Talks on Various Occasions

God in the Hands of Angry Sinners

Genesis 3: 1-13

1. Remember the old joke?

Q. What did the preacher preach on today?

A. Sin.

Q. What did he say about it?

A. He was against it.

Today I'm going to talk about sin.

2. It's easy to divide preachers up into those who preach grace, and the gospel, and those who like to talk about sin. Those of us for whom the center of attention is the gospel might give the idea that sin isn't such a big deal. I don't know about you, but I don't very much care for people who like to talk about sin. I always suspect that behind the preaching against sin the real motive is the desire to control people. To get the kids to shape up and conform to norms of respectable behavior, rather than messing up the grownups' world.

Also, I get the idea that people who make a big deal out of sin really get off on the idea that most people are going to be tortured forever in hell. (Have you noticed how angry and upset they get at the idea that maybe, somehow, everyone will be saved in the end; you'd think they'd get upset and angry at the idea that, in the end, some people may insist on being lost. This is a very different attitude than that of God, who would rather die than let this happen...)

And isn't there often an air of hypocrisy around those who preach against sin, so we suspect that they're probably trying to hide something, and trying to make themselves safe from what privately obsesses them by publicly preaching against it. When Jimmy Swaggart messed up, was anyone really surprised?

All of this makes it seem that there is something suspect about making an issue of sin. As though, like sex, death and salaries it's better taken for granted and not much talked about.

3. But I think we really have to tell the truth about sin, always remembering that it isn't the truth we tell if we don't tell it in love and in the light of God's good news. The only way to know what sin is is by way of the gospel. Otherwise we deny that the gospel is the power of God that exposes sin for what it really is and that utterly defeats it. We have to hear about sin from those who are willing to preach God's unconditional acceptance of human beings, from those who are ready to admit that God completely accepts us no matter what we do, or want to do, or fail to do.

4. Everyone thinks he knows about sin. Even people who are outside Christ know, or think they know, what sin is. Sin is what they'll have to quit doing in order to get right with God. We've all heard people say this: 'I can't become a Christian yet. I'm not ready to give up my card playing, my booze and women, my shady business practices,' or whatever. Sin, they think, is what you trade in for salvation, as soon as they have the will power to do so. Sin, they assume, is what you repent of in order to make things right between you and God.

5. Amazingly, there are even Christians who encourage this pagan idea of sin, insisting that people swear off one thing or another as a condition of getting admitted to the Church. But Christians need to fight the belief that this idea of sin contains, that the problem of the human race is that we want to be bad. Human beings are not sinful because they want to be bad. As though this is how the Fall took place: Adam, in the days before fig leaf fashions, sees Eve and says 'I want to be bad! Let's do evil! Let's go wild!' But of course this is false. The problem of the human race, the problem of sin, is what the Word of God says it is, not what human fantasy wants to imagine it is. Adam and Eve wanted to be good, they wanted to be like God, knowing good and evil. The essence of sin is this desire we have to be good.

6. Think of it; to be like God, to be God-like! To be a divine being, complete and good in oneself, independent and self-sufficient. To be the source of one's own life and one's own goodness. To have the power to tell what's good and what's evil. The power to see to it that what's right is done and what is not right is not done. To have the power to shape reality as one knows it should be shaped. To have the power to lay down the law, and see to it that others toe the line, doing what I know is best.

We don't understand what sin is, and what it means for us to be sinners, unless we focus on the fact that it all begins in our desire to take God's place, to become supremely good and wonderful and powerful and righteous, instead of trusting God to be God. Fitz Allison, Episcopal bishop of South Carolina, once said 'Most of us do not have a sense of sin, the interior existential evil within us from which all else is hatched. Instead, we have a feeling of guilt derived mostly from comparing our behavior to a moral or ethical code, and our pious gestures of repentance really have little to do with any real personal sense of the nature of sin. When we confess that we are 'sinners', we really mean that we admit to our failure to conform to a behavioral code, particularly of our religious body' ('Forgiveness: Who Needs It?', p. 1)

The nature of sin is that we human beings decide not to trust God to know and do what is good, especially good for us, but to take this upon ourselves. The nature of sin is that human beings decide they need not rely on God for life and righteousness, but close themselves off from him and try to become god-like in their own right. When we take God's view of sin, rather than the standard human one, our thought and talk about it will be radically altered. The gospel liberates us to tell the truth about sin, which is that the sinner wants to be good and powerful, like his idea of a god.

7. Our sinful desire to be virtuous and powerful takes many forms. One of the most important is the desire to control. We want to control God, to know the things we have to do to get his approval and be in his good graces, and to find the techniques for getting him to make things go the way we want them to go. Thus sinful man invents religion. Of course the true God cannot be controlled by our religious rituals, prayers and good deeds. So the 'God' religious, sinning human beings try to bring under their control is nothing but an idol. Every 'God' of every religion is a hollow idol, a projected image of man himself. Sinful man tries to control God by becoming God. He ends up being controlled by his own idols.

We want to control other people. Part of our idea of being like God is to be able to determine how other people act. We want to have power over their lives, because part of knowing good and evil is stamping out any competing idea of what is good and evil. Human relationships at every level are infected with the desire to dominate, to manipulate, to use the other person for our own ends, to control the other person so we can feel that we are righteous and in the right. When many people are involved, our sin manifests itself in our institutions, societies, governments. For sinful human beings, politics becomes the array of techniques by which some people dominate others and feel good about it; it's the means for some people to live off the work of others and feel virtuous while doing so. Ultimately our institutions, especially are nations and their governments, come to be our gods, the things we accept as being absolutely good and powerful.

The history of human misery since the Fall is largely the story of human religion and human government. The first murder was the result of a religious dispute. The culmination of man's rebellion against God, portrayed in the Apocalypse, is a religious dictatorship. And God himself is executed for blasphemy and sedition.

8. Man in revolt against God wants to control reality. Human beings want reality to accord with their illusions about their virtue and power, so we tell ourselves that it does. Think how very rare it is for someone to say 'Yes I did that because I wanted to do something bad.' People almost never admit that what they are doing is evil; people have to tell some story that makes them seem righteous in their own eyes. We are intractable self-justifying creatures. 'I'm not hurting other people, I'm just standing up for my rights! I'm not fighting for slavery, I'm fighting for my property rights! I'm not killing an unborn child, I'm exercising my freedom to choose what happens in my own body.' Even the madman who climbs up in the tower and shoots dozens of innocent people feels that he is in the right, that the 'system' has done him wrong and that 'they' have it coming. When people do what's wrong they tell themselves what they're doing is right. Ever since the day Adam tried to pin the blame on Eve, and she blamed the snake, human beings have been endlessly evasive, experts at ignoring reality in favor of self-deception that makes us feel justified.

Because we want to feel secure in ourselves we tend to avoid looking reality in the face. We often prefer to stay closed up within ourselves, living in a subjective world of fantasies rather than taking the risks involved in living in open fellowship with other human beings. Rather than facing the truth about ourselves and our desire to be like gods, knowing good and evil, we trivialize sin, inventing rules for us to follow and 'sinners' to break. We create the illusion that sin is the desire to do bad things, have bad attitudes, and think bad thoughts, evading the awful reality and depth of human sin, which lives precisely in our passion to be right and righteous. It is in our good works that we are most Godless. Sin is at its strongest exactly where we feel most sure of being right.

8. Wanting to be like God is to want what is impossible. The 'Father of Lies' promised Eve something that cannot be. All human efforts to achieve a sense of security and righteousness utterly fail. Only self-deception and fantasy can keep up the illusion that they are succeeding. Our revolt against God leads to frustration; taking his place is impossible. This frustration creates anger and despair in the human heart. The end-state of rebellious self-righteousness is self-condemnation and self-hatred. A lot of the overt sinning that goes on in the world is a symptom of despair, the bitter realization of our failure to be like God, of our inability to masterfully order reality according to our ideas of good and evil. Our reaction to the deep unsatisfied needs that only the real God could possibly satisfy is to try to satisfy them in bizarre, destructive ways. Much of the patently self-destructive and other-destructive things that we do are the result of our giving up, distracting ourselves from our failure to carry off the revolt against God. The existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre summed this up when, pointing out man's hopeless desire to become God, he described man as a 'useless passion.'

Frustration doesn't just lead to despair. It leads to anger and hatred. Carried to its logical conclusion, the decision to deny God and take his place for oneself is the decision to destroy him. The moment Eve accepted the proposition 'You will be like God, knowing good and evil' in her heart Christ was implicitly nailed to the cross. The Puritan Jonathan Edwards wrote a famous sermon called 'Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God' but I think he got it wrong. To understand the human condition, to understand the true nature of sin, we must say 'God in the Hands of Angry Sinners.' Sin implies not only our death; it implies God's murder. And the murder begun in Eden is completed at Calvary. Only when we say and think this do we comprehend what sin really is. And it's only when we know the God who becomes the 'God in the Hands of Angry Sinners' that the gospel of Jesus Christ breaks through our sinful, religious fantasies about God and ourselves and frees us from the power of sin.

9. Man, wanting equality with God, desires to be like God, knowing good and evil and lording it over his fellow man. But God graciously does the opposite, refusing to be the thing man in his sin strives to become. God refuses the temptation to be a self-sufficient, self-satisfied divine being. The great, amazing, heartbreaking fact is God's response to man's rebellion. He doesn't respond with indignant wrath at human ingratitude and stupidity. He immediately seeks man out and starts to help him, even while letting him have his own way, and become separated from God. God's response to our desire to destroy him and take his place is not to defend his place. God will have his way in the end, but not by overpowering or destroying the sinner. Man will have his way first. Thus starts the long road that ends with God in Christ murdered by angry sinners, offended at his challenge to their power and piety.

God will have his way in the end. He will have his personal, passionate, covenant relationship with the people he has called into being. At all costs. He will break down every power and every structure that destroys those whom he loves. God will defeat even our desire for self-sufficient godhood and forgive us for it. But he will not forgive us in a cavalier, whimsical, destructive way. He heals and forgives us only after letting our way of rebellion reach its logical conclusion.

It is as though God says to sinful man 'Have it your way...for now, but I will not forsake you in the end, and even before then I will not leave you to your own devices. From the very worst evils of your having things the way you want them I will bring forth your salvation. I will save you despite yourselves, turning what you do for evil to your good, which is your trusting me.' God makes clothes for Adam and Eve, even though their shame is a product of their new-found self-righteousness, a rejection of their 'merely human' status as physical, sexual creatures. God gives them a law to follow, a law that will preserve and protect man from himself, though he will use it in a vain attempt to achieve righteousness, as though righteousness could be something in oneself rather than one's being related rightly to God. But in the end will come the One who fulfils this law and delivers man from sin, even the sins of legalism and moralism. The people of God demand a king, and a government like that of their neighbors, so God lets them have what they want, despite the fact that in this they will more fully and perniciously manifest their falleness. Yet from this kingship God will finally bring them their savior-king. And finally, he gives them what they want, the chance to execute God as a threat to their religious and political power.

God brings something good out of something evil. Even as we act to intensify our alienation from God, God lets us do so, but he graciously turns our actions' results to his own end, which is our reconciliation to him.

10. The good news, as Luther once put it is this: 'God sent his son into the world...and said to him: 'Be Peter the denier; Paul the persecutor, blasphemer and assaulter; David the adulterer; the sinner who ate the apple in paradise; the thief on the cross.' (LW 26:280, 1535 Lectures on Galatians).

The good news is that God, with us as Jesus, refused to do the very thing that Adam and all his descendents attempted. Adam rejected his relationship of love and trust with God his father by trying to grasp equality with God. Jesus did not count equality with God as a thing to be grasped, but took the form of a servant. God became a servant to save men who tried to become gods. Rejecting the Devil's temptations of power and glory, Jesus chose instead to trust in his Father's word. What Jesus refused, and all the rest of us have accepted, in one form or another, is epitomized in the legalism of the Pharisees and the law and power of the Roman state. What Jesus rejected, and all the rest of us have tried to get, is a goodness that is one's own, rather than a goodness given us by God. Coming to us as he did, Jesus demonstrated that his commitment to us is more tenacious than our sinful self-righteousness, self-satisfaction, and self-contained independence; that his desire for us to belong to him is stronger than our desire to be as gods. This is the invading gospel that breaks the power of sin.

