This I Proclaim to You: A Poem

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What he did got their attention—

What an audacious thing to say to such distinguished men—

“What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you…”

Who was this man?

Why was he here?

When they heard of the resurrection of the dead some mocked and some shirked the discussion, but not so with Dioynsius, Damarius, and a few others.

Would this man tell them more?

What else would he disclose about the God who was previously unknown to them?

“What is he like?”

Wonder how they felt when they sat together to hear his teaching… “he has a name? he acts in history? he is described by images that we can understand?—

“Whose brilliance was this?

What creative mind are our lauds now owed?”

“Who? This God himself has spoken to tell us these things?

Words, you say, from this God’s own voice? Repetition, dear man, is that your job of choice?”

With a simple reply—“Goodness, knowledge, and power”—the man went on to say… “control, authority, and presence, you’ve never heard it this way?…

While you spend your time hearing and telling all that’s new, those of you who have believed are only just a few. Let me tell you more of his mercy, love, and truth; his glory and his action—this boldness is not uncouth.

Repetition, remember? That’s the task at hand, to say what he’s said and on that alone to stand.”

“Wait one minute,” they replied, “We have to know! Tell us his name! After what we’ve heard today we will never be the same. You’ve told so much of his goodness, of his joy, and of his grace… and now we wonder it is possible for us to see his face?”

“Wonder no more,” the man said, “his face you too will see, in all the joy and pleasure that there could ever be. As for his name, there is one that transcends all the rest, the LORD Almighty he revealed to Moses in the cleft.”

“Well, good, the LORD Almighty, he has made himself known, to you and us Athenians, this is no discov’ry of our own. And now we know his name, he is the one true God.”

He is Who Jesus is.

Praying for the Breath of Truth: Augstine and His Writing

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1. He gives, has given heed to himself, and has found himself, and has learned that his own filthiness cannot mingle with His purity; and feels it sweet to weep and to entreat Him, that again and again He will have compassion, until he have put off all his wretchedness; and to pray confidently, as having already received of free gift the pledge of salvation through his only Savior and Enlightener of man:-such an one, so acting, and so lamenting, knowledge does not puff up, because charity edifieth; for he has preferred knowledge to knowledge, he has preferred to know his own weakness, rather than to know the walls of the world, the foundations of the earth, and the pinnacles of heaven. And by obtaining this knowledge, he has obtained also sorrow; but sorrow for straying away from the desire of reaching his own proper country, and the Creator of it, his own blessed God. And if among men such as these, in the family of Thy Christ, O Lord my God, I groan among Thy poor, give me out of Thy bread to answer men who do not hunger and thirst after righteousness,but are sated and abound. But it is the vain image of those things that has sated them, not Thy truth, which they have repelled and shrunk from, and so fall into their own vanity. I certainly know how many figments the human heart gives birth to. And what is my own heart but a human heart? But I pray the God of my heart, that I may not vomit forth (eructuem) into these writings any of these figments for solid truths, but that there may pass into them only what the breath of His truth has breathed into me; cast out though I am from the sight of His eyes, and striving from afar to return by the way which the divinity of His only-begotten Son has made by His humanity. And this truth, changeable though I am, I so far drink in, as far as in it I see nothing changeable: neither in place and time, as is the case with bodies; nor in time alone, and in a certain sense place, as with the thoughts of our own spirits; nor in time alone, and not even in any semblance of place, as with some of the reasonings of our own minds. For the essence of God, whereby He is, has altogether nothing changeable, neither in eternity, nor in truth, nor in will; since there truth is eternal, love eternal; and there love is true, eternity true; and there eternity is loved, and truth is loved.

St. Augustine, On the Trinity, IV. I

The Old Good News and the Frontier of Our Lives

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The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ for the salvation of those who trust him is old news. It is really old, really good news. What are we after in hearing again and again what we’ve heard before?

The hope of hearing the old, good news is that it would perpetually break new ground in our lives. Have you looked inside lately? It is full of jungle. Inside of me is untamed wilderness and deep dark caves. And there is a claim that lays hold to all of it—  Jesus Christ is Lord.

So while the gospel is not new, there are new, unchartered territories in my life that are not yet under its rule. What I beg for my soul, for my family, for my church… is that the old good news of Jesus Christ would reach into these new territories of my life and establish its dominion. In short, this is sanctification– to be overcome by the gospel.

Blessed Are Those Who Have Not Seen, But Stand on the Shoulders of the Prophets and Apostles

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Then I saw in my dream that the Interpreter  took Christian by the hand, and led him into a place where was a fire burning against a wall, and one standing by it always, casting much water upon it to quench it: yet did the fire burn higher and hotter. . .

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, 75ff.

Many people have considered Christian faith an easy thing, and not a few have given it a place among the virtues. They do this because they have not experienced it and have never tasted the great strength there is in faith. . . But he who has had even a faint taste of it can never write, speak, meditate, or hear enough concerning it.

Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian, 277

The question of faith is not whether the faith itself is sincere, but whether the object of faith is worth such sincerity. Promise is not what constitutes my faith. It is promise and testimony. The New Testament is predominantly the ‘pay up’ of promise with a vision for its consummation. That is what the testimony is. The promises that God has made have been fulfilled. Blessed are those who have not yet seen but stand on the shoulders of the prophets and the apostles in hope.

Sure, we set our hope fully on the grace that will be brought to us at the revelation of Jesus Christ (1 Pet. 1:13), but only because of the grace already poured out upon us through the prophets who prophesied and through the apostles who preached the good news to us by the Holy Spirit (1 Pet. 1:12).

Frame on Aquinas: “A Project We Must Repudiate”

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In general, however, I regard the scholastic concepts as an unnecessary complication. Although I am not against the use of extrabiblical terminology in applying Scripture, I don’t see that the scholastic concepts above say anything true or important that can’t be said better, and argued more persuasively, in biblical terms.

A more serious concern is that these doctrines fall under the scholastic heading of natural reason, which in Aquinas’s view is prior to faith, “for faith presupposes natural knowledge, even as grace presupposes nature and perfection with perfectible” (Summa 1.2.2, Reply Obj. 1). It involves reasoning from God’s effects to his nature, without the aid of revelation, and under the assumption that God’s effects are better known to us than he is. In other words, Aquinas is recommending autonomous reasoning, which is self-consciously removed from the authority of God’s Word, enabling us to argue from the same premises as Plato or Aristotle.

… And that is a project that we must repudiate, as those who seek to think as covenant servants of God. 

John Frame, Doctrine of God, 224ff.

Praying for One Another, Part 1

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The Apostle offers two things in comfort to the Christians in Thessalonica who are suffering: 1) God considers it just to repay with affliction those who afflict you (1:6); 2) he will grant relief to you who are afflicted (1:7). The comfort that Paul gives the church has time significance—it is when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven…

… when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might, when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints, and to be marveled at among all who have believed, because our testimony to you was believed. (2Thessalonians 1:7-1o ESV)

This is one of the most intense Pauline passages in the New Testament, for the purpose of comforting Christ’s church. The Apostle follows with a prayer for the Thessalonians which he begins “To this end…” I love that Paul’s prayers are teleological. He prays with purpose and has a vision for believers. And what is the end for which he prays? It is that when Christ returns he will be glorified in his saints and marveled at among all who have believed. Paul wants Jesus to be glorified in his church when he returns and his wants the church to marvel at his coming. And so this is why he prays…

To this end we always pray for you, that our God may make you worthy of his calling and may fulfill every resolve for good and every work of faith by his power, so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ. (2Thessalonians 1:11-12 ESV)

Learning from Augustine—credo ut intelligam: Newbigin, Part 2

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After showing the need for revelation (57-64), Newbigin shows that the embrace of the gospel is a work of grace. He writes,

Christian discipleship is not a two-stage affair in which a concept of truth is first formulated and is then translated into a program for action. It is a single action of faith and obedience to a living person, the response to a personal calling (66).[1]

The work of God to reveal himself to creatures is a work of grace. He writes,

[The] world is not free as it thinks it is. We are not honest inquirers seeking the truth. We are alienated from truth and are enemies of it. We are by nature idolaters, constructing images of truth shaped by our own desires (69).

If we are to know God and embrace his revelation then he must call us out of the darkness to which we are accustomed and into his marvelous light where Christ is all.

Speaking of the Trinity, Augustine writes “And if this cannot be grasped by the understanding, let it be held by faith, until He shall dawn in the heart who says by the prophet, ‘If ye will not believe, surely ye shall not understand’” (Trinity, 7.12). The reference to Isaiah 9:7 is fundamental to Augustine’s theology. The ESV translates, “If you are not firm in faith, you will not be firm at all.” Although Augustine’s reading does not reflect the grammatical-historical hermeneutic of the present day’s most influential interpretive community, his reading is an accurate judgment in acknowledging the preeminence of faith in the task of knowledge. He discerned that the “Catholic doctrine” required him to believe things that could not be demonstrated (Confessions, 6.5). In Newbigin’s words, the gospel invites us to embrace things for which we cannot have certainty in the present. We are called to believe that which is still open to doubt. But our ability to doubt exists only because we are putting our faith in something else, namely, in the darkness to which we are captive. Augustine writes:

Behold my heart, O Lord, who wouldest I should remember all this, and confess to Thee. Let my soul cleave unto Thee, now that Thou hast freed it from that fast-holding birdlime of death. How wretched was it! And Thou didst irritate the feeling of its wound, that forsaking all else, it might be converted unto Thee, who art above all, and without whom all things would be nothing; be converted, and be healed (Confessions, 6.5).

As Augustine understood, faith is a work of God in calling us to life, breaking us free from the chains that once consumed our “personal commitment.”

[1] Calvin likewise locates the knowledge of God in the realm of trust and reverence. This location of knowledge is in the same vein of our present discussion by providing a theological basis for knowledge. Speaking of knowledge of God demands a different structure than the intellectual edifices of current vogue. See Calvin, Institutes, I.2.