Killing the Schoolmaster
Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, September 3, 2023
Rancière wants to remove our ability to stand on the shoulders of others. I recall Anthony Thiselton drilling into me in his hermeneutics classes that we were pygmies on the shoulders of giants. Rancière would have us cut the giants off at the knees and then merrily dance into the sunset. As Christians we must instead confess that the tradition matters, the past matters, those who have gone before us show us the way.
Some time last century Nietzsche killed God, or reported on our murder of the divine, anyway.
As the trends and forces which made him declare that God was dead accelerated we have systematically done the same to each authority figure we encountered, in diminishing scales of authority like repeatedly smashing Russian dolls, until they are all gone.
To have autonomy we have to not only kill God, but we must murder each authority figure that we find. After we subsume Nietzsche’s will to power it’s an inevitable climb up a hill of skulls. We become intellectual Oedipus’ who have to overturn the wisdom of the masters. We’ve stopped doing so actively long ago, instead we passively kill the wise daily.
This has allowed us to each enthrone ourselves as god of our demesne, and no god brooks rivals. So we separate one from another, each man an island, unmoored and solipsistically floating, lonely as a cloud.
Ok, so that’s overstated and overwrought—not least because reports of the Lord’s demise were greatly exaggerated, go and have a peek in the tomb—but what has happened in the last couple of centuries is a successive dethroning of God from every arena of public and private life. This is then followed, inevitably because vacuums must be filled, with a slow but inexorable enthroning of the self in each throne we find.
This is the backdrop, or part of it, that created the phenomenon we name (and inhabit) ‘expressive individualism.’ The problems with community that persist in our societies, well documented at this point, exist for all manner of structural reasons—and it can be difficult to tell cart from horse. However we arrived, we find ourselves in a place where we place community after our selves. I decry it and yet I do it, a product of the social imaginary in which I live and breath and have my being, it is difficult to not view the world through the prism of my ‘identity’ and sense of self.
Yet if we can break back into reality we might just discover a richer, wider, surprising world that wants to teach us stories of its and our maker. We might discover the world is much stranger and more delightful than we give it credit for, having explained away the mysteriousness and tied everything up in neat boxes. We’re wrong of course, but we need to begin to see the world again, to see the reality that everything we encounter participates in and points towards.
To see reality we will need teachers, and we’ve killed them all. Thank the Lord he’s the God of resurrection.
Not so long ago I worked at a different University where I was responsible for helping academics develop their pedagogy. This included evidence-based evaluations of whether new teaching methods ‘worked,’ coaching academics on their practice, and reading a lot of academic studies in pedagogic journals.
Once at a conference we were extolled the virtues of Jacques Rancière, a philosopher who was interested in ‘emancipatory pedagogy’ among other ideas.
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Something to Ponder
The Psalm begins and ends with the spotlight on the steadfast love of God. The Psalm invites us to consider four examples of people in dire straits who called out to God and discovered why they should thank God for that steadfast love. Perhaps Psalm 107 is the food for thought that we need.
The book of Psalms tends to become a favourite for people who have faced some challenges in life. Perhaps you have experienced grief over the loss of a loved one, discouragement during a dark season of life, or any other challenges that set the Psalms into vivid colour in our hearts. Once we know of the soul food kept in that storehouse, we tend to find ourselves returning again and again.
Sometimes the Psalm writer has found words for the ache in my heart. Other times the psalmist points my heart to where it needs to be looking. The book of Psalms is a real treasure – a refreshing spring for the weary times we all have to endure.
The book of Psalms sits at the centre of our Bibles for the times we are just reading through. Maybe there is no experienced crisis that leads us to this vast collection of Hebrew poetry. Sometimes, we will find ourselves reading it simply because it comes next in our Bible reading. It can be a great experience to read it through with fresh eyes and notice the uniqueness of each Psalm and the recurring themes.
Let’s look at the first Psalm of book five – Psalm 107. This Psalm sets the tone for the section that will follow. It begins as you might expect, with a call to thank our good God for his enduring, steadfast love. This call goes out to all who have been redeemed and rescued by God (v1-3).
