Divine Realities

In this short series of Analyses I have been attempting to counter the charge that the Christian faith, and Christian theology in particular, is simply words about words about words, possessing no objective reference. Such a charge can be the immediate fruit of the influence of the communitarianism of Lindbeck, and of a certain kind of extreme presuppositionalism, and ultimately perhaps of the pervasive shadow of Karl Barth.

Against this I have argued that grace, God’s sovereign, redemptive grace through Jesus Christ, builds on nature, as the church has taught for 1500 years and more. ‘Nature’ here can be understood in various overlapping and accumulating ways; the use of the five senses, and of the intellect, the use of natural languages in understanding and translating Scripture, itself written in natural languages, the possession of a universal concreated sensus divinitatis, natural, though perverted by the Fall, which gives to all us an intuitive awareness of divinity, a great and glorious creator to whom we are accountable, an awareness so unwelcome that we frequently pervert and silence the voice even though it still is to be heard. The influence of nature can also be seen in the development of arguments for God’s existence, as in Acts 14 and 17. Though we have not paid much attention to the Reformed attitude to natural theology in this series, Michael Sudduth has lately reminded us of its place in the Reformed tradition, and in celebration of this reminder I hope shortly to post something on Charles Hodge and natural theology.

Grace on Nature

But there is more than this. Were to attempt to show how grace builds on nature with regard to the objective basis of our faith, in the Incarnation and the ministry of Jesus, then we'd need to say something about Jesus real humanity, and the the historical reality of these events in the way that they form part of the human history of the planet. But here I touch on the personal appropriation of what Jesus did and suffered for the world, and to highlight two features. The first is to consider the question of how it is that grace builds upon our nature, and the sort of objectivity that grace has. Think for a moment of the regenerating and illuminating wok of the Spirit. How does this go? The indwelling of the Spirit is not that of a new visitor who comes to the house and proceeds to do all the work. What result from his work is a new man, a new creation, but this is not creation ex nihilo but the making of all things, the old things, new. The faculties which produce the old things are not replaced by a ‘new sense’ a sixth sense (despite what Jonathan Edwards appeared occasionally to teach) but they are old faculties which (through Spirit-given penitence and mortification) lose certain propensities, or have them weakened, and (through the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit) gain new propensities, or a strengthening of those that exist. The old nature is not expelled, like an evil spirit, but marvellously and mysteriously renewed. We are on the road to becoming truly human, not transformed into angels. So that while the regenerating work of the Spirit is supernatural, it cooperates with the natural, itself taking the initiative and fitting the natural for such cooperation. ‘Enlightening their minds spiritually and savingly to understand the things of God, taking away their heart of stone, and giving them an heart of flesh, renewing their wills……’

So as the natural powers of the soul give us a sense of objectivity and of the distinction between the objective and the subjective, the true and the false (even though the boundary between the to is often oddly-drawn), so the regenerating of these faculties is an extension of the range of that objectivity through a healing of human powers.

Covenant and Response

God is the living God, and his people are called into covenant fellowship with him; and besides the objectivity of divine realities being disclosed through nature, and as grace builds upon nature, they are experienced through the character of that covenant relationship. What is that relationship? At its vaguest, it is the relationship of compliance and resistance. Just as, in negotiating our way through our physical environment, we experience cooperation (as we lean on the chair) and resistance, (as we skid on the ice, or crack our shin against the table-leg), so the Lord calls us into covenant relationship with him, and to the same mix of compliance and resistance, at a different level, at a moral and religious level. The presence of this mix provides evidence of the objectivity of that covenant relationship, and of the Lord, with whom we are in covenant partnership. So that partnership is self-involving (a phrase that Donald Evans coined many years ago) not automatically, but by the Spirit.

When Jesus says ‘Come to me, all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest’, how do we become convinced that he speaks of realities, and that the whole business is not mere make-believe? Because those who come to him find rest. Or consider the phrase ‘God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble’. Here we have another expression of this same compliance-resistance pattern, akin to the resistance and yielding of physical relationships. Those who resist may not experience it as resistance. For though the pattern is parallel to that of the physical, it is much more nuanced: the prospect for self-deception is much greater. We cannot carry on for very long telling ourselves that we have not crashed the car when we have. Once again the language of the Westminster Confession provides a good summary of how that sense of objectivity may be built built up in the various exercises of faith – ‘yielding obedience to the commands, trembling at the threatenings, and embracing the promises of God for this life and that which is to come’. It is through the activities of and responses of obedience, trembling, and embracing (as appropriate) that provide us with a sense of the objectivity of him with whom we have to do. We find that the promises of God hold good, that he is as good as his word, and so come to develop a sense of the objective reality of God, to whom we succeed in referring through our covenantal responses.

