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Jan 14

Why I’m Not a Five Point Calvinist

By Robert | 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

Why Do I Feel Guilty?

By Robert | 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

What Does God Want?

By Robert | Cleric Listens | No Comments

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

Redemption: Justification and Salvation Both

By Robert | 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:

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.
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.
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.
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

God is Jewish

By Robert | 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.

Jan 14

Digital Theology

By Robert | Cleric Listens | No Comments

I am the son of a computing pioneer. My father was working at Point Mugu in the early 1950’s when one of the first analog computers ever sold arrived on the loading dock. Being a Scot, my father took note of the price tag, $65,000 I believe, and decided he needed to find out what this machine was and what it could do. He was soon able to use the device to simulate the flight of aircraft and the missiles to shoot them down, and later simulated the pulmonary and cardiac systems of the human body when he built one of the first working heart and lung machines in his spare time. With my mother he founded Simulations Councils, Incorporated, which later became The Society for Computer Simulation. Suffice it to say that he was so successful in spreading the gospel of computer simulation and its benefits that the Society today is no longer needed nor is it vital. All branches of human endeavor have adopted computers and simulation as a means of maximizing performance and control while minimizing costs and risks. With the development of integrated circuits, digital computers have largely replaced analog because of the increased computational power they offer at a much lower cost. This change has become possible only through the grudging realization that you can represent just about any datum or relationship through bits of 1 or 0, there or not there, present or absent. It’s not a romantic notion, but it’s true: by reducing all concepts to binary representation, we arrive at the best, cheapest, fastest way to do work and increase our leisure time.

In contrast to this increased dependency upon the black/white, there or not there reality of digital computation, we have the moral world around us. Francis Schaeffer points out that up until the 19th century, a similar, binary view of the world prevailed. Things were either in keeping with divine revelation or not; they were right or wrong, divine or demonic, worthwhile or harmful. With the introduction of Hegel’s dialectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, however, we have a world that is increasingly attracted to gray. There was no right or wrong, only progress towards a more refined synthesis. What started out as a philosophical commentary was soon applied in every arena, particularly moral theology or ethics. Gone is the quaint idea that things have implicit moral validity; a binary valuation. Hegel has allowed us to substitute a kind of analog morality that has had sweeping implications. Things that were once considered outrageous or inconceivable are now not only tolerated but encouraged as being avant garde or progressive. It seems that our society is moving in one direction with respect to technology, while it’s moving in the exact opposite direction in terms of philosophy, morality, or perish the thought, theology.

To be fair I should point out that not everybody’s gone to shades of gray regarding moral theology. Whereas the last almost 500 years have been characterized by a tension between the poles of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, that enduring conflict has given way to a new battle between liberal and conservative versions of Christianity. Unthinkable just a short time ago, conservatives of both Roman and Protestant stripes are finding they have more in common with one another than they do with their liberal compatriots. This could never have happened unless both Roman and Protestant theologians had started to think like Hegel and base their pronouncements upon changing views of what constitutes right. Just as an analog computer works by comparing relative voltages, modern moral debate is based upon a reference voltage that is fluctuating according to popular sentiment. The result is that Rome has compromised its moral integrity in the name of legal and financial expedience, and the only sins that abide in Protestantism are those of sexism, racism, and homophobia.

So the question then becomes, in this debate between liberal and conservative, who’s right? We can play Biblical roulette and proof-text using verses that buttress our preconceived position, but that’s been tried and has produced more acrimony than certainty. Is it possible to look at the full expanse of the revelation of God as revealed in both Testaments of the Bible and come to an understanding of how God operates, and how he chooses to reveal himself, that will shed some light on this clash of hermeneutics? I believe it is.

Taken as a whole, the first thing you notice about the Bible is its inherent redundancy in terms of both its form and its content. In terms of literary form, you have Hebrew poetry and chiastic rhetoric. The former is characterized not by rhyme, but by repetition, or parallelism. This repetition can be attributed to three concerns. The first is that it’s the only form of poetry that translates without loss; it doesn’t depend upon rhyme. Secondly, it helps convey emphasis. 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.”

Finally, it is God’s signature, so to speak, in all his dealings with his creation. Finite humans require a point of moral reference when receiving or asserting truth. As the author of the Letter to the Hebrews explains,

“Because God wanted to make the unchanging nature of his purpose very clear to the heirs of what was promised, he confirmed it with an oath. God did this so that, by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled to take hold of the hope offered to us may be greatly encouraged.”

A chiasmus is the traditional form of argument or persuasion wherein an argument is marshaled through a series of points, each building upon that which precedes it. A culmination or conclusions is reached, then the argument is repeated, point by point, in the opposite order. A five point argument would appear as A,B,C,D,E,D,C,B,A. This is the form of rhetorical argument Jesus and the apostles were so good at that they confounded the religious teachers who theretofore had been its sole masters.

