Confessions of a Theologian of Glory

Title page from Luther's Deudsh Catechismus, 1659

I have been reading through a book by Gerhard O. Forde, entitled “On Being a Theologian of the Cross.” Forde works his way through Martin Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation of 1518, juxtaposing a “theology of glory” with a “theology of the cross,” categories which he borrows directly from Luther.  The contrast between these ways of doing theology has shed light on my past year of theological training.  It is now apparent that I am functioning as a theologian of glory (again); for subtle shifts in my thinking have already occurred so that I no longer depend on the grace of God but rely on my own capacity to be faithful and to become more faithful.  Indeed, one of the chief claims of the theologian of the cross is that, by nature, every person is a theologian of glory.  We are in bondage to operate according to Scholastic Nominalism’s proposition to “do what is in one’s self” and let God do the rest.  This maxim encapsulates humanity’s unrelenting resolve to be “the master of [our] fate[s]/ the captain of [our] soul[s].”  We are, therefore, tragically bound to the insatiable thirst for our own glory.

As a theologian of glory, I operate as though my will were in control, free to choose between good and evil.  Under the assumption of “free will,” I attempt to reason myself into a more virtuous existence, or I try to make theology and virtue attractive so that it will appeal to my free choice.  My other strategy hinges upon my effort to discipline myself, to practice virtuous habits in order to reconfigure the years of sinful behavior patterns (e.g. impatience, anger, lust).  But an optimism about the elasticity of the will–that it may be bent toward faithfulness–says Forde, is the root cause of despair.  Telling a narrative that misrepresents the reality of human nature only leads first disillusionment then malady.

The cross is an attack on sin “that reveals the real seat of sin is not in the flesh, but in our spiritual aspirations, in our ‘theology of glory’” (1).  That is, the cross seeks to unmask optimism placed in human ability.  The real locus of sin lies not in our evil works, but in the good things we do; the theologian of the cross targets the “pretension” that accompanies what we do well.  Thus, the theology of the cross is offensive, for it reveals our rejection of God precisely through our good works.  This narrative upends and shocks us, pursuing us to the end of our rope, to surrender and cling to the cross.  This story claims that hope rises out of despair, that life comes only through death.

Luther organizes the Disputation according to the logic behind the division between the theologian of glory and the theologian of the cross: “The question of the knowledge of God is directly related to the claim that we can, by our natural powers prepare for grace by ‘doing what is in us’…A fault in the estimation of works [Theses 1-12] is based on a false estimate of the power of will [Theses 13-18], which in turn presumes a knowledge of God’s judgment on such works [Theses 19-24]” (70).  Theses 25-28 conclude the Disputations arch from the law of God to the love of God, arguing for the sole agency of the grace of God in the life of the theologian of the cross.

I will devote some space in the blogosphere to a series of reflections outlining the Disputation’s theses as they relate to my own grappling with Luther’s (and Forde’s) assertions.  Reading the book through the first time was convicting, confusing, challenging, and I am still unsure what it means to be a theologian of the cross in light of recent Biblical scholarship, e.g. more accurate views of “the Law” in ancient Judaism and the abounding critiques of Reformation exegesis of Paul, as well as some of modern theology’s push back on Luther’s ordo salutis and his definition of faith.  Finally, I hope these posts will help me work out how a theologian of the cross faithfully proclaims the ethical components of the gospel, the Christian vocation of justice and peace.

The Creed: Forming A Posture of Trust

A wily Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury

Rowan Williams, in Tokens of Trust, asserts that the Christian’s faith is a matter of trust, not belief. Although throughout Christian history the words ‘trust’ and ‘belief’ shared synonymity, in modern use the words describe two very different postures for the way we engage God’s existence. Our language is important as it directs our engagement with what we ultimately hold to be true. It is therefore vital that the distinction is made between ‘trust’ and ‘belief’ if we are to allow the existence of God to impinge upon our lives. A sketch of each posture, then, is necessary if we are to explore the significance of Williams’ claim. This will provide a foundation to explore the ways in which a posture of trust gives shapes to how we “take up” the Christian faith. And so we shall see that trust is the vehicle through which the reality of God penetrates our existence, affecting the way we feel about ourselves and about the world .

