Beeson Podcast, Episode 382 J. Todd Billings March 6, 2018 https://www.beesondivinity.com/podcast/2018/Union-with-Christ Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George. Timothy George: Welcome to today's Beeson Podcast. Today I have the privilege of talking with Dr. J. Todd Billings. Dr. Billings is the Gordon H. Girod Research Professor of Reformed Theology at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan. Welcome to the Beeson Podcast, Dr. Billings. Todd Billings: It's great to be with you. Timothy George: You know, I had the privilege of visiting with you in your school, Western Theological Seminary, some months ago when I was speaking in town. I'm so glad you've now come to Birmingham. You'll be speaking at Beeson Divinity School and here at the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, where we're recording this podcast. So, it's an honor to have you with us down south. Todd Billings: I've been looking forward to visiting. Timothy George: Now, tell us a little about yourself and your background. I thought it was interesting that you began your Christian life as a Baptist and have let's say evolved, is that the right word, into the Reformed Church in America? Talk about that pilgrimage. Todd Billings: Well, I'm tremendously grateful for my Baptist roots and my Baptist upbringing. I grew up in a Baptist church that really emphasized global mission and local mission, and so we would often have missionaries speaking at our church, staying in our home, and also a lot of scripture memorization. So, I mean, I think sometimes I was motivated just by the candy and various rewards. But I really tremendously appreciate all the scripture memorization that I had in my upbringing, and so many people coming along and discipling me in that way. I think that the pressure point for me came, especially when I went to college, and I went to Wheaton College and discovered more about the broader Christian tradition and also just the roots of things like the Apostle's Creed, the Nicene Creed. We never said creeds growing up, and I didn't see anything particularly to object to, though the descent into hell sounded pretty suspicious. I found my faith really growing as I found out about these broader aspects of the faith. But at least in my particular Baptist church, I know different Baptist churches are different, but we had kind of a tradition of non-tradition. If you say the word tradition or Christian tradition, it's almost always used in a pejorative sense. So, there's the Word of God, and then there's traditions, which inevitably distort the Word of God. But I found myself in a place still valuing the Word of God, and the preaching and the emphasis upon mission, but also finding that some traditions actually were helpful in helping me to dig deeper into the Word of God. And I had friends who grew up even in my Baptist church who, some of them went away from the faith in different directions, and I felt like actually some guidance from tradition is a really, really helpful thing. That we can't even be biblical on our own, that we need, in a sense, the best of the tradition of the church in order to do that. So, I really came to be at home, first in Presbyterian and then the Reformed Church in America. There's not too much theological difference there, in that there's a connection to the historic church, to the Nicene Creed, to the Chalcedonian Confessions about who Jesus Christ is. And there's a connection to historic creeds from the Reformation. But there's also a sense that we are always reading scripture anew, the Spirit is still speaking. So, scripture is the final authority, scripture is the source, but we're not just completely left on our own as we approach scripture. So, that's kind of why I ended up with that pilgrimage. Timothy George: Say a little bit about your academic pilgrimage. You were at Wheaton College, then you went to Fuller Theological Seminary for your Master of Divinity, and then on to Harvard Divinity School for your doctoral work. So, that's an interesting pilgrimage. Kansas Baptist, Wheaton College, Fuller, Harvard. Todd Billings: Yeah, it's not a very well-trod path. When I was at Wheaton, well, there were a number of reasons of why I ended up going to seminary and to Fuller, but one of the big ones was just my love for cross-cultural ministry that I found when I was at Wheaton. I did a six-month internship in Uganda working with the Church of Uganda, the Anglican church there. I was planning at the time of probably going on for a PhD in Philosophy. But it was actually, there were so many beautiful things about the church there, but then there were also problems, like theological problems, that I came across in ministry. It occurred to me, there's nothing that I could commit my life to that would be both more of service, but also just intellectually stimulating, than reflecting for the ministry of the church. So, that's what led me the direction of seminary, and after looking at several seminaries, I ended up at Fuller. I worked very closely with John Thompson, who's a reformation historian, and also with Miroslav Volf who was there at the time. I was his TA, and worked with him quite a bit. So, after being there, I was still actually interested in possibly going back overseas, but with a PhD. So, I decided, I'm going to go ahead and do my PhD. It was really an Anglican scholar named Sarah Coakley who drew me Harvard. It was the combination of just a very sharp analytic mind and thinking through theology and systematic theology, and a great love and respect for especially the ancient Christian traditions. So, the church fathers and those things. Timothy George: Now, one of the themes in your scholarship, I think this maybe