Reformed theology

Review: God at Work

/ rtrube54 / 1 Comment

God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life, Gene Edward Veith, Jr. Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2002.

Summary: A theology of vocation, rooted in the thought of Martin Luther, and covering God’s call over all of our lives.

It seems there are two extremes in the discussion. On one hand there is the notion of vocation as a religious calling that was the dominant idea prior to the Reformation, and there is the modern idea, which equates vocation with job–vocational training is job training. Gene Edward Veith, Jr. digs into the Reformers ideas of vocation, particularly those of Martin Luther, drawing extensively on Luther theologian Gustav Wingren’s Luther on Vocation. I found the book laden with insights giving meaning not only to our work but to all of life because Veith would insist that God’s calling extends to ever dimension of life, all the roles we fill as believer, congregant, spouse, parent, child, citizen, employee or employer.

One of the first was a subtle challenge to Weber’s Protestant work ethic. Veith proposes that the Reformed doctrine of vocation and its emphasis on encouraging the full expression of the individual’s unique gifts means we work not to prove our election but rather because we are elect, with a deep sense of the satisfaction and fulfillment that may come out of our work. Vocation is a place where we experience the love of God and act out of love and service in grateful response. He especially speaks of this in role relationships that the culture views as all about power. For the Christian, our vocation is lived out in prayer, in love, and service.

One of the basic grounds of vocation is that God sovereignly has chosen to work through human beings. He speaks to us, feeds us, heals us, and protects us through human beings faithfully living their vocations. When we speak of vocation, we speak of God’s “calling.” This is not singular. We have a number of callings. First of all, God calls us to himself through Christ. We all have callings to display God’s grace and mercy. We are called into families, into churches, into employment, into citizenship. Some have the calling for a period of being students. A significant aspect of calling, Veith insists, using the example of safety personnel who rushed into the Twin Towers on 9/11, consist simply in doing one’s job well. He devotes chapters to work, family, church, and society. In some of these he allows that one’s vocation as a peace officer or soldier, or judge or executioner, allows one to take lives lawfully that one could not do in one’s personal life. In others, like that of spouse, we violate our vocation if we join ourselves to any other than the person with whom we are covenanted in marriage, sinning against our vocation in the process. For pastors, he has challenging things to say about what does and does not fulfill pastoral calling, and how those with the ministry of the word, prayer, and spiritual care forfeit these to “run” the church.

He recurs to these ideas in the ethics of vocation. In many dimensions of life, sin is acting contrary to one’s calling. Often this means understanding our various callings–church work ought not draw us away from fulfilling our employment obligations and responsibilities well. In some seasons parenting takes precedence over some of the spiritual disciplines we might give ourselves to in other seasons. He speaks of the trials we face in our vocations and the practice of prayer and faith as we lean into these.

The concluding chapter focuses on resting in our vocations, accepting what we are rather than longing for what we are not, realizing we can please God in every good endeavor. And we look forward to our ultimate rest.

This book offers a whole of life perspective to calling, that recognizes that the same One calls in all of life. God is not just in church. He’s in the home, the kitchen, the bedroom, the shop floor, the laboratory, the crop-filled field, the city council chamber and the courtroom. God is at work through people in all of these places whether they recognize their calling or not. But for the Christian there is the great joy of knowing that as we “do our jobs” in each of these areas, often in ways little different from others, we know that we work alongside God. This is a wonderful book for enlarging our perspective on the significance of our lives. We are called.

Review: Reformed Public Theology

/ rtrube54 / 2 Comments

Reformed Public Theology, Edited by Matthew Kaemingk. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021.

Summary: A collection of 23 essays by leading Reformed thinkers articulating how Reformed theology bears on various aspects of public life.