11. The good news is that Jesus Christ is not for those who want to be good, respectable people. He is for those of us who are sick and tired of trying to be good. He offers himself to us as we repent of our desire to be as God, knowing good and evil. There are plenty of empty words about sin thrown around and about what to do about it. But there is exactly one solution to the problem of sin: trust God. The essence of sin is our distrust of God, our refusal to let him, rather than us, be God. So the solution to sin must be the opposite: trust God. Most of us one way or another feel and act as though there is some other solution, like stop sinning, or want to stop sinning, or trying to stop, or wanting to try to stop, or trying to want to try to stop doing whatever it is we've noticed as bad behavior. Or, amazingly, we tell one another that the thing to do is to resist temptation! But as someone once said, I can resist anything except temptation! These strategies are not ways to defeat the power of sin in our lives; they are exemplifications of its power, manifestations of the belief that we can do something to make ourselves right in God's eyes. Should we then not care about the profound tendencies within us toward destructive, evil ways of thinking, feeling, and acting? No: we need to trust God. Here, I think, is where the preachers who preach against sin let us down. They tell us to trust God, as though this were something we could do, if we just tried a little harder. But what do we do to trust God? What can any human being, born in sin and shaped in iniquity, do to trust God?

Trusting God is very hard, not because it is hard in and of itself. In a way, there's nothing to it; it's what we're made for. Trusting God is very hard just because it's not hard enough for self-righteous, distrustful fallen humans like you and me. We crave something else to do to convince ourselves we're good enough in our own eyes, and in God's. We want to be like God, knowing, and in control of, good and evil. It's not so much that trusting God is difficult; it's just that the truth about God seems so strange to us, and it's so easy to ignore.

When the truth seems odd, and it's easy to ignore and easy to forget, what we have to do is obvious. We sinners need to say it and hear it. We need to tell it to one another, again and again. And we need to hear it from one another, over and over. Don't tell me to stop sinning! Tell me that God has utterly defeated the power of sin over me. Let me hear the good news, the good news that stays news, because I am always more or less desperate to hear it and be changed by it. The gospel alone has the power to break through the illusions about sin that sin creates. So hear that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. Hear that we have, as a free gift, the righteousness of Jesus Christ. Listen and hear that there is nothing you can do to merit God's favor, because you already have it. Hear and believe that God would do anything for us, even put himself into the hands of angry sinners.

Donald H. Wacome The King's College Chapel 20 March 1990

Restoring Family Values

Plato reportedly said, “One ought to marry at all costs for if it proves to be a happy relationship one will experience bliss and heavenly delight. If it proves to be an unhappy relationship, one may then become a philosopher, and experience the joys of the mind.” From Plato’s point of view, I’ve beaten the system. Not only have I been able to experience the joys of philosophy, joys I have helped many of you experience too, I have also experienced the “bliss and heavenly delight” that comes from a long and happy marriage, even one blessed not with children but only a couple infamous cats. Compared to that, even the joys of the mind pale. In family life we are graced with what the old Anglican prayer book calls “mutual society, help and comfort.”

Who can be against the family? Generations of accumulated human wisdom and sheer common sense speak for it. Your parents, siblings, children at times drive you crazy yet home remains a wellspring of enduring happiness, safety and acceptance, as Robert Frost said, the place where they have to let you in. Making a good marriage and a loving home is a major and worthy goal in almost everyone’s life. The multiply divorced don’t often give up on the thing; they just keep trying, hoping that this time it will last. Even those who have had horrendous experiences growing up in dysfunctional families almost always want to start their own. It’s hard to imagine anything more widely agreed on than that the family is a good thing.

Yet, as we know, the family has come upon hard times. Things are a mess: high rates of divorce, amounting to serial polygamy in some parts of the country, broken homes, child abuse, domestic violence, children growing up without fathers, many children born unwanted or born to women not ready to care for them, many pregnancies aborted, parents more concerned about their own wants than their children’s’ needs…Trouble in the family as a social institution has predictably bad effects on society at large: poverty, crime and misery. The present unhappy state and uncertain future of the family should be a cause of concern for everyone.

In a way it is no surprise that, beginning about twenty years ago, this became something many Christians felt called to do something about. Thus were born organizations like Focus on the Family, The Family Policy Research Council, The Moral Majority, Promise Keepers, and many other groups dedicated, directly or indirectly, to promoting what became known as “family values.” Whatever their success in reversing the trends in society at large, this movement has had a significant impact on the Christian community. Taking a stand on behalf of “family values” has come to occupy center stage on the agendas of thousands of Christian churches, and for millions of individual Christians being on the right side of “family values” issues has become a crucial aspect of the active expression of their faith. At the same time, the scope of family values has broadened to include a whole cluster of interconnected beliefs and attitudes, some only remotely connected to the core issues of the breakdown of the traditional American family. Opposition to abortion, to single parent families, to equality for homosexuals, to cloning, fetal tissue and stem cell research, euthanasia, and even to the teaching of Big Bang cosmology or evolutionary biology, as well as resistance to changes in the traditional, subordinate role of women… these have come to characterize a large number of Christians. Indeed, these have for many, both Christians and non-Christians, become identified as the most important things that Christians believe, surely the most important things that conservative, fundamentalist or evangelical Christians believe. Intentionally or not, we Christians often present ourselves to the world first and foremost as bearing the message of family values.

So, what should we make of this movement? There are various ways to approach it. We could, with world enough and time, ponder each of the issues and stances on them that make up the package of family values so dear to so many of our brothers and sisters in Christ. Each in its own right is a complicated moral, political and social issue; each deserves sustained analysis and sober, careful judgment. About each we can ask: what makes sense in light of the Gospel? My own view is that on some of these matters the defenders of family values are clearly right, while on others they are drastically mistaken. But my concern now is not with the particular beliefs and attitudes they espouse, but with the underlying assumption that the defense of the traditional family is something it makes sense for Christians take up as their cause. Let me share some grounds for being skeptical about that assumption.

First, there’s Jesus. He’s important. Yet I have a hard time seeing Jesus as being an enthusiastic supporter of family values. As we read the Gospels, it’s abundantly clear that Jesus says and does a lot of things that undermined the traditional family of his day. In the lectionary text from Matthew 4, that many of you heard in church yesterday, Jesus calls James and his brother John who leave their father Zebedee in the fishing boat and take off with Jesus; this was for first century Jews an outrageous sign of disrespect and disregard for their family. In another passage we hear Jesus advising a young man who wants to become his disciple not to go home to serve, care for and ultimately bury his father – a supreme moral obligation -- but instead to “let the dead bury the dead.” Another time he tells a rich young man that he should sell all he has and give the proceeds not, as tradition dictates, to his family, but to the poor. Then there’s what Jesus said about divorce: today some readers fix on this to find a Jesus coming out in defense of family values, but that tears his words out of their context. To men for whom traditional family values include the husband’s absolute right to treat his wife as his sexual property and to divorce her at will, Jesus says that if they do that they are adulterers. In saying this, Jesus is declaring the wife the equal of her husband in the marriage relation and attacking their family values at the root. For them the essence of the family is its being a hierarchy with fathers and husbands over women and children. Note the disciples’ indignant reaction as recorded in Matthew 19: “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry!” On another occasion, facing an angry crowd about to stone a woman caught committing adultery, Jesus says “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” effectively removing his society’s principal way of imposing sanctions on those who threaten the integrity of the family. This Jesus asks, “Who is my mother and my brothers?” His model of the human being who can enter the kingdom of God is not the patriarch of the family, steeped in the Law and rich in good deeds; to enter the kingdom of God one most become as a little child. He turns the family value system upside down. Beyond Jesus’ words consider what he does: he goes around the countryside with a group of persons out of place in society, disreputable, disconnected from their proper roles as sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, husband and wives. And what he doesn’t do: discharge his most basic obligation to augment the wealth and honor of his own extended family by taking a wife and producing children of his own. Almost everything about Jesus is, in his first century context, anti-family. Back then anyone devoted to family values would have seen Jesus as a menace.

There is a possible response to this: Jesus shows at best indifference, and probably hostility, to the family of his day because, as ancient and traditional as it was, and God-given as it seemed to them, it was not in fact what God intends the family to be. But today followers of Jesus should take up the family values cause because now what is for us the traditional family – an institution very different from what the family was in Jesus’ day – is close to what God intends. I wouldn’t entirely discount the idea that the modern nuclear family is better for the individual human beings that God loves than the hierarchical, patriarchal family that Jesus treated with disrespect, though I think that’s a long way from seeing our present day institution as being fully approved by God.

But even if somehow we knew the way of life defended by today’s advocates of family values was decisively best for human beings, needing not to be criticized and changed at all but only defended as what God intends, I’d still be pretty skeptical about the family values movement.

One of the biggest influences on me over the years has been the French Reformed thinker Jacques Ellul. In one of his many remarkable books called The Subversion of Christianity, Ellul argues that times in history when society is in moral decline, wickedness runs unchecked, and chaos is everywhere, the Christian faith is most at risk. For it is precisely those times that Christians are most tempted to offer the world something else, something other than the good news of God’s grace in Jesus. Times of decadence and moral disorder cry out for us to do something to get people to behave themselves. When we see people’s lives disintegrating all around us because they’re not living the way God intends human beings to live, it is terrifically tempting to exchange the gospel for some other message that seems more important, more relevant, more efficacious, surely safer than announcing that God loves people unconditionally. Tell them that and who knows how bad they’ll get! Few of us at any time are comfortable telling people that God loves and accepts them just as they are, that salvation is not a matter of being good, that human goodness and badness are simply irrelevant to our being accepted by God. When people are behaving in destructive, foolish, dangerous, and plain wicked ways it’s even harder to proclaim the good news. Instead, we are ready to abandon the gospel in favor of something that makes more sense, to give in to the natural, powerful inclination to re-invent the Christian faith as one more religion of social control and appeasing God through good works. History shows that we are always, and especially in ages of moral disarray, likely to give up on the foolishness of God in favor of the wisdom of man, and to set ourselves up in God's name as guardians of good morals, of respectability and decency. The Church of the scandalous good news becomes the scolding guardian of morality and indeed of all things conservative and conventional. Doing something useful about sin seems more urgent than trusting in the power of the God who died a crucified felon to save sinners.

My take on the family values movement is that it might be just that kind of well-intentioned rejection of the gospel in favor of moralism. Strong families, sexual self control, personal responsibility, unselfish care for children…these are all good things but, like all good things, they can take the place of the one thing necessary, the one word we are utterly bound in love and gratitude to speak: the good news that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.

What I’ve said so far might sound pretty negative, but I want to end with something positive. The earliest followers of Jesus formed a community that saw itself as in important ways replacing the families of the ancient world. They ate meals together and held property in common, both in that time signs of being family. They called one another “brother” and “sister” and, like Jesus, they came to know God not only as Creator and Ruler of the universe, but as Father. A vision of the Church as a family is one I think we need to recapture. We have come to have a very different idea: the idea of the Church as a club. Consider the difference: to belong to a club, you have to follow the rules, you have to pay your dues, you have to be worthy of acceptance. Being a member requires having the right credentials. A club draws a line and carefully decides who’s a member and who isn’t. Let me tell you two stories that show us thinking of the Church as a club: several years ago in New York I knew an extremely thoughtful, inquisitive student; he was intellectually faithful, asking a lot of hard questions about his faith. One semester Richard started to attend a certain church. In conversation he happened to say to someone there that he did not understand the Trinity. This got back to the consistory; they discussed his failure to understand the Trinity and sent a representative to inform him that this was O.K. for now, but if he didn’t understand the Trinity in, say, six weeks, he would no longer be welcome at that church. To be a member there you had to understand the Trinity. It was no surprise that Richard did not bother waiting the six weeks but parted ways with that church immediately. That’s – I hope – an extreme case. But it illustrates the very common idea that the church is a kind of club for those who believe the right things, in the right way, for the right reasons.

