How “new” is teaching about new creation? If you listen to some, it’s a revolutionary idea. How “different” is the final new creation kingdom from what has been classically taught about heaven? Matthew Bates, in Salvation by Allegiance Alone, drills down on this theme of new creation and I would add a footnote to his discussion by noting my own book The Heaven Promise as an attempt both to frame belief in in heaven as belief in a new creation (new heavens, new earth) mode. If one reads on the history of heaven one will discover, quite frankly, that the best thinkers in history did not make heaven simply a place for souls, or simply a place of worship, or even a place of non-recognition — that is, where we will be so enthralled by God that we will not know one another (or care). The best thinkers combined two themes: worship with sociality. So sometimes I think the dramatic claim that new heavens and new earth thinking is totally different is only a claim that it differs from one particular, however popular, stream of heaven thinking.

Bates tackles new creation head on, beginning with a story of his preaching to an unsuspecting small church far more accustomed to soul-to-heaven thinking. He offers this pastoral, wise observation:

I tell this story to illustrate that there are deeply held convictions about heaven as the final reward among Christians—convictions that are not easily modified. Despite a near consensus among academics that the Bible does not teach that heaven as traditionally understood is the final goal of redeemed humanity, traditional convictions about heaven remain very stable in the church because, as a legacy of Western civilization, they are perpetually reinforced by the media and popular culture.

What has changed is holistic redemption:

For if final salvation is not primarily about the individual soul going to heaven, but about embodied transformation as the individual participates alongside others in the holistic restoration of the entire cosmos, then the logic of the allegiance-alone proposal takes on greater coherence. Allegiance to Jesus the king is the basis of citizenship in the new Jerusalem. Moreover allegiance entails an invitation to rule alongside him and is the foundation for transformation into his image.

Which is to say, pew-sitting-Christianity will be in for either a big surprise or an even bigger surprise.

While an important text in Isaiah on new heavens and new earth are behind it all, the fundamental vision for new creation is found in the Book of Revelation 22:12–16. Bates: “So, at the end of the salvation story, we do not find humans in heaven; rather we discover they are city-dwellers, still on earth” (132).

Here is a very critical element in this theology: any view of heaven, esp if it is new creation heaven, must offer meaningful hope to those who face death and tragedy. I find that some who emphasize new creation themes have no words for those who are dying. That’s a disastrous theology of heaven since hope is not only a NT word but the first embodiment of new creation heaven is the resurrected Jesus. You dare not tell people facing death that they need to get their eyes off what happens after death and onto the bigger theme of the renewal of all creation because inherent to the word “renewal” is the undoing of death as the hope of our faith. If you can’t talk to the dying with that hope, find something else to do.

So even though John states in Revelation that the first heaven and earth have “passed away,” the new heaven and new earth is best understood not as a brand-new creation from nothing but as containing elements of the old creation that have been purified and radically recrafted so as to be taken up into the new.

What will it be like? Evil will cease to exist; the place of chaos and death (ocean) will be no more; God will be with us and the great theme of divine-human companionship will be where it is designed. From tabernacle to temple to the incarnation [SMcK: to Paraclete] God will be with us. That is, we don’t go to God so much as God comes to us.

And we will live in the new Jerusalem. We will be home at last, there will be a gathering and advance of culture, and we will see the face of the glorified Lamb.

How different is a new creation heaven from the deep traditions about heaven in the history of Christian thinking?

The answer to the first question is a firm No. Paul not only embraced “slavery/servant” language as a metaphor for the Christian’s relationship to God — who today would say you are “slave” to God to someone released from trafficking? — but Paul simply told slaves to obey their masters and masters to treat their slaves fairly. Anyone who deeply believed in emancipation or who thought slavery was immoral would not say those things and would become sensitive to slavery as a a metaphor. The answer is no.

The second question is also deserving of consideration. In Paul Behaving Badly, Randy Richards and Brandon O’Brien examine this question too. A few observations, beginning with this: Paul is often accused of not getting this one right and that history has shown him wrong.

In modern times, nearly the worst indictment critics can level at a position or movement is to say that it is on “the wrong side of history.” Critics of Paul argue that because he never advocated for abolition or the civil rights of slaves, Paul and the Christian church he founded are on the wrong side of history. 93

Far too often we appeal to pragmatics and Paul’s limitations, but we sometimes do so with the notion that Paul actually penetrated deeper than the did on this question:

To begin with, in Pauls generation the Christian church didn’t have the social clout to end Roman slavery. … What was within their power was to love one another within those social systems with such pure and godly love that it gutted those systems of their power to oppress. … but it amounts to asking why Paul didn’t invent an entirely new economic system for the Roman Empire.

This lets Paul off the hook a little too easily, and this one can at times let us off the hook a little easily:

We have more options available to us today. While we tsk, tsk at Paul for not doing more to improve the plight of slaves with his limited options, we might ask if we ourselves have leveraged the greater resources at our disposal to advocate for the migrant worker, house the refugee or rescue the victims of human trafficking. 94

This is where I would begin on this discussion and in my Philemon commentary coming out this Fall I will do so.

Additionally, this critique ignores the radical new relationships Paul called believers to forge within existing systems.

Paul, they are right, did not begin with a vision for the Roman Empire but with a vision for the church and its fellowship. He called then for a church of siblings — brothers and sisters — that in that context relativized status.

But, I ask you, did he do the following?

Paul clearly planted seeds that flourished into abolition centuries after his death. If the church failed to water and cultivate these seeds, and it did, Paul is not to blame. Paul’s language about slaves seems woefully behind the times. But that’s easy for us to say on this side of history. To those of us who are further along in history, the people behind us will always appear “behind the times.” … When you get to Z, it’s easy to look back at Y and think that Y looks restrictive. But we have to look back historically and remember that Y is what got us from X to Z in the first place. We feel like Paul was behind the times because we have closed the discussion on slavery. That issue is an issue of the past, and Paul’s arguments are a relic of the past.

They return to the metaphor of slavery for us today:

While the world advocates for social ascension, the gospel calls us to follow Christ in downward mobility.

