Themelios 44, 3 (December 2019)

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

Editorial

D.A. Carson

But That’s Just Your Interpretation!

Strange Times

Daniel Strange

Remembering a Principal’s Principles

Robert S. Smith

Cultural Marxism: Imaginary Conspiracy or Revolutionary Reality?

What are we to make of Cultural Marxism? This article seeks to answer that question, first, by outlining the key elements and legacy of classical Marxism; second, by exploring the neo-Marxism of Antonio Gramsci; third, by assessing the main ideas and impact of “the Frankfurt School”; and, fourth, by offering some reflections on (i) the links between these thinkers and various contemporary developments, (ii) the wisdom of employing the term Cultural Marxism, and (iii) how Christians should respond to the current “culture wars” that are polarizing the Western world.

Hans Madueme

Adam and Sin as the Bane of Evolution? A Review of Finding Ourselves After Darwin

The diverse essays in Stanley Rosenberg’s edited volume Finding Ourselves After Darwin: Conversations on the Image of God, Original Sin, and the Problem of Evil (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018) offer a Christian analysis of the human person in light of evolutionary thinking. The recommendations to revise our understanding of original sin and theodicy raise particularly challenging questions. Traditional interpretations of Scripture, for instance, are often devalued in order to reduce tensions with our current scientific understanding. Additionally, the more radical arguments undercut doctrines that earlier Christians believed are pivotal to the biblical story. Overall, these noteworthy essays represent a wide range of creative possibilities for updating our theological anthropology in line with a post-Darwinian setting, but they are less convincing when justifying the theological cost for doing so.

William D. Mounce

Do Formal Equivalent Translations Reflect a Higher View of Plenary, Verbal Inspiration?

The article begins by establishing five categories of translation theory and argues that functional translations like the NIV do in fact reflect the meaning of every Greek word, but not in the same way as formal equivalent translations do. Therefore, formal equivalent translations cannot claim a higher view of inspiration.

Matthew Swale

Power for Prayer through the Psalms: Cassiodorus’s Interpretation of the Honey of Souls

Exegesis, prayer, and spiritual formation converge in the Psalms commentary written by Cassiodorus (490–584). Each psalm’s exegesis ends with a “conclusion” considering the implications for morality, doctrine, or prayer. This study focuses on how Cassiodorus’s exegesis of the Psalms provides power for prayer. First, Cassiodorus’s rich expositions of the Psalms of Ascent and Psalm 142 illustrate his approach to the Psalter as God’s provision of superior, life-changing words. Second, prayer flows from Cassiodorus’s handling of individual psalms in four ways: prayerful exegesis, prayer exemplars, prayer templates, and prayer as the means to psalmic formation.

Kenneth J. Stewart

The Oxford Movement and Evangelicalism: Initial Encounters

Commemorations of the birth of the Oxford Movement (later known as Anglo-Catholicism) have regularly intimated certain early commonalities with evangelicalism, especially within the Church of England. It was so at the 1933 centenary of the launch of the movement; such hypotheses have been given fresh life with the 2017 release of the Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement. This essay examines the basis for these suggestions and finds them wanting.

Kyle Beshears

Athens without a Statue to the Unknown God

Apatheism is indifference and apathy toward the existence of God. In our secular age, a person adopts apatheism when they feel a sense of existential security absent God, effectively dissolving their reason, motivation, and will to care about questions related to his existence. This indifference presents a stronger challenge for evangelism than does religious pluralism, agnosticism, and atheism. For this reason, evangelicals ought to explore ways of engaging apatheism.

Mark Boone

Inerrancy Is Not a Strong or Classical Foundationalism

The general idea of strong foundationalism is that knowledge is founded on well warranted beliefs that do not derive any warrant from other beliefs and that all our other beliefs depend on these foundational ones for their warrant. Although inerrancy posits Scripture as a solid foundation for theology, the idea that the doctrine of biblical inerrancy involves a strong foundationalist epistemology is deeply problematic. In fact, inerrancy does not require any particular view of the structure of knowledge, and notable sources on inerrancy tout it in ways inconsistent with most forms of strong foundationalism.

