Retired Pastor Ruminates

My friend and United Church of Christ colleague Herb Davis writes lectionary study notes weekly for the Confessing Christ Web site.  These are uniformly thoughtful and inspiring, and reflects Herb's life-long engagement with theology and church life.  Herb is also one of the best preachers I have ever heard.  Here are his reflections on the Gospel reading for Pentecost Sunday, John 14:8-17:

“It is fashionable to say,‘no one knows God’ or ‘there are many ways to God.’ Both statement may be true. Moses' request to see God was denied to protect him. God is wholly other, so in a sense God is not accessible to humans. These are not John's concern. He know that if you see Jesus,  you have have seen the Father. If you know Jesus you know the Father. The Father we see in Jesus is one who loves the world, who lays down his life for us, who is not ashamed of us but invites us to dwell with him forever. The Father we know is the judge we love. John is convinced that the God we know in Jesus Christ is to be proclaimed to all the world. The world needs to know and love the Father we see in Jesus.

Yet at the same time we are like Philip who is unsure, who have difficulty seeing the Father. The Jesus we meet is a scandal. There is no solid proof that this is the One. There is no absolute certainty that we have made the right choice. The Father we see in Jesus is not a noble, exalted man we seek but a Jew who dies on a cross.

Yet the Holy Spirit teases us, woes us, and sometimes convinces us that this crucified and risen one, this pushed aside one, this down-trodden, rejected, mocked one is truly The One, the face of the Father, the very heart of God. Miracle of miracles we believe!

So we celebrate the Pentecost, the miracle of miracles that a people still gather to praise Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Miracles of miracles is that there is still a people who keep watching and waiting for the new creation and get a glimpse or whiff of the Kingdom's presence. Miracle of miracles there is still a people who bear one another burdens. Miracle of miracles we see in our midst greater works than those of Peter and Paul and the Apostles. We know that what we ask in Jesus' name is done. Like Jesus the church is a scandal. There is no positive proof that we have received grace upon grace, love never ending. There is always the temptation to celebration Pentecost as an event in the past, to be nostalgic, to dress up in red and light flames of fire and remember the ancient Pentecost. John will not allow us to live in the past. The work of the Holy Spirit is a present work. The Mighty Acts of God are present in our midst. Greater works than these are alive in us who in spite of the darkness, Confess Christ as Lord of Lords, very God of Very God. We can't help ourselves! Jesus always a scandal is in our midst.”

I especially like the reminder that the work of the Holy Spirit is a present work.

1.  “Does justification by grace through faith (God's good news) call us to good works of justice?"

This question requires an affirmative answer but one with qualification, especially in light of the way both “justification” and “justice” are often understood today. The problem of a privatized understanding of justification and a secularized understanding of justice (identified below in question 2) are a modern development which cloud the intentions of the Reformers, who saw the hand of the sovereign God in all things in heaven and earth in ways we do not. Both Lutheran and Reformed articulations of the Pauline concept of justification by grace through faith carefully guarded the primacy and sovereignty of God as the actor in salvation. So, the Augsburg Confession, for instance, insists “we cannot obtain forgiveness of sin and righteousness before God by our own merits, works, or satisfactions, but that we receive forgiveness of sin and become righteous before God by grace, for Christ's sake, through faith, when we believe Christ suffered for us and that for his sake our sin is forgiven and righteousness and eternal life are given to us.” (Augsburg Confession, Article IV).

Likewise, the Westminster Confession (and Savoy Declaration) state: “Those whom God effectually calleth he also freely justifieth; not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous: not for any thing 'wrought in them, or done by them, but for Christ's sake alone; nor by imputing faith itself, the act of believing, or any other evangelical obedience to them, as their righteousness; but by imputing the obedience and satisfaction of Christ unto them, they receiving and resting on him and his righteousness, by faith; which faith they have not of themselves, it is the gift of God.” (Westminster Confession, Chapter XI, I.) This is language which is confident in its assumption that the primal theological issue is salvation of sinful mortals before the holy God. That God was sovereign over nations and societies, as well as over persons, was also taken for granted. The Reformation Christian, Roman Catholic, as well as Protestant, was located in a Christian state, despite disagreement over the exact confessional nature of that state.
The “good works of justice” which flowed from justification were described in the Reformation Confessions under the category of sanctification as “good fruits” or “good works.” (Augsburg Confession, Article VI, “The New Obedience,” and Article XX, “Faith and Good Works”; Westminster Confession, Chapter XIII, “Of Sanctification” and Chapter XVI, “Of Good Works”) Here again, God's sovereignty as the actor of salvation is carefully protected. “Faith should produce good fruits and good works  . . . but we should do them for God's sake and not place our trust in them as if thereby to merit favor with God.” (Augsburg Confession, Article VI) “Their ability to do good works is not all of themselves, but wholly from the Spirit of Christ.” (Westminster Confession, Chapter XVL)

