How fallen are our wills?

Is God’s morality so foreign to us that it can be expected to get mistaken for immorality by even devout followers of Jesus?

In my last post I began discussing this thorny question by ruling out the claim that the tension between the Old and New Testament conceptions of God’s nature is only apparent; while it is certainly not nearly so decisive that Marcion’s two rival gods solution begins to seem tenable, it is very real.

I then launched into a demonstration of at least one case where Scripture shows God expecting us to use our moral intuitions to inform our ethics, namely the Golden Rule, the basis of which is using our own sense of ethics to demonstrate our love for neighbor (which of course is tied to showing our love for God). If Jesus instructs us to consult our will, preferences, and our sense of right and wrong when dealing with one another, I can’t imagine a good reason we should expect that our sinfulness and creaturely estate are prone to thoroughly obscuring and distorting our understanding of good and evil.

But how can we even trust our moral intuitions, you ask, considering how corrupt and sinful we are?

First off – and this is necessary to consider – if you are asking that question, please realize that you have taken for granted some things that you probably feel are essential to Christianity that actually warrant further scrutiny. Those assumptions are not a clear, straight-forward reading of biblical testimony; they are not even an unrefracted reading of the important church father, St. Augustine, whose teaching is usually given credit for formulating the concepts. Rather, the assumptions behind the question, known as the doctrine of total depravity or total inability, are almost wholly dependent on the Reformers’ unique reading of Augustine.

According to that teaching, we are so broken by the Fall that we can’t see straight; in fact, more often than not (according to this view), we see things completely backwards.

“No matter how I word this next part, someone will inevitably be depraved enough to misuse it.”

It must be recognized here that the Reformers did not take up St. Augustine’s actual views without significant modifications, as Catholics in particular have been keen to point out. This uniquely Protestant articulation of total depravity contrasts with the other fathers of the Church who insist that the image of God imbued to us at creation remains intact, obscured but viable, functional albeit invariably dulled by the ailments of our fallen state. Both branches of the tree from which Protestants shoot, the Church of Rome and the Eastern Church, have roundly rejected Calvin’s conviction that the image of God in which we were created is now so twisted that we “cannot conceive, desire, or design anything but what is weak, distorted, foul, impure, or iniquitous…” The Church of Rome’s Council of Trent was not inventing a new teaching when it placed an anathema on those who taught that “the free will of man is lost and extinguished”; on the contrary, it was continuing the teaching that the imago dei, which includes free will, remains as part of what makes us human.

To be sure, living in this world and lacking wisdom, even when we try we will certainly not always be able to discern the best choice in particular circumstances, and we may indeed have exceptional difficulty living up to what we know is right, but the problem is not with an essential inability to recognize goodness and evil when we see it. We pursue our own ideals instead of God’s, but not because we don’t recognize what God’s ideals are; rather, we are culpable specifically because we know what is right and put it away from us. To put it another way, our wills remain essentially free to choose, but are prone to choose poorly because they are led astray by our selfish minds.

To say that humanity is not totally depraved is not to deny that everyone is fallen and in a state of sin from which we need God to save us. It just means that our sin doesn’t so compromise our make-up as humans that we’re stuck never being able to trust our judgment about what is wrong and right. In fact, in my previous post I already showed such a claim to be problematic just by considering our Lord’s own instruction. If we become overconfident in making judgments about good and evil – and I know this does happen – it is not from total inability but from prideful lack of caution. Contrariwise, we can become overconfident in our understanding of Scripture in any direction.

Even if you lay aside the issue of the imago dei and make an argument that unbelievers are likely to misapprehend and misrepresent true, big-g Goodness, the beauty of the author of Hebrews’ description of the New Covenant is that the law of God is engraved upon the hearts of believers: we are empowered to be moral agents acting on principles we do have indelible access to, deep within us. That itself would suggest that it should be quite the norm for us to make judgments about what constitutes moral behavior, and following from that is how important it is for the sincere believer to evaluate others’ claims about God’s character and actions, and to do so with reasonable accuracy. “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” At that point, it’s axiomatic that if God is described as performing acts that even some of those people we deem to be the closest to God’s likeness are troubled to explain, we should at very least not make acceptance of that description a tenet of faith.

