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Conveniently Untranslatable: Sheol, Hades, and Gehenna

~ Vincent

One of my personal pet peeves is when pastors bust out the weird words for Hell. “You can see here that they’re talking about Gehenna, which is different than Hades and certainly much different than Hell.” Huh? Hades and Gehenna aren’t English words. You’re just leaving words in their original language and insisting that it’s somehow different and deeper for not having been translated. Can you imagine if any other theological subject took the same approach? Imagine talking about the Gospel and someone said, “well, let’s be sure to speak about the evangelion, which is different from the gospel or the devar YHWH.” Or imagine if we were talking about prophets and someone insisted that we needed to start talking about prophētēs and navi’im if we REALLY want to be serious about all of this. Not all of these conversations are wrong-headed. There absolutely is a place for learning more about cultural attachments to different words and the art of translation, but when a single theological subject (Hell) is the only one that people ever want to debate, I start to wonder if it’s out of a misled curiosity or a deep-seated need for the text to say something other than it does. Ironically, when I looked at the players involved in those translation decisions, both intellectual wanderlust and deep discomfort with Hell seem to be present in the Hades/Sheol/Gehenna conversation.

On one side, you have evangelical pastors that seem to see conversations about Hades and Sheol as the work of serious scholarship unburdened by the assumptions of previous tradition. The logic goes something like this: do you really want to know what the biblical author was trying to tell you? Then you need to get back to the source of the book itself! What did these words mean in the original Jewish setting? The authors didn’t even know the word “Hell,” and if you read passages about Sheol while thinking about a burning pit full of devils, you’re going to totally misunderstand what they were getting at. If you want to be accurate, you have to accept that there are no clean, accurate translations of these concepts into English. We need to leave these words in their original language and let people learn what Jews thought about the afterlife in those timeframes if we want people to understand what those passages mean.

To some extent, I respect the thought process. It’s sincere and genuinely focused on the Bible. It is, however, a little misled. It tosses out the contributions of historic Christians in the effort of uncovering something “more accurate,” but what’s uncovered is almost always much, much less so. After all, it implies that there is a reasonably simple, non-scholarly way for people to comprehend what Jewish religious thought was about the afterlife over thousands of years, and that’s totally unreasonable. Just look at the three-year stretch that Jesus spent in public ministry! Throughout the New Testament, we see the Saducees and the Pharisees. Were they on the same page about the afterlife? No! For a Sadducee, any talk about the afterlife would have been absurd. They believed there was no afterlife at all. The Pharisees, on the other hand, there was a bodily resurrection at the end of time after which some would go on to everlasting life and others would go on to eternal torment. That’s a pretty big difference in the way they thought about the afterlife! Do you think they agreed on the meaning of the word Sheol? And remember, we’re only looking at two groups that were active in the three years that Jesus was involved in public ministry. The Old Testament covers THOUSANDS of years of history. If we’re convinced that words like Sheol and Gehenna are so wildly unlike our modern words that we need to leave them untranslated, we also need to accept that we can’t offer up one explanation about what the afterlife REALLY was to Jews for thousands of years and claim that this is a penetrating work of scholarship that finally explains the concept. If Jewish religious scholars couldn’t agree during the life of Jesus, they certainly weren’t all miraculously on the same page before that. No, we would need a study that’s far deeper and wider than we’re really interested in to seriously embark down this road. In describing what Jews “really thought” about Sheol, you’re inevitably picking one interpretation and blanket applying it for a broad swath of history.

Beyond introducing a level of complexity that is both not scholarly enough to be taken seriously and too scholarly for the most people to understand, there’s a bigger, simpler concern that ought to disqualify the use of these terms in an evangelical setting: is Sheol a real place? It’s usually described as a a spooky, neutral realm of the dead, so is that an actual possible landing place for people that die? What about Hades? And is Hades a different place than Sheol? After all, it is similar, although the Greeks had some moral distinctions to their Hades. You could make it to Elysium or sink to the depths of Tartarus. Oh, but those aren’t explicitly mentioned in the New Testament, so do they count? Or was the New Testament Hades different from the Greek Hades? And how does Gehenna fit into all of this? And how does ANY of it fit in with Christian orthodoxy? The simple truth is that it doesn’t fit into Christian orthodoxy. These places, if imagined as anything other than Hell or Heaven, don’t fit within a cohesive Christian framework. Our Christian forebears recognized this. Bibles didn’t leave those words in their Greek and Hebrew forms until the 19th and 20th centuries and none of those words appears in any historic doctrinal standards (unlike Heaven and Hell, which are pretty standard fare). Leaving the words untranslated doesn’t just risk confusing people! It also risks adding non-existent places to Christian’s understanding of the cosmos. The hundreds of years of resources where our ancestors in the faith translated those words as “Hell” actually help us to understand how they contribute to a consistent worldview. In ditching them for a “more accurate understanding,” we’ve ditched a tremendous aid.

But let’s jump to the other side of the theological spectrum. What about more liberal theologians? Why are they in favor of Hades and Gehenna instead of Hell? This one doesn’t take a lot of explaining. Universalism in both it’s soft and hard forms, are much more common in mainline churches and expectations for doctrine tends to be more pluralistic. In the tradition of Schliermacher, the Bible is often seen as a compilation of ideas about God that are bound by a very different time and culture, rather than a singular authoritative voice illuminating any objective truth. Removing instances of the word Hell from the Bible is generally seen as a good thing, since eternal suffering is supposedly incompatible with the idea of a good God. To use terms about Hades and Gehenna instead helps establish the foreignness and pluralistic nature of the Bible. It becomes more of a cultural curiosity, rather than something serious that needs to be addressed.

My belief is simple enough: people deserve to have Bibles where EVERY word is translated into their language, not just the convenient ones. For over well over a thousand years, Hades, Gehenna, and Sheol were normatively translated to “Hell.” The Vulgate used the Latin word for Hell. The Wycliffe Bible used Hell. The King James used Hell. Hell is the best English rendering of those Greek and Hebrew words, and using them creates a theological consistency that’s necessary to have any honest understanding of the faith. At times, I see people blame the shortcomings of Latin and English for a translation as “shallow” as Hell. The Latin word for Hell, Infernum, is pretty close culturally to our understanding of Hell, so maybe that’s where things fell apart! They claim, “we just don’t have the same vocabulary available to us as the Greeks and the Hebrews did! The Latins mistranslated those word, and English kept those wrong connotations, but now we’re getting back to a purer understanding.” The argument sounds good on paper, until you realize that Latin and Greek were both spoken in the New Testament era and there were no ancient Greeks disgusted by the Latins use of their filthy word Infernum for being too far from their pure Hades. If similar translations were good enough for the Greeks, how they it be too poor for us? A mountain has been made out of a molehill. These words can be reasonably translated! We just don’t like the translation, either because it bores us or because it scares us.

By no means do I say any of this to imply that serious cultural and word studies ought to be off limits. Of course Christians should learn more and continually try to understand what the Scriptures say. But we ought to ask ourselves, why is Hell the single word subject to this intense modern scrutiny? Nobody is scrambling to know the cultural nuances behind ancient and modern understandings of Heaven or implying that a purer understanding of purgatory is just beyond our grasp if we stopped using English. Why are the words for Hell mysteriously the exact words we can’t translate? Why are some of the explanations for those words popularly offered up by detractors actively incorrect (no, Gehenna was not a garbage dump outside of town and not a shred of archaeological or historical evidence has ever implied that it was)? Why has an uptick in interest in universalism coincided with our unwillingness to use “Hell”? Why are the untranslated words mysteriously absent from all historical doctrinal standards? We could go on and on with pointed questions, but the point is that we’re being horribly inconsistent when we use Sheol, Hades, and Gehenna, and our inconsistency isn’t random. It’s the product of very particular thought processes, all of which are skeptical of historic Christian tradition. The evangelicals want to abandon tradition to get back to a “true sense” of the text, and the liberals want to abandon it because they just don’t like it, but they’re both missing out. The things we were handed down from our Christian forebears may not always be perfect, but in this particular instance, they’ve given us clear direction on how to reasonably translate words into our language, and their translations offer doctrinal clarity that you simply can’t find without it. Next time you come across a Sheol, Gehenna, or Hades, be a little spicy and just say “Hell.” The choice isn’t just defensible; it’s better.

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 Authentic Self

~ Vincent

This entry is part of a series called “The Gospel in a Postmodern World.” Learn more about the series here.
Preached on November 6, 2022
Scriptures: Psalm 51, Romans 3:9-20

This is sermon three in our series on the Gospel in a postmodern world.  In our first week, we talked a little about the current state of things in the West.  Statistically, Christians are more likely to lose their faith than in any prior generation and conversions are rarer than ever before.  Rather than assume that it’s just a product of every church being incompetent or suggesting that the Gospel needs a hip new revision for a new era, I went in a different direction.  I suggested that the current Western cultural movement, Postmodernism, is one that is especially challenging for Christianity to flourish in.  The doctrinal orthodoxy of pop-culture is not kind to our faith.  We can’t just keep doing the same old same old.  We have to accept that we are missionaries in this new world, and the first step for any missionary is to evaluate the culture.  Know it.  Know the advantages and the disadvantages.  Know the challenges and the easy moves.  Know what people expect.  Then you can go from there.

In week two, we talked about truth.  The postmodern world is typified as a post-truth world.  There is no popular framework for real, objective truth.  There’s only subjective truth.  What’s true for me is not what’s true for you.  Truth is little more than an opinion that’s accepted by all present.  This will not do.  Christianity, from its inception, claimed to be genuinely true, not partially true or a truth in a competing market of reasonable truth claims.   Christians have to be people concerned with OBJECTIVE truth, calling people back to a genuine reality that was created by God.

And then we had a slight departure from the series in Reformation Day.  Which was fun!  I love doing a little history.  We talked about Martin Luther and the origins of Protestantism.  We learned about sola Scriptura and sola fide.  And near the end of the sermon, I mentioned that works righteousness was making a comeback.  People today, if they assume a god exists, don’t see themselves as someone who needs salvation from the God in question.  All in all, they don’t tend to see themselves as something that needs saving.  Which makes sharing the gospel in a traditional way a challenge.  “Hey, did you know God will forgive all your sins in Jesus Christ?”  “What sins?”  “The ones you’ve done your whole life long!”  “That’s pretty presumptuous of you.  I haven’t really done any sins that matter.  Actually, I’m one of the good ones.  Shame on you for being so judgy.”

