PASTORAL LETTER EASTER 2024

A good number of years ago, I was involved in a Good Friday march of witness type event. The event culminated in a service in the centre of town at what used to be the bandstand. Most of the churches turned out for the event. High and low, charismatic and conservative evangelical could all be found gathering for a united witness to the Good Friday shoppers.

The service at the bandstand took the format most church services take. On one occasion the speaker made reference to the resurrection as well as the events of Good Friday. Some of the churches represented took exception to this – you can’t talk about the events of Easter Sunday on Good Friday! We’re not there yet!

I think as pastors we live with what you might call a “Good Friday / Easter Sunday tension” in more aspects of our ministry than we realise or of which we are always conscious. I hesitate to use that kind of terminology outside of the work of Christ when He laid down His life on the cross and rose again from the dead. There is something that is specific and exclusive to Christ’s work that makes one reticent to be quick in applying it as any kind of exemplary act or as a metaphor of the struggles and triumphs of ministry.

However, given that the apostle Paul used the Easter events quite unashamedly to describe his own spiritual pilgrimage (e.g., Philippians 3.10-11) and to express aspects of his ministry (e.g., Colossians 1.24), it is not inappropriate to consider life and ministry through the lens of the events of the first Easter.

Of course, we will never experience anything like the inordinate pressure that Christ experienced in Gethsemane. Or the pain of rejection experienced at the hands of the mob and the religious and political authorities. Nor the physical pain and spiritual agony as He hung on the cross, bearing the sins of the world. But we do experience pain in ministry.

We all do or will bear the scars of spiritual conflict that sometimes works itself out in the cruel words and actions of those who oppose us. We know the pressure that ministry brings on us and our families. We know the challenge of keeping going and hoping that His strength really is made perfect in weakness.

And we know too the moments of breakthrough and divine turnaround. Times of healing, restoration and joy. Seasons of refreshing and renewed hope.

As I travel around, I have sensed something of that “Easter tension”.

On the one hand, the blessing of God is evident. At the same time, it must be said, we have seen trends and currents emerge in our culture that are cause for concern, as much for the future shape of society as for the church.

It is too tempting to resign ourselves to living in almost parallel worlds of divine expectation and cultural anxiety. I am not sure how that leaves us in the end. Neither anxious expectation nor expectant anxiety sound like good results to me!

There might be a better approach, one that is more in line with the events at the heart of our faith. Placing a Paul like “Easter grid” over this mixture of expectation and anxiety, we cannot fail to find a picture of hope emerging.

At perhaps His darkest moment on the cross, Jesus experienced the absence of God, summed up in His agonising cry of dereliction “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27.46; Mark 15.34). However we understand those words, they reveal a soul ploughed with the pain of greatest loss.

Yet the bleak furrows of dereliction became the fertile seedbed of glorious resurrection. God did not, in the words of the Psalmist suffer His Holy One to see decay (Psalm 16.10). He raised Him from the dead, the first fruits of a new humanity. And a sign too of hope for anyone facing the challenge of spaces and places that God seems to have abandoned.

I pray this Easter that you will not be daunted by what might appear to be places where God is not present. That you will resist the temptation to disconnect Good Friday from Easter Sunday. That you will have the Easter inspired faith and hope to dare to see the dereliction in the landscape around us as a doorway to the resurrection life of Christ.

Have a great Easter.

James & Beryl

SOME THOUGHTS ON SUBSTITUTIONARY ATONEMENT

In a previous post I attempted to demonstrate that the Reformers did not “invent” the concept of a substitutionary atonement. One of the challenges of writing on something like this stems from the fact that when one has already made up one’s mind on a particular approach to the topic in question, the danger of over stating the weaknesses or even caricaturing other arguments is ever present. I was a little concerned that I had, on reflection, done exactly that.

A short time later this article appeared on beliefnet and was referenced on Twitter under the heading “Jesus did not die for our sins”. The article stated that the concept of the atonement as substitutionary did not appear in church history until the sixteenth century. The notion that Christ died for our sins, because it is so intimately connected with an understanding of the atonement that only goes back as far as the sixteenth century, cannot therefore be considered as a biblical representation of what happened at the cross.

It has to be said that there are more cogent and more nuanced arguments against a substitutionary atonement. However, the  statement “Jesus did not die for our sins”  – unbelievably – is not considered inaccurate by those who do not hold to a substitutionary atonement, at least not in the way that phrase has been traditionally been understood.

In future posts, I might attempt to tackle some of the arguments against substitutionary atonement. In this post, I want simply to state why I believe in a substitutionary atonement. I don’t offer this as a definitive statement of a substitutionary atonement, never mind the oft despised understanding of Christ’s death as penal substitutionary atonement. Nor do I claim theological precision in the following presentation. It will bear the hallmarks of pastoral exposition, right down to three alliterative headings!

I would suggest that when we explore the types of Christ’s death, as set out in the old covenant, the terminology of both testaments and individual texts, it is hard to escape the conclusion that substitution is right at the heart of what God did for us in Christ.

Types

Typology is not something in vogue today. For a large part of the church’s history, it was an important approach to biblical exposition.

Typology simply recognises that certain characters and religious practices recorded in the Old Testament, pointed to Christ. They were types of Christ.

Chris Wright explains: “The word typology is sometimes used to describe this way of viewing the relationship between the Old Testament and Jesus. The images, patterns and models that the Old Testament provides for understanding Him are called types.”[1]

Noah, Abraham and Moses, for example, were types of Christ.

Throughout the Old Testament runs the theme of sacrifice.

Back in the Garden of Eden, God kills animals to provide skins as clothing for Adam and Eve (Genesis 3.21). God provides a ram as a substitute sacrifice for Isaac when Abraham in obedience to God takes his son up Mount Moriah (Genesis 22.12-14).

Probably the two most prominent types that point towards the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ are the sacrifices associated with Passover (Exodus 12.1-48; Leviticus 23.4-8) and the Day of Atonement (Leviticus 16.1-34; 23.26-32).

It is in my view hard to argue that substitution is not the key to understanding the significance of these religious practices.

Central to the concept of the kind of sacrifice entailed in Passover and the Day of Atonement – and in the practice of sacrifice as an integral part of Israel’s worship in general – is that of an animal taking the place of an individual or a family, or in the case of the day of atonement, the whole nation.

Passover was instituted to save the people of Israel from the wrath of God. John’s gospel is heavy with Passover symbolism in its depiction of the events of Good Friday. This symbolism is found at the beginning of the gospel as well when John the Baptist is recorded on two occasions as saying, in reference to Jesus “Look the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”

Christ is not the sacrifice we present to God as our gift to Him. He is God’s gift to us as His perfect sacrifice for us that has the objective of taking away our sins.

The letter to the Hebrews depicts Christ as the Great High Priest who enters the holiest place of all to present the perfect sacrifice, namely Himself, in the holiest place of all in heaven. This parallels what Israel’s high priest did on the Day of Atonement.

Texts

Secondly, there are texts that very explicitly present the atonement in terms of a substitutionary sacrifice.

It is hard to overestimate the importance of Isaiah 53 in the New Testament understanding of the work of Christ. From the earliest days of the church, it was understood as a reference to the death of Christ.

It is quoted on numerous occasions in the New Testament.[2] There are at least seven occasions when this passage of scripture is explicitly quoted with reference to Christ: Matthew 8:14-17; John 12:37-41; Luke 22:35-38; 1 Peter 2:19-25; Acts 8:26-35; Romans 10:11-21:[3] “[V]erses 1,5,6,7,8,9 and 11 – eight verses out of the chapter’s twelve -are all quite specifically referred to Jesus”[4]

New Testament theologian Joachim Jeremias maintained that “No other passage from the Old Testament was as important to the Church as Isaiah 53.”[5]

In Philip’s encounter with the Ethiopian recorded in Acts 8, this scripture is seen as referencing the death of Christ for our sins. The Ethiopian has been reading the prophecy and is puzzled. Philip explains its meaning in terms of the good news of Christ: “Then Philip began with that very passage of Scripture and told him the good news about Jesus.” (Acts 8.35)

So much in this passage points to a substitutionary sacrifice. Consider the following:

“Surely he took up our pain

    and bore our suffering,

yet we considered him punished by God,

    stricken by him, and afflicted.

5 But he was pierced for our transgressions,

    he was crushed for our iniquities;

the punishment that brought us peace was on him,

    and by his wounds we are healed.

6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray,

    each of us has turned to our own way;

and the Lord has laid on him

    the iniquity of us all.”

Or

“10 Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer,

    and though the Lord makes[c] his life an offering for sin,

he will see his offspring and prolong his days,

    and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand.”

It has to be said that Philip is not setting out a doctrine of the atonement in this passage. In fact, there is not a lot in Acts that inarguably sets out a doctrine of the atonement in the way I am suggesting that we find in the gospels or the letters.

That’s not to say that Philip was not interested in the atonement or had no grasp of Christ’s death as a substitutionary sacrifice.

For a start, the language of Isaiah 53 is substitutionary almost throughout.

It is also safe to say that simply because Philip doesn’t explain the doctrine of the atonement to the Ethiopian doesn’t mean that it was of little importance to him. After all, he says nothing about the resurrection in this passage either. On both those counts, we only have the aspects of the story that Luke chose to record, so we can’t be entirely sure that he didn’t mention the atonement or the resurrection![6] No doubt, the narrative is recorded in the way that it was because the Ethiopian was puzzled by what he was reading in Isaiah 53.

In my view, it is hard to make sense of Isaiah 53 through either a victory over the powers or moral example theory of the atonement. A substitutionary understanding seems a more natural reading.

The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1.29, 35)

The next day John saw Jesus coming towards him and said, ‘Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! (29)

When he saw Jesus passing by, he said, ‘Look, the Lamb of God!’ (35)

There has been some debate as to exactly what John the Baptist is referencing when he refers to Jesus as the Lamb of God.

An apocalyptic warrior lamb who will bring God’s judgment, a reference to Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac -“the binding of Isaac” (Genesis 22) and the lamb of the sin offering (Leviticus 16) have all been employed to interpret John’s pronouncement about Jesus.[7]

Whilst those suggestions have their own merits, the most likely reference is to that of the Passover lamb. Passover is very prominently in the background of John’s gospel. It is mentioned ten times in John’s gospel, more than any other book in the New Testament. The only book in the Bible that mentions Passover more than John’s gospel is 2 Chronicles.