Those with whom I’m conversing here would probably at this point insist that when weighing the questionable judgment of unbelievers who see God’s depiction in the Old Testament as monstrous against the judgment of the believers who are confident that God can still be good while doing evidently monstrous things, those believers who agree with the unbelievers over against Scriptural depictions are clearly likelier to be wrong. Many will make the appeal to total depravity or other shows of humility in saying that we should avoid reading Scripture apart from certain dogmatic rubrics, chief of which is the presumption that the biblical authors were never mistaken in any theological teaching they intended to convey.

But the sticking point for those of us who disagree with inerrantists on this subject cannot be dismissed as merely the hubris of humanity in rebellion. For those of us who have pledged ourselves to be taught primarily by Christ as the image of the invisible God, we find such uneasiness with other biblical descriptions of God to be the only response that is truly faithful to our teacher. Indeed, as St. Augustine wrote, “Whoever, then, thinks that he understands the Holy Scriptures, or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbor, does not yet understand them as he ought.” Could it be that a reading more faithful to the heart God engraved within us is one that doesn’t uncritically accept each biblical author’s own spin on theology wholesale?

Perhaps the reason God did not edit our Holy Scriptures to exclude misunderstandings of Himself and His ways is that their imperfection demonstrates just how “depraved” our minds can be.

When seeking to understand God’s nature, as always when reading Scripture, we have no default revelation that we can just put definitive quote marks around as so commonly wished for. We have no choice but to interpret, and to do so faithfully we must use all of the tools He built within us, limited and imperfect as they may be. But thankfully, we don’t have to shake off all of our bedrock assumptions about such fundamental concepts as right and wrong when we look at God. We would not recognize that we were looking at Him – could not be judged for missing Him – if we were not fitted to recognize Him. We must not sear our consciences and drag God’s good name through the mud in the interest of upholding our demands for inerrant revelation, especially under the veil of a false humility.

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  Does God play by the same rules?

Does God play by the same rules?

Are you one of those who finds it difficult to reconcile many of the acts attributed to God within the Hebrew scriptures with the dominant picture of God painted by the life and teachings of Jesus?

I’ve talked about this problem extensively in the past, but I return to it again because, as we’ve seen time and again, flimsy walls of apologetics constructed to hide the issue tend to result in an exit door being blasted through people’s faith. That’s why I’m devoting this post and the next to the topic.

When we talk of tension between pre-Christ and post-Christ depictions of God, defenders of inerrancy will frequently counter with observations about God’s goodness in the Old Testament and Jesus’ wrathful warnings of judgment in the New Testament. Gladly granted, there is not a sharp, uniform discontinuity between the Old and New Testament’s portrayal of all aspects of God’s nature, so we should expect to see God’s lovingkindness extolled in the Old Testament just as in the New we find assurances of a divine reckoning on oppressors. It is because of His lovingkindess that God will take drastic measures to wrest the downtrodden from the grasp of those who use His name to excuse the neglect and exploitation of His people. But we cannot contentedly ignore the obvious: the divinely enacted, sanctioned, or commanded decimation of entire people groups in the Flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Canaanite conquest, etc., and the hopeful anticipation of such divine violence crystallized in the frequent imprecations in the Hebrew psalter–all of these stand in dramatic contrast to Jesus’ insistence that his followers love their enemies, pray for their persecutors, avoid calling down fire from heaven on those who reject God, etc.

The other standard response to this has been that we as fallen humans, warped by the Fall, just don’t have the equipment necessary to judge right and wrong. We must leave it up to God to tell us what’s good and bad, and even when everything that’s within us and in our scope of understanding screams that God is being described as committing evil acts, we must say, “No, it must be good, because God is doing it.” Because the Bible says it and the Bible is inerrant, of course.

This popular understanding was well articulated a few years back in the promo video for Francis Chan’s book, Erasing Hell. Critiquing the idea that humans would deny that God has done something on the grounds that we deem it to be immoral, Chan responds:

I’m like a piece of clay trying to explain to other pieces of clay what the potter is like. Think about that for a second! It shows the silliness for any of us to think we are an expert on Him. Our only hope is that He would reveal to us what He is like, and then we can just repeat those things.

And of course folks like Chan believe that such a revelation from God is exactly what we have in the Bible. I have offered several critiques against this view of the Bible in earlier blog posts, often calling to attention the impossibility of magically knowing exactly “what it says” without having to account for the myriad assumptions we bring to the table. But for people who believe as Chan does, we must not only consciously and resolutely affirm everything attributed to God within Scripture, no matter how abhorrent to our consciences, but we had better not fail to call it “good”!

