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Jul 05
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Spiritual Hardening: A Correction

By | Cleric Listens | No Comments

Spiritual hardening is perhaps the most misunderstood and consequently abused concept in soteriology, perhaps even in all of theology. The common understanding is that God hardens people arbitrarily so that they can’t understand and submit to the Gospel of redemption. The most popular case of hardening is probably that of Pharaoh beginning in Exodus chapter 7, where it says “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and … he will not listen to you.” And later we read, “Yet pharaoh’s heart became hard and he would not listen to them, just as the Lord had said.” Paul cites this affair in his letter to the Romans, chapter 9, where we read,

 

“It does not, therefore, depend on man’s desire or effort, but on God’s mercy. For the Scripture says to Pharaoh: ‘I raised you up for the very purpose, that I might display my power in you and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.’ Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden.”

 

Paul goes on to point out that those who are hardened are incapable of resisting this process and therefore become objects of his wrath. These passages and others have led many, notably John Calvin, to conclude that God picks some for salvation and others for hardening and reprobation on an arbitrary basis. Thus the genesis of the concept of double predestination and the conclusions of the Synod of Dort in 1618-19. Ever since that Synod, virtually all of Protestant Christianity has accepted this notion that the minority are destined for eternal bliss, while the majority are consigned to eternal punishment; the former to show God’s mercy, and the latter to show his justice. The only dissenting voice has been that of Jacobus Arminius and his followers, the Remonstrants, who were declared heterodox at Dort and either murdered, imprisoned, or extradited. As they say, winners write history.

 

To figure out if this is the true meaning of hardening, it is helpful to go back to how God redeems a sinful humanity in the first place, thereby placing hardening in its proper context. My contention is that to have a coherent, Biblical soteriology, you must go back before any ecumenical council and read the Scriptures anew. Paul makes a distinction, little noticed, between justification and salvation. He does this twice in Romans, once in chapter 5 and again in chapter 10. This distinction is assumed in all his other writings, but these are the two most explicit discussions. What he says is that we are justified or forgiven on the basis of Christ’s sacrificial death, and we are saved by his on-going life conferred in the person of the Spirit. Justification, therefore, is universal; he died “for the sins of the whole world.” Efforts on the part of those in the Reformed tradition to limit justification, eg/ “limited atonement,” are popular but nevertheless unscriptural. The blood of Christ knows no limits on its efficacy; there is nothing we can do by way of work or sacrament to help the Cross. As of Good Friday, all are forgiven; placed “in Christ” in a legal or forensic sense. Note that in the two NT visions of the last judgment, people are not confronted with the sins they committed, but rather examined on the basis of the good they either did or did not do. This is not to suggest anything along the lines of a crude universalism. There are two halves of redemption, and being “in Christ” is only half. There’s also the other half, “Christ in us,” that is related by Paul to salvation. This is the life he talks about, and having our names in the “book of life” that Revelation alludes to. There are two judgments, one on sin on Good Friday, and another on fruitlessness at the last judgment. Thus we see there are two problems we have, guilt and powerlessness, two solutions, Christ’s death and on-going life, two titles for Jesus, Savior and Lord, two historic events affording us redemption, Good Friday and Pentecost, and even two sacraments, baptism and Eucharist. Leaving the last point aside, we should see that it’s entirely possible, in fact common, for people to be justified but subject to judgment and loss on the last day because they were unwilling to play host to the Holy Spirit and thereby bear fruit pleasing to God. The parables of Jesus often mention that it is possible to be invited to the wedding feast or whatever, and still be found lacking and failing to please God.

 

So if you can accept this scenario, just what is God looking for by way of response to his gracious forgiveness procured for us by Jesus? Clearly he’s not looking for works; this is the whole argument of Paul’s letter to the Romans. The Law cannot confer righteousness, this has to come “from God.” So if not works, what then? If blaspheming the Holy Spirit is the only unforgivable sin, what is its opposite? The testimony of all of Scripture, especially in the NT, is that we are to recognize God’s authority to exercise control over our lives, cede our will, and become obedient to the will of Jesus, who is not only Savior but also Lord. We are asked not to do something positive, but to stop doing something: rebelling and going our own way. A good metaphor from the Bible is the story of King David in 2 Samuel 23, where he longed for a drink from the well near the gate of Bethlehem, controlled at that time by the Philistines. When the three mighty men broke through the lines, got the water, and presented it to David, he refused to drink it. “Far be it from me, O Lord, to do this! … Is it not the blood of the men who went at the risk of their lives?” David had the right to drink the water, but recognizing that procuring it involved great sacrifice, he didn’t take advantage of his right. So too, all of us who are bequeathed a free will are nevertheless presented with the blood of Christ, by which he earned the right to be our Lord, and are asked, in effect, “Will you exercise your right to be your own Lord, or will you recognize the sacrifice of Jesus, and cede your will to him, and pour your will out on the ground as David did the water of Bethlehem?”

 

Viewed in the context of this rational, orthodox and thoroughly Biblical plan of redemption, where does hardening fit in? Is hardening a cause or a consequence of “blaspheming the Holy Spirit,” the only unforgivable sin? Indeed, according to Arminius, it is a consequence, not a cause. In his work A Brief Analysis of the Ninth Chapter of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, he points out that that Jacob and Esau are types, those that seek justification either by faith or by works, respectively.[1] And God hardens those types or groups of people who persist in sin.[2] Returning to our model of redemption mentioned above, this makes perfect sense. To persist in sin after God’s invitation to repentance is to “blaspheme the Holy Spirit,” to so provoke him to anger that he withdraws from the heart of the obdurate, leaving them, in Calvin’s words, “totally depraved.” We see, therefore, that hardening is not a positive imposition on the sinner, but rather the negative withdrawal of the Holy Spirit, our only source of power for doing good. Grace must be defined as nothing less than this “Christ in us,” God’s willingness to dwell in us making us once again spiritual creatures, and capable of something besides works of sin.

 

Armed with this insight, let us return to Romans 9. Ishmael, Esau and Pharaoh are therefore types. As Paul says in Galatians 4, “These things may be taken figuratively”.[3] Ishmael represents those who use human ingenuity to “help” God, ignoring his promises and substituting a short cut of their own device. Esau represents those who favor their physical appetites, literally, over God-ordained responsibility, while Pharaoh represents those who worship amiss. In his case, he thought himself a god and said, “Who is the Lord that I should obey him?”[4] Collectively they represent the avenues of temptation faced by all people, whether in mind, body or spirit. We see that God was hardening these men, not arbitrarily, but because they had already evinced attitudes and behavior that God had, in his eternal counsels, already deemed worthy of rejection and reprobation. This is the true meaning of choice and election. God has determined that he chooses or elects to salvation those who love him and please him rather than those who hate him and disobey him. Again, types or classes of people, not individuals. And they are hardened after the fact, not before.

 

These insights do much to restore the reputation of God, long sullied by the double predestination of Reformed theology. Predestination is salvaged as well, for it is not the arbitrary edict that some individuals go to heaven and some to hell, but is in keeping with the entire verse in Romans 8, “he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son,”[5] Predestination has nothing to do with God’s decree regarding salvation, but rather his decree that those who serve Jesus has Lord should receive sanctifying grace in this life to make them resemble Him more closely.

 

Calvin was right about many things, but not all things. He was right that apart from the ministry of the Holy Spirit, we cannot do anything right. We can know it, as Paul points out in Romans 7, we just can’t do it. So what becomes paramount to all people is this one thing: are we willing to receive both justification and power vicariously from Jesus Christ, or are we not? If we are, we will be fitting hosts to the ministry of the Holy Spirit, and we will love other Christians and bear fruit for eternity. If we are not, we will so grieve the Holy Spirit that he will be able to do nothing through us and will depart. This is the meaning of hardening: whatever grace we might be endowed with at birth, a conscience to know what is right, will be gradually withdrawn if we ignore the commands Jesus issues as Lord. That conscience will eventually be “seared as with a hot iron,” and we will lose the ability to know right from wrong, let alone choose aright.[6] The process of hardening is thus slow but inexorable to the spiritual obtuse. It is done by God for two reasons: first to show the impenitent sinner what life will be like without God, both in this life and the life to come. Secondly, to show the watching world what life looks like without the aid and blessing of the Holy Spirit. Believers and unbelievers alike should look with horror upon the life lived without grace. God always redeems something from his children, even if it is only that they serve as a bad example to others.

[1] The Works of James Arminius. Volume 3, pp 493,4.

[2] Ibid, p. 506.

[3] Verse 24.

[4] Exodus 5:2.

[5] Verse 29.

[6] 1 Timothy 4:2.

Nov 19
0

Preface to the Definitive Roguecleric Commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Romans

By | Cleric Listens | No Comments

 

This commentary is neither comprehensive nor exhaustive. It is meant to serve as an emendation and corrective to what others have written. I am a great admirer of D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones’s six-volume commentary on Romans 3:20 to 8:39, the portion of the letter he felt was paramount. He left chapter 9 untouched, however, which is a shame. Martin Luther made extensive reference to Romans, saying in his preface to his German translation, “This letter is truly the most important piece in the New Testament. It is purest Gospel. It is well worth a Christian’s while not only to memorize it word for word but also to occupy himself with it daily, as though it were the daily bread of the soul. It is impossible to read or to meditate on this letter too much or too well.”[1] He traces his theological conversion to contemplating verse 1:17, and John Wesley came to personal faith while listening to a sermon that quoted Luther’s preface.

Romans is Paul’s most self-consciously theological letter. Typically, his letters focused on pastoral issues generated by the struggle of living a Christian life in a pagan world. Romans has its share of pastoral admonitions, but from the outset, Paul is looking for opportunities to depart from the immediate to focus instead on the eternal, to use the pastoral as a springboard to address the theological. Once the theological foundation has been laid, he can return to the pastoral. For him, doctrine leads to understanding, understanding leads to hope, and hope leads to godliness.

Paul’s theological concerns revolved around what he calls the mystery of God, namely, how a humanity divided into Jew and Gentile could be reconciled to God and each other that they all might become one. His audience in Rome is predominately Gentile but nevertheless includes prominent Jewish members. Paul is therefore faced with the challenge of introducing concepts that may be novel to one group or the other, without losing touch with either one. Even though Paul was eminently successful in achieving balance in his presentation, we in the West have been relatively unsophisticated in our interpretation of the text.

