Category Archives: Ecclesial

A Response to Plato’s Impact on the Great Tradition of the Church

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Earlier this morning I listened to Credo Magazine’s podcast in which Matthew Barrett interviews Louis Markos, the author of From Plato to Christ, among other books. You can listen to that podcast here. They were discussing, of course, the role and impact that Plato had, and continues to have on the development of Christian theology. Barrett often likes to refer to the Great Tradition of the Church, which of course is really more of a Latin way to think about things theological and ecclesial (the Greeks have the Consensus Patrum, ha!) I of course repudiate the general prolegomenon, or theological methodology that broadly funds said Tradition. The following were some thoughts I ticked off, in response to the podcast, while at work, in a moment of free-time, and then posted them on my Twitter and Facebook accounts, respectively. I thought I’d share that here too.

One problem with the so-called Great Tradition of the Church, is its methodological direction; insofar that it offers one. It allows the shadowland of the philosophers—the accidents of history as given—to lead to the being of all reality in Jesus Christ. It supposes that there are vestigial logoi of God generally diffuse in the created order, and that profane humanity itself has the capacity to see it by way of an abstract and methodologically speculative reasoning. It then allows this framework to shape our respective knowledge of God when we are confronted with God’s “special revelation.” As if the heavens themselves declare the glory of the LORD in a way that is intellectually discernible outwith God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. In other words, an actus purus (pure being) notion of godness (as the Great Trad is supposedly funded by vis-à-vis a doctrine of God) presupposes upon the reality of a natura pura (pure nature) wherein grace and nature are asymmetrically independent domains of God’s greater reality. The result is that nature simply is awaiting, even as it supplies the preparation and mediation, of its own perfection as God comes to it in the grace of Jesus Christ. And yet nowhere in canonical reality do we see this supposition operative. ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and earth’ … and in the beginning the seed of the women would crush the serpent’s head while bruising its heel. The canonical reality, just as creational reality in general, has always already been suffused by the concreto of God’s Grace. His first Word of creation was from and for the Word who was with God, and was God. As such the Great Tradition allows the creation itself to predicate God’s perfection, as if the instrument of nature’s perfection; instead of understanding that God has always already been creation’s inner reality just as sure “as the world was created so that Christ might be born.”[1]

I need to refine my thinking a bit further, but all-in-all I think what I have posited above represents a type of critique I would make of the Great Tradition’s grace-nature dualism whereby we get things like the analogia entis, among other loci.

[1] I stole the quote “the world was created so that Christ might be born,” from Scottish theologian, David Fergusson. I often refer to this quote, and thought it was a nice way to close out my previous thoughts leading into it.

A Response to Tim Keller’s ‘Third Way of Winsomeness’ and James Wood’s Critique

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My friend, James Wood, wrote what became a controversial essay for First Things (of which he serves as an editor) entitled: How I Evolved on Tim Keller. As was predictable Twitter took up the baton of James’ essay, and ran in equal and opposing takes. My summary of James’ essay is this, in nuce: Tim Keller has attempted to offer a ‘third way’ to an engagement with the culture writ large. His third way operates in such a way that ‘winsomeness’ or ‘being extra nice’ to the culture will eventually draw the culture into the way of the Church, the ‘third way.’ This way might have worked a decade ago, to an extent, but given the shifts in the culture, particularly as so-called post-modern ideation took hold, or what we might call a ‘normative relativism,’ being winsome no longer works. The culture, instead of being open to the ‘nice people’ is now wholly ‘negative’ towards the third way, as such winsomeness no longer serves as the best way to engage with the culture. Indeed, as I read Wood, winsomeness for Keller really has become a symbol for capitulation to the mainstream winds of the culture; indeed, while this critique could be pinpointed on Keller, it is really one, more broadly focused on the whole of BigEva (‘Big Evangelicalism’). Insofar as I have understood James’ thesis I can only say, amen.

Conversely, while I stand in fellowship with Wood’s critique, in regard to a Kellerian engagement with the culture, I think my alternative approach is at an impasse with James’ own more ‘De Lubacian’ approach, which still maintains some sense of a given ‘natural order’ inherent to the world, even while given to it by the grace of God. I wrote the following as a thread on Twitter and Facebook, as an expression, off the top, of how I see the ‘third way,’ and the alternative to that as understood through a radically Christologically construed lens:

There is no “third way,” such a way always already presupposes the “binary,” and thus becomes predicated by it. In other words, to say that the Christian way in the world, vis-Ă -vis politics etc., ought to represent a third way (per Keller) presupposes that there is a “natural order” suffused by an abstract notion of common grace that purportedly funds the entirety of the created order. But this simply is not the Christian case. The created order is sustained by and for the living Word who is the Christ. The order is always already contingent upon that Word. As such its life is one of ec-static existence, one that is always already given to it, afresh anew, by the breath of the Holy Spirit, as He speaks God’s Word to us from moment to moment. It is this “hovering Word,” this in-breaking invasive Word whereby the Christian lives their respective lives from. There is nothing stable in this world order, except the Word for whom it was created. So, the Christian looks to and bears witness to Jesus Christ and His disruptive Word of Grace. A Word that contradicts the “common order,” with the otherworldly order of Kingdom come and coming. The common Grace of this world, is God’s disruptive Grace for the world as given in His own enfleshment in the Son. Thus, the Christian doesn’t operate from a “third way,” the Christian operates from the ONLY WAY, Jesus Christ.

