Month: June 2010

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Law and Policy Theology

A Theological-Legal Reflection on Conduct and Status

Many religious commentators on the CLS v. Martinez case are upset by the majority’s rejection of the argument that discrimination based on conduct differs from discrimination based on status. Some religious conservatives are keen to promote such a distinction because it would help immunize discrimination based on sexual conduct from strict constitutional scrutiny. For example, a church that refuses to hire people who practice a homosexual lifestyle – in other words, homosexuals who have sex – would not necessarily be discriminating against homosexuals as a class of people, particularly if the church is willing to hire people with homosexual inclinations who remain celibate.

The notion that a person’s internal inclinations and external actions can so easily be separated grates hard against the identity politics that underwrite our culture war debates. At some point, of course, nearly everyone agrees that certain inclinations must be stifled – such as the pedophile’s urge to sexualize children. But beyond extreme cases in which grave harm is inflicted on unwilling third parties, our majority culture’s highest possible value is the freedom of each individual to realize and actualize his or her own inclinations (or in law-review friendly language, to increase social welfare through the maximization of individual utilities and the minimization of externalities).

In a liberal, pluralistic democracy, it seems hard to suggest any other meaningful rule. If “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are “inalienable rights,” and if the core purpose of our polis is the preservation of those rights, conduct-status distinctions must be anathema. A person is not free to pursue his libertarian happiness if he is restrained from acting in ways that would satisfy his inclinations without harming innocent third parties. When restraints must be imposed to protect the freedoms of others, these are cases of externality costs, not cases in which the utility of an inclination can be separated from the utility of the conduct produced by the inclination. Because the proper balance of utilities cannot be determined exhaustively ex ante, the best approach is to agree on a broad social contract framework for resolving disputes. Or so the neo-Rawlsian story goes.

From the viewpoint of Christian theology, this sort of libertarian theory is idolatry. The true telos of life is not to actualize one’s self by maximizing one’s own utilities. Rather, the goal of the good life is to become united with Christ. This involves the loss of one’s old self, with its inexorable inclinations toward sin and violence, and in its place the resurrection of a “new creation,” in joyful fellowship with God, with God’s creation, and with the community of God’s people, sharing in some mysterious measure in the perichoretic fellowship of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The libertarian self dies so that the self created by God for happy communion may live.

This is why the Bible draws no artificial distinction between what we do with our bodies and the state of our inner selves. In fact, much of the New Testament’s epistolary literature deals with the Gnostic heresy of that the body is an illusion. The early Gnostic sects tended towards either harsh asceticism or sexual license, because, for them, only the “spiritual” or inner plane really mattered. The Bible, and particularly St. Paul, will have none of this kind of dualism:

Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never! Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, “The two will become one flesh.” But he who unites himself with the Lord is one with him in spirit.

Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body. 19Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body. (1 Cor. 6:12-20).

For Christian anthropology, the inner and outer “self” is an integrated whole. There can be no sharp distinction between “inclinations” and “conduct.” A Constitutional standard that would distinguish “conduct” and “status” is foreign to a Christian view of the human person.

In this light, it seems surprising that so many of the Christian lawyers and organizations involved in the CLS v. Martinez case vigorously argued for a conduct / status distinction.  I’m tempted to mitigate my surprise with a cynical nod towards the expediencies of litigation. If you want to “win” in the Supreme Court, a robust Pauline anthropology won’t do. The Court might, however, understand a legalistic approach to “religion,” under which communities are constructed through adherence to somewhat arbitrary rules.

Perhaps this argument is plausible: “religion” essentially is about external compliance, not internal transformation and the resurrection of the whole person. That is at least one possible sociological definition of “religion,” and it might be important to carve out spaces for people whose life plans intersect with communities that impose such rules.

Another potentially robust, if maybe still a bit cynical, explanation is that the Christian groups advocating an inclination / conduct distinction don’t want to be seen as illiberal. If the CLS excludes people engaged in homosexual activity from membership, it is not because the CLS is “anti-gay”; it is only a certain kind of conduct, not the person’s inner self, which is in question.  But all this is sophistry. Indeed, there were “teachers of the law” in Jesus’ day who took a similar view. According to Jesus, these lawyers were no better than “whitewashed tombs” (Matt. 23:27).

The truth is that all Christian organizations that exclude people from membership based on homosexual behavior are “anti-gay,” insofar as “gay” is a definition of identity linked to a person’s deep inclinations. For that matter, Christian organizations can and often should be “anti-heterosexual,” “anti-business,” “anti-capitalist,” “anti-family,” “anti-life,” and so on, insofar as any of these categories of desire take the place of God. Just ask the one after whom the Christian faith is named: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26).

Of course, they way I’ve framed the question is problematic, because the posture of a Christian community shouldn’t be “anti” anything unless we first understand that “love,” particularly the love of God revealed in Christ, is everything. We are all about becoming united with God in love through Christ, in anticipation of the day when “God may be all in all.” (1 Cor. 15:28). It is love that excludes certain inclinations, desires, and conduct. Love compels us to order our desires and our conduct so that God’s community of shalom can be established. Love burns away all that which tends to dissolve this community: misplaced desire and misdirected conduct, all of a piece.