For Williams belief is primarily a relationship to an abstract idea or thing. Belief answers the question of whether or not something exists out there. It regards the objects it probes as magical or mythical in nature, and so the question of belief in God is similar to, “Do you believe in ghosts or UFOs?” This is a rather impersonal question which is unconcerned with the consequence of whether or not something exists. That is to say, if a ghost really did exist, it would hardly make a difference in the grand scheme of things. This kind of belief cannot conquer the crippling effects of suspicion, because it forms a posture incredulous to hope, meaning, and relationship. Suspicion prevents one from participation in celebration, love, hope, and trust. It forms a posture closed to the possibility of God affecting the way we feel about ourselves and the world around us. This kind of posture rests on fallacious assumptions about God.

God is not the kind of being that is out there or ambivalent to what is going in the world. Belief for Christianity is not a question of opinion concerning whether or not God exists, but it is rather whether or not God is to be trusted. Williams makes this plain by turning our attention to the Creed, which draws for our imagination a radically different visage of God—one in whom we are invited to trust from the onset. The Creed is composed of statements that reveal God’s agenda by what God has done. It is therefore impossible to stand with neutrality in relation to God. Belief in God’s existence is inextricably tied to questions like, “Is God reliable? Does God have our best interest in mind?” The very nature of God thus demands that we not think of God in the same category as UFOs or ghosts. Belief is the wrong kind of posture for a God who is proximate and good. It is, then, a categorical mistake to approach God’s existence like one might an abstract being, such as a ghost. To do so is to relegate God to impotence and irrelevance. A posture of trust, however, invites God to make a difference in the way we feel about ourselves and the world around us.

Williams’ insistence on trust, not belief is rooted in the conviction that God is entirely other than that from which concept, theory or principle is constructed. Every mode of knowledge is defined by the nature of its object. Therefore, a God who is wholly other than creation necessitates a different kind of touching, seeing and hearing. Intellectual assent and conceptual postulation will not do. God is eternal and transcendent, but not impersonal or unknowable. God is not an impersonal force like gravity which pushes toward the center of the earth without reason or care; neither is God like a theory, a body of impersonal information to master. We must consider the proper mode of knowledge, or posture that accounts for the Creed’s proclamation of a God who cares, listens and speaks—a God who actually revealed Godself by entering our history as the human, Jesus Christ.

Since God lovingly cares for us, we are faced with the decision to receive or ignore God’s love for us. Care is the kind of thing that is only received when the source of care is trusted. It doesn’t matter how much God loves us, if we do not trust him, we cannot receive God’s love. A posture of trust is one of dependence and vulnerability in a relationship. Trust is germinated by its object when there is evidence that the object is working for one’s good and— of course—possesses the power to bring that good to fruition. We are compelled to trust that God is for us when we see God’s agenda made clear: peace and praise. This is most prominent in the cross where God suffered as a human in this world to set people free from fear and guilt to live a new life.

How then does a posture of trust shape the way in which we take up the Christian faith? If God is not an object of neutrality, but one who is relational and active for good, then abstract belief or intellectual assent will not do. And if the Christian life is a function of trust, not merely belief, then the task of spiritual and theological formation is to entrust our lives into the holy hands of God instead of amassing a framework of information. For this reason, the Creed’s theology is ultimately concerned that we entrust ourselves to the God it articulates. As we live our daily lives then, we must be attentive to situations in which we fail to trust God. We are often aware of external sin, but Williams’ emphasis on trust begs us to turn a critical eye to whether or not we, at a given moment, trust that God is perfectly loving, infinitely wise, and totally sovereign. We must ask ourselves, “Are my thoughts and actions indicative of trust in the God who is always and wholly for me?”

