Category Archives: Religion and theology

What we don’t get about the gospel

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This is just spot-on:

It’s no wonder that self-help books top the charts in Christian publishing and that counseling offices are overwhelmed. Our pride and our neglect of the gospel force us to run from seminar to seminar, book to book, counselor to counselor, always seeking but never finding some secret to holy living.

Most of us have never really understood that Christianity is not a self-help religion meant to enable moral people to become more moral. We don’t need a self-help book; we need a Savior. We don’t need to get our collective act together; we need death and resurrection and the life-transforming truths of the gospel. And we don’t need them just once, at the beginning of our Christian life; we need them every moment of every day.

—Elyse Fitzpatrick and Dennis Johnson, from Counsel from the Cross

(Emphasis mine.) That is, I think, the crux of the American church’s cultural resistance to the gospel; that’s the thing we don’t want to hear.

HT: Of First Importance

Things good pastors say

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The inimitable Jared Wilson has a wonderful post up today titled “10 Things Good Pastors Say” which captures some important truths about ministry. I will note that #1 really does not make one feel like a good pastor—nor, in some cases, does #2, especially when it comes in combination with #1—but that’s one of the reasons why they’re so critical. You don’t say them, you never have the chance to become a good pastor.Here’s the list, and I’ll include his comment for #1; if you want the rest, go read the full post.

1. Please forgive me.

Better than “I’m sorry,” which can often be followed with an “if” or a “but,” these words indicate a humble heart. Bad pastors hide their faults behind the cloak of their authority, practice self-defense against all charges, and basically pretend. Good pastors know they’re sinners and admit it.

2. You’re right.

3. You’re wrong.

4. Jesus loves you.

5. I love you.

6. Me too.

7. Any time.

8. Thank you.

9. Grace is true.

10. You’re approved.

Amen.

Sin and the gospel

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When the devil comes and says, ‘You have no standing, you are condemned, you are finished’, you must say, ‘No! my position did not depend upon what I was doing, or not doing; it is always dependant upon the righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ.’ Turn to the devil and tell him, ‘My relationship to God is not a variable one. The case is not that I am a child of God, and then again not a child of God. That is not the basis of my standing, that is not the position. When God had mercy upon me, He made me His child, and I remain his child. A very sinful, and a very unworthy one, perhaps, but still his child!

And now, when I fall into sin, I have not sinned against the law, I have sinned against love. Like the prodigal, I will go back to my Father and I will tell Him, ‘Father, I am not worthy to be called your son.’ But He will embrace me, and He will say, ‘Do not talk nonsense, you are My child,’ and He will shower his love upon me! That is the meaning of putting on the breastplate of righteousness! Never allow the devil to get you into a state of condemnation. Never allow a particular sin to call into question your standing before God. That question has been settled.

—D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Legalism tells us that we are still under the Law, that we must be good enough or we will be rejected. Lawlessness tells us that the Law is gone and we’re free to do as we please. The gospel tells us that when we fall into sin, we have not sinned against the law, we have sinned against love. The Rev. Dr. Lloyd-Jones, in this quote from his book The Christian Soldier, captures the heart of this about as well as it can be captured. We’ve been set free from the fearful, fretful tyranny of being good enough; the point of our sin is no longer that we’ve broken the Law and might be cast out from God’s presence, but rather that we have grieved the one who loved us and gave himself up for us, to whom we owe everything, and have contributed to the weight and agony he bore on the cross.

This is not, it should be noted, an easier truth to bear . . .

HT: John Fonville via Ray Ortlund

The joy of the faith

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There is a perception among a lot of folks that Christianity is a no-fun religion, that being a serious Christian is all about finding anything enjoyable and forbidding it. The great wit Ambrose Bierce, in his Devil’s Dictionary, defined Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy”—a base slander on the real Puritans, incidentally, but one which has attached itself to them, and also to their descendants, the Presbyterians. To take one example, the 20th-century American novelist Ellen Glasgow described her father (a Presbyterian elder) this way in her autobiography: “He was entirely unselfish, and in his long life he never committed a pleasure.”

Now, to some extent, you can see where people, even Christians, might get this idea; it’s not easy being a disciple, and it often isn’t comfortable. If we’re serious about following Jesus Christ, there are pleasures and desires that we have to set aside; try telling someone that they can’t have sex with whomever they want or make money however they want or do whatever they think is going to make them happy, and there’s a good chance you’re going to get called a killjoy, or worse. After all, we’re Americans—don’t we have a constitutional right to the pursuit of happiness? (Actually, that phrase is in the Declaration of Independence, but that still makes it part of our national DNA.) Where the world goes awry, though, is in its belief that that sort of thing—unrestricted sex, lots of money, “follow your bliss,” and so on—is the best way to pursue happiness. It does seem logical, to be sure—find something that gives you pleasure and do it—but that doesn’t make it the best option for a good life in the long run, and it isn’t.

