Dear Nathan,
We live in a time of significant controversy in the church. We labor in God’s vineyard amidst contentions contrary to the classic catholic faith of the church. As you await closure on a call for your ordination, I write these reflections on fidelity in ministry.
Hear these words from the Holy Scripture:
“Preach the word, be urgent in season and out of season, convince, rebuke and exhort, be unfailing in patience and in teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths. As for you, always be steady, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.” (II Timothy 4:2-5)
“O sing to the LORD a new song; sing to the LORD, all the earth! Sing to the LORD, bless his name; tell of his salvation from day to day. Declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous works among all the peoples;! For great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised; he is to be feared above all gods. For all the gods of the peoples are idols; but the LORD made the heavens.” (Psalm 96:1-5)
“Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.” (Micah 6:8)
“… Speak the truth in love.” (Ephesians 4:15a)
I was ordained at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in Charlotte, North Carolina on the first day of June, in the year of our Lord 1969. It was twenty-six days before the raid at Stonewall in New York that marked the beginning of the gay rights movement; seven weeks to the day in advance of the Eagle landing on the moon on 21 July: “one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind.” (Neil Armstrong); and a little over two months in advance of the Tate-LaBianca murders by the Charlie Manson gang (August 9). It was a time of Vietnam protests and “turn on, tune in, drop out.” Contemporary liturgies were sprouting up, coffee-house ministries vied to connect with the drop-outs. America was radically transitioning from industrious and family-oriented post-World War II to the culture of superfluous indulgence.
Preach the word, be urgent in season and out of season
Several factors have radically augmented Martin Luther’s accurate understanding of sin as “curved in on oneself”: in curvatus in se. …The deconstructivist conviction that “everything is interpretation” and that truth is radically (that is to say, only) subjective … the triumph of “natural rights over natural law” … the understanding of freedom as prerogative to decide for oneself what is right and what is wrong … and to do it …personal computers that let one sample what one wishes as to knowledge and information … internet exchanges that allow and foster anonymity … I-pods of personal songs … Insulative … personalized is atomized. Corollaries in “non-denominational” congregations and worship as essentially entertainment. And, economically, the notion of selfishness and indulgence as, if not virtue, at least rightfully proper to one’s standing as a 21st century western consumer.
This understanding of freedom and its radical ascendancy in its hermeneutical corollary — there is no intrinsic meaning to text and no truth to be heard or discovered, only perspective — constitutes a danger in our pilgrimage of the faith. A libertine understanding of freedom is its own kind of bondage: to personal autonomy rather than the rule of law, parent, or nation. This kind of freedom is rampant in our culture and virulent in some quarters in our church. It fosters a solipsism of ethical knowledge, a gnosticism of what is right and wrong pro me that scoffs at boundaries imposed by anything or anyone other than the self. This is bondage of the worst kind: bondage that understands itself as freedom. Jacques Ellul once argued that communism was the biggest lie in the history of humanity, in that it enslaved the worker in the name of freedom of the worker. This current libertine posture as to faith and life is of the same sort: it enslaves the believer in the name of the freedom of the believer. It is even willing to argue, with reference to normative teachings of Holy Scripture, that “they no longer apply.”
This gives birth to a new spirituality. Late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Western pietism sought to eclipse the controversies of dogma by sincere interior devotion. Partisan doctrinal struggles, which became violent during much of the 17th century in Europe, were set aside by the pietist. So also were the sterile assertions of the deists, whose intellectual austerity was their preferable alternative to a partisan God. Likewise the pietist could avoid the Enlightenment critics of religion: in pietism, reason counted only as an ally of common sense — one obeys God in spirit and in truth, pure and simple.
Pietist spirituality was a search for congeniality between inner yearning, outer behavior, and the Holy Spirit of God. It was a Christian piety, a Christian spirituality: given the content of the faith, how can one live with a pure heart and not lift up his soul unto vanity nor swear deceitfully? However much it may have been an alternative to contentious doctrinal struggles, this piety, this spirituality, understood itself as a Christian piety, at one with ecumenical creeds if not denominational strife. It was given intellectual respectability by Schleiermacher, in his assertion of the intrinsic God-consciousness and his Copernican revolution of the starting point in theology, from God’s self-disclosure in revelation the shift was made to intrinsic human religious sensibility.
