James Houston on The Rise, Decline, and Recovery of the Human Soul

Transcript

[peppy guitar music]

Well, dear brothers and sisters, it is the greatest joy and privilege to be with you on this occasion, and especially to be with my dear friend Bruce, that I have known since he was a student at Regent many years ago. He’s given us a wonderful background to what we want now, to pursue further. And what I want to ask of each of us is a kind of series of haunting background questions, that are like delayed time bombs, because it will take you the rest of your life to answer these questions. [audience laughing] But, the first one is: Is our identity more determined by our profession than by being persons in Christ? One of the problems that you face as pastors is that it’s so easy to have an identity that is given to you by your audience, your church, and it’s a very fragile identity. So, one of the things that arises from a self-achieved professional identity, is that it leads straight into narcissism. It leads straight into the whole area of having a depleted self, instead of a fulfilled self, by the grace of God, that’s number one. That haunts me, I hope it haunts you. Secondly, has thought priority to language in our culture? And I mean by that, that when I was struggling in my first sort of theological endeavor, having moved from a completely different environment, and a completely different profession, from geography to theology [laughs]. I wrote a book on, “I believe in the Creator,” and a friend very unkindly said, “You’d better.”

So, yes, I believe in the Creator. The issue that I face was, does one deal with the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo as primary or secondary to creatio per verbum? In other words, the polemic that was faced in the origin of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, that God in His sovereignty is creator over all things, and is the creator of all things, and therefore, we can never think of human creativity in anyway on the same page as God acting in creatio ex nihilo. Well, that I think is a road that leads to theological ideation, that is to say that it leads us into the whole area of the attributes of God, He’s omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent and all of those kind of abstract, philosophical notions about God. It’s a philosophical appreciation of God and of creation. The offense of creatio per verbum is first of all, it’s biblical, it’s what we have in the first creation story of Genesis 1, “God spake and it was done.” It’s the whole thrust of the beginning of John’s Gospel that, “In the beginning was the Word, “and the Word was with God and the Word is God.” So, we have to say what are the consequences of that theological understanding for us to say, does speech precede language, or rather, does speech precede thought? Now, we see that if we give priority to thought, we’ll end up in what Bruce has just been sharing with us. That this, I think therefore, I am, is who I am, you see. Now, of course, it’s almost as if God in His cosmic humor has got a laugh on us now, because 1/3 of this audience, possibly, demographically by the age of 85 is going to get dementia, you’ll lose your minds.

Audience Member: Ouch

Well, if you’ve lost your minds, why not realize the only solution is euthanasia? You’re no use to society, to mankind. So, we’re going to have a demographic revolution, which means we’re going to have a theological revolution. That no, it’s the speech of God that undergirds any of our thinking about God. And therefore, the priority of the Word of God has to be revised and re-understood in a new way. So that’s the second question. And the third question I want to ask: Is our pastoral theology today more expressive of a therapeutic culture than, indeed, of theo-anthropology? And we need to introduce the theme not of theology, but of theo-anthropology. Now what does that mean? It means if I’m pursuing knowing who is the identity of God, the answer is you will never appreciate the identity of God without knowing his embrace of man. In other words, you can’t separate them. When my youngest girl was very small and very loving we used to tease her and say, “Who do you love, “Mommy or Daddy?” And she hyphenated it, “I love Mommy-Daddy.” You couldn’t separate the one from the other. We need to appreciate, we can never appreciate God without His embrace of man. And so Karl Barth very appropriately said, “There is no such thing as Godless humanity.” If God is not there, man is not there either. And so, the gravity of what we face at the beginning of the 21st century is that with the denial of God, in the 20th century there’ll be the denial of being human in the 21st century.