Daniel Wiley

The God Who Reveals: A Response to J.L. Schellenberg’s Hiddenness Argument

The challenge of divine hiddenness has become one of the greatest advocates for skepticism in modern philosophical debate. From this challenge, Schellenberg has developed the now acclaimed hiddenness argument. For Schellenberg, an all-loving God would be always open to personal relationships with finite creatures, and thus all nonbelief would derive from resistance to God. However, the existence of nonresistant nonbelievers, or those who have never resisted the idea of God, must prove that God does not exist, for surely an all-loving God would leave enough evidence of himself to convince finite creatures of his existence and prevent nonresistant nonbelief. In response, I argue that (1) openness to personal relationships and love are not as correlated as the hiddenness argument demands, (2) nonresistant nonbelief is not provable, and (3) Schellenberg fails to reason to God’s omni-benevolence apart from Scripture.

Book Reviews

Paul S. Fiddes on Literature, Imagination, and Christian Doctrine

Paul S. Fiddes, Freedom and Limit: A Dialogue Between Literature and Christian Doctrine, Studies in Literature and Religion (London: Macmillan, 1991).

Paul Fiddes sets out to show how the images and stories of literature can help make meaningful doctrinal statements, and how theology can aid in the reading of literary texts. He does this in dialogue with William Blake, Gerard Manley Hopkins, D.H. Lawrence, Iris Murdoch, and William Golding.

According to Fiddes, stories and poems ‘offer a new world to our imagination in two ways – consoling us with the assurance of order in an everyday world that appears random and chaotic, and promising something new in a world that appears dulled by routine’ (5).

‘The story with its “once upon a time” offers us the hope of ever-open beginnings in a world where nothing seems new under the sun. It invites us to immerse ourselves into lives other than our own, to extend our range of consciousness’ (5-6).

Poetic images and metaphors have can have a similar effect on us. Unexpected imagery, especially, ‘seems to dissolve the world as we know it, to disintegrate the familiar in preparation for a new order’ (7).

However...

‘The quest for a new world in literature would be mere escapism if we did not feel that the text was reaching beyond itself to something of “ultimate concern” to us’ (8).

‘In poetry, drama and novel, the imagination thus reaches out towards mystery, towards a reality that is our final concern but which eludes empirical investigation and bursts rational concepts. The power of making pictures in the human mind (“imagination”), transcends itself towards something Other than the world which lies open to scientific discovery’ (11).

If novels, poetry and drama contain a movement towards mystery, is the same true of Christian belief? In one sense, says Fiddes, yes:

‘Holy scripture... is itself a piece of literature containing narrative, poetry and drama with all the openness to multiple meaning that these have. The character of scripture should, indeed, lead us to realise that the primary forms of talk about God are metaphor and story, and that they invite an assent of faith which is like the imaginative assent we give to these forms in literature’ (12).

Fiddes briefly discusses four types of movement towards mystery: correspondence, personal insight, symbolic vision, and negative catalyst (15-22). Such a movement, he says, appears to stand in contrast to Christian doctrine:

‘The movement towards mystery is playful and questing, and lays a stress upon the autonomy of the imagination to create something new... Conversely, the theologian is always bound to be responsible to what he believes has been revealed in a movement from Mystery Itself’ (22).

However, when we consider revelation, the gap is narrowed. First, if revelation is not first and foremost the disclosure of propositions, but the very being of God himself, then ‘revelation can be nothing less than an encounter with the speaking God, where “speech” is understood as self-expression, an opening and an offer of the divine Self’ (22). Thus, the concepts of Christian doctrine are a ‘response and witness to revelation, not revelation in the immediate sense’, and the Bible can become ‘a place of encounter with the same God who unveiled himself to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and who finally disclosed himself in Christ’ (23).