In my next post I will address the question of whether we as fallen humans actually have the equipment to make valid moral judgments. But whether or not we can make good judgments, it appears we are exhorted by the authors of Scripture to make those judgments anyway.

Consider the Golden Rule:

What God looks like?

Why is it important to be stunned by the God-centeredness of God? Because many people are willing to be God-centered as long as they feel that God is man-centered. It is a subtle danger. We may think we are centering our lives on God, when we are really making Him a means to self-esteem. Over against this danger I urge you to ponder the implications, brothers, that God loves His glory more than He loves us and that this is the foundation of His love for us.

~ John Piper
Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for a Radical Ministry, Broadman and Holman, 2002, pp. 6-7

Now, I realize that Johnny Bravo is probably a cheap caricature of Piper’s point of view. But I bring it up to point out that Piper’s presentation of God is as much a caricature, although he’s not yet identified it as such.

Hell, election, and arrogance

Despite Robert Burns’ own considerable moral indiscretions, he certainly had no trouble decrying religious phonies such as he saw in William Fisher, elder in Mauchline Kirk in 1785. In “Holy Willie’s Prayer”, Burns paints a vivid picture of a womanizing hypocrite whose excuses and even theological justifications strike me as authentic and potentially accurate. But forget those for this post. So as not to give the false appearance of indicting any of the Reformed with Willie’s moral failures, I will cut out all but the first five and final stanzas (but here’s the rest).

O Thou, who in the heavens does dwell,
Who, as it pleases best Thysel’,
Sends ane to heaven an’ ten to hell,
A’ for Thy glory,
And no for ony gude or ill
They’ve done afore Thee!

I bless and praise Thy matchless might,
When thousands Thou hast left in night,
That I am here afore Thy sight,
For gifts an’ grace
A burning and a shining light
To a’ this place.

What was I, or my generation,
That I should get sic exaltation,
I wha deserve most just damnation
For broken laws,
Five thousand years ere my creation,
Thro’ Adam’s cause?

When frae my mither’s womb I fell,
Thou might hae plunged me in hell,
To gnash my gums, to weep and wail,
In burnin lakes,
Where damned devils roar and yell,
Chain’d to their stakes.

Yet I am here a chosen sample,
To show thy grace is great and ample;
I’m here a pillar o’ Thy temple,
Strong as a rock,
A guide, a buckler, and example,
To a’ Thy flock.

………………

But, Lord, remember me an’ mine
Wi’ mercies temp’ral an’ divine,
That I for grace an’ gear may shine,
Excell’d by nane,
And a’ the glory shall be thine,
Amen, Amen!

Love that meter and rhyme scheme!

Isolating the theological content, and certainly not including Willie’s justification of his own hypocrisy in the omitted portion of the poem, on the whole I found that the depiction of Reformed doctrine in the first four and last stanzas, with its preoccupation on God’s acting in the interests of His “glory” via damnation and grace to fallen humanity, sounded very much like presentations I hear nowadays.

But considering Willie’s pompous demeanor, I must say that the ugly side of his attitude certainly bears a resemblance to someone I recently interacted with. (H/T to Matthew Raymer for reminding me of this poem.)

Again, I want to be careful not to bind Reformed theology – and still less all those who accept it as truth – to the personal flaws of Willie Fisher. But I do have to ask: considering their insistence that total depravity of the will, monergism, and unconditional election actually highlight our need for humility, why is it that the popular stereotype of those who are the most committed to Reformed theology as being insufferably arrogant seems to find so many matches in the real world?

My guess is that it would be hard not to let the idea of being “chosen” inflate the heads of those convinced that it applies to them. I know it would be hard for me to chalk up my own election (if I believed in such a thing) fully to divine mystery: I suspect that deep down I’d feel pride in somehow being one of those few whom God thought He could use to bring Himself glory, no matter how much my innate uselessness was necessary to qualify me. I suppose that in the end, even if I believed I had no merit going into it, that the act of divine election itself would afford me a special status in God’s economy and be a coat of many colors difficult to wear in humility. I must say, I know many very humble Reformed people, and I must applaud them for not succumbing to the temptation they face!

But the problem isn’t just with the Reformed, is it? It’s with all exclusivist Christians. Heck, it’s with all humanity. How can we avoid it?

