In his Foreward to ‘Restoration in the Church‘ Terry Virgo recognises that many Christians in the UK have recently (late 70’s / early 80’s) come out of historic Christian denominations and started meeting in ‘house churches’. But he sees this phenomena as a symptom of something much bigger, and he doesn’t want Christians to stop prematurely:
“If the use of the home is but a branch of this tree, what is the root? In a word, it is a diligent attempt to restore the church to New Testament Christianity, both in principle and practice.” That’s what ‘Restoration in the Church’ is going to be about: “I pray that God may use this book to cause many to face questions from which they might naturally shrink, such as ‘What is God saying to his people through these new churches that are emerging?’ and ‘What does he want us to do about it?’”
Chapter 1: Come and See “Our devotion to Christ is rarely matched by a similar devotion to his church, but finds expression in other areas. And so we fail to share God’s heart and follow his strategy.” – these ‘other areas’ might well be good Christian things – dedicated mission or mercy organisations, for example – but a low-view of what the church actually is results in us annexing our personal faith and expecting little of the church.
This attitude is not what you see in the New Testament: “Paul did not work simply to win converts, but to plant churches. He did not view his evangelising work as complete until elders had been established and churches formed. It was through the local church that the Kingdom of God was to be manifested. From them the gospel would sound forth.”
The charismatic gifts are for the gathered local church and should not be squandered either by privatisation or para-church priority. The Baptism in the Spirit “whetted their appetites for more of God and his ways, and they are endeavouring to build churches where he is free to move.”
“Many evangelicals are rendered ineffective by a sense of personal rejection. The gospel has not yet freed them from their apparent insignificance.”
Conclusion – Various strands of the British New Church movement (of which NFI was one,) emphasised the importance of the primitive New Testament understanding of ‘Church’. Whilst this emphasis was subordinated to the individual / personal benefits of a revived spirituality in the other ‘new church streams’ / emerging denominations, Newfrontiers consistently championed the church / corporate / body aspect over the individual aspect. Whilst this, and many of Terry’s other books, focus on personal spiritual establishment and restoration, it’s always with a view to building the Church.
Autumn 2022 has seen the beginnings of the Emmanuel Institute; a two-year ministry and theology training course designed for church members looking to advance in their understanding and ‘fan into flame the gift of God that is in them’ (see 2 Tim 1:6)
We’ve had a great start, considering a variety of theological approaches and taking in an overview of the whole of Scripture. Our next module sees us digging into the history of Newfrontiers, and the wider Restorationist / British New Church movement from which our church springs.
As I was planning the curriculum for the course, I presented my vision to a focus group of seasoned teachers and trainers in our church. In short, I proposed a fusion of Tim Keller’s ‘How to Reach the West Again‘ with Terry Virgo’s ‘Restoration in the Church‘. I reasoned that we need to see people formed who were at once aware of our roots as a movement and of the post Christian missional challenge.
A slide depicting the core concerns of two texts influential upon curriculum formation at Emmanuel
The big surprise for me was how keenly the gathered group felt a need for the restatement of our origins. (I had assumed that it would be the Keller material that I needed to argue for, but that was waved through without ceremony!) It is clear that there is an appetite to understand and engage with the core values which birthed the movement.
So with the next module in mind, I am blogging a series of chapter summaries from Restoration in the Church which will provide a snapshot of the concerns which animated the inception of Newfrontiers.
My notes from Judith Wolfe (St Andrews)’s presentation of her paper at the SST conference.
(3 parts and a coda)
Eschatology situated – death, judgement, heaven, hell / doctrinal interactions with creation and salvation / the general shape of Christian theology, of the story (Christianity is an eschatological religion) The phenomenon of eschatological expectation – church, oppression, Constantinian power. A variegated universal concern
Modern Eschatologies: Between Consummation and Catastrophe Secularised eschatologies in the modern era: What happens when there is a despair of the theological answers but not of the universally posed questions? Folk eschatologies elicited by modernism. Most of these social outworkings take the form of utopias. “I would go so far as to claim that eschatological expectations do and always will form part of the way we understand and experience the shape of the world and our place within it, even though they may remain implicit or inchoate. They function as the horizons within or towards which movement becomes possible and intelligible.”
