The Consequences of a Pseudo-Gospel

If anyone would like to see the future of the LCMS if we continue to deal with the Scriptures in a pure Law/Gospel way (i.e., Law versus Gospel), read this.

Gene Robinson is the product of a mainline American denomination that has clearly played Law against Gospel and is reaping the harvest of such an approach to the Scriptures. Other things have contributed to the chaos, such as picking and choosing which parts of the Scriptures are “God’s Word,” but behind it all is the idea that if someone says “no” to a particular behavior or lifestyle, that person is legalistic and anti-Gospel. Thus, the Gospel is turned into one big huggy-kissy “yes” to the perversion du jour.

“Jesus never says anything about homosexuality,” he says, the light tone in his nasal voice suddenly darkening, “but he says a lot about treating every person with dignity and respect. All the biblical appeals for a particular attitude to homosexuality can never quote Jesus.”

What, though, of Old Testament condemnations of “men who lay with men”?

“The Church isn’t the same yesterday, today and tomorrow,” he says.

“Only God is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. The Church has always been changing. The Holy Spirit is leading us into truth. And I believe we have learnt that about people of colour, about women, about those who are disabled and now about lesbian and gay people.”

In this system, Jesus is the Almighty Messenger of Acceptance, Dignity, and Respect (AMADR). Somehow “dignity and respect” are exchanged for love, and Jesus, the AMADR, has no words of condemnation except for those who condemn sin. What Robinson fails to understand is that this is not about “a particular attitude to homosexuality,” but about an attitude toward the relationship of men and women, and Jesus does have some things to say about that, including “at the beginning, God made them male and female,” with all that that entails in Genesis 2. We can talk all we want about dignity and respect, but there is no passage, not a single one, that expresses a positive attitude toward homosexual genital contact. The Law of God built into creation itself has been transformed into something that can mean whatever the individual sinner wants it to mean. Forget homosexuality; can Gene Robinson say a single prohibition to any form of conduct, sexual or otherwise?  And on what basis?  By what standard can he judge to be in the wrong those who think sex should be confined to marriage between one man and one woman?  Further, I challenge him to point to a single passage where Jesus says we should treat people with “dignity and respect.”

And can we put to bed (no pun intended) this ridiculous notion of the Holy Spirit leading us into some sort of nebulous “truth”? Why do these people always end in the middle of verse 13? The rest of the passage says,

“…for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” (John 16:13b-15, ESV)

The Spirit is not an independent god floating around bringing whatever notions of “truth” might fit with our own self-conceptions. If it doesn’t fit with the Trinity, especially the Gospel of the Incarnate Son, but also the creation of the world (God did that, remember?), then it’s not the Holy Spirit who gave that “truth.” How arrogant do you have to be to presume that your pet sin has been truthified by the Holy Spirit? This is more dangerous than any dictator claiming to have God on his side, because the dictatorship of the self over and against God is open to everyone. I’m not sure where, exactly, Gene Robinson would locate God and His revelation, since he seems to think that Scriptural prohibitions against having sex with other men is something the Church, and not God, has said. That’s freedom for you! Just claim that whatever sin you like to commit is not prohibited by God, but by the Church–St. Paul was a member of the Church, after all (the patriarchal, hierarchical, sexist, homophobic Church, at least).

But here is Robinson’s driving concern (sound familiar?):

“It is so sad to me that this issue has become so important to us,” he insists. “To raise any issue about the central issues that Jesus raised is idolatry. To focus on this issue to the exclusion of everything else is a kind of idolatry.

It makes the Church seem that much more hopelessly irrelevant to the culture for whom this is less and less of an issue all the time, and especially for people under 30. It makes the Church look so behind the times. Wouldn’t it be nice if the Church could lead for a change rather than bring up the rear?” [emphasis added]

It’s no longer loving someone who is “homo” to you that is narcissistic and idolatrous, but calling that sort of “sexual expression” wrong that is idolatrous! But seriously: who focuses on homosexual genital contact “to the exclusion of everything else”? There I agree with Robinson; such a person would have a problem.

