Category Archives: Soteriology

We only know it will be love: A sermon on 1 John 3:1-7

Posted by on April 23, 2012 7 comments

Brothers and sisters, here is the amazing thing that we have to deal with, that is so hard for us to understand. That is even harder for the world to understand. The thing that trips us up, the thing we cannot catch up with, that we cannot ever grasp is how great, how singular, how unprecedented, how utterly surprising and evernew is the love that God the Father has given to us in Jesus Christ. Through his act of love, uninterrupted, untainted, unqualified love, God has made us, in him, to be God’s own children, God’s own family. Make no mistake about it, brothers and sisters, that is what we are. And we are that, only in, through, and by God’s radical act of love in Jesus Christ, the Nazarene, the one we crucified, the one that the Father raised up, and who came back to us again speaking peace to us. The thing we cannot catch up with, that we can never grasp, never fully understand, is that somehow, through some miracle, God has made us part of God’s own life. We are God’s children! That is what we are!

And that, brothers and sisters, is why the world is confused by us, why they do not understand us when we speak about the Gospel. They don’t recognize us because they did not recognize Jesus, the one who has made us what we now are. Brothers and sisters, this is the miracle, that we are God’s children now. And yet, there is so much about this that eludes us. It is so weighty, so much greater than we can know and comprehend, indeed we cannot understand it. What this all means, what it will be, how it will be revealed, how we will live forever in God, what God’s victory shall look like, and what the world made new will be, brothers and sisters, these things we do not know. We cannot possess them, catch hold of them, grasp them, explain them, and hand them out to others as if they were goods and services. All of this is too wonderful for us.

There is only one thing we can dare to say we know. We know that when Jesus is apocalypsed, when he is revealed, manifested, when his transfiguring kingdom breaks forth in its ultimate fullness, when all this comes to pass we know this: that we will be like him. We will see him as he truly is. We will see, with unveiled faces, the fullness of the singular, radical, uninterrupted, and evernew Love that Jesus is. And then, brothers and sisters, on that day, we will be like that. We will finally shed all that remains of our blindness and our self-deception, and we will see the Love, the so-great Love of God that Father that is Jesus. And when we see it, we will be transformed. We will be like that. We will be loosed from all our hidden shadows and darknesses and be transformed. We will live, without reserve in that one great Love.

This is our hope, brothers and sisters. And every one of us who hope in this find ourselves working. We work, we struggle, we cry out, we yearn together to be made single-mindedly devoted to this Love. We strive to unify our divided hearts so that we might love without interruption, just as Jesus loves without interruption. We work for this, we encourage one another in this, we pray for one another in this, we weep with one another when we fail in this, and we keep on going together in this. We search, we pray, we yearn, we work, we study, we listen—all so that we may grow up into the Love that Jesus is.

And when we sin, when anyone sins, we shy away from this undivided Love. We cease to let it be the one true thing, our one true “law”. We seek to be unmoored from single-minded devotion. We long to divide things up once again into secret spheres where we can rule our own lives. When sin we are guilty of the worst sort of anarchy, an irrational refusal to have our lives transformed in the glory of the single-minded, uninterrupted Love of God that is Jesus. Sin is the refusal of this Love. It is the refusal to make this Love our one and only “law”. Sin is lovelessness.

And you know that this is why Jesus came to us brothers and sisters! This is why Christ apocalyptically came on the scene: To take this lovelessness away! In him there is no hint of lovelessness, but only the Father’s uninterrupted act of Love, the love that brings life out of death, new creation out of the present evil age, hope out of despair, praise out of sorrow, shouts of joy out of cries of grief. This is the Love that Jesus is. There is no lovelessnes in Jesus, no hidden shadow, no dark side. He came for one reason only, to destroy lovelessness wherever it exists in this world.

This is why, brothers and sisters, that no one who has been made part of God’s family through this Love continues to live in lovelessness. Those who keep on embracing power, control, domination, fear, and death, they haven’t understood this Love. They haven’t seen it yet. They haven’t tasted and known it yet. And when you, my brothers and sisters, when we fall back into lovelessness, we forget, we cease to live as what we are: God’s children. We pull ourselves back from the Love that God is and stumble backwards into the darkness that Jesus came to take away. When we are living in the Love that Jesus is, there is no room left for lovelessness.

So brothers and sisters, don’t let anyone make you believe the lie. The lie that one can be righteous, be moral, have integrity, be worthy  without living totally by Love. Everyone who lives out this Love is living in righteousness. There is no other ground, there are no other standards. To be righteous is to live the Love that is Jesus. There is no other righteousness, no other virtue, no other integrity, no other morality, no other standard by which we can assess ourselves. The only righteousness that God honors, that God creates, that God shares is the righteousness of self-abandoning Love. The only righteousness is the righteousness of crucifixion and resurrection. This is the only place we can live, this is the only hope we can stand on, this is the only life worth giving ourselves to.

