Asking Jesus into my heart

Derek Thomas

So I began to read Stott's book over the Christmas break. And a few days later, I found myself on my knees late in the evening in prayer. In the terminology I might have used then, "I asked Jesus into my heart." And he came.

These words of Derek Thomas’s, recently posted on the e-magazine Reformation 21, pinpoint an interesting and important question about the language we use in describing our faith, and its relation to our understanding of that faith. The language that we use in turn affects our formation as Christians and churches. For it is not just that (as Jesus explicitly teaches) as a man thinks in his heart so is he, but how a man thinks in his heart so is he. But the general question of the relation between spoken language and doctrinal understanding is scarcely ever discussed.

Given the importance of spoken language in the life of the church it is surprising that little seems to have been thought of its connection with or disconnection from sound doctrine. So I thought we might give it an airing. But because of the closeness of language to thought, and of thought to a person’s self, this can be a delicate matter. Pontificating is certainly to be avoided. So I am going to try to bear in mind another teaching of Jesus to help me. When he warned against causing the little ones who believe in him to stumble, I am assuming that he had in mind what these little ones say, as well as what they do in other ways. In what I say, I shall then try to avid causing users of such language to stumble.

An Assumption

I assume that when someone makes the bona fide request such as Derek Thomas did to ask Jesus into their heart they are not making a category mistake. They are using words and phrases that bear a positive relation to the language in which the faith has been officially as preached and confessed by the church through the centuries, but a rather loose relation, though perhaps such speakers do not realise that. The language is not reductionistic, intended to bear no direct relationship to the meaning, say, of the creeds.

To illustrate

Materialists typically think that the language of consciousness and especially of intentionality that we use everyday is eliminable, that it’s going nowhere, that we could adopt the language of brain states, neural firings and the like and lose nothing of cognitive importance thereby. T.H. Huxley referred to consciousness as an epiphenomenon, a bye-product of neural activity, like froth on the surface of beer, an effect without being itself a cause of further effects. It is not the froth on the beer that has cheering effects, but the beer itself. In the aftermath of Logical Positivism in the 1950’s and 1960’s there were attempts by R. B. Braithwaite and others, to translate/reduce the language of Christian theology into emotive language.

No one thinks that the language of asking Jesus into one’s heart, or of giving one’s heart to Jesus, is reductionist language, because without question people who talk like this are saying something of theological and spiritual importance about themselves. Nevertheless there is also something odd about it, as Derek also seems to think when he refers to ‘terminology that I might have used then’ implying (I think) that he would not speak that way now.

I don’t suppose for a moment that this is Calvinistic snobbishness in Derek’s case any more than (I hope) it is in mine. It’s not a case of someone demanding that if we are to talk seriously about theological and spiritual matters we must speak the language of the Westminster Standards, and only that language, to do so.

Of course we may understand the language as figurative, and then it could literally mean any of a number of things. But what if we take it more literally than that? Even so, there’s something odd about the language, just as (I would say) there’s something attractive about it. Not just that it’s terse and compressed (nothing wrong with that), or deficient in theological gravitas. Rather, it’s OK but it is going down the wrong track, a track that could lead off the track altogether, into the wilderness. I seem to remember that somewhere C.S. Lewis writes that to think of God as an old man with a long grey beard is a mistake, but that it’s not a very serious mistake. I’m inclined to think that a person who talks of conversion as asking Jesus into his life is making a more serious mistake. So let’s try to see why this might be.

What’s going wrong?

What is someone who asks Jesus to come into her heart saying? Here are things we need to bear in mind. The expression at least has this in its favour, that it is centred on Jesus. But according to the New Testament and the church’s confession of her faith, Jesus is not now in a position to come into anyone’s heart. Having suffered crucifixion, and enjoyed resurrection – how exhilarating that must have been! – he is now ascended to the Father, and though physically located at a place, the New Testament shows little or no interest in this bare fact, nor in the problems that it raises, but it stresses that he is now at his Father’s right hand, a place of exaltation and authority. So the language of taking Jesus into one’s heart invites Jesus to have a role which he is (literally) in no position to fulfil.

It is true that there is some language about Jesus in the New Testament that is related to talk of taking Jesus into one’s heart. We might point to Revelation 3.20, ‘If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me’. Jesus comes and enters into a person’s ‘door’. And there is John 14.20 ‘If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him’. But even here care is needed. The words from John’s gospel are concerned with the coming of the Spirit upon Christ’s departure. For the Father and the Son to take up their abode with the believer is to do this through the ministry of the Spirit. Christ Jesus will not abide with today’s believers literally, nor does the New Testament encourage its readers to think that he will, any more than Paul (for instance) is not in the least interested or concerned to show to his readers and hearers what is God’s will for their lives, or to offer advice about how they might discover what God’s will for them is.

