Merry Christmas to all

Eternal God,
by the birth of Jesus Christ you gave yourself to the world.
Grant that, being born in our hearts,
he may save us from all our sins,
and restore within us the image and likeness of our Creator,
to whom be everlasting praise and glory,
world without end. Amen.

(from the United Methodist Hymnal, 231)

A framework for the means of grace

My current column series in the United Methodist Reporter has been looking at the means of grace in Christian practice. I began by laying out how, in a Wesleyan sense, we understand the means of grace. I then went on to look at both works of piety and works of mercy. Works of piety orient us toward the love of God and consist of those worship and devotional practices that help us learn to love God better. Works of mercy orient us toward the love of neighbor. When we engage in them through acts of compassion and justice, we learn how to love our fellow human beings better.

It is crucially important to understand the means of grace as formational practices. We can't learn what it means to live the Christian life simply by sitting alone in a room and privately reading our Bibles. We have to have Christian friends who can help us, pushing us to really live out our discipleship, encouraging us where we fall short, and reflecting God's grace in our lives. In that sense, even those acts of discipleship that we undertake as individuals ultimately find their fulfillment in community.

Thus, I wanted to finish off the column series by offering a practical way to live into the means of grace in the context of community. The absolute best way I have seen that done is through the particular type of small group called Covenant Discipleship, which is an updated form of the early Methodist class meeting. I look at Covenant Discipleship groups as a means of grace in my latest Reporter column. For any person deeply attracted by the prospect of engaging the means of grace daily, but who is not quite sure how to do that, a Covenant Discipleship group offers a great way. It provides the framework necessary to live out discipleship to Jesus daily. And if you are a little numb to the small group craze that has swept the church in the past few years, don't be fooled. CD groups are different than most any other small group model I've seen.

In the past few decades, there have been a handful of pastors and scholars who have examined the purpose and function of Wesley's class meeting in the hopes of reinvigorating Methodist discipleship. The development of Covenant Discipleship is a direct result of their efforts. The primary person behind this work has been Dr. David Lowes Watson. Currently, Dr. Steve Manskar at the General Board of Discipleship is the leading force behind promoting Covenant Discipleship groups in the life of the church. The Office of Accountable Discipleship, which he heads, provides leadership and resources for starting and maintaining CD groups in local churches. If you'd like to find out more, visit the website here.

The four columns in the Reporter series can be found here:

1) "Finding faith through the means of grace"

2) "Transformed through holy habits"

3) "Loving your neighbor a real 'means of grace'"

4) "Covenant Discipleship helps us wait on God"

Does God predestine us to salvation?

Ok, so I said I wouldn't be blogging as much. But I received an interesting e-mail from a reader who wanted to know my positions on predestination and free will. I have worked this out from time to time in other settings, but this e-mail gave me the chance to try and condense it into as few words as possible. My sense is that in Protestant evangelicalism, Calvinist predestinarians vastly outnumber Wesleyan Arminians. In the mainline church, people generally don't get into such potentially divisive issues as the manner of election. But since I come from a mainline church with an evangelical wing in it (and since I have some evangelical leanings myself), I think it's important to take this issue up. There's a lot at stake, after all.

Here is the gist of the response I sent to my reader:

The problem of election and predestination is, indeed, one of the biggest theological conundrums the church has had to face. It goes back at least to St. Augustine, over 1500 years ago. I am not a predestinarian, and in this I follow Wesley's Arminian take on Calvinist election. I'll explain where I stand as best I can, but I also want to point you to a couple of excellent Wesley sermons where he makes a case much better than I can. They are "Free Grace" and "The Scripture Way of Salvation." The first sermon argues against predestination as contrary to the character of God, and the second gives a positive explanation of how God's grace works preveniently, in our justification, and in our sanctification.

The problem with predestination begins with how far you take it. Some have argued that God predestines all to eternal salvation. This is called universalism, and it has never been accepted by the church (although contrary to what some people think, it is not a modern invention. Very respected church fathers such as Origen and Gregory of Nyssa subscribed to a form of universalism). But if you reject universalism, you are forced to deal with how and why God elects some to salvation and not others. Most predestinarians who follow the logic of predestination all the way through (and Calvin was one of these) admit to what is called "double predestination", meaning that God elects some to salvation and others to perdition. That is, if we take God's sovereignty seriously, we must admit that he is in control of everything. By his will, some are eternally saved and others are eternally damned.

