In this meta-series, we have been exploring the question of whether we (and God) can or should forgive someone when they have not repented. This time around, we are going to turn our attention to some difficult pastoral situations and ask how they work when we hold that forgiveness can only take place when there has been repentance. (more…)
Archives: mark-baddeley
Forgiveness and repentance (part 2): Forgive as Christ in God forgave us
Thought
(Read part 1.)
As we head into the issue of whether we should or even can forgive someone who has sinned against us but hasn’t repented, let’s begin with one of the key principles that people raised in our first post—that we forgive others as God in Christ forgave us. As it is stated in Colossians 3:13, we are to put on compassionate hearts, kindness, humility and so on while “bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive”. (more…)
Forgiveness and repentance (part 1): A survey of the landscape
Thought
Many moons ago, my wife wrote a post on forgiveness. One of the issues that it raised for people was whether forgiveness could take place in the absence of repentance by the offender. My dear wife kindly semi-promised people that I would one day blog on the topic :). So here we are, with a series of posts designed to unpick why I am convinced that forgiveness must take place in the absence of repentance and that this issue goes to the heart of a Reformed understanding of the biblical gospel. (more…)
Interchange: The God who meets our needs and his Son, the perfect saviour
Thought
David McKay has raised two important issues about the idea of an impassible God that, I think, would naturally occur to many people confronted with the idea. And so we’re going to bump one of Martin Shields’s excellent concerns out in order to highlight another excellent issue raised by David:
One question I have is about the incarnation and exaltation of Jesus. I understand that one of the wonderful benefits of Jesus’ incarnation and exaltation is that God became Man and that Jesus remains forever an exalted Man. He is God but he is truly human. One of the things I take from Hebrews is that we have a great high priest who is a perfect man who is interceding for us. It is nice to know that he had the experience of being a man like us. He suffered and was tempted like us, but he was triumphant over all this suffering and temptation. He never sinned.
But I would have thought that it is important to know that he still feels for us now as an exalted Man. Has he retreated from sharing truly in our experiences and become impassible again? The more I think about it, the more this doctrine makes God to be cold and unfeeling.
Interchange: When God uses a word, it means what it says
Thought
Martin Shields’s second point is, in my view, the most important of all. He argues that God is no Humpty Dumpty from Through the Looking Glass:
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
(Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, Macmillan, London, 1871, chapter 6.)
Most of us agree with Alice that large anthropomorphic eggs sitting on walls don’t get to use words with completely different meanings. Words mean what they mean. And that’s Martin Shields’s second great concern:
Interchange: Keep your theological frameworks out of my reading of the Bible
Thought
Martin Shields offered a series of very thoughtful concerns in response to the last post in my series on impassibility. In the process, he raised a bunch of key issues to do with how we read the Bible. His concerns are profoundly important questions that affect far more than the issue of impassibility. So I’m going to offer in these four posts what I think is at stake in Martin Shields’s concerns and why I disagree with him in the hope that the debate might stimulate all of us forward as we live in the knowledge of God.
The God of love (3): Impassibility and the possibility of a good law
Thought
We have been turning our attention to the question of whether God is impassible—that is, that God is in no way affected by the creatures he has made, and cannot die or suffer. Last time around, we explored how impassibility was a key element in the early Christian understanding of creation—that God made everything from nothing, and did so as a free choice out of pure goodness. This time around, we turn our attention to God’s law. (more…)
The God of love (2): Impassibility and the possibility of a loving creator
Thought
(Read part 1.)
We have been looking at the question of whether God is impassible—whether God is ever the object of other people’s actions or only ever the subject of his own—whether he moves others but is never moved by them. As I suggested last time, this often raises the question for people of whether God has emotions—whether God is moved by what happens to us, good or bad. As it seems to us fairly obvious that God has to have emotions to be able to love, the notion that God is impassible is a prime contender for the ‘Most Unbiblical Abstract Philosophizing Award’. We just know that emotions are everything.