That would indicate that somehow Passover is connected with the person of Jesus and the events of His life and ministry.

Of course, right at the heart of the feast of Passover is the sacrifice of a lamb, as a reminder of how God’s wrath was averted from the people of Israel whilst the Egyptians fell under His wrath on the night Israel left Egypt.

Jesus was crucified at Passover.[8] John makes much of this:

When Pilate heard this, he brought Jesus out and sat down on the judge’s seat at a place known as the Stone Pavement (which in Aramaic is Gabbatha). 14 It was the day of Preparation of the Passover; it was about noon.

‘Here is your king,’ Pilate said to the Jews.

15 But they shouted, ‘Take him away! Take him away! Crucify him!’

‘Shall I crucify your king?’ Pilate asked.

‘We have no king but Caesar,’ the chief priests answered.

(John 19.13-14)

The association is perhaps not as pronounced in the other gospels, but they all draw attention to the Last Supper as Jesus eating Passover with [His] disciples (See Matthew 26.17-19; Mark 14.12-16; Luke 22.7-15)[9]

Paul in 1 Corinthians 5.7 makes the connection more explicit, directly stating that Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.

Undoubtedly what happened that night when the first Passover was observed had more than one dimension. It was a “victory over the powers” of Egypt. It was about deliverance from the power of an enemy. But right at the heart of Passover is a sacrifice designed primarily to avert the wrath of God from His people. “When I see the blood, I will pass over you” was the promise of God to His people when instructing them to apply the blood of the slain lamb to their doorposts and lintels (Exodus 12.13).

This “lamb of God” will take away the sins of, not only the people of Israel, but also the world (John3.16-17) by means of a substitutionary, sacrificial death.[10]

Terminology

Substitution underlies so much of – if not all[11] – the terminology used to communicate New Testament teaching about the work of Christ.

I have set out five of those terms below. So many others could be listed here.[12]

Propitiation

Propitiation is a key term in the New Testament revelation of salvation.[13] It is used by Paul in Romans 3.25 and the apostle John in 1 John 2.2 and 4.10.[14]

Propitiation carries the idea of turning away the wrath of God. Propitiation implies that Jesus did not just deliver us from the impact that sin has upon us, but that Jesus delivers us from the judgment of God. Jesus’s death on the cross is not only about delivering us from sin, but also about turning away God’s wrath from us, by taking upon Himself the punishment that we deserved.

Stott distinguishes three components of propitiation. Firstly, propitiation presupposes that sin arouses the wrath of God. Sin, therefore, is not just our problem, it is also God’s “problem”.

Secondly, God makes the propitiation, not us. This is what sets the biblical concept of propitiation apart from its pagan counterpart. In pagan religion, worshippers attempt to appease or propitiate an angry god by offering sacrifice. Biblical propitiation holds that God propitiates Himself.

Thirdly, God propitiates Himself by offering Himself.

God’s love is not secured by the cross of Christ. The love of God is the source of the cross of Christ (see Romans 5.8).

The Cup

O Christ what burdens bowed Thy head! was a hymn we used to sing. One verse goes like this:

Death and the curse were in the cup / O Christ ‘twas full for Thee / But Thou hast drained the last dark drop / Tis empty now for me / That bitter cup, love drank it up / Now blessing’s draft for me!

The reference, of course, was to the cup of Jesus’s prayer in Gethsemane (Matthew 26.39-42).

For years, I had understood the cup reference as symbolic of the pain and suffering Jesus would endure on the cross. It certainly is a symbol. But it’s more than a symbol. It is an Old Testament symbol.

The cup is mentioned in Jeremiah 25.15-29. God’s judgment is clearly what is in view. Further references can be found in Psalm 75.8, Isaiah 51.17-22, Ezekiel 23.32-34.

Jesus’s request for His Father to take the cup from Him was not an indication that He feared the suffering that awaited Him. What He recoiled from was the outpouring of God’s wrath.

Sacrifice

Sacrifice is all over the Bible. There are at least three hundred and fifty-seven references to sacrifice in the Bible.[15] Unsurprisingly, sacrifice appears in Exodus, Leviticus and then 1 Samuel, more than any other books of the Bible. What might be surprising is that the next highest occurrence of this term is found in Hebrews. Hebrews presents the death of Christ as a fulfilment of the sacrifices of the Old Testament era. The whole of the sacrificial system, given to Israel by God in His grace, as a way of approaching Him, is now discontinued because its fulfilment is found in Christ (Hebrews 9.13-15).

A number of Old Testament passages reveal explicitly that particular sacrifices are offered as a substitute for the worshipper (Leviticus 4.27-31), a member of the worshipper’s family (Exodus 12.1-13) or even the nation (e.g. Leviticus 4.13; Leviticus 16.1-33).

They are sacrifices for or on behalf of (see below). It is hard to deny that sacrifice and “how it works” is not implicitly substitutionary.[16]

For / On behalf of

Two Greek words – prepositions – meaning instead of and on behalf of, usually translated for, point to substitution in a very fundamental way.

For example, Christ died for us (Romans 5.8). One died for all (2 Corinthians 5.14). Christ gave His life as a ransom for many (Mark 10.45). Christ gave Himself as a ransom for all men (1 Timothy 2.6). Christ was made sin for us (2 Corinthians 6.19) and was made a curse for us (Galatians 3.13). The language points to the conclusion that Christ dies for us is equivalent to Christ died instead of us.

Joachim Jeremias comments that this kind of sacrificial imagery has the intention of expressing the fact that Jesus died without sin in substitution for our sins.[17]

Ransom

These prepositions turn up again in two text describing Christ’s death as a ransom for may / all people:

For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.’ (Mark 10.45)

Who gave himself as a ransom for all people. (1 Timothy 2.6)

Jesus substituted Himself instead of us and thereby died in our place.

Conclusion

There is so much more that could be said on this subject. I have already said more than I intended. Initially, I envisaged a post seven hundred or so words long, briefly covering the types, texts and terminology. The sheer weight of evidence demanded, I felt, more than the usual length of blog post.

I have leant heavily on John Stott’s The Cross of Christ throughout, not because his work is the source of my ideas, but because he unpacks the theme of substitutionary with such grace and skill in a work that is now a classic on the atonement.

My hope is that I have set out briefly – in comparison to a work like Stott’s – and clearly some fundamental biblical reasons for believing in a substitutionary atonement.

I’ll leave the last word with Paul:

“For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance[a]: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15.3-4)

---

[1] Wright, Christopher J.H., Knowing Jesus through the Old Testament, Oxford:2005, p.110. Wright spends seven pages very helpfully explaining what typology is and what it isn’t. Wright states that types or models are common vehicles of learning or understanding something “new or as yet unknown” and can be used in any discipline, not just theology (pp.111-12).

[2] Harold Wilmington claims that Isaiah 53 is mentioned 85 times in the New Testament. See his What You Need to Know About the Book of Isaiah, Wilmington, Harold L., Liberty University Digital Commons: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/58821268.pdf

[3] See Robert Wall, The Seven New Testament Quotations of Isaiah 53: http://biblecentre.org/content.php?mode=7&item=897

[4] Stott, John, The Cross of Christ, IVP:1986, p.145

[5] Cited in Stott op. cit., p.145

[6] See the comments in Carson, D.A. and Beale, G.K., Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament, Baker:2007

[7] See Carson, D.A. and Beale, G.K., Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament, Baker:2007, p.428.

[8] Joachim Jeremias, commenting on the words of institution Jesus spoke at the last supper, states: “He presupposes a slaying that has separated flesh and blood. In other words Jesus spoke of Himself as a sacrifice” [He was] “most probably speaking of Himself as the paschal lamb” [so that the meaning was] “I go to death as the true Passover sacrifice” cited in Stott, op.cit. p.72

[9] The apparent discrepancy between the synoptic account of the events leading up to Jesus’s crucifixion, placing Passover on the Thursday evening before Good Friday and John’s account which places Passover on the day of Jesus’s crucifixion, has puzzled some. This is best explained by either a difference in the calendars used by the Pharisees and Sadducees or the possibility that there were so many pilgrims in Jerusalem that the Galileans sacrificed their lambs on the Thursday and ate them Thursday evening, while the Judeans made their sacrifices on the Friday (see Stott, op.cit. p71).   

[10] Carson and Beale, op. cit. p.428.

[11] Stott makes the point that substitution does not sit alongside all the other pictures of the atonement – it rather underlies them all, op. cit. p.168.

[12] For example, justification, reconciliation, redemption.

[13] See Stott, op. cit. ch.7.

[14] The New International Version translates sacrifice of atonement or atoning sacrifice

[15] Source: Result for sacrifice in the Bible Gateway search engine.

[16] Stott goes further: “My contention is not that “substitution” is not a further “theory” or “image” to be set alongside others, but rather the foundation of them all, without which each lacks cogency”, Stott, op. cit. p.168

[17] Quoted in Stott, op. cit. p.149

Easter Reflection 2023: Easter happened. No-one can change that.

In my first year in post, I decided to write an Easter letter to all the pastors in the region. I think it was partly because we were still emerging from the weary and difficult days of the pandemic.

Nearly two years have passed since the Easter of 2021. It has been encouraging to see how the church has emerged from those days and regained shape and strength again.

The recovery has in some cases exceeded our best expectations. In every case, it has been remarkable. It could be said that what we had been building in the years up to 2020 was well and truly tested. Thankfully what we had built did not collapse under the pressure of the storm and it does seem that pastors are more notably upbeat than perhaps we were even a year or eighteen months ago.

Pastors’ retreats in Scotland, towards the end of last year, and in the North West at the beginning of March, confirmed my impression of a general optimism amongst us. It is once again a reminder of God’s faithfulness and ability to renew His church in difficult days.

Looking out on the culture of the society around is unlikely to fuel that optimism, more likely, in fact, to drain it. The church still seems to come in for unfair treatment and more than its fair share of ridicule. Secular groups continue to drive agendas in schools and promote practices that should set ringing the safeguarding alarm bells. Yet the media, on the whole, turns a blind eye and, in some cases, people in public life celebrate both the questionable thinking and practice.