And it is at this point that Wesley disagreed based on the character of God. It doesn't really work to just cite Scriptural texts back and forth. Those texts (particularly from Romans) that speak of predestination can be easily countered by other texts that support the opposite point of view. For instance, free will theologians take Psalm 145:9 very seriously: "The LORD is good to all: and his tender mercies are over all his works" (KJV). Or they point to 1 Timothy 2:1-6, which reads (in part), "This is good, and it is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all, the testimony to which was borne at the proper time" (RSV). But again, prooftexting only gets us so far. The question is, how to we interpret these texts?

Wesley, and Wesleyans (like myself), cannot abide by the notion that a God whose name is Love (1 John 4:8) would elect some of those who he created in his own image to eternal perdition. Indeed, the notion of creating beings in order to cast them into the fire makes God into a monster. "For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 6:23, RSV).

How, then, is salvation possible? Surely human beings who are corrupted by sin do not have the ability to choose God on their own. Left to our own devices, we will always choose Death over Life. And in fact, Scripture is adamant that our salvation is a gift from God and not the result of our own works (Ephesians 2:8). But the nuance that it is important to make is in how God's grace works on us. Grace does not begin to work in our lives when we accept Jesus as Lord and Savior. That may be the moment of our new birth, but it is the result of something God has been doing preveniently since the moment of our conception ("Before I formed you in the womb I knew you" - Jeremiah 1:5, RSV). That grace heals us to the point where we can respond to God's call upon our lives. When we accept Christ, it is only because we have been restored by grace to the point that we can take those first tentative steps of faith. But when we received God's justifying grace and thereby are born anew, we can begin to walk the path of sanctification that brings about a more fully restored will within us.

You'll often hear Wesleyans talk about prevenient grace, justifying grace, and sanctifying grace. They're not talking about three different kinds of grace that have qualitative distinctions between them. They are rather speaking about the instrumental working of grace in our lives. And it is through God's prevenience that our free will is restored to the point of accepting the free gift God offers us of salvation.

Time enough, but none to spare

I think the past few days of my life have been as busy as any I've ever had. I had to grade a bunch of final exams at the beginning of last week as a part of my T.A. duties, finished a paper on Wednesday, took a Latin final exam on Thursday, and flew to Dallas early Friday morning for a John Wesley Fellows conference. I'm back in Durham now, but I've got a lot more paper writing to do over the break. Thus, my blogging may be a little spotty over the next few weeks. I'll post when I can, but it may be more like weekly instead of two times per week.

Hope everyone is having a happy Advent. Peace +

God and Hillary Clinton

In its current issue, Christianity Today has an interview with Paul Kengor, the author of God and Hillary Clinton: A Spiritual Life (read the article here). In it, Kengor says that, beginning in the mid-1960s, Clinton "began following a left-leaning Methodism, and now Hillary Clinton walks step by step with the Methodist leadership into a very liberal Christianity."

I am always curious whenever I read a comment like that. I know that traditional evangelicals consider the mainline United Methodist Church to be quite liberal. But on the other hand, other mainline denominations like the Episcopal Church, Presbyterian Church (USA), and Lutheran Church (ELCA) see us as more conservative than themselves. I have personally studied and worshiped in settings with Methodists who are to the left of the left fringe of the mainline (think United Church of Christ or Christian Church/Disciples of Christ) and Methodists who are as conservative as any Southern Baptist in Texas. And while there is some truth to the generalization about theological and political leanings of Methodists depending on area of the country (think the conservative Southeastern and South Central Jurisdictions or the liberal Western, North Central, and Northeastern Jurisdictions), it is by no means true across the board.

All that is just a way of saying that I don't think statements like the one Kengor makes are very helpful. But Kengor's, like others of the type, are at least predictable. Because when you get on down a little bit in the interview, you see the two big issues he raises to back up the 'liberal' label: abortion and universal healthcare. Of the two, abortion is clearly the litmus test for self-described conservative evangelicals. Support legalized abortion and you're liberal; oppose it and you're one of us.