But it’s all about relevance. There is perhaps not anything worse that the Church could be. Hey, whatever people want to do, we’ll say it’s okay. You want to beat your wife? We’re relevant to that. You want to divorce your husband for the cable guy? We’re relevant to that. You want to drink yourself into oblivion? Let us help you! Whatever your perversion, we’ll be relevant. In fact, we’ll lead the way, and beat your wife for you! We’ll give you and the cable guy a blessing! See how relevant and leading we are?

The only way the Church can be relevant to damned sinners is to be irrelevant to their individual wants and desires. Only the Law that condemns sinners and their pet sins is relevant. Only the Gospel that forgives and does not excuse their sins is relevant. Everything else is playing games and chasing fads. The Church does not exist to “accept” anyone (which means, in Robinson’s parlance, “letting them do whatever they want as long as they don’t tell me I’ve sinned”), but to destroy their pretensions. Making people feel better about themselves is the job of the self-help section. The Church exists so that God can kill sinners and raise them to a new life. Robinson wants them to go back to their old life feeling “dignified” and “respected.” That’s called Hell.

This is a pseudo-Gospel, and therefore a pseudo-Christ. In Robinson’s World, everything is inverted:

Given that he is not about to change his view, Anglicanism faces an uncertain future, I suggest. “I believe,” he says, giving every indication of meaning it, “that in the end the communion will win out and we will hang together. God calls all of his children to the table. We can disagree and even say a lot of hateful things, but what we can’t do in good conscience is leave the table. Or demand that someone else not be at the table.”

Which seems to be exactly what some of his fellow bishops are demanding of him. “They are,” he confirms, “and that is the worst sin. But by virtue of our baptism, Peter Akinola and I are brothers in Christ and one day we are going to be in heaven together, so we might as well learn to get along here because we will have to get along there. God won’t have it any other way.”

He’s the victim and the sinned-against, and not even God is going to remove that self-assurance. Thus, the one who begins by saying “yes” to everything to which God says “no” becomes the most legalistic with those who oppose him. Everyone will have a lex aeterna; the question is, does it match God’s?

Unless the Missouri Synod can escape a pure Law/Gospel polarization, following the Episcopalians down their well-trodden path is absolutely unavoidable. And unless there is something outside Law vs. Gospel (God’s Law and God’s Gospel, remember), there is no argument that can be made against Robinson’s form of Law-Gospel reductionism. In such a universe, sin will be definable as “whatever condemns my so-called sin,” and the Church will turn into the world, where discourse becomes a series of emotional assertions with moral labels attached. God help us.

Timotheos

“Worship from the heart”

Fads come and go in the Church. Anyone who tries to keep up with trends in order to attract people will inevitably fail. The Church is not built on or sustained by trends, not even in “style” (as if form could be divorced from content). Christianity Today has an article on how evangelicals are turning to liturgical churches for various reasons. Mark Galli explains what attracts him to liturgy, even though it’s not “relevant.” (By the way, the best book I have ever read on the irrelevance of liturgy is D.G. Hart’s The Lost Soul of American Protestantism. Do yourself a favor and read it. It will, like all good books, shift your view of the landscape.)

What interests me is the comments, especially this one:

I really don’t understand all of this.Quite a strange article.God help us all.I personally believe all forms of worship are acceptable to God if it comes from the heart and is centered round Jesus Christ,that’s what Christianity is all about.Having said that if worship is traditional,contemporary or liturgy,we as Christians should never loose sight of how the Chuch began and what the foundation was;Christ’s Ressurection,his Oneness with God and how we as Christians can our lives under God’s grace in a Christ-like manner,loving our neighbours as we love ourselves and giving praise and thanks to our Saviour King Jesus Christ for making us right with God.

