Author: Luke Stamps

An Amplified Lord’s Prayer

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Brooklyn_Museum_-_The_Lord's_Prayer_(Le_Pater_Noster)_-_James_Tissot

Tissot’s “The Lord’s Prayer,” Public Domain

There is a special power that accompanies praying the words of Scripture. It’s not matter of magic or superstition. It’s simply a matter of praying in accord with God’s revealed will—praying God’s inspired words back to him. The Psalter is given to the people of God for this very reason. And the Scriptures provide many other prayers to this same end as well, including the prayers of Moses, Solomon, Daniel, Jesus, Paul, and more.

This is also one reason why I think all Christians should pray the very words of the Lord’s Prayer every day, preferably several times a day, and why I think the Lord’s Prayer should have a central place in the corporate worship of the people of God on the Lord’s Day. Praying in unison the model prayer that our Lord gave to us is a moving experience of the church’s spiritual unity. The Lord’s Prayer is almost hymnic in its meter, giving us good reason to believe that this prayer was memorized in the earliest layers of Christian tradition. And it quite obviously has served as a formula for prayer down through the centuries of Christian history.

But the Lord’s Prayer also sets the agenda for the priorities of Christian prayer. It’s not a matter of either recitation or a pattern of priorities to be followed, but both/and. Still, the “Our Father” can be amplified in our personal prayers to great spiritual benefit. Here is one way that the Lord’s Prayer might be utilized in this way:

Our Father, the one who in your great love has sent forth your only begotten Son in the fullness of time to redeem us, and the one who has sent your Spirit into our hearts, leading us to cry out to you as our Abba, Father (Gal. 4:4-6),

Our Father, the one who has not saved us as isolated individuals, but who has incorporated us into the body of Christ,

Our Father in heaven, the one who transcends space and time as the almighty maker and sustainer and Lord of all that exists,

May your name be hallowed, sanctified; may you vindicate the holiness of your great name, despite the ways that we have dishonored it among the nations (Ezek. 36:23),

May your kingdom come; may your saving reign and rule in your Son, Jesus Christ, come in my life and in my family’s life and in the life of the church and among all the peoples of earth,

May your will be done, your saving, end-times will to redeem a people for yourself and to sanctify them for your service (1 Thess. 4:3),

May all of these things be done so that a taste of heaven might be brought down to earth.

Give us this day our daily bread; principally give us anew the Bread of Life, the life of the world, your Son, Jesus Christ (John 6:33); give us also what we need materially, physically, spiritually, emotionally, and psychologically in order to do your will this very day.

Forgive us our debts, our great sins and transgressions against you, and form us into the kind of people who willingly extend forgiveness to those who have sinned against us.

Lead us not into temptation, guard us from ourselves and from the indwelling sin that pulls us away from you.

But if we are to enter into temptation, into a time of testing, deliver us from the Evil One and from all of our spiritual enemies.

We ask all of this in faith and confidence knowing that to you alone belongs the kingdom, the power, and the glory, both now and forever. Amen.

Harassed and Helpless

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sheep-agriculture-animals-countryside-87081I’ve been reading Matthew’s gospel recently, and one of the things that has stood out to me on this reading is Jesus’ compassion for people oppressed by sin. We often think about sin only in terms of our agency, that is, sin is something we do and are responsible for. Jesus certainly doesn’t diminish that understanding of sin and its consequences. He consistently calls people to repent of their sin and self-absorption and to believe the good news of the kingdom of God.

But Jesus also sees sin as a power that exerts itself over us and renders us helpless to rescue ourselves from its vice grip. He sees the crowds and has compassion on them “because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (9:36). He has compassion on those living with the painful consequences of a fallen world by healing their diseases (14:14). He has compassion not only on Israel but also on those living in Gentile territory, feeding their hungry bodies and souls (15:32).

His exorcisms also demonstrate that he knows the demonic powers have their hooks in us. He describes his Satan-plundering work as one who binds the strongman (Satan) and takes his property from him (12:29). It is not so much that sin is either something we do or something that has a power over us. It is both.

