Transcript
What then about the fact of unbelief? Are the unbelievers not clearly outside of the covenant? Now the crucial case of unbelief in the New Testament is the unbelief of the Jews. The Jews are the supreme case of unbelief because it is not that they have never heard, on the contrary, they have received the promises and yet they do not believe. And so the crucial case of unbelief is the case of the Jews. And this is the
case that Paul argues in Romans 9 to 11. Romans 9 to 11 is a very, very crucial passage, I think, for a basic theology of mission. And I'd like, if I may, to go through that with you just so that we look quickly at Paul's argument. And it's very unfortunate that in our reading of Romans, we very often skip this vital section. Romans 9 to 11, chapters 9 to 11. Paul has had his great exposition of
justification by faith culminating in the great chapter 8, which we've referred to already several times. And then he turns around to ask this question, what about the unbelieving Jews? Now he begins in Romans in 9:1 to 5, by asserting that they are Israelites, to them belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises. To them belong the patriarchs, and of their race according to the flesh is the
Christ. The Jews are God's chosen people. Paul never doubts that. And yet, verses 16 to 33, the rest of chapter 9, and yet Paul insists that God retains his sovereign freedom. He reminds us that not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel. Not all are children of Abraham because they are descendants. But through Isaac shall your descendants be called. It is Isaac and not Ishmael. And then again, in verse 13, we have the very
strong phrase, Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated. It is Jacob but not Esau. God retains his freedom, even towards the people whom he has chosen, the descendants of Abraham. And here we have the argument about God's freedom to make a vessel for wrath or for honour. Now, if you take that text alone, apart from its context, then you get the horrible doctrine of double predestination, as it was developed in Calvin. But you must take this
chapter in show you. But Paul is using an argumentum ad hominem here. He's using a particular argument in relation to this charge. The Jews accept the fact that God is sovereign. And if that is so, then God is free to do what he wants with his own. You cannot blame God. And so he uses this about the freedom of the potter. Has the potter no right over the clay to make out of the same lump one
vessel for beauty and another for menial use? Verse 21. Now, Paul is going to show that, in fact, God's purpose is the salvation of all. And if you take this text alone, you get a misrepresentation of Paul, which I think one must say that Calvin was guilty of here. But Paul is simply saying that God has the sovereign freedom. And therefore, also, he is free to call the Gentiles, as he says in Hosea, verse 25, those
who were not my people, I will call my people. And her who was not beloved, I will call my beloved. And Isaiah speaks, though the number of the sons of Israel be as the sand of the sea, it will only be a remnant that will be saved. And God is free. He is insisting that God's covenant does not destroy his sovereign freedom. But then, chapter 10, verses 1 to 17, he accuses the Jews of turning the
covenant into a contract. They have tried to have a righteousness of their own, a righteousness which would give them a claim against God. I bear them witness that they have zeal for God, but it is not enlightened. They have tried to establish their own righteousness and did not submit to God's righteousness. And then there is the argument about faith, righteousness by faith. It is only faith which puts us in the right relationship with God. And so,
Paul says, God has hardened their hearts. And here we have this very tough section from 10:18 through 11:10, where he quite specifically says that God has hardened the hearts of Israel. Their unbelief is the punishment for their attempt to have their own righteousness. And we have this reference to Pharaoh, God hardening the heart of Pharaoh. And again, if you take that in isolation, it's a horrible doctrine of God, God deliberately hardening the hearts of
people so that they do not believe. But then, if you go on 11 to 16, Paul very emphatically says that God's purpose is not that they should be lost, but that they should be saved. I ask, have they stumbled so as to fall? By no means. But through their trespass, salvation has come to the Gentiles so as to make Israel jealous. Now, if their trespass means riches for the world, and if their failure means riches for
the Gentiles, how much more will their full inclusion mean? Now, I am speaking to you Gentiles. Inasmuch then as I am an apostle to the Gentiles, I magnify my ministry in order to make my fellow Jews jealous and thus save some of them. For if their rejection means the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance mean but life from the dead? And then he goes on with the illustration of the branches. The purpose, he says,
