For two centuries now in Protestant communities the Bible has been under suspicion.
It is accused of being factually false, spiritually wrongheaded, ethically irrelevant, and antihuman in its overall influence. Once, most Westerners knew something of what was in the ‘Good Book’; nowadays, however, very few know or care what the Bible teaches. Though the criticisms and doubts about Scripture have been compellingly countered over and over again, that does not change the secular mind-set or banish biblical illiteracy from our midst. Yet ignorance of the Bible remains tragic, for it virtually guarantees ignorance of God. To re-establish in people’s minds the truth and wisdom of the biblical message is perhaps the church’s most urgent task today.
Who’s there?
Taking faith seriously means taking seriously the fact that Christianity has a given and abiding truth-content, and that therefore we must take the Bible seriously as the authoritative, self-revealing Word of our authoritative God. From this it follows that we must take God seriously in the terms in which the Bible displays him.
A latter-day theological student secured an A for answering the rather pompous exam question, ‘What is the significance of Jesus Christ for our postmodern era?’ in three words — ‘Whatever you wish’. That catches exactly the way people today think and speak of God: the word God becomes a wax nose that can be shaped or twisted any way one fancies. But fancy is fantasy, and what we need to know is the truth about the God who is there, whom we must all meet on judgment day, and who meets us here and now when we allow the Bible to speak to us. Here is a thumbnail sketch of what the Bible tells us about him.
God is holy
Holiness signifies the God-ness of God, the combined quality of being infinite and eternal; omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient; utterly pure and just; utterly faithful and marvelously merciful.
God is gracious
Grace is a New Testament technical term meaning love to the unlovely and seemingly unlovable, love that is primarily not a passion evoked by something in the loved one, but a purpose of making the loved one great and glad: love that to this end gives, never mind the cost, and rescues those in need, never mind their unworthiness.
God is triune
Trinity, the church’s word for expressing this internal three-in-oneness, or triunity, is a technical term coined to crystallise something that the Bible demonstrates. Both Testaments affirm that there is only one God, but the New Testament clearly shows us three divine persons acting as a team to carry through the work of grace that saves sinners and creates the church. The first is the Father, who planned everything, who sent his Son. The second is Jesus the Son, God incarnate, his Father’s servant, our Mediator, who died for us, rose for us, reigns for us, and will return for us. The third is the Holy Spirit, the executive, hands-on agent of the Father and the Son in creation, providence, and grace, who draws us to faith in Christ. As the three persons are linked together as sources of blessing, so they are linked as the focus of praise, prayer, and benediction.
What are we looking at? Not tritheism, a doctrine of three separate gods co-operating; that would in fact be a form of poly-theism. Nor is it what has been called modalism, a doctrine of one person playing three separate roles, like the late Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove; that would in fact be a form of unitarianism. No; by inescapable implication it is a doctrine of the only God as a tripersonal Three-in-One.
God commands
God states ideals for, and sets limits to, human behaviour. His moral law is found in the Ten Commandments and back-up Mosaic material, in the Prophets, in Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount and other teachings, and in the ethical sections of the New Testament letters. Law in Hebrew is torah, a word primarily implying not public legislation but family instruction, given with parental authority, goodwill and concern for the family’s well-being. It is vital to realise that God’s law, expressing as it does his holy will and reflecting his holy nature, fits and fulfills humanity as created; it is the Maker’s handbook, we might say, for human happiness, and disregard of it not only displeases God but also damages ourselves. God has made us and redeemed us so that we might bear his image, which includes, along with rational and responsible wisdom, moral perfection that matches his own. ‘You shall be holy’, he says, ‘for I am holy’ (1 Peter 1.15–16, citing Leviticus 11.44). This means love and worship with obedience Godward, and love and service with wisdom manward.
The way of holiness requires of all of us resolute resistance to a wide range of temptations at point after point in our pilgrimage, and all such resistance gives us, in the short term, something of this same feeling. C.S. Lewis pictures this by his image, in The Great Divorce, of the man with the lizard of lust on his shoulder, endlessly whispering to him that without the lust his life will not be worth living. But letting God have his way with the lizard sets the man unimaginably free.
Such, then, is the God of the Bible, the unchanging God who is always there whatever styles or shifts may mark the culture that surrounds the church. In an era like ours, in which Western culture is being constantly reshaped by the rapid mutations of post-Christianity, that must be highlighted and insisted on in our faith and witness. God is the same, Jesus Christ is the same, and essential Christianity is the same as they were in the first century, when the pagan world was turned upside down by the witness of the apostles.
What went wrong?
When reason insists on ruling — that is, making original decisions of its own — in the realm of faith, where, as we have seen, God’s truth should be received on God’s authority via God’s authoritative written Word, the results are bleak indeed.
In comes relativism, the abolishing of all absolute standards for belief and behaviour; in comes skepticism about all long-standing beliefs, as if their age automatically destroys their credibility; in comes pluralism, the confused condition in which we accept incompatibles side by side without full commitment to any of them; in comes agnosticism, the don’t-know, can’t-be-sure, who-am-I-to-say?, I-give-up, don’t-bug-me state of mind. Each of these isms is familiar among us today, they creep into churches as well as going on parade outside them, and the church of Christ is sadly enfeebled in consequence.
Two stages
The process of decline that produced this state of affairs, in which most of Western Protestantism has in fact shared, had two stages. First, from the mid-19th century on, biblical criticism, evolutionary dogma, socialist utopianism, and scientific pragmatism have called into question many aspects of biblical teaching and Christian supernaturalism, so that the whole message about Christ, salvation, and the church has become blurred, and the doctrinal definiteness that has marked the Christian tradition is felt increasingly to be unwarranted and unconvincing.
Then, second, since the middle of the 20th century, some teachers have recast biblical narratives to which they have denied factual status (miracle stories, including Jesus’s virgin birth, bodily resurrection, and ascension to heaven, in the first instance) as symbolising aspects of the inner experience of the church and the Christian; they have read biblical law codes as directing us to follow the best existing notions of secular justice; and they have spread the idea that loose spiritualising in this way is the only proper method of biblical interpretation.
The effect, as anyone can see, is to turn Christianity into a historically continuous church-based mysticism of transcendental God-feelings and attitudes of benevolence, none of which depends on any space-time events, and all of which, it seems, might cheerfully continue into the future even if it could be shown that Jesus Christ had never lived and that the gospel of salvation from sin is a mere mirage.
Much of the church today, including the Anglican Church of Canada and the Episcopal Church in the United States, has two religions in its womb — or shall we say in its theological colleges, in the minds and hearts of its clergy, in its publications and in the mentality of its members. There is the historic faith and there is the alternative Christianity that we have just described. The former is spelled out, for example, in the historic Book of Common Prayer; the fingerprints of the latter, sanitised somewhat, can be found in the Canadian Book of Alternative Services and the American prayer book of 1979. One recalls Elijah’s call for clearheaded choice at Mount Carmel: ‘How long will you go limping [some translations, ‘hobbling’] between two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him’ (1 Kings 18.21).
A robust return to the older wisdom about faith’s true object is urgently needed if the Anglican Church in particular is ever to impact the surrounding culture again. The same must be said of other churches with Reformation roots, both sides of the border, and elsewhere. All in these communities who take faith seriously should unite to work for this return.
This is an edited extract from Jim Packer’s recent book Taking God Seriously, published by IVP (£8.99, ISBN 978 1 844 746 095).