Some truths to embrace:

  • The world does not know Jesus. To the extent that they know us, that we make sense to the world, to its way of running, we are not living as what we are, the children of God.
  • Our only hope, the only thing we have, is that who Jesus is will be our future. We know nothing else, we must seek for nothing else.
  • When we really hope for the Love that is Jesus, we find ourselves working together to love better. When we really hope, we really work, and we can’t imagine not doing it.
  • Sin is refusing to allow Love, the Love that is Jesus, to be our one and only law, our one and only rule, our one and only criterion for life and hope.
  • It is more important to refuse to be deceived than to figure out everything that we should do, or how to answer every question. The radical “No” of God to all forms of lovelessness must always be before our eyes. Only when we let God’s “No” to lovelessness reign can we hear God’s resounding “Yes” of uninterrupted Love.
  • The definition of Love is Crucifixion and Resurrection.

 

Freedom from innocence: A Sermon on 1 John 1:1-2:2

Posted by on April 15, 2012 5 comments

Brothers and sisters, let me tell you what I am doing in speaking to you today. Let me tell you what exactly I am trying to declare and proclaim to you. I’m here to tell you about that which is eternal, that which is ultimate, that which is greater than any and every created thing. I’m here to proclaim to you the things of first importance, that which we heard, and saw firsthand in Jesus, the Word of God who made us alive. Jesus was revealed to us, brothers and sisters, revealed right here, among us, he came to us and made us alive when we were dead. We all have seen this, and we all are bound and determined to talk about it, to make it known. We saw the mystery: the very life of God, the eternal life of the Living Father, this was apocalypsed to us in the Crucified and Resurrected Jesus. When Jesus came, we saw and experienced the eternal life of God. That is who Jesus was. That is what we saw, that is what we can never stop speaking about.

And why do we keep talking about this? What is it about this Life that has come to us as Jesus that makes us continue to declare it over and over again? Brothers and sisters, we keep on talking about this because if brings us together! When we share this Gospel, this message of Life abundant, we share in it together, in its trials and tasks, its joys and sorrows, its callings and blessings. When we declare this truth, the truth that in Jesus God made us alive when we were dead, when we affirm this together and live it out together, brothers and sisters, we are bound together in unity, in love, in fellowship. And this isn’t just something for us, some sort of enjoyable group friendship that we enter into, no. When we declare the Gospel together, when we live the Gospel together, we are drawn into unity with the Father, and with Jesus. This is no mere human friendship we get to enjoy, no, when we speak the Gospel, when we live the Gospel, God’s very own self, God’s very own life comes to us, abides with us, endures with us, and sustains us.

That is why we’re talking about this yet again, so that we can fully and completely enter into the joy of life in God!

So here is the message for you again. Hear it and believe it once again, brothers and sisters. This is the truth we must speak and the truth we must live:

The truth is that there is no dark side of God. God is nothing but light, nothing but unfettered, undistorted, abundant love. There is no shadow, no underside, nothing behind the curtain. God is pure and undivided light. So then, brothers and sisters if we claim to be living the life that God in Jesus has given us, the life that is pure light, pure love, pure self-giving, if we claim to be living that life and yet harbor hidden darkness, we make ourselves liars. When we carve out little spaces in our life that we order and control by methods other than self-giving love, we deceive ourselves. When we claim to be God’s people, the people of the truth, a people of forgiveness and love, and yet build up spaces in our life together that are run by the powers of control, dominance, self-assertion, fear, and self-protection, brothers and sisters when we do this we lie. When we do this we stop living the Gospel and fall back again into sin and death.

However, when we give up our grasp on these spaces, when we let go of those corners of our life run by power rather than love, then brothers and sisters we enter into the very life of God. When we release those secret places and powers to which we cling so tightly we are delivered, by God’s unbreakable love, into life together, a new life, a life cleansed of all sin, all guilt, all slavery. When our hands open and our idols are allowed to fall to the ground, then brothers and sisters the blood of Jesus, the blood we spilled, it becomes a cleansing flood of mercy, grace, and love. A flood in which we are swept away together, immersed in new life, ever again for the first time.

The worst possible thing we can do brothers and sisters is pretend we are innocent. When we try to establish ourselves, to give reasons, to re-narrate and explain our sins away, brothers and sisters when we do this we deceive ourselves. When we do this we hang on to those secret spaces, we cling to those hand holds that keep us from being washed away in the flood of Christ’s love and grace. We shut out the truth when we try to establish our innocence. The quest for innocence, the quest for defending our own virtue, that is the quest for falsehood and sorrow. When we strive to be innocent, we lock the truth of the Gospel out of our lives.

The alternative is simple, painfully difficult, but simple in its beauty and freedom: we must begin, not with explanation, with rationalization, with self-defense, but with confession. The answer to the problem of our sin, and its ability to poison our life in the Gospel is not to establish ourselves in virtue, not to strive for a justifiable innocence, but to confess. When we confess our sins we are drawn back into the truth. The truth that God is the one who is faithful, who is righteous, just as we saw in Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. God is righteous and not us. God is faithful and not us. When we confess our sins our hands open and our idols are finally thrown away. The Faithful One, the Righteous One, the Crucified and Resurrected One, this One comes to us, and forgives us, cleanses us, and throws us into life together and service in this broken world.