I maintain that all our theological conundrums are caused by reading a Jewish or Eastern document, the Bible, with a Western or Greek mindset. While this is a problem when reading the rest of the Bible, it becomes critical when reading Romans. It’s not that Paul showed his own cultural limitations by thinking and writing like a Jew, but that as a Jew he was in possession of concepts and insights that cannot be translated into an Aristotelian idiom without alteration and loss. As will become clear in my exposition, there is a reason God chose one people as his medium of specific revelation: a long history of interaction with God has given the Jews a unique spiritual and intellectual heritage. We have to read and think like them if we want to understand that revelation. We in the West have let our cultural and intellectual prejudices obscure the fine balance Paul worked so hard to achieve.

Let me be specific. To really understand Paul, you have to remember that as a Pharisee, he used the rhetorical tools most favored by rabbis in their scholarship and disputations. Chief among these tools is that of symmetrical parallelism, or chiastic structure. Instead of a linear sequence of syllogistic deduction, as Greeks tended to favor, the Hebrew rabbis, Jesus included, would construct an argument that makes a series of points, each following from that which precedes it. They reach a conclusion, and then the argument is repeated in reverse order until they return to the starting point. Thus, the points in a seven-step chiasmus could be viewed as ABCDCBA. Each intermediate step shares a similar thought with its corresponding step. Sometimes these thoughts are simple repetition, sometimes the second is a corollary to the first. This device can be found in a single sentence, a paragraph, or even the whole document. It was used to show the inherent logic of the statements being made; to provide clarity in a written medium that lacked spaces, sentences, paragraphs, capitalization, punctuation, or other delimiters; and to aid in memorization where written documents were the exception rather than the rule. As we will see, to read a chiasmus as linear thought can lead to confusion and genuine suffering.

Another tendency is for Paul to express himself in the form of a diatribe—that is, an informal rhetorical dialogue with imaginary opponents. Sometimes he labels his antagonists, “Now you, if you call yourself a Jew,” but he’s usually content to refer to his audience in abstract terms that render his attacks less threatening. The translation introduces labels that help clarify this back and forth repartee: Paul, Jewish Teacher, or Teacher of Law. Further, Paul employs litotes, where he uses double negatives to assert a positive.

Finally, in addition to what Paul did, we should pay attention to what he did not do. He avoids terms that would tend to defeat his intention of bringing reconciliation to a mixed congregation of both Jew and Gentile. For instance, he avoids the term church in the opening address. Nor does he speak of Christians, for he doesn’t want to act as though Judaism is totally bankrupt and being replaced. Further, he avoids speaking of synagogues because they have historically been the province of Jews alone. He knows God is making a new humanity in Christ, and he avoids using terms that hearken back to old distinctions. Instead, he speaks of family and the unity implied by that concept. His overarching theme is that we can all join God’s family, where he’s a benevolent father who has met all our needs in the person of his son. He speaks variously to Gentiles, then Jews, then back again repeatedly. He’s always mindful of the criticisms his ideas will arouse, and he’s careful to deal with each in its turn. Every once in a while, he’s able to drop his defenses and sing a hymn of praise to God without reservation.

In order to display the rhetorical structure of this epistle, I’ve used Robert Bailey’s translation of the Greek text,[2] the Novum Testamentum Graece.[3] The Scripture is laid out in cascading format to illustrate the chiastic form as perceived by its modern translator, in an attempt to reconstruct what Paul originally intended. Words in italics indicate text not found in the Greek source. The Bailey translation precedes my comments. Robert Bailey and I both provide footnotes for further clarification and commentary—his are primarily concerned with rhetorical structure, mine with exegetical interpretation. His notes appear immediately following the scripture excerpts, while mine follow normal footnote patterns. My footnotes are intended to complement his. The New International Version of the Bible is by necessity a paraphrase, edited in order to read better and offer more clarity. When it provides something the Bailey text misses, I have added it with notation. In addition to using italics for emphasis, words in my comments that are italicized are keywords pulled from the scripture passage. Words that are capitalized in the body of a sentence should be understood as referring to cardinal concepts or typologies.

The overall structure of the letter forms a chiasmus along the lines of ABCBA:

 

[EXT]A) 1:1–7

  1. B) 1:8–17
  2. C) 1:18—15:13
  3. B) 15:14—16:23
  4. A) 16:25–27[/EXT]

 

Thus, A and B consist of greetings, housekeeping preliminaries, and buttoning up. The main body of the text, C, consists of insights into God’s plan of redemption that has revolutionized the standing of all humanity, Jew and Gentile, in his eyes. This main body, which is extensive, can be further subdivided as a chiasmus along the lines of ABCCBA:

 

[EXT]A) 1:18—3:20: Jews and Gentiles have both dishonored God.

  1. B) 3:21—4:25: Jews and Gentiles alike can receive righteousness from God.*
  2. C) 5:1—8:39: All are justified, those who live by the Spirit are also saved.*
  3. C) 9:1—11:36: God’s plan of redemption as experienced by Jew and Gentile.*
  4. B) 12:1—13:14: Life in the Spirit within the church and society.*
  5. A) 14:1—15:13: Potential cultural conflicts between Jew and Gentile.*[/EXT]

 

* I have renamed all sections except the first and have included these titles in the chapter introductions. Bailey’s original titles are included with the text of the scripture.

It is interesting to note that the major exegetical blunders that have been committed by interpreters of this epistle have occurred in the two sections of conclusion labeled C above. In the case of Romans 5, we have no commentators to my knowledge who make a distinction between justification and salvation, as Paul does. Like Calvin, they assume this is simple parallelism or repetition, not a profound distinction that clarifies the rest of Christian soteriology.[4] In 8:29–30, my exposition shows that a linear interpretation leads to misunderstanding, while a chiastic interpretation leads to clarity and logic. In this way I’m able to offer a reconstituted Ordo Salutis, a genuine first. In the case of Romans 9, most commentators, including Calvin and Luther, adopt a literalistic approach as opposed to metaphorical. The result, especially for Calvin, is an atrocious image of God who hates his creation.[5] Time and again in these critical sections, chiastic structures play an important part in conveying the sense of Paul’s argument. These and other themes are repeated whenever warranted by the text.

Chapter designations in the Bible are arbitrary at best, but they serve to divide the text and commentary into manageable portions. For ease, my chapters correspond with the text of Romans. Because theologians do not always use words in the same way, I’ve appended a Glossary of Soteriological Terms at the end of the commentary to document how I understand these words. I believe I am using them in the sense Paul was. Let us keep Paul’s goals and methods in mind as we read the text and confront those passages that have led to the doctrinal and denominational confusion that characterizes the Christian church today. We should read Paul according to his methods and intentions, not our own.

[1] Luther, Preface, lines 1–2.

[2] Bailey, “God’s Good News to the Romans.”

[3] Nestle et al., Novum Testamentum Graece.

[4] Will Durant says of Calvin, “ . . . we shall always find it hard to love the man who darkened the human soul with the most absurd and blasphemous conception of God in all the long and honored history of nonsense.” Durant, The Reformation, 490.

[5] Frederick Calder writes of Calvin’s view of God: “ . . . as a being of whom, in point of malignity, the prince of the lower regions is but a faint image and expression. . . . far more odious than anything ever dictated by the prophet of Mecca.” Calder, Memoirs of Simon Episcopius, 267–68.

 

 

To order this commentary, please use this link: https://www.amazon.com/Romans-Definitive-RogueCleric-Commentary-Rhetoric/dp/172527394

 

Nov 19
0

The Ordo Salutis: Corrected

By | Cleric Listens | No Comments

The ordo salutis, or order of salvation, has been a legitimate theological pursuit from the earliest times. The term was apparently first used by Lutheran scholars in the 1720’s, and it refers to the chronology of God’s plan of redemption. Though it has been most thoroughly developed in the Protestant church to fuel the Calvinist/Arminian controversy, it is a useful framework for discussing soteriology in any branch of the Christian tree. Based largely on Paul’s thinking as revealed in Romans 8:28-30, one would think that these three verses would be readily parsed and clearly understood. Instead, the opposite has happened. What appears to be a simple chronology of steps in how an individual is redeemed, turns out to be anything but simple. Taken as a linear sequence, it defies logic and Scripture; as evinced by the on-going controversy it engenders.

 

It is the intent and purpose of this paper to show that a Greek or Western exegesis of these verses which understands them to be a linear, temporal sequence is in fact in error and untrue to the intent of the author who was himself a Jewish or Eastern scholar. Versed in the rhetorical tools of the Pharisees, Paul used their structures and techniques not to obscure, but to elucidate. Without an appreciation of what those structures and techniques are, it is impossible to understand Paul’s meaning. By recovering that appreciation, Paul’s intent becomes clear, as does the subject of this paper, the ordo salutis.

 

Chief among Paul’s rhetorical tools was the use of symmetrical parallelism, or chiastic structure. Chiastic structures involve the development of a logical argument along the lines of an X, or chi, where a logical assertion is made, which leads to at least one and perhaps more assertions, eventually evolving into a conclusion in the interior of the structure. Then, the logical argument is repeated in reverse order, wherein each element leading to the conclusion is either repeated or complemented somehow, until the first element is matched. Thus, a seven element chiasmus would be represented as A,B,C,D,C,B,A, where D is the conclusion. Chiasma can be found within a sentence, paragraph, or an entire document; often enfolded within one another. They were used by Hebrew scholars for any number of reasons, including the desire to show the inherent logic of the statements being made, to provide clarity in a written medium that lacked spaces, sentences, paragraphs, capitalization, punctuation, or other delimiters, and to aid in memorization where written documents were the exception rather than the norm. Our appreciation for symmetric parallelism is relatively recent, dating from the late 18th century. Even then, most scholars were content to view rhetorical structures as stylistic phenomena, without particular regard for the ultimate impact they would have on the arguments proffered by the authors. This focus has changed only recently, mostly in the latter half of the 20th century. As a result, culturally sophisticated exegesis has been lacking with regard to the soteriological arguments that have swirled around the ordo salutis. I hope to show that this application is long overdue, and can provide the clarification that Protestant, and indeed all Christian theology, desperately needs.

