By Ben Davis

A review essay of Bruce Reichenbach, Divine Providence

Too often, when a discussion of God’s providence is brought to the table, it is framed in such a way that only trained philosophers or theologians can fully understand it. Thus large, awkward words eclipse simple, useable ones, and impenetrable logical syllogisms clash like warring armies in the night. In the end no one is served because overly-wrought, abstract ideas inveigh the steady practice of commonsense reasoning. What is supposed to be a pastorally-informed doctrine, then, – the foresight by which God lovingly provides and cares for his creation – is turned into a philosophical category seemingly divorced from the daily concerns of the church.

What’s more, philosophical analysis of divine providence is often a Procrustean bed fit snuggly over a small handful of isolated verses in Scripture. Instead of being the definitive guide for understanding providence, Scripture is merely an ancillary tool used to support sexier, metaphysically muscular philosophical definitions. Philosophy is an important tool for theology and exegesis, to be sure. But it cannot be the controlling paradigm by which to think about a topic that finds its locus explicitly in the biblical narrative. For in Scripture God’s providence is manifest in the daily lives of the people of Israel or the nascent churches in Acts or Corinth. This is not the God of the philosophers, in others words. This is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: a personal God who is intimately invested in the lives of his people.

Therefore, Bruce Reichenbach can open his book on divine providence by stating simply: “Scripture repeatedly recounts the intentional actions of the providential God.” A philosopher of great distinction, Reichenbach seeks to have his view of divine providence be formed – and informed – by the biblical text first. Accordingly, his opening pages survey the expansive landscape of Scripture, from Abraham’s binding of Isaac (Gen. 22) to God’s new covenant “established by the death and resurrection of Jesus” (Heb. 7:22; 8:13). From his point of view, the biblical writers “see divine providence spreading a wide umbrella over both natural and human events.”

The late theologian and ecumenical statesman Thomas Oden suggested that the root meaning for the term providence is to foresee or provide. Taken from the Latin, pro-videre, which meant to see ahead or anticipate, providence is primarily about God’s ability to provide for his people as he is able to see down the road, as it were, and plan according to future events. Although not stated explicitly, Reichenbach seems to share Oden’s view as he says that, “God provides for nature and through nature for humans” (looking to Job 5:10; Isa 43:20; Matt 5:45). And again, “God provides for all nations and peoples,” bringing, “food in abundance” (Job 36:31). Furthermore, God “provides a Passover lamb as protection from the deathly plague” (Exod 12), “gushes water from the rocks where there seems to be none” (Exod 17:5-6), and “brings decisive victory on the battlefield” (Deut 7:17-24). Looking to the incorporeal elements of divine provision, Reichenbach underscores the fact that humans receive God’s “offering of redemption” (Ps 111:9), “adoption into God’s family” (Eph 1:5), “the Spirit to guide us into truth (Jn 16:13), and “the Scriptures for our teaching, training, and correction” (2 Tim 3:16). In short, God knows the full scope of our needs – physical, spiritual, corporate, and individual – and graciously provides for them out of an abundant measure of his love, wisdom, and tender, Fatherly care.

The other side of divine providence is the notion foresight. That is, God provides for humans in the present because he can anticipate, or foresee, their need before it happens. Reichenbach identifies three “dimensions” that demonstration divine providence.

First, it proclaims God’s goodness insofar as God declares what he makes to be good and through love and grace seeks the good of blessing for what he created. God in his goodness is the source of blessing or happiness. Second, providence presupposes God’s power by which God realizes his purposes by his actions in the cosmos and, more especially, in the affairs of humanity. Third, providence invokes God’s wisdom revealed in his plans and purposes, to his understanding of the present and further, by which God directs us to what is good for us.

It is this third dimension that I want to touch on briefly here, for it speaks to the core argument of Reichenbach’s book. So: What are God’s purposes? Again, going back to Scripture, Reichenbach says that, “Scripture reveals that God has purposes for the universe as a whole, for groups and nations, and for particular individuals.” As to the first of these, he points to Ephesians 1:10: God intends “to sum up all things in heaven and on earth in Christ.” As to the second and third, he directs us to God’s intentions to graft the Gentiles into Israel to create one family with Christ as the head (Rom. 11). And as to the last, individuals, God desires to conform them to the image of his Son, Jesus Christ (Rom 8:39), and to show “the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness towards us” (Eph. 2:7). Throughout Scripture, moreover, we can see God calling particular individuals to carry out his purposes not only for their own sakes, but for the nation of Israel, the church, or the world as a whole. King Cyrus, the Apostle Paul, and Abraham would fit neatly into these categories.

Reichenbach warns against turning these particular callings into a normative rule for our own lives – as many are inclined to do. These are clearly examples of God working through select individuals in order to fulfill his promises and to further his plan of cosmic redemption realized in Christ. My calling to be a pastor, or your calling to be a doctor, or teacher, or whatever, are not the same as David’s calling to be King of Israel. Concerning God’s plans for human vocation, Reichenbach says rightly, I think: “God calls us to bring him into what we do, making him an essential aspect of our being and doing, wherein we take pleasure in our doing and serve others.” He goes on to suggest that, “generally vocation is not to be understood in the sense that God wants you to do this particular task in contrast to everything else, such that engaging in any other task runs counter to God’s will for you.” Your vocation is not cemented in the mind of God, in other words. To make it such may place an enormous degree of stress on a person. After all, what if you missed your calling?