The imago dei in Christian Eschatology “Martin Heidegger is one of the most sophisticated secular eschatological thinkers of the twentieth century, partly because he confronts this antinomy uncompromisingly, not denying but embracing it: Human existence, for him, just is to live not towards fulfilment but towards its impossibility.”
Coda: Theology and Religious Studies in the University
The role of imagination in theology and the natural sciences. Both depend and are predicated upon present circumstances.
A question concerning transhumanism. According David Pierce (co-founder of Humanity Plus) “If we want to live in paradise we will have to engineer it ourselves… compassion alone is not enough” – How does a transhumanist vision compare with Christian eschatology? Even physiological perfection doesn’t mitigate against corrupting human potentialities such as creed. Questions of time – dynamic and absolute.
WOLFE’S RESPONSE Conditions of the possibility – does this simply reveal the point of failure of our imagination regarding the eschaton – C.S. Lewis “Time is the only lens through which we can see eternity” The Bible gives us ‘a panopoly of images’ to consider what the end may be like, as opposed to a system. Seeds sown, embryos not yet born. ‘We have only the metaphorical or the analogous’ Transhumanism – Utopian thoughts conceive sin differently – Sin, as a response to scarcity – if only we could eradicate the conditions of scarcity then we could eradicate sin. In the garden a wrong way of being like God (autonomy) is posited. There is a right way of being like God, in being drawn into the life of Another
QUESTIONS
The world comes to bear a weight that it simply can’t bear if we seek to find the key to the eschaton in it. The Christian should give due weight to the hope of plenitude and divine love over scarcity whilst not trying to bring the circumstance about.
James Walters of LSE – The ends of the university. What can these conversations in theology about eschatology contribute to this situation? W – The world is not yet finished so there are engagements – both to discover and make – which consitutes an open invitation. Newman said that theology is part and parcel of what it means to be a university, viz. an organisation which has /everything/ as it’s purview. Theology is in a situation where it must collaborate with other subjects and should do so hopefully.
Hegel and an absolute end – Hegel scholars are divided on this. Does the system have a logically necessary end-point or is it eternally open.
Aaron Edwards, Cliff College – the Eastern Orthodox author Paul Kingsnorth writing about people electing to become pure mind, transcending the irritation of the body. W – Tolkein – What we make as makers will be taken up graciously by God into the new world. Forming beyond ones own will.
John Bradbury URC – Christological move to root the eschaton in the cross and resurrection. What does this move mean when expanded into a cosmological register? It seems to imply an unwanted annhiliationism, such that new creation would be in discontinuity with the old. W – Given that our most common images of resurrection are given by the natural world, no.
The role of faith or trusting God in human eschatology – is it being able to imagine that someone has a better imagination than us? W – I don’t think that God has imagination in the way that we do, God is pure act. The key role of faith is faith in the ressurection: It gives the paradigm. The role of faith is also towards whom and in whose image we are. The resurrected life will be a seeing of God face to faith, that we are mirrors or opposites of God who will only come to be themselves when in that circumstance – not now when God is hidden. Faith in Somebody who is yet unseen but whose vision will constitute our eternal blessedness.
Alan Morton, Nottingham – You lean hard into the death and resurrection motif to break up secular antimonies (which I am on board with). In using the imago dei, there are various readings which can end up losing the human, losing Christ etc. Do you see these secular antimonies playing out in Christian contexts. W – It is not my fault that people have bad views of the image of God! Self-subversion of most motifs of idolatry.
The dynamic life being brought into some static vision of the end. W – Greg Nyssa and Origen – epektasis.
What is the role of church and sociable dersires. W – The church as the summum bonum rather than the individual. Sociality or church is irreducible in our expectation of fulfilment, because we are and know ourselves – if at all – as in the love of God. It is harder in this life because God is hidden. The responsibility of church is to be, to some extent, Christ to each other in expectation of what will be.
Eschatology is the resounding affirmation that we are human, by being turned outwards. The idea of theology as the defender of the humanities is interesting – if theology had its crisis moment in the C19th (receding sea of faith in God), then humanities might be having its crisis now (receding sea of faith in man)
The eucharist is a central point in how Christians are to live imaginatively. The mass is named for its dispersible – being sent into our oridnary lives to outwork what it is that we are given, having been taken up in to Christ to be digested by him even as we digest him.
