Looked at a couple theological issues triggered by verses in Romans 1 and 2 yesterday in class.
1. "For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse" (1:20).
This verse gets at the question of natural revelation. To what extent is God discoverable through reason and experience? It also raises the question of those who have never heard of Christ. Is there enough revelation in nature for them to know God?
I never know how to teach the dance with Scripture at points like these. It's easy to do the science of "what was Paul thinking." But surely the Bible as Scripture is more than that. There is a Spirit dance that has been going on for 2000 years.
2. As for Paul, he was likely himself drawing on the book of Wisdom here. Here are some pertinent excerpts from Wisdom 12-14:
"You give repentance for sins” (12:19)…
All people who were ignorant of God were foolish by nature; and they were unable from the good things that are seen to know the one who exists… but they supposed that either fire or wind or swift air… were the gods that rule the world (13:1-2)…
Not even they are to be excused… how did they fail to find sooner the Lord of these things (13:8-9)… The idea of making idols was the beginning of fornication (14:12)… sexual perversion (14:26)."
My sense of what it must surely mean for God to be love and to want everyone to be saved suggests to me that prevenient grace must surely extend to everyone. There is layer upon layer of later Christian theology here, working out the details. Everyone who is saved is saved through Christ, but we vary in the light we have. But this is all gap-filling.
3. Related is the question of what Romans 2:4 means when it says that "the goodness of God leads you to repentance." Several translations add something like "is meant to" or "is supposed to" lead you to repentance. In the case of the person Paul is talking about, it probably doesn't.
You can build a theology of prevenient grace here. The goal is for Paul not to be a Pelagian, where we think we have the free will to come to God in our own power. Wesley dotted this eye with the idea that it is the power of God that underlies our ability to repent.
That's fine theology and I sign up for it. Paul of course probably wasn't thinking all that. Those are later debates. My hunch is that he was more saying that the possibility of repentance is something that comes from the goodness of God. It's not something we deserve or that a Jew didn't need.
Adventures in Romans...
Showing posts with label prevenient grace. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prevenient grace. Show all posts
Saturday, October 10, 2015
Sunday, May 10, 2015
SP4. The Spirit sanctifies the believer.
This is now the fourth and final post in a unit on the Holy Spirit in my ongoing series, theology in bullet points. The first unit had to do with God and Creation, and the second was on Christology and Atonement.
_______________________________
The Spirit sanctifies the believer.
1. In terms of priority, the body of Christ is primary, and the individual believer is secondary. Yet every individual is valued equally, created in the image of God, male and female, people of every tribe and nation, people of every status. All are loved whether sinner or saint.
God is love, so he loves every individual. But there are many individuals in the Church. So it seems obvious that there is more love dispensed to the Church as a whole than to any one individual in the Church. The health of the whole Church takes priority over the liberty of the individual Christian (e.g., Rom. 14; 1 Cor. 10).
Accordingly, the way in which the Spirit engages the individual is a microcosm of the way he engages the Church as a whole. The Spirit sanctifies the Church and makes it God's own. So the Spirit sanctifies the individual believer. The Spirit purifies the Church and makes it righteous, and the Spirit purifies the believer and makes us righteous. The Spirit empowers the Church for mission and service. The Spirit empowers the individual for mission and service. The Spirit leads the Church into truth. The Spirit leads individuals into truth.
2. If Christ is the basis of atonement, all the grace relating to salvation is dispensed through the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit that dispenses prevenient grace, the grace that comes to us before we are able to go looking for God. It is the grace that enables us to move toward God. It is the grace that empowers us to be able to repent and exercise faith.
It is the Holy Spirit that dispenses the grace that justifies us and acquits us of all our sin. The Holy Spirit is God's "seal" of ownership (2 Cor. 1:22), such that if someone does not have the Spirit, that person does not truly belong to Christ (Rom. 8:9). The Holy Spirit is an "earnest" of our eternal inheritance (2 Cor. 5:5; Eph. 1:13-14), which is both a guarantee of that coming promise and a down payment of what is to come, a "foretaste of glory divine."
The Holy Spirit is thus the central factor in the incorporation of a person into the body of Christ. You can be baptized and not have passed from death to life (Acts 8:16). You can have passed from death to life and not been baptized (Acts 10:44-48). You can have undergone significant change and movement toward a godly and righteous life. You can have prayed the sinner's prayer and agreed to all the creeds of Christendom with your head.
But unless a person has the Holy Spirit, he or she is not yet in Christ. [1] It is the Holy Spirit that gives witness to our spirits that we are children of God (Rom. 8:16). The Holy Spirit thus brings us the assurance that we are children of God. It is the act of the Holy Spirit whereby we become "in Christ" and when we speak of Christ in us, we are speaking of the Spirit of Christ, Christ's presence in us somehow mysteriously mediated by the Holy Spirit.
3. It is somewhat popular at the moment to speak of conversion as a long gradual process rather than an instantaneous one. [2] There is of course a good deal of truth in this claim. It usually does take a good deal of time for a person to change.
It's also a slightly different question from whether you will escape the judgment. Most believe that unbaptized children will escape the final judgment, and yet they have neither been baptized nor have they received the Holy Spirit. If so, then one can technically be "saved" in that sense without baptism, faith, or having even received the most crucial element of all--the Holy Spirit.