My second story is really a summary of discussions I’ve had several times in different places, including here at Northwestern. It starts with me asking someone how his church would respond if a gay person showed up and wanted to join. He says that would be fine so long as the gay guy was celibate; “we hate the sin but love the sinner.” I say, no, I’m talking about a gay guy who lives with another gay guy in some sort of ongoing, committed relationship. Oh, he says, then he wouldn’t be allowed to join our church. Why not? I ask. Because that person is sinning; homosexual actions are sins. So I say, I see, your church doesn’t allow any sinners among its members… No, he says; that’s not it. We are all sinners. But if he were living like that it would show that he’s sinning but not acknowledging what he’s doing as sin. That’s what would keep him out. So I say: So at your church sin is allowed but there’s no disagreement allowed about what is and what isn’t sinful? Well, no, it’s not that, he says. At this point I figure I’ve probably annoyed this student enough for one day and change the subject. Whatever you think about the particular question in this example, consider how easy it is to buy the idea that the Church is a kind of club with membership restricted to those who are willing to accept a certain way of life. Those who don’t endorse that standard of behavior are not allowed to join, no matter what they think and feel about Jesus.

Contrast a club with a family. Being a member of a family has nothing to do with your credentials. It’s not about having the right beliefs or acting the way you ought to act. Membership does not depend on having your dues paid up, or following the rules. How you treat other members, as well as how you treat yourself, might be pretty important to the other members, but that has nothing to do with whether or not you’re a member of the family. It’s a matter of birth. Or it’s a matter of adoption. Even if in the extreme they disown you, that’s just a legal thing; nothing changes the fact that you are a child of that family. That’s how I think it ought to be with our Church. To me, nothing else, especially not the club idea, makes sense in light of the good news of Jesus. The family value I’d like to see restored is the idea of the Church as a family. God’s family; he adopts you into it, gives you new birth into it with no more attention to your worthiness than your parents paid when you were born into their family. It’s human nature always to be looking for a reason to exclude someone. It’s one of the main ways we assure ourselves that we’re doing OK; we’re on the inside, not like those outsiders, those people who don’t have the right beliefs, who don’t have the right way of life. That motivation is always with us: we are, after all, sinners: we want to justify ourselves rather than trusting in God’s way of justifying us. But to be the Church of Jesus demands that we be ready to let anyone in, just because they are for some reason drawn to hear about Jesus, no matter what they believe, no matter their way of life. A Church like that would probably look different from many of our churches. The unwashed, the unwanted, the morally unacceptable, the suspect, the confused, the doubters, the outright skeptics…who knows who would fill the pews? We’d be putting up with people we might not like very much, people very different from us. It would not be a group of people who believe, think and act the same way. Its center would be loyalty to the gospel of God's no-strings-attached love, not being right and in the right. There would be big disagreements about big things with nothing but a shared, flying-in-the-face of-reason-and-common-sense kind of love to hold everyone together. It would be as wonderful and crazy as your family, maybe even as mine. That’s the family value I wish captivated the hearts and minds of Christians today.

Amen.

Donald Wacome

Christ Chapel

Northwestern College

28 January 2002

The theme given to chapel speakers this semester is “I Was Just Wondering…”

I was just wondering, what if things had been different?

Once there was a Dutch boy. He was nervous about going out on his first date. So he asks his friend van Hook for advice: "What does one talk about to win the affections of a Dutch girl?" Van Hook says "I'll tell you a secret. Dutch girls love three topics of conversation: food, family, and philosophy. That's all you need to remember. To ask about a girl's taste in food makes her feel important. To ask about her family shows that your intentions are honorable. And to discuss philosophy with her shows that you respect her intelligence." The Dutch boy was pleased: "Food, family, philosophy. Three f's; that's easy to remember!"

At last the day comes. He meets the girl and blurts out "Do you like noodles?"

"Why, no," says the startled girl.

"Do you have a brother?" "No."

The Dutch boy hesitates just a moment, but then asks: "Well, if you had a brother, would he like noodles?"

Besides falling short of scintillating date conversation, the Dutch boy's third question is a bit odd. It's a question that doesn't seem to be about anything. The Dutch girl never had a brother, doesn't have one now, and she never will. (I know because I invented her.) There's no brother to like or to dislike noodles.

Asking this kind of question, a question of the "What if things had been different?" variety, seems the stuff of jokes, or of fictional fun. As a boy I was fascinated by an article in Life magazine that aimed to answer the question "What if the South had won the Civil War?" It's the early 1960s and Cuba is a state of the Confederacy and Alaska, never purchased by a victorious Federal government, remains a Russian possession. Reasonable speculation, but who knows what would have happened, if things had gone differently, as they well might have, at Gettysburg? A mainstay of this sort of speculative fiction is the story that purports to answer the question "What if the Nazis had won World War Two?" The scenarios, portraying no actual past, present or future, can be plausibly scary: the German physicists cooperate with the Nazi regime, Einstein's letter to Roosevelt is lost in the mail, Hitler has the atomic bomb by 1944 and he uses his V2 rockets to deliver it: London and Washington, not Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are reduced to radioactive rubble. It's 1997 and a Nazi puppet regime rules in the old United States. I've read books and seen movies based on such "What if things had been different?" premises. The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick, is probably the best, though I hear that Newt Gingrich has co-authored a novel on this theme (though it may soon be revealed he didn't write it, but accidentally put his name to it without reading it!)

This sort of thing may be entertaining to those of a particular cast of mind, probably the same people who, like me, think my noodle joke is howlingly funny. But it may seem folly to start taking these "What if things had been different?" questions seriously. Shouldn't we restrict our questions to ones that are about something, a bout what actually happened in the past, about what's really going on now, or about what might really happen in the future? To inquire into the food preferences of non-existent siblings sounds like one of those questions philosophers contrive to confuse themselves and anyone else they can trap into listening, like such old standbys as "Can God make a stone bigger than he can lift?" "Do you know that you're not dreaming right now?" "Will your answer to this question be 'No.'? Like these, questions about what would have happened if things had been different might be good for a laugh, but they're not always fun. They can be downright ghoulish. An infamous example comes from the late Middle Ages. It appeared in the context of a theological problem: what happens to unbaptized infants when they die? One side said that God, being just, doesn't condemn to hell babies that never had the chance to sin. But the other side argued that God, being all-knowing, knows what these babies would have done if they had lived. They said God knows of each of the babies he sends to hell that it would have sinned if it had lived long enough to do so. The baby would have sinned if things had been different, so God is just in condemning it. Maybe the nicest thing we can say about that debate is that the Medieval monks, having no (official) babies of their own, entered into it with a degree of enthusiasm that belied a certain lack of pastoral sensitivity. Infant damnation probably isn't a particularly wholesome matter for prolonged speculation.

Even if we weren't inclined to dismiss these "What if things had been different?" questions as silly, it wouldn't be obvious where to look for answers to them. Ordinary questions, ones about what actually happened in the past: "Who poured water on the outside door to the LRC Thursday night?"; about what's actually happening now: "Who's back in Heemstra Hall, sleeping through chapel?", or about what will really happen in the future" "When will it start snowing?" are ones where we generally have a pretty good idea of what would count in favor of, or against, an answer. But where could we possibly look to find out about what would be, if things were different? Where do you look when you're wondering about things that are by definition different from anything that ever happened, is happening, or ever will happen?

As a matter of fact, there is a way to get at answers to these questions. The exotic logical apparatus, something called 'possible worlds semantics,' was discovered by a rabbi's 15-year old son from Omaha, probably the only bona fide child prodigy in the history of philosophy. It's one of the most useful and beautiful items in the toolbox of late 20th-century philosophy but, wonderful as it is, I do not propose to annoy you by trying to explain it, or even by exhibiting the neat philosophical tricks you can do with it. Instead, I'll just say a few things on behalf of the wondering paying attention to such matters makes possible. The practical significance of this kind of wondering is worth dwelling on, even if we ignore the technical manual that tells us how to navigate through the space of possible worlds.

Asking some of these "What if..." questions invites an ontological dizziness, a momentary vision of the radical contingency of human life. Many of us have had the thought: what if I had had different parents? We can imagine ourselves being raised by persons other than our parents. At times in the throes of adolescence you may have wished for that. But could you really have had different parents? If your mother and your father hadn't combined their genes the way they did the moment you were conceived, you would not exist. If things had been different in that way 20 (or however many) years ago things would be different today: you would not be here. You wouldn't be somewhere else, the child of a different pair of parents. You simply wouldn't exist. What if your parents had never met? What if your mother had married someone else? How would you be different? You wouldn't be different, you just wouldn't be. Possibly, your parents were childhood neighbors, sweethearts from the age of six whose eventual marriage was a sure thing. But much more likely is that you mother and father met one another, fell in love, and got married only as the result of a long, tenuous series of events, any one of which could have gone differently. If any of them had, they'd never have produced you. There are innumerable facts like this: if such and such a woman living in Amsterdam in 1765 had selected the blue, rather than the yellow, bonnet that fine Sunday morning, she wouldn't have caught so and so's eye as it wandered during the singing of the Psalm; he'd wouldn't have looked for her after the service, they'd never have met, married and given birth to your great great grandfather - and there'd have been no you. On such chains of chance your future existence once hung.

Even get your parents amorously together the day you were conceived, and your future existence still hangs by a thread. If things had gone just slightly differently, there'd have been no conception, or a sibling, one now in actual fact safely, eternally consigned to the realm of mere possibility, would have started to exist that day instead of you. For if any other of your father's millions of spermatozoa had won the race to fertilize that ovum, there'd be no you today. And which of them won that day was exquisitely sensitive to many highly chancy factors, among others the precise timing of the deed. My mother (who's in the habit of telling me things I'd as soon not have known) once confided to me that I was conceived one afternoon while a baseball game, the Red Sox vs. Cleveland, played on the radio. I imagine that if things had gone just a bit differently in Fenway Park that afternoon, say, if Ted Williams had swung at that high inside pitch that in fact he almost did swing at, both he and I would have struck out. My temporarily distracted father might have gone on to have some other son - or daughter. But I'd have struck out in a game where winners belong to that tiny minority of the possible people that get actually to exist.

We needn't think about it for long before we think of lots of things on which our existence depended, and many of them are things that could easily have been different. We tend implicitly to think of ourselves as necessary beings, as the inevitable outcome toward which past events tended. There's something unsettling in realizing how wildly unlikely, how totally unnecessary, each one of us is. The notion that the world was from all time primed to bring you and me into being is an unfounded, though comforting, illusion. If the tape of the past were rewound and played again, chances are none of us would reappear. The fact that any of us are here, really existing, signifies a vast improbability. This is, I think, a deep and genuine source of gratitude and wonder.

No doubt, to dwell excessively on these "what ifs..." will make you crazy. This is true even when we move from contemplating the cosmic contingencies of our being at all to reflecting on the past events of our daily lives. Wondering "what if things had been different...?" is one of the main ways past possibility persists in the present. It's the medium of regret: "if only I'd studied harder... if only I'd taken van Hook instead....if only I'd asked her out.." If I had done something else then, things would be different now. There's no changing the past, so to pay too much attention to what would have been had I been better or smarter isn't healthy. But never to indulge in this kind of wondering is to neglect a main source of the wisdom of which we are capable. We learn from our mistakes because we see the present as a product, not of inscrutable fate, but of our own choices and actions, which could have been different.