Contemporary spirituality, by contrast, is a yearning from the depths of a self at-large and self-discerning. It is a search for meaning beyond both nihilism and materialism — understood, both of them, as life in a universe without God. Contemporary spirituality begins, like Schleiermacher and ancient gnosticism, with the believing self, exploring — now even prowling — the smorgasbord of “spiritual” possibilities, from New Age to Scientology, from old Catholic to pentecostal, from Zen to Ayn Rand, from (in the recent words of Bishop Hanson) traditional hermeneutic to contextual hermeneutic. Like the untold number of catalogues that arrive in the mail, the spirituality contenders display their wares: on the Internet, in the telephone directory, in libraries of anthologies, in the latest fashions of spiritual pursuit. By the individual.
How to interface the Gospel with the self-absorbed spirituality seeker, the possible link to whom being immersed as it is in the miasma of contending spiritualities? With a Gospel overlaid with centuries of familiarity, including not a few mistakes and even more sins, on the part of the church? To a culture of individuals whose fascination with self defines spirituality? To a neo-gnosticism sophisticated beyond imagination (!) compared to first-century gnostic dabblers in the then-new Way?
By telling the old, old story of Jesus and His love. In just the way St. Paul tells it: “if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord, if you believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. . . . Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” It is simple, but not simplistic. Behind it and beyond it there is wonderful richness and complexity, a universe of both power and love, the God who is really God, the Savior who died for us. But in the moment of clarity there is simple faith and trust. Amid immeasurable yearning and deep darkness of the soul, amid competing claims within the Christian faith for the status of nova clearly outside the pale of acceptability, amid countless cheap imitations (both without and within the church), there is St. Paul’s simple and powerful formula: “if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord, if you believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. . . . Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”
Here is the heart of the gospel, from St. Paul in Romans:
- the whole world (is) held accountable to God
- the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from law
- all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God
- they are justified by His grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus
- we hold that a man is justified by faith apart from works of law.
Paul knows that under the law, the whole world is accountable to God. There is no exception for Jew or Greek, slave or free. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. No human being will be justified — made righteous, make himself worthy, make himself acceptable to God — by works of the law. But the Good News is that the righteousness of God has been manifested — declared, evidenced, invoked, broadcast for all to see — apart from law. It is the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. The new covenant, first announced by Jeremiah, is a covenant in the blood of Jesus Christ, “whom God put forward as an expiation … to be received by faith.” The content of Jeremiah’s new covenant turns out to be the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.
The nascent church at Rome needed to hear Paul’s message of God’s new order of things. “No human being will be justified in his sight by works of the law.” It could hardly have been put more clearly. For those who have any concern to be “right with God” (made righteous, justified, in good standing), the answer to the quest does not reside in proper self-understanding, not even of the Socratic sort. The answer does not reside in aspiring to or achieving Plato’s understanding of the Idea of the Good, however virtuous such a good man may be, however upright and pure such a woman. The answer does not reside in Aristotle’s arhth, excellence of the rational essence of humanity properly applied to things of reason, including proper control of the appetites. Nor does the answer reside in those whose first move is obedience to God’s law, understanding both cosmic reality and ethical behavior in the proper acknowledgement of the God who is God and that what He requires is not proper self-knowledge or conception of the Good or arhth but obedience. It just isn’t there for humanity to deliver, either as to thought or deed or will. The problem is that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” The works are inadequate. Obedience is finally inadequate.
“Through the law comes knowledge of sin.” The frame of reference for Paul’s audience was a paradigm of obedience to the law. Paul himself had come through what seems in retrospect a conservative vein of Jewish thought, the Pharisee Puritanism rigorously pursued. Few in Paul’s time understood the radicality of sin — as rebellion and separation from God, as being essentially flawed, as being by nature sinful and unclean.
Few in Luther’s time understood either the nature of sin or the nature of grace. The paradigm for humanity in Luther’s time was essentially medieval. The position of a man or woman was, in relation to God, that of serf to vassal, subject to sovereign. The grace of God was tamed and dispensed by the church. Humanity’s tendency to codify and calibrate had domesticated the radical wildness of God’s grace. More than domesticated; more accurately, ossified. Sin is the Pelagian notion of actions or thoughts done. Forgiveness is proper enumeration and penance, works done to atone. Humanity reduced to the protocols of medieval court and manor, with God as sovereign whose dignity is offended by their very presence, surely by their vile peasant stupidity. Something to atone, some satisfaction to be made. Christ and the saints are full of merits, plenty from the saints, inexhaustible from Christ. The church is the chancellor of the treasury of merits, dispensing to peasants (of whatever station and order in life) what they need to receive in order to get it right. These people needed to hear about the “grace as a gift,” about humanity “justified by faith apart from works of law.” And Luther said it clearly. Unmistakably. The church of that time blinked at the clarity, balked at the implications. Raised the question of authority. Recoiled from the plain truth of the gospel.
