Category Archives: Doctrine Of Sin

The Absence of Communion with God as the Status of the World: Sin as Hell

Posted on by

Being born into sin is akin to being born into hell. The Apostle Paul writes: “And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others.” Being spiritually dead, which of course is what Paul is referring to, has both spiritual and bodily consequences; ultimately, the final consequence is “for men to die once, but after this the judgment . . . .” Even while being born into a mode of “hell” the person, by God’s grace, has the opportunity to experience new life, the resurrected, ascended life in Jesus Christ: “ so Christ was offered once to bear the sins of many. To those who eagerly wait for Him He will appear a second time, apart from sin, for salvation.” But for those who insist on persisting in the original life they were born into, this hope finally slips through their fingers, and what once was escapable becomes the consummate or actualized realization in the eschatological life of final judgment.

John Calvin, according to Julie Canlis, emphasized the idea of being in sin, as being in hell. He saw this as the experience, indeed, the objective status of all humanity who are intent on living in the ruptured state they fell into as they were first conceived in sin in their mothers’ wombs.

This situation is nothing short of hell on earth, a qualitative state of misery and alienation. Fallen humanity is alienated from the Word — its source of life — and hence lives in a state of death.:

We must also see what is the cause of death, namely alienation from God. Thence, it follows, that under the name of death is comprehended all those miseries in which Adam involved himself by his defection; for as soon as he revolted from God, the fountain of life, he was cast down from his former state, in order that he might perceive the life of man without God to be wretched and lost, and therefore differing nothing from death.

William Bouwsma has opened our eyes in new ways to the relation between the culture of fear in which Calvin lived, and to his own fears of the “abyss” and “labyrinth.” What perhaps needs more attention is how Calvin specifically describes the Fall as a fall into fear. Calvin says that creation is designed so that humanity should see the goodness of God and “from it pass over to eternal life and perfect felicity.” Instead, “[a]fter man’s rebellion, our eyes — wherever they turn — encounter God’s curse” (II.6.i). This new state of sin is the grand inversion. We now misinterpret those very things “by which he would draw us to himself”; “so greatly are we are variance with him, that, regarding him as adverse to us, we, in our turn, flee from his presence.” Broken communion brings not just alienation but terror. “But who might reach to him? Any one of Adam’s children? No, like their father, all of them were terrified at the sight of God [Gen. 3:8]” (II.12.i). Hell becomes not so much location as condition, occurring not at life’s end but throughout every moment lived out of communion.[1]

For Calvin, as Canlis treated prior to our reading, sin wasn’t as much forensic loss, but relational, communion with God that was lost. As such, when sin is understood in these terms, as the primary frame, the antidote to escaping the hellish existence of communion lost is, indeed, God’s presence for us, in the world, in the resurrected person, Jesus Christ. He exculpates fallen humanity from its chalice of hell — the status of being born into sin — by becoming hell for us. In this impoverished status, the enhypostatic humanity of God delves into the fires of the abyss, what we inhabit daily as sinners, and from the inner-recesses of this lagoon of blackness, he sets us on the new ground of the Heavenly Kingdom as that is given foundation in the resurrected blood flowing through the veins of God’s elect humanity for the world in Jesus Christ. As Canlis underscores elsewhere, for Calvin, salvation from the consequences of sin, or hell, comes for the person as they are participatio Christi (in participation with Christ). He alone is the human who inhabits eternity bodily, and in this ascended life for us (pro nobis), it is here where alienation from God, and thus hell, is vanquished by the parousia of Christ (presence of Christ), both now, by the Holy Spirit’s ministry of koinonial presencing Christ’s body for us, and in the eschaton, by the Holy Spirit’s ministry of realized presencing of Christ’s body for us as we come to finally see and touch the body of Christ; not just in the Eucharistic anticipation, but in the fulsome and glorified beatific vision of the blessed Lord in all His immortal ineffability, even as that is concretized in the continuous bearing of His scars for us.

The Evangel is that while we ‘who were dead in trespasses and sins’ no longer must abide such obstinacy and alienation from God. We no longer must inhabit the ravishes of hell and the destroyed life this world knows, and can only know, as it loves the darkness rather than the light. Calvin’s message, as a kerygmatic message, is not one of final loss and palpable gloom, but his is a message of the Good News! The world, insofar as we properly understand God’s election for the world in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ, no longer is one defined by hell, but heaven. Heaven is the great reversal the sinful human heart could never, and would never imagine, simply because it lives in an alienated status of self-love and dis-communion with the living God. This is why, in order for humanity to become the humanity it was originally created for, must be gifted to it ecstatically from the Father’s Right Hand. This is the imago Dei from whence genuine humanity was created; from the humanity of God, that God freely chose as He first chose to be human for the world in the particular humanity of the man from Nazareth (Deus incarnandus). This is the hope and the longing fulfilled for a sinful humanity that said humanity needs. And so we proclaim that Jesus is Lord!

[1] Julie Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder: A Spiritual Theology Of Ascent And Ascension (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2010), loc 942, 946, 952.

Getting Deep into Sin: Moving Beyond Our Therapized Sin Through Christ

Posted on by

And Jesus answered and said to him, “Simon, I have something to say to you.” So he said, “Teacher, say it.” “There was a certain creditor who had two debtors. One owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. And when they had nothing with which to repay, he freely forgave them both. Tell Me, therefore, which of them will love him more?” Simon answered and said, “I suppose the one whom he forgave more.” And He said to him, “You have rightly judged.” Then He turned to the woman and said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave Me no water for My feet, but she has washed My feet with her tears and wiped them with the hair of her head. You gave Me no kiss, but this woman has not ceased to kiss My feet since the time I came in. You did not anoint My head with oil, but this woman has anointed My feet with fragrant oil. Therefore I say to you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much. But to whom little is forgiven, the same loves little.” Then He said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.” -Luke 7:40-8

So it was, as the multitude pressed about Him to hear the word of God, that He stood by the Lake of Gennesaret, and saw two boats standing by the lake; but the fishermen had gone from them and were washing their nets. Then He got into one of the boats, which was Simon’s, and asked him to put out a little from the land. And He sat down and taught the multitudes from the boat. When He had stopped speaking, He said to Simon, “Launch out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.” But Simon answered and said to Him, “Master, we have toiled all night and caught nothing; nevertheless at Your word I will let down the net.” And when they had done this, they caught a great number of fish, and their net was breaking. So they signaled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both the boats, so that they began to sink. When Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord!” -Luke 5:1-8

Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us: we implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God. For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. -II Corinthians 5:20-1

What purpose then does the law serve? It was added because of transgressions, till the Seed should come to whom the promise was made; and it was appointed through angels by the hand of a mediator. Now a mediator does not mediate for one only, but God is one. Is the law then against the promises of God? Certainly not! For if there had been a law given which could have given life, truly righteousness would have been by the law. But the Scripture has confined all under sin, that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe. But before faith came, we were kept under guard by the law, kept for the faith which would afterward be revealed. Therefore the law was our tutor to bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But after faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor. -Galatians 3:19-25

