The Hidden Power of God at Christmas

Christmas is about the humility of God coming into human flesh, entering the world born in a stable. This is lowly and rustic and familiar, but lest we think God reducing Himself to our span is a lowering of standards, a making of Himself comfortable with the way things simply are with us and our world, we need to be reminded that this is a paradox, a mystery of mysteries. The Incarnation is humility, but it is a great and glorious humility because here is also the presence full-strength of the Power and Majesty and Holiness who framed the worlds in glory and perfection, who rules on high and commands the innumerable angelic host, who demands justice and righteousness from His creatures and will judge them accordingly, who is infinite and incomparable in every way. Indeed, the Incarnation does not gainsay God's almighty power but rather underscores it and shows that it is of one substance with His love and compassion, which He extends even and especially to this race that has fallen from Him and brought the whole Creation into ruin. This is a God beyond all limits. This is a God who is big enough to become small for the sake of love.

The fullness of this Deity came to dwell bodily in the Child Jesus. This means that though this Child was small, though He was born in the meanest of circumstances, poor, of a people oppressed, He was able to faithfully carry out the plan for which His Father had placed His hand to the plow, and He did it not in spite of this smallness but precisely through it. Of Him, St. Paul hymns:

6 Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, 7 but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. 8 And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death— even death on a cross! 9 Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, 10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:6-11)

And, of course, Jesus through His death and resurrection has raised fallen humanity so that those who believe in Him may sit with Him in the glory mentioned above both now in the Church and forever in the New Jerusalem. Great is the promise of Christmas. Christ and we His brothers and sisters are the firstfruits of the New Creation, with which all of heaven and nature are destined to be crowned.

The Office of Readings on Christmas Day bears beautiful witness to the glory the Kingdom that has arrived in the humble birth of Christ will bring to the whole Creation. But while I was feasting on these wonderful readings this Christmas, I was also mourning the deaths of the worshipers in Nigeria who had been killed earlier that morning in church bombings as they were glorying in the same Christmas mystery. It is confusing, senseless, and tragic that on the morning when they were celebrating peace on earth that at least two dozen of Christ's redeemed should die in such wanton acts of hatred and violence. The promise of Christmas is not yet fully realized. It is perhaps in recognition of such realities that many parts of the Church commemorate the Feast of St. Stephen the Martyr the day after Christmas and the Feast of the Martyrdom of the Holy Innocents of Bethlehem on December 28. It is one thing that during the Christmas season violence should come upon the Church unexpectedly, but in light of all that the Incarnation means for humanity and the world, why do we intentionally turn our gaze back to the predations the enemy has made against God, His Christ, and His redeemed children as we do in these commemorations?

Well, until God's Kingdom arrives in all its fullness at Christ's Second Coming, His reign will often be manifested among us in a hidden manner, as it was in the First Coming. God came to us in the fullness of His glory, hidden in the weakness of the Child born in Bethlehem. We remember the martyrs in the midst of the Christmas celebration because in their deaths they bear witness to this Child, who grew up to become the servant of all, pouring out His blood and giving His life for a world determined to reject Him. Resurrection, glory, and the New Creation came through the cross. He descended into the earth that he might rise to the heights of heaven and fill the whole universe, and He made himself the bondsman of His enemies, receiving death at their hands, that he might be the captain of their salvation. This is how Christ has triumphed, won brothers and sisters for himself from among His enemies, and how He is transforming the world that yet lies in wickedness.

In like manner, as the martyrs echo the sufferings of the Lord who bought them, laying hold of Him who unto the death laid hold of them, they plant their blood as the seed of the Church. People see the power that is in their testimony to the Lord Jesus and come to recognize something they cannot account for in the unbreakable hope these have in Him. This is Christ at work, hiding His glory in the suffering of the saints, overcoming His enemies and theirs, converting foes of the Gospel to children of God, and all of it through the death He shares with His martyrs.

In a less dramatic though still paradoxical manner, this is also the way it is with all Christians in the lesser martyrdoms we experience in our lives. Life in a fallen world is filled with small vexations that build up and gradually steal away our strength. Life doesn't quite go the way we plan, and we don't seem as victorious as we think we ought to be. Our jobs are unsatisfying, or we fail in our relationships. We spin our wheels. We seem to accomplish little of lasting worth. Whether they be these kinds of trials or the catastrophies that leave our lives in utter ruin, Jesus Christ is with us, hidden in our hearts with power and grace for us and for our world. What we shall be in Him we do not yet see, but the fullness of God hidden in the helpless Child and the unveiling of the glory residing there that came through His humble obedience to the Father bear the ultimate witness to what is ours even now and what shall be fully realized in us and in our world from our communion with Him. Keep the faith, humble Christian; Christ hidden in us is the power that overcomes the world.