Reflecting on these matters surely makes us wonder about God. Isn't he in control? Don't things happen in accord with his plan? One of the great things about Reformed theology is its robust awareness of God as sovereign over his creation. God is entirely able to make happen whatever he wants to make happen, and so far as his keeping promises, and fulfilling his intentions goes, he is completely trustworthy. This sovereignty penetrates even to the stubborn human heart, where he creates faith there that could not otherwise come about. In this sense, God is in control. Yet the idea of God being in control is sometimes pushed too far, so it turns into the idea of God having a plan, according to which whatever happens happens just because it's part of his plan. God is portrayed not simply as faithfully and effectively acting in human history to bring about his goals, but as having already decided what will happen before it happens. This, I believe, substitutes ideas borrowed from pagan philosophy, determinism, or even fatalism, for our confession of God's steadfast power, wisdom and character. Those ideas are foreign to a world view grounded in the biblical revelation. It portrays God's creation as 'closed', not as having a future that is in any way open. To the contrary, it looks as though God chose to make a world in which there's real chance and real freedom. A world of characters with whom he lovingly interacts. Characters by whose actions the future is shaped. The God whose human face we see in Jesus is a God who makes himself vulnerable, who takes chances, who acts within a real world, full of real persons, distinct from, but capable of interacting with their Creator.

Wonder about things having been different can enhance our understanding of our Creator and Savior. This kind of wondering can help us know who God is. In a way, we already know what God is like. If someone asks: "What is God really like?" the right answer is the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The true God is not remote and inscrutable. He comes close by and makes himself known. As outrageous as this claim is, it's what we, who put our trust in Jesus, are entitled to say. On the other hand, when it comes to persons, there's no coming to the end of knowing them. To know someone is to know more than the facts about his past, present and future. It requires knowing what he would do in situations that are entirely hypothetical. This, especially, is what's involved in knowing a person's character, in knowing him as good and trustworthy. Imagine a student wondering: "What if I had offered Professor Schaefer a round-trip, first class ticket to Florida in exchange for an A in Biblical Faith?" She quickly realizes that it wouldn't have worked: even if the past had been different, and she'd offered the bribe, he wouldn't have accepted it. If she really has to wonder for long that reveals she doesn't really know Professor Schaefer; she's ignorant of his fixed good character. She doesn't know him. To really know him she'd have to know a lot about what he would do, if things were different than the way they actually are. Wondering about what someone would do, given possible situations that will never really come about, is a powerful way to explore a person's character.

We know what God is like by way of the Bible, the record of his actions through history on behalf of human beings. That written record inspires and disciplines a kind of wonder that may help us better grasp his character. What would God have done, if things had gone differently? The Bible tells us about the Fall of Humankind. Whatever we make of the precise nature of the highly stylized story in Genesis, Scripture teaches there that the human condition of estrangement from God isn't the way things always were and it's not the way things have to be. Something went wrong that did not have to go wrong. For me, this is a cause for wonder: What if Eve had said no, rather than yes, when tempted to forsake her trustworthy God for the empty promise of becoming like a god in her own right? Karl Barth, the great Reformed theologian, once speculated that if the Fall had not taken place, Christ would still have become incarnate. I have no way of definitively knowing if Barth was right about this, but it resonates with my sense of the character and intentions of the God we meet in the Bible. The Creator calls this world into being from nothingness because he purposes that there be personal creatures living in a covenant relation of love and trust with him. Jesus Christ, God with us, God made man and humanity taken up into God, is the meaning, point and purpose of this Creation. Was God being made flesh only a response to human rebellion? Is the incarnate God ultimately a solution to a problem we caused, not part of God's deepest, original intentions? Or has God always intended to be one of us, one way or another, no matter what it might take, no matter what the cost? I wonder.

The ghost of how things would have been if humans had acted differently haunts Holy Scripture. Speaking for God the Old Testament prophets seem to take it for granted that he is vividly aware that things not only could have gone differently, but that if the people of Israel had acted differently, if they had turned from injustice and idolatry, then things would have gone differently. If they had turned from trusting in power, money and invented gods, and put their trust in God they would not have gone into exile. The land of Israel would not have been lost. Israel would have become a kingdom of priests, drawing all the nations to knowledge of the living God. Or so it seems. Possibly, the long drawn-out disaster that is the history of ancient Israel was all somehow inevitable, the program of folly and rebellion merely playing itself out. Maybe repentance was never really possible. But I wonder: couldn't things have been different?

Finally, consider Jesus in the gospels: even there it's worth wondering "What if things had been different?" Was there a moment of opportunity, now irrevocably lost? For a while, as Jesus goes about healing and teaching it seems that the people of Israel are hearing him and at last opening themselves to their God. Remember those great, enthusiastic crowds that followed him wherever he went, the triumphant Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem. But after that, things fall apart. Jesus seems to realize that that he won't be accepted, and he sets himself to force the issue, pushing his opponents through the deadly endgame that moves toward the cross. The biblical witness tells us that Jesus came to die, but might things have happened differently, or was it already too late? There's biblical precedent for seemingly inevitable verdicts of judgment being reversed. I wonder whether even if the most likely thing was for the people to do what they did, to finally reject Jesus and let the political and religious authorities execute him for blasphemy and sedition, because such is the disposition of the fallen human heart, there still might have been a chance. Maybe things could have played out differently, with first Israel, and then the whole world, joyfully accepting their King, their incarnate God and Savior. Some say the sacrificial death of God was from the beginning a necessity; that what happened is what had to happen. Maybe the ultimate act of reconciliation, counteracting the ultimate act of rejection, was inevitable from Eden on. I don't know. Maybe things would have been different, if different choices had been made.

Charles Williams wrote: "There ought to be a great curiosity concerning divine things." God's mighty acts on our behalf, our creation and our salvation, are fitting objects of wonder because they are wonderful, matters of awe. We are called to wonder about them. Asking about what would have happened, if things had been different, is one of the ways for us to answer that call. Amen.

The God of the Bible and the God of the Philosophers

Chapel address on Philosophy and the Christian Faith

1. The Christian faith is not a theory of the universe. It is not a set of beliefs about the world. Nor is it a theory about the nature and actions of God. And it isn't even a theory about Jesus of Nazareth. Instead it is trusting the living God. It is knowing the God who reveals himself by acting in the world to know and love human beings. He is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the passionate, tenacious maker and keeper of covenant with people like you and me. The Christian faith is trusting the true and living God; it's not a system of beliefs, not a set of right answers with which we can rest secure. Because a person is a Christian she may know things about the world she otherwise would not know; she may think about the universe in ways she would not otherwise have thought. What she knows is true in virtue of her being a Christian may, and ought to, have interesting, important and surprising implications about the way the world is. Believing the right things can make it harder or easier to trust God, but trusting God is not a matter of having the correct theories about God.

We're always tempted to try to avoid the risks and uncertainties of encountering the living God by building a safe place for him, a strong and beautiful house of theory which explains the universe and makes sense of our lives. Of course we give him his rightful place at its center. And we are careful to defend this theological, philosophical structure against the infidels. But have we let the living God speak for himself? Or have we shut him up, preferring to hear our answers to our questions about him rather than his questions to us? St. Paul was talking sense when we said 'see to it that no one makes a prey of you by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ' (Colossians 2:8).

'See to it that no one makes a prey of you by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition...;' how are we to take St. Paul's advice? Is ignorance the best defense? Since we have the Truth, why should we even bother with philosophical theories of the universe? Why not stick with the simple faith? The fact that I am here, and the fact that Christian liberal arts colleges exist, shows that some of us think that philosophy is something Christians need to pay attention to. The same apostle who warned us about philosophy and vain deceit said it is our task to 'destroy arguments and every proud obstacle to the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.' (10 Corinthians 2.5). We are not to ignore philosophical thought; our job is to take it captive for Jesus Christ. The mere fact that there are philosophical things to know doesn't mean it's a good idea for us to know about them. There are plenty of things we're better off not knowing. Some things might be bad for us to know: how to dispatch your roommate with an ordinary clothes hanger, how to conjure up a demon; other things are just trivial, not worth the time it takes to know them: how many things are there in New York state that start with the letter 'Q', or who killed Laura Palmer. Bringing every thought into captivity to Christ surely doesn't mean we should waste our time thinking about this stuff.

2. One of the most important ways in which, it seems to me, we have been deceived by philosophical theories is in the way we think about God. It is clear that the Christian conception of God down through the centuries has been deeply influenced by Greek philosophy. In fact I suspect that an important part of the reason the Christian churches have had a hard time letting their hearts and minds be open to the unconditional good news about God's love for us in Jesus Christ, and have instead become moralistic and authoritarian, is because they have acquired a mistaken idea of God: a depersonalized, dehumanized God, one that cannot be easily related to the true and living God of the Scriptures. Christendom has often worshipped not the God of the Bible, but the God of the philosophers.

Think about the God of the Bible and how different he is from the God of the orthodox theological tradition. The God of the Bible walks in the garden in the cool of the evening and looks for Adam and Eve; he asks questions; he does things and waits to see what happens; he acts and waits to see how human beings react; he says he is going to do one thing and then he changes his mind; he gets angry and then his anger abates; he makes threats and then relents; he changes; he is moved to joy and anger by the doings of human beings; he is emotional; he wrestles with Jacob; he portrays himself as a father, a mother, a warrior. He reveals himself in the history of Israel as a real person, not cool, passionless, remote, but concrete and complex like human beings, only more so. He won't leave us alone; he insists on being with us. He argues, he bargains, he implores, he woos, he suffers. C. S. Lewis once wrote that 'real things are sharp and knobbly and complicated and different' (Miracles, p. 172). The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the living God of the Bible, is, of all things, a real thing. Sometimes people don't like to do God the honor of thinking he is a real thing; apparently it seems somehow impious, as though treating God as though he were real is 'putting him in a box.' But God is capable of speaking for himself. He has revealed what he is like in the history of Israel, in his word, and above all on the cross. The God of the Bible is alive. He is steadfast in his love but he is unpredictable in his actions. Yet we can know something of his nature because he shares himself with us.

The 'God' of ancient philosophy, the philosophical invention of Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus, is the 'God' that Christian theology adopted. The God of the ancient philosophers is an abstract object; he has all the reality of the square root of 16. This so-called God is not alive. He is beyond time and change, not the Ancient of Days but the Eternal One. The God of the philosophers is passionless, incapable of being moved to hot anger and tears by the human condition. He is serene and untroubled. The God of the philosophers knows everything about the future; he can't interact with human beings as free creatures on whom the as yet open future in part depends. The God of the philosophers is simple; there is no depth or complexity in his personality. As an abstract object, he is captured in the nets of our philosophical theories. He has his prominent place in our neat and rationally explicable scheme of things. We know what he's like and he is basically predictable. The God of the philosophers, the God of much of the theological tradition, is a creature of the human mind and, as such, is ultimately in our control. To bow down to something made by the human mind is no less idolatry than to bow down to something made by human hands. And it's a more dangerous, because a less obvious, form of idolatry.

Philosophical conceptions of what God has to be like, no matter what the Bible says, also infect our thinking about God incarnate. The tendency has almost always been to imagine Jesus as something other than fully human, as not subject to the same constraints and infirmities as the rest of us. We have portrayed him as all-knowing and infallible, as though he were not really a male human being born in first-century Palestine but merely a god inhabiting a human body. The philosophically-based theology that mesmerized Christianity for centuries has no place for the Jesus who lived a life of faith and trust with his father, having nothing to go on but the witness of the Spirit and his Father's written Word. The theological tradition, following Plato, has taught that Jesus did not really die. He did not face extinction; he merely became temporarily disembodied. His spiritual soul, the immaterial entity he really is, went right on living. The tradition does not conceive the incarnation of God himself into a sinful world as an outrageous and desperately risky act of free covenant love. It rejects the notion of God becoming one of of us, becoming nothing but a bunch of molecules like you and me. It cannot accommodate the God who makes himself vulnerable and falls into the hands of those who do not want him to be himself but who want to control him and who, failing that, to kill him.

The tradition has tried to refine and dehumanize the living God to make him philosophically acceptable. How can these philosophical theories about God have been reconciled with the witness of the Bible? Innumerable passages in the biblical witness to the living God and his unexpected doings are designated as 'anthropomorphic'; we are told that God doesn't really change his mind, he doesn't really undergo change, he isn't really effected by what we do, he really does always know what human beings are going to do next. All this, we are informed, are just the Bible's unphilosophical way of speaking. This is very intimidating. Anyone who thinks Holy Scripture might mean what it says looks pretty unsophisticated, as naive as the person who imagines God the Father as being an old man with a long white beard sitting on a throne. And of course not everything the Bible says about God is literally true. There are lots of metaphorical truths about God. His eyes don't literally run to and fro on the Earth (2 Chronicles 16.9) There is of course room for faithful disagreement as to precisely which of the things the Scriptures tell us about God should be taken literally and which metaphorically. The crucial question is whether, as our faith seeks understanding, we let Plato, or Aristotle, or Whitehead, or Wittgenstein, or anyone tell us what God is like, rather than letting God speak for himself.