That might seem like an odd statement, but there are two reasons to say it. The first is that pursuing happiness through pleasure produces a form of happiness which is highly dependent on your circumstances: if you find your circumstances pleasurable, you’re happy, and if your circumstances aren’t providing you pleasure, you’re unhappy. There are things you can do to ease that a little, which is why we have the common emphasis on keeping a positive attitude and phrases like “the power of positive thinking,” and there’s some truth in that approach; to quote Ellen Glasgow again, “Nothing in life is so hard that you can’t make it easier by the way you take it.” Still, as the Cowardly Lion found out—for all his efforts to encourage himself, he wound up muttering, “I do believe in ghosts, I do believe in ghosts, I do I do I do I do I do believe in ghosts”—positive self-talk only goes so far to help you rise above your circumstances. To really get free of them requires more.

The second reason is that we were made for more than just seeking pleasure and pursuing happiness. A lot of folks don’t believe that; even among Christians, we see people justifying affairs, divorce, and other quite sinful behavior with the line, “You want me to be happy, don’t you?” Whether anyone believes it or not, though, it’s true. As such, while the pursuit of pleasure may be enjoyable for a while, ultimately, it won’t satisfy. Pleasure by itself just isn’t enough for us; we were made for pleasure, but we were also made for something deeper—joy—and pleasure without joy ultimately palls. Without joy, pleasure isn’t any more substantial than cotton candy, and how long could you eat nothing but cotton candy without getting heartily sick of it? Our bodies were made for real food, not just spun sugar; in the same way, our souls were made for real food, not just empty pleasure—which requires discipline in our spiritual diet, just as in our physical diet, and developing a taste for more than just the sweet stuff.

This is not without its rewards, either. After all, it’s not like Jesus’ motto is “Pain, no gain”; just like physical disciplines of diet and exercise, which bring real and worthwhile benefits for those who practice them—I’ve never met anyone who succeeded in getting in shape and then said, “You know, I think I liked being out of shape better”—so does spiritual discipline, and the benefits are part of the point. It’s not that Jesus tries to bribe us into holiness, but there were many times that he promised great rewards for those who follow him, and the rest of Scripture does much the same. Among those rewards—and there are many—one of the greatest is joy, which is rooted much deeper than our circumstances; joy is rooted in the presence and the character and the faithfulness of God, and the work of his Holy Spirit. Thus it can endure and even grow in hard times just as in good times, because it’s able to draw on the things God has done in the past and look forward in confidence to the things he’ll do in the future.

Happy Reformation Day!

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Timothy George has an excellent piece on Reformation Day posted as the daily article on First Things—a juxtaposition which, I must confess, delights me no end. I particularly appreciate these paragraphs:

On this Reformation Day, it is good to remember that Martin Luther belongs to the entire Church, not only to Lutherans and Protestants, just as Thomas Aquinas is a treasury of Christian wisdom for faithful believers of all denominations, not simply for Dominicans and Catholics. This point was recognized several weeks ago by Franz-Josef Bode, the Catholic Bishop of Osnabrück in northern Germany, when he preached on Luther at an ecumenical service. “It’s fascinating,” he said, “just how radically Luther puts God at the center.” Luther’s teaching that every human being at every moment of life stands absolutely coram deo—before God, confronted face-to-face by God—led him to confront the major misunderstanding in the church of his day that grace and forgiveness of sins could be bought and sold like wares in the market. “The focus on Christ, the Bible and the authentic Word are things that we as the Catholic church today can only underline,” Bode said. The bishop’s views have been echoed by many other Catholic theologians since the Second Vatican Council as Luther’s teachings, especially his esteem for the Word of God, has come to be appreciated in a way that would have been unthinkable a century ago. . . .

Several years ago I was asked to endorse a book by my friend Mark Noll called Is the Reformation Over? I responded by saying that the Reformation is over only to the extent that it succeeded. In fact, in some measure, the Reformation has succeeded, and more within the Catholic Church than in certain sectors of the Protestant world. The triumph of grace in the theology of Luther was—and still is—in the service of the whole Body of Christ. Luther was not without his warts, and we can hardly imagine him canonized as a saint. (Remember: simul iustus et peccator!) But the question Karl Barth asked about him in 1933 is still worth pondering this Reformation Day: “What else was Luther than a teacher of the Christian church whom one can hardly celebrate in any other way but to listen to him?”

