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St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church Service on July 9,202

Martin Luther: A ‘Mighty Fortress’

MARTIN LUTHER:  A ‘MIGHTY FORTRESS’

 

I: — It is March 1545.  Luther has eleven months to live.  He isn’t terminally ill.  He has, however, been convicted of high treason, a capital offence.  Anyone assisting him will also be deemed treasonous and, if caught, executed.  Condemned by the pope as a heretic since 1520, he has been an outlaw of the Holy Roman Empire since 1521.  Anyone who assassinates him will be rewarded. He can never forget that life is short and death is sure.  Now he is reviewing his vast written output, fine-tuning theological expositions that have convulsed Europe, infuriated church authorities, provoked academic debate, and above all comforted millions as they found themselves newly assured that the arms of the crucified Saviour held them securely in a grip on them that would always be stronger than their grip on him.

At this time – March 1545 – Luther is revisiting the complete edition of his Latin writings.  While his Latin writings span decades, the preface to them is new, and one of the last items he will pen.  Listen to him as he takes us back to an earlier moment in his life and theological career:

I had indeed been captivated with an extraordinary ardor for understanding Paul in the Epistle to the Romans….a single word in chapter 1 [:17], ‘In it the righteousness of God is revealed’ …had stood in my way.  For I hated that word ‘righteousness of God,’ which, according to the use and custom of all the teachers, I had been taught to understand philosophically regarding the formal or active righteousness, as they called it, with which God is righteous and punishes sinners…. I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners, and secretly…I was angry with God, … the gospel threatening us with his righteousness and wrath…..Thus I raged with a fierce and troubled conscience.

At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words,… ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live.’   There I began to understand that the righteousness of God,… that by which the righteous lives, is a gift of God, namely faith…. Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.  There a totally other face of the entire Scripture showed itself to me…. Thereupon … I also found in other terms an analogy, as, the work of God, that is, what God does in us, the power of God, with which he makes us strong, the wisdom of God, with which he makes us wise….[1]

 

What had been Luther’s experience prior to this moment when the righteousness of God, so far from being that gift of God, owned in faith, which renders sinners rightly related to him, had instead been unrelieved condemnation that God, righteous in himself, visited upon hopelessly guilty sinners forever unrighteous in themselves?

 

II: — Luther’s experience, circumstantially his alone, inwardly appeared no different from the experience of humankind.  For instance, death looms for everyone.  One hundred-and-fifty years before Luther’s era, the Black Death (bubonic plague) had carried off 40%-45% of Europe.  Three of Luther’s friends had recently succumbed to a fresh outbreak.  Only days ago one of his best friends died suddenly.  Hunting one day with a companion, Luther accidentally fell on his dagger, severing an artery.  He pressed his hand in his groin to stem the haemorrhage while his companion procured help, aware that he had come within a hair’s breadth of death.

Later, when Luther was walking near the town of Stotternheim, a thunderstorm overtook him.  A lightning-bolt’s near-miss found him exclaiming, “St. Anne (she was the patron saint of miners, and Luther’s father was a mine-owner), help me.  I will become a monk.”

In July 1505 Luther entered the Augustinian monastery in Erfurt.  Monastic life appeared to agree with him, at least initially.  Looking back, twenty years later, on this period of his life, Luther smiled at the spiritual self-confidence he and others enjoyed at that time: “The greatest holiness one could imagine drew us into the cloister…we considered ourselves holy from head to toe.”[2]  Soon he found himself immersed in the study of Scripture and church doctrine.  Assigned to probe the academic question, ‘How does one find a gracious God?’, the exercise quickly became a personal preoccupation whose anxiety no mediaeval discussion could relieve.

Ordained to the priesthood in 1507, Luther continued his work in Scripture.  (Gordon Rupp, Cambridge University historian and a Methodist scholar of Luther, maintains that if Luther were a candidate at a university today he would be hired as Professor of Hebrew Language and Literature.)  As a Hebraist Luther quarried in the book of Psalms, initially; unlike many contemporary Christians, he found the gospel on every page.  Listen to him as he exulted as early as 1515 in Psalm 119, whose 147th verse exclaims, “I came before the dawn and I cried, because I very much hoped in your words.”  Now lit up by this passage Luther enthused, “Indeed I come before the dawn…because you, God, promised to forgive me…. I come early and cry because I have hoped in your words.  Your mercy, the mercy of a God who promises, has made me bold to pray out of season, as it were, before I have any merits.”[3]

At the same time, Luther’s schooling in Renaissance Humanism at Erfurt University (the pre-eminent locus of humanist scholarship in Germany), contributed to his nascent theological formation and remained a major ingredient in his theological understanding (although less widely recognized than the humanist contribution of other Reformers such as Zwingli and Melanchthon and Calvin).  “I am convinced”, wrote Luther as early 1523, “that without humanist studies untainted theology cannot exist, and that has proved true…. There has never been a great revolution of God’s word unless God has first prepared the way by the rise and flourishing of languages and learning.”[4]  In addition, his exposure to humanism heightened his distaste for theological speculation and rendered him averse to any theological articulation that assumed an Aristotelian underlay.  For Luther was convinced that Aristotle, the dominant philosopher the mediaeval church had co-opted; Aristotle had obscured and denatured the gospel for centuries.

In 1510 the Augustinian order sent Luther to Rome.  He walked (1500 kms.), every step heightening his anticipation of the glories that awaited him in the city.  Arriving in Rome, he was disillusioned by the ingloriousness that met him everywhere: the shabbiness of the environs, the poverty of the people, and not least, the throngs of prostitutes.  Still, he managed to ascend the Scala Sancta, the sacred staircase, repeating the Lord’s Prayer on each step.  Told that such an undertaking would earn heavenly bliss for anyone the religious devotee named, he whiffed superstition.  He walked home, having completed the only trip outside Germany he was to make.

Notwithstanding the theological misgivings his trip to Rome had aroused, Luther remained fixed in a theological meritocracy; namely, God accepts those whose goodness merits their acceptance; or at least God accepts those whose confession of sin is equal to the nature, depth and scope of their sin.  Luther, profounder than most, knew he could confess only the sin he was aware of, and even then, would never grasp sin’s enormity to God.  He was inconsolable not because he was psychologically bizarre but because he was spiritually perceptive.

Then how did Luther escape the cyclical trap of sin, misery, and condemnation before God?

 

III: — The way out, as mentioned earlier, was delivered to him through his study of the Psalms.  He began lecturing on the Psalter in 1513.  He would steep himself in it for the rest of his life.  In it he found the gospel everywhere.  Seeds were sown in his Psalms-studies that would bear fruit abundantly ever after.  In no time Luther heard and rejoiced in the throb of that bass note which reverberates throughout the Bible and establishes the rhythm of the Christian life; namely, the truth and reality (not the mere idea) that what God declares, God effects.  God’s utterance brings forth the reality it announces, the all-determining truth and reality of the believer’s life, as undeniable to the kingdom-sighted as it is incomprehensible to the kingdom-blind.  To say the same thing in more biblical vocabulary, when God declares us to be rightly-related to him not on the basis of what we do but on the basis of what he has done on our behalf in his Son – namely he has borne our sin and borne it away – then we are rightly-related to him.  There is nothing we should do or can do to ingratiate ourselves with him.  We are as much a child of God right now (‘rightly’ now) as we can ever be.  By faith we are bound so closely to that Son with whom the Father is pleased that when the Father looks upon the Son he sees us included in the Son and therefore pleased with us as well.  At once Luther’s tormented questions, “What must I do?  Have I done enough?  Is my doing good enough?  And how would I ever know?”; these questions evaporated.

Years later Luther was to write a tract, Two Kinds of Righteousness.  The two kinds are ‘alien righteousness’ and ‘proper righteousness.’  Alien righteousness is alien only in the sense, but crucially in the sense that it comes from outside us, comes from Christ, is always his gift and never our achievement.  Proper righteousness, on the other hand, is the Christian, already rendered such by having ‘clothed’ herself in Christ’s alien righteousness; proper righteousness is the Christian now repudiating the arrears of sin that still cling to her.

Let me say it again.  Alien righteousness, the Son’s right-standing with the Father, is a gift we own in faith.  Once rightly-related to God, we rightly repudiate, properly repudiate non-anxiously, the old man or woman of sin in us, which old man or woman, says Luther, was slain at the cross but won’t die quietly.  Paradoxically Luther exclaims that Christ’s alien righteousness “swallows up all sins in a moment”, even as by our proper righteousness we aspire to distance ourselves from Adam.  Put simply, because Christ’s righteousness is ours we are forgiven by God and know it; because our old man/woman has already been slain at the cross, we may and must now put him to death.  At all times, we must remember, the foundation and stable basis of the Christian life is what Christ has accomplished for us and forever vouchsafes to us: a new standing before God wherein we come before him as the son or daughter accepted by him and at home on his knee.

This lattermost point requires amplification.  Justification by faith hadn’t been taught by any theologian Luther had read, especially by Gabriel Biel, or by anyone Luther had read about in Biel.  Biel, the representative spokesperson for late Mediaeval nominalist theology, had maintained that moral aspiration is in truth a seeking after God that God recognizes and rewards.  At life’s end, sinners can hope that their aspiration, ‘topped up’, as it were, by God’s grace, will suffice for their acquittal before God, their justification.

Reading Scripture attentively, Luther saw that sinners, whose moral achievement is indisputable, wield their achievement as a bargaining point before God wherein they insist that their right-conduct in terms of a code is tantamount to that right-relatedness to God-in-person of which Scripture speaks.  Sinners, Luther insisted, were dead coram Deo; not ill, not deficient, not defective, not lame, but dead.  As such they achieve nothing and can claim nothing with respect to their predicament coram Deo.  They need a new standing before God that a corpse cannot acquire.  Therefore, justification has to be utterly gratuitous, sheer gift of God.  In addition, such justification is the sure foundation and stable basis of the Christian life now, not an unsure, wished-for, wait-and-see outcome at life’s end.

Two hundred years later, Charles Wesley (who himself came to faith in 1738 upon reading Luther’s commentary on Galatians) exclaimed, “No condemnation now I dread” just because Wesley first knew himself “Clothed in righteousness divine.”

It was Luther’s experience first. ‘Justification by faith’ (shorthand for ‘justification by grace through faith on account of Christ) became and remained the foundation of the Reformation. In his commentary on the Psalms Luther extolled, “If this article stands, the church stands; if it falls, the church falls.”[5]  Reinforcing his point, Luther later added, “Without this article the world is nothing but death and darkness.”[6]  It was upheld thereafter as the bedrock and stable basis of the Christian life.  Luther’s position as a Reformer was established.  From this position, he would think and write and preach for the next four years, all of it coming to a head when the pope summoned him to a hearing in the city of Worms.  As he came upon the city (he had travelled from eastern to western Germany) he wrote a friend, “All the way from Eisenach to here I have been sick.  I am still sick…. But Christ lives, and we shall enter Worms in spite of all the gates of hell and the powers in the air.”  Days later he would find himself saying, with unparalleled courage in the face of the mightiest institution in Europe, “Here I stand.  I can’t do anything else.  God help me.”

Courage?  We ought never underestimate the courage Luther’s stand would require.  Erasmus, possessing Luther’s horror at abuses in the church yet lacking Luther’s apprehension of the gospel; Erasmus, always ready to ridicule but forever reluctant to reform; Erasmus knew what courage was required, and knew just as surely that he didn’t have it.  In his feeble self-extenuation he wrote, “…mine was never the spirit to risk my life for the truth….Popes and emperors when they make right decisions I follow, which is godly; if they decide wrongly, I tolerate them, which is safe.”[7]  Erasmus, Luther knew by 1530, “was not concerned for the cross but for peace.”[8]  Years later, saddened and annoyed at Erasmus’ cowardice and shallowness, Luther would conclude, “Everything is a laughing matter for him.”[9]

 

IV: — Constrained by the living Word of God, sharper than any two-edged sword, Luther was aware that much needed reforming, not least the matter of indulgences.  Upset initially by the traffic surrounding indulgences, and soon offended by the logic of them, Luther penned his Ninety-Five Theses and hung them from the door of the church in Wittenberg.  Hallowe’en – All Hallows’ Eve – would never be the same after 1517.   What was the indulgence traffic in Luther’s day?  Whom did it profit?  Why was Luther vehement?

At this time the pope needed to finance the remodelling of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome.  He issued an indulgence, a certificate authorizing the remission of the temporal punishment of sin in return for payment.  In Wittenberg the master-hawker was Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar famed for his salesmanship.  A slogan was said to accompany his sales pitch: “When a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory to heaven springs.”  In case poetry was ineffective in having hearers part with their coin, Tetzel supplemented his rhetoric with grisly pictures of deceased persons alive and writhing in purgatory, crying out to relatives to purchase their release.  And if neither poetry nor terror moved them, Tetzel was aware that fervent devotion might.  In this regard Tetzel announced that when indulgences are offered and cross-plus-papal-coat-of-arms are displayed, the cumulative effect is equal to the cross of Christ.  Such a steroidal indulgence, Tetzel insisted, would pardon even someone who had violated the Virgin Mary.[10]

Luther was appalled.  He assumed that the new archbishop of his territory, Albrecht of Mainz, would surely want to be informed of religious abuses occurring within his territory.  Luther was aware of the immense power Albrecht wielded.  Albrecht was, after all, not only archbishop and cardinal; he was also archchancellor of Germany and the most powerful political figure after Emperor Charles V[11].  Not least, Albrecht was one of only seven men charged with electing the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.  Luther sent a copy of his protest to Albrecht of Mainz, together with a covering letter.  The covering letter was unambiguous.  “Once they acquire indulgence letters, the poor souls believe they can be sure of their salvation,” Luther pressed; “Good God! Souls that are being instructed under your care are being sent to their death, and it will be harder and harder for you to account for all this.  Therefore I could keep quiet no longer.”[12]  Four years later, when he was sequestered at the Wartburg, Luther would write to Philip Melanchthon, “I curse the hardness of heart that prevents me from drowning in the tears I should weep for the slain of my poor people.”[13]  Again, Luther’s courage here is noteworthy.  Years earlier Dr Dietrich Morung, a priest in Wurzburg, had preached from the city-church pulpit a sermon that questioned the entire indulgence mentality.  Cardinal Raimudi Peraudi, papal commissioner for indulgences and papal legate to Germany, had had Morung excommunicated and then incarcerated for ten years.  Luther knew what he was risking.[14]

And then Luther attached a second copy of his Theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg.[15]  (He didn’t nail it, we might note in passing, since in the sixteenth century papers were affixed to doors with wax.)[16]  It was customary in university towns to post topics inviting debate on public bulletin boards, since academic debate, in those days was a civic event.  All Luther had in mind was a public discussion of the theology underlying the indulgence practice and the finances floating it.

In Luther’s era, when a major church position opened up, it was sold to the highest bidder.  (This practice was called ‘simony.’)  Few clergy, however, were wealthy enough to bid on the position.  Therefore, the church, seeking to maximize pecuniary gain, opened up the bidding to wealthy lay persons whose wealth ensured the topmost bid.  Once the lay person had gained a church office meant only for clergy, he recovered his bidding-war costs through ecclesiastical taxation and monies otherwise pertaining to the office.  Then and only then was the officeholder consecrated.

Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz had done exactly this.  When Albrecht had indicated his interest in the position, officials in Rome set him up with the Fuggers, a major banking enterprise in Europe.  Now there was a three-party constellation: Albrecht, the papacy, and the Fuggers.  Each party anticipated benefiting hugely.  Tetzel was recruited to raise the money.

What theological understanding attended indulgences?  Indulgences never purported to alter eternal punishment for sin.  (Only God could.)  They merely affected temporal punishment, which temporal punishment the church could rescind, since the church had imposed it in the first place.

Here is how indulgences worked.  We sin, repent before God, and are forgiven.  Still, we need to make reparation and receive temporal punishment for our sin; whereupon the church, through its clergy, assigns penance.  It is possible, in this economy, for one to arrive at life’s end and have temporal punishment still owing, insufficient penance having been assigned.  The punishment owing is a debt that is ‘paid’ (paid off) by means of ‘doing time’ painfully in purgatory following one’s death.  A papally-authored indulgence, acquired through a cash payment, remits the debt and releases someone from purgatory.

In the popular understanding, however, some of the aforementioned subtleties were unknown.  While according to Canon Law indulgences remitted sin’s temporal punishment but didn’t forgive sin’s guilt, Archbishop Albrecht’s book Instructio Summaria left the matter ambiguous, with the result that the public understandably read ‘indulgence’ as ‘forgiveness of all sins’.  Luther knew that when people purchased indulgences they did so believing that they thereby ensured their salvation.[17]

Luther objected to the practice on several grounds.  First there was the crass materialism of it all, the ‘thingification’ of the Christian life.  Whereas the Christian life, Luther insisted, was the most intimate, personal relation between believers and their Lord, now it was a business or banking or institutional transaction.  In his tract Two Kinds of Righteousness Luther was to insist that when we are rightly related to God through faith in Jesus Christ, such faith, so far from an abstract, cold, one-sidedly forensic transaction; such faith, rather, is an encounter in which Christ (the bridegroom) is heard saying, “I am yours”, and the believer, (the bride) is constrained to say at the same moment, “And I am yours.”  Justification isn’t a hollow declaration; it is an effective word from the Lord who is present, in person, in his utterance; justification, then, is a mutual embrace and mutual pledge of utmost warmth and intimacy as Christ and his disciple encounter each other and embrace each other and are fused to each other.  Indulgences, on the other hand, were utterly sub-personal and could only depersonalise participants.