Christian communities are first and above all pro-love. “God is love” (1 John 4:8), and love, we recognize, is always a gift, freely given, freely received. God is the giver and we only respond. We love God only because He first loved us, and not because we deserve it. Indeed, until we are finally united with Him, our inclinations and desires continually tend towards selfishness and idolatry. We resonate with St. Paul’s agonized cry: “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (Rom. 7:24). We agree with Paul that we are rescued only in Jesus Christ.

It is because Christian communities are pro-love and pro-gift that we should always welcome gay people — along with all other strangers, all other aliens, all other outcasts — to fellowship with us. Yet, it is also because we are pro-love and pro-gift that Christian communities must establish standards of conduct that discipline the life of the community such that desire is continually directed towards the highest good, which is God and the peace God establishes.

Christians have historically understood sexuality in the context of a sacramental marriage commitment between one man and one woman, with the attendant possibility of new life in childbirth, because this reflects, we believe, something about the difference-and-coinherence of the persons of the Triune God Himself, as well as something about the gift of creation arising from the perichoretic joy known by God and instantiated in creation into that which is other than God. We understand sexual intercourse outside of the context of sacramental marriage to represent not only the violation of some external rule, but also a grave breach in the internal fibers of the community God is building. It is not out of animus for the person who is having sex outside of sacramental marriage that we might restrict the person’s role in the community. It is out of love, both for the person and for the community, and out of a great and overwhelming desire to see God’s peace realized for all.

The proposal that inclinations and conduct can be viewed in isolation, then, is exposed as empty and loveless. It reflects the sort of anthropological dualism towards which our neo-gnostic libertarian culture gravitates. This compromise should be resisted by the community called by the name of the Triune God revealed in Jesus Christ. Let us instead develop the courage to become an alternative community even when our distinctive witness forecloses access to the benefits of the libertarian secular state. We may, as good citizens in the earthly city, lawfully petition for the benefits of that citizenship, but let us do so without resort to legal theories rooted in a vision of the human person and the human community that falls so far short of what we believe is true and good.

Categories
Spirituality

Enns on Doubt

Great post from Pete Enns on the value of doubt and how to doubt well. “Being a Christian does not mean being certain of everything all the time. Doubt is a normal and important part of the Christian life. When God seems most absent, it may be then that he is speaking to you most clearly. It is then that you realize that your faith is not a fortress but a journey, and God means to take you “further up and further in.””

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Epistemology Historical Theology Humor Law and Policy Photography and Music Spirituality

CLS v. Martinez: An Ugly Decision Arising from Ugly Circumstances

Today the Supreme Court released its opinion in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez.  If you have heard about this case from the press or from an advocacy group and are concerned about it, I’d encourage you to read the entire opinion as well as the concurrence and dissent.  The whole package is ugly, I think.  It seems that the principles of freedom of expression, association and religion have been mired in a Dickensian procedural swamp, which was either created by the majority or conveniently used by the majority to bypass the big issues presented by the case. I urge interested readers to peruse the entire 75 pages of all the opinions, so that you may experience for yourself how a question of important Constitutional moment can be drowned in the turgid waters of civil procedure.

The majority opinion, written by Justice Ginsberg, holds that U.C. Hastings’ “all comers” policy was content-neutral and reasonably related to the school’s policy of promoting a diverse forum for student activities.  The all comers policy stated that approved student organizations must admit any student to membership or eligibility for leadership, regardless of the student’s status or beliefs.  A pro-choice group, then, would have to admit pro-choice students, a Democrat club would have to admit Republicans, the Christian Legal Society would have to admit non-Christians or people who do not live according to the CLS’ views on sexual ethics, and so on.

Indeed, the all comers policy does seem content-neutral as Justice Ginsberg describes it.  On its face, the all comers policy itself seems silly and unworkable — it essentially would require that no student organization can stand for anything other than the principle that it is good to encourage diverse viewpoints — but not unconstitutional.

In contrast, the dissent, written by Justice Alito and joined by Justices Roberts, Scalia and Thomas, goes into great detail about the factual circumstances of Hastings’ adoption of the all comers policy.  In short, according to Justice Alito, the all comers policy was “adopted” as a litigation strategy late in the game.  The policy really at issue, Hastings’ “Nondiscrimination Policy,” only prohibited discrimination based on a select few protected categories — race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, disability, age, sex or sexual orientation.  Enforcement of the Nondiscrimination Policy against groups, such as CLS, that discriminate in one of these categories on the basis of religious beliefs raises a very difficult Constitutional question:  do the freedoms of religion, speech and association mean that the government must accommodate religious groups that discriminate based on categories such as sexual orientation?

In a previous post, I summarized the issues in the case, and expressed my view that the whole thing was an unfortunate manifestation of ongoing confusion by Christians about the relationship between American government and Christian faith.  In his dissent, Justice Alito expresses disappointment with the majority and suggests that the majority’s opinion is “a serious setback for freedom of expression in this country.”  He might be right, but maybe not for the reasons he expresses.  In one sense, I’m glad the majority found a way to avoid deciding the more difficult issues presented by the Nondiscrimination Policy.  There is a hard tension between citizenship in the Church and citizenship in a liberal (meaning classically liberal) pluralistic democracy.  I don’t think it’s a tension that we in the Church should want to press up against so hard.  Sometimes, the wiser course for the life and mission of the ekklesia is to maintain a faithful witness without suing for full government recognition of all our rights.

