In the essay I mentioned yesterday, Joseph Bottum suggests that “maybe Christmas . . . lacks meaning without Advent.” That may sound strange, but I think he’s right. We live in a culture to which spiritual disciplines like self-denial are largely a foreign concept; to our society, the way to prepare to celebrate Christmas is by indulging ourselves in spending, consuming, and celebrating—shopping, throwing parties, shopping, decorating, shopping, eating, and more shopping. The problem is, that doesn’t prepare our hearts to celebrate, and still less to worship God; it just burns us out, leaving us sick of the whole thing. It essentially makes the celebration about the celebration—it makes it a matter of working ourselves up to the proper pitch of enjoyment just because everyone else is, and of making merry because we’re supposed to make merry—and that’s a very empty thing, with no substance to it, and really a very tiring one. Though the church tradition of preparing for Christmas with a season of reflection and self-examination and repentance is quite foreign to our world’s way of thinking, there’s a real wisdom to it if you stop and think about it.Advent, if we take it seriously, disciplines our anticipation and the emotions that go along with it, in part at least because it focuses our attention on just why we look forward to Christmas; as Bottum puts it, it “prepares us to understand and feel something about just how great the gift is when at last the day itself arrives.” After all, the message of Christmas is that the light shines in the darkness—which means we need to understand the darkness if we really want to understand the light. We need to understand the darkness not just in our world, but in our own lives, to really appreciate what it means that through Jesus Christ, God has caused his light to shine in our hearts. We need to look at sweet baby Jesus wriggling in a bed of straw, cooing and sucking his fist, and realize that that fat little hand is the same hand that scattered the stars across the night sky—and the same hand that reached down and formed the first man out of riverbank clay—and that he comes to us as God’s cosmic Answer to sin and death. Which means that if we’re going to take Christmas seriously, we need to begin by taking Advent seriously.(Excerpted, edited, from “Out of Chaos, Hope”)
Category Archives: Religion and theology
Camels, needles, and the eye of grace
And a ruler asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. You know the commandments: ‘Do not commit adultery, Do not murder, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Honor your father and mother.’” And he said, “All these I have kept from my youth.” When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “One thing you still lack. Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” But when he heard these things, he became very sad, for he was extremely rich. Jesus, seeing that he had become sad, said, “How difficult it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! For it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” Those who heard it said, “Then who can be saved?” But he said, “What is impossible with men is possible with God.” And Peter said, “See, we have left our homes and followed you.” And he said to them, “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not receive many times more in this time,
and in the age to come eternal life.”—Luke 18:18-30 (ESV)(I am greatly indebted in my understanding of this parable, and of the parables in general, to the Rev. Dr. Kenneth Bailey, author of Poet and Peasant and Through Peasant Eyes: A Literary-Cultural Approach to the Parables in Luke, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels, and many other books, for his work in bringing Near Eastern cultural assumptions and interpretations to bear on our understanding of Scripture—including this passage.)Some of you have probably heard this parable explained this way: there was a small gate in the city wall of Jerusalem which was called “The Eye of the Needle.” This gate was so small that a camel could barely fit through it—you had to take everything off the camel, get it down on its knees, and push it through the gate. Thus, the point of Jesus’ parable is that for the rich to get into heaven, they have to surrender all their riches to God and humble themselves before him. It’s a good explanation with a strong point; unfortunately, it isn’t true: there’s no gate known to have been called by that name, nor were there any gates of that size. One commentator has said wryly that the only gate which could possibly have earned that label was so small that the only way anyone could ever have fit a camel through it would have been to cut the camel into pieces.OK then, so what do we make of this? Well, another explanation is that the Greek word kámēlon, “camel,” is actually a misprint, and that the word should be kámilon, “rope”; there are some ancient manuscripts which have this reading. Then, Jesus would be saying that it’s easier to get a rope through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich person to enter the kingdom. Not easy, but a lot easier than a camel. However, it’s pretty clear that kámilon is actually the false reading, as copyists tried to soften this parable to something they could live with, and that Jesus was in fact talking about a large, ill-tempered mammal with a hump or two on its back and a mean glint in its eye. It wasn’t an original image, or unique to Jesus; in fact, it was common for rabbis to use the picture of a camel—or, further east, an elephant—going through the eye of a needle as an example of something impossible. In other words, Jesus is saying exactly what you think he’s saying.Which of course raises the question: does this really mean that rich people can’t be saved? To