24 October, 2019

Intro.] I have been asked, as a Christian of evangelical conviction, commitment and confession, to share with you my angle-of-vision on the evangelical movement in its present self-understanding and expression. I have been asked as well to share with you what cautions or corrections might be in order, and not least what might need to be re-emphasized if not recovered.

1:1] First of all we must ever keep at the forefront of our mind and heart and mission the human condition before God.

“Lost, dead, damned already” writes John Wesley in his tract Awake, Thou that Sleepest.¹ Evangelism at all times, and therefore evangelicalism at any time, presupposes the human condition he learned from Scripture. Wesley preached 40,000 times and travelled 400,000 kms, frequently rain-soaked in summer and winter alike, not because humankind ultimately needed help or improvement or encouragement or fixing up or topping up. He spent himself because he knew humankind needed saving. Saving from what? From whom? In other words, what is the gravest threat confronting the sinner?

When I put this question to my class in theology, invariably the class answers, “Sin is; or satan is; or cosmic evil is.” And invariably I reply, “No: God is; God is the sinner’s gravest threat”. Startled now, the class ripostes, “But isn’t God our saviour?

While the shocked class splutters, I pose my next question: “If you insist God is our saviour, then from what does God save us?”. The class thinks this question easier: God saves us from sin, or from ourselves, or from meaninglessness, from frustration, from futility, or from alienation of any and every sort.

To conclude the exercise I inform students that the gospel isn’t good news because it alleviates depression or despair or frustration; the gospel is good news in that it spares us condemnation at God’s hand. The gospel, simply, is God in his mercy saving us from God in his condemnation. God is the sinner’s enemy and therefore the one the sinner is to fear; and finally, God is the sinner’s saviour and therefore the one we are to trust, love and obey.

When students deem me overstated on this point, we re-visit the saga of Genesis 3. Adam and Eve, in the wake of their ungrateful, disdainful disobedience, are found outside the Garden of Eden. Did they wander out? If they did, they can smarten up, turn around (‘repent’ in biblical parlance), and step back in.

But they didn’t wander out carelessly or step out adventuresomely or stride out defiantly. They were driven out, expelled. Who expelled them? God did, by a judicial act. And the angel with the flaming sword bars re-entry.² Of themselves, therefore, they can’t repent. They can repent and go home only as God rescinds his condemnation. For until God rescinds his condemnation, there is no ‘home’ to go home to and no one to return to.

In the cross of Jesus Christ God rescinds his condemnation: now there is a home and a welcoming Father. In the cross of Jesus Christ God is reconciled to sinners: now sinners may become reconciled to him.

As I move around in evangelical circles I am disturbed by a tendency I am hearing too often; I am hearing the human predicament psychologized (i.e., we feel guilty for any number of reasons without being guilty before God). Or I hear the human predicament existentialized (i.e., through our sin we have alienated ourselves from God, from others, and from self). Lost here is Scripture’s insistence that we are not alienated from God on account of our sin; we are alienated from God on account of God’s judgement on our sin.

We must always remember that the penalty for our sin (to be distinguished from the consequences of sin) is condemnation. Such condemnation is operative now. The Day of Judgement will announce nothing new but merely render undeniable that truth of which the condemned are currently culpably ignorant. Right now God is rightly hostile to the sinner.

1:2] And yet through the cross of Jesus Christ God is overwhelmingly the sinner’s friend. Thanks to the atonement the barricade denying us access to God has been removed; the way home is without impediment; the invitation “Come unto me” is sounded and pressed upon us relentlessly.

Thanks to the atonement, I said a minute ago. The biblical notion of the atonement is fast falling from favour in the church, and finding heavy weather even in evangelical circles. “Substitutionary atonement amounts to child abuse”, we are told.³ What parent torments, even kills, his child for any reason, let alone for the ridiculous ‘reason’ of supposedly benefiting a third party, sinful humankind? Any doctrine of the atonement is cruelty cloaked in gibberish.

