Foreword
Foreword
by J. I. Packer
TO MOST WESTERN MINDS today, dogma seems to signify simply a personal view rigidly held, narrow in focus, unfruitful to entertain, and uninteresting to encounter. What a comedown for a great Christian word! For in the past dogma denoted a consensus of the whole church, acting through its leaders, regarding central Christian truth—biblical and apostolic teaching, that is, with regard to God.
Dogma, thus understood, was recognized as testimony to drama: that is, to divine action. The drama in this case is God’s complex but unitary program for creating a new humanity, the church, in and through Jesus Christ. Out of this two basic dogmas emerge. The program reveals God as three persons, eternally living an interrelated and unified life of mutual love, and now working together as a team in space-time history for the salvation of sinful human beings and the reconstitution of this spoiled planet. This truth is safeguarded by the dogma of the Trinity. Within the program, the high spot, the climax, the acme, the pinnacle, the center point, and the hinge on which, first to last, the efficacy of the project turns, is the fact that, as John Betjeman put it, “God was man in Palestine”—the reality, that is, of the earthly life, death, resurrection, ascension, present reign and future return of the divine Son, whose human name is Jesus, and whose role is that of Messiah, the anointed Savior-King, the one mediator between man and God. This truth is safeguarded by the dogma of the Incarnation. Here, then, are the dazzling, dramatic, and destiny-determining truths that are enshrined in the twin dogmas that Christians need to learn to unpack.
These declarations of the tri-personality of God and of the person and place of Jesus Christ periodically become battlegrounds. As in the first Christian centuries, so in the past two hundred years, many have doubted whether either is fully in line with the New Testament. It is true that the technical terms Trinity and incarnation are not found in the New Testament, but, as present-day scholarly study makes clearer and clearer, the realities for which these terms stand are certainly there, and are so in a very fundamental way. Sugar stirred into a cup of coffee is there in solution, and the sweetness of the taste is impossible to miss. So, too, when the thought-forms and narrative flow of the gospels and Acts, and the explicit theologizing of the epistles and Revelation, are properly examined, it is impossible to miss the fact that the three-in-oneness of God, and the divinity of the man Jesus, are foundational to and formative of the testimony that is being borne. Trinitarian and incarnational perspectives are tacitly but unmistakably present, and once you see them you can never overlook them again.
Two amazing things confront us here. The first is the objective, factual reality of the personally divine yet entirely human life that our incarnate Savior lived. What the gospels show us can be summed up like this: Without forfeiting or reducing either His divine identity or His divine powers, in full and exact obedience to the Father’s will throughout, and through the enabling agency of the Holy Spirit at every turn, the second person of the Godhead, the Son of God who is God the Son, became a fetus growing in Mary’s womb; was born and nursed like any other baby; passed through infancy, boyhood, and adolescence into manhood; knew from the first moment of his self-awareness as a newborn that He was the Father’s Son, who would always know and must always do what the Father directed, and did so unfailingly; blended meekness with majesty, seriousness with joyousness, satirical humor with sensitive gentleness, forthrightness against sin with vulnerable love to sinners in a unique perfection of character; modeled wisdom and humility, self-control and integrity, independence in face of men and prayerful dependence on his Father, in a way and to a degree never seen or imagined before; and finally endured six hours of supreme agony on the cross, giving His life a ransom for many, bearing away the sin of the world, undergoing the Godforsakeness that we sinners deserved. Then His resurrection displayed His divinity and demonstrated His victory to His disciples, who from then on linked Him with the Father in their worship and prayers.
The second amazing thing is the perspectival quality of the gospel narratives themselves—something that academics, poring over the details, do not always notice. In all four gospels we walk with Jesus’ disciples, watching Him through their eyes and sharing their experience of learning from Him and being mentored by Him. The skill with which each evangelist composing what was clearly a carefully planned discipling document with a pre-set word length, selected and linked up his chosen units of narration and instruction so as to set forth a coherent view, both personal and thematic, of Jesus Christ the crucified, risen, reigning Savior, is simply stunning. Stunning, too, is the recurring impact with which, again and again, Jesus, as it were, steps out of the gospel text to overwhelm us, its readers and hearers, as the rightful Lord of our lives. What is working here is the alchemy of the Holy Spirit, whereby through meditating on the story being told and imagining ourselves there as part of it, we are made aware of the Lord present with us now, saying to us in effect, “I am here, to be with you today and every day as your teacher, rescuer, life-giver, ruler and guide. As I discipled My followers in the days of My flesh, so now I am discipling you: learn, then, and practice the lesson that the passage you were reading teaches you.” It is idle to deny, and perverse to disregard, the fact that this happens.
Another mode of this same alchemy is the recurring experience of the double-take that the gospel narratives trigger. The evangelists’ calculated stress on the full humanness of their more-than-human subject prompts the thought, again and again, “What a wonderful person He was!”—and then jolts us into the further thought, “And He was, and is, God!”—Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today and for ever!” To induce this jolting but edifying double-take was certainly part of each evangelist’s purpose, and this is one of many factors that mark out the gospels as unique in human literature.
What has just been stated can be expressed as part of a point about biblical interpretation. Note to start with, that the apostle John affirms in his first letter that God is both light and love (1 John 1:5, 4:8). “Is” implies “is revealed as,” and “acts as.” This gives us the thought that everything which the Bible presents God as saying and doing should be understood in terms of both God-self-expressed-as-light (that is, revealing His holiness to illuminate our darkness and convict us of our sins), and also as God-self-expressed-in-love (that is, revealing mercy against the background of His wrath). In a similar way, John tells us in the prologue to his gospel that the Word (God’s logos, identified now as the divine Son) became flesh (John 1:14); which gives us the truly staggering thought that everything Jesus is reported to have said and done was God-self-expressed-as-man (that is, if we can believe it, our co-Creator God now living the creaturely life of a fully human being). God the Son had taken to Himself all that is involved in being perfectly human, and each of His words and deeds must now be appreciated as a demonstration both of man serving God as our model and of God serving man as our Mediator. Double-take? Yes.
Which brings us to The Incomparable Christ, a devotional exploration of the person, the work, and the key utterances of our Lord Jesus Christ, by mid-twentieth-century Bible teacher and missionary statesman J. Oswald Sanders. It is a book for believers, written to sharpen their sight of their Savior’s unique glory along the lines that the foregoing paragraphs have sought to spell out. To commend this book to a new reading public is a joy. Works of this kind do not date, any more than the Bible itself dates, and the present reprint is something to give thanks for. Its portrayal of Jesus our Lord is truly manna to the Christian soul, manna for which real Christians will always be hungry. So it only remains for me to say, bon appetit! and now to stand aside, so that you may move at once to the rich meal that Dr. Sanders has laid out for you.
J. I. PACKER
Board of Governors’ Professor, Regent College
Vancouver B.C.
Canada