The above passages are only a sampling of the many other pertinent passages that could have been added to this list. But I want to highlight something I think most Christians have lost sight of. That is, that without being pressed up and into the depth of our sin, as that is understood in the light of God’s Light for us in Jesus Christ, we fail to appreciate the gravitas of God’s holiness. Or inversely, without being participants in God’s life in Christ (participatio Christi), we have no capacity to know the depth of just how sinful we are. The Apostle Peter came to this realization on the fishing boat as he stood there with Jesus as the Son of God in his midst. When I think of Peter in this way I can’t but help to think of Isaiah as he similarly stood before God at the altar, “Woe is me, for I am undone! Because I am a man of unclean lips, And I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; For my eyes have seen the King, The Lord of hosts.” This self-knowledge of our unholiness only becomes possible as God has freely chosen to elect our humanity for Himself in Jesus Christ, enter into it in actualized and ‘economized’ way, and penetrate the depth of our fallen humanity with the deeper depth of His majestic humanity made humble consonant with His already Life as the eternal Son of the eternal Father by the eternal Holy Spirit. He brings the inner-sanctum of God’s “Holy, Holy, Holy” Life into the dust of our unholy lives, and takes those lives where we could or never would take them ourselves; to the death of death. But it is in this taking that we come to have vision of just how dreadful our fallen status is; we come to have this capacity through the risen eyes of Jesus’ resurrected humanity for us. It is in this depth reality the Christian becomes enliven to the depth of their own inhumanity apart from the gracious adoption of God in His Son for us, Jesus Christ.

We live in a world of platitudes. We inhabit a sitz im leben where the Christian existence is clinicalized, therapyized, academized, and sensationalized. In this world the Christian loses touch with the concrete of God’s flesh and blood reality of His sacrifice and substitution for us. When we lose this Holy correspondence provided for by the skin and bone of Jesus Christ, it is easy for us to paper over just how sinful we are in an attempt to bridge the gap between God and ourselves through our own therapeutic efforts. But the salvation of God for the world knows no such Pelagian effort, it rejects all types of synergistic energies, and instead pushes the Christian’s face into the menstrual rags of their own self-generated-righteousnesses. Until the Christian feels and faces the depth of their own filthy and futile hearts, as that is provided space for through the Holiness of God for them in Jesus Christ, such Christians will not be able to ‘elevate’ into a knowledge and thus experience of God wherein the scarred and bruised heel of the resurrected Christ makes contact into their lives in meaningful ways. Outwith this ‘contact’ in a real way the Christian’s existence is doomed to a superficial type of Christianity that can only result in focuses on an incurved self-possessed existence that is given expression in a variety of vainglorious efforts of an ostensibly-formed Christian life.

Why Listening to Joe Rogan Depresses Me: The Hope of Jesus Christ as the Antidote

Posted on by

I just finished listening to another episode of the Joe Rogan Experience. In this episode he had virologist/immunologist/pathologist, Robert Malone on the mic. This episode was on the heels of his viral podcast with a colleague of Malone’s, Peter McCullough. If you are staying informed on things, Malone and McCullough are of a cadre of high profile, and pre-eminent, MDs and scientists (including epidemiologists) who are critical of the mRNA and DNA vaccines; along with the lockdowns, and other measures being deployed in an attempt to ostensibly quell the Sars-Cov2 pandemic. I stand with these doctors in their respective efforts to descent against the machine. But this post isn’t about that effort per se.

As is typical with me, the issue I am having, particularly as I’ve listened now to a few of Rogan’s higher profile podcasts, is the lack of hopeful prescription. In other words, he, and his guests, at least the ones I’ve watched, while describing the utter insanity of the world right now, have no substantial hope to offer the world, i.e. they only have the indomitable human spirit to look to in order to make an attempt at providing a way of salvation out of this socio-cultural morass. But that is the problem: the indomitable human spirit, and that sort of turn-to-the-subjectivism is precisely what has led to the global conditions that would allow for this current mass psychosis to obtain. Their respective lack of viable prescription is precisely because they have opted out of revelational insight about the status of a fallen humanity (so theanthropology) and collapsed that into their own immanent lights. They simply operate on the horizontal in absolute ways. This is the very condition that gives rise to the sort of brute naturalism, and the hierarchy of being therein, that funds the authoritarianism that they rightfully are standing against. Because they have no genuine knowledge of self—which as Calvin notes in his duplex cognitio Domini only comes when the person has a genuine knowledge of the living God—they are unable to properly diagnose the real problem at play: viz. the fallen human condition.

While this ought to be expected with pagans, such as Joe Rogan et al., what has become more troubling in these times, is how it is that so-called spiritual leaders (pastors, theologians, Christian thought practitioners) are ostensibly operating with the same sort of “blind-spot” that their pagan counterparts are operating with. This is nothing new, as I argued in Master’s thesis on I Corinthians 1:17-25 (with a broader focus on chapters 1—4), the Apostle Paul confronted the Corinthian church for adopting the wisdom of the world in the name of the wisdom of the cross. This made them just as ‘carnal’ as the world they were supposed to be contradicting (with the wisdom of the cross), and as such they came to see the wisdom of the cross as both foolish and weak. Human nature, fallen human nature, has remained the same. The Church is populated largely by people who are held in a sort of ‘Babylonian Captivity’ (as Luther might intone) wherein a theologia crucis (theology of the cross) has given way to a theologia gloriae (theology of glory); indeed, given way as if the theology of glory was actually the theology of the cross.

As I walk away from podcasts like Rogan’s, or from a verity of church services and/or theological podcasts, the level of ‘carnal’ wisdom at work leaves me with a sense of nihilistic darkness. I feel the weight, not of God’s glory, but of nothingness that this world is guided by. It’s as if satan’s breath, eggy as it is, has filled the lungs of these ‘carnal’ practitioners (secular or sacred) with the sulfur of his forthcoming abode (and potentially theirs, God forbit it!). The answer to what ails the world isn’t a new Bab-el (the ‘coming together of a united humanity’), at least not one generated by the self-possessed, incurved humanity that is the abstract and aloof (from God) world. The answer, of course!, is God’s answer and purpose for the world enfleshed in His humanity for us in Jesus Christ. It is only this Pentecost[al] reality that has the power to turn this current world-order upside down, with a baptism of flaming tongues of fire that all cry out in their variegated unison, that Jesus is Lord. It is only this humanity, the singular humanity of God in Christ for the world, wherein a genuine denouement, an actualist reversal can obtain. This is the eschatological hope for which this world has been created, and now re-created in the resurrection of the Theanthropos, Jesus Christ.

