The (Hellish) Judgment of God

How to Hear the Voice of God

The Will of God Ep. 4. This week we discuss how we can hear the voice of God. Bonhoeffer is convinced that the primary and the orienting way God speaks directly to us is through preaching. He writes: Proclamation is the specific mandate given to the church. God wants a place at which, until the end of the world, God’s word is again and again spoken, pronounced, delivered, expounded, and spread. The Word that in Jesus Christ came from heaven wants to come again in the form of human speech [in the sermon]…In this word God wills to be personally present. In the church God is determined to speak in person. Karl Barth, one of Bonhoeffer’s teachers, says that the logic of preaching is the logic of incarnation. Christ is both fully God and fully human in one person. So it is with the sermon. The sermon is both a purely human word but also a purely divine word. Why? Because Christ promises to bear the word of the sermon. Bonhoeffer will say that in the preached word “Christ steps into the congregation.” Elsewhere he says that “Christ is the sermon.” The human preacher is not cancelled out or obliterated by this divine activity. Think of the burning bush. The humble bramble is on fire with the fire of God but it is not consumed. Or think of the sacraments. Just as the bread remains bread and the wine remains wine while also becoming the body and blood of Christ, so does the sermon remain a completely human word, but also becomes the word of God by God’s grace. The speaking of the sermon is only half the work of preaching. There is also the hearing of the sermon. Jesus Christ is responsible for both. This is why the sermon is not a performance, but an act of God in his mercy. But, as Bonhoeffer says, we have lost the sermon. We do not equip or ready ourselves for what it actually is: the living God coming to speak to you personally through the proclamation. We as the people of God need to understand that each Sunday the pastor is preaching the word Christ has given to him or her to preach and we need to be listening specifically for what Christ is asking of us. St. Augustine says it perfectly: For we have Christ, the teacher within. When anything comes to your ears from my lips that you are not able to take in turn within your heart to the one who is both teaching me what to say and distributing understanding among you as he thinks fit. He knows what he has to give and who he is giving it to and so will present himself to the one who asks and open to the one who knocks. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com [https://cameroncombs.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Knowing the Will of God for Your Life

The Will of God Ep. 3. This week we discuss knowing the will of God for our lives. God’s will is not a secret. God has revealed it and wants us to know it and do it. We discuss the difference between abstract, universal moral principles and the concrete commandment of God and we looked at the life of Bonhoeffer as an example. Here are a few quotes that cut to the quick of the class: Bonhoeffer on knowing the will of God: [Meditating on Ps. 119:19 “Do not hide your commandments from me.”] There is no doubt: God has given his commandments for us to know and we have no excuse, as if we did not know the will of God. God does not allow us to live in irresolvable conflicts; he does not turn our lives into ethical tragedies; rather, he lets us know his will, demands its fulfillment, and punishes disobedience. Things here are much easier than we like. Our distress is not that we do not know God’s commandments but that we don’t do them—and that as a result of such disobedience, we are gradually unable to recognize them. It is said here not that God hides his commandments but: God is beseeched for the grace not to hide his commandments. It is within God’s freedom and wisdom to deny us the grace of his commandment; then, however, there is for us not resignation but far more the urgent and persistent prayer: “Do not hide your commandments from me.” Bonhoeffer on the specificity, clarity, and concreteness of God’s commandment: God’s commandment is God’s speech to human beings. Both in its content and in its form, it is concrete speech to concrete human beings. God’s commandment leaves human beings no room for application and interpretation, but only for obedience or disobedience. God’s commandment cannot be found and known apart from time and place; indeed, it can only be heard by one who is bound to a specific place and time. God’s commandment is either utterly specific, clear, and concrete or it is not God’s commandment. Just as specifically as God spoke to Abraham and Jacob and Moses, and just as specifically as God spoke in Jesus Christ to the disciples, and to the congregations through the apostles, so God speaks just as specifically to us, or God does not speak at all. Karl Barth on the definiteness of the divine command: In [Genesis and Exodus] there is no such thing as a general rule which can be debated and needs to be filled out in its application. …And, again [in the Gospel of Matthew], it is the case that those who want religious ethical principles will find nothing here, but will have to turn to the other words of Jesus which seem to be more pregnant in this respect. Yet if they do they turn away from the living and acting person of Jesus Himself which is the content of the Gospel. They overlook the fact that we can best learn what the commanding of Jesus means at this point where we are so unequivocally confronted by his sovereignty, where he himself and his will take the place of every universal precept, and where we see him make this very definite use of his sovereignty. This is what happens when Jesus commands. …In the command of God we are face to face with the person of God, with the action and revelation of this person, with God himself. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com [https://cameroncombs.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Becoming a Mother of God