One of the things that persuaded me to follow Christ was the discovery of how the Christian faith bore on various aspects of public life beyond the church walls. What stands out as I reflect on important books that have helped me is that many of these have been written by those shaped by Reformed thought. This volume is evidence that there is a robust community carrying on this intellectual heritage

The book is introduced by a marvelous statement by Matthew Kaemingk that articulates the marks of a Reformed public theology:

  1. Listening to the Laity.
  2. Dispersing Power–pushing power out and down.
  3. Temporal Awareness–conscious of “what time it is.”
  4. Historical humility
  5. Aesthetic neighborliness
  6. Culture Making
  7. Public Delight
  8. A Liturgical Life
  9. A Liberated Solidarity

The twenty-three essays that follow are organized into six parts:

Public Culture: Contributors range the world addressing immigration, language, decolonialism, euthanasia, and pluralism. The essay on euthanasia, considering the case of the Netherlands was particularly striking to me in its assertion of the sovereignty of God over medicine, the ministry of prayer, listening, and living with the ambiguity of waiting.

Public Markets: Essays here cover work, economics, and labor rights. Having studied the theology of work, I appreciated Katherine Leary Alsdorf’s essay on a Reformed theology of work in New York, recognizing the rich affirmation of work in Christ’s Lordship over all while challenging the idolatries of vocation.

Public Justice: Writers address ideologies, populism, and activism. Stephanie Summers shares how she was formed through her relationship with Jim Skillen, who helped her root her fiery activism in a framework that saw opponents as potential partners and gave her an understanding of the different institutions or spheres that constitute civil society and saw politics as an avenue to love neighbors. Her narrative is a rich account worth reading by every young (and not so young) activist.

Public Aesthetics: Makoto Fujimura writes on Japanese aesthetics, Jamie Smith on poetry, Robert S. Covolo on fashion, and Eric O. Jacobsen on cities. I was familiar with all but Covolo and have never thought about fashion through the eyes of faith. He looks at fashion as gift, as market commodity, as social force, as aesthetic play, and as social costume and argues for its being worth serious reflection.

Public Academy: As a campus minister, I was particularly eager to see the essays in this section. None disappointed. Bethany Jenkins shows how the Reformed framework enables one to engage every aspect of the pluralist campus. Nick Wolterstorff outlines five themes characteristic of the Reformed understanding of scholarship with a strong encouragement both to engage diverse worldviews as a Christian while engaging in “dialogic pluralism” that both learns from and contributes to the learning of others through active shared engagement. Jeff Liou offers a great service in a thoughtful, nuanced, and Reformed discussion of Critical Race Theory (CRT), explaining it (very necessary, because many fight something they don’t understand), drawing upon Reformed understandings of justice and culture, including neo-Calvinism’s critique of modernity and Western liberalism, and its affirmation of the wealth of every culture. He notes correspondences and differences between Reformed thought and CRT, and highlights the similarity of Boesak’s Reformed critique of South Africa and much of what is found in Critical Race Theory.

Public Worship: The final section focuses on the public of the various aspects of our worship: communion and the welcoming of immigrants, public prayer as a place to give voice to the traumas of the public square, baptism as it bears on racism and sexism, various forms of confession and our civil discourse, and piety, how we imitate Christ in public life. The final essay on piety names the dichotomy between good work and spirituality that has often signaled that work doesn’t matter, only church and argues that ‘the things of earth grow strangely clear (rather than dim)/In the light of his glory and grace.” Our work in the world has eternal significance in and through Christ.

I cannot do all the essays justice in this space. Running through them are the Kuyperian ideas of “every square inch” and “sphere sovereignty.” There is also a Reformed eschatology, emphasized by the Reformed theologian Richard Mouw, to whom this volume is dedicated, of Revelation 21-22, where the kings of the earth bring the wealth of the nations into the holy city. All our efforts in the public sphere gain significance as we look toward that day, and the full revealing of the common grace of God in the world.