The Headquarters of Evil: The Satanic in Christian Dogmatic Explanation

Posted on by

Sin by definition is irrational. More pointedly we could say sin is “disaffective,” that is in regard to sin’s relational nature as a rupturing of relationship between God and us. Ultimately, sin has no anatomy. We can identify what it does, but are unable to explain where it came from, per se. As such, attempting to answer theological questions based upon ostensible answers to sin’s “nature,” is always a fool’s-errand. Thomas Torrance avoids such foolishness, and instead explains the irrational nature of sin up against the order of God’s triune life, and how the latter provides for an ordered universe vis-à-vis Him. Torrance writes: 

Second, by its very nature, moral or natural evil is essentially anarchic. It is an utterly irrational factor that has inexplicably entered into the created order. Whatever else evil is it involves the introduction of a radical discontinuity into the world that affects the relation of mankind to God, of man to himself, and of man to woman and woman to man, and of course of men and women to nature. It affects the entire relation of the universe to God, infecting its contingent nature or the relative independence given by God to the created order. As such evil defies human comprehension and any rational explanation. It is a virulent, demonic force radically antagonistic to all that is holy and orderly, right and good. St Paul spoke of it as the mystery of lawlessness (ἀνομία) of a strangely personal kind, in fact a malevolent will. It was in similar terms that Jesus referred to the Devil as the father of lies, the Satan with whom Jesus himself struggled in his temptation. And it is in similar terms that the Gospels tell us of the conflict of Jesus with the demonic powers of darkness that infested people’s lives in mind and body, but which he denounced as the enemy, rebuked and cast out of people’s lives, thereby showing that with his presence the Kingdom of God had been ushered in and deliverance from the power of darkness had been brought about. The sharp personal conflict of Jesus with evil reveals it to be more than the hypostatisation of a principle of contradiction between God and the world, and to be in fact an organised kingdom of evil and darkness with a kind of headquarters of its own, the power house of an utterly rebellious evil will or spirit which the Holy Scriptures call Satan. We are unable to understand how God continues to deal with the forces of darkness, but we believe that as he dealt miraculously with sickness and death, miraculously brought the turbulent winds and waves under his command, ‘Peace, be still;’ so we believe that he will bring his divine peace and power to bear marvellously and triumphantly upon the physical conditions of human existence in history, not to be sure in accordance with our conceptions, but in accordance with his transcendent wisdom.1 

The description of sin by Torrance, and its incubator, evil, could not be more apropos for our current status in the world at large. What shouldn’t be lost is the point that TF rightly underscores: viz. “As such evil defies human comprehension and any rational explanation.” This is the all-important point in regard to not only the ‘noetic effects of the fall,’ but more significantly the possibility for humanity to identify their actual problem as they stand in this world order. Without the light of knowledge provided for by God in Christ, particularly in the Incarnation&Atonement, human depravity will continue to lead itself into its own self-possessed inborn sense of divinity. This is why theologies that are based in speculation and discursive reasoning about God, speculation that starts from an epistemological ingress-point abstract from a ground of God in Christ, are doomed to theories of God, and thus everything, that only end in the circle of self-projection. 

Beyond that, and to one of the primary points of TFT’s treatment, evil is personal. Not in an abstract sense, but up against the personal God of Jesus Christ. That is to say, evil, and its adjunct, sin, has a “personal” origination insofar as that is embodied by a literal Satan and his literal demonic coven. The modern world, in post-Enlightenment form, has sought to demythologize the world of monsters, demons, and the angelic just the same. This is rooted, following TF’s point, in fallen humanity’s propensity to ignore the reality of the fall, and thus live into it by elevating themselves as the gods of the universe. As such, the unseen world, the invisible world is not manageable to them, thus the need to demythologize, or ‘disenchant’ the world of things they cannot seemingly master themselves. The irony of this “fool’s-errand,” is that such people, the people in the ‘Broadway,’ are in fact mastered by this unseen world to the point that the satanic ‘headquarters’ convinces unregenerate humanity that it does not exist. One result is that such people, the massa, do the bidding of Satan as he, indeed, is their father:  

41 You people are doing the deeds of your father.” Then they said to Jesus, “We were not born as a result of immorality! We have only one Father, God himself.” 42 Jesus replied, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I have come from God and am now here. I have not come on my own initiative, but he sent me. 43 Why don’t you understand what I am saying? It is because you cannot accept my teaching. 44 You people are from your father the devil, and you want to do what your father desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not uphold the truth, because there is no truth in him. Whenever he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, because he is a liar and the father of lies. 45 But because I am telling you the truth, you do not believe me. 46 Who among you can prove me guilty of any sin? If I am telling you the truth, why don’t you believe me? 47 The one who belongs to God listens and responds to God’s words. You don’t listen and respond, because you don’t belong to God.” -John 8:41-47 

The only remedy to this cosmic malady is for the person to repent and submit to the Word of God, rather than continuing to submit to the Serpent’s fake word. 

 

1 Thomas F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being Three Persons (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016), 227.  

 

 

An Evangelical Calvinist Christ Conditioned Account of Total Depravity

Posted on by

I am going to write approximately five posts, one for each point of the TULIP, providing an alternative sort of reified version of the TULIP; per Evangelical Calvinist lights. This will be the first installment where I will attempt to develop an explanation for the T or Total Depravity per a Christ conditioned understanding. As the first installment of this series let me also explain what the TULIP stands for, for those unaware. Total Depravity Unconditional Election Limited Atonement Irresistible Grace Perseverance of the Saints. 

According to The Canons of Dort Total Depravity entails the following: 

Article 1: The Effect of the Fall on Human Nature 

Human beings were originally created in the image of God and were furnished in mind with a true and sound knowledge of the Creator and things spiritual, in will and heart with righteousness, and in all emotions with purity; indeed, the whole human being was holy. However, rebelling against God at the devil’s instigation and by their own free will, they deprived themselves of these outstanding gifts. Rather, in their place they brought upon themselves blindness, terrible darkness, futility, and distortion of judgment in their minds; perversity, defiance, and hardness in their hearts and wills; and finally impurity in all their ­emotions. 

Article 2: The Spread of Corruption 

Human beings brought forth children of the same nature as themselves after the fall. That is to say, being corrupt they brought forth corrupt children. The corruption spread, by God’s just judgment, from Adam and Eve to all their descendants—except for Christ alone—not by way of imitation (as in former times the Pelagians would have it) but by way of the propagation of their perverted nature. 

Article 3: Total Inability 

Therefore, all people are conceived in sin and are born children of wrath, unfit for any saving good, inclined to evil, dead in their sins, and slaves to sin. Without the grace of the regenerating Holy Spirit they are neither willing nor able to return to God, to reform their distorted nature, or even to dispose themselves to such reform.1 

As an Evangelical Calvinist I can affirm all of the above, and even go further in an Athanasian way; in regard to the sub and dissolving human being as that entered into a ruptured relationship with God post-lapse. But as an Evangelical Calvinist I don’t see fallen humanity in abstraction from Jesus Christ’s humanity as Deus incarnandus (‘the God to be incarnate’). In other words, as an Evangelical Calvinist I think these things from a Christ conditioned supralapsarianism wherein fallen humanity was accounted for by God, logically and chronologically prior to humanity come to existence at all. That is to say, I affirm the depth dimension of fallen humanity, it is just that I think that the humanity Christ was to assume already was ready to deal with that, so to speak. This is not to say that I believe that sin was or is essential to what human being entails. But it is to say that Christ’s humanity, the one He would assume and personalize as Jesus Christ (an /-enhypostasis), was fittingly ready to do so with the aim of re-conciling all of humanity in His humanity for them.  

