Well, it’s not so new anymore for one thing. It is, however, a perspective on Paul’s writings on justification that suggests that Luther, and Protestantism following him, made the mistake of reading Paul through the lens of a legal mind. It argues that Paul, in relating to Judaism in the first century, doesn’t draw a clear line between a works righteousness legalism of Judaism on the one hand and faith alone Christianity on the other hand. New insights into the Judaism of the day suggested they weren’t the wooden boasters of self-righteousness we’ve been painting them out to be. Instead it suggests that Paul’s principle concern dealt with seeking to understand what it meant to be “in,” to be a part of God’s people, and how that question related to God’s law. I trust such a definition would be deemed reasonably fair if not especially expansive to those who embrace or embraced this view.
It is, however, one of those scholarly debates that a decade or so ago filtered down into educated layperson debates. It became a topic of conversation among the pipe-smoking bearded ones. On the scholar side there was some dots connecting Sanders and Dunn, the two big names in NPP and NT Wright who was, (and is) reaching a broad band of theologically curious laymen. Dr. Wright, in turn, had a significant impact on the thinking of many who came to embrace what came to be known as Federal Vision or Auburn Avenue theology.
The connections, I suspect, ran something like this. Federal visionists, as one can tell by their self-chosen name, were eager to affirm the corporate nature of God’s people. Rejecting crisis decisionism led to embracing varying levels paedo-faith from successional optimism to what some would call sacerdotalism. That is, the movement moved between pilsner to Oatmeal Stout, from a view that suggests we have reason to hope the children of believers are believers, though we can’t know for sure, to the baptized literally are all made believers but must labor to remain so and can fall away. Yikes. Thus the question of seeking to discern who is in and who is not, overlaps the New Perspective and Federal Vision.
Secondly, Federal Visionists and Dr. Wright shared a zeal for the kingdom of God. Both rejected an ideology that suggested that the Christian life consists of getting as many souls on to the lifeboat as possible before the Good Ship Earth sinks into Davy Jones’ end-times locker. If one is a committed justification by faith alone person like me, you can see why this would be troubling. If, however, you are a sawdust trail, the busses will wait, revivalist dispensationalist, you can see why this looks like the fifth plague. In short, there are genuine things to be concerned about from Dunn and Sanders to Wright to pilsener to Oatmeal Stout, though the farther down the road you go the worse it gets.
The good news is that this is generally old news. What drove its spread into the pews, I suspect, was theological pride. When we stopped arguing over reconstructionism a void was left in our puffed up hearts. So we found something novel either to embrace to show how smart we are, or to topple to show how faithful we are. But then I can’t see into people’s hearts of course. I can, however, say this. The sinner who beat his breast and cried out, “Lord be merciful to me, a sinner” went home justified. Be that guy.
Imagine, if you will, that you find yourself in the midst of the greatest storm ever to hit the world. The wind is blowing at gale force. The ground is trembling, splitting at the seams. Lightning crashes and lights up a sky overflowing with the blackest of clouds. Rain is falling all around you in drops the size of swimming pools, while geysers erupt in every direction. You hear the screams of your terror-stricken neighbors above the thunder. Imagine you are on a boat being tossed this way and that. Imagine the screeches, the howls and brays of a menagerie of animals threatening a stampede.
There are eight people who have no need to imagine such a circumstance. Instead, they remember it. Noah and his family survived that storm. They didn’t, however, survive by their wits. They didn’t survive by their wills. They didn’t even survive by their faith. They survived by the grace of the same God who created the storm in the first place. Which means they didn’t merely survive, but were absolutely and utterly safe for every moment of their journey. Their emotional experience matched, no doubt, their physical experience. Neither, however, matched the true reality.
While it is a good thing to always give thanks, the thing we should be thankful for in light of this true account, of Noah and the flood, isn’t that we personally haven’t been called to live through what Noah and his family did. Rather we should give thanks that we are living through the exact same true reality. We too are absolutely and utterly safe in the midst of whatever storms the One who keeps us safe sends our way.
One of the many evangelical errors that has infected the church is the notion that eternal torment is separation from God. No. There is no separation from God. Where, after all, would we go to hide from Him (Psalm 139:8)? God is not only present in hell but His presence is hell. The very fire that burns is the fire of His glory. Which is the very light that lights up heaven. The redeemed and those in their own sins both will for eternity experience the presence of God. The redeemed will experience that presence in the context of blessing, those in their own sins in a context of cursing. Just as He was in the storm and in the ark, so will it be forever.