Religious groups not renowned for their tolerance are embraced almost without question by people and bodies that are quick to point the finger at the church, the evangelical church in particular. It is not hard to imagine the hailstorm of protest and condemnation that would descend upon any Christian politician if they invited a group of men to pray in a very public manner on their accession to office. When Humza Yousaf was elected leader of the SNP, and thereby first minister of Scotland, he did exactly that, but without the ensuing condemnation in either the press or on social media.

Around the same time, Manchester Cathedral opened its doors to the Islamic community for a feast in connection with Ramadan. I am not convinced the central mosque in any British city will be returning the favour on Good Friday or Easter Sunday, or any time during holy week.

A sense of bewilderment and frustration, not to say anger, can easily overwhelm us in the face of what seems such unequal treatment and what can feel like the attempt to displace historic Christianity from the mainstream of public life in this country.

There are no quick or simple answers to these challenges. Reflecting again on the events of Good Friday and Easter Sunday, however, I believe we can find encouragement and direction as we both look back to the passion of Christ and around to mission in our society.

To follow the Christ of Easter and to walk in His footsteps is to invite ridicule. The Roman soldiers dressed him in a purple robe and pressed a crown of thorns into His head and mocked Him (Matthew 21.27-31). Christ as king pervades the record that we have of Jesus’s trial and Pilate’s ham-fisted attempt to abdicate his responsibility, as Roman governor, to pass judgment. His association with kingship and all that implied, lurked awkwardly in the minds of religious leaders, and Jewish and Gentile civil authorities (John 18.36-37, 19.13-16).

The claims of Christ and His status as king still prove awkward for authorities religious and civil. When ideologies and creeds are threatened and people feel uncomfortable, ridicule is a convenient tool for managing something that they don’t like or understand. For those who follow the King, the risk of ridicule is always close at hand.

Unfair treatment is never far away either.

Christ’s unjust treatment at the hands of the authorities is impossible to forget. What is easy to forget is the shift in public opinion from adulation to condemnation in the space of less than five days. The people who hailed him King on Palm Sunday preferred a terrorist to Jesus on Good Friday (John 18.39-40).

That’s a reminder, if ever there was one, that we cannot console ourselves with the idea of a silent majority who have great respect for the Christian faith. Even if such a majority exists, it provides no real basis for confidence as we look to the future.

The kind of confidence we need, as we look forward, is not to be found in the patterns and currents of contemporary life but in the event of Easter Sunday. It is in the God who raises the dead (2 Corinthians 1.9) and, in His Son, Jesus Christ, who was the first to experience the resurrecting power of God (1 Corinthians 15.20).

The world can ignore the church. The culture can try to smother the Christian faith. But no-one can change the fact that Easter happened. And whatever the spiritual climate we are in, the resurrected Christ is with us by His Spirit.

Have a great Easter.

The reformers were people of their time – but their ideas stretched back much further

I somehow managed not to choke on my falafel. My friend, who was in what you might call stage one deconstruction of evangelical faith, had just told me some of my core beliefs didn’t extend back further than the sixteenth century. The kinds of ideas that I and other evangelicals associate with the work of Christ were, in his opinion, pretty much made up by reformers like Luther and Calvin.

It is a pretty severe charge. Although it was in no way intended personally, it is hard not to take it personally on some level when those ideas have been central to what one has preached for three decades and believed for a few decades longer than that.

Apart from the personal dimensions set out above, I think this issue of the nature of the atonement is important. There are some serious currents of thought flowing presently in the church and around social media amongst pastors and scholars with respect to the atonement. In particular they challenge the idea that in the death of Christ the righteous demands of God’s law were satisfied, enabling sinners to know God as Father on the basis of what Christ has achieved.

The aim

In short, my aim in this piece is to establish that the kind of language and concepts the reformers used in connection with the atonement – legal and moral language and concepts – were current in the church of the day and had been in the church throughout its history. It could also be argued that those language and concepts became dominant in these discussions over the previous thousand or so years.

Not a defence of one view of the atonement over another

My objective in writing this piece, therefore, is not to defend a particular view of the atonement or criticise other views of the atonement. The purpose is more along the lines of exploring the accuracy of my deconstructing friend’s assertions about the historicity – lack of historicity – of an understanding of the work of Christ that proceeds along moral / legal lines as opposed to the currently more popular Christus victor or “victory over the devil” understanding of the atonement.[1]

The merits or otherwise of these different approaches demand separate treatment. I hope that some day I will manage to get around to writing something on the topic. In the meantime, this short piece on the atonement from Michael Bird more or less sums up my outlook.[2] In fact, you don’t really need to read any further if you accept Bird’s arguments; the ultimately important historical link is the one that stretches right back to the New Testament. Having said that, to claim a belief stretches back to the New Testament without having a concern for its appearance or lack of appearance in the history of the church might betray a disregard for the thought and efforts of Christians in previous centuries and their desire to be faithful to the gospel.

Currents of thought in evangelicalism

It is not hard to gain the impression if you read around what is being printed, tweeted or posted by some evangelicals that the church believed in the purchase of salvation by Christ on the cross as primarily if not solely the result of His conquest of the powers of darkness. This was, it is claimed by some, the original understanding of the work of Christ that was somehow pushed to the side in the Middle Ages, supremely by the reformers.[3]

The idea that the reformers were guilty of subverting an understanding of Christ’s work as victory over Satan by substituting a moral / legal approach to the work of Christ is historically inaccurate.

Alister McGrath in his comprehensive survey of the concept of the righteousness of God throughout history, is very helpful in charting how this term has been understood at various points in the church’s story.[4]

McGrath’s analysis very clearly indicates that a moral / legal understanding of the work of Christ was not an innovation of the reformers.

For their part, the reformers did not see themselves as turning their back on church history in a quest for the teaching of the New Testament. The New Testament was indeed the bar at which church teaching should be judged. That was not to say that there was nothing good in the history of the church. Faithfulness to the teaching of the church by stripping back the layers of tradition and ritual that had overlaid it for a thousand years was as much an objective for the reformers as anything else. You don’t have to read too far in Calvin’s Institutes, for example, to find him quoting with approval the church fathers.

Augustine

This was especially the case in connection with Augustine and his teaching on the righteousness of God and justification. His understanding was along the kind of legal and moral lines reflected in what the reformers taught.

Augustine’s teaching had been endorsed by the church at the Second Council of Orange in 529 A.D.[5]

The canons of the Council of Orange somehow were lost to the church for nearly six hundred years and were only rediscovered in the sixteenth century. Despite that, the moral / legal understanding of the work of Christ was alive and well in the centuries prior to the reformation.[6]

Anselm

Anselm of Canterbury’s work Cur Deus homo? (Why did God become man?), in McGrath’s view marked a distinctive break with what he describes as a “mythological view” of the atonement, namely, Christ’s victory over the powers of darkness.[7]

What the reformers taught about the work of Christ was consistent not just with Augustine but also with the direction of Western theology in general.

Conclusion

To recap then, the reformers were not trying to innovate.[8] The concepts and language of their teaching had a long-established history in the church. Additionally, it was not dependant on the voice of one theologian for historical credibility, it stretched back to and through Anselm and numerous scholarly figures who saw the significance of Christ’s work in moral / legal terms rather than in those of a battle with Satan.

I do understand that for some of my readers the above will seem like a very academic argument, with little relevance to very day Christian life. In truth, writing this post felt like that.

However, I do believe we need to curate carefully our own history. It’s too easy to dismiss ideas and doctrines that have a long and worthy tradition through historical ignorance. Some of these teachings have brought hope and comfort to thousands perhaps millions of people. To brush them away because they don’t fit with the prevailing ideas of a specific culture is, to my mind, unwarranted and even reckless. We have no right to rewrite history to suit our own ends.

The historical integrity of evangelical theology matters because people matter. And because the gospel matters. The reformers were people of their time, but their ideas stretched back much further.

---

Notes

[1] Mark Galli’s remarks in the linked article, about the cultural appeal of this model of the atonement at the present time reflect comments made by Alister McGrath about the age in which the victory over the devil theory was popular. It was an age in which the dominant ideological challenge to the gospel was a fatalistic worldview of the type found in Gnosticism:

“The main external threat to the early church, particularly during the second century, appears to have been pagan or semi-pagan fatalisms, such as Gnosticism, which propagated the thesis that man is neither responsible for his own sins nor for the evil in the world.”  McGrath, A., Iustitia Dei: Justification: The Beginnings to the Reformation, Cambridge: 1986, p.20.

[2] I realise that in saying this I have nailed my colours to the mast. I do believe in what’s known as a penal substitutionary atonement. At the same time, I believe that victory over the devil is also a dimension of the atonement. I just don’t see the need to harmonise Romans 3 with for example Colossians 2.15, or vice versa.  That being said, I do hope that what follows will indicate that I am not trying to “cook the historical books” in favour of a particular outlook.

[3] The modern classic by Gustaf Aulen, Christus Victor, made the ideas connected with this theory widely accessible to a modern audience when it was first published in the last century.

[4] McGrath, op.cit.

[5] “…it may be asserted that Orange II endorses an Augustinian doctrine of justification” McGrath, op. cit. p.74

[6] “It is a curious and unexplained feature of the history of doctrine that the canons of Orange II appear to have been unknown from the tenth to the middle of the sixteenth centuries” McGrath, op.cit. p. 74

[7] “The theological renaissance of the eleventh century saw the structure being subjected to a devastating theological criticism, particularly by Anselm of Canterbury…It is possible to argue that it is with Anselm’s insights that the characteristic thinking of the Western church on the means of the redemption of mankind may be said to begin.” McGrath, op.cit.  p.39

[8] That’s not to say the reformers didn’t innovate. Their differentiation, for example, between justification and sanctification marked a break with the Western theological tradition. See McGrath, op.cit. pp.186-7

“Dead people don’t come back to life”?

“Just a little reminder today. Dead people – don’t come back to life.” This tweet, posted by Professor Alice Roberts on Good Friday 2021, caused a bit of stir in the twittersphere amongst Christians. It’s now long forgotten, but it does raise some important issues that make it worth revisiting.