Right on.

Happy Hallowe’en!

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Yes, I’ve heard all the arguments about why Christians shouldn’t celebrate Hallowe’en; I used to be one of those making them. I don’t anymore, though I do still think that one should be very careful about how one celebrates it. (A couple pre-teens came by the house this evening dressed as, I think, the villain from the Saw movies; that is deeply not right.) Though I do not share her Catholic assumptions, I think Sally Thomas’ recent article on the First Things website, “The Drama of Hallowmas,” captures some important truths:

As a friend of mine observed recently, there is something medieval about Halloween. The masks, the running around in the dark, the flicker of candles in pumpkins, the smell of leaves and cold air—all of it feels ancient, even primal, somehow. Despite the now-inevitable preponderance of media-inspired costumes, Halloween seems, in execution, far closer to a Last Judgment scene above a medieval church door, or to a mystery play, than it does to Wal-Mart. To step outside on Halloween dressed as someone—or something—other than yourself is to step into a narrative that acknowledges that the membrane between our workaday, material world and the unseen realm of spirits is far thinner and more permeable than many of us like to think. . . .

The secular commercialization of Halloween bothers people far less than do its roots in the pagan Celtic festival of Samhain, which the Romans, after the conquest of Britain, eventually conflated with their own Feralia, a feast honoring the dead. When, in the seventh century, Pope Boniface IV instituted the feast of All Saints, to fall on the first of November, the eve of that solemnity coincided with the date of the ancient festival. The addition of the feast of All Souls in the eleventh century completed the three-day Hallowmas, dedicated to the memory of the Christian martyrs and honoring all the faithful departed.

The absorption of pre-Christian cultic observance into the Christian calendar is not limited, of course, to holidays dealing with darkness and death. The Church settled on the date for Christmas by much the same process. Halloween’s emphasis on darkness makes many Christians squeamish, but, to my mind, what my friend observed about the medieval feel of Halloween is more on the money. There is a drama to be played out, like a mystery play in three scenes, and it makes sense only if you observe all three days of Hallowmas—not only Halloween but All Saints’ and All Souls’ days as well. In this context, the very secularity and even the roots-level paganism of Halloween become crucial elements in a larger Christian story.

I think she’s on to something there. As my wife writes, reflecting on this,

While I don’t think that God needed us—or wanted us—to sin in order to tell his story, the fact remains that we DID sin. The world in which we live has darkness and sin and death and shadow. It is what we know and understand and in order to tell ourselves the story of redemption—of rescue from the darkness—one must necessarily start with the darkness. Maybe Halloween, from a Christian point of view, isn’t such a bad place to do that.

It seems to me that a lot of the Christian opposition to Hallowe’en is based on a desire not to start with the darkness, not to have to deal straight out with sin and evil and death. Which is understandable—but not, in the end, helpful. I think Thomas points to a better way. I can’t simply appropriate it, not being Catholic, since that means I don’t celebrate All Saints’ Day or relate to the saints who’ve gone before us in the same way as Catholics do; but I think she has the right idea:

Christian children need not, as some do, dress as saints for Halloween to “redeem” it. There is something right, I think, in acknowledging on Halloween that the day for the saints has not arrived yet. This is salvation history, after all. We are saved from something—even if only from the ordinary, secular world . . .

The cumulative iconography of being, first, a secular character confronting darkness, and then a saint in light, is imaginatively powerful and valuable.

That’s the conjunction we need; that, if you will, is the before-and-after of our lives. To really get it, though, we need to take the “before” seriously.

God, game theory, and the inscrutability of providence

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If you don’t read Fangraphs (and if you’re a serious baseball fan, you should), you missed an article recently that was astonishing in both the ambition of its task and the complexity of its argument. Mitchel Lichtman, known to many as MGL, wrote a lengthy post analyzing the Yankees’ sacrifice bunts in the eighth inning of the deciding sixth game of this year’s American League Championship Series and asking the question, “Were they good calls?” His answer was long, involved, complicated, and highly mathematical, and as such would probably be dismissed by many as arcane and pointless, especially since the Yankees (predictably) won regardless. Such a dismissal would be a mistake.

It would be a mistake because MGL answers that question not simply by calculating probabilities but by using game theory. I won’t pretend to understand his article completely at the detail level, but I think I have the essential insight right: predictability is the greatest tactical and strategic sin. Therefore, to maximize one’s chances of success, one must be unpredictable, which means not always going with the probabilities.

