Christianity is Comedy, not Tragedy

cartoon by John Guido

What makes this funny? (If you don't think it's funny, just pretend.) A chastened spirit is the last thing you expect from a Viking. Yet Haldor, who is clearly just coming off a rampage or an outburst of Nordic wrath, is looking all sheepish and so-very-sorry. My eleventh grade teacher told us that humor is the juxtaposition of the incongruous. Think of Monty Python's Flying Circus and Airplane.

But for that reason, Haldor illustrates the gospel. That transformation, that new nature, that unnatural kindness and, on the other hand, that brokenness over the evil that lurks within and bursts forth, is what Jesus does with sinners.

Christianity, in that respect, is comedy, not tragedy. My wife, a Grove City College educated English teacher, tells me that comedies and tragedies are distinguished by how they end. Comedies end in weddings, whereas tragedies end in funerals. Consider Shakespeare. Much Ado About Nothing ends in a wedding; Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet end in funerals. The Bible ends with the hope and promise of a wedding. "The Spirit and the bride say, 'Come!'" Christ, the bridegroom, responds, "Yes, I am coming soon" (Revelation 22:17, 20).

I recall Patrick Downey (assoc. prof. of philosophy, St Mary's College, CA) saying something like that when I knew him at Boston College fifteen years ago. You will find something of interest along those lines in his book, Serious Comedy: The Philosophical and Theological Significance of Tragic and Comic Writing in the Western Tradition (Lexington, 2001).

Back to humor--cartoon humor in particular--if you are interested in this subject, you need to read The Naked Cartoonist by Robert Mankoff, the cartoon editor for The New Yorker. He knows what's funny, and he explains why what works works and why what doesn't doesn't. On pp. 21-22 his advice is "just a little more inking--and a lot more thinking." He shows the magic of layering an idea over what otherwise is an ordinary picture, perhaps just by a caption. I always found that this is what separated Bizzaro from The Far Side (aside from off-putting pointy characters versus attractive round ones).

You can read this 2006 HuffPost interview with him.

For example, "If you're watching America's Funniest Home Videos you never say, "I don't get it." You're not saying, "Ok, a guy fell off a chair. Can someone explain that to me again?" But if you're looking at a Danny Shanahan cartoon in which there's two praying mantises -one male and one female and the male is missing his head and the female is saying "You slept with her, didn't you?" There's something to piece together. There's a slight delay where these different sort of competing ideas come together - mesh and produce laughter."

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Postscript:

Gregory Wolfe in his wonderful essay, "The Tragic Sense of Life" (Image, Spring 2009), firmly rejects this association of the gospel with comedy, and he cites Hans Urs von Balthasar in support of his position:

The notion that Christianity is somehow alien to tragedy—that it is simply and straightforwardly “comic” because the resurrection makes for a happy ending—could not be more radically wrong. In his essay “Tragedy and Christian Faith,” Hans Urs von Balthasar singles out three essential elements of tragedy: that the good things of the world cannot sustain themselves and are lost; that this places us in a position of contradiction or alienation; and that this condition is bound up with an “opaque guilt,” in which individual moral responsibility cannot account for all suffering, leaving us subject to a mysterious “inherited curse.”

According to von Balthasar, Christ does not banish tragedy but carries it into the heart of God. Christ “fulfills the contradiction of existence...not by dissolving the contradiction but by bearing that affirmation of the human condition as it is through still deeper darknesses in finem, ‘to the end,’ as love....”

David Bentley Hart appears to disagree in The Beauty of the Infinite, pp.374ff.

The Trinity and Harmony

Trinitarian teaching is usually presented as a bare but inscrutable fact one must simply accept. “We can’t understand it, but we must accept it because the Bible teaches it.” Or it is defended on consequentialist grounds. If God is not Trinitarian, and thus if Jesus is not God, then Christ’s sacrifice for sin was ineffective, and there is no salvation from sin.

But while it is true that the Trinity is ultimately incomprehensible, it is equally true that the world makes no sense without it. The deepest desires of the human heart make no sense without it. Or at least the Trinitarian nature of the Creator makes sense of those fundamental human longings in a way that no other religion or cosmology of any sort does.


When you reflect upon life, you can’t help but notice that there is conflict everywhere -- in marriage, between siblings, at work, on the road in government, between nations...even within oneself. It is inescapable. So how do you deal with that?

