Author: Vincent

Six Major Theories About Why Jesus Healed with Mud made of Spit (John 9)

~ Vincent

Why did Jesus heal the man in John 9 by making mud out of spit?!? I preached on John 9 recently and to make sure I had a good take, I looked up explanations from as many wise Christians as I could. People are all over the map on this one! There are so many explanations! I’ve sorted the theories into six major camps and added a quote from someone that I think is a great source for that explanation. Are there more theories out there? Absolutely, Feel free to do even more searching. I do, however, hope that this captures most of the breadth of the conversation. These ideas definitely aren’t mutually exclusive, so there are a lot of people that pick out several different reasons and agree with all of them.

(A lot of these quotes come from Christians throughout history, which means the primary sources can be tough to read. These are my paraphrases for ease of reading. Feel free to look up the original if something particularly. interests you.)

A Series of Symbols

The Lord came and what did He do? He unveiled a great mystery. He spat on the ground and He made clay out of His spit. Why? Because the Word was made flesh. Then, He anointed the eyes of the blind man. The man was anointed, but he still couldn’t see! Jesus sent him to the pool of Siloam. But notice that the evangelist pointed out the name of the pool: “sent.” And you know who was sent for us! If he hadn’t been sent, none of us would be free from sin! So he washed his eyes in that pool called sent — he was baptized in Christ!

-Augustine of Hippo, Tractate 44 on the Gospel of John

A Test of Faith

“The intention of Christ was, to restore sight to the blind man, but the way he went about it seemed absurd at first. By covering his eyes with mud, Jesus doubled his blindness! Who wouldn’t have thought that he was mocking that poor man or just doing some pointless nonsense? But Jesus intended to test the faith and obedience of the blind man so that he could be an example to everyone else. It wasn’t any ordinary test of faith! But the blind man relied on Jesus’s words alone. He was fully convinced that his sight would be restored to him. With that conviction, he hurried to follow Christ’s command. It speaks to his wonderful obedience that he simply obeyed Christ, even though there were so many excuses to do otherwise. When a devout mind, satisfied with the simple word of God, believes entirely in what seems incredible, that’s the true test of faith. Faith is followed by a readiness to obey, so that anyone who is convinced that God will be their faithful guide will naturally give their life over to God. Who could doubt that fear and suspicion crept into the man’s mind? He knew he might get mocked for what he was doing! But with hardly any effort, he broke through every barrier to faith and realized that it was safe to follow Christ.”

-John Calvin, Commentary on John

The Evangelistic Theory

“Maybe our Lord intended to draw even more attention to the miracle. A crowd of people would naturally gather to see something so odd, and the guide that helped the man get around the city would end up sharing the story as they went to the pool of Siloam.”

-John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament

The Gospel Comparison

“The man’s eyes were opened after a little clay was put in them and he washed them out in the pool of Siloam. God really does bless humble things during our process of conversion. It is incredibly humbling for a preacher who thinks, ‘I preached an amazing sermon on Sunday,’ to find God didn’t use that sermon to convert anyone! It was the random remark he made in town the other day that God worked with. He didn’t think it was worth anything! He didn’t plan it out or perfect it! But God did. What he thought was his best didn’t mean all that much to God, but when he wasn’t even trying, God blessed him. A lot of people had their eyes opened by little moments that had an incredible impact. The whole process of salvation is accomplished in simple, humble, everyday things. It’s so easy to compare it to the clay and spit that Jesus used. I don’t know many people that had their souls saved by formal, lofty processes. A lot of people join the church, but I haven’t met any that were converted because of a profound theological debate. It’s not common to hear that someone was saved because the pastor was so eloquent. Don’t get me wrong! We all appreciate eloquence. There’s nothing wrong with it! But eloquence has no spiritual power. It can’t transform our minds, and God prefers to use humbler things in His conversion. When Paul set aside human wisdom and decided not to use eloquent speech, he let go of things that weren’t going to be useful for him anyway. When David took of Saul’s elaborate armor and took up a sling and stone, he killed a giant! And the giants of today aren’t going to be conquered any better by people trying to put on the armor of Saul. We need to stick to simple things. We need to stick to the plain gospel and preach it plainly. The clay and the spit weren’t an artistic combination. It didn’t’ suit anyone’s taste! Nobody felt culturally gratified by that mud! But by that and a wash in Siloam, eyes were opened. It pleases God to use the foolish things to save those who believe in Him.”

-Charles Spurgeon, The Healing of One Born Blind

The Healing Spit Theory

The spittle of a human being is the best antidote for the poison of serpents, though, our daily lives attest to its efficacy and utility, in many other areas. We spit to keep ourselves safe from epilepsy and to avoid bad luck after meeting someone with a bad right leg. We apologize to the gods for having ridiculous expectations by spitting into our laps. In the same way, whenever medicine is employed, it’s good to spit three times on the ground to help it to take hold.

-Pliny the Elder, Natural History Book XXVIII, vii

A Meditation on Means

The Lord revealed his power more effectively by choosing this method of healing than if he had opened the blind man’s eyes with just a word. He used things that seem more likely to blind a man than to let him see! Who would believe that someone was about to heal the ears of a deaf man if they started filling his ears with mud? Clearing his ears might make sense, but putting mud in them? No. If Jesus wanted to use rational means to open this mans’ eyes, a surgical knife would have made more sense than mud. But Jesus chose to use this means for his power… it is supremely easy for him to heal by any means he wants. He can use laying on of hands or touching or a word or even spit and clay. If the word of Christ is added, any means he chooses will be effective, even if it seems more harmful than helpful to us.

-Wolfgang Musculus, Commentarii in Ioannem as found in Reformation Commentary on Scripture.

Augustine’s Apologetics and Contra Faustum

~ Vincent

Everyone has their favorites when it comes to theologians.

Augustine of Hippo is my guy.

I know, I know, he’s pretty mainstream as far as favorites go, but quality is quality, whether it’s loved by a million people or just one, and Augustine is quality. Is he smart? He was a genius.. Was he faithful? Absolutely. Did he bat 1000 when it came to hard questions and situations? Absolutely not. But that’s ok. Only Jesus did that, and expecting someone to nail it every time is pretty unfair. But even when Augustine is wrong, he’s wrong in an interesting way. He’s not going to leave you bored.

And he wasn’t just an idea guy; he was a people guy. There are some writers that are dry and dusty. Did they ever see the outside of their ivory tower? Probably not. And then there are the weird ones. I’m talking like Søren Kierkegaard weird. They’re brilliant and relatable when they write, but then you find out that they fumbled the love of their life by breaking up with them for no discernible reason and then they pined after them for the rest of their lives and wrote about it in several of their big works and you say, “Man, that guy had issues.” Did Augustine have issues? Yeah. But they were issues that are relatable. Anybody that’s read Confessions knows that even though Augustine was kicking over a thousand years ago, he had a life that is just like so many of our lives today.

At my church, I try to set aside a few Sundays every year to talk about big names in Christian history. I think it’s a fair critique of Protestants to say that too many of us imagine that there’s us and the Bible and that’s all there is, which is a shame because there’s thousands of years of people trying to live out the truth that’s contained in the Bible, and they’re really good examples to look up to. Augustine is one of the guys I set a day aside for every year in the hopes that someone learns about him and says, “Hey, I could be faithful like that!”

This past year, I wanted to highlight Augustine’s way of contending for the faith. He was a master at apologetics. People would come at him from every side, arguing about why orthodoxy was actually wrong and their weird heresy was secretly the real best religion and Augustine would just systematically destroy their arguments piece by piece by piece.

I was trying to pick out one of Augustine’s better arguments to highlight. I looked at Pelagius, the guy who famously said that God gave us the ability to know good from evil and a whole set of laws to help us choose good, so we don’t need extra help from God to do good! We just need to work hard and do it! It’s a bad take and skips over the damage that sin did to our will and our need for the Holy Spirit. It’s a great argument, but I prayed about it and just didn’t feel like it was the right choice. Then I looked at Augustine’s argument against Donatus Magnus, the leader of the Donatists. His clergy split off against the main Church because they endured during oppression when a lot of other Christian leaders had caved. They believed that anyone who betrayed the Church to Roman oppressors should be barred from leadership for life. Honestly, that’s one where Augustine was probably wrong about. I’m not gonna lie. The more you look into that one, the more you think to yourself, “I don’t know, it sounds like they’re the good guys and Augustine may be on the wrong side of this one…” I’m all for discussing someone’s mistakes, but it’s not exactly a great example of apologetics that can edify people. I kept looking and looking…

And then I found it. Augustine’s Contra Faustum (Against Faustus).

Why was this so exciting? Because Augustine writes about Faustus in Confessions. He talks about how he fell in with Faustus and his people (the Manichaeans) when he was trying to understand the point of life. He thought the Manichaeans were goofy, but they kept insisting that Faustus would explain everything when he got there. And then Faustus showed up! Augustine asked all his questions and Faustus responded, “I guess I never really thought about any of that. I don’t know.” Augustine didn’t hang out with the Manichaeans so much after that.

