Propoundance

We Are Warned

We are warned of our duty, our danger, and our remedy.

Our Duty: Love God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and spirit.

Our Danger: Due to our sin, we can not accomplish our Duty.

Our Remedy: We can not do any of this without the applied work of Christ to our lives.

The Divine Truth is Mysterious

Observ. 8. That divine truth is mysterious; 'According to the revelation of the mystery, Christ manifested in the flesh.' The whole scheme of godliness is a mystery. No man or angel could imagine how two natures so distant as the Divine and human should be united; how the same person should be criminal and righteous; how a just God should have a satisfaction, and sinful man a justification; how the sin should be punished, and the sinner saved. None could imagine such a way of justification as the apostle in this epistle declares: it was a mystery when hid under the shadows of the law, and a mystery to the prophets when it sounded from their mouths; they searched it, without being able to comprehend it (1 Peter, i.10,11.) If it be a mystery, it is humbly to be submitted to: mysteries surmount human reason. The study of the gospel must not be with a yawning and careless frame. Trades, you call mysteries, are not learned sleeping and nodding: diligence is required; we must be disciples at God's feet. As it had God for the author, so we must have God for the teacher of it; the contrivance was his, and the illumination of our minds must be from him. As God only manifested the gospel, so he can only open our eyes to see the mysteries of Christ in it.

Did you awake this morning with work on your mind or wonder?

"There is more mercy in Christ than sin in us." For that reason, "there can be no danger in thoroughly dealing [with ourselves]. It is better to go bruised to heaven than sound to hell." So, he went on to say, let's not be unwilling to face the unhappy truth about ourselves and to keep facing it, "until sin be the sourest, and Christ the sweetest, of all things." [Works, I, 47-48] 17th century Puritan, Richard Sibbes

What is the Gospel?

But the Gospel is neither accounts of our personal experiences nor commands that we are to obey. The Gospel is the Good News of what Christ did for his people 2,000 years ago. It is not about the new birth, nor the Second Coming, nor the activities of the Holy Spirit in our hearts. The Gospel is propositions about historical events that happened wholly outside of us. It has consequences and implications for us today, to be sure, but these consequences are effects of the Gospel, and must not be confused with the Gospel itself. The fatal error of the Dark Ages was to confuse God's work for us with God's work in us, and so pervert the Gospel. The same error is widespread among so-called Evangelicals today who do not distinguish between what Christ has done for us and what the Holy Spirit can do in us. We are rapidly re-entering the Dark Ages because the light and clarity of the Gospel has been lost.

What, in Hell, Has God Ever Done for Us?

"The question is well worth pondering: What, in hell, has God ever done for us?The answer, of course, is that in Christ, God himself has suffered the hellish agonies of the cross. We believe that Jesus descended into hell. That is to say, we believe that on the cross Jesus suffered the full fury of divine wrath and the utter despair of being separated from his Father's love -- the very essence of hell.

What, in hell, has God ever done for us? He has suffered the full penalty that our sins deserve. And now, having been to hell and back for us, Jesus has the empathy of grace to give every grieving, anguished, and enraged person who has lost what they love in life. There are some people in West Virginia who know this, and some who don't, and we should keep them all in our prayers."

Philip Ryken of Reformation 21 blog.

The Child from Ancient Days

"The origin of the Messiah who appears in Bethlehem is from eternity. Therefore, the mystery of the birth of Jesus is not merely that He was born of a virgin. That miracle was intended by God to witness to an even greater one -- namely, that the child born at Christmas was a person who existed "from of old, from ancient days." He was not merely born, as John 18:37 says; He came into the world. Listen to how Jesus puts it in John 8:56-59. He says to the Jews:

'Your father Abraham rejoiced that he was to see my day; he saw it and was glad.' The Jews then said to Him, 'You are not fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?' Jesus said to them, 'Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.' So they took up stones to throw at Him...

What Christ was before Abraham, indeed before all creation, John and Paul and the writer to the Hebrews make clear for us. John says in chapter one verse one: "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (and don't let any Jehovah's Witness convince you that the proper translation is "the Word was a God." The argument that they use is not grammatically compelling and it flies in the face of the rest of John's witness; for example, Thomas' confession, "My Lord and my God." Almost all scholars of antiquity, even those who think he was wrong, agree that John meant to say, the pre-existent Christ was God.) Verse 2: "He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through Him. And without Him was not anything made that was made." (Christ Himself was not a creature, but was involved in creating all that was created.) Verse 14: "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father." Christ existed before Abraham, indeed, before all creation because He was Himself one with the creator God."

~John Piper

The Gospel and Evangelism

“The Gospel is to be proclaimed in such a way that full place is given to the man Jesus in his Person and Work as the Mediator between God and man, otherwise it is not being proclaimed in a way that corresponds with its actual message of unconditional grace and reconciling exchange. The pattern had already been c learly set by our Lord when he proclaimed that all who wished to be his disciples must renounce themselves, or give up all right to themselves, take up the cross and follow him, and when he laid it down as a basic principle that those who want to save their lives will lose them. Face to face with Christ all would-be followers find themselves called into radical question, together with their preconceptions, self-centered desires and self-will, for to have him as Lord and Savior means that he takes their place in order to give them his place. The preaching of the Gospel in that radical form is not easy, for when we call upon people to repent and believe in Jesus Christ that they may be saved, we have great difficulty in doing that in such a way that we do not throw people back upon themselves in autonomous acts of personal repentance and decision, or encourage them to come to Christ for their own sake rather than for Christ’s sake, in direct conflict with the very principle about motives laid down by Jesus” (T.F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, pp. 92-93).

