He must maintain and defend it

We tell our Lord God plainly, that if he will have his church, he must maintain and defend it; for we can neither uphold nor protect it...

Thus Luther, Tabletalk, 368.

It is a common theme of my musings on Sunday nights and Monday mornings that if God wants to have a church, he is going to have to step in and work.  Whether the Sunday service has gone well or poorly - and I am often a bad judge of that - there is still the realisation that nothing we have done is sufficient.  Nothing we have done can bring it about that spiritually dead people will come to life; nothing we have done will lead by necessary consequence to the strengthening of faith; nothing we have done is adequate to defend those who know the Lord from the attacks of world, flesh, and devil.

Indeed, the church is a very fragile thing.

One of the most helpful applications which I take from the Advent season is simply this: not only does the world need Christ to come to redeem his creation on the last day, but the church needs Christ to come to save his people every single day.  Because God wanted to save his world, he sent forth from the heavens his eternal Word, to become a baby, frail and human.  If God wants to keep his church, he must send forth from the heavens his eternal Word, again and again and again, by his Spirit.  If God wants to grow his church, he must open up the heavens and show forth Christ.

It is a humble but impertinent prayer:

Lord God, you have shown us that we can do nothing without you, either to maintain your honour, display your glory, preserve your church, or advance your kingdom.  In truth, we are nothing unless you send your Word in the power of your Spirit.  And so, we turn to you.  If you desire to have a church, if you desire to draw a people to yourself, if you desire to be glorified in all the earth - you must do it.  Will you do it, please?  Amen.

Reformation 500

It is 500 years to the day since the Augustinian Friar Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, in an attempt to start a debate about the sale of indulgences which led to the revolution in the Church which we call the Protestant Reformation.

I have been remembering the Reformation by pondering the logic of the first few verses of Galatians 3:

O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified. Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?

The background to this passage is that the Galatian churches planted by Paul have been visited by other teachers, who have sought to persuade these Gentile believers that they must keep the Law of the Old Testament.  Of course we don't have their side of the argument, only Paul's, but my guess is that the Law was being offered as the path to growth in godliness - faith in Jesus is a great start, and gets you in to God's family; but to stay in, to grow, to make it to completeness, to enjoy perfect righteousness, pursue the Law.  We can see what Paul's response is by working backwards through these verses.

The central question is this: having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?  Given that the beginning of your Christian life was all from God, all his doing, are you now going to push on to complete godliness by means of human effort?  The Galatian believers would doubtless have wanted to answer in the negative; so would the mediaeval Catholic Church.  No, in keeping the Law the Galatians saw themselves as continuing in dependence on God's grace.  So, to, did the Church of Luther's day.  In fact, what would continued dependence on God look like, if not regular penance, indulgences, the sacramental economy?  No, Paul, we're not seeking to be perfected by the flesh.

But Paul wants to know: how did you receive the Spirit?  Was it by works of the Law, or by hearing with faith?  This sharpens the question.  What does it look like to depend on grace?  What did it look like, Galatians, when you first became Christians?  Did it look like the Law?  No, it did not.  It was faith in what you heard that first brought the Spirit to you.  God's grace came to you as you believed.  Now, do you suppose that God works inconsistently with himself?  Did he first bring you in through faith, so that he could keep you in through the works of the Law - or indeed, the works of the Church's penitential system?  Paul's point here is that God is certainly not inconsistent: as your Christian life began through hearing with faith, so it must continue.

So we might ask: well, what is it that we must hear with faith?  Paul is not here extolling the virtue of faith in general, and neither was Luther, despite what some secular observers of the Reformation might think.  It is faith in something particular.  It was before your eyes, says Paul to the Galatians, that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified.  It was in Christ crucified that the Galatians had trusted; this was the message which they had heard with faith.  The content of that message matters.  By trusting in Christ crucified, the Galatian Christians identified with him in his death, and confessed that it was their death too: the death of their old selves, the judgement on sin which they deserved now executed in the Messiah.  And as they heard this message with faith, so the Spirit was given, and they lived - the new life of Christ living in them.  (For all which, see Galatians 2:20).

How did you get in?  By hearing the message of Christ crucified and believing it.  How will you stay in?  By hearing the message of Christ crucified and believing it.  How will you grow?  By hearing the message of Christ crucified and believing it.  What will keep you to the end?  Hearing the message of Christ crucified and believing it.

This is what the Reformation was all about.  Not really faith in and of itself, but the Word - the Message, the Good News: that God in Christ was reconciling sinners to himself, that in Christ the old has gone and the new has come, that my sinful self was nailed to his cross so that I can live in new life.  Lots of people have lots to say about the Reformation on this anniversary, good and bad.  Much can indeed be said.  At its heart, this movement was about the message of Christ crucified, and that is worth celebrating.

Love and Security

If it is true that perfect love drives out fear (and the Scripture cannot be broken!) then I am sure it is also the case that lingering fear drives out love.

This is a fairly obvious reflection on 1 Corinthians 13:4-7. So much unloving behaviour flows from my felt need to protect myself and my own reputation. I need to look out for number one - how can I possibly have time for being loving? Even resentment or irritability can be traced back to fear about my own identity or the way others perceive me. By reckoning up the wrongs others have done me and meditating on them - which is resentment - I am really just reinforcing my sense of having been in the right myself. By reacting instantly with anger to the slightest crossing of my own will - which is irritability - I reinforce my sense of being at the centre of the universe.

I would need to be so secure, so totally certain that I didn't need to look out for myself, to love in the way the Scripture demands. I would need to really believe that my identity is secure in Christ. I would need to be sure that God sees me truly and loves me unconditionally.

It reminds me a bit of Luther. Luther argued that mediaeval Catholicism had got people so busy chasing after their own justification that they were not able to love others. The money that should have gone to the poor went on indulgences; time that should have been devoted to service of others was wasted in pilgrimages. The Church had people so busy chasing righteousness that they didn't have time to be righteous! If justification were given by grace, on the other hand, and received only by faith - why, then people could be free to live a life of love.

Theolgia Crucis

In lieu of anything profound from me, please do look at Michael Jensen's excellent summary of Luther's theology of the cross. I am particularly excited by his conclusion:

For Luther, then, the Christian life is lived in the middle of a tension between faith and experience. Our experience only serves to contradict our faith. This was something Luther expounded when he thought that he might be martyred. Where was God in this? Luther used the word Anfechtung – 'temptation', or 'assault' – to describe this experience. The devil, the world and death are allied in a war against man. But of course, it is a work of God too, to reduce man to utter reliance on him and him alone. The only way to grow in the Christian life is to return to the foot of the cross and start all over again.

Please do read the whole thing. Everything I want my theological thinking to be is encapsulated in this one theme of Luther's.

I wanted to write something more here about the doctrine of Scripture, but I find that as much as I want it to, a blog cannot be a place for test-driving unfinished thoughts. Hopefully I'll come back to that later.