Why was Thomas in a less favourable position to ourselves? Why is it a blessing to believe without seeing? Again, this is related to the opening questions in this blog...
I think it all has something to do with this: God wants us to know him as the one who gives sight to the blind, and life to the dead - and so he withdraws the risen Jesus from our sight, offering us only the testimony of the cross and resurrection, delivered by followers of the hidden Lord.
So is our positive reception of this message effectively a nullification of all of our previous contemplations and searchings and ponderings? Does grace, in this sense, destroy nature - or does it come as the corrective perfecting of our previous groping for God? Of course, there is a long and heated theological debate. Luther and Barth are often thought of as being the key representatives of the idea that grace destroys nature, in opposition to Aquinas, who represents the idea that grace perfects nature.
I wonder if it would be fruitful to think about it like this: Grace resurrects nature... that is, the grace of God is not continuous with any human foundations - it crucifies human pride... on the other hand, the grace of God does enliven and bring to fullness the genuine personhood that had been crudely existent before the coming of salvific grace. In this sense, grace genuinely destroys and perfects.
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12 comments:
Good call cousin
"I am making everything new"
Rev. 21:5
HI Matt,
Good to see you blogging.
I have thought about it in terms of: the ascension gives birth to a life of faith for all subsequent disciples. So why does God value faith? Dependence.
On another front: Tim Keller talks about Thomas and notes that the gospel ends with the affirmation of Thomas doubt ie so that the reader can be sure that the apostles, whose testimony we trust, had every conceivable proff necessary. They're trustworthy. I found that a keen insight.
hey cousin... notice that one of us is following the "use your middle initial" rule!!... that is a good quote from revelation - God makes everything new - and yet also, the kings of the earth bring their glory into the new creation: There is emphatic discontinuity between this age and the next, alongside definite continuity between the two. This seems to be the point in 1 Cor 15 also.
hi nige... Yeah I think 'dependence' is a great way to see the point of our present inability to see Jesus... and so the Christian life is "walking by faith, not by sight".
I did try to use my initials - but they happen to be MAT - as you know! - I put them in capitals but the silly blog changed them
love to you and your family
M A T M
PS there are more books in the bible than 1 Corinthians! HA HA
I'm hoping there are more books than 1 Corinthians, because I'm going to Israel next week, and I've got high hopes of discovering 3 Corinthians, somewhere in a cave near Qumran... Then I'll just sit back and let the honourary doctorates roll in...
That sounds fun. Hope you take some pictures and post them for us.
What about 1.5 Corinthians? :-)
I've found myself thinking along similar lines (grace resurrects nature - faith is not ex nihilo, but ex sepulchro). Here is an excerpt from an essay I wrote a couple of years ago on Jürgen Moltmann's conception of resurrection that I think you might find interesting.
"Essentially, for Moltmann, resurrection is a future reality. It is a reality of God’s eschatological new creation. Resurrection is not simply revivification, the reversal of dying, retrieving the dead back into this transient and death-destined existence. This was Lazarus’ experience (John 11). On the contrary, resurrection hope is seen in Romans 6:9 – ‘We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him.’ This hope is thus for more than retrieval of what was from the garbage pile of what-is-no-longer. It is the hope for redemption of life from death, a liberation of the entire created order from its ‘bondage to decay’ (Rom 8:18-23) and into God’s glorious freedom, where (or when) he will be ‘all in all’ (1 Cor 15.28). And this promise remains as yet unfulfilled; every funeral, every disappointment, every compost heap and dentist bill demonstrates it.
"However, this is not to imply that the resurrection of the dead is to be found at the end of a line of historical progress, or even as the apocalyptic and sudden ‘end of the line’. It is neither idealistic progressivism nor escapist flight from this present reality.
"The former mistakenly posits an immanent redemptive force in every human experience, which, even if this force is identified with God’s life-giving Spirit, nonetheless underestimates the depth of the problem. Grace doesn’t perfect nature by realising naturally inherent possibilities: ‘unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies…’ (John 12.24). The deathly powers must be destroyed, not reformed. Grace crucifies nature.
"The latter takes seriously this necessary negation of the negative, but takes it as abandonment, subsequently seeing the solution as replacement: another world in place of this one. But in the process, God abandons himself. To discard creation is to relinquish being Creator. On the contrary, the tomb is empty and the risen one bears the marks of his crucifixion: grace has not given up on nature. New creation is not ex nihilo, but ex sepulchro. The living one is the same one who was dead (Rev 1:18). The new creation is the renewal of this creation, not its understudy – or undertaker."
...Sorry for the self-indulgent self-quotation there.
Thanks for this Byron - this is excellent. I love the distinction between "ex nihilo" and "ex sepulchro" - is this your phrase or Moltmann's? I've had a couple of Moltmann books sitting on my desk for months now, and still haven't got onto them - I really need to give him a good read!
My phrases trying to summarise Moltmann's point. If you're more biblical studies than systematics, you might find some elements of Moltmann very frustrating (his exegesis can either be absent or "creative" at times), but he is a great writer who often opens up issues in genuinely new ways. He takes 1 Corinthians 15.20-28 very seriously and in many ways it forms one of the focal points of his thought. Which of his books do you have?
Over the last couple of years, I've posted many of my favourite Moltmann quotes.
I have 'The Coming of God' sitting on my desk at the moment, and another of his books hiding somewhere. I have read bits of his stuff, but not really given him a proper sit-down reading. In terms of 1 Corinthians, I've found that Moltmann, Pannenberg, and especially Barth have some incredibly useful insights. Pannenberg sees the Corinthian problem as "human self-assertion before God", and Barth sees it as "unrestrained human vitality". The solution is the cross, followed by the resurrection. I do wonder if present scholarship could benefit from being more attuned to the rhythm of death and resurrection in 1 Corinthians - and in Paul's theology more broadly...
Yep, Coming of God is fun. Make sure you read the intro to Theology of Hope. The whole book is here and the intro is here.
Hope you had a great trip.
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