Our Suffering Savior

He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
³He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.
Like one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

⁴Surely he took up our infirmities
and carried our sorrows,
yet we considered him stricken by God,
smitten by him, and afflicted.
⁵But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed.

Isaiah 53:2-5

⁹But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.

¹⁰In bringing many sons to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering. ¹¹Both the one who makes men holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers.

¹⁷For this reason he had to be made like his brothers in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. ¹⁸Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.

Hebrews 2:9-11, 17-18

Suffering is the most universal of human experiences. We cannot escape it no matter who we are or where we’re from. It will always catch up with us one way or another. Suffering is simply an unavoidable aspect of life. Some endure more suffering in a lifetime; others endure less. Some live in wealth; others live in poverty. Some live in health; others live constantly in the grip of illness. Some are despised and persecuted; others live in the good graces of seemingly everyone. But regardless of whether we live most of our lives in an overwhelming flood of trials and tribulations or in their relative absence, we all know pain. We have all known what it is to have a broken heart at one point or another; we have all known what it is to be hurt by friends, family, lovers, coworkers, and strangers; we have all known what it is like to be sick and to endure the illnesses of loved ones; we have all known privation at one time or another; we have all known the ravages of nature; we have all known the tragedies of death that befall our loved ones, and ultimately, we will all experience death for ourselves.

The question of why we suffer has been the most thoroughly considered of all questions theologians have wrestled with throughout the centuries. If God is all powerful, if God is good, why does he allow us to suffer as horribly as we do? In my humble opinion, Christianity does not provide a better answer for why we suffer than any of the world's other great religions. What it does provide, however, in comparison with them is the truth that our God is not removed from or indifferent to the sufferings of his creatures. Christianity asserts a God who exists in solidarity with his creatures in the face of their sufferings. The lessons of the cross are great and could be pondered for all of eternity, but, one of the greatest lessons we can learn from the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ is that we are not alone in our sufferings.

I have come to embrace a particular teaching on the nature of Christ's sufferings that powerfully conveys the reality of our Savior's solidarity with us in our sufferings. We rightly emphasize that Jesus’ Passion accomplished the satisfaction of Divine Justice's wrath against sin, but we cannot come away from the cross without also realizing that in those horrible hours hanging on the tree, Jesus willingly took up the experience of all the horrors of sin, suffering, and death that each and every human being has ever and will ever know. Not only did our Savior take the penalty for our sin upon himself but he also took on all the sufferings resulting from the presence of sin and evil in the world as his own personal experience. Whenever we endure suffering or see its presence, we have known the very experience of Jesus Christ.

We cannot, however, simply consider suffering an experience that Christ endured once in the distant past on Calvary. We can be sure that whenever we hurt, Christ is present to us right now at this very moment suffering right along with us. For the Christian, then, we do not suffer in vain, for Christ has sanctified suffering and redeemed it forever. Therefore, just as Christ suffered and was glorified as a result, if we suffer for him and alongside of him, we will surely share in his glory.

Filling the Universe with the Fullness of God

Ephesians 3:17-19
And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 4:8-10
“When he ascended on high,
he led captives in his train
and gave gifts to men.”

What does “he ascended” mean except that he also descended to the lower, earthly regions? He who descended is the very one who ascended higher than all the heavens, in order to fill the whole universe

Our life in this world is a constant search for wholeness, for fullness. For those of us who have been grasped by the love of God in Christ, we have found wholeness; we have found all the fullness. He is truly all we need. Christ alone is the fullness of God, and He has come in human flesh. Because of God’s coming into human flesh, when we are united to Christ through the Holy Spirit, this fullness comes closer to us than to our own hearts.