Whenever we search for innocence, whenever we defend ourselves morally, whenever we try to establish ourselves in virtue, we deny the Gospel itself. When we do that we call Jesus a liar. We shut our eyes to the cross, and turn our faces away from the resurrection.

Now brothers and sisters, understand that I am saying all of this so that we will be encouraged and empowered to stop sinning. But never forget that when we do fall, when we scramble to piece together our idols, when we furiously rush to carve out secret spaces of control and power in our lives, when we fall back into these forms of death, remember that Jesus, the Nazarene, the Crucifed and Resurrected one, he advocates for us in the presence of the Father. When we turn our backs on him, he continues to pour out his life of pure, uninterrupted love on us. Remember brothers and sisters that he is the Righteous and Faithful one and that he poured out his life to the fullest to bring us to God, to cleans us from our sins, and to deliver us from the slavery of death. He did this, brothers and sisters, not just for us. No! Not for us alone, but for this whole broken idolatrous, wretched world. This is who our Lord is, the One who will not turn his back of any of the dark corners of this world of rebellion, death, and slavery. Jesus has made himself life for all the world.

And brothers and sisters, this, this is the Good News. That we are saved, not by our innocence but by the faithful and unbroken love of the God we meet in the cross and resurrection. The God who is nothing but light, nothing but love. The God in whom there is no darkness. Let us turn once again to this God, let us cease striving for innocence, and confess our sins. Let us, once again enter into freedom, light, and life by the blood of the One who was Crucified, the one who was Raised, the One who Lives and will not be without us.

A really wordy paraphrase of Ephesians 2:1-10

Posted by on March 23, 2012 37 comments

A Sermonic Midrash on Ephesians 2:1-10
Preached on Sunday, March 18 at Church of the Servant King in Portland, Oregon.

Hear, listen, understand, and know, brothers and sisters what state you used to be in. Do not forget the slavery you once labored under. Do not forget the bondage that once owned you, dominated you, and beat you down. Do not forget that you once loved your slavery to sin and death. Make no mistake about it, in your former life, the life that you lived to yourselves before Jesus intervened, in that life you were nothing less than dead. You were not simply sick, not simply weak, not simply incomplete—no, now for the first time we have come to know weakness, sickness, incompleteness and failure—rather you were dead. As dead as any lifeless corpse being returned to the earth. Yes, brothers and sisters, do not forget this fact. Dead is what you were. Nothing less than dead. Cold, lifeless, impotent, and completely and utterly helpless. You had no potential in you for life, for love, for hope, for change, peace, and a future. All of this was impossible. Your slavery was complete, utter, and unbreakable. Do not forget that you were dead in your sins, dead by your own transgressions, dead by the tyranny and power of the Devil, dead under the yoke of principalities and powers. In every way, shape and form you were dead to the fullest. And there was nothing to be done.

And you lived this way, this death, this complete and total slavery, this was what you lived in. You were tossed around by the patterns, currents, and trends of this world. There was not even a hint of freedom. Everything about your life, your living-in-death, was ruled. In those days, blind to it though you were, your whole existence was dominated by the Prince of this world. The great adversary, the one who stands behind and in all the powers that shape this world, the enemy of life, the great hater of creation, he was your ruler, down to the very core. And oh, brothers and sisters he is still at work. He still flexes his power over all those who are disobedient, who still cling to their living-in-death. He dominates, oppresses, and enslaves. And this was once your story. This was once the truest thing about you.

Indeed all of us used to live this way. Each and every one of us used to live in death, and, God forgive us, we loved it. It turned us on, it made us exited. It motivated us, it aroused us. It drove us to get rich, to get secure, to make names for ourselves, to pursue, possess and sleep with the people we thought most attractive. This living-in-death animated every inch of our being, determined every facet of our motivations. It suffused our senses, it taught us how to see everything perversely, to enjoy nothing rightly. It made us excited to twist things by our own power and to our own ends. This was our nature. We were the children of this reality, this living-in-death. Our essence was to enslave and be enslaved. Our full and fundamental orientation was towards wickedness and self-establishment. We were just like everyone else in this world. Like every battered woman and child, like every violent and vengeful man. Like every jealous brother, and every bitter sister. Like every resentful mother, and every negligent father. Like every fickle friend, and duplicitous companion. Like every murderous stranger, like every opportunistic thief. Like every helpless slave, like every tyrannical slavemaster. Like every terminally ill cancer patient, and every perfectly healthy millionaire. We were just like all of these. There was nothing different about us from the whole mass of enslaved and enslaving human beings. We were dead. We lived in death and that was the truest thing about us. And there was nothing that could change this.

