Luminescence, Volume 2: The Sermons of C.K. and Fred Barrett

By C. K. Barrett, Fred Barrett and Ben Witherington III

What is found in this series, unveils an entirely different side of C.K. Barrett, a side one might never have known about if one had knowledge only of his famous commentaries and monographs. Herein lies a goodly selection of Kingsley's sermons preached largely in small- and medium-sized Methodist churches in the Northeast of England, though often elsewhere in England and around the world.
 
Fred Barrett was not the scholar his son was, but on close inspection, one can most definitely see the impact of the father on the son when it came to preaching. It seems right to include as many sermons from both of these men as we can in this series. One thing sorely lacking in much preaching these days is in-depth engagement with both the biblical text and one's tradition and theology. The sermons in these volumes demonstrate what such preaching can look like. While the first volume presented sermons on the Gospels and Acts, this second volume covers the rest of the New Testament and extensive portions of the Old Testament.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Aug 9, 2017
• ISBN: 9781498240536

C. K. Barrett

Charles Kingsley Barrett (4 May 1917-26 August 2011) was a distinguished biblical scholar. He served as Professor of Divinity at the University of Durham and wrote commentaries on the Acts of the Apostles, John, Romans, and 1 and 2 Corinthians.   Fred Barrett (28 October 1880-25 December 1957) was a well-known United Methodist minister and evangelist, serving in many parts of England.   Ben Witherington III is Amos professor of New Testament for Doctoral Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary and doctoral faculty at St. Andrews University. He is the author of numerous books, including New Testament Rhetoric (Cascade, 2009) and, with Julie Noelle Hare, The Living Legacy (Wipf and Stock, 2009).

Book preview

SERMONS ON THE LETTERS OF PAUL¹

1. Editor’s Note: There are, not surprisingly, so many sermons that CKB composed and delivered on the Pauline letters, that it was quite impossible to include them all in this collection whereas there are much fewer sermons on the General Epistles and Revelation and we were able to include all of those. There was room also for the vast majority of the OT sermons.

THE GOSPEL REVEALED—Romans 1.16–17

[Preached seven times from

5

/

25

/

03

at Bishop Auckland to

1

/

20

/

08

at Witton Gilbert]²

There is no greater text in the Bible, and I had the cheek to make on it the first sermon I ever preached. I have it still; it is tucked away at the back of a drawer in my study. But you need not worry, I am not resurrecting it today. In the last sixty odd years I have, I think, learned a thing or two about the world, and life, and myself, and other people, and about goodness and badness, about mercy and truth. But you may well think I have not lost all my cheek.

If you and I did not belong to a godless, profane, secular society the text might well lead us into the same hell that it gave the young Martin Luther, five hundred years ago. The Gospel in which God’s righteousness is revealed. But that is no Gospel, no good news. Luther knew the meaning of the words. He had been brought up on Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher, one of whose virtues was that he never said anything without carefully defining the words he used. He could tell you what righteousness, justice meant. Cutting a long story short, and simplifying a good deal, it is plain common sense that we all accept. Justice means giving every person their due. If he does well, he gets a reward, if he has done ill, he gets a punishment. We still expect to see this kind of justice done, and complain if it is not done. But now the court is not the Old Bailey, the court is God’s court. And here Luther knew that while he was as good as most folk, he was not good enough. Had he, and had I, loved God with all his heart, and soul and mind and strength? Had he, and had I, loved his neighbor as himself? Always? No. So righteousness could only say guilty, and pack us off to where the guilty go.

It was the Psalms that cracked the Pauline nut. First, by making it worse. Free me by thy righteousness, Nazarene! But the Psalms were the source of the words Jesus quoted on the Cross, my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? If Luther knew God forsakenness, so did Jesus. He had taken it for me. So Aristotle was wrong, at least as far as God was concerned. God’s righteousness is not a matter of handing out the punishments we all deserve. For God, it means putting things right, especially putting right the wrong relation that exists between us and God. That is where we can move on and take the next step. In the Gospel God reveals his power to put wrong things right, in particular wrong people into the right relationship with himself. Because of this, the Gospel is the power of God leading to salvation.

SALVATION

Nothing can work properly if it is out of the proper relationship with its Maker. Years ago now, so long ago I had almost forgotten it, I was talking to Conrad Eden, the great organist of Durham Cathedral. He told me that stacked away somewhere in the Cathedral archives was a quality of fine music written by earlier generations of cathedral organists. He would have loved to have played it, and to get the choir to sing it. But he couldn’t do it. The music was written on scraps of paper and no one could put them together. Here was a line for the tenors to sing; here was one for the altos, but they didn’t fit. They didn’t belong together. And (though I suppose someone may have succeeded since) up to that time, no one had been able to bring them together in harmony. One man could have done it, the composer. He knew what it should all sound like. The harmony was singing in his head. But he was not available, his creation was out of touch.

Creation is wonderful, however you think it happened, whether in seven days or with a Big Bang. Nothing is more wonderful than the creation of the human race. And somehow the human race has got it all wrong. Wasn’t the Garden of Eden somewhere in Iraq? What a story for the history books, or tabloids. The story of Eden is right at least in this: what went wrong was sin, and sin meant the rupture of the relations between the Maker and the thing made. I hid myself because I was naked. The point is not, Because I found out that my wife and I are sexual beings. It means because I sinned, because I disobeyed, because I ate of the tree which you forbade me to touch. Breakdown of relations, hence suffering and sweat for the man, suffering and subordination for the woman, and death for both.

