Continuing the Feast of the Incarnation

The Christ Mass is a glorious season! I rejoice that it is not yet over, as we move from the western celebration towards the celebration of Eastern orthodoxy' Christmas, the western Feast of Epiphany. For without the Incarnation, there can be no Atonement through the Cross; and without Incarnation, there is no real victory in Christ's resurrection.

It is sad that, for so many western Christians, Christmas is a difficult or, sadly, a meaningless time. Yes, is is made into something else by the world.;but is is still the ancient, Christ Mass: the feast of wonder at the coming of God as man: becoming as we are, that we might become as He - our Lord Jesus Christ - is.

As we come through the New Year, we continue with the joy of Christmas. May the joy of Christmas celebration continue with you for many days to come.

A little deeper .....

The Missional Doxology of the Philippian Hymn

It is so important to grasp the meaning of 'humbling ourselves' like Jesus.

In an essay, first published  IBTS's Baptistic Theologies 2 years ago, I contended that the Philippian hymn is best understood as a missional doxology, celebrating both the nature of God and the participation of Christian life in the life of God. In drawing on recent developments in New Testament Studies with some insights from Trinitiarian and missional perspectives on the Missio Dei.

I have revisited what I wrote then and am fully persuaded that the Biblical truths contained in Philippians 2.1-11 are seminal in grasping a baptistic understanding of mission and ministry today. This is what is found below. The fuller text, with proper Greek fonts, is found in the IBTS journal. But I trust what is written below might prove helpful to you.

I.a Recent developments in Biblical Studies

Within New Testament Studies, recent research into Second Temple Judaism has yielded important insights into the contextual background of early Christian writings. Richard Bauckham argues that Jesus Christ, within the context of the strong Jewish monotheism of the first century CE, is to be identified not simply as a messianic figure, but as a bearer of the divine identity: in Jesus Christ of Nazareth the revelation of the divine identity of the God of Israel is both present and fully explicated. Moreover, Bauckham insists that a failure to recognise the priority of this Christological profile, so often superceded in modern theology by the worldview of Nicea and the 4th century CE debates, has actually debased our appreciation of a high, New Testament Christology:

The earliest Christology was already the highest Christology. I call it a Christology of divine identity, proposing this as a way beyond the standard distinction between ‘functional’ and ‘ontic’ Christology, a distinction which does not correspond to early Jewish thinking about God and has, therefore, seriously distorted our understanding of New Testament Christology.

A complementary strain of studies has been rooted in a creative discussion on the nature of justification. This has recently focussed in a debate between two eminent churchmen, John Piper and Tom Wright, and a recognition that the nature of the Atonement embraces understandings of righteousness in the New Testament that are complex, giving rise not only to an understanding of imputed righteousness for the believer but also participational righteousness as an expression of our faith and life in Christ. The rediscovery in Pauline Scholarship, that Paul offers more than a forensic understanding of atonement, presents a richer and deeper perception of the Christian life that resonates with the orthopraxis called for in the Gospels. This is further evidenced in Michael Gorman’s seminal study of Pauline perspectives on conformity to Christ, Cruciformity. Gorman has since further developed his understanding of the Apostle presenting the Christian life as cruciform conformity to Christ:

it is conformity to Christ, or holiness, understood as participation in the very life of God – inhabiting the cruciform God.

We will observe how both these areas of discussion, the divine identity revealed in Christ and the way in which God saves us through Christ, bring fresh insight to our reading of the text.

I.b Recent developments in Trinitarian Studies and the Missio Dei

There has been something of a renaissance in Trinitarian theology in recent years, partly due to the growing influence of Eastern Orthodox perceptions of the Trinity among both Pentecostal thinkers and others concerned to explore and bring fresh emphasis to social and personal identity. Western interpretations of an Immanent Trinity have been further developed by employing a perichoretic metaphor, originating in the early fourth century in the Eastern Trinitarian thinking of the Cappadocians, in seeking to find a paradigm for social and interpersonal action among human agents.  Where this more Eastern perspective has been combined with the Western theologian Augustine’s employment of analogy in speaking of the Trinity, analogical comparisons and models have arisen. These models are based on a perception of how the Persons of the Trinity interact, translating this into how human social and personal identities can be affirmed. This approach stands in some tension with alternative approaches, which have stressed the actualisation of the Triune economy and the becomingness of God in the Person of Jesus Christ.

The distinction and the question of balance between Immanent and Economic models of the Trinity impinges upon a missional question. In that we speak of mankind as bearing an image of God, the Imago Dei, is this to be rooted first and foremost in a Trinitarian understanding, whereby we describe mankind as Imago Trinitatis, or Christologically, where we are fashioned Imago Christi? Moreover, in so far as it is legitimate to speak of God’s mission (Missio Dei), to what measure can the Philippian Hymn support the thesis that it is legitimate to speak of our engagement in the Missio Dei? These questions will be in our reading of the text, and will be returned to in the final section of the essay.


II.a Issues affecting the interpretational tradition of the text

Before coming to the text, we should recognise major interpretational themes and assumptions that have dominated scholarly commentary on the passage in recent years. The prevalent theory since the early twentieth century has been that the passage contains an embedded psalm, the Philippian Hymn, and that this Hymn, Pauline or pre-Pauline, expresses core convictions that Paul owned concerning Christ. Moreover, the Hymn has sufficient challenges in both its Greek vocabulary and the way the text is structured to have generated a rich and varied interpretative tradition, which has been forged in twentieth century discussion by two questions. Firstly, ‘what does the hymn celebrate?’ That is, is it primarily ethical, Christological or soterial in its focus and intent?   Secondly, given that debate has been characterised by much discussion on the Christology of the Hymn, a further question arises: ‘what are the Christological concerns and typologies present in the hymn?’

Due to this second, Christological question, much scholarly debate has been founded on the key concept of kenosis found in verse 7, together with associated questions of ontology arising from the previous verse 6. All of this has been set against a wider theological backdrop that has brought into question both the meaning and the relevance of ontological definitions and categories arising from Trinitarian statements in the Nicene Creeds of the fourth century CE and the Christology of the Chalcedonian Creed of the fifth century CE. Until recently, what appeared to be missing in most Pauline studies was an engagement with the Gospel as the Gospel of the kingdom of God, as expressed in the narrative and Jesus’ teaching within the four Gospel accounts. Also missing was any reflection on whether the Hymn invited engagement with the four Gospel accounts. While the Hymn most certainly invokes ethical, Christological and soterial reflection, could it be that the Hymn is better understood when set in the context of Paul’s awareness and concern for the advance and full advent of the kingdom of God: a central focus for both Jesus and the Gospel narratives?

At a popular level, dispensational teachings and their influence together with an idealisation of Jesus’ teaching as represented in the quest for the Historical Jesus had  driven a wedge between Jesus’ teaching on the Kingdom of God and a focus on soterial aspects of Paul’s teaching, especially on their forensic and penal aspects. More recent and well applied New Testament scholarship has sought to overcome this gulf. Such mediating scholarship is well represented by Bird, who views the Hymn as ‘fundamentally an ethical exhortation towards humility and self-giving rather than comprising an exercise in Christological speculation’; whilst Gorman views Paul as inviting us, together with all disciples of Jesus Christ, into an identification with Christ that is shaped by an embrace of his cruciform identity, detecting in Paul’s rendering of the Hymn, a ‘counterintuitive kenotic and cruciform identity of God displayed in Christ’.

Gorman’s stress that the Christian disciple is called into cruciform conformity to Christ leads us into another convictional question that affects what commentators bring to discussion of the text. To what measure can Christians conform in their humanity to the humanity of Jesus Christ? A conviction that sinful flesh can never share in the same humanity as the flesh of Christ is common within the Western tradition. Such a prior conviction will not readily allow an identification of what Christ has done with what the sinner might do unless there are alternative convictional templates that can be brought to bear.

One such template might be offered in Bauckham’s work. For Bauckham, the Hymn highlights the contrast between ‘high and low status, exaltation and humiliation, honour and shame’. This contrast, present in Christ’s manifestation of the divine identity, brings us to a deeper and fuller appreciation of the nature of God Himself. Citing the Mosaic theophany of Exodus 33-34 and the way that John’s Prologue relates the revelation of the Word in the Incarnation to the identity of the God of Israel, Bauckham explains,

God’s gracious love, central to the identity of the God of Israel, now takes the radically new form of a human life in which the divine self-giving happens. This could not have been expected, but nor is it uncharacteristic. It is novel but appropriate to the identity of the God of Israel.

Here, a complementary perspective can be offered in re-evaluating whether there is any Trinitarian theology implicit within the Hymn. Just as Bauckham contends that this early, New Testament Christology is already the highest theology, it can be reasoned that there is already a dynamic, Trinitarian formulation present in the Hymn. We would argue that this is in fact the case. Further, we would contend that such representation of the economic actualisation of the One God’s presence is profoundly more Trinitarian than later, Nicene attempts to differentiate and affirm in ontological terminology. Gorman’s explication, that God is revealed in the three, interconnected realities of ‘the narrative identity of Christ the Son, the essential character of God the Father, and the primary activity of the Spirit’, offers an exciting way of interpreting Trinitarian presence in terms compatible with Bauckham’s stress on divine identity found in Christ. We will return to this later, when we argue for an understanding of the Hymn as a missional doxology.

