Life in His Name by Modern Reformation

MODERN REFORMATION VOL.28 | NO.6 | NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2019 | $6.95

Life in His Name

STUDY THE GOSPEL OF JOHN WITH OTHERS. A N E W B I B L E S T U DY F R O M C O R E C H R I S T I A N I T Y. The White Horse Inn broadcast and Modern Reformation magazine have spent all of 2019 in the Gospel of John. Pastors, theologians, and scholars have lended their insights into this amazing eyewitness account of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. Now you can help others understand this Gospel and introduce them to Jesus using our brand-new ten-week Bible study. This study is perfect for a neighborhood Bible study, a lunchtime office outreach, or even one-on-one discipleship. For your gift of any amount, we’ll send you this study guide.

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FEATURES

“That You May Believe” BY JEFF MALLINSON

Jesus’ Resurrection Appearances BY TIMOTHY L. FOX

Dawn of the New Creation BY MICHAEL G. BROWN

COVER ILLUSTRATION BY METALEAP CREATIVE

KNOW WHAT YOU BELIEVE. MEMBERSHIP IS FREE. With over twenty-five years of radio broadcasting and magazine publishing, and our Campaign for Core Christianity, our mission is to help Christians “know what they believe and why they believe it.” Create a free account at whitehorseinn.org to access free content.

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DEPARTMENTS

Christ the Heart of Creation

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REVIEWED BY

Sing a New Song

C A R L R . T R U E M A N

BY DOUGLAS BOND

How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church

T H E O LO GY

Mental Illness and Demonic Activity

R E V I E W E D B Y M AT T B O G A

B Y S I M O N E T TA C A R R

64 55 FOCUS ON MISSIONS

The Post-Postmodern Direction of PostPostcolonial Missions B Y B A S I L G R A FA S

BOOK REVIEWS

Essential Writings of Meredith G. Kline REVIEWED BY ZACH KEELE

B A C K PA G E

Meeting a Stranger BY ERIC LANDRY

MODERN REFORMATION Editor-in-Chief Michael S. Horton Executive Editor Eric Landry Managing Editor Patricia Anders Associate Editor Brooke Ventura Marketing Director Michele Tedrick

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Creative Direction and Design Metaleap Creative Review Editor Ryan Glomsrud Copy Editor Elizabeth Isaac Proofreader Ann Smith

Modern Reformation (Subscription Department) P.O. Box 460565 Escondido, CA 92046 (855) 492-1674 info@modernreformation.org | modernreformation.org Subscription Information: US 1 YR $32. 2 YR $50. 3 YR $60. Digital Only 1 YR $25. US Student 1 YR $26. 2YR $40. Canada add $10 per year for postage. Foreign add $9 per year for postage.

LETTER from the EDITOR

Our second feature article is by Timothy Fox, a Presbyterian pastor in Austin, Texas. Dr. Fox examines each of the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus, showing how the disciples must now grapple with this one who has risen from the dead. As they grow in their own faith and knowledge, we in turn learn how to grow in our own faith and knowledge of Jesus. In the third feature article, Michael Brown—a Reformed pastor currently serving in Milan, Italy—draws our attention to the apostle Peter, who takes center stage at the end of John’s Gospel and becomes an object lesson for all who e have spent the last year workbelieve and follow Jesus. More than just a moral ing our way through the Gospel of philosophy or set of theological truths to which John. Along with our sister broadwe give adherence, Peter’s story shows us that cast radio program, White Horse the Christian life is actually a sharing in the new Inn, we have explored the themes, characters, resurrection life of Jesus. theology, history, and meaning of this imporNext year, we are returning to our issuetant book. We believe that these kinds of “deep specific themes, starting in January/February dives” into Scripture strengthen our with the “myth of secularism.” faith and ultimately help build up In a world where more and more the churches in which we worship young people identify with no and serve. I hope this has also been religion at all, it is tempting to “HOW WILL your experience. believe that secularism is winIn this issue of Modern Reformation, ning the day. In his forthcoming HIS DISCIPLES we turn to the final chapters of John’s article, however, Michael Horton ENGAGE HIM, account of the life, death, and resurwill argue how our age is similar WHAT WILL HE rection of Jesus. Now that Jesus is to other periods in church hisDO WITH THEM, tory in which believers have alive again, how will his disciples engage him, what will he do with grappled with paganism—not AND WHAT them, and what purpose does it all secularism—as they bear witness PURPOSE DOES serve? Our first feature article is by to Jesus Christ. IT ALL SERVE?” Jeff Mallinson—a Lutheran theoWe hope you will join us for logian at Concordia University in our twenty-ninth year of pubIrvine, California—who tackles lication as we tackle this and John’s purpose statement: “These other important questions about things are written so that you may believe that God, this world, and your life in it. Renew your Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by subscription today! believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:31). Over and over this year, we have explored the historical, factual, eyewitness evidence of John’s Gospel. In this article, Dr. Mallinson draws it all together and demonstrates how our faith is both reasonable and life changing. ERIC LANDRY exec utive editor

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Sing a New Song by Douglas Bond

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f it was good enough for Isaac Watts, then it’s good enough for me.” I didn’t come right out and say it, but I came close. I certainly was not going to attempt writing a new hymn; none was needed. Over two decades of writing and speaking about singing and liturgy, I’ve been accused of being a liturgical traditionalist. Skim through the proliferation of lyrics mass produced in recent decades and, whatever your particular taste in music, it’s impossible not to observe how different they are from the psalms and hymns the church has been singing for centuries. That’s precisely by design. They were written not only to be different but also to be better, more relevant, to conform to a new ethos.

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Some years ago, while visiting a church on our family vacation, we were invited to rise and sing the following: You are my wholeness, You are my completeness. In you I find forgiveness, Yes, in you I find release. It’s a wonder you take all those blunders I make And so graciously offer me peace. Bewildered, I reread the lines. Unless I was missing something, it appeared that the writer of these words had managed to flip everything around. The eternal living God—who made the earth, the sky, the sea, and all that is in

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them—had been reduced to a means of individual self-discovery. “You are my completeness,” the added bauble that finally makes me whole, as if God were a fashion accessory that puts the finishing touch on my outfit. I looked around the congregation. Hands were raised; eyes were pinched shut with emotion. What was I missing? There were references to forgiveness and peace, vague ones, but blunders? Only those “who think of sin but lightly” will refer to their offences as “blunders.” David uses no such reductionist terminology in his psalm: “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight” (51:4). To my ear, the flouncy cadence of the lines about blunders sounded so different from the earnest sobriety of David on his face, confessing his evil to a holy God. Surely, the song at this church service had to get better. How could it get worse? And in you I find true friendship, Yes, your love is so free of demands, Though it must hurt you so, You keep letting me go To discover the person I am. Maybe I was being too critical. Maybe the lyricist was onto a deeper truth in the line, “Your

The Christian’s chief end is to do all things to the glory of God alone; how much more so when we take poetic words on our lips, addressing God in sung worship?

love is so free of demands.” I wanted to be generous, to find at least a morsel of truth that might redeem these lines. While I cast about, I tried to picture the persecuted church singing this. Imagine Christian martyrs throughout the centuries lustily joining in with “Your love is so free of demands” as the wood is lit beneath their feet at the stake. Not only was this song nonsensical, singing this made a mockery of the persecuted church, then and now. Watts put it far better: Love, so amazing, so divine Demands my soul, my life, my all. I felt as if the fabricator of this newer ditty of self-actualization had learned his theology from a pop-psychology textbook—not from the word of God. Truth and the honor of Christ were at stake. I signaled down the row for my family to stop singing. Historically, the finest poetry woos us away from self-absorption and makes us less selfreferential. The best poetry “turn[s] us from ourselves to Thee,” as one poet put it. The Christian’s chief end is to do all things to the glory of God alone; how much more so when we take poetic words on our lips, addressing God in sung worship? Though my family and I had stopped singing, the rest of the congregation dutifully murmured onward: And like a father you long to protect me, Yet you know I must learn on my own. Well, I made my own choice, To follow your voice, Guiding me unto my home. Impotent and passive, the father figure portrayed by this lyricist now sits wringing his hands and waiting. How vastly different this is from the God of the Bible in Isaiah 46:9–10: “I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done,

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saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose.’” How equally dissimilar this is from the God portrayed in the rich canon of the church’s hymnody. The final plumage of self-praise in “You Are My Wholeness” shifted to praising the songwriter’s own choice. Unwittingly, all those who sing these words are praising themselves for following someone’s voice. We’re left to fill in many gaps, including who this “someone” is. Though the apostle Paul calls us to do everything in the name of Jesus Christ (Col. 3:17), oddly, while ostensibly singing to him in this reductionist doggerel, there was zero mention of the Triune God—Father, Son, or Holy Spirit. Wouldn’t ruined sinners rescued by Christ want to sing more like this? Why was I made to hear thy voice, And enter while there’s room, When thousands make a wretched choice, And rather starve than come?

SING A NEW SONG I confess that because of lyrics from songs like “You Are My Wholeness,” I had retreated into traditionalism. There are so many great psalm versifications and hymns to sing, I thought, let’s solve the problem. Instead of being subjected to such unworthy lyrical nonsense, let’s simply stick with the best of the past. I thought I’d found my safe place in self-righteous traditionalism. Until I began reading the book of Psalms. I love singing the psalms, and I’ve always tried to avoid debate with my exclusive-psalm-singing brethren. “Oh, you sing only the psalms?” Only? The psalms are the very words of God, breathed by his Spirit to the ancient poets who penned them. There’s nothing only about them. It was through those very psalms that I was repeatedly called to sing a new song (Pss. 33, 40, 96, 98, 144, 149). As the psalms were once

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“Oh, you sing only the psalms?” Only? The psalms are the very words of God, breathed by his Spirit to the ancient poets who penned them. There’s nothing only about them.

new expressions of praise for old covenant deliverances, so new manifestations of the gracious deliverance of our God call for new “songs of loudest praise” to give voice and substance to our new covenant gratitude. But these songs weren’t found just in the psalms. In Revelation 5:9, in a culminating torrent of splendor, the saints and angelic hosts “sang a new song, saying, ‘Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation.’” My traditionalism was getting pummeled.

THE MOUTHS OF BABES Meanwhile, my children began to work on me. “Daddy, don’t read us another book. Tell us a story; one you make up yourself.” I pointed to the walls of books in our home. There are so many wonderful things to read. “No, Daddy, make up a story.” That was twenty years ago. I’ve been making up stories ever since, my children often

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my chief critics. Writing books was one thing, but attempting to write a new hymn terrified me. Then I hit on a solution. I would have a character in one of my children’s books (The Accidental Voyage) write a hymn. Throughout the story, my protagonist gnawed his pencil in fits and starts. It was perfect. If he managed to craft a poem that resembled a singable hymn, then I would be safe. More likely, if my efforts in his persona were an unmitigated disaster, then I could simply blame this adolescent protagonist. What do you expect from a twelve-year-old? Feeling liberated, I furiously worked in secret on several other hymns. But exposure was around the corner. After writing a birthday sonnet for a pastor friend of mine, he asked me to write a new hymn for the Thanksgiving service—in a week. His was a discerning congregation of hymn-savvy Presbyterians. What did he think I was, a performing circus animal able to crank out poetry that would stand up to their scrutiny? I declined. Besides, after a long battle with cancer, my father had recently died and I didn’t feel much like writing a new hymn. We had sung hymns at my father’s bedside, reciting and singing the psalms, the thirty-fourth emerging as one of his favorites. This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him And saved him out of all his troubles. (Ps. 34:6) He would often ask me to read it. He would then lean back on his pillow, close his eyes, and smile as I read. Though I had declined to write the hymn, I found myself looking up biblical passages on thanksgiving, always drawn back to my father’s favorite psalm and the phrase, “O, taste and see that the Lord is good!” The allusion to the Lord’s Supper stirred me, but the days before the Thanksgiving service were clicking by and all I had was an initial idea. Neophyte muse that I was, how could I possibly write a hymn in so short a time—one that would be worthy of the high worship of God?

Three days before the Thanksgiving service, I managed to produce five stanzas that began like this: We rise and worship you, our Lord, With grateful hearts for grace outpoured, For you are good—O taste and see— Great God of mercy rich and free. The next stanzas explored the salvific roles of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, for which every Christian has unmeasured cause for thanksgiving. To match the poetic meter, the accompanist had chosen an existing long-meter tune. I sweated and fidgeted as the congregation sang.

HOSTILITY TO FORM As Augustine put it, “I count myself among those who learn as they write and write as they learn.” And did I ever need to learn several important things about hymns and writing them in these early efforts. My poetry tutorials, however, had begun much earlier. God placed me in a hymn-singing, literary home, where we would snuggle up on the couch and listen to my mother read aloud from Shakespeare, even Chaucer in Middle English. Not understanding a word, I was charmed by the sounds and cadence of the poetry. In my adult life, during decades of teaching history and literature, including the writing of poetry, I watched with mounting apprehension as our culture descended further into a post-poetry, post-literacy malaise, with the church dutifully in tow. Along with postmodernity’s hostility to form, dismantling culture and disfiguring art, our ability to define and appreciate poetry has been marred. We’re taught to disparage poetic conventions such as meter and rhyming, and anything else that gives shape and order to art. Literary experts say that we are to read poetry just like we read prose, as if poetry were

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a literary birth defect of prose rather than its own genre with its own rhetorical qualities. For thousands of years, poetry has included various metrical patterns and parallelisms of sound, rhyming being one of the most delightful and anticipated. In our moment, however, vers libre is celebrated as the highest form of poetry—emotive free verse that defies the conventions of the ages. With lines capriciously designated, much of this material is little more than fragmented prose masquerading as poetry. Literary elites assure us that traditional poets were simply being cute with words, showing off, being crafty in their slavish devotion to convention. I wonder if they might also tell us that Michelangelo was just being crafty with marble, that medieval architects were simply showing off with stone-vaulted ceilings, or that J. S. Bach was merely being cute with counterpoint. When critics of poetic conventions asked twentieth-century poet Robert Frost why he didn’t write in free verse, he replied with an apt simile, “Writing poetry that doesn’t rhyme is like playing tennis with the net down.” Frost believed that there was something inherent in the genre that demanded structural boundaries, if it is to be what it is. But his was a voice crying in a literary wilderness.

