Preaching the Whole Gospel?

A rallying cry in the Reformed community is the place of the gospel in the sermon.  According to a widespread and conventional view in the Reformed
churches, a sermon is only properly called a sermon if its subject is the gospel.  Any passage of scripture preached on must be mined to find its oblique reference to Christ.  This led Nietzsche to cynically applaud Christians for their ability to find a cross in every piece of wood, and a resurrection in every cave.

But Luther was emphatic on this point, and when his parishioners asked him why we preached the gospel every single week, he responded that “I preach the gospel every week because every week you forget it.”

So mainstream Evangelical preachers like Rick Warren are criticized for “not preaching the gospel.”  I am not familiar enough with Warren’s sermons to comment on this point, though I plan to download a few from the website to listen to and hear for myself.  But I would not be surprised if I discover in them aspects of the gospel that my Calvinist brothers and sisters would not recognize as the gospel.

I (clearly) do not name myself as belonging to the Reformed stream.  My roots are equally in the Anabaptist tradition (the so-called Radical Reformation, though this can become confusing) and in Wesleyan thought.  And this is perhaps the point of the widest divergence between the Reformed traditions and other Christian streams: not free will vs. determinism, not individual vs. corporate election, but soteriology: the doctrine of salvation.  What does it mean to be saved, and what does that salvation consist of?

And on this point, I feel that Calvinists think of the gospel as both too much and too little.

Adding to the gospel

Scot McKnight and N.T. Wright have both argued from opposite contexts (one a neo-Anabaptist, who blogs out of Portland coffee shops, and the other an Anglican bishop who writes 1000-page tomes out of abbeys and anchorages in Canterbury) that contemporary Christian teaching has confused the gospel with the message of salvation.  The gospel, they have both concluded, is simply the message that Jesus has completed the Old Testament story of Israel, ending their exile and reestablishing the people of God around a new temple in himself.  It is the message of Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection, his enthronement as the Son of God, the rightful king of all the earth.  The message of salvation (“how we get saved”) follows from that, and that’s where discussions about justification, regeneration and imputation come in.  But those discussions are not the gospel; they follow the gospel.

Many of my Reformed friends say very explicitly that if someone does not believe in imputed righteousness, for instance, they do not believe the gospel, and I think that’s a category mistake.  Where is this gospel presented in Acts 2, when the church made three thousand converts?  Where is this gospel in 1 Cor 15, when Paul says, “By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you,” and then goes on to cite the word he preached, which amounts to saying that Jesus was dead, buried, resurrected and many people saw him?

So I am concerned that in some cases the gospel is being added to and weighed down, when we tie the message about Jesus with our beliefs about how the message of Jesus functions to reconcile us to God.

Yet subtracting from it?

And the deep irony is that in doing this, we are at the same time undercutting the scope of the gospel, which is not just about getting out of hell free.  The gospel is a message of cosmic importance.  It is not just about saving human souls, getting them safely off to heaven when they die.  It is about redeeming the whole creation, every particle of it, and sanctifying human life and (even) community, every aspect of it.  God doesn’t care only for the soul, but for the whole person.

Here I think a comparison of Left Behind and some statements from John Wesley is instructive.  I believe Left Behind is a work that could only emerge from a Reformed tradition (in this case sort of quasi-reformed, as both its authors are Southern Baptists).

The Left Behind books were extremely evangelistic, and present their salvation message repeatedly, beginning within the first four pages of the first book.  Here is their first and most representative account of what salvation means: “Saved people aren’t good people, just forgiven.”  Salvation here has only to do with forgiveness, not with being people who “live holy lives.”

John Wesley, on salvation: “By salvation I mean, not barely, according to the vulgar notion, the way it is popularly talked about, deliverance from hell, or going to heaven. But a present deliverance from sin, a restoration of the soul to its primitive health, its original purity, a recovery of the divine nature, the renewal of our souls. I mean that God actually changes us here to be ready for that future.”

