Category: Theology

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Spirituality Theology

Sin and Brokenness

Daniel Kirk offers an excellent post on how the various ways we can speak of atonement relate to the various ways we can speak of sin.  I particularly like Dan’s conclusion:

once we’ve so expanded our vision of what living in a sinful world entails, we are confronted simultaneously with the various ways that we need all of Christ in every area of our lives.

If we have anger problems, that not only means we have guilt in our anger that needs to be forgiven, but likely some brokenness in our way of responding to the world and woundedness in our hearts that need to be healed before we can respond to our world with grace and patience. Moreover, if we have such a problem there is a power working to enslave us to this sinful passion from which we need to be freed.

And so I make the modest suggestion that when we deal with sex as a particular issue, we must anticipate that we will see evidence of sinful expressions that need to be forgiven, seemingly inescapable desires from which we need to be freed, and driving forces in broken and wounded hearts and bodies that need to be healed.

To claim that God is not concerned with what we do sexually is to revert to an insufficiently physical gnosticism. To cordon off sex from the realm of our humanity possibly marred by sin is to insufficiently recognize both the need for and extent of Christ’s atoning work.

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Justice Law and Policy Moltmann Spirituality Theology

Justice, Judgment and Reconciliation

The Sunday service on July 4 at my church was excellent. One of our younger pastors preached on the theme of “hope.” He managed to tie together some thoughts about hope rooted in our national history in the U.S. (there was a stirring reading from the Gettysburg Address) with his recent experiences on a missions trip in Cambodia. He observed how the Church in Cambodia is starting to produce little pockets of culture out of the ashes of totalitarianism, including economic and artistic renewal, in places where the gospel of freedom in Christ is being heard.

The ashes of Cambodian totalitarianism, of course, include Pol Pot’s killing fields, which our pastor visited. He described how the rains every year expose more and more of the bones of the estimated 1.3 million people who died during the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror. We are grateful that, for all our ills, nothing like the Killing Fields presently exists in the U.S., in no small part due to some of the moral and legal principles we inherited, however imperfectly and haltingly, from Christian, Jewish, and other religious sources. And we are grateful that there are communities in places like Cambodia where the Church is shining the light of the Gospel in its fullness.

At the same time, we may wonder: where is the answer to the bones that cry out for justice? We are painfully aware of the limits of justice in this life. Very few of the perpetrators of this sort of violence are ever identified, judged and convicted. Often they remain in power, or simply dissolve into anonymity. We cry out to God with the Psalmist: “How long will the wicked, O LORD, how long with the wicked be jubilant?” (Ps. 94:3). We look for the final judgment, the terrible “Day of the Lord,” when the “white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True” is unleashed — “With justice he judges and makes war.” (Rev. 19:11).

But how does this final judgment restore the victims of Pol Pot? My Evangelical Christian tradition in particular has emphasized that the final judgment is ultimately a sorting out of all those who have, during life, exercised faith in Christ from those who have not. The vast majority of Pol Pot’s victims were not professing Christians. Most had probably never heard of Christ. Are they condemned to Hell with their tormentors? Where, then, is “justice” for them? If final justice is mostly about one’s access to Christian teaching during life (or in Reformed theology, about one’s election by God), how does this provide any foundation for attempts to do “justice” during this life? Was Qohelet right after all: “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity”? (Eccl. 1:2).

One contemporary Christian theologian who has wrestled with these issues is Jurgen Moltmann. His most recent book, Sun of Righteousness, Arise!: God’s Future for Humanity and the Earth, summarizes his many decades of brilliant, if sometimes controversial and perhaps even heterodox, theological writing. I commend the reading of Moltmann to everyone, particularly to Evangelicals and others who are perhaps a bit too wedded to neat theological formulas, and this latest book of his is a great place to start.

Moltmann lived through World War II — he was a reluctant German soldier, became a POW, and returned to post-war Germany as a pastor and theologian — and as a result he has a keen eye for the problem of justice. For Moltmann, God’s “final judgment” must be conceived of as “not the great reckoning, with reward and punishment” but rather “the victory of the creative divine righteousness and justice over everything godless in heaven, on earth, and beneath the earth.”

