Transcription
It's very easy to get God wrong. It's very easy to have false views of God. The last line in the first letter of John is, "Little children, keep yourselves from idols." John Calvin once said that the human mind is a perpetual factory of idols. We're constantly imagining gods who don't really exist because they're easier to deal with.
The question of right doctrine or wrong doctrine are, as it were, symptoms of whether you're on the right path or not. If there is a hierarchy between the three persons, do you believe, for instance, the Father is superior to Jesus and the Holy Spirit?
The word "hierarchy," I don't think, is really helpful. People from the beginning have said God is beyond gender. But if we're confused, face it: the Western world has been confused about gender roles and identities for the last generation. It's time, hopefully, we move beyond that and settle down again.
Forgiveness is not simply a private transaction between me and God. As in the New Testament, forgiveness involves being part of a community that is formed by forgiveness.
The Ask ENT WR Anything podcast. Great to be with you again, Tom. Thank you for today's edition of the program. We're going to be talking about doctrine on today's edition, specifically the Trinity and baptism.
Here's a first general question from Andrew in Aberdeen, who says, "Hello, I'm a first-year university student studying Divinity at Aberdeen University. Something mentioned a fair bit last semester was heresy, and my question is this: How far does having the right view of God act in salvation? Obviously, we're saved by grace alone, but there must be a point when someone is no longer worshiping the true God. Maybe you can help in this."
So, how far does our view of God have to be doctrinally correct before we can say we are a Christian? Yes, the problem about saying that phrase "doctrinally correct" is that it presses all the wrong buttons in our culture. It sounds cold and static and mechanistic, etc.
I want to say it's very easy to get God wrong. It's very easy to have false views of God. The last line in the first letter of John is, "Little children, keep yourselves from idols." John Calvin once said that the human mind is a perpetual factory of idols. We're constantly imagining gods who don't really exist because they're easier to deal with.
The God who does really exist is the one who made the whole world and came to rescue and restore the world in Jesus. The more we look at Jesus, the more we understand who this God is. This God is all-consuming, all-demanding, all-loving, all-wise, and that's very difficult to do business with.
So, the church has developed traditions of worship to say if you're serious about this, then here are wise ways in which your prayer can lead you into the heart of that mystery. It remains a mystery. God remains a mystery.
The question of right doctrine or wrong doctrine are, as it were, symptoms of whether you're on the right path or not. It's like when you go to the doctor and you're worried about a persistent itch or something, and the doctor says, "Hmm, we better have a look at that."
He takes a little bit of skin or something and then does chemical tests on it. It's not that being human means having the right sort of little bit of skin on that point in your arm. It's that this may be a telltale sign that something is going on which could eventually kill you or not, as the case may be.
So, if somebody were to say, "I think that actually the idea of the Trinity is rubbish. I think that there's just the one and that Jesus is just a distant reflection," then one might say, "Well, you're on the way. Keep reading the Bible, keep saying your prayers. This will sort itself out on the way."
Or you might say, "If you're distancing Jesus from your picture of God, watch out because this may be like the little bit of skin that may be the telltale sign that you're actually moving away from the thing which actually reveals who the true God is and which will then draw you into the fullness of life in him."
I suppose what I'm getting from this question from Andrew is there's this concern that if you don't have the right view, you won't be saved. Now, I'm very glad that I'm not saved by having the right theology, or else who could be saved?
But there is that sense in which what I get from you there, Tom, is the idea that if you're moving away from the picture of God as revealed in Jesus, then you're moving away from the path he's laid out for us.
Yes, and clearly there are theologies of justification hovering in the background here. What does justification by faith mean if faith includes specific propositional statements like "Jesus is Lord" and "God raised him from the dead"?
If somebody says, "Jesus is not Lord and God didn't raise him from the dead," then I think there are serious questions to be asked about which God it is you're worshiping. Particularly, has your life been grasped by the gospel and Spirit so that you are now a new creature in Christ?
Because if you have been, then there are certain things which ought to show up. You know, like again the medical analogy: if this person is really getting better, then they will be either putting on weight or maybe taking it off, depending on what was wrong with them in the first place, and their skin will be a more healthy color, etc.
It's not that the aim of the doctor is that you have skin of a certain color. It's that these are telltale signs of what's going on inside.
