Dead Souls

I have been writing a section of my thesis today on the Soul. This was a topic which interested Augustine through his whole life. He blazed the way in the West towards a spiritual view of God and the soul - managing to reject the Stoic view which dominated philosophy, that all which exists must be physical. After several years in the sect of the Manichees, he also managed to shrug off their idea that the soul contains sparks of the divine imprisoned in a body.

Once Augustine managed to conceive the possibility of a non-physical soul, he began to find ways to make sense of scripture.

With his famously hierarchical view of the universe, Augustine represented God as being above the soul, and the soul above the body. So, God gives life to the soul; the soul gives life to the body.

This enabled him to argue that the soul is immortal, but only in a certain manner of speaking. It is immortal in that even when it is dead, it can give life to the body. It is mortal in the sense that it dies when not enlivened by God.

All of this meant that Augustine could preach about the rather grotesque image of bodies walking round the place, animated and inhabited by dead souls:

‘The soul is able to die, it is able to be killed. It is certainly immortal. Look at what I dare to say – it is immortal and able to die. That is why I said that it is immortal in its own kind of way.’ s. 65.3.

‘So wonderful a thing is the soul, that it is able to give life to a body though it is itself dead. So great a thing is the soul, so excellent a creature, that it is able to enliven a body though it is itself dead.’ s. 65.6.

‘The soul is dead without God. Every person without God has a dead soul. You mourn the deceased: mourn rather the sinner, mourn the wicked, mourn the faithless.’ s. 65.7.

It makes for a hauntingly disturbing sermon illustration, which Augustine seems to have played up as he acted out the situation of asking somebody to try and prove their soul is not dead!

People worry that Augustine's highlighting of the soul as the true reality of a person denigrates the body, or was overly Platonic. Taken in isolation from the rest of his theology this is an understandable concern - but it should be remembered that alongside the above doctrine, Augustine argued strongly for the physical actual resurrection of the body. When he parted company from the beliefs of his day, he did so with verve. Am writing about the resurrection tomorrow.

For Sale

I was speaking with an elderly woman a few days ago, and asked her how she became a Christian. There were lots of interesting things to reflect on in her story, which involved traveling round post-war Europe, educating her children and the death of her husband.

She was very enthusiastic for the Lord and thankful for the good news of salvation through Christ. When she came to explain the details of how she was told the message of Christianity, I pressed her for more details on what convinced her to become a Christian.

Her answer was - 'The man who talked to me about Jesus was so clearly not trying to sell me anything. He was just talking about reality.'

I think we try to sell the Gospel too much these days. The Gospel is indeed more credible when those who believe it, appreciate that it is reality.

Wrestling with God

Here is a sermon I preached on Genesis 32 recently, at Eden Baptist Church, Cambridge.
The passage is one of the more mysterious ones in the Old Testament - it poses several challenges to the preacher: How to preach the Gospel from it, the legitimacy of character examples, the need to outline Jacob's earlier life - and the sheer strangeness of the scene. God wrestling with Jacob; I learned a lot from studying the passage.

We enjoyed visiting Eden Baptist. Sermon is at link below:

Genesis 32: Wrestling with God

Calvinism - Drink Shaken

Follow the link below for a short article I wrote for Reformation21, the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.

It reflects on the significance of piety in Calvin's development of the Institutes.

Calvinism - Best Drunk Shaken

Romans 1 & Knowing God

We have been reading Romans past two days - it has been on my mind as I go about daily business.

As a result a thought occurred to me-

On the train I noticed a number of older academics attending a conference in Cambridge celebrating Charles Darwin. I have no idea what the conference stated or taught, but it was clear from their conversation that they as individuals celebrated the fact that Darwin legitimised their atheism.

It seems obvious to me that Darwin is regaled and hailed as far more than a scientist - he is seen by many as a revolutionary theologian who has disproved the existence of God. Having read his writings I know that he did no such thing, and the praise of him has much of the spirit of Psalm 2 about it - 'let us throw of our chains....'

However the ongoing 'debate' about atheism/theism and Darwin/creation legitimises assumptions that run contrary to Romans 1.

The long and short of it is this. As I listened to the conversation about atheism on the train, I realised that the 'debate' has made many Christians engage with secularists as if said secularists are unsure whether there is a God. There is need of evidence and a debate - we think.

However Romans 1 teaches that not only do all people know there is a God - we also know how he feels towards us. We know that he feels angry. This point, that we know God is angry, is one I do not believe is taught or preached widely today. Our friendship evangelism, courses, invite events, publicity efforts etc seem calculated to win people already very inclined to think God feels warmly towards them and will help out with life when they are polite enough to make time for him. They do not seem aimed to rouse and awaken those who harden themselves to the fact they know - they have offended God and he is angry with them.

Ironically, the suppressed knowledge that God is there, and is angry at us, is a very plausible explanation for the excessive regaling of any thinker who we think gives us justification to disbelieve God's existence.

Trek Illustration - Beam me up!