Audience Member: Yes. That underpinning what it means to be human is the reality of the God that has embraced us in the incarnation. Well, that’s the background to what we’re going to talk about the rest of this time. [audience laughing] It’s huge, I remember [laughs], I remember a few years ago my son was witnessing a PowerPoint presentation I gave in Singapore and he roared with laughter and he said, “Dad never use PowerPoint again.” [audience laughing] Because what I was lecturing was a completely different lecture from what I’d originally composed beforehand on the PowerPoint, it’s always a moving target. And so one of the things that has been sort of, my lifestyle is never repeat the same lecture again. So I’ve always destroyed my lectures. You see, I’m a late starter and the great privilege of late starting is you never stop learning. [audience laughing] And so, when you have that background it means that, consequently, there’s always new freshness, there’s always new perspectives. You never stop seeing things with a different hue, different intensity or depth than before. So, in the light of all of that, what do I do now? [audience laughing] [laughs] Well, first of all I was going to say a lot more about the origin of the concept of the soul in the classical world, and so when Christian psychologists today are saying, scrap this conception of the soul, I think Christian psychologists talking about that, well of course we all know that psychology is a-historical, and if it’s a-historical than they’re not interested in what the classical world thought about the soul, you see. But the fact is that we are historical beings.

We, all of us, have a past, and our culture has a past, and Western civilization has a past. And so, therefore, yes of course, there’s an awful lot of confusion about the soul because as we go through the evolution of all these Greek thinkers and how they saw the soul, they were all dealing with different issues. One issue was, is the human a demi-god? So that there’s a kind of, no boundaries between the human and the divine? And that’s what the hero is, a hero is a demi-god that is neither bounded as a human being nor expressed in the infinitude of what is God. So that was one issue about the soul. Another issue is, of course, immortality. What happens after death, so is the soul then, the sort of bridge between this life and the next life? And then there’s the question of passions. Is the soul therefore, expressive of deep emotions, and deep desires, is that what it is to be soulful? And so you could go on and on through all these great thinkers and then you could see how their own world more legislated the nature of the soul in terms of the shaping of character, under Roman law, and of having portraiture of lives that were being shaped like the marble sculptures that you see in the classical museums today. So that you live with a sculpted life. And so in the marble is still the expression that is soulful in the face of the person. Are these in fact marble sculptures of heads just simply the curriculum of our school? This our professor, this is who he is, this is what he’s going to teach you as a way of life. So there’s a great ramification of thinking about the soul from that classical background that we have. The scripture uses the concept much more matter of factly. It’s the language of ordinary day life.

It’s first of all, indicating the unity, of course, of body, soul and spirit, the tripartite notion is expressed in the New Testament as the colloquial language of the culture around it. It’s not trying to do anything more than speak in the vernacular. But the complexity of all of that we have to leave. And so we also leave behind us what Bruce has been focusing on so clearly and so brilliantly to you this afternoon. What I want now then to do, is to suggest that we in North America have been handicapped from our heritage of a misconception that we’re still living with. You see the colonization of the New World was a new laboratory for the human being. It’s what de Tocqueville suggested was, there’s a new social experiment taking place in North America that we’ve never seen in the Old World. And that is, the cultivation of the individual. That this is the culture of the individual. So the individual is uprooted from all the traditions of Europe, all the cultural history of Europe, and now with this romantic new zeal, that is as revolutionary as the French Revolution itself, now a new experiment of the human condition is being developed in America. Wow. So, remember that’s your heritage. Remember that, that heritage was reinforced through all the development of different philosophies in the 19th century and especially the tremendous importance of this great guru that is going to teach us everything as the varieties of religious experience was being taught by

Off Screen: William James.

William James, that’s right. You’re inheritors of the ideology of William James. Now, what happens, especially we’re going to jump through all the mirages of Hollywood and the 20’s, and the Great Depression and the 30’s, and now we come to the post war situation in America. And what happens then? How can the engines of war, all this enormous productivity that took place which made the Second Great War unique in the history of man, because never was science more harnessed in technology in the Second World War. So all that productivity of super bombers, of tanks, of aircraft, all the great technological achievement of industrial production, how is that going to be turned into the plowshares of peace? Well, there’s only one way, to re-invent the empty self. Or rather to invent the empty self as a reinvention of the individual. And so the rise of advertising, certainly the rise of the credit card and certainly the shopping malls, are all expressive that you need self-fulfillment. And this whole cult of self-fulfillment has pre-occupied our culture in North America ever since. So that now you’re promised by Master Card that you’re master of all your choices, when you have this card. [audience laughing] Little do you know that you’re going to be the slave of debt for the rest of your life. And so this conning of ourselves is self-fulfillment.