CONGREGATIONAL PASSIVITY How does this relate to sung worship? Observe the congregation in a contemporary service, and it becomes clear that it is difficult to sing lyrics composed to post-poetry dictates. Throughout much of Western civilization, poetry was composed to be sung by the whole clan. Today, singing is now largely done for us by commercially popular, celebrity entertainers or those who imitate them. The congregation has become avid listeners, but increasingly inept participants in full-voice singing. Finding myself a guest in many different churches, most arranged with the entertainers and their instruments on center stage, I’ve

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[Robert] Frost believed that there was something inherent in the genre that demanded structural boundaries, if it is to be what it is. But his was a voice crying in a literary wilderness.

been observing congregational singing for years. Many people are not singing at all, especially the men, and most of those whose lips are moving are murmuring more than full-voice singing. Why is that? Whatever our playlists look like and however lustily we might sing in the privacy of our cars, let’s be frank: one who is not a pop musician feels uncomfortable attempting in public to sing like a solo-voice entertainer. It turns out that, although they call themselves “worship” leaders, they are not leading us. They are doing it for us. Our participation is irrelevant to the performance. Join in if you care to. Either way, it will not change the instrumental, high-volume sound pulsing through the worship center.

CONVENTIONS FOR CONGREGATIONAL SINGING So, how are we to write, compose, and sing new songs that reflect the ethos of worship rather

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than the ethos of entertainment? David played his harp, a solo performer—for the sheep. But he wrote psalms to be sung by the congregation, young and old, without any consideration for generational preferences. Hence, as we attempt to craft new songs, the hymn writer does not write for a solo performer or for a choir. A good hymn could be sung by either; but the writer of a new hymn, like David, will intentionally craft poetry accessible for the whole congregation of God’s people to sing with full voice. When Christians of all ages and various singing abilities rise to their feet to sing the praises of their redeemer, if things are to be done decently and in order, they will want to sing with one voice. Though it is more difficult to observe when hymn poetry is subordinated to the musical score (as in American hymnals), for centuries, virtually all hymns have been written in regular rhyme and meter. Solo entertainers

Music in worship is first and last about the voice of the congregation singing to and with one another the word of Christ.

can sing metrically irregular songs and often do, but singing free-verse worship songs is difficult for the congregation.

WHAT MAKES A GOOD HYMN? Our greatest problem of discerning what is worthy to sing in worship is a theological problem. Americans fixated on making everyone equal don’t make good worshipers. Sinners, undone by their crimes in the face of a holy God, falling on their faces before the sovereign Lord who has paid their vast debt in full with his precious blood, make better worshipers. We must get our theology right before we can correct our doxology. Another problem we have with evaluating what is worthy to sing in worship is that we no longer think of hymns as poetry, and in our postpoetry culture, we have lost the literary tools to require the highest standards for that poetry. What we sing before the face of our redeemer in worship must be the finest human poetry, set to the most appropriate human music, shaped by the biblical ethos of worship. Music in worship is not first about loud instruments, multicolored lights, or soloists aping entertainment celebrities, as we see in the ubiquitous nightclub liturgy of our present situation. Music in worship is first and last about the voice of the congregation singing to and with one another the word of Christ. Paul put it this way: Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. (Col. 3:16–17) Here, Paul tells us how and what to sing. New songs of new covenant worship find their substance and boundaries in this locus classicus of

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Praise choruses and worship songs have been generally reductionist in theological content, saying less and less about doctrinal truths and often never using the name of Christ.

sung worship. Notice that three times we are told to take Christ’s name on our lips in our singing, and we’re told three times in the whole context of the passage to sing our thanksgiving—which strongly suggests that new lyrics will be Christ centered and filled with gratitude. This Colossians passage reveals three more functions of hymns, summarized by hymnologist Erik Routley: New covenant hymns will codify doctrine (“teach and admonish”), unify the church (“one another”), and glorify God (“to God”). We have seen a decay of all three of these functions in most of the new songs of recent decades. Praise choruses and worship songs have been generally reductionist in theological content, saying less and less about doctrinal truths and often never using the name of Christ. Furthermore, instead of unifying the church, the shift to lyrics and music that suit the ethos of entertainment has created a generational rift and divides the church. Some churches have a traditional service and a contemporary one, thus dividing the church by tastes and age rather than bringing the church together with one voice in song. A good test if a lyric will unify the church is to ask if the persecuted church would have chosen to sing it, if the early church would have sung it, and whether Christians would have sung it in the Reformation, the Great Awakening, or the missionary movement of the nineteenth century. The third function of singing to the glory of God has been under attack for decades. When the church prefers singing what entertainers

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sing at concerts or what Christian radio stations are playing, there is a pull to imitate the entertainment industry and its popular celebrity method of singing with church worship leaders now attempting to look like and sound like they are on stage at a concert. The late Keith Green, himself a vanguard of contemporary Christian singing, was distressed as he observed changes afoot: It isn’t the beat that offends me, nor the volume—it’s the spirit. It’s the “look at me!” attitude I have seen at concert after concert, and the “Can’t you see we are as good as the world!” syndrome I have heard on record after record. That was decades ago. What would Green say today? However noble the intentions, the entertainment arrangement is the perfect storm for singing to the glory of the performers on the stage. Routley quips that when the three functions of hymns—codify, unify, glorify—are absent, he wished for the song to have “the short life of all rootless things.”

NEW REFORMATION HYMNS Finally, Paul tells us to write and sing new hymns “with all wisdom”—that is, to do so skillfully. This means that those who presume to craft new hymn lyrics or compose tunes for those lyrics

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need to study, develop their skills, know what they are attempting, and stand on the shoulders of the great hymn writers of the past such as Cowper, Watts, Wesley, Havergal, Bonar, and many others. It was while immersed in the study of our hymnody that I became so reluctant to attempt writing a new hymn. How could I possibly measure up to the best hymn writers of the past? Then it occurred to me: I don’t write books because I think I’m the best writer in the world, any more than I love my wife because I think I’m the best husband in the world, any more than I parent my kids because I think I’m the best parent in the world, or any more than I worship Christ because I think I’m the best worshiper in the world. Neither do I write hymns because I think I’m the best hymn writer in the world. Then one frosty December evening, as I scribbled in front of the fire, I found myself toying with the idea of attempting a carol. When I came to my senses, I contemplated tossing my notes into the fire. What was I thinking? Christ’s advent? The sacred mystery? Angelic heralds? The culmination of thousands of years of prophecy? The best of the existing carol canon guaranteed failure on my part. Carols are uniquely rich with celebratory atmosphere, evocative of rejoicing and feasting, sleigh bells, and every charming winter association imaginable. Hymnologists tell us the best-loved hymn of all time is actually a carol, Charles Wesley’s “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.” It was literary suicide to attempt a carol. Because of my fears, early scribblings for this carol sat dormant for several years. Hymn writing can sometimes be like that for me: an initial burst of ideas and then nothing; just an imaginative black hole. Then another advent season approached. I read aloud from Luke’s Gospel with my family, and we sang a carol. When the kids were tucked in their beds, I pulled out my initial notes and sifted through the scribbled idea and word banks. Late that night, with fear and trembling, I managed to set down six stanzas as they

appear below, beginning with the angelic announcement of Christ’s advent to the shepherds, proceeding to our Lord’s sinless life, Gethsemane and the cross, the resurrection, and concluding with Christ’s triumphant Second Advent. I offer it here for this advent season in hopes that it might help you fall down in wonder at the glorious sight of the incarnation of the Son of God, and then rise and joyfully sing the praises of King Jesus. What wonder filled the starry night When Jesus came with heralds bright! I marvel at His lowly birth, That God for sinners stooped to earth. His splendor laid aside for me, While angels hailed His Deity, The shepherds on their knees in fright Fell down in wonder at the sight. The child who is the Way, the Truth, Who pleased His Father in His youth, Through all His days the Law obeyed, Yet for its curse His life He paid. What drops of grief fell on the site Where Jesus wrestled through the night, Then for transgressions not His own, He bore my cross and guilt alone. What glorious Life arose that day When Jesus took death’s sting away! His children raised to life and light, To serve Him by His grace and might. One day the angel hosts will sing, “Triumphant Jesus, King of kings!” Eternal praise we’ll shout to Him When Christ in splendor comes again! DOUGLAS BOND is the author of twenty-eight books, including his latest, God Sings! (And Ways We Think He Ought To). He also leads church history tours and is the lyricist of New Reformation Hymns (www.bondbooks.net).

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FOCUS ON MISSIONS

The Post-Postmodern Direction of Post-Postcolonial Missions by Basil Grafas

n my article “Learning How to Live and Thrive wit h PostPostcolonial Missions” in the last issue of Modern Reformation (September/October 2019), we started a new topic that I would like to finish off now. I proposed that evangelical missions works according to one of two paradigms, colonial missions and postcolonial missions, with a third paradigm emerging recently from the batter’s box: post-postcolonial missions. My premise is that in the case of either colonial or postcolonial missions, we continue to address missions with colonialism still in the foreground. Beyond that, postcolonial missions—like colonial missions before it—still frames missions in a colonial way. I stated that this was analogous to the

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relationship between modernism and postmodernism. Postmodernism is not “after” modernism but rather the late stages of modernism. It is, in a way, when all of the modernist chickens come home to roost. So, if my comparison is apt, then postcolonial missions is a late stage of colonialism. Where colonial missions revolved around Western church planting, involving denominations and voluntary societies, postcolonial missions are still controlled by Western money, Western academic perspectives, Western marketing through trade publications, and Western missions organizations, whether denominational or parachurch. While stabs are made at breaking the modernist colonial mold by promoting national leaders and international

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partnerships, it is all still within the grasp of Western partners. One of the clearest ways we can see this dysfunction is in the relatively recent proliferation of Muslim-idiom translations of the Bible. These are nearly all created and promoted by Westerners. The constant drumbeat of national Christian opposition to them has done almost nothing to eliminate their presence in Muslim cultures. Rather, the response to this criticism, particularly by non-Western Christians, has been damage control in the West to convince donors that nothing wrong is taking place, but they still do not repudiate the translations themselves or remove them from circulation. It is all about marketing. Perhaps just as devastatingly, nationals exercise their freedom by using these Western approaches rather than inventing their own, which forces Western Christians to adjust their own participation in that new world. The adoption of Western paradigms ensures that nationals continue to receive Western funding, whether or not the money actually funds the stated ministries designated. Make no mistake about it, colonial missions has not yet faded from view. There is one more thing to say about postcolonial missions: While it is absolutely true that Western missiologists and missionaries remain in the grip of old ideas, so do nationals. This can be seen in one of two ways. In the first case, nationals go along with Western

approaches and then resent the Westerners they use—but perhaps this turnabout is fair play. After all, a case can be made for the self-serving nature of missions. In other words, it is about what you receive, not just what you give. The other iteration of postcolonial missions from the nationals’ perspective is that as nationals begin to exercise freedom from control, they still do so with a bias against the Westerners interested in serving them. Old feelings die hard. This reflexive response, however, carries its own dangers. For example, the assumption of personal control over a nation’s missions can make them more vulnerable to a hunger for control. It can, on the other hand, make it harder to receive wisdom. To finish this introductory thought, I am not saying that colonialism was an unqualified failure. It was manifestly not that, as millions of new Christians around the world can testify. It did, however, leave some damaging effects that still play themselves out in contemporary missions, whether in naked colonial fashion or in postcolonial camouflage. But all this will pass. It is changing right under our noses, although most of us cannot see it. Let’s look at a broad outline of the differences and then consider specific examples of the difference that changes will make. A postpostcolonial missions paradigm will engage in missions without the looming presence of colonialism. Of course, we need young leadership

[Colonialism] did, however, leave some damaging effects that still play themselves out in contemporary missions, whether in naked colonial fashion or in postcolonial camouflage. 14

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to fully realize something that new. I can see it coming, but I am probably too old to fully embrace it. Following are a few characteristics that I see emerging from this new world. The trend against strict denominationalism will continue but with a great twist. Postcolonial missions championed missions unchained from denominational control. The ubiquitous writing of Ralph Winter, Bob Blincoe, Dudley Woodberry, and to some degree, Andrew Walls testified to neo-evangelicalism’s fascination with missions freed from historical organizational constraint. For them, the future of missions was bright, but only as it proceeded farther away from the lights of the denominational city. The post-postcolonial twist will also move away from Western leadership altogether, including that of the parachurch, but it will move back toward the myriad clustered lights of local churches and perhaps, if they have them, presbyteries or evangelical dioceses. Despite the assertions of missionary journals and books, the explosion of Christianity outside the West is not taking place through paradigms established and fuelled by parachurch ministries. Trips to Asia and Africa belie these self-promoting stories. The truth is that the growth of Christianity is taking place fundamentally the way it always has: through visible, confessing, suffering churches. This is what works, and the reason it works is that it aligns our methods with Christ and his ministry. I anticipate yet another significant shift. I see a growing proliferation of partnerships between local churches in the nations and in the West. Although these started in earnest over twenty years ago, their constitution is changing. The first partnerships in which I participated were initiated by missionaries who gathered churches in a cluster around their work. So, whether the missionary was part of a denominational or parachurch organisation, these entities continued to dominate the pursuit of the gospel in the nations. There was a certain logic to it. After all, the missionaries were the logical go-between as cross-cultural

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ministry experts. The costs, however, far outran the benefits. It meant, ultimately, that foreign missionaries were still driving, and not simply serving, missions and churches among the nations. In a third sense, it was a safe option. Nationals were no longer invisible to Western churches, and that smelled like progress. It also meant that missionaries, with one foot each in two different cultures, could ensure that everyone got along. But as I alluded to in my last article, this urgency to get along indicates that they are not yet part of the family. When I read my Bible (our church is working through Ephesians, and I preached before that in 1 John), I see that the church is a living, single organism—a body with Christ as its head. A complementary picture has God’s people, the church, as one family that encircles the earth. These believers are not autonomous individuals but rather a cluster in local churches. In the colonial world, it made sense to send out evangelists and church planters who carried the word to cultures that had never heard or read it before. Bible translations in these situations also had to bear a great deal of weight. In the total absence of local preachers and teachers of the word, their translations had to serve as a means of communicating what the Bible said and meant. In such a world, we often saw the creation of translations that did nothing more than tell us what some bright translator thought the Bible meant, rather than what it said. We do not need that. The non-Western, young church vastly outnumbers us already. There are pastors, teachers, evangelists already here. They need Bibles. They do not need postmodern interpretations. Likewise, when local churches in the new Christian world partner with churches representing older Christianity, roles have to change. The West is no longer driving the expansion of the church. Rather, it should fuel it through service to the national leadership. The change also has to be reciprocal. Nationals have to go into these new relationships expecting God to work a miracle through them. When I started thinking about partnerships nineteen

FOCUS ON MISSIONS

years ago, I remembered the description of the church I learned in my Greek Orthodox youth: Church is the place where heaven and earth come together; it is the gathering of believers who meet God there. That implies to me now that partnerships should be places where God changes all of us. To be honest, I see only shadows of that now. Yet I yearn for this, and I hope to live long enough to experience the joy and chaos of it all. It will take hold, however, as we learn to embrace

this new one holy catholic and apostolic world. There are many speed bumps and diversions along the way. The key one—the one that God will have to level—is the lack of trust, which is the silent witness to missions. I still see it. My prayer is that God will deal with all of our hearts, and in so doing, infuse his people with a trust for him that overflows toward one another. BASIL GRAFAS is the pen name of an American missionary

working overseas.