But the Holy Spirit comes in an instant, and in that sense, you become part of the people of God in a moment. There may be a long process leading up to that point, and there is almost always a long process thereafter. But this is a different issue than being baptized into Christ by receiving the Holy Spirit, which must thereby always happen definitively in a moment.
The disciples cannot be used as an example of gradual incorporation into the body of Christ, even if they changed gradually. The Holy Spirit simply was not given in the manner of the new covenant until the Day of Pentecost. In that sense, none of the disciples were "in Christ" until the Day of Pentecost, when they were baptized into Christ in an instant. [3]
4. How does one know that this baptism, this receiving of the Holy Spirit has taken place? There can and often have been noticeable signs. The book of Acts testifies to the sudden ability to speak in other languages, a sudden boldness to proclaim Christ's resurrection, the sudden ability to perform miracles and healing. In the American revivals of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, people often felt an overflow of emotions and might start shouting or even running the aisles of a church.
But did everyone in the early church experience these sorts of dramatic manifestations or emotions? Not likely. We can imagine that the most typical manifestation of the Holy Spirit is a sense of peace and assurance, a sense that, in fact, you are received by God and at peace with him.
No doubt there will be some who do not feel different. Some, perhaps because of their past, may not feel anything at all. But are you truly committing to God with your whole will to the extent you know how? Are you making a choice of faith for God? Are you willing to make that faith public, including a public confession of faith in baptism?
Then you should trust that your sins are forgiven and that the Holy Spirit has taken control over your life. Sometimes God uses others to give us an assurance in such cases. Seek out someone you trust. God often empowers others in the body of Christ, especially those he has called to minister, to proclaim to us that our sins are indeed forgiven (cf. John 20:23).
3. The Holy Spirit thus sanctifies us and sets us apart as belonging to God. He purifies us of our guilt of sins past and he overcomes the power of Sin present and future. The Holy Spirit is behind initial sanctification, the act of cleansing us of our past sins and setting us apart as God's children. The Holy Spirit is behind progressive sanctification, the increase of righteousness and godliness in our lives.
When we get to the point of complete surrender of all our lives in every way we know how, the Holy Spirit can sanctify us entirely, making it easy to do the good we want to do. But we will always have room for growth until the day when we are glorified, when our mortal, corruptible bodies, our flesh subject to Sin and temptation, is transformed into resurrected bodies that are made like Christ's glorious resurrection body.
The Holy Spirit thus empowers us for obedience. The Holy Spirit imparts righteousness and godliness to the believer so that we are not only legally in right standing before God, but the Spirit actually makes us good. We are not, as Luther taught, doomed always to be both sinner and saint, but the Spirit empowers us not only to do the good but even to want the good. [4]
3. The Holy Spirit not only empowers us for purity. He also empowers us for ministry. We have already mentioned the manifestations of the Holy Spirit in Acts. The Church is praying in an upper room in Jerusalem when the Holy Spirit comes on the Day of Pentecost. The Church is born. The Spirit brings everyone there into Christ.
Immediately we see a change. They are witnessing with boldness to the crowds, even in languages they have never learned. The next day, Peter and John heal a lame man. Later in Acts they and others will cast out demons.
The mission of the Church is the mission of God. The mission of God is the redemption of everything in the creation. The Spirit empowers the Church--both on an individual and corporate level.
The Holy Spirit sanctifies the believer. He purifies us. He incorporates us each individually into the body of Christ. He empowers us.
Next Sunday: E1. The Church is the body of Christ.
[1] We are not talking about tongues here, for not all who receive the Holy Spirit in Acts speak in tongues and the rest of the New Testament is practically silent on the topic, except for a couple chapters in 1 Corinthians.
[2] E.g., Richard Peace, Conversion in the New Testament: Paul and the Twelve (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999).
[3] In this sense, Peace's book is inadvertently trying to address two quite different questions at once, one a question of change and the other a question of incorporation. Given this blurring of questions, it is no surprise that his book barely mentions the most important element in conversion of all--the Holy Spirit.
[4] Simul iustus et peccator, semper repentans -- "At the same time, righteous and a sinner, as long as we are always repenting"
_______________________________
The Spirit sanctifies the believer.
1. In terms of priority, the body of Christ is primary, and the individual believer is secondary. Yet every individual is valued equally, created in the image of God, male and female, people of every tribe and nation, people of every status. All are loved whether sinner or saint.
God is love, so he loves every individual. But there are many individuals in the Church. So it seems obvious that there is more love dispensed to the Church as a whole than to any one individual in the Church. The health of the whole Church takes priority over the liberty of the individual Christian (e.g., Rom. 14; 1 Cor. 10).
Accordingly, the way in which the Spirit engages the individual is a microcosm of the way he engages the Church as a whole. The Spirit sanctifies the Church and makes it God's own. So the Spirit sanctifies the individual believer. The Spirit purifies the Church and makes it righteous, and the Spirit purifies the believer and makes us righteous. The Spirit empowers the Church for mission and service. The Spirit empowers the individual for mission and service. The Spirit leads the Church into truth. The Spirit leads individuals into truth.