I’m sure “Abby” is a nice girl/woman. I am not writing this to bash her. She says, “I personally believe all forms of worship are acceptable to God if it comes from the heart and is centered round Jesus Christ.”

The problem is with worship that “comes from the heart.” Does Jesus want what comes from my heart? Jesus says,

“For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.” (Mark 7:21-23, ESV)

Only if you do not know yourself could you think that Jesus is speaking only of unbelievers. The problem is not that worship does not come from the heart and that makes it dry or boring or meaningless. The problem is that far too much worship comes from the heart. We are so bound up in ourselves that we even want our worship to revolve around our selves. I am not sure how worship could come from the heart and at the same time be “centered round Jesus Christ.” When I am in the midst of the Divine Service, I find that there is way too much of my heart already; I don’t need more, I need less. And, in fact, that is why I need the Divine Service after all. Because I need a new heart. I need a heart of flesh and not one of stone. I need a full body transplant, and we surely are not going to get it if we’re worried about whether we’re giving God our all or not. As much as we think we’re focused on God when we try to make sure we’re worshiping sincerely and from the heart, we are more focused on ourselves than if we just do what the liturgy does. Get out of your heart! Get out of your head! What do you think is actually worth saving in your heart or head?

The liturgy of the Divine Service is about changing the focus, and it is not something we can accomplish by trying harder or praying ex corde or getting rid of all formality and ritual. It is precisely the formality and the ritual that move us beyond ourselves.  If we have our way, the Divine Service will become our own private worship service. The consequences are enormous. If it’s my worship service, or even if it’s the worship service to which I am going to praise God, then there is no longer any Body of Christ, but only atomized individuals who are there to get what they can out of the service. It’s no longer about what God wants to give you in Jesus Christ, but about what affects you in such a way as to make it meaningful. Are we so arrogant as to think that what we put in or get out of the service can change what God wants to give us? Clearly, if you don’t think about what’s going on, the benefits of the service may be lost on you. But that’s the glory of the Christian liturgy! God is still there, giving out His gifts, and if you don’t realize it, that’s your loss. But your attention or lack of attention cannot inhibit God’s work in Jesus Christ. I would go so far as to say that if you have been given faith to trust Christ, even if you aren’t paying attention on a given Sunday, Christ still works in you by His Word and Sacrament. Only unbelief brings judgment. How easily we get caught up in worship works-righteousness by thinking God’s work in us depends on how clean our hearts are or how uncluttered our brains are.

These are only the beginnings of thoughts about what is going on in the Divine Service. All I’m really sure about is that God doesn’t want what’s in my heart a lot of Sundays, and He doesn’t need what’s in it the other Sundays. Thank God that He’s faithful when we’re not.

Timotheos

Who Said It?

I received an e-mail from the American Chesterton Society saying that Chesterton did not actually say this.

Here’s another one: can anyone tell me which Church Father said something to the effect of, “We go to the Sacrament as if to our death, so that we go to our death as if to the Sacrament”?  I know I’ve read it, but I can’t find the source right now.  Anyone want to do my work for me?

Timotheos

Why “Diversity” in Worship?

David Berger of Concordia Seminary in St. Louis has written an essay on worship diversity and the use of statistics to evaluate the “worship experience.”  So far only 93 visitors.  His words deserve far wider dissemination and discussion.

Timotheos

Unnecessary Punctuation “Marks”

If bad punctuation leading to misunderstanding has ever annoyed you or made you angry, go here. Reminds me of the first book to make me laugh out loud in a long time: Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves. (You’ll never look at punctuation in the same way.)  [If such things make you laugh, see this.]

The other day I was putting liquid gold–I mean, gasoline–in my truck and I noticed one of the warnings on the pump: “Do not overfill, tank.” If my name’s not “tank,” does that mean I can? Do they have a lot of tanks filling themselves up in Crookston, MN? What is with the urge to put random punctuation in strange places?

