Category: Evangelical Spirituality

Here is Luther on the obedience of faith

Faith receives, love gives. Faith leads people to God, love leads people to others. In faith a person lets God do good to them; in love a person does good to others. For he who believes has all things from God, and he is blessed and rich. Therefore he needs nothing more, but devotes his life and work to the good and welfare of other people. In love he does for his fellow people what God has done for him in faith – as though by faith he draws upon the good from above and by love he distributes good here below.

In a remarkable and readable book, Faith Victorious, the Finnish Lutheran scholar Lennart Pinomaa introduces the spiritual theology of the great Reformer. Here’s Pinomaa’s comment on Luther’s view of the obedience of faith

While Catholicism looked upon sanctification as a continuous activity on man’s part, as cultivation of self, as ‘school’, Luther saw it theocentrically: God does everything. Man’s struggle is a struggle for faith, not for works. Faith involves the total man totally. faith cannot result in inactivity, for it lives  by God’s judgement and grace, which in turn give rise to the activity of faith. If something is lacking, it at once becomes a matter of faith. The activity of faith in the service of others; the other person is therefore an inseparable part of aith. The aim of faith can never be merely one’s own salvation.
Both quotes from Faith Victorious.An Introduction to Luther’s Theology. (Lima, Ohio: Academic Renewal Press 2001), 75, 77.

To use the modern grammatical oddity -that is so not wrong!

Christianity is not cultured spirituality, but a new creation. Discipleship is well, but it was not discipleship that conquered the world for Christ, it was apostleship. It was not a disciple church but an apostolic, a church not of Christian learners but of Christian confessors. Since the decisive things of the cross, the Tomb, and Pentecost, the Christian is much more than a disciple of Christ – s/he is a member of Christ; s/he is a confessor and a regenerate. Discipleship is no match for the degeneration and egotism which are in the world by lust. We are not now Christ’s disciples merely but His purchased property; and Christianity before it is a discipline is a salvation….above all He is the Lord God with something more than a value for us – with an eternal and costly right whose value we but poorly prove. (P T Forsyth, Faith Freedom and the Future, 276-7)

Words to give us pause about what it is we are about when ‘making disciples’ suggests a more promising future for Christ’s church than bearing costly personal witness and confessing His Lordship over our lives, to our actual cost. Forsyth’s spirituality of the cross presupposes Christian lives bought with a price, no longer our own, and called to live as those purchased outright as redeemed confessors, whose lives speak His truth by the eloquence of sacrifice.

As always, Forsyth points to depths of Christian truth and experience that might make contemporary Evangelicalism with our passion for the practical, our desire to accentuate the accessible, seem just a little, well, shallow. ‘Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me’ is a hard lifestyle to sell to others; it’s even harder to live it for ourselves.

Spending some time writing a piece on P T Forsyth, which is all the excuse I need to find all kinds of diversionary paths that lead down fascinating Forsythian avenues. Reading again Harry Escott’s small anthology P T Forsyth and the Cure of Souls, I began the now habitual head-nodding that is my bodily acknowledgement that once again he is right, and again, and here again. Here’s a chunk of theological granite to weigh alongside some of the overblown plastic of some of the more utilitarian, guaranteed low effort and low-cost approaches to spirituality – what Karl Rahner once called anthropoegoism – (a peculiarly modern heresy evident in a person’s self centred and self-interested approach to the Divine as a resource to be used for our purposes). Forsyth will have none of it.

Prayer contains the very heart and height of truth – reality and action. In prayer the inmost truth of our personal being locks with the inmost reality of things, its energy finds a living Person acting as their unity and life, and we  escape the illusions of sense, self and the world. Prayer, indeed, is the great means of appropriating, out of the amalgam of illusion which means so much for our education, the pure gold of God as he wills, the Spirit as he works, and things as they are. (Escott, p. 68)

Prayer in this sense is a form of spiritual clarifying; a willingness to be introduced to the reality of who we are in the presence God and to discover in penitent wonder and surrendering worship who God is. And that encounter strips away our illusions about what our life is for, who and what we are called to be, because ‘the soul becomes very sure of God and itself in prayer’. The living, acting Christ becomes known as the one who gives new and regenerated life and who energises and enables action. That is the meaning of one of Forsyth’s epigrams: ‘Prayer is the assimilation of a holy God’s moral strength.’