A similar preoccupation with repetition is evident with respect to the historical events the Bible records. Old Testament, New Testament; two. These equate with the two covenants, first with Abraham, then through Jesus. Two temples, the one made of stone, then the flesh and bones of Jesus. Each sacrament has its own prior adumbration as well, first the water of the Red Sea, which presages baptism, and then the Passover lamb, which finds its perfection in the sacrifice of Jesus. Even the bad stuff seems to have a precursor, with the destruction of the temple and deportation of the Jews as a foretaste of the final judgment of humanity. Though resembling the literary forms mentioned above, this repetition of events or types is more comprehensive still. Whereas the former involves repetition of like words or concepts, the latter involves the repetition of events that are similar in intent but different in terms of efficacy. In every case, there is first an imperfect, temporary, physical presentation, primarily of human authorship or agency. There is then a later repetition that is of divine agency, that is perfect, permanent, and spiritual. It’s as if God lets us try it once ourselves to make the point that we can’t do it by ourselves. He then comes and does it unilaterally and correctly.

The form of Biblical revelation appears to be a reflection of a deeper bilateral symmetry of the cosmos itself. There are two created orders, one spiritual and one physical. There are two moral actors, God and man. The intent was that they were to be in communion, but it was not long before a problem developed between them. At the outset of trouble we see two perspectives. God asks, “Who told you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” Man, showing that the first sign of human sin is blame shifting, responds by saying, “The woman you put here with me – she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.” It’s not his fault, it’s the fault of the woman and the God who put her there. From this point on, man has two problems: God’s at enmity with him, and he’s at enmity with God. This produces two dilemmas on man’s part: moral guilt and powerlessness to change. God’s solutions, needless to say, are also two in number: our justification and our salvation.

If there’s one thing that has been consistently overlooked in the Scriptures, it’s this notion that God’s solution to our problems, our redemption, is a two-step process. I don’t know why this is so hard to see, but apparently it is. 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. 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:

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

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. 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:

The second word God speaks is that of salvation, to Paul an entirely different issue. 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 realize that their justification carries with it a moral imperative. 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. The notion of “eternal security” is not only not Biblical, it’s apparently not true. 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 if this fantasy is indulged in, become subject to this coming, second judgment. Jews and Christians both have sensed this reality, and have commemorated coming of age 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. Jesus is now our Lord.” This, as both experience and the Bible suggest, is anything but universal.

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 Pentecost is a historical fact no less than Good Friday, each of us must allow a personal Pentecost if its benefits are to be conferred upon us. No individual can take credit for this new life, but it is nevertheless up to us to cede exclusive control of our volition, and let the Spirit have his way with us. The goal is that our behavior might conform to and reflect our legal status as being morally righteous. We have a role to play that, unlike that which Pelagius would encourage, is not positive. It is negative, the cessation of something pernicious, but one which nevertheless requires our concurrence. As Oswald Chambers says,

“The disposition of sin is not immorality and wrong-doing, but the disposition of real-realization – I am my own god…The condemnation is not that I am born with a heredity of sin, but if when I realize Jesus Christ came to deliver me from it, I refuse to let Him do so, from that moment I begin to get the seal of damnation.”

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. For the very young, this is a 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. And 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. Children who are baptized young should be raised in the knowledge of their accomplished justification. This is the norm. Older people who come to faith in Christ later in life should view baptism as an opportunity to agree with Paul that “I have been crucified with Christ.” They are dead to self, and the ceremony symbolizes burial that an entirely new person might come up who is aware of their 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 introduced by divine act on two days in history, Good Friday and Pentecost.

So what does this say about the revelation of God’s will for our doctrine and moral conduct? It reveals that God is squarely in the digital age. To quote Oswald Chambers again,

“In spiritual relationship we do not grow step by step; we are either there or we are not. God does not cleanse us more and more from sin, but when we are in the light, walking in the light, we are cleansed from all sin. It is a question of obedience, and instantly the relationship is perfected. Turn away for one second out of obedience, and darkness and death are at work at once.”

There are several passages in the Scriptures that suggest some analog computing lingers in the universe, such as when it says that along with differing gifts and degrees of revelation there are differing expectations. Further, as behavior differs, rewards can follow suit. For the most part, however, there is right, and there is wrong. It galls us, who favor systems that we can master without help from another, but it’s just not what the Bible is saying. The Bible is a book of extremes, of absolutes, just as holiness is absolute. We need to rehabilitate the notions of black and white. They are not inclusive, nor are they intended to be. We’re not the point of reference, God is. Jesus echoes this absolute dichotomy when he says, “…whoever is not against you is for you, ” and “He who is not with me is against me.” All attempts to render God’s will with respect to our doctrine, our philosophy or our behavior in shades of gray is to try to dilute that which is absolute.

It’s a hackneyed cliché to say that there are only two kinds of people in the world, but that appears to be the case with regard to our response to the Gospel. When Jesus was crucified there were two thieves executed along with him, and they exhibit the two responses we can have to his ministry. One is the wrong response, and the other is the right response. Listen to the first thief, who is flippant about his own role in matters and incredulous regarding Jesus’ authority. “Aren’t you the Christ? Save yourself and us!” He personifies those in every age who hear the Gospel and make the mistake of thinking they are alive when in fact they are dead. This mistake may be manifested in two ways. On the one hand they can deny guilt by reserving the right to determine moral authority unto themselves. In doing so they are saying they don’t need a Savior. On the other, they can acknowledge guilt, but insist that they have the power within themselves to reform. They don’t need a Lord. Both constitute blaspheming the Holy Spirit, either by denying the testimony to our guilt found in the Scriptures He caused to be written, or by refusing Him control of our will. The Holy Spirit is gentle but he’s determined, and he will not tolerate competition for our will. He, like anybody with whom we have a relationship, can be frustrated and driven from our presence. The man who competes with the Spirit will eventually be left alone, bereft, fruitless. The second thief is the obverse. “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. In such men the Spirit finds a chance to dwell, and the sure and certain sign of his presence is the fruit he bears. Between the two men, we have the sum total of human response to the Gospel. 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? I binary question.