3. As often happens, effective criticism of what goes wrong in philosophy comes from inside philosophy. Today many philosophers are realizing that their ideas about God do not come from God but from non-Christian philosophers, and that faithfulness to God requires that we turn back to God's own account of what he is like. In contemporary philosophy there are increasingly many reasons to believe that the ideas of God in the theological tradition don't make much sense on their own and, more important, that they can't be made to fit the living God we meet in the Bible. The reality of the authority of the Bible is that it is always there to criticize the thought and action of the Christian Church. The word of the living God is powerful and ultimately eludes Christians' best efforts to control it and make the God of whom it speaks palatable. The authoritative word of God judges and criticizes our religious and philosophical talk about him. By means of it God can graciously liberate us from the grip of the philosophies that have so distorted our thinking about him. My conviction is that it is the calling of late 20th-century philosophy to turn our theories back to God, to listen to him speak in the Scriptures rather than imposing our conceptions of what he has to be like on him. It is exciting because there is hope that things are really going in that direction. But what matters is not whether any particular philosopher or school of philosophers is right or wrong on any given issue. It is that the voice of Scripture is again, after being silenced for centuries, being taken seriously. My hope is that our philosophical theories will, by God's grace, be conformed to his word. For what finally matters is not what philosophy thinks of God, but what God thinks of philosophy. Once again the tools of philosophy seem to be available to deliver us from the God of the philosophers and give us back to the God of the Scriptures.

Human beings in their fallen condition naturally want to know God as he is in himself. But this is not the way God has chosen be known. We know God only as he acts on our behalf in our space and time. And what we see are not merely appearances of him, not symbols for him, for beyond those we see the true nature of the living God, God himself showing us who he is, walking, talking, sweating, bleeding, alive, dead, and alive again in our tricky and dangerous world. The God we know in the Bible is not obvious. He transcends the powers of our minds and imaginations. He is a stumbling block to anyone who thinks God should conform to the concepts and categories of our philosophies. Knowing him cannot be reduced to adopting a theory about him. Having the right beliefs about him cannot take the place of trusting him. At the end of the day what distinguishes the saved from the lost is not that the saved believe the true, and the unsaved false, theories about him. The ultimate question is whether the living God is graciously present in our lives or whether we have shut him out. One way to shut him out is to replace him with the unreal, impersonal God of the Greek philosophers and of far too many Christian theologians. One way toward saying yes to his presence in our lives is to rethink our ideas about him, critically testing them against the biblical witness to see if we have let the true and living God speak for himself.

Donald H. Wacome, Ph.D. 5 December 1990

The Sermon on the Mount and the Third Use of the Law

I urge you, who are to be teachers of others, to learn this doctrine of

the true and proper use of the law carefully, for after a time it will be

obscured again and will be completely wiped out! 1

Today I want to talk about the Sermon on the Mount as it relates to the question of the third use of the law. By 'law' I mean something quite general: demands for performance, whether internal or external, natural or conventional, that constrain human behavior by making rewards or punishments depend on what we do or fail to do. So 'Thou shalt not kill', 'Speed limit 55', 'I'd better get a high-paying job or people won't respect me', and 'If I don't do better work, I won't value myself' all count as manifestations of law.

Since the Reformation, theologians have identified different functions (uses) of law. First, there is the 'civil' use of the law. This is law in its most obvious sense: rules made by institutions, mainly, but not only, governments, to restrain human evil and keep order. The first use of the law restrains fallen men, preserving life and keeping the peace. Divinely-sanctioned offices held by government officials, parents, and others (e.g., teachers), make the continuation of worthwhile human life possible, and make the proclamation of the gospel possible too. To the extent that governments and other institutions use their power in this way we are to respect them as God's instruments, manifesting his gracious concern and love for foolhardy, self-destructive fallen human beings.

Then there is the second function of the law, what has been variously called its 'spiritual', 'theological', or 'pedagogical' use. Here the focus is on the moral law, especially as it was made the center of the religious law of Judaism. The law in its second use serves to refute our self-righteousness, and specious self-sufficiency, making salient our sinfulness and hopelessness before a just and holy God. The law in its second use drives us to despair, presenting standards which we cannot satisfy. In this way the law is a taskmaster, driving us toward Christ as our only hope.

So far this is relatively uncontroversial. But is there a third use of the law? The law in its third use would be a law for Christians as such. While the second use of the law is to bring us to the realization of our need for justification, the law in its third use would function as a guide or aid in the process of sanctification for those who have been justified by Christ, the object of their faith. On a possible third use of the law the Reformers diverge. Luther makes no explicit reference to a third use for the law; whether he implicitly accepts a role for the law in the lives of the justified is a matter of controversy. For Calvin, there is a definite third use of the law; indeed this is in his opinion its principal use. The Anabaptists went further, arguing that Jesus is a 'new Moses' who gives us a new law. Full obedience to it, in the form of a life of radical discipleship, is the mark of the genuine Christian. On the other hand, so-called antinomians held that the life of faith is one of total freedom, exempt from all law.

There is a great deal at stake here so far as our understanding of our lives as Christians is concerned. Whether, and if so in what way and to what extent one's spiritual journey into the Christian faith is a matter of obeying rules, is of decisive importance in our daily lives.

If there is a third use of the law, where are we to find its content? Presumably not by paying close attention to the statutes of the secular state, nor by examining the ceremonial law of the Old Testament. Neither is directly relevant to the growth of the person Christ has justified. Those who promote a third function of the law direct us toward the moral conscience, the Decalogue, and other biblical teachings, especially those of the Apostles and Jesus himself. The Sermon on the Mount is a central text for those who see the Christian life constrained by law, since it records many sayings of Jesus that are directed toward his disciples and which are imperative in form. Indeed, in the eyes of many, especially non-Christians, the Sermon on the Mount represents the essential summation of Christian ethics, a way of life that makes sense in light of the Gospel. In this talk I will briefly outline an analysis of the Sermon on the Mount that pays special attention to what Jesus is showing us about the place of law in Christian existence. I suspect that the way to understand the Sermon on the Mount is in essence descriptive, telling us how things are, rather than prescriptive, telling us what to do. In explicating the Sermon this way I hope to say something about its continuing relevance for us today.

Because the overall context for the Sermon on the Mount is Jesus going about Galilee 'preaching the gospel of the kingdom' (4.23), it is reasonable to take the Sermon as somehow explicating the content of that good news. The 'beatitudes' (5.3 - 5.12) are an announcement that certain individuals are blessed, i.e., that they have been, or will be, brought into a right relationship with God, becoming part of the Kingdom of heaven. Those who are 'poor in spirit', 'those who know their need of God' (NEB) are the ones who are blessed. People who have given up on their own righteousness, on their own power, on their own wealth, and who, having no other hope, rely on God's anointed, are the ones who will find blessedness, who will find consolation, who will know God. The blessed are those who, having abandoned the power of being right, and are now totally dependent on God's goodness, can be peacemakers and forgivers. The passage refers back to Isaiah 61, where it is God who takes the initiative on behalf of his people. Because here we have Matthew identifying Jesus as God's anointed in whom God takes that initiative, any reading of the beatitudes which makes them the entrance requirements for entry into the kingdom of God, that is, any reading on which they are ethical demands on anyone who hopes to be restored to a relationship with the living God, is impossible. The opening passage of the Sermon on the Mount congratulates and encourages those who see Jesus for who he is. It does not impose a new law upon them; it describes their new condition to them.

In the next verses (5.13 - 5. 16) Matthew portrays Jesus as taking what appears to be a more imperative stance toward those who are the light and salt of the world. Those who have heard the good news of God's freely-given blessing can forget it, going back to the bad news of self-reliance and righteousness by our own efforts. To do this makes no sense; it's like using salt that’s no longer salty, like putting a light under a basket. Jesus' appeal here is not to things we must do in order to gain God's favor. He is pointing out what, given the facts of the Gospel which he has just delineated, it is reasonable for someone to do.3 In this way the descriptive has a prescriptive aspect. Jesus does not impose a new law of good works and evangelism on the poor of spirit, telling them what they must do if they are to stay in God's good graces. Jesus here continues to explicate the gospel; he does not retreat from it.That this is what Jesus is up to here explains the transition to the next passage, where we find one of the most theologically important texts in the New Testament: 'Do not think I came to abolish the law or the prophets; I have not come to abolish but to fulfill' (5.17). Jesus emphatically asserts that every part of the law will be fulfilled. This makes sense only against the background of a possible misunderstanding of the relation of the law and the good news. Jesus knows that his preaching could be understood as if he were saying: 'It doesn't really matter to God what we do; the law really never meant anything to him.' To believe this is to believe that Jesus, and the work he is doing, is unnecessary and unimportant. To believe that is to abandon the good news. To combat this Jesus spells out something of what it would mean to really satisfy the requirements of the law. He shows why he is necessary. Any attempt to capture what is required to please God in a prescriptive formula fails.

For example, Jesus says: "You have heard that it was said to those of old, 'You shall not commit adultery' but I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart" (5.27-28). Should we assume, as some do, that Jesus is showing us that the law must be internalized, involving not only external actions but our inner intentions and motives as well, and that if, unlike Jimmy Carter, we avoid 'lusting in hearts' we have kept this part of the law? On this account Jesus purges the law of its ceremonial inessentials, properly interpreting it in its inner moral meaning. I think this would be a radical mishearing of Jesus' words. His point, I take it, is that it is impossible for us to really keep the law, no matter how it is improved and refined.

Any attempt to say 'I have done this, so I have made myself acceptable to God' is to try to relate to God in a way he will not be related to. It is to try to control God, coming toward him with our works of righteousness, expecting him to accept us on the basis of our strength and goodness, rather than depending entirely on him for our very lives. Despite what Satan promised in Eden, we cannot approach the true God as little gods, equipped with our little knowledge of good and evil, refusing to let him be our God. Relating to him that way, every obeyed law we bring him he will reject, saying it's not good enough. Consider the case of the rich young ruler (in ch 19). When he claims to have obeyed the law fully, Jesus simply adds a new and intolerable requirement. He thereby demonstrates that legalism is recursively self-defeating. The perennial human effort to be as gods, knowing good and evil, and thus to relate to God as our equal, is doomed to despair and defeat. Here Jesus puts the law to its pedagogical use, backing us into a corner and thereby drawing us to himself, the one who fulfills the law because he has a relationship of complete faith and love with his Father. In Jesus the possibility of a covenant relationship between humans and God is finally made actual. We participate in that relationship by faith in Jesus, not by obedience to law.

This lesson is properly directed to Jesus' disciples as well as to the uncommitted crowds. The pedagogical use of the law applies to Christians as well as those who do not yet trust in Christ. Our self-righteousness is insidious and tenacious. We need to be reminded that we relate to God on the basis of nothing but faith. And we need to hear what this means. In fact, we often need to hear precisely this sort of thing just because, knowing the truth of the gospel, we start thinking our theological rightness makes us better than those who don't know it. The utter impossibility of our pleasing God by being right and doing right needs to be vividly presented to us, as Jesus does in the Sermon. This creates in us what Luther called an 'evangelical despair,' the humbling but joyful realization that God accepts us unconditionally, by grace alone. The law in its pedagogical use is at work, in Calvin's words: 'dismissing the stupid opinion of [our] own strength....by it [we] come to realize [we] stand and are upheld by God's hand alone; that, naked and empty-handed, [we] flee to his mercy, repose entirely in it, hide deep within it, and seize upon it alone for righteousness and merit. For God's mercy is revealed in Christ...in Christ his face shines, full of grace and gentleness, even upon us poor and unworthy sinners.'

