Category Archives: Nick Needham

Matthew Henry’s Perspective on Thirdwayism: Contra Secularism’s In-Breaking into the Churches

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The evangelical churches in North America, in particular, and in the West, in general, have largely been secularized. To say something has been secularized has broad affect. But primarily, I am wanting to emphasize how pagan Enlightenment categories have been uncritically swallowed by the churches. Whether that be to affirm climate change (as “creation care” or ecotheology), softness on Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender-Queer-Intersex (i.e., “gay Christians”) issues, critical theory and critical race theory, Liberation theology, and a whole host of other antisupranaturalistic Enlightenment categories and ideologies, the evangelical churches, by and large, have allowed themselves to be defined by. And if the culture, as the Apostle Paul and the Holy Spirit identify for us, is in fact an ‘evil age,’ then what in God’s Holy Name hath this darkness to do with the Light? As Christians, as ambassadors, as emissaries of Jesus Christ we have been called to bear witness to Jesus Christ, and by this witness, by His reality, His resurrection power indwelling us, indeed as we participate in His life by the Spirit, by His Light we are to expose the darkness; which would entail, that we, on the other hand, repudiate the secularism, the paganism, the Enlightenmentism that so many of the evangelical churches are in fact imbibing (even in the name of Jesus Christ as “bridge-building” aka thirdwayism).

Conversely, the aforementioned has a history. The formative parts of that history are present within the 17th and 18th centuries (so, the Enlightenment). This was a time when the empiricism and rationalism of someone like John Locke, the rationalistic dualism of Immanuel Kant, the Deism of the like et al. was in full blossom. The Deists, of course, simply believed that there was a transcendent god, up there yonder, who got everything started, who created the heavens and earth, gave it a good spin, and has since left it to itself; and to us. Embedded in Deism was a charred rationalism, that when applied to the confessional Dogmas of the historic church, with particular focus on the doctrine of the triune God, left God almost dead in the gutter; left a God, as noted, who was most assuredly not three-in-one / one-in-three. As such, being a confessional Christian—someone who affirmed the orthodox ecumenical church creeds of Nicaea, Constantinople, Chalcedon, with reference to the triunity of God and the deity of Christ—had come to wane. In the face of the intelligentsia of that day and hour, to be a confessional Christian was looked at like being the village idiot or something. Even so, and by the mercy of God, such persons persisted.

In the midst of this, those “persistents,” the people who withstood succumbing to the Deists and rationalists among them, within the “churches,” remained faithful to the reality of the triune God. Indeed, here is how contemporary church historian, Nick Needham, writes about one of these ‘faithful,’ with direct reference to Matthew Henry himself:

For the Dissenters, Presbyterian Matthew Henry (1662–1714, author of the famous Bible commentary, spoke in a similar vein as the 18th Century began:

The low condition of the church of God ought to be greatly lamented; the Protestant interest small, very small; a decay of piety; attempts for reformation ineffectual. Help, Lord! There are but few who are truly religious; who believe the report of the Gospel, and who are willing to take the pains, and run the hazards of religion. Many make a fair show in the flesh, but few only walk closely with God. Where is he that engageth his heart, or that stirs up himself to take hold of his Maker?[1]

The way Henry was referring to his time and day in the churches sounds eerily similar to our day and time. More than ever, so-called evangelical Christians, particularly “the leaders,” have allowed the erosive powers of the current world culture[s] to seep into the churches; and they have done this all in the name of Jesus Christ. There are many who use the name of Jesus Christ, refer to the Bible, use all the right Christianese, and yet they have in point of fact denied the power of God, the Gospel, in favor of cloistering with the various secular ideologies run amok among us in this world system. These ‘forces,’ within the churches, particularly as we see that given expression in a magazine like Christianity Today, or in the writings and activities of the late, Tim Keller’s thirdwayism (acquiescing to the progressive ideologies of the 21st century), in the name of bridge-building, or in the “winsomeness” of someone like Russell Moore or J. D. Greear, have taken the many peoples of the churches into the slough of despondency, right along with them. This shan’t remain the case!