1. You can force everyone else to submit to your will. This is tyranny, and we have seen it in men like Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and more recently in Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. But people who deal with conflict this way end up entirely miserable.

2. Another way to deal with conflict is to preclude it by isolating yourself from everyone else. But this ends up in loneliness and self-absorption of a different sort. It is dehumanizing, and thus leads also to misery.

3. The third way, the one for which we were created, is to seek harmony through love. Because we were made in the image of the Trinitarian God, we were made for loving harmony, not for self-centered isolation, nor for self-centered domination. Father, Son and Holy Spirit exist in perfect agreement without any one of them oppressing the others and without each one walling himself off from the others. They exist in eternal, loving harmony.

Handel's Messiah

We can understand harmony between one another by the example God the Creator has given in music. Each note is different; it has a place in the musical order that God has created. That order is fixed. Not even Congress can change the notes, not even if they appropriated $700 billion to do it. Notes are notes. Each note, considered on its own, is beautiful and glorifying to God. But it does not fulfill its purpose until it’s arranged with other notes, e.g. in a melody. Still more glorifying to God, however, is the arrangement of notes in harmony with one another. In a harmony, a number of notes form one sound. That is most glorifying to God because it most resembles the Trinity itself. In a chord of three notes, the three are clearly discernable within one sound.

Accordingly, when we, who were made in his image, live in harmony with one another, we glorify him. We live in harmony when we live as God created us and gifted us to be. Sour notes produce cacophony, not harmony. Sin is a spiritually sour note. That harmonious living involves respecting what God created and gifted others to be. I Corinthians 12 pictures the church this way--as the body of Christ with many parts, each doing its part and respecting all the others for their contributions. This requires knowing godliness in general, and your own gifts and calling in particular. It also requires knowing the other gifts and callings, and respecting what God does with them.

Thus, in Christ, people, like different notes, can come together—regardless of race, class, occupation—and, without surrendering their differences, can find beautiful, God-glorifying unity of purpose. This is not the moralistic, relativistic celebration of difference we hear trumpeted as gospel these days. Nor is it a libertarianism that stands formalistically aloof from distinctions between good and evil. Rather, it is the harmony-shalom-unity that does not deny difference, but honors it's glorious divine purpose.

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What others are saying:

David Bentley Hart in The Beauty of the Infinite (p.276)

“The image of cosmic music is an especially happy way of describing the analogy of creation to the trinitarian life. Creation is not, that is, a music that explicates some prior and undifferentiated content within the divine, nor the composite order that is, of necessity, imposed upon some intractable substrate so as to bring it into imperfect conformity with an ideal harmony; it is simply another expression or inflection of the music that eternally belongs to God, to the dance and difference, address and response, of the Trinity.”

Robert Letham in The Holy Trinity: In Scripture, History, Theology, and Worship (pp. 438f.)

“The whole idea of developing a theme, of moving progressively and purposefully to a goal, of returning after a myriad of complex modulations to a resolution, of a variety of instruments playing different notes that are all part of a single score, is based on the matrix of realities found in the created order, which the Holy Trinity put there in the work of creation itself, and which reflects who he is.”

Also in Letham, p. 446

“Only a God who is triune can be personal. Only a Holy trinity can be love. Human love cannot possibly reflect the nature of God unless God is a Trinity of persons in union and communion. A solitary monad cannot love and, since it cannot love, neither can it be a person. And if God is not personal, neither can we be—and if we are not persons, we cannot love. This marks a vast, immeasurable divide between those cultures that follow a monotheistic, unitary deity and those that are permeated by the Christian teaching on the Trinity. Trinitarian theology asserts that love is ultimate because God is love, because he is three persons in undivided loving communion. By contrast, Islam asserts that Allah is powerful and that his will is ultimate, before which submission (islam) is required.”

Pray For Your Pastor

The pastoral ministry is an especially difficult calling. A good minister, like the Good Shepherd he serves, spends himself to exhaustion and gives himself sacrificially for the flock under his care. The labor is particularly demanding because not only is a gospel minister the special target of everything in this world, both seen and unseen, that hates Christ and wants to see his Kingdom fall (as if that were possible), but he also suffers from the assaults of the people whom he serves. He's too dull; he's too passionate. He preaches too long; he preaches to lite. Too much doctrine; too many stories. I just don't like him. He's not the man we had before, or the man I heard at the conference.

