The Fall is not from the Gospel (Part Two: The Problem)

Somebody stepped inside your soul

Somebody stepped inside your soul

Little by little they robbed and stole

Till someone else was in control

- “The Troubles” by U2

Evangelical theology (that is the theology of the more conservative branches of American Christendom including but not limited to Baptists, Methodists, Nazarene, etc.) is far more Catholic than it would like to admit. In fact the theology of many Baptists would sound like a fine (extremely) low church Roman Catholic homily or papal bull.

You see at the root, Catholic and American Evangelical theology, share a common theme: you are responsible for your sanctification, that is your being made holy. The Catholics picked this up from Aristotle mostly and the Evangelicals from the American “can-do” spirit. Regardless of how they got there, they arrived at the same destination: grace and works.

While Catholics fully acknowledge this being the case; the largest American Evangelical mouthpiece, the Southern Baptist Convention, tries to fudge a bit. They can’t fully acknowledge this because of their Calvinist history, but they can’t fully deny it for fear of losing all the “born-again Christians” who “made a decision” after “finding Jesus” to “let Jesus in their heart.” (This is malarky if not heresy, but the two terms are not necessarily mutually exclusive.) It would be easy to paint the situation so simply. However, the Devil is in the details. We find the Devil resting comfortably in the footnotes.

Kevin DeYoung, whose work reflects some of the best American Evangelicals put forward, denies explicitly following a Catholic notion (A Hole in Our Holiness, pp. 28 & 29), it is still there. Lurking. DeYoung and most American Evangelicals, take a logical turn from looking at the starting point of Jesus’ justification in the form of the atonement and move it to sanctification. It is, as Tchividjian points out a “grace, but …” statement. I get grace, but I also need to do stuff. Flowery language is often employed by DeYoung and others to stay true to their alleged Calvinist roots while maintaining a efficacious change.

Here Tchividjian and DeYoung would agree that fruits are produced by a changed life through the justification event. However is that enough? The key is in emphasis for these two people. Tchividjian emphasizes justification and DeYoung emphasizes sanctification. Like good Calvinists both are looking to systematic theology to be the key to opening the door to salvation.

The trouble however goes much deeper and I believe that Tchividjian has a better grasp on it. Evil and darkness go much deeper than the merely a tree not bearing fruit. They show that the problem is in the center. Therefore justification has a larger role to play than sanctification.

Michael Horton in an essay entitled “Does Justification Still Matter?” really dares to call people out on this. He states that “justification is just not on people’s radar.” I think that is DeYoung’s problem. It isn’t that he doesn’t believe it. Its that he is so desirous to move onto the next lesson. There is a need to master your basics before you move onto more advanced discussions. DeYoung seems to put this forward in spades. It isn’t intentional. Its just that so many Christians want to get busy living a “good” life that they leave justification behind as if it were “childish thing.”

And yet evil still clings to us. The question is whether day by day in every way we are getting better and better. If so, than what point does the Gospel have for us if the law is justifying us and if not, what is the point of getting better at all. Put simply, neither route is particularly correct. Sin exists and is bred in our bones. It thus comes out in the flesh, but we are so concerned with the symptoms that we forget the realty. It is here that work’s based Christianity, be it American Evangelicalism or Roman Catholicism or Wesleyanism, fails to be more than symptom management. The problem is just that, one unified problem. It is called sin. It will not be fixed by our being made better, but by our being set apart. We will not be able to do this on our own. As U2 put it, “God knows its not easy, taking on the shape of someone else’s pain.”

For the Calvinist we must look to the Christ event. This point of justification is the origin point. Sanctification does occur, though as we shall examine in the next post, not in the way we Americans have been taught it does. Justification however is the root. We cannot focus on the fruits of sanctification to somehow make up for a close examination of the change. The symptoms will still be the same, although they may smell more pleasant, if we are concerned with their outcomes. Better a sinner who relies on his justification, than good man who has put all his money on being sanctified. It is better to stop and remember our justification than to always be focused on the next step in our sanctification. But these are just theological terms and only vaguely outline the far more powerful and dynamic reality that brings about this change.

The Fall is not from the Gospel (Part One: Introduction)

I have been meaning to write this for awhile now. (Perhaps I already have and have just forgotten about it.) Nevertheless, it bears repeating and reiterating. It is something I learned from a failure and a group of pharisees. 

Not long ago the head pastor of a megachurch was involved in an affair. He resigned and took time off to reexamine and realign his life. His name is Tullian Tchividjian , maybe you have heard of him. Anyhow, I would often gobble up whatever he was talking about and writing. I would listen to his sermons or play his books on my e-reader. I was captivated. 

Tchividjian is a crypto-Lutheran. Hiding out among Evangelical Presbyterians, he would sometimes chime in with quotes from Luther and other prominent theologians of this faith tradition. The most important person he cited though was the twentieth century Lutheran theologian Gerhard Forde. (A man whose theology is debated almost as much as how to pronounce his name.) Forde’s claim was that there was no such thing as being against the Law and so you had to rely totally on God’s grace.

And so it was that a Presbyterian mega church pastor led me down the dark road of a much debated Lutheran theologian. But the craziness inside the church didn’t end there. Tchividjian often shared this viewpoint alongside mainstream Evangelical mega-church theology. Needless to say, it didn’t go over very well. After a very public row with Kevin DeYoung, the bridges were officially burned after a somewhat unrelated incident of Evangelicals “protecting one of their own.”

So Tchividjian gathered like-minded people and started his own website. I found his messages there to be exactly what I needed. He spoke of the toughness of grace (something I will discuss in a moment). He fleshed it out in ways that were new and different from what most Evangelicals had been saying. He mentored and was mentored by people grappling with this. Most importantly, I watch how grace could make a proud and self-assured man humble. I watched as someone who did not have intrinsic humility was transformed into a person intoxicated by grace.

Then the bottom dropped out. Tchividjian had always appeared to have a rocky relationship with his wife and the two ended up wounding each other in the deepest way a man and woman can. Much ink has been spilled about the affairs and why they happened. It was wrong and nothing can ever change that. However, I saw Tchividjian’s enemies pounce once again at him and his stance on grace.

I especially remember reading an article written by a fellow Evangelical pointing out that this is the obvious outcome of so-called “hyper-grace.” I do not remember the writer, but I remember how I had to explore on a deeper level all that I had come to understand about this. I wanted to see if the wages of so-called “hyper-grace” was sin. I am saddened to say, that I do not believe so. I am saddened because this means that a good deal of our Evangelical theology is flat-out missing the mark. I want you to join me for a spell as we examine this a little bit. I think it is best to start at the problem. Not just any problem. No. The Problem. Sin.