Look at it this way. One may calculate out all the probabilities as to whether a given move—such as, say, a sacrifice bunt attempt—is likely to help one’s team win the game or not, but if you calculate them all out, put them in a table, and then rigidly follow that table, what’s going to happen? The other team is going to know what’s coming and respond accordingly, and then all your probabilities are knocked into a cocked hat. For the optimum move to remain the optimum move, one must sometimes do something else; failing that, others will adjust, and their adjustments will turn what had been the best move into a failing move.

Read the post if you want a fuller explanation than that and think you can follow it. For my purposes here, I have to admit that I don’t really care if Joe Girardi made the right call on those bunts or not; I’m more interested in the underlying reality that sometimes the “best move” isn’t the best move, and that sometimes you have to do something that would seem in isolation to be counterproductive in order to best advance your goals.

Read more→

T. F. Torrance rocks the gospel

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Maybe it’s partly because I’m a Celtophile, but I have a tremendous appreciation for the Torrance brothers of Scotland (Thomas F. and James B.). They don’t seem to be all that well-known on the American side of the big puddle, but I think both were among the great theologians of the past half-century. I’m particularly grateful for J. B. Torrance’s strongly Trinitarian and covenantal understanding of Reformed theology, which I think provides a powerful corrective to the tendency toward gracelessness in certain strains of the Reformed communions, and for T. F. Torrance’s work on theology and science (a good brief introduction to his thought in this area can be found in the little book Preaching Christ Today: The Gospel and Scientific Thinking).

I mention this to highlight the fact that the two most recent quotes posted on Of First Importance are both from T. F. Torrance, and both wonderful and important statements. Yesterday’s lays out the implications of our union with Christ (a doctrine on which the Scots seem to be a good bit stronger than most Americans):

From beginning to end what Jesus Christ has done for you he has done not only as God but as man. He has acted in your place in the whole range of your human life and activity, including your personal decisions, and your responses to God’s love, and even your acts of faith. He has believed for you, fulfilled your human response to God, even made your personal decision for you, so that he acknowledges you before God as one who has already responded to God in him, who has already believed in God through him, and whose personal decision is already implicated in Christ’s self-offering to the Father, in all of which he has been fully and completely accepted by the Father, so that in Jesus Christ you are already accepted by him. Therefore, renounce yourself, take up your cross and follow Jesus as your Lord and Saviour.

Today’s shows how that underpins the gospel of grace:

To preach the Gospel of the unconditional grace of God in that unconditional way is to set before people the astonishingly good news of what God has freely provided for us in the vicarious humanity of Jesus. To repent and believe in Jesus Christ and commit myself to him on that basis means that I do not need to look over my shoulder all the time to see whether I have really given myself personally to him, whether I really believe and trust him, whether my faith is at all adequate, for in faith it is not upon my faith, my believing or my personal commitment that I rely, but solely upon what Jesus Christ has done for me, in my place and on my behalf, and what he is and always will be as he stands in for me before the face of the Father. That means that I am completely liberated from all ulterior motives in believing or following Jesus Christ, for on the ground of his vicarious human response for me, I am free for spontaneous joyful response and worship and service as I could not otherwise be.

This radical understanding, that life is all of Christ, and all in Christ, and none of me, is the heart of the gospel; it’s what we as Christians are called to preach and to live out.

Now, who is this church thing about, again?

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I was blown away last night by a great post from the Vice Moderator of the 218th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Rev. Byron Wade. I’ve never met him, but I’m confident in saying two things about him: 1) he’s good people, and 2) he’s on the liberal side of things in his beliefs. He was, after all, chosen for this position by the Moderator of that GA, the Rev. Bruce Reyes-Chow, of whom both those things are also true. (GA always elects liberals.) I’ve had various interactions with Bruce online—on this blog, and his, and Facebook—and I like and respect him a great deal; he’s the sort of person who can disagree with you with grace, respect, affection, and an honest desire to understand where you’re coming from. That’s all too rare (and probably always has been). As such, though I don’t know the man he chose as vice moderator, in my book, Byron Wade comes well recommended for character.

All of this is by way of saying that the following passage comes from someone with a real heart for the church, but not from an evangelical (as in fact he says himself):

The surprising thing that I have heard in my travels is stories about pastors/laity who do not preach and/or mention Jesus Christ. While I have not heard it a lot, it has been said to me enough that it caused me some alarm. . . .

I am in no way a Fundamentalist or a person who is considered an “evangelical street preacher.” What I am saying is that I believe that we who call ourselves followers of Jesus Christ may want to preach him to others, for if we don’t people will go elsewhere. And I would hate to think that we are losing out on witnessing to others because we don’t talk about Jesus.

