"Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever does not enter the sheepfold by the door but climbs in by another way is a thief and a robber."
"You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit. As your forebears did, so do you."
"When reviled, he did not revile in return; when suffering, he did not threaten; but he trusted to the one who judges justly ."
These texts seem to be marching in two different directions at the same time. Jesus himself provides us with a strident example of "reviling" as he denounces false messiahs as thieves and robbers. And Stephen calls his fellow Jews "stiff-necked" and "uncircumcised in heart and ears," although Peter insists that Jesus’ forgiveness and love is the living paradigm for Christian ethics. Surely we can’t resolve this conflict by arguing that Christians must indeed suffer abuse unless that abuse is directed at our religious belief, whereby we are obliged by Scripture to have at it with a vengeance. That way lies fanaticism.
Virtually anything (and its opposite) can be proved from the Bible. The resolute proof-texter can find justification for both genocide (Deut. 20:16-18) and pacifism (Matt. 5:38-41) , homophobia (Rom. 1:26-27) and a CIA-like collusion between spies and prostitutes (Josh. 2:1 -21) , pagan mythology (Gen. 6:1-4) and radically exclusive monotheism (Isa. 45:18-23) The Bible is such a mixed bag of texts that no one could pretend to subject himself or herself to the authority of every chapter and verse without becoming hopelessly schizophrenic.
When the radical tensions within the, Bible are compounded with the enormous time gap between biblical times and today, it is small wonder that many texts simply leave us cold. Sometimes the problem may be our own coldness of heart, but often it is the flintiness of the given text. For example, in light of the self-humbling fulfillment of both law and prophecy in Jesus Christ, biblically sanctioned religious persecution or genocide can never again be even remotely conceived as an answer to religious and racial diversity.
The ancient heretic Marcian would solve the problem of difficult or odious texts by re-editing the Bible. Although we have many modern Marcians, I don’t think we can utilize such high-handed censoring of the past. Christians stand in a historical line from ancient Israel to Jesus Christ. We can’t absolve ourselves from the onus that may be on Israel, for example, for its ruthless invasion of ancient Canaan by trying to explain it away, any more than we can absolve ourselves from the catalog of horrors that have resulted from the theocratic pretensions of the church. Nor can American Christians be absolved from the systematic slaughter and exile of Native Americans that parallels the invasion of Canaan, or of slavery and its seemingly intractable aftermath. Neither revisionist analyses nor liberal breast-beating exempts us from collective responsibility.
The Bible offers us many answers to society’s evils, but no pat answers. Apart from the sheer diversity of its oracles and laws, the Bible never reads the same from age to age or from day to day. Our faithful response to Scripture is governed by the unsystematizable relativities of history and the supremely unsystematizable freedom of the Holy Spirit. Thus, a text that may strike us as an irrelevant throwback may, in a given situation, burn suddenly with new power.
In the liberal era, for example, theological openness and cultural tolerance appeared to be self-evident Christian theological virtues. How else could the Christian faith be correlated with each new wave of human spirituality? To the enlightened, to "revile" someone over doctrinal niceties seemed hardly Christian. But all this was put to the test when Hitler’s new Aryan spirituality, his pagan religion of blood and soil, was foisted on the church as the latest and highest manifestation of the human spirit. It was in the context of Germany 1934 that the Confessing Church in its Barmen Declaration rallied around the utter exclusivism of our Johanine text and that other unyielding Johanine claim, "I am the way, the truth and the life: no one comes to the Father, but by me" (John 14:6) . He who enters the door by any other way is a thief and a robber. How could one be a Christian and not so revile Hitler or the mounting list of such fiends spawned in our era?
On the other hand, John 10:1 or Acts 7:51 would never work as imperatives for Christians in interfaith dialogue. Christians engaged in such dialogue need to be led by universalistic themes in Scripture. The Scripture is not a club by which to drive away all but the most rabidly committed. It is the proclamation of good news. It is good news both that all is not merely relative, that there is authority to call the Hitlers of the world what they are (thieves and robbers) , and that Jesus Christ, the one door, is the door of salvation for all.
How dependent we are upon the promptings of the Holy Spirit to get anything right. So much of the history of the Christian church is the history of theological overkill or underkill, of a brutish wielding of the totalitarian potentialities of an uncircumspect monotheism on the one hand or the weak capitulation of the strong word of Scripture to human preference and prejudice on the other.
There exists no such thing as the perfect sermon, a text preached so that it will seem liberating and redeeming to all and enslaving and alienating to none. Similarly, the various contributions of the many saints and seers, storytellers and casuists of Scripture can only be, as T. S. Eliot put it, "reconciled in the stars." Yet this is but another way of recognizing that while we are being saved we have not yet seen the manifest reign of God where diversity enriches all and divides none.
Since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, they are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption which is in Jesus Christ, whom God put forward as an expiation by his blood, to be received by faith
Martin Luther believed that the theology of this text was the essence of the gospel. Seeing himself a sinner who fell infinitely "short of the glory of God," the salvation that Luther found through the redeeming death of Jesus Christ was for him a sheer gift of the most unmerited grace. The Reformation would have died stillborn if many of Luther’s contemporaries had not shared his sense of sm and dependence.
Though many of us were raised in traditions that stressed the depth of our personal sin, we have generally allowed ourselves to be talked out of it. Modernity teaches us to see all our deeds -- even our most deviant criminal acts -- as psychological, sociological, economic or biological responses to environmental or genetic factors. Such determinisms preclude all genuine sin-talk.