Jason Micheli is the author of Cancer is Funny: Keeping Faith in Stage Serious Chemo. He’s a United Methodist in Alexandria, Va, blogs at www.tamedcynic.org, and hosts the Crackers and Grape Juice Podcast. 

How Resident Aliens Live: Or, the Fitch Option

On Ash Wednesday I suffered my monthly battery of labs and oncological consultation in advance of my day of maintenance chemo. During the consult, after feeling me up for lumps and red flags, my doctor flipped over a baby blue hued box of latex gloves and illustrated the standard deviation of years until relapse for my particular flavor of incurable cancer. I wrote a book called Cancer is Funny but it didn’t feel very funny looking at the bell curve of the time I’ve likely got until I make good on the promise that begins every Lenten season: ‘To dust you shall return.”

Leaving my oncologist’s office, I drove to the hospital to visit a parishioner. He’s about my age with a boy about my boy’s age. He got cancer a bit before I did. He thought he was in the clear and now it doesn’t look like it will end well. The palliative care doctor was speaking with him when I stepped through the clear, sliding ICU door. After the doctor left our first bits of conversation were interrupted by a social worker bringing with her dissonant grin a workbook, a fill-in-the-blank sort that he can use to insure that his boy knows who his dad was. We were interrupted again only moments after she left by the chaplain, dressed like an old school undertaker,  offering ashes to us without explanation. It was easier for both of us to nod our heads and receive the gritty, oily shadow of a cross. “Remember,” he whispered, “to dust you came and to dust you shall return.”

As if the truth that none of us is getting out of life alive wasn’t already palpably felt between us.

The chaplain stepped over the tubes draped off the bed and left as quickly as he’d come. I sat next to the bed. I know from both from my training as a pastor and my experience as a patient, my job was neither to fix his feelings of despair nor to protect God from them. It certainly wasn’t to dump on to him the baggage I’d brought from my doctor’s office.

My job, I knew, as both a Christian and a clergyman, wasn’t to do anything for him, to bring to him my preconceived agenda but, simply, to be with him.

I listened. I touched and embraced him. I met his eyes and accepted the tears welling in my own. Mostly, I sat and kept the silence as though we were adoring the host.

I was present to him, with him, buoyed in the confidence that in this discipline of being present with him, naked and afraid- certainly one of whom Jesus calls the least among us, Christ was with us too, present in an almost tangible way that augers a permanent presence God will perfect in the fullness of time.

Here’s a question for the clergy types out there and, even, for ordinary non-pensioned Christians:

The confidence I have in the practice of being present in a hospital room, the trust I have that through the practice of presence Christ is present, why does it not extend to the other disciplines Jesus has given us?

Why is it that in the hospital room I’m content to be present, faithfully, and trust Jesus to show, yet everywhere else in my ministry I run (until I drop) on the unexamined assumption that it’s up to me to change my parishioners’ lives and then, with them, to change the world?

I trust Jesus not to be AWOL in the cancer ward but otherwise I typically operate as if God is the object of a curriculum program (for which I’m always scrambling to find the latest, shiniest product in the Cokesbury catalog) rather than the active agent in the world who calls us to participate with him and to do so not through the latest thematic teaching series but through the concrete practices he gave to us. It’s an assumption that in trying to conform people to Christ leaves them consumers instead and leaves me exhausted.

Taking his title from the coda of James Davidson Hunter’s significant book To Change the World, in Faithful Presence David Fitch unpacks the communal Christian disciplines by which God changes the world.

The grammar of that sentence is key to understanding Fitch’s work and how it connects with his preceding book Prodigal Christianity.

Whereas Fitch worries that James Davidson Hunter’s faithful presence proposal too easily becomes a prescription for individuals embodying the faith in the hopes of transforming culture, thereby underwriting the privatization and loneliness of the culture, Fitch notes how Hunter also misses, as perhaps a sociologist must, that we are not the active agents of mission.

In Faithful Presence, Fitch makes explicit that God is the subject of Christian speech; mission and transformation- they’re what God does.

Faithful presence then names a set of practices of the community but, more foundational, it names a participation in what the Living God is doing antecedent to us. Continuing the premise of Prodigal Christianity, where God the Son forsakes his inheritance to venture out into the Far Country that we call the sinful world in order to return all that belongs to the Father back to the Father, Fitch exposes the anthropological assumptions lurking behind how we conceive of the practices of the Church. They are not our means to God, for, in good Barthian fashion, scripture does not narrate our journey to God but God’s relentless journey to us. Nor do the practices simply equip us to engage in mission as though the mission was our mission. Rather the practices of the Church are the means God in Christ has given to us to locate God at work in the world and to join with God in what God is doing in the world. As Fitch writes, the practice of faithful presence is only intelligible because “God is present in the world and God uses a People faithful to his presence to make himself concrete.” God’s presence in the world, Fitch adds, cannot be apprehended generally or without mediation.

Only God can reveal God.

Therefore, we require the disciplines Jesus gave us.

Fitch’s emphasis on the disciplines echoes a bit with James KA Smith’s You Are What You Love. in that both authors lament the degree to which God in the Enlightenment got relegated to an idea or a belief in the individual’s head. Smith attempts a recovery of the practices of the faith because our formation comes through habituation not information. While Fitch would no doubt concur with Smith about the Enlightenment’s reductionism of discipleship to belief, the practices for Fitch are not merely habits to form us in our faith. They are the promised locations in which Christ is present with us and through which Christ changes the world. As Fitch notes, the Great Commission itself not only promises that Christ will be present to his people (“I am with you always”) the charge to make disciples of all nations assumes disciplines by which will be present to form disciples. The disciplines, as Fitch identifies them, bear resonances with the Catholic sacraments:

The Discipline of the Lord’s Table

The Discipline of Reconciliation

The Discipline of Proclaiming the Gospel

The Discipline of Being with the ‘Least of These’

The Discipline of Being with Children

The Discipline of the Fivefold Gifting

The Discipline of Kingdom Prayer

If Faithful Presence stopped there it would be a helpful theological corrective to how we treat the disciplines, reminding us they’re vessels of God’s activity not our mediums to God, but it would not enliven Christian imagination to broaden what we mean by engaging in God’s mission.