THEOLOGY

Mental Illness and Demonic Activity by Simonetta Carr

W 16

e are drawn to extremes, because they help us categorize the world around us. We like things that are black and white, right or wrong,

good or bad. Categorizing saves us the time and exhausting efforts of trying to understand what is beyond our comprehension. Mental illness, especially in its most serious forms, jolts us out

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of our well-organized systems and challenges our complacent belief that we can control what’s around us. It baffles scientists, who are still working at finding satisfying answers. And it baffles Christians, especially those who have comfortably settled in a world of good and evil. Interestingly, while most scientists are willing to admit there is still much that science has not discovered, many Christians—children of a God who is largely incomprehensible—choose to jump to simplistic conclusions. What’s different, strange, and confusing is often attributed to the devil.

While most scientists are willing to admit there is still much that science has not discovered, many Christians . . . choose to jump to simplistic conclusions. What’s different, strange, and confusing is often attributed to the devil.

LINKING MENTAL ILLNESS TO DEMONIC POSSESSION This tendency is understandable. Mental illness can cause mystifying changes in both appearance and behavior. Many relatives of people with schizophrenia, for example, have learned to detect changes in brain activity by looking at the eyes, which can go from a dead stare to rapid movements or incessant blinking. This is both frightening and puzzling. For this reason, many Christians throughout histor y have chosen to make simple associations. Since some people in the Bible who had a strange and scary appearance and lost control of their movements were possessed by demons, Christians today assume that those who exhibit similar traits must fall into the same category. This type of reasoning creates a host of interpretative problems. First of all, trying to find a biblical correspondent to a mental health issue is poor exegesis and can be grossly misleading, because correlation doesn’t imply causation. Second, the “symptoms” exhibited by the demon-possessed in the Gospels vary so much from one individual to the other that this correlation would have to extend to neurological or physical conditions (such as deafness, blindness, speech impediment, and epilepsy), which few Christians would identify as demonic.

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Third, the examples of demonic possession listed in the Gospels were not provided as a manual for modern exorcism (let alone as a diagnostic manual of mental disorders), just as Jesus’ miracles are not a blueprint for a higher Christian life. This is a general hermeneutical rule: We shouldn’t automatically deduce general principles or doctrines from a biblical narrative. In this specific case, Christ’s miraculous activity had the purpose of revealing the kingdom that had come bursting into this world and the utter defeat of Satan and his minions. Finally, this interpretation generates a swarm of complications on the practical level. If we accept that, in this case, correlation implies causation, then how can we apply this to the numerous Christians who live with schizophrenia? Taking this reasoning to its next logical step, we’d have to say that Christians can be demon possessed, even if the Bible teaches that they belong to Christ, who dwells in them by his Spirit (1 Cor. 6:19–20; Rom. 8:10; 14:8; Gal. 2:20; Col. 1:27).

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Can a person be inhabited by both God’s Spirit and the devil? Since the Scriptures answer in the negative (2 Cor. 6:15–16), the only way to maintain this reasoning is to say that a person can lose his or her salvation. Here is where some people let their experience inform their biblical interpretation, instead of doing the opposite.

DEMONIC ACTIVITY The Bible doesn’t negate the existence of demons. In fact, it reminds us from its first book to the last of the devil’s activity in our world and in our lives. It’s important, however, to remember that demonic concentration in today’s world is different from how it was when Jesus and the apostles were on earth. At that time, it had the specific purpose of proving Jesus’ power over the satanic forces he was about to utterly defeat. As my pastor, Rev. William Godfrey, recently noted, the fact that the New Testament Epistles don’t provide instructions on how to deal with demonic possession seems to confirm the limited scope of these occurrences.1 Today, the main activity of demons seems to be to mislead and deceive, oppose the gospel, spread false doctrine, discourage faith and assurance, and encourage sin. From the book of Revelation, we learn that Satan is also busy inspiring governments and rulers to blaspheme Christ and persecute his followers (see Rev. 13:6–7). While the Bible doesn’t rule out the ability of demons to afflict believers in other ways (see Job 2:7), it’s important to remember they can do so only with God’s permission and under his restrictions and are not to be feared (see Job 1:12; 2:6; Matt. 10:29–31). Louis Berkhof describes them as “lost and hopeless spirits. They are even now chained to hell and pits of darkness, and though not yet limited to one place, yet, as [John] Calvin says, drag their chains with them wherever they 2 go, II Pet. 2:4; Jude 6.” The spiritual battle is ongoing and real, but Christ has won the decisive victory on the cross and this fact cannot be discounted. The Bible

doesn’t extend the same promises to unbelievers, however, so the possibility of demonic possession can’t be ruled out; but it should be considered a rare occurrence in extreme cases, not a go-to answer, and the judgment must be made with care by qualified people. Some religions still include exorcism in their protocol. The Roman Catholic Church trains priests to perform exorcisms according to a specific rite. Statistics are hard to obtain, because there are many cultural factors at play. In a society where demonic possession is expected, exorcisms are reported more frequently. When I was seventeen in Roman Catholic Italy, my educated mother, who held several degrees, took me to an exorcist to cast out the supposed demons behind my teenage rebellion. I left the room and the priest never chased me. I hope he had enough sense to explain to my mother the conspicuous difference between the biblical examples of demonic possession and hormonal mood swings! These differences are also marked in the case of mental illness. In an article on mental illness policy, Steven Waterhouse (pastor at Westcliff Bible Church in Amarillo, Texas) lists a few. For example, while “untreated people with schizophrenia will often speak in nonsense and jump rapidly between unrelated topics,” the demons in the Bible “spoke in a rational matter” and 3 knew exactly what they were doing. THE DISTINCTION IN CHURCH HISTORY The tendency to associate mental illness with demonic possession has been prevalent throughout history, prompting people to believe it has always been a common Christian view. In reality, the distinction has been clear from the start, and many Christians have repeatedly tried to correct the confusion. Medical treatment for mental illness has its roots in antiquity, with preparations compounded by both Greek and Byzantine physicians. These cures were, of course, quite

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The famous preacher John Chrysostom . . . mentioned contemporary physicians as examples of compassion toward those who lived with a mental illness, even when the illness took on violent expressions.

imperfect, and there is no need to romanticize or try to recover them as more “natural” (natural is not always safe). The point is that mental illness was seen as an illness and, generally speaking, the church fathers accepted this definition. The famous preacher John Chrysostom (d. 407) mentioned contemporary physicians as examples of compassion toward those who lived with a mental illness, even when the illness took on violent expressions. “For so too the physicians, when they are kicked, and shamefully handled by the insane, then most of all pity them, and take measures for their perfect cure, knowing that the insult comes of the extremity 4 of their disease.” Nonconformist pastor Timothy Rogers (1658– 1728) wrote a short manual on melancholy, which was an illness he had to face for most of his life. In his book, he cautions Christians from automatically associating mental illness to demonic activity: People greatly wrong both the devil and melancholy people by calling the unavoidable effects of their disease “the temptations of Satan,” and the language of that disease a compliance with them. They ascribe to the devil a greater power than he has, and vex the diseased person more than they need to do. For though I do not question that an evil spirit, through the permission of God, is the

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cause of many sicknesses that come upon our bodies, yet there are also many such that are the result of a disordered motion of the natural spirits, and in which the devil has 5 nothing at all to do. He admits that the devil can also take advantage of an illness—particularly when the illness affects the brain. This is not limited to mental illness. Many of us feel like Jekylls-turned-Hydes when a bad case of the flu clouds our minds, and we become prone to thoughts and emotions we might normally restrain. Rogers continues: As it is the common custom of cruel and barbarous persons to set upon the weak, and to trample on those who are already thrown down, so it is common for the devil to take occasion from our bodily indispositions to attack and molest our spirits, which are bereaved even of that force which they used to have when the house in which they dwelt was at ease, and free from those that they are always under at such seasons. For then it is night with us, and in the night those beasts of prey range abroad that stay in 6 their dens during the brightness of the day. This doesn’t mean, however, that the devil has agency in every action of the person who lives with mental illness. Rogers especially

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The spiritual battle is real. We are daily fighting against spiritual forces. The problem is that they are much smarter than most of us, and they often disguise themselves as angels of light.

The only thing I can offer is that the most severe effect of this ideology falls upon the afflicted. This demonology stomps on the conscience of the ill, assuming that a person must have sinned in some form to invite the demon possession. As one afflicted, regardless of the origin of my sufferings, I have to believe that God’s grace is sufficient for me. I’m just grateful that I don’t have to manage demon activity. This is not part of my progressive sanctification. I’m called to mortify sins, not creatures. The spiritual battle is real. We are daily fighting against spiritual forces. The problem is that they are much smarter than most of us, and they often disguise themselves as angels of light (2 Cor. 11:14). That’s when they are most dangerous. In our effort to exorcise what looks demonic, we need to be careful that we don’t end up doing the devil’s work of discouraging fellow believers and destroying lives. SIMONETTA CARR was born in Reggio Emilia, Italy. She has

cautions people from suggesting this to the person involved, as it might “induce the opinion in them that they are actually possessed of the evil one. . . . I would not have you bring a railing accusation even against the devil, neither must you falsely accuse your friends by saying that 7 they gratify him.”

THE DANGERS OF DEMON HUNTS A simple Internet search can bring up many examples of people with mental illness who have been abused and traumatized by wellmeaning church members who cautioned them about demons or tried to perform exorcisms. The results have been dismal. Quite often, this approach only aggravated the paranoia, delusions, or feelings of guilt that many people with mental illness experience. In some cases, these have led to suicide. From experience, my friend Ed can identify with this problem:

written for various newspapers and magazines and has translated the works of several Christian authors into Italian. She is author of the series Christian Biographies for Young Readers (Reformation Heritage Books). She lives in Santee, California, with her family and is a member and Sunday school teacher at Christ United Reformed Church. 1. William Godfrey, “The Spirit of Christ Opposed,” sermon preached at Christ United Reformed Church, Santee, California, on May 26, 2019, http://www.christurc.org/sermons/2019/5/26/ the-spirit-of-christ-opposed. 2. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 149. This and the previous paragraph are taken with slight modifications from Simonetta Carr, Broken Pieces and the God Who Mends Them (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2019), 203–4. 3. Steven Waterhouse, How to Differentiate Demonic Possession from Schizophrenia, https://mentalillnesspolicy.org/coping/demonicpossession-mental-illness.html. 4. John Chrysostom, The Homilies of St. John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople, on the Gospel of St. Matthew, trans. Sir G. Prevost (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1852), 278. 5. Timothy Rogers, The Trouble of Mind and the Disease of Melancholy, part I, VIII, C.1, http://www.gbcroc.org/Outlines/The%20 Trouble%20of%20Mind%20and%20the%20Disease%20of%20 Melancholy-Timothy%20Rogers.PDF. 6. Ibid. 7. Timothy Rogers, quoted in Archibald Alexander, Thoughts on Religious Experience (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1844), 89.

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FEATURES

In his final two chapters, John invites us to follow Jesus with the struggling disciples, moving out of our own ignorance and unbelief into true knowledge and certain belief, whatever this might cost us as we await his return.”

“THAT YOU MAY BELIEVE”

JESUS’ RESURRECTION APPEARANCES

DAWN OF THE NEW CREATION

illustration by

“That You May Believe”

JEFF MALLINSON

METALEAP CREATIVE

It’s a bold claim. Granted, it’s a doctrine confessed without much hesitation each week by Christians worldwide. And even the spiritual but not religious crowd often appeals to our deceased loved ones going to a better place. This is because many of us want to believe that we don’t go into oblivion after this short life. But is the claim of resurrection true? Or, alas, is it little more than a way to quell our human fear of death? John the Evangelist contends that Jesus indeed rose from the grave, in the flesh, and that this is a trustworthy hope for those who believe in him to share in that promised triumph over death. Dorothy Sayers rightly wrote concerning the Christian claim of Jesus’ resurrection: IFE BEYOND DEATH?

Now, we may call that doctrine exhilarating or we may call it devastating; we may call it revelation or we may call it rubbish; but if we call it dull, then words have no meaning at all. That God should play the tyrant over man is a dismal story of unrelieved oppression; that man should play the tyrant over man is the usual dreary record of human futility; but that man should play the tyrant over God and find Him a better man than himself is an astonishing drama indeed. Any journalist, hearing of it for the first time, would recognize it as News; those who did hear it for the first time actually called it News, and good news at that; though we are apt to forget that the word Gospel ever 1 meant anything so Sensational. Sayers is worth citing here, because I think we’ve become so tired of fraudulent and far-fetched claims about the afterlife and paranormal phenomena that we sometimes ignore the astounding nature of this claim that death might not be the end. It is a big deal, and we can’t just shrug it off. It’s not that kind of mundane claim. John says at the end of his Gospel that, of all the things he could have written concerning the life and teaching of Jesus (see 20:30), what he chose to include was specifically meant to help people trust in the claim that Jesus, the risen one, was in fact who Christians claimed he

was. Such a claim, as unlikely as it seems from a contemporary standpoint, is at least worth exploring sincerely and in depth. Permit me to take us on what might at first seem like a frivolous detour: something that happened on reality television a few years back.