Whether Professor Roberts was  taking a calculated dig at Christians and their faith or was just feeling a little insecure at a time of year when the Christian story unavoidably challenges humanist doctrine at its very core, we know not. It is hard to imagine that she felt that she was doing nothing more than stating the obvious in the face of centuries old superstition.

In fairness to Professor Roberts, she had every right to make her statement of faith, even if it did offend a whole section of society. Freedom of thought and expression is something that I would hope every Christian would want to champion.

As someone with a fairly high profile as a Professor of Public Engagement in Science and a regular tv broadcaster, however, her tweet could easily be perceived as a cheap shot at a section of the public with whom she is supposed to engage. It promotes the kind of disengagement that a professor of public engagement would be expected to endeavour to overcome. The absence of religious posts on her twitter feed this Easter might indicate that, on reflection, the tweet wasn’t the wisest, however accurately it expressed her outlook.

That being said, I have no axe to grind with Professor Roberts. I grew up in a Christian environment in which we expected opposition and criticism from those who did not share our faith. It was just the way it was and is.

What I think is worthy of further exploration are the contents of the tweet itself.

There are two things that I think are worthy of review.

Firstly, the tweet was widely understood as a rejection of the resurrection of Christ. One would imagine that this was indeed the way the post was meant to be understood. It was certainly understood that way by many Christians.

That is understandable. It has become fairly common to speak of Christ “coming back from the dead” or “returning to life” or, using biblical language, being “raised to life”. All of those terms describe accurately what happened on the first Easter day. Christ did return to life.

What our use of that kind of language today does not always take into account is that Jesus’s life was not simply restored. He was resurrected.

Throughout the gospels we have accounts of people being brought back to life. They were restored to life after they had died, the daughter of Jairus (Luke 5.35-43) and Lazarus (John 11.43-44), being perhaps the most notable. They were brought back to life, but eventually died; there is no-one around today of whom I am aware who claims to be the daughter of Jairus or whom claims to be Lazarus.

Christ’s return to life, on the other hand, was never reversed by death. He exists, says the writer to the Hebrews (7.16), in the power of an indestructible life. The life that He lives now is of a different order. That is because He was resurrected, not merely restored to life. And because He was resurrected, He has a resurrection body. He is still embodied. He ate food (Luke 24.42-43) and invited Thomas to touch His wounded hands and side (John 20.24-28). Yet He is not limited by time and space. He appeared to His disciples when they had locked themselves away – and then disappeared (John 20.19; Luke 24.30-31).

Paul presents Christ in His resurrection body as the prototype of the kind of body Christians will inherit in the age to come. Christ is the firstfruits (Philippians 3.21; 1 Corinthians 15.20). We are the full harvest. Until He returns, Christ is the only person who has been and will be resurrected. No-one else ever has been or will be until then.

To say that no-one ever has been resurrected or will be resurrected until the return of Chirst, is not the same as saying that no-one ever has been or will be restored to life within the present age.

No doubt people who share my faith have no problem with the biblical stories of people like Lazarus being brought back to life. I have equally no doubt that secular humanists would completely reject those kinds of stories as examples of pre-scientific superstition.

The question I want to pose is: Is the claim “Dead people – don’t come back to life” accurate?

Even without reference to the gospels or what one might term religious experience, I would suggest that the truthfulness of the statement as an accurate description of the totality of human experience is at least open to question. Of course, for the vast majority of people, “we’re born, we live, we die” sums up human experience.

The vast majority. But not everyone.

Gary Habermas is one of the world’s leading experts on the resurrection of Christ. He has also conducted research into near death experiences (NDEs). In a presentation posted on Youtube, he cited a Gallup poll that revealed that something like eight million Americans had experienced NDEs. His interest in this subject springs from his belief that NDEs might offer a starting point for conversations about the resurrection of Christ.

Habermas does not try to argue that every NDE is evidence of life after death or evidence that people can die and come back to life. He does raise the question of what we do with those cases where people who are clinically dead recover consciousness and are able to reveal information that they could not otherwise have known.

He describes the experience of one lady who had an NDE in which she was able to look down on her family in the hospital waiting room. She heard her brother-in-law say “If she’s going to kick the bucket, I hope she hurries up. I have an appointment in one hour.” When the lady came to, she asked her brother-in-law if he had said this!

According to Habermas, there are many instances of this kind of thing. Sometimes the events reported are not concerned with what is happening in the next room, but with events happening many miles away. The story of a seven year old who drowned and her experience of “Angel Elizabeth” in Habermas’s opinion, is one in particular that raises questions that are impossible to answer adequately from a humanist / naturalist perspective.

Habermas’s conclusion is that it is very hard for atheists to explain all NDE evidence. For Habermas, all the medical explanations have no explanation for what he calls “evidence at a distance”. Such evidence, he concludes, is the gamechanger.

You don’t need to buy into everything that Habermas says to recognise the prevalence of the NDE. Just type “NDE” into YouTube and dozens of videos will come up.

Perhaps the most curious of all NDEs, concerns the English philosopher, A.J. Ayer. Ayer was a thoroughgoing humanist, a kind of Richard Dawkins of his day. And then, in 1988, whilst recovering from pneumonia in a London hospital, he had an NDE when his heart stopped for four minutes.

Ayer wrote up his experience in an article entitled What I saw when I was dead. In it he described some of what he saw in the following terms:

“The only memory that I have of an experience, closely encompassing my death, is very vivid. I was confronted by a red light, exceedingly bright, and also very painful even when I turned away from it. I was aware that this light was responsible for the government of the universe. Among its ministers were two creatures who had been put in charge of space.“

It’s tempting to jump to the conclusion that Ayer had some kind of religious experience. Those who share his philosophical convictions would no doubt claim that he was simply delusional. Towards the end of the article he reasserted his humanist faith and sometime later followed up with another article that appeared to distance himself even further from any kind of belief in God.

Publicly, it seemed, the experience had little impact on Ayer. His humanist credentials remained intact. Privately, however, it was a different matter. Those who were close to him, including the doctor, Dr. Jeremy George, who treated him painted a very different picture. George related that Ayer had said he had encountered a divine being and that he was going to have to revise all [his] various books and opinions.

What Ayer really believed about what happened, we’ll never know. His friends, though, do testify that he was a changed man after the experience, irrespective of his attempts to keep his public image intact.

Is any of the above conclusive proof of life after death or that dead people can come back to life? No. We don’t have conclusive evidence to indicate that people can come back to life. What we do have, in spades, is enough data to challenge that assertion – that dead people do not come back to life – as an adequate description of human experience.

Shakespeare’s words, put into the mouth of Hamlet, that there are more things in heaven and earth , Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy, are more applicable to the issues of life and death than we might care to imagine. It would certainly do more to advance our understanding if professors of public engagement with science explored these kinds of phenomena in their own right rather than either completely ignoring them or filtering them through thought systems that seek to diminish their reality.

And taking our cue from Habermas, it might help us in our witness to the resurrection, if we as Christians took NDEs a little more seriously. It might help us build a bridge to people whose eyes have been opened to some of those things in heaven and earth for which a secular mindset has no explanation.

REVELATION IN A TIME OF PANDEMIC

As one who has been exposed to rumours of the Lord’s return throughout his entire life, the latest round of speculation about the second advent does not surprise me. What does surprise me is not that the Lord hasn’t returned already, but that William Hill isn’t offering odds on the sacred event taking place sometime before the pandemic has ended. If the good people at that particular betting establishment were more aware of evangelical sentiment, they could make themselves a whole lot of money.

Come to think of it, it might be a good thing if every time someone wanted to express an opinion on when the Lord was returning, they had to put down some money. It might even save us from some of the speculation Jesus warned against in Matthew 24!

My tongue in cheek suggestion only very thinly covers up the kind of frustration that many of us feel with the rush to Revelation that major catastrophes inevitably produce.

In the last twenty-one months I have preached on the return of Christ on three occasions. All three sermons were on what is known as the Olivet Discourse, as recorded in Matthew 24, Mark 13 and Luke 21. In those sermons I claimed no insight whatsoever with respect to any connection between the pandemic and the return of Christ. As far as I am concerned there is none, at least not any more than there is or was with any other major event of this nature present or future. To clarify, I do believe that the Lord could return before the pandemic is over. Nobody knows the day or hour. Nobody. And it’s worth remembering who the Somebody was who told us that nobody knows.

It seems to me that a major question when it comes to the Lord’s return surrounds how we should interpret Revelation.

Interpreting Revelation: a proposition

How should we approach the book of Revelation? How do we even begin to attempt to interpret its contents?

Both of those questions are particularly important with respect to two major chunks of Revelation that are often enlisted as signs of the end that are beginning to be fulfilled in our day, namely the opening of the seven seals and the sounding of the seven trumpets (Revelation 6-9).

My intention in this post is to outline an approach to interpreting Revelation. The approach is three-fold, entailing an acknowledgement that we need to interpret it in a way that maintains the unity of the book; that we should recognize its literary genre; and that we should approach it through the eschatological grid recorded in the teaching of Jesus in Matthew 24 / Luke 21 / Mark 13.

This approach will, I believe, lead us to a conclusion that Revelation is not wholly about the future and had as much an application to the people to whom it was addressed in the first century as it has to us.

The unity of the book of Revelation

Firstly, if the main body of teaching in Revelation (chapters 4-22) is primarily or, in the minds of some, entirely about the long-term future, one has to ask what relevance it had to those who read it, or heard it read, back at the end of the first century. It is hard to see that it had any relevance whatsoever if it is more or less a timetable of events that precede the Lord’s return.

New Testament scholar, Gordon Fee makes the point that the letters to the seven churches, recorded in chapters 1-3 serve as the backdrop for the rest of the book:

In terms of the overall context and structure of the Revelation, the seven letters thus serve as the immediate background for all that follows[1]

And again:

Indeed, it is John’s recognition that the church is headed for a time of severe trial that helps the later reader to make sense not only of the book as a whole, but of the next vision (chs. 4–6) in particular. [2]

The structure of the book supports the argument that it was intended to be read and understood as having a present application for those who received it.

If the contents of chapters 4-22 only have relevance for a generation nearly two thousand years or more away from the generation that first received the book, one has to ask why the book begins with letters to historical churches. Those churches and the letters they receive, can seem incidental to the main action of chapters 4-22.