Left Behind shows its Calvinist view of salvation particularly in who salvation is open to.  There are numbers and quotas.  In the sixth book of the series, we’re informed that less than 25% of the world was raptured, and the books stress that there are set limits of how many will convert during the seven year period between the rapture and the end of the world, for instance, among the ethnically Jewish, there will be 144,000, no more and no fewer.

Wesley, by contrast, believed that God empowered all to accept salvation, if they choose to turn to God.  He did not believe all would be saved, but believed all could be saved.  He believed “the love of God from which comes our salvation is free in all and free for all.”

But we can really see how Left Behind limits the scope of the gospel by asking what salvation does.  Is it just for the soul, or is it for all aspects of life?  What changes when someone is saved?  In Left Behind, it is primarily a change of status, being moved from one list to another.  Then, when you die, your soul goes to heaven instead of hell: one of the books is even titled “Soul Harvest.”  In another book, salvation is described like this: “Those who have trusted Christ have been written in the Lamb’s Book of Life, so that when they die physically they remain alive spiritually and are never blotted out.”  One of central themes of the Bible, resurrection, is not hinted at as part of what salvation.

For Wesley, on the other hand, God cares about human life as a whole, body and soul.  He wrote in a letter, “It will be a double blessing if you give yourself up to the Great Physician, that he may heal soul and body together. Unquestionably this is God’s design. He wants to give you, my dear Mrs. Knox, both inward and outward health.”  God cares not only about your soul, but about your body, mind, emotions and relationships.  There is no “health-and-wealth gospel” here, as Wesley realizes that not all things will be perfect, and  thatsuffering is part of the bargain (“take up your cross and follow me”).  Further, Wesley recognized that the gospel is for all of creation, including animals.  God raises all things up.

John Calvin actually did believe in the presence of animals in the afterlife.  He didn’t want to, but he was convinced that the way to read scripture was to take its plain meaning, and there is just too much talk of animals in the new creation to ignore.  So Calvin creatively posited that there would be animals in the afterlife, but that they would exist in a physical world on which humans would only gaze from heaven, like a kind of free-range zoo.  For Wesley, animals, the creation and humans were interrelated in such a way that God would raise them all together, as a redeemed whole.  And because God cares about the whole creation, so should we.

But my point is this: the neutered gospel of Left Behind is the logical conclusion of the way that the gospel is conflated with the message of salvation in Reformed circles.  Many Reformed Christians rise above their doctrine in the same way many atheists live good lives despite their nihilism.  But the gospel as a message of how to get saved is simply insufficient to the whole scope of the gospel message.

So what about our sermons?  Is it incumbent on us to make the message of Christ’s kingship the subject of every sermon?  Is there no room for sermons exploring the ramifications of that enthronement, sermons about the role of the church in the city, or in the nation?  Sermons about restoring relationships?  Granted that these all these must be shaped around the cross of Christ, but are they not subjects worth preaching about in their own right?

What do you think?

There Is Much Better News

In the aftermath of this very sad day, many in the Facebook community have shown great compassion and comfort to the Pearson family, as little Paxten breathed her last.  Much of the input has included the notion that Paxten is God’s newest angel.  Surely, this is good news.  Surely, this is comforting and reassuring.  God has not abandoned Paxten.

But there is much better news.

Paxten is not an angel.  Heaven forbid.  God’s plan for humans was never to make them into angels.  As humans, we are not incomplete – not beings who need to undergo a metamorphosis to achieve our full potential.  Humans, not angels, were created in the image of God.  And when God took on flesh, it was human flesh.

Of course, all of this is from the Christian perspective.  You can believe what seems reasonable and attractive to you, though I would argue that the traditional Christian view is better news than any challenging view of the afterlife.

In the traditional Christian view, Paxten has died and is resting with Jesus now, in a spiritual place of restoration and renewal.  On its own, this would be good news, and would be a comfort to Libby and Blake, and all others who mourn for their lost loved ones.  But this is only part of the Christian good news.  In the Christian story, Jesus came not to make death a little less unpleasant by offering rest afterward, but to undo death.  Christ’s resurrection is significant because it is the first of many.