Buki mentioned a book she is reading by Carlo Rovelli on physics which spends time discussing the Eucharist.
The Bible makes it hard to map the putative end on to geo-political events. It is a feature, not a bug. Hope is not utopianism, it hopes in an unspecified end.
Here again are my unedited and fairly ramshackle notes from the SST conference, second plenary session.
Michelle Fletcher from King’s College London summarised her paper ‘Edging towards the End: The Building of Disaster‘, an examination of the changing themes in disaster movies. The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, Deep Impact, Armageddon, Volcano, The Day after Tomorrow, 2012 etc.
Not an attempt to trace their respective eschatologies, but a broad brush assessment of themes and motives.
CHANGES IN EMPHASIS OVER DECADES
It’s a disaster – 1970s – criticism of hubris and technological pride and mismanagement. Developing love for those outside of your immediate circle. Ending disaster – 1990s – the advance of sfx. Disasters averted by human collaboration. Who is saved? Witty banter introduced, levity. In the Shadow of Disaster – 2000-10s – distance (a toning-down of first-person pulping), reversal of powers, salvation of those within your own realm (Greenland) and lack of societal connection. The end of all things – 2020s – Greenland, Don’t look up – the requirement for human action to avert disaster. What is saved? Stuff (DLU), contesting of anthropocentrism (DLU again – flashing images of humans in the context of their environment and fellow creatures)
CRITERIA
Unpicking the Ends Zone of Impact Family Who should be saved?
Don’t Look Up – ‘For the first time in the history of the planet, a species has the technology to prevent its own extinction’ – says the president in reference to nuclear weapons, with the potential to destroy the asteroid.
“During a scene where the President and staff offer ‘prayers’ for the world, her abominable son Jason says the following: ‘There’s dope stuff, like material stuff, like sick apartments and watches, and cars, um, and clothes and sh*t that could all go away, and I don’t wanna see that stuff go away. So I’m gonna say a prayer for that stuff. Amen.'” (Fletcher 2022)
OUR OWN ENDS
Reversals: New Jerusalem – The question of the ‘stuff’ in Revelation – mimetic of the co-option of Roman grandeur and how this might go on to fuel Constantinian ambitions. Systems: Outside are the Dogs Borders: Written in the books – Written in the Lamb’s book of life, Angels on the gates, fornicators not in. A different focus to the anthropocentric A difference in ‘who makes it in’
RESPONSE FROM: SAMANTHA HARPER-ROBINS
A dancer, researcher in dance and embodiment studies – dance in the Hebrew Bible.
She described her resonance with the 90s era disaster – watching Armageddon hearing ‘Don’t want to miss a thing’ and witnessing the sacrifice: “There was hope for the world but what about Bruce Willis?!” What is the point in saving the world if we all meet with oblivion anyway? What of an afterlife? The 90s trope places the asteroid as an inevitable and irresistible levelling.
The English cultural upbringing where death is not something contemplated nor prepared for until it is present. We lack meaningful ritual contexts for preparation. The dead body has no spiritual meaning. The disaster movie serves this kind of function. ‘A disembodied cathartic ritual’. How does a developing awareness of intersectionality affect our understanding of the themes.
RESPONSE
Visceral memory – criticised as ’emotional pornography’ – the fast editing speed and the emotive soundtrack (Armageddon) – K-19 the widowmaker caused Fletcher the greatest reaction (not included because of genre – war film rather than disaster – so visceral that she will not forget nor watch again).