In the second place, Luther opposed the church’s usurping God’s prerogative.  The church of his era understood the ‘power of the keys’ (Matt. 16:19) to reside in institutional authority vested in it by Christ, enabling the church (i.e., the clergy) to remit temporal punishment or retain it.  Luther, and all the Reformers following him, upheld the ‘power of the keys’ as the efficacy of the gospel preached.  The church proclaims the gospel, which gospel is nothing less than Jesus Christ in his presence and power.  As the church attests the gospel, the Lord whose gospel it is, the Lord who ever remains Lord and judge of his body, the church, so as not to inhere it; this Lord acts in the power of the Spirit and forgives penitent believers.  Plainly there is the most intimate relation between Christ and his people, head and body.  Luther liked to speak of the totus Christus, the whole Christ.  To have Christ at all is to have Christ entire, head and body.  Nonetheless, the head is never buried in the body.  Never does the Lord of the church collapse himself into the church or transfer his authority to it.

In the third place Luther objected to the confusion between the penalty for sin and the consequences of sin.  The penalty for sin is alienation from God arising from God’s judgement.  The consequences of sin are the ‘after-shocks’ reverberating through perpetrators’ lives and the lives of those they touch.  The penalty for sin is cancelled as penitent sinners own God’s mercy.  The consequences of sin – dismemberment or death, for instance, following the impaired driver’s collision – remain as long as life lasts, spreading relentlessly like ripples from a stone dropped once into water.

In the fourth place Luther deplored the flagrant commercialisation of it all.  Make no mistake: the indulgence traffic was hugely rich.  Between 1486 and 1503 Cardinal Peraudi, a masterful indulgence-pusher, had raised over 500,000 guilders through the popular vehicle.[18]  In the village of Vorau, an Austrian municipality so very small that by 2009 its population numbered only 1496, Peraudi was reputed to have sold 50,000 letters of indulgence.[19]  Not only was the invention of the printing press to enter into its glory in the dissemination of Reformation tracts, treatises, tomes and translations of the Bible; the invention of the printing press, double-edged like every human invention in a fallen world, had already inked hundreds of thousands indulgence certificates.  While Luther opposed indulgences for theological reasons (one of which was affording financial protection to exploited people), the indulgence traffic made millionaires out of printers as surely as it did church bureaucrats.  Different persons from diverse spheres now fused their fury concerning Luther, as surely as Pilate and Herod became friends the day Jesus Christ was condemned.

In the letter to Albrecht that accompanied the Ninety-Five Theses, Luther underlined his conviction that “indulgences confer upon souls nothing of benefit for salvation or holiness”.  And then in the same letter he tersely reminded Albrecht, “…it is the first and sole office of bishops that the people learn the gospel and the love of Christ.”[20]

Luther followed up both the Theses (Latin) and the Letter (Latin) with his vastly more popular sermon in German, A Sermon on Indulgences and Grace.[21]  It was the sermon in German, reprinted at least twenty-four times between 1518 and 1520, rather than the Theses in Latin, that made Luther a household name overnight.

Tetzel, apoplectic at Luther’s renown, riposted six months later (April 1518) with one hundred and six theses denouncing Luther’s ‘errors’.[22]  Tetzel’s retort was never reprinted.

Pope Leo X (the last non-priest to be made pope) supported Tetzel and Albrecht.  Leo labelled Luther “a wild boar in the Lord’s vineyard;” i.e., purely destructive.  Leo had become a cardinal at age 13 and pope at 37.  He allegedly remarked, “God has given us the papacy; now let us enjoy it.”  He spent colossal sums of money, and relished parading around Rome on Hanno, his albino elephant.  (The elephant, admittedly, cost him little, since it was a gift of King Manuel I of Portugal.)[23]  Leo pronounced Luther a heretic and excommunicated him.

What about Protestant theology today?  Are indulgences peculiar to late-mediaeval churchmanship, a matter we can put behind us forever?  As the year 2000 approached and the new millennium loomed, Pope John Paul II issued a Jubilee Indulgence.  The Jubilee Indulgence was much less onerous than many of its predecessors, for it maintained it was necessary to visit one church once only.  And if visiting a designated church was too much, the indulgence could be gained by foregoing tobacco or alcohol for one day, or for making any donation on behalf of the poor.

 

V: — The Ninety-Five Theses were posted in 1517.  Much thereafter poured from Luther’s pen.  And in 1520 there appeared three more unforgettable tracts: Address to the Nobility of the German Nation, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and The Freedom of the Christian.  The lattermost remains the most widely read item in all of Luther’s writings.

Not only is this tract moving on account of its understanding and expression; it is also comprehensive in its discussion as few other tracts are.  Luther himself wrote of it, “Unless I am mistaken… it contains the whole of the Christian life in a brief form.”

Before we probe Luther’s tract we must be sure we understand ‘freedom’ in conformity to Scripture.  In popular parlance, freedom is the capacity to choose among alternatives.  A child at an ice-cream counter is said to be free to choose vanilla or strawberry or pistachio.  Such ‘freedom’ (so-called) is nothing more than indeterminism; that is, the child hasn’t been coerced, outwardly or inwardly, to choose one flavour over another.

Yet when Paul reminds the Christians in Galatia, “For freedom Christ has set us free” (Gal.5:1), he cannot mean that Christ has set us free so that we may choose to obey Christ or disobey him.  (Such freedom, so-called, is nothing less than the bondage of sin.)  The apostle can only mean that Christ has set us free to obey him – and this only.  In other words, freedom is having Jesus Christ remove all impediments to our obeying him; to say the same thing differently, freedom is the absence of any impediment to acting in accord – and only in accord – with one’s true nature.

Imagine a derailing switch placed upon railway tracks.  The train is impeded from travelling along the rails.  When the switch is removed, the train is said to be free to run along the rails.  If someone asks, “But is the train free to float like a boat?”, the proper reply can only be, “But it isn’t a train’s nature to float like a boat; it’s a train’s nature to run on rails.”

Christ has freed his people to act in accordance with their true nature; namely, a child of God.  In other words, Christ simultaneously frees us from all claims upon our faith and obedience that contradict our nature as child of God and frees us for everything that reflects our nature as child of God.  It is our nature as child of God to love God and neighbour in utter self-abandonment.

Luther succinctly sets out the theme of the tract:

A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.

A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.

 

Expanding on this statement Luther writes,

We conclude, therefore, that a Christian lives not in himself, but in Christ and in his neighbour.  Otherwise he is not a Christian.  He lives in Christ through faith, in his neighbour through love.  By faith he is caught up beyond himself into God.  By love he descends beneath himself into his neighbour.

 

Christians, freed by Christ for their true nature – bound to Christ by faith and bound to the neighbour by love – live henceforth in radical self-forgetfulness.  Taken out of themselves, their self-absorption shrivels and their anxiety evaporates.  The gospel effects this, and can effect it just because the gospel, as all the Reformers after Luther insisted, isn’t chiefly idea but rather power.  The Reformers everywhere reflected Paul’s conviction that the gospel is the power of God unto salvation (Rom. 1:16).

Luther goes on to say that there is only one way of living in Christ by faith.  There are, however, three ways of living in the neighbour by love.

[1] We live in the neighbour by love as we share our neighbour’s material scarcity, and do so out of our material abundance, even material superfluity.  Luther admits this costs us little.  If I have five shirts, giving one to a shirtless neighbour exacts little from me.  Luther notes too that when we do this we also gain social recognition (today, we’d say an income tax receipt for ‘gift in kind’).

[2] We live in the neighbour by love, in the second place, as we share the neighbour’s suffering.  Luther maintains this is costlier in that proximity to suffering in others engenders suffering in us.  Painful though it is, however, we feel good about it; and if we do it well, we are rewarded for it (the Order of Canada or the Lions’ Club Humanitarian Award accorded Mother Teresa).

[3] Finally, says Luther not in his Christian Freedom tract but in a later one, we live in the neighbour as we share the neighbour’s disgrace, the neighbour’s shame.  This is by far the costliest way of living in the neighbour.  Here there is no reward; here there is no social recognition.  Here, on the other hand, there is nothing but social contempt and ostracism.  Here we profoundly know what it is to be ‘numbered among the transgressors’, for was not our Lord before us publicly labelled with a disgrace he didn’t deserve?  In concluding his discussion of this matter Luther insists that our service “takes no account of gratitude or ingratitude, of praise or blame, of gain or loss…. [the Christian] most freely and most willingly spends himself and all that he has” – including his reputation.

 

VI: — One more mediaeval tradition Luther overturned was clergy celibacy.  His rejection of clergy celibacy was one instance of his rejection of sacerdotalism.  Sacerdotalism is the notion that the clergy have spiritual powers invested in them by virtue of their ordination.  The notion that the sacraments can be administered effectively only by clergy, for instance, is one aspect of sacerdotalism.  Another notion is that the pronouncement of absolution following confession will leave the penitent forgiven by God only if absolution is pronounced by a clergyperson.

Luther insisted that Jesus Christ, our ‘great high priest’, has fulfilled the priestly line of the Older Testament.  For this reason, there isn’t, and there can’t be, a priestly class in the church.  All Christians are priests before God.  To be sure, Luther maintained, for the sake of order at Sunday worship, only someone whom the congregation has recognized and authorized is to preach and administer the sacraments, lest chaos overtake the congregation.  Nevertheless, the distinction between clergy and laity with respect to spiritual powers has been eliminated.

Luther reinforced his understanding here by having congregants receive Holy Communion in both kinds, bread and wine, whereas lay people, to this point, had been given bread only (wine, along with bread, being consumed by the clergy only).  While giving wine to lay people may seem a small point to us, in Luther’s day it was huge: from now on the church was to be defined not in terms of a clergy hierarchy (priest, bishop, pope) who had unique powers; the church was to be defined as the people of God, a ‘kingdom of priests’, a ‘holy nation’, in the words of the apostle Peter (2nd Peter 2:9).  Luther eliminated the clergy/laity distinction.

Marriage among the Reformation clergy was another sign of its disappearance.  The mediaeval church had forbidden the clergy to marry (beginning in the tenth century) inasmuch as marriage was inferior to celibacy.  In Luther’s day marriage was thought to be vitiated by the depravity of women.  Women, it was said, had been the downfall of Adam, Samson, David and Solomon.  In the Aristotelian mindset that underlay much of the mediaeval church, women were said to be botched males; if copulation were error-free, a male would result every time.[24]

In addition, Luther faulted the church fathers, in particular Jerome, Cyprian, Gregory and Augustine.  Hadn’t Cyprian, a giant in the Patristic era, written, “If you hear a woman speak, flee from her as if she were a hissing snake”?[25]  The mediaeval church had expatiated on the various ways in which marriage was fraught with sin, the last way being marital sex undertaken for the sheer pleasure of it.

Luther and his followers inverted the late mediaeval understanding by transferring the praise of monastic life to marriage.  In no sense was marriage second-best.  In the fourth century, Jerome had assigned numerical values to marriage and celibacy.  On a scale of 0 to 100, Jerome assigned 100 to virginity, 60 to widowhood, and 30 to marriage.  Marriage was last in this scheme because it was a concession to inferior persons who would derail spiritually and psychologically without the institution.  Inverting all such calculations, Johann Bugenhagen, Luther’s friend and pastor of the city church in Wittenberg, exclaimed, “It is faith, and not virginity, that fills paradise.”  (In this regard it is worth noting that while Pope John Paul II had canonised or beatified almost 300 people as of 1997, he had elevated no woman who wasn’t a virgin.)[26]

Luther was not naïve in this matter.  Always looking to Scripture, he knew Jesus to have said (Matt. 19) that some men are born eunuchs; some become eunuchs for the kingdom of God, and some become eunuchs thanks to the violence of other men.  Roughly, then, there are people who, for many different reasons (not least psychological difficulties) are incapable of sustaining a lifelong union; in addition, there are those who forgo marriage because of a vocation to celibacy; and there are those who, through sheer misfortune, are denied the opportunity to marry.  None of this, however, undoes God’s mandate to marry following God’s pronouncement that it isn’t good to be alone.  And needless to say, Luther, as Hebraist, was aware that marriage is the commonest metaphor everywhere in Scripture for God’s covenant relationship with his people.  This fact alone guarantees that marriage ought never be slighted.

Luther exemplified his high view of marriage in his love for his wife, Katharina von Bora.  She had been assigned to a convent at age six.  Having appropriated Luther’s understanding of the gospel as she matured, she had somehow conveyed word to Leonhard Koppe, a fish merchant, that she and others wanted to embrace the Reformation understanding of faith and life.  In 1523 Koppe extricated twelve nuns from the convent in herring barrels. (This feat too required enormous courage.  In Catholic Saxony, one year later, a man was beheaded for helping a nun escape.)[27]  In 1525 Luther married Katharina.  Together they had six children, and until he died he loved her in exemplary fashion.  Listen to Luther extol his beloved Katie in his 1531 sermon On the Estate of Marriage:

God’s word is actually inscribed on one’s spouse.  When a man looks at his wife as if she were the only woman on earth, and when a woman looks at her husband as if he were the only man on earth; yes, if…not even the sun itself sparkles any more brightly and lights up your eyes more than your own husband or wife, then right there you are face to face with God speaking.[28]

 

Luther delighted in his Katie as he delighted in nothing and no one else.  He regarded husband and wife as God’s gift to each other.  And because the clergy and laity alike were God’s people without spiritual distinction, the clergy should cherish the same gift – marriage – and thank God for it.

 

Brother Martin had no idea, in 1517, that his Ninety-Five Theses would precipitate an earthquake.  His reading of Scripture, however, reminded him that when God spoke at Sinai, God’s voice shook the earth (Heb.12:28).  And his reading of Scripture confirmed every day his conviction that when the gospel is announced, Jesus Christ acts and speaks, once more shaking the earth – and all of this for the sake of that kingdom, Luther grasped with iron fast certainty, which cannot be shaken (Heb. 12:28).

 

 

Luther’s favourite Psalm was 118.  “Although the entire psalter and all of holy scripture are dear to me as my only comfort and source of life,” revelled Luther, “I fell in love especially with this psalm.  Therefore I call it my own….Here you see how the right hand of God mightily lifts the heart and comforts it in the midst of death….Is not this astounding?  The dying live; the suffering rejoice; the fallen rise; the disgraced are honored.”[29]   It was crucial that the disgraced be honoured, for whereas Luther the brash monk had earlier boasted “We considered ourselves holy from head to toe,” the older Luther, only eighteen months from death, wrote his friend, Georg Spalatin, “Now join with us prodigious and hardened sinners lest you diminish Christ for us….You can be a bogus sinner and have Christ for a fictitious savior.  Instead, get used to the fact that Christ is a genuine savior and that you are a real sinner.”[30]

While Luther maintained Psalm 118 to be his favourite, his most frequently cited was Psalm 50:15: “Call upon me in the day of trouble” (says the Lord); “I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.”  Luther, in trouble from the moment he was pronounced an outlaw (1521) until he died 25 years later, had called upon God relentlessly. Was he delivered?  Certainly he believed he was.  Did he glorify God?  His theological legacy – 450 treatises, 3000 printed sermons, 2600 extant letters – is largely a paean of praise to God.

Two weeks before his death (18th February 1546) Luther, now in Eisleben, learned that his wife Katharina, minding children in Wittenberg, was anxious concerning his illness.  He wrote her telling her that her anxieties for him were groundless: “I have a caretaker who is better than you and all the angels; he lies in the cradle and rests on a virgin’s bosom, and yet, nevertheless, he sits at the right hand of God, the Father almighty.  Therefore, be at peace.”[31]

 

You have a caretaker, and I have a caretaker, who lies in a cradle and rests on a virgin’s bosom even as he sits at the right hand of God the Father almighty.  Therefore you and I may, and must, be at peace.

The Reverend Dr Victor A. Shepherd

[1] LW 34: 337.

[2] WA 17:1, 309.  Quoted in Hendrix, 27.

[3] LW 11: 51.  Hendrix 70. Emphasis added.

[4] LW 4: 34.  Hendrix 169.

[5] WA 40: III, 352-353.

[6] WA 39: I, 205.  Sine hoc articulo mundus est plane mors et tenebrae.

[7] R.A. Mynors, et al., eds. The Correspondence of Erasmus. 12 Vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974-2003.  EP 218   quoted in Pettegree, Brand Luther, 231.

[8] WABr II: 387-9.  In Pettegree  231.

[9] LW 54: 81.  In Hendrix 171.

[10] Hendrix, 58.

[11] Hendrix, 136.

[12] LW 48:46.  Hendrix 55.

[13] LW 48:  215.  Hendrix 113.

[14] Pettegree, Brand Luther, 61.