came from your work as a student at Harvard particularly, on John Calvin related to the question of union with Christ. What does that term mean, union with Christ? Todd Billings: Well, it's a term that gets at a central feature of Christian identity, who we are as Christians. Are we just people who believe in Jesus, and because we believe we are going to heaven someday, but that's just sort of a small aspect of who we are. Or is it a richer vision like we have in the Apostle Paul, where our very identity is to be adopted children of God, united to Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit, and that that identity actually frames the gifts we receive in the gospel? Frames justification and forgiveness and the new life and sanctification that we receive in the gospel. So, in many ways, it's a big category, it's a broad category that includes so much about the gifts we receive in salvation. But ironically, it's often a missing category, I think, in the Christian community as well. We sometimes just want to go straight from, you know, we have faith to you have forgiveness, so that means you're going to heaven. But the question is, who are we? Who are we in the meantime? We're people who have been united to Jesus Christ, his death and resurrection, who have been united to one another in the Body of Christ, who have been adopted, Paul says, but we're awaiting our adoption. So, I think, it's been enriching just even to my own spiritual life to dig deeper into those biblical images related to union with Christ, and giving a more dynamic sense of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. Timothy George: I remember reading Paul with that question in mind. All those prepositional phrases, en Christo, en Christo, over and over, I don't know how many times, but dozens, scores and scores of times. He uses that as a central motif. However, some people get very nervous with that kind of language, and particularly with reference to mysticism, which is another big, big term. We could spend a whole podcast talking about, what is mysticism? But there are dangers, I'm sure, with some forms of mysticism. How would you respond to that question about union with Christ and mysticism? Todd Billings: Well as you said, the term mysticism is used in quite a few different ways. John Calvin himself, speaks about a mystical union that we have with Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit, and that in a sense, our core identity becomes united to Christ in this sense. But I think that Calvin has some good instincts here, that mysticism does not mean just in our head or having some elaborate experience that has nothing to do with the life of the world. For Calvin, as he unpacks this union with Christ, it is always connected to love of neighbor, communion with others. This is one reason why he did not endorse a private celebration of the Lord's Supper. Because in order to have koinonia or communion with Christ, you have to have communion with one another. You can't just have this sole monastic united to God in this separate experience. But much more this experience of union with Christ by the Spirit is connected to the community, is connected to love of neighbor, and even love of the most vulnerable. Timothy George: Yeah, in the 19th century, a lot of Calvin scholars were concerned to find out, what's the central teaching, the central dogma of Calvin's theology? And many people proposed and many people today would still say, I think, it's predestination, it's election, the sovereignty of God, something like that. You seem to zero in on union with Christ, but certainly not to the detriment of these other great themes. Can you say how they are organized or balanced in Calvin's mind in your thinking? Todd Billings: Well, I think that union with Christ is central, but it's not a central dogma in the sense that he comes up with this doctrine of union, and then he deduces everything else from that central dogma. Likewise, Calvin definitely does not come up with a doctrine of providence and then deduce everything else from that, or doctrinal predestination and deduce everything else from that. He's very exegetical in his approach. So his whole program, as he talks about it early in his career in 1539, 1540, when he has his second edition of the Institutes, and he starts his writing of commentaries, is to have lucid expositions of scripture in his commentaries. Then in places where he needs to go in a lot more depth, like about the person of Christ or about the atonement or things like that, he will organize those together in a series of common-places in the Institutes. So, the Institutes is not meant to be just a series of reflections, where one topic sort of causes or leads to another. It's all exegetically rooted, and it's all rooted back into his commentaries. So, when I teach a course on Calvin, of course we read from the Institutes, but we read quite a bit from the commentaries, we read from his pastoral works and so on, because it's all interconnected in that way. So, I guess, I think it's helpful just to note that in terms of speaking of salvation, Calvin thinks that union with Christ is central. He says because it holds within it justification and sanctification and the work of the Spirit, it's like the big tent under which all sorts of other, even specific and even at times polemical discussion take place under that. But if you lose the sense of the big tent, then you've lost a lot. Timothy George: You know one of the places, it seems to me, in Calvin's theology where union with Christ comes to the fore, is his eucharistic theology. Todd Billings: Yeah, definitely. Timothy George: I know you've been very interested in that whole question of the Lord's Supper, what