The Word Leaps the Gap Quotes

“We live in a confused time, with democracy in apparent decline and with the church and Christian consciences increasingly at risk from governments, in various parts of the globe, that, having made a mess of almost everything else, decide to distract attention by stirring up anti-Christian sentiment and passing laws designed to make life difficult for those who want to be faithful followers of Jesus Christ. This is where faithfulness, loyalty, and trustworthiness will stand out, where that fourth meaning of rrionc is needed over against the shrinkage of "faith" to merely "my personal belief." The rhetoric of the Enlightenment has been extremely keen to squash "faith" into "private, personal belief," so that it can then insist that such "faith" should stay as a private matter and not leak out to infect the wider world. But since the Christian's personal belief is in the creator God who raised Jesus from the dead, this personal belief can never remain only a personal belief but, rooted in the trust that is the first meaning of rricrts, must grow at once into the loyalty, the public trustworthiness, that is the fourth meaning. This too is part of the virtue of "faith": to take the thousand small decisions to be loyal, even in public, even when it is dangerous or difficult, and so to acquire the habit of confessing this faith (sense 3) both when it is safe and when it is dangerous. Just as Mother Teresa spoke of recognizing Jesus in the Eucharist and then going out to recognize him in the poor and needy, so we need to learn the virtue of affirming our faith in our liturgical and prayer life so that we
can then go out and affirm it on the street, in public debate, in pursuit of that freedom for which the second-century apologists argued.
Christian faith, then, does indeed belong among the virtues. But we can only understand that in the light of the full biblical and eschatological narrative, in which God's eventual new creation, launched in Jesus' resurrection, will make all things new. Christian faith looks back to Jesus, and on to that eventual new day. It tastes in advance, in personal and public life, the freedom that we already have through Jesus and that one day we shall have in all its fullness. The practice of this "faith" is, on the one hand, the steady, grace-given entering into the habit by which our character is formed, a habit correlated with those resulting from the similar practice of hope and love. On the other hand, the practice of this faith is the genuine anticipation in the present of that trust, belief, and faithfulness that are part of the telos, the goal. That goal, already given in Jesus Christ, is the destination toward which we are now journeying in the power of the Spirit. Virtue is one of the things that happen in between, and because of, that gift and that goal.”
― J. Ross Wagner, The Word Leaps the Gap: Essays on Scripture and Theology in Honor of Richard B. Hays

“37. On this point, and the whole paragraph, see especially Oliver O'Donovan, The Ways of Judgment (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005).”
― J. Ross Wagner, The Word Leaps the Gap: Essays on Scripture and Theology in Honor of Richard B. Hays

“Rather, Caesar's proper and limited task is to bring a measure of order to present society, to anticipate in specific acts of judgment (putting-to-rights) such elements of God's final putting-to-rights as can be done within the present age.37 Part of our difficulty in today's world is that we are completely unclear about what it is that governments can do, and should try to do, and how they should go about finding a moral basis for doing it.”
― J. Ross Wagner, The Word Leaps the Gap: Essays on Scripture and Theology in Honor of Richard B. Hays

“First, this faith does indeed become a virtue, in the Christian sense. The initial reaching out in grateful response, itself precipitated by the work of the Spirit and the preaching of the Word, is the start of a lifelong reaching out, a faithfulness that, like the initial faith, is the answer to God's faithfulness in Jesus Christ and in the word of the gospel. But this lifelong faithfulness, sharing as it does the nature and character of the initial faith by which one is justified, is not (again, as in some romantic or existentialist dreamings) a matter of giving expression to how one happens to be feeling at the time. (One of the evils of our age is first to say "I feel" when we mean "I think";
then to pass, subtly, to the point where actual feelings have taken the place of actual thought; then to pass beyond that again, to the point where "feeling" automatically trumps "thinking"; then to reach the point where thought has disappeared altogether, leaving us merely with Eliot's "undisciplined squads of emotion. "35 At that point, one of the nadirs of postmodernity, we have left behind both the classical and the Christian traditions, though tragically you can see exactly this sequence worked out in various would-be Christian contexts, not least Synods.)
This lifelong faithfulness is a matter of practice. It means acquiring a habit: making a thousand small decisions to trust God now, in this matter, to believe in Jesus and his death and resurrection today, to be faithful and trustworthy to him here and now, in this situation ... and so coming, by slow steps and small degrees, to the point where faith, trust, belief, and faithfulness become, as we properly say in relation to virtue, "second nature" Not "first nature;' doing what comes naturally. No: second nature, doing from the heart that which the heart has learned by practice and hard work. Christian faith thus reaches out, by Spirit-inspired and eschatologically framed moral effort, toward the telos for which we were made, that we should be image-bearers of the faithful God. This means, in the terms I have posed in this paper, that faith is indeed one of the things we learn to do in the present time that truly anticipates the full life of the coming age. This is the sense, I think, in which lifelong Christian faith, though not different in kind or content from the faith by which one is justified (but only in temporal location, i.e., ongoing rather than initial), is indeed to be reckoned among the virtues.”
― J. Ross Wagner, The Word Leaps the Gap: Essays on Scripture and Theology in Honor of Richard B. Hays

