Becoming Evangelical?

Well, I guess it was probably inevitable but I finally lost all of my “born again” marbles and joined the Lutherans. Short of swimming the Tiber this is probably the thing conservative Evangelicals suspicious of creeds, formal liturgy, and sacraments fear most when one of their own takes a look at Christianity before and beyond the scope of that which considers the individual heart decision to receive Jesus in one particular moment of life the central focus of Christian faith. To compare the issue to something that is easily accessible for American Protestants at the moment, if we think of this in terms of the “Why I hate religion but love Jesus” video that went viral across the Internet recently, I have likely chosen that which the hip young man in the video would claim Jesus came to abolish. If religion means that you believe the central encounter of the Christian faith is that which occurs when Christians gather together on a weekly basis to encounter the risen Christ in Word, Sacrament, and one another, then color me religious and allow me to mention that Jesus had no intention of abolishing such a thing.

I will agree with Jefferson Bethke, however, that Jesus came to abolish a false kind of religion where your faith, public or private, makes no practical difference in the way you treat people for whom you believe Jesus died or live your life before the God you claim to love. That’s the real dichotomy here. It’s not Jesus v. religion but false religion v. living faith that is the all important distinction we must maintain. Likewise, when it comes to my move to Lutheranism from mainstream Evangelicalism, the divide I am crossing is not between heart Christianity and formal Christianity but between what I see as a kind of Christian faith that has unintentionally separated public and private and heart and body with its exclusive focus on individual conversion and that which more successfully integrates our total experience and need as human beings before God.

Even here, however, I am perhaps raising a dichotomy just as unhelpful and insulting as the one Bethke raised in his immensely popular diatribe. As Christians and Protestants both, contemporary Evangelicals and Lutherans, when we look at one another, should see much of ourselves in the other. The reasons are both historical and confessional. The popular and amorphous form of Protestantism we know today as Evangelicalism applies to itself the name Lutherans have applied to themselves since the Reformation. Lutherans are the first group of Christians specifically known as “Evangelicals,” and the central emphasis on the biblical Gospel that Jesus alone saves us by His cross and resurrection through faith today’s Evangelicals inherited historically from these original Evangelicals. The Lutheran spiritual tradition exalts this Gospel in many powerful ways. Gene Veith, in his wonderful book, The Spirituality of the Cross: the Way of the First Evangelicals, lays this out in greater detail, but I will spell out a few of the high points.

Jesus Christ and His cross and resurrection take the central place in every Lutheran service of worship. At the confession and absolution of sin, we ask for forgiveness "for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ and His most holy, bitter, and innocent sufferings and death" for us and the Pastor grants the same to us through the Word of Jesus Christ. The Scripture readings in the service always focus on the person and work of Jesus Christ. In the Old Testament reading we are faced with the Law, which convicts us of sin and points us by types and shadows to Jesus Christ and His cross work. The practice is for two readings from the New Testament to be given, but one of the readings is always from the four Gospels and the sermon most often focuses on the Gospel text. The person, teaching, and saving action of Jesus always come to the fore in this way. Not just in the subject matter, however, but also in the manner of presentation and emphasis, the sermon also centers on Jesus, with its climax being the proclamation that Jesus has secured our salvation through His performance of the Law for us, His bearing the punishment for our sins on the cross, and His justifying us and empowering us for new life through the resurrection. Jesus and His cross and resurrection also come into sharp relief at the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, which is Christ’s giving to us of His true Body wounded for us and His true Blood shed for us for the forgiveness of sins. And of course, the service is not seen primarily as an obedience we perform for God (Law), but rather as His offering of forgiveness to us in Jesus Christ (Gospel), to which our hearts respond by worshiping and glorifying God in gratitude for what He has done for us.

Lutheranism and contemporary Evangelicalism also exalt the Gospel by our similar focus on the Holy Scriptures as the absolute foundation for what we believe, confess, and live as followers of the Lord Jesus Christ. As I alluded to above, the reading and preaching of the Word of God is central to the Lutheran service as the means of grace by which Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit not only reveals Himself to us but makes Himself present to the gathered body and individual believers for saving, teaching, and guiding us. As is the case with contemporary Evangelicalism, Lutheranism is thus only as Christ-centered as it is Bible-centered.

