Over the past few days I have been reading The Benefits of Providence, a newly-published book written by James Spiegel. It is a deeply challenging book that is filled with weighty subject matter. It has given me a lot to think about and meditate upon. I look forward to attempting to summarize this book in a meaningful in an upcoming review. I am sure it will be quite a challenge.

The book is, of course, an examination of divine providence with corresponding application to the life of the believer. It is far more than “mere theology,” but is filled with useful application. Today I would like to discuss one small section of the book. In the second chapter the author compares and contrasts two views of providence, the high and the low. He defines the high view as the Augustinian (which most of us would recognize and apply to our lives) and the low view as the Open Theistic view. At one point, while discussing the hermeneutics of providence, he makes a distinction between two understandings of divine action. The first is the phenomenology of divine action which refers to the way God’s activity appears to human beings. The second is the metaphysics of divine action. This refers to the way God actually works within and behind the world.

These are, of course, both important aspects of what the Bible teaches about God. Even if you have never stopped to consider the difference between these it will become immediately apparent that there must be a difference between the reality of God’s actions and how we perceive them. It is important that we focus some attention on each one of these without allowing a focus on one of them to blind us to the other. Spiegel provides a brief example of what can happen when there is too great a focus on either one of them. It is this I would like to discuss and expand upon today.

Phenomenology at the Expense of Metaphysics

Open Theists provide a clear example of a group of people who have allowed their focus on phenomenology of divine action to blind them to the metaphysics of divine providence. In an earlier article I defined Open Theism in this way. “Open theism is a sub-Christian theological construct which claims that God’s highest goal is to enter into a reciprocal relationship with man. In this scheme, the Bible is interpreted without any anthropomorphisms - that is, all references to God’s feelings, surprise and lack of knowledge are literal and the result of His choice to create a world where He can be affected by man’s choices. God’s exhaustive knowledge does not include future free will choices by mankind because they have not yet occurred.” Here are some characteristics of this teaching:

1. Man has libertarian free will. Man’s will has not been so affected by the Fall that he is unable to make a choice to follow God. God respects man’s freedom of choice and would not infringe upon it.
2. God does not have exhaustive knowledge of the future. Indeed, He cannot know certain future events because the future exists only as possibility. God is unable to see what depends on the choices of free will agents simply because this future does not yet exist, so it unknowable. In this way open theists attempt to reconcile this doctrine with God’s omniscience.
3. God takes risks. Because God cannot know the future, He takes risks in many ways - creating people, giving them gifts and abilities, and so on. Where possibilities exist, so does risk.
4. God learns. Because God does not know the future exhaustively, He learns, just as we do.
5. God is reactive. Because He is learning, God is constantly reacting to the decisions we make.
6. God makes mistakes. Because He is learning and reacting, always dealing with limited information, God can and does make errors in judgment which later require re-evaluation.
7. God can change His mind. When God realizes He has made an error in judgment or that things did not unfold as He supposed, He can change His mind.

Open Theists, to their credit, have invested extensive effort in attempting to understand the personal relationship between God and His creatures. They have studied the passages in the Bible about God’s interaction with the world and have formed what they feel are biblical understandings of the freedom God extends to humans. But where Open Theists have gone wrong is in downplaying the way God actually works behind the scenes. Their emphasis on the way things appear to humans has blinded them to the metaphysics of divine providence. When they encounter what believers have historically considered anthropomorphisms, for example, they interpret these literally rather than figuratively. When they see that God extends freedom of choice to human beings, they understand this as being libertarian free will. And so they interpret the metaphysical through the phenomenological rather than alongside it. Spiegel says, “They commit the egregious mistake of using biblical phenomenological data as evidence for metaphysical claims about God. Consequently, their doctrine of providence is fundamentally unbiblical, and their portrait of God is woefully incomplete.”