Jesus-centric

But what is attractive about the language is that it is Jesus-centric. And bearing this in mind, one way to think of the use of such language is as an affirmation of the great fact of the believer's union with Jesus. He is in Christ, witnessed to by the fact that Christ is in him by his Spirit. I suggest that this is one way of reading such informal expressions, as testifying to the believer’s willing union with Christ. But as well as keeping the emphasis on Christ’s Spirit as the indweller of God’s people, I reckon that such language ought to be tempered by the emphasis of Paul that Christ dwells in the hearts of his people by faith. (Ep. 3.17) The language of Christ coming into the heart is the language of union with Christ, and this (Paul tells us) is the language of believers.

February and forward

In February there will be a post ‘Taking Jesus into my heart’ which aims to reflect about popular evangelical expressions and their relation to the theology and confession of the church. Later on in the year we shall be looking at a new book on B.B. Warfield and at a couple of issues arising from that. Then, for good measure, there will be a piece on Richard of St Victor’s book on the Trinity, recently translated into English for the first time, and by an Italian.

It Ain’t Necessarily So - Second Half

So although Calvin does not employ the apparatus of alternative possible worlds, nor the ’foreknowledge of possibilities’ in the manner of Gomarus, it is clear that Calvin envisages the divine mind as having before it various alternative possible outcomes, no doubt myriads of them. There are alternative outcomes, which are consistent states of affairs, that God could have chosen, each of which is in accordance with his nature. No doubt there are also consistent states of affairs that God could not have chosen, possibilities that are abhorrent to his nature. And any outcome which God might have chosen, if he had chosen it, that outcome would be necessary only because he chose it, spontaneously and willingly. So there is a distinction to be drawn between God willing a certain outcomes according to his nature – wise, just, and so forth, and God willing a particular outcome necessarily. The latter does not follow from the former. The particular outcomes that he wills are thus hypothetical or conditionally necessary.

So the necessity that God should act in accordance with his nature is a different sort of necessity than that possessed by states of affairs brought about by the divine will. God is necessarily wise, for example. Wisdom is a discriminable feature of his essence, such that any individual lacking such wisdom could not be God. Such wisdom is not given to him, nor imposed on him. God’s wisdom is ontologically or necessarily possessed by him, in virtue of his aseity. By contrast God creates the heavens and the earth. These states of affairs are brought about, causally necessitated, by God’s wisdom. He wills them. They are product of God’s ontologically necessary wisdom, but they are not themselves metaphysically or ontologically necessary. ‘I shall not hesitate with Augustine that “the will of God is the necessity of things” and that what he has willed will of necessity come to pass as those things which he has foreseen will come to pass.’ They are logically contingent, and causally necessary in virtue of his will, his choice of this and not of some other alternative. But because God wills them omnipotently and immutably they have the necessity of the consequence.

So there is an ambiguity over the expression ‘Whatever God wills, he wills necessarily’. Necessarily whatever God wills is wise, just, good etc: the action-type is necessitated by God’s nature. But it does not follow that each action token is necessitated in the same way, or indeed that any action-token is necessitated in this way. Actions ad extra are causally necessitated by God’s will. Such outcomes, if willed by God, must be in accordance with his nature and caused by him. Jesus said that his Father could of these stones raise up children to Abraham, and were he to have done so he would have brought about this state of affairs, causally necessitated it, a state of affairs that would have been a consistent expression of his nature. That is, there is a distinction between

Necessarily, whatever God wills he wills wisely.

And

If God wills some particular wise act W, W is necessitated.

Whatever God wills ad extra has the necessity of the consequence.

In its first occurrence ‘necessarily’ denotes metaphysical or ontological necessity, while its second occurrence ‘necessitated’, it denotes causal necessity, and its third occurrence draws attention to the immutability of whatever he wills. That caused action is willed by God in accordance with his nature, but its choice is not logically entailed by that nature. But the choice having been made it cannot fail.

Calvin himself respects the distinction between the manner in which God possesses powers, such as wisdom, and the manner in which creatures possess such powers in a number of places, most notably in his Excursus ‘Coercion versus Necessity’ in The Bondage and Liberation of the Will. The question is whether necessity excludes responsibility, praise and blame. Not so, says Calvin. ‘We reply that God is good of necessity, but he obtains no less praise for his goodness because of the fact that he can only be good’.

