This goes well with Friday’s post on grace-driven effort; this is E. Stanley Jones, courtesy of Of First Importance:
Grace binds you with far stronger cords than the cords of duty or obligation can bind you. Grace is free, but when once you take it, you are bound forever to the Giver and bound to catch the spirit of the Giver. Like produces like. Grace makes you gracious, the Giver makes you give.
Due to a combination of circumstances, I found myself this week filling in for my wife, who’s one of the book-review bloggers for Thomas Nelson (which now calls their review-blogging program, absurdly, BookSneeze), to write a review of the book Jesus Manifesto by Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola. It’s a 179-page (plus footnotes) expansion of a ~2400 word essay they posted last summer, which I noted at the time when Jared Wilson flagged it. The essay was a powerful challenge to the increasingly Jesusless American church, but there was plenty of room to expand on each of their ten points; now, each one gets a chapter. The resulting book is not perfect, by any means—there’s room for criticism, as there is with any human work—but I’m grateful to Sweet and Viola for writing it, and to Thomas Nelson for publishing it and pushing it, because the church in this country badly needs to hear what they have to say.
I will probably come back to this book and interact with it more than once, because there’s a lot here; but for now, let me just post here what I put up on my wife’s blog. The best summary of this book comes from the authors themselves, in the last chapter, in words taken straight from the original essay:
Christians don’t follow Christianity; they follow Christ.
Christians don’t preach themselves; they preach Christ.
Christians don’t preach about Christ: they simply preach Christ.
The purpose of the book is to lay out why that’s so and what that looks like, in order to address “the major disease of today’s church . . . JDD: Jesus Deficit Disorder.”
Sweet and Viola do an excellent job of this; they have written a book which is truly centered on—indeed, saturated with—Jesus. Rather than resting on human wisdom, it rests solidly on Scripture, the word that contains the Word, “the cradle that contains the Christ,” in Luther’s phrase; this is not to say that they ignore the wisdom of Christians through the ages, but they only use it to expound and amplify the voice of the Scriptures as they speak of Christ. This book will make anyone who reads it with an open mind and heart aware of their hunger and thirst for Jesus; one hopes it will do the same for the American church.
Time was, I used to read a lot of systematic theology; I don’t do that much anymore. Rather, I’m much more likely to read commentaries. This is not to disparage the work of systematic theology—I still have a lot of it on my shelves, and I make use of it; but I think the church, at least since Aquinas, has tended to make much too much of theological systems, to the point where we identify with and believe in them rather than in what—or rather, Who—they’re supposed to point us to. Just consider the labels Protestants use: Lutheran, Calvinist, Wesleyan, Baptist, Reformed, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian. (Those churches which call themselves Catholic and Orthodox are different because they defined themselves against each other—the purpose of their names is to identify them as the true church and the other as not.) I think systematic theology has a useful and important purpose in helping us to interpret Scripture holistically, in the big-picture view, with integrity; but we must always remember that it is merely a guide to understanding, not the substance of our beliefs.
It’s easy to lose sight of that, but it’s true, because true Christianity isn’t about believing in beliefs, it’s about believing in a person: Jesus Christ, the Son of God, in whom the fulness of the Triune God is revealed. Doctrines, even true doctrines, don’t save us—only Jesus saves us; it matters that we believe true things, yes, but we seek to believe true things in order that we may more clearly see and know and believe in the one who is Truth.
Christ cannot be summarized in propositional statements and assertions of fact; indeed, all the true statements we can make about him and his teaching are of necessity partial. We cannot follow him by making up a list of things to do and not to do, or by identifying the things he did and trying to do them; we cannot help others know him merely by telling them things about him, even if every last one of them are true things. Christian faith cannot ultimately be explained, nor can it fully be taught, even though teaching is an important element of the work of the church. In the end, it can only be lived, Christ in us by his indwelling Holy Spirit; and the only way we can fully carry out his command to make disciples is by living in him and allowing others to live closely with us as we do so, so that we can say to them, “Follow me as I follow Christ.”