Augustine went on to become a Christian bishop, and lo and behold, years later he found out that the SAME FAUSTUS wrote a book on why Christianity is stupid and nobody should believe it. And because he’s a legend, Augustine literally reprinted Faustus’s book line by line with point-by-point disputations of every single idea that he had.

Contra Faustum isn’t one of Augustine’s more popular works, which makes sense. There aren’t a lot of Manichaeans around today to disagree with, and Augustine wrote over a hundred books, so not every one is going to become a legend. That said, there’s a lot to love here. In the sermon, I tried to pull out some of the arguments that were more relevant today. Does the Gospel have anything to do with Jesus being born of a virgin? Does the Old Testament conflict with the teachings of Jesus? Why don’t Christians keep the Old Testament law? I know I’ve heard each of these points brought up by people today to try to disprove orthodox Christianity, and these arguments aren’t new. Augustine took each one on hundreds of years ago, and most of his responses hold up really well. Here are my summaries/paraphrases of three chapters of Contra Faustum that I used for preaching. I hope they’re edifying for you!

Aquinas and Abortion

~ Vincent

Thomas Aquinas’s name gets dropped in quite a few pro-abortion arguments.  Roe v. Wade referenced Aquinas.  President Biden referenced Aquinas.  There’s even a popular undercurrent of pseudo-history you can find around the internet that appeals to Aquinas to portray the Middle Ages as this golden age of abortions where your local herbalist was always at the ready to sell the neighborhood abortion drugs at the drop of a hat.  But why is Aquinas referenced with such regularity?  

Aquinas didn’t believe that a fetus was genuinely human until one to three months after the pregnancy began.

And that’s true!  He didn’t.  We’ll get to why in just a minute.  But the strange thing about all of the Aquinas citations is that the people who reference Aquinas (on both sides of the aisle) don’t seem to know much about him.  They know he’s a famous Christian and philosopher and if they can convince people he’s on their side, boy, that would be a knockout punch in their favor.  But that’s the thing; they’re not curious about what he actually has to say for himself.  They want to explain their own position and drop his name in there when it’s convenient.  When they bother to give any citations, they tend to be from secondary sources (which is so lazy when when the person in question wrote as much as Aquinas did) and even when there are direct citations, his most famous works are usually referenced, rather than the most relevant to the actual topic at hand.  So, I wanted to give Aquinas a fair opportunity to speak on the matter.  What did Aquinas actually believe about abortion? 

It’s a big question, so I’m going to tackle it in three different pieces: Aquinas on the Beginning of Human Life, Aquinas on Sex, and Canon Law in the Day of Aquinas.

And if you’re looking for spoilers, here’s the big picture: working within the bounds of popular science in his day, Thomas did believe that human life starts to be genuinely human between one and three months into a pregnancy (depending on the child’s gender). This qualified early-term abortion as a crime other than murder. That said he still lists it as a crime against nature regardless of when it happens, and he worked within a system where it was legally punishable by law at any stage during the pregnancy. Aquinas’s question wasn’t “Is abortion a crime,” so much as it was, “How serious a crime is abortion at each stage?”

Let’s dig in.

Aquinas on the Origins of Life

If we want to talk about Aquinas and abortion, the first place to go is his commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences.  It’s not as well known as his famous Summa Theologica, but it’s the only place where he goes from speaking in abstract terms about human development to a description that’ so concrete that it lists specific timeframes for that development.  The context here is a debate about Jesus’s development during Mary’s pregnancy. When was that little fetus Jesus? Was he the Son of God right from the moment of conception?  Or did he become the Son of God at a certain moment in the pregnancy?  Classic Aristotialian thought held that sperm grew into a person in the incubating space of the womb (indicated in the word’s derivation from the Greek σπέρμα sperma meaning “seed”). That process took 40 days for a male child and 90 days for females.  If you hold to that Aristotlian science (and Aquinas certainly did), you end up with a question: did Jesus have a proto-human phase in which he successively became a human from a sperm?  Or was he just instantaneously there in the womb as a person through the power of the Holy Spirit?  He answers as follows:

[A]ccording to the faith, Christ’s conception must be held to have happened instantaneously, for human nature was not assumed before it was perfected in its species, since its parts were not assumable except by reason of the whole, as is evident from what was said in Distinction 2. … For this reason we must consider that conception to have been instantaneous, so that these things existed in the same instant: the conversion of that material blood into flesh and the other parts of Christ’s body; the formation of the organic members and the soul being infused in the organ-bearing body; and the assumption of the ensouled body into the unity of the divine person.

Now, in others these things occur successively, such that a male child’s conception is not completed until the fortieth day, or a female’s until the ninetieth, as the Philosopher says in History of Animals, [book] 9. But in the completion of the male body Augustine seems to add six days, which are distinguished as follows, according to him in his Letter to Jerome. For the first six days the seed has a likeness resembling milk; in the next nine days it changes to blood; then in twelve days it solidifies; in eighteen days it is formed to the complete lines of the members; and from then on the rest of the time until the time of delivery it grows in size. Thus the verse: Six days as milk, three times three as blood, two times six forms the flesh, three times six the members. However, in Christ’s conception, the matter that the Virgin supplied immediately took the form and figure of the human body, as well as the soul, and was assumed into the unity of the divine person (Commentary on the Sentences, Book 3, Distinction 3, Question 5, Article 2).

You can see him reference some of his previous work (Book 3, Distinction 2, Article 3) in the quote there to try to establish that Jesus Christ was not just the soul, but the body.  In the incarnation, there was a perfect union of God and man, not a material body that developed separately and then a soul that came along after the fact. There had to be a legitimate, full union between the two natures. He admits that for normal humans, the Aristotelian norm of 40 and 90 days before you’re fully human is true, but Christ’s exceptional incarnation led to him just popping into being through the power of the Holy Spirit, rather than developing from a sperm.

All of this science is very strange to us and obviously wrong. He doesn’t even know that eggs exist; only sperm. Even so, you can see how this really clearly gives us the framework to determine when a fetus is a human child. In his words, it’s “ensouled” after the first few weeks. Before that, an organic creature is developing, but it’s not one that’s human just yet.

If we just look at this solitary piece, abortion feels like a pretty rational move for a Christian that’s following in his footsteps, right?  Ah, but we can’t just pluck out his pieces about human development (a proportionally small piece of his works) and ignore the lion’s share of what’s left and declare ourselves to be thinking in his tradition.  Let’s keep going to see why Aquinas actually did not support abortion.

Aquinas on Sex

Now that we know what Aquinas thinks about the development of a fetus, we need to understand what he thinks about the procreative act itself.  On this topic, Aquinas really is absolutely a man of the medieval Chrisitan world.  And what did medieval Christians think about sex?  Well, to them, it was absolutely intertwined with having babies.  You couldn’t rightly separate the sensual aspect from the procreative aspect without stumbling into sin.  Now, obviously I’m not saying that everyone in the middle ages acted according to that worldview and never cheated on their spouse or whatever other thing you can imagine.  Of course they did.  People don’t always live up to the ideals of their society, even if they claim to ascribe to them.  But when it comes to the ideals, doctrines, and philosophy of the time, there can’t be any doubt that any effort to enjoy sex without an openness to procreation was sinful.

And why?  Well, the medieval world, and especially Thomas Aquinas, thought in terms of natural law.They believed the world had a natural sort of logic to it that was built in by God.  As you went about living your life, you were expected to look at each object and each act to consider why it exists.  Why did God make this?  What was his purpose?  Are you acting in a way that’s consistent with the logic of God’s creation?  Or are you twisting things around to serve your own wants, rather than God’s intended purpose?

That’s really abstract, so let’s work through an example.  An obvious one is food.  What is the logic of food?  Food exists to give us nourishment.  The process of eating it might be pleasurable (and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that), but if we’re going to live by the logic of the thing, the process of eating should never be separated from its natural end: we eat to be nourished.  If we start to enjoy it without that end in sight, that’s when we start to sin.  Are you enjoying Doritos because you’re hungry?  That’s great!  Are you enjoying Doritos when you’re already full but you just want to keep munching because they’re delicious?  That’s sin.  You’re losing sight of why God gave us food and just enjoying it out of gluttony.

