The Foundations of Faith

This week, our college's newspaper had a couple of opinion pieces in support of Rob Bell's new book, Love Wins.  I didn't want to enter into the whole argument over whether or not Bell is a Universalist, but I wrote this response to a disturbing trend that I see in evangelicalism today.  I had to cut down what I wrote quite a bit to submit it, so here I'm going to post it in full:

When I took Bib Lit I as a freshman, I remember Dr. Richard Smith giving us his “domino and pyramid” models for constructing a biblical theology.  Build your worldview out of equally weighted points of belief, and your entire system wobbles precariously like a domino file: threaten one piece, and your whole world comes crashing down.  By contrast, a wise theologian—for we all become “theologians” when we think about God—constructs a worldview shaped like a pyramid.  Fundamental convictions form a wide base on which we stack successively less significant layers of belief.  This model requires that we differentiate between areas that are “hills to die on” and peripheral academic quibbles.  We can then debate the tiny issues on the top of the pyramid without endangering the entire structure.  Some issues, however, strike at the very heart of our faith, and these we must defend with the fervor that Paul charged Timothy to “guard the deposit entrusted to” him against “what is falsely called ‘knowledge’ ” (1 Tim 6:20). 

A pyramid only has four big corner bricks.  Likewise, I believe that God may only call us to identify a small number of foundational points in our theology.  The opinion piece states that “universalism is no more heretical than Arminianism or Calvinism.”  To bring in the debate over free will and election in the same breath as Universalism is to compare apples and oranges.  The Calvinism-Arminianism debate is in the middle of the “pyramid.”  Different people might place it at varying levels of importance, but everyone would agree that it fits into the vertical strata between peripheral and crucial issues somewhere between Christian tattoos and the doctrine of the Trinity, respectively.  The exclusivity of salvation, however, is a brick wedged firmly on the base horizontal level between truths such as Christ’s deity and the virgin birth.  Take these away, and you no longer have Christianity.  Let these slide in the name of “tolerance,” and you no longer have any faith worth living for.

We might think of this using the analogy of sports.  Every season, professional leagues vote in rules changes during their offseason meetings.  If there is a pyramid of football rules, to borrow Dr. Smith’s metaphor for theology, the length of timeouts or the placement of kickoffs might have equivalent importance to the choice of point color for the very top of the structure.  Change the playoff format or the rules on hitting, and now we’re cutting a bit deeper.  Make the ball round, though, and let players kick it along the turf, and now we have a different form of “futbol” all together. 

This is what moving the line on the clear biblical teaching of the exclusivity of salvation does to us.  Is Rob Bell a “universalist?”  I don’t know; I’ve never met Bell, and I haven’t read his book from cover to cover.  I don’t want to attack any one person or question the legitimacy of their faith.  I hope that Bell is a believer, and I have no desire to suggest otherwise.  Rather, I am responding to much greater issue, namely, the movement that I see down a continuum that leads to Universalism.  The problem with this trend is that, in the words of Bell’s title, the idea that “Love Wins” makes the serious logical error of equating God’s love with his unwillingness to judge unrepentant sinners.  It finds its basis not in Scripture, but rather in our human incredulity that a loving God would condemn those who oppose him to hell.  The problem with this thinking is that God, and not our thinking, is the ultimate authority.  God’s patient love and eventual wrath are both rock-hard biblical truths that we must accept and hold in tension, whether we understand them in this life or not.  Whether it be labeled “inclusivism,” “universalism,” or something else, all expressions of this trend suggest that to love others we must make no judgments about their eternal destiny; who are we to judge whether or not God will let someone into heaven?  This is a nice thought—or is it?  The Bible says that everyone must have a saving relationship with Jesus Christ, for “no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).   Is letting people think otherwise, to their eternal peril, really love?  Scripture tells us that “it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment” (Heb 9:27); how can we profess Christ-like love for the world while we tell unbelievers that there may be opportunities for salvation after death? 

I believe that we will all be blown away by the depth of what we don’t understand when we reach heaven.  God commands us to “not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes” (1 Cor 4:5), and as undeserving sinners we must all leave God room for miraculous outpourings of the same grace to others.  But Christ commissions us as the church to spread the gospel with the urgency that comes from believing that this world is a sinking ship.  This issue of Univeralism must be to us a cornerstone to the pyramid, a hill to die on, but not because it makes us the winners in an academic argument.  Souls hang in the balance; we owe it to a dying world. 