How this chaotic state of human affairs reveals itself in practice I shall not attempt to describe, partly because we lack the time and partly because you know it already. You read the papers, you watch the news on television, you hear it on the radio. I expect the Garden of Eden has been well and truly blown up by now. And I have said it so often, and so many other people have said it so much better than I have. It is the story of Jesus. If we are, not to sum it up, but at least to stretch out a pointing finger in the right direction, I begin and end with the death cry I have already quoted from Luther. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken Me? The one person God could not justly forsake, felt bitterly the forsakenness that we in our insensitivity will sometimes shrug off. And he bore it for us, entering our hell so that we might recover heaven.

All the images human beings have used to describe this event are faulty for it is unique. There is nothing like it. I think sometimes of a medicinal tablet that you throw into a glass of water. It sinks to the bottom and in effervescing it disintegrates, but the health-giving, life-giving properties of the medicine permeate the whole glass full of water. You drink it and it heals. Christ too sank to the bottom of life, touched the very bass string of humanity. And so the human creation is cleansed. Sounds like a conjuring trick, does it? But wait. The rich text has another word for us faith.

FAITH

The power of God unto salvation for everyone who believes (that is, has faith). Therein is revealed a righteousness of God by faith unto faith (that is faith all along the line, from beginning to end). Only believe? It sounds easy, easy enough to mock. So for example Bernard Shaw. I haven’t read it for decades and I am not sure in which of the prefaces you will find it, and I am bound to quote from memory. But he says ‘the Reformation, with its doctrine of by faith alone, was a triumph of cheapness. Saved at the cost of a credo and a penny in the plate.’

Remarkable, isn’t it, how an intelligent person can read a plain text and get it wrong? But perhaps he wanted to get it wrong. Henry Drummond had a better picture of the matter. He was asked once to speak to the members of an expensive and exclusive London club. He began his address: The entrance fee to the Kingdom of God is—nothing. The annual subscription is all you have.

Faith means freedom all the way through, and in more ways than one. It begins, as the New Testament tells us, as a gift from God. There is no other way it can begin. The trouble with God’s human creation is that we have cut ourselves adrift from God. We want to go our own way, not his. We want to go under our own steam, responsible to no one but ourselves, unwilling to place ourselves under an obligation by discovering all the strength that God supplies. And if we sense something is wrong and want to put it right, we draw on our own strength to do so and make our own existence more self-centered than ever.

The only way forward is to accept God’s gift, knowing that it can never be anything but a gift, that we can never deserve it nor find the resources to buy it. We must accept God’s gift of faith and go on accepting it. Faith is always a gift, always free; we never have it by right. I said that faith is freedom all the way through. It is. It starts and continues as a gift and it sets us free, free from fear, from anxiety, from habit; free from ourselves. That means it sets us free for creative service.

I started with Luther. Let us have him again in the greatest Christian epigram that ever he uttered: A Christian is a free lord over everything, and subject to no one. A Christian is a menial servant of everything and subject to everyone. He is free through faith, a servant through love. The same faith that sets him free manifests itself only in universal love. There is far more to say in this greatest of texts, but time allows for only this—the Gospel is for all.

THE GOSPEL IS FOR ALL

Paul has his own way of putting it here, and we shall have to find ours. Paul’s world was made up (so most people would have said) of ordinary normal people, and of Jews. Of course they, in truth, were normal too. But everyone knew they were odd. They had their own religion which was different, their own laws and customs, their own fierce nationalism which prevented them from sharing fully in the almost universal civilization of the Greco-Roman world. The Gospel began amongst them, for Jesus was a Jew. So, to the Jew first. But Paul adds at once, but also to the Greek meaning by that non-Jews. So that was everyone. The good news for all. What Paul says and the way he said it is still important, but guided by it, we can put it differently. The Gospel is for all—for the naturally religious and for the naturally irreligious.

•

2. Editor’s Note: This is one of the latest sermons composed by CKB, in

2003

and one of the later ones to be preached as well. This is appropriate, for as Kingsley says, the first sermon he ever preached, as a teen, was on this text. This sermon is not a revision of that one, but rather a fresh take on that key text.

‘THE ADVANTAGE OF THE JEW"—Romans 3.1–2

[Preached fourteen times from

10

/

7

/

51

at Wesley Memorial Lowfell to

5

/

28

/

80

at Thornley]

Do not at once dismiss this text as an academic answer to an antiquated question. If you only take the trouble to transfer it into our own idiom you will find that the question is the most relevant one we could ask on a Sunday morning in the mid-twentieth century. What advantage has the Jew? asks St. Paul speaking of the elect and privileged people of God. In this year of our Lord we ask—What good is it to be a Church member? Well you are one; what good is it? Do you know? Do you care? Could you explain it to anyone else? I don’t think we can afford to despise St. Paul’s assistance in finding an answer. But we must first consider how and why the question came to be asked.

HOW AND WHY THE QUESTION CAME TO BE ASKED

You will not understand the question if you do not know what is contained in the first few chapters of this epistle. The first chapter must have given a good deal of pleasure to many of Paul’s Jewish friends. It was the kind of thing they liked. Look at the Gentile world says St. Paul. Take idolatry. Here are people living in a world God has made and instead of worshipping the Creator, they pass him by to worship his creation—humans, birds, four-footed beasts, creeping things. Can you wonder at the consequences that follow from this original offense? Wonder that they are filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness? That they turn to lying, murder, adultery and sodomy? Can you wonder that the whole of life goes wrong when its starting point is wrong? So far so good; but the Jew gets a bad shock in chapter 2.