Resurrection is not a shadowy, spiritual afterlife – it is the return to life, the undoing of death.  It is like the seed that was planted in the earth and bloomed into something both like the seed and entirely superior to what came before.  Paxten is resting with Jesus, and is also awaiting the completion of what Jesus consummated in the resurrection – the resurrection of all life and all creation.  The day when those who have died (the Bible says they are like those asleep) and those who are still alive (awake, in the Bible’s words) will be raised together to new life.  On that day, Libby, Blake and Paxten will be reunited, not as angels or disembodied spirits, but as people with the image of God restored in them completely – people free from cancers and pains, free from tears.

And the angels will look on with envy.

C. S. Lewis, a traditional Christian writer, summed up the biblical view of angels like this:

The angels have no senses; their experience is purely intellectual and spiritual. That is why we know something of God which they don’t. There are particular aspects of His love and joy which can be communicated to a created being only by sensuous experience. Something of God which the [angels] can never quite understand flows into us from the blue of sky, the taste of honey, the delicious embrace of water whether cold or hot, and even from sleep itself.

In life after the resurrection, these sensory experiences will remain, and Libby and Blake will be able to hold their little girl’s hand again, as Paxten leads them on her own two feet from one wondrous joy to another.  This is what the resurrection of Christ promises, and in the midst of much bad news, this is much better news.

Bono on Jesus

Bono often surprises me. Sometimes he surprises me by being humble, or being sincere, or being candid.  But here he surprised me by being well-read.  In an interview with Michka Assays (his usual interviewer for book-length projects), he said this:

Assayas: That’s a great idea, no denying it. Such great hope is wonderful, even though it’s close to lunacy, in my view. Christ has his rank among the world’s great thinkers. But Son of God, isn’t that farfetched?

Bono: No, it’s not farfetched to me. Look, the secular response to the Christ story always goes like this: he was a great prophet, obviously a very interesting guy, had a lot to say along the lines of other great prophets, be they Elijah, Muhammad, Buddha, or Confucius. But actually Christ doesn’t allow you that. He doesn’t let you off that hook. Christ says: No. I’m not saying I’m a teacher, don’t call me teacher. I’m not saying I’m a prophet. I’m saying: “I’m the Messiah.” I’m saying: “I am God incarnate.” And people say: No, no, please, just be a prophet. A prophet, we can take. You’re a bit eccentric. We’ve had John the Baptist eating locusts and wild honey, we can handle that. But don’t mention the “M” word! Because, you know, we’re gonna have to crucify you. And he goes: No, no. I know you’re expecting me to come back with an army, and set you free from these creeps, but actually I am the Messiah. At this point, everyone starts staring at their shoes, and says: Oh, my God, he’s gonna keep saying this. So what you’re left with is: either Christ was who He said He was the Messiah or a complete nutcase. I mean, we’re talking nutcase on the level of Charles Manson. This man was like some of the people we’ve been talking about earlier. This man was strapping himself to a bomb, and had “King of the Jews” on his head, and, as they were putting him up on the Cross, was going: OK, martyrdom, here we go. Bring on the pain! I can take it. I’m not joking here. The idea that the entire course of civilization for over half of the globe could have its fate changed and turned upside-down by a nutcase, for me, that’s farfetched.

Bono is clearly channeling C. S. Lewis here.  Some of Lewis’s own structure remains intact.  “But actually Christ doesn’t allow you that” is not so far off from Lewis’s “He hasn’t left us that option.”  But Bono has also made the old argument clearly his own, in the same way I heard him give a vulgar paraphrase of the Exodus at the G8 Summit in 2005.  Bono believes what he’s preaching.

