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May 13 - July 4, 2017
On a recent radio program a prominent minister spent fifteen minutes enforcing the point that “justification,” the forgiveness of sins, involves no change at all in the heart or personality of the one forgiven.
But what he in fact said was that being a Christian has nothing to do with the kind of person you are. The implications of this teaching are stunning.
But, to be quite frank, grace is cheap from the point of view of those who need it. That is why attacks on “cheap grace” never make much difference. To try to rule out unheroic Christianity by making grace expensive will only add to confusion about matters of vast importance.
And for those of us who think the Bible is a reliable or even significant guide to God’s view of human life, can we validly interpret its portrayal of faith in Christ as one concerned only with the management of sin, whether in the form of our personal debt or in the form of societal evils?
Should we not at least consider the possibility that this poor result is not in spite of what we teach and how we teach, but precisely because of it? Might that not lead to our discerning why the power of Jesus and his gospel has been cut off from ordinary human existence, leaving it adrift from the flow of his eternal kind of life?
History has brought us to the point where the Christian message is thought to be essentially concerned only with how to deal with sin: with wrongdoing or wrong-being and its effects. Life, our actual existence, is not included in what is now presented as the heart of the Christian message, or it is included only marginally. That is where we find ourselves today.
To the right, being a Christian is a matter of having your sins forgiven. (Remember that bumper sticker?) To the left, you are Christian if you have a significant commitment to the elimination of social evils. A Christian is either one who is ready to die and face the judgment of God or one who has an identifiable commitment to love and justice in society. That’s it.
What is taught as the essential message about Jesus has no natural connection to entering a life of discipleship to him.
The influential Anglican Bishop Stephen Neill, for example, says simply: “To be a Christian means to be like Jesus Christ.” And, “Being a Christian depends on a certain inner relatedness to the living Christ. Through this relatedness all other relationships of a man—to God, to himself, to other people—are transformed.”
But the inevitable question will then be: Who is a Christian by such a standard of authentic Christlikeness?
If you ask anyone from that 74 percent of Americans who say they have made a commitment to Jesus Christ what the Christian gospel is, you will probably be told that Jesus died to pay for our sins, and that if we will only believe he did this, we will go to heaven when we die. In this way what is only one theory of the “atonement” is made out to be the whole of the essential message of Jesus. To continue with theological language for the moment, justification has taken the place of regeneration, or new life.
Moreover, what it is to believe that Jesus died for us is currently explained in various ways, with differing degrees and forms of creedal content or association with a local church or denomination. Indeed, as we shall see presently, this issue—what the faith that saves is—is a flash point of current controversy. But for some time now the belief required to be saved has increasingly been regarded as a totally private act, “just between you and the Lord.” Only the “scanner” would know.
And so the only sure outcome of belief is that we are “just forgiven.” We are justified, which is often explained by saying that, before God, it is “just-as-if-I’d” never sinned at all.
On the understanding of the theological right there is no behavior that absolutely indicates belief and none that is absolutely ruled out by it. Grace and forgiveness (salvation) by grace, “plus nothing and minus nothing,” is thought to require that. To insist that something more than mere faith must be present would be to add “works” on to pure grace. And that, we know from our Protestant cultural heritage, cannot be done.
One of the most influential writers in the conservative camp today is John MacArthur. He has defended the view that you cannot have a “saving” faith in Jesus Christ without also intending to obey his teachings. You must accept him as Lord, hence the name Lordship salvation.
This fact is hidden from Ryrie and others on his side by their own systematic way of reading New Testament references to faith or belief in Christ and to “the gospel” so that they fit their account of what is at issue.
The difference between adherents of Lordship salvation and its critics has to do with what makes up saving faith. But we should also consider where the two sides agree. They agree that being lost or saved is solely a matter of demerit and merit, on what it is for faith to be saving faith, and on what being “saved” amounts to. These points form the heart of the gospel on the theological right.
Associated with this agreement that the issue in salvation is only “heaven or hell” is a further agreement that being saved is a forensic or legal condition rather than a vital reality or character. No one is in this “saved” condition until declared to be so by God. We do not enter it by something that happens to us, or in virtue of a reality that moves into place in our life, even if that reality is God himself. The debate then is about what must be true of us before God will declare us to be in the saved condition.