Now, take that logic and apply it to sex.  Why does sex exist?  To have kids.  That’s the natural, logical end of the process.  If you wanted to have sex righteously, you were expected to look towards the end (babies), rather than just indulging for the pleasure of the process itself.  That was lustful and a misuse of what God gave us.  Not only was this logic very popular throughout the medieval world, but it was very popular with Thomas Aquinas.  As a matter of fact, the argument and examples that I just gave (sans Doritos) are straight out of his magnum opus, Summa Theologica, when he’s rejecting the idea that all “venereal acts” are inherently sinful:

A sin, in human acts, is that which is against the order of reason. Now the order of reason consists in its ordering everything to its end in a fitting manner… Now just as the preservation of the bodily nature of one individual is a true good, so, too, is the preservation of the nature of the human species a very great good. And just as the use of food is directed to the preservation of life in the individual, so is the use of venereal acts directed to the preservation of the whole human race (Question 153, Article 2).

Also, notice that he felt the need to debate whether or not there can be non-sinful sex.  That should tell you something else about the medieval world verses our own!  While we debate, is there any sex that is morally wrong, they were debating whether there was any sex that is morally right!  A very different starting place

This alone helps us shift gears when we’re thinking about Aquinas and abortion.  Aquinas would not have wanted anyone to have sex if they weren’t open to having children.  That would be against the nature of the act and sinful sex, even for a married couple.  Aquinas says as much directly in his Commentary on the Sentences when he addresses one of Peter Lombard’s quotes about birth control:

As for those who procure poisons to induce sterility, they are not marriage partners, but fornicators. (Sent. IV, 31.3 (184). 1.

Although this sin is grave, and to be counted among wicked deeds, and against nature (for even beasts desire offspring), nevertheless it is less grave than murder, since a child conceived could be prevented in another way.  Nor is such a person to be judged irregular, unless he should now procure an abortion for the child about to be born  (Book 4, Distinction 31, Question 2, Article 3).

And in that quote, you can see how he starts to move from birth control to abortion in applying the same logic. We are given food to be nourished.  We are given sex to procreate.  Why is a person made pregnant?  Is it to end the pregnancy?  No.  That would qualify as going against the natural logic of pregnancy in the most direct way possible.  Natural law philosophy was one of Aquinas’s biggest emphases, so if we want to introduce him to conversations about abortion, we have to remember that background first and foremost before we can deal with any of the specifics.

Church Law in the Days of Aquinas

But now that we’ve set the stage on some of Aquinas’s basic convictions as an Aristotilian thinker and a natural law enthusiast, we need to acknowledge the actual law of the medieval church during the era that he was at work.  As famous as he was, he influenced the teachings, and the teachings most definitely influenced him, so what did the church actually hold during the eras in question?  And I do want to acknowledge that this is a really complicated thing to research.  A shocking amount is not readily accessible if you don’t speak Latin.  Luckily, Paul Harrington wrote an excellent summary of laws pertaining to abortion over time in church history in The Linacre Quarterly that makes the depths of medieval church law accessible to anyone. While we have a particular interest in church law during the lifetime of Aquinas (1225-1274), a broader picture of what was going on in the medieval and Roman Catholic church won’t hurt our understanding either.

Looking at church law over time, for a little over a thousand years, the church considered abortion to be legally identical to murder and the standard punishment was usually excommunication.  It’s hard for us to wrap our minds around something like excommunication, since there’s not really an equivalent today. If we get kicked out of our congregation, good riddance! We’ll just go to the church down the street! But if we want to really understand their mindset, it’s crucial to recognize just how serious a punishment like that was in that timeframe.  An excommunicated person was cut off from the church until they had fully repented, meaning they couldn’t go to worship with their family and community.  They couldn’t participate in the sacraments.  They couldn’t get married.  They couldn’t offer prayers for dead relatives.  They couldn’t get buried. And if they died while excommunicated, Hell was the destination.  Excommunication was the most severe punishment you could get from the church.  This was serious.

A little after the turn of the millennium, we do see that distinction between an animated and inanimate fetus make it’s way into law. It first appeared in 1116.  A bishop named Ivo of Chartres first introduced it, and that distinction was taken up by a legal scholar named Gratian and printed in the legal textbook that became the standard for decades moving forward, Decretum.  It continued in Roman Catholic law for 753 years until Pope Pius IX ended that distinction in 1869.  During this period, if you got an abortion outside of the 40 day limit for males or 90 day limit for females, you were a murderer.  If you got an abortion within the limit, you had committed quasi-murder or homicide (the language varied depending on specifics at the time).  As the name implies, the punishments were less severe for quasi-murder.  For example, in 1159, your punishment was 3 years of penance if you aborted an inanimate fetus, verses the 7 years of penance or more that you would receive for aborting an animated fetus (which was the punishment for murder). And that’s just one specific instance. Sometimes, the punishment was a lifetime of excommunication. Sometimes it was left up to regional leaders. You get the idea. The important thing to note is that there was a legal distinction that made one a greater sin and the other a lesser sin. Some of the other abortion-centric laws in this timeframe didn’t acknowledge the distinction. For example, a piece of legislation by Regino of Prum in 1211 introduced a law that anyone caught selling drugs to induce abortion (at any stage of development) was guilty of murder. On the whole though, the distinction stands (for those who are curious, the distinction never really seems to have made a meaningful appearance in the Protestant world).

Notice that Aquinas’s position was the dominant position of the church during this time.  Abortion was always sinful.  The distinction in church law was never used to imply otherwise.  The distinction came up because people wanted to know how severe the sin of abortion was. Was it murder? Was it quasi-murder? Was it grave sin? Is it a lifetime excommunication or a period of penance? What punishment fits the crime?

Conclusion

Whew!  That’s a lot to take in.  Honestly, every time I learned more about this topic, it genuinely pushed me to deeper levels of understanding.  It was wild to see how recent our modern understanding of biology is, how church law was enacted in different eras, and how philosophy and theology have influenced one another in so many different ways.  I didn’t come to this question knowing the answer.  I came because I wanted to see firsthand what the truth was, and after some sifting around, I found more of it than I started with.  And I got to rediscover that history is so weird!  People in different times had such different ideas that are hard to wrap our minds around.

Nevertheless, at the end of it all, I have to wonder whether pro-abortion appeals to Aquinas are a product of ignorance or if they’re knowingly made in bad faith.  The solitary point of agreement is that he did not think human life began instantaneously after sex.  After that point, it’s all downhill.  In spite of that agreement, he did agree to a relatively early date where the child was fully human.  He considered abortion a crime against nature at best and murder at worst (depending on the timing).  He upheld and helped to shape a system of philosophy and canon of law that literally included it as a punishable offense.  Is this really the best person to appeal to?

As humans, we have the unique privilege of looking at this world around us and trying to figure it all out.  That’s wild!  We get to learn and read and try our best to come to knowledge of the truth.  A basic part of wielding that privilege well is acknowledging when we disagree with others and why we do.  When we misrepresent the legacy of others to make our ideas more palatable to those who would otherwise disagree, we’re participating in a lie, and the truth is never uncovered by lying.

Other great recommendations for those who want more:
Summa Theologica Ch. 118
Summa Contra Gentiles, Book 2, Ch. 65 and up
Abortion: Part VIII, Paul V. Harrington
A Great Free Translation of All Things Aquinas by the Aquinas Institute

Christian Perfection and the King James Bible

~ Vincent

If you’re not in a church with Wesleyan heritage, you probably don’t know what Christian perfection is. Heck, even if you’re in a church with Wesleyan heritage, there’s a solid chance you haven’t heard about this particular doctrine. It’s not hard to see why. The name is pretty bad. Yes, fellow Wesleyan people, I said bad. Try to hang with me for a second. “Perfect” isn’t something most people see as either achievable or desirable in our era. Folk wisdom tells us that “nobody’s perfect.” Movies feature villains that want perfection in this world and are willing to fight, hurt, or kill people to find it (“The Lego Movie” and “Kubo and the Two Strings” both come to mind). Self-help books of all shades encourage us to accept the imperfections in this world, rather than lose our mind seeking perfection. Even a lot of contemporary church language is caught up in appreciating our “brokenness,” rather than hating ourselves for falling short. In the eyes of the average person, any doctrine including the word “perfection” is scary from the start.

To be fair, it’s pretty clear that Christian perfection was a controversial doctrine from its inception. When John Wesley (the founder of Methodism) started talking about it, a lot of his friends disagreed with it. His ministry partner and brother, Charles, seems to have had a different idea of what it was and how to achieve it. Even Wesley’s exhaustive explanation of the doctrine, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, is a real challenge by anyone’s definition. It is a composite work that includes personal reflections, hymns, minutes from a conference that he attended, bits from sermons that he preached, journal entries from a person that he thinks may have achieved Christian perfection (right before they died), and arguments against people who claimed to have achieved Christian perfection that he didn’t think managed it (the most notable examples being Thomas Maxfield and George Bell). John went through seven different revisions of this booklet across his life as he added more and more content. It’s kinda like a scrapbook of his doctrine and how he’s come to understand it across his lifetime.