CRT on JI

I’ve now read Carl Trueman’s piece on Packer in J.I. Packer and the Evangelical Future (ed. Timothy George, Baker), ' J.I. Packer: An English Nonconformist Perspective'. It is tough and tender, sharp-edged and analytic, as you would expect. Though somewhat critical of JI, it ends by paying him a gracious tribute. If you are interested in its topic, and you haven’t read this piece, you should do so. He brings together the business of the closing down of the Puritan Conference and Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ call to all evangelicals in mixed denominations to ‘come out’, and maybe he’s correct to do so. Together they are parts of the one call to ‘separation’ of over forty years ago, the failure to heed which has, in Carl’s judgment, blighted British evangelicalism in the years since. His thesis is that

The disaster of 1966, from which British evangelicalism is only just emerging, could have been much less damaging if Packer had listened to Lloyd-Jones’s negative call to come out and supplemented it with that which Lloyd-Jones failed to do: a proper ecclesiological, doctrinal, confessional alternative to remaining in mixed denominations’. (128)

The twin anomaly

He thinks that Packer was and is an anomaly within the evangelical wing of the Church of England: a working class, first-class Reformed theologian in a coop of Bash pietists. He was an anomaly culturally, and an anomaly theologically. A lodge in a cucumber field, so to speak. Being a working-class lad, he should have been attracted to Dissent but for some reason wasn't. (Trueman is good on reminding us of the historically important divide between the Church of England and Protestant Dissent. This still lingers, though few non-Anglicans seem to know the first thing about their history. The words ‘dissent’ and ‘nonconformist’ have largely changed their meaning. Few members of the Church of England too, I suspect, realise that their church once persecuted and marginalised fellow-Christians.)

Packer was also an anomaly among his non-Anglican evangelical and Calvinist brethren who were led (and mesmerised) by Martyn Lloyd-Jones, the revivalist, conversionist, somewhat mystical orator-preacher incessantly talking about the church but with no doctrine of the church. For Packer did (and does) have a view of the church. According to Carl, in Packer, Martyn Lloyd-Jones met his theological match, could not take the heat, and forced the break. (Here Carl relies on Gaius Davies’ analysis of Lloyd-Jones’s character defects. Trueman and Davies may be correct on these, but as character analysis is not my field, I shall leave that to the more qualified. Save to say that Carl may at this point have lost sight of the overall thesis of Davies’s book, Genius, Grief and Grace, (Mentor, Second Edition, 2001) which is that the Lord may use deeply faulty people. You don’t have to be perfect to be a blessing, and you ought not to conclude from the fact that you are a blessing that you are perfect).

The call to 'come out', in 1966, and Packer's part in the book Growing Into Union (published in 197o) led to separatists dissociating themselves from JI in the running of the Puritan Conference, which was disbanded. Together these two events formed the critical time for this doubly-anomalous theologian. If he had taken Trueman’s advice (so to speak) Packer would have stood up to Dr. Lloyd-Jones. But at the same time he himself should have heeded his call to ‘come out’, and obtained a faculty position at the London Theological Seminary (a Lloyd-Jones establishment which came into being some years later than this critical time). (126) And then (as far as I can discern from what Trueman says), the mantle of Chalmers or Machen falling on him, and arm-in-arm with a chastened Dr Lloyd-Jones, Packer should have led his fellow separatists, those like him who had ‘come out’, away from independency, with its sectarian tendencies. He should have crafted and led the formation of an English equivalent of the Free Church of Scotland or the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Not to have done this, not to be the leader that he should have been, was Packer’s ‘failure’. (128) Trueman comments, 'No wonder he had to leave for Canada'. (126)

There seem to me to be two strong arguments against this analysis, arguments which are, in effect, two sides of the same coin. An argument about the man, and then an argument about his beliefs about the visible church, and what those beliefs imply.