Are you any better? With all your privileges and advantages are you ahead of the Gentiles? You who boast in the Law and suppose that in it you have the very truth of God himself visible before your eyes; do you not earn greater condemnation? I know you don’t worship a cat or a snake, but do you not do a far more dreadful thing? Do you not worship yourself? In other words, these things being so, and here we come to our question—What is the good of being a Jew?

Now just as Paul pleased the Jews so it is possible to please a Methodist congregation today. I say that in no critical spirit; every preacher knows that it is true. You can go the round of the things that Methodists do not like. Take drink. There is plenty to talk about there. Think of the colossal expenditure, the ruined health, the broken homes, men turned into beasts and some into devils, and children into frightened beaten urchins. Think of gambling. Think of the average weekly budget on the pools. Think of the perversion of thought that turns little words into a combination of providence and fairy godmother, of the demoralizing search for something for nothing. Take sex in all its twists and follies and perversions, from the divorce courts to the filthy words and pictures scribbled in the street and public lavatories.

Of course it is always easy and popular to talk about these things. But I wish Methodists would always read Romans 2 as well as Romans 1. Let us paraphrase it. But suppose you are called a Methodist, and rely upon Methodist law and discipline and are confident in the God who warmed John Wesley’s heart and are quite sure you are appointed by God to tell the world about drink and all the rest of it. Tell me, do you ever dishonor God yourself? As his self-appointed champion do you never let him down? Do you not find at the very heart of your religion a core of self-seeking? Do you never preen yourself on being a bit better than other people? God I thank thee that I am not as other persons are—drunkards, gamblers, adulterers, or even as this my neighbor who is now in his garden while I am at Church.

I am sure no one will misunderstand me. I am not defending drunkenness, gambling, and fornication. I am not saying the Church is full of hypocrites and knaves. I am only trying to take sin as seriously, and to see it as inwardly, as does St. Paul. Church membership, if it means no more than having your name in a book and one class ticket means no more than being born a Jew. Church-going, as far as it become mechanical, means no more than circumcision. The Church member is assailed by temptation as much as anyone else. His sins are not so gross, but they can be as devastating in their effects, witness the crass materialism of Methodists who will not for the sake of Christ and the Church part with so much bricks and mortar. Now if all this is true, what is the advantage of the Jew? What is the good of being a Church member? Why should we remain within the structure of organized religion? Paul’s answer is clear, and if he doesn’t get beyond his firstly, it is because the firstly is so important. The Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God. The Church is the place where the Bible is read and preached and where the sacraments of the Word are distributed. There now remain two further things to say.

THE NEGATIVE ADVANTAGE OF THE BIBLE

Given the Bible, you know where you are, and you know which roads are blind alleys. The Bible is the map of life, not in the sense that it gives you a ready-made commandment for every conceivable set of circumstances—that notoriously it does not do. For example, it does not tell you which way to vote on ballots. It is a map in the sense that you can check your position on the sea of life. The Jew is not necessarily a better person than a Gentile, indeed he may be worse, because his temptations are more subtle; the dutiful member is not necessarily a better person than the person outside the Church. His temptations are real and his sins more corrupting. But there are some things no one can say with a Bible in his hands, some excuses he can never make.

He cannot say sin doesn’t matter, it makes no difference how I live. Here is one of the vast dangers of the modern world, you can call it loosely the fallacy of puritanism. And the action itself matters. There is no absolute standard outside the action by which you can measure it or judge it. All that matters is whether you wish to do it and whether it serves your ends. It would be tedious to point out how motives of that kind prevail in the policies of great nations. It might be not uninstructive to estimate the weight of such motives in any general election. How much of what is said is said not because it is true and right but because it is advantageous to me and damaging to my opponent? It is in some respects most urgent to notice how this affects our personal decisions and actions.

I remember a high bank official speaking to me once in perplexity about a bank employee who had told him that he had no motive other than expediency for being honest, that is, the only reason why he didn’t take the bank’s money, or anyone else’s, was because the odds were he would be found out and would be worse off than he would have been on his salary. How can you trust such a person? The moment he sees his opportunity, he will act because he knows no absolute standard of right and wrong, which can say, This you shall do, this you shall not do. It seems to me beyond doubt that a continued drift away from religious convictions is bound to result in the dissemination of that attitude. But you can’t think and act like that if you have the Bible. It is not for nothing that the Bible goes into detail here. You shall have a just measure and a just weight, it says. That means that somewhere there, there is something that really is a pint or really is a pound. There are such things because God intends them to be. There is a difference between good and evil because God is one, and not the other. That is the first thing. You in the Church, however you may fail, cannot say sin doesn’t matter.

Nor can he say, sin isn’t my fault. Here is another very characteristic reaction of modern life. That evil exists is something only the blindest optimist can deny. But who can blame them? Here, if we care to use labels, are two more fallacies, the economic and the psychological. The world is apt to say today, True, things are going badly wrong, but the fault lies with the economic system under which we live, the whole framework of life in which we have been brought up. Or again, the fault lies with our psychological makeup, for which we are not responsible. Because my parents were funny or neglectful or permissive or indifferent, because a cat jumped into my cot when I was six weeks old, or a schoolmate thrashed me when I was sixteen, because of these things I can’t think straight or live right. I am not for a moment saying that economic and psychological factors don’t affect life, but I am saying that you in the Church cannot hide behind these shelters from your responsibility, and that is one of your greatest advantages. You are made in the strictest and truest sense of the word a responsible person.

