Mr. Oliver, members of the Board and of the faculty, friends, your kindness brings a glow of cheer to this occasion. It’s a quiet glow, and I’m glad for that. Westminster has certain scruples about adopting the props of “show biz.” We have had no frugging in the aisles, and the men of the choir sang without drums, guitars, or slap bass. The only pageantry apparent is the medieval mummery of gowns and hoods, and these, I take it, are symbols of decorum, not festivity.
This restraint is most commendable. Westminster has never had a president and I have never been president of anything but a college literary society. My best friend has her misgivings about my new role. Some of you know me as ex-Eutychus, and others have noticed a certain resemblance to Charlie Brown. As I take these new responsibilities on my shoulders you are ready to ask with Lucy, “What shoulders?” Well, all of you may take comfort that the theme of this address is the ministry of hope.
You will realize that the humor of the situation is not jesting. There is absurdity in every calling of God’s grace. I will solemnly confess that God has not permitted me to stand here tonight without making the absurdity in my case painfully evident to me. Only a fresh discovery of the abounding hope of the gospel gives me liberty to accept this charge in the presence of the Savior. My reflection on the theology of hope has been first the seeking of my own need.
Yet to consider the ministry of Westminster Seminary in the light of the Christian hope is like seeing the campus foliage in the slanting fire of an autumn sun. The familiar bush is aflame with glory.
Hope is the word of our time. The revolutions that sweep the continents are born of hope. Time magazine began an article on the fate of the civil rights revolution in America with these words: “In the classic pattern revolution leads to hope, hope to frustration, frustration to fury. Thus, it is that so many revolutions end by devouring their own children and destroying the goals for which they were fought.”[1]
HOPES IN CONTRAST
Hear the cadenced language: revolution to hope, hope to frustration, frustration to fury. That whirlpool to the depths contrasts with the springing rhythm of the Apostle Paul: “And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope: and hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us” (Rom. 5:3–5).
The nations are gripped with a fever of hope. They have seen that technology can check disease, reap abundant harvests, and offer leisure in luxury. They have seen too the weapons of technology; they covet goods, wealth, and power.
This hope is doomed to frustration partly because it is devoured by its own fierce haste, partly because it is exploited by a more cynical selfishness, but finally because it is realized. The glory of this secular hope has come. The economy of abundance for which the Gentiles seek has been found—in the American suburbs.
Mrs. Stone has it. Tennessee Williams describes her as she enjoys health, leisure, and luxury. “Mrs. Stone pursued the little diversions, the hair-dresser at four o’clock, the photographer at 5:00, the Colony at 6:00, the theatre at 7:30, Sardi’s at midnight...she moved in the great empty circle. But she glanced inward from the periphery and saw the void enclosed there. She saw the emptiness...but the way that centrifugal force prevents a whirling object from falling inward, she was removed for a longtime from the void she circled.”[2]
The transition from secular hope to existential despair requires only the instant in which the bubble bursts and all is nothingness. Just now, a secular optimism is the mood of the American mind and the key-note of contemporary theology. The call is to clear away the defeatism of old and new orthodoxies and to venture with the secularists in the building of the new metropolis, the city of man. Let the church nail up its escape hatch to heaven, renounce its heritage of accomplished salvation, and become a partner with Christ, establishing in history the new mankind, which is the essential manhood of all men.
Sub-Christian hope will always disintegrate into despair and sub-Christian despair will always generate illusory hope.
Yet this mood does not dispel more reflective and more somber expressions of despair. Sub-Christian hope will always disintegrate into despair and sub-Christian despair will always generate illusory hope.
The glory of the Christian hope has another center than the economy of abundance or the new mankind. God is the hope of Israel, the promised portion of his people. “Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord...I wait for the LORD, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope...Let Israel hope in the LORD: for with the LORD there is mercy, and with him is plenteous redemption” (Psalm 130:1, 5, 7).
