Multiple Christmas services at our Evangelical Anglican church greeted the usual throng of local, and not so local, folk, for whom Christmas constitutes a rare exception to their more regular practice of non-attendance. This sudden, but predictable, annual re-kindling of religious interest is quite reasonably regarded by the regulars as a great opportunity for evangelical outreach. No surprise, then, to see, stacked up in piles by the exit, for distribution to any interested person, free copies of a what turns out to be a short presentation of the Christian faith for non-believers. Not, this time, the familiar re-issue of a tract bearing the name of some respected evangelical classic, but a genuinely new text, recently published by one Glen Scrivener.
I am always interested in any publication that could prove useful for the purposes of popular evangelism. With the ever-disappointed, but still indomitable, excitement of the elderly prophet, I still eagerly await the publication of that elusive tract that will be MY ‘light to lighten the gentiles’ – a brief and easily understandable text answering to the needs of an evangelist unconvinced by the claims of Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA).
In this case, the title of the proffered tract – ‘The Gift’ – gave particular grounds for hope.
Why? Because, for me, that notion – gift – recalls to mind an important strand in (relatively) recent philosophical and theological writing. This strand of thought has contributed fruitful perspectives on Christianity which, while rooted in the everyday, engage powerfully with a wider non-Christian context. It has even served as the basis for understandings of Christian sacrifice and atonement that altogether bypass PSA.
I therefore read, with gratified surprise, the back-cover reviews by names associated with The Gospel Coalition (TGC). Fancy! A tract-length presentation of the Christian faith that actually offered a convincing alternative to PSA, yet carried with it the endorsement of the Evangelical community! Now that would be a book I could personally use! Maybe even (am I dreaming?) the first promise of some future evangelistic endeavour in which I might be able to share – with all my misgivings about PSA!
In this blog, I shall evaluate this short book: first from the perspective of the WHAT of its claims about Christianity (i.e. Is this a position that I can personally endorse?); second, from the perspective of the HOW of its presentational technique (i.e. How would this go down with an interested enquirer?)
First, though, I should say something about the very real difficulty of the task our author sets himself in adopting the approach that he does.
On the face of it, it would seem natural enough to frame a presentation of Christianity in these terms; after all, Scripture itself is full of the figurative language of gift and giving. In the case of a popular tract, however, the problem is that such language may not be immediately intelligible to people unschooled in decoding it. Connections of images, associations of ideas, that may be self-evident to us, are not necessarily so to the ‘unchurched’. Yet, when we try to translate the meanings and connections established by this figural language into literal terms – to say these things in the way a philosopher might – we end up with something that turns out to be remarkably complicated.
Glen Scrivener’s response to the challenge of making the biblical language comprehensible is to begin with everyday situations of a kind familiar to his readers. He can then employ the biblical language in relation to those situations in such a way as to make the meanings of that language clear. The overall structure of his text shares the ‘problem:resolution’ pattern common to most such presentations: there is an exposition of the human problem of ‘sin’, then that of the Christian answer to that problem. Both sections are introduced via apparently real-life interchanges between Scrivener and his wife Emma. These conversations fit in with the general theme of family Christmases, which forms the point of departure for the discussion, and gives conversational subtitles to each of the chapters dealing successively with what S. sees as the four ‘moments’ of the gift: ‘It’s for you’ (God’s initial gift); ‘You shouldn’t have’ (humanity’s inadequate response); ‘I wanted to’ (God’s answer to the inadequate response in the form of the incarnation); ‘Thank you’ (our appropriate response to God’s answer).
My own evaluation of this approach
If I may be allowed to anticipate somewhat on my conclusions, S. doesn’t altogether succeed in making his message clear. I would challenge even the most sympathetic reader to summarize what the author intended to convey in this text – let alone a sceptical and unchurched non-believer. In my opinion, the fault is almost certainly in the manner of presentation – the HOW of S’s approach, rather than the WHAT of its take on the Christian message. But lack of clarity in the presentation leaves the reader in some doubt as to what the author means. Still, as someone with more familiarity than most with what Christians have said on this topic, I think I can discern both S.’s understanding of the gift, and the intended use to which he puts it in delivering the Gospel message.