If we sin it is our fault, our own fault, our own most grievous fault. There can be no hiding. It is all there in the first few chapters of Genesis. The serpent deceives Eve, and Eve tempts Adam and the guilty creatures hide from God. But they cannot hide—Adam where art thou? And they cannot make excuses—Adam blames Eve, and Eve blames the serpent, when in fact they know, and God knows, they are all guilty together.

The Christian cannot say God doesn’t care. God will forgive me, that’s his job, says the skeptic. But you can’t say that. That is another thing the Bible will not allow you to say for behind the other two points lies most essential of all the fact that sin is a personal offense against God, and that its awful consequence is that it separates people from God. That is written with dreadful clarity in the first story of the Bible, to which I have already alluded. After their sin, Adam and Eve are driven out of the garden of God, and the whirling sword them away; they are outside. Nothing but righteousness will do with God. There is no way to get around his requirements. Not even the most magnificent show of religion will do. Shall I offer hundreds of animal sacrifices when only one is required? Shall I offer a vat of oil, when a pint will do? Shall I make the most costly sacrifice of all, my first born child? No, he has shown you of human being what is good. . .

The negative advantage of having the Bible, of belonging to the people of God is that it puts us in the one place where we can hear and understand the Gospel. It shows us up as sinners, persons without excuse, at whom the wrath of God is directed, who can say only, God be merciful to me, a sinner. And this leads us to the positive advantage of the Bible.

THE POSITIVE ADVANTAGE OF THE BIBLE

This is that the Bible having shut us up away from every hopeless way of escape, reduced us to despair, offers to us the one way of hope. It points us to Christ. There is not time to go into all that that implies. I shall quickly mention three hard facts before coming to the application.

1. God means that the gulf created between himself and humankind by sin should be bridged. That is one meaning of the sacrificial system of the Old Testament. It is true that the sacrifices couldn’t take away sin, but as Hebrews says they kept the sense of sin alive and more—they kept alive the hope that something more effective could be done. Why should God mock us with a slaughtered lamb if there is not a Lamb of God to bear away the sins of the world? The Bible never minimizes the gravity of sin, but it never suggests it is too big for God to handle.

2. Not only so, God himself takes the initiative in dealing with the problem. The Bible itself is not flotsam and jetsam thrust up from the surge of busy human life. It does not come up from beneath, it comes down from above. Even the punishment of the first sinners is matched with the promise of grace. Again and again God intervenes in mercy.

3. And this points forward to the assurance that in the end God will bridge the gulf. And this is where the New Testament begins and this is what the New Testament means. So that the advantage of being a Church member, of belonging to the people of God, is not that we are exempt the pains and sorrows, the temptations and sins of other people, but that we are in the place where God acts, we are able to hear when God speaks. We are under no illusions about ourselves, and therefore we can learn the truth about God. But beware: the advantage consists in nothing else. Not in our influence or tradition, not in our experience or virtues, but only in this that we are humbled before God, humbled and humiliated as no other people can be, and there and then we can hear the astounding word of his liberating grace.

•

JUSTIFICATION—Romans 3.24

[Preached twenty-seven times from

2

/

9

/

55

at Hatfield College to

11

/

5

/

00

at Cassop]

I am going to preach about justification. And I will say at once, that I know that of all the obscure technicalities of theological jargon, the word justification is the worst. Surely, you may say, "it was in process of being expelled from the language of sermons in 1904, not to speak of 1954. It is at least three syllables too long, and Latin words ending in –atio have nothing to do with the simplicity of Christ." Well, I will not contend for the word. If you can find another that better expresses the same thing, I will gratefully use it. But for the thing itself I will contend.

Luther, and the other reformers, spoke of justification by faith as the article of faith by which the Church stands or falls; and in saying so, they were true expositors of the Bible, and good theologians. You cannot have Christianity without justification. And I will add, whether or not this is relevant to a sermon, you must decide, that to me justification has made more real difference than any other thing I have ever discovered, in theology or anything else. There is only one place to begin. We must talk about judgment.

JUDGMENT

Perhaps this is to go from bad to worse, but not if you will give the matter five minutes thought. Judgment may not be a popular theme, but it is not for that reason a false or an unprofitable one. There are several ways in which you can look at the matter. Take it first simply on the level of common sense. What does a manufacturer do with the goods he produces? At this point I sat back to think of a suitable illustration, and kindly enough, a train began to steam out of Durham station. That is sufficient. Take a railway engine. Before it is allowed on the line, the boiler is tested for steam pressure, the brakes are tested, the strength of the steel in the wheels and the body work is tested. If you make anything, you test it before you put it into use, and you keep on testing to see if its fit to do its job safely and efficiently.

Or, to take a different illustration, I spend most of my time teaching. Now a university doesn’t exist for the sake of examinations, but examinations it must have. You can lecture and discuss for a time, but in the end you have to say—What have these young men and women made of it all? What have they taken in? Now if God is the Creator, and he is also the Educator of humankind, it is not unreasonable that at some time or other, he should, as it were, stops the processes of creation and education and say—How are the creatures getting on? Are they doing what I made them for? Are they learning what I am teaching? That is judgment.

Look at it another way. In the earliest days of the Old Testament, Abraham puts the question—Shall not the judge of all the earth do right? That is, if there is a city with a mix-up of good and bad people in it, will God treat them all alike? Will he blast them all with the indiscriminating destructiveness of an atomic bomb? No, say the Old Testament. God is the judge of the whole earth, and because he is, he can be relied on to behave with justice. There may be much beyond the righteous dealing of God, but the Old Testament is quite sure that you can build on that as a foundation.