Which means prayer is transformative – of personality and character, of politics and society, of human failing and human longing. ‘Prayer, as our greatest work, breeds in us the flair for the greatest work of God, the instinct of his kingdom, and the sense of his track of time.’ (Escott p. 81).

Right back to that article what needs writing!

Blogging is intermittent at present. Don’t blog when I’m away from home. Next few days I’m in Cardiff on a dual purpose visit. I’m doing a couple of lectures on the hymns of Charles Wesley, and meeting up with the other UK Baptist Principals – amongst other things to harden up arrangements for the Baptists Doing Theology in Context conference later this year at Luther King House, Manchester.

I’ve posted on the Scottish Baptist College blog the details of the lectures – recent blog posts here on Charles Wesley have been sparked by immersing myself again in Weselyan hymns and biography. The Wesleyan hunger for holiness drove Charles and John to a lifelong programme of original research, analysing and exploring the origins and nature of personal Christian experience. Their search for a theology of experience which encompassed redemption and sanctification and took with radical seriousness the power of divine love to renew the image of God in human personality, inspired some of Charles most remarkable hymns. And woven through them a rich combination of Christian theological traditions from Augustine’s Homilies on 1 John and his Confessions, to Eastern Fathers such as the Cappadocians; from Ephrem the Syrian to the Anglican poet George Herbert, from Luther to a whole clutch of Puritans; from Henry Scougal of Aberdeen whose Life of God in the Soul of Man had an influence out of all proportion to its size on the theology and spirituality of the Wesleys and Whitefield, and on to the non-conformist expositor Matthew Henry, whose brilliant one-liners at times are the inspiration for entire hymns. And on…..and on.

To study Wesley’s hymns is to encounter theology that is passionately felt and told; it is also to discover just how varied and suggestive, how profound and creative Christian theology can be, when powerful streams meet, and earlier tradition encounters contemporary experience in a new confluence. For myself, the devout eclecticism and reasonable enthusiasm of John Wesley’s theology, and the poetic virtuosity Charles Wesley displayed in setting Evangelical faith to music and rhythm, demonstrates how a classic stream of Christian tradition such as Evangelical Spirituality, incurs debts it must never disown. Whatever else contemporary Evangelicalism loses, and it is in process of losing much, it must not lose its sense of indebtedness to and dependence upon, the insights and energy, the spiritual resources and theological correctives, of a Christian tradition much older, wider and deeper than any single movement. Of course it’s hard now to define Evangelicalism as a movement – qualifiers such as conservative and progressive, variations of species that are encountered in different cultural contexts, claims and counter-claims to represent ‘historic Evangelicalism’ and thus exclude others as non-representative, and a plethora of agenda driven marketable Evangelical makeovers, suggest a serious dissolution of distinctives. Anyway, Evangelicalism never was a unified, overarching, co-ordinated movement, but rather an expression of Christian faith shaped by a cluster of convictions variously interpreted, and yet which were common to people of many Christian traditions.

Which is why it is important that discussions of contemporary Evangelicalism should not be divorced from the historical origins in the Evangelical revival of the 18th Century; nor should the classic expressions of Evangelicalism be isolated from that continuous flow of Christian tradition, as if Evangelicalism somehow superseded all other traditions in theological truth claims, missional urgency, spiritual vitality. Any particular tradition that cuts itself off from the mainstream, becomes an oxbow lake, and is in danger of simply drying up as the rest of the river flows on.

One of the reasons I study the hymns of Charles Wesley and the sermons of John Wesley, and much else in the Evangelical Spiritual tradition is because I refuse to allow contemporary a-historical fashions to dictate what Evangelicalism is or isn’t. And often restatements and redefinitions make little meaningful reference to our own tradition, never mind Evangelicalism’s own dependence on those many streams that originate up in the foothills of the Christian tradition, and which in their flow towards the sea feed and sustain each other like tributaries. Traditions must change, adapt, remain responsive to contextual flux, but there is also something given to a tradition which later generations cannot simply decide to dispense with in the struggle for survival we call relevance.