At a very basic level the aforementioned does not discount what classically obtained at the fall of humanity. Evangelical Calvinists maintain that humanity, at an even deeper level than the Canons articulate, was so submerged into subhumanity, that the only one who could reverse such a tragedy was the Theanthropos (Godman), Jesus Christ. The requirement was not simply a forensic decision, and by virtue of that humanity was re-fellowshipped with God; the requirement was that humanity needs-be re-created in such a way that they might be genuinely human again—from the inside/out. But this re-humanization isn’t simply a reditus or return to ‘paradise lost’; for the Evangelical Calvinist it is an apocalyptic elevation wherein humanity is taken to where God had always intended to take humanity through the incarnation of the Second Person. In other words, as the Apostle Paul argues, the second Adam is greater than the first Adam; as corollary, the fellowship re-created humanity has come to have with God, as mediated through the resurrected humanity of Jesus Christ, is greater than what Adam and Eve only experienced as inchoate humans whose destinies were always already intended to be elevated through participatio Christi.  

Conclusion 

In principle, Evangelical Calvinist can go along with the classical Calvinist idea that humanity is desperately lost, and inhabitants of a bondaged will. But we don’t think this sort of lostness in terms of an abstract humanity, as if we can think these things from below, so to speak. Evangelical Calvinists maintain, at least this one does, that just as knowledge of God, in general, is slavishly conditioned by a principial Christ concentration; likewise, knowledge of what it means to be human, and as such, fallen human, can only be thought from Christ’s humanity for all. Just as He assumed flesh (assumptio carnis), it is in this reality wherein the actual depth dimension of sin becomes ‘knowable.’ In other words, the fact that it required God to become human in Christ to ‘save’ us from ourselves, in this it should become apparent at just this point that humanity, outwith Christ, and God’s unilateral movement for us therefrom, was absolutely lost in the death of our trespasses and sins. So, for the Evangelical Calvinist, from this Christ-spectacled vantage point, fallen humanity was total. In other words, what the incarnation of God reveals is that humanity was something like a wandering star for whom the black darkness has been reserved forever. This is the depth of what Christ took on when He entered our fallen humanity and took it for Himself. That is, there was no hope in the ‘far country’ of the dead-humanity apart from God’s genuine humanity confronting us with the Light of His Word in Jesus Christ. Only His Word as that took on flesh could speak to these dead bones by the spiration of the Spirit and bring new life; new humanity; a humanity where there had come to be none until His unilateral and gracious movement for us in Jesus Christ.  

1 The Canons of Dort.

Spitting Out the Caricature-Water: An Anatomy Lesson on Pelagianism

Posted on by

In my last two posts I have made reference to the theological heresy known, historically, as Pelagianism. In an effort to provide further theological development and engagement with this locus I want to refer us to a description of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the cor curvum in se (heart turned in on itself) provided for by Philip Ziegler. There is a facile understanding of so-called Pelagianism, by some (of my interlocutors), wherein they seem to think that the conceptuality that the language of Pelagianism signifies is theologically unproblematic. In other words, some of my interlocutors believe that if they can exonerate Pelagius himself from the ‘heretic-label’ that his teachings have gained via the councils of 2nd Orange, Ephesus, and Carthage, that they can espouse his teachings, in the main, and avoid the heretical label altogether (since in their view Pelagius wasn’t really a heretic anyway, particularly, because according to them Pelagius didn’t teach what the whole history of the Church believed he taught). But this naively misses the whole point: whether or not Pelagius taught the idea of a neutral morality and human-will, indeed in need of an aide of grace, is not the point of critique in regard to Pelagianism simpliciter. What is at stake is, oriented by biblical faithfulness vis-à-vis whether or not someone’s theological anthropology in fact coheres with the teaching of Scripture in toto. In other words, does Scripture teach that humanity simpliciter is born with a freewill that has the capaciousness to respond to the offer of the Gospel on its own strength or not? This is what some of my interlocutors have attempted to argue, all the while either by way of acquitting Pelagius himself, or by suggesting that they aren’t corollary with the historic tenets of Pelagianism proper; particularly as understood by almost ALL within Church history.

Bonhoeffer, according to Ziegler’s accounting, maintained the common notion that Luther et al. have maintained in regard to the biblical anthropology of homo incurvatus in se. That is, “and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil” (Jn 3.19); further, “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God” (Rom 3.11). The case can be made further, from Scripture, that the human problem is unsurpassable save someone extra nos (outside of us) entering into our incurved and sinful situation, and redeeming us from the inside out; guts and all. According to Ziegler this is what Bonhoeffer maintained; here is how Ziegler illumines that for us:

Whatever else will be meant by divine freedom and transcendence, in the first instance they mean that God is not at the disposal of fallen human reason, neither ‘to hand’ or ‘in hand’ to be deployed in schemes of metaphysical and existential explanation. Bonhoeffer conceives of human reason as such to be verkrümmten—warped and turned in upon itself—fully conformed to sin’s distortion of humanity…. As such it is ‘imprisoned in itself, it sees only itself, even when it sees another, even when it wants to see God (DBWE 2: 45). To the extent that such reason does think and speak of ‘God’ it can only do so as an epiphenomenon of its own religious ambitions, as an idea firmly resident in and subservient to its own self-reflection (DBWE 2: 44, 50, 51). Since, as Bonhoeffer explains, ‘thinking is as little able as good works to deliver the cor corvum in se from itself’ (DBWE 2: 80), the truth of God must come upon reason ‘from beyond and break in upon it in such a way that one is placed ‘into the truth by Christ in judgment and grace’ (DBWE 2: 96). Thus the axiom ‘deus non potest apprehendi nisis per verbum’ (it is impossible to apprehend God apart from the word), which Bonhoeffer approvingly cites from the Confessio Augustana (DBWE 2: 53, 67). The saving address of the Word has the form of God’s transcendent freedom: it is God giving himself ‘without precondition’ (DBWE 2: 89) to be known across the otherwise unbridgeable chasm of unlikeness, most concretely the unlikeness of human sin and divine righteousness (DBWE 2:54, 79).[1]

For Bonhoeffer, according to Ziegler, and I would maintain for the teaching of Scripture itself, the human condition is so enslaved to sin that it has no hope in itself to surpass its condition. In other words, the fallen human being, which is what all human beings apart from Jesus Christ’s vicarious humanity are, is so trodden down by the effects of sin that there isn’t one part of it, not its affections, intellect, or will, that hasn’t become constrained by its own weight of ineptitude; that isn’t only always for the self rather than for God. And this is precisely why ‘He who knew no sin, assumed sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.’ The fact that it took God to become Theanthropos (Godman) ought to illumine the minds and hearts of those who would be tempted to think that they have anything in them (even if claimed to be from a God -givenness), that could say Yes or No to God; that this is utterly and biblically fallacious. And yet this is what some of my interlocutors want to maintain; and to do so with a straight (and even smug, at points) face.