Perhaps it’s in loving “the outsiders”, even our enemies, no less than we love ourselves. In kenosis, we forget whatever privileges we think we have and devote our very lives to making them available to others. A deep-seated, God-empowered will to love and act in love to all indiscriminately; a conscious decision on our part not to elect some and damn others, or treat anyone as though God had done so.

Gosh, it’s still a difficult balancing act, but it’s worth trying to keep in mind.

 

A bit of a rant about limited atonement and unlimited smugness

Come to the table of grace; seek Him who gave you His life
Remember the price that was paid, the gift of His sacrifice
Come to the table of grace; love there to comfort and hold
Remember the cost of His life, given to free ev’ry soul.
Come to the table, the table of grace

from “Come to the Table of Grace” by Pete Carlson

Forget the concept of the atonement embedded within this song. The melody is pretty, the lyrics humble and reverent. It’s an invitation to remember the death of Christ and commune with a God who loves us by means of the ancient rite of the Lord’s Supper.

Believe it or not, my family attends a PCA Presbyterian church in our neighborhood. By design, none of the members know my personal positions, although a few, including the pastor and the choir director (yes, I do try to sing in the choir) are aware that I’m not Reformed.

Recently our choir was practicing the above song when one particular line prompted the choir member next to me to raise his hand and lodge an objection: “I think I have a theological problem with this song.” The choir director immediately knew what the problem was. One word: “…given to free every soul.” The choir member continued ruefully, “A little universalism creeping into the text.” (Prior to last week’s firestorm, this lyric would have been construed as more of a limited atonement issue specifically, but his statement shows that he’s obviously aware of and spooked by the new boogeyman in Reformed circles — thanks, Rob Bell.)

As you might guess, I was a little annoyed. Calvinistic proof-texts aside, there are clearly passages in the New Testament that speak more inclusively, and the Reformed reinterpret those passages to fit their preferred theology. So why couldn’t they do that with this lyric? Besides, it’s only sung once in the arrangement, and singing the song as written would not have turned anyone into an Arminian or a universalist. It was a matter of principle; it was an opportunity to ensure that damnable doctrine was given no quarter in this church.

Seemingly the only other person annoyed by his objection bravely pointed out that the previously practiced song had quoted John 3.16 (“God so loved the world“), but this was vaguely dismissed as “different”. Not wanting to debate limited atonement with a room full of Presbyterians, I still desired to suggest that non-exclusivistic language is actually common within Scripture itself, and they dutifully reinterpret (or ignore) it elsewhere with nary a second thought. So I subtly quoted 1 Timothy 4.10, “the Saviour of all people, especially of those who believe,” but apparently no one was familiar with the passage and it fell on deaf ears as though I had said nothing. The director was happy enough to take suggested emendations, and someone wryly suggested “given to free chosen souls,” which struck us all with its hubris; I had to admit that it was at least an honest statement of their belief, and I think it sunk in among many of them anew that this was in fact what they believed. Ultimately the decision was tabled for later so we could get on with practice.

But it won’t leave the objector’s mind. As we sing the song again, he decides he likes the “chosen souls” substitution. Did I say I he liked it? He loved it. He got positively giddy at the prospect of shocking too-comfortable Calvinists and uncomfortable non-Calvinists in the congregation with a doctrinal affirmation so stark. When we started to sing the song again, he nudged those around him and whispered with a wild, I’m-nailing-the-ninety-sixth-thesis-to-the-door look in his eyes, “We’re going to sing chosen souls.” It was part suggestion, part test of courage: because of his conviction that all of us were good Calvinists, the question was whether we were going to step up to the plate and belt out this “doctrine of grace” with pride.

After my initial response was ignored, I hoped against hope that someone would ask me my opinion on the matter so that I could say, “If Paul can say, ‘As in Adam all died, so in Christ shall all be made alive,’ then I won’t feel bad about saying ‘free ev’ry soul.'”

At the end of practice, the conscientious objector formally suggested “chosen souls,” and the director, now realizing the fact that anything else would be tantamount to compromise against the gospel itself, asked if there were any objections. I didn’t say anything: it would have been the start of a debate I wasn’t prepared for, and I just wanted to get out of there.

