The Nature of Theological Engagement

 

I am eternally grateful to my Systematic Theology Professor Dr. Adrio Konig for instilling in me as a student a healthy approach to theological engagement. He had deliberately populated his department with a wide range of different theologians: There was Simon Maimela, a liberation theologian, Len Hulley, a Methodist, Brian Gaybba, a Catholic, A Pentecostal whose name I forget and Konig himself who was Dutch Reformed. Konig’s approach was as follows.

·       Make sure you listen carefully to what each theologian says.

·       Make sure you understand how and why he or she has arrived at their position.

·       Don’t simply sign up to one or other position but establish your own position.

·       Make sure that you can give a well-reasoned account of this position.                                                                                                                                       

I found this approach quite liberating. I remember writing an assignment for Dr. Gaybba and receiving a good mark although I was pretty certain that he didn’t share the position I was advocating. He simply recognised that I had tried hard to build a rational case for this position from Scripture. (I sent greetings and an expression of gratitude through a mutual friend in Grahamstown to Dr. Gaybba last year shortly before he died.)

John Wesley also gives us a good example to follow. With amazing humility considering what an apostolic giant he is on the landscape of church history, he writes in the preface to his Forty Four Sermons.

Are you persuaded you see more clearly than me? It is not unlikely you may. Then treat me as you would desire to be treated yourself upon a change of circumstances. Point me out a better way than I have known. Show me it is so by plain proof of Scripture. And if I linger in the path I have been accustomed to tread, and am therefore unwilling to leave it, labour with me a little, take me by the hand, and lead me as I am able to bear. But be not displeased if I entreat you not to beat me down in order to quicken my pace. I can go but feebly and slowly at best; then I should not be able to go at all. May I request you further not to give me hard names in order to bring me into the right way? Suppose I were ever so much in the wrong, I doubt this would set me right. Rather this would make me run so much the farther from you and so get more and more out of the way.

 

The challenge is to hold firmly to one’s convictions, (for faith is the certainty of things hoped for but not seen) while maintaining a teachable spirit. How marvelously Wesley models this. 

One of my “Fathers in the Faith” was the late Ian Thompson. A theologian of considerable stature, he held office at different times as Principal of FEDSEM and Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in South Africa. Yet he was one of the most humble and saintly men I have ever had the privilege to meet. Conversing with Ian especially on theological matters he was always gentle and concerned to understand what a person was saying. Rock steady in his convictions yet without trace of the judgmental. I recall his saying to me on one occasion, “Peter our conversation must be always gracious yet seasoned with salt.”

Well, I’m still trying to get that right.

I confess to a certain admiration for Martin Luther as he debates with his ecclesiastic adversaries in the Market Square of a German town, using the earthiest of language. The apostle Paul too, was not above using earthy language when he wished to make an important point: Of the circumcision party he says, “I wish those who unsettle you would emasculate themselves.” And, “…Christ Jesus for whom I have suffered the loss of all things and do count them but dung, that I might win Christ…”(KJV)

The fact is that at times this imperishable Gospel which we are called upon to proclaim from the rooftops, must be defended and contended for robustly.

Theological engagement may be robust so long as it is respectful.

I am disappointed when in a theological discussion a person adopts an ad hominum approach and begins to catalogue my shortcomings. This is unhelpful. I am able to produce a far more comprehensive catalogue of my sins than may be apparent to him or her.

In any theological engagement, it is important to play the ball and not the player.

It is especially important to avoid the ‘hard names’ that Wesley refers to.

Affixing a person with a pejorative label is no substitute for dealing with the issue. 

So then, why not play it safe and avoid theological engagement? 

The thing is none of us has the monopoly on truth.

None of us is yet fully mature in Christ.

We have yet to attain to “the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph 4.13)

And this involves doctrinal soundness and stability, “so that we may no longer be children tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine…” (Eph 4. 14)

Yes we have the elementary doctrine of Christ in place, the stuff of the Nicene Creed, we know that we are saved by grace through faith in Jesus, not of ourselves it is a gift of God, but we must go on to maturity (Heb 6.1 ; Eph 2.8)

The fact is that we need to be “filled-out” by other believers. Each of us comes from a different context and has traveled a unique journey with Jesus, and so together we are able to pool our testimonies and perspectives, to enrich one another and so approach to a fuller understanding of Him. That is why Scripture says, “..speaking the truth in love we are to grow up in every way into Him who is the head, into Christ……when each part is working properly the body grows so that it builds itself up in love.” Eph 4. 16 

This involves respectful, truth-seeking, theological engagement. 

Peter Frow

September ‘22  

The Holy It

 

I’ve been reading the autobiography of Father Brian D’Arcy the Irish priest who wrote a column for the Irish tabloid Sunday World entitled, “Father Brian’s Little Bit of Religion.” The column was widely read and continued for some 30 years.