2. If Christ is the basis of atonement, all the grace relating to salvation is dispensed through the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit that dispenses prevenient grace, the grace that comes to us before we are able to go looking for God. It is the grace that enables us to move toward God. It is the grace that empowers us to be able to repent and exercise faith.
It is the Holy Spirit that dispenses the grace that justifies us and acquits us of all our sin. The Holy Spirit is God's "seal" of ownership (2 Cor. 1:22), such that if someone does not have the Spirit, that person does not truly belong to Christ (Rom. 8:9). The Holy Spirit is an "earnest" of our eternal inheritance (2 Cor. 5:5; Eph. 1:13-14), which is both a guarantee of that coming promise and a down payment of what is to come, a "foretaste of glory divine."
The Holy Spirit is thus the central factor in the incorporation of a person into the body of Christ. You can be baptized and not have passed from death to life (Acts 8:16). You can have passed from death to life and not been baptized (Acts 10:44-48). You can have undergone significant change and movement toward a godly and righteous life. You can have prayed the sinner's prayer and agreed to all the creeds of Christendom with your head.
But unless a person has the Holy Spirit, he or she is not yet in Christ. [1] It is the Holy Spirit that gives witness to our spirits that we are children of God (Rom. 8:16). The Holy Spirit thus brings us the assurance that we are children of God. It is the act of the Holy Spirit whereby we become "in Christ" and when we speak of Christ in us, we are speaking of the Spirit of Christ, Christ's presence in us somehow mysteriously mediated by the Holy Spirit.
3. It is somewhat popular at the moment to speak of conversion as a long gradual process rather than an instantaneous one. [2] There is of course a good deal of truth in this claim. It usually does take a good deal of time for a person to change.
It's also a slightly different question from whether you will escape the judgment. Most believe that unbaptized children will escape the final judgment, and yet they have neither been baptized nor have they received the Holy Spirit. If so, then one can technically be "saved" in that sense without baptism, faith, or having even received the most crucial element of all--the Holy Spirit.
But the Holy Spirit comes in an instant, and in that sense, you become part of the people of God in a moment. There may be a long process leading up to that point, and there is almost always a long process thereafter. But this is a different issue than being baptized into Christ by receiving the Holy Spirit, which must thereby always happen definitively in a moment.
The disciples cannot be used as an example of gradual incorporation into the body of Christ, even if they changed gradually. The Holy Spirit simply was not given in the manner of the new covenant until the Day of Pentecost. In that sense, none of the disciples were "in Christ" until the Day of Pentecost, when they were baptized into Christ in an instant. [3]
4. How does one know that this baptism, this receiving of the Holy Spirit has taken place? There can and often have been noticeable signs. The book of Acts testifies to the sudden ability to speak in other languages, a sudden boldness to proclaim Christ's resurrection, the sudden ability to perform miracles and healing. In the American revivals of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, people often felt an overflow of emotions and might start shouting or even running the aisles of a church.
But did everyone in the early church experience these sorts of dramatic manifestations or emotions? Not likely. We can imagine that the most typical manifestation of the Holy Spirit is a sense of peace and assurance, a sense that, in fact, you are received by God and at peace with him.
No doubt there will be some who do not feel different. Some, perhaps because of their past, may not feel anything at all. But are you truly committing to God with your whole will to the extent you know how? Are you making a choice of faith for God? Are you willing to make that faith public, including a public confession of faith in baptism?
Then you should trust that your sins are forgiven and that the Holy Spirit has taken control over your life. Sometimes God uses others to give us an assurance in such cases. Seek out someone you trust. God often empowers others in the body of Christ, especially those he has called to minister, to proclaim to us that our sins are indeed forgiven (cf. John 20:23).
3. The Holy Spirit thus sanctifies us and sets us apart as belonging to God. He purifies us of our guilt of sins past and he overcomes the power of Sin present and future. The Holy Spirit is behind initial sanctification, the act of cleansing us of our past sins and setting us apart as God's children. The Holy Spirit is behind progressive sanctification, the increase of righteousness and godliness in our lives.
When we get to the point of complete surrender of all our lives in every way we know how, the Holy Spirit can sanctify us entirely, making it easy to do the good we want to do. But we will always have room for growth until the day when we are glorified, when our mortal, corruptible bodies, our flesh subject to Sin and temptation, is transformed into resurrected bodies that are made like Christ's glorious resurrection body.
The Holy Spirit thus empowers us for obedience. The Holy Spirit imparts righteousness and godliness to the believer so that we are not only legally in right standing before God, but the Spirit actually makes us good. We are not, as Luther taught, doomed always to be both sinner and saint, but the Spirit empowers us not only to do the good but even to want the good. [4]
3. The Holy Spirit not only empowers us for purity. He also empowers us for ministry. We have already mentioned the manifestations of the Holy Spirit in Acts. The Church is praying in an upper room in Jerusalem when the Holy Spirit comes on the Day of Pentecost. The Church is born. The Spirit brings everyone there into Christ.
Immediately we see a change. They are witnessing with boldness to the crowds, even in languages they have never learned. The next day, Peter and John heal a lame man. Later in Acts they and others will cast out demons.
The mission of the Church is the mission of God. The mission of God is the redemption of everything in the creation. The Spirit empowers the Church--both on an individual and corporate level.