The primary question is, What is the scope of God’s plans and purposes for creation? No one doubts that God has plans and purposes for us. The heart of the matters is to what degree do those plans situate the details of our daily lives? To suggest that every aspect of our existence is planed according to a pre-determined blueprint is to advance a view known as meticulous sovereignty. On this view, “believers . . . say that whatever happens to them – good, bad, or indifferent – is part of God’s plan; God has and works his purpose in each event that he realizes.” As I mentioned in my first post, the view of meticulous sovereignty is often used by pastors to comfort the bereaved or to offer solace to those experiencing difficult, seemingly insurmountable, circumstances. The intentions behind its use are understandable, and I am deeply sympathetic to them. But by the same token, there is another, very disturbing side to this view that often escapes our sight, which is:

Some events bring unrelieved pain, serious suffering, and dysfunction that seem individually unrequited. Other events introduce obstacles to our realizing our perceived vocation. On the large scale it is difficult, if not impossible, to think that Stalin’s ruthless pogroms and murders in the Katyn Forest, the deadly deportation marches of the Armenians, Hitler’s racial cleansing and hideous concentration camps, Pol Pot’s massacres of his Cambodian people, that brutal Hutu genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda, the Serbian massacres of Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica, and the tragic slaughters by ISIS in Syria and Iraq are part of God’s plan for the good of the people affected. Is is difficult, if not impossible, to think that the colonial, degrading plantation enslavement and mistreatment of Africans and the American willful destruction of Native American cultures, the demeaning segregation of Blacks, Indians, and Colored by white Southern Africans, the trafficking of women and children for prostitution in India, and mass murders in a Colorado theater and a Connecticut elementary school are part of God’s plan for the good of those so maltreated. And on the individual level, it is difficult to believe that contracting pancreatic or brain cancer, macular eye degeneration, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases, schizophrenia and bi-polar disorders, and so much more are part of God’s detailed plans for an individual’s good and not harm. . . In short, not only is it difficult to believe in meticulous providence in the face of this evil, it demeans the sufferers themselves to say that this seemingly gratuitous suffering is part of God’s best plan of blessing for them (Italics mine).

Surely you get the point. Better, though, is the view that God’s plans for us are often broad and generalized, while only occasionally being pointed and specifically invoked. This view takes human freedom seriously, and it furthermore maintains the character of God as one of enduring goodness and loving-kindness. For if God planned the atrocities mentioned above and countless others besides, then we have every duty to question his character as a loving God, worthy of our worship, adoration, and sole allegiance.

To close this chapter, Reichenbach gives us an image. Sovereignty, he suggests, invokes the image of a political relationship, namely, that between a governing ruler and the governed. On this score, not everything that happens aligns with the governors will, nor does he/she get to determine the outcome of everything they want. The scope of the governor’s rule is set by the freedom allowed for their people. If significant freedom is granted, then it stands to reason that the governor is limited in their range of action – assuming, of course, they continue to respect the integrity of this arrangement. Thus, “In granting significant freedom to their subjects, sovereigns make it possible for their authority and will to be freely obeyed and also freely resisted,” Reichenbach notes. Furthermore, “If sovereigns command their subjects to do some act and if the subjects are free, they can refuse – although at the same time they must bear the consequences of their refusal.”

In the Christian tradition, as we see clearly in Scripture, God is sovereign over his creation. God not only oversees it, but has purposes to bring it all to the same fruition. This is not a democracy, however. We do not elect God as our sovereign. No; in his inscrutable grace, God initiates a relationship with humans by offering and binding himself to a covenant, whereby we are his people and he is our God. By virtue of this relationship, humans have a choice in the matter. Abraham had the freedom to reject God’s call. Human freedom is not an illusory proposition labored over by philosophers. Humans are free to respond to God’s love or not. God initiates; humans respond: that is the defining characteristic of our relationship.

As Reichenbach notes, “significant sovereignty between free persons, then, is more like a dance between two partners. They need not be equal in skill or ability, power or knowledge. In our case, it is the covenant dace of life. The key to the dance is God’s desire to be in a covenant partnership with those he created.” Thus, as God moves, we move, as we move, God moves – each movement taken is in a concert of mutual love, joy, and respect – until we reach our final end, where Christ is all in all to the glory of God the Father.

Thus far Tim Keller’s book Making Sense of God : An Invitation to the Skeptical has looked at six aspects of human life, givens that Keller suggests we cannot live without: meaning, satisfaction, freedom, identity, hope, and justice. Each chapter looked at both secular and Christian narratives, and at the specific focus that Christianity offers. In the last two chapters he turns to a broader overview. He begins by asking “is it reasonable to believe in God?” and offers six specific reasons the answer is yes. Before digging into the list, however, it is important to set the stage. God (if there is a god) is not a creature or object contained within the material universe. “[Religions] understand God rather as Being itself, the ground and condition for all other things to exist. All things that have being depend on God moment by moment for it. Without God nothing would exist at all.” (p. 217)  This has important consequences for the way we should look for evidence of God.  Keller quotes C. Stephen Evans “To believe in God is to believe the universe has a certain character; to disbelieve in God is to believe the universe lacks that character and has a very different character.” (Why Christian Faith Still Makes Sense, p. 22) Arguments for the existence of God are best shaped by the nature of the world we experience.

I will list the arguments using the titles used by Keller.

Cosmic Wonder. One argument for the existence of God is found in the very existence of the universe. This is essentially a first cause argument. All natural things have a cause. Science studies these causes with increasing precision. For the material universe studied through science to exist there must be some cause accounting for its very existence. A place where the chain of events begins. “This means that there must be some unique being that exists without cause, that did not spring out of nothing, that is its own cause and the source of everything.” (p. 218) The cosmic wonder we experience in a universe that exists and seems to have sense and purpose  is, perhaps, “a compelling sign of God’s reality.”