LOOKING FOR LIFE BEYOND THE GRAVE AND BINGE-WATCHING TV On April 26, 2016, MTV broadcast the most shocking episode of anything that could happen on television. This was an episode of the oftbinged series Catfish, in which the hosts seem to encounter concrete and startling evidence regarding life beyond the grave. Normally, the show connects people who have developed romantic connections online, despite one of the individuals misrepresenting themselves digitally. The show often ends with reconciliation and forgiveness between the parties involved. Sometimes, the couples even get married in real life. But on this episode, a young Kentucky woman named Kayla claimed she was contacted by a woman named Courtney who said she’d been conversing with Kayla’s deceased father. It gets even weirder: when Kayla was a child, she and her sister watched in horror as their father stabbed their pregnant mother to death. This murderer, with severe mental health issues, eventually committed suicide in prison a few years afterward. Parentless and grieving, nearly a decade and a half later, Kayla eventually decided it would be healing for her to forgive her father, recognizing his schizophrenia, among other psychological conditions. Around that time, she received this unexpected call from Courtney, who claimed she had been receiving messages for Kayla from her dead father. My family and I streamed this episode one mellow afternoon. Halfway through the show, we sat on the edge of our seats, fixated on the glowing screen in our living room. Surely, we thought, there must be something fraudulent going on; but judging from the dialogue alone, we couldn’t determine who might be lying. With Kayla in tears, Courtney revealed details about

secret family history that Kayla claimed only her father and aunt would know. Surprisingly, Courtney didn’t ask for money, nor was she promoting a professional paranormal service. Rather, she was initially reluctant to appear on the show. But Courtney eventually agreed to appear on camera and offer evidence for her startling claims. Eventually, Courtney agreed to serve as an ad-hoc medium, passing messages from the father to Kayla and her aunt, the dead man’s sister. As the episode progressed, Kayla shifted from skepticism to belief that the ghost of her father was indeed contacting her through Courtney. At this point, a couple of Christian religious concerns arose. First, Kayla and her aunt claimed that they had reservations about conversing with the dead because necromancy was against their Christian beliefs. Second, Kayla broke down in tears as she asked a poignant question: If ghosts are real, she wondered, that presents evidence that there really is a transcendent reality. If there is a transcendent reality, then God must exist. But this brought Kayla to tears; because if God exists, then why would God allow her to lose both her parents? The show never unmasked—Scooby Doo style—any ruse behind the ghost story. On the contrary, the skeptical cohosts said they believed the story on the show. Even afterward on social media, they doubled down on their belief that there was no prior connection between would-be-medium Courtney and the dead father. Moreover, the show prompted several long threaded discussions on Twitter about the possibility of life after death, evidence for ghosts, and whether such things could possibly be knowable to thinking people these days. Why do I recount this reality show episode? Because when it ended, my family and I were unsatisfied, intrigued, and wanted to know the rest of the story. Surely, the gravity of the claims made on this show needed some careful follow-up. For if it was true, then the implications would be far more significant than just our rainy-day binge watching: it would challenge not only a materialist’s denial of the supernatural, but also many religious understandings of the

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ARE ALL SUCH CLAIMS ABOUT LIFE AFTER DEATH LITTLE MORE THAN GULLIBLE PEOPLE ALLOWING THEIR WISHFUL THINKING TO GET IN THE WAY OF RATIONALITY? MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

afterlife. In short, my family and I wanted the complete story from someone intimately connected to the situation who was able to fill in the hazy details. We needed someone like John the Evangelist to provide a reliable account of these strange events, however otherworldly they turned out to be. The best we could do, however, was spend the next hour or so scouring the Internet. The only helpful bit of evidence we found was that, despite their claims that necromancy was against their family religion, Kayla’s aunt had previously posted on social media that she was excited to go see a famous medium perform. In the end, my speculation is that the aunt was a passionate believer in mediums. She may or may not have conspired with Kayla. She may or may not have believed her brother’s ghost was making contact. Whatever the case, the fact that she wasn’t truthful about her belief in mediums caused my family to finally dismiss the claims as unworthy of further investigation. This intellectual resolution allowed us to go back to our other mundane tasks that day. But it also left us a bit disappointed, and it raised an additional question: Are all such claims about life after death little more than gullible people allowing their wishful thinking to get in the way of rationality? Whereas the Catfish story started to seem, well, fishy, John suggests that the account he provides demonstrates the trustworthiness of the Christian claim that Jesus is risen indeed. To what extent, then, were the things he recorded the source of belief that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God?

IS JOHN’S GOSPEL RELIABLE? To begin to answer this question, it is important to consider whether John’s account is historically reliable. For this, we might turn to the extensive annotations on the New Testament composed by the French Reformed theologian and rector of Calvin’s Genevan Academy, 2 Theodore Beza (1519–1605). Beza made the claim that the Gospels, and John’s in particular,

Whatever the evidence for the biblical texts might be, unbelievers remain stubborn in their unbelief unless the Holy Spirit awakens their hearts and minds to the truth, while the true sheep naturally heed the voice of the Good Shepherd.

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are self-authenticating. He agreed with his colleague John Calvin that a person wouldn’t believe in the truth of Christianity without having their spiritual and intellectual blindness healed or having been given ears to hear the proclamation. In other words, whatever the evidence for the biblical texts might be, unbelievers remain stubborn in their unbelief unless the Holy Spirit awakens their hearts and minds to the truth, while the true sheep naturally heed the voice of the Good Shepherd. This perspective has strong support from John’s Gospel, which frequently notes unbelievers’ willful blindness, their preference for darkness over light, and their lack of ears to hear the good news. Yet Beza spent more energy than Calvin did elaborating the marks (notae) of Scripture’s authority. He didn’t think that unaided human reason could arrive at theological truth. He didn’t think that it could even convince an unbeliever of the reliability of the Gospel text. But he did believe that God tends to work through means, including the means of apologetic argu3 ments for the reliability of John’s Gospel. Beza had something helpful to say, then, about the curious way in which John suggests that by merely writing down what he knew about Jesus’ life and teaching, he would provide a source for belief in Christ. He described the selfauthenticating text as “autopistic,” a word derived from the Greek implying that something has the ability to generate belief in its trustworthiness without some other authority, such as the decrees of an official church. The Gospel as self-authenticating does not entail fideism (faith apart from any grounds whatsoever). Nor is it like Buddhism, wherein one tries a spiritual method and then evaluates whether it has practical benefit to the disciple. Rather, this concept relates to the way in which Renaissance humanists would approach documents in general. Humanism in the sixteenth century was often tied to the practice of law. Often, this involved contract law, which relied on the verification and interpretation of important documents, such as last wills and testaments. Thus Christian humanists like Beza described Scripture as God’s last will and testament, and they used some of

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the same techniques they used to determine whether a will was forged or not to demonstrate the reliability of the resurrection accounts. Throughout his biblical scholarship, Beza pointed to several authenticating marks. Let me share just two to illustrate the gist of his approach. First, Beza noted that a key witness to the resurrection, Mary Magdalene (John 20:10–18), makes the account more believable and serves as an “internal mark” of the text’s authenticity. An internal mark is something about a text that does not require external (in this case extrabiblical) evidence. How so? In first-century Jewish law, the testimony of a solitary woman would not be considered sufficient to prove a case. Moreover, the fact that the disciples appear unfaithful in John’s text shows that, if the male disciples had wanted to concoct a story, they wouldn’t have contrived something that cast them in a bad light. Second, Beza suggested that the text’s “sublime nature” is itself a mark or piece of evidence for its authenticity. In this way of thinking, John’s theological understanding, intimate details, and narration of Jesus’ powerful words all have the ring of truth. Noteworthy here is the idea that Jesus’ audiences often remarked that “no one ever spoke with the sort of authority that Jesus did” (John 7:46). Consider what it’s like when you go to an auto mechanic. Say you hear a rattling noise. You pull into the repair garage, and a novice technician fumbles around, shrugs, and suggests that maybe you should replace a certain part and see if that fixes it. You might be desperate enough to give this a shot. But what if instead the garage owner, who has decades of experience, came out and confidently explained the cause of the noise. This would likely put you at ease as you took comfort in the sense of confidence and competency contained in the master mechanic’s words. Throughout John’s Gospel, Jesus comes across like the master mechanic, able to handle his detractors deftly. Jesus does this because he knows who he is and is confident of his relationship to the Father. Why, then, would so many modern scholars claim that John is unreliable and generally late

in terms of composition? I suspect the answer has more to do with the scholar’s personal biases than with the text itself. Here, I’m not referring to the general anti-supernatural bias of secular scholarship, though that’s also a factor. I’m referring to the generally ethical and nontheological understanding of Jesus within mainline Christianity since the late nineteenth century. In that context, Jesus is typically a great moral teacher but not God incarnate. Now, few typically want to suggest they’re against Jesus, or even that he was wrong about something. So, if one could show that Jesus himself never claimed to be God in the flesh (as he clearly does throughout John’s account), then a scholar could deny his divinity as a later innovation but still claim to be a fan of the historical Jesus. In other words, the academic bias against the reliability of John’s Gospel is typically rooted in an overall anti-theological bias. I could summon several Christian writers to argue my point here, but it might be more helpful to call on someone from outside Christianity. Alan Watts (1915–73) was an Episcopal priest who shed his ordination to teach about Eastern religions, especially Zen Buddhism. In a lecture on Jesus, he suggests that John presents something historians and religious scholars should take seriously: So I regard the Four Gospels as on the whole as good a historical document as anything else we have from that period, including the Gospel of Saint John. And that’s important. It used to be fashionable to regard the Gospel of Saint John as late. In other words, at the turn of the century the higher critics of The New Testament assigned the Gospel of Saint John to about 125 A.D. And the reason was just simple. Those higher critics at that time just assumed that the simple teachings of Jesus could not possibly have included any such complicated mystical theology. And therefore they said, “Well, it must be later.” Now, as a matter of fact, in the text of the Gospel of Saint John the local color, his knowledge of the topography of Jerusalem,

and his knowledge of the Jewish calendar is more accurate than that of the other three writers, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And it seems to me perfectly simple to assume that John recorded the inner teaching which He gave to His disciples and that Matthew, Mark, and Luke record the more exoteric 4 teaching which He gave to people-at-large. One of the more modernist Christian biases is that Jesus never intended to claim that he was God incarnate, yet there is nothing historically to validate that bias. I quoted Watts here because the second paragraph above is a succinct and pithy way of summarizing the internal marks of John’s authenticity. Here, I must note that Watts ultimately suggests that Jesus’ message was that we all are God incarnate. That’s another matter for another time. The point here is that classical Christianity and Watts agree that John provides historical evidence, and that Jesus made astounding claims to divinity, and that this was a major reason why folks wanted him dead. All of this derives from these things that were written by the evangelist so that we might believe in Jesus’ true identity and find new life through that realization (John 20:31).

PROPHECY FULFILLED In addition to what we’ve noticed thus far, John frequently makes note of the evidential value of fulfilled prophecy. For instance, he records Jesus claiming that the Old Testament provides testimony supporting his identity (John 5:39). He is careful to note when historical events correspond to ancient prophecy, such as when the Messiah is said to be from the “seed of David” and born in Bethlehem (John 7:42). Likewise, John refers to Psalm 41, which predicts that Jesus would be betrayed in a particular way: “But the Scripture will be fulfilled, ‘He who ate my bread has lifted his heel against me’” (John 13:18). Some of the prophecies are major plot points (for instance, John 19:37, 20:27 notes that Jesus’ hands and feet were to be pierced, according to Psalm 22). Other times, John points out little

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details a casual reader might have missed. For instance, John 18:7–9 reads: So he asked them again, “Whom do you seek?” And they said, “Jesus of Nazareth.” Jesus answered, “I told you that I am he. So, if you seek me, let these men go.” This was to fulfill the word that he had spoken: “Of those whom you gave me I have lost not one.”

FULFILLED PROPHECY, THEREFORE, IS ANOTHER INTERNAL MARK OF THE TEXT’S AUTHENTICITY, ONE THAT REQUIRES NO EXTRABIBLICAL VALIDATION FOR IT TO VALIDATE THE NARRATIVE. MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

Appeals to fulfilled prophecy are often dismissed as inauthentic by pushing forward the dates on the original text. Yet, if we recognize that John’s account demonstrates no knowledge of the destruction of the Jerusalem temple, which occurred in AD 70, it seems that there would have been men and women alive who knew whether the passages about Jesus’ birthplace, interactions with Roman and religious leaders, and associations with friends such as Mary, Martha, and Lazarus in fact happened. Fulfilled prophecy, therefore, is another internal mark of the text’s authenticity, one that requires no extrabiblical validation for it to validate the narrative.

CHARGES OF SORCERY AND DEMONIC POWER That said, if we do go looking for extrabiblical verification of John’s Gospel, we find something rather intriguing in the Babylonian Talmud, which records how the unbelieving religious leaders during Jesus’ time made sense of the facts. It was taught: On the eve of the Passover Yeshu was hanged. For forty days before the execution took place, a herald went forth and cried, ‘He is going forth to be stoned because he has practiced sorcery and enticed Israel to apostasy. Anyone who can say anything in his favor, let him come forward and plead on his behalf.’ But since nothing was brought forward in his favor he was hanged on the eve of the Passover! (Sanhedrin 6:2.1C–D) Note that Yeshu is the Hebraic version of the name Jesus. Hanging refers not only to a noose,

but a mode of execution that differed from the traditional Jewish practice of stoning. In any case, the Babylonian Talmud supports the idea that, at the very least, something uncommon occurred. Those who rejected Jesus’ claims couldn’t deny that Jesus had done some astounding things, but they could only attribute his miracles to the dark arts and demonic power.

PRIVILEGE AND NATIONALISM VERSUS JESUS’ NEW KINGDOM

THOSE WHO REJECTED JESUS’ CLAIMS COULDN’T DENY THAT JESUS HAD DONE SOME ASTOUNDING THINGS, BUT THEY COULD ONLY ATTRIBUTE HIS MIRACLES TO THE DARK ARTS AND DEMONIC POWER. 32

If Jesus’ unbelieving contemporaries saw his wonders with their own eyes, then why were they so reluctant to believe? It might have something to do with a phenomenon psychologists call the “sunk-cost bias.” This occurs when we desperately try to hold on to something into which we’ve poured significant time and energy. Note how John records the rationale behind Jesus’ opponents who say, “If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation” (John 11:48). Whatever the evidence, they were reluctant to let go of their status and privilege. How common it is that we sinful mortals tend to be cool with Jesus, so long as his teaching doesn’t threaten our cultural power or national identity! Nonetheless, Christians globally are invited to abide in Scripture and listen attentively to the voice of the Good Shepherd, even when following the way of his kingdom might cause Christians to lose popularity within the dominant culture. There are several other ways in which we are biased against receiving the clear but radical teachings of Jesus, yet it seems that his teaching of how all our meritorious works and spiritual investments are worthless is particularly annoying to religious types.

