’The Stoic bears, the Epicurean seeks to enjoy, the Buddhist and Hindu stand apart disillusioned, the Muslim submits, but only the Christian exults.’ (E. Stanley Jones)

’The enjoyment of God is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied. To go to heaven, fully to enjoy God, is infinitely better than the most pleasant accommodations here. Fathers and mothers, husbands, wives, or children, or the company of earthly friends, are but shadows; but God is the substance. These are but scattered beams, but God is the sun. These are but streams, but God is the ocean.’ (Jonathan Edwards, Works, II, 244)

’Religion does not banish all joy. As there is seriousness without sourness, so there is a cheerful liveliness without lightness. When the prodigal was converted, “they began to make merry”…Who should be cheerful, if not the people of God? They are no sooner born of the Spirit, but they are heirs to a crown.’ (Thomas Watson)

’When [the Holy Spirit] so sheds abroad the love of God in our hearts, and so fills them with gladness by an immediate act and operation (as he caused John Baptist to leap for joy in the womb upon the approach of the mother of Jesus), – then doth the soul, even from hence, raise itself to a consideration of the love of God, whence joy and rejoicing doth also flow. Of this joy there is no account to be given, but that the Spirit worketh it when and how he will. He secretly infuseth and distils it into the soul, prevailing against all fears and sorrows, filling it with gladness, exultations; and sometimes with unspeakable raptures of mind.’ (John Owen, Works, II 253)

Take a saint, and put him n any condition, and he knows how to rejoice in the Lord.  (Walter Cradock)

Joys are our wings; sorrows are our spurs.  (Anon)

Here, joy begins to enter into us; there, we enter into joy.  (Thomas Watson)

Why should Christians be such a happy people?  It is good for our God, it gives him honour among men when we are glad.  It is good for us, it makes us strong.  “The joy of the Lord is your strength” (Neh 8:10).  It is good for the ungodly, when they see Christians glad, they long to be believers themselves.  It is good for our fellow Christians, it comforts them and tends to cheers them.  (SPurgeon)

With reference to the Ten Commandments, J. John asks, ‘Why should we burden modern men and women with the primitive code of a nomadic tribe that lived under skin tents in a desert? Yet the answer is that even amid vast changes, some things remain stubbornly unalterable. Switch the tents to flats and houses, transform the nomadic tribes to executives in business suits, alter the desert into a modern city and you will find that human nature stays exactly what it always was. Of course things have changed. The clicking abacus has become the sophisticated computer, the creaking ox-cart has become the supersonic jet, but fire is still fire, water is still water and humanity is still humanity…We have the same vices as our ancestors. And we need the same rules.’

J. John, Ten, p13f.

We tend to think of satire as a rather modern thing.  The 21st century, however, does not have a monopoly on stupidity, and therefore does not have a monopoly on the use of satire as a means to expose that stupidity.

Satire has three main elements: a target, a vehicle, and an implied against which the target is criticised.  Satire s often accompanied by a comical or mocking tone.

The flaws of biblical characters are often exposed satirically.  Satire also occur frequently in the Wisdom literature, where human follies such as greed, laziness are regular targets.

Satire occurs particularly often in the writings of the prophets, as a means of pronouncing God’s judgment on evil.  The Book of Amos is full of satire.

The Gospels contain much satire.  Religious hypocrites such as the Pharisees, are portrayed with satrical scorn.  The speeches of Jesus are frequently satirical (Matthew 23, for example), as are the parables.

The ‘great masterpiece’ of biblical satire is the book of Jonah. This writer attacks the kind of Jewish nationalism that refused to accept the universality of God’s grace.  The protagonist of the story upholds the very qualities the writer is holding to up satirical ridicule.  There is orinical humour in the ignomious behaviour of the wayward prophet.

Based on The Origin of the Bible (ed P.W. Comfort)

Although some exegetes think that Paul has stopped talking about ‘justification’ by the time he reaches Romans 8, he is ’still cheerfully working out the full implications of what he said in chapters 3,4 and 5.’

The reason there is no mention of ‘faith’ in chapter 8 is that Paul is talking about final, not present, justification.

‘Salvation’, according to Paul in this chapter does not mean being saved from this world but being saved for the world (8:18-26).  We were created to be God’s stewards and vice-regents in this world, and salvation means fulfilling this purpose.  By the same token, salvation does not mean ‘dying and going to heaven’; salvation means victory over death and all that is associated with it (tribulation, hardship, persectuion, famine, nakedness, danger, weaponry) and it therefore places physical resurrection and the renewal of creation at its centre.  ‘That is “what the whole world’s waiting for”‘ (Rom 8:19).

Paul’s doctrine of justification is based on the fact that this great rescue operation has already been inaugurated in Jesus Christ, and is already being implemented through the spirit (sic).

What we should notice in Romans 8 is the way that the renewal of all creation interlocks with the indwelling of the spirit.  According to Rom 8:4 the righteous intention of the law (which was to give life) is fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.  The present moral life does not ‘earn’ salvation, it anticipates it.  Perfection is not attainable, but a sincere desire to please God, along with repentance and forgiveness for failings, is inevitable.  To believe that one has experienced new life in Christ, there must be real signs of life.

Paul’s final and glorious statement of assurance, Rom 8:31-39 does not mention faith, but it most certainly expresses faith.  It rests all its weight, not on anything we might do, but on God’s achievement in Christ.  ‘We’ who cannot be seaprated from the love of God in Christ are ‘those who are in Christ Jesus’, 8:1, those ‘who believe in the one who raised Jesus from the dead’, 4:23-25.  And the more the Spirit is working in their lives, the less they we even think about their efforts ‘qualifying’ them for anything.  ‘Salvation is not simply God’s gift to his people but God’s gift through his people.’