So, yeah, we’re dealing with something that’s challenging and difficult to articulate. To briefly summarize the doctrine, Wesley believed that, through the Holy Spirit, a mature Christian could reach a state where they would avoid willfully sinning. That was Christian perfection. These Christians could still sin through ignorance, mistake, or error, since their bodies and minds were still very much in this world, but their hearts would be so mature in the faith that God’s love would reside in them. THAT’S the core of the idea. If you want to know more about it in John’s words, I recommend his sermon “On Perfection” from the year 1740. It’s much more readable than Plain Account. If you don’t want to read more but think my explanation is way too generous for such a wildly-named doctrine, John’s words from one of his letters put it into words that suit modern people a little more readily:

Perfection is only another term for holiness, or the image of God in man

John Wesley (Letter to Rev. Mr. Dodd, The Works of John Wesley, 11:450-451)

Rather than argue about whether or not this particular doctrine is good or bad, I’d like to share a little revelation about why it takes the form that it does. I’ve always wondered, “Why did John choose that particular name? I mean, if the word “holiness” or “sanctification” accomplish the same thing, why not use one of them? That would have gone a long way with some of his detractors!” Well, reading through some of the sermons of Count Zinzendorf recently (a Wesley friend that, like many Wesley friends, had a falling out with John before the end of his life), and he cited Philippians 3:15 regarding a desire for Christians to become perfect. You can imagine my puzzlement. I flipped open my NIV Bible and checked the verse: “All of us, then, who are mature should take such a view of things. And if on some point you think differently, that too God will make clear to you.” Okay? What was Zinzendorf talking about? Was I reading a bad translation of his sermons? And then I realized that the NIV is hundreds of years away from the translations that were being used in the 1700s. Of course it doesn’t sound the same; it wasn’t what they were reading. I popped open what would have been more normative for the time, the KJV, and lo and behold: “Let us therefore, as many as be perfect, be thus minded: and if in any thing ye be otherwise minded, God shall reveal even this unto you.” There was a “perfect” there historically that was translated differently today!

By no means do I think that’s a bad thing. Language changes, and translations change to keep up with the way that we speak. It looks like the Greek word, teleioi, is translated in different instances as either perfect, mature, or fully grown. But think about that! The fact that the New Testament has 7 instances of that word that all moved from “perfect” to something else over time is wild! And that’s not the only word that was translated away from “perfect” to something else. The KJV has the word “perfect” in it 129 times, versus the NIV’s 45 times. That’s almost three times the number of perfects! Now, obviously you’re going to have a different number of “perfects” depending on your Bible translation (NRSV- 41, NLT- 47, CSB- 32, ESV- 94), but with very few exceptions, most of us see the word “perfect” in our Bibles far less than 18th century Christians like John Wesley would have.

As a side note, I totally acknowledge that even though I stumbled onto this little tidbit while reading Count Zinzendorf, he was a German speaker and wouldn’t have regularly engaged the KJV. I’m woefully under-equipped to manage wading through historic German Bibles to get that primary source verification, but I’m going to assume that the translator of Zinzendorf’s sermons was accurate, which would mean that even German translations from the 18th century were more likely to use words like “perfect” than their modern equivalents are.

Why did John Wesley stick with the name “Christian perfection?” Well, he says in his Plain Account, “There is such a thing as perfection; for it is again and again mentioned in Scripture.” To modern readers, that’s a pretty hollow claim. There’s a couple well-known verses that reference perfection, but it’s usually referencing God, not people. Why would Wesley stake his whole idea on a word that doesn’t appear in the Bible as much as he acts like it does? Because in the translation that he was familiar with, it DID come up again and again. He saw the epistles as packed with references to Christian perfection! Language changes and Bible translators adapt, but it was a joy to see why a doctrine with such an inflammatory name got it’s name.

That OLD Church Music: Psalms

~ Vincent

The split between contemporary and traditional worship is one of the great dividers of Protestant churches in our time.  If we’re being honest, a great deal of that split comes down to music.  Do you prefer singing soft rock from Christian radio stations?  Or do you prefer classical hymns from around the year 1700 until around 1970?  For a lot of people, the answer to that question determines what kind of service they’re going to be looking for.  But what is there for people that like the oldies?  I’m talking about traditional traditional music.  No, not that newfangled Gregorian chant.  I mean that really old stuff.  I’m talking about the psalms.

The English word “psalm” comes from the Greek word psalmos which was a type of sacred song that was sung to a harp.  In Hebrew, the book of Psalms is called tehallim.  It comes from the same root as the word “Hallelujah” (hll are the three letters both words are built around), and it means “praises.”  These aren’t poems.  They’re songs.  They’re meant to be sung during worship, usually by chant (which was the easiest way to get large groups to sing a song together before sheet music was widely available).  Not only were the psalms sung in Jewish worship (including during the time of Jesus), but they were so important to early Christians that a fair few councils in the first thousand years of Christianity went out of their way to encourage people not to sing anything other than the psalms of the Bible.  For example, canon 59 of the Council of Laodicea (held in 363 AD) reads, “No psalms composed by private individuals nor any uncanonical books may be read in the church,” (trans. Schaff).  That’s not to say you can’t find any hymns from these eras.  You certainly can, but mature Christians leaders were constantly calling Christians back to the basics.  Sing the psalms.  Before you start singing anything else, sing the psalms.

The particulars of congregational worship became less of a concern of the average person in the Middle Ages.  Every song (be it psalm or hymn) was sung in Latin, which the average person didn’t speak.  They couldn’t join in because they didn’t even know what was being sung.  Choir monks handled the singing duties on their behalf.  For the early Protestants, the Reformation wasn’t just about taking back the Bible; it was about taking back worship for the average person.  While some groups favored the use of hymns (Lutherans), Reformed and Anglican Christians stuck to the Book of Psalms.  It wasn’t until the 18th century that writers like Isaac Watts popularized and spread what we think of today as hymns in English-speaking countries.

That sense that we ought to be singing the psalms is pretty rare today.  While some of us favor guitars and some favor organs, there aren’t many that are particularly interested in singing psalms.  Which is a real shame!  For thousands of years, the psalms were the mainstays of Christian worship.  And why?  Did our ancestors lack the lyrical creativity that we have?  Were they too dull to come up with any real hit songs?  No!  They sang the Psalms because they didn’t think you could do any better than Scripture.  As great as hymns like A Mighty Fortress is My God (that one happens to be my favorite) might be , they’re not Scripture.  If there’s one little piece of worship music that sticks in a person’s head in a given week, why not have it be one of the songs that Jesus sang?  Why not have it be a psalm?

But what about our hymns?!?  What about trendy, newfangled pieces like “Rock of Ages” and even trendier pieces like “In Christ Alone”?  Is it time to get rid of them?  Of course not.  And if we’re being honest, I don’t think that’s a realistic fear at this point.  These are the songs we know.  We love them, and they’re quite good.  We don’t have to abandon them.  We could, however, afford to add the older oldies to our mix.  Take a minute today and find an arrangement of a psalm that you like.  Youtube is full of them.  There are orchestral arrangements, contemporary pieces, and even chants.  You’ll find something that you can enjoy.  Not that you’ll enjoy it all, of course, but you probably don’t like everything on the radio or in the hymnal either.  Even if it takes a few minutes, take the time to do it.  The psalms are your spiritual heritage, and they were made to be sung.  Give them a try!

Come, Holy Spirit by Ambrose (Modernized)

~ Vincent

I’ve written previously about how old hymns are cool and it’s a shame more people don’t get the chance to sing them. One of the biggest barriers to enjoying these old hymns is their tune. No matter how theologically rich the lyrics might be and how cool the historical circumstances were, people aren’t going to enjoy a hymn if they don’t know how to sing it. I say this as someone who has been on both sides of the problem. I’ve pulled the most amazing worship music out of the dark corners of the world to share with my congregation and watched as they’ve sadly muddled through the thing, wondering why I picked something so weird. I’ve also been in the pews, desperately trying to figure out how on earth this weirdo song we’re singing this morning goes, wishing they’d have just stuck with “Amazing Grace.” New songs are hard, and new songs that are off the beaten path are even harder still. If we’re going to reintroduce some forgotten classics, we need a way to make them a little more familiar.

Back in the early days of hymnals, this wasn’t a problem. Hymnals were basically a book of poems with recommended tunes. In worship, you matched up a good tune to a good poem and BOOM! You had a hymn. So why not do that today?

This Pentecost, I reworked Ambrose’s classic hymn “Come, Holy Spirit” (Nunc Sancte nobis Spiritus) to the tune of “My Hope is Built on Nothing Less” (aka “Solid Rock”) and it was shockingly natural. I did have to tweak it in parts, add a line, and make a chorus, but I was delighted with how well it went on Sunday. For anyone looking for an ancient hymn that’s singable for Christians today, here you go!

come-holy-spirit-melodyDownload
come-holy-spirit-fullDownload

The Prosperity Gospel

~ Vincent

In worship, I’ve been preaching through John 6. In overview, Jesus makes bread for hungry people, the people get excited, the people chase Jesus down for more miracle bread, Jesus says he’s the bread of life and all they really need, and finally people get disappointed and leave. Here’s a crowd of people that legitimately witness a miracle, but instead of bowing down before Jesus, they want to put him to work. They don’t really want the bread of life; they want a life of bread.

