my life and my doctrine

I’ve recently been following many, generally painful and non-constructive, discussions on the SRE on trial page of Facebook. I don’t want to rehash the arguments here, but question an assumption of those who promote the ethics course. My bugbear is when people claim secular ethics as worldview-neutral and therefore isn’t a challenge to organised, for want of a better term, religion. If that were the case, how can it be considered for the SRE time slot? (However, I would like to add that this is more constructive than discussions about the appropriateness of SRE in schools at all. From what I understand, that’s not up for debate.)

This struck me as I heard about the recent French vote, in the lower house, to ban the burka.

Justice minister Michele Alliot-Marie says the approval was a success for French republican values of liberty, equality, fraternity and secularism.

I am yet to work out how it is a win for liberty. How a ban on public religious practise equals freedom. It seems to me, from a possibly ill-informed outsider looking in, that the desire for secularism is greater than the right to personal self-expression. In the end, it gives me the impression that secularism sits in judgment over religion and wants to push what it thinks is good or bad for an individual. Equality becomes less about equality, but uniformity. No longer the right the choose, but the assumption that all will choose the same.

Why did this particularly strike me this week?

I’ve been preparing sermons on 1 Timothy for later this year and have been dwelling on this very bold, very absolute, very modernist statement:

For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and humanity, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all (1 Tim 2:5-6)

Paul doesn’t have any sense of diplomacy or tact as he states the truth. Regardless of what the prevailing view might have been in the cosmopolitan Ephesus, regardless of the culture of the day, there is one God. And there is only one God. And the only mediation between God and humanity. Jesus Christ who died, that we might know this one God.

I’ve been told plenty of times, that Calvin’s Institutes were written as a framework and springboard into Calvin’s commentaries. I’m ashamed to admit that it took until this morning before I really appreciated how good his commentaries are. I’ve been preparing for a Bible study on 1 Timothy 2. After checking out Tim Challies’ recommendations of commentaries on the Pastoral Epistles, I’d bought Calvin’s.

So, what was so good about it?

1. It’s easy to read as Calvin deals with the text phrase by phrase. It’s written like someone speaking, in a friendly manner, and preaching, in an exhortatory manner. Calvin wants to convince us of what he’s discovered in the Bible.
2. It’s absolutely soaked in Scripture. The most refreshing thing about this commentary is how often Calvin quotes other parts of the Bible. He clearly lets the Bible speak for itself. He demonstrates a supreme confidence in God’s word to be clear and let Scripture explain Scripture. When dealing with 1 Tim 2.6 – ‘who gave himself as a ransom for all men’, there are a couple of sentences of his explanation, though most of the paragraph is quotes of Rom 8.34; Hebrews 7.17 and Hebrews 4.14-5.3. Further, unlike many commentaries or other Christian books I read, the text of the verses are written out in full, not just referenced. More than that, they are included into the body of the text. For some reason I’m prone to glancing over quoted bits of Scripture when they are block quoted in a page of text. This decision of the editors made me read more Bible than I normally do while reading a commentary, rather than assuming I’m the studious type who will look up every reference as they come.
3. It’s relevant to his day and age. He’s not just explaining a text for a technical insight. Rather it is evident that his goal is to address the issues of the day and in particular the teachings of the Roman Catholic church that he wants to refute.
4. It’s relevant today. One of the consequences of using Scripture to explain Scripture is that it is still relevant today in our society. It’s not as though there were anecdotes of the 16th century equivalent of Facebook, sport or other social occasion.

Pick it up and read one.