Full Contact Christianity

Creeds: Generosity

28 November 2010

I need to say thank you to my good friends Dr. Steve Lewis and Joe Anderson, whose discussion and friendly disagreement over the use and meaning of the creeds inspired me to think more deeply and more clearly about these issues than I ever had in the past. I’m grateful to you both.

In our theological community, nitpicking is considered the acme of theological skill. I honed the skill from a very early age; I’m one of the heirs of a particular strain of southern fundamentalism, so I was raised to it. I can, in all modesty, nitpick with the best of ’em. To be honest, the skill has served me very well in certain contexts. It’s important at times to be exact, say what you mean to say, no more and no less, and to hear everything that others are saying — or, even more importantly, to hear what they’re not saying.

But…

But there are other times when it’s a weakness. It can be a real problem when we’re trying to obey Ephesians 4:3 with living people, and I’ll save that discussion for another time. But the trouble it causes the living doesn’t even hold a candle to the trouble it causes us when we’re dealing with the dead. We read every historical formulation as though it were written yesterday, and criticize it for all the things it doesn’t say, all the things it says differently than we would say them. We do not pay attention to the vital historical context in which the creeds were written, and therefore we do not notice the victories our fathers achieved.

What we ought to do is ask a different question. Not, “Would I say it like this?” but “Did they succeed at addressing the problem before them in their day (not, notice, the problem before me, now)?”

For example, “Eternally begotten of the Father” in the Nicene Creed is hard to prove. In Scripture, begetting seems to be discussed in the context of the Incarnation, and it’s not exegetically clear that it applies to the preincarnate Christ. But what was the context? The Nicene fathers were at war with the heresy of Arius, who said that Christ was not eternal, but “There was a time when He was not.” “Eternally begotten of the Father” was the Nicene fathers’ way of clearly, unequivocally saying that the Arian claim was a lie. For the need of the hour, it was a most effective tactic, imperfect as it may seem to us from our present vantage. (Do you think you have a better solution to the problem? Let’s say you’re right — so what? Who couldn’t come up with a better answer, given a millennium and a half to think about it? But the Nicene fathers didn’t have a millennium and a half. Arius had to be refuted then; the sheep God committed to their care needed a solution then.)

Why did it matter? As with all the early Christological controversies, what was at stake was nothing less than the very essence of the Christian faith: the promise that human beings can be partakers of the divine nature (2 Pet. 1:4). Jesus is the paradigm case: He shows that it is possible for full deity to really meet full humanity. If His deity is diminished (as Arius would have had it) then what we struggling, sinful men partake of is not really the divine nature, but something less. And if His humanity is diminished, then it is not possible for real human beings to partake of the divine nature — which is to say that we go over the same cliff by a different path.

Believe it or not, we get “mother of God” (Theotokos if you prefer the Greek) in the Definition of Chalcedon in similar fashion, as a refutation of Nestorius, who was perfectly happy to say that Mary was the mother of Jesus, but would not say that she was the mother of Christ. For Nestorius, “Christ” meant both the man Jesus and the divine Word, come together in one, and he would not affirm that the divine Word had a mother. The fathers took this (correctly, I might add) as a flat denial of John 1:14, and a serious threat to the theological underpinnings of the promise of 2 Pet. 1:4. As a result, they adopted the verbiage “mother of God” to unequivocally deny the errors of Nestorius — and it worked, beautifully. They were defending the truth that Jesus is undiminished deity and undiminished humanity. They succeeded; we reap the benefits of their success–and make no mistake, “mother of God” was the instrument of their success.

Can we improve upon the wording of the Nicene Creed, or the Definition of Chalcedon? Perhaps so. Ought we to evaluate them as though it were written last Tuesday by some evangelical pastor in Tucson? Of course not. What we ought to do is read them as a stunning and hard-won refutation of a pernicious heresy. We ought to say them as celebrations of victory — they are the particular formulations by which, once upon a time, the core truths of the faith once delivered to all the saints were preserved so that we might hear them now. The men who wrote them are our people, members of Christ’s church and part of the same Body in which we now find salvation; we are their brothers-in-arms, their spiritual children and heirs.