Categories
Spirituality

The Christian Faith of Manute Bol

This is a great piece in WSJ on Manute Bol’s Christian faith.  Bol was a professional basketball player, who was known more for his size than his skill.  Here’s an excerpt:

When his fortune dried up, Bol raised more money for charity by doing what most athletes would find humiliating: He turned himself into a humorous spectacle. Bol was hired, for example, as a horse jockey, hockey player and celebrity boxer. Some Americans simply found amusement in the absurdity of him on a horse or skates. And who could deny the comic potential of Bol boxing William “the Refrigerator” Perry, the 335-pound former defensive linemen of the Chicago Bears?

Bol agreed to be a clown. But he was not willing to be mocked for his own personal gain as so many reality-television stars are. Bol let himself be ridiculed on behalf of suffering strangers in the Sudan; he was a fool for Christ.

During his final years, Bol suffered more than mere mockery in the service of others. While he was doing relief work in the Sudan, he contracted a painful skin disease that ultimately contributed to his death.

Bol’s life and death throws into sharp relief the trivialized manner in which sports journalists employ the concept of redemption. In the world of sports media players are redeemed when they overcome some prior “humiliation” by playing well. Redemption then is deeply connected to personal gain and celebrity. It leads to fatter contracts, shoe endorsements, and adoring women.

Yet as Bol reminds us, the Christian understanding of redemption has always involved lowering and humbling oneself. It leads to suffering and even death.

Categories
Science and Religion

Os Guiness: Plunge in Without Fear

This is a great video from Os Guiness. This is another one that I think any pastor of young adults must take to heart.

Categories
Science and Religion

Rachel Evans on Faith, Science and Her Journey

There is a great post on BioLogos by Rachel Evans, in addition to the video below.  I think any pastor involved with young adults needs to listen carefully to Rachel’s story.

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Photography and Music Spirituality

James Emery White on the Crisis in Evangelicalism

Scot McKnight reviews James Emery White’s new book on Jesus Creed. I read Scot’s review and scanned the book on Amazon preview.

Sigh. I’m sure this is unfair, but books like this make me want to convert to Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy. For all of Dr. White’s emphasis on Truth, pragmatism, orthodoxy and the Church, the problem with Evangelicalism has been that its fundamental tenet of foundationalist Biblicist inerrancy is obviously untrue and unworkable, its doctrinal emphasis has ignored the historic center of Trinitarian orthodoxy, and it has no functional ecclesiology through which to mediate theological understanding. It’s not working and it’s losing influence because it’s fundamentally broke. (Note: I am using the term “Biblicist inerrancy” to distinguish this from the sort of “functional infallibility” that I think is a more appropriate model for Biblical authority. See my comments on Billy Graham and Charles Templeton below).

White sounds the gong of the “correspondence” theory of Truth. There are enormous epistemological issues over the “correspondence” view of Truth, various ways of construing it, and so on. These are deep waters. Sorry, but it’s grossly inadequate for a non-philosopher theologian just to say the word “correspondence.” It becomes a distracting fight. Many serious theologian-philosophers (e.g. Nicholas Wolterstorff) have demonstrated why foundationalist-correspondence theories of Truth are inadequate from a Christian perspective.

White talks about orthodoxy and doctrine but at least from the preview I could see doesn’t really offer a basis for defining what is finally and absolutely orthodox, other than an apparently softer version of the Biblicism that is now dramatically failing Evangelicalism.

As an example, he tells the famous story of Billy Graham and Charles Templeton. Templeton takes Biblical criticism and scholarship seriously, and loses his faith. Billy pietistically says “God, this is your word, and I believe it,” and goes on to become Billy.

If evangelical faith is going to survive, it needs to bring Billy and Charles together. A correspondence theory of truth tied to Biblicistic inerrancy simply is a failure unless one has the capacity, like Billy, to put intellectual concerns on the shelf and focus on pragmatics. I’m not knocking Billy here at all — maybe many people are designed by God and called take Billy’s approach, and they don’t need to do the difficult work required for serious scholarship.

But we are living in a time when the average American is far better educated, far better connected, far more cynical, and far more savvy than in Billy’s heyday of the 1950’s. Evangelicalism will be dead within the next generation if the best it can muster is the same common-sense, naive, foundationalist Biblicism that caused it to lose its credibility in the first place.

I do appreciate White’s emphasis on the virtue of civility, however. That alone can go a long way.

Categories
Science & Technology Text(s) of Scripture Theological Hermeneutics Theology

The New Testament and the Mission of God: Part II

In my Reading the New Testament Missionally class at Biblical Seminary, our final project was to write a paper on this topic: “Explain the mission of God in the Bible as you understand it on the basis of the New Testament. Who or what is sent by whom, as a result of what causes, and to achieve what ends? What are the main implications of this divine missional story for your life and for the life of the Christian church in the early 21st century?”