Metaphysics at the Expense of Phenomenology

At the opposite end of the spectrum to Open Theists we might find hyper-Calvinists. Hyper-Calvinists, who in reality are anti-Calvinists since they deny many of the crucial teachings of historical Calvinism, overemphasize the metaphysics of divine providence and this blinds them to the realities of human freedom and responsibility. Many Christians have struggled to reconcile divine sovereignty and human responsibility and have often done so with results that are far from satisfying or convincing. But hyper-Calvinists have done the church a great disservice by removing almost all emphasis from the phenomenological.

A popular definition of hyper-Calvinism, adapted from an article written by Phil Johnson, is as follows:

1. [Hyper-Calvinism] is a system of theology framed to exalt the honour and glory of God and does so by acutely minimizing the moral and spiritual responsibility of sinners … It emphasizes irresistible grace to such an extent that there appears to be no real need to evangelize; furthermore, Christ may be offered only to the elect… .
2. It is that school of supralapsarian ‘five-point’ Calvinism which so stresses the sovereignty of God by over-emphasizing the secret over the revealed will of God and eternity over time, that it minimizes the responsibility of sinners, notably with respect to the denial of the use of the word “offer” in relation to the preaching of the gospel; thus it undermines the universal duty of sinners to believe savingly in the Lord Jesus with the assurance that Christ actually died for them; and it encourages introspection in the search to know whether or not one is elect. [Peter Toon, “Hyper-Calvinism,” New Dictionary of Theology (Leicester: IVP, 1988), 324.]

Phil Johnson provides the following five characteristics of this aberrant theology:

1. Denies that the gospel call applies to all who hear, OR
2. Denies that faith is the duty of every sinner, OR
3. Denies that the gospel makes any “offer” of Christ, salvation, or mercy to the non-elect (or denies that the offer of divine mercy is free and universal), OR
4. Denies that there is such a thing as “common grace,” OR
5. Denies that God has any sort of love for the non-elect.

Calvinists, and indeed most evangelicals, affirm that the offer of the gospel is given in sincerity to the non-elect and the elect. Calvinists believe, though, that only the elect are able to respond to this call. Hyper-Calvinists, in stressing the metaphysical, deny either that the offer is truly given or that it is given in sincerity. They stress the secret will of God at the expense of the revealed will, which is to say they stress metaphysics at the expense of phenomenology. Similar to Open Theists, then, they commit an egregious mistake. But in this case the mistake is in using biblical metaphysical data as evidence for phenomenological claims about God. Like Open Theists, their portrait of God is woefully incomplete.

Conclusion

Charles Spurgeon, when asked about the seeming contradiction between human freedom and divine sovereignty replied famously, “I do not try to reconcile friends.” It seems to me that the same is true when we discuss divine action. The way God actually works and the way it appears He works do not stand at odds with each other. We do not need to reconcile these as if they are enemies for which we need to make an uneasy peace. We can affirm both of them while trusting and believing that God has been good to us in revealing only as much as we can know and understand. It is only when we place appropriate emphasis on both the metaphysical claims and the phenomenological that we can be confident we have a biblical portrait of God.

I was about eighteen years old the first time I saw a dead person. Just a few days earlier my grandmother had unexpectedly suffered a massive heart attack and had died nearly instantly. The family was given the opportunity to say “goodbye” to her before the funeral. We were ushered into a room in the funeral home, and there, across the room, she lay in an elegant coffin. I took a deep breath and walked over to where she lay.

Grammy didn’t look a whole lot different than she had when she was alive. She lay peacefully and could almost have been asleep. Almost. As children we used to pretend to be dead sometimes, but of course we weren’t capable of acting it out very well. But Grammy wasn’t acting. Her chest was not rising and falling as her lungs filled with air and her eyes were not fluttering as they do when people sleep. Grammy could snore with the best of them - I remember as a child giggling at the racket she made when she slept as I passed by her bedroom - but this time she made no noise as she slept. There was no doubt about it - my grandmother was dead. Death pervaded her entire being. It wasn’t just that one part of her had stopped working - all that she was; her entire body, mind and soul had ceased functioning.

