A Polanyian View of Church Order?
As most people probably already know, I am a theologian. I am not a theologian by profession except inasmuch as all pastors are implicitly theologians, whether they take that task seriously or not. I am not academically qualified to speak as a theologian in the sense of one with a PhD in theology. And yet, I consider myself a theologian nonetheless. This does not mean, however, that theology is my only interest. It isn't. My secondary interest that has developed is the philosophy of science. Though there are certain aspects of this field that do not interest me (perhaps because I am not convinced they are dealing with the kinds of issues that are primary), I am trying to read as widely as I can since I have found the issues being discussed in it to be remarkably parallel (though not identical) with my primary interests in theology.
One of my favorite philosophers of science is Michael Polanyi, who actually may have had a more profound impact and influence on theologians than on scientists, judging by subsequent literature. Polanyi began his career as a physician, then went back to school to be trained in chemistry. Later, he was pulled into philosophy almost unwillingly because of discussions about the nature of science that were going on between Western scientists and the scientists in the Soviet Union. The question that dominated these discussions was to what extent (if at all) should the state provide guidance for the development of science. Those in the Soviet Union argued that the state, which planned everything else, should plan science. After all, if one of the great purposes of science is to serve the advancement of a state, then the state should be able to say what these scientists should be working on. In the West, this was opposed, though there was a time when this opposition was rather weak which, it would seem, is what pulled Polanyi into the debate in the first place. Western scientists argued that science could only be pure if it was free from political oversight, at least in the sense advocated by the Soviets.
Polanyi had many reasons to advocate for his view. First, because he is convinced that all knowledge, not least scientific knowledge, is the knowledge of persons who are dedicated to the truth of reality. That is, all knowledge is personal knowledge, which does not mean subjective knowledge but the acknowledgement by persons of what is the case independently of that acknowledgement. Because of this, persons engaged in research must be free to follow their personal (and largely tacit) insights and hunches. Often, significant discovery arises, not because a research program has made it clear what one should work on but because a scientist travels down the lonely road where they see a promising result that nobody else could see.
Additionally, Polanyi draws attention to the fact that much of science is only verifiable by a small number of specialists. This deviates from the kind of objectivist notions that have become increasingly popular in our culture today that say that all scientific claims are publicly verifiable, that is, anyone could do the experiment and see that the results are true. This, of course, is not true. In point of fact, only people who have been educated into a scientific culture, who have been trained to operate in ways consistent with contemporary science, who know how to use the laboratory equipment, and who have spent years working on a specialty are actually able to verify every experiment, and indeed many experiments go unverified, not least because of the tremendous cost of time and money it would involve. The point of this for our discussion is that the state is fundamentally unqualified to discern which paths in research are promising and which are not. To trust what has traditionally been done by the dynamic and unformalizable scientific intuition to bureaucrats would be to destroy science in one fell swoop.
What would seem to be a measure introduced in order to improve efficiency would turn out to be grossly inefficient, because it kills the creativity that makes science, which is far less exact and formal that many people often think, work. Rather, Polanyi argues that the most efficient way forward is to allow each scientist the freedom to pursue their own interests, to follow their own clues, and to make their own discoveries. By making the government over what research is done decentralized, it can benefit from the mutual oversight of all scientists instead of one, perhaps scientifically minded but perhaps not, politician or committee. This means decisions can be made quickly by the people who are competent to make them rather than slowly by people who may know nothing about the matter. Also, because of the practice of academic publishing, scientists can know what is going on around the world and adjust their own work to most effectively take advantage of these global insights.
In the last month or so, I have been struck with the significance of this line of thought for the church. I have begun to realize recently that most of the churches I have known have a tendency to decide, in the abstract, what it is that a church should be about, develop ideas of the kinds of ministries that should happen, and then try to recruit leaders to shape it. When this is the approach, I have noticed that several things happen. First, we tend to have some degree of difficulty to find the right people to lead these different ministries. There are some who have the skills necessary but who are already overburdened with volunteering. There are others who have the skills but have no passion for the ministry they are being recruited for. There are still others who have the skills needed but have never been asked and so may not even realize that they have such abilities. There are also times when we have people who are excited and passionate about something but simply do not have the competence to get it done.
Secondly, I find that when the ministries of the church become fundamentally more basic than the people who are leading them, there comes a time when leadership shifts for whatever reason and we often find that the idea that we might allow a ministry to cease too horrifying, so we scramble to find someone, anyone, who is willing to fill the spot. They might not be the kind of person needed for that ministry, they might be being pulled from another area where they are effective, and we must also always entertain the possibility that the church might be being called to allow a particular ministry to come to completion so that resources can be reallocated and new things can get started.
This way of approaching ministry puts the main power in the hands of very few people, who are often all too happy to take it and use it. Masterful "visions" that are generated in the mind of one person are imposed on others and what is and what is not in line with it is decided ahead of time, which carries with it the double-edged sword of the fact that the vision is clear, but it is not necessarily shared by the people. What ministries should and should not be pursued are no longer based on the prayerful answer to the question, "What is God calling us to at this time and place" and instead rooted in the question, "In what way does this further the vision we voted on once upon a time."
The problem with this whole way of approaching ministry is that it sometimes works and it has worked for some time in many churches. Leaders in a more authoritarian past established such rules for church governance and they have remained more or less unchanged. Even those who have come from such rebellious generations, who have been ruthless at changing the outer trappings of so many churches, have left the internal structure largely unchanged. The people are different and the hairstyles and clothing have changed, but the top-down authoritarian structure that the church learned, not from the self-giving Lord, but from the marketplace, has remained.
This is why I have found Polanyi's conception of academic freedom for scientists to be so compelling for the church. This is not simply because I like Polanyi's work (though I do), but because it seems to give some concrete insight into what Paul wrote so often in the New Testament. Paul does not create job descriptions out of abstract speculation and then apply them to every church without adjustment. His vision for the church approaches ministry in such a way that ministry is never a job to do, where qualified people can be swapped in and out with no real change. Ministry is always done by people who are prepared and gifted by God for the task, which means that the gift of God must be understood as more basic than the task that is performed by means of it.
To put this in more concrete terms, when Paul speaks of a five-fold ministry in Ephesians 4:11-13, we must not read it in such a way as to imply that there were clearly defined "job descriptions" for what it was to be an apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor or teacher. Rather than saying, "We need these five tasks done, who can we find to do them," it seems more consistent with Paul to say, "God seems to consistently raise up these five kinds of people. It is not for no reason that he does this. Find them and recognize them." Paul often exhorts the leaders to lead, but he never seems to be concerned about where leadership would come from. God would raise it up if we only have eyes to notice.
Who knows what it means to be an evangelist? Those who receive the ministry of the evangelist? Not really. Who can spell out what an apostle is? Someone who has never been called to nor participated in the apostolic calling? In many ways, it is not even entirely possible to have the ministers themselves define what it takes to do their job, since God does not seem to be all that worried about the secular qualifications of those whom he calls. Jesus did not send Peter and the other disciples off to seminary to be trained; he simply called and they followed. Peter never took a preaching class, Paul was never formally trained in pastoral care. The passion and the anointing that comes from the Holy Spirit can do what all the training in the world could never do on its own (it should be noted that I am in no way against formal training. However, we must never imagine that God is waiting for someone to go to school before they can be used by him).
In spite of all the efficiency that seems to be inherent in a rigidly centralized conception of the church, it can be woefully inefficient. So long as the central leader is well aware of the gifts and graces of the people in the church and can entrust leadership into their hands, it is true that such church government can be quite efficient. However, it is often tempting to insist that the pastor is not only an overseer who responds to issues by reallocation of resources but is also the prime minister, who has skills that nobody else can approximate, who fills a professional need, who sees themselves primarily as an employee of a local church and not primarily as a servant called and sent by God. If this happens, ministry quickly becomes made after their image and any gift of a layperson that does not fit into such an image becomes marginalized, regardless of how necessary it may be.
If a central planning agency for science could be trusted to always know which are the promising projects, could be relied upon to always know what is needed and how to maximize resources to that end, it would be amazingly efficient and helpful. If it falls down, even in a minor way, it has the distinct possibility of crippling science and discouraging scientists from making new and hitherto unlooked for discoveries. In a similar way, if a pastor is always able to see clearly what is needed and the best way to go about responding to that need, it could be a wonderful way to run the church. However, if a pastor lacks the knowledge and discernment needed for this task at any point (which inevitably happens as they are human and finite like everyone else), they may find that their greatest strengths can turn out to be their greatest weaknesses in a given context.