II.b The Text

Verses 1 - 5

While the Hymn proper is identified as the pericope of verses 6-11, we will deal with it as an embedded component in the context of the surrounding verses. The exhortative character of Paul’s address to these Christians is expressed in the preceding verses 1-5. The appeal of verse 1, ei; tij ou=n, ­invoking Cristo,j, avga,ph, koinwni,a and pneu/ma, has a content that, whilst presented in poetic prose, points to aspects of communion with the God of Israel. The strong monotheism of Second Temple Judaism and the context in which Paul writes does not lead him to express himself in explicitly Trintiarian terms; but referral and appeal to avga,ph, koinwni,a and pneu/ma are all appropriate to Israel’s God and to the Cristo,j as bearer of the divine identity. Likewise, where Paul appeals to his correspondents concerning his own sensitivity and desire that he might have cara, the appeal is to a unitary identity. This might be realised through his correspondents owning a common resolution to share in love, with a unity of soul and common purpose. We would interpret this to be a call to participation in the qualities of God’s unitary character over against being rooted in the arrogant and empty ethics of pagan life (verses 3-4). Certainly, in the bridging verse 5, it is the participatory nature that appears emphasised, evn u`mi/n o] kai. evn serving to stress identification with - not merely imitation of - Christ. The use again of the verb fronei/n in verse 5, following on its use twice in verse 2, suggests that intentionality is here important to the Apostle.

In this opening section, we would discern the genesis of our thesis. Certainly, we note with Bird that the Hymn is not to be viewed simply as a Christological discussion; but we would also moot that it is more than an ethical exhortation. In the language of verses 1-5, we detect a measure of celebration of the very character of God manifest in Christ Jesus, expressed through God’s missional intentionality invested in and among these Christian disciples. If Paul believes it is in Jesus that the unique character of Israel’s God is revealed, and faith involves being rooted in Christ’s identity and aspirations and not simply in decisional and existential reasoning, then verses 1-5 provide a fitting prologue to the Hymn through Paul drawing his correspondents towards an intentionality which they share with the bearer of the divine identity, Jesus of Nazareth.              

Verses 6 - 8

The divine identity made manifest in Jesus Christ is revealed both in the self-abasement of verses 6-8 and the exaltation which follows in verses 9-11. Each is complementary to the other in assisting our apprehension of the mission of God, embracing and rescuing humanity through Jesus Christ. That these actions are here presented typologically is not in dispute: among New Testament scholars the presence of both Adamic and Messianic typologies is much debated. However, where these typological allusions inspire ethical propriety and even imitation, do they invite more than that? Is the imitation or participation so engendered to be viewed as an invitation towards imitation of Christ’s human behaviour, or might it be even an invitation to participation in the very life of God? As we have noted, Bauckham’s emphasis on questions of identity, rather than ontology or function, leads us to a Christology that views the manifestation of the divine identity in this man, Jesus Christ. Where does this in turn take us? Is this a call to ethical imitation or more than that, an invitation both to celebrate and to participate in the dynamic life of God? We will now seek to engage with the text of the Hymn as it relates to these issues in this section, going on to appraise them more fully in the third section of the essay.

The first aspect of verses 6-8 we would note is the intentionality expressed through the two active aorist verbs, evke,nwsen in verse 7 and evtapei,nwsen in verse 8. Further, where these verbs indicate the active intentionality of Jesus, their object, in both cases e`auto.n, serves to stress the voluntary, intentional aspect of Christ’s action and expression as bearer of the divine identity. It is the deliberate and volitional intent of Jesus Christ both to ‘empty himself’and ‘humble himself’.

Central to our understanding of the text is the meaning and usage of kenosis, or ‘self emptying’, in verse 6. Here it is the verbal form of kenosis that relates the identity of Jesus Christ ‘in the form of God’ to ‘(in the) form of a slave’. Here, it is the whole of God’s identity being expressed and entering into the identity of a servant that is associated with Jesus Christ. Following Bauckham’s plea that we focus on identity, rather than ontology or function, we will avoid discussion as to whether this is the ‘divine’ or ‘human’ aspect of Christ under discussion. We will not interpolate into the text a fifth century CE, Chalcedonian definition or even mindset connoting ‘two natures’ in Christ, whether human and divine. Likewise, we should note that Paul does not reduce the divine identity into personal Trinitarian terms, whereby particular association with any particular hypostasis of the God’s triunity is emphasised. Here, the reference is simply to Jesus Christ, the full bearer of divine identity and possessor of divine status; to the whole of Him entering into the whole of a servant identity.

Bauckham’s exegetical point is that the Hymn is an interpretation and application of Deutero-Isaiah Messianic typology, but this predicates a critical theological conclusion: that what is being spoken of here is not simply the unique identity of Jesus Christ, but the unique identity of the God of Israel:

The God who is high can also be low, because God is God not in seeking His own advantage but in self-giving. His self-giving in abasement and service ensures that his sovereignty over all things is also a form of his self-giving. Only the servant can also be the Lord.

A further, complementary understanding of Jesus Christ serving as both the paradigm and the catalyst for human participation with the very life of God Himself is developed by Michael Gorman. For Gorman, kenosis also is a manifestation of God, not only of Christ. God is possessed of an essentially kenotic and cruciform character:

It is especially imperative that we see the modus operandi of both incarnation and cross as theophanic. The narrative identity of Christ reveals a similar disposition in his preexistent and his incarnate life: self-emptying and self-humbling. This is theologically important because it demonstrates that for Paul true humanity and true divinity are analogous at the most fundamental level.

The full manifestation of the divine identity is in this Jesus Christ. A repeated emphasis that this is manifest in the very humanity of Jesus Christ is stressed in the text. He comes ‘in the likeness of mankind’ (verse 6) and again, in verse 7, He ‘appears’ to us ‘as a human being’. Here is the highest Christology, the full revelation of God present with us in the very manifest presence of Jesus Christ’s humanity.

We note that this presents us with a huge challenge and warning against any propensity toward discussing mankind as imago trinitatis where that discussion may be detached from this radically Christological starting point and focus. There can be no real Christian theology without the recognition of the unique and complete theophany that is the humanity of Christ. Likewise, any attempt to speak of the identity of Christ, other than that identity of Christ being the manifestation of the identity of the God of Israel, is a declination and a reduction of the high Christology here present.

The declaration and celebration of the theophany that is in Christ Jesus does not, however, conclude with the action of kenosis. Theophany in humanity now affirmed, we are led on to see that this theophany is actualised, in verse 8, in terms of a voluntary, self ‘humbling’ that is expressed in ‘obedience’. If the conception of a missional perspective lies in the preceding verses 1-5, then here in the Hymn proper is birthed the expression of the full, missional dynamic. The ‘becoming’ of this bearer of the divine identity is inextricably woven into the actualisation of divine intentionality through Jesus Christ’s obedience. Furthermore this intentionality is expressed in and through the actualisation of service in obedience.

Taking up the great messianic theme of Isaiah, our human engagement in this missional actualisation lies in the identity of Christ as the anointed servant of the God of Israel. As Christ is called as a servant, so too are we summoned to the attitude and practice – the intentionality – of servanthood. It is through this servant, Jesus Christ, that the God of Israel extends His salvation to the ends of the earth; and it is in the execution of this servant’s task that salvation is effected for sinners. In this Paul is at one with the Gospel writers, directing us to the Messianic paradigm, that we should adopt the very intentionality of Jesus Christ. Here Paul emphasises the participational paradigm in Jesus Christ. It is here, of course, that Paul roots his own identity as an apostle, because he is first and foremost as Cristou/ dou/loj, ‘slave of Christ’.

An integral aspect of Jesus Christ as manifestor of the divine identity lies in His attitude and practice of active obedience to the will of God. An appreciation of this emphasis on Jesus Christ’s willing submission is essential to understanding what we are called to in the will of God. The very essence of discipleship is discipline and conformity to the instruction – Torah – of God to mankind. What is prominent here is the emphasis that God is to be discovered not simply in and through the appearance of Christ as a man, but as a man who is the faithful servant of the God of Israel. The ultimate revelation of God in and through the Incarnation as a manifestation of the divine identity is not to be sidelined but is made complete and is perfected through the servant-ministry of Jesus Christ. There is no greater or more impressive manifestation to be had.

v 9 – 11

If the abasement and humbling of Christ is the birth, the celebration and rejoicing that carries our narrative through to its doxological celebration lies in these concluding verses of the hymn. It is here quite understandable that commentators who affirm the soterial over Christological typologies in the hymn found their argument, looking to the eschatological expectation and telos anticipated.

Yet this second half of the Hymn can also serve to expose a deliberate paradox within the preceding verses. Gorman argues that here we are faced with Paul’s appeal to the counter-intuitive revelation of God with which we are confronted and which we are invited to embrace in Jesus Christ - counter-intuitive because it is contrary to any concept of deity other than one radically restructured in the light of Jesus Christ. Commenting on the preceding verses, Gorman notes,

Although Messiah Jesus was in the form of God, a status people assume means the exercise of power, he acted in character — in a shockingly ungodlike manner according to normal but misguided human percep­tions of divinity, contrary to what we would expect but, in fact, in accord with true divinity — when he emptied and humbled himself.

Gorman’s interpretation allows us to see that the exaltation is not simply a vindication of Jesus Christ, but the very manifestation of God as truly God, in terms of His own self-definition. He is God who chooses to demean and debase Himself in order to effect our salvation.

It is this observation that allows us to contest that this Hymn, from its conception, through its birth and now in its celebration, is truly a missional doxology. For we would argue that what we have here is not a rehearsal of a bifurcated Christology that rips apart the coherence of the Incarnate Word, but a celebration of the divine identity of the God of Israel, inherently different and utterly unlike the gods of the Graeco-Roman world which surrounded the first Christians. Here is a God whose manner of self-revelation does indeed demand a counter-intuitive way of understanding. It is counter-intuitive in the way we think of God, a God who comes close rather than remaining far off; but it is also counter-intuitive in the way the Hymn here invites us to see that we are to participate in the missional intentionality of God as the Christ Himself does.

