California Bound

In the midst of our busy packing up and moving, I haven’t had the chance to announce this on my blog yet, but Esther and I are moving to Sierra Madre, California, where I will be serving as the youth pastor as Sierra Madre Congregational Church.  We are amazed at God’s kindness to us, as we feel that this is the perfect thing for us in many different ways.  We are in the midst of driving across the country now, and will be very busy during our first few weeks there, so I won’t be able to post as much over the next few weeks.  God has been very faithful and very gracious to us, down to the tiny details.

We’re driving through Oklahoma now, stopped for lunch at Panera.  Esther is a great travel companion, and we’ve enjoyed the chance to talk and think together about life.  Its also been super fun to see friends and family along the way, who are kindly letting us stay with them.  My right ankle is tired because our truck doesn’t have cruise control, and since its been rainy most of the time I have sharpened my skills at choosing the right windshield wiper speed.  Other than that, its been a pretty normal drive.  Thanks for checking in.  Back to the interstate now….

Read Full Post »

Justification (4): True Righteousness

When we were in Rehoboth I read Martin Luther’s Concerning Christian Liberty as part of my study on justification.  As I read I kept noticing two themes:

First, it is justifying faith apart from works that yields true obedience, because only justifying faith results in grateful love to God, which is the spring of all true obedience.  Justification by works ultimately says, “I will obey God in order to get something.”  But that is not love.  That is not true obedience.  Second, it is justifying faith apart from works yields glory to God, because it gives credit to God for both the commandments and the fulfillment.  Justification by works says, “God gave the commandments, I gave the fulfillment.”  But justification by faith says, “God gave me them both.”  In the latter, God does more, and God is therefore more honored.

But it was when I read this paragraph that I realized that these two aspects of justifying faith – its resultant genuine righteousness and its God directed nature – are connected:

“The First Commandment, which says, ‘Thou shalt worship one God only, is fulfilled by faith alone.  If you were nothing but good works from the soles of your feet to the crown of your head, you would not be worshiping God, nor fulfilling the First Commandment, since its impossible to worship God without ascribing to Him the glory of truth and of universal goodness, as it ought in truth to be ascribed. Now this is not done by works, but only by faith of heart. It is not by working, but by believing, that we glorify God, and confess Him to be true.  On this ground faith alone is the righteousness of a Christian man, and the fulfilling of all the commandments.”

My take away: I am only pleasing, honoring, and obeying God as I ought when I give him 100% of the credit for it.  If I obeyed the law perfectly, but out of my own strength and for my own justification, I would not have attained true righteousness, for not giving God all the glory and credit is itself unrighteous.  Its only when I realize I have no righteousness to give that I can start to find real righteousness.

As the newer worship song “All I Have is Christ” puts it:

Now Lord I would be Yours alone, and live so all might see

The strength to follow Your commands could never come from me

Oh, Father, use my ransomed life in any way You choose

And let my song forever be, my only boast is You

Read Full Post »

Comfort in Commitment

Today I was reading Paul’s farewell speech to the Ephesian elders in Acts 20, and was comforted by Paul’s statement in verse 24 that “I consider my life worth nothing to me, if only I may finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me—the task of testifying to the gospel of God’s grace.”

To count one’s life as nothing if only to be faithful to Christ is a huge challenge.  But today it also struck me as a comfort.  When I surrender to Christ afresh, I am liberated from the bondage of other competing goals – being right, looking good, winning an argument, settling scores, etc.  To the extent that faithfulness to Christ is my life’s only final purpose, then failings in these things lose their sting, and become sanctifying influences to the death of my indwelling sin.  I am liberated to put my ultimate hope in the one thing that can never, and will never, fail.  In commitment there is comfort, and freedom, and hope.

Read Full Post »

Cleverness and Christ

This is short and simple, but man – something to think about every single time you preach:

“No man can bear witness to Christ and to himself at the same time.  No man can give the impression that he himself is clever and that Christ is mighty to save.”

James Denney, a Scottish pastor, quoted in John Stott, Between Two Worlds: The Challenge of Preaching Today (Eerdmans, 1982), 325.

