the Scriptures the Fascination with the mysterious things concerning himself ” (Luke 24:27).

As liberal theologian Paul Tillich pointed out (and If an obsession with “power encounters” stumbles exhibited), mysticism and rationalism are of one piece. over the weakness of the cross, the preoccupation with Like Plato, the mystic-rationalist does not care much for moralism finds the preaching of the cross “foolishness.” this world and wishes to escape the world of “appearHow can the ances” by abstract wicked be declared contemplation of righteous while “the Divine.” they are still sinful?

Christianity is If I could know deeply committed right now that to this world nothing I did (creation, provicounted for my dence, redemption salvation, why through historical would I even try to events, restoration be holy? It’s unfair of the whole for God to elect creation at the end people without of the age, including basing his choice the resurrection of on anything in or our bodies), and foreseen in those announces that God who are chosen. cannot be known Or, as we have seen directly by our already from reason, but must Feuerbach’s pen: reveal himself by “The Christian condescending to theory of our capacity. The justification by mystic-philosopher faith is rooted in a who attempts to cowardly renunpenetrate God’s ciation of moral hidden council, effort,” and belief either by specuin the hereafter lation or claims to nothing more than secret knowledge of “an escape God’s will beyond mechanism.” Our what is revealed in fallen sensibilities Scripture, is a rebel against the theologian of glory.

Descent from the Cross, Fiorentino utterly g racious The theologian of character of God’s the cross is content way of saving. When sin and grace are replaced with to know God as he has graciously manifested himself in therapeutic, ethical, political, and pragmatic concerns, it the Living and written/preached Word. MR is a sure sign that we too have stumbled over the Rock of offense.

The Puritan Thomas Goodwin warns us of our tenDr. Michael Horton, a member of the Council of the Alliance of dency even as Christians to attempt to turn faith into a Confessing Evangelicals (ACE), is a research fellow at Yale Divinity School work. Seeing the condition of his ship of faith and and co-pastor of Christ Reformed Church (CRC) in Placentia, California. obedience, one sets out to rebuild another ship, “so he

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Is Anybody Home?

WHAT TO DO WHEN IT SEEMS LIKE GOD ISN’T THERE ROBERT KOLB At the end of Shisaku Endo’s novel Silence (the silence of God is meant), the Japanese convert Kichjiro comes to a fallen Por tuguese missionar y priest, seeking absolution for trampling on the image of Christ. T h e p r i e s t , S e b a s t i a n Rodrigues, has earned the epithet “the Apostate Paul” by succumbing to torture and trampling on the image of the Christ child and his mother.

Rodrigues is about to be forced to take a Japanese name and to marry, thus losing the last traces of his identity as a Portuguese and a priest. He has already lost his claim to be Christian, he is sure. He confesses, “I, too, stood on the sacred image … on the face of the man who has been ever in my thoughts, … on the best and most beautiful face that any man can ever know, on the face of him whom I have always longed to love.”

But in that moment of confrontation with his own shame and guilt, the apostate hears the voice of his Lord, the Lord who remains Lord, in spite of, and in the midst of, the shame-filled weakness and utter stupidity of his apostasy. “‘I understand your pain and your suffering. It is for that reason that I am here.’ ‘Lord, I resented your silence.’ ‘I was not silent. I suffered beside you.’”

Instantly the fallen priest realizes what it means that the Lord’s strength is perfected in our weakness (2 Cor. 12:9). “His five toes had pressed upon the face of one he loved. Yet he could not understand the tremendous onrush of joy that came over him at that moment.” For the Lord returned. Christ had again renewed his claim on this priest who no longer deserved to be called “Father.” Rodrigues decided then that, defrocked or not, he would absolve Kichjiro. If such an act betrayed his fellow priests and the system in which he had served Christ before his apostasy, it would 14

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Interior of a Hungarian Church, Adam Woolfitt, Corbis not be a betrayal of the Lord himself, 1 whose own strength and wisdom are revealed in what seems weak and foolish to this world (1 Cor. 1:18-2:16).

The Lord had been speaking through and in the midst of the fog of silence which the fallen priest was enduring. Suddenly, the truth of that often emptysounding cliché, “God is never nearer than when he MODERN REFORMATION

seems furthest away” came home to him. This God had claimed his own triumph over the worst of evils, even the apostasy of his own children, through the weakness and foolishness of his own cross. For his threat to deny us when we deny him turns into his promise, “if we are faithless, he remains faithful—for he cannot deny himself ” (2 Tim. 2:12-13). Father Rodrigues had ventured into a foreign land confident that his own exploits for the faith would make God’s glory manifest.

But in the wilderness of his sojourn, this pilgrim found the God who reveals himself on his own cross and in the crosses of our own fragility and flaws, fears and failures.

Endo’s novel about the failure of the Jesuit mission in seventeenth century Japan has often been interpreted out of the mouth of his enemy, the lord of Chikugo, who had wrung the apostasy from the priest’s soul: “‘This country of Japan is not suited to the teaching of Christianity. Christianity simply cannot put down roots here …. Father, you were not defeated by me …. You were defeated by this swamp of Japan.’” 2 Such an interpretation misses the point of the story’s conclusion.

The novel presents a theology of the cross. Even in the weakness and failure of such a life as that of Father Rodrigues, the cross of Christ generates its word of forgiveness and life.

For Such a Time as This This is not religion as we like religion to be. We rather enjoy the glories of a Christianity which rewards our loyalty and punishes the unfaithfulness of such utter failures as Father Sebastian. We prefer a religion which delivers the kinds of success with which we are comfortable. We embrace with pleasure a Christianity which quickly roots out the evils in life we do not like (and occasionally even those we do). We covet a God of glory, supported by power, rational proofs, good common sense, and success. But such a view of religion reflects neither the biblical description of the Christian faith and the activities of our God, nor the ever harsher realities of American life at the end of the twentieth century. The theology of the cross, with its word of forgiveness and life in the midst of crushing evils, addicting sins, and personal failures of the worst sort, is just what we need.

A quarter of a century ago, the Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall wrote an attempt at “an indigenous theology of the cross” for North America. The Vietnam era—with Watergate and the oil crisis thrown into the mix of the war for good measure—seemed to have brought to an end the naive optimism which had blinded the American imagination since the Enlightenment had given it birth. Hall believed that “intimations of man’s apparent ignominy and the meaninglessness of the historical process” were changing

the mentality of a people who had never been able to come to terms with evil and tragedy.3 In the 1970s Hall saw the first honest American confrontation with the tragic taking place on a national scale (apart from the crisis over slavery and states rights 140 years earlier). It was taking place, Hall observed, in a thought-world still dominated by Marxism and existentialism, two ends of a spectrum which is circular, meeting in the atomization of individuals, isolated either into the darkness of the void of absurdity or into the blind devotion to a leader and a system which would ensure them a proletarian paradise.4 Today Americans are in the smothering grip of a practical materialism (which has replaced the theoretical version), and of a pragmatic individualism, which works through a creed of democratic (rather than dictatorial) imposition of alienation and estrangement from natural human support systems. This practical materialism and narcissistic individualism of our own fin de siècle are creating a whirlwind of havoc in human hearts. Our national heritage offers no genuine means of coping with the real tragedies which are breaking over Americans in all stations and stages of life. As families and firms fail, as homes and health are lost, recreation and even religion no longer restore our spirits.

Hall spoke of a “national philosophy of optimism,” “that heritage [which] has encouraged us to indulge our sense of expectancy along lines so unqualifiedly positive that no negative, not death itself, can be seriously admitted at the conscious level.”5 Such a worldview is a fragile phenomenon, which politicians have been able to keep alive only for those protected from the harsh realities of American life by a little more money, a little more luck, or a little more self-deception. For the real men and women of the year 2000, an honest appraisal of life from the foot of the cross makes more sense than ever before in this continent’s short memory.

In the past two generations much evangelistic outreach has been successful at luring burned-out Christians back into congregations by offering nice groups of people where we could find companionship and conversation with others much like ourselves. That strategy served to bring many into a true enjoyment of life in Christ Jesus. Indeed, the Christian faith does bring genuine joy and pleasure to human beings who are experiencing sunny days!

More important, however, the faith also helps us to be honest about the storms which beset life. Such storms are now descending upon an increasing number of Americans. The Christian congregation of the future in this society will therefore have to function increasingly as a spiritual hospital. As we care for others this week, we know that next week they will be our physicians and we their patients. The church of the twenty-first century in our God-forsaking society will be JULY/AUGUST 1997

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and utterly vulnerable to death. We see our reflection in the image of a dying incarnate God (Mark 15:34).

Third, the cross shows us the way back to life: through faith—alone! Neither empirical proof nor rational proof will place us in the hands of God; these epistemologies serve well on earth, but they place the object of our search for knowledge under the dominion of our own minds. God maintains his Lordship over our minds. He speaks his promise of life from the cross. This promise elicits and creates faith. God destroys the wisdom of the wise and thwarts the discer nment of the discerning; he saves those who believe, through the proclamation of Christ crucified (1 Cor. 1:18-25).

Four th, the cr ucifor m paradigm reveals how God restores life: by letting the law pay us the full wages our sinfulness has ear ned us (Rom. 6:23a), by burying us as sinners in Christ’s tomb and thereby giving us life again as an absolutely free The Theology gift—genuine human life of the Cross (Rom. 6:4, 23b).

The theology of the cross Finally, the theology of the gives us a paradigm for cross presents us with the way witness, friendship, and in which we live our lives in suppor t in the nor mal him. Our resurrected life as routines and in the God’s new instruments of emergencies of those around righteousness is a life which us. The Lord calls us into bears crosses for others—for their lives to embody the the sake of Christ (Matt.

Living Presence of his love.

As Paul sketched his theology The theology of the cross directs us to God in human 16:24). We evaluate our success neither in terms of how many of the cross, above all in the flesh, God on the cross… blessings we experience nor in first two chapters of his first terms of how much suffering we have endured. Rather, we epistle to the Corinthians, we see that this paradigm for find satisfaction in serving up the love of Christ to those Christian realism first of all defines who God is for us. who are thirsting for love, as God places them in our paths.

He is not some hidden form, whose plans and counsels The theology of the cross directs us away from all we can only dimly sense. The God hidden behind his attempts to speculate about God as he is hidden behind own majesty and glory is a god shaped in our own image, nature or the clouds of our imagination. The theology of as Feuerbach observed. The only God we know is the the cross directs us to God in human flesh, God on the one whose righteousness—whose right way of being cross, God raised from the dead. To all the modern God—is revealed in the sacrificial love of the bloodquestions about what truth might be and what kind of drenched cross. The only God there is appears to us as claim truth might have on us, the God who is revealed in the kid in the crib, the criminal on the cross, the corpse in crib, cross, and crypt seizes us anew as we present him to the crypt. The fullness of God was pleased to dwell in the those who have lost their way. We introduce our God on one who reconciles all things to himself by making peace his cross. We witness to God revealed as Jesus, on the cross. through the blood of his very own cross (Col. 1:19-20).

For people who are dissatisfied with their old Second, the paradigm of the cross defines who we are. identity, the cross helps explain why they do not “feel We are those people who know ourselves only when we good” about themselves. The theology of the cross come to see that we are sinners, justifiably forsaken by God haven for the homeless, a home for the helpless, a hospice for the hopeless. It will be a community of believers gathered at the foot of the cross, with a lifeembracing view of the cross on which our Lord hangs.

We look to the cross because we need to focus on the defeat of the evils which afflict us. Jesus accomplished this triumph by taking our sinfulness into the body of his death and burying it in his own tomb.

We look then to—and through—the empty tomb when we want to look at the life which he won for us by burying our evil. We look through that tomb into eter nity, where God is, identifying us as his children through his re-creating word of forgiveness. Then we look from his perspective back through the tomb into the daily life, and we perceive our experiences of his ear thly presence among us. We see how he has used us as his instr uments of love and salvation.

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helps us understand the fullness of what it means to be human, and thus how broken humanity is. The theology of the cross points us to the center of our humanity, our trust in Jesus Christ. From the foot of the cross we see how wrong we were—no matter how well we behaved— because we did not love and trust in Yahweh above all things. We witness to the God who calls us to trust him and who bestows our new identity in this trust.

For those who are seeking the right way of living and thrashing about for a new identity, the theology of the cross confirms what the disciples of psychologist Erik Eriksen all know. Successful human life begins by learning to trust, and trust accompanies those who can live at peace throughout the progression of their lives.

The theology of the cross leads us to place our lives in God’s hands, through the power of his Holy Spirit, rather than try to master life on our own terms. It helps us understand fully what the biblical writers mean when they say that those who are truly human—the just—do live, in fact, by faith. The theology of the cross also shows us how God restores the true identity of those whom he has called to be his children. He does that by taking us through the death of Christ into our own death as people who have fouled our own nests and have to live with the consequences of our sin. The theology of the cross leads us from our old life being crucified with Christ into a new life which is raised with him. We witness to new life for old, dying sinners by carrying people on the Lord’s words to his cross.