The sexual revolution finds many Christians flip-flopping older puritanical attitudes -- some see repressed sexuality as a greater evil than premarital sex and abortion. While not all is licensed among Christians, a striving for personal rectitude is being replaced by a sense of liberal or revolutionary social "responsibility." Ironically, one finds in some Christian social ethics hints of a smug satisfaction over the correctness of the analyses (Marxist, Freudian, feminist, among others) of human brokenness. One’s "hermeneutics of suspicion" not only exposes society’s "real" villains but shows a solidarity, albeit self-appointed, with the oppressed. The ideological cognoscenti have moved beyond mere personal sin.
Americans are still driven by the myth of human progress. The successes of science and technology have kept alive -- despite wars, racism, overpopulation, ecological catastrophe, homelessness, incest and domestic violence -- the belief that one day we will get things right. And when we rid the world of poverty, ignorance and disease and provide for the needs and pleasures of everyone, human venality will cease. Our machines and knowledge, not God, will save us. Old notions such as the fear of God have been widely replaced by theologies that hold that God is powerless to do anything save lure people to righteousness, theologies that deny life beyond the grave altogether, or theologies that preach universal salvation.
I am not deploring all this. I am merely sketching a cultural milieu in which preaching about sin will more than likely be met with one or another form of "I’m OK, you’re OK." It is crucial to remind ourselves that a Christian confession of sin rests not on cultural, philosophical or psychological pessimism but on Jesus Christ. For one discovers sin only when one knows the one against Whom it is committed -- the one who meets us in the forgiveness Wrought in Christ’s cross. Thus, if I am in despair I find that my despair is ill-founded. Acknowledging sin entails, among other things, the happy assessment that nothing that is wrong with us is finally beyond forgiveness. Yet if I have prospered, I find that my success has been built on the sinking sand of worldliness, for the triumph of Jesus Christ came through the cross. The brooding secular existentialist has no more insight into our broken relationship to God than does the upbeat pragmatic secular yuppie.
What if our liberal capitalism and the blandishments of our technologically fueled hedonism were one day to set humanity free from war and criminality? Christians drawn from such a merry herd of contented beings would still, should they experience Christ’s expiating death, be driven to confess that no matter how relatively benign hedonism renders life, they themselves were in no way perfect as their "heavenly father is perfect."
To know Christ is to know my own role in his death and that my crucifixion of God’s’ son is but the logical extension of my heartlessness toward my neighbor. No new world will change the primal fact that I do not love my neighbor as myself. Indeed, the underlying assumption of our consumer utopia is that universal plenty will make self-sacrificing love unnecessary. A Christian recognition of sin is first a recognition of our betrayal of God’s self-sacrificing love, a betrayal that is exposed only with the laying bare of such love in the cross.
When Paul persecuted the church he had no real grasp of the nature and extent of his betrayal of God’s love, for he did not fathom the depth of that love. His mature sense of sin arose only through meeting the risen Christ on the road to Damascus. "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" was at once a judgment and a call of love. Paul’s discovery of his sin in the very recognition of sin’s forgiveness did not turn him into a Pollyanna. Romans contains some of the most drastic assessments of the human condition ever penned. Yet it is crucial to remember that in Romans Paul views both sin an human blindness toward God as that from which we are being delivered. Romans reaches its crescendo in Paul’s claim that "God has consigned all men to disobedience, that he might have mercy upon all" (11:32) .
The world in its worldliness can’t see that sin-talk explains anything. This is the reverse side of the world’s claim that does not need the work of Christ. The church has its work cut out for it. We ought not let the world’s willfulness so exasperate us that we become striden accusers of the world’s naïveté. The church has one overriding task: proclaiming by word and deed a perfect love which will in its own suffering way judge and redeem all things human. Love-talk is the bedrock upon which sin-talk must be built, lest it sink into the marshes of cynicism or self-pity.
"Stay with us, for it is toward evening and the day is now far spent." So he went in to stay with them. When Jesus was at table with them, he took the bread and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened and they recognized him; and he vanished out of their sight.
Luke’s account of the encounter of the risen Christ with two disciples on the road to Emmaus witnesses to the strange juxtaposition of hiddenness and discovery evoked by Christ’s resurrection. Knowing that Jesus had been crucified, the two disciples were utterly unprepared to see him alive. More important, the resurrected Christ was the only new creation since the first creation. What they confronted was not a revivification of the man they had known, but rather one knowable only by a miracle of divine self-disclosure.
This scenario creates an undeniably aesthetic aura and is a favorite subject for Christian artists. Rembrandt, for example, painted several times that instant when the disciples’ eyes were opened. The very young Rembrandt was drawn to the melodrama of the baroque, using dramatic lighting effects to re-create the event. As Rembrandt matured, his highly charged interpretation of the story gave way to a very different sense of awe, a deeper, radically personal awakening, a subtle awareness reflected in the eye of one of the disciples. At the very instant of the disciple’s recognition a servant offers a plate and appears to see nothing at all remarkable.
Rembrandt’s maturation serves as a parable of our own posture toward such biblical accounts. For most of us every act of God, every revelatory experience, comes in the form of worldly occurrences that can be read in naturalistic terms. We realize that our most profound spiritual convictions can be interpreted as intense psychological states. Faith knows that there is infinitely more to existence and the reality of God than our fleshly eyes can perceive, but faith -- a living by what cannot be seen -- is the only way to know this. We are dismayed by interpretations of biblical narratives -- like Cecil B. DeMille’s epics -- that focus on their special-effects potential, such as Jesus’ disappearing like some movie ghost.
