Category: Thinking Things Through

How many of you have heard a sermon that included an analogy intended to explain faith that went something like this:

Everyone exercises faith. That chair you are sitting in, you have faith in it. You wouldn’t have sat in it if you didn’t, right?

Simple enough to understand. But what would happen to this analogy in the hands of those who see hell and damnation in the likes of this article? Perhaps something like this:

Sure I have faith in the chair. But nobody has to actually sit in the chair to have such faith. You can’t demand we sit! We aren’t capable of sitting on our own… would you have us try to merit the chair by attempting to sit on it of our own power? Well, of course everyone who has faith will sit on the chair. You see, once you have true faith, a faith solely in the chair and entirely separate from actually sitting, then, as an entirely separate activity that comes later, you will sit out of thankfulness.

Now, I do not mean to disparage thankfulness, which should play a primary role in our sanctification. But it seems like the categorizations and deliniations being emphasized in such an approach are foreign to the Bible. We are saved by faith on account of God’s great grace. But such a great doctrine is not in any way opposed to a call to obedience. We sit in the chair. We may wrestle with fears and sin and often try to get off the chair, but we ultimately abide there because where else can we go for so great a salvation?

Well the metaphors are getting way too mixed up at this point, so I’ll leave off for now.

Here’s a post to a reformed discussion forum regarding Norm Shepherd:

I have had three friends convert to Rome thanks to talk like this and thanks to Scott Hahn. Not that that seems to bother anyone(I dont mean the RCUS guys here or Ted). One friend spoke this way about justification and works. It is very alarming and it is clear why Turretin said works are not part of justification. As for the Shepherd folks-you all are doing a great job. The pope should be very happy about this kind of talk. Make sure you all CC the Vatican so they can see that the counter Reformation is still working!

The author assumes, I suppose, these people are leaving for Rome because they hate God’s grace and want to earn them some of that there salvation. Perhaps. But is it not possible that they leave because the reformed folks they wish to talk to about issues of substance go ballistic whenever they catch a whiff of someone interacting with the countless passages of scripture that mention works in some relationship to salvation?

I’ve read some pretty stern criticism of Norm Shepherd or, for instance, the view espoused by Don Garlington on Justification and Perseverance. As far as I can tell, there are those in the reformed camp who believe these men are proposing a faith + works view and thus denying the gospel.

A few comments and questions:

1) Regarding the new perspective on Paul: how does Romans 9:30-32 fit in? (What then shall we say? That the Gentiles, who did not pursue righteousness, have obtained it, a righteousness that is by faith; but Israel, who pursued a law of righteousness, has not attained it. Why not? Because they pursued it not by faith but as if it were by works. They stumbled over the “stumbling stone.”) This passage seems to support an “old” view of Paul… i.e. that the Israelites were not simply following the law to maintain covenantal boundaries, but were seeking to establish their own merit through the law.

2) I recently wrestled with a particular sin, and found strength in that time of temptation by recalling that my God is the God Who Sees, and that sin is no longer my master, and that where sin remains the abiding master, well, it doesn’t look good from Don G.’s reading of Romans 2. As it happens, I resisted the temptation in that particular case. But I then became worried, based on the harsh criticisms I’ve read of Shepherd and others. Was I now trying to earn my salvation? By allowing eschatological judgment to factor in to my ethic, had I just compromised the Gospel by making Justification ethical? I became surprisingly distressed, and ended up spending some time in prayer simply affirming my utter reliance on the righteousness of Christ. Were my means of finding strength against the temptation dishonoring to God? Was I to resist the temptation out of thankfulness only?

3) Shepherd is accused of making statements that are believed to be “soft” on justification by faith. He is said to have made justification ethical rather than forensic and all sorts of other horrible things. If Shepherd is so dangerous, what does the average Bible reader make of:

–Jesus: Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

–Paul: There will be trouble and distress for every human being who does evil: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile; but glory, honor and peace for everyone who does good: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. For God does not show favoritism.

–James: You see that a person is justified by what he does and not by faith alone.

I’ve heard countless answers to these passages to harmonize them with forensic justification, and I’m not questioning the explanations. Rather, I hear accusation after accusation that, although Norm Shepherd claims to believe in this or that sound doctrine, he doesn’t mean it, because look at what else he says, and look at his overall tone. Well, Jesus, Paul, and James would fall to the same criticisms if one approached them determined to find error and ignore the fullness of what they said.

