This, as you might guess is something of a liability for me, and perhaps my group. I comb through the song sheets, looking in vain for “Praised Be Thou, Inaugurator of Participationist Eschatology” and the like.

So instead, I have to go with what we have.

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Today, as I thumbed through and picked out a few things, I did so with a little bit of an internal eye roll. I grabbed a song that I knew was little more than a compilation of scripture verses. I knew it was a theologically and pastorally apt conjunction of scripture and real life.

But it wasn’t me. I wasn’t feeling it. I felt like a bit of a hypocrite singing first person singular lyrics about myself that didn’t reflect my reality, how I actually have responded to life as late.

You get it? I didn’t want much to do with the song. But I picked it anyway, inasmuch as “The Galatian Praise Song” is something I try to save for Lent.

But then…

When it actually came time to sing the song, I found myself able to sing it, to believe it, to celebrate the reality of what I was singing.

How do you think about worship?

Usually, I think of it as an attempt at an authentic response to God, reflective of where I was when I came in.

And that’s an important piece of it.

But there’s something else going on in worship as well. Worship becomes a tutor to our hearts. We sing what is true, even when we don’t believe it, or didn’t a few seconds before, in order to enter into the belief that we lack.

Worship isn’t just about experience, it is also about ultimate reality. Or, perhaps better, is about creating an experience that expresses and embodies–and therefore summons us into–the reality into which God has called us in Christ.

When we gather as one and with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we participate in the fulfillment of God’s covenant promises. We speak truth again, we catch a glimpse of reality.

And we can believe.

I want to riff on that a bit today, in conversation with my Open Letter to New Testament Intro Students. In short, community is crucial for keeping hold of your faith when your faith is challenged.

The context within which a dearly held conviction is challenged, and the way that faith is depicted in relationship to that challenge, can make all the difference in whether that challenge leads to a lost faith or a reconfigured and strengthened faith.

Image: Photography by BJWOK / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In response to my open letter, several commenters voiced their concern that critical reconfiguration of what the Bible is and what it says do not happen more in the church. And I think there is something tremendously important about this call. Yes, we have to handle the issues carefully and not unduly disturb the faithful.

But here’s the problem with pretending that the Bible is something it is not: if the context of faith depicts the Bible, or science, or belief in one way, and then a student enters a non-faith environment and discovers that the Bible or science or belief are entirely different it creates an apparently clear choice. Either stay with the faith and reject the learning or hold fast to the learning and reject the faith.

The reason why NT Intro destroys people’s faith in college is because the community of faith has not been forthright about what the Bible actually is, and so the student is confronted with a choice between belief or knowledge.

In general, communities help create and perpetuate systems of plausibility. This can be a bad thing or a good thing, depending on the truth and benefits of how the group is perceiving and articulating reality.

If Christianity is true, then the calling of the church is to articulate, and demonstrate, a coming reality that is often not visible to human eyes: Jesus is the enthroned and coming Lord. We need community to keep making that reality real, to help us be renewed by the transforming of our minds, by the conversion of our imaginations.

This means that when we’re struggling, we need the community. If we leave it, we are placing ourselves on an interpretive grid where this true reality is not accounted for in the interpretation of the world. And its unbelievability can quickly become unplausibility, and the faith withers.

It is precisely because context is crucial for wrestling with faith-challenging issues that I think it is a seminary professor’s duty to deal with all the difficult issues in class. The fact that Christians, in a Christian setting, while confessing Christ as Lord, can acknowledge these things is, itself, tonic against the notion that certain realities about the Bible or history tear apart the very fabric of Christian faith.

In the film Gods and Generals, Stonewall Jackson utters this provocative line to a dying man who confesses to unbelief: “Well then, I will believe for the both of us.”

When we’re struggling, we need people to believe for us. We need people to carry our belief when it cannot carry itself. We need ourselves to be infused with the gift of faith that comes from the participation in the body of Christ. And we need to know that our struggles can be Christian struggles, modes of living and doubting that honor the Christ whose faith saves us.

