By Grace Alone

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By Grace Alone

have tried to show that it is unreasonable to set up an opposition between observation and reason on the one hand, and revelation and faith on the other. I have argued that to shut out the possibility of revelation is to exclude at the outset the possibility that the cosmos might embody a purpose distinct from the various human purposes we bring to our encounter with it. But I have spoken as though revelation was, so to speak, a matter of giving information about what we would not be able to find out for ourselves. Revelation is indeed this, but it is this only because it is something much more. The revelation of which we speak in the Christian tradition is more than the communication of information; it is the giving of an invitation. It is more than an unfolding of the purpose, which was otherwise hidden in the mind of God but is now made known to us through God's revealing acts; it is also a summons, a call, an invitation. If we may refer to my rather crude parable of the building site - the Builder is not merely telling us what he is building; he is calling us to be builders with those whom he has already recruited. The response that is called for, therefore, is not only intellectual assent but also active response. It is belief and obedience, and the two are but two sides of one response. It is not that we are given a vision of the new world which God purposes and then consider how we might translate this vision into practical action. We are not given a theory which we then translate into practice. Instead, we are invited to respond to a word of calling by believing and acting, specifically, by becoming part of the community which is already committed to the service of the Builder. We are invited to commit ourselves and to learn as we go what our role in the whole enterprise is to be. Our commitment is an act of personal faith. There is no possibility of the kind of indubitable certainty that Descartes claimed and that has been the criterion (spoken or assumed) for reliable knowledge in modern society. There is no insurance against risk. We are invited to make a personal commitment to a personal Lord and to entrust our lives to his service. We are promised that as we so commit ourselves we shall be led step-by-step into a fuller understanding of the truth.

All of this is canonically embodied in the words that are so central in the gospel narrative: "Follow me." At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus addresses these words to his first disciples, and their response is a single act which is both faith and obedience. At the end, when the mission of Jesus seems to have led into the darkness of total disaster, Jesus again assures Peter that, although Peter cannot follow his master now, he will follow afterwards; and when Thomas asks, "How can we know the way?" Jesus answers, "I am the way, and. the truth, and the life" (John 14:6). Christian discipleship is not a two-stage affair in which a concept of truth is first formulated and is then translated into a program for action. It is a single action of faith and obedience to a living person, the response to a personal calling.

If we are to use the word "certainty" here, then it is not the certainty of Descartes. It is the kind of certainty expressed in such words as those of the Scriptures: "I know whom I have believed, and I am sure that he is able to guard until that day what has been entrusted to me" (2 Tim.. 1:12). Note here two features of this kind of assurance which distinguish it from the ideal of certainty we have inherited from the Age of Reason. In the first place, the locus of confidence (if one may put it so) is not in the competence of our own knowing, but in the faithfulness and reliability of the one who is known. The weight of confidence rests there and not here with us. Secondly, the phrase "until that day" reminds us that this is not a claim to possess final truth but to be on the way that leads to the fullness of truth. I do not possess the truth, so that I do not need to be open to new truth; rather, I am confident that the one in whom I have placed my trust, the one to whom I am committed, is able to bring me to the full grasp of what I now only partly understand.

This suggestion seem congruous with the teaching of the New Testament about the work of the Holy Spirit in leading the followers of Jesus into the fullness of truth. While the incarnation of the Word is an event in past history, not something which we search out and look for in the future, we are promised the help of the living Spirit who is the Spirit of God and the Spirit of Jesus, to enable us to draw out the meaning of that which has been given once and for all in the incarnation and to explore the ultimate limits of space and time with the aid of the divine Spirit. And this has immediate consequences.

This is the kind of certainty that is available to the Christian and in which he or she may rest. And surely it must be an illusion to imagine that there can be available to us a kind of certainty that does not involve this personal commitment. This at least must surely be said: if the biblical depiction of the human situation is true; if the supreme reality is a personal God whose we are and to whom we are responsible; then there is something quite absurd about the posture of those who claim infallible certainty about God in their own right and on the strength of their own rational powers. In our interpersonal relations, we would never make such a claim for our knowledge of another person. How absurd to make such a claim with respect to God!