Read Full Post »

Justification (3): Imputation versus Accusation

According to my understanding of classic reformed theology, justification consists of two aspects, one negative and one positive.  Negatively, justification consists in the forgiveness of our sins and canceling of our guilt before God: “[God has] forgiven us all our trespasses by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross (Colossians 2:13-14).  Positively, justification consists of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to our account so that we are declared righteous in God’s sight.  “the words ‘it was counted to him’ were not written for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord” (Romans 4:23-24).  In other words, justification doesn’t just make not bad in God’s verdict.  It makes us good. It does not merely bring us up from the negatives to zero.  It puts us in the positives.  Its as if we have this massive debt to God, and Christ not only pays our debt, but then he puts all of his own money into the bank.

I do believe that the imputation of alien righteousness onto the believer’s account is taught in Scripture.  I know its a much disputed doctrine these days, and this post is not intended as a thorough defense of it.  I see it hinted at in the Old Testament (e.g., Genesis 15:6, Jeremiah 23/33), and then more fully explicated in the New Testament, and especially Paul’s epistles.  But as one who has struggled, as I believe I have, with the reality of demonic accusation, I find the vision of Zechariah 3 one of the most helpful pictures of justification in the Bible.  Joshua the high priest appears before the angel of the Lord, with Satan at his right hand to accuse him.  But the Lord rebukes Satan, claiming that Joshua is a “brand plucked from the fire.”  And then – and this is what I love – Joshua is not merely stripped of his filthy rags but he is clothed with clean garments.  It seems to me that embedded in this narrative is the presentation of justification, and in particular the imputation aspect of justification, as a foil and contrast to accusation.  Satan’s accusations against Joshua are rebuffed by Joshua’s clean garments.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about over the last year or so is the need for fighting accusatory thoughts with the doctrine of justification.  Everybody has had accusatory thoughts pop into their head before.  Thoughts like: “you don’t have what it takes;” “nobody respects you;” “God cannot forgive that sin;” “you’re a nobody.”  And on and on.  Sometimes these come from other people.  Sometimes they come from the flesh.  Sometimes they come from our imagination.  But sometimes, I believe, they come from demons.  Satan is called “the accuser of our brothers, who accuses them before God day and night” (Revelation 12:10).  Satan accuses just as he tempts; he is a beast as well as a harlot; he lures and flatters us, but he also punches us in the face.

Victims of verbal abuse no how psychologically damaging constant accusations can be.  No matter how weird or bizarre the claims, if you hear it often enough, and don’t have a counter claim to take refuge in, you start to believe it.  It gets a hold over you.

I am so thankful for the liberating power of the doctrine of justification.  No accusation can stand before it. Esther and I have been talking lately about how much true growth in holiness consists of drowning out the voices of accusation with the voice of justification, and the voice of imputation.  When we feel accusations from the enemy, we need to preach the truths of the gospel to ourselves – our forgiveness, our adoption, the canceling of our debt, our being clothed in the rich garments of the righteousness of Christ, etc.  Sometimes I will take a particular aspect of the gospel, such as my adoption as God’s son, and not go out into my day until its thoroughly in my head and heart.  What a difference it makes!  All the difference in the world.  When in the deepest places of our hearts the voice we are hearing is not the accusations of the enemy, but the good news that we are righteous in God’s sight on account of Christ – I am finding that that is where hope is, and that is where all true obedience is.

Read Full Post »

Joad and Lewis on Natural Evil

About a year and half ago I stumbled across C.S. Lewis’ treatment of the problem of the suffering of animals before the human fall in chapter 9 of his The Problem of Pain, titled “On Animal Pain.”  In it he suggests (as he also suggests in Miracles) that the fall of angels may have corrupted the natural world prior to the creation of humanity.  I’ve been helped by this possibility.  I know that for some, this whole issue is a strange one to even think about, but for me, the problem of natural evil is a serious one that calls for some kind of response.  Lewis has lessened the intellectual tension for me a lot.  Nevertheless, I’d always wished Lewis had gone into greater detail concerning his meaning here, and in particular fleshed out the mechanism by which he thinks the rebellion of Lucifer and his cohorts could have affected nature.

I was therefore very interested to learn in making my way through God in the Dock that Lewis has fleshed out his views on this subject more thoroughly, in essay #20 of the first section, called “The Pains of Animals: A Problem in Theology.”  In it C.E.M. Joad, head of the Philosophy department at the University of London, responds to the 9th chapter of The Problem of Pain.  Joad finds Augustine’s old free-will theodicy satisfactory for the general problem of evil, but is not satisfied with Lewis’ theodicy for natural evil.  It is a very courteous and intelligent response.  Lewis’ response, in turn, makes many helpful points, but three in particular that struck me.