The unique contribution Fitch makes in Faithful Presence is arguing that each of these disciplines given to us by Christ have three interrelated and complimentary manifestations in the social spaces of our lives.

Precisely because God is the active agent of mission, on the move in the world, these disciplines should likewise force us to be on the move in a dynamic that avoids the familiar Sunday to Monday, in here-out there connection that bedevils Christians. Fitch denotes these spaces by illustrating three circles: a closed circle. a dotted circle, and a semi-circle. The closed circles represents the social space of the church. The dotted circle is an extension of the church, our friends and neighbors; like the closed circle, committed Christians still comprise the dotted circle but the dots show how this social space makes room for strangers and seekers too. The semi-circle meanwhile is what we might refer to as a third space where Christians go into the world, into their community, as a guest.

In the case of the Eucharist, for example, the closed circle is obviously the celebration of the sacrament during gathered worship. Because God is on the move, the presence of Christ in the sacramental table extends into the community so that, in the dotted circle, a Christian leader hosts friends, committed and curious, at a table in their home and, over food and wine, they pray together, make themselves vulnerable to one another, discern God’s word, and submit aspects of their lives to the lordship of Christ. Finally, in the semi-circle, the mutual vulnerability at table gets extended out into the community where the Christian is not the host but risks being the guest of neighbors and unbelievers. As Christ is present at the ornate lacquered table in the sanctuary, Christ is present at this ‘profane’ table too, at work to nurture all that is the Father’s back to him.

I taught a PDF version of Faithful Presence to a group of local pastors at Wesley Seminary last summer for a two week course on mission.

The way Fitch extends the disciplines across these social spaces to show how and where the church can engage in God’s mission shifted the entire paradigm for their thinking.

In my own United Methodist tradition, ‘mission’ has gotten redefined as good (social justice) work someone else does, be it the denominational apparatus or the credentialed missionaries funded by it. Not only does this demote our denominational connection to a funding relationship, it disempowers local churches from discerning where God is at work in their local communities. Rather than three increasingly widened circles through which we extend presence, it assumes only two closed circles, the local church celebrating the sacraments and the global church doing good works. Its an arrangement that encourages maintenance mode ministry, which in a post-Christian culture necessarily leads to exhaustion. What’s more, it leaves pastors ill-equipped to extend the disciplines into their homes and community.

Every pair of eyes in the classroom popped open as they begin to revision their ministry, asking what it would be like for them to gather neighbors and community members around the dotted circle of their table, trusting that Christ will be there to call people over time into submission to him. The possibilities multiplied for them as they applied these three social spaces to the other disciplines in Fitch’s book. And, it should be noted, these local pastors all served small congregations. The conventional way of construing mission had only disempowered and discouraged them that churches their size could not meaningfully do mission. They could neither send lots of money to the denomination nor could they execute expensive, volunteer-heavy mission projects for the less fortunate.

In the same way the limitations of a small canvas can provoke the most creative art, Fitch’s explication of these particular disciplines extended across the ordinary social spaces of their lives exploded imaginative possibilities for their ministries.

As much as Christ is present in and through a funded missionary in Cambodia, they realized, Christ is present when they sit with someone like me in the hospital room. If God is the active agent of mission and not us, then it’s silly to distinguish between ‘real’ mission and ordinary practices like breaking bread and forgiving sin.

As a preacher, I think Faithful Presence is worth the read just for the theological framework. Our Christian speech needs reminding always that God is the agent not us.

As a pastor, I believe Faithful Presence is exactly the sort of manual that maintenance modeled mainline churches need in order to learn how to engage with Christ in their post-Christian contexts. In many ways, Faithful Presence is the handbook for how resident aliens live. It offers the praxis Stanley Hauerwas’ sequel to Resident Aliens never quite managed to flesh out.

As a closet Anabaptist, however, I’m left with a question.

I’d like to see Fitch engage how Faithful Presence interacts with John Nugent’s equally good book Endangered Gospel: How Fixing the World is Killing the Church. While agreeing with Fitch that God is prodigally at work in the world, my reading of Nugent makes me wonder if Fitch has made the Church too instrumental and not a good and an end in and of itself; that is, is the Church the means through which God is changing the world or, as Nugent argues, is the Church the change, the better place, God has already made in the world?

While I hope to see future engagement between Fitch’s and Nugent’s complementary work, I suspect Fitch’s Faithful Presence is a needed companion to another book in everyone’s queue at present, Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option.

Dreher sees Western culture as lost and, in the wake of the Obergefell decision, antithetical to it. In the light of this development, Dreher recommends Christians imitate the witness of St. Benedict of Nursia, retreating into disciplined enclaves of like-minded, like-valued Christians in order to weather a new dark age.

Despite my sympathies for Dreher’s proposal, I think the Benedict Option may be a curious option to commend to Christians in this moment because, in fact, St. Benedict was not retreating from culture. Rather, he was also safeguarding the best contributions of elite and secular culture during the dark ages. Benedict helped change the world not simply by retreating from it, as Dreher suggests, but by preserving the best contributions of culture-makers. St. Benedict, then, corroborates James Davidson Hunter’s thesis that culture is changed only from the top down, from the culture-makers outward to the culture-consumers.

I believe Fitch’s Faithful Presence offers a middle way between the concerns of Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option about Christians now living as strangers in a strange land, on the one hand, and Hunter’s argument, on the other, about how cultures undergo transformation through its culture makers. In particular, Fitch’s 3 Circles of faithful presence provide Christians with a more balanced rhythm of gathering in disciplined, intentional community with other Christians, for the sort of formation and preservation Dreher seeks, but also venturing out into networks of friendships and neighborhoods to join in what God is already doing among them.

What Fitch helps us remember, even Dreher, is that discipleship is not only about practices, which can be preserved and practiced apart from culture, it is as much about participation too.