Timotheos

Another Brilliant Exploitation of Popular Culture

After House, it was only a matter of time before Jack Bauer entered the Office of the Holy Ministry. I’m surprised it took this long.

Timotheos

What Do Other Christians Believe About the Lord’s Supper?

I would have thought this would be clear by now, but I encounter people all the time who think that “we (Lutherans of the Missouri Synod variety) really believe the same things” about the Lord’s Supper as other Christians. May this post forever put that conception to rest (if only!). The reason for this post is not to bash other Christians; they are free to choose their congregations. But let’s not have any papering over of real, substantial differences–in this case, the most substantial of them. (Remember that Luther was willing to compromise with Zwingli on nearly every article of the Faith which they discussed at Marburg, but not on the Lord’s Supper. That should tell us something.)

An ELCA pastor recently told me that the United Methodists (with whom the ELCA is in altar and pulpit fellowship) had changed their stance on the Lord’s Supper, saying that they now believe that they eat Jesus’ Body and Blood. The Methodists must have missed that memo. Here’s what their website says:

The Lord’s Supper (Communion, Eucharist)

• The Lord’s Supper is a holy meal of bread and wine that symbolizes the body and blood of Christ.
• The Lord’s Supper recalls the life, death and resurrection of Jesus and celebrates the unity of all the members of God’s family.
• By sharing this meal, we give thanks for Christ’s sacrifice and are nourished and empowered to go into the world in mission and ministry.
• We practice “open Communion,” welcoming all who love Christ, repent of their sin, and seek to live in peace with one another.

Oops. “Symbolizes” doesn’t quite rise to the standard of the Lutheran Confessional teaching on the Lord’s Supper. But one could see how people might be confused. This is from a Methodist booklet on the Lord’s Supper:

Jesus Christ, who “is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being” (Hebrews 1:3), is truly present in Holy Communion. Through Jesus Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit, God meets us at the Table. God, who has given the sacraments to the church, acts in and through Holy Communion. Christ is present through the community gathered in Jesus’ name (Matthew 18:20), through the Word proclaimed and enacted, and through the
elements of bread and wine shared (1 Corinthians 11:23-26). The divine presence is a living reality and can be experienced by participants; it is not a remembrance of the Last Supper and the Crucifixion only.

This paragraph points out explicitly the problem with Lutherans talking about the “real presence” in the Sacrament. We mean that Jesus’ Body and Blood are eaten along with the bread and the wine. Methodists and others believe that Jesus meets us in Communion, even at the altar, but you will never see or hear any official statement that says “We believe that when we eat the bread and drink the wine, we are eating and drinking the same Body and Blood of Jesus that were crucified and raised from the dead.” If they can’t say that, they believe differently from Lutherans.

What about the PCUSA, with whom the ELCA is also in fellowship? From their website:

In eating the bread and drinking the cup offered by God, our memory of the promises are made present by the Holy Spirit.

[...]

This, then, is the Presbyterian understanding of Communion: Is Jesus physically present in the elements of the Eucharist–have the molecules of bread been changed into molecules of the body of Jesus? No.

Is Jesus spiritually present in the elements of the Eucharist, authentically present in the non-atom-based substance with which he is con-substantial with God–that is, is he genuinely there to be received by us, and not just in our memories? Yes.

The Presbyterian position (Calvin’s position) is not the Lutheran position. Though we don’t believe that “the molecules of bread [have] been changed into molecules of the body of Jesus,” we do believe that “Jesus [is] physically present in the elements of the Eucharist.”

How about the United Church of Christ? (Are you sensing a pattern? Yes, the ELCA is in altar and pulpit fellowship with, perhaps, the most liberal Christian–the word almost requires quotes–denomination in the United States. By the way, the ELCA pastors with whom I was discussing these things doubted that Rev. Jeremiah Wright was a member of the UCC. Think again.) From their website:

The breaking of bread and the pouring of wine reminds us of the costliness of Christ’s sacrifice and the discipleship to which we are all called. In the breaking of bread, we remember and celebrate Christ’s presence among us along with a ‘cloud of witnesses’ – our ancestors, family and friends who have gone before us. It is a great mystery; we claim it by faith.