Naturally, I started thinking about people that have that sense of religiosity today. There are plenty of popular speakers who claim that God wants to lead you to a life of bread. The prosperity gospel preachers are the most obvious example. I didn’t want to misrepresent them when talking about them, so I started digging through some of the their writings to get a sense for the kinds of things they say and believe. Let me tell you, it was a wild ride. Not only was it broadly ickier than I expected (you’ll see), but there were a lot of little dots I got the chance to connect.

Prosperity gospel preachers are overwhelmingly nondenominational. They’re also well represented by people of every race. Neither of these first two items surprised me. I can’t imagine most of these pastors being open to denominational oversight, and no race is immune from the temptation of money. What did catch me off guard was the religious background that most of these preachers had. There’s a surprisingly strong tie between prosperity gospel preaching and the Charismatic/Pentecostal tradition. Not every prosperity gospel preacher has a Pentecostal background, but the modern American prosperity gospel did get its start there (Oral Roberts tends to be the usual starting place for religious historians), and it still has really, really strong ties to it today. As a non-Pentecostal/Charismatic looking at their tradition from the outside, the connection seems pretty logical when I think about it. Charismatics often put a really high premium on miracles in a Christian’s life today. It’s not wild to assume that you can get to, “God wants to give me money if I have enough faith,” pretty quickly from there if you go off the rails. Pentecostalism also lacks the clear denominational structures that can prevent obvious false teachings from reaching the pulpit, and it tends to have a really low emphasis on (and even active skepticism about) education. I didn’t expect the connection between those two entities, but it makes good sense.

History aside, I was shocked at how shameless prosperity gospel preachers can be. Legitimately, wholeheartedly, shameless. Here are some quotes that just broke my heart:

  • “Sow a seed on your MasterCard, your Visa or your American Express, and then when you do, expect God to open the windows of heaven and pour you out a blessing.” -Oral Roberts (“Success in Life” broadcast on the Trinity Broadcasting Network September 21, 1990)
  • “The best thing you can do for the poor is not become one of them.” -Rev. Ike (“The Gospel According to Rev. Ike,” Ebony Magazine, Dec. 1976)
  • “Don’t wait for the pie in the sky by-and-by when you die. Get yours now with ice cream and a cherry on top!” -Rev. Ike (“The Gospel According to Rev. Ike,” Ebony Magazine, Dec. 1976)
  • “If you’ve got one-dollar faith and you ask for a ten-thousand dollar item, it ain’t going to work.  It won’t work!  Jesus said, ‘according to your [faith,]’ not according to God’s will for you, in His own good time, if it’s according to His will, if He can work it into his busy schedule.  He said, ‘According to your faith, be it unto you.’  Now, I may want a Rolls Royce, and don’t have but bicycle faith.  Guess what I’m going to get?  A bicycle.” -Rev. Frederick Price (Fredrick K. C. Price. “Praise The Lord” broadcast on TBN. 21 Sept. 1990)
  • “God works by faith. You must believe first, and then you’ll receive” -Joel Osteen (Your Best Life Now, p. 33)
  • “You will often receive preferential treatment simply because your Father is the King of kings, and His glory and honor spill over onto you” -Joel Osteen (Your Best Life Now, p.40)
  • “Remember, only what you give can God multiply back. If you give nothing, and even if God were to multiply it, it would still be nothing!” -Oral Roberts (The Miracle of Seed-Faith, p.27)

And my personal favorite, when Oral Roberts told all of his followers that he was going to die unless they sent him eight million dollars. There are a million newspaper articles about it, but that wasn’t enough for me. I wanted something more incriminating. I wanted to read about the incident in his own words. I didn’t have to look far. He literally wrote about it in his own autobiography:

  • “The Lord spoke to me near the end of 1986 and said, ‘I told you to raise $8 million to carry on My medical work. You have from January 1 to March 31 to get it done. If you don’t then your work is finished, and I am going to call you home.'” -Oral Roberts (Expect a Miracle: My Life and Ministry, p.289)

Yikes.

You read quotes like this and can’t help but feel angry. When the anger subsides, you worry about the people that they’re taking advantage of. Sure, some of them might be able to afford a donation here and there to support a charismatic speaker, but what about the people who are desperate? What about the woman who has cancer, trying to juggle her medical bills, sending “Rolls Royce faith” checks in the hope that thing will turn around? What about the poor man with brain damage who sends in any little bit of cash that he can in the hopes that God will miraculously restore him? I believe in miracles and tithing as much as the next pastor, but I’ve known people in these circumstances, and I’ve seen the damage that prosperity gospel preachers can cause. Here is a pack of wolves on the prowl for desperate, down-on-their-luck people. Not everyone has the gift of discernment, and they’re counting on that. It reminded me of another certain historical preacher that assured people that God would give them blessings if they forked over some cash:

You should know that all who confess and in penance put alms into the coffer according to the counsel of the confessor, will obtain complete remission of all their sins…. Why are you then standing there? Run for the salvation of your souls! Be as careful and concerned for the salvation of your souls as you are for your temporal goods, which you seek both day and night…

Don’t you hear the voices of your wailing dead parents and others who say, ‘Have mercy upon me, have mercy upon me, because we are in severe punishment and pain. From this you could redeem us with a small alms and yet you do not want to do so.’ Open your ears as the father says to the son and the mother to the daughter, ‘We have created you, fed you, cared for you, and left you our temporal goods. Why then are you so cruel and harsh that you do not want to save us, though it only takes a little?

-Johann Tetzel , Sermon on Indulgences

Where’s a Martin Luther when you need him?

Insights from Old Sermons

~ Vincent

Deciding to post the entirety of a sermon series (The Gospel in a Postmodern World) was a task that took a lot more work than I expected. When I set out to do it, I thought, “All the work is already done! Since I’m moving to a new church, this will be an easy way to post stuff while I get accommodated to my new job.” WRONG! It took me AGES to get all of these sermons edited, transcribed, and posted. There was a lot of unexpected work that went into it, but I’m glad I did it. It was great to go back and look at some old sermons to let them sink in. Not only was it great to look at the material again (which I learned a lot from the second time through), but it was uniquely helpful to wrestle with them for such an extended period of time. Here were some insights I gained throughout the process that I thought were worth sharing.

1. Sermons are a lot of work.

Seriously, pastors are basically up there writing a book chapter by chapter each week. We might have different styles; some of us are writing a verse-by-verse commentary while others are working on a devotional and still others are doing totally different things, but regardless of which style someone uses, it’s a ton of work. We should remember that! As a pastor, I can verify that I feel guilty when I spend too much time on a sermon. Writing good sermons feels like the baseline for the job. The more you do on top of that, the successful you feel.

These seven sermons alone (35,000 words) measured up to a little under half the length of an average novel (75,000ish words) and was on-target for the length of a self-help book (30,000-60,000) or a shorter non-fiction book (40,000-70,000 words). That’s a lot of words! And this only represents seven sermons! Now, I preach for about 30 minutes each Sunday, which puts my sermon length above the average mainline protestant pastor (25 minutes) and below the average evangelical preacher (39 minutes), so my results are a little different than some others might be. Regardless of length or style, sermons are a ton of work, and it’s worth remembering that.

2. Sermons are their own medium

I know I just finished saying how sermons are like books, but they’re also not like books at all. Editing these suckers down to get them posted took a surprising amount of effort. A couple of them were already written, so I just had to do some light editing before I posted them, but the ones that weren’t written were put together using a transcription of the worship service from YouTube, and those ones were brutal to edit. Spoken words tend to be pretty informal. “Hey, how’s it goin’? You feeling tired today?” That sort of thing. There are also a lot of rules you can break while you’re speaking that are much harder to break when you’re writing. For example, writing in incomplete sentences are a no-no. They’re hard to read and look sloppy. On the other hand, when you’re speaking, you can throw around incomplete sentences all you want. If you’re taking a spoken piece and trying to transcribe it, you can try to really mash those incomplete sentences together with enough semicolons and colons, but it’s going to really hinder its readability. The spoken word just isn’t the same as the written word, and it takes some energy and creativity to translate one to the other.

3. Old Sermons Deserve More Attention

Sermons are one of the most disposable forms of media that I can think of. Books get read time and time again. Plays get performed over the course of a few weekends before the actors call it quits. Lectures from teachers and professors get used annually as long as they continue teaching the class. Even YouTube videos get watched multiple times if they’re good! But most sermons get exactly one day in the sun before they vanish forever. Sure, they’re often recorded somewhere, but very rarely does anyone go back and watch old sermons. Which is a shame! I found some really good stuff in here! And I’m sure there is a lot of really good stuff in all the old sermons out there that goes unnoticed just because their day in the sun has ended.