The man

First, Carl’s view of JI requires one to think of him as something of an evangelical and Reformed free spirit, with Dissent in his working-class veins, forming deep theological convictions that strongly tend to separatism from those who disagree with him on vital matters. (After all, Packer became a public figure largely through the sponsorship of the IVF, as it was then). But in fact Packer grew up as a working-class nominal Anglican. Anglicanism ran (first somewhat sluggishly, it seems), in his veins. So Trueman seems to think that Packer was and is an Anglican with a bad conscience for being so, all the time looking for a way out from Anglicanism that is consistent with his Reformed outlook.

But the evidence points the other way, that (despite the difficulties JI sees in being and staying an Anglican, difficulties that have surely grown since the time he went to Canada), he remains an Anglican with a good conscience. There is no evidence, as far as I know, that he ever toyed with ‘coming out’, that it was ever a live option for him. Nor was it that in a Lloyd-Jones - Packer stand-off Packer blinked first. There was no such stand-off, to my knowledge. Rather, while there was heartache (on Packer’s side at least) over the break, the likelihood is that he could not understand what all the fuss was about. And if JI was reviled, he most certainly did not revile again. As far as he was concerned there was nothing to get hot under the collar over, no ‘dilemma’, since in his eyes his adherence to Anglicanism was consistent both with his ‘Puritanism’ and with his fellowship with other evangelicals who differed from him over his churchmanship.

Trueman writes of a virtual world in which Packer had left the Church of England, and of what would or might have followed. As it happens, on Packer’s arrival in Canada aspects of that virtual world had a chance to become part of the real world. For once he was in Canada he certainly had plenty of opportunity to join a confessional, separatist Reformed congregation or denomination had he so wished. I imagine that had he done so, he would have been received with open arms. But he chose not to; the virtual world in which Packer leaves Anglicanism for some form of separatism remained virtual. Like so many emigrants to North America he lovingly took his old church with him. Why? The obvious answer is: because it was a part of his identity.

The ecclesiology

This brings us to the second argument against the analysis, Carl’s thoughts on Packer’s ‘ecclesiology’. Carl faults the run of Anglican evangelicals for having no doctrine of the church, and being in effect Anglican opportunists. By contrast Packer, he says, being a truly Reformed theologian, did have a doctrine of the church, (122) a ‘passionate love for the church and its visible unity’. (127) He appreciates ‘Reformed theology as elaborately doctrinal, confessional and thus ecclesiastical’. (119) Yet for all this, Carl tells us, ‘Packer remained an Anglican. That was, I believe, a mistake’ (128), a mistake to stay in ‘a body with an unacceptably mixed theological makeup and lack of doctrinal discipline’. (123) (A strategic mistake, presumably, because the longer he remained an Anglican, the longer he denied himself the realisation of his Reformed ecclesiology.)

But what Carl seems not to appreciate is that the Anglican church, with her episcopacy, her state connection in England, and her theologically-mixed character, is (as our earlier posts have shown) a state of affairs fully consistent with JI's ‘doctrinal Calvinism’, his avowed 'Puritanism', and with his brand of Reformed ecclesiology, even though maintaining that view over the years has occasioned him much personal pain and humbling. Carl quotes Packer as believing that ‘the claims of evangelical unity do not require ecclesiastical separation where the faith is not actually being denied [i.e. where it is not made impossible to express oneself] and renewal seems possible [i.e. it is possible to have influence for good on such a mixed church]’.(122) This is one expression of JI's commitment to Anglicanism as a ‘mixed’ church.

Another part of JI’s ecclesiology (as we have also already seen) is that he holds that no issue of principle is involved if some fellow Christian dissents from his view. So his Reformed ecclesiology is not monochrome, or imperialistic, nor (at the same time) does his own version of it have separatistic implications. For him Reformed ecclesiology is a genus with several species. The species that he has committed himself to is a consistent working out of the Anglican denial of the regulative principle: it is permissible to do (in church government, and in worship) what Scripture does not forbid. This denial of the regulative principle permits (Packer judges) the inclusion within the Anglican zone of those with deep theological differences, as in the church of Corinth in Paul’s day, perhaps, or in one or another of the Seven Churches of the Revelation, even though these differences are deplorable, just as it equally permits fellowship with the separatists should their separatism allow for such fellowship.