[15] In addition to sending a copy of the Ninety-Five Theses and an accompanying letter, Letter of Martin Luther to Albrecht, Archbishop of Mainz (LW 48:43-49) Luther also subsequently preached and published in German his sermon, A Sermon on Indulgences and Grace (WA 1:239-46.

[16] See Timothy J. Wengert, Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, ix.

[17] Bernhard Lohse, Martin Luther’s Theology, 101.

[18] Hendrix, 57.

[19] Pettegree, Brand Luther, 61.

[20] LW 48: 44.

[21] WA 1:239-46.

[22] For an English version, see Johann Tetzel’s Rebuttal against Luther’s Sermon Indulgences and Grace, trans. Dewey Weiss Kramer (Atlanta: Pitts Theology Library, 2012).

[23] Hendrix, 67.

[24] For an amplification of this matter see Victor Shepherd, Interpreting Martin Luther: An Introduction to his Life and Thought, 301; and Steven Ozment, Protestants, 152-3.

[25] LW 54: 357.

[26] John Kent, Wesley and the Wesleyans, 106-7.

[27] Hendrix, 136.

[28] LW 51:17-42.

[29] LW 14: 45; 14, 86.

[30] WABr 10: 639.

[31] Martin Brecht, Martin Luther: The Preservation of the Church – 1532-1546, 373.

Martin Luther on Reformation Sunday

                A

[1] Who is the best English hymnwriter? Surely everyone is going to shout, “Charles Wesley”. Who is the best liturgist? Anglicans and non-Anglicans agree it’s Thomas Cranmer. The most perceptive Bible translator? – William Tyndale. The most able catechists in English Christendom are the Westminster divines, while the finest preacher is deemed to be Hugh Latimer.

Imagine all these gifted people, gifted with diverse talents, gathered up and concentrated in one individual. What it took a dozen Englishmen two hundred years to accomplish, Martin Luther did in twenty. Luther is prodigious.

Did it all begin on Nov. 9, 1483 when Luther was born? Not exactly. It began thirty years later when Luther, tormented by uncertainty concerning his standing as unholy sinner before holy God, ransacked Scripture yet again but this time found lighting up for him the life-giving theme of the righteousness of God.

Up to this point Luther had always understood the righteousness of God as a quality in God that merely highlights the unrighteousness of the sinner. In other words, the righteousness of God, a righteousness that God possesses in himself, can only be bad news: God’s righteousness exposes and condemns the sinner’s unrighteousness.

Now, however, Luther saw with Spirit-given Kingdom-sightedness that the righteousness of God is that act of God whereby God renders his people rightly related to him; that is, the righteousness of God is that act of God whereby God turns capsized relationships right-side up. In the same way, the power of God isn’t a quality that God possesses so as to render human capacity insignificant. The power of God, rather, is that act of God whereby God empowers his people. The wisdom of God is that act of God whereby God renders his people wise.

Up to this point Luther had looked upon human righteousness as active; it was a righteousness we were supposed to achieve or acquire by extraordinary feats of so-called sanctity, religious observances, pilgrimages, fasts and flagellations; supposed to achieve or acquire, that is, but weren’t able to.

Now, however, Luther discerned and ever after spoke not of an active righteousness whereby we come to merit our standing with God; instead he now spoke characteristically of a passive righteousness that was passive only in the sense that our righted relationship with God is God’s gift, a gift that we can never fashion or forge or achieve, yet may and must receive. This gift has already been fashioned for us by the One whose cross has borne our sin and borne it away. The believer’s righteousness is passive in the sense (only in the sense) that the hymnwriter captured centuries later, “Nothing in my hand I bring; simply to thy cross I cling.”

In his fresh appropriation of Scripture Luther grasped that what he could never achieve had been given him; the acquittal a guilty person could never earn, someone else had won for him; the pardon a condemned rebel would never deserve, the sin-bearing Lord had pronounced upon him. In short, a clemency that remained out of reach was his, thanks to crucified arms that embraced him so as never to let him go.

Luther gloried in the truth and reality of the greatest gift imaginable; namely a righted relationship with God. He gloried in it and glowed with it every time he spoke of it.

[2] Listen to Luther himself as he traces for us the path whereby he came to glow:

Though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience. I could not believe that he was placated by my satisfaction….Nevertheless, I beat importunately upon Paul…most ardently desiring to know what St. Paul wanted.

At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, namely, ‘In it [i.e., the gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed, as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live’. There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous [person] lives by a gift of God, namely, by faith….There a totally other face of the entire Scripture showed itself to me….And I extolled my sweetest word [‘the righteousness of God’] with a love as great as the hatred with which I had before hated the word ‘righteousness of God.’ Thus that place in Paul was for me truly the gate to paradise.”

[3] The “place in Paul” was Romans 1:17. For the rest of his life Luther would return to the epistles, chiefly Romans and Galatians, whenever he needed to revisit the gospel of right-relatedness with God by faith, the good news that God, thanks to his cross-wrought mercy, puts in the right with himself those who through their disobedience and defiance are currently in the wrong before him.

Specifically, Luther found Paul’s epistle to the Galatians the clearest, ‘impossible-to-miss’ declaration of the gospel. Luther wrote a commentary on Galatians in 1519, and another one, much expanded, in 1535. He used to refer to Galatians as his ‘Katie von Bora’. Katarina von Bora, everyone knows, was Luther’s wife (with whom he remained ardently in love); by naming Galatians as ‘my Katie’ he meant that whenever he needed invigoration, comfort, consolation, encouragement, not least correction, he knew where to go.

Luther relished Romans and Galatians inasmuch as there he found the epicentre of the gospel stated clearly and compellingly. For this reason, these two Pauline epistles would correct aberrant readings of Scripture elsewhere.

Luther couldn’t have known, of course, that the gospel of Romans would give rise to 80 commentaries on Romans alone, written by scores of thinkers, in the 16th century. He couldn’t have known that Romans would undergird the Evangelical Awakening in the 18th century. He couldn’t have known that Romans would undergird Karl Barth’s theological bombshell in the 20th century. But he wouldn’t have been surprised to see it happen. And he would have known why.

While Luther would extol the gospel of God’s grace for the rest of his life, a gospel unmistakeably delineated in Romans and Galatians, he didn’t come upon it there for the first time. He came upon it first in the Older Testament. To be sure, the Older testament doesn’t use the vocabulary of Romans/Galatians, but certainly the Older Testament speaks of the God whose mercy visits mercy upon those whose predicament before him is otherwise hopeless, and who thereby gives them a standing and a recognition – ‘you are my daughter, my son, with whom I am now pleased’ – they could never merit or achieve. Luther found the gospel throughout the Older Testament, but especially in Deuteronomy, the second half of Isaiah, and the Psalms.

[4] Plainly Luther exulted in the good news of God’s righting sinners with himself through faith in the crucified; plainly Luther exulted in this inasmuch as he was preoccupied with being in the right with God. Why was he preoccupied? Was he neurotically anxious over an insignificant matter? Was he obsessing over something inconsequential?

Luther was oceans deeper than this. He was aware that God is not to be trifled with. He knew that the sinner’s predicament before God is perilous. When I was on my way to my doctorate (University of Toronto) I had to appear before Prof. Jakob Jocz, Wycliffe College, for an oral examination. When the examination had concluded, Prof. Jocz, a Christian from eastern Europe who had witnessed unspeakable suffering and who was as deep as a well; Jocz said to me, “Mr. Shepherd, your grasp of the gospel is remarkable. Always remember that people never get the gospel; they never get the gospel until they understand that God is properly angry with the sinner.”

Luther knew as much. Luther knew that our defiant disobedience principally does three things to God: it breaks God’s heart, it provokes God’s anger, and it arouses God’s disgust.

Scripture, particularly the Older Testament, speaks again and again of God’s heartbreak at the recalcitrance of his people. (All we need do here is read the book of the prophet Hosea.) As for God’s anger, it too is found on every page of Scripture, not least in the gospel accounts of the public ministry of Jesus, where Jesus ‘boils over’ every day, it appears. As for God’s disgust, Scripture reminds us that we are repulsive to God; we are a stench in the nostrils of God. Over and over Scripture uses the language of ‘defile’ and ‘defilement’. Sinners are defiled people whose defilement God finds obnoxious.

How obnoxious? What’s the most repulsive thing you can imagine? (Don’t tell me!) Luther, whose imagination never lacked vividness, lived in an era that hadn’t yet seen a flush-toilet. Luther’s vocabulary with respect to repulsiveness – I think I should say no more lest I empty this room and spoil your lunch.)

[5] Let’s shift gears and think about Christmas. Every year in the Christmas season Luther capered and cavorted, laughed and leapt like children so very excited on Christmas Eve that they are beside themselves. Why was Luther near-delirious with joy over Christmas? He was ‘over the moon’ because he couldn’t thank God enough for the Christmas gift. The gift, of course, is Christ Jesus our Lord, given to us as the Saviour we need as we need nothing else.

Luther knew that when God looks out over the entire human creation, God can’t find one human being, not one, who renders him the glad and grateful, cheerful obedience God expects from the people he has created. Whereupon God says to himself, “If I’m going to find even one human being who renders me such cheerful obedience, I shall have to provide that human being myself in the person of my Son”. And so we have Christmas, where God in his mercy provides the human covenant-partner of God who remains rightly related to his Father in life and in death.

Luther knew that because Jesus of Nazareth is the one whose entire life and death are unbroken obedience, then insofar as we cling to the Nazarene in faith we are bound so closely to him that when the Father sees the Son with whom he is ever pleased he sees you and me included in the Son: we too, clinging to this one in faith, are declared – effectually declared – to be rightly related to the Father.

Luther knew, in the second place, that when sinners provoke God’s just judgement upon them, God’s judgement is just and there is nothing sinners can do to relieve themselves of it. Yet the breathtaking news of Christmas is that in the Son whom God has brought forth in our midst: in him, on Good Friday, the just judge visits his judgement on the Son who has identified himself with sinners, even as the just judge, the Father, one with his Son, absorbs his judgement in himself. If the just judge has exercised his judgement upon us only to absorb it in himself, what is left you and me? – mercy, pardon, acquittal, acceptance.

Luther knew, in the third place, that when sinners arouse God’s disgust (God finds sinners loathsome), the good news of Christmas is that the one crucified between two terrorists at the city garbage dump has soaked up the stench we are with the result that those who cling to him in faith are now rendered the fragrance, the perfume, of Christ (as the apostle Paul speaks of Christians in 2nd Corinthians).

Luther ‘lit up’ over Christmas just because he knew that in the Bethlehem gift the obedience we are expected to render but don’t; in this one such obedience has been rendered on our behalf. The anger we have provoked has been borne for us and borne away. The disgust we arouse has been soaked up by the one who leaves us smelling like roses. (Don’t we speak, at Christmas, of the ‘rose of Sharon’?)

All Luther wants to do is thank God for this gift and cling so very tightly to this gift in faith so as to be identified with him forever.

For Luther, then, the Christmas child is our salvation. In him we enjoy the same relationship with our Father that he, the Son, enjoys with his Father; namely, we, now rightly related to God, are that child of God with whom the Father is ever pleased.

At this point Luther knew himself a free man; a free man because freed by God’s gospel.

B

Yet Luther knew that those who have been freed for God have been freed not only for the praise of God but freed also for the service of the neighbour.

In 1520 Luther published a tract that has turned out to be the best-known of all his writings. The tract is labelled Christian Freedom.

Not only is this tract moving on account of its understanding and expression; it is also comprehensive in its discussion as few other tracts are. Luther himself wrote of it, “Unless I am mistaken… it contains the whole of the Christian life in a brief form.”

Before we probe Luther’s tract we must be sure we understand ‘freedom’ in conformity to Scripture. In popular parlance, freedom is the capacity to choose among alternatives. A child at an ice-cream counter is said to be free to choose vanilla or strawberry or pistachio. Such ‘freedom’ (so-called) is nothing more than indeterminism; that is, the child hasn’t been coerced, outwardly or inwardly, to choose one flavour over another.

Yet when Paul reminds the Christians in Galatia, “For freedom Christ has set us free” (Gal.5:1), he cannot mean that Christ has set us free so that we may choose to obey Christ or disobey him. (Such freedom, so-called, is nothing less than the bondage of sin.) The apostle can only mean that Christ has set us free to obey him – and this only. In other words, freedom is having Jesus Christ remove all impediments to our obeying him; to say the same thing differently, freedom is the absence of any impediment to acting in accord – and only in accord – with one’s true nature.

Imagine a derailing switch placed upon railway tracks. The train is impeded from travelling along the rails. When the switch is removed, the train is said to be free to run along the rails. If someone asks, “But is the train free to float like a boat?”, the proper reply can only be, “But it isn’t a train’s nature to float like a boat; it’s a train’s nature to run on rails.”

Christ has freed his people to act in accordance with their true nature; namely, a child of God. In other words, Christ simultaneously frees us from all claims upon our faith and obedience that contradict our nature as child of God and frees us for everything that reflects our nature as child of God. It is our nature as child of God to love God and love the neighbour in utter self-abandonment.

Luther succinctly sets out the theme of the tract:

A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.

A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.

Expanding on this statement Luther writes,

We conclude, therefore, that a Christian lives not in himself, but in Christ and in his neighbour. Otherwise he is not a Christian. He lives in Christ through faith, in his neighbour through love. By faith he is caught up beyond himself into God. By love he descends beneath himself into his neighbour.

Christians, freed by Christ for their true nature – bound to Christ by faith and bound to the neighbour by love – live henceforth in radical self-forgetfulness. Taken out of themselves, their self-absorption shrivels and their anxiety evaporates. The gospel effects this, and can effect it just because the gospel, as all the Reformers after Luther insisted, isn’t chiefly idea but rather power. The Reformers everywhere reflected Paul’s conviction that the gospel is the power of God unto salvation (Rom. 1:16).

Luther goes on to say that there is only one way of living in Christ by faith. There are, however, three ways of living in the neighbour by love.

[1] We live in the neighbour by love as we share our neighbour’s material scarcity, and do so out of our material abundance, even material superfluity. Luther admits this costs us little. If I have five shirts, giving one to a shirtless neighbour exacts little from me. Luther notes too that when we do this we also gain social recognition (today, we’d say an income tax receipt for ‘gift in kind’).

[2] We live in the neighbour by love, in the second place, as we share the neighbour’s suffering. Luther maintains this is costlier in that proximity to suffering in others engenders suffering in us. Painful though it is, however, we feel good about it; and if we do it well, we are rewarded for it (the Order of Canada or the Lions’ Club Humanitarian Award accorded Mother Teresa).

[3] Finally, says Luther, we live in the neighbour as we share the neighbour’s disgrace, the neighbour’s shame. This is by far the costliest way of living in the neighbour. Here there is no reward; here there is no social recognition. Here, on the other hand, there is nothing but social contempt and ostracism. Here we profoundly know what it is to be ‘numbered among the transgressors’, for was not our Lord before us publicly labelled with a disgrace he didn’t deserve? In concluding his discussion of this matter Luther insists that our service “takes no account of gratitude or ingratitude, of praise or blame, of gain or loss…. [the Christian] most freely and most willingly spends himself and all that he has” – including his reputation.

Conclusion

Martin Luther on Reformation Sunday: the man from Wittenberg launched a revolution that altered the course of history. Today we have probed only one area of his work, but it’s an area foundational for everything else.

Luther recovered the freedom of the gospel: the freedom that gives penitent sinners the gift of free right-relatedness to God thanks to the crucified Son; and the freedom whereby otherwise self-preoccupied people can forget themselves by abandoning themselves and their fussiness as they live henceforth to assist the neighbour whose need is undeniable and whose suffering is relentless.

Martin Luther happens to be a giant.

Victor Shepherd          October 2017

“A Safe Stronghold Our God Is Still”

In 1530, Martin Luther lived in Coburg Castle for five and half months under the protection of Elector John the Steadfast. It was during this time that Philip Melanchthon represented Luther at the Diet of Augsburg, which Luther could not attend as an outlaw of the Holy Roman Empire. 

 

“A Safe Stronghold Our God Is Still”

[A] “And then all hell broke loose”, many people are fond of saying in everyday English. “And then all hell broke loose.” We can use the expression frivolously to speak of something ultimately insignificant, as some do when the Toronto Maple Leaf hockey team is leading by three goals only to lose the game by giving up four goals in ten minutes.

Or we can use the expression profoundly, as war compels us to do when we describe the air-raids on London or Coventry in World War II, or when we speak of the ‘Final Solution’, the Shoah, that Nazi perpetrators unleashed on hapless victims.

When we use the expression profoundly we mean that horror has been unleashed. In the wake of unprecedented horror, our language fails, abysmally fails, to describe what is unfolding.

When Luther said, in so many words, “All hell has broken loose”, he was speaking most profoundly of all. For Luther was aware that cosmic assault was operative. The evil one himself, with all the powers the evil one can co-opt and concentrate; this one has turned upon Luther in person, as well as upon all that Luther upholds concerning Jesus Christ, his kingdom, his truth, and his people, not to mention Luther’s family and friends. In the aftermath of this assault Luther will speak for the rest of his life of Anfechtung as he is overtaken, time after time but never permanently, by an appalling sense of God’s absence together with an inability to find in his heart any awareness of God’s love and mercy, any evidence that God still loves him, holds him, and honours him.

