Tag: Martin Luther
2 Who I’m Voting For…
Yeah, sorry for the tease, but I don’t think so.
I posted this last week but the WordPress analytics tell me not enough of you took a gander. So with the polls closing soon here’s some pastoral, Kingdom-focused wisdom from yours truly….
Every now and then I flirt with the belief that Christians should opt out of campaigns and elections, let the chads and voting booths, the empty soundbites and inane talking points lie fallow for a season.
It’s not that I don’t think certain issues are important. It’s not that I don’t think Christians should be engaged in the concerns of their given context. It’s that I suspect a mass Christian opt-out on Election Day might be a helpful and cleansing reminder to our politicians that A) the means by which they engage political conversation couldn’t be more divergent from our faith convictions and B) the notion that the teachings of Jesus fit perfectly into either party is what the Church has usually referred to as heresy.
After all, issues and elections may be important, but only Jesus will bring the Kingdom and Jesus’ plan to heal the world is neither the Democratic or Republican platform but the Church. The extent to which that notion scares you or strikes you as naive exposes both Jesus’ unreasonableness and your own lack of faith.
Every election year when well-meaning Christians either ask me voting advice or just post their silliness about ‘voting the bible’ on Facebook, I’m reminded of Martin Luther’s maxim that he’d rather have an effective pagan leader than an incompetent Christian at the reins of government.
When it comes to me, I’ve got conservative Tea Party types convinced I go to sleep at night beneath a portrait of Che, Mao and Jesus arm-in-arm. And I’ve got liberal Democrats who think I’m raging right-to-lifer. There are military folks who think I’m a Mennonite in name only and left-leaning activists who think my reluctance to believe in ‘rights’ language is proof I’m a backwards fascist.
Without trying to sound self-congratulatory, such ambiguity makes me, I think, a Christian. Or at the very least, a pastor.
As examples like Pope Benedict and Archbishop Rowan Williams point out, Christian convictions do not easily lend themselves to party affiliation despite those parties’ drooling eagerness to adopt ‘God language’ into their platforms.
Which is to say, as a follower of Jesus, you shouldn’t really care for whom I vote just as I, frankly, do not care for whom you do.
As Jesus might say, ‘render unto Caesar …’ or maybe he would say…’the law and the prophets do not hang on…’ or maybe he would say…’put away the sword…’ or how about ‘the Kingdom of God is like a tiny-not-as-significant-as-your-paid-advertising-mustard seed…or might he warn ‘you cannot serve God and Mammon…’?
This screed was prompted and brought to you by Jonathan Martin’s Election Day Communion meme:
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 Why Young People are Better than Old People
Okay, the title is just an exaggeration to get your attention.
Matthew Husband is a recent Va Tech grad, known to many of you. Matt leaves for Africa this Wednesday to volunteer for a year in AIDS prevention and treatment. Matt is a Baptist (sigh) but he has been involved with Aldersgate in such things as our mission in Guatemala. Here’s the last few lines of Matt’s post about his trip:
“This line of crazy circumstances has proven to me that this is where the Lord is leading me this next year. I continue to pray that the Lord use me the way he intends and that my own selfish desires never interfere with his plan. Although, I am excited beyond belief for the next year, I am still scared to death on how to the Lord is going to use me and mold me….”
Matt’s departure, as well the week I spent last month in Guatemala with some college students and college grads, got me thinking about God’s calling.
As a pastor, perhaps the thing I love most about my relationships with students is how I get to hear them constantly wrestling with and asking about God’s call in their lives. It’s natural they would, I suppose, given their stage of life. By and large, old people (and by old I mean anyone my age and up) have already made their choices- or compromises- and settled into their lives. That’s why, for people my age, the question is more often how they can fit God into their busy lives, but young people, with their lives ahead of them, more often ask how can God use them and their life.
The word we use in church, ‘call,’ comes from the Latin word, vocare, meaning ‘to call.’ It refers to God’s call or Jesus’ ‘come and follow me.’ What’s exciting for a pastor is how young Christians, especially if you get enough Jesus in them, are always responding to that ‘follow me’ with questions like ‘How?’ ‘Where?’ ‘To do what?’
If that’s the upside of ‘call’ and ‘vocation’ then preaching on Isaiah this weekend got me to thinking about what we miss, young and old, about God’s call.
Typically, the way we use the word, ‘vocation’ refers to someone’s career, to their paid work. Some Christians use the word even more narrowly, referring specifically to a subjective ‘feeling’ that calls them into religious work. It’s no wonder then that many assume God only calls people like me, priests and pastors.
Here’s the problem:
Our careers, our work, what we do to pay the bills- none of it is anything Jesus ever says anything about.
The vocation = career equation we’ve set up isn’t a biblical equation.
What’s more, thinking vocation = career is bad news to anyone who is retired, out of work or just hates their job and does it only because they have to.
The earnestness with which Matt wants to be used by God makes me wish that we as the Church could recover an authentically Christian concept of vocation.
Because the biblical equation looks more like this:
Vocation = Each of Us Doing…Anything
God calls each and everyone one of us. Anything we do, in whatever role we have, if it’s done in faith and done to glorify God, then it’s a holy calling. A vocation.
While it’s wonderful (and energizing for me) for young people to struggle with their place in the world and how God can use them, it’s equally true that whether we’re working or volunteering or (grand) parenting you can practice a vocation.
As Kenda Dean says, ‘what matters for Christians isn’t the work we do but the lives we live.’
Or, as Martin Luther said a bit more vividly: God is just as pleased when a father changes his daughter’s diapers as when a priest celebrates the Mass.
So I wish Matt well and I pray for what I already know he’ll be praying for: that he would let God use him and that we would glorify God both in the amazing and in the mundane experiences he encounters.
PS: You can read more of his post here.