that the Jews have rejected the Gospel in order that it may go to the Gentiles. This is a summary of actually Paul's experience in town after town. He goes first to the synagogue, and the Jews drive him out, and so the Gospel goes to the Gentiles. And Paul says this is God's plan in order that the Gospel may come to the Gentiles. But the Gentiles also must not make the same mistake. They must not imagine that
because the Gospel has come to them, therefore they are the chosen people and Israel is rejected. Verse 17, if some of the branches were broken off and you, a wild olive shoot, were grafted into their place to share the riches of the olive tree, do not boast over the branches. If you do boast, remember it is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you. You will say branches were broken off so that
I might be grafted in. That is true. They were broken off because of their unbelief, but you stand fast only through faith. So do not become proud, but stand in awe. For if God did not spare the natural branches, neither will he spare you. Note then the kindness and the severity of God. Severity towards those who have fallen, but kindness to you provided you continue in his kindness. Otherwise you too will be cut off. In other
words, the Gentiles must not repeat the mistake of the Jews and imagine that because the Gospel has come to them, they have rights over against God as compared with other people. And so it all leads through to the final consummation of the whole thing, verse 28. As regards the Gospel, they are enemies of God, the Jews that is, are enemies of God for your sake. But as regards election, they are beloved for the sake of the
forefathers, for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. Just as you were once disobedient to God, but now have received mercy because of their disobedience. So now they have been disobedient in order that by the mercy shown to you, they also may receive mercy. For God has consigned all men to disobedience that he may have mercy on all. Oh, the depth of the riches and the wisdom and the knowledge of God. Here in this
wonderful passage, you see, Paul interprets the divine strategy, which in which God's faithfulness to his covenant and God's freedom over against his people are, so to say, intention with each other. If I may go back to the illustration that I used before when I said that it is of the essence of biblical understanding of salvation, that salvation does not come right through the skyline, but comes through from the neighbor. You might say, well, then the Jews
are an exception, because for the Jews, it came through the skyline. Paul's answer is, yes, exactly so. But the Jews also have to learn the same way. The Jews have disbelieved, not in order that they may be lost, but in order that they may have to open the door to the Gentiles and receive salvation through the Gentiles. You see, this is the final argument. Paul says the hardening of the heart of the Jews is in order
that the gospel may go to the Gentiles. But you Gentiles, you must be well as you also make the same mistake. You convert the covenant into a contract. You imagine that you are God's chosen people and the Jews are the rejected ones. You therefore be careful, lest you make the same mistake because the purpose of God, says Paul, is that in the end, through you Gentiles, the Jews are to hear the gospel and be saved. So
that God's strategy, so to speak, is intelligible. His tactics may seem very strange. God's tactics may seem very strange, but his strategy is clear. It is that he has shut up all men to disobedience in order that he may have mercy on all. The purpose of God is the salvation of all, but always only through and with the other, and never alone, and always only by the sovereign grace. So that if you then ask, as some
people in England are inclined to ask today, are you really saying to us that a Christian is no better than a Hindu or an atheist? That a Christian has no more standing before God than a Hindu or an atheist? You have exactly the same problem raised in Romans, and Paul answers it in Romans 3, where the question is asked after Paul has convicted both Gentiles and Jews of being under disobedience in the first two chapters. Chapter
one, the Gentiles, chapter two, the Jews. And then he goes on, what advantage then has the Jew, or what is the value of circumcision? What is the use of being a Christian if God intends to save everybody? It's the same question that you get asked in missionary meetings today. And the answer is, much in every way, to begin with, the Jews are entrusted with the oracles of God. You have been entrusted with the gospel. That's a
sufficient answer to that question. You have been entrusted with the gospel. Paul never questions that. He never questions that the Jews are God's chosen people who have been entrusted with the gospel. But the point is that here, let me sum up and stop because it's time for coffee. If you accept the idea that God's salvation is something which is wrought out in history, if you accept the idea that salvation depends upon actions done in history so
that there are particular names and particular places and particular actions like baptism or the Eucharist, which are actual physical actions here in history, if you accept that God's salvation is worked out through actual events in history, then there is always the danger, the temptation, that you will use these actions as the basis for a claim against God. And then is where Paul says the hardening of the heart takes place and God has to harden your heart