But it is not the Old Testament only, the New Testament also, Jesus himself, teaches the judgment of God. The famous picture of the sheep and the goats is a New Testament picture. It is of course true that there will (according to the New Testament) be a good many surprises in the judgment, some will be astonished to find themselves in white wooly coats, and others astounded at the horns they sprout. The Queen of the South, who had wit and humility enough to listen to Solomon will come off better than the preachers and professors of theology who were too wise and self-satisfied to listen to Jesus. But—the judgment is there. Jesus does not soften the judgment, he makes it more stringent. You know the old saying, he says, thou shalt not murder, and whoever shall commit murder shall be liable to the judgment, but I tell you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be liable to the judgment.

The upshot of all this is clear. Between us and God there stands—a judgment, and there is no evading it. Human behavior is to be taken seriously. Voltaire’s saying, Le bon Dieu, me pardonnera, c’est san métier, is as fatuous a piece of rationalism as you can find. We are rebellious creatures of an Almighty God. We are sinful and we are guilty. We are not fit to be called his sons and daughters; we are not fit even to be called his servants.

If this is true, what can we do about it? Or better, what can be done about it? There is only one answer to this, the real predicament in which human beings stand. You may know better and more attractive words, if you do by all means use them, but the real substance of the answer lies in this word: justification.

JUSTIFICATION

In essence, this is a perfectly simple idea, and what must be said about it can be said very quickly. The judgment is set, and you and I stand in the dock, with God himself upon the bench. We know well in our consciences that we are guilty, that whatever punishment the Judge has in mind will not be more than we deserve. And then, instead of the sentence everyone is expecting, there is a verdict of acquittal. If you take away the stage setting in the law court, this amounts to pretty much the same thing as forgiveness, but the background of justification requires, as the background of forgiveness would not do, that the seriousness of the offense is borne in mind. That is justification. It has often been misunderstood, and I think we shall understand it better, if we look at the misunderstandings.

First, it has sometimes been said that justification is not this process of acquittal, but means God’s work in actually making people good. When they have co-operated with God’s grace and become good, then they are justified. Now of course it is true that God does this; he does make people good. Incidentally, no one has said this more strongly than Luther. Do you remember his correction of Karlstadt’s revolutionary preaching at Wittenberg? What is faith if it does not issue in love? It is a pity that Wesley, judging Luther by Lutherans, got him wrong at this point. Perhaps by now he knows what it is to be judged by Wesleyans and does not like it! This, I repeat, is true enough, but it is not justification. If you want another theological label, it is sanctification, and important as that is, it is not the foundation of the Christian life. For one thing, it does not deal with the past, for another can we seriously think that we shall ever be good enough to deserve God’s love? No; the essence of justification is that it is something that God’s love does for us while we are still sinners.

Second, it is sometimes objected that justification by faith involves a legal fiction. It means either that God pretends we are good, when we are not; or that he pretends faith is goodness, which it is not. This is calling black, white and we have a strong and very proper conviction that that is something even God has no business doing. But this is no more true than the idea that justification means making people good. Justification is a creative divine act in the field of relations. See Romans 5.10–11. The parallel with reconciliation is very instructive. The Judge does not pretend that after all, the prisoner is a pretty decent fellow. On his own, he brings him into a proper relation with himself.

May I use an old illustration to bring this out? It is the story of a headmaster interviewing a boy who has done things he ought not. In his wisdom, he decides that he will not punish the boy, and the boy, with the strong sense of justice most boys have, rejects it—I don’t want to be let off. The headmaster replies, I’m not letting you off, I’m taking you on. When God justifies us, it means that he is taking us on, as his children, his servants. He restores the proper relation between himself and us.

But this illustration will take us a stage further. What I have just described could only be done by a good headmaster, exercising a positive creative influence in his school. A weak disciplinarian could not do it. Only a person who was a positive force for righteousness could do it. That is why, in this text, Paul does not speak of justification alone but adds through the redemption that is in Jesus Christ.

THROUGH THE REDEMPTION THAT IS IN CHRIST JESUS

God’s verdict is not an off-hand pronouncement; it is the result of a mighty creative act. This is not the time to expound the Cross in detail. That needs a sermon in itself, or rather a few hundred sermons. But at least we can see in it a creative divine act, by which the moral balance of the world was changed, out of which sprung the possibility of a new relation with God. Let me say two things about it.

First, it shows, if I may put it so, that God in his school is a good disciplinarian. He pays us the compliment of taking our behavior seriously. He will never say of our sin, ‘That’s nothing, it doesn’t matter.’ I cannot subscribe to the certain narrow theories of the atonement which represent God as simply inflicting on Christ the punishment that was due to us, as if he must hit someone and didn’t mind whom he hit. Yet there is truth there; and the death of Jesus does mean that God’s doesn’t simply let our sin go by, but deals with it.

Second, the Cross shows that God acts in love, and love in the end is the only creative power we know. He loved us while we were still sinners; his was a love that sought only to give, not to get. And—see how all the ends tie up—when humans, however sinful they may be, respond in faith to love like that, God and humankind are reconciled. We are justified by grace through faith.

How easy, shallow, and perfunctory our religion is! How lightly we trifle with it! How scared we are of anything we can label ‘theology." So long as we can be respectable and conventional, and God doesn’t trouble us too much, we are content enough. Can it possibly be that a film should shake us out of our sleep? Will it make a difference if we see a fellow human being wrestling for that real peace with God which alone can release us for the work of life? At least we shall be more sober and more steadfast Christians if we know that we are justified by faith; if we recall that someday we shall have to reckon up with God our Maker; and that the Son of God died that we might be restored to the divine family.