Father Brian writes that while on sabbatical in San Francisco he encountered a group of women including nuns who were working to revise the Trinitarian formula, “Father, Son and Holy Spirit,” which they considered unacceptably sexist and patriarchal.

They eventually came up with, “Parent, Sibling and Holy It.” 

It remains to be seen if this will enjoy much traction.

 

Peter Frow

December 2022

On Being Judgmental

 

If you do not condone what I do,

I will be offended,

I will be hurt,

I will say you are unloving,

And I will judge you to be judgmental.

 

It’s curious that I never feel more judged than by someone who informs me that I am being judgmental.

Somehow those who are exceedingly broadminded as to what they deem permissible, become suddenly rather ‘narrow’ towards those who don’t share those same permissive views. The new tolerance becomes highly intolerant of anyone holding a more scrupulous position. 

Certainly, there is a Scriptural injunction to, “Judge not lest we be judged.” Within the context this means we are not to adopt a Pharisaic ‘holier-than-thou’ stance towards others lest we be judged by God. However, as Professor Richard Hays points out, this has come to mean, “I’ll wink at your sin if you wink at mine.” 

The fact is that there are two kinds of judging:

the one we must not do

and the other which we must do. 

The one which we must not do is the stone-throwing, condemnatory kind, the one which mistakes self-righteousness for righteousness, which fails to acknowledge that there is none without sin and that but for the grace of God we are all in deep, deep trouble. 

The kind of judging which we must do is perhaps better termed the practice of discerning right from wrong. 

Romans 12. 2  puts it this way:

“Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may test and approve what is God’s good and perfect will.” 

Thus, while believers must live each moment with a profound consciousness of God’s grace, we must also be spurring one another on in the quest for holiness. 

None of us can claim to have arrived, yet together we press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus, and if anyone is caught in a transgression, those who are spiritually mature should restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness. (Philp. 3. 14; Gal 6. 1) 

To do so is not to be judgmental but simply to recognise that, “I am my brother’s keeper.” 

Peter Frow

October 2022

The Heavenly Chariot

 

I would describe my doctrinal position as ‘Mere Orthodoxy.’

There are some theological circles in which I move

where such a confession is reckoned ‘seriously uncool.’

Inexcusably retrograde.

Yet if in such circumstances I incline to feeling beleaguered,

To my aid comes G. K. Chesterton,

Like a gale, a refreshing wind, he comes:

 

“People have fallen into the foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy.----- It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic. The Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse, yet it is utterly un-historic to say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. --- It is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one’s own. It is always easy to be a modernist, as it is easy to be a snob. ---- It is always simple to fall, there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.”*

 Well, I’m clinging on to that chariot with all my strength. 

Peter Frow

October 2022 

*G.K. Chesterton - Orthodoxy

Mr. Chairman

 

Mr. Chairman…

Ahem, that is, I meant to say: Chair

Chair, it has been observed that the Bible has a decidedly sexist bias having been written by men for men.

Seemingly Jesus himself is one of the chief culprits here:

To appoint twelve males as apostles would seem to indicate that he was not immune to prevailing first century Jewish prejudices involving the severe dis-empowerment of women. His choice of these men seems also to be wanting in discernment including as it did the ‘bad apple’ Judas, although measured against the mediocrity of the other eleven, he at least showed a measure of resolve. Jesus could surely have done better by including certain women of noble character and spiritual stature such as Martha and Mary Magdalene.

Further, he unfailingly addressed God as ‘Father’ and never as ‘Mother’. This too must be considered unacceptably patriarchal in the light of current enlightened mores relating to these matters. 

It would seem then Chair, that one of the chief tasks of this commission would be to educate Jesus. 

It is worth mentioning however that in pursuing this objective we might well encounter considerable difficulties, not least of which is that Jesus is God, and indeed were we to attain our goal we might discover that the situation had become less sexist but more ‘Godist’.

 

Peter Frow

September 2022

                                   

Concerning Theology & Praxis

Concerning Theology and Praxis

Praxis is a technical term denoting the way in which theology is played out and expressed in practice. It is obvious that our theology concerning a particular issue needs to precede its practical application.

The supporting theology for the proposed endorsement of same-sex marriages by our church seems to run as follows:

God is a God of love and justice

LGBT+ persons have been and are currently being treated unjustly and unlovingly.

Therefore,

To prevent any further discrimination we must be prepared to marry them.

It is not difficult to see the disconnect between the statements which precede the therefore and that which follows.

It is like saying, “Children are being abused therefore we should give children sweets.”

No, if children are being abused we should stop abusing children.

Whether it is good to give children sweets is another matter entirely though doubtless that is what they would like.

The word ‘therefore’ is in fact a non sequitur in both instances.

That LGBT+ persons should be treated with love and justice goes without saying and the church has much to repent of for not having done so.

This is a justice issue.