I strongly endorse S.’s position, in as far as I have understood it – though I would no doubt experience some of the same difficulties as S., if I tried to explain it for a general readership in a popular tract.
Of course, that is not the readership I envisage for this blog! These comments are primarily addressed to Glen Scrivener himself (if he is out there!) and people like him, who might be contemplating producing similar books in future, including his friends at TGC. With such readers in view, I shall take liberty of setting out in non-figurative terms what I take Scrivener’s position to be. I hope others, including Scrivener himself, return once again to the task of conveying the Gospel in this way. It seems to me a most promising approach. But, the first stage towards realizing it successfully is an understanding of what needs to be conveyed, even if that involves a level of linguistic abstraction entirely out of place in a book for the general reader. This is what I myself shall attempt in my summary of his position below.
The message
The notion of gift used by S. combines two aspects of our common human experience widely recognized in their separation by ‘non-religious’ as well as believers, and does so in such a way as to give them a specifically religious (i.e. theistic) meaning. The first of these aspects is the sense we have as human beings that our life experience comes to us from outside ourselves. The term ‘givenness’ is frequently applied to this idea. The second of these aspects, which the notion of gift brings into meaningful relation with that of givenness, is the awesome capacity of the things of our experience to assume some ultimate value in our eyes – whether because such value is intrinsic to those things, or attributed by ourselves.
Now, to describe life as a ‘gift’ is to ascribe a cosmic intentionality to the ‘givenness’ we have just described, and to see the special value of the phenomena of life as an expression of that cosmic intention. In cruder terms, when the notion of ‘gift’ is introduced into the existential context, the ‘givenness’ of life is taken to presuppose its source in a ‘giver’, and the value of things, to be attributable to a purpose on the part of such a giver.
This notion of a cosmic gift and a cosmic gift-givenness is, I believe, fundamental to all religions – certainly all theistic ones. But Christianity and Judaism know the cosmic gift in a form specific to our particular traditions. Here, the ‘giver’ or ‘source of life’ is a transcendent being – i.e. God – believed to exist prior to – and beyond – our individual and collective life experience, as well as within it. The things of our experience are regarded as having an intrinsic value by dint of being created, then donated to us, by that transcendent being. Thus, in the first chapter of Genesis, God is described as creating all things through his Word – and of making them so as to be ‘good’. The animals, for example, are successively presented to Adam for him to name.
An inevitable consequence of this very specific understanding of the cosmic gift is to reject as impious and aberrant all other potential understandings – such as those that presuppose a purely imminent notion of the deity, or the notion that he/she belongs to a particular race or community. The ‘God’ of the Judaeo-Christian tradition is the one god of all humankind, a god who did not beget us, or some particular group of us (as in many religions), but created and chose us for Himself. The temptation to give the devotion which is the due of our transcendent, creator deity to some other deity of our own conception is what the Bible terms ‘idolatry’.
In his characterization of the human predicament (the unavoidable first stage of any evangelistic presentation of faith) Scrivener avoids the word ‘idolatry’, as he avoids the word ‘sin’ – no doubt advisably. Yet it is clear, that for this author, the characterization of human nature as inherently idolatrous follows on from that of God’s good creation as a gift. All our human mess-ups, Scrivener seems to imply are ultimately attributable to idolatrous attachments to objects of our own devising – what the Bible terms ‘idols’.
Here, then, presented to the best of my ability in my own, somewhat abstract, terms is what I take to be Scrivener’s ‘diagnosis’ of the human problem to which Christ comes as the remedy. Our first question has to be: Is it also the diagnosis of the Bible and the Christian tradition?