Lutheran spirituality and theology also, however, bring the same central Gospel into focus by emphases different from those highlighted by contemporary Evangelicalism. Both traditions will point to the same realities but focus on them in different ways and to different degrees. For instance, when it comes to the doctrine of the Trinity, we both affirm the Triune God as a priority in our worship and thinking, but it has been my experience that Lutherans and other classical Protestants as well as Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox place more explicit emphasis on the Triune God than most Evangelicals do. This is important because we obscure the Gospel inasmuch as we obscure the reality that God is Triune. The Trinity is the bull’s-eye center of the Christian faith because the doctrine of the Trinity is the expression of everything we know about God because of His revelation of Himself to us as Jesus Christ. The Trinity reveals the Gospel as the greatest demonstration of the love that characterizes the inner life of God, and it is the Gospel that most clearly reveals that God is Trinity, for our redemption is the work of the entire Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The explicit emphasis on the Triune God in the life and worship of Lutheranism also shows how the Gospel is co-extensive with the community and the way of life it produces. Because the Trinity reveals to us how God is, not just in His inner life but also as He is with His creatures, the Trinity also reveals to us how we are to be with one another in our life in God. If God Himself is a community of love, life in God is always life in community, and the life in the Christian community is to be characterized by love.

The emphasis on the Triune God in Lutheranism also keeps us aware of and in continuity with the ancient Christian Church, in which the articulation of the doctrine of the Trinity took place. Not only does the oneness of the Triune God keep us cognizant of our Savior’s prayer that we be one as He and the Father are one, but the Ecumenical Creeds that are our inheritance from the process of the articulation of the doctrine of the Trinity were delivered to today’s divided global Christian Church from the undivided ancient Church.

The invoking of the Trinity with the sign of the cross at the beginning of the service, the offering of the peace of the Lord to one another, the reciting of the Creeds, prayers offered “through Jesus Christ, our Lord, who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever,” and the conclusion of our services with the threefold Amen both actualize and keep us mindful of our sharing in the Triune life of God and all the implications of this reality.

Lutheranism and contemporary Evangelicalism, however, differ more in regard the diverging emphases we place on spirit and matter and the internal and the external in the way God communicates to us the salvation Christ accomplished for us. For instance, while we both understand and proclaim loudly that God has accomplished salvation for the world and humanity through His Incarnation as Jesus Christ and His death and resurrection in His physical body, Lutherans understand according to the Scriptures that God continues to use material realities to communicate to us the body-and-soul salvation Christ accomplished for us through His human nature. This starts with the way we understand the agency of the Word of God in salvation. Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit working, in, with, and through physical words on a page or spoken audibly by mouth, gives faith and salvation to believers. The efficacy of the sacraments as means of salvation comes through this same operation of Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit in the promises of His Word. Baptism saves through the use of water to apply the promises of God's Word to us. Jesus Christ in His Body and Blood comes to be present in, with, and under the bread and wine of the Lord's Supper in a literal and supernatural manner by the power and promise of His Word.

While for contemporary Evangelicals such an earthly and physical understanding of salvation by sacraments would seem to imply salvation by works, Lutherans understand this precisely to be a corollary of salvation by Christ alone through faith alone. Powerless to grasp God's salvation from within ourselves, God, who is far from us because of our sin, comes to us from outside, putting his forgiveness, life, and grace into us through the Word we hear, the Triune Name he puts on us in baptism, and His Body and Blood we receive through eating and drinking the bread and wine of the Lord's Supper. It's by these physical means that we understand that we have not saved ourselves, not even by our emotional or spiritual appropriation of grace, but by God's objective salvation He renders to us as pure gift, which we receive as helpless and needy creatures from the merciful hand of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ. In this, we also understand that the forgiveness and grace we have received through Christ and His cross and resurrection, grasp us and have implications for us body and soul, internally and externally, individually and corporately, both now and in eternity.

I will conclude by saying that I do not see my arrival in the Lutheran churches and tradition as a repudiation of my Evangelical heritage. Rather, the buds I still see growing richly in contemporary Evangelicalism have both their roots and fullest flowering blossoms in the faith and practice of the first Evangelicals.

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.