Like in Henry’s day, it is easy, and at a point, even appropriate to bewail the current church situation. But we cannot stay in that status. The ‘faithful’ must recognize our current moment, as that has been foisted upon us, even by us, and first and foremost repent. Once this step has been taken it is incumbent on each and everyone of us, indeed as individual members of the church, to keep in step with the Holy Spirit, take up our crosses daily, and follow Jesus Christ. As we live out our unique callings by our Master, as we shine brightly with the Brightness of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, as we expose the darkness with the Light of Christ, we might be able, yet, to inject the churches, the church, with the vitality of our risen and ascended Lord. That can only come as we participate in the life of Christ, in union with Him, and by His resurrection and ascension energy, in shared koinonia (fellowship), one with the other, by which the power of God, the Gospel, can come to have full effect on the liveliness of the churches, and as the light to the world that Jesus is Savior and Lord.

[1] Nick Needham, 2000 Years of Christ’s Power: Volume 5: The Age of Enlightenment and Awakening (Great Britain: Christian Focus Publications, 2023), 99.

Purple Energy, An Analogy on the Trinity

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The Trinity: An Illustration

Just as one flame contains three realities in a single fire, so there is one God in three persons. How? The flame is made of a shining brightness, a purple energy, and glowing heat. It has a shining brightness so that it can give light, a purple energy so that it can be active and alive, and a glowing heat sot that it can burn. The shining brightness represents the Father, who reveals His brightness to believers in His fatherly care. The purple energy contained with the brightness (by which the same flame manifests its power) represents the Son, who from the Virgin took a body in which the divine nature demonstrated its miraculous powers. The glowing heat represents the Holy Spirit, who pours Himself glowingly into the minds of believers. But where there is no shining brightness, no purple energy, and no glowing heat, there is no flame to be seen. Likewise, where neither the Father, nor the Son, nor the Holy Spirit is honoured, God receives no worthy worship. And so, just as we see these three realities in the one flame, so we must understand three persons in the unity of the divine nature.

Hildegard of Bignen

Scivias, Book 2, chapter 2, section 6[1]

 

[1] Cited by Nick Needham, 2000 Years of Christ’s Power: Volume 2: The Middle Ages, 7th to 15th Century (Scotland, UK: Christian Focus Publications Ltd., 2016), 194.

Jesus’s Eternal Life as the End and Beginning of All Things: Applied to the death of Ron Grow

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16 So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. 17 For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, 18 as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. –II Corinthians 4

I am continuing to process my grief at the loss of my dad. My dad suffered like Job in many ways. Although much, if not most of my dad’s suffering was brought on by the [bad] choices he made. Nonetheless, he suffered immensely, and he did so as a child of the living God. He struggled with prescription drug addiction; deep doubts about his salvation (which actually led to the drug addiction); he endured unending sense of loss; he went through a divorce from my mom after 36 years of marriage that he never recovered from; he lost many close to him, the last was his cousin, Tommy, who was like a brother to him (Tommy wasn’t a Christian when he killed himself approx 3 years ago). My dad suffered immensely, and in ways that my short list does not adequately capture (I didn’t even mention all the physical stuff he dealt with). But in this all there was redemption. You see, my dad is the type of person that Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, came for. Jesus came for the bruised reed, the smoldering wick, the downcast and broken; my dad qualified. The wisdom of God, a staurological wisdom, is of the sort that assumes sinful humanity all the way down. In this assumption the Son ensarkos takes all the blights, even our unbelief and disobediences, and puts these many deaths to death in His singular death for us. The Son of God, the Christ penetrates so deeply into the warp and woof of our sinful beings that he captures our bone marrow itself and redeems it. He did this for my dad. Even in, especially in my dad’s broken and tattered status, the Son of God, who is the Christ, vanquished all the dark nights of the soul at their very fountainhead, and brought eternal life as a well-spring that flows throughout all the ages. My dad’s sinful and battered status was assumed by the Son of God in the incarnation, and redeemed from the inside/out. And yet, and this is the Wisdom, God was able to use all of the suffering, even of the self-inflicted sort that my dad suffered from, and bring new creation through the resurrected and vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ, the Son of Man. There is no loss where Jesus Christ sets His foot, there is only always gain. My dad experienced this gain in seedling form in 1970, and now in penultimate blossomed form in his currently intermediate status now.