The heresy of Pelagianism, in the history, apart from debates surrounding the man Pelagius, is what Bonhoeffer, according to Ziegler maintained in the aforementioned. Some of my interlocutors will assert that Bonhoeffer is just a good Augustinian; but that reply is simply an attempt to poison the well with caricature-water. What Pelagianism, the doctrine, has come to signify is: that people have a God-given and grace aided capacity in themselves to respond positively or negatively to the Gospel offer; that is Pelagianism. Some of my interlocutors believe that this teaching is in fact the biblical teaching, eo ipso they are Pelagians, by any historic standard for understanding that terminology and the conceptuality it signifies. But the biblical teaching, as we have just been noticing, with help from Bonhoeffer, is that humanity requires resurrection and the new creation of Christ’s human body in order to have capacity to say Yes to God. Some of my interlocutors, though, have an anemic understanding of what the atonement entails (and this ironically is where they are in lockstep with the Calvinists they claim to be in critique of). The atonement involves ontological depth, as TF Torrance rightfully emphasizes; along with the Apostle Paul. This implies that the Gospel isn’t simply about whether or not someone gets to go to heaven or not; the Gospel, under this pressure, involves what it in fact means to be fully human coram Deo (before God) in the prosopon Christi (face of Christ). Some of my interlocutors don’t understand the depth dimension of the Gospel implications in regard to what it actually did; i.e. it fully recreated humanity by the resurrection humanity of Jesus Christ. This ought to enlighten some of my interlocutors; they ought to be able to infer that if the Gospel goes this deep, then it went this deep for a reason. The reach of sin has a primal orientation such that its effects denude the human capacity in itself, even if so-called God-given and aided by grace, in such a way that it takes God Himself to stoop down and recreate the capacity for us to be for God and not against Him in and through the Yes and Amen of His life for us (pro nobis) in Jesus Christ!

My next post, or some post in the near future will be in reference to the Apostle Paul against Pelagianism and its contemporary proponents. I’m afraid some of my interlocutors believe they have the scriptural teaching on their side, but they really don’t!

[1] Philip G. Ziegler, “God,” in Michael Mawson and Philip G. Ziegler eds., The Oxford Handbook of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 140.

Defeating False Condemnation by Resting in the Humanity of Jesus Christ

Posted on by

Wanted to provide a brief word on sin, and being free from it and any sense of condemnation it might bring into our lives post-confession/repentance. I have past sins that the accuser of my soul likes to bring up at points. I have to dig down with the Lord in prayer, and almost mechanically/analytically work through what He has done for me and how that implicates who I am now as a new creation in Christ. Douglas Campbell highlights how sin functions in the Apostle Paul’s thinking quite well:

The seriousness of Paul’s account of human wrongdoing here needs to be noted. If sin is just a series of bad choices that proceed from a fundamentally healthy nature, then Jesus needs to provide only a clear example of how to behave, along with some additional teaching about right acting. That he had to die, executing our condition, then resurrecting human nature in a new form, suggests that there was something irredeemably corrupt and contaminated in the old one. As some scholars would put it, our problem is radical (from the Latin radix, meaning “root”), suggesting that our problem goes down into the very roots of our nature.[1]

The assumption of our humanity, by Christ, and then Him putting it to death suggests (strongly) that sin has penetrated our very natures (ontology) as human beings; that nothing short of that ‘old man’ being put to death and a ‘new man’ being re-created in the resurrection of Jesus Christ will do. It is only through union with Christ, through participation with Christ’s vicarious humanity that the Christian comes to have fellowship with the Holy and triune God. It is in this where the Christian lives into what it genuinely means to be human coram Deo.

With the aforementioned as the background let me provide a scenario. I’m humming along, all of the sudden the enemy pops up his grubby face and starts attempting to remind me of past sins. Before I knew how to handle this, this sort of accusation would trip me up very badly. Now I no longer fall for this, since I am not ‘ignorant of the devil’s devices.’ What I do when this happens is turn to the logic of Romans 8:

31 What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? 32 He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? 33 Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. 34 Who then is the one who condemns?No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us.

1) I recognize that in my fallen heart I am even worse than what the loser enemy is accusing me of. 2) I recognize that ‘He who knew know sin became sin for me that I might become the righteousness of God in Him.’ 3) I recognize that Jesus Christ took that old man that the devil seeks to thwart me with, condemn me with, and has put it do death in His humanity. 4) I recognize that because I am ‘in Christ’ in His death and burial, that likewise I am always and forever in Christ in His resurrected humanity. 5) I recognize that the enemy is attempting to condemn a humanity that the living God of all creation took for Himself and me with Him. 6) I recognize that if the enemy wants to attack anyone He must attack and condemn the ‘Son of Man.’ 7) I recognize that that poser god, the devil, already tried to condemn the Christ, and all that resulted in was Jesus triumphing over him, and his minions, making a public spectacle of him at the cross. 8) I recognize that who I am is so inextricably bound to who Christ is for me that the enemy no longer has a target to hit in me. 9) I recognize that I am not in a place, nor is the sucker evil one to condemn anyone. 10) I recognize that God is the only One who can rightfully condemn anyone. 11) I recognize that the Judge became judged for me, that I might have and find my life in His. 12) I recognize that the enemy is a beaten foe, and a chump; I tell him to eat skubalon in the name of Jesus Christ.

This is the exercise I have been going through over the last couple of days. To God in Christ alone be the Glory!   

[1] Douglas A. Campbell, Pauline Dogmatics: The Triumph of God’s Love (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020), 116, n.7.

The ‘Nothingness’ of Chaos and the Victory of God’s Yes: With Application to the Great Panic of COVID19

Posted on by

I was going to write a new post on a doctrine of sin, and I still might later tonight. But I came across this one that I wrote in March 2020. I thought I would reshare it because I think it is still applicable and good. We now know the panic over Covid (which I knew back then) has been overwrought. But no matter, the fear of death clearly remains the fear that shapes the way a non-believing society takes formation. 

Mark Lindsay offers a wonderful treatment of evil or das Nichtige or ‘nothingness’ in the theology of Karl Barth. I want to catch up with him in the midst of that treatment, and read along with him as he describes an implication of Barth’s thinking on evil and sin in the world. But I want to do this in a particular context, with the hopes of drawing out a certain application with reference to the current unparalleled and seismic upheaval we are currently seeing unfold before us in the COVID19 Panic. Let’s catch up with Lindsay, read along with him for a moment, and then attempt to distill and apply Barth’s doctrine of nothingness and evil in the world to our current catastrophe.

The second corollary is that, as the enemy of divine grace, Nothingness is primarily an assault upon God, with humanity as only the secondary target. Again, this is in contrast to Schleiermacher’s doctrine, according to which the sovereignty of God elevates Him above all violations. For Barth, however, the conflict with Nothingness is primarily and properly God’s own affair. Nothingness is the assault of the nonwilled reality against the elected creation. As such, it represents an attack not only upon God’s created covenantal partner but also and primarily upon God’s decision to elect and, therefore, on God Himself. In CD II/2, Barth makes clear that, in pre-temporal eternity, God is an electing God. “[I]n the act of love which determines His whole being God elects.” Moreover, the act of election “is not one moment with others in the prophetic and apostolic testimony”, but, enclosed “within the testimony of God to Himself, it is the moment which is the substance and basis of all other moments in that testimony.” This being the case, the violation by Nothingness of the act and decision of election is as such a violation of God. This means that God, in faithfulness to His covenant, must take up the battle against Nothingness. He must be “the Adversary of the adversary”, otherwise He would not be true, either to His covenant partner or to Himself. As Barth puts it,

We have not to forget the covenant, mercy and faithfulness of God, nor should we overlook the fact that God did not will to be God for His own sake alone, but that as the Creator He also became the covenant Partner of His creature, entering into a relationship with it in which He wills to be directly and [primarily] involved in all that concerns it…[This] means that whatever concerns and affects the creature concerns and affects Himself, not indirectly but directly, not subsequently and incidentally but primarily and supremely. Why is this so? Because, having created the creature, He has pledged His faithfulness to it. The threat of nothingness to the creature’s salvation is primarily and supremely an assault upon His own majesty.