With God.

It all comes back to God’s agency.

The agency of God is perhaps the fatal flaw in Dreher’s book for he forgets, or neglects to make clear, that God is active in the world (a world Dreher would characterize as ‘lost’ to the Church) apart from the Church and God is waiting for the Church, who are God’s sent People, to join him in his work.

Because so many now are discussing the latter book, I cannot recommend the former with heartier enthusiasm.

By John Frye

My wife, Julie, and I have been attending an intentionally diverse church for over a year. We’ve noticed a compelling dynamic in a multiethnic community. Yes, we affirm as a church that we all want to be a preview of the new creation vision seen in Revelation 5:9 “…members of every tribe and language and people and nation.” Our church is named Tribes Church. In our often racially-tense culture, within a country with a history of racially-charged atrocities, and pontificating politically-diverse solutions, simply quoting Revelation 5:9 and singing together, growing in Christ together, and eating together does not create the ecclesia community for which the Apostle Paul fought and taught. Factions, grounded in whatever differences there are among us, are cancerous tumors in the body of Christ. I’m learning that a vital, healing component is to sit and listen well to one another’s stories. Listen well to the other’s story.

With the election of the current President I had good-hearted, Christ-loving brothers and sisters of color tell me that they were genuinely frightened. One brother told me that this year his daughter for the first time ever was called a n** at school. This in Grand Rapids, MI, the Christian publishing mecca. When I hear things like this, and many other things as well, I have to, as a white male, get out of my story and enter the story best as I know how of my Black friends, Asian friends, and Hispanic friends. Because I consider myself a nice, white male, I may assume that’s how others view all white males. Bad, very bad assumption. You might say, “Well, duh,” to this, but it is a more challenging move than it sounds to enter someone else’s story. Thank God we have a role model for this in Jesus.

Jesus was schooled in the story of Israel, the nation that was to be the gateway of God’s blessing upon nations. Jesus was born into a very distorted, damaging version of Israel’s story. A story in his time that meant vicious rejection of the other, even among segments of the Jewish people themselves. I imagine some Jewish children coming home and saying, “I was called ‘scum’ by Rabbi Snooty Mouth today.” You, a male Jew, thanked God everyday you weren’t born a Gentile, a Samaritan, a woman, a Scythian, a slave, a barbarian, or a hick Galilean if you lived in Judea.

Jesus lived Israel’s story the way it was intended. He got crucified for it, too. Jesus didn’t die only to get me saved. Jesus died (and rose again) to create mosaic communities who live under the blessing of God the Father. Ecclesiology was on Jesus’s mind when he gave his life on the cross. Unless the gospel rewires all us socially, then you can spout all the soteriology you want and you will still miss Jesus’s mark. Paul was adamant that diverse people living in social unity around Jesus was the new birth, the new people, the gospel creates. The death, burial, resurrection, and reign of Jesus the Messiah birthed a multiethnic body called the church.

We must help one another to bring our broken, fearful stories to Jesus and offer them up into his redeeming story. I can’t help my brothers and sisters to do that if I don’t know and accept their stories. We enrich each other and our appreciation for the unifying power of Jesus increases when we see how Jesus takes “the many” and makes them “one in Christ.”

Matthew Bates, in Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King, contends that salvation by faith alone is better translated and understood as by allegiance alone. As we sketched his answers to a couple of questions Monday, today we turn to some other answers to other questions.

I believe many of these questions are forced on 1st Century texts and as NT Wright has said so often, they are asking 16th Century questions of 1st Century texts. Bates has made his positive case in the book so far but he retreats some to survey the field for the questions that many ask. I say again, these questions are often simply not Jewish nor are they Pauline. They are in other words the questions of modern reformed types who confront Judaism in its more original form and it disorients their approach to Paul.

Question: If Paul and other New Testament authors indicate that our eternal verdict will be rendered on the basis of works (at least in part), then how does our salvation relate to obedience to God’s law or other rules? 

It’s very hard to avoid the works-faith-grace problem when one studies the NT in the context of Judaism, and it is also very hard to extinguish having to do something from faith. Bates sets up his answer with a brief, but very solid, explanation of the new perspective.

The biggest idea in the new perspective is a new perspective on Judaism and how works, grace, covenant and redemption worked in Judaism. It begins often with how they were framed in the Reformation.

The New Perspective on Paul

“by faith, not by works.” In arriving at this conclusion, however, the Protestant Reformers, so this scholarly story goes, had in fact falsely projected their caricatured conceptions of medieval Catholic teaching—that is, that Catholic teaching demands “works” as a condition for salvation—onto ancient Judaism.

Regardless of whether this scholarly reassessment has correctly described the real position of the Reformers, medieval Catholicism, or ancient Judaism (and professional opinions on these matters vary considerably), it is beyond dispute that this reassessment has had the salutary effect of forcing all serious interpreters of Paul and the New Testament to step out of habitual ways of reading these texts and to seek to become reacclimated.

Moreover, E. P. Sanders and others have shown that most ancient Jews believed that they were born into covenant membership as an ethnic privilege (chosen by God by race as much as by grace), and hence that they were moving toward final salvation so long as they did not flagrantly disregard the commands.

This has a huge impact on how we read Paul: if his “opponents” were neither non-believing Jews nor works-as-merit-righteousness people, then things roll in new ways.

Thus, when we read about “justification” in Paul, which has traditionally been regarded as denoting the first step of salvation, the moment at which we enter into “right” relationship with God through Jesus, we ought to begin with at least a modicum of suspicion that Paul’s language about justification might be more flexible than has been encouraged by the traditional Reformation-inspired systems.

That is, the nub of the question with which Paul is wrestling is this: Do the people of God have right standing with God through performing a legal code, or is it by allegiance (pistis) to the Christ as the Holy Spirit works in the community to actualize the power of God for salvation? 