 

Application: Romans 8:28-30

 

Verse 28 is not part of a chiasmus, but instead is an introduction and qualifier for the chiasmus that is to follow. Specifically, Paul is setting forth the group or population of those to whom God issues calls. Is salvation universal? Of course not. The testimony of all of Scripture is that God’s plan of redemption is universal in concept and potential, but in reality is somehow limited in efficacy. Calvin and his sycophants have ascribed this reality to the belief that God has chosen some for salvation and the balance for reprobation on an arbitrary basis, by somehow limiting the atoning power of Christ’s blood on the Cross. Jacobus Arminius, among others, has countered that it is through God’s omniscient foreknowledge of our response to the Gospel that grace is limited to some and not all. I contend that although Arminius’ vision of God is less odious than that of Calvin, it, too, misses the point of this verse. What Paul is saying is that God redeems a select group, to be sure, but it is a group that self-selects according to one criterion: they love God. This accords readily with the balance of Scripture, that says that God has chosen to redeem those of a “noble and good heart,” who “obey,” and put God’s Word “into practice.” There is nothing capricious about membership in this group.

 

The corollary to loving God is to be called by Him according to his purpose. The temptation here is to see calling as the first step in a logical, temporal sequence in the ordo salutis. I contend that this is premature, and that the second half of this verse is merely stating that those who love God qualify for God’s plan of redemption, which results, as far as the experience of Paul’s readers is concerned, with experiencing a call from God. More anon.

 

Now for the fun. I would represent verses 29 and 30 in the following form:

 

A – “For those God foreknew…”

 

B – “he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those he predestined…”

 

C – “he also called; those he called,…”

 

B – “he also justified; those he justified…”

 

A – “he also glorified.”

 

Thus, we see that A represents actions of the Father, who foreknows or elects a certain kind of person, somebody who loves and obeys him and who puts his Word into practice. This kind of favored individual is ultimately rewarded with glory when they complete their service on earth, a “good and faithful servant.” These are monergistic actions that reflect God’s eternal counsels outside of time.

 

B represents actions of the Son, or developments that involve the instrumentality of Jesus the Christ, and though they, too, are monergistic, they differ from the A themes in that they are subject to historic witness. Note that predestination, a term that occurs six times in the Greek, has no particular soteriological overtones. The other two places in Scripture where it refers to God’s plan of redemption are found in Ephesians, where Paul uses it to encourage his Gentile readers that God, in his eternal counsels, has decided that Gentiles as well as Jews are eligible for redemption. It cannot be interpreted as referring to some sort of cosmic roulette whereby some are consigned to salvation and others to preteration. It simply means something is already decided; it is part of a larger scheme that is inviolate. Here it refers not to the accepted late medieval usage that God predestines some to heaven and some to hell, but rather the determination that those who are elect, on account of their response to the Gospel, will in fact be sanctified or improved upon in an objective way on account of their association with Christ in the person of the Spirit. God is not interested in mere acquittal for a rebellious humanity, but in an actual, observable reformation of manners. Although we necessarily filter and diminish the person of Jesus who dwells in the heart of a Christian, we nevertheless present a more mature, holy and integrated persona than we would have prior to our conversion. It is the Father’s intention that we join a new family, a family wherein he’s the Father and Jesus is the chief sibling, and that we become his agents for the spread of the Gospel and the ultimate redemption of all humanity.

 

The great imperative suggested by the B theme in this chiasmus is twofold. Mentioned first is the determination of the Father that Christ be found in us; that we play host to Jesus that he might bear fruit through us. Although this violates the logical priority of any ordo salutis in chronological terms, it is mentioned first by Paul because it is contingent. There is an element of synergy here because although our conformance to Christ is a predetermined desire of the Father, it is nevertheless particular because it involves our cooperation. It is not that we must perform a work, that we actively do something of our own engineering, but that we cease to do something, and that is to maintain our rights, recommit Adam’s sin of self determination, and thereby grieve the Holy Spirit so that he cannot work through us. The sacrament associated with the necessity that Christ be found in us is the Eucharist, wherein the believer kneels, and by taking the elements affirms that just as the body requires physical nourishment from without on a regular basis, the life of Jesus in his heart also requires regular nourishment from Him. Here is further proof that a sequential interpretation of these verses serves Paul’s purposes poorly.

 

The first action Jesus performs for us from a theological perspective is also a B component, but it is presented second because it is a universal fait accompli for all humanity. That is, we are justified, one and all, by Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross. In contravention of accepted Reformed soteriology, there is no limit to the power of the blood of Christ. As we read in the parable of the wedding feast, God invites all to the feast, good and bad. The two accounts of a last judgment in Matthew 25 and Revelation 20 do not mention sin as a basis for disqualification. Rather, what is mentioned in these two accounts is not bad things done, but rather good things not done. In the former account it is largesse withheld from fellow humans, specifically Christians, and in the latter it’s the absence of the life of Christ in us. Just as Christ is expected to be in us, we are all unilaterally placed in Christ from a forensic, legal perspective as of Good Friday. The sacrament tasked with communicating this reality is Baptism, and an associated Confirmation, wherein we both celebrate our prior and efficient justification, and also identify with Christ’s death to self-will that we subsequently allow. The B component of this chiasmus can be summarized as the sovereign determination that there be a complete interpenetration between the believer and Christ, all made possible through Good Friday and Pentecost. What counts in Paul’s mind is not which of the two components is presented first, but rather that these are the historical manifestations of prior determinations of the Father, and as such are trustworthy.

 

The conclusion to the chiasmus is found in the concept of calling. As Paul said in verse 28, God calls those who love him and who therefore cooperate with His plan of redemption. The Romans were apparently beset with troubles and persecutions, as Paul goes on to acknowledge. Paul places these burdens in context by saying that they are the norm for any person who aspires to follow God in a lost, pagan world. This call, to complete the picture, is the province and action of the Holy Spirit. As Oswald Chambers points out, “The Holy Spirit is the Deity in proceeding power Who applies the Atonement to our experience.” This call can be answered, or it can be resisted. Thus, the logical conclusion to Paul’s picture of God’s plan of redemption is that there are monergistic actions outside of time, A, that are the Father’s province alone. Then there are monergistic actions, B, that culminate in events in time and history, one of which is independent of human response, and one of which is not. C represents God’s decision to involve his human children, and it therefore becomes contingent in some way. For the plan to work there must be a synergy between God’s plan and our heart. Our action is not positive that it be regarded as a Pelagian work, but rather a negation, the cessation of a work: the pernicious work of rebellion initiated by Adam.

 

A reconstituted ordo salutis from God’s perspective would be as follows:

 

1) God elects those who love him, as a class, to participate in his plan of redemption.

2) God determines that those who love him will join a new family as his children, and predestines that they will be conformed to the likeness of his Son.

3) God ordains that Jesus should die on a Cross in place of a sinful humanity and thereby justifies all. God raises his Son from the dead to validate our justification.

4) Jesus ascends to his former glory as previewed in the Transfiguration.

5) As of Pentecost the Spirit of Jesus is poured out on all who are willing to accept righteousness and power vicariously from Jesus.

6) God commands his children to preach the Gospel to all the world that all might perceive a call to membership in God’s family.

7) God confers glory on all those who bear fruit.

 

All these are monergistic decisions that God has made from eternity, God being something of a supralapsarian, knowing that a free humanity would fall and require redemption. Four of them have historical referents, events witnessed in time and place, though proceeding from God’s eternal counsels, and having efficacy not limited to time or place.

 

A reconstituted ordo from man’s perspective would be as follows:

 

1) We hear the Gospel preached and our conscience bears witness to its truth. It is attractive because it posits monergistic actions that bring assurance. We learn that God is both rational and kind in terms of whom he favors and rewards. We find that in Christ our two major problems are solved, those of guilt and powerlessness. We realize that a response to these unilateral actions on God’s part is warranted. They constitute a personal call.

2) Such a gracious Savior has the right to be Lord; we cede our will to him.

3) The Father confers the Holy Spirit on all that are disposed to receive both righteousness and power vicariously from Christ. Sanctification begins, we are conformed more and more to the likeness of Christ.

4) Empowered by the Holy Spirit, we bear fruit in other lives.

5) At death, we receive glory and honor as a good and faithful servants.

 

Conclusions

 

The advantages of an exegesis of Romans 28-30 that takes Hebrew rhetorical structures into account are many. First of all, it delivers us from the illogic of a sequential model that makes no sense. To place justification, which is universal, near the end of a temporal sequence, is to require the development of fantastic concepts such as limited atonement. To interpret calling, the end of the process from the perspective of human agency as first, and make it a synonym for election, is to deny humans the role in their redemption that God has graciously offered. Foreknowledge, which is in fact a synonym for election, no longer has to refer to the arbitrary selection of some individuals over others, but rather refers to God’s legitimate and fair decision to seek collaboration and fellowship with people who love him rather than those who hate him. Predestination is liberated from reference to foreknowledge, election, calling or choice, to refer instead to a simple desire on God’s part that his love and power be evinced in real lives in real history with real benefits for all. Perhaps glorification is the only step in the ordo salutis that emerges from the pages of history with something of its actual meaning intact, that God can and will reward those who please him at the heavenly banquet.

 

Most importantly, a culturally and intellectually correct exegesis of these verses allows an ordo salutis that conforms to the clear intent of the balance of Scripture, particularly the parables of our Lord. Most notably, it solves the conundrum of universality and particularity in redemption. All are invited and justified, but not all are saved. How can this be? Paul makes a distinction between justification and salvation in Romans 5:9,10 and 10:9,10. They are not the same. All are delivered from moral guilt, not all are spared at a second judgment, this time not for sin, but for fruitlessness. Jesus is Savior of all, but evidently he is not Lord of all. To bear fruit you must play cooperative host to the Holy Spirit, for apart from Him we can do nothing. Unless we bear fruit, as represented by wedding garments freely offered to all guests, we will be evicted from the presence of God. The branches that are burned as useless were originally “in Me.”

 

Further, these verses conform to a larger, coherent soteriology. Two actors: God and man. Two problems: guilt and powerlessness. Two solutions, both involving Jesus: his death and his life. Two historic events: Good Friday, and Pentecost. Two sacraments: Baptism and Holy Communion. Two titles for Christ: Savior and Lord. Two judgments: Good Friday and the Final Judgment. Two outcomes for man: glory or reprobation.

 

The only hope for ecumenical rapprochement and effective evangelism is an accurate understanding of God’s plan of redemption, the ordo salutis. As long as churches, denominations, communions and factions cling to their shibboleths of soteriological error, the Church will be enervated and the parousia delayed. Christ, a gracious groom, waits in his Father’s house for a bride to reach a maturity that will allow their marriage and the consummation of the ages. For two millennia an accurate explication of God’s mode of redemption has been before us. If we can learn to love him with our scholarship as well as our hearts, we can break out of our self-imposed limitations and become the children, and Church, God has always intended us to be.