Perceived Design. This is a fine-tuning argument. The universe has a range of precise characteristics that make the existence of life possible. Many people have argued that the probability of all these parameters having exactly the right values is incredibly small, maybe 1 in 10¹⁰⁰. It seems incredible that this is just a lucky accident. The multiverse hypothesis, that there are many different universes with different parameters and we are (of course) in the one that is just right, is one proposed solution to this problem. But it is a hypothesis to account for a phenomenon that could equally well be accounted for by the existence of designer. “So, believers in God argue, as long as you don’t beg the question and assume that God could not possibly exist, then the fine-tuning of physics makes more sense in a universe in which there is a creator and designer.” (p. 219)

Moral Realism. Moral law points to the existence of a law-giver. Moral obligation has no firm foundation in a random, meaningless universe. Even human rights are hard to justify. They are little more than (temporarily) useful conventions for the propagation of a species.

Consciousness. We think and reason and relate and create. We ask rhetorical and speculative questions. We can imagine things that have never been, and sometimes bring them into being.  In fact we appear to create “out of nothing.” Certainly our thought processes and actions are connected with the physical activity of our brain, but how do electrochemical events imagine a bridge or develop a complex mathematical proof?  “As it stands now, human consciousness points to something beyond the natural world.” (p. 223) This isn’t just because of our ignorance of neuroscience, however. It is also because we are convinced that our ideas and emotions are grounded in something real. They are not merely utilitarian illusions. “Consciousness and idea making make far more sense in a universe created by an idea-making, conscious God.” (p. 224)

Reason. Alvin Pantinga has argued that there is no reason to trust our senses in a purely materialist world. We have evolved to reproduce. Sometimes reproductive success and survival are helped by truth, but other times an illusion might serve us better. It seems that our thought processes must be grounded in something other than utilitarian  function – helping us “feed, flee, fight, and reproduce.”

Beauty. We have an indelible sense that beauty is real. Flowers, birds, a lush jungle, a barren dessert, the sunset. It is hard to explain our sense of beauty as an artifact of evolution. Certainly some ideas of beauty could be related to food and mating, but far from all. “In fact, to find something useful is to see it as a means to an end, but to find something beautiful is different. It is marked by “utter gratuity.” It is deeply satisfying immediately, in itself, not for anything it does for us.” (p. 226)

Where does this take us? None of these arguments are conclusive proofs and Keller does not claim that they are. But he does find them powerful positive arguments.

All of these arguments and signs that we have been reviewing are not so strong as to force belief, but they do make it completely rational to believe. In fact, these arguments are that it is more rational and takes less of a leap of faith to believe in God than to not believe. If your premise that there is no God leads most naturally to conclusions you know are not true – that moral obligation, beauty and meaning, the significance of our love, our consciousness of being a self are illusions – then why not change the premise? (p. 227)

 I wouldn’t go as far as Keller. I don’t find these arguments persuasive for the existence of God – that it is more rational to believe in God than not. However, I do think that they do point to real shortcomings in the scientific materialism and secular humanism that permeates much of Western culture and most certainly the academy. There are significant reasons to doubt that scientific materialism provides an adequate and accurate understanding of life, the universe, and everything. It simply isn’t true that disbelief is rational and belief, in contrast, irrational.  Scientific materialism isn’t the nice neat package it is made out to be. It is reasonable to believe that there is a God, a creator and designer, who enables us in some way or other to create and think and relate, to experience love and beauty, and to be repulsed by evil as morally wrong.

What do you think? Are these arguments convincing?

What arguments do you find convincing?

What conclusions would you draw from these six arguments?

If you wish to contact me directly you may do so at rjs4mail[at]att.net

If interested you can subscribe to a full text feed of my posts at Musings on Science and Theology.

Years ago, when my research was on the Synoptic Gospels, I composed a list of how the Evangelists “edited” their sources. Using the standard theory of their relationships (Mark first, then used by both Matthew and Luke, both of whom also used another source called “Q”), I came up with the following sorts of edits by the Evangelists:

1. Instead of editing they “conserved” or “preserved” by copying.
2. They sometimes conflate two sources into one.
3. They sometimes expand the source they are using.
4. They sometimes transposed an account or a saying from one location to another location.
5. They sometimes omit something in their source.
6. They sometimes explicate a tradition or explain that tradition.
7. They sometimes alter their source so as to make something clearer.

This list with an illustration or two or three of each can be found in my first book Interpreting the Synoptic Gospels. It was very much a beginning professor’s textbook and it would be fun to edit the whole thing but that’s for another day and another discussion.

With this early list of the kinds of redaction we see in the Gospels I was curious what list Michael Licona would come up with in his new and important book Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? Licona, instead of simply examining how Matthew and Luke used their sources, examines how Plutarch presents in his Lives two or more accounts of the same person. In other words, instead of seeing how Plutarch altered sources, Licona looks at how Plutarch treats himself!

The Synoptic Gospels reveal two stubborn realities: differences and similarities. The former can unnerve some readers because they’d prefer they all be the latter! Not so any careful reader of the Gospels knows. So here’s but one example. Here is Mark’s version of Jesus’ instructions to the twelve on their mission:

Mark 6:7 Calling the Twelve to him, he began to send them out two by two and gave them authority over impure spirits. 8 These were his instructions: “Take nothing for the journey except a staff—no bread, no bag, no money in your belts. 9 Wear sandals but not an extra shirt. 10 Whenever you enter a house, stay there until you leave that town. 11 And if any place will not welcome you or listen to you, leave that place and shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them.” 12 They went out and preached that people should repent. 13 They drove out many demons and anointed many sick people with oil and healed them.