I find today that Christians, especially younger Christians, have a shallow sense of evil. Not Luther: he found evil to be monstrous, hideous. He found evil to be subtle, sneaky, disguised, like a spy-informed commando raid. He also found evil to be a frontal assault without dissimulation, nothing less than death-dealing brutality.

Whether subtle or frontal, Luther insisted, “The ancient prince of hell hath risen with purpose fell…on earth is not his fellow.” Evil, finally, is a power greater than anything humankind can bring against it.

[B] Then who or what can defeat such a power, secure the victory achieved, and render God’s people beneficiaries of it? Only the “proper Man”, Christ Jesus, can.

Jesus Christ is the “proper” man in that this man isn’t man only; this man is God incarnate. Because this man is God incarnate, he can gain that victory which humankind otherwise has no hope of seeing. And because this man is God incarnate, this man is our elder brother who ensures our adoption as sons and daughters of the Father.

Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ alone, is the “safe stronghold” or “mighty fortress” within which God’s people are protected from lethal assault and in which they are secure in the company and arms of their elder brother.

‘Stronghold’: the word occurs repeatedly in the Palms. “The Lord is a stronghold for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble” (Ps. 9:9) “The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, my God, my rock in whom I take refuge, my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.” (Ps. 18:2)

Luther’s first published writings were his expositions of the Psalms (1513-1515). While many Christians today find the Psalms puzzling at best and off-putting at worst (except, of course, for a few favourites like Ps. 23), Luther found the gospel, no less, everywhere in the Psalms.

Let’s linger over Psalm 18:2. The Lord is my rock. Rock is solid ground. It suggests a refuge from floods that otherwise sweep away everything. (Flood or turbulent water, everywhere in Scripture, is a metaphor for the chaos that laps at us at all times and threatens to engulf us.) The Lord is my fortress. A fortress is that to which marauders cannot gain entry, that which whose walls render would-be invaders futile and frustrated. The Lord is my deliverer. It’s wonderful to be secure on solid rock; it’s wonderful to stand within the fort and see attackers repelled. But so far all we are doing is standing within the fort, passive. We need to be moved beyond passivity; we need to be delivered from our enemies so that we can join the God-man in his active campaign against all that mocks him and mobilizes against him.

And even if Christ our captain conscripts us into his army; even if we are equipped to fight alongside him in his campaign against all forms and forces of wickedness, we shall never last if we are panic-stricken. We must finally be delivered from the fear that otherwise drains us and dispirits us. For this reason the Psalmist once more cries, “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” (Ps. 27:1)

[C] Did Luther have anything to fear? Did Luther have anyone of whom he had reason to be afraid? We must remember that Luther wrote his best-known hymn between 1527 and 1529. He wrote it to reassure his people that they could rely on, trust in life and in death, the One who remains victorious in the face of evil’s most concentrated assault. What were the features (at least some of them) of the assault?

One was Luther’s medical problems, such as the onset of kidney stones, an agony no sixteenth-century treatment could relieve. Another was his heart problems. Another was his grief over the death of Elisabeth, his eight-month old daughter who succumbed to pneumonia. Another was the outbreak of the plague in August 1527. (One hundred and fifty years before Luther’s era, we should remember, the Black Death or Bubonic Plague had carried off 40% to 50% of Europe.) Luther’s political ruler, Elector John Frederick, evacuated Wittenberg University and reconvened it in Jena until spring 1528. Luther, however, refused to protect himself self-servingly but rather, like the diligent pastor he was, remained behind in Wittenberg to attend the sick and the dying. The Turks (the sixteenth-century’s version of Islamic threat) had been moving westward relentlessly, and by 1529 had laid siege to the city of Vienna. In addition, the Second Diet of Speyer (1529) had overturned the first (1527), with the result that Evangelicals were no longer tolerated (and, we should note, for the first time in history were known as ‘Protestants’). In 1529 Luther published his Large Catechism. In his exposition of the sixth petition of the Lord’s prayer he reflected on the danger surrounding his people: “This is what ‘lead us not into temptation’ means: ‘We cannot help but suffer attacks and even be mired in them, but we pray here that we may not fall into them and then drown.’”

And then there were the threats Luther had lived with for years. The pope had pronounced him a heretic in 1520, and then had excommunicated him. The emperor had condemned him an outlaw. Anyone assisting the outlaw would be deemed treasonous; anyone caught assisting Luther would be executed.

Luther had much to fear. Still, what rang in his heart was the Psalmist’s gospel-insistence, “The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” “Christ Jesus is his name, the Lord Sabaoth’s son; he, and no other one, shall conquer in the battle.”

[D] Jesus Christ has indeed conquered; he has gained a victory apart from us, extra nos. This victory, achieved without our help, extra nos, has been won on our behalf, for us, pro nobis. Essential as this is (it is, after all, the ground of our salvation), we shan’t benefit from it unless what has been achieved extra nos, pro nobis, is finally applied in us, in nobis. Luther, like all the Reformers, carefully balances pro nobis and in nobis, the work of God for us wrought in Christ and the work of God in us, owned in faith. Christology must always be balanced with pneumatology. All that Christ has gained for us benefits us only as we ‘put on’ Christ in faith. As much as Luther’s heart sings whenever he speaks of Christ, his heart sings no less whenever he upholds that faith which is God’s gift, to be sure, yet always a gift that we must own and exercise.

Like all the Reformers, Luther understood faith as notitia, assensus and fiducia; understanding, assent and trust. When we confess “I believe”, something must be understood or else faith is indistinguishable from idolatry. Something of the gospel must be understood or else faith is no different from superstition. Something of the gospel must be understood or else saying “I believe” is substantively no different from saying “I don’t believe”.

In the second place, what the mind understands of the gospel, however elementary, the will affirms; and what mind and will uphold the heart trusts (fiducia). To say that trust is the crucial element in faith is to say that we cannot save ourselves or inform ourselves or protect ourselves; we can only trust, entrust ourselves to, the “proper Man” who includes us in his victory.

While trust is the determining element in faith, Luther insists that the One whom we trust is also the One whom we are to love. It is unthinkable that we might trust someone we found repulsive. For this reason, Luther, in several places, discusses faith in terms of marriage, Scripture’s favourite metaphor for God’s covenant faithfulness with his people and theirs with him. In this regard Luther likens faith to that event wherein the bridegroom, Jesus Christ, embraces the bride and says, “I am yours”, while the bride, the believer, embraces the bridegroom, saying, “And I am yours”.

[E] With his close reading of Scripture, Luther is aware that Paul speaks in Ephesians 6 of the ‘armour’ that Christians are to put on as they contend with principalities and powers. One aspect of such armour is the ‘shield of faith’. Consider again the first two lines of Luther’s hymn: “A safe stronghold our God is still, a trusty shield and weapon”. While God is named the shield, everywhere in his writings the Reformer insists that faith renders the life-saving shield effective. In the same vein, Luther is aware that when the apostle Paul maintains we are justified by faith, ‘justified by faith’ is shorthand for ‘justified by God’s grace through our faith on account of Jesus Christ’. Looking at the matter from a different angle, Luther is aware that while we are justified by grace, we are never justified apart from faith, since grace forges within us that faith by which grace becomes effectual. To say, then, that God is our shield is to say that faith is our shield.

Luther, like all the Magisterial thinkers, came to the Reformation only after years of intense immersion in humanism. Having studied at Erfurt University, the major north-German centre of Renaissance humanism, Luther maintained that his humanist studies were a major ingredient in his theological development . “I am convinced”, wrote Luther as early 1523, “that without humanist studies, untainted theology cannot exist, and that has proved true…. There has never been a great revolution of God’s word unless God has first prepared the way by the rise and flourishing of languages and learning.”

For this reason, as soon as Luther read in Paul’s Ephesian letter that the shield of faith is able to nullify “all the flaming arrows of the evil one” he would have recalled a major incident in Roman military history.

In 53 B.C.E, the Parthians, under General Surenas (a military genius), fired flaming arrows in a high trajectory upon their Roman foes. The Roman soldiers held their shields above their heads while the projectiles rained down on them — at which point the Parthians fired a second salvo straight ahead, chest high. While Roman soldiers were still reacting to the second salvo, a third, in a high trajectory, fell down on them once again. Their shields couldn’t protect them against attack from two directions simultaneously. Moreover, because all these arrows had been dipped in pitch and then ignited, as soon as a flaming arrow stuck in a wooden shield it set the shield on fire. Attack from above, attack from in front, the soldiers’ protection aflame: they were helpless, and their situation hopeless. Demoralization soon effected one of the worst military defeats Rome would ever know. With this item of recent history in mind the apostle repeats yet again, “Faith in Jesus Christ is sufficient in the face of all life’s flaming arrows.”

When the apostle spoke of the shield of faith he was drawing on yet another aspect of military lore. As a Roman army advanced, each soldier’s shield, carried on the left arm, protected two-thirds of his own body and one-third of the body of the man on his left. Every soldier counted on the man on his right to protect the right-most one-third of his body that would otherwise be fatally exposed. The shield of faith protects the Christian as well as her fellow-Christian.

Luther’s Renaissance education integrated ancient military history concerning flaming arrows and the apostolic word concerning the efficacy of the shield of faith.

[F] “And though they take our life, goods, honour, children, wife.” We have already discussed the manner in which Luther’s life was threatened. His goods? Enemies accused him of profiting from the colossal sales of his books. In truth, Luther refused all royalties, and died dirt-poor, poorer than Erasmus. His children? Elisabeth’s death, we have noted, broke his heart. His heart was broken again when 13-year old Magdalena, afflicted with tuberculosis, died in his arms. His wife? Luther’s enemies smeared him with accusations of lust and lechery on account of his having married at all, and having married an ex-nun. No matter. He cherished Katharina as a singular gift of God.

At the end of it all he was found singing what he sang in the 1520s, “The city of God remaineth”. Luther knew that while creation begins in a garden, it ends in a city, the city of God – which city has to be “let down” since humans are incapable of building it. How was Luther to get to the eternal city? By faith, of course.

Let’s think once more, therefore, of the shield of faith. There is one additional matter we need to know about the shield of faith. When the mothers of Sparta sent their sons off to battle, their last word was, “Come home with your shield, or come home on it; but don’t come home without it.” If their soldier-son came home without his shield then plainly he had surrendered: disgrace! If, however, he came home with his shield, then he had triumphed gloriously. And if he came home on it, then he had fallen nobly in battle and was now borne home with honour. The same shield that equipped the soldier in life brought him home, with honour, in death.

Faith is the shield on which Christ’s soldier, Martin Luther, has been carried home, with honour, to that city of God which is nothing less than a kingdom that cannot be shaken.

2017 Sept. 16

 

Lyrics to A Safe Stronghold Our God is Still

1 A safe stronghold our God is still,
a trusty shield and weapon;
he’ll keep us clear from all the ill
that hath us now o’ertaken.
The ancient prince of hell
hath risen with purpose fell;
strong mail of craft and power
he weareth in this hour;
on earth is not his fellow.

2 With force of arms we nothing can,
full soon were we down-ridden;
but for us fights the proper Man
whom God himself hath bidden.
Ask ye who is this same?
Christ Jesus is his name,
the Lord Sabaoth’s Son;
he, and no other one,
shall conquer in the battle.

3 And were this world all devils o’er,
and watching to devour us,
we lay it not to heart so sore;
they cannot overpower us.
And let the prince of ill
look grim as e’er he will,
he harms us not a whit;
for why? his doom is writ;
a word shall quickly slay him.

4 God’s word, for all their craft and force,
one moment will not linger,
but, spite of hell, shall have its course;
’tis written by his finger.
And though they take our life,
goods, honour, children, wife,
yet is their profit small;
these things shall vanish all:
the city of God remaineth.

Source: Church Hymnary (4th ed.) #454

Enhancing Gospel-Integrity in Christian Higher Education

 

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‘Born of the Virgin Mary’: The Miracle of Christmas

 

‘BORN OF THE VIRGIN MARY’: THE MIRACLE OF CHRISTMAS

I: — ‘Born of the virgin Mary’: we repeat the words every time we recite the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed.  Both creeds are normative for the church universal; both maintain that the virginal conception of our Lord is as essential to the substance of the faith as is the bodily resurrection of our Lord.

Yet many people tell me either they don’t see the point of ‘born of the Virgin Mary’ or they can’t affirm its historicity, its facticity.

Many people tell me virginal conception is such a stupendous miracle claim that believing it is ludicrous.

 

II:  I happen to uphold ‘born of the virgin Mary’.  And I agree with the worldwide church over the centuries that it is a crucial ingredient, a necessary ingredient, in what Christians believe.

[a] Let’s start by addressing the misgivings of the skeptics: “To uphold the virgin birth is to make a claim for a miracle.”  This is correct.  But to reject it on the grounds that it is a miracle is to reject all miracle, including the creation of the universe, the creation of the universe ex nihilo, from nothing.

Let’s think for a minute about the universe. The universe is vast.  How vast?  The Hubble telescope has found galaxies that are 14.5 billion light years away.  (One light year, I should add for those of us who still think in terms of miles; one light year is approximately six trillion miles.)  14.5 billion times six trillion miles: that’s how vast the universe is in all directions.

On a cloudless night I like to look at the stars; I mean the stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way.  It’s only 100,000 light years away.  If I look through my binoculars I can see the next galaxy behind ours, Andromeda.  Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away.  In other words, the light streaming into my binoculars from Andromeda has taken 2.5 million years to reach me.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is a medium-sized galaxy.  It has only 300 billion stars.  Galaxies tend to occur in clusters.  Our galaxy, with its 300 billion stars, is one item in a cluster of 11,000 galaxies – and that’s one cluster only.  (There are two trillion galaxies, of approximately 300 billion stars each.)

Who made all this?  God did.  Out of what?  Out of – nothing. Why would anyone uphold the creation of the vast universe out of nothing and then stumble over of the historicity of the virgin birth?

[b] “Not so fast”, someone objects; “The virgin birth isn’t a core item in Christian doctrine, since it is mentioned by only two New Testament writers, Matthew and Luke.  It can’t be important.”

To be sure, Matthew and Luke speak of it explicitly.  Mark, John, and Paul, however, certainly speak of it implicitly.  When Jesus begins his public ministry in his hometown, hearers are astounded, and they cry out, Mark tells us, “Where did he get his wisdom and power?  Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?” (Mk 6:3) In Jewish circles a man was named by his father, always by his father. Mark doesn’t mention Joseph at all.  Mark traces Jesus to his mother only: “Isn’t this man the son of Mary?”  Mark is telling us, in so many words, that he agrees with Matthew and Luke concerning the virginal conception of our Lord.

John: in 1st John 1:18 John writes, “We know that those who are born of God do not sin, but the one who was born of God protects them.”   You and I: we are “those who are born of God.”  In another sense, Jesus Christ alone is “the one, the Son, who is born of God.”  In speaking of these two categories John uses two different verb tenses.  The verb tense he uses of Jesus highlights our Lord’s unique birth, a unique birth that is essential to our ‘new birth’.

What about Paul?  Paul implicitly upholds the virgin birth in several places, only one of which I shall mention.  In Galatians 4 Paul speaks three times of human generation, and every time he uses the normal Greek word ‘to be born’.  When he speaks of Christ’s birth, however, he uses an entirely different word.  The word he uses of Christ’s birth isn’t the word that speaks of normal human generation.  It’s a word that speaks of the arrival of Jesus, the event of Jesus, the coming of Jesus –tacitly denying that Jesus was generated in the way that all other humans are procreated.  Unquestionably Paul upholds the virginal conception of Jesus – as do Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

 

III: — Before we look into what ‘born of the virgin Mary’ is telling us, we should be sure to grasp what it isn’t telling us.

[a] It isn’t telling us that normal human procreation is tainted.  The Hebrew mind rejoices in children and rejoices in how children are brought forth.  The book of Proverbs insists that “the way of a man with a maid” is glorious.  Scripture nowhere casts aspersion on human procreation.

[b] It isn’t telling us that Mary is a biological freak.  Strictly speaking, the virgin birth isn’t about Mary at all: it’s about Jesus.

[c] It isn’t telling us that Jesus is half-human and half-divine.  Someone half-human is useless to you and me who are wholly human.  Someone half-divine can’t save you and me since it will take all God’s resources to save totally depraved sinners like us.

[d] It isn’t telling us that the virgin birth proves our Lord’s deity.  The virgin birth doesn’t prove anything.  But it does point to something; it’s a sign of something; it attests something.  Then what does it point to?  What’s it a sign of?  What does it attest?

 

IV:  It’s a sign that Jesus Christ, the saviour of the world, has to be given to us.  Humankind cannot produce its own saviour.  History cannot produce history’s redeemer.  We sinners all need a fresh start, what scripture calls, in various places, “new birth” or “new creature” or “heart of flesh” (rather than “heart of stone”) or “renewed mind”.  The point is, human history cannot generate its rescuer.  Its rescuer has to be given to it.