 

 

Jan 14
0

Why I’m Not a Five Point Calvinist

By | Cleric Listens | No Comments

T – Total Depravity

The first point of orthodox Calvinism is that man is totally depraved.  I would argue that he’s right to the extent that our will is depraved, and apart from the indwelling Holy Spirit, nothing good can be accomplished by man.  Pelagius’ argument was that man could in fact do right apart from the aid of the Holy Spirit, and in this he’s totally wrong.  However, as Richard Hooker and Romans chapter 7 point out, although we are powerless to do right, we are not powerless to know and aspire to do right.  Says the Apostle Paul, “For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.  For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do – this I keep on doing.”  Thus we see that by the Biblical record, as well as the witness of discerning Christians, we are partially, not totally, depraved.  A distinction must be made between our moral perception and our moral action.  Thus it can be concluded that our conscience is intact until “seared as with a hot iron,” as Paul says.  One down, four to go.

 

U – Unconditional Election

Perhaps the biggest error of Calvinist soteriology is to be found in the doctrine of double election or predestination for the individual.  In a typical Greek or Western reading of the Scriptures, which is always an error, Calvin concludes that God elects some for salvation to show his mercy, and some for damnation to show his justice.  This is a complete misunderstanding of the terms election and predestination as used by the Biblical authors.  A careful reading of those authors reveals that these terms are used almost exclusively when the audience in question is composed to a large degree of Gentile converts to Christianity.  What was the first problem confronted by the early Church?  As early as Acts chapter 6 we have a conflict arising between the Christians of Jewish and Greek background revolving around the relative status of the two groups.  Specifically, the question was just how Jewish Gentile converts had to become.  Did they have to adopt Jewish cultural and religious customs, or not?  This was the topic of discussion at the very first ecumenical council held in Jerusalem and recorded in Acts chapter 15.  The Biblical authors used the concepts of election and predestination to assure their Gentile audience that from before time and forever, in the eternal counsels of God, their need of a Savior was anticipated and planned for, no less than was the Jews’.  Thus, even though they were looked down upon by their Jewish brethren, the Gentile converts were coequal in God’s eyes, and were full members of the Church along with those of Jewish heritage.  These terms have nothing to do with individuals; they have to do with groups or categories of people.  This is in keeping with Jesus’ own use of the term “elect,” that it refers to all those people who respond to God’s grace with obedience to himself as Lord and a consequent humility toward one’s fellow man.

Calvin can be somewhat excused for arguing for unconditional election, in that he was arguing for God’s sovereignty in opposition to the Roman dogma of the church and pope’s possession of the keys to heaven.  He overstated his case in order to counteract over a millennium of ecclesiastical overreaching and doctrinal error.  I understand his intent and zeal, but his followers and he were in total error when it comes to understanding these terms in the context of their authorship and audience.

 

L – Limited Atonement

How can it be that Jesus died for the sins of the whole world, yet by his own admission, not all are saved?  If there is one question that separates Christians, it is this: how do you explain how grace is limited to some and not available to all?  Romans state that it’s a matter of which church you’re a member of; their church being the only valid one.  Calvinists say it’s a matter of God’s caprice; see above.  Baptists and fundies say it’s a matter of not having too much fun; it’s the sin you avoid.  Dispensationalists say it’s a matter of knowing times and dates, as per Tim LaHaye.  To resolve this dilemma one must read the Bible; all of it.  Paul, and the author of the letter to the Hebrews, make a distinction between justification and salvation, an important difference.  Paul’s passages are found in Romans 5:9,10, Romans 10:9,10, and I Timothy 4:10.  See also Hebrews 9:28.  That is, we are justified or forgiven because of the death of Christ, which Scripture affirms as being for the “whole world.”  There was a judgment passed on sin, and it took place on Good Friday.  I posit that as of that day, and indeed for all time, as God is outside of time, all humanity stood justified or forgiven for all sin.  Our sins will never be brought up to condemn us, as they are covered by the sinless blood of Jesus.  As of Good Friday, all humanity, of all races and religions and in all times and places, have been placed “in Christ” from a legal or forensic perspective.  This is not a universalistic statement, however, because in addition to being justified by Christ’s death, Paul says we must be saved by his life.  Thus we conclude that there are two judgments, not one.  The second judgment, which is described in Matthew 25 and Revelation 20, doesn’t involve sin at all, but rather the good we did not do, having already been justified.  Like in the parable of the wedding feast where someone is invited but chooses to refuse the wedding garments freely offered to him by the host, we can be justified and in Christ legally, but if Christ is not in us effectually through his risen life, we are not saved from this second and final judgment.  God’s will is that there be a complete and unlimited interpenetration of his Son and the individual believer; we in him legally, he in us effectually.

This explains how grace is limited.  It is not limited in the sense of Christ’s sacrifice.  It’s only limited by us in terms of our willingness to cede our will to the risen Christ in the person of the Holy Spirit and let him bear positive fruit through us.  For Calvin to say that the blood of Christ is somehow limited in its efficacy is to criticize God and his plan of redemption.  Any limits it encounters are the result of our deliberate refusal to cooperate with his plan which is both accessible to people yet honoring of their will.  Jesus is Savior of all, but not Lord of all.  To be saved is to have him as both.

 

I – Irresistible Grace

The idea here is that those who are chosen for salvation can do nothing to frustrate God’s sovereign choice of them for redemption.  Just as the damned cannot change their fate, neither can the saved.  This argument is a corollary to unconditional election, similarly stating that God’s sovereign election of a person to salvation leaves no room for human resistance.  While the doctrine of unconditional election focuses on God’s sovereign role, this doctrine focuses on man’s role, or lack of same.  It is inserted into the Calvinist creed to do two things; first, to make a cute word like TULIP, as it’s somewhat redundant, and secondly, to support prior statement of God’s sovereign rule.  Should the former doctrine prove untenable or overreaching, then this corollary will of necessity fall.  See prior arguments.

 

P – Perseverance of the Saints

Of the “five pillars” of Calvinism, this notion has the least warrant in Holy Scripture.  This doctrine states that “once saved, always saved” and all believers who are truly redeemed shall have “eternal security.”  Despite the fact that this rumination is explicitly refuted by Matthew 12:43-45, Hebrews 6:4-12, 2 Peter 1:10, and 2 Peter 2:20-22, it is nevertheless one of the most widely promoted falsehoods of Calvinist doctrine.  It precludes the possibility and necessity of any sort of human response to God’s grace in Jesus Christ.  Further, it would fulfill Arminius’ critique that this would make God the author of evil.

Just as Luther came up with 95 things that seemed debatable about indulgences, I offer these points to put classical Calvinist thinking in some sort of Biblical and rational context.  They all arise from the fundamental error of taking a document inspired by a Jewish God, and written by Jewish authors for a predominantly Jewish audience, being largely figurative, integrative, and synthetic, and reading it from a literal, individualistic, and analytical Greek or Western point of view.  Such an approach violates every tenet of proper exegesis, and results in a gross distortion of the propositional truth contained therein.  The fruit of Calvinist thinking is bitter indeed.  It is repulsive to the mind, enervating to the heart, and destructive to the spread of the Gospel.  As Will Durant writes,

“… we shall always find it hard to love the man who darkened the human soul with the most absurd and blasphemous conception of God in all the long and honored history of nonsense.”

 

Jan 14
0

Why Do I Feel Guilty?

By | Cleric Listens | No Comments

We live in a moral universe.

If we didn’t there would be no such thing as guilt; nothing would matter.

But because we live in a such a universe, thoughts and actions count.

The cost of meaning is the possibility of failure.

The reason we feel guilty is because we are guilty.

We do not belong to ourselves, we belong to somebody else.

When a moral inventory is taken, we fall short, hence our guilt.

There will be an accounting at some point.

What is most peoples’ reaction to this fact?

They run around, trying to find something that they do well and others do poorly to emphasize.

And they blame shift.

“The woman you gave me, gave me to eat, and I ate.”

It’s your fault, it’s her fault, but it’s not my fault.

The only solution?  To confess your guilt, and give it to somebody who has no guilt of their own.

Who is that?  Jesus of Nazareth.  He has already taken your guilt, placed it in his own account, and paid for it.

This was done 2,000 years ago, but many don’t realize it.  When you do, it’s the most wonderful realization in the world.

Jan 14
0

What Does God Want?

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The one point the Church needs to be clearest on appears to be the point on which it is the most vague: what does God want?  And nor is it vague by intention; denominations strive to be precise on this matter, it’s just that they disagree.  An impartial observer who wanted to investigate the claims of Christ would have no trouble finding sincerity on the part of his followers, just consistency.  So how about we take a step back and see if there cannot be some sort of simplification and distillation of the Biblical record to answer that most important question: what does God want?

 

The Biblical record doesn’t comprise more than two chapters before trouble develops between God and his creature, man.  It is said that as a result of the Fall, there is enmity between God and man; God is mad at us, and we are mad at God.  The first sign of this enmity was that when God was looking for man during his walk in the cool of the day, man was ashamed and hid himself.  Thus, the prevailing reaction most people have to God, even to this day, is the desire to flee and hide.

 

Now the Bible is clear as well that God would undertake steps to deal with his enmity towards us first through the Law and then through a Son, the Messiah.  The life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth was focused on his sacrificial death on the Cross on Good Friday.  He came not to teach, but to die, that his Father’s enmity toward the human race might be expiated through a substitutionary atonement.  Having submitted to this sacrificial death, during which all the accumulated sins of humanity were placed on him, Jesus declared all humanity justified; forensically guiltless and rehabilitated in his Father’s eyes.  Once again, God walks in his creation, looking to have fellowship with his sons and daughters, you and me.

 

This scenario leaves one important point untouched, however, and that is the enmity we feel towards God.  We still feel the shame of nakedness in front of God, and even though the Gospel declares our relationship restored, we will have none of it.  We continue to run from him and hide whenever he approaches.  This sense of nakedness before God, the resulting shame and tendency toward flight are thus the keys to answering the question: “What does God want?”  Clearly, what he wants is for us to realize that we’ve already been justified and to stop running away.  Thus, what he wants is not a positive contribution, a “work” in the sense of a Pelagian effort that springs from our own virtue, but a negative, the cessation of something that springs from our own false perception.

