Full Contact Christianity

Ruin it for Them

25 June 2024

Last week, we looked at matters of politics, class, and Pentecostalism discussed in Dr. Miles Smith’s summary of exvangelical memoirs. In addition, Dr. Smith also spoke of a type of clericalism, in which “the leaders of those churches could speak with near ex cathedra authority on any issue they deemed important.” In some of the churches Smith has in mind, this is because the church is effectively a cult of personality; the pastor’s opinion is effectively law on everything from the Trinity to parenting philosophy to the merits of the Chicago Bears.

While there’s undoubtedly a problem there, Dr. Smith represents an unhelpful form of backlash: an implicit contention that pastors exceed their mandate when they speak to this-worldly concerns. So it is that Smith opines one of his exvangelical writers “can be forgiven for retroactively wincing at the graphic depictions of copulation in a book written by Tim Lahaye and his wife Beverly.” He goes on to say that pastoral advice on sex is clear “evidence of a clericalist culture run amok.” The book in question would have to be The Act of Marriage; I read it years ago, along with a whole generation of evangelicals older than me. For what my opinion is worth, I don’t recall it leaving any scars.

Whatever the shortcomings of a particular book, one has to ask: as opposed to what? Should we have no books on sex written by pastors? If an accurate depiction of copulation offends Smith’s sensibilities, one wonders what he thinks of the act itself — or of the God who designed it! Would Smith have pastors remain silent about sex, or speak in tasteful generalities that offer no actionable advice? For two suburban virgins on their wedding night, a few “graphic depictions of copulation” are helpful. Where would Smith suggest that ordinary Christian people get practical advice on the details of sex? Pornhub?

Which raises a point: I can tell you that while some exvangelicals “checked all the boxes” while they were in the church, others very much did not. Some exvangelicals I know hated the discussions of sex at church because they were already daily porn users, even if they weren’t actually sleeping around themselves. They didn’t need to hear a “graphic depiction of copulation” from a pastor because they were watching it for entertainment already, and they didn’t want to hear about chastity, because they were already in high rebellion. They still recall those conversations with guilt and loathing, and nobody should be concerned about that.

Meanwhile, a number of the exvanglicals of my acquaintance complain of the opposite problem: their churches seemed preoccupied with the details of internecine doctrinal squabbles, and unable to offer substantive help for important matters of everyday life like dating, sex, and child-rearing. When we’re damned for speaking to sex, and damned for refusing to, one begins to suspect that talking about sex is not really the problem. “We played the harp for you, and you did not dance; we played the flute for you, and you did not mourn.”

But returning to the matter of pastoral advice: there’s a “great gulf fixed” between the earthy preachers who get into the details on one hand, and upscale ministry professionals who keep things at the level of luncheon conversation on the other. This cultural divide has been a feature of Western ecclesiastical life for centuries. The internet hasn’t really changed that, but it has made the divide easier to see, since anybody with access to Youtube can see plenty of both types, and the wide gulf between them. (See the last 10 or so paragraphs of Nathanael Devlin’s excellent essay on the Moscow Mood for a discussion of one such divide within the Reformed community.) What are we to do?

Obviously, not every pastor is well-equipped to offer advice on every subject, nor is the pool of people with helpful counsel about sexuality (or anything else) confined to pastors alone. The relevant command from Christ is to make disciples, and it applies to all of us! Where we’re able to offer a disciple-making influence to our brothers and sisters, we should, and we it makes little sense to confine ourselves to unhelpful generalities. In a culture where The Experts (all rise!) are wildly unlikely to honor God’s design for anything at all, God’s people dare not leave one another at the mercy of the secular wolves. On anything.

We are not gnostics; we proclaim Christ in all places and for all things, right down into the earthy details that don’t make for polite country-club conversation. Of course, not everyone will agree on everything, and we should relish the opportunity to foster robust discussion and debate on everything from sleep-training your kids to making fluffy biscuits to sexually satisfying your spouse. Nobody should be embarrassed to get into the details as required to offer one another meaningful help; loving your neighbor requires it. God made us of dust and breath, after all. There’s no shame in being material, nor in talking like you are.

