Classic Luther for Reformation Sunday

On October 31, 1517 an obscure university professor posted a list of 95 theses, or propositions, that he wished to debate. If you read them today they don't seem all that remarkable, and one could be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss was about. However, in the spring of the following year Luther published another set of 28 theses which came to be known as The Heidelberg Disputation. Luther was still a loyal Roman Catholic when he wrote these, but here you can see the seeds of the theology that would turn him from Martin Luther, Augustinian monk into Martin Luther, Protestant Reformer.

I especially love the last four:

25. He is not righteous who does much, but he who, without work, believes much in Christ.

26. The law says, "do this", and it is never done. Grace says, "believe in this", and everything is already done.

27. Actually one should call the work of Christ an acting work (operans) and our work an accomplished work (operatum), and thus an accomplished work pleasing to God by the grace of the acting work.

28. The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it. The love of man comes into being through that which is pleasing to it.

There in a few brief lines is summed up a theology of free grace alone (sola gratia) for which I give thanks on this Reformation Sunday.

The indispensable Christian virtue

I came across this quote from Augustine via John Calvin in Letters to a Young Calvinist by James K. A. Smith.

A saying of Chrysostom's has always pleased me very much, that the foundation of our philosophy is humility. But that of Augustine pleases me even more: 'When a certain rhetorician was asked what was the chief rule in eloquence, he replied, "Delivery"; what was the second rule, "Delivery"; what was the third rule, "Delivery"; so if you ask me concerning the precepts of the Christian religion, first, second, third and always I would answer, "Humility."' (Institutes 2.2.11)

Look for more on Smith's book later. It's a gem! You can read the first few chapters, I mean letters, here.

Boehner (pronounced bay-nur)

I enjoyed reading this Vanity Fair piece by Todd Purdum on the man who may well wake up next Wednesday as Speaker of the House, and arguably the most important political figure in the country. If Ohio Congressman John Boehner ends up taking back the gavel from Nancy Pelosi it will be the culmination of an improbable journey.

John Boehner wasn’t born a Republican. He became one the same way that thousands of other working-class Catholic men of his generation did: through hard work and the absorption of the shifting cultural and political values that culminated in Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. He is the second-oldest of 12 children (his brother Bob is 362 days older), nine boys and three girls born over a 20-year period to Earl and Mary Ann Boehner. He grew up in the Cincinnati suburb of Reading, in a house that initially had only two bedrooms. His parents slept on a foldout couch in the living room. Jerry Vanden Eynden, a childhood friend, recalls that his most vivid memory of the Boehner household is of cloth diapers drying everywhere—on a clothesline outside in summer, and in the basement in winter. Earl Boehner ran Andy’s Café, a shot-and-a-beer bar in nearby Carthage. It specialized in sandwiches and plate lunches for truck drivers and hourly workers from a nearby Procter & Gamble plant. John worked there from the time he was old enough to push a broom, eventually holding every job in the place: bottle sorter, busboy, waiter, and finally bartender, learning, as he put it a couple of years ago, “to deal with every jackass that walks in the door.”

And one more paragraph that hints at the challenges a Speaker Boehner might face. . .

. . . Boehner is by nature a salesman, a deal-maker, not an ideologue. He has been respectful of the anger of Tea Party voters and has attended some of their events, but he has not embraced their tone. He has given a wide berth to the controversial proposal by Paul Ryan, the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, to dramatically cut back and effectively privatize Social Security and Medicare. On more than one occasion, at roundtable discussions with reporters this summer and fall, I watched him decline to mix it up on hot-button topics on which the loudest voices in his party had taken strong stands. These included the Obama administration’s hasty (and mistaken) firing of a black Department of Agriculture official who was accused of making racist remarks, when in fact she’d been calling for tolerance; the controversy over the proposed Muslim prayer room and cultural center near Ground Zero, in Manhattan; and the nature of Barack Obama’s religious beliefs. After a speech in Cleveland, when Boehner was asked, “Would you care to offer an opinion about whether Barack Obama’s a Christian or not?,” he replied crisply, “No. The American people are worried about the economy.” Boehner’s brain trust includes people whose experience dates to the Gingrich era. They remember what happened when the Republicans overreached by twice shutting down the government in disputes with Bill Clinton, and they also remember the way Gingrich and Clinton managed to work together on issues such as overhauling the welfare system. In Washington, people with this kind of perspective are antiques, like something out of Herodotus.

I wish him well.

Why Facebook beats Twitter

@ The Frontal Cortex

Farmer Joel

Money quote at 5:15. . .