One solution that has been put forward is to see the seven churches as seven ages of the church. The church age, extending from the day of Pentecost until the rapture of the church, is divided into seven ages. Ephesus reflects the earliest age of the church, Laodicea the lukewarm, apostate church of the very last days.

The difficulty with this approach is that there is nothing in the text of chapters 1-3 to suggest that we should understand it in this way. The letters are real letters to real churches in Asia Minor towards the end of the first century. Presentations of this kind of interpretation tend to be arbitrary in the way the various ages of the church are apportioned, and it is hard to see how they are in any way related to the text of Revelation.

Given that the “ages of the church” approach is not tenable, we are left with the question of how the letters to the seven churches fit into the overall structure.

We are left with two possibilities. Either the letters to the churches are simply an unconnected preliminary to the book; or they are integral to understanding the whole of Revelation.

The first of those options is not really an option at all. We are left then, with the second option, namely that whatever John sees and hears in the next nineteen chapters (4-22) have direct relevance to the seven churches and their present experience and the predictions made about their near futures have a direct bearing on how we interpret Revelation.

Revelation as prophecy / apocalyptic / letter

Secondly, the blend of literary genres of which Revelation is made up makes it more likely that it was a work with contemporary relevance as well as long term significance. Fee argues that Revelation is part letter, part apocalypse, part prophecy. In his opinion, this indicates that the work in its entirety was intended for people in the first century as it much as it is for us or for a future generation that sees the return of Christ:

The result is that John has given the church a combination of apocalyptic and prophetic. The book is cast in the mold of apocalyptic: it was born in (or on the brink of) persecution; he intends to speak about the End; it is a carefully crafted piece of literature, using cryptic language and also the imagery of fantasy; and it is ultimately dealing with salvation and judgment. But above all else it is prophetic in intent and content. Thus it is a word from God to their present situation, but written against the backdrop of the future, with its certain judgment and salvation. At the same time this book comes as an epistle, written to and for the churches in their present situations. Whatever else, it is not a word sealed until the end of time; for John, with the death and resurrection of Christ, the End had already begun. He writes for the encouragement (and watchfulness) of churches that stand on the brink of a holocaust about to be let loose on them by the Roman Empire.[3]

For me, and perhaps for many reading this post, it is hard to assess what Fee has written about the kinds of literature that have influenced the composition of Revelation. Whether every biblical scholar would agree with Fee’s conclusions about how we should interpret Revelation, most would concur with his understanding of the genres referred to in the above quote (apocalyptic and prophetic).

However, even for those of us who are unfamiliar with the kinds of literary genres that make up the Bible, the text of Revelation itself reveals something of its own character.

It goes without saying that it is a prophecy. Five times within the text, it is described as a prophecy (Revelation 1.3, 22.7,10,18,19). It is also a letter in as much as it was sent to the seven churches.

The words “To the angel of the church in…write” precedesthe message given to John for each of the seven churches.

In 1.11 John is instructed: “Write on a scroll what you see and send it to the seven churches: to Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea.’”

And again in 1.19: “Write, therefore, what you have seen, what is now and what will take place later.”

The instruction to write is repeated at 14.13, 19.19 and 21.5.

It would, in my view, be as foolish to try to interpret Revelation without trying to understand its literary background as it would be to try to understand it or any other work of literature divorced from its historical or social context. Revelation is a certain type of literature. It is not a gospel or a letter like Paul or Peter wrote. It is not a record of history like the book of Acts. Its biblical counterparts are more along the lines of the major prophets of the Old Testament.

That means that we should at least recognize that we cannot handle it in the same way as, for example, we do the gospels.

It also means that the way in which it is sometimes treated by contemporary authors as a kind of end times handbook, is entirely inappropriate and likely to result in all sorts of conclusions at which John – or Jesus for that matter! – never intended us to arrive.

Revelation, then, was a kind of a prophecy wrapped in a letter that was intended for a particular group of people in the first century in the first instance, however much of it still awaited fulfilment at a later date.

The teaching of Christ as the foundation of eschatology

A third reason to believe that Revelation is not simply about the days immediately prior to the return of Christ, brings us to what might be the interpretive key to the seven seals and seven trumpets in particular, and possibly to the whole of the book. In his commentary on Revelation, Ian Paul provides a table that compares Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 24 with the first six seals.[4] One immediately sees the parallels.

Theme	Jesus teaching in Matt.24	Seal
False Religion	5	First horse
War	6	Second horse
Famine	7	Third horse
Earthquakes	7	Sixth Seal (Rev.6.12)
Believers put to death	9	Fifth Seal (Rev. 6.9)
Fleeing to mountains	16	Sixth Seal (6.15)
Sun and moon darkened	29	Sixth Seal (Rev. 6.12-13)

Revelation 6 & Matthew 24

Although there is no hint of literary dependence, there are significant parallels between the things related in the opening of the seals and those related in Jesus ‘eschatological discourse’ recorded in Matthew 24:4–35 (and Mark 13:5–31; Luke 21:8–33)[5]

A generation before Ian Paul was writing, Michael Wilcock made the connections between Matthew 24 and the seven seals very forcibly. For Wilcock, Christ had set out a complete framework of human history from the first century until the last judgment.[6] On the basis that what the Lord had taught in those two chapters was fairly clear, Wilcock maintained that Revelation, especially the content surrounding the seals and trumpets should be interpreted through the grid of Matthew 24 and 25.

The same kind of point is made by Robert Mounce in his more technical commentary on Revelation:

“It should be noted that although the form of John’s vision is related to Zechariah, the subject matter corresponds to the eschatological discourse of Jesus in the synoptic gospels. Luke records wars and tumults, nation rising against nation, great earthquakes, famines, pestilences, great signs from heaven and persecution (Lk. 21.9ff; cf. Mk13.7ff and Matt. 24.6ff). By combining earthquakes and the cosmic disturbances, the seven woes of Luke are included within the six seals of Revelation.”[7]

Admittedly, the Olivet Discourse, as Matthew 24, and its parallels in Mark and Luke, are known, has been the subject of controversy itself, with some maintaining that Jesus is speaking mainly about events yet to come.

Within the text itself, however, it is hard not to conclude that at least some of the passage refers to the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. The entire passage is a response to two questions:

“Jesus left the temple and was walking away when his disciples came up to him to call his attention to its buildings. 2 ‘Do you see all these things?’ he asked. ‘Truly I tell you, not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.’ 3 As Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately. ‘Tell us,’ they said, ‘when will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?’” (Matthew 24.1-3)

The when will this happen question, is clearly a reference to the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple. Some of what Jesus says must therefore refer to this event.

The follow up question – what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age? – is a reference to the return of Christ.

What many have understood as the signs that indicate the closeness of Christ’s return, turn out, in the Lord’s own words to be nothing of the sort. Wars, famine, earthquakes are not a sign of the end. They are simply a part of human history:

“You will hear of wars and rumours of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come.” (v.6)

These verses and those that follow up to verse 28, are to do with life between the ascension of Christ and the return of Christ. Verse 15 appears to be an oblique reference to the fall of Jerusalem.

Verses 29-31 refer to the return of Christ, but there is precious little in terms of signs of His preceding His return.[8] In fact, verses 36-51 are a call for watchfulness and faithfulness because no one knows about that day (vv.36, 42).

Wilcock’s interpretation of the seven seals against the backdrop of Matthew 24 is similar to that set out in Paul’s table above.

He then poses a question about the seven trumpets. If the trumpets are to be understood as following the seals chronologically, how do they fit into the kind of framework set out by Jesus in both Matthew 24 and 25? The short answer is that there is no space for them:

“We must therefore beware of any theory about the future that adds unwieldy extras to the perfectly proportioned outline given us here [Matthew 24-25]. We must view with suspicion any interpretation which tries, for example, to insert four chapters of Revelation between two words of Matthew 24…Interpreters who find in Revelation extensive prophecies which cannot be found in Matthew 24-25, are, in fact, casting aspersions on Christ’s teaching in the latter place and implying that it is defective, or at least badly proportioned and inadequate to preserve His disciples from error.”[9]

So how are we to understand the trumpets?

Wilcock’s solution is to see the seals and the trumpets as two sides of the one coin. The seals are a description of history up until the return of Christ, with special reference to the church. The trumpets are a set of warnings to the unbelieving world.

“In a word, the two scenes are parallel. The breaking of the seals shows what will happen throughout history, up to the return of Christ, with particular reference to what the church will have to suffer. The trumpets, starting again from the same point, and also declaring what will happen throughout history up to and including the return of Christ, proclaim a warning to the unbelieving world. Note in passing that the Olivet discourse confirms this by following the description of the Parousia in Matthew 24.29-31 with a long section of warning to those living in the age before the Parousia.”[10]

I find Wilcock’s approach compelling. Reading Revelation through the lens of Jesus’ own teaching on His return seems to me very sensible. You might counter that one has to arrive at certain conclusions about Matthew 24 and its parallels, and that there is no agreed interpretation of these passages of scripture. I will concede that that is the case, simply because it is a fact. However, the sort of schema Paul or Wilcock are suggesting, has wider acceptance and is more firmly rooted in history. Even a committed futurist like Douglas Moo can see the merits of an interpretation of Matthew 24 that describes the sweep of history, the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., and the return of the Lord.[11]

Perhaps an even more important consideration is in respect of how shaping an influence Jesus’ teaching should have on eschatology. D.A. Carson, reflecting on the influence of Jesus’ eschatological teaching on Paul’s teaching in the Thessalonian letters, concludes that “Jesus Himself sets the pattern for the church’s eschatology”[12].

It’s difficult to argue with Carson’s conclusion. Who else could or should set the pattern for the church’s eschatology?

One implication of Carson’s uncontroversial assessment is, I would suggest, that what Jesus teaches should control as much as possible our interpretation of other eschatological literature in the New Testament. It would, would it not, be inappropriate to arrive at an interpretation of Revelation with little reference to the teaching of Christ? Or worse still, to read our interpretation of Revelation back into what Jesus teaches in Matthew 24 / Luke 21 / Mark 13? One would hope that to consider this kind of approach inappropriate would be as uncontroversial as Carson’s conclusion about the primary role of Christ’s teaching in the development of Christian eschatology.

Conclusion

Pastors and preachers always – or at least should always – aim to arrive at an interpretation of scripture that is both faithful to the biblical text and the larger biblical story.