I’m not sure why it had never occurred to me before to post Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address for Memorial Day, but I think it’s well worth doing—not least because of its insistence that the most important thing we can do to honor those who died fighting for that which is good and true and right is to take up the work and carry it on.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Pete Hegseth, the head of Vets for Freedom, posted this on NRO’s The Corner last year; I posted it at the time, and decided it was worth re-posting this year.
Memorial Day is about one thing: remembering the fallen on the battlefield and passing their collective story to the next generation. These stories, and the men who bear them, are the backbone of this American experiment and must never be forgotten. As John Stuart Mill once said, “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse.” The minute—excuse me, the second—we believe our freedoms inevitable and/or immutable, we cease to live in history, and have soured the soldier’s sacrifice. He died in the field, so we can enjoy this beautiful day (and weekend). Our freedoms—purchased on the battlefield—are indeed “worthy of war.”
And this day, with America still at war, it is also fitting that we remember the soldiers currently serving in harm’s way. Because, as any veteran can attest, just one moment, one explosion, or one bullet separates Veterans Day from Memorial Day. Soldiers currently in Iraq and Afghanistan are fighting for our freedoms today, knowing it’s possible they may never see tomorrow. These troops—and their mission—deserve our support each day, and our prayers every night. May God watch over them—and their families; May He give them courage in the face of fear, and righteous might in the face of evil.
just because I’ve been thinking about this one lately:
One of my friends on Facebook posted the chorus to “Revive Us Again” as her status, and now I have Ashley Cleveland’s version stuck in my head. Of course, it doesn’t take much to get that one stuck in my head; nor do I regret it, because it’s a great version. It’s also well worth sharing—so, without further ado:
As long as I’m at it, I’ve been meaning to post Moses Hogan’s phenomenal arrangement of “The Battle of Jericho” ever since my wife discovered it a couple weeks ago; since it’s in the same general vein, albeit a choral arrangement rather than solo voice with a blues-rock band, now’s as good a time as any.
(Genesis 1:1-3; Galatians 4:4-7, 1 John 4:6-10)
The doctrine of the Trinity is perhaps the most difficult of all Christian beliefs. It’s hard to understand how God can be one, and yet three; it’s hard to define what we mean when we say that; it’s even hard to figure out what words we can use when we talk about this. The traditional formulation is that God is three persons in one being, but that has its problems; one of my seminary professors, J. I. Packer, insisted that we really couldn’t say anthing more than that God is three things in one thing, but there’s a problem with that, too—things are impersonal, and God is clearly personal.
So it’s hard to wrap our minds around this, as you can see from all the different illustrations people use. St. Patrick taught the Irish about the Trinity by holding up a shamrock, with its three leaves; others hold up the egg, which consists of yolk, white, and shell; my Nana preferred to talk about how each of us has multiple roles, so that for instance I am a son to my parents, a husband to my wife, and a father to my children. All of these are inadequate, though; in fact, some of them, if we really thought about them seriously, would lead us far astray from the biblical witness.
Actually, though I don’t trust attempts to illustrate the Trinity, the best one I’ve ever run across is the structure of our federal government. That may sound strange to say, but I’ve actually read folks who argue that trinitarian theology was in the back of the Founders’ minds (some of them, anyway) when they designed it. I don’t know about the history there—it’s an interesting idea, but I haven’t seen any primary sources that support it—but as an analogy, it has its points. There is a certain hierarchy and structure to our branches of government, but none of them are dominant; each does different things; and the relationship between them constitutes our government and makes things happen. Thus, for instance, laws are passed by the legislative branch, executed and administered by the executive branch, and enforced by the judicial branch.
Of course, God is unlimited and perfect, while our government is limited and imperfect (though it occasionally forgets the fact) because it’s composed of limited and imperfect people, but there are some real parallels there that are worth considering. One could even argue that the fact that our government is designed to function in a way analogous to the divine Trinity might have something to do with why this “noble experiment,” as Abraham Lincoln called it, has turned out so well. I would never use politics to prove theology, but it’s an interesting thing to think about.