And some of you may feel as though that’s an untrue statement.  You might think, “Hey, most people would agree to their sinfulness on some level, Vincent.  You’re just being judgy.”  So let me clarify my observation here: how many people that you meet genuinely consider the core of their humanity to be tainted by original sin?  How many people genuinely think that they’re only capable of good by God’s grace, without which they are only able to sin?  Not a lot.  The average assumption about human nature isn’t that it’s hopelessly flawed.  It’s that it’s actually shockingly good.  Let’s think about a pop culture example that states this theory pretty clearly.

How many of you saw The Greatest Showman?  It came out about 5 years ago.  It was actually up for a few awards, if I remember correctly.  It’s this musical about the circus.  In that movie, there’s a group of people that belong to the circus’s freak show.  They’ve had hard lives.  They’ve been made fun of.  They’ve been ostracized.  But now?  Now that they’re in a community together, they’ve gained the confidence to be themselves… and they sing this power ballad: This is Me.

I am not a stranger to the dark
Hide away, they say
‘Cause we don’t want your broken parts
I’ve learned to be ashamed of all my scars
Run away, they say
No one’ll love you as you are
But I won’t let them break me down to dust
I know that there’s a place for us
For we are glorious
When the sharpest words wanna cut me down
I’m gonna send a flood, gonna drown ’em out
I am brave, I am bruised
I am who I’m meant to be, this is me
Look out ’cause here I come
And I’m marching on to the beat I drum
I’m not scared to be seen
I make no apologies, this is me.

What is the assumption about our singers?  That deep down, they’re incredibly beautiful.  They’re different in a way that scares the world, and so the world has tried to keep them down.   So they have to band together and resist the pull of society!  They have to learn to be authentically themselves in a hostile world. 

 The problem isn’t with me!  The problem is OUT THERE in society!

Now, obviously in that example, it’s hard not to agree.  Being mean to a bearded lady because they look different is unambiguously cruel.  But that ballad spoke to people from every walk of life.  It won the Golden Globe award for the Best Original Song, it was nominated for an academy award and a Tony, and it had millions of replays on every music streaming service you can think of.  And why?  Because it’s easy to relate.  It’s easy to feel like someone who is uniquely beautiful that’s being held back by society.  That’s part of the philosophical lens of the postmodern world.  Sin isn’t something in me.  I’m pretty amazing once you get to know me.  SOCIETY is the sinful thing.  If you tell me Im sinful, that’s not gonna resonate.  It’s mean.  I’m pretty good.  If you tell me society is sinful… oh, man.  AGREED.  Society IS dreadful.  We need to get rid of that thing so that I can start being my authentic self!

The orthodox Christian view is very different than the modern Western view.  And just to drive that point home, I want to look at two philosophers.  One a very orthodox Christian theologian.  One a philosopher of the Enlightenment.  Both men wrote a book named Confessions.  Both of those books detail a story in which they  stole produce.  But the takeaway for each man is totally different depending on how they think about sin and what needs redemption.

Our orthodox Christian is Augustine of Hippo.  In his Confessions (written sometime in the fourth century) when he was a teenager, he was hanging out with his friends one night… and they saw this tree of pears on someone else’s property.  And what did they do?  They stole the pears!  They snuck into the yard, filled a basket with the pears, and made off with them.  Why?  Not to eat them.  As a matter of fact, they had better pears at home.  They just threw the basket of pears to some pigs and laughed about the whole thing.  No, they stole them because it wasn’t allowed.  They wanted to break the rules.  They wanted to steal.  They wanted to destroy something beautiful!  He writes:

“It was foul, and I loved it. I loved my own undoing. I loved my error–not that for which I erred but the error itself. A depraved soul, falling away from security in thee to destruction in itself, seeking nothing from the shameful deed but shame itself.” 

-Augustine, Confessions

For Augustine, why did he destroy the pears?  Because something is wrong INSIDE.  There’s something deadly wrong.  That’s why we need salvation… because from our birth, something inside is veering us away from life towards death.  That’s sin.  That’s the problem.  Original sin was something humans were born with.  Because of humanity’s fall when Adam and Eve ate that fruit that God told them not to, humanity’s nature itself was changed.  We went from law-abiding creatures to law-breaking creatures.   So every one of us, regardless of what we’ve done specifically, is tainted by original sin.

Now, let’s move to Rousseau.  Rousseau was a philosopher in the Enlightenment and he ALSO wrote a book called Confessions.  Make no mistake, if you’re a nerd, you don’t accidentally write a book called Confessions without knowing what you’re doing.  He’s deliberately drawing his audience’s attention to Augustine.  And he ALSO includes a story about produce theft with friends!  But notice how he tweaked things.  He’s working for this guy whose mother has a little garden growing nearby.  And this boss asks him to regularly go steal a little bit of asparagus from that garden, sell the asparagus, and give him the proceeds.  He’s really uncomfortable that he would be asked to do this by an authority, but he wants to please the boss, so he does it.  And after a few times, he starts to become bitter.  He asks himself a question: “Why am I taking on all the risk with none of the reward?”  So he starts skimming a little off the top.  But that’s not really enough to make it worth the punishment that he would endure if he were caught stealing, so he starts stealing other little things that he finds around the house.  Apples.  Trinkets.  Anything that he can get his hands on.  He’s been put in an unjust situation!  In his mind, additional theft at least gives him what he’s owed for his boss’s unfair demands.  Notice what slowly twisted him.  Was it his inner desires?  No!  The real culprit was society!  He writes:

A continual repetition of ill treatment rendered me callous; it seemed a kind of composition for my crimes, which authorized me to continue them, and, instead of looking back at the punishment, I looked forward to revenge. Being beat like a slave, I judged I had a right to all the vices of one.

-Jean-Jaques Rousseau, Confessions

Rousseau doesn’t believe in original sin like Augustine does.  He believes in what I’ll call “the beauty of authenticity.”  He thinks people are fundamentally good.  The thing that causes trouble is society.  Society warps people.  It makes them want to be other than what they are.  They start to try to be better than.  Bigger than.  Smarter than.  They want to be the boss!  And for them to be better than, others have to be lesser than.  People, fundamentally good, are warped by the society around them.  People have to learn to let go of society’s corrupting grasp and be the beautiful creatures they always were.

Pears and asparagus.  Both stolen.  Both thefts encouraged by friends.  But the locus of conversion is very different.  Do we need to convert individual people?  Or do we need to convert society?

And some of you, I’m sure, are saying, “Vincent, slow down.  Aren’t they both right?  Isn’t it true that society needs changing and people need changing?”  Sure.  But what we’re trying to identify is the root problem.  If it’s society, I can set out to create bulwarks against unrealistic expectations and oppressive forces to recover the goodness that each person secretly holds in their hearts.  It’s not going to be easy, but it’s doable.  If the problem is that original sin has corrupted human hearts… well that’s a bigger challenge that we can tackle.  That’s when we need to get someone much bigger involved.

The seeds that Rousseau planted during the Enlightenment took root.  And they grew.  And today we see their expression in movies like The Greatest Showman.  People are wired to critique the world around them.  Ask anyone!  Ask, “What cultural forces are preventing you from being yourself?”  You’ll get a laundry list of answers.  Easy.  Ask someone, “What sins are preventing you from being yourself?”  and you’ll get a less warm answer.  Similarly, it’s really hard to talk to someone about a God that forgives their sins when people aren’t really concerned about their own sins.  It’s much easier to talk about a God that wants to change the world around me.  

And I include myself in that.  Remember, as we critique culture, we’re a part of it.  We don’t get to say, “This is what other people do!”  No, this is what WE do too.  It’s really hard to talk about personal sin, it’s easy to talk about societal sin.  That isn’t a natural human instinct to push the blame onto someone else.  It’s a cultural shift.  The early Methodists were required to be in small groups.  You couldn’t be a Methodist without being in a small group.  It didn’t work that way.  And during your small group, you had confession time.  With everyone there.  And you named every sin that you were wrestling with.  And everyone there prayed for God to help you with those sins.  Can you imagine doing that today?  No way!  That sounds insane!  Give me a justice group or something.  Let me go solve the problem OUT THERE!  But the problem in here?  Psht.  Get that outta here.  It’s good enough.

So let’s think about this shift.  Can Christianity let go of its commitment to original sin and shift to focus primarily on societal sin?  No.  No we can’t.  That’s not to say we can’t acknowledge that there’s sin out there.  It’s not to say that we can’t work to try to help those affected by it.  But we can’t say, “people are fundamentally good and we just need to work on some really good laws until we get it just right and THEN everything will be good.”  We can’t.  The problem is deeper than that.  According to the Bible, we could come up with the most perfect society in the world, all the best laws, totally remove all oppressive forces, totally remove all need to feel better than or worse than… and we’d still manage to mess it up.

Turn in your Bible to Romans 3 verse 9:

What shall we conclude then? Do we have any advantage? Not at all! For we have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin. As it is written:
“There is no one righteous, not even one;
    there is no one who understands;
    there is no one who seeks God.
All have turned away,
    they have together become worthless;
there is no one who does good,
    not even one.”
“Their throats are open graves;
    their tongues practice deceit.”
“The poison of vipers is on their lips.”
“Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.”
“Their feet are swift to shed blood;
ruin and misery mark their ways,
and the way of peace they do not know.”
“There is no fear of God before their eyes.”


Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. Therefore no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of our sin.

Most of what we have in this section is just Paul quoting other parts of the Bible.  He’s quoting several different psalms and Isaiah.  Why?  To talk about our sin.  And is this because Paul hates people?  Not at all.  He thinks that people have a problem that’s deeper than societal pressures.  He thinks our hearts are fundamentally infected.  And if you have an infection in your heart, do you worry about polishing up your social interactions?  Do you say, “Man, I just try harder and the infection will just go away!”  No.  You don’t solve an infection with willpower. You call a doctor.  Paul is trying to tell us that there’s this infection in our hearts.  And he knows the doctor: Jesus.