Busyness: The Enemy of Spirituality

A friend handed me a photo-copied and coffee stained interview with Eugene Peterson published in 1991 in The Wittenburg Door (I just visited the website of the aforementioned magazine and found it to be reprehensible; a magazine brandishing satire to chop down to size those religious leaders it considers pompous is unfortunate).  Peterson struck a chord with me; his words resonate with my own attempts at spirituality and ministry.

I am posting a few excerpts which are, for me, both a hearty call for repentance and an affirmation of  some of my suspicions about the contemporary protestant Church.  Peterson’s insights are the fruit of a long, faithful pastoral service, thoughtful introspection, and the prophetic viewpoint of a person entrenched in Scripture with one foot in the here and now of the Church and the other in God’s future kingdom.

PETERSON: “Busyness is the enemy of spirituality.  It is essentially laziness.  It is doing the easy thing instead of the hard thing.  It is filling our time with our own actions instead of paying attention to God’s actions…It is an either/or situation.  Busyness has nothing to do with activity, and spirituality is not the absence of activity.  You either enter into what God is doing or you don’t.  A busy person is a lazy person because they are not doing what they are supposed to do.”

DOOR: “It seems like most pastors we know are just like you have, described.  Busy, busy, doing the work of the Church.”

PETERSON: “Most pastors want to run a good church and they will do just about anything to make that happen.  We pastors have a good nose for the market.  We sense when people are getting a little bored and we jazz things up a bit, challenge them with a new project, and we use Sunday morning ‘worship’ as the stage to do that.  I am convinced that pastors don’t give two cents about worship.  They really don’t.  And there’s a good reason for it.  True worship doesn’t make anything happen.  It is a losing of control, a weaning from manipulative language and entertainment.  It’s tough to practice that reality because give the choice between worship and dancing around the golden calf, pastors know people are going to dance.  Pastors sense if they really practice worship they are going to empty out the sanctuary pretty fast.”

“…The pastor’s primary work is leading the people in worship on Sunday morning, proclaiming the word of God, being knowledgeable in theology and scripture, and being committed to a pastoral chair which does not have the therapeutic model for its structure…Pastor’s pray a lot.  Prayer is hard work, but the prayer should be the distinctive about us.  We should have a deliberate or a conscious, intelligent, personal relationship with God which is articulated in prayer.”

DOOR:  “You mentioned earlier that your model for ministry is spiritual direction…What would [that] look like?

PETERSON:  “It doesn’t have a very exact definition, but classically, it is a friendship or companionship which enables another person to recognize and respond to God in their lives in detail, not in generalities.  It takes a lot of leisure.  You can’t do it in a hurry.  It requires extensive knowledge of your people.  You do this over a number of years, not a number of days.  It has no goal in the end.  It is not counseling.  Counseling has a goal, but there’s no goal in spiritual direction.

There is a great story in Moby Dick .  They are in the whale boat and they are chasing Moby Dick.  The sailors are rowing furiously and the sea is frothing, but there is one person in the boat who is not doing anything.  He is just sitting there, quiet and still.  It’s the harpooner, ready to throw the harpoon.  Melville has this great line:  ‘To ensure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpoonists of this world must start to their feet out of idleness and not out of toil.’  For a long time the harpoonist appears to be ‘non-productive’.  But that is only so that when the right moment comes he can be productive.”

DOOR:  “So spiritual direction is a slow process that looks idle and inefficient.”

PETERSON:  “It’s subversive.  I’m a subversive, really.  I gather the people in worship, I pray for them, I engage them often in matters of spiritual correction, and I take them on two really strong retreats a year.  I am a true subversive.  We live in a culture that we think is Christian.  When a congregation gathers in a Church, they assume they are among friends in a basically friendly world (with the exception of pornographers, ect.).  IF I, as their pastor, get up and tell them the world is not friendly and they are really idol worshippers, they think I’m crazy.  This culture has twisted all of our metaphors and images and structures of understanding.  But I can’t say that directly.  The only way that you can approach people is indirectly, obliquely.  A head-on attack doesn’t work.  Jesus was the master of indirection.  The parables are subversive.   His hyperboles are indirect.  There is a kind of outrageous quality to them that defies common sense, but later on the understanding comes.  The largest poetic piece in the Bible, Revelation, is a subversive piece.  Instead of being a three point lecturer, the pastor is instead a storyteller and a pray-er.  Prayer and story become the primary means by which you get past people’s self-defense mechanisms…

If the church member actually realized that the American way of life is doomed to destruction and that another kingdom is right now being formed in secret to take its place, he would be pleased at all.  If he knew what I was really doing and the difference it was making, he would fire me.