This same idea is also communicated in the Old Testament. When God reveals his glory to Moses on Mt. Sinai, he also reveals the depths of his compassionate character:

The LORD passed before him and proclaimed, “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation” (Ex. 34:6-7).

God is just and will punish the wicked. But he is also gracious and merciful and desires to pardon and deliver us from sin’s power.

The Psalms express the same truth. Consider just one passage that demonstrates the compassion of God for weak and helpless sinners. Psalm 103:8-14,

The LORD is merciful and gracious,
slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
He will not always chide,
nor will he keep his anger forever.
He does not deal with us according to our sins,
nor repay us according to our iniquities.
For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him;
as far as the east is from the west,
so far does he remove our transgressions from us.
As a father shows compassion to his children,
so the LORD shows compassion to those who fear him.
For he knows our frame;
he remembers that we are dust.

God’s mercy is not permissiveness. He doesn’t suspend his justice in order to extend forgiveness (that’s why the cross was necessary for salvation, Rom. 3:25-26). But God knows our weakness. He “knows our frame” and “remembers that we are dust.” God is not surprised that we stumble and fall, many times in the face of the same temptations. He is like a compassionate father, who sees his children struggling. He knows. He remembers. And he extends compassion and mercy.

The apostle Paul also sees sin not only as a choice we make (it is certainly that) but also as a force or power that has been unleashed on the human race, abetted by the demonic principalities and powers. Unbelievers are those who have been blinded by Satan, “the god of this age” (2 Cor. 4:4). Paul conceives of the cross of Christ not only cancelling our sin debt but also disarming the demonic rulers and authorities by triumphing over them (Col. 2:14).

To highlight sin as a power over us is not to obviate our responsibility or guilt—far from it. It is to highlight the depth of God’s mercy in Christ, who understands that sin, though our own doing, is not something we can free ourselves from. He stoops all the way into our darkness, taking on the powers himself, in order to lift us up into the light and liberate us from sin’s bondage. One of the key terms for salvation in the Scriptures is, after all, redemption—a concept rooted in the Exodus, when God bought back his people from slavery.

We need to apply this truth both to ourselves and to others. We need to know that God has this kind of mercy and compassion for us in our struggles with sin. God is not a slave master, waiting for us to mess up so that he can bring down his hand of vengeance. He is a Father, recall, who has compassion on his children and knows our weakness. But we also need to be the conduits of this kind of mercy to others. Rather than seeing those who offend us or those in rebellion against God as our enemies, we become children of our heavenly Father when we too remember and when we too know that humans are dust. They are weak. They are oppressed. They are blinded by Satan. They are like sheep without a shepherd. May we become the kind of people who bear witness to this merciful Good Shepherd, not by being moral scolds, but by being willing to bear with people in their helplessness and to show them the path to true liberation.

Like It or Not, God Is With You

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mccreight

This Lenten season I have been reading I Am with You, by Kathryn Greene-McCreight, which was the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lent book for 2016. It is a biblically rich and pastorally sensitive reflection on the presence of God with his people. This quote from Erasmus has really stuck with me over these past few weeks:

Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit. 

Which means, “Called or not called, God will be there.” Or, in Greene-McCreight’s looser rendering, “Like it or not, God is with you.” Sometimes God’s presence is discomfiting and even frightening. His nearness often means judgment. His presence often brings rebuke and chastisement. His providence often spells sorrow and pain. But he is still there with his chosen people, sanctifying, prodding, sustaining, pulling us to glory.

And when the dust settles, God’s people know: the threat of his absence is even more terrifying than his sometimes uncomfortable presence. And so we give thanks, knowing that our Triune God is still with us. Even in death, we know that our crucified and risen Christ has promised to remain with us to the very end of the age (Matt. 28:20), like it or not.