No Pacifist Utopias

According to a common understanding, Christian pacifists are pacifist in part because the early church was pacifist before Constantine became the Emperor of Rome, at which point the church sold out on their pacifism and anti-government attitudes in exchange for a cozy spot as the official religion of the Roman Empire.  I know that in many cases this common understanding is true.  Many Christians are pacifist and hold to exactly this reading of history.

But if we read carefully John Howard Yoder’s argument for a Christian commitment to nonviolence, we will find that he, at least,  does not rely on such an account at all.  “Constantinianism,” as Yoder uses the term, does not depend on Constantine, but uses him as a symbol of the marriage between church and Empire.  According to Yoder, this marriage “began before A.D. 200 and took over 200 years; the use of his name does not mean an evaluation of his person or work.”  Any account of Constantinianism that begins before 200 A.D. doesn’t allow much time for a pacifist utopia to flower and then decay.

It is true that we find very strong pacifist writings among the church fathers.  But there’s a huge absence of information surrounding the early church, and those polemical pacifist writings were written against something present in the life of the church.  Some of the warnings against Christians serving as soldiers were clearly being aimed against Christians who were in fact serving as soldiers.  Even pacifist historians like Roland Bainton make it clear that the church was, at best, inconsistently committed to a nonviolent posture.

But likewise, Yoder argues that non-Constantinian strains continued to exist in the institutional church;  in the heights of the Middle Ages and through the Crusades you can find strains of pacifist resistance.  In his recently published Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution, he says

Constantine did not change everything, and later reformations did not change everything. So we tip our hat at this point to a pacifist undercurrent in medieval culture, about which we can know little except that it existed. The medieval church remained largely pacifist. It is a fact that caesars and princes and their soldiers were let into the church, and that an ethic developed to permit them to be in the church despite their killing. This change did not mean that people saw the new ethic as normative for the rest of the Christians or believed that it set aside the earlier position. For most people, just war and canonical provisions allowing soldiers access to the church and the sacraments were concessions and exceptions, not the rule.

The claim that “the medieval church remained largely pacifist” might seem a bit exaggerated.  So what did Yoder mean by this?  He sets out six basic dimensions:

1. The Peace of God protected specific places or persons (e.g. on church property, non-combatants named in 4, below).
2. The Truce of God forbade violent hostility at certain times (e.g. holy days, Sundays).
3. Bishops engaged in diplomatic intervention to mediate or arbitrate conflicts.
4. Clergy, religious, penitents, pilgrims and peasants had exemption from military obligation; it was linked, in the case of the clergy and religious, to total prohibitions against fighting.
5. The right of sanctuary was observed.
6. Peace awareness had a liturgical undergirding; there were, for example, masses for peace, celebrations when wars ended, and legends that developed around peacemaking saints.
7. Nonviolent – usually spiritual – sanctions dissuaded people from going to war, or from giving offense so as to promote war; these included excommunication and fostering the moral power of higher nobles.

Yoder readily admits that this was “the normative teaching of the church, which was seldom fully respected.”  Yoder goes on to describe the several militant orders that arose within the medieval church (Knights Templar, etc), but states that

this worldly church – the princely bishop, and the militant soldier-priest – remained the exception.  The main stream of canon law continued to say that a soldier could not be a priest or a priest a soldier.  A priest who went to the battlefield had to go as a confessor (chaplain), and he could not have a lethal weapon for self-defense…. Shedding blood disqualified a priest for ordination… People who have shed blood, even in a just war, do not have access to the Eucharist without a period of penance.

Yoder summarizes, “So we have several strands of rejection of war: the stories of saints, holy times and places, clergy exemption, and the polluting effect of shedding blood.”  And of course there were the movements within the church that made rejection of violence a focal point: Franciscans, the Brethren of the Common Life and other such groups.

What are are left with is an intelligent, mature, robust church history, in which peace concerns didn’t move from central to non-existent at one exultant instant, but rather where general fidelity to the radical counter-cultural lifestyle of the gospel was constantly being eroded by “realist” political concerns.  This explains why Yoder sees “Radical Reformation” not as a moment in history, but as a posture that attentive Christians must always assume as part of a church amidst Constantinianism in every age.

