Just and Sinner
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This was a question from a student:
The Bible says that God is love. Does that mean that anyone who loves is a good person? Can an atheist love anyone?”
I will get to an answer below. First, however, we must focus on some preliminaries, on “the spirit of the age”.
In one sense, there is much truth in what this man says… :
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ALL your good works…that you can remember doing..STINK to high Heaven.
There. Are you proud of yourself?Isaiah 64:6
God is looking for spontaneous works done for people in need..who can’t pay back..without thinking about doing it or not..not weighing the cost.
— Steve Martin (shaking the ladder) (@pudicat11) September 8, 2018
There is no doubt that an element of the truly righteous life, or good life, is that it is characterized by real love and compassion which does not think about rewards, comes spontaneously comes from the heart, and shares the love of God with all people (see, e.g., Deut. 11).
That said, here is the answer you will be hearing from some who carry Martin Luther’s name–and from some quarters of the American evangelical churches–more and more:
The truly righteous life, or good life, is always about compassion (acts perceived as compassionate!) which never thinks about rewards, always comes spontaneously from the heart, and never fails to indiscriminately share the love of God with other full human beings in equal measure.
See what I did there?
And, importantly, you will also hear (no doubt!) the following:
We are all broken people, with good and evil inside of us, and what really matters is that you do your best to live a righteous life.
If you at least struggle in your soul to overcome this evil in yourself…. If you really just want to live the kind of honest and righteous life Nadia Bolz-Weber speaks of, you are on the way, on the side of the angels…
After all, you might hear “Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God…”
And Biblically speaking, this message–while certainly having the capacity to appeal to many persons from all tongues, tribes, and political preferences–is massively messed up. It confuses what we might call “civil righteousness” with the righteousness that avails before God, and it even, leaving no room for passages like I Tim. 5:8, Gal. 6:10, Eph. 5:22, and I Cor. 6:9-10 for example, throws real civil righteousness under the bus.
And–importantly!–note that as Pastor Todd Wilken puts it, here “the Simul,” which is how some Lutherans have come to describe Paul’s description of a Christian continuing to struggle with sin (see Romans 7), now “applies to everyone, believers and unbelievers alike. It is truly a different gospel.”
And notice that The Simul applies to everyone, believers and unbelievers alike. It is truly a different gospel.
— Todd Wilken (@toddwilken) August 14, 2018
When it comes to what Bolz-Weber is striving to achieve though, we must acknowledge the utter brilliance of what she is doing here.
First of all, she is correct in pointing out that the early church fathers do not always seem to see the pleasure of sex as a gift from God, which it clearly is (see the Song of Solomon and many of the Proverbs).
Second, even before the most recent issues regarding the Roman Catholic churches scandals, many have been rightly calling into question Rome’s insistence on mandatory celibacy for priests–and with this, of course, the necessary rejection of Paul’s apostolic advice in I Cor. 7:1-7 (see this post for the best analysis I have seen on this issue).
Third–and most unexpectedly–because even among some of the most theologically conservative Christians most of them believe that in Romans 7 the Apostle Paul is speaking about his life before becoming a Christian… Even the the Reformed camp (i.e. derving from Calvin, Zwingli and co.), seemingly sharing the “Protestant Reformation” with the Lutherans, are very much divided on this text.
All this said, what Bolz-Weber is saying is truly is a different Gospel, and sadly, as Pastor Wilken has seen more clearly than most, there are many on this train fixated on “the Simul,” even if they do not intend to undermine biblical truth.
How different are today’s “conservative” Lutherans–who sometimes, for example, carelessly double down on things on Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation–from the Great Reformer himself! (just see the introduction to my paper recently published in Concordia Theological Quarterly here).
As the Reformation progressed, Luther–to say the very least!–grew more and more cautious when it came to downplaying the role of God’s law, confirmed in the Scriptures, in the life of the believer.
