Tag: Justification
0 Not Perfect But Being Perfected
For our sermon series, this weekend I’ve been thinking about Justification by Faith Alone (vs Works). There’s no way to talk about Justification without talking about Martin Luther, the catalyst of the Reformation.
Luther carried this understanding of justification one step further.
Because the Gospel is God’s declaration to us and because this is a grace that is totally outside of us to which we can only respond with trust, there is no discernible interior change in us.
God looks on us with favor. God declares the Gospel to us: ‘For the sake of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven.’ And the only response possible to such a promise is trust.
What Luther understands happens in justification then is that God chooses to see Jesus when he regards us. And God always does choose to see Jesus when he looks upon us. For Luther, even after we’ve responded in trust (even after we’ve had faith for a lifetime) we never cease essentially to be sinners. The new life faith makes possible always remains, in Luther’s view, nascent. Fundamentally, sin remains our determinative attribute even after justification.
This is Luther’s doctrine ‘Simul iustus et peccator.’ It translates to ‘at once justified and a sinner.’ Properly understood (and logically) Luther does not have a doctrine of sanctification, whereby God’s grace works within us to grow us in holiness. Karl Barth, a 20th century theologian in the Reformed tradition, emphasized this point by using the term ‘vocation’ rather than ‘sanctification.’ Christians have a calling in the world even though living out that calling does not effectively change or heal our sin nature.
Thomas Aquinas (and John Wesley after him) would argue this point. While admitting our sanctification can never be complete this side of heaven and so we retain a proclivity to sin, they would argue that once we respond to God in faith we truly do begin to heal. Wesley would even make the plain point that Jesus’ teachings seem superfluous if our nature never heals sufficiently that we can live out those teachings. Jesus’ teachings, for Wesley, were attainable expectations for Christians, but for Luther-convinced of our permanent sin nature- saw such an expectation as a depressing command (‘Law’ in Luther’s terminology as opposed to ‘Gospel’) we can never meet.
To be fair to Luther, his doctrine of ‘simul iustus et peccator’ wasn’t intended to recommend Christian passivity in the face of sin. We shouldn’t just resign ourselves to our sin nature; however, many of those who followed after Luther argued precisely this perspective.
0 By Grace Alone?
For our sermon series on ‘The Seven Truths that Changed the World: Christianity’s Most Dangerous Ideas’ we’re talking about Justification by Faith (vs. Works).
In Thomas Aquinas’ three-fold understanding of grace, grace begins with God. On that starting point there’s no difference between the Catholic perspective and what Luther fleshes out in his re-formation.
The second procession of grace, sanctifying grace, is grace that is in us. But how do you know if you have sanctifying grace? That question starts to get at Luther’s criticism.
The third procession of grace, according to Thomas, is our response of faith, hope and love that sanctifying grace makes possible. Again, if you don’t really have sanctifying grace- if perhaps you’ve deceived yourself and only thought you did- then necessarily you can’t possess genuine faith, hope and love.
Thomas’ formulation of grace, though it boasted a pedigree that went all the way back to the church fathers and though there appears to have been no other reformation era critics of it, in Luther’s mind placed for too much on us.
Whereas Thomas believed sanctifying grace is bestowed upon us in baptism and through the sacraments, Luther re-conceives grace’s movement.
Grace, first of all, names God’s favor, loving inclination, towards us. This is where Luther and Thomas agree. Second, grace is a Word addressed to me, a declaration. For Luther this declaration is the Gospel. Rather than a gift God implants within us, this Word God declares to us is the gift. Third, this word-gift is what enables me to respond in faith.
Part of the difficulty in the reformation debates is the confusion of terms. Thomas and Catholic theology in general use the term ‘justification’ to name the entire process of God’s favor towards us, God’s sanctifying grace and our response. Luther and the reformers after him instead use ‘justification’ to refer exclusively to God’s inclination and declaration to us. Our healing and response tend to get treated separately as ‘sanctification’ or ‘vocation’ or, in Wesley, ‘perfection.’ So, often, when Protestants accused of Catholics of ‘works righteousness’ it’s because Protestants thought Catholics were speaking of justification when, really, Catholics were talking about sanctification. And when Catholics thought Protestants were eliminating any role for works of faith and making faith totally passive it’s because Catholics thought Protestants were speaking of sanctification when, really, Protestants were speaking specifically about justification. That both sides tended to be led by stubborn, recalcitrant men didn’t ameliorate the confusion.