Barth is not thereby implying that God Himself is essentially threatened and corrupted by Nothingness, as humanity is. The counterpart of humanity’s vulnerability to the power of das Nichtige, which we have already seen, is that we must not overestimate its power in relation to God. Indeed, if its power should be rated “as high as possible in relation to ourselves”, it must be rated “as low as possible in relation to God.” Nevertheless, God is not unmoved by radical evil. On behalf of His creation – which, in its encounter with Nothingness can only show itself to be the impotent victim of suffering – God opposes, confronts and victoriously crushes His graceless adversary. As may be expected from such a consistently Christocentric theologian, the locus of this triumph over evil is the incarnation or, more specifically, the cross and resurrection of Christ.

At this place, we must qualify our earlier comment that God is not threatened by Nothingness. In the incarnation, God Himself becomes a creature and thus takes upon Himself the creature’s sin, guilt and misery. In “what befalls this man God pronounces His No to the bitter end.” The entire fury of Nothingness – and of God’s wrath directed towards it – falls upon Christ “in all its dreadful fulness…” Precisely, however, because this man is also God, “Nothingness could not master this victim.” It had power over the creature. It could contradict and oppose it and break down its defences. It could make it its slave and instrument and therefore its victim. But it was impotent against the God who humbled Himself, and Himself became a creature, and thus exposed Himself to its power and resisted it.

By confronting and decisively triumphing over Nothingness in Jesus Christ, God has relegated it to the past. In the light of the cross and the empty tomb, “there is no sense in which it can be affirmed that nothingness has any objective existence…” Barth rejects outright the suggestion that radical evil exists in the form of an eternal antithesis. On the contrary, he insists that it has no perpetuity. It is neither created by God, nor maintained in a covenantal relationship with Him. Thus, “we should not get involved in the logical dialectic that if God loves, elects and affirms eternally he must also hate and therefore reject and negate eternally. There is nothing to make God’s activity on the left hand as necessary and perpetual as His activity on the right.” Nothingness has been brought to its end, no longer having even the transient and temporary existence it once had. On this note of “cosmic optimism”, Barth concludes his presentation of his doctrine.[1]

There are complexities—like Barth’s doctrine of election—that we will not have time to unpack here. But hopefully, you, the readers are able to at least see how asymmetrical this warfare is between God’s holiness in Christ for us, and His [last] enemy, which is: death (or nothingness or das Nichtige). The bottom line is this: for Barth, according to Lindsay, evil operates in a sort of Athanasian key. It is a non-reality reality that parasitically seeks to dissolve the very Good of God’s triune Life into nothingness. Because, for Barth, God has freely elected to not be God without us, but with us [Immanuel], when the non-graced side of contingent reality (or nothingness, or evil), along with its nothingness minions, like the satan or the demons represent (the principalities and powers in Paul’s Colossae theology), attempt to ‘kill, still, and destroy’ God’s creaturely reality (namely: us / humanity), this attack is an attack on the very Who of who God is. Barth is careful to retain the Creator/creature distinction in this framework, just as he has, as George Hunsinger identifies it, a ‘Chalcedonian Pattern’ shaping his theology; but it is highly significant, in Barthian theology, to realize that God humbled Himself for us, in keeping with His Who character, that He might exalt humanity unto Himself in the resurrected and recreated humanity He assumed for us in the incarnation. This is significant, for Barth, just because, as we have been considering, in God’s Freedom, once again, for God to be God in His new creation, it means that He will not do that without us; this is God’s Grace, and represents the Divine No, and ultimate dissolution of what already is nothing in God’s Kingdom: evil and death. It is because God has so identified Himself with us in Christ, that we, the creatures are assured of being on the Yes side of God’s indestructible eternally triune Life.

Application

How might the above consideration apply to the current panic, and unprecedented global upheaval we are currently seeing unfold before our eyes as the ostensible result of COVID19? Clearly, there has been upheaval, chaos, and conflagration the world over throughout the annuls of world history. Wars and rumors of wars; famines and destitution; pandemics, plagues, and paranoia have swept through the landscape like a scorched earth since the Great Lapse of Adam and Eve ‘in the beginning.’ What has sustained humanity through all of these tumultuous seasons of waning and wallowing?

The answer to this, should be clear by now: it is God’s Yes, and His decisive No in His Yes, to the das Nichtige that seeks to kill and destroy all that is good and holy in the world; all that has been taken up into God’s humanity for us in Jesus Christ (cf. Rom 8.18ff). It is this eternal reality, the ‘Lamb slain before the foundations of the world,’ that sustains this seemingly fluttering and futile earth-system. The Life in this world is not contingent upon this world, but the One who sustains it moment-by-moment through the Word of His power; who is the risen Christ! This is the victorious reality that cedes the nothingness that would desire to assume the life of God as its own; on its own non-terms, and anti-Christ ways.

When I look out at the chaos, fear, pain, and suffering this teetering world is currently experiencing; when I am tempted to fling myself into the nothingness and das Nichtige that seeks to dissolve God’s life, and make it its own; I fall back, moment-by-moment, into the reality that nothingness stands no chance against the everythingess of God’s triune and eternal Life. This is the hope that the Christian has in this world. And no matter what the exterior circumstances nothingness seeks to throw at us, as Christians, even in our own angst and experience of this nothingness, we of all people can bear witness to the fact that we know that we and all humanity can participate in the extra life of God for us in Jesus Christ. We can bear witness, even when ‘we have the sentence of death written upon us,’ to the reality that ‘we know the One who raises the dead.’ Isn’t this what the world is fearful of, and panicking over? Isn’t it ultimately fearful of having its current experience of life and satisfaction snuffed out? We can bear witness to the world, no matter how deep the terror of nothingness might seem, that there is a something reality that has penetrated nothingness and turned it on its head. We can give the world Hope, as they see that operative in our lives; as they see the Holy Spirit bearing witness that God is love, and that He has demonstrated that by taking nothingness to the cross of Christ and resurrecting a new day for all who will. Soli Deo Gloria

 

[1] Mark R. Lindsay, Barth, Israel, and Jesus: Karl Barth’s Theology of Israel (UK/USA: Ashgate Publishing, 2007), 48-52. Also see Lindsay’s Pdf of his whole chapter where this long quote is taken from entitled: Nothingness Revisited: Karl Barth’s Radical Evil in the Wake of the Holocaust. In the book version that I’ve been reading Lindsay has the pertinent sections from Barth’s CD bracketed throughout for the reader’s reference. In the essay form he has all of the CD references footnoted; the reader will want to refer to his essay which I have linked here if they want to follow up further in Barth’s Church Dogmatics.