Why then are we believers so often cast down? The simple answer is that we have allowed Satan to take from us the awareness of just how full and wonderful this fullness is. We have allowed him to steal our joy and purpose because we have drawn the loop too tightly on what this salvation God has given us consists of. We have lost the full-orbed Christian hope. Let me explain what I mean. I believe we have robbed God of His good world and failed to see that “heaven and earth are filled with His glory.” Over the last 1000 years the Christian Church has increasingly bought into a dualism that strictly opposes nature to grace, heaven to earth, and matter to spirit. What may come as a great surprise to most is that the Bible simply does not teach this. The faith of Israel embodied in the Old Testament and the faith of the Church embodied in the New Testament teaches us that not only did God establish a good and perfect universe once in the distant past but that He has continuously from the foundation of the world upheld, governed, ruled, and manifested Himself in every inch of the universe. In spite of the entry of decay, corruption, and death into his creation through the Fall, God is still governing and guiding everything toward the glorious fulfillment of His will. The Good News for us as Christians is that God has fulfilled in our flesh at just the right time in history all his promises for the consummation of the universe. The Word became flesh and dwelt, “tabernacled” among us. In the Incarnation, death, burial, resurrection, ascension, and heavenly rule of His Son Jesus Christ, God has given us in the present time the fulfillment of all His future promises. This is the Gospel. God is recovering all that was lost in the Fall through the person and work of His Son Jesus. This Gospel is as big and broad and wide and long and high and deep as the universe and it expands to cover everything, visible and invisible, that God has made. It is not plan B. God has not abandoned the project He began in the beginning but is renewing it and bringing it to its final glory in His Son. This is what I mean by the full Christian hope. Christ is filling the universe with Himself and all the trappings of His glory.

Justification: Whose Legal Fiction?

A conversation I was having yesterday with a friend has set me to thinking. My completely awesome friend JK converted to Roman Catholicism two weeks ago and he was sharing with me his frustrations with Calvin’s view of the Eucharist and how, but for rejecting transubstantiation and the consequent adoration of the elements, Calvin’s view on virtually all other points is the Roman Catholic view. I mentioned something about a perceived radical nominalism the Reformers might have been reacting against in Catholicism’s making the elements the substantial body and blood of Christ while they retain the properties of bread and wine and in some sense may still be spoken of as symbols. I guess I was driving toward the seeming appearance of an epistemological monstrosity in which God becomes bread and wine when one tries to have it both ways, so I wasn’t quite expressing myself clearly in bringing up radical nominalism. There is a transformation in the Catholic view—not just God making bread and wine Christ’s body and blood by fiat. This was key, though, because it moved us toward discussing justification, about which my buddy said the Reformers were working with a radical nominalism in having the justified imputed righteous while they remain sinners. That Luther philosophically defended simul iustus et peccator by resorting to the nominalism of Ockham and others, I agree, but Protestant justification is not a legal fiction. Not only is justification a declaration about Christ satisfying all of God's requirements of justice for us, but it is also a transformative declaration about sinners becoming the righteousness of God, in the same way that in transubstantiation, the words, “This is my body. This is my blood” are a transformative declaration about bread and wine becoming what they were not previously.

The above is a controversial rumination, but it led to one that might be just as controversial. I’m thinking that in regards to justification and our understandings of grace and what grace does to the rebel children of Adam and Eve, both Protestants and Roman Catholics have difficulty with process. Catholics might would say I have a lot of gall saying that in the way that Protestantism divvies up justification and sanctification and states justification as an instantaneous event that delivers a forensic righteousness (not a real personal righteousness, Catholics would note) decisive for final salvation, which, Catholics would go on to argue, renders the process of sanctification that follows superfluous in the economy of salvation. In some Protestant explanations of justification, I would have to admit this Catholic objection scores a legitimate point, but I would counter by speaking of justification as a delivery in the present of an earnest of the substantial righteousness, secured and vouchsafed for us by the perfect life, death, and resurrection Jesus Christ underwent in our place, that will belong to the Christian when God delivers him or her finally and completely from sin and all its effects at the last day. In other words, justification for Protestants need not be considered so exhaustive of salvation that God's delivering us at the level of our nature from the power and presence of sin between regeneration and glorification is emptied of all significance. Justification is the declaration of a fact that will be; the fact—Christ's perfect obedience imputed to us in the present—declaring what will assuredly be in the future—our glorified nature resulting from justification-grounded sanctification.

Where do I view the Catholic understanding of justification to have trouble with process in regards to how grace works? I mean, over against Protestantism Roman Catholicism does not distinguish between justification and sanctification and thinks of the decisive note of justification as a process, for crying out loud! Well, here goes. In Roman Catholicism, the declaration of righteousness a Christian receives at first justification is the declaration of a fact pure and simple, not qualified in any way. At justification, the Christian is not simultaneously a sinner and just; a Christian is just just. All is right with him or her. I may be misrepresenting from this point forward (I do not know, but I trust my ex-Reformed, out-of-the-closet Catholic friend and his Catholic brothers and mine will let me know if I have unintentionally misrepresented the Church’s teachings), but it seems the conclusion we must draw from this is that all the truly meaningful adverse affects of the Fall are healed when one is regenerated (if only until the first post-baptismal sin). Because the only thing wrong with the fallen human being is the deprivation of grace, it seems that it is only because of continuing sin throughout the remainder of life that the further sanctifying work of God is required for the Christian to arrive at the beatific vision. In other words, after first sanctifying grace there is no more healing of human nature that needs to be done. Everything afterwards is just an elaborate maintenance operation.

