Christian History Magazine on Christian Civic Engagement

The latest issue of Christian History Magazine is devoted to the topic of ‘City of Man: Christian Civic Engagement through the Ages’.

Here’s the issue blurb:

‘How do Christians live as citizens of a fallen world? The question of civic engagement is one that the church has been asking since its earliest days, and this is how it has often answered: This world is not our ultimate home, but we must work for its good while we live in it. Meet the believers who sought to live faithfully in the world without being consumed by it; sometimes by working hand-in-hand with the state; sometimes enduring its persecution. Discover how they did all these things as a way to follow Jesus in this issue of CH.’

The whole magazine is available as a 11.4 MB pdf here.

Themelios 46, 1 (April 2021)

The latest Themelios is online here (and available here as a single pdf), containing the below articles.

Editorial

Brian J. Tabb

The Neglected Virtue of Contentment

Strange Times

Daniel Strange

Coming to Our Senses: The Case for a Civil Elenctics and an Elenctic Civility

Henri A.G. Blocher

Canonicity: A Theologian’s Observations

The topic of the biblical canon raises a specific, twofold difficulty for evangelical systematic theologians: the appeal to the Spirit’s testimony and a recognition of divine providence in history. It is crucial to recognize that “canon” entails both a principle – a body of teaching incorporating the word of God that binds the conscience of believers – and a list of books officially recognized as authoritative by the world-wide church. The principle of canon and specific canonical books are organically linked. While the validity of our confession of the canon of Scripture cannot be proven on any “neutral” ground, believers have sufficient clarity and confidence to confess the rule we need in radical dependence on God.

Matthew Bingham

Brains, Bodies, and the Task of Discipleship: Re-Aligning Anthropology and Ministry

Exploring the intersection of anthropology and ministry, this article offers an appreciative critique of recent authors who suggest that effective Christian discipleship requires holistic, bodily engagement. James K.A. Smith and others have helpfully drawn attention to ways in which contemporary evangelical approaches to Christian formation can risk over-emphasizing the transfer of information while neglecting things like desire, love, and imagination. Having thus diagnosed the problem, these authors suggest that the solution lies in a turn towards “embodied rituals” that they believe can more effectively form the whole person. Through a critical evaluation of this proposal, the present article seeks to distinguish between its attractive aspects and those which would unhelpfully undermine the Reformation emphasis on the primacy of Word ministry. The article concludes by suggesting ways in which evangelicals might advance a more holistic approach to discipleship that is congruent with longstanding Reformation priorities.

Daniel K. Eng

‘I Call You Friends’: Jesus as Patron in John 15

This article proposes that John 15:13–16 draws on the language of Roman patronage, which impacts the understanding of Jesus’s sayings regarding friends. We will suggest that φίλος conveys a regent obedient to a royal patron. Thus, the role of Jesus’s friend is one of subordination, not equality. After an introduction to patronage, this article makes the case that Jesus portrays himself as the greatest patron. First, John’s farewell discourse points to the disciples being subordinates. Second, Jesus makes a contrast between slaves and friends, which is consistent with many patronal relationships. Third, Jesus describes himself as a broker, mediating benefit from the Father. Fourth, inscriptions and provincial coinage contained terms like ΦΙΛΟΚΑΙΣΑΡ (friend of Caesar), referring to regents of the emperor. Patronage best explains the saying, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends (15:13).” Jesus’s ultimate sacrifice for subordinates makes his patronage greater than Caesar’s.

Scott MacDonald

Spirit-Anointing and New Testament Church Leadership: Are Our Church Leaders Uniquely “Anointed?”

Does the church need Spirit-anointed leadership? “Anointing” is an increasingly common topic in relation to Christian leaders. This article aims to clarify the role of Spirit-anointing in the Old and New Testaments, with special attention to texts that are explicitly relevant to the church’s experience (i.e., 2 Cor 1:21–22; 1 John 2:20, 26–27). The misuse of the term “anointing” arises from a recast of Old Testament pneumatology as post-Pentecost. This misapplication of Old Testament texts denigrates the Holy Spirit’s expanded role of inhabitation in the New Testament era. Furthermore, the obfuscation of Spirit-anointing has incurred significant harm to the practices and doctrines that relate to local church leadership.

Doosuk Kim

The Parting of the Way: A Survey of  the Relationship between Jews and Christians in the First and Second Centuries CE

People today clearly view Judaism and Christianity as different religions. Undisputedly, however, Jesus and his followers were Jews in the first century. When did the parting of the way between Jews and Christians take place? What are the decisive factors that made the two ended up so far from each other? This essay examines this relationship in its social, theological, historical, and political context. The evidence suggests that though the exact time and impetus for the parting remain elusive, the parting of the way began in the first century and gradually became clearer in the second century.