Fiddes goes on to say that such a view of revelation has affinities with a view that literary texts ‘open up a new world to the reader through encounter and living interaction with the text rather than directly through any concepts it contains’ (23-24).

Thus, when it comes to revelation, ‘we may find the abiding substance of Christian doctrine neither in religious experience nor in a “deposit” of truth, but in a story – the story of Jesus in the context of the biblical narrative of God’s dealings with his people Israel’ (25).

‘We can see a parallel between the theological appeal to revelation and the use of imagination in literature; in both cases there is a story which calls for attention in its own right, which demands that we notice it, and take account of it as it is. We are not to treat the story as a storehouse for our own preconceptions’ (25-26).

He cautions:

‘However, if the story with which Christian doctrine is concerned, and which it affirms as the story which makes sense of all others, is to be the same story through every age, there have to be some agreed concepts connected with it. In the first place, the achievement of Jesus is to be understood in the context of God and his relationship to the world’ (26).

‘Thus, there is an indissoluble difference between the place of story in doctrine on the one hand and in literary imagination on the other; Christian theologians, working from belief in revelation, are moving within restraints that are not laid upon the novelist. Imaginative writers may, nevertheless, recognise their own kind of limits and tensions... It also remains to be shown that there is not only a parallel, but actually a union between revelation and imagination’ (26).

Fiddes takes the literary imagination to be ‘one type of response to “general” revelation (31). Even though creative writers might not understand themselves to be responding to divine revelation, it is ‘consistent with experience for a Christian theologian to interpret their work (even if they do not) as one kind of response to God’s offer of himself, in encounter between divine and human personality’ (32).

Gabriel Fackre on the Doctrine of Revelation

Gabriel Fackre, The Doctrine of Revelation: A Narrative Interpretation, Edinburgh Studies in Constructive Theology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997).

Following the previous entry on the book by Gregory C. Higgins which tries to match a distinctive emphasis of a particular theologian on to a specific part of the biblical story line, I was reminded of Gabriel Fackre’s 1997 volume on the doctrine of revelation which does something similar.

As well as containing individual narratives, the Bible tells an ‘overarching story’, and Fackre explores the doctrine of revelation from this perspective, tracing it through various stages of the biblical story. God is revealed as the main character in a continuous and coherent narrative, divided into several ‘chapters’ – creation, fall, covenant with Noah, covenant with Israel, Jesus Christ, Scripture, the Church, salvation, and the consummation.

Fackre uses the narrative structure as a framework in which to discuss the views of various theologians on revelation. Some theologians, he claims, choose to focus on one phase in the narrative rather than another. But why not look at the whole story?

He takes his cue from William Abraham:

‘Divine revelation must not be approached in independence from delineating the divine activity through which God reveals Himself. To pick out any one act or activity as the essence of revelation is to miss the total picture, yet this is what has happened in the history of the doctrine of revelation. One generation focuses on divine creation as the bearer of revelation; another in reaction focuses on divine speaking to prophets and apostles; another focuses on Jesus Christ as the bearer of revelation; another highlights the supreme significance of the inner illumination of the Holy Spirit; yet another argues that revelation comes only at the end of history… What unites each element to the other is a narrative of God’s action that stretches from creation to the end.’

[William J. Abraham, Divine Revelation and the Limits of Historical Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 13.]

Fackre thus seeks for a more comprehensive approach to revelation.

After an Introduction (outlining models of revelation and his own narrative interpretation), and a Prologue (on God, ‘the trinitarian source of disclosure’), the individual chapter titles are as follows:

1. Creation: The Invitation to know God
2. The Fall: The Noetic Consequences of Sin
3. The Covenant with Noah: The Grace of Preservation
4. The Covenant with Israel: Elective Action
5. Jesus Christ: Incarnate Action
6. Scripture: Inspiration
7. The Church: Ecclesial Illumination
8. Salvation: Personal Illumination
9. Consummation: Eschatological Illumination

In the epilogue he writes:

‘Viewed from the vantage point of the journey traversed, the Christian doctrine of revelation affirms that the triune God by a common grace gives sustaining glimpses of the divine purpose, and by anticipatory action in Israel and definitive incarnation in Jesus Christ discloses who God is and what God wills, as communicated to us by inspired Scripture appropriated by an illumined church and believer, and revealed in its full glory at the End’ (226).