The ‘Nothingness’ of Chaos and the Victory of God’s Yes: With Application to the Great Panic of COVID19

Posted on by

Mark Lindsay offers a wonderful treatment of evil or das Nichtige or ‘nothingness’ in the theology of Karl Barth. I want to catch up with him in the midst of that treatment, and read along with him as he describes an implication of Barth’s thinking on evil and sin in the world. But I want to do this in a particular context, with the hopes of drawing out a certain application with reference to the current unparalleled and seismic upheaval we are currently seeing unfold before us in the COVID19 Panic. Let’s catch up with Lindsay, read along with him for a moment, and then attempt to distill and apply Barth’s doctrine of nothingness and evil in the world to our current catastrophe.

The second corollary is that, as the enemy of divine grace, Nothingness is primarily an assault upon God, with humanity as only the secondary target. Again, this is in contrast to Schleiermacher’s doctrine, according to which the sovereignty of God elevates Him above all violations. For Barth, however, the conflict with Nothingness is primarily and properly God’s own affair. Nothingness is the assault of the nonwilled reality against the elected creation. As such, it represents an attack not only upon God’s created covenantal partner but also and primarily upon God’s decision to elect and, therefore, on God Himself. In CD II/2, Barth makes clear that, in pre-temporal eternity, God is an electing God. “[I]n the act of love which determines His whole being God elects.” Moreover, the act of election “is not one moment with others in the prophetic and apostolic testimony”, but, enclosed “within the testimony of God to Himself, it is the moment which is the substance and basis of all other moments in that testimony.” This being the case, the violation by Nothingness of the act and decision of election is as such a violation of God. This means that God, in faithfulness to His covenant, must take up the battle against Nothingness. He must be “the Adversary of the adversary”, otherwise He would not be true, either to His covenant partner or to Himself. As Barth puts it,

We have not to forget the covenant, mercy and faithfulness of God, nor should we overlook the fact that God did not will to be God for His own sake alone, but that as the Creator He also became the covenant Partner of His creature, entering into a relationship with it in which He wills to be directly and [primarily] involved in all that concerns it…[This] means that whatever concerns and affects the creature concerns and affects Himself, not indirectly but directly, not subsequently and incidentally but primarily and supremely. Why is this so? Because, having created the creature, He has pledged His faithfulness to it. The threat of nothingness to the creature’s salvation is primarily and supremely an assault upon His own majesty.

Barth is not thereby implying that God Himself is essentially threatened and corrupted by Nothingness, as humanity is. The counterpart of humanity’s vulnerability to the power of das Nichtige, which we have already seen, is that we must not overestimate its power in relation to God. Indeed, if its power should be rated “as high as possible in relation to ourselves”, it must be rated “as low as possible in relation to God.” Nevertheless, God is not unmoved by radical evil. On behalf of His creation – which, in its encounter with Nothingness can only show itself to be the impotent victim of suffering – God opposes, confronts and victoriously crushes His graceless adversary. As may be expected from such a consistently Christocentric theologian, the locus of this triumph over evil is the incarnation or, more specifically, the cross and resurrection of Christ.

At this place, we must qualify our earlier comment that God is not threatened by Nothingness. In the incarnation, God Himself becomes a creature and thus takes upon Himself the creature’s sin, guilt and misery. In “what befalls this man God pronounces His No to the bitter end.” The entire fury of Nothingness – and of God’s wrath directed towards it – falls upon Christ “in all its dreadful fulness…” Precisely, however, because this man is also God, “Nothingness could not master this victim.” It had power over the creature. It could contradict and oppose it and break down its defences. It could make it its slave and instrument and therefore its victim. But it was impotent against the God who humbled Himself, and Himself became a creature, and thus exposed Himself to its power and resisted it.

By confronting and decisively triumphing over Nothingness in Jesus Christ, God has relegated it to the past. In the light of the cross and the empty tomb, “there is no sense in which it can be affirmed that nothingness has any objective existence…” Barth rejects outright the suggestion that radical evil exists in the form of an eternal antithesis. On the contrary, he insists that it has no perpetuity. It is neither created by God, nor maintained in a covenantal relationship with Him. Thus, “we should not get involved in the logical dialectic that if God loves, elects and affirms eternally he must also hate and therefore reject and negate eternally. There is nothing to make God’s activity on the left hand as necessary and perpetual as His activity on the right.” Nothingness has been brought to its end, no longer having even the transient and temporary existence it once had. On this note of “cosmic optimism”, Barth concludes his presentation of his doctrine.[1]

There are complexities—like Barth’s doctrine of election—that we will not have time to unpack here. But hopefully, you, the readers are able to at least see how asymmetrical this warfare is between God’s holiness in Christ for us, and His [last] enemy, which is: death (or nothingness or das Nichtige). The bottom line is this: for Barth, according to Lindsay, evil operates in a sort of Athanasian key. It is a non-reality reality that parasitically seeks to dissolve the very Good of God’s triune Life into nothingness. Because, for Barth, God has freely elected to not be God without us, but with us [Immanuel], when the non-graced side of contingent reality (or nothingness, or evil), along with its nothingness minions, like the satan or the demons represent (the principalities and powers in Paul’s Colossae theology), attempt to ‘kill, still, and destroy’ God’s creaturely reality (namely: us / humanity), this attack is an attack on the very Who of who God is. Barth is careful to retain the Creator/creature distinction in this framework, just as he has, as George Hunsinger identifies it, a ‘Chalcedonian Pattern’ shaping his theology; but it is highly significant, in Barthian theology, to realize that God humbled Himself for us, in keeping with His Who character, that He might exalt humanity unto Himself in the resurrected and recreated humanity He assumed for us in the incarnation. This is significant, for Barth, just because, as we have been considering, in God’s Freedom, once again, for God to be God in His new creation, it means that He will not do that without us; this is God’s Grace, and represents the Divine No, and ultimate dissolution of what already is nothing in God’s Kingdom: evil and death. It is because God has so identified Himself with us in Christ, that we, the creatures are assured of being on the Yes side of God’s indestructible eternally triune Life.

Application

How might the above consideration apply to the current panic, and unprecedented global upheaval we are currently seeing unfold before our eyes as the ostensible result of COVID19? Clearly, there has been upheaval, chaos, and conflagration the world over throughout the annuls of world history. Wars and rumors of wars; famines and destitution; pandemics, plagues, and paranoia have swept through the landscape like a scorched earth since the Great Lapse of Adam and Eve ‘in the beginning.’ What has sustained humanity through all of these tumultuous seasons of waning and wallowing?

The answer to this, should be clear by now: it is God’s Yes, and His decisive No in His Yes, to the das Nichtige that seeks to kill and destroy all that is good and holy in the world; all that has been taken up into God’s humanity for us in Jesus Christ (cf. Rom 8.18ff). It is this eternal reality, the ‘Lamb slain before the foundations of the world,’ that sustains this seemingly fluttering and futile earth-system. The Life in this world is not contingent upon this world, but the One who sustains it moment-by-moment through the Word of His power; who is the risen Christ! This is the victorious reality that cedes the nothingness that would desire to assume the life of God as its own; on its own non-terms, and anti-Christ ways.