There is rich fare to be found in these pages, often as introductions to more extensive works. For anyone looking for alternatives to the political ideologies often baptized as “Christian,” for anyone wanting to engage in public life in whatever way fits their calling, there are good resources that take us beyond being good, little Christians, that help us think about the purposes of God, the nature of human beings and society and institutions, that help us think in biblical categories about justice, and about the meaning of our worship as we look beyond the church doors. The essays bring in voices from every continent and social situation, belying stereotypes of Reformed thought being only white and western. This is the substantive content needed in adult education in our churches, in workplace ministries, among community organizers, among faculty and campus leaders, and Christians working inside the beltway, and not just in the halls of our seminaries.

____________________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: None Greater

/ rtrube54 / 1 Comment

none greater

None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God, Matthew Barrett (Foreword by Fred Sanders). Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2019.

Summary: Drawing on classical and reformed theology, discusses the perfections of God, that set God apart from all else.

It seems a common tendency in Christian preaching, and even in our informal conversations, to try to “bring God down to our level.”  Christian Smith, in a study of the religious beliefs of American teens, coined a term to describe the God of many: “moral therapeutic deism.” In this system, there is a belief in a God who made the world, who wants us to be nice and fair, the purpose of life being to feel happy and good about oneself, God only gets involved in our lives when we need God, and that good people will go to heaven when they die. Such a God is nice, domesticated, and mostly irrelevant to our lives. God is like us, only a bit better and maybe more powerful.

The classical theologians like Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas, and those in the Reformed tradition of the author thought quite differently. For them, God, as Anselm put it, is “someone than whom none greater can be perceived,” hence the title of this work. While God may have certain communicable attributes like love, that are evident in part in human beings, God’s incommunicable attributes are utterly unlike any other creature and set God apart as incomparably greater than human beings.

It was this God that Matthew Barrett discovered in college when he read Calvin’s Institutes, and the other theologians mentioned above, opening his eyes to the glory and majesty of God. His hope in this book is that through a study of God’s attributes, particularly those dealing with the incommunicable perfections of God, to sow the same sense of wonder in his readers, inviting them to give up their domesticated versions of God for the incomparably greater undomesticated God of scripture.

The first three chapters of the book lay groundwork. First he explores the incomprehensibility of God, that we may speak of attributes, but none of us may see or know God in God’s very essence. It is not that God in unknowable, because God makes God’s self known through God’s works. He discusses how we may speak of God in analogical language as revealed by God to us, and sometimes in anthropomorphic language of hands, eyes, even wings, none of which are true of God’s essence. Most of all, we must recognize that God is infinite in God’s perfections, and without limits–a staggering realization for finite and imperfect creatures.

The remainder of the book discusses the perfections of God:

  • God’s aseity or self-existence independent of all of creation.
  • God’s simplicity, that even when we speak of various attributes, these are not “parts” of God but compose a seamless whole.
  • God’s immutability, that God does not change, grow, improve, or diminish, which is a tremendous comfort.
  • God’s impassibility, that God does not experience emotional changes, both settled in his promise-keeping love, and holy wrath toward evil.
  • God’s eternity, that he is timeless and not exists in the eternal present.
  • God is omnipresent: not bounded by a body, infinitely present.
  • God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnisapient: all-powerful, all knowing and all-wise.
  • God is both holy and loving: the high and lifted up God Isaiah sees, who cleanses his mouth and takes his guilt away and lovingly commissions him.
  • A God who is jealous for his own glory, inviting us into a similar jealousy for the glory and reputation of God above all in our world.

I found this discussion far from the “sterility” often found in such treatments of the attributes of God. Barrett helps us understand how each attributes both feeds our worship of God and is of great consolation to the believer. For example, the aseity of God means that the gospel depends on a God who does not depend on us. He deals with questions that may arise, such as how we can speak of simplicity and yet believe in a triune God. He differentiates an immutable God from one who is rigidly immobile. He deals with the classic conundrum of God creating a rock so big he cannot lift.

His discussion of impassibility is particularly intriguing in taking on Jurgen Moltmann’s “suffering God.” Yes Christ in his humanity suffers, but God does not suffer, God redeems. God is not like the family suffering over a family member trapped in a fire, but rather the fireman who has the capability and compassion to enter the burning building, enduring the flames and the smoke, to rescue the loved one. I’m not sure I buy this, and it seems these ideas are framed in either/or terms, not admitting the possibility of both/and, or the possibility of a quality of suffering in the God of eternal love who from eternity both purposed creation and the redemptive work of Christ.

