Confident Assurance

(From devotionals at work)

"I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God that you may know that you have eternal life." 1 John 5:13

"To the question: what must I do to be saved? the old gospel replies: believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. To the further question: what does it means to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ? its reply is: it means knowing oneself to be a sinner, and Christ to have died for sinners; abandoning all self-righteousness and self-confidence, and casting oneself wholly upon him for pardon and peace...." -JI Packer

Life is full of uncertainty, and it often invades the Christian at the heart of his faith, causing him to ask if he really belongs to Christ. Let me point out some responses to such doubts. They are simple, but we need to repeat them to ourselves often.

First, God Himself says that He will not turn away those who come to Him (see the passage above). Isaiah 55:3 says, "Incline your ear, and come to me; hear, that your soul may live; and I will make with you an everlasting covenant." God says in Joel 2:32 (also Romans 10:13), "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved." These passages show that God desires to draw us to Himself more than we desire Him. And we can rest in that.

Second, we shouldn't get hung up on analyzing our faith. Faith is a means to and end, which God accomplished in Christ. Therefore our question should not be, "Do I have enough faith?'' but, "Do I believe the promises of God?" Faith only operates when it is beholding its object.

Thirdly, we shouldn't forget that we have an enemy. The name "Satan" in Hebrew means "the accuser." He will use every hint and suggestion to make us doubt we are loved by God, or maneuver us into thinking that our salvation depends on us. We can't stand up to him by boasting in our faith; our strength is in repeating to him what Christ has accomplished on the cross. Our best defense against Satan is to preach the gospel at him. (See Zechariah 3:2).

The point of this devotional and the ones that have preceded it is that the finished work of Christ for us is fixed, perfect, irrefutable, based on a plan the Trinity developed for our salvation before the world began. That plan is objective. That is, it exists and functions outside ourselves, and for that reason cannot be shaken even when we are. The imputed righteousness of Christ to His people is the rock on which we stand.

Next week we will shift gears and take a look at what God does IN us. If you have time, read 2 Peter 1: 1-15. We'll be spending some time there.

Paul's Great Exchange

(From devotionals where I work)

"But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord." -Philippians 3: 7-8

An English judge found himself kneeling at Communion beside a man he had once sentenced for a crime. When asked if he recognized the man, he said, "Yes. That was a miracle of grace." He was asked again, "You mean that such a man should be kneeling beside you?" "Not at all," he said. The miracle is that I should be kneeling beside him. I was brought up in a good, religious, moral home, and served my community. It is much more difficult for someone like me to recognize his need for a Savior. I am the miracle of grace." -Jerry Bridges (paraphrased)

The apostle Paul before his conversion would have made a great church member. He was dedicated to God as an infant, had a long family religious heritage, went to the best school and studied under well known professors, was devoted to the faith, a zealous church worker, above reproach, and a model citizen.

Yet in this passage in Philippians, he called it all "loss." The word for loss was a word rarely used in the New Testament. It meant to throw something overboard--to jettison even a valuable cargo to save lives on a sinking ship. Paul regarded all his "religious" attainments as worth nothing, because he had found something more valuable.

That which he prized more than his own reputation was "knowing Christ Jesus my Lord." It is important to point out here that he is not speaking of a mere intellectual knowing, or a moral knowing, or grasping a set of doctrines. The knowing he exalts here is intimate, relational knowledge of a Person. And Paul's knowledge was not only the apprehension of who Christ was and what He had done for Him. Paul had been invaded by the Life of God that flows through Christ, the life that brought the world forth, and that was revealed to humanity when that Life became human Himself. The knowledge was not something he pursued; it was something that pursued him.

Paul exchanged his own self-righteousness for the righteousness and life of another, and never looked back. We need to do the same. Moral self-righteousness is more dangerous than gross and blatant sin. It is sneaky and gives us a sense of false confidence that strangles the work of the gospel in us. Paul firmly believed that he was saved on the basis of the finished work of Christ alone. He was so convinced of this that he even publicly rebuked Peter when he began to drift into legalism from fear of what his Jewish Christian friends would think of him for hanging out and eating with gentiles.