To the Reformers the doctrine of justification needed no justification, as it seems to today, against the charge that it led to a privatized faith. Rather it protected God's sovereignty and initiative in the act of salvation and in the processes by which the salvation takes hold of people. That “good works and responsible service in the whole world” (Invitation to Action, p. 9, paragraph 6) were the fruits of justification was not questioned.

2. How does the atoning "work of Christ" inform out work?

The “lost chord” in modern mainline Christianity is atonement: the conviction from which the church was born and by which its life was fueled for centuries. Because of this loss the question of the proper relationship between justification and justice, between what God does and what we do, is the critical theological question for our time. In the modern period Christian faith has increasingly been understood as a religion of amelioration, rather than a religion of redemption. Thus understood, Christian faith is reduced to a series of ethical imperatives; guidelines for relationships of human being to human being, rather than of human beings to God.

Christians of an earlier time knew themselves the recipients of redemption by an act of a righteous God, so justice was, for them, the social righteousness demanded by the righteousness of God. For example, P. T. Forsyth (1848-1921) could write: “Righteousness is applied holiness,” and (quoting Wernle) “ ... it is in the doctrine of justification that Christian theology and Christian ethic meet.” (The Christian Ethic of War, pp. V and 165)

When justice is wrenched from justification the church loses its way and finds itself running errands for society, rather than confronting that society with the grace and judgment of the cross of Jesus Christ. Where the cross is seen as a sign or symbol, even of high principles, rather than as an atoning act of the Holy God, the church will understand its primary charge to make like sacrifices on behalf of others. Jesus is then seen more as model and exemplar rather than as savior. But classical Christianity, in a variety of formulations, asserted that only God can save, that God doesn't show something by the cross but does something on the cross. The cross is not an object lesson or demonstration, but a divine act of life which justifies sinful humanity before the holy God.

Certainly there can be disagreement on the theological articulation of the atonement, but can we question the fact of atonement itself and remain identifiably Christian? My "bridge-repair" suggestion is renewed attention to the Biblical conviction of the holiness of God and the sinfulness of humanity. The "work of Christ" might then have its ethical content restored, so often lost when we focus on the person of Christ using metaphysical categories. In theological terms this means Soteriology precedes and controls Christology.

3. How are Christ's obedience and ours related?

The “Joint Statement on Justification” from the Lutheran-Reformed Dialogue (Invitation to Action, p. 9, items 2, 5, 6) offers these summary statements: “This gospel is the good news that for us and for our salvation God's Son became human in Jesus the Christ, was crucified and raised from the dead. By his life, death and resurrection he took upon himself God's judgment on human sin and proved God's love for sinners, reconciling the entire world to God . . . This doctrine of justification continues to be a meassage of hope and of new life to persons alienated from our gracious God and from one another. Even though Christians who live by faith continue to sin, still in Christ our bondage to sin and death has been broken. By faith we already begin to participate in Christ's victory over evil, the Holy Spirit actively working to direct our lives . . . As a community of servants of God we are called and enabled to do works of mercy and to labor for justice and peace among individuals and nations.”

Emilio Castro's evocative book title “Sent Free” captures the dynamic relationship between justification and justice. We are not justified out of the world but for the world which God loves and for which Christ died. Of special importance today is a new understanding of humanity's relationship to the created order in the light of the atoning work of Christ, which brings about "a new creation.” The World Council of Churches now identifies “The Integrity of Creation” as a concern along with “Peace and Justice.” These emphases properly recognize that the gospel has implications not only for individuals but for nations and societies as well. There are cosmic implications to the work of Christ, and justification must not be understood in a social vacuum.