But there is still something more, much more, to be said here. When we speak of God's self-revelation, we are certainly speaking of more than information and even invitation: we are speaking of reconciliation, of atonement, and of salvation. Our discussion so far has assumed that we are, so to speak, competent to undertake the search for truth - this has been the unquestioned assumption of modernity The central conviction of the Enlightenment was that human reason, once liberated from the shackles of tradition, superstition, and religion, was capable of coming to the knowledge of the truth. The call, so often heard in ringing tones, to "follow truth at all costs," assumed that we are so made that we know what it is that we are seeking and that we shall recognize it when we find it. Here we have to come to that part of the whole Christian tradition against which the Age of Reason most strenuously took up arms. At the heart of the story of the ministry of Jesus as interpreted by the Fourth Evangelist, there occurs an encounter between Jesus and those of his hearers who had believed in him. It is reported that he said, "If you continue in my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free" (John 8:31). Here we seem to have a direct reversal of one of the axioms of modernity, namely, that freedom of inquiry, freedom to think and speak and publish, is the way - the only way - to the truth. Jesus appears to reverse this. Truth is not a fruit of freedom; it is the precondition for freedom. It is not surprising that it was these words of Jesus which (according to the Fourth Gospel) precipitated an attempt to kill him. His hearers rightly perceived that he was telling them that they were not, as they believed, free. They were in bondage to sin, and only the truth could set them free. And he, Jesus, was the one whose word was truth and who could therefore set them free.

Here we have the most radical attack possible on the assumptions of modernity. To state the situation straightforwardly, this attack can hardly fail to rouse the same kind of anger in contemporary society as it did among those who heard those words of Jesus. Perhaps nowhere is this anger more deep today than among those Christians who have sought (with the truly admirable intention of making the gospel acceptable to the modern world) to commend Christianity as a tenable belief within the liberal assumptions of modern society. This helps to explain the strength, even ferocity, of liberal denunciations of what is called "fundamentalism." We cannot evade the sharpness of the issue here posed.

The anger of Jesus' hearers was to culminate in the events of Good Friday, when the living Truth was utterly rejected. Those who took up stones to kill Jesus rightly perceived that he was denying their claim to be free. "The Jews" in this text, as always in the Fourth Gospel, represent the world which does not acknowledge Jesus. That world is not free as it thinks it is. We are not honest inquirers seeking the truth. We are alienated from truth and are enemies of it. We are by nature idolaters, constructing images of truth shaped by our own desires. This was demonstrated once and for all when Truth became incarnate, present to us in the actual being and life of the man Jesus, and when our response to this Truth incarnate, a response including all the representatives of the best of human culture at that time and place, was to seek to destroy it.

It is this terrible reality that the liberal typically fails to recognize. It is absurd to say, as many do, that the traditional Christian teaching about the radical corruption of human nature comes from sources alien to the Jesus of the Gospels - St. Paul and St. Augustine being the prime suspects. This radical judgment on human nature is part of the very marrow of the New Testament witness. It would he strictly intolerable and therefore unbelievable if it were not seen through the eyes of those who have been brought to a new life by the resurrection of Jesus from the dead and by the gift of the Holy Spirit. Apart from this, the only possible implication of the death of Jesus would be the one enacted by Judas when he went out and hanged himself. It is possible, however, to avoid the implication set forth by Judas and to face and acknowledge the terrible reality exposed in the crucifixion of Jesus. This is evidenced by the fact that there are those who have been brought through the death and burial of the old self, that self which was confident in its own power to know the truth, and who have been incorporated into the life of him who is the truth and who is able to lead us into the truth. It is they alone who are truly free.

Because this is so, the witness that Christians bear to the truth must be a humble and penitent witness. This dying and being brought to life is something that must be continually renewed, reknown, and reenacted throughout life. The confession of the truth will be part of a continual indebtedness to grace. It will never be the kind of certainty which supposes that I can become a possessor of the truth by the exercise of my own natural powers. It will mean that my understanding of the truth must be constantly open to revision and correction, but - and this is the crucial point - only and always within the irreversible commitment to Jesus Christ. If that commitment is questioned, then I am once again a clueless wanderer in the darkness, bamboozled by the products of my own imagination. The strength of the liberal tradition is its willingness to be open to new truth. And the gospel itself makes this liberal mind possible; for if we know that Jesus is indeed the Word made flesh, the visible and knowable presence in the midst of history from whom and for whom all things exist, then we shall meet new experiences of any kind of reality with the confidence that we are given the clue for their understanding. But if that clue itself is questioned or abandoned, then we become clueless playthings of the winds and waves of fashion, "blown about by every wind of doctrine." Contemporary church life furnishes an abundance of illustrations.