Is pastoral ministry important? Absolutely. Is it as important as the ministry of lay people? Of course. But, it must be clearly noted, it is no more important than this. To behave as if this were not so not only skews the whole Polanyian system but is tantamount to an eye saying to a hand, "I have no need of you." It seems to me that a more significantly decentralized approach to ministry is more conducive to allowing the Holy Spirit to govern, not only the individuals who make up the church, but the church as a whole. Those who have gifts in particular areas will be able to provide mutual oversight, freeing up those with different gifts to work elsewhere and elsehow.
The questions that remain are these. How can we move forward? How can we convince the average Christian that God actually wants to use them, has gifted them, not only with skills, but with passions, that he wants to harness for the good, not only of the church, but of the world? Undoubtedly the answer involves prayer and repentance regarding ways we have been discouraging in the past.
Showing posts with label theology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label theology. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Monday, November 21, 2011
Some Thoughts about the Nature of Illustration in Sermons etc.
Some thoughts about the nature of illustration in sermons etc.
I have just begun my fifth year as a pastor. I must admit that my approach to preaching has changed over the years. Those who attend the United Methodist Church in Hudson might be able to point out one or two things that have changed since I have been there, such as cultivating a somewhat milder tone, but there are others as well. For example, before having to preach week after week, I thought of myself as an outline preacher. I always thought it was neat when someone could just stand up with a few scribbles on a piece of paper and then deliver a passionate and engaging message.
The transition from outline to manuscript, in hindsight, was inevitable. When I preached several times at my home church in Marshalltown as an intern, I only ever used outlines, but they steadily got to be far more detailed and each point turned into a paragraph. Once I had to write a manuscript for my sermon that I had to give at licensing school. One of the things I appreciated was the ability to think out in more precise terms what I wanted to say. As I put it into practice, I found that the Holy Spirit worked just as much when I prepared throughout the week as it did when I preached from an outline. In fact, I found that, by thinking out exactly what I wanted to say and seeing how it sounded out loud, I was able to use more precise language, reducing confusion and other good things. I found that I was more able to preach with boldness and conviction when I wrote out a manuscript than I ever was when I preached from an outline.
Though manuscript preaching is quite common in the mainline (or, at least, within some parts of the mainline), it was quite uncommon in the circles I found myself in before becoming a pastor. In spite of the fact that I found a manuscript extremely helpful, there was still a nagging feeling that I had, at least in this way, abandoned my tradition. I had to wrestle with this for quite a while.
All of this is to set the stage for some thoughts on illustrations in sermons, because this is also an area where I find myself at sharp distinction from, not only my tradition before becoming a pastor, but even among my seminary peers and throughout the mainline. I have personally never been in favor of filling my sermons with illustrations. The initial, gut-level reason why I have tended to avoid them is because I am simply not that creative of a person. I have always had a hard time figuring out good illustrations, so I more or less let them go. From time to time, someone (usually from outside of the church I serve) would talk about how helpful they have been in their lives, and I would begin to wrestle with the issue over again.
I found myself having conversations with people who love good illustrations in sermons and been able to discern my issues at a deeper level. I began to realize that, when people would speak of really powerful illustrations they have heard used, they would not be able to recall the point from the Gospel that was the real purpose. One person in particular related to me a youth leader he knew who frequently brought small items that were related to the message that they could take home to remind them of it. There was one particular item that he kept in his room and had a lot of meaning for him. But when I asked him, “What was the point of the message that went along with that item?” The response was, “I don’t remember.”
Even in my own experience, I have found that this is the case. Relatively recently, I used an illustration that I thought was better than most. Not only did I make the point at the very beginning that the illustration was very limited, I also made sure to frequently point away from the illustration to the reality I was hoping to communicate. The talk was very well received. The young people who heard it loved it and really resonated with the illustration. However, it became clear that their grasp on the illustration was far stronger than their grasp on the actual point made by the Gospel. The talk was relatable, but I began to think that it could be argued that, since in practice, the illustration overshadowed the Gospel in the hearers, it was not truly a Gospel message, not truly the Christian faith proclaimed and received.
It is only recently that I found, in the course of my reading, a truly clear and deeply theological argument along these lines. Let us say that we have an aspect of revelation, “Thing A.” Because the ways and thoughts of God are not like the ways of human beings (Isaiah 55:8-9), we should not be surprised that it is not easy for us to understand. After all, it stands against the ways of the world and it stands against us inasmuch as we are sinners who are not fully conformed to the image of Christ. In order to understand the revelation of Thing A, we introduce an illustration, “Thing B.” The moment we try to illustrate Thing A with Thing B, our attention becomes divided between the two, if it is not wholly captivated by Thing B.
The problem is that, while Thing A is revelation, Thing B is not. At its best, the illustration would intend to make a leap from Thing B (the illustration, created out of our own imagination) to Thing A (revelation, given by God). But how is this possible? How can we make a jump directly from something that is not revelation to something that is? How can we say that the two Things are similar in any meaningful way for the church if one is revelation and one is invented by human beings? It might be argued, “But Thing B is so much easier to understand than Thing A, so we should start there.” I do not deny that Thing B is easier to understand. How could it be otherwise? Thing B stands far closer to us than Thing A because Thing A stands against us as the Word of God while Thing B was invented by the creativity of human beings.
When we illustrate the Gospel with images that we have thought up ourselves, what have we done? If people walk away from the sermon or other message remembering the Gospel and the revelation from God and not the illustration, then the illustration was unnecessary. If they walk away remembering the illustration and not the revelation, they have walked away with something, but it is something of fundamentally human creation and not the word of God. There is a word for substituting something of human creation for the revelation of God. Idolatry.
When I first heard illustration bluntly called idolatry, I thought to myself, “Well, I probably wouldn’t go THAT far.” However, the more I think of it, the more I think that it is true. What can we make of the desire to illustrate the Gospel to make it easier to understand by making it something of our own creation? What are we to do if illustration is as important as we make it by our constant use of it? What are we to say to those who think that illustration is so important for sermons and other Christian proclamation that it is not just helpful but necessary?
I cannot finally stand in judgment of others on this as it probably would not take someone long to find all kinds of other problems in my sermons that I post for all to see, especially if they were looking for them. However, I have become more convinced than ever before that illustration is not where I should be putting my energy. I refuse to feel that my preaching is inferior because it is devoid of illustration. I hope that people would walk away from my sermons remembering nothing that was said than remembering something of my own clever invention that replaces the Gospel in their minds.
I have just begun my fifth year as a pastor. I must admit that my approach to preaching has changed over the years. Those who attend the United Methodist Church in Hudson might be able to point out one or two things that have changed since I have been there, such as cultivating a somewhat milder tone, but there are others as well. For example, before having to preach week after week, I thought of myself as an outline preacher. I always thought it was neat when someone could just stand up with a few scribbles on a piece of paper and then deliver a passionate and engaging message.
The transition from outline to manuscript, in hindsight, was inevitable. When I preached several times at my home church in Marshalltown as an intern, I only ever used outlines, but they steadily got to be far more detailed and each point turned into a paragraph. Once I had to write a manuscript for my sermon that I had to give at licensing school. One of the things I appreciated was the ability to think out in more precise terms what I wanted to say. As I put it into practice, I found that the Holy Spirit worked just as much when I prepared throughout the week as it did when I preached from an outline. In fact, I found that, by thinking out exactly what I wanted to say and seeing how it sounded out loud, I was able to use more precise language, reducing confusion and other good things. I found that I was more able to preach with boldness and conviction when I wrote out a manuscript than I ever was when I preached from an outline.
Though manuscript preaching is quite common in the mainline (or, at least, within some parts of the mainline), it was quite uncommon in the circles I found myself in before becoming a pastor. In spite of the fact that I found a manuscript extremely helpful, there was still a nagging feeling that I had, at least in this way, abandoned my tradition. I had to wrestle with this for quite a while.