Pastors above all have this responsibility; it’s our job to equip the saints for the work of the ministry. Ministers who stand aloof from such “peripheral” matters are betraying their office, no matter how “gospel-centered” it makes them feel. “The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed” — a very old problem, but no less pressing for its distinguished pedigree. Many ministers want to hold back, and many of the sheep want their ministers to hold back. They have acquired a taste for the sweetmeats of the secular wolves, and they’re not overly interested in having a pastor intrude “outside his area of expertise” and ruin it for them.

Let’s go ruin it for them! Jesus did; how can we do any less?

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Seven Laws of (Magical) Reality

22 June 2024

One of the major projects before us as a church in the 21st-century WEIRD (Western, Educated, Individualistic, Rich, Democratic) world is repenting of our concessions to modernism, and returning to the worldview of the Bible. I know you’re thinking “We’ve been on top of this Christian worldview thing since Francis Schaeffer,” but no, we haven’t. Schaeffer made a great start. Ministries like Summit have done wonders for us. But we have a long way to go yet to recover a truly biblical grasp of the world and our place in it. I have something that will help: a “sort-of-manifesto” for Bnonn and Smokey Tennant’s podcast True Magic, laying out their founding principles, which (spoiler alert) are as follows:

Physical things participate in spiritual patterns.
Physical things therefore have meaning.
We participate in the same spiritual patterns at different levels.
There is an order of being that flows down from God.
Heaven and earth participate together in Man.
Therefore, Man must live liturgically.
To live liturgically, we must study both Man and Scripture.

I’ll let you read their elaboration on each of the principles for yourself. Suffice to say, this is the kind of thinking we need to be doing more of.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

People Like You

18 June 2024

Miles Smith of Mere Orthodoxy was kind enough to read a stack of exvangelical memoirs for us. For those of you who are blessedly unfamiliar with the trend, this is now a whole subgenre of personal memoir. You, too, can be applauded as courageously speaking truth to power, if only you will very publicly break up with the church, preferably on Instagram. You might even get a book deal out of it. Mr. Smith has done us all a service, plowing through a number of such books in order to discuss some of the common elements. He writes:

“Fundamentally, exvangelicals seemed to have been told that a specific type of church was the true church, that true faith probably didn’t exist outside of it, and that the leaders of those churches could speak with near ex cathedra authority on any issue they deemed important. The specifics may change from church to church–some tended to be vaguely charismatic, others strict dispensationalists, and still others a kind of independent folk Calvinist. But all shared a certain exclusivity and clericalism that defined their existence. These churches and this culture were governed ostensibly by the Bible, but ultimately it was a faith defined primarily by individual pastors….Enough of these churches led by enough of this clericalist type of minister popped up between 1970 and 2000 to build an entire subculture.”

Just a Subculture?

Speaking from my experience ministering to people who’ve abandoned their faith, I agree that a number of them fit Smith’s profile, which is to say that (in rough generalities) they come from churches that mix generic doctrinal orthodoxy with cult-of-personality sociology. I’ve been at war with that defective ecclesiology my entire adult life. I cut my teeth in ministry doing counter-cult work with the victims of exactly that sort of ministry. Upon hearing their stories, I’ve surprised quite a number of exvangelicals from such churches by responding, “Well, you can’t go back to that!” (And they shouldn’t, either. There are plenty of faithful-if-flawed churches to fellowship with; no need to get tangled up in a cult.) But look, while we all agree that cults of personality are a bad idea, that’s hardly the whole story with exvangelicals.

Plenty of these folks don’t fit that profile, and Smith himself mentions one of them when he wonders aloud why so many people listened to Bill Gothard and Joshua Harris. It’s a good question (which I’ve discussed elsewhere), but the point for the moment is that he’s aware of Joshua Harris, himself now an exvangelical. Harris didn’t grow up the downtrodden follower of some clericalist mini-pope out in the swamps, thinking his church was The Only True Church. He grew up speaking all over the country in churches and at conferences, and attended seminary at Regent College in Vancouver before abandoning his faith. The exvangelical phenomenon is not confined to the isolated backwaters.