Bates then turns to a complex issue that Augustine and Pelagius and the Reformers and Catholics engaged, and the modern constructs of this are very much more than any of the predecessors. Bates expounds what Paul is getting at here — two approaches to redemption and God’s blessings in this life:

Works of Law as Rule Performance

Moreover, the pistis path succeeds whereas the works-of-the-law approach fails specifically because successful performance of all the commands is demanded by the law if life is going to result—but as we have just discovered in [Gal] 3:10, the law itself testifies that the commandments cannot be successfully performed, and the covenant curse is the inevitable result.

The problem need not be that the individual in question is inappropriately trying to “earn” salvation by trying to establish his or her own righteousness (nor is this possibility excluded), but it could merely stem from a failure to see that grace, the gift of the Christ event, has shown that all forms of worth that could determine a person s righteousness are empty.

The good news is that Christ has absorbed the curse.

Yet there is good news in the midst of the gloomy prospect of the covenant curses. For the curses have indeed fallen, but Jesus has taken these curses upon himself: “The Messiah redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us!” (Gal. 3:13).

The issue is systems of redemption more than personal merit seeking; the issue is how to read history; the issue is hermeneutics, a hermeneutics that knows what has happened in Christ’s new creation redemption.

As John Barclay puts it, Paul’s compatriots were mistakenly insisting that “God’s righteousness should recognize as its fitting object, the righteousness defined in their own Torah-based terms”—and in so doing they were failing to recognize that the Torah had in fact reached its telos (goal or fulfilling end) in the Christ event. That is, Paul regarded his compatriots as falsely believing that God gives his gift of righteousness only to those who prove themselves worthy—and that God’s “worth” system was enshrined in the performance-demanding Torah. The importance of this subtle difference is that Paul is not critiquing the general human attempt to “earn’ salvation by doing good deeds or self-righteousness as much as he is hinting that all merit-based systems fail to grasp the totally unmerited nature of the Christ gift—a gift that can be accessed only by pistis to the king.

Question: If the law of Moses represents a genuine, God-given standard but at the same time does not result in righteousness, is it the case that the good works necessary for salvation and the good works that the law demands are different? are these good works different than the works demanded by the law of Moses? 

Yes and No.

So while the answer is no because it is the allegiance to the king himself that counts rather than performance of the Mosaic law, it is also yes since allegiance (pistis) to Jesus as king demands obedience to the deepest intentions of the law of Moses (see Matt. 5:17-48) even though this law has now reached its climactic goal (Rom. 10:4).

But this provokes many to ask this sort of question:

How are we, devoid of an absolute rule-based standard such as the law of Moses, supposed to be able to make determinations about what constitutes obedience to Jesus the king? We are to obey the Lord Jesus’s commands through the discerning and empowering aid of the Holy Spirit—and in so doing we will fulfill the good works that all along the law was designed by God to aim toward. The result is that the true intention of all the commandments are fulfilled, especially the love command.

But why is the aid of the Holy Spirit necessary? Why can’t we please God simply by remaining obedient to the Ten Commandments or God’s other moral instructions? Because of the powerlessness of our flesh, God had to do something for us.

Bates sums it all up here:

So, in sum, for Paul, salvation requires the performance of concrete works (deeds) in loyal submission to Jesus as the king (i.e., salvation by pistis necessarily entails enacted allegiance), but Paul stridently opposes the idea that good works can contribute to our salvation when performed as part of a system of rule keeping apart from the more fundamental allegiance to King Jesus. In other words, the real “faith” versus “works” divide in Paul is more accurately framed as a divide between works performed as allegiance to Jesus the king versus works performed apart from new creation in the Christ. And the latter usually but not always takes the form of a system that seeks to establish righteousness through performing prescribed regulations. 

The challenges have been heard. Matthew Bates, in Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King, contends that salvation by faith alone is better translated and understood as by allegiance alone.

Does this — to use the language of some critics — “smuggle” works into the meaning of faith? If salvation is by faith (pistis), then how can it be anything but the single act of turning from the Self to Christ in a surrendering faith?

In addition, how can it be “by grace alone” if grace alone means pure gift? That is, if one can do nothing because it is purely a gift, then how can one contend that the word “faith” combined with “grace” means “allegiance”? Bates knows this discussion well because he was both nurtured into faith in that view and has examined it carefully in his own biblical studies.

Bates takes on what is at work in the above two basic questions and responds to each.

Question: If salvation is by grace (a gift), then how can it depend on our allegiance to Jesus?

One cannot question grace without running directly into the bold and broad language of the Bible: God is the actor in our redemption; we cannot and do not save ourselves.

Thus, it is certain that if we are to be saved, it must come from outside ourselves, as an undeserved gift from God (Eph. 2:5). God graciously takes the saving initiative in both corporate (Rom. 5:6; Titus 3:4-7) and personal salvation (Acts 13:48).

In the recent Apocalyptic model where Grace (upper case) conquers all Sin and Sinners and Flesh, and anything else in the way, God acts for our redemption. There is more than a hint of universalism in much of the Apocalyptic school, but at some point someone has to come in to explain why there is such a demand to repent and believe in the New Testament gospel texts.

For this topic, read D. Bonhoeffer, Discipleship

Which means, both the older form of Calvinism, the newer form of Apocalyptic theology, the Arminian and the less than Arminian or anabaptist … in the end we all talk about the necessity of faith, and this lands us in the classroom of Matthew Bates listening to his explanation of what “faith” means. To reduce “faith” to “trust” in that existential surrender of the Self to God in Christ runs into not just Jesus’ demand of discipleship or Jame 2:14-26 but into what faith means in Paul. To Bates:

Yet not even traditional understandings of faith as belief or trust in Jesus’s saving work claim that humans have no active role to play in salvation. On the contrary, most everyone would affirm that God requires us to perform at least one concrete action in response to God’s grace, to respond “in faith,” however we define it, to God’s offer of salvation in Jesus. In fact, Jesus himself states as much in the Gospel of John. When the crowds ask Jesus, “What must we do, to be doing the works of God?” Jesus responds quite simply, “This is the work of God, that you pisteuete eis the one whom he has sent” (John 6:28-29). Regardless of how we translate pisteuete eis, whether “believe in” or “trust in,” or as I am tempted to translate it, “give allegiance to,” there is no doubt that pistis, to whatever degree it constitutes a “work,” is required—and this is not felt to preclude grace under the traditional understandings of faith.