Finally, the two sides agree that getting into heaven after death is the sole target of divine and human efforts for salvation.
But we get a totally different picture of salvation, faith, and forgiveness if we regard having life from the kingdom of the heavens now—the eternal kind of life—as the target. The words and acts of Jesus naturally suggest that this is indeed salvation, with discipleship, forgiveness, and heaven to come as natural parts. And in this he only continues the teachings of the Old Testament. The entire biblical tradition from beginning to end is one of the intimate involvement of God in human life—or else alienation from it.
Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness, we are told (Gen. 15:6). What did Abraham believe that led God to declare or “reckon” him righteous? Was it that God had arranged payment for his sins? Not at all. The story makes it very clear that Abraham believed God was going to give him a male baby, an heir, and through that baby a multitude of descendants who would possess the land promised to him.
In the face of such faith, God declared Abraham to be righteous. Does that mean he declared he would go to heaven when he died? Not precisely that, but certainly that Abraham’s sins and failures would not cut him off from God in the present moment and in their ongoing relationship in life together.
The issue, so far as the gospel in the Gospels is concerned, is whether we are alive to God or dead to him. Do we walk in an interactive relationship with him that constitutes a new kind of life, life “from above”? As the apostle John says in his first letter, “God has given undying life to us, and that life is in his Son. Those who have the Son have life” (1 John 5:11–12).
What must be emphasized in all of this is the difference between trusting Christ, the real person Jesus, with all that that naturally involves, versus trusting some arrangement for sin-remission set up through him—trusting only his role as guilt remover. To trust the real person Jesus is to have confidence in him in every dimension of our real life, to believe that he is right about and adequate to everything.
The sensed irrelevance of what God is doing to what makes up our lives is the foundational flaw in the existence of multitudes of professing Christians today. They have been led to believe that God, for some unfathomable reason, just thinks it appropriate to transfer credit from Christ’s merit account to ours, and to wipe out our sin debt, upon inspecting our mind and finding that we believe a particular theory of the atonement to be true—even if we trust everything but God in all other matters that concern us.
It is left unexplained how it is possible that one can rely on Christ for the next life without doing so for this one, trust him for one’s eternal destiny without trusting him for “the things that relate to Christian life.” Is this really possible? Surely it is not! Not within one life.
To be committed to the oppressed, to liberation, or just to “community” became for many the whole of what is essential to Christian commitment. The gospel, or “good news,” on this view, was that God himself stood behind liberation, equality, and community; that Jesus died to promote them, or at least for lack of them; and that he “lives on” in all efforts and tendencies favoring them. For the theological left, simply this became the message of Christ.
But, just as there was a serious question as to what constitutes saving faith, so there is a problem with the precise nature of redemptive love. In this world there are many things called love. Which love is it that is God? And who is the God that is love?
We have from the Christian left, after all, just another gospel of sin management, but one whose substance is provided by Western (American) social and political ideals of human existence in a secular world.
To reiterate, that irrelevance to life stems from the very content of those “gospels”: from what they state, what they are about. They concern sin guilt or structural evils (social sins) and what to do about them. That is all. That real life goes on without them is a natural consequence of this.
We lose any sense of the difference between information and wisdom, and act accordingly.
Where we spontaneously look for “information” on how to live shows how we truly feel and who we really have confidence in. And nothing more forcibly demonstrates the extent to which we automatically assume the irrelevance of Jesus as teacher for our “real” lives.
The disappearance of Jesus as teacher explains why today in Christian churches—of whatever leaning—little effort is made to teach people to do what he did and taught. Once again, it is a natural consequence of our basic message.
Sincere teaching on such matters simply does not appear on the Christian’s intellectual horizon as something that might be done. We do not seriously consider Jesus as our teacher on how to live, hence we cannot think of ourselves, in our moment-to-moment existence, as his students or disciples.
