The Recovery of Worship

By R.C. Sproul

The Greek word for "worship" is proskuneo. Originally it meant "to kiss reverently," which involved stooping down to kiss. Early Greek writers spoke of stooping to kiss the ground, as an expression of thanksgiving for a safe arrival. Later on, proskuneo came to mean prostration, throwing oneself on the ground to show awe or respect before some deity. This was seen not only with regard to pagan gods or goddesses. It was also practiced when appearing before rulers, such as Alexander the Great. The idea was one of reverence, and this attitude of submission was signaled by falling prostrate on the ground. In the Septuagint Greek Old Testament such worship was reserved for Jehovah God. In fact, it was considered sacrilege for a Jew to express worship toward any other pagan god or person. One recalls that Daniel's friends refused to bow to their ruler's idol (Dan. 3:1-12). 

- Wayne Detzler, New Testament Words in Today's Language (1986)  

In the 1960s a book appeared on the continent of Europe written by the French Roman Catholic theologian Yves Congar titled Ecclesiam Ab Abel, i.e., The Church from Abel. Congar's book traced the origins of the modern church not just to the New Testament time, or to the Upper Room (which is the usual beginning point or watershed of Protestant thought regarding the historical origins of the church). Congar went back into the Old Testament, all the way to back to Abel. You may wonder, "Why did he stop there? Why didn't he go back one more generation and title his book, Ecclesiam Ab Adam?"

The reason he went to Abel is because he saw the essence of worship in the dynamic of sacrifice and in the critical disjunction between the offering of Cain and the offering of Abel. This, according to Congar, is what gives us the historic moment of true worship. This view is, and has been, controversial, and one largely rejected by historic Protestant theologians. In our tradition it must be understood that part of our protest has been against sacerdotalism. Sacerdotalism is a theology of salvation through the priestly ordinances of the church. This is why Roman Catholic dogma has taught ex opere operata, or salvation through the works of the various sacraments. Rome, for example, defines the instrumental cause of justification as being baptism. Protestant evangelicals believe the Scriptures reveal that the instrumental cause of salvation is faith. That was, and is, the first great issue. Rome says that baptism is the instrument by which the saving grace of justification is conveyed to the human soul. That grace can, of course, be lost through the commission of mortal sin. If a person destroys that salvific grace he must be restored to saving grace through the second plank of justification, which is the sacrament of penance. Again, what is being said is this: you must enter into salvation, first through baptism, and then when there is any lapse you are restored to salvation through penance. The other five sacraments of the church augment and increase the operations of grace. These are the sacraments of extreme unction, communion, marriage, confirmation and holy orders. Sacerdotalism, in its essence, teaches that salvation is through these sacraments as administered through the priesthood.

The Protestant Reaction 

It is against this concept of justification and salvation that Luther waged his protest and argued that justification was by faith in Christ and in Christ alone. He said it was not conveyed through the rites and ceremonies of the church. What happened in the midst of this great controversy was that in the development of the Protestant movement there was a strong protest not only against sacerdotalism, but also against ritualism and liturgicalism. These are customarily negative concepts to our Protestant heritage. At the same time the Reformers of the sixteenth century understood that Christ did indeed institute sacraments. Thus they were careful, when they denounced sacerdotalism, not to denounce the sacraments of baptism and communion, which they saw revealed in the Scripture. The Reformers, as they combated ritualism as an empty attachment to the forms of the church, saw that this often led to thinking ritual somehow pleases God, bringing redemption to the person participating in it. This caused them to rigorously attack ritualism as a distortion of true worship.

The worship patterns of leading Protestant theologians such as Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin reveal that though the ritual of Sixteenth-century Protestantism changed dramatically at points from the ritual of Rome, these reformers retained some ritual. As a result, in most non-liturgical churches of our day where a strong negative view of ritualism still prevails, you still have ritual If you have a call to worship every Sunday morning, or a benediction, you have some ritual. These are very plainly rituals.

We can conclude then that these Reformers said no to liturgicalism, yet they understood corporate worship did need some liturgy, some pattern, some form. Public worship is not simply public chaos.

Asking the Right Questions 

The question for the Reformers then, and especially for us today, is "What kind of order, what kind of ritual, what kind of liturgy?" Further, "How do the sacraments fit into the life of the church, and is there such a thing as Reformed worship?" To put it more plainly, "Is there such a thing as biblical worship?" Or, "Is it a situation where we have a virtual existential license from God?" Has He said to us, "You write the script and whatever you do, if you do it meaningfully and sincerely, I will give My blessing to it"?

What I would like to do in this article is some needed, and I trust healthy, speculating. I plead for charity from you, my reader, as I seek to discover something of what it means to please God in worship. That is what I desire to do when I worship Him, and I trust this is what you desire to do as well. What pleases God in worship? That is what I wish to bring to Him in my worship.

I am going to develop some of my thoughts in this area from Exodus 26, but this does not mean that I am trying to reconstruct the liturgy of Israel in the modern church. I understand that most of the patterns of worship instituted in the Old Testament were typological and have been fulfilled in the finished work of Christ. To reinstitute them would be nothing less than to recommission the judaizing heresies of old and to fall under the anathema of the apostle and thus of God. Exodus 26, then, is our text. Let us read verses 1-6:

Make the tabernacle with ten curtains of finely twisted linen and blue, purple, and scarlet yarn, with cherubim worked Into them by a skilled craftsman. All the curtains are to be the same size - twenty eight cubits long and four cubits wide. Join five of the curtains together, and do the same with the other five. Make loops of blue material along the edge of the end curtain in one set, and do the same with the end curtain in the other set. Make fifty loops on one curtain and fifty loops on the end curtain of the other set, with the loops opposite each other. Then make fifty gold clasps and use them to fasten the curtains together so that the tabernacle is a unit. 

When you read a portion of the Book of Moses like this you see something of what provoked an exquisite sense of appreciation for living life based on every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. But how do I, living as a Christian under the New Covenant, read this text? Is this a contractor's blueprint for the building of the tabernacle? Somehow this blueprint gets mixed up with the decalogue and the treaty of covenant and then becomes part of the Old Testament. Is that how it is? Do we have here, in other words, someone's building plan from thousands of years ago that has absolutely nothing to do with the kingdom of God, or are we dealing here with the inspired Word of God?

As one who believes that this is the very Word of God I can't help but notice the minutiae of detail in this text. The attention to detail extends right down to the thread, the yarns and the exact dimensions of measurements. The thing which jumps off the page here is that the God of heaven and earth is demanding a meticulous conformity to His will and His prescription concerning how these people of Israel at this place and time are to worship Him acceptably.

We must be careful here, for, as I have already said, I am not at all suggesting that we reinstitute Jewish worship. But I am asking this question as a Christian theologian, "What in the world is going on here? Why is God concerned with these things? What are the elements, the generic principles that God is incorporating into His system of worship?" Keep in mind that it is only here that we encounter a pattern of worship that is designed not by some saint or Genevan Reformer, but we find here a pattern of worship designed by God Himself. This is why I ask, "What was this divinely given pattern of worship like, and why?" And furthermore, "How did it get distorted, and why?" Did this worship of God, established at Sinai, become sacramentalistic to these ancient people? Did the people of Israel devolve into a ritualistic dead formalism in their worship? Did Israel historically develop an empty liturgicalism necessitating Jeremiah to say, "You people come and you do your liturgy. You say this is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord. You say the words, but without the heart."

Jesus rebuked Israel for having the outward forms and trappings of religion. Instead, He taught that the worship required was that which was rendered in spirit and in truth. When we read the prophets, even with a cursory reading like this, we see that their agenda always included a critique leveled against Israelite worship. But nowhere are the prophets or the Reformers revolutionaries. They never called the people to turn away from ritual, liturgy or sacrament, but rather away from the distortions of these things. They called upon the people to return to the original sense of the forms. That's what reform meant. It wasn't a call to entirely replace the forms, but rather a call to recover the original meaning of the forms that God had instituted for His people.

Non-Verbal Communication 

I have taught for some time in the seminary classroom. One of my assignments is to teach in the Doctor of Ministry program. One of the courses I teach is in communications. It's not primarily a course in preaching, but more than half the course is devoted to non-verbal communication so that pastors can understand the dynamic of non-verbal forms of communication, and how these forms can enhance or detract from the actual verbal dimensions of preaching. It seems that in the sixteenth century, because Rome had eclipsed the Word of God with the sacraments, the verbal was swallowed up by the non-verbal.

In an effort to recover the verbal we have this tendency in our Protestant heritage to almost totally neglect the non-verbal dimension of divine communication. Notice throughout the Old Testament that when God gives His Word He repeatedly seals that Word with some kind of visible sign. He makes a promise to Jacob, and Jacob takes a rock and pours oil on it and marks the spot. Abraham builds an altar when he comes to a significance of dedication and thus he worships. These Old Testament patriarchs are continually doing something physical to memorialize their meeting with God and hearing His Word.

For Glory and for Beauty 

When God institutes worship in the Old Testament He makes a definite provision for the reading of the law. However, the overwhelming concentration in these chapters in Exodus is best described in terms of God's commandments to enhance the non-verbal act of worship. This is why He goes into such incredible detail about the kind of thread that was to be used in the garment of the priest. "I want purple thread! I want white thread! I want scarlet thread!" In Exodus 28 we read:

Have Aaron your brother brought to you from among the Israelites, along with his sons Nadab and Abihu, Eleazar and Ithamar, so they may serve Me as priests. Make sacred garments for your brother Aaron, to give him dignity and honor (vv.1-2). 

Time after time in these chapters of Exodus God couples the designing work of artisans with the bestowing of His Spirit. In fact, the first people the Bible ever mentions as being filled with the Holy Spirit are Bezalel and Oholiab, artisans selected by God to mould, shape and design the furniture and vessels for the tabernacle, the ark of the covenant and the garments for the priests. Can you believe that? The first time God fills a human being with His Spirit, at least as recorded in the text of Scripture, is for the aesthetic purpose of design and form. God says that He is doing this for His own glory and for beauty.