But neither can justice take the place of justification at the center of the gospel. The ethical fundamentalism of some Liberationists resembles nothing so much as Biblical and confessional fundamentalism in its resistance to critical questions. To view the issue of inclusive language, to take one example, solely as a justice issue, without regard for substantive theological issues, is to mistake the complex for the simple and to risk the church's teaching and witness. Another example where we have lost the proper relationship between justification and justice is this: Certain associations in the United Church of Christ are requiring candidates for ordination to document their commitment to justice issues. This is right-minded but wrong-headed. It puts the ethical cart before the theological horse. But a vacuum will be filled, and since the historic religion of redemption has given way to the religion of amelioration there is a certain logic to this new requirement. How uncouth it would seem today if a Church and Ministry Committee would inquire of a candidate, “Do you believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross for your sins?” Would a negative answer be outweighed by a dramatic commitment to peace and justice? Whose peace? Whose justice? Will volunteer work for “Right to Life” be accepted or rejected? On what grounds? Since we are not saved because of works, neither should we be ordained because of them?

Our works of justice must be eschatological and symbolic. We still bear the burden of a Constantinian conception of Christendom, when a sectarian and missionary model of the church more closely approximates our situation in the modern world. One mission instrumentality executive confessed: “We cannot deal with every social issue, but we look constantly to determine how we can make a difference.” (S. Rooks) This recognizes the proximate nature of all our good works, and expresses a proper Christian humility. Justice understood apart from justification can easily become functional atheism, losing sight of God's primacy and sovereignty, which is what the doctrine of justification by grace through faith is meant to insure.

(I delivered this paper at the Seventh Craigville Theological Colloquy, Craigville, MA, July 16 - 20, 1990.)

(Photo:  R. L. Floyd, 2010)

My town sits on a particularly rich literary and intellectual “trade route.”  Most notably Moby Dick was penned here in the mid-nineteenth century (see my post Moby Dick as Theology.)  Moby Dick wasn’t the commercial success Melville had hoped for, but Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom it was dedicated, understood and appreciated it.

I have ruminated about why Hawthorne “got” Moby Dick, when most of the critics of the day saw merely a dark muddled fish story interrupted by frequent wordy digressions on whaling.

The answer I think, and this is hardly a new theory, lies in their common New England heritage and the ever-looming memory of the two centuries long Puritan experiment, by their time for all practical purposes over.  Hawthorne, of course, wrote the enduring iconic Puritan novel, The Scarlet Letter, which every American schoolchild must read.  That The Scarlet Letter is more about Hawthorne’s nineteenth-century neighbors than about his seventeenth-century Puritan forbears should not let us underestimate its importance in defining Puritanism in the popular imagination (any more than Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, another school favorite, should, although it too is less about the Puritans than it is about its own context, the social hysteria of 1950's McCarthyism.)

The third canonical school text on Puritanism is Jonathan Edwards’ notorious Enfield sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” a brilliant but scary depiction of the fires of hell and the tenuousness of human life.  To those of us who have actually read other Edwards' sermons, the choice seems largely to have been made on the basis of dramatic impact, and not to get too paranoid, another piece of literary ammunition to discredit the Puritans.  At least “Sinners” is an actual Puritan text.

But even Edwards’ ritual enemies often admit he is a towering intellectual figure.  Recently I have been reading in and about him, and the first thing that struck me is that a mere 100 years separates Edwards Freedom of the Will (1754) from Moby Dick (1851), both written here in the Berkshire Hills but in different intellectual worlds.

Much changed here in that hundred years.  For one thing, when Edwards lived, Pittsfield didn’t exist as a city, but was part of the much conflicted frontier, the “howling wilderness” as Edwards was to describe nearby Stockbridge, to which he came in 1750.  I like that the local community college has a “Jonathan Edwards Library,” but Edwards died in 1758 and Pittsfield wasn’t founded until 1764.  But it is the Berkshire Community College so the title is apt.  I once delivered a community forum lecture on Puritanism there and, while the students were attentive and eager to engage, their knowledge of Puritanism in general and Edwards in particular was spare, and largely formed by the aforementioned canonical school texts.