Let me say first that I am pro-life on the issues of both abortion and the death penalty, as I have explained on this blog in the past. I think we have a good statement on capital punishment in the Book of Discipline, while I think our statement on abortion is morally weak, self-contradictory, and practically useless. That said, any person or group that uses a single issue to define a label, and then uses that label as a litmus test for religious orthodoxy, is advocating for a fairly thin, one-dimensional Christianity. If you wanted to test the UMC's orthodoxy by its actual doctrinal statements, you could go to our Articles of Religion and Confession of Faith in the Book of Discipline and find that we are - at least in Protestant terms - orthodox all the way down.

But of course, religion in the popular discourse is not about theological orthodoxy. It's about social policy orthodoxy. And while one's views on social policy can be derived out of theological propositions, it is also often influenced by philosophical convictions regarding secular politics that has very little to do with one's view of God and God's work in the world. For instance, the other issue Kengor pins on Hillary - that of universal healthcare - would seem on the surface to be a very conservative tenet. After all, what Christian who believes in the sanctity of life would not want every American to have access to healthcare? Heck, I know I do! But for evangelicals influenced more by their political ideology than the Bible, this is not about God's valuation of life. It is about the size of government, its influence in our lives, and taxation. Thus, anyone who wants universal healthcare is a liberal.

Now I get real nervous about government influence and taxation myself. But I also want poor, sick kids to have access to a physician. And that comes directly out of my faith convictions. If we don't want nationalized medicine, fine. But we still need to talk about how every citizen of this country is going to be able to get affordable healthcare, 'cause right now our system is a mess. I don't consider my view on healthcare to be conventionally conservative or liberal. But I do view it as arising out of an orthodox understanding of God and God's valuation of human life.

Going back to the issue of abortion, I am curious as to how folks like Kengor would respond to the idea that outlawing abortion would necessitate a more expansive governmental role in healthcare and foster care. For instance, doesn't forcing mothers to carry babies to term - babies who would otherwise be aborted - morally obligate the government to provide a much greater degree of medical care, foster care, and adoption services than it currently does? I think it does, and I would be willing to support some type of legislation that would work toward outlawing abortion while providing the resources necessary to care for both the mothers and children who would be most directly affected by the change. But then, that is also the kind of move that Kengor and others view as liberal - an expanding of government services that interferes with individual choice, enlarges the federal bureaucracy, and requires greater taxation.

So all this is just a way of saying that it is dangerous to start throwing religious labels around that are dependent on a one or two issue litmus test - especially when those issues can be as much dependent on secular political views as they are on theological convictions. In fact, I think it is dangerous to throw the 'conservative' and 'liberal' labels around in general when it comes to the church. There's just too much of a tendency to view faith through the lens of secular politics to make the labels themselves very meaningful.

My questions for Kengor are these: What do you mean by Methodism as a "very liberal Christianity"? Who are the "Methodist leadership" to which you are referring? How does your view of the proper role of the federal government influence your view of an issue as either religiously liberal or religiously conservative? Is there a problem in assigning such labels to people based on their views of social policy, when social policy is so often tied to political interests that have little to do with theological doctrine?

Manna and Mercy

God wants to transform us. To heal our brokenness. To cleanse us from sin. To redeem us. To restore the image of God within us. To give us the same mind as Christ Jesus.

And the means of grace are the way he has chosen to do that.

The means of grace are those signs, words, and actions that God uses as channels through which to pour grace in our lives. I have been writing a column series on the means of grace in the United Methodist Reporter. I began the column series with an overview of the means of grace, dividing them as Wesley did - into works of piety and works of mercy. Then in the second installment, I focused on works of piety - those acts of worship and compassion which draw us closer into the life of God.

Hand in hand with works of piety are works of mercy. I write on this topic in this week's column. These are those acts of justice and compassion that express our love of neighbor. When we engage in works of mercy, we are both reflecting God's loving mercy for us and extending that mercy to others. Works of mercy are a form of the church's witness to the world. And that is crucially important. But they do something more - they work to sanctify us as we engage in them. Like works of piety, the works of mercy help us to receive God's grace. They thus shape our character and transform us into the people God wants us to be.

God has extended manna and mercy to us. He asks us to give that gift on to others. And when we do, we show the world what it means to live as members of God's own kingdom - in the here and now!

Esther's Choice

[The following commentary is intended as a companion piece to my latest article in the Covenant Discipleship Quarterly, which is available here.]