Cultural nods to Revelation and prophetic writings – underdeveloped and background knowledge (as in the ‘domestic’ US culture) ‘The worst bits of the Bible!’ / ‘Don’t you know what’s happening?! It’s the apocalypse man!’. In recent efforts The end has returned to a nuclear, heteronormative family as that which is preserved
RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS FROM THE FLOOR / ONLINE
Very neat endings, threads wrapped up. F – This contrasts with Revelation which has ‘The least neat ending ever – we’re left with the New Jerusalem hovering in the air, asking whether it’s ever going to land!’. Disaster movies need to end somewhere positive for the viewers after all the destruction. This is the notion of the Rebuild – in Skyscraper (2018) Dwayne Johnson is asked at the end what are you going to do? ‘Rebuild!’ Also the ‘waters receding’ in Deep Impact. Towering Inferno – ‘We’ll build better.’ Compare Speilberg with the ‘double ending’ where the ending is shown but then further expounded
The fate of ‘the baddies’ in reference to insider-outsider motifs in Revelation. F – in the 1970s – Towering Inferno has a punishing of evil in the death of the perpetrator of the faulty wiring. But there is necessary complexity for the sake of dramatic tension with regards to the salvation of morally questionable and the death of morally commendable characters. Revelation – a purging of the Earth – fornicators definitely out, reflecting cultic practices described in the Hebrew Bible.
Judith Wolf – The End of the World used as ‘the end of one’s personal world’ and therefore dealing with trauma. F – this is more explicitly present in television series and arthouse films. However, people have been shown to turn to these mainstream films. Post 9/11 there was a feeling to turn from making disaster films for an indefinite time. However, people resorted to renting disaster films as a means of therapy and identification.
To what extent do arthouse depictions deviate from heteronormative and other tropes? F – Hope is always there in the big hollywood disasters; Pandora’s box has been opened but it has to end in hope – flying birds, hints of a future. Without this, sales are negatively affected. Children of Men is more on the subject of the post-apocalyptic. There is an interesting cut-scene from Don’t Look Up with Oglethorpe attempting to make up with his estranged wife. Lot and Lot’s daughter ideas – pictures on the walls of houses in France, the visions of the end as an orgy and the politics of survivors.
B Movies – Earth-tastrophe etc. – do they exhibit the same themes? Where do the Left Behind movies fit?! A cartoonish take on the themes. Left behind on the other hand is ‘post-apocalyptic’ – what happens when society is completely re-ordered. Things so close to the Biblical material are harder to unpick and analyse because of our own proximity. Perhaps Left Behind is best understood alongside horror films, where the theological questions are around fear, what is motivating the terror etc.
The move of focus from bodily death to the abstract destruction of cities. How can we be helped in preparing for our own death and the death of our loved ones? F – Part of the fun of the disaster film is the tension of who will die when. Clubbing together – what should you do to stay alive? Don’t grab someone else’s place or nudge someone out of the way. Staring into the loved one’s eyes when you have no way out (2012, Greenland). Heteronormative loved ones. Also the older widowed man who speaks to the lost loved one who is waiting for you. It is more about thinking of what is important to you now – a good life is where you get to be old and go to the arms of our loved ones. We like buildings to speak for us – the things that survive and speak of the absence of human bodies
The opposite shift in Disney films vis the nuclear family – missing parents etc. Survival predicated on different kinships, inter-species. F – We must consider the audience; films targeted at children and to be watched by all. The nuclear family has always been a myth – there is always mess. The idea of Return, of broken families being restored. (Ed. does this parallel the ‘Rebuilding’ trope?) In 2012 Curtis is no longer married In Greenland an estranged family returning and re-establishing the family. In Deep Impact it is forgiveness for the errant father who has re-married. F – Not the real situation but the ideal. And causing us to ask ‘Who do I need to reconcile with?!’
Aaron Edwards, Cliff College – Is there a danger of reading the elitism in disaster movies into insider-outsider messages in Revelation? F – Revelation has elicited some really troubling ways of building societally – ‘Everybody doesn’t like Revelation until they realise they can use it against their enemies. They can use it rhetorically’ – the Whore of Babylon etc. But Revelation is a book dealing with collective and individual trauma, it isn’t aimed at one particular group. To approach the text responsibility we need to be mindful of the insights of trauma theory. F. throws the question back to the theologians.
Reception history of Revelation – Regarding the influenza outbreak in 1918 which caused people to reach for the Scofield Bible and how the dispensation and rapture propogated. F –
What will disaster movies look like post Russian invasion of Ukraine. F – Repeated showing of disasters leads to increase in donations. The research suggests an opening of empathy rather than a desensitization. We are helped by these dramatisations to relate. The lead time in film production means a 5 year delay in interpretation of events. Black Hawk Down was brought forward by 6 months because people wanted to see American soldiers being brave.