The shape of that new life becomes clear through the theology of the cross. For those who have learned no boundaries and delight in finding sure boundaries through some kind of regulations of the law, the theology of the cross comes as a freeing word. It puts the whole world at our feet because the whole world is at our Lord’s feet. And following the example of our Lord, we learn that we stoop to lift the world at our feet and hold it, with all its misery, in our arms. In modern America many people are searching for a formula for a satisfying and successful life. When the Lord says to us that we find that kind of life by taking up our cross, our initial reaction is surprise. Christians help one another to practice the kind of life that does not depend either on temporal success or temporal suffering but depends only on faithful following of the Lord into the lives of those who need us in the course of daily life.

Therefore, we come to hurting people with the word from the cross. For the prodigals whose broken lives seem beyond repair and who find no way out of their apostasy, despair can be broken by the theology of the cross. The light from the other side of Christ’s tomb may again shine into their hearts through an evangelistic approach which grows out of this theology.

For those who hate themselves so much that they

wish they were dead because they have been betrayed and exploited by others, or because they have failed to live up to their own understanding, Christian witness can give the gift of death to an old identity and a horrible past. The theology of the cross then gives witness to the gift of new life which replaces the wages paid by Christ’s death.

For those who long for a new identity, or a new sense of security and safety in life, or a new meaning and feeling of worth for life, this death to the old way of living expressed in the theology of the cross will come as the life-bestowing breath of fresh air direct from Eden.

The theology of the cross is not only a good way of approaching the content of Scripture for study and learning. It also offers an analysis of human experience, and of God’s way of dealing with the human experience, which provides power and insight for evangelistic witness. For the theology of the cross presents God’s message for North Americans at the turn of the twentyfirst century in a dynamic and meaningful way which will reshape their lives and give them the gift of faith in Christ Jesus. His dying and rising are the truth and the only way to life. MR

Dr. Robert Kolb is Professor and Director of the Institute for Mission Studies at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis.

HYMN

by Charles Wesley “O thou Eternal Victim slain” O thou Eternal Victim slain A Sacrifice for guilty man, By the Eternal Spirit made An offering in the sinner’s stead; Our everlasting Priest art thou, And plead’st thy death for sinners now.

O that our faith may never move, But stand unshaken as thy love!

Sure evidence of things unseen, Now let it pass the years between, And view thee bleeding on the Tree, My God, who dies for me, for me.

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Q UTOES Man hides his own things, in order to conceal them; God hides his own things, in order to reveal them. — Luther, Sermon, February 24, 1517 “And here again we ought to observe that we are called to a knowledge of God: not that knowledge which, content with empty speculation, merely flits in the brain, but that which will be sound and fruitful if we duly perceive it, and if it takes root in the heart …

Consequently, we know the most perfect way of seeking God, and the most suitable order, is not for us to attempt with bold curiosity to penetrate to the investigation of his essence, which we ought more to adore than meticulously to search out, but for us to contemplate him in his works whereby he renders himself near and familiar to us, and in some manner communicates himself … For each man’s mind is a labyrinth.”

— Calvin, Institutes, 1.5.9,12 “In sleepless nights I have often asked myself whether a God exists who shares in the personal fate of men. It is becoming hard for me to believe this. For this God must for years have allowed rivers of blood and suffering, and mountains of horror and despair for mankind to take place … He must have allowed millions of decent men to die and suffer without lifting a finger. Is this meant to be a judgement? … Like the Psalmist, I am angry with God, because I cannot understand him...And yet through Christ I am still looking for the merciful God. I have not yet found him. O Christ, where is truth? Where is there any consolation?”

— Karl Goerdeler, shortly before his execution under Hitler, cited by McGrath, 179-180

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“Christ took away [the] curse of the law and the right which it had so that even though you have sinned, even though you now have sin (for we must use the language of Scripture), yet you are saved. Our Samson has shattered the power of death, the power of sin, the gates of hell. This is what Paul means in Gal. 3:13. ‘Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us.’”

— Philip Melanchthon, Loci Communes, “Difference Between Old and New Testaments” “There was no place in the whole world on the morning of the crucifixion which the human mind might have thought less likely to be the locus of the concentrated presence of our Redeeming God than the place called Golgotha. Men might say the evening before, ‘When I look up to the heavens, which thine own fingers framed, to the sun, the moon, the stars, … then say I what is man?’ (Psalm 8:3-4) and they might say also, ‘The heavens declare the glory of God’ (Psalm 19:1). But the last thing that Calvary was saying, the last impression it was conveying, was ‘This is my Beloved Son in whom I am well pleased’ (Matthew 3:17).

Whatever it looked like, it did not look like the place from which emanated the almighty love of God. Whatever its schema, it was not the schema of the glory of His grace....He was an abhorrent thing. ‘That holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God, Emmanuel’ (Matthew 1:23); but it will end in that holy thing forsaken.”

— Donald Macleod, The Humiliated and Exalted Lord, edited and introduced by J. Ligon Duncan III, 34, 37

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“Therefore, although the preaching of the cross does not agree with our human inclination, if we desire to return to God our Author and Maker, from whom we have been estranged, in order that he may again begin to be our Father, we ought nevertheless to embrace it humbly.”

— Calvin, Institutes, 2.6.1

Jesus Christ? or if I be sinking down into hell, who can go and get Christ to put forth his arm to pull me out again? This, I say, is the manner of the spirits of men, even under the gospel.”

— Seventeenth-century English Puritan Thomas Goodwin, Christ Set Forth

“I have by long experience observed many holy and precious souls who have clearly and wholly given themselves to Christ, to be saved by him his own way, and who at their first conversion (as also at times of desertion) have made an entire and immediate close with Christ alone for their justification, who yet in the ordinary course and way of the spirits have been too much carried away with the rudiments of Christ in their own hearts, and not after Christ himself. They are more interested in searching into the gracious dispositions of their own hearts, so to bring down, or to raise up (as the words of the apostle are, Rom. x.8), and so get a sight of Christ by them. Whereas Christ himself is ‘nigh them,’ if they would but nakedly look upon himself crucified through a single faith … “‘If thou shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.’ Yet notwithstanding, though a Christian knows all this, and though the gospel and the way of believing is most clearly and nakedly preached, the soul, when it forecasteth with itself all his own sinfulness, and unworthiness, and discouragements, will sink under the same thoughts of the impossibility of his salvation that the Jew had: he will still be saying, Who shall climb up into heaven, to bring Christ down to this heart of mine? or where shall I have a ladder to reach up to close with

“When a certain shameless fellow mockingly asked a pious old man what God had done before the creation of the world, the later aptly countered that he had been building hell for the curious.”

— Calvin, Institutes, 1.14.1 “That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things which have actually happened. He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross.”

— Luther, The Heidelberg Disputation, Theses 19-20 “Luther’s theology of the cross assumed its new significance [after the Second World War] because it was the theology which addressed the question which could not be ignored: is God really there, amidst the devastation and dereliction of civilization? … Rarely, if ever, has a sixteenth-century idea found such a powerful response in twentieth-century man.”

— Alister McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross, 179-180

Whether one becomes aware of God’s glory by contemplating the eternal laws of nature or by quiet prayer and adoration in view of the inexhaustible riches of creaturely life; whether one sees history as the Eternal’s unconcealed revelation, or whether because of the mystery of personality one is convinced of the certainty of the Uncaused, in every case the attempt is made to reach the knowledge of God by way of creation.

— Walther von Loewenich, Luther’s Theology of the Cross, 18 JULY/AUGUST 1997

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Suffering and Joy: THE MINISTRY AS PARTICIPATION IN CHRIST’S CROSS J. A. O. PREUS The pattern that Christ has established for his ministers is his own path of suffering and joy. This understanding was impressed upon me in a very powerful way a few years ago when I returned home from Saudi Arabia, where I had served as a military chaplain in a Marine infantry battalion as part of Operation Deser t Stor m. Beyond a doubt, that experience was at once the most painful and the most joyful I have ever had in the ministry.

After the war was over, and we were coming back to the States, I came home in the first wave to prepare for the Marines arrival home. The battalion surgeon, CDR Richard Ilka, had stayed over there until the end. I

arrived home on Good Friday. The Marines had had an Easter sunrise service on the shores of the Arabian Gulf and the chaplain preached on I Cor. 15: “And just as we have borne the image of the first man (Adam), so shall we bear the image of the second man (Christ).” Dr. Ilka wrote me a letter the next day in which he said, “They took down your tent the day you left and burned your sign and trash, including your homeless person style furnishings. Many here speak about you and miss you.

There is an emptiness in the camp without you, our image of the second man.”

There was nothing he could have said that could have meant more to me. He was telling me that in my ministry in their midst, in my suffering and in my joy,

“Jesus invites those whom he calls into his ministry to participate in his suffering and in his joy.”

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they saw Christ, the second man. This gave meaning and purpose to my suffering, to the hardship and deprivation I had experienced on their behalf—and it gave depth and substance to the joys I knew there. In all our suffering and in all our rejoicing on behalf of Christ’s people, there is no greater reward—no greater burden but also no greater joy—than that in us they may see him.

When you get involved with the ministry of our Lord, just what are you getting involved with? How does Jesus’ ministry of the cross, his suffering and his joy work itself out in our ministry? How may our ministry be seen as a participation in the cross of Christ and in his ministry?

I must make something very clear, however, right at the outset. It would be very easy for us (who according to the old Adam, tend always to works-righteousness) to hear what I am saying in the way of the Law. This must not, by any means, be understood in a legalistic way.

Rather, to be in the ministry of Christ in the Church is, before anything else, a gift, as is every other gift given us in the cross. It is given to us to live under the cross with Christ, given to us to be in his ministry; given to us to spread his word to far-flung places, in much the same way that our salvation is a gift, or our sanctification is a gift of the Gospel.

The ministry is a gift. To participate in it is a gift which Christ confers by his call through the Church. To be like him, to participate with him in his ministry of suffering and joy must be viewed by us, not as a burden to be borne by us (which leads only to burn-out), but rather as a great, liberating gift. Such a recognition, by God’s grace, may lead us to a reevaluation of our ministries, and of the sorrows and joys we experience in them, thus enabling and empowering us to adopt healthier patterns of thought and action.

Paul indicates very clearly in many passages that the ministry of Christ is not only a ministry of suffering, but is also a ministry of joy. In Colossians 1:24, however, these two dimensions of the ministry come together in a unique way: “Now I rejoice in what was suffered for your sake, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church.”

Paradoxically, he speaks about both joy and suffering in the same context. The contradiction is only apparent. Paul suggests that both must be held in tension. Jesus invites those whom he calls into his ministry to participate in his suffering and in his joy. As our ministry is a participation in Christ’s ministry, it is also a participation in Christ’s cross.

Now, this suffering/joy paradigm is not a goodnews/bad-news kind of thing. According to Paul, both are good and may be viewed as Christ’s gifts to those whom he calls. But both can be misused or abused. To suffer well and to rejoice well are not easy. Nor is this a

Law/Gospel thing, for Paul in this passage teaches us that the ministry is a gift given us to do; the sufferings and the joys that come in the ministry are both gifts which may be viewed from the perspective of the Gospel.

Suffering One thing is certain: Participation in the ministry of Christ will involve you in suffering. You know that your calling into the ministry of Christ already has involved suffering and hardship, if not the kind Paul suffered, at least enough at times to press you to your limits, perhaps to the point of burn-out, or even despair.

What purpose does your suffering serve?

There is, of course, a fundamental difference between Christ’s suffering and your suffering for his sake.

The suffering of Jesus on the cross was universally salvific. He suffered for the sins of the entire world. He bore their burden and weight on his shoulders, enduring the wrath and punishment of the Father for them. His suffering merited grace and mercy for all the world.

Our suffering for his sake and for the sake of the Gospel is not like that at all. There is no sense in which our suffering is, like Jesus’, vicarious or meritorious. It does not earn God’s favor, either for ourselves or for anyone else. What purpose, then, does our suffering for the Gospel’s sake serve? How should we view it? What is its source? There are some important clues in our Bible passage, Colossians 1:24: “Now I rejoice in what was suffered for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church.”

The “now” is emphatic. What’s the reference? Is it temporal? “Now” as opposed to when: the past, the future? I think Paul is saying something like the following: “Now, after having been involved in the afflictions since first becoming a servant of the gospel, I rejoice in what was suffered.” This, I think, flows most naturally from v. 23, “of which I, Paul, have become a servant.” If this is true, then Paul’s rejoicing is in view of his ministry of the Gospel.

Notice what Paul says: in what was suffered, not despite; not because of. We are not Stoics. Nor are we masochists. What Paul is suggesting here, I think, is that the sufferings given to us in our service of the Gospel may be viewed by us in a very different way than what we often think of as normal. He points us towards understanding them as gifts which we are granted to bear for the sake of Christ’s body, the Church.