Of course, this analogy also has its dangers—including the temptation to snipe about the tendency of government to think it’s God—but it also has this advantage, that it points us to the reason why the doctrine of the Trinity matters. It’s easy to think that it really doesn’t, because it seems so abstruse and arcane and removed from real life; it’s easy to figure that this is just a case of people with more brains than sense and too much time on their hands cooking up the most complicated thing they could think of. In truth, though, this is anything but. Granted that the Bible never uses the word “Trinity” and that there is no one passage that teaches it, this is nevertheless a doctrine that is biblically necessary and profoundly important to our understanding of God.
First, it’s biblically necessary because it’s the only way to reconcile all the biblical statements about God. Obviously, God is one and there is only one God—Deuteronomy 6 makes that clear—and God the Father is God. But Jesus Christ also claimed to be God, in many ways. John 5:18: “This was why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because . . . he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.” John quotes him multiple times as calling himself the Son of God, and identifies him in the opening of his gospel as God, but distinct from the Father. Later on in John 5, Jesus identifies himself as the one who will call the dead to rise at the end of time and carry out the final judgment. Luke 5, the healing of the paralytic, Jesus forgives the man’s sins and we see the reaction of the Pharisees: “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” John 10:30, he declares, “I and the Father are one”; John 8:58, he tells the Jewish leaders, “Before Abraham was, I AM”—claiming the unspoken name of God as his own rightful name. Biblically, on the testimony of Jesus, he and the Father are distinct, in relationship with one another, and both fully God.
The evidence for the Holy Spirit on this point is not as extensive, but it’s still clear. For instance, Paul says in 2 Corinthians 3:17-18, “The Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.” The Spirit of God is shown to be involved in creation, in Genesis 1; and in John 15:26, Jesus teaches his disciples that the Spirit proceeds from the Father. The Father didn’t create the Spirit, the relationship is something much closer than that; the Spirit is of the same being as the Father. And then in Galatians 4, the Spirit is identified as the Spirit of the Son, indicating that there’s a similar close connection there. 2 Corinthians is the only place I can think of where the Bible comes flat out and calls the Holy Spirit God, but throughout the New Testament he is treated as God.
So the Father is God and Jesus the Son is God and the Holy Spirit is God, and there is only one God; so we have three, and we have one, and somehow those are both true at the exact same time, and that’s God. Even one of the principal names of God in the Old Testament allows for that, because it’s a plural form. People have broken their brains trying to figure out exactly how that works, and nobody’s ever gotten there yet; the only thing that we can say for certain is that the only people who have produced explanations that human beings can fully understand have done so by denying one part or another of the biblical witness, making God less than what the Bible says he is. Or perhaps we should say, what he are, or what they is; ordinary language just doesn’t express it. All we can do is accept that this is one of those things that’s beyond our understanding—and that it ought to be, that this is a good thing. After all, any god small enough for us to fully understand would be too small to be God. When you consider that we don’t even fully understand each other, or even ourselves, we ought to expect that God should be too big for us to wrap our little minds all the way around.
Still, just agreeing with this isn’t enough. There are those who accept the doctrine of the Trinity as true but unimportant, and that’s a major mistake. For one thing, that always seems to lead to collapsing the work of one Person of the Trinity—most often the Holy Spirit, but not always—into the work of the others, or even into the work of the church. As Dr. Packer has pointed out, the latter is one of the characteristic theological errors of the Roman church—it’s why he always insisted we should study the great Eastern Orthodox theologians, because in the West, Augustine got it wrong and everybody followed him; it’s also why one of the strong emphases of the Reformation, out of which our part of the church tradition comes, was on a renewal and reinvigoration of Trinitarian thought, including a return to taking the work of the Spirit seriously. This is critical, because all three Persons of God are involved in our salvation, and all three are involved in our ongoing life. Somehow, whenever we start to lose sight of the work of one of them, we always end up losing sight of the gospel along with it; it always seems to result in legalism and salvation by works in the end.
As well, the doctrine of the Trinity reveals to us a highly significant truth: God is relational within his very nature. This is why John can say, in 1 John 4, that God is love. Have you ever stopped to think about that? This isn’t an adjective, like saying that God is good, or God is just; that would have been “God is loving.” Which is true, but not the same thing. Nor is this the same as saying “God loves.” Nor is this equal to saying “Love is God”—that we worship an emotion, or an impersonal force—because God is personal, a being, not merely a force. Is this statement just hyperbole? In other contexts, it could be, but that doesn’t fit with 1 John, where it’s made quite straightforwardly to support John’s assertion that anyone who does not love does not know God. This isn’t just praise of God, it’s a serious statement about his nature and character.