Evangelicalism insists, nevertheless, that either our Lord “…bore our sins in his body on the tree”⁴ or there is no gospel at all. Evangelicalism knows too that all shallow caricatures of the atonement are wide of the mark. After all, in the Incarnation God himself has come among us and identified himself with us in his condemnation of us. In the Son who is “reckoned with transgressors”⁵ the Father has bound himself to sinners.

In the incarnation, however, the Son’s alienation from the Father on Good Friday is nothing less than the Father’s self-alienation for our sakes. In other words, Father and Son alike are one in their judgement of sinners and one in their execution of that judgement. In the incarnation, however, the Father’s visiting his condemnation of sinners upon the Son is finally the Father’s visiting his condemnation of sinners upon himself. In Jesus Christ, the Son Incarnate, the just judge executes his judgement and absorbs that judgement in himself. If the just judge absorbs in himself the deadly condemnation we sinners deserve, then what remains for us?—acquittal, pardon, forgiveness; relief, release, life. With consummate concentration Athanasius declared, “Our resurrection is stored up in the cross.”⁶

Our resurrection is indeed stored up in the cross—if, so far from any sort of child abuse, God, the implacable foe of sinners, has executed his judgement upon them; and then, in his incomprehensible mercy, has absorbed that judgement in himself and thereby rendered himself the undeflectable friend of sinners.

I remain persuaded that the foundation of evangelicalism is gathered up in scriptural faithfulness to humankind’s predicament under God, as well as in God’s provision for us in the atonement of the Incarnate One. If either aspect is omitted, then evangelicalism has betrayed its trust, trivialized itself, and rendered itself unable to speak savingly to our contemporaries.

2:1] Jesus Christ, God’s definitive provision for us who are “lost, dead, damned already”, must be owned in faith. He must be seized, trusted, “put on” in Paul’s vocabulary.⁷ While we can embrace him only because he has first embraced us in the cross and illumined us as to his act by the Spirit, we in turn must hold him fast “with both hands in that fellowship by which he has bound himself to us”, in Calvin’s vocabulary.⁸

To embrace Jesus Christ is to embrace all of him, the totus Christus, in Luther’s vocabulary.⁹ To embrace all of Christ is to embrace head and body alike. In other words, we cannot be immersed in and identified with Christ our Lord unless we are immersed in and identified with the church.

For this reason I am persuaded that evangelicals are frequently in danger of minimizing the cruciality of the church; frequently in danger of thinking a parachurch movement to be a substitute for the local congregation if not superior to it.

Too often evangelicals appear to suggest that to be converted to Christ is to be converted to a severed head, the body of Christ amounting to little more than an option for those who ‘do church’ or an inessential encumbrance for those who don’t.

On this matter we need to look back to David, Israel’s greatest king, the Messianic figure with whom God’s covenant is eternal, the one who therein anticipates Jesus Christ. Samuel, we are told, “anointed him [David] in the midst of his brothers.”¹⁰ The translation “in the midst of” is crucial, for according to our Hebrew foreparents the Messiah always brings his people with him. To be sure, the Messiah cannot be reduced to his people; neither is he a function of them. At the same time, however, he isn’t who he is apart from them. Intimacy with him is intimacy with them.

For this reason weaker translations of the Hebrew text are misleading; e.g., David was anointed “in front of his brothers”¹¹, or “while his brothers watched”¹², and perhaps weakest of all, “from among his brothers”.¹³ “While his brothers watched” suggests his brothers were spectators at an event that didn’t include them; “from among his brothers” implies that his brothers were left behind.

Luther was more profound: to be related to Christ at all is to be related to all of him, the totus Christus.

While Jesus Christ cannot be collapsed into his body thereby rendering him no longer the church’s Judge and Lord (an error for which evangelicals correctly fault Roman Catholic thought), neither can the Judge, the Lord who transcends the church ever be separated from it (an error for which Roman Catholics correctly fault much Protestant thought). Evangelicals need a scriptural understanding of the church that is theologically more profound and more nuanced; evangelicals need this much more than they need instruction from the social psychologists on how to foster homogeneity in group-growth dynamics.

