Sunday, August 23, 2020

Jesus - Savior or Example? Part II

Collect of the Day: Proper 15


Almighty God, you have given your only Son to be for us a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life: Give us grace to receive thankfully the fruits of his redeeming work, and to follow daily in the blessed steps of his most holy life; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.  Book of Common Prayer 

I began with a prayer above that spoke of Jesus as both the sacrifice and the example or exemplar.  These are two Christologies, understandings of the person and work of the Messiah, Jesus.

Because some more rationalistic (antimiraculous) theologians didn’t like the bloody Old Testament sacrifice of atonement and didn’t like the idea of someone else dying for them or anyone else (This seemed “unfair” to them.) and because they did not believe in the deity of Christ (They were Deists, rather than Theists.), they proposed a view of Christ in which he was a wise teacher and a good person, who left us an example of how to act.  This is called an Exemplarist Soteriology.  Soteriology is the teaching or doctrine about how we are saved.


These theologians believed that Jesus was not a sacrifice, but only a moral example, a teacher.  They did not believe Jesus was the son of God or a miracle worker.  For them Jesus’ teaching and life laid down the perfect example of a good person, a person who pleased God.


There is no doubt that Jesus meant us to follow his example.  There is also no dout that Jesus gave his teaching so that we could be conformed to his image, to his moral will.


However, Exemplarist Soteriology begs a few questions. First if Jesus is an example, why would he be “THE” example? In other words, why Jesus and not Buddha? “It’s my tradition,” is no answer.  If Jesus is not the Son of God who died for me and paid the price for my sin, why follow his teaching? Examplarist Soteriology doesn’t answer the question about how to deal with our “sin problem.”  


Generally speaking these theologians didn’t accept that everyone was born in sin and so needed redemption (the doctrine of original sin).  They were more in line with the thinking of Pelagius, an early theologian, who believed that we did not need a sacrifice for sin, but only need to work harder and longer to overcome our sins.


Exemplarist Soteriology also doesn’t answer HOW we can follow Jesus’ example.  If he is the greatest, most perfect teacher, how are we to find the strength and will to follow him?


Biblical soteriology gives us the answer: the answer is the Holy Spirit.  Following salvation (being saved from sin) is sanctification (being conform to Christ’s likeness).  Once we are saved the Holy Spirit comes to dwell in us and guides us into growing in holiness.  Not only does the Holy Spirit indwell us and guide us, he gives us POWER to live the Christian life, to follow Christ’s example.


Jesus’ example may be a beautiful thing.  Immanuel Kant, the Enlightenment philosopher, loved Jesus the Teacher.  He called him Master.  Kant’s Categorical Imperative, a law which he believed we could reach by practical reason alone, was a paraphrase of the “Golden Rule.”  


Kant said, “Act in such a way that your action could become universal law.” He claims that we can know this by thinking alone without revelation.  His law means in paraphrase, “If you don’t want someone to steal from you, don’t steal.  Stealing can’t be allowed.”  In simpler, positive terms he could have said, “Do unto others what you want them to do unto you.”


In his book, Religion within the bounds of reason alone, Kant talks much of the Teacher, but not of the Savior.  Kant is a Deist who does not see Jesus as the Savior or the Son of God.


We cannot accept an Exemplarist Soteriology.  Jesus is not just an example, he is the Savior of the whole world.


We should follow his example. The New Testament is full of commands to follow Christ’s example. The goal of sanctification, growth in holiness is to make us like Jesus, to conform us to his image.


The sacrifice of Jesus is the accomplishment of our salvation, our atonement with God the Father. The presence of the Holy Spirit is the motive power of sanctification. Salvation is a moment, a decision to accept Christ.  Sanctification is a lifetime of effort to live like and for him.


I like that prayer above because the “two wings of the dove,” so to speak, are balanced.  There is no real growth in Christ or outcome of salvation without conforming to his example and teaching.  There is also no growth without the presenec of the Holy Spirit within our lives.  But there is no hope of following that example without first being redeemed and reconcilied with God without the death and sacrifice of Christ.