Christian artist George Rouault painted several landscapes depicting Christ walking between two disciples, pictures that evoke the Emmaus account. Bold patches of luminescent colors with subtones give the radiant appearance of stained glass or a flaming coal. The miraculous landscapes are more abstract than realistic. Such a posture toward reality reflects the way many moderns understand scriptural events. We know something of decisive import happened in Judea when Pilate was procurator, but we are never in a position to produce anything like a videotape. Where does fact end and legend begin? Reading the Bible entails a creative openness -- it’s more like being an artist than cataloging a coroner’s findings.
If we are not content with such uncertainty and try to take control of Christ by our historical-critical method or our theological formulations, he eludes our grasp. We are so shaped by modern skepticism that we may even be tempted to doubt the certainty of our own experience of Christ when he cannot be produced on command in a narrowly positivistic or rationalistic manner.
Yet a vanishing not unlike Christ’s vanishing is characteristic of all human relations. We have all experienced moments of intimacy with friends or lovers in which remarkable bonds of sympathy and mutuality emerge. The Other is present to us in astonishing immediacy and openness so that there seems to be a commingling of beings in the bonds of affection. Yet that Other, who becomes almost as real to one as one s own self, does not and cannot stay. Moods change. One gets bored. Trivia becomes important. The Thou becomes an It. The moment never lasts. One cannot recapture on command those moments of self-disclosure and relationship when another self was almost indistinguishable from one’s own self.
Human love, which gives existence its viability and purpose -- both our love of God and our love of neighbor -- is spontaneous, fragile and fleeting. Like the heavenly manna of the Exodus, love cannot be preserved and stored. We cannot manage it. We can only hope that it will be there for us when we most need it. These ought not to be melancholy thoughts, any more than the two disciples should have lamented the vanishing of the risen Christ. We know that Christ’s vanishing and the vanishing of every human moment and the self we are at every moment serve to underscore the utter preciousness of life. This simply makes more glorious the mystery that this precious life which we presently experience as so poignantly fragile is, like the God who gives it, eternal.
". . . this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel:
‘And in the last days it shall be,
God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy . . .
the sun shall be turned into darkness
and the moon into blood . . .
And it shall be that whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved."
According to Acts, on Pentecost, after Peter was sufficiently recovered from his ecstasy of the Spirit and had found his rational tongue, he refutes the charge of drunkenness: It’s too early in the day, what do you take us for! But if not a raucous spree, what had occurred? Peter’s choice of the Joel text indicates that the ecstasy the apostles had experienced was not a mystical group rapture. They reported no loss of selfhood, no absorption into oneness. Their experience did not arise out of an ascetic, quietistic withdrawal, and it did not lead to an indifference to the world.
The descent of the Spirit signaled an unprecedented condition in which personal salvation and the imposition of the politics of the kingdom of God on the world political scene were but two sides of the same coin. The new age of the Spirit, characterized by the nondiscriminatory favor of God, had dawned as the Spirit was poured upon all flesh -- male and female, old and young. When God’s reign is made manifest, calling on the name of God will entail no blind existential leap of faith but a clear acknowledgment of the glorious truth of things -- that God is love and thus it is love that makes the world go round.
Yet this, was not utopianism. Indeed, Peter’s appeal to the apocalyptic tradition is an implicit rejection of utopianism. The collapse of communism in Europe demonstrates what a George Orwell or a Reinhold Niebuhr long understood: the implementation of any utopian system automatically produces an antiutopia. Every utopia is totalitarian because every utopia is born of the impulse to totalize one’s cherished but finite daydreams. From Plato to radical feminism, from More to Marx, every ideal vision is fraught with horrors to those who by nature or opinion do not share the ideal.
The new age of the Spirit is what no utopia can possibly be -- the spontaneous, manifest reign of God himself -- God ruling in freedom to create freedom; God redeeming the wreckage that finite freedom and creativity tragically engender. The Spirit’s descent empowers the church of the risen Christ to proclaim the end of the world, an end that is not oblivion but the world’s new creation.
The Christian life is a life lived in the new age of the Spirit but also in anticipation of the coming of the new age. Faith discerns, in the Spirit, realities as invisible as God himself. Yet the invisible God has elected to hold in abeyance his manifest rule; we can only stammer about that which words cannot utter and work to accomplish that which is finally beyond human achievement.
Herein lies the rub. Every witness we offer, each political solution we try in anticipation of the manifest reign of God, reflects our finite, all-too-human interpretations of our inspirations and visions. Thus, the very proclamation of the kingdom, especially as it claims the sanction of the one true, holy God, has the potential for being repressive, like any merely utopian scheme. Christian history’ is replete with acts of repression in the name of the Spirit.
Though driven by the Spirit to speak and act, our expectation of the perfect freedom of the reign of God can be uttered and our praxis realized only in terms of particular metaphors, projects or cultural prejudices. Pure glossolalia may not so concretize and delimit the divine, but it pays the price of being incomprehensible. The very attempt to define or concretize the freedom born of the Spirit can be read as an attempt to achieve closure on God’s truth. If the apostles learned anything, it was that there is no closure possible with the Spirit of God.
As Augustine knew long ago, to be silent is to betray the Spirit. Compelled to speak yet compelled to distort the infinite by our finite words, our Pentecost faith is hard-pressed by the task the Spirit lays upon us. No wonder Christians are tempted -- despite the Spirit’s descent into the world -- to try to elope with the Spirit away from the world.