Matthew’s version of the same basic instructions:

10:5 These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. 6 Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel. 7 As you go, proclaim this message: ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ 8 Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received; freely give. 9 “Do not get any gold or silver or copper to take with you in your belts— 10 no bag for the journey or extra shirt or sandals or a staff, for the worker is worth his keep. 11 Whatever town or village you enter, search there for some worthy person and stay at their house until you leave. 12  As you enter the home, give it your greeting. 13 If the home is deserving, let your peace rest on it; if it is not, let your peace return to you. 14  If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, leave that home or town and shake the dust off your feet. 15 Truly I tell you, it will be more bearable for Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town.

Where did Matthew “get” that set of instructions in italics? It’s not in Mark. The parallel in Luke 9 only tells them to heal and exorcise and preach about the kingdom, while the earlier parallel in Mark 3 has preach and exorcise. But Matthew has a complete list of things to do. Where did Matthew get this? (1) Was he there and used his memory? (2) Did he compose Matthew 8-9 and so use what Jesus did to color what Jesus told the twelve to do? (3) Did he use Mark and Luke and maybe some Q (Luke 10) and then add a bit on his own? (4) Or, or, or?

Licona, I believe, helps us.

First, he clarifies Plutarch’s compositional devices. What are those devices? He lists these:

1. Transferal: shifting words/deeds made/done by one person to another person.
2. Displacement: what I call “transpose” above.
3. Conflation: combining events from two or more events.
4. Compression: compressing the time involved in events.
5. Spotlighting: focusing attention on a person and neglecting others. [This category is something Licona is responsible for “spotlighting.”]
6. Simplification: Omitting and altering details that complicate.
7. Expansion of narrative details: inventing minor details to improve the narrative, preserving historical verisimilitude and plausibility.
8. Paraphrasing: obvious.
9. Licona refers here to the now common “law of biographical relevance”: telling a story in a way that is relevant to the main character.

Most important is this: Plutarch’s Lives are written as rough contemporaries of the Gospels and they are both “lives” (biographies, bioi) and hence seeing how one operates (Plutarch) may provide categories for understanding how the Evangelists were operating. The only assumption here would be that the conventions for biographical writing would be similar. Licona is accurate in this assumption/conclusion. A good question that would be asked is “What were the conventions of ancient biography that would be assumed/practiced by the NT Evangelists?”

This is a good paragraph from Licona that shows how ancient biographers worked:

“Sometimes Plutarch will redact elements of a story in order to support the portrait he is painting of his main character. This may result in placing the main character or his adversary in a light that is more or less favorable. Even if Plutarch had no credible reports supporting his redaction, he still believed the point he was emphasizing was true. Plutarch may also have altered a detail slightly to create irony. He occasionally portrays motives differently, usually in a manner that provides some illumination on the protagonist’s character in that Life” (109).

This is a good reminder: “In light of instructions for good literature writing by Lucian and Quintilian, we determined that historians were permitted to craft peripheral details and connect events synthetically in order to produce a narrative that flows smoothly” (110).

Second, he clarifies how the Evangelists compare to Plutarch and Licona does this by examining the compositional techniques of the Evangelists. He patiently examines sixteen passages and these are some of his major conclusions:

“We observed that they substitute words and phrases, alter syntax, change the inflection of a term from singular to plural (or vice versa), add in order to intensify, clarify, translate, or expand upon the thought. … On two occasions, Matthew converts Jesus’s one-sided address to his antagonists to a dialogue with them” (182-183).

“Noticeably absent are clear examples where we can recognize the evangelists following the law of biographical relevance. The reason is because all four Gospels feature the same main character, Jesus” (183).

“The evangelists occasionally displace an event from its original context and transplant it in another either to raise tension in the narrative or to link it with another story involving the same characters. They simplify, though not often. More than the other evangelists, Matthew occasionally transfers what one person said to the lips of another. And the evangelists occasionally change the recipients being addressed. They compress and probably conflate stories. Because Matthew is known to abbreviate often, it should come as no surprise to observe that he compresses more often than the other evangelists. Luke and John make use of literary spotlighting, and Mark and Matthew probably do. However, spotlighting is not nearly as prominent in the Gospels as we observed in Plutarch’s Lives. Yet, spotlighting may be occurring more often than is within our ability to recognize it, since Jesus is the main character in all four Gospels” (183-184).

Third, he offers some conclusions, and these are most important when it comes to the nature of the Synoptic Gospels, their integrity and reliability as sources, and how these Evangelists did what they did.

In all cases we are to learn that we are to let the Gospels be the Gospels, which is to say, we are to let them do what they did and conform our expectations of the Gospels to what they were doing rather than to what we want them to have been doing.

“Many who believe the biblical authors were divinely inspired also assume those authors must have written with the degree of accuracy and almost forensic precision we desire and expect today. However, this would require those authors to have stepped out of their culture and to have thought in terms of literary conventions that were in existence—as we see in the work of Asconius—but not valued as highly as other conventions” (201).

Licona’s book is the most important book I’ve ever read on the literary techniques of the Evangelists. There is no book that has this finesse based on the Gospel genre as a “biography” and hence this study can be used with confidence in classes engaged in the Synoptic Gospels. His conclusions about how the Evangelists did what they did are reliable and give us yet one more clear glimpse in how to understand the nature of the Gospels.

For Christians the big questions in any discussion of science and faith generally come down to Scripture. How are we to read Scripture as the word of God? In much of the church there is an assumption that this should be straightforward… just read it literally. Unfortunately, this doesn’t hold up well for many of us. It isn’t even science that is the biggest challenge to this “simple” reading, it is Scripture itself. It isn’t clear that the Bible was intended to be read in this flat, literal manner. Among other things, Scripture is full of figurative language and allusions. The books have been structured to convey a message and often (more often than we expect) the flat reading misses in significant ways.