What shall we conclude then? Do we have any advantage? Not at all! For we have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin

What’s going on here?  Paul is addressing whether or not Jews have an advantage over Gentiles in regard to sin.  After all, they had the law, right?  Surely someone who knows the law will be in less trouble than someone who doesn’t have the law!  They’ve got everything right there!  You might think about this as though it’s about church people today.  Don’t we have an advantage against sinning?  We’ve got the Bible!  We’ve got church tradition!  But what does Paul say?  NO!  You’re not any better off!  You’re a sinner.  You’ve got the same infection that they’ve got.  You need a doctor just as bad.  Sin isn’t just a problem that requires some better laws.  It’s deeper than that.  You need something bigger.  

And now Paul gives us that big list of Scripture quotes:

“There is no one righteous, not even one;
    there is no one who understands;
    there is no one who seeks God.
All have turned away,
    they have together become worthless;
there is no one who does good,
    not even one.”
“Their throats are open graves;
    their tongues practice deceit.”
“The poison of vipers is on their lips.”
“Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.”
“Their feet are swift to shed blood;
ruin and misery mark their ways,
and the way of peace they do not know.”
“There is no fear of God before their eyes.”

Look at what he’s doing here.  He’s naming all of humanity first off.  Little babies.  Old folks.  Everyone.  Nobody is righteous.  Not one.  All have turned away.  And now he goes all throughout the human body to show just how lost we are.  Our throats.  Our tongues.  Our mouths.  Our feet.  From head to toe: infected by sin.

And every so often, there’s someone who gets tripped up by that word “fear.”  Fear of God means respect in this context.  Don’t get tripped up.  It’s reverence in the face of his awesome majesty.  It’s the sobering recognition that he’s in charge of every aspect of everything ever.  It’s that feeling of proper smallness in the face of infinite bigness.  It’s not fear that he’ll hurt you.  That’s not what Paul is trying to say.  He’s saying, nobody has a right relationship with God.  Not one of us.  

Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. Therefore no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of our sin.

The problem should be clear at this point.  It’s not JUST what’s outside.  Sure that’s wrong.  But more than that, there’s a problem inside.  Let’s read on to see the solution.

But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.

There’s the solution.  Faith in Christ is the only thing that can cure us.  Our works aren’t enough.  Just like with Martin Luther last week, you can try and try and try and no amount of effort will ever be enough to solve the problem.  Every person on earth is redeemed not by works, but by faith. A commentator named Handley Moule writes: “The harlot, the liar, the murderer, are short of it; but so are you. Perhaps they stand at the bottom of a mine, and you on the crest of an Alp; but you are as little able to touch the stars as they.” Everyone falls short, but everyone can be justified freely by His grace. The doctrine of original sin matters because you can’t cure a disease that you don’t know about.  If we say we’re all good inside and it’s just a matter of outer troubles, we’re addressing the wrong problem.

But what do we do if maintaining sinfulness is a part of the core Christian thing?  How do we evangelize to people who don’t see themselves as sinful?  If you don’t need to be saved, how can I introduce a savior? I spoke with a campus minister from the university recently, and he actually brought this up.  He mentioned that evangelizing to people by talking about their sinfulness and need for a savior might have worked 50 or 60 years ago, but today, it’s just a non-starter.  People don’t recognize their personal sin or need for a savior.  But something that has proven to be especially effective is evangelism about relationship.  We live in a timeframe where people are more isolated than ever.  In Robert Putnam’s landmark study, Bowling Alone, one of the metrics he used to check societal isolation was the size of groups that people went bowling in.  Now, people go bowling by themselves more than ever.  Bowling leagues are much smaller than they were in the past.  And that’s just the metric he chose as his central conversation piece for the book.  Social clubs are dying in droves, petitions are less common than ever, people know their neighbors less, people meet their friends more rarely.  Community is at an all time low.  People are lonely.  This campus minister recognized that and used it to evangelize.  He talked to people about how God wants to be in relationship with them, despite all the ways they’ve been pushing him away.  THAT worked.  THAT was effective at opening a conversation about God.

People may not feel guilty, but they feel alone.  They know that something is wrong in this world and they’re desperately trying to fix it.  Do they need to know about sin?  Yes.  Absolutely.  But leading with that isn’t going to make sense.  It’s going to feel like an attack and people will defend against an attack.  Guilt versus innocence may not make sense, but loneliness and closeness do.  It’s not a perfect substitute.  After all, if I’ve hurt God, can’t I do something to make it better?  There’s that gap where it’s not completely addressing the sin problem.  But, you know, it’s not works-centric and it’s still accurate.  Sin is a doctrine that will probably take some time for people to understand in our era.  That’s ok.  Not everything will make sense all at once.  Sometimes, you just need to get a foot in the door and see where things go.  When I was first Christian, I barely had anything that looked like a genuine Christian faith.  The only doctrines I thought seemed good were Heaven and a good God.  The rest just seemed crazy!  But the deeper doctrines need more time to teach.  I was hooked by the lure of eternity and and God pulled me in from there.

As we evangelize today, it’s important to recognize that people won’t see themselves as sinful.  This is a hard doctrine.  And unlike objective truth, a debate won’t gain us any ground.  But we can pivot.  We can acknowledge that we are far from God.  Our relationship is weak.  Only through Christ’s sacrifice can we approach God afresh.  And when people start to encounter God, they’ll recognize that it’s not enough to just say hi.  Something more is necessary.  Something that transforms what they are into what they were always supposed to be.  And it’s a good reminder for us too.  When we don’t feel particularly sinful.  When we’re convinced that we’re just a good person trapped in crummy circumstances that someone else really ought to clean up… well that’s when we need to recognize that our relationship with God is weak.  If we’re blaming the world as though he doesn’t know what’s going on in it, we need to spend some time with him.  Only then will we start to see the transformation that we need.

Amen.

Reformation Day

~ Vincent

This entry is part of a series called “The Gospel in a Postmodern World.” Learn more about the series here.
Preached at The Plains United Methodist Church on October 30, 2022
Scriptures: 2 Peter 1:10-21, Romans 1:8-17

Happy Reformation Day, everyone!

I’ve noticed a lot of Methodist churches don’t regularly celebrate Reformation Day, which is a shame.  It’s a great opportunity to look back at our own history; to see where we’re from and what some of our core DNA is.  We need to give it the attention it deserves.  At one of my past appointments, I spoke about Martin Luther during the sermon, and afterwards a woman came up to me and said, “Wow, Martin sounds great!  I haven’t met him yet.  Does he go to the other service?”  Who can’t blame her for what she doesn’t know?  It’s on us pastors for not teaching it enough.

For those curious, Martin Luther did not go to the other service. Martin Luther lived in the 16th century.  He was the founder of Protestantism.  Without him there would be no Methodists!  There would be no Anglicans from which Methodists could come!  Not only would there be no Protestants, but what we know today as the Roman Catholic Church would look different as well.  Martin Luther is a big deal so I think it’s worth a little time to tell his story and remember about one of the great Protestant heroes.  

I want you to imagine that the year is 1521. You are in an imperial court in the city of Worms, a city that’s in what we know today as Germany, but was known back then as a part of the Holy Roman Empire.  This room is full of some of the most powerful people in the world.  Among them is Charles V, the singular man who is the archduke of Austria, the Prince of Spain, the lord of the Netherlands, the duke of Burgundy, and the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.  He is a big deal.  There’s also a papal envoy dressed in some of the finest clothes imaginable.  In front of that envoy, a monk stands next to a pile of books.

The envoy speaks: “Martin Luther, this court has reconvened.  Yesterday we asked you two questions.  The first: ‘Are you the author of these books in front of you?’  You answered yes.  Our second question: “Do you renounce the ideas contained therein and recant your heresy?’  You asked to be granted a 24-hour recess.  This was granted, but we are back today, Mr Luther, and we need an answer.  Do you renounce the ideas contained within these books and recant your heresy?”

You wouldn’t have expected things to turn out like this given where this story starts.  It starts in a little kingdom called Saxony.   Saxony was not the kind of place where life-altering things tended to happen.  It was in Northern Germany.  Northern Germany wasn’t well developed.  It was really rural.  Southern Germany had a lot of stuff.  Northern Italy had a lot of stuff.  Northern Germany?  Not so much.  There were no ruins of an old Empire to build on.  There were no great trade routes.  Most of their top items to sell were natural resources; grain, fish and minerals.  Saxony wasn’t the kind of place where big things happened. 

None of that was helped by the politics of Saxony only a few generations back.  When King William II of Saxony died, his two sons split the kingdom and each inherited half of it.  The elder brother got to choose how the lands were split, and the younger brother got to choose which area he wanted to inherit.  And so the elder split the lands: one of the two parcels was a long, twisty portion of land that was mostly rural, and the other was a little clump of land that had all of the major cities in it.  The choice fell to the younger brother: did he want to rule the urban center of the lands, or the larger rural area?  He took the urban area, leaving the elder brother, a man by the name of Ernest, the jaggedy rural strip.

Since Ernest was the elder and got second pick of the lands, he got something extra: the title “Elector of the Holy Roman Empire.”   I don’t want to get too far into the weeds describing the political system of 16th century Germanic kingdoms, but here’s a really basic understanding: imagine if the United States had a weak federal government and strong state governments.  In this model, the president would still exist, but he would appear on the global stage to represent the collective interest of the states.  Individual states would have a lot of autonomy.  The president wouldn’t really have much say over them.  That’s basically what the Holy Roman Empire was.  There were a bunch of really small kingdoms, some so small that they were just singular cities, all bound together in mutual interest and represented by an emperor that they got to elect.  Not everyone got to vote for the emperor though.  Only a very small group called “the electors” got to vote.  Ernest may have inherited the rural lands, but he was an elector, and that made him, strangely, an important man with a somewhat unimportant kingdom.

That’s the legacy of 16th century Saxony.  Not exactly the center of the world.  But when Ernest passed away, his son, Frederick the Wise, was looking to change all that.  Frederick was bound and determined to make little Saxony the kind of place where things happened.  The capital of Saxony, Wittenberg, only had 2,000 people in it and 400 buildings, but it was the biggest city there was in Saxony, so that’s where he started.  He created two plans to make Wittenberg a destination for people all over the world.