The Holy Spirit sanctifies the believer. He purifies us. He incorporates us each individually into the body of Christ. He empowers us.
Next Sunday: E1. The Church is the body of Christ.
[1] We are not talking about tongues here, for not all who receive the Holy Spirit in Acts speak in tongues and the rest of the New Testament is practically silent on the topic, except for a couple chapters in 1 Corinthians.
[2] E.g., Richard Peace, Conversion in the New Testament: Paul and the Twelve (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999).
[3] In this sense, Peace's book is inadvertently trying to address two quite different questions at once, one a question of change and the other a question of incorporation. Given this blurring of questions, it is no surprise that his book barely mentions the most important element in conversion of all--the Holy Spirit.
[4] Simul iustus et peccator, semper repentans -- "At the same time, righteous and a sinner, as long as we are always repenting"
Sunday, January 11, 2015
S3. God was reaching out to us far before we knew it.
This is the third post in a unit on salvation in my ongoing series, theology in bullet points. The first section had to do with God and Creation, and I have also finished units on Christology and Atonement.
________________________
God was reaching out to us far before we knew it.
1. Grace is God's "unmerited favor." That is to say, it refers to the fact that God gives us gifts and blessings that we have not earned and do not deserve.
There are some common misconceptions about such grace in the New Testament. For example, it is often suggested that grace comes with "no strings attached," that grace is unconditional. This idea, although frequently repeated, neither is what the New Testament says nor what we would expect given the background of this language in the Greco-Roman world.
First of all, to say that grace is, by definition, undeserved, unearned, does not imply that it is unsolicited or that the patrons who dispensed it had no expectations in return. Grace language was patron-client language. In the Mediterranean world, patrons were individuals who gave gifts to others. As gifts, they were not earned or paid for and, true, there were no contractual obligations involved. The arrangement was informal.
But a person could ask for grace (charis), and grace usually came with some informal expectations. For example, if a person was given a gift (charisma) from a patron and then went on to shame or disgrace the patron, it was not at all likely that the gifts would continue. Grace often came with certain informal expectations of the recipient.
So the New Testament concept of grace did not in any way suggest that a person might not ask for it. The idea that we must put our faith in God and Christ order to receive God's grace in no way contradicted the meaning of the word grace, for the key is that the gift be disproportional to any human action, not that it be completely unrelated to human action.
2. John Calvin had a sense that God had bestowed on all humanity something he called "common grace." In other words, all humans share in common good gifts from God that we have not earned and that we receive whether we do good or evil. The model for common grace is Matthew 5:45, where God causes the sun to rise on both the righteous and the unrighteous. Similarly, he gives rain to farmers whether their hearts are turned toward or away from him.
3. John Wesley further suggested that God's grace reaches out to us in hope of our salvation long before we know it. Indeed, he has been reaching out to us long before we were even born. He called this sort of grace, "preventing grace," but most in the Wesleyan tradition now refer to it as prevenient grace, God's grace that comes before we are even aware of it.
This grace goes back to God's plans to save the world through Jesus Christ. [1] In that sense, God's overall plan, of which each of us is a potential beneficiary, was in action millennia before we even existed. It was existent in God's walk with his people Israel before Christ came to earth. It was most evident in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus himself. It has been playing out in the church these last two thousand years.
In our individual lives, God's prevenient grace takes hold of our lives before we are conscious of our need for God. If we are born in a church, we are hopefully surrounded by God's grace in people who love us and pray for us. We are under the ministry of God's servants. We hopefully fellowship with God's people In some churches, we experience baptism as a child in a way that both is God grabbing hold on us from the very beginning and a community of faith binding itself to pray and nurture us in faith.
All this can happen long before we have any sense of our need for God. It is part of God "wooing" us to him. He draws us toward faith and toward himself.
4. Yet even for those outside the direct influence of the church, God is leading each person toward him. Wesley himself believed in total depravity as Calvin did, meaning that humanity is not empowered to reach up to God. Our default state is one of moral powerlessness.
However, while Calvin believed God either "turned on" our coming to him or "left the switch off," Wesley taught that God's prevenient grace brought everyone up to a point where we could either continue to move toward him or might ignore his invitation. Philosophically, there is a great difference between these positions. Both indicate that we come to God on the basis of his grace and, indeed, that no one would come to God without God's grace.
The contrast is that, for Wesley, God has made it possible for everyone to come to him and thus puts the ultimate responsibility for our possible condemnation on us as individuals. For Calvin, God effectively decides for us whether we will choose him or not. For Wesley, God makes it possible for us to choose him, so that choosing him is still a matter of God's power but we are each responsible for the choice we make. No one is condemned without an opportunity to have been saved.
For Calvin, God is ultimately responsible for our condemnation. For Wesley, we are. Yet for both, God's grace is the basis of our salvation. [2]
5. Wesley himself did not draw the logical conclusion of his own theology. If God truly gives light to everyone in the world, if God's prevenient grace truly makes it possible that everyone can, in theory, be saved, then God must shine this light even on those who have never heard of Jesus or have heard of Jesus in a hostile or vastly erroneous way.
True, there are stories of individuals having visions and dreams of Jesus. Then when they come into contact with Christians, they immediately recognize in Christ the person of their vision.