We ought to be generous enough with them not to subject their words to tests they weren’t designed to meet. Nor should we Monday-morning quarterback them, as if they ought to have been omniscient and foreseen the loopholes that later generations found in their words, or the abuses to which their words were later put. It is enough to ask of them that they handled — often heroically — the problems of their own day. It is far too much to ask that they would also have anticipated ours; that’s our job, not theirs. “Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof.”

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Creeds: Harmony and Unison

21 November 2010

As we saw in a preceding post, when the language of the Creed is biblical, we are not free to abandon it, even if the framers of the creed — or later users of it — would not understand that language in the same way we do. We are not free to shy away from the way the Bible talks about things.

So what do we do? Isn’t it dishonest to recite the Creed knowing that we don’t mean the same thing as some others do when they say the same words?

Two issues here: First of all, how come this kind of thing always seems to only work one way? How come it’s me being dishonest, and not them? Especially since — from where I’m standing, at least — I mean what Scripture means by it, and they don’t. Hardly seems right. How about this: I am honestly employing the language of Scripture, and they are betraying their principles by unlawfully importing to the biblical expressions meanings that God did not intend?

Second, and more important, we can disagree and still be one. Christ only has one Body. What actually unifies us is not our doctrinal statements, nor our creeds, but our common participation in Christ. A difference on whether Christ descended into hellfire after His death simply isn’t enough to trump our common participation in Christ. You can’t undo the cross with a pen and a sheet of paper.

Or to say it in the old way: We believe in one holy, catholic and apostolic Church. We believe in the communion of saints. Or in the even older way: “There is one Body and one Spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling: one Lord, one faith, one baptism; One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.”

When I go to, say, a GES conference, I find myself sharing an auditorium with many people with whom I disagree quite seriously, some of whom I would never allow to speak to a flock for which I am responsible. In other circumstances, I find myself sharing a classroom or even a pulpit with someone I seriously disagree with. And yet, we fellowship and worship together. I recently became involved with a prayer effort in my community that puts me on the same team with a very broad range of folks. And yet, we will continue to pray together. Why? Because Christ has united us. They are my people, even if I don’t like it (I do, actually, but my likes and dislikes are irrelevant).

If a pen and paper can’t undo the work of the cross, neither can a clock or a calendar.

Back in 650 or 700, there were Christians. Christ was building His church. The gates of Hades were not prevailing against it. These people said the Creed, and by those words they were expressing their belief in Jesus, the same Jesus I believe in. They were joined to Him who is my Head; they were members of the Body in which I am also a member. They still are; when I ascend the heavenly Zion on Sunday morning to worship before the mercy seat of the heavenly tabernacle, they are the “spirits of just men made perfect” about whom the author of Hebrews writes. I was baptized into the same Christ as they; I eat of the same bread, drink of the same wine, worship on the same holy mountain. They were, and they are, my people, and if I cannot speak in unison with them on everything, I can still speak in harmony.

When I say the Creed, I am not trying to paper over the differences between us. But I am claiming continuity with them. I am in their debt, and I am grateful. The Creed is their gift to me; they formulated it, spoke it, preserved it for me, and here it is: an adept summary of the Faith once delivered to all the saints, articulated as best they understood it, given to me, although I have done nothing to deserve or earn it.

They are my people. When I say their creed, I am saying that I am in harmony with them, and because of that harmony, it is my creed too.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

A Little Theological Light Verse

18 November 2010

Regarding what follows below: I considered offering a little apologeia for theological light verse, but in the end I gave up. You will either think that it is its own justification, or you will think that no justification is possible. Either way, blathering on about why I do it seemed pointless and self-indulgent. So without further ado, gentle reader, I give you a little theological light verse.