Bill Shishko, may pastor at Franklin Square Orthodox Presbyterian Church, is a thoroughly sound and remarkably pastoral preacher, and he recently preached on the importance of praying for your pastor (or, if you are a pastor, the importance of resting in prayer for blessing in your ministry).

Having cautioned the Christians in Ephesus to equip themselves spiritually with the full armor of God and to pray at all times for all the brothers and sisters in Christ, Paul adds a special request to pray for him in particular. He says to pray, "also for me, that words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains, that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak" (6:19f. ESV).

I will not attempt to reproduce the sermon, or even the sermon outline, but only offer some wisdom that I gleaned from the message.

When you pray for your minister, you are praying for yourself. Paul instructed Timothy, "Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for in so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers" (1 Timothy 4:16). Your minister feeds your soul from the word of God. As he thrives, in due course you will thrive.

The minister's vices often become a virus in the church. When he goes astray, he takes a large part of the church with him into destructive error.

Pray for the minister in his preaching, research, devotional reading, broader reading, prayer life, thought life, counseling, local church government, wider denominational responsibilities, private encounters, family life, finances, worries and encouragement. He is not a rock. Christ is the Rock. He is a sinner like you, a broken vessel through whose weakness God manifests his strength and glory.

A minister's family faces special challenges. There are unique strains on his marriage and pressures on his children. Breakdown in his family has a profound effect through him on the church, on visitors to the church, and on those who are watching the church. Pray for them.

The minister feeds his sheep by his preaching; the flock supports the minister by their prayer.

Before you criticize your pastor, pray for him. No, first develop a history of praying for him.

What if God Were NOT a Trinity?

The trinitarian nature of God has always been a challenge for Christians. It was a challenge for the church to settle on and formulate the doctrine in the fourth century. It has been a challenge for the church to keep a firm grip on this doctrine in each successive age. Most recently, it is the Russellites, the so-called Jehovah's Witnesses, who have embraced the Unitarian heresy. But American Evangelicals, in their theological shallowness and self-centered sentimentality, have a dangerously weak grasp of this essential doctrine.

The doctrine of the Trinity is challenging because though Scripture clearly teaches the doctrine, albeit indirectly, it is a doctrine that is uniquely incomprehensible. In fact, my theology professor in seminary, Wayne Spear, told us, "If you think you understand the Trinity, you're a heretic." Then he would smile mischievously. Some people have tried to explain the Trinity with pictures and diagrams--think of Saint Patrick and his cloverleaf--but ultimately they attempt to simplify what cannot be simplified without being utterly falsified.


This may lead some to wonder if the doctrine is even true? Of course, a re-engagement with the witness of Scripture should be sufficient to draw the doubting soul back to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, saying "Where else will I turn, Lord? You have the words of eternal life." But As Moses was not able to look at God directly, but instead viewed him indirectly, seeing only his hind parts, so too, though the Trinity may be impossible to understand fully when studying it directly, it may be helpful to examine it indirectly by asking, "What if God were not a Trinity, a tri-unity, one God in three persons?"

Consider three doctrines concerning God as he has revealed himself in the Bible. He is trinitarian, i.e., he is one God and yet he exists in three persons. He is self-sufficient, i.e., he does not need us or anything else in his creation. He is love, i.e., he is essentially relational.

If God were unitarian and essentially relational, he would not be self-sufficient. That is to say, he would suffer loneliness apart from his creation. He would need us. But that is absurd. That would not be a God worthy of worship. That would be a God with whom you could negotiate an eternal bargain. Conceivably the human race could form a labor union of sorts and conspire to withhold fellowship from God unless he met our demands. The very thought of it is blasphemous. I once heard a minister tell his congregation that God created us because he was lonely. Of course, because God is indeed trinitarian, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were perfectly content in loving friendship with one another before the creation of the world. Loneliness was impossible. How could any mere creature rival what the three persons of the Trinity had, continue to have, and always will have with one another? Clearly this minister of Christ was not accustomed to thinking about what came out of his mouth when he instructed his people in their faith. But that notion of God's neediness that only we can fill is very attractive to those who are self-centered and sentimental and thus have little concern to be Biblically theological.