In my view, it is spot on – much more so than what we encounter in many classic Evangelical presentations, for example, in John Stott, Nicki Gumble or C.S. Lewis – let alone the majority of evangelistic sermons! That is why Scrivener has no difficulty in finding Biblical metaphors which – for anyone schooled in the figurative language of the Bible – presuppose the characterization of the human predicament detailed in the above paragraphs. For example, a Scriptural metaphor that runs through the warp and weft of Scrivener’s account is that of the ‘source’ of our existence – i.e. God – as a ‘spring’ or ‘well’. The key problem of idolatry is correspondingly characterized in terms of the human propensity (Scrivener cites the prophet Jeremiah here) to ‘dig their own (wells), broken (wells) that cannot hold water’. We are all, says Scrivener, inveterate ‘well-diggers’. This figurative mode of thinking, indebted as we have shown, to the fundamental Scriptural view underlies Scrivener’s more general analysis of human behaviour, such as the following:
This is the problem with the world. Instead of give-and-take, we grasp-and-tear. Instead of being filled by the original Giver and pouring out to others, we feel empty by ourselves and try to use others. We identify people as means to our ends or as obstacles in our way. It begins with a failure to receive from God, our true life source. It continues with our desperate attempts to make life work on our own terms. And so we tap into everything and everyone we crave. And it works. Sort of. For a bit. But not really. Because nothing finite can fill us. (pp. 28-29)
In the context in which these generalizations appear, I seriously doubt whether they will convey anything very coherent to the theologically uninformed and biblically naïve reader – even with the benefit of the verses of Jeremiah cited previously. Yet, I hope those readers who have diligently followed my blog to this point, will see that, in the light of my own account of Scrivener’s position above, there is a coherence in what this passage is saying. This is best demonstrated by developing somewhat upon the ‘irrigation’ metaphor after the manner of some recent gift theorists.
If you have difficulty imagining why, when God is the source of all being, human beings would be motivated to dig their own wells in dry ground, then let’s finetune Jeremiah’s analogy. Suppose there is, as in Jeremiah, one source of water, but, that in order to be distributed, this water must be canalized by human beings through a network of streams and ditches. Now imagine that, instead of allowing the water to move freely, humans erect weirs and dams in order to divert the water in self-interested ways. You can see how, through an ethos of self-interest and its justification by means of a doctrine of scarcity people might come to ‘feel empty’ and ‘identify others as an obstacle in their way’. This general situation could be said to have ‘begun’ as a result of a failure to credit God as the true owner of the life source, and to ‘continue’ ‘with desperate efforts’ to make things work on the basis of the alternative doctrine that that ‘our water belongs to us’. This would, in effect result in the replacement of ‘give-and-take’ by ‘grab-and-tear’.
The most obvious way to interpret such a metaphor would be on an economic level, with a focus on the water itself as representing the material prosperity that nourishes us. However, there is also no reason why it could not as easily be understood on a spiritual level. We could, instead, place the emphasis on the question of the source, and how we come to see ourselves, not as merely the ‘diverters’ of God’s blessing, but as our own little gods, claiming to supply the needs of others out of our own resources, and fighting the similar claims of others where they threaten to undermine our self-belief. Such I believe is human idolatry. And as a comprehensive account of what is wrong with world, of what the evangelists have traditionally called ‘sin’, it serves very well in my opinion.
So, Scrivener’s account of the human ‘problem’ is essentially very satisfactory, and, I suspect, would be very persuasive if only it could be communicated adequately in a language comprehensible to the unchurched and biblically naïve.
What about his account of God’s ‘solution’?
Here again, as with the ‘problem’ – only considerably more so – I will have to translate what, on the basis of my wider church experience and theological reading, I take Scrivener to be saying into my own more abstract, but at least coherent terms, in order to be able to express some degree of support for its fundamental theological validity.