•

FAITH AND WORKS: WESLEY AND LUTHER—Romans 5.1–11

[Preached four times from

5

/

29

/

88

at Elvet to sometime in

1993

at M.R.]

John Wesley had a problem, and he was too honest a man to pretend that it was not true. That is perhaps one difference between him and us. We are apt to sweep our personal problems under the carpet and hope that in due course they will disappear (and sometimes they do). Not Mr. Wesley. Before 1738 as well as after it, he was honest with himself; the problem would not go away. Even when he himself went to America, hoping, I suspect, not only (as he said) to convert the heathen Americans but to find a solution. There was no solution in America and he brought the problem home with him.

If you care to use Biblical language, it was the problem of faith and works; if you prefer, you can call it the problem of religion and ethics, but it was partly by thinking of it in these terms that Wesley got it wrong, and I prefer to avoid religion, as a word anyway. How do you come to terms with God, find peace with God, if we again may be biblical? By believing things, or doing things?

Wesley had tried that way of doing things. Few persons had done more. He emerged from the pious background of Epworth Rectory. Of course he would be ordained like his father, so he went to Oxford. Official Oxford was nothing like pious enough, so he found ways of making it more so, joined the Holy Club (previously founded by Charles, but led by John when he came back to Oxford in 1729) which met for study, devotion, and philanthropy. One’s first impression was that they were a crowd of quite insufferable young men; but why should they not have taken seriously what all Oxford professed to believe? And they visited the jail, and they gave sacrificially for the relief of the poor. And so it went on, across the Atlantic and back, another stream of good works.

Believing then: so far as this meant accepting the creeds there was no problem. Like a later figure in history, he would have signed not thirty-nine articles but forty if there had been another one. But was faith more than this? Some said it was, but Wesley was not impressed. It was later, I think, that he spoke of the still brethren the pietists³ who had fastened on the text be still and know that I am God and interpreted it to mean that one must not pray, receive communion, do good but just—be still. He did not trust that attitude; better surely to obey the commandments.

But what then did you do? I have continued a bit to make the point both clearly and briefly, but it was a desperately serious problem. Was there any way one could accept it with integrity? Put like that the question is one that faces many people today. Behind Wesley’s problem, we can see our own.

This was the point at which Luther came to Wesley’s help. Today someone will have to quote the famous words just once more, so let us get it done: it was on May 24th that Wesley went unwillingly to a meeting in Aldersgate Street where someone was reading Luther’s Preface to Romans.⁴ It was about 8:45 when he reached the vital passage, and from Wesley’s description there seems to be no difficulty in putting one’s finger on it. He was describing, says Wesley, the change God works in the heart by faith. Here it is:

Faith is a divine work in us, which changes us and gives us new birth from God (John

1

.

13

), and kills the old Adam, makes us new beings in heart, will, mind and all our powers and brings the Holy Spirit with it. It is a living, busy, active powerful thing is faith, so that it is impossible that it should not incessantly be doing good. It does not ask whether good works should be done; before anyone asks it has done them, and is constantly so doing. Anyone who doesn’t do such works is simply without faith.

So the answer is not my painful religious striving, but faith. And out of faith comes more works and better works because I am not using them as a means to an end, but doing them because I want to do them, because God is making it possible for me to so forget myself that I spend all my time and all my energy in serving my neighbors.

How did Luther get there? What did Wesley learn from him? The core of it is in these words of Wesley which everyone knows: I felt I did trust Christ, Christ alone, for salvation. It is the solus Christus of the Reformation. Faith can forget itself precisely because it is focused upon Christ. And it does forget itself. The piece of Wesley’s Journal that on the whole people do not remember is this—The enemy suggested, ‘this cannot be faith; for where is thy joy?’ . . . after my return home I was much buffeted by temptations. Notwithstanding Wesley’s I felt faith is not feeling but objective trust, the recognition that my fate and the world’s is not in my hands but in God’s. And there it rests, whether I am happy all the day or not.

So much, as I drafted my sermon comes under the heading—Introduction. It does not follow that the main bulk of the sermon is still to come, only that on this special occasion we are having a higher proportion of Introduction. But Wesley himself knew very well that preaching was not a matter either of historical analysis or of recounting one’s experience. It is the exposition and application of the Word of God in Scripture. But the Introduction may help us to see Romans in sharper focus. What does the chapter teach about faith?

First that faith leads to reconciliation, peace, righteousness. Perhaps we have already had enough about this. The peace is peace with God, the righteousness is a right relationship with God. They are near enough the same thing, but the latter gives a sharper edge to the former. In a fight, either party may be right, and merely to knock the other fellow down doesn’t prove that he was wrong, and peace may be—often is—a matter of reciprocal give and take, compromise. Righteousness (with Paul’s great word justification) puts the conflict in the Law court, and the judge, this Judge anyway, is always by definition right. I who stand in the dock am accused by the Law, proved to be in the wrong by witnesses, and maybe by my own confession too. Yet the Judge finds his own way, at his own cost, not of letting me off but of taking me in, restoring me to the fellowship of society and his own. This is the relationship with my Maker, for which my Maker made me; it is not an odd queer thing; only in it am I my own true self.