When I look out at the chaos, fear, pain, and suffering this teetering world is currently experiencing; when I am tempted to fling myself into the nothingness and das Nichtige that seeks to dissolve God’s life, and make it its own; I fall back, moment-by-moment, into the reality that nothingness stands no chance against the everythingess of God’s triune and eternal Life. This is the hope that the Christian has in this world. And no matter what the exterior circumstances nothingness seeks to throw at us, as Christians, even in our own angst and experience of this nothingness, we of all people can bear witness to the fact that we know that we and all humanity can participate in the extra life of God for us in Jesus Christ. We can bear witness, even when ‘we have the sentence of death written upon us,’ to the reality that ‘we know the One who raises the dead.’ Isn’t this what the world is fearful of, and panicking over? Isn’t it ultimately fearful of having its current experience of life and satisfaction snuffed out? We can bear witness to the world, no matter how deep the terror of nothingness might seem, that there is a something reality that has penetrated nothingness and turned it on its head. We can give the world Hope, as they see that operative in our lives; as they see the Holy Spirit bearing witness that God is love, and that He has demonstrated that by taking nothingness to the cross of Christ and resurrecting a new day for all who will. Soli Deo Gloria

 

[1] Mark R. Lindsay, Barth, Israel, and Jesus: Karl Barth’s Theology of Israel (UK/USA: Ashgate Publishing, 2007), 48-52. Also see Lindsay’s Pdf of his whole chapter where this long quote is taken from entitled: Nothingness Revisited: Karl Barth’s Radical Evil in the Wake of the Holocaust. In the book version that I’ve been reading Lindsay has the pertinent sections from Barth’s CD bracketed throughout for the reader’s reference. In the essay form he has all of the CD references footnoted; the reader will want to refer to his essay which I have linked here if they want to follow up further in Barth’s Church Dogmatics.

Paul’s Doctrine of Sin from a Doctrine of Christ: With Reference to Douglas Campbell

Posted on by

Sin. A word that has various understandings within the church; particularly the church of the 21st century. I would imagine that most in the churches have a rather elementary grasp on what sin entails. For those who have thought about it more deeply, even they would have variance on the way they understand sin’s impact upon the human being. Some might think of its affect in terms of a disease that might need to be cured; others as utter death that leaves the human being in a totally incapacitated state left to themselves; and maybe for others, somewhere in between the two poles just mentioned. No matter what someone’s position on sin is it often seems that, even in the best of cases, they attempt to define what sin is in rather abstract, or I suppose, literary ways alone. Indeed, appealing to Scripture seems like the best way to come to an understanding of what sin entails, but literary studies, I would argue, will not give us the depth dimension of sin and its impact. We clearly must engage with Holy Scripture’s teaching on what sin is and does, but I would contest that if we simply attempt to define sin’s heft in that way alone, that we will not arrive at a proper understanding of sin’s reality. The Apostle Paul doesn’t actually think sin from abstraction; can you guess where he thinks it from?

Paul, as with everything, defines sin’s height and depth from, you guessed it: Jesus Christ.[1] If we think sin and σάρξ (transliterated: sarx), or Paul’s frequent usage of ‘flesh’ together, what we quickly come to realize is that sin has penetrated into the very depths of what it means to be human; it has devolved us from beings capable of having a right relationship and fellowship with the living God (which is what it means to be human for us), to a status that has become sub-human, or out of koinonia/fellowship with Yahweh, the triune God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If we think sin, as Paul does, from what it took for God to re-concile us unto Himself, through the enfleshment of the Son, His death, burial and resurrection, then we will come to have a greater appreciation of what God has accomplished for us; and just how utterly wicked and evil our hearts actually are. Douglas Campbell explains it this way as he is describing how the Apostle Paul thinks on these things:

The seriousness of Paul’s account of human wrongdoing here needs to be noted. If sin is just a series of bad choices that proceed from a fundamentally healthy nature, then Jesus needs to provide only a clear example of how to behave, along with some additional teaching about right acting. That he had to die, executing our condition, then resurrecting human nature in a new form, suggests that there was something irredeemably corrupt and contaminated in the old one. As some scholars would put it, our problem is radical (from the Latin radix, meaning “root”), suggesting that our problem goes down into the very roots of our nature.[2]

In other words, sin does something ontological to human nature. As Athanasius and even Maximus the Confessor argue, human beings, apart from the redeemed humanity of Jesus Christ are sub-human. This does not mean that the mass of humanity has no value; it simply notes that without Christ for us we are not living out what it means to be creationally human. It presupposes that humanity has an anchor outside of itself; that it has an image it was originally created in, and then recreated in. To be human in the economy of God’s Kingdom in Christ is to be ‘lifted up’ and seated at the Right Hand of the Father in participation with the humanity of Jesus Christ.

As Campbell’s explanation should make clear: For the Apostle Paul, if it required God to become human, and be executed in our stead, then humanity apart from this gracious work is in a status that is inconceivably mal (bad) before God (coram Deo). We are in a place where our ontology is jacked up; which means that our epistemology is jacked up; which means that our practice and function as homo sapiens is going to be utterly jacked up all the way down. If nothing else, there is more empirical evidence for this truth, about sin and the human condition, than any other field of inquiry. True, from within this ‘fallen’ state humanity will attempt to say that the crooked is straight / the straight is crooked, but even in this state we can see how destructive (even by just looking at the stats) living this way actually is.

The cross of Jesus Christ executes this sinful status, and raises up a glorified Christ in whom God’s Kingdom is rightly framed. A Kingdom wherein “there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”[3] Jesus Christ lives that Kingdom for us now, and He breaks into our lives moment by moment letting us know that His Kingdom has come, and is coming; a Kingdom that, at a root level, has reversed the human nature unto the status that the Living and Holy God has always envisioned for it; a status that finds its very lifeblood in Immanuel’s veins; a status, that is exalted and highly lifted up participating in the eternal and triune life of God; a status that this world system, left to its own fallen devices, has no place within—but Christ.

I will be writing more on this topic in days to come. I want to talk about how ‘sin’ impacts salvation theories (soteriology), and its related theme: theological-anthropology. There are, of course, constant debates about what is called total depravity and total inability, so on and so forth. But I think those debates are given orientation by too much of an abstract (from Christ) notion of what sin actually is and does. If we think sin from Christ, and all its organic lineaments, we will arrive, I think, at very different theological categories and ways of thinking than the so called classical discussions have given us in this regard. But we will visit this discussion later. In this post I simply wanted to clear my throat a bit, and let Campbell provide a brief and precise explanation of how sin functions in the theology of Paul the Apostle. This throat clearing exercise will be instructive for later discussions on sin.

[1] Karl Barth is famously known for thinking sin from Christ.

[2] Douglas A. Campbell, Pauline Dogmatics: The Triumph of God’s Love (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020), 116, n.7.

[3] Revelation 21:4, KJV.