 

Now you may well say, “I don’t run from God.  He doesn’t scare me.”  Yet think of the ways we do run.  We hear him in the Garden no less than Adam, as we watch friends and neighbors change for the better when they encounter Christ.  And those very friends tell us of a God who has already forgiven us, and who does not judge us for our sins.  Yet what do we say in reply?  We drag up all our offenses against God and man, and act as if they are still in between us.  We postpone our divine encounter until we can stop them on our own, something that will never happen.  Or we deny that we’ve done wrong at all, saying that these things are fine and of no consequence to God or ourselves.  Both these responses are wrong.  The Biblical record says that we are justified by Christ’s death, but we are saved by his life.  We will not be judged for our sins; they have been atoned for on Good Friday.  What we will be judged for, however, is fruitlessness.  Having already been forgiven by God, do we stop running, walk with him, and let the Spirit that animated his Son dwell in us as well so that fruit might be born in a lost and broken world?

 

So we see that it is possible to be clear on this question of what God really wants.  And it’s not something we do, a work, but something we stop doing, a rest.  A rest from justifying ourselves by denying moral law, or from striving to make ourselves moral without the aid of the Spirit of Jesus.  We are born as responsible moral agents, and at the age of majority are challenged by the Gospel to see how we will react.  Will we deny the Biblical record and claim we have no sin, or the ability to stop sinning on our own?  Or will we simply say, “I am not at enmity with God any more.  If he’s not mad at me, then I’m not mad at him.  When I hear him walking in my life, I will not run, I will not hide, because I’m no longer naked.  I’m clothed with the righteousness of Christ, and I trust that the Spirit will not bring me ruin but success.

 

Jan 14
0

The Number 2

By | Cleric Listens | No Comments

Much is made of Biblical numerology, and not without reason; the numbers 3, 7, 12 and 40 seem to recur with purpose and regularity throughout the Scriptures.  I would argue, however, that one cannot understand the Bible and the God who caused it to be written without an appreciation for the number 2.  Let me explain.

 

The first thing you notice about the Bible is its inherent redundancy.  It seems as though God does everything twice!  Look.  Old testament, new testament; two.  These equate with the two covenants, first with Abraham, then with Jesus.  Two temples, the one made of stone, then the flesh and bones of Jesus.  Each sacrament has its own prior adumbrations as well, first the water of the Red Sea, which points to baptism, and then the Passover lamb, which finds its perfection in the Cross and the Eucharist.  Even the bad stuff seems to have a precursor, with the destruction of the temple and deportation of the Jews, a foretaste of the final judgment of humanity.

 

In each case we see the same pattern.  There is an imperfect, temporary, physical presentation, which presages a later, perfect, permanent, spiritual reality.  It is as if God wants to prepare us for the latter, so that we might have both warning and hope, and be thoroughly prepared.  Two.  Twice.  As Joseph says in Genesis 41:32, “The reason the dream was given to Pharaoh in two forms is that the matter has been firmly decided by God, and God will do it soon.”

 

Then, within the words of the Bible itself, we find Hebrew poetry.  It is characterized not by rhyme, but by repetition, or parallelism.  Being the only form of poetry that translates without loss, we find that God always says things twice.  Two, again.  Whether it be warning or promise, God wants us to know that  the matter has been firmly decided, and he will do it soon.

 

The bilateral symmetry of the cosmos is further demonstrated when we leave the form of the Scriptures and start to dwell upon the theology they reveal.  There is the kingdom of God, and there is creation.  Spiritual and physical.  There are two actors, God and man.  God and man are doing swell at the beginning, but are soon at enmity.  Man has two problems: God’s mad at him, and he’s mad at God.  This produces two moral dilemmas on man’s part: guilt and powerlessness.  These two problems lead in turn to two judgments, the first over sin on Good Friday, and the second over fruitlessness at the end of time, as per Matthew 25 and Revelation 20.  God’s solutions, needless to say, are also two in number: the aforementioned Good Friday and Pentecost.  For God’s enmity with man and our resultant guilt we have the death of the sinless Son of God, to cover our sins with his blood, and place us, legally, in his position of rectitude.  Having thus been justified from God’s perspective, we also need ministry from our perspective.  To eradicate the enmity we feel toward God, we need an infusion from without.  This is the role of the Holy Spirit, who comes in and fills the void left when our spirit was attenuated in the Fall.  Although we can’t take credit for this new life, it is nevertheless up to us to cease striving and rebelling, and to let the Spirit have his way with us, that our behavior might conform to and reflect our legal status.  We have been placed in Christ forensically, but Christ is to be placed in us effectually as well.

 

Two solutions, and guess what, two sacraments.  Just as we are justified once, so are we to celebrate that fact through the one baptism commanded by Christ.  And here we see the desirability of child baptism, for what is it except for the celebration of something done for us by another, with no agency or effort on our part?  Just as an infant child is incapable of willful effort one way or the other, and may even be asleep, he stands justified by the act of Christ’s death on the cross 2,000 years ago.  Just as that action is perfect and needs no repetition, so too our baptism is a one-time act that need not and should never be repeated.  Then, what of our powerlessness?  Even the greatest of saints knows the experience of needing a new infusion of power from above.  As the Scriptures record, the apostles themselves were “filled with the Holy Spirit” time and again.  So for the on-going drama of life, we need a sacrament that is repeatable, and which corresponds with our constant need of divine help.  Thus, communion is a request that the Spirit of Jesus dwell within us, no less than the bread and wine do, in a literal, deliberate sense.  Two actors, two problems, two solutions, and two sacraments, two points of contact with divine power.  Here’s a graphic representation of my point:

Moral Actor Problem Judgment Solution Christ’s Role Sacrament
God Enmity with Man On Sin Death on the Cross Savior Baptism
Man Enmity with God On Fruitlessness Pentecost Lord Eucharist / Confirmation

 

So what can we conclude from all this?  Both theoretical lessons and practical applications.  Regarding theory, I would, of course, make two points.  First, God is a God of simplicity.  He suits his solutions to the situation with an elegant economy that suggests his only goal is to reach us and help us succeed.  Secondly, we should beware of any belief or practice that stands alone.  If there is not a spiritual, perfect counterpart to our thought or action, we should be warned that we might in fact be infatuated with a prior, physical, transitory adumbration, and not the perfect, final, permanent reality.  This is why God saw fit to destroy the Jewish temple after the body of Christ had rendered it obsolete and a snare.

 

In terms of practical application, I would invoke the cliché that says there are only two kinds of people in the world.  How so?  There are two thieves crucified with Jesus!  They represent the only two responses that the death and life of Jesus can command.  The first is flippant and incredulous, “Aren’t you the Christ?  Save yourself and us!”  He personifies those in every age who hear the Gospel and choose to reserve the right to determine moral authority unto themselves.  The second is the first man’s opposite in every way.  “Don’t you fear God, since you are under the same sentence?  We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve.  But this man has done nothing wrong.  Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”  This man is honest about himself, and believing regarding Jesus.  He has ceded his role as moral arbiter, and has in fact repudiated that right.  Between the two men, we have the sum total of human response to the Gospel.  The computer age has shown that the most effective and efficient way to compute, store and transmit data is through the use of bits; ones or zeros.  Either positive or nothing.  There or not there.  Analogue is fine for wrist watches and home audio, but when it comes down to ultimate reliability and parsimony, we are squarely in the digital age.  As with information, so with theology.  As Jesus says, you’re either for or against him, there’s no third way.  The question is not whether or not you’re a thief; any religion can tell you that you are.  The question is which thief are you?

 

So don’t make things more complicated than they really are, and never accuse God of not telling you what’s coming and what’s really important!  He’s done it all, if we’re simple enough to count to two.

Event 1                                                        Event 2

Old Covenant – Genesis 15                      New Covenant – Mt 26 etc.

Law                                                              Grace

Passover Lamb                                          Jesus

Red Sea                                                       Baptism

Jonah in fish 3 days                                 Jesus in Earth 3 days

Circumcision to enter promised land  Repentance to enter KOG

Babel to confuse speech                         Tongues to restore communication

Elijah                                                         John the Baptist

Israel                                                         Church

Noah and a promise- Genesis 8:21     Isaiah 54:9 and a promise

Manna                                                      Feeding of the multitudes

 

Jan 14
0

Redemption: Justification and Salvation Both

By | Cleric Listens | No Comments

Being a retired priest, I have the luxury of watching the Church from a safe distance and gaining some perspective on her travails.  What I see makes me sometimes wish I did not have said luxury and perspective, as what presents itself is troubling, and getting no better with time.  Although people are forever trying new packaging and forms for Christian life and worship, I get the sense that the problem lies not in the presentation, but rather in the substance, of our message.  Like Stephen on his way to getting stoned, let’s quickly review sacred history up to the present time, and see how we got into this mess.

 

Christianity in the West was a single franchise monopoly until the 16th century.  Yes, the Eastern Church broke off, and there have always been Middle Eastern variants of Christianity that should be recognized, but in the West, it was Rome or nothing until Martin and John got involved.  What ensued over the next 100 years, almost to the year, was a contest of hearts, minds and pens that still defies easy analysis LO these many years later.  Rome insisted that human tradition can and should be used to clarify Scripture in the formation of doctrine.  The good part of this is that their very imaginative interpretations of Holy Writ have allowed them to continue to talk about behavior and authority up to the present day.  They may not be right, but at least they maintain a semblance of order in their house.  And, it’s a big house.  As Stalin observed, “Quantity has a quality all of its own.”  The bad part is that they’ve had to cover for some pretty bad decisions in the past, like the celibate priesthood, and they are now paying a very real price for their approach to Scripture.

 

Lest we Protestants gloat over Rome’s troubles, however, we have many of our own.  No, we don’t embrace Pelagius in our soteriology; our God is sovereign and cannot be manipulated by human agency.  But then again, you ask a Protestant why behavior and authority matter, and if the person you’re asking is honest to his own Reformed traditions, they won’t be able to tell you.  The result?  The mainline Protestant denominations, each and every one, are beset by those who, in the words of Oswald Chambers, are saying, “Christ died for me, I go Scot free.”  The fights about sexual mores and political imperatives have driven the life, and the people, out of these churches in a comprehensive fashion.  If you want to witness fiscal, moral and theological irrelevance, just attend a mainline Protestant church.

 

So those of us with a little time on our hands have traditionally opted for one of two choices: wring our hands and give up, or takes sides and enter a fray that has yet to impress the non-Christian world as being at all important.  Being a little younger than most retirees, I was involved in a serious auto accident, I’ve chosen a third course, and that is to go back and see if there isn’t something the antagonists are missing that really is wrong with our message at its very core.  Forget packaging, forget names; what are we really saying about God and the human condition, and is it right?