Alternatively, if God were unitarian and wholly self-sufficient, then he would not be love. That is, entering lovingly into relationships would not follow from his essence. He could remain cold and aloof from his human creation, issuing only laws and demands while punishing every infraction with a severe hand. Of course this is Allah, the god of Islam, who is nowhere in the Koran identified as "love."

Both of these absurd consequences are grotesquely unchristian. You cannot be a unitarian--i.e. deny the existence of the one, true God as tri-unity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--and believe coherently in a transcendent God who is nonetheless a loving God.

The Lord Our Righteousness

I heard of this hymn, "Jehovah Tsidkenu," by Robert Murray M'Cheyne (1813-1843), the young Scottish preacher of few years and great accomplishment, years ago and have searched for it from time to time. But the Internet clears the brush and exposes all sorts of information!

Jehovah is a corruption of Yahweh, the covenant name of God in the Old Testament. Tsidkenu is Hebrew for "our righteousness." The phrase comes from Jeremiah 23:5-6, "Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In his days Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell securely. And this is the name by which he will be called: 'The LORD is our righteousness.' (ESV)"

I once was a stranger to grace and to God,
I knew not my danger; and felt not my load;
Though friends spoke in rapture of Christ on the tree,
Jehovah Tsidkenu was nothing to me.

I oft read with pleasure, to soothe or engage,
Isaiah’s wild measure and John’s simple page;
But even when they pictured the blood-sprinkled tree,
Jehovah Tsidkenu seemed nothing to me.

Like tears from the daughters of Zion that roll,
I wept when the waters went over His soul,
Yet thought not that my sins had nailed to the tree
Jehovah Tsidkenu — ’twas nothing to me.

When free grace awoke me by light from on high,
Then legal fears shook me, I trembled to die;
No refuge, no safety in self could I see —
Jehovah Tsidkenu my Saviour must be.

My terrors all vanished before the sweet name;
My guilty fear banished, with boldness I came
To drink at the fountain, life-giving and free—
Jehovah Tsidkenu is all things to me.

Jehovah Tsidkenu! My treasure and boast,
Jehovah Tsidkenu! I ne’er can be lost;
In Thee shall I conquer by flood and by field—
My cable, my anchor, my breastplate and shield!

Even treading the valley; the shadow of death,
This “watchword” shall rally my faltering breath;
For while from life’s fever my God sets me free,
Jehovah Tsidkenu my death-song shall be.
The meter is 11.11.11.11, but a suitable tune of that meter is CARITAS ("My Jesus, I Love Thee").

Spared Death and Sparse Thanks

A car was crushed under a truck. This video bills the driver as having "cheated death."



The Lord's mercies are a wonder to behold. Even more wondrous is how he continues them despite how little thanks he receives.

And of course the media presents these things as though there were no God. On one level, our country is no different from a atheist regime.

Liberals Fear the Godly in All Forms

The evangelical church is in bad shape. Our worship is shallow, our intellectual life scandalous, and our politics co-opted. But Lauren Sandler is frightened by our emerging power. In Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement (Penguin, 2007), she says there is something “terrifying and alluring” emerging from our ranks. People who should be growing up into enlightened defenders of Western progress are being drawn into what she calls the “Disciple Generation” of a hip, culturally engaged, profoundly irrational and politically dangerous new evangelicalism.

The book is somewhat sensationalist. Sandler, a self-described “unrepentant Jewish atheist,” wants to alert her secular liberal friends to this looming threat, but she also wants to sell books. So instead of providing a truly general survey of evangelical youth, she highlights the Goth church in the Queens bar, heavily tattooed skateboarders, and the power focused Patrick Henry College students.

In her trolling around the edges of evangelicalism looking for controversy, however, she makes an interesting observation. The “disenchantment with the modern experience, that has not fulfilled all that it promised” (p.239) is driving young people to Jesus, to spiritual discipline and to the agape love that is found in Christian community. That love “is the emotion that secularism, enraptured by its logic and empiricism, refuses to engage” (p.10). Addressing her secularist audience, she warns that, “their lives are in fact a criticism of our own.” In response to this, she suggests that enlightened people save this emerging generation from the lure of superstition and right wing nuttery by “the promise of love articulated within a genuine expression of youth culture” (p.33).