answer that, let’s go back to the beginning of the story and start over, with the ruler and his question. We don’t know much about this guy, just that he was a prominent member of the community, probably because of his wealth, perhaps with a formal position of some kind; but a couple things are clear. First, he shows Jesus considerable respect, addressing him as “Good Teacher,” which was a much stronger compliment than it sounds like to us; and second, he’s clearly a religious man, asking in all seriousness, “What must I do to be saved?”The problem with this question is that it’s rooted in an unhelpful view of God and his law, one that sees salvation as something we can earn if we just do enough of the right things; the ruler is essentially asking, “What boxes do I have to check off in order to be assured that I’ve earned eternal life?” He seems to be asking completely sincerely, and out of good motives, but his understanding of God still needs to be challenged, and so Jesus challenges him. First, he questions the ruler’s opening compliment. In the Oriental world, one compliment requires a second, so it might be that the ruler is fishing for a compliment of his own; or he might just be trying to butter Jesus up. In either case, does he really mean what he’s saying? So Jesus omits the return compliment, choosing instead to hold the compliment he’s received up to scrutiny: “Why do you call me good? Only God is truly good; do you really want to apply that title to me?”Though he asks the question, Jesus doesn’t press it—he isn’t trying to push the ruler to a declaration of faith, only to startle him into considering his words more carefully, and so he goes on to answer the ruler’s question. “What must you do? You know the commandments: Don’t commit adultery, don’t commit murder, don’t steal, don’t bear false witness, and honor your father and mother.” It’s interesting here that Jesus only mentions the commandments that deal with how people are to treat each other, without touching the commandments that address our relationship to God. It makes a certain amount of sense, when you think about it; how we treat one another is something very concrete, and so it’s easier to tell whether you’ve killed someone than if you’ve kept a commandment like “I am the Lord your God; you shall have no other gods before me.” As well, Luke shows a consistent concern for the self-focus that can come from having great wealth, and Jesus’ response speaks to that concern.To this, the ruler says, “I have kept all these commands since my youth.” That’s a pretty bold statement. It was said of Abraham, Moses and Aaron that they had kept the whole Law, but of no one else, and now this young man calmly puts himself in their company; that would seem to open him to a charge of overconfidence, at the very least. And yet . . . as sure of himself as he is, the ruler can tell that something is missing, that somehow he’s falling short; why else would he have come to Jesus in the first place? If he really believes that he’s kept all the commandments all his adult life, then he clearly sees that even that is not enough—that something more is needed. That’s why Jesus proceeds to tell him what he still needs to do: “Sell everything you have and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”To fully understand how radical this command was, it’s important to know that the ruler’s wealth—which was probably mostly in land—didn’t merely belong to him; his home and land were the family estate, and the family estate was of supreme importance in that society. It supported the family, and it symbolized the unity of the family, which was far and away the most important institution and authority in each person’s life; the command to sell it all and follow Jesus was a demand for a complete transfer of loyalty and allegiance. No longer would he be able to put his family ahead of God, nor would he be able to trust to his wealth to support himself and his family; to obey Jesus, he would have to set both utterly aside and trust wholly in God, in defiance of all the commands of his culture and all other authorities. He would have to step out in faith, totally unsupported in worldly terms, with no one to follow but Jesus and no ground beneath his feet save trust in God.“When he heard this, he became sad; for he was very rich.” Partly this was because he loved his wealth and didn’t want to give it up; partly it was because his wealth was the grounds of his self-confidence. After all, he was rich, so obviously God had blessed him for doing good, and he was doing good with his wealth, so obviously he was earning God’s favor; but Jesus blew all that away. Instead, Jesus demanded that he give up his wealth, give up every earthly sign of God’s favor and everything he could ever use to earn that favor, give up along with it his overarching loyalty to his family, and come to God as a humble beggar. What must I do to earn salvation? Give up any hope of earning salvation and accept it as God’s gift, and along the way give up any competing loyalties; and that wasn’t an answer the ruler could accept. In sorrow, he walked away.In response, Jesus said, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! Indeed, it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” Now, this shocked the crowd, and it has shocked the church down through the years—but not for the same reason. Both the crowd and the church take this as a comparative statement about the salvation of the rich versus the salvation of the poor—but they take it in opposite directions. We tend to assume that Jesus is saying that it’s easy for the poor to get into heaven but impossible for the rich, and so we come up with ways to make this something less than impossible, as in the interpretations I mentioned earlier. The crowd, on the other