Yet what are we to make of the Old Testament saints, who did not yet know of Jesus? What do we make of the Ninevites, whose repentance God accepted even though they had no knowledge of Christ? What do we make of Job, who by all reckonings was not even an Israelite but someone who worshiped God as best he knew how?
Indeed, Paul himself uses the uncircumcised Abraham as a model of justification by faith, but the faith of Abraham is not a faith directed toward Jesus but toward God the Father (Rom. 4:17). God has chosen to reconcile the world through Christ, but he did not justify the Old Testament saints on the basis of their knowledge of Christ but on the basis of their faith in God. "Whoever would approach him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him" (Heb. 11:6). Note that not a single instance of faith in Hebrews 11 is directed specifically toward Jesus.
The point here is not in any way to diminish the centrality of Christ in atonement. It is to say that the heart is the location of faith rather than the understanding. The Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner once suggested that there may be "anonymous Christians" who have responded to God in faith on the basis of Christ who do not yet, with their heads, know the name of the one in whom they have believed. [4]
This position is not without its difficulties, but it is the logical outworking of Wesley's theology, which both affirmed God's prevenient grace and the heart as the center of human response to God. It's greatest objection is the urgency of spreading the gospel, and the fact that faith comes by hearing (Rom. 10:17).
Theology is of course worked out over the whole of Scripture, rather than by a war of individual verses. What Wesleyan theology wishes to affirm is what Scripture itself says, that God wants everyone to be saved, which implies that God reaches out to everyone.
But here is an important point. To say that God reaches out to everyone does not mean that everyone has an equal exposure to God's voice. It is only to say that everyone has a chance, enough to be without excuse. Does not Paul himself imply in Romans 1:20 that God's power and glory are self-evident to all? Does not Acts 17:26-28 imply that God has set out the world in a way that can lead non-Jews to him?
At the same time, to say that everyone has a minimal chance does not suggest that evangelism, traditionally conceived, does not greatly increase the opportunity for salvation. It does not deny that prayer can create a greater likelihood that a person will finally reach out for God, although God always in every case looks for the human response. He does not force anyone to choose him.
6. We cannot presume that God will always empower our will to move toward him. If we can only come to God because his prevenient grace is drawing us to him, then we will not be able to come to him if he ever withdraws it. Wesleyans in that sense do not believe in free will in the pure sense. Since the Pelagian controversies of the 400s, Christians have not believed that we have the power in ourselves to come to God. Rather, God empowers us to move toward him.
In that sense, a person who rejects the grace of God today cannot assume that he or she will even want God's grace later on. It is his grace that draws us to repentance. In one of the scariest verses in the New Testament, Hebrews suggests that Esau knew that he needed to repent, but at that point could not find a place of repentance (Heb. 12:17).
So anyone who truly repents and seeks God will find him. But a person who says, "I will repent on my death bed," probably will not find true repentance in their heart on that day. They may know in their head that they need to repent but not find the will to repent in their heart, which is a gift of God's prevenient grace.
In all these things we must confess that we know very little of how God works behind the scenes. We know that he wants everyone to be saved, which means he must surely give everyone a chance. His grace has been reaching out for us before the world began and it continues in or births and lives, long before we realize it. It continues in our daily lives, even after we have come to faith. We cannot possibly know how often he intervenes in the events of our lives, interrupting the normal flow of cause and effect. It is a striking demonstration of his love for us.
Next Sunday: S4. God revealed himself to Israel in preparation for Christ.
[1] Theologians debate whether Jesus would have become human if Adam had not sinned. Those who believe Jesus planned to become human regardless of whether Adam sinned are called "supralapsarians." Those who think he only planned to come if humanity sinned are called 'infralapsarians." In general, Wesleyans would tend to be supralapsarians. For hyper-Calvinists, of course, there is no meaningful distinction between the two, since by their reckoning, God planned for Adam to sin.
[2] The Calvinist idea that God entirely manipulates our salvation is called "monergism." For them, a single work is in play, that of God. Wesleyan-Arminians and historic Christianity have more predominantly affirmed a "synergism" between God's action and human response. The work is vastly disproportionate, with God's work the overwhelmingly predominant element. Yet God empowers the human will to play a role as well. Otherwise, God is straightforwardly responsible for evil.
[3] E.g., Rahner, Theological Investigations IV (New York: Crossroads, 1982 [1966]), 180-187. This idea helped the Roman Catholics at Vatican 2 explain how non-Roman Catholics could be saved and yet not be part of what they believe is the true church. It helped provide a basis for non-Catholics being "separated brothers."
________________________
God was reaching out to us far before we knew it.
1. Grace is God's "unmerited favor." That is to say, it refers to the fact that God gives us gifts and blessings that we have not earned and do not deserve.
There are some common misconceptions about such grace in the New Testament. For example, it is often suggested that grace comes with "no strings attached," that grace is unconditional. This idea, although frequently repeated, neither is what the New Testament says nor what we would expect given the background of this language in the Greco-Roman world.
First of all, to say that grace is, by definition, undeserved, unearned, does not imply that it is unsolicited or that the patrons who dispensed it had no expectations in return. Grace language was patron-client language. In the Mediterranean world, patrons were individuals who gave gifts to others. As gifts, they were not earned or paid for and, true, there were no contractual obligations involved. The arrangement was informal.
