The Church's first mission

"A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross."

That was H. Richard Niebuhr's comment in The Kingdom of God in America about the view of mainline Protestantism on the coming of the Kingdom of God. He was describing the belief that society's natural progress has pretty much done away with the need to understand sin, Jesus Christ, the atonement, and salvation in the ways they were understood in previous times.

Niebuhr wrote those words in the 1930s, but they pretty accurately describe wide swaths of the Protestant church in America today.

The belief in society's progress, held so firmly by Protestant liberals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was shattered by the devastation of World War I. But curiously enough, mainline Protestant denominations in the United States didn't seem to get the message (Niebuhr and others notwithstanding).

And whereas our Social Gospeling forebears still believed strongly in personal piety, the Protestant liberalism of the mainline church today has lost even the belief that something about salvation necessarily involves personal transformation. The optimism in human progress is still there, though, and our latter-day Protestant liberalism often sees the church itself as a hidebound organization that needs to 'catch up to the times.'

I've always been curious about how we could possibly look back over the last hundred years and see progress. Sure, there's been lots of technological progress - in science, medicine, engineering, etc. We've been to the moon, and we've stamped out smallpox.

But if you look at other measures, you can see how the very same technology that looks like progress in one place looks like regress in another. How about the 20th century's wars? Advances in technology allowed us to kill more people in war than had died in the wars of all other centuries combined. And what about the state of the environment - the plants, the animals, and even the atmosphere? At the rate we're going, we'll be lucky if there are any animals left in a few decades besides us and the ones we either eat or keep as pets. Our great technology is extinguishing animals, ecosystems, and glaciers in equal measure.

So are we really progressing?

The answer is 'no,' at least not in the way that really counts. Everyone is born a heathen, crippled by sin and in need of God's grace. And so God the Father calls all of us to walk the way of salvation shown to us through his Son, Jesus Christ. And the only real progress is the progress of the Holy Spirit in our lives, as we are healed by grace and made holy in heart and life. That is a progress that happens anew with every person, as he or she is gently healed by grace and restored through the ministry of the church and participation in the means of grace.

This is the Scripture Way of Salvation. I make the case in my recent UM Reporter column that proclaiming the reality of salvation through word and action is the very reason the Methodists were called into existence by God in the first place. And it remains our true calling still today.

The problem with us Methodists is not that some want to pursue social justice while others want to focus on spiritual formation. It is that all of us have an impoverished understanding of what salvation means. And we can begin to remedy that by searching deeply into our own tradition for the rich resources that await us there.

What is salvation?

Wesley said that there are three grand doctrines in Scripture: Original Sin, Justification by Faith, and the Holiness consequent upon that justification.

When was the last time you really heard salvation preached in your church? When was the last time you preached it?

A few weeks ago the lectionary gospel reading was from John 3, and I was the guest-preacher in a little Presbyterian church here in Durham. Preparing the sermon, I found myself gravitating to John 3:3 and Jesus' command that all must be born again. This is not typical Methodist or Presbyterian fare, although once upon a time Methodists were very concerned with the new birth. So I preached on it, and I ended up realizing that my very uncomfortability with the doctrine of the new birth probably says a lot about both the church in which I minister and the theological formation I recevid as a child and later as a divinity student.

I've actually been thinking a lot about salvation and why it doesn't seem to be the focus of mainline preaching these days. Is it because at heart we are all soft universalists? That's my guess. But Scripture suggests that universalism is wishful thinking. Is it because we only equate salvation with "going to heaven after you die"? Probably so, but that's only because we have allowed a certain kind of shallow, antinomian Calvinism to become the standard account of savlation in the church and abandoned our own tradition's understanding of it.

My new column in the United Methodist Reporter wrestles with this very issue. The church's primary mission should be to proclaim and embody the gospel in such a way that souls are being saved. I don't know why we need a church that is primarily (or only) a social/civic organization dressed up in spiritual language. And I am afraid that that is largely what we have become.

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.

Practicing your faith

I don't believe in a John 3:16 faith.

That is, I don't believe that the Christian faith is summed up perfectly in that particular verse, as so many people do. Now I do think every bit of it is true: God does love the world; he did give his only begotten son; we are called to believe in him and we are promised eternal life.

But the problem with a John 3:16 faith is that so many people both start and stop with it. The transformation of their lives (what we call sanctification) is not important, so long as they believe that Jesus is who he says he is. How they use their time, who they choose to love, how they spend their money, and whether they commit to life in the church don't seem to have much bearing in their lives.

The problem with this, of course, is that it runs against the grain of the entire New Testament witness. The Scriptures want to testify to us how our lives are transformed by Christ as we live in the covenant community known as the church. And that involves a change in our habits. Every one of them.

There are other "3:16s" out there that help to put John 3:16 in its proper perspective. Check out Ephesians 3:16, which speaks of inner transformation through the power of the Spirit (a transformation which, if it is true, must be expressed outwardly as well). Or Philippians 3:16, which enjoins us to hold fast to what we have attained - a statement which, in the light of Paul's previous comments about pressing on toward the goal, is about the importance of how we live out our lives in concrete acts. Then, of course, there is Revelation 3:16, where the Laodiceans are told that they will be spewed out of Christ's mouth for their lukewarmness. If that's not a call to a new way of life, I don't know what is!

About a year and a half ago, Steve Manskar at the General Board of Discipleship asked me to write a couple of short essays for Covenant Discipleship Quarterly about my experience with Covenant Discipleship Groups. I happen to think CD Groups are one of the best tools in helping Christians practice their faith through concrete acts - acts which, in turn, help to facilitate the work of the Spirit in sanctification. So if you are interested in something more than a simple John 3:16 faith, you should check out Steve's work in Covenant Discipleship at the GBOD. The website is here.

Those two essays I wrote for the CDQ are online as well:

Covenant Discipleship and My Journey into Ministry (Part I)

Covenant Discipleship and My Journey into Ministry (Part II)

Steve recently asked me to start contributing regularly to CDQ, so there will be more essays out in the future. I'll post them on the blog as I do with my United Methodist Reporter columns.

The error of church programming

Programming.

That is the contemporary Church's answer to relevance. If we can just come up with relevant, interesting programming, the Church of today thinks, then we can bring people into the church.

This is a complex issue, but there are at least two problems with it:

1) An error of ends - The end that the addiction to church programming points toward is a larger, more "active" congregation. The hope is to bring in young singles and families, making the church look more like the megachurches that appear on TV. So the church adopts programming that is designed to do just that (and which is often published by the very churches that supposedly deserve emulation). This is an improper end, of course. The only end that any church should aim toward is the salvation of its members and those outside the church to whom it offers the gospel. Salvation is a holistic process and may involve certain kinds of programming. But the end must be salvation - through the church - and all ministry efforts should be geared toward that end.

2) An error of means - Programming may be a useful means, but the church has bought into it as the absolute key to "success." In actuality, programming should be third or fourth down the line. Participation in the church should be understood as a way of life, the primary arena for human activity by those who call themselves church members. And that way of life must begin with a Eucharistically-oriented worship. Small-group prayer and bible study should be second. (Holy Communion, Scripture, and prayer, after all, are Wesley's three primary means of grace.) After these, I would suggest that outward-oriented mission should be third. Only after these should programming be listed. Interesting or fun activities and studies are great as far as they go, but they should never take the place of a form of church life centered on worship, bible study, corporate prayer, and mission.

I write about this in my current column in the UM Reporter. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.