As I’m sure you can tell by this post having no particular point, I’m still stewing a bit at the hubris of the revised lyric. Could there be a more obvious way of undermining the beauty and humility characterizing the original lyrics? Could they not find a way to avoid compromising their “gospel” without sounding like self-congratulatory, exclusivistic jerks?

I’d like to emphasize that this occasion is mostly atypical of this congregation, or we wouldn’t be attending. I only know that if I am in the service when this is sung, I will articulate the more clearly, “given to free ev’ry soul!”

The yet unfinished work of Christ

Does your Christian tradition teach or imply that it is better to err on the side of faith than works?

Yesterday I posted a quote from MacDonald that indicted the doctrine of imputed righteousness as an inoculation from pursuing personal holiness. As luck would have it, that same morning a web-only Christianity Today article by Jason Hood pushed back against a modern movement in that same direction, strong especially among the most fiercely monergistic Christians, a group whose predecessors 150 years ago were the subject of MacDonald’s critique. Theirs is an attempt to make sure everyone knows first of all that the gospel is all about what Christ has done on our behalf and nothing about what believers can do. To some degree it is this conviction that is behind a trending preoccupation with the concept of “grace” among the New Calvinists, typified by the Sovereign Grace movement. I sometimes think that if these people had any doubt about any of the so-called “doctrines of grace” (the five points of Calvinism), it would be “the perseverance of the saints”, given their fierce warnings about those who momentarily falter from trusting “Christ alone” for salvation.

In particular, Hood writes to target a rhetorical device in which the speaker suggests that being accused of antinomianism is a sign that the gospel-centric preacher is doing something right. Now, figuring out what precisely antinomianism (anti-law-ism) means is a huge undertaking, because it means different things depending on who is charging whom with promoting it. Here in the case of the argument Hood is attacking, it refers to a tendency to reject more rules and guidelines of behavior than is spiritually healthy, to be so anti-legalism that you will stop doing good works at all. Hood cites no less a leading light than Martyn Lloyd-Jones as an example of someone who suggests that being accused of favoring too much grace in this way just might be an indication that one is on the right side of the grace/works divide, sufficiently emphasizing our utter dependence on the sufficiency of Christ’s atonement.

Before reading this article, I don’t think I’d heard that meme specifically, but I have recently heard someone preaching his conviction that being charged with advocating “cheap grace” for emphasizing the wholly unmerited nature of God’s grace is offensive, given that 1) it cost Jesus his life, 2) for the rest of us, grace is free, and 3) it’s a dreadful thing to try to add to what Christ has already done. This is closely related to the idea as above, symptomatic of a faulty view of what the gospel is. In the Synoptics especially, Jesus was hardly a critic of “works-based righteousness”: for instance, in Matthew Jesus is shown teaching that the difference between a sheep who inherits life and a goat who inherits destruction is purely and wholly a matter of behavior. As Hood points out, even Paul was more against works of Torah than he was against good works generally.

I do reject the idea that we must earn salvation by jumping through hoops, and I mourn the fatigue and condemnation felt by those who believe that the proper combination of doing enough good things and avoiding doing enough bad things will make the difference between life and death eternal. My hope rests in the belief that God sees and empathizes with our many weaknesses. Yet I am convinced that the particularly and predominantly Protestant emphasis on identifying with Christ’s work through belief (“faith“) alone, entirely passively rather than on a more active and holistic level, has tended toward a deeply problematic lack of emphasis on what early believers thought was one of the primary reasons He created and saved us: “good works in Christ.”

Hood’s point is that we should not be happy either with appearing legalistic or antinomian, since both are dangerous. In fairness, the Christians under Hood’s critique would be sure to make a distinction between working out one’s salvation and working for one’s salvation, but it is tragic that in their fear of the latter they would be content to be accused of underplaying the former.

Indeed, I’d go farther than Hood did and say that between the two, the more dangerous over-emphasis is on “trusting in the finished work of Christ alone”, particularly when that phrase is used as shorthand for “not allowing our focus on Christ to stray too far from our theology of what the cross and the resurrection did for us”. A mandated necessity to believe the right things is hard to locate in Scripture, but commands to do the right things, one of which occasionally includes believing, is positively ubiquitous in both Testaments. We are advised that the hallmark, the telltale fruit of faith is faith-fulness, the outworking of (rather than fervent belief in) heavenly truths within our world — the institution of the reign of God that Jesus proclaimed as “the gospel”. This single-minded obsession with the “finished work” of Christ on the cross cannot help but distract us from the ways in which Christ’s work remains unfinished, and in an important way began at his death.