There is no question of this verse saying anything that would infringe upon the all-sufficient reconciling death of Jesus Christ. There is nothing lacking in what Christ did.

Paul does not suffer on behalf of the Colossians in the same way as Jesus did. Yet there is apparently a relationship between the apostle’s suffering of the afflictions on the one hand, and “you,” the “body of Christ,” the Church on the other hand. This is summarized by the word huper, “for, or on behalf of.” This strongly implies that there is value for the Church in Paul’s suffering.

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Paul does not mention here the specific content of his sufferings and afflictions for the Gospel. He makes no reference to any specific incident from his ministry here (although he does at considerable length in II Corinthians 11). Precisely what experiences come upon an apostle or a pastor is unimportant; what is important is that they are, as Paul says, “for you.” This is Gospel language, gift language. These “gifts” provoke joy in the apostle because they point both backwards and forwards to the two most significant days in the history of the world: backward to the day of salvation when Jesus suffered for the sins of the world; forward to the day of resurrection when the Christ who suffered will come in glory to eliminate all suffering. Thus the ground of joy is that our sufferings for the Gospel are reminders, signs of Christ’s suffering.

We may summarize the implications of this text for our topic under five points: 1. The sufferings of the messengers, the “death at work in the apostle” (2 Cor. 4:7), lets the power of Christ and the glory of God truly shine through in the lives of the converts. People see the sufferings of Christ in the suffering of the messenger. It is proclamatory.

2. The commission and the life of the apostle are one; therefore the proclamation and the suffering of the apostle are one. We can’t entirely separate our calling from ourselves. As called, we are witnesses, even often in our suffering.

3. The apostle is the representative and imitator of his Lord. The apostle’s sufferings take on the character of an epiphany, revealing the glory and strength of God in weakness. This is the strongest argument against any triumphalistic vision of the ministry which emphasizes success and glory. The theology of the cross goes to the very heart of the very nature, as well as the functions, of the ministry of Christ.

4. The apostle’s suffering has value for others. We must let the huper (“on behalf of ”) have its full force. Of course, it is necessary to keep the all-sufficient sacrifice of Christ distinct from the subsequent sufferings of Paul or of us. Yet we must also let Paul’s sufferings stand, differentiated from Christ’s, still of benefit to the Colossians. A triumphalistic theology of glory views these sufferings as signs of weakness, to be avoided at all costs. Such theology commends a vision of comfortable Christianity, safe from the pain and weakness of life in Christ. Not so the theology of the cross.

5. In this way it is possible to revolutionize our view of the sufferings we undergo in the ministry, to see them not simply as bad things that happen to us 22

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and which we must try at all costs to avoid. Nor are we to view them as good in themselves or to seek them out. There will be trial enough for us; we don’t need to go out looking for it. Rather, we must see our sufferings for the sake of the Gospel as bearing an essential relationship to Christ’s sufferings and to his cross. We should view them as his gifts to us, as reminders and testimonies of Christ’s sufferings on our behalf, and recognize their benefits for us and for those whom we serve.

We are not the same as the one whom we represent, that is certain. We are not Christ. But we are not the same as laypeople either. We in the ministry, the designated leaders, are often targets for the world’s hostility, lightning rods of opposition, consecrated servants, mediators of the Gospel, and preachers of the crucified Christ in word, deed, and suffering. Ours is a calling that imitates the pattern set by Jesus. Thus, in our ministry we give testimony in our historical situations, in our bodies, to that love which was given unto death so that others might live.

Joy We’ve spoken at length about the suffering that is involved in the ministry of our Lord. But it is also, as Paul says, a ministry of joy. He proclaims, “I rejoice in what was suffered.” Are you joyful in your ministry? Are your joys grounded upon the same foundation as Paul’s?

The joy of the ministry is, like suffering, a reflection of Christ’s ministry. We don’t often think of Jesus as having been very joyful. Apparently the Gospel writers didn’t see much need to give details about Jesus’ rejoicing, about his sense of humor, and so forth. But we can assume that there were occasions when he rejoiced.

Some of his parables indicate that he certainly knew what joy was. In Luke chapter 15 Jesus tells three parables which culminate in great joy. The Parable of the Lost Sheep (15:3-7) speaks about there being much rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents. In the Parable of the Lost Coin (8-10), there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels. In the Parable of the Prodigal Son (11-32), there is feasting and celebrating, music and dancing, over the son who was found. Jesus certainly knew about joy.

In his Upper Room discourse, in very tender terms, Jesus mentions his joy and the desire that his disciples may have “the full measure of my joy within them” (15:11; 16:20ff; 17:13). Here he not only indicates that he is joyful in his ministry but that he also conveys his joy to those whom he calls.

Jesus knew joy. And so do those whom he calls into his service. Ours is a ministry of joy. It is a participation in Christ’s joy. Paul says, “Now I rejoice in what was suffered for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church.”

There are a few insights which we may glean from MODERN REFORMATION

this passage relative to the joy of the ministry. First, the reason for the joy is the same as the reason for the suffering: huper (“on behalf of ”). Paul rejoices on behalf of the body of Christ. The basis for apostolic joy is the mystery kept hidden for ages, but now disclosed to the saints. There is a Christ-relatedness to our joy in the ministry. The true reason for rejoicing in our ministry is for the sake of the Body of Christ, the Church. Second, because of the above, the joy of the ministry is a joy that is deep and profound. It is built upon the foundation of the glorious riches of the mystery of the ages (vv. 26-27), forged out of the energy of Christ working powerfully in the apostle.

These insights have several implications for our understanding of the joy of the ministry.

1. The joy of the ministry bears an essential relationship to Christ and his body the Church.

The rejoicing flows from the ministry, and ultimately from Christ himself. This joy is a gift, it is not a selfish joy. It is not the product of human accomplishment, nor the result of the acquisition of wealth. It is not the contentment of job security, nor having a cabin on the lake, nor a good medical and pension plan (although good things in themselves). The joy of the ministry can never result from exercising authority over people’s lives (the power of lording it over them). It is not the good feeling we get when people look to us as experts, nor what we feel when we are recognized for our fine preaching or our excellent bedside manner.

These are false joys, the products of a fallen theology of glory. They are not the joy of Christ in us, they do not flow from our participation in his ministry, in his cross.

2. Secondly, it is out of character with the very nature of the ministry when pastors are constantly complaining, constantly negative about their ministry. It is inappropriate when pastors complain incessantly about their parishioners, their living conditions, and their low pay. Our ministry is fundamentally a ministry of joy and so we may learn to be, like Paul, “content in all circumstances” (Phil.

4:11).

3. Third, the joy of the ministry is not a giddy, bubbly, superficial, “don’t worry, be happy” kind of joy. It is not based on emptiness, blind optimism or positive thinking. The joy of the ministry is forged out of the hurts and sins of God’s people, the weight of which we as undershepherds are called upon to bear. This joy, therefore, has a depth and breadth to it which makes it realistic, aware of the trials and the suffering that life in Christ, life under the cross will bring. It is the joy of Christ, “who, for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame” (Heb. 12:2).

Gustave Doré As ministers of the cross, our ministry is a reflection of the ministry of Christ. In our call, Christ invites us to participate with him in his ministry of reconciliation.

Our participation in Christ’s ministry involves many things, among them the paradox of joyful suffering. In the light of Christ and on behalf of his body, the Church, we are granted a new way of suffering and of rejoicing, which in many ways transforms our actions and our attitudes in the ministry.

Of course, our reflection of Christ is imperfect, always marred by sin, always far short of the perfect suffering and joy of Christ. It is only an imperfect image, only “as through a glass darkly” (1 Cor. 13:12).

Yet, when we fail, there is forgiveness for us—a strength, in the Word of the one in whose name and by whose command we serve. MR

Dr. J. A. O. Preus, a member of the Council of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, is Dean of Faculty and Professor at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis.

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Divine Impassibility and Our Suffering God: HOW AN EVANGELICAL “THEOLOGY OF THE CROSS” CAN AND SHOULD AFFIRM BOTH PETER D. ANDERS An important aspect of the Christian gospel that seeks to proclaim the love, mercy, and compassion of God is the affirmation of God’s identification and solidarity with human suffering. A suffering humanity needs a God who knows what it means to suffer. The church has traditionally met this need by emphasizing the passion and death of Jesus Christ. Especially in the theolog y of the Reformation, a “theology of the cross” sought to recognize God’s self-revelation hidden in the humility, shame, and suffering of the cross of Jesus Christ. Through the theology of the cross, God is known as the God who suffers with and for humanity. Yet, how does God identify with human suffering? Does God suffer in himself, in his own being; or is God immutable (unchanging), and therefore impassible (incapable of suffering), as the church has historically affirmed? Can God’s impassibility be upheld while at the same time affir ming his real awareness of, and tr ue identification with, human suffering? Why is it theologically important to maintain the historical witness to God’s impassibility, especially in the face of so much suffering in today’s world?

In this article, I will seek to answer these A suffering humanity needs a God who knows what it means to suffer. questions in two ways. Negatively, I will offer a being voiced in wider evangelicalism, is Jurgen critique of the contemporary theological trend that Moltmann’s theology of the cross. The most important seeks to attribute suffering to God’s being, or to assert discussion of Moltmann’s theology of the cross is found God’s passibility.1 This trend affirms that God suffers in in his book, The Crucified God, where he attempts both to himself, and that the suffering of Jesus is the actual understand God’s being from the suffering and death of suffering of his divine nature. A clearly articulated Jesus and to apply this understanding to what he calls a representation of the general trend, and a viewpoint also “theology after Auschwitz.”2 A representation of this 24

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theological project in contemporary evangelicalism is found in Dennis Ngien’s article, “The God Who Suffers,” which appeared in the February 3, 1997, edition of Christianity Today.3 Positively, I will seek to answer these questions by reaffirming the Christian historical understanding of the trinitarian conceptual distinction, the incarnation, and Chalcedonian twonature Christology; and by demonstrating the proper relationship between them as the context for a theology of the cross. In view of these key doctrinal formulations, I will demonstrate how an evangelical theology of the cross can and should affirm both divine impassibility and God’s true identification and solidarity with the suffering of this hurting world.

The Modern Understanding of Love One of the key motives for affirming a theology of the cross that attributes suffering to the being of God is a modern understanding of love that is founded upon the freedom of God. This understanding of love is held in common by both theologies under consideration here.

Drawing insights from modern psychology, this view of the nature of love focuses on the concept of relational reciprocity: an exchange of feelings in the voluntary opening of oneself to vulnerability, or the possibility of being affected by another.4 This sort of love is seen as the acceptance of the other without regard to one’s own being. It necessarily includes the possibility of sharing in suffering and the freedom to suffer, and therefore must be a voluntary act of will. As such, it creates the possibility for an alternate view of suffering that is neither an unwilling suffering that results from some alien cause, nor apatheia or the incapability of suffering. When applied to God, this “suffering of love” has as its very foundation the freedom of God to choose to be affected by human action and suffering in history. Both Moltmann and Ngien move from this notion of love to divine passibility by arguing that God’s suffering love for humanity, working in freedom, must flow out of the fullness of God’s being. Furthermore, to love in the fullness of his being, God must reciprocally take suffering, even death, into his own being. Thus, for these theologies of divine passibility, God may truly and justly be God for humanity through his loving, voluntary openness to our suffering, in which he intrinsically participates.

This understanding of the nature of love is useful when applied to humanity and to the person of Jesus in general. It broadens and enriches the classical theistic view of love as merely an attitude and action of goodwill toward another. However, I contend that to apply this notion of love to the intrinsic being of God is problematic when analyzed in light of the traditional Christian doctrine of the Trinity that draws a conceptual distinction between what is referred to as the immanent

(or ontological) Trinity and as the economic Trinity. In recognizing that their relational, reciprocal concept of love must focus on God’s external, or extrinsic, relationship to the creation as it is also applied to God’s own being, both Moltmann and Ngien are forced to resolve the resulting conflict between God’s external works and the triune intrinsic being of God by stressing the conceptual equivalence of the immanent and the economic Trinity. However, when this modern understanding of love is applied to the intrinsic being of God through this elimination of the trinitarian conceptual distinction, it becomes problematic in that it also eliminates the freedom of God it holds as foundational. In order to demonstrate this, I will first briefly explain what is meant by this trinitarian distinction in the historical Christian doctrine of the Trinity.