I was taken aback by the finality of death. Grammy could only act out her state of being. She was dead and had no choice but to act dead. Nothing I could do, nothing the doctors could do, could ever make her act alive again. Her body was an empty, decaying shell that had served its purpose and was already beginning to return to the dust from which it had come.

As I looked down at her pallid face, how I wished that she would open her eyes just one more time, take my hand and tell me that she loved me. And how I wished I could spend just a few minutes to tell her about my plans for the future; if she couldn’t be there to witness them at least I could tell her that in just a few months I was planning on asking Aileen to marry me. I could tell her some of the goals I had set for my life. But it was too late for that. Had I spoken to her, the words would just have been spoken into a void.

It was irrational of me to hope against hope that she might just give me one more chance to tell her how much I was going to miss her and just once chance to make sure she really knew about Jesus.

If you have ever taken the time to read through the Bible, or even a portion of it, you’ll know that it devotes great attention to life and death. The words “dead” and “death” appear hundreds, even thousands of times within the pages of God’s Word. Why the great emphasis? The answer is evident when you look at the world. Take a look around in your school, your office and maybe even your home or your church and you will see dead men walking all around you. These people may still have a heartbeat and may still be able to hear and speak, but in a spiritual sense they are dead. The Bible is devoted to explaining the cause of and solution to this death.

I want to take you to just a couple of verses in that book, verses that most people read and just pass on by without ever reflecting on them. It is a pity to pass them by for they contain something that is too important to miss. Genesis is the first book in the Bible and we are going to look at the fifth chapter which speaks about the first man who ever walked this earth - a man who was created perfect in a perfect world. It was a world that knew no evil, no sin, no death. Verses one through three read “This is the book of the generations of Adam. When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them Man when they were created. When Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth.”

You may be wondering what possible importance I could attach to verses that seem only to list some genealogical details. But look closer. The first verse says “He [God] made him [Adam] in the likeness of God.” So God created a man who was in His own image. That means man was perfect, holy and spiritually alive. Man had perfect, unbroken communion with His Creator. Now look to verse three. “When Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son in his own likeness, after his image.” Do you see what has happened here? Somewhere between Adam and his son, a change took place. Where Adam was created in God’s likeness and in God’s image, Adam’s son was created in Adam’s likeness and in Adam’s image!

The key to understanding this transformation is contained in another book of the Bible - one written two thousand years after the first. In Romans 5 verse 12 we read “…Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned…Yet death reigned from Adam.” We are all familiar with the story of how Adam and his wife Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden. While the act of eating a piece of fruit God had forbidden them to touch seemed quite harmless, it was an act of willful rebellion against the Creator on the part of human beings. Through that act of rebellion and disobedience, sin entered the world. Having entered, it has multiplied, increasing to the point that it has extended to every being in the world. And that includes you and me.

Death reigns in this world, doesn’t it? They say that the only inevitabilities in life are death and taxes. You can cheat the government and avoid taxes, but I’ve yet to meet anyone who can cheat death. It’s a fact. A few months ago I saw a short program on The Learning Channel about a man who is obsessed with delaying death and even the onset of aging. This man consumes vast amounts of vitamins and minerals, literally thousands of pills every week. Yet it is a fool’s game and one he is guaranteed to lose. You and I and everyone you know are going to die some day. This man, despite all of his pills, will die too. We don’t know when, where or how, but we do know it is coming.

Did you notice that the Bible chooses not to speak about sickness reigning from Adam? It never says that illness and discomfort entered the world through one man, does it? It speaks of death. Finality. Decisiveness.

Ever since Adam, death is our natural state of being. When you look around you, you see dead men acting out death. A dead man can not act alive. My grandmother, when she lay in that casket, had no choice to act alive, did she? Death ruled over her, forcing her to act out her state of being. In the same way, people who are spiritually dead have no option but to act out death. They may have the vague appearance of life, but the fact is they are dead. They have no ability to change their state of being.