What’s essential in the divergence of views is how, for Luther, there’s nothing inside me that is different or changed. There’s nothing inside me that empowers me to respond to God with faith, hope and love. Luther did believe that eventually our trust in God would create a new life but that new life would never be the basis of our justification. It would never be why we’re pleasing to God.
Again, this gets back to Luther’s spiritual crisis. For Luther, what’s important is that we don’t look within ourselves to determine if we’re saved.
For Luther, looking within is the problem because, basically, inside we’re messed up. Within us, no matter how much we trust God, is a whole stew of conflicting motives. Obviously this is an incredibly autobiographical insight on Luther’s part. According to Luther if we want to know how we stand before God we look, not within, at the promise of God.
Justification, then, in this classical Protestant formulation is objective (in that it depends not on our apprehension of it) and it is passive (in that it God’s act outside of us).
0 How Can I Get A Gracious God?
We’re in the midst of a sermon series on ‘The Seven Truths that Changed the World: Christianity’s Most Dangerous Ideas.’ This week we’re talking about Justification by Faith (vs Works) Alone.
The usual way Christians talk about being saved by faith owes to Martin Luther.
For much of his monastic career Martin Luther was plagued by the question ‘How can I get a gracious God?’
The question began to crystalize for Luther thanks to the help of a mentor, the abbott of his monastery.
The abbott, knowing Luther well, believed (correctly, I think) that Luther’s relentless introspection and agonizing over his contrition was, in a fundamental way, in conflict with the simple, gracious message of the Gospel.
Luther had an epiphany. He attributes it to close readings of Paul’s letter to the Romans. At some time, in confession, Luther heard the priest offer the words ‘Martin, your sins are forgiven’ and his experience was to stop focusing on the authenticity of his contrition and to listen to the priest’s words and to trust them.
And when he trusted that, Luther’s world changed and it had a ripple effect through his whole understanding of the Gospel.
For Luther, what became critical was that the priest said something. This is essential- for Luther now the Gospel is a word that gets said. The Gospel isn’t dormant in the pages of scripture. The Gospel is a promise that is proclaimed.
Fundamentally, what Luther came to understand is that the Gospel is a statement. It’s a spoken word that takes the form of a declaration: ‘Martin, for the sake of Jesus Christ, your are forgiven.’
The Gospel is a declarative statement. It’s not a command (‘Go and do…’). It’s not horatory (‘Let us…’). It’s not an imperative (‘We should…’).
It’s critical to see this because it leads Luther to ask: how can you respond to a promise? You can’t obey a promise. All you can do is trust it or not trust it.
What Luther realizes in the confessional is that God doesn’t ask anything of us. God makes a declaration to us.
This is what Luther meant by ‘justification by faith alone’ which gets clarified later as ‘justification by grace through faith alone.’ It’s not the case, as is often misunderstood, that our faith justifies us. Luther instead means that God has declared us forgiven, we’re justified. (Indeed John Calvin and Karl Barth will say this declaration happened on the cross and is perfect, meaning it applies to you whether you want it to or not.)
‘By faith alone’ means that the only possible response to God’s declaration is faith, which Luther understands as trust.
Once Luther comes to this understanding of justification the entire foundation of the medieval church becomes useless to him, making a collision with Rome inevitable.
1 Are We Saved By Our Faith In Christ Or By The Faith Of Christ?
Sometimes a preposition can make all the difference.
I remember my first theology course as a freshman undergraduate, Elements of Christian Thought, with Gene Rogers. I’d just become a Christian as a Junior in High School and was only beginning to become acquainted with the actual content of our faith. The topic one week was Justification & Salvation, and I remember another student asking the TA:
‘If Christians believe we’re justified by faith in Christ, then what about people like me who don’t have faith, who’d maybe like to have faith but can’t seem to find it? Is it our fault then if we’re not saved? Why faith is essential why is it so hard? That seems like a pretty limited God.’
It hit me then and still does as a very good question. Not only does it make essential something that is sincerely elusive for many people, it also turns faith into a kind of work- the very opposite of Paul’s point- in that we’re saved by our ability to believe.
This week we continue our sermon series on ‘Christianity’s Most Dangerous Ideas’ with the theme of Faith vs. Works.
The irony of this historic debate among Christians, however, is that the very idea of justification coming through faith in Christ is premised on a bad translation of scripture.
Almost everywhere that is written in English is a wrong translation. It is properly translated by the King James. Take a look at this passage from Romans:
“But now the righteousness of God apart from the law is revealed, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets, even the righteousness of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, to all and on all who believe. For there is no difference; for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” Romans 3:20-23
In Greek, the actual wording is “even the righteousness of God, through the faith OF Jesus Christ.”
