Written by Rev. Calvin Robinson |
Wednesday, May 10, 2023
The choice is not a Christian society or a secular society. The choice is increasingly becoming between a woke society and an Islamic society, both of which are oppressive. If we truly want to be free, and live lives in truth, beauty, and goodness, the only option is to return to a Christian society. That means Christians need to stand firm in the faith.

What does a post-Christian West look like? Liberals argue that it is a secular society free of the “antiquated oppressions” of religion. Conservatives might argue that we get our moral compass from Christianity, and without it, we have a limited understanding of truth, beauty, and goodness.
Either way, I’m not convinced we’re entering a period of agnosticism or atheism. It seems to me as Christianity shrinks away into the corners of Western society, another faith is being promoted to take its place as the default.
I would argue that liberals are handing over the reins to Islam.
In the Midlands of England, Bradford Cathedral made the news for hosting a large Iftar event. Iftar is the breakfast meal of Muslims who are fasting throughout Ramadan. For a place of Christian worship to be hosting such an event will be held up by liberals as inclusive. But to Christians, it may be seen as offensive, to the point of sacrilege, especially if prayers are said during the event. Some Christian leaders seem to have lost all sense of the sacred and instead focus on temporal matters, worshipping the god of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity over our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
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While the God-centeredness of God might lead us to expect a simple Christ-centeredness of Christ in his earthly ministry, this is largely not what we (yet) find in his state of humiliation. In End, Edwards points to John 7:18 (one of several statements from Jesus renouncing the pursuit of his own glory) as characteristic of Christ’s humbled state: “The one who speaks on his own authority seeks his own glory; but the one who seeks the glory of him who sent him is true, and in him there is no falsehood.” The incarnate Christ does not “[seek] his own glory” but the glory of his Father, “him who sent him.” Jesus sought his Father’s glory, says Edwards, “as his highest and last end.”6

“That one phrase, the glory of God” — says Jonathan Edwards — includes “all that is ever spoken of in Scripture as an ultimate end of God’s works.”1
This might be Edwards’s most memorable, and often quoted, summary of his Dissertation Concerning the End for Which God Created the World. In the final section, he argues that God’s supreme end in creation is one (not many), and that this one end is best captured as the glory of God — that is, the “true external expression of God’s internal glory and fullness.”2 God made the world, and rules all of history, to display his own glory.
So, many of us, gladly persuaded by the biblical refrain, speak reverently of “the God-centeredness of God.” As the Scriptures testify at many times and in many ways, and as Edwards catalogs and presents, our Creator righteously has a “supreme regard to himself,”3 rather than any mere humans. With patient instruction and careful reflection, biblically shaped minds often see the sense and rightness of the infinite value of the Creator compared to his creatures — yet the incarnation and human life of Jesus raises some fascinating questions.
What happens when the Creator himself, in the eternal person of his Son, takes on our full humanity, and in this way becomes a creature, with us, in the created world? How does the earthly life of Jesus, the God-man, in his so-called “state of humiliation,” from birth to the cross, relate to God’s God-centeredness? And how does this God-centeredness relate to Christ’s subsequent “state of exaltation,” beginning with the cross and resurrection, and including his ascension and sitting down on heaven’s throne?
Developing Theme
In both Edwards’s dissertation and his most celebrated work, The Freedom of the Will, he addresses (albeit indirectly) this often-overlooked aspect of our doctrine of Christ. In End, chapter 2, section 3 (on “particular texts of Scripture, which show that God’s glory is an ultimate end of the creation”), Edwards briefly notes that “Scripture leads us to suppose that Christ sought God’s glory as his highest and last end,”4 a theme to which he returns in section 6. In Freedom, Edwards draws in a relevant aspect of his christology as “a point clearly and absolutely determining the controversy between Calvinists and Arminians.”5
As we’ll see below, in both instances, Edwards leads us to consider our question diachronically, rather than statically. In other words, despite our tendency to press for a simple timeless answer, Edwards observes a progress and development of the theme across time as the incarnate Christ moves through his “state of humiliation” to his “state of exaltation.”
Today, in his exalted state, with the Son’s redemptive work complete, the glory of the Father and his Son are seen to be the one essential whole that they are, and always have been. But in the earthly life of Christ, the plan of the Father and Son unfolded in history as Jesus moved toward the cross.
Christ’s Goal in Life
First, Jesus, the God-man, lived his human life in utter dedication to his Father and his Father’s glory. Rightly did the angels proclaim, “Glory to God!” at Jesus’s birth (Luke 2:14), as the glory of the Father came to the fore in the life and ministry of the Son. In his state of humiliation, from manger to cross, the man Christ Jesus did not glorify himself, he says (John 8:54; Hebrews 5:5), but his words and deeds, and the effect and intent of his human life, were in full and glad submission to the will, and glory, of his Father. As Jesus summarizes his earthly life and ministry in John 8:49, “I honor my Father.”
The Son loves his Father (John 14:31). And he lived as man, and set his face toward the cross, propelled by his great delight in and love for his Father. Jesus instructed his disciples to so live, and bear fruit, that his Father would be glorified (Matthew 5:16; John 15:8), and he taught them to pray for the hallowing of his Father’s name (Matthew 6:9; Luke 11:2). The night before he died, Jesus summarized, in prayer, his life’s work as “I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do” (John 17:4). When Jesus sees that, at last, his “hour” has come for the cross, he turns heavenward in prayer, “Father, glorify your name” (John 12:28).
While the God-centeredness of God might lead us to expect a simple Christ-centeredness of Christ in his earthly ministry, this is largely not what we (yet) find in his state of humiliation. In End, Edwards points to John 7:18 (one of several statements from Jesus renouncing the pursuit of his own glory) as characteristic of Christ’s humbled state: “The one who speaks on his own authority seeks his own glory; but the one who seeks the glory of him who sent him is true, and in him there is no falsehood.” The incarnate Christ does not “[seek] his own glory” but the glory of his Father, “him who sent him.” Jesus sought his Father’s glory, says Edwards, “as his highest and last end.”6
In Freedom, Edwards observes that “the words [of Isaiah 42:1–4] imply a promise of [Christ’s] being so upheld by God’s Spirit, that he should be preserved from sin; particularly from pride and vainglory, and from being overcome by any of the temptations he should be under to affect the glory of this world; the pomp of an earthly prince, or the applause and praise of men.”7
So, to be clear, the God-centered God becoming man in the life of Christ does not produce one who is, in essence, a self-centered human. Jesus’s preservation from sin, says Edwards, is “particularly from pride and vainglory.” As demonstrated in rebuffing Satan’s temptations in the wilderness, Jesus did not pursue “the glory of this world.”
Rather, Edwards cites Isaiah 49:7 to show that Jesus, in his state of humiliation, is “one deeply despised, abhorred by the nation.” However, here in the same verse of prophecy comes the shift from humiliation to exaltation that will come at the cross: “Kings shall see and arise; princes, and they shall prostrate themselves” before the one who once was deeply despised.
His Near Approach to Death
As Jesus draws near to the cross, we discover a significant development. Edwards turns from John 7 to the “now” of John 12, with Jesus’s crucifixion “in a few days.”8
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Written by Alan D. Strange |
Monday, February 19, 2024
The “spirituality of the church” (SOTC) relates to the reality that the church is supremely a spiritual institution (not a biological one, as is the family, or a civil one, as is the state) and that its power is moral and suasive (not legal and coercive, as is state power), ministerial and declarative (not magisterial and legislative, as is power in the Roman Catholic Church). Thus, the church is an institution gathered and perfected by the Spirit, having chiefly spiritual concerns, carried out in a spiritual fashion by a Spirit-indited use of the means of grace.