“The Bible’s all one book,” they said,
“So a word means the same in all places.”
“Abide in the ship or ye cannot be saved,”
Said I — and imagine their faces!

Predestined before the earth’s foundation
Long before any Scripture’s read:
Not just their souls; their interpretation’s
Predestined before the earth’s foundation.
Beware the children of the Reformation
If you would not have the meaning of “dead”
Predestined before the earth’s foundation
Long before any Scripture’s read.

When Calvin told Beza to heed to the text
Beza held fast ’til his life was all spent
But old Calvin slapped him when he got to heaven:
“The text of the Institutes ain’t what I meant!”

Predestinate terminology’s
The greatest hazard to the text
To ever rise. Some always see
Predestinate terminologies
As antidotes to uncertainties,
Compared to the dangers of which, a perplexed,
Perdestinate terminology’s
The greater hazard. To the text!

9 Comments | Poetry | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Creeds: Wording

14 November 2010

It’s important, when reading a historical document, to understand what the authors mean by what they say. Corollary to this, it’s dishonest to pretend that their words mean something they did not intend.

For example, Lewis Sperry Chafer always maintained that he believed in the perseverance of the saints. But what he meant by “perseverance of the saints” was that the saints would persevere in being saints, which is to say, eternal security. This is mildly dishonest, because the terminology “perseverance of the saints” goes back to the Canons of Dordt, which definitely did not mean only eternal security; they meant that the saints will persevere in acting like saints.

It would have been more honest for Dr. Chafer to simply say that he didn’t believe in the perseverance of the saints, but he did believe in eternal security.

When the wording in question is biblical, however, we do not have the option of simply abandoning it.

For example, take “He descended into hell” in the Apostles’ Creed. Arguably, that wording, when first introduced in the Latin version of the Creed, meant no more than that Jesus went where dead people go. They used the word “Infernus,” which repeatedly appears in the Vulgate as a translation of “Sheol,” the Hebrew term. In the Hebrew cosmology, all the dead go to Sheol — some to Abraham’s bosom, and some to torment, to be sure. But Sheol was all of it. That is, apparently, within the semantic range of “Infernus.” (The Greek OT translated “Sheol” as “Hades” with similar connotations.)

Note that I said “arguably” above. Later, in the middle ages, many Christians taught that after dying on the cross, Jesus spent three days in hellfire suffering for the sins of the world before He was raised from the dead. There is some argument as to what the original framers of the phrase in the creed actually meant by it — just that Jesus really died, and really went where dead people go, or that Jesus suffered the flames of hell to really pay for our sin after He said “It is finished.” Turns out, “Infernus” can mean either the place of the dead generally, or the place where bad people go to suffer for their sins.

So what does one do with the creed? When I say it, I say “He descended into Hades” rather than “He descended into hell” because the English word “hell” has connotations of suffering for sin, which is the meaning I don’t endorse. But many of my conservative brethren would ask: With that ambiguity in play, why would I be willing to say that phrase at all?

We cannot simply abandon “He descended into Hades” for the very good reason that it’s true. Scripture speaks of the death of Jesus in just that way, albeit obliquely (Acts 2:31). To say “He did not descend into Hades” is to say that He did not go where dead people go — which is to depart from Scripture, and the Christian faith. We just can’t say that.

So we say the creed, and when we say the words “He descended into Hades” we know that some of the people who have said those words do not mean what we mean by them. In fact, the people involved in framing that part of the creed may not have meant what we mean by it. However, they would have justified the language by appeal to Acts 2:31, just like I would, and Acts 2:31 ultimately does not mean what they mean by it; it means what God means by it. I affirm the biblical language wholeheartedly, and to the best of my understanding, I mean what God meant by it.