I conclude, then, that God goes to painstaking extremes to be sure that the place where the people gather to worship Him exhibits a visual impact that is conducive for worship. In a word, the tabernacle was beautiful. If the tabernacle was this beautiful, then the temple of the Lord must have been even more beautiful.

I am not saying, by this observation and by my conclusion, that it is our obligation to build a new tabernacle. Here is what I am saying: If you have come to believe, as a result of supposed Protestant tradition, that to construct a church building with any concern for beauty is to act against the character of God, you are in serious trouble. Why do I say this? Because here we see God Himself expressing His concern for both beauty and design. We read in Exodus 28:

Make a plate of pure gold and engrave on it as on a seal: HOLY TO THE LORD. Fasten a blue cord to it to attach it to the turban; it is to be on the front of the turban. It will be on Aaron's forehead, and he will bear the guilt involved in the sacred gifts the Israelites consecrate, whatever their gifts may be. It will be on Aaron's forehead continually so that they will be acceptable to the Lord (vv.36-38). 

This beauty is not a monument to the arrogance of the preacher. This visual display of beauty is to communicate the holiness of God. It must not become an ostentatious display of human pride. We saw this at the base of Mt. Sinai with the golden calf episode. The golden calf was beautiful. It was also blasphemous. Beauty, you see, can be used against the glory of God. We know that people can become so hung up on the external trappings that they begin to worship the graven images as they did at the base of Sinai. Such was the case with the golden calf. God says, "I want gold and I want beauty, but I will not permit a bull to glorify Me."

Crossing the Threshold 

In the summer of 1992 I spent two months traveling in Eastern Europe, a place I had never visited previously. During this teaching trip the first place we went was Czechoslovakia, to the old city of Prague. The overwhelming impact of the city is an external testimony to the history of Christianity. When you go to the central square there is a massive statue of a man, boldly standing against an unseen enemy, leading a people who are downcast and oppressed. This monument stands as a testimony to the life and labors of the Reformer John Hus. Within 50 yards of the Hus statue, commemorating the life of a man burned at the stake by the Roman Catholic Church, are several Roman Catholic churches. Further on, as you walk across the Charles Bridge, you are overwhelmed to see larger-than-life statues about every 30 feet. You see likenesses of great theologians such as Aquinas, Augustine, and Athanasius. It is like a textbook on church history. After you cross the bridge you next come to this great church where Mozart was the organist. At the top of the hill, overlooking the entire city, is St. Vitus Cathedral with its magnificent flying buttresses and spectacular vaulted ceilings. I have never been in a city where there is such visual display of Christian heritage as in Prague. As I looked at one of these churches I thought to myself, "Wow, these places communicate a spiritual sensation within you when you simply walk into them."

I sometimes ask my seminary students, "Have ever been in a Roman Catholic cathedral?" When their answer is positive, I then ask, "What is the feeling you get when you go in?" Now, I know that they have an antipathy built into their emotions because of their Protestant theology. Invariably, when my students are candid, they say, "I'm overwhelmed with a sense of the transcendent and with a sense of awe." There is, you see, this immediate sensation of stepping across the threshold from the secular to the sacred. We usually get into a discussion and then somebody says, "But Jesus says that God is to be worshiped everywhere." They argue that He cannot be contained in buildings. This is surely true. But the concept of the holy, the concept of the sacred, the concept of the consecrated, is as much a New Testament conception as it is an Old Testament conception. I wish to argue that for the Christian there is still sacred space and there is still sacred time.

We often wonder why our country has been so secularized. I am sure there are numerous reasons, but within our own tradition, we Protestants have so reacted against Rome that we have done everything we can to disguise the purpose of our churches as we assemble to worship God. As a result we lose all concept of sacred place. In addition to this, our approach to the Lord's Day and to Christian tradition leads to losing the concept of sacred time.

In classic architecture there was a conscious attempt to use art forms that would suggest transcendency - the decorative walls, the arched ceilings, the stained glass, the resonating physical structure - all of this was done by design. Their distinctive architecture communicates the threshold - the moving of the human being into a posture of worshiping a highly exalted and supremely holy God. This all communicates that when we come into His presence it is not like going into a town meeting hall; it is simply not to be business as usual.

In recent years we have had megachurches begun by men who have asked the unchurched, often thousands of them, "Why do you not attend church?" They ask those who once went, "Why did you quit attending?" They tabulate the responses and seek to develop a church based on what will draw such people to their worship. They discovered in their questioning that the number one reason people stay away from church is that they feel it is boring. The second reason is that they find church irrelevant. When they ask why people do come to church they find that the first reason given is that they want fellowship. Meaningful human relationships are their top priority.

Whether we have understood this cognitively or simply by intuition we have done everything in our power to attract people to our fellowship, to make them comfortable in this fellowship, and to design the church buildings primarily for fellowship. We know that the chief reason we are supposed to come to corporate worship on the Lord's Day is to worship God. Yet, we have reasoned, people are not going to be attracted to worship unless we cater to their desire for fellowship.

Please don't misunderstand me. I think fellowship is a legitimate need for people in the church, and I think we should be aware of the fact that people desperately want it. We do need to meet people's need for human relationship, but I think that if we design our Sunday service exclusively for this principle we are not going to have any reason for fellowship.

What is the real crisis in American worship today? I suggest the real crisis is that people need a genuine sense of the overwhelming presence of God in the corporate gathering of the church. I see this all through the Word of God as well. People encounter God in various ways in the Scriptures, and their reactions are often quite varied. Some are excited, some are gritty, some laugh, some cry, some run, some cower, but nobody is ever bored: ever. And no one ever meets the living God and walks away and says, "That was surely irrelevant." So I don't know what we are doing on Sunday mornings in many of our churches, but if people are bored it is because they are not having a real sense of the presence of God in their worship. I am quite sure about that. 

Worship and Our Five Senses

Now I would like to turn your attention to the pattern we observe in the Old Testament. In the worship by Israel there was a visual display of majesty the eyes beheld in the experience of worship. It seems quite apparent that when God designed a pattern of worship in the Bible the entire human being was engaged in the experience itself. The word was proclaimed to the mind, but in addition to this cognitive aspect, there was also the experiential where all five senses were deeply engaged in and involved with the worship experience.

Before we leave our thoughts about the visual part and move to the other four senses let me suggest a principle. This is what I will call "Sproul's Law of Aesthetics": Every form is an art form, and every art form communicates something. There is a reason why something is shaped the way it is shaped. We do not design things for utility only, or simply for functionality. This can be seen in the pen with which I write. It may be bright red so as to get your attention and to cause you to buy it instead of the dull and black pen of the competition. You see red and it jumps out at you. Even the reason why designers choose a particular print style on the pen has to do with graphic design. People are highly trained and well paid in making these apparently simple decisions. Every form, you see, is an art form and every art form communicates something.

A church building communicates something to every one who enters it. If I were a pastor I would be asking this question: "What does our building communicate?" And, further, "What exactly do we want to communicate so that we might display the glory of God?" Does your church building visually promote God's glory? Does it display God's beauty? I sometimes fear that we Protestants do everything in our power to make our churches as ugly as we possibly can so that no one will ever accuse us of liturgicalism. Many of our churches are aesthetically unattractive. Your office; church, and sanctuary all communicate a message. It is, for sure, a visual message. Is this message conducive to putting people in a posture of worship, or does it conceal the transcendency of God?

If God gives attention to the color of thread and to every little detail, He must think that the visual stimulation of our sanctuaries is critical for true Worship to occur.

What then about the auditory nerve and the experience we have related to that? I'll never forget the first time the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology used the Westminster Brass. It was an opening Friday night service in Philadelphia at Tenth Presbyterian Church. The first, and subsequently standard, opening hymn was "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God." The Westminster Brass began to play. The people at Tenth were ecstatic. They had never heard such brass instrumentation at Tenth Church; I wondered what would happen. The experience of worship was so exhilarating that evening that I will never forget it. The service lasted for over two hours, and it was time for the postlude. You must understand that at most churches, including Tenth Presbyterian, you say a benediction and then after about a five second silence there is the sound of the organ. At that point everyone heads for the exits. Well, on this particular evening the postlude was from the Westminster Brass. When they began to play nobody moved. Not a soul. The whole congregation, about 1,300 people, sat through the entire postlude and didn't know exactly what to do. When the brass concluded the postlude the people stood up and gave a standing ovation and pleaded for more. I'll tell you why this occurred; people are aesthetically starved for beautiful music. They wanted to hear the music of majesty.

Our churches use instruments like the organ and piano. Why? Does the symphony orchestra have an organ? A piano? Not generally. Why not? Because the organ and piano are designed to be imitation symphony orchestras. They imitate the sounds of the various instruments such as the strings, the brass, and the reeds. The only time you see a piano at the symphony is when there's a piano concerto that is a special part of the program. And yet many people seem to think that the only instruments that are divinely ordained for worship are the piano and organ.

The worship of Israel used all the elements of music including strings, brass, and reeds. It included rhythm, melody and harmony. All aspects of music were integral to their worship. It was an orchestral feast for the people of God when they assembled. It was an experience of majesty for the ears.

As you look carefully at the Word you will see that one of the really weird aspects of Israelite worship is associated with the olfactory dimension. The olfactory dimension has to do with the altar of incense which God prescribed. Some of you might be thinking, "Is Sproul telling us that we need to swing incense lamps in the church?" Relax, please. We're just looking at the Old Testament worship pattern. When God commands the use of incense in worship He sets down as an absolute law a patented formula for the incense that is to be made and to be burned on the altar. He says to the people of Israel that a particular mixture of very aromatic blends was to be used at the altar of the Lord. Why? Because the altar of incense, which symbolizes the prayers of God's people, will have a particular and peculiar identity and aroma all its own. This exclusive aroma was to be associated in the memory banks of the people of Israel and with the house of the living God.