If what is rehearsed here is indeed theophanic, what are its implications? Bauckham is cautious, leaning towards a celebration of what the Messiah has undertaken in terms of Deutero-Isaiah fulfilment, whereby through ‘the career of the servant of the Lord, his suffering, hu­miliation, death, and exaltation, is the way in which the sovereignty of the one true God comes to be acknowledged by all.’ Bauckham’s focus is upon what is undertaken by God in Christ, not upon our response. Gorman, on the other hand, is clear that this means for us a ‘participation, by means of Spirit-enabled theoformity, in the reality of the life of the kenotic triune God’. The tenability of this thesis lies in the manner in which he links the Hymn with the immediately following section of the Epistle, in verses 12-18.


v 12 – 18

Bird represents a majority view among commentators in opining that the indicative of what has been accomplished in Christ, found in the Hymn, leads to an imperative for the Christian’s ethical response in the following verses. Gorman, however, links the celebration of Incarnation and full participation to connect the verses that follow the Hymn not only as an ethical imperative arising out of the indicative of what Christ has done for us, but a necessary predicate, the ‘community that bears wit­ness to this divine mission ... A people characterized by communal kenosis for the good of the world is both the means and the goal of God's saving activity here and now.’

This stress on intentionality in missional participation, rather than merely imitation of ethical intent, makes sense of the injunction in verse 12, closely partnered to the affirmation of God’s sovereign enabling in the midst of our activity, in verse 13. Furthermore, the allusion to ‘shining like stars’ in verse 15 unmistakeably evokes the eschatological, celebratory anticipation of the same metaphor uses in the apocalyptic imagery of Daniel. Here in the Hymn is a destiny in eschatological fulfilment that in some manner touches us already, as the disciples already shine in anticipation, already participating in the life and mission of God because of their present participation in the life of Jesus Christ.

In pursuing our thesis that the Hymn presents us with a missional doxology, we are attracted by both Gorman’s exposition and the strength of emphasis on participation and what that leads him to. However, we have some reservation arising from how far we can express present, human participation in the divine, without slipping into a confusion of the two. If we were to take the Hymn merely as an ethical injunction, this would not prove a problem to us. But where we have detected a call to missional participation, to what extent can we distinguish present participation in the missional activity of God from complete, full and unqualified deification of our humanity? To answer this challenge, we will turn in our third section to address this question together with others raised in the first section of this essay.

III. Missional Doxology

We have raised three questions which we now turn to address in this final section of our essay. Firstly, in the first section, we questioned whether speech about mankind as the image of God (Imago Dei) is to be expressed in Trinitarian terms, as Imago Trinitatis; or Christologically, whereby we speak of mankind being formed in the Image of Christ (Imago Christi)? Secondly, in so far as it is legitimate to speak of God’s mission (Missio Dei), to what measure does our reading of the Hymn support the thesis that it is legitimate to speak of our being taken up in engagement in the Missio Dei? Thirdly, in the second section, we concluded with a final question, asking whether we should or could distinguish present participation in the missional activity of God from complete, full and unqualified deification of our humanity? We now turn to reflect briefly on each of these in turn.

Should speech about mankind as Imago Dei be founded in Imago Trinitatis or Imago Christi?

Some may answer, ‘let us have both’! Our question, however, is about subject and predicate. Put another way, if we are to follow the leading of the Biblical canon, should our starting point be with Jesus Christ or with a doctrine of Trinity? Our response, in the light of scholarship we have reviewed in relation to our text, is that it must be founded unequivocally upon Imago Christi. Nowhere in the Early Fathers does an explication of mankind as Imago Trinitatis find expression. This is not to belittle the mystery of God unveiled in and through the person of Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, as the present writer among others has argued and demonstrated elsewhere, the understanding of God as a communion of Persons, removed from and construed outwith a contingency upon the theophanic event that is Jesus Christ, is a perception that arises in the fourth century CE at the very earliest.

Moreover, in response to our Symposium’s question, ‘How, if at all, can we be sure that our convictions are of God and not purely human constructions for maintaining positions of power in our world?’, we would observe that the post-Nicene development of a comprehensive doctrine of an Immanent Trinity, described and distinguished as ontologically separated communion removed from mankind, parallels the emergence of Christendom as an expression of political power, going on to develop separated doctrines of Immanent Trinity in politically separated dominions of Latin Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. We would also observe that recent re-emergence of interest and emphasis in stressing an awareness of God as Economic Trinity occurs in a time where the power of Christendom has been weakened and arguably broken. Is this a cause of concern or celebration? I recall an early class in theology, asking a group of young Christians for adjectives to describe God. Their response was to give me the ‘omni’s’: omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent - words associated with power and might: human constructions for maintaining positions of power in our world? On the other hand, we have met in our study of the text with Gorman’s appeal to think counter-intuitively. To grasp how Christ, as presented by the Apostle in the Hymn, calls us to view God in a manner that is radically different from the place of power exercised by Caesar, as an earlier call to discipleship invited the Hebrews to see that the God who leads them out of Egypt is fundamentally different in His expression and understanding of power from the Pharaoh and the gods of Egypt. Such a God calls us to a counter-intuitive manner of thinking that is not necessarily more attractive to us than convictional constructions that serve to keep others and even ourselves in a place of bondage, oppression, exploitation and control. Gorman’s emphasis on radically orientating our understanding of the Christian life and faith itself around a focus on participation in the very humanity of Jesus Christ has offered us a tenable interpretation of the Hymn that invites us not only to ethical imitation but substantial communion with the God who calls us into His own cruciform identity. Such an interpretation surely invites caution in any move to fashion our understanding of God upon any typological or analogical vision other than that focussed on the cruciform centre that is in Jesus Christ.

Is it legitimate to speak of our being taken up in engagement in the Missio Dei?

John Flett, in his recent study on the relationship of Christian mission to understandings of Trinitarian theology, points to a perceived deficiency in some recent Trinitarian thought, especially in appropriating the Social Trinity and the Cappadocian perspective of perichoresis, in that an idealised reflection on God’s essential nature can lead us to a view of communion with God that relegates mission to second place, separating the act of God’s reaching out through Christ from God’s essential, immanent identity. Mission becomes, by implication, an afterthought. What we are faced with in the Hymn, however, is an emphasis upon kenosis, or Christ’s self-emptying, that draws us into reflecting on what is truly defining of the divine identity. Could it be that Christian mission must involve at its very heart self-emptying and renunciation, because this is what God in Christ undertakes and what God in Christ calls us into? As Flett observes, ‘The question of the missionary act is answered in God’s self-humiliation and his exaltation of the human’.

In seeking to engage with our second question, we must first then ask whether our Christological and anthropological convictions can accommodate an understanding of mission as participation in the very life, objectives and expression of ministry that is in Jesus Christ. As noted, our ability to do this may be impeded by any competing focus on a perception of God that looks firstly to an Immanent rather than Economic Trinity; but it also will be affected if we are convinced, for instance, that it is impossible for a sinless Christ to share in the same humanity as our sinful humanity. In such an instance, we will inevitably encounter difficulty in accommodating a participationalist understanding of communion with God, the Christ and Christian mission itself.

Our response, arising from our reading of the Hymn, is that Christian mission can be nothing other than participation in the mission of Christ himself. It is such adherence to Christ, empowered by the Holy Spirit and lived out in submission and obedience to the God of Israel, that releases us into a realisation of the Triune reality of the divine identity that can only be found through being taken up in missional activity in Jesus’ name. As Bauckham notes, in commenting on the narrative of Jesus Christ’s worship by the disciples at the conclusion of Matthew’s Gospel,

The scene is a Gospel equivalent to the last part of the christological passage in Philippians 2:6-11. But, whereas in that passage it is the Old Testament divine name, YHWH, that the exalted Christ receives, here the disciples are to baptise “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”(v.19). The formula, as in the phrase “calling on the name of the Lord” which New Testament usage takes up from the Old with reference to baptism and profession of Christian faith, requires precisely a divine name. “The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit” names the newly disclosed identity of God, revealed in the story of Jesus the Gospel has told.

The Hymn is of necessity missiological both in content and focus, because the very character of the Triune God is at its heart. Missio Dei meets us and carries us in our humanity into the new creation that we have become in Christ Jesus. It is the engagement of the Creator with that He has created, coming out of the heart of God’s engagement with us. This finds its focus nowhere other than in participation in Christ, embracing us in the powerful practices of his ministry, lifting us up towards eschatological communion in the Triune name.

Can we distinguish present participation in the missional activity of God from complete, full and unqualified deification of our humanity?

The key to answering our final question lies in our concluding response to the second question posed above. If present participation can be inspired in the powerful practices patterned by Jesus Christ and celebrated in verses 6-8 of the hymn, then it also ends there. For in verses 9-11 we are met with inspiration and affirmation of eschatological hope and fulfilment expressed in the exaltation of the One who has fully revealed the divine identity, gathering our humanity to Himself, lifted up to manifest the glory of the God of Israel. In these verses, there is no ethic to emulate or sacrifice to participate in. There is but the wonder of being spectators who taste, in the coming of the Holy Spirit, something of what we intentionally focus on yet wait for in the future coming of God’s Kingdom in its fullest.