GOD OUR HOPE
Hope cleaves to the living God—not to a nameless infinite nor to an impersonal ground of being, but to the God who speaks and utters his covenant name Jehovah, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He not only calls his people by his name but calls himself by their name: El Elohim Israel, God the God of Israel. The God of the name is self-determined, not indeterminate; infinite, not indefinite; present, not absent. The most high God dwells in the midst of his people.
No greater blessing can be given to a people than that God’s name should be named upon them. The crown of the covenant lies not in what God gives to his people but in what God is to his people: I will be your God and you shall be my people. Love is the bond of God’s personal covenant. Israel is restored from rebellion when God proclaims his name to Moses, the name of loving kindness and sovereign mercy.
No greater blessing can be given to a people than that God’s name should be named upon them.
God’s personal presence becomes the hope of his people when he comes to dwell not in the bush or in the temple but in his Son. The blessing of God’s name is revealed as the presence of God our Savior and Christ Jesus our hope (1 Tim. 1:1).
The dayspring of hope that arises to shine on those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death is the glory of the present Lord. Not only is the child of the virgin the Lord’s Christ, blessed by the aged Simeon; he is Christ the Lord, hailed by the hosannas of the hosts of heaven (Luke 2:26, 11). God is in the midst of his people. When hope is gone and exhaustion can no longer lift the oars against the waves, then he comes, walking on the water.
JESUS LIVES
He comes, who is the prince of life, and he enters death for our salvation; his triumph is the seal of our hope. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to his great mercy begat us again unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, unto an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for you, who by the power of God are guarded through faith unto a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time” (1 Peter 1:3, 4).
Not the ghostly hope of modern heresy but the glorious hope of Christ’s living flesh is the hope of the gospel. The apostle Paul could not say this more plainly. “If Christ has not been raised your faith is vain, ye are yet in your sins...If we have only hoped in Christ in this life, we are of all men most pitiable” (1 Cor. 15:17, 19).
We do not create a doctrine of the resurrection to generate hope; we must hope because Christ did rise from the dead. The spurious theology that continues to speak of Christ’s resurrection while allowing for the decay of his body somewhere in Palestine is itself decaying in our time. If Christ’s resurrection is but the projection of our hope, then he is dead and his God is dead with him.
We do not create a doctrine of the resurrection to generate hope; we must hope because Christ did rise from the dead.
But Paul knew the living Christ; he had seen his resurrection glory and he waited for the day of his coming again. “When Christ, who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall ye also with him be manifested in glory” (Col.3:4). The Christian hope is one. The glory of the returning Christ, the glory of the new heaven and earth, is the glory of the resurrection body bearing the nail prints that we too shall one day see.
The Christian hope is worldly, new-worldly. We do not come to our age with a special language game that is fun to play on Sunday mornings. We talk plainly about what the world is and what it will be. Christ is our hope for that frail and withered body lying in deathly silence among the funeral flowers. She is joined to Christ. Because he lives, she lives; and when the voice of his risen body again sounds on earth, her resurrection laughter will echo his name.
THE COMING WORLD
Christian hope is not made real by being conformed to the narrow possibilities of a world shut up to death. The real world is the coming world, the new man is the living Lord. Hope that is no wider than a coffin is a mockery in life and a terror in death.
Hope that is no wider than a coffin is a mockery in life and a terror in death.
God’s great handiwork in nature and history will not end in corruption but in glory. The groaning and travailing creation will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children ofGod (Rom. 8:20).
The new secularism calls men from religious myth to secular reality because it does not believe in the resurrection of Christ’s body or in the world to come that bursts from the garden tomb. But Christian hope calls pilgrims to journey through the world of creation to the world of consummation. We have here no abiding city, but we seek after that which is to come. Hope affirms the world, for the meek shall inherit the earth; but it affirms the world not as it now is but as it shall be when death is swallowed up of life.
