My Desktop Photo 85

Photo by Andrew Stark
(click on photo for larger view)There will be snow in the new heavens and new earth and it will be even more beautiful than this, because this is snow from a cursed world.

I suppose some of you think that snow itself is part of the curse. You would be wrong.

A New Year's Tradition: Getting Your Theology on Track

If you’ve read here much, you’ll know that I love theology. One of my favorite things to say about theology is that it makes my heart sing. Some of you will know exactly what I mean by that and some of you won’t, because theology doesn’t seem to do that for everyone. Once in a while, someone will ask me why I tie my noodle in knots trying to understand all those dry and airy doctrinal things. After all what really matters is doing and loving and relieving the suffering in this world, isn’t it? 

You know what? I don’t think I can over-emphasize the importance doing and loving and hugging. I am so thankful that there are believers who specialize in these things. Where would I be without them? But here’s the thing:  It’s not theology or mercy, but both. Huggers need a firm place to stand. I got that last sentence from John Piper in a sermon on suffering called Subjected in Hope, which you really, really, really—triply emphasized—should listen to. “If the ground gives way underneath while you’re hugging” says Piper, “all the hugging in the world doesn’t help. … It doesn’t work, over time, only to hug.”

Yep, you need a firm place, and that means knowing something about ourselves and our God and his workings in this suffering world, and that is theology. Theology is not dry and airy or impractical. It is solid ground where I can stand when I hug those who are suffering and solid ground where I can keep on doing when I’m the one who needs the hugs. And maybe, if you’re wired like me, solid ground will also make your heart sing. But no matter who you are, solid ground is worth tying your noodle in a knot over.

This brings me to the New Year’s tradition. It seems that every Christmas brings me new knowledge of family and friends who are enduring difficult trials and when it’s over, I feel like reposting this post I wrote right after Christmas 2005. It’s theology, but it’s also—like theology usually is—practical. Because if you don’t wrestle with these things before the trials come, you’re going to be hit with a double-whammy when you find yourself struggling with your trials and wrestling with your God at the same time.

So here’s the annual repost of Getting Your Theology on Track.

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Generally speaking, I’m a C. S. Lewis fan. I’m willing to overlook disagreements I have with his theology because of the clarity of his writing and his helpful explanations of some complicated things. There is, however, a book of his I didn’t like much—A Grief Observed. It was recommended to me as helpful to the Christian who is grieving, so I read it twice after my husband died, but I found it much more disturbing than helpful. Lewis’s wife’s death brought him to a place of real despair, a response to the death of a spouse that I tried to understand, but couldn’t, even though my circumstances were very similar to his. I couldn’t help wondering what his view of God’s relationship to suffering had been if something like his wife’s death could pull the rug out from under his faith.

That’s why I enjoyed reading this post at Triablogue. The whole post is good, but here’s the paragraph that I believe is crucial:

It is important to get your theology on track before disaster strikes. It won’t spare you heartache. But it will spare you gratuitous heartache, and it will hasten the healing process.

In what I believe was God’s providential preparation, in the years right before my husband’s cancer diagnosis, we came to a much fuller understanding of some things about God: that he is working his plan in every bit of the universe all the time; that he has righteous reasons for everything he does, even though we might not—and probably won’t—understand them; and that suffering and death, when they occur, are God’s chosen means to accomplish good things.

When the cancer diagnosis with its grim prognosis was announced, my first thought—really and truly—was, “Aha! We learned all that just so we could go through this.” We had no crisis of faith because we had already come to an understanding of God’s work in the world that included his choices of suffering and death as the best way to accomplish his right and good purposes. I won’t pretend that ours weren’t difficult circumstances, but I will say that we were not unsettled by them. No, they made sense from the get-go, because we already had a theological framework with a cubbyhole for difficult suffering.

I had a friend in Bible college who went on to have a child who was severely handicapped, and then, on top of it all, was horribly burned when his clothes caught fire on a burner in the kitchen. She wrote a book that explained the understanding about God that she and her husband had come to as a result of their child’s suffering. Some of the answers they’d been given when they questioned pastors and relatives about God’s role in their child’s suffering were what I consider to be orthodox and satisfying answers, but they found them unsatisfactory. She wrote that over time, they came to understand that for the most part God simply lets his universe run without intervening. Thinking of God as one who chooses not to interpose himself in affairs of the world was the way out of their crisis of faith. It allowed them to keep loving God and stop seeing him as cruel for not stepping in and keeping their child safe. When I read her book, I kept thinking that this solution to the problem of human suffering was much worse than the solutions they had rejected. How could anyone trust a God with a hands-off policy in his creation?