It all comes down to the Pentecost miracle. Not necessarily the actual appearance of tongues of fire or the fact that people of many nations heard the apostles speaking in their own languages; such mighty works, wonders and signs, seen without the Spirit’s gift of sight, can be ignored or dismissed, or can be used to reduce Christianity to a faith in crass wonderments. We ourselves experience the power of Pentecost whenever we glimpse the liberating agenda and praxis of the Spirit that beyond finite utterance. It is a miracle when the selfsame Spirit who opened our hearts and impels us boldly to speak and act uses our blundering words and actions to open the ears of others. Praise God that the results of our witness are largely beyond our control and that what he Spirit achieves in this new age always takes us by surprise.
". . . they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him." Saying this, she turned round and saw Jesus standing, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping? Whom do you seek?"
Let’s begin by admitting that we Christians can’t agree on what happened Easter morning. Certainly resurrection faith does not require belief in the resuscitation of a corpse! But does it require faith in the empty tomb? Maybe the various Gospel accounts are best read as innocent attempts -- decades after the first Easter -- to provide some historical hook on which first-century believers could hang their experiential faith.
The proclamation of the empty tomb was not self-evidently believable to many early Christians. Paul, the earliest New Testament writer, indicates that the resurrection itself was an intellectual hurdle for antimaterialistic first-century believers who supposed salvation to be the liberation of the soul from the body. Nonetheless, despite their philosophic biases, many early Christians experienced Christ alive in their hearts, and thus questions surrounding his resurrection became significant. How could he be alive in us even as we dwell on this earth if his earthly body lay rotting in an earthly grave?
If the empty tomb is ahistorical and is merely an ad hoc answer to such a question, it is clearly a naïve solution. For if the empty tomb merely solves a perceived contradiction between the risen Christ being truly among us while his body moldered in the grave, then where is the body now? If the Ascension is merely a sensational way of getting rid of the body problem once and for all, what sense can be made of the idea that the corporeal Jesus resides somewhere in the invisible realms of eternity?
Paul’s understanding of Christ’s resurrection does more than give us an empty tomb for a resurrection faith. For Paul what came forth from the grave was a new reality -- not a physical body but a "spiritual" body (I Cor. 15:35-44) . Whether belief in the empty tomb is required by Paul’s account of the resurrection of a spiritual body can be argued interminably. Was the earthly body of Christ somehow consumed in his resurrection like a grain of wheat that sprouts new life (I Cor. 15:36-37) , in which case the tomb would have been empty? Or did Jesus’ body simply go the way of all flesh, while his "spiritual" body was an utterly new creation? And what of the authority of Scripture? On what grounds can we claim to accept God’s promise of eternal life and then reject the Scripture’s claim that the sign of God’s promise is the empty tomb?
A growing number of theologians and pastors are indifferent to any such arguments and reject all belief in life beyond the grave. According to them, even Jesus went into oblivion. Christ’s resurrection is meaningful only if we make it so here and now in the only existence we will ever have. Such debates don’t seem terribly helpful to Christians as they in faith approach the tomb with Mary at Easter. Overwhelmed by these contradictory theories, we cry out with Mary, "They have taken away my lord, and I do not know where they have laid him." When the children of God ask for bread, has theology provided only a stone? Or worse, morbid debates in which we Christians end up sounding like embalmers, necrophiles or nihilists?
I know what I think "happened" on Easter -- at the tomb and beyond. But at the most important level, it doesn’t matter in the least what I or anyone thinks. For the reality outstrips our thoughts about it. The whole history of the modern and postmodern eras has burned into our consciousness -- on grounds as various as Enlightenment rationalism and post-Nietzschean deconstructionism -- the scientific, psychological and ontological impossibility of a resurrection. Even more grievous is that our lifestyles are so utterly worldly that our praxis seems to give the lie to any residue of belief in life beyond the grave. Yet despite all this, Christ keeps coming back to us.
Nearly 2,000 years separate us from Mary, yet we will go to church this Easter with many of the same expectations as she on the first Easter at the tomb. Everything our mutual worldliness -- Mary’s and our own -- has taught us leads us to believe we will find only death. And we will find the death, the living death, that our worldliness and sin and religiosity has wrought in us. Nevertheless, as Christ surprised Mary in the garden, he may also surprise us in the routine of the liturgy, the lections and hymns, perhaps even in the preaching.
For despite our doubts and denials, our complacency and hedonism, he is alive. Even we First World Christians, we secular lords of the earth, know he is alive. He survives even us. Is it any wonder he is discovered walking daily among his own, among the wretched in developing countries? Africa and South America already number the majority of the world’s Christians. Of course he would be walking among the poor. And how powerfully he is alive among the long-suffering Christians of Eastern Europe where communism sought in so crude (and thus in a far less corrupting manner) to take his life.
To rid ourselves of him once and for all, we must slay him. But slay him and he will rise. "God raised him up, having loosed the pangs of death, for it was not possible for him to be held by it" (Acts 2:24) . We keep crucifying him -- by our treatment of the poor, by our ceaseless intellectualizing, by our rank worldliness -- and he keeps rising to meet us; he will not be snatched away. Furthermore, despite our evasions and doubts, we know very well where to find his body. God forgive us, we his church are his body, in our faithfulness but also in our sin. His body is on his table, on our tongues, in our bellies and in our bowels. How foolish of us to deny his resurrection or slay him anew, for we but deny and slay ourselves.
"But God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we are now justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God ."
There was once a time when stern Christians knew or thought they knew the divine rationale lying behind the claims of this text. Both orthodox and liberal Protestants subscribed to theories of the atonement reflecting their respective visions of Christ’s work.