The first was to create the biggest collection of relics the world had ever seen.  Relics were basically Christian artifacts.  The presiding theory of the day was if you looked at a relic God would bless you.  It was a very mechanistic process.  Look at the thing?  Get the blessing.  Frederick started collecting relics and managed to get his hands on over eighteen thousand of them.  He even managed to collect a vial of milk from the Virgin Mary and a twig from the burning bush.  Now, you can decide if you think those relics were legitimate or not, but people at the time thought they were VERY legitimate.  Pilgrims started flocking to Saxony to see all of his relics laid out in Wittenberg’s chapel.  They wanted to soak up all of God’s grace that they could!

Frederick’s other plan was to build a university in Wittenberg.  He’d build a massive, top-notch university and people would come from all over the place to attend!  Maybe, some of them would even stick around and become citizens of Saxony.  So he started hiring professors.  He even bought one of those newfangled printing presses!  Printing presses were a bit of a curiosity at this point.  Books weren’t all that common.  They weren’t even written in language that the average person understood.  They were only in Latin, the language of scholars.  Frederick wasn’t sure how exactly this printing press was going to help him, but new things were exciting and his university would have nothing less but the very latest in technology.

Even with Frederick’s ambitious plans in full swing, the average person would not have expected much from little Saxony.  Nor would people have looked at the hero of the Reformation, Martin Luther, and expected great things from him.  Martin was from a middle-class family.  His dad owned a mining business and managed the business side of things, which was both expensive and risky.  He had to take out loans to buy the mining rights to a piece of land and he never knew when there might be a cave-in or flooded tunnel that would impact his ability to pay off the loan properly.  He spent most of his life in debt as he took out and paid off different loans, but all things considered, he was pretty good at what he did.  The mining business did well enough, so he sent his son, Martin, off to college in a place called Erfurt, a big city in the area, in the hopes that he would become a lawyer.  If he was a lawyer, Martin would be able to help the family business a lot.

That was not to be.  Martin went to college, and one day, while he was coming back to campus from a little trip, there was a storm.  We’re not just talking about a little rain. We’re talking about howling winds crashing thunder!  Lightning struck right next to him!  He was sure he was going to die.  He prayed to God, “Let me live through this and I will do whatever you want. I will give my whole life to you,” and the storm subsided.  So, true to his word, he gave his life to God and became a monk.  His father was not particularly enthusiastic at first, but he warmed up to it over time. He saw his son’s sincerity and wanted what was best for him.  So, Martin started living in his local Augustinian monastery there in Erfurt.  He found a mentor that he really admired.  Things were going well!  Unfortunately, his mentor moved away.  There was this little university that was just getting started up in Saxony’s capital, Wittenberg, and it was hiring up all of the professors that it could.  Since Martin’s mentor was both a monk and a professor, he took a job and transferred over to a monastery in Wittenberg.  Unfortunately, Martin didn’t have a lot of friends around the Erfurt monastery after his mentor left.  The other monks weren’t on the same page as him.  They decided to transfer him to their branch in Wittenberg so that he would be near his old friend and out of their way.  When you’re a monk, you don’t really get a say in the matter.  They’re not asking if you’d like to be transferred; they’re telling you that you’re getting transferred.

You might think that Martin would be overjoyed to be back with his friend.  He was not.  He was really frustrated.  Wittenberg was full of nothing!  All of Saxony was full of nothing!  That was the kind of place where barbarians settled!  Nonetheless, as he settled in, things turned out pretty well for him.  He became a pastor and worked at the local church.  His mentor helped him get on-staff at the university where he taught as the professor of biblical theology.  Everything was slowly turning out ok.

Now we have the right person (Martin) in the right place (Wittenberg) for the Reformation to kick off, but there’s one critical element we haven’t discussed: the powder keg.  The event that blew up and kicked everything off.  At the time, the Catholic Church was selling something called indulgences.   An indulgence was basically a little certificate from the pope that said all of your sins were forgiven.  They were also transferable.  You could buy one and apply the forgiveness to someone else.  A lot of people would buy them for their dead relatives.  The popular assumption of the day was that your dead relatives were probably in purgatory.  Heaven was only for the super holy Christians, Hell was for non-Christians, and purgatory was for Christians that were too sinful to make it into Heaven.  God would purify them over the course of a few thousand years until they had been fully cleansed of their sins.  That process of purification was said to be pretty unpleasant, so you wanted to help your dear sweet relatives get out of there in any way you could.  Buying the pope’s indulgences was the best way to get grandma to Heaven.

I’m sure many of you find that thought process unthinkable, but there’s a long series of ideas that were accepted over time before selling indulgences started to make sense.  I won’t go through all of it, but it starts with ideas like, “Well, if you go to a holy site, isn’t it reasonable to think that God would bless you?”  Sure, ok, that makes sense.  God probably blesses pilgrims that go to holy sites.  “Well, what if Christians do something to help others?  Like defending them from persecutors by going on crusade?  Will God bless them for doing that?”  Ok, sure, intellectual baggage of the crusades aside, maybe it’s reasonable that God would bless people that set out to help others in unfortunate circumstances.  “Well now, what if you donate a large amount of money so that someone else can do those things?  Wouldn’t that also deserve a blessing?  Because you’re the reason someone else can do it.”  Right there, you’ve already got the fundamental framework for indulgences.  You’re just a hop, skip, and a jump away from writing certificates. 

Martin hated the church’s sale of indulgences.  They were getting ready to sell them in Saxony for the third time in five years.  Saxony wasn’t wealthy!  Why did they keep selling them there?  And all the money from the indulgences was going to fund repairs of Saint Peter’s Basilica, a really fancy church in Italy.  Why did the pope need the money of peasants to fund a church for the wealthy?  And Martin saw the negative effects that indulgence sals had on people, both rich and poor.  Poor people that had to scrimp and save so they could buy a certificate for grandma to go to Heaven.  The rich, on the other hand, didn’t worry as much about living a Christian life when indulgences were around.  They could do whatever they wanted as long as they made sure to grab a certificate for themselves when they were done.  The whole thing had gotten completely out of hand.

As this was happening, Martin had a rapid spurt of spiritual growth.  He was someone who seemed to have it all: he was a professor, he was a monk, and he knew his Bible forward and back!  But he had a dark secret: he hated God.  Martin hated God because he thought that he would never be good enough for him.  The popular theory to explain how law and grace functioned in the Christian’s life was via something called “imbued grace.”  They thought that God gave you enough of his grace to go out and keep the law pretty well.  If you made mistakes, well, then God would be angry.  If you asked for forgiveness, he might punish you a little less severely, but you would still be punished to some degree.  And after it was done, you were expected to go and live a perfect life again.  Martin believed it, just like everyone else, and so he tried very hard to live a life without sin.  He realized that when he really thought about what he had done on a given day, there was always sin to be uncovered.  There was always a moment when he was jealous or when he was short with someone, and so God was always angry and waiting for him to do better.  His best wasn’t good enough.

But everything changed when he was teaching a class on Romans.  Romans is like that.  Some of the most famous Christians of all time converted while reading Romans. Saint Augustine, one of the most famous Christians of the 4th Century, converted while reading Romans.  Martin Luther converted while reading Romans.  John Wesley converted while reading Romans.  The book of Romans is powerful.   Let’s look at one of the passages that was on the top of his mind.  This is Romans 1:8-17:

First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you,because your faith is being reported all over the world.

This is a letter from Paul to Roman Christians and you can see that he’s impressed with them.  He’s impressed that they have such incredible faith in a place like Rome.  Christians in Rome endured a lot of persecution.  Torture and even death, depending on who was in charge at the time.  It would have been incredibly dangerous.  You would need an impenetrable faith!  But this is the kind of church where people had impenetrable faith.  They didn’t stumble; they endured.

God, whom I serve in my spirit in preaching the gospel of his Son, is my witness how constantly I remember you in my prayers at all times; and I pray that now at last by God’s will the way may be opened for me to come to you.

In other words, he wants to visit them.

I long to see you so that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to make you strong— that is, that you and I may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith. 

I love the humility here.  One of the great apostles says, “I want to give you a gift and the gift… is that you and I get to sit down and build each other up.” Faith is not just a one-way street!  It’s something that takes people coming together.  People that are mature and very wise and people that are brand new!  We all stand to learn and be built up by one another.

I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that I planned many times to come to you (but have been prevented from doing so until now) in order that I might have a harvest among you, just as I have had among the other Gentiles. I am obligated both to Greeks and non-Greeks, both to the wise and the foolish. That is why I am so eager to preach the gospel also to you who are in Rome. For I am not ashamed of the gospel, 

The gospel would have seemed pretty ridiculous by a lot of the popular philosophies of the day.  The average Roman would think that the gospel was nonsense! “Your God’s so great? Well, why’d he get crucified then?  A powerful god doesn’t end up dying on a cross.  I can find a god more worthy of my worship than that.”  The average Jewish person would have been equally disinterested: “Your god is supposedly great, but he hasn’t delivered us from the Romans.  I don’t see any grand miracles that he’s done.  He rose from the dead and apparently did nothing worthy of note for me.”

But Paul is not ashamed of the gospel, regardless of what others think! He goes on to say why:

because it is the power of God 

How often do you think about the gospel in that way?  How often do you understand it not just as a collection of words, but as something powerful?  As words that crackle with energy?   The gospel is the power of God!  It’s not just something for us to mull over in our spare time.  It’s the kind of force that changes hearts and minds.

For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”

This whole time, Martin had been trying to be good enough.  And here we see one of the major themes that comes up again and again throughout Romans: you’ll never be good enough to earn salvation.  On our own, we are not capable of perfectly keeping God’s law.  God grants us salvation not because of our works, but through faith in Christ.  When we reach out and trust in him, that makes all the difference.  Our salvation isn’t through legalism.  It’s through love! God looks down and sees not a guilty person, but someone who has been cleansed!  Who is innocent!  Who is pure!  Someone covered by the perfection of Christ.

We are saved by faith, not works.  Does that mean we should go on sinning?  By no means!  Paul specifically says that later in this same letter to the Romans.  But if our salvation isn’t based on legalism, we should be able to act however we want, right?  No!  Paul says that a true Christian should be transformed through their encounter with God.  We shouldn’t want to sin anymore.  We should be totally different creatures, empowered by God to seek what is right instead of what is wrong. And besides that, our motivations for doing what’s right should change.  We don’t keep the law out of fear of God’s punishment.  We do it out of fear of hurting our relationship with him.  We want to make him happy.  We should naturally want to honor and cherish the one we love.  Our relationship with God may not be based on maintaining a code of conduct, but we should still want to honor the God who saved us with everything we do.