Two remaining questions: Are the Marvel films disaster films? F – not if it has supernatural figures – possible, plausible to happen now. Someone observed that there was a decade-change at SST from the late 90s to now from papers featuring 20 pages on Barth towards the kind of pop cultural considerations this morning!
I am attending the Society for the Study of Theology conference at Warwick university. This year’s subject is ‘The End of the World’
In the first plenary, David Clough summarised his paper ‘The End of Creatures‘ with a further interaction from Marilu Bosoms and questions from the room and online delegates. Here are my disjointed notes.
The ‘end of the world has a history’ – survivors of Hiroshima spoke about it as such. Shierry Weber Nicholson speaks of trauma as ‘world-ending’ for the victims. Clough – ‘The ending of myriad human worlds that have come and gone’
The key question: ‘Who’s world is ending?’
1. A theology committed to God as creator of all that is must attend to the whole creation
2. ‘It’s all about us’ must be contested
Creatures and environments, and humans amongst them. Ps 104 and the impact of human industrial activities. An anthropogenic mass-extinction event. Ps. 104 written well after the ‘Quaternary Megafauna Extinction that made around half of large land mammals extinct.’ Gen 1-2 / Isaiah 11
99% extinction. Theology done on the grounds of creatures which have come to an end.
Scotus’ haeccity / G M Hopkins
Teilhard de chardin’s view of history – ends
‘God’s work of redemption is inclusive of all creatures’
RESPONSE FROM MARILU BOSOMS
Q. What are other compelling theological questions for caring for creation?
Animals reveal more facets of God’s fullness and reveal ways of making God known. Take Job’s command to ‘ask the beasts’ seriously.
The medieval emphasis – Aquinas ‘For God brought many things into being… might be supplied by another.’ [is this dependent upon scholastic metaphysics]
What does it mean to praise the creator of all with the knowledge of human complicity in their disappearance?
CLOUGH’S RESPONSE
At heart he is an ethicist – the exploration should extend beyond the reality of the praise psalms to the actual content of them.
Resistance to formulating theological explanations patterned upon Teilard. Rather focus upon the capacity – God making time and place for creatures, as much pre-comet as post. Thinking redemption in a more than human sense.
QUESTIONS FROM THE FLOOR
1. Ps. 104 re. God having a secure place for all – Divine failure rates! Do we only care about creatures when they live to a certain maturity level? Quite close to the problem of evil which we have strong reasons for not addressing theologically (clough)
2. What place do these creatures have for you in eschatological perspective? Descartes denied animal souls in order to ensure that Heaven remained a viable Christian doctrine. Because there would be too many bugs. Clough’s vision, by contrast is ‘ridiculously exuberant and maximally inclusive’.
3. Further to the previous: How does the non-competitive nature of God’s care apply to viruses and bacteria? Conservatively, one might say that viruses exist right at the boundary of living and unliving. Clough is ‘allegeric’ to this. A Christian theology cannot get by without reference to the fallenness of creatureliness. Irreconcilable conflict between human and non-human beings. Liberation from bondage must entail harmonious co-existence of creatures.
4. The questions of scale and cheerfulness – Clough’s greatest criticism is for those at the high extremes of both of these. Praise where there is simultaneously sorrow and joy? John Wesley’s sermon ‘The New Creation’ where he mourns that two thirds of creatures can only get by by taking the lives of others. Clough wonders whether this comes over as a bit gnostic – a theologian who is not really into the world as we find it. He thinks not; it is an impassioned love for fellow-creatures which drives the project. Therefore, he remains in love and sorrow and lament rather than tragedy.
5. An invitation for C to expand on his understanding of sin. The Priestly author of Genesis 6 describes it as bloodshed. The other instance of describing it as deficit – inability to now read the book of nature, which is what Paul says. In on animals 1 – C has a passage for describing sin as transcending the human sphere – sin in the more-than-human realm. Ref. Jane Goodall and chimpanze infanticide (and the shock exhibited by the animals in the community).
6. Does the agrarian nature of Abrahamic… self-domestication of dogs and humans: was agriculture ‘human domestication’? Hunter-gatherer vs agrarian. How did the vegan visions of Genesis 1-2 and Isaiah 11 come from an agrarian society using animals for food? The distance between their lived experiences and God’s will. Abolition of argriculture? No!