I don’t think Wood’s and I conclude at disparate places, per se, but we arrive at the destination differently. Either way, Keller’s third way ends up looking thisworldly in a very abstract sense. In other words, his purported winsomeness ends up being a capitulation to the winds of the progressive culture rather than a witness that contradicts it. Is the culture good, inherently so? No, the cross says so. Is there a way to be in the world that stands back and looks critically at the ways of the world, and says: ‘there is a better way, a third way, and I am here to tell you about it.’ No, the resurrection says so. The reality is that the Christian Way is not a thing, or a mode, it is not a posture we have possession over. Thus, the Christian Way ends up being something that the Christian waits upon, and bears witness to as the Way comes afresh anew into the life of the Christian as the Christian bears witness to their lived reality, to their Christian existence for them in Jesus Christ. When the Christian lives in and from this Way it ends up being a way that is not informed as a third way, as an alternative to the other ways of the world, but the Only Way as the Lord of lords imposes Himself upon our ways, and thus the world’s way. In other words, rather than living from a ‘holy-huddle’ (third wayism), from a static worldview known as the Christian third way, the Christian lives under the Way of God for the world that not only contradicts the ways of the world, but the ways of the Church, insofar that the Church ends up looking more like the culture it inhabits (by way of values, morality so on and so forth) rather than the culture of heaven whence it receives its life as gift moment-by-moment from Jesus Christ. The third way, as I read it, forecloses on the Way of God for the world in Jesus Christ in such a way that it leaves its proponents in the same lurch it is supposedly attempting to redeem. In other words, ironically, the third way ends up collapsing the Kingdom into its own perception of what that looks like, and in so doing its way ends up looking like the cultures of this world rather than the culture of the King. And this, once again, because the third way ends up really being a worldview constructed from the supposition that the world has an inherently natural order to it, one funded by the neo-Calvinist, or Dutch Reformed notion of ‘common grace.’ But this isn’t the way, for as David Fergusson has written: “the world was made so that Christ might be born.”

A Quick Sketch on My Constructive Doctrine of the Church After Barth

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The Church is radically important. I’m afraid some in the Barthian trad are wrongly understood in regard to their ostensible de-emphasizing of the Church as the historic body of Christ. But this would be wrong. It is instead, that Barthians want to emphasize the esse of the Church’s reality in Christ. Barthians see the Church as the place where encounter with the risen Christ obtains afresh anew through the proclamation of the Word. It is in this encounter that the Church experiences the power required to bear witness to its reality in Christ. Barthians are first and foremost Protestants, and ones who radically emphasize the Reformed scripture principle vis a vis a theology of the Word. The historical nature of the Church, in this frame, entails the history of God’s life for the world in Jesus Christ. This is the evangelical basis by which the mediation of God to the world is actualized; that is, by the Son become flesh. For the Barthian trad the basis and inner reality of the Church is the Covenant of God’s life for the world in Christ. There is no ‘grace perfecting nature’ in this frame. Instead, as TF Torrance rightly took Barth’s sacra doctrina it is ‘grace all the way down’; both protologically and eschatologically, with the latter conditioning the former. In the end: for the Barthian trad the Church is all important in the sense that this is the ordained place of God wherein the people of God participate in the fellowship of God as they are elevated into the presence of God as mediated through the vicarious humanity of Jesus. In this frame, the Church is not a prolongation of Christ’s body, as in the Catholic tradition, but instead is a witness to its own reality as it encounters that afresh anew in Christ. In short: the Church does not possess its reality, but it is given it as gift afresh as the event of God’s life for the world is actualized in intense ways as the communio sanctorum comes together as the very body of Christ. The Church’s role, in this trad, is primarily one of witness; witness to the One she knows as her Lord. 

Bonhoeffer’s Experience with the American Liberals: My Experience with the American Evangelicals

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Theological virtuoso Dietrich Bonhoeffer, after already earning two PhDs in theology (by his mid-twenties), came abroad to diversify his theological portfolio. He landed on the shores of New York, and in the halls of Union Theological Seminary. He had been trained in the liberal theological tradition, where it was founded, in Germany by its greatest minds; its most premier, just as he was entering studies, was Adolf von Harnack. But after writing his PhD dissertation, Communio Sanctorum, and then his post-doctoral Habilitation, Act and Being, even while being critical of aspects of Karl Barth’s theology, in the main, Bonhoeffer took the Christocentric, and orthodox turn with Barth. This had all happened just prior to him ending up at Union. He had the real deal liberal theological training behind him (just as Barth did), and could sniff out a phony version of it better than anyone else. Even so, as noted, he had abandoned the premises of liberal theology through appropriating Barth’s broad contours, and made that significant turn. When he entered Union Theological Seminary he was anticipating finding more of the same in regard to liberal theology, but he had come to learn how to apply theology at the social (street) level; and Union had a stellar reputation for this. But what he found, and was shocked by, was just how far-gone Union was. He realized that they were peddling an imposter’s version of liberal theology; to the point that they had completely gutted it of anything doctrinally or historically interesting. In the end he didn’t even think that what Union was offering was Christianity at all. This is interesting, and parallel to my own impression of American evangelicalism today. But before I share some of my impressions, let us hear further on Bonhoeffer at Union, and how Gary Dorrien frames things for us: 

He said it bluntly to his friend Helmut Rößler in December 1930. American liberal Protestantism, Bonhoeffer wrote, was ‘infinitely depressing’ to him, ‘smiling in desperation’ without realizing it was desperate: 

The almost frivolous attitude here is unprecedented, and my hope of finding Heb. 12:1 fulfilled has been bitterly disappointed. Moreover, theology in Germany seems infinitely provincial to them here; they just don’t understand it; they grin when you mention Luther     (DBWE 10: 261). 

A week later, writing to German church superintendent Max Dietsel, Bonhoeffer allowed that American seminarians were certainly friendly; they even expected professors to be friendly. But conversations with American students and professors ‘almost never yielded anything of substance,’ because Americans were averse to substance and truth: 

There is no theology here. Although I am basically taking classes and lectures in dogmatics and philosophy of religion, the impression is overwhelmingly negative. They talk a blue streak without the slightest substantive foundation and with no evidence of any criteria. The students—on the average twenty-five to thirty years old—are completely clueless with respect to what dogmatics is really about. They are not familiar with even the most basic questions. They become intoxicated with liberal and humanistic phrases, are amused at the fundamentalists, and yet basically are not even up to their level.        (DBWE 10: 265-6) 

Bonhoeffer struggled to convey how bad it was. He had groused about shallow students at Berlin, too, but he assured Diestel that this was much worse. Americans ‘dreadfully sentimentalized’ religion, they spouted their opinions with ‘an almost naïve know-it-all attitude,’ and any reference to Luther evoked insolent laughter. They were proud to be superficial, counting it as sophistication. With a glimmer of something important, Bonhoeffer said that most of the theologians and clergy at Union accepted James’ notion of a finite God: ‘They find it to be profound and modern and do not sense at all the impertinent frivolousness in all such talk.’ Local church services were much the same: 

The sermon has been reduced to parenthetical church remarks about newspaper events. As long as I’ve been here, I have heard only one sermon in which you could hear something like a genuine proclamation, and that was delivered by a Negro (indeed, in general I’m increasingly discovering greater religious power and originality in Negroes)      (DBWE 10: 266) 

That was another important glimmer; Bonhoeffer caught that gospel truths were existential to Adam Clayton Powell Sr. and his African American congregation at Abyssinian Church. Overall, however, the case for despair was overwhelming. Bonhoeffer puzzled over how the usual fare in American churches could be called Christianity. The Federal Council of Churches, he reported, was equally frivolous: ‘People talked about everything, except about theology. Only rarely did anyone venture any comments really getting to the point, and if they did, the discussion quickly moved on to the daily agenda’ (DBWE 10: 266-67). 

