Taking part

Scripture - the Old and New Testaments - is the story of creation and new creation. Within that, it is the story of covenant and new covenant. When we read scripture as Christians, we read it precisely as people of the new covenant and of the new creation. We do not read it, in other words, as a flat, uniform list of regulations or doctrines. We read it as the narrative in which we ourselves are now called to take part. We read it to discover "the story so far" and also "how it's supposed to end." To put it another way, we live somewhere between the end of Acts and closing scene of Revelation. If we want to understand scripture and to find it doing its proper work in and through us, we must learn to read and understand it in the light of that overall story.

N.T. Wright

Surprised by Hope

The toleration of evil

From James Burton Coffman's commentary on chapter 16 of Revelation, after he has pointed out how much Western society - in particular his own American culture - has become so debased.  

We do not offer this interpretation as meaning that "the end of time is upon us" or that the final judicial hardening of the race of mankind has already occurred. Nor, are the things we have pointed out intended as an affirmation [of the last days], for it is not true, that all art, music, literature, publications, entertainment, etc., are evil. Thanks to the God of heaven through Christ, there are still many wonderful, beautiful, and uplifting things available in every one of these fields; and it could be that the complete fulfillment of this prophecy lies yet a great distance into the future, or that the things we have understood as pertaining to the whole world could be merely the astounding perversions that mark the decline of our own isolated culture in America. Therefore, we make no claim whatever that this bowl of wrath, or any of the others, is totally fulfilled by the aberrations noted.

However, our interpretation is that the bowls of wrath mean exactly the type of moral and spiritual pollution of the total human environment that we have attempted to point out. It is not merely that lust, vulgarity, pornography, violence, perversion, and obscenity are present in our culture. They have always been present in greater or lesser extent in every culture. What is alarming today is the toleration, acceptance, and justification of such things, even to the extent of their being advocated and encouraged by and political institutions; and that is what signals a frightening new aspect of such wickedness today. It could be later than we think.

More of an action

The third of six summings-up that P T Forsyth gives in the sixth chapter of his book, The Work of Christ (page 150)

This reconciling and redeeming work of Christ culminates in his suffering unto death, which is indeed more of an act than an experience.  Here, in the Cross, is the summit of his revelation of grace, of sin, and of humanity.  And the central feature of this threefold revelation in the Cross is the holiness of God's love.  It is this holiness that deepens error into sin, sin into guilt, and guilt into repentance; without which any sense of forgiveness would be but an anodyne and not a grace, a self-flattering unction to the soul and not the peace of God. 

Word and deed

If God in Christ simply said the most powerful word about his goodwill, his placability, and his readiness to forgive, that would destroy his work, and the height of his place. Thus God would be saying more than he did; and we have a natural and proper difficulty in thoroughly trusting people who say more than they do.

If Christ were simply an expression of God's love, then his Cross would simply be what is called an object-lesson of God's love; or it would simply be a witness to the serious way in which God takes man's sin; or it might even be no more than the expression of the strong conviction of Jesus about it. We are exposed to the danger there always is when we make revelation a word rather than a deed, something said instead of something done, when we make it manifestation only and not redemption.

P T Forsyth, in The Work of Christ, page 99

Forsyth on the Gospel

[The Gospel] is not a projection of [our] innate spirituality. It is revealed, not discovered, not invented. It is of grace, not works. It is conferred, not attained. It is a gift to our poverty, not a triumph of our resource. It is something which holds us, it is not something that we hold. It is something that saves us, and nothing that we have to save. Its Christ is a Christ sent to us and not developed from us, bestowed on our need and not produced from our strength, and He is given for our sin more than for our weakness.

....Now of these two tendencies one means the destruction of preaching. If it cease to be God’s word, descending on men and intervening in history, then it will cease as an institution in due time. It may become lecturing, or it may become oratory, but as preaching it must die out with a positive Gospel. People cannot be expected to treat a message of insight from man to man as they do a message of revelation from God to man. An age cannot be expected to treat a message from anoth
er age as they treat a message from Eternal God to every age. Men with the passion of the present cannot be expected to listen even to a message from humanity as they would to one from God. And if humanity redeem itself you will not be able to prevent each member of it from feeling that he is his own redeemer.


P T Forsyth, as quoted in Jason Goroncy's forthcoming book: ‘Descending on Humanity and Intervening in History’: Notes from the Pulpit Ministry of P.T. Forsyth, to be published soon by Pickwick Publications.

The core of revelation

In all that babbling of ours we miss the core of biblical revelation when it speaks to our faith and asks questions of us. It will teach us neither the historical nor the physical facts of how the earth began, neither genetics nor cosmology. It asks a question -- a series of questions -- that is; it makes people responsible (obliged to respond) and throws us back upon our freedom.

Jacques Ellul
Living Faith