4 Comments | Classics, Controversies, Ecclesiology, Meditations, Speaking as God Speaks | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

“Descriptive, not Prescriptive,” part 4: Options and Patterns

7 November 2010

Before I begin this entry, I need to make something clear to you, dear reader. Some of the examples I use here are indeed topics of discussion and continuing growth in my church, and I am using them because they are very much on my heart of late. But I am not picking on my church. As my church has been prodded toward obedience on these things, it has responded very well. So as I talk about evangelical resistance to growth in certain areas, that is not a passive-aggressive way of calling out recalcitrant people in my own circle. There aren’t any. I mean just what I say — I see this resistance in the broader evangelical church, and I am seeking to address it as best I can.

Options and Obedience

Many believers will simply fail to notice a biblical requirement — say, the one to sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. They may have read those passages many times, but it simply doesn’t occur to them that they should do something in response. The first time this dawns on them, it is because someone is pushing for a particular type of obedience — say, “We need to sing the Sons of Korah version of Psalm 148 in the service this Sunday.” Upon being challenged as to why this is necessary, the speaker will respond with Ephesians 5:19.

The response at this point is pretty predictable. “There’s nothing there that says we have to sing that particular song this particular morning.”

This is of course true. The church could be in complete obedience to the biblical requirement and never sing any song by that particular band, ever. Unfortunately, too often what happens next is…nothing.

Because we need not sing that particular arrangement of that particular psalm this week, we don’t. Also we don’t sing any other arrangement of that psalm. Or any other psalm. And in this way the fact that God gives us freedom in how we obey becomes the occasion for not obeying at all.

Patterns

This is where biblical patterns of obedience are so helpful to us. The Bible not only gives us requirements to obey, it gives us patterns of obedience to emulate. A particular example may not be the only way of obeying, but it is a way of obeying. We don’t have to start from scratch.

The first problem evangelicals have with these patterns is failing to even notice them. We notice that the early church successfully resolved an important theological disagreement in Acts 15, for example — but we pay no mind at all to how they did it. We recognize the commands to be of one mind, to submit to one another, to contend earnestly for the faith, and so on. And Acts 15 becomes a sermon illustration: “See, they stood up for the truth. We should too.”

Yes, but how? Are we acting in continuity with the way they did it? We don’t know. We never even checked to see how they did it. We just take the goal that the requirement gives us, and improvise something that we think will get us there.

At some point, some observant soul may point out how they did it, back in the day. “Look at what they did. They appealed to another church with more theological ‘horsepower,’ they appointed a day to gather, they pursued the dispute until everyone had fallen silent, and then they responded, unanimously, to the issue.”

Most evangelicals respond to that observation in the same way that they do to the suggestion that we must sing this arrangement of this psalm this week. That is, they say “Sure, that was a good way to do it. But it’s descriptive, not prescriptive. We don’t have to do it that way, just because they did.”

True, up to a point. Every situation is somewhat different, and it is the province of God-given wisdom to appraise those differences and tweak our response accordingly. This is to say that we will not respond in unison with our fathers at every point; sometimes we will be in harmony with them.

But what madness makes us suppose that we may simply invent an approach without regard for the examples that God gives us in inspired Scripture? What makes us think that we may act out of harmony with the way in which our fathers obeyed?

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Happy Reformation Day

31 October 2010

On this day 493 years ago, Martin Luther nailed the 95 theses to the door of Wittenburg chapel, and in so doing started a fire that has not yet gone out.

The medieval church was in many ways a praiseworthy institution, and it has many lessons to teach the church today. However, corruption and doctrinal defection had also accumulated over time. There had always been reformers who protested against the problems in the church, but in the early sixteenth century God used Luther and the other Reformers to bring these things to the attention of the church leadership in a way they could no longer afford to ignore.

This was Christ’s judgment on His church, and the leadership ought to have responded by repenting. Indeed, repentance was exactly the response that Luther and the other Reformers sought. They never conceived of themselves as starting a new church; they never intended to start a new church. But the leadership hardened in their rebellion, and as a result the Protestant churches were born.