Secondly, faith leads to character. Paul sees it working out through tribulations; Wesley would do the same. These tribulations are our moral education in the world, and for the Christian they lead to endurance and tried character. There is nothing automatic about this. Consider how many times tribulations—annoyances, fears, being abandoned or done down by people you trusted, physical pain and weakness, loneliness, the loss of a loved one; make it real. Tribulation which has such an old-fashioned sound has led you into despair, bad temper, cowardice, retaliation, deceitfulness and the like. It is faith that gives it a positive outcome and enables you to glory in it. Apart from glorying in the Lord, there are only two kinds of glorying that Paul can tolerate. One is glorying in tribulations, the other is glorying in life, that is in the future, God’s future. These are both safe because by definition they mean I am not glorying in myself, in what I now am, in what I have now achieved. In tribulation, in life, I can only glory in God.

We forget this educational element in the Christian life at our peril. I suspect that Wesley over-simplified the notion of holiness, though he did not simplify it nearly as much as some people think he did. In any case, he was right to insist that becoming and being a Christian is a moral experience. There may be joy in it, or there may not, but if there is not love, love that is ever seeking to be perfect love, there is something wrong.

Thirdly, faith is for all. It is an offer to all. It is not restricted to the virtuous, the naturally religious, the intelligent. It was while we were yet sinners that Christ died for us. The only qualification for the Gospel is sin, and all the unqualified may get up and go out. But you have already uttered the words yourselves:

Outcasts of men, to you I call,Harlots, and publicans, and thieves!He spreads His arms to embrace you all;Sinners alone His grace receives;No need of Him the righteous have;He came the lost to seek and save. (Charles Wesley)

I need not tell you that the Wesley exegesis and the Wesley poetry became the Wesley program. It is precisely at this point that we must be careful to live in the real world. I suppose there may be in the Elvet congregation a few people who work for the Inland Revenue—publicans in the biblical sense. I do not think there are any harlots or thieves here. Wesley would have been more comfortable in this fellowship if there had been a few. Let me quote the first lines in the Times for Good Friday of this year:

Modern Methodists would be wise to admit that their sharp edge has been blunted by two centuries of institutional religion. A modern Wesley would be as likely to lead a movement outside Methodism as within it. The vivid hymns of his brother Charles Wesley, so moving and stirring at the time are now the old favorites, sung more for nostalgia than for fervor.

The Church of England itself has begun to reclaim Wesley as one of its own—at last. That may be an ecumenical advance. But it is also a sign that modern Wesleyanism has lost its spikes and is now safe to embrace. Your minister is keen, and so am I, that we not use this service simply as a celebration of a fairly distant past. We must think about our own Church, in our own world, in our own day. What Paul says in Romans 5 is of eternal validity, so that is something. What else is there time to say?

We talk easily about Wesley’s conversion. Some people say that we ought not to use that word. It wasn’t a conversion. He didn’t change his beliefs. He was an orthodox Christian before and after. He did not give up an evil life; he did not have an evil life to give up—he had been too good to be true. Well there is some weight in that argument though for myself I continue to say conversion. What we can say is this. Before 1738, Wesley wasn’t bad but he was inhibited. He tried hard, but he could not find his feet. He served God, he said, as a servant; later he was to serve him as a son. It was only when he trusted Christ alone that he was free—free to be the man God always wanted John Wesley to be.

We do not belong to a bad Church. Of course it has its faults, fewer perhaps than most, but it is not a bad Church. I think I could make a case for saying it is an inhibited Church, that has not yet attained, or perhaps rather has lost, the freedom that belongs to faith and the Gospel. We are too concerned about what other people, people in other churches, people outside the church, will think about us. We are; I am. But though the Church will always have to think, to plan, to organize, it needs nothing so much as to lose its inhibitedness and enter into the freedom of the children of God. And that we achieve, as each one learns to find Christ, Christ alone. I’ll give you one more picture of what it means. I do so with an apology, for I have told this story in Elvet before; it was however on 6/23/57 and the two or three who were here, will be tolerant.

When Wesley travelled to America, it was not in the Concorde or on the Q.E. but in an 1712 cork-shell of a ship on which there were also a group of Moravians—a sort of Lutheran sect. There was a storm and Wesley was afraid, afraid to die. The Moravians he could see were not. He asked their leaders why. They know whom they have believed. To see a comparison you need to only read between the lines of Wesley’s report that the Moravians had certain humble practices and were laughed at by the English for doing so. There was not only danger of drowning; there was the reality of sea-sickness. There were of course no professional stewards and stewardesses so the Moravians cleaned things up. It seems to me that you need a good deal of the love of God in your heart to clean up other people’s stinking vomit, when you are more than a little queasy yourself and are being jeered at for doing so. They know who they have believed—Christ only. And out of that trust the practical love that cleans up the vile mess of the world. Wesley embraced both, and the world and God waits for us to do the same.

•

3. Editor’s note—in this case, Moravians.

4. Editor’s Note: Actually on closer inspection what the sources really say is on Nettleton Court off Aldersgate Street but something about the phrase the Nettleton Court experience doesn’t quite roll naturally off the tongue.