We who are in Christ are safe. He is our treasure and is beyond the possibility of loss or harm. We are His treasure and one with Him, and therefore just as secure as He is. He calls us, just as He did Noah and His family, just as He did the disciples on the boat in the Sea of Galilee, to trust Him, to faith, to rest. Let the thunder thunder. Let the tempest toss. Let us rest on the Rock, knowing that He protects us so well that apart from His will not a hair can fall from our heads.
Pop culture is a sanitizing force. No, it doesn’t make the world a cleaner place. It just makes us all the more the same. We are a world awash in golden arches, swooshes, and the real thing. Because people in Maine watch the same television shows, listen to the same radio programs, and attend the same movies as folks in Oklahoma, we are losing not only our national distinctives, but our regional distinctives. Our language is becoming homogenized, and our accents are going the way of the dodo bird.
Local cultures, however, fight back from time to time. Consider something as universal, once upon a time, as giving directions. In the Midwest, where the land is flat, you will be told to follow this road this many miles, and then turn east. You’ll turn north again after the next light, and what you’re looking for will be on the south side of the road. For those of us who grew up amidst rivers and mountains, and twisting, turning roads, such is pure gobbledygook. Where I grew up you told people which roads one should turn left or right on, and that was it.
In the south, however, the whole process is different. “You come up on the Kinderhook farm …” (and here we pay close attention, because we think we must turn soon) “…and you go right past that. Not long after you’ll pass Barnrock church. Just keep going. When you get to Nordyke road, you’ll see a log cabin up on the hill. That belongs to the Kisers. Keep going straight.” Directions, to the southerner, aren’t instructions in how to get from place to place, but a travelogue about the journey, and an introduction to all of the neighbors.
My conviction is that this strange reality is an expression of a stranger, more hidden reality. Such people don’t see places as means of travel, but as the setting of their lives. The farms and the rivers and all the other landmarks aren’t places to turn, but places to return to our past, our roots, our broader community. In the south, for all its foibles and shames, it is easier to remember that what we are is bigger than ourselves.
Some cultural patterns make the Gospel easier to grasp; others make it harder. A culture where fathers are largely absent and irresponsible, for instance, is one that will find it hard to understand the love of our heavenly Father. In turn, a culture given to extreme individualism is one in which one man living and dying for another just doesn’t make sense. A culture where one’s identity is more corporate than singular is one that can in turn identify with a substitutionary atonement.
All cultures have weaknesses and strengths. The great thing about southern virtues or midwestern virtues or northern virtues isn’t that they are southern or midwestern or northern, but that they are virtues. The capacity to live in a more covenantal world, a world where we recognize that the world is bigger than just us, is a good thing because this is the world God gave us.
That our culture tends to put up roadblocks to our faith doesn’t mean, however, that we devise detours. That some subcultures lack many loving fathers doesn’t mean we change the message that God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son. And that His life for ours is a puzzle to our insulated world doesn’t change the fact that He gave His life for ours. We do not contextualize our message, but contextualize the culture. That is, we are about the business of building a culture, a kingdom, where, though it is foolishness to the Greeks, and a stumbling block to the Jews, the death on the cross is for us the power of God unto salvation. We have a message that creates a new culture, and will change that message for no one.
The cross of Christ is our landmark, our direction, and the very context of our lives. It is where we have come from, where we are heading, and what attends us along the way. Christ died for sinners, both those that can grasp the notion, and ones that find such to be confusing. What never changes is our most sacred faith: Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again.
I have written before about the cowardice of paper prophets. These thundering heroes build a following and a reputation by denouncing with great vigor and panache the errors of those who are not their audience. They are preaching against Ninevah in Jerusalem, pronouncing woe against Jerusalem in Cleveland. When we do this we get credit for courage when all we are really doing is tickling ears.
Now I have friends, plenty of them, at varying distances from my ideological sweet spot. And I have plenty of concerns over them, usually their distance from my ideological sweet spot. But what really concerns me is the weaknesses evident among those who are just like me.
Of course all sin, sooner or later, traces its origins back to the father of sins, the devil, and the mother of sin in him, pride. Check the tag on any given sin and it is apt to declare, “Brought to you by pride.” Pride, however, has numerous nuances, and we are not safe if we avoid their kind of pride, while embracing our own kind of pride.