hand, assumed that the poor had a harder time being saved. After all, the rich built synagogues, funded orphanages, gave money to those in need, paid for the upkeep on the temple, and in general did good things that most people couldn’t afford to do. Their wealth was a sign of God’s blessing, and it gave them the ability to satisfy the Law’s demands in a way that ordinary folk couldn’t, and so surely if anyone was saved, it was the rich. If it was impossible for them to be saved, what hope was there for anyone else?Then of course there’s Peter, with a completely different concern: he figures that those who had done what the ruler had been unwilling to do—this being, of course, Peter himself and his fellow disciples—ought to be rewarded, and he wants to make sure they get what’s coming to them. His concern is understandable, because Jesus’ challenge here is daunting, to say the least: “Whatever besides me is most important to you—your wealth, your family, your sex life, your job, your hobbies, your ambitions, whatever—set it aside and follow me”; that’s a pretty high standard, and Peter wants to make sure that he and his friends who have tried to answer that call will get the reward they deserve. Jesus reassures him: those who have denied themselves and set aside all other loyalties to follow Jesus will indeed be rewarded—they will receive the life of the kingdom of God, in this life and the life to come; but still, as the crowd is wondering if anyone can be saved, Jesus doesn’t point to his disciples and say, “Look at them, they’ve done it, they’ve earned eternal life.” No, for them, too, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle; for them, too, their only hope is that “what is impossible for human beings is possible for God.”The truth is, salvation is impossible, from our end; it can’t be earned, or manufactured, or accomplished in any way, shape or form. We might as well try to drive our car to the moon, for all the good it would do us. Unfortunately, this is something the church keeps losing sight of, as we often fail to take our own sin as seriously as the sin of others. I think that’s why so many of our arguments get so fierce: we assume that our salvation is perfectly reasonable, and that because “they,” whoever “they” might happen to be, are in some way outside the will of God, their salvation is unreasonable. Truth is, all of our salvation is unreasonable; none of us have any hope at all of being good enough to make it happen, no matter what we have or do right. When once we understand the demands of God’s holiness, what he requires of us, and what’s necessary to satisfy him, it becomes clear that we can’t do it, that we could never do it; if we truly see our own sinfulness and our own limitations, we realize that we’d have better luck trying to fly by flapping our arms and diving off the Sears Tower.But what is impossible for us is possible with God, because of Jesus Christ. That’s why we have hope, that’s why there’s a reason for our faith, and that’s why he makes the staggering demands that he does, because in nothing and no one else can we find salvation. He has given us an impossible faith—impossible by our own effort, impossible by our own standards—in a God who has done the impossible for us, and so he makes impossible demands to go with it: “Be perfect, as I am perfect.” “Love your enemies, and do good to those who curse you.” “I am the Lord your God; you shall have no other gods before me.” “Die to yourself.” “Sell everything you have, give it to the poor, and trust me to provide for all your needs.” We can’t do what God asks of us; but what we cannot do for ourselves, he has done for us in Jesus, and will do in us by his Spirit. And so, we don’t ask, “What must I do to be saved,” for we know that to be a question with no answer. Instead, we celebrate God’s amazing grace that saved us despite ourselves, and we give him all our love and all our loyalty and all our obedience, not in order to be saved, but because we have been saved.
Taking time for Advent
Tomorrow is the first day of the Christian year, the first Sunday of Advent. For those not familiar with it, Advent is the season of preparation for the celebration of the birth of Christ; it’s a very different thing from what the world calls “the Christmas season,” though the two run together. As Joseph Bottum put it in First Things,
Christmas has devoured Advent, gobbled it up with the turkey giblets and the goblets of seasonal ale. Every secularized holiday, of course, tends to lose the context it had in the liturgical year. Across the nation, even in many churches, Easter has hopped across Lent, Halloween has frightened away All Saints, and New Year’s has drunk up Epiphany.Still, the disappearance of Advent seems especially disturbing—for it’s injured even the secular Christmas season: opening a hole, from Thanksgiving on, that can be filled only with fiercer, madder, and wilder attempts to anticipate Christmas.More Christmas trees. More Christmas lights. More tinsel, more tassels, more glitter, more glee—until the glut of candies and carols, ornaments and trimmings, has left almost nothing for Christmas Day. For much of America, Christmas itself arrives nearly as an afterthought: not the fulfillment, but only the end, of the long Yule season that has burned without stop since the stores began their Christmas sales. . . .Even for me, the endless roar of untethered Christmas anticipation is close to drowning out the disciplined anticipation of Advent. And when Christmas itself arrives, it has begun to seem a day not all that different from any other. Oh, yes, church and home to a big dinner. Presents for the children. A set of decorations. But nothing special, really.It is this that Advent, rightly kept, would prevent—the thing, in fact, it is designed to halt.