 

I was able to confirm my suspicions and crystallize my own response after a visit to the home of a fellow cleric.  This man is a little more senior than I, and he views my efforts at theologizing with a combination of avuncular amusement and genuine horror.  I had commented that Paul makes a distinction between justification and salvation, and added that I felt this point was lost on most commentators.  The priest in question leapt from his chair and thrust a copy of N.T. Wright’s Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision into my hands.  I am not the only one, he seemed to be saying.  After reading the book, I can understand why he thought it was apropos.  Bishop Wright does in fact point out that Paul draws a distinction between the two concepts, and goes on to define justification in a most satisfactory way.  Where I would depart from his painstakingly thorough and labored analysis, however, is the way he defines salvation.  It’s only through an understanding of this second idea, and how it differs from justification, that really allows us to understand the mechanism of redemption.

 

I’m not focusing on this seemingly minute point in order to join the ranks of theologians and churchmen over the ages who feel that parsing words more finely somehow reveals more truth and insight into the mind of God.  Nor am I, in Wright’s own words, offering the scorpion of scholarly infighting instead of the fish of the Gospel.  After my injury I don’t have the will or energy to do that, which may be just why God allowed me to be in that car in the first place.  What I propose instead is to apply the same scrutiny to Paul’s writing that Antoine de St. Exupery applied to his biplane, when he observed that “Perfection is achieved not when there’s nothing more to add, but when there’s nothing more to take away.”

 

Suffice it to say that most commentators either gloss over the verses where Paul contrasts justification and salvation, or conclude that they refer to the same thing from different perspectives.  Rather than do what others do in this regard, I propose we look at two verses that hold them in stark contrast, and see if we can discern what Paul may be trying to say.  In Romans 5:9,10 we read:

 

“Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him!  For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!”

 

Further, in Romans 10:9,10 we find:

 

“That if you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.  For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved.”

 

Now the first temptation is to say that Paul is simply indulging in that time-honored practice of Hebrew parallelism, where one statement is repeated in a different manner to have poetic impact.  Resist the temptation.  Give him more credit.  Let us assume that he wrote what he wrote for a reason, and wasn’t being redundant for the sake of literary form.  What I propose is that Paul is separating two things that must be kept separate, or else we will lose insight into how God redeems mankind.

 

First, Paul says that something happened on one day, Good Friday, that he calls justification, where all humanity was declared innocent in God’s eyes, and placed in Jesus’ legal position of righteousness.  The Rt. Rev. Dr. Wright is adamant on this definition of justification, and I agree.  To Paul it means being found by the divine court to be in a position of righteousness and legal probity exactly like that of Jesus Christ.  We’re not any different, but our legal standing is updated to reflect Christ’s righteousness, not our own. Donald Bloesch seems to agree:

 

“Something happened for our salvation in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ independent of our belief or response.  Reconciliation and redemption are an accomplished fact, an objective reality that is not affected by the subjective attitude of man…The atonement of Jesus Christ signifies a transformation of the human situation, and not simply the possibility of a future salvation.”

 

Now I would clean up Donald’s soteriological nomenclature somewhat, but my point abides: on Good Friday Christ died for all humanity, independent of time, our awareness, or our ability to respond.  All are placed “in Christ,” whether they know it or not, and are justified.  As Scripture boldly proclaims, Christ died for the sins of the whole world.  There is nothing limited or imperfect about the shed blood of the sinless Son of God.  Is that the last word on man’s redemption?  No, but it is the first word.  God is no longer at enmity with us.

 

The second word God speaks is that of salvation, to Paul an entirely different kettle of fish.  It is, according to John the Baptist, Jesus, John the apostle, and of course Paul, deliverance from a coming wrath reserved for those do not value, but rather squander, their justification.  It’s not too much to say that whereas both Rome and Geneva say people are lost until they are saved, variously through ritual observance or divine election, a careful reading of Paul suggests that we’re in fact saved until we’re lost; a very different thing!  And Paul’s not the only one saying this.  What we read in many parables, in Hebrews chapters 4 and 6, and throughout that entire, pesky, book of James, is that we can indeed fall out of a position of favor with God.  Further, Jesus himself says in John 15:2 that the branches that are cut off and burned are those originally “in me.”  Although it is treading on the inner counsels of God, I would venture that at the age of majority, people become subject to the temptation to declare themselves moral free agents, and become subject to this coming, second judgment.  Jews and Christians both have sensed this reality, and have commemorated the occasion with rites to confirm a right decision.  What each is saying is, “We are no longer at enmity with God, and therefore trust him to control our lives.”  This, as both experience and the Bible suggest, is anything but universal.

 

Looking at redemption as a two-phase project makes perfect sense.  There are two actors, God and man.  God and man are doing swell at the beginning, but are soon at enmity.  Man has two problems: God’s mad at him, and he’s mad at God.  This produces two moral dilemmas on man’s part: guilt and powerlessness.  God’s solutions, needless to say, are also two in number: Good Friday and Pentecost.  For God’s enmity with man and our resultant guilt we have the death of the sinless Son of God, to cover our sins with his blood, and place us, legally, in his position of rectitude.  Having thus been justified from God’s perspective, we also need ministry from ours.  To eradicate the enmity we feel toward God, we need an infusion from without.  This is the role of the Holy Spirit, who comes in and fills the void left when our spirit was attenuated in the Fall.  Although we can’t take credit for this new life, it is nevertheless up to us to cease striving and rebelling, and to let the Spirit have his way with us, that our behavior might conform to and reflect our legal status.

 

Two solutions, and guess what, two sacraments.  Just as we are justified once, so are we to celebrate that fact through the one baptism commanded by Christ.  And here we see the desirability of child baptism, for what is it except for the celebration of something done for us by another, with no agency or effort on our part?  Just as an infant child is incapable of willful effort one way or the other, and may even be asleep, he stands justified by the act of Christ’s death on the cross 2,000 years ago.  Just as that action is perfect and needs no repetition, so too our baptism is a one-time act that need not and should never be repeated.  Then, what of our powerlessness?  Even the greatest of saints knows the experience of needing a new infusion of power from above.  As the Scriptures record, the apostles themselves were “filled with the Holy Spirit” time and again.  So for the on-going drama of life, we need a sacrament that is repeatable, and which corresponds with our constant need of divine help.  Thus, communion is a request that the Spirit of Jesus dwell within us, no less than the bread and wine do, in a literal, deliberate sense.  Two actors, two problems, two solutions, and two sacraments, two points of contact with divine power.

So what can we conclude from all this?  Both theoretical lessons and practical applications.  Regarding theory, I would, of course, make two points.  First, God is a God of simplicity.  He suits his solutions to the situation with an elegant economy that suggests his only goal is to reach us and help us succeed.  Secondly, we should beware of any belief or practice that stands alone.  If there is not a spiritual, perfect counterpart to our thought or action, we should be warned that we might in fact be infatuated with a prior, physical, transitory adumbration, and not the perfect, final, permanent reality.  This is why God saw fit to destroy the Jewish temple after the body of Christ had rendered it obsolete and a snare.

 

In terms of practical application, I would invoke the cliché that says there are only two kinds of people in the world.  How so?  There are two thieves crucified with Jesus!  They represent the only two responses that the death and life of Jesus can command.  The first is flippant and incredulous, “Aren’t you the Christ?  Save yourself and us!”  He personifies those in every age who hear the Gospel and choose to reserve the right to determine moral authority unto themselves.  The second is the first man’s opposite in every way.  “Don’t you fear God, since you are under the same sentence?  We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve.  But this man has done nothing wrong.  Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”  This man is honest about himself, and credulous regarding Jesus.  He has ceded his role as moral arbiter, and has in fact repudiated that right as he formerly exercised it.  Between the two men, we have the sum total of human response to the Gospel.  The computer age has shown that the most effective and efficient way to compute, store and transmit data is through the use of bits; 1’s or zeros.  Either positive or nothing.  There or not there.  Analogue is fine for wrist watches, speedometers and home audio, but when it comes down to ultimate reliability and parsimony, we are squarely in the digital age.  As with information, so with theology.  As Jesus says, you’re either for or against him, there’s no third way.  The question is not whether or not you’re a thief; any religion can tell you that you are.  The question is which thief are you?

 

At this point those in the Reformed tradition throw up their hands and say the only explanation for the success of some and the failure of others must be predestination and divine election.  In doing so, however, they show themselves to be more faithful to the traditions of John Calvin and the Synod of Dort than they do to Scripture, which they pretend to revere.  Aren’t most references to election and predestination spoken, whether by Paul or Peter, to gentile audiences, in order to stress God’s knowledge of their need and their inclusion in the person of a Jewish Messiah?  And are they not references to categories of people, and not as we in the West in the tradition of Aristotle like to think, to individuals?  Election and predestination, as used in the Bible, refer to God’s preordained plan of redemption, and the fact that some would submit to that plan, while others would not.  Never does it refer to God’s arbitrary choice of some for salvation and some for damnation as individuals.  Have not those in the Reformed tradition demanded allegiance to John Calvin over and above the Bible?  No less an authority than Will Durant characterizes Calvin as having “darkened the human soul with the most absurd and blasphemous conception of God in all the long and honored history of nonsense.”

 

So what is God’s solution to the problem of our lack of power?  Like our moral guilt, our lack of power is solved by Jesus Christ.  Not by his death, but rather, as Paul says, by his life.  Whether this refers to the life conferred upon Christ after his death or that same life poured out upon the Church as of the Ascension and Pentecost is immaterial.  What is germane is that God intends to make us righteous in behavioral fact as well as legally.  The only way to do this is to offer the Spirit, who can come into the heart of the Christian, to become the motive force for a new existence, based upon Christ and not our sinful selves.  Thus, not only are we in Christ as of Good Friday, Christ is also potentially in us as of Pentecost.  This mutual interpenetration is what God intends for all his children; anything else is an abridgement of the divine plan for redemption.

 

Unlike justification, salvation can be resisted, not because it requires a work, but the cessation of a work: our relinquishment of our will, of control over our lives.  We have a role to play, but unlike Pelagius’ approach, that role is negative and cannot be credited as emanating from our own power or nature.  All credit goes to the Spirit who does these wonders in us, but that same Spirit does not brook competition, and will not persist if we make too many inroads into his hegemony.  All talk of “eternal security” and “once saved, always saved” does not stand up to the light of Scripture.  Not only are these concepts not Biblical, they are actively harmful to the mission of the Church.  The only unforgivable sin, we are told, is blaspheming the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit wrote the Bible, and to argue with its contents, whether by word or deed, is to frustrate the redemption bought by the Father at such great cost.  To claim otherwise is to mislead people regarding both our human situation and the heart of God.