There are interesting parallels, I think, between Bonhoeffer’s impression of American liberalism, and how American evangelicalism has come to operate today. I can only imagine Bonhoeffer running across a Progressive church today, or your typical American evangelical church, and walk away with the same impressions he did when he was exposed to the “Christianity” at Union Theological Seminary. For me personally, this is my impression of American evangelicalism in the main. I think of Christianity Today styled evangelicalism, and when I juxtapose that with so-called Progressive American Christianity, I don’t see much difference. Maybe their doctrinal statements would differ, but their praxis reduces to the same; what Christian Smith and others have identified as a moralistic therapeutic deism. There is no real sense of the Christian, and thus concrete God of Jesus Christ present in most of American evangelicalism these days (whether that be on the progressive or mainstream evangelical continuum). What we are exposed to are other purely pragmatic or flattened versions of the social gospel, with no reference to a God outside of the horizontal domain; or we get a pie-in-the-sky notion of God, who is there to help us feel good about ourselves, and present us with experiences that are supposed to elevate us to our best lives and self-actualized selves now. 

 

Barmen, Barth and Agamben in Contradiction to BigMedicine as the State Church

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What is the relationship between the state and church? This question was thrown into intense relief at the outset of the so-called Nazification of the church in Germany back in the thirties. Because of this serpentine evil pressed against the people, and thus the German church, leaders in both the Lutheran and Reformed communions came together to form what would become known as the Confessing Church. Its most well-known participants were Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The leaders in this emerging church felt compelled to offer a declaration that would galvanize their respective position against what they discerned to be an overstep (understatement) of Hitler and his state church. The Confessing Church leadership believed, and rightly so, that the state had no business interfering with the church’s business; equally, they were convicted that the state itself had its own God-ordained integrity, to maintain order and law in and among the broader population. They articulated what they believed, with reference to these matters, in what came to be known as the Barmen Declaration. It is composed of various theses, under which explanation, both positive and negative is given. The thesis that particularly focused on the relationship between church and state is found in thesis 5; it reads as follows:

    1. “Fear God. Honor the Emperor.” 1 Pet. 2:17

Scripture tells us that by divine appointment the State, in this still unredeemed world in which also the Church is situated, has the task of maintaining justice and peace, so far as human discernment and human ability make this possible, by means of the threat and use of force. The Church acknowledges with gratitude and reverence toward God the benefit of this, his appointment. It draws attention to God’s Dominion [Reich], God’s commandment and justice, and with these the responsibility of those who rule and those who are ruled. It trusts and obeys the power of the Word, by which God upholds all things.

We reject the false doctrine that beyond its special commission the State should and could become the sole and total order of human life and so fulfil the vocation of the Church as well.

We reject the false doctrine that beyond its special commission the Church should and could take on the nature, tasks and dignity which belong to the State and thus become itself an organ of the State.1

Christiane Tietz in her recently released book, Karl Barth: A Life in Conflict, offers the following commentary and context for thesis 5:

The fifth thesis describes the relationship between church and state. The state is to provide justice and peace, the church is to remind the state of the kingdom of God and make the state aware that it must answer before God’s commandment and righteousness. There are two statements of rejection expressed under this thesis: the doctrine of the “totalitarian state” that seeks to dominate all areas of life, including the church, is rejected, as is the teaching that the church should take over the tasks or characteristics of the state. Barth later noted that a strong and vital church would have needed to judge the abuses of the Nazi state even more strongly. Even for these statements however they had to summon all their courage. In light of the ideology of that era the theses were “an immense contradiction.”2

Because my audience is varied, and probably not generally in-step with me on discerning our times, I want to provide further elaboration on what I think is actually happening in the state; and then how that is related in sinister form to the church at large. In order to help me elucidate my own perspective I will share a passage from Giorgio Agamben where he discusses the collapse of state directed medicine into a religion of its own. He writes:

The medical religion has unreservedly adopted from Christianity the eschatological appeal dropped by the latter. Capitalism, by secularising the theological paradigm of salvation, had already eliminated the idea of the end times, replacing it with a permanent state of crisis without redemption or end. ‘Krisis’ was originally a medical concept which designated, in the Hippocratic corpus of texts, the moment when the doctor decided whether the patient would be able to survive the disease. Theologians reprised the term to indicate the final judgement that occurs during the last day. If we look at the state of exception which we are now experiencing, we could say that the medical religion combines the perpetual crisis of capitalism with the Christian idea of the end times, of an eschaton where the extreme decision is constantly ongoing and where the end is simultaneously rushed and deferred in an incessant effort to govern it, without its ever being resolved once and for all. It is the religion of a world that feels itself to be at its end, and yet it cannot—like the Hippocratic doctor—decide whether it will survive or die.3

Lots of rich insight and perspective provided for by Agamben, but for my purposes what serves instructive is the link that is made between the medical superstructure, particularly as that is supported by the state (ie FDA, CDC, BigPharma, WHO etc.), and how this has sought to displace the church’s role as the church. Attendant to this sublation, of the church by the state, the medicine-state as religion now seeks to baptize all of its elect (even by the sword if necessary) with their ‘means of grace’ administered through the various holy waters on offer; whether that be mRNA based, or not. But without getting into those details further, suffice it to say, the church now is in just as precarious of a situation, and even greater than, what the Confessing Church was facing in the natural theology being promulgated by the state church of the Third Reich and Hitler. Things have been sophisticated since the 1930s by way of technology, and new communicative strategies and platforms for mass media and propaganda; but the sinister nature, and unholy ingress of the state into the sphere of the church is at an all-time high.