The Hymn stands as an invitation to us to participate in the life of Christ, leading us to the place of our baptism into union with Christ in His death. It is a call to present participation thus far. But beyond that? Beyond that we are left in our place of weakness, service and powerlessness to celebrate the victory and vindication of the one whom we adore in doxological joy, awaiting the fullness of His coming. For the present we patiently pursue participation in his path. And then, who knows but God what beauty awaits us or the measure in which our humanity will be transformed?

Christ and Control

Good, Christian leadership is not only about delegation. In a Christian context, a leader never has - nor should seek to have - his will done. There is Another in charge!

Christian leadership is also more than consultation + delegation. It begins with discernment and contingency: 'I think this is what God might be saying: can you confirm this for me?' This is the baptist way. Get confirmation from God's people. Then inspire and encourage and assist in the execution of it.

This is contrary to the flesh. The flesh wants to dominate. Control. Insist and bully. See one's own wisdom bear fruit.
The way of Christ is to empty self; serve; humble self and obey God.

You have a choice as to the type of leader you might be. Worldly or Christ-like. Being Christ-like is harder. Which will you choose?

Hope and Calvin

Calvin has been called, 'the theologian of hope'. I like that. I started my theological journey with immersion in the writings of John Calvin. And I soon realised, as even the most superficial use of a biblical concordance will demonstrate, that a Biblical understanding of the Christian life starts with news of hope. Signs of hope. God's covenants declared and demonstrated. To Noah, Abram, Moses, David and the promise of the New Covenant: all finding their fulfilment through Jesus Christ. In this, I am a Calvinist.

I meet too few such Calvinists, these days.  Many people want to start with their faith. Their ideas and opinions. Their fancies. Not enough realise that faith is the sustance of things hoped for. That effective faith can only be birthed out of hope.

It was a joy to meet and share with Jill Rowe, Ethos and Resource Director of Oasis UK, when I officiated at the ordination of Gary Smith in Aberdeen today. We talked about hope and agreed together on its priority. She talked about how thirstly and hungry young people are, throughout our land, to hear of the Christian good news of hope. Hope that you have faith in and live and love for.

Nice to know there are people who are committed to holding out hope to others.

The Ethics of Mission

Christian Mission that is not grounded in practical, Biblical ethics is meaningless. Evangelism is not salesmanship. It is the declaration and demonstration of Good News, founded in purposeful pursuit of righteousness in self and justice for others, that heralds the coming of Christ's Kingdom.

The first step in the work of evangelism lies in serving others in Jesus' name. For Jesus, proclamation was always accompanied by practical help. We need to learn from this. In setting out an evangelistic strategy, serving others is our first point of meaningful contact. Once a relationship of blessing has been established, the reason for the blessing can be explained. 

I weary of attractional strategies confused with mission. Start with being holy. Then begin serving others. Then explain how and why you are who you are do what you do. That is Christian mission. Consolidation? Yes, we then have to help those who begin to respond come closer to Jesus. But begin with Jesus-style mission.

Bring it on

I have to say this because it needs saying. We need to rediscover an understanding of mortification. I am disturbed by its absence in what I read and hear. Yes, I believe in grace, mercy, love and compassion. I'm into all of that. But 'putting to death' of self. Renouncing personal preferences and predilections for the sake of the community's health and witness to salvation. Dying with Christ in order to be raised with Christ.

A failure to have a synchronised understanding of mortification, maturity and mission will lead to a vacuum in morality among us. Perseverence in godliness for our Saviour's sake rather than personal preference in gratification for self's sake.

Bring it on.

Ministry Matters

Apostolicity should not be confused with arrogance and assumption. True prophecy is not salted with presumption and pride. I am fully at one with Alan Hirsch, when he compares the fivefold APETS ministry of Ephesians 4 to a spectrum of giftings that are latently present in any man or woman of faith. But I have to say that the only name I want to be know by is that of a servant: a minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Both the words 'mission' and 'ministry' come from the one Greek, New Testament word: 'service'. That  great exemplary passage, Philippians 2, speaks of the example of Jesus Christ to us all, in emptying Himself, taking the form of a servant, humbling himself and being obedient. And calls us to do the same.

So here is a suggestion. Let's try just calling ourselves 'ministers', 'servants'. Let's stop examining our navels and whispering the question to the mirror, 'am I an apostle, prophet, evangelist, teacher or pastor?' Let me abandon self-affirmation and manifest such gifting as it pleases the Lord to manifest through me in service of others, in humility and submission to the collective discernment and decision of my peers.

Radical, eh? Or maybe just wise, as our forefathers thought when they called themselves but 'ministers of the Gospel'.

grace

Yesterday, I found myself thinking about grace. Amazing grace, in fact. While I was preaching in Campbeltown. I was talking about the Resurrection as the 'wake up' for the first Christians. It was the resurrection and ascension of Jesus that caused people to reassess everything, especially the significance of the death of Jesus Christ.

Paul only grasped what the full Gospel is about when he met with the living, ascended Jesus. Only then did he start to see the atoning power of Christ's death.  His realisation that Jesus had truly been vindicated by God, through resurrection and ascension (Philippians 2.9-11), caused hin to look more fully at the crucifixion and its significance.

Prevenient grace. Effectual calling. Great doctrines from the Reformation times. About being awakened to the reality that 'Jesus is alive!' by the Holy Spirit and then convicted, by the same Spirit, as to 'sin, righteousness and judgment' in a way that releases us into repentance and faith.

What an amazing God. Time to meet with the Living Jesus again, my friend?

Productive Pioneering: Meaningful Ministry

I returned yesterday from an intensely meaningful 24 hours with the heads of ministry departments in the Baptist Union of Great Britain and the Baptist Union of Wales, accompanied by my colleagues John Greenshields and Stephen Hibbard. It was a hugely creative time, when we reviewed trends and shared vision for future developments. Here are some of the reflections which I awoke with this morning, following on from that meaningful and satisfying meeting which was, to my mind, full of genuinely prophetic insight.

Knowing the Power of the Cross

The Philippian hymn (Philippians 2.5-11) is the defining paradigm of the Christian life. It is the place where the teaching of Paul and the Gospel awareness of Jesus most clearly converge, showing how Paul understands the Christian life in terms of conforming to Jesus Christ. This conforming comes through the point of convergence of our humanity with Christ, which is formatively found in the taking by Jesus of our sin to Himself on the Cross, simultaneously infusing us with His righteousness (2 Corinthians 5.21).

This is why an appreciation of what Jesus did on the Cross is so focal to Paul. It is an appreciation of what Jesus has done that brings us into a conformity to Christ that applies that righteousness to fruitfulness in our lives. It is in the action of self emptying, service, humbling ourselves and obedience that we enter into the path of conformity to Christ, in a manner that will lead to a witness issuing from our lives.

The Integrity of Mission and Ministry

Any distinction or disjunction between mission and ministry is a cultural one, not a Biblical one. In actual fact, in terms of the model that the Bible gives us in the Philippian hymn,  to be a good minister you have to learn to be a missionary; and to be a good missionary, you need to be able to minister to people.

The underlying key is that in looking to form disciples of Jesus Christ, we cannot separate caring from conversion, nor pioneering from pastoring. Empathetic embrace and effective evangelism belong together. Leading people to Christ involves leading them to and through the Cross to be members of a confessing, caring community.

We must not confuse aggressive, rude, intrusive and abusive behaviour with mission and evangelism! Authentic mission and effective evangelism is clothed in sacrificial service, humility and obedient conformity to Jesus. For this very reason, evangelists must be tutored to show authentic care for people and be concerned for community, just as effective pastors must be produced, who practice proclamation and practice evangelism towards the lost who are strangers to Jesus Christ.

We are not all good at everything. As baptists, we believe in the priority of teamwork, not 'go it alone' soloists or superstars. We need multivoiced and Christ-minded mixtures of people to be effective in fellowship together.

Making Disciples

Making Christ-focussed disciples is our primary act of worship. Discipleship involves watch-care, walking and witnessing together. Any errant ecclesiology or theory of mission and conversion that seeks to separate pioneering from pastoral care is a betrayal of discipleship and the ministry that the church has been called to.

We have a wonderful Master and a witnessing ministry. Let's continue on the journey, focussed and faithful!

Testimony

And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to him, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to observe the Lord ’s commands and decrees that I am giving you today for your own good?

Sugar coated stories about God's goodness are no real testimony. The story of God's people in the Old Testament, as in the new, is a testimony to the ups and downs of discipleship. Periods of Blessings. Of testing. Of laughter and of tears. Of suffering and the waiting for final vindication and victory.

This is the story of Israel. It is the story of Jesus. It is meant to be our story too.

The central place of Deuteronomy 10.12, in commissioning God's people, calls them to fear Him. Walk in His ways. Love Him. Serve Him. Our testimonies should speak of this rite of passage being outworked in our lives.

There is nothing more wholesome than the honest celebration of God's faithfulness and mercy outworked in the lives of sinners, like you and me, who stumble along in the glorious path laid out by our Lord Jesus, thanking God for His enduring love.

Church Planting

How do you tell a good church? You tell it by its fruit. So many people get this wrong. They look at the expertise of the praise Band, or the charisma of the lead pastor. They look at the size of the crowd. But the real test is the fruit. What sort of people are produced and replicated by the ministry of this church?

The next question: 'what are the signs of genuine, Christian discipleship?'  Then, 'What indicators are there, that show a person to being true to Jesus?'

Engage in these questions, and then dream, imagine and the design your life and then a church's life to produce this sort of fruitfulness. That's real church planting.