First, we sang “Crown Him with Many Crowns.” Well, we sang, “Crown him the Lord of love, behold his hands and side.” I never stop wondering how different Christianity would be if we could remember that this is love. The cross is love. The self-giving of Jesus, the son-giving of God.

If we loved the world like Jesus loved us, how would we be different? How would we be differently seen?

My second moment came while singing, “Great is thy faithfulness.”

While my mouth was singing the words, “Great is thy faithfulness, O God my Father,” my eyes were looking at this:

And my mind was thinking, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Christianity lives in that dialectic. The faithful God is the God hidden in the cross. Great is thy faithfulness is the song we sing to the same God we confess as ours while we join our voices with Jesus’ Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani.

In the latter half of the paragraph about Paul’s own ministry, the formation of Christ in the Gentiles is the goal. Paul extends Christ’s death by going to the Gentiles, and the goal is that Christ Himself is formed in them. This is the hope of glory.

The story Paul tells is one in which there is a sure and certain line to be drawn between the cross of Christ and the eternal hope that lies ahead. “Hope” is Christological, and begun by participation “in him.” Paul’s own work intends to “present each person mature in Christ” (1:28).

The transformation that lies ahead is begun now. It begins with the cross, is reenacted in the community’s cruciform life together, plays out in acts of faithful obedience and love, and resolves with hope being realized in glory.

The trick, it seems, is to hold onto all these things simultaneously: to be of sure hope, possessing Christ, while not embracing a triumphalism that neglects the cross; to be confident that we are a reconciled people, while still recognizing our need for transformation; to see the cross of Christ saving us, but not to leave it behind as we seek out how to best love and serve the world in which we find ourselves. There is no hope without the cross, but there is no maturity or love without it, either.

Before the Christ hymn, Paul says that God rescued us from darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of the beloved son (1:13). And immediately after the Christ hymn we read, “Once you were alienated from God and were enemies… But now he has reconciled you by his physical body through death.”

The focal point here we too often miss: the place of our reconciliation is not our own hearts when we come to rest in Christ. The place and time of our reconciliation is Jesus’ death on the cross for us.

Similar things appear in Romans, for example, when Paul says, “Having now been justified in his blood…” and “Having been reconciled to God through the death of his son.” The Christ event itself, not the application of it to us, is the transformative reality of the Christian story and the “center” of Paul’s theology.

Reconciliation happens on the cross–and it transforms us. The purpose is to make us before God what we could not be in God’s presence in any other way: holy, faultless, blameless (Co 1:22).

This is one of those points in Paul’s letters where the sweeping power and transformative breadth of the Christ event seems to encompass each and every individual. But to my mind, Paul always seems to step back from this possibility.

This purification and holy standing before God is to be had, “If indeed (εἴ γε) you abide, in faith.”

The person’s union with Christ, and persistence in Christ through faith, hope, and love, seems a necessary prerequisite to participating in the reconciliation won by Christ. God has done the work, in Christ, of reconciling an alienated humanity to Himself. But for as cosmic as its scope is, there is still, it seems, a need to be united to that saving Christ, a reconciliation to be had by faithfully responding to and living into the gospel by which we are called.

The main point, however, is not to limit the application of the salvation or to downplay its breadth. The significant factor is that God has acted to create a reconciled cosmos, and invites us into that cosmic space. It is a place where we stand, not as reconciled individuals, but part of a reconciled humanity freed from enslaving powers that work against God, God’s good, and God’s people.

Cosmic freedom is won, and God transfers us into the space that is once again one with himself.

He then moves into his prayer for them: that they’ll be filled with the knowledge of God’s will so that they can lead lives worthy of the the Lord. Please God; bear fruit; grow in knowledge; endure with patience; give thanks.

Protestantism has created some odd heresies. One of these is an elaboration of justification as by “faith alone” that renders the works, i.e., the everyday life of a Christian, inconsequential. For the Pauline letters in the NT, nothing could be further from the case. Paul’s missionary goal is to bring about, not faith alone, nor even faith in Christ per se, but “the obedience of faith” (Rom 1). Paul celebrates the Thessalonians’ work of faith (1 Thess 1).