Hope then lives in the tension between promise and fulfillment. “In hope were we saved; but hope that is seen is not hope: for who hopeth for that which he seeth? But if we hope for that which we see not, then do we with patience wait for it?” (Rom. 8:24, 25). Hope in the promise is hope in the sure Word of God. Contemporary theology puts the living Word of Scripture aboard the same Stygian ferry where it has laid the living body of the Savior and conveys them both to a shadowy underworld where religious concepts are preserved from annihilation. Yes, we are told, Scripture must be a unique and authoritative witness to Christ, but only on the understanding that witness is not revelation but man’s fallible response to God’s revealing act.
COMFORT OF THE SCRIPTURES
Again, the hope of the gospel is being bound by the dead-grave clothes of human possibilities. If history is supreme over God’s Word, then its sure promises are dissolved in ambiguity. But if God’s Word is sovereign over history, then he speaks and it is done, he commands and it stands fast, and he will watch over his word to perform it. Then through the comfort of the Scriptures we have hope, for the zeal of the Lord of hosts will make all his promises yes and amen in Christ Jesus.
We possess the living and the written Word on the same terms. Not only does Christ testify to the Scriptures and the Scriptures to Christ, but Christ shaped the Scriptures by his Spirit, and the Scriptures shaped Christ in the obedience of his Sonship.
We dare not weaken the Word of God’s promise in order to exalt the Word of his presence in Christ. To the contrary, it is by the wisdom of the richly indwelling Word of Christ that we press on to know Christ in us, the hope of glory. Paul speaks so much of the presence of Christ and how union with Christ draws this grand doctrine from the realization of the history of redemption in Christ. He describes the mystery of Christ confirming the promises given to the fathers by becoming the hope of the Gentiles (Rom. 15:12). We must heed Paul’s full expression: “the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you the hope of glory” (Col. 1:27). Paul thinks of the dwelling of Christ in the Gentile church as the great fulfillment of redemptive history. Here is hope of glory—God’s great plan has moved to its climactic phase. The praises of the Gentiles are a pledge of the consummation of redemption. The nations are delivered from darkness to become partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light. Even the contributions of the Gentiles for the poor saints of Jerusalem become a sign of the ministering of the wealth of the nations in the fulfillment of the promises of God.
CHRIST THE PLEDGE
Yet hope holds more than such pledges of the promise. Christ himself is the pledge to every believer. The Holy Spirit is the earnest, the down payment of the full redemption of the new creation; and by the Spirit, Christ himself is present in glory transforming the individual believer and his body, the church, into his own image from glory to glory.
The hope of the Christian is a rainbow of assurance that stretches from Christ’s presence in glory through the Spirit to his coming in glory at the end of the age. Not only does the Christian have his hope in Christ sealed because Christ stands for him in his heavenly mediation; that hope is sure because Christ abides in him witnessing by the Holy Spirit that he is a son of God and an heir of glory. What is the calling of this hope? Is this the “theology of glory” so often deplored? Does it spawn pharisaical complacency? Is it the ultimate caricature of all status-seeking on the part of those who imagine they have arrived spiritually?
The hope of the Christian is a rainbow of assurance that stretches from Christ’s presence in glory through the Spirit to his coming in glory at the end of the age.
All these objections seem quite valid from without. The gospel of grace is an open invitation to license until one has tasted grace! The gospel of hope is constantly joined in the New Testament with the experience of suffering. Tribulation works steadfastness; steadfastness, approvedness; and approvedness, hope. Hope is the product of the experience of faith. Through fires of testing hope becomes pure and strong. The Christian not only rejoices in hope, he sorrows in hope and suffers in hope.
Out of the fullness of hope in Christ the ministry of hope is exercised. Paul ministered in hope, laboring that the offering up of the Gentiles might be a sacrifice well-pleasing to God. His prayer was, “Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope, in the power of the Holy Spirit” (Rom. 15:13).