But. Oh, brothers and sisters, but! Nevertheless, this, though it was the whole story from beginning to end, this was not all. In the midst of all this death, all this slavery, all this transgression, in the midst of the utter and undeniable reign of every power of death and sin and Satan, there came something new. Something impossible. Something that could never have been imagined to come.

But God! The one forgotten and abandoned by us. The one rejected, despised, and ignored above all. This One, this Love beyond all hatreds this mercy beyond all vengeance, this Life, this death-destroying Life: This came to us. In the very center of it all. Right in the midst of it. At the highest and lowest point of our living-in-death, this came to us. Overturning everything in its path this Love, the Love of God did something that had never been imagined, something utterly impossible according to every pattern and potentiality in this world: It made us alive.

Jesus, God in the flesh came to us and loved us with an indestructible love. He let it all fall on him. Everything that makes up this whole world of living-in-death. He threw himself in the path of all of it. He flung himself across the path of each and every single person in this world. He threw himself into our prison, into our fortress of death and slavery holding nothing back, giving himself utterly and fully to death. He embraced our living-in-death without reserve. He took it all in, and let it have its way with him. He took it all in, so that he might have us, so that, unimaginably we might be with him. And that is the insane newness that has come to is. That is the divine madness that has irrupted into our world. That when we were dead beyond all hope, an infinite Love did the impossible. It made us alive. But not just alive, borthers and sisters, no. It made us alive together with him. The Love that has impossibly come among us is not content to restore us to our own lives. No, this Love, the Love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit will do nothing less that make us alive together with Jesus, with God’s very self.

This is what we mean, brothers and sisters when we say that “by grace you have been saved.” When we say that, when we confess that, when we proclaim that, we remember and rejoice that this is what has been done. That we were dead—and nothing but dead—and now, impossibly, miraculously, madly, God has made us alive, not alone, or even together, but with Christ Jesus. God has done this.

And more than this, brothers and sisters, God has done something even more impossible, something even more mad. God was not content to simply raise us, for the first time to life, or even to make us to live in the presence of Jesus. No, God has done even more. God has seated us, brothers and sisters alongside Christ. His victory becomes our victory. His glory becomes our glory. His life becomes our life. His joy becomes our joy. His freedom becomes our freedom.

Why, brothers and sisters? Why has God lavished such unprecedented and underserved love, mercy, and glory onto us? What reason for this mad excessiveness could there be? What reason could God have to raise up emaciated child and vindictive murderer together and bring them into indescribable glory? Why did God do this? We know but one reason, because God wants to. The Love that God is desires to shower everyone he has made with immeasurable grace, with limitless kindness, with infinite forgiveness, with unending glory, with eternal joy. This is just what God wants to do, that is what the life of Jesus tells us, what it establishes, what it promises.

So do not be deceived, brothers and sisters. We are alive for one reason and one reason only. Because God has done this in and through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the faithful one. We are alive solely because God’s love has come upon us in the form of this One, this one who was faithful unto death. We had nothing to do with brining this about. Nothing of our own making, no potential within us, nothing we had contributed to this. It is nothing but God’s gift. No work we have done, no accomplishments we can claim contributed anything to this new life being given to us. We have nothing to boast about, nothing to claim, nothing to hold in our hands as if it were our own. No, we have nothing but empty hands in the face of what God has done in Jesus. God has made us alive and God alone has done that. We stand now with empty, open hands, hands which cannot grasp, cannot make, cannot seize, but can only ever remain open, stretched out to God in praise, lament, intercession, and joy, and to one another in welcome, embrace, forgiveness, and support.

And that is what God has now created us to be. He has made us what we are in Christ Jesus. Do not be deceived, brothers and sisters. Who you are now has nothing to do with any of that living-in-death that used to be true about you. It once was the only true thing about you, but now it is nothing but a lie. A false, powerless, defeated shadow. Do not imagine that it has anything more to do with who you are. Who you are now is who God has created you to be in Christ. In Christ God has created us to live towards God and towards each other with empty hands, with open arms. We are made, now, solely for praise and embrace. God has prepared this for us, brothers and sisters. He has set a way of life now before us, a life of empty, outstretched hands. A life where we can do nothing but move, reflexively from shouts of praise to God to unconditional embrace of all who cross our path.

God has prepared this path for us, brothers and sisters. For all ages God has destined us for this in Christ. To be set free from the living-in-death that was once our fate unto being alive with Christ, open to God, embracing all others in love. This is what God has made us to be. And that, now, is the only thing that is true about us. Brothers and sisters, do not fall back into the things that are no longer true, tempting though they may appear. We know that these things are death altogether. Brothers and sisters, remember, confess, proclaim, and enact the truth this day. The truth that God has made us alive with Christ, has enthroned us with Christ, has set us free from every slavery, from every domination, from every power of death and sin and hell. The truth that who we are is not who we were, but only who God in Christ has now and is continuing to make us to be. Open your hands and open your hearts to receive that truth, the one and only thing that is now true. That we are not who we were, that the world is not what it was, that nothing will ever be that way again, that the old age is passing away and the only thing that is something is a New Creation. Hear, brothers and sisters and believe that again. Turn again, with me, pray, praise, love, serve, repent, forgive, open, appeal, give, suffer, and rejoice together. For nothing will ever be that old way again. We are now what God has made us to be. That, and that alone is true.