When state tyranny infringes on the people in general, and the church in particular, it is the church’s rightful place to say a resounding and holy, Nein! The church is here to bear witness to the reality of God’s life for the world, and the truth that comes with that kind of life as the ground and grammar of everything. When the state conflates itself with the church as the church, when it has ministers on the payroll, as they do in America through COVID relief, so on and so forth, this is the time for the Confessing Church of the 21st century to yell out a resounding, No! The Confessing Church is like the sons of Issachar who had “men who had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do (I Chronicles 12.32) . . . .” When the church discerns a tyrannical state using the name of Christ to grow its tyranny, particularly as it does that in the place of and as the church, then it is time for the churches, and any semblance of an emerging Confessing Church to take the mic and say, No!

Unfortunately, most mainstream evangelical pastors, and other church pastors of various movements and traditions, have failed to call out the statism as churchism currently underway in the world. They have failed to recognize, unlike Agamben, that there is a new religion in the world, and it is BigMedicine as a proxy for the state. Until pastors and theologians in the mainstream come to this realization, they will continue to bow the knee to Caesar, not realizing that they are even doing so. They will continue catechizing their people with notions that the ‘loving’ thing to do is to be baptized into this new religion, and bear witness to the fact that salvation has come to the masses in and through this new form of baptismal regeneration. Indeed, here is a learned pastor, I know, who just yesterday posted the following on Facebook:

Regardless of whether or not a government has the “right” to mandate vaccinations, masks, and social distancing, and regardless of whether or not I as an individual have the “right” to refuse, because I am a follower of Jesus called to love my neighbor, I have been fully vaccinated, I wear a mask and practice social distancing in public, and I avoid crowds. I’m not afraid of COVID-19. I love you enough to do whatever I can to protect you. If I catch SARS-CoV-2, I’ll likely recover fairly quickly because I am fully vaccinated, but I could still transmit it to someone who isn’t or to someone with a compromised immune system. As a follower of Jesus, I’m called to lay down my “rights” and serve. I don’t want you or any of your loved ones to wind up on a ventilator in an ICU. I’ve been in too many ICUs to wish that on anyone. Nor do I want you or your loved ones to die from a deadly pandemic. I’ve officiated at far too many funerals to ignore that possibility.4

This is a perfect example of how the state has reached into the church, and in the name of health and safety, presented ministers of the Gospel with a new law-code and Great Commission to be followed. It is couched in subterfuge and misinformation, and on this pastor’s part, received without any critical investigation whatsoever. As a result, he has become an unwitting tool in the hands of the angel of light, declaring health and safety over the masses in the name of an elixir that self-proclaims itself as the current means of salvation for the world.

The Confessing Church of the 21st century needs to cry out, Nein!, over and over again; and to do so as the sons and daughters of Issachar: viz. with understanding!

 

1 Barmen Declaration.

2 Christiane Tietz, Karl Barth: A Life in Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 235 kindle.

3 Giorgio Agamben, Where Are We Now?: The Epidemic As Politics (Lanham: Rowman&Littlefield, 2021), 53.

4 Anonymous, accessed 09-13-2021.

 

 

The Golden Calf of Same Sex Attraction Among the Churches: And the Perspicuity of Holy Scripture

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Same sex attraction (SSA) does not deserve special sin status; and yet many Christians, and their ecclesial denominations are giving it this status as I write. To even acknowledge this distorted order, this sin as a special sin is to give away the theological goose before we even get started. The New Testament doesn’t single out homosexual attraction in special ways. Indeed, the NT lists homosexuality among a bunch of other sins. Note I Corinthians 6:9-11: 

9 Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, 10 nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. 11 And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. 

If we were to visit Leviticus, we would see the same phenomenon. Homosexuality throughout the canon of Holy Scripture is understood to be an abomination before God as much as any other sin. James 2:8-13 says: 

8 If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” you are doing well. 9 But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. 10 For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it. 11 For he who said, “Do not commit adultery,” also said, “Do not murder.” If you do not commit adultery but do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law. 12 So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty. 13 For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment. 

There is nothing complicated about this issue in the NT or OT witness of Holy Scripture. There is no need to make an elaborate argument. Someday, and I’d venture to say, sooner than later, pagans and Christians alike will come to recognize that a clairvoyant prophetic witness stood among them as found within the totality of the canon of Scripture. As Yahweh declares through Ezekiel about Ezekiel’s witness: 

30 “As for you, son of man, your people who talk together about you by the walls and at the doors of the houses, say to one another, each to his brother, ‘Come, and hear what the word is that comes from the Lord.’ 31 And they come to you as people come, and they sit before you as my people, and they hear what you say but they will not do it; for with lustful talk in their mouths they act; their heart is set on their gain. 32 And behold, you are to them like one who sings lustful songs with a beautiful voice and plays well on an instrument, for they hear what you say, but they will not do it. 33 When this comes—and come it will!—then they will know that a prophet has been among them.” -Ezekiel 33:30-33 

God speaks clearly. God does not die the death of a thousand qualifications; that’s our interpretations and recontextualizations of Scripture that die such deaths.  

People who are struggling with same sex attraction-sin, or any other sin all have been given the same antidote; and this is to the point. The cross of Christ reduces sin to its logical conclusion; to death, or nothingness. We clearly live in sin-riddled bodies, and will until the eschaton (simul justus et peccator); but as Christians we fight! We reckon ourselves, and the members of our bodies dead to sin, and alive to Christ. This is God’s antidote for all sin, no matter what it is. Murder, rape, homosexuality, lying, thievery, the entertainment of impure thoughts, all of these and more have the same antidote: it is the death of death, the cross of Jesus Christ. The Christian has the power of Almighty (Pantocrator) God in Christ standing behind them; this is the power of the reckoning we have been called to. All of sin is reduced to the same level at the foot of the cross; there is no special sin thereat. And yet many churches, even doctrinally ‘orthodox’ ones like the Presbyterian Church of America, have capitulated to the culture and identified same sex attraction as an ontological status among people. They have thus rejected the clear teaching of Scripture on sin, and allowed cultural constructs to shape the way they think sin. Kyrie Eleison  

What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? 2 By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? 3 Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. 

5 For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. 6 We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. 7 For one who has died has been set free from sin. 8 Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. 9 We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. 10 For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. 11 So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. 

12 Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. 13 Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. 14 For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace. 

15 What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! 16 Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? 17 But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, 18 and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. 19 I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification. 