So, let us rejoice in his redeeming sacrifice for us and let us strive to be more like him.

Jesus - Savior or Example?

 Collect of the Day: Proper 15


Almighty God, you have given your only Son to be for us a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life: Give us grace to receive thankfully the fruits of his redeeming work, and to follow daily in the blessed steps of his most holy life; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.  Book of Common Prayer


Evangelical Christians tend to focus on Jesus as the one who paid the price for our sins, Jesus the atoning sacrifice.  This is good and appropriate.  “There is salvation in no other name,” says the Apostle Peter in his sermon on the Day of Pentecost.


Church tradition contains various attempts to explain what it means for Jesus to be our atoning sacrifice.  Of course this idea of the atoning sacrifice comes from the Old Testament: the sacrifice lamb is slaughtered for the sins of the people and the blood of the sacrifice is sprinkled on the altar.


The writer of the letter to the Hebrews lays out all of this logic from the Old Testament sacrifices.  He tells us that Jesus is the sacrifice, priest and prophet, as well as the coming King!


When Jesus first went to see John the Baptist in the desert John said, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.”  John’s phrase could not be clearer.


Much later Anselm of Canterbury wrote a book called Why the God-man? In is book Anselm lays out the logic of redemption.  He does not offer this explanationn as an a priori argument, a “before the fact” argument from intuitive logic alone. Rather he says that having learned from Scripture that Jesus is the Son of God, born of a virgin and born to be the sacrifice of sins, he lays out the logic of redemption, as philosophers would say “a posteriori,” after having learned about the redemption by revelation, he is able to follow it with his human logic.  It is not an event or reasoning he could have come to without revelation, but having received it, he can “rationalize” it, give a reasonable explanation.  There is no tension between revelation and reason.  Revelation makes known and logic confirms.


Anselm’s argument is for penal substitutionary atonement.  These days many people find fault with his argument: too bloody, violence against an innocent animal, etc.  However, his logic is an explanation of biblical revelation.  He is not inventing something to suit the tastes of his generation or ours.  He is laying out the logic of scripture and revelation.


The atonement is an idea taken from the Old Testament.  We must be recconciled to God. We are estranged from our maker.


The way to overcome this separation from our maker is through a sacrifice.  We are guilty of sin, deliberate wrong doing, breaking God’s law, hurting our Father.  We must pay a price to be reconciled to him.  This is the “penal” part of penal substitutionary atonment.  We are guilty before God’s law and a penalty must be paid.


We understand that atonement must be achieved and we now understand why a penalty, a “life for a life” must be paid, but why substitutionary?


God in his mercy had allowed the people of Israel to substitute a perfect lamb for themselves as a substitute for payment for their sins.  Though the people should have died, God allowed the high priest to offer a sacrifice of a perfect lamb once a year on the Day of Atonement to cover the sins of the people.


Jesus is the sacrifice lamb.  He is a perfect sacrifice and his death accomplishes our reconciliation with God.  


Jesus death also redeems us.  We had willingly sold ourselves into slavery to sin and the devil.  Jesus pays the price to buy us back, buy us out of that slavery.


Anselm in trying to explain this “mystery” (mystery in the Bible doesn’t mean something beyond comprehension, it means something not yet revealed) draws on the Old Testament sacrificial system and the explanations of Jesus, John the Apostle, Paul and the writer of Hebrews.  Anselm explains these scriptural ideas, this revelation, with reason, so that people can understand Jesus’ sacrifice and their own salvation.


Jesus had to be born of a virgin to be sinless.  The sacrifice lamb had to be without blemish, perfect.  A sinful person could not pay the price for other sinful people.  Even the high priest could not cleanse himself from his own sin.  Only a person who was sinless could be the sacrifice for sin.


Anselm also drew from the writer of Hebrews when he argues that Jesus or the sacrifice for sins had to be a man, a human.  No animal could really pay the penalty for the sins of humans.  Only a perfect man could make this sacrifice.


So, Jesus had to be born of a virgin as a man to be a sinless man and he had to be born a man to make atonment for men.  However, no man could pay the infinite price needed to redeem and reconcile humankind to God.  For this reason Jesus needed to be the Son of God born of a virgin to pay the penalty for humankind.