From the foregoing, then, sanctification and the entire sacramental system it depends on is just a maintenance operation, so thorough is the healing effected by first sanctifying grace. I might be wrong on this because Catholics recognize that concupiscence still remains in a Christian after baptism, but even if Catholics do not believe this concupiscence to be sin itself, it is still a disorder that was not present in humanity at our first creation. Concupiscence, even if we are not guilty simply by virtue of it, is still the seething cesspool of all unrighteousness. Is this the perfect and complete substantial righteousness, the healed nature, on account of which God calls us righteous? As long as the sin factory remains operational in any capacity, we cannot safely be spoken of as substantially righteous in God’s presence. This is where the Tridentine Roman Catholic formulation of justification is susceptible to the same charge of legal fiction Catholics levy at Protestant views of justification.

It seems, in Roman Catholic soteriology, that God can’t do fatherly business with human beings until they come into his presence with every last vestige of unrighteousness or unsoundness in their nature done away with. This is where I say the Tridentine Roman Catholic view of justification and grace, for all of its reliance on Aristotlean becoming, has trouble with process. If Protestants have a process problem in our understanding of such a front-loaded imputed righteousness that it implicitly makes the subsequent healing of our nature and the obedience that would flow from it superfluous in the economy of salvation, then Catholics have just as big a process problem in their view of a positional justification that requires a pristine essential righteousness moment-to-moment in a human being for saving communion with the Holy Trinity. Being called and really made righteous is a long process because the wreck the Fall has made of us is truly great and terrible. Arriving at the end of the process is not and cannot be a precondition for beginning. God takes care of working it out so he can get us started standing on solid ground. For Protestants, that solid ground is the alien righteousness of Christ imputed to us presently, which by the progressive work of the Holy Spirit will so permeate us by the last day that it will rightly be spoken of at that point as our own personal nature.

I will conclude this haphazard and off-the-cuff reflection on grace by positing that grace neither be considered exclusively in terms of God’s unmerited favor by which he relates to sinners, a la Protestantism, nor that grace be considered exclusively in terms of Divine energy that must infuse people in order to lift them into communion with the Holy Trinity, a la Catholicism and Orthodoxy. I prefer a both/and approach. They are two sides of the same reality. Grace is nothing other than the personal benevolence of God, whether exhibited in forgiving sinners or communing with his creatures whether they be upright or fallen. God forgives us, fills us, heals us, loves us, by the Spirit of his grace. Grace is forgiveness and healing and peaceful harmony with God through Christ in the Holy Spirit.

Overreacting to John Piper's 2 Minutes with the Pope

I saw this video of John Piper’s response to the question of what he would say to the Pope if he had two minutes with him, and I just had to respond. Let me throw out a few caveats before I get to it. First, Piper is responding off the cuff to a question he wasn’t expecting and this is probably in a conference situation where everybody is operating with the same assumptions and views. All in all, the situation is not conducive for a comprehensive and nuanced response to an opposing point of view. Second, I don’t know as much as I probably should about Piper. He is a big name for evangelical Calvinists, and he has had a hugely positive impact in the lives of many of my friends. I can’t argue with this. I have every intention of reading Don’t Waste Your Life, and my personal impression of him the few times I’ve listened to him on the Internet is positive. This man is a passionate, warm, human being fully alive with love for Jesus and people kind of guy. I think he is an overwhelmingly positive force in the Kingdom of God.

That all being said, I think John Piper might have a too-narrow conception of the Gospel. If his engagement with NT Wright and here, with Roman Catholicism, is any indication, Piper has substituted a comprehensive explanation of the Gospel with a very specific formal statement about how the Gospel works to bring individual sinners into right relationship with God. Don’t get me wrong, I agree with the formulation Piper here gives: “we should rely entirely on the righteousness of Christ imputed to us by faith alone as the ground of God being 100 percent for us, after which necessary sanctification comes.” This is how the Gospel works to bring people into the Kingdom of God, but, necessary and central though this affirmation might be, this does not encompass all that the Gospel entails. The Gospel put more comprehensively might go something like this: Jesus has been established as the world’s true Lord through his righteous life, death, and resurrection and that, as a result, God has lifted his curse on the whole created order, brought it into his favor, and set it on a trajectory towards its original intended end of righteousness, which will be fulfilled at Christ’s Second Coming. Take Piper’s formulation with this and we have the who, what, how, what for, and where are we going of the Gospel.