Then we find ourselves walking through four examples of challenging circumstances from which God rescues his people:
First, we read of the weary wilderness wanderers failing to find a place of sanctuary (v4-9).
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The Person of the Holy Spirit
As the third person of the Trinity, the Spirit is co-equal with the Father and Son, and yet as a distinct person, the Holy Spirit is the one who regenerates us and guides us into all truth. He doesn’t speak on his own authority but relays the truth. The Holy Spirit is ever illuminating the work of the Son, bringing glory to Christ and declaring the Logos to the church.
Albert Mohler says, “In some evangelical circles the Holy Spirit has faded into the background of our theological interests, leaving us with an anemic view of the Spirit, and subsequently, a deficient relationship with the third member of the Trinity.”
The Bible is not silent regarding the person and work of the Holy Spirit! He appears on the opening page of Scripture (Genesis 1:2) and is seen throughout, most primarily in perfecting & sanctifying the believer.
The Person of the Holy Spirit
John 14:16-17 says, “16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, 17 even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.”
Notice with me that Jesus does not say the Spirit of truth is an “it” – but uses the personal pronouns “he” and “Him”. “You know Him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you.” We would not describe our spouses as “it” – unless we wanted to sleep on the couch. The Holy Spirit is not an impersonal wind, ghost, or force that you can channel or use like Luke Skywalker with enough concentration.
The Holy Spirit of God has knowledge (1 Cor 2:10-11), a will (1 Cor 12:11), a mind (Rom 8:27), He loves (Rom 15:30), reveals (Acts 13:2), intercedes (Romans 8:26), teaches (John 14:26), guides (Acts 16:6-7), can be grieved (Eph 4:30), insulted (Heb 10:29), lied to (Acts 5:3), and blasphemed (Matt 12:31-32). These can all only be referring to a Person.
You can’t grieve or lie to an “it”. You can’t sin against an impersonal thing. No one has ever sinned against their toaster by grabbing a bagel at Panera instead of at home – but countless men have sinned against their wives by committing adultery.
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The Basics—Election
As Americans raised in a democratic republic, we cling tenaciously to the principle “one person, one vote.” It is very easy (and almost natural) to carry over this principle to our understanding of redemption from the guilt of our sin. We mistakenly assume that God should give everyone a chance to go to heaven, and if people refuse God’s gracious offer, then people, in effect, send themselves to hell by refusing God’s gracious gift. This makes perfect sense on democratic presuppositions because in the civil kingdom (the political sphere) each individual is assumed to be entitled and empowered to determine their own course in life. And if this is true in American political life, then it should be true when it comes to the salvation of sinners. Right? Well, no. The Bible does not allow us to understand humanity’s redemption from sin in such rosy terms.
Because of Adam’s sin, we are all sinners by nature and by choice. As his biological children and heirs, we are born guilty for Adam’s act of rebellion in Eden. The Bible speaks of this as being dead in sin (Ephesians 2:1). This simply means that we are unwilling and unable to do anything to save ourselves. Because we are dead in sin, we cannot even take those first steps toward God that some Christians mistakenly think we should be able to make (cf. John 6:44, which tells us that on one can come to Jesus unless drawn by the Father). It is common to hear Christians describe God’s grace in generic, medicinal terms, or as a rescue from peril such as, “grace is like a medicine which, if we are willing to take it, enables us to come to Christ,” or that “grace is a life-ring which we must grab and cling to, or we will drown in our sins.”
Our problem is not that we are spiritually sick, weakened and impaired by our sin, or that we are morally corrupt. It is much worse than that. The Bible says we are dead in sin. Dead people do not, and indeed cannot, come to God. God must act upon us while we are dead in sin or else we stay dead! He alone can make us alive with Christ (cf. Ephesians 2:1-10). As Paul recounts here, God does everything necessary to save us from our sins when we are unworthy of such salvation, and unable to do anything about our predicament. Democratic presuppositions simply don’t apply to matters of sin and grace. Humanity’s plight (the curse and death) and God’s sovereign grace are the proper categories here. From beginning to end God must save us because we are unable to do anything to save ourselves. This is where we find the very heart of God’s saving grace—the doctrine of election.
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