Make no mistake: people are slow, very slow, to admit this.  The world staggers from one ‘sure fix’ to another ‘sure fix’, the previous ‘sure fix’ having failed miserably.  In the preceding century there were two attempts at remaking humankind, one from the political left (communism), and one from the right (fascism).  Not only did they fail to inaugurate a ‘new day’ for humankind; they brought with them unparalleled savagery and suffering.

We should distinguish here between the human situation and the human condition.  The human situation can always be improved humanly.  We can always assist the needy neighbour, share our abundance with those who lack, address glaring inequities and reduce criminality.  We can always correct deficits and deficiencies in education and health care and social assistance.

The human condition, on the other hand, our condition before God, is different: this we can’t correct.  Only the direct intervention of God himself can affect it.  Because Christians are the beneficiaries of such intervention we now know, have long known, that the innermost twist to the human heart; the human perverseness beyond anyone’s understanding; the profoundest self-contradiction – all of this we know we cannot remedy ourselves; we know the remedy has to be given to us, since we cannot generate it ourselves.

In all of this I am not slighting at all those cultural riches that do ever so much concerning the human situation.  Pharmacology can reduce pain.  Surgery can relieve distress.  Psychotherapy can untie emotional knots.  Above all, literature can provide a diagnostic tool for understanding human complexity. Nevertheless, humankind’s ultimate problem isn’t complexity; it’s corruption, self-contradiction.  We have to admit that the root human condition is oceans deeper than the human situation, and the cure for the root human condition only God can provide.

As I mentioned a minute earlier, the world never lacks people who think they can provide it.  Marx said a new human being, the new birth, arises at the point of revolution.  And what did Marxism provide except wretchedness and cruelty for 70 years in the USSR?  Mao Tse Tung said he could remake humankind, and he took down 90 million of his own people.  Pot Pol claimed as much, and he slew 25% of his fellow-Cambodians.

Then is the human condition hopeless?  Not at all: we’ve been given the saviour we’ll never give ourselves.  We’ve been provided the rescuer we long for yet know we can’t generate.  We’ve been given the One who has guaranteed our reconciliation to God and our restoration with God and our new life in God.

‘Born of the virgin Mary’ is constant reminder that only the intervention of God himself can save us.

 

V: — It’s also constant reminder that faith in the saviour; faith has to be given to us as well.  We can’t generate faith out of our innermost resources.  Paul speaks of the condition of sinners before God as “dead in trespasses and sins”.  Dead.  And what can a corpse give itself? – nothing.  Then the faith that recognizes, rejoices in, and clings to the saviour; the faith that trusts him in fair weather and foul; the faith that loves him because he first loved us (when others tell us we are silly); the faith that obeys him (when politically correct people tell us we are utterly out-of-step with our society): such faith has to be given to us.

To be sure, when I say faith has to be given to us I had better say in the next breath that such a gift has to be exercised.  The gift we have received we have to affirm.  The One who is now embracing us, we have to embrace in return.  Of course.  But it all begins with the gift of faith in that saviour who has himself been given to us.

Sometimes we hear it said that it’s much more difficult for people to have faith today than it was years ago or centuries ago.  I disagree.  I think the spiritual condition of people is the same in any era, any century.  Was faith easier when our Reformation foreparents were being burnt at the stake?  Was faith easier when, in the 14th Century, bubonic plague killed 50% of Europe?  Martin Luther used to say, “Cover your eyes and open your ears.”  Luther meant this: when we look out upon the world, what we see contradicts the goodness of God and the love of God and the mercy of God.  For this reason, we have to “open our ears” and hear the gospel, hear it with the ‘ears’ of the heart, for only then will faith thrive in the midst of the world’s contradiction of it.

My children were raised in a clergyman’s home.  This means they overheard suppertime telephone conversations.  (People tend to phone their clergyman at suppertime since they think that’s when they are most likely to find him home.)  To be sure, my daughters could overhear only half the conversation, my half.  Nevertheless, when the conversation had ended and I sat down again to my chicken soup, my daughters were white: they had heard enough to know that devastation had overtaken someone whom they had seen the previous Sunday at worship.

Make no mistake: it is nothing less than a miracle that anyone believes. Faith has to be given to us for two reasons: one, you and I cannot generate faith out of our own resources; two, even if we could, the ceaseless negativities in world-occurrence would overwhelm it and suffocate it.

Every day I thank God for the gift of faith, to me, of course, but not to me only.  For every day as a pastor I look upon people with radiant faith whose lives have unfolded with such difficulty that there’s no earthly reason why they should believe, and every earthly reason why they shouldn’t.  And yet their faith sings: the miraculous intervention of God that has given us the saviour we need continues to give us faith in the saviour as only he can give.

 

VI: — The virgin birth, arising from the direct intervention of God, attests one more miracle: the final, full manifestation of the gift of shalom, a new heaven and earth in which righteousness dwells.  The author of Hebrews maintains that already, right now, we have been given a kingdom that cannot be shaken.  And so we have.  Because Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead and his resurrection can never be undone; because the king triumphant has to bring his kingdom with him or else he’s no king at all; because of this the kingdom of God is here, in our midst, operative, right now, as surely as Christ the King himself is in our midst.  We have been given a kingdom that cannot be shaken.

Christ’s kingdom, however, is not yet fully manifest.  It is here, but only by faith do we discern it and affirm it.  It is in our midst, but it remains disputable.  The day has been appointed, however, when the kingdom, real but disputable, will be rendered manifest so as to render it beyond dispute.  On this day, the day of Christ’s indisputable self-manifestation, we who suffer and groan now are going to appear resplendent, holy and whole alike.

To say we are going to be rendered holy, definitively, is to say that the arrears of sin in us, all of which we have repented and aspired to put behind us, will finally be dealt with.  To say we shall be rendered holy definitively is to say we shall be beyond the reach of sin and its capacity to distort us.

In addition, we are going to be rendered whole definitively.  Which is to say, we shall be beyond the reach of evil and its capacity to disfigure us.

Right now every last human being is distorted by sin and disfigured by wounds.  We victimize ourselves through our sin, and we are victimized by our wounds.  Now while everyone is sinner equally, not everyone is wounded equally.  Through sheer misfortune, some people have been wounded far more severely than others.  The criminal courts recognize this.  We read that someone has been deemed unfit to stand trial, for instance, on account of derangement.  While the deranged person is neither more nor less sinner than the rest of us, undoubtedly he is more wounded and warped than most.

Back in my seminary days I took a course from Dr James Wilkes, a psychiatrist at the old Clark Institute, now CAMH.  Each student was assigned a book to read for class presentation.  The book assigned me was Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.  Capote had written up an incident where two young men decided to break into and plunder a farmhouse in Kansas.  When they broke in, to their surprise they found the house occupied.  They panicked.  Matters went from bad to worse to horrific. By night’s end the men had brutally murdered the three occupants of the house.  One miscreant was subsequently imprisoned; his accomplice was hanged.

Both these criminals had grown up with what Dr Wilkes, psychiatrist, called “poor provision.”  That is, these young men had had wretched upbringings.  They had been provided none of the parental guidance and emotional support we take for granted.  In addition, they had suffered horrific physical injuries, were in chronic pain, and for many reasons had remained abandoned.  When I had finished my class presentation Dr Wilkes paused for the longest moment, staring down at the desk in front of him; then he remarked soberly, “The behaviour of those young men: that’s what society, any society, can expect when children and adolescents live under terrible stress with poor provision.” Some people, unfortunately, are terribly wounded.

I learned something that day I’ve never forgotten.  Whenever I am clobbered in church life I ask myself one question: “The clobbering I’ve just taken from Mr. X – did it arise from his sin, his depravity?  Or did it arise from his woundedness, his pain?”  I don’t know, since I don’t have access to anyone’s heart.  “Did she clobber me because she’s wicked, or because she’s in pain herself?”  I have survived in church life by reminding myself, every day, that I am going to relate to people in terms of their suffering, and I shall leave it to God to relate to them in terms of their sin.

And then I’m going to look to that glorious day when Mr X – and you and I and all God’s people – are finally beyond the distortion of sin and the disfigurement of evil, that day when we shall be both holy and whole, our depravity remedied and our wounds healed.  I’m going to continue looking ahead to that day which has to be given to us, that day when the Kingdom of God appears in its final, full manifestation, and no one is left victimizing himself through his sin and victimizing others on account of his suffering.  On that day we shall be holy and whole definitively.

 

VII: — “Born of the virgin Mary”.  At the beginning of the sermon I said it was a pointer to the gift of Jesus Christ.  It’s a sign of the reality that he is.  But it is it sign only?  Or is the sign of the event so closely related to the logic of the event that the sign of the event is part of the event itself, so that to believe in Jesus Christ, the saviour given to us, is simultaneously to believe ‘born of the virgin Mary’?

Today I rejoice that the saviour human history cannot generate has been given us.  Faith in him, impossible for us to work up, is constantly given us.  And the final, full manifestation of Christ’s kingdom will be given us as surely as our Lord has been raised from the dead.

I believe without hesitation or qualification or reservation, “born of the virgin Mary”.

Victor Shepherd                             Advent 2017

The Role of Faith Communities in the Treatment of Mental Illness “The Story Of Our Life: Written By The God Who Suffers For Us And With Us”

I: — In my final year of theology studies (1970), University of Toronto, I enrolled in a course, “The Human Person in a Stressful World”. The course instructor was Dr James Wilkes, a psychiatrist connected with the Clark Institute of Psychiatry (now part of Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health). Until then (I was 25 years old) I had apprehended no more of psychiatry than the silly caricatures and stupid jokes that popularly surround ‘shrinks’ and ‘wig-pickers’. Months later I emerged from the course not merely with medical information I had heretofore lacked; I emerged with a new world. Wilkes hadn’t simply added several items to my mental furniture; he had admitted me to a world I hadn’t known to exist.

What was the world? It was the complexity of the human person together with the multidimensionality, pervasiveness and relentlessness of human suffering. It was the configuration of the stresses, frequently swelling to distresses – intra-psychic, social, biological, historical, religious – that bear upon people, together with the configuration of responses to such stresses. (Some responses are individual – stress stimulates some people to greater achievement, while stress effects breakdown in others; other responses are social – institutionalization, whether in hospital or prison, is one such social response.)

My debt to Dr Wilkes is unpayable. Not least, he introduced to me the Diagnostic Statistical Manual; as a result I gained even deeper appreciation of the scope, profundity and versatility of human suffering. He spared me lifelong shallowness born of ignorance; spared me a simplistic, unrealistic approach to the people I would see every day for the next forty years in my work as a pastor.

II: — One month after the course had concluded I was ordained to the ministry of The United Church of Canada, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. In no time I was living and working in north-eastern New Brunswick, one of the most economically deprived areas of Canada. And just as quickly I found myself face-to-face with people whose difficulties were the ‘common cold’ of the psychiatric world; e.g., mood disorders, anxiety disorders, schizophrenia. I also witnessed suffering less commonly seen in the Twentieth Century: hysterical paralysis (episodic leg immobility in someone devoid of a physical impediment) and even hysterical blindness when someone was ‘put on the spot’ in a troubling social situation only to find her vision disappearing and returning repeatedly.

III: — My work as pastor on behalf of psychiatric sufferers found me conversing with family physicians and psychiatrists. Both groups, but especially psychiatrists, frequently appeared suspicious of clergy, even occasionally disdainful. Soon I learnt why: too many clergy (at least of that era) tended to a facile, one-sided pronouncement concerning psychiatric patients as possessing inadequate faith and defective trust in God; psychiatric sufferers were haunted by a guilt they were supposed to have; in addition they were self-absorbed. The clergy-proposed cure was simple: all such spiritual problems could be shed through a combination of ‘positive thinking’, ‘exercise of the will’, and ‘greater faith’. The medical fraternity appeared to think the clergy only worsened the sufferers’ predicament in that to their anguish were now added guilt (they were manifest spiritual failures) and anxiety (they feared they lacked the spiritual resources for rising above their pain).

Thanks to Dr Wilkes I was spared such simplistic glibness. Equipped with what I had gained from him, I revisited my theological formation, now keeping in mind the subtleties and complexities of human distress, determined to avoid naïve assessments and subtle accusations of personal deficiency if not personal failure; determined to avoid, in short, a false spiritualization of someone’s suffering.

IV: — As I revisited my theological understanding I developed a constellation of key spiritual themes found in the Abrahamic tradition. This constellation of key spiritual themes formed the matrix of my ministry to psychiatric sufferers.

[A] The first is elemental: God is for us. Three thousand years ago the Psalmist exulted, “This I know, that God is for me.” (Ps. 56:9) This conviction is the bass note, the downbeat, the ever-recurring throb. It remains the stable basis and the governing truth of everything else: God is for us. It’s picked up again in the apostle Paul’s letter to the church in Rome: “If God is for us, who is against us?” (Roman 8:31). The force of the assertion is, “If God is for us, who could ever be against us ultimately, regardless of all appearances to the contrary?” Since ‘appearances to the contrary’ abound in anyone’s life and especially in the ill person’s life, it cannot be insisted too often that God is for us.

To be sure, those who belong to any of the Abrahamic traditions arising from ‘The Book’; that is, those belonging to the Jewish, Islamic and Christian communities are always aware that ‘The Book’ says much else about God: God is judge, God is wrathful, God’s face is set against evildoers, and so on. Ill people tend to fasten on these texts, convinced that their illness is the result of God’s anger concerning them and God’s judgement upon them.

The general tenor of ‘The Book’, however, is wholly different. To be sure, God is judge (isn’t any person who lacks judgement anywhere in life to be pitied?). Unlike our judgement, however, God’s judgment is always the converse of his mercy. God bothers to judge us only because God has first resolved to rescue us and restore us. (If God didn’t intend the latter he wouldn’t bother with the former: he would simply ignore us.) God’s judgement, then, is always and only the first instalment of our restoration and the guarantee of its completion.

Since, according to ‘The Book’, God is love, love isn’t merely something God does (the implication being that God could as readily do something else if he wished; namely, not love); rather, since God is love, love is all God is and therefore all God can do. God can never not love, never act in a way that contradicts his character. God’s wrath, said Martin Luther, is God’s love burning hot – but always and everywhere love.

Mentally ill people, let me repeat, tend to assume their illness is the result of God’s displeasure with them. Two comments have to be made here: one, their illness isn’t the result of God’s displeasure; two, if elsewhere in life they have mobilized God’s displeasure (ill people like to remind me – correctly – that though they may be ill they are still sinners) God’s judgement is only his love setting us right. God’s judgement is God’s mercy beginning its work of restoration.

God is for us. This note has to be sounded relentlessly, for this note determines the rhythm of human existence.

[B] The second item in the constellation of key spiritual themes: God shares our vulnerability; shares our vulnerability not least because God is vulnerable himself. Ill people, I have found, fault themselves remorselessly for not being invulnerable; for not being strong enough, able enough, competent enough, resilient enough; in short, for not being inviolable. They assume that finitude, limitation, weakness isn’t or isn’t supposed to be part of our humanness. They fault themselves for not being invulnerable in the face of life’s assaults. (I have noticed, by the way, that psychiatric sufferers who fault themselves for their fragility would never fault themselves if they suffered a broken leg in a car accident. Without hesitation they would fault the driver whose car struck them. In other words, when they are physically incapacitated, they can legitimately blame others; when they are psychiatrically incapacitated they can only blame themselves.)

There has arisen in our society a miasma that continues to settle upon and soak into the populace at large; namely, we are, or are supposed to be, invincible, devoid of fragility, frailty and finitude. We are, or are supposed to be, nothing less than titanic in our capacity to withstand assaults. We are, or are supposed to be, possessed of an omnicompetence amounting to omnipotence. Worse, such omnipotence is deemed to be an attribute of God and therefore a property of those made in God’s image.

Omnipotence, however, understood as unmodified, unconditioned power, is terrible. A moment’s reflection should assure us that power for the sake of power; power unqualified by anything; sheer power is sheer evil. Then why attribute it to God?

More profoundly, power, properly understood, is the capacity to achieve purpose. What is God’s purpose? – a people who love him and honour him as surely as he loves and honours us. How does God achieve such purpose? – through God’s own vulnerability. The Abrahamic traditions refer alike to the One who repeatedly, characteristically suffers at the hands of his people yet never abandons them. God’s suffering, in these traditions, is likened to many things, but likened most often to a woman in end-stage labour whose child, conceived in pure joy, has brought her greater distress than she could have imagined yet who will not renounce the struggle but must see it through, until the child who is her delight is in her arms and on her lap.

So it is with God. From a Christian perspective specifically, the cross attests God’s limitless vulnerability (he hasn’t spared himself anything for our sakes), while the resurrection attests the limitless efficacy of limitless vulnerability.

Not only are we humans unable to escape our vulnerability (regardless of the messages advertisers beam upon us); to want to escape it is to want to be titanic. And to think we can escape it is to fancy ourselves gigantic and to ignore our Creator who renders himself defenceless before us for our sakes.