The fundamentalist critique of liberal theology must be taken seriously. But fundamentalists do a disservice to the gospel when, as sometimes happens, they adopt a style of certainty more in the tradition of Descartes than in the truly evangelical spirit. This can show itself in several familiar ways. Sometimes it is an anxiety about the threat that new discoveries in science may pose to Christian faith an anxiety that betrays a lack of total confidence in the central truth of the gospel that Jesus is the Word made flesh. Sometimes it leads to a refusal to reconsider long-held beliefs in the light of fresh reflection on the witness of Scripture. One may contrast this with the truly liberal spirit shown by the Jews of Berea, for when confronted by the revolutionary message of the apostle, they did not simply reject it but "examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true" (Acts 17:11). And it can manifest itself in a claim for the objective truth of the Christian message that seems to depend on the acceptance of the false dualism of Enlightenment thought. Insofar as the word "objective" is used as a synonym for "really true," one must of course accept it unreservedly. But, it seems to me, its use in the context of modern thinking can lead to the false impression that the Christian faith is a matter of demonstrable fact rather than a matter of grace received in faith. Perhaps liberals would be more ready to listen. to the very serious question put to them by fundamentalists if the latter were more manifestly speaking as those who must think, as they must live, as debtors to grace. There is much wisdom in the simple words with which Herbert Butterfield concluded his study of Christianity and history: "Hold to Christ, and for the rest be totally uncommitted."

One of the most quoted sayings of the Enlightenment was that of Lessing when he spoke of the "great, ugly ditch" which separates history from science. Accidental happenings of history, he said, cannot prove eternal truths of reason. The gospel is an account of events in history. "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son. . . ... From the standpoint of the Enlightenment, this statement does not validate any claim to know eternal truths of reason. Any conclusions drawn from this historical statement would be subjective. One way of describing what happened at the birth of the modern era is to say that there was a shift in the perception of reliable truth from a story (the story told in the Bible) to a model of reality in terms of timeless laws of nature. The paradigm for the latter was, as I have noted earlier, Newton's mathematical physics. Newton's model calls for no faith in alleged divine revelation. Its functioning can be grasped by normal human powers of observation and reason. If the functioning of the cosmos is to be understood by means of this model, since there is no way of discovering the purpose for which the cosmos exists simply by observation of its workings, it follows that we are free to impose our own purposes on the cosmos. And, furthermore, insofar as we understand the ways in which the cosmos functions, we shall be able to formulate laws of nature that will enable us to predict with certainty the outcome of the actions we take. But, in the absence of any reliable information about the purpose (if any) for which the cosmos exists, the purposes we impose upon it will be as diverse as the persons whose purposes they are.

If, by contrast, we look for reliable truth in a story, the position will be quite different. A story is constituted by the actions of people who make choices, choices which are never totally predictable. If we understand our lives in terms of a story, we know that things are not predictable. A story always has room for surprises. The Bible, taken as a whole in its canonical shape, tells the story of the cosmos and of the human race in terms of the activity of its Author and Governor. In the language of Hans Frei (The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, the Bible renders the character of God. We only come to know the character of a person by learning the story of that person's life - how he or she speaks and acts in different situations. In the Bible as a whole, we are encountered by one whose character becomes clear as we continually allow the story to fill our minds. As we do this, we become aware that our lives are part of this universal story, and they are given a shape as part of it. We are given a sense of where we have come from and where we are going. This does not, however, provide us with means for the infallible prediction of what is to come; the Author has given us sufficient proof of his capacity for surprising us! But we have a confidence which is based on trust in him. Our lives are shaped, therefore, not by the confidence that we know enough of the laws of nature to chart our course with certainty, but by a faith (which can always be questioned) in the one whose story it is. I have affirmed that it is this biblical shaping that accounts for the distinctive character of the society we call Europe.