It’s an excellent meditation on the meaning and purpose of the discipline of Advent, and why we need it; I encourage you to read the whole thing.
Relevance, busyness, and fruit
Speaking of quotes, I got out of the habit of checking the Rev. Dr. Ray Ortlund’s blog, Christ Is Deeper Still, when he took a couple weeks off to go hunting; which means I have a lot to catch up with, since he puts up a lot of great material. In his recent posts, I particularly appreciate two, which seem to me to stand in striking juxtaposition (though no one seems to have commented on this). The first is this quote from Thomas Oden:
I am doggedly sworn to irrelevance, insofar as relevance implies a corrupt indebtedness to modernity. . . . My deepest desire as a theologian is to be permitted to study the unchanging God without some pragmatic reason. I simply want to enjoy the study of God—not write about it, not view it in relation to its political residue, or pretentiously imagine it will have some social effect. The joy of inquiry into God is a sufficient end in itself. . . .
I relish those times when there are no responsibilities but to engage in this quiet dialogue that is my vocation. Then, I readpray, studypray, workpray, thinkpray, because there is nothing I more want to do.
So when old activist friends ask why I’m not out there on the street working to change the world, I answer that I am out on the street in the most serious way by being here with my books, and if you see no connection there, you have not understood my vocation. I do not love the suffering poor less by offering them what they need more.
The second is this one, from the next day:
In this provocative blog post, C. J. Mahaney helps me ask a change-conducive question: “Am I deploying my daily life fruitfully or just racing through it busily?” I am drawn back to Psalm 1.
The psalm bristles with contrasts. Not nuances. Stark contrasts. And not because the psalm is simplistic but because it is so profound. In this world’s Gadarene rush of ever-expanding options we need that blunt clarity. Psalm 1 calls us back to the one choice we all face every day: good versus evil. It’s that profound. It’s a choice between simple confidence in the Spirit-filled ways of God versus nervous, hyper-active, carnal worldliness. . . .
It’s a picture of impotent restlessness versus fruitful quietness. Wasn’t it Pascal who said that all the world’s troubles are due to men’s inability to sit quietly in a room and read a book? Couldn’t we make that case for The Book?
Busyness can be a drug. It makes us feel important and needed. Fruitfulness is another matter. It is a miracle of God’s grace through his Word, imparted to a heart that stays quiet and low before him, set upon doing his will only.
It seems to me that there’s an important truth here: often, fruitfulness only comes by setting aside the activity that the world deems relevant. True fruitfulness comes from being rooted in God, and that requires time spent, not “doing something,” but sitting quietly in his presence. It requires time given over to “readpray, studypray, workpray, thinkpray,” that we may come to better know our God and draw more deeply from his life.
This means two things. First, as Mahaney says in the post Ortlund references, it’s very easy to avoid the truly important things by keeping ourselves very busy with the urgent things, because the world around us will see our busyness and approve; indeed, one difficulty in seeking to do the opposite can be that people will think we’re unproductive, and judge us accordingly. (Of course, that’s not without some reason, since one can always fall off into laziness this way as well, and actually become unproductive.) To be fruitful requires us to buckle down and identify what really matters, and then to focus on that; and thus it requires most of all that we devote ourselves to seeking God’s face, which we cannot effectively do in the midst of our busyness (though he can always interrupt our busyness, if he wills). For that, we need the spiritual disciplines of solitude and silence, “unproductive” though they may seem to be; and we need to be open to confront all the things about ourselves and our lives that we do not wish to confront.