Spoken of any single person, these words would not make sense; but God isn’t just a single person. Instead, he is three in one, and the persons of God exist in eternal relationship with each other—relationship that consists of pure, unflawed, unadulterated love. We can say that God is love because love is the essence of his nature, because he exists eternally in love among themself. The Father loves the Son and the Spirit, the Son loves the Father and the Spirit, the Spirit loves the Father and the Son, and this is who God is, and this is why he do what they does.
The Greek Fathers expressed this by borrowing the word perichoresis from the Greek—it’s the word for a circle dance in which the dancers are whirling about in sometimes highly complex patterns, so that there is constant movement, each yielding to the other and being yielded to in turn. The relationship of the Trinity, they saw—and rightly, I think—is a joyful dance of mutual celebration.
Once we get hold of this, it helps us to understand some things about God that we may find puzzling or even off-putting. For instance, I’ve known people to complain about the fact that God describes himself as a jealous God, demanding whole-hearted, selfless praise from his people and indeed from the whole world; why, they ask, would we want to worship a God like that? And how does that square with Paul’s praise for the humility of Christ, who gave up his glory and his prerogatives for our sake? I’ve actually heard a preacher—one I otherwise respected quite highly—come out and call God a narcissist, and then try to make that OK by arguing that God is so great that he’s the only one who has the right to be a narcissist. I don’t think that flies. But I think this makes more sense when we realize what we’re seeing here: each Person of God is jealous for the praise that each of the other two deserves. When we ignore the Holy Spirit and deny his work, for instance, I’m sure the Spirit is grieved, but I would imagine that it’s the Father and the Son who are really displeased by that.
This also helps us understand what God is on about in our lives. I’ve said this before, that God didn’t create us because he was lonely, because he needed someone to love or to love him; he already had that. Rather, he created us as an extension of his love. We are not children of God in the same way Christ is the Son of God, but he created us in order to adopt us as his children, in order to expand the circle of the divine love by inviting us into it and including us within it. Of course, it wasn’t long before the first humans were convinced there was something better out there, and we’ve been following various branches of that rabbit trail ever since; and so God, who created us in love, pursued us in love, and redeemed us in love. His intent now is the same as it ever was, just with a lot of suffering mixed in as a consequence of our distrust and rebellious self-will.
Finally, I think this helps us see clearly who we are in God, and to understand why all our efforts to bargain with him or earn his favor are pointless and doomed to failure. God doesn’t need our love, and he doesn’t need anything we can give him—he is complete in themself. As such, he’s not out to get anything from us, or to try to manipulate us for his own benefit, because we can’t benefit him. He simply loves us because he is love, and he delights in our love for the same reason; he gives us work to do because he loves us, because whether we understand it or not, we need it, and he takes pleasure in us when we trust him enough to do what he gives us to do. He delights in us when we delight in him, when we trust his grace, when we seek his presence. Everything we can give God is purely extra—that’s why he takes so much pleasure in what we give him. He doesn’t love you because of what you’ve done, or because of what you might do; he simply loves you because that’s who he is and that’s why he made you—and whatever else may change, that never will, and so God’s love never will.
Well, OK, not exactly; but given that people are now defending the White House’s job offer to Rep. Joe Sestak by reminding us that the Reagan White House may have tried something similar in California with Sen. S. I. Hayakawa 28 years ago, I think this from James’ entry on Brewers Hall of Famer Robin Yount in his New Historical Baseball Abstract is very much on point:
In 1978, after Yount had been in the major leagues four years, he held out in the spring, mulling over whether he wanted to be a baseball player, or whether he really wanted to be a professional golfer.
When that happened, I wrote him off as a player who would never become a star. If he can’t even figure out whether he wants to be a baseball player or a golfer, I reasoned, he’s never going to be an outstanding player. . . .