The Grace of God Prevailed

"I have tried hard to maintain the free choice of the human will, but the grace of God prevailed."
-Augustine

How can God's love and humanity's selfishness be brought together in a communing fellowship?

Since the selfish sinner is unwilling, and unable to become willing, to participate in a fellowship or communion of love with God and other human beings, why has God not abandoned humans completely? Christianity answers that since God is ultimate and humans are finally accountable to God, and since the reality of God is a love that wills to commune with humans right now as well as forever afterward, God is not indifferent to humanity's unwillingness to love and to be loved rather than to be a self. Because the reality of God in Christ is the love that aims for communion, that love cares whether humans accept or reject it. It would cease to be righteous selfless love if it relented in its will to create communion with those who have rejected it. Because it does continue to care infinitely for those who are unwilling to commune with it, God's love requires that humanity's estrangement be overcome and that a radical atonement be established between loving God and selfish humanity.

How can God's love and humanity's selfishness be brought together in a communing fellowship? Christianity asserts that this is a question for God to answer, because humanity is in no disposition to renounce and sacrifice anything of its own. Therefore, the motivation, the will, and the resources to atone holy (loving) God and unholy (selfish) humanity are all on God's side. This situation, according to Christianity, constitutes the crisis point at which grace, the inexplicable extension of God's love, becomes necessary. It supplies the missing link between God's love and humanity's selfishness that is necessary for the salvation of humankind from the sinful, fallen condition.

At the same time, Christian teaching maintains that the mere presence of God's love does not suffice to induce selfishness to yield itself to communion with God's love. The power of God's love has to be conducted in such a manner that it creates communion with selfish people while they are still being selfish. Christians are instructed to see God's love demonstrated in precisely that creative manner in Jesus Christ, and they refer to it as "the grace of God given in Jesus Christ." What they see in Jesus Christ and call grace is God's making a sacrifice that humans ought to have made but refused to make. Christianity announces that right here in human history - where humans ought to have sacrificed their selfishness to God - the love of God acted vicariously for humanity in Jesus Christ and sacrificed selfless love to selfish humanity. This grace, this vicarious action of God's love, has supplied the missing link, in Christianity's scheme of salvation, a link that has joined holy (loving) God and sinful (selfish) humans in a radical atonement:

'In Christ God was reconciling the world to God's reality, no longer holding humanity's transgressions against them . . . . Christ was innocent of sin, but for our sake God made him one with our sinfulness so that in him we might be made one with God's goodness' (2 Corinthians 5:19, 21).

The Shadow of Christ - Part Two

A great heritage awaits us in the Old Testament. But how do we unlock it? Christ Himself is the key that unlocks the riches of the Old Testament. Let us see how.

First of all, Christ is the all-glorious Lord, the only Son of the Father, who from all eternity beholds the Father face to face, who is with God and who is God (John 1:1). Every word of the Old Testament is the word of God Himself (2 Timothy 3:16-17), and God is the trinitarian God--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Thus all of the Old Testament is Christ's word to us, as well as God the Father's word to us.

Second, the Old Testament teaches us about Christ. Such is one main implication of the story of Luke 24. Christ is the focus of the message of the Old Testament. He is the One to whom it points forward, about whom it speaks, and whom it prefigures in symbols.

Third, Christ not only instructs us but establishes communion with us through His word. We abide in Christ as His word abides in us (John 15:7). As the Holy Spirit works in our hearts, we find that we are meeting Christ, and He talks to us very personally through the Bible, including the Old Testament.

Fourth, Christ changes us and transforms us through His word. As we meet with Christ and experience His glory, we are transformed into His image. The Bible says that we start out with a lack of understanding of the Old Testament, due to hard hearts (Luke 24:25; 2 Corinthians 4:4). This lack is like a veil over our hearts, keeping us from seeing it correctly (2 Corinthians 3:14-15). When we turn to the Lord, the Holy Spirit works in us and the veil over our hearts is removed (2 Corinthians 3:16-17). Then we see the true glory of Christ. "And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit" (2 Corinthians 3:18).

Fifth, as our hearts are changed we begin to respond to Christ in adoration, thankfulness, and obedience. Christ is our Lord, our master, and that means that we must obey Him. But Christ is also our beloved, and that means that we come to love to please Him and obey Him (John 14:15, 23). Our response ought not to be a reluctant, grumbling obedience, but joyful, enthusiastic obedience. And so it will be more and more, if we belong to Him and have fellowship with Him, because Christ writes His own law on our hearts (2 Corinthians 3:3, 6; Hebrews 10:16).

Thus when we read the Old Testament we should pray that Christ will both enlighten us and transform us. Because the Old Testament as well as the New is Christ's word, we should believe what God teaches there, obey what He commands, and give thanks for the blessings and communion that He gives. Above all, we should endeavor to search out how the Old Testament speaks of Christ.

We need to keep in mind two final key elements: humility and love. We are beset by sin and our understanding will be imperfect as long as we are in this life (1 Corinthians 13:12). We must be humble enough not to overestimate our abilities. We must realize that God's thoughts are above our thoughts (Isaiah 55:9), and that we will never come to the bottom of their unsearchable depths (Romans 11:33-36). In Christ "are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge" (Colossians 2:3). We should come to Christ for all enlightenment. But when we do so, we also acknowledge "how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ" (Ephessians 3:18). Paul prays for us "to know this love that surpasses knowledge--that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God" (Ephessians 3:19). Truly Christ's love surpasses knowledge, and we adore Him in awe rather than come to a complete mastery of what we study.