Consider we Christians, and how we look at the world. They proudly deny not just the truth of the gospel, but the truth of truth. We believers, on the other hand, affirm the truth of truth while thinking we do so because we’re so smart. Consider how one group of Christians look at other groups of Christians. They proudly embrace the tactics of the world, marketing the gospel. We deny the wisdom of this approach, and proudly think ourselves wise for thinking so. We reject the worldliness of a gaudy pride, while nurturing the worldliness of a smug pride. We look down our noses at each of these groups for looking down their noses at us. We are Smug-ol, alone in our dark cave, caressing our precious ring of orthodoxy and orthopraxy.
It is smugness that worries me, that quiet, unassuming assumption that I am not only better than other men, but disdainful of them, beyond them, in possession of the one truth to unite them all. It is the fatal presumption that the world would be a better place if everyone were just like me.
The solution, of course, is not to deny the power of the truth we have learned. Insofar as our convictions flow out of the Bible, they are indeed eternally precious. Instead the solution, as is so often the case, is gratitude and humility. God did not reveal His truth to us so that we could stroke it in some dark cave. He gave it to us that we might let His light shine before men, and that we might give thanks to the praise of His glory.
Whether one, like the world, is proud of one’s sin, or if one, like me, is proud of one’s right thinking and right doing, one is still caught in the web of pride. What we must cast into the fires is not the righteousness but the pride. What we must do is repent and believe the gospel, giving thanks. People like me need to learn this wisdom from The prophet, that blessed are the poor in spirit, for ours is His kingdom.
We know more than we let on. So Paul tells us in Romans 1. Still our conclusions are not the fruit of careful, dispassionate reasoning. Motives mix up our minds, and too often we end up believing not what we know but what we want to believe. Which is one reason I am so grateful for those who faithfully go, stand and speak outside the baby killing centers in our neighborhoods.
The “clients” come in various groupings: boyfriends with their girlfriends; girls with their girl friends; even grandmothers with pregnant granddaughters. They come knowing that they are not there to have cells removed. They come to murder their unborn babies. The tool they use to suppress that truth, however, is its very banality, its ordinariness. They tell themselves that it’s no big deal, precisely because the world doesn’t make a big deal out of it. They think they will walk in, hand over their cash, and walk out just a little more hollow. Ordinary Christians, lining the sidewalk, speak a very simple truth- You are going in there to murder babies. Some, on the sidewalk come to hold up signs of aborted babies. Some stand and silently pray. Some gently plead. Some boldly preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. All tell the truth- You are about to murder your baby. All tell the truth- the culture is lying; you are about to murder your baby. All tell the truth- you know the truth. If you will embrace Him, you will find life abundant.
Some of the couples walk past sharing the nervous laughter of those walking through a graveyard. Some angrily denounce. Many draw their hoods over their faces, blocking their ears with their earbuds, and hurry past. All hear the truth- I’m here to murder my baby- and all feel its weight. They don’t believe the lie. They do, however, act on it. They murder their babies. They go home, and like those on the sidewalk, they mourn the death of their babies. They suppressed the truth, and the result was something even more perverse, more unnatural, than the burning lusts of those Paul addresses in Romans 1-¬- mommies murdering their own babies. As perverse as it is, we ought not find this shocking, to be surprised that the unregenerate side with the lies. All of us, in our natural state are of our father, the father of lies.
The second lie is worse. Inside the church, inside the vibrant, orthodox, passionate, politically active, evangelical church we believe this lie- Abortion is a political issue. We should vote for that electable candidate that is more “pro-life” than the other electable candidate. We believe this lie- that abortion is a bad social problem. We should write a check to the Crisis Pregnancy Center. I saw the truth when I went there, to the killing place. Twenty yards away there was no political issue. Twenty yards away there was no bad social problem. I learned the same truth as those who went inside- those who went inside were murdering their babies. For every living pair of moms and babies, only one would get out alive.
Political issues are solved politically. Social problems are solved socially. But when babies are being murdered, we are called to go there, to stand, and to speak. We are called to bring the potent and powerful Word of God to bear at the very gates of hell. We are called to bear witness to Him, who bore our shame. We, each of us, carry within us the Spirit of Truth. He indwells us. When we suppress the truth, however, we quench Him. Praise God by His omnipotent grace, we are then convicted. We then go, kneel and weep. Our hands are bloody. But they are washed in His blood.
