In our I hope brief blog-versation, Doug Wilson has posted a couple more things to think about. In one he asks who our father/Father is. We either have God or the devil as our father. Well, yes and no. I’m with Doug in what he’s getting at, I think, but here again I’m not so sure about terminology. The devil as father was a liar from the beginning. Well, every child lies instinctively. You don’t have to teach kids to lie. Those little children that Jesus wanted to come to him were “of their father the devil” in some sense. So am I, since I still have an Adamic death-nature that messes with me — and as far as I’m concerned Romans 7 STILL is talking about that, even if I’m increasingly lonely in thinking so.
When Peter confessed Jesus as the son of the Living God, Jesus blessed him for listening to the Father. Five minutes later Jesus condemned him as a mouthpiece of Satan.
Also, of course, I had a physical father; and if I were a Presbyterian clergyman I would address Presbytery as “Fathers and Brethren,” acknowledging that older minister are fathers to younger ones. Every human being has God the Father as his father by creation; Adam as his father by generation; and the devil as his father by Adam’s decision to give the world to him. Christians have God the Father as father because they are in Christ, the Son.
Perhaps I should write “faithful Christians.” It seems to me that the Bible is telling us to be concerned about who is faithful, who trusts and obeys, and leave the heart (and “regeneration”) to God.
Doug writes that someone who denies the Apostles’ Creed and breaks all Ten Commandments is not a true (faithful) Christian. Well, of course. Certainly. My only beef, such as it has been, is with the use of “regeneration” and the implication that this means a “change of nature” in what I personally think is a more philosophical sense of “nature” than I’m happy with. People who deny that God knows the future; men who won’t let their wives have the Lord’s Supper save by their own hands; people who keep mistresses — that’s what excommunication is for. I’ve had the privilege of kicking wicked people out of the church more than once — and in those cases I did not shed a tear. They were wolves.
In his second post-Jordan post, Doug speaks of his own father’s remarkable work. I note that his dad’s name is Jim. So, there. What more need be said?? I’m certainly all in favor of what his father did. Sure, there are more than a few baptized people who need conversion, to “get saved.” But here again I have to enter a caveat from the chapter on “Conversion” in my Sociology of the Church. Let’s take a case in point. Mr. RB is asked to teach Sunday School to adult men in a liberal church. He teaches them, and they come each week, but there is no real sign of life. Until the third (yes, third) year. Then one after another the men seem to have eye-opening “AHA!” experiences. Suddenly it all makes sense as it had never before. They each feel converted and think that for the first time they are real Christians.
Ah, but is this what happened? Something happened, yes; something wonderful. Alleluia (as we say in Matins, which is a darned good discipline for Christian schools and others). But was this conversion from death to life, or from baby faith to self-conscious faith? Or a conversion from confused messed-up trust in as much of God as their liberal church had taught them to a wonderful faith in the whole-Bible God? If these men, who went to church every week in a liberal city where they could have stayed at home, who thought of themselves as Christians, who would have argued that Jesus was the savior even if they could not carry the argument very far — had died in the first year of this Sunday School class, would they have gone to hell?
Well, folks. I don’t know. Some were probably ignorant, shallow real believers. Some may have been in the church merely for social reasons. (There was a Jewish man who always came to my father’s class at the Methodist church when I was little — it was his way of staying in touch with other businessmen.) Anyway, that’s why I’m a Bible teacher. My job like Doug’s is to teach indiscriminately anybody who will give me the time of day every last thing I know from the Bible.
But what I do earnestly believe is that is can be very dangerous pastorally to hold up such situations as this as normative for actual faithful Churches. The norm in a serious church is for children to grow up never knowing a time when they were not loyal to Jesus, and undergoing conversions along the way from baby faith to child faith to adolescent faith, etc. The first epistle of John speaks of baby faith, youthful faith, and aged faith. They look different.
Two other tads and I hope I’m done for now. 1. I do not see Jesus or anyone else ever accusing children or even ordinary Christians of being sons of the devil, etc. This language is reserved for older men who are officers in the communities of the faithful. It’s not “woe to you, whoever you are,” but “woe to you, scribes and pharisees.” These also are the only people Jesus threatens with hell. Those who presume to be teachers incur stricter judgment. Please note also that in Matthew 7, those who come and say “Lord, Lord” and to whom Jesus says, “I never knew you,” are in fact false prophets, not ordinary people. I’m not at all saying that “ordinary” Christians cannot be sinful hypocrites and bound for hell; but I am suggesting we learn our rhetoric from Jesus and Paul.
2. And here’s a serious question: were Abraham and David regenerated? Were they born again? Did they have the New Heart? My answer is no. All these things are Pentecostal blessings and aspects of the New Age. Only by some kind of metonymy can they be applied to people before that time. But, were Abraham and David friends of God? Were they despite all, faithful men? Certainly. Abraham is the father of the faithful; he is not said to be father of the regenerate. My plea is that we talk the way our Protestant Reformers did: of faith and faithfulness; of obedience and disobedience.
And a final note: I don’t know about erstwhile queens of Norway, but this erstwhile princess of Sweden is a heroine of mine. Check out her great hymn.
I still don’t see why the generation/regeneration (father/son) model must be so rigid, unchangeable, and unidirectional. To the degree that covenantal sons of the devil are transferred into the Son, now sons of the Father…why is it so unthinkable for covenantal sons of the Father (in Christ) to defect and become “twice-dead” sons of the devil (thinking here of the line of Seth’s apostasy)? Whatever the immutable decreed ends are – God knows – the covenantal (ecclesial/personalistic) categories are not set in stone until the Last Day.