Vern S Poythress - The Shadow of Christ in the Law of Moses

The Shadow of Christ - Part One

Long ago in Palestine two disciples of Jesus were walking along the road from Jerusalem to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35). A stranger joined them. He asked them about the things they had been through, and they began to explain. They were heartbroken because the master and friend in whom they had put all their hopes was dead. But the stranger said some strange things to comfort them. Instead of sympathizing, He said, "How foolish you are, and how slow of hearet to believe all that the prophets have spoken!" (Luke 24:25). The disciples' real problem was not with a dead master but with themselves. They did not understand the Old Testament. And so the stranger helped them to understand. "Beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself" (Luke 24:27). The stranger, of course, was Jesus Christ, the master Teacher of the Old Testament. What did Jesus tell those two disciples? We do not know the details. But we do know the heart of His teaching: "Did not the Christ have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?" (Luke 24:26).

Even before Jesus was finished, and even before He revealed who He was, a remarkable transformation began to take place in the hearts of the disciples. They said, "Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked to us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?" (Luke 24:32). The Old Testament Scriptures began to open up to them, and they were awed, amazed, and overwhelmed all at once.

Later on Jesus appeared to a larger group of His disciples. He continued teaching along the same lines:

"Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures (emphasis mine). He told them, 'This is what is written: The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. I am going to send you what my Father has promised; but stay in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high." (Luke 24:45-49)

Christ enabled the disciples to understand not merely the implications of a few passages of the Old Testament, but "the Scriptures"--the whole Old Testament. What do these Scriptures really say? Christ introduces His explanation with the words, "This is what is written" (Luke 24:46). That is He promises to give them the substance and heart of what is written in the Old Testament. What He says next contains His answer: "The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem" (Luke 24:46-47).

The whole Old Testament fiinds its focus in Jesus Christ, His death, and His resurrection. The Apostle Paul says the same thing in different words: "For no matter how many promises God has made, they are 'Yes' in Christ. And so through him the 'Amen' is spoken by us to the glory of God" (2 Corinthians 1:20). "These things [in the Old Testament] happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come" (1 Corinthians 10:11). Jesus says, "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished" (Matthew 5:17-18).

Vern S. Poythress - The Shadow of Christ in the Law of Moses

When we fail to recognize the how's, when's, what's and to what extents of Christ in the Old Testament, we are in danger of viewing everything in the law as "what I must do because it is right" which is a falsehood in its fundamental foundation. Scripture is explicit in saying we can do nothing that will gain God's favor; absolutely nothing.

Yes, Scripture also says that the doing of the law is healthy and right, but if our fundamental motivation to do the law is because it is right, then how does the doing make us more Justified? Or how does the doing produce Sanctification?

The doing does not do either.

continued...

The Gospel is the life of God

"It has the life of God. Paul said to the Corinthians, "I gave you birth through the
gospel"! And then, after it has regenerated us, it is the instrument of all continual growth and spiritual progress after we are converted. "All over the world this gospel is bearing fruit and growing, just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it and understood God's grace in all its truth." (Col. 1:6). Here we learn: 1) That the gospel is a living thing (cf. Romans 1:16) which is like a seed or a tree that brings more and more new life--bearing fruit and growing. 2) That the gospel is only "planted" in us so as to bear fruit as we understand its greatness and implications deeply--understood God's grace in all its truth. 3) That the gospel continues to grow in us and renew us throughout our lives--as it has been doing since the day you heard it. This text helps us avoid either an exclusively rationalistic or mystical approach to renewal. On the one hand, the gospel has a content--it is profound doctrine. It is truth, and specifically, it is the truth about God's grace. But on the other hand, this truth is a living power that continually expands its influence in our lives, just as a crop or a tree would grow and spread and dominate more and more of an area with roots and fruit."

Tim Keller

The Self-Authenticating Scripture

John Murray, "The Attestation of Scripture,"
in The Infallible Word,
edited by N. B. Stonehouse and Paul Woolley,
(P & R Publishing Company, 2002 edition), p. 46-47.

Personal Holiness: More Than a Mere Outline of a Human Being

1 Peter 1:13-21
Intro:
• Secular groups that exegete the fallen human condition well: Evanescence (vocals by Amy Lee) – Song: Bring Me to Life ("How can you see into my eyes like open doors, leading you down into my core, where I’ve become so numb without a soul. My spirit sleeping somewhere cold, until you find it there and lead it back home. Chorus: wake me up inside. Wake me up inside. Call my name and save me from the dark. Bid my blood to run before I come undone. Save me from the nothing I’ve become…breathe into me and make me real. Bring me to life."). What is so powerful to be about this song is that the songwriter recognizes that there is something terribly wrong with her humanity, that her humanity is severely defective and lacking. What we have in this song is really a groaning for holiness (I think you’ll see what I mean by this a little later).

• There’s a scene in The Fellowship of the Ring where Bilbo says to Gandalf: “I feel thin–sort of stretched like butter scraped over too much bread. I need a holiday, a very long holiday, and I don’t expect I shall return. In fact, I mean not to!” What we see here in Bilbo is also a groaning for redemption, a longing to be set right. He too is longing for personal holiness.

• I want to ask 1 Peter 1:13-21 three questions:
1. What does personal holiness involve?
2. What does its absence look like?
3. How do we cultivate it?

I. What does personal holiness involve?

A. The integration and synchronization of our entire being (i.e. mind, will, and emotions)

1. Mind (v. 13, “preparing your minds…being sober-minded)

a. Two phrases:

1 Peter 1:13 Therefore, preparing your minds for action, and being sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

i. Prepare your minds – prepare yourself for thinking hard and long

ii. Being sober-minded – to be sober-minded is to be in control of your thought processes.

b. Summary: Personal holiness is an intellectual pursuit (Romans 12:1-2; 2 Corinthians 10:5). It requires intellectual vigor.