WHAT IS TO BE BELIEVED PRECISELY? So far, we’ve seen that John records details that lead us to believe. Before I conclude, though, it’s important to highlight the way in which

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John isn’t simply pointing readers to a generic belief but to a specific doctrinal understanding of Jesus. Theologians speak of the doctrine of Jesus’ nature and identity as “Christology,” something that is central to John’s Gospel. John is thus not merely proclaiming that Jesus was the Messiah and that he rose from the grave; he is also noting that Jesus was simultaneously fully human and fully divine. Of course, he starts his whole book by establishing this thesis: Jesus was the divine logos, which was present before the foundation of the world, which means that Jesus was God (John 1:1). In addition, John was trying to disabuse people of the error of Gnosticism (the thirdcentury theologian Irenaeus suggested precisely this in his book Against Heresies 3.16.5). While there were many variations of gnostic theology, they were typically united in their belief that, to borrow a line from the rock band The Police, “We are spirits in a material world.” This way of thinking considers bodies a problem for sentient beings, rather than gifts from the Creator. Thus gnostics taught that the body is essentially bad, while the spirit is essentially good. For this reason, gnostics taught that Jesus was ultimately liberated from the body (if he ever really had one) and appeared to the disciples as a spiritual being. In contrast, John insists that Jesus rose again as a true flesh-and-blood body, even eating a fish breakfast with his disciples after he rose from the dead (John 21:12). I mentioned earlier that my family found the paranormal Catfish episode “fishy,” while here the “fishy” encounter between Jesus and his old friends is what reminds us that the work of Jesus overcomes the problem of embodied human existence by returning the gift of our embodiment with a new redemptive mission, rather than simply creating a bunch of ethereal beings floating about the universe.

LIFE IN HIS NAME Finally, John is interested in relating more than mere historical knowledge about Jesus. He put pen to paper not simply to convince his readers

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to accept abstract doctrines about God. Indeed, biblical faith is primarily not about intellectual assent to the philosophical proposition that God exists. Instead, it is to trust in the idea that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was the God who sent Jesus into the world, and that through him God would reconcile the world to himself (2 Cor. 5:19). In other words, the God who was faithful to his people in the past will deliver us now as well as our faithful descendants. By believing in Jesus as the Son of God, John says, we receive the consolation that death is not the end of our story. Rather, we learn about the hope of abundant life, which begins here and now in its partial form but finds completion in the Christian hope of a resurrected body. Through the gospel, followers of Jesus have nothing to lose, since they’ve already gained everything as coheirs with Christ (Rom. 8:17). Often, as we struggle through the difficulties of this mortal existence, we tend to lose heart. We sometimes relegate our faith to a list of propositions we affirm on Sunday mornings, but God offers a flood of hope that washes out all the shadows and fears of this existence with his eternal light. John ultimately admits that he could have satisfied our curiosity with a massive library containing everything Jesus did and said (John 21:25). Instead, with the testimony he does provide, along with his claim to be a faithful witness to the Christ, he passes on Jesus’ call to Peter and all who have ears to hear: “Follow me,” calls the Good Shepherd to his beloved sheep. JEFF MALLINSON (DPhil) is professor of theology and philosophy at Concordia University, Irvine, and a veteran podcaster. 1. Dorothy Sayers, “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged,” The Whimsical Christian (New York: Collier Books, 1987), reprinted with permission in Modern Reformation (November/December 1994). 2. Beza’s critical edition of the New Testament had several editions, including Jesu Christi Domini Nostri Novum Testamentum (Cambridge, 1598). Although it was not translated, much of it found its way into the English Geneva Bible, and ultimately it influenced the King James Bible. 3. For a thorough discussion of how Beza developed arguments for the reliability of the faith and the biblical account of the resurrection, see my Faith, Reason, and Revelation in Theodore Beza (1619–1605), (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 4. This broadly available audio lecture was transcribed and is posted at https://amp3083.wordpress.com/2016/08/15/ alan-watts-jesus-christ-christianity/.

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Jesus’ Resurrection Appearances

TIMOTHY L . FOX

UR WORLD MAKES a radical separation between the realms of “truth” (for example, fact, science, reason) and “values” 1 (opinion, religion, emotion). Yet the final two chapters of John’s Gospel make an intimate and unbreakable connection between true knowledge of Jesus and true belief in Jesus; there is no division between the “Jesus of history” and the “Christ of faith.” The early-twentieth-century Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck, drawing from a long pedigree of Christian theology, shows that faith is actually a kind of knowledge— indeed, a certain knowledge!—even if it is not the same kind of knowledge as that compelled 2 through scientific observation and proof. John wrote his Gospel account to lead the reader into the true belief in Jesus that is also true knowledge of Jesus: “These things have been written in order that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that, by believing, you might have life in his name” (20:31; all empha3 ses added), with Jesus having already defined eternal life as the knowledge of the only true God and his Son (17:3). As John narrates Jesus’ resurrection appearances, he repeatedly underscores this link between faith and knowledge. There is a loose pattern repeated throughout John 20–21: the disciples’ ignorance and unbelief, which are then confronted by Jesus’ own knowledge of them, which then leads to their true knowledge of and faith in him. In his final two chapters, John invites us to follow Jesus with the struggling disciples, moving out of our own ignorance and unbelief into true knowledge and certain belief, whatever this might cost us as we await his return. In other words, John is not merely recounting what Jesus did after his resurrection; he is also exhorting us to leave behind our own unbelief for the sake of better knowing and following our resurrected Lord.

JOHN’S THREE “ASIDES” TO HIS READERS

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We can see this as John makes “asides” in chapters 20–21, explaining to us what he’s doing and how we should respond. He had already done

this in the midst of narrating Jesus’ crucifixion, “pausing” the action in order to exhort the reader: “He who saw [Jesus’ side pierced] has testified—his testimony is true, and he knows that he is saying true things, in order that you also might believe” (19:35). The first post-resurrection “aside” is also a kind of “pause,” coming between two of Jesus’ appearances to the disciples: just after he confronted “doubting” Thomas, but just before his seaside appearance in Galilee (21:1): On the one hand, Jesus also did many other signs in the presence of the disciples (which have not been written in this book), but on the other hand, these things have been written in order that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God, and that by believing you might have life in his name. (20:30–31) Hence with these first two asides—one interrupting the crucifixion and the other interrupting the post-resurrection appearances—John explicitly aims for the readers’ own belief, by means of his written testimony to the truth of Jesus’ identity and work. The third and final aside comes at the very end of the Gospel, right after Jesus’ final appearance to the disciples, when the apostle identifies himself as the “beloved disciple”: “This is the disciple who is testifying about these things and who wrote these things, and we know that his testimony is true” (21:24). Here John connects knowledge, testimony, and truth, just as he did in the first aside of 19:35, where (as in the second aside of 20:31) he linked them with belief. As we now look at the post-resurrection appearances in more detail, we will repeatedly see this link between faith and knowledge in the disciples themselves.

THE DISCIPLES’ POST-RESURRECTION GROWTH IN FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE Peter and John at the Empty Tomb John makes his first post-resurrection link between faith and knowledge in 20:1–10, in which he describes how he (the “beloved disciple”)

and Peter respond to Mary Magdalene’s worried announcement that Jesus’ tomb is empty: “We do not know where they have laid him!” (20:2, 13). Peter and John enter the tomb, only to find Jesus’ grave-clothes. When John sees these clothes, he believes (20:8), since before this he and the other disciples “did not understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead” (20:9). The Greek word often translated here as “understand” is oida, which appears all through these chapters and is normally translated simply as “know,” such as Mary’s anxiety about not knowing what 4 happened to Jesus’ body. The point here is that, after seeing the empty tomb, John moves from relative ignorance into a deeper faith. This is a common tension in John’s Gospel: Jesus’ disciples must grow in their faith and knowledge (compare their relative ignorance/ unbelief in 2:22 and 12:16 with their knowledge/ belief in 6:68–69), even as John repeatedly shows us that the disciples’ developing—but genuine— faith is something entirely different from the false “faith” of those who are mainly interested in Jesus’ spectacular miracles (e.g., 2:23–24; 6:26; see also 8:30–38, where Jesus sharply rebukes a large group of people who “believe” in him, calling them children of the devil!). Mary at the Empty Tomb We see something similar in Jesus’ postresurrection appearance to Mary in 20:11–18. Even beyond her ignorance of what happened to Jesus’ body (v. 13), John also tells us that even when she saw him, she didn’t “know it was Jesus” (v. 14), thinking him to be a gardener instead. Jesus then simply and tenderly addresses her by name (v. 16), revealing his prior knowledge of her, even though she had failed to “know” him. But now that Jesus has clearly revealed himself by personally addressing her, she then finally knows him, excitedly exclaiming, “Rabboni!” which John translates for us as “Teacher!” In line with Jesus’ commission to her, she then tells the apostles that she has “seen the Lord” (v. 18). Jesus’ loving, knowing call to Mary has turned her ignorance into knowledge of (and belief in) him as the resurrected Teacher and Lord.

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Two Appearances to the Apostles

JESUS NOW MOVES TOWARD HIS STRUGGLING DISCIPLES, SPEAKING GOD’S BLESSING SPECIFICALLY UPON THEM, AND THEREBY LEADING THEM INTO JOYFULLY RECOGNIZING AND EMBRACING HIM. MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

John next recounts Jesus’ two visits with the apostles that occur a week apart (20:19–29). The first visit is on the evening of his resurrection, when Thomas is not there (v. 24). It isn’t clear whether they believed Mary’s announcement of the resurrection, though the fact that they’ve fearfully locked themselves in a room even after hearing from her (v. 19) doesn’t exactly commend them. In any case, Jesus clearly takes the initiative here: he enters the room, speaks God’s peace to them, and then shows them “his hands and his side.” At this point, we read that the disciples “rejoiced when they saw the Lord” (v. 20). Just as with Mary in the garden, Jesus now moves toward his struggling disciples, speaking God’s blessing specifically upon them, and thereby leading them into joyfully recognizing and embracing him. Jesus then equips them by the Holy Spirit to go out to announce God’s forgiveness of sinners like them (vv. 22–23). Jesus’ next appearance to the apostles comes a week later, when Thomas is with them. They can now say with Mary that they “have seen the Lord”; but when Thomas first heard this from them, he vehemently refused to believe unless he too could see and even probe Jesus’ wounds. He is so adamant in his disbelief that John describes it with the Greek language’s strongest form of denial—something like “I will never ever ever believe!” (v. 5 25). Once again, Jesus somehow enters the locked room where they are gathered and then initiates with a pronouncement of God’s peace (v. 26). He then turns specifically to Thomas, inviting him to do exactly what he’d incredulously demanded a week before, saying, “Put your finger here.” But then Jesus commands him, “Do not disbelieve, but believe!” (v. 27). Thomas responds with faith and knowledge, acclaiming Jesus as “my Lord and my God!” (v. 28), in a way similar to how Mary called him “Teacher” and “the Lord” when she finally recognized him. Like before, Jesus took the initiative to reveal himself to a struggling disciple in order to turn his disbelief and ignorance into faith and knowledge. By

making himself known to his disciples, Jesus evoked the faith he commanded. While Jesus welcomes Thomas’s faith and worship, in verse 29 he praises those who, unlike Thomas (and the other disciples), believe without seeing: “Have you believed because you’ve seen me? How blessed are those who haven’t seen and yet have believed!” It’s here that John makes the “aside” described above, interrupting his narrative in order to remind us, his readers, that he has written in order to lead us to the kind of faith that Thomas had just voiced, even though we do not yet see Jesus’ resurrected body as Thomas did. If we imitate Thomas and the other disciples by responding in faith to Jesus’ self-revelation through John’s written, nonvisual account, then we will be the “blessed” ones praised by Jesus. The disciples saw many other “signs” that John did not record for us in writing (v. 30), but he recorded enough of Jesus’s selfrevelation for us so that we can and even should respond with faith like Thomas and thereby enjoy Jesus’ blessing upon us (v. 31). Just as with Mary and the apostles, through John’s written Gospel, Jesus now moves toward us in our own unbelief, calling to us in his perfect knowledge of us and so leading us into faith. Through Christ’s own testimony by his Holy Spirit, we can know (and therefore trust) him just as confidently as the disciples did, even if we don’t yet see him. And so John’s “aside” in verses 30–31 comes as an invitation for self-examination: Are we readers of John’s Gospel responding with faith as we are confronted by the resurrected Jesus’ self-revelation to us? Breakfast in Galilee with the Apostles In chapter 21, John resumes his narrative description of how Jesus appeared to most of the apostles (including Peter, John, and Thomas) up in Galilee. The disciples are back to fishing, and once again we are reminded of their ignorance: “Jesus stood on the shore; yet the disciples did not know that he was Jesus” (v. 4). Yet again, Jesus initiates a conversation with them through a personal, knowing address:

“Children, don’t you have any fish to eat?” (v. 5). They had caught nothing, but when they take Jesus’ advice, they haul in an enormous—even miraculous—catch. It’s at this point that John (“the disciple whom Jesus loved”) excitedly tells Peter, “It is the Lord!” (v. 7). In light of his abundant provision for them, the disciples now know him, as John underscored in verse 12 when Jesus invited them to eat breakfast with him (v. 9): “Now none of the disciples dared to question him, ‘Who are you?’ They knew it was the Lord.” Of course, the breakfast menu—fish and bread—points us back to the feeding of the five thousand in chapter 6, a miracle intended to bring about faith in Jesus as the bread of life (6:27, 29, 35). So here again, Christ makes himself known to his struggling disciples in order to strengthen their faith, by showing himself to be both their provider and their provision. A Conversation with Peter In 21:15–19, having fed the disciples, Jesus now turns to Peter and exhorts him to feed his sheep. Each time Jesus asks Peter “Do you love me?” Peter affirms, “You know that I love you!” The third and final time Peter does this, he emphasizes the comprehensiveness of Jesus’ knowledge: “You know everything” (v. 17). Again, Jesus’ knowing embrace of his beleaguered, sometimes unfaithful disciples is the foundation for their own movement into greater faith in and knowledge of him, which inevitably produces love for him. In 16:27, Jesus already made a close connection between believing him and loving him: “The Father himself loves you because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God.” As with all disciples, Peter’s love for Jesus will manifest itself in obedience to Jesus (“If you love me you will keep my commands”; 14:15). Here in 21:15–19, Jesus commands Peter three times, focusing on Peter’s duty to nourish the Lord’s sheep. In verse 18, after his third exhortation to “feed my sheep,” Jesus ominously warns Peter that this pastoral obedience will lead him into suffering: “When you are old, you will stretch out

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Just as with Mary and the apostles, through John’s written Gospel, Jesus now moves toward us in our own unbelief, calling to us in his perfect knowledge of us and so leading us into faith.

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your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want.” In case we missed it, John immediately explains to us that Jesus here is telling Peter how Peter will die (v. 19). Not only does Jesus know the current posture of Peter’s heart (“You know that I love you!”), he even knows the future humiliation and misery of his death. In this verse, John again highlights for us how Jesus’ personal knowledge of his disciples is what secures and produces their growth in faith in, knowledge of, and love for him. When this prediction leads Peter to ask Jesus whether John will suffer similarly, Jesus deflects the question, refocusing him on obeying his master wherever he leads: “What is that to you? You follow me!” (v. 22). Peter must trust Jesus, the one who has already shown his might by conquering death, his generosity by providing breakfast, and his mercy by embracing the one who had so cowardly denied him. Jesus gives his sinful disciples everything they need to trust and know him, as they follow him on his wellworn path of suffering and rejection.