The reality into which Christians enter is not merely a different set of heart thoughts (I now believe in Jesus) but a whole new sphere of life.

The paragraph ends with Paul’s affirmation that God has freed us–we are now in the kingdom of the beloved son. Not merely freed from condemnation, we are now freed to learn, to grow in the knowledge of God. Not merely free to learn, we are free to act in accordance with what we know.

To be one who exists in Christ is to have a life defined by a certain kind of actions. This is not merely the repetition of “belief” in Christ, but a whole life lived so as to please our God and Father.

In Thessalonians, the “faith” is specifically associated with “work”. In Colossians, it would seem to be faith that has Christ as its object. “Faith in Christ Jesus,” it would seem, is roughly equivalent to “believing in Jesus.”

But is this so?

The phrasing is πίστιν ὑμῶν ἐν Χριστῷ.

When talking about believing in someone or something, εἰς is more common than ἐν. It raises the question for me as to whether we’re supposed to see ἐν Χριστῷ as the object of our faith (as it’s most often taken) or as the cosmic space within which the believer exists.

In parallel with Paul’s pervasive “in Christ” language, is this about “faith that we have in union with Christ”?

Romans 4:12 uses what might be a parallel expression. Speaking there of Abraham’s faith, Paul says, “The faith which was in uncircumcision,” τῆς πίστεως τῆς ἐν τῇ ἀκροβυστία.

“Faith in the uncircumcision” is not a description of the object of Abraham’s faith, but of his status at the time of belief.

So, perhaps, in Colossians 1: “I’ve heard of the faith that you have as you are in Christ Jesus, the love that you exercise toward the community of saints, and these because of the hope that is awaiting you at the consummation of all things.”

Perhaps…

Another story of Presbyterians going Presbyterian on one of their own.

The story is old. It goes something like this: Inerrantist, complementarian, Presbyterian, covenant theologian, willing to sign off on the 80+ pages of the Westminster Confession of Faith, has his ordination stymied by a theological debate.

Seriously.

I’ve pretty much come to the point where I’d think that if anyone is willing to sign off on your 80+ pages of theology that you should grab them and never let them go.

But that’s not how the conservative Presbyterian world works. That’s not the fruit of traditional Reformed Theology.

And what I say to them I say to all of us: If the fruit of our theology is that it makes people jerks, it is not good theology.

At some point, we have to step back and say that it’s not merely that people take the theology in a wrong direction, or that people with good theology nevertheless behave badly. There is something in the culture of the places that cling to Reformed or Neo-Reformed theology that makes them rabid about theology.

And these worlds aren’t alone. Lots of us move in or through ecclesiastical circles where there is a viciousness to the theological conversation, or a viciousness in the pursuit of holiness.

I am thankful for the Reformation. It opened up the doors for much-needed reform to come to the church. And that good reform did come both to the Roman Catholic church and through the newly birthed Protestant churches.

But one of its most unfortunate legacies was its providing us a theological justification for separating our theology and teaching from our ethics and behavior. Faith is one thing. Works is something else. The faith we profess is crucial. The works we perform will all need to be forgiven.

And with that, we surrendered our calling to judge by fruit. We are not to believe every prophet. We are not to believe every teacher. And while many of us have strong standards of judgment, ours are not the ones Jesus erected.

For us, the standard of judgment has to do with theological correctness, with correspondence to our system of doctrine. False teachers are run out of town when they say the wrong thing about the Bible or what God was thinking about before creation, or sex.

But Jesus tells us that the reason to run someone out of town is not their theological system but their fruit.

And what we too often, too willfully, forget, is that contentiousness and divisions are the very fruit of the flesh that demonstrate a person’s walking by the flesh and not by the Spirit.

In other words, if the fruit of your theology is that it creates a community of jerks, your teaching has gone awry.

Contentiousness should be a wake up call for us. When we find ourselves in worlds where fights recur, something has gone amiss–we should examine how we’re defining the gospel and thus ourselves as God’s people, and figure out what went wrong.