Subjective interpretations of texts, especially those found in books whose genre might be less familiar to us, is always a risk.

Even though the keys to unlocking such texts might not be immediately available to us, we can always do our best to reduce the risk of a subjective interpretation. We might never eliminate that risk altogether. By comparing scripture with scripture, beginning with passages where a line of interpretation is widely accepted and consulting authorities on matters of background and language, we can at least begin to reduce the risk of an overly subjective interpretation.

By adopting the kind of threefold approach to Revelation suggested above, namely acknowledging the unity of the book, recognizing the literary genre and building on the teaching of Jesus as recorded in Matthew 24 and its parallels, we will at least approach Revelation in a way that makes the possibility of an interpretation that is both faithful to the text and biblically robust much more likely.

It seems to me that this approach will lead us to conclude that Revelation is not concerned with the future alone. It had direct relevance for the seven churches in Asia Minor, it had relevance for the church throughout history and it speaks to us today.

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[1] Gordon Fee, Revelation, New Covenant Commentary series, p64

[2] ibid p65

[3] Ibid, from the Introduction

[4] Ian Paul, Tyndale New Testament Commentary: Revelation: Leicester, 2019 p.147. One does not have to agree necessarily with Paul’s conclusions as to the contents of the seals to recognize that they somewhat mirror the content of the Olivet discourse.

[5] Ibid, p.147

[6] Michael Wilcock, The Message of Revelation, BST: Leicester, 1975, pp.74-75

[7] Robert H. Mounce, The New International Commentary on the New Testament, The Book of Revelation: Michigan, 1977,p.152

[8] Some argue that the event described in vv.29-31 is not the return of Christ but the fall of Jerusalem. They see the Son of Man coming on the clouds as a coming to God rather than a coming to earth.

R.T. France takes this approach and R.C. Sproul also takes this approach. Sproul cites evidence from Josephus that there were visible signs in the sky when the Roman armies of Titus surrounded Jerusalem. I am not convinced by this interpretation, primarily because similar language is used in Revelation 1 and it is difficult to see it referring to anything other than the second advent. I appreciate that I might be oversimplifying this matter and that it demands more extended discussion. Carson, in the work referenced below, makes a strong case against this view, as does Donald Hagner in Donald A. Hagner, Word Biblical Commentary, Matthew 14-28: Texas, 1995.

[9] Wilcock op. cit. p.87

[10] ibid., p.88

[11] Douglas Moo in Ed. Stanley Gundry, Three Views on the Rapture: Michigan, 1996, p.251, footnote 65.

[12] D.A. Carson, The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Matthew 13-28: Michigan, 1995, p.489

Climate Change

Engaging with climate change

Years ago, the whole issue of climate change seemed like a distant issue to me. I would imagine that I am not the only one who felt that way.

For years it seemed that there was a credible counter argument to the claim that the climate was changing and that the change was being brought about by environmentally unfriendly human lifestyles and practices. The formerly credible idea that the kind of climate change we are currently experiencing is more a phenomenon of history which we just have to accept, has now been well and truly kicked into touch.

The Little Ice Age

Climate has changed in the past, without much help from human beings. Europe’s so called Little Ice Age[1], extending from the 14^th until the 19^th century, came about as the result of factors beyond the control of human beings. Paintings by Hendrick Avercamp (1585-1634)[2] capture a period in European history when Dutch waterways froze over during winter in a way that does not happen today.

The difference between phenomenon such as the Little Ice Age and what’s happening today is two-fold. Firstly, as indicated above in previous times when the climate has changed, the change has not been brought about by the actions of human beings. Secondly, the climate change that we are currently experiencing is a global, not just a regional, phenomenon.[3]   

Reporting on the IPCC special report Global Warming of 1.5 Degrees Celsius[4], NASA summarized the impact this kind of rise in global temperatures would have on human beings:

At 1.5 degrees Celsius warming, the report projects that climate-related risks to human health, livelihoods, food security, human security, water supply and economic growth will all increase, and will increase even more at 2 degrees warming. Disadvantaged and vulnerable populations, some indigenous peoples and communities with livelihoods based on agriculture or coastal resources will be at the highest risk.[5]

Climate change, and its potentially disastrous consequences for the human race, is a fact. And our part in that change is a fact.

The consequences of doing nothing to try to arrest the rise in global temperatures are too grave to entertain. They compel even the most reluctant of our political leaders to do something to reduce carbon footprints.

The church does have an obligation to engage with this issue and has been doing so. Various Christian agencies have been active in and around Glasgow during COP26. And you can find plant of articles online that provide a helpful commentary. Evangelical Alliance[6] are always good on these issues. As are Tearfund[7]. Elim recently broadcast a very informative discussion on YouTube.[8]

I appreciate that for some within the Christian community, climate change is another contemporary fad that distracts from the gospel. Some go further and connect the issue to new age spirituality and therefore see it as a false gospel that is all part of an end-times scenario that will make way for antichrist.

In truth, for some of us, climate change, and those who were ringing the alarm bells, was so linked to a political outlook which had little place for Christian values that we found it hard to acknowledge.[9] However, if someone tells you your house is on fire, you don’t enquire what the person’s political or religious beliefs are. You call the fire brigade!

Credibility and Stability

This is an issue we have to engage with. I say that for two reasons: credibility and stability.

Firstly, there is an issue of credibility.

If we as the church do not engage with the most urgent, or certainly what is perceived to be the most urgent issue of our age, both church and gospel will lose their credibility as relevant public witnesses.

I can hear evangelical sensibility disturbed by the use of language like perceived to be the most urgent issue of our age and the term relevant.

And I am not entirely comfortable with that language either. The reality is that in the minds of many, perhaps most, this is the most urgent issue of our time. That is especially the case with millennials and Gen Z.

If we refuse to talk about what most people are talking about, we severely limit our ability to engage with the public. Or at least to engage meaningfully and constructively. (There is a kind of “Christian” engagement with the public that is unhelpful. That is what we want to avoid.)

Then there is the issue of stability.

If we as the human race do not do something to attempt to stop global temperatures rising, we risk massive instability all over the world. To my mind, that is in the interests of no-one. There are no winners in an unstable society, apart from those who are in a position to exploit that instability. If you want a scripture for that, how about “Love your neighbour as yourself”? Instability does not provide an environment in which people can flourish. It would only bring further suffering to those who are already suffering most from other man-made catastrophes.

So what might a simple biblical framework for engaging with this issue look like?

Stewards of this World

Firstly, we are stewards of this world.

We don’t own this world. It belongs to God.

“The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it; 2 for he founded it on the seas and established it on the waters.” (Psalm 24.1-2)

We look after it because it belongs to God and because He has made us stewards of His creation. This is outlined in Genesis 1.26-30. And as Psalm 146.3-4 makes clear (see below), this stewardship has not been revoked because of the fall.

We don’t worship it. It’s not mother earth. We care about the environment and climate change because we worship God, not Gaia. And we do need to be clear about that. Some of the spirituality surrounding climate change is a new age spirituality[10]. But just as you don’t have to worship an injured person to treat their wounds, you don’t have to worship the earth to acknowledge that it needs to be cared for.

God created the world through Christ (John 1.1) and upholds it (Hebrews 1.1) and sustains it through Christ (Colossians 1.15-18).

Shared responsibility

Secondly, we all share a responsibility for the planet.

It is important to recognize that the earth was give to the whole of humanity. Not just to Israel or the church:

“The highest heavens belong to the Lord, but the earth he has given to mankind.” (Psalm 115.16)

The earth is a shared resource. We have a shared responsibility for the way in which it is look after and the way its resources are used.

Loving our neighbour takes on a global dimension when seen in this light.

Finally, by engaging positively and constructively with this issue, we recognize that climate change is a sign from heaven.

It’s a sign of the frailty of humanity.

Psalm 146.3-4 says:

“Do not put your trust in princes, in human beings, who cannot save. 4 When their spirit departs, they return to the ground; on that very day their plans come to nothing.”

The difficulties world leaders face in trying to grapple with this issue reveals the limitations of even the most powerful. Sadly, it also reveals our limited moral capacity as well. Even some small changes to our lives could make a difference, but often they are changes we are unwilling to make.[11]

Climate change as a sign

It’s a sign of our fractured relationship with God

Some are concerned that engaging with climate change is a distraction from the gospel. However, it can be a great opportunity for the gospel. Our broken relationship with the earth has come about because of our broken relationship with God.

We would never have had this problem if there was no sin.

And it’s a sign of the age to come.

The whole creation, says Paul, is groaning (Romans 8.22-25).

Ultimately, the redemption of the physical universe relies on the return of Christ. There will never be a time in future history this side of the return of Christ, when the earth is restored to a pristine, Eden-like condition.

Our actions and our vision are not just to make life better for people here and now. They speak of a kingdom yet to come in fulness. Of a new heavens and new earth that will be brought about through the return of Christ.[12]

We are seeking the coming kingdom. We are not building utopia.[13] We do not know whether we will be able to turn things around or not. But we do know that one day the King will return and the kingdom will come in its fulness.

I’ll end on a note of hope with a quote from the great evangelical prophet of the mid twentieth century, Francis Schaeffer:

“Francis Bacon wrote this: ‘Man by the fall fell at the same time from his state of innocency and from his dominion over nature. Both of these losses, however, can even in this life be repaired; the former by religion and faith, the latter by the arts and sciences.’ It is a tragedy that the Church, including the orthodox, evangelical Church, has not always remembered that. Here in this present life, it is possible for the Christian to have some share, through sciences and the arts in returning nature to its proper place”[14]

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[1] “Little Ice Age”, Britannica.com

[2] Hendrick Avercamp: The Little Ice Age, National Gallery of Art

[3] The Little Ice Age Wasn’t Global, but Current Climate Change Is, Eos (news service of the American Geophysical Union)

[4] IPCC Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5 ºC, IPCC               

[5] A Degree of Concern: Why Global Temperatures Matter, Climate.NASA

[6] For example, Climate change: Gospel motivation for a global issue, Jo Evans, Evangelical Alliance

[7] For example, Christianity and climate change : A nine-part film series for small groups featuring Katharine Hayhoe, the internationally renowned Christian climate scientist, Tearfund

[8] The Climate Crisis and the Church, Elim Pentecostal Channel YouTube

[9] What would Jesus do? Talking with Evangelicals about climate change: The Guardian

[10] Interesting article in the Irish Times: God, make way for Gaia: A deity even atheists can believe in, Irish Times. It highlights some of what’s at stake in our engagement on this issue and serves as a reminder that we need to have a robust biblical spirituality.