and you have to learn to receive the gospel again through others. Let me give an illustration from a famous occasion in the story of the Reformation. You remember that when Luther was imprisoned in the Wartburg and was going through a period of profound temptation and felt that the devil was getting the better of him, Luther wrote up on the wall of his tomb, I am baptized. Now that was rightly understood, that was a declaration of justification
by faith. Not my piety, not my good works, not even my faith, if you mean my faith, my capacity for faith, my power of faith, none of these things saves me. I have been baptized, in other words, God has taken me into his family. Now rightly understood, that is a declaration of justification by faith. It is a man throwing himself completely on God's mercy and trusting God's mercy and not trusting anything in himself. There you have
the true understanding of what you may call the historicity of salvation. But as we know, that can very very easily be twisted into something very different. Baptism then becomes a magical right by which I guarantee that I am okay with God. That baptism then becomes a magic. Now we've seen the same thing with the Eucharist. When I go to the Lord's Supper, I go as one who knows that not my faith, not my understanding, not my
piety, not my obedience, none of these things at that point matters. I simply accept the unspeakable gift of God's grace and trust, rely on it and trust it. But again, that can be twisted round and the sacrament becomes a magical act by which I secure a place for myself against God as compared with my neighbor. I am baptized, therefore I am okay as compared with the unbaptized pagan. You see, this is the same thing that I
was expressing in another way when I spoke about the covenant becomes a contract. Now it's a very subtle twist and it can happen in the twinkling of an eye before you realized it. And it's this that Paul is fighting against in those letters to the, especially in the Romans but also in the Galatians, that God is both faithful and free. He is faithful to his covenant. The gifts and the calling of God are without repentance, that
wonderful verse in Romans 11. God never goes back on his promises. God is faithful but he is also free. God is sovereign and God cannot be, as it were, put on the spot. I am baptized, I am a communicant, I am a believer, I am an Israelite and therefore you have to accept me and I have a status which is different from the status of the one outside. There you have converted the covenant into a contract
and Paul argues in this extremely complicated argument of Romans 9 to 11. It is a complicated argument and if you take one little bit of it by itself, as for instance his image of the potter and the pots, and if you take that by itself you can construct this monstrous doctrine of double predestination, that God has created certain people in order to be damned and certain other people in order to be saved. If you take one
bit of it out like that you can produce that horrible doctrine. But if you take the argument as a whole, it's clear and understandable. And if I go back to my very simple but I think very true illustration, if we accept the biblical understanding that that salvation is not an individual direct message through the skylight to me as a solitary spiritual monad but that it is, that it happens when I open the door to the neighbour
who brings to me the word of salvation and I must receive it from my neighbour, I must hear it, I must receive it, and in that act I am bound to my neighbour within the saving work of God. And if that is true, as I think it is, then Paul is arguing that in the end this must be true for Israel also. In the end Israel must receive salvation through the Gentile, although in fact it is
Israel which is God's chosen people from the very beginning and God never goes back on that. And that is true always, it is true now, and it is because God is faithful, it remains true. Well I think as you can see that has immense bearing on the whole, our whole understanding of mission and particularly our understanding of the whole problem of unbelief. But perhaps it's time to stop. Election as being election for privilege rather than election
for mission. And secondly the twist by which covenant is converted into contract. And Bill was pointing out to me as we went across one illustration of that which I had it in mind to mention but didn't because it is up to be a rather controversial issue but I talked about baptism and the sacrament of the Lord's Supper as illustrations of something which from when rightly seen is the expression of the givenness of salvation. That salvation rests
upon what God has actually done in history and therefore we as it were rest upon a fact. And we are not saved by our faith, we are saved by what God has done and we believe. But that this can very easily be given a little twist and then baptism and the Lord's Supper become magical rites by which we so to say manipulate the grace of God. Now another illustration is the historic episcopate, the idea of the