I wish not to review the shortcomings of the great atonement theories, but to point out that mainline Protestant preaching and teaching has largely abandoned any attempt to expound rationally the divine priorities behind the cross. If the theories still play any part, it is as symbols or metaphors for religious convictions we hold to be beyond rationalization. Maybe we need a new hymn: "Jesus Saves I Know Not How."
Science seeks a theoretical grasp of every aspect of nature. The ideologues of academia provide us with a whole string of reductionist theories which attempt to comprehend all human phenomena in a single stroke. Yet, ironically, many churches that desperately seek to be relevant to modernity still consider the crucifixion central to their faith, if also rather incomprehensible. There are many reasons for this, including the historical failure of any of the various theories to compel enduring universal consent, a general sense that we blaspheme against the sheer mystery of God by witnessing to the glory of God’s actions with a cocksure orthodoxy, and a philosophic climate characterized by a profound skepticism about all metaphysical or theological attempts to probe rationally the truth of things.
As we acknowledge the inevitable failure of any attempt to nail down God’s thinking, we must recognize that there is more to the matter of our widespread agnosticism regarding the atonement than theological modesty before the mystery of the divine. Indeed, our overweening pride in our culture gives the lie to any claims we might make to theological modesty. Theological vagueness on the atonement is less modesty than evasion. We often cover our unbelief in sweet theological nothings: And beyond our nagging doubts, we are troubled by the implications that we as modern believers might be forced to draw were we to face up rationally to our claim to have been justified by Christ’s blood.
Obviously, our understanding of sin and guilt is deeply conditioned by our cultural assumptions. Consider, for example, the implications of our belief in the political and moral superiority of liberal democracy. The assumptions undergirding our democracy are a somewhat paradoxical amalgamation, characterized by a free-flowing sense of moral relativism, a laissez-faire individualism and a fairly profound liberal sense of social responsibility: It is difficult enough to make sense out of these dogmas without considering our Christian faith in the saving power of Christ’s cross.
Are we not driven to think some unthinkable thoughts? For example, our liberal democratic sense of both individualism and collective responsibility impels us instinctively to defend the little guy against the big guy. In the face of historic injustices, can we forever repress a theological reading of what our social instincts tell us -- that we should stand in solidarity with the oppressed and be suspicious of the totalitarian potential of power? Is not God the ultimate source of all power? Since the Father has sacrificed the blood of the Son to achieve our justification, must we not ask whether the same suffering the Father imposed on the Son should be imposed on the Father himself if he is to be justified in humanity’s sight?
The feudal system entailed an awful sense of sovereignty. Thus, the medieval church had little problem with Anselm’s contention that God cannot forgive unless satisfaction be made for sin. I cannot ignore or deny this terrible potential, but my American sense of sovereignty also compels me to think in terms of mutual responsibility, indeed mutual culpability. How can I, white and middle class, acknowledge my corporate (not to say personal) guilt in institutionalized racism and then claim that God, the primal source of all societal relationships, remains utterly innocent of all that transpires?
Mainline Protestantism often assumes as gospel the liberal cliché that to understand all things is to forgive all things. Sin and guilt melt sway in a consideration of the environmental or hereditary factors that lay behind human wantonness. Many ordinary people sense in this thinking, in the case of criminal acts, a callously intellectualized disregard for the victim of crime. The victim’s cry of outrage is trivialized by such deterministic’ reductionism. Absolutized, it becomes obscene.
However, in so far as there is truth in the contention that our brutal, heartless acts are the result of conditioning, it simply underscores God’s primal responsibility in creating such a situation. The more our liberal, social-scientific thinking excuses human culpability, the more it points the finger at God, the primal source of our ambiguous existences.
To see that even victimizers are in some sense victims of the forces that drive them to victimize must shape our under-standing of Christ’s cross. If God is creator, then God reigns over the death of every sensate being that ever moved on earth -- to say nothing of his special responsibility for the bloody sins of those beings he has made in his image. Our sense of the inevitability of suffering compels us to affirm dimensions in the cross of Jesus that Paul might not have found. But this should not censor the witness that we as people of our time with fear and trembling must make. God has offered himself in blood not just for our sins but for the suffering he compels upon the world in its progress to eternal glory through the caldron of finite oblivion.
". . . This Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men"
Here is a text to try our modern Christian souls. It appears to be on a collision course with the best of our liberal values. God is up to his eyes in the blood of Jesus! God in league with "lawless men"! How can any Christian argue with much conviction against capital punishment if God effects his purpose in such an unwaveringly bloody way? On what basis can we work for world peace if God required such a violent resolution of the conflict between creatures and himself?
Imagine hearing this text for the first time, uninsulated from its chilling effect by a lifetime of such language in church. It was not without reason that 19th-century liberal theologians revolted en mass against the orthodox Anselmian doctrine of atonement that taught that the only ultimately compelling reason for Christ’s coming was that he might suffer his substitutionary, sacrificial, expiating, even propitiating death.
How, many 19th-century Christians wondered, could Christendom hope to break with the superstitious, medieval past and ground civilization on justice and understanding unless it denied God’s implication in Jesus’ cruel death? Could a humanity capable of producing modern civilization be so deeply depraved that it could be set right only through such a primitive sacrificial schema?
Yet the soteriological necessity of Christ’s cross remains pivotal to the whole New Testament. The New Testament preserves nothing of any earlier understanding. We can’t attribute any serious authority at all to the New Testament unless we are willing to come to terms with the centrality of this text.