One of the legacies my father passed on to me was a love of the outdoors. Scotsmen like to camp because it’s cheap, but in the process an appreciation for the created order took deep root. As that creation is beautiful and beneficial, so one can conclude that the One who made it is beautiful and well-disposed towards us. Every aspect of creation, its laws of life and death, are intended to make us mindful of the intelligence and love behind the work. It has been argued that the presence of DNA in all living organisms proves that all evolved from a common life form. I would counter that when the Lord goes to the trouble of developing a system that works, that is perfect, he uses it throughout his garden. As with natural laws, so with moral laws. The same reasoning can apply to the processing, storage and communication of information, whether secular or sacred. Nature has validated a binary nomenclature for data processing as best; it’s clear, concise and responds to advances in technology. I contend that this is a reflection of the fact that the moral universe is itself binary in essence; God has instituted a mechanism of salvation that is itself clear, concise, and responsive to cultural translation. Our natural tendency is to make things, especially important things, more complicated than they really are. It should come as a relief and a joy that all we really need to know about life can be comprehended if we can just count to two.

Jan 14

Christmas Thoughts

By Robert | Cleric Listens | No Comments

This essay is about Christmas. Really! But where to start?

When we consider how God speaks to us, we realize there are two ways he does so. First, there is the extraordinary: pillars of fire, commandments written on stone, or flashes of lightning. Even the voice of a donkey. Then there is the more pedestrian way, his written Word. But this, too, is wildly varied, and we should be struck by how often he speaks to us in poetry. And when I say poetry, I’m not referring to the rhyming verse we’re familiar with in Western languages, but rather the Eastern variant, which is known as parallelism. Parallelism is simply saying things twice, but in slightly different ways. Whereas our poetry repeats sounds, Hebrew poetry repeats thoughts. No doubt God chose this form of poetry for several reasons, not the least of which is that it translates into all languages without loss. Further, it tends to bring emphasis to what’s being said, and whenever God speaks, emphasis is always justified. As was said by Joseph when interpreting Pharaoh’s dream, “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.” But more than being an effective literary device, I believe this repetition tells us something about the author, God himself. For a careful reading of the Bible reveals that not only does God tend to say things twice, he tends to do things twice as well. Nowhere in the Biblical narrative is this more clear than in the case of the first Christmas in Bethlehem of Judea.

On the one hand, nothing is more unique than the birth of Christ. Never before, and never since, has God deigned to enter his creation as a human being, even a baby. I’m fond of saying that those things that are done perfectly need never be repeated, and the birth of Jesus falls into this category. By any measure the Incarnation was a success, and achieved everything the Father intended that it should accomplish. By Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, he has, in the words of Oswald Chambers,

“…switched the whole of the human race back into a right relationship with God.”

But for all the success of the Incarnation, it still had one major weakness, and that was its particularity. Even after his resurrection, Jesus was limited in his presence to one time, one place, one audience. If the whole of humanity, the whole of creation were to be redeemed, something more needed to be done. What we see, to our eternal joy, is that the Father decreed that upon his ascension, Jesus would be empowered to send his own Spirit forth to all humanity. The plan was that people might do in their individual circumstances what Jesus himself would do were he there. In allowing this, the full ministry of the risen Lord could be multiplied to the extent that any and everybody who was disposed to obey him as Lord would become his ambassador.

The only catch in this arrangement is that it involves the will of the human recipient. Our justification doesn’t require our knowledge, approval or participation in any way, for it was accomplished in full on Good Friday; Jesus is Savior of all. Our reception of God’s Spirit does require our knowledge, approval and participation, however, because it involves our will, our volition. Specifically, it requires that we cede that will to another, even Jesus Christ. Because of this glaring difference, Jesus is not Lord of all. The reason some refuse this interference in their lives is because it is, strictly speaking, unnatural. Adam and Eve were very deliberate in their decision to rebel, and it’s only by a series of moral choices that we undo the rights and habits they established. What are those choices? Essentially, more than doing new things, they are a cessation of things that we’ve always done. First of all, we have to stop running from God. Whereas Adam ran because he was naked and ashamed, Paul says we are now clothed with Christ, and thus clothed we can cry “Abba, Father.” Further, we must stop trying to repay our debt to God as if we ever could. The evil servant, confronted with his astronomical and unpayable debt, simply asked for more time, and he would pay everything. This is temporizing, purely and simply. Finally, to cede our will means that we stop committing Adam’s other sin, and that was deciding for ourselves what is good and evil. If we would be about Jesus’ business, we must submit to him in all ways, not only in terms of what we don’t do, but also what we do.

