Tag Archive - works

Believing is Doing

June 27, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 19 Comments

Last week I had some reflections on “faith” in Colossians 1: perhaps the defining aspect of Christian faith is that this faith that exists in Christ. In the opening, thanksgiving section of the letter the triad of faith, hope, and love, as it is embodied by the Colossian church(es), is Paul’s source of celebration.

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.

If It Makes You a Jerk, It’s Not Good Theology

May 16, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church with 16 Comments

It happened again.

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.

What We Do, Echoing in Eternity

August 24, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 14 Comments

“What we do in life echoes in eternity!” Thus saith Maximus, the Gladiator. Now the question we’re all asking: is Gladiator good theology?

I’ve been reading through Revelation, and today came through a few chapters close to the end. This is where the great whore goes up in flames and becomes sport for her own crows… er… a feast for those who profited from her. Great, gory stuff.

But the thing that continually pops out at me when I read through these concluding segments are the places where we discover that our works are far from incidental for the eternity ahead.

Let’s start with the dress of the Bride. In my deeply Pauline circles, people often talk about being clothed in the righteousness of Christ. That’s an apt metaphor for union with Christ: “all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourself with Christ” and all that.

But what is the Bride wearing? Is she wearing the bright, spotless righteousness of Christ? No.

“It was given to her that she might be dressed in pure, pristine linen–for the linen is the righteous deeds of the saints” (Revelation 19:8). The church, the bride of Christ, shines with the glory of what God’s people have done on earth.

Earlier in the book there had been a word of comfort spoken concerning those who “die in the Lord”: “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on. Yes, says the spirit, in order that they might rest from their labors–for their works follow with them” (Revelation 14:13). Why don’t they work anymore? Because their works enter in after them.

The really scary stuff, of course, comes at the very end. With the judgment.

“The dead were judged by what was written in the books–according to their deeds” (Rev. 20:12).

“…Death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and each one was judged according to his deeds” (Rev. 20:13).

“Behold! I am coming soon! And my reward is with me to pay each one according to what he has done” (Rev. 22:12).

One of the challenges besetting post-Reformation soteriology is coming up with a robust place for our works in the big picture of both what God is up to in the world and our own eternal future. We shrink back from passages such as these that seem to tie our eternal state with what we do here on earth. We often retreat to Paul for counter-testimony to overturn what otherwise would seem clear.

I think we need to get over it.

The assumption throughout Revelation is that God’s people are distinguished from the world by being faithful witnesses of God and of the Lamb. We are distinguished by not participating in the violence, immorality, and abuse of persons that defines “the world,” as well as by our faithful service to God rather than God’s adversaries.

In other words, the point of Revelation is that Christians should take comfort in the fact that God looks at the ways that they are set apart from the world and will vindicate them for it in the end. If the idea of being judged according to our deeds, or having our deeds be the eternal adornment of the church, is not a source of comfort to us, I’d humbly suggest that the problem is not that this is theologically incorrect.

Instead, the problem is how we’re living (or not living) in faithfulness to the lives to which we have been called.