historic ministry as continuing from the apostles. Now once again I think rightly understood that is again an expression of the fact that we are saved through what God has done and we rely upon it, we trust in it, we give ourselves to it. But again it can become twisted round so that the whole idea of apostolic succession becomes a kind of magic by which one as it were asserts a claim against God that other people don't
have and I think this is a very valid illustration. One of the books that helped me very much in the period of my life when I was struggling with this whole question because as a person brought up in the Presbyterian tradition and contemplating the possibility of living in an episcopally ordered church I had to wrestle with this whole question how do we understand the idea of the historic episcopate and it was a book of Michael Ramsey
called The Gospel and the possibility that one could see the ministry also as part of the givenness of the gospel as a historic reality just as one can certainly misunderstand it in this kind of magical sense. Well that was my second point and then my third point was does this mean that there are no conditions what about unbelief and I took as the crucial example of unbelief the unbelief of the Jews and we looked at the
way Paul wrestles with that mysterious problem in the central section of Romans so those were my three points now my remaining four points are much more briefly dealt with. The fourth one is therefore that we reject the idea of election as something apart from Christ. I think this idea is what has discredited the whole doctrine of election so that many Christians are unwilling to think about this doctrine at all. It is clear in the scriptures that
everything begins with the action of God. God chooses. We never find in the Bible that the initiative comes from somewhere else. God chooses Abraham. God chooses Moses. God chooses Jeremiah. God takes the initiative. He lays his hands upon Israel, upon Moses, upon Jeremiah. Certainly not to say you are to be saved and the rest of the world is to be lost. No. Always I chose you that you should go and do my will, that you should
go and bear fruit, that you should go and be my messenger, my instrument, my witness. Always choosing in order to serve God's purpose of salvation. Certainly one cannot read the Bible without recognising the centrality of this. God's choosing, God's election. But the whole doctrine of election has become discredited and has become distasteful to people because of the false idea of an election apart from Christ, the idea of a secret decree before Christ, apart from Christ, by
which some are destined for blessedness and some for damnation. In some of the Reformed confessions, one almost gets this idea because there is so much said about election before one ever comes to Jesus Christ. Now that is a misunderstanding. It's due to taking certain isolated sections of scripture by themselves and building them up into a doctrine. What the scripture shows us is election in and through Jesus Christ. It is Jesus Christ who is essentially and primarily
God's elect, God's chosen, and we are chosen in Christ. And what first of all St. Paul and then supremely St. John show us is that Christ is not, so to say, an afterthought. Christ is not God's afterthought to deal with the problem of sin. God created the world in and through Christ. God created us in and through Christ. God's loving election of Jesus Christ is the foundation of the whole of creation and therefore it is the
basis on which we understand the whole of our history, the whole of our as human beings. It's the basis on which we understand our human life as it really is, not as the life of a sole abstracted out of history, but the life that we live, the actual life that we live, which is a life of sharing with one another in a common history which is wrought out in a world of things, in the world of
nature, in the world of art, of science, of techniques. We have no human life apart from that. But this is the real life that we live. There is a tendency at the present time to try to isolate the personal, even when we accept Martin Buber, to try to isolate that from the world of things. I mean, I think, for instance, a good deal of what is done in the name of group dynamics and all this game
where you try to confront people with each other as kind of naked spirits apart from a subject to discuss or a world to discuss. We are not naked spirits. We are people as we share in a common world. We relate to one another as we relate together in a world which we share, which is a world of things. This is the real person as he really is. I think that we are led astray by abstractions of
all kinds. Here, what is given to us in scripture is the assurance that this real world and our real life as real people relating to each other, living as, after all, a child, does not become a fully developed human being except through relating to its mother, to its parents, to its brothers and sisters and so forth. Now, that this real world is God's world created by God through Jesus Christ to be summed up in Jesus Christ
