Jason Micheli's Blog, page 28

"Only the Metaphysical Can Bless Us, Never the Historical"

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The earliest instance of the New Testament citing Psalm 69 is Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. In chapter 15, the apostle points to the psalm to corroborate his command that believers should, not pleasing themselves, welcome one another. Critically, Paul puts the psalm in Christ’s voice:

“The insults of those who insult you have fallen on me.”

Consider the claim the primal church makes in making Jesus the voice of Israel’s faith.

I recently asked an Old Testament how preachers should go about interpreting the Psalms Christologically. The professor balked at my premodern bias and insisted that preachers should first read the Psalms— and all of the Hebrew Bible— in its original context. In the mainline church, this interpretative approach is sacrosanct to the point of being beyond consideration; however, it is a curious consensus if the church rightly confesses the triune name of God.

That is—

What is the original context of an Old Testament passage if, as the dogma professes, Jesus is in the Trinity?

What is the original context of Psalm 69 if its speaker is Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim?

To this question, Robert Jenson writes:

“If the Old Testament is first and foremost a record of ancient Israel’s faith, it unsurprisingly turns out to be indeed just that, the artifact of a religious community that is other than the church, and moreover is not now extant. We will read the Old Testament from the New or we will not be able to read these texts as Scripture at all. This new agreement goes, however, little further.

Somehow—it is now often agreed—we have to read the Old Testament christologically and pneumatologically.

But even this repentant scholarship has left that “somehow” undetermined.

Scholarship’s modern inability to resolve that “somehow” results, I propose, from a certain distinction that we all tend to make, that indeed is so ingrained in our habits as to seem inevitable. When it is proposed that Old Testament texts have a christological or ecclesial sense, many biblical scholars will now agree, but this sense will then be anxiously and promptly contrasted with another sense which the texts are supposed to have “in themselves” or “originally” or “for their own time.” The official exegetes will now not often simply brush off proposals of christological and ecclesial readings of the Old Testament. But they will still quickly say, “On the other hand, we must not override their original sense” or something to that effect, and those of us who are not certified exegetes will more or less automatically concede the point.

The trouble is:

When reading Old Testament texts christologically or ecclesially is contrasted with another reading which is said to take them “in themselves,” or in their “original” sense, the churchly reading inevitably appears as an imposition on the texts, even if an allowable one. Christological or ecclesial readings will be tolerated for homiletic purposes, or for such faintly suspect enterprises as systematic theology, but are not quite the real thing.

We need to question this all too automatic distinction.

The place to start is by observing some obvious but generally overlooked hermeneutical facts: an author’s intention or a community of first readers’ reading is plainly not identical with the texts “themselves” or with an “original” import. Any author constantly interprets her own writing—before, during, and after formulating text. We later readers are not the only ones with a particular hermeneutic and with resultant interpretations of the texts an author produces; the author has his own, and these are no more identical with the texts themselves than are ours. Moreover, first readers are just that and no more: they are not pure receivers of meaning but first readers, which is to say, the first readers to have a chance to impose their the church’s christological-ecclesial reading and a reading of the texts in some original entity but the church’s christological-ecclesial reading and the author’s and first readers’ equally problematic readings. So soon as we see that these are the readings to be considered, we are liberated to ask: Which of them grasps the texts “in themselves” or as they are “originally”? And the answer to that question is not necessarily that the author’s or first readers’ reading is original, not if there is someone in the picture besides the author, the first readers, and us. Not when the text is supposed to be Scripture, so that God the Spirit is in the picture.

It was—I now have come to see—a function of the old doctrine of inspiration to trump the created author with prior agents, the Spirit and the Word, and to trump the alleged first readers with prior readers, with indeed the whole diachronic people of God, preserved as one people through time by that same Spirit.

And then we may very well take the christological-ecclesial sense of an Old Testament text as precisely the “original” sense, the sense which it has “in itself,” if in the particular case we have grounds to suppose that the christological-ecclesiological sense responds to the intention and reception of this primary agent and these primary readers.

Thus it was a founding maxim of modern thought: “Only the metaphysical can bless us, never the historical.”

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“The main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing.”

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Here is a conversation I had with Bishop Scott Anson Benhase, author of Done and Left Undone, which you should definitely check out.

Here is the nugget I read from him that is worth its weight in gold:

“Years ago when I was recruiting at one of our seminaries, I ended each interview by doing a role-play with them. I’d play who I was (minus being a bishop), a 50-something, over-educated, occasionally-pissant, straight white male. I asked each seminarian to tell me why I should join their church.

They all mentioned community. I said I attended AA. I had all the needed support. They mentioned outreach opportunities. I replied I was an active member of Rotary. I was already fully involved in helping needy folk. Lastly, they mentioned the glorious music program at their church. I responded I had season tickets to the local symphony. I already enjoyed plenty of great music. I waited patiently for some mention of how their church could meet my greatest need, namely, to be reconciled with God through Jesus by his cross. Never came. One did mention Jesus would be a good exemplar for my life, so I gave him points for that. Church leaders aren’t social directors, community service providers, or music impresarios. We got one thing and one thing only: God’s grace in Jesus. We’re stewards of the Great Narrative of Redemption. When we busy ourselves with other tasks, we’ll lead, but it won’t be missional leadership. My friend Paul Zahl told me that every church he’s ever seen or been part of that’s led with “Jesus Christ and him crucified” has grown. That’s been my experience, too. As Stephen Covey has said about organizations: “The main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing.”

Show Notes

Summary

In this conversation, Scott Benhase discusses the challenges and responsibilities of church leadership, particularly during times of crisis. He emphasizes the importance of slowing down, listening, and fostering spiritual maturity among congregants. Drawing from his experiences and the Benedictine tradition, he highlights the need for empathy, humility, and perspective in pastoral care. The discussion also touches on the concept of a 'full gospel church' that balances social action with spiritual growth. In this conversation, Scott Benhase discusses the challenges and dynamics of church leadership, particularly in the context of faith education, outreach, and the complexities of navigating disagreements within congregations. He emphasizes the importance of understanding congregational needs, maintaining relationships with those who hold differing views, and the necessity of reconciliation in the face of conflict. Benhase also reflects on the role of the church in a post-Christian world and the significance of a Benedictine approach to ministry, highlighting the need for a focus on God's grace and the core message of reconciliation through Jesus Christ.

Takeaways

The church often pulls leaders back in, even after retirement.

In times of upheaval, slowing down is crucial for healing.

Listening first and speaking second is essential in conflict resolution.

Many congregants lack spiritual maturity and self-awareness.