7. Death. Psalm 104 – God gives life, God takes life. What is so awful about this? What is the difference between dying one by one or mass extinction. How serious is death if there is an ‘exuberant’ future? C says the difference between ethicists concerned with an animals and those with environments: The destruction of a ‘mode and possibility’ of a way of living is the difference. DF – What’s your theology of death?
8. What does good and bad intervention look like? Reconceiving what good living alongside other creatures looks like. We exoticise it – elephants rather than badgers. In On Animals vol 2 a consideration of contexts – Cheltenham races where four horses died this year. 50-100,000 dogs destroyed in the UK last year in consequence of the settlement on companionship.
9. The transformation of relationships between predators and prey in the new creation – does predation become play?
10. Sympathetic refusal of telelogical theodicies – Christology and salvation history does not need to fall with the rejection of theodicy.
11. Regarding animal sacrfice, the sacrificial system and fulfilment in Christ. C – It is not a discounting – the astonishingly radical idea that the only way to kill an animal is under sacrificial, priestly regulation. The ability of the animal to mediate between human and God. Is this an aspect which will be redeemed.
12. Ben Quash quoted Arthur Hugh Clough ‘The Latest Decalogue’: ‘Thou shalt not kill, but need not strive officiously to keep alive’… We need an account of different kinds of killing. There are forms of killing which deserve the name murder. These are difficult ethical distinctions. C says the place to start is Karl Barth – respect for life in non-human animals specifies a long series of caveats without which, the killing is murder. Augustine thinks it a reductio ad absurdum to think of a stopping-off point for murder beyond the human. C thinks that there are other stopping-off points beyond the human.
13. The goodness of creation. For Schleiermacher the goodness of creations was its openness. C – that which creates the demand for lament. If we could just despair it would be different. But we can recognise the goodness of the telos of these creatures which surround us and their inability to fulfil this is a sorrow to us, ergo the goodness of creation is evidenced by the devastation which prevents its manifestation.
“Faith can make use of the waters of affliction to swim faster to Christ” (Watson 31)
This phrase, with its natural-world imagery and its Christocentricity sounds like it could have come from a sermon by C. H. Spurgeon a couple of centuries after Watson’s time. What is interesting to me is the modality in that first clause: ‘Faith can make use…’ which suggests that equally, faith could not make use of the afflictions of life. And of course, it is not faith in an abstract or impersonal sense; faith is exercised in personal trust. It is the person of faith who is in view.
The thing at stake in affliction is still a choice for the person of faith as to which way they will swim. To extend the image, the current created by the affliction is Divinely intended to aid the sufferer in swimming to Christ. Conversely, there is still the possibility of swimming away from Christ in the waters of affliction but for the Christian, despite the disorientation occasioned by the ‘affliction’, this is actually harder to do. In effect it is a swimming against the flow, and against the actual purpose in the suffering. So the motion is not enforced but it is logical; the pain is supposed to draw you near, not push you away, and you can choose whether or not you go with it.
The aforementioned Charles Spurgeon speaks about this force of direction as the ‘blessed hurricane*’
“In seasons of severe trial, the Christian has nothing on earth that he can trust to, and is therefore compelled to cast himself on his God alone. When his vessel is on its beam-ends, and no human deliverance can avail, he must simply and entirely trust himself to the providence and care of God. Happy storm that wrecks a man on such a rock as this! O blessed hurricane that drives the soul to God and God alone!”
(Charles Haddon Spurgeon – Morning and Evening – Morning reading for August 31st)
It is this being ‘compelled’ which Watson is talking about too. My point is that, here at least, compelled is different in strength to forced. Despite the powerful working which Spurgeon portrays, I can’t imagine him exchanging those terms. It is the right and natural course that trouble should send the believer to God, and something to celebrate; as Spurgeon says “it is a happy trouble that drives you to your Father!”
* In searching for this quote, I found the top result returned was actually a song on the theme by a friend of mine.