We live among a people who understand estrangement from each other as much as — or more than — they understand estrangement from God. Many of them live in uncomfortable tension between the ashes of a relationship they hoped for and the reality of what they’ve got. Others bear the pain of having to walk away, hounded by sin on both sides, their own and his or hers — ”My covenant which they broke, though I was their husband,” says the LORD.
Perhaps the analogy of broken relationships can catch the attention of a people who seem to be little acquainted with God’s wrath and judgment, who are antinomian (against the law, above the law) in an ignorant, if not arrogant, sort of way. Christian antinomianism is of the arrogant sort if one can say, “because of the gospel, I have no more need of the law.” Or, “because of the gospel, the law does not apply.” Or even worse, “because of my new understandings, the law does not apply.”
But I say ignorant because the last forty years have marked a dramatic shift in both the understanding of piety and the breaches of piety among American Lutherans. The large theological dragon to be slain by young pastors coming out of seminary in the late 60s was “legalism,” a kind of notion of salvation by works of law, especially virulent in the buckle of the Bible Belt. The several cultural revolutions of the last third of the 20th century have obliterated self-conscious legalism in the popular mind. Denigrating God’s law as a mere cultural convention, or perhaps, less self-consciously, focusing on God’s love as “acceptance of me on my own terms of self-worth,” many understand life in the gospel as a life free from guilt — a liberation from both the consequences of sin and from the requirements of the law.
Luther was obliged to recall the church to the proclamation of the gospel. What he saw in Wittenberg was a system and structure that had largely reduced faith to quantifiable observance and empty rituals, distorting the gospel not so much to a vigorous legalism but to a piety that concerned itself with purchased indulgences, funded masses, perfunctory prayers.
I would argue that the proclamation of the Gospel in our time presupposes a vigorous preaching of the Law. The Law is not obliterated in the new covenant. Adultery is still sin. Honoring one’s parents is required. Keeping God’s name holy is not perfunctory but mandatory. The Good News is not that the Law is crushed and obliterated. The Good News is not that the requirements of the Law no longer apply. The Good News is that God does not judge us by our achievements within the Law. We are, instead, declared righteous by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus.
We will not begin to understand either the power or the beauty of the Gospel until we understand the requirements, the severity, and the judgment of the Law. We will not understand the requirements and severity of the law until we come to terms with its Author. The Author of the law is the author of the universe, the Father of all, the Judge of all. “You shall have no other gods,” the commandments begin. Commandments ! The practical atheism of our time makes God remote, even impotent, to the oi poloi, even to ostensible Christians. Luther’s appreciation of his predicament so far surpasses the selbsverstandnis of most of us so as not even to be in the same universe of humanity. Luther understood that his situation before the wrath of God was absolutely untenable. Luther understood that the requirements are there, articulated and enforced. Luther knew what he was up against.
So many of us skip to the grace part — what we want to call the whole part, the Word part, the Gospel part — without paying attention to our predicament. We address our predicament with moments of affirmation, seek self-esteem from sources congenial, “compadres” kind. We seem unwilling to tend our soul in any sense other than its aspect as self, a modern distortion of soul unknown to Greeks and Hebrews, unaddressed by Jesus — except in terms of what must be denied, that is, rejected, along with taking up the Cross, in order to follow Him.
It is now fashionable to ignore the power of God. Various proponents of natural theology are re-invoking one or another form of the teleological argument, which in turn invokes causality, the Uncaused First Cause. Much of liberal theology, including not a few in the ELCA, have reduced God to metaphor by reducing talk about God to metaphor. The antipathy to putative patriarchy tends to dismiss not only God as Father but also God as power, God as person, even God as God.