Benedictine leadership emphasizes responsibility for one's spiritual life.

Empathy must be balanced with objective distance in pastoral care.

Humility is recognizing one's own flaws while leading others.

A full gospel church integrates social action with spiritual growth.

Pastoral leadership is an absurd vocation that requires faith.

Cultural nihilism stems from a lack of belief in redemption. There was no teaching the faith of the church that was going on.

You want to begin with where things are.

Don't demonize folks who disagree with you.

Don't cut off from people who disagree with you.

It's a brave space to be.

We're beginning to see the other as not enemy.

Keep the main thing the main thing.

Our atonement theology is so flaccid and so weak.

God has something to say to them that is a word of mercy.

I need you.

Sound Bites

"The church is kind of like the mafia."

"Slow things down because people are highly reactive."

"Listen first and speak second."

"There's no Bible study, no teaching the faith."

"Don't demonize folks who disagree with you."

"Don't cut off from people who disagree with you."

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"The Saints Are Those Who Know Their Sins"

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For a conference, I recently found myself in a Pentecostal Church of God congregation for perhaps— I think— the first time. There, a number of congregants approached me to talk to me about Shirley Pitts. She apparently had found an audience well beyond what I might’ve imagined. After fighting back tears, I remarked that Shirley is most definitely in the Kingdom gossiping about how she’s more popular than other saints.

Since I gave this Mockingbird talk about Shirley well before I started this Substack (and since we’re approaching All Saints) I thought I’d post it here. People often accuse me of not being a Wesleyan. I’d prefer to characterize myself as an inconvenient Wesleyan. What keeps me in the fold? While I’ve yet to bury, after 25 years, a Christian who was “perfect in love,” I have known Christians who died different from how they’d lived.

Shirley is Exhibit A for what keeps me in the sanctificationist fold. It’s perhaps the most un-Methodist thing that I stuck in one place long enough to see God change her. I’m still recovering from the fact of having seen God work.

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“How to Vote like Jesus”

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In anticipation of All Saints and Election Day, I have been revisiting some of the “political” writing from the church’s cloud of witnesses. If, as Stanley Hauerwas insists, the church does not have a politics but is a politics, then much of the church’s political theology will appear in this partisan age as insufficiently political. Nevertheless, as Jesus says, “Let those with ears hear.” Take the passage below entitled— a-politically— “How One Must Read and Understand the Scriptures.”

Origen of Alexandria is one of the “ante-Nicene” church fathers, meaning he worked before the fourth century ecumenical council which gave the church the Nicene Creed. Diarmaid MacCulloch has written that reading Origen is like an exuberant adventure of the imagination. Origen wrote in the early third century and argued for, among other items of dogma, the eventual return of everything to God’s glory, even Gehenna and the devil— that is, he preached a cosmic, universal salvation.

In writing on the mysteries of the divinely inspired scriptures, Origen exhorts readers and believers to a posture of humility that is in markedly short supply this election cycle. For instance, Origen is the opposite of this Texas pastor who recently “preached” to his congregation about How to Vote like Jesus.

In case you only skimmed the article, 20,000 received this “sermon.” And applauded it. This “preacher” alleged that the ways and judgments of God are easy to discern and so to act upon by his hearers. And it would not take long on a search engine to find a pastor preaching with similar certainty from the other side of our partisan divide. By contrast, Origen teaches that not only is the parallel between our age and the history of the scriptures elusive to discern, historical figures in scripture like King Josiah or Darius must be read according to the spirit and not the letter of the text.

Origen, whose father was martyred for the faith, writes in On First Principles:

“But let it be sufficient for us in all matters to conform our mind to the rule of piety and to think of the words of the Holy Spirit in this way, that the text shines not because composed according to the eloquence of human fragility, but because, as it is written, “all the glory of the King is within.” Yet Paul, scrutinizing by the Holy Spirit, searches out the deep things of God only to exclaim in despair and amazement, “O depth of the riches of the knowledge and wisdom of God!” And that it was from despair of attaining a perfect understanding that he uttered this, listen to him saying, “How unsearchable are the judgments of God and his ways past understanding!”

For Paul did not say that it is difficult for the judgments of God to be discerned, but that they cannot be searched out at all. Paul did not say that it is difficult for his ways to be traced out, but that they cannot be traced out.

For however far one may advance in the search and make progress by intense study, assisted even by the grace of God and an enlightened mind, he will not be able to arrive at the final goal of those things that are investigated. Nor can any mind, which is created, have the possibility to comprehend everything, but as soon as it has discovered a small piece of things which it seeks, it again sees others which are to be sought; and even if it arrives at these, it will again see many others succeeding them that must be examined.

Because of this, therefore, the most wise Solomon, beholding by wisdom the nature of things, says;

“I said, I will become wise; and wisdom herself was removed far from me, further than it was; and a profound depth, who shall find it?”

Isaiah also— knowing that the beginnings of things could not not be discovered by a mortal nature, and not even by those natures which, although more divine than human, were nevertheless themselves either created or formed, knowing then, that by none of these could either the beginning or end be found— says, “Tell me the former things which have been, and we will know that you are gods; or announce what the last things are, and then we will see that you are gods.”

For my Hebrew teacher also used to teach thus: that at the beginning or end of all things could not be comprehended by anyone except only the Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, Isaiah, speaking in the form of a vision, spoke of there being only two seraphim, who with two wings cover the face of God, and with two his feet, and with two they fly, calling one to the other saying, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of Sabaoth, the whole earth is full of your glory.” Therefore, as the seraphim alone have both their wings over the face of God and over his feet, it may be ventured to declare that neither the armies of holy angels, nor the holy thrones, nor the dominions, nor the principalities, nor the powers…

None are able to understand fully the judgments and ways of God.”

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The "Necessity" of Resurrection

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Here is the second installment of our study of Robert Jenson’s writings on the Last Things, starting with his chapter “The Saints.”

Jenson The Saints1.21MB ∙ PDF fileDownloadDownload

You can join us tonight live at 7:00 EST by clicking HERE.

We will discuss sections 4 and 5 this week.

Show Notes

Summary

This conversation delves into the theological perspectives of Karl Barth and Robert Jensen, exploring their views on authority, the nature of judgment, and the significance of community and intimacy with God. The discussion highlights the differences between Protestant and Catholic beliefs, the role of saints, and the implications of Jesus's death and resurrection for humanity. The speakers emphasize the importance of joy and love in understanding God's judgment and the ongoing narrative of faith. In this conversation, the speakers explore the themes of intimacy, brokenness, redemption, and the nature of existence in relation to faith. They discuss how genuine love and acceptance can transform relationships, the importance of embracing one's flaws, and the role of saints in the narrative of redemption. The conversation also delves into the concept of fulfillment in heaven, the significance of desire, and how identity is measured through Christ.

