From Sinner to Singer

Jesus said that it is not what goes into a person that makes them unclean, but what comes out of their heart. Out of the abundance of the heart come all kinds of sin: evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. This failure of heart, what Christian theologians have described as concupiscence or our tendency to sin, is described by the Apostle Paul in a tight little passage as the consequence of false worship.

Despite the beauty and delight of the world around us, we refused to respond to our Creator with a due sense of thankful or praise (Romans 1:21). Instead, we turned to from the Creator to the creation, worshipping it in his place, desiring the things he had made rather than our maker (Romans 1:23, 25). Through idolatry, our hearts became just as darkened and our thinking futile as the things we worshipped.

Paul is probably picking up on the idea prevalent in the Old Testament that we become what we worship. This is seen in Isaiah; the prophet is commissioned to preach to his idolatrous generation with the result that they deaf, blind, and dull hearted (Isaiah 6:9-10) – just like the idols they worship (Isaiah 42:8, 17-25)! Hence why one of things the Servant of the Lord brings is the restoration of sight to the blind.

Likewise, the Apostle John can describe our hearts in this manner. John can urge his readers to guard against idolatry (1 John 5:21; cf. 1 Corinthians 10:7, 14) because he knows that our concupiscence lies in our love of things in God’s good world (1 John 2:15-17). The problem lies not out there; it lies in mangled love or over-desires: ‘the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes, pride in possessions’.  It is not hard to imagine as Andrew Cameron does that this is John’s commentary on that moment in the garden when sin was let loose on the world: (cf. Genesis 3:6) good for food’ [desire of flesh]; ‘pleasing to the eye’ [desire of eyes]; ‘desirable for wisdom’ [pride].[1] What John describes is our thankless, obsessive, destructive misappropriation of the Creator’s creation. Our love for the wrong things has bent us out of shape.

It was his reflection on these verses that led St Augustine to describe our propensity to sin as disordered love. Human beings are liturgical creatures – we are made to worship something. In our refusal to thank and glorify God, our hearts have turned to find something else to worship.

 

These are thy gifts; they are good, for thou in thy goodness has made them. Nothing in them is from us, save for sin when, neglectful of order, we fix our love on the creature, instead of on thee, the Creator.  (City of God, XV.22)

What is needed is for our misdirected hearts to be reordered, for our hearts remain restless until they come to rest in that for which they were made (cf. Confessions I):

But living a just and holy life requires one to be capable of an objective and impartial evaluation of things: to love things, that is to say, in the right order, so that you do not love what is not to be loved, or fail to love what is to be loved, or have a greater love for what should be loved less, or an equal love for things that should be loved less or more, or a lesser or greater love for things that should be loved equally. (On Christian Doctrine, I.27-28)

Millennia later, the former Augustinian monk Martin Luther diagnosed the human condition in a similar way. According the Luther, our life and worship is incurvatus in se, turned in on ourselves.

Our nature, by the corruption of the first sin, so deeply curved in on itself that it not only bends the best gifts of God towards itself and enjoys them (as is plain in the works-righteous and hypocrites), or rather even uses God himself in order to attain these gifts, but it also fails to realize that it so wickedly, curvedly, and viciously seeks all things, even God, for its own sake. (Lectures on Romans)

In his A Treatise on Good Works, an exposition of the Ten Commandments, Luther says the call to
“have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3) and the call to believe in Jesus alone for your justification
(Romans 3–4) are, in essence, the same thing. To say you must have no other gods but God and to say you must not try to achieve your salvation without Christ are one and the same.

Now this is the work of the First Commandment, which commands: “Thou shalt have no other gods,” which means: “Since I alone am God, thou shalt place all thy confidence, trust and faith on Me alone, and on no one else.”

For Luther, idolatry is the fundamental root of our sins and problems; you do not lie, commit adultery, or steal unless you first make something more fundamental to your hope and joy and status than God.
Anything you look to more than you look to Christ for your sense of acceptability, joy, significance, hope, and security is by definition your god—something you adore and serve with your whole life and heart. That is an idol, by definition. 