So, if somebody says to me, "Somebody wrote me the other day and said, 'Well, I read a bit of what you'd written on the resurrection, and it doesn't make any sense to me because we know that dead people don't rise, and so clearly Jesus didn't rise from the dead,'" and on and on and on, page after page after page telling me why I'm wrong about this, I want to say, "Yeah, I understand those arguments. You're actually distorting various things, but it looks to me as though what you're basically saying is, 'I do not believe in a God of new creation.'"
I want to say the God of the Bible is a God of creation and new creation. If you want to say, "I really don't believe in that God," well then, you really don't believe in that God.
You know, in a sense, Pascal's wager: you might be right, but I don't think you are. Because as I look at Jesus, I actually see new creation. And I then see, as C.S. Lewis said again, we keep quoting him, "I believe that Jesus is Lord in the same way that I believe that the sun has risen, not because I can see it, because actually it dazzles me, but because I can see everything else."
Yes, I'm sure we'll kind of talk more generally about the way doctrine works as we go through these questions, but specifically the Trinity came up from various people.
Here's David in Massachusetts to start us off. He says, "The Trinity seems to be a critical and core theological doctrine, and yet not laid out in scripture as simply or obviously as I might expect or want. Could you help me with that?"
Yes, I hope I can. What the third, fourth, and fifth-century fathers expressed in terms of Trinity is expressed in the New Testament very clearly, but not in that philosophical formulation. I'm not saying they were wrong to do the philosophical formulation. They were grasped by the reality which is expressed in the New Testament.
Then, as their surrounding pagan culture was saying, "What are you saying about God?" they were drawing on various different bits of philosophy, including bits of Stoicism, bits of Platonism, to say, "Well, it's something like this."
Yet, you can see the line of thought going that way doesn't necessarily work the other way. One of the great theologians of my youth, Henry Chadwick, who was a wonderful professor in both Oxford and then Cambridge and a great man of God, once wrote an article about the famous statement of Chalcedon, which is 451 AD, that Jesus is fully God and fully man.
He said, "Yeah, Chalcedon got this right, got this right, got this right, but if we started with Chalcedon, we would never have guessed that the Jesus that they're talking about is the Jesus of Matthew, Mark, and Luke and John."
Because in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, he leaps off the page as this alive character. He's not just a combination of static philosophical categories.
Now, here's the thing: if I was to do a longer answer to this good person, I would want to go to passages like 1 Corinthians, like Galatians. Actually, I think Galatians is the earliest Christian letter. Even if it's not the earliest, it's pretty early.
In Galatians 4, Paul says that God has rescued us by sending his own Son. Then, because he's rescued us through the Son, he has sent his own Spirit to cry, "Abba, Father," within us.
Then he says this is Galatians 4:8 and following: "So you've got a choice. You either go with this God or it's some form of idolatry."
I want to say from that moment on, if the doctrine of the Trinity didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent it. This is the God who sends the Son and the God who sends the Spirit of the Son.
But it's a narrative. It's an exodus-like narrative. It's a rescuing, new creational narrative. What happens in the Exodus is God rescues his people, and he comes to dwell with them in the Tabernacle, in the tent.
That's where the idea of God who is both over against us and in our midst and the rescuing one—that sounds like the Trinity to me.
I suppose the reason why they felt the need to, in a sense, codify it philosophically speaking in those councils was because there were many other competing ideas, obviously, at the time. People had very different ideas.
To some extent, obviously, by and large, Christian denominations, whatever their flavor, tend to hold in common a Trinitarian view. The ones that deny that, be they Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormonism, whatever, tend to—that tends to be the issue that divides.
So, why would you say it's so integral to Christian orthodoxy, this particular issue, over and above something like baptism, which we'll come to, or any other issue?
It is because ultimately we are in the God business. People in the modern West, I think, have started to realize now that the word "God" is not univocal. When I was growing up, people assumed that if somebody said the word "God," they were talking about the same thing.
"Do you believe in God or don't you?" The right answer to that question is, "Which God are we talking about?" Because there are many gods. In the New Testament world, there were many, many gods. Paul says there are many gods and many lords.
But then look what Paul does in 1 Corinthians 8. He says, "For us, there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and we to him, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things."
What's he doing? He's taking the Jewish confession of faith, the Shema: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one." It's clear in the Greek what he's doing. He is discovering Jesus inside the definition of the one God.
That's how the church is marked out over against the pagan world around. We are one God, one Lord people. Then, as he says in 1 Corinthians 12, "No one can say that except by the Holy Spirit."
So, in 1 Corinthians 12, again it becomes Trinitarian. I know Richard Bauckham, in his book "Jesus and the God of Israel," also did that. I thought quite revelatory work for me, at least as someone who's new to it, looking at, I think, Philippians and that obviously very divine passage about Jesus, not choosing equality with God, making himself nothing, but then giving him the name that is above every name in the end and effectively putting him on, saying, "You know, this is Yahweh now, you know it also as Jesus."
Absolutely, and that remains the mystery. That's there in glimpses in the Old Testament, like in Daniel 7, when it says, "Thrones were set in heaven. The Ancient of Days took his seat, and then one like a son of man came and was presented and took his seat next to the Ancient of Days. To him was given dominion."
Some of the early rabbis puzzled about that. "So are there two powers in heaven?" The answer is no. This is the one throne of the one God, but it is shared with somebody who is a son of man.
I will come to more questions, but another question just occurred to me then. Granted that Paul and the early Christians were worshiping God as Jesus as God from a very early stage, to what extent do you think Jesus himself was aware of his divinity?
The way I put it is in terms of vocation. I think that's very clear that Jesus' baptism, as in Mark 1 and so on, something happens which doesn't create a vocation out of nothing but dramatically confirms a vocation which is already there.
That vocation is expressed in terms of Psalm 2: "You are my Son; this day have I begotten you," and Isaiah 42: "Behold my servant whom I've chosen, the one in whom I delight."
The way that I would put it—and interestingly, another book you should read if you haven't already is Richard Hays' book "Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels," which brings a lot of this into fresh light—I believe that Jesus from his earliest days was aware of a vocation to do and be this character that Scripture was speaking of, aware that strangely in those same passages, this is how God himself expresses himself as a human being.
That's very mysterious. But ultimately, I think it goes back to Genesis 1, the creation of man and woman in God's image. God creates human beings against the day when he will come and himself be, if you like, a character in his own play, or the character in his own play to do what only he can do.
I believe Jesus had that as a vocation. Now, many people—one of the privileges of my life is I've worked with a lot of people struggling with their vocations, and I know kind of how it goes.
Sometimes from quite an early day, people are aware, "I think maybe I'm supposed to do X, Y, and Z." Sometimes that's just a fantasy, and it's all wrong, and it doesn't happen, and they're stupid, and they need to unlearn that.
Other times, things that there have been glimmers of then do actually come, and it turns out, "Yep, they were right. That really was what God wanted to do." It seems to me Jesus was aware richly, deeply of that vocation from his earliest days to do and be what in Scripture only God gets to do and be.
Yes, we must go to some of the questions that are here. Jason asks about whether there's any hierarchy. Jason is in Dallas. He says, "Would you mind expounding on the Trinity and discussing if there is a hierarchy between the three persons? Do you believe, for instance, the Father is superior to Jesus and the Holy Spirit?"
The word "hierarchy," I don't think, is really helpful. I mean, you do have those passages where Philippians 2, which you just quoted, "Every tongue should confess Jesus is Lord to the glory of God the Father."
In 1 Corinthians 15, you have the Son who is ruling at the moment, and when he has overcome all enemies, including death, he will present to the Father the kingdom which is now complete. Then it says the Son will be subjected to the Father so that God may be all in all.
I think these are ways of saying something which is almost unsayable, ways for which we don't have very good language. I think to step back and say, "Oh, it looks like a hierarchy, so you've got the Father and the Son is definitely down there somewhere, and then the Spirit is somewhere else we're not sure where," that's kind of missing the point.
That's not what those ways of speaking were designed to do. These are ways of saying—and in both cases echoing Isaiah, echoing the Psalms particularly—go back and live within the narrative of Isaiah and the Psalms, and there you find that the Creator God, who is overall and above all and beyond all, nevertheless dwells with those who are humble and contrite in heart, dwells in the temple in Jerusalem.
It's that to and fro within which the story makes sense. You know, it's like I'm not an engineer, I'm not an architect. If I was planning to build a house to live in, there are all sorts of things where I would just have to trust that the architect seems to know what the stresses and strains are in this building.
When I shut the front door, I'll trust that the roof isn't going to collapse on my head. At a certain point, that's what theology is like. The more you live in the house, the more it works. The more you say, "Yes, I see we have this and we have that, and here I am, and I can now..."
I don't want to be purely pragmatic. It's not just it seems to work for me, though there is an element of that about it.
Of course, another question here on the persons of the Trinity. Toby in Church Stretton, Shropshire, asks, "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or Creator, Savior, and Sustainer? Is there really a problem with the gender of the Trinity, and can we have a personal relationship with a job title?"
That's a very good question because over the last 20, 30 years, some people, seeking to be sensitive to the fact that many women have found the church's practice as well as the church's language to be bruising and dismissive, you know, as though, "Well, God is the sort of male one, and then you women are out there somewhere."
People have tried to say, "Well, instead of Father, Son, Spirit, let's try these other things." The problem with that is that in Scripture and in all the great theologians, the word "Creator" properly goes with Father and Son and Spirit.
The word "Redeemer" goes with Father and Son and Spirit. "Sanctifier" likewise. Everything that God does, God does triune. So, if you try and split these up, you're not any longer talking about the Trinity.
It is the Trinity which is the gold standard. Of course, we say, "Oh, well, we know that many people have suffered from having abusive fathers or whatever." People in the first century knew that as well just as well as we did.
It's like the language of kingdom. People say, "Oh, we don't do kingdom language because we know that kings are tyrants and they are abusive." Excuse me, who did they have as kings in the first century? They had Herod, they had Caesar.
Yet Jesus talks about God's kingship because he's reclaiming the idea of God's wise, just, healing, redemptive sovereignty. Yes, I understand why people might want to find other ways of saying things for a short-term purpose, but don't think that those alternative blessings are Trinitarian because they're really not.
If we're blessing somebody in the name of the true God, which is what ministers ought to be doing, then let's make sure it is in the name of the true God.
I'm tempted to go off in the direction of that old chestnut of whether we should use female or male pronouns for God, but we'll leave that for another episode, I think, because that's a whole discussion in itself.
People from the beginning have said God is beyond gender, right? But if we're confused, face it: the Western world has been confused about gender roles and identities for the last generation. It's time, hopefully, we move beyond that and settle down again.
Once that confusion is going on, everything feels awkward. Let's live through that awkwardness and hopefully come out the other side.
Let's turn to the other doctrine. We'll have to deal with this more briefly than the Trinity, but baptism was another subject that a number of people have written in about.
Here's James in China who says, "No, actually, let's do Oscar first of all in the Netherlands. In your answers, you often underline the importance of baptism. In my conversations with pastors from other denominations, I notice a growing openness towards different forms or ways to baptize: infant, adults, water on the forehead, full immersion. So where do you stand on what Oscar calls the friendly discussion about baptism?"
Yeah, I remember being in a discussion in Rome, an ecumenical discussion some years ago, where some of the Roman Catholic theologians were saying that there are two great ecumenical instruments: baptism and the Bible, the two Bs, which is really exciting because actually, officially, if somebody moves from being Roman Catholic to being Anglican or vice versa, they don't get re-baptized because we recognize one another's baptisms.
Actually, I, of course, recognize if somebody has been baptized in a Baptist church with full immersion, they've been baptized. Sadly, not all Baptists will recognize that I've been baptized because I was sprinkled as a child.
I know that that remains a bone of contention. It's a curiously modern bone of contention. I'm not an expert on early Baptist history, but the fact is that the church baptized infants right the way through from very early on.
Of course, there is a debate as to whether that happened in the New Testament. It seems to me obvious that it did, but not everyone agrees with me. But certainly from the 2nd century right the way through, there is a peculiarity about that—not that the church cannot have gone wrong for those years, because I think it has in some ways.
But I want to say, hang on, what are we saying about all sorts of things at this point? Most Christians recognize most other Christians as fellow Christians, however they've been baptized.
Then the question is, what does baptism mean and why do we do it? That has to do with the fact that Christianity is not a form of Platonism, which is about something internal purely for which the outward thing would only be a vague visual aid.
But it is about a community. It's a community which is formed by the death and resurrection of Jesus. Jesus himself was baptized by John in the River Jordan, and his early followers were people who had been baptized by John and then by Jesus' own followers.
That obviously continued in the early church, and that wasn't just some odd magical thing. It was evoking the crossing of the Red Sea and the crossing of the River Jordan, so the book of Exodus and the book of Joshua.
It was saying that we are the new Exodus people, and that means we are the people of new creation. That means that we take this precious symbol, water, which goes right back to Genesis 1.
You know, that out of the waters of chaos, God brings new life. It says we are people of new creation, and that matters bodily. It matters that that's happened in my personal history, not in my imagination or in my inner spirit leaving my body unaffected.
That's why Luther says that the Christian life is a daily baptism, a daily dying to sin and coming to life with God. So all of that matters in a way which goes beyond the mere visual aid idea, which is easier for Western Christians to slip back into if they're not careful.
Let's go to James in China now, who asks, "Does one receive forgiveness at the time of baptism into Christ—immersion in water preceded by faith in Jesus as Messiah or repentance and confession of Christ?" He illustrates that with a number of passages: Mark 1:41, 16:15, Luke 3:3, Acts 2:38, and various others.
But it's an idea I've seen, you know, that people can get hung up sometimes on the specific language that accompanies baptism in the gospels and the Acts. That obviously, even denominations have emerged out of this idea that actually it is the act of baptism that imparts, if you like, the forgiveness and so on.
Yes, it seems to me that anyone who turns to God, who simply, whether they kneel down or stand up or whatever, says to God, "Lord, I am a mess. Sorry about that. Please forgive me because of Jesus," I want to say that person receives forgiveness right then and there.
However, forgiveness is not simply a private transaction between me and God. As in the New Testament, forgiveness involves being part of a community that are formed by forgiveness, that know themselves to be the people who've been rescued from Egypt, as it were, the people who've come out from the land of sin and slavery and are now in this strange, dangerous new creation place.
Hence, they have to offer one another forgiveness as well. So what baptism does is it brings you, ideally, into the community where the word "forgiveness" is over the door.
So in that sense, yes, personally, you can know God's forgiveness right now. And that's so for practicing Christians. When we sin, we can know God's forgiveness right now.
But often, as the church has discovered over the years, when somebody who is a Christian has done something which they know is wrong, sometimes they find it hard to forgive themselves.
Sometimes the only way they can really be assured of God's forgiveness is by somebody in the community, perhaps somebody in authority in the community, assuring them almost formally that, "Yes, you are part of this forgiveness community, and God forgives you."
So the baptism, bringing you into the community, is also the means by which that sense that you may or may not have as a sinner that God has forgiven you—the fact that you are welcomed into this community—often that's the thing that really makes people know it's true: "I am forgiven. These people love me."
Isn't that wonderful? There's a wonderful viral video. I don't know if you've seen it. It's in a sort of African-American congregation, and the minister has a boy, probably sort of 11 or 12, who he's going to baptize by full immersion.
The minister's going on at some length, and the boy eventually says, "I can't wait any longer." He holds his nose and he dunks himself under. It's tremendous fun, but there's a sense of the expectation and joy in that particular video.
As somebody who does believe in infant baptism, I've baptized my own children and two or three of my five grandchildren. I've baptized—that is a very special moment.
But equally, there are very special moments for young adults, and in my tradition, that's confirmation, etc. It is indeed, though I must confess I have seen one or two Anglican churches, more evangelical ones, something almost like rebaptism happening where perhaps because someone comes to faith really as an adult but has been baptized.
I think it still goes under the label of reaffirmation of baptismal vows, but nonetheless, water is involved and so on. What do you think of that? How closely does that become a sort of second baptism?
Second baptism is a contradiction in terms. You know, it's baptism by definition is once. You can't come into the house twice. However, if somebody has behaved as if they weren't in the house, then there may be all sorts of ways of recognizing and celebrating under God their returning to the family.
But I wouldn't myself go anywhere near treating that as a second baptism. What we've often done, and is now quite regular, I think, in the Church of England, is where you have confirmation services, of which, of course, I've done quite a lot, you also have baptism services as part of the service.
So people who haven't been baptized get baptized and confirmed in the same event. But then often the confirmation candidates and sometimes the whole congregation will come to the font, dip their finger in, and make the sign of the cross to reaffirm their baptismal vows.
This is not a rebaptism, but here's the point: we in the West have often thought of baptism as something which we do to this candidate. I think it's better to see baptism as one of the things which the church regularly does to say, "This is who we are in Christ."
Like the breaking of bread and the wine, the Eucharist, whatever we call it, that's one of the things we do which affirms and embodies who we are in Christ.
So baptism is something that we all do together frequently, into which we incorporate this person who's come as a candidate. I would rather think of it like that rather than something which is just us doing it to this one person.
It's been tremendous stuff, thank you. We're already at the end of today's program, but we've covered Trinity and baptism. That's not bad going for half an hour, say.
Anyway, thank you very much. There are many other questions of doctrine that I'm sure we'll come to in another edition of the program in due course because that's always various things that people are interested in finding your thoughts on.
But for the moment, we'll leave it there. Until next time, thanks for being with me. Thank you. Pleasure. [Music]