Takeaways

Karl Barth emphasized the authority of Christ over human structures.

Jensen's ecumenical approach seeks unity among Christian traditions.

The last judgment is rooted in the cross and resurrection of Christ.

God's judgment is fundamentally an expression of love.

Intimacy with God is central to the Christian experience.

The story of Jesus informs the stories of all believers.

Happiness is a fruit of the spirit, not mere emotion.

The role of saints is to remind us of our shared faith journey.

Theological language should promote joy and community.

Understanding judgment requires a shift from fear to love. Intimacy involves knowing and loving someone fully.

Brokenness can be a source of strength and connection.

The gospel encourages resilience in the face of failure.

Forgiveness allows us to move beyond our past mistakes.

Heaven offers a space for delight and fulfillment.

Every person's unique story contributes to the community of saints.

The church should embrace and value individual particularity.

Desire is an essential aspect of human existence.

Perfect love dispels fear and encourages authenticity.

Our identity is rooted in our relationship with Christ.

Sound Bites

"It's just tire after tire after tire."

"Karl Barth had this desire to have the sense of what authority."

"Jesus is the one true sacrament."

"I know you struggle with alcohol and you are still my beloved."

"It's through my brokenness that I get to minister."

"The gospel reads fall down seven times, get up eight."

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The Freedom of the Prisoner of God

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Romans 14.1-10

I preached on the road this Sunday, and my gracious host indulged my request to stick with my exploration through Paul’s Letter to the Romans.

During our second war in Iraq, one week during Lent the Lord summoned me to preach about the use of state-sponsored torture. Newspapers had only recently begun reporting on the Torture Memos which documented the ghastly abuses by at the prison in Abu Ghraib. The images outraged the world. In the face of such revelations, the churches in America were silent. I was young and brash and preached what I took to be self-evident.

“Why is the church in America so quiet these days?” I exhorted my hearers.

I let question linger for an uncomfortably long silence before I continued:

“Why are Christians so quiet about this particular issue? What is the matter with us? Why is the church instead consumed with culture wars. Has the church lost its nerve? Has the church forgotten we worship a crucified Lord?

No matter what a person has done or is suspected of doing, once that person is taken into custody, he or she becomes defenseless. The Old and New Testaments alike are clear: abuse of a defenseless person is an abomination in God’s sight. The defenselessness of a fetus is a central argument advanced against abortion. This conviction about defending the defenseless lies at the very heart of our faith. Yet we are silent, as quiet as all his followers who did not shout, “Do not crucify him!”

As soon as I handed over the benediction that Sunday, a church member assaulted me in the narthex and, sticking his finger in my chest, he hollered at me, “Just where in the holy hell do you get off preaching like that, preacher?!”

I stammered.

“Well, Senator,” I said, “It is Lent and the Lord was tortured to death.”

The Chair of the Armed Services Committee shook his head and waved his finger at me.

“You tell me, preacher— if Jesus was still alive do you honestly think Jesus would having anything to say about torture and the government?!”

“Um, well Senator, uh…I mean, he was crucified, I think...um...maybe he would have...” I started to say.

He shook his head and waved me off.

“Jesus would be rolling over in his grave if he knew you’d brought that kind of politics into our church! Just where did you get the idea that your liberal politics has any place in the church?!”

“He doesn’t have a grave…it’s empty…” I muttered to myself.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Never mind,” I said.

He stood there, his hands on his hips, dandruff on his shoulders, waiting for me to answers.

Finally, he repeated his question, “Where did you get the idea that kind of politics has any place among believers?!”

I stammered, “Uh, I mean, it’s called the Book of Kings.”

He thought I was being cute.

“You better watch out!” he threatened, “I could have you run out of this place!”

“Bless your heart,” I replied.

He narrowed his eyes and held his holler to a whisper, “If what you believe about Jesus leads to those sorts of views, then I don’t see how you have any place here!”

And then he shook his now crimson head, motioned for his wife to catch up to him, and then he hurried off.

A few weeks after, on Easter Sunday, when he arrived, opened up the worship bulletin and saw that I was the preacher, he turned right around and left the way he had come.

Back then I was not the humble, wise, and mature man you see before you today. I was proud and pietistic, not a little self-righteous. And I wore his rebuke like the Silver Star. He had wounded me, but I had remained strong in the faith.

Or so I thought.

Looking back, in light of Paul’s letter to the Romans…

Scripture says I was weak.

Remember, the apostle Paul did not number his sentences any more than you do. Not until the Middle Ages did the church add the chapter and verse divisions in the modern Bible. And there is nothing at the top of chapter fourteen to indicate a transition in thought or a change in subject matter; therefore, Paul’s discussion of the dilemma that divides the Christians in Rome in chapters fourteen and fifteen is the continuation of the summons with which Paul ends chapter thirteen, “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ.”

That is, if the Holy Spirit has clothed you with Christ— if God has baptized you— then the way you make your baptism intelligible to the world is by welcoming those whose obedience to Jesus Christ appears at odds with your own.

Not only is there no transition in thought indicated in verse one, Paul’s entire epistle in fact has been building to his discussion of this issue.

Here in chapter fourteen, all the previous elements of Paul’s letter cohere:

The definition of original sin

The promise and offense of the gospel

The astonishing claim that believers are Jesus’s risen body

And finally the exhortation for disciples of Christ to wrap themselves in Christ (baptism) and so live as Christ.

Every ingredient in the epistle thus far has been folded into the argument in order to reckon with this fight over what’s on the table in the church at Rome. Meat.

Evidently, some in the church at Rome abstain from meat out of allegiance to the lordship of Christ. Others not only “eat everything,” they fear the scruples of the others contradict the message of Christian freedom.

Paul takes it for granted that readers understand the context.

In the belly of the Beast’s empire, there was no reliable way for believers in Rome to know with certainty that the meat they found in the market had not previously been offered upon Caesar’s pagan altars. This is the reason Jews throughout the diaspora often avoided meat; likewise, a segment of Christians in Rome opted for vegetarianism as an aspect of their obedience to Christ.

To say the least, their fellow congregants did not appreciate their commitment. Quite obviously, “weak in faith” is very clearly not the self-designation of the vegetarian Christians. It is a slur used against them by their fellow believers. It is a contemptuous epithet used by those who call themselves “strong in faith” to express their disdain for the other. The so-called “strong in faith” were strong because they understood what Paul had taught the Galatians; namely, Christ + ______ is no gospel at all. Any ought or should added to the gospel eliminates the gospel.