“What politician or moralist ever placed happiness in the cross?” (Watson 30)
I like this glib little phrase. I like glib little phrases generally, but this one jumped off the page at me: First thought – ‘There must be a backstory!’. I don’t know enough about his life and times to opine upon who Watson had in his crosshairs here but, regardless of that, there is a principle lurking beneath the rhetorical barb here. ‘Politicians’ and ‘moralists’ seems to be his shorthand for those whose ultimate concern is the present and whose purview of life stops at death’s door. Plenty of past cultures have placed their hopes in an ‘afterlife’ which consists solely of living on through their progeny. That it is so common in our days to live without even that kind of ambition should strike as strange. We are the anomaly.
And that is what Watson is getting at here: the modern person considers their happiness to be bound up squarely in individual well-being, avoiding harm at all costs even when that harm is really the path to their happiness. Watson cites Job 5:17 How happy is the one whom God corrects. Job is the classic example of the man who lost everything – at the hands of God – and yet lives to prove the truth of the verse above.
But is it clear how affliction is supposed to make us happy? It seems a knotty and contradictory idea. Watson says “The moon in the full is furthest off from the sun: so are many further off from God in the full-moon of prosperity; afflictions bring them nearer to God. The magnet of mercy does not draw us so near to God as the cords of affliction.” The paradox is that we are creatures made to relate with others and finally with our Creator. Creature comforts – the full-moon of prosperity – auger against the happiness which we are built for in our most basic being. I doubt very much that anyone particularly likes being corrected; it carries connotations of exposure of ignorance and the shame of failure. Yet, if that correction comes from love, and holds at least the promise of restoration, perhaps it will begin to be easier to be happy in the moment.
“Affliction teaches us to know ourselves. In prosperity we are for the most part strangers to ourselves. God makes us know affliction, that we may better know ourselves. We see that corruption in our hearts in the time of affliction, which we would not believe was there.” (Thomas Watson p27)
It’s a lesson which is nigh on impossible to learn in peacetime: Knowing yourself. How can you see yourself as you actually are? The ‘you’ of peace, health, vitality, popularity, usefulness, respect and friendship is always something of a caricature. Happy times are not generally conducive to serious self-reflection (“we are for the most part strangers to ourselves”). This is more forthcoming when the celebration stops. Watson calls us to see the Divine hand in this. When you lie in the bed ill, or heartbroken, or angry, or bereaved God is giving you an opportunity. An opportunity to get to know yourself. Now, a normal sane reaction to this is scorn: ‘Thanks very much! I get to endure all this pain and the reward is to get more familiar with myself; the embittered soul battling underneath this misery.’
On the face of it, not a very enticing offer. But look again, and there really is a worthwhile gift to be discerned. That little word ‘corruption’, quoted above, is not one that we are used to using in its non-metaphorical sense. Metaphorically, we speak of ‘corrupt officials’ who may be bought with a bribe, or of ‘corrupt national systems’ where that same spirit manifests more broadly. In literal use, corruption is rottenness – and in Watson’s text above, the referent is your heart. To sensitively draw a friend’s attention to the cream cheese on their upper-lip without inadvertently shaming them is a tricky task. To highlight the darkness, the rottenness, of the selfish motives of their heart – and most painfully, where they supposed their motives to be pure – is quite another operation. It’s one that makes plain to us the “corruption in our hearts… which we would not believe was there“. The God of the Bible, the father of Jesus Christ, is committed to just that level of surgery on those who entrust themselves to him. That kind of determination, when personally applied, gives a serious hue to Philippians 1:6 where Paul says, “the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ.” (my emphasis)
So how do these thoughts cash out for you and I? This year has offered a wider variety of afflictions to wider array of people than most years in living memory. I wonder what kinds of recent personal affliction you can call to mind now? Disappointment, unexpected isolation, illness, poverty – these things are real and part of me feels bad for rubbing them in our faces. I’m not trying to be a black cloud here, but neither am I advocating Oprah-esque positivity. Personally, this year has had elements that could genuinely make it either one of the worst or best years I have known. And this won’t be decided by a ‘pros and cons’ calculation in which obvious blessings tip the balance. I could stack up the unexpected benefits – the pleasure of seeing my family way more than I expected to, the gift of abundant time and space to think, study, create and play etc. – and then compare these to the pains of losing work, income, sense of value and direction. No, the outcome is more than a little dependent on the finality with which the afflictions are viewed and the traction that they are allowed to have in one’s self-reflections. Without making an exact parallel or being melodramatic, it puts me in mind of the semi-colon tattoos which some have – moments which could have put pay to the course of a life are instead (and non-trivially), translated into new beginnings. Scripturally, this is borne out in Hebrews 12:11 “No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.” especially that last clause, because it’s perfectly possible to endure hardship, discipline, affliction and not be trained by it. A critical and prayerful engagement with the pain through sincere and sustained asking of the ‘why?’ questions is required. Then being alert to the answers. If you do it right, you are led to see yourself, it hurts and reformation becomes possible. The way out is through, but getting out is not the primary aim.