Recently I read that the human nose can distinguish between several hundred distinct odors. Have you ever been walking down the street on a spring day and somehow the fragrance of a particular bouquet of flowers snaps your mind back to when hearts were young and you were 16 years old and you were going to call on that very special young lady? Haven't you had an experience like that? You have aromas associated with Christmas, with certain places, with certain times. In the same manner God built that experience into the worship of Israel. When the people moved into idolatry this became part of the prophetic criticism. God said, "I despise your sacrifices. Your offerings have become a stench in my nostrils." The original intent of the fragrance was to create a memorable aroma that was beautiful and pleasant, and to suggest the sweetness of the presence of God.

A pastor friend of mine some years ago said to me, "You know R.C., there's something I don't understand." I said, "What is that?" He answered, "I've been in this church for three years and it seems like we have the most spiritually alive church in this town, but our reputation in the community is that our church is dead. I don't understand it." I suggested to him, "I do. If you come in the front door of the church and sniff you'll see what I mean." He replied, "What are you talking about?" I said to him, "It smells like death in that building. The place is 200 years old and the wood is rotting. There's mold and mildew everywhere. It smells like a funeral parlor. Before the people ever sing the first hymn or hear the Word of God they feel like they are experiencing death because it smells dead. It's that simple." I went on to tell him, "If I were the pastor of this church I would crawl through the rafters on Saturday night and put some kind of pine fragrance in the air. I would do anything to get rid of that smell. Repaint, change something, but alter that smell." I am asking you, honestly, how does your church smell?

The other two senses are taste and touch. How many times is the imagery of God throughout the sacred Scripture linked to certain tastes? He institutes feasts in the Old Testament, such as the Passover. The items He includes in the Passover are carefully selected to remind the people through their taste buds of their rescue from the wrath of God when the angel of death passed over them in Egypt. Calvin once wrote about how appropriate it is that the fruit of the vine is used to symbolize for us the person of our Lord. On the one hand the crucifixion is the most bitter moment in human history, and the bitter aftertaste of wine communicates this truth. Yet the very moment of Christ's pouring Himself out in death is the most singular moment of redemption. It is the most joyous time in history. We call this Good Friday, not Bad Friday. Why? On this day our redemption was secured. Calvin thus concludes that wine serves well as a symbol of that which makes the heart glad. It also looks like blood, and Calvin comments that this is fitting, too, since the Lord would take something so common and set it apart and give it uncommon association just as He does with the bread. We are then to taste this and know that the Lord our God is good. Search through your concordance and see how many times the imagery of taste is used for God and for Christ throughout the Bible.

Someone once did a study of Jonathan Edwards' works, searching for all the adjectival qualifiers that he used to write his highly graphic and imaginative material. The word Edwards uses most often might surprise you. It is the word "sweetness." People would think the answer is wrath or judgment, but the word he uses more than any other one to describe the character of God is sweetness. Edwards is always talking about the sweetness of Christ.

The prophet Ezekiel ate the scroll of God that was filled with woe, mourning, and suffering, only to discover it was as sweet as honey in his mouth. How often does the Bible draw metaphorical descriptions from taste to communicate something about the character of God?

The last sense is touch. I remember when the charismatic movement broke out in the 1960s. It spread through religious schools like Duquesne University and Notre Dame University. It appeared in several major Lutheran bodies, the old Presbyterian church, and other denominations like these. One of the things that saw as an observer very early on was the feely-touchy dimension of it all. People were laying hands on each other for everything. They didn't do this just to speak in tongues. If you had a stomachache you got the laying on of hands; if you worried that the car was going to run out of gas you laid hands on the car. I saw everybody was touching this, touching that.

What is it that makes the human touch so attractive to people? When the minister gives a benediction at the end of our Sunday service he stands and puts his hands up and prays. Why does he do this? In the house church of the New Testament era the pastor at the end of the service of worship went around the room and individually put his hand on the head of every worshiper and pronounced the blessing of God upon him or her. He touched each worshiper. When the churches grew too large to accommodate this individual and personal tactile expression of God's benediction the pastor extending his arms and hands over the people became the symbolic gesture. Symbolically the pastor was saying, "I am touching you now in the name of God."

Several years ago the Christian Reformed Church had its annual convention at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, CA. I was invited, not by Dr. Schuller, but by the Christian Reformed denomination, to speak. I addressed the evening meeting, and they had a most interesting and fascinating way of concluding. They asked those who wanted prayer to come forward to a kneeling rail, extending across the front of the church. Seventy-five people came that night and knelt at the rail during the closing prayer. Instead of a normal benediction, brief and predictable, the minister prayed for about ten minutes. The pastor who led this prayer began at one end of that rail and went down the entire length laying his hands on each person, simply touching them for a moment. It was very meaningful.

Do you know how desperately people want to receive the touch of Christ? Why do we pastors stand at the door after the service and shake the hands of our people? For some of our older friends this may be the only touch they receive all week. I sometimes take their hand and hold it an extra second or two because I know that this is true. I am not talking here about sensuality. Not at all.

I am talking about what Luther meant when he said that it was our responsibility, as much as possible, to be Christ for our neighbor. Now that can be a blasphemous thought in certain ways; it could be understood as an exercise in unspeakable arrogance. But that is not what Luther meant, of course. He meant that we have to mirror and reflect the concern, the compassion and the kindness of Jesus to our people. This will sometimes mean touching them, in an appropriately sacred way.

Have you been to an ordination service? Have you observed the laying on of hands? For ministers who are ordained that is a powerful experience. It was not simply the words of the charge that I heard that day that I recall. It was also the touch of the elders - the fathers and brothers who laid their hands on my head. That brought an overwhelming experience because they were doing this in the name of God. This action is symbolic, but very powerful. We live only a very small percentage of our lives at the cognitive level.

I hope some of you know the reputation I have, a bad reputation with some, of being an unreconstructed, Aristotelian logician. I get that criticism all the time. I am told, "Sproul reduces the faith to logic." Actually, I hope people keep saying that about me. I hope it gets worse. I think we are living in the most anti-intellectual period in the history of the church, and I think the most important thing that has to happen on Sunday mornings is a spiritual awakening of the mind. Having said this I wish to go on record by saying that God simply does not address the mind alone, but also the vision, the hearing, the tasting, the touching and the smelling. The one place where God historically ordained worship for the people of Israel He was very careful to bring to our attention the dynamic of what was going on. In order that He would be glorified and that His holiness would be at the very center of the worship experience, God regulated that the whole of our being is to become involved in worship. Shouldn't we recognize this as we seek to glorify God in the spirit of holiness? Recovery of a biblical experience of worship must recover this balance if it is to engage the whole person in the activity of worship.

Author 

Dr. R.C. Sproul serves as president of Ligonier Ministries in Orlando, FL. He is the author of 30 books, is featured on numerous audio and video teaching series, is a popular conference speaker, and serves as a professor at Reformed Theological Seminary, Orlando. This article was originally presented as an address in October 1992 to a group of pastors attending the Whitefield Ministerial Fraternal in Wheaton, IL. The Whitefield, Fraternal is sponsored by Reformation & Revival Ministries, Inc.

Cheap and Costly Grace

BY T. F. TORRANCE

GRACE is not cheap but costly, costly for God and costly for man, but costly because it is unconditionally free: such is the grace by which we are justified in Christ Jesus. That is the theme which Karl Barth set himself to work out insistently and unambiguously in the famous second edition of his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, which had such a shattering effect on religion and theology between the two world wars, but which many people have recently picked out of the pages of Dietrich Bonhoeffer without adequately understanding it. Because God has concluded us all under His mercy and justified us freely through grace, all men are put on the same level, for whether they are good or bad, religious or secular, within the Church or of the world, they all alike come under the total judgment of grace, the judgment that everything they are and have is wholly called into question simply by the fact that they are saved by grace alone. This grace is infinitely costly to God because it is grace through the blood of Christ, but it is desperately costly to man because it lays the axe to the root of all his cherished possessions and achievements, not least in the realm of his religion for it is in religion that man's self-justification may reach its supreme and most subtle form.

How did the Reformers understand justification by grace? Normally they expounded it as justification by faith, partly because of the Pauline usage which was given such decisive exposition by Luther in his discussion of the epistles to the Romans and Galatians, but also to stress the contrast between "faith" and "works". Understood in this way "faith alone" was the correlative of "grace alone" but before long it became apparent that the notion of "justifying faith" was highly ambiguous. This made it easy for the opponents of Reform to caricature the Lutheran doctrine of justification, but was the Council of Trent entirely wrong when it accused it of turning faith into a justifying work? History has proved the fathers of Trent shrewder than was realized at the time, for this is exactly what happened again and again in the development of Lutheran and Reformed Theology alike, when it was taught that men and women are justified by God's grace if they repent and believe. Thus there arose the concept and practice of conditional grace which permeated Protestantism, Lutheran Pietism, and Federal Theology of the Calvinists, Puritanism and Anglicanism alike. The Romans had taught that we need first of all an infusion of supernatural grace for without it we can do nothing, but that must be given to us ex opere operato, that is, without any co-operation on our part. Once it is received, however, we may co-operate with divine grace in living the Christian life, meriting more grace through repentance and obedience and receiving it through the sacraments. The Reformers rightly attacked this quantitative notion of grace and exposed the Pelagian heresy latent in the Roman notion of merit, for it obscured the Gospel of free forgiveness of sins granted on the merits of Christ alone. But as soon as righteousness and life were thought of as offered to us by God under the condition of faith the old errors crept back to corrupt the evangelical message and a new legalism resulted. Nowhere perhaps has this difficult ambiguity in historical Protestantism come out more sharply than in the controversies that arose with the publication of The Marrow of Modern Divinity 1645 and 1649. In Scottish theology it received its most trenchant exposure from the pen of James Fraser of Brea in A Treatise on Justifying and Saving Faith (not published until 1722) in which he rejected the whole notion of conditional redemption and attacked the legalizing of the Gospel that came from making "justifying faith" into a saving work. He sought instead to ground faith upon the active obedience of Christ and His complete sufficiency for our justification, which gave rise to an unconditionally free proclamation of the Gospel.