Today Christ’s church is fragmented into many pieces, most of whom do not think of themselves as part of one another. But we have only one Head, and He has only one Body. We believe — to put it in the old way — in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, and the communion of saints. We also believe in the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting, and on that day when we all stand in the assembled throng before God’s throne in heaven, there will be no fragmentation. Even today, when the spirits of just men made perfect gather on the heavenly Zion, there is no division.

In fifteen minutes, my church body and I will ascend to the heavenly Zion and join them, as will many other churches in this town and around the world, and there, on that holy mountain, nothing will divide us — even if we don’t yet know it.

Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

“Descriptive, not Prescriptive” Part 3

24 October 2010

Every child in the world knows that you can learn how to live from stories. And the biblical authors themselves teach us to read the biblical stories for instructions on how to live. They get doctrine from narrative. They treat the stories as prescriptive.
And so ought we to do.

Of course, we have to interpret them properly. “Brothers, do not be children in understanding. In malice be children, but in understanding be mature.”

So how does this work? When we read Genesis, it teaches us. The story of creation teaches us how the world is organized. We have mostly disregarded those lessons since the Enlightenment, but let’s take one of the cases where we’ve gotten it right. In the beginning, God made one man, and from his side, He brought forth one woman. He brought her to the man and created the first marriage, an image of the Trinity: God unites man and woman. It is, as the popular saying goes, Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. Also not Eve and Charlotte, nor Adam, Eve, and Charlotte, nor any of the other permutations.

Jesus took the story of marriage’s very beginning and showed that it taught a lesson about divorce: “What God has joined together, let man not put asunder.” Now, divorce is nowhere mentioned in the Genesis account of Adam and Eve. There is no direct prohibition of divorce in the Genesis account of Adam and Eve; in fact, divorce is never mentioned anywhere in the whole story. But a particular marriage can harmonize with the origins of marriage and fulfill what marriage is for, or it can be out of harmony. Jesus’ prohibition of divorce is a call for individual marriages to harmonize with the paradigm case of marriage. The exception He allows, in cases of adultery, is also in harmony. The divorcer, in that case, is not putting asunder what God joined together, because the adulterous spouse has already done that. In broad strokes, this is the way a true origin story can be applied.

So what origin stories do we have to work with? Genesis 1 is the origin of the world, and man in it. Genesis 2 is the origin of man in particular, and marriage. The story of Noah is the formation of the geophysical world we now live in, and the origin of civilization as we know it. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are the origin of Israel as a people, and Exodus is the origin of Israel as a nation-state. Acts is the origin of the Church.

Wouldn’t it be something if our ecclesiology began to reflect that last one? If our actual church practice began to harmonize with our origin story? But that’s another post.

31 Comments | Chicken Bones, Controversies, Doctrinal Inconsistencies, Ecclesiology, Meditations | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

“Descriptive, not Prescriptive,” Part 2

17 October 2010

So where does this “descriptive, not prescriptive” thing even come from?

It’s about fear. It’s about being afraid that someone will take some horrible event in a story and decide that it’s God’s will to act it out. Next thing you know, somebody’s trying to have multiple wives, and justify it because after all, David and Solomon and Jacob did. Or speak in tongues, and justify it because it shows up in Acts. Or dance, because Miriam and David did. Or drink wine, or…pick your personal horror story.

And let’s face it: “that’s descriptive, not prescriptive” is an undeniably attractive solution. By denying your opponent in the debate any recourse to the narrative passages of the Bible, you’ve effectively cut his legs out from under him. It’s all very, very convenient.

It’s also ignorant, foolish, and unbiblical. The one thing it’s not is childish–as we’ve seen, every child knows that stories teach.

The biblical authors make their points from narrative, and they do it constantly. Imagine Paul making the argument of Romans 4 in a synagogue — as he must have done many times. “Abraham was justified by faith, before he was ever circumcised!” he says to the crowd. “The same thing can happen today.”
Now imagine one of his opponents rising to rebut him: “Our esteemed guest, Rabbi Paul, fails to realize that the Genesis account is descriptive, not prescriptive.”