Christ’s (and God’s) solution, if we restrict ourselves to Scrivener’s formulation, is, through the incarnation, to ‘give Himself’ – in order to say and show, to errant humanity: ‘I love you’. Having given us the world, and ourselves (through creation), God gives us His very Self (in Christ). To ‘love’ someone, it is implied, is to give them what is your own – ultimately, yourself. Scrivener cites here the well-known Christmas text from the Gospel of John: ‘God so loved the world that He gave his only Son …’ How is this love shown? Through God Himself in the form of his incarnate Word, entering the world, living among us, dying for our sakes, and finally being resurrected.
The question to ask of this solution is, of course, whether it fully answers to the human problem, earlier defined as fundamentally one of idolatry. There are two aspects to this. First, whether and how Scrivener’s formulation of the solution, supposing that to be the Gospel’s true meaning, would measure up to humanity’s problem; second, whether and how the Gospel events themselves (i.e. Christ’s entering the world and dying for us) can be understood in terms of that formulation.
Let us begin with the first aspect of the question.
I can certainly understand how God’s giving of Himself would supply the remedy to our human idolatry – but only if I expand somewhat on Scrivener’s proposition: ‘Having given you a world, having given you you, He now gives you Himself’. Scrivener sees this ‘gift’ in terms of its expression of God’s love. As he goes on to say: ‘Because this is how love operates. Love gives whatever the cost.’ In other words, the answer to my ‘well-digging’ propensities lies in being utterly convinced that I have an ultimate value depending on the source of my existence, to which my independent and self-interested ‘irrigational schemes’ contribute nothing.
This is fair enough as far as it goes. But it invites the question whether God’s hasn’t already given us everything in creation (i.e. in ‘giving you the world, and you you’), and what more is really added in his ‘giving you Himself’. It leaves us with precisely the question this little book set out to answer: namely, why Jesus and why Christmas!
The answer lies in taking ‘He now gives you Himself’ in another direction. We could understand God’s action not just as EXPRESSING something (i.e. his love), but as COMMUNICATING something (i.e. who He is). In other words, we could understanding the Gospel events as the means by which God offers us the ultimate revelation of himself. This is absolutely not something Scrivener spells out in this text, but I would be very surprised if it isn’t something he believes; indeed, he may have so taken it for granted that he has unwisely assumed that his biblically naïve readers will themselves supply what he has omitted!
Now if we allow ourselves to give Scrivener’s words this broader sense, then it becomes much more apparent why, at least in principle, God’s ‘solution’ measures up to the problem. We are likely to abandon our well-digging to the extent we become altogether persuaded – not just that the water won’t dry up (i.e. God loves us) – but that God Himself is the true source, that all water comes from Him, and, therefore, our own well-digging pretensions are misguided and wrong! I’m not sure this amounts to an altogether adequate account of the Gospel; but at least it’s one that leaves room for the Christ-event! After all, it is one thing for God to give us life in the first place (as He does to the animals}; another thing, for Him to give us the revelation that he does so (as He appears to do only to ourselves).
However, the real inadequacy of Scrivener’s solution shows up in relation to the second aspect of our question: namely, why God’s self-revelation should take precisely the form of his Son entering the world, sharing our human life, and dying for our sake. Take the following:
At Christmas Jesus stooped down to our humanity, but throughout his life He kept on stooping – all the way to his death on a cross. In order to meet us in the depths of our hellish predicament, Jesus set out resolutely for Jerusalem, where he knew he would meet his fate … Why was Jesus so determined to die? Because he loves. Love says, ‘Your plight will be my plight, Your struggles will be my struggles. Your debts will be my debts.’
My own response here (and what genuinely sceptical reader wouldn’t share it?) can only be: ‘Well, how the dickens was THAT supposed to help?’ Such a reaction is if anything invited by the emphasis the author earlier placed, in relation to the gift, on the importance of appropriateness (to recipient and occasion):
Perhaps this particular present never crossed your mind- you didn’t even know it existed. But as soon as you see it, you know it’s right. Instinctively you cry out, ‘Wow, it’s perfect!’