The Conceptual Trinitarian Distinction The conceptual distinction between the immanent and economic Trinity has traditionally been affirmed in obedience to the biblical witness of God’s transcendence from his creation, and his freedom in relationship to it, and God’s immanence in the creation in terms of his external acts. Briefly stated, the immanent Trinity refers to the being of God insofar as he is transcendent from his creation and focuses on God’s internal acts (his acts ad intra). The economic Trinity refers to the God who is immanent in his creation and consists solely of God’s actions outside of himself in relation to his creation (his acts ad extra). The immanent Trinity is the intrinsic Trinity or “God in himself,” while the economic Trinity is extrinsic or “God for us.” In terms of relationship, the concept of the immanent Trinity is primary to that of the economic Trinity and therefore exists necessarily; the latter is dependent and contingent upon the former, and exists only when God acts externally. The priority of the notion of the immanent Trinity is the foundation of the freedom and self-sufficiency of God; God does not need the creation to exist—God exists in himself prior to, and independent from, his act of creation. This makes it possible to affirm that God is free in relation to his creation since he does not have to act ad extra, but can choose to relate to the creation or choose not to. Thus, intrinsically, God is independent and ontologically distinct from his creation even as he freely chooses to exist in relationship to it. It is this point that serves as the basis for the freedom of God. Here, God’s “otherness” is always affirmed in both his transcendence and immanence; and here, God is able to be immutable and impassible and creative and in relationship with creation.

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Divine Love, Freedom, revealed himself in his external works. Thus, the God and the Trinitarian Distinction who reveals himself to be in his acts ad extra truly The specific understanding of love in the modern corresponds to whom God is in his very being ad intra. It sense of reciprocity, with its focus on God’s voluntary should be noted that while God’s acts ad extra constitute a opening of his own being to suffering, is fundamentally true reiteration or revelation of himself, this revelation is based on the relational freedom between God’s intrinsic not exhaustive of his intrinsic being. This differentiation being and his external acts. However, I contend that serves to confirm the veracity of God’s self-revelation on because only the historical trinitarian distinction the one hand, while it maintains God’s otherness, maintains this freedom of God, theologies of divine infinitude, and incomprehensibility on the other. One passibility that eliminate this distinction will ultimately further important point concerning the relationship prove theologically unworkable. The attempt to hold between the concepts of the immanent Trinity and the together this modern relational understanding of divine economic Trinity is referenced theologically by the love, freedom, and passibility, with the elimination of phrase, “Opera Trinitatis ad extra sunt indivisa” (the external the trinitarian distinction, can be examined revealingly in works of the Trinity are undivided). This affirms that terms of the conflation of one aspect of the Trinity into the whole Godhead is present in whatever God does ad the other. Understanding the elimination of the extra, or external to himself. It seeks to maintain the trinitarian distinction in this way will show how unity of the Trinity in the relational actions of God is not free in terms of this view, thus God that are often manifested particularly as taking away that which Moltmann and the operation of one or another of the Ngien hold as central to their persons of the Godhead. theologies. This point can be As I stated above, theologies demonstrated with the following such as Moltmann’s and Ngien’s— two arguments. which seek to attribute an external, First, if the concept of the relational aspect of God to his immanent Trinity is conflated intrinsic being—must diminish into that of the economic this traditional distinction Trinity, then God’s being is his between the immanent and acts ad extra. The immanent economic Trinity. Moltmann Trinity is neither reiterated nor recognizes this when he follows revealed in God’s external acts, but it Karl Rahner in eliminating the is God’s external acts. Thus, God’s distinction altogether and affirming being exists only in terms of his external them as one and the same. He argues relationships and, if that is true, then God that this traditional concept of the must relate to the creation in order to immanent Trinity as a closed circle of divine being distinct from God’s God affects the world and is affected exist. God is no longer free not to relate by his experiences of the world… to the world since he is dependent upon external acts is inadequate. Stressing the creation for his existence. the loving “mutual relationship” Furthermore, if God’s being ad intra is one and the same within God himself, and between himself and the world, as his self-revelation ad extra, then it would not be Moltmann sees God’s relationship to the world as having possible to affirm that God existed in himself before his a “retroactive” effect on his primary relationship to external act of creation. Thus, this move unacceptably himself. God affects the world and is affected by his leads to monism (God and the creation are one) in that experiences of the world to the point that the economic it eliminates the freedom of God in his otherness and Trinity can be understood as actually taken up into the transcendence as related to his external acts. immanent Trinity. Thus, he recommends a “Trinitarian Second, and more pertinent to these theologies of concept of the cross,” which focuses on the event of the passibility, when the idea of the economic Trinity is cross that occurs between the Father and the Son, and as conflated into that of the immanent Trinity, then God’s the kyrios (pivotal or dominant event) of the history of acts ad extra are in God or constitute the very intrinsic the world.5 Here, Moltmann affirms that, at the cross, being of God. Here, God himself is not merely not only suffering but all of history is taken into the reiterated or revealed in his external acts; God’s external intrinsic being of God. Thus, with this concept of the acts are “in” God himself. If God’s acts ad extra Trinity, rather than with that of the traditional trinitarian constitute his being, then these acts must necessarily take distinction, the true scope of Moltmann’s theology of on the reality of divinity since divinity is the reality of the cross and his doctrine of divine passibility are God’s being. This is the case even if God’s acts ad extra realized.

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constitute, but do not exhaust, his reality since they would take on the reality of divinity by having any part in the intrinsic reality of God. Thus, if God takes human suffering into his own being, then this suffering takes on the divine being of God. Suffering that is raised to the status of divinity by being “in” God must then become associated with the divine intrinsic nature of eternality or freedom from time. It would no longer be possible to say that there was a time when God did not suffer, and then in freedom God chose to suffer; when suffering is associated with his intrinsic being and “divinized” or “eternalized,” it is not accurate to talk of it in temporal terms. This is exemplified in the human experience of begetting as it is applied to the divine intrinsic relationship between the Father and the Son. When the Father is spoken of as begetting the Son in terms of the immanent Trinity as an act ad intra, the term “begetting” takes on an eter nal and perpetual significance: the Son is eternally and perpetually begotten.

In the same way, when suffering takes on an eternal and perpetual significance by virtue of its incorporation into the immanent Trinity, it can no longer be said that there was a time before when it was not and a time after when it is. When suffering is taken into the being of God, it always and everlastingly is. The God who loves from the fullness of his own being by “taking up” suffering into his own being is eternally and perpetually suffering. This suffering will never be overcome. Moreover, a passible God who takes suffering into his own intrinsic being is not and never has been free not to suffer. Divine suffering in this sense becomes as necessary for God’s intrinsic being as any of his attributes. When God is understood as eternally and perpetually suffering, he can never be understood as not suffering. Thus, it is at this key point concerning the freedom of God that the application of love as reciprocity to the being of God becomes problematic. Without God’s freedom in relation to suffering, there can be no true, voluntary love, and no divine passibility according to the terms in which moder n theologies of passibility such as Moltmann’s and Ngien’s want to define them.

Yet, a mediating position might state that although God the Son, incarnate on the cross, takes suffering into his own being, God the Father could have participated in the suffering in some qualitatively distinct way that maintained God’s passibility as well as God’s freedom.

Again, I answer, “Opera Trinitatis ad extra sunt indivisa”; what is attributed to one person of the Trinity is necessarily attributed to the Trinity as a unity of three persons. To argue that a distinct intrinsic work, experience, or relation of God the Father is in any degree ontologically separate from that of God the Son is to deny the unity of the Godhead that this historical affirmation seeks to maintain. The unity of the

Godhead is clearly disrupted if it is affirmed, for example, that while God the Son suffered and died on the cross in his own being, God the Father remained impassible and alive in his. Since it is the triune God who is always and everywhere present, it must follow that God in his tri-unity was present on the cross, although the work is properly understood as distinctly that of the divine second person. Therefore, I would argue that a move in the direction of this sort of mediating view is a move toward tritheism.

Divine Suffering and the Person of Jesus Christ Although these theologies of divine passibility ultimately prove to be problematic theologically, this does not leave humanity with a God who does not relate to human suffering. I believe that both Moltmann and Ngien properly look to a theology of the cross and to the suffering of Jesus as a true revelation of God in solidarity with suffering humanity. They each ask what the cross of Jesus means for God himself. Ngien answers that the divine nature of Jesus participated in the suffering of the cross in such a way that, “The human suffering of Jesus is really God’s own suffering: God suffered as we do.”6 Moltmann is even clearer when he concludes, “If that [God himself suffering and dying on the cross] is taken seriously it must also be said that, like the cross of Christ, even Auschwitz is in God himself.” 7 While I agree here with Moltmann and Ngien that conclusions concerning the suffering of God can and should be drawn from God’s self-revelation hidden in the humility and suffering of Christ on the cross, I contend that these conclusions must be understood within the context of properly related doctrines of Christolog y, the Trinity, and the incarnation. Thus, any conclusions affirming the intrinsic suffering of God’s being as the divine nature of Jesus are as problematic as those relating to the elimination of the trinitarian conceptual distinction.

This point can be demonstrated by applying the conclusions reached above to the following brief outline of the historical Christian understanding of the incarnation and two-nature Christology, which focuses on the doctrine of the hypostatic union.

The hypostatic union simply refers to the synthesis or hypostasis of the divine and human natures in the one person of Jesus Christ. The doctrine of the hypostatic union is founded upon the assumption that it is cogent to speak of a human nature and a divine nature that include the full attributes or all the essential qualities that make up humanity or divinity, respectively.

Furthermore, while the human nature as a created thing does not necessarily exist (since its essential qualities are found in its nature rather than in its subsistence), the divine nature does exist necessarily (since God’s nature JULY/AUGUST 1997

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or essence includes existence). In other words, the qualities essential to humanity can be divided from their particular instantiation or hypostasis, but God’s cannot.

This distinction is important for understanding the anhypostasis and enhypostasis characteristics of the human nature of Jesus as it relates to the hypostatic union.

Although the ancient Church fathers borrowed the concepts of “anhypostasis” and “enhypostasis” from the philosophy of Aristotle, they employed these terms (in this context) to describe certain supernatural realities that transcend, not only their use in Greek philosophy, but also the possibilities inherent in our natural world.

Anhypostasis defines the human nature of Jesus as not having its own instantiation or existence. Enhypostasis defines the human nature of Jesus as having its existence only in the divine Son or Logos. The human person of Jesus must be an instantiation of human nature in the same way that any specific human person must be an instantiation of the human nature. However, the doctrine of the hypostatic union holds that the human nature of Jesus exists, not in an instantiation or subsistence of a specific human person, but in the instantiation or subsistence of the divine Son. The divine Logos or God the Son, who is necessarily both divine nature and the instantiation of that nature, “took on human flesh” (John 1:14). Thus, the hypostatic union involves the divine Son, with both divine nature and hypostasis, becoming the hypostasis of the human nature. This makes it possible to affirm that the incarnate Jesus possesses a human nature and a divine nature united in one hypostasis or person. This doctrine of the two natures in traditional Chalcedonian Christology seeks not only to make a distinction between the divine and human natures, but also to assert their unity in the one person of Jesus. The one-person Jesus is both fully human, possessing all the essential qualities or attributes of humanity, and fully divine, possessing all the essential qualities or attributes of divinity. Therefore, it is equally proper to assert, from the Chalcedonian perspective, that the historical person Jesus is God and man.

Of course, many issues arise from this outline of the hypostatic union that are all worthy of serious analysis.

Important to this discussion, however, are the implications of the trinitarian distinction and the doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum (communication of proper qualities between the two natures) as they are applied to this basic understanding of the hypostatic union. These implications form the proper context for a theology of the cross as they profoundly affect the way God may be understood as suffering in the person of Jesus. Because Jesus Christ is not merely a revelation of God, but actually God the Son incarnate, the intrinsic being of God must be present necessarily, actually, and ontologically in the person of Jesus 28

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as his divine nature and hypostasis. Thus, the trinitarian distinction relates to the incarnation in such a way that it can be affirmed that Jesus is fully God himself, and that the extrinsic work of the person Jesus is a true reiteration or self-revelation of God’s being, or “God for us.” It is for this reason that Jesus understands his personality and personhood in terms of Sonship; that is, as the Son of God (Matt. 11:27; John 10:30), as well as Son of Man (Matt.

16:13). In this context of the hypostatic union, the tradition affirms the doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum in order to better understand the way in which the human nature and the being of God as the divine nature coexist in the one person of Jesus. By this doctrine, it is generally understood that the proper qualities of each nature in the unity of the person of Jesus are interchanged or communicated from one nature to the other within the hypostatic union. Given this simple definition of the doctrine, it is important to note the one key implication that demonstrates the problem with affirming God’s intrinsic passibility in the suffering of Jesus.

This implication of the communicatio idiomatum is simply that there are some attributes distinctly related to each nature that are not communicated to the other.

