This is the eighth 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.
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The power of the Spirit breaks the power of Sin.
1. "Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ... and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God" (Rom. 5:1-2). By his grace, God has initiated the possibility that we can be reconciled to him. He sent his Son to die on the cross for sins. He sought us out in his prevenient grace when we were not looking for him.
He brought us to the possibility of repentance and faith. Then when we put our faith in the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ, We trusted in his faithful death. God gave us the Holy Spirit as a down payment of a glory yet to come, a guarantee of our coming inheritance, a seal of his ownership of us. He forgave us of past sins. He justified us, putting us in a right relationship with him. He adopted us as his children.
He purified us of our uncleanness. He sanctified us through his Spirit, setting us apart as his own. He regenerated us to new life. He made a new creation. We were born again.
We are now "in Christ," just as Christ is in us. We have been crucified with Christ. Now we live in the life of the risen Christ. We are at peace with God. We have hope of the resurrection and finally receiving the glory God originally intended for humanity to have in the creation.
2. Paul's opponents in the early church did not make a distinction between those parts of the Jewish Law that were "moral" and those that might be considered "ceremonial." In fact, Paul himself did not explicitly divide up the Law in this way. However, Paul did seem to distinguish between parts of the Jewish Law that were specifically for Jews and parts that were more universal in scope. These parts correspond roughly to the later Christian distinction between the "ceremonial" and "moral" parts of the Law. [1]
So for Paul's opponents, he seemed to be encouraging sin when he told Gentile believers that they were not bound by "works of Law." He records one of the rumors about him. He is accused of saying, "Let us do evil so that good may come" (Rom. 3:8). Romans 6-8 is more or less a defense against this charge.
"What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin go on living in it?" (Rom. 6:1-2). Here Paul is not talking about the parts of the Law that are specifically for Jews but what we might call today the "moral" parts of the Law, the universal parts. When we were raised with Christ, we were raised to "newness of life" (Rom. 6:4).
Accordingly, we must not "let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions" (Rom. 6:12). Since Paul talks about not obeying Sin, he clearly is not talking about some legal situation. That is, he is not saying that God considers us to be righteous because of Jesus, even though we are not really living righteously. Paul is clearly talking about how we live, a real change in our lives.
"Just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness for sanctification" (Rom. 6:19). Again, Paul is talking about real life consequences that come from the Spirit inside us. Romans 12:1-2 draws out the ethical implications of the entire first eleven chapters of Romans: "Present your bodies as a living sacrifice... Do not be conformed to this world."
3. The Holy Spirit thus empowers a Christian to live a life that is not characterized by sin. "Those who have been born of God do not sin, because God’s seed abides in them" (1 John 3:9). That is not to say that it is impossible for believers to sin (1 John 2:1). Indeed, much of 1 Corinthians is directed at Corinthians who continue to sin even though they should not. "I could not speak to you as spiritual people, but rather as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ... for you are still of the flesh. For as long as there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not of the flesh, and behaving according to human inclinations?" (1 Cor. 3:1, 3).
However, sinning and giving into temptation should not be the norm for a Christian. "No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength" (1 Cor. 10:13).
It is popular to see Romans 7:14-25 as the ongoing struggle of a believer with temptation and sin. However, the context in Romans 6 and 8, not to mention the first part of Romans 7, make it clear that Paul is not talking about the Christian in these verses but about a person who wants to keep the moral part of the Law but does not yet have the power of the Spirit to do so. Romans 8 gives the conclusion: "The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death" (8:2).
4. John Wesley systematized these scattered dynamics of the New Testament into what he considered to be the normal storyline of a Christian, what he and others called the ordo salutis, the "order of salvation." God's prevenient grace leads to his convicting grace. Conviction is when the Holy Spirit convinces you that you need God's forgiveness. When we then repent and put our faith in Christ, we experience God's justifying grace. He then purifies us of sin and imparts true righteousness to us by his sanctifying grace. [2]
The Wesleyan tradition has historically distinguished between initial sanctification, progressive sanctification, and entire sanctification. While sanctification is a biblical term, these gradations are based upon the logical implications of the biblical text. That is to say, these are not exactly biblical terms themselves.
Initial Sanctification
Sanctification in the New Testament is when a person is purified from the stain of sin and set apart as God's. In theology, however, sanctification refers to the actual impartation of righteousness. At conversion, Wesley taught, a person is empowered to be victorious over Sin and temptation. A person will likely continue to struggle with temptation, Wesley taught, but they should largely be victorious over it. "Initial" sanctification thus refers to this initial cleansing from the sin acts of the past and the power in our lives by the Spirit to overcome the power of Sin. [3]
The power of Sin is the default force in this world that pulls humanity toward sin. Wesley, following Calvin and Augustine, thought of the power of Sin in terms of a sin nature inside us, the default tendency of humanity to commit acts of sin because of a nature we have inherited from Adam. In a previous article, we argued that Paul thought of this dynamic more as a power over the creation than nature inside us.
Although Wesley formulated his ideas in his own theological categories, we can see his idea of initial sanctification as a logical extension of the biblical text. A Christian may struggle with temptation after he or she receives the Spirit. But God has forgiven them of past sin acts. God has cleansed them of the stain of past sins. God gives them the power to live a life in which Sin does not rule over their actions.
Progressive Sanctification
Wesley believed that a Christian would continue to grow in righteousness. If a believer continues to struggle in various areas when they first believe, over time they should fall into temptation less and less. The person should continue to grow.
We saw in 1 Corinthians 3:1-3 above that some believers remained "in the flesh" even after they became Christians. They were like babies and needed to grow up. Some of the New Testament is dedicated to this strange problem. How can a person continue to sin after they have God's Spirit within them.
Wesley thus was playing out logically and systematically what the biblical text says here and there about the need for believers to become more and more victorious over temptation as they progress through the Christian life. By "progressive sanctification," Wesley referred to the continued growth of a believer after conversion and the fact that it should become easier and easier to fight temptations to sin the longer a person is in Christ.
Entire Sanctification
This process of sanctification, Wesley believed, should climax in a moment of "entire" sanctification. This moment in an individual's salvation story is the one that requires the most logical and experiential construction beyond what the biblical text. Wesley himself referred to this moment in the life of a believer as achieving Christian perfection, drawing on passages like Matthew 5:48 and Hebrews 6:1. [3]
The wording of "entire" sanctification comes from 1 Thessalonians 5:23: "May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." Paul here of course was speaking informally. He was not speaking of a systematic doctrine or of a crisis experience in this verse. He was speaking, first, to the entire community more than to each person as an individual. He was speaking of his hope that there would be no sin at all among them--that any sin would be removed--as well as that the community would remain spotless until the point of Christ's return.
But Wesley and the Wesleyan tradition systematized these elements. Wesley believed that a Christian would come to another moment of crisis, even after conversion. A person would experience God's convicting grace again, this time of the fact that the power of Sin still had some power in one's life, even if it was not often victorious. A person would be aware of the sin nature within. This would lead to repentance and faith again, this time to experience a moment of entire sanctification. Wesley characterized this state as one of perfect love, of 1) loving God with all one's heart, mind, soul, and strength and 2) loving our neighbor as oneself (e.g., Matt. 22:34-40).
While there is no systematic statement like Wesley's in the Bible, we can see that the components are there and that we can construct such an event logically and experientially. We regularly find Christians who are still "fleshly" or carnal in the manner of 1 Corinthians 3:1-3. They should not have sin in their lives. They should not struggle so much with the power of Sin, but they do.
Believers often come to a point in their walk with Christ where they realize the existence of undiscovered sin or unsubmitted aspects of our lives. Wesley more than anyone else in Christian history draws our attention to the need for us to surrender ourselves completely to God. True, we will not always know every bit of ourselves. True, our lives are always changing. New areas to submit will always arise.
But Wesley prompts us to ask, "Have I given everything to God that I know to give? Am I willing to do anything the Lord would call me to do? Will I sign over the deed to the property of my life, beyond any individual room in the house? Will I give God the whole house of my life? Will I commit to give God every knew part of my life that I discover?"
This level of commitment usually comes down to a final decision. There will often be one final area of hold out, one final part of our lives that is harder to surrender completely to God than the others. For this reason, more than any, the moment of final surrender is usually a crisis moment, an event. We cannot logically be completely sanctified, completely God's, unless we are completely surrendered. [5]
Wesleyans thus speak of complete surrender and consecration of ourselves to God as our part in entire sanctification (although even that is empowered by the Spirit). Then God responds with full empowerment, full sanctification. How, after all, can we be fully empowered by the Spirit if we are not fully surrendered?
5. In 1739, Charles Wesley, the brother of John Wesley, wrote the words to the hymn, "O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing." One of the verses begins by saying, "He breaks the power of canceled sin, he sets the prisoner free." Charles was not actually talking about entire sanctification in this verse but about what he and John believed should be true of every Christian.
When we become a Christian and receive the Holy Spirit, God breaks the power of Sin over our lives. The lives of Christians from that point on should not be typified by acts of sin. Rather, we should walk in a newness of life. The more of our lives we surrender to God, the more empowered for righteousness we will be.
And when we surrender ourselves fully to God, as much as we know to do, then we are wholly God's. Then it should cease to be a struggle to love God and to love our neighbor. It should become easy to do the good we know to do. We should be able to love others with delight and not only with effort.
The power of the Spirit breaks the power of Sin.
Next Sunday S9: The dead in Christ will rise.
[1] The sacrificial parts of the Jewish Law seem to fall into a third category for Hebrews, namely, parts of the Jewish Law that were fulfilled in Christ. Meanwhile, the civil law of Israel had much to do with its Ancient Near Eastern context and so was very specific to its today, although we can still discern universal principles in it.
[2] Wesley's classic sermon in this regard is "The Scripture Way of Salvation."
[3] In general, I am capitalizing the word Sin when it refers to the power of Sin rather than individual sin acts.
[4] Unfortunately, neither of these verses will bear the load Wesley wanted them to bear. Most versions rightly translate Hebrews 6:1 as "maturity" rather than "perfection." Meanwhile, Matthew 5:48 is talking more informally of loving everyone rather than just our neighbors--going the whole way and being "complete" in our love. Wesley took informal comments and made them into systematic formulae.
[5] John Fletcher was the first person in the Methodist tradition to equate this crisis moment with the Spirit-fillings of Acts. Wesley, however, did not formulate Christian perfection in terms of Acts, even if there is some evidence that he was favorable toward Fletcher's use of Acts. However, almost no contemporary biblical scholar in any tradition would now interpret Acts in that way. See the previous article on the Spirit in conversion.
Sunday, February 15, 2015
Saturday, February 14, 2015
6. Innovation requires some trial and error (3).
Previously on Seminary take-aways:
1. There are key moments of opportunity.
2. You need the right people.
3. Good leaders collaborate and navigate.
4. Innovation requires some trial and error. (1)
5. Innovation requires some trial and error. (2)
1. After the struggles to find our way with the design of the Missional Church class, Russ turned to Keith for help from an expert on curriculum development. The result was the birth of a process that we would follow until the entire curriculum was written. It was also a process that we followed somewhat in the creation of the Spanish MDIV.
a. We would begin with a team of experts in the same room, much as the Missional Church had originally started. The process began with a brainstorm. Everybody in the room would write down on individual pieces of paper topics that they thought should be covered in, say, a leadership course.
b. Then we would group these into 16 weeks' worth of headings, under which we could place all of this content. We would tape our individual papers under the relevant week with the goal of capturing as much of the brainstorm material as possible.
c. By the third semester, we had developed a new flow for the Integration Paper (IP), which from then on was assumed in our curriculum planning meetings. Remember that the IP was an assignment in all the praxis courses where the students took a pastoral issue and answered it by examining it throughout the course in the light of Bible, theology, church history, and other disciplines.
(The first time through I really had Wesley’s Quadrilateral in mind—at first, there was an assignment at the end where they looked at Supporting Disciplines. In the third semester, that became a preliminary research assignment in Week 3 so that they had some sense of the lay of the land on an issue before they started exploring Bible, theology, and church history.)
So from the third semester on, Week 7 would be completely dedicated to doing exegetical work. Week 14 would be completely given to writing the final position paper. Other weeks the IP would be one of their assignments. So in Week 3 they would do preliminary research. In Week 8 they would tie the biblical passages together into a biblical theology. In Week 9 they would look at theological sources and in Week 10 church historical precedents.
By the fourth semester (Spring 2011), we were picking the IP topic for Missional Church, choosing the passages, sources, and church historical precedents for students. Then in the Leadership course we let students pick between three topics for the IP, picked sources and precedents, but let them pick passages. In Spring of 2013, Dr. Arn and I broke down the exegetical work even further.
These revisions were all meant to ease students into the skills needed for these assignments as gently as possible. For a time, the IP assignments were all standardized in all the praxis courses. We knew which assignments went in which weeks where.
d. Around that time, we developed a template of roughly three discussions and a submission for each week. It was still too much, and we are still in some cases trying to prune it down to two discussions and a submission. The Application Paper remained in the final week.
e. After the curriculum meeting, individual assignments were given to different people to write up. Smaller ones earned $50. Bigger assignments were worth $100. Then my job was to stitch them altogether into a single style and put them into Blackboard.
Inevitably, the first cohort ended up with the assignments being put up week by week for the first three courses. Sometimes the second cohort had something similar because we were revising the material from the trial and error of the first time through. Each semester we improved the format... which meant that the documents had to be edited all over again.
It was an awful lot of work, and a lot of sighing was heard coming out of my office. (Wayne used to joke about all the sighing)
2. We continued with a different professor for praxis, Bible, theology, church history, and IP in the second semester. We could have as many as five different professors for one course. It was unsustainable. The administration of finding all these individuals was unbearable. The pay was complicated (Karen Clark was a trooper). The students had trouble figuring out which professor to email. It wasn't as bad onsite, because you could see which professor was in front of you.
But it could not last. A question Henry Smith asked loomed large in my mind: "If this is such a good idea, why isn't anyone else doing it?" Keith saw it before I did. With each passing year we would have far too many moving pieces to handle 5 professors per course. I have an email from Bud Bence even in the second semester (March 2010) with the subject line: "even historians have limits."
At the beginning of the third year (Fall 2011), we went to two professors for each praxis course, a lead praxis professor and a "foundations" professor who handled Bible, theology, and church history. John Drury and I didn't like the term "foundations" professor, because we didn't want to suggest that these assignments were necessary prerequisites for understanding the practice. They were more like resonances with the praxis in Bible, theology, and church history. I've actually moved more toward calling this person the "integration" professor.
A formula of 2/3 praxis and 1/3 "foundations" had been the model from the beginning. So went the loading of the courses from this point on. The praxis part of the course was considered 4 credit hours and the foundations part 2 credit hours.
There was an unintended consequence to having so many different foundations professors. It dis-empowered the voice of Bible, theology, and church history in the curriculum. Inevitably, the professors in this role tended to be adjuncts and their assignments had an ad hoc character. They did not build toward a cumulative understanding of the topic in relation to Bible, theology, or church history.
3. There are advantages and disadvantages to a course designed by committee. The potential advantage is that you might get a more balanced rather than idiosyncratic perspective. The disadvantage is that you may not get as unified a voice in the course. I tried to give a unified voice as final editor, but I'm not a leadership expert either.
We had some lively debates. Should the course cover leadership theory in general? Most thought yes but some thought no. Should the course cover mission and vision statements? Should it have a section on fund-raising and building projects? What about budgeting? Most thought yes but some thought no. I think the course ended up very good, and Bob Whitesel has continued to improve it ever since.
As a final aside, Keith Drury taught the first Leadership course onsite the second semester because Bob had taught the first Missional Church course onsite. It was my sense that it would be good for the students to have a different professor for each course, although Bob could have easily taught both.
We had some struggle to translate the online courses we had created back into an onsite format. It was a surprising problem. And it was at times harder to find onsite professors than online ones. The third semester onsite we had a cycling cast of leadership praxis teachers from week to week, everyone from Bob to Keith to David Drury to Wayne Schmidt. I thought it would be a great treat, to have such a rich cast of characters. But the students again found it confusing.