An exclusive emphasis on trusting that Christ did this, that, or the other on the cross or through his resurrection produces a stillborn faith. It is a belief in too little, after all, in that it has a propensity to stop us short of believing that one thing that I believe is the most important: what God wants us to believe about how we should live. I am persuaded that, far from it being a dangerous competitor of the work of Christ on the cross and a possible barrier to salvation, a dominating resolution to participate in those works and teachings of Christ before the cross is the most important instantiation of salvation.

When reading one recent testimony at Religion at the Margins, I was deeply saddened: not for the author, who still seeks to imitate Christ despite his loss of faith, but for those who considered his “wayward” theological beliefs to be of more concern than the hurting ones he sought to serve, and still more for those hurting ones who are still being told that their real problem is not “trusting in Christ’s finished work”. Surely the God described in the New Testament who desires that His followers’ character resemble His own would be far more satisfied with an exceptionally ignorant follower, a silly but obedient child in whose life He is able to cultivate righteous attitudes and behaviors but who is somehow under the impression that she serves a Cosmic Platypus, than He would be with a follower who has come to the right conclusions on every aspect of Jesus’ nature and his atonement for us and who even tries to love his neighbor, but who passionately cautions everyone not to attempt to “add to the finished work of Christ” by being preoccupied with doing the sorts of things that Jesus was concerned with during his life.

The overblown fears of “works-based righteousness” and the “social gospel” are insidious because they encourage us to leave undone the nitty gritty work of personal holiness before God, from the hidden negatives, such as not lusting and not coveting your neighbor’s blessings, to the visible positives of our faith, such as alleviating the suffering of those in need. Christianity is a much bigger campaign than many understand it to be: it costs us everything. God shows His grace to the world through our participation in the unfinished work of Christ.

When inerrancy is truly evil

Now the glory of the God of Israel had gone up from the cherub on which it rested to the threshold of the house. The Lord called to the man clothed in linen, who had the writing case at his side; and said to him, “Go through the city, through Jerusalem, and put a mark on the foreheads of those who sigh and groan over all the abominations that are committed in it.”

To the others he said in my hearing, “Pass through the city after him, and kill; your eye shall not spare, and you shall show no pity. Cut down old men, young men and young women, little children and women, but touch no one who has the mark. And begin at my sanctuary.” So they began with the elders who were in front of the house. Then he said to them, “Defile the house, and fill the courts with the slain. Go!” So they went out and killed in the city. While they were killing, and I was left alone, I fell prostrate on my face and cried out, “Ah Lord God! will you destroy all who remain of Israel as you pour out your wrath upon Jerusalem?” He said to me, “The guilt of the house of Israel and Judah is exceedingly great; the land is full of bloodshed and the city full of perversity; for they say, ‘The Lord has forsaken the land, and the Lord does not see.’ As for me, my eye will not spare, nor will I have pity, but I will bring down their deeds upon their heads.” Then the man clothed in linen, with the writing case at his side, brought back word, saying, “I have done as you commanded me.”

Ezekiel 9.3-11

That was the wise old prophet Ezekiel speaking to Judah. Here’s the most influential prophet speaking to this generation of Calvinists:

Please note that at the time I took this screenshot, fifteen other people had followed the Piped Piper of Bethlehem waaaay out of the bounds of the real world.

If you want to know why I think inerrancy and Piper’s Reformed theology, particularly in tandem, are not merely trifling misunderstandings, see Exhibit A.

Thoughts on “Christ crucified” and the gospel according to Jesus and Paul

Recently I was listening to a pastor describing the gospel in the predominant Reformed fashion as the message that sinners are absolved of guilt because Christ died in order to allow God to punish sin without condemning vile, sinful humanity (at least those of us who are fortunate enough to be among the elect). Under this rubric, “the cross” becomes shorthand for “the way in which Christ received our justly deserved penalty and condemnation”, the so-called penal substitution theory of the atonement. At one point this pastor used Paul’s insistence that he preached nothing but “Christ crucified” as evidence that Paul preached the gospel as defined above.