In like manner, John Calvin wrote in his Christian Institutes that “the human heart is an idol factory” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, I 11.8). Our hearts and minds are perpetually industrious in imagining new things to love and worship. This long tradition of equating sin with idolatry was neatly summarized a few years ago by moral theologian Oliver O’Donovan:

 [I]t is possible, notwithstanding the truth that we love and know only the good, also in a sense to love evil. We love evil by resting in the pattern of loves and dreads that comes immediately to us, treating our dreads as though they were equally real with the goods we love. ... This is perfectly expressed in the traditional Christian doctrine of original sin, described memorably by Martin Luther as an incurvatus in se, a self-enclosure. In sin we divide the good world God has made into two “worlds”, one good and the other evil, and we make our own contingent perspectives the criterion for the division. And this gives a new, negative sense to the term “world”, which we have hitherto spoken of positively as God’s creation. This negative sense is characteristic of the New Testament, and points to the reality a constructed world, a world of our own imagination, pitched over against the created world and in opposition to it.[2]

The great human tragedy is that despite being the divinely commissioned image-bearers in the world, we turned from reflecting that image to the creation and love of other images. We exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped idols of our fashioning. Out of the abundance of the heart comes all kind of impurities, and our hearts had grown ruinous. Yet whilst the human heart spewed forth impurity, the Jesus Christ – the very image of God (2 Corinthians 4:4; Colossians 1:15) – came forth to heal our hearts. His work is summarised by Hebrews 1:3 as such:

He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word. When he had made purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high…

Hebrews goes on to say that this purification came through Jesus’ own blood (9:14). He has put away sin once and for all (9:26), enabling those purified by him to serve the living God. The end result as pictured in Hebrews 13 is a life issuing forth as a sacrifice of praise. Those purified by Jesus the great high priest are enabled to live a life of worship to God. Along the same lines Paul encourages the mind set on the Spirit to be transformed, as the body worships God (Romans 12:1):

I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

This is the antithesis of the perverted worship of Romans 1. Whereas in Romans 1 humans were dishonoured in their bodies, worshipping and serving creatures, disapproving of God which issued in a depraved mind, in Romans 12 Christians are instructed to present their bodies in the service and worship of God, which leads to the renewing of their minds, that they may approve God’s will. The achievement of Christ is to turn God’s enemies into those who are by the Spirit conformed to the image of God’s Son. We are set free from sin to respond to God by grace. In other words, we are turned from sinners into singers. We do not live under slavery to sin. The prayer of conversion is, with John Donne, that God would “Come | And recreate me now grown ruinous.”   We are made fit to worship the true and living God. Far from being hostile towards and unable to please God, I am someone who lives for the praise of God’s glory. Rather than being incurvatus in se, I live (in another of Luther’s phrases) coram Deo; that is, before God, before his face, and in his presence.

This is not to deny the presence of sin in Christians, what Don Carson describes as “shocking, inexcusable, forbidden, appalling, out of line with what we are as Christians.” But to be a Christian is to have one’s darkened heart renewed by the Spirit, so that the abundance of this heart, by God’s grace, produces fruit. Having been purified by our high priest, we are transformed from idol makers to glory reflectors, from incurvatus in se to coram Deo, from sinners to singers.

We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. (Romans 6:6)

Through him, then, let us continually offer a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that confess his name. (Hebrews 13:15)

---

[1] Andrew Cameron, Joined-up life: A Christian account of how ethics works (Nottingham: IVP, 2011), 52-53.

[2] Oliver O’Donovan, New College Lectures 2007: Lecture 2 ‘Admiring’. http://www.newcollege.unsw.edu.au/newcollegelectures.html.

Balance

Douglas Moo defines the New Perspective on Paul

One of the difficulties with grappling with the New Perspective on Paul (NPP) is coming to terms with the variegated nature of the movement. Despite the build-up of the NPP as one large, monolithic bloc affecting Biblical studies, doctrine, and early church history, the reality is far more complex. Although the leading lights of the NPP share a same interest in research and methodology, their origins and conclusions are quite diverse. This must lead to a chastened humility when outlining the NPP on general terms.

Nevertheless, Douglas Moo’s essay in Justification and Variegated Nomism: Volume 2 – The Paradoxes of Paul offers a profitable introduction to both perspectives: the claims of the NPP and misgivings of the Old Perspective on Paul (OPP). In ‘Israel and the Law in Romans 5-11’, Moo observes that what NPP has attempted is in effect “a rotation of Paul's central theological axis”. That has lead to a flip from a vertical to a horizontal orientation. What does this look like? According to Moo it means an ethnocentric rather than anthropocentric reading, privileging the background over the foreground and the corporate rather than the individual. For Moo this is witnessed in an emphasis of ecclesiology over soteriology or union with Christ over imputation, or a macro reading over the micro. At the risk of caricature, this last point is seen in some NPP’s love of describing the big picture, but failure to engage in close exegesis.

