Taking God Seriously

Vital Things We Need to Know

By J. I. Packer

Good News Publishers

Copyright © 2013 J. I. Packer
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4335-3327-3

Contents

Preface,
1 Taking Faith Seriously,
2 Taking Doctrine Seriously,
3 Taking Christian Unity Seriously,
4 Taking Repentance Seriously,
5 Taking the Church Seriously,
6 Taking the Holy Spirit Seriously,
7 Taking Baptism Seriously,
8 Taking the Lord’s Supper Seriously,

CHAPTER 1

TAKING FAITH SERIOUSLY

When a person falls into convulsions, short-term remedies may for the moment calm him down, but the long-term need is to diagnose the root cause of his trouble and treat that. So it is today with churches round the world, including the worldwide Anglican Communion, a body that is over seventy million strong and growing by leaps and bounds in both Asia and Africa. A much-publicized Episcopal decision in Canada to bless same-sex unions as if they were marriages, as well as the consecrating in the United States of a diocesan bishop who unashamedly lives in such a union, has convulsed global Anglicanism in the way that pebbles thrown into a pond send ripples over the entire surface of the water. Pressure groups and leadership blocs have emerged in Anglicanism’s “Old West” (Britain, North America, Australasia) resolved to fight this issue till approval of gay pairings is fully established. Tensions over the question between and within provinces, dioceses, and congregations have become acute, and there is no end in sight.

What, we ask, is the root cause of these convulsions? What would be needed to get us beyond them? The fact we must face is that the clash of views on how, pastorally, to view and help male and female homosexuals grows out of a more basic cleavage about faith. To map this and suggest what to do about it is ourpresent task.

WHAT IS FAITH? A WORD THAT SLIPS AND SLIDES

Getting the hang of current disagreements about faith is not easy, for the word faith itself is used elusively and does in truth mean different things to different people, though this fact often goes unrecognized. The way of the “Old West” churches, in prayers, sermons, books, and discussions that seek to be unitive, is constantly to refer to the faith as a common property held by all who worship, but without defining or analyzing its substance, so that worshippers can go for years without any clear notion of what their church stands for. Theologians rise up to affirm that, in idea at least, faith goes beyond mere orthodoxy (belief of truth) to orthopraxy (living out that truth in worship and service, love to God and man) — and in saying this they are right so far. But when some think orthodoxy sanctions behavior that others see orthodoxy as ruling out, it is clear that agreement about the truth we live by is lacking, and that is what we have to look at now.

Complicating our task is the fact that all varieties of the dimension of life we call religion (Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Baha’i, Voodoo, Sikh, New Age, Scientology, and the rest) are regularly lumped together with all the versions of Christianity (Roman Catholic, Orthodox, conservative Protestant, liberal Protestant) as so many faiths. This usage makes it seem that all religions should be seen as essentially similar — which is probably how most post-Christian Westerners do in fact see them, though in the church this is very much a minority idea. Then, too, we use the word faith for whatever hopes about the future individuals cherish and live by (e.g., that science will save the planet from ruin; that there will not be another economic crash like 1929; that this or that missing person will be found alive; that this or that cancer can be beaten; that every cloud will have a silver lining; and so on). These broader uses of the word grew up as its former Christian precision dissolved away, so that in modern Western speech faith has become a vague term, a warm fuzzy slipping and sliding from one area of meaning to another all the time. In the New Testament, however, faith is a Christian technical term, specific in meaning as our secular technical terms (computer, dividend, airplane, spanner, appendectomy, syllabus, for example) are specific in meaning, and its New Testament meaning remained specific for Christians till about a century ago. It is something we need to get back to.

What did the apostolic writers have in mind when they spoke of faith? Nothing less than what they took to be the distinctive essence of Christianity: namely, a belief-and-behavior commitment to Jesus Christ, the divine-human Lord, who came to earth, died for sins, rose from death, returned to heaven, reigns now over the cosmos as his Father’s nominated vice-regent, and will reappear to judge everyone and to take his own people into glory, where they will be with him in unimaginable joy forever. This was “the faith” that was taught and defended against Gnostic syncretists from the start (we see Paul in Colossians and John in his letters actually doing that); soon it was enshrined in creeds, which began as syllabi for catechetical instruction of enquirers; and, with its Trinitarian implications made explicit, it has since then been at the heart of mainstream Christianity everywhere. (The Reformers debated with Roman Catholics as to whether faith brings present justification directly, but no one in the debate doubted that real faith includes all that we have described.)