Politics and Pentecostals…

Smith’s article focuses quite a bit on both recent politics and the charismatic movement with regard to his exvangelical interlocutors. Bethel Church gets a mention, as does Greg Locke’s Global Vision Church, and the word “Trumpist” also comes up a surprising number of times for a short article. The overall effect is to give the impression that you’re seeing a wave of these “I used to be a Christian, but…” books because independent churches with no historical roots got themselves tangled up with Trump and Pentecostalism, and people understandably fled. (If only we’d all remained mainline, cessationist, and respectably centrist, how faithful we would be!) In keeping with that, there’s a definite class-oriented vibe in Smith’s piece. Trump’s appeal is populist, Pentecostalism is famously working-class, particularly in the South, and there’s a certain looking-down-the-nose, “Isn’t this a bit regrettable” tone in the article, especially in its conclusion: “We sometimes accuse exvangelicals of leaving ‘Protestant churches.’ I’m not so sure they did.” I began to wonder about Smith’s background: I made a bet with myself that he was a southern Episcopalian.

Upon a little research, I discovered that Dr. Miles Smith IV (Ph.D. in history, 2013) is Anglican (ACNA), “a native Carolinian,” and a Citadel M.A. graduate who, in addition to his serious work, “sometimes writes for popular outlets like Mere Orthodoxy, The Gospel Coalition, Public Discourse, The Federalist, and The University Bookman.” Call me crazy, but my Appalachian fundie-trained nose could smell the clubby, upper-crusty Southern Anglican aspirations coming off Smith’s article. As you might have guessed by now, Gentle Reader, I do not find this an endearing trait, but that’s fine; Jesus transcends all our tribal affinities. Miles Smith and I both belong to Christ, and therefore to one another, and anything that stands in the way of our unity is future ash in the Kingdom of God. For today, the point is that you should not be lulled by Dr. Smith’s complacent sense that exvangelicals don’t come from the same places that we real Protestants do.

…and you

I do appreciate Dr. Smith’s sacrificial act, slogging through a stack of self-justifying exvangelical accounts so the rest of us don’t have to. Speaking as a pastor who actively works with such people on a regular basis, I think Smith’s treatment tells some truths, but falls woefully short of really capturing the exvangelical phenomenon. The whole truth is a good bit less comfortable: while some of the folks who abandon the faith come from insular, low-caste swamps on the working-class side of the tracks, rather a lot of them are more like Joshua Harris: well-resourced, experienced, and connected to multiple institutions. (And not all of them admit to having abandoned the faith, but that’s a subject for another time.)

It would be comforting to believe that people like us (“real” Protestants, or whatever) know too much to fall for the temptation to abandon the faith, but it’s just not true. We’re not just losing people from the margins; we’re losing people like you–and your kids. Cool-shaming can work on anybody, and seems to work particularly well on people who aspire to respectability–or as C. S. Lewis put it, a place in the Inner Ring. The antidote is as simple as it is painful:

“Therefore Jesus also, that He might sanctify the people with His own blood, suffered outside the gate. Therefore let us go forth to Him, outside the camp, bearing His reproach, for here we have no continuing city, but we seek the one to come. Therefore by Him let us continually offer the sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of our lips, giving thanks to His name; but do not forget to do good and to share, for with such sacrifices God is well pleased.” (Heb. 13:12-16)

UPDATE: Dr. Smith recently discussed his article with Aaron Renn.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Shadow Sins

11 June 2024

Some sins are fully conscious. You’re doing someone wrong, taking advantage of their weakness or their goodness or their inattention, or you’re cynically manipulating them to your advantage, and you are fully conscious of what you’re doing.