I just finished the chapter on the hymn in Philippians 2:6-11 in The Climax of the Covenant by N.T. Wright. Once I got past the fact that he has quotes in four different languages (Hebrew, Greek, German, French… none interpreted because, after all, every Ph.D. in Biblical studies from a major school would know them…), I found it more or less earth-shattering. He spends numerous pages going over the 10 or so major strains of interpretation on that snatching/grasping word at the end of verse 6 and, after offering a synthesis of his own making, shows how the flow of the text fits in with Paul’s Adam-Christology as well as the creedal view of the Father and Son.

Basically, he has verse 6 saying that Jesus had something (e.g. part of the God-head), but he chose to not take advantage of it. So Wright creates a parallel with Adam, but makes much of the differences as well. At the end of the hymn, we find God exalting Jesus, demonstrating that Jesus had in fact revealed God. The particular point that hit home in a fresh way was the notion that Jesus’ humiliation unto death was not simply a means of our salvation, it was a revelation, in some basic, significant way, of who God is. Thus the admonitions before and after the hymn that call upon us to follow Christ are calling us live as God’s image-bearers. The humbling call of Christ is not simply to test us or sanctify us, it is in an essential way the outworking of being made in God’s image.

It’s really quite overwhelming.

Just a quick question for all of you. Why Moses and Elijah on the mount of transfiguration? Is Jesus’ role as prophet being emphasized? For that matter, here’s another question. It is easy for me to understand king as an enduring office, and priest isn’t too hard either. But what is the role of prophet after the second coming?

From O. Palmer Robertson’s The Christ of the Covenants (page 175, footnote 7):

The language of Meredith Kline is misleading on this point. His desire to maintain the distinctive emphasis of the law-covenant may be appreciated. But his statements too easily could be understood in a legalistic fashion. He interprets Paul as saying that the Sinaitic covenant “made inheritance to be by law, not by promise — not by faith, but by works” (By Oath Consigned, p. 23).

The distinctiveness of the Mosaic covenant resides in its externalized forms of law-administration. But the law under Moses cannot be understood as opening a new way of attaining salvation for God’s people. Israel must maintain the law, not in order to enter the favored condition of the covenant of redemption, but in order to continue in the blessings of the covenantal relationship after having been empowered to do so throught their covenantal oneness-with-God experienced by grace through faith alone. Under both the Mosaic and the Abrahamic covenants man experienced redemption by grace through faith in the work of the Christ who was to live and die in the place of sinners.

I must confess, I find the concept of earning an inheritance oxymoronic.

Ephesians 4:4-6
There is one body and one Spirit– just as you were called to one hope when you were called– one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.

WCF XXV: Of the Church
The visible Church, which is also catholic or universal under the Gospel (not confined to one nation, as before under the law), consists of all those throughout the world that profess the true religion; and of their children: and is the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ, the house and family of God, out of which there is no ordinary possibility of salvation.

It seems to me the church as the kingdom of God, as part of Christendom, is attacked from almost every conceivable angle in the modern American evangelical religion. We have rugged American individualism, individual rights that trump the rights of groups, eschatology that undermines the kingdom of God as a present reality, salvation by individual prayer, relationship not religion, and on an on. I feel like I should break into a rendition of “Another Brick in the Wall.” Each of these bricks contribute to a whole which undermines the value of the church, her worship, her sacraments, her preached word, her very identity as the body of Christ and the bride of Christ.

But why should there be any tension between a personal faith and a corporate identity? Why are “personal” and “individual” treated as synonyms? As adults, the profession of our personal faith credentials us, in a sense, to be brought into the covenant community by way of baptism. As infants, our parents’ standing in regards to the covenant credential us to be brought into the covenant through baptism. In both cases, it is within the corporate body of Christ that our personal salvation is worked out from faith to faith through the grace of God.

It would appear from the sweep of history that allowing the notion of individuality to permeate such topics in place of the personal leads to all sorts of trouble.

What is the best way to learn the Bible? What gives the best bang for the buck? If you are going to engage in some type of Bible reading or study in the coming twelve months, what approach is most likely to yield the best results? I first became self-consciously interested in such questions during college. At that time I was being trained in the inductive Bible study method and taught to have a daily quiet time. The QT tended to emphasize a subjective response to God’s word, while the inductive study focused on learning God’s word.

Within a couple years, however, I found that if I simply read the Bible, using any time that I might have previously used for in depth study to read yet more, I learned far more and I learned it more quickly. I discovered that as I read the whole of the Bible, challenging passages gradually became less daunting. Paradoxically, I discovered that what I had previously considered a simplistic reading of the text led to a deeper understanding than my in depth Bible studying was able to yield.