Though Paul’s sympathies clearly lie with the “strong in faith,” the strong’s reproach of the weak fails to take seriously the fact that, for the latter group, it is a matter of faithfulness to the Ten Commandments and not simply the kosher laws, especially the first and over-riding commandment, “You shall have no other gods but God.”

“How can we proclaim that Jesus is Lord if we eat meat sacrificed to the barren deities?” the weak in faith anguished. “Will not our manner of living contradict our message?

On the other side of the aisle, the strong in faith argued, “How can we proclaim the gospel if we fret over the law?”

While this partisan divide may strike us as a peculiar problem to vex a church, exactly because it was about the commandments we can easily switch out meat for a different biblical mandate in order to get a sense of how this debate threatened the health of Christ’s Body.

For example:

According to polls, millions of Christians in America currently support the mass deportation of illegal immigrants from the country. Indeed Christians are the cohort most in favor of the policy proposal.

On the other hand, other Christians are the first to insist the scriptures broker no compromise, “When an immigrant sojourns with you in your land, you shall do him no wrong. You shall treat the immigrant who sojourns with you as a native among you, and you shall love him as you love yourself, for once you were immigrants in the land of Egypt: I AM the Lord your God (Leviticus 19).”

Switch out meat for a different biblical mandate that currently divides Christ’s Body and you can begin to appreciate the risk which menaced the church at Rome.

Instead of vegetables, insert abortion into Romans 14 and 15. After all, the Lord Jesus attests to the prophet Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.”

Rather than protein, at issue could be believers who support peddlers of lies yet worship the One who not only commands us not to lie but is himself the Truth.

Jesus commanded his disciples not to take up the sword. Should Christians endorse sending far more powerful weapons to Ukraine or Israel? Survey says we are not of one mind on the issue.

There is more that divides Christ’s Body than what’s on the menu.

When Martin Luther King Jr. called Sunday morning the most segregated hour in America, as much as he was talking about Black versus White he could have been talking about Red versus Blue.

We do not do well welcoming brothers and sisters whose faith in Christ leads them to convictions and commitments other than our own convictions and commitments.

Nevertheless!

This is not a problem without a solution.

The scriptures themselves supply the solution.

As the New Testament scholar John Barclay says, the sheer amount of space Paul devotes to this single issue— meat— signals that he intends his response here to be a model for all our moral discernment.

What the apostle says about this issue goes for all issues. What Paul says to the weak and the strong in Rome about what divides them, Paul says to each of us amidst our divisions.

Tim Alberta is a journalist who writes for the Atlantic. He is also an evangelical Christian whose father, Richard Alberta, was the pastor of a large, well-known church in Michigan. Starting in 2016, Alberta wrote a number of articles critical of then-candidate Donald Trump. Three years later, on the set of a cable news television show Alberta learned that his beloved father had suddenly died.

On the day of his Dad’s visitation, Tim Alberta stood in a receiving line at the back of the sanctuary with his three older brothers. Alberta’s father had grown Cornerstone Church from a small congregation into a megachurch and now he was surrounded by a crowd of church folks he’d known since he was a boy, all chastising him for his political stance. With his Dad’s body in a box only a few feet away, they ridiculed him for being weak in faith.

Alberta writes:

“They kept on coming. More than I could count. People from the church—people I’d known my entire life—were greeting me, not primarily with condolences or encouragement or mourning, but with commentary about Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump. Some of it was playful. But some of it wasn’t playful. Some of it was angry; some of it was cold and confrontational. One man questioned whether I was truly a Christian. Another asked if I was still on “the right side.” A righteous anger was beginning to pierce the fog of melancholy. Here, in our house of worship, people were taunting me about politics as I tried to mourn my father. Card- carrying evangelical Christians, they didn’t see a hurting son; they saw a vulnerable adversary.”

A few hours after Tim Alberta buried his Dad, he and his brothers crashed on the sofa in their parent’s living room. Behind them, in the kitchen, a small platoon of church ladies worked to prepare a meal for the family.

Alberta recalls thinking:

“Here is the love of Christ. Watching them hustle about, comforting Mom and catering to her sons, I found myself regretting thinking the folks at our church were  anything but humble, kindhearted Christians like these ladies. Maybe I’d blown things out of proportion. Just then, one of them walked over and handed me an envelope. It was left at the church, she said. My name was scrawled across it.”

A longtime church elder had written it to say his dead father would be ashamed of him for his politics. Alberta read the letter in shock at its cruelty and then handed it to his wife, who flung it to the floor, crying out, "What the hell is wrong with these people?”

“To be free in Christ is to be free even from the way of life we are convinced inevitably proceeds from our understanding of our freedom in Christ.”

In his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, the theologian Karl Barth writes that “to be free in Christ is to be free even from the way of life we are convinced inevitably proceeds from our understanding of our freedom in Christ.” Paul’s warning to the strong and the weak in Rome, Barth says, is precisely a warning against our faith; that is, Paul cautions us against ourselves. He admonishes us against any certainty about what constitutes the faithful life. “Life under the freedom of Christ,” he writes, “is the unjustifiability of everything we choose to name “the Christian life.””

“Life under the freedom of Christ is the unjustifiability of everything we choose to name “the Christian life.””

Specifically, Barth is referring to the remarkable missing features in Paul's discussion of the debate which divides the church in Rome.There are two: Concord and Commandment.

First, it is notable that the apostle makes no attempt whatsoever to urge the partisans to settle their disagreement and find consensus over the issue in question.

Second, when he at last addresses the problem between them— Paul does not arbitrate their differences by appealing to the law. Paul neither cites the commandments nor quotes the scriptures.

Instead, Paul points to the Christ event:

"While you were yet an ungodly, enemy of the Lord, Christ Jesus died for you. In Jesus Christ, you have been welcomed by God with a surprising mercy and an incongruous grace. Therefore, welcome the other.”

Meat is such an idiosyncratic, antiquated issue Paul’s auditors today miss how seismic is his solution.

Notice—

Paul subordinates all the commandments to baptism.

You shall love the immigrant as you love yourself.

Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.

Turn the other cheek.

Thou shalt not bear false witness.

Paul subordinates all the commandments to the more determinative fact that through water and the Spirit the Father’s only Son has made you his siblings; therefore, we just are brothers and sisters of one another.

We are more brothers and sisters through Christ than if my mother had made us siblings.