20 For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. 21 But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. 22 But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life. 23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. -Romans 6:1-23 

 

 

 

A Review of Progressive Christianity: With Reference to Pastor Josh Scott

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I spent two hours watching an interview with self-proclaimed progressive pastor, Josh Scott, last night. His church, GracePointe in Nashville, Tennessee, put out an infographic saying what God’s Word isn’t and is; you can imagine what they said. I’ll give you their very first “isn’t”: 1. The Bible isn’t the Word of God, according to Josh Scott and his church, GracePointe. It seems that after that there isn’t much left to engage with. The moment a “Christian church” says, as part of their confession, that Holy Scripture is neither Holy nor God’s Word to and for humanity, there isn’t even a candle’s wick left to con-versate with. But I want to review, a bit, of what Scott thinks. If you want to watch the 2 hour plus interview, you can do that here.

Sketch

Scott’s story is the standard progressive testimony. He grew up in Eastern Kentucky, part of the Freewill Baptist denomination and Southern Baptist Convention, respectively. His grandpa was a Freewill Baptist pastor, but he tragically died when Scott was 11 years old. Scott says this event had a traumatic effect upon him. The circumstances are rather tragic. Scott says his grandpa was holding a church business meeting, and it was a meeting under duress. Apparently someone at the meeting shouted at Scott’s grandpa: ‘we don’t want you here, just leave!’ His grandpa literally had a heart attack and died right there. For Scott, as a young boy, this left an indelible mark on his psyche. He says that he associated that with the sort of God that the Bible referred to for many years following; a God of wrath and anger. This also started young Josh on a quest that has pushed him to become what he has today. As he got older, as early as his late teens, he began preaching on the Freewill/SBC circuit. He would travel around in his area and do pulpit supply for a variety of churches, weekly. As he continued to age, still young in his early to mid-twenties, he really started to have doubts and questions about the God he had been exposed to in his circles. He got his hands on the writings of Max Lucado; Scott says, ironically, that Lucado was the first to plant the seed in his head that it was okay to read more than just the Bible. Apparently in Scott’s primitivist circles it was the Bible (solo Scriptura) only; no other books were allowed to be read when considering who God is.

Once Josh Scott was given the permission to do so, indirectly by Lucado, Scott began reading NT Wright, which led to, unfortunately him reading some founding Jesus Seminar fellows such as Marcus Borg and John Dominick Crossan. When you hear Scott describe his understanding of God, and with particular reference to Jesus and the New Testament, what he describes, on both the higher critical and spiritual side, sounds like a cabling together of Borg’s Gnostic spirituality, and Crossan’s revolutionary Jesus. Later, as Scott describes it, he got his hands on Richard Rhor’s work; which as Scott explains, injected a levity of mysticism into his spirituality that he needed. Beyond this, Scott says he was an English major in college, which also informs the way he approaches Scripture. He claims to take a literary approach to Scripture, but then betrays that by saying that most of the Bible is metaphor; inclusive of the Trinity. In regard to his doctrine of God, when you put all of these informing voices together, and I’m sure many more that he didn’t share, he says that he is a panentheist (although his version of panentheism doesn’t sound very closely related to an “orthodox panentheism,” meaning I don’t think most panentheists proper, like Jürgen Moltmann, would recognize it). When we get into his understanding of salvation theory he says that he is a pluralist. The way he describes things, in this vein, sound quite close to John Hick’s theological pluralism. Here is a concise sketch of Hick’s understanding:

In the late 1960s, Hick had another set of experiences that dramatically affected his life and work. While working on civil rights issues in Birmingham, he found himself working and worshiping alongside people of other faiths. During this time he began to believe that sincere adherents of other faiths experience the Transcendent just as Christians do, though with variances due to cultural, historical, and doctrinal factors. These experiences led him to develop his pluralistic hypothesis, which, relying heavily on Kant’s phenomenal/noumenal distinction, states that adherents of the major religious faiths experience the ineffable Real through their varying culturally shaped lenses. Hick’s pluralistic considerations then led him to adjust his theological positions, and he subsequently developed interpretations of Christian doctrines, such as the incarnation, atonement, and trinity, not as metaphysical claims but as metaphorical or mythological ones. However, despite Hick’s changes theologically, many of his underlying philosophical positions remained largely intact over the course of his long career.[1]

The way Scott describes his theory of salvation sounds almost word-for-word with Hick’s pluralism. Since Scott rejects the Bible as God’s Word, ultimately, his modus operandi works from an absolute turn-to-the-subjectivism. His understanding of the theological and spiritual all depends on the experiencer’s sense of God and reality. There is nothing or no One extra nos (outside of us), no mind-independent extramental reality known as God, per se, for Scott’s theology proper. At this point, if you’re aware, Scott’s spirituality and theology sounds akin to the Enlightenment rationalism and romanticism of someone like Friedrich Schleiermacher. Indeed, the way Scott thinks Jesus sounds almost exactly like the Ebionite understanding that Schleiermacher et al. (Crossan etc.) operated with; just not quite as sophisticated.

The Ethical Cash-out

The way all of the aforementioned cashes out in Scott’s ecclesial and pastoral polity is to defer to the broader culture in order to know what truth and reality actually entails. There is a level of scientism, and essentially a whole lot of normative relativism at play in the way Scott thinks about anthropological concerns vis-à-vis socio-political issues. The primary thing his church wants to stand for is the value and affirmation of each person’s unique human experience. In our culture that happens to reduce most readily to human sexuality. They want people to know that they not only love, but affirm the LBGTQ+ community without qualification. He believes the church has damaged her image, almost beyond repair, by the way the church has treated people who live as homosexual, or in that sphere. This takes us back to the sort of God Scott was exposed to as a child and teenager; it is this God he is attempting to deconstruct, going as far as asserting that Scripture is not God’s Word, and then reconstructing it in the broader culture’s self-projected collective image. Ultimately, Scott simply sounds like a secular progressive, but with an attempt of recasting that through a quasi-Christian imagination, linguistically.

Conclusion

Josh Scott represents a typical progressive Christian. His testimony mimics most anyone else’s who claims to be progressive Christian. Almost all of their stories share a common past in some iteration of what they would now call Fundamentalism (and many of them did grow up in genuinely Fundamentalist religions and subcultures). The thing is, is that they haven’t really moved past their past, they have simply re-iterated a neo-Fundamentalism. It’s just that their informing word comes from the progressive secular culture, rather than their maybe idiosyncratic subcultures they grew up within. They live in a negation of a negation now, and this is sad. They look back at what and who they thought God was, and then negate that through their progressively formed optics handed to them by the broader culture. In some cases, like Scott’s, they might get their hands on various ‘liberal’ thinkers within the mainline and higher Protestant traditions; typically ones who themselves have taken shape under the pressures provided for by Enlightenment premises. They will work this into their neo-Fundamentalist (or ‘progressive’) mode, and live as if they part of a brave new world in the Christian imagination. But the sad reality is that there is nothing historically Christian whatsoever about what progressive Christians claim to be. And the thing is, this is exactly how they like it.