This difficulty is just as evident in our own times, for Evangelical Protestantism, has developed a way of preaching the Gospel which distorts and betrays it by introducing into it a subtle element of coredemption. This happens whenever it is said that people will not be saved unless they make the work of Christ real for themselves by their own personal decision, or that they will be saved only if they repent and believe, for this is to make the effectiveness of the work of Christ conditional upon what the sinner does, and so at the crucial point it throws the ultimate responsibility for a man's salvation back upon himself. That is very far from being Good News for the sinner, for he knows well that if everything depends, at last on the weak link that he must add to the chain of salvation then he is utterly lost. The message of the New Testament is quite different. It announces that God loves us, that He has given His only Son to be our Saviour, that Christ has died for us when we were yet sinners, and that His work is finished, and therefore it calls for repentance and the obedience of faith, but never does it say: This is what God in Christ has done for you, and you can be saved on condition that you repent and believe. The Gospel must be preached in an evangelical way, that is, in accordance with the nature and content of the Gospel of free grace, else it is "another Gospel". It is not faith that justifies us, but Christ in whom we have faith. But the history of Protestantism shows that it is possible to speak of justification by faith in such a way that the emphasis is shifted from "Christ" to "me", so that what becomes finally important is "my faith", "my decision", "my conversion", and not really Christ Himself. This is partly what has led to the modern notion of salvation by existential decision, in which we interpose ourselves, with our faith and our decision, in the place of Christ and His objective decision on our behalf.

Think, for example, of the change that has come over the conception Christus pro me between Luther and Bultmann. For Luther the pro me referred to the objective intervention of God in Christ, a saving act independent of man himself by which he is liberated even from himself, for there is nothing that man can do by way of knowledge or decision or believing that can deliver him from his in-turned, self-centred self. He distinguished the pro me, therefore, sharply from a mere belief that something is true. Just as in the Holy Communion he refused to translate the est in Hoc est corpus meum by significat so he refused to translate the pro me merely by "what it means for me". While faith has its proper place in justification it is faith that rests entirely on the objective fact proclaimed by the Gospel that Jesus Christ was put to death for our trespasses and raised for our justification. But with Bultmann the pro me is very different, for all statements that in the New Testament speak of what God has done for me are transposed to speak only of what He means for me. Now of course the pro me of Luther also includes the significance of what God has done for me, because in Christ God has taken an objective decision on my behalf that means something for me, but for Bultmann it is just this objective act that must be dropped altogether in order to get the meaning of it "for me". Thus the death of Jesus on the Cross is merely something that happened in the closed connection of cause and effect and that has no meaning for us, but there is another event that may have meaning, the kerygma or preaching of the apostles about this event which we must apply to ourselves. Thus for Bultmann interpretation of the New Testament is the same as giving it a meaning for myself now in my own contemporary situation; but I cannot do that, he argues, if I concentrate upon something that actually took place in the past for that can only introduce doubts and destroy faith. Rather must I be prepared to give up any attempt at the kind of security that finds for faith an objective act of God in history, and take the road of radical decision in which I work out the meaning for myself in the present.

This is what he means by justification by faith, but it would be hard to think of  anything so opposed to Luther's teaching at the Reformation when he spoke of justification as taking place extra nos and of the righteousness bestowed upon us in the free gift of God as aliena justitia, all in order to show that it does not rise out of what we do and is not invested with any significance that we think up for ourselves. Justification is through Jesus Christ alone, while faith is the divine gift of trust and reliance on what Christ has done in which we are caught up out of ourselves and planted in Him. But for Bultmann this relation between faith and what Christ has actually done is snapped, for "faith" has become man's own human act, his existential decision, the process by which he gives meaning to the kerygma for himself in the present. This concentration upon the meaning of the Gospel as what it means for me, in detachment from objective acts of God in our world and in detachment from historical events in the past, imports an astounding egocentricity in which the significance of the pro me is shifted entirely from its objective to its subjective pole. And so we see justification by grace being turned into its exact opposite.

This is why Karl Barth put as his fundamental question to Bultmann, that which asks whether the kerygma as Bultmann expounds it is really a Gospel at all, Glad Tidings of utterly free grace and divine justification beyond anything that we can do of ourselves. The great lesson to be learned from this is that whenever we take our eyes off the centrality and uniqueness of Jesus Christ and His objective vicarious work, the Gospel disappears behind man's existentialized self-understanding, and even the Reality of God Himself is simply reduced to "what He means for me" in the contingency and necessities of my own life purpose.

Let us consider then what is involved in justification by Christ alone. It means that it is Christ, and not we ourselves, who puts us in the right and truth of God, so that He becomes the centre of reference in all our thought and action, the determinative point in our relations with God and man to which everything else is made to refer for verification or justification. But what a disturbance in the field of our personal relations that is bound to create! Many years ago when I read a well-known book on The Elements of Moral Theology I was astonished to find that Jesus Christ hardly came into it at all. He had been thrust into a corner where He could hardly be noticed, while the ethical and indeed the casuistical concern dominated the whole picture. But what emerged was an ethic that was fundamentally continuous with our ordinary natural existence and was essentially formal. How different altogether, I thought, was the ethical disturbance that attended the teaching and actions of Jesus or the upheaval that broke in upon contemporary society and law when He proclaimed the absolutes of the Kingdom of God, and summoned people to radical obedience.

What happened when Jesus came upon the scene has been very memorably expounded by Bultmann in his little book that bears the English title Jesus and the Word. What He challenged was the formalization of the Will of God in the Jewish Ethic which came to be concerned with the authoritative commandments as such rather than with their content, but it was the content that determined whether a commandment was really God's will or not. Bultmann then shows from the teaching of Jesus that when obedience is simply subjection to a formal commandment or authority, the human self need not be essentially committed. What man does is to yield accidental conformity while he himself remains neutral, finally untouched by the divine claim. In this kind of decision he stands outside of his action; he is not completely obedient. It is precisely this detachment and neutrality that Jesus broke through in His call for radical obedience, in which man's inner being is brought to assent to what is required of him: he decides to act in such a way that he is completely committed to his decision for his whole self stands behind what he does. It is only with such a radical obedience, Bultmann claims, that a genuine ethic is to be conceived for then man is forced out from his hiding place behind formal law and authority and is made fully responsible for his actions. There cannot be any doubt that this is what Jesus did, and St. Paul followed Him closely in this, but it is just at this point that Bultmann's understanding falls radically short of the Gospel of justification by Christ, for he insists that man is then thrown entirely upon himself in regard to the judgments of good and evil, so that he himself is made responsible in every new decision for what is to be done. That is to say, after his magnificent analysis of what Jesus taught face to face with the authority of the Scribes and Pharisees, he throws man back finally upon himself as the sole bearer of responsibility, whereas what the Gospel of Jesus proclaims is that God Himself has stepped into our situation and made Himself responsible for us in a way that sets our life on a wholly new basis.

We may express that in another way. What Jesus did, according to Bultmann, was to think out radically to the end the absolute requirement of man within the relation between what he "is" and what he "ought to be" and so made everything pivot upon man's own individual decision. But there is no suggestion of a Gospel that Jesus Christ has to come to lift man out of that predicament in which even when he has done all that it is his duty to do he is still an unprofitable servant, for he can never overtake the ethical "ought". But actually the Gospel is the antithesis of this, for it announces that in Jesus Christ God has already taken a decision about our existence and destiny in which He has set us upon, the ground of His pure grace where we are really free for spontaneous ethical decisions toward God and toward men. This means that the decision to which man is summoned in the kerygma of Jesus is one that reposes upon the prior and objective decision that He has taken on our behalf and which He announces to us freely and unconditionally. What is completely disastrous in Bultmann's ethic is that it rejects the objective decision, the actualized election of grace, upon which the whole of the Christian Gospel rests, so that in the last analysis he can only promulgate an ethic which, "radical" though it may be, is only a prolongation of man's already existing experience and a reduction of it to what his previous knowledge includes, or at any rate, could acquire through philosophical analysis. This is only to incarcerate man in the end quite cruelly in his own existentialized self-understanding, for there is no divinely provided fulcrum whereby he may be lifted out of the prison-house of himself and his own naturalistic existence, no really objective Christ, no vicarious Saviour.

Justification by Christ, however, is something very different. It means that God Himself has intervened in our ethical predicament where our free-will is our self-will and where we are unable to extricate ourselves from the vicious moral circle created by our self-will, in order to be selflessly free for God or for our neighbour in love. It means that God has interacted with our world in a series of decisive events within our historical and moral existence in which He has emancipated us from the thraldom of our own failure and redeemed us from the curse of the law that held us in such bitter bondage to ourselves, that we are now free to engage in obedience to His will without secondary motives, but also so free from concern for ourselves and our own self-understanding that we may love both God and our neighbour objectively for their own sakes. It is thus that justification involves us in a profound moral revolution and sets all our ethical relations on a new basis, but it happens only when Christ occupies the objective centre of human existence and all things are mediated through His grace.