Note Carl Trueman’s words on the White Horse Inn blog:
In the early years of the Reformation, Martin Luther was so carried away by his recovery of the doctrine of justification by grace through faith that he believed that little positive moral teaching was necessary in the church: believers would simply spontaneously respond to God’s grace by performing works of love. Luther assumed that Christians would know what such works were, but by the late 1520s, it was clear to him that this was not the case—the church required careful and precise moral guidance; the rhetoric of ‘just do works of love’ was a dictum into which Christians could pour any content and none, as the fancy took them. (This was the primary concern which lay behind his composition of his Small and Large Catechisms.)
While I think it is largely inaccurate to say that the “earlier Luther” thought believers would just spontaneously respond to God’s grace by performing works of love,” (just see 1520-1528 here and “tolle lege”) this quote is significant for what it is correct about: we “require[] careful and precise moral guidance”.
What can be done about the great problems we face today? Even relatively good secular men like Jordan Peterson have absolutely nothing to offer vs. Bolz-Weber’s teaching, but can only go along with it while urging caution and mild pushback, at the most saying something like this:
“In the long term, more extreme forms of what she proposes, in all likelihood, won’t work…”
Why is this all that can be said? Because the “knowledge” among even “conservative” elites of influence is no longer something like “justified true belief,” but rather “conceivable, useful trust”: a lethal cocktail usually consisting of thoughts cobbled together from modern men like Charles Darwin, Georg Hegel, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, and William James.
Not Jesus Christ!
What to do?
What should we say to a man, for example, who feels his relationships are healthy and strong and who is sure he trusts in Jesus Christ, but does not seem to call “sin” what Scripture calls sin?
What if he is content “killing his old Adam”–keeping his flesh down–only by engaging in the good deeds he is “passionate” about and is convinced are helpful to his neighbor (perhaps to him, the ethics of Aristotle, Kant, or even Nadia Bolz-Weber, for example, are more or less synonymous with “God’s Law,” or, scratch that, “God’s [evolving] will”)?
What do we do if such a person insists that they have no need of warning or correction?
It is indeed a Christian act to forego a wedding–and to lovingly and sadly express our concern–if a professing Christian couple makes it clear to everyone they do not consider their premarital sex sin. https://t.co/vpResW6G6B
— Nathan Rinne (@NathanRinne) September 30, 2018
What do we do when, for example, even seemingly devout Lutheran Christians who are clearly brilliant are also clearly laying the groundwork for the erosion of God’s law among the faithful in the name of love? Or can’t see what is directly in front of their faces? What do we say to persons who insist on using pious-sounding phrases like
- “God’s law is not a window through which we inspect other people’s sins, but a mirror to reveal our own,” or
- “You may use your conscience to guide your behavior. You may not use your conscience to guide my behavior,” (more here) or
- For Luther, the Old and New Adam, or Eve, are clearly bound in a life and death struggle within each person.
Or, maybe they even insist that, while they believe in the inerrancy of the Scriptures, there is much that the Apostles got wrong….
With all this on the table for our consideration, we are now ready–finally!–to give a biblical answer to the student’s question:
First, we should be very careful about how we address this question. What should we say about the two non-Christians who fall in love? Or even the worldly caddy who really does care, at some level, about the golfer he makes big money from?
When I John says that the one who does not love does not know God, it does not mean that the one who shows love in just any way knows God the way one needs to know God….
After all, do we not all live and move and have our being in God? When the popular writer Frederick Buechner blogs “To love God is to be saved. To love anybody is a significant step along the way…” what should be our response? Does Paul not say God fills the hearts of even pagans with joy (Acts 14)? So, if this is the case, what could be wrong, or incomplete, about such love?
Here, we are in part talking about a “first article” [of the Apostle’s Creed, which deals with God as Creator] kind of love – i.e. love that is a residue or continual fallout from creation itself, by the Creator who is love.