Second, this means that we have to accept that our fruitfulness does not in the end arise out of our own strength. Certainly, we won’t be fruitful if we truly do nothing, but the sheer expenditure of energy won’t produce any fruit, either, if it’s merely our own. As Psalm 1 points out, the tree produces fruit not by frantic effort, but because it’s planted in good soil beside a river; it has sent its roots deep and is drinking deeply of the water, and drawing out the nutrients from that good soil. That is the effort from which the fruit comes, and no other.
Grace is free . . . that’s precisely the problem
There’s a change in the blogroll, under the heading “Theoblogians,” that I think is worth noting. I’ve regretfully taken Doug Hagler’s blog Prog(ressive)nostications off, since he’s shutting it down (given that it’s been over a month since he posted, I can’t be accused of being hasty in that respect) and added in the blog Of First Importance, a quote blog to which Jared Wilson pointed us a while back, which has some great material. I particularly like this one—I’d missed it, but my wonderful wife drew it to my attention—from Dan Allender, picked up from Gospel Transformation:
The cost for the recipient of God’s grace is nothing—and no price could be higher for arrogant people to pay.
That about sums it up, I think.
In case anyone is wondering . . .
. . . I really haven’t dropped off the face of the earth; but between being sick myself, having a sick wife and (for a while) a sick daughter, and major computer work at the church (which will be well worth it, when it’s done), I haven’t had a great deal of time or energy to put into this blog. (I’m also behind on e-mail as a result of the same issues, so if I haven’t gotten back to you, please, don’t give up on me.) A more normal posting schedule will no doubt resume when circumstances permit, but it probably won’t be until next week.In the meantime, I’ve been meaning to comment on Tyler Dawn’s recent post on the nature of prophecy, so I’ll recommend you go read it. Even if you believe the gift of prophecy ceased with the death of the first apostles, she has some good things to say about the nature of our relationship with God, and about what real Christian leadership looks like.
Further thought on submission and expectations
Wives, submit to your husbands as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives, and do not be harsh with them. Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord. Fathers, do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged.—Colossians 3:18-21One of the things we often miss about this passage, and its parallel in Ephesians 5 about which I posted earlier today, is that as he addresses different groups of people, Paul directs his comments to them—for instance, his comments about wives are addressed to wives, and his comments about husbands are addressed to husbands. This might seem obvious, but we often tend to read them the other way around—as if Paul had written, for instance, “Husbands, your wives are supposed to submit to you as to the Lord”; we focus on what others are supposed to do for us, rather than on what Paul commands us to do. Verse 20 isn’t addressed to parents, to use as a stick with which to beat our children, but to the children themselves; yes, we need to teach our children to be obedient, but you know, the reason really isn’t “Because I say so.” It’s not because I say so, it’s because God says so, and because I in my place am trying to do the best I can to teach them to do what is wise and good and pleasing to God. And the first sentence isn’t written to tell husbands what we have the right to expect; the word to us is, “Love your wives.” In Ephesians, Paul takes it a step further: “Love your wives as Christ loved the church.” It’s an absolute command; it isn’t contingent on anything anyone else does or doesn’t do. Our job is to do our job, not anyone else’s. That’s just how it works.
Brief meditation on submission and marriage
And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ, wives to husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also should wives submit in everything to their husbands.Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her that he might sanctify her, cleansing her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without stain or wrinkle or any other mark, that she might be holy and unmarred. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. Whoever loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am talking about Christ and the church. However, let each one of you love his wife as himself,
and let the wife see that she respects her husband.—Ephesians 5:18-33That first paragraph above is Ephesians 5:18-24, and if you’re used to English translations, it probably looks weird to you. Your typical English Bible will put a full stop after “our Lord Jesus Christ,” then set verse 21 off as a separate paragraph: “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” Then you’ll have a heading, most often Wives and Husbands, and then verse 22 will read, “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord.”The only problem is, that verb in verse 22 doesn’t exist; inserting it, and the heading, makes it sound like a new and separate command from everything that’s gone before, and it just isn’t. It’s a particular application of a broader command: the command to mutual submission. To the world, this sounds like a really strange concept, since what the world has in mind when it thinks of “submit” or “be subject” is one person bossing another around—I tell you what to do and you do it, and that’s that. It’s a one-way street. What Paul means is something very different: all of us as brothers and sisters in Christ are supposed to submit to one another as part of being filled up by the Spirit. What this means is, submission isn’t about hierarchy, and it isn’t a matter of most of us doing what a few people