 

Let me see if I can make this more clear with a table:

 

Phase of Redemption Divine Event Corresponding Sacrament Christ’s Role Our Role Relative Position Duration Moral Position
Justification Good Friday Baptism Savior Passive We in Christ One Time God no longer at enmity with us
Salvation Easter/Pentecost Holy Communion/

Confirmation

 Lord Negative Christ in us On-Going We no longer at enmity with God

 

Note the many advantages to making, or discovering, this Pauline distinction:

 

  1. First of all, you’re suddenly faithful to the entire Biblical revelation.  You don’t have to say you’re in favor of this portion of Scripture over another.  You can read it all, believe it all, and obey it all with none of the selectivity that characterizes today’s Church.  We’re saved by grace through faith, but faith takes on new virility.  It’s not intellectual assent to a theoretical proposition, it’s submission to a superior authority, as illustrated by the Roman centurion in Matthew 8.  God does it all, but there is a role for us, albeit a negative one.  Behavior counts, because although you can’t be saved through works, you can, as David Chilton says, be damned by them.
  2. Secondly, there’s a pastoral advantage.  For the first time, you can engage in logical talk with people, Christians and non-, about the universal experience of the vicious circle of repentance, failure, guilt and back-sliding in moral endeavor.  There’s a reason all aspire to morality, and an equally good reason why we all fail.  Failure need not lead us to reject morality, as so many do, but rather to shift the basis for our moral inspiration away from ourselves to the life of Jesus in us.
  3. Thirdly, all this is good for God’s reputation.  He doesn’t deal with problems is a fragmentary of incomplete way.  God deals not just in legality, but also in reality.  He doesn’t demand of us what he doesn’t make possible through the death and life of his own Son, both.
  4. Finally, such thinking can clean up any discrepancy between Roman and Protestant, to say nothing of the fragmented nature of the latter body.  Rome can hereby escape from the clutches of Pelagius, a much-needed change, and place the responsibility for redemption where it belongs: with Christ.  Geneva, too, can breathe easier.  Divine election and predestination are no longer the deformed individual phenomena we’ve always assumed in the West, and Protestants can talk about authority and behavior for the first time in almost 500 years.

 

Perhaps all this confusion comes from the titles we give Jesus.  As Savior, he justifies and cleanses us from sin.  As Lord, he saves from the coming wrath.  It sounds backwards, but this is the way it makes sense.  Perhaps the confusion is also due to the arrogance of our times.  How could Paul, simple Jew that he was, outsmart us with all our scholarship and philosophical sophistication?  It could be that those very things that we are so proud of are what are keeping us from hearing what he was actually trying to say to us.  Whether Roman or Protestant, we add our own traditions, heroes and shibboleths until the power and simplicity of the Gospel are lost.  Until our reading becomes as careful as Paul’s writing, we’ll be condemned to centuries of acrimonious debate while a waiting world looks on, unimpressed.  Maybe if theologians contemplated biplanes as opposed to jumbo jets, the Church would be able to take flight as God intends.

 

Reduced to its essence, the job of the Church is to understand this mechanism of redemption, and to share that knowledge with a rebellious and hurting world.  To the extent that we are imperfect in our understanding ourselves, we will necessarily be unable to fulfill that commission.  As Francois de Malherbe said to his preacher after a particularly poor sermon, “Improve your style, monsieur!  You have disgusted me with the joys of heaven.”  Just so.

 

Jan 14
0

God is My Friend: A Primer for Children

By | Cleric Listens | No Comments

A friend accepts all people

“… God treats you and me the same.”  Romans 2:11

 

A friend accepts people as they are

“… while we were still me people, Christ died for US!.”   Romans 5:8

A friend forgets our mistakes

“I will forgive and forget all the wrong things.”  Jeremiah 31:34b

 

A friend gives us a place to stay

“Make your home in my love.”  John 15:9b

 

A friend is easy to please

“I won’t lay anything heavy on you.”  Matthew 11:30 TM

 

A friend knows what makes us happy

“’I know the plans I have for you,’ says God, ‘They are for good and not for bad, to give you a future and a hope.’”  Jeremiah 29:11

 

A friend doesn’t keep secrets

“I call you friends, and tell you everything that I have heard from our Father.”  John 15:15b JBP

 

A friend warns of danger

“Not everyone who calls me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will go to heaven …”  Matthew 7:21a

 

A friend knows what makes us sad

“… your wrong things keep you from your God,”  Isaiah 59:2

 

A friend lets us choose

“Do you want to get well?”  John 5:6b NIV

 

When we cannot do something, a friend will do it for us.

“… I don’t live any more, but Christ lives in me.”  Galatians 2:20a  Beck

 

A friend is easy to find

“I stand at the door.  I knock.  If you hear me call and open the door, I’ll come right in and sit down to supper with you.”  Revelation 3:20a TM

 

God is MY friend

“Abraham believed God … and he was called God’s friend.”  James 2:23 NIV

Jan 14
0

God is Jewish

By | Cleric Listens | No Comments

My daughter recently made the observation that popular Christian authors have a theme they consistently return to in their writings.  She was able to spout off what Tim Keller and John Piper feel is their unique contribution to the Christian agenda, based on having read a number of their works.  “What’s your theme, Dad?”  Although both insufficient and misleading, I immediately replied, “God is Jewish.”  Let me explain.

 

The first thing to point out is what I do NOT mean.  I do not mean that God cares one whit about the fate of racial and political Israel, any more than cares about his lost children wherever they are found.  Of all the great foreign policy blunders of the 20th century, I am persuaded that failing to listen to T.E. Lawrence and giving the Middle East away to European powers at Versailles ranks first.  A close second would be Great Britain giving Palestine to the U.N. to turn over to Jews to found a new, theocratic state.  Quick reference to Leviticus 26 can explain the fate of the Jewish race from the time of Christ, if, of course, you understand their rejection of Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah as having any meaning at all.  As far as I can ascertain, all references to Israel in the Bible after the coming of the Messiah refer to the Church, which is Jewish in its roots but ecumenical in its final flowering.  Paul goes to great lengths to portray the breaking down of the racial barrier between Jew and Gentile as the mystery of God, for which all creation has been waiting.  To this day, Jews remain hostile to the Christian Gospel, and formally reject it as a perversion of the revelation over which they claim sole custody.  So I am no Zionist, and contend that crimes committed in the name of God are even more onerous than those committed for more base reasons.

 

What I do mean by saying God is Jewish, is that the Bible, in both testaments, is a document that is singularly Jewish in terms of its authorship, its intended audience, its literary style and its philosophy.  This means the Western or Greek reader must take this Eastern background into account when reading the Scriptures or he’s simply not going to understand what he’s reading.  First of all, he is going to come to wrong conclusions.  He’s going to think it’s saying things that it is not.  Secondly, he is going to miss things that he should be getting, points that the author thought he had presented clearly.  Further, I submit that this East/West mismatch has led to the major theological fights in the Christian Church, both Catholic and Reformed, to date.  Until this ingrained bias is recognized and taken into account, Christian thought will be paralyzed and the mission of the Church enervated.

 

First, the wrong conclusions.  Christian thought was dominated by pagan and Roman Catholic distortions for over 1,000 years.  With the adoption of Christianity as the state religion by Constantine, the old pagan pantheon was replaced by a Christian cast, but the script was not fundamentally altered.  The result was that the Jewish concept of monotheism was completely lost in the translation.  The subsequent hash was then systematized, to the extent that it could be, by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century.  After having experienced a personal revelation in 1273, Aquinas admitted that “all I have written now appears to be of little value.”  He died before he was able to set matters straight, and the unexpurgated Summa Theologica has become the unquestioned source for all Roman “theology” since.  Because the Roman church was dominated by political and philosophical forces from the start, it’s no wonder that the basic message of a loving triune God was immediately lost.

 

What’s more surprising, however, is that Protestant theology is just as prone to distortions due to this Eastern or Jewish presentation as Roman theology.  The reformers attempted to sweep away the human accretions of those thousand plus years and get back to Scripture and the original message of the early Church.  Their rallying cry was Sola Scriptura, Scripture Only, and they said that if it couldn’t be found in the Bible, it couldn’t be required of a man.  Just what was the Bible saying, though?  In their zeal to refute Rome and the counterreformation some of the reformers, notably John Calvin, overstated their case.  Will Durant, author of The Story of Civilization, says of Calvin, “…we shall always find it hard to love the man who darkened the human soul with the most absurd and blasphemous conception of God in all the long and honored history of nonsense.”  What would lead Durant, probably the most circumspect man ever who ever lived, to make this statement?  No doubt Calvin’s theory of what has become known as double predestination.  Let’s take a look at what this term refers to.

 

The concepts of election and predestination are Biblical.  The words elect and election are not found in the NIV in the Old Testament, nor is predestination in any of its forms.  In the New, elect appears six times in the Gospels, always appearing as the words of Jesus, and five times in the Epistles, used four times by Paul and once by Peter.  Election appears three times, used twice by Paul and once by Peter.  Predestination in its various forms appears four times in epistles, always used by Paul.  On the basis of these 18 occurrences, Calvin refuted the Roman doctrine of merited grace and consequent salvation.  What was in question was what I call the agency of salvation; that is, who saves whom?  For Rome, we save ourselves, with the help of the Church, of course, by putting God into our debt by works or merit and supererogation.  The notion that anybody could force God to do anything, and by ascribing debt, no less, was anathema to the reformers.  They, one and all, pointed out that God is sovereign, and man can do nothing to force God’s hand.  Further, no good thing resides in us, as Paul so eloquently put it, and we can do nothing to earn our salvation.  While all this is true, Calvin and his followers went further and said that God simply chooses some for salvation, to show his mercy, and some to damnation, to show his justice.  We are elected to salvation or perdition by God’s fiat, and that is that.  The fate of the individual is beyond their control, as man is powerless to resist God’s will.

 

Not all Protestant reformers bought into double predestination.  Jacobus Arminius, for example, went to great lengths to point out that for God to elect some to sin and damnation, he would have to be the author of sin.  Calvin’s followers took care of this valid objection, however, by making sure that the Arminians were excluded and the Calvinist faction prevailed at the Synod of Dort in 1618-9.  Since the closing of that ecumenical synod, Christian thought has stagnated into a pattern of sniping between Roman and reformed, and has never been able to come up with anything suggesting a synthetic solution to the problem of what these 18 Biblical references actually mean.  Could it be that the Church has painted itself into a theological corner simply by the way it has read these few passages?  I think so.