That college experience no longer surprises me, though I think it runs contrary to the expectations of many evangelicals. Put most simply, I had discovered that the Bible is a book and that it was most fruitful to approach it as a wonderful piece of literature, replete with themes and plots that were carried through from one end to the other. Overlooked by many well-intentioned Bible study methodologies aimed at basic discipleship, the implications of God having given us a book, a unified piece of literature, are fairly straight-forward and known by almost any literate person. Books are meant to be read. They can also be studied, and such study can be tremendously fruitful, but the basis is a familiarity with the text. No literate person would expect to study in detail only the middle chapter in the most simplistic, plot-driven novel and gain much insight.

Familiarity with the Bible takes time. It is not simply a novel with a linear plot and simple characterizations. It is literature that builds words into larger structures that span the text. Thus, it takes a fair amount of broad reading to gain that familiarity that would normally be considered a precursor to in depth study. That is the source of the paradox. Normally, broad is associated with shallow, while narrow is associated with deep. When the subject matter is a fairly long piece of literature, quite the opposite can prove true. Diving deep without the knowledge to understand the themes and structures being displayed in a slice of the text will usually yield rather shallow and possibly misleading insights. Reading broadly (i.e. reading the whole Bible over and over) allows one to accumulate the knowledge needed to understand what a particular passage is communicating, thus yielding what would typically be considered deeper knowledge.

I seem to be dwelling on what I perceive as misplaced distinctions or compatible categories positioned as being mutually exclusive. Here’s another distinction I’ve encountered, one I’m sure is fairly common: fellowship and learning God’s word. I lead a small group with our church, and it is not uncommon to have the choice of content and format for a small group presented as a choice between learning and fellowship. The more I’ve thought about this distinction, however, the less helpful I find it. If our use of scripture is grounded in some form or fashion in the public sphere, there is far less of a need to choose between learning the Word and fellowship.

The distinction arises, I believe, quite naturally from the normal meaning attributed to the notion of studying the Bible. In our day and age, it often means some form of the inductive Bible study method, or some other diagram-the-sentence-and-examine-each-word methodology. I’ll need to write another piece on my views of broad versus narrow, but suffice to say that such an approach is not the only way to go about learning the Bible, nor is it necessarily the most helpful. Suppose one can learn the Bible by talking about a theme in the Scriptures, such as the Lamb of God, using perhaps a list of references to lambs in the Bible as a starting point. Could not a group of people tell each other the story of redemption by talking about the various references to lambs, contributing the pieces of which they are familiar until a greater whole is formed?

It seems to me that such an approach could bring the scriptures to bear on our lives. Beyond that, it could create an environment of rich fellowship, so long as one is able to get beyond the idea that fellowship must be tied to entertainment or telling each other intimate details of one’s life (either in the form of testimony or prayer request). I would propose that fellowship can be built up using many different types of stones. Perhaps one type of stone is entertainment, another sharing a meal, another praying together, and yet another talking to one another about the stories of the Bible.

I heard a quote the other day that positioned contingency and certainty as mutually exclusive. I have a feeling that the quote sounded quite normal and natural to many of those who heard it, yet I found myself questioning the validity of such a categorical distinction. I’ll throw out an example first, and then some reflections on the inner workings of both the mistake as well as its appeal.

One way of approaching the topic is to ask, “Do the elect have to have faith to be saved?” Perhaps this example highlights the difficulty of the question I am posing. Of course the elect have to have faith, but once viewing salvation in terms of election, it is rather difficult to admit contingencies, such that what contingencies exist are often overlooked in the name of certainty.

Here’s the issue. Certainty is often tied to people’s perception of outcomes, while contingency is often associated with means. Properly understood, providence gives an account of contingent means while lending certainty based on the promises of God (e.g. all things work to the good of those who love God). I would guess, however, that many people struggle with God’s providence allowing for, or even supporting, the free choices of men. Likewise, I would guess that their notion of certainty is tied to God’s decree and His immutability, without leaving room for God’s providence to factor in the contingency of other agencies with whom God has endowed with free will. Thus, the notion of a contingent outcome being entirely certain is a poor fit for their thinking.

I would further argue that such an approach is entirely unnecessary and unwarranted by the scriptures, but is a natural bias that might evolve from a particular emphasis in one’s thinking. That is, if one slices and dices historic reformed theology to emphasize the various theologies of God, his decrees, his election, etc. without also emphasizing a solid understanding of the agency of man, the covenant of God, the means of grace, etc., it is quite easy to lose sight of the contingency of the life each of us lives. But the fact that one does not emphasize the doctrines that help us give a proper account of contingency does not in any way remove the contingency from one’s life. Thus, one is at risk to make such category mistakes as viewing contingency and certainty as mutually exclusive.