So faith, that is, believing, is in the New Testament a “two-tone” reality, a response to God’s self-revelation in Christ that is both intellectual and relational. Mere credence — assent, that is, to “the faith” — is not faith, nor is commitment to a God or a Christ who is merely a product of human imagination. Christian faith is shaped, and its nature is determined, entirely by its object, just as the impression on a seal is shaped entirely by a die-stamp that is pressed down on the hot wax. The object of Christian faith, as the apostolic writers, the creeds, and the basic Anglican formularies (Articles, Prayer Book, and Homilies) present it, is threefold: first, God the Three-in-One, the Creator-become-Redeemer, who throughout history has been, and still is, transforming sinners into a new humanity in Christ; second, Jesus Christ himself, God incarnate and Savior, now absent from us in the flesh but personally and powerfully present with us through the Holy Spirit; and third, the many invitations, promises, commands, and assurances that the Father and the Son extend to all who will receive Jesus as their Savior and Lord and become his disciples, living henceforth by his teaching in his fellowship under his authority.

All of this is laid before us in the Bible, the revelatory book that God has given us for the forming of our faith. In the Bible, faith is a matter of knowing the facts of the gospel (the person, place, and work of Jesus Christ), welcoming the terms of the gospel (salvation from sin and a new life with God), and receiving the Christ of the gospel (setting oneself to live as his follower by self-denial, cross-bearing, and sacrificial service). Believing the biblically revealed facts and truths about God and trusting the living Lord to whom these facts and truths lead us are the two “tones,” the intellectual and relational aspects of real faith, blending like two-part harmony in music. This is the understanding of faith that needs to be reestablished.

We noted above that in our time the word faith has become a warm fuzzy, slipping and sliding in use in and out of its Christian meaning to refer to other modes of believing and behaving that, whatever else they are, differ in significant ways from what we have described. This fuzzification of faith has developed in parallel to increasing ignorance of biblical teaching and growing skepticism as to whether that teaching as it stands may properly be called the Word of God. Is there a connection? Yes. When the church ceases to treat the Bible as a final standard of spiritual truth and wisdom, it is going to wobble between maintaining its tradition in a changing world and adapting to that world, and as the wobbles go on, uncertainty as to what is the real substance of faith and the proper way of embracing it and living it out will inevitably increase.

But the Bible is currently interpreted in many different ways, and scholars’ arguments about its meaning are regularly over ordinary people’s heads. So even when Scripture is acknowledged as the standard, are confusion and uncertainty likely to be any less? This is a fair question, and to answer it we need to take a longer, harder look at the Bible than perhaps we have ever done before.

WHAT IS THE BIBLE? FAITH AND THE TALKING BOOK

Most people in churches nowadays have never read through the Bible even once; the older Christian habit of reading it from start to finish as a devotional discipline has virtually vanished. So in describing the Bible we start from scratch, assuming no prior knowledge.

The Bible consists of sixty-six separate pieces of writing, composed over something like a millennium and a half. The last twenty-seven of them were written in a single generation: they comprise four narratives about Jesus called Gospels, an account of Christianity’s earliest days called the Acts of the Apostles, twenty-one pastoral letters from teachers with authority, and a final admonition to churches from the Lord Jesus himself, given partly by dictation and partly by vision. All these books speak of human life being supernaturally renovated through, in, with, under, from, and for the once crucified, now glorified Son of God, who fills each writer’s horizon, receives his worship, and determines his mind-set at every point.

Through the books of the Bible runs the claim that this Jesus fulfills promises, patterns, and premonitions of blessings to come that are embodied in the thirty-nine pre-Christian books. These are of four main types: history books, telling how God called and sought to educate the Jewish people — Abraham’s family — to worship, serve, and enjoy him, and to be ready to welcome Jesus Christ when he appeared; prophetic books, recording oracular sermons from God conveyed by human messengers expressing threats, hopes, and calls to faithfulness; poetry books, containing songs to and about God (Psalms) and celebrating love between a man and a woman (Song of Solomon); and wisdom books, which in response to God’s revelation show how to praise, pray, live, love, and cope with whatever may happen.

Christians name these two collections the Old and New Testaments respectively. Testament means covenant commitment, and the Christian idea, learned from Paul, from the writer to the Hebrews, and from Jesus himself, is that God’s covenant commitment to his own people has had two editions. The first edition extended from Abraham to Christ; it was marked throughout by temporary features and many limitations, not unlike a nonpermanent shanty built of wood on massive concrete foundations. The second edition extends from Christ’s first coming to his return and is the grand full-scale edifice for which the foundations were originally laid. The writer to the Hebrews, following Jeremiah’s prophecy, calls this second superstructure the new covenant and explains that through Christ, who is truly its heart, it provides a better priesthood, sacrifice, place of worship, range of promises, and hope for the future than were known under its predecessor. Christians see Christ as the true center of reference in both Testaments, the Old always looking and pointing forward to him and the New proclaiming his past coming, his present life and ministry in and from heaven, and his future destiny at his return; and they hold that this is the key to true biblical interpretation. Christians have maintained this since Christianity began.