  

Out of Envy

I read this today, from Mark in the account of Jesus' trial:


Mk 15:10 - "For he [Pilate] perceived that it was out of envy that the chief priests had delivered him up."


Pilate sees through to the root of this sin, which is the source of all sin--the desire to be like God and the envious anger that people have toward him for being God.  Adam and Eve sinned so that they might be like God, and the devil before them fell because he resented God's power and wanted it for himself.  The chief priests envied Jesus because of his claim to deity.  You do not "envy" a schizophrenic who claims to be the President, but many have envied the President and some have tried to kill him.  This suggests that the Jewish leaders recognized Christ's deity, but instead of worshiping it made them angry.


People have made similar mistakes with the incarnation every since.  God brought himself close to us in the person of his son not so that we could see ourselves as one step closer to the satanic goal of becoming like God, but so that we would trust in he man Jesus and be saved.  It is human nature to confuse self-giving humility for weakness.  People continue to strive to assert themselves over God when they reject Jesus and try to do things on their own; as with the Jewish leaders, the humble appearance of Christ only makes them think "I could do that!"  Our human envy stirs: "Why him?  Why not me?"  And so Christ is a stumbling block to natural man.  

More on "cheap grace" in the Christian culture

It is far too common in today's churches to hear the forgiveness of sins proclaimed with no focus on new life in Christ, absolution without the requirement of absolute devotion, freedom from sin without slavery to Christ's foreign righteousness.  It is the cheap grace that Bonhoeffer preached against, a grace that is not worth living or dying for because it has been stripped of its power.

The prophet Jeremiah confronted this problem in his day, as well.  The people of Jerusalem and Judah were wicked, and God sent Jeremiah to preach against them.  In Jeremiah's commission, Yahweh says, "behold, I have put my words in your moth...to pluck up and break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant" (Jer 1:9-10).  In the context of this sin that the Lord sent Jeremiah to confront, though, false prophets and priests proclaim a contrary message of easy absolution.  Twice in the opening chapters of Jeremiah, in 6:14 and 8:11, Yahweh gives Jeremiah these words against such false men of God:

"They have healed the wound of my people lightly,

saying, 'Peace, peace,' when there is no peace."

And here we have it: a message of "cheap grace" in the 7th century BC.  God's righteousness is eternal, man's inability to live up to it is as old as Adam, and yet so is humanity's attempts to bestow free forgiveness upon itself.  We should not think that the cheap grace seen in some parts of Christianity today is anything new.  It is an ancient mockery of God's holiness and needs to be eradicated with as much zeal as God commissioned Jeremiah to display in ancient times.

The Debt of the Incarnation

The mystery of the incarnation is gigantic, all-encompassing, worthy of our whole life’s devotion to searching out its depths.  God undoubtedly had many purposes in sending his son to be born, minister, die, and be raised again.  Every secondary purpose was certainly for the primary goal of God’s glory.  And, the dearest outcome of Christ’s life to us must be our salvation from eternal condemnation through his death.  But I wonder if we focus as we should on his life. 

The very presence of God in him made Jesus a marked man from birth, doomed, from a human perspective, to death from the beginning.  From Herod’s attempt to kill him as an infant to his townspeople’s attempt to throw him off a cliff to his ultimate betrayal and crucifixion, people sought to kill Christ for declaring himself to be who he truly was: the Son of God and coming King.  God sent his son into the world to die.  In his sovereign plan, God knew that this would happen; Christ is the Lamb who was slain from the foundation of the world. 

Although the Cross is the only way that we can imagine God fulfilling his infinite love for us while at the same time satisfying his unquenchable wrath, he most certainly could have worked things out a different way.  He could have created an entirely alternate world, with no need for the death of his son at all.  And yet God chose to send his Son among us as Immanuel, “God with us” (Mt 1:23).  He was tempted in every way as we are without sin (Heb 4:15).  He was fully man, yet the perfect man.  And this very same Jesus calls us to be perfect, as the Father is perfect (Mt 5:48). 

This is what I mean by the death of the incarnation: God knowingly, purposefully sent his son to die so that he could show himself to us in our own terms.  There is no greater revelation than the God man, the Word become flesh.  The prophets of the Old Testament received incredible revelations, but with the Incarnation God went beyond all of this by speaking to us “by his Son,” who “is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being” (Heb 1:2-3).  And we are called to strive for perfection as we imitate God’s example through Christ (Eph 5:1).  When we do make a life of following Christ’s example as closely as possible, we spurn the God-given example in Jesus that cost our Father his very Son.  And, when we do make discipleship the one purpose of our lives, we do the one thing that we can do to honor Christ’s sacrifice.  

