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.

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[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.