On both these counts I believe that Carl, in writing an interesting and absorbing piece, has nevertheless missed the mark. But I think I may now have discerned in his own character a trait that I had not seen before - romanticism, ecclesiastical romanticism!

Senses, Intellect and Spirit

In response to the charge that Christian theology, indeed the Christian religion, is nothing other than words about words about words, we have seen that our minds and our senses are to be used in a quite natural way in coming to understand our faith. The Christian message is in this sense not at all discontinuous from ‘the natural’, even though our natural powers are fallen. We take this for granted, I suspect, and only notice the fact when it is drawn to our attention. Our senses are fallen but not obliterated. Christianity is not gnosticism, which requires its disciples to be initiated into a special ‘language of heaven’, one that is discontinuous from the natural languages we all speak. At Pentecost those present heard in their own languages the account of the mighty works of God. Nor does it require special non-natural or supernatural access to the basic factual claims of the faith, even though, because of our fallenness, the enlightening and reviving work of he Spirit is needed to enable us to understand the significance of what we learn, and to apply it to our lives.

The senses and the Apostles

The Apostles themselves ‘saw with their eyes; they ‘looked upon and touched with their hands’, concerning the word of life, the life which was ‘made manifest and [which] we have seen and heard’. They saw, they heard, and they touched the Incarnate one of God, and these facts provided John with an argument against Gnosticism. That which their senses told them about ‘we proclaim also to you’ (I John 1. 1-3) What John and the others had seen and heard formed the basis of his declaration of the gospel and of the fellowship which all believers have with the father and his Son. The exercise of senses and intellect provided the Apostle Peter with some reason, a good reason, for thinking that he and the other apostles have not followed cleverly devised myths…….’. Why? Because ‘we were eye witnesses of his majesty, for when he received honour and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to him in the Majestic Glory, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased”, we ourselves heard this very voice, for we were with him on the holy mountain.’ (2 Peter. 1.16) When Paul met with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus he saw a light from heaven, and heard a voice and was then deprived of his sight. The men who were with him also heard the voice. (Acts 9 Cf. John 12.29) ) Similarly, the Saviour said to doubting Thomas: ‘Put your finger here, and see my hands, and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve. But believe’. Seeing, hearing, touching – these were all involved in learning of Christ, confirming the character of God’s revelation, and it seems that the Apostles went out of their way to stress their importance.

What did their senses tell them? First, that their faith was not a case of private or collective hallucination or delusion. They were not following myths, magical events in which the senses are tricked and deceived, but that the Saviour, being God made flesh, himself had that sort of objectivity which our senses convey to us, and the absence of which - ‘cleverly devised myths’ – the senses are also able to detect. We are tricked and puzzled by the cleverness of a magician for some time, but not for all the time. We do not actually believe that the woman has been sawn in half, or that the rabbits were all in the hat. The Saviour did not seem to be magically ‘present’ on the Mount of Transfiguration, but he was present, physically palpably present, for the one transfigured was a physical person, and the glory that surrounded him was visible to the human eye. Even the voice from heaven was not a purely interior voice of the sort we refer to when we talk of the voice of conscience, but ‘we ourselves heard this very voice’, not physically produced by means of human lungs and larynx, but nevertheless a voice objectively identifiable through hearing.

This account of identification by means of the senses is not the whole story, of course, but it is part of the story, and an essential part. Grace builds upon nature. Peter himself goes on to refer to a ‘more sure’ word of prophecy. (2 Pet. 1. 19) He recognises degrees of certainty. Their experience on the holy mountain provided some degree of certainty, God’s word, the product of the inspiring activity of the Holy Spirit, provided a surer ground of belief and hope than what they witnessed, considered as a series of events. Peter speaks of these data as if they were on a sliding scale, with the matters eye witnessed being less sure than the word of prophecy revealed to them, which is, by comparison, like a ‘a lamp shining in a dark place’.

So grace builds upon nature. Not in the sense that grace simply grows out of nature, for that would give us a wholly naturalistic religion; but in the sense that it presupposes nature and is not fundamentally at odds with it, overturning it and negating it. In particular, it presupposes the sort of objectivity that nature routinely conveys to us. The word of prophecy is ‘more sure’ when measured against the sureness and certainty of our sensory experience. It has an objectivity that goes beyond the objectivity conveyed by the reports of two or three witnesses as to what they saw and heard.