The Enlightenment, as I have suggested, was - from one point of view - a shift in the location of reliable truth from the story told in the Bible to the eternal truths of reason, of which the mathematical physics of Newton offered the supreme model. It was with confidence in the universal validity and reliability of these truths of reason that Europe reached out into the rest of the world with its civilizing mission. Even as recently as the 1930s, the famous Layman's Report Rethinking Missions saw the true function of the Christian missionary enterprise in terms of the universal communication of these eternal truths - the socalled "clear universals" which were valid for all human beings irrespective of their traditional cultures. I have referred to the dramatic collapse of this confidence and to the seminal figure of Nietzsche as the one who saw the inevitable outcome of the program of Enlightenment. Nietzsche and his disciples - the so-called postmodernists - have effectively turned Lessing on his head. The eternal truths of reason are in fact products of particular histories. Instead of eternal truths, we have The Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche) and The Archaeology Of the Social Sciences (Michel Foucault). The self-evident truths of the Enlightenment are, we now see, not self-evident at all but only appear self-evident to a society which has been shaped by a particular story. (It is not self-evident to an orthodox Hindu that all individuals are born with equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.) There are no timeless truths; there are only metanarratives which falsely claim to explain the human story as a whole but which are in fact themselves simply products of particular human histories.

Now it is obviously true that all our eternal truths and all our metanarratives are products of particular human histories. They are all socially and historically embodied. They do not exist in a suprahistorical, supracultural stratosphere. They are embodied in a particular language, using concepts, symbols, and models which have been developed in particular human communities. They are part of human culture, of particular human cultures. There is no reason to deny this.

But it is another matter if the conclusion is drawn that none of them are true or that their competing claims to account for reality are all equally true or (if you prefer the same thing in other words) equally false. That conclusion is unwarranted. It rests on the unstated assumption that truth must be something accessible apart from particular human languages, concepts, and models. The (true) assertion that all truth claims are culturally and historically embodied does not entail the (false) assertion that none of them makes contact with a reality beyond the human mind.

How, then, can we affirm the validity of these culturally and historically embodied truth claims? How can we be sure that these verbally formulated truth claims make contact with the realities of the minds which have formulated them? Plainly (as Thomas Torrance has pointed out), the relation between words and that which is not words cannot be stated in words. The relation is not a matter of verbal definition but of the total commitment of the whole person to that which is affirmed in the verbal statement.

Here we must refer again to that fatal step by which Descartes made the basis of certainty the thinking mind isolated from the whole embodied self and from the whole reality of which. the human being is a part. There is no detached way of arriving at objective truth, if this means a kind of truth claim not embodied in the affirmation of particular persons who use particular languages and concepts. I can only affirm the objectivity of a truth claim which I make by committing myself to live and act in accordance with this claim. If this is condemned as subjectivism and relativism, it is only because there lurks in the mind of the objector the illusion of a kind of knowledge which is not the knowledge of any human subject. The point can perhaps be sharpened by using two words which often play a part in discussion of these matters - the words "certain" and "fact."

For Descartes, as we have seen, the ideal of certainty was attained in mathematics. In the modern period, truth claims have been widely regarded as certain if they could be expressed in mathematical forms. This has been the ideal of scientific knowledge. But, as Einstein repeatedly said, the statements of mathematics are certain only when they make no contact with reality. As soon as a mathematical formula is applied to a situation in the world outside the mathematician's mind, it ceases to be certain. In Polanyi's summary, only statements that can be doubted make contact with reality. In other words, the mark of an indubitable statement is that it makes no contact with reality. If we are to make contact with reality, we must have the courage to make statements that can be doubted. There can be no knowing of reality without the courage to affirm what can be doubted and to act on that affirmation.

In addition to "certainty," the word "fact" also appears often in this discussion. Facts are supposed to be objective; interpretations of them, in contrast, are held to be subjective. That a man called Jesus was crucified and that it was alleged by his disciples that he had risen again - these are facts. That in this action God was reconciling the world to himself is interpretation, not fact, and is therefore subjective. But both statements are interpretations, the one being the interpretation of the disciples and the other being the interpretation shaped by the contemporary, modern worldview. Facts are not entities that simply implant themselves in a vacant mind; they are grasped by a mind trained in a particular culture to grasp them. The same realities presented to a child of three and to a trained scientist will not be the same sort of facts to both of them. The latter's statement of the facts will he determined by his or her scientific training.