Just not all of it.

There are also the Moravians (do you even have to ask if the ELCA is in fellowship with them?). From their website:

In respect to the sacrament of holy communion, the Moravian Church does not try to define the mystery of Christ’s presence in the communion elements, but recognizes that the believer participates in a unique act of covenant with Christ as Savior and with other believers in Christ.

That’s an nice way out of having to struggle with Christ’s words.

I’m not even going to try with the Episcopalians. Probably some of them believe what we believe. Or what Rome believes. Or what the Baptists believe. There is this, however. Hard to know how they understand the “the inward and spiritual grace.”

Please, no one tell me that we “all believe the same things.” Not true, and if people would take ten seconds to search their websites (the UCC took me a little longer; had to get past all their social justice programming), they could compare that with even the Small Catechism and realize that there is no unity. I’ll take the Episcopalian apostolic succession over false teaching and false unity in the Supper any day. “I’d rather eat the Body of Christ with the Pope than mere bread with Zwingli.”

Timotheos

New Blog

I commend to you Chuck Finney’s Anxious Bench.  (Not for little children; my daughter was a little scared of the picture.)  And to think that I was critical of those Lutherans who thought Mr. Finney did some good things.  Like, he was good at evangelism, right?

Timotheos

Muslim-Friendly Worship

I set out to write about Prof. Herb Hoefer’s ideas for making worship more Muslim-friendly (which, I hesitate to say, I saw first in Something News–can’t quite recall its full title at the moment…), only to find out it had already been done, and probably better than I could have done it. See Father Hollywood’s remarks here.

Prof. Hoefer is a professor at (again, I hesitate to say it) my alma mater, and he has long been involved with the mission work of the Missouri Synod and the Northwest District. I know the man, and I say nothing bad about him as a person. Out of the professors under whom I studied there, he was the least hostile to the traditional tenets of orthodox, Lutheran Christianity–at least, I thought so before I read his article (which can be found at the end of Father Hollywood’s post, but, curiously, no longer on the CU-P website; it can be found here also). Prof. Hoefer’s article is the extreme end of what many LCMS congregations currently do under the guise of missional concern. Be all things to all people, they say. Isn’t that what St. Paul said? Lest anyone be fooled about where such logic leads, simply read Prof. Hoefer’s paper.

Apparently, not only should we dumb down our liturgical heritage to make people “comfortable” and so they can “understand it,” we should also remove anything remotely offensive to a religion antithetical to Christianity, Islam. Should we remove all things that talk about Jesus as Messiah so we do not offend Jews, who might then be “attracted” to Christianity? I understand that Prof. Hoefer is speaking about a particular context, say, in a Muslim country, but his examples come from the U.S. Is the U.S. now a Muslim context? I mean, we’re not Great Britain, for pity’s sake!

But this sort of emphasis, on removing or changing elements of the faith once delivered to the saints, has behind it a false understanding of conversion. What happened to the bound will, unable to come to Jesus or believe in Him without the Holy Spirit working repentance and faith? We do not attract people to the Church so that they will then believe. This is directly opposed to the total depravity of the will worked by sin. More likely, people will be driven away from the Gospel, because that’s what often happens when the Gospel confronts sinners. People will never be saved unless they encounter the full, condemning Law of God and the full, saving comfort of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, Son of God and Son of Man. Will this offend Muslims and others?

When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, said to them, “Do you take offense at this? Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But there are some of you who do not believe.” (For Jesus knew from the beginning who those were who did not believe, andwho it was who would betray him.) And he said, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.”