Moltmann’s theology often wrestles with the meaning of history, hope, and freedom, and even “final” judgment, he believes must be “open” to the future: “Because the judgment serves this new creation of all things, its righteousness is not a righteousness related to the past, which merely establishes what is done and requires it. It is a creative righteousness related to this future, a righteousness which creates justice, heals and rectifies.” This is a judgment of restoration and reconciliation, akin to a truth commission in which the perpetrators of violence “must listen to [their vicitms’] accounts and learn to see themselves with the eyes of their victims, even if this is terrible and destructive.” The intention of this judgment is “to put right the disrupted relationships between people and nations; its intention is not to reward or punish individuals. . . .” The last judgment, then, should be imagined as “a peaceful arbitration whose purpose is the furtherance of life, not as a criminal court which decides over life and death.”

Here is a compelling vision of hope for the dry bones in Cambodia’s killing fields. They will meet their murderers in the eschaton — and they will be reconciled to each other, and all in the end will be saved.

It will be difficult for most Christians in Augustinian traditions — including most Evangelicals — to accept much of Moltmann’s vision, not least his universalism. Personally, from my theological perspective, I desire to do my best to account for the fullness of the Biblical witness in a way that coheres with the Tradition, reason and experience. Rev. 20 does not seem to me a picture of universal reconciliation, and the Tradition, reason, and experience suggest that some people will refuse to be reconciled. And yet, Colossians 1:2 seems tantalizingly inclusive: the Christian hope is that Christ will “reconcile all things to himself.” Perhaps those of us in Evangelical Augustinian traditions cannot rely on Moltmann, but I believe we can at least learn from him that the cosmic scope of salvation must be bigger than our limited horizons if there truly is to be final justice. And maybe this can lead us to learn from our Catholic and Orthodox brothers and sisters, from the early Greek Patristic writers and from contemporary Catholics such as Balthasaar and Ratzinger, a bit more about the meaning and hope of salvation.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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Theological Hermeneutics Theology

Jesus, Paul and the Mission of God — Part II

III. The Mission of Jesus: Restoration and Prolepsis

A. Jesus in Narratival Perspective

If the story of creation from the Divine perspective is one of Trinitarian love, the story of creation from the human perspective is one of rebellion and death. Some narratival approaches to the Bible suggest that the diversity of the scriptural canon frames an overarching, unifying narrative of creation, fall, complication, cross, and consummation.[1] This is a helpful approach, which enables us to understand that Jesus’ mission during his first advent represented a sort of climax in the drama of redemption.

This narratival structure views the drama of redemption from the human perspective: how do we find ourselves in the current broken mess of the world, and how can this mess be fixed? Jesus is the answer to these questions, which burn through the pages of the Hebrew Bible. After humanity’s fall into sin, God takes the initiative to “clothe” the man and the woman.[2] He continues to pursue and preserve humanity in the covenant with Noah, and He calls a particular people to experience and spread His righteous fellowship in the covenants with Abraham and David.

By the close of the Hebrew Bible, however, God’s chosen people, His putative agents of redemption, have rebelled against God and have suffered the judgment of defeat and exile at the hands of Assyria and Babylon. The holy city of Jerusalem and its Temple, the place of God’s presence, have been destroyed. When the exiles are permitted to return to Jerusalem, the hope of Israel’s prophets turns towards a deliverer, a Messiah, who will restore the nation and the Temple.

During the “intertestamental” period, the hope of restoration becomes ever more pregnant as the remnant of Israel experiences Greek and Roman rule. The Roman puppet ruler Herod rebuilds a magnificent Temple in Jerusalem, but for many zealous Jews, this represents an abominable counterfeit of God’s holy purposes. Some of these Jews, including the Maccabees, attempt military rebellion, only to be crushed by Rome. Others, particularly the Pharisees, attempt to practice holiness within the daily context of Roman oppression, while yet others, such as the Essenes, withdraw into chiliastic communes; and still others, particularly the Sadducees, attempt to reach some accommodation to Hellenistic culture. Jesus steps into this milieu of “restoration eschatology” and both fulfills and upsets this hope. In this sense, we can say that the mission of Jesus is to inaugurate the Kingdom of God by restoring God’s reign over humanity through a people called to be God’s own holy people. N.T. Wright and others have helpfully situated Jesus’ frequent teaching about the “Kingdom of God” within this framework of the Second Temple Jewish hope of restoration.[3] Jesus, however, reframes Second Temple restoration eschatology by suggesting that the hope of redemption will extend beyond the Jewish people and that the power of redemption lies in his own person rather than in a revitalized Temple.