THE DYNAMIC OF HOPE
It is to train men in this ministry of hope that Westminster has been raised up. By the dynamic of the hope of the gospel, the dilemma of contemporary theology and theological education is resolved. We are not forced to choose between secular relevance and Scriptural revelation. To blind unbelief, the gospel seems unreal because it promises too much, fantastically too much—but its promises could not be more relevant to the needs of a dying sinner. Perhaps the gulf has widened between the image that man has of himself and the picture that God reveals of him. Yet God is still true though every man is a liar.
Before the guilty rebel can hope in Christ, his false hope in his own idol must be thrown down like Dagon before the ark. The ministry of hope wields the axe of judgment before it kindles the sacrifice of praise. Hope is not served by removing the offense of the gospel. To proclaim “Peace” when judgment is coming is to deceive and destroy. The true prophet is known by his cry, “No peace to the wicked.”
Every secular hope builds a city that cannot abide, a kingdom that will be shaken, a house that will fall in the flood of judgment. Hope in Christ cannot rest in chariots and horses. It dare not usher in his kingdom by using the sword in his name. Hope walks the way of the cross, the path of service and suffering, not of political dominion and compulsion.
Those who do not believe that Christ will come in power and judgment will sooner or later seek to wield power and execute judgment. But those who remember the purpose of the restraint of wrath in Christ’s long-suffering will plead with men to repent. The mission of the church is fulfilled in hope. The false hopes of secularism and universalism and the foolish hopes of Arminianism will betray the ministry of the gospel. Only hope in God’s sovereign grace—a sure hope that does not mislead and cannot be frustrated—only that hope will sustain the ministry of evangelism. When Christ would encourage his apostle at Corinth, he said in a vision, “Be not afraid, but speak...for I have many people in this city” (Acts 18:10). Just because our hope is in the Lord, the high mystery of his electing love is the anchor of hope.
Just because our hope is in the Lord, the high mystery of his electing love is the anchor of hope.
Hope in the Lord drives men by Christ’s love to preach the gospel through the highways and hedges, in season and out of season. Calvinism can be dried like a pressed flower to keep the color of the divine glory in two-dimensional death. But Christ the hope of glory is the prince of salvation who will thrust forth laborers into his harvest. Glorying in hope is the dynamic of revival whenever missionary zeal grows cold.
FRUITS OF HOPE
The ministry of hope that evangelizes the world also edifies the church. Abounding hope purifies and unites the people of God. Everyone who has his hope set on Christ purifies himself even as he is pure. There is a holy intolerance of unfaithfulness to Christ that is kindled by hope. Lost hope brought Judas to betrayal and renewed hope comes as the breath of the Spirit to the Christian who is winded in the race. To despair of Christ’s praise for his church is sin. The Christian who convinces himself that tolerance of false teaching is ecclesiastical realism, sins not only against truth but against hope. The zeal of true hope is jealous of Paul to present the church as a pure virgin to Christ.
The Christian who convinces himself that tolerance of false teaching is ecclesiastical realism, sins not only against truth but against hope.
Hope also holds fast to the unity of the church of Christ. We are called in one hope of our calling and press to that hope “with every grace endued.” No Christian in this life has yet become what he is called to be, and the church, too, is still under construction. It must be seen in its design, not in its incompleteness. Yet the fullness
of Christ indwells the church and to that fullness the church shall come.
This keynote of hope must shape the training of the ministry. Only in hope can Westminster or any of its graduates stand fast. The Christian apologetic is one
of hope. We dare not scale down the gospel until it is believable to unbelief. Neither dare we flee with the gospel to a noumenal never-never land that is safe from scientific scrutiny. We must be strong and of good courage and utter God’s name over his whole creation. Hope knows that the victory is won, that faith shall be sight, that Christ is now seated at the right hand of power.
HOPE'S PERSPECTIVE
But steadfast hope must also be an abounding hope. Not only apologetics, but each discipline of seminary study has a fresh dynamic in the perspective of hope. Biblical studies gain in value, for the sure Word of God becomes infinitely precious. Further, hope grasps the structure of Scripture as the word of promise and unfolds the beauty of the history of redemption and of its realization in Jesus Christ. Systematic theology has always traced the history of salvation, but deepened by hope, systematics can address our age with fresh understanding of the fullness of scriptural doctrine. What power lies in the biblical development of the calling of God, to take one example.