But a person could ask for grace (charis), and grace usually came with some informal expectations. For example, if a person was given a gift (charisma) from a patron and then went on to shame or disgrace the patron, it was not at all likely that the gifts would continue. Grace often came with certain informal expectations of the recipient.
So the New Testament concept of grace did not in any way suggest that a person might not ask for it. The idea that we must put our faith in God and Christ order to receive God's grace in no way contradicted the meaning of the word grace, for the key is that the gift be disproportional to any human action, not that it be completely unrelated to human action.
2. John Calvin had a sense that God had bestowed on all humanity something he called "common grace." In other words, all humans share in common good gifts from God that we have not earned and that we receive whether we do good or evil. The model for common grace is Matthew 5:45, where God causes the sun to rise on both the righteous and the unrighteous. Similarly, he gives rain to farmers whether their hearts are turned toward or away from him.
3. John Wesley further suggested that God's grace reaches out to us in hope of our salvation long before we know it. Indeed, he has been reaching out to us long before we were even born. He called this sort of grace, "preventing grace," but most in the Wesleyan tradition now refer to it as prevenient grace, God's grace that comes before we are even aware of it.
This grace goes back to God's plans to save the world through Jesus Christ. [1] In that sense, God's overall plan, of which each of us is a potential beneficiary, was in action millennia before we even existed. It was existent in God's walk with his people Israel before Christ came to earth. It was most evident in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus himself. It has been playing out in the church these last two thousand years.
In our individual lives, God's prevenient grace takes hold of our lives before we are conscious of our need for God. If we are born in a church, we are hopefully surrounded by God's grace in people who love us and pray for us. We are under the ministry of God's servants. We hopefully fellowship with God's people In some churches, we experience baptism as a child in a way that both is God grabbing hold on us from the very beginning and a community of faith binding itself to pray and nurture us in faith.
All this can happen long before we have any sense of our need for God. It is part of God "wooing" us to him. He draws us toward faith and toward himself.
4. Yet even for those outside the direct influence of the church, God is leading each person toward him. Wesley himself believed in total depravity as Calvin did, meaning that humanity is not empowered to reach up to God. Our default state is one of moral powerlessness.
However, while Calvin believed God either "turned on" our coming to him or "left the switch off," Wesley taught that God's prevenient grace brought everyone up to a point where we could either continue to move toward him or might ignore his invitation. Philosophically, there is a great difference between these positions. Both indicate that we come to God on the basis of his grace and, indeed, that no one would come to God without God's grace.
The contrast is that, for Wesley, God has made it possible for everyone to come to him and thus puts the ultimate responsibility for our possible condemnation on us as individuals. For Calvin, God effectively decides for us whether we will choose him or not. For Wesley, God makes it possible for us to choose him, so that choosing him is still a matter of God's power but we are each responsible for the choice we make. No one is condemned without an opportunity to have been saved.
For Calvin, God is ultimately responsible for our condemnation. For Wesley, we are. Yet for both, God's grace is the basis of our salvation. [2]
5. Wesley himself did not draw the logical conclusion of his own theology. If God truly gives light to everyone in the world, if God's prevenient grace truly makes it possible that everyone can, in theory, be saved, then God must shine this light even on those who have never heard of Jesus or have heard of Jesus in a hostile or vastly erroneous way.
True, there are stories of individuals having visions and dreams of Jesus. Then when they come into contact with Christians, they immediately recognize in Christ the person of their vision.
Yet what are we to make of the Old Testament saints, who did not yet know of Jesus? What do we make of the Ninevites, whose repentance God accepted even though they had no knowledge of Christ? What do we make of Job, who by all reckonings was not even an Israelite but someone who worshiped God as best he knew how?
Indeed, Paul himself uses the uncircumcised Abraham as a model of justification by faith, but the faith of Abraham is not a faith directed toward Jesus but toward God the Father (Rom. 4:17). God has chosen to reconcile the world through Christ, but he did not justify the Old Testament saints on the basis of their knowledge of Christ but on the basis of their faith in God. "Whoever would approach him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him" (Heb. 11:6). Note that not a single instance of faith in Hebrews 11 is directed specifically toward Jesus.
The point here is not in any way to diminish the centrality of Christ in atonement. It is to say that the heart is the location of faith rather than the understanding. The Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner once suggested that there may be "anonymous Christians" who have responded to God in faith on the basis of Christ who do not yet, with their heads, know the name of the one in whom they have believed. [4]
This position is not without its difficulties, but it is the logical outworking of Wesley's theology, which both affirmed God's prevenient grace and the heart as the center of human response to God. It's greatest objection is the urgency of spreading the gospel, and the fact that faith comes by hearing (Rom. 10:17).
Theology is of course worked out over the whole of Scripture, rather than by a war of individual verses. What Wesleyan theology wishes to affirm is what Scripture itself says, that God wants everyone to be saved, which implies that God reaches out to everyone.
But here is an important point. To say that God reaches out to everyone does not mean that everyone has an equal exposure to God's voice. It is only to say that everyone has a chance, enough to be without excuse. Does not Paul himself imply in Romans 1:20 that God's power and glory are self-evident to all? Does not Acts 17:26-28 imply that God has set out the world in a way that can lead non-Jews to him?