This is not just an insider issue, it is also an evangelism issue. The flat reading is often easily dismissed by skeptics, especially educated skeptics, those who might see books by Richard Dawkins or Bart Ehrman and find it easy to reject the possibility that Christianity is in any fashion reasonable for the modern (enlightened) person. We don’t want to deny truth to attract outsiders, but we also don’t want to erect unnecessary barriers.

I am leading an adult Sunday morning discussion class this winter that digs into the question of interpretation, looking for the full depth of meaning in Scripture. One of the primary resources we are using (after the Bible itself) is Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness by Richard B. Hays. Scot posted on this book several years ago, just after it came out, and reviewed the book for Books and Culture (Believing to Understand). The book is a bit academic, but well worth reading. (As an aside: We desperately need resources that make ideas like those developed by Hays accessible to the average Christian reader and small group or class discussion.)

Calming the Sea. Consider the image above – Rembrandt’s depiction of the calming of the Sea. For many Christians this is just a demonstration of the deity of Christ. He can perform miracles, therefore he is divine. (Of course prophets in the Old Testament and apostles perform miracles as well, but ignore this for now.) Others find it necessary to look for scientific explanations – such as this example about the story of Jesus walking on water, suggesting a layer of ice as a possible explanation. Both the typical Christian brush and the search for scientific explanation miss the point (although the former gets closer).  What can we say about the calming of the sea? The following is a passage in Mark (4:35-41).

That day when evening came, he said to his disciples, “Let us go over to the other side.” Leaving the crowd behind, they took him along, just as he was, in the boat. There were also other boats with him. A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped. Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?”

He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, “Quiet! Be still!” Then the wind died down and it was completely calm.

He said to his disciples, “Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?”

They were terrified and asked each other, “Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!”

 The passage is a powerful one. It is significant that Jesus doesn’t pray to his father to calm the storm, rather he simply rebukes the wind and the waves. Mark ends the story with a question, provocatively left open for the reader to fill in the blanks. Hays points to the Old Testament as a context for this story and its deep Christological significant, particularly to Psalm 107.

Some went out on the sea in ships;
    they were merchants on the mighty waters.
They saw the works of the Lord,
    his wonderful deeds in the deep.
For he spoke and stirred up a tempest
    that lifted high the waves.
They mounted up to the heavens and
    went down to the depths;
    in their peril their courage melted away.
They reeled and staggered like drunkards;
    they were at their wits’ end.
Then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble,
    and he brought them out of their distress.
He stilled the storm to a whisper;
    the waves of the sea were hushed.
They were glad when it grew calm,
    and he guided them to their desired haven.
Let them give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love
    and his wonderful deeds for mankind.
Let them exalt him in the assembly of the people
    and praise him in the council of the elders. (107:23-32)

In this passage there is no doubt – the Lord, YHWH the God of Israel, is the one who stills the storm. Mark portrays Jesus doing exactly this. Hays notes, “Jesus’ mastery over the wind and waves demonstrates that he is the possessor of a power that the OT consistently assigns to the Lord God alone. It is God who rebuked the waters and formed dry land, God who parts the sea for Israel, God who made the storm be still. Well might the disciples ask “Who then is this …?”” (p. 23) And “common knowledge” (among some anyway) ascribes to Mark a view of Jesus as a good man, a view later corrupted by the church!

Walking on Water. Hays comments on Mark 6:45-52, the story of Jesus walking on water, as well.

Later that night, the boat was in the middle of the lake, and he was alone on land. He saw the disciples straining at the oars, because the wind was against them. Shortly before dawn he went out to them, walking on the lake. He was about to pass by them, but when they saw him walking on the lake, they thought he was a ghost. They cried out, because they all saw him and were terrified.

Immediately he spoke to them and said, “Take courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid.”(47-50)

Hays suggests that this passage should invoke an image of Job 9 where it is the Lord alone who “treads on the waves of the sea” (v. 8, the Septuagint has “and walks upon the sea as on dry ground.”) The passage in Job also includes the idea of God passing by … “a confession of God’s mysterious transcendence of human comprehension: God’s “passing by” is a metaphor for our inability to grasp his power.” (p. 25)  This isn’t a miracle in need of scientific explanation (no ice on the surface or just under!) but a manifestation of divine glory.

The Great Commission. One final passage, this one from Matthew 28:16-20

Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

The short video below lays out Hays’ approach to the passage:

Hays takes us to Daniel 7: 13-14.

In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.

 No low Christology in Mark or in Matthew! This becomes obvious when the book is read in the context of the Old Testament, the Scriptures available to the early church. A flat reading simply doesn’t do justice to the whole.

I will dig deeper into Hays’ book and some of the other resources in the next few months.

What insights do you gain from understanding these passages as an echo of the OT in the words and actions of Jesus?

How do the evangelists portray Jesus?

If you wish to contact me directly you may do so at rjs4mail[at]att.net

If interested you can subscribe to a full text feed of my posts at Musings on Science and Theology.

By Michelle Van Loon at www.MomentsAndDays.org

and www.MichelleVanLoon.com

I’ve been blogging for more than a decade,and I’ve written often about spiritual abuse by church leaders – sharing both my own experience and referencing the struggles of others. I’m just one voice in a large crowd: there are numerous blogs, books, and worthwhile organizations telling the stories of spiritual and/or clergy sexual abuse survivors. The internet has been a tool for good in this struggle as it has facilitated connection between survivors. In a few high profile cases, the networking of survivors has been instrumental in bringing to light what has happened in the darkness.