These themes are particularly poignant in the events and teachings of Matthew 20-24. In the parables of the laborers in the vineyard and the marriage feast, Jesus suggests that the Kingdom of God relates to a person’s disposition towards God and results from God’s broad and generous grace, rather than deriving primarily from a national identity. In Matthew 21, Jesus is hailed as a Messiah, consistent with restorationist expectations, but his action of “cleansing” the Temple is an unexpected symbol of the Kingdom’s extension to the “outer courts” of the Gentiles. In Matthew 24, Jesus somewhat obliquely predicts the destruction of Jerusalem, which eventually occurred in A.D. 70 under the Roman Emperor Titus.

The synoptic Gospels each in their own way conclude with the theme that will be picked up in Paul’s epistles: not the restoration of the Temple, but the death and resurrection of Jesus, represent the inauguration of the hoped-for “age to come.”

B. An Excursus on Proleptic Eschatology and the Drama of Scripture

In my view, the five or six-act narratival structure of the Bible, with the death and resurrection of Jesus as a climactic point in the story, is helpful, but ultimately insufficient. From the divine perspective, the story of redemption proceeds proleptically. For God, the story in a sense starts at the end and is told backwards. The “sixth” act of the drama, that of consummation, was God’s purpose from “before the foundation of the world.”[4] The “new heavens and new earth” and “new Jerusalem” of Revelation 21 are not things God improvised in order to fix a mistake. The heavenly city is rather the telos of which Eden, the Tabernacle, the Temple, and the Church are beginnings.[5] If we fail to emphasize the “divine,” proleptic side of the Biblical narrative, I fear that we lose something important about the Trinitarian shape of the missio Dei.

[1] See N.T. Wright, Paul in Fresh Perspective (Fortress Press 2005) and The New Testament and the People of God (SPCK 1992); Craig G. Bartholomew and Michael W. Goheen, The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story (Baker Academic 2004).

[2] Gen. 3:21.

[3] See, e.g., N.T. Wright, Paul in Fresh Perspective (Fortress Press 2005).

[4] Eph. 1:4.

[5] For more on the notion of proleptic eschatology, see, e.g., Jugen Moltmann, Theology of Hope (Fortress Press ed. 1993); Stanley Grenz and John Franke, Beyond Foundationalism: Shaping Theology in a Postmodern Context (Westminster John Knox 2001). Some of the early Eastern Patristic sources, particularly Irenaeus, also offer helpful teleological correctives to the Western theology in this regard. See Gustav Wingren, Man and Incarnation: A Study in the Biblical Theology of Ireneaus (Wipf & Stock 2004).

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Science & Technology Theological Hermeneutics Theology

Jesus, Paul, and the Mission of God — Part 1

Here is some material from a paper I had to write in my Reading the New Testament Missionally class. The subject of the paper is “How do you understand the mission of Jesus in his historical context and the relationship of Jesus’ mission to the mission of Paul and the early church?”

I. Introduction

The mission of Jesus, Paul, and the early church are about the same thing: God’s eschatological redemption of the world. Each of these actors play different, but complementary, roles in God’s mission.

II. Background: the Mission of God

Before we consider the specific mission of Jesus, Paul, and the early church, we must first briefly explore the missio Dei in which these actors participate.

Often we think of God’s mission in the world as one of rescue or repair. In this view, the original good creation was God’s “Plan A,” and human sin required a “Plan B,” the sending of Christ to save a few from judgment. This view of God’s plan for creation is profoundly mistaken. Jesus said that God loved him “before the foundation of the world” (John 17:24), and texts such as Ephesians 1:4 tell us that God “chose us in [Christ] before the foundation of the world. . . .” God’s redemptive mission in Christ and in the Church, then, was “Plan A.” Redemption was God’s plan from eternity past.