Psychiatric sufferers should be helped to see that their fragility isn’t a sign of moral weakness or personal failure or uncommon ineptitude or unusual folly. They should be helped to see that owning their vulnerability, rather than denying it or attempting to flee it, might just be essential to their recovery. Sufferers should be helped to see that their vulnerability is the leading edge of their triumph.

[C] The third item in the constellation of spiritual themes: God alone is the ‘story-writer’ who can render the negative, seemingly opaque developments and details of our existence a story rather than a chaotic jumble that ultimately defies comprehension.

Imagine a line in the middle of a novel; e.g., “The man who had waited for hours finally walked away, dismayed that the woman hadn’t noticed him.” If the question were asked, “What does it mean?”, the obvious rejoinder would be, “It all depends; it all depends on what preceded this event in the narrative; and no less it all depends on what follows this event; ultimately, it all depends on how the narrative turns out; that is, it depends on the last chapter. The mentally ill person persistently comments, “I don’t know why I’m ill; I don’t understand what it’s supposed to mean; I can’t make any sense of it.” Lack of meaning is a stress in anyone’s life, yet lack of meaning is something that confronts us all whenever we are face-to-face with evil.

We should admit that one aspect of evil’s evilness is evil’s sheer meaninglessness. To the extent that evil could be understood, it would be rational event, its evilness reduced by the explanation. What is evil is finally inexplicable and will always lack meaning, not least the evil of illness.

In the face of the stress of that meaninglessness which makes the burden of illness all the more burdensome, the ill person is always prone to try to reduce the burden by positing a meaning, by ‘finding’ a meaning (as it were) that actually isn’t there but the ‘finding’ of which is easier to endure than no meaning. The problem here, however, is that the ‘meaning’ the ill person posits is arbitrary, unrealistic, and worst of all, self-deprecating. Now she thinks the meaning of her illness is that it was ‘sent’ to teach her a lesson, or to remind her of personal failure, or to make major changes in her life, or to confirm her inherent wickedness. In the interest of reducing her burden she has only increased it.

The truth is, the meaning of any one event in anyone’s life depends on several factors. In the first place it depends on what has preceded the onset of illness. In the second place it depends on what is yet to occur in that person’s life. Above all, it depends on the meta-narrative that gathers up and determines the ultimate significance of all the events, good and bad, in that person’s life – which meta-narrative no one, ill or not, can write inasmuch as no individual is the author of her own meta-narrative.

All of us like to think we understand how life is unfolding and how life’s ingredients are connected until – until a negativity occurs that is nothing less than a ‘surd’ (in the mathematical sense); i.e., a development that doesn’t fit anywhere and can’t be seen to fit or be made to fit; a ‘surd’ development that defies the logic by which we had understood our own existence up to this point. Yet since the meaning of a story depends on the last chapter, and since the last chapter hasn’t been written nor can be written by us, we must admit that for the present illness remains a surd: we cannot determine its meaning at this time nor its place in the conclusive narrative that is anyone’s life. People from the traditions of ‘The Book’, however, maintain that the ultimate meaning of anyone’s life can be entrusted to the One whose meta-narrative gathers up our self-determined, myopic narratives and transmutes them into something whose meaning, truth and splendour we can only await at this time but which we need not doubt.

Let’s change the metaphor. Instead of an author or master narrator let’s think of a master weaver. A weaver weaves loose threads into a rug whose pattern is recognizable and pleasing; more than pleasing, desirable – why else would anyone find the rug attractive and want to purchase it? Two comments are in order here. One, what goes into the rug are hundreds of loose threads of assorted lengths and diverse materials. Two, even while these threads are being woven into a rug, anyone looking at the rug from underneath would see something that wasn’t recognizable, wasn’t attractive, and would seem little improvement on loose threads. And yet, when the weaver has finished and we can look at the rug from above we recognize a pattern, a completion, an orderliness that is comely and convinces us that the rug is a finished work, elegantly concluded. Only as we are brought from looking up from underneath to looking down from above do we recognize what the weaver has accomplished.

Right now all of us are on the underside of the rug looking up at it; and while the apparent lack of order and attractiveness may puzzle us or even amuse us, the mentally ill person is never amused and is more than puzzled: she is dismayed, fearing that her life, seemingly a jumble now, will never be more than a jumble. Lacking coherence now, it will always lack coherence. The Abrahamic traditions, however, maintain that ultimately no one’s life is meaningless; no one has to posit an arbitrary meaning in order render life endurable, fictively endurable. Instead, we affirm that the weaver gathers up all the elements of our existence, including the most painful and incomprehensible, with the result that our life, our concrete existence, finally is and finally is seen to be coherent, meaningful, attractive, useful, a finished work brought to completion.

[D] The fourth item in the constellation of key spiritual themes: a community has to embody the truth it claims to cherish. In short, a community has to embody, exemplify, the constellation of spiritual themes discussed to this point. Since the communities of the Abrahamic traditions maintain, for instance, that there is no human being, anywhere, in any predicament, who is ever God-forsaken, the community that upholds this truth has to embody it.

Note: I didn’t say there is no human being who doesn’t feel God-forsaken. Neither did I say that people have no reason to feel God-forsaken. They manifestly have. Nonetheless, since it remains true that God doesn’t abandon, despise or reject, there has to be a community that doesn’t abandon, despise or reject.

Our concrete embodiment of this truth takes at least two forms.

(a) Most simply, the community shares its material resources with those who are especially needy. Everyone is aware, of course, that there is a government-enforced, non-voluntary sharing of our material resources with the needy. This enforced, non-voluntary assistance is found in the combination of graduated income tax and social assistance and health-care. While this arrangement isn’t an explicit aspect of the life of church or synagogue or mosque, it is the indirect illumination arising from the witness of biblically-informed communities. We ought never to sell it short, and we should continue to ask ourselves what might be the social texture of our society if secularism succeeds in extinguishing the indirect illumination of biblically-informed peoples.

The Mississauga congregation I pastored for 21 years partnered with the local synagogue and Baha’i fellowship in developing two affordable housing projects (value: $35 million). This housing accommodated needy people, among whom were always many who were in psychiatric difficulty, and more than a few whose psychiatric condition was chronic. Quickly we noticed that many of the people we housed were undernourished; whereupon we developed Mississauga’s first food bank. It still operates, and every year it distributes food whose market value is $12 million. Next we noticed that many children were so poorly fed they were underachieving at school; whereupon we fashioned a ‘breakfast club’ in order to give them a nutritious start to the school-day. The ‘breakfast club’ was headed-up by the rebbitzin, the rabbi’s wife. She served unstintingly for 25 years. At one point there were 44 people from my own congregation serving in the ‘breakfast club’.

The most elemental level of community is serving the neighbour’s material scarcity through our material abundance.

(b) The second expression of community is sharing the neighbour’s suffering. To share the neighbour’s suffering where mental illness is concerned is at least to befriend that person and thereby at least reduce the suffering person’s isolation and loneliness.

The mentally ill person suffers what every human suffers in terms of frailty, disease, bodily breakdown through accident, sickness and aging. In addition the mentally ill person suffers from her particular psychiatric problem, indeed lives, lives out, that problem, as the non-psychiatrically afflicted do not live that problem, at least. And in the third place, the mentally ill person suffers the social stigma visited upon the psychiatrically troubled. The community has to be aware of all three levels of such suffering, and remain aware that such suffering, cumulatively, is an appalling burden.

When I was a pastor in Mississauga my wife and I invited back to lunch each Sunday a different family from the congregation. Several matters need to be noted here.

One, the unmarried person was still a family, and should not be overlooked in a society almost exclusively couple-oriented.

Two, in a congregation of 400 families there were always several people who had been diagnosed with assorted psychiatric problems.

Three, the mentally ill person is not only suffering atrociously herself; her family is suffering too, in a different manner to be sure, but suffering nonetheless.

Four, while these people had been invited to lunch, if they were still sitting in our living room at 5:00 p.m., they were invited to supper. I came to see that loneliness is an enormous problem, not least loneliness among those one would think least likely to be lonely since their lives outwardly seemed devoid of social deficit; loneliness especially in those whose mental illness heightened their isolation; and of course loneliness in those whose ill family-member found others avoiding the family.

In the course of our simple hospitality we welcomed to our home and table the bipolar person, the obsessive-compulsive, the phobic, the schizophrenic, the substance-addicted, and those afflicted with personality disorders. Among these were the ‘dual-diagnosed’; e.g., the mentally ill person who is also blind or in trouble with the law.

The role of the community of faith isn’t to mimic the mental health professional; certainly it isn’t to suggest that medical intervention is superfluous. The role of the community of faith is to render concrete its conviction that ill people matter and shouldn’t be ignored. Not least, the role of the community of faith is to hold up – for the sufferer herself but also for the wider society – the truth that the troubled of this earth have been appointed to a future release and recovery more glorious than their pain allows them to glimpse at this time.

 

Address to the American Psychiatric Association                               May 2015

Dr. Victor A. Shepherd

 

Why Is This Friday Different From All Others?

Isaiah 53:7-12 1st Peter 2:22-25 Luke 23:32-43

Today is Passover, and in Passover services throughout the Jewish community a young child asks his parents, “Why is this night different from all other nights? It’s assumed it’s important that the child know why this night is different from all others. It’s assumed as well that the child’s parents can tell her why.

At some point our children have asked us or will ask us, “Why is this Friday different from all other Fridays? Why do we call Good Friday ‘good’? It’s important that our children know why. And we, their parents, should be able to tell them.

The quickest answer is “Good Friday is the day on which Jesus died.” But our children will still have many questions: “Why do we make so much of the death of Jesus? We don’t make anything of the death of John the Baptist? And when aunt Susie died last year no one at the funeral said it was good.”

Children persist. “Is it because Jesus died a martyr?” But thousands of Christians have died martyrs. “Then is it because Jesus’ death was unusually painful or distressing?” But millions have died in greater physical pain and distress. Then why is this Friday different from all others?

‘Good Friday’ is a modern expression. In the mediaeval era Christians spoke of God’s Friday. For on this day God acted definitively on behalf of humankind. On this day God did something apart from which the human predicament would be hopeless. He did something apart from which we would have remained helpless. This Friday, God’s Friday, has eternal significance for the entire human creation.

I: — As we ponder what God did and why he did it the truth about us humans begins to settle upon us. We read the all-time favourite parable of the lost son, and we hear the father cry, “My son was lost. He was dead.” Lost? Dead? Do these words really describe the situation of sinful humankind before God? Surely Jesus didn’t mean that unbelief has consequences as serious as this. (‘Lost, dead.’)

And then our eyes alight on a few words with which Jesus introduces a teaching to his disciples: “If you fellows, evil as you are…” He’s talking to disciples, to his friends, not to atheists or moral degenerates or

ne’er do wells; to disciples. And to them he says, matter of factly, as if what he’s saying were so obvious no one could disagree, “If you fellows, evil as you are….”

We penetrate the sentimental haze that surrounds Christmas and recognize that the unrestrained effusiveness and uninhibited joy pertain to one item: we’ve been given a saviour. We catch the mood of the New Testament writers. Their mood is, “Whew. At last. Just when we thought it was all over with us and our predicament was irretrievable.” If these men and women are ecstatic over the gift of the saviour, do they know something about the human predicament that we, in our inflated self-assurance, have overlooked?

And then we hear Jesus announcing, as he looks detractors in the eye, “I didn’t come to call the righteous. I came to call sinners to repentance.” Repentance is a turn-around in life; it’s an about-face, a 180-degree redirection. Does Jesus Christ assume that my life is fundamentally misdirected now?

Yes. Our Lord’s diagnosis is that humankind is wrapped up in a deep-rooted revolt against God. Unbelief (he’s not talking now of the unbelief of the head, a relatively slight matter, but rather about the unbelief of the heart: hardness of heart); unbelief, he insists, isn’t an ‘allowable option’ that some pseudo-sophisticates prefer to hold. Unbelief of the heart is wilful rebellion and repudiation, protracted defiance and disdain concerning God himself. It’s persistent ingratitude concerning God and prideful contempt as well. Our revolt issues, in God’s economy, in a human condition that is accurately described, without exaggeration, by the words ‘lost’, ‘dead’.

A diagnosis as catastrophic as this has to be met with a treatment that’s anything but superficial, or else the treatment will prove wholly ineffective. Yet in our society shallow diagnoses of the human condition abound, and we are constantly proffered superficial treatments. Shallow diagnoses always call forth shallow treatments. One treatment is greater moral earnestness; another is hyped up religiosity; another is cultural refinement; another is more government control in order to ensure social order; another is less

government control in order to ensure individual responsibility. None of these treatments can remedy the human condition; they are all too shallow.

When I was eleven years old I was playing touch-football on the street when one of my friends upended me. My head struck the curb, and my skull was fractured. My friends managed to get me home. I was dazed, pain-wracked, and profoundly disoriented. My mother, distressed at seeing me and preferring not to think my condition critical, went to the bathroom medicine cabinet, took out a tube that was supposed to fix everything, and squirted Vaseline on my head. What was Vaseline going to do for a fractured skull? Nobody is faulting her. She didn’t perceive how badly I was injured; or unconsciously she couldn’t bring herself to admit I was badly injured; or she wanted to ‘buy time’, wait and see, by playing ‘Let’s pretend’.

In light of humankind’s predicament before God (universally denied by the purveyors of shallow diagnosis and treatment), all shallow recommendations are as ineffective as putting Vaseline on a fractured skull.

God sees our repudiation of him (the unbelief of the heart), our brazen attempts at disguising our revolt, and our shallow attempts at remedying a predicament whose profundity we won’t acknowledge. God reacts. Of course he reacts. If God didn’t react he’d be a psychopath, as character-deficient as those pathetic people who are conscienceless, shameless, and everywhere dangerous. His reaction is his condemnation. His reaction issues in our estrangement from him. His reaction fixes a gulf between him and us, which gulf our rebellion, rejection and repudiation of him aimed at anyway, didn’t it?

Our Lord is the supreme realist. His diagnosis is correct. We are, he tells us, estranged from God by our defiant disobedience, and fixed in that estrangement by God’s just judgement.

II: — Yet Good Friday is God’s Friday, remember; and God’s Friday is Good Friday. Good Friday must

be good news, it has to be good news, or nothing could be good about it. Good Friday is good news, the good news of the gospel. The gospel is God-in-his-mercy coming among us who are lost and dead just because he is more distressed at our estrangement from him than we are. In his mercy God will do anything in order to set us right with himself.

Then what has he done? At the cross he has sealed his judgement upon us and manifested that judgement incontrovertibly (bad news); and at the cross he has simultaneously taken his own judgement upon himself, thereby fashioning acquittal for us. Good news.

Think of the last time you had to discipline your child for a serious offence. You had to do two things. In the first place you had to impress on your child your displeasure at her; you had to ensure your child understood that her behaviour was unacceptable; you were not going to tolerate it, and her punishment she deserved entirely. In the second place, you had to assure your recalcitrant child that you still loved her; that her outrageous behaviour grieved you more than it grieved her; that your anger – legitimate, vivid, evident – was nonetheless nothing compared to your heartbreak. In a word, you had to assure your child that the punishment she had to undergo pained you more than it pained her, cost you more than it cost her. Every parent wrestles with this dilemma.

God wrestles with it too. And God resolves his dilemma through the cross. Through the cross he makes plain that our defiance of him and repudiation of him, so far from a slight matter, is an intolerable matter, a damnable matter. After all, our recalcitrance has cost him his Son – which is to say, has cost God himself everything, since Father and Son are one in their suffering on Good Friday.

At the same time, through the cross God declares that his mercy is without measure and without end, for he hasn’t spared his Son, hasn’t spared himself, all for the sake of sparing us. So it is that Paul exclaims, in limitless amazement, “God instantiates his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

I have heard people say, “What does the death of Jesus have to do with God’s saving us? If we were drowning a hundred metres offshore, out in the middle of the lake, and someone standing on the dock took pity on us, and exclaimed, ‘I feel sorry for your predicament. I’ll jump into the water and drown too: we’ll both drown together” – I’ve heard people say that such a situation doesn’t prove that the second person loves the first or can save the first. All it proves is the stupidity and ineffectiveness of the silly person who jumped off the dock and threw his life away.

Then did Jesus merely throw his life away? In truth, our Lord’s cross is wholly different. The alienation from his Father that the Son undergoes on Good Friday – the dereliction we call it (“Why have you forsaken me?”) is nothing less and nothing other than humankind’s alienation from God (even though we are insensitive to it). And since, according to the Incarnation, Father and Son are one in their judgement upon us, one in their execution of that judgement, and one in the alienation that judgement entails, then the Son’s alienation from the Father is simultaneously the Father’s self-alienation. And the Father’s self-alienation is nothing less than God, the just judge, absorbing in himself his judgement upon us, leaving us acquittal, pardon, forgiveness, life.

Think of it from another angle. In Jesus Christ, God the judge enacts his sentence of condemnation upon humankind. And then God the judge does what no human judge ever does in a court of law. He steps down from his elevated bench, stands with the offender, and imposes on himself the sentence he has just imposed on the offender, thereby absorbing in himself the sentence the offender deserves and has received and yet is now spared.