Understandably, many who’ve experienced abuse from a church leader never return to a church. In the wake of my own traumatizing experience, I remember repeating my own version of Peter’s words from John 6:68 (“Lord, where else can I go? You have the words of eternal life.”) even as my husband and I tried to figure out how our family could ever be a part of a congregation again after all that had happened at our previous church. I still loved Jesus even though I was hurting, but it seemed at the time his big “C” Church didn’t love me back.

In the wake of the trauma, it was easier not to attend church. We relied on our Christian friends to provide us fellowship. We even attempted home churching with two other families for nearly a year. But as time went on, we realized we missed the structure and relative diversity of congregational life. It was a milepost on our continuing journey toward healing that we found we could hope most churches were not teeming with gross dysfunction or being run by adulterous leaders – and then act on that hope.

The road back to church was a two-steps-forward-one-step-back process. One telling moment came as we were moving toward making a commitment to a new congregation when an elder tasked with plugging people into the ministry of the church sensed some reticence on my part.

He said, “It sounds like you have a lot of trust issues.”

There are a few different ways in which these words can be expressed: with empathy, with concern, with motive-judging suspicion. In the case of this elder, he was functioning as a commission-only salesperson, trying to overcome possible objections in order to close the sale. His hard sell was a well-meaning but misguided attempt to enfold us in the life of the congregation.

I wanted to say, “Of course I have trust issues! If you’d been through what we’ve been through, you’d have trust issues, too.”

I simply wasn’t that quick on the draw. Instead, I stammered through a muddy statement explaining that we’d experienced some painful things in our previous unhealthy church, and we were trying to ease into congregational life. We’d been attending the church for several months, and he naturally assumed we were ready to take the next step into ministry involvement.

For what it’s worth, I still have trust issues. At this point of my life, I recognize that the caution I carry has little to do with fear of a church leader wounding me again and everything to do with the wisdom birthed from a deeply painful and faith-forming experience.

While it wasn’t helpful to have a church leader I didn’t know (and who didn’t know me) challenge me regarding my damaged trust, there were things many other leaders and fellow congregants said and did that assisted in my rehab process:

• I appreciated it when I was seen by church leaders as a person, not as a warm body to be leveraged to fill a slot on a church org chart.

• It was meaningful to me to have congregation members reach out in conversation before or after a worship service more than one time. A simple hello one week is nice; a second or third conversation with the same people helped us ease into congregational life far more than a “newcomer’s information luncheon” ever did.

• Simple, low-commitment opportunities to work alongside other church members (such as serving together at a soup kitchen or food panty) were far preferable to joining a small group. Working alongside people with a common purpose in mind was far easier than going to a stranger’s house for a two or three hour weekly meeting.

• My husband and I were grateful when a leader took the initiative to invite us out for a cup of coffee so we could get to know one another outside the four walls of the church.

While these things can make a difference for all newcomers to a church, they were essential parts of what helped us find our way back to congregational life.

If you’re an abuse survivor who has stayed in or returned to the church, what other attitudes or practices would you add to my list above?

Many of us were introduced to the Christ and Culture issue by reading H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture and it has stood the test of time as it is now still routinely purchased and read in its sixth decade. In his influentialism approach to Christ and Culture I saw the essential typology for American Christians — both liberal and conservative, evangelical and otherwise. So I read more of H. Richard Niebuhr’s books (though I confess I don’t think I’ve read an entire book of his more famous brother, Reinhold).

This led me to read Kuyper. My colleague, David Fitch, often says something about “Kuyperianism” and in reading Yoder and Hauerwas over the years I’ve encountered Kuyper so I wanted a firmer handle. I had dabbled in James Bratt’s Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader but then James Bratt’s full biography of Kuyper appeared, and I read it. It is called Abraham Kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat. Bratt gave me categories and perspective to read the former volume that collected his essays. I also dipped into a devotional study by Kuyper, and read into some of the newer collections of Kuyper’s works.

This was all done to sketch a Kuyperian theory of Christian involvement in culture and the state, and for me it had to do with how Kuyper and his sort understood the kingdom of God. I had an outline with way too many quotations and it got a bit unwieldy for the project I was working on when I discovered my favorite Kuyperian: Rich Mouw.

Rich Mouw wrote Abraham Kuyper: A Short and Personal Introduction. What Mouw did for me was to give bigger handles to comprehend Kuyper and he had a hermeneutic of Kuyperianism that gave me firmer footing for reading Kuyper. So I let Mouw be my guide in Kingdom Conspiracy and I’m glad I did, though quoting Kuyper himself would have made the section thicker and longer (and the book got long enough as it was).

One should not, I suspect, equate “influentialism” with Kuyperianism for Niebuhrianism would also be influentialism. But one of the big themes for Kuyper was how best does the Christian engage culture and society and state. Kingdom is not infrequently connected to the vision and the influences. That’s another topic for the Kuyperians.

Rich Mouw is my favorite Kuyperian. Tim Keller would be my second. (I like Keller’s focus on the church, but more of that below.) I don’t know Kuyperianism intimately enough to say who is the best Kuyperian, but I suspect not many (if any) outrank Mouw.

I want in this post to discuss Rich Mouw’s splendid new Kuyperian book called Adventures in Evangelical Civility: A Lifelong Quest for Common Ground. Not all Calvinists or all Kuyperian are on the quest for common ground and not all of them are close to Mouw’s admirable ability to conduct conversations with civility. In this book, which is a memoir like narrative through his intellectual life — a meandering through scholars who have made an impact on him (and the names and breadth of his reading illustrate why he has become so civil), Mouw makes some self claims, and they are these:

I am a Christian
I am a Calvinist
I am a Kuyperian
I am a pietist
I am a professor, philosopher and theologian
I am a seminary provost and president
I am retired

Of the 2d, 3d, and 4th, with ten total points, I’d say he is 4 parts Calvinst, 4 parts Kuyperian and 2 parts pietist. But this kind of scoring may create mis-impressions. He’s always both Calvinist and Kuyperian and his pietism seems to me have created the man who is both civil and always seeking common ground, not least in his deeper-than-most appreciation for variants like Mormonism or even world religions. Perhaps it is Mouw’s pietism that makes him the kind of civil Kuyperian Calvinist that he is.