Or imagine Jesus, teaching on divorce: “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because of the hardness of your hearts, but from the beginning, God made them male and female. For this reason a man will leave father and mother, and cleave to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.”
A scribe steps forward in the crowd: “That was true for Adam and Eve, but that’s descriptive, not prescriptive.”

This is just nonsense, and we all ought to know better. Certainly the biblical authors regularly drew prescriptions from narrative. If we are not to follow their hermeneutics, then what are we to do? Just make something up?

That’s pretty much what we’re doing, and the effects are devastating.

The first and most obvious problem is that three quarters of the Bible is story. God gave us the Bible so we would know how to live, and we’re trying to pretend that a person can’t learn how to live from three quarters of it. That’s the kind of mistake that tends to issue in long-term disobedience out of sheer, willful ignorance. Sorry to say, such disobedience is not in short supply.

Second, the most dedicated “description not prescription” guy gets the story about the kid playing in the street. He will also immediately object, “But biblical stories are not nearly that simple. They’re far more complicated.”

Of course this is true, but consider the ramifications. When he pleads “descriptive, not prescriptive,” he is in effect pleading ignorance. Jesus and Paul set the example, but this guy can’t follow them. He is admitting that his hermeneutics have broken down, that he’s off the edge of the map. “Descriptive, not prescriptive” is the hermeneutical equivalent of “Here be dragons.” But this is just admitting that he doesn’t know how to read the story.

The solution, of course, is to learn. But instead of learning, he treats his ignorance as an argument for not learning how to read the biblical stories. He wants to deny that it’s possible to learn how to read the biblical stories, and this is just silly. It’s the equivalent of a frustrated six-year-old who claims that it’s impossible to tie his shoelaces on the grounds that he finds the process confusing. In Solomonic idiom: simple ones love simplicity, and fools hate knowledge. The solution is to listen to Wisdom, turn at her rebuke, and seek for her like hidden treasure. Blurting out “descriptive, not prescriptive” is a poor substitute.

The fact that conservative evangelicals have pursued ignorance for a few generations compounds the problem. We have institutionalized the foolishness, and it now afflicts us as a blind spot for our whole community. Now we have diligent, hardworking servants of God who have been trained to be happy with their ignorance. Let me say that again: diligent, hardworking pastors are unable to read three quarters of the Bible well, and they’re completely okay with that, because we have taught them to be okay with that.

This is sin, and like all sin, the cure is as simple as it is painful and difficult: repent!

5 Comments | Chicken Bones, Controversies, Doctrinal Inconsistencies, Ecclesiology, Meditations | Tagged: Hermeneutics | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

“Descriptive, Not Prescriptive,” Part 1

10 October 2010

So as I’m setting out to prove a point about the biblical pattern of doing things, I flip to the relevant passages in Genesis, or Acts, or 2 Chronicles. If I’m talking to a conservative evangelical who has had some Bible college or seminary training, I will almost invariably hear the same objection:
“You know, that passage is really descriptive, not prescriptive.”

For those of you who are blessed enough not to know what this means, here’s a quick rundown:
Descriptive: What they did
Prescriptive: What we (or at least the original audience) ought to do

In other words, the narrative portions of the Bible are true in that they accurately report what those people did, but you can’t infer from them that we ought to do the same. If you try — so goes the reasoning — then we’ll have people chopping up their concubines into little bits, or having multiple wives (you know, like David!), or speaking in tongues, or whatever other horrors we can dig up. Anything to inspire fear, uncertainty, and doubt about learning how to live from the stories of the Bible.

Hence “it’s descriptive, not prescriptive” and its cousin “you can’t get doctrine from narrative.”

Now I don’t mean to be overly offensive, but guys: every child in the world knows that this isn’t true.