All of this is to set the stage for some thoughts on illustrations in sermons, because this is also an area where I find myself at sharp distinction from, not only my tradition before becoming a pastor, but even among my seminary peers and throughout the mainline. I have personally never been in favor of filling my sermons with illustrations. The initial, gut-level reason why I have tended to avoid them is because I am simply not that creative of a person. I have always had a hard time figuring out good illustrations, so I more or less let them go. From time to time, someone (usually from outside of the church I serve) would talk about how helpful they have been in their lives, and I would begin to wrestle with the issue over again.
I found myself having conversations with people who love good illustrations in sermons and been able to discern my issues at a deeper level. I began to realize that, when people would speak of really powerful illustrations they have heard used, they would not be able to recall the point from the Gospel that was the real purpose. One person in particular related to me a youth leader he knew who frequently brought small items that were related to the message that they could take home to remind them of it. There was one particular item that he kept in his room and had a lot of meaning for him. But when I asked him, “What was the point of the message that went along with that item?” The response was, “I don’t remember.”
Even in my own experience, I have found that this is the case. Relatively recently, I used an illustration that I thought was better than most. Not only did I make the point at the very beginning that the illustration was very limited, I also made sure to frequently point away from the illustration to the reality I was hoping to communicate. The talk was very well received. The young people who heard it loved it and really resonated with the illustration. However, it became clear that their grasp on the illustration was far stronger than their grasp on the actual point made by the Gospel. The talk was relatable, but I began to think that it could be argued that, since in practice, the illustration overshadowed the Gospel in the hearers, it was not truly a Gospel message, not truly the Christian faith proclaimed and received.
It is only recently that I found, in the course of my reading, a truly clear and deeply theological argument along these lines. Let us say that we have an aspect of revelation, “Thing A.” Because the ways and thoughts of God are not like the ways of human beings (Isaiah 55:8-9), we should not be surprised that it is not easy for us to understand. After all, it stands against the ways of the world and it stands against us inasmuch as we are sinners who are not fully conformed to the image of Christ. In order to understand the revelation of Thing A, we introduce an illustration, “Thing B.” The moment we try to illustrate Thing A with Thing B, our attention becomes divided between the two, if it is not wholly captivated by Thing B.
The problem is that, while Thing A is revelation, Thing B is not. At its best, the illustration would intend to make a leap from Thing B (the illustration, created out of our own imagination) to Thing A (revelation, given by God). But how is this possible? How can we make a jump directly from something that is not revelation to something that is? How can we say that the two Things are similar in any meaningful way for the church if one is revelation and one is invented by human beings? It might be argued, “But Thing B is so much easier to understand than Thing A, so we should start there.” I do not deny that Thing B is easier to understand. How could it be otherwise? Thing B stands far closer to us than Thing A because Thing A stands against us as the Word of God while Thing B was invented by the creativity of human beings.
When we illustrate the Gospel with images that we have thought up ourselves, what have we done? If people walk away from the sermon or other message remembering the Gospel and the revelation from God and not the illustration, then the illustration was unnecessary. If they walk away remembering the illustration and not the revelation, they have walked away with something, but it is something of fundamentally human creation and not the word of God. There is a word for substituting something of human creation for the revelation of God. Idolatry.
When I first heard illustration bluntly called idolatry, I thought to myself, “Well, I probably wouldn’t go THAT far.” However, the more I think of it, the more I think that it is true. What can we make of the desire to illustrate the Gospel to make it easier to understand by making it something of our own creation? What are we to do if illustration is as important as we make it by our constant use of it? What are we to say to those who think that illustration is so important for sermons and other Christian proclamation that it is not just helpful but necessary?
I cannot finally stand in judgment of others on this as it probably would not take someone long to find all kinds of other problems in my sermons that I post for all to see, especially if they were looking for them. However, I have become more convinced than ever before that illustration is not where I should be putting my energy. I refuse to feel that my preaching is inferior because it is devoid of illustration. I hope that people would walk away from my sermons remembering nothing that was said than remembering something of my own clever invention that replaces the Gospel in their minds.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
The "Rational" Theory of the Atonement
The "Rational" Theory of the Atonement
A few months ago, between finishing seminary and moving across the state, a friend of mine who is not a Christian, but willing to have open and honest dialogue with Christians, invited me over to talk about faith and God. I always enjoy these conversations and this particular friend is a wonderful dialogue partner; he is always respectful and willing to listen, but he is also not afraid to ask the tough questions.
From my point of view, the most significant point in the conversation came when he said to me, "This is what my life looks like right now. I'm pretty darn happy with how things are going. Why should I believe in Jesus." All of a sudden, it struck me that there is a considerable portion of the church that would want me to bring up the doctrine of hell and use that as the reason why he should believe in Jesus. The argument being something like this. "You should believe in Jesus because, if you don't, you're going to go to hell."
The only problem with this is that it is radically unbiblical. By that, I don't mean that hell is not something spoken of in the Bible, nor that it is not real, nor that it is not a serious consequence that goes along with obstinate unbelief, but rather it is not biblical in the sense that nowhere do we see hell used as a threat to get someone to believe. Jesus warns people about it, pleads with them so that they need not go there, but he never threatens people with it. I mentioned all this to my friend and gave a different response.
I said (words to this effect, at any rate), "I think that you should believe in Jesus and the gospel because I have this deep and abiding conviction that it is true." Now, this might seem like something of a copout. After all, why should my personal convictions be the yardstick by which other people's opinions and lives should be led? And yet, I have become more and more convinced, not only that such a response was not fundamentally wrong, but that it really is the only responsible answer. Here is why.
At the end of the day, why should we believe in Jesus? Well, one strand of apologetics argues that we should believe in Jesus and be Christians because Christian faith is remarkably consistent with the deep ethical convictions of most Americans. Of course, this is somewhat begging the question, as our American culture has been deeply formed by the Judeo-Christian ethical tradition. How can we be surprised that our culture's approach to morality and ethics is remarkably similar to the tradition that shaped it. That is a basic insight of sociology, and not a distinctly Christian one.
Another approach is that we should believe in Jesus because, if we don't, we will be punished and sent to hell. This has at least one advantage over the previous view in that it acknowledges Christian faith to be more rich than, and irreducible to, morality, a problem that people on both the left and the right make (though it takes different forms). This also has an emotional element in it. After all, none of us want to go to hell, nor do we say that we want anyone else to go to hell (it is at this point that hell becomes not only a motivation for a personal decision but also the primary impetus for evangelism). However, as I mentioned above, I am more and more convinced that to make hell the primary reason to believe in Jesus is to put the cart before the horse. If Jesus talks a lot about hell, but never as a threat, it would do us well to follow his lead. Let us acknowledge hell, let us understand its seriousness, but let us never threaten.
The fact of the matter is that there is a stereotypical practice of evangelism that says, "Look at yourself. You aren't really all that good, are you? Compare yourself to the Ten Commandments, especially as interpreted by Jesus. You can't say you're all that righteous can you? No you cannot. You are in trouble and you need saving from beyond yourself. Now, here comes Jesus to do what you could never do yourself." Now, it is certainly the case that, if we take these elements separately, they are all in agreement with scripture. However, when taken as a whole, we find no precedent anywhere in the Bible. The closest we get is the beginning of the book of Romans, where Paul uses the sinfulness of the world to demonstrate how much we do, in fact, need saving. However, he is writing to an established church, and we cannot divorce those chapters from the rest of the letter, which is remarkably Christocentric and Trinitarian.
Christ is not, first and foremost, the solution to a problem. In fact, if Christ had never come, we never would have realized that we even have a problem that needed solving. It is only when we see God take up residence in our human flesh and live so radically differently than we do, when we see that sin is such a big problem that the only way it can be solved is by the second Person of the Trinity taking on human flesh (a tremendous sacrifice in itself), living a human life, being hated, mocked and mistreated, and finally killed, could wrench us out of the clutches of evil, that we understand that we need a savior. The realization of our need for salvation is historically identical with the culminating act of atonement. Nowhere do we see the Biblical writers work out a doctrine of sin independently of Christ and then use Christ as the solution to the problem.