Have you ever heard that? Someone claiming that the gospel is all Christians need to focus on, all that’s necessary, the only thing we have any business preaching (I do not intend to challenge these assertions here), and in the same breath asserting that “the gospel” means “God punished Jesus in our stead”? Downplaying our utter wickedness and the fact that we deserve to rot in hell for eternity (or even just be consumed) and a primary focus on the ethics of Christianity are seen as tantamount to rejecting the gospel of Christ.

The question that sprang to my mind as I heard the aforementioned pastor, eventually prompting this post, was whether Paul’s phrase “Christ crucified” in 1 Corinthians 1-2 in any way depends upon or implies penal substitution. I believe the answer is a resounding no, so resounding that answering either yes or the more modest yes and no present the danger of propping up a massive distraction from the important message Paul was trying to convey.

The contextual thrust of the passage in which “Christ crucified” is found is unequivocal: Paul is attempting to correct a fundamentally incorrect attitude in the church, an attitude that was hardly unique to Corinth or the first century. He is displeased to have learned that factions have sprung up in the church at Corinth, a faction of Apollos, a faction of Paul, and – with no exemption from criticism – a faction of Christ. Appealing first to those who set themselves up as his followers, he calls attention to the basis of his own leadership, which was not power or eloquence, but humility.

“For Christ did not send me to baptize but to proclaim the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power.” (1.17)

Image via Wikipedia

Building cliques around leadership meant calling attention away from the very power source of the “cross of Christ”, namely, submission. That was counter-intuitive to be sure, but…

“…it is written, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.'” (1.19)

It is this immediate context in which the assertion that “we proclaim Christ crucified” is first made:

“‘…but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” (1.23-25)

Nowhere present here or within this entire passage is so much as a passing mention of the wrath of God justly levied against our utterly depraved state. The focus is somewhere else entirely: for Paul, this principle of inversion, the reversal of strong/weak, wise/foolish is a thoroughgoing program, the hallmark and curriculum of the Kingdom.

“Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God.” (1.26-29; cf. Philippians 2)

Paul appeals to his own example of self-abasement in the interests of others as the only possible basis for his credibility, which basis simultaneously disqualifies him from exaltation:

“…I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling.” (2.1-3)

“For when one says, ‘I belong to Paul,’ and another, ‘I belong to Apollos,’ are you not merely human? What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you came to believe, as the Lord assigned to each.” (3.4-5)

“So let no one boast about human leaders. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future–all belong to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God. Think of us in this way, as servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries.” (3.21-4.1)

Both to those who uphold and who question his authority, Paul repeats his insistence throughout chapters 1 through 3 (as indeed in various places throughout both letters to the Corinthians) that he wielded a leadership exercised only through and valid only because of his submission, sacrifice, and willingness to be persecuted. It’s a sustained, focused argument: Paul’s focus on the message of a crucified Messiah was intended to show his own Christ-like, “cruciform” bona fides.

When we hear “Christ crucified”, we should avoid losing the focus and intent of that phrase in Paul’s argument. For Paul, Christ’s crucifixion was the exemplar of submission and self-sacrifice, paradigmatic of the whole new world order over which Christ has been made king (again cf. Philippians 2, and also see here). If one insists that “Christ crucified” is the gospel, then at very least the gospel must be defined not as “God punished Jesus in our stead” ¹ but as “the Messiah has through self-abasement become Lord of all.”

However, even framing it that way is anachronistic, for the same reason that it should be manifestly clear that the message of the gospel could not be “that Christ received our justly deserved punishment and condemnation”: the gospel long predates Jesus’ crucifixion. Jesus preached the good news of the Kingdom of God from the very beginning of his ministry, and we have absolutely no reason to believe that his own future death was the subject of his main message. The good news, the gospel, was of the coming of the Kingdom of God, an original conception of which was anticipated by other sects of Judaism before him and found its roots in the canonical Old Testament (e.g. Isaiah 40.4-5). Jesus took up the mantle to fulfill those hopes: the oppressed would be vindicated and the oppressors laid low. Originally, and even in the first century, this eschatological corrective was envisaged as taking place by the restoration of national Israel’s political fortunes. However, it seems that the earliest Christians saw in Jesus a Messiah, a divine restorative agent, who did not overcome might with might, but with self-sacrifice.