Aside: This progressively Christian subculture is now making inroads into what were once conservative Bible Colleges, Seminaries, and churches. Just yesterday, professor at Calvin College (James KA Smith) tweeted, that he not only loves but affirms ALL of the LGBTQ+ students on campus. This is a growing trend whether we are reading a Christianity Today article, or attending The Gospel Coalition’s sponsorship of the Revoice Conferences. Pastors, theologians, and Christian teachers of all stripes seem to be buckling under the cultural pressure to faithfully proclaim the historic and orthodox witness of Holy Scripture as God’s Word in all matters. Scott and the progressive Christians are just more explicit about their self-understanding and identity within the ecclesial landscape. What makes things more deleterious though for the broader evangelical world, is that a version of progressivism has been seeping into their churches and schools, albeit in softer tones and without the flamboyant fanfare that the Scott’s of the Christian world present with.

This is a time to be vigilant, and for pastors, theologians and other Christian leaders to know their Christian stuff. Not so they can engage in a debate, per se, but so they can offer a thick and robust alternative Christian Dogmatic that has an intentional in-formation of their socio-political activism in the public square. What I mean is that if the genuine Christian is going to take a stand in our day and age, they need to know who God actually is and what God’s Word actually says with reference to the various culturisms we are being barraged with every single day. But it is time to stand up and be counted. Be a Bonhoeffer, or an Esther why don’t you!  

[1] David C. Cramer, “John Hick,” in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed 03-11-2021.

The Church’s Need for Systemic Repentance: CRT and other Chimeras of Natural Theology

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Since Critical Race Theory (CRT) isn’t available as an analytic tool for Christians doing the work, in the ecclesial context, towards working through the racial complex; and if the Gospel itself is Self-sufficient, as the Power of God to do so; this still means that Christians have the responsibility to develop grammars and strategies, rooted in the kerygma itself, that help facilitate a genuinely Kingdom oriented telos (or purpose). Clearly, in my view, appealing to a correlationist frame between a genuinely Gospel oriented praxis, and secular is a non-starter. The particularity of the Gospel is scandalous to the world’s wisdom, so much so that it thinks the Gospel is both foolish and weak. But Christians find their being in this foolishness and weakness; we find our lives in its cruciformed shape; and we live and move out of this orientation. In my view then, appeal to CRT as an analytic tool for attempting to engage in “race relations” in the church represents a copout. It is the hawking off of the church’s responsibility to the world, and asking the world to do the work (i.e. provide the “tools” and “ways”) of figuring out a way to reconcile the races.

I do think there are legitimate racial disparities and even so-called inequities in the world writ-large. And insofar as the evangelical church reflects, and even follows the world/culture at large, and she does in significant ways, these disparities and inequities get smuggled into the ecclesial context. But this really reflects a deeper problem; it is a problem of allowing a natural universalizing theology to shape the church. In other words, the problem, in nuce, is that the evangelical churches (among the other churches) have so collapsed or immanantized the culture into the fabric of the Church, that the very Lord of the Church, Jesus Christ, can no longer be heard. Indeed, the culture so saturates the Church that the Church actually believes it is open to her Lord’s voice, when in fact the voice they are actually hearing is the broader culture’s. This is the deeper problem, and the ongoing racial, and other problems in the Church are really only symptoms (serious ones) of this sort of primal problem wherein the Church at large has conflated the culture’s voice with the Lord’s, thus making the latter self-same with the former. Until this is identified for what it is, as the Antichrist of natural theology, the idea that racial reconciliation, or any other sort of reconciliation might happen, in meaningful ways, will remain a chimera of a never ending story of purely horizontal horizons.

John Webster offers some pertinent insight on Karl Barth’s moral theology and ethical anthropology with reference to the Liberal Protestant church of Barth’s German/Swiss day. Webster writes:

A large part of Barth’s distaste is his sense that the ethics of liberal Protestantism could not be extricated from a certain kind of cultural confidence: ‘[H]ere was … a human culture building itself up in orderly fashion in politics, economics, and science, theoretical and applied, progressing steadily along its whole front, interpreted and ennobled by art, and through its morality and religion reaching well beyond itself toward yet better days.’ The ethical question, on such an account, is no longer disruptive; it has ‘an almost perfectly obvious answer’, so that, in effect, the moral life becomes too easy, a matter of the simple task of following Jesus.

Within this ethos, Barth also discerns a moral anthropology with which he is distinctly ill-at-ease. He unearths in the received Protestant moral culture a notion of moral subjectivity (ultimately Kantian in origin), according to which ‘[t]he moral personality is the author both of the conduct with which the ethical question is concerned and of the question itself. Barth’s point is not simply that such an anthropology lacks serious consideration of human corruption, but something more complex. He is beginning to unearth the way in which this picture of human subjectivity as it were projects the moral self into a neutral space, from which it can survey the ethical question ‘from the viewpoint of spectators’. This notion Barth reads as a kind of absolutizing of the self and its reflective consciousness, which come to assume ‘the dignity of ultimateness’. And it is precisely this — the image of moral reason as a secure centre of value, omnicompetent in its judgements — that the ethical question interrogates.[1] 

I would contend that this mode has taken over the evangelical churches of North America, and the West at large. It seems that the mainline and/or progressive churches have now come to set the ethical space for much of what used to be considered the conservative evangelical churches. They all are operating with this same sort of allegiance to cultural relativism, and the turn-to-the-subject in the name of Jesus Christ as ultimately determinative for what it means to be socially activist and engaged. She can no longer, by and large, hear the voice of her Lord; because her Lord is in point of fact her own voice projected out as the living Lord’s (see Barth’s appropriation of Feuerbach). What the Church is in need of before anything else is systemic repentance. She needs to be willing, corporately, or as large bodies as witness bearers to the rest of the Church, to recognize her sin of syncretism, and cry out for the Lord to ‘liberate’ her from her cultural bondage; just so she can actually hear the lordly voice of the risen Lord once again, afresh and anew every morning in His great faithfulness.  