Christians call the Bible the Word of God — “God’s Word written,” as Anglican Article 20 puts it — for two reasons. The first is its divine origin. Jesus and his apostles always treat Scripture as the utterance of God through the Holy Spirit, transmitted by the agency of men whose minds God moved in such a way that in all their composing they wrote just what he wanted as their contribution to the text and texture of the full Bible that he planned. The Bible’s quality of being thus completely shaped by God, so that it may and must always be read as God testifying to himself through the testimony to him of the human writers, is its inspiration. The second reason for calling the Bible God’s Word is its divine ministry of revealing God’s mind to us as the Holy Spirit gives understanding of what its text says, and thus makes us “wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (see 2 Tim. 3:14–17). This quality of thus communicating knowledge of God, of his grace, and of his Son, is the Bible’s instrumentality. Your word is formally the utterance that proceeds from your mouth and substantially the expression and communication of your mind, and so it is with Scripture as the Word of God: formally, more than a million words strung together; substantially, God’s inexhaustible, Christ-centered, salvation-oriented, self-revelation to us. The Bible is both God-given and God-giving, and as such it stands as the standard of Christian faith.

Christianity expresses the thought of Scripture as the standard by calling it the canon. This is a Greek word, meaning a measuring rod, and thus a rule. Some have wondered whether the sixty-six-book Protestant canon includes all it should, or contains items that should not be there, but uncertainty about this is unwarranted. There is no good reason for doubting (1) that our Old Testament canon was established in Palestine before Jesus was born, and (2) that the first churches were right to see documents authored and/or approved by apostles as carrying God’s authority and complementing the Old Testament, and (3) that they were also right to claim the Old Testament as Christian Scripture and to interpret it as foreshadowing Jesus Christ the Messiah, and the kingdom of God and the new life that came with him.

Nor is there any good reason to fear that the church made mistakes when in the second and third centuries, confronted with spurious gospels, epistles, and acts bearing apostolic names, it identified the genuine apostolic writings and dismissed the rest. Nor do there exist outside the canon any documents that for any reason seem to merit inclusion. At the Counter-Reformational Council of Trent the Roman Catholic Church defined into the canon the twelve-book pre-Christian Apocrypha that Jerome had found in the Greek version of the Old Testament (the Septuagint) and included in his Latin rendering (the Vulgate) in the fifth century; but since these books never belonged to the Hebrew Palestinian canon that Jesus knew, the council’s decision must be judged a mistake. It is precisely the books listed in Anglican Article 6 and found in every printed Bible, neither more nor less, that together form the canonical Word of God.

All God’s people agree that as God’s Word, the Bible has authority — God’s authority! What this means is not always clearly seen, but the mainstream understanding is as follows: Authority means the right, and so the claim, to control. Sometimes it operates by agreement, as when authority is given to political leaders, army officers, team captains, and policemen, but in this case it is intrinsic. God has authority because he is God, and we should bow to his authority because we are his creatures. What comes through to humble and openhearted people as they read and study the Bible, or hear it read and taught, is awareness of God’s reality as our almighty, morally perfect, and totally awesome Maker, plus the sense that he is telling us truth about relations between him and us, plus a realization that he is calling for, indeed commanding, faith in him and faithfulness to him, repentance and redirection, self-denial and obedience as the path to the life he wants us to taste here and enjoy hereafter. All of this centers constantly on words and deeds of Jesus, the church’s living Lord and, as we have said, Scripture’s point of reference, who is felt again and again to be stepping out of the book into our lives in order to take them over and change them. The Bible is thus experienced as a book that talks, speaking for itself by pointing us to the Father and the Son, who speak for themselves as they offer us forgiveness and acceptance and new life. The authority of Scripture is not just a matter of God putting our minds straight, but of God capturing our hearts for fully committed discipleship to the Lord Jesus. So the Bible is to be approached with reverence, handled with care and prayer, and studied, not to satisfy curiosity in any of its forms, but to deepen responsive fellowship with God who made us, loves us, seeks us out, and offers us pardon, peace, and power for righteousness through Jesus Christ our Lord.

The modern world knows virtually nothing of this approach to Scripture. It is vital that the church recover it, follow it, and proclaim the need for it everywhere.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Taking God Seriously by J. I. Packer. Copyright © 2013 J. I. Packer. Excerpted by permission of Good News Publishers.
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