We do not argue that people are good or evil of necessity because God is good of necessity, but show by means of this example that it is not contrary to reason for a quality which exists of necessity nevertheless to be deemed worthy of praise or censure.

Similarly with contingency. In discussing contingency in connection with divine providence in the Institutes Calvin reserves the term ‘contingent’ for causal contingency, never denying that, should God have willed it, there could have been an alternative causal outcome from that what in fact occurred. What he does deny is the presence of uncaused or self-caused events, Fortune, or (it seems) libertarianly-free human choices. He steers a mid-course between Epicurean Fortune and Stoic Fate. So the necessity that he ascribes to divine action is conditional or hypothetical necessity, contrasting ‘chance’ (in a metaphysical sense) with divine contingency.

Putting this in a rather different way we can suppose that for Calvin, all the particular actions that God wills he wills so as to necessitate the outcome, with a hypothetical necessity . It is because he chooses to bring about some action that it is necessarily comes to pass, his choice being infallible and all powerful and in accordance with his nature. ‘What necessarily happens is what God decrees, and is therefore not exactly or of itself necessary by nature’.

So, when Vos concludes that according to Calvin, ‘therefore, everything is necessary. Because the whole of reality is necessary, God knows and acts necessarily, and because God knows and acts necessarily, everything is necessary too’ these words are an inaccurate account of Calvin’s view due to the failure to disambiguate what is ontologically necessary, a feature of God’s essence, and what is causally necessary, a consequence of his will, and what is hypothetically necessary. Only in this way can Calvin’s attitude to God and necessity be made clear, and its relation to those that followed him in Reformed Orthodoxy be properly assessed.

A sidelong glance at Reformed Orthodox treatments of the divine will does not give the impression that they are engaging in a reconstruction of the doctrine of God, along Scotist or any other lines. For example, take Turretin’s short section on the divine will. (III.14) He makes the following points. A contrast needs to be drawn between absolute necessity and hypothetical necessity with respect to God. God wills himself necessarily, but other things freely, because created things (with respect to God) are contingent. God’s freedom consist in acts that are spontaneous and indifferent. Indifferent acts are those which God ‘so wills that he could have nilled them’. (An ita illa velit, ut potueruit ea nolle). There is no suggestion that such indifference is a case of synchronic contingency: no reference to ‘moments’ or structures in the divine mind, for example, or to time, but simply a reference to God’s sovereign choice. Instead, indifference is linked to divine aseity. God cannot do without his wisdom, which is thus absolutely necessary, but he can do without planet Earth, which is thus only hypothetically necessary. ‘Contingent’ is understood by reference to the divine essence. No created thing is necessary with respect to God but contingent ‘(as he could do without them) so he wills all things as that he could not will them.’ Such things are contingent with respect to his own being. Interestingly, Turretin’s emphasis is not on God’s freedom to create A or B, but to create A or to refrain from creating it, the ‘freedom of contradiction’. I suggest that all these points are consistent with Calvin’s doctrine of God. The only difference is stylistic, whereas Calvin’s views are scattered throughout his writings, Turretin gathers together his views in a formal and more self-aware mode.

There are of course difficulties in understanding divine freedom given the general position regarding divine simplicity that Calvin adopts. As Brian Leftow has shown, if one thinks of divine freedom principally in terms of the opportunity to choose between alternatives to it is impossible to fit this into Aquinas, not on because of his atemporalism but also because of the strength of his commitment to divine simplicity which seems to imply the necessity of the divine will, since for Aquinas the divine volition is an aspect of God’s simple nature. I think it is fair to say that wherever Calvin dwells upon these features of God – his simplicity and atemporality, the application of the difference between necessity and hypothetical necessity - his outlook is very similar to that of Aquinas, but he tends to cast a veil over the divine mind rather than attempt to work out a position in detail as Aquinas does. Rather than try to work out a version of divine simplicity that is more hospitable to divine freedom than Aquinas’s, (assuming Calvin was aware of the difficulties of Aquinas’s view), Calvin takes the approach that the Creator – creature distinction sets up not only an intellectual barrier to understanding, but should also remind us of the moral and spiritual difference between ourselves and God. Calvin insists that it is impertinent, a loss of creaturely reserve, to try to bridge the ontological gap between the Creator and his creatures.