“The gift is the gift of the path to a richer, more responsible humanness; authenticity includes the choice to make an act of will despite desire, not simply bringing desire and will into line. To choose to believe, to choose to continue to believe, to choose to be faithful, loyal, and trustworthy, despite all the pressures to unbelief and disloyalty, is typical of the choices that constitute, or contribute toward, the life of Christian virtue.”
― J. Ross Wagner, The Word Leaps the Gap: Essays on Scripture and Theology in Honor of Richard B. Hays

“And, once again, this contextualizing of Christian virtue within the redemptive eschatological framework underscores the great revolution in virtue ethics that took place from Paul onward, or as Paul would say, from the cross of Jesus Christ onward: the dethroning of pride and the enthroning of humility and gratitude.”
― J. Ross Wagner, The Word Leaps the Gap: Essays on Scripture and Theology in Honor of Richard B. Hays

“Such a dream would be the moral or even emotional equivalent of a poor person suddenly winning the lottery: without effort, suddenly all your problems are over! Just pray about it and there won't be any more moral battles!
But virtue is not like that, and Christian moral living is not like that either. The romantic dream of an inner transformation that will make moral effort unnecessary is untrue both to the New Testament and to worldwide and millennia-long Christian experience.”
― J. Ross Wagner, The Word Leaps the Gap: Essays on Scripture and Theology in Honor of Richard B. Hays

“The gospel, as Paul knew, is folly to pagans. Trusting it would appear, not as a virtue, but as a vice. "Faith" of this Pauline sort can therefore come about only in response to the grace and revelation of the God of Abraham, the God who raised Jesus from the dead.”
― J. Ross Wagner, The Word Leaps the Gap: Essays on Scripture and Theology in Honor of Richard B. Hays

“Here "faith" and its cognates mean, more or less, faithfulness, loyalty, reliability, trustworthiness, and even, in consequence, something like our word "integrity": the quality of being so fully in tune, all through one's thinking and acting, that others know they are with someone on whom they can lean all their weight. (This is perhaps part of what Revelation means in calling Jesus the "faithful" witness.)23 More particularly, to put it anthropomorphically, someone of utter faithfulness is someone on whom God knows that he can lean all his weight.24 In this sense, of course, none of us (except Jesus himself) is fully trustworthy in the present life.”
― J. Ross Wagner, The Word Leaps the Gap: Essays on Scripture and Theology in Honor of Richard B. Hays

“Thus, most obviously, the cardinal virtue of justice, giving to each person what is his or her due, is transformed into &y&rrq, giving to each not simply what is due but more besides, including "justice" itself (since &y&rrii will
never wrong anyone, as Paul says elsewhere 13 ), but going beyond it into generosity, giving to each in the way God gives to each, that is, lavishly and without thought for cost.”
― J. Ross Wagner, The Word Leaps the Gap: Essays on Scripture and Theology in Honor of Richard B. Hays

“We can become, in other words, people for whom the romantic or existentialist dream might eventually begin to come at least partially true. But this is not, or not for the most part, something straightforwardly and completely given in baptism and in initial Christian faith.”
― J. Ross Wagner, The Word Leaps the Gap: Essays on Scripture and Theology in Honor of Richard B. Hays

“Aristotle spoke of the goal or end, the telos, of human moral behavior. We are on a journey toward that point, which he called EObaiµovia. That has normally been translated as "happiness"; but the meaning Aristotle had in mind was not the one that word often suggests in today's Western world (the feeling of contentment or pleasurable excitement) but the more organic one of becoming our full and true selves, discovering in practice the best and highest activity of which humans are capable.”
― J. Ross Wagner, The Word Leaps the Gap: Essays on Scripture and Theology in Honor of Richard B. Hays

“Many discussions of virtue, and many discussions of faith, begin from where we presently are, as muddled, sinful, half-believing human beings, and explore the ways in which virtue (including "faith" in some sense) can help us move forward to become the people God wants and intends us to
become. In this, as in many areas of theological exploration, I find it helpful to start instead from the far end, from the ultimate goal. I propose that we begin with the picture of what God intends us to be, and has promised that we shall be, and to work back from there to where we are. This is, I suppose, rather like the procedure adopted by some management consultants: to ask where the company ought to be twenty years from now, to imagine that we are already at that moment of presumed or anticipated success, and then to ask the question, How did we get here? What steps did we take on the way?”
― J. Ross Wagner, The Word Leaps the Gap: Essays on Scripture and Theology in Honor of Richard B. Hays