The Will of God Ep. 2. A catena on the birth of God in each person: Meister Eckhart: Here, in time, we are celebrating the eternal birth which God the Father bore and bears unceasingly in eternity, because this same birth is now born in time, in human nature. St. Augustine says, “What does it avail me that this birth is always happening, if it does not happen in me? That it should happen in me is what matters.” We shall therefore speak of this birth, of how it may take place in us. Matthew Fox, riffing on Eckhart: What good is it to me if Mary gave birth to the Son of God 1400 years ago and I do not give birth to the Son of God in my own person and time and culture? . . . We are all meant to be mothers of God. Volker Leppin on the theology of the German mystic Johannes Tauler: Isaiah 9: “For a child has been born for us, a song given to us.” Tauler explains this verse with a three-fold hermeneutic. The biblical text initially speaks of the intra-Trinitarian birth of the Son through the Father, secondly of the historical birth of Jesus in time [to Mary]…and thirdly of the birth of God in the soul of a faithful person. Maximus the Confessor: The mother of the Word is the true and unsullied faith. Just as the Word, who, as God, is by nature the creator of His mother who gave birth to Him according to the flesh, and made her His mother out of love for mankind, and accepted to be born from her as man, so too the Word first creates faith within us, and then becomes the son of that faith, from which He is embodied through the practice of the virtues. Jordan Daniel Wood, commenting on Maximus: This is our adoption, how we become God’s children. As it was in the historical Incarnation, the Holy Spirit, who dwells perichoretically (wholly) in the Son, is ‘the one creating’ the Son’s birth in and as us. Maximus again: Christ is always born mysteriously and willingly, becoming incarnate in those who are saved. He causes the soul which begets him to be a virgin-mother. Dietrich Bonhoeffer: We can and should speak not about what the good is, can be, or should be for each and every time, but about how Christ may take form among us today and here. Bonhoeffer again: The will of God is nothing other than the realization of the Christ-reality among us and in our world. The will of God is therefore not an idea that demands to be realized; it is itself already reality in the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ. The will of God is…a reality that wills to become real ever anew in what exists and against what exists. The will of God has already been fulfilled by God, in reconciling the world to himself in Christ. To disregard the reality of this fulfillment and to set a fulfillment of one’s own in its place would be the most dangerous relapse into abstract thinking. Since the appearance of Christ, ethics can be concerned with only one thing: to partake in the reality of the fulfilled will of God. Chris Green: When the world as you know it starts to crumble…you need to understand that it’s just a birth pang, it’s just a contraction. God is being born…God wants to be born right here, right now—in your life and in mine, in your family and in mine, in this city, in our schools, in our children’s lives, in the lives of our neighbors—God is ready to be born…You need to remember that when everything is going wrong it’s just that Christ is crowning, and have hope. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com [https://cameroncombs.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