Here is Part II of my effort.

My statement of mission is this: The mission of God is to be God for the world God created. God is “God for the world God created” by the desire of the Father, the sending and suffering of the Son, and the ministry of the Spirit. The mission of the Church is to incarnate God’s life in the world in anticipation of the age to come, when God will be all in all.


II. The Fall; or, The Great Turning

In the five or six-act structure of recent narrative theology, the second act is the pathetic crisis of the Fall.[1] As the curtain rises on this second Act, God has created the world as “good,” and has installed human beings, the man and the woman, as his vice-regents over creation, in the “garden” of Eden.[2] The man and the woman appear to have everything they need for fellowship with each other and with God.[3] The man and the woman, however, rebel against God’s command and eat of the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”[4] They are cast out of the garden, the ground and humanity are cursed, and the way back into the garden is barred by angelic beings “and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.”[5]

The prefatory hymn of John 1 does not refer directly to this “Fall” event, but simply assumes the current state of “darkness.”[6] Paul, however, connects Adam’s sin to the “death” of all humanity and to the “groaning” of all creation.[7] For Paul, Adam, the sinner, is the prototypical “first” humanity, while Christ, the perfect redeemer, is the prototypical “second” humanity.

The Fall is the lynchpin of classical Augustinian theology. For much of Christian history, it was assumed that this was a “literal” event in human history – that the first two human beings, Adam and Eve, lived in a paradisiacal state from which they “fell.”[8] If the Western Patristic or Scholastic Catholic divines or Reformers were to speak in terms of the “mission of God,” they would have construed it as a mission to restore the paradise lost by Adam’s sin.[9]

By the nineteenth century, however, it had already begun to become evident that the Biblical story of the “Fall” cannot be simply and literally historical. Today, it has become clear beyond any reasonable doubt that the created world, including human beings, developed through an evolutionary process that involved billions of years of struggle and death.[10] Narrative theology, for all its merits, simply sidesteps this problem. What can we make of the dramatic hinge of the “Fall” in a post-scientific age? How should the information we are able to glean about the created world influence the story we tell?

This is an enormous question, which cannot be resolved within the scope of this paper, and probably cannot be definitively resolved at all.[11] I’d like to suggest, however, that the “Fall” cannot be understood as somehow temporarily thwarting God’s original purposes for creation. Rather, the “Fall” represents a misdirection of human will and desire that God had already taken account of when He created the universe, the consequences of which God Himself entered into through the cross.

God evidently designed a dynamic process of physical death and decay into the fabric of the created order as a means of producing life. There is no possibility of the creation we enjoy today without an unimaginably deep history of evolutionary change. And there is no evolutionary change – no possibility of “life” as we know it – without entropy and death. The physical constraints human beings face, therefore, are not the proximate result of “Adam’s” sin, but rather are a necessary function of the created world. In this sense, the creation itself, before humanity comes onto the scene, already bore a “cruciform” shape.[12]

But humans are more than physical beings.[13] Apparently we are the only creatures on the earth who possess the “spiritual” capacity to relate to God, to each other, and to the created world itself, in a manner somehow analogous to the relationality of God.[14] We alone are created in God’s image.[15] The primordial human rebellion against God – the “Fall” – represents our existential experience of the brokenness of this relationality as well as an ontological fissure that somehow transcends the empirically observable universe. We know that in some sense we are unique, that in some sense we are “free,” that in some sense we are made for union with God, each other, and the world. We sense that our lives should reflect the mutuality, coinherence and perichoretic fellowship of God’s Triune life, from which we were born. Yet we each experience the pain and loneliness of desires that are turned in on ourselves and away from God, others and the world. To be left to ourselves, alone, is the heart of what it means to be “fallen.”[16]

If the term “Fall” were not so entrenched, I might prefer a narrative header such as “The Great Turning.” In fact, I think this is consistent with some Eastern Patristic and contemporary Eastern Orthodox thought about sin and the Fall. In On the Incarnation, for example, Ireneaus envisioned pre-Fall Adam as inherently mortal, and Athanasius pictured Adam and the entire pre-lapsarian creation as an infant that needed to grow and develop. [17] Contemporary Orthodox theology likewise understands original sin less as an Augustinian inherited depravity and more as a continuing misdirection of the will.[18]

God created human beings with a capacity to orient their relational capacities towards God, the each other, and the creation. Humans were made to participate in the life of God. But we turned and turn, primordially and individually, in a different direction, inwards, into our selves, and away from God. The “mission” of God is to draw us back towards Himself, back into His life, and thereby to “complete” – in some sense with us and through us as well as in us and upon us – the work and mandate of creation.[19] God accomplishes this mission through His own suffering in the crucifixion of the incarnate Son, in His recreation of all things, begun with the Resurrection of the incarnate Son, and in his final victory over evil and injustice, revealed fully at the Son’s return.[20] In this way, the “mission” of God is a mission “for the world” – the second major phrase in my definition.

[1] See Craig G. Bartholomew and Michael Goheen, The Drama of Scripture (Baker Academic 2004), at p. 27.

[2] Gen. 1-2.

[3] This is symbolized beautifully in Gen. 2:25: “The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.”