The modern paradigm is hardly the subservient medieval peasant, whether of the common or royal variety. Restricting our view to the United States, although as many as 90% acknowledge God as “existing,” significantly fewer acknowledge Him as Lord. In a culture of plenty, seduction by Mammon takes many forms. In a culture of freedom understood as individual rights, the notion of obedience is consigned to primitive enclaves. In a state where just authority is constitutionally declared to be first and only by the consent of the governed, many have made the political paradigm also the moral paradigm: God’s authority in religion has its origin and its limits, like the state’s authority in political affairs, by the consent of the governed. The law is, in the main, regarded as positive (that is, of human origin), rather than natural or divine, in origin: a human construct.
In the church as in the culture, the paradigm is not obedience but freedom — the freedom, in principle, of the human person from any constraint except what is self-acknowledged and self-consented. Freedom not only to decide what and when to act and say, but also to define what is sin. There are theologians who scriptures to cultural construct, and then attempt to enlighten holy writ. Reformers seek to enlighten by now making noble and virtuous relationships and acts declared by scripture to be sinful. Reformation, understood uncritically as “change,” is blessed as the proper avenue to enlighten in the direction of new cultural understandings.
There is no short answer to a culture with the bit between its teeth, to a church so acculturated as to presume to redefine as loving, caring, committed, and just what God in scripture declares to be sin. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” is invoked to silence voices of prophetic concern. The fallen condition of humanity is understood as warrant to preclude anyone’s making legitimate judgment of what someone has consented to as just and loving.
Only the power of God in the Law makes the power of God in the Gospel meaningful. Only the realization of how we are trapped in sin and failure before God can make our understanding of grace any more than “Ho hum. Of course God forgives us. We deserve it. God don’t make no junk.” Such a view is the apotheosis sin, because it amounts to saying that we have no sin.
“Change” does not constitute genuine Reformation. “Consent” is not grace. Man is not god. The law is not, in the first instance, a human construct. God is not mocked.
If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we continue in His Word we are truly His disciples. And we shall know the Truth. And the Truth shall make us free.
“If you continue in my word you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” John 8:31-32
“If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples” — a big “if” these days. A big “if” across time. Luther’s stand at Worms, his conscience captive to the Word of God, was to continue in that Word, as a disciple, no matter what. But those who continue in His Word are ever challenged by those whose claims to faithfulness do not ring true to the Source. Already in Paul’s Corinth there were those who challenged the notion of resurrection (c. 15). It is always difficult to discern motives, but the history of the church is dotted by those who sought to continue in the Word but whose efforts are either patently or suspiciously heretical or apostate: Basilides and Valentinus, Sabellius and Arius, Pelagius, Joseph Smith and John Shelby Spong. Ancient presbyters and theologians, rustic autodidacts and avant garde bishops, they form a long syllabus of errors that demonstrate, sometimes only long after the fact, the difficulty of the Lord’s conditional clause: “if you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples.”
Even among those who name the name of Luther there are now those unwilling to accept the Word of God as norming for faith and life. Among the many sad contests in the Lutheran church (ELCA) there stands out the question of the status of the Word of God to norm either faith or life. At the first level is a “theocentric christology,” which challenges the claim of the Savior that “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one cometh to the Father but by me.” Jesus the Christ becomes one among several, if not many, possible avenues to God.
Thus in the name of tolerance-amid-diversity, the claim to continue in His Word is eroded if not evaporated. Respect for the integrity of other religions of the world is a necessity, over against prejudice and controversy, to say nothing of violence. Dialogue is desired, even mandatory. But who sacrifices on the altar of tolerance the centrality of the Incarnation, the Cross, and the Resurrection as the Way to the Father, does not continue in the Word and is at best a specious disciple, if not an apostate, however well-meaning.
What are the criteria for proclamation? What are the limits of “respect for religious pluralism”? What should Philip have done, when he discovered the eunuch reading already from Isaiah? Why did Philip not respect the religion of the eunuch, who already would enjoy (if he read three chapters over) “an everlasting name which shall not be cut off” (Isaiah 56: 5b)?
In a global context where religious pluralism has come to mean having such respect for the customs and religions of peoples that one has not the temerity, much less the commission, to preach unto them Jesus, this incident cuts deeply to the contrary. As Carl Braaten said a few years ago, “the missionaries are coming home and they are not going back. … How long will it be until God takes the gospel from our faithless hands and gives it to (those who will proclaim it)?” (St. Olaf, first “Called to Faithfulness” Conference) What is the decorum for mission and proclamation? Must we only preach to the choir?