Pittsfield was named after the British Prime Minister William Pitt the Elder, who so influenced the future of North America by his efficient administration of the Seven Years’ War.  The first minister of Pittsfield’s First Church of Christ was Parson Thomas Allen, Harvard trained but influenced by the New Divinity of the Edwardsian disciples that developed Edward’s themes after his death.  (I was the eighteenth minister of that church.)  By Melville’s time in the mid-19th century my eighth predecessor John Todd (1800 -1869) was the incumbent, but there is no record of Todd and Melville crossing paths that I have found.  Todd thought of himself as being in the Puritan succession, but the grand granite meeting house he built in the Gothic revival style points more to the prosperous 19th century Congregationalism of the beginning of the Gilded Age than to the Puritans.

All thoughtful New Englanders in these times had to engage the legacy of the Puritans.  Edwards himself in the mid-eighteenth century was dealing with a changing world far removed from the world of the 17th century founders.  It was his genius to cast the theological preoccupations of that world into the new thought-forms of the Enlightenment.  He wasn’t the only bright young man in his time to read Locke and Newton and have his eyes opened, but he seems to be the only one who didn’t turn away from the old verities, rather he used the new learning as tools to express the old truths.

But by the mid 19th century it was more the novelists than the theologians who were grappling mightily with the themes of the founders.  So Melville’s fish story plumbs such deeps as election, predestination, and theodicy.  Where Edwards found human freedom in the affections, Melville finds the demonic in human obsession.  Hawthorne’s village soap opera explores old themes as well: covenant and community, morality and hypocrisy.

That is why Hawthorne “got” Melville.  He understood what Melville was trying to do, because he was trying to do it as well: make sense of this rich and ambiguous religious and intellectual legacy that had so shaped the American mind and soul for better and for worse.

That Puritanism, real and imagined, continues to be a template for American ideas, even in our own time, is as true as a quick look at the rhetoric of American Exceptionalism proffered by the W. Bush era neoconservatives as a defense of the Iraq war demonstrates.

Which is to say that the ghosts of the founders’ faith linger.  Perhaps a more nuanced reading of their actual beliefs and positions would result in a more nuanced approach to the issues they raised.

The most recent news from Iceland is mixed: new tremors in the volcano, but a lower ash cloud. That should help free up air travel and help thousands of stranded passengers get to their destinations. Most of us know somebody who got grounded, and was trying in vain to get home from a business trip, or to fly to Boston from Europe for the fabled marathon there today.

Is anybody else out there as frustrated as I am by the built-in obsolescence of IT products?

When I upgraded my Mac to “Snow Leopard” (OS 10.6) recently, all of a sudden my wonderful Hewlett-Packard “All-In-One” printer, scanner, copier became a “One,” that is, just a printer.

So I bit the bullet and called HP support, and got a charming and helpful person who basically said, “We don't support that product.”  I asked her if they anticipated creating drivers for it? “No, we no longer support that product.”

Which translates into, “We are not creating drivers to make the product you bought from us a few years ago functional, because we want you to buy a new product from us and put the old one in the land-fill.” SHAME!

My machine was about three years old.  Would we accept that from a company that made, say, refrigerators or lawn mowers?

But their policy of built-in obsolescence is smart from a purely economic point of view, because I did end up buying another product from them, a good product at a good price (I had to spend the better part of another afternoon on the phone with them to get it to work on my Mac, but that is another story for another day.)

So I didn’t even punish them for their policy by buying from another company.  Why?  Because their product was better and cheaper, and every hardware company, even my much-favored Apple, builds in obsolescence with constant newer, better and faster software.  If you want to stay up, you have to pay up!

But what happens to all these old computers and printers that still work fine, or would if they could run the newer software?  They get thrown away and added to the garbage of the planet.

So what would a “Green” IT company look like?  And at what point would it become in these companies' best interest to attend to being good stewards of the earth?  Just wondering.

My friend and Confessing Christ co-conspirator Willis Elliot, who is a polymath, Biblical language scholar, churchman, provocateur, nonagenarian, and a long-time interlocutor, is the guest poster today.