Righteousness, Only Righteousness

How should Bible believing Christians, committed to the way of Jesus, respond to the serious ethical challenges facing us today?  In this extended reflection, 'Righteousness, Only Righteousness',  three essential ingredients are proposed for that process.

'Righteousness, Only Righteousness', by Jim Purves, is freely available in the 'Resources' section of the Baptist Union of Scotland's website or alternatively can be obtained, in a Kindle version, from the Amazon online store.

A Bighearted Weekend

Spent a meaningful weekend with evangelist, Chris Duffett. I have come to greatly respect this man and his careful thinking and generous spirit. He encourages Christians to find courage in reaching out to others, in ways that gives them confidence in communicating Jesus and that are simple and effective.

It really hit me that we live in a society where people are, generally, shy and a bit scared of other folk. This is true for all categories of people, Christian or not. But people are lovely and precious. Chris' method of helping Christians to cross over that fear barrier, in order to communicate and express the love of God for people, is inspiring.

It leaves me with much to ponder and also implement. Expressing the Good News to others, that they might become disciples: it can never stop at 'theory level'. It is something to act upon for every one of us. 

Ethics as Worship

We have to see worship as being more than the act of praise, in song and in dance.

Worship needs to be understood as our participation in the Mission of God; our honouring God in expressing the practices that arise from communion with Him. We see this call to this active participation in the character of God in Scripture. It is at the heart of the Law (Deuteronomy 11.22), the Prophets (Isaiah 58) and the  Writings (Psalm 146). It is in the practice of expressing Transforming Presence, Embodied Instruction and Constructive Community through pursuing personal Integrity of Being, Doing and Proclaiming the Character and Mission of God.

To understand the essence of worship being the way we walk in our lives, we need to turn both to the teachings of Jesus and also the Mosaic Law: where the location of worship and the regulations guiding us are expressly laid out for the practices of daily living.

In the life and teachings of Jesus; his undertaking of healing and acts of ministry on the Sabbath, as well as eating the grains in the field, we see the outworking of worship and Sabbatical rest in His ongoing communion with God and the ministry that issues out of that. Indeed, we see Jesus reorientate an understanding of Temple, and worship 'at the place of God's choosing', in terms of His teaching to the disciples that reorientates them to see His body as the temple that God will raise on the third day. Participation in His body, in His life, becomes the central act of worship. An understanding of self, redefined by the Transforming Presence, Embodied Instruction and Constructive Community that is in Jesus Christ Himself.

The Knowable God

It is occasionally heard that God is, ultimately, unknowable. I disagree. I hear in the Gospel and see in the Scripture quite a different story.

There, we meet the declaration that God is knowable when we recognise Him in the life, ministry and victory of Jesus Christ. Jesus is the εικον of God. Looking at Jesus is to look at God. Listening to Jesus is listening to God.

Isn't God Trinity? Yes. But the reason our forefathers developed a doctrine of Trinity was because they recognised and confessed the Divinity of Jesus. Best to get the order the right way round, eh?

So, knowing God is knowing Jesus. Now the next question: 'how well do you and I know Jesus; and what do we need to do in order to get to know Him better?' Now, that's something to work on.

Discipleship

Discipleship. It begins with this and ends with this. Our worship: our Christian life; our ethics; our Evangelism: all are based on this and grow out of this.

Belonging to Jesus and becoming like Jesus in what we are and do and say.  It all boils down to this. Anything else is at best a distraction and at worst an irrelevancy.

Condoning & Condemning

But thanks be to God, who always leads us as captives in Christ’s triumphal procession and uses us to spread the aroma of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are to God the pleasing aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing. To the one we are an aroma that brings death; to the other, an aroma that brings life. And who is equal to such a task? (2 Corinthians 2:14-16 NIV)

A refusal to condone is not the same as an insistence to condemn. The Christian life, from the first moments of repentance and initial steps of faith, is a story of change. This journey leads us through a path where there is transformation and the developing of virtues which, through our death to self and resurrection with Christ, are exercised and improved upon in our lives.

But there has to be an intentionality in this. There has to be a self- conscious humbling of self towards service and obedience to our heavenly Father. It does not take place automatically. It has to be deliberate and determined.

This is why Christians, while not condemning those involved in same-sex relationships, should not condone same-sex relationships. As much as addiction to drink or drugs, or gluttony that leads  to obesity, it is not a healthy activity. We are not to lead others into sin, or encourage sin in their lives.

All of us are called on the journey or transformation and change. All of us are called to repent and be renewed. We are not to place others under condemnation. But neither are we to condone that which is patently named as wrong in the sight of God.

Abandonment and decline

Once the narratives of Scripture are abandoned, and the ways of the Covenant Community departed from, there is only death and decline. But where the testimony of Scripture is held to and the way of  Christ pursued, there is life through the path of death to self and resurrection power in the Holy Spirit.

Sunday last was Pentecost. The power of holiness, consecration and revelation of the power of the Age to Come is here now, for those who would receive it and walk with it. But it does not belong to those who accomodate themselves to the decline, decadence and dissolution that sadly marks our society today.

There is a time to rejoice. And there is a time to mourn and sing the song of lament. Today.

Marcion Revisited and Abominations Entertained: Theological Ingredients of a toxic cocktail within the Scottish context

Marcion, a second century bishop, was excommunicated by the Roman See in the second century AD. He could not reconcile his reading of the 'loving' God of the New Testament with his reading of the God of the Old Testament. Was Marcion right?

Introduction

What we have here is of something of a prequel to the discussion on ‘same-sex marriage’. What follows in this paper is built on a simple supposition; yet one that, in my estimation, is often lost sight of when Christians turn to discussing ethics. That supposition is that our God is a living, self-revealing God. He approaches us in and through Jesus Christ. And in approaching us He would transform us, expose and expunge sin, deal with unholiness and rebellion; and realise for us and in us salvation, holiness and righteousness. Furthermore, in coming to us, He comes to us in the situations, circumstances, cultures and contexts in which we are placed. Fundamentally, this paper seeks to build on what it means to meet with this living God, to be changed by Him and to live for Him. We look at what this might imply in reconstructing a basis for Christian ethics that might begin to help us engage with the challenge that is before us.

Apologies to those who might have expected a paper on Judges 21, as first intimated. For a copy of that paper, first delivered at a conference at IBTS in Prague in 2011, please refer online to http://audiosermonupdate.blogspot.co.uk/ 

We will engage with this challenge in three stages.

In the first instance, we will reflect on what it means to be embraced by God. We identify three components that might be looked for in forming and shaping a Biblically Christian approach to ethics. We will argue that an adequate and practical Christian ethic for today's church needs to recognise and re-engage with all three of these components.

Secondly, in acknowledging that God comes to us in the situations, circumstances, cultures and contexts in which we are placed, we will identify some problems that occur in the Scottish context. We will see how these parochial problems have militated against the development of a Christian ethic that adequately synchronises the three essential components, laid out in our first stage of argument, within Scottish ecclesial theology.

I here distinguish ecclesial theology from academic theology. Scottish academic theology, undertaken in a University or further educational setting, has and continues to make significant contribution to developments in theological understanding. Until recently it became, through the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, significantly detached from the ordinary practice of Scottish, ecclesial life. Ecclesial theology is what is engaged in at a congregational level; for wherever God is spoken of, theology is being discussed.

Thirdly, in acknowledging how deficient and limiting theological considerations have affected our use of language and concepts, and how our use of language should properly acknowledge how it is that God chooses to embrace us, we will offer some working definitions of language that might help us in our approach to the present debate.

Part 1.   EMBRACED BY GOD

It is our contention that an adequate Christian ethic in the Scottish context needs to be shaped afresh by God's Transforming Presence, informed by a Christ-centred understanding of Embodied Instruction and be rooted in the context of Constructive Community.

1.1  Transforming Presence

The Holy Scriptures anchor an understanding of Christian devotion, and the ethic that arises from it, in a meeting with the transforming presence of God. It is there in the theophany of Sinai (Exodus 33-34), where Moses is captured by the glory and goodness of God: a seminal meeting for understanding the transforming, irradiating effect of an experimental meeting with God.

The Sinai theophany of Exodus 33.6-7 is hugely significant in showing the transitive, active nature of God's Being as revealed to us: the reality of the Economic Trinity expressed in Oneness and integrity of action. Meeting God is not a spectator sport. It is to enter the transformative power of His presence. Moses is unable to bear confrontation with the full glory of God, but is confronted instead with the revelation of God's goodness. Here, God describes Himself all in 'doing' words: 'compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in merciful love and faithfulness, showing His love to a thousand generations and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin'. It is the kinetic power of the self-revelation of this God of Love that is astounding. Every attribute of God is identifiable as something that can be replicated in and through humanity, made in the Image and likeness of God.

This significance of this experimental meeting with God is taken up in the writings of both the Apostle Peter (2 Peter 1.3-4) and the Apostle Paul (2 Corinthians 3.17-18). The importance of meeting with God in a way that is transformative is thereafter regularly rehearsed in Christian tradition, from the writings of the Church Fathers such as Gregory of Nyssa, through to post Reformation times and the writings of John Wesley; all of which have helped shape the development of contemporary evangelicalism, the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements and post-modern, experimental spirituality.

What is important to note, for the purposes of this essay, is that this experimental meeting with God is authenticated by its transforming effect. Those who are truly met with by God are impacted by and through meeting with Him. Meeting with the living God cannot but be transformative. It is, whilst being an existential experience, possessed of both formation and command. God meets with us in His own Being, exposing us and confronting us with His own missional identity.  God would reshape and remould us afresh in His likeness through embracing us, in our humanity, in and through Jesus Christ. It is this eliciting of a confession of Jesus Christ as 'Lord' that marks the purposeful presence of the Holy Spirit, distinguishing the Holy Spirit from other ecstatic or spiritual experiences.