Maximus on the Mystical Knowledge of God in Christ

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I have recently been reading St. Maximus the Confessor’s commentary on the Lord’s Prayer, and it, like all of Maximus’ writings, rewards careful (and prayerful) reflection. If you don’t know about Maximus, I’m not talking about this guy (but he was pretty awesome too). Maximus was a seventh century Byzantine monk, theologian, and controversialist. He is most well-known for the pivotal role he played in the monothelite controversy—the debate over the number of “wills” in the incarnate Christ—which culminated in the sixth ecumenical council (the Third Council of Constantinople, 680-81) and its proclamation that Christ does in fact have two wills (dyothelitism) that correspond to his two natures. Maximus was so convinced of this position that he was willing to endure torture (he had his tongue cut out and his hand severed) and ultimately the exile that took his life. As such, he is referred to as the “Confessor,” which in Eastern Christianity refers to one who suffers for the sake of orthodoxy.

But Maximus’ theology is much richer and wider than this single doctrinal controversy. Indeed, his work is nothing less than cosmic in scope, in that he sees the whole of reality—everything from personal piety and the church’s liturgy to the created order and the grounding of abstract properties—summed up in the Incarnate Logos and the Triune God that he reveals.

But back to his comments on the Our Father. His commentary is wide-ranging. It touches on the specifics of the prayer but also interprets the prayer as a kind of window into the whole economy of redemption. It is full of rich intertextual connections and allegories that illuminate the mysteries of the Christian faith. This paragraph, in Maximus’ prologue to the commentary, especially stood out to me:

In becoming incarnate, the Word of God teaches us the mystical knowledge of God because he shows us in himself the Father and the Holy Spirit. For the full Father and the full Holy Spirit are essentially and completely in the full Son, even the incarnate Son, without being themselves incarnate. Rather, the Father gives approval and the Spirit cooperates in the incarnation with the Son who effected it, since the Word remained in possession of his own mind and life, contained in essence by no other than the Father and the Spirit, while hypostatically realizing out of love for man the union with the flesh.

Maximus provides here a tightly packed summary of the whole Christian faith. Notice several salient points:

  1. Christocentrism: For Maximus, the incarnate Christ provides the key that unlocks the mystical knowledge of the whole Trinity. The Son reveals the Father and the Holy Spirit because, even though the Son alone is incarnate, the other divine persons are fully present in the Son, in whom the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily. Thus, true Christocentrism can never be Christomonism, because Christ reveals the whole glorious Godhead.
  2. Perichoresis: As Maximus argues, this Christocentrism is predicated upon the mutual indwelling of the divine persons. The Cappadocian concept of perichoresis is often misused in contemporary Trinitarian thought when it is leveraged as a kind of catch all, meant to solve the problem of divine unity in social or relational models. But this misuse should not cause us to jettison this crucial insight. Perichoresis is not the interpenetration of distinct divine agents but the intimate sharing of life together in the numerically singular divine essence.
  3. Inseparable operations: Maximus argues that the incarnation is not an act of the Son alone but of the whole Trinity in unity. The Augustinian insight that all of the external acts of the Trinity are indivisible is echoed here by Maximus. It is not enough to say that the Father sends the Son or that the Holy Spirit is the agent in his virginal conception; the Son himself also “effected” the incarnation. The Trinity acts in unity to bring about the mystery of the Word-made-flesh.
  4. Appropriation: Having said that, Maximus is also careful to safeguard against theopaschism or patripassianism, by maintaining that the Son alone is made man. Incarnation is properly appropriated to the Son alone, but this truth should never be pitted against the indivisible divine act of incarnation. The doctrine of inseparable operations and the doctrine of appropriation must be held in tension.
  5. Extra Calvinisticum: In becoming incarnate, the Son did not surrender his divine “mind and life.” He continues to share in the selfsame divine life as the Father and the Spirit, even in his incarnate state. This doctrine, which came to be known as “Calvin’s extra” in the Reformation debates over the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, is actually a much older teaching. Indeed, as David Willis has suggested, the doctrine is more properly titled the extra Catholicum or the extra Patristicum because of its near universal acceptance in classic Christologies.
  6. Hypostatic union: Finally, Maximus highlights the union of divinity and humanity in the person, or hypostasis, of the Son. This union is realized “out of love for man,” since the motivation and telos of the incarnation is the salvation of fallen humanity. As the Nicene Creed has it, the Word became incarnate and was made man “for us men and for our salvation.” So the goal of God in the incarnation is soteriological in nature. As Maximus says elsewhere, “the realization of the divine counsel is the deification of our nature.”