God Is (Not) in Control

The Will of God Ep. 1 Here is an excerpt from Chris Green’s Surprised by God [https://a.co/d/021IkHdj] that not only cuts to the heart of what we discussed in class, but is the genesis for all my thoughts on the matter: “In many ways, our move toward a mature grasp of the truth begins in the recognition that God is not in control of what happens in the world, and that all that we experience in this world is at best an incomplete realization of God’s will for us. Perhaps we want to think God is in control because of our own fantasies for control or our own anxieties of being controlled. Regardless, we have to come to terms with the fact that God is not in control–even as we confess in faith that God is sovereign… “[S]overeignty is utterly other than what we have known as control. Control makes something act in ways false to itself. It violates, overpowers, coerces, masters. Control takes away freedom, forcing someone or something to do what is against its own nature or will. And God, as creator, simply does not–and indeed, cannot–do that kind of violence. God gives being to creatures, affording them their freedom, their integrity. To say that God is sovereign is to say that God does not need control to get his will done. He does not have to destroy our freedom to express his own; he does not have to subjugate us to make himself known as Lord. God’s sovereignty is such that his freedom is not at odds with our freedom, and his Lordship does not subjugate but frees and empowers and fulfills. Creatures overpower; God reigns. And that reign is absolutely identical with God’s love… “Luther said that if all we had to go on was our experience of the world, we would have to conclude either that God does not exist or that God is evil. But by faith we see more than our experience of the world: we see God, and hear his promises to set all wrongs right. Until the end, therefore, when God’s will is finally fully done, we have to maintain a distinction between what happens and what God is doing, trusting that nothing happens apart from God’s will but that not everyuthing that happens is itself God’s will. Or to say the same thing another way, everything that happens takes place within the will of God but not everything that happens is the will of God. What is more, nothing that happens is God’s will in fullness. Whatever happens, then, and whatever GOd does, we are left waiting for the fullness of God’s action, and so we pray, even after GOd has acted, “Let your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt 6:10)… [Tragic events need not be said to be “the will of God,” as if God planned for this tragedy to happen just like so.] “It is best, I think, to say that [tragic events take] place not as the will of God, but within the unfolding of that will of God. Difficult as it is to imagine, [those moments] remain open to the will of God—God even now is still active then and there, in a time closed to us as past. Hence, we must patiently endure until God’s will is finally, fully done. And when that will is done, then we will see that God indeed is good… “In history, God has not yet acted fully–except in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. IN him, we have seen already what we do not yet see anywhere else for anyone else. As the writer of Hebrews says: ‘Now in subjecting all things to [human beings, as promised in Psalm 8], God left nothing outside their control. AS it is, we do not yet see everything in subjection to them, but we do see Jesus’ (Heb. 2:8-9a). That is, we do not see human beings in their rightful, promised place. WE do not see the world set right. But our hope is that what has already happened to Jesus, what is already true for him as the Last Adam and the head of new creation, will be true of us too in the end. We believe that God already has done everything God can do for Jesus, but not yet for us—and so we live by faith and not by sight… “Whatever happens to us, whatever comes or goes in our experience, good or bad, fortunate or unfortunate, we can know God is not through being God yet, not through doing what he eternally purposes to do, and when God’s will is finally fully done, all things will be made right…When God is all in all, everyone will know what we see already not by sight but by faith. In the meantime, we remain faithful, hoping against hope in a God for whom all things are possible and in whom all things not only have their beginning but also their rightful and joyous end.” (Surprised by God, pp. 39-44) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com [https://cameroncombs.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Jesus and the God of the Old Testament