Shall we say then that although there is a pedagogical function of the law relevant to Christians and everyone else, there is no third use of the law, no law directed to Christians alone? The short answer is to say Yes: either the work of Jesus Christ is sufficient or it isn't. Jesus did not go to the cross to fulfill the law and then, having risen, introduce a new law for you and I to fulfill. When Jesus says, e.g., that if we do not forgive those who wrong us, then God will not forgive us (6.15) he does not mean that our being accepted and forgiven by our father is, after all, conditional, not decisively brought about by what Jesus did at the cross. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus does not unwrap the good news to show us the bad news within. The gospel is good news all the way through, despite the fact that we will surely go on being judgmental, unforgiving, lusting in our hearts, feeding our children stones, and in general, being stinkers. Indeed, we will even go on trying to live by law, and failing, try to fake it, angling to present ourselves to others as doing better than we are. We must have a righteousness greater than that of anyone who tries to live by the law; we must have - and we can have - the righteousness of Christ. That is the gospel that is always of relevance to us, no matter how often and how long ago we've heard it.

In his Sermon on the Mount Jesus does tell us what to do. He tells us to not be foolish, like the man who built his house on the sand - his own righteousness - but to build on Christ's righteousness (7.24 - 28). It is foolish to try to live by the law, because there is no possibility of success. Only absolute perfection is good enough for God, and we can't produce it. But we can have it for the asking (7.7). It is crazy not to take what he offers. We cannot by our own devices produce the fruit of good works for which God made us. But the fruit of righteousness comes naturally, given the root of the gospel (7.17-18). It is ridiculous to think it can come about in any other way. Jesus concludes this great gospel message, his Sermon on the Mount, with an appeal to the facts, and to what makes sense in light of them.

Holy Scripture contains many imperatives directed toward those who have accepted Christ. Many Christians take them as a set of rules we are supposed to follow, and thus as constituting a third use of the law. I submit that we must not understand them as conditions we are being called upon to satisfy: Jesus Christ has satisfied every condition; instead, they are descriptions of what God is like, what he has done, and indications of what is reasonable given God's goodness and saving action on our behalf. They point us toward the natural outcome of our hearing the good news. These indications are not there to induce fear and anxiety in us, pushing us back into the realm of performance, where we have no choices but despair or hypocrisy. On the contrary, they direct our wandering attention back to the facts of what our gracious Lord has done for us, and what he will certainly do in us.

1. Luther, 1535 Lectures on Galatians (LW, 26, p. 312)

2. When institutions go beyond this, striving to realize the good for human beings, they usurp God's place and become demonic powers.

3. Note that to 'become worthless' here is a translation of a Greek term meaning to become insipid, foolish. To know the gospel, yet to act as though it isn't true, is silly.

4. Institutes of the Christian Religion, (2.7.8)

Donald H. Wacome 2 November 1989

On the Northwestern College Theological Identity

Some thoughts on a colleague’s “A Call for Clarity and Vision”

1. My esteemed colleague suspects that "an aggregate number" or "a significant number" of NWC faculty are neither Reformed nor Evangelical. He contends that we should do "careful research" whether this is the case, though he leaves it unspecified what "an aggregate number" might be…two ? many? a majority? everyone but him? He also contends that if this is the case we should do something to rectify the situation, presumably to change current hiring and tenure policies or, failing that, at least to be honest about this departure from what he regards as the college's tradition.

2. I find the claim that anything less than the overwhelming majority of NWC faculty are Reformed or Evangelical incredible, as well as divisive. Almost every faculty member whose beliefs I know anything about not only believes all nine of the defining assertions, but takes them of the first importance in their lives, teaching and scholarship. It is fair to say that a significant number of faculty would not interpret some of the concepts that appear in my colleague’s definition of “Reformed” (sovereign, electing, covenanting) in the Reformed way, but surely most of these colleagues are paradigmatically evangelicals.

3. Drawing on the Faculty Handbook, he examines the college's policy on the hiring of faculty who are not Reformed. He points out that faculty from other theological traditions are expected to be supportive of and sympathetic to the mission of the college. His interpretation of this doesn't seem plausible to me. He appears to read the Handbook as requiring that "a faculty member of this college should be in broad approval of Reformed theology," where in the context "approval of" means "believing." But that leaves us with the policy that we can hire non-Reformed persons just so long as they believe in Reformed theology. That seems far from a reasonable construal. I suggest that it means something like thinking that a Christian liberal arts college in the Reformed tradition is a worthy idea and being willing and able to work cooperatively with colleagues who are Reformed even if one's own theological views are different.

4. My colleague’s call for honesty and clarity in how Northwestern describes itself is laudable. In his automotive mereological analogy, he points out that it would be a mistake to call a car a Honda Accord when it has a hood from a Jeep, a Humvee roof, a Chevy bumper, and so on. Rightly so. But the analogy can mislead. Whether the car has the right combination of parts to count as a Honda Accord doesn’t matter when it comes to its worth as a car; what matters is whether it has the right combination of parts for doing whatever it is supposed to do. The vehicle he imagines might be the best vehicle for getting us where we want to go. If it is, it would be a mistake to reject it because it doesn’t belong in an established category.

5. The Board of Trustees recently articulated an alternative policy on some of the matters my colleague addresses, stating that “it is important to maintain a significant Reformed presence within the faculty, ideally across the disciplines” and that “it is possible, even desirable, to hire and welcome some persons who are not Reformed - both ‘ecumenical’ and ‘evangelical’ Christians.” Perhaps to some this looks like a “failure to formulate, articulate and apply a coherent and clear theological identity [that] will do immeasurable harm to the life of this academic institution,” but there is nothing incoherent in trying to be the sort of college the Board endorses, not if this is what best serves the college's mission. The Trustee’s vision for Northwestern is more complex and difficult than either the theological uniformity that is the norm at most Christian colleges or some sort of vague “generic” Christianity. The policy poses a number of definitional questions, e.g., what counts as a significant Reformed presence? The gloss some of us received on the policy defined “Reformed” in terms of “accepting and following” the Reformed confessions, but how is this to be understood? Not, I hope, in so narrow a way as to by stipulation excise from the ranks of the Reformed many who regard themselves as such. And what is an "ecumenical" Christian, anyway? Given the prevailing evangelical ethos of the college are we really prepared to hire serious Christians who are not evangelicals? There are plenty of questions, but overall the Board’s statement is an excellent articulation that is, I believe, true to the history of the college and one we can rally around today. Reformed theology best creates a framework within which Christians from a wide range of backgrounds can work together to profess Jesus Christ in an academic setting; this is the wisdom of the policy spelled out by the Trustees.

6. When I was hired there was a prevalent account of what the Handbook means when it speaks of support for and sympathy with the Reformed mission of the college. NWC was happy to hire persons whose theological views are not Reformed so long as they possessed a “Reformed attitude” toward Christian higher education and could, because of that, be sympathetic to and supportive of the college's mission. In practice, this criteriology typically was applied negatively: those who regarded Christian higher education as indoctrination, or as apologetics, or who saw a profound sacred/secular distinction that renders areas of study off limits for Christians, or who conceived the relation of faith to learning in moralistic terms, or who endorsed a fundamentalist separatism, or who adopted a narrow anti-cultural form of Christian faith, or who saw rational inquiry as inimical to piety, or who accepted a compartmentalization that rendered it impossible for their faith and their disciplinary learning mutually to interact would not be a good fit for NWC irrespective of the character of their Christian faith on other dimensions. Such views were regarded as at odds with the college’s mission conceived in terms of the robust integrative and transformative vision of God as both Redeemer and Creator that flows from the Calvinist tradition. Indeed, in theory, an individual lacking Reformed theological convictions even on the great soteriological truths might be a better candidate than one who formally endorses every Reformed doctrine while lacking what could be called a “Reformed sensibility” toward Christian higher education. This implicit hiring policy made sense to me in virtue of its clear connection to the mission of the college. I think it still makes sense, and the vision reiterated by the Trustees exemplifies an ongoing commitment to it. The Board’s statement envisions a college that has a unique, coherent and theologically principled identity.

Northwestern College Chapel 19 November 1992

What does it mean to be Reformed?

But how does it help you now that you believe all this? (Heidelberg Catechism, Q. 59)

1. What does it mean to be Reformed? Especially now, many hundreds of years after the Reformation, how much of it is still alive and important for our real lives as Christians? Of what personal relevance are those old theological theories and arguments? Or, as Question 59 of the Heidelberg Catechism asks, “But how does it help you now that you believe all this?” Today I want to focus our thoughts and imaginations on some of the ideas that were all but lost when Luther, Calvin and company rediscovered them, because these are, in the nature of things, always at risk of being forgotten again, and because they are, I am convinced, of great help to us. In fact, it seems to me that without the crucial insights of the Reformation all we’re left with are some bits and pieces of the Christian religion, not a faith in the living God.

2. Think first about the way the Reformers described the human condition, about their rediscovery of the awful depth and insidious power of sin. People always assume they know what sin is. Even people who aren’t Christians, or religious in any way, think they know all about sin. Sin is what you’ll have to quit doing in order to get right with God. God wants us to do certain things that we don’t want to do, and he wants us not to do certain things that we want to do. Someone says: “I’m not ready to become a Christian yet. I’m not ready to stop cheating on exams, gossiping about my roommate; I’m not ready to give up my shady business practices, sex, drugs, and rock and roll” or whatever. Sin, people think, is what you repent of to make things right between you and God. According to this point of view, the human problem, the problem of sin, is that we want to be bad. As though this is how the Fall took place: Adam -- this is before fig leaves came into fashion -- sees Eve and says “I want to be bad! Let’s do evil! Let’s go wild!” But of course this is wrong. The real problem of the human race, our fallenness, is what the Word of God says it is. Adam and Eve wanted to be good, they wanted to be like God, discerning and deciding between good and evil. The reality of sin is this desire we have to be good, because it is always, everywhere and in everyone a desire to have our own goodness, not to depend on God for our goodness. We are sinners because rather than trusting God to know us and to declare us his good creatures, we want to justify ourselves. We chose not to rely on God to know and do what is good, especially good for us, but to take this upon ourselves, killing God in our hearts and taking his place.

Human beings want reality to accord with their illusions about their power and goodness, so we tell ourselves that it does. Think how very rare it is for someone to say “Yes I did that because I wanted to do something bad.” People almost never admit that what they are doing is evil; people have to tell some story that makes them seem o.k. in their own eyes. We are hopelessly self-justifying creatures. “I’m not hurting other people, I’m just standing up for myself!” “I’m not fighting for slavery, I’m fighting for my property rights!” Even the psychopath who climbs up in the tower and shoots dozens of innocent people feels that he is in the right, that the ‘system’ has done him wrong and that ‘they’ have it coming. When people do what’s wrong they tell themselves what they’re doing is right. Ever since the day Adam tried to pin the blame on Eve, and she blamed the snake, we have been endlessly evasive, experts at ignoring reality in favor of a self-deception that makes us feel in the right.

Rather than facing the truth about ourselves and our desire to be like gods, knowing good and evil, we trivialize sin, inventing rules for good people like us to follow and bad people like them to break. We create the illusion that sin is the desire to do bad things, have bad attitudes, and think bad thoughts, evading the awful reality and depth of human sin, which lives precisely in our passion to be right and righteous. Obviously enough, humans do do bad and even terrible things, but these actions are ultimately the symptoms of our underlying desperate condition. It is in our good works that we are most Godless. Sin is at its strongest and most treacherous precisely where we feel most sure of being right. The Reformation brought to light the intensity of the rebellion of the human heart that years of moralizing religious tradition had hidden from sight. The news about us is much worse than we feared.