Most commentators (wrongly, of course, but we’ll show them grace) look to the immediately preceding verses as the thesis statement of the letter:

For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believes–to the Jew first as well as the Greek. For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed from faithfulness unto faithfulness, as it is written, “But the Righteous One will live from faithfulness.”

But then, the strange part. Verse 18 begins, “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of people…”

“For” (γάρ)? Argumentatively, this should mean that Rom 1:16-17 is dependent on v. 18–the wrath of God revealed from heaven is the grounds for the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith.

Most often, the “for” is brushed aside as a non-specific connector.

But I wonder if Rom 3 might not help us here.

In the beginning of Rom 3, Paul is wrestling with the place of Jews in this story of God’s saving actions in Christ. What advantage has the Jew? What is the benefit of circumcision? A chapter that has just leveled the playing field, by claiming that uncircumcised Gentiles might, actually, be the heart-circumcised people of God, Paul revisits the “Jew first” element he highlighted in 1:16.

The contrast he draws is between the faithlessness of Israel and the faithfulness of God. Throughout, Paul is playing with the word “faithfulness” (πίστις, πιστεύω), the same Greek word that he builds on in 1:17: God’s righteousness is revealed from faithfulness unto faithfulness. The contrast here is between God’s faithfulness in contrast to the unfaithfulness of the Jewish people.

In fact, Paul goes on to say, the righteousness of God (again, compare v. 17–the gospel reveals the righteousness of God from faithfulness) is established by “our”, i.e. Israel’s, unrighteousness.

God’s truth, Paul says, abounds to his glory–precisely through the the untruth of Israel.

The God who will inflict wrath (cf. ch. 2!) is not unrighteous in his judgment.

The point I wish to make in drawing these passages together is that ch. 3 provides us with a similar argument to that which we find so baffling in ch. 1. It is Israel’s unrighteousness (the ultimate point of 1:18-30 as it bleeds into ch. 2 with “Therefore, you are without excuse”) that demonstrates God’s righteousness, Israel’s faithlessness that enables God’s faithfulness, Israel’s lie that enables God’s truth.

In short, I think that when he said, “For” in 1:18, Paul meant it.

Now, of course, the question is how these things are: how is it that Israel’s faithlessness is actually the means for God’s faithfulness, Israel’s unrighteousness the means for God’s righteousness, Israel’s lie the means for God’s truth?

But that’s a question for another day.

In fact, this is a recurring issue in the Reformed Tradition: what does the faith as the disposition of my heart have to do with the Christ event as such as the means of salvation?

In Church Dogmatics 1.6.4, Karl Barth tackles the thorny problem of the relationship of faith to the word of God. And when “word of God” means, first and foremost, Christ the word of God, what we are dealing with is the relationship between Christ as the object of our faith and our own faithful response to that Word.

As with the discussion of “word” and our “experience” of it, Barth in his discussion of faith is most concern to insist that what is true about how God is at work in the world is never true merely in and of itself, but only as a continuing act of God.

When discussing faith, Barth begins with a small-print exposition of faith that begins with pistis as the faithfulness of God (Rom 3) and then through Christ’s work, the human response, Christian teaching, and finally a religion that exists throughout history and as such can be studied as a phenomenon.

When talking about faith as the human response to the gospel, Barth draws us to a reality that is not inherent in humans in and of ourselves. It is not a mere dimension of our humanness that can be directed in any number of directions. True faith is defined by its object, not by an inherent human disposition being employed.

Moreover, even for the Christian, faith is not merely a one-off gift or experience. It must be ever exercised afresh, from faith to faith we might say.

Faith is real, because God has given us his Word and we have seen it. And it is real as it is lived and experienced afresh and anew–even as Barth demands that the word of God is real and is in fact the word of God inasmuch as it is experienced afresh and anew by the continuing work of God.

Having put this finishing touch on the knowability of God’s word, Barth is now ready to turn to the project itself and address the problem of dogmatics.