A grace worth dying for

It is often said that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.  The only exception to this rule is the mind-boggling gospel message: turn in your failing human life, and God will make you a new person in Jesus Christ so that you can spend eternity with him.  It is an equation that is grossly imbalanced but upon which humanity’s every hope depends. 

In a world where we are so accustomed to the natural, where we are trained to search out the tricky angle on any deal that seems too perfect, we often have a hard time accepting God’s free gift of grace.  And as a result, we see 2,000 years of Christianity full of attempts by sinful men to commend themselves to God rather than take him at his word.  This is the saddest picture in the world: sinful people who have nothing but yet refuse to loosen their empty fists to accept the undeserved mercy of Jesus Christ. 

Sometimes we make the gospel too hard.  But an equal danger is making it too easy, and in doing so we do create our own gospel which really is “too good to be true.”  In fact, accepting Christ’s offer of salvation is the easiest and the hardest decision of all.  Easiest, because it requires nothing of us; no application, no interview, no resume of good works before God will consider us for salvation.  Yet it is also the hardest, because the prerequisite for this kind of grace is death to our former selves.  Thus Christ asks nothing of us, and at the same time he asks us to give up everything.  The key is that the everything we have is really nothing compared to the everything of our God.  This kind of sacrifice is illustrated by Jesus’ parable of the hidden treasure, where a man sells all he has so he can buy a field where he has found a buried fortune that is worth infinitely more (Mt 13:44).  Jim Elliot was right, that “he is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”

Death to ourselves must take place before we can have new life in Christ, because we cannot carry our sinful flesh into the Body of our Lord.  There is no union between our old and new natures; they are absolutely, elementally different.  Paul says that we, “having been set free from sin, have become slaves to righteousness” (Rom 6:18).  We are Christ’s slaves!  Paul writes elsewhere that we are no longer our own; “you were bought with a price.  So glorify God in your body” (2 Cor 6:19b-20).

We must die?  A hard teaching!  Maybe its time that we realized that our user-friendly gospel, which allows us to keep everything about our former way of life while picking and choosing those elements of life in Christ that make us feel the best, really is too good to be the true message of Jesus.  And yet what else did we expect?  God gave his very son to die; would he throw away such a precious gift if it was not worthy of a great sacrifice in return?  I wholeheartedly believe that God’s grace would not be worth our commitment if it were not so costly.  We have been redeemed not by money or anything of this world, but with the blood of our Lord (1 Peter 1:19).  A job can ask me for my time and repay me with money, possessions can ask me for my money and deliver me temporary pleasure, but only the Lord can offer so great and surpassing a reward that he demands my very life.  This is the God that I want to serve; this is a grace worth dying for!

Why I'm starting to blog

Whenever I read blogs, my first question is always why someone thinks that their thoughts are worth my reading.  So, I want to put out my purpose for this up front.  It doesn't really matter to me whether or not anyone reads what I put here, because that's not my goal.  I'm really just looking for a way to write down my thoughts about my life and Christ to hopefully work some things out in my mind and to document my journey of discipleship.  Putting up a blog is a way to keep myself thinking and writing regularly and maybe even have a handful of people join me in my own exploration of the gospel.

The title is from Isaiah 50:7, where the servant says that he has set his "face like a flint" in the face of suffering.  The servant at least in part finds his future fulfillment in Christ, "who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at teh right hand of the throne of God" (Heb 12:2).  Likewise, Paul models himself after Christ, telling the Philippians that, "forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus" (Phil 3:13b-14). 

For me, this is one of the key pictures of the Christian life: the disciple running a marathon, exhausting the resources God gives him yet constantly pressing forward, yearning for a heavenly reward.  His face is the picture of determination, unflinching, its features unyielding in their comittment to the goal as if they were chiseled out of flint.  It is the picture of distance running legend Emil Zatopek, pictured on the background, who was known as the "human locomotive" for his extraordinary will to push past the limits of human performance.  That is my picture of discipleship, and I pray that when Jesus sees my life it looks spiritually like Zatopek did physically.  I hope that it reminds him of his own life of complete abandon for God.