My main issue, however, is that Piper does not seem to have grasped the full nuance of the Roman Catholic position on justification, and from that flattened understanding, has rather obtusely declared Roman Catholic theology heretical.

To the Roman Catholic position on justification: are we talking about first justification as in baptism or are we talking about final justification? If we’re talking about first justification, or, to find the most analogous modern Reformed Protestant term, “regeneration,” I believe some Catholics would posit that this does come by faith alone. At any rate, the sole graciousness of God in first regenerating a sinner is quite profoundly acknowledged by the Roman Catholic Church. On this issue, perhaps, if we cut through the formal systematics each side is using, the differences are not quite as profound as would first appear.

The rub is in reference to final justification. Historically, Protestants have not parsed justification the way Catholics do into initial, positional, and final categories. To be declared righteous at regeneration is one in the same as being declared righteous in the end, and this comes solely on the basis of Christ’s righteousness imputed to the sinner. This is Piper’s position. I will play the game of double justification, though. NT Wright does it far better than Piper thinks he does and even John Calvin can speak of a double justification where in the end believers are judged according to works that have themselves been justified by grace alone through faith alone. Works may enter in to final justification, but they rest entirely on the ground of Christ’s righteousness for their worth.

On the Roman Catholic side, however, we have a final justification that is based on righteousness infused by faith and works. A first declaration of righteousness at regeneration does not guarantee a declaration of righteousness at the final day. Catholics must work with God for a righteous verdict on the final day. Obviously, this is quite different from justification by faith alone. There is no denying there’s quite a gulf between these views, but a look at the qualifications both Protestants and Catholics make on final justification, faith, and, works makes the gap look less imposing.

In Calvin’s case, with God justifying us in the end by works viewed in light of Christ’s imputed righteousness, or, in the case of NT Wright, with God in his covenant faithfulness working righteousness in his people in order to deliver them with the same verdict on the last day that he did when he first declared them righteous on their entry into the covenant, Protestants, with BIG qualifications, can also say we will be judged in some sense by our works. In this light, we must look at the way Protestants define faith. For John Calvin, faith subsumes a disposition of piety, and the Westminster Confession of Faith speaks of justifying faith as never being alone but “ever accompanied with all other saving graces,” being “no dead faith, but work[ing] by love” (XI. 2).

Let us look to the Catholic qualifications of works. For instance, without grace removing sin from believers or without God crowning his own gifts with grace in the works of believers, Catholics teach that works do not of themselves merit favor with God. It seems to me that though works are required for salvation in Roman Catholicism, they don’t amount to a hill of beans unless God determines to look on them in a merciful light. Why is it that the distinction between mortal and venial sins is superfluous prior to baptism, unless God views Christians according to a fatherly standard the unregenerate are not privy to? Catholicism is not Pelagian or even semi-Pelagian. I think semi-Augustinian would be a better designation. If you take Catholic qualifications into account, I think it is no more pertinent to call Roman Catholic theology heretical than it is to call Arminian theology heretical. First justification there does not guarantee final justification either. Unfaithfulness can muck it up. Are the Young, Restless, and Reformed crowd sectarian enough to call John Wesley a heretic?

I must also take exception to the use of the word “heresy.” I wish we Protestants would pronounce a moratorium on this word until we learn to use it correctly. In Protestant terms, it seems to me that heresy means an error so severe that it makes the holder of it almost certainly toast. Every time we Protestants call someone a heretic, this means we believe that they are almost certainly going to Hell if they do not repent. I wish conservative Roman Catholics would likewise refrain from throwing the term about when speaking of Christians who belong to what the Vatican calls, “ecclesial communities,” but even in this case, there are extenuating factors, like “invincible ignorance,” and degrees within the Catholic concept of heresy that are conceptually impossible in conservative Calvinist theology. In our post-Vatican II universe, Protestant “heretics” can still be saved unless they know in their consciences that they are maintaining heretical beliefs. For doctrinaire Protestants, it just doesn’t matter.