EVOLUTION—Romans 5.12–21

[Preached once at Westminster, Oxford on

4

/

6

/

97

]

To choose this text for this occasion might seem to be an intended provocation. You may spend a couple of days talking about evolution, but at the end we are going back to the old story of creation—Adam and Eve and the garden of Eden. Away with Darwin and his evolution. We don’t have apes as our grandfathers. Of course it is no such thing. It is probably true that Paul read the first chapters of Genesis in a rather different way from ours, read the story as a story, and with no reference to the Big Bang or anything of the kind. But anyone can see that in this paragraph Adam, whatever else he may have been, is primarily a theological or anthropological concept, comparable with and standing over against the other theological concept—Christ. Paul has no interest in telling a tale, passing on a legend of creation. He is talking about humanity, related as it is about the two poles, the two universal and representative human beings—Adam and Christ. It is not creation but how we get from creation to here, that he is dealing with, and that process is, more or less, evolution. How did human beings, and the non-human beings who are their neighbors, and their institutions and activities become what we know, we think we know, them to be now?

I am a theologian, and an ex-mathematician with no biology whatever, and it seems to me, on the outside, that evolutionary theory itself has evolved a great deal since Darwin’s time; certainly it has been applied, not always I think convincingly, in a great variety of fields. But I am beginning with what I understand is basic Darwinianism, by which I mean evolution proceeding by way of natural selection and with Paul’s guidance I hope to see its theological and practical significance. The basic proposition from which I begin is a demythologized version of the doctrine of Original Sin. But I had better define my term.

Original Sin means there is something wrong with the human race. Not just with this or that member of it, but with the race as a whole. Nothing makes what is wrong clearer than does the old myth of Adam and Eve, the snake and the apple. Adam and Eve wanted to possess the desirable object—the fruit was to be desired. They want it because they believe it is the way to power over their environment, power over God himself. Knowledge is what you need to give you power over your environment, knowledge of how to make a wheel, knowledge of how to use electromagnetic radiation, and control genetic processes. And said the snake, eat and you will be like God on his level, no longer one of his subordinates. So humankind has a will to power; no harm in that, if he will use it rightly and smartly. The snake persuades him to use it wrongly.

It can of course be abused, and constantly is abused in the realm of religion. That is why I asked that Genesis 4 be read instead of Genesis 3. Here are two brothers, Cain and Abel and they are both religious men, that is, they both want to be in with God. But one of them has found out that animal sacrifice works better than vegetables. So what is poor Cain to do? He wants to control his environment, his religious environment, and his brother is winning all the time. There is only one thing to do—put Abel out of the way. Religious people have been disposing of their brothers and sisters ever since, sometimes with Cain’s violence, sometimes in more respectable ways (e.g., just excommunicate them).

So there is a will to power in humanity, and unless somehow it can be controlled, it is a ruthless will to power. And wherever it comes from, it is born in us. Whoever sees an unselfish baby? Or a baby that looks as if it wants to say, Dear Mother: I am terribly hungry, but I will not seek your heart until you have had another three hours sleep. Unselfishness is something we have to learn.

Demythologizing does not mean getting rid of myths; it means understanding them. This is of course old stuff among students of the New Testament and I suspect with us all. Myths are not idle tales, they are ways, often profound ways of expressing truth, often profound truth, about God and our relation with him. For some purposes the myth will serve, for others it won’t, some must demythologize it, expressing the same truth in a different style compelled to use ugly, abstract nouns instead of the attractive pictures. You will notice I have been doing it in the last few minutes.

And what of the theory that evolution proceeds by way of natural selection? We know what it means. The giraffe with the longest neck gets the fruit at the top of the tree, and lives; the rest don’t get it and starve. And so long necks develop. The rhinoceros with the thickest skin charges through the thorn bushes and survives; the rest are torn to pieces and die. And so thick skins develop. The person with the best qualifications, or perhaps with the best act at interview, gets the job and the rest go under. Each one against the rest, each one for himself, and there is Original Sin demythologized. And Paul knows it, for here precisely is the contrast between Adam and Christ, between the old community and the new. It is there in the paragraph of your text, though it has to be dug out and inferred. We know what Adam’s act was—the expression of will-to-power. Christ’s corresponding act was an act of obedience, that meant a renunciation of power. Not what I wilt, but what thou wilt. And on occasion Paul will spell it out in detail. Though he was in the form of God, he humbled himself, took the form of a servant, became obedient, even unto death. And all that is neither myth nor dialectic but history.

I have been all too well aware that so far, all this may have sounded more like a theological lecture than a sermon; but we are coming to the sermon, to the preaching of the Gospel now. And though I disavowed provocation, this may sound provocative enough, for the Gospel is the contradiction of evolution. I do not mean that it rejects evolution as a valid description of the development of creation. Paul can be said to accept it. The biblical picture of humankind is a picture of a creature exercising will-to-power. The creation narrative itself represents God as saying to the man and woman he has made: Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth. The same thought is echoed in the Psalms. This dominion has led to animal developments and other developments, all good and right when they are rightly used.

We owe to human will-to-power the marvelous advances in our understanding and employment of natural phenomena and processes. But there is a good deal else we owe to human will-to-power, from Cain’s murder of Abel to Hitler’s elimination of Jews, and beyond. It is this will-to-power, this will to survive, this will to dominate our environment that somehow must be dealt with. Dealt with, not eliminated. Not eliminated because if we eliminated it we would cease to grow, to learn, to develop. We should still tread the earth in deadly fear of the dinosaur, and we should squat in our mud huts, and think ourselves lucky if we survived to the great age of twenty-one. We should lose Bach and Beethoven and Brahms and Berlioz, and Barth and Bultmann too. But there is stronger reason for holding on to any scientific theory that seems to meet the facts about humankind’s incredible search for mastery over its environment—we are still striving after knowledge of the infinite.

But there is a stronger reason—it is the command of God. I have quoted it already from Genesis, let me quote it now from the Psalms—"thou has made him a little