I maintain that it is helpful, in our grasp of ecclesiology, to revisit how the church has been viewed in major families in Christendom.

2:2] In the Reformational families of classical Protestantism the church is understood as those who gather to hear the Word of God preached. The sermon is the single largest item of worship, occupying no less than one-third of the service and frequently more than one-half.

The presuppositions of this understanding of the church are noteworthy. One presupposition is that the gospel has a precise content; another, that we have to be informed of this content. In other words, the content of the gospel has to be divinely revealed; and it is impossible to intuit it.

The precedent for this understanding has ample scriptural warrant. Moses preached. The prophets preached. Jesus, we are told, “came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God.”¹⁴ Not least, when Jesus sends out the seventy missioners, he declares, “Whoever hears you hears me.”¹⁵ There is no ‘as if’: ‘whoever hears you, it’s as if they heard me.’ To hear the missioner preach is to be confronted with and encountered by Christ-in-person; i.e., whenever the Word of God is preached, Jesus Christ acts—unvaryingly.

The Reformers speak with one voice here. John Calvin maintains that when the gospel is preached the “blood of Christ flows.”¹⁶ Intensifying this point, Calvin adds, “When the gospel is preached, [Christ’s] sacred blood falls on us along with the words.”¹⁷ The congregation, in other words, consists of those who hear the Word of God preached and therein find themselves drenched in the blood of Christ. It is little wonder Calvin reminds us, “When he [Christ] speaks, we tremble.”¹⁸

Any understanding of the church that highlights the uniqueness of the gospel will also emphasize the need for and place of correct doctrine. Doctrines are truths about Christ that point to him and describe him. He, by contrast is Truth (in the biblical sense of aletheia, reality). To be sure, Truth cannot be reduced to truths; eternal reality cannot be reduced to provisional statements that speak of it. Still, Truth cannot be described or commended or communicated apart from the truths that speak of him. Therefore to belittle doctrine is to belittle the one of whom it speaks.

The church consists of those who gather to hear the Word of God preached.

2:3] Another understanding of the church attested in Scripture is one dear to Eastern Orthodoxy, 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.

In this understanding we exist as individual Christians; that is, we are identified with Jesus Christ only as we are found in and identified with his body, the corporate people of God. What’s more, it is only as we are members of the body that we share the body’s ministry and mission. Ultimately there is only one ministry, the ministry of Jesus Christ in his body. To remove ourselves from the church is not to share in his ministry; which is to say, not to share in any ministry (a point evangelicals often appear not to grasp).

Christians who understand the church as the body of Christ have a fine sense of historical continuity. They know that humans are human in any era. Therefore Christians today are not the first to face, for instance, religious pluralism. They know that biblical faith took root in the midst of religious and cultural pluralism. After all, God spoke to Abraham and Moses and Malachi in a setting that included Canaanite religion¹⁹ and child sacrifice²⁰ and sacral prostitution.²¹ Christians in the apostolic era attested the uniqueness of the Incarnate Son of God amidst a sea of Gnosticism, mystery religions, and idolatrous worship of the Roman emperor.

As for multisexuality (never think there are only half-a-dozen sexual orientations), any comparison between what occurred, and was even trumpeted, in the ancient world and what can be found in the scores of documented paraphilias today (paraphilias being unusual patterns of sexual arousal and gratification); any comparison here falsifies contemporaneity’s claim to sexual novelty or discovery.

Aware of the 3500-year history of the church, our Catholic friends grasp the cruciality of Christian memory. They know that to lack memory is to be amnesiac. And the tragedy of amnesia isn’t that someone has forgotten this or that. The tragedy is rather that the institution without memory lacks an identity; lacking an identity it cannot be trusted. An institution that slights memory, not knowing who it is, doesn’t know how to act in conformity with who it is. Therefore it can only act whimsically, capriciously, arbitrarily.