Romans 12:1-2 I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. [2] Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

2. Will (v. 14, “as obedient children” or “children of obedience”)

1 Peter 1:14 As obedient children [or “children of obedience”], do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance

a. Peter is referring to people whose lives are characterized by willful obedience.

b. Summary: Personal holiness is a volitional pursuit—every decision must be made with a profound God-consciousness, a profound consciousness of God as our Father.

3. Emotions (vv. 13, 17)

a. Two Phrases:

i. “set your hope fully” (v. 13)

1 Peter 1:13 Therefore, preparing your minds for action, and being sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

ii. “you call on him as Father” (v. 17)

1 Peter 1:17 And if you call on him as Father who judges impartially according to each one's deeds, conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile,

4. Did you notice that what Peter is teaching us is that personal holiness is the centering of our entire being upon God, the integration and synchronization of our mind, will, and emotions upon God.

• ILLUS: How do we know if a human being is a good human being? How do we know if a watch is a good watch?

Westminster Catechism: What is the chief end of man? The chief end of man is to glorify God and [by] enjoying him forever.

Augustine: “Thou hast made us for thyself and restless is our heart until it comes to rest in thee.”

B. The conscious awareness of a new relationship (v. 17)

1 Peter 1:17 And if [since] you call on him as Father who judges impartially according to each one's deeds, conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile,

1. Before we get to “who judges impartially” I want us to unpack “you call on him as Father” a little more.

2. Although God was spoken of as a father in the OT (Psalm 103:13, “As a father shows compassion to his children, so the LORD shows compassion to those who fear him.” Hosea 11:1), it comes to occupy a dominant position in the NT.

a. Jesus’ use of Father (prayer and teaching)
b. Paul’s use: “Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 15:6; 2 Cor. 1:3; Eph. 1:3).
c. Peter use: 1 Peter 1:3

John 20:17 Jesus said to her, "Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brothers and say to them, 'I am ascending to my Father and your Father' "

• The beauty of the Gospel is that we are brought to share, as T.F. Torrance puts it in his book Three Persons, One Being, “in the Communion of Love which the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit eternally are” (p. 143). “God is love” makes no sense apart from the doctrine of the Holy Trinity!

3. When Peter says that we as believers call upon God as Father, he is saying that God is eternally for us, even as God is for His eternal Son! Speaking of the Fatherhood of God, Michael Gorman says: “To say that God is our Father…is to say above all that God is for us, as demonstrated in the giving of his only Son so that that Son could become the first of many ‘sons’ (children) of God” (Cruciformity, p. 13). And I add, “to say that God is our Father is to say above all that God is for us even as he is for each person of the Holy Trinity!”

• At the heart of personal holiness is (1) the integration and synchronization of our entire being upon God and (2) the conscious awareness of our new and most profound relationship with God as Father.

• The holy life VALUES this relationship with The Father in such a way that it affects the way that we live.

II. What does the absence of personal holiness look like?

A. “Don’t be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance” (v. 14).

B. “Don’t be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance” (v. 14)

1. “passions” is “epithumia” –

2. Connect 1 John 2:15-17 with I John 5:21

1 John 2:15-17 Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. [16] For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and the pride in possessions—is not from the Father but is from the world. [17] And the world is passing away along with its desires.

1 John 5:21 Little children, keep yourselves from idols.

3. The reason for coming under the influence of pre-knowing God over-desire is not hard to find.

Gospel Transformation: “When we fall away from God, we experience great lack, need, deficiency, and alienation. In order to fulfill our lives we resort to idolatry [or over-desire]. We serve, love, desire, trust, fear, worship other things apart from God to give us love, joy, peace, freedom, status, identity, control, happiness, security, fulfillment, health, pleasure, significance, acceptance, and respect” (pp. 44-45).

• Examples: (1) High G.P.A.; (2) girl/boy friend, marriage partner;

4. What we must see is that “over-desire” always moves toward disintegration, toward the disjunction between mind, will, and emotion. It always leads to discontent, frustration, and emptiness.

ILLUS: To be under the influence of over-desire is to be like a neurotic dog…always moving from one object of affection to another

Henry Scougal: “The soul of man is of a vigorous and active nature, and hath in it a raging and inextinguishable thirst, an immaterial kind of fire, always catching at some object or other, in conjunction wherewith it thinks to be happy” (p. 109).
Cornelius Plantinga: “All idolatry is not only treacherous but also futile. Human desire, deep and restless and seemingly unfulfillable, keeps stuffing itself with finite goods, but these cannot satisfy. If we try to fill our hearts with anything besides the God of the universe, we find that we are overfed but undernourished, and we find that day by day, week by week, year after year, we are thinning down to a mere outline of a human being” (Cornelius Plantinga, Not the Way It’s Suposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin, pp. 122-123). [To the degree that we lack in personal holiness to that degree are we a mere outline of a human being.]
• ILLUS: There’s a powerful scene in ROTK where Gandalf comes into King Theoden who is under the spell of Saruman (through Wormtongue) (Gandalf: “Breathe the free air again, my friend.” Theoden: “Dark have been my dreams of late.”).

III. How do we cultivate personal holiness?

A. It is not cultivated by:

1. Fear of punishment – If fear is the primary motivation for our personal holiness, we will find: 1) our motivation losing its power after time. 2) that we have a great deal of trouble with repentance.