About now you’re asking, wasn’t this article about Christmas? Trust me, I’m getting there. On the one hand, the birth of Christ was a unique event, never suffering or requiring repetition. On the other hand, it is a metaphor for what we must undergo if we are to be restored to usefulness in God’s kingdom. In the words of Oswald Chambers…

“Just as Our Lord came into human history from outside, so He must come into me from outside. Have I allowed my personal human life to become a ‘Bethlehem’ for the Son of God?”

The Orthodox church makes much of Mary, calling her theotokos, which means God-bearer. Rome venerates her as well, viewing her as slightly more accessible and no less powerful than her son, our Lord Jesus. What Oswald is pointing out is that although nobody can nor need duplicate Mary’s role historically, we must all replicate her role spiritually. We can, no less than she, carry the person of Jesus in our hearts and minds, making him present here and now no less than he was present in Bethlehem.

The only complication with this plan is that it requires our cooperation. Just as Mary said, “I am the Lord’s servant, May it be to me as you have said,” we have to utter the same words of submission. What unites all Christians is not that we are cleansed from our sins by the death of Christ; all humanity can make that claim. What is peculiar to Christians is that we have renounced that Satanic independence into which we were born, and have agreed that Jesus should not only be our Savior, but our Lord as well.

Here we see God as the ultimate poet, the ultimate lover of his creation. He is not content that things should be to his liking in heaven, he also wants them to be to his honor and glory on earth. So he makes it possible, nay, necessary, that He who dwells in heaven in his primal glory, should also return to earth in the hearts of those who will do his bidding. And this is the key; he visits those who are predisposed to do what he says were he to speak! As Oswald Chamber says,

“If anything is a mystery to you and it is coming in between you and God, never look for the explanation in your intellect, look for it in your disposition, it is that which is wrong.”

If we are willing, then God will do repeatedly and spiritually what he did uniquely and historically in the coming of his Son into the world. Two moral actors, two realms of creation, two Advents; there is a fundamental binary quality to the cosmos. Separate in spatial and temporal dimensions, yet unified in the spiritual. This theme of unity overcoming separation is what characterizes God’s activity, and it is possible only through the repetition of the life Jesus brings. When we encounter repetition in language, it’s poetry. When we encounter it in our lives, it becomes the heart of God. Oswald continues:

“I cannot enter into the realm of the Kingdom of God unless I am born from above by a birth totally unlike natural birth. ‘Ye must be born again.’ This is not a command, it is a foundation fact. The characteristic of the new birth is that I yield myself so completely to God that Christ is formed in me.”

Jan 13

God: The CliffsNotes

By Robert | Cleric Listens | No Comments

Introduction

When I was in college, CliffsNotes were displayed behind the bookstore counter, covering all the books and topics students would be tested on in the coming semester. Now, far be it from me to consult one of these cheat sheets, but there they were. SOMEBODY must be buying them, having neglected to do their homework on a timely basis. The notion was this: you don’t have to read the whole text, read the CliffsNotes and get what is essential while avoiding what was optional. It strikes me that somebody needs to do this for the average man in the street, who knows nothing about the Bible or all that has been written about it. Where is theology that accords with Antoine de St. Exupery, who when contemplating his biplane observed, “perfection is achieved not when there’s nothing more to add, but when there’s nothing more to take away?”

The purpose of this exercise is to document the critical issue of how God deals with mankind, and what is expected of us by way of response. Folks, that’s all that really matters, and it isn’t that complicated. It’s rumored that Karl Barthe, no stranger to overkill in his own oeuvre, was asked towards the end of his career what he had learned about theology. His answer? He quoted the child’s ditty, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” Just so. Short of wholesale reductionism like this, let’s see what can be said about God and his dealings with us that is essential, correct, and brief. Our audience, lost and hurting, deserves nothing less.

Question: How Does God Deal with Humanity?

How does God deal with man? In two ways: forensically and effectually. There is a logical priority here, so they should be dealt with in order.

By forensically I mean legally. Because God is moral, and because we’ve been created in his image, we exist in a moral relationship with him. That means that there is a hierarchy in our relationship: he is in a position of authority, and we are in a position of subservience. These are not popular notions, but that doesn’t detract from their veracity. God’s position of moral superiority is inexorable and immutable, and is characterized by a divine sovereignty of volition. God can and does do what he wants, when he wants, and there’s not much we can do about it, not that we should want to.

This is what allows us to talk about what is right and wrong. Things are right or wrong to the extent that they coincide with this divine will. To be right, you must be in accord with divine will. Anything else is to be wrong. Thus, right and wrong are discovered only by revelation; they are received by us as subjects in God’s creation. Want to know right from wrong? Read the Bible. From its stories we can infer all we need to know of God’s moral requirements.

So we find ourselves in a moral relationship with God whether we like it or not. It follows that that relationship can go one of two ways; well or poorly. The Bible is a story about how it went well for a chapter or two, then went poorly, and then, through God’s persistent and patient work, started to go well again. When our representative, Adam, ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he caused two problems for himself and all his children. First of all, he brought moral guilt upon all humanity. On account of his disobedience, God was now at enmity with man. He was mad at us. The second problem Adam caused was that his actions killed the spirit of man, and we lost our ability to be in touch with God. As Jesus says, God is spirit, and those who would worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. The symptom of this spiritual death is that we are incapable of doing right, and are only capable of doing wrong. We are weak, we lack power to do anything worthwhile from a moral or divine perspective. When we try to do right, we fail, and we blame God for exposing our error because it stands in stark contrast to his abiding holiness. So not only are we guilty in God’s sight, we are also hobbled in actual fact. We are at enmity with God. We are mad at him.