But can secular enlightenment top the resurrection? Because they have no risen, glorified, and life giving Savior, they will not have the "secular Great Awakening" that she sees is necessary to cobat what Christianity offers. Where there is no loving heavenly Father, there can be no movement-wide "promise of love," but only abstract causes and cultural power grabs.

A Debtor To Mercy Alone

I find that Evangelical college students do not know old hymns. Thus they do not sing the praises of the church throughout the ages. Also as a consequence, they miss out on the theological depth and worshipful instruction that is found is many of these hymns.

"A Debtor To Mercy Alone" is one of my favorites.

A debtor to mercy alone, of covenant mercy I sing;
Nor fear, with Thy righteousness on, my person and off’ring to bring.
The terrors of law and of God with me can have nothing to do;
My Savior’s obedience and blood hide all my transgressions from view.

The work which His goodness began, the arm of His strength will complete;
His promise is Yea and Amen, and never was forfeited yet.
Things future, nor things that are now, nor all things below or above,
Can make Him His purpose forgo, or sever my soul from His love.

My name from the palms of His hands eternity will not erase;
Impressed on His heart it remains, in marks of indelible grace.
Yes, I to the end shall endure, as sure as the earnest is giv’n;
More happy, but not more secure, the glorified spirits in Heav’n.

The words are from Augustus Toplady (1740-1788). The Trinity Hymnal sets it to the tune Trewen, a fine Welsh melody by David Emlyn Evans (1843-1913).

The Audacity of Suing God

"The Parable of the Vineyard" (Matthew 21:33-46)

by John S. C. Abbott & Jacob Abbott, Illustrated New Testament (1878)

A Nebraska state senator is suing God, WORLD Magazine reports.

Nebraska state Sen. Ernie Chambers, 38, has filed suit against God for causing "widespread death, destruction and terrorization of millions upon millions of the Earth's inhabitants." He claims the litigation is meant to make a serious point about equal access to the court system. But the senator's past criticism of Christians and regular habit of skipping morning prayers during the legislative session suggest that other forces are at work.

The court has threatened to dismiss the lawsuit due to its inability to serve God with notice. But Chambers argues that courts routinely acknowledge God's omniscience and omnipresence while swearing in witnesses and therefore should recognize that God is already aware of the proceedings and will be present for all hearings. ("God on Trial," Aug. 23, 2008; p.14)

This is ironic in the extreme. Imagine a domestic servant who steals from the employer, breaks his stuff, curses him continually, abuses the other servants, acts like he owns the place, never does his job except by accident when it happens to coincide with the servant's own plans, and finally humiliates and even kills the employer's son--his only son, whom he loves. Then when the employer brings consequences to bear upon the servant, not so much in punishment (that is held over until later, if necessary) as in chastisement, the servant sues the employer for unsafe living conditions.

The completely self-serving servant refuses to recognize the food, clothing, shelter, protections and steady flow of comfortable amenities that the employer continues graciously to supply. Moreover, the employer even offers peace and amnesty by transferring the servant's debt of punishment to employer's own son.

And, of course, these chastisements are nothing compared to what the servant deserves: expulsion into the cruel outdoors.

In short, it is we who stand condemned before God--in all his goodness.

Do you suppose, O man—you who judge those who practice such things and yet do them yourself—that you will escape the judgment of God? Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? But because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God's righteous judgment will be revealed. (Romans 2:3-5 ESV)

But, in contrast to sinful human beings, there is mercy and grace before God's righteous seat of judgment...and it centers entirely in the person of Jesus Christ the Savior.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.

And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God. (John 3:16-21 ESV)

That is news you won't find in the mainstream media.

Community and the Longing Soul

In a sermon at Franklin Square Orthodox Presbyterian Church on Long Island, New York, Pastor Benjamin Miller said,

We long for a bond of human community that nothing can break (no one moves away, grows cold toward us, dies), in which each is eagerly pursuing the good of everyone with an infinite and gracious love. But that is found only in God the Father through Jesus Christ.

This brings to mind Augustine's prayer from the Confessions, "Father, you made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you." Aristotle's observation is true: we are "political animals." We were made for community. "No man is an island, sufficient unto himself," said Donne. But though made for community, we were not made for this world. What we long for in relationships, we cannot find in earthly, natural relationships.