Some sins are fully unconscious—just as wrong, but you have no idea you’re doing it. Even when someone calls an unconscious sin to your attention, it can be extraordinarily hard to see, not because the act is particularly subtle, but because you’re genuinely unaware of what you’re doing. You are responsible for your unconscious sins—it’s not as if someone else should be apologizing for the things you do—but you can’t do anything about them until you become aware.

There’s also a third category: semiconscious sins. This is where a lot of the trouble happens. These are often patterns of behavior that have worked for you in the past, and like all people you habitually resort to things that have worked before. (This is called “learning,” and it’s how we become able to ride a bike or throw a ball or anything else we do: repeat what worked, and don’t repeat what didn’t. But learning is not a fully conscious process, and not all the behaviors we learn are good.) These semiconscious sins involve patterns of behavior that sin against the people around you, and they often involve violations of your self-concept.

For example, if you think of yourself as a generous person, you would probably not allow yourself to be stingy on purpose—say, by always being the last one to buy a round of drinks. If you were fully conscious of the implications of the act, you wouldn’t let yourself do it. But if you somehow acquired the habit back in your poorer days, and it’s worked for you, you will probably will continue the habit even though you don’t actually need to spend less money now. You will simply allow the program to run in the background, as it were, without examining it closely.

How do we know this semi-conscious category even exists? First of all, because the Bible talks about it in terms of self-deception. If someone else is deceiving you, then you can be fully unconscious of a thing, but if you are deceiving yourself, then some part of you knows. Apologist Greg Bahnsen likens self-deception to holding a beach ball underwater: it’s a demanding task, and there’s no way to be successful without being at least somewhat aware of what you’re doing.

Secondly, you know this category exists because you’ve experienced it for yourself. We’ve all had the experience of someone challenging a pattern of our behavior: “Hey, have you ever noticed that whenever you’re in this situation, you do X?” a well-meaning friend will say. X — as your friend is describing it — is clearly sinful, or at least a rotten thing to do to a friend. You’re offended, and you begin to object: “I do not! I would neve….” and then you can’t even finish, because all the times you’ve done exactly that come flooding into your mind, and you experience the stomach-dropping sudden cessation of ignorance: “He’s right! I totally do that!”

Now, if you were fully unconscious of what you were doing, that realization wouldn’t come so easily. And if you were fully conscious, you wouldn’t have been able to start the instinctive defense, only to stop when you suddenly realize your friend is right. That experience only happens because you were semiconscious of the pattern to start with. Someone had to connect the dots to make it fully visible, but the dots were all visible over in the corner of your eye, not quite out of view, just waiting for someone to connect them.

These three different categories call for somewhat different responses. Of course, you should repent of all your sin, but if you’re fully unconscious of a sin, you can’t very well repent of it. Rest assured, there are items in this category for you, and thank Jesus that He cleanses you of all sin. That’s pretty much all you can do, until God makes the sin conscious. Trust me, it’s on His to-do list.

If you’re fully conscious of the sin, and you were conscious the whole time, there’s nothing to do but repent, fully and immediately, and take your lumps.

The third kind is a little trickier, but the brief is ultimately pretty simple: “rebuke a wise man, and he will love you,” and your job here is to be the wise man. Learn to love the people who will grab that thing that was over in the corner of your peripheral vision and drag it into full view. Don’t punish your friends for bringing things to your attention; encourage them!

One of the best things you can do is cultivate a ruthless honesty. Repent of exactly what you’ve done, and don’t repent of things you haven’t done. Depending on your personality, you’ll be tempted in one of two directions. Some people will be tempted to repent of nothing in the past. “I wasn’t aware of it,” they’ll tell themselves, “and I can’t possibly be responsible for something I’m not aware of. Of course I won’t do it in the future.” This won’t do, for the simple reason that you did what you did, and you need to own it. Your heart is a dark, deceitful place, more than capable of hurting your friends for your advantage and lying to you about it. You let it run around without a leash, and that’s on you. So confess it and forsake it.