The Evangelical tradition has moved on since Wesley’s day – but what is it that gives Evangelicalism continuity with its own past?

What in the tradition is ‘given’, that without which Evangelicalism begins to lose its impetus and flow, its place in the mainstream, and puts it in danger of becoming an oxbow lake, cut off by the slow accumulation of silt?

Questions. And not unimportant ones.

There are times when Charles Wesley is so precisely explicit in recounting Christian experience, so assured and confident of the realities and verities of evangelical theology as it arises from the confluence of evangelical experience and biblical doctrine, that it’s easy to forget the balancing reticence that prohibits assurance becoming presumption. The Love Divine that excels all other loves, and which is beyond all knowledge, is to be trusted fully and freely on its own terms, even though such faith has eternal consequence. And trusted not because it is fully understood, or underwritten by  intellectual guarantees, but because it floods the heart with joy, renews the spirit in love, and recreates the entire personality in the image of God, and God does all this by a love that operates outside the categories of any epistemology limited by human finitude.

So when Charles coments, In vain the first-born seraph tries, to sound the depths of love divine; and when he declares,”T’is mystery all! Let earth adore. Let angel minds enquire no more", he is declaring the mystery of Divine Love off limits to any form of calculus, logic or formula that by definition seeks to define, and thus control, and thus limit.

But Charles is not only saying that the Divine Love is immeasurable – he is saying it is a mystery so deep that the only response is adoration, what is demanded is the capitulation of the heart in trustful, grateful love. The apophatic strain in Charles Wesley’s hymns is however less than total – for in the Gospel story of God in Christ, who emptied himself of all but love and was crucified for sinners, the divine love is indeed revealed, and in such terms as is sufficient for salvation. But in worship and adoration the Christian heart and mind recognises that the Divine Love has an infinite surplus, an inexhaustible fullness, an endless repertoire of creative, redemptive power, that renders praise all but speechless, and compels a reverent reticence in which words give way to adoring wonder.

One of Charles’ lesser known hymns expresses an important truth deeply embedded in Christian mysticism. For example in The Cloud of Unknowing the writer describes the deepest relations of a person to God, not in terms of knowing, but in terms of loving: "Because he may well be loved, but not thought. By love he can be caught and held, but by thinking never".

So in a hymn based on Job 11.7, "Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty to perfection?, Wesley teaches the importance of theological humility as a spiritual grace, and as a prerequisite to proper worship:

Shall foolish, weak, short-sighted man

   Beyond archangels go,

The great Almighty God explain,

   Or to perfection know?

His attributes divinely soar

   Above the creatures’ sight,

And prostrate seraphim adore

   The glorious Infinite.

.

Jehovah’s everlasting days

   They cannot numbered be,

Incomprehensible the space

   Of thine immensity

Thy wisdom’s depths by reason’s line

   In vain we strive to sound,

Or stretch our labouring thought t’assign

   Omnipotence a bound.

.

The brightness of thy glories leaves

   Description far below;

Nor man, nor angels’ heart conceives

   How deep thy mercies flow:

Thy love is most unsearchable

   And dazzles all above;

They gaze but cannot count or tell

   The treasures of thy love.

Apophatic theology is an important restraint on that human impulse, particularly strong in accomplished theologians, to reduce God’s immensity to manageable theological proportions. What P T Forsyth calls our ‘lust for lucidity’. In Charles Wesley’s theology of praise and worship there is an important expression of apophatic thinking. At times worship for Wesley is a willingness to glory, not in what we know, but in what we cannot know; a celebration not of understood certainties but of incomprehensible mysteries; a contented acceptance not of doctrinal precision but of personally appropriated spiritual experience.

Mystery is an essential element in Christian theology, a necessary safeguard that, like the angel at the garden of Eden, prevents us from ever presuming to go where we have no right to go. Amongst the priorities in contemporary worship songs and hymns, is a rediscovery of a proper reticence, a willingness to live with and within a mystery that baffles, bewilders and captivates. How about some apophatic praise songs then?