My proposal has therefore been to read John 10/Romans 8, and other traditional “perseverance”/”eternal security” passages, not in the usual categories of immutable secret things, but in concert with their very covenantal contextual counterparts (John 15/Romans 11) wherein the categories are fluid. That is, only as one remains covenantally “in Christ” may one be assured he is safe and secure in the love of God (Rom 8), held tightly by His hand (Jn 10). Again, all of this is in accord with the eternal plan (Ps 135)…including whether or not he does indeed persevere. I sense no Arminian would be willing to swallow that whole.
So, I just don’t see what’s so wrong with this model (because it’s Augustinian and not Calvinist?). It seems to do a more natural business with the apparently antithetical verses I referenced in the above. Instead of an unresolvable “tension” at which point we simply punt, this is quite coherently the visible covenant worked out on the plane of creation, on-stage as it were…whatever secret decrees God may have ultimately planned behind the curtain.
What am I missing here?
todd robinson
As I said over there, I have a very hard time connecting the language about sons of the devil with regeneration. On the “Evangelical” assumption of regeneration, there’s a double dissociation between the two. On the one hand, someone could be faithful both externally, and in their own thoughts. They could show real, temporary faith and love. But yet, ultimately fail. That is, they may be able to be objectively called a son of God–perhaps better than you or I–and yet be unregenerate. On the other hand, someone could be legitimately saved at 20, and later fall away. Then they would be a regenerate son of the devil. They even may die in rebellion (which exposes something not entirely Biblical about the system).
But a double dissociation is proof that though the two concepts may be related, they aren’t the same. You can be faithful, without being regenerate; and you can be regenerate without being faithful.
Paternity is important. But it isn’t “regeneration.”
I’ve been thinking about this issue in light of our creedal formulae, as well as the gospel events that we have enshrined in the Church calendar. I’m not quite satisfied with my own wording, but I hope this is somewhat intelligible.
According to the definition of Chalcedon, Jesus is “perfect in manhood”; and therefore He is
“to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son….”
The motivation behind this definition was stated simply enough by Gregory of Nazianzus: “What is not assumed is not redeemed;” and I am probably safe in assuming that everyone in this discussion sees this motivation as being grounded in a true, biblical insight. Now, if it was indeed necessary that the Son of God be made man in the fullest sense (henathropesis) rather than merely inhabiting a body, that He might redeem man in the fullest, then at very least it would seem strange if it was not also necessary that we remain men once redeemed. Those who use the language of “new nature” generally still consider redeemed men to be men. But it seems to me that once you admit that a redeemed man is still a man, you have denied a change of nature in the Chalcedonian sense.
Again, the definition of Chalcedon insists that Christ has two natures “inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union.” So, if the union of the two natures in Christ did not demand that either of them change, then why would we suppose that a union of Christ with His people should require a change of our nature? I suspect that this perceived need arises from a recognition that God is holy and we are defiled. But apparently the supposed new nature doesn’t solve this problem, because we are still sinners and God is still holy. Also, there seems to be a confusion of categories going on here, because a metaphysical solution is being proposed for an ethical problem.
There are, of course, other senses of the word nature. Unfortunately, I think the change of nature that many Evangelicals have in mind is a change of Aristotelian nature. Aristotle defined nature thus: “the primary and proper sense of ‘nature’ is the essence of those things which contain in themselves as such a source of motion.” I suspect that most Evangelicals, when they speak of the new nature, have in mind something very much like instinct — an innate (or in this case, in-renate) propensity towards faithfulness. This may sound innocuous, but what it does is locate the cause of our perseverance in ourselves, albeit in our remade selves. That this instinct is supposedly implanted by God does not change the fact that it is now inherent to our physical constitution (in the sense of phusis), so that when we fall into sin we tend either to question whether we are truly born again or to take our sin too lightly, since sin is thought of as accidental to our transubstantiated constitution.
Also, to demand that we must undergo a change of nature in order to receive the Spirit seems to downplay either the reality of the Incarnation or the sufficiency of the Atonement or the power of Pentacost. In the Incarnation, the Son of God became true man, that we might become true men (i.e., faithful images of God), not to make us something other than men. In the Atonement, He rendered payment for us, reconciling us to God in Himself, so that we are reckoned holy and clean. At Pentecost, God poured out His Spirit on men; He did not transform men apart from His Spirit. This all seems quite sufficient to me. I see no need for a metaphysical transformation of man himself, let alone a transformation that I cannot describe in any intelligible way.
A final note: if we hadn’t lost the idea of a mystical body, we might never have seen a need to invent the spiritual heart transplant.
I’ve seen the tendency for people who strongly emphasize the model that focuses measuring legitimacy of conversion through intensity of inward experience to enter into a kind of fideism. Yes, they say you are saved by Jesus, but if the definitive evidence of that is the intensity of your revulsion against your own sinfulness, you will tend to try to gin up enough revulsion to be sure that you really are saved. I’ve seen this, especially among reformed Baptists, who I suspect are the most direct descendants of the Great Awakenings.
I said that awkwardly, and I’d like to try again: Revivalism seems to be about helping church members be sure that they really are saved. How are you sure? You feel guilty for your sins, loathe yourself for them, then you have a conversion experience which acts as a cathartic purge of guilt. But that can lead to something like, ‘the more guilty I feel about my sins, the more sure I am that I’m saved’ and eventually to ‘I’m not sure that I’m saved, but if I can gin up enough self loathing, then I can be sure.’