That is, what can be properly attributed to one nature of the hypostatic union is not necessarily properly attributed to the other. For example, the divine attribute of infinitude, while fully present in the divine nature, cannot be communicated to the human nature. This is simply because an infinite human nature is something more than what is properly human; therefore, if Jesus possessed an infinite human nature, soteriological problems would arise since he would not be human in the same sense as humanity in general. If this were the case, Jesus would not be truly human in the same way he would not be truly God if his divine nature did not possess infinitude, or if the finitude of the human nature were attributed to the divine. Likewise, while it is proper to attribute suffering to the human nature, the divine nature of Jesus could not suffer as the intrinsic being of God for the reasons concluded in the discussion of the trinitarian distinction above. The specific human quality of suffering cannot be attributed to God’s eternal being in the same way that the specific human quality of finitude cannot be attributed to God’s infinite being. Suffering is an experience of human nature that cannot be properly communicated to the divine. Therefore, it should be concluded that, although the person of Jesus did indeed experience suffering, the divine nature—which, as I have shown, must remain impassible in order to be freely and fully God—could not and in fact did not suffer within the hypostatic union. The precise reality of the communication of divine and human attributes in the person of Jesus is beyond human comprehension. Yet, this discussion MODERN REFORMATION

demonstrates the importance of maintaining an understanding of the doctrine between the boundaries of a total separation (Nestorianism) and a complete confusion (Eutychianism) of the attributes of the divine and human natures.

Theologies of the cross holding to divine passibility, such as Moltmann’s and Ngien’s, which seek to affirm the intrinsic suffering of God in the passion and death of Jesus, push the doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum beyond what it historically intended to affir m.

Moltmann criticizes Martin Luther’s theology of the cross for not relating what he referred to as the suffering of God in the person of Jesus to the intrinsic triune being of God. This is due, as Moltmann acknowledges, to Luther’s careful ar ticulation of the suffering of God within the context of traditional Chalcedonian Christology.8 Moltmann, however— by ar ticulating the Christolog y of Chalcedon within the context of his notion of love and divine passibility—proceeds beyond Luther in denying, at least in terms of suffering, the qualitative distinction between the divine and human natures of the one person of Jesus that the doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum seeks to maintain. In the context of Chalcedon, Luther rightly wants to speak of God as truly suffering in the person of Jesus; but he does not want to attribute this suffering specifically to the divine nature and ultimately to the intrinsic triune being of God. Thus, Luther holds his theologies of the Trinity, incarnation, and two-nature Christology in proper relationship and as the context for his theology of the cross.

and die. To take the doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum out of the context of the person of Jesus and apply it without limitation to the particular natures of the hypostatic union, is to confuse the two natures and push the doctrine beyond the boundary of Eutychianism.

This error is exemplified by Ngien when he states, in focusing on the person of Jesus, “Evangelicals should not be offended at the thought that the death of the crucified Christ involved not only the humanity of Jesus but also his deity”; and then states, when he moves to a focus on the two natures of Jesus specifically, “Christ’s death would be the death of just another human being, [if not for] the death of the Son of God.”9 I agree that the suffering and death of Jesus do involve his humanity and deity in the sense that he is the incarnate God-man; that God suffered and died for us in Jesus Christ is a true and accurate assertion. However, in light of a properly applied doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum, it must be affirmed that the divine nature of Jesus did not specifically suffer and die in and of itself, but only in reference to the unity of the person of the God-man.

For, in addition to the conclusions stated above, the intrinsic death of God in the specific death of the divine nature of Jesus is obviously problematic since in God we all “live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). If God actually and intrinsically dies, then the whole of creation, which he alone sustains, must also die with him.

Furthermore, a death experienced by God within which he may still actively sustain creation or resurrect himself is not a death in solidarity with that experienced by humanity. The mystery of the incarnation is not in the actual death of God’s intrinsic being; it is in the precise reality of the communication of attributes between the two distinct natures in the unity of the one person of Jesus. Thus, within the relational context of these historical Christian trinitarian, incarnational, and christological doctrines, it is possible to affirm that Jesus, as the God-man in the true mystery of the incarnation, suffered in a way that makes possible the affirmation that God, though intrinsically impassible, truly suffered in solidarity with humanity.

The more we acknowledge the

radical otherness and transcendence of God … the more we will cherish, lift up, and worship Jesus Christ who is the incarnation of God, the Immanuel, or “God with and for us.”

Properly Relating These Key Doctrinal Formulations The properly related historical doctrines of the trinitarian distinction, incarnation, and two natures of Christ do not allow free movement between what is properly attributed to the hypostatic unity of the person of Jesus (which may be the essential attributes of each nature) and what is properly attributed to each specific nature. For example, it is proper to affirm that the incarnate person of Jesus as the God-man is infinite and eternal, as well as able to suffer and die. But it is not proper to say that the specific human nature of Jesus is infinite and eternal, or that the specific divine nature of Jesus can suffer

Divine Impassibility and Our Suffering God I have argued that the modern understanding of JULY/AUGUST 1997

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love, which is a primary motivation for contemporary theological affirmations of divine passibility, is founded upon the freedom of God; and that the freedom of God is preserved by the traditional conceptual distinction between the immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity.

Fur ther more, I maintained that the trinitarian distinction must be confused or eliminated when this modern understanding of love is applied to the intrinsic being of God; and that the resulting loss of God’s freedom makes divine passibility, based upon this notion of love, problematic.

In addition to this, I demonstrated that when this conclusion is properly applied to the incarnation and traditional two-nature Christology, the problem with attributing suffering specifically to the divine nature of Jesus is also clear.

Thus, I have shown how affirming divine passibility is problematic for evangelicals who want to remain faithful to the revelation of Scripture as it has been witnessed to historically in the traditional doctrinal formulations of Christology, the Trinity, and the incarnation. I have also shown how evangelicals, by maintaining a proper relationship between these doctrines serving as the context for a theology of the cross, can affirm both divine impassibility and God’s identification and solidarity with human suffering in the person of Jesus Christ. I will now conclude with an answer to the concern as to why modern evangelicals should affirm both divine impassibility and the suffering of God with a focus on the trinitarian distinction.

It should be understood that the trinitarian distinction is the conceptual key that locks the door on our attempts to “humanize” God or, in this case, to bring the infinitely qualitatively distinct and incomprehensible God closer to humanity through the application of human suffering to God’s intrinsic triune being. In this way, the trinitarian distinction prevents us from re-creating God after our own image. Yet, the trinitarian distinction is also the conceptual key that opens the door for the understanding of God himself as freely relating to humanity in the incarnate person of Jesus. It properly points humanity to Jesus, who is the only mediator through which God and humanity may meet in true solidarity. The more human we try to make God, the less we need the incarnation. But the more we acknowledge the radical otherness and transcendence of God, through the affirmation of traditional doctrines such as the trinitarian distinction and divine impassibility, the more we will cherish, lift up, and worship Jesus Christ who is the incarnation of God, the Immanuel, or “God with and for us.”

Rather than following after the contemporary trend of theological thought that seeks to affirm divine passibility in the face of profound human suffering,

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evangelicals should reaffirm this historical Christian doctrine of the trinitarian distinction with its christological and incarnational implications. Through this doctrine, we understand that God must be impassible to be freely and fully God for humanity.

Only through this freedom and fullness may God truly be in loving relationship with humanity. And only in the affirmations of this trinitarian distinction, as they are properly applied to Christology and the incarnation as the context for a theology of the cross, may we affirm both the divine impassibility of God and the loving, voluntary choice of God to suffer in the passion and death of the person of Jesus Christ in true solidarity with suffering humanity.

Peter D. Anders received an MA from Wheaton and is currently engaged in graduate studies at Yale Divinity School, where he is also involved in the Works of Jonathan Edwards Project. He attends Christ Presbyterian Church (PCA) in New Haven.

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IN PRINT Theology of the Cross PCRT The tape series from the 1997 Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theolog y, with the theme “The Theology of the Cross.” Speakers include ACE Council members Alistair Begg, Michael Hor ton, James Montgomery Boice, and John Armstrong. (Excerpts from some of these addresses appear in the “The Altar of God’s Mercy” article in this issue.)

C-97-P0A, $30.00 The Cross of Christ John R. W. Stott (Westmont, IL: InterVarsity Press) “I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross …. In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?” Why should an object of Roman distaste and Jewish disgust be the emblem of our worship and axiom of our faith?

B-ST-5, $23.00 The Transcendence of God J. Gresham Machen (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth) Machen, an MR favorite, was the principle founder of Westminster Seminary and of what is now the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

In this work he explores the importance of maintaining both the eminence and transcendence of God, especially when we consider the suffering of Christ.

B-MACH-1, $10.00 The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross Leon Morris (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans) The result of Mor ris’ careful background research is a lucent and rewarding study of one of the major themes of Christian theology—the death of Christ and the interpretation of its significance by the early church.

B-MORS-1, $13.00

A Journal of Lutheran Theology The Reformation 1996 issue of Logia: (Vol. V, Number 4), titled, “Theology of the Cross and Justification.”

The Logia address is: P. O. Box 94, Cresbard, SD 57435.

J-LT-5:4, $5.50

OUT OF PRINT: (available at your local library) Luther’s Theology of the Cross Alister E. McGrath (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985) Significantly updating the discussion, McGrath also delves more deeply into the historical-theological context of Luther’s breakthrough based on his reading of Paul.

Luther’s Theology of the Cross Walther von Loewenich translated by Herbert J. A. Bouman (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1976) The Erlangen professor provides the most sweeping survey of Luther’s approach to this subject and it is eminently readable. While the author’s attachment to neo-orthodoxy is quite apparent, he gives the reader a helpful survey of the debates and provides a wealth of citations from Luther.

Calvin’s Doctrine of Word and Sacrament Ronald Wallace (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker) Although Luther pioneered the recovery of Pauline teaching, Calvin organized and elaborated these contributions. In this helpful book, Wallace shows how these themes were integral to Calvin’s understanding of Word and Sacrament. Readers should also consult Calvin’s Institutes, where he frequently contrasts “the knowledge of God the Redeemer” with speculation, merit, and mysticism.

All books (except out of print) are available from MR by calling (800) 956-2644. Phones are answered from 8:30 am through 4:30 pm Eastern Time, Monday through Friday. For further book recommendations and an on-line resources catalogue, please visit our website at www.remembrancer.com/ace.

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A CLOUD OF WITNESSES THE POWER OF THE GOSPEL BY PHILIP MELANCHTHON (1497–1560) Those whom conscience has terrified in this manner [by convicting of sin] would most surely be driven to despair, the usual condition of the condemned, if they were not lifted up and encouraged by the promise of the grace and mercy of God, commonly called the gospel.

If the afflicted conscience believes the promise of grace in Christ, it is resuscitated and quickened by faith, as the following examples will reveal wonderfully.

In Genesis, chapter 3, the sin, repentance, and justification of Adam are described. After Adam and Eve had sinned and were looking for coverings for their nakedness—for we hypocrites have the habit of relieving our consciences by making amends—they were called to account by the Lord; but his voice was unbearable.

Under these conditions neither coverings nor pretexts excused their sin. Convicted and guilty, the conscience lies prostrate when it is directly confronted with sin through the voice of God. They flee, and Adam explains the cause of their flight when he says: “I heard the sound of thee in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked” (Gen. 3:10). Note the confession and the acknowledgment by the conscience. In the meantime, Adam eats his heart out in grief until he hears the promise of mercy, the word spoken about his wife that her seed would bruise the serpent’s head (Gen. 3:15). Even that the Lord clothed them did something to strengthen their consciences, and is unmistakably a sign of the incarnation of Christ. For it is that flesh which in the last analysis covers our nakedness and destroys the confusion of trembling consciences on which the insults of the reproachful have fallen (Ps. 69).

We recalled before how David was undone by the voice of the prophet Nathan. And he certainly would have perished if he had not at once heard the gospel: “The Lord also has put away your sin; you shall not die” (II Sam. 12:13) … [The] Spirit of God has richly shown us the works both of his wrath and of his mercy.

What more evangelical expression can be conceived of than this: “The Lord has put away your sin”? Is this not the sum of the gospel or of the preaching of the New Testament: Sin has been taken away? You may add to these examples many stories from the gospels. Luke 7:37-50 tells of the sinful woman who washes the feet 32

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Expulsion of Adam and Eve, Masaccio MODERN REFORMATION

of the Lord; he consoles her with these words: “Your sins are forgiven” (v. 48). And what is better known than the story in Luke, chapter 15, of the prodigal son, who confesses his sin? How lovingly his father receives, embraces, and kisses him! In Luke 5:8 Peter, stunned by the miracle and, what is more, struck in his heart, exclaims: “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” Christ consoles and restores him by saying: “Do not be afraid,” etc. (v. 10). From these examples I believe it can be understood what the difference is between law and gospel, and what the power of the gospel is as well as that of the law. The law terrifies; the gospel consoles. The law is the voice of wrath and death; the gospel is the voice of peace and life, and to sum up, “the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride,” as the prophet says (Jer. 7:34). And he who is thus encouraged by the voice of the gospel and trusts in God is already justified; on this I shall soon say more.