Finally, I must end my overreaction to a 2 minute clip by grappling with the most troubling implication of Piper’s designation of those who do not agree with justification by faith alone in the confessional Protestant sense as heretics. The implication is that prior to the rise of the Waldensians in the 12th century, all of three people were saved for about eleven hundred of the first twelve hundred years of Church history. Let me ask, is Ignatius a heretic? Is the martyr bishop Polycarp? Is Irenaeus? Is Chrysostom? Is Athanasius? Is Ambrose? Is Bernard of Clairvaux a heretic? Is predestinarian, incipient quasi-Calvinistic Augustine, our hero, a heretic? For all of his Protestantly-speaking sound teaching on the sole graciousness of God in salvation, he does not even arrive at an incipient Protestant teaching of justification by faith alone. You won’t find a formal affirmation of justification by faith alone anywhere in the first millennium of the Church. Do I believe it’s possible that it wasn’t till the second millennium of the Church that we began to grapple most fully with Paul’s teachings on justification? Yes, I do, but failing to arrive at the formal declaration of justification by faith alone hits not right at the very heart of the Christian Gospel. We must look elsewhere for the doctrine on which the Church stands or falls. We have been promised that “the increase of his government shall know no end.” If the vast majority of Christians who have ever lived have failed to grasp the most central essence of the Christian faith, heaven help us all. That would be a failure of the promise of the perpetual growth of the Kingdom of God in this world. But thanks be to the abundant mercy of our God, salvation has been marching on where it has not been expressed in confessional Protestant terms. Christ saves all those who cling in simple faith to him.

Life Digestible in the Blogosphere and the Soul

At the prompting of a friend, I am going to fire this blog up again and see where it takes us. I’m going to take an approach, however, that is less exhausting to myself and my reader. I’m going to stop writing theological treatises and try to just put my thoughts out there as they come to me, in brief, often undeveloped bits—the kind of stuff that is more appropriately digestible in the blogosphere.

The thought occurs to me that something very particular is being communicated to the people of God when in the New Covenant Passover celebration we eat not just the flesh of the Lamb of God but we also receive His blood as well. This is highly significant in that in Old Covenant sacrifice, the blood of the sacrifices was off limits to the people bringing their sacrifices. The blood belonged to the Lord alone, because “the life is in the blood.” The Lord, as the Giver of life, alone had a right to the substance that contained the life force. If this was so with the blood of the animals of Old Testament sacrifice, how much more should the blood of God’s very Son belong solely to Him?

The cross of Christ turns this logic entirely on its head. The Life of God is given for our life. In the Lord’s Supper, we receive the sign and seal of this blood poured out for us. This is the obvious signification, but we need to go further. Of course, in the Old Testament sacrifices, the blood of the animals was given for the life of the people as well, as a type of the great sacrifice God-in-the-flesh would later make for His people. Yet, though the blood of animals was given for them, it was not theirs. This is not so with the blood of Christ. It belongs to us as our spiritual drink. This is a clear example of how the grace given us in the New Covenant is “further up and further in” than what the people of God received in the Old Covenant. In Christ’s shed blood now offered to us to consume, we make the very Life of God our life. The very Life of God runs through our veins because of the Incarnation and the cross, and He signifies and delivers this Life really and truly to us in the cup of the Lord. The fancy theological word for having the very Life of God flowing through our veins is deification. We are caught up in a unique way in the fellowship of the Trinity through Jesus and His blood. The Church Father Athanasius said, “God became man so that man might become God.” We share in the divine nature. We are being made gods.

The deification angle of the cross and the Eucharist, of course, is suggestive of teaching about justification and sanctification. That we receive the blood of Christ to consume in a way the people of God in the Old Covenant did not have the blood of their sacrifices to consume implies more than just blood covering and imputation for us.[1] God is indwelling us, filling us up with Himself that we might be transformed and conformed into His image. His blood not only propitiates God’s wrath for our sin and gives us a standing of purity and righteousness before Him, but it really takes away our sins.

---

[1] Obviously the blood of animals is life with a lowercase “L” but Christ’s blood is LIFE, so the syllogism might be a bit strained.

Filling Up Christ's Afflictions

What does it mean to truly love one’s enemies? A look into the life and story of 20^th-century evangelical Romanian pastor Richard Wurmbrand is a good place to look for insight into the answer to this question. Wurmbrand, the founder of the international ministry Voice of The Martyrs, suffered profoundly for his faith and work as a Christian minister under the repressive communist regime of his Romanian homeland. Beginning in 1948, he was imprisoned for 14 years for his activities as a leader and evangelist in the Underground Church of Romania. In the hands of his captors, Wurmbrand suffered three solid years of solitary confinement and other unimaginable tortures. Released by the communist authorities in 1964, Wurmbrand left Romania and settled in the United States, traveling the world and speaking out on behalf of Christians persecuted in the Communist bloc of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. He tells his story in the profound volume, Tortured for Christ.

Though it has no “literary value,” as Wurmbrand readily admits, Tortured for Christ has been an important book in bringing the plight of persecuted Christian communities to public light in the West, expressing the profound love for Christ, his people, and the world that motivates Christians to suffer for their faith, and mustering support for those suffering persecution.