[1] John Webster, Barth’s Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth’s Thought, 35-6.

Barth’s Visible and Invisible churches in Contradistinction to Roma

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The concept of the visible/invisible church has always intrigued me. The conception of the visible church as articulated and understood by the Catholic church has always irked me. Barth’s conception of the dialectic between the visible and invisible reality of the church has edified me. Christoph Schwöbel provides a very cogent sketch of what this ecclesiological reality entails in Barth’s ecclesiology (contra a Roman Catholic, and even iterations of scholastic Protestant understandings). Schwöbel writes:

For Barth, the visible Church is also an article of faith. The church is believed both as invisible and visible Church. “Visible” and “invisible” are not two species of the same genus, he emphasizes, but one and the same subject in two respects. In order to explain the dialectic, Barth points to a parallel in his doctrine of the Word of God. Just as God’s revelation is the Word becoming flesh in Christ, this Word becoming Scripture and Scripture becoming a human word in proclamation, so the invisible Church is where the visible Church is. However, the visible church can never by itself be an object of faith; the visible Church belongs to faith as pointing to its ground in God. By itself, it is a creature in which one cannot believe, because one can only believe in the creator. Everything else is idolatry. Therefore Barth can say: “One believes in God when one believes in the visibility of the Church that falls from above into history—because that is He, that is His work of reconciliation—just as an individual human person believes in God by believing in the grace falling from above into his boundless unholiness.” Believing in the Church means to believe in God as God creates, preserves, and perfects the Church. For Barth it is therefore clear that the visible church witnesses to the invisible church and in doing so witnesses to God as the only object of faith: “The glory of the church is to give all glory to God.”[1]

The significance of Barth’s ecclesial dialectic cannot be overstated. As Schwöbel underscores, Barth’s is an ecclesiology, as is typical, that is portioned out by concentrating on Jesus Christ and the Triune life as the church’s ground. Schwöbel also, and rightly so, highlights how the analogy of Barth’s particular concept of the threefold Word of God implicates Barth’s understanding of the visible/invisible church. As is thematic in Barth, the visible only has its reality as it bears witness to its res in the invisible inner-ground of her life in the perichoretic liveliness of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This serves as a protection against absolutizing one iteration of the visible church as the one and only iteration of the church catholic by grounding the church’s esse or reality in the transcendent God who genuinely is ‘universal’ and, in the Barthian sense, ‘for all’ (pro nobis). This gives Barth’s doctrine of the church a freedom that the Catholic ecclesiology, simpliciter, cannot have. This is so, because the Catholic church has so collapsed the reality of the church into her idiosyncratic expression of the church, that God’s grace is held captive to this church’s liturgical formulas rather than the liturgical reality, in se, that obtains in the mysterium Trinitatis.

More to say, out of time for now.

[1] Christoph Schwöbel, “’The Kingdom of Christ Now Present in Mystery,’ and the Question of the ‘Distance between Christ as Lord, King, and Judge and His Church,’” edited by Matthew Levering, Bruce L. McCormack and Thomas Joseph White, OP, Dogma and Ecumenism: Vatican II and Karl Barth’s Ad Limina Apostolorum (Washington D.C., The Catholic University of America Press, 2020), 104-05.

‘Mixing Manure with Ice Cream’, A Response to Pastor Dave Rolph: The Theopolitical Gospel

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This in response to Pastor Dave Rolph; he is pastor of Pacific Hills Calvary Chapel in Aliso Viejo, CA. He was once principle of Calvary Chapel High School at Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa, an Associate Pastor at Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa, and a very close associate and confidant of Pastor Chuck Smith’s (founder of the Calvary Chapel movement). I grew up the son of a Conservative Baptist pastor, but in a very formative time of my Christian walk, I attended Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa (about 5 services a week), for approximately 5 years; I attended Calvary Chapel Bible College for a year; was accepted into Calvary Chapel School of Ministry (but did not attend, went to Multnomah instead); and got into part of the ‘inner circle’ (on the fringes of that part) of Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa leadership because of a friend of mine who lived with the director of the Calvary Chapel School of Ministry. All this to say: I have background and context with Calvary Chapel, which is why I continue to pay attention to it and its leadership.

So, in light of the aforementioned, as I started, let me respond to something that Dave Rolph just posted on his Facebook feed. He is responding to those who have apparently been pressing him on his apparent lack of engagement with all the politics of the day. He wrote in full:

Mixing Manure With Ice Cream

I have stated many times that mixing politics with Christianity is like mixing manure with ice cream. It doesn’t hurt the manure, but it ruins the ice cream. In this divided age it is more and more challenging to avoid mixing Christianity with politics. In fact, I find that nowadays one’s Christianity is generally assessed based on his or her politics. This certainly brings much-needed passion into politics, making it today’s leading spectator sport, but it is devastating to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

I once asked Pastor Chuck Smith what would’ve happened if he had endorsed Richard Nixon in 1968 or 1971. He shook his head and said, “Oh man! Calvary would’ve been emptied out and the Jesus Movement would’ve been over.”

But it isn’t only the politics of the Right that threatens the gospel. History is replete with examples of an emphasis on social justice degrading the work of the Spirit as well. How many examples are there of great social work in the name of Christianity that now do good social work without a hint of the gospel, other than a cross as a logo or the name Christian hidden in an acronym somewhere.

Now, I hear the cries from both sides of the spectrum. “We still believe the Bible and support conservative political causes.” Or, “We don’t compromise doctrinally at all when we also advocate for progressive ideals and against systemic evil.” And I believe you. For now. But history either teaches us well, or we are doomed to repeat it.

The real question should be, “Is there one person out there who might not hear the gospel because my politics turns them off?” There are many points on the political right with which I agree. There are also many points coming from the newly woke crowd with which I agree. If you don’t think the slaughter of innocent unborn children is horrible you are a moron, and certainly not a Christian. If you are a racist then you are a moron and certainly not a Christian. But those issues are not the gospel.