It was inconceivable to Luke that Peter or any primitive Christian could have -- postresurrection and post-Pentecost -- viewed the cross as a mere accident of history. Writing two or three decades earlier, Paul witnesses to his belief that Jesus’ death was foreordained: "Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures" (I Cor. 15:3b) . Mark, the earliest gospel, is dominated by a sense of the necessity of Christ’s suffering. The Acts text merely sounds this New Testament theme with a particularly startling frankness.
With the breakdown of communism in Eastern Europe, we may well see a rekindling in the West of the liberal myth of progress -- to the extent that it ever died in the American heart. After all, it took two wars, the Holocaust, Stalinism, the H-bomb and Vietnam, among other events, to dampen our optimism sufficiently to allow for a theological reconsideration of primitive ideas such as sin. In neo-orthodoxy’s heyday there was even a certain enthusiasm for sin-talk and an openness to the centrality of the cross. However, not even the hoariest neoorthodox recalcitrant would wish to debunk the re-emergent optimism at the price of re-enacting the horrors of our century.
Surely there are other ways ‘to talk about sin and redemption without pointing to wars, genocide and poverty with a triumphant "I told you so." We can’t sell even ourselves on God’s participation in the cross of Christ by resorting to what Bonhoeffer called "clerical tricks" -- stressing the wretchedness of the human condition so that people will be driven to resort to the church’s theological nostrums.
This is not to minimize the reality of sin or tragedy, nor is it to buy into some new utopian delusion. However, the brokenness we experience (earlier generations called it original sin) ought not to be the cutting edge of the church’s proclamation. The good news is not that we are both mortal and flawed -- this announcement is neither good nor is it news; the good news is that in the incarnation of his son, Jesus Christ, God has taken our humanity up into himself and thereby has ordained and determined to participate in humanity (even becoming sin on our behalf [I Cor. 5:21]) , just as surely as he intends us to participate in his own being. It was God’s eternal plan to make us what he himself is.
This does not entail determinism. The foreknowledge in the "divine plan" lay in the moral inevitabilities of the human situation. Given the alienation that exists between God and ourselves and our self-deification, we could not but slay him whom the Father sent. Judas was not an automaton; he chose to betray Jesus, just as the hour, site and method of execution were of human choosing. However, the determination to put an end to our alienation by taking it up into his very being through the inescapable suffering of his son was of God’s own choosing.
Thus, God simply will not accept our self-assessment as sinners enthralled by mortality and death. Christ’s resurrection demonstrates finally the folly of our trying to ascribe ultimacy to sin, mortality and death. As the human parent looking through the eyes of love sees in the child a better possibility than could the stranger, so God sees us as better than we, as strangers to our own true being, can see ourselves. Unlike the human parent, God does not stand by helplessly as the child fails to realize its potential. Yet God does not enslave us in order to save us. God both has foreknowledge of his ultimate triumph and is intent on liberating his creatures. God’s triumph entails the true freedom of humanity.
If we hope to persuade people to live as lovers and not as brutes, we ought never to use human lawlessness and despair as a prolegomenon to the Christian faith. Rather we should talk, first and last, about God and God’s "definite plan and foreknowledge." For in the light of that plan we glimpse how the human race is better than it imagines, better than it can imagine.
"These people who have turned the world upside down have come here also".
"You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of God who called you out of darkness into marvelous light".
It is fascinating that the ministry of the apostle Paul would be seen as turning "the world upside down." Paul did not see himself or the church as an agent of change. He so vividly expected the imminent return of Jesus that the goal of social change was hardly relevant. Time was too short. Many of his social comments sound quite conservative to our ears. He was prepared to live with the institution of slavery (Philemon) , the secondary status of women (I Cor: 14:34-36) , and authoritarian magistrates, who did "not bear the sword in vain" (Rom. 13:4) .
Nonetheless, the charge that the otherworldly Paul was upending the world would not have been laughed out of court. Paul’s preaching was, in fact, undermining the status quo. Indeed, if it were true that the one holy God entered humbly into the world in the person of Jesus, then Paul was merely broadcasting the news of a fait accompli. The first-century worldview and the whole hierarchical world order had already been turned on its head. If God became human so that he might confer divinity upon the creature, then it follows that the last must be first, that the poor are blessed.
After it became clear to the church that God was in no hurry to bring in his kingdom, the sociopolitical indifference of a Paul gave way to a new form of living in the world. Yet even before this de-apocalypticization of the faith, the earliest Christians, though-they made no attempt to change society, inevitably challenged it by their very example of "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control" (Gal. 5:22-23) .
Such a vision of life has implications for questions of war and peace, infanticide and abortion, slavery and the rights of women, justice and privilege, orgyism and gladiatorial amusements. Even a persecuted Christianity had a humanizing impact on the culture at large. Ironically, when the church permitted itself to be coopted by Constantine, along with gaining an increase in worldly power and security it lost much of its capacity to cause upheaval.
Christianity’s cultural triumph has shaped much of atheism’s agenda in the modern era. It is a cliché that Western atheism is "Christian" in that it rejects the Christian God. Thus it ought not to be surprising that much Western atheism opposes God in the name of moral sensitivities that have been shaped by Christianity.
Another kind of atheism also hoists Christianity on the petard of its own success.. This second type of unbelief might acknowledge Christianity’s influence and might even condone its celebration of love, its ethics of mercy and its passion for justice. In this cultural sense the vast majority of Westerners have been more or less Christianized. But the very triumph of Christianity has in another sense made the church and its God superfluous. The church conceived as it is in I Peter as "a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation" would have to be regarded as a sacerdotal throwback, a repristinization of an archaic vision that Western civilization has consumed and digested -- drawing from it nourishment for altogether new purposes: Thus, as the command "fill the earth and subdue it" (Gen. 1:28) helped inspire Western civilization to create science and technology, so Jesus’ celebration of love has been culturally recombined with the materialism of the Bible to produce the vital hedonism of our civilization. The Christian church had its era for turning the world on its head; now the world is returning the favor.