The Joseph Story Ep. 7. In lieu of a write-up of the class I’ll leave you with a couple of quotations. The first, from St. Maximus the Confessor, which framed our discussion. The second, from Chris Green’s Sanctifying Interpretation, which was the primary source for the entire class. St. Maximus the Confessor: “In consequence, it is necessary for him who seeks God piously not to latch on to a phrase, lest, instead of God, he unknowingly receive things about God; that is, because he is dangerously devoted to the words of Scripture instead of to the Word, the Word flees the mind which thought it had taken hold of the bodiless Word by his garments, indeed, much like the Egyptian woman who did not take hold of Joseph, but of his clothes instead…” Chris Green: “What are we to do with these [hard] passages? … One [approach] which is essentially Patristic, and which I think also fits with the best of Pentecostal interpretations. It insists that there is a spiritual sense to every text, and that we must press past the literal sense, ‘the letter,’ to grasp or be grasped by ‘the spirit.’ Read this way, the violence in the OT actually means something besides what it seems to mean at the literal level. Origen, for example, argues that the calls for Israel to wipe out the people of the land as described in Joshua are a parabolic way of calling for the churches to put to death their sinful appetites. In his own words, ‘a kingdom of sin was in every one of us before we believed. But afterwards, Jesus came and struck down all the kings who possessed kingdoms of sin in us, and he ordered us to destroy all those kings and to leave none of them.’ And he concludes: ‘Unless [Israel’s] physical wars bore the figure of spiritual wars, I do not think the books of Jewish history would ever have been handed down by the apostles to the disciples of Christ, who came to teach peace, so that they could be read in the churches’ (Origen, Homilies on Joshua 15). “These passages] do, of course, put us as readers in a difficult place…The good news is that God means to put us in that difficult place. “God uses the Scripture to overthrow our false conceptions of God. Paul was deeply committed to the Scriptures before he encountered Jesus on the road outside Damascus. But after that encounter, he was differently and more faithfully biblical, because he saw God differently—in the face of the resurrected crucified Jesus of Nazareth. “For most of us…the most difficult are the ‘texts of terror’ that characterize God as vindictive, bloodthristly, malevolent. The God we think we find in the OT is difficult to stomach, never mind adore. What are we to do in the face of these difficulties? We cannot ignore them, or dismiss them by using Jesus’ ethic as a trump card, playing the NT off against the OT. And we cannot explain these difficulties away by saying the OT texts merely witness to an earlier phase of God’s self-revelation and the moral development of God’s people. According to Jesus’ own teaching, how we read the OT is itself God’s judgment of us. The OT is nothing other than Jesus’ testimony, the Spirit’s prophecy (Rev. 19:10); therefore, to refuse Moses’ witness is to turn away from Christ. But to receive that testimony faithfully is to be indwelt by the Word that glorifies us with God’s own glory (Jn 5:36-47)… That is well and good, you might say, but how should it determine our reading of horrifying texts? We must begin, I believe, with a clarification, distinguishing the God who inspires and interprets the OT texts from the one described in the texts themselves. The inspiring, interpreting God is of course the Triune God revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Nazarene. But the narrated God, the God who is a character in the biblical stories God has inspired, is sometimes an entirely or almost entirely false image of the true God. In the Scriptures, God humbly takes on the guise of a character, one character among others—sometimes even a bad, or at least conflicted, one. As Rowan Williams argues, one way of understanding Scripture is as ‘a parable or a whole series of parables’ in which God says of himself: ‘This is how people heard me, saw me, responded to me; this is the gift I gave them; this is the response they made,’ requiring us to respond in kind (Williams, Being Christian, p. 28). I would say it just a bit differently than Williams does. In the ‘parables’ of the OT, God is not reporting to us how people understood and misunderstood his ways then and there. Instead, God is is here and now putting us to the test by describing himself at least somewhat misleadingly. ‘Everything written long ago was written to teach us’ (Rom. 15:4)… “If what I have just been describing seems too strange to believe, take a moment to consider the way Jesus taught and how people responded to his teaching, The Evangelists show us that he spoke mostly in parables, riddles, and symbolic acts, and read the Scriptures subversively and troubled traditional practices. In response, some of his contemporaries think they have understood him when they in fact have not. Others, like the rich young ruler (Mt. 19.16-22), understand him just well enough to be enraged or saddened by what he has said. A few are intrigued enough to follow him in spite of their lack of understanding. Most are left in complete bafflement. To make matters stranger, Jesus tells us that he intended such responses: ‘I speak in parables, so that ‘looking they may not perceive, and listening they may not understand’ (Lk. 8:10). Why would he do that? Rickie Moore offers what I take to be the pathbreaking insight: ‘Jesus told parables for one reason: in order to ‘throw’ people. Jesus threw people for one reason: in order that they might be broken. And Jesus became the wildest parable of all when He became broken. Everybody was thrown by that.’ Here, then, is the critical point. The same Jesus whom we find teaching in the Gospels is the Word who speaks in Scripture. And his pedagogy remains the same. He continues to tell parables, and for the same reason. He means to throw us, too.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com [https://cameroncombs.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]