 I find Moo’s description helpful because I don’t want to place the weight at the one end of these dichotomies. I don’t want to emphasize the horizontal over the vertical, or focus on the background and neglect the foreground. If Moo is right, this is a helpful corrective of the NPP.

However, I think Moo’s definition also shows-up some of the problems with what I’ve generally  described as the OPP. By placing things in such a dichotomised way merely moves the problem towards the other end of seesaw. What arose from the OPP in 19th and 20th century liberal Protestantism is people who could provide a theologically apt account of salvation, but then turn around and deny the historicity of Jesus. Surely this is a problem? Surely it’s a problem when Christianity is reduced to a timeless philosophy or morality? But this is what has tended to happen when people have bought into an ‘either or’ dichotomy. Instead of neglecting either the horizontal or the vertical, don’t we want both? Don’t we want both soteriology and ecclesiology (which Calvin’s doctrine of ‘union with Christ’ provides by the way)? Can’t we have both the foreground and the background? Without the background we lose the historical, social, religious and theological context/worldview that the foreground arose in. And without the foreground, the background loses relevancy. Why can’t we have both? Instead of arguing for the anthropocentric over the ethnocentric, does not a reading of Paul push theocentricism center of stage? Likewise the individual verses the corporate; aren’t the two brought together in Christ? He loved me and gave himself for me at the same time that he ransomed for God a kingdom from every nation and tribe and language.

Moo’s definition is very useful in grappling at general terms with the shortcomings of the NPP. But by resorting to such dichotomies, I’m not sure that he leaves us in a better position. Indeed the NPP arose out of the OPP’s reduction of Paul and the gospel to individualism and tendency away from ecclesiology and context. Instead what is needed is balance. Balance because the announcement that Jesus Christ is Lord results in both vertical and horizontal – you might say cosmic – reconciliation. Balance because the gospel was announced in a particular context means it is even more meaningful when it is announced today.  Balance because the news that you are saved by grace (Ephesians 2:8) fundamentally alters who you relate to your siblings (Ephesians 4:32). Balance, because Christ came to preach to those who far off as well as those who were near, reconciling them both in his body under the on Father.

...mens eadem...

"Don't be conformed to this present evil age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind..." - Romans 12.2

"The word of God was the sweat of [Paul's] brow, but it was also the life of his mind. Our juncture of history is rather like Paul's in one respect: it requires a Christian preacher to come to the defence of the life of the mind. As Universities daily conform themselves more closely to the school of wizardry in children's fiction, a repository of magic techniques to get startling effects, who else is left to care for how people, as individuals, think for themselves about the coherence of understanding, principle, and purpose that makes the difference between living in freedom and living in servitude? As the young flock in ever greater numbers to our Universities and colleges, who is there to talk to them seriously, and with all the resources of refined scholarly culture, about the meaning of their human existence, about how vast quantity if scatted or organised information can be distilled into something worth a humans being's while to be occupied with in his or her one and only venture in life? Of course, we shall be told that virtue cannot be taught, that the existential dimension of wisdom is something each person must discover for him or herself, not a topic for inclusion in a syllabus, to be "covered" in a tutorial. All of which is perfectly true. Yet wisdom can be present or absent as a goal and a horizon, before which everything covered in a syllabus can begin to assume its real importance. But this requires teachers who believe that learning is not simply perfecting a performance, but has to do with the terror and hope that is due to existence itself. It requires teachers who believe in the human reality of salvation and loss, who live out their academic roles as those who continually ask how they may be saved?" - Oliver O'Donovan, No End to the Word, The Word in Small Boats, 2010.

Resurrecting the Gospel

A few years ago when I was at uni, the EU was using Easter as an opportunity to witness to the university. We gave out hot cross buns, books about Jesus, and had lots of good conversations. But the center-piece of this event was a large banner, which in giant letters stated ‘We believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.’ The banner also bore the names of hundreds of students and lecturers who agreed with the statement and wanted to proclaim it to a doubting and skeptical university. We were declaring the Christian gospel –Jesus Christ is Lord and God has raised him from the dead (Romans 10.9). As the Evangelical Union, the gospel union, we were committed to declaring the same gospel that the Apostles had declared thousands of years earlier. It is from their eyewitness accounts that we believed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The very shape of Christianity is determined by the events that first Easter – a fact that the Apostles were acutely aware of. For the Apostles, the resurrection was the core foundation of their gospel: “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures…” (1 Corinthians 15.3-4). In his resurrection, Jesus is designated as the Son of God, the King of Israel and true heir of David (Romans 1.3-4, also 2 Timothy 2.8), and is marked out as the one who will judge the world: “…Now God commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead” (Acts 17.30-31, also 10.39-43). As the one who is to judge, the apostles believed that Jesus was not just the King of Israel, but the Lord of all creation and to him belongs obedience from all nations (Romans 1.5, 15.12).