At the end of the day, everything that we believe as Christians has its roots in Christ. It must be noted that by this I mean Christ as understood as an Israelite and in light of the whole witness of the Old Testament, not a kind of spaceless and timeless Christ (whatever that might be). Our understanding of morality is not primarily rooted in tradition or even the Ten Commandments, but in the actual life of Christ as the pattern and standard of rational human life. All false understandings of the world of space and time are revealed to be what they are because, in Christ, their faulty presuppositions are exposed for what they are. Even our doctrine of the Trinity is not independently generated, but is rooted in the belief in the Incarnation (that is, we would never have arrived at a doctrine of the Trinity if God did not take on human flesh and live among us).
In the systematic theology that I wrote, I included something that, in hindsight, is something of a summary paragraph of all my convictions. Here it is:
If it is true (as Christian faith has always proclaimed) that only in Jesus of Nazareth do we see God fully revealed to humanity, then all of our thinking about God must be utterly rooted and grounded in the person of Christ. When we declare that Jesus is Lord, we are not only saying that Jesus is truly God, but that God is truly Christ-like. This quickly becomes the overarching criterion or datum of all our thoughts and statements about God, humanity, and the interaction between the two, and we must begin our refection upon every topic by asking the question, “What does the Incarnation tell us about this?”
Those first four words, "If it is true," are of crucial importance. If, indeed this central conviction of Christian faith is true, if it stands firm, then all the rest of Christian teaching hangs together; if it is not true (which I would claim is harder to prove than some might think), then it all falls apart. Everything depends on whether God actually became a human being and lived among us in and as the man Jesus of Nazareth. It is precisely the conviction that this is indeed what has happened that is the reason we should believe, and any other benefits or reasons to believe must take a secondary position to this conviction.
It is really not altogether different from the way science works. As modern science has advanced and been forced to account for the objective status of reality (the same objective status that much of modern philosophy has been trying to doubt out of existence), we have had to deal with the radical challenges this advance has made on how our "reason" would like us to view the universe. The Copernican view of the universe won the day over the Ptolemaic view, not just because it proved to be a simpler way to account for the observational data, but because of a deep and abiding conviction that it actually was a more true way of looking at the universe. Relativity physics did not win out over Newtonian mechanics because the people just liked it better, because they didn't. It actually was quite confusing at first and forced us to revise our understanding of things that seemed so self-evident, like space and time.
For example, even secular science no longer believes that the universe is infinite, both in space and time. Rather, because of the belief that the universe had a specific beginning point and because there is a limit to how fast things can move (that is, the speed of light), the universe, in all its vastness, is not infinite. It does not matter how much our "reason" would desire it to be different than it is, it is finite and no amount of argument or wishful thinking can make it otherwise. Why should we believe that the universe is finite and not infinite? Because, at the end of the day, that is the way it is, and it would be irrational to think otherwise. Rationality and irrationality is not determined by public opinion but by reality itself.
Here again was my response to my friend that I mentioned earlier. "I think that you should believe in Jesus and the gospel because I have this deep and abiding conviction that it is true." It is because of this deep conviction that God actually has taken on human flesh that I think you should believe it, too. Not first and foremost because you will go to hell if you don't (I don't think we should make any decision, least of all major ones like this, based on fear), not because you can't do good things if you aren't a Christian (though I do believe that it is incredibly hard to take a real stand if our morality and ethics do not go back to Christ), but because this is what God has done, and if it is indeed true, it is of staggering significance. It means that God does not consider it to be too much of a sacrifice to step into his creation, to become one of us and one with us. It means that God is so far from being deaf to our pains and hurts, our trials and tribulations, that he stepped into the midst of them and made them his own, standing in complete solidarity with us, those who hated him.
That is why, for lack of a better term, I have chosen to call this the "Rational" theory of Atonement. Not because every other way of thinking about atonement is irrational, but because this places the impetus for faith on deep ontological convictions, without which the whole structure of Christian faith collapses. It is because our understanding of the universe is vastly different depending on whether or not God has come among us in and as Jesus Christ. It is from this conviction that God has indeed done this that everything else flows.
A few months ago, between finishing seminary and moving across the state, a friend of mine who is not a Christian, but willing to have open and honest dialogue with Christians, invited me over to talk about faith and God. I always enjoy these conversations and this particular friend is a wonderful dialogue partner; he is always respectful and willing to listen, but he is also not afraid to ask the tough questions.
From my point of view, the most significant point in the conversation came when he said to me, "This is what my life looks like right now. I'm pretty darn happy with how things are going. Why should I believe in Jesus." All of a sudden, it struck me that there is a considerable portion of the church that would want me to bring up the doctrine of hell and use that as the reason why he should believe in Jesus. The argument being something like this. "You should believe in Jesus because, if you don't, you're going to go to hell."
The only problem with this is that it is radically unbiblical. By that, I don't mean that hell is not something spoken of in the Bible, nor that it is not real, nor that it is not a serious consequence that goes along with obstinate unbelief, but rather it is not biblical in the sense that nowhere do we see hell used as a threat to get someone to believe. Jesus warns people about it, pleads with them so that they need not go there, but he never threatens people with it. I mentioned all this to my friend and gave a different response.
I said (words to this effect, at any rate), "I think that you should believe in Jesus and the gospel because I have this deep and abiding conviction that it is true." Now, this might seem like something of a copout. After all, why should my personal convictions be the yardstick by which other people's opinions and lives should be led? And yet, I have become more and more convinced, not only that such a response was not fundamentally wrong, but that it really is the only responsible answer. Here is why.
At the end of the day, why should we believe in Jesus? Well, one strand of apologetics argues that we should believe in Jesus and be Christians because Christian faith is remarkably consistent with the deep ethical convictions of most Americans. Of course, this is somewhat begging the question, as our American culture has been deeply formed by the Judeo-Christian ethical tradition. How can we be surprised that our culture's approach to morality and ethics is remarkably similar to the tradition that shaped it. That is a basic insight of sociology, and not a distinctly Christian one.
Another approach is that we should believe in Jesus because, if we don't, we will be punished and sent to hell. This has at least one advantage over the previous view in that it acknowledges Christian faith to be more rich than, and irreducible to, morality, a problem that people on both the left and the right make (though it takes different forms). This also has an emotional element in it. After all, none of us want to go to hell, nor do we say that we want anyone else to go to hell (it is at this point that hell becomes not only a motivation for a personal decision but also the primary impetus for evangelism). However, as I mentioned above, I am more and more convinced that to make hell the primary reason to believe in Jesus is to put the cart before the horse. If Jesus talks a lot about hell, but never as a threat, it would do us well to follow his lead. Let us acknowledge hell, let us understand its seriousness, but let us never threaten.
The fact of the matter is that there is a stereotypical practice of evangelism that says, "Look at yourself. You aren't really all that good, are you? Compare yourself to the Ten Commandments, especially as interpreted by Jesus. You can't say you're all that righteous can you? No you cannot. You are in trouble and you need saving from beyond yourself. Now, here comes Jesus to do what you could never do yourself." Now, it is certainly the case that, if we take these elements separately, they are all in agreement with scripture. However, when taken as a whole, we find no precedent anywhere in the Bible. The closest we get is the beginning of the book of Romans, where Paul uses the sinfulness of the world to demonstrate how much we do, in fact, need saving. However, he is writing to an established church, and we cannot divorce those chapters from the rest of the letter, which is remarkably Christocentric and Trinitarian.
Christ is not, first and foremost, the solution to a problem. In fact, if Christ had never come, we never would have realized that we even have a problem that needed solving. It is only when we see God take up residence in our human flesh and live so radically differently than we do, when we see that sin is such a big problem that the only way it can be solved is by the second Person of the Trinity taking on human flesh (a tremendous sacrifice in itself), living a human life, being hated, mocked and mistreated, and finally killed, could wrench us out of the clutches of evil, that we understand that we need a savior. The realization of our need for salvation is historically identical with the culminating act of atonement. Nowhere do we see the Biblical writers work out a doctrine of sin independently of Christ and then use Christ as the solution to the problem.
At the end of the day, everything that we believe as Christians has its roots in Christ. It must be noted that by this I mean Christ as understood as an Israelite and in light of the whole witness of the Old Testament, not a kind of spaceless and timeless Christ (whatever that might be). Our understanding of morality is not primarily rooted in tradition or even the Ten Commandments, but in the actual life of Christ as the pattern and standard of rational human life. All false understandings of the world of space and time are revealed to be what they are because, in Christ, their faulty presuppositions are exposed for what they are. Even our doctrine of the Trinity is not independently generated, but is rooted in the belief in the Incarnation (that is, we would never have arrived at a doctrine of the Trinity if God did not take on human flesh and live among us).