[4] Gen. 2:15-17.

[5] Gen. 3:22-24.

[6] John 1:5.

[7] Romans 5:12-20; 1 Corinthians 15:12-26.

[8] See, e.g., Milton’s classic allegory Paradise Lost.

[9] The Eastern tradition does not, in contrast, tend to speak in such terms. See James R. Payton, Light from the Christian East: An Introduction to the Orthodox Tradition (IVP Academic 2007). In many ways, the Eastern tradition’s notion that humanity has become misdirected and must be directed back towards union with God (“theosis”) informs the re-reading of the Western tradition that I am to some extent attempting in this paper.

[10] For a general discussion of the scientific evidence, see Darrell Falk, Coming to Peace With Science: Bridging the World Between Faith and Biology (InterVarsity Press 2004); Francis Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free Press 2007).

[11] For a discussion of some of the issues, see R.J. Berry and T.A. Noble, Darwin, Creation and the Fall: Theological Challenges (InterVarsity Press 2009).

[12] See George L. Murphy, The Cosmos in Light of the Cross (Continuum 2003).

[13] For a discussion of theological anthropology and the problem of the “mind” or the “soul,” see David W. Opderbeck, A Critically Realist Theology of Law, Neurobiology and the Soul, Social Science Research Network Working Paper, available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1594907.

[14] Many animals possess significant capacities for empathy and relationality, but there seems to be something unique about human beings in this regard. See Wentzel Van Huyssteen, Alone in the World?: Human Uniqueness in Science and Theology (Eerdmans 2006).

[15] Gen. 1;2.

[16] I am obviously drawing here on the Barthian and “neo-orthodox” tradition concerning the human condition and the “fall.” See, e.g., Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation (Westminster John Knox 1996). At this point in my thinking about this question, however, I would depart from neo-orthodoxy by suggesting that the “Fall” must have been a “real” primordial event. My sense of hermeneutical consistency and the integrity of my broadly Reformed theological outlook seem to require a “historical” fall with ontological consequences of some sort. But perhaps the “flaming sword flashing back and forth” that guards the “garden” represents an epistemological as well as an existential barrier against recovering the history “behind” the Gen. 1-4 narratives. For a preliminary effort to sketch out a “realist” view of the fall that is also scientifically literate, see my essay A Historical Adam? on the BioLogos website, available at http://biologos.org/blog/a-historical-adam/.

[17] See supra Note 15.

[18] See supra Note 25.

[19] This description of the “mission” of God also obviously resonates with Eastern Orthodox theology, particularly with the notion of theosis. See supra Note 25.

[20] I am drawing here from Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (Fortress Press 1993). Bryan Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat also draw heavily on the suffering of God in relation to the mission of God and the praxis of the Church in Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire (IVP Academic 2004). The possibility of Divine passibility and suffering, of course, is a controversial one in contemporary theology, as it seems to run afoul of orthodoxy with respect to Divine impassibility and simplicity. See, e.g., Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, at pp. 155-168. At this point in my own reflection and study, I confess that I am not yet fully able to navigate these difficult waters. I do agree with Hart that “[a] God who can become, who can acquire determinations, who has his future as potential and realizes his future through ‘dramatic self-transcendence,’ is not God but a god, a mere supreme being; and regarding the gods, Christianity has always quite properly been identified as atheism.” Ibid., at p. 166. I also like Hart’s manner of turning Divine impassibility into something of awe and beauty: “God’s impassibility is the utter fullness of an infinite dynamism, the absolutely complete and replete generation of the Son and procession of the Spirit from the Father, the infinite ‘drama’ of God’s joyous act of self-outpouring — which is his being as God.” Ibid. at p. 167. For this reason, I say that God’s “mission” is to “be” God, and not to “become” God.

Categories
Theological Hermeneutics Theology

The New Testament and the Mission of God: Part I

In my Reading the New Testament Missionally class at Biblical Seminary, our final project was to write a paper on this topic:  “Explain the mission of God in the Bible as you understand it on the basis of the New Testament. Who or what is sent by whom, as a result of what causes, and to achieve what ends? What are the main implications of this divine missional story for your life and for the life of the Christian church in the early 21st century?”

Here is Part I of my effort.

My statement of mission is this: The mission of God is to be God for the world God created. God is “God for the world God created” by the desire of the Father, the sending and suffering of the Son, and the ministry of the Spirit. The mission of the Church is to incarnate God’s life in the world in anticipation of the age to come, when God will be all in all.

I. God, Creation, and “Mission”

When we speak of God having a “mission,” our capacity for analogical speech stretches to the breaking point.[1] “Mission” is a term with military connotations, which implies a discrete task assigned by a superior authority (a “principal”) to be carried out by an agent on the principal’s behalf. The agent typically is trained and equipped by the principal for the particular mission assigned. The principal typically is itself subject to some higher authority, which sets the parameters for the sort of mission the principal may assign to the agent.