The situation we have just described—the disconnection of life from faith, the absence from our churches of Jesus the teacher—is not caused by the wicked world, by social oppression, or by the stubborn meanness of the people who come to our church services and carry on the work of our congregations. It is largely caused and sustained by the basic message that we constantly hear from Christian pulpits. We are flooded with what I have called “gospels of sin management,” in one form or another, while Jesus’ invitation to eternal life now—right in the midst of work, business, and
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We can learn from him how to live our lives as he would live them if he were we. We can enter his eternal kind of life now. The Kingdom Must Make Sense But this cannot come about unless what Jesus himself believed, practiced, and taught makes sense to us. And his message must come to us free of the deadening legalisms, political sloganeering, and dogmatic traditionalisms long proven by history to be soul-crushing dead ends. Obviously it does not so come to us now, and this is a fact widely recognized.
Does what we have discussed in this chapter not make it clear that serious difficulties currently bar people of good intent from an effectual understanding of Jesus’ gospel for life and discipleship in his kingdom? We must now try to identify and remove these difficulties. If we cannot remove them, no gospel we bring can have a natural tendency to lead onward into a life of discipleship to Jesus and to personal fulfillment in the kingdom of the heavens.
Jesus’ good news about the kingdom can be an effective guide for our lives only if we share his view of the world in which we live. To his eyes this is a God-bathed and God-permeated world.
It is a great and important task to come to terms with what we really think when we think of God. Most hindrances to the faith of Christ actually lie, I believe, in this part of our minds and souls.
We should, to begin with, think that God leads a very interesting life, and that he is full of joy. Undoubtedly he is the most joyous being in the universe. The abundance of his love and generosity is inseparable from his infinite joy. All of the good and beautiful things from which we occasionally drink tiny droplets of soul-exhilarating joy, God continuously experiences in all their breadth and depth and richness.
So we must understand that God does not “love” us without liking us—through gritted teeth—as “Christian” love is sometimes thought to do. Rather, out of the eternal freshness of his perpetually self-renewed being, the heavenly Father cherishes the earth and each human being upon it.
The Old Testament experience of God is one of the direct presence of God’s person, knowledge, and power to those who trust and serve him. Nothing—no human being or institution, no time, no space, no spiritual being, no event—stands between God and those who trust him.
When Paul on Mars Hill told his Greek inquisitors that in God we “live and move and exist,” he was expressing in the most literal way possible the fact learned from the experience of God’s covenant people, the Jews. He was not speaking metaphorically or abstractly.
To be born “from above,” in New Testament language, means to be interactively joined with a dynamic, unseen system of divine reality in the midst of which all of humanity moves about—whether it knows it or not And that, of course, is “The Kingdom Among Us.”6
In Acts 11:5–9, within a span of five verses, exactly the same phrase, tou ouranou, is translated in three different ways by the New American Standard Version, and by most others. It is translated “the sky” in verse 5. “the air” in verse 6, and “heaven” in verse 9.
Matthew, the quintessentially Judaic Gospel, as a matter of course utilizes the phrase the kingdom of the heavens to describe God’s rule, or “kingdom.” It captures that rich heritage of the Jewish experience of the nearness of God that is so largely lost to the contemporary mind. This heritage is a primary revelation of the nature of God. Thus it forms the mark of identification of the one we address in the central prayer of Christendom: “Our Father, the One in the heavens…” (Matt. 6:9).
The phrase kingdom of the heavens occurs thirty-two times in Matthew’s Gospel and never again in the New Testament. By contrast, the phrase kingdom of God occurs only five times in that Gospel but is the usual term used in the remainder of the New Testament. What is the significance of this variation in terminology?
I am a spiritual being who currently has a physical body. I occupy my body and its environs by my consciousness of it and by my capacity to will and to act with and through it. I occupy my body and its proximate space, but I am not localizable in it or around it. You cannot find me or any of my thoughts, feelings, or character traits in any part of my body. Even I cannot.
Similarly, God is, without special theophanies, seen everywhere by those who long have lived for him. No doubt God wants us to see him. That is a part of his nature as outpouring love. Love always wants to be known. Thus he seeks for those who could safely and rightly worship him. God wants to be present to our minds with all the force of objects given clearly to ordinary perception.
So we should assume that space is anything but empty. This is central to the understanding of Jesus because it is central to the understanding of the rule of God from the heavens, which is his kingdom among us.