JOHN NOW CALLS US TO GROW IN FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE John ends his Gospel with a final aside, reminding us that we, too, have everything we need to trust and know Jesus as we heed his call to “follow me.” As in 20:30, John says in verse 25 that he didn’t write down everything he could have; indeed, the entire world couldn’t contain the books required for this! Instead, he wrote down what we need, and his testimony is trustworthy: “We know that his testimony is true.” Just who, however, is John referring to here when he says “we”? It’s possible he is using the “editorial we” to speak for himself alone, which 6 is fairly common in the New Testament. But why would he then immediately describe the testimony as his and not our testimony? Instead, in light of the exhortational nature of these chapters (as seen in the “asides”), it seems that John’s “we” is actually a kind of appeal for his readers to join him and the other disciples in knowing Christ through believing in Jesus,

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whose identity and work John has faithfully documented for us. As we’ve seen, John has been emphasizing how the disciples moved from ignorance/disbelief into knowledge/faith, not just for the sake of narrating events but also to present models for us—those who are blessed, because we believe even though we do not see like Thomas did (20:29–31). So when John says that “we know that his testimony is true,” he is probably including his believing readers alongside himself as those who have accepted the self-revelation of their resurrected Lord. This would be similar to how John opened his Gospel. In 1:14, he described how he and the other disciples witnessed Jesus’ incarnation (“We have seen his glory”); but then in 1:16, he explicitly extends the “we” beyond the apostles to include all those who have believed in him (“From his fullness we have all received grace 7 upon grace”). John wrote his Gospel so that we might find eternal, resurrection life through believing and knowing the resurrected Jesus, just as the original disciples repeatedly did before us in John 20–21. As modeled in these post-resurrection appearances, through John’s inspired writing, we too are now confronted by the resurrected Jesus in the midst of our own ignorance and unbelief. He knowingly addresses us like a shepherd calling to his sheep, patiently providing everything we need in order to grow in faith and knowledge. The conqueror of death says to each of us, “You follow me!” We too must follow him out of our unbelief, even if we must suffer for his sake. Confident faith and true knowledge are not enemies after all; instead, to repurpose a phrase from the Westminster Confession, they “sweetly comply” for those who can truly call Jesus “my Lord and my God.” We conclude with another quotation from Bavinck in which he ends his long discussion of faith by linking it again with knowledge. He notes how the world scoffs at our trust in Jesus as the crucified and resurrected Son of God, accusing us of being unsophisticated and unscientific. [Yet] believers do know those mysteries; they are no longer a folly and an offense to them; they do marvel at God’s wisdom and

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love manifest in them. . . . It does not even occur to them, therefore, that the mysteries surpass their reason, that they are above reason; they do not experience them as an oppressive burden but rather as intellectual liberation. Their faith turns into wonder; knowledge terminates in adoration; and their confession becomes a song of praise and thanksgiving. Of this kind, too, is the knowledge of God theology aims for. It is not just a knowing, much less a comprehending; it is better and more glorious than that: it is the knowledge which is life, “eternal 8 life” (John 17:3). TIMOTHY L. FOX (PhD, University of St. Andrews) is pastor of Christ the King Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas, and adjunct professor at Knox Theological Seminary.

1. See Francis Schaeffer, Escape from Reason (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1968), and The God Who Is There (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1968). Here, he describes the modern world’s theory of knowledge in terms of the “Lower Story” of cognitive, verifiable “rationality” now divided from the “Upper Story” of noncognitive, personal “meaning.” 2. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 1:577–78. 3. Unless otherwise noted, all Bible translations are the author’s, though drawing heavily from the ESV. 4. Another word used throughout John to describe knowledge is the Greek word ginōskō, as in 17:3 (“This is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God”). But these words significantly overlap. John appears to use them interchangeably, as can be seen in 21:17: “Lord, you know [oida] all things; you know [ginōskō] that I love you.” All through the story of Jesus’ breakfast with Peter, John repeatedly uses different words to describe single concepts, such as “sheep” and “love.” 5. This is the ou mē (double negative; i.e., “not not”) plus aorist subjunctive (denying that something is even possible), which is even stronger than ou mē plus future indicative (denying that something will happen). Unlike in English, in Greek a double negative emphasizes the denial. 6. D. A. Carson, The Gospel According to John, Pillar New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 683–84, takes this position after presenting a few different options. For an example of the “editorial/apostolic we,” see 2 Cor. 2:14, “But thanks be to God, who leads us [=Paul] in triumphal procession.” Paul has just been describing his own anxiety and suffering (“When I came to Troas,” 2:12). 7. John Calvin, Commentary on the Gospel According to John, trans. William Pringle (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1847), 1:50, commenting on John 1:16, says that “John classes himself with the rest, not for the sake of modesty, but to make it more evident that no man whatever is excepted.” Similarly, see the “we all” of 1 Cor. 10:17; 2 Cor. 3:18; Eph. 2:3; 4:13; and James 3:2. Even without using “we all,” John uses “we” to include himself alongside his readers in 1 John 1:7: “If we walk in the light . . . we have fellowship with one another.” 8. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 1:621.

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Dawn of the New Creation

MICHAEL G. BROWN

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N A CLEAR DAY, I can see the Italian Alps from the balcony in my study. Their impressive form stares at me like the imposing faces of majestic giants, sculpted by deep lines of grey and green, crowned with snow-topped peaks. Living in Milan, I know that the Alps are never far away. Although a map over my desk indicates their geographical proximity, the fact is that most days I can’t see them at all. They are usually obscured by the city’s notorious nebbia, the foggy haze that completely washes out the horizons, and months can pass before I can even manage to make out a few of their jagged lines. It is therefore easy to forget that these breathtaking mountains are a present reality. So too, it seems, is the significance of Christ’s resurrection in the daily life of the Christian. We believe the testimony of the eyewitnesses that the resurrection of Jesus is a factual event, and by faith we believe the apostolic claim that it guarantees our bodily resurrection in the future. Still, the present reality of Christ’s resurrection in our daily living is something we can easily forget. The Bible, however, teaches us that the resurrection of Christ is more than an event in history that has bearing on our resurrection in the future. It is the dawn of the new creation in which we participate now.

A LIVING HOPE Perhaps no verse in the New Testament summarizes the seismic shift Christ’s resurrection causes in the believer’s life better than 1 Peter 1:3: Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Writing to encourage a group of churches in Asia Minor at a time when stormy seasons of persecution loomed on the horizon, the apostle Peter begins his letter with this beautiful doxology, praising God for what he has

accomplished through the resurrection of his Son. Peter doesn’t tell his readers to keep a positive attitude because things are sure to improve. He doesn’t give them clichés or platitudes just to make them feel better. Instead, he tells them about hope. It has been said that hell begins when hope ends. We cannot live without hope. Remove all hope and life becomes too dark to live. This is due to the fact that as human beings we are hardwired to hope. In the beginning, God designed us to look forward to the future glorified life for which he created us, symbolized in the Tree of Life. The tragic story, of course, is that we fell short of that glory when Adam, our representative in the garden, rebelled against our Creator. In Adam, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Although we continue to hope, our hopes have been frustrated by sin ever since the Fall, and so we no longer hope for the glory of the age to come. Many of things for which we do hope are good in themselves (love, health, family), but they are confined to this present evil age and misguided by the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of possessions. This is why we are never ultimately satisfied. As C. S. Lewis said, The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites us, are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy. . . . If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical expla1 nation is that I was made for another world. Nevertheless, we go through each day, week, and year always hoping for the best and looking for some satisfaction in our lives. We must; otherwise we die. The hope about which Peter writes, however, is different. It is not a dead or empty hope, but a sure and living hope—a hope that holds the future in the present, because it is anchored in the past. Peter hopes for God’s salvation, the final deliverance from sin, suffering, and death that will be fully realized in the resurrection of

the body on the last day. It is “a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time” (1 Pet 1:5). Peter’s hope is firm, because God has already accomplished salvation “through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” Only this kind of hope can truly withstand the tempestuous onslaughts of persecution and sorrow in our present evil age.

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING Peter’s hope was not always so confident. When Jesus died on the cross, it was the end of Peter’s hopes. In John 20, we find him hiding behind locked doors “for fear of the Jews” (20:19). The previous Friday, the One whom he believed was the Messiah, whom he had followed as a committed disciple for several years, was crucified. Peter’s high hopes of seeing Jesus inaugurate the Messianic kingdom in Jerusalem seemed crushed on a Roman cross. On top of that, Peter was completely crestfallen by his own moral failure, having done the unthinkable by publicly denying his Lord (John 18:15–18, 25–27). Peter was now frightened, miserable, and hopeless. Like the rest of the disciples, he was not expecting Jesus to rise from the dead. All hope seemed to be lost. But then came a series of shocking events. First, Peter learned from the women that Jesus’ tomb was empty (John 20:1–2), a claim he ran to verify (20:3–10). Later that day, Jesus physically appeared to Peter (Luke 24:34; 1 Cor. 15:5; John 20:11–29), and hope was reborn in Peter’s heart. This hope was strengthened profoundly by Jesus’ restoration of him. Eating fish and bread with the disciples, Jesus said to the one who had denied him three times, “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?” (John 21:15). Jesus knew that Peter, though undoubtedly amazed and ecstatic by the resurrection event, was still tormented by his guilty conscience. The Lord didn’t ask him, “Simon, son of John, what were you thinking? Have you wept enough? Have you repented enough? Are you really sorry? Because I’m not so sure.” Any of those questions would have plunged Peter into

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an abyss of despair. Instead, Jesus looked at this bruised reed and smoldering wick of a man and asked him, “Do you love me?” In that question was all the hope of complete restoration. Before the resurrection, Peter did not want a king who wore a crown of thorns, and he wouldn’t tolerate Jesus talking of his crucifixion (Matt. 16:21–23). But the resurrection changed everything, changing the cross from a tragedy into a triumph. It was nothing less than the public vindication of Jesus as the truly righteous man and the last Adam, who succeeded in doing what the first Adam failed to do—namely, to love God perfectly with all of his heart, soul, and mind and love his neighbor as himself. The resurrection crowned the victory of Christ, his victory for Peter, and his victory for all those who believe. The resurrection of Christ transformed Peter from being a coward to being courageous. This man, who was once overcome by fear as he denied Jesus in public and hid for fear of the Jews, boldly stood up among the crowds in Jerusalem during the Feast of Pentecost, proclaiming with a loud voice that God had made Jesus of Nazareth both Lord and Christ. The Holy Spirit emboldened Peter, but this was only because of Jesus’ resurrection and ascension. Had this not happened, the Spirit would not have been sent from heaven and the church would have no gospel to proclaim.

BUT THE RESURRECTION CHANGED EVERYTHING, CHANGING THE CROSS FROM A TRAGEDY INTO A TRIUMPH. MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

This Jesus God raised up, and of that we are all witnesses. Being therefore exalted to the right hand of God, and having received the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you yourselves are seeing and hearing. . . . Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified. (Acts 2:31–36) Peter’s central message in that pivotal sermon was that Christ’s resurrection was the proof that Jesus was not merely a good man and wise teacher, but also the God-man and cosmic ruler of the universe who had inaugurated his kingdom. Those who put their trust in him receive

Peter’s central mes sermon was that Chri the proof that Jesus man and wise teacher, and cosmic ruler of t inaugurated

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sage in that pivotal st’s resurrection was was not merely a good but also the God-man he universe who had his kingdom.

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his imputed righteousness and the forgiveness of sins, living now in the hope of eternal life. Apart from the resurrection of Christ, Christianity cannot exist and our hope is dead. If Jesus did not physically rise from the dead as reported by Peter and the other eyewitnesses, then we have no reason to believe that he is the Son of God or that his death on the cross was the propitiation for our sins. As the apostle Paul reasons in 1 Corinthians 15:17, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.” Christianity has nothing to offer us separately from the resurrection of Jesus. The gospel is not a method of self-improvement or moral therapy, but the announcement of God’s redemption of sinners through the life, death, and resurrection of his Son (1 Cor. 15:3–8). If Christ was not bodily raised in history, then we cannot be bodily raised to eternal life in the future; and we should therefore simply eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die (1 Cor. 15:32). But if he was raised from the dead, as the historical record indicates, then everyone should put their trust in him, for he truly is the One whom he claimed to be: the resurrection and the life. “Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die” (John 11:25–26). The entire claim of Christianity hangs upon the factuality of this event. This resurrection of Jesus was a life-changing reality for Peter. It was the basis for his boldness for the gospel, the foundation of his willingness to suffer for the name of Christ, and the reason for the hope that was in him. But it is also a lifechanging reality for us. Although we are not eyewitnesses to the resurrection as Peter was, our lives are still animated by this living hope because of the resurrection. We live in confidence that Jesus lives and reigns over all. We are comforted to know that God has accepted us on the basis of the merits of Christ, “who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification” (Rom. 4:25). We look to life beyond the grave—not our souls flying off to heaven to live happily ever after in a nonphysical realm, but the resurrection of the body—to enjoy eternal communion with God in the consummate

WE ARE COMFORTED TO KNOW THAT GOD HAS ACCEPTED US ON THE BASIS OF THE MERITS OF CHRIST. VOL.28 NO.6 NOV/DEC 2019

glory of the new creation (Rom. 8:18–25; 1 Cor. 15:22–28, 43-57; Phil. 3:21; Rev. 21:1–4).