John Piper on Alcohol: “Drinking can be okay.”

John Piper has a whole line of short videos on the desiringGod account at youtube.  I’ve blogged before about my frustrations with John Piper, whom I admire and disagree with in equal measure.  Watching him express his views on alcohol in this short, pastoral forum has made it clearer to me how phrase my frustration.

I have difficulty with John Piper the theologian.  But I admire, respect and want to continue to learn from John Piper the pastor.

Theologically, Piper and I step all over each other.  We may not agree on 1 in 10 non-essential matters.  But pastorally his drive, his concern and his very obvious love for his parishioners is exactly where they need to be, and stand as a challenge to both pastors and theologians church-wide.

You can see it in how he addresses the subject of Christians and drinking.  I happen to agree with him here, both that alcohol can be a gift from God (“We should thank God for beer and burgundy by not drinking too much” – Chesterton), and that too cavalierly expressing that gift can be damaging to others and to our own witness.

The comments page for this video show mostly Christians who think Piper is being too charitable here.  They make the standard Baptist arguments about alcohol content in our culture versus first century Palestine, about when drinking becomes drunkennees (“Would it be okay to smoke just one joint?”) and so forth.

But Piper focuses the issue away from ridiculous line-drawing and toward “a pattern of life.”  His pastoral concern is evident, and he speaks with earned credibility to the damage alcohol does to individuals and communities.  From Piper’s perspective, we’re wrong when he make alcohol out to be evil, and we’re equally wrong when we act like alcohol is no big deal.

What do you think?  Is Piper offering the best perspective on the issue?  What would you add or modify?

Augustine, Martyrdom and Nonviolence

Now we must follow in the footsteps of the martyrs by imitating them; otherwise our celebration of their feast days is meaningless.

This is among the first words in Augustine’s sermon on the feast of St. Laurence,one of his theologically and politically densest sermons.  The strand of thought that ties together the whole sermon, which moves from a meditation on the nature of life to an exhortation to exercise nonviolence in our personal lives (while supporting the violence of the God-ordained magistrate), is the contrast between lovers of this life and lovers of the next one.

Augustine’s encapsulation of this life is poetic and prescient, would not feel out of place in Pensees or Ecclesiastes, and deserves to be quoted in full.

Surely I needn’t remind you how short life is. We know from experience that it is full of suffering and complaining. It is beset by temptations, it is filled with fears. It burns with passions; it is at the mercy of change. It hurts in misfortunes; with success, it grows arrogant. It greets profit with unrestrained joy; and is tormented by losses. Even while someone is rejoicing over his profits, he is trembling in case he loses what he has already got, and has that to complain about. Though before he ever got it, of course, he wasn’t complaining. In short, life is genuine unhappiness, or deceptive happiness.

Augustine continues in this vein, and finally expresses puzzlement.  How is it that this unpleasant life has so many and such ardent lovers?  “There are so many lovers of this present life,” Augustine exclaims, “Temporary, brief, unpleasant, yet it has so many lovers!”  Augustine compares the clinging love of this life with the love of a “bad woman.”

What have you fallen in love with? What do you love that’s drawn you to it? You’re a corrupt lover of a bad woman: what are you going to say to her? How are you going to address this life of yours that you’ve fallen in love with? Talk her up, chat her up, win her over if you can. What are you going to say? “Your beauty has reduced me to this state of rags?” She shouts back, “But I’m ugly. Are you in love with me?” I can hear her shouting, “I’m a hard woman, and you’re embracing me?” She’s shouting again, “I’m the flight type – are you going to try and chase me?” Listen to the woman you love answering you: “I won’t stop with you; if I do spend a time with you, I won’t stay. I could strip you of your clothes – but I couldn’t make you happy.”