Possessed of Christian memory, however, and therefore acquainted with the church’s history, Christians in the Catholic family are characteristically patient. The church is 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. After all, since Jesus Christ is never without the earthly manifestation of his body, he is never without witnesses to himself.

2:4] There is yet another understanding of the church that can be traced from the First Century congregation in Corinth to charismatic Christians today; namely, the church as the community of the Holy Spirit. This tradition reminds us that we must choose to enter the Kingdom; no one oozes into it; that while God so loves the world as to go to hell and back for it, the world remains the world: the sum total of God-defiant, disobedient men and women tacitly organized in their hostility to the gospel. This tradition reminds us that faith is not the same as ‘beliefism’; cruciform discipleship is not the same as middle-class ‘yuppyism’; the gate admitting us to eternal life is narrow, and the way is anything but easy.

In the same vein these Christians insist that doctrine, however necessary, is an abstraction, while life in the Spirit is concrete.

When Paul, heartbroken and angry in equal measure, confronts the church in Galatia concerning its anti-gospel slide into legalism, he asks them, “Did you receive the Spirit through hearing with faith or by works of the law?”²² His reference to their receiving the Spirit is a reference to an occurrence in their Christian experience, an occurrence vivid, memorable, and undeniable. 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?” Note that the apostle is endeavouring to correct their theology by appealing to their experience of the Spirit.

The apostle John, in his brief, five-chapter first 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 out of death into life.”²³ 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”.²⁴ To be visited with God’s Spirit isn’t to wish or long for or hanker after or speculate; it’s to know.

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

There is a family of Christians who highlight what should never be forgotten; namely, a body without vivifying Spirit is no better than a corpse.

3] And yet evangelicals must always be aware of the distortions that lap at all three traditions of the church.

3.1] The church consists of those who gather to hear the Word of God preached? Before long an unbalanced emphasis on preaching turns into an adulation of the preacher as the congregation is built around a personality cult or verbal glitz. Or the sermon morphs into an intellectual exercise that happens to use religious words, while congregations become amateur, armchair philosophers who relish intellectual titillation and exude intellectual snobbery.

3.2] The church is the body of Christ? If this understanding is isolated from the other two, it is soon forgotten that Christ ever remains Lord and Judge of the body. It is soon forgotten that the church traffics in much that calls down Christ’s curse. It is soon put forward, usually implicitly, that Christ inheres the church and is a function of the church. Overlooked now is Peter’s startling pronouncement: “…the time has come for judgment to begin with the household of God.”²⁵

3.3] The church is the community of the Holy Spirit? This salutary corrective is lost if this particular understanding neglects the other two. For an 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 of any sort arising from any stimulus. Intensity, vividness, immediacy, we should note, can as readily describe a life of sin.

My point in my protracted discussion of the church is this: I long to see evangelicalism recover the totus Christus, the whole Christ. I crave having us recognize that to say “I believe in Jesus Christ” includes our saying “I believe that the church is essential to our salvation and witness.” I hunger to see evangelicalism endorse a richer understanding of the church as the body of Christ, gathered by the Word, empowered by the Spirit, and all of this for the sake of rendering visible that Kingdom which the King has brought with him in his resurrection from the dead, which Kingdom can no more be shaken²⁶, let alone overturned, than the King’s resurrection can be undone; which Kingdom, real right now, is discerned by faith in anticipation of that day when King and Kingdom alike will be beyond dispute because beyond denial.

4] One matter remains to be investigated; namely, what is the spiritual presupposition of the sinner’s predicament/rescue, and what is the spiritual presupposition of the church? The presupposition of the sinner’s predicament is the holiness of God, while the presupposition of the church is the holiness of God’s people. The holy God calls, equips, and commissions a holy people, the “holy nation.”²⁷

I have long been persuaded that holiness—of God and of God’s people—is the preoccupation of Scripture.

4.1] To say that God is holy is to say that God is incomparably himself. God belongs to no class. God is predicated of nothing. Yahweh isn’t one among several deities, not even the best of several. Yahweh, alone, is God.