2. Being driven by duty –

B. But by feeding daily upon the Gospel

1. “set your hope [longing] fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ” (v. 13).

2. “live at the cross” (v. 17). Where do I find this?

1 Peter 1:17-19 And if [since] you call on him as Father who judges impartially according to each one's deeds, conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile, [18] knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, [19] but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot.

a. “Conduct yourselves…” is the only command in verses 17-19. If we isolate this command…

b. What immediately precedes and follows this command to walk in fear of the one who judges impartially to each one’s deeds?

i. What Precedes: “since you call on him as Father who judges impartially according to each one’s deeds” (v. 17a).

Hebrews 12:5-6 "My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him. [6] For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives."

ii. What Follows: “knowing that you were ransomed…” (vv. 18-19)

1 Peter 1:18-19 knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, [19] but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot.

c. Verses 18-19 make sure that we make the connection between Christian fear and the cross. When Peter says, “conduct yourselves in fear,” he is referring to a fear that is deeply paradoxical. It is a fear of God that has two parts in its connection to the cross:

i. I am terribly sinful—
ii. I am unbelievably loved—

3. To fear God as a believer is to see at the same time that I am more sinful than I ever imagined and yet more loved than I ever dared hope. This is what cultivates personal holiness.

• Seeing how sinful we are without at the same time how loved we are empties us of all motivation to pursue holiness. “What’s the use?”

• Seeing the “love of God” without out seeing our sin is to strip ourselves of all motivation as well. “Why do I need to be holy?”

4. It is only at the cross where we are able to truly cultivate personal holiness. So live there, eat there, drink there. It is there that we move away from a “mere outline of a human being” and are “renewed in knowledge after the image of Christ” (Colossians 3:10).

Dan Cruver - Professor at Baptist Bible College in Clarks Summit, PA

How Can I Know God?

"What is Christianity? Some say it is a philosophy, others say it is an ethical stance, while still others claim it is actually an experience. None of these things really gets to the heart of the matter, however. Each is something a Christian has, but not one of them serves as a definition of what a Christian is. Christianity has at its core a transaction between a person and God. A person who becomes a Christian moves from knowing about God distantly to knowing about him directly and intimately. Christianity is knowing God."

Why do I need to know God?
Our desire for personal knowledge of God is strong, but we usually fail to recognize that desire for what it is. When we first fall in love, when we first marry, when we finally break into our chosen field, when we at last get that weekend house—these
breakthroughs arouse in us antic ipation of something which, as it turns out, never occurs. We eventually discover that our desire for that precious something is a longing no lover or career or achievement, even the best possible ones, can ever satisfy. The satisfaction fades even as we close our fingers around our goal. Nothing delivers the joy it seemed to promise. Many of us avoid the yawning emptiness through busyness or denial, but at best there is just a postponement. “Nothing tastes,” said Marie Antoinette.

There are several ways to respond to this:

By blaming the things themselves – by finding fault in everyone and everything around you. You believe that a better spouse, a better career, a better boss or salary would finally yield the elusive joy. Many of the most successful people of the world are like this – bored, discontented, running from new thing to new thing, often changing counselors, mates, partners, or settings.

By blaming yourself – by trying harder to live up to standards. Many people believe they have made poor choices or have failed to measure up to challenges and to achieve the things that would give them joy and satisfaction. Such people are wracked with selfdoubts and tend to burn themselves out. They think, “If only I could reach my goals, then this emptiness would be gone.” But it is not so.

By blaming the universe itself – by giving up seeking fulfillment at all. This is the person who says, "Yes, when I was young I was idealistic, but at my age I have stopped howling after the moon." This makes you become cynical, you decide to repress that part of yourself that once wanted fulfillment and joy. But you become hard, and you can feel yourself losing your humanity, compassion, and joy.

By blaming and recognizing your separation from God – by seeing that the emptiness comes from your separation from God, and by establishing a personal relationship with him.

In order to form a personal relationship with God, you must know
three things:

1) Who we are:

God’s creation. God created us and built us for a relationship with him. We belong to him, and we owe him gratitude for every breath, every moment, everything. Because humans were built to live for him (to worship), we will always try to worship something – if not God, we will choose some other object of ultimate devotion to give our lives meaning.

Sinners. We have all chosen (and re-affirm daily) to reject God and to make our own joy and happiness our highest priority. We do not want to worship God and surrender ourself as master, yet we are built to worship, so we cling to idols, centering our lives on things that promise to give us meaning: success, relationships, influence, love, comfort, and so on.

In spiritual bondage. To live for anything else but God leads to breakdown and decay. When a fish leaves the water, which he was built for, he is not free, but dead. Worshiping other things besides God leads to a loss of meaning. If we achieve these things, they cannot deliver satisfaction, because they were never meant to be "gods." They were never meant to replace God. Worshiping other things besides God also leads to self- image problems. We end up defining ourselves in terms of our achievement in these things. We must have them or all is lost; so they drive us to work too hard, or they fill us with terror if they are jeopardized.

2) Who God is:
Love and justice. His active concern is for our joy and well-being. Most people love those who love them, yet God loves and seeks the good even of people who are his enemies. But because God is good and loving, he cannot tolerate evil. The opposite of love is not anger, but indifference. “The more you love your son, the more you hate in him the liar, the drunkard, the traitor,” (E. Gifford). To imagine God’s situation, imagine a judge who also is a father, who sits at the trial of his guilty son. A judge knows he cannot let his son go, for without justice no society can survive. How much less can a loving God merely ignore or suspend justice for us—who are loved, yet guilty of rebellion against his loving authority?