Food, Inc. (dir. Robert Kenner, 2008)

Lovelace on the "indissoluble connection" of Justification and Sanctification

One of my former pastors -- a church planter influenced by Tim Keller -- told me I should read Dynamics of Spiritual Life by Richard Lovelace. Five years later I'm taking him up on his suggestion. Lovelace was one of Keller's professors, and one doesn't have to read far to recognize Lovelace's imprint on Pastor Keller's ministry.

At the outset Lovelace acknowledges the huge debt his book owes to Jonathan Edwards. In Dynamics he was attempting to write a "manual of spiritual theology" along the lines of Edwards' work defending and critiquing the First Great Awakening. Lovelace saw a spiritual awakening happening in the 1970's with the rise of the Jesus Movement and the resurgence of evangelical faith on college campuses. He may well have been right. Not only Keller, but present-day leaders like John Piper, Bill Hybels and Chuck Smith came out of the milieu that Lovelace chronicles in the opening pages of the book. In any case, his main concern was to identify the elements of individual and corporate vitality that mark periods of renewal, or revival, throughout biblical and church history.

One of the reasons my former pastor loved the book was because the gospel is always at the front and center of Lovelace's arguments. A chart on pg. 75 (of my older edition) describes the three stages of renewal as I. Preparation for the Gospel (we're gripped by an awareness of God's holiness and the depth of our sin) II. Depth Presentation of the Gospel III. Outworking of the Gospel in the Church's Life. The second of those stages he divides into four primary elements. They look something like this.

A. Justification: You are accepted in Christ

B. Sanctification: You are free from bondage to sin in Christ

C. The indwelling Spirit: You are not alone in Christ

D. Authority in spiritual conflict: You have authority in Christ

Regarding A and B there is an "indissoluble connection between our appropriation of justification and our experience of sanctification." Confusing or conflating the two inevitably leads to some form of works-righteousness. Examples of this are Augustine's teaching on "infused grace" and the "calculus-of-merit theology" of the medieval church. It was against this backdrop that Luther's rediscovery of justification sola fide came like a lightning bolt across the night sky. However, Lovelace reminds the reader that preaching and piety that emphasizes justification by faith alone without an equal commitment to progressive sanctification leads to the spiritual virus the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer diagnosed as "cheap grace." On the other hand, an emphasis on sanctification that isn't grounded in an unalloyed doctrine of justification results in legalism and/or a theology of merit. Lovelace is worth quoting here since yours truly and some regular readers of this blog grew up in a tradition that was prone to the latter error.

. . . the conscience cannot accept sanctification unless it is based on a foundation in justification. When this is attempted the resulting insecurity creates a luxuriant overgrowth of religious flesh as believers seek to build a holiness formidable enough to pacify their consciences and quiet their sense of alienation from God. Theoretically this should be a disorder limited to Catholics—medieval asceticism is the largest monument in history to the uneasy conscience which results when justification is misconstrued—but the large number of serious Protestants who are essentially insecure about their own justification makes it common in the rest of the church also.

Here are two more quotes on justification/sanctification.

Viewed from one perspective, the Protestant Reformation was an effort to remake every sector of the church according to biblical direction. In another sense, however, the spiritual heart of the Reformation was more simply an effort to rebuild the understanding of the Christian life, incorporating Luther's insight on justification.

A large part of institutional Protestantism assumes that all professing Christians (and perhaps all men) are justified, whether or not they show evidence of conversion and sanctification. This is simply the modern form of cheap grace.

And here Lovelace cuts to the chase.

Only a fraction of the present body of professing Christians are solidly appropriating the justifying work of Christ in their lives. Many have so light an apprehension of God's holiness and of the extent and guilt of their sin that consciously they see little need for justification, although below the surface of their lives they are deeply guilt-ridden and insecure. Many others have a theoretical commitment to this doctrine, but in their day-to-day existence they rely on their sanctification for justification, in the Augustinian manner, drawing their assurance of acceptance with God from their sincerity, their past experience of conversion, their recent religious performance or the relative infrequency of their conscious, willful disobedience. Few know enough to start each day with a thoroughgoing stand upon Luther's platform: you are accepted, looking outward in faith and claiming the wholly alien righteousness of Christ as the only ground for acceptance, relaxing in that quality of trust which will produce increasing sanctification as faith is active in love and gratitude.

In order for a pure and lasting work of spiritual renewal to take place within the church, multitudes within it must be led to build their lives on this foundation. [emphasis mine]

I look forward to sharing more from this book!

Quotes from Dynamics of Spiritual Life: An Evangelical Theology of Renewal (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1979) pp. 100-102, 104

Google goes bebop

I love what the doodlers at Google came up with to celebrate jazz legend John "Dizzy" Gillespie's birthday. Get a taste of Dizzy's artistry here.