John Kegley

The Nature and Task of Theology in John Owen’s Forgotten Work

Theologoumena Pantodapa may be John Owen’s most comprehensive theological work and his greatest contribution to the Reformed tradition. However, this work was not translated into English until 1994. Since its translation, it has received a noticeable lack of scholarly attention. This essay seeks to fill a part of the void in scholarship by examining Theologoumena Pantodapa’s historical context, structure, and key themes. This examination is profitable and pertinent for pastors, students of theology, and all Christians as it includes an analysis of Owen’s hermeneutical method, understanding of the relationship between theology and practice, and comments on the character of the gospel theologian.

Jarred Jung

Trinity, Creation, and Re-creation: A Comparison of Karl Barth and Herman Bavinck’s Trinitarian Doctrines of Creation

Karl Barth’s doctrine of creation, while rooted in his doctrine of the Trinity, errs in the way that creation is conflated into re-creation, resulting in a diminished doctrine of creation at the expense of his christological Trinitarianism. By comparing Barth’s doctrine of creation with that of Dutch Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck, this article argues that Bavinck offers a doctrine of creation that is as equally grounded in the doctrine of the Trinity as Barth’s and yet avoids the shortcomings of Barth’s doctrine by appropriately distinguishing between creation and re-creation. As such, Bavinck serves as an appropriate example of doctrinal emphasis for theologians and pastors.

Geoffrey Butler

Appeasement of a Monster God? A Historical and Biblical Analysis of Penal Substitutionary Atonement

Long considered a key tenet of evangelical theology, the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement has come under particularly intense scrutiny in recent years. Critics claim that it is a fairly recent innovation with little support prior to the Reformation, and that it depicts Yahweh as comparable with the pagan deities of the OT. This article makes the case that, on the contrary, the substance of penal substitutionary atonement has been taught from the church’s earliest days, arguing that the doctrine stems directly from a careful, thoughtful engagement with Scripture, which from beginning to end points toward the sacrificial death of Israel’s Messiah.

Robert D. Golding

Making Sense of Hell

Christian universalism (the view that all people are eventually saved) is largely predicated upon a negative reaction to the traditional doctrine of hell. It is therefore a “second option” to those who see hell as illogical, unnecessary, and/or cruel. In this article, I will argue that hell is not only logical and just but that it is also conceivably necessary. I will do this by way of a theological examination of those who occupy hell’s harrowing halls. This is essential because the loss of the traditional doctrine of hell can mean the loss of souls along with it. Doubting hell is playing with eternal fire.

Book Reviews

Ethics in Brief Volume 21, Nos. 5 & 6 (2016)

Two issues from Volume 21 of Ethics in Brief, published by The Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics, are now available online:

Julian Rivers

Fundamental British Values and the Virtues of Civic Loyalty

This paper reflects the rise of ‘fundamental British values’ as a core part of the Government’s counter-extremism strategy. It identifies several problems with the idea of FBVs, and suggests that we need to recover the concept of civic loyalty instead. It is appropriate to promote this through education, which should in part seek to form pupils and students into virtuous citizens.

Kirsty Jones

Dementia: Living in the Memories of God – A Review

[From the Conclusion:] Offering an original and carefully constructed theology of dementia, Memories is essential reading for academic and pastoral work on disability and anthropology. Swinton effectively shows why the church should care about people living with dementia, and how it can care well. God, he emphasises, cares because he remembers persons as they were, are and will be, holding their reality in his hands and cherishing each moment of joy and sorrow. Remembering, for God, is purposeful and powerful; his memory is the foundation of humanity and each human life. Inspired by such a vision, the book moves us cognitively beyond narrow conceptions, emotively beyond apathy, and practically into action.

Going to Extremes?

I contributed this week’s ‘Connecting with Culture’, a weekly email service provided by the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity.

Monday this week saw David Cameron deliver a speech announcing plans to tackle Islamist extremism. Calling for the promotion of ‘British values’, the Government, he said, will confront ‘groups and organisations that may not advocate violence – but which do promote other parts of the extremist narrative’.

The unease, voiced by some commentators, is that a wide definition of what counts as ‘extreme’ leaves the door open for attacks on anyone whose views differ from the Government. Writing in The Independent, Abdul-Azim Ahmed expressed concern that the speech ‘casts the net of extremism so wide it undermines some very basic civil liberties’. In The Telegraph, Brendan O’Neill wrote of a ‘dark, twisted irony’ to Cameron’s speech, warning that attempts to clampdown on ‘non-violent extremism’ will extinguish freedom of speech and debate.