Jesus Christ. Jesus is God himself come to Earth. He first lived a perfect life, loving God with all his heart, soul, and mind, fulfilling all human obligation to God. He lived the life you owed—a perfect record. Then, instead of receiving his deserved reward (eternal life), Jesus gave his life as a sacrifice for our sins, taking the punishment and death each of us owed. When we believe in him: 1) our sins are paid for by his death, and 2) his perfect life record is transferred to our account. So God accepts and regards us as if we have done all Christ has done.

3) What you must do:

Repent. There first must be an admission that you have been living as your own master, worshipping the wrong things, violating God’s loving laws. “Repentance” means you ask forgiveness and turn from that stance with a willingness to live for and center on him.

Believe. Faith is transferring your trust from your own efforts to the efforts of Christ. You were relying on other things to make you acceptable, but now you consciously begin relying on what Jesus did for your acceptance with God. All you need is nothing. If you think, “God owes me something for all my efforts,” you are still on the outside.

Pray after this fashion: "I see I am more flawed and sinful than I ever dared believe, but that I am even more loved and accepted than I ever dared hope. I turn from my old life of living for myself. I have nothing in my record to merit your approval, but I now rest in what Jesus did and ask to be accepted into God’s family for his sake."

When you make this transaction, two things happen at once: 1) your accounts are cleared, your sins are wiped out permanently, you are adopted legally into God’s family and 2) the Holy Spirit enters your heart and begins to change you into the character of Jesus.

Follow through. Tell a Christian friend about your commitment. Get yourself training in the basic Christian disciplines of prayer, worship, Bible study, and fellowship with other Christians.

Why should I seek God?

On one hand, you may feel that you "need" him. Even though you may recognize that you have needs only God can meet, you must not try to use him to achieve your own ends. It is not possible to bargain with God. (I’ll do this if you will do that.”) That is not Christianity at all, but a form of magic or paganism in which you “appease” the cranky deity in exchange for a favor. Are you getting into Christianity to serve God, or to get God to serve you? Those are two opposite motives and they result in two different religions. You must come to God because 1) you owe it to him to give him your life (because he is your creator) and 2) you are deeply grateful to him for sacrificing his son (because he is your redeemer.)

On the other hand, you may feel no need or interest to know God at all. This does not mean you should stay uncommitted. If you were created by God, then you owe him your life, whether you feel like it or not. You are obligated to seek him and ask him to soften your heart, open your eyes, and enlighten you. If you say, “I have no faith,” that is no excuse either. You need only doubt your doubts. No one can doubt everything at once—you must believe in something to doubt something else. For example, do you believe you are competent to run your own life? Where is the evidence of that? Why doubt everything but your doubts about God and your faith in yourself? Is that fair? You owe it to God to seek him. Do so.

What if I’m not ready to proceed?

Make a list of the issues that you perceive to be barriers to your crossing the line into faith. Here is a possible set of headings:

Content issues. Do you understand the basics of the Christian message—sin, Jesus as God, sacrifice, faith?

Coherence issues. Are there intellectual problems you have with Christianity? Are there objections to the Christian faith that you cannot resolve in your own mind?

Cost issues. Do you perceive that a move into full Christian faith will cost you dearly? What fears do you have about commitment?
Now talk to a Christian friend until these issues are resolved. Consider reading: Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis (MacMillan) and Basic Christianity, by John Stott (IVP)

© 1991 - Tim Keller

Philosophy and Self-Justification

"Alain de Botton notes in his book Status Anxiety that many societies see a direct relationship between reputation and self-image. If others hold me in contempt, then I must either defend myself against their contempt or accept their contemptuous assessment. Philosophy introduces a mediator, reason, which assesses and judges reputation for its truth value. If reputation does not match reality, then one can maintain a good self-image in spite of the slings and arrows of society. Philosophy has thus also often been misanthropic, or at least skeptical of the wisdom of the crowd. This is a nice exercise if one wants to be protected from shame. But philosophy's approach is incoherent; for on what basis do I trust my judgment over that of others? Is it because I know myself better than others? Do I? Philosophers certainly assume that this is the case, but it's not at all clear that it's true.

There are undoubted benefits to philosophy. Philosophy limits or eliminates duelling and other violent resolutions of a shame-honor conflict. If someone throws down the gauntlet and calls me a cad, I can calmly and philosophically conclude that he is wrong, and walk away. I don't have to fight to prove it. Yet, ultimately, philosophy (in de Botton's setup) is a mechanism for self-justification, a method for putting the self in the position as judge of the self. And that, Barth saw, was a fundamental sin, for Christians confess that there is one Judge only. Our status, our honor or shame, is indeed dependent on another's assessment. But He is a merciful assessor. That is justification by faith."

Leithart

Christmas, A Cure for the Pain of the World

Defenses of Christmas aren't much better than the attacks. Remember: cynics get intelligence, believers are good hearted, dimwits. Defending anything based on religion, such as Christmas, must rely on feeling and not intellect, says our culture. Christmas is good, because it is about family, as if family is an unmixed blessing for most people. Christmas is good, because it is about "belief," especially in the spirit of Santa. Since Santa does not exist, and recent holiday movies demand we believe in him, this seems like a call to madness. Christmas is also supposed to be about the "child within," but in a culture in dire need of grownups this seems dangerous as well. Jesus once said to be like a little child regard to humility, but irrational Christmas marketers aren't saying that. Christmas seems to involve believing in the unbelievable in order to regress to childishness.