Samuel Rutherford (1600 – 1661), Scottish theologian and pastor, wrote the following with reference to trial and tribulation vis-à-vis eternity:

For your afflictions are not eternal; time will end them, and so shall you at length see the Lord’s salvation. His love sleepeth not, but is still working for you. His salvation will not tarry or linger; and suffering for Him is the noblest cross that is out of Heaven. . . and this is the fruit, the flower and bloom growing out of your cross, that ye be a dead man to time, to clay, to gold, to country, to friends, wife, children, and all pieces of created nothings; for in them there is not a seat nor bottom for soul’s love. Oh, what room is for your love (if it were as broad as the sea) up in heaven, and in God!

We may indeed think, Cannot God bring us to heaven with ease and prosperity? Who doubteth but He can? But His infinite wisdom thinketh and decreeth the contrary; and we cannot see a reason of it, yet He hath a most just reason. We never with our eyes saw our own soul; yet we have a soul. We see many rivers, but we know not their first spring and original fountain; yet they have a beginning. Madam, when ye are come to the other side of the water, and have set down your foot on the shore of glorious eternity, and look back again to the waters and to your wearisome journey, and shall see, in that clear glass of endless glory, nearer to the bottom of God’s wisdom, ye shall then be forced to say, “If God had done otherwise with me than He hath done, I had never come to the enjoying of this crown of glory.”[1]

Don’t lose hope. God in Christ is hope. No matter what our plights in this vanquished life Christ is its end; and if He is its end He is its beginning too. Jesus is, indeed, the Alpha and Omega of God for the world; Jesus is this world’s telos, and only reason for existence. It is as we are participatio Christi that we begin to experience what this existence is all about. Unfortunately, since we still inhabit these bodies of death, our experience is shaped by bouts of death. But as Christians, even as we are constantly being given over to the death of Christ, it is only so that His life might be made manifest through the mortal members of our bodies; our bodies of death. This is what Rutherford is on about; he understood that this life isn’t our life at all, but Christ’s! Our lives, according to the Apostle Paul, aren’t ours, they are Christ’s. This means, once we are born again of the imperishable seed of baby Jesus’s life that no matter what sort of peril or trauma enters our lives, it isn’t ours, and it belongs to Christ. The Christian understands that we never live in abstraction from Christ; the Christian knows that the ground of their human being is Christ’s human being for them. The Christian recognizes that there is a correspondence between our lives and Christ’s, and this precisely because the Son freely chose to make His all circumscribing life correspond to ours; that by His poverty for us we might be made rich through the election of His resurrected humanity pro nobis.

My dad knows this hope. He travailed and kicked in suffering such that I could hardly bear it. There is a paradox in his loss. I miss him in ways that are hard to articulate. But when I think of his suffering, and the state he would be in right now, if he had survived, I find great joy in knowing that he has finally been released from the surely bonds that his body of death shrouded him in. Thankfully, those bonds were Christ’s, and Christ shrugged them off once and for all in the resurrection. My dad lives in the resurrection fully now. Maranatha!

[1] Samuel Rutherford, Selections from His Letters, cited by Nick Needham, 2000 Years Of Christ’s Power: Volume 4: The Age Of Religious Conflict (London: Christian Focus Publications, LTD, 2017), 440.