Is the same true in a spiritual sense? Can a person who is spiritually dead change his state of being and come to life? The answer is both yes and no. Stayed tuned for the second part of this article where I will explain.

Every now and then I go rooting through the archives and find an article either I did not finish or feel could be written better. This is one of those that I did not finish. Hopefully this time I can get it right!

In my reading of early church history this past week I came upon a passage from Justin’s First Apology in which he describes the worship of the early church.

“And on the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits; then, when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things. Then we all rise together and pray, and, as we before said, when our prayer is ended, bread and wine and water are brought, and the president in like manner offers prayers and thanksgivings, according to his ability, and the people assent, saying Amen; and there is a distribution to each, and a participation of that over which thanks have been given, and to those who are absent a portion is sent by the deacons. And they who are well to do, and willing, give what each thinks fit; and what is collected is deposited with the president, who succours the orphans and widows and those who, through sickness or any other cause, are in want, and those who are in bonds and the strangers sojourning among us, and in a word takes care of all who are in need. But Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly, because it is the first day on which God, having wrought a change in the darkness and matter, made the world; and Jesus Christ our Saviour on the same day rose from the dead. For He was crucified on the day before that of Saturn (Saturday); and on the day after that of Saturn, which is the day of the Sun, having appeared to His apostles and disciples, He taught them these things, which we have submitted to you also for your consideration.

“Having ended the prayers, we salute one another with a kiss. There is then brought to the president of the brethren bread and a cup of wine mixed with water; and he taking them, gives praise and glory to the Father of the universe, through the name of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, and offers thanks at considerable length for our being counted worthy to receive these things at His hands. And when he has concluded the prayers and thanksgivings, all the people present express their assent by saying Amen. This word Amen answers in the Hebrew language to genoito [so be it]. And when the president has given thanks, and all the people have expressed their assent, those who are called by us deacons give to each of those present to partake of the bread and wine mixed with water over which the thanksgiving was pronounced, and to those who are absent they carry away a portion.

“And this food is called among us Eukaristia [the Eucharist], of which no one is allowed to partake but the man who believes that the things which we teach are true, and who has been washed with the washing that is for the remission of sins, and unto regeneration, and who is so living as Christ has enjoined. For not as common bread and common drink do we receive these; but in like manner as Jesus Christ our Saviour, having been made flesh by the Word of God, had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so likewise have we been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word, and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh. For the apostles, in the memoirs composed by them, which are called Gospels, have thus delivered unto us what was enjoined upon them; that Jesus took bread, and when He had given thanks, said, “This do ye in remembrance of Me, this is My body;” and that, after the same manner, having taken the cup and given thanks, He said, “This is My blood;” and gave it to them alone. Which the wicked devils have imitated in the mysteries of Mithras, commanding the same thing to be done. For, that bread and a cup of water are placed with certain incantations in the mystic rites of one who is being initiated, you either know or can learn.”

I was struck both by the similarities and the differences between worship today. Nick Needham points out that the three primary ingredients of the early worship services were the reading and expounding of Scripture, prayer, and the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. Noticeably absent, of course, is music and singing. While we do know, even from other accounts written from Justin, that music was a part of the services, it was clearly not as central to the services as we make it today. Conserversely, the celebration of the Lord’s Supper was a more important part of the service, or at least than the service of most of today’s Protestant churches.

It is interesting to note as well that during the early history of the church, and in fact until the 14th century, Christian worshipped while standing. Pews (and stackable, cushioned seats) are quite a late development. Those who were tired or infirm would be able to sit around the outside edge of the church while others stood. Standing was also considered the proper posture for prayer. Generally those who prayed would keep their eyes open looking towards heaven, and their arms outstretched.

One thing Justin does not make clear, but which seems clear from other documents, is that the service was divided into two components. The first, the service of the word, which included singing, reading of the Scripture and the sermon was open to everyone. The second part, the prayers and Lord’s Supper, were open only to baptized believers. Everyone else had to leave.

Corporate worship was an important time for believers and they worshipped, at least initially, very simply.