Christians well know how much joy and gladness that consolation brings. And here belong those happy words the prophets use to describe Christ and the Church.

Isaiah 32:18: “My people will abide in a peaceful habitation, in secure dwellings, and in quiet resting places.” Isaiah 51:3: “Joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and the voice of song.” Jeremiah 33:6: “I will … reveal to them abundance of prosperity and security.” Jeremiah 33:9: “I will change the speech of the peoples to a pure speech, that all of them may call on the name of the Lord.” Psalm 21:6: “Thou dost make him glad with the joy of they presence,” etc.

Psalm 97:11: “Light dawns for the righteous, and joy for the upright in heart.”

But why heap up arguments when it is obvious from the promulgation of the law and the advent of Christ what the power of both law and gospel is? Thus Exodus, chapter 19, describes with that a horrifying spectacle the law was given, and we have just reviewed this above. For just as the Lord terrified Israel at that time, so the consciences of individuals are tormented by the voice of the law, and they exclaim along with Israel: “Let not God speak to us, lest we die” (Ex. 20:19). The law demands the impossible, and the conscience, convicted of sin, is assailed from all directions. In this condition, dread and confusion so trouble the conscience that no remedy appears anywhere unless the very One who cast it down raises it up. Some seek consolation by their own strength, efforts, works, and acts of appeasement. But these do not accomplish any more than Adam accomplished with his fig leaves. So are those who array themselves against sin in the power of their own will (arbitrium). The actual facts teach that they soon fall even more miserably. “The war horse is a vain hope for victory; and by its great might it cannot save” (Ps. 33:17). “O grant us help against the foe, for

vain is the help of man” (Ps. 108:12)!

On the other hand, the advent of Christ is described by the prophet Zechariah as follows in 9:9: “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble.” First, when the prophet

The law terrifies; the gospel consoles. The law is the voice of wrath and death; the gospel is the voice of peace and life. gives the order to rejoice, he teaches that the word of this King is different from the law; moreover, he expresses the gladness in the conscience of one overjoyed at hearing the word of grace. Next, there is nothing tumultuous, but all is calm, that you may understand he is the author of peace, not of wrath. This is that characteristic which elicits Zechariah’s term “humble,” which the Evangelist, as if in explanation, has made “meek.” Isaiah has the same idea in 42:3: “bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench.”

In a similar vein the apostle contrasts the face of Moses with that of Christ in II Cor. 3:13ff. Moses terrified the people with a glance of his countenance, as we have stated above. For who could bear the majesty of divine judgment when even the prophet deprecates it: “Enter not into judgment with thy servant” (Ps. 143:2)?

When the disciples see the glory of Christ on Mt. Tabor, such a new and wonderful joy floods their hearts that Peter, forgetting himself, exclaims: “Lord, it is well that we are here; if you wish, I will make booths here” (Matt. 17:4). Here is a view of the grace and mercy of God. Just as a glance at the bronze serpent saved men in the wilderness, so are they saved who have fixed eyes of faith on the cross of Christ (John 3:14ff.). Therefore the apostles most fittingly called their joyful message evangelion, or “good tidings.” For the Greeks also commonly designate their announcements and public commendations of deeds well done as evangelion …. MR

Philip Melanchthon was one of the most important first-generation German Reformers. This article, “The Power of the Gospel,” is a section of Melanchthon’s Loci communes theologici, one of the earliest Protestant dogmatics.

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THE ALTAR OF GOD’S MERCY The following are excerpts from plenary addresses delivered at the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology in April. The theme was “The Theology of the Cross.”

The Centrality of the Cross

ALISTAIR BEGG

Pastor, Parkside Church, Cleveland …We are not surprised by the antithetical nature of world religions. We have g rown accustomed to the marginalizing of essential elements of theolog y from those [within liberal theological circles] who reject the authenticity and sufficiency of Scripture. But what we are unprepared for, and in many cases unaware of, is the fact that within the framework of conservative Christianity, we have still yet to fight for the centrality of the cross. Let me explain to you what I mean. And you are sensible people, you need to judge whether my observation is accurate.

It is possible—I do not want to say it is likely, I want to say simply that it is possible—it is possible to be in an evangelical church and not hear the cross preached. Now, I do not mean that we do not see the cross carried, on little chains around ladies’ necks. Now, I do not mean that we do not see the cross stamped or embossed on gaily colored Bible covers and carriers—strange little things that we see people walk around with … I am not suggesting that, in not hearing it preached, we do not hear it referred to.

But hearing it referred to, is not the same as hearing it preached … The rehearsing of clichés with evangelical buzzwords in them, and the sounding out of evangelical mantras, dare not be equated with giving to the cross the place that the Scriptures give it; namely, a central place in life, and doctrine, and worship, and ministry, and evangelism, and practice! The central emphasis of the cross declares its necessity, establishes its meaning— namely, that it is substitutionary, that it is propitiatory, that it is efficacious, etc …. —and also in seeking to do that, that does not shy away from its offense.

You see, when we redefine the essence of the human 34

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predicament—and we are doing this, loved ones!—when we redefine the essence of the human predicament, in terms of a lack of self-esteem, in modern psychological terms, then we will inevitably find people being offered a couch rather than brought to a cross; being introduced to a psychologist rather than being confronted by a Savior.

When the battle is redefined in political terms, and that is made central, then what the Bible says is central becomes inevitably peripheral. And if evangelicalism has been good about one thing in the last fifty years, it has surely been good about this: namely, taking what is central and making it peripheral, and thereby allowing what its peripheral to take the central place. And we could discuss this well into the night, with many, many illustrations. The trivialization of the cross, amongst those of us who ought to know better, is observable in many different ways.

[So, let’s look at the place Scripture gives the cross.]

Let’s begin in Luke, chapter 24. You know the story: it follows upon the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. The fellows are going down the road, totally disappointed and disgruntled, because, as far as they can tell, salvation history has ended in the cul-de-sac of a Palestinian tomb. And as they are walking, alongside comes Christ himself. They are kept from recognizing him, and in the course of discussion, we read in verse 25: “He said to them, ‘How foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Christ have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?’ And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.” If you look forward to verse 44: “He said to them, ‘This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.’ Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures. He told them, ‘This is what is written: The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations ….’”

Now, if there is one sermon that any of us might MODERN REFORMATION

have enjoyed listening to, it surely must be this one. To have had the privilege of standing there, or sitting down, and listening to Christ himself expounding the theme “Christ in all the Scriptures.” To have Christ himself take these disciples through the Bible, and to point out the absolute, essential dimensions of the cross, as it appeared—through the Passover, the serpent in the wilderness, and so many different places. Where did he go? Did he remind them of his words from the cross— that three of them came from the Psalms? Did he turn them back to Psalm 22, as he rehearsed his statement: “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” Did he remind them of Psalm 69, in the statement: “I am thirsty,” and unfold that for them? Did he turn them to Psalm 31, and explain how it was, and why it was, that he chose to use those words to say, “Into Your hands, I commend my Spirit”? And do you think that he went all the way through the Prophets, and did not turn to Isaiah, chapter 53? That he did not drive home to the minds of these as yet unconvinced and uninitiated dear souls, the absolutely central place of his dying, of his suffering, and of his cross? He reminded them that he was simply doing again what he had said to them—for them—when he had been with them. “This is what I told you when I was still with you.” But they weren’t real quick on the pick-up. Turn to Mark’s Gospel, chapter 8 … He comes back to it in chapter 9...Chapter 10, verse 32 … And again, he took the twelve aside, and told them what was going to happen to him.

What characterized the last month of the Lord Jesus’ life, was a deliberate attempt to teach his disciples about his death. And when you read the Gospels, it becomes perfectly clear that the death of Christ, the cross of Christ, and its significance, is given a disproportionate amount of time in each of these Gospel records. It is quite clear that the author in each case had no intention of simply writing a biography of the Lord Jesus. But everything in the Gospels is arranged to lead up to the climax of the cross itself.

That is why when, for example, you read in John’s Gospel, you have at the very earliest stages this notion of his hour not yet coming—even in the Cana of Galilee event … Til finally we have Christ saying, “Father, I have come to this hour, and I am here for this hour, and I understand perfectly.” And in a moment in time, the expression of the great Covenant of Redemption, from all of eternity, when the Father, and the Son, and the Spirit, have it determined in the framework of their mutuality and co-equality, how this amazing plan of redemption will unfold in the experience of history.

And that’s why when we read these Gospel records, we find ourselves again and again and again being brought to this central emphasis.

When you go into the Acts of the Apostles, what

do you find? The Apostles hit the streets, and what do they talk about? “You crucified this Jesus, and God has raised him from the dead!” And as you go through the Acts of the Apostles, there are some fourteen occasions, that I managed to count, where the cross is directly and expressly preached.

“We preach Christ crucified,” Paul says to the Corinthians.

“Before your very eyes, he says, Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified.” And the word which is used there is the word for “placarded.” It is placarded, he says, in the same way as you drive from the airport into the center of the city, and you are confronted by these huge signs calling out all kinds of things—to do, and places to go, and things to purchase. It is all placarded there that all might see. That is the very word which Paul uses. He says, “Now, when I came to Galatia, I placarded the message of the crucified Christ for all to see!”

The Necessity of the Cross

MICHAEL HORTON

Co-Pastor, Christ Reformed Church, Orange County ...The evangelical Church tells people today, “Jesus is the answer.” The world booms back with the bumper sticker: “If Jesus is the answer, what’s the question?” You tell us; what is your question? Well, I’d like to be happier. Jesus is the answer! I’d like to be wealthier.

Funny thing, Jesus is the answer to that too! I would like to have a happier marriage. Jesus is the answer. I’d like to have a great experience. Jesus provides that; go to Toronto! I’d like to have total liberation from the problems of this world; I would even like to be at the place where I’m never troubled by my own sinfulness.

Of course we long for freedom from sinfulness, especially as Christians. This is part of what we are looking forward to. We have been taken from the age that is, into the age that is to come that is already breaking in upon us. Yet, we still haven’t found what we’re looking for. We are still looking for that better city; that city which is above that is coming down.

Jesus is the answer, but what is the question? You see, that is the problem today. We don’t know what the question is. The necessity of the atonement, the necessity of Christ’s cross is not that great, because we do not have a sense of our own sinfulness. Heaven JULY/AUGUST 1997

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forbid people should actually have some heavy sense that before God they stand naked and ashamed. Heaven forbid we should address this need—the need that truly matters.

But think of a lot of the preaching in evangelical churches today. Moses is an example of leadership.

Joshua gives us principles. It is the Aesop’s Fables approach to the Bible. Find a Bible character and find out what he teaches about how we should order our lives, and what practical principles he can lead us to.

You can find that in any religion. You do not need the Bible for that kind of practical religion.

But the Bible is about the cross … As Moses prepared the way for Joshua to carry Israel into the promised land, so John the Baptist prepares the way for Jesus by bringing his people to that very same Jordan River to be baptized. Yet, no sooner is Jesus baptized than he is tempted by Satan. We see that temptation in the first chapter of Mark’s Gospel. Immediately the Spirit drove him into the wilderness, where he was for forty days, tempted by Satan. He was with the wild beasts, and the angels ministered to him.

In the other Gospels, we see the exchange that takes place between Jesus and Lucifer, that ancient enemy of the preincarnate Son. Lucifer, the angel of light, the theologian of glory, promises glory to mortals like Adam, and he comes to the second Adam to promise the same thing. “If you will only eat this fruit, Jesus, you will be as God. I will give you the kingdoms of this world. You can have all of the wealth and splendor without the cross.”

If you could have anything at all, what would it be?

Money? “Show me the money.” That is what our culture is all about. Fame? Everyone would know you.

Power? To be able to tell other people what to do, and instantly they would do it? Or even the religious experience of glory and power? A spiritual control over sickness and disease, where you could name and claim health, wealth, and happiness? Moral perfection?

Political utopia? What are your felt needs?

Satan comes to Jesus precisely at the point of his felt need. (This is really important for us, because if we are really going to found a theology of felt needs, it will always be a theology of glory. It will never be a theology of the cross.) Jesus’ felt need in that hour was not to go to the cross. His felt need in that hour was for food; he was physically hungry. It was a very practical need. But, while the first Adam reached for the fruit and Israel demanded the food they craved in the wilderness, this second Adam—this true Israel—is already obedient to the Word of God. And this Word is finally a Word of the cross, rather than a word of glory.

Here we find Satan as the champion of the theology of glory. “Jesus, get the crown without the cross!”

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remember also that he possessed eternal glory. He knows what perfect peace, happiness, joy, prosperity, power, and wealth really are. Yet, instead of grasping what he really wants, he obeys the Word.

The world wants religion to improve us. The Christian faith comes to destroy us, so that we can be raised again with Christ on the third day.