But as soon as he returned to baseball, Yount became a better player than he had been before; his career got traction from the moment he returned. What I didn’t see at the time was that Yount was in the process of making a commitment to baseball. Before he had his golf holiday, he was there every day, but on a certain level he wasn’t participating; he was wondering whether this was really the sport that he should be playing. What looked like indecision or sulking was really the process of making a decision.
This is often true. What Watergate was about was not the corruption of government, as most people thought, but rather, the establishment of new and higher standards of ethical conduct. Almost all scandals, I think, result not from the invention of new evils, but from the imposition of new ethical standards. . . . In the biographies of men and nations, success often arrives in a mask of failure.
I think James’ argument is well-taken, and very much applicable to the Sestak scandal. The irony of it all is that the new ethical standards that the Obama White House is now resisting, with some help from a press corps that really doesn’t much want to go after them, are the product of the Obama campaign. The people now insisting that politics as usual is “perfectly appropriate” are the same people who were telling us two years ago that we needed to vote for Sen. Obama because politics as usual is unacceptable. Maybe it was unrealistic then; it still looks bad for them now. As the Wall Street Journal summed the matter up,
It’s possible that all we really have here is a case of the Obama White House playing Washington politics as usual, which the White House refused to admit for three months because this is what Mr. Obama promised he would not do if he became President. However, this is clearly what he hired Mr. Emanuel to do for him, and given his ethical record Mr. Clinton was the perfect political cutout. So much for the most transparent Administration in history.
Then again, George W. Bush merely exercised his right to fire a handful of U.S. Attorneys, and Democrats made that a federal case for years even though it has since gone nowhere legally. The Emanuel to Clinton to Sestak job offer still needs a scrub under oath by the Justice Department and the relevant Congressional committees.
I believe the phrase we were looking for here is “hoist with their own petard.”
Everybody in the post-Christendom West seems to want to claim Jesus, even if they don’t actually know anything about him or like what he actually taught; the vestiges of the cultural authority the church used to have (which are, admittedly, a lot greater here in the U.S. than elsewhere) no doubt have something to do with that, along with the lingering sense that Jesus was somebody really special. The result is a great many attempts to bring Jesus down to the desired size so that his image can be manipulated without fear; Jesus must be reduced to just another great teacher—the greatest of all, perhaps, so long as the difference between him and, say, Buddha is understood to be a difference only of degree, not of kind.
The problem is, that just won’t wash if you actually look at Jesus; as C. S. Lewis pointed out, making the modern world aware of an argument dating back to the early days of the church, that’s the one option Jesus doesn’t leave us. He makes claims that no good, sane person would make, and says things that no one who doesn’t accept his claims would tolerate.
A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
If you can praise him as a great teacher, it’s proof you haven’t taken him seriously. And as James Stewart points out in his book A Faith to Proclaim, this goes further even than what he taught, into how he taught.
There is nothing in the Gospels more significant than the way in which Jesus deliberately places Himself at the very centre of His message. He does not say with other teachers, “The truth is everything, I am nothing”; He declares, “I am the truth.” He does not claim, with the founders of certain ethnic religions, to suggest answers to the world’s enigmas; He claims to be the answer—“Come unto Me, and I will give you rest.” He does not offer the guidance of a code or a philosophy to keep men right through the uncertainties of an unknown future; He says, “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.”
Teachers are people from whom we learn and then depart, doing whatever we will with their influence in our lives and our relationship with them; their true authority extends no further than the limits of our submission. While there are many who refuse to acknowledge Jesus’ authority, it is not in reality so limited—indeed, it isn’t limited at all; and he did nothing whatsoever to encourage us to think that it was, or is.
Update: It occurred to me today that I missed an even more important distinction in that last paragraph. Teachers are, as a class, primarily important to us for what we learn from them; there may be a significant relationship there as well, but not necessarily, and even when there is, it’s almost always secondary. That’s not to say anything about teachers, but rather about the way our society understands education: the importance of teachers in our lives is all about us. Jesus is primarily important to us for who he is, for our knowing him and being united to him; what we learn from him is secondary, important not for its own sake but because it contributes to our relationship with him.