Byron titled his post (quite properly, I think) “Is it just me or are we supposed to be talking about Jesus?” Read the whole thing—some of the stories he tells truly are worrisome. As I read, two thoughts struck me, both rather sad. First, it’s a wonderful thing to hear this point being made by somebody on the liberal side of the aisle; I don’t say that all liberal Christians shy away from talking about Jesus, but one doesn’t often hear liberals calling out the American church for its Christlessness. Second, several of the stories he tells may perfectly well have happened in churches that consider themselves “evangelical”; when folks like Jared Wilson and Michael Spencer criticize the Jesuslessness of the church in this country, it’s not Ivy League liberals they have in mind.

As such, it’s a good thing to be able to make common cause with more liberal folks like the Vice Moderator to ask the American church together, “Is it just me, or are we supposed to be talking about Jesus?” Who knows—maybe coming from someone like Byron, it will actually scandalize the church into paying attention.

The keystone: humility

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The connection between my last two posts—the first on why we should talk with those with whom we disagree, and the second on the nature of wisdom—may not be all that obvious, but I think it’s a profoundly important one. Specifically, the connection is humility, which is necessary for both, and which comes from both. It takes humility to talk with those we believe are wrong, not so that we can demonstrate to them how wrong they are, but in a receptive way that is open to what we might learn from them; and doing so teaches us humility, which helps us to grow wise. Wisdom in its turn breeds humility, and teaches us how much we have left to learn from others.

This might sound like a strange thing to say, but it’s true: wisdom is humble. Humility even more than wisdom is underrated, not the sort of thing we tend to praise people for, because it doesn’t draw attention to itself—and because we often tend to consider pride a good thing. From the point of view of the Scriptures, though, humility is one of the virtues which is supposed to define the people of God. The Catholic priest and philosopher Ernest Fortin went so far as to call it

the Christian virtue par excellence . . . humility first of all of a God who would humble Himself to take on our humanity and give His life as a ransom for the many. But humility as well for the believer—to understand that all is grace; that we have no right to claim anything as our own—not our life, not our gifts, not even our faith. We are at every moment God’s creation.

Think about that: we worship “a God who would humble Himself to take on our humanity and give His life as a ransom for the many.” That’s straight out of Philippians 2. No one ever had more reason to put his own interests and desires first, or to glorify himself, than Jesus; and yet he let go of glory, he let go of all the things pride values, and humbled himself to become a mere human being—and not even one who lived a rich, comfortable life, but a vagabond from the working class; and even beyond that, he accepted the horrible death of a convicted criminal. And he did it all for us, out of love, and set us his example to follow—and Paul points to that in 1 Corinthians 1 and calls Jesus our wisdom from God.

Does this mean, then, that God calls us to look down on ourselves, to put ourselves down and dismiss ourselves as unimportant? No. Those sorts of attitudes are counterfeits of true humility, and are really just pride in disguise; they still focus our attention inward, on ourselves, and they still put us at the center of everything we do. True humility takes our focus off ourselves altogether; it’s what Paul means when he writes in Romans 12:3, “Don’t think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you.” Humility is seeing ourselves clearly, in the light of God’s holiness and grace, and accepting what we see; it is the place where we are well aware both of our weaknesses and failures and of our glories and strengths, and don’t make too much or too little of either, because we know that our value and importance rests not in what we have done or what we can do, but only and always in the fact that God made us and loves us. As C. S. Lewis put it, someone truly humble could design the most beautiful cathedral ever built, and look at it and know it to be the most beautiful cathedral ever built, and enjoy it just the same as if someone else had done it.

This is why the Scriptures consistently associate humility with wisdom—to take another example, Proverbs 11:2 says, “When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but wisdom is with the humble.” Wisdom begins with the understanding of our own limits—that is, I think, part of the reason for the declaration in Psalm 111:10 that the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom; one of the reasons for that is the recognition of just how great God is, and how small and limited we are. Wisdom requires the acceptance that we never know as much, we never understand things as well, we’re never as smart or as far ahead of the game, as we think—and that in consequence, we need each other. That requires humility.

We must humble ourselves before each other if we are to learn from each other; we must humble ourselves before God if we are to grow in his wisdom; we must humble ourselves to receive correction and rebuke if we are to learn from our mistakes; we must humble ourselves to confess our immaturity if we are ever to mature. We must humble ourselves to accept and admit our incompleteness, our brokenness, our sinfulness, if we are ever to be made complete, whole, and holy. And in the last analysis, we must humble ourselves to understand that “all is grace,” that none of us are self-made, but that “we are”—all of us—“at every moment, God’s creation,” if we are ever truly to be ourselves.

(Partially excerpted from “True Wisdom”)

 

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