All this in a week when Tim Farron, new Liberal Democrat leader and self-confessed Christian, had to tackle pointed questions about his views on same-sex sexual relationships, and whether he would seek God’s guidance before making policy decisions. To many, it seemed a bit unfair. As Farron himself pointed out to John Humphreys on the Today programme, ‘everybody comes to every situation with a set of value judgments’.

Indeed, every political vision operates out of some overarching perspective on life; every policy decision is supported by moral considerations of some sort. But there still seems to be a lingering presumption that a so-called ‘secular’ perspective is more neutral, less in danger of ‘extremism’, and so more appropriate for the public square. That is surely open for debate.

Does the belief that Jesus Christ is Lord mark Christians out as ‘extremists’? Maybe so. But it ought also mark us out as civil, seeking the good of others. The ongoing challenge will be not just to continue to contribute to the common good wherever we find ourselves, but to do so as Christians, with all that our discipleship to Jesus entails.

Seeking neither to take over the institutions of society nor abdicating responsibility altogether, we can feel confident about bringing a Christian vision into everyday life, including the public sphere. As theologian James K.A. Smith puts it: ‘The public task of the church is not just to remind the world of what it (allegedly) already knows (by “natural” reason), but to proclaim what it couldn’t otherwise know – and to do so as a public service for the sake of the common good.’

More from the Centre for Public Christianity (November 2012)

Among other items, the most recent newsletter from the Centre for Public Christianity contains links to video interviews with Tim Costello (CEO of World Vision Australia) on how those of us in the west are more concerned with our own wellbeing than the plight of the vulnerable, and Ryan Messmore, arguing that a place for religion in the public square is a crucial element of a civil society.

Kyle David Bennett on Discerning the Spirit

In the latest Comment, Kyle David Bennett offers some reflections via Richard J. Mouw’s Uncommon Decency: Christian Civility in an Uncivil World (Downers Grove: IVP, 2010) and James K.A. Smith’s Thinking in Tongues: Pentecostal Contributions to Christian Philosophy (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010).

For his part, Richard Mouw argues that ‘faithfulness to one’s principles and beliefs and politeness to those who disagree with these principles and beliefs is fundamental to any Christian civility’. Yet Mouw also argues that our way of seeing and understanding, informed by God’s revelation, also ‘constitutes the Christian nature of our civility’. So, while anyone can be polite, ‘being polite because of God’s command to be polite and one’s understanding of others as “special creations” of God is a unique characteristic of Christianity’. And, as Mouw notes, we also need to participate in practices that cultivate this sort of understanding.

Thus, as Bennett notes:

‘We need the church. The church, with its liturgical practices and spiritual formation, teaches and forms us to be civil. By its own “civility” and incarnation of a particular perception and way of being in the world, the church cultivates this civility in us... We cannot be civil on our own. To be civil, we need both perception and spirituality, instruction by God and intimacy with God.’

Even so, according to Bennett, the revelation of others as ‘special creatures’ does not exhaust the theological resources for Christian civility.

‘This other layer is God’s presence in creation, and in particular, his action within it. We need a Christian civility that is informed by a thorough sensitivity to the Spirit’s presence and work in the mundane of creation, including our civil encounters. We need a Christian civility that is not only informed by revelation and spirituality, but discerns the Spirit in the civil.’

Bennett appeals here to the work of James Smith. While he is seeking to articulate the contributions to philosophy of a distinctly Pentecostal philosophy and is not directly addressing civility as such, yet Smith argues that a central element of a Pentecostal worldview is the element of surprise – the expectation of surprise, an ‘eye’ for the ‘surprise’ of the Spirit in creation.

Bennett picks up on this, noting:

‘A Christian civility, then, in light of Smith’s challenge, would take note of the Spirit’s presence and work in all aspects and rhythms of creation, including civil encounters... Too many notions of Christian civility assume God is absent or only observing in the everyday events of public life. We need a more trinitarian and eschatological understanding of God’s dynamic relationship to creation and how we relate to God and live within this creation... Such a logic, such an understanding, encourages us to move about the world with fear and delight, being sensitive to the Spirit’s presence and work in all things, including those we come into contact with in public spaces.

And he concludes:

‘We are surrounded by the gracious activity of God. We need to be mindful of this at all times, especially when we are in public spaces. God cannot be monopolized. We need to treat others with civility not only because they are created in God’s image, but also because they may be the very vessel through which God speaks to us and others. It should make a difference to understand that our interaction with others is not only before God, or in response to God, but a result of God and God’s interacting in our interactions. We need to discern the Spirit’s presence and work in our civil encounters, for such discernment is an important layer of a Christian notion of civility.’