Now God has a dilemma on his hands. What to do? First of all, he can start over with a better cast of characters. This is what he did in the flood, when he decided that only Noah had anything on the ball. Yet in the end, starting over changed nothing, and that approach was forever abandoned; God gave us the rainbow. Secondly, God could simply go over the rules again, and hope that the trouble was caused by an information deficit. This is the story of the Old Testament. On the off chance that the Jews simply needed some guidance and encouragement, he gave the Law through Moses and correction through the Prophets. Needless to say, nothing changed here either. Even though the Jews had all the information they needed, and rituals that addressed their moral quandary, they continued to evince the guilt and powerlessness common to man as a result of the Fall.

Our problems with God have consequences in our relationships with the rest of Creation as well; we fight one another, the created order, and ourselves. Sickness, death, estrangement, violence; all are symptoms of a prior schism with our Creator.

Finally, God can undertake reform on his own, unilaterally. If man’s the problem, by leaving him out of the process perhaps an effective remedy can be found. This is the story of the New Testament. Here we have God getting to the root problems of moral guilt and powerlessness, not patching things up with a band-aid. The way he does this is through his Son, Jesus of Nazareth. As Paul says in Romans 5:9,10, he justifies us by the death of Christ, and he saves us by his life. Redemption involves not one but both of these activities.

In order to solve the problem of our moral guilt, God came up with a plan called the substitutionary atonement. It’s based on the principle that when a law is broken, the guilty party must pay with their life. As Scripture says, “without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness.” It works in this manner: God selects somebody who is without sin, who is not guilty, and assigns to them the guilt or responsibility for the crime that has been committed. The punishment that is due the guilty party is put on this innocent party. The grace or freedom that was due the innocent party is then transferred to the guilty party. A great exchange takes place, whereby the innocent pays the price owed by the guilty, and the guilty are accorded the liberty due the innocent. Hardly fair for the innocent, but who are we to complain? The only problem with this plan is that nobody on earth could be found to function as an innocent sacrifice. All people, imbued with sin, fail on the first requirement that the victim be themselves innocent. For this plan to work, somebody had to be found who was not subject to the hereditary sin that bedevils all mankind. This is where Jesus of Nazareth comes in. Not having a human father, he doesn’t have the heredity of sin the rest of us do. He, alone, of all people born on this earth, qualifies to function as the scapegoat in this plan of redemption. Just as God provided a ram for Abraham so he didn’t have to sacrifice Isaac, God provides his own son to take our place as the intended sacrifice. As Abraham said to Isaac, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” By offering himself in our place, Jesus upholds the perfect holiness of God, while enabling sinners to have communion with God once again.

This tells us something about God’s nature. He is willing to pay the price for humanity to be redeemed through his own suffering. This magnanimity is why we worship God.

Viewed this way, we understand the cosmic significance of certain events in history. Specifically, we see that as of Good Friday, judgment has been passed on human sin for all people, in all places, and for all time. There is no limit to the power of the blood of Jesus. As Scripture says, he died for the sins of the whole world. As Jesus further says, all sins and blasphemies uttered against the Son of Man will be forgiven. We will never be judged for the wrong we do, our sins of commission. No longer need we be ashamed for our nakedness, as Adam was, for we are now clothed with Christ, to use Paul’s expression. In a very real sense, God is no longer at enmity with us; he is no longer mad at us. The curtain separating God from man is torn in two, and we can boldly enter God’s presence as children.

Good Christian ministry stresses the effectiveness of God’s actions on Good Friday. As of then, our sins are washed away. It is important for people to know this. This is why we baptize infants who are oblivious to their spiritual condition. All people, infant and adult, stand justified by that one-time, unrepeatable, forensic transaction whereby the Father judged sin in the person of his Son without reference to our knowledge or participation.

Easter, therefore, is derivative in its importance. It is significant not just because Jesus is found to be alive, but because of WHY he’s alive. The Law prescribed death as a punishment for moral transgression. When Jesus died for our sins, the Law was satisfied. Having been satisfied for all time and eternity, it ceased to exist; it was fulfilled. When it ceased to exist, the penalty it prescribed, death, was also vitiated. The resurrection of Jesus Christ proves that the whole of mankind is now rehabilitated in God’s eyes. We are in Christ, as both relational metaphor and legal reality.

One problem solved, one to go. If divine intervention on our behalf stopped with Good Friday, we would be abandoned to an endless cycle of spiritual tumult. Moral effort would lead to failure, failure to guilt, guilt to confession, confession to forgiveness, forgiveness to renewed effort and subsequent failure. God, in his love, for us, knows that we need not only legal forgiveness but also effectual help. We need to be changed in reality as well as exonerated legally. To do this, he again turns to his son Jesus. He forgives us through his death, but to use Paul’s terminology in Romans 5:9,10, he saves us through his life.