Presupposing

Here I pause to say a word or two about ‘presuppositionalism’. There are those who say that the purely biblical way to convey the faith to others is to presuppose, as a kind of axiom, Scripture and all that it tells us. But it seems to me that the biblical data that we have briefly considered (there are other data too, I think) point in the other direction. That we do not, and cannot presuppose Scripture, but that we first trust our senses, and then trust Scripture, as a more sure word of prophecy. We cannot, without vicious circularity, derive our epistemology from presupposing Scripture.

For a moment, consider that phrase ‘presupposing Scripture’. What is Scripture? At its most basic, it is a library of sixty-six books, in various languages, mostly Hebrew and Greek. We have it in English translation, which for the most part serves us very nicely. It is a material object, a book, which we need to distinguish from other books, with individual books, chapters and verses, whose words we need to read and understand (if the words are in our own language) or to translate (if they are in their original languages). In order to even get to the text of Scripture we need to use our senses, what we can see and touch, and to rely on these senses, as we generally rely on them in distinguishing, say, an apple from an avocado, or a peach from a pear. What entitles us to trust our senses at this point? We cannot be warranted in trusting our senses by presupposing Scripture (as the presuppositonalists aver) because we need our senses to identify and understand the words, clauses and sentences of Scripture to begin with. To rely on Scripture to warrant our use of our senses, while at the same time using our senses to understand what the Bible warrants, is viciously circular.

The disciples at the Transfiguration, and Thomas in the Upper Room, did not rely upon Jesus to verify the reliability of their senses, but they trusted their senses implicitly in the way that they trusted them when they counted the loaves and the fishes. It was by such a use of their senses and judgment that they witnessed the transfigured Christ, and the resurrected Christ.

There is no other recourse at this point than to recognise the working of learning processes the function prior to meeting Christ (in the case of the disciples) or to reading Scripture )in our case). There must therefore be an epistemology, however primitive that is distinct from and prior to Scripture, though consistent with what it teaches us about our condition as a fallen race. It is at this point that (for some) the panic seems to set in. But there is no need to panic, any epistemology which, consistent with what Scripture teaches generally about fallen human nature, warrants our uses of our senses and intellect, and the account of which is not at odds with reliance upon the sense and intellect, will do.

It is impossible to set up a ‘Scriptural epistemology’ without vicious circularity, the procedure of appealing to Scripture to justify the use of our senses etc. using our senses in making that appeal. The best we can hope for – and all we need reason to hope for – is epistemology which is not at odds with Scripture. So, for example, an epistemology which delivered to us a general scepticism with regard to the use of our senses would be at odds with Scripture, and there are of course several such epistemologies which have been appealed to in the history of Christian theology. The ‘Reformed’ epistemology of Plantinga and Wolterstorff is the latest of these, and currently prominent, but it is not the only candidate.


The grace that builds on nature

So grace builds on nature, it does not supplant it. We have already identified one way in which this happens. First, the gospel is not a trick of magic, which though the senses are involved, deceives them, but events to which the senses of those who saw and heard bore reliable witness. There are degrees of certainty. There is a more sure word of prophecy than even the Transfiguration and its divinely-prophetic commentary. The testimony of eyes and ears, may sometimes deceive us, as in tricks of magic, but it was not deceived in the case of the Transfiguration. Even here, the testimony of eyes and ears is not to be gainsaid.

So for the Apostles at least, their teaching was not words about words about words, but words which identified and described realities which they learned of with their eyes and ears and fingers. To be sure, there is more to the revelation of God’s mercy and grace in Jesus Christ than this, but there is not less. Grace builds upon nature, it does not ignore it, or destroy it. This places the Gospel in the realm of objective realities, not purely subjective teaching or a scripturalism which has a kind of Platonic, non-sensory character. (I suspect that in the case of at least some versions of 'presuppositionalism' there is a confusion between the order of being (how things are from the standpoint of the divine decree) and the order of knowing (the processes by which we come to learn of what God has decreed) - but (mercifully!) that's a topic for another occasion).

Next time, in our fourth and final post on this theme, we shall look at the objectivity of the work of the Spirit in his regenerating activities.