As well this sacrifice could only happen once.  The Old Testament sacrifices went on year after year.  None of them could atone for the sins of the nation.  However, Jesus “offered the once for all sacrifice for sin” (Hebrews 10:12) his work was finished.


For the past twenty years Linda, my wife, and I have attended St. James Church, Voorschoten, NL (Church England, Diocese of Europe).  I won’t explain how we ended up at St. James.  It’s a long story.


However, I want to say one thing, which is logical, scriptural and emotional.  When we celebrate the Lord’s Supper (Holy Communion) at one point in the liturgy the minister says,


All glory be to thee, Almighty God, our heavenly Father, for that thou, of thy tender mercy, didst give thine only Son Jesus Christ to suffer death upon the cross for our redemption; who made there, by his one oblation of himself once offered, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world; and did institute, and in his holy Gospel command us to continue, a perpetual memory of that his precious death and sacrifice, until his coming again.


When the minister says: “one oblation (sacrifice) of himself once offered, a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world,” my heart sings.


I’m a very emotional person despite being a philosopher.  I am not a thinking machine.  However, Anslem lays out logically, what I choose to believe volitionally with my will.  Logic can explain, but without a choice of the will there is no salvation.  “The angels know and dread.”  You can know the truth and still reject it.


I don’t see any problem laying out the logic of a “mystery,” since biblically a mystery is not something which can never be understood.  Biblically a mystery is a secret which is finally revealed.


The Bible says that the prophets of old longed to see the day of the Messiah.  The plan of redemption and atonement was not known to them.  Not unclear to them, but hidden from them.  After Jesus died and rose again they understood.


We should not pit rational explanation against “mystery” or faith. (I don’t mean godless, arid, modern Reason. I mean full orbed ancient and medieval reason.) Faith is not “believing what you know ain’t so.” Faith is placing your trust in Jesus the Savior having understood first what it means that Jesus is the Savior and that you need one.  


Continuing in faith isn’t a mystery either.  The Bible was given to us to understand that mystery and it’s implication: that Jesus died for our sins and that we must live our lives from here on out to please him.

Monday, August 17, 2020

Who's afraid of James KA Smith?

                St Luke Evangelical Lutheran Church, Pittsburgh, PA


To be fair to James KA Smith and Who’s afraid of Postmodernism?

 

(if he cares what one fellow philosopher/ thinker at a small seminary thinks)

 

I wrote many notes on the first chapter about Derrida.  I disagreed fundamentally.  I guess I belong with the “BIOLA school.” I am an evidentialist.  I believe some certainty; a reasonable certainty is possible.

 

I think he was too generous to Derrida and too critical of his opponents.  We should be afraid of “interpretation all the way down.” “Interpretation of interpretation” means we don’t have any way to know whose interpretation is right.  He doesn’t care, but I don’t see how we can prefer Christianity, except as our emotional, subjective choice, if we have no true historical accounts of Jesus and the Apostles.  He thinks having “faith” or being illumined by the Holy Spirit is enough, but what makes him different than Quakers or Montanists?

 

Concerning the second chapter on Lyotard, again I think he was too generous.  Lyotard means “grand narratives,” just like Christianity.  To my mind there is no Christianity without a commitment to theism.  Theism is a grand narrative.  There is no knowledge of “truth” without a commitment to “objective” (not apodictic) certainty.

 

I think Smith is a sort of fideist.  He claims to be presuppositional, but I think van Til would reject this claim.  What is true for him is true for him; that’t all.  There is no sort of apologetic, even Schaeffers’, despite his protestations to the contrary. We can only offer our version, our story.

 

Concerning the third chapter about Foucault I made fewer notes. He is right that we need discipline and that discipline forms us.  We need Christian discipline.  Evangelical churches need to recover proper discipline.  However, if Derrida is “right”, there is no “proper” discipline.