Everyone knows how crucial Deut. 6:4 is to Israel’s faith: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” If this text (“…the Lord ourGod…”) is read by itself, however, it might suggest that Yahweh happens to be Israel’s God but Shiva could be no less the deity of Hinduism and Devas of Buddhism. In order to avoid this error we must always read Deut. 6:4 alongside Zech. 14:9: “And on that day Yahweh will be king over all the earth. On that day Yahweh will be one and his name one.” The Holy One of Israel alone is God.

4.1.1] Because God’s holiness is God’s unique Godness; because God’s Godness is derived from nothing else and is shared with nothing else, God is not to be identified with his creation as a whole nor with any part or dimension or aspect of his creation. While pantheism maintains that God is the essence of all that is, prophet and apostle insist that God is not the essence of anything God has made. The being of God is divine. The being of the creation is creaturely. The being of God is infinite and necessary. The being of the creation is finite and contingent. There is a qualitative discontinuity here, an ontological discontinuity that can’t be compromised. Any suggestion that a creaturely item is divine is an affront to the holiness of God.

Panentheism, a near relative, insists that God is in the essence or of the essence of all that is. If God is the essence or in the essence or of the essence of all that is, then there’s nothing that isn’t divine. And if there’s nothing that isn’t divine, then by definition sin and evil cannot exist. (Now we understand why our secular ‘yuppie’ friends flirt with or are even devotees of the New Age Movement. The New Age Movement, pantheistic or at least panentheistic, legitimates, even divinizes, all human behaviour while denying any human behaviour to be sinful or wicked.)

4.1.2] In the second place God’s holiness means that God cannot be measured by or assessed by anything other than himself. God is the absolute standard of himself.

4.1.3] In the third place God’s holiness means that God’s character is without defect or deficiency. God’s character is free from taint of any kind.

God’s love is devoid of sentimentality.

God’s anger is devoid of irascibility or petulance.

God’s judgement is devoid of bias or arbitrariness.

God’s patience is devoid of detachment or indifference.

God’s sovereignty is devoid of coercion or tyranny. (Who, after all, is less tyrannical, less coercive than the Lord of the cosmos dying between two criminals at the city garbage dump, derided by foes and abandoned by friends?)

4.1.4] In the fourth place, God’s holiness means that all aspects of God’s character are gathered up into a unity. Just as every shade of the spectrum from infrared to ultraviolet is gathered up into what we call ‘light,’ so every aspect of God’s character and God’s loftiness and God’s lordship is gathered up into God’s sheer Godness, God’s holiness.

5.1] God’s holiness, according to Scripture, entails the holiness of God’s people. The God who is holy insists that his people be holy too. Needless to say, we can’t be holy with God’s Godness, since God’s Godness is shared with no one. Nonetheless we are appointed to reflect God’s holiness, to mirror God’s character, in a way that is appropriate to us whom God has made in his likeness and image.

Unambiguously Peter exclaims, “…as he who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct, since it is written, ‘You shall be holy for I am holy.’”²⁸ Echoing this conviction, Paul says of his fellow-Christians, “For we are [God’s] workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”²⁹ Plainly both apostles were acquainted with the dominical pronouncement, “Everyone who comes to me and hears my words and does them….”³⁰

It should surprise no one, then, that from cover to cover Scripture is preoccupied with holiness. Scripture is preoccupied, we have to admit, where the church hasn’t been. For instance, Christians have contended vociferously over predestination. We should note, however, that the predestination word-group occurs approximately fifteen times in Scripture, while the holy/holiness word-group occurs 835 times. Scripture’s characteristic concern is holiness, both God’s and ours.

I am convinced that the overarching, comprehensive theme of Scripture is one matter with two aspects: God’s re-assertion of his holiness in the face of our denying his, and God’s re-establishing our holiness in the wake of our contradicting ours. We deny God’s holiness and we contradict our own. According to Scripture God is ceaselessly at work to re-asserthis holiness and re-establish ours.