tell us to do. Instead, it’s a matter of how we as Christians relate to one another and care for one another. It’s a matter of heeding Paul’s words in Philippians 2: “Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.” As the ultimate example of this attitude, Paul points to Christ, who had more right than anyone to insist on his own way and his own prerogatives, but chose instead to give them all up and accept crucifixion. It seems to me that the command to submit to each other doesn’t mean that we have to do whatever anyone tells us to do, but rather that we don’t have the right to dominate others; we can’t insist that we are more important than they are. Instead, we should be willing to let others be more important, we should be ready to let others have their way, and we should be as concerned for the good of those around us as for our own good.This is the context in which Paul turns to address wives and husbands. Many argue that this is a special case, that mutual submission is only the rule outside of marriage, and that inside marriage, submission is a one-way street. The reason I’ve usually seen offered for this is that Paul doesn’t go on in either of these passages to tell husbands to submit to their wives, and that therefore this must be a special duty for wives, not husbands. On first read, that makes sense; but if that’s the correct reading of these passages, then what do we make of the fact that Paul tells husbands to love their wives, but never tells wives to love their husbands? Clearly, he doesn’t mean that wives don’t need to love their husbands. This suggests—especially in light of the command in Ephesians to mutual submission—that he doesn’t intend submission to be just one-way, either; after all, one element of loving another person is being willing to put them and their will and their good ahead of ourselves and our own. Rather, it seems likely that Paul emphasizes submission to wives and love to husbands for some other reason.My guess is that that reason is the cultural situation he’s dealing with, which enshrined the legal superiority of husbands over wives. Husbands had, at least in theory, absolute power over their wives—and, for that matter, their children; and we all know what absolute power does: it corrupts. It corrupts those who wield it; it also corrupts those who are under it. Paul’s driving concern, then, is to address both halves of this relationship and tell both husbands and wives how to deal with the situation as Christians. The key principle here is that this should be all about Christ, and doing what pleases him (which includes not submitting to things which clearly do not please him); along with this, we see the truth that greater authority doesn’t mean a greater opportunity to get your own way, but rather a greater opportunity to love and serve. Thus Paul tells husbands, “Love your wives as Christ loved the church.” How did Christ love the church? He laid down his life for the church. That, and nothing less, is the standard.
The work of holiness
Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming. In these you too once walked, when you were living in them. But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised,
barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all.Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.—Colossians 3:5-17 (ESV)I said yesterday that the bad news is that we’re all sinners, and that we’ll never win free of that in this life. That’s the bad news of the law, for which the good news is Jesus Christ; and for those of us who bow to him as Lord, though we may never know complete freedom from sin this side of eternity, we don’t have to just give up and give in, either. God’s grace is at work in us, setting us free from sin, and while that work is unfinished, he never fails of his purposes. No matter how bad we might be (or might have been) or how holy we think we are now, no matter how old and set in our ways or how young and callow, God is at work in us, and he calls us to work with him, to align our efforts with his. Paul lays out two parts to that in this passage. First he says, all these things that belong to this fallen world and to your old selves, put them to death. It’s much the same thing he says in Romans 8:13, where he writes, “If you live according to the sinful nature, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live.”This isn’t something we can accomplish in our own strength; our own efforts need to be a part of it, and there’s an important place for spiritual disciplines such as prayer, worship, and silence, but it’s only by the power of the Spirit of God that we can make any real progress in dealing with our sin. The goal is the complete rooting-out and destruction of sin in our lives; we’ll never reach it in this life, but it’s nevertheless the goal toward which we work. It’s an ongoing struggle against the sin in our lives, to weaken and starve it, so that through loss of strength and lack of food, it dies away little by little, losing its ability to draw us into sinful actions. This requires us to know our own sinfulness, to be aware of the ways in which our sin tricks us and overcomes us, if we are to fight against it intelligently; and it requires constant vigilance—but then, as the Irish politician and writer Edmund Burke noted, that’s always the price of true freedom.Along with this, Paul says, “Change your clothes!” The image here is of the old self with its sinful practices as a suit of clothes we wear, and of the new self, which is from God, as another suit of clothes. The more we come to appreciate the new life God has given us, the more we learn to see the old self, those old clothes, for the dirty things they are. Imagine coming home after some fiasco, soaked to the skin, cold to the bone, covered in mud and filth, and taking a long, hot shower, or perhaps a long, hot bath; when you’re warm and clean, are you going to put those clothes