Ressentiment and the “new universalism”

Posted by on April 28, 2011 128 comments

Everybody’s buzzing about the “new universalism” these days. For my part I’m rather surprised that its taken this long for this discussion to become such a trendy subject. The most rigorous, and in my opinion, most stringent evangelical proposals for universalism are not exactly new. Books like Thomas Talbott’s The Inescapable Love of God and Gregory MacDonald’s (Robin Parry’s) The Evangelical Universalist have been in circulation for years (five years for MacDonald, over ten for Talbott). Such examples could be multiplied, and sadly it seems that with its newfound popularity, the discussions about universalism seem bound to lose theological depth and become yet another arena for various pop Christian figures to go about posturing in one direction or another. The upshot of all this the unfortunate amelioration of quality in so many of the ensuing discussions, which is partly why I’ve been so disinterested in them.

A recent example of this phenomenon is a post lambasting the “new universalists” by James K.A. Smith. While there’s certainly a lot in his post that deserves comment, I’ll just confine myself to three, one about the way he sets up his dismissal of the new universalists, and then two about his two critique-summaries of the alleged pathologies that drive people to be such universalists.

First, Jamie deems the paramount question to be “what compels one to be an evangelical universalist?” What sort of “motivation” must such people have that would possess them to want to be universalists? So the important question is decidedly not “What argument has the most merit theologically, biblically, etc.?” but rather, “What sort of emotional pathologies must people have that make them want to be universalists?”

This is an interesting mode of analysis indeed. What makes it so super awesome is that now we need not even bother about any arguments being made, now all that is required of us is to sit back and speculate about what sort of insipid motivations these new universalists might have. Why take the time to take on a theological argument when we can just as easily accuse the proponents of that argument of being a bunch of gushing sentimental liberals who just can’t bear the thought of Gandhi in hell? I suppose ad hominem has always been the easiest form of argument.

The two sub-questions that Jamie then raises, as he somehow accesses the inner motivations the new universalists, regard “imaginiation” and “hope.” The first question he clearly has the most fun with. It is, of course, the allegedly iconic statement of evangelical universalists “‘I can’t imagine’ that a God of love would condemn Gandhi to hell.” This sort of reasoning Jamie deems to be unforgivably anthropocentric, reducing God to whatever makes us comfortable and conforms with our liberal sensibilities.

Of course, it would be harder to deal with the arguments of folks like Talbott, Parry (MacDonald), and others who don’t in any way argue that it’s just so yicky and mean that I don’t want to imagine somebody as nice as Gandhi in hell. The argument, in fact, is not about how good Gandhi is, but about what Christ’s cross and resurrection means about the nature of salvation and the nature of God. But those questions — you know, the real ones — are the ones that Jamie seems decidedly not interested in engaging.

Ironically, though, even as he ignores the true theological questions in favor of casting his opponents as bleeding-hearted liberals, Jamie decides that the appropriate counter-argument is simply to affirm the inverse of the one he has just lambasted. Thus, borrowing from yet another rather ill-thought out column by Ross Douthat, Jamie asks us if we’re really comfortable with the idea of Tony Soprano in heaven. Are we really down with the idea that bad, mean, wicked people are just going to be forgiven and accepted by God? What should we say about that?

Well first of all, lets get one thing straight: Tony Soprano is fictional character for God’s sake. So I really don’t expect him to be turning up at the pearly gates. Please, if we’re just going for cheap shock value can we just go all the way with the super cool rhetoric and make it Hitler? That’s what we mean, right? So now that that’s out of the way, it seems that the counter-question Jamie wants to pose via Douthat is “If we’re uncomfortable with Gandhi in hell, why aren’t we uncomfortable with Hitler in heaven?” The real irony of this line of argument however is that is no less anthropocentric and Feuerbachian than the (imagined) argument it is designed to counter. “I can’t imagine a God who would dare to place Hitler at the banquet table alongside those he murdered!”

The argument is loaded with indignation that God might dare to unilaterally act to reconcile Nazis and their victims, Klansmen and the blacks they lynched, etc. Now who’s projecting? Are we really to believe that a vision animated by the overriding hermeneutic of retributive justice where the good guys (us) win and the bad guys get their just deserts is somehow countercultural Gospel truth, standing against the all-too-human tendency to want a God of our own designs and makings who . . . saves us along with our enemies? Seriously?