By no means am I saying that every sermon deserves to be played on repeat, but I am saying that I took a preaching class where I never read, listened to, or watched a single sermon that wasn’t given by myself or a classmate. I have a Master of Divinity degree and my coursework rarely had me looking at old sermons (with the singular exception of the required class on John Wesley to fulfill Methodist ordination requirements). By no means am I blaming any professors or the program I participated in. They had so much to teach already. I don’t blame them for not adding one more thing to the pile. There are a million things that deserve our attention in a given lifetime. We grab what we can and the rest slips by. I’m just saying that I hope to pay more attention to old sermons. There’s more there than most of us recognize.

The Empty Tomb and Charlton Heston

~ Vincent
“Are you a master builder or a master butcher?”

I love watching The Ten Commandments around this time of the year. You know, the one with Charleton Heston in it?  They had that movie on TV every year during Easter weekend when I was growing up, so we’d munch down on some jellybeans and enjoy.  Not all of it, of course.  That would have been absurd.  The movie is well over three hours long (not counting the commercials) and I was a kid.  If I was lucky, I managed to get as far as the Nile turning to blood before I got distracted by something else.  Mind you, there were a few marathons of endurance when I managed to make it through the entire thing (usually, by recording it and playing it back over the next few days), but usually I only got bits and pieces every year.  Needless to say, the Passover story just feels right for me to think about whenever Easter comes around.  Which is pretty weird since I’m not Jewish.

I’m not the first Christian to associate leaving Egypt with Easter.  Cyril of Jerusalem, a bishop in the 4th century, thought in those same terms.  I’ve been reading through some of his stuff lately because I’m leading a confirmation class, and Cyril’s catechetical lectures are some of the most famous confirmation materials in history.  In them, he covers the basics of Christianity for people who were hoping to be baptized, so there’s a lot about the Church, the sacraments, and why we need Jesus so much.  And in 4th century Jerusalem, you got baptized on Easter, so every class led up to that big day.  Afterwards, there were a few more bonus classes where Cyril taught the newly-baptized Christians from the mouth of the very tomb where Jesus was buried.  Can you imagine being present for that?  Even reading about it all these years later is exciting!

The first sermon that Cyril gave from the mouth of the tomb, was about… the exodus from Egypt!  Well, and baptism.  And Jesus.  All of that rolled into one.  Here it is in some of his words:

Let’s turn from the old to the new, from the figure to the reality.  There, we have Moses sent by God to Egypt; here, Christ was sent by his Father into the world.  There, Moses came to lead oppressed people out of Egypt; here, Jesus came to rescue people oppressed in the world by sin.  There, the blood of a lamb warded off the destroyer; here, the blood of the Lamb without blemish, Jesus Christ, wards off every demon.  There, a tyrant pursued the Isarelites all the way to the sea; here, the author of evil followed you even to the streams of salvation.  The tyrant of old was drowned in the sea, and the one today vanishes in the waters of salvation.

-Cyril of Jerusalem, First Lecture on the Mysteries (trans. Gifford 1894, paraphrased by me)

To Cyril, the Bible wasn’t this chaotic mess of stories all jumbling around.  Everything was deeply connected, and it was all intended to help us.  So when we read the Passover story, we should take note of details.  We should notice who the people are and what they’re up against.  We should notice where their salvation is from and how they are saved!  We should take note of every little detail.  Why?  Because it’s not just about a group of people thousands of years ago.  It’s about you and me, it’s about God, and it’s about how he saved us.  He acted in the past in certain ways to prepare us for what was coming in Jesus: the fullness of salvation for all people.

I have no idea what you’ve got in store this Easter season.  Whether you’re sitting through the full three hour and forty-five minute epic that is The Ten Commandments, or something way less exciting, just remember that it’s not a bad time of the year to think about the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt.  That story, with all of its drama and excitement, isn’t so far from our situation.  Just as the Israelites were saved by the blood of a lamb all those years ago, we are saved by the blood of the perfect lamb today.

Discipleship in a Postmodern World

~ Vincent

This entry is part of a series called “The Gospel in a Postmodern World.” Learn more about the series here.
Preached on December 4, 2022
Scriptures: John 18:28-40, 2 Timothy 4:1-8

Haven’t you heard of that madman who in the bright morning, lit a lantern and ran around the marketplace crying incessantly: “I’m looking for God!  I’m looking for God!”  Since many of those who did not believe in God were standing around together just then, he caused a great laughter.  “Has God been lost, then?”  Asked one.  “Did he lose his way like a child?”  asked another.  “Or is he hiding?’  “Is he afraid of us?”  “Has he gone to sea?”  “Emigrated?”  Thus they shouted and laughed, one interrupting the other.  The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes.  “Where is God?”  he cried.  “I’ll tell you!  We have killed him- you and I!  We are his murderers.  But what does it mean?  … Is there still an up and a down?  Are we now straying through an infinite nothing? … God is dead.  God remains dead.  And we have killed him!… Do we not ourselves have to become God merely to appear worthy of it?”… Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners: they too were silent and looked at him disconcertedly.  Finally, he threw his lantern on the ground so that it broke into pieces and he left.  “I come too early,” he then said, “My time is not yet… This deed is still more remote to them than the remotest stars and yet they have done it themselves!”  It is still remembered how on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and started singing a requiem.  Led out and called to account, he is said to have replied nothing but “What then are these churches now if not the tombs and sepulchers of God?”

That little parable was written by the great philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.  I’m sure you’ve heard the quippiest line from it, “God is dead.”  It’s often used by amateurish atheists trying to argue that God isn’t real.  “God’s dead! Science has disproved him!”  Not true.  And not what Nietzsche was interested in saying.  Nietzsche isn’t trying to make some big clever atheist point.  No, in its original context, Nietzsche isn’t celebrating.  He’s lamenting.  God is conceptually dead to the world around him!  Nobody believes that he’s there.  Our way of thinking no longer includes that particular dogma.  We assume that God doesn’t act and probably isn’t capable of changing the world.  People act!  People change the world.   We vote and we invent and we work and we plan.  The idea that a God is genuinely represented in that process seems absurd to most!  If there is a God, he’s certainly not imagined to be the sort of God that can do things.  He exists in a little irrelevant box at best.  At worst, that box is his coffin.  As far as popular imagination goes, God is conceptually dead.  And what does that mean? 

If we don’t believe in God anymore, nothing can be the same as it was when we did.   Everything has to be different.  Is there still an up and a down?  Is there still a right and a wrong?  Can there be real meaning in the world?  Or are we all just floating in an infinite nothing, trying desperately to create meaning where there is none?  If God is dead, we are still here, we still crave some kind of point.  If God is dead, we need to become Gods to fill the void in the cosmos that we created.

In the end of his little parable, the madman (clearly a stand-in for Nietzsche) wanders away.  The crowd isn’t ready for him yet.  They want to pretend that everything is still the same.  That up is objectively up and down is objectively down.  That there’s an objective point and that things can politely go on as they have been.  But the madman knows better.  Nothing is objective anymore.  People just aren’t willing to admit it just yet.  And that’s a summation of Nietzsche’s philosophy.   Nietzsche’s whole idea was that if Westerners no longer believe in God, they need to start being honest with themselves.  There can be no appeals to absolutes.  There can be no pleasant, safe reliance on old social structures that were built with the assumption that a god existed and wanted certain things for us.  If we don’t believe in God, we need to tear down the old structure and build fresh.  Because the rules that we are playing by are absurd.

The future Nietzsche foretold is now.  The postmodern era is here.  There are no absolutes.  There is no objectivity…  no singular way of being.  We have each become as God, creating our own meaning, crafting our own laws, and living free from the commands of others.

And what has become of churches in this world?  If Nietzsche is to be believed, they’re tombs and sepulchers.  Evidence of something that’s gone.  Memorials for a lost era.  They exist so people can look backwards at what once was for those that wish to reminisce.

That’s not far off.

Eight weeks ago, we went through the statistics of not only United Methodist decline, but also Christian decline in the Western world.   I think they bear repeating.  In the early 1990s, around 90 percent of American adults identified as Christian.  In 2007, the number was down to 78% (a twelve percent loss).  In 2020, that number was 64% (a further 14 percent loss).  And that’s just the amount of people that are willing to tick the “Christian” box on a survey!  The number of devout Christians is much lower than that.

And there’s the fact that the average number of new United Methodists in the United States each year is about -200,000.  And there’s the fact that a person going into undergraduate studies as a confessing Christian only has between an 18 and a 30 percent chance of leaving that same campus as a confessing Christian.  Things are declining.  And on top of all of those sobering statistics, we saw the pandemic.  Some experts are saying that it sped things up by about ten years.  The decline that was happening slowly in our churches happened quickly.  Churches that looked like they were just one good pastor away from recovery can’t pretend anymore.  And the United States is one of the most religious countries in the Western world.  Don’t even start with Europe. 