An early thinker’s transitional moment:

As I reported earlier, I started off as a college student endorsing Van Til’s refusal to concede to Edward John Carnell the legitimacy of looking for areas of agreement with nonChristians in our apologetic efforts. My attraction to Van Til’s perspective would soon give way to much sympathy for Carnell’s side of the argument. And it wasn’t just because I came to see the attractiveness of Carnell’s approach as a plausible apologetic methodology—although it certainly was that. More importantly, his way of viewing things gripped me experientially. I kept sensing, in various encounters with people beyond the boundaries of evangelical Calvinism, that my theological feet were actually finding real patches of common ground (16-17).

In a quote from Rousseau I couldn’t help but think of the zeal at work in the progressive evangelical crowd who have at times fallen for the idea that the gospel is social justice activism:

“The transition from the state of nature to the civil state,” he remarks, “produces a quite remarkable transformation within—i.e., it substitutes justice for instinct as the controlling factor in [one’s] behavior, and confers upon [one’s] actions a moral significance that they have hitherto lacked” (56).

Mouw’s core in this book is the search for and discovery of common patches where people of difference may stand together for a common cause or belief. When Evangelicals for Social Action began to fragment, Mouw’s Kuyperianism kept him grounded but still capable of finding common places for civil discussion and action, even when he did disagree with Yoder — here’s how he expresses Yoder’s theory of atonement:

It is important to pay attention to various theories of the atonement, including the moral example theory, of which Yoder’s is a very sophisticated version. But none of this should ever detract from a central emphasis on the once-for-all transaction that has traditionally been associated with the motifs of substitution, payment, and sacrifice (68).

Furthermore, the present-day Anabaptists and their fellow pilgrims are right to call us to account for the ways we often identify Christian discipleship with specific political programs and ideologies. The church’s record in aligning itself with political power, and in freely giving its blessing to various military campaigns, is not a noble one. For all of that, though, I am not ready to concede that the solution for Christian disciples is to abandon all efforts to employ the political means available to us as citizens to pursue Christian goals. Nor am I convinced that a thoroughgoing pacifism is mandated for Christian disciples (74).

When it comes to finding common ground and compromise for the sake of justice, Mouw:

I would be happy to accept this statement of public policy as an accomplishment made possible by a careful exploration by persons who, in spite of serious worldview differences, possess a shared sense of justice grounded in a common createdness (79).

This brings into play an earlier discussion in the book on the image of God and createdness. Our common createdness provides the platform for common ground, civility, conversation, and compromise for the common good. Including language that jumps from the Christian box into common discourse:

[Jimmy] Carter related “thick” to “thin” by showing how a public address on policy matters can employ the language of a broad-ranging public discourse while being able to link each key point to concrete biblical teaching. It illustrates for me a workable principle: think “thick” within the Christian community and then speak “thin” in the public arena (80).

For Mouw activism isn’t simply the aim and, in fact, there’s very little indication of the kind of social activism Mouw engages in his life. Rather, the mode, namely, civility, is emphatic.

I have experienced a shift in my own focus, as an evangelical who cares about public involvement, from urging evangelicals simply to get involved in public life to encouraging them to work at exercising that involvement in the right spirit. This led, for me, to a sustained emphasis on the concept of civility in public life (82).

… the importance of drawing on Calvin’s overall perspective for seeing the church as a place in which we learn how to cultivate the kind of virtue that is appropriate and necessary for public life (85).

He found the Barth vs. Brunner to be dichotomies that were resolved by Kuyper in the idea of “common grace”:

Common grace, in contrast, is typically set forth by the neo-Calvinists as a divine strategy for bringing the cultural designs of God to completion (104).

There is a lot about law in common grace and natural law, all mentioned at some level in Mouw’s book. Instead of moving toward grace and love, Mouw moves more readily toward the I-Thou in the covenant concept.

He turns at one point to a younger Nicholas Wolterstorff who typologized three kinds of Calvinsts: doctrinalists, pietists, and Kuyperian. How is the Kuyperian depicted by Wolterstorff? “the Bible is meant to give us our cultural marching o; orders, , instructing us in the ways of discipleship in the collective patterns of life in the larger human community (120) … it is about being aligned with God’s culture-transforming purposes in the world” (120). Ah, that’s a very common way of understanding Kuyperianism but Mouw surprises: he sees himself as a pietist. Well, OK, I say to myself, and I see that pietism especially pervading his work in common ground and in civility. But his focus in this book over and over has to do with culture and culture-influencing and the public square.

Our intellectual lives, our cultural engagements, our relationships with others in the body of Christ—all of these must be guided by a personal and communal godliness, by hearts that desire the kind of holiness without which none shall see the Lord (124).

Mouw makes some strong critiques of identity politics today and the fragmentation of people into identities that end up in clusters rather that common ground arising from our common image of God. Hence, “If we take the Pentecostal alternative to Babel seriously, we cannot allow multiculturalism simply to be defined in terms of the Babel experience” (137).

Like Michael Horton, he believes in the village green (common ground) but knows it is insufficient for ecclesiology. Hence, evangelicalism is the common ground but the narrower expression for him is Calvinism and Reformed churches.