The second question Jamie lodges relates to “hope.” Namely whether or not its ok to “hope” for something that is contrary to Scripture. Of course this line of argumentation begs the rather gargantuan question of whether the hope for the salvation of all creation is really so obviously unbiblical. Of course such questions are not engaged by Jamie’s post (and really we couldn’t expect that from a post). However it bears mention that works like Talbott’s, Parry’s, and others have done serious work, both in terms of textual exegesis and theological hermeneutics on the very questions that, at the outset of his post Jamie claims such universalists don’t care about. If one is interested in really knowing what is going on in this debate, it will be necessary to go beyond the latest Rob Bell craze, and really read the substantial work that is being done in the field. That would certainly help mitigate the multiplication of posts like Jamie’s that do little more than make meta-critiques that, in reality, have no real target to find.

The real problem, I believe, that the whole buzz about “the new universalism” represents — and it is particularly typified in Jamie’s post — is the refusal to engage these questions theologically. Instead it is all a matter of figuring out who the sappy liberal is, and finding a clever way to make the accusation. If people are really interested in exploring the theological issues at work behind the current hubub, they will need to look beyond the temptation to simply attack people’s motivations, and they will have to do more than watch that one Rob Bell video on YouTube. A good place to start would be to read some the actual work that’s been being done on this topic over a long period of time, which I’ve made reference to above. Then perhaps we could see some posts on the topic that at least get the questions right.

J. Kameron Carter on Haiti: From Theodicy to Christ-odicy

Posted by on February 18, 2010 Comments Off

As was mentioned in the comments to my quote from Nate’s article on Haiti, you should also make sure to check out J. Kameron Carter’s excellent reflection on the tragedy. Here’s a quote:

For in Jesus, so we confess, God was manifest, not metaphysically above the fray, but in the flesh, in our condition (1 Tim. 3:16). In him, pain and suffering are taken up into God’s identity. Our economy of pain is received into the divine economy of life. The suffering and pain that marks the humanity of God, thus, includes the realities of physical and social death, as well as the conditions that perpetuate death and suffering. In the person of Jesus, these realities have been decisively dealt with and, indeed, dealt with not by a god who is above the fray but by one who is named Immanuel, God with Us, one who walks in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Jesus’s resurrection from the dead by the Spirit of God points to that form of life within and ultimately beyond the conditions of death.

And yes, we must say both at the same time: within death but ultimately beyond the conditions of death. We must say “within death” to indicate how Jesus has absorbed death and its power within himself. From within his taking up of death and suffering, a social space is constituted beyond death and suffering. Thus, we also say “ultimately beyond the conditions of death.”

From here, we also glean the significance of the resurrection. Jesus’ resurrection, which we live into by the Holy Spirit, empowers us now to work within tight spaces—the tight space confronting the world community now, among other tight spaces, is the trauma of the Haitian earthquake—to bring life from death.

By coming at the issue of God and suffering, which this Haiti crisis compels us to do, from the vantage point of the God not above our pain but the God known in and who is identified from our pain, the classical theodicy question comes to an end. We step beyond theodicy and into a “Christ-odicy.” That is to say, we address suffering from Jesus Christ. And to approach suffering from him is to approach those who suffer, not as those merely needing our charity (which positions us above them), nor as those who trigger our intellectual and aesthetic capacities to glean the beautiful from the tragic (which also positions us as masters, above the fray), but as those who witness God to us, the God who is the Neighbor—the one and only Neighbor—who has come to us (cf. Luke 10:25–37). They are neighbors in whom God is known and is present to us. And thus, Haiti is the witness to our redemption. The script is Christologically flipped: they are the missionaries to us. To neglect them, to position ourselves above the fray and thus above them, to not work to change the social conditions that make natural disaster worse—these are all signs of the refusal of salvation.

T. F. Torrance on justification and orthodoxy

Posted by on February 17, 2010 7 comments

WTM has a solid quote from T. F. Torrance on justification and its relation to orthodoxy:

Justification is God’s word of truth and its revelation is truth. This word justification does not have to do simply with righteous living but with righteous understanding, for righteousness is God’s right or truth as well as his holiness and involves knowing as well as doing, and thus to do righteousness is the same as to do truth. (Compare Jesus’ statement, ‘you will know the truth and the truth will make you free.’) The revelation of righteousness is the word that puts us in the truth and as such tells us that we are in un-truth. Justification says “let God be true, but every man a liar’, as Paul puts it with reference to Psalm 51. This word of justification which puts us in the truth denies all self-justification and denominates it lying, or un-truth. If God’s justification of the ungodly means that no one can boast of their own righteousness, then it also means that no one dares to boast of their own orthodoxy, for to claim orthodoxy is to claim to be in the right, to be in the truth; it is a boasting of the right, whereas in point of fact justification by putting us in the truth, reveals that we are in the wrong, in un-truth.

Thomas F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, Robert T. walker, ed. (InterVarsity, 2009), 105.

Union with Christ, union with each other

Posted by on February 10, 2010 16 comments

It’s often commonly perceived that a central difference between Protestant and Roman Catholic ecclesiologies lies in that the former claims that one’s membership in the church is conditioned upon their union with Christ, whereas the latter tends to argue that one is only united with Christ through their membership in the church. Obviously this is caricature, but it does get at a common sentiment or style often found in various Protestant and Roman ecclesiologies.