And this notion of needing to be a consumer to have well-being is what’s destroyed our soul in the 20th century. Now, what we need to recover is the significance of those voices that went through the persecution in Germany with the Nazis. And to recognize that it’s those voices that we need to listen to now. In other words, we are listening to Dietrich Bohnhoeffer in the “Cost of Discipleship.” We are listening, perhaps more, though some of us find it very difficult to listen to all the church dogmatics of Karl Barth, but we should be listening to him. We should be listening to those pastors like, Eduard Thurneysen in his theology of pastoral care, which is as a friend of Karl Barth, interpreting Barth pastorally. Or indeed, the Dutch theologian, Jacob Firet in his “Dynamic of Pastoring.” Or perhaps a voice you’ve never heard of, the Catholic Dietrich Von Hildebrand in his book “The Transformation in Christ” which were lectures that he gave in front of the Nazis in 1933. We don’t realize that Dietrich Von Hildebrand was declared by Himmler, and Hitler in 1938 as enemy number one of the Fuhrer system. And it was because of this hatred to his lectures on “Transformation in Christ.” Well, you see, it’s in the heat of persecution, it’s in the heat of such opposition, it’s in the stance of Carl Barth nein, no. The state church is in collapse.

The idea of making every pastor a miniature Fuhrer, is not the gospel. It’s that stance that therefore, should inspire us in America to radically revise what we mean by pastoral theology. Now you see, the problem that we are dealing with is that because we’re not radical enough, all our solutions are ad hoc. So even spiritual formation, even spiritual discipline, even spiritual direction are really rather ad hoc to what our lives should be and our ministry should be. You see, there should be an awareness that the message that we’re communicating contains its own pastoral ministry. Its own transformative impact, its own dynamic consequences as a result of who we are. And so, in closing I want to suggest that one way in which we can see how this can be revised is therefore, to recognize that as evangelicals we have been conned, especially by the Niebuhrs. And it’s interesting, that Reinhold Neibuhr and Richard Neibuhr as brothers, one at Yale and the other in the seminary in New York where Bonhoeffer himself attended and got confused by, that what they’re really advocating is that Christ is simply an assistance to having a deeper life as a human being. That the icon of Christ in culture is really a kind of deistic Christ, it’s an abstraction of a notion about Christ. That’s very comfortable with the culture. And so as Christians we are so sucked in and en-culturated by our culture we don’t know it. And so we have to ask God, help us oh God to be aware that it’s not that Christ is against culture, Christ is the source of culture. But that the cultural notions that we have of Christ are all wacky. [audience laughing] And that we need, therefore, to recover that God is the ground for humanity, and therefore, theo-anthropology is what we should embrace.

So, let me just conclude by suggesting one way in which you might think about this. Take Luke’s gospel and the Acts. When we look at the theo-anthropology of these two writings, which even sometimes the most liberals call us agreed probably is a unity of authorship, that Luke is the author of both books. What we find is that Luke constantly, consistently in the Acts of the Apostles, doesn’t say like the other gospels that Jesus is Yaweh. Now, for the Jews that was fantastic. That the God of Exodus, the God of Isreal, the God of the Prophets, Yaweh is Jesus. That’s revolutionary. But Luke says something even more. Luke is saying Jesus is Lord of all. He’s the cosmic Lord. And those words, “of all” reproduced 100 times or so in the Acts of the Apostles. It would be an interesting exercise to look at the narrative and the impact that those words had on each of the narrative associations where Luke is pronouncing these words, “He is Lord of all.” In other words my brothers and sisters, Our God is the God of the academy. Don’t bow down to the academy for your professional identity and compromise with your Christian life. That’s what we have to fight against today. So, how then, does that inspire us to realize that theo-anthropology is all the pastoral theology we need. In fact, it’s more that we can cope with. Well first of all, because it’s personal. There’s an intimacy and a personal focus on the God-man solvivic character that we find in Luke and Acts which is quite remarkable. And so there is this awareness then, that Luke, first of all is dedicating his writings to a friend. So, there’s the context, friendship is the basis for this communication. And we find throughout it all the intimacy of detail of where Luke, in the encounters that Jesus has with people is to particularize them so they stand out uniquely. Then out, one of the crowd, He identifies the woman who touches him in the crowd. He identifies the one who’s sitting in the trees, Zacchaeus. And everywhere we find that Luke’s perspective is that Jesus [soft music plays] will identify you as no one has ever identified you in your life.