* * *
But the flaccid are no less a problem than the rigid. Hoarding the Word and making it exclusive to one’s own communion — or turning the Word into a weapon of orthodoxy — violates the spirit of Jesus’ words: it does not so “continue in His Word.” Just as bad, confidence in one’s orthodoxy, however properly informed, is no insurance that faithfulness will consistently prevail. Such confidence may well allow at the fringes, and then at the heart, practices newly popular but clearly marginal to the faith. A Missouri brother (LCMS) recently remarked to me that “Schmucker has won.” That is, the unconfessional eagerness of Samuel Simon Schmucker to construct a “general protestant” frontier church, with Lutherans blended in, a Schmuckerism that came out of Gettysburg in the 1830s, has finally prevailed. I thought he meant ELCA, referencing the several “ecumenical” agreements that embrace diverse eucharistic theologies and welcome to pulpit and altar pastors of traditions not uniformly committed to trinitarian orthodoxy – and, in some cases, welcoming moral heterodoxy, lifting up as blessed to the church behavior universally scorned in the scriptures.
Sadly, he responded, however much that may be true of the ELCA, it is also the case with Missouri. I was astonished. He explained that Schmucker had not only infiltrated but was threatening to dominate the LCMS, in the form of the triumph of “church growth” practices over the theology and worship according to the tradition. Especially the worship. Incipient in user-friendly, nonconfessional worship is a theology flaccid as to Law and Gospel, as to simul justus et peccator, semper penitens, as to Who and what are being confessed and believed. Lex orandi, lex credendi. “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples…”
“You will know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”
There have been two significant “sunderings” of this quotation from the Lord in St. John’s eighth chapter. The first was the secular disengagement of the first part of the pronouncement from the second: that is, the separation of “if you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples” from “you will know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” Modern education follows the Enlightenment premise that indeed knowing the truth is a necessary precondition for freedom, but that both knowing the truth and being made free are enterprises that can be carried on quite apart from any discipleship to the Lord. Indeed, from the secular point of view, can only be carried on quite apart from any prior commitments to transcendent authority, other than to the ascendancy of reason and an often unspoken adherence to material causality only.
One does not want to suspect that the founders of Lenoir-Rhyne College had any such separation in mind when they used only the phrase from the main clause as the college motto: (“the Truth shall make you free”). Certainly from those who insisted, in the college’s charter filed with the state of North Carolina (1891), that “the college shall teach the scriptures and the (Lutheran) confessions, even if the synod does not!” there is no sign of abandoning the conditional clause! Nevertheless, for generations that often do not know Jesus, much less Joseph, the phrase stands naked of its condition: “if you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples.”
I do not want to quibble over the assertion that in Christ all truth coheres. In the cosmic (that is, universal) sense, all truth finds its genesis and its telos in Christ the Word Incarnate. That we believe and that we confess. But the search for the truths of art and science and philosophy are everywhere being conducted apart from any overt assertion of the cosmic Christ, in whom all things hold together. Is it enough that it is the church which knows this, and not the present age? Perhaps. But, however one argues it, one cannot deny that the sundering of “my word” and “disciples” from “you will know the truth” and “the truth shall make you free” has both accompanied and facilitated not only the relativization of truth and but also the enhancement of a freedom that acknowledges no bounds.
That’s the first sundering — of the first part from the second. But there is another divorce, more recent and more serious, thus far more virulent. That is the sundering of “truth” from “freedom,” not only in the culture but especially in the church. I cannot improve on the work of John Paul II in this regard. His Veritatis Splendor, 1993, stands as a monument at the end of the 20th century, a brilliant attempt to correct errors in moral theology in the church. A major contention is noted by Russell Hittinger’s designation of “uncommanded man” as accurately illustrative of men and women inside and outside the church who will not be commanded by God but who have usurped with their freedom the prerogative of defining the content of the good. That is, in our freedom we wrest from God the truth of what is good and what is evil. Adam and Eve began the enterprise and humanity has continued it across time, sometimes surreptitiously. But in the present day now openly and often with great pride: “the Bible is culturally conditioned. All truth is culturally conditioned. Truth is radically subjective. I will spin as I will. I will decide what is good. Your definition is not the same as mine. Words are what individuals make them.” The currency of deconstruction is the yield of the radical, even joyful, separation of truth from freedom.