With all the advantages of affliction being listed here and in the past few posts, perhaps it’s easy to forget (and here I am wildly overestimating my powers of persuasion), that these afflictions of life are in fact evils. Let’s hear it from Watson again: “Do not mistake me; I do not say that of their own nature the worst things are good… though they are naturally evil, yet the wise over-ruling hand of God disposing and sanctifying them, they are morally good.” (Watson 25) Perhaps I should have started with chapter one; Watson’s outline of how ‘The Best Things’ work to grow you. But we’ve just had 2020 so, you know, I stand by starting with the Worst Things.
“A sick-bed often teaches more than a sermon.” (Watson 27)
Yet again, Watson is on the money – and that is coming from one who has heard, written and preached a couple of decades worth of sermons. This is not to say that sermons don’t teach at all. In fact, they do even more than that. The purpose of a sermon is not only to teach the meaning and detail of Scripture but to facilitate live encounters with the living God. That’s the point of preaching, what’s supposed to happen. It’s the thing that makes it thrilling to hear and what sets it apart from any other type of speaking and hearing. The preacher, their life and their message are a conduit for the present speaking of God to his people. If that hasn’t been your experience, expectation or prayer when hearing a sermon, then let it be – there is a richer experience available! Sermons then, approached in faith by the hearers, communicate not just the scripturebut the Person.
So, given that glowing endorsement, why on Earth recommend that a ‘sick-bed’ is probably, if not certainly, better than a sermon when it comes to teaching? Watson says “Affliction teaches what sin is.” And there it is; actual harm brings the reality of the failure and the tainted state of self and the world to bear not only upon our minds but on our very lives.
“In the word preached we hear what a dreadful thing sin is, that it is both defiling and damning, but we fear it no more than a painted lion; therefore God lets loose affliction, and then we feel sin bitter in the fruit of it.”
Thomas Watson
That we ‘feel sin’ this way through sickness is one of those peculiar blessings that we’re getting used to hearing about in this series. The sort of smack-in-the-mouth blessings which we might have thought we understood whilst it was all theoretical and we still had our teeth intact.
“He was more beholden to his iron chain, than to his golden crown; the one made him proud, the other made him humble.” (Watson 27)
The next example is that of King Manasseh of Judah (709-643BC). One of the accounts of his reign is 2 Chronicles 33 and there it explains how Manasseh begins that reign by studiously disobeying everything God had ever said to his people: “Manasseh misled Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, so that they did more evil than the nations whom the Lord had destroyed before the people of Israel.” (2 Chronicles 33:9)
What happens next is the essence of this discussion of evil being worked for good:
10 The Lord spoke to Manasseh and to his people, but they gave no heed. 11 Therefore the Lord brought against them the commanders of the army of the king of Assyria, who took Manasseh captive in manacles, bound him with fetters, and brought him to Babylon. 12 While he was in distress he entreated the favour of the Lord his God and humbled himself greatly before the God of his ancestors. 13 He prayed to him, and God received his entreaty, heard his plea, and restored him again to Jerusalem and to his kingdom. Then Manasseh knew that the Lord indeed was God. (2 Chronicles 33:10-13)
There is an interesting historical aspect running through this – Manasseh rejects the results of the past. He did the evil acts that had gotten nations destroyed earlier in the book. When he is eventually restored, it is because he ‘humbled himself greatly before the God of his ancestors’. That he prayed sincerely and was restored so quickly after leading vast swathes of people astray must at least give us hope that these kinds of sudden change are possible. This is both a personal and a societal encouragement. Consider what buried ways and rejected fidelities, things that fed and watered us culturally in past generations, could be retrieved by that kind of humiliation and repentance.