Before we proceed further let us pause to ask how it has come about that in the Churches that stemmed from the Reformation, the mighty Saviour, Jesus Christ, could be reduced to the vanishing point that He is given in the existentialist re-interpretation of the Gospel. It looks as though it developed out of our persistent Protestant attempt to interpret Christ solely through His works. "This is to know Christ, to know His benefits", as Melanchthon expressed it. When you start off from the saving work of Christ like that and from what He means to you in your experience, Christ Himself tends to disappear behind His benefits, so that a doctrine of the person of Christ is determined by the value-judgments you pass on Him. Or to express it more doctrinally, when the atonement is limited in our thought only to what Christ did in His death on the Cross while the Incarnation and the incarnate life of the Son of God are treated only as a prelude or as a necessary means for atonement, then a proper Christology concerned with the nature and person of the Son of God tends to fall away. But when atonement itself is not rooted ontologically in Christ or in God Himself, then it becomes what the Germans call Ereignistheologie, a theology of events. Thus the saving benefits of Christ in which we rejoice, becoming detached from His personal Being, rapidly degenerate into timeless events with no essential relation to history. That is what we see happening very clearly in the Ritschlian background to Bultmann's thought, but when the kerygma of saving events is detached from historical facticity like that, we are inevitably thrown back upon ourselves, so that we interpret it out of own existence in the concrete circumstances in which we are involved. Then we read out of it only what we have first read into it.

It becomes clear, therefore, that what we require to recover is an understanding of justification which really lets Christ occupy the centre, so that everything is interpreted by reference to who He was and is. After all it was not the death of Jesus that constituted atonement, but Jesus Christ the Son of God offering Himself in sacrifice for us. Everything depends on who He was, for the significance of His acts in life and death depends on the nature of His Person. It was He who died for us, He who made atonement through His one self-offering in life and death. Hence we must allow the Person of Christ to determine for us the nature of His saving work, rather than the other way round. The detachment of Atonement from Incarnation is undoubtedly revealed by history to be one of the most harmful mistakes of Evangelical Churches. Nowhere is this better seen, perhaps, than in a theologian as good and great as James Denney who, in spite of the help offered by James Orr and H. R. Mackintosh, was unable to see the essential interconnection between Atonement and Incarnation, and so was, on his own frank admission, unable to make anything very much of St. Paul's doctrine of union with Christ. At this point, as Mackintosh pointed out, Denney and Ritschl were at one.

This has certainly been one of the most persistent difficulties in Scottish theology. In Calvin's Catechism we read: "Since the whole affiance of our salvation rests in the obedience which He has rendered to God, His Father, in order that it might be imputed to us as if it were ours, we must possess Him: for His blessings are not ours, unless He gives Himself to us first." It is only through union with Christ that we partake of His benefits, justification, sanctification, etc. That is why in the Institutes Calvin first offered an account of our regeneration in Christ before speaking of justification in order to show that renewal through union with Christ belongs to the inner content of justification; justification is not merely a judicial or forensic event but the impartation to us of Christ's own divine-human righteousness which we receive through union with Him. Apart from Christ's incarnational union with us and our union with Christ on that ontological basis, justification degenerates into only an empty moral relation. That was also the distinctive teaching of the Scots Confession. But it was otherwise with the Westminster Confession, which reversed the order of things: we are first justified through a judicial act, then through an infusion of grace we live the sanctified life, and grow into union with Christ. The effects of this have been extremely damaging in the history of thought. Not only did it lead to the legalizing, or (as in James Denney's case), a moralizing of the Gospel, but gave rise to an "evangelical" approach to the saving work of Christ in which atonement was divorced from incarnation, substitution from representation, and the sacraments were detached from union with Christ, but sooner or later within this approach where the ontological ground for the benefits of Christ had disappeared justification became emptied of its objective content and began to be re-interpreted along subjective lines. It is because this is the state in which so many people in this country find themselves today that they become such easy prey for the reductionist notions of the Gospel that reach us from the Continent. We Protestants require to go back in our tracks in order to recover something we lost in our reaction against Roman error, how to interpret the work of Christ from His Person rather than the other way round. Unless we do that we will inevitably interpret both the work and the person of Christ from out of ourselves.

There is a further aspect of justification by grace that requires to be considered. By putting us completely in the right or the truth with God, Christ calls us completely into question. That is the offence of Jesus that the Evangelists were not slow to point out, for the way in which He embodied the love of God among men or expounded to them what the Kingdom of God was like so often rebuffed them. Parable after parable, saying after saying, shocked them terribly, while the kind of person He was and the kind of ministry He exercised cut deeply lnto their pride, their knowledge, their religion, and their most cherished desires. By bringing the Kingdom of divine grace to bear directly upon their lives He revealed the vast chasm between the heart of man and the Will of God, for it provoked the bitter hostility of man to God and brought Jesus to the Cross. Yet in His suffering and passion He launched God's supreme attack upon man's self-centredness, self-concern, self-security, self-seeking and self-will. What Jesus did could not be bent to serve the will of men, for He remained to the very end the absolute grace of God that will only be grace and nothing but grace, immutably, unrelentingly, invincibly sheer grace: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." By pouring forth upon men unconditional love, by extending freely to all without exception total forgiveness, by accepting men purely on the ground of the divine grace, Jesus became the centre of a volcanic disturbance in human existence, for He not only claimed the whole of man's existence for God but exposed the hollowness of the foundations upon which man tries to establish himself before God. That is precisely what St. Paul meant by speaking of justification as the shattering revelation that God alone is true and every man a liar.

This is most apparent in the realm of our moral life, where the very fact that all men are justified freely by grace concludes them all alike in the solidarity of sin and judgment. It is the unconditional nature of justification that gives it a ruthless radicality in presenting every man before God as a needy sinner, for it is only the sinner that is justified and forgiven. The absolute measure of the forgiveness is the absolute measure of the judgment of the divine mercy. That is why we are saved not by the works that we do but by faith that frees from what we do to find refuge alone in what Christ has done for us. That is why at Holy Communion we feel shame for our whole being, for our good as well as for our evil, before the Body and Blood of Christ we have no goodness to protest, but can plead only the merits of the Saviour. Before the bar of such grace we are searched and judged through and through, where God is Just and Justifier of the ungodly.

This is equally true in the realm of our knowledge, for all thought and statement are justified or verified by reference to Christ alone, from a sole ground in the pure grace of God and not from a ground in ourselves. This means that the Gospel of grace cannot be made understandable by reducing it to what our previous knowledge already includes, as Bultmann insists, or that the divine revelation is to be justified and even legitimized through assimilation to the basic forms of self-understanding that we acquire apart from it. What it does mean is that God's self-revelation makes contact with us not by appealing to some criterion of truth at our disposal but solely out of its own resources. It is to be apprehended therefore out of itself, in accordance with its nature and in the light of its actual happening in our midst and through a conceptual assent which we are forced to yield to it under its own self-evidence. But this means that we come to knowledge only as we are wholly brought into question, so that we with our preconceptions and prior knowledge are encircled with questions on every side and every question we ask must itself be questioned, that the truth of God may break through to us unhindered and undistorted by answers that we think we can give. By being put in the truth with God we are told that Jesus Christ is our truth, that we have to look away from ourselves to Him alone, and therefore dare not boast of a truth of our own. Even when we have done all our duty in thinking and speaking as accurately and exactly as we can, that is, orthodoxly, we confess that Christ alone is true and that we are in untruth. Thus to boast of orthodoxy is to reject justification by grace alone, for to boast of orthodoxy is to claim that we are already in the truth and do not need to be put in the truth by divine grace. It is a form of self-justification in which we claim that we are able to verify and justify our own beliefs and statements, whereas he who really knows the grace of God knows that he is unable to compel God to be the truth of what he says about Him.

This is the epistemological relevance of justification by the grace of God which the Reformers applied to their understanding of traditional theology and their interpretation of the Holy Scriptures. Because they found that justification directed them to Christ to find their right and truth in Him alone, and thus called in question their self-justification, they found that they had to reject the idea that the criterion of truth is lodged in the subject of the knower or the interpreter. In all interpretation of the Scriptures, for example, we are thrown back upon the Truth of the Word of God, which we must allow to declare itself to us as it calls in question all our preconceptions or vaunted authorities. This meant that even though we cannot but work within a stream of tradition we must operate only through bringing all our traditional ideas and all prejudicial notions to the criticism of what becomes revealed in our continuing inquiry of the Word of God. That is to say, they found that justification forced them to transfer the centre of authority from the subjectivity of man or the Church to the objectivity of the Truth itself.

No one since the Reformation has applied justification by God's grace alone so radically and daringly to human theologising as Karl Barth. It means, as he has shown us, that we can never look for the truth in ourselves but must look for it beyond ourselves in God. It means that we can never claim the truth of our own statements, but must rather think of our statements as pointing away to Christ who alone is the Truth. Theological statements do not carry their truth in themselves, but are true in so far as they direct us away from themselves to the one Truth of God. That is why justification remains the most powerful statement of objectivity in theology, for it throws us at every point upon the Reality of God and what He has done for us in Christ, and will never let us rest upon our own efforts. It is therefore from this ground that we must direct our challenge to those "new theologians" who deliberately make self-understanding the criterion of their interpretation of the Gospel, or who insist upon an anthropocentric starting point for theological inquiry. If modern science has learned anything from Christianity, it has learned just this, that in any sphere of investigation we understand things out of themselves and according to their natures, and not out of our own preconceived ideas, yet it is this basic principle of science and theology that they sin against so badly.