Paul makes a clear distinction between these two activities, justification and salvation, as does the author of the Letter to the Hebrews. This distinction is also implicit in all of the parables and in the words of John the Baptist. What we gather from Scripture is that in addition to the judgment passed on sin on Good Friday, there will also be a judgment leveled on fruitlessness at the consummation of the age. Matthew 25 portrays this as a separation of the sheep from the goats, and the distinguishing criterion will not be sin committed, but rather righteousness squandered. Nobody is judged for wrongs done, but all will be judged for the good not performed. John the Baptist refers to this when he says that the axe is already laid to the root of the tree that does not bear fruit. Jesus, in his parable of the wedding garments, states that all are invited to the wedding feast, both good and bad (universal justification,) but the guest who is found to be without wedding garments is cast out, for he does not have the fruit that is expected of those who would put themselves in the Spirit’s service.

Many attribute the Pauline distinction between justification and salvation to Hebrew parallelism. This is wrong. Until the reality of TWO judgments for different problems is realized, Christian soteriology makes no sense. Once you do make the distinction, then everything falls into place. The idea of salvation is that we have been put in Christ’s position legally, but our nature is unchanged. Only when the Spirit of Christ enters us effectually does that essential nature change, and we can have the power to do right. In addition to being in Christ, we need Christ in us. This is the normative expectation of the Bible story, yet it’s not widely understood by Christians. Many act like Mary Magdalene, who recognized Jesus after his resurrection. In her enthusiasm she clings to him, not wanting to let him go. Yet Jesus chastises her, saying that to cling would be wrong, as he must return to the Father to complete his redemptive work. Should he not ascend, he would not be accorded the authority to shed his Spirit abroad over all humanity as happened on Pentecost. Uninformed Christians, many of whom appreciate their justification, nevertheless do not know that God has done more for them than merely forgive them. He has also made it possible to recover their spiritual capacity lost at the Fall and be a successful spiritual creature once again.

The experience of trying to live without a personal Pentecost is called back-sliding, and results in that spiritual treadmill described earlier. People who have this experience usually do one of two things. Either they persist in trying to please God with their own efforts and become neurotic, unattractive religious humbugs, or they can give up and reject Christian morality as impossible, and become religious liberals.

Question: What Does God Expect from Us?

The experience of spiritual renewal being described here has been given many names: being born again, baptized in the Holy Spirit, filled with the Holy Spirit, regenerated, being saved or being converted. They all attempt to describe the same reality, that the individual, born a two part person with a body and a soul, is as of salvation a three part person, with the addition of the Holy Spirit of the risen Lord Jesus entering into their being. The details of the experience vary as gifts of the Spirit vary, and it is a mistake to make some aspects of the experience normative for all. What is normative, however, is that the conscious mind will have a new awareness of God’s moral authority, as well as a new capacity for obedience to that authority. Evangelical denominations tend to associate this experience with adult baptism, while churches with historical consciousness tend to associate it with Confirmation. Because individual experiences vary, some conclude that this whole process of personal regeneration is optional. This is a grave mistake, and lies at the root of the incapacity of the Christian Church we see today. Again, the Bible suggests the following bilateral symmetry:

Actor

Man’s Problem

Attitude as of the Fall

Solution

Historic Event

Extent

Our Position Relative to Christ

Associated Sacrament

Judgments

Role of Christ

Event in Theological Terms

God

Guilt

Enmity with Man

Blood of Christ

Good Friday

Universal

Us in Christ legally

Baptism

On Sin

Savior

Justification

Man

Power-

lessness

Enmity with God

Life of Christ

Pentecost

Particular

Christ in us effectually

Eucharist

On Fruitless-ness

Lord

Salvation

We see that two actors have two perspectives that lead to two problems requiring two solutions, both involving the Son of God. One solution does not involve our participation, just our appreciation. The other solution, because it impinges on our will or volition, DOES involve our participation. To the extent that we accept the idea that we must cede our will to God, all will go well. To the extent that we take umbrage at God’s requirements, we will not be allowed to participate in God’s salvation. Thus, the seemingly random experience of spiritual regeneration is not due to God’s caprice or “election,” but rather our willingness to acknowledge our position of moral servitude. To be more specific, God links the outpouring of the Holy Spirit to our attitude towards that document written by that same Spirit, the Bible. If we go to God and say, “I want your spiritual blessings in the here and now, but I’m going to argue with what the Spirit has caused to be written in the past,” then I’m pretty sure God’s going to withhold further spiritual revelation until that attitude changes. He doesn’t, as Jesus said, cast his pearls before swine. This reality makes it hard for people-first types to get anywhere with God. If we cling to our liberal notions about freedom of the will in all its permutations, we will find ourselves bereft of true revelation.