The OT Book of Esther has always fascinated me. For one, it has no direct mention of God anywhere in the text. The closest it ever comes to mentioning God is Mordecai's cryptic statement that, should Esther fail to act on the Jews' behalf, "deliverance will come to the Jews from another quarter."

Beyond that odd fact, Esther is also interesting in the portrayal it gives of the Jews living in exile. So many peoples in history (including the Israelites of the Northern Kingdom) have disappeared from history after suffering conquest and/or exile. But not the Judahites. Their identity as a people did just the opposite - it persisted and actually became stronger. The Jews of exile undoubtedly began codifying their sacred texts into the Old Testament scriptures that we have today. Of course, God's providential care sustained them throughout the Babylonian captivity until they could return to the Promised Land. But practically, they had to take the steps that would allow them to maintain their corporate existence in the absence of a land or a Temple cult. The fact that they succeeded remains one of the great marvels of history.

Then there's the figure of Esther herself. Young, ethnically different from the people who surrounded her in the court of Xerxes, and faced with a powerful adversary in the court official Haman, Esther makes a compelling heroine. Early in the book, her chief assets seem to be her beauty and a very capable uncle in the person of Mordecai. But when crisis strikes and Haman's plots threaten the destruction of all the Jews in Persian lands, Esther risks her own life - first by seeking an audience with the king uninvited, and then by baldly exposing Haman's plot to the king.

Now, the Babylonian Empire is gone by the time of the events described in Esther, and the Persians have allowed the Jewish elite in exile to return to their land. But many Jews have stayed in Persia, and after all, Judah itself is now incorporated into the massive Persian Empire. If Haman's plots had been carried out, it mostly probably would have meant the extermination of the Jews as a distinct people. The actions of one young woman were thus crucial to the survival of God's chosen people.

We might ask the question, "Why did Esther act at all?" Mordecai issues his famous challenge ("Who knows? Perhaps you have come to the throne for just such a time as this.") and simultaneously threatens Esther that she will not escape Haman's wrath just because she is the queen. But that must have seemed like a desperate threat from a man who - because he was one of Haman's chief enemies - must have been at the top of the proscription list.

Nevertheless, Esther acts. Faced with a choice, she chooses to risk her own life and position in what must have seemed like a desperate gamble. And that choice proved salvific for God's people. I look at this story in my current article in the Covenant Discipleship Quarterly. I believe there are a number of reasons why Esther found the courage to do what she did. Foremost among these is the way she was nurtured and formed by the practices of a close-knit religious community. Esther could act because of who she was raised to be. If she did not know how to pray, or how to fast, or how to identify with her faith, Mordecai's appeals to her would undoubtedly have fallen on deaf ears.

Is there a lesson in this for us? Sure there is. Formation in the faith is key to our identity as Christians. People are almost never sanctified in an instant. It is a long, slow process that extends over one's entire life. But when we are shaped in faithful ways, we can be assured that, when He comes to us, we will recognize Him for Who He Is.

So Judas is a bad guy, after all

Sometime ago, National Geographic came out with a sensationalistic story arguing that the Gospel of Judas, a Gnostic text dating from the 3rd century A.D., reveals that Judas wasn't actually a dirty, rotten betrayer of Jesus. As the "Lost Gospel of Judas" website says, "this newly discovered Gospel portrays Judas as acting at Jesus' request when he hands Jesus over to the authorities."

Like most sensationalistic, media-driven stories about new Jesus "discoveries", this one is turning out to be way over-blown. In an interesting NY Times op/ed piece, Rice University biblical scholar April D. DeConick explains several serious translation errors on the part of the National Geographic team that led to significant misinterpretations of the text - some of them the exact opposite of what the gospel actually means. (Read Prof. DeConick's article here.) For instance, the gospel, while Gnostic in flavor and not friendly to an orthodox Catholic cosmology, nevertheless calls Judas a demon who is separated from the holy generation of Jesus' followers and who is informed of the mysteries of the kingdom only so he can endure suffering appropriate to his crime. All of this, properly revealed by Prof. DeConick's translation, runs counter to the version National Geographic put forward.

I haven't read the National Geographic issue on the Gospel of Judas, nor have I read the gospel itself. I've just got too many other things on my list. But I do appreciate it when a responsible scholar speaks up to correct the hasty mistakes of a media source desperate to make a buck off of sensationalistic reporting.