So, how, in case of God’s great ‘gift’ to humanity, is the gift appropriate to the recipient? How does Christ ‘stooping down even to death on a cross’ answer to the problem of idolatrous humanity? It will not do just to keep going back to the intentions of the giver – as though, as we say, ‘it’s the thought that counts’! There’s a well-known anecdote, how true I don’t know, that the artist Van Gogh was so stricken with love for a certain lady, that he sent her his ear in a box. By any standards, this was truly a gift that cost the giver pain and huge personal sacrifice. Clearly, his love must have been really great to warrant such expression. So, what could have been lacking in such a gift?
To be fair, it’s asking a lot to demand a full explanation of something that takes the bible-scholar, NT Wright, a good four volumes to get to the bottom of. Some inadequacy is inevitable in a book of this length. Still, an explanation can be inadequate to a degree that it would have been better left unattempted …. where, for example, it leaves sceptical readers more sceptical than it found them !
The presentation
Scrivener introduces both the human problem and its Gospel solution through scenes from his domestic life. Something no doubt to be expected given the background theme of Christmas. The intention is clearly to demonstrate the meaning of the figurative language of the Bible through its application to a concrete situation.
In fairness to our author, I have to confess finding personal revelations of this kind a bit ‘cringe’ – especially they seem not justified by contribution they make to the message of the sermon – as is very much the case in this tract.
The ‘dispute’ between the author and his wife Emma forms the pretext for a good four pages of print, but the real issues and motivations are only sketchily alluded to. The point seems be that evil arrives out of nowhere, and that, during such moments of ‘hell’, ‘we don’t know what comes over us’. ‘This is the problem of the world’, resumes the author somewhat pompously, before proceeding to the interesting observations about ‘well-digging’ that we cited earlier. The observations are clearly meant to draw the lesson of the scene we have just witnessed. Yet the relevance of well-digging to the dispute is barely indicated:
Emma and I both turned to our ‘broken wells’ – faulty sources of life and joy. Our broken wells were things like ‘being right’, ‘an easy life’ and ‘family approval’.
Really? Then, why have you just spent four pages not telling us anything about those motivations? I can understand that such detail might be too personal. Yet, in that case, why use personal anecdote – and not rather a fictive story that would make the intended point without being too embarrassing to recount in any detail?
Scrivener opens the second half of the discussion which addresses itself to the ‘solution’ as opposed to the ‘problem’, in the same way as the first – with an interchange with his wife, perhaps one that arose out of the previous scene. Here the author feels the need to ask his wife whether she loves him, and ponders what possible response to that question would be capable of satisfying him. The point here is evidently to introduce the idea that what idolatrous humanity most needs in the way of an answer to its idolatrous propensities is that demonstration of the divine love that the Gospel of John refers to in the words ‘God so loved the world …’ and Scrivener himself sums up for us ‘Having given you the world, and having given you you, He gave you Himself’.
The problem with this will already be clear from what I have already said about the deficiency of Scrivener’s message here. What is required, we have argued, at least if the ‘solution’ is to measure up to the ‘problem’, is for the divine gift (‘He gave you Himself’) to be understood, not just as an expression of love, but as a revelation of who God is in relation to us. The trouble with the introductory material – its ‘cringe-ness’ apart – is that it causes the reader to focus entirely on gift as expression. What Scrivener needs is illustrative material that will instead bring us to reflect how a gift can be revelatory of the g(G)iver and that g(G)iver’s relationship to the recipient; indeed, how a gift can even be used to influence or change a relationship through what it reveals.