Our salvation is based on the infinite merit of Christ, not on our actions. Our tendency is to drift back into performance based acceptance (PBA), dragging back up from the bottom of the sea what we've thrown overboard. But shouldn't we do good works? Of course. But true good works are the result of the presence of Christ living in us, not actions that we perform on our own apart from him.

Reconciliation

(From a series of devotionals where I work)

"...we rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received our reconciliation." Romans 5:11

"When two parties are at enmity a reconciliation may be effected by a change in either or in both. When, therefore, it is said that we are reconciled to God, it only means that peace is restored between Him and us." -Charles Hodge

The term reconciliation, and our need for it in our relationship to God, implies that there is a break between God and man. In order to understand the term, we have to first examine some other terms. Romans 3:10 states that "None is righteous, no, not one." If that is the case, then reconciliation has something to do with our becoming righteous before God. Martin Luther struggled, like most of us would, with self-imposed disciplines to help him achieve what he felt was the righteous standard that would finally reconcile him to God. His constant failure led him to despair. But one day as he was studying the book of Romans, he realized that the term "righteousness of God," as Paul used it, meant a righteousness that comes from God as a gift, a righteousness imputed to us on the basis of the work of Christ. According to 2 Corinthians 5:21, God "reckoned" sin to Christ, and righteousness to us.

Another theological term related to reconciliation is "justification." Protestants believe that "to be declared just" is not a position to be gained through increased holiness, but a determination in the heart of God to see us as just before Him. It is based solely on the work of Christ, and not our own. It is not just a matter of God changing His mind about us; it is based on Christ's action on the cross as our substitute.

The point of these words is that all our salvation, acceptance by God, and future life in Him are based, not on our striving to become righteous, but on the finished work of Christ in His birth, life, death, resurrection, and present rule of the universe.

(***I want to put in a parenthesis here because I feel like I need to clarify where we're going in these weekly comments, especially since we're dealing with something as serious as the Christian's understanding of his salvation. Along those lines, it has helped me to remember the two "imp" words. One is "imputation." Imputation is something that happens outside me. It is something that God says or declares about me that is based on His own plan and actions and purposes. It is something I accept by faith, but nothing to which I contribute.

The other "imp" word is "impartation." Impartation is what happens inside me as I grow in God and move towards final salvation when I die. Words like "life," "light," "sanctification," "divinization," "Spirit," etc. are all impartation words. They have to do with the gradual change towards holiness that occurs in the believer, and includes anything that has to do with our warfare against "the world, the flesh, and the devil."

Large portions of the Church argue which of the imps is the most important, and if one or the other of them is even theologically sound. I personally believe they are both true, and should be kept in balance. To believe in imputation without impartation means that I confess the work of Christ, but experience no inner change--a biblical impossibility. Folks who hold this position are generally very intellectual, but since they have no inner life, define Christian growth by a list of rules. They are sometimes referred to as "brains on a stick." Folks who stress impartation over imputation live with a sense of failure and insecurity, since the proof of their salvation is in their own experience rather than in the declaration of God. Both must work together: that which is imputed is the foundation of our lives; that which is imparted is the temple built upon it.

So, to clarify where we are: these studies for the last few months have dealt with imputation. I am concerned about imputation because I find a tendency among evangelicals to walk the aisle and never get a firm grasp on exactly what they have done, or, more precisely, what Christ did for them. It never hurts to go back and strengthen the foundation. I will continue on this track for a few more weeks. Then we will shift gears and study the stages of internal Christian growth. ***)

Chesterton's Aquinas

I just finished Chesterton's biography of Thomas Aquinas. I did so because Chesterton's style is always entertaining, and because I have a desire to go places I've been warned not to go, like a 70 year old out of shape man who decides to wrestle alligators, just for the bragging rights. Aquinas can be appreciated and contextualized by a Protestant. But Chesterton himself is a different story. He doesn't mask his contempt for Protestantism in this work. "Alligator" is not a bad analogy.