Let’s return to the matter of parents disciplining children. A parent comes upon a child behaving outrageously and consigns that child to her bedroom, without supper. Some time later, the parent, so very upset at the child’s behaviour that the parent can’t eat his supper, goes to the child’s room, sits with the child, and tells the child why all of this had to occur. Then the parent, having absorbed the punishment he

assigned the child, puts his arm around the child, and the two of them walk out of the room together.

III: — Together. This word brings us to the last point of the sermon. As God has absorbed his judgement upon us at the cross, he and we can live henceforth together. He can’t do anything more for us than he has already done. Whether we live henceforth together now hangs on our response.

Our response will include several aspects. It will include our recognition that the diagnosis concerning us has been correct. It will include our acknowledgement that the remedy for our predicament God alone has fashioned. It will include our admission that we do not add to this cure nor do we subtract from it: either we receive it or we spurn it. Our response will include our discernment that the remedy, finally, isn’t an ‘it’ at all but rather the effectual presence of Jesus Christ himself, and therefore we are going to embrace him gratefully or rebuff him haughtily.

Two hundred years ago it was the custom of the leaders of a vanquished army to hand over their swords (ceremonial swords) to the victor. Handing over one’s sword was the conclusive, public acknowledgment of surrender.

After the last shot was fired in the Battle of Waterloo, 1815, the victorious general, the Duke of Wellington summoned the defeated French generals to his tent. They appeared, greeted Wellington, and took the seats he offered them. Immediately they congratulated Wellington on his superior military prowess. Why, they were professional soldiers too, and certainly they had an eye for military genius. In fact, they continued, so fine a soldier was Wellington that it was no disgrace to lose to him. It was an honour simply to be found on the field of battle with him. Perhaps they could all have a glass of sherry and toast each other.

The flattery mounted. Wellington listened to it for twenty-odd minutes and then said quietly, yet

uncompromisingly, “Gentlemen, I want your swords.” He didn’t want to be flattered. He wanted to be surrendered to. And he wanted a conclusive, public acknowledgement of that surrender. To this end the men who surrendered to him were going to have to stand before him empty-handed.

It is for the same reason the hymn writer cries, “Nothing in my hand I bring; simply to thy cross I cling.”

If you are offended by the simplicity of the Good Friday message, I can only say that the gospel, finally, is simple.

If you are offended by its diagnosis of the human predicament before God, I must insist on its realism.

If you are offended by the crudeness of crucifixion and blood and bedraggled Jew, I can only say that no one has ever been saved by Gentile, genteel refinement.

Why is this Friday different from all others? Why is this Friday Good Friday? Because it’s God’s Friday. And by God’s grace and the faith his grace enlivens within us, may it ever be yoursand mine as well.

Victor Shepherd

Good Friday 2015       St Bride’s Anglican Church, Mississauga          

Festschrift Acceptance Speech

On the occasion of his Festscrift,Victor was honoured as Distinguished Fellow, with celebration writings, recognizing his outstanding contribution as “Pastor-Preacher-Scholar.”   This event took place on Saturday June 7th, at Bayview Glen Church.            

Fetschrift

     Soren Kierkegaard, a better philosopher than I, once remarked, “Life can only be understood backwards, even though it has to be lived forwards.”  Kierkegaard meant that only after episodes in our life have occurred can we understand them; but of course since we must ‘live forwards’ we can never anticipate how our lives are going to unfold.  I could never have anticipated being named Distinguished Fellow by the Centre for Mentorship and Theological Reflection, founded by my colleague, Prof. Dennis Ngien. (The event tonight, by the way coincides with the 16th anniversary of Dennis’s Centre for Mentorship and Theological Reflection.)

   I began my theology studies in 1967, and was soon ordained to the ministry of Word, Sacrament and Pastoral Care.  For four decades I was an everyday pastor and every-Sunday preacher, and for four decades I remained startled and moved at how people, suffering people in particular, count on their pastor to be for them an icon of Jesus Christ and his triumph.

   And then, in the midst of and overlapping with my work as pastor, I was invited to teach at Tyndale.

———————–

    The occasion of my recognition tonight as teacher is also the occasion of gratitude to many.

   First I must mention Donald Bastian, retired bishop of the Free Methodist Church in Canada.  Over 20 years ago Bishop Bastian chaired the committee that appointed me the first occupant of Canada’s only Chair of Wesley Studies.   

   Of course I wouldn’t have been appointed anywhere had I not thrived under the doctoral supervision of Prof. David Demson, a thinker whose theological gifts in the University of Toronto were without peer.

  Ten years after my appointment to Tyndale, Prof.  David Neelands, Dean of the Faculty of Divinity at Trinity College, University of Toronto, appointed me to Trinity College in order to supervise doctoral students from any of the seven theological colleges on the U of T campus.  Prof. Neelands gave me a gift greater than he will ever know.

   The first two doctoral students assigned me (one each from Wycliffe and Trinity) made my task easy, thanks to their prodigious academic ability.  Both are here tonight, and both are now professors at Moody Bible Institute, Chicago: Marcus Johnson and John Clark.

   My single largest debt to any individual, however, is the debt I owe Professor Emil Fackenheim, whose grave I visited in Jerusalem in 2011.  For decades Fackenheim was the brightest star in U of T’s philosophical firmament.  In class he discussed philosophy, and nothing but philosophy. Fackenheim’s lectures acquainted us with aspects and implications of philosophy we could never have found or probed or profited from without him.  Outside class, however, Fackenheim, rabbi as well as philosopher, didn’t care to talk about philosophy.  Outside class Fackenheim wanted only to speak of GOD.  One day he commented to me, “Shepherd, modernity thinks it is solid and substantial while God is ‘iffy’, vague, ethereal, ephemeral.  Shepherd, there is nothing ‘iffy’ about God; God is concrete, weighty, opaque, dense.  Modernity has it wrong.  In light of the depredations of the 20th century (here I knew he was thinking of the Holocaust) there is a huge question mark above humankind; but above Him there is no question mark whatever.”  When Fackenheim uttered ‘God’, the entire room filled with the Shekinah, and I thought I was on Sinai with Moses or on Carmel with Elijah.  Fackenheim’s stamp is on me everywhere.

   I like to think that at my life’s end there will be two or three students who will have come to know through my witness what I came to know through Fackenheim’s: namely, what it is to be overwhelmed by and engulfed by and taken up into the immensity and density, the sheer ‘thickness’, of the One who can never be escaped and, at the last, won’t even be disputed.   

    Tyndale has been a wonderful gift to me, a gift of many facets: academic colleagues, staff members, administrators, librarians.  The single, most moving aspect of Tyndale’s gift, however, has been students.  The students have always struck me as younger venturers on the Kingdom-journey who, I trust, will profit from us who are older venturers on the same journey with them.

——————————————————————

   Always to be cherished are the dozens of family-members and friends here tonight who have endured my spasticities and encouraged me at all times.

   And then there’s my dear wife.  In 45 years of marriage Maureen has never, never even once, complained about the sacrifices my vocation has exacted from her.

   Above all, I am grateful to our Lord Jesus Christ.  His crucified arms embrace us now even as he points us to the Day of his glorious appearing, when faith will give way to sight, hope give way to hope’s fulfillment, and love give way to nothing – except more love, for ever and ever.

 

The Triune God and the Threefold Nature of the Church

 

 

 The Triune God and the Threefold Nature of the Church

      On Halloween many people wear false faces.  No one is upset because everyone knows the false face is only a game.  If, however, someone walked into a bank wearing a false face, it would be another matter.  Everyone would know the false face is an occasion of evil.

   Many of us ‘put on’ a false face, as it were, in different social situations in order to misrepresent ourselves and deceive others.  I can hate you in my heart and yet ‘put on’ a face that suggests friendship.  I can despise you in my heart and yet ‘put on’ a face that suggests admiration.  In these situations (situations of sin, we should note) the face we wear contradicts the heart we possess.  Plainly the person putting on the false face can never be known, and because she can’t be known she can never be trusted.  If anyone is to be known and trusted, face and heart have to be one.

   What about God’s face and God’s heart? If we think of Jesus Christ as the manifest ‘face’ of God, then the doctrine of the Trinity attests the face of Jesus and the heart of the Father to be identical.  The face the Father displays in the Son is not and never can be a false face.  Face and heart are one.  God as he is towards us (the Son) is identical with God as he is in himself (the Father).  This point is crucial, for otherwise God’s activity upon us and within us might be merely something God does, unrelated to who God is.  If this were the case, God’s activity upon us and within us would be a manipulation that never acquainted us with the heart of God, with the result that we could never know God himself, and therefore we could never trust him.

    The doctrine of the Trinity is crucial.  At the very least it attests the truth that who God is in his dealings with us is who God is in himself; and no less importantly, who God is in himself is who God is in his dealings with us.

    In other words, the doctrine of the Trinity witnesses to God’s identity: what we see in Jesus Christ is what we get; namely, God himself and nothing other than God himself.  In addition the doctrine of the Trinity witnesses to God’s unity.  What is done for us in Jesus Christ and what is effected in us through the Holy Spirit is an act of the one God: these two acts aren’t the activities of two different deities or two lesser deities or two non-deities.

   What God does for us in the Son is called ‘Christology’; what God effects in us through the Spirit is called ‘Pneumatology.’  The arithmetic is simple: Christology plus Pneumatology equals Theology.

   “Who is God?”  Scripture never answers this question directly.  Scripture answers this question indirectly by posing two other questions.  “What does God do on our behalf?  What does God effect within us?”  The answers to these two questions add up to the question “Who is God?”  God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  This God is one.  The doctrine of the Trinity attests the unity of God, and, as we have already noted, the identity of God.

   While Scripture nowhere articulates a doctrine of the Trinity, the ‘raw materials’, as it were, of the doctrine are not hard to find.  Everyone is familiar with Paul’s blessing: “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” (2nd Cor. 13:14)  The same triune formula is found in narrative form in Luke’s gospel concerning the Christmas annunciation made to Mary: “The Lord (“Lord” is the name of God in the older testament) is with you….you will bear a son who will be called the Son of the Most High….the Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.” (Luke 1:28-35)  In John’s gospel Jesus announces that the Father will send the Holy Spirit in the name of the Son. (Jn. 14:26)

   It is no surprise that when heresy threatened the church repeatedly, the Council of Nicaea (325 C.E.) framed a doctrine of the Trinity that has worn well ever since, departure from which is deemed no less than denial of the gospel.

I: —  Despite the fitting emphasis on the Triune being of God, different theological families within the church tend to emphasize one person of the Trinity.  Their emphasis gives rise to a particular theology and particular church practice.  Later we shall see how a one-sided emphasis fosters serious distortion. But for now let’s note how highlighting one person of the Trinity characterizes one theological family in the church as a whole.

(i)    Let’s think first of the understanding of the church in classical Protestantism, the churches that come out of the Reformation, more-or-less what we call ‘mainline’ Protestant denominations today.  Here the church is understood as those who gather to hear the Word of God preached.  And there’s nothing wrong with this as far as it goes, since we should gather to hear the Word of God preached.

   This understanding is reflected in interior church architecture.  The pulpit is front and centre.  The pulpit is elevated, always elevated above the communion table.  The bible is placed on the pulpit and is read from the pulpit.  Plainly the theological order is Scripture, sermon and sacrament.  Scripture is the source and norm of the sermon, and scripture and sermon together are the content of the sacrament.  Good!  Our Reformation foreparents were correct (I am convinced)  when they insisted that without Scripture the sermon is no more than gospel-less subjectivism, and without Scripture and sermon the sacrament is no more than superstition.

   The order of service reflects the priority of preaching.  The sermon is the single, largest item of worship.  It occupies not less than one-third of the service, frequently more than one-half.  When, in this understanding of the church, a pastoral relations committee is assessing candidates for the pulpit, the paramount question on everyone’s lips is “Can she preach?”

   The presuppositions of this understanding of the church are noteworthy.  One such presupposition is that the gospel has a precise content, and people have to be informed of this content just because the gospel isn’t an instance of humanistic self-help or religion-in-general or vague sentimentality.  The content is precise; it’s God-given.  It isn’t negotiable or substitutable or alterable.

   The gospel’s precise content matters, and matters supremely since the gospel is ultimately the power of God for salvation. (Rom. 1:16)  The hearer’s eternal destiny and temporal wellbeing hang on the preached Word and the hearer’s response.

   The precedent for this understanding of the church is impressive.  Moses spoke – to the people who assembled to hear him.  His speaking imparted something the world will never be without.  The socio-political shape of the Western world (at least) is unimaginable without the Decalogue.  When Benjamin Disraeli, Prime Minister of Great Britain, was taunted repeatedly in the House of Commons on account of his Jewishness, one day he had had enough.  Disraeli turned on his ridiculers, “Yes, I am a Jew.  And when your foreparents were eating acorns in the Forest of Arden, my foreparents were giving laws to the world.”

   Not only Moses preached; the Hebrew prophets preached.  Amos cried, “God has spoken; who can but prophesy?” (Amos 3:8)  In the same manner God exclaimed to Jeremiah, “I am making my words in your mouth a fire.” (Jer. 5:14)  Either Jeremiah opened his mouth to let out the fiery word or he was consumed by it.

   Jesus, we are told, “came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God.” (Mk. 1:14)

   Not least, when Jesus sends out the seventy missioners he insists, “Whoever hears you, hears me.” (Lk. 10:16)  There is no ‘as if’; “whoever hears you, it’s as if she heard me.”  To hear the missioner preach Christ is to be confronted with Christ-in-person.  To say the same thing, whenever the Word of God is preached, Jesus Christ acts – invariably.

   The Protestant Reformers knew this.  In his commentary on Galatians 3:1 John Calvin maintains that when the gospel is preached the “blood of Christ flows.”  And in his commentary on Hebrews 9:20 Calvin writes, “When the gospel is preached, [Christ’s] sacred blood falls on us along with the words.”  Imagine it: whenever the gospel is preached the saving blood soaks the congregation.  In his commentary on Isaiah 6:1-5 Calvin reminds us that when Scripture is read today God-in-person speaks; then Calvin adds soberly, “When he speaks, we tremble.”

   The living Word, Jesus Christ, surges over us as the inscripturated Word is expounded in the preached Word.  This living Word we cannot acquire elsewhere or elsehow.  We can’t acquire it through watching movies, playing golf or waterskiing.

   Neither can we acquire it (him) through nature.  Don’t tell me you can.  Don’t tell me that God speaks most clearly to you through nature.  Don’t tell me you feel closer to God in nature than you do anywhere else.  When you have observed a tsunami or a fox eat a rabbit or a snake eat a frog, don’t tell me you have just had privileged access to God.

   Don’t tell me that when you are standing on the dock on Lake Muskoka and the loon warbles just as the sun sets and you feel awed, you are closer to God than you are in church.  At that moment you are moved (profoundly, we must admit) by God’s creation, the beauty of that creation and the genuine mystery of that creation.  But the beauty of God’s creation is not the glory of God, and the mystery of the creation is not the mystery of the God who is forever other than his creation and ought never to be confused with it.  No one looking at the creation, however long and however intently, ever came to an understanding of redemption and righteousness and sin.  No gazing upon the immensity of the universe informs us of the God who, for the sake of us who despise him, humbled himself in a manger and humiliated himself at a cross where he was publicly identified with the scum of the earth.

   To say that the church consists of those who gather to hear preached the gospel with its precise content is to say that there’s no such thing as blind faith.  To be sure, we have to trust God on days so dark as to be utterly opaque; but the God whom we trust on opaque days himself can’t be opaque or we wouldn’t know whom to trust or why we should trust.  Unless we are schooled week-by-week in the precise content of the gospel, faith will erode and discipleship will disappear.

   Any understanding of the church that highlights the gospel in its uniqueness will also emphasize correct doctrine.  Doctrines are truths about Christ that point to him and describe him.  He is Truth (in the sense of reality).  Truth, reality, shouldn’t be confused with or reduced to provisional statements about him, truths.  At the same time, as Truth he can’t be described or commended or communicated apart from the truths that speak of him.  To belittle doctrine is to belittle him of whom it speaks.

   The church as those who gather to hear the Word preached; this understanding is important and should be cherished.

(ii) — Yet there’s another understanding of the people of God in Scripture.  It’s one that’s dear to the Catholic tradition: Eastern Orthodox, and the twenty-two churches that make up the Catholic family, chief among which is the Roman Catholic.  This understanding highlights the church as the body of Christ.

   There are 188 images of the church in the New Testament.  Immediately all of us could name some: the bride of Christ, for instance.  Others are less-known: the church as perfume, or a farmer’s field, or a letter delivered by Canada Post.  By far the dominant image among the 188 is the body of Christ.  Jesus Christ is head of his own body, the church.  Any assault on the body is at the same time an assault on our Lord.  For this reason not to discern the corporate nature of the church, the body of Christ, is horrific.

   In the Hebrew bible, as soon as you ask someone his name he tells you the name of his tribe, because he has no identity apart from his tribe.  In the Hebrew mind the corporate identity of the people of God looms large.