In the systematic theology that I wrote, I included something that, in hindsight, is something of a summary paragraph of all my convictions. Here it is:
If it is true (as Christian faith has always proclaimed) that only in Jesus of Nazareth do we see God fully revealed to humanity, then all of our thinking about God must be utterly rooted and grounded in the person of Christ. When we declare that Jesus is Lord, we are not only saying that Jesus is truly God, but that God is truly Christ-like. This quickly becomes the overarching criterion or datum of all our thoughts and statements about God, humanity, and the interaction between the two, and we must begin our refection upon every topic by asking the question, “What does the Incarnation tell us about this?”
Those first four words, "If it is true," are of crucial importance. If, indeed this central conviction of Christian faith is true, if it stands firm, then all the rest of Christian teaching hangs together; if it is not true (which I would claim is harder to prove than some might think), then it all falls apart. Everything depends on whether God actually became a human being and lived among us in and as the man Jesus of Nazareth. It is precisely the conviction that this is indeed what has happened that is the reason we should believe, and any other benefits or reasons to believe must take a secondary position to this conviction.
It is really not altogether different from the way science works. As modern science has advanced and been forced to account for the objective status of reality (the same objective status that much of modern philosophy has been trying to doubt out of existence), we have had to deal with the radical challenges this advance has made on how our "reason" would like us to view the universe. The Copernican view of the universe won the day over the Ptolemaic view, not just because it proved to be a simpler way to account for the observational data, but because of a deep and abiding conviction that it actually was a more true way of looking at the universe. Relativity physics did not win out over Newtonian mechanics because the people just liked it better, because they didn't. It actually was quite confusing at first and forced us to revise our understanding of things that seemed so self-evident, like space and time.
For example, even secular science no longer believes that the universe is infinite, both in space and time. Rather, because of the belief that the universe had a specific beginning point and because there is a limit to how fast things can move (that is, the speed of light), the universe, in all its vastness, is not infinite. It does not matter how much our "reason" would desire it to be different than it is, it is finite and no amount of argument or wishful thinking can make it otherwise. Why should we believe that the universe is finite and not infinite? Because, at the end of the day, that is the way it is, and it would be irrational to think otherwise. Rationality and irrationality is not determined by public opinion but by reality itself.
Here again was my response to my friend that I mentioned earlier. "I think that you should believe in Jesus and the gospel because I have this deep and abiding conviction that it is true." It is because of this deep conviction that God actually has taken on human flesh that I think you should believe it, too. Not first and foremost because you will go to hell if you don't (I don't think we should make any decision, least of all major ones like this, based on fear), not because you can't do good things if you aren't a Christian (though I do believe that it is incredibly hard to take a real stand if our morality and ethics do not go back to Christ), but because this is what God has done, and if it is indeed true, it is of staggering significance. It means that God does not consider it to be too much of a sacrifice to step into his creation, to become one of us and one with us. It means that God is so far from being deaf to our pains and hurts, our trials and tribulations, that he stepped into the midst of them and made them his own, standing in complete solidarity with us, those who hated him.
That is why, for lack of a better term, I have chosen to call this the "Rational" theory of Atonement. Not because every other way of thinking about atonement is irrational, but because this places the impetus for faith on deep ontological convictions, without which the whole structure of Christian faith collapses. It is because our understanding of the universe is vastly different depending on whether or not God has come among us in and as Jesus Christ. It is from this conviction that God has indeed done this that everything else flows.
Monday, October 31, 2011
Difficult Passages in the Bible
Difficult Passages in the Bible
From time to time, I have given myself what have turned out to be difficult preaching assignments. What makes them difficult depends on the task at hand. For example, once I set out to preach at least once from every book of the Bible. This was difficult because it is next to impossible to attain any level of continuity from week to week if you do this (one could, I suppose, break it down into series where themes are developed throughout the Bible, but I did not do this; perhaps I was not even equipped to do this at the time). Usually, though, the difficulty takes the form of looking at a large chunk of scripture or an overarching theme, that forces me to preach on a text that is particularly difficult.
Now, what makes a text difficult? Sometimes, it is difficult because it tends to be interpreted in a particular way over and over again so that there is one particular interpretation that overshadows the text so strongly that it seems like it is the only way to read the text, when it is, in fact, distorting it. When preaching on such texts, one cannot simply say, "If you interpret this text this old way, you are an idiot." Not only is it not tactful or loving, it simply isn't true. Many brilliant and faithful interpreters have contributed to the misunderstanding of some texts, not because of any fault in themselves but because the influence of that particular interpretation is so very strong. When addressing some texts, the difficulty often comes in, not only because it requires a great shift of thinking of the preacher themselves, but also because one needs to take the central insights of the dominant interpretation seriously, even if a correction needs to be made.
When I think about preaching on difficult texts, however, it is a different kind of text that I am thinking about. I am thinking about texts that tell me things I don't know if I want to know about God, texts that, at least at first glance, make me want to skip over them (if I am preaching through a book, passage-by-passage) or interpret them in a way that basically says, "It doesn't really mean that." The problem with the first way out is that it shows that certain passages are helpful and worth studying while others are not. It means that there is something that is revealed about God (or humanity) in those passages that I do not want to take seriously for one reason or another. The problem with this is that, even if Christian preachers are afraid of taking those passages seriously, those who read the Bible in order to make Christians look foolish are not afraid of doing so. If we as Christian leaders are not willing to take those difficult passages seriously, we are terribly ill-prepared to dialogue with those who are and such a weakness will not have good results for us.
The problem with the second way out is that it presupposes that there is something wrong with the Bible that we need to correct. Now, as many of you know, I think that the position that has classically been known as "Biblical inerrancy," has some serious problems and that I do not hold it (though I am very interested in discussing the issues at stake with anyone who wants to), so my concern is not "If there is even the tiniest problem with any part of the text in any way, the authority of the Bible collapses to the ground." Rather, it is because my sustained encounter with difficult texts has shown me that they are often precisely the points where our nice, neat ways of understanding God are challenged by the reality of God itself and shown to be wanting.
What I have learned after forcing myself to take difficult texts as seriously as possible is that the sermons are, in my opinion, better, my understanding of God is drastically deepened, and I find more joy, knowing that God's revelation continually demonstrates to me that God is far greater, far richer, far more faithful and good than I could ever imagine. Those passages that once seemed so difficult, so troubling, so frightening to have to explain to a congregation or youth group have, more often than not, become some of my very favorite passages. At the very least, they quickly become crucial texts for the interpretation of the whole tapestry of Biblical passages, as their significance proves to be more comprehensive than we would be led to believe, considering how seldom people actually talk about them.
What I am saying is that, regardless of whether you are a Christian preacher, or even a Christian leader, take those hard texts seriously. Do not brush past them, do not interpret them in a way that makes their offensiveness vanish into thin air (though you may find they are not as offensive as you first thought, when you learn what they have to teach). Read them, ask the tough questions, work with others in trying to understand them. Your hard work will be richly rewarded.
From time to time, I have given myself what have turned out to be difficult preaching assignments. What makes them difficult depends on the task at hand. For example, once I set out to preach at least once from every book of the Bible. This was difficult because it is next to impossible to attain any level of continuity from week to week if you do this (one could, I suppose, break it down into series where themes are developed throughout the Bible, but I did not do this; perhaps I was not even equipped to do this at the time). Usually, though, the difficulty takes the form of looking at a large chunk of scripture or an overarching theme, that forces me to preach on a text that is particularly difficult.
Now, what makes a text difficult? Sometimes, it is difficult because it tends to be interpreted in a particular way over and over again so that there is one particular interpretation that overshadows the text so strongly that it seems like it is the only way to read the text, when it is, in fact, distorting it. When preaching on such texts, one cannot simply say, "If you interpret this text this old way, you are an idiot." Not only is it not tactful or loving, it simply isn't true. Many brilliant and faithful interpreters have contributed to the misunderstanding of some texts, not because of any fault in themselves but because the influence of that particular interpretation is so very strong. When addressing some texts, the difficulty often comes in, not only because it requires a great shift of thinking of the preacher themselves, but also because one needs to take the central insights of the dominant interpretation seriously, even if a correction needs to be made.