I think Wurmbrand’s story is particularly pertinent considering that at the current time over 200 million Christians are suffering some form of discrimination or persecution worldwide and that during the century we have just come out of 50 million Christians died for their faith in Jesus Christ, a figure that accounts for 65% of the martyrs in the 2000 years of the Christian Church’s existence! At such a time in history, Christians need to have a strong sense of the message of love they have for those who hate them and the God they serve. For those of us who live in historically Christian cultures and societies, we must look to the experience and message of those who have suffered profoundly for their faith in order to express the depths of God’s love for humanity to our societies, where opposition to Christian claims is only growing.

I bring this anecdote from Tortured for Christ to show the power of Christ’s witness through his suffering Body to reach the enemies of God and humanity with his love. In the experience of Wurmbrand and fellow members of the Underground Church imprisoned for their work for the Gospel, suffering at the hands of the Communists became their most powerful means of reaching them with God’s love. Wurmbrand recounts the martyrdom of Grecu, beaten slowly to death over the course of two weeks under the leadership of an official named Reck, to illustrate the redemptive power of Christian suffering:

During the beatings, Reck said something to Grecu that the Communists often said to Christians, “You know, I am God. I have power of life and death over you. The one who is in heaven cannot decide to keep you in life. Everything depends on me. If I wish, you live. If I wish, you are killed. I am God!” So he mocked the Christian.

Brother Grecu, in his horrible situation, gave Reck a very interesting answer, which I heard afterward from Reck himself. He said, “You don’t know what a deep thing you’ve said. Every caterpillar is in reality a butterfly, if it develops rightly. You have not been created to be a torturer, a man who kills. You have been created to become like God, with the life of the Godhead in your heart. Many who have become persecutors like you, have come to realize—like the apostle Paul—that it is shameful for a man to commit atrocities, that they can do much better things. So they have become partakers of the divine nature. Jesus said to the Jews of His time, ’Ye are gods.’ Believe me, Mr. Reck, your real calling is to be Godlike—to have the character of God, not a torturer.”

At that moment Reck did not pay much attention to the words of his victim, as Saul of Tarsus did not pay attention to the beautiful witness of Stephen being killed in his presence. But those words worked in his heart. And Reck later understood that this was his real calling. (42)

To love one’s enemies is to return blessing for their cursing, to take their reviling and torture, and instead of following in their steps by deforming the image of God in humanity through hatred, to unite those sufferings to Christ and by them appeal to the tormentors to be reconciled to God. As Grecu’s story indicates, God uses such appeals to break the most hardened of hearts and renew the image of God in the most depraved of sinners.

Persecutions and sufferings will come, but Christ is redeeming the world through the sufferings of the persecuted. The sufferings of the saints are a massive signboard pointing back to the cross, where Christ’s suffering and death turned to blessing and life for the world. Pray for the persecuted Church. Their love, expressed in so costly a fashion, is our surest testimony that the sacrifice of Christ is healing the world. Indeed, their suffering love is itself a conduit by which that healing Christ has accomplished flows to others, including persecutors. Let us love our persecuted brothers and sisters and support them in their powerful witness to the Christ who is filling up his afflictions for the sake of the Church and the world through them.

A Patchwork Quilt of Broken Vessels

I haven’t blogged in a while and it’s getting high time I did. Your humble correspondent must admit that he has been a bum and an insufferable jackass for a good little bit now, and explaining my recent experience and unloading some of the insights gained from said experience is a good preparatory exercise for leaving that state and returning to productivity.

I am entering a new phase of life that scares me. Seminary education via correspondence was proceeding at a snail’s pace, and I found that undertaking the enterprise of theological education with only myself as a conversation partner was becoming an exercise in spiritual pride and constipation. I have also come to the realization that continuing with more school right now is simply a stall tactic to avoid the inevitable. Don’t get me wrong, I treasure the deeper knowledge and experience of Christ our Savior and training in his service I have gained in my time at seminary and this course of action has been faithful to God’s calling on my life, but I realize that if I don’t get on the horse now and quit waiting around for my future, someday will become never. In light of these realities, I’m reluctantly hauling my happy self off to look for a job. The hitch is that I’m a bit lazy and unmotivated and that working with a disability is fraught with challenges but mostly I’m afraid of the unknown and of the answer to the question of whether or not I can hack it. Currently I’m steering toward work in education, social services, or counseling. It would be ideal if I could find this kind of job in a church or ministry context where I could also use my training and passion for theology and worship.