so that we're dealing with the real world and we're speaking of things which have actually happened in history. We are not speaking about ideas, about doctrines, about concepts. We're telling a story about what actually happened. That's my fourth point. My fifth one is a question. Does this mean universalism? Now, one of our problems here is that for many good Christians at the present time, this is a kind of switch. You ask a person, are you a
universalist? And if the answer is not satisfactory, you switch off and there is nothing further to be said. I think, as I said the other day, I reject a kind of rationalistic universalism. You cannot escape from the very grave warnings of scripture about the possibility of final loss. Our life is a real life with real choices to be made on which real consequences depend. We are caught in scripture, and this is much more true of the
New Testament than of the Old. There is much more about eternal loss in the New Testament than in the Old. We are warned that it is possible to be cast away, to be cut off, to be lost. That I am bound to affirm, and I believe that we would not be taking human life seriously if we did not affirm that. But on the other hand, and this is the positive point that I am trying to make,
and it's a point which many people will not listen to because they think it means universalism. The positive point that I am trying to make is that God's salvation concerns the completion of this whole purpose of creation. That God's salvation is not addressed to an abstraction called an individual soul. There is no such thing. That is an abstraction. It is one way of looking at our human existence. It is an important aspect of our human existence
that we have an interior, unshareable, private existence in which we face our whole existence and destiny from this angle that I call I, my existence, my life, my future, my destiny. That is true, but that is not the whole truth and can never be the whole truth about the human situation. God's salvation is not like the Hindu idea of salvation, simply addressed to this solitary monad. On the contrary, God's salvation is concerned with the completing, the
perfecting, the bringing to its consummation of all that he has begun to do through Jesus Christ in the creation of the world. In that sense of the word, we have to accept seriously the many passages in the New Testament which speak of God's universal purpose of salvation, God's purpose to complete what he has begun in the creation of the world. But again, I say that does not mean a denial of the possibility of loss, the possibility
of being rejected because firstly, scripture teaches that so plainly and secondly, to deny that would be to deny the reality of human freedom. That is my fifth point. My sixth point is I said and I stressed that we are talking about what actually happened. We are not talking about concepts and ideas, we are talking about events. One cannot overstress this point. Again, it's a place where the Christian is sharply distinguished from the Hindu. During my days
as a missionary in the first station where we lived, I used to spend one evening each week in the Ramakrishna Math talking with the Hindu scholars there. I remember one time the Swamiji who was at the head of the Math looking at me in absolute astonishment. I said to him that if it could be proved that Jesus had never lived, I would have to become a Hindu because I could not find any other rational way of
interpreting the human situation. He looked at me in absolute astonishment. He said, you mean to say that you are prepared to rest your ultimate salvation on a historic event which cannot be proved. To him that was just crazy. For him it was obvious that the only real things are the kind of eternal ideas, the eternal concepts and that the idea that you could rest your ultimate salvation on a happening which cannot be proved, as no historical
event can be proved, seemed to him to be crazy. But this seems to me to be precisely the point that we believe that we are resting on what God has done and that he really has done it and that it is part of this history of which we are also a part. Now if you say that, and this is my point, how is that history related to the ordinary history that we study in a school or
college or that we read in the history books or that we read in the daily newspaper each day? What is the relation of so to say God's history to history as a whole, to what we call secular history? Are there two kinds of history as has sometimes been suggested? You know these two blessed German words, Heilsgeschichte and Weltgeschichte, the idea of a sort of salvation history and world history as two different kinds of history. Well that
I think you cannot accept. There are not two histories. There is only one history. But how do we understand the relationship between these two? And this is what I want to talk about tomorrow and I hope that you are seeing that one has to lay this foundation if one is going to talk about the place of things like development, revolution, liberation and all that in the mission of the church. To ask those questions means to raise
the question of how you relate God's history to world history and this is what I want to come to tomorrow. But meanwhile, and this is my last point which is really just a kind of summing up point, not a new point, that I hope I persuade you that election is in a very real sense the foundation of mission. Paul in all his letters begins by identifying himself by the word kletos apostolos, called apostle, called to be