Pastorally and personally, it is my observation that existential awareness of, or a conviction regarding the existence or love of God towards us, is not the same as meeting with God in a way that personally transforms us. We can engage in 'God talk' without being affected by a God who would embrace us. Nor is this distinction between meeting with God in a way that personally transforms us and engaging in ‘God talk’ something that is consistent or constant through the Christian life. Just as it is possible to be met with by God in a transforming way after having been previously persuaded or convinced of His existence and of any number of doctrines, it is also possible to have been met with God and then, thereafter, to move away and retreat from ongoing communion with Him. Why? Because the real embrace of God is transforming. It challenges and can even traumatise us in our deepest parts. Sometimes we start with being existentially religious then become real with God. Sometimes we start with being real with God and then become reduced to being simply religious, in form and words. Transformation is not comfortable.

This recognition, that a true meeting with God can be nothing other than transformative, is embodied in the 2nd Declaration of Principle of our Baptist Union of Scotland. There it states that the administration of Believers' Baptism is for 'those who have professed repentance towards God and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ'. Repentance and faith are not simply actions in a sequence of choice. They are together a response evoked from meeting with the Living, Holy God. Subscribing to the supposition that there is a God, or that you are forgiven or loved by God, is not to be confused with faith. Faith, as the action of recognising and consciously embracing participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, arises out of being confronted with the reality of Jesus Christ. A faith that is not accompanied by recognition of God's call to repentance is no faith at all.

1.2  Embodied Instruction

The development of ethics in Western culture has been largely founded on an idealised or cultic systems of virtues or values born out of both Greek and Roman pagan traditions. But what we are presented with in the Hebrew system of the Covenant people of God is something quite different. That is, the character of the instruction given to God's people is reflective of the very character of God himself. The redemptive actions of God seek to lead His people into a separate and distinctive identity, marking them out from other peoples: I am the Lord, who brought you up out of Egypt to be your God; therefore be holy, because I am holy. (Leviticus 11:45 NIVUK). It is when we read the Mosaic Laws in this light that we can begin to make sense of them. They are not buillt on a philosophical system. They express the very character of God to a people within a culture and context. They are the indicatives of embodied instruction, to be pursued in the particularities of every day life.

While distinguishing and preferring a Biblical base from an Aristotelian foundation to ethics, we are indebted to the significant contributions in developing convictional ethics of Alastair McIntyre, who in 1981 first published 'After Virtue', emphasising the importance of Aristotle's grasp of virtue ethics formed and developed within human society; and the work of baptistic theologian James McClendon, whose methodology is especially useful in mapping the convictions associated with practices formed through living in contact and community with others. 

McIntyre, in the Preface of the 3rd edition of 'After Virtue' [2007], acknowledges that ethical systems are further shaped and influenced by biological factors. Ethical systems are complicated because life is complicated. This insight, that any ethical system is formed through the interaction of a number of different levels of enquiry, is further developed by the baptist ethicist, Glen Stassen, in his recent publication, 'A Thicker Jesus: Incarnational Discipleship in a Secular Age'. Stassen notes the complexity of systems and how biological, preferential, ideological and communitarian factors all contribute to the developing of ethical and moral systems, adding, 'This interaction of God's continuous, living interaction with the basic building blocks of creation suggests something more like God's interactive persuasion than total domination' [A Thicker Jesus’, Kindle Edition, 2012, Loc 2228].

Just as Peter expresses this redemptive, covenantal emphasis in his thinking (1 Peter 1.15), so too Paul sees the embodiment of the Mosaic Law coming to full expression in the life of Jesus Himself. The Law, like a tutor, leads us to Christ (Galatians 3.24). In this we glimpse how, for Peter and Paul as for the Gospel writers, the identity of God expounded in a redemptive pattern among humankind is only fully realised in Jesus Christ. In Jesus Christ we meet with an ethic rooted in human, volitional behaviour that willingly and worshipfully longs to conform to God. In Him, it is embodied instruction: an ethic presented in and patterned by Jesus Christ Himself.

It is easy to miss the emphasis conveyed in Philippian Hymn in the repeated assertion that it is the humanity of Jesus that we are here dealing with: taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself (Philippians 2:7b-8a NIVUK) The kenotic action, however else it is to be interpreted, must also include this humbling and willingness of Jesus in His humanity to serve: submission to the will and way of God expressed in and through humanity, patterned for all humanity.

God's transforming presence constrains and calls. It is doing more than persuading or producing principles, values or virtues. The Being of God come to us produces a reaction. The transforming presence of this God constrains us, carrying us forward in communion with the mission of God Himself, caught up in His Being. Where these drivers of God's transforming presence confront and call us towards the image and likeness of God, these same drivers find their greatest fruitfulness in the place where God fully embraces and conjoins Himself to our humanity: in His Word embodied among us, in the person of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. It is here that we see the heart of embodied instruction. It lies in knowing love, entering participation in Christ; and finds full expression in the pursuit of service through self-sacrifical submission to God's will and way.

It is this pursuit of service of God and of service towards others in Jesus' name, submitting to the revealed will and way of God, that constitutes the pursuit of Biblically defined justice: where Old Testament understandings of justice and righteousness can, because of Jesus Christ, be telescoped together into one New Testament Greek word, 'justice / righteousness', δικαιοσυνη. It is hard to improve upon Old Testament theologian Walter Brueggemann's definition of righteousness as, 'Yahweh's ready capacity to be present in situations of trouble and to intervene powerfully and decisively in the interest of rehabilitation, restoration and well being' [‘Theology of the Old Testament’, Fortress Press, 1997, p 130]. We would contend that 'justice / righteousness' within the Old Testament carries a wider connotation, beyond a simply forensic sense, which would connote one or more of (1) establishing God's embodied instruction now; (2) our pursuing God's embodied instruction now; (3) future judgment as to whether God's embodied instruction has been expressed or pursued.

God does not communicate to us through a series of propositions. He communicates through the story of a people, Israel; a person, Jesus Christ; and the body of that person, the Church. God's truth is found in embodied instruction, purposefully present and empowered by the Holy Spirit for a people that pursue God's justice and righteousness as patterned and expressed in the person of Jesus Christ. Here is embodied instruction found, as it is found also in His body; that is, the Constructive Community of those living by faith in Jesus Christ: a people purposefully participating in the life, ministry and victory of Jesus Christ.

1.3  Constructive Community

Community stands at the very heart of the Gospel. It is in and through what is shared with us, interpersonally, that we discover what love is and how it transforms relationships. We might speak of communities as being either thick or thin. Communities that are thicker tend to have a clearer perception and readier enactment of shared values and ethics which are character forming, in ways that can and do change people. Thinner communities, while they may share aspirational values or virtues, are less likely to really change people. They share ideas and common language; perhaps sing the same songs; and possibly share little else. They are more likely to 'talk the talk' than 'walk the walk'. Thin communities are more likely to be atomised or fragmented communities with poorer communal lives.

The distinction of 'thick and thin' in ethics is found in the work of political philosopher Michael Walzer [‘Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at home and abroad’, Notre Dame, 1994] and developed in relation to the constructive ethics of community by Parush Parushev. Here, we further adapt and develop the use of 'thick and thin' to differentiate between congregational communities that are, through prioritising intentional relationality, thick; and those that are thin: sharing certain values or virtues, emphasising common confessional or ideological affirmations. One of the characteristics of church life is that it is possible to have a congregation that shares a strong, ideological position or is highly attractional in its missional policy but that is, in terms of intentional relationality between members, quite weak: this would properly be called a thin community. Thickness or thinness have little to do with the size of a church.

What we see, within the continuity of Old and New Testaments, is God's commitment to Embodied Instruction finding expression within Constructive Communities that have to be, for that purpose, thick communities. We see this in the Decalogue's emphasis on marrying worship of the Living God to how we live out community relationships, accompanied with concrete practices spelt out in the Mosaic Law at large. The call of God in the Old Testament is towards the constructing and developing of thick communities that own Embodied Instruction.

Old Testament scholar Daniel Block helpfully likens the Decalogue to a 'Bill of Rights', not a set of juridical decrees. The Decalogue helps both to define and develop constructive community. He adds, 'However, unlike modern bills of right, the document does not protect ones own rights but the rights of the next person' [‘NIV Life Application Commentary on Deuteronomy’, 2012, Kindle Edition, p161].

Thicker, constructive community is not easily sustained. It is personally costly, requiring self-sacrifice, demanding humility, calling us to service, forcing us to look and think beyond ourselves with concern for the good of others. Conversely, in present culture we are increasingly witnessing the 'thinning' of Christian communities. The context of owning the shared convictions and practices that build constructive community is weakened, as people know and mix with one another less and less. The antidote is to grasp the need for and pursue afresh the necessary, constructive role of developing thicker communities.

Within our Baptist Union of Scotland, we speak of moving forward in terms of being Intentionally Relational, Unashamedly Missional and Creatively Rooted. As the congregations in our Union continue to journey together, we are committed to developing thicker, constructive community. We emphasise this because it is what the Bible emphasises. We seek to do it this way because this is what we see Jesus doing. It is this context that allows for the development of disciples who, in learning to be intentionally relational, are prepared for being unashamedly missional, reaching out to others from constructive community in acts and words of Christlike service, heralds of the Good News of Jesus Christ, demonstrators and declarers that the breaking in of the Kingdom of God to this present, darkened Age has begun.