When I think about preaching on difficult texts, however, it is a different kind of text that I am thinking about. I am thinking about texts that tell me things I don't know if I want to know about God, texts that, at least at first glance, make me want to skip over them (if I am preaching through a book, passage-by-passage) or interpret them in a way that basically says, "It doesn't really mean that." The problem with the first way out is that it shows that certain passages are helpful and worth studying while others are not. It means that there is something that is revealed about God (or humanity) in those passages that I do not want to take seriously for one reason or another. The problem with this is that, even if Christian preachers are afraid of taking those passages seriously, those who read the Bible in order to make Christians look foolish are not afraid of doing so. If we as Christian leaders are not willing to take those difficult passages seriously, we are terribly ill-prepared to dialogue with those who are and such a weakness will not have good results for us.
The problem with the second way out is that it presupposes that there is something wrong with the Bible that we need to correct. Now, as many of you know, I think that the position that has classically been known as "Biblical inerrancy," has some serious problems and that I do not hold it (though I am very interested in discussing the issues at stake with anyone who wants to), so my concern is not "If there is even the tiniest problem with any part of the text in any way, the authority of the Bible collapses to the ground." Rather, it is because my sustained encounter with difficult texts has shown me that they are often precisely the points where our nice, neat ways of understanding God are challenged by the reality of God itself and shown to be wanting.
What I have learned after forcing myself to take difficult texts as seriously as possible is that the sermons are, in my opinion, better, my understanding of God is drastically deepened, and I find more joy, knowing that God's revelation continually demonstrates to me that God is far greater, far richer, far more faithful and good than I could ever imagine. Those passages that once seemed so difficult, so troubling, so frightening to have to explain to a congregation or youth group have, more often than not, become some of my very favorite passages. At the very least, they quickly become crucial texts for the interpretation of the whole tapestry of Biblical passages, as their significance proves to be more comprehensive than we would be led to believe, considering how seldom people actually talk about them.
What I am saying is that, regardless of whether you are a Christian preacher, or even a Christian leader, take those hard texts seriously. Do not brush past them, do not interpret them in a way that makes their offensiveness vanish into thin air (though you may find they are not as offensive as you first thought, when you learn what they have to teach). Read them, ask the tough questions, work with others in trying to understand them. Your hard work will be richly rewarded.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Justification by Grace
10/23/11 Justification by Grace Grace UMC
One of the words that has played a dominant role in Christian faith, especially since the time of the Reformation is justification. Though people have used it many times, it is one of those words that some people may not have heard or, if they have, they may have written it off as one of those "church words," those words that pastors and other church leaders get all excited about but don't have any real connection with our daily lives. But justification is an absolutely central part of our Christian faith. Without it, the Reformers said, the whole of Christian faith would come crashing down. It is the article by which the church stands or falls.
But what exactly is it? What does it mean to be justified by grace? Ultimately, the Christian doctrine of justification is the answer to the question that shows up several times in the New Testament, "What must I do to be saved." The Greek word from which we get justification is δικαιοσυνη, which can be translated either "justice" or "righteousness." To be justified is to be made righteous, to be made just. Specifically, the issue is how we, who are unjust and unrighteous, can be delivered from the consequences of that injustice and unrighteousness.
Now, before we can go any farther, we need to deal with a situation that is growing much more common in our world today, though it isn't really anything new. What I am saying, and what the church has said since the very beginning, is two things: First, we find ourselves in a situation where we need saving and that we need to be saved by someone outside of ourselves, since we are not capable of fixing our own problems. The second thing is that this salvation is indeed possible. In fact, it is so possible that it has been offered to us in Jesus Christ without price.
The fact of the matter is that there are people out there who will challenge both of those points. The first group of people tend to be, but are not always, militant atheists. Their position is to deny that human beings, in general, are in need of being saved at all. There is actually a long tradition, that stems from the Enlightenment, that human beings are basically good and not tragically flawed and fallen that, while it is true that human beings seem to be the cause of our problems, it is equally true that human beings are able to solve those problems in one way or another themselves. The problem might be that people are just not educated well enough, that they have simply not been taught the difference between right and wrong, or, given that they have, they might not know how to go about living appropriately in light of it. The basic conviction is that human beings are good enough, or at least, they'd better be, since we are all we have. A recent rallying cry for many people today is, "I don't need God to make me happy," or "I don't need God to make me a good person." According to such a view, which is increasingly common and outspoken, human beings simply do not need to be saved, or that their salvation must come from themselves.
Actually, it would be unfair to imply that such people do not think that people need to be saved. In point of fact, they do, often, think that people need to be saved, they need to be saved from religion and faith itself. In light of the fact that many Christians' lives are not marked by hope, joy and peace in the midst of turmoil, but rather with guilt and shame over not being good enough, it does not take much for someone to conclude that our faith is precisely the problem. So far is this from the Christian point of view that we need God to save us, that it says we need to be saved from God.
Another group of people that would disagree with the Christian message of salvation are those who believe that there is no such thing as absolute truth, justice, goodness, meaning, or anything like that, or if there were, we would have no way of knowing it. We might have a deep longing and desire for truth and meaning, but we cannot obtain it. We might desperately need saving, but there is no such salvation possible. Clearly, this deviates from the Christian position that salvation is not only possible, but near at hand if we will only receive it.
When we say that we are justified by grace, or that we are saved by grace, what exactly do we mean? I think that we might misunderstand what this means unless we spend some time and reflect a bit about how we are not justified. First of all, we are not justified by what we do. This is a theme that has been emphasized by countless writers, especially since Martin Luther. It is something that, if we take a moment and read the New Testament, especially certain letters of Paul, like Romans and Galatians, we will find all over the place. We are told over and over again that, when we are accepted in the eyes of God, it is not because of anything we have done. We are not saved because we have been really good people, nor because we have done more things right than wrong, nor because we are better than certain people we know. You are not loved by God because you come to church every Sunday, or at all. You are not saved because you give a lot of money to charitable causes. We are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.
Another thing that does not save us is our intentions. It does not matter if you have intended to do all kinds of good things, but just never managed to get it done. They used to say, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions," but while that phrase emphasizes that our intentions are no good if they do not ultimately turn into actions, my point is that intending to good and doing everything you can toward that good end is not what saves us. It isn't by having pure intentions that makes us loved by God and we are not saved by them.
Thirdly, and this is something that cuts especially hard on people like me, we are not saved by our opinions or our convictions. This cuts against me because I am very interested in what people believe and why they believe it. Sometimes, I can get so caught up in it that it is almost as if I am more concerned with people thinking the right way and having the right opinions than I am about them being transformed by the power of the Gospel. A well-known Christian pastor wrote a book earlier this year and caught tremendous fire for doing so. There were many other Christian leaders who attacked this man, claiming that he had abandoned proper theology. The implication was that people simply could not be saved unless they had the right understanding of salvation. If someone was misled in the nature of salvation, it would make it impossible for them to be saved. The retort made by other leaders, with which I agree, was, "If we cannot be saved unless our theology is just right, who can be saved?" If God cannot save us in spite of our bad theology, we are all in a lot of trouble.
So you might be wondering, "If we aren't saved by what we do, or by what we intend to do, or by our opinions and convictions, how in the world can we be saved?" The answer is that we are saved by grace alone. In our text, we heard Paul declare that, independent of Christ, we are all, we must hear that all, people who lived according to the passions of our flesh and were, by nature, children of wrath like everyone else. After that serious declaration, what do we read? "But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ." The question we want to know the answer to is, "What is it about us, either as humanity as a whole, or as us as individuals, that makes God take us from being those who are dead in our sins to being alive in and with Christ?" And the answer is grace.
You may recall a few months ago, back in July, when I had the chance to preach a sermon where we asked the question, "What is Grace?" I suggested that grace is not, in fact, a what at all, but is a who. Grace is, in its fullest and most complete sense, Jesus Christ, and if Jesus Christ, then God. Grace is certainly unmerited favor, and it is true that we can do nothing to earn grace in any way, shape or form, but what it is, what it really is, is Jesus Christ.