 

The final chapter is taking Postmodernism to church.  Smith grew up in a Plymouth Brethren church.  I have some experience of the Plymouth Brethren church.  They are disciplinarians.  They are not sacramental in, say, an Episcopal or Anglican sense.  They are opposed to images (stained glass or otherwise).  They do sing, but they have long and sometimes several sermons.  Sunday was kids sitting with mom on the left side of the church.  They are austere

 

OK, things need to improve.  However, as someone raised in a liturgical church (Evangelical Lutheran) I see pluses and minuses to “liturgical” worship.  First, it can become rote repetition.  One person I knew considered that the Public Confession was enough to absolve him of his adultery, which went on for years.

 

Again, to be fair we had good Sunday School teachers and sincere members.  We had some restrained, but beautiful stained glass.  We had a wooden altar with small shields of the Apostles. We had a great big Reformation type pulpit.  We used the Lectionary.  We read Psalms, an Old Testament reading, an Epistle and the Gospel each Sunday. The minister wore robes and a stole.  We had an organ and a choir.  Many of these things are what Luther called adiaphora, things we can be preferences but not required.  Luther and Calvin had a lot to say against the Roman Catholic church and its practices.  Smith is not in the Reformation tradition.

 

However, there were problems in our little Lutheran church.  When my wife and I attended Catechetical classes (discipline) for two years, many of our friends from school (with German last names) attended too. The day after we were confirmed all but four of us (out of about twelve) stopped coming to Sunday School or youth group, and most did not even attend church.  Sacraments: infant baptism and the Eucharist were not magic to keep people in the church.  I personally did not accept Christ until three years later.

 

Another thing I dislike, as far as can tell, is that Smith wants Liturgy, Sacraments, Tradition, etc. but he wants them in a very individualistic and modern way. He seems to pick and choose the elements of liturgical churches and worship he wants (“catholic”) but submits to no one.  Liturgical churches have bishops.  The Roman Catholic Church has bishops and a Pope.  The Orthodox churches have Patriarchs.  He seems to have a “have your cake and eat it too” approach.  He may take what he likes from these Traditions, which are “catholic,” meaning anything he likes, and he can reject (as an individual what he dislikes).

 

I understand Pete Gilquist and Jon Braun becoming eventually Antiochian Orthodox.  They bought into Orthodoxy and submitted.  They wanted this Eastern Tradition and they owned it.  Thomas Elliot and John Henry Newman wanted the Magisterium to solve their hermeneutical problems.  They wanted Tradition.  They submitted to Rome.  But to whom does Smith submit?

 

Smith is correct to take aim at independent Evangelical churches in some respects.  They likewise seem to submit to no one.  They tend to bend the Gospel to reach people, to compromise.


But as quick as he is to shoot at them, I think of our home church in Pittsburgh, PA, North Way Christian Community.  Church Growth is not a be all and end all, but North Way is evangelizing and they are forming campuses (local churches) in tough neighborhoods, as well as the suburbs. Smith seems to hate suburbia.  I don’t know where he lives.

 

He is right to take issue with the emerging church and the emergent church.  However, where he agrees with them I tend to disagree.  Brian McLaren has accepted too much Postmodern indeterminacy in my view.

 

I see in Smith, I believe, something I have seen in some of the others I have mentioned above.  In my lifetime I have been at different times connected to Evangelical Anglicans and Romans Catholics, as well as some who have converted to Orthodoxy. I have lived in an Eastern Orthodox country.  For many who have grown up in a boring, plain Baptist church they seem to crave something more. I became a Baptist by choice (Millard Erickson’s denomination).

 

I know the good things about liturgical churches. We worship in a Church of England church while we have lived in the Netherlands. We have many friends from my wife’s seminary, Trinity [Episcopal] School for Ministry, who are Anglicans (and some Orthodox now and some Roman Catholic).  I attended a Roman Catholic university (Louvain in Belgium).  I have many Roman Catholic friends. I may disagree with them, but I appreciate them. However, I am not ready to give up a sure foundation in the Bible for sacraments of any church or to give up reasonable certainty in the historical reliability of the Gospels for a fideistic embrace of sacramentalism, especially when it is “catholic” and not grounded anywhere.