As the King that Israel had long waited for, the apostles knew that Jesus’ resurrection was significant for understanding the purposes of God. When Paul states that the gospel was “promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures”, he doesn’t have a couple of proof-texts in the back of his mind. The gospel – the death and resurrection of Jesus – is the climax of God’s covenant with Israel. In raising Jesus from the dead, God has shown himself faithful to his promises to Abraham and David, and has ultimately triumphed over sin and death – the evil powers that have held the world captive since Genesis 3. Jesus is the Christ promised by God to Israel in scripture. His death and resurrection reveal God’s plan for Israel and the world.

For the Apostles, this meant two things. Firstly, forgiveness of sins was now possible for both Jews and Gentiles through Jesus (Acts 13.37-38, 5.31). All people every where must now repent and follow the true king. Secondly, the resurrection of the dead, which Israel didn’t expect until the last judgment, had already happened to Jesus. The newly risen Lord now reigns over creation and guarantees us a resurrection like his when he returns (1 Corinthians 15:20ff). This was the gospel the apostles proclaimed – Jesus is Lord and he offers forgiveness for all and a living hope of a future resurrection.

Our challenge today is to continue announcing the resurrection of Jesus and allowing it to shape our lives. Despite living amongst many competing world views including post modernity and materialism, the resurrection of Jesus, God’s King, shows these up as idolatry by announcing the reality of Jesus’ Lordship. Like the apostles, evangelicals today must keep the resurrection central in our understanding and proclamation of the gospel.

The Christian Historian

This is a bit long, but i think it is worth reading:

Church history is a moral matter but…it becomes fully so only within a wider theological context. The Christian engaging with the past has even stronger reasons for doing so as part of a maturation in critical and self-aware perception than the secular student, though there are important analogies even within the secular framework. A central aspect of where the Christian begins, the sense of identity that is there at the start of any storytelling enterprise, is the belief that the modern believer is involved with and in a community of believers extended in time and space, whose relation to each other is significantly more than just one of vague geographical connection and temporal succession. In theological shorthand, the modern believer sees herself of himself as a member of the Body of Christ.

Who I am as a Christian is something which, in theological terms, I could only answer fully in the impossible supposition that I could see and grasp how all other Christian lives had shaped mine and, more specifically, shaped it towards the likeness of Christ. I don’t and can’t know the dimensions of this; but if I have read St Paul in I Corinthians carefully I should at least be thinking of my identity as a believer in terms of a whole immeasurable exchange of gifts, known and unknown, by which particular lives are built up, an exchange no less vital and important for being frequently an exchange between living and dead. There are no hermetic seals between who I am as a Christian and the life of a believer in, say, twelfth century Iraq – any more than between myself and a believer in twenty-first-century Congo, Arkansas, or Vanuatu. I do not know, theologically speaking, where my debts begin and end. What any one believing life makes possible for others (and for which particular others) is not there for inspection. How my progress towards the specific and unique likeness of Christ that is my calling is assisted by any other Christian life is always going to be obscure.

…Despite the popular postmodernist talk about how we are ‘spoken by’ language rather than speaking it, we worry about our boundaries; we do not like having them unpatrolled in the way that a robust theology of Christ’s Body might suggest. But the truth is that, for anything resembling Orthodox Christian belief, any believer’s identity will be bound up with just this incalculable assortment of strangers and their various strangenesses.

Hence the Christian believer approaching the Christian past does so first in the consciousness that he or she is engaging with fellow participants in prayer and Eucharist, fellow readers of the same Scripture; people in whom the same activity is going on, the activity of sanctifying grace. This is not in itself the conclusion (they are so much like us that they must be the same really), but the implication of the Christian’s basic belief that we are called into a fellowship held together not by human bonds but by association with Christ. Particular bits of historical research may make it harder or easier to put flesh on this fundamental conviction, but the only thing that could simply unseat it is a refusal of the underlying theology of the Church to which we are committed by practicing the sacraments and reading the Bible. If you see Christianity simply as an enterprise if the human spirit within history, the challenge of understanding the past is going to be difficult, less radical. For the historian who has theological convictions, that challenge is to discern as last something of what is truly known of Christ in the agents of the past.

- Rowan Williams, Why Study the Past? 2005.