What a rich paragraph! If you have never read Maximus, you should remedy that. You might start with this selection of his spiritual writings or this collection of his Christological reflections. For secondary sources, you might try Balthasar’s classic treatment, Andrew Louth’s introduction (with several important translations of Maximus’ own writings), or the recent work of Paul Blowers.

The Pattern of Sound Words: Some Brief Thoughts on the Semantics of Orthodoxy

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One of the reasons why I believe the consensual tradition of Christian orthodoxy deserves so much deference is that its theological language has been time-tested. It has been tested in the laboratory of Christian history and Christian experience. It has passed through the crucible of ecclesiastical conflict and has been vindicated by lay Christian consensus across time and space. The challenges of translation and contextualization still remain, but the semantic categories passed down to us have survived for a reason.

Calvin once mused about a scenario in which no extra-biblical language would be needed in order to communicate what Scripture clearly teaches about the nature and works of the Triune God. But, as Calvin rightly conceded, Christian theologians must employ extra-biblical terminology, not because the language of Scripture is insufficient, but because it is so often distorted.

This is also why I am so wary of newer categories that have little to no precedent in the Christian tradition. The historical categories of Trinitarian orthodoxy–hypostasis and ousia, procession and mission, inseparable operations and appropriation–have been tested and tried–biblically, theologically, philosophically, and pastorally.  They have, as a result, a kind of sturdiness and reliability that can’t be found in the newer categories of so many recent evangelical treatments of the Trinity–like the granite walls of Yosemite compared to loose shale. The newer terms–relationship, role, functional subordination, eternal relations of authority and submission–are, at best provisional, and must undergo a significant probationary period in order to test their biblical and theological utility. In some cases, their incommensurabilty and inconsistency with the traditional ways Christians have interpreted Scripture and the Triune mystery at its heart are more than apparent.

So for my part, its better to tread the old paths of orthodox terminology, with all of their careful and intricate beauty and rationality, than to begin afresh with newer and less tried alternatives.

Andrew Fuller on the Incomprehensible Trinity

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A helpful reminder from 18th century Baptist pastor and theologian, Andrew Fuller:

A subject so great and so much above our comprehension as this is requires to be treated with trembling. Everything that we can think or say, concerning the ever blessed God, requires the greatest modesty, fear, and reverence. Were I to hear two persons engaged in a warm contest upon the subject, I should fear for them both. One might in the main be right, and the other in the wrong; but if many words were used, they might both be expected to incur the reproof of the Almighty: “Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?” (Letters on Systematic Divinity)

The Extra Cyrillicum: In the Bosom of the Virgin, Filling All Creation

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The doctrine known as the extra Calvinisticum states that the Son of God is not limited to nor circumscribed by his human nature. Even “after” the incarnation, the eternal Son still continues to exist as God, upholding the universe by the Word of his power, along with the Father and the Spirit. The doctrine emerged out the Reformation controversies over the presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. The Lutherans maintained that the Son’s human nature became ubiquitous by virtue of its union with the divine nature and could therefore be present “in, with, and under” the elements of the Eucharist (a misapplication of the ancient doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum, or communication of attributes). The logic of the Lutherans seemed to be that wherever the divinity of Christ is, there also is the humanity of Christ. The Calvinists, on the other hand, maintained that the incarnation does not introduce a change or mutation to either the human or the divine nature of Christ; instead, since both natures retain their integrity, the Son must continue to exist in his divinity, even apart from his human nature. The Lutherans lampooned this view, labeling it Calvin’s extra, meaning, “outside of”–as if Christ’s divinity was sort of spilling out of him in a spatial sense (for more on the extra, see Paul Helm’s essay on it here).