But in turning the Roman Catechism again, I noticed something rather different. The Catechism specifically posits “the unity of all [the church's] members with each other as a result of their union with Christ” (789). This is the exact articulation of what is commonly perceived as the “Protestant” instinct, namely to  argue that the church’s mutual togetherness is constituted by Christ’s own indwelling of all Christians. In other words, even for the Roman Catechism one does not obtain union with Christ by becoming part of the church, rather through Christ’s act of uniting himself with you, you become part of the community of all those in whom Christ already dwells through the Spirit.

Volf on the body of Christ, ctd.

Posted by on February 9, 2010 21 comments

So, given what we’ve seen from Volf, how does he ultimately describe the church as the body of Christ? In a rather trinitarian way:

Christ cannot be identical with the church. An element of juxtaposition obtains between Christ and the church that precisely as such is constitutive for their unity. Only as the bride can the church be the body of Christ, and not vice versa. To be sure, one should not understand the genitive Christos (“of Christ”) exclusively in the possessive since (“the body that belongs to Christ”), but rather must also interpret it in and explicative sense (“the body that is Christ”). Otherwise the church and Christ would be merely juxtaposed and their specific oneness suppressed (see 1 Cor. 6:15; 12:1-13). The identification of Christ and the church however — “your bodies [are] members of Christ” — derives from the union between Christ and Christians, a union that cannot be conceived in physical categories, however articulated, but rather in personal categories, and a union for which the enduring distinction between the two is of decisive importance. Thus the identification of Christ and the church stands for the particular kind of personal communion between Christ and Christians, a communion perhaps best described as “personal interiority”; Christ dwells in every Christian and is internal to that person as a person. Rather than being thereby suspended, the specifically Christian juxtaposition of Christ and Christians is actually first constituted through the Holy Spirit. If this is correct, then Paul’s statement that “all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28) does not mean that this “one” is “Christ himself”; they are “one” insofar as they are “in Christ” or insofar as “Christ” dwells “within” them.

Thus, for Volf, to call the church the body of Christ is to speak of the personal indwelling of Christ, by the Spirit in all Christians, thus binding them together relationally as a communion of persons. The language of the body is thus one of divine indwelling and relational giving. We are the body of Christ in that Christ, in the Spirit dwells in us and gives us to one another in the same mode of descending, self-giving love that Christ himself embodys as the ikon of the Trinity in the world.

Baptism into the damned

Posted by on February 4, 2010 6 comments

Bob Eckblad makes some interesting points about Jesus’s baptism in his subversive and challenging book, A New Christian Manifesto. Noting, as many have done, the obvious parallels between Jesus being baptized and then going into the desert for forty days and the story of Israel and the Exodus, Eckblad notes some crucial differences. In the Exodus, the children of Israel go through the Red Sea on dry land while the Egyptians in turn are drowned in the flood. However, when Jesus is baptized in the Jordan, he is immersed. He descends down into the depths of the flood where Israel has never trod.

According to Eckblad this has some fascinating ramifications. According to his analysis, Jesus’s baptism was a “symbolic entry into the fate of the ‘bad guys’—Pharoah, his army, chariots, horses, and riders. Jesus’ acceptance of this baptism and the entire New Testament teaching on baptism is nothing less than a call for all future followers to join in the fate of the enemies of God’s kingdom, the ‘them’ that we may deem worthy of exclusion, punishment, or death” (p. 34).

Interestingly, as Eckblad notes, this seems to shed some light on the description of Christ’s descent into Hell in 1 Peter 3:18-22. There reference is specifically made both to Jesus’s act of preaching to those who died in the flood (clearly also connected with baptism and the Exodus notion of salvation) and his lordship and dominion over “angels and authorities and powers.”

Thus, as Eckblad argues:

Here we see a distinction between human beings who died in the flood, whom he went and preached to, and the angels, authorities, and pwoers that became subject to him through his victory. The fate of God’s enemies is nothing less than death. yet death itself is undone by Jesus’ own death with and for the unrighteous. . . .

All distinctions between insiders and outsiders, the saved and the damned, perpetrators and victims, the righteous and the unrighteous, clean and unclean, Israel and the nations are leveled when insiders go under water, instead of through it on dry ground. Under water we all die totally. Under water, God’s chosen people join the damned. Wee come up dead to the flesh—that is, dead to any distinctions that would mark us as in any way superior, worthy. (p. 36, 37)

More on Freedom

Posted by on May 18, 2009 14 comments

In light of some recent discussions about the nature of freedom, theologically speaking, I’m going to venture a proposal here. From a Christian perspective, freedom is the translation of human beings into the triune life of God. To be free is to be united to God through Christ, and in being so united, to be liberated from any and all powers, ideologies, loyalties, and compulsions that would direct one away from union with God. Union with God here is understood as participation in the radical love the defines God’s life. To be free is to be liberated from anything that would compete with God’s love for the possession and production of human identity.