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer insists, to exclude others from the Body of Christ based on any law— that is, based on any local tradition, any cultural value, or any political issue— is our attempt to undo what Christ does indissolubly through baptism.

Just so, what is or is not biblical is no longer the final criterion for faithfulness. “Scripture says…” no longer suffices as a way to adjudicate obedience. If you go to the Bible simply to win arguments, it’s your word you find there not God’s word. The final criterion for every argument is now, “In Jesus Christ, you have been welcomed by God; therefore, welcome the other.”

According to Paul, the ultimate and only standard in the “now time” is allegiance to Jesus Christ who has welcomed us.

And because the weak’s abstention from meat is integral to their desire to honor the Lord, Paul accepts it as a genuine expression of faithfulness. Similarly, the strong’s omnivorous diet is an authentic witness to their freedom in Christ; consequently, Paul accepts it too as a genuine— if apparently contradictory— expression of faithfulness.

What Paul will not abide is either side judging the other or offering the other a welcome contingent  only on eventual agreement.

Paul subordinates all the commandments to baptism.

What establishes your faithfulness is not your position on a given issue but your motive for staking out that position. To live by faith is to submit all our differences to our allegiance to Christ. If I advocate for a position other than your own but I do so to serve Christ, then, as my brothers and sisters, you must accept it as a legitimate expression of discipleship. However, if I advocate for that very same position for a reason other than to honor Christ— if my position is really just the personal political preference I would have if I were not a Christian—  then what is faithful in one light is sin in the other.

This is what Paul means when he warns at the end of chapter fourteen:

“You are condemned if…you do not act from faith; for whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.”

In other words—

It is possible for two Christians to hold two completely contradictory politics  on a given issue and yet both be judged faithful and obedient.

And it is possible for two Christians to share the same politics on a subject and for only one of them to be judged faithful and obedient while the other is condemned for sin.

What Paul says to the church at Rome is seismic. And he intends it to encompass every issue. But it is not new. It is what God says to Samuel in Bethlehem as he’s about to search for the new king to anoint, “The Lord looks on the heart.”

Not the box you check on a ballot.

Not the sign you hang in your yard or the sticker you affix to your tailgate.

Not your Facebook post or TickTock video or retweet.

The Lord looks on your heart.

As John Barclay writes on our passage:

“For Paul, the welcome of Christ, because it neither matched nor reinforced preexistent values or norms, has put all other value systems into question. The only salient values for believers are those that arise from the good news. Because peace, love, and self-denying service are integral to this good news, the “strong” must bear the burdens of the “weak.” Walking in love is now the only non-negotiable good that must be practiced at all times among believers.”

Walking in love— what Karl Barth called “the freedom of the prisoner of God.”

"What the hell is wrong with these people?” Tim Alberta’s wife screamed in her in-laws’s living room.

She could’ve yelled, “What is wrong with us?"

Sin.

And while we were yet sinners, Christ welcomed us.

Therefore, welcome one another.

Years after he accosted me in the narthex, Senator Roberts of the Armed Services Committee came to me, inquiring about baptism. The Lord had not saved him through water and the Spirit, and he was at an age where it nagged at him. In the intervening years, I’d grown on him and he had learned to trust me.

To be honest, me getting cancer helped him to take a shine to me.

We were talking about baptism in my office, my print of Karl Barth before an empty tomb hanging behind his head, when all of a sudden he changed the subject.

He took off his glasses.

He rubbed his bald head with his sleeve.

And he said, “All those years ago, when I got angry with you for your (he struggled still to call it such) sermon. You let me walk away. You didn’t pursue me or follow up with me. Why?”

And this time I was sitting but I resumed my stammering, “Uh…”

He shook his head and put his elbows on his knees, leaning forward.

“Was what you said about the Bible true?” he asked me.

“Yes,” I think so— I mean, I believe so.

He nodded like I was a witness in a committee hearing.

“And was what you preached about Jesus true, so far as you believed it?”

I nodded.

“Then why for God’s sake did you let me walk away? Why did you let me stay away for so many Sundays?”

I felt my cheeks flush red.

“You should’ve come after me,” he reproached me, “I’m your brother.”

I didn’t reply. I didn’t want to interrupt the sermon.

“I’m your brother,” he said again, and then he pointed down at the baptismal liturgy in the Book of Worship that lay open on my desk.

“Or, at least I will be. Come Sunday, we’re going to be stuck with each other.”

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Christian Politics

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As the liturgical calendar turns towards All Saints and the Last Things and as we near Election Day, I am revisiting some of the political writings from the Communion of Saints. Here is a sermon my mentors Stanley Hauerwas preached for my church for Christ the King 2019. Not all of you will like this sermon, but that’s the point. In the spirit of Romans 14, we must be able to welcome the ways of faithfulness of those to whom those ways strike us as odd or contrary to our own.

Christ the King

Jeremiah 23: 1-6, Colossians 1: 11-20, Luke 23: 33-43

I do not know about you but I have found going through these last three years exhausting.  One of the reasons I have found them exhausting is I have no idea what is going on.  Or it may be I think it is obvious what is going on and I do not have the slightest idea what could be done to right the ship. Something seems to have happened to our world and few of us have any idea how to put in back together.  

That I am a theologian should make some difference.  I have spent a life time reading books that should give me insight into the world in which we find ourselves. For example consider this passage from Bonhoeffer’s Ethics:

“For the tyrannical despiser of humanity, popularity is a sign of the greatest love for humanity.  He hides his secret profound distrust of all people behind the stolen words of true community.  While he declares himself before the masses to be one of them, he praises himself with repulsive vanity and despises the rights of every individual.  He considers the people stupid, and they become stupid, he considers them weak and they become weak, he considers them criminal and they become criminal.  His most holy seriousness is frivolous play; his conventional protestations of solicitude for people are bare- faced cynicism.  In his deep contempt for humanity, the more he seeks favor of those he despises, the more certainly he arouses the masses to declare him a god.   Contempt for humanity and idolization of humanity lie close together.  Good people, however, who see through all this, who withdraw in disgust from people and leave them to themselves, and who would rather tend to their own gardens than debase themselves in public life, fall prey to the same temptation to contempt for humanity as do bad people.”

Bonhoeffer wrote that sometime between 194l and 1943 while staying at the Benedictine Abbey Ettal.  The secret seminary he directed had been closed by the SS and many of the young men he had trained had been drafted only to be sent to Russia.  The passage I just read is obviously Bonhoeffer’s reflections on Hitler and the Nazi takeover of German life.  That it is so may mean it is not relevant for our situation because being ruled by a bore is not the equivalent to being ruled by a totalitarian murderous thug.  I suspect, however, it is all too relevant to our situation. 