But the Calvinists had the upper hand in this debate–in terms of both Scripture and the Christian tradition. On the latter, David Willis has argued convincingly that the Calvinist view is so well attested in the tradition that the doctrine is more properly termed the extra Catholicum or the extra Patristicum, rather than the extra Calvinisticum.

One of the most common objections to the extra is that it runs the risk of Nestorianism. If Christ has a divine life, so to speak, outside of his incarnate experience, then doesn’t this entail that he is functioning effectively as two persons, one divine and one human? Gerald Hawthorne, for example, argues that the early church fathers implicitly taught this view, namely, that Christ has a kind of “dual existence” as God and as man. According to Hawthorne, this view either risks Nestorianism or else a kind of “de facto Docet[ism], failing to estimate fully the humanity in which divinity made itself visible.”

cyril

Ironically, Hawthorne cites Cyril of Alexandria as an example of this view. I say “ironically,” because Cyril was, of course, the chief anti-Nestorian in the lead up to the Third Ecumenical Council, the Council of Ephesus (431), which denounced the two-persons heresy. So if Cyril himself affirms the extra, then it seems highly unlikely that it actually risks the error of Nestorianism. Here is the relevant portion on the issue from Cyril’s Third Epistle to Nestorius:

And we do not say that the flesh was changed into the Godhead, or again that the ineffable nature of God the Word was perverted into that of the flesh, for He is immutable and unalterable, ever abiding the same, according to the Scriptures; but while visible as a babe in swaddling clothes and yet in the bosom of the Virgin who bare him, He was filling all creation as God, and was enthroned with Him who begat Him. For the divinity is immeasurable and without magnitude, nor does it admit of circumspection.

The Word is united to flesh and so Christ is one person, but this does not mean that his divinity is contracted, so to speak, to his human nature. He remains the Word even in his incarnate state. Thus, because he has two natures, there is nothing improper in ascribing to him, as a single person, attributes and activities distinctive of his two natures: nursing at Mary’s breast, while at the same time filling all creation. So perhaps we could, with some justification, even speak of the doctrine as the extra Cyrillicum.

O Radix

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If you don’t know about Malcolm Guite’s excellent little book of sonnets on the church year, Sounding the Seasons, you should remedy that. Guite is an Anglican poet-priest who has a knack for making the sturdy, permanent truths of the Christian faith as lively and relevant as they really are.

Guite opens with an extended selection of sonnets on Advent, including seven that match the great “O Antiphons” of the final seven days of Advent. Here is today’s sonnet, “O Radix,” celebrating the Root of Jesse:

All of us sprung from one deep-hidden seed,
Rose from a root invisible to all.
We knew the virtues once of every weed,
But, severed from the roots of ritual,
We surf the surface of a wide-screen world
And find no virtue in the virtual.
We shrivel on the edges of a wood
Whose heart we once inhabited in love,
Now we have need of you, forgotten Root,
The stock and stem of every living thing
Whom once we worshipped in the sacred grove,
For now is winter, now is withering
Unless we let you root us deep within,
Under the ground of being, graft us in.

Incarnation Anyway?

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A couple of years ago I read through Edwin Chr. van Driel’s important work, Incarnation Anyway: Arguments for Supralapsarian Christology. In it, van Driel explores the question, would God have become incarnate even if there were no sin from which to rescue humanity? Or, to state the question differently, in the eternal plan of God, is God’s decree to become incarnate in Christ logically anterior to his decree to permit the fall (supralapsarian)?

Van Driel admits that in the Western traditions, the answer to this question is (for the most part) decidedly, no. Calvin is representative on this point:

One such [vague] speculation is that Christ would still have become man even if no means of redeeming mankind had been needed…But since all Scripture proclaims that to become our Redeemer he was clothed with flesh, it is too presumptuous to imagine another reason or another end. We well know why Christ was promised from the beginning: to restore the fallen world to succor lost men….In short, the only reason given in Scripture that the Son of God willed to take our flesh, and accepted this commandment from the Father, is that he would be a sacrifice to appease the Father on our behalf (Institutes 2.12.4).