Peter is clear that we are this "chosen race," pursuing the calling to "declare the wonderful deeds of God." This does not mean that the church can preach Christ in a historic vacuum. But it might help us to focus on the origin of the power to turn the world on its head.
On the one hand, the church is not the people of God because its leaders sound off on sociopolitical issues. Often the contradictory pronouncements of the churches simply reflect the pluralistic babble of society at large. On the other hand, sometimes there is a broad-based recognition of God’s will in the church. For example, many saw that in the nonviolent campaign of Martin Luther King, Jr., God had raised up a prophet. Conversely, the claim that the Vietnam war was God’s command was obscene to many. Even a working consensus vis-à-vis the concrete will of God is rarely achieved. What is the Christian position on multinational corporations, abortion, use of fetal tissue, the Democratic and Republican parties, rain-forest management, atomic energy or euthanasia? ‘There are times when God’s silence is almost as deafening as his word. We often discern God’s will only in pious generalities or after the fact and are reduced to aping the world’s own wisdom or mouthing Christian truisms.
Yet even this situation contains a wonderful possibility: we are privileged to speak of God’s deeds in Jesus Christ, confident that this truth can spark responses not only among believers but even among unbelievers. Christ’s love is more powerful than atheism or the often puny faith and insight of the church. It can work its own victory out of both. Let us never suppose that the power of the love of Christ to turn the world upside down depends upon our capacity to calculate the physics of the maneuver. God works through the word we have been called to proclaim, but God is free to flip the world over his shoulder in ways that confound our calculations.
Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?
Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword . . . those who do not take their cross and follow me are not worthy of me
I don’t think I’m alone in confessing that my instinctive answer to Paul’s rhetorical question is very different from his. Though I could wish to echo Paul’s "By no means!" Luther’s "Be a sinner and sin strongly, but even more strongly have faith and rejoice in Christ" is a cornerstone of my ethics.
I’m not a murderer, mugger, rapist or dope pusher: I strive to be a faithful and gentle spouse, a good role model to children. I try to pursue my career with integrity. I keep informed, vote, pay my taxes. I’m a reasonably exemplary citizen, as I’m sure are many of my fundamentalist, Catholic, Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic and Jewish neighbors. It isn’t any theological superiority that makes me a civil paragon; it’s more a function of my class and economic status. We ought not to despise such civic virtue. Marxist or Freudian accusations notwithstanding, religious folk are generally a societal boon.
Still, our good citizenship is quite beside the point when measured against Jesus’ reckless eschatological imperatives involving swords and crosses. Indeed, our profoundly felt obligations to our families, jobs, country and all that we have at stake temper our zeal for radical commitment and render us cooperative citizens even though our society exhibits so much de facto atheism. Our worldliness leaves us hoping that Jesus’ grace will in the end overwhelm his demands.
Most of us know in our souls that we have no intention of fulfilling Jesus’ incredible demands: sell all, resist not the evil man or woman, take no heed for the morrow, leave one’s family, bear the cross. Our premeditated disobedience makes our claims to being Christian somewhat curious. How a cynic might delight in our liturgies that come stocked with prayers of confession. We "confess" from the start that our hope lies in our whining for God’s forgiveness.
Appeals to cheap grace are not our only recourse. Ingenious theologians can make the eschatological otherworldly import of Jesus’ teaching vanish before our eyes. Thus, we can style ourselves obedient when in fact we are merely being guided by one or another set of worldly ethical agendas -- some noble, some base. Christians have convinced themselves that they were following Jesus by joining a host of irreconcilable movements from the New Deal to laissez-faire capitalism, from Nazism to Marxism, from paternalism to feminism. Jesus can be made the champion of every cause.
Medieval monasticism was one such effort to adapt Jesus’ apocalyptic agenda to the world. Christians venerating martyrdom found in monasticism a way to martyr their own flesh. Ironically, the walls of monasteries and convents made such self-mortification relatively secure in the unstable feudal world; indeed, many mortified their flesh amid works of aesthetic splendor. Luther saw monasticism as a human substitution for God’s righteous order. However, in calling Christians out of monasteries into the world he opened up a very different coopting of Jesus’ imperatives: becoming indistinguishable from the world. Luther, the former monk who exposed the accommodations and pride behind asceticism, suits our cultural hedonism just fine.
We are left dumbfounded by Jesus’ statement "Blessed are the poor." Poverty seems to us a curse: "For you always have the poor with you." Mainline Christian social ethics are shaped by the ideal of a world without poverty. We would regard it as obscene if preachers taught the poor to be content in their poverty. We preach social justice and not martyrdom, economic equity and not poverty. Jesus’ words are way out of step with the best thinking of the church.
In his story of the Grand Inquisitor, Dostoevsky charged that if Jesus returned to preach anew, his words would so unsettle the church, which had compromised Jesus’ teachings to make them humanly bearable, that we would have to kill him. That there are exceptions to Dostoevsky’s point, like a Mother Teresa, simply underscores the fact that the rest of us have determined to go our own way.
Jesus’ apocalyptic radicalism is irrelevant to the worldly requirement of any age. In Christ and Culture H. Richard Niebuhr quotes Joseph Klauser’s powerful charge: "‘Jesus ignored everything concerned with material civilization: in this sense he does not belong to civilization.’ Therefore, his people rejected him; and ‘two thousand years of non-Jewish Christianity have proven that the Jewish people did not err."’
