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.