I am aware that to begin a sermon with these kind of reflections risks offense.  I am visiting preacher.  I will say what I have to say and then get out of town.  I do not have to pay any price for a sermon, and some may wonder if it is a sermon, that seems far too political.  But then I hope to convince you that one of our failures as Christians has been our unwillingness to acknowledge and preach the politics of the cross.      

There is also the problem of using a sermon to support or criticize particular political opinions. I obviously am not a big fan of Donald Trump while many of you may well think him an inspired leader for our time.  Yet you do not get your view in play because I am in the pulpit and you are in the pew.  I win.

Of course we try to avoid acknowledgment of the politics of preaching by underwriting the dogma that religion and politics do not mix.   It is assumed my negative view of Trump and those with more positive views should keep those judgments to themselves particularly when they are in church.  The only problem with that strategy, which I take to be an attempt to avoid conflict, is the importance of recognizing that few claims are more political than the phrase “religion and politics do not mix.”

That is particularly true when the attempt to keep politics out of the sermon is reinforced by the distinction between the public and the private.    Most of us are well schooled by the general presumption that religious convictions are “personal” or “private.”  “Private” means it is not incumbent on anyone else to believe what I believe.  

That commitment is assumed to take the politics out of religion.  Of course as the great historian, Herbert Butterfield, observed some years ago there is usually enough conflict in any church choir to start a war.  But that is a politics internal to the church .  No one, moreover, takes such a politics seriously.  The only problem with the relegation of religious convictions to the private means is that when what we believe is so understood what we believe is seldom thereby thought to be true.

By now I may have tested your patience to the breaking point. You came to hear a sermon and what you have gotten seems more like a lecture about religion and politics that you can well do without.  Where is the good news in these problematic generalizations about the relation of the church and politics?      

Here is the good news—“There was also an inscription over him, ‘This is the King of the Jews.”  Today we celebrate the feast day of Christ the King.  It does not get more political than that.  The temptation, of course, is to use the language of kingship to make the cross a religious symbol that has no political implications.  We are after all Americans.  We have never had a king or queen and we have not seemed less for not having monarchs.  Was not the War of Independence fought to free Americans from the reach of a king?

We are in the generic sense democrats.  Democracies do not have kings.  At least they do not have kings that actually rule.  We are, moreover, a liberal democracy which is dedicated to the project of making each of us our own tyrant.  To be an American means you have to do what you want to do.  

Jesus may have been a king but we will not be ruled by a king.  We will not be ruled by a king or queen unless we have learned to live as if we are each a monarch of our lives.  Yet the desire for freedom without limitation leads, as Bonhoeffer’s analysis presupposes, to servitude.  

But this is Christ the King Sunday.  If Christ is king it must surely be the case that there is no way to avoid the fact that there was and still is a politics in play that climaxed in his crucifixion.  The one who tempted him in the desert was revealed in the crucifixion as the false ruler that tempts us to be more than creatures of God’s good creation.  

It is not accidental that the feast day of Christ the King was established by Pius XI in 1925 in his encyclical Quas primas.  Pius was so concerned by the murderous reality of WWI he reasoned that the only hope of avoiding future conflicts depended on the public recognition and celebration of “Christ the King.”  We become a people incapable of killing one another through the recognition that Jesus is king. 

To be sure the politics we experience are democratic.  It is also true that there are few examples of the politics of democracy in the Bible.  Jesus is nowhere addressed as “Mr. President.”  Nor does he seem to be someone who might try to win an election.  Take up your cross and follow me does not sound like a winning campaign slogan.  I concede that there is one democratic moment in the Gospels—the people choose Barabbas.

I think the problem of articulating the politics of the cross in modernity is not because we are stuck with kingship language in a democratic social order.  No, I think the problem is Jesus.  In Colossians we are told “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him.”  All things have been created through him—dominions, rulers, or powers.

What are these “powers?”  They are givens of God’s good creation that were meant to make our lives possible.  But they are fallen giving us the illusion that we are in control of our lives.  They were meant to make us cooperative and at peace with one another but they are now used to assert our will over each other.

But they have been exposed and thus redeemed by Christ making it possible for us to live in peace. What does it mean to say they are redeemed?  It is to say that the pretention that we are our own creator has been unmasked by the cross.  It is to say that if there did not exist a people who worship a crucified king then the world Bonhoeffer describes is never far from reality.    

Christ is king.  Christians accordingly must be the most political of all God’s creatures but our politics is not “out there.” Our politics is first and foremost here in this bread and wine.  Here we become for the world a people of peace in a world of violence.  Such a people are made possible by the forgiveness of sins.  Forgiveness makes possible the acknowledgment that we can confess the sins of the past without trying to justify what was so wrong nothing can make it right.  Slavery was sin.    

There can be no question for us who worship a crucified savior—religion and politics do mix.  Indeed they do not mix but in fact they are one.   There is no politics deeper than the community that is gathered around the cross of Christ.  For it is assumed such a community has nothing to lose by acknowledging the truth about our failures to follow this Lord is about truth.  

We live in a dangerous world made more dangerous by our unwillingness to obey anyone other than this strange king of the Jews.  Do not be afraid but rejoice in the fact that you are a citizen of the kingdom of this crucified king.

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"Jesus Christ is Not a Standard by which I Can Judge Others."

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My friend and mentor Stanley Hauerwas says:

“The church does not have a politics, the church is a politics.”

Nowhere is Stanley’s distinction more clear than in Christ’s Sermon on the Mount wherein Jesus speaks to the entire crowds who have gathered at the Mount of Beatitudes but he addresses only those who have drawn near to him as his disciples.

The Sermon on the Mount, in other words, is not a general ethic.

The Sermon on the Mount is, rather, a description of the particular community called to discipleship.

As the liturgical calendar approaches All Saints, the civic calendar lurches towards Election Day. In light of both, I’ve been revisiting some of the “political” writings from the communion of saints. We live in contested times and I certainly do not fault any of you for having convictions about matters that matter; I hold my own. Nevertheless, the only unique time— as Barth would say— is the time of Jesus Christ.

I offer these passages, therefore, in recognition of the one fact that all believers can share: Red or Blue, we are first and finally brothers and sisters by baptism.

(Check the main page for the other installments)

Here is a passage from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyred on direct orders of Adolf Hitler as World War II neared its end. It is always remarkable to read Bonhoeffer’s work, remembering that he was waist-deep in the dangers posed to him by fascism. Bonhoeffer never allowed for the exigency of the moment to obscure the command laid upon him by Christ. For example, here he nevertheless cautions believers against doing what many Christians in America do today with righteous abandon, judge their neighbors.