As such, “freedom” truly names the singular reality of divine grace, which, through the Holy Spirit breaks into the world and into our lives as an act of pure gift. Grace comes to humanity in pluriform ways, occurring wherever, through the Spirit, the singular agape of Christ invades and transforms human lives that had previously been in bondage to principalities and powers.

As such, freedom takes on many forms as it interrupts and transfigures human life. True freedom is an event which happens as human persons are taken up, transfigured, re-created by God’s radical grace. What this freedom looks like depends on the social situation that God’s grace invades for the purpose of transformation, but the end result is always the same: liberation into a life of missional love, the experience of God’s own non-coercive self-giving on behalf of others.

Freedom is what happens when God draws us out of those things that inhibit participation in agape. This may and will mean political and social liberation for oppressed peoples who are violently deprived of any sort of self-determining power. Likewise this may and will mean liberation of ideologically-bound human beings who are, though their affluence, enslaved to the power of ubiquitous choice, decadence, and upward mobility. In this case the experience of freedom must be an embrace of the path of kenosis, a joyful descent into self-divestment, self-limitation, and agapeic sacrifice. This is the experience of freedom that most people reading this blog need to embrace as the path for their lives in Christ.

Theosis Defined

Posted by on May 8, 2009 4 comments

Gorman offers the following definition of theosis as it applies to the thought of St. Paul:

Theosis is transformative participation in the kenotic, cruciform character and life of God through Spirit-enabled conformity to the incarnate, crucified, and resurrected/glorified Christ, who is the image of God. (p. 125)

The only thing I might tweak here would be to replace “Spirit-enabled” with “Spirit-actualized” or something of that nature. Other than that this seems to be a good definition of theosis, which makes clear that theosis is not about having our human nature changed into divine nature or something like that. Rather it is transformative participation that results in conformitas Christi.

Justfication as Theosis

Posted by on May 6, 2009 6 comments

Again, from Gorman:

Because the faithful and loving crucified Christ is the image and self-revelation of God, the paradoxical process of justification by co-crucifixion, or resurrection through conformity to the crucified Christ, means that the pisteuontes (“believers”) are those who are becoming like God and thus experiencing the process of theosis inasmuch as they embody the symbiosis of fidelity and love found in the Son of God.

What does that mean? Inasmuch as Christ’s faithful and loving death reveals the faithfulness and love of God, and justification is participation in that death, justification is participation in the faithfulness and love of God. It is, thus, a process of deification or theosis. The cruciformity that is constitutive of justification is actually theoformity, or theosis . . . This means also that to become the righteousness or justice of God in Christ is theosis. This is not primarily an individual experience, but a corporate one of communal theosis–we become, in Christ, the righteousness/justice of God. (p. 90-91)

Justification as Co-Crucifixion: Summary

Posted by on May 5, 2009 1 comment

Again from Gorman, here is the summary of his view of justification:

Justification is the establishment of right covenantal relations–fidelity to God and love for neighbor–by means of God’s grace in Christ’s death and our Spirit-enabled co-crucifixion with him. Justification therefore means co-resurrection with Christ to new life within the people of God and the certain hope of acquittal/vindication, and thus resurrection to eternal life on the day of judgment.” (p. 85-86)

Cruciformity as Theoformity

Posted by on May 5, 2009 14 comments

More good stuff from Michael Gorman’s new book, Inhabiting the Cruciform God:

To be more specific, Paul has not two soteriological models (juridical and participationist) but one, justification by co-crucifixion, meaning restoration to right covenantal relations with God and others by participation in Christ’s quintessential covenantal act of faith and love on the cross; this one act fulfilled by of the “vertical” and “horizontal” requirements of the Law, such that those who participate in it experience the same life-giving fulfillment of the Law and therein begin the paradoxical, christologically grounded process of resurrection through death. That is, they have been initiated into the process of conformity to the crucified Christ (cruciformity, Christification), who is the image of God–and thus the process of theoformity, or theosis.” (p. 45)

Against Cheap Justification

Posted by on May 5, 2009 1 comment

Michael Gorman’s new book, Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul’s Narrative Soteriology is just a goldmine. Mike was kind enough to send me a copy, so today I’ll be posting a smattering of quotes and thoughts from my reading of the book thus far. At the center of the book is Gorman’s supremely helpful proposal of how to understand the doctrine of justification in Paul. According to Gorman, the best way to understand the much-debated doctrine of justification by faith is to understand it as “justification by co-crucifixion.” In contrast to the constant squabbles, particularly amongst those who claim the name “reformed”, Gorman calls us toward Paul’s far more radical doctrine of “costly justification”:

There have always been legitimate theological arguments about justification, as well as less noble but understandable interconfessional squabbles. But it may also be the case that there is another, more subtle (and thus more dangerous) theological reason for at least some aspects of the current situation regarding justification. To paraphrase Dietrich Bonhoeffer, parts of the Christian church have become enamoured with cheap justification. Cheap justification is justification without justice, faith without love, declaration without transformation.” (p. 41)

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