Once again justification by grace applies also in the realm of religion for it tells us that it is only the forgiving and reconciling presence of God in human religion that can give it reality, and that this is to be found only in Jesus Christ the one Mediator between God and Man. It tells us therefore that human religion has no worth or truth in itself. Since in and through Christ a way really has been opened up into the presence of God for worship in spirit and in truth, all previous religion, or religion outside of Christ, is displaced and relativized, and robbed of any claim to truth in its own self-grounded existence. Justification reveals in fact that religion can be the supreme form taken by human sin, and be, as it were, an inverted form of atheism. That applies no less to the Christian religion in so far as it becomes independent and autonomous, or indeed secular, and therefore as an attempt on the part, of man to secure and entrench himself before God. History certainly makes it clear that through sin and self-will the Christian religion, as easily as any other, may be turned into a form of man's cultural self-expression or the means whereby he seeks to give sanction to a socio-political way of life, and even be the means whereby he seeks to justify and sanctify himself before God. As such it is called completely into question along with every non-Christian religion through justification by grace alone.

This was the point made by Karl Barth with such force in his attack upon nineteenth century religion and the whole conception of theology as the science of religion, as well as his attack upon all self-centred, self-conscious: pietistic religion. Just because religion is the supreme possibility of all human possibilities it can become "the working capital of sin", the chief means by which sin so insinuates itself into human existence. that self-understanding becomes man's ultimate concern and the human subject sets himself on the throne of the divine Subject. It is this kind of religion and even the kind of "God" set up and worshiped by this religion that falls under the axe of justification through Jesus Christ. This is the source of Bonhoeffer's thought which has been so travestied and misused in modern pop-theology in the call for a "religionless Christianity". Already in The Epistle to the Romans Barth had poured scorn on this "pseudo-radicalism", that in which people seek to escape from sin by removing themselves from religion and taking up with some other superior thing, for all this is still to work within the self-centred and self-righteous movement of the human spirit that expresses itself in religion.

Let it be granted that God is to be found only "on the other side of the frontier of religion" or "only when the end of the blind alley of ecclesiastical humanity has been reached", but the exposure and relativization of religiosity and ecclesiasticism arise only out of justification by Christ where the positive connection between the truth of religion and God has been established by grace, where the religious and the ungodly alike are justified before God, and where therefore religion is not only judged but justified before God, and judged only because it is justified before Him. That to which we are summoned here is a religion of grace in which we live out of God and not out of ourselves, in which everything in religion is justified by reference to Jesus Christ because it can have no justification by reference to itself, where even the Christian religion lives through divine absolution and is made to rest entirely upon the righteousness of God, and therefore where a "Christianity without Christ" can only vegetate as a religious but empty form of atheism. The Christian religion has its justification either in the name of Jesus Christ or not at all. It is certainly abolished when everything is made to pivot upon man's own self-understanding.

However we think of it, then, justification calls for a radical self-renunciation, a displacement of the self by Jesus Christ, and therefore for a relentless objectivity in which you do not love your neighbour because love is a form of your self-fulfilment, in which you do not think out of your own self-centredness but out of a centre in the incarnate Word who summons you to leave all and follow Him, and in which you do not pray or worship God in your own name or in your own significance but only in the name and significance of Jesus Christ, in which therefore you do not baptize yourself but are baptized out of yourself into Christ, and in which you do not feed upon yourself but feed only upon the Body and Blood of the Lord.

Justification is at once the most easy thing and yet the most difficult thing to understand, for it is the most easy and yet the most difficult to accept. It is easy because it is so utterly free, and therefore so cheap in the sense that it is quite without price or condition, but it is so difficult because its absolute freeness devalues the moral and religious currency which we have minted at such cost out of our own self-understanding. It is too costly for us. Justification by grace alone is equally difficult for the man in the parish and the man in the university. Luther was surely right when he declared that no matter how clearly and simply you preach justification, the common people react to it like a cow staring at a new gate. But in teaching of university students I find that the reaction may also be one of anger and resentment when they understand more than they can accept. But everywhere it seems to be true that modern man wants "cheap grace", grace which does not set a question mark at his way of life or ask him to deny himself and take up the Cross in following Christ, grace that does not disturb his setting in contemporary culture by importing into his soul a divine discontent but one which will let him be quite "secular", grace that merely prolongs his already existing religious experience and does not spoil him for existence as a man of the world. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that there should be immense pressure upon the Church to trim and popularize itself in order to get alongside "modern man" and offer a "grace" that is comprehensible to him. But a "grace" that is comprehensible in this way is not the grace of God that breaks in upon us from beyond all human possibility, and a "Church" that has removed from its proclamation the power to shock is very far from being the Church of Jesus Christ. A "Christianity" that has become so secular that it is capable of direct communication to the man of the world, as Kierkegaard used to remind us, has become a harmless superficial thing, capable neither of inflicting deep wounds nor of healing them, for it has nothing to say to men which they do not already know and cannot say to themselves in more satisfactory ways. The more the Church tries to get "with it" the more it makes itself an otiose relic of the past.

This is not to argue that the Gospel does not need to be proclaimed and taught in the language of the day in which people can hear and grasp what is being said. It must be preached in Chinese to the Chinese and in American to the Americans, and with all the clarity and simplicity that is possible, otherwise it will never reach its target, that is, not even begin to offend, but it must be recognized that the evangelical message about the saving acts of God in Jesus Christ will inevitably appear self-contradictory and meaningless if it is commended to people within the frame-work of their existing natural knowledge. As Michael Polanyi has pointed out to us so often, such a result is inevitable whenever a language that is apposite to one subject matter is used with reference to another altogether different matter. It is just here that much that is said today about the "supernatural" founders so miserably, for, to continue Polanyi's thought, "the extent to which any event can be established in terms of natural science, it belongs to the natural order ot things. However monstrous and surprising it may be, once it has been fully established as an observable fact, the event ceases to be regarded as supernatural. It is illogical to attempt the proof of the supernatural by natural tests, for these can only establish the natural aspects of an event and never represent it as supernatural". (Personal Knowledge, p. 284). What follows from this is not that we must discard the notion of the supernatural as something meaningless in the modern world for that would imply that we are to preach only what the natural man can take in naturally, but rather to call for the kind of intellectual effort that is required for every attempt to advance from what we already know to what is really new and which cannot be inferred from what we already know or merely fitted into it when we do apprehend it. As in every great scientific advance we have to engage in a desperate struggle with ourselves in order to make the radical shift in meaning that it involves, so we must ask of the modern world to consider what is announced in the Gospel. By its very nature it cannot be apprehended without a profound change in our natural habits of mind, without a desperate struggle with ourselves and our aversion for change, without taking a step forward beyond what can be validated in our ordinary observable experience toward what can be known only out of itself and in accordance with its divine nature. Deus comprehensus non est Deus, as Augustine said. Grace that is comprehensible is not grace, for it is the grace of God that can be known only as God Himself is known, out of God and not out of ourselves. That is what justification by grace means.

What, then, are we to make of the modern interpretation of justification, recently advanced again, as God's acceptance of us as adults or mature people? On the face of it, this seems to be in flat contradiction to the teaching of Jesus that unless we become as little children we shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. There is undoubtedly an immense contrast here between the teaching of our Lord and the "new theology", for He never talked about maturity and adulthood. He spoke rather of childhood and childlikeness, about being born again, about the blessedness of those who received little children in His name, even of the necessity of becoming like "sucklings" if we are to participate in God's Kingdom. It is not God's acceptance of us as adults, but God's acceptance of us in simplicity where, like children, we are devoid of sophistication and pretentious self-understanding, where we let Christ be everything, and that includes being the mighty Saviour who came to make Himself responsible for us, to shoulder our burdens, and bear away our sins.

But there is more than this in the notion of maturity and adulthood that is now being advanced. Consider what it meant to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was a German of the Germans, deeply, desperately concerned for the problem of Germany, for the very soul of his people as it became revealed under the tyranny of Hitler. It is a strange fact that until modern times Germany seems to have lacked a significant martyr, that is someone who was so committed to his Christian conviction that he was prepared to make himself fully responsible for it to the extent of laying down his life for it. Germans have tended too easily to yield to authority and Lutherans have tended too easily to yield to the State and in the last analysis to bow before its dictates. Like children kept too long under parental control, German Christians had difficulty in making up their own minds. But with the death of Bonhoeffer (who is here a representative figure, for the German Church now has countless martyrs) German believers began to grow up. Bonhoeffer, you remember, and others found themselves forced to take a terrible decision to assassinate Hitler - it must have been far more terrible for Bonhoeffer as a minster of the Gospel than for the others. Bonhoeffer's courage in this affair to be independent, without even "using God" as an "external prop" for his faith, his readiness to take a decision and to bear full responsibility for it in death, constituted so to speak a moment of destiny, for in him German Christianity came to maturity, and adult man emerged upon the scene, free from the shackles of authority and standing on his own feet. Germany desperately needed that kind of conviction and courage, and it needed someone like Bonhoeffer to embody it and manifest it. Hence after the catastrophic defeat of two world wars, and the traumatic sense of guilt, disillusionment and humiliation that followed, the figure of the martyred Bonhoeffer stood out as an archetype for the new man. Yet the tragedy of the situation is that in the malaise of recent years instead of really listening to Bonhoeffer, many German thinkers and writers and Churchmen have come to "use" Bonhoeffer for their own ends, as a means of objectifying their own self-understanding and as a symbol on which to project their own image of themselves. And they have been aided and abetted in this by people in Britain and the D.S.A. In this way Bonhoeffer's thought has been severely twisted and misunderstanding of him has become rife especially when certain catch-phrases like "religionless Christianity" and "worldly holiness" are worked up into systems of thought so sharply opposed to Bonhoeffer's basic Christian theology, not least his Christology.

But let us try to single out the real point he was making. There are people who worship God to the end of their life not only in a childlike way but in a childish way, purely on the ground of external authority, be it from the Scriptures or the Church. Take away the minister from the congregation and how often the members appear to collapse in their faith. They have been relying on external props and have not really grown up in their faith. It is even possible to "use God" as a prop like that, to make Him the prop of your own religion, in such a way that you are protected from the searching judgments of God or from being concluded with all the godly and ungodly in the one solidarity of sin under the divine grace. But when justification by grace is taken seriously the ground is completely taken away from your feet, and away with it there goes your own "religion" and the "prop-God" that belongs to it. This was Bonhoeffer's way of radicalizing justification by grace alone over against man's own religious self-justification and self-security.