Over against a loose notion of ’salvation by faith’, this conception is more biblical and more Trinitarian.  Paul invites his hearers to trust in Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, and in the Father wholse love triumphed in the death of his son, and in the holy spirit (sic) who makes that victory operative in our lives as we seek to love and serve God in response (5:5; 8:28).  It is also more creational, and more Israel-focused.

Based on Wright, Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision, 206-212.

Bishop Tom Wright is a hugely influential figure in the Christian church today.  He is a prolific author – both at the scholarly and the popular levels -, an engaging speaker, and an original thinker.  It it, perhaps, his penchant for ‘fresh’ thinking that thrills some, infuriates others, and perplexes the rest of us.  Of course, he himself would chuckle at this last remark, for he would say that he is regarded in the theological academy and in the Church of England as an ultra-conservative.  He believes in the Resurrection, for goodness’ sake!

Evangelical opinion tends to be somewhat polarised.  Readers of this web site will perhaps realise that I do not feel readyeither to demonise Wright or to canonise him.  In this regard, I was interested to read Phil Heaps’ review of Wright’s recent book Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision.  I find that Phil expresses rather well some of the ambivalance that I feel.

Phil asks,

Is [Wright] a heretic, whose distorted gospel is all the more dangerous because he writes not only scholarly tomes, but popular, engaging books for ‘the man on the street’? Or is he a brilliant expositor whose explanation of the New Testament and the gospel is ground-breaking and hugely significant?

He pinpoints one of the difficulties facing anyone who ponders Wright’s voluminous writings:-

The difficulty with reading Wright is that he uses familiar words with radically different meanings — not to be obscure or deceptive, but claiming to recover their biblical meanings, as opposed to their usage in, for example, Reformed Confessions and popular Christian jargon. This presents a double problem: reading things that sound orthodox, but actually mean something different, and reading things that sound all wrong, but may in fact be perfectly orthodox.

Accordingly, many critiques of Wright simply struggle at a superficial level with the terminology that he uses.  Heresy hunters can have a field day.  For example, critics are appalled by Wright’s apparent insistence that justification on the last day will be based on a believer’s works, whereas what he might actually mean is that we are seen to belong to God’s people by by our lives of obedience.

Wright seems constitutionally incapable of saying anything in quite the same way as anyone has ever said it before.  He regards himself, perhaps, as setting forth a new paradigm, one which re-examines all of our treasured traditional beliefs and then ends up as…well, a restatement of what the best Christians in the reformed traditions have always believed and taught.

Having said that, Wright does have some characteristic emphases that we should take very seriously.  For instance, he wants very much to draw out the corporate aspects of the Christian message, as opposed to the crass individualism of 20th-century evangelicalism.  Then again, he directs our attention to the Jewishness of our faith, relating it both to the Old Testament story and to the Judaism of New Testament times.  But there are problems, too, not least in Wright’s (over?-)emphasis on Christ as the end of exile.  It is ironic (and I think that he finds it so) that his severest critics come from Calvinist ranks even though he is convinced that he stands very firmly in the tradition of Calvin himself (as opposed to the Lutheran or pietist traditions).

Not mentioned by Phil Heaps, but too important not to be mentioned here, is Wright’s insistence that ‘eternal life’ does not equate to ‘going to heaven when I die’.  Clearly, Wright has a point here, although we might wish that he would deal less in caricatures of evangelical teaching.  I find it worrying, for example, that he so often mentions the more personal aspects of salvation, only to dismiss them with faint praise (“Of course, that’s hugely important, and I wouldn’t deny it for a moment, but what really matters is…”

Phil discusses two further aspects of Wright’s teaching, particularly as they touch on the doctrine of justification.  These are: ‘righteousness’ and ‘faith’.  Wright seems to force both of these great Pauline (and biblical) terms into moulds in which they do not quite fit.  Faith, for example,  becomes less the means by which a sinner finds peace with God, and more a ‘badge’, marking out who is a member of God’s people.

Phil Heaps concludes:-

At its best, Wright’s exegesis is competent and rigorous, and his logic compelling, in striking contrast to at least some of his vocal critics. At other times his big picture seems to sweep aside the actual details of his text, and rhetoric makes up for lack of argument. In particular, he tends to dismiss or caricature alternative views using loaded language (‘abstract, simplistic, merely…’) rather than seeking to present them as attractively as possible, before effectively critiquing them (something of which we are all guilty?). Thus he needs reading carefully and critically, to see whether his case is as strong as it sounds! Sadly, sometimes Wright is unnecessarily sarcastic or cutting. Undoubtedly many of his critics are wrestling a ‘straw man caricature’ of his views. But this doesn’t justify his (humble sounding, but actually rather patronising) assumption that the only possible reason anyone might disagree with him is that he hasn’t explained himself clearly. It doesn’t appear to cross his mind that, having understood him, someone might reject many of his key assertions based on the evidence!

And he adds that criquing Wright is still ‘work in progress’.  I know what he means.

Somewhat to my regret, I’ve made rather more this year of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth than I have of the 500th anniversary of John Calvin’ s birth.

As a small contribution towards putting this right, I draw attention to a biography of Calvin by the noted scholar T.H.L. Parker.  First published in 1954, it is now reissued by Desiring God Ministries and is available online here.

John Piper writes:-

I am eager for people to know Calvin not because he was without flaws, or because he was the most influential theologian of the last 500 years (which he was), or because he shaped Western culture (which he did), but because he took the Bible so seriously, and because what he saw on every page was the majesty of God and the glory of Christ.