back on? And yet that, in a sense, is just what we do whenever we turn back to sin: we’ve been washed clean, and yet we put the filth of the old self back on. Paul says, “Don’t do that—put on the habits of your new life in Christ.”If we put these two commands together, we get a complete picture. As we work to put to death the inward reality of sin, we are also to be at work stripping ourselves of our sinful habits, which are rooted in that inward reality, and replacing them with new ones. For the things we need to set aside, Paul points on the one hand to the disordered desires which lead us to pursue the pleasures and things of the world instead of God, and on the other, to the destructive passions, and the destructive language that goes with them; put those aside, he says, take them off and get rid of them. In their place, clothe yourselves with a new way of living, one which is marked by compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, and a forgiving spirit. These words describe an attitude that doesn’t give way to rage when one is done wrong but chooses to show grace, and is willing to waive one’s rights for the good of others, even when they don’t deserve it. The ultimate example of this is Jesus, who at times spoke quite sternly to the Jewish leaders who had set themselves against him, yet died on the cross for them, with a prayer for their forgiveness on his lips. Just so, says Paul, we should bear with one another and forgive one another just as Christ has forgiven us.Of course, it would be very easy to take these things and turn them into just another legalistic religion, just another way of putting faith in our own ability to be good enough—just work hard enough at being compassionate, kind, humble, gentle, patient, and forgiving, and you’ll please God. But look what Paul says next: clothe yourself with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony, and let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts. In other words, these virtues aren’t individual things to be worked on individually and to be accomplished by stern effort—they’re supposed to be the fruit of the love of God and the peace of Christ in our lives. When are we not compassionate, kind, humble, and so on? When we don’t love the people we’re dealing with, or when we’re not at peace—when we’re in conflict within ourselves, when we’re in conflict with those around us, when we’re anxious, when we feel the weight of our own lives resting on our shoulders. But if we open ourselves up to the love of God—because love, too, is not something we do in our own strength; love comes from God, it’s his gift to us and his work in our lives—and let him fill us with his peace, then these virtues are the result.
Ecclesia reformata semper reformanda secundum verbum Dei
or, in English, “The church reformed and always being reformed according to the word of God.” This 16th-century Latin motto captures the spirit and purpose of the Reformation, and so it has continued to be used through the centuries by those of us who consider ourselves heirs of the Reformation and students of the wisdom of the great Reformers. (You know, the sort of people who look at October 31 and think “Reformation Day,” not just Halloween, and write blog posts in honor of the day.)
Unfortunately—aided by a common mistranslation, “the church reformed and always reforming“—in recent times we’ve seen this motto misused in support of ends which are completely contradictory to the spirit and intent of the Reformation and the Reformed tradition; this sort of thing is quite common in the Presbyterian Church (USA), the denomination in which I serve as a pastor. The tendency is to interpret “always reforming” as the ongoing work of the church, reinventing itself to fit the culture, and set that over against “reformed” as if these are two separate things. Thus, for instance, we get this comment from Adam Walker Cleaveland from a few years ago on his blog pomomusings (emphasis mine):
I think that one could fairly easily make an argument that many of our Presbyterian churches today have focused primarily (almost exclusively) on the “Reformed” aspect, and have not critically evaluated how the church may need to continue to be “always reforming” in light of our current context.
Always reforming. Always being sensitive to the radical openness and movement of the Spirit. Always being aware that we may need to be critically evaluate our theology and methodology. While at the same time, being aware of and sensitive to the things that are part of the tradition of the Presbyterian church, and those things that are important in the holy scriptures. The Bible is an important part of the heritage of the Presbyterian church and the Christian tradition, but we must be wary of creating logocentric churches, where we become strict-constructionists when it comes to our theologies and methodologies, only allowing whatever the scriptures and tradition says. That must be balanced and held in tension with the new waves of the Spirit that may be calling for new theologies and new methodologies in a new world.
In Cleaveland’s case, he was coming from a self-consciously “emergent” position, an influence which is only beginning to emerge (if you will) in the PC(USA); but we see this sort of argument all the time from liberals in the denomination. “The Bible is an important part of our heritage, but the world is evolving and we need to evolve with it. Yes, Christians used to believe that homosexuality was sinful, but we know better now. God is doing a new thing, and his Spirit is calling for a new theology that’s appropriate to the times. We’re supposed to be always reforming—we can’t afford to cling to the dead past, we need to move with the present.” And so on, and so forth. In a nutshell: “Always reforming, new wind of the Spirit, therefore whatever we don’t like about historic Presbyterian theology and morality, we can throw out.”