And here, inspired by the words of Scripture, we see Martin articulate one of his big ideas: sola fide.  We are saved by faith in Christ alone, not by our works.  Not our abilities.  Not because we’re good enough, but because we have faith in Jesus.  We reach out to him and accept the sacrifice he made on our behalf.  Martin’s big idea didn’t come from the intellectual trends of the day, but through scripture alone.  There’s another one of his big ideas: sola Scriptura.  That’s Latin for “by Scripture alone.”  Scripture is the only authority that we can rely on to ensure that we’re practicing real Christianity and not just something that we made up.

Now we’ve got the who, the where, and the what.  Everything is in place.  Martin Luther started preaching what he had learned in Romans.  And the indulgence sellers came into Saxony and started preaching their doctrines.  This is a selection from the sermon of a man named Johann Tetzel.  He was selling indulgences in Wittenberg, and this is what he preached:

You should know that all who confess and in penance put alms into the coffer according to the council of the confessor, will obtain complete remission of all of their sins…  Why are you standing there?  Run for the salvation of your souls!…  Don’t you hear the voices of your wailing dead parents and others who say, “Have mercy on me, have mercy on me, because we are in severe punishment and pain.  From this you could redeem us with 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 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?”  (20-21, A Sermon, Johann Tetzel, as found in The Protestant Reformation, Hillerbrand)

THAT was the last straw.  THAT was what made Martin Luther write his ninety-five theses.  Ninety-five reasons why indulgences were bad! Ninety-five reasons that the pope was wrong! Ninety-five ways the church was failing!  And he didn’t just keep this debate in academic halls. He started writing books.  These were books written in a language that regular people could actually read.  He wrote for the average person because he thought they deserved to know what was going on.  He also made sure that people had access to the Bible in their own language so they didn’t have to take his word for it.  They could go to the Word of God and look for themselves!  He looked to Scripture alone (sola Scriptura) to find the truth, and now everyone else could do the same.  Because even if he was eloquent, his words weren’t worth anything.  God’s word was worth something.  It was and still is the final authority on all things.

Some people get a little confused about Luther’s relationship with tradition They think he brought this new, unheard of understanding to the Scriptures and represented a radical break in Christianity from its past.  That is not the case.  Yes, he trusted Scripture alone as the ultimate authority, but that doesn’t mean he was ignorant of tradition or uninterested in the Christians that went before him.  Read some of his writings sometime!  You won’t make it far without finding a citation from one of the great thinkers from the first 1500 years of the faith.  The man was a professor that sold books.  His goal wasn’t to prevent people from reading and learning from those who went before him!  His goal was to reconnect with early Christianity and recover the faith from people who had slowly twisted it over the years.  Sola Scriptura doesn’t mean separating yourself from the collected body of Scriptural knowledge and just believing whatever you want to believe about the Bible.  It means learning as much about it as you can about God’s word, educating yourself on what it’s saying to you, and taking it as the authority above any earthly thinker, regardless of how popular they might be.

Well, after he posted his ninety-five theses, things got difficult.  It turns out posting ninety-five reasons why the pope is wrong doesn’t exactly put you in his good graces, and in those days, the pope was shockingly powerful.  Pope Leo X wrote a papal decree called Exsurge Domine, which is Latin for “Arise, O Lord.”  It basically said: “Martin Luther, turn from your heresy or burn for your heresy.  The choice is yours.”  And that brings us back to where we started: an imperial court where a monk is being questioned.  He was asked, “Do you recant your heresy?”  Here is how he responded:

“Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the holy Scriptures or someone can reasonably prove to me that I have erred (for I neither believe in the pope nor the councils alone since it has been established that they often erred and contradicted themselves) I am bound by the Scriptures which I have cited at length and my conscience has been taken captive by the word of God. I am neither able nor willing to recant. Here I stand. I can do no other.”

From there, things got really crazy.  He was whisked back to Saxony, where he went into hiding.  Remember how Frederick the Wise was deeply invested in making Saxony a place where things happen?  Turns out that no matter how devoutly Catholic he was, he wasn’t willing to give over someone who attracted as much attention and sold as many books as Martin Luther.  Martin’s big ideas kept spreading, and more and more people started hearing the things that he was saying.  That is how Protestantism started.

Why do I think this story is worth our consideration?  It’s not like anybody is going around selling indulgences today, right?  After all, why would they?  The average person isn’t convinced they’re particularly sinful.  They may not perceive themselves to be perfect, but they don’t think they’re a bad person, and that ought to be good enough for God.  Works righteousness has made a significant comeback in the modern era; the bar for salvation-worthy works is just a lot lower than it was in Luther’s day.

People simply don’t understand the seriousness of sin anymore!  In an environment like this, we need to remember our solas: sola fide and sola Scriptura.  From whence comes our salvation?  Not from ourselves!  Contrary to popular belief, we’re not particularly good.  We’re saved because God is particularly good.  He’s the only one with the power to save us.  The best thing we can do is to trust our lives in his hands.  To have complete and total faith in him, rather than ourselves.  Sola fide.  And how do we know that this is the case?  Not because we’ve kept up with the philosophical trends of the day particularly well or because we’ve read the articles that have harvested the most clicks.  No.  Our authority is not the shifting sands of public opinion.  It’s Scripture alone. Sola Scriptura.  We look to the word of God and that is our rock and our anchor.

Aside from the solas, Luther’s boldness is so incredible.  He stands for what’s true, even knowing that he might be killed for it.  That’s the level of boldness that the church desperately needs to reclaim today.  Only a few generations ago, it was socially advantageous to participate in a church.  It didn’t matter if someone believed any of it; they were happy just to be participating in a normative institution of American culture and reaping the benefits that came along with it.  You can find records where businessmen with almost no interest in religion move to a new town and immediately join the local church.  Why?  So that they can promote their business and be seen talking to the right sort of people.  People gave up their Sunday mornings to get something tangible.  Churches that participated in that cultural quid pro quo are in a hard place today.  Why?  Because things don’t work that way anymore.  Nobody stands to gain new clients or a good reputation because they go to a local church.  At best, the church is neutral on both of those axes, and at worst, it may actually cost them a good reputation to be a regular participant in an orthodox church.  The next generation of Christians will not be enticed into Christianity because they stand to gain anything in the secular world.  To the contrary, they will have to pay something.

Martin Luther was willing to pay any price when it came to keeping the word of God.  I pray that each of us would be willing to do the same should it fall to us.

Amen.

Relative Truth

~ Vincent

This entry is part of a series called “The Gospel in a Postmodern World.” Learn more about the series here.
Preached at The Plains United Methodist Church on October 23, 2022
Scriptures: John 14:5-14, Acts 4:1-13

If you missed last week, we’re doing a series about culture.  Specifically, modern Western culture.  The postmodern era has brought tremendous challenges both to our own discipleship and our ability to share the faith with others, so we’re going to think about what this postmodern era is.  How it functions.  What are these challenges that it has brought and how can we navigate them well?

There’s no more obvious place to start than a conversation about truth.  Postmodernism is defined by a plurality of truths.  The word “truth” may as well be translated into “perspective” or “healthy mindset.”  It would function almost the same.  Think about when you’ve heard people say things like, “I need to speak my truth.”  My truth?  What is my truth?  In no other era would there be this assumption that your truth is different than my truth and our two truths might contradict each other, but they’re both true.  That would have been insane!  Either something IS or it IS NOT truth!  There can’t be two contradictory truths at the same time.  But here and now?  That’s the norm.  Truth is perspective.  It’s whatever is healthy (by our definition) for us.  It’s certainly not a single unified thing that is the same for everyone.

To see this in action, one need look no further than that reality show legend, Survivor.  Yes, I still watch the occasional season of Survivor.  I know it lost it’s magic somewhere around season 32, but I just can’t help myself sometimes.  In any case, in one episode, a tribe was debating which person they should vote out that night.  It was a particularly nasty conversation.  And of course, nobody’s story is lining up.  They all have their own idea about how things should unfold based on who they think the heroes are and who they think the villains are; who is helpful and who is harmful.  This goes on for a while before one woman finally calms everyone down and said, ““You have your truth, I have my truth, and we have to decide how to navigate in the light of all of these truths at tribal council tonight.”  Everyone stopped fighting and nodded as though she’d said something very wise.  Sure enough, there was a delicate peace until the vote that night.

That’s what we’re talking about right there!  Notice that she didn’t say, “We each have our own perspective.”  That would have been accurate, but she didn’t say that.  She said, “We each have our truth.”  As though there were a million different, completely accurate realities that had played out.  Nobody was actually wrong.  Nobody had a warped perception or different goals.  No, they had their own truth.  And arguing wasn’t pointless because they were all competing to be the last one standing on a gameshow and naturally had conflicting goals.  No!  There were just so many truths that they couldn’t be navigated fairly.  To say, “You’re wrong.”  would have been chaos!  To say, “I disagree” wasn’t worth it!   They all had to all be right to stop the fighting, which was totally insane to the viewers at home!  Because we knew what was happening behind the scenes!  We knew that half of the people were lying through their teeth to try to get their way!  They were obviously more interested in winning the game than discovering any kind of truth!  But no.  They all had their own truth.

Why was that woman’s plea so effective?  Surely it would have been easier to just say that we all have our own ideas and settle things at tribal council.  But no.  Each of the players had something more than ideas.  They had their truth.  Social cohesion within the group was only possible insofar as they were willing to give up their claim to the truth.  It didn’t matter if you were honest or dishonest, winning or losing, none of that mattered.  Unity was possible by giving up on truth.  Was it a true unity?  Not really.  But it was an easy unity.  One in which everyone was equally wrong.

That same spirit is present in the Church.  In an effort to be socially acceptable in this new era, in an effort to get a seat at the table, we often give up claims to absolute truth.  Rather than honestly tell people who believe totally different things, “I think you’re wrong,” there’s a temptation to say, “we’re both equally right in our own way.”