In chapter two, the paralytic man comes to Jesus to be healed, but is told that his felt need for immediate physical healing is not his real need, his most immediate need.

“Son,” Jesus says, “your sins are forgiven.” This is your real need, Jesus says. After this, though, the paralytic is also physically healed as a sign of this greater miracle. To the grumbling Pharisees, Jesus asks, “Which is easier to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or, ‘Arise, take up your bed and walk’? Yet, so that you may know that the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sins, I said to the paralytic, ‘Arise, take up your bed and go home.’”

Throughout Jesus’ ministry, people followed, but mostly because of glory. As we note in John 6, people want their felt needs satisfied. As they catch up to Jesus for another meal, though, he says, “You don’t follow me because you believe I am who I said I am, and you don’t believe because of the miracles, these signs which I do.

You simply follow because you ate and had your fill.

You are consumers.” And thus, Jesus whittles the Church at this point—the visible Church, that is. He whittles it down significantly, from five thousand consumers to at least eleven disciples. They come seeking glory, not forgiveness. They don’t want forgiveness.

Today, we probably would have built a big church out of that. “You don’t come for forgiveness, but eventually, you might come for forgiveness. So at least we will get you coming here because of glory.” … [But then again, we are not that different than the disciples.] In Mark 13, Jesus describes his death and resurrection to them in terms of the temple. “Don’t you understand it? I am the temple. I am the holy of holies in whom the fullness of the godhead dwells bodily.”

But his disciples are so fascinated by the outward glory and majesty of the earthly temple that they miss his point entirely. “How can you—you described by Isaiah 53 as a man who had no beauty that anyone should admire him—be Solomon’s temple in all of its glory?”

Finally the second Adam endures his last temptation in the garden, saying, “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done.” It was not the Roman execution he feared. It was not even the mockery of his own people. It was the vengeance of his own Father that so tormented his soul that night. For Jesus, judgment day is about to come crashing down upon the sacred head now wounded.

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And when it does come crashing down, there is no one in the universe to make him happy, to meet his felt needs, to make him feel self-esteem or fulfillment.

There is no one, no one in the universe, not even his own Father. Jesus becomes the abandoned one, hanging on the cross because of our sins.

When Israel rebelled in the wilderness, God sent venomous snakes, commanding Moses to raise a brass serpent. Everyone who looked upon it would be healed.

What an inglorious sign of redemption! Like all of the signs of redemption—God slaughtering an animal and covering you in the bloody skins—God is awfully earthy; not very spiritual. Why on earth would you put a brass snake on a poll? And raise it in the middle of the desert so that the people bitten by the venomous snakes could look on it? Do you see how the whole Bible is about the cross? Christ, by his cross, was the one who crushed Satan’s head on that stake, so that everyone who looks to him—the sin bearer—is forgiven, and lives!

This is so disorienting. This sign of the cross raised for the healing of the nations. It is foolishness to those who are perishing. Infamous throughout the whole world as the empire’s instrument of execution, this is the symbol of Christianity? God in the electric chair? And this is God at his best? God sitting on a throne in a palace, I can understand. But God suspended on a throne of splinters is unimaginable. And yet the Gospel is that that is where God’s wisdom trumped all the cleverness of the great philosophies of the western and eastern worlds. It was in that moment that all of our glory parades were made as nothing as the glory of God hung suspended with blood dripping and flies buzzing about it. In that passage that was read to us, the humiliated Christ is now the exalted Christ before his ascension. As he had told the Pharisees, they did not understand the Bible at all because they did not understand that he was the center of it all.…

The Meaning of the Cross

JAMES MONTGOMERY BOICE Pastor, Tenth Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia 1 Peter 2:24: “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.” … We have made reference already to the passage in Luke 24, in which Jesus is explaining the meaning of his death to his disciples, who, by that time,

still had not gotten it. What Jesus did, we are told, is go to Moses and the Prophets, and explain to them in all the Scriptures, the things that concern himself. Now that is a very interesting verse, because it combines the three major parts of the Old Testament, according to the Jews’ understanding … So, we have the Torah, the Prophets, and the writings or the Scriptures. So, when Jesus began with Moses and the Prophets, and explained to them in all the Scriptures the things that concerned himself—that it was necessary that the Son of Man go to the cross, and suffer and die, and on the third day rise again—it is a way of saying that he began at the very beginning of the Bible, and he moved through it to the very end.

It is easy enough to see that; he was referring to the Old Testament. You go back to the book of Genesis, and there as early as the third chapter, you have the announcement of the cross. Adam and Eve have sinned in the Garden; they are expecting to die, because that is what God said. “The day in which you eat of the fruit of the forbidden tree, you will surely die.” God comes; he pronounces judgments, at the end of which they are still not dead. What they have heard is the announcement of the Gospel. One is going to be born of the woman, who will crush the head of Satan—even though Satan is going to strike his heal. We understand that, as we look back, as a prophecy of what was to come.

You go the whole way through the Old Testament, and you find it again and again, book after book. We had mention already of Isaiah 53, the greatest of the prophets. Finally, we come to the end of Malachi, and we find Malachi looking forward to that Son of Righteousness, who is risen with healing in his wings.

So, you find the cross the whole way through the Old Testament. We find it the whole way through the New Testament as well.

Satisfaction has to do with the character of God, whom we have offended; and therefore, it has to do with sin. To make satisfaction means to make reparation for damages that are done … In this case, the damage is done to God’s honor, and it is an offense against his character. That is one reason, I suppose, why we do not hear very much about the cross in our churches today. If the cross is God’s answer to the sin question, we don’t talk about the cross, because we are not very conscious of our sin.

It is not only conservative theologians who are saying this. Even worldly people have noticed it. Karl Mennenger wrote a book some years ago by the title, Whatever Became of Sin? He then explained, as he understood it, why people don’t talk about sin anymore.

He said, rightly, that sin by definition is an offense against God. So, if you push God out of the picture …

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you can’t really have sin anymore.

Well, if you do not have sin, then you don’t have a cross. The first step to understanding what the cross is all about is to realize the gravity of sin, and that the cross is God’s answer to the sin question … Anselm, far more than people in our day, understood this indispensable point: in order to understand the cross, you have to understand how serious sin is. If we don’t understand the seriousness of sin, we assume that all God has to do is forgive us. We forgive other people, after all, so why shouldn’t God just forgive us as well?

We have to understand as well that it is never a case of mere human beings appeasing God’s wrath. It is a case of God himself satisfying his own wrath, through the death of Jesus Christ. It is not surprising that this is hard for people to understand. We just do not think as God thinks; his ways are not our ways; his thoughts are not our thoughts. That is why God has taken so much time throughout the Scriptures to elaborate the meaning of the cross.

He began it in the Old Testament, with these elaborate destructions having to do with the sacrifices— primarily that which involves the Ark of the Covenant.

The Ark of the Covenant was a wooden box that was covered with gold. It was about a yard long, about eighteen inches high and deep. It contained the Law of Moses, the Ten Commandments that God had given to Moses on the mount. The original tablets, you will recall, were broken by Moses when he came down from the mountain, in that scene described in the thirtysecond chapter of Exodus. But then the Ten Commandments were written out again, and it was that that was placed within the Ark. Now, this Ark of the Covenant had a covering, which was called the Mercy Seat. It was made out of pure gold, hammered. At either end of this covering, or lid, of this box that contained the stone tablets of the Law, there were two cherubim—angel-like figures that faced one another. They had wings that went backwards and then upwards, and came together almost meeting over the top of the Mercy Seat, above the Ark that contained the Law. Within that space between the wings of the cherubim, God, in a symbolic way, was understood to dwell.

I ask the question: What does that picture mean?

What are you to understand when you direct your mind toward the Ark of the Covenant, which is within the most holy place of the Jewish Tabernacle? It is a picture of judgment, of course, because here is God, the holy God, looking down, and as he looks down upon earth, what meets his gaze? His holy Law, within the box of the Ark, the very Law that you and I have broken. That picture is a picture of judgment, and every Jew, as they thought about that, understood what that was about.

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and right, must judge sin.

But then, here is where the good news comes in.

Once a year, on the Day of Atonement, the High Priest, after performing a sacrifice for himself and the sins of his family, out in the courtyard, killed another animal and took the blood of that animal, very carefully (lest he violate any of the requirements of the Law and perish by taking the holiness of God lightly), made his way into the most holy place with the blood of the sacrifice, and sprinkled it upon the Mercy Seat, which was the covering of the Ark. Now, what does it picture? Now, as God looks down from between the wings of the cherubim, toward the Law which we have broken, he sees intervening in between the blood of the sacrifice. It symbolizes that death has taken place out there in the cour tyard, by the Altar. An innocent has died.

Substitution has been made. Blood has been shed. The wrath of God is satisfied. Now, the love of God is free to go out and embrace the sinner.

Now, it is all just a symbol. They understood, and it said very clearly in the Old Testament that the blood of sheep and goats does not take away sin. They are just animals. But it pointed forward to the blood of Jesus Christ, that would take away sin. Those who understood the Gospel in the Old Testament understood that, and looked forward to the coming of the Redeemer.

Incidentally, that is why that cover of the Ark is called the Mercy Seat. It is translated in the Greek Septuagint by the word “propitiation”—because it is the place where propitiation was made, and the wrath of God was turned aside.

The Offense of the Cross

JOHN ARMSTRONG Director, Reformation and Revival Ministries … If the mystery of Calvary were at the heart of our faith and godliness, I don’t think we would have a hard time taking the Lord’s Supper, as John Calvin wanted it to be taken, every week…

But the cross is also a scandal because it goes contrary to all ideas of human merit.

Ah, here is the theology of merit The last thing men will give up—even evangelical men, who will make their decision for Christ—is their own righteousness. They will fight you for that. They will definitely fight you for that. “Well, I know I’m saved by grace, but ….” No! “But” nothing. It is grace, or not at all. It’s Christ, or not at all. It’s the cross, or not at all.

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The world is full of do-gooders; religious, righteous do-gooders galore. So Toplady writes (in Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me): Not the labors of my hands Can fulfill Thy law’s demands; Could my zeal no languor know, Could my tears forever flow, All for sin could not atone; Thou must save, and Thou alone.

Indeed, as long as you are content with yourself, in your present condition—even your present professed Christian condition!—there is no hope. Your only hope tonight is Christ and him crucified.

Secondly, tonight, the believer can glory in the cross because here he sees God. We have so many people today running here and running there; running to Toronto, running to Pensacola, looking for God. They say they are “looking for the Spirit to fall.” People are trembling and quaking, and testifying to the Spirit falling. But I keep looking and listening, and I keep asking, “Where is the scandal of Calvary?” Is it in repenting? Turning over a new leaf ? Promising to serve God? Wanting to get rid of some sin? Some of this is laudatory and right of course, but without the cross, it takes the poor and confused, even the true believer, right back into another cycle of bondage. But Paul’s whole word to us tonight, from Galatians 5, is that we are free!

But what makes us free, if we take our eyes off of Calvary? It is here that we see God. We must not miss that God has become man! We cannot look at God in any other way than first through the doctrine of Christ. God has become man and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. We beheld his glory, and we saw in him the very glory of God—not full blown and blazing, for we could not handle that; we could not see it. But we saw the glory in this human person.

We preach because Christ has come, through the New Covenant fulfillment of all the prophets. We say that the Messiah has come, and he has died. We preach Christ and him crucified. This is what Paul is saying.

Jesus Christ and his death on Calvary is the center of everything distinctly Christian. This is the polestar, the Northstar, the theology of the cross. This is that which is all of our theology, as Luther said.

Here we see the face of God. So the hymn writer can say:

Christian believers that you get the assurance of your pardon? Where is it that you find hope and help and strength to face the world in which you live, and the judgment which is to come? Where is it that you find any hope whatsoever? Well, I will tell you where you do not find it—and it is where a lot of us have looked. You do not find it in a decision you have made somewhere in the past. You do not find it looking back to driving stakes, and writing decisions, and writing prayers, and uttering various things that people tell you. You do not find it going back through the same process over and over again. You do not find it either in moral improvement. You do not find it in improving your life, or changing your life, or getting your life in order under Christ, or by the law of God. You do not even find assurance in saying, “I have believed. And I believe that I believed, believingly.” You do not find it there.

Where do we find assurance? When the enemy comes to you … n the night and says, “Do you look at yourself ? What kind of man are you? … What kind of minister are you? If they could see you now, if they could see your heart, if they could see what I’ve seen and what you’ve seen, and what I know and what you know, if they could see you, how dare you get on your knees and pray? How dare you preach that sermon? How dare you talk to that man about his soul? Who do you think you are?”