Christmas is about the birth of Jesus, the incarnation of God and Man. If true, it is [a pivotal] moment of history. If false, it is useless. Best reason and best experience argue that it is true. My heart bears witness to His gentle Voice. My mind demands that I accept the truth of history. This moment when Heaven and Earth were brought together is the answer to the pain of our existence and that is the very problem with both cynicism about Christmas and most defenses of the holiday.

The cynics see a world of pain and embrace it. Chaos is basic to their vision of the world, but their very rationality denies this view. The defenders act as if platitudes can solve problems. Warm hearts are not enough against cold reality.

Christmas is for a world of pain. Christmas is good news, because it shows God comes down to Earth and saves us. Such news makes merry, but remains realistic. It is for sin, but about redemption. It denies nothing about human hurts, but does not rest content in them.

Dr. John Mark Reynolds - Eidos

Delighting in the Sabbath

"No age has ever more intensely needed Sabbath-keeping than ours. Attempts to scrap God's moral law and to replace it with institutions and schemes of human invention are miserably failing. Sabbath-keeping in isolation is not an answer to all man's ills. Yet, this law is intimately related to all others and has a necessary connection with the other branches of God's moral code. Where even small segments of mankind have succeeded in implementing a joyful observance of the Sabbath, they have reaped enormous benefit. It is time for us, too, to call the Sabbath a delight and to return unto the Lord."

Call The Sabbath A Delight - Walter J. Chantry

Redemption is not possible, but Accomplished

The Bible tells us of "…that great Savior, who, after such preparation, actually accomplished the purchase of redemption, and who, after he had spent three or four and thirty years in poverty, labor, and contempt, in purchasing redemption, at last finished the purchase by closing his life under such extreme sufferings as you have heard, and so by his death, and continuing for a time under the power of death, completed the whole." (Jonathan Edwards, History of the Work of Redemption) The Bible tells us of a Savior who did not die to make redemption possible in the lives of those who would place their trust in Him, but of a Savior who actually and finally redeemed His people with His death. When Christ cried out "It is finished!" he indicated that His work of atonement was complete. He did not make atonement possible, but actually accomplished it.

Challies

The Enemy of Mankind

O, how is the world darkened, clouded, distracted, and torn to pieces

by those dreadful enemies of mankind called words!

Jonathan Edwards

The Gospel

"the gospel of the grace of God" (Acts 20:24), "the gospel of the kingdom" (Matt. 4:23), "the gospel of Christ" (Rom. 1:16), "the gospel of peace (Eph. 6:15), "the glorious gospel," "the everlasting gospel," "the gospel of salvation" (Eph. 1:13).

No matter how you say it, it is the best news mankind can ever hear and accept!

Psalm 25:11

"For thy name's sake, O Lord, pardon my iniquity; for it is great."

Proverbs 21:1

"The king's heart is like channels of water in the hand of the LORD; He turns it wherever He wishes."

Praise God for His Sovereignty.

The Gospel - All of Grace

1. Man cannot understand it. This is necessary to a change. Whatsoever is done by the will, must be done by the impulse of some other faculty. Sensitive appetite cannot instruct the will to this work. Sense is not capable of reason, much less of religion, though it be the portal to both. The will can never be moved to any good thing, unless the mind propound it as good and amiable. The act of thinking must precede the act of believing, for we cannot believe without thinking of what we believe. It is less to think than understand. If we cannot, then, do that which is less in the preparation, we cannot do that which is greater, especially when it is impossible to will without thinking; and thinking is a necessary means to willing. He that cannot prepare himself for a good thought, how can he prepare himself for a gracious habit? What ability have we to the act of faith, when we have no ability to any thought of faith? We cannot by the strength of nature understand it, if we consider,

(1.) The first blot caused by sin was upon the understanding. Man was first deceived by the sophistical reasonings of the serpent. The first effect of sin was to spread a thick darkness upon Adam's understanding. Though the whole house, and every beam of it, fell together, yet this faculty was first unfastened, and brought all the rest to ruin. As soon as ever he ceased from glorifying God as God, a darkness was brought upon his foolish heart: Rom. i. 21, 'When they knew God, they glorified him not as God, but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened,' where the apostle describes the state of man in corrupt nature after his fall.

(2.) There is a darkness transmitted from him to the understanding of every man by nature. The light is darkened in the heaven of the soul, the more spiritual part of the mind, Isa. v. 30, as the prophet speaks in another case. Our understandings are so closed up with the thick slime of sin, that we cannot see the beauty of gospel truths; 'darkness comprehends not the light,' John i. 5. Though the light of the sun did shine a thousand times brighter than it does, and strike upon the face and eyelids of a man with the greatest glory, yet if there be a spot upon the apple of his eye, if he scants a seeing faculty, he can apprehend nothing of it.

(3.) There is an unsuitableness and a contrariety in the mind of man to the gospel, which is the instrument of regeneration. There is a mighty distance between the spiritual object and the natural faculty. The understanding, though never so well furnished with natural stuff, is but natural, and flesh; the object is supernatural and spiritual; therefore the richest mere nature can no more attain to the knowledge of spiritual things, than the clearest sense can attain to the knowledge of rational. Though every man 'by nature has the things contained in the law,' Rom. ii. 14, 15, yet no man has by nature the things contained in the gospel. The gospel has not the same advantage in the hearts of men as the law hash, for it finds nothing of kin to it. Though a natural heart has some broken pieces of the law of God deposited in it, yet there is not the least syllable of Christ or regeneration written in the mind by the hand of nature.