“Remember Billy and Susy, who lived across the street? Remember how one day, their mommy told them to stay in the yard, but little Billy went and played in the street and got hit by a car? Susy played in the yard, and she’s fine, but Billy’s going to be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.”

Every child who hears the story, and every parent who tells it, understands perfectly well. Is there any exegete so obtuse that he can fail to understand that this story has a moral? Of course not. And you, dear reader, understood the story as well — even those of you who have had a seminary hermeneutics course at some point.

Furthermore, no parent tells the story and then later begins to think, “Oh my gosh! What if my kid thinks I’m telling him to act like Billy?”

The question, friends, is not whether we can learn how to live from stories. The question is whether we ever learn how to live from anything else.

13 Comments | Chicken Bones, Controversies, Doctrinal Inconsistencies, Meditations | Tagged: Hermeneutics, narrative | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

C. S. Lewis on Protestantism

26 September 2010

This from C.S. Lewis, Oxford History of English Literature: The Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama pp. 32-34

We want, above all, to know what it felt like to be an early Protestant. One thing is certain. It felt very unlike being a ‘puritan’ such as we meet in nineteenth-century fiction. Dickens’s Mrs. Clennam, trying to expiate her early sin by a long life of voluntary gloom, was doing exactly what the first Protestants would have forbidden her to do. They would have thought her whole conception of expiation papistical. On the Protestant view one could not, and by God’s mercy need not, expiate one’s sins.

Theologically, Protestantism was either a recovery, or a development, or an exaggeration (it is not for the literary historian to say which) of Pauline theology. Hence in Buchanan’s Franciscanus ad Fratres the Friars’ prophylactic against it is to keep clear of the ‘old man from Tarsus’ (Tarsensis fuge scripta senis).

In the mind of a Tyndale or Luther, as in the mind of St. Paul himself, this theology was by no means an intellectual construction made in the interests of speculative thought. It springs directly out of a highly specialized religious experience; and all its affirmations, when separated from that context, become meaningless or else mean the opposite of what was intended.

Propositions originally framed with the sole purpose of praising the Divine compassion as boundless, hardly credible, and utterly gratuitous, build up, when extrapolated and systematized, into something that sounds not unlike devil-worship. The experience is that of catastrophic conversion. The man who has passed through it feels like one who has waked from nightmare into ecstasy. Like an accepted lover, he feels that he has done nothing, and never could have done anything, to deserve such astonishing happiness. Never again can he ‘crow from the dunghill of desert*. All the initiative has been on God’s side; all has been free, unbounded grace. And all will continue to be free, unbounded grace. His own puny and ridiculous efforts would be as helpless to retain the joy as they would have been to achieve it in the first place. Fortunately they need not. Bliss is not for sale, cannot be earned. ‘Works’ have no ‘merit’, though of course faith, inevitably, even unconsciously, flows out into works of love at once. He is not saved because he does works of love: he does works of love because he is saved. It is faith alone that has saved him: faith bestowed by sheer gift. From this buoyant humility, this farewell to the self with all its good resolutions, anxiety, scruples, and motive-scratchings, all the Protestant doctrines originally sprang.

For it must be clearly understood that they were at first doctrines not of terror but of joy and hope: indeed, more than hope, fruition, for as Tyndale says, the converted man is already tasting eternal life. The doctrine of predestination, says the XVIIth Article, is ‘full of sweet, pleasant and unspeakable comfort to godly persons’. But what of ungodly persons? Inside the original experience no such question arises. There are no generalizations. We are not building a system. When we begin to do so, very troublesome problems and very dark solutions will appear. But these horrors, so familiar to the modern reader (and especially to the modern reader of fiction), are only by-products of the new theology. They are astonishingly absent from the thought of the first Protestants. Relief and buoyancy are the characteristic notes. In a single sentence of the Tischreden Luther tosses the question aside for ever. Do you doubt whether you are elected to salvation? Then say your prayers, man, and you may conclude that you are. It is as easy as that.

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Posted by Tim Nichols