[11] Like not upgrading your mobile phone every time you are out of contract! See Green Inc – The Green Tick: BBC Sounds from 19.48-19.56

[12] Revelation 21.1

[13] See a previous post on utopian thinking: Shades of Gray: rediscovering the surprising roots of European thought

[14] Francis Schaeffer, Pollution and the Death of Man : The Christian View of Ecology, p.50

When the culture is better at making disciples than the church

The challenge of discipling our young people against the backdrop of an aggressively secular culture

‘You send your kids to youth group. What? An hour a week if we’re lucky? Meanwhile twenty-five percent of all kids in this country under the age of twenty-one are spending eight hours on social media a day. And fifty-seven percent are spending more than four hours or more a day. They’re being catechized…There is a catechism out there. There’s the identity narrative. And that is “You’ve got to be true to yourself”. There’s the freedom narrative, which is “Anyone should be free to live the way he or she wants to as long as the don’t hurt anyone else. There’s the happiness narrative and that goes like this: “In the end you’ve gotta do what makes you happy. You’ve just gotta do what makes you happy”. Then there’s the morality narrative. And the morality narrative is “Hey, no-one has the right to define what is right or wrong for you. You have to define what is right and wrong for yourself.”

That eight hours on social media – that’s a catechism.’ Tim Keller [1]

A few years ago, I was on a long car journey. I decided to stop on the way for coffee, planning to listen to a podcast before I began the journey again.  I can’t remember the title of the podcast and can’t find it anywhere on the net. Fortunately, I made notes! It featured Tim Keller giving his opinion on what were the most crucial issues for his denomination as it looked forward.

Keller listed four areas of concern. The first was to do with character and spirituality. Helping church members regain confidence in evangelism was a second. A third was to do with handling controversy in a digital age.

The final one was the one that grabbed my attention most. Keller was concerned that culture, specifically Western culture, was catechizing our children and young people and the church’s best efforts were woefully inadequate.

Some, perhaps the majority, of readers of this post will not be from a church tradition in which the terms catechism or catechising were common currency. They tend to be associated with the more historic denominations and communions of the Christian Church.

Catechising is instructing young people or new converts in the basics of the Christian faith. In that respect a catechism is a bit like a discipleship course.

Keller’s argument goes something like this:

At the time of the reformation, the various reformed parties – Lutherans, Presbyterians, Anglicans, etc., produced catechisms. In those catechisms, various aspects of Christian truth received precious little coverage, for example, the doctrine of God and the person of Christ.

However, justification by faith and communion received huge coverage. Keller asks the question why that was, and provides an answer: the objective of the catechisms was to prevent those catechised from becoming Catholics.

Keller goes on to argue that the contemporary church, in as much as it still catechises young people, is doing it against the backdrop of the concerns of the reformation rather than against the backdrop of the challenges of contemporary culture.

Catechisms that really work are counter-catechisms, in other words they don’t just present Christian belief, they deconstruct the other narratives in the culture. Keller maintains that this is what Jesus was doing in the sermon on the mount. “You have heard it said…but I say unto you”, is Jesus’s way of not only presenting truth but undoing the narratives of the authorities of the day.

Narratives of identity, freedom, happiness and morality are out there in the culture. That’s what we need to interact with if we are going to shape people in the ways of Christ.

Those narratives are promoted by the culture incessantly. To underline his point, Keller cites statistics about the length of time people under the age of twenty-one spend on social media, compared to the time we have with them in church. The church is, in his view, failing in its task.

Keller has been making this point for a few years now. It is hard to say if the message has landed on good soil. In a recent discussion with Carey Nieuwhof, he appears to feel that his ideas have fallen on stony ground.[2]

Keller, of course is speaking in an American context and in the context of a presbyterian tradition and ecclesiology.

There are issues of church tradition and culture and geographical context that should be factored into any assessment of Keller’s concerns. It would, however, be too easy to diminish the challenge that we all face, irrespective of denomination or geography.

The U.K. is a different country to the U.S.. That much is obvious. It’s some of those differences that should concern us.

For example, we are much more secular than the U.S.. U.K. schools, on the whole, aggressively promote a secular agenda at both primary and secondary levels of education. I can’t make a comparison with America as I am not familiar enough with the school system there.

Engagement online is not always easily measured. One study in the U.K. claimed that children between 5-16 had an average of 6.3 hours screen time per day.[3] So there is a broad similarity with Keller’s stats on social media engagement.

Whether the church in the U.K. is any more effective in the spiritual formation of children and young people than the church in the U.S., is hard to say. The hour per week in the youth group that Keller cited, is probably similar in a U.K. context.

The challenge is both to catechise (substitute “disciple” or “mentor” or “spiritually form”, if you like) and counter catechize children and young people who in their waking hours are almost continually exposed to the influence of an aggressive but subtle secularizing culture.

I say subtle because a secular humanistic worldview is so embedded in just about everything in the public square – media, arts, politics, entertainment – that sometimes we don’t even recognize its presence.

What can we do?

Recognising the challenge we face would be a great start. Sometimes it feels as though we either don’t recognize the problem or we do but we want to pretend it’s not as big a problem as it really is.

A review of what we are doing and trying to achieve in our discipleship teaching would be another positive move.

No doubt there is much more that could be said. But this is a massive challenge and it would be too easy to dispense easy answers to a complex challenge.

Keller has been a compelling – and positive – voice for the gospel for the last couple of decades. It would be remiss of the church to turn a deaf ear to his concerns for the upcoming generations. And it would be reckless to allow the culture to do a better job at discipling our children and young people than the church.

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[1] Deconstructing Our Culture’s Catechism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3SOlYnQh_k&ab_channel=RedeemerCitytoCity

[2] Tim Keller on How Culture is Changing and the Future of the Church: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1ekh6e5SIg&ab_channel=CareyNieuwhof

[3] Screen Time: NHS Greater Glasgow and Strathclyde: https://www.nhsggc.org.uk/about-us/professional-support-sites/screen-time/#

From “all this” to “all that”

Below is the text of a talk I gave to some pastors back in February. It was my attempt to try to provide some commentary on where things were at and the direction in which they might go.

Getting ready for “all that” while we’re still in “all this”

Just recently I was asked to contribute an article to a publication entitled Church Without Walls. As you have probably figured out already, it is about what the church could or should look like post pandemic.

There seems to be a general conviction that when “all this” is over a new “all that” will just be beginning. On the whole, I think, Christian leaders are seeing this as a time of opportunity. The word reset has become a part of the leadership vocabulary when discussing the possible futures of the church in Scotland or indeed the UK as a whole.

There is also a fairly general if not universal conviction, that the landscape in which we will find ourselves is going to present us with some major challenges. For example, we don’t know what church will look like – and it would be dangerous to apply any ideas we have on that subject to the whole body of Christ.

Undoubtedly, there will be economic challenges as business attempts to adjust to the financial impact of the pandemic.

However, perhaps the biggest scar of all that the pandemic will leave will be on the mental health of society as a whole.

All of the above are changes and challenges over which we have very little control.

Change is not inevitable and not inevitably positive

There does seem to be a feeling that change in the church in the wake of the pandemic is inevitable and positive.

Whilst change might be desirable – certainly positive change! – it would be mistaken to believe that positive change or indeed any change at all in the way that churches function is inevitable.

In the first months of lockdown, I read a history of the reformation which covered the first hundred years or so of the reformation in Europe. Those hundred years produced one upheaval after another – including the plagues that affected whole societies. Ultimately, none of those challenges directly produced change in the church.

So, it is worth keeping a sense of historical perspective and acknowledging that, throughout its history, the church has seen persecution, plague and war on numerous occasions. What might be described as existential threats, in the end didn’t impact that much on the basic configuration of the church.

Mostly, the church changes positively when in response to the Spirit of God we make changes. When “all this” is over and we enter into the “all that” that is around the corner, our hopes for positive change within the church should be rooted in that knowledge.

Positive change in the life of the church comes about when we make wise and godly decisions based on what the Spirit is saying and take into account the “all that” of the context in which we find ourselves. A changed or changing society does not in itself change the church in a positive way.

There is a possibility that we will just revert to doing what we have always done. Depending on context that may or may not be a bad thing.

How do we embrace the kind of change we sense God wants to bring when our current “all this” turns to a future “all that”?

John the Baptist: preparing the world for change

John the Baptist lived at a time when God was changing the nation of Israel. In fact, he was the change agent, to use contemporary language.

Luke 3.1-20 records John’s preaching ministry and the responses of the people to whom he preached.

John’s message was one of change. You can’t preach repentance without being interested in change!

So, what can we learn from him?

Recognise the restrictive power of church culture (8)

When John preached to the people of Israel, some tried to convince themselves that they weren’t included in his challenge; they were Abraham’s descendants, after all.

John engaged with their thought patterns, warning them not to say to themselves. Their culture conditioned response was closing them down to the possibilities God was placing before them. They thought that their history guaranteed their destiny, when God was looking for humility.

It’s good to recognise and honour what God has done in the past, but when it produces entitlement shaped thinking, it becomes a barrier to what God wants to do.

Make spirituality simple (10-14)

Asking yourself what you actually want people to do, is a question that brings focus to leadership. When asked what he wanted people to do, John was very clear in his response. It was simple.

It is tempting to become complicated in giving people spiritual direction and often a lack of direction is down to a lack of clarity and simplicity.

It has to be said as well, that people sometimes prefer complicated to simple. It’s one of the unhelpful patterns that can be found in some church cultures today. This can often be the case in charismatic church culture in particular (I speak as a charismatic).

Make spirituality people centred (10-14)

Notice that this simple response John required was both practical and people related.

Give away your shirt. Share your food. Don’t exploit people. Simple stuff. Easy to understand. Not always easy to do.

If the past eleven months or so have taught us anything, it has taught us the importance of practical, people centred Christianity.