Chesterton defends Aquinas as the father of Common Sense philosophy and theology, beginning as Aristotle did with "real things" as opposed to the abstract forms of Plato. Aquinas observed the changeableness of things, and the potentiality of things, but instead of lapsing into existentialism or nihilism like many 20th Century philosophers, chose to reason "up" instead of "down." Changeableness meant all things were moving towards the Unchangeable, and had their origins in it (Him). Potentiality meant Purpose. Purpose meant Personality. Changeableness, however, did not mean that any idea or object is fleeting or to be belittled. On the contrary, every object expressed the mind of God in its individuality and special place in the world.

Aquinas turned to Aristotle as an antidote to the dualism of Manichaeism. There was also contact in the 13th Century with Islam in the East. A Number of Moslem scholars were perverting Aristotle's philosophy into a type of pantheism, and (according to Chesterton), Aquinas was concerned to recover Aristotle for the Church and deliver him from Islamic distortion. This brings up the topic of Chesterton's perception of the place of Aquinas in the history of Christianity.

Aquinas' work was approved of by the authorities of the Catholic church in his lifetime. But not everyone in the Church at large agreed. Chesterton referred to his opponents as "Augustinians." I could not tell if he meant the Order, or a wider theological company. At any rate, they were the "conservatives" of their day, mildly deterministic in their views on the nature of salvation (following Augustine). Chesterton accuses them of being neo-Platonists. (Whether or not Augustine was a Platonist is beyond my knowledge. Chesterton associates Platonism with Logos Christology, which would draw the whole Eastern Church under the shadow of Plato.) At any rate, Aquinas became the victor in these debates, and his Summa is the heart of Roman Catholic theology down to the present.

But, back to Chesterton's view of history: When Aquinas won a permanent victory in Catholic thought, "Conservative" Augustinianism went underground, where it bubbled and crackled until it exploded in an Augustinian monastery in northern Germany @300 years later. Luther, Chesterton tells us, represented the counter-revolution against Aquinas' revolution of Common Sense, and carried its followers back into the murky waters of determinism and pessimism. In addition, Luther cheated. He used the force of his personality to back his theology, a thing Aquinas would never have done because he felt that asserting personality obscured the power of pure reason. (Why don't you tell us how you really feel, GK?)

Since then everything has pretty much gone downhill in Christendom, except for the fact that the Protestant descendents of the magisterial reformers have rejected the monergistic soteriology of their fathers, and returned to the synergism of Common Sense. I personally have considered this a weakness that grows out of inconsistency: An Evangelical is someone who holds to the 5 solos of the Reformation but rejects the 5 points, creating the odd stance of a man who boasts in his family name but refuses to be seen with his parents. But I digress.

No doubt this view of Church history was a bit of a shock. It reverses how every good Protestant interprets the events. But it is not the reversal of interpretation that troubles me. It is simply that it is one more interpretation to add to the multiplicity of views surrounding what I've come to call the "Story" (maybe that overlaps Aquinas' Ens?).

Perhaps Aquinas himself can help--all changeable things are moving through their potential to the Unchangeable. I wonder if in Paradise I will come to a grove of trees on a grassy knoll. Under it sit Athanasius, Aquinas, and Augustine (is it an accident that the three representatives of the divisions in Christendom start with "A"?), all giving their attention to an old lady, who is delightedly telling the story of how her prayers in a small Russian church moved the heart of God to drop winter on the Grande Armee. It is obvious that these prayers and this woman are as much at the center of the heart of God as the accomplishments of the three, and they are as enthralled with her story as with their own. Because God is at the center, all things are at the center. "For of Him, and through Him, and to Him are all things."