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE! Believers already live in the present as members of the world that is yet to be. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Cor. 5:17). This new-age reality was inaugurated by the resurrection of Jesus. The power of the age to come has already invaded this present evil age. The resurrected and exalted Christ rules not only over the world but also in his church by means of his word and Spirit. In the Old Testament, God promised a great outpouring of his Spirit on his people in the latter days (Ezek. 36:25–28; 39:29; Joel 2:28–29; Zech. 12:10). Although Israel failed to bear fruits of righteousness, God’s people became abundantly fruitful in the new covenant because of the work of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit would produce in his people what they were incapable of producing themselves, causing them to walk in new obedience (Ezek. 36:27). The same Spirit who was active in the original creation of the universe would once again bring forth life. As Michael Horton notes, “Yet, the resurrection of Christ makes it so, not only because it sets the rest of the redemptive economy in motion but because it is the first installment on the full 2 consummation.” The resurrection of Jesus inaugurated the new covenant, causing this new creation by the Holy Spirit to emerge. What Israel longed for in the old covenant—namely, resurrection and restoration—is already coming to pass in the lives of believers now in the new covenant. The Spirit applies the power of Christ’s resurrection to the people of God, so that they can walk in newness of life (Rom. 6:1–10; Phil. 3:10). Because we have been baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection, we must recognize this new reality in which we live. Not only has Christ rescued us from the penalty of sin, but he has also delivered us from its dominating power. United with him in his death and resurrection,

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believers have the resources they need for the daily discipline of putting off the old self and putting on the new, which is “created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph. 4:22–24). Paul exhorts us, “Reckon yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 6:11 NKJV). “The language of ‘reckoning,’” says N. T. Wright, “is that of adding up a sum, a column of figures.” When I add up the money in my bank account, that does not create the money; life is not, alas, that easy. It merely informs me of the amount that is already there. When I have completed the “reckoning”, I have not brought about a new state of affairs in the real world outside my mind; the only new state of affairs is that my mind is now aware of the way things actually are. So it is here. When Paul says [in Romans 6:4] that “as the Messiah was raised from the dead through the father’s glory, so also we are to walk in newness of life”, he is not asking Christians to do something that, being still 3 “dead”, they are unable to perform. In other words, believers must be who they truly are! Having been raised with Christ, we are no longer slaves to sin. Why would we then live as if we were? This new reality of our union with the risen Christ is precisely why we experience a constant battle with sin. Although the pollution of sin still clings to us in this life, it does not comport with our regenerated hearts, for we have been raised with Christ and are seated with him in the heavenly places (Eph. 2:6; Col. 3:1–4). As Peter says to his readers, “The passions of the flesh . . . wage war against the soul” (1 Pet. 2:11). We simultaneously feel the joyful desire for holiness and the sorrowful disappointment for our sin. As someone once said, “The pathway to holiness is paved with a sense of your own wretchedness.” But this is also good news in the sense that the whole reason why we can say both “I delight in the law of God, in my inner being” (Rom. 7:22) and “wretched man that I am!” (Rom. 7:24) is because we are inseparably united with the

risen Lord Jesus Christ, who has promised to bring us to completion and gloriously raise our bodies from the dead. In the meantime, the Spirit continues to apply the power of Christ’s resurrection to us through the means of grace.

FOOD FOR THE JOURNEY If I want to walk to the Alps from my house, I had better pack some meals. Being well supplied with sustenance is crucial. The same is true for Christians regarding their journey from what is already (regeneration and justification) to what is not yet (glorification). We need spiritual nourishment along the way, which Christ provides through his word and sacraments. Indeed, it is the communion meal in particular that the Scriptures identify as a real participation with the true body and true blood of the risen Lord Jesus. Writing to the church at Corinth, the apostle Paul explains that the communion meal had a deeper significance than many of the Corinthians realized—some to their own peril. Far from being an empty ritual, the Lord’s Supper allows us to commune with the risen and exalted Christ in heaven. Warning the Corinthians against the idolatrous practice of frequenting sacrificial meals in pagan temples (a popular custom in their city), Paul reminds the members of the church about the nature of the Supper: “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation [koinonia] in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?” (1 Cor. 10:16). The word koinonia in verse 16 means far more than mere fellowship; it highlights our union with and communal sharing in the actual body and blood of Christ. While there is indeed an important horizontal dimension of koinonia— namely, our fellowship with one another in the church (v. 17)—it is the vertical dimension of our koinonia with the physical and glorified Christ (v. 16) that becomes the foundation of our horizontal koinonia. To put it another way, we enjoy life in the body of Christ (that is, the church), because we receive life from the body and blood of Christ as he gives himself to us in

the communion meal. By virtue of his resurrection, Christ has become “the life-giving spirit” (1 Cor. 15:45), who refreshes our souls for eternal life in the sacrament of his holy Supper. Calvin and the Reformed tradition understand the New Testament to teach that Christ gives himself to us as our food and drink by the agency of the Holy Spirit when we receive the sacrament in faith. Says Calvin, “The Spirit makes things which are widely separated by space to be united with each other, and accordingly causes life from the flesh of Christ to reach 4 us from heaven.” It is the Holy Spirit who makes it possible for believers on earth to receive the whole Christ in heaven, which is where our Lord has remained since his ascension (Luke 24:51; Acts 1:9–10; Heb. 4:14). It is in heaven where Christ not only reigns, having “sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high” (Heb. 1:3), but also serves as our great high priest, “a minister in the holy places, in the true tabernacle that the Lord set up, not man” (Heb. 8:2). It is there in the true tabernacle, where Christ has “seated us with him in the heavenly places” (Eph. 2:6), that he properly nourishes us with his body and blood, even as we receive ordinary bread and wine on earth. The Lord’s Supper is not an empty ritual or just another opportunity for Christians to do something in worship. Through this meal, the resurrected Christ animates the lives of his people by increasing their faith, strengthening their assurance of salvation, and combating their doubt, temptation, and fear. As the Italian reformer Peter Martyr Vermigli says, What more could there be to lead the faithful to life than this kind of food? Do we not by such eating dwell in Christ and Christ in us? Can we ask for so great a good to be more clearly promised us than when he himself 5 said, “Who eats me shall live by me”? HOMESICK FOR OUR TRUE HOMELAND For all the blessings we enjoy now at the dawn of the new creation, there is still a massive “not yet”

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to be fulfilled. Our hope is not an end in itself. We long for that day when our hope will dissolve into reality and our faith into sight. We are “sojourners and exiles” (1 Pet. 2:11), homesick for our true homeland in the “new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells” (2 Pet. 3:13). We cry out “How long, O Lord?” as we endure “sorrows while suffering unjustly” (1 Pet. 2:19). Yet, because of the resurrected Christ with whom we are united, we can continue on our earthly pilgrimage knowing that our labor is not in vain. Peter tells us that we have been born again, not only to a living hope but also to “an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you” (1 Pet. 1:4). As surely as Christ was raised from the dead, so too shall we be raised. Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls. (1 Pet. 1:8–9)

OUR HOPE IS NOT AN END IN ITSELF. WE LONG FOR THAT DAY WHEN OUR HOPE WILL DISSOLVE INTO REALITY AND OUR FAITH INTO SIGHT. MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

May God lift our eyes above the hazy horizons of this present evil age and fix them upon the majestic glory of Christ. May he continue to strengthen us through the present reality of his Son’s resurrection. And may he hasten that day when the gap between what is “already” and “not yet” will finally be closed. MICHAEL G. BROWN is an ordained minister in the United

Reformed Churches in North America and serves on the mission field in Milan, Italy, where he is pastor of Chiesa Riformata Filadelfia.

1. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 120–21. 2. Michael Horton, Pilgrim Theology: Core Doctrines for Christian Disciples (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), 219. 3. N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 252. 4. John Calvin, “The Best Method of Obtaining Concord,” in Selected Works of John Calvin: Tracts and Letters, vol. 2, trans. Henry Beveridge, ed. Henry Beveridge and Jules Bonnet (repr., Grand Rapids: Baker, 1983), 578. 5. Peter Martyr Vermigli, The Oxford Treatise and Disputation on the Eucharist (1549; repr., Kirksville, MO: 2000), 11.

SHARE WHAT YOU BELIEVE AND WHY YOU BELIEVE IT. WE KNOW FROM NUMEROUS SURVEYS, polls, and sociological studies that biblical literacy is declining, and we see a brand of evangelicalism that increasingly slips into moralism. Christians who don’t know what they believe have just stopped believing. Left unchecked, this problem will grow. This is why White Horse Inn, Modern Reformation magazine, and Core Christianity exist. You and I, along with our pastors and friends in the pew, need to be constantly encouraged and built up in our understanding of and grip on the beauty of the gospel. Moreover, we can be a part of the solution to the growing influence of “Christless Christianity.” We have the great privilege of being involved in what God is doing here on earth as he extends his kingdom. With that in mind, Core Christianity has created our first-ever Bible study in print to empower you to share the good news of Jesus Christ with your family, friends, and neighbors.

THE GOSPEL OF JOHN BIBLE STUDY WAS DESIGNED WITH SEVERAL THINGS IN MIND: To advance the gospel.

To speak to honest questions.

To engage the drama of Scripture, teach the

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doctrine of historic Christianity, move to

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informal gatherings among friends).

We have tremendous opportunities ahead of us, both here and abroad. We are ready to create more resources to help Christians “know what they believe and why they believe it.” The donations we receive by the end of the year will directly impact what we can accomplish. Would you consider making a yearend gift? Together we can make a difference in the lives of people we don’t even know all over the world. Every gift matters! As an expression of our gratitude for your crucial support of any amount, we will send you The Gospel of John Bible Study.

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GET MORE CONTENT AT “THE MOD.” H O M E T O W E B - E XC LU S I V E A R T I C L E S BY M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N . Every week, we feature brand-new articles discussing the social and theological topics of the day, as well as reviews of the books we and our contributors are currently reading, along with monthly contributions from our esteemed colleague and longtime MR contributor Dr. Carl Trueman.

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BOOK REVIEWS

Book Reviews 56

Essential Writings of Meredith G. Kline

Christ the Heart of Creation

Introduction by Jonathan G. Kline Biographical Sketch by Meredith M. Kline

By Rowan Williams

How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church By C. Christopher Smith

REVIEWED BY

Zach Keele

Carl R. Trueman

Matt Boga

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BOOK REVIEWS

Essential Writings of Meredith G. Kline Introduction by Jonathan G. Kline Biographical Sketch by Meredith M. Kline Hendrickson, 2017 330 pages (hardcover), $29.95 n a festschrift for Professor Moshe Greenberg, Tehillah le-Moshe (Eisenbrauns, 1997), the editors’ appreciation honored the scholar in the following manner: “His life-work is a demonstration that the study of ancient texts does not necessitate losing contact with the vital currents of the spirit and the intellect” (xxi). Such an estimation fits well with Meredith G. Kline (1922–2007), whose scholarly life paralleled Professor Greenberg’s in many ways. In fact, just as Professor Kline’s dissertation on The Ha-bi-ru was hitting the press in 1956, Greenberg had completed his doctoral work on a similar topic just a year previously (The Hab/piru, 1955). Kline engaged with Greenberg’s work. Yet—like Greenberg, an e m i n e n t O l d Te s t a m e n t scholar—Kline spent his life’s work researching ancient texts. In our present age, such intellectual effort appears to hold little value for the fastpaced issues of the immediate. Hendrickson’s collection of the Essential Writings of Meredith G. Kline, however, proves nothing could be farther from the truth. As readers work their way through this collection of essays, it is clear how engaged Dr. Kline was with the ancient text of Holy Scripture and how thoroughly acquainted he was with the other ancient texts of Israel’s contemporaries. His work in the texts was not only skilled at the highest level, but it was also permeated with respect and honor for the sacred word of God

within its cultural context in order to serve the church in its own context. In this volume, Jonathan G. Kline (Dr. Kline’s grandson) collected sixteen articles and essays written by Dr. Kline over his fiftyplus-year academic career in Reformed seminaries and the church. The earliest essay dates to 1958 (“Because It Had Not Rained”), and the latest to 1996 (“Har Magedon: The End of the Millennium”). It’s debatable whether or not these are the best of Dr. Kline’s writings, but they are a superb sampling of his life’s work and show his versatility and breadth as a scholar and churchman. In this regard, the value of this volume stands out. Even in our digital age, some of these articles remain tucked away in hard-tofind journals. Now that they are in one place, readers can enjoy his captivating biblical theology. The selected essays, well chosen by Jonathan Kline, are all at their base level exegetical essays. From Genesis 2:4, “Because It Had Not Rained,” to Zechariah 1:8, “The Rider of the Red Horse,” to Revelation 20:4– 6, “The First Resurrection: A Reaffirmation,” Dr. Kline’s labors span the entire canon of Scripture without ever leaving it. It’s an academic discipline that exercises the intellect and models biblical scholarship. For readers without training in Hebrew, Greek, or the ancient Near East, the rigor of Dr. Kline’s linguistics will be difficult to follow. This, however, should not be a deterrent to working through this collection of essays, for sprinkled through his philological labors are devotional nuggets and ecclesiastical gems. A few examples will whet the appetite. For instance, at the conclusion of “Lex Talionis and the Human Fetus,” Dr. Kline pastorally applies the conclusions of his exegesis concerning widespread abortion by saying, “It is hard to

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imagine a more damning commentary on what is taking place in enlightened America today than that provided by this legal witness out of the conscience of benighted ancient paganism” (102). In “Feast of Cover-over,” he compares the similarities and differences between that first pesah and the cross of Christ by concluding, “No epiphany of glory for [Jesus] here—rather, the epitome of scorn” (167). The primary audience for these essays is trained pastors and scholars, who should carefully interact with Dr. Kline’s exegesis. While not every detail will be met with acceptance, his scholarship demands the respect of engagement, not dismissal. Nonetheless, from Dr. Kline’s masterful ability to harvest from ancient texts, any thoughtful Christian can read and find nourishment for the spirit and mind, all centered on Christ and God’s glory. In the spirit of the Reformation, Dr. Kline is, from alpha to omega, an exegetical theologian invigorated by love for his Savior. A higher compliment I cannot pay. In a similar vein, a second commonality unites this sampling of Dr. Kline’s life’s work: his devotion to the service of the church. Although there is no mistake that the majority of his work is technical and in discussion with the broader academic guild, he plows these technical rows for ecclesiastical fruit. All his research is framed by how Holy Scripture actually binds the conscience of the believer and so regulates the teaching of the church. In this service, he regularly parleys with traditional interpretations, especially with respect to Genesis 1–2, Genesis 6, and Revelation 20. It is evident, however, that his motivation is not to be contrarian or novel; it comes out of a deep conviction of the authority of sola scriptura and Christian liberty. Like our Reformed forefathers, Dr. Kline was ever alert to how human traditions and opinions can be popularly canonized within the church and therefore must be regularly weighed against rigorous exegesis of Holy Scripture. Even as he labored at a high level, Kline’s love for the average saint in the pew never lost focus. He served the pastors in the pulpit, who in turn fed the

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In the spirit of the Reformation, Dr. Kline is, from alpha to omega, an exegetical theologian invigorated by love for his Savior.

saints Lord’s Day after Lord’s Day, all in service to our Great King. A final remark is necessary concerning his writing style. It is not unusual to hear that his writing is difficult and inaccessible, but another estimate is more fitting. In the introduction, Jonathan Kline notes the creativity within his scholarship. Although he may use language that is unfamiliar in everyday parlance (and he enjoys his hyphens!), Dr. Kline can weave together beautifully rich sentences, where form and meaning are wonderfully matched. In this way, Kline resembled the authors he spent so much time studying: the prophets. The blackbelt skill of the prophets was the rhetorical

BOOK REVIEWS

creativity they pulled from the law and the culture around them to foretell the greater realities to come. Meredith G. Kline was the student who followed the example of his teachers. As a reviewer, then, I encourage readers to go forth and not just learn, but enjoy. ZACH KEELE is pastor of Escondido Orthodox Presbyte-

rian Church in Escondido, California, and lecturer in Greek, Hebrew, and English Bible Survey at Westminster Seminary California. He is the author of a commentary on Judges for the Rafiki Foundation (2009) and several articles and book reviews in New Horizons, the denominational magazine of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

Christ the Heart of Creation By Rowan Williams Bloomsbury, 2018 304 pages (hardcover), $35.00 have always had a somewhat ambivalent attitude to Rowan Williams. I find his own positive theology to be of the banal liberal variety that causes damage to the church. His time as archbishop of Canterbury was, in a sense, the practical fruit of that—though, to be fair, from a purely human perspective, no one can corral the Anglican communion of our day, riven as it is with theological and moral disagreements made yet more intractable by geographical tensions. Yet if I find little or nothing to admire in his theology or ecclesiastical leadership, I still regard him as one of the most brilliant and helpful expounders of historical theology. He may not agree with the tradition of Christian orthodoxy on many salient points, but he certainly understands it.