Sadly, also, in the church. Wrote the Bishop of Rome: “A new situation has come about within the Christian community itself, which has experienced the spread of numerous doubts and objections of a human and psychological, social and cultural, religious and even properly theological nature, with regard to the Church’s moral teachings. It is no longer a matter of limited and occasional dissent, but of an overall and systematic calling into question of traditional moral doctrine, on the basis of anthropological and ethical presuppositions. At the root of these presuppositions is the more or less obvious influence of currents of thought which end by detaching human freedom from its essential and constitutive relationship to truth. Thus the traditional doctrine regarding the natural law, and the universality and the permanent validity of its precepts, is rejected; certain of the Church’s moral teachings are found simply unacceptable; and the Magisterium itself is considered capable of intervening in matters of morality only in order to ‘exhort consciences’ and to ‘propose values,’ in light of which each individual will independently make his or her decisions and life choices. (VS, # 4, emphasis added)
This in the church of Rome. Absent a Magisterium since the sixteenth century, now awash in dissent from the authority of the scriptures, Protestants are often reduced to trying to make lemonade. Or, worse, overtly to celebrate the lemons as the gospel, newly understood.
The sundering of freedom from the truth is a logical, even inevitable, consequence of the sundering of the conditional clause from the primary one. If we do not continue in the Word, we are no longer His disciples. And if we are no longer His disciples, whether we intend so or not, we shall sooner or later — and now is the later — separate freedom from truth. We do it by absolutizing freedom and relativizing truth: if my freedom is absolute then I can define my own truth.
The theological problem with this is primary; primary that is, as to the first commandment: Who is God here? The ethical problem is immediately following: Who will determine what is Good, much less mandate one to do it? What is the Good becomes a matter of personal judgment or preference and, finally, a matter of power — whether of force or of votes. The political problem with this is the social yield: absent truth, freedom becomes chaos — first theological and philosophical, then very quickly moral. Eventually, social. It is not too great a stretch to suggest that we are already into the “eventually.”
Faithfulness and integrity require that we do not make the sundering moves. God give us strength and wisdom, first to discern the Word, and then to continue in it. “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples. And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
Who is God Here?
We have, in the contemporary scheme of things, a bi-polar set of aberrations in the greater Christian community concerning the nature of God. At the one extreme is the perspective informed by the “mountain that may not be touched,” the awesome terror of judgment and fire evoked in its graphic details and soteriological consequences by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. At the other is a virulently resolute form of neo-Marcionism, itself in the main innocent of knowledge of Marcion but nonetheless willfully determined to dismiss as unworthy any notion of God as judge, as fire, as giver of divine laws. This is, further, a neo-Marcionism that rejects God as the One who defines and declares what is good and what is evil.
The former is represented in its less cruel manifestations by preaching whose initial and primal premise is that what the sinner needs most is conviction of his sins in order properly to repent and to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. A student of mine, himself now a veteran of twenty years of hearing such preaching, observed that it is long on law and short on gospel, as one might expect. But, more importantly, it tends not to convey the love of God, whether love as gentle shepherd or love as cleansing fire. What it conveys is a calculus of stinking sins, a litany of deeds that represent unredeemed humanity as chiefly captive to appetites — surely an easy target given the tenor of our culture, from its entertainment to its politics.
Being captive to appetites is no virtue, as Aristotle already knew, but the casting of the scenario is, my student further observes, almost inevitably Pelagian. Sin is reduced to events of appetites gone awry — fornication, impurity, licentiousness, drunkenness and carousing — rather than fundamental willful rebellion against God, manifest in works of the flesh that include idolatry, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissension, factions, and envy, to complete St. Paul’s listing in Galatians. Repentance consists essentially of resolving to control appetites, now with the aid of the risen and ascended Lord. God’s anger — actually, more His displeasure — is focused thus more upon appetites than idolatry, or perhaps appetites constituting idolatry, than upon the fundamental human move to disavow Him as Lord, the move original to Eden, where human beings determine what is good and what is evil.
In an age replete with indulging one’s appetites, preaching the control of appetites is not without its merits. But it tends to be itself seductive, in that one may well be persuaded that a proper relationship with God amounts to appetite control; indeed, that sin can be avoided if one is but properly isolated (“Seven Miles from Any Known Sin” was — and perhaps still is — the advertising logo of a college not two hundred miles from here). Such preaching also tends to reduce God to a Divine Special Prosecutor whose interest is in behavior control. The trouble with such a view is not that it focuses on bogus or sinful acts but that it ignores the depth of human deceit and rebellion, on the one hand, and the cleansing fire of God’s love, on the other. Fire as heat and anger it can feel. Fire as love it understands less.