In an age of theological rationalism when the Trinity was seen as a form of manufactured speculative metaphysical maybe, but so what, doctrine, Charles Wesley produced a series of hymns that some argue did much to conserve Trinitarian orthodoxy by embedding it in hymns. Doxology became the durable form of theology, because Wesley’s genius was to take theological truth and spiritual conviction and turn them into the prayers and praises of hymns. In 1767 the Wesley brothers published Hymns on the Trinity, and gifted to the church some of the best theological reflection on why Christian spirituality must have a Trinitarian foundation.

Fountain of Divine compassion,

    Father of the ransomed race,

Christ our Saviour and salvation,

     Spirit of consecrating grace;

See us prostrated before Thee;

    Co-essential Three in One,

Glorious God, our souls adore Thee

    High on Thine eternal throne.

.

While we in Thy name assemble,

    Overshadowed from above,

Let us at Thy presence tremble,

    Holy Triune God of Love;

Father, Son and Spirit bless us,

    Who the true Jehovah art;

Plenitude of God in Jesus,

    Enter every contrite heart.

The first verse places theological reflection within an attitude of adoring contemplation. The second verse moves from adoration to petition, and from contemplation of the Divine beauty to petition for the Divine presence in the human heart humble enough to welcome the Holy Triune God of love. Charles has little interest in speculative analysis, though he treats the doctrine here and there in his sermons. But as Geoffrey Wainwright pointed out, in the hymns he moves from the calm prose of his written sermons, to the ‘incandescent orthodoxy’ of hymns intentionally experiential; analysis yields to adoration, and speculative thought is transmuted into spiritual response.

The two verses of this hymn would be an interesting call to worship – doxology as adoring contemplation, and as humble petition.

Much of my research time is now taken up preparing lectures I’m scheduled to deliver at South Wales Baptist College in a few weeks time. Given the general title Evangelical Spirituality, I’ve chosen to explore the role of Charles Wesley’s hymns in helping give shape and content to emergent Evangelical spirituality. The combination of experience, theology, scriptural discourse and rhetorical skill are all evident in the remarkable literary achievement of A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People called Methodists.

Edited by his brother John, Charles wrote most of the hymns gathered and orgainsed into a handbook of the spiritual theology and theological experience of the Evangelical Revival; it is a key source of early Evangelical theology. Charles Wesley is too easily eclipsed by John, but in recent years there has been a revival of scholarly activity focusing not only on his hymns, which are magnificently presented in the Bicentennial Edition, but on other aspects of Charles life and contribution to the Evangelical revival. The critical notes, Introduction, and comprehensive indices of the Bicentennial Edition have made this book one of my most cherished possessions, especially since mine is the early Oxford Edition, beautifully bound in Oxford blue and decorated with John Wesley’s monogram. This month S T Kimbrough and others publish the first full critical edition of Charles’ Journal in two volumes; and a few years ago Oxford printed a critical edition of his sermons. Then too, several important biographical and theological studies add to the growing list of monographs and secondary studies. It’s a good time to be studying the hymns of Wesley, and I’ll do a post soon of the key resources, primary and secondary.

My own specific interest at present is the rhetorical and polemical use of language, poetic skill and device, and the pastoral strategy that can be discerned in Charles’ work. Theological imagination, speculative mysticism reined in by biblical constraint, doctrinally definite assertion having to accommodate bold even reckless aspiration for all and every blessing made available by an infinite grace. Charles’ theology is not for the faint hearted conservative scared of overstating the divine readiness to bless. Amongst his more adventurous efforts are a number of hymns on the Triune God, in the form of prayers that the eternal Trinity come in renewing power to indwell and renew the human heart. The renewal of God’s image in the redeemed, renewed and perfected heart is the definitive goal of Charles Wesley’s theology. He never, ever, underestimated the possibilities of divine grace and eternal love as they worked on fallen, fallible human nature with redemptive intent. If that gave his hymns an unsettling note of extravagance, Charles would have preferred that to a theology always wanting to qualify and limit grace to the reach of human reason, even the sanctified reason of the theologically timid.

Come, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,

  Whom one all-perfect God we own,

Restorer of thine image lost,

  Thy various offices make known;

Display, our fallen souls to raise,

The whole economy of grace.

