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January 6 - March 16, 2020
The doctrine of creation, as we saw in chapter 4, was shaped against the harsh gnostic dualism that saw bodies as antithetical to spirituality.
Indeed, the Spirit loves bodies and rests upon them.
Digest it indeed, this sweet, strange gift. God the holy, other, transcendent, majestic, magnificent, and eternal takes up residence
within us. Here is the gift and power of the spiritual life, and—Donne is quite right—here is a testimony of God’s love for us that ought to incite us to ardent love for God in return.
Against a moralism that relies on human effort—teeth gritted as we try desperately to be good—the Holy Spirit works fruit in us by the power of sanctifying grace.
To blaspheme against the Spirit is to say that Jesus’s power is not from God.
They grow, not by our own frenetic effort, but from the good trees that God cultivates through the gospel of Jesus Christ.
“I take religion to be, not the bare saying over of so many prayers . . . but a constant ruling habit of soul, a renewal of our minds in the image of God, a recovery of the divine likeness, a still-increasing conformity of heart and life to the pattern of our most holy Redeemer.”[14]
This power can be embraced with a deep confidence in the Spirit’s work, or this power can be rejected and denied.
There can be both good and bad reasons for hesitation around the powerful work of the Spirit.
We want to be in
charge, and we are put off by anything that might reveal our vulnerability.
Tongues are one gift among many possible gifts of the Spirit, but they are not to be demanded of all Christians.
Some Christian traditions hold a strong cessationism, the belief that the special gifts of the Spirit ended with the New Testament age. This position is motivated by a desire to curb abuse of charismatic gifts.
When Christianity is open to the Spirit and takes the work of the Holy Spirit seriously, we recognize that the gospel is about God’s love for people who are marginalized in a world of sin.
“one Holy Spirit who before had sporadically called, anointed, and visited chosen vessels, at last came to dwell in and with the faithful community, and in the form of hope with the whole of humanity.”[26]
The Spirit in the church helps us to testify to who Jesus is and what he has done.
We must take care, lest we claim stupid, selfish, and sinful things in the name of the Spirit, but we have been given ways to take that care, means to discern the truth of the Spirit. Discernment is a key pneumatological category, and the Christian life is one in which we grow in the ability to discern wisdom and to recognize truth.
“It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to impose on you no further burden than these essentials: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from fornication. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well. Farewell”
The church of Jesus Christ is this joyous community: the community that rejoices in God’s gracious salvation. The church is the community that opens up, through that grace, to proclaim Christ’s peace to those “who were far off” and to “those who were near” (Eph. 2:17).
As we practice ecclesiology, the doctrine of the church, we learn what it means to be the people who were once “called ‘the uncircumcision’” (Eph. 2:11) because we were estranged from God, a people of aliens made citizens, strangers made children, those “who once were far off” and
have “been brought near by the blood of Christ” (Eph. 2:13).
Where those of us who breathe the air of individualistic cultures tend to speak in the singular, “I,” biblical language speaks often in the plural.
The church’s unity, very often, is more a matter of faith than of sight, but this does not undo the truth of that unity.
Unity, no less than any other aspect of sanctification, is not a work we can perform under our own power.
Unity is part of the church’s visible witness to the grace of Jesus Christ.
the church is God’s holy household, “built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone.
Holiness, like unity, is not ours by will or work. It is a gift of the grace of Christ, a gift the church receives by the power of his sacrifice.
The church catholic, as we saw in the decision of the Jerusalem council, graciously makes room for all peoples, nations, races, and cultures.
Apostolicity is about authority and truth, and the authority of the apostles is in their eyewitness testimony to Jesus (2 Pet. 1:16).
In a world of dissension, the oneness of the church is a witness testifying to the Father’s loving action in sending the Son into the world. By living in profound unity, the body of Christ should mirror the Son’s unity with the Father.
In a broken world, the holy church is a witness that displays to that world the alternative to brokenness: the beauty and goodness of God’s holiness.
In a world of racism, elitism, classism, and nationalism, the catholic church is a witness that embodies a reality wherein “all tribes and peoples and languages” (Rev. 7:9) are truly welcome as members of the household of God, welcome in the u...
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In a world full of emptiness and unmet longing, the catholic church lays a family table where people are f...
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In a world of lies, the apostolic church is a witness that tells the truth about God, proclaiming the good ne...
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But the church is not defined by sin, because the church is not ours. The church exists only by grace, and in that grace, faithfulness happens.
Because the work of the church is God’s work, it cannot be overthrown by human error. Because
the good things of the church are grace, our unrighteousness cannot cancel them out.
The work of separating righteousness from unrighteousness is God’s, not ours.
Second, God is powerful enough to create visible unity in the church, even in the midst of brokenness. Finally, the brokenness of the church is crucial to the beauty of its witness. Without honesty about that brokenness, our witness to grace is impossible.
To ignore all this is injustice and untruth, and these are only some of the biggest moments in a church history that was never pristine. We acknowledge this, not to be pessimistic or to dismiss the church, but to attempt to speak truth in the practice of ecclesiology.
Our horrible brokenness as the church is not enough to destroy the work of God.
The church is grace and not works. Even in our brokenness, perhaps especially in that brokenness, God still creates and recreates the visible church in the world.
For Luther, the church happens when we faithfully preach the Word and administer the sacraments.
“Wherever you hear or see this word preached, believed, professed, and lived,” Luther writes, “do not doubt that the true ecclesia sancta catholica, ‘a Christian holy people’ must be there.”[3]
Church happens when the gospel is proclaimed, when new Christians are “buried with” Christ (Rom. 6:4) in baptism, and when the family...
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Christian faith is a missionary faith, and the Christian church is a missionary church.
A sacrament is a visible sign of spiritual grace.
In the sacraments, there is a connection between visible, material creation and the grace of the Spirit. The visible sign, when we come to the Lord’s Table, is the bread and the cup.
(1) baptism, (2) communion (also called eucharist, from the Greek word for giving thanks), (3) penance and reconciliation, (4) confirmation, (5) marriage, (6) holy orders or ordination, and (7) anointing of the sick (the sacrament that used to be called last rites or extreme unction).