Were Jesus not the living word of God and the source of my salvation, I too would reject him as an irrelevant crank. As it is I have neither the resolve to follow him nor the consistency to turn from him. I am stuck with him and he with me. And I’m not alone in this. The neo-orthodox cliché that Christianity is an impossible possibility is not all wrong. We can only approximate Jesus’ demands in the crudest ways, which can at times seem like vulgar parodies. This predicament is entailed in God’s entering the world. The world cannot contain God as God contains the world. God’s initiatives are always distorted when we try to act upon them, not just because we are sinners but because we are not God. Our ethics symbolizes an order of righteous love that we can barely glimpse and rarely bring to pass.
. . . I found also an altar with this inscription, "To an unknown god." What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you
For Christ also died . . . that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit; in which he went and preached to the spirits in prison . . .
. . . even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees nor knows that Spirit; you know that Spirit, for that Spirit dwells with you and will be in you
Paul correlating the Christian gospel with pagan agnosticism -- our apologetic passage from Acts is something of a rarity. In general the Bible takes an exclusivistic and revelational tack. The John text speaks for much biblical thinking in its claim that the "Spirit of truth" is not some generally available power that just anyone can plug into or that pagans seek after without knowing. The Spirit "whom the world cannot receive" is known to those with whom and in whom the Spirit chooses to dwell.
We have here more than a faint aroma of predestinarianism. Why indeed doesn’t everyone embrace the truth of Christ, which, at least in our best moments, seems obvious to us? Is it that they lack the eyes to see or the ears to hear? Have we Protestants drifted so far from the Reformation that Luther’s theology of revelation no longer strikes a responsive chord?
I believe that I cannot of my own understanding and strength believe in or come to Jesus Christ my Lord, but that the Holy Ghost has called me by the Gospel and illuminated me with His gifts, and sanctified and preserved me in the true faith . .
The revelational rap against apologetic theology is that it either engages in a sellout to the "world" (the self-disclosure of God being so utterly relativized by human wisdom that Christians are unable to tell atheists anything that they don’t already know), or it is an exercise in various intellectual imperialisms, such as: "We can prove the existence of God" or "If human culture really understood itself, it would find that it is striving toward that which we already have." Yet if Luther was right and humanity cannot storm heaven with its understanding and strength, then doesn’t the mystery of glorious light -- "the Holy Ghost has called me by the Gospel and illuminated me with His gifts" -- take us into a predestinarian darkness?
As if the seeming predestinarian "logic" of revelational theology (so fundamentally alien to the apologetic mindset) were not problem enough, there is the harsh apocalypticism into which Jesus is reported to have so deeply dipped his hands. In the synoptics the terrible sayings of Christ the Tiger far outnumber the words of mercy from the sweet and gentle Jesus. In many such sayings life before God is pictured as a brutal prospect: "It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell . . ." (Mark 9:43b) .
The Gospels portray’ Jesus as torn between his fierce outrage over human sin and his profound sympathy for the frailties of the ostracized in his society. Jesus rejected the heavy burdens that ritualistic legalism laid upon the poor, but in its place he demanded an ethic of drastic self-sacrifice that leaves most of us shattered. Christendom has seen various attempts to lead Christianity back to the "religion of Jesus," eschewing the "high" christological impulses of the New Testament. The "religion of Jesus" strikes me as often terrifying.
The son of God didn’t come into the world preaching the true religion. Nor was he a teacher of a self-evident, benign and livable ethic. Indeed, he didn’t come into the world bearing all the answers. He came to bear the pathos and the burden of all the questions. The answers that the "historical Jesus" gave to the questions of existence were crucified with him. They came under the various judgments of both God and humanity. "Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered" (Heb. 5:8) . It was by his humiliating suffering that the Jesus, the imperious apocalyptic ruler, was "made perfect" (Heb. 5:9) .
Thus the traditions of both Paul and Peter were driven to say things about the universal implications of Christ’s death that the historical Jesus as a first-century Palestinian Jew would not and could not have imagined. They declared that even the pagan reaching blindly toward an unknown God is witnessing to a reality greater than he or she realizes. In these traditions there exists no unbridgeable chasm between the saved and the damned. In its place is the recognition that all religious longing is grounded in an impulse that is validated and redeemed by Christ’s cross. In Paul’s own writings this universalism becomes explicit if the once rabidly exclusivistic Paul was moved by the work of Christ to anticipate elements of rationalistic liberalism in his apologetics and universalism, Peter was driven to "remythologize" apocalyptic Judaism. Thus for Peter, Christ has preached Good News even in hell. Not even hell can resist the good will of God.
How else but universally could the unreserved, suffering commitment of God in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ be understood? Having suffered his own and human wrath in Christ’s suffering and triumphed over both wrath and suffering in Christ’s resurrection, it becomes difficult to grasp just why God would want to remain eternally alienated from a reprobate humanity -- especially since God has been able to use such reprobates as Paul, the religious fanatic, and Peter, who denied Christ, and ourselves as the instruments of his peace.
What an awful responsibility such universalism places on Christians. How easily it degenerates into cheap grace. Only by living lives of self-giving love can our words about the glorious triumph of God’s love have any credibility. Otherwise our words seem for all the world like fantasy wish fulfillment. Bonhoeffer was right in insisting that it is not abstract argument but concrete example that gives power to the church’s word. Example is always the most credible apologetic.