“How can I believe in God” asked Woody Allen, “when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?” Allen is humorously raising the question of how a good God allows bad things to happen.  He raises the question about religious knowledge when he says, “I am plagued by doubts . . . if only God would give me some clear sign; like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.”

That makes us laugh, but who among us has not been troubled by questions and doubts at some time in our life. I think that the story of “doubting Thomas” is probably in the Gospel of John because, even in the early generations of the church, faith in the Risen Christ was not an automatic thing. Faith was hard to come by and hard to keep in those days just as it is today. So Thomas is a stand-in for all the doubters then and now.

The problem was that Thomas was not present the first time that Jesus came to the disciples, and he won't accept their claim that Jesus is alive unless he can see him with his own eyes and touch him with his own hands.

The disciples had been hiding. They had bolted the door and were listening for the dreaded sound of footsteps on the stair when suddenly Jesus was among them. He stood there in their midst and he told them to breathe in his breath, his holy breath and spirit, so that they could go out into the world again and perform his holy work.

Thomas is told of this event, but he says that, “Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe.” And a week or so later Jesus does appear to them again and this time Thomas is there, and he sees Jesus and touches the wounded hands and side, and only then can he say, “My Lord and my God!”

Jesus replies to Thomas, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not see and yet believe” which refers to every generation since then which cannot see Jesus but relies on the testimony of those like John and Mary Magdalene who did see.

And yet often we remain like Thomas. We do need some evidence. Roughly two thousand Easters have taken place since Thomas's day, two thousand years' worth of people proclaiming that the tomb was empty and the dead Christ alive among us to heal, sustain and transform. But in one sense it is not enough. If we are to believe in his resurrection in a way that really matters in our lives and in the life of the world, we must have some experience of it.

And so it is that when and where people believe in the resurrected One, they have in some sense seen him, or at least known him, sensed him. If we are not to see him and touch him as Thomas did, we still must know him.

For now as then, it is not Jesus's absence from the empty tomb that convinces us, but his presence in the midst of us.  Easter is not the celebration of the absence of his body from the tomb, but his living presence with us now.

So how do we know him when we can't see him or touch him? In Luke's Emmaus story the disciples knew him in the breaking of the bread, and we still know him in the supper he told us to continue in memory of him. And it is not just his memory we know but his real presence.

We may know him in the Word while reading the story in the Bible or hearing a sermon. We may know him in moments of prayer, in moments of deep need or dark despair, or in moments of great joy, such as a baptism. We may know him in service with others, in the joys and challenges of living in the church, which is his body. We may know him by a sick bed or in the hour of trial over a life-changing decision. There are many ways to know the risen Christ, but touching the wounds of his body, as Thomas did, is not one of them.

So we walk by faith and not by sight. Our faith lives among our doubts. “Doubts,” says Fred Buechner, “are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it alive and moving.” It is often our doubts that get us thinking and moves our faith to a more mature level. In some real sense we never stop being Thomas the doubter.

Life is complex and mysterious, many questions and concerns do not lend themselves toward easy answers. Yet it is precisely there in the complex world where faith must live if it is to be faith at all and not mere wishful thinking. But that is precisely where we still meet the living Christ, in the real events and commonplaces of daily life. An apocryphal gospel that didn't get into the canon supposedly written by Thomas himself depicts Jesus as saying, “Cleave a piece of wood and I am there. Lift up the stone and you will find me there.” Which is to say there is no place on earth or in our lives too remote or outlandish for the One who came to save us all.

So we must again and again look for the risen Jesus in the ordinary day to day events of our lives. And we look for him amid our doubts. Unlike Thomas we do not get to touch him. But we can know him, and in the end we really do walk by faith and not by sight. But our faith in him is not blind faith. Faith is trust, and we generally trust only those whom we have experienced as trustworthy.

If we believe that Jesus is alive it is because at some time in our life he has made himself known to us. If we have not touched him, he has touched us, so that we have been able to say, as Thomas did when he touched that wounded side and held those ruined hands, “My Lord and my God.” Amen.

(This is an excerpt form a sermon I preached on April 14, 1996, entitled “We Walk by Faith.”  Picture:  Caravaggio, The Incredulity of St. Thomas)