Thinking the Triune Grammar with Augustine and Gregory the Theologian

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I am an ardent believer in being exposed to Trinitarian grammar as much as possible. The mysterium Trinitatis is a reality that all Christians, at all times, in all places ought to be getting lost in over and over again. I find great joy, and a peace that surpasses all understanding as I contemplate the great mystery of the triune reality; but I don’t do see blindly. To think God as triune is to think concretely about the divine life as that has been Self-revealed and exegeted for us in God’s givenness for us, with us, and in us, by the Holy Spirit in Jesus Christ. St. Augustine captures the sense of what I’m after this way:

Should I even ask, O Lord? Should I even ask? You have spoken, and you have acted, and you have called us to believe. You have taught us that we walk by faith and not by sight, by trust in your good promises of goodness, and not by understanding. It is enough that you know the nature of things. Should I ask?

If I ask, will I receive an answer? You are beyond all my thoughts, greater than all that I can say, incomprehensible in your eternal communion as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. You cannot be encompassed with any concept, bounded by anything greater than yourself, since you are greater than all. All my efforts to encompass you are acts of idolatry and not true worship. And you made all things and all things shine with the bright radiance of your glory. Your world seems as incomprehensible as you yourself.[1]

With this sense of awe about who God is, as that is set before us by Augustine, let’s turn to Gregory Nazianzus to get his eloquent and rather to the point thinking on who God is as the Triune reality:

I set before you the One Deity and Power, Found in the Three-in-Unity, Embracing the Three one by one, equal in essence and nature, Neither increased not decreased by ideas of greater or less; In every way equal, in every way the same, Just as the loveliness and hugeness of the heavens are one: The infinite oneness of Three Infinite Ones, Each of whom is God when seen individually in Himself. As the Father is God, so is the Son, And as the Son is God, so is the Holy Spirit; And the Three are likewise One God when seen together. Each is God because they are of the same essence, And they are One God because of the single principle of Deity. The very instant I conceive of the One, I am enlightened by the brightness of the Three; The very instant I differentiate them, I am carried straight back to the One. When I regard any One of the Three, I think of Him as the Whole; My sight is filled to the brim, And the greater part of what I am thinking of eludes me! I cannot grasp the greatness of One of the Three So as to reckon a greater greatness to the Others. And when I see the Three together, I see only one torch, And I cannot divide or share out the Undivided Light.[2]

33 Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how unfathomable his ways!

34 For who has known the mind of the Lord,
or who has been his counselor?
35 Or who has first given to God,
that God] needs to repay him?

36 For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever! Amen.[3]

 

[1] Augustine cited by Peter J. Leithart, Athanasius, xv-xvi.

[2] Gregory Nazianzus cited in, The Early Church Fathers, edited by Nick Needham (Scotland, UK: Christian Focus Publications, 2017), March 7th entry.

[3] The Apostle Paul inspired by the Holy Spirit, Romans 11:33-36, NET Bible.

Is the Antichrist an Actual Person? Irenaeus Thought So

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The Bible teaches that there will be, or currently is, an Antichrist figure who will come, or has come, and attempt to thwart the very purpose of God in a climaxing form. When the reader reads passages from the book of Daniel, II Thessalonians, and Revelation they are confronted with this shadowy figure. I grew up, and was even trained in a tradition that maintains that the Antichrist is indeed a singular person who will show up during the seven year period known as ‘Jacob’s Trouble’ or the ‘Great Tribulation.’ My former tradition teaches that this personage will rise up and provide world peace, but only for the first three and a half years of the Tribulation. Mid-point through the Tribulation this Antichrist personage will reveal his true character, his devil-possessed character, and declare himself God; to be worshiped in Nebuchadnezzarian fashion. During the last three and a half years of the Tribulation this Antichrist will wreak all sorts of pain and torture upon the world; that is if the world doesn’t bow down and worship him as God.