an apostle we translated in English. But in the Greek it is very simple, called apostle. He is an apostle because he is called. The calling of God is the fundamental thing. Called, chosen, sent. And this is an action in history and this is the foundation of any true understanding of mission. These are my seven points and you can really switch off. Just to kind of go over again but from somewhat slightly different angles, what I think
are the essential theological issues and I am going to number these through one to eight and then move on to the new material. The first one is simply the point that God takes the initiative that throughout the Bible and here I think again one has something that distinguishes the Bible from other sacred books. The tremendous emphasis on the initiative of God. You did not choose me, I chose you. And secondly, that we are dealing with real
happenings, events in history. One way this is so obvious that it seems absurd to keep on stressing it, yet in another sense it is not obvious. Obviously the human world is full of stories. All peoples tell stories and some of the stories that people tell have a special quality about them because they seem to provide a focus for meaning, a focus for our dealing with life. And there are some stories that people tell which provide a
focus for the life of a whole nation. Stories like for the the Spanish Armada and Dunkirk. Each nation has stories which it tells and retells and constantly retells because these stories seem to focus the meaning of existence and of course the story of God. Some of these stories are of the character of myths. That is to say they are stories in which the same theme is expressed but the characters vary. It doesn't matter who the character
is. Very specially you have the stories of dying and rising gods which formed such a big part of the story world of the of the Near East in the time when the New Testament was written. Now how are we to understand these stories? There is one very influential way of understanding them is to see them all as essentially myths, illustrations of eternal truths so that it does not matter too much whether they really happened, when they
really happened, but they illustrate and of course this I suppose was one of the great achievements of Greek thought to press behind the stories to the idea, to the concept which is the eternal idea lying behind all these stories. Now the Bible also of course is full of stories. The structure of the Bible is that it is telling a story. It tells stories about God. You do not find in the Bible a phrase like for example
a typical phrase from a Reformation confession. There is one supreme being, infinite, omnipotent, eternal, omnipresent, omniscient. Immediately you hear that phrase you know that could not come from the Bible. It is a different kind of language altogether. The Bible tells stories about sometimes very very you might call them if you like primitive stories, anthropomorphic stories if you like the word, but I think that Pascal grasped the essential point when he wrote on those famous words that
were found stitched into his jacket after he died. Not the god of the philosophers, the god of Abraham, the god of Isaac and the god of Jacob. I think that Pascal hit on the real crux of the matter. The point here is that the Bible is not unique in that it tells stories. All the literature of mankind is full of stories. The point here is that it is claimed that the story is fundamental, that you cannot
translate the story into a doctrine. Even a magnificent doctrine like there is one god eternal, omniscient, omnipresent, etc. That the story is the essence of the point and that you cannot translate it into something else. Now what is being denied here, this is my third point, what is being denied and what is being affirmed. What is being denied, if you like to put it so, is that the really real is to be found by searching within,
by examining our own soul, our own mind, our own reason. That the really real is the timeless, spiritual, eternal in which the soul is ultimately alone with the alone. You haven't missed very much. What is being affirmed is that our real humanity consists of our being with and for others within a given created world, which the story of which is the real thing we have to deal with. Now this comes out very clearly, for example, at
the very beginning of the Bible, when you have the story of the creation of man and where the emphasis is upon the creation of man as male and female, as man and woman. That this belongs to the very essence of the matter, where the great text in the P narrative of the creation in Genesis 1, when you come to the climax of the story, God said let us make man in our image after our likeness and
God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them, and God blessed them and said be fruitful and multiply. So that the being of man is only a being in relationship. The concept of man alone, of the isolated spiritual monad, the soul, is an illusion. Man has his being only in relationship, and this is, as it were, written into the very constitution of man by the