In a twist of irony, the visiting professor who taught on conflict management ended up leaving his church in the middle of the course... over not handling conflict well at his church.
1. There are key moments of opportunity.
2. You need the right people.
3. Good leaders collaborate and navigate.
4. Innovation requires some trial and error. (1)
5. Innovation requires some trial and error. (2)
1. After the struggles to find our way with the design of the Missional Church class, Russ turned to Keith for help from an expert on curriculum development. The result was the birth of a process that we would follow until the entire curriculum was written. It was also a process that we followed somewhat in the creation of the Spanish MDIV.
a. We would begin with a team of experts in the same room, much as the Missional Church had originally started. The process began with a brainstorm. Everybody in the room would write down on individual pieces of paper topics that they thought should be covered in, say, a leadership course.
b. Then we would group these into 16 weeks' worth of headings, under which we could place all of this content. We would tape our individual papers under the relevant week with the goal of capturing as much of the brainstorm material as possible.
c. By the third semester, we had developed a new flow for the Integration Paper (IP), which from then on was assumed in our curriculum planning meetings. Remember that the IP was an assignment in all the praxis courses where the students took a pastoral issue and answered it by examining it throughout the course in the light of Bible, theology, church history, and other disciplines.
(The first time through I really had Wesley’s Quadrilateral in mind—at first, there was an assignment at the end where they looked at Supporting Disciplines. In the third semester, that became a preliminary research assignment in Week 3 so that they had some sense of the lay of the land on an issue before they started exploring Bible, theology, and church history.)
So from the third semester on, Week 7 would be completely dedicated to doing exegetical work. Week 14 would be completely given to writing the final position paper. Other weeks the IP would be one of their assignments. So in Week 3 they would do preliminary research. In Week 8 they would tie the biblical passages together into a biblical theology. In Week 9 they would look at theological sources and in Week 10 church historical precedents.
By the fourth semester (Spring 2011), we were picking the IP topic for Missional Church, choosing the passages, sources, and church historical precedents for students. Then in the Leadership course we let students pick between three topics for the IP, picked sources and precedents, but let them pick passages. In Spring of 2013, Dr. Arn and I broke down the exegetical work even further.
These revisions were all meant to ease students into the skills needed for these assignments as gently as possible. For a time, the IP assignments were all standardized in all the praxis courses. We knew which assignments went in which weeks where.
d. Around that time, we developed a template of roughly three discussions and a submission for each week. It was still too much, and we are still in some cases trying to prune it down to two discussions and a submission. The Application Paper remained in the final week.
e. After the curriculum meeting, individual assignments were given to different people to write up. Smaller ones earned $50. Bigger assignments were worth $100. Then my job was to stitch them altogether into a single style and put them into Blackboard.
Inevitably, the first cohort ended up with the assignments being put up week by week for the first three courses. Sometimes the second cohort had something similar because we were revising the material from the trial and error of the first time through. Each semester we improved the format... which meant that the documents had to be edited all over again.
It was an awful lot of work, and a lot of sighing was heard coming out of my office. (Wayne used to joke about all the sighing)
2. We continued with a different professor for praxis, Bible, theology, church history, and IP in the second semester. We could have as many as five different professors for one course. It was unsustainable. The administration of finding all these individuals was unbearable. The pay was complicated (Karen Clark was a trooper). The students had trouble figuring out which professor to email. It wasn't as bad onsite, because you could see which professor was in front of you.
But it could not last. A question Henry Smith asked loomed large in my mind: "If this is such a good idea, why isn't anyone else doing it?" Keith saw it before I did. With each passing year we would have far too many moving pieces to handle 5 professors per course. I have an email from Bud Bence even in the second semester (March 2010) with the subject line: "even historians have limits."
At the beginning of the third year (Fall 2011), we went to two professors for each praxis course, a lead praxis professor and a "foundations" professor who handled Bible, theology, and church history. John Drury and I didn't like the term "foundations" professor, because we didn't want to suggest that these assignments were necessary prerequisites for understanding the practice. They were more like resonances with the praxis in Bible, theology, and church history. I've actually moved more toward calling this person the "integration" professor.
A formula of 2/3 praxis and 1/3 "foundations" had been the model from the beginning. So went the loading of the courses from this point on. The praxis part of the course was considered 4 credit hours and the foundations part 2 credit hours.
There was an unintended consequence to having so many different foundations professors. It dis-empowered the voice of Bible, theology, and church history in the curriculum. Inevitably, the professors in this role tended to be adjuncts and their assignments had an ad hoc character. They did not build toward a cumulative understanding of the topic in relation to Bible, theology, or church history.
3. There are advantages and disadvantages to a course designed by committee. The potential advantage is that you might get a more balanced rather than idiosyncratic perspective. The disadvantage is that you may not get as unified a voice in the course. I tried to give a unified voice as final editor, but I'm not a leadership expert either.
We had some lively debates. Should the course cover leadership theory in general? Most thought yes but some thought no. Should the course cover mission and vision statements? Should it have a section on fund-raising and building projects? What about budgeting? Most thought yes but some thought no. I think the course ended up very good, and Bob Whitesel has continued to improve it ever since.
As a final aside, Keith Drury taught the first Leadership course onsite the second semester because Bob had taught the first Missional Church course onsite. It was my sense that it would be good for the students to have a different professor for each course, although Bob could have easily taught both.
We had some struggle to translate the online courses we had created back into an onsite format. It was a surprising problem. And it was at times harder to find onsite professors than online ones. The third semester onsite we had a cycling cast of leadership praxis teachers from week to week, everyone from Bob to Keith to David Drury to Wayne Schmidt. I thought it would be a great treat, to have such a rich cast of characters. But the students again found it confusing.
In a twist of irony, the visiting professor who taught on conflict management ended up leaving his church in the middle of the course... over not handling conflict well at his church.
Friday, February 13, 2015
5. Innovation requires some trial and error. (2)
Previously on Seminary take-aways:
1. There are key moments of opportunity.
2. You need the right people.
3. Good leaders collaborate and navigate.
4. Innovation requires some trial and error. (1)
1. Yesterday I talked about both the joy and the struggles of putting an innovative dream into concrete curricular form, a dream for a different kind of seminary into its first course, the Missional Church course.
The first class of MDIV students began on Monday, August 3, 2009. I might mention that I consider the MA students that graduated that August 8th to be the first graduates of Wesley Seminary. Technically, the seminary did not have its name until the board meeting in October 2009. There was some concern about confusion with other seminaries that have "Wesley" in their name, which led to a little delay. Just to make sure everyone knows, the official name ended up, "Wesley Seminary at Indiana Wesleyan University." :-)
I might add that since my contract as Dean began July 1, 2009 (the day that Chip's contract began and Bob's was renewed), I personally consider that the day the Seminary was technically founded. :-)
I mentioned the first convocation service, Sunday, August 9, 2009. The first cohorts of MDIV students, one online and one onsite, came to take two one week intensives before the Fall Missional Church course began. The first class was Pastor, Church, and World, and it was taught by Russ Gunsalus, who for that first semester was the Chief Operating Officer of the seminary.
The second week was a one week course called Cultural Contexts of Ministry, which Norm Wilson taught. BTW, in keeping with the trial and error theme, we no longer have new students take two courses when they begin the program. We just made this change last year. Now students just begin with one week on campus. Contexts is now scheduled in the third year, alongside church history. More on that later.
2. I should mention that Nate Lamb was our first admissions person. He and Julie also led the music in the first convocations. He was such an inviting personality to prospective students, and the team had a great synergy with him. It was hard when he left to go plant a church in Colorado. We wondered how we would ever replace him. But Aaron Wilkinson is just as much a force to reckon with. Aaron's unstoppable.
It embodies a principle that I feel keenly as I leave the Seminary. I hope people will miss me as Dean. But I'm also quite aware that whoever becomes the new Dean will have gifts I don't. It relates to Monday's installment: "New leaders bring new gifts."
3. Another piece of the puzzle I should mention is the Spiritual Formation sequence. These are six one hour courses taken alongside the six praxis courses (missional, leadership, worship, proclamation, congregational formation, and congregational relationships). Keith spun these out in less than 60 seconds at one of the MDIV curriculum committee meetings in the summer of 2007. I remember that three of us were sitting downstairs in Noggle at desks in the northwest classroom (Dave Smith I think was the third person).
Some of the Christian Ministry faculty at that time felt like spiritual formation in many contexts was often "too heavenly minded to be any earthly good," as if all there was to being formed spiritually was going into some room to pray and read your Bible. Like it or not, human psychology plays a role--a HUGE one. God is not a Gnostic. (Some of us also had a similar sense of spiritual gifts tests, which are often based on shallow readings of certain biblical texts, taking informal lists and making them into fixed roles God has designed for all time.)
Keith whipped off the top of his head what I considered a much more profound series of courses, one that is meant to lead a person through the actual process of change (not dissimilar to AA). The first course asks about how change happens (Change and Transformation). The second assesses where you are (Self-Awareness and Appraisal). Next you need to know where you are going (Goal Setting and Accountability). The fourth course is Mentoring and Spiritual Direction, because you won't get there alone. The fifth course is then what for some programs is the ONLY sense of spiritual formation (Personal and Corporate Spiritual Disciplines). Finally, the sixth course was intended to cross a finish line (Recovery and Deliverance), to reach at least some goals.
Other key features unfolded. The ideal would be a single professor to go with a cohort through the entire sequence together. Every other week they would do some act of worship, so that these courses were not merely cognitive but affective and spiritual.
Keith Drury wrote the first course. Someone else tried to write the second. I ended up doing a lot of gap filling when the material generated didn't match the new thing we were trying to do. Halee Scott wrote the third and fourth spiritual formation courses. Jeremy Summers the fifth, and Dave Ward wrote the final one.
Of course when Colleen Derr became the point person for the spiritual formation sequence at the end of our third year, she took it to the next level. She eventually added spiritual classics to the courses (I think in the fifth year), then after our ATS visit added a mentor component to all the spiritual formation classes...
1. There are key moments of opportunity.
2. You need the right people.
3. Good leaders collaborate and navigate.
4. Innovation requires some trial and error. (1)
1. Yesterday I talked about both the joy and the struggles of putting an innovative dream into concrete curricular form, a dream for a different kind of seminary into its first course, the Missional Church course.
The first class of MDIV students began on Monday, August 3, 2009. I might mention that I consider the MA students that graduated that August 8th to be the first graduates of Wesley Seminary. Technically, the seminary did not have its name until the board meeting in October 2009. There was some concern about confusion with other seminaries that have "Wesley" in their name, which led to a little delay. Just to make sure everyone knows, the official name ended up, "Wesley Seminary at Indiana Wesleyan University." :-)
I might add that since my contract as Dean began July 1, 2009 (the day that Chip's contract began and Bob's was renewed), I personally consider that the day the Seminary was technically founded. :-)
I mentioned the first convocation service, Sunday, August 9, 2009. The first cohorts of MDIV students, one online and one onsite, came to take two one week intensives before the Fall Missional Church course began. The first class was Pastor, Church, and World, and it was taught by Russ Gunsalus, who for that first semester was the Chief Operating Officer of the seminary.
The second week was a one week course called Cultural Contexts of Ministry, which Norm Wilson taught. BTW, in keeping with the trial and error theme, we no longer have new students take two courses when they begin the program. We just made this change last year. Now students just begin with one week on campus. Contexts is now scheduled in the third year, alongside church history. More on that later.
2. I should mention that Nate Lamb was our first admissions person. He and Julie also led the music in the first convocations. He was such an inviting personality to prospective students, and the team had a great synergy with him. It was hard when he left to go plant a church in Colorado. We wondered how we would ever replace him. But Aaron Wilkinson is just as much a force to reckon with. Aaron's unstoppable.
It embodies a principle that I feel keenly as I leave the Seminary. I hope people will miss me as Dean. But I'm also quite aware that whoever becomes the new Dean will have gifts I don't. It relates to Monday's installment: "New leaders bring new gifts."
3. Another piece of the puzzle I should mention is the Spiritual Formation sequence. These are six one hour courses taken alongside the six praxis courses (missional, leadership, worship, proclamation, congregational formation, and congregational relationships). Keith spun these out in less than 60 seconds at one of the MDIV curriculum committee meetings in the summer of 2007. I remember that three of us were sitting downstairs in Noggle at desks in the northwest classroom (Dave Smith I think was the third person).
Some of the Christian Ministry faculty at that time felt like spiritual formation in many contexts was often "too heavenly minded to be any earthly good," as if all there was to being formed spiritually was going into some room to pray and read your Bible. Like it or not, human psychology plays a role--a HUGE one. God is not a Gnostic. (Some of us also had a similar sense of spiritual gifts tests, which are often based on shallow readings of certain biblical texts, taking informal lists and making them into fixed roles God has designed for all time.)
Keith whipped off the top of his head what I considered a much more profound series of courses, one that is meant to lead a person through the actual process of change (not dissimilar to AA). The first course asks about how change happens (Change and Transformation). The second assesses where you are (Self-Awareness and Appraisal). Next you need to know where you are going (Goal Setting and Accountability). The fourth course is Mentoring and Spiritual Direction, because you won't get there alone. The fifth course is then what for some programs is the ONLY sense of spiritual formation (Personal and Corporate Spiritual Disciplines). Finally, the sixth course was intended to cross a finish line (Recovery and Deliverance), to reach at least some goals.
Other key features unfolded. The ideal would be a single professor to go with a cohort through the entire sequence together. Every other week they would do some act of worship, so that these courses were not merely cognitive but affective and spiritual.
Keith Drury wrote the first course. Someone else tried to write the second. I ended up doing a lot of gap filling when the material generated didn't match the new thing we were trying to do. Halee Scott wrote the third and fourth spiritual formation courses. Jeremy Summers the fifth, and Dave Ward wrote the final one.
Of course when Colleen Derr became the point person for the spiritual formation sequence at the end of our third year, she took it to the next level. She eventually added spiritual classics to the courses (I think in the fifth year), then after our ATS visit added a mentor component to all the spiritual formation classes...
Thursday, February 12, 2015
4. Innovation involves some trial and error. (1)
Previously on Seminary take-aways:
1. There are key moments of opportunity.
2. You need the right people.
3. Good leaders collaborate and navigate.
The first year of the Seminary was "Launch Year."
1. The first course in the Seminary curriculum is Missional Church. Long before Dr. Charles Arn became the first new faculty member, Russ Gunsalus, as Director of Graduate Ministry, was getting the band back together to work on the first course.
In February of 2008, Russ got Norm Wilson, Keith Drury, Dave Smith and me together at a retreat center in northern Indiana to brainstorm what this course would look like in concrete form. Bob Whitesel, who lived in the area at that time, also dropped by. At that time he was the only full-time faculty person in the Department of Graduate Ministry.
The team saw four main content items in this course: 1) evangelism, 2) service, 3) church planting and multiplication, and 4) global missions.
Evangelism
It was obvious that evangelism needed to be in this course, but we did not want it to be a narrowly defined evangelism. There is some internal Seminary joking about the church growth movement. Bob Whitesel of course was a student of Don McGavran, so any dismissive comment about the church growth movement being shallow immediately meets with strong push back from Bob about the real church growth movement and the depth of McGavran's theology.
But there were worries expressed in the creation of Wesley that it not become a "church growth seminary," in a pejorative sense. So in designing the Missional Church course, we did not want the course to have a narrow definition of evangelism as something along the line of Evangelism Explosion back in the 70s or a superficial sense of evangelism as leading people to pray the sinner's prayer.
(I might add that in the Summer of 2010, Wayne Schmidt and the faculty read through The Next Evangelicalism and had a lively discussion about the "homogeneous principle" that was so well known as part of the church growth movement. It's the idea that like is attracted to like and thus that churches grow more the less diverse they are.)
Service
We chose the word missional not only because it was a buzz word at the time but because the Wesleyan tradition has always been concerned with aspects of the gospel that today we would call "social justice." The Wesleyan tradition does not pit service to the needs of others against spiritual needs. The good news extends beyond salvation of the soul to salvation of the whole person in every domain, indeed to the redemption of the structures of society and even the creation.