Another sort of person will be tempted to over-confess, to not only own his actions but apologize as if he’d been cynically conscious of it the whole time. To this person, “I didn’t see it” will seem like a lame excuse he wouldn’t dare to make. But it is a sin to lie to your friends, in either direction. You may not under-confess, and you may not over-confess. Tell the truth: “I never quite thought about it like that, but now that you’ve described my behavior in those terms, I see that you’re right. I was wrong, and I’m so sorry I put you through that.”

And then go and sin no more.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Beware the Abstract Nouns!

4 June 2024

A bit back, I posted a link to this article on my Facebook feed. The response was predictable: my comments were full of Christians objecting to the notion that Jesus wasn’t a nice guy.

Now, I’m not complaining; this is trouble I’m happy to be in. Jesus was not, in fact, a nice guy, and I don’t mind annoying folks who think He was. As you can see, I have a mug in the cupboard for just such occasions.

(Yes, really. My daughter-in-the-faith Anna got it for me, and I love it!)

If you need a demonstration that Jesus was not a nice guy, go ahead and re-read the gospels. I’ll wait. This post isn’t about that. This post is about the trends I’ve noticed in the outraged (or “concerned”) responses to such observations. I’ve noticed three major defenses against the council of God here: christological heresy, pragmatics, and abstract nouns.

Christological Heresy

Now obviously, there are the folks who will trot out the old chestnut, “Well, Jesus was God and you’re not, so….” Ignore these people. Their objection is functionally a christological heresy, the notion that Jesus is not human the way you are human, such that He presents you with an example of what a human life should look like. Besides, honestly, they’re being intellectually dishonest. These same people are in favor of being christlike when we’re talking about humility or caring for the poor or washing someone’s feet; it’s only when you start talking like Jesus in ways that will get you uninvited to the cool kids’ table that they trot out their “Jesus was God” excuse.

Besides, John the Baptist wasn’t God, and he called the religious leaders a “brood of vipers” too. Amos wasn’t God, and he famously called the mall rats of Jerusalem a bunch of cows. Ezekiel wasn’t God, and his comments about donkeys continue to scandalize 2500 years later. Paul wasn’t God, and he publicly wished the circumcision party would just chop it off. All these mere humans were led by the Holy Spirit to describe scandalous things honestly, in a scandalous way. Obviously this is a tool a righteous man can be led by God to employ.

Pragmatics

Some folks won’t bother to argue about whether Jesus did, in fact, say these things, or even about whether we’re allowed to say them. They’ll just encourage you to “keep the main thing the main thing,” remain “gospel-centered,” and promise you that you’ll see better results if you just focus on the gospel rather than “getting sidetracked.” What these folks are missing is—in their terms—that the gospel is supposed to be the center of something. We’re here to proclaim the full council of God, and to follow Jesus’ whole example, not just a core sample of Jesus’ praxis that happens to fit some tight-shoed schoolmarm’s canons of niceness. They seem to honestly think they can get better results than Jesus got by taking a different approach than He did. All I can say is…good luck with that.

Abstract Nouns

Finally, there are the folks who will bury you under an onslaught of abstract nouns. This approach will start with an appeal to a basic biblical command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” “Let your speech be always with grace.” “Be kind to one another.”

Then you will be challenged to be loving/gracious/kind based on the biblical command, which , ex hypothesi, means that you’re not allowed to talk like Jesus did.

Any appeal to Jesus’ example will generally be met with the “He was God” objection, above, and any appeal to any other example will be met with “That passage is descriptive of what the person did in his human frustration, but what makes you think it’s prescriptive for us?” The net result of this hostility to the biblical narratives is that there are no concrete examples to which one might appeal for anything. Then, the abstract nouns like “love,” “kind,” or “gracious” become empty suitcases that we can fill up with whatever we like.

In the absence of having our tastes catechized by the biblical stories, we tend to fall back on whatever our sentiments dictate to us. In the early 21st century church, that generally means we’re falling prey to weapons-grade niceness. In our imaginations, being loving or kind means you would never say anything hard; gracious speech means nobody is ever offended. If someone is offended, that automatically means you’ve done something wrong.