This kind of love for neighbor, although something you certainly would like to have in a neighbor (as opposed to the alternatives!), is severely deficient because:
- a) It is not bolstered and informed by an underlying love for the Triune God, and hence its ultimate hope and expression is not the salvation of the whole world – i.e. people’s rescue from sin, death, and the devil and growth in eternal life, that is, knowing God through His Son, Jesus Christ (John 17:3), and
- b) A lack of godly purity or holiness in fulfilling this love – which of course is supposed to flow through us unhindered from God and for our neighbor, devoid of any false motive or desire
The believer in Christ, on the other hand, lacks the love they should have in the sense of b) above (not a). But–critically!–they also know God as He reveals Himself to us in Christ, that is, as the friend of sinners who do not love as they ought.
We need to talk in a certain way about these things. The best way is the way of the first Lutheran Reformers, who contra what many say today, never rejected the best of classical philosophy:
“…our relationship with God is based upon the essential righteousness of Christ, sacrificed for us. Within that relationship, God would make us, by His Holy Spirit, also essentially righteous [where we reflect the love of Christ (God)]. This work He begins in our baptisms and brings to a completion in the resurrection.” — my pastor
When you realize that the Formula of Concord teaches Aristotelian metaphysics. (FC SD I.57) pic.twitter.com/mAhp3yDB4n
— Jordan Cooper (@JustandSinner) July 31, 2016
Again–it mattes not whether someone like Pastor Cooper nails the exact specifics here–this love of God, this “essential righteousness” in line with God’s Ten Commandments, is very different than the world’s “love”.
To take just one jarring example, as I noted in a previous post, “Nancy Pearcy, in her fantastic recent book Love Thy Body, has many important tidbits to share–tidbits that show Christianity as a constant that moves the world, not vice versa…:
- “We should never defend Christianity by saying it is traditional. From the beginning, it has stood against the traditions of its day” (70).
- “Beginning in the fifth century, Christian leaders finally began to wield enough political influence to pass laws against sexual slavery…The most reliable index of how deeply Christianity had permeated a society was whether it outlawed sexual slavery” (72).
- “[In ancient Greece and Rome] brothels specializing in sex slaves, including children, were a legal and thriving businesses… Jesus shocked his contemporaries by treating children not as contemptible but as valuable…” (104-105).
- “Scripture offers a stunningly high view of physical union as a union of whole persons across all dimensions” (138).
- “The communion of male and female is meant to mirror the communion of divine persons within the Trinity” (139).
- “Some of the early martyrs were slaves who proclaimed their freedom in Christ by refusing to [sexually] service their masters – and were executed for it” (143).
- “Christianity, we might say, invented consensual sex when it developed a sex ethic that assumed that God empowers individuals with freedom” (143).
- “When we make sexual decisions, we are not just deciding whether to follow a few rules. We are expressing our view of the cosmos and human nature” (156).”
I went on to build on what Pearcey had to say:
“We are expressing our view of the cosmos and human nature” not only as regards sexual decisions but about politics as well. After all, most political action — that is the governance of human beings in the world — happens organically with marriage, i.e. at the level of the family the one flesh union creates. It should therefore be no mystery why marriage is the ultimate icon of Christ and His Bride, who is the Church — the mother of the children of God who guides them to their Shepherd-King.
Renew true love in your Church O Lord! Do not let our love grow cold!
And when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on earth?
Have mercy Lord.
Be gracious Lord…
Faith is about trusting God's promises made in and fulfilled in Jesus. It's about loving God, the creator and redeemer of all things, more than created things. It's a relationship of dependence on the living God for all things, spiritual and physical, now and for eternity.
— Hipster Spooky Lutheran (@hipsterlutheran) September 28, 2018
FIN
Images: Nadia Bolz-Weber from here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBtyZbauH0g ; Sirius Black: https://www.flickr.com/photos/134433772@N08/20140992932 (public domain).
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