Here it’s appropriate to address the attention paid by many Christians, notably Protestants, to the terms election and predestination. Reading the Bible from a Western, or Greek perspective, these terms seem to suggest that God chooses some for salvation and others for damnation without regard to individual volition or behavior. Although this conclusion does uphold God’s sovereignty, it does violence to his character as a loving Creator. It is helpful to note several things about how the Bible uses these terms. First of all, it can be argued that they are used exclusively when addressing Gentile readers, or speaking of God’s treatment of Gentiles. Rather than argue that God is arbitrary, the terms suggest that God, in his eternal counsels, knew of the spiritual needs of Gentiles and in his love included them in his plan of redemption. Until the coming of Christ, the revelation of God was limited to Jews. With the coming of Jesus, however, that revelation was opened up to Gentiles as well, in what Paul calls the “mystery of God.” By using the terms foreknowledge, choice and election, the Biblical authors are assuring their Gentile readers that they, too, are objects of God’s love and eligible for inclusion in his plan of redemption. Further, these terms should be understood in the light of Eastern or Jewish intent. Typically, Easterners do not think in terms of individuals, but rather in terms of families, tribes, nations or other groups; types if you will. What these terms really state is that ALL those who submit to God’s plan of redemption, without regard to race, are eligible for eternal felicities. The idea of double predestination, wherein God damns some arbitrarily as individuals is a pernicious and false reading of Scripture. The term predestination never refers to assigning some to heaven and some to hell, but rather to stipulating that benefits will accrue to believers in this life, and not just in the life to come. We are predestined, for example, to conformance to the nature of Christ or adoption as sons, while we yet live. This is not to suggest that God’s plan of redemption cannot be frustrated. God does allow us to damn ourselves. In the words of Oswald Chambers, “The condemnation is not that I am born with a heredity of sin, but if when I realize Jesus Christ came to deliver me from it, I refuse to let Him do so, from that moment I begin to get the seal of damnation.”

Christians are forever fighting about whether or not we can “lose our salvation.” Certain terms, not found in the Scriptures, such as “eternal security,” have been coined to introduce the notion that “once saved, always saved.” These conundra have their root in poor Biblical exegesis. As said before, justification is universal, while salvation is particular. It’s not so much that one “loses” their justification, but that the introduction of a second judgment renders acquittal at the first nugatory. It is entirely possible to experience the joy of forgiveness and moral justification, and eventually be cut off and burned as a fruitless branch. The branches that are burned in John 15:2 were originally, in Jesus’ words, “in me.”

So if God doesn’t save or damn as individuals arbitrarily, what does he look for? Roman Catholics typically have answered ritual fidelity, fundamentalists have responded by saying the avoidance of certain attractive sins, and dispensationalists have said God looks for knowledge. None of these is correct. Technically speaking, God’s not looking for anything positive at all, but rather something negative. He doesn’t want us to do anything, but to stop doing something. He wants us to exhibit two qualities, both of which are negations. First of all, he wants us to be honest; honest about our inability to do anything morally good or correct on our own. He wants us to stop protesting our innocence. Then, he wants us to be humble. Humility is a willingness to accept his intervention and aid. Lacking the power to do any good thing ourselves, as Paul laments in Romans 7, we invite him to come and do in us what we can’t do ourselves, and to give him all the credit for it. God doesn’t want to improve us, he wants to replace us; a very different thing. All this comes back to our perception of God’s moral authority. Do we grant him all authority, or do we reserve moral authority for ourselves?

Perhaps it’s best to go back to the beginning to discover what God is looking for by way of response from us. When Adam ate of the tree in the garden, he saw that he was naked and ashamed, and ran from God. He was mad at God. As of Good Friday, however, we are “clothed with Christ,” and no longer stand naked nor in need of being ashamed. Therefore, what God’s now looking for from us is that we accept this new legal standing, and stop running from him. When he offers us the Spirit of his son Jesus as a gift, we should accept it in trust that it’s a good thing, and not judge, whine or run away as if we believe it to be an evil trick. To run from the Spirit is to commit the one sin that will not be forgiven, which is described as blaspheming the Holy Spirit. When you refuse the offer of a personal Pentecost, or reject the words of the Bible that were written by the Holy Spirit, you recommit Adam’s sin, nail Christ to the cross all over again, and cut yourself off from spiritual power and the possibility of bearing fruit. We may exist, but we are not alive.

Jesus has two titles: Savior and Lord. He is the Savior of all, no matter what you know or acknowledge. He is your Lord only by a matter of moral transaction: will I do what my Lord says?

What we’ve shown so far is that God deals with man in two ways and only two ways. There is no mystery, no fuzziness, no vagueness about his dealings with man. Although our experiences of God differ and he defies being placed in a box according to our wishes, nevertheless God’s plan of redemption is as consistent and immutable as he is. From his dealings with us, we can conclude what he expects from us. Specifically, he doesn’t expect from us things we cannot do ourselves. He doesn’t expect us to be perfect or even good. He doesn’t expect us to come to him with works, but only true, solid sin. He doesn’t expect us to change things we cannot change. What he does expect, as stated before, is honesty and humility. All who submit to God’s plan of redemption are predestined to new life now and elect to participate in the life to come. Those who reject the plan as onerous, too degrading or whatever, are in effect arguing with God and will find themselves deprived of his plan’s benefits. As John 5:22 says, you cannot honor the Father without honoring the Son, and as John 12:48 says, you cannot honor the Son without honoring the Word he speaks as Lord. If a person is not in touch with God, it’s because they have put conditions on their submission to his Word.