At the heart of the concern that drove Michael Polanyi into the field of philosophy was his recognition that scientific work involved the passionate, personal commitment of the scientist to a truth which is, in the beginning, only intuitively sensed but which can only be reached if there is a willingness to affirm belief in statements that can be doubted. The alternative would be the collapse into skepticism and nihilism that we are seeing all about us in the developed world.

The business of the church is to tell and to embody a story, the story of God's mighty acts in creation and redemption and of God's promises concerning what will be in the end. The church affirms the truth of this story by celebrating it, interpreting it, and enacting it in the life of the contemporary world. It has no other way of affirming its truth. If it supposes that its truth can be authenticated by reference to some allegedly more reliable truth claim, such as those offered by the philosophy of religion, then it has implicitly denied the truth by which it lives. In this sense, the church shares the postmodernists' replacement of eternal truths with a story. But there is a profound difference between the two. For the postmodernists, there are many stories, but no overarching truth by which they can be assessed. They are simply stories. The church's affirmation is that the story it tells, embodies, and enacts is the true story and that others are to be evaluated by reference to it.

The world, so far as recorded history enables us to know, has always been full of stories, myths which expressed in story form the way of understanding the human situation. Such myths do not claim factual truth, in the sense that their veracity can be checked against the record of contemporary witnesses or accessible artifacts. They express eternal truths in story form. By contrast, the story that the church tells is a competitor in the field where secular historians tell the story of a society, a nation, a civilization, or the story of the world. The church's story is not a different kind of story from the one these histories tell; its difference is with respect to the interpretation of the records which are the raw material common to them all. It is not a special kind of history isolated from the work of secular historians. It is, if you like, a counterhistory, interpreting the same evidence in a different way. Perhaps the point that I am making can be highlighted by observing that some theologians have affirmed that, while the crucifixion of Jesus is an event in history, the resurrection is not. Of course this drives a wedge right through the heart of the Christian creed. If, in fact, the tomb was not empty on that Sunday morning, then the crucifixion of Jesus has to be understood quite differently from the way it is to be understood if the tomb was empty. The church's affirmation is that the story it tells is the true interpretation of all human and cosmic history and that to understand history otherwise is to misunderstand it, therefore misunderstanding the human situation here and now.

This is a stupendous claim. It is rendered even more astounding when one considers the weakness, confusion, cowardice, and downright wickedness to be found in all generations in the body to which the telling of this story has been entrusted. There can be no attempt to hide the enormity of the gulf between the treasure entrusted to the church and the body to which this trust has been given, between the story that the church tells and the story of the church itself with its global span and long history. One must be quite honest about church history and about the church's present actions and attitudes.

Yet none of this is the last word. Here is where the demand to walk by faith is at its most urgent. In spite of the church's sin, God remains faithful to those whom he has called. The promise of the Holy Spirit's guidance has not been withdrawn. Even in the darkest hours, signs of the divine presence shine with a brightness that cannot be hidden. And the story that the church tells continues to exercise its power both to correct and reform the church and to convince and convert the world. And however grievous the apostasy of the church may be, it remains that God has entrusted to it this story and that there is no other body that will tell it. From age to age, the church lives under the authority of the story that the Bible tells, interpreted ever anew to new generations and new cultures by the continued leading of the Holy Spirit who alone makes possible the confession that Jesus is Savior and Lord. God's sovereignty is that of God's grace. It is as savior that God is Lord. It is as the one who overcomes our alienation from the truth that God reveals the truth. We are not, as we like to think, naturally lovers of the truth. It has become possible for us to know God and to speak confidently of God only because the beloved Son who knows the Father has taken our place in our estrangement from God and has made it possible to come to a true knowledge of God through him. So the revelation of God given to us in him is not a matter of coercive demonstration but of grace, of a love that forgives and invites. That reality of grace governs both the confidence we have in speaking of God and the manner in which we must commend the gospel to others.

But if we are to speak in these terms, we must deal in greater depth with the specific questions modernity and postmodernity raise concerning the authority of Scripture. In the discussion so far, I have simply taken this authority for granted. We cannot continue the discussion, however, without facing these questions, even if only briefly, and this must be the business of the next chapter.

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