But no. When grace incarnate walked among us, He regularly offended the respectable people. In a particular moment, “children of snakes!” was the kindest, most loving thing anybody could say to the Pharisees, and we know that because Jesus said it.

Go thou, and do likewise.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Actual Humanities at Princeton?

1 June 2024

A propos of my recent post Not Dead, Just Relocated, I just ran across a Free Press story about a professor who is trying to revive the humanities at Princeton, of all places. May his tribe increase!

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Proposition on a Cross?

21 May 2024

We all agree that how one gets from ‘unbeliever’ to ‘believer’ is a critical question. But the question of precisely what one must believe…that can go really bad places if you get too tight-fisted about it. There are serious problems with demanding a single proposition that accounts for every person’s journey from the one category to the other.

1. It simply is not a question the Bible ever poses or answers.

2. No proposed “saving proposition” accounts for all the recorded conversions in Scripture — a fact which should register WAY more prominently in the content of saving faith (COSF) debates than it does. Read the latter chapters of Gordon Clark, Faith and Saving Faith for a good treatment of this.

3. The COSF question makes a significant category error. It assumes that getting the proposition right is what matters, and that’s incorrect. A proposition was not nailed to the cross for your sins; you’re not saved by faith in a proposition, you’re saved by a Person in whom you trust. The Bible–Jesus Himself, in fact–uses multiple propositions to elicit and support that faith. The proposition is a window, and it’s true enough that not every window points out at Jesus. But if the conversion accounts of Scripture itself are to be believed, there are many windows that do. The point is not to get the exact right window, as if there were only one; the point is to be looking through the window at Jesus.

2 Comments | Bare Minimum Gospel Foolishness, Controversies | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Self-Medicating With Memes…or Laws

14 May 2024

If your approach to public policy is dictated by your empathy, then you are self-medicating. You feel other people’s pain, and you want to do something to relieve the pain. That’s a genuinely good desire, but understand that you are prone to the risks and temptations that always attend self-medication, chief among them numbing the symptoms without finding the real cause, and low sales resistance to hucksters.

As to numbing the symptoms without uncovering the cause: the pain you feel is mostly not from people you directly know, it’s from media images. The pain you are dispelling isn’t their pain; it’s yours. Here’s how I know: when you hear the plight of whoever, you feel the burning need to do something. Then you do a thing, and you feel better. But that thing you do — what is it? You sign a petition, share a meme, make a donation, vote for a particular measure or person. Even if it was the right thing to do vis-a-vis the problem at hand, you feel better long before your actions could possibly have rippled out to the point where they’ve had any real effect on the actual situation. That person’s pain has not yet been alleviated, but you already feel better. That means you’re not in pain because they’re in pain. You’re in pain because you heard about their pain.

Your pain doesn’t go away because their pain went away. Your pain gets alleviated because you obeyed your internal mandate to “do something.” Long before you have any way to know for sure if what you did helped them, hurt them, or simply did nothing, you’re going to feel better regardless of the eventual outcome.

That serves to make your low sales resistance even lower. You’re a decent person; confronted by human suffering, you genuinely want to relieve it. Which means you want to believe (1) that there’s a way to relieve it, and (2) that way is accessible to you. Can you see that your thirst for an accessible fix already makes you more likely to fall for a smooth operator with a slick line of bullshit? It may not actually help anybody except the charity professionals making a salary off your contributions, but if it sounds good, your vicarious pain will evaporate when you click the ‘donate’ button or share the meme. Under those circumstances, the proposed fix barely even has to be plausible, because you already want to believe it. It’ll alleviate your discomfort just because you “did something.”