True subversion requires patience.”

DOOR:  “This sounds so… well … opposite of what most people think a successful pastor should do.

PETERSON:  “Pastors should not give people what they want just because it brings in customers–which it does.  The biggest enemy to the Church is the development and proliferation of programs to meet people’s needs.  Everyone has a hunger for God, but our tastes (needs) are screwed up.  We’ve been raised on junk food, so what we ask for is often wrong or twisted.  The art of spiritual leadership is not to tell people that they can’t have what they want, but to give them something of what they’ve asked for and not let it go at that.  You try to shift the dimensions of their lives slowly towards what God wants.”

If you are interested in reading the whole article, which I encourage you to do, then click here: original article.

St. Augustine on the Struggle for Belief

St. Augustine: to renew and exalt the faithful hearing of the gospel of man's utter need and God's abundant Grace.

“…though I could not yet know for certain whether what he taught was true.  For all this time I restrained my heart from assenting to anything, fearing to fall headlong into error.  Instead, by this hanging in suspense, I was being strangled.  For my desire was to be as certain of invisible things as I was that seven and three are ten.  I was not so deranged as to believe that this could not be comprehended, but my desire was to have other things as clear as this, whether they were physical objects, which were not present to my senses, or spiritual objects, which I did not know how to conceive of except in physical terms.

If I could have believed, I might have been cured, and, with the sight of my soul cleared up, it might in some way have been directed toward thy truth, which always abides and fails in nothing.  But, just as it happens that a man who has tried a bad physician fears to trust himself with a good one, so it was with the health of my soul, which could not be healed except by believing. “

St. Augustine, Confessions, Bk. 5, Ch. 4

Transformation: The Death of the Principled.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus purifies us from all sin.”

St. John the Beloved

It is self-justification that holds the individual in darkness. This darkness is not a conceptual reality or a principle, but a relational position. The truth here is grace that enables us to commune in relationship with the Risen Lord, the living Christ Jesus. This grace is not an ideal, a principle, nor a proposition to accept, but it is an affirmation through relationship. Transformation only comes through relationship because it is only through relationship that the deep recesses of a heart are opened. It is not an intellectual assent to proper doctrine; nor is it through the study and application of knowledge that the structure of the heart is reformed; it is fellowship with Jesus alone that purifies a heart. Again, this is not just a theological ideal, but an ideal reality brought forth by trusting in the person of Jesus. The Jesus who knows the depths of evil in a person, and yet, faithfully forgives and accepts that person as he is.

The reason we do not experience transformation is because we do not have true fellowship with Jesus through the Gospel. There is no room for self-justification in fellowship with the One who freely justified the sinner by his costly sacrifice. It is trust that is the foundation for fellowship. For trust moves a person out of hiding and into the light. It is imperative that the individual trust in the loving embrace of Christ, because trust is the mechanism that enables a heart to receive the unbound love and grace of God. If you do not trust me, it does not matter how much I love you, because you cannot receive it. Trust is the door through which love must pass.

Darkness is the heart hidden from God; there self-justification prevails as sin remains unresolved. Grace is the means by which a person possesses fellowship with a God who resolves sin through forgiveness. Fear is the enemy of grace. John the Beloved knew that it is only love experienced in fellowship that can transform a self-justifying heart when he warned, “The one who fears is not made perfect in love” (4:18). Fear is conjured by performance, and no person can be in intimacy with Christ through merit. The goal of grace is intimacy. It is a a relational environment through which we interact with God, not a doctrine or a principle. In the form of a principle, grace justifies sin but it does not justify the sinner.