This is a highly readable contemporary rendering of classical theology. It has become popular to bash classical statements of theology. Often, what is being bashed are caricatures. Here is the real stuff, articulated clearly and winsomely. I didn’t agree at every point, but found myself again and again marveling at the greatness of God and challenged to consider the ways I’m tempted to domesticate God. That, I think, is what makes for good theological reading and may be found here.

________________________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: The Givenness of Things

/ rtrube54 / 2 Comments

The givenness of things

The Givenness of Things, Marilynne Robinson. New York: Picador, 2016.

Summary: A collection of essays drawn from various lectures questioning our prevailing ideas through the lens of John Calvin, and others in the Reformed and Humanist tradition.

If you have read Marilynne Robinson’s fiction, you have the sense that there is a world of theological thought undergirding her narratives, particularly reflected in her lead character, Reverend John Ames. To read her essays is to enter into that rich theological world, and the extent to which this woman reads.

It is also to experience a voice that seems from another time, questioning our prevailing ways of thought. Like C. S. Lewis, Robinson is a reader of old books, particularly old theologians like John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards, and she allows these voices of another time to question our accepted ways of looking at things.

One example is the essay from which the title of this collection is drawn, “Givenness.” The essay focuses around the ideas of Jonathan Edwards’ Religious Affections and the intrinsic character of the affections of love, joy, hope, desire, and others in our experience of faith. Here, and in other essays, she argues against the scientific reductionism that reduces the affections to the firing of neurons. Similarly, the opening essay on “Humanism” describes the glories of the works of the mind that came out of the Renaissance, and challenges the reductionism that would explain all of this through evolutionary mechanisms and physical processes. It is not that she is anti-science. It is obvious that her reading includes and delights in a great deal of science writing. It is the scientism that asserts hegemony over all domains of human experience to which she objects.

The book consists of seventeen essays, most with one word titles like “Reformation,” Servanthood,” or “Limitation.” Perhaps the most striking for me was her essay on  “Fear.” These statements were particularly arresting:

“First, contemporary America is full of fear. And second, fear is not a Christian habit of mind….As Christians we are to believe that we are to fear not the death of our bodies but the loss of our souls” (p. 125).

She explores how this drives the fearful nationalism evident even when she was writing these essays, and the stress on preserving and extending the Second Amendment in the acquisition and proposed “right” to concealed carry. She also wonders about the financial interests exploiting this culture of fear.

Her essay on “Theology” explores not only theologians like Jonathan Edwards, but the theological content of the plays of William Shakespeare (whetting my appetite to read some Shakespeare). She explores particularly the ways Shakespeare handles reconciliation and matters of mercy, grace, and forgiveness.

These are simply tastes of what you will find in this rich collection representing Robinson’s thought. Prepare to read rigorously, and to explore the intellectual by-paths Robinson will take in exploring an idea. One must pay close attention to follow the thread of her arguments. Again, like Lewis, one has the sense that she brings everything she has read to anything that she says.

Finally, the book concludes with a two-part conversation with Barack Obama while he was president. As much as anything, he is interviewing her and what a delight to listen in on this wide-ranging conversation between two literate persons. One of the moments that reflected one of the president’s deep regrets was his struggle to close the gap between Washington and Main Street, the ways we engage with each other in everyday life, and the distance between that and our political discourse–our compassion toward the needy near us and our fears of “them” — a comment evoked by Robinson’s essay on fear.

One might critique her essays as reflecting a very Euro-American focus and a lack of engagement with writers outside the Western theological, philosophical and literary canon. There may well be some validity in that critique, but perhaps she is doing something very similar to those calling for other voices, in drawing on voices no longer a part of our cultural discourse, and who speak to our contemporary ideas from another perspective, and from another time.