There’s an anecdote that I occasionally hear people tell about religious truth.  There are three blindfolded men all in the same room as an elephant.  The first man is standing near its head, so he reaches out and touches its trunk and says, “This animal feels like a snake!”  The second man is near the back of the elephant and he’s sitting down.  He touches the elephant’s leg and says, “No!  It’s like a tree!”  The third man is standing on a ladder, and he reaches out and feels the bristly hairs on the elephant’s back and says, “Nah, it’s probably a horse.”  Who was right?  All of them.  They only knew what their circumstances allowed, but they were all right in their own way.  The implication here is that all religions are fundamentally the same.  All a little wrong.  All a little right.  Who’s to say what’s genuinely real?  But note that for the story to exist at all, there has to be someone in the room that’s seeing these weirdly-positioned men with the elephant!  Otherwise, there would be no story to tell!  Someone has to have an objective point of view.  Chrisitians used to feel comfortable claiming to be that person.  We were the ones who saw when everyone else was blindfolded!  But now?  Now things seem more complicated.

You heard our first passage earlier today.  Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me.”  Classic.  That phrase alone makes Jesus such a challenge in a postmodern world, because he doesn’t claim to have a truth.  He claims to be THE truth.  The only truth.  That makes people bristle.  Even pastors!  In one Bible study I attended, someone read this passage and said, “This is why evangelism is so important.  Because Jesus is the only way.  He said so right here.”  Then the pastor spoke up.  “Well, hold on now.  It might say that he is THE way, but I think we need some ontological humility.  We don’t know how Jesus comes to others and how he works with people that we don’t know.  This is him speaking to us, but not to them.  I prefer to imagine him saying, ‘I am a truth, a way, and a life.’  That’s much closer to what he was actually trying to say.”  Where were that pastor’s ideas grounded?  Certainly not in the Bible.  Even if you take these passages back to the Greek, each of those words, way, truth, and life, are preceded by the Greek word “hay.”  That’s an exclusive singular word, not a generic singular.  “The” is undoubtedly the proper translation, not “a”.  And “except through me” could more literally be translated as “if not by me.”  Again, very exclusivist language here.  No, the hesitation wasn’t rooted in the Bible.  It was rooted in postmodern thought.  For Jesus to say that he was THE way was terrifying.  Far too cocky.  Far too self-assured.  And so, to translate the Bible “with humility,” it had to deliberately be mistranslated.  That’s how frightening absolute truth claims are in the modern world.

And it’s not just claims in the Bible that are “adjusted.”  It’s the way we consider our own faith.  A different pastor explained to me once that they believed that they believed that Jesus was God.  I said, “So you believe that’s true, in other words.”  And they said, “I wouldn’t go that far.  I believe that it’s my belief.  I don’t feel comfortable talking about what’s true.  Who am I to say what’s true?”  Who am I to say what’s true… And we wonder why evangelism has fallen on such hard times.  “Hello, I want to talk to you about Jesus.  I believe it’s my belief that he’s a way to living.  And if you don’t like that, it may not be your truth, but it’s my truth.”  What a life-changing prospect to be given something that’s so totally peripheral to your existence.

Postmodern life has shifted the way we think.  We’re afraid of admitting that we have THE truth to all of existence.  We’re afraid of a Jesus that would actually claim to be THE truth.  And so we change our language to appeal to a new culture.  What if Jesus was just an option?  Just a way.  Just a belief you can hold.  And if you don’t like him, that’s fine!  But if you do, then come to church.  Jesus becomes a product in the grand supermarket of beliefs.  He’s great!  Unless he’s not the product you’re looking for, in which case just go a few isles over and try out buddhism or agnosticism or any other thing.   The customer is always right!  Find what suits you.  That’s your truth.

In the battle for people’s hearts and minds, Christians have made a strategic retreat from the concept of absolute truth in the hopes of gaining ground later on other topics.  But when you retreat from a concept as central to the Christian message as truth, everything else collapses after it.  What began as a strategic retreat turned out to be a rout, stacking loss after loss after loss.  

To be a Christian in the postmodern era, we have to wake up to the core of what Jesus was and what we’re supposed to be.  We have to yearn for truth.  Not the safe, comfortable, postmodern truth that is self-contradictory and optional.  We have to pursue real truth. Absolute truth.  The kind that says, “This is how the world is, and if you don’t agree with it, you’re wrong.”  The kind that says, “This is how the world is, and if I don’t live it out, I’m wrong.”  A truth that doesn’t snivel and beg for consideration, but commands respect.  A truth that we may not fully comprehend in every aspect, but one that doesn’t for one second become anything less than binding.  And that’s not to say we can’t be humble.  Of course we need to be humble.  But our humility has to be humility to the truth first and foremost.  If Jesus is God, we have to humbly accept that and accept nothing else.  If he’s not, we need to move on.

As someone who was an atheist, I’m passionate about this.  I hear people say that Christianity is a way but there are many other equally good ways and I shudder.  Because being a Christian is not easy.  It’s hard.  It takes constant repentance, study, and devotion.  It takes self-denial, self-awareness, and the boldness and courage necessary to witness to others.  It’s not comfortable!  You have to give your life completely to something greater than yourself.  If all of this is optional, I’d quit so fast your head would spin.  If I can get the same results by doing whatever I want, I’m gonna go do whatever I want.  If Christianity isn’t true, it’s certainly a much less attractive option than raw hedonism.  I’d take that any day of the week!  If Jesus isn’t actually God, if his commandments aren’t actually binding, if he didn’t actually break the powers of sin and darkness on the cross, if he doesn’t command my heart, my soul, my all any more than my couch does, then why bother?  Christianity is either uniquely true or an unnecessarily rigorous option in the marketplace of ideas.

And that’s the thing about historic Christianity.  Never before the postmodern era did Christianity claim to be a neat way of living for those that were interested.  It rose precisely because it claimed to be the ultimate truth by which everything else was truly seen.  It was the light in the darkness.  It was in a way that nothing else could ever be.  Let’s turn to our second reading here Acts 4:1-13.  We have Peter and John, and they have gone to the temple where tey met a man who couldn’t walk.  They healed him and they started preaching.  Of course, the temple is the seat of religious power in this area, so it starts to cause trouble.  That’s where we pick up.

1 The priests and the captain of the temple guard and the Sadducees came up to Peter and John while they were speaking to the people. 2 They were greatly disturbed because the apostles were teaching the people, proclaiming in Jesus the resurrection of the dead.

Keep in mind, preaching the resurrection of the dead would have been very controversial here.  The Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection of the dead.  They were a bit of an outlier.  The Pharisees did believe in the resurrection and they were much more popular with the common Israelite.  The Pharisees were men of the people; the Sadducees were men of the aristocracy.  Even if their belief was outside the norm, these men were not to be taken lightly.  Talking about the resurrection of the dead on their turf would have been considered a very bad move.

3 They seized Peter and John and, because it was evening, they put them in jail until the next day. 4 But many who heard the message believed; so the number of men who believed grew to about five thousand.

Only a few chapters earlier it said that three thousand people believed, but now we’re already at five thousand!  They didn’t get there because things were easy!  Because it was just so darn delightful!  No, there was active persecution towards those who were preaching about Jesus!  But the Church grew, not because it was pleasant or easy, but because it was bold!  This was something that people had to take notice of!

5 The next day the rulers, the elders and the teachers of the law met in Jerusalem.

Now we have a list of names.  A few of them should be familiar.  Caiaphas especially, who was involved in the crucifixion of Christ.

6 Annas the high priest was there, and so were Caiaphas, John, Alexander and others of the high priest’s family.7 They had Peter and John brought before them and began to question them: “By what power or what name did you do this?”

8 Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them: “Rulers and elders of the people! 9 If we are being called to account today for an act of kindness shown to a man who was lame and are being asked how he was healed, 10 then know this, you and all the people of Israel: It is by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified but whom God raised from the dead, that this man stands before you healed. 11 Jesus is

‘the stone you builders rejected,
 which has become the cornerstone.’

12 Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.”

That’s a bold claim.  That is precisely the kind of claim that made people uncomfortable across the spectrum of society.  Both the Israelites and the Romans would balk at this.  First, there’s the Israelites.  Did they believe in a savior?  Sure.  But they believed in a savior that was only for them.  He was a military hero!  He’d come and kick out the foreigners and restore Israel to its rightful place on the world stage.  This was a personal savior only for Israelites.  Outsiders didn’t have any business with him.  At best, news about the savior would be neutral for them, and at worst, the news was about their impending downfall.  Israelites already earned their savior by virtue of their birth.  They were waiting for him all this time.  Now these men are talking about a savior that isn’t honoring their birthright?  And this savior is for everyone?  Absurd.  The Israelites loved their good news and most of them genuinely believed it, but their good news was for them alone.

The claims would have caused just as much trouble in Roman society.  They were happy to have as many gods as you can imagine!  If a neighboring country had some gods that they were excited about, great!  Add them to the pantheon.  No big deal.  They would even show how open they were to new gods by making public sacrifices to their enemy’s gods before combat.  After the battle was over, they would claim that those gods obviously liked the Romans better.  Otherwise they would have won!  Sacrificing to enemy gods wasn’t just for bragging rights after the battle.  It also showed the enemy that their gods weren’t a problem.  They could keep their gods.  They just had to bend the knee to Caesar.  Their gods could stick around as long as he played nice with the others.  As long as that god didn’t claim to be THE god, there was no problem.  That’s why one of the earliest charges that Romans would make against Christians was atheism.  People were martyred over that!   Denying the existence of the other gods was horrifying to Romans!  One god wasn’t nearly enough for a fair-minded, tolerant person.

13 When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus.

I love this verse especially.  They assumed that these men in the temple must have been powerful or influential.  Maybe they were self-styled mystical gurus or a couple of aristocrats trying to gain power.  Maybe they were even some kind of rare religious scholars with years of research under their belts.  They had to be big shots in some way, shape, or form to be making claims like that!  But then they start to interact with Peter and John and they realize that these are just regular guys.  They’re not even pretending to be better than anyone else.  There’s no arrogance about them.  There’s a humility.  They’re just average people that somehow found the truth, and now they cling to it more than life itself.