What do you do? Where do you go? … You go as quickly as you can possibly go to Calvary. You run to the cross of Jesus Christ … Why? Because here God has pledged his mercy in the message of the cross to the foulest of sinners! “Foul I to the foundation fly; Wash me Savior or I die!” … His death is sufficient for all of my sin. His sacrifice is accepted in heaven even now for all of my unrighteousness. Credited to my account on the basis of his Calvary Work, is his own perfect righteousness. Therefore, I stand now as I shall stand in the Day of Judgement, not in anything I have done, but I stand in him complete; clothed in his righteousness; cleansed by his blood; and prepared to meet him face to face ….

All four of these Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology (PCRT) speakers serve on the Council of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals (ACE).

See from his head, his hands, his feet, Sorrow and love flow mingled down; Did e’er such love and sorrow meet, Or thorns compose so rich a crown?

Let me close with this simple word. Where is it as JULY/AUGUST 1997

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BACK ISSUES NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1994 The Word Became Flesh God created us in his own image, and he is the Great Artist.

However, we often confuse and important biblical distinction between creation and redemption. When we do this, we are confusing heaven and earth, the sacred and the secular, worship and entertainment, ministry and business. In this magazine learn how to clearly distinguish between creation and redemption. Contributors include: Eric Casteel, Rick Ritchie, D.G. Hart, Gene Veith. Code # MR-11/95 MAY/JUNE 1995 Evangelism Missions. Evangelism. The greatest privilege of any Christian is to share the Gospel with an unbeliever; but those two words easily haunt many churchgoers. Why is that? Is there a biblical, Reformational way of bringing the Gospel to the world? Read this issue to find out. Contributors include: Carl Henry, Russell Matthews, Rick Ritchie, Shane Rosenthal. Code # MR-05/95 MAY/JUNE 1996 Scripture Holy Scripture is not built into our hardware. In fact, when it comes to the Gospel, Scripture actually runs contrary to our nature.

Delving deeply into the sacred text can therefore be a challenge. In this issue, contributors focus on the Bible’s purpose: Why was it given to us, what should we be looking for, what does it tell us about history and what general rules should we be following to interpret it?

Contributors include: S. M. Baugh, D. A. Carson, Ronald Gleason, Carl Henry, V. Philips Long, S. Rosenthal, Rachel Stahle. Code # MR-05/96 JULY/AUGUST 1996 When the Salt Loses Its Savor “You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its savor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing, but to be cast out and trampled underfoot by men,” (Matt. 5:13). This warning about the salt losing its savor is a problem that many evangelical leaders are concerned about today. This edition of Modern Reformation highlights many of the concerns outlined by the newly formed Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. Contributors include: James Boice, Robert Godfrey, R.C. Sproul, Mark Thompson, David Wells.

Code # MR-07/96 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1996 Polemics: A Defense of Defending Most evangelical Christians agree with the necessity of polemics (the

practice of defending a doctrine or set of doctrines in opposition to others). The problem lies not in the idea but in the practice. In this issue, contributors defend the business of defending the truth within the church itself. Contributors include: R. Scott Clark, Gary L. W. Johnson, J. Gresham Machen, Rick Ritchie. Code # MR-09/96 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1996 Pilgrim’s Progress What do you think about when you come across that verb “to sanctify” or the noun “holy”? Especially in our day, images of a prude come to mind. That caricature is not only superficial, it’s the opposite of the biblical portrait. In this magazine, contributors dispel misconceptions about the important topic of sanctification.

Contributors include: John D. Hannah, Harold L. Senkbeil, Zacharias Ursinus. Code # MR-11/96 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1997 The Whirlpool: The Effects of Popular Culture on Religion A time when “whirl”—the fascination with the novel, eccentric, eclectic and “exciting”—is king, our age is dominated by an obsession with mass popular culture. But, how do we get the Christian message out without marketing it in some sense? Are we perhaps making more out of the dangers of “pop-culture” than we should? Contributors include: Ken Myers, Leonard R. Payton, Rick Ritchie, Gene Veith. Code # MR-01/97 MARCH/APRIL 1997 Finding the Keys: Liberating the Ministry from Trivial Pursuits What should we think about organizations, businesses, entertainment media, and other groups that call themselves “ministries”? What is the relationship of today’s minister to the prophets and apostles? Contributors to this issue of Modern Reformation explore the possibility that our whole contemporary notion of the ministry is out of step with Scripture. Contributors include: D. G. Hart, Lawrence R. Rast, Jr., Rick Ritchie.

Code # MR-03/97 MAY/JUNE 1997 How Do We Receive Christ: God’s Sacraments or Ours?

Among other things, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are supposed to unite us not only to Christ, but to his Body. And yet, they have caused some of the widest divisions among professing Christians. In this issue, contributors from many denominational backgrounds discuss the meaning, method and mode of the Sacraments.

Contributors include: Timothy George, W. Robert Godfrey, Arthur A. Just, Tom Nettles, Rick Ritchie. Code # MR-05/97

Cost per issue: $4.00 To order call MR at 215-546-3696 (M–F 8:30 am–4:30 pm ET) 40

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Ava i l a b l e f r o m m o d e r n R E F O R M AT I O N 1 - 8 0 0 - 9 5 6 - 2 6 4 4 JULY/AUGUST 1997

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FOOTNOTES HIDE NOT YOUR FACE—Michael S. Horton 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, translated and edited by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (NY: Vintage, 1968), 1052.

2 F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, translated by Walter Kaufmann (NY: Vintage, 1974), 125.

3 Rene Descartes, Meditations on the First Philosophy, in The Rationalists, trans. by R. H. M. Elwes (NY: Doubleday, 1974), 116-7.

4 Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, edited and abridged by E. Graham Waring and F. W. Strothmann (NY: Ungar, 1987), 47.

5 Don Cupitt, “A Final Comment,” in John Hick, ed. The Myth of God Incarnate, (London: SCM, 1977).

6 Ludwig Feuerbach, op. cit., 48.

7 Ibid., 47.

8 Karl Marx, quoted by E. Graham Waring, intro. above, op. cit., viii.

9 F. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 9.

10 John Henry Cardinal Newman, An Essay in Aid of A Grammar of Assent (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1973), 390.

11 Ibid., 391.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid., 392.

14 Ibid., 394.

15 Ibid., 397.

16 Immanuel Kant, conclusion to his second Critique.

17 Ludwig Feuerbach, op. cit., 28.

4

Ibid., 26-32.

Ibid., 39.

5

DIVINE IMPASSIBILITY AND OUR SUFFERING GOD—Peter D. Anders 1 For a concise account of the modern development of the issue of divine suffering, see Paul S. Fiddes, “Suffering, Divine,” The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Modern Christian Thought, ed. by Alister E. McGrath (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), 633-6. For a more detailed account, see Paul S. Fiddes, The Creative Suffering of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

2 Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology, trans. by R. A. Wilson and John Bowden (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993). For a concise discussion of other theologians representing this trend, see Warren McWilliams, The Passion of God: Divine Suffering in Contemporary Protestant Theology (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1985).

3 Dennis Ngien, “The God Who Suffers,” Christianity Today, February 3, 1997, 38-42.

4 Fiddes, 634. Fiddes discusses this modern understanding of love as one of the four primary motivations for affirming divine passibility. The remaining three motivations he cites are Christology, the justice of God, and the mutual relationality between God and creation.

5 Moltmann, The Crucified God, 249.

6 Ngien, 40.

7 Moltmann, The Crucified God, 278. Brackets added.

8 Ibid., 235.

9 Ngien, 40-1. Brackets added.

IS ANYBODY HOME?—Robert Kolb 1 Shisaku Endo, Silence (Tokyo: Sophia University, 1965), 297-8.

2 Ibid., 292. This is the interpretation of William Johnston, Sophia University, Tokyo; cf. his preface, ibid., 1-18, esp. 12-16.

3 Douglas John Hall, Lighten our Darkness, Toward an Indigenous Theology of the Cross (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976), 24.

continued from page 44 for more distraction.

What seems so obvious to anxious, pained, bewildered moderns is what is so wrong. We are having to learn again, even in the Church, that Christ’s paradox is always true: “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matt.

10:39). Losing one’s life flies in the face of all of the counsel we are receiving today that it is by finding the self, cultivating the self, expanding the self, and actualizing the self, that we will find life. Today, selfrestraint and the self-abnegation—which faith requires—have become obscenities. And we miss the point entirely if we think that this is simply a quarrel between two competing views of therapy.

No, what is at stake is whether or not we will be able to see the greatness of God, and whether what we see will enter into the innermost fibers of our being, for this is where our true spiritual health resides. The greatness of his power, wisdom, and goodness, and his greatness in creating, sustaining, and ruling over all of life, are not simply doctrines to be talked about but truths to be appropriated. His greatness in giving and judging his Son in our place, as well as his greatness for

what he has yet to do one day in putting truth forever on the throne and error forever on the scaffold, should be matters of great weight to us and great joy for us.

The psalmist spoke of longing, of fainting for God, of being enraptured with his beauty (Ps. 84:1-2), of having a compelling thirst for him (Ps. 42:1). How out of place this would be in many of our churches today! The truth is that our diminished “god” simply lacks the power to summon up such longing, such hope, such pleasure, in those who have come to worship him. But if our God has become small and skinny, he has been diminished only in our understanding and experience.

He has not really been diminished. So why can we not hope that the Church will yet be surprised to discover his greatness afresh? Why can we not hope that those who long for God, who are enraptured by his beauty, who thirst deeply for him, will become the norm rather than the exception? I know of no reason.

Dr. David F. Wells, a member of the Council of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, is the Andrew Mutch Distinguished Professor of Theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts.

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ON MY MIND

By David F. Wells

The Skinny God any years ago, J. B. Phillips wrote a book called Your God is Too Small. It was quite popular at the time, in 1952, although it now seems rather quaint. The juvenile understanding of God Phillips was attacking then is, by contemporary standards, rather innocent. This, however, is a book which I believe should be written afresh every decade.

For is it not the case that our internal bias (cf. Rom. 1:21-5) constantly tilts us away from God’s centrality and toward our own? And does this not lead us to focus more on ourselves and less on him? Even worse, don’t we then substitute our importance for his greatness?

This inward bias is now being mightily encouraged by our experience of the modern world, the upshot of which is our fascination with our self. Those who are well fed seldom think about food but for the hungry this becomes a consuming preoccupation. And for modern people, the self has likewise become an obsession. We are the starved. How else can we explain the fact that America has half the world’s clinical psychologists and one third of the world’s psychiatrists?

Over approximately the last thirty years, the number of clinical psychologists has increased 350%, clinical social workers 320%, and family counselors 680%, so that today we have two psychotherapists for every dentist and there are more counselors than librarians. The plagues of the modern self are providing sustenance for an extraordinary number of professionals, as well as driving a burgeoning publishing industry.

At the root of these statistics are two related developments. On the one hand, it is undeniable that life in our contemporary world is extraordinarily difficult, that the toll it extracts is high, and that the wounds it inflicts are deep. We, today, live with more stress, with higher levels of anxiety, than any prior generation. We have more people passing through our lives on a daily basis than ever before because of telephone, fax, e-mail, and even television and yet we are often lonely because so few ever matter to us personally.

We often are not rooted in any place but wander around our society like perpetual migrants and we may not even have families to which we are connected in any meaningful way. The constant change, the terrible speed

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of it, the escalating number of choices we have to make, all extract their cost. And we must also live in a society that is fragmenting in fundamental ways. Between 1960 and 1993, violent crime increased 560%, single parent households 300%, births to unmarried mothers 400%, and teen suicide 200%. So, it is no wonder that we feel alarmed and insecure and that we also become preoccupied with the wounds and pains within.

On the other hand, many (even in the Christian world) have drunk deeply at the trough of popularized psychology and appear to accept its two basic assumptions. First, we believe that we can find release from these pains through the right technique. If we are anxious, guilty, insecure, lost, unmotivated, unappreciated, ineffective, or friendless, we need worry no more about it. There is an answer, though we will have to pay to get it. Second, we have come to believe that our top priority should be that we seek our own authenticity before all else and that others, such as spouses or friends, may have to be treated as a threat to our own growth. Hence, where these assumptions have intruded upon the Church, our spirituality has become extremely privatized, highly individualistic, inimical to commitments, and quite ethically indifferent. Because this is so, we lose our appetite for God, our taste for his Word, and our sense of dependence on Christ. Our God, too, has become too small and is now often lost amidst our inner preoccupations.

There are, of course, those who genuinely need professional psychological care but the overwhelming proportion of those who have cast their faith in psychological terms do not. Their appetite for the therapeutic has come about for other reasons. In part, it reflects their own inner emptiness and the pain which this creates; in part, it rests on our growing cultural sufficiency, that what God’s grace, power, and regeneration once did, we can now do for ourselves; in part, it reflects a greatly diminished sense of sin and our refusal, quite often, to bear the pain of any self-reproach at all; and in part, it seems to reflect our lost ability to see any purpose in life outside of the self, an inability that both fuels our self-indulgence and stokes our need continued on page 43 MODERN REFORMATION