Because hope is the reach of faith through time, it must take history seriously not only in the Bible but in the church. Experience works hope in the life of the individual, and the perspective of hope cannot ignore the experience of all the people of God through the ages, or the growth of their understanding of God’s word.
Practical theology, too, has much to gain from the theology of hope. We have seen that the dynamic of hope drives the church to mission, to edification, to worship. The preaching of the church offers the promise of hope; its order applies the discipline of hope. The ministry of mercy is a sign of hope, presenting in deeds of compassion a token of the relief of all misery and the restoration of all blessings that will come with the new heavens and the new earth.
The realism of hope takes a strong interest in the life of man and the history of the world. The pilgrim to the city of God does not pass by on the other side when he sees a wounded man on the road to Jericho. The cheerfulness of hope ministers to men in their need.
HOPE POSSESSED
You will observe that the biblical doctrine of hope furnishes an approach that is superficially similar to many of the trends of our time yet really set against them. The emphasis on history, on biblical theology, on involvement with contemporary affairs, these all have new meaning when Christian training is stamped with hope. Yet all hangs upon that living hope that centers upon the living God.
Further, and this may be most important of all, the perspective of hope joins the believer with the object of his faith. Neither the ministry of the word nor training for it may abstract doctrine from life. On the one hand, the doctrines of the application of redemption require much further study. What riches there are to be possessed in understanding the doctrines of union with Christ and of the work of the Holy Spirit! How strange it is that the high mysteries of God’s sovereignty have been much discussed, but that so little theological analysis has been given to the subject of prayer.
On the other hand, the training of men as ministers of hope must not only instruct them in the doctrines of that hope; it must encourage them to possess it. Just because Christ in you is the hope of glory, training for the ministry of hope must be training in maturity in Christ. The charter of the seminary wisely defines a grand design, to “unite in those who shall sustain the ministerial office, religion and literature; that piety of the heart which is the fruit only of the renewing and sanctifying grace of God, with solid learning.”
The rolling wooded campus of our catalogue is a hilltop where we watch for the dawn of his appearing.
A ministry of hope can be raised up in no other way, for learning is not the right hand and piety the left hand of the gospel minister. Rather learning and piety alike are the reasonable service of the renewed mind proving what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God. Jesus Christ is the hope we minister and our hope as we minister. Our one hope is in one Lord who has come and is coming. The rolling wooded campus of our catalogue is a hilltop where we watch for the dawn of his appearing.
Westminster’s hope is not a new faculty, a new student body, and certainly not a new administration. Our hope is the presence of the Savior’s glory.
“Therefore, seeing we have this ministry, even as we obtained mercy, we faint not. . . For we preach not ourselves but Christ Jesus as Lord and ourselves your servants for Jesus’s sake. Seeing it is God who said, ‘Light shall shine out of darkness,’ who shined in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:1, 5, 6).
Mr. Chairman, in pursuance of the action of the Board of Trustees on May 17, 1966, I present to you Edmund Prosper Clowney, native of Philadelphia, Bachelor of Arts of Wheaton College, Bachelor of Theology of Westminster Theological Seminary, Master of Sacred Theology of Yale University, Doctor of Divinity of Wheaton College, student of theology and of mankind for many years, pastor in Connecticut, Illinois and New Jersey, sometime editor of the Presbyterian Guardian,Lecturer and Instructor, Assistant Professor, Associate Professor and Professor of Practical Theology in this institution, long celebrated as facile with both the artist’s brush and the writer’s pen, master of the columnist’s scalpel, author of Eutychus (and his pin), Preaching and Biblical Theology, Called to the Ministry, Another Foundation, administrative and educational pioneer par excellence, for induction as the first President of Westminster Theological Seminary.