The elders and teachers of the law send the disciples out of the room so they can deliberate and they decide to warn them never to do anything like this again.  We pick up at verse 18:

18 Then they called them in again and commanded them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus. 19 But Peter and John replied, “Which is right in God’s eyes: to listen to you, or to him? You be the judges! 20 As for us, we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.”

These were humble men, but also ones that were totally transformed by this truth that they’ve found.

We’ve established that absolute truth was core to the Christian message from the beginning.  We’ve established that postmodern Westerners have a really hard time accepting that there is any one genuinely true truth.  So how do we fight for truth in a way that’s intriguing?  How do we promote truth in a way that’s beautiful?

That’s the thing.  Christian truth is beautiful.  God became man and died for us?  God loves us so much that he pursues us even when we’re fleeing him?  The awful things that people do in this world aren’t just subjectively distasteful but genuinely wrong.  And God wants to build a new world by transforming us by his grace.  And in the end, God wins.  THAT’S beautiful.  All of that is beautiful. 

But let’s be honest, people don’t get hung up on that.  People get hung up on parts that they don’t like.  They don’t like what the Bible says on certain topics.  They can’t understand what certain parts of Christian doctrine really mean.  They can’t imagine a God that would say something that they don’t like.  To go back to the metaphor of the supermarket of ideas, they’re standing in the isle, trying to pick out what religion is best for them, and Christianity keeps telling them that they’re wrong about things and need to get with the program.  How offensive.  How absolutely rude.  Why on earth would they pick a product that doesn’t fit them?

But Christianity doesn’t claim to be a product.  It claims to be the truth.

This world doesn’t need more products.  It doesn’t need more philosophies that excuse us doing whatever it is we want in a given moment.  It needs something that dares to bind the world together with more than mutual apathy.  It needs something that dares to tell people, “God cares about you so much that he’s not content to leave you where you’re at.  He cares about everything you do.  He cares about the dumb stuff you post on social media at midnight.  He cares about what you read and what you do and how you act.”  We are not our own.  God will not rubber stamp whatever we feel is acceptable.

The strength of the postmodern mindset is that nobody ever has to feel wrong.  You have your truth and nobody can argue with that.  The weakness is that we KNOW things are already wrong and we need something to change it.  And can we change it?  We in all of our sin?  We who can’t get through the week without doing something that we’re not proud of?  You wanna put all your eggs in that basket?  Or is there something greater that we can turn to.  Someone that is better than our best.  Someone that just might actually be able to clean all this up.

That’s why Jesus is good news to the postmodern person.  He makes the claim to objectively be at the heart of everything.  We have the opportunity to not just live out our own random, selfish, made-up, self-satisfying claims, but to OBJECTIVELY transcend our own nature.  In a world where evil stands strong as ever, a philosophy built on mutually leaving one another to our own devices is not enough.  We need to be held accountable for our actions, philosophies, and desires.  We need objective truth.  We need God



United No More

~ Vincent

The United Methodist Church was, in hindsight, a pretty bad name for our denomination. I can’t count the number of times that there was something controversial going on in a conference and someone would say, “UNITED Methodist?!? Why are we called united? We’re NOT united at all!” Which is fair. When you’re a part of a massive entity that’s been struggling to identify what exactly it is for as long as anyone can remember, having a name that begins with “united” must seem pretty silly. But that word didn’t get there because we were so wildly harmonious! We were named “United” Methodists because of a church merger. The Evangelical United Brethren Church and the Methodist Church came together in 1968 to create the United Methodist Church. “United” is a nod to the EUB side of the merger.

The EUB was a much smaller church than the MC. Previously EUB congregants represented about 7 percent of total UMC congregants after the merger. That being said, this all happened the zenith of Methodist power in the United States, so the EUB’s membership was still nothing to sneeze at. There are quite a few denominations around today that wish they were as big as the 750,000 member EUB church! Sizes aside, the goal of the merger was to forge a marriage of equals. There was this great ecumenical hope that more and more churches would find common ground and come together, so nobody wanted to kill that enthusiasm by creating the appearance that the MC gobbled up the EUB. Again and again during the merger, people sought out ways to ensure that EUB distinctives and heritage would be protected going forward.

But did it work? Not really. The fact that the average person doesn’t know why “united” is in the name is pretty clear evidence of that. And why should they know that? Who cares about some boring ‘ol historical details. As long as a fact sounds like an answer to a trivia question, it’s going to seem trivial in people’s hearts and minds. Education about the Evangelical United Brethren Church are still requirements in United Methodist seminaries, but again, as long as it’s kept safely in the Methodist History section, it’s not going to become something that pastors make use of in their ministry. John Meunier recorded a little piece of a General Conference petition on his blog that specifically laments several ways in which the Methodist side of the merger hasn’t honored the full heritage of the EUB. Unfortunately, the original source that he linked to has since been removed, so a big thanks to him for preserving this little piece of history:

A widespread, but largely overlooked obstacle to being an inclusive church is the omission of United from our church name and the name of our people. The Methodist Church ceased as an organization on April 23, 1968, as did The Evangelical United Brethren Church (EUB). On that date, The United Methodist Church was born, a new church created by the marriage of the two former bodies. This was the  intention of the Plan of Union. When the word United is omitted, it suggests that the marriage was a pretense and that the union was, as some disappointed former EUB’s have termed it, a hostile corporate takeover.

Since 1980, the General Conference has declared that omitting United from our church name is “unacceptable usage.” Yet the practice continues in conversation and in print. Former EUB’s are not being oversensitive about a few syllables. When Methodist is used in place of our proper name, it becomes, to them, a painful reminder of more than a dozen serious betrayals of the spirit of union and inclusiveness:

1. Glorifying Wesley and Asbury, while ignoring or belittling the inheritances from Otterbein, Boehm, and Albright.
2. Abandoning beloved EUB institutions, including Westmar College, Otterbein Press, Kamp Koinonia, and the Church and Home magazine.
3. Cutting off EUB clergy widows from their only pension income, the dividends from Otterbein Press.
4. Repeated attempts to close United Theological Seminary.
5. Identifying Heritage Sunday with Aldersgate Sunday in 1976 and 2004.
6. Removing the EUB Hymnal from circulation and canceling its status as an official United Methodist hymnal in 1972 .
7. Including only two EUB hymns in the 1988 United Methodist Hymnal.
8. Replacing “debts” or “sins” in the Lord’s Prayer with “trespasses.”
9. Excluding the EUB service of infant dedication from The Book of Worship.
10. Restoring the Lovely Lane Chapel while leaving the EUB birthplace, the Peter Kemp Farmhouse, just a few miles away, to the fickle mercies of a secular economy bent on commercial expansion.
11. Suppressing the fact that the twin flames in the cross-and-flame emblem represent the Methodist and EUB traditions and that, when depicted correctly, the two flames are equal in size.
12. Closing a disproportionate number of former EUB churches (28 percent of those closed between 1975 and 1985).
13. Representing an ash-less Ash Wednesday, the EUB practice and the universal Protestant practice before 1970, as “un-United Methodist.”

2012 UMC General Conference Petition, as cited by John Meunier at
https://johnmeunier.wordpress.com/2012/02/23/an-eub-laments/

As I’m headed to the Global Methodist Church, I’m leaving the “United.” Which is ironic. From what I can tell, the EUB was more evangelical than the Methodist Church and had distinctly less modernist influence, but now their name has been claimed by the faction that they would have least agreed with! Oh, politics. Either way, popping that word in front of the denominational name didn’t preserve any heritage. We have the opportunity to honor our theological history in more than name; we can actually know it. But it’ll take work! We need to know about more than John Wesley. Yes, I get it, he’s the guy that started the thing. Nobody is downplaying that. But where did Wesley get his much of his theological outlook? Jacob Arminius. Who helped Wesley get Methodism going in the colonies? Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury. Who wrote the famous covenant prayer he adopted? Richard Alleine. Who helped get the Gospel to German-speaking populations in the colonies? A disgraced Mennonite bishop, Martin Boehm, and a Reformed missionary, William Otterbein. And who literally helped spread Methodism among German-speakers when the actual Methodists didn’t allow preaching in German? Jacob Albright.

Of course, we also have a million ecumenical saints going back to the very beginning of Christianity to learn from and celebrate, but it’s worth noting that Global Methodists have some really cool heritage that a lot of us don’t even know about. We lost the name, but let’s not lose the treasures that history has for us.

Going Global

~ Vincent

For about a year now, I haven’t posted all that often on the ‘ol bloggerino. Some of that was because I had just moved and was settling into a new job (which I wrote about here), some of it was because I just had a son (which ironically was a couple days before the entry on birthdays, which I didn’t plan at all), but the biggest reason was because of what’s been going on in the United Methodist Church. The church split in a super-political mess and evangelicals and traditionalists left and started a new denomination: the Global Methodist Church.

Unsurprisingly, a guy who regularly blogs about classic theology is very much a theological traditionalist, so I found myself navigating the tricky politics in all of this. I led a church through a discernment process to see if they wanted to leave. I constantly stayed up-to-date on the circumstances as they unfolded and shifted. I managed the gross politics of it all. Needless to say, it was really stressful and hard. Frankly, I don’t plan on writing about the specifics of it here anytime soon, if ever. It was ugly and there’s no immediate need to relive it. A quick google search will help you discover just bad the politics of leaving the UMC were/are. There are already very skilled people with a greater knowledge of the political circumstances than myself writing about this, so I’ll leave it to them.

But why didn’t I write anything about historic church splits? After all, I did a ton of research on the topic of church splits in America over the past hundred or so years. There were several times I wanted to blog about it, but it would have been pretty imprudent to openly talk about church splits with an orthodox/traditionalist bias when I was still working for the United Methodist Church. There were even a couple articles that I posted that I ended up taking down, just because I knew that if a congregation member stumbled across them and felt that they reflected my own opinion too clearly, it might cause trouble down the road. I had to play my hand close to my vest until their discernment process was done. If they wanted out, I’d help them navigate the process. If they didn’t, I’d head out on my own. Sadly, the final vote from church members ended with them choosing to remain United Methodist (they needed 66.6% to leave and only managed 62%), so I had to say goodbye and move on to the Global Methodist Church.