That sort of foolishness is an abuse of your drive to do something. That drive is given to you by God for the purpose of moving you to change the world. Don’t fritter it away sharing memes; get off the couch and actually do something for the problems that are nearest and clearest to you.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Bible Class Debrief

10 May 2024

We taught through the entire story of the Bible over two years in two middle school classrooms, and every week we debriefed afterwards…in front of microphones. If you’d like to listen in, the episodes are now dropping every three days or so on the Headwaters website.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Confess With Your Mouth

7 May 2024

Do you have to confess Jesus with your mouth to be saved?

YES!!! That’s literally exactly what Romans 10 says. In case v. 9 was somehow unclear, v. 10 clarifies it. The belief leads to righteousness, but salvation comes of confessing with your mouth. That’s just what it says. The only thing for any faithful Christian to do here is shout a hearty “AMEN!”

Having done that, we need to be sure we understand what Paul actually meant, because he’s not a post-Great-Awakening American like we are, and in contemporary English we have some ways of using religious language that are–by biblical standards–a little odd. When we use the word “saved,” in a spiritual context, we pretty much always mean “going to heaven, as opposed to going to hell.” So you can say “The lifeguard saved me,” and we all know you mean that he pulled you out of the wave pool, but when you say “Jesus saved me,” we all think of heaven.

Our default meaning for “saved” is a biblical usage–you can see Paul use it in Ephesians 2:1-10–but it’s not the biblical default meaning. When you see the word “saved” in the Bible, you need to ask a few more questions, like “Saved from what?” In Romans in particular, we need to remember that by the time we encounter 10:9-10, we’re ten and a half chapters in. Let’s not forget what came before it–you did read what came before it, right? Paul has already told us what he means by “saved” here; he began the theme in ch. 1 when he told them he was ready to preach the gospel (1:15) to the faithful saints in Rome (1:7-8), explaining that he’s not ashamed because the gospel saves–there’s our word–those who believe (1:16). We tend to impose our default meaning on 1:16 — you believe and now you’re going to heaven, i.e., “saved” — but that’s not quite what it says. Paul is saying that the gospel saves those who already believe, and he makes that clear in the next verse by quoting Habakkuk 2:4, which is plainly talking about someone who’s already a just man being saved from physical death by his faith. (Think Daniel in the lion’s den, or the three Hebrew children in the fiery furnace — they are among the direct recipients of the promise in Habakkuk.)

Paul goes on to discuss how we’re all justly damned in 1:18-3:20, and then begins to discuss the possibility of attaining God’s righteousness apart from the Law, through faith in Christ (3:21-4:25), and then moves on in 5:1 to discuss our status once we’ve attained that righteousness, being justified by faith. Here’s where our word “saved” comes up again: “MUCH MORE then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be SAVED from wrath through Him” (5:9). Being “saved” in Paul’s usage here is much more than being justified. Like Abraham, your faith is accounted for righteousness, and you are justified on that basis — the same thing 10:9-10 says: “for with the heart one believes unto righteousness.” But God has more — “much more!” — in store for you than that.

Paul goes on to discuss how we deal with sin in this life (according to 6:23 it’ll kill you). As he develops his argument, Paul makes it clear that while arranging your mental furniture correctly is important (ch. 6), it’s not enough to keep you out of sin (ch. 7). Actually living resurrection life in your dead/mortal body requires active intervention by the Spirit (8:10-11), and when we allow the Spirit to work through us, He intervenes not only in our deeds, but even in our prayers (8:26ff). And if our own mortal nature can’t separate us from God’s love, then nothing can (8:31-39). So “saved” in Paul’s usage here has nothing to do with going to heaven when you die, and everything to do with being delivered from physical death. To borrow a paraphrase from St. Schwarzenegger, “Come with me if you want to live.” God’s faithfulness to His people is nowhere better demonstrated than in His continuing pursuit of His people Israel, which is Paul’s subject in ch. 9-11, where our text appears.

In that context, Paul asserts that we receive righteousness through faith (as discussed in ch. 4, and which is what we mean in contemporary English by “saved”), but being delivered from God’s wrath on sin in this life requires more than that. Specifically, you need to be willing to speak up.

2 Comments | Exegesis | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols