Thankful Thursday

It’s been a very busy day, so here I am, late at night, writing today’s thanksgiving post. I’m ending my day on a thankful note and that’s a good way to finish up, isn’t it?

I’m thankful that God gives me energy to work hard. I’m thankful that he gives thoughts to think and words to speak. I’m thankful that he gives wisdom for planning and strength for doing.

I’m thankful that God kept me and my family safe as we went about our business today. 

I’m thankful that today’s big boiling dyeing disaster in the kitchen cleaned up pretty well. 

I’m thankful for open windows and summer breezes. I’m also thankful for the first fresh rhubarb picked and washed and waiting in the fridge for me to turn it into pie or crisp.

While I’m listing, let me say that I’m thankful for mosquito repellent. 

And I’m thankful for a comfortable bed at the end of the day.

Throughout this year I’m planning to post a few thoughts of thanksgiving each Thursday along with Kim at the Upward Call and others.

Christianity and Liberalism: Chapter 3

Guess what? I still don’t have a copy of Christianity and Liberalism. I first ordered it on May 12, and twice since UPS has returned my order to Amazon.ca as “undeliverable.” On Tuesday a lovely man in the help department of Amazon.ca told me that they’d been having problems with UPS shipments to the territories, and he could solve my problem (so he thought) by shipping my order express mail for free. It was all good until that night when Canada Post locked their workers out and the mail service in Canada stopped completely. So I’ve still got no book and I don’t know when or if I’ll ever have one. But I do have a PDF copy, and I’ve printed the chapter so I can still participate in Tim Challies’ Reading Classics Together.

This week’s chapter discusses the doctrines of God and man. These two doctrines, writes Machen,” are the two great presuppositions of the gospel. It follows then that any faith system that gets the doctrine of God and the doctrine of man fundamentally wrong is not really Christianity at all. What Machen shows us in this chapter is that on both of these points “modern liberalism is diametrically opposed to Christianity.” 

True Christianity teaches objective truth about God. God is not known merely through our feelings of him, but by what reveals about himself to us. Some modern liberals, however, consider it unnecessary to have any kind of concept of God in order to know him, but believe that feeling a sort of God-presence is enough.

Others among them say that it is only through the life of Jesus that we understand God’s character. In response to this, Machen argues that while it is true that the incarnate Christ revealed God, he revealed him against the backdrop of “the Old Testament heritage and of Jesus’ own teaching.” When Jesus says that those “who have seen me have seen the Father,” it is assumed that those who learn more of God from Jesus already have a concept of God. Jesus himself, Machen says, was a theist, and likewise, “at the very root of Christianity is the belief in the real existence of God.”

The one definitive term that you might find a liberal using in regards to God is “Father,” and even then, what they mean by the fatherhood of God is something completely different than what a Christian means by the it. God is not, according to true Christianity, just a kind of universal Father to all humankind. 

The gospel itself refers to something entirely different; the really distinctive New Testament teaching about the fatherhood of God concerns only those who have been brought into the household of faith. 

When summing up the section on the doctrine of God, Machen writes that modern liberalism may not be completely pantheistic, but it is certainly “pantheizing,” for it obscures the distinction between God and man, or God and the world. 

Modern liberalism pantheizes when it comes to the doctrine of man, too, because of its tendency to deny the creaturely limitations of mankind. What’s more, it minimizes the effects of sin. In true Christianity, the very starting point of faith is facing the reality of sin. Machen puts this common loss of consciousness of sin down to 

a mighty spiritual process which has been active during the past seventy-five years. … The change is nothing less than the substitution of paganism for Christianity as the dominant view of life. Seventy-five years ago, Western civilization, despite inconsistencies, was still predominantly Christian; today it is predominantly pagan.

Paganism has a high view of the human nature, whereas Christianity “is the religion of the broken heart.” It doesn’t end there, mind you, but it always starts with the consciousness of the depth of sin. And without the consciousness of sin, there is no meaningful call to repentance; without the consciousness of sin, there is no Christianity at all.

In both these areas, the doctrine of God and the doctrine of Man, what Machen calls “modern liberalism” stands in direct opposition to real Christianity. It’s not much different than the kind of belief that exists in some present day churches, although we might use another label for it. 

Next week’s chapter is on the Bible and I’m looking forward to it. Anyone want to place a bet on whether my book will be here by then?

To Grant Life and to Bring About Death

In 40 Questions About Christians and Biblical Law, Tom Schreiner answers a question about the purpose of the law:

From one perspective the law was intended to give life to Israel.Paul says in Romans 7:10 that “the commandment was intended for life” (my translation). If one kept the law, then the law would be a vehicle for life. If one looks at the law from this restricted perspective, then the law was given to grant life for those who observed it. Nevertheless, what Paul emphasizes repeatedly is that God sovereignly intended the law to reveal transgressions and to bring about death. Are these two perspectives contradictory? Not at all. It is simply a matter of looking at the purpose of the law from two different perspectives. From an immanent perspective, the law was intended to give life; but from a transcendent perspective, it was given to increase sin. The former is not falsified or trivialized by the latter. The promise of life through the law was frustrated by human sin, not by any defect in the law. 

The typical Jewish view was that the law was given to bring about life. In Judaism there was the proverb, “The more Torah the more life” (M. Aboth 2:7). This was the standard Jewish view…. Romans 7:10 reflects the same perspective, but Paul differs from his Jewish contemporaries in seeing a transcendent purpose to the law that is remarkably different. Jews typically believed that the law was given to counteract the sin Adam introduced into the world. Astonishingly, Paul argues that the law is not a solution but part of the problem: “Now the law came in to increase the trespass” (Rom. 5:20). The law at one level may have been given to bring life, but it actually failed miserably to do so and increased transgressions instead. Such is Paul’s argument in Romans 7:7-25. The content of the law is “holy and righteous and good” (Rom. 7:12). Nevertheless, the law has been co-opted by sin, so that sin has increased with the addition of the law. Sin has taken on the character of rebellion, in that commands forbidding particular actions, such as coveting, have actually promoted sin, because the command arouses the desire to do what is prohibited. The cancer that brings death should not be traced to the law but to the human being, who is dominated by the flesh.

I’ve never heard the terms immanent and transcendent used to describe two different ways to look at the law. I’m not sure what definitions of those words he’s using. I’d like to ask, if I could. 

Despite my uncertainty over the use of those terms, I think this explanation of the two perspectives on the purpose of the law is instructive. What do you think? Does it help?