Grammar Lesson:
It is a possessive or genitive phrase. Now a genitive means that this phrase can be interpreted as either subjective or objective. In other words, it is like the phrase, the Love of God. That is either our love for God, or the love that God has. In one case it is objective (love for God), in the other subjective (God is the subject) and it describes the love that belongs to God, or God’s love.
In Greek, the faith of Jesus Christ is also a subjective genitive, but has been interpreted as an objective in almost every translation.
Why is this important?
Because it is not our faith in Jesus which justifies us, but the faith of Jesus Christ in us which justifies us. Faith isn’t a work. Isn’t our work at least. The faith that saves us and justifies us is the obedience of Christ.
In other words, it is his faith at work in us and in our hearts which produces righteousness and the God kind of life.
This explains why faith is a gift and why we are saved through faith by grace and not as a work of our own. It is not our faith which justifies, but the faith of Jesus given to us, which resides in us.
The good news is, it isn’t my faith that matters. It is the faith OF Jesus Christ given to me, that when God regards you or me God isn’t measuring our feeble attempts at faithfulness. In other words, when God looks upon us God chooses not to see us but to see Jesus.
0 Children as a Means of Grace
The other night I came home late, feeling tired and grumpy. The boys had already gone to bed and Ali was nearly asleep. I sat down to read in bed, still feeling tired and grumpy. I’d read only a few pages when Gabriel got up and stumbled, half asleep, into the bathroom to go potty. After he was done, he stumbled into my room, still half asleep, to give me a hug and a groggy smile. Hugging me, he rubbed my back gently, mumbled ‘I’m glad you’re home Daddy’ and then stumbled half asleep back to his room.
This week we continue our sermon series on ‘Christianity’s Dangerous Ideas’ with the familiar (tired?) debate over Grace vs Works. Typically, the argument via Paul gets framed in terms of our sinfulness and Christ’s awesomeness. There’s nothing we could ever do to earn God’s pardoning love. To think so only leads to more sin and a kind of idolatry. Instead we’re saved purely by the gift of what God has done in Jesus Christ, a gift we don’t deserve (grace) that we can respond to only by faith.
What I’m wondering in the wake of G’s gesture the other night is if the Grace vs Works dynamic need not apply only to God’s gift in Jesus but also all the other gifts God gives to us every day during the day and night: a child’s smile, a friend’s ear, just the right song on the radio when you need to hear it.
If so, then perhaps the reason we’re not, could never, be saved by our works is because if we thought so then we’d be so focused on ourselves that we’d stop looking for or noticing the gifts of God all around us.
5 Does Being ‘Biblical’= Being Pauline?
Does Being ‘Biblical’= Being Pauline?
I’ve started reading NT Wright’s book, How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels. In some ways it’s a continuation of his work in Simply Jesus.
Wright’s overarching premise is how Christianity in the West has largely forgotten what the Gospels are about. Christians of all traditions and across the theological spectrum tend to read the Gospels episodically or we read them to buttress theological perspectives we bring to the texts. We do not- and haven’t since the ancient church, Wright contends- read the Gospels, asking the question: ‘What overall story does this Gospel think its telling?’
Wright argues that Christians, especially since the Reformation, have construed the ‘gospel’ in terms of atonement and justification; meanwhile, the story the Gospels attempt to tell is how God in Christ is King of the Earth as in Heaven. The extent to which Jesus’ ascension has become a neglected text and holy day supports Wright’s assertions, and just on a literary level it’s a good charge to level. There are no other narratives we could read where how the authors constructed the beginning, middle and end are incidental to the authorial ‘point.’ It’s not a trivial detail that the Gospels conclude with Jesus’ enthronement nor is it of little consequence that Luke ends the Gospel with Jesus’ ascension and then Luke’s Acts picks up with the disciples living in the form of this new Kingdom, on earth as in heaven.
Whatever one’s theology, Wright thinks it problematic that most Christians can articulate a definition of the gospel that need not make any reference to the actual Gospels. Our definitions of the Gospel center on terms like atonement and justification, terms that feature prominently in Paul but are not in the Gospels themselves and are certainly not their main theme. In the same way, Wright notes a commonly observed problem with the creeds; namely, that they skip from Jesus’ birth to his death and resurrection and leave out the bulk of the Gospel story.
Instead of shaping our definition of ‘gospel’ by asking what story the Gospels are attempting to tell, we use the Gospels, Wright says, to illustrate arguments derived from Paul. By doing so, Christians have lost the plot…of the Gospels. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Wright doesn’t ask the question but it’s there in his argument: Shouldn’t our reading of Paul be in submission to and in service of the Gospels rather than vice versa?