First, Lewis stresses the extent to which this chapter of his book was “guesswork” (his term), and argues that speculations about the question can only be helpful once we have admitted that (1) our knowledge is too limited for a definitive judgment for or against theism on the basis of natural evil, and (2) there are numerous possibilities for how this problem may be solved.  In particular, Lewis stresses the possibility that animal suffering may appear to be suffering when it is not; or, more probably, may appear to be far worse suffering than it actually is.  But the important point here is that the “guesses” are only proper once we have first settled the question of God’s existence and goodness on the basis of what we have more certain knowledge of, namely, his revelation to humanity in Christ.  He writes:

No man in his senses is going to start building up a theodicy with speculations about the minds of beasts as his foundation.  Such speculations are in place only, as I said, to open the imagination to possibilities and to deepen and confirm our inevitable agnosticism about the reality, and only after the ways of God to Man have ceased to seem unjustifiable.  We do not know the answer: these speculations were guesses as to what it might be.  What really matters is the argument that there must be an answer (italics his).

Lewis goes on to suggest that God’s revealed goodness in our lives is a sufficient reason for trusting that there is an answer to this question.  This is a very reasonable approach: moving from what we do know to what we don’t know.

Second, Lewis denies a common caricature of his suggestion that Satan’s rebellion may have corrupted creation, namely that the mechanism of corruption was temptation:

If Dr. Joad thinks I pictured Satan tempting monkeys, I am myself to blame for using the word “encouraged.”  I apologize for the ambiguity.  In fact, I had not supposed that “temptation” (that is, solicitation of the will) was the only mode in which the Devil could corrupt or impair.  It is probably not the only mode in which he can impair even human beings; when Our Lord spoke of the deformed woman as one “bound by Satan” [Luke 13:16], I presume He did not mean that she had been tempted into deformity.  Moral corruption is not the only kind of corruption.  But the word corruption was perhaps ill-chosen and invited misunderstanding.  Distortion would have been safer (italics his).

Some people find the notion that Satan’s rebellion may have had effects on nature incredible, but I don’t see it as very different from what Christians have always believed about the human fall, namely, that evil corrupts creation.  The only difference is the agent (angels rather than humans) and the timing.

Finally, on a more basic level, Lewis argues that the very strength of our judgment against natural evil itself suggests theism:

I know that there are moments when the incessant continuity and desperate helplessness of what at least seems to be animal suffering make every argument for theism sound hollow ….  Then the old indignation, the old pity arises.  But how strangely ambivalent this feeling is …. if I regard this pity and indignation simply as subjective experiences of my own with no validity beyond their strength at the moment (which next moment will change), I can hardly use them as standards whereby the arraign the creation.  On the contrary, they become strong as arguments against God just in so far as I take them to be transcendent illumination to which creation must conform or be condemned.  They are arguments against God only if they are themselves the voice of God.”

In other words: the problem of natural evil is an argument against God only to the extent that it is an argument for God.  If the vastness of natural evil were to destroy the possibility of God in our minds, it would simultaneously destroy the possibility of us calling it natural evil.

Read Full Post »

Religion Without Dogma?

I am listening to C.S. Lewis’ God in the Dock this week and last, and I have to say that his essay “Religion without Dogma?” in the first section is fantastic.  His apologetics at their finest.  He gently but relentlessly tears to shreds an essay called “The Grounds of Modern Agnosticism” by Professor Price (whoever that is).  People who have never read any C.S. Lewis could read it as miniature representative of his apologetic approach as a whole, as in in books like Miracles and The Problem of Pain; those who are like myself Lewis fanatics like me will still find that it makes some unique points (or at least points I don’t recall him making in his books).  Is there anybody out there like C.S. Lewis?  What a combination of humility, literary skill, and spiritual insight, all jammed into one person.

Read Full Post »

Robert Letham’s The Holy Trinity

I’ve finished Robert Letham’s The Holy Trinity (or at least the parts of it I wanted to read), and I have to say its a fantastic book.  Some thoughts:

1) One of the best things about studying the doctrine of the Trinity, in my opinion, is that it forces you to engage with the whole Christian tradition, both East and West – not just Protestantism, or Protestantism + a select few Roman Catholics.  Letham does a great job at this.  He traces the development of the Trinity in the West through Tertullian, Athanasius, Augustine, Richard of St. Victor, Anselm, and Aquinas, and then parallels it with the development of the Trinity in the East through Origen, the Cappadocians, John of Damascus, Photius, Gregory Palamas, and a few more recent Eastern thinkers.  He also devotes a chapter to the filioque split, and throughout analyzes what we can learn from both traditions (East + West).  The result is that by reading the book you learn a lot about the Eastern Orthodox church as well as Trinitarian doctrine.