Why all this effort of God’s part? For two reasons. First of all, man was destined for holiness, not destruction. God intends to put creation back on the right footing it was on in the beginning. But now it is not based upon something as ephemeral as man’s ability to understand and obey. The new Kingdom of God is based upon resolute and absolute obedience of the Son of God who redeems all by his death and animates all by his Holy Spirit. The second reason the Father goes to all this trouble is that a bride must be found for the Son. Just as Abraham sent his servant back to his homeland to find a bride suitable for his son Isaac, and Isaac for his son Jacob, so, too, the heavenly Father sends his Son to earth to find a suitable bride. One who is chaste, spotless, responsive and obedient. This can only be a bride who has been purified by the blood of the Cross of Good Friday and animated by the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. Like all good stories, the story of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is at its root a love story. The object of love gets into trouble, but through the perseverance of the lover, all obstacles are overcome, the marriage takes place, and they live happily ever after.

Question: Is All This Doctrine Important?

Now why all this effort to establish doctrine with regard to what’s known as soteriology, the doctrine of how we’re saved? The last time people fought about this was 400 years ago. Weren’t all the salient issues resolved then? Actually, no. And all the vituperation that’s flying around today about what constitutes Christian behavior is a direct result of having either forgotten received truth or having new, unresolved doctrinal issues.

Perhaps the most pernicious result of doctrinal laxity is the notion that there is no role for humans to play in their own redemption. John Calvin and his acolytes went so far as to say that we have no control over our eternal destinies; it’s decided by God, and arbitrarily at that. Therefore, when ethical questions arise, it’s hard for Christians to say what right behavior is, or that there’s a standard for morality at all. The answer to this quandary is to remember that there are two judgments, one for sin and one for fruitfulness. The former is taken care of by God unilaterally on the Cross on Good Friday. In spite of what Calvin said, there is no limited atonement regarding sin. On the other hand, something is expected of us by way of response to that reality, and that is a negation of our freedom so powerfully exercised at the time of the Fall. We are expected to recognize the incompatibility of our moral freedom and the Lordship of Jesus Christ, and to cede that freedom to him as Lord. This is not a pleasant process, and is therefore one that many, indeed most, shy away from. This explains why justification can be universal, but salvation is not; most lack the moral character necessary to stop running from God and let the Holy Spirit have his way with us.

If this is true, the consequences for our approach to pastoral ministry are legion. Everything we do as Christians should be directed towards helping others come to a right conclusion about the deleterious effects of moral free agency, that they might consciously place themselves under the moral authority of the risen Lord. Listen to what an astute pastoral counselor, Bill Gillham, has said.

“Biblical counseling seeks to lead the believer to the end of his strength – regardless of how productive (or nonproductive [sic]) such ‘strength’ may have proven to be – and into the certainty of Christ’s strength through him! The Holy Spirit, often through the school of adversity, always works against the believer’s dependency upon the flesh. Ultimately his flesh becomes nonproductive [sic] by Supernatural design at which time many seek counseling. The counselor who uses techniques generated by lost men to help such a believer cut his losses is interrupting God’s process of bringing that Christian to the end of his personal resources. The more ‘skilled’ and ‘effective’ the counselor, the more he sets God back to square one, having to begin the breaking process all over again.”

The same note is echoed by Oswald Chambers, who writes:

“One of the severest lessons comes from the stubborn refusal to see that we must not interfere in other people’s lives. It takes a long time to realize the danger of being an amateur providence, that is, interfering with God’s order for others. You see a certain person suffering, and you say – He shall not suffer, and I will see that he does not. You put your hand straight in front of God’s permissive will to prevent it, and God says, – ‘What is that to thee?’ If there is stagnation spiritually, never allow it to go on, but get into God’s presence and find out the reason for it. Possibly you will find it is because you have been interfering in the life of another; proposing things you had no right to propose; advising when you had no right to advise.”

This perspective runs completely counter to what many consider “Christian” behavior and proper “pastoral” care. When we are asked to minister to the homeless, alcoholics, drug users, sexually promiscuous, serial adulterers, or what have you, relief of their immediate suffering may be exactly what God does NOT want you to do. When symptoms of spiritual death are removed, there is little incentive to go to the root problem, which is organic separation from the Holy Spirit. Bad soteriology leads to bad pastoral theology, each and every time. The debates that rack the Church today are unmistakable evidence that theology was neglected yesterday.

Answer

Although I would never have depended upon a CliffsNotes while in college, I do believe there was a disclaimer somewhere in each volume that said something to the effect that reading the Notes was not a substitute for reading the actual work. It was intended, it said, to complement the original work to enhance understanding of what you’ve already read. I echo that, perhaps vain, entreaty, with regard to the Bible. Is this a comprehensive summary of the contents of the entire Bible or the self-revelation of God? Of course not. But just like the CliffsNotes, this summary may just serve to help you pass the only test that counts, the test of your response to the love of God as found in the death and resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. That’s a test for which there is no make-up, no retest, no recovery. But tests are only bad when you’re not prepared. If you’re prepared, they’re a chance to show what you know: that God is love, and has already done all that is needed to solve our two problems of moral guilt and powerlessness. That, if you ask me, is pretty good news.

CliffsNotes is a registered trademark of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and is used without permission.

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Redemption: Justification and Salvation Both

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God: The CliffsNotes

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