The problem is twofold. First, these are folks who are very interested in reforming the church, but not so interested in the secundum verbum Dei part; I don’t know what “according to cultural assumptions” would be in Latin, but that would be more to the point. This is not to say theyreject the Scriptures, just that they reject the idea that the Scriptures could be telling them something they really don’t want to hear; they want the church to believe what they want the church to believe, and they’re happy to offer any interpretation of Scripture they can which supports that, but if they decide they can’t sustain those interpretations, they don’t respond by changing their position. Instead, they respond by rejecting the authority of Scripture on that point, declaring essentially, “that was then, this is now, and we know better.” (Some would point out that secundum verbum Dei is a later addition, which is true; it is, however, a clarifyingaddition—it adds nothing new to the older motto, but rather makes explicit what was already implicit.)
(It should be noted at this point that most of this can also be said of many who consider themselves evangelicals; the primary difference is that evangelicals don’t justify themselves by explicitly rejecting the authority of Scripture. Rather, the evangelical tendency is to privilege the individual interpretation of Scripture and simply insist that yes it does mean what I want it to mean. It still ends up locating primary authority in the autonomous individual rather than in the voice of God speaking by his Spirit through the Scripture, but by a different route and in less straightforward fashion.)
Second, there is the belief that the church is the agent of its own reformation, and that this is about the church reinventing itself and evolving. As McCormick theology professor Anna Case-Winters pointed out in Presbyterians Today several years ago, this is directly opposed to what this motto actually means, and what the Reformation was all about. As she says, this doesn’t mean that “newer is better,” nor does it leave it to us to determine what “reforming” looks like. Rather, it’s about
restoring the church to its true nature, purified from the “innovations” that riddled the church through centuries of inattention to Scripture and theological laxity. . . .
God is the agent of reformation. The church is rather the object of God’s reforming work. God’s agency and initiative have priority here. . . . Theologian Harold Nebelsick put it well: “We are the recipients of the activity of the Holy Spirit which reforms the church in accordance with the Word of God.” The church is God’s church, a creature of God’s Word and Spirit. As we say in our Brief Statement of Faith, “we belong to God.” God’s Word and Spirit guide the church’s forming and reforming.
What we need to understand here is that this motto isn’t about justifying anything we might want to do; it is rather about acknowledging that being the church isn’t about justifying what we want to do. It isn’t about getting what we want, or believing what we’re comfortable believing; instead, it’s about the negation of that approach. It’s about recognizing that the reason we keep needing God to reform us is that we keep slipping back into building churches that are about us, giving us what we want and keeping us comfortable, and thus keep needing to be called back to the will of God as revealed in Scripture. It’s also about recognizing that yes, God still speaks by his Spirit—but that he will not contradict anything he has already said, because who he is doesn’t change, and thus that if we think we feel God leading us, we need to test that sense against what he’s already revealed in Scripture.
This is why what Dr. Case-Winters says about the 16th century remains true for us today:
In the 16th-century context the impulse it reflected was neither liberal nor conservative, but radical, in the sense of returning to the “root.” The Reformers believed the church had become corrupt, so change was needed. But it was a change in the interest of preservation and restoration of more authentic faith and life—a church reformed and always to be reformed according to the Word of God.
Being Reformed means being radical in precisely that sense, for it means not that we’re always becoming something new, nor that we’re always changing, but that we’re always being conformed and reconformed to the unchanging standard of the Word of God, which means of the character and will of the one “whose beauty is past change,” as Hopkins put it. It means not that we adapt to this world, but rather we’re pulled away from adapting to this world; the goal is not to let this world squeeze us into its mold, but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. It means accepting that we don’t set the agenda, but rather that we’re called to surrender to God’s agenda, and thus recognizing that we’re people under authority—the authority of God, and thus of his revelation to us in his Word—and that we must bow to that authority even when we don’t like what we hear, rather than trying to find ways to rationalize what we want to do instead.
It means, in short, allowing ourselves to be Reformed, not by our word and our will, but by the will of God in accordance with his Word.