Another course of events that has gone down recently is a source of much sorrow and a cause for repentance at my own stubbornness and naiveté and the effects it has had on family members who had to suffer through a community that apparently did not want them. In spite of my many and controversial ruminations in recent years about the importance of the worship, teaching, and community of the church and the need to return to a churchly and sacramental Christianity as the path to reform, I find myself at the current time without a church. A piece of advice for those who would follow the path I have attempted to trod from broad evangelicalism to high Protestantism: prepare for a rude awakening if you think because of its traditionally high ecclesiology this segment of the American church has been resistant to the compromise with unhealthy individualism that has plagued mainstream evangelicalism. In spite of my profound Presbyterian convictions I am in all likelihood returning to the Baptist tradition. Let me note that the abuse of the doctrine of covenant succession coupled with the abandonment of the Scriptures and the Reformed confessions and catechisms has coalesced in many historically Reformed churches and denominations in a closed-off, self-conscious elitism that will soon strangle those communities caught in its grasp. The children of mainline Presbyterians have stopped going to church and so the Presbyterian Church USA is experiencing an inevitable numerical hemorrhage. With all of its talk about inclusiveness and diversity, the increasingly liberal Presbyterian Church USA is faithful to the culturally “respectable” progressive ideals of pluralist theology, sexual confusion, and uncritically leftist social and political action but far too often fails to live up to the more countercultural and scandalous progressive ideals of the biblical witness, i.e., preaching the gospel and fostering cohesive and nurturing communities where people from diverse social, cultural, racial, and economic backgrounds are warmly welcomed and accepted into the full worshiping, witnessing, serving, and fellowshipping life of the church.

Lest this turn into a rant against liberal Protestantism based on my limited experience of that segment of American Christianity, I want to emphasize a couple of things. 1) The community in which I gained the unhappy surprise of humbling disappointment has its good points and fair share of earnest, welcoming, and wonderful Christians, as I’m pretty convinced almost all churches do. Elvis has not left the building but his representatives are swimming upstream against the inertia of generations of taken-for-granted grace and the stubborn insistence on, “Well, this is just how we Presbyterians are!” 2) This is not just a problem in liberal and socioeconomically ascendant churches. The keynote of churches in America, conservative and liberal, Protestant and Catholic, is voluntarism. The church is an optional society that we get to make in our own image. An elder in the church I have left essentially told me as much. He was of the opinion that the Scriptures do not teach that individual Christians are obligated to be committed to a particular group of believers. The church exists for no other purpose than to feed individual Christians for their personal ministries in the world. This is sad. The church exists to feed and please me; I do not need to love and serve Christians who do not look, think, or act just like me. Pray tell, if we feel this way about other believers, what does it say about how we will treat nonbelievers who do not look, think, or act just like me?

Pardon me if I suggest that it is precisely this kind of thinking and behavior that causes people on the margins to give up on the church altogether. If outcast church members are not part of the in-group and the members of the in-group feel no sense of Christian love to include and welcome “the least of these” among their brothers and sisters, how can the church possibly realize its mission of being the suffering and world-healing Body of Christ and mother of all the faithful that Jesus has purchased her to be?

Pay close attention, when I say shocking and controversial things like the church is “the house and family of God, out of which there is no ordinary possibility of salvation,” as Presbyterianism’s Westminster Confession of Faith does (25.2), I am not positing a works righteousness whereby all Christian people are forced to conform to the misleading, superficial, cookie-cutter image of the hyper-caffeinated, elite super Christian in order to be saved. The church is not a voluntary society for heroic Christians who have everything together and are of old family, of respectable reputation, of upper-middle class means, or of vast influence in the community. No, the church is the Body of the Lord that has big and loving arms in which to embrace nobodys, losers, outcasts, ordinary people, and those unfortunate fools who think they do not belong to these kinds of categories. Jesus does not embrace people in his body for their social connections or money; he embraces us in his flesh purely because we are sinful and weak and small and empty. He is interested not in what we can bring of ourselves that the world so clamors after and esteems but in the wonders he can work in the world through a patchwork quilt of broken vessels like us—broken vessels that he takes such pleasure in putting back together, making holy, and using to advance His Kingdom. What I hear when I hear that the church is voluntary is really that certain people for whom Christ died are not wanted or that other believers have shown that person that he or she was not wanted or needed after all. My brothers and sisters, this should not be. We need the church and the church needs us because Jesus Christ is there. It is the place through which healing flows to the nations. I think we have to get rid of this notion that the church is supplemental or not necessary to Christian life in order to see this more clearly. Maybe if we came to see it as a tragedy that people are rejected by the church and leave it, then maybe we will realize the gravity of Jesus’ command that we love one another and start doing it on an individual and communal level.