A U.S. Marine, for example, might be assigned a mission to provide covering fire for members of his squad. The Marine squad together might be engaged in a mission to locate and destroy a hideout used by terrorist insurgents in Afganistan. The squad’s mission, ideally, will be tied to the overall U.S. mission in Afganistan, which in turn, ideally, will be situated within the national mission to secure the citizenry against terrorism and to spread democracy abroad. The “mission” of the U.S. as a nation derives from the contingent historical circumstances that led to the founding and development of the nation and the creation of its Constitution and other legal and cultural norms.

We cannot ultimately speak the same way about God because there are no contingent circumstances that led to God’s being. God simply is (and, in theological terms, is simply).[2] God’s “mission,” then, must in some sense equate with God’s a priori “being.” Thus, the first part of my statement of the mission Dei is the verb “to be.” God’s “mission” flows from His being. In Trinitarian terms, the immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity.[3]

This aspect of the mission of God is expressed beautifully in the first chapter of John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.”[4] What is this “beginning?” It is not the “beginning” of the life of God. The Word “was” in the beginning the preexistent agent of creation. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men.”[5]

God’s creative activity, then, did involve agency. The Logos was “with” God and all things were made “through” the Logos. The Logos, therefore, acted on God’s behalf, as God’s agent. Thus, my statement of the mission Dei refers to the “world God created.” God’s “mission” involves creation.

Yet there was no imperative for the Divine Logos to create. No lack or crisis prompted God to call the universe into being, and no part of the universe came into being except by the action of the Logos. And in contrast to our usual use of the term “mission,” the “mission” of creation given to the Son by the Father is not greater than the agent. A soldier might be required to sacrifice himself to advance his mission, because the mission is greater than any individual soldier. Christ, in contrast, “is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”[6] The universe is contingent on God’s creative and sustaining action exercised by the Son, but God is not contingent on the universe.[7] There is reciprocity between God and the agency of the Logos in the dynamic of creation: all things were created not only “by [the Logos]” but also “for him.”[8]

God’s “mission” of creation, then, is not something delegated from one ontologically independent entity to another. The relationship of the Father and the Son is one of mutuality and coinherence.[9] The analogy of “mission” with respect to creation and God’s Triune life ultimately breaks over the fact of coinherence. In this sense, creation is not God’s “mission.” Creation is the extension of the Divine life through the agency of the Logos (“in him was life“) into that which is other than God.[10] As David Bently Hart puts it, “God’s gracious action in creation belongs from the first to that delight, pleasure and regard that the Trinity enjoys from eternity, as an outward and unnecessary expression of that love; and thus creation must be received before all else as gift and as beauty.”[11]

This theme is developed by Jurgen Moltmann in his creative and challenging book God in Creation. Moltmann draws from Luther’s theology of the cross, which for Moltmann “expresses the conviction that the creation and sustaining of the world are not simply works of the almighty God, but that in them God gives himself and communicates himself, and is thus himself present in his works.”[12] God’s act of creation is also a kenotic act of self-limitation, because “out of his infinite possibilities [for creation] God realizes this particular one, and renounces all others.”[13] Moreover, because creation flows from God’s perichoretic life, creation “proceeds from God’s love, and this love respects the own, personal existence of all things, and the freedom of the human beings who have been created.”[14]

Creation, then, was never a static, Platonic abstraction of “perfection.” Creation was from the beginning an “open system” with potentiality for development towards an eschatological future.[15] Eschatology is understood from the perspective of the original creation and what has gone wrong, but at the same time creation must be understood from the perspective of the eschatological future and ongoing participation of creation in the life of God.[16]

[1] Because God is wholly “other,” all theology works only by analogy. See, e.g., Stanley J. Grenz, Theology for the Community of God (Broadman & Holman 1994), at p. 11 (“[t]heological systems do not provide a replica, a ‘scale model’ of reality. Their propositions are not univocal. Hence, no one system can claim to be an exact verbal reproduction of the nature of God or of the human person and the world in relation to God. Rather, the theologian seeks to invoke an understanding of reality by setting forth through an analogous model realities which may be mysterious, even ineffable.”).

[2] For a discussion of the “simplicity” of God, and some problems with that notion in Augustinian theology, see Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1: The Triune God (Oxford Univ. Press 1997), at pp. 111-114. Jensen seeks to ground divine “simplicity” in mutuality rather than in indistinguishability. Id. at 113.

[3] For a discussion of this formulation, referred to as “Rahner’s Rule,” see Stanley J. Grenz, Rediscovering the Triune God: The Trinity in Contemporary Theology (Fortress Press 2004), at pp. 55-71.

[4] John 1:1-2 (NIV).

[5] John 1:3 (NIV).

[6] Col. 1:17.

[7] See Thomas F. Torrance, Divine and Contingent Order (T&T Clark 2005); See also Jurgen Molmann, God in Creation (Fortress Press 2003), at p. 38.

[8] Col. 1:16 (NIV).

[9] See, e.g., Jenson, supra Note 2; see also Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, supra Note 4, at p. 155 (stating that “[t]he Christian understanding of beauty emerges not only naturally, but necessarily, from the Christian understanding of God as a perichoresis of love, a dynamic coinherence of the three divine persons, whose life is eternally one of shared regard, delight, fellowship, feasting, and joy.”).

[10] John 1:4.

[11] David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Eerdmans 2003).