Is it the case, Wright wonders, that when we claim to be biblical we’re really being Pauline instead? And by neglecting the narrative arc of the Gospels are we actually being something profoundly less than biblical?
0 Watch This: Some of My Favorite Christian(?) Movies
Now, I know some of you prefer your Christian movies to be the overt type- the bathrobes and beards type of movies, usually starring Chuck Heston or Anthony Quinn, or some of you like the recent spate of faith friendly movies that all seem to be about firemen.
Not me.
A film need not be made by Mel Gibson or star Kirk Cameron (really, Kirk Cameron?) to convey something of the Gospel. The Holy Spirit is not the sole possession of the Church (or TBN); therefore, the profane can contain the sacred within it, as much if not more than the self-described religious fare. This has always been the case. Christians just seem to have forgotten it of late.
I qualify these as ‘Christian’ because none of them are explicitly religious nor, as far as I know, made by practicing Christians. This doesn’t prevent them, however, from resonating in powerful ways with aspects of our Christian confession.
Pan’s Labyrinth and Inglorious Bastards
As Walter Brueggemann argues, one of scripture’s chief attributes is how it puts forth a ‘sub-version’ to the dominant story of reality. Against the reality of empires and evil, scripture continually professes that what appears to be going on isn’t what’s really going on. By asserting this story, people of God laugh at evil and its power. This is what the prophets do. This is what Revelation is largely about.
I can think of no better film versions of this than Pan’s Labyrinth and Inglorious Bastards. One is a beautiful tale of a ‘sub-version’ of the Spanish Civil War. Another a profane, violent comedy about WWII in which Hitler is killed- what better way to spit in the eye of sin than to imagine a different fate for Hitler?
Unforgiven
It’s almost an old movie now, but in it Clint Eastwood offers the best, most concise summary of original sin and justification. The young, aspiring assassin asks Eastwood’s gunslinger, after having killed several bad guys: ‘They had it coming to them, didn’t they?’ And Eastwood replies: ‘We’ve all got it coming to us, kid.’
A History of Violence
Most violent movies either glorify violence or trivialize it. This is the only movie I have ever seen that uses traditional action movie violence to articulate its maker’s non-violent message. Its violence is visceral, almost like ballet. You’re left realizing the cost, physical and emotional to all concerned, of what we do to each other. It’s also got a great ambiguous ending- does Vigo’s family forgive him? Or are they too numbed and accommodated to our culture of violence?
Children of Men
A science fiction dystopia that got lost in the euphoria over one of the hundred Harry Potter movies. Mystery writer PD James wrote the (inferior) novel. It tells of a near future in which women are no longer able to become pregnant. The last generation of youth born to women are violent nihilists and every one else vaguely goes about living out humanity’s last days. Then, an every man, played by Clive Owen, becomes the steward of the last woman on earth to become pregnant. Earth’s last hope rests on one woman’s baby. Sound like an advent movie? It is. If you want a sense of the longing, fear and anticipation of Jesus’ birth then don’t watch the Nativity. Watch this.
It’s on Netflix so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t watch this. A single mother and her son’s life is interrupted by the arrival of her long estranged brother. It’s a warm, realistic movie. The scene where she fesses up to her (episcopal?) priest about her affair is not only the best example of pastoral care I’ve ever seen; it’s also spot-on what Christians mean by the word ‘grace.’
Even Richard Gere can make a good movis…of course this movie predates me. It’s a Terrance Mallick film that retells/reworks the story of Abraham and Sarah’s sojourn in Egypt in the 19th century American prairie. It’s the MOST BEAUTIFUL, and I mean visually, film I have ever seen. You’re left feeling that all the earth is charged with grace. Which, of course, it is.
I know what a lot of you think about Woody Allen. Whatever, he’s a genius. Picasso was a freak too, no one quibbles about his art. Crimes and Misdemeanors is a Job-like meditation on whether God sees what we do in this life. The question is asked by Martin Landau, who’s done a few things that make him hope the answer is no. He asks the question to his eye doctor, a faithful practicing Jew. What’s the answer? Well, let’s just say the eye doctor (spoiler) is losing his eye sight.
Tree of Life
This movie took a lot of s$%^ last year when it came out. It’s by Terrance Malick too. Dinosaurs. Meditations on Nature vs Grace. Sean Penn and Brad Pitt. CGI Creation Story. Stunning Photography and Legit Philosophy. What’s not to like?
If the movie suffers or is imperfect it is so because of its ginormous ambition. When comparing it to, say, Superbad, just consider the degree of difficulty.