.

O that we now, in love renewed,

  Might blameless in thy sight appear;

Wake we in thy similitude,

  Stamped with the Triune character;

Flesh, spirit, soul to thee resign

And live and die entirely thine!

February is Charles Wesley month for me. Early March I am doing two lectures in Cardiff on Evangelical Spirituality and I’ve chosen to explore the theological rhetoric (rhetorical theology?) of Charles Wesley’s hymns. The tercentenary of his birth in December 2007 has once again focused attention on a hymn writer whose poetry articulated evangelical experience in all its immediacy, diversity, strangeness and controversy. During and after the Evangelical Revival the hymns provided emotional and spiritual narratives into which converts and those seeking a deeper sense of God, could enter as participants,recognising that they shared many of the experiences described. And for those who sang them or heard them sung as observers, they proclaimed the spiritual realities of a Gospel scandalously accessible, free from ecclesial or doctrinal disqualification.

It’s a commonplace hardly worth mentioning that a poet who wrote thousands of hymns consequently produced a corpus of mixed quality; hilarious doggerel co-exists with joy-filled devotion, banal cliche with inspired invention, repetitive predictable rhymes with some of the most precise and original spiritual theology. I’ve read and studied Wesley’s hymns for years now, and I still think his best hymns represent an original high point in Evangelical spirituality, and some of the finest spiritual theology in our language.

This morning I discovered a hymn I hadn’t know before, entitled ‘Forgiveness’. The first two stanzas begin by asking the question, "Forgive my foes? it cannot be:/My foes with cordial love embrace?" Then for ten lines Wesley describes the helplessness of the ‘fallen soul’ to draw the "envenom’d dart", and laments that till the Spirit is recieved and grace renews, forgiveness is impossible. Then come the last two stanzas in which the destructiveness of hate and anger are described in powerful images, and in the context of prayer, the miracle of forgiveness takes place by the coming of Christ into heart and will so that the offender is now thought about through the Saviour’s mind:

Come, Lord, and tame the tiger’s force,

Arrest the whirlwind in my will,

Turn back the torrent’s rapid course,

and bid the headlong sun stand still,

the rock dissolve, the mountain move,

and melt my hatred into love.

.

Root out the wrath thou dost restrain;

And when I have my Saviour’s mind,

I cannot render pain for pain,

I cannot speak a word unkind,

An angry  thought I cannot know,

Or count my injurer my foe.

Tiger, whirlwind, torrent, blazing sun, rock, mountain – images that make you think of cruelty, violent energy, destructive force, white hot rage, hard implacability, immovable persistence. And only the work of the indwelling Saviour can tame, arrest, turn back, halt, dissolve, move, melt such naturally destructive forces – and not by power but by love.

Now – there’s a hymn to sing at the end of a fractious church meeting; or as a prelude to sharing the broken bread and poured out wine we dare to call communion. Forget the emotionally fluffy, self-absorbed feel-good praise songs – here’s a hymn that requires a bit more honesty before God. My experience of Evangelical religion, theology, spirituality – choose whatever word – has not always been consistent with Wesley’s Evangelical ethic of relationships which are rooted in a theology of reconciliation, and which are repeatedly repaired through the inner renewal that is the work of the indwelling Christ.

I have long felt, in my own heart and spirit, and in wider Christian experience, that forgiveness and love, as actions and attitudes of the renewed will represent one of the tougher tests of our devotion, much harder than singing ourselves into devotional reveries; readiness to forgive, and awareness of how much we need to be forgiven ourselves, are truer marks of genuine discipleship.

Now Charles Wesley could give as good as he got, and had as much need of grace as the rest of us. Some of his verse written against others drips with sarcasm and is positively corrosive of goodwill. But here, in a hymn like this, the Gospel is shown to be the power of God unto forgiveness, redeeming love miraculously melts hate, and the grace of God converts my foe into one whom I now see through the eyes of the Saviour. Evangelical spirituality is not only about a renewed heart – but about a heart indwelt by Christ – the evidence of which is a ministry of reconciliation, reconciled reconcilers reconciling, forgiven forgivers forgiving.