John Stott on the Bible 2

John R.W. Stott, You Can Trust the Bible: Our Foundation for Belief and Obedience (Grand Rapids: Discovery House, 1991, first published in the UK by IVP in 1982 with the title The Bible: Book for Today).

See here for an introduction to the book.

In chapter 1 – ‘God and the Bible’ – Stott takes his cue from Isaiah 55:8-11…

‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,’
declares the LORD.
‘As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
As the rain and the snow come down from heaven,
and do not return to it without watering the earth
and making it bud and flourish,
so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater,
so is my word that goes out from my mouth:
It will not return to me empty,
but will accomplish what I desire
and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.’

… from which he draws three lessons:

• The reasonableness of revelation
• The way of revelation
• The purpose of revelation

The reasonableness of revelation
Men and women will not discover God by their own unaided intellect (‘My ways… your ways’, etc.). Given the difficulty even of reading the mind of others, let alone God’s thoughts, ‘it is only reasonable to say… that unless God takes the initiative to disclose what is is His mind, we shall never be able to find out’ (14).

The way of revelation
God has revealed himself to us in the way we reveal ourselves to others – by works and words, the things we do and say. God is seen in his works (e.g., Psalm 19:1; Romans 1:19-20), his revelation in nature, but especially through his words, ‘the main model used in the Bible to illustrate God’s self-revelation’ (16).

With a sideways nod to 2 Timothy 3:16, Stott writes that Scripture is ‘God’s Word, issuing from God’s mouth’ (17).

Stott notes here that ‘God’s Word… was closely related to His activity’, which entails that we should not make a sharp distinction between ‘personal’ revelation and ‘propositional’ revelation. God’s words interpreted his deeds, as ‘He raised up the prophets to explain what He was doing to Israel, and He raised up the apostles to explain what He was doing through Christ’ (18).

In addition, ‘God’s Word had come to us through human words’ (19). God spoke through prophets and through apostles. Inspiration was not a mechanical process, but ‘a personal process, in which the human authors were usually in full possession of their faculties’ (19) and used their distinctive literary styles.

Such ‘double authorship’ is affirmed in the Bible itself, where the law is sometimes ‘the law of Moses’ and sometimes ‘the law of the Lord’, and where God speaks through the prophets. Although it is not an exact analogy, since Jesus is a person not a book, ‘as in the incarnate Word (Christ), so in the written Word (the Bible) the divine and human elements combine and do not contradict one another’ (20).

‘On the one hand, the Bible is the Word of God. God spoke, deciding Himself what He intended to say, yet not in such a way as to distort the personality of the human authors. On the other hand, the Bible is the word of men. Men spoke, using their faculties freely, yet not in such a way as to distort the truth of the divine message’ (20).

The Bible’s double authorship affects the way we read it: because it is the words of human beings, we study it as we would every other book, using normal methods of investigation; because it is the Word of God, we study it ‘like no other book’ (21).

The purpose of revelation
Why did God speak? To instruct us ‘for salvation’ (2 Timothy 3:15). Just as the rain and snow accomplish a purpose (Isaiah 55:10-11), so ‘God’s Word, issuing from His mouth and disclosing His mind, does not return to Him empty’ (21). It bears fruit, saving people and changing them into the likeness of Christ (salvation is in the context – Isaiah 55:7, 12).

Stott concludes with a call to humility – acknowledging the limitations of the human mind and our sinfulness, and sitting under God’s Word, ‘eager to hear it, grasp it, apply it, and obey it in the practicalities of daily living’ (23).