 

First of all, who is being elected or predestined here? Calvin assumed that it was individuals who were chosen for heaven or hell.  A casual reading of the Bible will show that in the beginning, God’s preferred unit of address is not the individual, but the family, the tribe, the nation, or the even the civilization. When Achan, Korah, Dathan, and Abiram were punished, their whole families were collected and suffered the same fate as those who actually sinned.  This is no doubt because none of us acts in a vacuum, and what we say and do is both cause and consequence of our communal life.  Although this policy was eventually rolled back and tempered by first Moses and then Ezekiel, the Bible stresses that sin and virtue are corporate qualities that for the most part persist from generation to generation.  God says he will punish “the children for the sin of their fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.”  To say that God does not take our upbringing into account when judging us, for good or ill, is to impugn his integrity.  This was Arminius’ argument.  God ultimately judges the individual, but he also has strong opinions about culture and ideology that aid and abet the individual in behaving the way they do.  So to say that God picks and chooses individuals is only correct when you realize that those individuals are members of a larger group or type.  It appears to me that this assumption of individual address is an interpolation due to Greek or Western philosophy, and is contrary to the intent of the Jewish authors of the Scriptures.

 

This leads to a second question, and that is, how does God decide what group you are in?  Although a crude reading of the Scriptures will say that it’s all based on genealogy, which is its own version of fiat, as the Biblical narrative progresses it becomes clear that blood is quickly superseded by behavior.  This can explain why references to predestination and election are restricted to the New Testament, are so few in number, and appear only when speaking to or about non-Jews.  The letters to the Romans and Ephesians were written to non-Jews, and the pastoral epistles of Paul were addressed to Timothy and Titus, both of whom were involved in ministries to the Gentiles.  Timothy was half Greek himself, being from Lystra in Asia Minor.  Peter, too, wrote to those scattered throughout the Gentile world, not to the Jews of Judea.  Thus, it makes sense that this concept of preordained election was meant to assure Gentile Christians that from before time and forever, God would know of their need for a Savior, and they would be included in his plan to unite Jew and Gentile in one man, Paul’s fundamental mystery of God.  When Jesus refers to the elect, he too is implying that those chosen for salvation are a subset of his hearers, whether Jew or Gentile.  Viewed this way, election and predestination are not threats to winnow individuals arbitrarily, but rather promises that at no time did God intend salvation to continue on a racial or political basis.

 

How did a promise get turned into a threat that would be used to browbeat reformed Christians to the extent that they were no more assured of pardon than their Roman brethren?  By imposing a Western, individualistic reading on an Eastern, tribal concept.  That’s how.

 

Another major problem that has stymied Biblical scholarship and ministry since the Reformation has been the tendency to read the Bible in a literalistic manner.  Archbishop Ussher of Ireland was the first to formally suggest that the world was between four and five thousand years old according to the various genealogies mentioned in the Scriptures.  The world, he said, was created in six twenty four hour days, literally.  The only problem with this approach is that it doesn’t take into account the Jewish tendency to write not for analytical purposes, but for synthetic.  Put another way, science may be the fruit of Western thought, but philosophy is the Eastern root.  I quote Will Durant again:

 

“Science wishes to resolve the whole into parts, the organism into organs, the obscure into the known.  It does not inquire into the values and ideal possibilities of things, nor into their total and final significance; it is content to show their present actuality and operation, it narrows its gaze resolutely to the nature and process of things as they are…But the philosopher is not content to describe the fact: he wishes to ascertain its relation to experience in general, and thereby to get at its meaning and its worth; he combines things in interpretive synthesis; he tries to put together, better than before, that great universe-watch which the inquisitive scientist has analytically taken apart…Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.”

 

It’s not as though Greeks and Jews have a different view of truth, but they do have a different view of what’s important.  Take the creation narrative of Genesis.  To the Greek it gives a faulty account of the construction of our planet because it says it took place quickly.  Therefore, the entire account is dismissed as so much superstition and nonsense.  Not so fast, says the Jew.  The account tells you about agency, order, priority, purpose and man’s place in the cosmos, if you will enrich your understanding of language.  The Hebrew word for day, yom, is translated in the NIV Bible using over forty different words, only one of which is day.  It can mean period, phase, duration, many different things, but all pertaining to the passage of a finite period of time.  Think of all the ink, to say nothing of blood, spilled because of this misunderstanding not so much of language, but of thought.

 

In addition to causing trouble when reading how things got started, a literal gestalt will wreck havoc when reading about how things will end.  The nonsense of John Darby and his Dispensationalism comes from a desire to read an Eastern eschatology with a Western bent.  Whenever the Bible touches on what’s happening in the future or in heaven, concrete concepts fail, and literary liberties must be taken.  When Matthew, Mark, and Luke speak of the heavenly bodies being shaken at the coming of the Son of Man, does this mean a literal falling of the planets?  I assume it means that those things of which we are most sure, the rising and setting of the sun, for one, might as well be suspended, for all will be lost.  This squares with the fact that this figure of speech was used many times in the Bible for other nations and tribes that were being written off by God.  By its very nature, the Bible has become a medium of communication across time and cultures, and as such is subject to eisegesis, where foreign meanings can be injected into it if so desired.  This puts an added burden on the Bible interpreter, that he be aware of the peculiarities of the time and place of its composition as well as those of his own audience.

 

In addition to the danger of misunderstanding what is there, there is the danger of missing what the author was actually trying to convey.  Perhaps the most distinctive literary device of the Jew is the use of repetition.  Hebrew poetry is characterized not by rhyme, but by repetition or parallelism.  This is useful, as it translates, while rhyme does not.  Further, it conveys something about God and his mode of communicating with us that we miss if we think it’s just a poetic device.  Might not a loving God, like a concerned parent, deign to say things twice, whether warning or promise?  In his interpretation of Pharaoh’s dream, Joseph said that the fact that the dream was presented twice showed that God was resolved to bring this thing to pass and quickly.  Indeed, just about every event of consequence in the Scriptures can be found twice, once performed in history, imperfectly, and perhaps temporarily, and then again spiritually, perfectly, and permanently.  For each event there is a counterpart, that is either prediction, promise, or warning on the one hand, or realization, fulfillment, and final installation on the other.  You’ve got the Old Testament, then the New.  The Law, then the Gospel.  Moses, then Jesus.  The Red Sea, then baptism.  Passover, then the Cross.  Genesis 15, then the Lord’s Supper.  The list goes on and on.  Indeed, the number two can be said to be the numerical concept around which the whole revelation of God revolves.

 

Western New Testament scholars, however, are slow to appreciate this state of affairs.  Paul makes a distinction between justification and salvation.  To the western scholar, this is just parallelism, or poetry. To the Jew, however, such a distinction deserves our attention.  What Paul is saying, is that man has two problems, guilt and powerlessness.  God has two solutions, the death of Jesus and the life of Jesus.  The Church has two sacraments, baptism and communion.  One, like the death of Christ is unique, the other is repeated, like the continuous drawing we must do from the life of the risen Lord.  Failure to make this distinction has lead to much suffering, as disputes arise about the importance of behavior and the role man may or may not have in his own redemption.  Until you understand the mechanism of salvation, you don’t really know where you stand in the process, or how to help others who come under conviction.  All this imprecision in our thinking and trouble in our mission is due to cultural bias in our reading.

 

I could go on.  Arminius never said what Pelagius did, that we’re to draw good from within ourselves to merit salvation.  What he did say, and what I believe the Bible says, is that we’re to stop doing something, that is, protesting our innocence and trying to do things ourselves.  The ultimate test of honesty is to say that we are in fact guilty before a holy God.  The ultimate test of humility is to admit we can do nothing about it, and ask Jesus to do it in us.  All of this requires a change of heart, which implies the exercise of the will.  Why did Jesus speak in parables?  Why was he indirect in his explanations?  To the Greek, this is not only confusing, it is somewhat offensive.  Why doesn’t he just come out and say it?  We can assume that Jesus did everything for a reason.  If God were interested in dispensing information alone, he would have been more straightforward in his manner.  Yet God, in keeping with his Jewish nature, wanted to do more.  He wanted to engage the will of his hearer, knowing that the propositions being shared carried with them a challenge to personal independence and authority. In order to have the desired effect, all communication had to engage the will, so that the hearer would be invested in true understanding.  Again, God is a God of import, not of facts alone.  Eastern, not Greek.

 

This also explains why God did not see fit to leave us a historical record of his self-revelation that is punctilious and comprehensive.  The Scriptures, as it says in the 39 Articles of the Church of England, contain everything necessary to salvation.  They do not contain everything that can be known, and certainly don’t contain everything about God himself.  They do, however, contain enough to persuade the reader of life and death and purpose, if the reader is so disposed.  Those who ask for impeccability or undue comprehensiveness in the divine record are revealing that they are not interested in meeting God, they are interested only in explaining and controlling God’s chosen means of self-disclosure.  God doesn’t dance to our piping because it would be casting pearls before swine and would change nothing for the hard-hearted.

 

When I took my first Old Testament class in seminary, the professor opened with a correction.  He said, “There’s a vicious rumor circulating that I believe you have to speak Hebrew to go to heaven.  This is not true.  You don’t have to speak Hebrew to go to heaven, but if, once you get there, you want to know what’s going on, I believe you have to speak Hebrew.”  Perhaps this is an overstatement, as good translations from the Hebrew abound.  What we should strive for, however, is an understanding the mindset that goes with the language, which couldn’t be more different that that of the Greek or western mindset most of us have grown up with.  God had a choice when deciding where Jesus would be born.  He could have been born in Macedonia, or anywhere in the western world.  He did not go that route.  Instead he chose the backwater province of Judea, because it had the culture, philosophy and literary tradition that best coincided with a message of ultimate value that requires the participation of the entire hearer, his heart as well as his mind.

 

So Martha, my contribution is that God is Jewish.  It’s ironic that this should be the case, because many Jews today have become Westernized in their thinking, and have used that thinking to dismiss the claims of Christ.  Better we should all, Jew and Gentile alike, start looking not for reasons to not believe, but for excuses to believe, that we might one and all be delivered from the hell of solitude that a critical, analytic spirit inevitably leads us to.