And yet this life has its lovers.  Augustine holds up the example of the martyr to show us that another love is possible: love of the next life.  Augustine gives several illustrations of why this is a sensible move to make.  He describes how some lovers of this life will pay their entire fortunes to live a little longer, and in the end are left without their fortunes and have only postponed death.  Why not instead give your fortune to Christ, who will keep both your fortune and your life to await you in the next life?

The martyrs possess this kind of wisdom, and unlike the dead who lost the life they love, now possess the lives they love, and “will possess it even more fully at the resurrection of the dead. And so, by suffering as much as they did, have paved the way for us.”

But Augustine hits an interesting wall here, because in recounting the martyrdom of St. Laurence, he observes that he was killed by the Roman state.  This leads Augustine to make two points, held together in a sort of dialectical tension.

The first point is that Christians must follow the martyr in not resisting evil men.  This passage mirrors or even pre-figures many writers who argue for Christian nonviolence, and is worth quoting at length.

If you are able, and are not bad yourself, then pray for the evil person to become good. Why do you treat those who are bad violently? You reply, ‘Because they are bad.’ As soon as you treat them violently, you add yourself to them. Let me give you some advice. There’s some evil person you despise? Well, don’t let there be two. You criticize him, and then join him? You swell the ranks you’re condemning. Are you trying to overcome evil with evil? To overcome hatred with hatred? Then there will be two lots of hatred, and both will need to be overcome. Can’t you hear the advice your Lord gave through the apostle Paul, Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Now maybe he is worse than you; but you are still bad, and so there will be two of you who are bad. I’d rather that at least one were good. And in the end violence leads to death. Then what about after his death, when the one bad man can’t be touched by punishment any longer, while the other is taken up alone with his hatred? But this is not civil order; this is madness.

Augustine then moves from Romans 12, which he quoted above, to Romans 13, observing that punishment and the upholding of civil order is appointed not to individual Christians, but to the state.  “Bad men have their own judges and authorities,” he says, “He does not wield the sword without reason. He is an avenger of [God’s] anger, but on the evil-doer.  If you do evil, then fear him.  Do you want to live without fear of the authorities? Do good, and you will have praise from them.”

But here is where Augustine is led into a position in tension with the one above.  St. Laurence did good, and was killed by the authorities.  And his answer, while unsatisfactory in itself, leads us in a promising direction.  His answer amounts to a word game.  He says,

The apostle did not say, ‘Do good and the authorities themselves will praise you’….If the authorities are just you will have praise from them in that they themselves will praise you. But if they are unjust, if you die for your faith, for justice and for truth, you will have praise from them even though they treat you violently.  You will have praise from them, even though they don’t praise you themselves.  They provide the opportunity for you to be praised… if the holy martyr Laurence hadn’t had [such] praise from the authorities, we wouldn’t be honoring him today.

I find this unsatisfactory because it holds an almost childishness overliteralness.  Who knows if this trick would work in Paul’s Greek anyway?  But for all that, the fundamental point is exactly right.  When an unjust authority persecutes Christians who are living holy lives, that is itself a form of praise. It means we’re doing something right.  When Christians living holy lives are put to death, the authorities are exposing both themselves and the church for what they are.

And yet Augustine famously endorses Christians to act as judges, executioners, governors and soldiers.  In these capacities (and only these) the Christian can act in judgment and punishment of others.  But even here Augustine is problematic for modern liberalism, as he observes that as a bishop of the church “when we find a pagan in authority, we treat him as we ought to treat a pagan, when we find a Christian in authority we treat him as a Christian.”  In other words, as a bishop he has spiritual authority over Christians, regardless of their position.  Indeed, in letters Augustine often pulls rank on Christians in government, illustrating a complicated church-state relationship.

Concluding Thoughts

Martyrdom is politically significant. The martyr shows us another way to live, in  faithful confrontation with the world. Augustine’s political theology, which I find problematic at points, gives us resources to draw on in a critique of modern liberal democracy. Among other things, it calls into question the distinction that Kennedy, and more recently Mitt Romney, stress between a spiritual Christian identity and a political, non-sectarian one.