 

Review: Philosophy of Revelation

/ rtrube54 / 5 Comments

Philosophy of Revelation

Philosophy of Revelation, Herman Bavinck (edited by Cory Brock and Nathaniel Gray Sutanto, foreword by James P. Eglinton). Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2018 (Originally given and expanded from Stone Lectures in 1908).

Summary: A new annotated edition of Dutch Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck’s 1908 Stone Lectures at Princeton, arguing that revelation is a warranted basic belief.

Herman Bavinck (1854-1921) was a Dutch Reformed theologian, writing mostly in Dutch, from the late nineteenth, early twentieth century. With the translation of his Reformed Dogmatics in 2003, studies of Bavinck’s work has flourished. This work represents an expanded version of Bavinck’s Stone Lectures at Princeton, first translated in 1908 by Geerhardus Vos. Two contemporary Bavinck scholars recognized the importance of this work to discussions of Reformed epistemology, and have given us this new annotated edition of the work. The annotations to the work are found in the footnotes and address everything from alternate translations of the text to explanations and context for Bavinck’s arguments, a tremendous asset to any modern scholar-theologian studying Bavinck. This is particularly important because Bavinck is engaging philosophers, scientists, and historians of his day, who are often not a part of contemporary academic and theological discourse.

Bavinck’s basic argument, anticipating the work of Alvin Plantinga, is that revelation is a warranted basic belief. The lectures argue this inductively from the disciplines of philosophy, natural science, history, religion and religious experience, culture, the Christian faith, and our teleology, our understanding of the future. Revelation in its general form (the things we can’t not know), and particularly around religious experience and Christian faith, special revelation, are shown to be basic to human experience and actually foundational to science, history, and philosophy.

Bavinck writes in a period where modernism had theology on its heels. Scientific research exalted the materialistic, rational explanation of all. What I was most intrigued with in the work was how Bavinck anticipated much of the developments of the last one hundred years in the movement from materialism to various forms of pantheistic monism in shaping our view of reality. Bavinck is one of the first I have observed to address the questions of the one and the many and how revelation, and the Christian faith offers the only satisfying explanation about connections between material and spiritual reality, and the sources both of oneness and true diversity. He is also prescient, in his discussion of revelation and the future, in anticipating the eugenics movement, and more recent efforts in genetic modification or even trans-humanism, human efforts to control our future.

The strength of this work is the basic argument Bavinck is making, and its connection to later thinkers from Van Til to Plantinga and Wolterstorff. An important aspect of this philosophy of revelation is the argument for how revelation serves as the basis of the coherence of all intellectual inquiry. This is desperately needed good news for our modern, fragment university world, as well as our fragmented modern lives, and even sense of self.

Sometimes, Bavinck’s engagement with scholars of his day makes it harder for those of us unfamiliar with them to keep track of his argument. The annotations are quite helpful in this regard. While it may have felt like meddling in the text, some form of subheadings or marginal summaries would have been helpful to this reader in keeping track of the thread of his argument. In some cases, such as critiquing Darwin, it felt that he might have been relying on apologetic arguments of his day that are less helpful with the advances of biological science. I realize that such a criticism simply reflects the problem of engaging any scholarly work from one hundred years ago.

None of this takes away from the compelling case he makes for a warranted basic belief in revelation, addressing both the philosophy of revelation, and the philosophy of revelation. We continue to live and move and work in an incoherent culture that divorces reason and revelation. Bavinck offers a significant extended argument for reconciling these, summarized well in one of his concluding statements:

“Revelation in nature and revelation in Scripture form, in alliance (verband) with each other, a harmonious unity which satisfies the requirements of the intellect and the needs of the heart alike.” (p. 242)

[By the way, don’t overlook the editors explanation, in their introductory essay (pp. xxxii-xxxiii), of the use of Piet Mondrian’s work on the cover of this work!]