It is in the narrative of constructive community, where lives are engaged in being intentionally relational, that we see Embodied Instruction have its intended and proper effect.  It is in the context of constructive community that we can come to understand the significance and meaning of words properly formed by their meaning shaped by culture and context, worked out in shared convictions and practices. Words, within the context of constructive community where the Transforming Presence of God is sought and the Embodied Instruction of the Scriptures is worked out in Jesus' name, are given godly substance and meaning. Words outwith the context of constructive community are susceptible to misappropriation, misuse and even abuse.

Part 2.   Parochial Problems

We can identify problems that are particularly evident in our context under three headings: inherited perspectives; misconstruing Law and Grace; abandoning personhood and affirming individualism.

 2.1  Inherited Perspectives

Looking to the Transforming Presence of the Living God, developing theology through narratives where words and their definition find their fuller meaning in the context of the story of intentionally related lives, would not be primary feature of post-Reformation theology in Scotland. An Aristotelian methodology, categorising theological truths as propositions possessed of universal meaning, quickly became the traditional focus of post-Reformation Scottish, theological enquiry.  Rationalising tendencies within medieval, Western Christendom continued through to find expression in nascent Protestant theologies, as in ‘The Westminster Confession of Faith’. Thomistic, neo-scholasticism, which characterised the development of Reformed theology in Geneva from Beza onwards and which was also present among the British Puritans, did not sit easily with a theological method built on Scriptures speaking of a God who meets us experimentally, in His glory and goodness. A tragic effect of this rationalistic reduction of Biblical Revelation, as it found expression in the Scottish context, was the confusion of God's sovereignty with determinism, as given expression in the logic of double predestination and the logical syllogism, as expressed in ‘The Sum of Saving Knowledge’.

The doctrine of double predestination leads to the fatalistic conclusion that, whether you are destined to heaven or hell, there is nothing you can do about it. It is integral to the thinking of ‘The Westminster Confession of Faith’, which still serves as the subsidiary standard of faith of the main Scottish, Presbyterian denomination, the Church of Scotland. The doctrine finds full expression in the work of the Puritan, William Perkins, 'The Golden Chain'. In 1650 the ‘Westminster Confession of Faith’ was published bound together with another Puritan piece, 'The Sum of Saving Knowledge', which calls upon us to examine our lives to see if the fruit of true of faith are present therein. Contrast this with a pre-Bezan, more Christ-focused Calvinism of the earlier ‘Scots Confession’. A fuller treatment of these important themes in the development of Scottish theology from the Reformation through to the twentieth century is beyond the scope of this paper, but can be found in my earlier works, ‘The Triune God and the Charismatic Movement’, Paternoster, 2004; and ‘How Theology Became Nonsense’, Kindle Edition, 2012.

The quest to substitute theological formulae for the irreducible immediacy of the God whose transforming presence is a consuming fire, quickening awe, fear, love and loathing would, of course, invite reaction. Some reacted by seeking to deconstruct the complexity of such formulaic theologies by searching for conceptual, universal principles or indicators. But to do so they would have to turn away from the Hebraic reality of Biblical revelation, where Transforming Presence and Embodied Instruction find proper expression within Constructive Community.

Marcion appears to have embraced the importance of love not just as a necessary practice of Constructive Community, but sought to establish it as a universalising principle of life. In removing his understanding of love from the context of Constructive Community witnessed to in the Old Testament, reflecting the disruptive reality of pursuing Transforming Presence through Embodied Instruction, Marcion robbed ‘love’ of its proper context and culture and divorced it from the God who gives it meaning, rooted in His redemptive actions. Marcion detached love’ from the God who gives ‘love’ meaning in the midst of humanity, rebellious in sin and raw from the suffering that it brings. He lost sight of the God who had to die on the Cross because He lost sight of the continuity of character of the God revealed both in the Old Testament through to the Old Testament. Marcion looked for a universal principle. But full bodied, Biblical Christianity can offer no principles or doctrines detached from Transforming Presence, Embodied Instruction and Constructive Community, as revealed in both the Old and New Testaments together.

A compelling reason for rejecting confessional statements as an adequate means of communicating truth lies in the testimony of Scripture itself. Firstly, that God Himself has chosen to communicate with us through the fullness of truth embodied in a human person, Jesus Christ. Truth comes to us embodied in a person and, as a preparation to that, in a community constructed for that purpose: Israel. Secondly, when language is detached from the narratives of culture and context it is, in large measure, deprived of meaning. As modern language theorists have well demonstrated, words find their meaning within the context in which they are given expression.

When we take Embodied Instruction seriously, through pursuing the path of being Intentionally Relational, we understand that Biblical words such as 'justice', 'faith' and 'love' can only be given expression and meaning in the pursuit of Embodied Instruction that finds expression in Constructive Community. For without grasping the necessity of weaving together Transforming Presence, Embodied Instruction and Constructive Community, there is no common context in which to use and give expression to these words, as the Bible uses them.

2.2  Misconstruing Law and Grace

Two additional effects of schematising theology need to be considered, as they significantly effect how ecclesial theology has developed in the Scottish context. The first relates to a reading of Paul through Luther and others. The second to the significant influence of JN Derby.

2.2.1  Atonement and the problem of Luther

Where Eastern Christendom has focussed more on the Resurrection and a doctrine of Sanctification, Western Christendom has concentrated more on the Crucifixion and a doctrine of Justification: this would be true of the Western Catholic tradition prior to the Reformation and of both Roman and Protestant traditions thereafter. There is a consequent danger in Western theology that, while an appreciation of the Crucifixion is essential to any Christian theology, an exclusive focus on penal substitution and satisfaction theory obscure our appreciation of other aspects of what transpired with Christ upon the Cross.

I do not dispute the validity of both penal substitution and satisfaction theory and do not here make reference to the debate over imputed righteousness, featuring the prominent New Testament scholars Tom Wright and John Piper. For a fair analysis of that debate, Michael Bird provides an excellent mediating analysis [‘The Saving Righteousness of God’, Paternoster, 2006]. That there are both forensic and substitutionary aspects to a full understanding of Atonement is not here in question.

Basic to a Biblical appreciation of Christ's death and resurrection is that disciples of Jesus Christ are called to participation in Christ's death and resurrection. This is what was symbolised in the early baptistic rituals of the primitive church and so powerfully enacted in our practice of believers' baptism by full immersion. Not only do we confess that Christ died for us, we acknowledge too that we are called to active ownership of and participation in this life of Christ.

Whilst an exposition of the fuller implications of Christ's atoning death and our participation in it are outwith the scope of this paper, these themes are explored and developed at length in the excellent work of New Testament theologian Michael Gorman [‘Cruciformity: Paul's Narrative Spirituality of the Cross’, Eerdmans, 2001; ‘Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification and Theosis in Paul's Narrative Soteriology’, Kindle Edition, 2009].

While this aspect of what Jesus Christ has done for us may be clear to us, there is a huge danger if we allow ourselves to stress the adequacy of Christ’s penal death on the Cross without holding clearly onto what Reformed and Holiness Theologies have traditionally described as a doctrine of Mortification: a willingness to seek the putting to death of fleshliness and sinful propensities within our own lives. Of course, we are fully dependent upon the present power of the Holy Spirit to so do; but unless we pursue this, we can end up by detracting from the power of what transpired on the Cross of Christ. This danger is heightened by an aspect of Martin Luther's theology, which drives a greater wedge between the power of grace and the place of conforming to God's Law than is present in the Reformed tradition. There is a danger with Luther, that Sola Gratia becomes so all encompassing a doctrine that the needful place of our dying to self and living for Christ is lost sight of.

This point is reinforced from an Old Testament perspective by Daniel Block who has recently stressed the importance of the Mosaic Law being understood, Biblically, as a means of grace [‘How I Love Your Torah, O Lord’, Wipf and Stock, 2011, pp 1-20].  Block further explains, 'Of the Reformers Luther tended to read Deuteronomy through the lenses of Paul's rhetorical seemingly antinomian statements. His own debilitating experience of works-righteousness within the Roman Catholic Church contributed significantly to his view of a radical contrast between the law (which kills) and the gospel (which gives life). His emphasis on the dual function of law (civic - to maintain external order on earth; theological - to convict people of sin and drive them to Christ) completely missed the point of Deuteronomy, which presents the law as a gift of grace to the redeemed to guide them in the way of righteousness and lead to life' [‘NIV Life Application Commentary on Deuteronomy’, Kindle Edition, 2012, p 27].

2.2.2  The disrupting effect of Darbyism

If there is a danger that a Lutheran filter can cause us to have a diminished respect for the Old Testament and cause us to be distracted from reading and applying the gracious precepts of the Old Testament Law, this can only  be reinforced under the influence of the early nineteenth century, Irish Anglican clergman, J N Darby.  Derby's idiosyncratic interpretations of the Scriptures gained widespead influence in the early Brethren Movement, being popularised further through vast swathes of North American evangelicalism by the use of the widely distributed Schofield Reference Bible.

The effect of Darby's theology spread far beyond Brethren circles and, through the newly published Schofield Bible, became endemic in emergent Pentecostalism and through other parts of American Evangelicalism from the early twentieth century onwards. A full exploration of both the content and effect of this is to be found in the work of Pentecostal scholar, Matthew Thomson, 'Kingdom Come: Restoring Pentecostal Eschatology' [Deo Publishing, 2010]. Two innovative ideas of Darby that permeated much of North American Evangelicalism were his division of the whole of human history into seven periods, or dispensations; and the notion of the gathering of Christians saints up to God prior to the advent of an Age of Tribulation: the 'rapture' of true believers up into heaven.