Conclusions
1.All the good evangelistic presentations of the Christian faith known to me begin with a description of the ‘sinful’ human predicament. Scrivener’s emphasis on idolatry here is entirely biblical, and, in my view, speaks to the contemporary reader as the more traditional definitions (e.g. on sin as selfishness or the falling short of a perfect standard) cannot. The definition of sin as idolatry follows naturally from the understanding of life as a divine gift to which we fail adequately to respond. This framing of the human predicament is, in my view, theologically impeccable, and has been developed extensively in theological studies. It seems, in the case of Scrivener’s little book, to be making a long-overdue but welcome appearance in the field of popular evangelistic introductions to the Christian faith. Particularly welcome, I should add, because such an approach opens the door, at least in principle, to a presentation of the faith that is not based on PSA, such as we see attempted in this text.
2.Sadly, on the presentational level, S.’s attempt at such an approach doesn’t really work. But I see no reason in principle why such an approach shouldn’t work. For example, Tim Keller does well with it – albeit in more extended discussion than the format of this evangelistic tract would permit.
The everyday scenario of the ‘dispute’, though fitting the Christmas theme, doesn’t really serve its purpose. The generalizations it is intended to illustrate are themselves overly dependent on associations of biblical images, that, while meaningful to the biblically literate, seem less than rigorous to the unchurched reader, when presented without further elaboration. The solution would be to jettison the scenario, and either replace it with a more relevant example, or attempt to unpack the biblical language in more abstract terms – or both.
3.The explication of God’s response is unbalanced in that it overemphasizes the expressive aspect of the gift, when what is really needed is an account of the divine gift as revelatory of God’s nature. Once again, the introductory scenario is unhelpful – in this case, because it pushes theologically in the wrong direction. It should be replaced by some more helpful scenario, perhaps stressing the potential functions of the gift (human or divine) in communicating something of the giver, and setting the relationship with the recipient on a new course. Alternatively, there needs to be a fuller and more consequential explanation given of what it means for God to ‘give Himself’ and how that would measure up the human problem described in earlier chapters.
This leaves us with what might seem the biggest problem. We need to explain to the sceptic why a revelatory gift by God of His very Self, one answering to our human idolatrous need, would most appropriately take the form it does in the Gospel revelation – namely, that of the Christ-event.
Providing a complete answer to that question would be an awesome task, more appropriate to a theological treatise. Still, we can find at least the beginnings of an answer, if we begin where those theological treatises generally begin: with Jesus’s own final communication to his followers of the ultimate meaning of God’s sacrificial gift in the life and death of his Son. This we find in the words and actions of the Eucharist.
If we want to give an account of the significance of the Christ-event as the ultimate divine gift, the only reasonable place to start is surely with the bread which Jesus claims to be ‘my body given for you’. Or alternatively, if we wanted to remain with the theme of ‘God so loved the world’, we could take our point of departure in Jesus’s action of washing his disciples feet, where, as John himself says alluding to Christ’s death and resurrection, ‘having loved his own, he loved them to the end’. The gift, expounded on these lines, is a genuinely revelatory gift, in which God the Son, not only expresses his love for us, but communicates who God is, and His relationship to us, in a manner that, through our participation, actively changes that relationship.
Finally, in our Eucharist, we have, through Christ, a true act of worship that can substitute its pattern for the false worship of our idolatries. It is through our Eucharistic worship that our own sacrificial instincts and intentions are so moulded that our whole lives can become an act of true worship as enjoined by St Paul (Romans 12.1), rather than serving secular goals of personal fulfilment or self-actualization.
So, replace the seemingly rather random paragraphs on Jesus’ life, death and resurrection with some brief account of what Jesus himself says about the significance of his life and death at the Last Supper, and you will have, I would suggest, both a very adequate account of the Christ-event as divine gift and a far better understanding of how the gift measures up the problem of human well-digging.
I don’t know how all this could be accommodated to a specifically Christmas theme. As I’ve set the argument out, it could seem more appropriate to the season of Easter ! My only suggestion is that the ritual of Christmas gift giving could be related in some way to the still surprisingly widespread tradition, even among evangelical churches, of attending a ‘Midnight Mass.’ After all, it was at that occasion that I picked up Scrivener’s book!