Grace, too, comes in: and grace as God’s gift of redemption to us creates a bond and an obligation of response.

In other words, Barclay has convincingly demonstrated that it is a misunderstanding of grace (gift) in antiquity and in Paul’s Letters to suggest that grace could not truly be grace if it requires obedience as an obligatory return. We are undeserving of God’s gift of the Messiah—shockingly so!—in ancient contexts as well as contemporary. Yet the modern notion of the “pure gift” (a gift that requires no reciprocation) seeks to perfect grace along the wrong axis and does not align with the ancient evidence pertaining to grace.

That’s the point: most today seem to think the word grace means “pure gift” in the sense of You can do nothing to get it and you can do nothing after receiving it that has any significance. Where did this idea come from? Some will say it is a phenomenology of the meaning of the term (grace, gift) but Barclay proves that is not what gift meant.

It is inappropriate, then, to suggest that God’s gift of the Messiah, if the gift is accepted and subsequently held, would be ineffective in bringing about God’s transformative aims. So we should not set grace at odds with the required behavioral changes (good deeds) associated with allegiant union to Jesus the king.

In short, we cannot say in an unqualified fashion that final salvation is by grace and by faith apart from embodied obedience, for this misunderstands the nature of both charis (“grace”) and pistis (“faith”) in antiquity and in Paul’s Letters.

Question: If we are saved by allegiance alone, and allegiance involves concrete acts of obedience to Jesus the king, then does this not violate the principle that we are saved by faith, not by works? 

Regarding the role of works in salvation, although many systematic treatments attempt to skate around this issue in a variety of ingenious ways, Paul himself states that we will be judged on the basis of our deeds [Romans 2:5-8].

As a PhD student I attended a Tyndale House conference with the theme: justified by faith but judged by works. I recall a brilliant paper by Howard Marshall marshalling the evidence of how often the NT texts about judgment say rather explicitly that we will be judged by works. Not only that, no judgment text says “All I have to ask is if you accepted me into your heart one time.”

So, what happens is… here’s one:

Some of those who are particularly eager to rescue the idea of “faith alone, not works” seek, in squeamish alarm, to propose two judgments (or separate stages within the one judgment)—one on the basis of deeds that is for the purpose of determining rewards only, and another on the basis of “faith alone” that determines eternal destiny.

The fact of the Bible is simple:

Concrete actions and their results (works) are the basis of the judgment—doing or not doing certain things and the specific results obtained (albeit the list of approved and disapproved actions and deeds remains somewhat general).

If so, we are wise then to incorporate faith into the sense of allegiance:

Might it not be better to affirm that when Paul speaks of salvation by pistis in Jesus the Christ, not by works, that he speaks of allegiance to Jesus as the sovereign king? That is to say, we really are eternally judged, just as Paul indicates, in part on the basis of our works, but these works are part of pistis as embodied allegiance or enacted loyalty. Pistis is not the polar opposite of works; rather pistis as ongoing allegiance is the fundamental framework into which works must fit as part of our salvation.

The relationship between pistis and works is not one of cause to effect but rather of overlapping nested categories.

2 Cor 5:10; Rev 20:12-15; Eph 5:5; Gal 5:19-21; 6:8

There is nothing less than a full throated irritation among some today. Some contend Christians are being persecuted, some think that claim is risible and biting into a NothingBurger, some come back with responses of incredulity that anyone cannot see this, and others say this is alarmism pure and simple. More of some of this when I blog about Rod Dreher’s new book The Benedict Option.

For today I want to trot out what I read recently in Mary Eberstadt’s little book It’s Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies.

My contention is that we should distinguish between breakdowns of genuine freedom of speech and persecution of Christians, we should recognize that some in the latter think their freedoms are restricted in a way that is not only un-American but hostile to faith, and it would be good if we could at least have a reasonable conversation about these distinctions and the reality of the latter. To call this alarmism simply doesn’t help and it’s yet another good time for us all to read some Rich Mouw on civility, beginning right here: Uncommon Decency: Christian Civility in an Uncommon World.

Here is some stuff from Mary Eberstadt’s It’s Dangerous to Believe:

‘Where will we go?”

In the three years since that night in Denver, I’ve learned that this question is being asked all over. I’ve heard it from Baptist ministers in Texas, for example, explaining their astonishment that theyor any other Americans—had lived to see the day when a mayor of Houston would subpoena the sermons of five Protestant ministers, to see if their words about sexuality ran afoul of a new city ordinance.

‘Where will we go?” has also been asked by undergraduates whose religious club, Inter Varsity, one of the largest collegiate associations in the country, has lately been “derecognized,” or denied the privileges allowed to other student groups, on campuses in numerous states—this, for being what one writer dubbed “the wrong kind of Christian,” that is, those who believe traditional moral teaching.

Homeschooled Protestant evangelical college students in upstate New York; members of the Anglican Communion in Virginia and elsewhere; Dominican friars and other clergy around the English speaking world; faculty members and administrators at several Christian colleges and universities: a lot of people feel so culturally disenfranchised that they, too, are now wondering the same thing.

Small wonder. The ranks of other people pilloried and deprived of their own “pursuit of happiness” now grow apace: the high school football coach suspended in Washington State in 2015 for kneeling to say a prayer at the end of a game; the American military chaplains who claim to have been reassigned on account of their faithfulness to traditional Christianity; the small business owners working in the wedding industry at a time when vindictiveness in the name of the sexual revolution is apparently boundless; the Christian staffer at a day-care center who would not address a six-year-old boy as a girl, and was fired on account of it; the teacher fired in New Jersey for giving a curious student a Bible; and related cases in which acting on religious conviction has been punished, at times vehemently. …

An adjunct professor at the University of Illinois, Kenneth Howell, hired to teach a class in modern Catholic social thought, is suspended from the classroom for teaching modern Catholic thought about natural law.15 The head of the religion department explains that his explication of Church doctrine concerning homosexuality caused accusations of “hate speech.’ …

A U.S. Marine in North Carolina is court-martialed, given a bad-conduct discharge, and denied military benefits because she pasted a motivational passage from Isaiah 54:17 near her office computer (“No weapons formed against me shall prosper”). According to a military judge, the quotation “could be interpreted as combative … [and] could easily be seen as contrary to good order and discipline.’