Both these concerns are gathered up in what I call the ‘root’ commandment of Scripture. The ‘root commandment’ is, “You shall be holy as I the Lord your God am holy.”³¹ This commandment is heard over and over throughout the bible. It’s the bass note; it’s the downbeat; it’s the refrain; it’s the pulse: “You shall be holy as I, the Lord your God, am holy.”

The ‘root’ commandment, I have called it. But look at the grammatical form: “You shall be….” “You shall be” can be read as command or as promise. Read as command it means “You ought to be holy, you had better be holy.” Read as promise it means “One day you will be rendered holy; I guarantee it: you will be found holy.”

It is our friends, the seventeenth-century Puritans, who insist that all God’s commands are “covered promises.”³² The Puritans always knew that what God requires of his people God gives to his people. What God commands his people to exemplify God promises his people will display. Put another way, “You shall be holy as I, the Lord your God, am holy” is the command of God underlying all Scripture and no less the promise of God crowning and adorning all Scripture.

5.2] Holiness is both God’s gift and humankind’s task. What God gives us, we are to live. Holiness is both by grace and by grit. How gritty is the grit? Very gritty, according to the single most protracted discussion of holiness in all of Scripture. The single most protracted discussion of holiness is found in Leviticus, chapters 18-27. Leviticus 18 begins, “And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, ‘Speak to the people of Israel, and say to them I am the Lord your God. You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you.’” Plainly holiness has everything to do with our doing. It doesn’t matter how we feel or what we intend or what ecstatic religious experiences we have undergone if we fail to do.

Do what? Holiness, so far from being so heavenly as to be of no earthly good, is startlingly mundane, according to Leviticus 18-27. Consider the following. We are to treat the stranger (the stranger is always vulnerable, lonely and anxious) as one of us. If we are merchants we are to use just balances and weights and measures. If we have to go to court we mustn’t attempt to bribe the judge. And if we happen to be the judge then we must judge justly, favouring neither the rich nor the poor.

We mustn’t offer up our children to pagan deities. Surely the discussion of holiness in Leviticus is irrelevant right here, for who would sacrifice their own children today? As a matter of fact millions offer up their children to pagan deities every day. How many parents are there in Thailand who have consigned their children, more or less twelve years old, to a horrific sex-trade catering to wealthy Europeans and North Americans while the Thai government looks the other way, so incomparably lucrative is the tourist sex-trade for the Thai economy?

Do you think children today aren’t offered up to pagan deities? Then why is it a child who is challenged—challenged in any respect—has the right to special education and the right to social assistance and the right to special access in public buildings and, not least, the right to her own toilet—but she doesn’t have the right to be born?

Lest we think that such down-to-earth holiness is a peculiarity of the book the church manages to avoid, we should look at holiness in the book of Exodus: “You shall not boil a kid (young goat) in its mother’s milk.”³³ Why not? A she-goat would never be aware that her offspring was being boiled in her milk.

There are two considerations here. One, even though the goat isn’t aware that it’s her offspring being cooked in her milk, anyone who has watched an animal nurse her offspring tenderly and defend it fiercely would be utterly insensitive if he did what the command of God forbids. In the second place, in the ancient world to boil a young goat in its mother’s milk was to invoke a foreign deity. If God forbids us now to boil a kid in its mother’s milk then God is forbidding his people now to call upon foreign deities.

Tell me: what deities, so-called, are invoked right now? What deities are invoked when a baseball player who fails to get a hit seven times out of ten is guaranteed fifteen million dollars per year for the next five years while homemakers are selling daffodils on street corners because cancer patients needing treatment have been told there’s a six-month waiting list for the equipment?

“Walk in love, insists Paul, “as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us….but fornication and all impurity or covetousness….Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.”³⁴ And when we are told that Christians must keep the marriage bed undefiled³⁵, we cannot pretend that Scripture doesn’t presuppose, everywhere, marriage to be the union of a man and a woman.