_____________________________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: Essential Writings of Meredith G. Kline

/ rtrube54 / 4 Comments

Essential Writings of Meredith G Kline

Essential Writings of Meredith G. Kline, Meredith D. Kline (Foreword, Tremper Longman II; Biography, Meredith M. Kline; Introduction, Jonathan G. Kline). Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2017.

Summary: A collection of articles by Meredith Kline spanning Genesis to Revelation, and the author’s academic career characterized by biblical insight and theological integrity within a Reformed perspective. 

Meredith G. Kline (1922-2007) was a professor of Old Testament perhaps best known for one of his early works, Treaty of the Great King (1963). Drawing on discoveries in Hittite treaty forms, he contended that the structure of Deuteronomy reflects the structure of treaty covenants of the Second Millennium BC, lending support for traditional dating as opposed to a late date at the time of Josiah’s kingship.  He was also author of The Structure of Biblical Authority (1975), an important contribution to the discussion of the doctrine of scripture.

This new collection of articles gives us the “essence” the work of Kline, and introduces him to a new generation of students of scripture, aided by a biographical sketch by his son, and an introduction by his grandson, both who have followed in his steps as Old Testament scholars. In reading these articles, that essence consists in scholarly rigor and precision and a capacity to reach novel conclusions and fresh insight that remain consistent with Reformed theological orthodoxy, and centered around the redemptive work of Christ and redemptive purpose of God.

Part One opens with two essays on Creation, centering on details like the lack of vegetation on the earth due to it not having yet rained and there being humans to cultivate the earth. The effect of these essays is to argue against a literal creation week on the basis of the Genesis text, and that there is no inherent conflict between biblical and scientific accounts of origins.

Covenant, Law, and State are the concerns of Part Two. Kline finds a basis for the common grace of the state in God’s promise to Cain. He questions traditional interpretations of Genesis 6:1-4, arguing these are tyrannical kings using their prerogatives for various illicit unions, including polygamy. He argues that the two tables of the law are actually two copies of the law, the sovereign’s and the vassal’s. He looks at laws around lex talionis and miscarriage, and what they reveal about the life ethic of scripture (while noting that abortion was unthinkable in this culture).

Part Three centers on Faith, the Gospel, and Justification. It begins with a careful study of Abraham’s ” Amen” in Genesis 15:6, considering its use throughout the Old Testament, contending that this was indeed a declaration of faith in God and God’s promises by which Abraham is justified by God. The next article proposes Exodus as the basis for the Gospel genre. Finally, in “Double Trouble” he argues that the doubles in scripture concerning penalties are not multiplications but rather the penalty mirroring the offense (a “double” as it were).

Under the theme of “Redemption,” Part Four begins with an essay on Passover, which Kline argues is better understood as “cover-over.” One of the most interesting essays in the collection was an argument that in Job, Satan is the one who in fact is the object of a “trial by ordeal.” Finally, in an article that like many moves back and forth throughout scripture, Kline considers the messianic imagery of the rider of the red horse in Zechariah 1:8.

Three of the four essays in Part Five concern the resurrection, and particularly the hope believers have of being immediately in the Lord’s presence upon death, what Kline sees as “The First Resurrection” in Revelation 20:4-6. The second and third articles are connected, with the third a rejoinder to a response by Ramsey Michaels. I wish in this case that Michaels’ response could have been included so the reader could follow the discussion. The final makes the proposal that Har Magedon is actually Har mo’ed or the Mount of Assembly, and is sited at Mt Zion/Zaphon (cf Psalm 48).

While he questions traditional readings, often drawing on lingual-cultural insights, he tests interpretation of particular texts against the whole of scripture and moves from biblical to theological exegesis in a way that consistently witnesses to the redemptive, Christ-anticipating arc of the text. It is a consistent challenge to bring fresh insights to the study of the biblical text without drifting away from orthodoxy. I thought these articles a good example of scholarship that flourished within that tension. There is also an unspoken testimony to the integrity of his life and work in this book with three generations of Klines, all Old Testament scholars, contributing to this book. Not a bad scholarly legacy!

____________________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.