Someone else who went to the same Bible college and whose family, for a while, attended the same church as ours, became one of the more well-known proponents of open theism. He mentions his brother’s death in a motorcycle accident as one of the things that pushed him toward his belief that God does not know the future choices of human beings and takes the risk that bad things will happen in order to allow for autonomy in his creatures. I have the same question about the open theist’s God: How could I trust him?

Why have I told you these stories? Because these are two examples of people whose crisis of faith following tragedy led them to less-than-orthodox views of God. It sometimes works this way, I think, when people have no firm theology of God’s relationship to human suffering before a crisis strikes. It’s more difficult to come to see God as a God who knowingly works good things through suffering while we’re in the midst of it.

If you’ve already come to love a God whom you understand to be purposefully working in all things—even the terribly tragic ones—for his good purposes, then you keep on loving and trusting him when real tragedy strikes you. And more than that: You cling to him as the only sort of God who could be a rock for you in difficult times. That you weren’t spared suffering doesn’t throw you for a loop, because you expected that somewhere, sometime, you would have your share of it as God conforms you to the likeness of his son.

You still suffer, of course, but you suffer knowing that there is meaning in your suffering, something that cannot be there if God is simply creation’s uninterested or unknowing overseer. You still suffer, but you suffer with God as a firm comfort and a source of steadfast hope, for you know that your tragedy, in his hands, is working good things.

Redemption Accomplished and Applied: Faith and Repentance

I’m participating in Tim Challies’ Reading the Classics Together program. The book is Redemption Accomplished and Applied by John Murray, and this week’s reading is the fourth chapter of Part 2: The Order of Application. Here is Tim’s summary.

In this week’s reading we move down the order of salvation from regeneration to faith and repentance, which are both effects of regeneration. Regeneration is an act of God alone, but believing and repenting are what the sinner does.

In faith, the sinner receives Christ and rests in him alone for our salvation. Murray looks at two aspects of faith—its warrant and its nature—in order to help us to understand  what it is.

The warrant of faith is the reason the sinner has for trusting Christ for salvation. How does the sinner know that Christ is willing and able to save him? Two reasons are given. First there is the universal offer of the gospel.

God entreats, he invites, he commands, he calls, he presents the overture of mercy and grace, and he does this to all without distinction or discrimination.

And God gives this offer in both the Old Testament and the New Testament. Given the scriptural evidence, what can we conclude but that no one is excluded from God’s offer of the gospel and his command to repent?

Second, there is the sufficiency and suitability of Christ as Saviour.

It is not the possibility of salvation that is offered to lost men but the Saviour himself and therefore salvation full and perfect.

Murray goes on to argue in this section of the chapter against a particular breed of hypercalvinists (He doesn’t call them this, but these seem to me to be who he has in mind in his comments.) who teach that the warrant of faith is the conviction that one is being saved or that one is elect. I don’t think people who teach this particular sort of wrong doctrine are common, at least not now, but I’ve come upon a few in my past discussions on the Baptist Board. “It is to us in our lost condition,” he says, “that the warrant of faith is given and the warrant is not restricted or circumscribed in any way.”

Next, our chapter discusses the nature of faith. Faith is knowledge, conviction and trust. It requires, first of all, that we understand something of the truth of Christ. Second, we must believe that the truth of Christ is really true and that is exactly meets one’s needs as a sinner. Thirds, faith requires us to rely wholly on Christ alone for salvation. Faith is nothing less than

self-commitment to him in all the glory of his person and perfection of his work as he is freely and fully offered in the gospel.

In the second section of this chapter, Murray discusses repentance, which is defined as “turning from sin unto God,” and is inseparably tied to the kind of faith that saves. The gospel is not only “that by grace we are saved through faith but it is also the gospel of repentance.” This statement is supported with several quotes from scripture which emphasize the necessity of repentance. True faith is repentant faith. To sum up, “the broken spirit and contrite heart are abiding marks of the believing soul,” and the contrite heart is a heart which looks to Christ for forgiveness and cleansing.

I suspect there are particular historical controversies behind some of the points Murray makes in this chapter. I may look into this more when I get time. Meanwhile, well-informed ones who know these things are allowed to drop hints in the comments.