is it, how do we celebrate it, what does it mean for us as believers in Christ, and for us as a community of faith, as a church? How does one encounter Jesus Christ in the Lord's Supper in word and sacrament? Todd Billings: I think that for Calvin, Jesus Christ has promised to be present in word and in preaching, and it's the same Word who is present in sense of sacramental form, in the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper. So, the underlying logic of what holds it together is union with Christ. Now, Calvin does some peculiar things. On the one hand, he wants to say that you can feed upon Christ, and have the kind of feeding upon Christ that John 6 talks about, even apart from the Lords' Supper. On the other hand, he wants to say that the Lord's Supper is not just about a remembrance of Christ's work or even a remembrance of what Christ has done in us in the past, but it's a nourishment on Christ. Some folks, particularly when I was at Harvard were, you know, pretty annoyed by this. I mean, how can you say the Lord's Supper's important if you can actually feed upon Christ apart from the Lord's Supper? And I think that Calvin's solution to this is to say that, in a sense, the Lord's Supper is an icon of the gospel. It shows us what the center of the Christian life is, and it doesn't show it by being something totally other than the preached word. No rather, just as the preached word, it holds forth Jesus Christ to us crucified and raised by the power of the Holy Spirit and leads us into this union with this same Christ. So, there's a sense in which the Lord's Supper involves a celebration and a recognition of both forgiveness of sins and new life, both justification and sanctification. And preaching should involve that as well. So, it's a way in which God has actually provided an instrument for bodily creatures like us to know of God's covenantal love. I mean, Calvin thought that even before the fall, there were sacramental signs. That in the tree of life, that God gives the tree of life because he says, bodily creatures like us just won't be convinced of his love unless we have bodily signs. So then, when we have the Lord's Supper in the Christian life, it's a restoration of that relationship with God we've had in Eden, and even higher than that, since Christ is the second Adam. And higher, it's a feeding upon life itself in Jesus Christ who is the temple, and is light. All these biblical images center in on Jesus Christ, and union with Christ points like a funnel toward how to access those biblical images, and how to feed upon them in a sense. Timothy George: You know, we're Americans, and so we're interested in everything that's utilitarian and pragmatic. And the big question when we think about something like the presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper, is how? How can this be? How does this happen? What are the mechanics of it? Well, Calvin doesn't really fully answer that maybe to our satisfaction. But he gives a stab at it in an interesting way. I wonder if you would comment. In book four of the Institutes, he has this language about our hearts being lifted up into the heavenly sanctuary and there communing with Christ. There is a real spiritual presence of Christ that happens in this way by the power of Holy Spirit, he's saying. Todd Billings: Right, right. Timothy George: Say something about how do we talk about that? Todd Billings: I think the first thing to say, like you mentioned, is that it's a mystery. But some of the question is, is it a biblical mystery? Is it a mystery that brings us deeper into the biblical narrative? I think that some of what Calvin is ... Calvin is getting at several things. One is, he doesn't want an emphasis upon the real presence of Christ at the supper to lead to us being fixated upon objects. So, we're just fixated upon the bread, we're fixated upon the cup. In fact, he thinks that if we're not paying attention to other people, then we're missing the point. If there's a sort of high point in Calvin's eucharistic theology when a congregation celebrates, it's actually much more in the table fellowship and the sharing with one another the koinonia of the bread and the wine that we share in Christ as we share with one another. But this sharing is also one that, it's of Jesus, who is in heaven. He has gone before us. What do we know about heaven? Well, the main thing we know is that Jesus is there. And if we are to long for heaven, and to ache for heaven, we need to orient our affections upon Jesus. Now at this point, I'm riffing more on Calvin than just going with Calvin. But there's certainly a sense in which, as the reformed tradition and Calvinist tradition develops this theme, there's a real sense of ache and anticipation for heaven that comes alongside Calvin's view here. In fact, I mention in a book I have coming out, that the Song of Songs becomes one of the most preached upon texts in a lot of reformed circles with the Lord's Supper, that this is the foretaste of the wedding feast of our beloved, of our spouse. So, I think there's a way in which, on the one hand, what Calvin says about our hearts being lifted up to heaven, it teaches us something about heaven. That heaven is going to have bodies, it's going to have other people, it's not just ethereal, and it's going to be centered on Jesus. But then also with the lifting up to heaven, it gives us a sense that we are in an in-between time. We pray, "Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven." We're not there yet. So, it does give us, I think, a proper both delight and ache. The Lord's Supper should made us hungry. It should nourish us, but also make us hungry. So I think, from what I've said, Calvin would explicitly