However whether or not same-sex persons should be married is a holiness issue, and if we wish to apply the phrase, “in the sight of God” to such union then God needs to be consulted.

This is a holiness issue.

We may not drag the holiness issue under the banner of justice by means of a false ‘therefore,’ and call the whole thing a matter of ‘justice’. To do so is pure sophistry.

It would seem that the cart, consisting of the proposed praxis concerning same-sex marriage, is being pushed by humans. This is hardly surprising as the theological horse intended to draw it is too puny for the task. Too puny by far.

Peter Frow

Faith is like the Square Root of Minus One

Jesus is The Truth, the wellspring and yardstick for all truth and the Creator of all things both visible and invisible.

It follows therefore, that when anyone reaches the very pinnacle of their particular discipline they will find themselves looking into the face of Jesus.

Thus all disciplines, whether Architecture, Medicine, Accounting, Psychology, History and all the rest will ultimately be found to subsume seamlessly under His Lordship.

Theology is indeed the ‘Queen of the Sciences,’ (though not many campuses would acknowledge this in our day) and ‘The fear of God is the beginning of Wisdom.’

This is why Scripture in employing metaphors to illustrate spiritual truths finds them ready to hand in the fields of agriculture, medicine, biology, philosophy, meteorology and many more.

Which leads me to the discipline of Mathematics.

Could one not find illustrations from mathematics which would bring to light spiritual truths.

One could call this synthesis of Theology and Mathematics, “Theomatics.”

Well that rolls off the tongue quite nicely, but it would need to include some real arithmetic anomalies.

For example the Marriage Institution which declares that “—the two shall become one flesh.” Would have to be rendered, 1 + 1 = 1

And the doctrine of the Trinity would need to be, 1 + 1 + 1 = 1

This really doesn’t look like a promising line of theological exploration.

However, The square root of minus one is an intriguing mathematical concept which might just come to our aid in helping us get our heads around some Biblical Brain teasers.

Most people know that if you multiply +1 by itself you will get +1

And if you multiply –1 by itself you will also get +1

So the square root of +1 (√1) could be either +1 or –1

So what then is the square root of –1 (√-1) ?

Clearly it can’t be either +1 or –1

The mind does a back flip in trying to visualise the answer.

For this reason this was sometimes termed an imaginary number until mathematicians objected to this term pointing out that although difficult to conceptualise it was not only real but very useful and effective in certain applications.

Thus the square root of –1 became abbreviated to the symbol  i and it is termed not an imaginary number but a complex number.

It is used extensively in vector arithmetic.

We must explain that unlike a number which has only magnitude, a vector is an entity which has both magnitude and orientation.

Now what is noteworthy, is that if a vector is multiplied by i that is the square root of minus one, it has the effect of swinging that vector through 90 degrees without altering its magnitude.

Thus, if a certain vector of say 1 metre in length and lying in a horizontal plane, was initially oriented to point North, after multiplying it by i it would point East. Multiply it by i again and it will now point South and so on.

How might this help our understanding of ‘Faith’:

Scripture states that, “—God has given to every man a measure of faith.” (Rom. 12. 3)

Thus from this text, faith is a gift from God for which man can claim no merit.

Yet Hebrews 11 verse 6 declares that, “—without faith it is impossible to please Him.”

Here, clearly God is pleased when we exercise faith, for it would make no sense for God to be pleased with a gift He had given with no activity on man’s part.

Also Jesus commends the centurion for his great faith and upbraids the disciples for their ‘little faith’

Ephesians 2.8 reads: For by grace we are saved through faith, not of yourselves it is a gift of God, not of works lest any man should boast.

Herein lies the tension between Calvin and Arminius:

The pure Reformed position would be that both the grace and the faith with which the grace is appropriated are gifts of God, for if faith must be exercised with volition by man then it becomes a work and man may claim merit for it and we know no merit can attach to man in respect of his salvation.

To Arminius, the grace is the gift, but it must be appropriated by the exercise of our faith, but the objection remains that if volition is employed in such exercise, this becomes a meritorious work.

But what if faith is a complex concept, neither work nor gift or perhaps both at the same time, just as the square root of minus one is a complex number whose answer is neither +1 or –1 or perhaps both at the same time.

So complex is the relationship between gift and works in the entity called faith that it defies conceptualization.

Yet difficult as it is to conceive, its effects are abundantly manifest for it can change the orientation of a person.

Thus a person coming to faith in Christ will experience a change of orientation – once hell-bound he is now Heaven-bound, once afar off, he is now brought near by the blood of Christ.

This might help explain Jesus imperative to Nicodemus, “You must be born again,” while shortly afterwards he declares that the wind (that is the Spirit) blows where He wills: quite unpredictable and beyond man’s control.

In future when one encounters a conundrum like this in Scripture, one need simply say, “Ah well, it’s just like the square root of minus one, - incomprehensible but effective.”