The popularity of Darby's teaching beyond his death can largely be attributed to the simple scheme of what became known as Dispensationalism. It allowed the believer to feel secure amidst threatening political, social and economic conditions. Significant to this doctrine was the polarising of Law and Grace, in a manner previously unknown among advocates of Reformed Theology.

Darby stressed the place of Sola Gratia standing in contrast to the need for works of the Law - which were seen as the divine criterion for salvation both during the Mosaic Covenant's dispensation (from Moses to Christ) as well as in the the period between the rapture of the saints of God and the future commencement of the millennium. Darby concluded that the people of Israel are to be the recipients of the earthly Kingdom during the millenium, an era that would see the fulfilment of the prophecies in the Old Testament - as yet unrealised - for the people of Israel. Consequently, the expectation of the saints saved by grace is not a New Heavens and Earth, but an entirely heavenly habitation.

For Darby, there was no mixing of Grace and Works. The teaching of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount was irrelevant for Christians during the dispensation of grace. All that was required was true faith. And anyway, there was no expectation of the saints participating in a renewed creation, here on earth. The saints on earth would be gathered up in the rapture to heaven. The earth would belong to Israel.

2.3  Abandoning Personhood and Affirming Individualism

The third strand of a parochial problem that finds expression in the Scottish context and which would militate against the development of a Christian ethic that adequately synchronises a proper appreciation of Transforming Presence, Embodied Instruction and Constructive Community is the rise of individualism over against a proper appreciation of personhood.

A number of recent theologies of Social Trinity have rehearsed and revisited an understanding of personhood. This, hopefully, will serve to remind us again and again of another Biblical perspective: that persons exist in and through their interpenetrating relationships. Persons belong to plurality. This insight and emphasis stands in stark contrast to a tectonic drift towards individualism and an emphasising of individual rights, stressing the ascendency of liberal democracy and eclipsing a more plural, socially aware system of social democracy.

Glen Stassen explores these issues more fully in looking at the relation between Democracy and Human Rights, with specific reference to the recent history of North America [A Thicker Jesus, Chapter 5]. And the phrase, 'There is no such thing as Society', has been much quoted (or misquoted) in the British context on the recent death of a prominent politician.

To the growth of individualism, we must also add the emergence of Decisionism: by which I mean the act of identifying salvation with the momentary response of an individual. Decisionism in the nineteenth century, finding expression in an evangelistic method popularised by Finney and Moody, effectively ignited afresh in the post-War period in the 1955-56 Scottish Crusade of Billy Graham, powerfully called people to faith by making a decision to believe in Jesus Christ. For many, however, the responsibility of the individual to make a decision for and respond to the message of the Gospel, whether by means of ‘the Sinner’s Prayer’ or by some other indication of decision, would become the ‘default setting’ of what both the Gospel and eternal salvation is truly about, eclipsing crucial criteria such as ‘repentance’ and ‘fruitfulness’.

Ally this to a growing emphasis within Church Growth theory from around the same period, evaluating success in multiplied numbers present in gatherings, whether in thick or the thinnest of communities, and it would become so much easier to lose sight of Transforming Presence, Embodied Instruction and Constructive Community.

2.4  A Toxic Cocktail

What are some of the indicators of an ecclesial theology unintentionally creating a toxic cocktail? We might suggest some of the ingredients are as follows:

• Confessions of personal transformation and repentance diminish; testimonies of individual satisfaction and personal decision increase.
• Old Testament Law as a gift of grace lost sight of; salvation ‘by faith alone’ misunderstood and misrepresented.
• Superficial thin community replacing onerous thick community.
• Truth recast as proposition and ethics recast as theory.
• Prophecy interpreted more as future-telling, and less as exhortation to faithful witness marked by self-sacrifice and service.

 Before we can begin to develop constructive community, we need acknowledge that the community is first constituted by bringing Transforming Presence and Embodied Instruction among people. To help change others, I must first be changed and in a vital, spiritual relationship with God. I am continually turning to Father, asking Him to irradiate me in the presence of His Being, rooting me in the humanity of His Son and enabling me, by the infusing power of the Holy Spirit, to become more like Jesus.

This was true of both the Old Testament experience of Israel and that of the disciples, shaped and changed by Jesus. A developmental journey, painfully learning the implications of having God with us. A journey where the Transforming Presence produces transformed people. A journey involving blessing, rebellion, discipline, wrath, repentance and renewal. And always covered by the intense, covenant love of the God who is a consuming fire.

We meet God fully in Jesus Christ. God does not give us values or principles, divorced from the specificity of culture and context. The Incarnation and the expression of all truth and grace in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, a 1st Century Jew, is adequate demonstration of this fact. As is the specificity of command in the Mosaic Law, which we also recognise as a gift of God’s grace to His people, God demonstrating His grace in creating, commanding and constructing a community of people characterised by Embodied Instruction.

What we see, through the continuity of Old Testament and New Testament witness, is Transforming Presence leading to Embodied Instruction, expressed in explicit practices designed to form and build community in a positive and constructive manner. Both Jesus and Paul’s repudiation of certain cultic or ceremonial practices originally contained in Mosaic Law was in the context of building and affirming the essential characteristics of Constructive Community: reaffirming the drivers of grace, compassion, love and faithfulness, mercy and forgiveness. But these are always concretised in a way that builds community in a way that is healthy and functional, where God’s rule is found in the synchronised expression of righteousness and justice. Nowhere in the teachings of Jesus or the New Testament Apostles are sexual practices commended or amended from those prescribed under Mosaic Law. For sexual practices lie at the heart of our human identity as social beings, building Constructive Community. What are the sexual practices and relations that best build a Constructive Community, where God has been met with in His Transforming Presence; and where a continuity of Embodied Instruction is recognised and affirmed? This is the critical question that we need to engage with afresh.

Part 3.  RESHAPING A CHRISTIAN ETHIC: RECLAIMING KINGDOM LANGUAGE IN THE DISCUSSION OVER MARRIAGE AND HOMOSEXUALITY

The meaning of language is an important factor in this whole conversation. Our thesis is that the context in which this language and vocabulary is expressed needs be redeveloped, recognising the essential ingredients of God’s Transforming Presence, the Embodied Instruction of His Word and the Constructive Community wherein and through God reveals Himself to the world.

Part of the difficulty in discussions to date over ‘same-sex marriage’ is that much of the language that has been in use, often formulated in contemporary cultures and contexts that are foreign and possibly hostile to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, has been appropriated and applied as if were properly normative for all: possibly a revised or corrupted form of Aristotelian method. We need to disassociate ourselves from abstract, non-sense talk of individual 'rights'. What we as Christians begin with is the Transforming Presence of God: we cannot 'do' Christian ethics without consciously seeking to have humble, repentant hearts. We need to look afresh at Scripture and take seriously what God commands, not excusing fleshliness under a misconstrued notion of grace. We need to realise that Christian ethics is more to do with our seeking to serve a healthy, functional community that practices sex righteously, than with personal preferences and the satisfaction of libido and appetites.

To conclude this prequel, I offer the following working definitions of key words often used in the discussion relating to ‘same-sex marriage’ issues, reappropriating vocabulary to be shaped by the threefold emphasis on Transforming Presence, Embodied Instruction and Constructive Community.

3.1    Virtue

A Christian virtue is formed through the human response of willing conformity to God, expressed in the convictions and practices of the community of God, in accordance to the Law of the Spirit in Christ Jesus. A Christian virtue is conceived out of the Transforming Presence of God, given birth through the Embodied Instruction of God’s Word and nurtured within Constructive Community.

Chastity and the avoidance of adultery, fornication, homosexual practice and prohibited degrees of heterosexual marriage are normative virtues and practiced convictions within Constructive Christian Community, illumined by God’s Transforming Presence and expressed in the Embodied Instruction of God’s Word.

3.2    Love

Love of God and awe / fear of God are integrally related: they invite repentance and engagement with the Embodied Instruction of God that leads to thicker, Constructive Community; community irradiated in God’s Transforming Presence. In such a community the practices of love are discovered and developed. Love of God and humanity is demonstrated in no way other than in obeying His Embodied Instruction contained in Scripture and manifestly fulfilled in Jesus Christ.

3.3    Justice

Biblical narratives speak of the rule of God as synonymous to justice. It is the absence of the rule of God that leads to injustice. The Biblical words denoting ‘Justice’, both in Hebrew and Greek, bring together private morality and public ethics where God’s Transforming Presence is sought by people in community. Justice is the pursuit of Constructive Community constrained by the Embodied Instructions of God’s Word, enabled in the light of His Transforming Presence.

3.4    Freedom

In the Biblical narratives, Freedom is deliverance from bondage: from sin and social structures that degrade and destroy the image and likeness of God within our humanity. Freedom is found through becoming captive to life in Christ. It is the antithesis of individual, self-determination. Freedom is not the same as personal anarchy. Freedom is rooted in conformity to the Embodied Instructions of God’s Word, enabled in the light of His Transforming Presence and found in a community constructed under the rule of God.

3.5    Inclusion

In the narrative of God’s saving acts, God reaches to people in saving grace in a way that precedes His calling of people into His community. God reaches to us with the reality of His transforming presence and then draws us to Himself. He reaches out and, through our willing participation in dying to self and entering the resurrected life of Christ, as symbolised in believer’s baptism, draws us to acknowledge the Embodied Instruction expressed through Constructive Community.