5.3] A few minutes ago I spoke of the ‘root’ commandment of Scripture: “You shall be holy as I the Lord your God am holy.” Now recall the “great and first”³⁶ commandment, “You shall love the Lord your God without qualification or reservation or hesitation, and you shall love your neighbour with total self-forgetfulness.”³⁷ How is the root commandment related to the great commandment? The connection is plain: holiness is freedom to love. To be holy is to be human (authentically human); to be authentically human is to be free to love.

The purpose of God’s rendering his people holy is to render us authentically human. Some people have foolishly spoken of God’s sanctifying grace in terms of their becoming superhuman. But to aspire to be superhuman is to aspire after sin. And not to put too fine an edge on it; to aspire to be superhuman is to behave like a subhuman. It is the purpose of God’s grace to render us authentically human.

6] The Newer Testament characteristically speaks of Christ’s people as hagioi, ‘holy ones,’ ‘saints.’ Saints are not spiritual super-achievers of any sort. Saints are simply exemplary human beings. Saints are human beings, restored by God’s grace to human authenticity, who exemplify their Lord who went about doing good inasmuch as he knew that One alone is good, and this One alone is good just because this One is Yahweh, and Yahweh alone is holy; that is, uniquely, singularly, God.

This One we are to love—and fear. For only as we fear him, Scripture insists, shall we love both him and his people alike.³⁸

1^ Wesley, Works, vol. I, 151.

2^ Gen. 3:24.

3^ E.g.,“Feminist theologians argue that no doctrine is more problematic, and no symbol more potentially destructive to women and other marginalized persons, than the doctrine of Christology and the symbol of the cross. Exclusive focus on a male savior subjected to unjust suffering and violent death for the benefit of all human beings, feminists proclaim, all too often leads to harm for women.” Deanna A. Thompson, Crossing the Divide: Luther, Feminism and the Cross (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), 100.

For a trenchant critique of the ‘child abuse’ accusation, see Bruce L. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions of Barth’s Doctrine of the Atonement”, The Glory of the Atonement (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), chapt. 17.

4^ 1^st Peter 2:24.

5^ Luke 22:37.

6^ Athanasius, Orationes contra Arianos, 1.43.

7^ Eph.4:24; Col. 3:10.

8^ Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.2.24.

9^ Martin Luther, Palm Sunday Sermon from 1524, “On Confession and the Lord’s Supper”.

10^ 1^st Sam. 16:13, English Standard Version.

11^ Good News; New Century.

12^ Contemporary English.

13^ Pearls from the Bible.

14^ Mark 1:14.

15^ Luke 10:16.

16^ Calvin, Commentary Gal. 3:1.

17^ Calvin, Commentary Heb. 9:20.

18^ Calvin, Commentary Isa. 6:1-5.

19^ See, e.g., Elijah’s confrontation with the Baal priests, 1^st Kings 18:20-40.

20^ On child sacrifice see Lev. 18:21; Deut. 12:31; 2^nd Kings 21:2-6, 17-18; Jer. 7:31; 32:325; Eze. 16:20-21.

21^ On sacral prostitution see Deut. 23:18; Hos. 4:14; 1^st Cor. 6:12-20. Sacral prostitution was found in Syria, Phoenicia, and Babylon. The Pentateuch and the Hebrew prophets denounce it.

22^ Gal. 3:2.

23^ 1^st John 3:14.

24^ 1^st John 4:13.

25^ 1^st Peter 4:17.

26^ Heb. 12:28.

27^ 1^st Pet. 2:9.

28^ 1^st Pet. 1:15.

29^ Eph. 2:10-11.

30^ Luke 6:47 (Emphasis added).

31^ Lev. 19:2.

32^ See, e.g., William Gurnall, The Christian in Complete Armour (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 2017), chapt. 1, “The Saint’s Call to Arms”.

33^ Exod. 23:19.

34^ Eph. 5:2-3,11.

35^ Heb. 13:4.

36^ Matt. 22:19.

37^ Ibid, paraphrased.

38^ Deut. 10:12. For the relation of the fear of God and holiness of life see Calvin, Sermons on 1 Timothy, trans. Robert White (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2018), 25, 27.