   We modern individuals have difficulty understanding the solidarity of Israel.  The prophet Isaiah, commissioned by God to address a sharp word to the people; Isaiah doesn’t say, “I may be stuck living with degenerate people whom God is going to punish, but I know better than they and I’m not one of them.”  Instead Isaiah, fully aware that he has a commission others lack, cries, “I am a man of unclean lips; and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.”

   According to biblical understanding the church as body of Christ has everything to do with the church’s identity.  You and I exist as Christian individuals only as we are related to Christ’s body, the corporate people.  We like to think we can be related to Jesus without being related to the church, and we could be related to him without being related to them – if Christ were a severed head.  But he isn’t a severed head.  He is always and everywhere the head of his body.  Therefore to be related to him at all is to be related to all of him, head and body.

   Paul asks us to imagine a human body dismembered, the sort of spectacle we might find at an airplane crash or wartime bomb blast.  There are detached arms and legs and torsos scattered everywhere, along with blood and guts and faeces and interstitial fluid and who knows what else.  Repulsive?  He wants it to be.  He wants it to be so very repulsive that you and I will think twice about dismembering the Christian fellowship.

   The second point the apostle has in mind is reflected in his question, “Of what use is a leg?”  A leg is used to support and propel a torso.  A severed leg can’t support or propel anything.  Strictly speaking, therefore, is it a leg at all?  Strictly speaking a severed ‘leg’ doesn’t exist; what exists is a chunk of putrefying flesh, nauseating and malodorous, that should be buried immediately.

   It is only as you and I are members of the body that we share in the body’s ministry and mission.  There is in truth only one ministry, the ministry of Christ in his body.  To remove ourselves from his body is not to share in his ministry; which is to say, to have no ministry at all.

   While we are speaking of ministry we should soberly take note of the fact that the churches that understand themselves chiefly as body of Christ (Anglo Catholic, Roman Catholic, and so on) have been the most faithful in ministering to the marginalized in the inner cities.  It is they who minister to the mentally ill, the ex-convict, the recipient of social assistance; in short, they have been the most faithful in ministering to the least, the last, the lonely, the loser.

   Christians who understand the church as the body of Christ have a wonderful sense of historical continuity.  They know that humans are humans in any era, and therefore Christians today are not the first generation of Christians to face major issues.  They smile when they are told that pluralism, for instance, is a new challenge to the church.  New?  Biblical faith took root in the midst of religious and cultural pluralism.  Our Hebrew ancestors knew that God had spoken to Abraham and Moses and Malachi in an environment that included Canaanite religion and child sacrifice and sacral prostitution – all of which they had to resist.  Christians in the apostolic era upheld Jesus of Nazareth as the Son of God, the world’s sole saviour and Lord, the Messiah of Israel and the coming Judge – and all of this amidst a sea of Gnosticism, mystery religions, and idolatrous worship of the Roman emperor.  We aren’t the first generation of Christians to face pluralism.  Neither are we the first generation of Christians to face multisexuality, the presence of which, we are told, ought to find us adjusting our convictions.  The ancient world, and every era ever since, has been acquainted with multisexuality.

   Aware of the 3500-year history of the church, our Catholic friends appreciate the cruciality of Christian memory.  To be without memory, anywhere in life; to be amnesiac is no small matter.  The tragedy of amnesia isn’t that someone can’t remember where she left her umbrella.  The tragedy, rather, is that the person with no memory doesn’t know who she is.  Lacking an identity, she doesn’t know what to do, how to act.  Lacking an identity, therefore, she can’t be trusted – not because she’s uncommonly wicked – but rather because, not knowing who she is, she doesn’t know how to act in conformity with who she is.  Anything she does can only be arbitrary, capricious, spastic, inconsistent.

   The year 2013 is only six months behind us. 2013 was the 450th anniversary of the Heidelberg Catechism (1563), a document some folk regard as the crown jewel of the shorter Reformation writings.  The Heidelberg Catechism has sustained generations of Christians when shaken by assaults from without and upheavals from within.  It begins magnificently.  Its first question (of 129) is, “What is your only comfort in life and in death?”  Answer: “My only comfort in life and in death is that I am not my own, but I belong, body and soul, to my faithful saviour, Jesus Christ.”  Since 2013 was the 450th anniversary I looked in the Reformation churches everywhere in Canada for a celebration, or at least an acknowledgement, of this wonderful document.  I looked in vain.  Make no mistake: had the Heidelberg Catechism been written by Catholics it would have been visible last year in every church.  Do we Protestants know who we are?  Can our grandchildren trust us?

   “The church as the perduring body of Christ; it all sounds good,” the sceptic remarks, “but it must refer to some mythological church that exists nowhere.  It doesn’t refer to my church, St Matthew’s by the Esso station, with its bickering, pettiness, and power-plays.”
  But it does refer to St Matthew’s by the Esso station.  Yes, the church is like Noah’s Ark, Reinhold Niebuhr reminded us: if it weren’t for the storm outside no one could withstand the stink inside.  Or as Karl Barth liked to say, “If Christ hadn’t been in the boat it would have sunk.”  The point is, Christ was in the boat – and still is.

   For this reason those who understand the church as the body of Christ, with its identity and visibility and perdurability, are characteristically patient Christians.  Is the church weak?  God will strengthen it.  Compromised?  God will restore it.  Confused?  God will enlighten it.  While we should always be concerned, we should never panic.

   For as long as time remains Jesus Christ will be head of his body.  Decapitation isn’t going to occur.  Christ will always use his body to do his work in the world; and he, the head of his body, will always guarantee the efficacy of that work.

(iii) There is yet another understanding of the church highlighted by many Christians, the church as the community of the Spirit.  While we might think first, in this regard, of our Pentecostal friends, the church as community of the Spirit is found in many of the smaller, more charismatic denominations and independent congregations.

   While the Pentecostal denomination appeared early in the 20th century, its antecedents were found in the holiness movement of the 19th century, and in every century before that, all the way back to the 1st century church in Corinth.

  Those who uphold this understanding of the church insist that we must choose to enter the kingdom; no one oozes into it.  They are quick to remind us that while God loves the world and suffers on its behalf, the world remains the world; namely, the sum total of God-defiant, disobedient men and women tacitly organized in their hostility to the gospel.  Repentance is not the same as remorse.  Faith is not the same as ‘beliefism’.  Cruciform discipleship is not the same as middle-class ‘yuppyism’.  These people remind us that the gate which admits us to eternal life is narrow, and the way is anything but easy.  There is a great gulf fixed between righteousness and condemnation, life and death, truth and delusion; in short, between God and evil.

   They are quick to remind us that doctrine, however necessary, is an abstraction, while life in the Spirit is concrete; they tell us graphically that a body which lacks the Spirit is no better than a corpse.

   When Paul, heartbroken and angry in equal measure, confronts the church in Galatia concerning its anti-gospel slide into legalism, he gets to the point in a hurry.  “Tell me,” he writes: “Did you receive the Spirit through hearing with faith or by works of the law?” (Gal. 3:2)  His reference to their receiving the Spirit is a reference to an occurrence in their Christian experience, an occurrence as vivid, memorable and undeniable as any occurrence in experience of any sort.  It’s as if he said, “That raging headache you have right now; did you get it through concussion or through over-exposure to the sun?”  What can’t be denied is that someone with a headache knows she has a headache.  “Did you receive the Spirit through embracing the gospel with faith or through self-righteous legalism?”  The apostle is trying to correct their theology by appealing to their experience of the Spirit.

   The Christians in Rome are reminded that they have received the Spirit of sonship, adoption, with the result that the cry, “Abba, Father”, is drawn out of them.  They utter it spontaneously.  They can’t help crying, “Abba, Father,” as surely as someone in pain can’t help groaning, or someone tickled by a good joke can’t help laughing, or someone rejoicing can’t help beaming.  The apostle isn’t asking them to expound the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God; he’s asking them to recall how they came to be ‘lit.’

   The Christians in Thessalonica had undergone terrible persecution when Paul wrote them.  Aware of their faith and their resilience he wrote, “You received the word in much affliction with joy inspired by the Holy Spirit.” (1st Thess. 1:6)  The Lord whom they cherished had poured his Spirit into them with the result that they remained unbroken and undeflectable, and all of this without grimness but rather with joy, when they had no earthly reason to rejoice.

   The apostle John, in his brief, five-chapter 1st epistle, uses the expression “we know” or “you know” or “I know” 34 times in one of the smallest books in Scripture.  “We know that we have passed from death to life.”  It’s all gathered up in “By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his own Spirit.”  To be visited with God’s Spirit isn’t to wish or long for or hanker after or speculate; it’s to know.

   In one of my seminary courses on homiletics we students had to preach to each other under the supervision of the professor.  One of my classmates delivered a sermon in which he used the expression “I suppose” half-a-dozen times.  When he finished, the class, and especially the student who had preached, waited on the professor for his evaluation.  There was silence, painful silence.  Then the professor looked at the student for the longest time and finally remarked, “You suppose?  You suppose?  Mister, when you ascend the pulpit steps on Sunday morning either you know or you don’t say anything.”

   To speak of the Spirit is to speak of the immediacy and intensity and intimacy of God.  The Spirit is God-in-our-midst acting, and acting upon and within his people so as to move them beyond doubting who he is, what he has done, and what he asks of them.

II: — Let’s return now to a discussion of the Trinity.  Plainly any departure from Trinitarian understanding lands us in confusion, error, falsehood, even in personal distress.  Yet despite Scripture’s insistence on a Trinitarian understanding of God and the church’s wisdom in framing the doctrine, a non-Trinitarian unitarianism always laps at the church.  Such pseudo-Christian unitarianism can be a unitarianism of the Father, or of the Son, or of the Spirit.

(i) – A unitarianism of the Father depicts God as austere, even severe, even tyrannical.  It renders God frigid and fearsome.  It likes to speak of God as “in control.”  It reiterates that God is sovereign, even as it confuses sovereignty with coercion.  It speaks of God’s providence, even as it confuses providence with omnicausality.  God is said to be “high and lifted up,” as Scripture maintains, even as unitarianism’s one-sidedness renders the exalted God inaccessible and unknowable.

(ii) There is also a unitarianism of the Son.  Jesus is our pal.  For this reason he and we can be palsy-walsy.  He sympathizes with us in our pain and we sympathize with him in his.  He’s our friend – and why not, since in John 15 he names us his friends.  Forgotten, alas, in the unitarianism of the Son, is the complementary truth that while he is our friend, he ever remains Lord and Judge of the relationship.  To be sure, Jesus is our friend, but he is a friend to be feared.

  We are quick to co-opt Jesus for our self-serving agenda, when all the while he claims us for his Kingdom-agenda.  He may be our friend, but he will never be our ‘flunkie.’

(iii) Lastly, there is a unitarianism of the Spirit.  Religious experience is now featured.  Before long any experience is featured, as long as it’s vivid and intense.  Forgotten, of course, is that only one Spirit is holy; all other spirits are unholy.  Holy Spirit gives rise to holy living; unholy spirits give rise to something else, regardless of intensity or vividness.  A unitarianism of the Spirit one-sidedly magnifies religion of the heart, conveniently overlooking two crucial Scriptural truths: one, the heart of humankind is “deceitful above all things and desperately corrupt, utterly beyond understanding,” says the prophet Jeremiah (Jer. 17:9); two, ‘heart’ (‘lev’ in Hebrew) always includes the mind.

III: —  To no one’s surprise, any distortion concerning the Trinity; that is, any decline from a Triune understanding of God to a unitarian misunderstanding of God results in a deformed understanding of the church cherished by that particular church family which one-sidedly highlights Father or Son or Spirit.

(i)  Let’s begin with classical Protestantism, with the notion that the church consists of those who gather to hear the Word preached.  Before long the emphasis on preaching turns into an adulation of the preacher.  Now the congregation is built around a personality cult, or hero-worship, or verbal glitz.  “Our minister is a dynamic speaker” some people have boasted to me.  I don’t doubt that he is.  And I have heard many dynamic speakers whose rhetorical gifts were deployed in the service of a high-flown enunciation of nothing.  Such speakers forged a lucrative career by craftily saying nothing, and skilfully saying it well.

    Again, a one-sided emphasis on speech-communication readily leaves hearers happy in the illusion that their only responsibility is to follow the argument of the sermon.  They think that attentive listening to the dynamic speaker exhausts their obedience to God.

  Again, where preaching is emphasized one-sidedly, the congregation becomes a club of amateur, armchair philosophers who relish intellectual titillation.  Since Sunday morning worship is now one-sidedly intellectualist, a mood of intellectual snobbery arises in the congregation.  After all, not every Christian is as intellectually sophisticated as are they and their pastor.

   Again, a one-sided emphasis on preaching will always highlight doctrinal precision, and the history of the church tells us that unnecessary intricacy promotes a wrangling that finds yet another Protestant splinter added to the thousands that exist already.

(ii) What about our apprehension of the church as the body of Christ?  Here too a glorious truth will be distorted and deformed if it is emphasized one-sidedly, in isolation from the other two understandings.  While it is correct to maintain that the body of Christ will perdure inasmuch as Christ the head will never be severed from it, too often it is forgotten that Christ ever remains the Lord and Judge of the body.  As soon as the church forgets this truth it assumes that everything it does has Christ’s blessing when in fact much that the church has done calls down Christ’s curse.  “‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?’  Then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; go away from me, you evil-doers’” – says Jesus himself.  (Mat. 7:23)

    Again, denominations that recall the promises Christ makes concerning the church – e.g., “The powers of death will never prevail against it” – assume that the survival of their denomination or congregation is guaranteed.  The promise means nothing of the sort.  When Christ pronounces the church irrefrangible he is promising that he will preserve the community of his faithful people; faithful people, faith-filled people – not membership rolls or baptism registers or Christmas and Easter drop-ins.  History is littered with the dust of long-dead denominations and congregations.  Christ’s faithful people can count on his promise; no one else should ever presume upon it.

   Again, a one-sided emphasis on the church as the body of Christ finds people assuming, perhaps unconsciously, that Christ has collapsed himself into the church; he now inheres the church and is a function of the church: whatever the church does, he does.  Wrong!  Jesus Christ is never the church’s possession to be manipulated or deployed or even relegated to the basement should he prove awkward and embarrassing.  Alas, such a church has forgotten Peter’s startling pronouncement: “…it is time for judgement to begin at the household of God.” (1st Peter 4:17)

   

(iii)  Lastly, a one-sided understanding of the church as the community of the Spirit will find the church’s one-sidedness distorting and disfiguring what it rightly tries to uphold.  While a recognition of the place of Christian experience is legitimate, even necessary, a one-sided, unbalanced elevation of experience leaves people unable to distinguish between experience of God and experience of the world; unable to distinguish between experience of God and experience of anything at all; unable to distinguish between Christian righteousness and cultural refinement.  Now the measure of spiritual authenticity is intra-psychic intensity, inner intensity of any sort arising from any stimulus.  As a pastor of 40 years’ experience I have heard the silly, sad tale of those who insisted their extra-marital affair was God-willed and God-blessed; after all, the intensity of their affair was so much more thrilling than humdrum domesticity.  Intensity, vividness, immediacy, we should note, can as readily describe a life of sin.

   Ultimately, a one-sided emphasis on the church as community of the Spirit lends religious legitimacy to any community born of any spirit.  At best there is the inability to distinguish the church from a neighbourhood club or social-service organization or humanistic association.  At worst there is the inability to distinguish between the Holy Spirit and the satanic.  Do I exaggerate?  Recall the history of Germany in the 20th century.  The German people claimed a spiritual sanction (specifically a Christian sanction) for a demonized state that German people today want only to forget.

   Not least, a one-sided understanding of the church as the community of those whom the Spirit has ‘torched’ in the present moment overlooks the history of the church and the wisdom entrenched in its tradition.  To be sure, no one wants traditionalism, the suffocating grip of the long-dead.   Nevertheless, our Christian sisters and brothers who have moved from the church militant to the church triumphant have something tell us, and they should be allowed to speak.  Remember: we are not the first generation of Christians, and it is the height of arrogance to think that we can see farther by not standing on the shoulders of our foreparents in faith.

   Lastly, a one-sided emphasis on the Spirit and Spirit’s immediacy undervalues the mind.  We are to love God with our minds, and it is impossible to love God unless we understand something of his nature and his purpose and his way with us.  Unless we understand something of God’s nature and purpose and way with us, our worship is sheer idolatry.

IV: — Distortions of the church abound.  Invariably they arise from a distorted grasp of God as Triune.  Plainly a more profound apprehension of God is needed if the church is to be healed.  Therefore we must turn once again to the God who is Father, Son and Spirit.

   While we rightly speak of the being of the triune God as Father, Son and Spirit, when it comes to our knowing the Triune God the order is always Spirit, Son and Father.  As the Spirit surges over us and frees us, we abandon our unbelief and embrace in faith the Son who has already embraced us; and having embraced the Son who has already embraced us we are rendered one with the Father.  At this point God’s Triune incursion and the church’s threefold witness have borne fruit concerning us.

  Then tonight may the Spirit ever join you and me to the Son in the Son’s obedience to and adoration of the Father.  For then we shall know ourselves sealed upon the heart of God, and this for ever and ever.

Victor Shepherd     June 2014