His latest volume is a case in point. Christ the Heart of Creation is a dense though sweeping account of the doctrine of God from the perspective of Christology from the ancient church via Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham, through Luther, Calvin, and their heirs, to Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, and Wittgenstein. It is, of course, not a comprehensive treatment of the topic (Williams is selective in the theologians he chooses to address), but it is both substantial in argument and judicious in focus. Anyone who has ever taught a course in patristic thought knows that the literature has traditionally been divided in approach between those scholars who see the doctrine of God as emerging from questions relating to the identity of Christ and those who see the doctrine of Christ emerging from questions relating to the identity of God. We might put it this way: Which comes first, the incarnation or the Trinity? It has also often been framed in terms of an EastWest divergence, whereby the Cappadocian fathers set forth a view of the Trinity emphasizing God’s threeness, while the West, under the influence of Augustine, emphasized the unity and fell thereby into an incipient Unitarianism. The systematic work of the late Colin Gunton was predicated on such a distinction. More recent scholarship, however, has challenged both the Trinity-Christology alternative and the East-West dichotomy. Lewis Ayres and Khaled Anatolios have reframed the history of Trinitarianism in a manner that refuses to see a major disjunction between the Eastern fathers and Augustine, and John Behr has retold the story of Nicaea in a manner that makes creation and God’s relation to it the central question in the development of patristic theology. Though Williams offers no significant interaction with Ayres, Anatolios, or Behr, his

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[Rowan Williams] provides the reader with a thought-provoking account of the development of christological and Trinitarian doctrine.

work certainly complements theirs. The story he tells is one where the relation between God and creation is central to understanding the emergence of the Chalcedonian understanding of Christ’s person, and where the doctrinal questions concerning God and Christ also raise logical or linguistic questions concerning how human words can be applied to God (how we can speak of him) in a meaningful fashion. One of the central points that Williams makes—one that is vital for contemporary conservative Protestants to heed—is that the linguistic and conceptual developments represented by the Nicene-Chalcedonian trajectory in patristic thought do not occur as the result of the imposition of an alien Greek philosophy onto the narrative of the Gospels. That notion—touted by Socinians, Adolf von Harnack, et al.—is one of those simplistic errors whose superficial plausibility gives them an almost zombie-like longevity, even within allegedly orthodox circles. On the contrary, says Williams, “What seem to be highly abstract terminological debates, in the patristic and medieval periods, are generated by problems that are rooted in the narrative of the New Testament—not by the importation of alien considerations, the agenda of ‘Greek philosophy’ or whatever” (117). Put simply, the Gospel narratives make claims about the identity of Christ that point both to him as God and as a

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creature. Generating a conceptual framework for doing justice to both of those is a complex task that takes a long time; but it is a process demanded by the biblical text, not by the speculative imaginations of hair-splitting theologians with nothing better to occupy their time. Given this, the reader is variously treated to subtle but rewarding accounts of divine simplicity, immutability, impassibility, and other attributes. Williams puts numerous caricatures to the sword; and certainly in the sections dealing with the patristic, medieval, and Reformation periods, he provides the reader with a thought-provoking account of the development of christological and Trinitarian doctrine. Although the sections on Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, and Wittgenstein were of less interest to me, even here his sympathetic reading of the sources provides material for the orthodox to use in positive theological construction. If I had to cite one section as particularly helpful, it would be the one on the development of Christology by the Byzantine fathers after Chalcedon. As Williams puts it, the ecumenical council did not so much solve the problems of Christology as restate them in a different form. Thinkers, such as Leontius of Byzantium, took the formula of Chalcedon and further elaborated a Christology to address the issues of Christ’s full humanity and divinity in the unity of his person. Most notably, the idea of Christ’s

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anhypostatic human nature emerged as vital to discussion. This is important, because it allows Williams to show the dialectical nature of doctrinal formulation over time. Orthodox Protestants should heed Williams’s argument. Until very recently, much of what has been written on the doctrine of God in our own circles has been neither biblical nor orthodox by the historic standards of the church, and much of it is based on simple ignorance of the texts. Talking a few years ago to one prominent critic of eternal generation and advocate of the eternal subordination of the Son, I asked him what fourth-century fathers or what work of Lewis Ayres he had read and found wanting. He responded that he had read nothing of either, but he did quote the Bible all the time in his systematic theology. Such ignorance is culpable among those who seek to teach the church. A few hours in the company of Williams’s book would be a great antidote to those who understand neither the catholic faith nor the way in which theological concepts are framed and refined over time. Some years ago, I was sitting in a restaurant in Cambridge with my son when I noticed a donnish bearded figure walking past the window. “That,” I said to my son, “is Rowan Williams, the former and disastrous archbishop of Canterbury.” “What does he do now?” he asked. “He does what he is best at,” I replied. “He doesn’t try to lead the church or be a big shot. He simply reads historic texts carefully and teaches them to others.” There is a lesson here for many of us, and this book is a prime example of that. CARL R. TRUEMAN is professor at the Alva J. Calder-

wood School of Arts and Letters at Grove City College in Pennsylvania.

How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church By C. Christopher Smith Brazos Press, 2019 222 pages (paperback), $16.99 ome of the most profitable, Godg l o r i f y i n g, a n d p e r s o n a l l y challenging conversations I’ve had in the last decade occurred with a deacon in my local church. With our union in Christ at the forefront, these conversations allow for difficult (sometimes ignorant) questions to be asked with a mutual understanding that the questions posed come not from malice but from a genuine desire to learn from one another and grow more fully into the image of Christ. When we get together, we do so with an expectation that we will learn something new from each other. We’ve faced different circumstances in our lives, and it has been life-giving to be able to sit down with him for hours at a time, while he—a thirty-something black man— just lets me empty myself of the questions and concerns American culture has created in a thirty-something white guy like me. He does not condemn me for the ways I understand things; instead, he lovingly and charitably challenges and engages with me to think more like a Christian on important issues. It’s this type of conversation I believe C. Christopher Smith is trying to encourage Christians everywhere to engage in, with his book How the Body of Christ Talks. From the outset, Smith says that the fundamental question with which he wrestles is “How do we learn to talk together in our churches when we have

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been formed by a culture that goes to great lengths to avoid conversation?” (8). Throughout the book, he shows an appreciation for the diverse makeup of the church (cultural, experiential, racial, and so on), often revisiting the biblical description of the church as Christ’s body made up of many distinct members. While Smith acknowledges that our diversity and sin will create a relational mess, in the spirit of pressing on together toward eternity, he reminds us of the imagery of John 15 and what it means to abide in Christ and with our brothers and sisters (ch. 6). In addition, he rightly points out that our cultural upbringings have certainly played a part in how we approach any number of conversations, and we need to be mindful of those shaping influences (ch. 8) while remaining acutely aware of the God-given, image-bearing dignity of those with whom we may disagree (ch. 9). In an attempt to make a case for why we ought to engage in these types of conversations, even when our culture is encouraging us not to, Smith spends his first chapter creating a setting for the rest of the book in social trinitarian theology. “Social trinitarianism,” he states, “emphasizes the three divine persons, in contrast to other interpretations that emphasize their unity” (12). As he begins to apply his Trinitarian theology to the way members in the church interact with one another, he further accentuates diversity by emphasizing that God is a “fundamentally social being and that humankind created in God’s image is also fundamentally social.” His statements here in the opening chapter seem to communicate that the unity of the Godhead—and through Smith’s application, the unity of the church— is of secondary importance when it comes to having constructive conversations. He doesn’t outright reject classical Trinitarianism, but he so emphasizes the fundamental conversational diversity of the Trinity that the impression with which the reader is left is that unity in diversity is found in the way the Trinity communes among itself rather than the church’s union

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We need to be mindful of those shaping influences [of our cultural upbringings] . . . while remaining acutely aware of the God-given, imagebearing dignity of those with whom we may disagree.

with Christ, her indwelling by the Spirit, and her adoption into the family of the Father. This is not to say that social trinitarianism has no value (or place in this conversation), simply that it’s less than accurate (and therefore less than helpful) to ground the import of the way in which brothers and sisters in Christ talk to each other in the way the Trinity communes among itself, rather than in their mutual union in Christ. We can (and must) learn to talk to one another well—not because the Trinity communes among itself, but because we are image-bearers of the living God, members of the body of Christ, and irrevocably united to him by his life, death, and resurrection. Another underlying theme throughout the book is that we all have a “truth” to contribute to the conversation that is completely valid and needs to be taken into consideration when the local church, through conversation, defines what actual truth is. This is an unfortunate—and I’m sure unintended—byproduct of neglecting the

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If . . . what God has said is of first importance and we all find unity in his truth, then there is great power and freedom for Spirit-filled, church-edifying conversation.

importance of true Christian unity. The result is a low view of God’s word, which essentially sends church members out to create compromises with one another in order to find a sense of unity, rather than speak humbly and lovingly with one another because of the unity we already have. Smith spends the rest of How the Body of Christ Talks digging into the how of creating and sustaining spaces for conversations. He describes optimal group size, formatting, scheduling, and the like for holding conversations within the church, all of which are helpful for the local body that would like to start but doesn’t know how to begin. Nonetheless, the problems inherent in his social trinitarian framing work their way out in the examples of conversational techniques provided throughout the book. Many of the examples provided seem to be ways of either abrogating the responsibility of church elders to instruct and defend sound doctrine (see 157–61) or encouraging congregants to find a sort of unity in diversity (see 74–77). Although he earnestly attempts to lay solid practical groundwork for meaningful conversation, the foundation is so faulty that I struggled to see how lasting any attempt could actually be. If we’re not unified in Christ, only striving to live out what we individually believe is good and right for us as the church, then we

will have unity insofar as our opinions agree. If we’re working together for the gratification of our own desires, not the glory of God, then our “unity” will ultimately result in schism, because we will all have different opinions on which desire or goal is most important. If, however, what God has said is of first importance and we all find unity in his truth, then there is great power and freedom for Spirit-filled, churchedifying conversation. For thoughtful Christians firmly established in what they believe, How the Body of Christ Talks will be of some value. Smith has many beneficial things to say. For example, I appreciated the detailed practical suggestions and was encouraged by his reminder that diversity is not a barrier to unity but a wonderful aspect of life in Christ. But, since the social trinitarian construct makes it more problematic than ultimately helpful, I wouldn’t generally recommend it. I believe our Christian unity ought to be the bedrock for the church’s call to conversation, and I find it risky to recommend resources that would encourage otherwise. MATT BOGA is a member and lay leader at Reality Church

of Stockton in Stockton, California. In his free time Matt enjoys reading, building with his hands, and playing basketball. You can follow him on Twitter at @mattboga.

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B AC K PAG E

Meeting a Stranger by Eric Landry

hristmas is a time when we cross great distances and deep divides to be with the ones we love. For some, that might mean traveling to see family and friends in a different town or state. For others, it might mean taking small steps to overcome conflict with someone in your family. Christmas is a time when we try to overcome estrangement. One divide we all feel is the divide between God and us. God is a stranger to us. God is naturally different from us because he is distinct from creation: he is the Creator and we are his creatures. God is also ethically distinct from us: he is holy and we are not. This difference, unlike the natural difference that exists between God and us, is not benign. God is morally opposed to those who are not like him in holiness, justice, righteousness, and love. We are by nature, therefore, enemies of God. All the religions of the world try to overcome this estrangement by trying to make their way up to God through a well-lived life, or by offering a particular set of sacrifices, or by believing certain doctrines. Only Christianity, however, says that God has descended to us. Although he would have been perfectly within his rights to keep his distance and to refuse to engage with his rebellious creation, he overcomes this estrangement by drawing near. The heart of the Christian religion and the center of what we celebrate at Christmas is God drawing near

to us in the person of his Son, Jesus. By joining a human nature to his eternal divine nature, God overcame the natural difference between him and his creation. Jesus is as fully human as you and me. God also overcomes the ethical estrangement between him and his creation through Jesus. “To as many as received him,” John 1:12 says, “he gave power to become the sons of God.” If you’ve ever ridden the “Tube” in London, you quickly get used to the voice that tells you to “mind the gap”—the space between the platform and the subway car that must be crossed over. Receiving Jesus begins by acknowledging the gap that exists between God and us, not just naturally but also ethically. To receive Jesus means we must be honest about the estrangement we feel. Receiving Jesus means we see in him the way to cross over from a place of danger to a place of safety, from a place of estrangement to a place of belonging. When we receive Jesus, we become “children of God”—a special privilege given as a gift to those who trust in Jesus. Is God a stranger to you? He doesn’t need to be. He has overcome the estrangement in the most accessible of human forms: the baby who reaches out for our embrace. God has drawn near. The Lord of Creation has become like you and me—for you and me—so that he might redeem us. ERIC LANDRY is executive editor of Modern Reformation.

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HELP THE NEXT GENERATION. B E C O M E A PA R T N E R T O D AY. In a time when the “nones” (or those claiming no religious adherence) are, according to pollsters, growing and when our own churches are stagnant or shrinking, it is more important than ever to identify and celebrate the gospel: the glory of God manifested in the grace he shows to those who deserve the very opposite. This is Christcentered Christianity at its best and with the support of our partners we produce resources that help transform churches, prisons, families, and individuals.

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Jesus said to him . . . “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. JOHN 20:29–31