Webster Christ Our Salvation

Expositions and Proclamations
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68359-421-5
Verlag: Lexham Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

The church's vocation is to treasure the gospel and live it out. The late theologian John Webster believed Christian preachers and theologians should be principally concerned with the proclamation of this news. At the center of that proclamation is our salvation in Christ. In this compilation of homilies, John Webster explores the various contours of the salvation accomplished for us in Christ and displays for preachers a model of theological exegesis that understands that the gospel is the heart of holy Scripture. Readers of Christ Our Salvation will be presented with a feast of 'theological' theology for Christian proclamation.

John Webster (1955-2016) was professor of divinity at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. Former chaplain at St. John's, Durham, and canon of Christ Church, Oxford, he preached and lectured internationally. He is the author of many books, including God without Measure, vols. I & II, The Domain of the Word, and Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Webster, John

Leseproben

II A REAWAKENED AFFECTION Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day. Your commandment makes me wiser than my enemies, for it is ever with me. I have more understanding than all my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation. I understand more than the aged, for I keep your precepts. I hold back my feet from every evil way, in order to keep your word. I do not turn aside from your rules, for you have taught me. How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth! Through your precepts I get understanding; therefore I hate every false way. PSALM 119:97–104 One of the most weighty claims that the Christian gospel makes on human life is the reordering of our affections. That is, faith in Jesus Christ and life lived under his governance requires not only a change in our practices, ideas, and attitudes but a deeper alteration, one which underlies those things. That deeper change is a change in what we love. If the gospel is indeed to take up residence in us, it can only do so as our affections are transformed and our hearts are set on new things. Until that happens—until our affections are made new by being set on new objects—the work of regeneration will remain incomplete. Why the affections? What makes them of such cardinal importance in the life of Christian discipleship? Often in common speech we use the word “affection” to mean a not-very-passionate liking for something: we talk of an affection for cats and dogs, or antiques—something nice and possibly absorbing yet hardly earth-shattering. But affection can also be used in a deeper sense to indicate the fundamental loves which govern us and determine the shape of our lives. In particular, the affections are that part of us through which we attach ourselves to things outside of ourselves. Sometimes the object of our affections may be a person, or a form of activity, or a set of ideas; whatever it is, we cleave to it through the affections. When we set our affections on something, we come to regard it as supremely significant, valuable, and praiseworthy. It offers us a satisfaction and fulfillment which we cannot derive from other things, and we arrange our lives in such a way that we take every opportunity to enjoy that satisfaction and experience that fulfillment. In this way, our affections—our loves, which are fixed on certain realities, and our desires, which long for what we love—are one of the driving forces of our lives. The affections are in a real sense the engines of our attitudes and actions. What we are and what we do cannot be separated from what we love. Because the affections are so important, the consequences of human sin upon the affections are particularly catastrophic. Sin means alienation from God, and alienation from God means the detachment of the affections from their proper objects. Our desiring and loving become disordered. We attach ourselves to the wrong things; we come to take satisfaction and fulfillment not from what God has ordained as the means of our flourishing but from wicked things. No longer a means of adhering to our good, no longer a way of cleaving to God’s ways for us, our affections are detached from God. Our affections no longer follow the truth; they become chaotic; they are a sign of the breakdown of our lives as creatures. This disintegration of the affections as they lose their grip on the truth is no slight business; it is one of the greatest signs of our human degeneracy, and no amount of human effort can heal us. If the affections are to be renewed and the disorder overcome, it can only be by a work of God that makes human life new. That is, the affections can only be renewed by baptism. They must submit to that twofold work of God in which we are put to death and raised from the dead. Like everything else about us, the affections must be judged and condemned, exposed in all their falsehood and malice and vanity, and they must be recreated by the power of God’s Spirit. If we are to be disciples of Jesus Christ, our affections must be put to death. Attachments have to be broken; our love must be separated from its false objects; we must