No one searching for Paul’s unity with the teachings of Jesus should miss this unifying, early Christian motivating vision of the reign of God: mutual submission and voluntary servanthood is at the heart of the Kingdom of which Christ is king. Interestingly, here we find one of the least disputable indications of the content of the historical Jesus’ teachings, since this principle of inversion not only dominates the first few chapters of 1 Corinthians, the earliest known Christian writing, but also features prominently in the Synoptics (and, for what it’s worth, the Gospel of Thomas as well).

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¹ Despite my oft stated misgivings with the doctrine, I do not mean to claim that there is no trace of the idea of penal substitution intimated or implied within Paul’s writings. However, the frequent use of the expression “Christ crucified” as a proof that Paul thought the core of Christian soteriology to be God’s wrath against sin appeased through punishing Jesus is surely wrong-headed. For if Jesus was exalted to lordship for accepting the cup, what part would that person play who demands satisfaction for wrongs done him –even if that person was God Himself? Would he not be the last, the lowest, the least Christ-like? Jesus would not in that case be exemplifying the Father to humanity, but showing Him up.

One of the greatest Christian sermons comes to YouTube

At long last, David Baldwin‘s labor of love has given us an annotated recording of George MacDonald’s theological tour de force, “Justice.” This is definitely MacDonald at his finest; his beliefs on the Atonement, hell, God’s Fatherhood, and, of course, justice are nowhere more compelling than in this masterpiece.

Enjoy, disseminate amongst all your loved ones (friends don’t let friends believe that the gospel = penal substitution), and by all means, subscribe to David’s YouTube channel.

http://www.youtube.com/p/FAC741A6318BCF05?hl=en_US&fs=1

Spurgeon*, eat your heart out!

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* With no offense intended toward the estimable Charles Haddon or his devotees. Spurgeon was a truly great preacher, arguably more consistently so than his contemporary MacDonald, with one decisive discriminator: Spurgeon was much more frequently wrong. 😉

Justice and the demands of the law

Here’s a little thought experiment.

Let’s say you heard tell of a ruler of a foreign country who decreed that all citizens of his country who broke even one of that country’s laws deserved to be, and henceforth would be, locked up and tortured for the rest of their lives.

Additionally, he took the most revered, humble, and law-abiding citizen up on his offer to take all the blame and punishment for all crimes great and small that were perpetrated by a select group of citizens, a group chosen neither by the severity of their crimes nor by any discernible merit on their part (the others were out of luck).

This left pardoned jay-walkers and murderers alike to roam the street and continue doing what they wanted with virtual impunity, although it was hoped that many would turn over a new leaf out of gratitude and the promise of a fatter retirement check. Everyone else would be tortured the moment they committed the most minor infraction, which was hard to avoid given that the laws of the land were intricate and formulated in direct opposition to basic human nature.

What would your response be to such a report?

1. “Injustice! Barbarism!”
2. “The real story here is grace. The demands of the law must be satisfied. Transgressors know what’s coming to them before they commit a criminal act. Justice must be served. The guilty must by no means go unpunished. After all, there’s nothing in Scripture that this violates, and his authority is guaranteed by Romans 13. But what grace the ruler shows by executing vengeance on the innocent, saving (some) from their punishment!”
3. Something else?

Would the report about this ruler’s policies seem more believable or less so if you discovered through close observation that the king otherwise seemed to be a good, tenderhearted man whose ideology and policies were upheld by fair-minded folk to be the very model of fairness? What if, after your own examination, you concluded that his other demonstrations of kindness and even personal affection for his people were unparalleled throughout the world? What if his pardoned citizens upheld his chief virtues to be “justice” and “grace”?

C.S. Lewis once said (on another subject), “…nonsense remains nonsense, even when we say it about God.”

I realize I’m taking on a few different evangelical narratives here, especially penal satisfaction, eternal conscious torment, and election. I also realize that many of my brothers and sisters on an entirely different theological page will answer none of those questions I posed, but will first scramble to make fine distinctions between this hypothetical ruler and God. To them I say: you know very well what I’m getting at, and if you dismiss the legitimacy of my analyzing your doctrine of God’s justice in this way, then it shouldn’t be a problem for you to come right out and honestly answer these questions within this hypothetical  construct. Right? Would such a ruler be a good, just, wise, and merciful ruler?

If you answer, “Your analogy is crude, limited, fanciful, and breaks down at various points,” I will congratulate you. I think this is exactly what happens when we try to weave together the various human approximations of the meaning of the atonement and salvation found in the NT and hold to our construct as the only inviolable doctrine.