As I sometimes said to my students, when you’re in Christ you’re more yourself than you ever could be by yourself. The gift of uniqueness is found by being in Christ. And Luke is the person that will help you to see that. And then we see, of course, all the speeches and all that witness that we have of the Acts of the Apostles is all in the context of specific events and of specific witness and of specific law court with a specific time table. All of that is so clearly, clearly specified. And then again, we find that in this writing that pastoral theology is always integrative of proclamation of instruction and of nurture. Luke is not the kind of pastor that we have today. I’m the senior pastor, and I specialize in preaching, and I leave pastoral shepherding to somebody else. You cannot be a pastor unless you’re a shepherd. You cannot specialize in your pastoral ministry. Because what you’re doing is, of course you’re proclaiming the Word of God, of course you’re instructing, you’re teaching and breaking it open so that they will understand what they don’t understand. But you’re nurturing as any mother nurtures her child. And you never separate those things when you’re a true shepherd, when you’re a real pastor in Christ. And so, at the end when Paul is joining the Ephesian elders he uses these three great terms to indicate that they are to do the same thing, that the preaching, and the teaching and the nurturing are never separated. Again, a fourth thing that we find in these two wonderful writings is that pastoral ministry reflects the portraiture and identity of Jesus Christ. In a sense this portrait of Jesus that is given by Luke is so overwhelmingly present, so intimately, infinitely intimate, that the Acts of the Apostles are not really the acts of the apostles at all.

They’re the acts of God through the apostles. And what that ministry is, is a ministry of having seen the face of Jesus, and having seen the face of Jesus, all my heart is satisfied. And so when you have seen Him, and this is what I love about the apostle Paul so much, it’s been one of the versus that has haunted me all my public life, “O King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to that heavenly vision.” That heavenly vision has grown, and three times over, it’s a vision that of course, is tremendous but then, it’s a vision that’s greater still and it’s a vision above the brightness of the mid-day sun. So, in one’s own pastoral experience, the face of Jesus is more wonderful today in your life than it ever was when you were first converted. Let the portrait grow, let the vision grow. And then the consequence is that you will have, oh dear me, I’ve overstepped the time. Pastoral theology then, is fifthly vitally Trinitarian. You can never separate the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We have denominations that belong to a divine dysfunctional family where I’m all for the Fatherhood of God and the Liberal Presbyterian Church and I’m all for Jesus Christ as an Evangelical and I’m all for the Holy Spirit as a Charismatic. It’s dysfunctional. [audience laughing] And the Babel of Exegesis which is like the Tower of Babel about the Acts of the Apostles in scholarship, needs to be reunited, that what unites us is the Trinity. And this Trinitarian awareness of what the communication of faith is all about should be essential. And finally, pastoral theology is prayerful intercession. You know, after the ascension there could have been a real consternation among the disciples. You know, Jesus among us has been wonderful, now He’s gone. And the Acts of the Apostles is assuring us, Stephen in his martyrdom saw, I saw Him at the right hand of God. Who did he see? He saw Christ as the intercessor. That Christ has not forgotten us, though He’s in Heaven. Christ is with us as never before. And so we, acting in a Christ-like capacity, are intercessors for others.

I don’t forget you, I’m always thinking about you, I’m praying for you, that’s the role that we find in the Acts of the Apostles. So because He stands at the right hand, what does that mean? Well in the law courts when the advocate stood on the left hand you were condemned, death was your penalty. So whenever you saw the advocate who had failed to advocate for you, he was on the left hand of the judge or the Caesar. But on the right hand he had succeeded [laughs], he had won your case and so, in redemption we have this wonderful appreciation, “Oh,” says Stephen, “you judge me falsely.” But the advocate has judged me rightly, I’m blessed and forgiven by Him. And so he saw Him at the right hand of God. So help us Lord, we pray, in all our pastoral ministry to realize that our heavenly Christ is standing on the right hand of the Father making intercession for us. Thank you. [peppy guitar music]