learn to abhor and turn from the things to which our disorderly affections cling. That process, the putting to death of false affections, is no slight work of a moment; it is a long, hard effort, one in which we have to fight ourselves and our circumstances. We hang on like limpets to the objects of our affections. We fear losing the things to which we cling, even when we know they are destructive, because we cannot believe that there is any good for us without them, and so dying to such false affections is the work of a lifetime as we try to deny ourselves and inch forward toward holiness. But the putting to death of the affections is only the reverse side of their being remade. As we grow in holiness, our affections are not destroyed; rather, they are attached to fitting objects as we learn to love and desire the right things. Moving ahead in the Christian life depends a great deal upon this reordering of our affections. Experiences, moral effort, religious exercises will not get us very far unless the affections are engaged and we are drawn away from unworthy loves to our true end. Now, all that is a prologue to coming to terms with something Psalm 119 works to hammer into our souls—namely, that one of the hallmarks of the spiritual life is a reawakened affection for God and the ways of God. One of the chief fruits of our remaking by the Holy Spirit is a delight in God’s law. “Oh, how I love your law!” Or again: “How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!” (Ps 119:97, 103). What does the psalmist mean here by God’s “law”? We’re schooled by our culture to think that nothing could be less delightful than law. Law instinctively seems to be something arbitrary and inhibiting. For the psalmist, however, law is an altogether wholesome and delightful matter. God’s law is not an arbitrary set of statutes managed by some divine magistrate; still less is it a mechanism for relating to God through a system of rewards for good conduct and punishments for misbehavior. God’s law is best thought of as God’s personal presence. It is God’s gift of himself, in which he comes to his people in fellowship and sets before them his will for human life. God’s law is the claim that God makes upon us as our Maker and Redeemer. And because it is his claim—the claim of the one who made us and has redeemed us—God’s law calls us to be what we have been made and redeemed to be: God’s people, those who are to live with him and for him and so find fulfillment and peace. The law which is celebrated all through Psalm 119 is our vocation to be human; it is the form of life with God, the path of real human flourishing. And that is why it engages our affections and fills us with delight. “How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!” (Ps 119:103). When the affections are converted back to God, then God’s law ceases to be a threat; it’s no longer something we merely respect or fear. We’re not terrified of it like slaves, and our keeping of it is not craven, sullen, inhibited adherence to rules. It is delightful: we enjoy its sweetness because we know God’s law isn’t a prison but a space in which we can grow and thrive. We can learn a good deal about ourselves if we inquire into our lives from this angle. If we’re alert and conscientious Christian people and not lazy or couldn’t-care-less about our faith, then we’ll want to examine ourselves now and again—to try to be aware of what we’re up to, how things stand with us in this great matter of our fellowship with God. Self-examination shouldn’t, of course, be overscrupulous or anxious; it shouldn’t drive us inside ourselves or make us feel defeated by our muddles. It should always be rooted in the assurance that God is much better at forgiving us than we are at forgiving ourselves. But, with those things in mind, the wise Christian will, from time to time, want to ask: Where do my affections lie? If I am as truthful as I can be about myself, what draws my desires? What are the objects of my loving? When I look dispassionately and without illusion at who I am, what is the substance of my delights? As we engage in that kind of reflection and try, as it were, to take the temperature of our spiritual lives, the psalm offers us two tests, two lines of inquiry to help us see our lives in the light of the truth. Both of them are ways of asking how deeply our affections are engaged by the law of God and how firm our attachment is to his ways for humankind. The first test is this: affection for God’s law will be demonstrated in spiritual meditation. “Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day” (Ps 119:97). Those whose affections delight in God’s law will spend a great deal of time pondering it. Why? Because sin confuses our thinking. It makes us unsteady and unstable; it distracts us by filling our minds with a great clutter of falsehoods, and those falsehoods prevent us from seeing the truth and setting our affections on the truth. Sin makes sure that we can’t see the truth and so can’t love it. But as the Spirit takes hold of us and makes us new, one of the things brought about is a new focusing of our lives. We become more centered; our lives and our affections are directed to the simple and utterly attractive reality of God. And when our affections are set on God, then our minds follow: we begin to meditate on God and God’s law, and...