If we’re going to be a church in the West, we have to acknowledge that we no longer live in a culture that creates Christians by default.  We live in a culture that is statistically proven to convert people away from Christianity.

Ever since I got here, you guys said you wanted to grow.  And that’s what every church says, right?  Well, most of ‘em anyway.  They say they want to grow.  If we want to share the Gospel with people around us, we can’t bury our heads in the sand as to these facts.  We’re past the time when most of the population is actively looking for a church to attend.  There are still cultural conservatives (people that look back and see something of value, even when others are moving away from it).  Which is brilliant!  That instinct will lead them to the most valuable truth there is.  But most people aren’t like that.  Most aren’t looking for churches, nor are they interested in what we’re doing.  Making disciples right now is the most difficult it’s been in over a thousand years.   Because for the very first time in Western History, we’re trying to share the Gospel with people who think they know it and think it doesn’t hold up.  They think that God is dead.

If you’re discouraged right now, don’t be.  Legitimately.  The downside of sermons like these is they sound so horrendously dire.  Gloom and doom and sadness all around.  There’s no point in that.  Here’s the good news:  God is real.  He doesn’t require our approval to exist.  He simply exists!  And he’s in control!  And we’re never alone or abandoned.  He has called us, you and me, to be missionaries to the Western world at the dawn of a new era.  We have been chosen by God for a remarkable task!  No need to feel upset.

We aren’t doing this to sit around and feel miserable.  We’re asking a question.  How?  How can we share the Gospel with a world that thinks God is dead.  How can we share the greatest news there ever was with a new generation?  

Evangelism today won’t look the same.  The status quo will not hold.  We can’t just wait for people to come to us and expect that with the right preacher at the helm, the right extra-fun event, and the right decor, people will come flocking.  They won’t.  A lot of them don’t even know we exist.  They’re not looking for events from us.  They’re not even thinking about us.  We have to go looking for them!  We’re missionaries in a new world, and we have to go to the people.  We have to know them.  To know what they love.  What they fear.  What they long for.  What concerns them.  We have to know the culture.  And once we do, that’s when we can start to meaningfully consider how we can share the Gospel.

So what did we learn over the past eight weeks?  What are the themes that emerged?  What do I hope we walked away with?

Well, I want to start with a Scripture.  If there’s one Scripture that reflects the post-modern person, I think it’s our first reading about Pontius Pilate, John 18:28-40.  Here is a man that is face to face with Jesus himself… and what does he say?  “What is truth?”  What is truth?  Pilate is a big, bad Roman governor.  He’s heard a thousand people tell him what’s “true.”  And he’s done bothering with all that.  There’s one truth: power.  The Roman Empire has sent him to govern this territory.  Fact.  The people of the territory are angry at Jesus for having the audacity to tell them that he’s God.  Fact.  They demand his execution.  Fact.   And now?  Now Pilate has to act.  Don’t bother talking to him about truth.

And here’s Jesus.  Weak.  Captured.  Assailed by enemies at every turn.  And he makes his claim once more.  “I’m God.”  And he does make that claim.  How else could you possibly read verse 36?  I have a kingdom but it’s not of this world.  Hmmm, so he is a king and has a kingdom, but it isn’t here.  I wonder where it is…  And yet he’s always clever enough to never quite say something that could get him killed.  Did I say I was a king?  I never used those words.  YOU used those words.  I was someone who was born to testify to the truth.  Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.

And then the words of Pilate.  “What is truth?”  Pilate is world-weary. To him, there is no truth in this world outside what we make of it.

That’s the postmodern world.  There is no truth in this world outside of what we make of it.

In our time on this theme, we’ve thought specifically about five big ideas that cause controversy.  Five doctrines that the post-modern world holds that our doctrines prevent us from agreeing with.

1. There is no objective truth.
2. The authentic self is inherently good. Society is inherently evil.
3. The only legitimate authority over a person is themselves.
4. The world is defined by power.
5. Happiness is the goal all living things should strive for.

First, we spoke about absolute truth.  Just like Pilate, we live in a world where people assume that talk about truth is ridiculous.  There is no objective truth.  We each have our own truth, our own separate way of being, our own assumptions, but our truth isn’t actually true for other people.  That would be absurd.  What is truth?  An unwillingness to consider truth as objective is a challenge to Christianity because Jesus never claimed to just be a subjective truth; a great option for those interested.  He claimed to be THE WAY.  The singular, objective truth in a world that is swimming with confusion.

Then we spoke about the second doctrine: authenticity.  Augustine and Jean Jacques Rousseau and their dueling stories of produce theft.  Why do people do bad things?  Is there something in us?  Or do the real factors lie outside of us?  The dominant philosophical forces tend to assume that wrong lies outside of ourselves.  That’s why it’s so easy to rail against society and so hard to talk about sins that we ourselves are actively fighting.  Another hurdle for people today.  Because believing in Christianity sounds like moving to a very positive way of thinking (I am inherently good) to a very negative way of thinking (I need help to be good).

Next, we talked about authority.  We looked at poetry and art and other mediums that reflect that great question: where does authority lie?  In an author?  In a work?  Or in an audience?  Postmodernism assumes there is no author that matters and the work is what you make of it!  The audience (us) holds all the real authority.  But it’s hard to live when you’re the one making up everything as you go along.  Because you know you made it up!  And there’s a suspicion that it was entirely arbitrary.  This is a sticking point where Christianity has some power over postmodernism.  Because we aren’t just making up meaning;  we’ve got it!

We spoke about power.  The world has become so cynical.  In our stories, we see self-interested characters doing whatever it takes to gain power.  And that’s what history has started to look like: just a bunch of jerks trying to get power over one another.  Our trust in any governing entity is just rock bottom, and not just because of particulars, but because it’s hard to believe that anyone is trying to lead for anything more than money.  Christianity presents, what I believe is a more compelling option.  The Bible says there’s more at work in the world than selfishness.  There’s hope, joy, and love.  Things aren’t as grim as they seem.  Things are more complicated than that.

Finally, we talked about suffering.  Since the post-modern world has no objective meaning, there’s no real reason to suffer.  You’re in charge of your own destiny, so aim to get as much pleasure as possible.  Seek pleasure.  Avoid pain.  Enjoy happiness.  Which makes all this suffering in the world hard to account for.  Because what does pain have to do with existing?  It’s just a meaningless frustration that humanity should have solved by now.  Christianity has always held that suffering is not all bad.  It’s not pleasant, but it’s not evil in and of itself.  Sometimes, we grow through difficult situations.  Because our lives aren’t just intended to make us happy.  They’re intended to make us holy.  And becoming holy can’t happen if everything is smooth.  We are challenged to smooth out those rough edges keeping us from listening to God.

That’s the past few months in a nutshell.  The world around us is different than us.  It has new assumptions that influence not only the way non-Christians look at us, but the way we look at ourselves.  If we’re going to be missionaries to the postmodern world, we have a lot to think about.

So what’s something to end on?  What’s a big takeaway that represents kind of an amalgamation of all we’ve learned?   I’ve been thinking about that all week.  I’ve been reading book after book of the Bible, looking for a Scripture that speaks to how we should hold ourselves.  And the more I looked, the more I was drawn to some of the last words of one of the greatest evangelists in all of history: the Apostle Paul.  And why?  Because here was a man that evangelized from some of the earliest days of the faith.  He traveled from town to town, trying to share the Gospel with people that weren’t actively looking for it just yet.  The passage we have today is from the last verse of the last letter he wrote.  Paul was in a prison cell in Rome awaiting his execution when he wrote this letter to the evangelist Timothy.  So these are his last words.  The last words from one masterful evangelist to another.  And here’s what Paul has to say in 2 Timothy 4:1-8:

In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I give you this charge:Preach the word; 

If you want to see people become Chrsitian, you have to tell people!  We don’t get to just politely show up on Sunday and then wonder, “Gee, why is it nobody is coming?  Is the sign not big enough?  I’ll go measure the sign.  Are we not having enough fun activities?  Let’s arrange for a few more of those.  Do we need some t-shirts with our logo that we can wear in public?  That’ll turn things around!

By no means are any of those bad things,right?  They’re good!  But in a world where people don’t think that God exists, nobody is going to start attending church because they saw a great sign, they attended a fun event, or saw us wearing a t-shirt with our logo on it.  Nope.  They know that churches exist!  There’s dozens of them littering the landscape.  They know we’re here.  They’re not gonna start believing in God because they saw a great sign.  They need someone to talk to them.  To actually explain to them why Christianity than they think it is.  Why it’s not just a relic of the past or a hand-me-down from a more primitive age; it’s the truth at the center of every life.

be prepared in season and out of season;

Have you ever had a moment where you thought to yourself, “Man, I could have witnessed back there, but I wasn’t sure that I could handle it.”  Sometimes that happens!  We’re talking to someone and it starts to get deep.  And we know that there’s room to start talking about Jesus.  But we’re scared.  What if we say it wrong?  What if they aren’t open to it?  What if they get mad at us?  What if we’re not good enough.