The human bonds that sweeten our lives are blessings from God, but like all of his blessings they point beyond themselves to the One who alone truly satisfies. It is the failure to see this that in the modern world has led to utopian ideology and thence to monstrous tyranny. Mistaking the sign for the signified, seeking in this world what can be found fully only in the next, or in what transcends this world, is idolatry and leads necessarily to disappointment, misery and destruction.

With that in mind, the wisdom of the American system of government can be seen in its moderation. It secures for each citizen the freedom to pursue happiness, but does not guarantee that happiness. That is only God's to give.

Indeed, God has promised us that happiness. He has promised you that happiness. He gives you himself, and does so only in the Lord Jesus Christ, the Savior of sinners and the Mediator of the New Covenant.

To Israel he said, "I will satisfy the weary soul, and every languishing soul I will replenish" (Jeremiah 31:25 ESV).

He fulfilled this promise in Jesus the Messiah, the hope of all nations: "I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst" (John 6:35).

Vos on the Kingdom of God

Geerhardus Vos has a fine statement on the kingdom of God in his introduction to The Teaching of Jesus Concerning the Kingdom of God and the Church (Presbyterian and Reformed, n.d.).

He first draws attention to Luke 4:43 where Jesus says, "I must preach the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns as well; for I was sent for this purpose" (ESV). He adds that the importance of this concept of the kingdom of God "will best be felt by considering that the coming of the kingdom is the great event which Jesus connects with his appearance and activity...(p.9)."

Having made a brief case for the centrality of this idea in the Bible and in the teachings of our Lord, he then cautions the reader against interpretive excess.

While thus recognizing that the kingdom of God has an importance in our Lord's teaching second to that of no other subject, we should not go to the extreme into which some writers have fallen, in finding in it the only theme on which Jesus actually taught, which would imply that all other topics dealt with in his discourses were to his mind so many corollaries or subdivisions of this one great truth. The modern attempts to make the kingdom of God the organizing center of a theological system have here exerted a misleading influence upon the interpretation of Jesus' teaching. From the fact that the proximate object of his saving work was the realization of the kingdom, the wrong inference has been drawn, that this must have been also the highest category under which he viewed the truth. It is plain that the one does not follow from the other. Salvation with all it contains flows from the nature and subserves the glory of God, and we can clearly perceive that Jesus was accustomed consciously to refer it to this divine source and to subordinate it to this God-centered purpose, cf. John 17:4. He usually spoke not of "the kingdom" absolutely, but of "the kingdom of God" and "the kingdom of heaven," and these names themselves indicate that the place of God in the order of things which they describe is the all-important thing to his mind.

It is only with great artificiality that the various component elements of our Lord's teaching can be subsumed under the one head of the kingdom. If any deduction and systematizing are to be attempted, logic and the indications which we have of our Lord's habit of thought on this point alike require, that not his teaching on the kingdom but that on God shall be given the highest place. The relation observable in the discourses of the Fourth Gospel between the person of Christ and salvation, is also the relation which we may conceive to exist between God and the kingdom. Because god is what he is, the kingdom bears the character and embodies the principles which as a matter of fact belong to it. Even so, however, we should avoid the modern mistake of endeavoring to derive the idea of the kingdom from the conception of the divine fatherhood alone. This derivation expresses an important truth recognized by Jesus himself, when he calls the kingdom a fatherly gift to the disciples, Lk 12:32. But it represents only one side of the truth, for in the kingdom other attributes of God besides his fatherhood find expression. The doctrine of God in its entire fulness alone is capable of furnishing that broader basis on which the structure of his teaching on the kingdom can be built in agreement with Jesus' own mind.

It is worth noting that the Great Commission speaks of authority and obedience, but makes no explicit reference to the kingdom of God. Jesus' restatement of it before his ascension in Acts 1 is similarly silent. Vos is saying that not the kingdom but God himself is the comprehensive theme in the Bible and thus in Jesus' teaching, more specifically the glory that he is due and that sinful man, made in his image, has denied him, but which will be his in the end, in heaven, on earth, and under the earth.

But the kingdom is the most prominent expression of that. When the angel announces the Messiah's birth to Mary, he uses kingdom terminology: "...the Lord will give him the throne of his father David. And he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end" (Lk 1:32-33 NKJV). As this gospel is heading for the ends of the earth, Luke tells us in the very last verse of the Book of Acts, "[Paul] lives two whole years at his own expense, and welcomed all who came to him, proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance" (Acts 28:30-31 ESV). The Apostle Luke equates the kingdom of God with the gospel.