But van Driel suggests that this line of reasoning begs the question in some important respects. Is it actually the case that Scripture gives us no reasons for the incarnation other than those tied to Christ’s work of sin-bearing atonement? For example, does Scripture not also speak of the incarnation in creational and eschatological terms that transcend (without occluding) the incarnation’s redemptive rationale?

But what would a scriptural case for the “incarnation-anyway” position look like? What Scriptures have proponents of this view marshaled as evidence for their position? Many supporters of the position have pointed to the sweeping Christological claims of Ephesians and Colossians with regard to Christ’s place in God’s creational agenda. Ephesians 1:10 maintains that God’s purpose in Christ was “a plan for the fullness of time to unite (anakephalaioo; recapitulate) all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.” Likewise, Colossians 1:16 speaks of Christ—not just the Son of God as such, but the incarnate Christ—as the one through whom and for whom all things were created. So it appears that the incarnation has a creational, not merely a redemptive, dimension.

Van Driel also makes three interrelated theological arguments in favor of the incarnation-anyway position. He suggests that there are a number of goods that we would not have apart from the incarnation:

  • The superabundance of the eschaton. The eschaton (the final state) is not merely a return to the proton (the first state). It transcends Adam and Eve’s experience in the garden because it involves an eternal, permanently sinless, face-to-face encounter with God in the face of Christ.
  • The vision of God. Relatedly, when we are transformed in the eschaton, we will experience the beatific vision. But how so? First John explains that the glorified saints will be like Christ, because they will see him as he is (1 John 3:2). Our experience of God will not merely be one of intellectual contemplation, but we will see our God in his incarnate state. As embodied creatures, we will know God in an embodied way.
  • Divine friendship. As van Driel argues, “for friends, presence is what counts.” God is not content to remain at a distance, but he makes himself “maximally available” to his creatures. This he accomplishes finally and fully through the incarnation.

So we have these superadded gifts only in light of the incarnation. But do we really want to say that these eschatological goods are entirely contingent upon the presence of sin? Was the fall, then, actually a felix culpa, a happy fault, that was necessary in order for God to bring about these final purposes for his creation? This view is problematic for van Driel, because it seems to make God’s good purposes dependent upon evil. Instead, van Driel maintains that these creational purposes were intended by God all along, with the added necessity of redemption entering into the picture posterior to the decree to permit the fall (I use the word “posterior” rather than “after” because we must remember that the decree of God is eternal; it is not as if the fall took God by surprise and only then did he determine to send a Savior; the decree to permit the fall and provide redemption was willed “before the foundation of the world” no less than the decree to create. So we are not dealing with a temporal but a logical priority here).

So what are we to make of this case for the incarnation-anyway position? I admit that I find many of these biblical and theological arguments quite compelling. The New Testament, especially Paul’s cosmic Christology, does seem to teach what Myk Habets has referred to as the primacy of Christ–that the incarnate Christ is preeminent in all of God’s purposes, for creation and consummation no less than redemption. But it should be noted that the overwhelming majority of texts that speak of the incarnation do situate it in terms of God’s redemptive work. And there may be other problems for the incarnation-anyway position that I need to think through more carefully. But at the moment I am inclined to think that incarnation has primacy in the eternal decree of God. So perhaps–wonder of wonders–God in his infinite love determined to be Immanuel, God with us, all along.

“An Invasion of God”

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nativity-icon

Everything in Christianity centers on the incarnation of the Son of God, an invasion of God among men and women in time, bringing and working out a salvation not only understandable by them in their own historical and human life and existence, but historically and concretely accessible to them on earth and in time, in the midst of their frailty, contingency, relativity, and sin.

-T. F. Torrance

In other words,

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us—that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. And we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.

-1 John 1:1-4