And you know, I’d like to say that in that moment, the Holy Spirit will take over and you’ll be shockingly eloquent and your speech will supernaturally start to be more than you were capable of on your own.  I’d like to say that… but I won’t.  Because even though miracles can happen, it’s best for that not to be plan A.  If we want to share our faith, we have to be prepared.  Be prepared to talk about it!  Be ready to answer questions.  Be ready to say why it makes a difference and answer questions that people have!  And you might think, “Oh, not me.  I’m not good at that sort of thing.”  That’s nonsense.  You are uniquely gifted with a perspective that no one else has.  You have relationships that no one else has.  You have a personality that no one else has.  You have a story that no one else has.  You are uniquely equipped to talk to people about Jesus in a way that no one else can.  So practice.  Talk about Jesus to other Christians.  Talk about Jesus to your family.  Talk about your faith so when the time comes to witness, you’ll be prepared regardless of whether it’s a moment you expected or a moment you didn’t expect.

correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction.

Here, the Bible is showing us that this is about more than theory.  Nobody is asking you to talk at length about abstract philosophy.  There’s nothing wrong with philosophy when it’s addressing real needs that we have, but real life is not abstract.  It’s real.  It’s earthy.  It’s urgent.  When we share the Gospel with people, we need to do more than just tell people, “Well, you know, I think it’s quite viable that a God could exist.  Let me give you my list of proofs.”  That might be good, depending on the person, but it’s hard to work a theory that there might be a God into everyday conversation organically.

No, we share the truth of a God that we KNOW.  A God that we can talk to.  A God we have a relationship with.  A God that helps guide our lives towards what’s good for us and leads us away from those things that would harm us.  This isn’t about abstract theory.  This is about everyday living.  It’s about the choices that we make every second of every day to move towards truth or to move away from it.  To become the people that God is calling us to be, or to walk on paths that we’re not made to walk.  Paul mentions correcting, rebuking, encouraging, and patience because this is a lived faith, not a theory.

For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. But you, keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry.

This is a theme that came up repeatedly that I didn’t expect: the fight between the hard work of believing God’s truth, and the comfortable work of accepting a convenient lie.  Repeatedly, the Bible has told us, “Watch out!  You’re gonna be tempted to make up easier stuff.  Don’t do it.  It’s not the way to go.”  Now Paul refers to a particular time in which sound doctrine will be unacceptable to people.  They don’t want anything to do with it.  They’d rather make up their own thing than believe what God says.

If you look through Chrsitian history, in every era people have wondered, is this that time that Paul was talking about?  Is THIS the era in which people will not put up with sound doctrine?  I’m not comfortable making that claim.  I mean, to even make it assumes that things in the West are what God is really focusing on and, as we’ve said before, Christianity is growing in Asia, South America, Africa, and other regions.  Just because some of us might feel like things are bad in our area doesn’t mean it’s not different in other places.  There are Chinese people on the other side of the world where church numbers are swelling thinking to themselves, “Finally, an era where people crave the truth!  Praise God!”  It’s always hard to know if this is THE TIME, given the limitations of our own perspective.

But it’s not new to assume that the time might be now.   I think that speaks to the reality that whether or not a specific, ultimate instance of that time has come, people naturally have a hard time accepting truth.  In our sin, it’s much easier to accept a pleasant lie rather than an uncomfortable truth.

People might not want to hear the tough truths that God is telling.  Sometimes WE don’t want to hear the hard truths that God is telling us.  Because truth is hard to swallow.  Life is hard enough.  Usually, we just want a pat on the back. But we were not born so that we could limp through life and get a pat on the back.  We were born for more than that.

So is this THE time that Paul was talking about?  Or is this just A time like any other?  I don’t know.  I only know that we can’t go around sharing God’s truth with people and expecting that they’re gonna be thrilled right off the bat!  We have to be gentle.  Patient.  Kind.  Understanding.  Because truth can be hard to hear.  It’s tempting to look for people who just tell us what we want to hear.  It’s hard to listen to the truth.  So we need to listen, even when it’s hard.  And we need to be kind and patient when we share with others.  Endure.  Do the work of an evangelist.

For I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time for my departure is near.  I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.  Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day—and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing.

Paul knows that his time is almost up.  He’s in prison.  He’s going to die.  Throughout his epistles, he compares the Christian life to running a race.  Here, he says that he has run the race.  The end is here for him.  And is he afraid?  Afraid that he didn’t do enough?  Afraid that all the churches he planted are gonna die now that he’s not there?  Afraid that he went too far in his preaching and should have chilled out a little so he could stick around?  No!  He didn’t do all of this evangelizing because he wanted to build a bigger church and get famous.  He did it because he loves God.  God commanded him to share and so he did!  There was no fear.  Because now, as things come to a close for him, there is only joy.  Joy for what lies ahead.  Joy for union with his creator.  Joy for himself and for all others that love Jesus.  The crown of righteousness lies ahead.   The life of an evangelist shouldn’t be defined by fear of how things are going to go or what others are going to say.  It’s defined by joy.  It’s defined by peace!  It’s defined by faith. 

As we come to the end of this series, here’s the post-pandemic truth: every church in America has to wake up to the fact that we have reached a fork in the road.  There are two paths ahead of us.  We have to pick one and move.  Because we can’t keep going like we were.  There’s no path at all in that direction.

The status quo isn’t a real option at this point.  Don’t get me wrong; we can keep the status quo as far as church goes.  We can change nothing.  We can even reset everything back to the way it was in the 90s, back when 90 percent of people were confessing Christians and things were easier.  We can do that.  We won’t make any new disciples, mind youm because we don’t live back then anymore.  We live now.  Looking backwards will feel good, but it will  be a huge waste of time.  Nostalgia is a heck of a drug.  It’ll make you feel better.  But it won’t change anything.

There’s two real options for those that want to build churches: The Path of Pilate.  And the Path of Paul.

The first option is the Pilate option.  We can recognize that we have enjoyed a certain level of power in Western society for thousands of years.  Our doctrines naturally made sense to people.  Our ways seemed intuitive.  Christianity was woven into the fabric of society, and that kept our churches full and the number of disciples high.  But Nietzsche is right.  We’re in a new world now, and our logic is no longer intuitive.  If we want to continue existing as a powerful, respectable, comfortable institution, we’ll need to make some trade offs.  We’ll need to adjust our doctrines to align with the world as it is today.  It’d align with the intellectual authorities of our age.  It’d be popular with the average person.  We can stop saying that Jesus is THE way and start saying he is A way.  We can stop saying that people are sinful and start saying that people need to be themselves.  We can trade out holiness for happiness.  And will we thrive?  Honestly?  Probably not.  But it’ll be comfortable, and a few people that are uncomfortable with the hard truth that other churches tell but that want the trappings of Christianity will walk through the doors hesitantly, and say to themselves, “Oh thank goodness, I found a reasonable church.  That’s great.”

Some of you may be thinking, geeze Vincent, tell me how you really feel.  The way you’ve presented it, that’s no option at all!  To the contrary, not only is the Pilate path an option, this would be a much easier option than all the alternatives.  None of us will have to work overtime.  None of us will have to have uncomfortable conversations.  Each of us will be free to relax.  Pilate lived a pretty good life, right?  He enjoyed a certain level of power in his heyday!  And we could too.  We could cling to our historic power and find ways to make it last.  What is truth, we’d ask.  And we’d eat and drink and be merry.

The second option is Paul’s option.  We can acknowledge that the world has changed its assumptions.  That they’re no longer eager to buy into what we’re saying.  A lot of what the average person assumes actually conflicts significantly with what God tells us.  And under these circumstances, we can say, “Welp, time to get out there and evangelize.”  And we’ll be weird in a lot of people’s eyes!  We’ll be those crazy outsiders that make wild claims that don’t make any sense.  But we’ll be those weirdos that chose Christ over Caesar.  The God of the next world over the God of this one.  It’ll be much harder.  But we stand to gain infinitely more.

We’re at the dawn of a new era, and a decision must be made.  I can’t answer this question for you.  Because this isn’t just a leadership decision or an institutional decision.  It’s not just the church that has to answer this.  It’s you.  Each and every one of you.

Pilate or Paul?
Power or Weakness?
Caesar or Christ?

Are you really willing to go all-in on this?  Because it’s not too late to cash out and enjoy the time we’ve got left.  It only costs your integrity.

Caesar or Christ?
Do you want to sell out?  Or are you going to go all in?