I won’t pretend it wasn’t a terrifying transition. So many of the churches that leave the UMC are able to do so because a supportive pastor helps guide them through the disaffiliation process. It only takes 34% of people to block a disaffiliation vote, and if the pastor isn’t interested in helping you leave, drumming up 34% tends to be pretty doable (if they even present disaffiliation as an option to them in the first place). I wasn’t sure if there would be an open church that I could get a job at, but God is good. Not only were there multiple opportunities available, but one of them was perfect. Sometimes, you just go to a place, meet the people and realize, “Yeah, this is it.” I’m off to Kenton, Ohio to work with Walnut Grove GMC, and I’m incredibly grateful to God for that opportunity.

It’s been a hard year, but I’m a few weeks away from being a part of a new denomination with a new church and a new future, and I’m so excited. The simple fact that clergy are actually expected to affirm the Apostle’s Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Chalcedonian definition is music to my ears, but on top of that, language in church law concerning Scripture is elevated, language concerning tradition is more reverent, church rites have been rewritten to be in-line with historic norms, there are more listed reference documents for historic orthodoxy, and the church bureaucracy is slimmer. I’m happy as a clam (assuming, of course, that clams are pretty darn happy on the whole).

For those reading this that are United Methodist, no hate. I’m dear friends with many of you and have grown a lot during our time together. That being said, we know we believe different things. It’s time to go our separate ways. I’m sure we’ll still be friends and learn from each other, but we’ll have more integrity working seperately than we would together.

For those that are looking to jump ship and haven’t made it quite yet, hang in there and keep excited. It’s worth it.

For those that aren’t Methodist at all and are wondering why they should care about this, just remember that for Christians in any denomination under the sun, orthodoxy has a cost. No matter what tradition you’re in, no matter how sure you are that it could never happen there, it absolutely can. A friend told me that when he joined the UMC, he warned them that he would resign if they ever changed the definition of marriage in church law. Everyone laughed because “it could never happen here.” They were wrong. There is, as good ‘ol Dietrich Bonhoeffer taught us, a cost to discipleship. That cost is fighting for the faith. Don’t shrink away from heresy and call it “a matter of opinion.” Confront it with love and compassion. Correct it if you can. Leave if you must. But don’t give up. It’s worth it to keep the truth that was entrusted to us by God.

As hard as the battles can be, there comes a day when the battles end and you can beat your swords into plowshares. I found that ending, and I pray that you do too.

Birthdays in Job?

~ Vincent ~ 2 Comments

I hadn’t thought a lot about birthdays and the Bible. I had heard some vague rumblings that birthdays were a pagan custom that was imported to the faith at a relatively late date and I uncritically accepted that and moved on. Imagine my surprise when I got to John Calvin’s eleventh sermon on Job and he spoke AT LENGTH about the Scriptural, spiritual value of… birthdays?

The origin of celebrating birthdays was the fact that the ancient fathers knew that it was right to give thanks to God and that this day was a solemn time every year for blessing God openly. Yes, for if we have lived some years of our lives, even though we are to remember God’s benefits incessantly, it is nonetheless good that, on the day we entered the world, there be a perpetual reminder to say, ‘A year has passed. God has brought me this far. I have offended him in many ways, and I must now ask him for forgiveness. But especially has he granted me great grace. He has always assured me of the hope of the salvation he has provided, and he has delivered me from many dangers. So I have to remember that, and now that I have entered upon another year, it is fitting that I prepare myself for God’s service, for the bad periods I have gone through have shown me how much I need his help and how I would have been a hundred thousand times lost without him.’

John Calvin. Sermons on Job – Volume 1: Chapters 1-14 (Kindle Locations 2362-2369). The Banner of Truth Trust. Kindle Edition.

All of this comes in reference to the third chapter of Job when Job cries out, “May the day of my birth perish!” To be clear, Calvin isn’t suggesting that’s an explicit reference to a birthday celebration. In context, it’s obviously a reference to the original day of Job’s birth. Calvin is arguing that the day of our birth is a sacred gift. On that day, God imprinted his image on us and honored us with the gift of life. From then onwards, he nurtured us with sustenance and care. We should hold the memory of such a day as holy and never speak ill of that event. Honoring its anniversary is a tradition passed down from ancient times that has sacred value. He admits that pagans twisted birthday celebrations to be something primarily about self-indulgence and that all too often, that’s what birthdays end up being. But the core of the tradition is beautiful because it’s about honoring God and acknowledging what he has given.

So John Calvin thought there was a biblical aspect to birthdays. I was shocked! But even if he’s dealing with an indirect reference in this case, Job 1:4 says that Job’s children feasted together on their birthdays in the NIV translation. Not the translation I was most familiar with, but certainly one that holds a fair amount of weight. Even beyond that, a solid chunk of commentators agree that the best understanding of this passage is that Job’s children were celebrating birthdays (John Hartley’s commentary, Pulpit Commentary, Elicott’s Commentary, etc.). Clearly, this isn’t a wild minority viewpoint. A chunk of legitimate theologians believe that birthday celebrations are biblical!

So are there other references to faithful people having birthdays in the Bible? Well, first off, let’s take care of the obvious references. In Genesis 40, Pharaoh has a (somewhat infamous) birthday that involved executions. To give some background, Joseph had previously met Pharaoh’s chief cupbearer and told the cupbearer that he’d be restored to his previous standing and the baker that he would be executed. The prophecy comes to pass on Pharaoh’s birthday. Unfortunately, the exonerated cupbearer doesn’t remember that Joseph’s prophecy and so Joe ends up stuck in jail for a few more years. The other obvious example of a birthday isn’t much better. Matthew 14 and Mark 6 both refer to King Herod’s birthday, on which he allows a beautiful young girl to wish for anything. She wants John the Baptist’s head, and he reluctantly delivers. You can definitely see why birthdays have negative cultural connotations for some readers. But there are a few more references worth delving into.

In the Jewish Encyclopedia (archived online here), Adler and Roubin argue for a few other passages being indicative of birthday celebrations. Hosea 7:5 has a festival called “the festival of our king,” or “the day of our king.” The king gets really drunk that day. They argue that a remembrance of the day of his coronation would be a more somber affair (judging from the notes Josephus left in Antiquities), but a birthday would fit the description reasonably well. They also point to Jeremiah 20:14 in which Jeremiah cries out, “Cursed be the day I was born!  May the day my mother bore me not be blessed!” On one hand, this is an obvious example of Hebraic parallelism (saying the same thing twice for poetic effect), but asking that the day of his birth “not be blessed” does suggest that doing something to bless that day was a custom, which would line up very clearly with Calvin’s argument for a day of remembrance and prayer. Genesis 24 also refers to Isaac’s day of weaning, which was cause for a great feast. Rashi, perhaps the most famous Jewish commentator of all time, holds that children were weaned at 24 months and references Talmud tractate Gitten 75b as proof. This establishes that, at absolute minimum, there was a customary celebration of the second birthday, which may well have led to future remembrances as well.

There does seem to be a reasonable amount of weight against birthdays as well. First off, let’s acknowledge the bad arguments. A lot of the arguments against birthdays in that you’ll find across the internet comes from bizarre speculation. Weird websites argue that all birthdays come from this cult or that cult and gift-giving is representative of making sacrifices to false gods. There’s a mysterious lack of citations in all this, which makes sense. Birthdays aren’t really “from” any particular place, as far as I can tell. A handful of cultures all developed some form of commemorating the day of their birth, and there’s even certain eras where such celebrations gain popularity and others where they lose it depending on cultural trends. For example, Professor Howard Chudacoff argues that the modern American birthday rituals took shape in the 19th century when standardized education made age a more important factor in a young person’s life (which helps explain why there’s still an active copyright on the shockingly young song, “Happy Birthday”). All of that to say, it’s more complicated than some of the poor arguments make it out to be.

But let’s evaluate the good anti-birthday arguments. If we look to that ancient Hebrew historian, Josephus, in Against Apion book 2 chapter 26, he argues that Jews do not celebrate birthdays because they don’t want to drink to excess and want to live sober lives. Early Christians also appear nervous about birthdays. Origen definitively comes down as anti-birthday, saying in his Homily on Leviticus:

Not one from all the saints is found to have celebrated a festive day or a great feast on the day of his birth. No one is found to have had joy on the birth of his son or daughter. Only sinners rejoice over this kind of birthday. For indeed we find in the Old Testament Pharaoh, king of Egypt, celebrating the day of his birth with a festival, (Gen 40:20) and in the New Testament, Herod (Mark 6:21). However, both of them stained the festival of his birth by shedding human blood. For the Pharaoh killed “the chief baker,” (Gen 40:22) Herod, the holy prophet John “in prison.” (Mark 6:27) But the saints not only do not celebrate a festival on their birthdays, but, filled with the Holy Spirit, they curse that day.

Homily on Leviticus VIII, trans. Barkley

It does seem likely that early Christians carried the same discomfort towards birthdays that Jews of their time did. Judging from a handful of secondary sources I got my hands on, some of that Christian discomfort tended to uniquely focus on Roman and Greek religious practices that were incompatible with Christianity (the act of honoring birthday spirits and the like). As time went on, those associations dimmed and birthdays didn’t seem as threatening as they once were.

So were birthdays an alarming heathen practice throughout the entirety of Bible that the people of Israel had to resist? Or is Calvin right? Was some memorial of the day of one’s birth both reasonable and respectful and twisted only by heathen influences? I think the attitude towards birthdays likely depends on the era you’re looking at. There were a lot of groups in that region throughout history that celebrated birthdays in some way, shape, or form (Greek, Egyptian, Roman, Arabs, etc.) It would be odd for that to have been permanently and absolutely resisted as evil, especially when we take some of Adler and Roubin’s references into account. While far from airtight, they establish that there’s precedent for the idea of something like birthdays in Israel, depending on the timeframe you’re looking at. Were Job’s kids celebrating birthdays? They very well may have been, especially when you consider that Job and his family did not live in Israel and were probably used to different cultural norms. That being said, by the time you get to the New Testament era, it seems clear that the dominant Greco-Roman understanding of birthdays (along with some historical bad influences) left a distaste for them among devout Jews and Christians that wore off over the coming centuries. Ultimately, I think Calvin has a leg to stand on when he’s talking about the potential scriptural value of birthdays. Which is just a delight. Next time you have a birthday, you can rest easy knowing that you’re not secretly engaging in wild pagan idolatry.