Some years ago, I was a school governor. On one occasion we were given some training. At the end of the session, the trainer recommended that at the end of every governors’ meeting we should ask and seek to answer one question: How will this affect the children?

We would do well to ask ourselves a question along these lines after every leaders’ meeting. If what we are doing doesn’t have the stated purpose of moving people closer to Jesus, it raises a question mark over what we are doing.

Open up to the Holy Spirit (v.16)

John didn’t stop there, however, he spoke of the Spirit who was still to come. And he spoke of Jesus, who would baptise with the Holy Spirit and fire.

Our love for and focus on Jesus should bring us into an experience of the Spirit and His power, since Jesus is the baptiser in the Holy Spirit.

We are going to need the power of the Spirit more than ever after “all this” is over and we find ourselves in the “all that” that is to come. Let’s have a new openness to the Holy Spirit.

Expect a divine shake up! (9,17)

Finally, expect a divine shake up (9,17)

John spoke of trees being cut down and wheat being winnowed. Felled trees change a landscape. Winnowed wheat has had its impurities shaken out.

There is an aspect of what’s ahead that we have and will have no control over.

That aspect is the action of God. He knows what He is doing. We just have to trust Him. Whatever we think we know or don’t know about the future, trusting the One who knows the “all that” that is to come, is the main thing.

Shades of Gray: rediscovering the surprising roots of European thought

For most of my adult life – actually most of my life – I’ve had an interest in eschatology. The church in which I now serve, was for most of its history, especially its earliest years, driven by a strong belief in the imminent return of Christ.

I do not think that is still the case. In all honesty, I’m not sure that is a wholly bad thing; it’s hard to lead a productive life when every earthquake and every war is a potential sign of the rise of the antichrist. It is all too easy for an anticipation of Christ’s return to degenerate into speculation about the signs of the times and a preoccupation with what the enemy might be about to do on the world stage.

The eschatological engine

The engine that drove that belief was what is known as premillennialism. In short, Christ returned to set up an earthly kingdom for one thousand years. After one thousand years of peace Satan rebelled and was defeated in a final battle. The last judgment then takes place and the new heavens and new earth are ushered in. The end.

As I am sure you will appreciate, this was not a mainstream belief in the wider church never mind the world that I grew up in. It’s probably even less the case now.

Discovering Gray

About eighteen months ago I came across a book by John Gray, former professor of European thought at London School of Economics and visiting professor at Harvard and Yale. The book was entitled “Seven Faces of Atheism”. In one of those moments where you feel as though you are onto something new, I purchased a number of Gray’s other publications, amongst them Heresies and Black Mass.

What I found astonished me. Gray set out very clearly the case that one cannot understand Western politics unless one understands premillennialism (Gray uses the term millenarianism, which is a synonym for the same phenomenon).[1] Western politics, whether in its liberal expression or in its more extreme expressions, is effectively a quest for the kingdom of God without God.

Gray, it should be noted, is not a Christian. He is an atheist.[2] It should also be noted that he is not a new atheist. Some of his most withering criticism is reserved for the new atheists, more severe than anything I have read by a Christian apologist. In his view the new atheism is based every bit as much on beliefs that cannot be substantiated, as religion.[3]

Munster: 1533-34: Millenarian belief at its most extreme

Although acknowledging that millenarian belief has been around as long as Christianity itself, Gray’s starting point are the events in the city of Munster between 1534-35.

Munster had become the focal point for apocalyptic expectation when Anabaptist prophet, Jan Matthijszoon declared that the Kingdom of God would appear in Munster in 1533.[4] Matthijszoon perished in a reckless military caper to defeat the forces of the authorities whom he had ousted.

Into this cauldron of eschatological expectation arrived another Anabaptist leader, Jan Bockelson, or John of Leyden as he came to be known, in autumn of 1534. The mantle of leadership passed to Bockelson who declared himself a messianic king.

What unfolded in those months in which Bockelson had control of the city, serves to illustrate Gray’s larger point that the pursuit of an earthly utopia by human means is not just futile but highly destructive to human life and relationships. Beheadings were not unusual in the “messiah’s” attempt to make people conform to the rules he laid down.

In some ways Munster became like a prototype of a communist state. Property was confiscated, apparently in service of the common good. Polygamy became the order of the day.

The whole thing came to a disastrous end when forces loyal to the church stormed the city after months of siege. Bockelson was captured and put to death.

In the coming years there would be a handful of further Munster like scenarios, most notably in Wetsphalia. The rest were mainly local proclamations of a New Jerusalem that took place in 1535.

Gray comments:

“But the attempt to take the heavens by storm died out among Christian believers by the end of the sixteenth century. Thereafter, apocalyptic myths renewed themselves in explicitly political forms, most of them militantly secular.”[5]

The myth of progress

The idea that we can make the world a better place is at the heart of most political ideologies and philosophical systems. In some, it is not just the idea of progress that drives the system, it is the promise of utopia.

Marxism, for example, holds out the idea of a perfect world, cleansed of capitalism and the bourgeoisie.

Gray argues that the idea of progress is a myth – in both senses of that word. It’s a myth in the sense that it is an overarching story providing meaning. It is also, in his opinion a myth, in the sense that it is just not true: there is no progress in history. The world is not a better place today than it was, say, three hundred years ago. One might counter that of course the world is a better place and that we are much more civilized. Gray, no doubt, would cite the history of the twentieth century as compelling evidence that progress cannot be used to describe the course of history.

For Gray, the idea of progress is an inheritance from Christianity. History, before Christianity, was considered cyclical rather than linear. The Jewish faith might have had a similar conception of history to that of Christianity, but it was a localized faith rather than a world faith.

A linear conception of history is an inheritance from Christianity, a conception that underlies the idea that history is progressing. Hence the conclusion that the European enlightenment of the eighteenth century, which produced the philosophical systems and political ideologies of the last three hundred or so years.

Gray accepts progress in science as fact. He has no quibble with that. He does not accept that it follows that there has been progress in ethics or politics. The belief in progress is just that – a belief. And it’s a belief that we have developed to help us manage our fear of the future.[6]

Gray’s rather damning description of this belief is in terms of a drug:

“Belief in progress is the Prozac of the thinking classes”[7]

The dangerous absence of original sin

Uncomfortable as that relationship between Christianity and the enlightenment might seem for those who want to distance themselves from faith, it would be surprising if the ideas that came to shape European society had no connection whatsoever with the dominant ideas in European thought that predated them.

Gray, however, is not seeking simply to point out a much-overlooked connection. He highlights a concern.

His concern is not simply that atheists or agnostics ignore this relationship with Christianity. His concern is that utopian philosophy or politics do not have the in-built braking system that Christianity has.

He points out two aspects of Christianity that set it apart from its enlightenment offspring.

Those two aspects are original sin and the Christian belief that the Kingdom of God ultimately is brought about by God Himself. It comes about supernaturally. It is not brought about by human beings.

Original sin, argues Gray, acknowledges the flaws in human beings in a way that secular philosophy or ideology does not. And when we begin to believe that we can bring about the secular equivalent of the kingdom of God, we have entered dangerous territory. [8]

The results are only too clear to be seen: millions of people slaughtered in the twentieth century in the pursuit of the utopian dreams promulgated by political ideologues:

“In traditional Christianity the apocalyptic impulse was restrained by the insight that human beings are ineradicably flawed. In the secular religions that flowed from Christianity, this insight was lost. The result has been a form of tyranny, new in history, that commits vast crimes in the pursuit of heaven on earth.”[9]

Gray’s conclusion is that contemporary politics is essentially religious in nature:

“Modern politics is a chapter in the history of religious myth”[10]

And again:

“When Christianity was rejected, its eschatological hopes did not disappear. They were repressed, only to return as universal projects of emancipation.”[11]

This, in Gray’s view, marks a dangerous reimagining of traditional Christian eschatology, for the simple reason that the dreamt of future is not brought about by divine intervention, but by human beings:

“Modern revolutionary movements are continuations of medieval millenarianism. The myth that the human world can be remade in a cataclysmic upheaval has not died. Only the author of this world-transforming end-time has changed. In olden times, it was God. Now it is ‘humanity’”.[12]

Conclusion

I have offered a very brief overview of some of Gray’s key ideas. His approach to contemporary politics and its connections with Christianity, provides us with some fruitful opportunities for developing conversations with people who have a secular outlook. It should be said that Gray is not breaking new ground entirely. He himself acknowledges the work of Norman Cohn and Erich Voegelin[13].

His ideas also, I think, underline the importance of eschatology in our attempts to communicate with twenty-first Western society in particular. Much of what is unfolding around us has the hallmarks of a quest for the kingdom of God, without God. Those dynamics can be found in social justice movements, climate change protest groups, like Extinction Rebellion and in the “Woke” phenomenon in general.

On a more personal level, I cannot help feeling a little bit of satisfaction in discovering the central importance of premillennialism in European thought. It astonishes me that a view that throughout my life was sincerely held by fellow believers, yet rejected within and without the church, turns out to be the key to understanding the Western world – or so it seems.

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[1] See the article Millennialism in Britannica online: https://www.britannica.com/topic/millennialism

[2] See Michael Ramsden’s critique in John Piper and David Mathis, Finish The Mission, Wheaton:2012, pp74-79

[3] John Gray, Seven Types of Atheism, London:2018, pp9-23

[4] Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490-1700, London: 2003, pp. 204-207 provides good coverage. The 1533 prediction of the arrival of the kingdom of God was originally made by another Dutch Anabaptist prophet, Melchior Hoffmann.

[5] Gray, Seven Types of Atheism, p.78

[6] This is a recurring theme. In fact, it is pretty much fundamental to understanding Grays’s pessimism concerning politics. A good overview of the idea can be found in John Gray, Heresies, London: 2004, pp1-14

[7] Gray, ibid., p3

[8] Gray references Erich Voegelin’s work on Gnosticism. Voegelin maintained that secular political philosophy was “gnostic” in that it, amongst other things it put the onus on human beings to bring about the perfect world. See Gray, Seven Types of Atheism, p74

[9] Gray, Heresies, London: 2004, p44

[10] John Gray, Black Mass, London: 2007, p1.

[11] Ibid.p26

[12] Gray, Seven Types of Atheism, p73

[13] Ibid, pp73-74