We can see this at work on a smaller scale when we look at the advances of science. Once, most people believed that the earth was the center of the universe and that the sun went around the earth. Copernicus suggested that the earth actually rotates and travels around the sun. The reason why the Copernican view of the universe was ultimately accepted was not because people just liked it better, because they didn't, as it forced us to realize that we are not the center of the universe, nor because the old way of thinking couldn't deal with what they saw, but because, after long scrutiny, it was felt that it was simply closer to what really is the case. The ultimate judge was not just one person or another, but the nature of the universe.
Likewise, Einstein's theories of Relativity overturned Newtonian mechanics, not because people liked it better, in fact, when Einstein first published his ideas, only about a half dozen people in the world knew what he was talking about. It was because, as helpful as Newton's way of thinking had been, it was felt that Einstein had gotten down to a deeper understanding of reality. At the end of the day, it was not a debate that solved the issue, but the nature of reality. There were debates about the merits of various theories, but at the end of the day, the answer to the question, "Why Einstein and not Newton," is "Reality itself."
But if we aren't used to this way of thinking, this kind of answer isn't very satisfying, is it? We aren't, in our day and age, used to appealing to ultimate things. We want to talk about reasons, we want to know why things are the way they are and not something else. To simply say, "That's the way it is," seems like it is avoiding the issue, but sometimes, it is the only answer there is and there is no probing behind it.
I think that sometimes we want to know the reasons why is not so we can have conceptual clarity, that we can connect the dots, but so that we can have some control over things. We want to be able to say, "Our scientific findings are what they are for this reason, and they can't be anything else because of this reason," but we can't do it. We can imagine the world being different than it is, but things are the way they are and not some other way.
The same kind of thing is true with our understanding of salvation by grace. We want to say, "Alright, God takes us who were dead in our sins and makes us alive in Christ. Why exactly does he do this?" At the end of the day, the only answer we have is the ultimate fact that God is who he is. Whether we like it or not, this is the only answer we have. When Moses was speaking with God when he saw the burning bush, he says to God, "If I come to the Israelites and say to them, 'The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,' and they ask me, 'What is his name?' what shall I say to them?'" God's response is, "I am who I am." I think part of the point is that God does not put himself in a box by saying that he is like certain things or unlike certain things, but simply that he is, that he exists, and that he is who he is and not anything else. God was not able to give an argument, that he could be understood in terms of something else. God does not say, "I am the good one, or the merciful one," though he is both good and merciful. God is who God is and there is no reason beyond the fact that he is.
This is the point. We are saved by grace, we are saved by God. Why are we saved? Because God loves us. Why does God love us? There is no reason beyond the fact that God is who God is. And God demonstrates who he is by coming among us in Jesus Christ. The only God who is is the God who meets us as Jesus Christ, who enters into our world of space and time, who shoulders our burdens, who heals us of our brokenness, who endures our scorn and hatred without vindictively retaliating, and offers us forgiveness long before we ever ask for it.
But the message of grace does not always seem like good news to us, does it? Do we not like to earn what we have? Do we not like to think that we have done something, anything to deserve what we receive? Are we prepared to receive the treasures of the gospel and of all the riches of God, what Paul calls "the immeasurable riches of" God's "grace in kindness" at absolutely no cost? We need to understand that when God offers salvation to us by grace alone, it does not mean that we could have earned it some other way, but he is offering us an easier way. Indeed, God is actually offering us a harder way, one that costs everything. You see, to say that we are saved by grace is to say that absolutely nothing short of God's almighty grace is sufficient to save us. We are people who are in need, unable to be who we ought to be, and in need of a savior. It is not as though God simply makes it so we do not have to give anything in return, it is that we have nothing to give. Our hands are empty and we simply cling to Christ, knowing that, if Christ does not save us, we are surely lost.
Just a few days before Jesus is crucified, he says this to the chief priests and the pharisees. "Have you never read in the scriptures: The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord's doing, and it is amazing in our eyes...' The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls." If we have erected a hope that is independent of Christ, no matter how sound and sturdy it seems, it is and will be crushed by Christ and shown to be insufficient. Nothing that we create with our hands, or with our minds, or even with our lives, is capable of doing what grace can do. When we give ourselves to Jesus and trust entirely in him, our plans for self-righteousness are shattered. And if there comes a time after we have given ourselves to Christ and we somehow get it into our heads that we need grace plus something else, the moment it comes in contact with the cornerstone that is Christ, it too is shattered.
Make no mistake. Salvation by grace alone is not a "get out of hell free" card, it is not taking the easy way out. To be saved by grace is the single most costly, humbling, thing you can do. It is to say, "I have nothing to offer, my hands are empty; Lord, save, or I perish." It is to come before God, not with a list of good things you've done, not with a list of evil things you have avoided, not even with a list of the things you need to be forgiven for, but simply with the empty hands of faith. The life of one who is saved by grace is not necessarily any better than that of one who is not, though it should improve as you grow in grace; nor is it necessarily any worse than one who is not. This is a good rule of thumb to see if you are living a life that is fully consistent with one that has been marked by grace. If, at the end of the day, it were to turn out that there is no God, that Jesus Christ was simply a man and nothing more, your life should make absolutely no sense. Our lives should be so devoted to God, and because of that, to one another, that the things we do should be completely incomprehensible to those who do not believe in God. With that in mind, let us go live in ways that are so devoted to God in every way, that to the unbelieving world, it is simply unbelievable. Let us pray.
AMEN
One of the words that has played a dominant role in Christian faith, especially since the time of the Reformation is justification. Though people have used it many times, it is one of those words that some people may not have heard or, if they have, they may have written it off as one of those "church words," those words that pastors and other church leaders get all excited about but don't have any real connection with our daily lives. But justification is an absolutely central part of our Christian faith. Without it, the Reformers said, the whole of Christian faith would come crashing down. It is the article by which the church stands or falls.
But what exactly is it? What does it mean to be justified by grace? Ultimately, the Christian doctrine of justification is the answer to the question that shows up several times in the New Testament, "What must I do to be saved." The Greek word from which we get justification is δικαιοσυνη, which can be translated either "justice" or "righteousness." To be justified is to be made righteous, to be made just. Specifically, the issue is how we, who are unjust and unrighteous, can be delivered from the consequences of that injustice and unrighteousness.
Now, before we can go any farther, we need to deal with a situation that is growing much more common in our world today, though it isn't really anything new. What I am saying, and what the church has said since the very beginning, is two things: First, we find ourselves in a situation where we need saving and that we need to be saved by someone outside of ourselves, since we are not capable of fixing our own problems. The second thing is that this salvation is indeed possible. In fact, it is so possible that it has been offered to us in Jesus Christ without price.
The fact of the matter is that there are people out there who will challenge both of those points. The first group of people tend to be, but are not always, militant atheists. Their position is to deny that human beings, in general, are in need of being saved at all. There is actually a long tradition, that stems from the Enlightenment, that human beings are basically good and not tragically flawed and fallen that, while it is true that human beings seem to be the cause of our problems, it is equally true that human beings are able to solve those problems in one way or another themselves. The problem might be that people are just not educated well enough, that they have simply not been taught the difference between right and wrong, or, given that they have, they might not know how to go about living appropriately in light of it. The basic conviction is that human beings are good enough, or at least, they'd better be, since we are all we have. A recent rallying cry for many people today is, "I don't need God to make me happy," or "I don't need God to make me a good person." According to such a view, which is increasingly common and outspoken, human beings simply do not need to be saved, or that their salvation must come from themselves.
Actually, it would be unfair to imply that such people do not think that people need to be saved. In point of fact, they do, often, think that people need to be saved, they need to be saved from religion and faith itself. In light of the fact that many Christians' lives are not marked by hope, joy and peace in the midst of turmoil, but rather with guilt and shame over not being good enough, it does not take much for someone to conclude that our faith is precisely the problem. So far is this from the Christian point of view that we need God to save us, that it says we need to be saved from God.
Another group of people that would disagree with the Christian message of salvation are those who believe that there is no such thing as absolute truth, justice, goodness, meaning, or anything like that, or if there were, we would have no way of knowing it. We might have a deep longing and desire for truth and meaning, but we cannot obtain it. We might desperately need saving, but there is no such salvation possible. Clearly, this deviates from the Christian position that salvation is not only possible, but near at hand if we will only receive it.