After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him. So Jesus said to the Twelve, “Do you want to go away as well?” (John 6:60-67, ESV)

Thus stands the question of Jesus to Prof. Hoefer, and to us as well.

[More comments here, here, here, here, and here]

Timotheos

Atheism and Morality

I’ve been watching Christopher Hitchens debate Dinesh D’Souza (the first part is here). There are a number of points on which Hitchens misunderstands the nature of Christian belief. But there is one that really misses the point, which is that Christians supposedly say that atheists have no basis for making moral judgments, and that without a form of religion there will be only chaos. That is not the Christian claim about morality. The question is not whether atheists can live a “moral life” (whatever that might mean to an atheist), but whether there is anything beyond the self or the human on which moral actions can be based. That is a subtle, but highly significant, difference. In other words: atheists can and do act morally in many ways and very often. However, there is no ultimate reason why they should.

They act morally because they haven’t yet been honest enough with themselves to rid themselves of the vestiges of the Creator’s morality, as Nietzsche saw. Hitchens makes his mistake by limiting morality to the past two thousand years, i.e., anno Domini. The problem is, if the Christian conception of reality is true, morality comes not when Christ arrives on earth, but at the beginning of creation itself. If God is behind morality, it would hardly be surprising that people prior to Christ, and even prior to Sinai, acted morally; that is, in accord with the Law of God in creation. It’s built in, as Paul in Romans explicitly says. No Christian ever said that morality began with Christ, but with God at the beginning of creation.

Another problem: Hitchens loves examples of supposed Christians acting contrary to what he considers moral. But where does Hitchens’s morality come from? From the human collective? Talk about arbitrary. And even if morality was decided by human consensus, there is no basis or foundation within atheism to object if an individual within that collective decided to act contrary to the general human consensus. What other basis could there be than a trumped-up emotivism? “Well, I don’t much like it when you do that.” Good for you.

The second problem with arguing on the basis of Christians behaving badly is that Christianity has within it the ability to critique the actions of its members and correct them. There are explicit and particular standards, within the New Testament especially (seeing Christ as the fulfillment of the whole Old Testament), for deciding whether behavior is wrong or right. Regardless of whether Hitchens or anyone else believes that God is behind those standards, they exist. Thus, Christians have it within their religious conception the ability to say, “Yeah, killing people for the sake of land, money, difference of belief or opinion is wrong. We shouldn’t do that, and if any Christian does do those things, he or she is not acting according to Christian belief.” The abuse of something does not negate its use. By what standard do atheists judge the acts of zealous Christians or Muslims? Surprisingly, they sound very nearly like what Christians would say about the same actions. What does such a coincidence prove? It proves, or at the very least suggests, that the standards are inherent to humanity. That is what Hitchens and others say, but such a statement does not mean what they think it means. They think it means that humans came up with things very much like the Second Table of the Ten Commandments (sort of like how those same humans invented God–which begs the question, if the invention of God was a poisonous idea, why is not the invention of morality equally as poisonous?). However, Christians also claim that a general sense of right and wrong is inherent in humans, precisely because their Creator put it there. Hitchens doesn’t get that we’re not arguing this point. He thinks that Christians think that Christ brought a completely new teaching, as if we believed in a NT God and an OT God (fyi, that’s called Marcionism, and it was rejected by Christians a long time ago). No, as St. Paul says, even Gentiles (i.e., unbelievers) have the Law of God “written on their hearts” (cf. Romans 1:18-20; 2:14-16). (By the way, Paul is far more harsh with hypocritical believers than Hitchens could ever be: see Romans 2:1-5.)

Finally, it should seem strange to Hitchens et al. that when they describe Christianity, Christians do not recognize their descriptions. They’ve taken caricatures and parodies and pretended that they are the thing itself. Why should anyone take their critiques seriously when they, from the outside, claim to understand Christianity better than those inside, who disagree not only with their conclusions but with their premises?

Timotheos