This is from his book which I am convinced is as little-read as it is famous, Discipleship:

“DO NOT JUDGE, so that you may not be judged.”

Disciples live completely out of the bond connecting them with Jesus Christ. Their righteousness depends only on that bond and never apart from it. Therefore, it can never become a standard which the disciples would own and might use in any way they please.

What makes them disciples is not a new standard for their lives, but Jesus Christ alone, the mediator and Son of God himself.

The disciples’ own righteousness is thus hidden from them in their communion with Jesus. They can no longer see, observe, and judge themselves; they only see Jesus and are seen, judged, and justified by grace by Jesus alone. No measuring standard for a righteous life stands between the disciples and other people; but once again, only Jesus Christ himself stands in their midst.

The disciples view other people only as those to whom Jesus comes.

They encounter other people only because they approach them together with Jesus.

Jesus goes ahead of them to other people, and the disciples follow him. Thus an encounter between a disciple and another person is never just a freely chosen encounter between two people, confronting each other’s views, standards, and judgments immediately. Disciples can encounter other people only as those to whom Jesus himself comes. Jesus’ struggle for the other person, his call, his love, his grace, his judgment are all that matters. Thus the disciples do not stand in a position from which the other person is attacked.

Instead—

In the truthfulness of Jesus’ love they approach the other person with an unconditional offer of community.

When we judge, we encounter other people from the distance of observation and reflection. But love does not allot time and space to do that. For those who love, other people can never become an object for spectators to observe. Instead, they are always a living claim on my love and my service.

But doesn’t the evil in other people necessarily force me to pass judgment on them, just for their own sake and because of our love for them?

We recognize how sharply the boundary is drawn.

Love for a sinner, if misunderstood, is frightfully close to love for the sin. But Christ’s love for the sinner is itself the condemnation of sin; it is the sharpest expression of hatred against sin. It is that unconditional love, in which Jesus’ disciples should live in following him, that achieves what their own disunited love, offered according to their own discretion and conditions, could never achieve, namely, the radical condemnation of evil.

If the disciples judge, then they are erecting standards to measure good and evil. But Jesus Christ is not a standard by which I can measure others. It is he who judges me and reveals what according to my own judgment is good to be thoroughly evil. This prohibits me from applying a standard to others which is not valid for me.

When I judge, deciding what is good or evil, I affirm the evil in other persons, because they, too, judge according to good and evil. But they do not know that what they consider good is evil. Instead, they justify themselves in it. If I judge their evil, that will affirm their good, which is never the goodness of Jesus Christ. They are withdrawn from Christ’s judgment and subjected to human judgment. But I myself invoke God’s judgment on myself, because I am no longer living out of the grace of Jesus Christ, but out of a knowledge of good and evil. I become subject to that judgment which I think valid. For all persons, God is a person’s God in the way the person believes God to be. Judging others makes us blind, but love gives us sight.

When I judge, I am blind to my own evil and to the grace granted the other person.

All judging presupposes the most dangerous self-deception, namely, that the word of God applies differently to me than it does to my neighbor.

I claim an exceptional right in that I say: forgiveness applies to me, but condemnation applies to the other person. Judgment as arrogation of false justice about one’s neighbor is totally forbidden to the disciples. They did not receive special rights for themselves from Jesus, which they ought to claim before others. All they receive is communion with him.

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"Here, where those whom I don’t like are sitting next to me among the faithful, this is precisely where the church is."

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“The only criterion for membership in the Body of Christ is the Word of God and faith.”

In his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, Karl Barth asks:

Does the behavior of the OTHER lie so far outside the freedom of God that the one who knows he’s free in Christ should exclude the OTHER from Christian fellowship?

(In case you haven’t read Romans, the answer is an emphatic “No.”)

In the context of Romans 14, the issue was between the “weak” who attempted to keep some form of the Mosaic kosher commandments and the “strong” who demonstrated their Christian freedom by “eating everything.”

The real issue was that both the weak and the strong saw the Other as phony Christians, illegitimate in their application of the faith.

In our own day, it appears not to be a contrived analogy to suggest that politics is to the church what meat-sacrificed-idols was to the Christians at Rome. The “weak” and the “strong” are those who would anathematize their fellow believers for their respective support of Team Red or Team Blue.

Does voting for Donald Trump lie so far outside the freedom of God that the one who knows he’s free in Christ should exclude the MAGA voter from Christian fellowship?

Does voting for Kamala Harris lie so far outside the freedom of God that the one who knows he’s free in Christ should exclude the progressive voter from Christian fellowship?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer faced what would prove to be a more drastic form of this dilemma in 1933 when Germany instituted the so-called “Aryan Paragraph,” excluding Jews and other non-Aryans from civil service positions. While this ban did not include church leaders, German Christians quickly moved to implement similar proposals in the Reich Church. Even the prominent theologian Emanuel Hirsch called for segregating Jewish Christians into their own congregations.

It was in this foreboding context that Bonhoeffer composed the following discussion theses in preparation for the Old Prussian General Synod of September 5–6, 1933. In them, he reasserts the claim that a racial precondition— indeed, any precondition— for church membership undermines the nature of the church.

“The only criterion for membership in the Body of Christ,” Bonhoeffer insisted, channeling Romans 14, “is the Word of God and faith.”

Here are some of the discussion theses Bonhoeffer prepared for the synod in 1933 to discuss this challenge to the nature of the church.

1. Radical version of the Aryan Paragraph:

Non-Aryans are not members of the German Reich Church and are to be excluded through the establishment of their own Jewish Christian congregations.

2. Second version of the Aryan Paragraph:

The law governing state officials is to be applied to church officials; thus employment of Jewish Christians as pastors should be discontinued, and none should be accepted for new employment.

3. Third version of the Aryan Paragraph:

Although the Reich Church constitution has not adopted the Aryan paragraph, it has made clear by its silence that it recognizes the regulations affecting students, which are designed to exclude Jewish Christians from theological study, as binding on the church. Thus it accepts the future exclusion of Jewish Christians from the ministry of the church.

Re: version 1.

The exclusion of Jewish Christians from the church-community destroys the substance of Christ’s church, because first: it reverses the work of Paul, who assumed that through the cross of Christ the dividing wall between Jews and Gentiles had been broken down, that Christ has “made both groups into one” (Eph. 2), that here (in Christ’s church) there should be neither Jew nor Gentile . . . but rather all should be one.