[12] God in Creation, at pp. 60-67.

[13] Ibid., at p. 61.

[14] Ibid., at p. 63.

[15] Ibid., “Creation as an Open System,” at pp. 34-40. This view of creation resonates with some early Patristic sources, particularly Athanasius and Ireneaus. See Athanasius, The Incarnation of the Word of God (online version available at http://www.worldinvisible.com/library/athanasius/incarnation/incarnation.c.htm); Gustav Wingren, Man and Incarnation: A Study of the Biblical Theology of Irenaeus (Wipf & Stock 2004).

[16] Ibid., at p. 34. Moltmann extends his understanding of creation and kenosis to God’s self-limitation of His own attributes, including His omnipotence and omniscience. According to Moltmann, “God doesn’t know everything in advance because he doesn’t will to know everything in advance. He waits for the response of those he has created, and lets their future come.” Ibid. at 64. At this point I will part ways with Moltmann. God can “limit” His omnipotence in the sense that He does not always do everything He is capable of doing. For example, God could destroy the world in judgment in this instant, yet He refrains, because He “is patient with [us], not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” (2 Peter 3:9.) But it seems to me that God cannot limit His omniscience without ceasing to be God. If an omniscient being voluntarily ceases to know all things, then that being no longer possesses the attribute of omniscience. Some open theists address this a different way, by arguing that the future is simply unknowable, because the “future” does not yet exist. See, e.g., The Open Theism Information Site, http://www.opentheism.info/ (stating that “God could have known every event of the future had God decided to create a fully determined universe. However, in our view God decided to create beings with indeterministic freedom which implies that God chose to create a universe in which the future is not entirely knowable, even for God. For many open theists the ‘future’ is not a present reality-it does not exist-and God knows reality as it is.”). This view ultimately is unappealing to me for several reasons, in particular that an “eschatological” view of creation (which I find greatly resonant), it seems to me, requires a proleptically realized future that is in some sense already an ontological reality. Therefore, if pressed, I would opt for some version of supralapsarianism in order to “reconcile” God’s sovereignty with the “openness” of creation to God’s eschatological future.

Categories
Theological Hermeneutics Theology

Jesus, Paul, and the Mission of God — Part III

IV. The Mission of Paul: The Ingrafting of the Gentiles and the Time Between the Times

Many scholars have discussed the apparent tensions between Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God and Paul’s relative lack of attention to that theme. As noted in our lectures, however, Paul’s letters can hardly be understood as a “later” institutional accretion over Jesus’ simpler message of the Kingdom, since the Jesus traditions collected in the synoptic Gospels likely were not written in their canonical form until after Paul’s letters were composed and circulated.[1] Moreover, Paul’s letters themselves sometimes refer to proto-creedal affirmations that relate to the Jesus traditions.[2] It is better to understand the Pauline corpus as an extension of Jesus’ teaching about the “Kingdom of God” as well as the start of a wisdom tradition about how to live in the “time between the times” when the Kingdom is inaugurated but not yet consummated.

Paul’s theology extends Jesus’ teaching about the Kingdom of God to the Gentiles. As noted in Section III.A. of this paper, Jesus himself prefigured the notion that the hope of “restoration” would extend beyond the nation of Israel. Paul makes this theme explicit and explores the theological and praxiological implications of this move in detail.

This is perhaps most majestically expressed in Romans 1-11, particularly in the (in my view) widely misunderstood chapters 9-11. High scholastic Calvinism, and the degenerative forms of neo-Calvinism often represented in populist Evangelicalism, tend to view Romans 9-11 primarily as statements of exclusion. In this view, these chapters are about the particularity of election and double predestination.

But the direction of Paul’s argument in Romans 9-11 is in fact about inclusion. Paul is offering here a defense of his teaching that the blessings of the Kingdom are available to the Gentiles in Christ. Romans 9-11 could be viewed as a theological exposition of Jesus’ parables and teaching in Matthew 21-24, particularly the parables of the laborers in the vineyard and the wedding feast. That God has surprisingly extended the Kingdom to the Gentiles should provoke no complaint from Israel, for God is free to show mercy and compassion to whomever God chooses.[3]

Although Paul does not often use the term “Kingdom of God,” his narrative of an alternative “empire” under Christ echoes Jewish critiques of Babylon and Rome.[4] Rather than the Hebraic concept of “Kingdom,” Paul prefers the Greco-Roman notion of “Lordship.” This may reflect Paul’s missional posture as the “Apostle to the Gentiles.” A pressing concern for Paul’s Gentile readers would have been the notion that Jesus, not Caesar, is kyrios, and that God’s Kingdom is not the Roman Empire. Indeed, this notion is the crux of Paul’s argument in Romans 10: faith in the resurrection and Lordship of Christ, rather than cultural identity, are the hallmarks of inclusion in the Kingdom.[5]

Paul’s praxiology also is central to his mission. One of Paul’s central pastoral concerns was to manage tensions between Jewish and Gentile Christians, particularly regarding adherence to Torah. This is reflected in Paul’s participation in the Jerusalem Council, narrated in Acts 15, in the Pastoral instructions in Paul’s letters (for example, Romans 14-15), and in the detailed discussion of law and grace in Galatians.