Comfort for the persecuted church

Photo courtesy of the the Lausanne Movement flickrstream

Read the story behind the picture here

The posture of a disciple

Two more vignettes and some concluding comments on Scot McKnight's The Jesus Creed: Loving God, Loving Others. This is from the chapter titled "Abiding in Jesus" on the story of Martha & Mary in Luke 10.

Martha flits about the kitchen with her mind on many things, mostly herself, while her sister, Mary, sits in front of Jesus at his feet, with her mind on anything but herself. There you have it. Mary's posture tells the story. Her posture is that of a student, of someone who wants to listen to what Jesus has to say, of someone who can wait for dinner. It is the posture, in fact, of someone who is so enthralled with Jesus that dinner might not even happen. . . .

Disciples at the time of Jesus didn't sit in chairs and listen to teachers who lectured behind Torah-lecterns with each Torah-point on the screen. Instead, teachers often taught in homes. When they did, their students sat at their feet, the way kindergarten students gather round their teachers in a circle and open up their minds for learning, like little birds in a nest with open beaks waiting for food. Because this posture is the custom for disciples, "sitting at the feet" of someone becomes an idiom for "being a disciple." (p. 193)

I love McKnight's ability to situate Jesus in his first century Jewish world using clear approachable language. Here's another example from the chapter on the last supper.

To any casual onlooker at the time of Jesus, the Last Supper of Jesus looks like the official Passover meal. But the longer that onlooker observes, the more subtle differences appear. In fact, the onlooker can be excused for thinking that Jesus is setting himself in center stage much more than the Jewish father normally does. There is a reason for Jesus' becoming the center of the meal.

We've already observed that Jesus amended the sacred Shema to form the Jesus Creed; we've also seen that he amended the sacred Kaddish prayer to form the Lord's Prayer. Now we can see that he amends Pesah (Passover) to form the Last Supper. Jesus makes it clear that he is the Lamb of God, and he also makes it clear that the Last Supper anticipates his death, a death for others. That is, Passover becomes personal. Instead of an altar and a priest, Christians have a table and Jesus. Instead of sacrificing a lamb, Christians remember Jesus' death. Instead of eating a lamb, Christians drink the wine and eat the bread. Instead of slaying the firstborn of Egypt, Abba slays his own firstborn. And instead of protecting Israelite babies with blood-smeared doors, Abba protects those who drink from the Firstborn's cup. (p. 268)

Given the author's self-identification as an Anabaptist theologian I admit I expected to find a lot to disagree with in this book. I didn't. This is a solid work of theological and devotional reflection on the meaning of Jesus' actions and words. Though the "Jesus Creed" -- McKnight's name for the Two Great Commandments of Mark 12:28-31 -- isn't the same as the gospel (i.e., it's not the basis of our justification Jesus is) it is the key to spiritual formation for the justified sinner. Loving God and loving neighbor is an apt mission statement for the disciple of Jesus Christ. I'm glad I read this book.

From lattes to IPA's

USA Today and AP report on the opening of a revamped version of Starbucks that just opened in Seattle. From the AP story:

Something new is on the menu at a renovated Starbucks in Seattle: beer and wine.

The store that reopened Monday is the first under the Starbucks brand to offer alcohol.

Craft beer and local wines go on sale after 4 p.m. The idea is to offer drinks and a wider variety of savory food that will attract customers after the morning espresso rush.

The store closed in July for the renovation, which also includes a circular coffee bar that brings customers closer to the baristas.

The Olive Way store is one of Starbucks Corp.'s percolators for ideas that could someday spread to the Seattle-based chain's other locations. Company officials have declined to say how soon elements from the shop might appear elsewhere.

And from USA Today:

If Starbucks (SBUX) executives have it figured out right, this could be the prototype for the next generation of stores for one of the world's most influential brands.

A very different kind of Starbucks is on tap. It will serve regional wine and beer. It offers an expansive plate of locally made cheeses — served on china. The barista bar is rebuilt to seat customers up close to the coffee.

Most conspicuously, the place looks less like a Starbucks and more like a cafe that's been part of the neighborhood for years.

I'm not sure what to make of this. I have something of a love/hate relationship with the world's most famous siren. I'm down with the whole regional thing, but my cynical side thinks Starbucks should figure out how to serve up a consistently good cup of coffee (or a latte for under $3) before they branch out into beer, wine and cheese. Nevertheless expect to see this trend coming to a store near you. Like the USA Today story says: "When Starbucks sneezes, global pop culture feels the draft."