fact that he is made male and female, man and woman, made to exist in togetherness. And then secondly, this is coupled with the command to be fruitful, to multiply, to replenish the earth, to subdue it, to have dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every living thing. This also is part of the essential given being of man, to tend and replenish the earth, man as steward of nature for God,
so that man's agriculture, his technology, his art, his science is all part of God's essential purpose for him. This is the thing that is being affirmed, that the real, the really human is this being in relationship, in relationship to one another, the world of I thou, to use the Buba language, but also within a world of I it. And as we said yesterday, I think that in recovering the enormously important insight about the distinctive character of
the I thou world, which is the gift of Buba to our generation, we must not forget that that world is only given to us as part of an I it world, and that one does not achieve the fullest reality of personal relationship by trying to abstract it out of the world of impersonal relationships. In fact, it is in the family where the biological relationships, so to speak, are at their maximum, but the personal relationships also are
at their deepest. So that I would want to hold both of these things together, that man has his being in relationship, in interpersonal relationship, and that relationship is within a relationship to an impersonal world. And both of these points are essential for the true understanding of the being of man. The fourth point is that this arises out of the nature of the being of God himself. This is not accidental. This is because God himself is not
a monad, but from all eternity is three persons in one God, the unity of a being in relationship, so that from eternity there is relationship within the Godhead, father and son bound together in the unity of the spirit. And any concept of God as a solitary monad is an illusion, that is as much an idol as something that we construct out of wood or stone. There is no God other than this triune being in whom relationship
is of the very essence, so to say, of the divine being from all eternity. The word was in the beginning with God, pros ton theon. And fifthly, therefore, that salvation, the making whole of all things, can only be by binding men one to another in that bond which binds together the Godhead. That's a very bold phrase to use, but it's justified by the language of scripture. That salvation can only be by binding men together in the
bond which binds the Godhead. And I was thinking here of John 17. John 17 as the climax of all that goes before. In John 15 and 16, we have the, we are gradually, there is unfolded to us. I think this is perhaps the supreme missionary teaching of the Bible in John, the chapters leading up to John 17. We have unfolded to us the vision of the new being which is made possible through the going of Jesus
to the Father by the way of the cross, the new being which is an abiding in the Son as the Son abides in the Father. The Father abiding in the Son, the Son abiding in his disciples, the disciples abiding in the Son, the Son abiding in the Father. And all of this is supremely expressed in the language of the consecration prayer of John 17. Above all, John 17:20 and following. I do not pray for these
only, but for those who are to believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, even as thou Father art in me and I in thee, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. The glory which thou hast given me, and remember the glory of Jesus in St John's Gospel is the glory of sonship, the glory of relationship, the glory of an only begotten
of the Father. That is the glory which he has given to those who believe. And that they may be one, even as we are one, I in them and thou in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that thou hast sent me and hast loved them as thou hast me. The being of the church in the world is to be the presence in the world of that glory, which is the
being of the triune God. And that glory is the glory of relationship of the Son, the beloved Son of the Father. The Son is the beloved whom the Father has chosen and sent, and therein is the glory. And the being of the church will be the manifestation of that glory in the midst of the life of the world. And so it is not too bold to use the language that I have used, that is, binding men
to one another in the bond which binds the Godhead. So that, in other words, the object of God's saving work is not man considered as an isolated monad, as a disembodied separated from his brother man, separated from the history into which God has set him. Rather, the object is man as he truly is, and he truly is only what he is given to be in the creation itself, namely man with his fellow man in a real
history, part of the real world of nature. And therefore, salvation can only be through the word becoming flesh. Flesh, the word that emphasizes the reality of this created world in its distinction from God, wholly part of this created history, a man of flesh and blood with and for his fellow men at a certain time and place in history and in geography. Part of this created world, and therefore it is said that he is savior of the world, savior of the world.