Having adequately prepared the reader, Vos then states the unparalleled importance of this kingdom theme.

On the other hand, it cannot be denied that in many respects the idea of the kingdom acted in our Lord's thought and teachings as a crystallizing point around which several other elements of truth naturally gathered and grouped themselves in harmonious combination. That is the idea of the church, where it emerges in his teaching, is a direct outgrowth of the development of his doctrine of the kingdom, will appear in the sequel. But not only this, also the consummation of the world and the final state of glory were evidently viewed by him in no other light than as the crowning fulfilment of the kingdom-idea. Still further, what he taught about righteousness was most closely interlinked in his mind with the truth about the nature of the kingdom. The same may safely be affirmed with reference to the love and grace of God. The great categories of subjective religion, faith and repentance and regeneration, obviously had their place in his thought as answering to certain aspects of the kingdom. Even a subject apparently so remote from the kingdom-idea, in our usual understanding of it as that of miracles in reality derived for Jesus from the latter the larger part of its meaning. Finally, the kingdom stood in our Lord's mind for a very definite conception concerning the historical relation of his own work and the new order of things introduced by it to the Old testament. All this can here be stated in general only; our task in the sequel, will be to work it out in detail. But what has been said is sufficient to show that there is scarcely an important subject i9n the rich repertoire of our Lord's teaching with which our study of his disclosures concerning the kingdom of God will not bring us into contact.

You can find the book online here.

You can buy the Westminster Discount Books reprint of the book from the Westminster Seminary Bookstore here.

The Unity of Religions

Envir Hoxha (pronounced hoja) smashed the majority Muslim religion in Albania and reduced the faithful of all Illyria's religions to mere co-religionists. The result? Though Albania is 70% Muslim and almost all the rest are either Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic, it is all quite nominal. In a seminar on the value of religion for democracy, both a "Muslim" and a "Christian" gave an account of the essential unity of all religions, at least the monotheistic ones, and thus the basis on which we can all finally get along in this necessarily shared life. Secularists who remain sentimentally attached to their religious heritage are fond of viewing religion this way.

But is it possible that what is most important in religion--what is most profoundly significant--is not what they share in common but what distinguishes them, i.e. what is unique to each one? That, after all, is how the religious themselves view their own religions. It is only those who are more concerned about peace among men than about peace with God that view it otherwise.

And isn't it always the unique and distinguishing that is of greatest importance? What is common merely directs us to it. If we were to recognize only what is common to all human beings, friendship--that which sweetens life and affirms our humanity--would become impossible, and it is only in friendship--that attachment of one's own particular soul to another particular soul in all its particularity--that humanity is most profoundly understood and cherished. A tyrant has no friends.

Medicine, for example, is premised on an understanding of what is common to all human bodies--the circulation of blood, the respiratory system, the arrangement of organs--and yet without recognizing and taking seriously the distinguishing characteristics of particular bodies, the diagnosis and cure of illness are impossible.

So too with religion. If we recognize only what religions share in common and if we refuse to take seriously what distinguishes them, it is impossible to understand any particular religion or even religion itself.

God became man to remedy sin. But he became a particular man at a particular time to redeem particular men and particular women. If you suppress that distinguishing feature of Christianity, then the religion that you claim teaches essentially the same thing as Islam is not in fact Christianity.

The Innes Theological Blog

Frontispiece to Francis Bacon's Great Instauration

Why another Innes blog? Well, it is not because I just don't have enough to do. But from time to time I have a strictly theological post that I want to put out there.

My original blog, Principalities and Powers, is for Christian and theoretical reflection on political life. I have avoided posting anything that gets too far off the political and cultural path. This blog allows me that freedom to roam.

I call it Piety and Humanity after Francis Bacon's use of the phrase in New Atlantis, his literary envisioning of the scientific society for which he was laying the practical and theoretical foundation. "Besides, we are come here among a Christian people, full of piety and humanity." It was Bacon's intention to replace piety with the modern virtue of humanity, and retrofit the Christian faith for service to the new science and the brave new world for which it would provide a foundation and establish a horizon.

This blog is in part simple theological reflection, but in part--and unavoidably--a conversation with that world...our world.