Finally, Paul offered practical instructions for Christian living prior to the consummation of the Kingdom at Christ’s return. Although Paul, along with other first-century Christians, probably believed that Christ would return during his own generation, he laid the ethical foundations for wise living in the time between times — which as we know has now extended over two millennia. This can be seen, for example, in Paul’s teaching about sexual immorality, lawsuits, marriage, the sacrament of the Eucharist, and spiritual gifts.[6]

V. The Mission of the Early Church: Faithful Expectancy

From Luke-Acts, we see the mission of the early Church as a missionary endeavor. The Church is established and sent into the world to proclaim the Gospel, accompanied by the signs and wonders of the Spirit that indicate the Kingdom of God is breaking into the present age.[7]

From the Pauline corpus, we see the mission of the early Church as an exercise of patient fellowship. The “body of Christ” (1. Cor. 12) is to incarnate Christ in the local culture, anticipating the immanent resurrection, at which time those in Christ will become like him, all enemies of God’s shalom, including the enemy of “death,” will be vanquished, and “God [will] be all in all.” (1 Cor. 15). Paul’s vision for the community of the Church is that it would embody God’s Kingdom on earth:

So, as those who have been chosen of God, holy and beloved, put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience; bearing with one another, and forgiving each other, whoever has a complaint against anyone; just as the Lord forgave you, so also should you. Beyond all these things put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity. Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body; and be thankful.[8]

In the Church, then, God’s purposes for the creation are being realized, even as the creation itself “waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God” and “groans and suffers the pains of childbirth,” and even as we continue to “groan within ourselves” as we wait for the completion of God’s redemption at the resurrection.[9]

The New Testament’s apocalyptic literature takes on similar themes, but from a somewhat different angle. In the Petrine (or pseudo-Petrine)[10] epistles and particularly in Revelation, the mission of Jesus is pictured from the perspective of consummation. Here the Lamb of God is also the Rider on the White Horse, the cosmic Christ who rides out “conquering and to conquer.”[11]

This literature is saturated in the imagery of Second Temple apocalyptic, but the vision of the “age to come” is more holistic. There is no “temple” because God Himself is present in the heavenly city, all of the “kings of the earth . . . bring their glory” through the city gates, and the “tree of life,” not seen since Genesis 3, now offers its leaves “for the healing of the nations.”[12]

The primary mission of the Church from this vantage point is to bear witness and to persevere, despite opposition and persecution. John offers this beatitude at the close of his apocalyptic vision: “[b]lessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the tree of life, and may enter by the gates into the city.”[13] We are reminded that the Church’s incarnational mission does not encompass winning the final victory through the exercise of temporal power. Instead, the Church patiently lives out its calling as it eagerly awaits the one who is “coming quickly,” the “Lord Jesus.”[14]

[1] I find this point interesting and possibly helpful, but I confess that I’m not conversant enough with current scholarship on the synoptic tradition to evaluate fully whether the “date of authorship” of the synoptic Gospels vis-à-vis Paul’s letters is significant. James R. Edwards’ book The Hebrew Gospel & the Development of the Synoptic Tradition (Eerdmans 2009), for example, suggests that the synoptic Gospels draw significantly from an earlier “Hebrew Gospel,” which presumably would predate the Pauline epistles. Edwards’ hypothesis responds to and critiques the notion of the “Q” source underlying the synoptic tradition. If something like the “Q” thesis is correct, that also would imply a textual Jesus tradition that predates Paul. In any event, various verbal Jesus traditions, including Jesus’ extensive “Kingdom of God” sayings, must predate the canonical Pauline and pseudo-Pauline epistolary literature, such that, in one way or another, the Pauline tradition is “later” than the Jesus traditions.

[2] An excellent example is 1 Cor. 15:3-8.

[3] Romans 9:14.

[4] For a discussion of this theme, see the chapter “Gospel and Empire” in Wright, supra Note 9. Paul does, of course, occasionally use the Jewish concept of the “Kingdom of God.” See, e.g., 1 Cor. 15:50; Gal. 5:21.

[5] Romans 10:9-10.

[6] See, e.g., 1 Cor. 5-14.

[7] For an excellent “missional” perspective on Acts, see Beverly Roberts Gaventa, Abingdon New Testament Commentaries, Acts (Abingdon Press 2003).

[8] Col. 3:12-15.

[9] Romans 8.

[10] For a discussion of the authorship of 2 Peter and Jude, See Richard J. Bauckham, Word Biblical Commentary: Jude, 2 Peter (Word 1983).

[11] Rev. 6:2.

[12] Rev. 21:-16 – 22:2. For an excellent discussion of how this eschatological vision relates to the “cultural mandate,” see Andy Crouch, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (InterVarsity 2008) and Richard Mouw, When the Kings Come Marching In: Isaiah and the New Jerusalem (Eerdmans 2002). For a discussion of the physical, this-worldly nature of the new heavens and new earth, see N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (HarperOne 2008).

[13] Rev. 22:14.

[14] Rev. 22:20. Would that our evangelical churches in North America could rekindle this vision and turn from our political, economic and cultural idolatries!