3. But the good news that burst forth again in the Reformation was even better than we could have imagined. The good news is that Jesus Christ is not for those who want to be good, respectable people. He is for those of us who are sick and tired of trying to be good. He offers himself to us as we repent of our desire to be as God, knowing good and evil, as we reject our desire to be right, and in the right on our own. There are plenty of empty words about sin thrown around and about what to do about it. But there is exactly one solution to the problem of sin: trust God. The essence of sin is our distrust of God, our refusal to let him, rather than us, be God. So the cure for sin must be the opposite: trust God. Most of us one way or another feel and act as though there is some other solution, like stop sinning, or want to stop sinning, or try to stop, or want to try to stop, or try to want to try to stop doing whatever it is we’ve noticed as our bad behavior. This is a maze with no way out. This will make you crazy. These strategies are not ways to defeat the power of sin in our lives; they exemplify its power, manifesting the conviction that we must be able to do something to make ourselves right in God’s eyes.

But the good news, the gospel of Jesus Christ, is that even though there is absolutely nothing you can do to put yourself into God's good graces, nonetheless he accepts you as you are. There is no condition you can satisfy that will make you o.k. in his sight, but he accepts you unconditionally. The good news still echoing from the Reformation is that God loves you and accepts you no strings attached. He doesn't say: "Be good in this way and I'll give you what it takes to make me like you." He doesn't say: "Do the best you can with what you've got and I'll help you along the rest of the way." This would be a cruel tease for anyone, like you or me, who is really completely helpless!

Instead, God says, "even though you are not at all good I am going to count you as good. In fact, from now on I'm going to see the goodness, righteousness, and faithfulness of Jesus Christ when I look at you! From now on, you may see yourself as bad, weak, and worthless, but I'm declaring that a lie! The goodness of Jesus now counts as yours!" God has spoken, he has had his good word so now there is literally nothing we can do to make God like us any more, or any less, than he does right now!

When we are joined to Jesus by faith, God sees us in him: in God’s sight, we are covered with the innocence and perfect holiness of Jesus (Q. 36 in the Heidelberg Catechism). As the Reformers were especially insistent to point out, our being justified in this way is not a reward for believing the right things, a prize for having faith. On the contrary, faith itself is a free gift from God, not a work of the mind and heart by which we earn his favor. One later Reformed theologian said: the point of the Reformed confession is not so much that we’re justified by faith and not by works, as it is that it is God and not us that brings about our justification.

How do we react to this? Of course, we say that's too good to be true! And what that means is we're not willing to trust God for our goodness; we think that can't be the way God is; there’s got to be a catch, something we have to do to satisfy him. People with big investments in being good, right and religious, not only outside Christianity but even within it, have always and will always try to reject and suppress this good news. "What would happen if people really started to believe this? What if people, especially the young people, who are bad enough anyway, hear that God loves them no matter what they do! You can bet they'll go wild and make a mess of their own lives and ours too!" Trusting God on this, trusting him for a righteousness imputed to us, rather than insisting on a righteousness that is there within us where we can keep an eye on it, is the hardest thing of all for fallen humans who want to be like gods, knowing and controlling our own righteousness, hell-bent on putting ourselves in the right. Sometimes we’re afraid that the grace of God will be cheap. But it’s worse than that: it’s free!

The Reformers' outrageous claims about God's outrageous grace don't stand alone. What becomes especially clear in the Reformed branches of the Christian family is that this gospel of unconditional grace is not spoken into a vacuum. We don't have to fear that human beings will go bananas if they find out God accepts them just as they are, and figure out that their rotten behavior will not separate them from the love of God. For the very same God who died for us, is the God who created us. Creation and Gospel are not separated or at odds. The same gracious God is at work for us in creation and on the cross. He made us for this very purpose: to live trusting him for our righteousness and for everything else. In hearing the gospel of his no strings attached acceptance of us we are trusting our Creator. It is, in the deepest sense, natural for us to respond in love and gratitude to the God who accepts us without condition. As the Reformers were fond of saying: the fruit of good works grows naturally out of the root of the gospel! There’s often not much point in telling ourselves and one another what we ought to be doing. Despite the great popularity of this it almost never works. But we are always in need of hearing God’s efficacious, transforming word about what he is doing for us.

When we confess the good news that God declares us good with the goodness of Jesus we cannot forget who is doing this declaring. God is not like us. Our tendency is to love and accept other people conditionally. We might care very much what they do and what they become; if they foul up badly enough, if they cause themselves and us enough pain and trouble we'll dump them, cutting off our love. Or maybe we do accept them just as they are, without conditions, but only because at bottom we really don't much care what they do, or what they make of themselves. Our love is either conditional or careless. We associate unconditional acceptance with not really caring what someone does.

This is not the way God is. The God who loves us absolutely unconditionally is the very same God who cares passionately what becomes of us. This is not the sentimental acceptance of an indulgent grandfather. The true God is a consuming fire who wills to heal us. He cares about us more than we care for ourselves and he will have his way in the end. The righteousness he has reckoned as ours will become fully ours; he will finally settle for no less. There is nothing mushy in his tender but tenacious love for us. This is no flaky religion of thinking nice thoughts and having plenty of self-esteem. God’s acceptance of us in Christ is no exercise in wishful thinking; it is the exacting promise of the reality he will bring to pass.

3. "But how does it help you now that you believe all this?" Empowered to trust God, we are saved from our religions of condemnation and control, we are rescued from the final despair of giving up on ourselves. We’re no longer caught in the trap of performance and achievement to prove our worth. Instead of the endless futile attempt to be, or to convince ourselves or at least everyone else, that we really do make it, that we’re good enough, we are now enabled to focus our attention on the amazing fact that God has declared us good enough. Gratitude to our Creator and Savior is the only response that makes any sense at all.

For us, in our calling as Christ’s students and scholars, an immediate practical implication of being shaped by the good news of God’s grace is that we begin to become free and confident in our faith. Once we know that our faith in God itself depends on his free and irresistible decision to accept us for the sake of Jesus, being insecure, uptight and defensive about that faith becomes absurd. The goodness of God’s grace is the one secure anchor for all our feeling and thinking. We can trust God with our hearts and minds, with our doubts and questions. Faith can now bravely, creatively, relentlessly seek understanding. We’re free but securely held in God’s grace. We can now aim at becoming the best questioners and challengers of our own most cherished beliefs and values. In a world in which most of us wall ourselves off from people who don’t agree with us, and close our ears to the hard questions and unfamiliar ideas that threaten the beliefs by which we define and justify ourselves, those who are hearing the word of God can express their gratitude by committing themselves to living an intellectual life worthy of the gospel, a model honesty and integrity. In this way the gospel spoken afresh at the time of the Reformation is the foundation of all genuine Christian action, including the work of the Christian liberal arts college, the work to which we are now called.

We have confidence because the work of our salvation is not our work; it is God’s work. In the same way, we can have confidence that what goes on in the world at large is in God’s hands. When we don’t trust God, and instead pursue the illusion of a righteousness of our own making, we’re easily seduced by some program for the moral improvement of the world. But here too the work is not ours but God’s. It is not, finally, our job to try to change the world. It is not primarily our task to save the world, or Western Civilization or America, from the liberals, or the conservatives, or the secular humanists, or the fundamentalists. It is our task to witness to the fact that God has decisively acted to change the world in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The gospel of God’s unconditional love for human beings, fully realized on the cross, is the one great transforming force in human affairs. We can have no ultimate loyalty to anything else, no matter how good and urgent.

Does this mean that we are not to care about what goes on in the world? Here again the Reformed tradition supplies the broader context that helps us make sense of, and authentically live, the good news. Our witness to God’s grace in Jesus is not simply a matter of private, personal faithfulness, nor is it just a matter of telling people what God has done on their behalf. These are of vital importance, but the crucified God is also the Lord Creator, and he claims every square inch, every corner, of his world, inviting us in all our activities to work with him in its transformation into his kingdom. As witnesses, we are invited to be co-workers, not spectators.

4. What does it mean to be Reformed today? I think above all it means not accepting any version of Christianity that forgets the core message of the gospel. It means not making the mistake of thinking we can put the good news of God’s unconditional love for us away safely on the shelf of doctrines we all accept and take for granted. It means to be vividly aware of how easily the word of God can be drowned out by other voices, calling us to try to do the right thing and justify ourselves. To be Reformed is to be hearing, and telling, and acting out the good news that is always transforming us, always undermining our assumptions, usually a bit scary, but forever new and unexpected.

Prayer: Go now in grace and peace, gratefully knowing you are righteous in Christ before God, heirs of eternal life.

Amen.

Only A Symbol?

Several years ago I was taking a class in preparation for confirmation into the Episcopal Church when we entered into the inevitable question as to whether Christ is in some mysterious way really present in the eucharistic elements, of if instead the bread and wine are only symbols. I started to think, and still think, how odd it is to prefix the "symbols" with "only." As though we're thinking "Alas, the Lord isn't really here; it's merely a symbol!" Suppose you're summoned to the telephone: "It's for you; it's Bill Clinton!" but you petulantly respond "So what? He's not really there...He's just on the phone...After all, those tinny sounds out of the phone merely represent the president!" That would be a strange way to see things, but sometimes it's the way we see symbols. How alienated we must be from the realities of this universe if it's easy to say "It's only a symbol, not the thing itself but just something else standing for it."

Iris Murdoch, in her play Above the Gods, has Plato say "one thing can stand for another, that's as deep as what's deepest. People have always known this." Maybe so, but it's easy to forget the import of the fact that we make our home in a semantically deep universe, one in which things don't keep to themselves. Things mean; they point toward what is other than and beyond themselves, thinking of, speaking of, referring to, denoting, exemplifying, representing, symbolizing: one way or another standing in for what is absent and yet, just because of this standing in, present. A world of meanings is a world of vicarious realities.

How it's possible for one thing to mean another is a foundational philosophical problem - some would say it's the philosophical problem. How can ideas (whether they are bits of brain or modes of immaterial substance), or sounds, or marks on paper reach beyond themselves and grasp what's 'out there?' What makes my idea of a tangerine an idea of a tangerine an idea? What makes my idea of a tangerine an idea of a tangerine? Surely, my idea of a tangerine bears no interesting resemblance to the tangerine. How do we represent what is elsewhere, or nowhere? How can there possibly be such a thing as intentionality, subjectivity, consciousness, mind, a self, us? The question of what we are is part of the mystery of meaning. But we're not the whole of it.

There's meaning in the world, but there's a sense in which meanings make it. The world isn't ready-made. It's not a 'given,' pre-packaged world. It is by way of our symbol making and symbol using that we sort things into a world. Without a rich, complex and subtle scheme of interrelated symbols I can make no sense of the simple question "How many things are there in this room?" I need symbols, a frame of concepts, kinds, and categories before I can say what's there. There's no world worth talking about until some things stand in for other things. Worldmaking and symbol making happen together.

The activity of making and using symbols lies near the center of the forms of life that express our humanness. Symbolizing with the world's perceptual materials, artists add to the world, reshape and enrich it. Configurations of stone and steel, paint, motions, sounds, words are complex symbols (often themselves formed of further symbols) that represent what is, or what could be, or even what could not be, to give us insight and enlightenment that draws us deeper into grateful participation in what is. They add to the world's store of meanings, deepening it by adding new layers of representation that supervene upon the levels of meaning already there.

Consider the symbolizing activity that constitutes Christian worship. We symbolically reinact God's mighty acts on our behalf: creation and salvation. By singing, speaking, gesturing, kneeling, standing and sharing the sacraments we link our stories with God's story. We represent God's free, unconditional and unexpected acceptance of us, and our response to him, with our liturgical representations. Without these ways of meaning we would not remember our God and Savior, not as the community that is his body. Symbols make apparent the past, present and future of God's grace.

It is tempting to connect the ways we mean in worship to what we represent there. We recall the weakness and humiliation of Christ on the cross because his being there is the ultimate vicarious reality. There he takes our place, representing us in the place of judgment and abandonment. When he defeated the powers of evil and returned from death it was, again, one man taking the place of all. Because he was there his goodness is counted as ours. Thus, the primary Reformation teaching of 'imputed righteousness:' Jesus Christ standing in for us. One taking the place of all there at the center of all things.