2) This book increased my respect for the technical language that has arisen in church history for fleshing out the doctrine of the Trinity.  Words like homoousios and hypostasis, perichoresis and procession, begottenness and being, spiration and substance, can sometimes initially seem more philosophical than biblical.  In the past I’ve sometimes wondered whether they are too abstract and speculative to be helpful.  Learning about the battles fought over these words, the issues at stake in them, and the arguments underlying them has put me in a position, if not always to understand them, at least to respect them.  For one thing, the church was forced into more technical language in order to refute heresies.  And for another, I’m convinced that such terms really do accurately convey truths about God in his eternal, triune being.  All this increases my sense of how dependent we are on the efforts of earlier Christians in our understanding of the Trinity, my appreciation of the depth and nuance of ancient Christian thought, and my desire to spend more time studying in the area of historical theology.

3) An interesting question that arises several times throughout the book is, could the Father or the Spirit have become incarnate, or only the Son?  Anselm and Thomas Torrance have strange arguments for an answer of “no.”  I have no idea what the answer is to this, but I think its an interesting question.

4) Another question I am asking: to what extent can appealing to the “divine essence” or “divine nature” or “Godhead” smuggle in a “hidden fourth,” something in God other than Father, Son, and Spirit?  In Scripture we do not meet a divine essence, but rather the One God who is who He is as Father, Son, and Spirit.  Of course, not all references “divine essence” or “divine nature” or “Godhead” imply an impersonal fourth, but I wonder if there is a danger here.  We must be wary against leaving the impression that there is anything “left over” after the three persons.

“The Trinity is not a further specification of a more determinative reality called god, because there is no more determinative reality than the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”   -Stanley Hauwerwas, With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology (Brazos, 2001), 15.

“Even Godhead exists only in and with the existence of Father, Son and Holy Ghost …. Only the One who is God has Godhead.”   -Karl Barth, quoted in Letham, The Holy Trinity, p. 283

5) Though the doctrine of the Trinity is extremely difficult, and there are many errors we can fall into on all sides, reading this book increased my sense of how much this doctrine is worth the difficulties and risks.  As Augustine put it, “in no other subject is error more dangerous, or inquiry more laborious, or the discovery of truth more profitable” (quoted on p. 2 of Letham).  The Trinity is at the heart of the Christian faith and the heart of our conception of God, with significant implications for the rest of Christian theology.  It seems to me that we are really missing out when we don’t think of this doctrine as anything more than a mathematical conundrum, to be resolved when we get to heaven.  I think the doctrine of the Trinity should influence our prayer, our worship, our devotion, and even (I think) our apologetics.  Something so gloriously and so basically true cannot be irrelevant.

Read Full Post »

Its Better to Repent

Repenting can be painful.  Self-deception is always easier than staring the undisguised, unexcused ugliness of your sin in the face, completely owning up to it, genuinely hating it, and actually turning from it.  But C.S. Lewis helped me see to today how the alternative is much more painful in the long run:

“Does Christianity encourage morbid introspection?  The alternative is much more morbid.  Those who do not think about their own sins make up for it by thinking incessantly about the sins of others.  It is healthier to think of one’s own.  It is the reverse of morbid.  It is not even, in the long run, very gloomy.  A series attempt to repent and really to know one’s own sins is in the long run a lightening and relieving process.  Of course, there is bound to be a first dismay and often terror and later great pain, yet that is much less in the long run than the anguish of a mass of unrepented and unexamined sins, lurking in the background of our minds.  It is the difference between the pain of the tooth about which you should go to the dentist, and the simple straight-forward pain which you know is getting less and less every moment when you have had the tooth out.”

C.S. Lewis, “Miserable Offenders,” published in God in the Dock, in The Collected Works of C.S. Lewis (Eerdmans, 1996), p. 384.

Read Full Post »

Food for Thought

“If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did. If our churches aren’t appealing to younger brothers, they must be more full of elder brothers than we’d like to think.”

-Tim Keller, Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith (Dutton, 2008), 15-16.

Read Full Post »