At the same time, to say that everyone has a minimal chance does not suggest that evangelism, traditionally conceived, does not greatly increase the opportunity for salvation. It does not deny that prayer can create a greater likelihood that a person will finally reach out for God, although God always in every case looks for the human response. He does not force anyone to choose him.
6. We cannot presume that God will always empower our will to move toward him. If we can only come to God because his prevenient grace is drawing us to him, then we will not be able to come to him if he ever withdraws it. Wesleyans in that sense do not believe in free will in the pure sense. Since the Pelagian controversies of the 400s, Christians have not believed that we have the power in ourselves to come to God. Rather, God empowers us to move toward him.
In that sense, a person who rejects the grace of God today cannot assume that he or she will even want God's grace later on. It is his grace that draws us to repentance. In one of the scariest verses in the New Testament, Hebrews suggests that Esau knew that he needed to repent, but at that point could not find a place of repentance (Heb. 12:17).
So anyone who truly repents and seeks God will find him. But a person who says, "I will repent on my death bed," probably will not find true repentance in their heart on that day. They may know in their head that they need to repent but not find the will to repent in their heart, which is a gift of God's prevenient grace.
In all these things we must confess that we know very little of how God works behind the scenes. We know that he wants everyone to be saved, which means he must surely give everyone a chance. His grace has been reaching out for us before the world began and it continues in or births and lives, long before we realize it. It continues in our daily lives, even after we have come to faith. We cannot possibly know how often he intervenes in the events of our lives, interrupting the normal flow of cause and effect. It is a striking demonstration of his love for us.
Next Sunday: S4. God revealed himself to Israel in preparation for Christ.
[1] Theologians debate whether Jesus would have become human if Adam had not sinned. Those who believe Jesus planned to become human regardless of whether Adam sinned are called "supralapsarians." Those who think he only planned to come if humanity sinned are called 'infralapsarians." In general, Wesleyans would tend to be supralapsarians. For hyper-Calvinists, of course, there is no meaningful distinction between the two, since by their reckoning, God planned for Adam to sin.
[2] The Calvinist idea that God entirely manipulates our salvation is called "monergism." For them, a single work is in play, that of God. Wesleyan-Arminians and historic Christianity have more predominantly affirmed a "synergism" between God's action and human response. The work is vastly disproportionate, with God's work the overwhelmingly predominant element. Yet God empowers the human will to play a role as well. Otherwise, God is straightforwardly responsible for evil.
[3] E.g., Rahner, Theological Investigations IV (New York: Crossroads, 1982 [1966]), 180-187. This idea helped the Roman Catholics at Vatican 2 explain how non-Roman Catholics could be saved and yet not be part of what they believe is the true church. It helped provide a basis for non-Catholics being "separated brothers."
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Revelation (Wes. Theo. series)
For the last few weekends, I've been spinning out what kinds of things I might write if I did a small book overviewing Wesleyan theology. The brainstorms I've done include:
Faith (Introduction)
God
Creation and Alienation
There is so much of me in these posts that it really should be called a Wesleyan theology rather than anything like an overview from a historical perspective. It seems to me the last two hundred years push us to broaden our consideration, not least because we now have a better understanding of how to read the biblical texts on their own terms. A re-presentation seems necessary to speak with full power to today, and a mere repetition of historical categories seems two dimensional to me.
Today's overview is Revelation.
4.1 Natural Grace
John Calvin had a sense of grace built into nature, and I personally believe it is healthy for us to believe that there is a great deal of goodness in nature still that remains an embodiment of God's love for us. The Stoics spoke of "logos seeds" in all of us, which some parts of the New Testament call "the implanted word" (e.g., James 1:21). These are bits of the truth of God's will in all of us. Perhaps we want to call this "natural revelation," elements of the creation that point to God.
Dare we believe that God reaches out to the non-human parts of his creation as well, both in salvation and in goodness?
4.2 Prevenient Grace
Wesley and Wesleyans have traditionally gone one step forward to speak of God's prevenient grace, his "lightening" of everyone who comes into the world (cf. John 1:9). In my opinion, the most coherent Wesleyan theology today will believe that God reaches out to everyone who ever lives in this world. This is a reaching out not with the head, since clearly most of those who have lived on the earth have never heard of Christ. It is a reaching out with the heart.
Similarly, the response God is looking for is surely not a response with the head, some hollow assent to certain beliefs, but an assent with the heart. But that is for tomorrow.
4.3 Israel
Christians believe that God reached out to humanity through a people. Surely he must have been reaching out to humanity long before Abraham. Egyptian culture had flourished for well over a 1000 years before then. Even by Bishop Ussher's standards, humanity had lived for over 2000 years before then, and science would say a massively greater time than this. From Abraham to the Christian age, the overwhelming majority of the world knew nothing of Israel's faith.
So once more we must either believe that God cared nothing for these poor souls or that he was reaching out to their hearts long before he came with matters of the head. Christians believe that his coming to Israel was the beginning of a coming with the head. But even here, he reveals by building a relationship with a people. He meets them where they are at.
It is not a full revelation of himself. He meets them with their understanding. A fuller truth is "concealed" or, better, it is partial. He lets them do things that are not his perfect will. Jesus includes divorce in this category. I would include the attempted annihilation of whole peoples in Canaan.
4.4 Scripture
The texts that we now call Scripture accumulated over a 1000 year period or so. So we once again see that God's revelation is vastly larger than these written texts. But these written texts are the fullest witness of the head to God and his relationship with his creation. They give us the story of God's focal reaching out to the world through Israel and then ultimately, through Christ. They are the playing field on which Christians wrestle together to find God's will, to work out our salvation together with fear and trembling.
4.5 Christ as Revelation
The Word of God is Jesus Christ (John 1:14). No other word compares to the fullness of God's reaching out to reveal himself, and any confusion on that matter bespeaks a tendency to idolatry. It is in Jesus Christ that God has most fully revealed himself, once again showing that reaching out in relationship and not knowledge is the center of revelation.
4.6 The Spirit and the Church
God has not stopped revealing himself. New issues arise. Further, the Christians of the first centuries systematized their understanding of Scripture in the time after Christ. If we are to believe the historic doctrines of Christian faith and accept the canon of Christian Scripture, we must believe that God continued to reveal himself to them even after the time of the New Testament.
The tension between the pneumatic and the traditional in knowing and doing God's will remains present with us today. Surely God still speaks to individuals through the Spirit. Yet much individual revelation is none of the sort, and traditional structures help sift through such matters. This tension is already present within the witness of the New Testament in the contrast between the prophets of the early church and structures that included overseers and deacons.
Faith (Introduction)
God
Creation and Alienation
There is so much of me in these posts that it really should be called a Wesleyan theology rather than anything like an overview from a historical perspective. It seems to me the last two hundred years push us to broaden our consideration, not least because we now have a better understanding of how to read the biblical texts on their own terms. A re-presentation seems necessary to speak with full power to today, and a mere repetition of historical categories seems two dimensional to me.
Today's overview is Revelation.
4.1 Natural Grace
John Calvin had a sense of grace built into nature, and I personally believe it is healthy for us to believe that there is a great deal of goodness in nature still that remains an embodiment of God's love for us. The Stoics spoke of "logos seeds" in all of us, which some parts of the New Testament call "the implanted word" (e.g., James 1:21). These are bits of the truth of God's will in all of us. Perhaps we want to call this "natural revelation," elements of the creation that point to God.
Dare we believe that God reaches out to the non-human parts of his creation as well, both in salvation and in goodness?
4.2 Prevenient Grace
Wesley and Wesleyans have traditionally gone one step forward to speak of God's prevenient grace, his "lightening" of everyone who comes into the world (cf. John 1:9). In my opinion, the most coherent Wesleyan theology today will believe that God reaches out to everyone who ever lives in this world. This is a reaching out not with the head, since clearly most of those who have lived on the earth have never heard of Christ. It is a reaching out with the heart.
Similarly, the response God is looking for is surely not a response with the head, some hollow assent to certain beliefs, but an assent with the heart. But that is for tomorrow.
4.3 Israel
Christians believe that God reached out to humanity through a people. Surely he must have been reaching out to humanity long before Abraham. Egyptian culture had flourished for well over a 1000 years before then. Even by Bishop Ussher's standards, humanity had lived for over 2000 years before then, and science would say a massively greater time than this. From Abraham to the Christian age, the overwhelming majority of the world knew nothing of Israel's faith.
So once more we must either believe that God cared nothing for these poor souls or that he was reaching out to their hearts long before he came with matters of the head. Christians believe that his coming to Israel was the beginning of a coming with the head. But even here, he reveals by building a relationship with a people. He meets them where they are at.
It is not a full revelation of himself. He meets them with their understanding. A fuller truth is "concealed" or, better, it is partial. He lets them do things that are not his perfect will. Jesus includes divorce in this category. I would include the attempted annihilation of whole peoples in Canaan.
4.4 Scripture
The texts that we now call Scripture accumulated over a 1000 year period or so. So we once again see that God's revelation is vastly larger than these written texts. But these written texts are the fullest witness of the head to God and his relationship with his creation. They give us the story of God's focal reaching out to the world through Israel and then ultimately, through Christ. They are the playing field on which Christians wrestle together to find God's will, to work out our salvation together with fear and trembling.
4.5 Christ as Revelation
The Word of God is Jesus Christ (John 1:14). No other word compares to the fullness of God's reaching out to reveal himself, and any confusion on that matter bespeaks a tendency to idolatry. It is in Jesus Christ that God has most fully revealed himself, once again showing that reaching out in relationship and not knowledge is the center of revelation.
4.6 The Spirit and the Church
God has not stopped revealing himself. New issues arise. Further, the Christians of the first centuries systematized their understanding of Scripture in the time after Christ. If we are to believe the historic doctrines of Christian faith and accept the canon of Christian Scripture, we must believe that God continued to reveal himself to them even after the time of the New Testament.
The tension between the pneumatic and the traditional in knowing and doing God's will remains present with us today. Surely God still speaks to individuals through the Spirit. Yet much individual revelation is none of the sort, and traditional structures help sift through such matters. This tension is already present within the witness of the New Testament in the contrast between the prophets of the early church and structures that included overseers and deacons.
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