Second:

if the church excludes the Jewish Christians, it is setting up a law with which one must comply in order to be a member of the church-community, namely, the racial law. It means that Jews can be asked at the door, before they can enter Christ’s church in Germany, “Are you Aryan?”

Only when they have complied with this law can I go to church with them, pray, listen, and celebrate the Lord’s Supper together with them. But by putting up this racial law at the door to the church-community, the church is doing exactly what the Jewish Christian church was doing until Paul came, and in defiance of him; it was requiring people to become Jews in order to join the church-community.

A church today that excludes others has fallen away from the gospel, back to the law.

The German Christians say:

The church is not allowed to undo or to disregard God’s orders, and race is one of them, so the church must be racially constituted.

We answer:

The given order of race is misjudged just as little as that of gender, status in society, etc. . . . In the church, a Jew is still a Jew, a Gentile a Gentile, a man a man, a capitalist a capitalist, etc., etc. But God calls and gathers them all together into one people, the people of God, the church, and they all belong to it in the same way, one with another.

The church is not a community of people who are all the same but precisely one of people foreign to one another who are called by God’s Word. The people of God is an order over and above all other orders.

“Who is my mother, and who are my brothers? . . . whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” [Matt. 12:48, 50]. Race and blood are one order among those who enter into the church, but it must never become a criterion for belonging to the church; the only criterion is the Word of God and faith.

The German Christians say:

We don’t want to take away from Jewish Christians the right to be Christians, but they should organize their own churches. It is only a matter of the outward form of the church.

We answer:

(1) The issue of belonging to the Christian community is never an outward, organizational matter, but is of the very substance of the church. Church is the congregation that is called together by the Word.

Membership in a congregation is a question not of organization but of the essence of the church.

(2) To make such a basic distinction between Christianity and the church, or between Christ and the church, is wrong. There is no such thing as the idea of the church, on one hand, and its outward appearance, on the other, but rather the empirically experienced church is the church of Christ itself.

Thus to exclude people from the church-community at the empirical level means excluding them from Christ’s church itself. That part of the church that excludes another is, of course, the one that is truly shut out.

(3) When the church’s organizers exclude anyone, they are interfering with the authority of the sacraments. Here in our church, Jewish Christians have been accepted, by the will of God, through the sacrament of baptism. Through baptism they are joined together with our church, and our church with them, by indissoluble ties.

If the church that has baptized believers now throws them out based on any law, it makes baptism into a ceremony, which implies no obligation on its part.

The German Christians say:

The German church people can no longer endure communion with Jews, who have done them so much harm politically.

We answer:

This is the very point where it must be made crystal clear: here is where we are tested as to whether we know what the church is.

Here, where those whom I don’t like are sitting next to me among the faithful, this is precisely where the church is.

If that is not understood, then those who think they cannot bear it should themselves go and form their own church, but never, ever, can they be allowed to exclude someone else. The continuity of the church is in the church where the Jewish Christians remain.

In summary:

The church is the congregation of those who are called, where the gospel is rightly taught, and the sacraments are rightly administered, and it does not establish any law for membership therein. Any expectation for membership other than faith is therefore a false doctrine for the church and destroys its substance.

— DBWE 12:425–432

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"Weak is the Man who Allows Himself to be Pushed into a Position from which He Judges Others"

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Karl Barth once said that “politics is a game that is played in full and vigilant awareness of its relativity.”

More and more, fewer and fewer Christians in America exhibit an awareness of the relativity of politics, of what Bonhoeffer called its finiteness. Neither “Make America Great Again” nor “Protect Democracy” are aspirations chastened by a biblical knowledge of sin, no matter how noble one or the other might prove. Instead of a recognition of our shared finiteness, political parties have become the equivalent of the “Salt Life” sticker on the back of pickups pulling boats; that is, partisanship is now a lifestyle brand.

Politics is an instance of what my friend David Zahl calls seculosity.

Given the coming turn in the liturgical calendar and the mere weeks to Election Day, I have been rereading some of the political thought from the church’s cloud of witness.

You can read my last post here.

Here is a brief exegesis by Karl Barth from his Römerbrief, first published in 1919— not a boring, inconsequential time in politics. Note, that by KRISIS Barth refers to the judgment of God upon all things, including— especially— our politics, revealed in Christ.

Barth writes (in admittedly gendered language) :

“The proper “Pauline” Christian takes no interest in differentiating their manner of life from others and has no real capacity for making himself conspicuous— Paul, it is true, did not always reach this standard himself, and we certainly do not. The “Pauline” Christian does not complain of those who hold opinions differing from his own, nor does he abuse them; rather he stands behind them sympathetically asking questions. He has discovered he is his own worst enemy long before he has experienced the hostility of others. He admits without arrogance that there are many other non-Pauline possibilities, but he pays them so little attention that they never become, so far as he is concerned, so clearly defined that he has to reckon with them as opposing possibilities: were this to take place, he would be lost, for his position is no position, and woe betide him, if he were to allow himself to be enticed onto ground where one point of view stands solidly and honestly in opposition to others. He is, if possible, more reserved than even the Socratic philosophers; for he does not assume an attitude of reserve, in order to provoke another to doubt his own convictions.

No, so fundamentally does he presume the One in the other, that the other must be permitted to follow his own road to the end. He who is free in Christ does not win his victory in the midst of clashing convictions; he wins by recognizing the common End of all convictions.

This attitude is very far removed from “toleration,” for he certainly does not intend to let the convictions of others be; but it is equally far removed from “intolerance,” for he certainly does not wish to take away their convictions from them. He treats the convictions of others seriously, merely because he is aware of the KRISIS— the judgment of God upon all things, revealed in Christ— which lies before them and behind them. His own way is peculiar only in the sense that whereas others forget this KRISIS, he is mindful of it.

He is right, only because he does not desire to be right.

All reformers are Pharisees. They have no sense of humor. Deprive a Total Abstainer— a really religious Socialist, a Churchman, or a Pacifist— of the PATHOS of moral indignation, and you have broken his backbone.

The Pauline Christian makes of his freedom a concrete thing, making himself weaker than the weak. He knows what his opponent does not know— namely that, God maintains fellowship with him nevertheless, that is with the OTHER.

Can anyone with any understanding of the unparalleled mercy of God set at nought the OTHER?

Does the behavior of the OTHER lie so far outside the freedom of God that the strong man (i.e., the one who knows he’s free in Christ) should suppose that, though he may continue in fellowship with publicans and whores, Pharisees must be excluded?

Weak is the man who allows himself to be pushed into a position from which he judges others.”

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