An Ongoing Dialogue
Historically, the church has at times claimed a supremacy that she does not have—over the state, especially—and she has, at other times, allowed the state to dominate her. Part of the genius of the Reformation was the rediscovery that the state is not over the church or vice-versa, but that all institutions are properly under God. The Scots, in opposing Erastianism—the notion among some Protestant rulers that the church is properly under the state, as was the case with the Church of England under the English monarch—particularly developed this Reformational notion that the church was not under the state in what they called the “spiritual independency of the church.” In the American context this came to be known in the nineteenth century as the doctrine of the “spirituality of the church” (SOTC).
To be sure, the doctrine was often abused to stop the mouth of the church against slavery; however, Charles Hodge of Princeton, and others of his time and following him, developed a better use of the doctrine, capturing the older notion that the spirituality of the church was calculated to spare the church from simply giving way to politics and state control, minding instead its proper spiritual call and mission, having rule over its own affairs. At the same time, Hodge was careful not to muzzle the prophetic voice that the church always possesses as she calls the whole world to repentance and faith. The spirituality of the church of this sort could be helpfully recovered for the ongoing dialogue of how the church is to relate to the world in which it finds itself, both in how it distinguishes itself from the world and how it gives itself to the world.
It is important for the church to do both: to distinguish itself from the world, or it fails to be the distinct agency of gospel proclamation that it is called to be, and to give itself to the world, or it fails to be the foot-washing servants that Christ calls it to be. The present atmosphere, in which the politicization of virtually everything looms, can prove especially challenging in this regard. Highly charged partisan political currents can impact the church as well as civil society, especially when it comes to the temptation of those on both extremes—left and the right—to bring social, economic, political, and like agendas into the church. The church as church may have something to say about present concerns (e.g., abortion, same-sex marriage, etc.), which is to say that God’s word may address such, usually in principle, though not in detail; in any case, not in a way that renders the church just another voice in the current cacophony of shouted political slogans, but that contributes a proper faith perspective to vexing moral questions in the public square. We need to be salt and light, to witness to the power of Christ and his gospel in an unsavory, dark world in a way that does not avoid the moral issues of our time, bringing a clear prophetic witness to them, but also not allow politics to swamp the boat so that the gospel gets sunk in a sea of cultural concerns.
Recapturing Spirituality
The SOTC, which we seek to recapture, is today either forgotten as a concept or remembered only for its abuses (e.g., justifying the church not addressing American slavery and the racial hatred that especially developed in its wake, including iniquitous Jim Crow laws).
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