These disparate stories taken from recent headlines are examples of a toxic new force now hurtling across the United States and other advanced societies. They are part of the mounting toll of a widespread and growing effort to shame, punish, and ostracize people because of what they believe. This is moral and social change for the worse—and not only in the United States, but across the boundaries of what can still be called Western civilization.

Whether you like her angle on these stories or not is not as important as distinguishing between freedom and persecution while recognizing hostility toward traditional expressions of the Christian faith.

What do you think?

At some point we all face suffering. At some point we all face unjust suffering, the suffering of the innocent, the suffering of pain that takes us to a place where we ask “Why?” So Krish Kandiah, in his new book Paradoxology:

Whether we are forced to watch the suffering of others, or experiencing suffering in our own lives, we desperately want to know ‘Why?’ Why does God stand passively by when there is so much suffering going on all the time? Why does he criticize our tendency to walk on by on the other side of the road when we see people in need, when he himself sees all suffering and yet chooses to do nothing? Does God not care? Does God not understand? Or perhaps he is, after all, incapable of stepping in? God’s deliberate policy of not fixing things when we are suffering highlights one of those universal paradoxes – we believe that God is active and powerful, so if he does not intervene, we are forced to conclude that this God is actively choosing to be passive (86).

Surely this is one of our faith’s biggest challenges and surely also one of the deepest questions to answer. This paradox is also quite true, as I remember Elie Wiesel questioning God’s existence because of the Holocaust and the Rebbe telling Elie Wiesel that the reason to believe is because of the Holocaust. Here is Kandiah’s formulation:

The problem of suffering is one of the most enduring questions humanity has to grapple with, and from an anthropological point of view it is one of the main reasons humans have sought to explain the world we live in by reference to a God or gods. At the same time, in our culture particularly, it has become perhaps the main reason raised in objection against belief in God (86).

Every religion deals with unjust suffering: is it, as in Hinduism, karma? is it, as in Buddhism, wrong desire? is it, as with atheism, bad luck? “Unlike atheists, we believe that the inevitable question ‘Why?’ is in fact crucial evidence that we intrinsically believe things don’t happen by chance, that someone is in control and that things don’t have to be this way” (94).

He turns to Job:

Naked I came from my mother’s womb,
and naked I will depart.
The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away;
may the name of the Lord be praised (Job 1:20-21).

Job’s confession reveals a commitment to continue trusting God despite his circumstances. Job’s perspective is that life itself is a gift, and so is everything that comes with it, and he will continue to love God for who he is, not for what he has given to Job (95).

But then that torturous dialogue. What do we learn?

First, we are clearly told that God is in control.
Second, we learn that not all suffering is deserved.
Third, we see God specifically allowing suffering to happen to an innocent person. Satan is permitted to disrupt Job’s life, which throws us back to the classic paradox: does suffering continue because God is not all-powerful, or because God is not all-loving? The book of Job clearly states that God is all-powerful; Satan can do nothing to Job without God’s permission. So the question becomes whether God is all-loving. Can we truly continue to believe in a loving God when he allows such extreme suffering simply to win what appears to be nothing more than a divine wager? As the story unfolds, however, we will see that there is more at stake than a cruel test.

What of the free will defense? “God desires genuine relationships with us as human beings, something which is only possible when there is free choice” (99). “God is still in control, but as he has given us space for us to exercise our freedom, so we have to reap some of its consequences, and live in a world that is not as God originally intended, nor how it will eventually end up” (99).

He wants to present his case before God, but when he gets there God interrogates him.

In fact, the constant barrage of questions from God is not designed to silence and belittle Job, but rather to help him to see something of the wonder of the world as God sees it – to experience a sense of awe. Job doesn’t learn about God’s perspective on his own suffering, but he does learn about God’s perspective on the whole world. Job finds himself knowing God better: ‘My ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you.’ Job finds himself trusting God better: T know that you can do all things; no purpose of yours can be thwarted.’

The only answer to the problem of suffering we will find in Job is the example of reflecting on the universe to observe the power, skill and wisdom of God demonstrated in nature. This is evidence enough to prove beyond question that if God is able to create and order the universe, then he is more than capable of overseeing the details of our lives. If God is powerful enough to create the constellations and yet is attentive enough to watch while ‘the doe bears her fawn’, then he is capable enough to work out the complexities of our lives.

The free-will defence of suffering puts God’s desire for genuine human relationships at its centre. So, in the end, does the book of Job. Will anyone still choose to trust God even if they lose everything? The book of Job answers, yes. The pain of Job’s tragedy and the steadfastness of his faith despite it proves that God’s creation project has not been a waste of time. Job’s story encourages us that when life is hard and perhaps God feels distant and passive, we can get through this with our faith intact.

Methodological naturalism. For most scientists this is a foregone conclusion; a scientist studies nature and looks for natural cause and effect. Among Christians the term is often viewed as a cop-out,  giving away the farm by ruling divine action out of bounds. Many atheists view the term as indicative of a failure to face facts and admit that there is nothing but the natural world.  Which view is closest to yours?

Jim Stump, in his recent book Science and Christianity: An Introduction to the Issues, digs into the concept of methodological naturalism. His first point (as a good philosopher) is that methodological naturalism is not an easy concept to define.  Well, methodological isn’t terribly hard to grasp. Methodological is contrasted with metaphysical or ontological naturalism. The emphasis in methodological naturalism is on the method of doing science rather than on the existence or nonexistence of anything beyond the natural world. All scientists can approach their work as methodological naturalists no matter what views they hold concerning the ultimate shape of reality – Christians, atheist, Hindu, Buddhist, or whatever.  For Jim, the hard term is “natural.” What counts or doesn’t count as natural? Most definitions are, or seem, circular. Natural phenomena are those that are investigated by natural means obeying natural laws.