At the other pole is a view that refuses to understand love as fire. Here the aberration is a kind of neo-Marcionist view that both anger and law, not to speak of fire, are unworthy of God. The Marcion of the second century rejected the Old Testament, law and prophet alike, on the basis that it was revealed by — and featured — a God of anger and wrath, incapable of grace, devoid of the love that is reflected in Paul’s understanding, and John’s. Supra-Paulinist that he was, Marcion sundered the paradox of law and gospel into polarities, dispensations of different deities.
Neo-Marcionites of this century reject law and judgment, whether at Sinai or Calvary, in favor of a love that validates the individual person, per se. If “God don’t make no junk,” then my nature — my sensibilities, my appetites — are fundamentally my business and, equally fundamentally, God-blessed. Neo-Marcionites understand God’s love as radical acceptance, sure enough, but reserve the right to define for themselves what is of the good and what is evil. If they understand God’s love as refining fire, it is to their own ends, as in “fire that cleanses me of self-pity and self-loathing,” or “fire that burns away the pain of rejection.” But the language of neo-Marcionism is not that of love-as-fire. The prevailing motif is love as acceptance — absent repentance for errors in appetites that are, after all, only a matter of convention and not a matter of Divine concern.
Holy Scripture knows no such truncations of God. There is contrast between the old covenant and the new, but not in the sense of the absence of fire, as from the writer of Hebrews: “You have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. See that you do not refuse the one who is speaking … for indeed our God is a consuming fire.” (see Hebrews 12:18-29)
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The prophets declared the need for repentance. Are we as blind as the folk of pre and post-exilic Jerusalem? Of course. The human capacity for self-deception is not recently acquired nor lately discarded. God has addressed it many times. In the prophets, continually. In the Incarnation, finally. In the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ is our salvation. The progressive perspective of our time paints Jesus well as liberator from oppression, focused as we are on the plight of sundry victims. But we have diluted or eliminated our understanding of Jesus as liberator from sin, death and the power of the devil — sin having been discounted, death avoided as an event of preparation, and the devil written off as vestige of ancient superstition.
What we are lacking is repentance … even understanding the need to repent. We go about our religious activity — worship services, family events, even our prayers — oblivious to how it does not square with the rest of our lives. Some overtly seek to change what is evil into good. Others are simply content to live their lives undisturbed. To all of us come the words of the prophets to repent, to examine, to remedy. But first we need a renewed understanding of the depth and reality of sin, especially the fundamental, original sin of stealing from God the authority to order what is good and what is evil. And the understanding that we are both freed from bondage to it but resident in it, simul justus et peccator, semper penitens.
“He has shown you, O man, what is good.
And what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” Micah 6:6-8
The content of justice is, of course, what is at stake, as well as the extent (to whom). The content of doing justice is, in the mind of the Hebrew prophets, justice as God declares it: seeing to it that the poor are not exploited by the powerful; tending to orphans and widows, and all those who are vulnerable on that account; speaking hard words to persons of power who endorse or enhance exploitation; castigating the rich for their opulence in the face of surrounding poverty; protecting strangers and foreigners from persecution. Justice is not merely what is “best known through the experience of injustice or struggles to overcome it,” as one ELCA theologian recently put it.1 This reduces the substance and content of justice to mere subjectivity, and invites the tyranny of the aggrieved.
The “peace and justice” chorus of liberal Protestantism, however much it rightly emphasizes those oppressed by racism and economic injustice, also includes in its portfolio — and prominently — a set of “justice content” that the prophets would exclude. Justice has expanded to include not only the right to food and housing, but also the right to varying forms of sexual expression. And a pursuit-of-happiness dimension that includes the demand for society and the church to bless relationships of two men or two women, in the manner of marriage. And a more lethal pursuit-of-happiness dimension that includes defending the right to choose to terminate one’s gestating child. For this Micah and Amos would cry justice? So it is said, and so it is pursued. The ELCA finds it necessary, and even promising (?), to devote time, money, and energy to how to incorporate the former perspective in its ecclesial life, as to ordination and blessing. Micah … and Amos, where are you?2
“Walking humbly with our God” requires first that we acknowledge as God who is really God. Not some God of our own constructs. Or some revisionist understanding of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. We still have the garden-variety idolatry of previous generations; that is, following the gods of the belly, or some other sensuality, or filthy lucre, or power, or self-adulation. All those things are still around, in force, and lifted up by many of the canons of the culture. Those things we fight, but have fought from time immemorial. But today’s idolatry is an assault upon God Himself. A linguistic challenge of the metaphysical heights. That is not walking with God, much less walking humbly.