When we say that we are justified by grace, or that we are saved by grace, what exactly do we mean? I think that we might misunderstand what this means unless we spend some time and reflect a bit about how we are not justified. First of all, we are not justified by what we do. This is a theme that has been emphasized by countless writers, especially since Martin Luther. It is something that, if we take a moment and read the New Testament, especially certain letters of Paul, like Romans and Galatians, we will find all over the place. We are told over and over again that, when we are accepted in the eyes of God, it is not because of anything we have done. We are not saved because we have been really good people, nor because we have done more things right than wrong, nor because we are better than certain people we know. You are not loved by God because you come to church every Sunday, or at all. You are not saved because you give a lot of money to charitable causes. We are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.
Another thing that does not save us is our intentions. It does not matter if you have intended to do all kinds of good things, but just never managed to get it done. They used to say, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions," but while that phrase emphasizes that our intentions are no good if they do not ultimately turn into actions, my point is that intending to good and doing everything you can toward that good end is not what saves us. It isn't by having pure intentions that makes us loved by God and we are not saved by them.
Thirdly, and this is something that cuts especially hard on people like me, we are not saved by our opinions or our convictions. This cuts against me because I am very interested in what people believe and why they believe it. Sometimes, I can get so caught up in it that it is almost as if I am more concerned with people thinking the right way and having the right opinions than I am about them being transformed by the power of the Gospel. A well-known Christian pastor wrote a book earlier this year and caught tremendous fire for doing so. There were many other Christian leaders who attacked this man, claiming that he had abandoned proper theology. The implication was that people simply could not be saved unless they had the right understanding of salvation. If someone was misled in the nature of salvation, it would make it impossible for them to be saved. The retort made by other leaders, with which I agree, was, "If we cannot be saved unless our theology is just right, who can be saved?" If God cannot save us in spite of our bad theology, we are all in a lot of trouble.
So you might be wondering, "If we aren't saved by what we do, or by what we intend to do, or by our opinions and convictions, how in the world can we be saved?" The answer is that we are saved by grace alone. In our text, we heard Paul declare that, independent of Christ, we are all, we must hear that all, people who lived according to the passions of our flesh and were, by nature, children of wrath like everyone else. After that serious declaration, what do we read? "But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ." The question we want to know the answer to is, "What is it about us, either as humanity as a whole, or as us as individuals, that makes God take us from being those who are dead in our sins to being alive in and with Christ?" And the answer is grace.
You may recall a few months ago, back in July, when I had the chance to preach a sermon where we asked the question, "What is Grace?" I suggested that grace is not, in fact, a what at all, but is a who. Grace is, in its fullest and most complete sense, Jesus Christ, and if Jesus Christ, then God. Grace is certainly unmerited favor, and it is true that we can do nothing to earn grace in any way, shape or form, but what it is, what it really is, is Jesus Christ.
We can see this at work on a smaller scale when we look at the advances of science. Once, most people believed that the earth was the center of the universe and that the sun went around the earth. Copernicus suggested that the earth actually rotates and travels around the sun. The reason why the Copernican view of the universe was ultimately accepted was not because people just liked it better, because they didn't, as it forced us to realize that we are not the center of the universe, nor because the old way of thinking couldn't deal with what they saw, but because, after long scrutiny, it was felt that it was simply closer to what really is the case. The ultimate judge was not just one person or another, but the nature of the universe.
Likewise, Einstein's theories of Relativity overturned Newtonian mechanics, not because people liked it better, in fact, when Einstein first published his ideas, only about a half dozen people in the world knew what he was talking about. It was because, as helpful as Newton's way of thinking had been, it was felt that Einstein had gotten down to a deeper understanding of reality. At the end of the day, it was not a debate that solved the issue, but the nature of reality. There were debates about the merits of various theories, but at the end of the day, the answer to the question, "Why Einstein and not Newton," is "Reality itself."
But if we aren't used to this way of thinking, this kind of answer isn't very satisfying, is it? We aren't, in our day and age, used to appealing to ultimate things. We want to talk about reasons, we want to know why things are the way they are and not something else. To simply say, "That's the way it is," seems like it is avoiding the issue, but sometimes, it is the only answer there is and there is no probing behind it.
I think that sometimes we want to know the reasons why is not so we can have conceptual clarity, that we can connect the dots, but so that we can have some control over things. We want to be able to say, "Our scientific findings are what they are for this reason, and they can't be anything else because of this reason," but we can't do it. We can imagine the world being different than it is, but things are the way they are and not some other way.
The same kind of thing is true with our understanding of salvation by grace. We want to say, "Alright, God takes us who were dead in our sins and makes us alive in Christ. Why exactly does he do this?" At the end of the day, the only answer we have is the ultimate fact that God is who he is. Whether we like it or not, this is the only answer we have. When Moses was speaking with God when he saw the burning bush, he says to God, "If I come to the Israelites and say to them, 'The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,' and they ask me, 'What is his name?' what shall I say to them?'" God's response is, "I am who I am." I think part of the point is that God does not put himself in a box by saying that he is like certain things or unlike certain things, but simply that he is, that he exists, and that he is who he is and not anything else. God was not able to give an argument, that he could be understood in terms of something else. God does not say, "I am the good one, or the merciful one," though he is both good and merciful. God is who God is and there is no reason beyond the fact that he is.
This is the point. We are saved by grace, we are saved by God. Why are we saved? Because God loves us. Why does God love us? There is no reason beyond the fact that God is who God is. And God demonstrates who he is by coming among us in Jesus Christ. The only God who is is the God who meets us as Jesus Christ, who enters into our world of space and time, who shoulders our burdens, who heals us of our brokenness, who endures our scorn and hatred without vindictively retaliating, and offers us forgiveness long before we ever ask for it.
But the message of grace does not always seem like good news to us, does it? Do we not like to earn what we have? Do we not like to think that we have done something, anything to deserve what we receive? Are we prepared to receive the treasures of the gospel and of all the riches of God, what Paul calls "the immeasurable riches of" God's "grace in kindness" at absolutely no cost? We need to understand that when God offers salvation to us by grace alone, it does not mean that we could have earned it some other way, but he is offering us an easier way. Indeed, God is actually offering us a harder way, one that costs everything. You see, to say that we are saved by grace is to say that absolutely nothing short of God's almighty grace is sufficient to save us. We are people who are in need, unable to be who we ought to be, and in need of a savior. It is not as though God simply makes it so we do not have to give anything in return, it is that we have nothing to give. Our hands are empty and we simply cling to Christ, knowing that, if Christ does not save us, we are surely lost.
Just a few days before Jesus is crucified, he says this to the chief priests and the pharisees. "Have you never read in the scriptures: The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord's doing, and it is amazing in our eyes...' The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls." If we have erected a hope that is independent of Christ, no matter how sound and sturdy it seems, it is and will be crushed by Christ and shown to be insufficient. Nothing that we create with our hands, or with our minds, or even with our lives, is capable of doing what grace can do. When we give ourselves to Jesus and trust entirely in him, our plans for self-righteousness are shattered. And if there comes a time after we have given ourselves to Christ and we somehow get it into our heads that we need grace plus something else, the moment it comes in contact with the cornerstone that is Christ, it too is shattered.
Make no mistake. Salvation by grace alone is not a "get out of hell free" card, it is not taking the easy way out. To be saved by grace is the single most costly, humbling, thing you can do. It is to say, "I have nothing to offer, my hands are empty; Lord, save, or I perish." It is to come before God, not with a list of good things you've done, not with a list of evil things you have avoided, not even with a list of the things you need to be forgiven for, but simply with the empty hands of faith. The life of one who is saved by grace is not necessarily any better than that of one who is not, though it should improve as you grow in grace; nor is it necessarily any worse than one who is not. This is a good rule of thumb to see if you are living a life that is fully consistent with one that has been marked by grace. If, at the end of the day, it were to turn out that there is no God, that Jesus Christ was simply a man and nothing more, your life should make absolutely no sense. Our lives should be so devoted to God, and because of that, to one another, that the things we do should be completely incomprehensible to those who do not believe in God. With that in mind, let us go live in ways that are so devoted to God in every way, that to the unbelieving world, it is simply unbelievable. Let us pray.
AMEN
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