By way of symbols we grasp reality and reality grasps us. So, what should I have said about the Eucharist? Is Jesus Christ really there? It is hard to take seriously the dichotomy between really being there and symbolically being there. Only a misapprehension of the role and reality of symbols forces us to choose between St. Thomas' implausible metaphysics and a Zwinglian "merely a symbol." On reflection being there symbolically looks less like the opposite of really being present and more like a way of being present. A way that reflects the reality of this universe and its Creator's way with it. So I'd answer: "Yes, he is really there: symbolized in the wine and bread."

Christmas Meditation

Angels singing in the night sky. Shepherds and wise men. Carols. Snowy darkness. A thousand points of light....The Christmas story holds a deep and winsome appeal for millions of people who otherwise find the Christian message silly or irrelevant or repugnant. The sense of goodness, blessedness and wonder still breaks through the commercialism to touch those for whom the Crucifixion is just a grotesque historical accident and the Resurrection a gauche fable. No wonder conservative Christians get suspicious at any move toward emphasizing Christmas at the expense of Good Friday and Easter. Important as the Incarnation is as a theological doctrine, any attempt to put it first seems like insidious, sentimental liberalism.

I suspect this uneasiness comes from our sometimes faulty understanding - perhaps more accurately our faulty proclamation - of the good news about Christ's death and resurrection. We have a hard time making these events sound credibly like good news in the way the Christmas story is so clearly good news for everyone. Whether we like it or not, in modern times Christianity has managed to get itself associated with much of the bad news of the world. Instead of being a message (like the Christmas story) most people would hope is true, the Christian message - as heard - has become something people hope isn't true. Christian faith has become identified with respectability, complacency, "middle class morality;" with having all the answers, with smugness, with the desire to condemn and control: with the denial of life. So far as I can see, we can't make sense of what has happened during the last few centuries without appealing to the central fact that the Gospel of Jesus Christ has been co-opted by moralism. But Christmas seems to be the part of the story that has not been completely obscured.

We need to re-integrate the meaning of Christmas with the meaning of the Cross and the Emptied Tomb. "Behold! The virgin will be with child and will bear a son, and they will call his name Immanuel, which means 'God with us'." God himself takes the initiative. His action is unconditional and unexpected. Into the land of the dead comes a small thing, barely noticeable; for a moment just a cluster of cells. Infinitely vulnerable, totally at risk. The original blessed event: the first and only child born thoroughly alive; born not dead in Adam who sought to be his own source of life and thereby rejected life Himself, but born alive, in loving fellowship with the very Source of life. Yet in being born this Lord of Life is now counted among the dead, the lost, the wounded. God fully identifying himself with us in our separation from him, becoming part of it, placing himself under its laws and effects. God reckoning himself as one of us not just later, at the awful cross, but here, from the beginning. Here lie the wonder and attraction of Christmas, but the true message of the Cross is already there.

It's so easy to betray the child Christ, to try to fit his passion into our moral and religious categories; to portray his sacrificial death as placating an angry Deity whose laws we have broken. But here, as with the miracle of the Incarnation, it is God who makes the first move, becoming one of us, with us and for us. The healing he brings wrecked humanity is unconditional. On the cross Christ is reckoned a sinner so that we sinners are reckoned as having his goodness. This is the inestimably valuable idea of salvation by imputed goodness - of justification by faith in Christ's sufficient sacrifice It is as full of wonder as the vision of the child in the Bethlehem stable under the starry night. God accepting us precisely as we are; loving us without condition. No less than God taking infant flesh, here lies the deep mystery of goodness and hope that penetrates the hardest hearts. When this good news is remembered, preached and celebrated, people respond. God's grace breaks through the moralizing; the transforming Gospel is heard again. We become again the Church of the Great Christmas.

And then finally the beginning: the Resurrection. In his life we have life. We who were born dead, not functioning, incapable of friendship with God and God's creation, are made alive. We receive what Jesus always had, what Adam rejected: the covenant tie to the source of life, but now a tie our fear and pride cannot break. Now the deadness in us begins to fall away; now the healing begins. We grow in the experience of God's tender love for us. We no longer belong to the kingdom of death and dread. The gift of the child of Christmas is an everlasting gift to those who dwell in darkness and despair.

One message of love and hope unites Christmas, Good Friday and Easter, always there, ready to break forth as good tidings of great joy which will be for all people.

Bearing One Another’s Burdens

Pauline Anstruther, a character in Charles Williams’ novel Decent Into Hell, since childhood has lived with a terrible, secret, shameful fear. Peter Stanhope is the first person to whom she reveals it, and his response shocks and confuses her: “But, he said, “I don’t quite understand. You have friends; haven’t you asked one of them to carry your fear?” “Carry my fear?... How can anyone carry my fear? Now ashamed, and wishing she hadn’t told him about it, Pauline tries to change the subject, but Stanhope persists: “Will you tell me whether you’ve any notion of what I’m talking about? And if not, will you let me do it for you?” She says politely, “Do it for me?” “It can be done you know…It’s surprisingly simple. And if there’s no one else you care to ask, why not use me? I’m here at your disposal, and we could easily settle it that way. Then you needn’t fear.” “But how can I not be afraid?...It’s hellish nonsense to talk like that …” “It’s no more nonsense than your own story. That isn’t, very well, this isn’t. We all know what fear and trouble are….When you leave here you’ll think to yourself that I’ve taken this particular trouble over instead of you. You’d do as much for me if I needed it or for anyone. And I will give myself to it. I’ll think of what comes to you, and imagine it, and know it, and be afraid of it. And then you see, you won’t….Haven’t you heard it said that we ought to bear one another’s burdens?” “But that means…” she begins, and stops. “I know,” Stanhope says. “It means listening sympathetically, and thinking unselfishly, and so on. Well, I don’t say a word against all that; no doubt it helps. But I think when Christ or St. Paul, or whoever said bear, he meant something much more like carrying a parcel instead of someone else. If you’re still carrying yours, I’m not carrying it for you—however sympathetic I may be.” Pauline says, “And if I could do—whatever it is you mean, would I? Would I push my burden on to anybody else?” Stanhope replies, “You must give your burden up to someone else, and you must carry someone else’s burden…This is a law of the universe, and not to give up your parcel is as much to rebel as not to carry another’s. You’ll find it quite easy if you let yourself do it.”

In another book, commenting on the priests, scribes, and elders who taunted Jesus on the cross, saying, “He saved others; he cannot save himself!” Charles Williams says, “Precisely. An exact definition of Christ’s kingdom.”

Like Pauline Anstruther, I have only the dimmest idea of what Stanhope—and Williams—are talking about. And so I think I must have only the dimmest idea of what St. Paul means when he told the Galatians to bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. But here we are, each burdened in his or her own way with hard choices, failed plans, anger, shame, new and old fears. So I’m thinking it’s a good time to find out. Commanded to give up our burdens and take up another’s—whatever that means—let us pray as St. Francis prayed: Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Amen.

Memorial Service for Henry J. Halvorsen

“What is your only comfort in life and death? That I, with body and soul, am not my own, but belong to my faithful savior, Jesus Christ.” No one will be surprised that I choose these words from the Heidelberg Catechism to celebrate the life, and honor the memory, of Henry Halvorsen. We are here with grief, but without regret. For we share and affirm Henry’s abiding faith in the gracious God who goes with us into suffering, death, and loss. We thank God for a life well lived to the glory of God, the life of a kind, gentle, and generous man. The encouraging father, the patient teacher preparing his Sunday School lessons, teaching—or at least trying to teach—his daughter calculus. The meticulous engineer—every day I take hold of the porch railings he designed and built from scratch, still steady after years of Iowa weather. His quiet pride in his grown children, Ellen, Karen, and David. His exuberant delight in his grandchildren. His unfailing love for ‘mom,’ persisting to the very end, even as all else faded. I ask myself what Henry would say if he could speak to us now. I think he might remind us that through those long years as his memory inexorably failed, he was not forgotten, but known and loved by his Creator and Lord, he who redeems all that is lost. Henry would, I think, assure us that although his powers of body and mind deserted him, he was held secure in the hands of Jesus, who made our mortal flesh his own, and took our weakness upon himself. And I am sure that Henry would insist that against all appearances, and despite the sadness that now surrounds us, the grave is denied the last word, death is defeated, and an unimagined resurrection to new life lies ahead. For Christ is risen! So let us be grateful for the full measure of years we had with Henry, but let us also be confident that we will one day greet our much-loved father, husband, friend with laughter and tears of great joy. May God, who is rich in mercy, sustain in us the hope of everlasting life.

Amen.

A Tribute to Our Esteemed Colleague

Jay Van Hook

on the occasion of his retirement from

Northwestern College

April 1999

How to encapsulate Jay van Hook? How to display for public admiration the essence, van Hook in himself, the ding an sich? It seems appropriate to begin by quoting from an essay in The Banner by Harry Boer entitled "First Tango At Calvin" (an event in which Jay may well have been involved): "When notable men and women retire from professional life they usually fade out of the public eye until the occasion of their death. Then in greater or lesser degree, note is taken of the life they have lived, the achievements that earned them attention, and their effect on society." Happily, van Hook yet lives and indeed exhibits no propensity to fade. We sum him up not post facto but in mid-course, seeking to send him on with a flurry of well-earned praise.

We could of course retrace his philosophical trajectory, examining the formative influences of such philosophical mentors as Harry Jellema, Paul Oskar Kristeller, John Hermann Randall, E. P. Mahoney, Alvin Plantinga and Wamba-dia-Wamba, noting the curious and intricate routes by which his unique intellectual vision evolved, culminating in his own distinctive contribution to the philosophical conversation of humankind. We could praise his readiness to forgo the accoutrements of philosophical conformity, his sensitivity to the prophetic voices on the edges of respectability, to Jacques Ellul, Richard Rorty and Jack Caputo, his readiness always and everywhere to enliven faith with skepticism, dogma with deconstruction. I could recount vignettes from his philosophical career: forcing the 'Reformed epistemologists' to encounter the Great Pumpkin, biting the bullet on my reductio ad absurdums: "Well, I guess cats do have immaterial souls after all!" or making us consider the possibility that it really is turtles all the way down.

We must remark also on the effects of his long excursion into African philosophy, a quest undaunted by the possible non-existence of its prey. Like the African sage philosophers whose wise sayings are treasured by the tribe and passed on down the generations, van Hook's sayings - brief, pungent, enigmatic - no grand metanarrative for him, no system building, no 'ifs and only ifs' - are captured for posterity's edification in The Beacon's 'Campus Quotes.' And again following in the tradition of those African wise men known for making frequent perilous trips to distant locales to bring wisdom back to their villages, van Hook sacrificed who knows how many precious moments with his Intro. students, journeying off to remote and risky places like Ann Arbor and Orlando, a more frequent flyer than even the Owl of Minerva.

But on this occasion we must above all ask where this college would have been over the last quarter century without van Hook among us, doing his philosophical duty, exercising his penchant for telling the truth, especially those truths his peers weren't always disposed to let him get away with saying. We are wont to catalogue him as a liberal - the only faculty member to have a life-size Hilary Clinton in his office, not to mention an autographed photo of the first cat, but beneath that left-leaning veneer lies a true conservative, a man who cares - and fights - for what is worth keeping. Standing up for the liberal arts against the inroads of more worldly pursuits, contending for the depth and dignity of the Reformed tradition against all who would thump Bibles and sing praise songs, and delivering philosophy from its analytic trivializers. Without him we fear we'll drift, lacking our moral ballast.

Florida's comfortable and complacent are already bracing themselves, while here in the home office many of us mentally compose our personal top ten lists of reasons we will miss Jay van Hook. My list would express my gratitude not merely for a colleague who afforded me the opportunity to be the skinniest guy in the philosophy department, but for a colleague who graciously and generously put up with someone whose philosophical, theological, and political ideas he found pretty loony, for a fellow philosophical bachelor who - rumor to the contrary notwithstanding - attended no singles dances but did try each and every special at the Hatchery. Thanks, Jay for being a good friend and colleague. Go, as I know you will, in grace and style.

Don Wacome Professor of Philosophy Northwestern College 27 April 1999