Bonhoeffer was aware of the fact that we have to think on different levels and of the need on each level to think purely and consistently within it, without mixing up our thought on one level with that on another. Thus on the level of natural science we have to think of nature out of nature, exploring and explaining natural processes solely in terms of themselves, without having recourse to some truth from a different level of thought brought in like a deus ex machina to help us out at some difficult impasse. Hence we cannot bring God as a working hypothesis into our natural science in order to explain anything in it, both because natural science in its self-limited concern only for what is observable and contingent operates with a methodological exclusion of God, and because God is not a natural fact of the world that is amenable to the kind of experimental testing and control that we employ in natural science. Bonhoeffer held, then, that in all natural knowledge we have to act according to the principle, etsi deus non daretur, without reckoning God among the data. Now Bonhoeffer's position rests rightly upon the fact that God Himself means us to look at the world in this way, for this is the kind of world He has created - it has been made in such a way that it is to be known through scientific inquiry out of itself. Thus the detachment of our understanding of the created universe and all that goes on in it from theological opinions is part and parcel of the Christian doctrine of God the Creator. This happens in no other religion, but it does happen in the Christian religion. Hence to bring in "God" in order to stem the "secularization" of human knowledge is not only pointless but to use "God" against His will and can only lead into deep confusion. It can only distort our doctrine of God by confounding Him with worldly powers, and alienate men further and further from the living God of the Bible who is to be known only through the Cross and weakness of Jesus Christ but who in Him conquers the power and space of this world. Thus the "God" that the Christian must learn to do without is the "God" as used by man to justify his own views, the "God" who is a prop to his self-justification, but not the God of justification by grace alone. What Bonhoeffer is protesting against here is the habit of thinking of God and of nature on one and the same level (or, on two quite separated levels which are merely the obverse of each other, which amounts to the same thing!) - this is the error not only of naturalism but also of a false apologetic that attempts to defend the Christian doctrine of the transcendence of God on the same plane of thought as that in which we engage in merely natural knowledge.

But now the question must be raised whether this principle, etsi deus non daretur, can apply consistently to the level of ethical thought and behaviour. Are we to engage in moral decisions without bringing God into them at all, and are we to learn how to behave in this secularized world in a purely secular way, etsi deus non daretur? That is to say, are we to learn how to live without God, without prayer, without the supernatural, without any belief in or thought of the interaction of God with our world? If so, does this not really mean that we are thrown back fully and finally upon ourselves? Surely this would be a total misunderstanding of Bonhoeffer's thought, for he insisted that what he was concerned with was "a clearing of the decks for the God of the Bible", and that the point of departure for Christian ethics is not the reality of one's own self or the reality of the world, but the "reality of God as He reveals Himself in Jesus Christ". As he says in his Ethics, we have to discard the questions "How can I be good?" and "How can I do good?" and ask the very different question "What is the will of God?" Bonhoeffer starts, like Barth, from the fundamental principle of the justification of the sinner by grace alone which makes a man really free for God and his brothers for it sets his life on a foundation other than himself where he is sustained by a power other than his own. Justification by grace alone removes from us all false props, all reliance upon external authorities, and all refuge in worldly securities, and throws us not upon ourselves but upon the pure act of God in His unconditional love, so that the ethical and the religious life are lived exclusively from a centre in Jesus Christ; If the principle etsi deus non daretur is applied here it must be in accordance with the radicalization of justification that we have already discussed in ethics and religion, in which man is so emancipated from himself that he is genuinely free for spontaneous action toward God and toward his fellow men.

Yet there is an ambiguity here that seems to go back to a peculiarity in Lutheran thought, the sharp distinction between Law and Gospel, or between the two Kingdoms, the Kingdom of this world and the Kingdom of God, the realm of sight and the realm of faith. Although it was not intended in this way by Luther, it had the unfortunate effect of segregating religion as the sphere of inward relations with God from ethics as the sphere of external behaviour falling within the institution of the State. Thus Luther's distinction between Law and Gospel has so often been a pretext for a way of life in which a man can be a committed member of the Church of Christ on the one hand and yet very much a man of the world on the other hand - etsi deus non daretur. When this is reinforced by the philosophical assumption of a radical dichotomy between the noumenal and the phenomenal, the spiritual and the sensuous, the other world of God and this world of closed natural existence, then the disjunction between the Christian Gospel and its practical application becomes very wide indeed - which is one of the most regrettable results of Bultmann's ideas in German theological institutions.

Yet this is exactly what Bonhoeffer rejected in ethics and in Christology. He would have nothing to do with the dualism in the "pseudo-Lutheran" scheme in which the autonomy of the orders of this world is set in opposition to the Law of Christ. He attacked the kind of thinking in two spheres in which there is such a disjunction between them that a man is forced to seek Christ without the world or the world without Christ, or to try to stand in both spheres at once in their division from one another and so to become a man of eternal tension and conflict. Instead of thinking of two separated realities we are rather to think of the one Reality of God "which has become manifest in Christ in the reality of this world". Thus for Bonhoeffer everything pivots upon the fact that in and through the Incarnation the Being of God Himself is to be found "in space and time", for it is by participating in this Christ that we stand at once both in the Reality of God and in the reality of this world. But this involves the rejection of the dualism of Neo-Protestant Christology which as Bonhoeffer rightly held, was but a recrudescence of the old Greek antithesis of idea and phenomenon, i.e., the very dichotomy that belongs to the essence of Bultmann's whole position. This is made abundantly clear in Bonhoeffer's Christology.

Bonhoeffer's ethic is grounded upon this positive Christology that rejects equally both docetism and ebionitism, the different forms of error that arise on the assumption of a radical dichotomy, and instead holds inseparably together the full Godhead and the full manhood of Jesus Christ. For Bonhoeffer this meant a critical repudiation of the approach to Christology that had dominated the nineteenth century, from the side of Christ's saving work and His influence upon us, and an approach that interpreted the work of Christ from the nature of His Person, for in that way alone could the saving work of Christ be grounded ontologically in His Divine Being. The consequence of this for ethic was profound, for it meant that it had to be rooted both in the Person of Christ and in His active obedience. As such it is concerned with the way in which the reality of Christ assumed reality in our world of space and time, and therefore with the way Christians do not live "in themselves" and "on their own account" but in Christ and on His account. Christian ethic is ontologically structured in Jesus Christ and therefore participates in and through Him in His victory over the dualism between two separated spheres. It is because he took so seriously the incarnation of the Son of God in the space and time of this world that he insisted that "there is no real possibility of being a Christian outside the reality of this world and that there is no really worldly existence outside the reality of Jesus Christ". There is no place therefore to which the Christian can withdraw from the world; rather must he learn to live out the reality of Christ within it, for it is in that world that He the Son of God made our reality His own, and made His reality ours. This lets us see how grotesque the current cult of "Bonhoeffer" is, when it resurrects him from the dead dressed up in the stolen garments of an existentialized and secularizing "Christianity" grounded upon the dualistic assumptions that he overthrew.

Now let us return to the principle etsi deus non daretur as Bonhoeffer used it, and consider its obverse which is equally true, that when we think theologically we cannot bring in from natural science "evidence" to help us out at some point of theological difficulty, or "criteria" by means of which to manipulate the data, and to cut out what is not acceptable to "modern man", for that would involve just as great a confusion of thought as it would be to employ God as a "stop-gap" in natural science. This is evident, for example, in the way in which Bultmann with an arbitrary scientism sweeps aside a great deal of the material presented in the Biblical witness without even making a respectful attempt to consider it on its own ground or in its own light. The fact is, however, that when he rejects as mythological all those aspects of the Christian faith which are traditionally known as supernatural, he obviously regards them as elements in a primitive, pre-scientific cosmology; that is, he thinks of them naturalistically as aspects of a "world-view", and does not think of them theologically. He is so naively misled by the imagery often employed by Biblical writers that he misconstrues theological distinction as spatial or cosmological distance, and then offers to explain statements cast in this form as objectifications or projections out of man's self-understanding. But this confusion in the reference of biblical and theological statements is the result of the naturalistic habit of mind that Bultmann has brought to the biblical material in the first place. That is to say, while he professes to acknowledge the scientific approach in natural science in which we know things out of themselves and according to their natures, he throws away this scientific approach when he moves into the realm of theology, where he will not allow us to interpret Biblical statements about God's action in history, about the incarnation, resurrection, ascension or parousia of the Son of God, theologically, in accordance with the nature of the Reality with which we are there concerned. But when Bultmann tumbles so completely into the illogicality of doubting the supernatural because it does not stand up to his natural tests, it becomes obvious that his parade of scientific critique is only a way of advocating his own philosophical assumptions and naturalistic beliefs.

Another obvious example of this confusion in thought is the argumentation of John Robinson in Honest to God, in which he agrees readily with Bonhoeffer that we cannot use God as a hypothesis in our worldly knowledge, but calls for an end of theism because he can only conceive of it as making use of a "God of the gaps" - that is why his fundamental approach to theism makes him caricature it so crudely as involving statements about God as "a Being" or as "a Person", which traditional theism never does. To think of God under the indefinite article like this is not to think of Him theologically in accordance with His divine nature, but naturalistically as One among others, and therefore creaturely, beings and persons. When we say theologically that God exists, "exists" here is defined by the nature of God, for He exists only as God exists, and so we speak of Him as the Supreme Being who is not in a genus with other beings. And when we say theologically that God is person, the kind of "person" that is meant is determined by who God is, and so to speak of Him as the Person, and indeed as the one Source of all personal existence. As Richard of St. Victor and Duns Scotus taught us long ago, the notion of "person" used of God must be ontologically derived from God's own nature, and therefore from the Trinity, and not logically worked up from general ideas we already hold on other grounds, else we can only speak of God as "individual substance". That is to say, in a proper theism we must get the analogical reference of our thoughts and statements about God right, tracing them back to their source in Him, but how can Robinson do that when he thinks of God, it would seem, only in pictures, and theologizes by finding some new picture deemed relevant to "secular" man, which we must put in the place of the old image of God? What is this but thinking by mythological projection out of ourselves? It is doubtless consistent with this that he should think of God as the ground of our being, for this is to think out of a centre in the depth of man rather than out of a centre in God himself - but then how will it ever be possible for such a thinker to distinguish God from himself?