A great quote from Bavinck:

‘We must remind ourselves that the Catholic righteousness by good works is vastly preferable to a protestant righteousness by good doctrine. At least righteousness by good works benefits one’s neighbor, whereas righteousness by good doctrine only produces lovelessness and pride. Furthermore, we must not blind ourselves to the tremendous faith, genuine repentance, complete surrender and the fervent love for God and neighbor evident in the lives and work of many Catholic Christians.” (199)

Here is my favorite set of lines from this entire book, one that I resonate deeply with:

Many of us have had to move beyond a harsh acceptance of strong convictions to a gentler spirit of civility. But many of the younger evangelicals today need to move in the opposite direction. They don’t have to work as hard at being civil people, but they do need to be guided in the direction of strong convictions. They aren’t very literate biblically. Nor do they have the theological memories of those past struggles that gave birth to the strong convictions in the evangelical community (220).

It is hard to know how to critique a memoir like this but I do want to register a pervasive concern I had with the book. Rich Mouw is a statesman, a theologian, and a church man, but this book is about his public life. I would like to have seen more about the church: his church, the role of the church as church in society, and how the church can embody ways of life that the culture and the state will not because their “worldview” is otherwise. The absence of the church, I’m confident, is not because Mouw is not in the church; it is because this book is about seeking common ground with outsiders and insiders who differ.

Another way of engaging culture and the state is for the church to be the church and as a church witness to an alternative kingdom at work in this world. The distinctive difference I see between the Kuyperian framing of topics and the Anabaptist has to do with the aim, the end, the primary focus of one’s energies: is it the church or culture? is it the church as a means of influencing and transforming culture? is it the church as comprised of citizens for the sake of culture?

Too many today think the primary aim of the Christian is to make the world a better place. Whether a person gets juiced from liberation theology, social gospel, conservative evangelical social activism, or Kuyperianism, the issue is real-er than real today.  Many today are convinced of these forms of activism and are completely unsure how important the church is.

I am doing a series on the blog about why I became Anglican, and thefirst week I looked at the church calendar and last week at worship, and this week I want to dip into “worship,” by which I mean Sunday morning worship service. (I do not equate worship with Sunday morning worship, but Sunday morning worship is worship.) This week I look at the Lectionary.

Image used with permission.

I’m not a historian of the lectionary, and it is common property to a wide range of churches and that is why today it is called “The Revised Common Lectionary” and it is available online here.

In essence, the RCL is a 3-year cycle of Bible readings for Sunday worship (and daily readings as well). The lectionary is built on the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, with John weaved in over the three years. The Bible readings in a lectionary-based worship service are ordered into an Old Testament lesson, a reading from the Psalms, a reading from an Epistle, and then “The Gospel.”  As the church calendar is rooted in the life of Jesus (see the image above), so the lectionary readings from the Bible aim at the Gospel reading and prepare for it and enhance it. This squares the church on the Gospels as the gospel.

There are of course omissions from the the RCL: many passages from the Old Testament are not a part of the 3-year cycle; most of some books (Leviticus, Numbers, 1-2 Chronicles) are either absent for a variety of reasons, not least is that some are repetitious or difficult for public consumption (at least in the presence of children). If you want to see a good charting of percentages, see here. Here are the graphs from that page that summarize the percentages:

One may sniff about the low percentages from some books in the Bible, but care to compare these numbers with the display from non-lectionary churches? (Many churches today don’t even have Scripture readings in the service other than what the preacher reads for the sermon.)

I have three personal responses to the lectionary that attract me not just to Anglican worship but to lectionary-based worship:

First, the preacher/pastor is not in charge of which texts to preach but the lectionary is. Pastors and preachers will favor what they want to preach and this means over time hobby horses, favorite themes, texts that cover topics the preacher/pastor wants to focus on. Fine, but over time what one likes and what one doesn’t like will have too much influence.

Mind you, lectionary based churches provide the pastor/preacher with flexibility and at times one must pastorally vary from the lectionary text.

I provide an example: during my teenage years our pastor preached one by one through some of the Pauline letters. 1 Corinthians, he skipped 2 Corinthians if I recall accurately, then he went to Galatians and Ephesians and about the time he got to Colossians I went off to college. Sunday evening and Wednesday evening allowed the pastor to preach on other topics, but they tended to be topical or about prayer. This is not a criticism of my pastor’s sermons but evidence of what happens: I went through my teen years without an exposition of a Gospel. Perhaps this was the reason I fell so hard for the Gospels when I got to college and seminary.

Second, the wisdom of the lectionary is that over three years the three Synoptic Gospels and most of John will be covered and will form the center of the Bible readings. This means in a lectionary based worship, if done consistently over years, Jesus becomes the central topic.

One can’t improve on a lectionary-based worship that constantly leads the listeners to Jesus.

Third, because there are four texts the preacher/pastor can choose which one to focus on or can use each in a full-lectionary sermon.  A series might be done from Genesis during a Genesis period in the lectionary, or Exodus, or Isaiah, or from one of the Epistles or from the Psalms. One doesn’t have to choose the Gospel for the sermon text.

My conclusion is that: a lectionary-based worship is not perfect but it is wise. Our priest, Jay Greener, at times uses Ordinary Time for a series on a topic or a Bible book. Some lectionary preachers preach only on the Gospel and never preach on the Old Testament, the Psalms or the Epistle. This starves the church from the other direction.

The lectionary is wise.

Oh, one more point, a fourth: if you have never been to a lectionary-based church you may both be stunned by how much Bible is read aloud and really enjoy hearing more than a verse or two, may simply enjoy hearing the Bible read aloud, or may appreciate hearing from the whole Bible over time. I know I do.