I hear from people everyday who are frustrated that I won’t “take a side.” I’ve taken a side. That side is the pure, unadulterated gospel. That’s the ice cream for me.[1]

My off the cuff stream of consciousness response to him was this:

The Gospel is scandalous because it won’t allow for a Swiss neutrality. It is disruptive because it forces the Christian into a scandalous particularity that even on points of political theory must say a loud no or yes. The Christian bears witness to the Kingdom of Christ, which makes it inimically political; with *sides*. The sides may overlap one way or the other, in regard to the horizontal politik we are all ensconced within, whether we like it or not. Wisdom says that to take a particular side, to say yes to a side that has more proximity to the values of the Kingdom, must occur for the Christian. Unfortunately the Gospel is ultimately political, and in this in-between time, it does call us to make the hard decisions of taking a particular side. The side transcends the party or the person, but because of particularity, the side will ultimately, of necessity, collapse into one party or person over another. If the values of the Kingdom, on a grade, are more embodied by one party or person, then the grade slides that direction more than the other. IOW, to remain politically neutral, in my view, is not a corollary of the Gospel. And to attempt an appeal to a *pure Gospel* as the antidote to this dilemma misunderstands just how the Gospel has come to us, and comes afresh and anew, in the timber and blood of the cross of Jesus Christ. The Gospel is this-worldly, just as it is God for us in Christ. As such, while the Gospel gives us an external transcendence to think and live from, it does so immanently in a man from a particular place called Nazareth. If the Gospel is not neutral, than neither can we be. If the Gospel freely stooped down, and took the low-road, then this is our mode of theological existence in the world. To be the fool in Christ, is not to seek a docetic high-road untrammeled by the goings on of this world, but it is to take the byway of Chalcedon wherein the Christian finds standing in what might appear to be foolish and weak vis-à-vis the *civilized* world. This implicates how we take stands politically; or it should. Signed, 2 cents.

And his response to me was this: “Dave Rolph Bobby Grow You’d really hate Jesus. And Paul. And Peter. And John.” This wasn’t really the response I was expecting; but we can chalk it up to him being in the heat of the moment.

Let me attempt to unpack what I wrote to him a little bit more. All that I was doing was pointing out that the analogy of the Gospel itself does not allow for an apolitical, and neutral approach to any of these things. The Gospel reality itself, starting with the Gospel Hisself, who is the Christ, is stridently political through and through. That is how my comment to Rolph can be boiled down, and should be. I was noting a principled point that is an implicate of the disruptive nature of the Gospel; i.e. that the Christian way can neither be apolitical nor neutral in any way. If the Gospel is the very ground of all reality, if there are no spheres in reality untouched by the reality of the Gospel, as the Gospel is all of creation’s telos (purpose), then it is inconceivable, indeed more, it is incoherent to imagine a world of “pure Gospel” wherein the Christian can Platonically stand aloof from the concretions of this worldly reality. This is the ground and grammar my reply to Rolph was working from.

While the Gospel re-creates, it doesn’t ignore what is confronting this present evil age; indeed, it contradicts it! If the Gospel confronts and contradicts this current world system, then it does so in highly explicit ways that cannot, by definition, remain aloof or “unmixed.” Indeed, the analogy of the incarnation itself says this: that the eternal and triune God, in the second person of that life, in the Son, “mixed” Himself with humanity that humanity, by the Grace of Adoption might be mixed into God’s very inner life. That is a disrupting reality that brings with it a holy confrontation to this world order that is highly political, and full of choices of whether a person will stand with God’s way in Christ, or their way. Attempting to discern what that way is, in the muddle of all the evils in the world, is exactly what the Christian has been called to. This isn’t a “mixing,” or better, collapsing of the Gospel into this world order; instead it is recognizing that because God has mixed Himself into this order, by becoming human in Christ, that it is no longer possible to not be ‘worldly’ Christians (as Bonhoeffer might note).

Conclusion

To close let me refer us to a definition of apocalyptic theology and what I take to be very important towards how we ought to think of the Christian’s engagement with the world; and what that implies towards developing a genuinely theopolitical approach that does not attempt to hide behind the name of Jesus in retreat from this world system. Philip Ziegler writes:

As Gaventa concisely puts it, “Paul’s apocalyptic theology has to do with the conviction that in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has invaded the world as it is, thereby revealing the world’s utter distortion and foolishness, reclaiming the world, and inaugurating a battle that will doubtless culminate in the triumph of God over all God’s enemies (including the captors Sin and Death). This means that the Gospel is first, last, and always about God’s powerful and gracious initiative.” Inasmuch as it is an expression of specifically Christian faith, “apocalyptic theology always and everywhere denotes a theology of liberation in an earth that is dying and plagued by evil powers.

In the words of Donald MacKinnon, its subject matters in nothing less than “God’s own protest against the world He has made, by which at the same time that world is renewed and reborn.”[2]

And:

For my own part, I am certainly drawn to the task of envisaging an apocalyptic theology for “ardently Protestant” reasons. For it seems to me that, understood as it is here, apocalyptic is a discursive idiom uniquely suited to articulate the radicality, sovereignty, and militancy of adventitious divine grace; just so it is of real import to the dogmatic work of testing the continued viability of Protestant Christian faith. . . . The apocalyptic idiom starkly illumines at one and the same time both the drastic and virulent reality of human captivity and complicity in sin, and the extraordinary power of saving divine grace that outbids it, reminding us that things are at once much worse yet also paradoxically far, far better than we could possibly imagine them to be.[3]

You will note the reference to ‘liberation theology,’ which I repudiate. But the theologian doesn’t have to adopt liberation theology (and its latent Marxism) in order to appreciate the point about God’s invasion into this world, and what that implies about the Christian’s engagement with the world. I agree with Rolph that we don’t want a non-Gospel issue to become a stumbling block that stands in the way of a person coming to Christ (which is a very ‘conversionist’ and I would say, Pelagian way to think), but to say that we ought to find a neutral ground for the Gospel, in order to achieve that, fundamentally misunderstands just what the radical implications of the Gospel are. Christians don’t live in abstraction from this world, we live in it as witnesses to the order of God’s life and kingdom that has transected, contradicted, and re-created this world system in such a way that to remain abstract from that reality misrepresents exactly what this world needs! The Gospel is the Good News of God to the world precisely because it is the most political statement ever announced: i.e. that Jesus is King!!

 

[1] Dave Rolph, Facebook Post, accessed 08-16-2020.

[2] Philip G. Ziegler, Militant Grace: The Apocalyptic Turn and the Future of Christian Theology (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2018), loc 162, 171 kindle.

[3] Ibid., loc 214, 224.