The trouble with adopting methodological naturalism it that it seems we have to predetermine what counts as natural. And that will inescapably involve metaphysical notions and values that are not properly scientific by the standards of methodological naturalism.In that case, our metaphysics is going to affect our science, so long as we are committed to science as explanatory. (p. 71-72)

Commenters on this blog have occasionally suggested that methodological naturalism is metaphysical naturalism in disguise because it simply rules out everything else. Certainly some who favor intelligent design feel this danger.  Let’s not worry about defining “natural” at this time and move on to look at the nature and practice of methodological naturalism.

Practice of Science. It is relatively easy to see where the practice of chemistry and physics; geology and agriculture; genetics and embryology along with many other disciplines and subdisciplines can be approached through the lens of methodological naturalism.  We look for and confine ourselves to the study of the interactions between atoms and molecules, even subatomic particles, the interaction of light and gravity with matter, and the laws that describe these interactions.

Problems may arise when scientists in these fields look to grand unifying theories. Jim brings some of Alvin Plantinga’s work into the discussion.

There is something to be said for recognizing disciplinary boundaries. Michael Ruse … compares methodological naturalism to going to a doctor and expecting not to be given any political advice. The doctor may have very strong political views, but it would be inappropriate for him or her to disseminate them in that context. So, too, the scientist ought not to disseminate religious views, as they are not relevant to the task at hand. But Plantinga counters that in assessing grand scientific theories we will necessarily cross disciplinary lines in order to use all that we know that is relevant to the question. For the Christian, he thinks this properly allows the use of biblical revelation in assessing whether something like the theory of common ancestry is a correct explanation. And he believes that can be called Augustinian, or theistic, science. (p. 76)

In part this is because, historically speaking, what counts as natural is a moving target. I think Plantinga has an important point concerning grand theories – but (big but) – he is completely off-base in applying his concern to the question of common ancestry.  Evolution and common descent are natural scientific questions with methodological naturalism an appropriate approach – even for devout Christians. Before digging a little deeper into places where methodological naturalism should be held lightly we will  look briefly at reasons for retaining methodological naturalism.

Retaining Methodological Naturalism. In the natural sciences (biology, chemistry, physics, geology, astronomy, climatology, meteorology … ) reasons given for abandoning methodological naturalism are always gap arguments. Jim does not put it quite this bluntly, but after reading quite widely, this is the clear conclusion. I have not yet found an argument that is not based on a possibly temporary state of ignorance. Protestations to the contrary are emotional rather than evidence based.

Inserting supernatural agency or events into explanations has a fairly poor track record historically. Science has been remarkably successful at figuring out the causes of phenomena that were once explained by supernatural agents – from thunder and solar eclipses, to disease and epilepsy. Of course that doesn’t mean that science will be able to figure out everything in the future. But it should give us pause before thinking we’ve found some phenomenon for which there will never be any scientific explanation. To do otherwise would be to inhibit scientific investigation. Take the example of how the first living cell came about. Scientists don’t have very promising models right now for how that could have happened through natural means. (p. 77-78)

Both Alvin Pantinga (Jim cites a couple of articles written in 1996 and 1997) and Stephen Meyer (Signature in the Cell) suggest that this should allow us to draw the conclusion that the best explanation is that here we have a place where God acted as an intelligent agent. Jim notes “But should we call it the best scientific explanation we have at present if we say “and then a miracle happened” and there was life? It seems more in keeping with our present usage to say, “At present we have no scientific explanation for that phenomenon.” (p. 78) To insert a supernatural act of God here is to insert God into a gap in our knowledge. If the gap fills where is God? Of course God is responsible for the origin of life, just as he is responsible for the weather and the formation of a babe in the womb; but it isn’t either God or science. It is God and science. As a Christian I am convinced that as scientists we study God’s ordained and sustained creation.  Perhaps there are places where there will never be a satisfactory scientific explanation, but it is unwise to draw this conclusion about any individual proposal.

When is methodological naturalism troublesome? Here I leave Jim’s chapter and give my own view. Methodological naturalism is troublesome when we step away from the impersonal (chemistry, physics, …) and move to  the personal. If there is a God who interacts with his creation methodological naturalism will give the wrong result in these instances.

Methodological naturalism applied to the study of history will guarantee that we never find God active in history. Methodological naturalism would require us to accept that dead people never come back to life without some yet unknown scientific mechanism for rejuvenation. Methodological naturalism would require us to propose a natural explanation for every act of Jesus – from walking on water to stilling the storm, healing the lame, blind, and deaf, and feeding the multitudes. For many the “natural” explanation is that these never happened – they are tall tales. But, the incarnation is a very personal act. If the Christian God exists, methodological naturalism won’t get to the truth. N. T, Wright makes this argument in his book The Resurrection of the Son of God. If we don’t eliminate the possibility of resurrection, then The Resurrection makes good sense. Many scholars today, of course, simply eliminate the possibility and look for natural explanations.

I will suggest that another place where methodological naturalism fails is in some areas of the social sciences. Humans and human social constructs are shaped by interpersonal interactions. The plasticity of the human brain means that we are shaped and formed not only by “nature” i.e. our genes, but also through community – our social environment. Ideas change people. If there is a God who interacts with his people, his presence and interaction will change people. Natural explanations, ignoring the supernatural, i.e. God, will never get to the complete truth. Here is a case where the a priori move to eliminate God from consideration will limit understanding … if there is a God. This isn’t miraculous, but neither is it natural because God isn’t natural.

Methodological naturalism is troublesome when it shapes our grand theories of being. However, it is counterproductive, and can be destructive to faith, to insist on gaps in impersonal processes and insert divine as opposed to natural cause.

What do you think?

Is methodological naturalism a useful approach?

What are the limits, if any, to methodological naturalism?

If you wish to contact me directly you may do so at rjs4mail[at]att.net

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