So Micah’s brief verse carries a lot. Something like Jesus to the rich young ruler, about the great commandment. Only put in principally an ethical form (do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with God).
Nathan … so, son ….
“Preach the word, be urgent in season and out of season, convince, rebuke and exhort, be unfailing in patience and in teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths. As for you, always be steady, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.” (II Timothy 4:2-5)
“Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.” (Micah 6:8)
And through all this, “… Speak the truth in love.” (Ephesians 4:15a)
May God be with you,
Dad
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See PUBLIC CHURCH: For the Life of the World. By Cynthia D. Moe-Lobeda. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press Publishers, 2004) Public Church advances content and rationale for a social ethic (cultural, economic, social, political), understood as public vocation, for the ELCA. Cynthia Moe-Lobeda locates discussion of “church in public life” not in the traditional “two kingdoms” description of God’s two-fold rule, but in the “incarnation of Christ as seen in cross, resurrection, and living presence” – as expressed in informing the baptismal vocation of believers. “Public” here is juxtaposed to “private,” rather than “personal.” One’s calling in “public church” can be both personal and public, but not private. Whence comes the content of “justice”? Moe-Lobeda reviews Biblical and classical understandings of justice, but asserts (among current critiques of “modern notions of justice”) that “what constitutes justice is best known through experience of injustice or struggles to overcome it.” (p. 28) Invoking God’s “preferential option for the poor,” she advocates for Christians of privilege Bonhoeffer’s “seeing from below”: seeing from the perspective of those powerless and oppressed. What is the yield here? Moe-Lobeda has written a piece that invokes and deploys Lutheran traditions and categories and, in many respects, properly so … including her understanding of public witness (including political) as intrinsic to baptismal calling. She invokes the simul justus et peccator anthropology, but then divides the world between oppressors and victims, with the differential turning on degrees and qualities of power inherent in the classes, advocacies, etc. In her review of the content of justice, she invokes without critique that astonishing claim that the content of justice is best known through the experience of injustice …. which reduces the substance of justice to subjective perspective. And allows her to include those “oppressed” on account of, among other things, sexual orientation, in her cadre of victims in search of justice. (p. 66) Thus, to oppose, for instance, the legitimation of gay or lesbian “marriage” could be seen as perpetrating an injustice. The book is, thus, an argument that turns Lutheran social ethics into a tool that can be used by revisionists of all sorts … seeking only victim status as justification for their claims. She is silent regarding those victims who rank absolutely the least in terms of power — the babes in the womb. Moe-Lobeda correctly notes that we live “in a world where evil masquerades as good.” (p. 31) In such a world, she would have done the better to place “Holy Scripture as norm and rule for faith and life” front and center — for the public church.
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From Marianne Howard Yoder, a request: Sometime in the church I would like to hear an explication of the word justice which includes Plato’s understanding. For Plato, justice is to be worked toward not only in the state (i.e., the relationships between people, including the laws they agree to follow) but also within the individual human being. For Plato, justice also has to do with the soul. The man or woman who is just specifically manifests the virtues of wisdom, courage, and temperance. Such virtues, inculcated through the control of one’s intellect, spirit, and appetites by one’s reason, yield a balanced, harmonious person who is capable of discerning the truth. Justice in the human being “remembers” and appropriates justice as one of the Forms. There is a content to justice that human beings discern, rather than “invent.” Plato thinks that if there are enough just people in the state (i.e., the community), or most certainly if they are the ones in charge, then a just state will follow. – MHY …“Loving kindness” offends only the Nietzsche’s of the world. What is popular is “random acts of kindness.” Well, o.k. There is virtue, if only of the whimsical sort, in doing kind things on the spur of the moment, randomly, as it were. But does the randomness not also fence out the “love”? Acts of kindness proceed from a kind person (Aristotle); a good tree produces good fruit (Jesus). However random, or (perhaps better) spontaneous, kindness ought properly to proceed from one who loves kindness. One whose love, in our case, is there because He first loved us. “Love one another” is our “new” commandment, from Jesus himself, in the upper room. A good tree bears good fruit. One who loves kindness will do kindness, sinners though we all are.