Be warned - this recent sermon has a Star Trek illustration.

Through gritted teeth a small number of non fans have admitted it may help clarify an important Biblical concept.

Beam it down at:

Mark 7 Sermon

Marriage?

I am preparing to marry my wife's sister this weekend...

Thankfully (no offence intended) not in the sense Laban arranged it for Jacob in Gen.29.

This will just involve leading some marriage vows and preaching on 1 John 4.

Love of Money

When invited to preach at a church recently, I felt that the media stories on MPs' Expenses, suggested that a sermon on the Love of Money may be apposite.

Here is an exposition on the final chapter of 1 Timothy, which contains the famous warning about the love of money being a root of all kinds of evil.

A fascinating quote from Simon Cowell is included...

Sermon on 1 Tim. 6.

Assurance: A touch stone?

I felt a bit guilty recently, since I realised that I have on several occasions criticised the book 'Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, A history from the 1730s to the 1980s', by D. W. Bebbington. I have done that without reading it...

I have in the past mentioned that I feel his definition of evangelicalism to be inadequate and misleading. Without going into it in too much detail, I am of the opinion that it is too sociological a definition. There are varied consequences of this, some of which permit his history to proceed; others give room for a form of evangelicalism I, for one, am not fully comfortable with.

Anyway, I felt a twinge of guilt at criticising a book I have never read (I know I know - I am sorry!). As an act of penitence I bought a lovely secondhand hardback copy yesterday from my Cambridge bookdealer.
Having read the work, I still disagree with his definition, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that after the opening chapter, the definition seems to fade from the book, and one gets a fascinating romp through evangelical history.

I learned a lot, especially from the sections on the late 1700s. The 1980s were, I think, rather thinly covered. Little real appreciation for the significance of Stott, Lloyd-Jones and Lucas was demonstrated. All were mentioned too cursorily; perhaps that was due to the proximity of time when Bebbington was writing.

Anyway, the point which intrigued me was Bebbington's highlighting of the doctrine of Assurance:

'The three symptoms of discontinuity in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of conservative Protestantism should not be seen in isolation from each other. They are bound together by an underlying factor, a shift in the received doctrine of assurance with all that it entailed.' p.42.

Now I find this very interesting.... For it is a doctrinal analysis of aspects of evangelicalism. This I would commend as a worthwhile exploration. However it is not the sort of analysis that sits well with his sociological definition of evangelicalism. In other words, I think that the crux of Bebbington's argument is a doctrinal critique. However that for which he is best known, and what he states upfront as his terms of debate, is sociological.

Assurance is indeed very important. We need to try and avoid several errors:

1. We should avoid suggesting that it is normal or good to lack assurnace.
2. We ought to resist basing assurance upon merely rational deductions.
3. We must discern the different situations people seeking assurnace are coming from - ie the uninformed new believer is in a different place to the long term believer who is sinning with a high hand.

As we go about all this, we should long for a doctrinal articulation, in the context of pastoral ministration, which gives due weight to the unchanging Word and ever living Spirit. It should go without saying, that a merely sociological understanding of assurance never gave anybody a peaceful night's sleep!

Step out of the Crowd

Here is a sermon I preached recently on Mark 5 - the raising of Jairus' daughter and the healing of a woman.

Stepping out of the Crowd - Personal Faith

I enjoyed the study for, and delivery of this sermon. One of the main reasons for this was that I allowed myself to explore and develop the themes that I found interesting in the passage. In doing so, I was following advice I have heard from a well known preacher- 'Preach what you find interesting and the listener will probably find it interesting too.'

Recently, I defended that approach in a public class, and was rebuked with the reproach that, 'Such an attitude leads to cults.' I reflected on that comment for a month or two, and while it contains a grain of truth, I surmise that it is erroneous. The advice is sound, because it is not intended to be advice which is followed in isolation from all the other principles of Bible handling and exposition. On the contrary, the advice is a necessary acceptance of two truisms:

1. The alternative, to preach that which the preacher is not interested in nor drawn to, involves an inner disjunction that leads to hypocrisy (in extreme cases) or, more usually, a performance in which the preacher's heart is not in it.

2. It is constitutive of good preaching that the preacher make personal selection of focus, emphases and direction. This is simply an acceptance of the fact that God chooses to use human preachers and does not simply email his interpretation to congregations.

In the end, all preachers preach what they have found interesting. Following the advice to do so is simply a healthy recognition of what we must do. It is only when we realise what we are doing, that we can learn to do it better.

So - I hope the interpretation of the passage is sound, and I also am unashamed to say that it focuses on issues in Mark's Gospel that I have found interesting and which grip me. Other preachers may not focus on the crowd theme, neither might they take so much time to explore the significance of the Mosaic Cleanliness Laws. That is fine - we are all different and come at the passage with our own lived experiences.

I guess that has implications for the issue of people copying other people's sermon material... But I will leave you to ponder that for yourself!

Stepping out of the Crowd - Personal Faith