agree with some, and some of it I'm sort of riffing off of, and that you see developments of later in the reformed tradition. But I think that's actually a really rich way to speak about the Lord's Supper. Timothy George: You mentioned your new book. It's titled, Remembrance Communion and Hope, brand new from Eerdmans Press. So, can you say a little bit more about it? Todd Billings: Yeah, the book was, it's centered around a wager for congregations, especially for leaders of congregations. And the wager is that a renewed theology and practice of the Lord's Supper can lead to a deeper embrace of the gospel itself. Now, I'm using a lot of theological words there, and it may just sound like I'm just trying to convince people, oh, celebrate the Lord's Supper more often, and everything will be better. That's not what I'm saying, though I think actually a more frequent celebration for many congregations would be a very good thing. But it's exploring the notion in Calvin and the later reformed tradition, that the Lord's Supper is an icon of the gospel. That we can actually live into an embrace of the gospel that is deeper and wider than many views of the gospel than are prominent in our day, where the gospel is just forgiveness or just a new ethic, and that the Lord's Supper can provide an entryway, a pathway, for that. So, that's the central thesis and direction of the book. Timothy George: I want to shift focus just a little bit, and ask you to say something about your own physical health, because a few years ago, you received a very unwelcome diagnosis of cancer. You've been very upfront to talk about that as a Christian, as a theologian. You've written a book about it, Rejoicing in Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer and Life in Christ. It came out in 2015. Talk about that whole issue, your illness and also your faith. Todd Billings: Well, it's been something that as I have come to terms with my illness, which puts me in a fairly unpredictable situation, it's an incurable cancer. I am tested every three months, I'm still on chemotherapy, though at this point, I'm on a lower regimen of chemotherapy than I was before, just trying to keep the cancer numbers stable. But I've tried to use this as an opportunity to explore, for myself and for others in ministry, how scripture speaks into situations like this, particularly suffering that doesn't seem to make sense. This cancer didn't come from anything I ate or was exposed to, it doesn't seem to be retribution for anything I did. Timothy George: It's inexplicable in that way. Todd Billings: Yeah, yeah. And in some ways it would be a lot easier if there was an explanation. I certainly went through a phase where I wanted somebody to blame, even if it was just myself. That would be easier than just to have it as an open question. But yeah, I think one thing I'm convinced of is that cancer patients, others who are suffering from illness, those who are dying, have much to teach the rest of the Christian community. We often pray for people when they go into the hospital, and we should, but rather than just praying for them to leave the hospital, in a sense we should be praying that the Spirit is active through them and is even speaking through their weakness. Because God likes to speak through situations like this. I've been really ministered to as I've gotten to know others in the cancer and community, others who have died as I've walked the path with them. In our society today, we tend to push death to the sidelines. I mean, we have it on the newspaper headlines and in movies and the like, but it's not a real-life concrete experience that reminds us on a daily level, yes, I will die. Yes, you will die. We tend to live as if we don't have these limits. I think that's a loss, that's a loss actually for our faith as well. So, in a number of different ways, I've sought to just, yeah, see what the Lord is teaching me, see where I'm called to as I live with this cancer, and I'm grateful for the days and months that I have. Timothy George: You're speaking to a number of pastors who work with people in all kinds of illness, including cancer. If you could say one thing to pastors about how they can best shepherd others who suffer from cancer and other kinds of diseases we have no control over in some ways, what would you say to them? Todd Billings: If I could say one thing, I think it would be that the cancer patients and others suffering from serious illness, don't need their illness explained. They do want people to go along with them. They do, I think, really long deeply to hear the words of scripture, especially the psalms. But if you have a really neat and tidy explanation for the problem of evil, save it for another time. Everyone is different as they go through illness, and so pastors need to be responsive to that. But in a sense, just sit with the person long enough to find out where they are in response. If you have a default mode, I would say go to the Psalms. Timothy George: My guest today on the Beeson Podcast has been Dr. J. Todd Billings. He teaches Reformed Theology at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan, one of the leading Calvin scholars in our country today. We are honored to have you with us in Birmingham and at Beeson. Thank you so much for coming and sharing your life and your thoughts with us. Todd Billings: It's great to be here. Announcer: You've been listening to the Beeson Podcast with host Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson Podcast at our website beesondivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational, evangelical divinity school training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. 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