If it is easier to confess our sin, reveal our weaknesses, and layout our evil thoughts to God, who is perfect and holy, sinless and just, than to confess to my brother or sister who is a sinner like me; then, we must ask ourselves why this is true. The reason is this: we live in darkness wherein self-justification thrives. We are not truly confessing to God. We are confessing our sins to ourselves and also granting ourselves absolution (Bonhoeffer). It is confession to another that breaks the chains of self-justification.

A self-justifying man can never be known by others. He must protect his belief that he is strong, worthy, necessary. Above all, he must protect his belief that his sin is less than others. A psychic power struggle exists between individuals as each person attempts to position himself where he can obtain from others acknowledgment that he has made himself something. Confession is the destruction of pride by making sin in the form of abstraction into a concrete reality; it makes the principle of sin into the reality of my being.

“A man who confesses his sins in the presence of a brother knows that he is no longer alone with himself; he experiences the presence of God in the reality of another person.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The journey out of isolation and into fellowship is through the grace in which we must trust. In the fellowship of Jesus, self-justification loses its hold as a person trusts in the truth of grace which demands that he reveal himself in vulnerability to the world. Only in trust, can a person receive the purifying love of Jesus. Only in the purifying love of Jesus can a person put his trust.

It is not the knowledge of Jesus’ grace that transforms.

You must trust in the grace of Jesus.

When you trust in the grace of Jesus, you will experience fellowship.

When you experience fellowship, you will be perfected through his Love.

Reflections of Self: Despair in the Homeless

“The biggest danger, that of losing oneself, can pass off in the world as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, ect. is bound to be noticed.”

-Soren Kierkegaard

Each person has a self; that is, each person must build an identity in something. Kierkegaard states that “self-awareness” is the difference between man and animal. A man must find purpose, significance and meaning to his life; essentially, he must justify his own existence. This justification must come through an identity bestowed from an outside voice. A homeless person, no matter how hard he tries, cannot believe himself to be of value and purpose in a world that is constantly beating him down through neglect.

A gang member, who I met in an impoverished city park, told me that the homeless were already dead but still breathing. The person who builds his self in society is no different: dead but still breathing. In the midst of society’s current, a person is consumed by the need to build and maintain an existence that will reap acceptance, wealth, love, accomplishment, ect. The self built in the temporal cannot last an eternity. Society turns its head from those who sit and beg, refusing to allow an identity to be gratified by its glance .

After losing his wife, his family, his job, his money, and his place in society, the homeless man quickly discovers he has lost himself. His self did not erode away as his family and society banished him to an existence of nothingness in the streets; his self quietly and subtly passed off in the world unnoticed long ago. Any time one feels a sense of one’s own spiritual poverty, he covers it with pleasure or praise. However, he who now has nothing is painfully aware that he has always been nothing. Despair floods the individual who grapples with this reality: an existence of a self or an identity constructed apart from God is death.

The inexplicable joy and exorbitant hope possessed by many homeless overthrow the suburban ethos. Those who have are the ones who are to be satisfied, full, and even- blessed, not those who have not.

“Blessed are you who are poor,

for yours is the kingdom of God.

Blessed are you who hunger now,

for you will be satisfied.

Blessed are you who weep now,

for you will laugh.”

Herein the complexities of Jesus’ words lie chilling truth: those who have not are able to despair in a way that those who have cannot. The poor are forced to seek an identity in God because society will not allow citizenship in man’s kingdom. A homeless person intimately knows his own spiritual poverty; he believes himself to be nothing and weak- and unworthy of favor. Thus, the poor are enabled to drink more deeply from the riches of Christ’s saving blood. But, those who have will innately be inclined to cover any weakness, need, or poverty to retain a social identity.

Blessed are those who society keeps weak and vulnerable, for the kingdom of God is real to those who believe they need it.