BTW, Bob Whitesel wrote Waypoints about the time this course was being created, which has missional written all over it. He repeatedly emphasizes that a missional church contrasts with an attractional church. An attractional church is focused on how to bring people to itself. A missional church asks what God is doing in one's community and jumps on board with his mission.
Church Planting and Multiplication
When we were just proposing an MDIV in the summer of 2007, I met with all three General Superintendents in Indy to see if the Wesleyan denomination was in support of our Seminary venture. In fact, in a move that seemed unprecedented, all three later came to one of the Seminary Task Force meetings to show their support (Earle Wilson, Tom Arminger, Jerry Pence). Clearly they emphatically supported the venture. Somewhat reminiscent of Paul in Galatians 2:10--they only wanted us to remember church planting and multiplication.
The multiplication piece was also central on their minds because, as I understand it, the survival rate of plants that are part of a parent church (what Bob calls "internal plants") is much higher than plants that are out on their own.
Global Mission
We felt like there should be something on traditional missions in this course. Norm always kept us mindful of the global church in all our designing.
2. If everything went according to plan, the Missional Church course would first be offered in August of 2009. That was over a year later. On the retreat, we had come up with an outline for the course, and Norm Wilson was asked to take a first shot at filling in the concrete blanks. I'm sure Keith Drury was sitting back shaking his head while I fumbled around in the dark about this whole curriculum design piece. We knew what we wanted the general characteristics of the classes to be. But getting a real course into a form we were happy with was another thing.
For example, Norm had never taught an online class at that time, so inevitably his first drafts had a very onsite feel. Ironically, by the time the Seminary was going, we would end up with the opposite problem: our courses ended up so oriented around the online that we had trouble figuring out how to do them onsite at first.
I apologize to that first cohort for the pain I caused them. :-) Here were the initial features of that first template that now seem obviously way too complex and just too much:
3. So let me back up a bit. Norm had created many pieces, but the craziness above (more on complexity later) required a particular kind of crazy to put together into concrete form. I know when Dr. Charles Arn came on as our first faculty hire, July 1, 2009, he must have felt like nothing yet had been done on the course. Little did he know how much water had already flowed under the bridge.
As was his right as a full-time faculty person, we began to join what had been before with his own expertise in the area. This is a natural aspect to any joining of new to old. We had to negotiate what stayed from before, what was modified, what would be new, and what order it would now go in. Chip was, as always, the consummate team player. Bob was going to teach the onsite Missional course in the Fall, so he was also part of the discussion.
This is one of the features of a start-up organization. When you start with such a small number of people, each new person changes the mix much more dramatically than when you are adding someone to an existing organization with an established core and ethos. In the case of the Seminary, the dream was so unlike the prior experience of any new person, that joining must have been something like jumping into ice cold water for each new faculty person. It was like learning a whole new language.
Through no fault of Chip's (indeed, he would have had it done lickity split), the course was only mostly finished by the time the semester began. I was trying to jockey between the voices (not to mention the other aspects of the Dean's job) and be an instructional designer in Blackboard all at the same time.
That leads to another aspect of my stubbornness that I know many questioned especially in the second year of the Seminary. Why doesn't the Seminary just go along with the way the rest of the online programs operate at IWU? My goal was to take the best of both CAS and CAPS. This inevitably led to tensions in the early stages. Online CAPS was designed for 10,000. We were trying to customize for 30.
With regard to Blackboard, for example, I wanted the buttons to be organized by week rather than by type of assignment (you'll notice that all of IWU now does this and other things I changed for the Seminary ;-) We had sixteen week courses, so going under one button for assignments, then having to click out to go to another for discussions, then click out to go to another for submissions, and another for groups seemed insane. Why not just collect all the assignments for each week in one place?
There were other areas where I wanted to customize Blackboard. For example, we wanted students and professors to be able to subscribe to forums (remember that old function in Blackboard when you could get an email when someone posted something? ;-), which wasn't the default format at that time.
Mind you, this was even before the Center for Learning Innovation was created. I remember when Dave Leitzel showed me how to do what I wanted to do in Blackboard. But I would have to create it if I wanted it a customized way.
4. So there was a quick feedback loop back then, with just as quick revisions made. The first cohort knew they were guinea pigs, but there was a certain excitement at being the first cohort that I think made up for it. Everyone had the sense that they were part of something very exciting and innovative. Do you all agree?
The first convocation service was packed in the commons of the student center for that August 2009 start. Keith Drury preached the sermon, "From Great to Good." Chip led us through a litany I had created that stitched together different Bible verses. We took communion by intinction. We tried to come up with a song that might become the Seminary song, something like "And Can It Be" is at Asbury.
The fact that I can't remember what it was indicates that it didn't stick. :-)
1. There are key moments of opportunity.
2. You need the right people.
3. Good leaders collaborate and navigate.
The first year of the Seminary was "Launch Year."
1. The first course in the Seminary curriculum is Missional Church. Long before Dr. Charles Arn became the first new faculty member, Russ Gunsalus, as Director of Graduate Ministry, was getting the band back together to work on the first course.
In February of 2008, Russ got Norm Wilson, Keith Drury, Dave Smith and me together at a retreat center in northern Indiana to brainstorm what this course would look like in concrete form. Bob Whitesel, who lived in the area at that time, also dropped by. At that time he was the only full-time faculty person in the Department of Graduate Ministry.
The team saw four main content items in this course: 1) evangelism, 2) service, 3) church planting and multiplication, and 4) global missions.
Evangelism
It was obvious that evangelism needed to be in this course, but we did not want it to be a narrowly defined evangelism. There is some internal Seminary joking about the church growth movement. Bob Whitesel of course was a student of Don McGavran, so any dismissive comment about the church growth movement being shallow immediately meets with strong push back from Bob about the real church growth movement and the depth of McGavran's theology.
But there were worries expressed in the creation of Wesley that it not become a "church growth seminary," in a pejorative sense. So in designing the Missional Church course, we did not want the course to have a narrow definition of evangelism as something along the line of Evangelism Explosion back in the 70s or a superficial sense of evangelism as leading people to pray the sinner's prayer.
(I might add that in the Summer of 2010, Wayne Schmidt and the faculty read through The Next Evangelicalism and had a lively discussion about the "homogeneous principle" that was so well known as part of the church growth movement. It's the idea that like is attracted to like and thus that churches grow more the less diverse they are.)
Service
We chose the word missional not only because it was a buzz word at the time but because the Wesleyan tradition has always been concerned with aspects of the gospel that today we would call "social justice." The Wesleyan tradition does not pit service to the needs of others against spiritual needs. The good news extends beyond salvation of the soul to salvation of the whole person in every domain, indeed to the redemption of the structures of society and even the creation.
BTW, Bob Whitesel wrote Waypoints about the time this course was being created, which has missional written all over it. He repeatedly emphasizes that a missional church contrasts with an attractional church. An attractional church is focused on how to bring people to itself. A missional church asks what God is doing in one's community and jumps on board with his mission.
Church Planting and Multiplication
When we were just proposing an MDIV in the summer of 2007, I met with all three General Superintendents in Indy to see if the Wesleyan denomination was in support of our Seminary venture. In fact, in a move that seemed unprecedented, all three later came to one of the Seminary Task Force meetings to show their support (Earle Wilson, Tom Arminger, Jerry Pence). Clearly they emphatically supported the venture. Somewhat reminiscent of Paul in Galatians 2:10--they only wanted us to remember church planting and multiplication.
The multiplication piece was also central on their minds because, as I understand it, the survival rate of plants that are part of a parent church (what Bob calls "internal plants") is much higher than plants that are out on their own.
Global Mission
We felt like there should be something on traditional missions in this course. Norm always kept us mindful of the global church in all our designing.
2. If everything went according to plan, the Missional Church course would first be offered in August of 2009. That was over a year later. On the retreat, we had come up with an outline for the course, and Norm Wilson was asked to take a first shot at filling in the concrete blanks. I'm sure Keith Drury was sitting back shaking his head while I fumbled around in the dark about this whole curriculum design piece. We knew what we wanted the general characteristics of the classes to be. But getting a real course into a form we were happy with was another thing.
For example, Norm had never taught an online class at that time, so inevitably his first drafts had a very onsite feel. Ironically, by the time the Seminary was going, we would end up with the opposite problem: our courses ended up so oriented around the online that we had trouble figuring out how to do them onsite at first.
I apologize to that first cohort for the pain I caused them. :-) Here were the initial features of that first template that now seem obviously way too complex and just too much:
- Many weeks had five assignments--way too much. Chip and I ended up pulling out at least one assignment every week even before the first offering of the class was over.
- The first offering of Missional Church had four professors--Chip as the praxis professor, me as Bible, Chris Bounds for theology, Bud Bence for history, and me as "Integration Professor."
- The student had at least two of the above professors each week, which means that there was frequently confusion over who was teaching what.
- Each week had an "Application Paper" assignment in which the learning of the week was applied to the student's local church ministry and captured at the end of the course in an uber-strategic Application Paper.
- The course had running throughout it an "Integration Paper" (IP). In this paper, students pick a pastoral issue and then explore it in relation to the Bible, theology, and church history in order to formulate a pastoral response.
- The student could pick any topic relating to mission for this IP, which means everyone was doing something different. Every student had to pick their own passages, find their own theologians and historians, etc.
3. So let me back up a bit. Norm had created many pieces, but the craziness above (more on complexity later) required a particular kind of crazy to put together into concrete form. I know when Dr. Charles Arn came on as our first faculty hire, July 1, 2009, he must have felt like nothing yet had been done on the course. Little did he know how much water had already flowed under the bridge.
As was his right as a full-time faculty person, we began to join what had been before with his own expertise in the area. This is a natural aspect to any joining of new to old. We had to negotiate what stayed from before, what was modified, what would be new, and what order it would now go in. Chip was, as always, the consummate team player. Bob was going to teach the onsite Missional course in the Fall, so he was also part of the discussion.
This is one of the features of a start-up organization. When you start with such a small number of people, each new person changes the mix much more dramatically than when you are adding someone to an existing organization with an established core and ethos. In the case of the Seminary, the dream was so unlike the prior experience of any new person, that joining must have been something like jumping into ice cold water for each new faculty person. It was like learning a whole new language.
Through no fault of Chip's (indeed, he would have had it done lickity split), the course was only mostly finished by the time the semester began. I was trying to jockey between the voices (not to mention the other aspects of the Dean's job) and be an instructional designer in Blackboard all at the same time.
That leads to another aspect of my stubbornness that I know many questioned especially in the second year of the Seminary. Why doesn't the Seminary just go along with the way the rest of the online programs operate at IWU? My goal was to take the best of both CAS and CAPS. This inevitably led to tensions in the early stages. Online CAPS was designed for 10,000. We were trying to customize for 30.
With regard to Blackboard, for example, I wanted the buttons to be organized by week rather than by type of assignment (you'll notice that all of IWU now does this and other things I changed for the Seminary ;-) We had sixteen week courses, so going under one button for assignments, then having to click out to go to another for discussions, then click out to go to another for submissions, and another for groups seemed insane. Why not just collect all the assignments for each week in one place?
There were other areas where I wanted to customize Blackboard. For example, we wanted students and professors to be able to subscribe to forums (remember that old function in Blackboard when you could get an email when someone posted something? ;-), which wasn't the default format at that time.
Mind you, this was even before the Center for Learning Innovation was created. I remember when Dave Leitzel showed me how to do what I wanted to do in Blackboard. But I would have to create it if I wanted it a customized way.
4. So there was a quick feedback loop back then, with just as quick revisions made. The first cohort knew they were guinea pigs, but there was a certain excitement at being the first cohort that I think made up for it. Everyone had the sense that they were part of something very exciting and innovative. Do you all agree?
The first convocation service was packed in the commons of the student center for that August 2009 start. Keith Drury preached the sermon, "From Great to Good." Chip led us through a litany I had created that stitched together different Bible verses. We took communion by intinction. We tried to come up with a song that might become the Seminary song, something like "And Can It Be" is at Asbury.
The fact that I can't remember what it was indicates that it didn't stick. :-)
Wednesday, February 11, 2015
3. Good leaders collaborate and navigate.
Previously on Seminary take-aways:
1. There are key moments of opportunity.
2. You need the right people.
1. Designing the Seminary's curriculum took some trial and error. The MDIV design team involved no conflict at all in the Summer of 2007. Everyone wanted the best possible result. We had data from a survey Russ had done with a large number of youth pastors. We had benchmarks from other institutions. We had the combined ministry knowledge of the task force.
The degree proposal passed all the internal committees. It passed a visit from the Higher Learning Commission in the Fall of 2008. A separate Seminary task force soon began to explore a whole new branch of the university in the Spring of 2008, one that might seek Association of Theological Schools accreditation (this was not an automatic assumption--we knew the traditional requirements of ATS were in transition. Henry Smith wisely suggested we aim for where it was headed rather than where it currently was).
Part of the design involved the question of order. It made sense to have the course on mission first. Leadership seemed a good second because we thought that the kind of student interested in a practical MDIV would also be very interested in leadership. We also had Bob Whitesel as our first faculty member, who was an expert in both areas. It seemed like an exciting first year line up to create enthusiasm.
Bob introduced us to Chip Arn, son of the well known church growth expert Win Arn. Chip was the first new hire of the Seminary venture. Chip, Russ, and I have fond memories of meeting at Bob Evans and scheming him as part of the new Seminary. I always tell new students that he has the gift of online teaching. Somehow he has managed to be full-time faculty and still live in California. :-)
More tomorrow on the trial and error involved that first year with the curriculum design process and implementation.
2. I've developed some thoughts on collaboration over the years. I agree with Jim Collins that truly great companies involve teams who generate vision and direction together. Great companies are not a "genius with a thousand helpers."
That's not to say that companies cannot achieve great things with directive leaders who aren't very collaborative. It just won't be much fun for those on the inside. Here are some thoughts I've developed on collaboration over the last eighteen years at IWU:
a. There needs to be a clear line of authority to make final decisions after collaboration.
b. Collaborators need to go along with a decision once it has been made.
c. The leader of collaborations should not be self-interested but truly want the greater good.
d. There are also types of people around whom leaders need to navigate in collaboration:
Good leaders collaborate... and sometimes have to circumnavigate.
1. There are key moments of opportunity.
2. You need the right people.
1. Designing the Seminary's curriculum took some trial and error. The MDIV design team involved no conflict at all in the Summer of 2007. Everyone wanted the best possible result. We had data from a survey Russ had done with a large number of youth pastors. We had benchmarks from other institutions. We had the combined ministry knowledge of the task force.
The degree proposal passed all the internal committees. It passed a visit from the Higher Learning Commission in the Fall of 2008. A separate Seminary task force soon began to explore a whole new branch of the university in the Spring of 2008, one that might seek Association of Theological Schools accreditation (this was not an automatic assumption--we knew the traditional requirements of ATS were in transition. Henry Smith wisely suggested we aim for where it was headed rather than where it currently was).
Part of the design involved the question of order. It made sense to have the course on mission first. Leadership seemed a good second because we thought that the kind of student interested in a practical MDIV would also be very interested in leadership. We also had Bob Whitesel as our first faculty member, who was an expert in both areas. It seemed like an exciting first year line up to create enthusiasm.
Bob introduced us to Chip Arn, son of the well known church growth expert Win Arn. Chip was the first new hire of the Seminary venture. Chip, Russ, and I have fond memories of meeting at Bob Evans and scheming him as part of the new Seminary. I always tell new students that he has the gift of online teaching. Somehow he has managed to be full-time faculty and still live in California. :-)
More tomorrow on the trial and error involved that first year with the curriculum design process and implementation.
2. I've developed some thoughts on collaboration over the years. I agree with Jim Collins that truly great companies involve teams who generate vision and direction together. Great companies are not a "genius with a thousand helpers."
That's not to say that companies cannot achieve great things with directive leaders who aren't very collaborative. It just won't be much fun for those on the inside. Here are some thoughts I've developed on collaboration over the last eighteen years at IWU:
a. There needs to be a clear line of authority to make final decisions after collaboration.
b. Collaborators need to go along with a decision once it has been made.
c. The leader of collaborations should not be self-interested but truly want the greater good.
d. There are also types of people around whom leaders need to navigate in collaboration:
- The Dominator - There are some people who either talk too much during collaborations or always try to bully the rest of the group to do what they want or think is right. These people tend to get marginalized. They stop getting put on committees. The team tries to work around them. Woe to those under them when they are in leadership. (I imagine that the more experience and knowledge a person has, the more disciplined they have to be not to talk in collaborations. They need to let others give ideas. What would you say, no one individual should talk more than 25% of the time?)
- The Big Mouth - Those who can't keep the confidentiality or confidences of groups working toward a goal will also eventually find themselves circumnavigated (of course the clever sometimes use such people to spread information without them knowing it).
- The Feet Dragger - There are some people whose main function is to slow down the movement of a project. They want to do more research or look at the risks more closely. As frustrating as these people are, they should be heard. Sometimes they're right. But such people should not be the ones making the decisions. They should work for the leaders but not be the leaders. (I would put most of those who are natural born administrators in this category)
- The Broken Record - Some people are very good at one thing. No matter what you are working on, it comes back to that one thing. They should be heard. If you are talking about that one thing, let them go to town. But they need to be "navigated around" on all the other things.
Good leaders collaborate... and sometimes have to circumnavigate.
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
Wesley on communion, at Oxford, on the Law
We read three more sermons of Wesley this week at IWU.
The Duty of Constant Communion
I've had people suggest this sermon to try to guilt trip Wesleyans into taking communion more often. Don't do it. It backfires. Give them the sermon "Means of Grace" instead.
What works in this sermon is the idea that, if God actually dispenses his mercy to us in communion, then why wouldn't we want it as often as possible? I also agree with Wesley that one shouldn't be fearful about taking communion because you're not perfect. Similarly, I do not at all believe that communion inevitably becomes a ritual if you take it often. I believe I could take communion every day and it not become a "vain repetition."
However, his argument that it is a command of God to do it as often as possible doesn't work. Jesus says, "as often as you drink it." He does not command a specific time frame. It is also unhealthy to think of it as a duty. It is a privilege. It is a great opportunity. In that sense, I fear we are hearing some of Wesley the "almost Christian" in this sermon.
The Almost Christian
This is a masterful little sermon. Wesley preached it at Oxford in 1741. It is masterful for the way it fits its context and for the way it builds its rhetoric.
The text is incredibly clever, Herod tells this to Paul in Acts 26, that Paul almost convinces him to be a Christian.
What Wesley does is he describes a very religious person, a very pious person. Indeed, he is describing himself as a "methodist" in the Holy Club when we was at Oxford before. How wonderful if we had lots of people in our churches who were "almost Christian" like he describes!
He builds to the "altogether Christian." This is the person who loves God and neighbor truly. And at the climax of the letter he gets to the main point. This is the person who is justified by faith.
I wonder if today we should almost preach the sermon backward, since we have plenty who are justified but are hardly as dedicated as the almost Christian he describes.
The Original, Nature, Properties, and Use of the Law
I was really impressed with this theological piece. I think, to a large part, it fits very well with the new perspective on Paul. Wesley recognizes that Paul in Romans 7 is referring to the Jewish Law, but he distinguishes different referents within the Jewish Law when Paul uses the word law.
I know that purists will point out that Jews did not distinguish between ceremonial and moral parts to the Law. But, like it or not, Paul uses the word law to refer to different parts of the Law that roughly correspond to what Wesley means by these terms. The phrase "works of Law," especially in Galatians, largely refers to what Wesley calls the ceremonial law. Similarly, Romans 7, as Wesley says, points to the part of the Law that Paul expected believers to continue to live out.
Wesley also weighs in on some contemporary debates within Protestant. Lutherans and, I believe, some Pietists, rejected the "third use of the law." Luther accepted the first two uses of the Law: 1) to show us that we are sinners, 2) to lead us to Christ. (Wesley does here have the old sense of the law as a schoolmaster, where it would be more appropriate to think of it as our guardian).
Calvin and Luther, however, debated about the third use of the Law--to show us how to live. Wesley here sided squarely with Calvin. The (moral) law shows us how we need to live, by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Also interesting here is Wesley weighing in on divine command theory and the Euthyphro question: "Is good good because God says so, or does God say so because it's good?" For Wesley, good is not arbitrary or a random choice of God's will. Good is good because God is good and thus good is his will.
Of course I have questions about this answer, orthodox and Wesley-an though it be. But my thoughts are only musings, nothing I am willing to stand on.
The Duty of Constant Communion
I've had people suggest this sermon to try to guilt trip Wesleyans into taking communion more often. Don't do it. It backfires. Give them the sermon "Means of Grace" instead.
What works in this sermon is the idea that, if God actually dispenses his mercy to us in communion, then why wouldn't we want it as often as possible? I also agree with Wesley that one shouldn't be fearful about taking communion because you're not perfect. Similarly, I do not at all believe that communion inevitably becomes a ritual if you take it often. I believe I could take communion every day and it not become a "vain repetition."
However, his argument that it is a command of God to do it as often as possible doesn't work. Jesus says, "as often as you drink it." He does not command a specific time frame. It is also unhealthy to think of it as a duty. It is a privilege. It is a great opportunity. In that sense, I fear we are hearing some of Wesley the "almost Christian" in this sermon.
The Almost Christian
This is a masterful little sermon. Wesley preached it at Oxford in 1741. It is masterful for the way it fits its context and for the way it builds its rhetoric.
The text is incredibly clever, Herod tells this to Paul in Acts 26, that Paul almost convinces him to be a Christian.
What Wesley does is he describes a very religious person, a very pious person. Indeed, he is describing himself as a "methodist" in the Holy Club when we was at Oxford before. How wonderful if we had lots of people in our churches who were "almost Christian" like he describes!
He builds to the "altogether Christian." This is the person who loves God and neighbor truly. And at the climax of the letter he gets to the main point. This is the person who is justified by faith.
I wonder if today we should almost preach the sermon backward, since we have plenty who are justified but are hardly as dedicated as the almost Christian he describes.
The Original, Nature, Properties, and Use of the Law
I was really impressed with this theological piece. I think, to a large part, it fits very well with the new perspective on Paul. Wesley recognizes that Paul in Romans 7 is referring to the Jewish Law, but he distinguishes different referents within the Jewish Law when Paul uses the word law.
I know that purists will point out that Jews did not distinguish between ceremonial and moral parts to the Law. But, like it or not, Paul uses the word law to refer to different parts of the Law that roughly correspond to what Wesley means by these terms. The phrase "works of Law," especially in Galatians, largely refers to what Wesley calls the ceremonial law. Similarly, Romans 7, as Wesley says, points to the part of the Law that Paul expected believers to continue to live out.
Wesley also weighs in on some contemporary debates within Protestant. Lutherans and, I believe, some Pietists, rejected the "third use of the law." Luther accepted the first two uses of the Law: 1) to show us that we are sinners, 2) to lead us to Christ. (Wesley does here have the old sense of the law as a schoolmaster, where it would be more appropriate to think of it as our guardian).
Calvin and Luther, however, debated about the third use of the Law--to show us how to live. Wesley here sided squarely with Calvin. The (moral) law shows us how we need to live, by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Also interesting here is Wesley weighing in on divine command theory and the Euthyphro question: "Is good good because God says so, or does God say so because it's good?" For Wesley, good is not arbitrary or a random choice of God's will. Good is good because God is good and thus good is his will.
Of course I have questions about this answer, orthodox and Wesley-an though it be. But my thoughts are only musings, nothing I am willing to stand on.
2. You need the right people.
Previously on Seminary take-aways: There are key moments of opportunity.
1. Bob Whitesel, channeling John Maxwell, perhaps channeling Jim Collins in Good to Great, channeling David Maxwell, has often told me that "You need the right people on the bus, and you need the right people in the right seats on the bus."
Collins' point is that great ventures depend more on the people than on the goal. In fact, he argues that great companies pick the right people before they pick their goals.
In a sense, the team that designed the Seminary had been on the same IWU bus for a long time. There was already a synergy of values and purpose, a common sense of what good buses look like and where they should go. On the one hand, Russ Gunsalus had been the half time Director of Graduate Ministry for several years under the CAPS model designed by now President Wright. This bus already had a winning design:
Russ brought a knowledge of the workings of the adult infrastructure of IWU. He quickly took on the role of the one designated to lose sleep at night worrying about what needed to be done for it to actually happen. He had the title of Chief Operating Officer for the Seminary's first semester.
I am a writer with a penchant for seeing the big picture. I was able to take the ideas of the curriculum groups and see it make it's way into the concrete warp and woof of a week by week curriculum.
President David Wright has often said that it takes a person. These were "right people" to create something innovative. There was an uncanny synergy. As an aside, I see this same team synergy at 12Stone, a real dream team who caught a dream together.
2. That was now over five years ago. In year 4, we faced the fact that the team that designed the curriculum was no longer around. The team had changed. We now had a faculty living with a curriculum they did not design, on a bus they were not driving. It became important to give more ownership of the curriculum to them without losing our distinctives.
I leave as IWU and the Seminary begin a time of strategic planning. That leaves the key questions that we stumbled on at the beginning for the future:
1. Bob Whitesel, channeling John Maxwell, perhaps channeling Jim Collins in Good to Great, channeling David Maxwell, has often told me that "You need the right people on the bus, and you need the right people in the right seats on the bus."
Collins' point is that great ventures depend more on the people than on the goal. In fact, he argues that great companies pick the right people before they pick their goals.
In a sense, the team that designed the Seminary had been on the same IWU bus for a long time. There was already a synergy of values and purpose, a common sense of what good buses look like and where they should go. On the one hand, Russ Gunsalus had been the half time Director of Graduate Ministry for several years under the CAPS model designed by now President Wright. This bus already had a winning design:
- The cohort model is superb. It builds community. It increases retention. It guarantees that you will have enough students for each class to go.
- A strength of the cohort model from a practical standpoint is that it allows you to build one course at a time. You do not have to have a full curriculum (or faculty) to begin. You can quite reasonably build the plane while it is flying. You don't need the landing gear until you have to land.
- A sense that seminary should actually prepare a person to do ministry, that the seminary training most needed by ministers is practical
- A sense that we learn best by doing, a penchant for problem based learning
- An aversion to disciplinary silos, a penchant toward integrating disciplines
- A culture of collaboration and submission to the greater good
- A host of other common paradigms, many relating to the Wesleyan tradition
Russ brought a knowledge of the workings of the adult infrastructure of IWU. He quickly took on the role of the one designated to lose sleep at night worrying about what needed to be done for it to actually happen. He had the title of Chief Operating Officer for the Seminary's first semester.
I am a writer with a penchant for seeing the big picture. I was able to take the ideas of the curriculum groups and see it make it's way into the concrete warp and woof of a week by week curriculum.
President David Wright has often said that it takes a person. These were "right people" to create something innovative. There was an uncanny synergy. As an aside, I see this same team synergy at 12Stone, a real dream team who caught a dream together.
2. That was now over five years ago. In year 4, we faced the fact that the team that designed the curriculum was no longer around. The team had changed. We now had a faculty living with a curriculum they did not design, on a bus they were not driving. It became important to give more ownership of the curriculum to them without losing our distinctives.
I leave as IWU and the Seminary begin a time of strategic planning. That leaves the key questions that we stumbled on at the beginning for the future:
- Who is on the bus? We know the majority of bus riders and their seats.
- Is everyone on the same bus?
- Where is the bus going?
Monday, February 09, 2015
1. There are key moments of opportunity.
Before I transition back to teaching and writing, I thought I would try to capture some of the things I think I've learned these last six years as Dean. I want to go roughly chronologically.
The first is that there are moments of opportunity. They come and go. If you're at the right place at the right time and have the courage to act, great things can happen. You can call them God-moments. You can call them kairos moments. I'm a Wesleyan. I don't think God always manipulates these. But I believe he does sometimes.
What was the key moment in the founding of Wesley Seminary? IWU had considered starting a seminary several times for the Wesleyan Church in both the 80s and 90s. It came somewhat close in the late 90s, with a task force that actually drafted a proposal. Each time, the question of money seems to have derailed it. I might also add that Asbury Seminary had served the denomination so well over the years that many wondered whether it was really worth it to go to such an effort. Did we even have the resources as a denomination?
So what was the key moment that led to the start of a seminary? Here are some of my thoughts:
The moment might easily have passed. A year or two later, President Smith might have been deep into other projects. This moment came just as he was about to become president. President Greenway of Asbury had been reaching out to Wesleyans when his attention was diverted. If he had continued, there might not have been any felt need.
So that's my first take-away. There are moments of opportunity. When they come, you either act or they pass you by. Some people never get these moments. Others miss them because they do not discern the kairos moment.
The first is that there are moments of opportunity. They come and go. If you're at the right place at the right time and have the courage to act, great things can happen. You can call them God-moments. You can call them kairos moments. I'm a Wesleyan. I don't think God always manipulates these. But I believe he does sometimes.
What was the key moment in the founding of Wesley Seminary? IWU had considered starting a seminary several times for the Wesleyan Church in both the 80s and 90s. It came somewhat close in the late 90s, with a task force that actually drafted a proposal. Each time, the question of money seems to have derailed it. I might also add that Asbury Seminary had served the denomination so well over the years that many wondered whether it was really worth it to go to such an effort. Did we even have the resources as a denomination?
So what was the key moment that led to the start of a seminary? Here are some of my thoughts:
- An undergraduate religion faculty and graduate ministry faculty (basically, Russ Gunsalus and Bob Whitesel) who were enthusiastic about starting a seminary.
- The financial stability of IWU in the early 2000s, coupled with a new President (Henry Smith) who came to see the Seminary as a matter of mission.
- A somewhat cooling of the Wesleyan Church's closeness with Asbury. I personally believe that if Jeff Greenway had remained president, Wesley Seminary probably wouldn't exist.
- A potential relationship between IWU and another seminary that fell through. Keith Drury raised the question, "If we only have one seminary card to play in the next 10 years, how do we want to play it?" This situation was the trigger.
The moment might easily have passed. A year or two later, President Smith might have been deep into other projects. This moment came just as he was about to become president. President Greenway of Asbury had been reaching out to Wesleyans when his attention was diverted. If he had continued, there might not have been any felt need.
So that's my first take-away. There are moments of opportunity. When they come, you either act or they pass you by. Some people never get these moments. Others miss them because they do not discern the kairos moment.
Sunday, February 08, 2015
S7. God adopts us as his children; we are born to new life.
This is the seventh 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 adopts us as his children and we are born to new life.
1. Adoption is one of the New Testament images Paul uses to describe what happens especially to Gentiles when they believe. In adoption, God takes those who were not his children and makes them his children. While it should have gone without question that Jews would remain God's children, Paul was distressed to find that the Jews in his day largely did not believe (Rom. 9:2). Many of them were cut out of the tree, even though they were natural branches (Rom. 11:17-24).
Nevertheless, God called him to be a minister to the Gentiles (Gal. 2:7-8; Rom. 11:13). He became a minister of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:18). Now non-Jews could also become sons and daughters of God. "In Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus"(Gal. 3:26-28).
Paul uses this adoption language, interestingly enough, of both Jew and Gentile. Jews were adopted as God's children long ago (Rom. 9:4). Now non-Jews could be adopted as well. But each individual, whether Jew or Gentile, needed to be adopted now (Gal. 4:5). The key to adoption, as we saw in the previous article, is the Holy Spirit. "You did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, 'Abba! Father!' it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God" (Rom. 8:15-16).
Adoption is of course a metaphor, an image to help Paul's churches conceptualize their new identity in Christ. His churches would have understood the metaphor in terms of adoption in that day. Here it is significant to note a key difference with today. We almost always adopt individuals when they are children. But in the ancient world, adoption was often done as adults. For example, Julius Caesar adopted his nephew Augustus, who later became emperor, so that he would become his heir. In some cases, an adopted child might be considered more the child of the adopter than biological children, because they were chosen.
We thus should not in any way minimize the image of God adopting us as his children. Adopted children were every bit as much the children of a father in the ancient world as biological children. And so of course it should be today.
2. Paul goes on in Romans 8:17 to say that if God has adopted us as children, then we are his heirs, "heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him." In fact, Paul shifts the imagery in Romans 8:23 to speak of our adoption taking place at the point of resurrection. In that verse, he speaks of the coming moment when our bodies are "redeemed" from their current enslavement to corruption in this world and they are transformed to become like Christ's resurrection body. We will explore this aspect of adoption in a later article.
3. The New Testament not only uses the image of adoption when it speaks of those who become God's children. It also uses the images of new birth and regeneration. Those who were not alive become alive, and those who were dead come back to life.
Probably the best known use of this metaphor is in John 3, where Jesus is talking to Nicodemus. "You should not be surprised at my saying, 'You must be born again'" (John 3:7, NIV). [1] "What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit" (John 3:6). The kind of birth Jesus has in mind is thus not physical birth, but a spiritual birth. Note that this image of the Spirit as the beginning of a believer's life fits neatly with Paul and Acts, where receiving the Spirit is the key moment in becoming part of God's people.
"If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! (2 Cor. 5:17). [2] Titus 3:5 says, God "saved us, not because of any works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy, through the water of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit." Note again the association of the Holy Spirit with regeneration, along with baptism as the outward sign of the work the Spirit does in the heart.
1 Peter 1:3 similarly says, "By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead." Not only hope, but the believer now should "walk in newness of life" (Rom. 6:4). The new life is not just some fiction. It is a changed life, as we will explore further in the next article.
4. Although we will discuss baptism in a later section on the sacraments, it should be mentioned here in this section on salvation. Baptism is the use of water to symbolize the washing of the sins of an individual. When practiced by immersion, it symbolizes the death of the individual to sin and then the rising out of the water to new life (Rom. 6:4).
Arguably, baptism is not an essential element in the passing from death to life. In Acts 10, Cornelius receives the Holy Spirit and is now part of the people of God before he is baptized. Similarly in Acts 8, the Samaritans are baptized and are not in the people of God because they have not received the Holy Spirit. [3]
Nevertheless, baptism is a normal element in conversion. It is the consistent pattern of the New Testament that those who become believers be baptized. There is thus every reason to include it in the process of conversion and no reason not to practice it. See the later article on baptism in the section on the Sacraments. [4]
5. Several of the passages above hint and what may have actually been the key feature of crossing from death to life for Paul himself. Romans 6:4 associates baptism both with our death and our new life. But a key phrase in this regard is that we are buried "with Christ."
For Paul there is a kind of mystical union that takes place between us and Christ when we become Christians. The Holy Spirit is surely the mechanism for this "mystical participation" in Christ. By way of the Spirit, Christ is in us (Rom. 8:10). And yet, in some way, we are now in Christ as well.
First, we die with Christ. "I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me" (Gal. 2:19-20). We are buried with Christ (Rom. 6:4). We are dead to sin (Rom. 6:2, 11). "If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! (2 Cor. 5:17).
We are incorporated into the "faithfulness of Jesus Christ," that is, his faithfulness to death, even death on a cross (Phil. 2:8). Although the expression, "the faith of Jesus Christ," is a matter of debate among Pauline scholars, many are sympathetic to the sense given it in the Common English Bible (CEB): "We are born Jews—we're not Gentile sinners. However, we know that a person isn't made righteous by the works of the Law but rather through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. We ourselves believed in Christ Jesus so that we could be made righteous by the faithfulness of Christ and not by the works of the Law" (Gal. 2:15-16).
Galatians 2:20 in the CEB is even more intriguing: "The life that I now live in my body, I live by faith, indeed, by the faithfulness of God’s Son, who loved me and gave himself for me." This translation tries to capture what may very well have been another double entendre for Paul. We are both justified or declared right with God on the basis of our human faith, yet the only way this is possible is by our inclusion within the faithfulness of Jesus Christ.
"In Christ" is a far more common expression in Paul's writings that anything like justification. Paul arguably employed justification language when he was sparring with his opponents, but his more natural language is that of being incorporated into Christ.
So just as we have died with Christ, we also rise with Christ. We rise with Christ to a newness of life (Rom. 6:4), just as he rose from the dead. This is not just the resurrection of our bodies in the future. This is a change of life for us now on earth. We no longer let Sin rule in our bodies, because we have died with Christ to Sin (Rom. 6:2-3, 12). The power of the Spirit has broken the power of Sin over the believer (Rom. 8:2).
When a person receives the Holy Spirit, they are born again, born of the Spirit. They are dead to sin because they have died with Christ. They rise like Christ to new life. They are born again. In Christ, they now walk with a newness of life.
Next Sunday: S8. The power of the Spirit breaks the power of Sin.
[1] It is quite possible that Jesus in John wanted his audience to hear a double entendre with the word "again." It can also mean "from above," as the NRSV translates it. The kind of second birth Jesus has in mind, therefore, is a birth from above.
[2] Some people get upset with translations like this one, since they have grown up with a translation like, "he is a new creature" (KJV). Certainly we are welcome to debate interpretations, but it is only ignorance that gets upset at this translation, for the Greek simply says, "If someone in Christ, new creation."
[3] As tempting as it is to mention the thief on the cross, he really does not apply because he is before the arrival of the Spirit on the Day of Pentecost. He is still in the age of the old covenant.
[4] When 1 Peter 3:20 says that Noah's family were "saved by water" and then goes on to speak of baptism saving us by this washing, it should be taken as a metonymy. A metonymy is when something associated with something else is substituted in language for that other thing. So baptism here is not the actual action that saves us but it is very closely associated with what literally saves us, namely God's forgiveness and his filling us with the Holy Spirit.
________________________________
God adopts us as his children and we are born to new life.
1. Adoption is one of the New Testament images Paul uses to describe what happens especially to Gentiles when they believe. In adoption, God takes those who were not his children and makes them his children. While it should have gone without question that Jews would remain God's children, Paul was distressed to find that the Jews in his day largely did not believe (Rom. 9:2). Many of them were cut out of the tree, even though they were natural branches (Rom. 11:17-24).
Nevertheless, God called him to be a minister to the Gentiles (Gal. 2:7-8; Rom. 11:13). He became a minister of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:18). Now non-Jews could also become sons and daughters of God. "In Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus"(Gal. 3:26-28).
Paul uses this adoption language, interestingly enough, of both Jew and Gentile. Jews were adopted as God's children long ago (Rom. 9:4). Now non-Jews could be adopted as well. But each individual, whether Jew or Gentile, needed to be adopted now (Gal. 4:5). The key to adoption, as we saw in the previous article, is the Holy Spirit. "You did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, 'Abba! Father!' it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God" (Rom. 8:15-16).
Adoption is of course a metaphor, an image to help Paul's churches conceptualize their new identity in Christ. His churches would have understood the metaphor in terms of adoption in that day. Here it is significant to note a key difference with today. We almost always adopt individuals when they are children. But in the ancient world, adoption was often done as adults. For example, Julius Caesar adopted his nephew Augustus, who later became emperor, so that he would become his heir. In some cases, an adopted child might be considered more the child of the adopter than biological children, because they were chosen.
We thus should not in any way minimize the image of God adopting us as his children. Adopted children were every bit as much the children of a father in the ancient world as biological children. And so of course it should be today.
2. Paul goes on in Romans 8:17 to say that if God has adopted us as children, then we are his heirs, "heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him." In fact, Paul shifts the imagery in Romans 8:23 to speak of our adoption taking place at the point of resurrection. In that verse, he speaks of the coming moment when our bodies are "redeemed" from their current enslavement to corruption in this world and they are transformed to become like Christ's resurrection body. We will explore this aspect of adoption in a later article.
3. The New Testament not only uses the image of adoption when it speaks of those who become God's children. It also uses the images of new birth and regeneration. Those who were not alive become alive, and those who were dead come back to life.
Probably the best known use of this metaphor is in John 3, where Jesus is talking to Nicodemus. "You should not be surprised at my saying, 'You must be born again'" (John 3:7, NIV). [1] "What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit" (John 3:6). The kind of birth Jesus has in mind is thus not physical birth, but a spiritual birth. Note that this image of the Spirit as the beginning of a believer's life fits neatly with Paul and Acts, where receiving the Spirit is the key moment in becoming part of God's people.
"If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! (2 Cor. 5:17). [2] Titus 3:5 says, God "saved us, not because of any works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy, through the water of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit." Note again the association of the Holy Spirit with regeneration, along with baptism as the outward sign of the work the Spirit does in the heart.
1 Peter 1:3 similarly says, "By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead." Not only hope, but the believer now should "walk in newness of life" (Rom. 6:4). The new life is not just some fiction. It is a changed life, as we will explore further in the next article.
4. Although we will discuss baptism in a later section on the sacraments, it should be mentioned here in this section on salvation. Baptism is the use of water to symbolize the washing of the sins of an individual. When practiced by immersion, it symbolizes the death of the individual to sin and then the rising out of the water to new life (Rom. 6:4).
Arguably, baptism is not an essential element in the passing from death to life. In Acts 10, Cornelius receives the Holy Spirit and is now part of the people of God before he is baptized. Similarly in Acts 8, the Samaritans are baptized and are not in the people of God because they have not received the Holy Spirit. [3]
Nevertheless, baptism is a normal element in conversion. It is the consistent pattern of the New Testament that those who become believers be baptized. There is thus every reason to include it in the process of conversion and no reason not to practice it. See the later article on baptism in the section on the Sacraments. [4]
5. Several of the passages above hint and what may have actually been the key feature of crossing from death to life for Paul himself. Romans 6:4 associates baptism both with our death and our new life. But a key phrase in this regard is that we are buried "with Christ."
For Paul there is a kind of mystical union that takes place between us and Christ when we become Christians. The Holy Spirit is surely the mechanism for this "mystical participation" in Christ. By way of the Spirit, Christ is in us (Rom. 8:10). And yet, in some way, we are now in Christ as well.
First, we die with Christ. "I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me" (Gal. 2:19-20). We are buried with Christ (Rom. 6:4). We are dead to sin (Rom. 6:2, 11). "If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! (2 Cor. 5:17).
We are incorporated into the "faithfulness of Jesus Christ," that is, his faithfulness to death, even death on a cross (Phil. 2:8). Although the expression, "the faith of Jesus Christ," is a matter of debate among Pauline scholars, many are sympathetic to the sense given it in the Common English Bible (CEB): "We are born Jews—we're not Gentile sinners. However, we know that a person isn't made righteous by the works of the Law but rather through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. We ourselves believed in Christ Jesus so that we could be made righteous by the faithfulness of Christ and not by the works of the Law" (Gal. 2:15-16).
Galatians 2:20 in the CEB is even more intriguing: "The life that I now live in my body, I live by faith, indeed, by the faithfulness of God’s Son, who loved me and gave himself for me." This translation tries to capture what may very well have been another double entendre for Paul. We are both justified or declared right with God on the basis of our human faith, yet the only way this is possible is by our inclusion within the faithfulness of Jesus Christ.
"In Christ" is a far more common expression in Paul's writings that anything like justification. Paul arguably employed justification language when he was sparring with his opponents, but his more natural language is that of being incorporated into Christ.
So just as we have died with Christ, we also rise with Christ. We rise with Christ to a newness of life (Rom. 6:4), just as he rose from the dead. This is not just the resurrection of our bodies in the future. This is a change of life for us now on earth. We no longer let Sin rule in our bodies, because we have died with Christ to Sin (Rom. 6:2-3, 12). The power of the Spirit has broken the power of Sin over the believer (Rom. 8:2).
When a person receives the Holy Spirit, they are born again, born of the Spirit. They are dead to sin because they have died with Christ. They rise like Christ to new life. They are born again. In Christ, they now walk with a newness of life.
Next Sunday: S8. The power of the Spirit breaks the power of Sin.
[1] It is quite possible that Jesus in John wanted his audience to hear a double entendre with the word "again." It can also mean "from above," as the NRSV translates it. The kind of second birth Jesus has in mind, therefore, is a birth from above.
[2] Some people get upset with translations like this one, since they have grown up with a translation like, "he is a new creature" (KJV). Certainly we are welcome to debate interpretations, but it is only ignorance that gets upset at this translation, for the Greek simply says, "If someone in Christ, new creation."
[3] As tempting as it is to mention the thief on the cross, he really does not apply because he is before the arrival of the Spirit on the Day of Pentecost. He is still in the age of the old covenant.
[4] When 1 Peter 3:20 says that Noah's family were "saved by water" and then goes on to speak of baptism saving us by this washing, it should be taken as a metonymy. A metonymy is when something associated with something else is substituted in language for that other thing. So baptism here is not the actual action that saves us but it is very closely associated with what literally saves us, namely God's forgiveness and his filling us with the Holy Spirit.
Saturday, February 07, 2015
Wesleyans and Grudem (Satan and demons)
Some of my previous posts in this series include:
Miracles
Prayer
Angels
Chapter 20: Satan and Demons
Grudem is an interesting thinker in that he is a fundamentalist in thinking and yet sympathetic to the charismatic movement. That's an unusual combination.
Accordingly, the amount of detail this chapter covers is quite striking. Grudem has clearly thought about this topic a lot more than most Wesleyans do. In fact, he reminded me of a remark a friend once made about Roman Catholic theology. They have been around so long that they have thought about a lot of things that Wesleyans have not thought much about. They've developed some ideas that, to many of us, may seem a little weird.
In the same way, Grudem has asked questions about demonic activity that most Wesleyans have never even occurred to most Wesleyans.
1. As with angels, there is much in this chapter that Wesleyans either would agree with or would not really have an opinion on.
There are a number of things in the chapter that may be right, but it really seems more or less to be speculation and charismatic tradition.
a. There are not many passages in the Bible about Satan and demons, and much of what is said had deep connections to Jewish apocalyptic thinking. The allusive nature of these comments make it dangerous for us to be very detailed about our thoughts on Satan and demons. It will inevitably be difficult for us to know where the cultural context of apocalyptic Judaism ends and distinctly Christian revelation begins.
Indeed, much of what Christians believe about Satan and demons seems as much a matter of Christian tradition after the New Testament as it does the Bible itself. So we must decide whether God continued to unpack revelation in this area after the Bible or whether this is simply an area in which we should only have some basic core beliefs like those mentioned above.
b. For example, Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 simply were not about Satan in context. Satan is unknown in Isaiah or Ezekiel, and the context of these two chapters is obviously about evil kings at the time of these two prophets. Later interpreters read these passages in a "fuller sense" about Satan. That may be a legitimate "spiritual" way of reading these passages.
Perhaps that is legitimate. The problem is that the New Testament does not clearly endorse this reading. Luke 10:18 may allude to Isaiah 14 when Jesus says that he observed Satan fall from heaven like lightning. But the context of Luke 10 is not the fall of Satan before Adam. It is the exorcist ministry of Jesus' disciples. It either referred to what was happening in Jesus' own ministry or to what is now destined to happen.
c. Again, some of the key verses about the origins of demons come from very obscure verses in the Bible: 2 Peter 2:4, Jude 6. Other possible verses to take into account are 1 Peter 3:19, Genesis 6:1-2, and Rev. 12:4. These are scarcely clear enough to build much in the way of essential Christian belief.
Grudem's hermeneutic, a fundamentalist hermeneutic, takes individual verses and harmonizes them into an overall system. By contrast, because individual verses are most likely to be ambiguous and to be based on historical context, biblical theology should focus on big principles and live with uncertainty about individual verses that do not seem to fit.
What is particularly difficult in relation to these sorts of verses is how deeply entrenched they seem to be in an apocalyptic Jewish worldview. The New Testament only skirts the edges of this paradigm. If we read passages like those again from the perspective of Jewish apocalyptic, we would read Genesis 6 as angels having sex with human women, for that is how 1 Enoch reads this text.
This Jewish background literature gnaws at a person the more you know it. It suggests that Grudem's reading requires a person to treat 1 Peter, 2 Peter, and Jude as if they weren't written at the time and place that they were. Once again, we end up endorsing Grudem's theology of where Satan and demons come from but probably revealing that he does not get that belief from the Bible but from early Christian tradition, which is okay.
d. My personal hunch is that we should take the millennium in Revelation 20 symbolically. No other part of Scripture suggests there will be 1000 years between Jesus' return and the final judgment. And we shouldn't base a doctrine on something that only appears once in Scripture. It's not, however, something to die for. We'll know when it happens.
e. Given how much of the ancient Jewish worldview is involved in NT imagery about Satan and demons, we should probably be cautious in our application. For example, not all instances of epilepsy are demon-possession. It is quite possible that some events that would have been identified as exorcisms in the ancient world would today be identified as schizophrenia or other psychological conditions.
Let me be clear here. I am not suggesting that all instances can be explained as mental disorders. Similarly, I am not discounting any of Jesus' healings. But we are dealing with real people here, and love demands that we be very careful in this area. If medication works, then we should medicate rather than presume a demon is involved. I have no doubt that heinous things have been done by both well-intentioned and less than well-intentioned Christians in this area.
5. In summary, Satan and demons exist. They remain a strong influence for evil in the world, but their power is nothing compared to God's. Jesus has struck the definitive death blow, even if they will not be finally dis-empowered until Jesus returns.
Miracles
Prayer
Angels
Chapter 20: Satan and Demons
Grudem is an interesting thinker in that he is a fundamentalist in thinking and yet sympathetic to the charismatic movement. That's an unusual combination.
Accordingly, the amount of detail this chapter covers is quite striking. Grudem has clearly thought about this topic a lot more than most Wesleyans do. In fact, he reminded me of a remark a friend once made about Roman Catholic theology. They have been around so long that they have thought about a lot of things that Wesleyans have not thought much about. They've developed some ideas that, to many of us, may seem a little weird.
In the same way, Grudem has asked questions about demonic activity that most Wesleyans have never even occurred to most Wesleyans.
1. As with angels, there is much in this chapter that Wesleyans either would agree with or would not really have an opinion on.
- Satan is a fallen angel, as are demons.
- Satan is the head of the demons.
- Satan and demons are opposed to God.
- The power of Satan and demons is limited and doesn't even come close to God's power.
- What the OT calls "gods," we would call demons. I would add that the earliest strata of the OT does not know yet about Satan. There are places in the early OT where God is said to cause something evil (e.g., 2 Sam. 24:1) where later passages indicate it was more precisely Satan (1 Chron. 21:1), with God's permission (see Job 1).
- Jesus exorcist ministry on earth was the binding of Satan, a sign of the inauguration of the kingdom of God. Satan's power is definitively over, even though he is still kicking.
- Demons are active in the world today.
- Not everything evil that happens comes from Satan and demons.
- Demons cannot make a Christian do something, but they can attack and try to influence them.
- Christians need not fear demons. Christians who are spiritually strong can rebuke demons when they know for certain they are dealing with one. Grudem is probably right that whatever Jude 8-10 is about, it is not about the kind of confrontation the seventy had with demons in Luke 10. It may refer to the kind of over-zealous demon seeking of some in the charismatic movement.
There are a number of things in the chapter that may be right, but it really seems more or less to be speculation and charismatic tradition.
- Demons can't read our thoughts or know the future. Sure, why not. But we can imagine that they are smarter than Einstein. There are people who are so intuitive they can more or less see what's coming. You would imagine that angels and demons are smarter.
- Grudem questions some teachings in the charismatic church today. He finds no evidence for there being demons in certain territories or locations (421). He discourages questioning demons for information.
- Grudem questions language of demon possession. He apparently distinguishes that from "having" a demon (Matt. 11:8). I'm not sure I see the difference.
- I seriously doubt that demons are the main culprit behind someone who teaches false doctrine. Evil is not focused in belief but in the heart. We discern evil when we discern a heart of hatred, not when someone has crazy ideas.
- He gives some interesting advice: don't talk glibly about demons (431); focus on people oppressed, not on demons. Don't be overly curious about demons (432).
a. There are not many passages in the Bible about Satan and demons, and much of what is said had deep connections to Jewish apocalyptic thinking. The allusive nature of these comments make it dangerous for us to be very detailed about our thoughts on Satan and demons. It will inevitably be difficult for us to know where the cultural context of apocalyptic Judaism ends and distinctly Christian revelation begins.
Indeed, much of what Christians believe about Satan and demons seems as much a matter of Christian tradition after the New Testament as it does the Bible itself. So we must decide whether God continued to unpack revelation in this area after the Bible or whether this is simply an area in which we should only have some basic core beliefs like those mentioned above.
b. For example, Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 simply were not about Satan in context. Satan is unknown in Isaiah or Ezekiel, and the context of these two chapters is obviously about evil kings at the time of these two prophets. Later interpreters read these passages in a "fuller sense" about Satan. That may be a legitimate "spiritual" way of reading these passages.
Perhaps that is legitimate. The problem is that the New Testament does not clearly endorse this reading. Luke 10:18 may allude to Isaiah 14 when Jesus says that he observed Satan fall from heaven like lightning. But the context of Luke 10 is not the fall of Satan before Adam. It is the exorcist ministry of Jesus' disciples. It either referred to what was happening in Jesus' own ministry or to what is now destined to happen.
c. Again, some of the key verses about the origins of demons come from very obscure verses in the Bible: 2 Peter 2:4, Jude 6. Other possible verses to take into account are 1 Peter 3:19, Genesis 6:1-2, and Rev. 12:4. These are scarcely clear enough to build much in the way of essential Christian belief.
Grudem's hermeneutic, a fundamentalist hermeneutic, takes individual verses and harmonizes them into an overall system. By contrast, because individual verses are most likely to be ambiguous and to be based on historical context, biblical theology should focus on big principles and live with uncertainty about individual verses that do not seem to fit.
What is particularly difficult in relation to these sorts of verses is how deeply entrenched they seem to be in an apocalyptic Jewish worldview. The New Testament only skirts the edges of this paradigm. If we read passages like those again from the perspective of Jewish apocalyptic, we would read Genesis 6 as angels having sex with human women, for that is how 1 Enoch reads this text.
This Jewish background literature gnaws at a person the more you know it. It suggests that Grudem's reading requires a person to treat 1 Peter, 2 Peter, and Jude as if they weren't written at the time and place that they were. Once again, we end up endorsing Grudem's theology of where Satan and demons come from but probably revealing that he does not get that belief from the Bible but from early Christian tradition, which is okay.
d. My personal hunch is that we should take the millennium in Revelation 20 symbolically. No other part of Scripture suggests there will be 1000 years between Jesus' return and the final judgment. And we shouldn't base a doctrine on something that only appears once in Scripture. It's not, however, something to die for. We'll know when it happens.
e. Given how much of the ancient Jewish worldview is involved in NT imagery about Satan and demons, we should probably be cautious in our application. For example, not all instances of epilepsy are demon-possession. It is quite possible that some events that would have been identified as exorcisms in the ancient world would today be identified as schizophrenia or other psychological conditions.
Let me be clear here. I am not suggesting that all instances can be explained as mental disorders. Similarly, I am not discounting any of Jesus' healings. But we are dealing with real people here, and love demands that we be very careful in this area. If medication works, then we should medicate rather than presume a demon is involved. I have no doubt that heinous things have been done by both well-intentioned and less than well-intentioned Christians in this area.
5. In summary, Satan and demons exist. They remain a strong influence for evil in the world, but their power is nothing compared to God's. Jesus has struck the definitive death blow, even if they will not be finally dis-empowered until Jesus returns.
Friday, February 06, 2015
The Next Phase of Schenck
Word is quickly trickling out and it is now official that I am transitioning back to a full-time professor role at the end of the summer. This opportunity was completely unexpected! But after some prayer and reflection, it strongly felt like the right move. God has blessed me with such wonderful opportunities! In the Fall, I will return to the School of Theology and Ministry to resume teaching New Testament and a grab bag of other delightful courses on both the undergraduate and graduate level.
1. Almost six years ago, I was part of the "seed company" to start the first Wesleyan seminary. What a tremendous opportunity, to be the founding Dean of a denomination's first seminary! Not only that, but it has become the fastest growing seminary in the world! Apart from my children, it is truly the crowning achievement of my life thus far. We are waiting on the official count, but we believe we ended January with over 500 students!!!
I hope over the next few weeks to give my sense of the Seminary's story these last six years. When it began, I was charged to take the academic vision of an amazing team of dreamers and see it implemented into a concrete, week-by-week curriculum. We designed and put into electronic form an integrated, practical curriculum the world had never seen before. And it just gets better and better as the faculty continue to perfect it!
For the last five years, I have had the privilege of working with Wayne Schmidt, who has kept the innovation going beyond the curriculum into a set of expanding networks. That is truly one of his greatest gifts, to make connections and forge new relationships. My job was to be his "academic executive pastor," to see those new connections make their way into concrete academic form and to remove any academic obstacles with creative problem solving. That task was like cat-nip for me. We saw the creation of the first online, fully Spanish MDIV. We have seen unique partnerships develop with 12Stone® Church and others.
I was privileged to be the point person in hiring the first faculty of the Seminary. This is an amazing team, all of whom have superpowers. They have to be given credit for much of the growth of the Seminary. For example, Colleen Derr redesigned our MA in Children, Youth, and Family. More than anything else, it is our greatest current growth area. Another significant component of our growth is the Tom Benjamin connection, first forged by Wayne but overwhelmingly sustained by Kwasi Kena and Safiyah Fosua. Joanne Solis-Walker has tirelessly nurtured our Spanish MDIV program. These new venues are the secret to our growth. The whole faculty, though, are mavens in their own right, not least the one man marketing machine we know as Bob Whitesel.
2. So why go back to teaching and writing, you ask. Actually, I suspect this move is a no-brainer for those who know me. I have enjoyed being Dean immensely. I think I brought just the right creativity and flexibility needed for a Seminary that was not going to be academic business as usual. The task called for someone who wasn't an assembly line thinker or an accountant type, someone who could use a pencil to bolt in the landing gear before the plane lands or rewire a curriculum around multiple dead spots just in time to throw the switch. Again, that stuff has been like cat nip for me.
But as my good friend Steve Lennox says (the new President of Kingswood University BTW), just because you can do something doesn't mean you have to. When the opportunity to teach came up unexpectedly, it felt like the right thing to do for this next season. For one thing, there are few things that come more naturally to me than teaching undergraduates. Dean-ing was incredibly stimulating. Some days I felt like Dumbledore in Harry Potter zapping zombies all around with fire; other days I felt like Dumbledore pulling thoughts out of his head with a magic wand.
On the other hand, teaching undergraduate philosophy and New Testament is more like going to King's Island every day. It will be like going on sabbatical.
And you may not know it, but the School of Theology and Ministry (STM) isn't just undergraduate any more. Indeed, I'll be teaching Romans and Galatians to graduate students on campus in the Fall. It may seem a little strange, but one of the secrets to IWU's growth is that we don't get bureaucratically preoccupied with symmetry. President David Wright encourages things to grow where they are most naturally poised to grow. So the Seminary is doing a spectacular job focusing on practical ministry areas like church planting and church health. We even hope to have a DMin up and running by the summer of 2016 (with Bob Whitesel and Leadership in the first cohort).
At the same time, STM's five year KERN program goes into its first graduate year in the Fall. So Seminary students who live in the area will actually be able to take Bible electives with me even as soon as the Fall on the residential campus. Along with the Seminary, STM is also one of the most innovative parts of the university. So stay tuned for exciting things yet to come out of it! I am wondering if it may be poised to be a thought leader within the broader Wesleyan tradition in the way that the Seminary has already become a leader in the area of practical ministry.
3. Obviously there are mixed feelings here. I wish I could be everywhere. Suffice it to say that I will miss the cat nip of the Seminary. I predict it will pass 1000 in five years! It has much glory yet to come, and I hate to miss it! I am destined for Seminary envy!
But no melancholy allowed! I hope to continue doing some teaching for the Seminary. My head, heart, and hands remain open for service in any way I can help.
Who knows what the future holds? Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gifts and continued blessings! I will set my hand to the plow and to new innovations and opportunities yet to come.
1. Almost six years ago, I was part of the "seed company" to start the first Wesleyan seminary. What a tremendous opportunity, to be the founding Dean of a denomination's first seminary! Not only that, but it has become the fastest growing seminary in the world! Apart from my children, it is truly the crowning achievement of my life thus far. We are waiting on the official count, but we believe we ended January with over 500 students!!!
I hope over the next few weeks to give my sense of the Seminary's story these last six years. When it began, I was charged to take the academic vision of an amazing team of dreamers and see it implemented into a concrete, week-by-week curriculum. We designed and put into electronic form an integrated, practical curriculum the world had never seen before. And it just gets better and better as the faculty continue to perfect it!
For the last five years, I have had the privilege of working with Wayne Schmidt, who has kept the innovation going beyond the curriculum into a set of expanding networks. That is truly one of his greatest gifts, to make connections and forge new relationships. My job was to be his "academic executive pastor," to see those new connections make their way into concrete academic form and to remove any academic obstacles with creative problem solving. That task was like cat-nip for me. We saw the creation of the first online, fully Spanish MDIV. We have seen unique partnerships develop with 12Stone® Church and others.
I was privileged to be the point person in hiring the first faculty of the Seminary. This is an amazing team, all of whom have superpowers. They have to be given credit for much of the growth of the Seminary. For example, Colleen Derr redesigned our MA in Children, Youth, and Family. More than anything else, it is our greatest current growth area. Another significant component of our growth is the Tom Benjamin connection, first forged by Wayne but overwhelmingly sustained by Kwasi Kena and Safiyah Fosua. Joanne Solis-Walker has tirelessly nurtured our Spanish MDIV program. These new venues are the secret to our growth. The whole faculty, though, are mavens in their own right, not least the one man marketing machine we know as Bob Whitesel.
2. So why go back to teaching and writing, you ask. Actually, I suspect this move is a no-brainer for those who know me. I have enjoyed being Dean immensely. I think I brought just the right creativity and flexibility needed for a Seminary that was not going to be academic business as usual. The task called for someone who wasn't an assembly line thinker or an accountant type, someone who could use a pencil to bolt in the landing gear before the plane lands or rewire a curriculum around multiple dead spots just in time to throw the switch. Again, that stuff has been like cat nip for me.
But as my good friend Steve Lennox says (the new President of Kingswood University BTW), just because you can do something doesn't mean you have to. When the opportunity to teach came up unexpectedly, it felt like the right thing to do for this next season. For one thing, there are few things that come more naturally to me than teaching undergraduates. Dean-ing was incredibly stimulating. Some days I felt like Dumbledore in Harry Potter zapping zombies all around with fire; other days I felt like Dumbledore pulling thoughts out of his head with a magic wand.
On the other hand, teaching undergraduate philosophy and New Testament is more like going to King's Island every day. It will be like going on sabbatical.
And you may not know it, but the School of Theology and Ministry (STM) isn't just undergraduate any more. Indeed, I'll be teaching Romans and Galatians to graduate students on campus in the Fall. It may seem a little strange, but one of the secrets to IWU's growth is that we don't get bureaucratically preoccupied with symmetry. President David Wright encourages things to grow where they are most naturally poised to grow. So the Seminary is doing a spectacular job focusing on practical ministry areas like church planting and church health. We even hope to have a DMin up and running by the summer of 2016 (with Bob Whitesel and Leadership in the first cohort).
At the same time, STM's five year KERN program goes into its first graduate year in the Fall. So Seminary students who live in the area will actually be able to take Bible electives with me even as soon as the Fall on the residential campus. Along with the Seminary, STM is also one of the most innovative parts of the university. So stay tuned for exciting things yet to come out of it! I am wondering if it may be poised to be a thought leader within the broader Wesleyan tradition in the way that the Seminary has already become a leader in the area of practical ministry.
3. Obviously there are mixed feelings here. I wish I could be everywhere. Suffice it to say that I will miss the cat nip of the Seminary. I predict it will pass 1000 in five years! It has much glory yet to come, and I hate to miss it! I am destined for Seminary envy!
But no melancholy allowed! I hope to continue doing some teaching for the Seminary. My head, heart, and hands remain open for service in any way I can help.
Who knows what the future holds? Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gifts and continued blessings! I will set my hand to the plow and to new innovations and opportunities yet to come.
Friday Novel: God's Power
The story continues.
"So God must be pretty powerful," Tom said.
"Not just very powerful," the angel said. "He is all powerful. There is nothing--and I mean nothing--that he cannot do."
"Can he lie?" Sophie said with a smile.
The gargoyle smiled back. "He can, but he won't. It's impossible for God to lie because he refuses to do it."
The gargoyle continued. "There have been people who have played with words over the years to try to say that God can't do everything. One of the most famous is the question if God can make a rock so big that he can't lift it.
"But it's a trick question. God can lift every rock. That's what it means to say he is all-powerful. It is impossible for God to make a rock he can't lift precisely because he is all-powerful."
"So he wouldn't have all power if he couldn't do that, right?" Tom asked.
"Precisely."
"And how much does God know?" Sophie asked next.
"Let me guess," Tom said. "He knows everything."
"That's right," the angel said.
"Even the future?" Sophie followed.
"Yes. And here's the tricky part. He knows the future even though you haven't yet decided what to do next."
Tom and Sophie didn't know what to say about that. It was an idea too big really to fit in your head.
"What else?" Sophie finally said.
"God is many more things, things that even I don't understand. He is here everywhere. There is nowhere you can go that God is not present.
"But the most important thing to know about God," the angel continued, "is that everything God does, he does with love."
"What about bad things? What about the bad things that happen?" Sophie asked.
"That's a hard one," Tom agreed.
"It is," the gargoyle said. "There a couple things you need to keep in mind with that. One is that God wants people to choose good. There's little pleasure in you doing the right thing if you don't really choose the right thing."
"You lost me there," Sophie said. "Could you say that again?"
"Which feels better?" the angel tried again. "If your dog comes to you because she loves you or if she comes to you because someone is smacking her with a stick?"
"That's not funny," Sophie said. "You shouldn't beat dogs with sticks."
"Don't look at me," Tom said.
"Obviously the dog should come to you because she wants to," Sophie finally answered.
"Exactly. So God does not force us to love him, and most of the time he does not force us to do the right thing. He wants us to choose to do the right thing.
"But if he gives us the power to choose," he continued. "Then some people are going to choose the wrong thing. A lot of the suffering of the world comes from God allowing us to choose."
"And what's the other thing?" Tom said. "What's the other thing we need to remember?"
"The other thing to remember is that God has the big picture in mind. He's not just loving toward you. He is loving toward everyone. Sometimes in order for some bigger good to take place, he allows some unpleasant thing to happen to individuals."
"My head hurts," Tom said.
"Mine too," Sophie added.
"It also helps to realize that some things we think are bad aren't always bad."
"That's a third thing," Tom remarked with a smile.
The angel look at him, but went on anyway. "Like death. Death is hard for the living, but those who die themselves are at peace if they are with God..."
"So God must be pretty powerful," Tom said.
"Not just very powerful," the angel said. "He is all powerful. There is nothing--and I mean nothing--that he cannot do."
"Can he lie?" Sophie said with a smile.
The gargoyle smiled back. "He can, but he won't. It's impossible for God to lie because he refuses to do it."
The gargoyle continued. "There have been people who have played with words over the years to try to say that God can't do everything. One of the most famous is the question if God can make a rock so big that he can't lift it.
"But it's a trick question. God can lift every rock. That's what it means to say he is all-powerful. It is impossible for God to make a rock he can't lift precisely because he is all-powerful."
"So he wouldn't have all power if he couldn't do that, right?" Tom asked.
"Precisely."
"And how much does God know?" Sophie asked next.
"Let me guess," Tom said. "He knows everything."
"That's right," the angel said.
"Even the future?" Sophie followed.
"Yes. And here's the tricky part. He knows the future even though you haven't yet decided what to do next."
Tom and Sophie didn't know what to say about that. It was an idea too big really to fit in your head.
"What else?" Sophie finally said.
"God is many more things, things that even I don't understand. He is here everywhere. There is nowhere you can go that God is not present.
"But the most important thing to know about God," the angel continued, "is that everything God does, he does with love."
"What about bad things? What about the bad things that happen?" Sophie asked.
"That's a hard one," Tom agreed.
"It is," the gargoyle said. "There a couple things you need to keep in mind with that. One is that God wants people to choose good. There's little pleasure in you doing the right thing if you don't really choose the right thing."
"You lost me there," Sophie said. "Could you say that again?"
"Which feels better?" the angel tried again. "If your dog comes to you because she loves you or if she comes to you because someone is smacking her with a stick?"
"That's not funny," Sophie said. "You shouldn't beat dogs with sticks."
"Don't look at me," Tom said.
"Obviously the dog should come to you because she wants to," Sophie finally answered.
"Exactly. So God does not force us to love him, and most of the time he does not force us to do the right thing. He wants us to choose to do the right thing.
"But if he gives us the power to choose," he continued. "Then some people are going to choose the wrong thing. A lot of the suffering of the world comes from God allowing us to choose."
"And what's the other thing?" Tom said. "What's the other thing we need to remember?"
"The other thing to remember is that God has the big picture in mind. He's not just loving toward you. He is loving toward everyone. Sometimes in order for some bigger good to take place, he allows some unpleasant thing to happen to individuals."
"My head hurts," Tom said.
"Mine too," Sophie added.
"It also helps to realize that some things we think are bad aren't always bad."
"That's a third thing," Tom remarked with a smile.
The angel look at him, but went on anyway. "Like death. Death is hard for the living, but those who die themselves are at peace if they are with God..."
Thursday, February 05, 2015
What is distinct about a Wesleyan hermeneutic?
I was confronted with this question the other day. If I were to write an "introduction to studying the Bible" book to become the "go-to" book for colleges and seminaries in the Wesleyan tradition, what would be distinctive about it? What would distinguish it from other hermeneutics and Bible study books out there? There are books in these areas written by individuals in the Wesleyan tradition.
Here were some first thoughts?
Here were some first thoughts?
- Historical method is historical method. I think what is more distinctive are the hermeneutical values in which we place the results of historical study.
- The priority of the Bible for Wesleyans is transformation, both corporate and individual. This is God's doing and it is on God's agenda. The priority is formation rather than information.
- The priorities of the individual for God are 1) our hearts, 2) our behavior, 3) our thoughts. So God is most interested in forming our attitudes and living through the Bible. Ideas are secondary.
- Because of its sense that God's love is his central feature, the Wesleyan tradition naturally gels with an incarnational God, a God who comes to us. As such, we believe God speaks to us whatever our understanding of Scripture may be. We don't have to get to the original meaning to finally hear God. God will meet us without us having to have a certain understanding.
- Thus, the Wesleyan tradition is more open to "more than literal" and figural readings of the Bible than other Protestant traditions. We are not bothered if the NT does not read the OT in context. We are open to the Spirit speaking to us out of context through Scripture. God's goal with the Bible is to meet us, not to give us a homework assignment.
- On a side note, the "new perspectives" are far less a problem for the Wesleyan tradition than they are for the "high Protestant" traditions.
- We are not opposed to the way the Spirit has used the Church to clarify the application of Scripture in the Church. We are more a tradition of prima scriptura rather than sola scriptura.
Wednesday, February 04, 2015
The Theology behind [insert topic]
There's a part of me that bristles a little when I hear something like, "People don't realize the theology behind [X]." In so many words, "If they knew the theology behind [X], they would stop doing it."
To me, there is a skewed assumption here, namely, that thinking and ideas are the bottom line behind our actions and practices. It assumes that the fundamental basis or the fundamental bedrock of ethics is a system of ideas.
But there is only one fundamental basis for ethics: "Love the Lord your God" and "Love your neighbor as yourself." Everything else is the playing out of this intention in the light of concrete consequences and implications. Ethics is not based on a system of ideas. It is the interplay of intentions and consequences.
Now, ideas come into play insofar as they represent our intentions or impact others. But there is an all too common Platonism in Christian-speak, as if the ideas are fundamental and the world simply a shadowy embodiment of them. But Plato was a screwy nut-ball. Our ideas are shadowy representations of the real world.
As an example, should we have an American flag on the pulpit? It's an odd thing to be sure. Are we saying that our love of the US is in some way comparable to our love of God? Are we even saying that we worship America in some way as we worship God? What are our motivations for putting the flag on the pulpit?
I suspect they are usually innocent and the consequences not too significant, which is why this is not usually that big of a deal to me. However, the confusion of country with religion as an object of love can come to have bad consequences or embody bad loves. At that point, the confusion may need to be addressed in concrete terms.
Sure, you might say that this discussion is exploring the underlying theology of flags on pulpits. I bristle to put it that way. I would rather say we are exploring our intentions and attitudes. We are exploring our loves.
Let me at least say this. You may not win a lot of arguments with lead practitioners using the "theology behind" argument. Idealists make for good martyrs, but most of them don't change the world much. Most just end up really disappointed.
Talk motives and consequences. Them I've heard of.
To me, there is a skewed assumption here, namely, that thinking and ideas are the bottom line behind our actions and practices. It assumes that the fundamental basis or the fundamental bedrock of ethics is a system of ideas.
But there is only one fundamental basis for ethics: "Love the Lord your God" and "Love your neighbor as yourself." Everything else is the playing out of this intention in the light of concrete consequences and implications. Ethics is not based on a system of ideas. It is the interplay of intentions and consequences.
Now, ideas come into play insofar as they represent our intentions or impact others. But there is an all too common Platonism in Christian-speak, as if the ideas are fundamental and the world simply a shadowy embodiment of them. But Plato was a screwy nut-ball. Our ideas are shadowy representations of the real world.
As an example, should we have an American flag on the pulpit? It's an odd thing to be sure. Are we saying that our love of the US is in some way comparable to our love of God? Are we even saying that we worship America in some way as we worship God? What are our motivations for putting the flag on the pulpit?
I suspect they are usually innocent and the consequences not too significant, which is why this is not usually that big of a deal to me. However, the confusion of country with religion as an object of love can come to have bad consequences or embody bad loves. At that point, the confusion may need to be addressed in concrete terms.
Sure, you might say that this discussion is exploring the underlying theology of flags on pulpits. I bristle to put it that way. I would rather say we are exploring our intentions and attitudes. We are exploring our loves.
Let me at least say this. You may not win a lot of arguments with lead practitioners using the "theology behind" argument. Idealists make for good martyrs, but most of them don't change the world much. Most just end up really disappointed.
Talk motives and consequences. Them I've heard of.
Tuesday, February 03, 2015
Wesley's The Way to the Kingdom
This Spring the Honor's College at IWU has initiated reading groups on campus that are reading through a number of Wesley's sermons. One of them I read this morning is titled, "The Way to the Kingdom."
1. Wesley's main text is Mark 1:15: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news" (NRSV). Some will recognize this verse as quite possibly the cornerstone of Jesus' message on earth. Of course Wesley did not have the benefit of the last two hundred fifty years of biblical studies. In their apocalyptic context, Jesus and John the Baptist likely referred to the coming in-breaking of God's rule to the earth in a very concrete and visible kingdom, for which we still look.
But as a child of his age, Wesley tied this kingdom to true, inward religion. He connects the phrase "the kingdom of God" in Mark to the phrase in Romans 14:17: "The kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit" (NRSV). Wesley takes this verse to mean that the kingdom of God is something inside us. I suspect more is going on here for Paul than Wesley sees in this verse, because he was 1700 years removed from Paul. A more literal paraphrase of Paul would go something like this: "The kingdom of God, which we await to come to earth fully when Christ returns, will not be focused on the purity rules of the Jewish Law and should not be now. Rather, the key concern in God's kingdom is that we be righteous and that we be at peace with one another and that we be a community of joy."
2. Here we get to an essential point and one that I think is particularly important for the Wesleyan tradition. Neo-evangelicalism, because it was born out of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, is very focused on the original, historical meaning of the Bible (although it sets sharp boundaries on the conclusions a scholar can reach using historical-method). If you go to the pillar institutions of evangelicalism--Wheaton, Gordon-Conwell, Trinity, or any number of others--the focus of their biblical studies program is not only on how to read the Bible in context but you will find an assumption that this meaning is more or less the meaning we need to know to hear God in the Bible. In so many words, unless you learn Greek, Hebrew, and do extensive homework, you are not equipped to read the Bible "for all its worth."
Wesley was not a scholar of the original meaning, but his theology was usually spot on. We can do the hard original meaning research and the sophisticated hermeneutics work to come up with the same things he came up just by catching the spirit of Scripture, even if he was not in a position to know the letter with precision (and truth be told, even experts disagree frequently on this).
I am not against the original meaning at all, what the Bible really meant. I'm out of a job as a Biblehead if the church ever throws the real meaning of the Bible away completely. What I am saying is that the original meaning task is not the "be all and end all" of the Bible for the Church. It is relevant. It is part of it. But the theological task in which it sits is more primary. Our theology and ethics find their origins in the original meaning of the Bible, but they come to us within a framework that the Spirit has worked out over time. The Church does not read the Bible so much to "get back" as to move forward.
3. So in this sermon, Wesley argues that true religion is a matter of the heart, not of orthodoxy or ritual. "Neither does religion consist in orthodoxy or right opinion which... are not in the heart, but the understanding" (56). "The nature of religion is so far from consisting in these, in forms of worship or rites and ceremonies" (55).
Remember of course that Wesley was quite concerned to be orthodox and that, as an Anglican, his ritual practices were far more extensive than the typical Wesleyan Church (a lot of my seminary students would be wierded out thinking he was Catholic ;-) But these were not the essence of religion for him. These were not the heart of the matter.
"This alone is religion, truly so called; this alone is in the sight of God of great price. the Apostle sums it all up in three particulars--'righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost'" (56).
Faith "is not... a bare assent to the truth of the Bible, of the articles of our creed, or of all that is contained in the Old and New Testament... It is... a sure trust in the mercy of God through Christ Jesus" (60). More properly, it is faith in the God who raised Jesus from the dead and, thus, in Jesus as Lord, but Wesley is completely right in what it is not.
4. I found this sermon refreshing. I put smiley faces in the margins when he broke exegetical rules or got an interpretation wrong. He mixes Scriptures together from different places in the Bible. He has a "soterian" view of the gospel (60). As a child of the Enlightenment, his filter is individual focused in places where Paul was surely more corporate in thinking.
But Wesley's message is spot on. It is not that orthodoxy is unimportant, and there is much a Christian can gain from the sacraments. But these do not make someone a Christian. BTW, this also applies to neo-evangelical orthodoxy or even the expected practices of holiness communities. We may find that we have just changed the referent of these terms but still missed the point.
Repentance for our wrongdoings and faith in Christ--this is what God expects of our hearts. Love of God and love of our neighbor, this is what God expects in our lives. God expects true righteousness, and this will result in peace and joy.
1. Wesley's main text is Mark 1:15: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news" (NRSV). Some will recognize this verse as quite possibly the cornerstone of Jesus' message on earth. Of course Wesley did not have the benefit of the last two hundred fifty years of biblical studies. In their apocalyptic context, Jesus and John the Baptist likely referred to the coming in-breaking of God's rule to the earth in a very concrete and visible kingdom, for which we still look.
But as a child of his age, Wesley tied this kingdom to true, inward religion. He connects the phrase "the kingdom of God" in Mark to the phrase in Romans 14:17: "The kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit" (NRSV). Wesley takes this verse to mean that the kingdom of God is something inside us. I suspect more is going on here for Paul than Wesley sees in this verse, because he was 1700 years removed from Paul. A more literal paraphrase of Paul would go something like this: "The kingdom of God, which we await to come to earth fully when Christ returns, will not be focused on the purity rules of the Jewish Law and should not be now. Rather, the key concern in God's kingdom is that we be righteous and that we be at peace with one another and that we be a community of joy."
2. Here we get to an essential point and one that I think is particularly important for the Wesleyan tradition. Neo-evangelicalism, because it was born out of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, is very focused on the original, historical meaning of the Bible (although it sets sharp boundaries on the conclusions a scholar can reach using historical-method). If you go to the pillar institutions of evangelicalism--Wheaton, Gordon-Conwell, Trinity, or any number of others--the focus of their biblical studies program is not only on how to read the Bible in context but you will find an assumption that this meaning is more or less the meaning we need to know to hear God in the Bible. In so many words, unless you learn Greek, Hebrew, and do extensive homework, you are not equipped to read the Bible "for all its worth."
Wesley was not a scholar of the original meaning, but his theology was usually spot on. We can do the hard original meaning research and the sophisticated hermeneutics work to come up with the same things he came up just by catching the spirit of Scripture, even if he was not in a position to know the letter with precision (and truth be told, even experts disagree frequently on this).
I am not against the original meaning at all, what the Bible really meant. I'm out of a job as a Biblehead if the church ever throws the real meaning of the Bible away completely. What I am saying is that the original meaning task is not the "be all and end all" of the Bible for the Church. It is relevant. It is part of it. But the theological task in which it sits is more primary. Our theology and ethics find their origins in the original meaning of the Bible, but they come to us within a framework that the Spirit has worked out over time. The Church does not read the Bible so much to "get back" as to move forward.
3. So in this sermon, Wesley argues that true religion is a matter of the heart, not of orthodoxy or ritual. "Neither does religion consist in orthodoxy or right opinion which... are not in the heart, but the understanding" (56). "The nature of religion is so far from consisting in these, in forms of worship or rites and ceremonies" (55).
Remember of course that Wesley was quite concerned to be orthodox and that, as an Anglican, his ritual practices were far more extensive than the typical Wesleyan Church (a lot of my seminary students would be wierded out thinking he was Catholic ;-) But these were not the essence of religion for him. These were not the heart of the matter.
"This alone is religion, truly so called; this alone is in the sight of God of great price. the Apostle sums it all up in three particulars--'righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost'" (56).
Faith "is not... a bare assent to the truth of the Bible, of the articles of our creed, or of all that is contained in the Old and New Testament... It is... a sure trust in the mercy of God through Christ Jesus" (60). More properly, it is faith in the God who raised Jesus from the dead and, thus, in Jesus as Lord, but Wesley is completely right in what it is not.
4. I found this sermon refreshing. I put smiley faces in the margins when he broke exegetical rules or got an interpretation wrong. He mixes Scriptures together from different places in the Bible. He has a "soterian" view of the gospel (60). As a child of the Enlightenment, his filter is individual focused in places where Paul was surely more corporate in thinking.
But Wesley's message is spot on. It is not that orthodoxy is unimportant, and there is much a Christian can gain from the sacraments. But these do not make someone a Christian. BTW, this also applies to neo-evangelical orthodoxy or even the expected practices of holiness communities. We may find that we have just changed the referent of these terms but still missed the point.
Repentance for our wrongdoings and faith in Christ--this is what God expects of our hearts. Love of God and love of our neighbor, this is what God expects in our lives. God expects true righteousness, and this will result in peace and joy.
Monday, February 02, 2015
S6. God fills us with his Holy Spirit as a seal of ownership.
This is the sixth 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 fills us with his Holy Spirit as a seal of ownership on us.
1. We can repent, by the power of the Spirit. We have have faith, by the power of the Holy Spirit. God can forgive us. God can declare us cleared of all charges in his divine court and justified. We can even get baptized in water.
But the most fundamental feature of "conversion," of crossing from death to life. The "without which it hasn't happened" (sine qua non) is the Holy Spirit. "Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him" (Rom. 8:9). "Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit" (Acts 2:38).
The Holy Spirit is God's brand on us, his seal of ownership. "It is God who... has anointed us, by putting his seal on us and giving us his Spirit in our hearts as a first installment. " (2 Cor. 1:21-22). The Holy Spirit is the "earnest" of our inheritance, which is both a guarantee of what is to come but also a down payment of it (2 Cor. 5:5; Eph. 1:13-14).
In the book of Acts, the Holy Spirit is the crucial factor in salvation. In Samaria, there is a problem because individuals have been baptized but not received the Spirit. Peter and John come up to solve this problem (Acts 8:14-17). In Acts 10:44-48, no further discussion is needed about the possibility that uncircumcised Gentiles can be saved after Cornelius and his soldiers receive the Holy Spirit. They immediately assume baptism is the next step, even though the cleansing of their hearts is already accomplished (Acts 15:9).
At Ephesus, Paul does not consider baptism in the manner of John the Baptist to be effective, because they did not receive the Holy Spirit with it (Acts 19:2). He lays hands on them after they are baptized in Jesus' name, and they receive the Holy Spirit.
In all these instances, the Holy Spirit is the most crucial element in "conversion," inclusion in the people of God, of salvation. Repentance is not always mentioned. Faith can surely be assumed in the vast majority of cases, but is not always mentioned. [1] Baptism can be after the fact. Justification is of almost no interest to Acts. But no one is part of God's people unless they receive the Holy Spirit. [2]
2. Justification and sanctification have traditionally been considered twin sides to conversion to Christ. Justification has been considered the legal side of conversion. We are declared "not guilty" in the divine court. We are considered to be righteous in God's eyes and the divine court. Righteousness is imputed to us as a legal fiction--we are not really righteous, but we are considered such in the eyes of the law. [3]
Sanctification is a term that has then been used to refer to the actual righteousness that God imparts to us. He actually makes us righteous through the Holy Spirit that he imparts to us. The Wesleyan tradition sometimes calls this event, "initial" sanctification. God purifies us of our sins and positively makes us righteous. In Wesley's view, the person who is born to new life by the Spirit may still struggle against sin, but should still be able to make the right choices when faced with temptation because the Holy Spirit is within us.
There is nothing wrong with this theology, although it is probably not what sanctification terminology means in the New Testament. To "sanctify" (hagiazo) means to make holy (hagios). To be holy means, in its oldest meaning, to set something apart as God's. It is hard for us in our Western paradigms to make sense of this idea. Perhaps you might think of magnetizing something or touching something that belongs to someone who gets very upset when you touch his or her stuff. [4] You take off your shoes when you are on holy ground (e.g., Exod. 3:5). You treat the holy with great reverence and respect--it belongs to God.
Yet "to sanctify" also can have a sense of purifying something. For example, in Hebrews, to be sanctified has a primary sense of being cleansed of sins (e.g., Heb. 10:10). [5] Believers are set apart as belonging to God (2 Thess. 2:13) and, accordingly, they are not only purified from sin but must remain pure and undefiled (e.g., 1 Thess. 4:3). [6]
3. We might ask, given our scientific worldview, what exactly or literally it might mean to be filled with the Holy Spirit. In Paul's worldview, he may very well have pictured literal wind of a sort within us, a little bit of heavenly substance. After all, for the Spirit to be a down payment, we might picture a little bit of what is to come inside us. Hebrews 6:4 speaks of "tasting" the heavenly gift.
With the clarity of Christian theology, we have to believe that the Spirit has always been everywhere present. The difference is thus more on what we experience than on the presence of the Spirit. The person filled with the Spirit is the person empowered to do God's will. Receiving or being filled or being baptized is thus language about what we experience than any real change in God's presence, which was always there to begin with.
It is the Holy Spirit that makes it possible for us to love each other, the essence of righteousness. It is the Holy Spirit that empowers us to make the right choices, to choose to do the right thing (in mind and body) rather than the wrong thing. This power in our thoughts and actions is God's gift to us, the stamp on our lives that shows we are his.
Those who have faith in the atoning death of Jesus and put their faith in him as Lord experience the power of the Holy Spirit over their lives. They are "filled" with the Spirit.
Next Sunday: S7. God adopts us as his children and we are born to new life.
[1] It is possible to be filled with the Holy Spirit without exercising faith, as happens to John the Baptist in Luke 1:15. John is filled with the Spirit before he is even born.
[2] Most consider "receiving," "being filled with," and "being baptized by" the Holy Spirit to be more or less synonymous expressions in Acts, all of which relate to conversion. See James D. G. Dunn, Baptism in the Holy Spirit: A Re-examination of the New Testament on the Gift of the Spirit (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1977).
[3] It is important for the Calvinist tradition to say that Christ's righteousness is considered our righteousness or that when God looks at us, he now sees Christ. This is a nice picture, but it is nowhere stated in Scripture. The meaning of 2 Corinthians 5:21 probably was not about a transfer of sin and righteousness. It is a poetic expression that might be more literally unpacked something like the following: God made Jesus, who did not have any sin, to become a sin offering so that we might demonstrate the righteousness of God. See N. T. Wright, "On Becoming in the Righteousness of God," Pauline Theology, vol. 2, ed by David M. Hay (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 200-8.
Having said that, it is hard not to hear a poetic play in 2 Corinthians 5:21, a poetic double entendre--Christ goes from righteous to sin. We go from sin to righteous. Nevertheless, while Paul does in at least one instance allude to a transfer of our miasma, our pollution and curse to Christ (Gal. 3:13), Paul never clearly speaks of the transfer of Christ's righteousness to us.
[4] I am not here emphasizing the angry part of this analogy, but the way a person engages something that is holy, namely, with great respect and caution.
[5] This is also more or less what Hebrews means when it speaks of "perfecting" a person who trusts in Christ's sacrifice.
[6] This language seems especially appropriate in the area of sexual defilement, where Paul retains traces of Levitical purity in his worldview.
________________________________
God fills us with his Holy Spirit as a seal of ownership on us.
1. We can repent, by the power of the Spirit. We have have faith, by the power of the Holy Spirit. God can forgive us. God can declare us cleared of all charges in his divine court and justified. We can even get baptized in water.
But the most fundamental feature of "conversion," of crossing from death to life. The "without which it hasn't happened" (sine qua non) is the Holy Spirit. "Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him" (Rom. 8:9). "Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit" (Acts 2:38).
The Holy Spirit is God's brand on us, his seal of ownership. "It is God who... has anointed us, by putting his seal on us and giving us his Spirit in our hearts as a first installment. " (2 Cor. 1:21-22). The Holy Spirit is the "earnest" of our inheritance, which is both a guarantee of what is to come but also a down payment of it (2 Cor. 5:5; Eph. 1:13-14).
In the book of Acts, the Holy Spirit is the crucial factor in salvation. In Samaria, there is a problem because individuals have been baptized but not received the Spirit. Peter and John come up to solve this problem (Acts 8:14-17). In Acts 10:44-48, no further discussion is needed about the possibility that uncircumcised Gentiles can be saved after Cornelius and his soldiers receive the Holy Spirit. They immediately assume baptism is the next step, even though the cleansing of their hearts is already accomplished (Acts 15:9).
At Ephesus, Paul does not consider baptism in the manner of John the Baptist to be effective, because they did not receive the Holy Spirit with it (Acts 19:2). He lays hands on them after they are baptized in Jesus' name, and they receive the Holy Spirit.
In all these instances, the Holy Spirit is the most crucial element in "conversion," inclusion in the people of God, of salvation. Repentance is not always mentioned. Faith can surely be assumed in the vast majority of cases, but is not always mentioned. [1] Baptism can be after the fact. Justification is of almost no interest to Acts. But no one is part of God's people unless they receive the Holy Spirit. [2]
2. Justification and sanctification have traditionally been considered twin sides to conversion to Christ. Justification has been considered the legal side of conversion. We are declared "not guilty" in the divine court. We are considered to be righteous in God's eyes and the divine court. Righteousness is imputed to us as a legal fiction--we are not really righteous, but we are considered such in the eyes of the law. [3]
Sanctification is a term that has then been used to refer to the actual righteousness that God imparts to us. He actually makes us righteous through the Holy Spirit that he imparts to us. The Wesleyan tradition sometimes calls this event, "initial" sanctification. God purifies us of our sins and positively makes us righteous. In Wesley's view, the person who is born to new life by the Spirit may still struggle against sin, but should still be able to make the right choices when faced with temptation because the Holy Spirit is within us.
There is nothing wrong with this theology, although it is probably not what sanctification terminology means in the New Testament. To "sanctify" (hagiazo) means to make holy (hagios). To be holy means, in its oldest meaning, to set something apart as God's. It is hard for us in our Western paradigms to make sense of this idea. Perhaps you might think of magnetizing something or touching something that belongs to someone who gets very upset when you touch his or her stuff. [4] You take off your shoes when you are on holy ground (e.g., Exod. 3:5). You treat the holy with great reverence and respect--it belongs to God.
Yet "to sanctify" also can have a sense of purifying something. For example, in Hebrews, to be sanctified has a primary sense of being cleansed of sins (e.g., Heb. 10:10). [5] Believers are set apart as belonging to God (2 Thess. 2:13) and, accordingly, they are not only purified from sin but must remain pure and undefiled (e.g., 1 Thess. 4:3). [6]
3. We might ask, given our scientific worldview, what exactly or literally it might mean to be filled with the Holy Spirit. In Paul's worldview, he may very well have pictured literal wind of a sort within us, a little bit of heavenly substance. After all, for the Spirit to be a down payment, we might picture a little bit of what is to come inside us. Hebrews 6:4 speaks of "tasting" the heavenly gift.
With the clarity of Christian theology, we have to believe that the Spirit has always been everywhere present. The difference is thus more on what we experience than on the presence of the Spirit. The person filled with the Spirit is the person empowered to do God's will. Receiving or being filled or being baptized is thus language about what we experience than any real change in God's presence, which was always there to begin with.
It is the Holy Spirit that makes it possible for us to love each other, the essence of righteousness. It is the Holy Spirit that empowers us to make the right choices, to choose to do the right thing (in mind and body) rather than the wrong thing. This power in our thoughts and actions is God's gift to us, the stamp on our lives that shows we are his.
Those who have faith in the atoning death of Jesus and put their faith in him as Lord experience the power of the Holy Spirit over their lives. They are "filled" with the Spirit.
Next Sunday: S7. God adopts us as his children and we are born to new life.
[1] It is possible to be filled with the Holy Spirit without exercising faith, as happens to John the Baptist in Luke 1:15. John is filled with the Spirit before he is even born.
[2] Most consider "receiving," "being filled with," and "being baptized by" the Holy Spirit to be more or less synonymous expressions in Acts, all of which relate to conversion. See James D. G. Dunn, Baptism in the Holy Spirit: A Re-examination of the New Testament on the Gift of the Spirit (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1977).
[3] It is important for the Calvinist tradition to say that Christ's righteousness is considered our righteousness or that when God looks at us, he now sees Christ. This is a nice picture, but it is nowhere stated in Scripture. The meaning of 2 Corinthians 5:21 probably was not about a transfer of sin and righteousness. It is a poetic expression that might be more literally unpacked something like the following: God made Jesus, who did not have any sin, to become a sin offering so that we might demonstrate the righteousness of God. See N. T. Wright, "On Becoming in the Righteousness of God," Pauline Theology, vol. 2, ed by David M. Hay (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 200-8.
Having said that, it is hard not to hear a poetic play in 2 Corinthians 5:21, a poetic double entendre--Christ goes from righteous to sin. We go from sin to righteous. Nevertheless, while Paul does in at least one instance allude to a transfer of our miasma, our pollution and curse to Christ (Gal. 3:13), Paul never clearly speaks of the transfer of Christ's righteousness to us.
[4] I am not here emphasizing the angry part of this analogy, but the way a person engages something that is holy, namely, with great respect and caution.
[5] This is also more or less what Hebrews means when it speaks of "perfecting" a person who trusts in Christ's sacrifice.
[6] This language seems especially appropriate in the area of sexual defilement, where Paul retains traces of Levitical purity in his worldview.
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