The story of God’s mission is ultimately the story of the eternal life of the Triune God.[1] As David Bosh notes, “[m]ission [is] understood as being derived from the very nature of God. It [is] thus put in the context of the doctrine of the Trinity, not of ecclesiology or soteriology.”[2] Creation results from the abundance and generosity of the perichoretic fellowship of Father, Son and Spirit.

The God who created knew beforehand that the creation would experience human sin and suffering, and that His act of creation therefore would also entail an act of sending and redemption. We cannot know for certain why God chose to create in light of this knowledge. Perhaps St. Augustine was right — perhaps this is the best of all possible worlds, and it is better for God to have created, with the result of some ultimate good, than not to have created at all.[3] Or perhaps Augustine’s classical theodicy should be tempered with the fact that God Himself enters into the suffering of creation through the cross.[4]

The problem of evil and the theodicy of creation remain mysteries.[5] A Trinitarian theology of creation and mission, however, provides a helpful glimpse into these often overwhelming existential questions. The immanent Trinity — the inner-Trinitarian relations of the Divine Persons — is also the economic Trinity — the actions of the Divine Persons with respect to creation and redemption.[6] God’s mission in creation is the extension of the shalom of the perichoretic Trinitarian dance to all of creation.

[1] In fact, if we were to follow the “Plan B” logic through the entire Biblical narrative, we would presently be in something like “Plan I,” which would encompass creation, fall, flood, Babel, Israel under Moses, Israel under the judges, Israel under the kings, and Israel in exile. It would seem that God continually engages in failed experiments, which would leave little hope for the success of the “Church Age” or even for the return of Christ.

[2] David Bosh, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Orbis 1991).

[3] See, e.g., Augustine’s exploration of this theme in The City of God.

[4] See Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: the Cross of Christ as the Foundation of Criticism and Christian Theology (Fortress Press 1993).

[5] For an excellent exploration of the problem of evil, see Nigel Goring Wright, A Theology of the Dark Side (InterVarsity 2003). Nigel Wright leans towards Karl Barth’s understanding of “evil” as “nothingness,” which seems fruitful to me.

[6] For a discussion of this formulation, referred to as “Rahner’s Rule” after Catholic theologian Karl Rahner, see Stanley Grenz, Rediscovering the Triune God (Fortress Press 2004).

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Theology

Soul Sorting and Election

My third and (I think) final post on the “soul sort” narrative is up on Jesus Creed. This one is about “election.”  This topic ultimately is a deep mystery, upon which I offer my reflections as tentative at best.  Here’s the conclusion of the post, but I encourage you to hop over to Jesus Creed and read the whole thing:

We, the Church, have been elected for mission. But this emphatically does not mean that those outside the visible Church are forever outside the reach of God’s grace. Barth’s approach is helpful here: God has already said “yes” to all of humanity in Christ. The eschatological victory over sin, evil and death is sealed. In my view — given what I know of God’s character revealed in Christ – at the final judgment, only those who persistently reject God’s grace will remain outside the Kingdom. Karl Barth, C.S. Lewis, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Leslie Newbiggin, Donald Bloesch, Dallas Willard, and the like, were right: it is wrong to suggest that all people who do not (as far as we can see) have access to the Gospel in this life are simply cast off by God. (Whether God’s salvation encompasses an ongoing post-mortem “harrowing of Hell,” as many Eastern Church Fathers and contemporary Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic theologians suggest, I do not know, though I personally suspect something like this is so. ) Yet, as always, it is not for me to pretend to constrain what God can or cannot do, or to pry too deeply into His mysteries. Judgment and salvation belong to God alone.

Meanwhile, we who know Christ go into the world with great hope and anticipation for the wedding feast to come, as people chosen by God for His mission of redeeming all of creation, trusting that nothing God has done or will do is in the slightest way unloving, unjust, unfair, or wrong, working out our own salvation, and content to leave the mystery of final judgment to our good and beautiful God.

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Law and Policy Theology

Law and Justice at JC

Stop by and join the conversation on Law, Judgment and Justice.