But why is a Christian bishop's thought forced into this mould? It is because he too operates with the philosophical assumption of a radical dualism, superficially concealed but actually revealed by his rejection of "supranaturalism" and his identification of God with "the ground of our being". On the one hand, there is the natural world to which we all belong, secularly understood by closing the circle of explanation and centred in human affairs, but on the other hand there is God understood as "creative ground and meaning", but God is not thought of as interacting with it in any causal way. Let it be granted that the causal relation between God and the world is of a unique kind, appropriate to the nature of God, and that there are mistaken and misleading ways of speaking of God's transcendence and supernatural activity, nevertheless it seems clear that in insisting upon "the powerlessness of God" (again pathetically misconstruing Bonhoeffer's thought) Robinson has lapsed into an inverted form of deism which cannot be covered up by his rejection of the deistic caricature. It is all the same for this deistic "God" whether He is absent like a rich aunt in Australia where He is powerless to intervene, or present in the depth of John Robinson's breast as the significance of his being where He is powerless to save, answer prayer or even to have mercy, for He is so entangled in the ground of his being that He cannot be other than what Robinson always and actually is in the depth of himself. It is no use his appealing at this point to John Macmurray's statement that God is "the personal ground of all that we experience" for Macmurray holds that we know truly and rationally only when we know objectively, and that means when we can distinguish what is objectively real from our own subjective states and conditions, and he holds also that it is this objectivity subsisting between our personal relations that is "the core of rationality". Thus Robinson's position is more impossible than that of straightforward deism, for he is unable to distinguish God "out there" rationally as objectively and transcendentally other than the depths of his own being, and so he is thrown back upon himself to give content to his notion of God, as what is of ultimate concern for him in the depth and significance of his own being. But when he does that by looking about for a new way of speaking about God that will satisfy that concern of his and so get the "God" that he wants, how can he avoid making God a predicate of himself or "using God" for his own ends and satisfactions, which is precisely the kind of "God" that Bonhoeffer exposed as idolatrous projection and must be given up?

It is evident that the so-called "new theologians" are out for cheap grace, i.e. the "God" they want, one to suit themselves and modern "secular" man, rather than the God of costly grace who calls for the renewing of our minds in which we are not schematized to the patterns of this world but are transformed in conformity with His own self-revelation in Jesus Christ. They balk at Jesus Christ at the crucial point in His message, where He asks them to renounce themselves, take up the cross and follow Him unreservedly all along the road to crucifixion and resurrection. Somehow they feel, rather mistakenly, that the Gospel threatens elements of truth that are very important for them and which they must secure for the modern world. Actually they are far from understanding them properly because they are obstructed in working out their implications through their own self-centredness, and cannot see that what the Gospel threatens is the distortion of them involved in the way they seek to uphold and preserve them. They are indeed important truths, although they have taken a long time to germinate since they broke free from their husks at the Reformation, namely, the liberation of nature that comes from taking seriously God's creation of the world out of nothing, and the affirmation of nature that comes from the doctrine of grace alone in which God turns in the unconditional freedom of His love toward the world which He has made and which He continues in His grace to maintain in its distinctness from Himself and thus in dependence upon Himself. Both of these assert that it is the active and creative relation of God to nature that alone preserves its utter contingency and obstructs its divinization. Cut away that relation to the God of creation and grace and what ensues can only be deism or atheism in some form or other. The confusion of thought that has arisen today can be indicated by pointing out that while these elements of truth gave rise to modern empirical science operating with the principle of objectivity, the new theology smothers them with a massive subjectivity in which there is revealed a reactionary fight from scientific objectivity.

We cannot work out the implications of these important elements of truth here, but two points must be pointed out, that are essential to any serious consideration of them. They tell us that we must learn to think, not in separated spheres, but on different  levels at the same time. They tell us also that there must be interaction between the levels, if everything is not to dissolve into meaninglessness. The importance of holding both these together can easily be indicated through the analogy of the hierarchy of levels in language, in mathematics or the various exact sciences, where the openness of each level upwards to the next through interaction with it is absolutely necessary for rational thought, for apart from it we can only engage in playing games at the different levels without any applicability to reality. What I find most of the "new theologians" doing, however, is cutting away the interaction between the two main levels of thought with which they are concerned, relating to nature and to God, in the crazy idea that only in this way can they preserve the distinctness and significance of each level of thought! Some of them, on the other hand, try to flatten the levels out on to one and the same plane of thought, thus producing impossible contradictions and illogicalities, as would happen, of course, in any science if that were done. Without any doubt the corroding or the eliminating of this interaction between the levels of thought can only lead to utter futility and meaninglessness - and that is what so many of the "new theologians" are doing, driving the flock of Christ into the chasm of unmeaning.

Now in order to draw our discussion to a close let me illustrate this problem by linking it up again with justification, and considering it in its Lutheran form of simul justus et peccator. Here we are thinking on two levels, of the divine act of justification in Christ, and of the existence of the human sinner in this world, at the same time. It was a peculiarity of Luther's exposition of this that he thought of the righteous act of God as set forth sub contraria specie, under its contrary aspect, real in Christ and for the sinner in Christ, but hidden under the veil of this visible world. Hence he expounded the relation between the justus and the peccator in terms of imputation in a dialetical manner. But there is another side to his thought, for justification is the content of the Word of grace that God directs to us, a Word that is mighty, living and active. When God declares in His Word that we are righteous, we are righteous, for His Word makes it so. It is not an empty Word but one that fulfils what it declares. Thus there is a creative relation between the justus and peccator, for God continues to maintain a dynamic relation between Himself and the sinner in such a way that His forgiving and creative Word operates in his being and life. Although it is only by faith that we may properly discern that interaction, it will be revealed in its full reality at the coming of Christ and in the resurrection of the body. But since the reality of justification is grounded in the incarnate person and work of the Son of God, it is continually communicated to us afresh in the real presence of Christ in the bread and wine, so that here and now in our worldly historical existence we may actually partake of it as we have communion in the Body and Blood of Christ. Luther's immense insistence upon "This is my body", against every attempt to reinterpret it as "This signifies my body", is due to his penetrating insight that if the creative interaction between God and the world, between the Son of God and history, or between justifying grace and the ungodly is weakened or whittled away, the Christian Gospel becomes empty of content and reality.

It has been a constant temptation of Lutheranism, however, especially in modern times to stress too much the dialectical side of Luther's thought about the divine gift of righteousness as concealed under its contrary worldly aspect, and so to let a merely imputational or forensic relation between justus and peccator replace a real, dynamic relation, with the result that justification comes to be thought of as an empty legal fiction. When that happens anywhere the great Reformation message fizzles out into meaninglessness, while every attempt to fill in the vacuum with stuff derived from man's self-understanding only leads in the end to bitter ressentiment and mocking iconoclasm. In this event the wages, of the new theology is death, including the most cynical death of all, the death of "God".

But of course there is quite a different side to Lutheranism, for the "new theology" belongs only to its modernistic flank. The main teaching of the Lutheran Church is to be found in the central emphasis upon union with Christ, upon the positive, creative relation between the forgiving God and the sinner, upon the presence and activity of the divine Reality in the reality of this world, such as we have seen in the thought of Bonhoeffer, or such as we may see today in the theology of Schlink or Vogel, Skydsgaard or Prenter. But, when as in Bonhoeffer, the dialectical aspect of Justification is sharpened to a cutting edge, as when he speaks about "the Church as the evil world to the highest degree", or "worldly holiness", this cannot be used as grist for the mills of the theologies of radical dualism, where it can only be purloined for the expression of  "cheap grace", whereas in Bonhoeffer's thought, as in Luther's, it was meant as the expression of "costly grace" - that is, of the incredible abasement of God in which He condescended to come Himself in His own personal Being into our world of space and time, and to interact in His grace with worldly men in the depths of their sins and shame, conquering the power of our space and time through His "weakness" in Jesus, and justifying the ungodly through His "powerlessness" on the Cross. This is the antithesis of the "new theology". Its statements may be linguistically identical with those of Bonhoeffer or of Luther, or even with those of the Holy Scripture, but their meaning is quite different, for the rejection of God's interaction with this world and the assumption of a radical dichotomy between the world of the divine Reality and this world of space and time, gives those statements quite another reference as they are deflected back finally upon man himself for their content.

OUR CONTRIBUTORS 

E. F. CLIPS HAM, M.A., B.O., Ministerial Recognition &, Library, Baptist Church House, London.

V. E. W. HAYWARD, M.A., Division of Studies, World Council of Churches, Geneva.

M. A. LAIRD, M.A., Research student, London University. (Lecturer at Serampore College, 1960-65).

E. A. PAYNE, C.H., 0.0., President, Baptist Historical Society.

T. F. TORRANCE, M.B.E., 0.0., D.Theol., Dr. Theol., Professor of Christian Dogmatics, University of Edinburgh.

ROSEMARY TAYLOR, A.L.A., Assistant Librarian, Institute of Historical Research, London.

Reviews by: L. G. Champion, E. F. Clipsham, W. D. Hudson, W. E. Moore, B. R. White, S. F. Winward.