I have since moved away from the above tradition of interpretation, and believe that the Antichrist, while real and personal, does not necessarily have to be a single figure, nor does he have to fit into the ‘timeline’ of a purported seven year period known as the Great Tribulation. I believe, along with Richard Bauckham, that a proper reading of the book of Revelation leads us to believe that the ‘power of the Beast’, which is the power of the Antichrist, has been pervasive and present ever since the ascension of Jesus Christ; that the book of Revelation’s historical referent, when referring to his power and even personage, was the Roman Empire, and Nero as her emperor. This doesn’t mean that there cannot be multiple referents in mind, in regard to John’s apocalypse, but it does mean that the power of the Beast and the Antichrist have been present throughout all of the world empires that would seek to dominate the world over through military might and economic dominance built upon the backs of slave labor and human trafficking. What my view does entail is that the world empires are desperately evil and wicked above all else; no matter what period of world history we find ourselves in. What is interesting about our period in history is that we now live in a globalized situation never known before; mostly because of the techno-age we have come to inhabit. At some point in history there will be a final generation; the hard part is knowing if we are it or not. Indeed, this really isn’t the Christian’s aim, per se; but Jesus did say that we should be watching, and the Apostle Paul said that this time of orgasmic irruption should not take the sons and daughters of the light as if a thief in a night had come (I Thess 5). I believe all of the conditions for Christ’s second coming have already obtained. This is not to say that there cannot be a literal Antichrist figure who steps up, and attempts to have the whole globe worship him as God. But it is to say that we already have conglomerates of world leaders who already fit that bill; we already have had and continue to have Great Tribulation the world over, of the sort that the Scriptures indicate will be indicative at the parousia of Jesus Christ.

I write all of the above, really, to get to an early pre-Nicene church father, Irenaeus, to see what he thinks about the Antichrist. The interesting thing about Irenaeus was that he is reported to be the disciple of Polycarp, and Polycarp was the disciple of the Apostle John (and also, in the traditional account, for some: the author of the book of Revelation). Irenaeus was what was known as a chialist, today we would call that a ‘premillennialist.’ His chialism was different than what we typically understand as premillennialism today; and his reasoning for it had more to do with his debates with the Gnostics. Here is what he thought about a personal Antichrist:

In this age, some walk towards the light, and unite themselves with God by faith. Others, however, avoid the light, separating themselves from God. Therefore at the end of the age, the Word of God comes preparing a suitable dwelling place for both sets of people. For those who are truly in the light, He gives an abode where they can enjoy the light’s blessings, and the good things the light contains. For those who are in the darkness, by contrast, He gives an abode where they must share in the tribulations of darkness. Thus He says that those standing on His right hand are summoned into the heavenly kingdom, whereas those on His left hand He will send away into everlasting fire, since they have freely abandoned all that is good (Matt. 25:34, 41).

This is why Paul says: “Because they did not receive the love of God that they might be saved, therefore God shall also send upon them the power of error, that they may believe a lie, so that all may be judged who have not believed the truth, but consented to unrighteousness” (2 Thess. 2:10-12). For Antichrist will come, and by his own agency he will concentrate in himself the whole human enterprise of rejecting God. Antichrist will carry out whatever he does by his own will and choice, sitting in the very temple of God, so that those deceived by him will adore him as the Messiah. On this account, he will justly be cast into the lake of fire.

By His foreknowledge, God foresees this human choice of sin, and therefore at just the right time, He sends to sinners such a man as Antichrist, “that they may believe a lie, so that all may be judged who have not believed the truth, but consented to unrighteousness.”[1]

We see things in the world today, particularly in the strange times we are currently inhabiting, that could make some to think that we are right in the very midst of a moment where a shadowy Antichrist could easily rise up and bring ‘salvation’ to this world order. It isn’t hard, not at all, to imagine a global delusion whereby people could be led into a state of panic and fear, of the sort that they would be willing to jump off a cliff if the ‘leadership’ told them to. No matter what moment we’re in, the Bible is clear that there will be, or maybe even is now, an Antichrist who will deceive the people, with satanic power, and attempt to ultimately rise up against the true and living God with all of his serpentinish might. Irenaeus, believed, clearly, that this intensification of evil would rise up at just the right, and ordained moment, leading the world to one last death-dance as the devil himself seeks to thwart the purposes of God’s Kingdom in Christ. Maranatha

[1] St. Irenaeus cited by Nick Needham, Daily Readings: The Early Church Fathers (Scotland, UK: Christian Focus Publications, 2017), February 28th.