(more…)
The God of love (1): Star Trek and the impossibility of impassibility
Thought
Spock vs. Data
Star Trek, in all its reincarnations, is a great show. It is so pretentious in its aspirations to say something meaningful and so inane in its working assumptions, that it works as an almost perfect mirror of the values and concerns of the society that existed when it was televised. The highly evolved and civilized Federation of the future almost always reflects the concerns of the slightly left-of-centre-leaning portion of North American society who were the target of the show’s producers. The ‘Federation’ is simply ‘the Democratic Party writ large’. And so the show acts like a great expression of the cultural intuitions of the societies to which we belong and live and minister in. (more…)
Dos and don’ts when dealing with the downcast
Life
I have been talking with a long-term friend of mine in recent weeks. He’s a believer, who has had a harder-than-average road to walk. That, combined with some bad Christian teaching and an inherent susceptibility, has finally created a perfect storm of mental ill health.
The thing that surprised me when talking to him recently is that as he begins the process of recovering from a depressive/anxiety breakdown, he has had to avoid his Christian friends and family. The reason? They care. And in their care, they inevitably call on him to trust God, to look to God, to place himself in God’s hands or the like. They can’t avoid exhorting him to stir up his faith, however “softly, softly” they venture it.
The problem? His world is little more than darkness without any reasonable possibility of improvement. He is overwhelmed with burdens that seem silly to anyone not him, but to him, they are the fixed compass of his universe. He is barely standing up under the weight of just being himself.
But add an exhortation to do something to that load—especially one like “trust God”—and you have far more than a single straw to break the camel’s back. You have essentially made brick from that straw and hurled it onto the load. You have given him one more thing—and it’s a critical thing at that—to whip himself with as he judges himself to not be trusting God.
Self-knowledge for godliness and ministry (Part 6)
Life
Self-knowledge for godliness and ministry (Part 5)
Life
Jennie and I have been discussing personality theories as a worked example of pursuing self knowledge in the service of godliness and ministry. Jennie has discussed some of what they offer, and in my last post, I discussed two interlinked possible problems they can create: justifying sin in ourselves or others. Over the next two posts, we turn to two more related weaknesses—weaknesses arising from over-valuing the insight that personality tests might offer.
Self-knowledge for godliness and ministry (Part 4)
Life
Jennie and I are pursuing a series on self-knowledge in the context of godliness and ministry, and we have been looking at personality tests as a kind of ‘idiot’s guide’ example—a way to begin cultivating the kinds of non-biblical (but not anti-biblical) knowledge and thinking that will promote a good understanding of ourselves. Last time around, Jennie looked at some of the strengths of such tests—the kind of issues they can flag for us, and hence the kind of resources they can offer.
However, it is one of the perennial features of sinners like us that there is no gift that God gives, however powerfully good or however prosaic, that we cannot pervert and turn into fuel for further sin. And personality theories, like more serious psychology in general, often generate certain characteristic abuses of what is offered. These are the weaknesses of personality theories, and without a serious engagement with the problems inherent to personality theory, one cannot use the tool properly; one has to understand the limitations and problems, as well as what it can do, to have any chance of using it in the service of the glory of God.
So over my next couple of posts, here are a bunch of weaknesses to do with personality theories—again, not an exhaustive list, but a list designed to prompt the kind of thinking that makes us self-aware about the limitations to the self-awareness that such tests can offer.
Self-knowledge for godliness and ministry (Part 2)
Pastoral Ministry
I’ve argued in a previous post that self-knowledge is critical for anyone who is serious about pursuing godliness and serving others. It is the junior partner to the knowledge of God, but it is still essential. As I stated there, the basic reason for this conviction is theological. However, I also think that self-knowledge is important because of observation. Over the years, I have witnessed people come unstuck, and it often appeared to me that many of these cases were because they didn’t have a good understanding of themselves.
Self-knowledge, godliness and ministry (Part 1)
Pastoral Ministry
I have come to the point where I think self-knowledge is one of the great overlooked virtues in the path to godliness and effective ministry.