(4.) Besides this, the natural levity of the understanding does incapacitate it to prepare itself. It is with the understanding as with a line, the farther it is stretched out the weaker and more wavering it is. So is the understanding, being at a distance from God. How do vain thoughts intrude into the mind! No man can keep a door locked against them. We feel them rushing upon us while we endeavour to avoid them. We are confounded and overwhelmed by them, and drawn to things against our own resolutions. Man has not the command of his own heart, so much as to think steadily of a divine object.

(5.) Hence it follows that a natural mind has no right notion of grace. To the right notion of a thing is required suitableness, pleasure, and a fixedness of the mind upon it. A natural mind wants all these. How can it then prepare itself for that which it has no knowledge of? And without knowledge it cannot commend it to the will. The apostle asserts a plain cannot in this business: 1 Cor. ii. 14, 'He cannot know them, because they are spiritually discerned.' Being destitute of the Spirit, they cannot discern the things of the Spirit.

Charnock

The Cross

The cross. What a diverse and theologically complete term.

The New Testament describes the Cross in its multiple facets.

It is a military operation; the Divine Warrior’s victory over Satan, sin, and death.
It is an act of diplomacy; reconciling the world to God.
It is a legal act; the execution of a sentence of death.
It is a cultic act; the sacrifice that ends all sacrifice.

The 4th can be more aptly stated: "sacrifice and the redemption of society."

It is clear from the New Testament that the cross has both theological and sociological dimensions. That is, the cross reconciles God with man and also reconciles man and man, redeeming human society.

My ultimate aim is to answer Anselm’s question, Cur Deus Homo? in a way that demonstrates not only the theological but the "sociological" necessity of the cross.

I.
Raising the question this way immediately raises a conflict with secular thought. To be sure, Christians and secularists agree that society needs to be redeemed. Though secularists may object to the use of a religiously loaded word like "redemption," one of the driving forces of post-Enlightenment modernity has been the passion to liberate human society from its pathologies so that it may flourish in freedom and peace. A central question that divides Christians and moderns has to do with the means for achieving that condition. For Christianity, society is redeemed by the Incarnate Son, who entered a disordered and perverted world reeling under the curse and wrath of God (Rom. 1:18-32) to redeem "us from the curse of the Law, having become a curse for us" on the cross (Gal. 3:13). Through the blood of Christ and through His cross, Jew and Gentile have been made "one new man" and are "reconciled in one body" (Eph 2:11-16). Through Jesus, societies torn by violence, hatred, and envy, societies inflated with pride, societies distracted and obsessed by sensuality are renewed in joy, peace, patience, love, goodness, faithfulness, and self-control.

For moderns, on the other hand, Christianity is one of the pathologies from which society must be delivered. Moderns are repulsed at the idea of substitutionary atonement and by sacrifice. For Jesus to take our place is unjust and unbecoming of God. According to Nietzsche, the "god on the cross" cannot be the redeemer of society and human life; rather, the cross was the negation of life. For others, claiming that a violent death lies at the heart of history legitimizes violence, and to suggest that human society and culture can be redeemed only by an event during the first century, an event that took place in the Eastern backwaters of the Roman Empire, is patently absurd. Who needs that? If we liberalize political systems, adjust the incentive structure of the economy, break down invidious class barriers -- if all this can be done, then soon the lion will lie with the lamb and the cow and the bear will graze together. This confidence that society can be redeemed by human effort cuts across the political spectrum; it can take a conservative law-and-order regime or a liberal agenda of removing-discrimination-and-inequalities. The differences between conservative and liberal are less important than their essential agreement that society can be redeemed by law. Both agree that a "new order of the ages" can be established by Constitutional Convention, without the gore of crucifixion or the miracle of resurrection.

Theologians in the modern world have felt the pressure of these objections to traditional theories of the atonement. Beginning with the Socinians of the sixteenth century, and increasingly in the subsequent two centuries, sociological (and psychological) theories of the atonement supplanted earlier theological theories. For modern theologians the cross did not effect a transformation of human life, but instead set an example of the kind of life that would regenerate man. If only we all lived like Jesus, pouring ourselves out for others, sympathizing with the miserable, identifying ourselves with outcasts, we could usher in the millennium.

Intellectual history is full of paradoxes, and several are involved in modern theology’s abandonment of satisfaction theories of the atonement. For one, many modern thinkers, eager to escape the long shadow of Anselm, found that some idea of atonement and substitution was essential to any coherent moral philosophy. Kant serves to illustrate this point. According to the analysis offered by R. R. Reno, Kant, like other thinkers of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment, attempted to hold together three premises concerning the possibility of redemptive change for man or for society. First, according to the "personal continuity" criterion, a man or society who changes from evil to good must be somehow the same throughout the process of change. Otherwise, obviously, no change has taken place, but only replacement. Second, according to the principle of "moral determination," what we are morally is who we are. Our moral condition is the key to our identity. Finally, according to the (Pelagian) criterion of "personal potency," the power to change from evil to good must lie in human beings themselves.

But Kant ultimately could not avoid some kind of atonement, even substitutionary atonement. There is evidently a conflict between the "personal continuity" criterion and the "moral determination" criterion. If our moral condition determines our identity, then the "new man" is not the same person as the old man and if this is true, it does not seem that moral change is possible. The problem becomes acute in Kant’s analysis of punishment. Those who sin must be punished, but the new man is not the same as the old man, and therefore it is unjust for him to suffer the consequences of his former self’s actions. But if the new man does not suffer any consequences of his former self’s sins then there does not appear to be any meaningful moral continuity between the old man and the new.

Kant’s solution to this dilemma is to introduce a concept of vicarious suffering. Though the new man is not strictly liable for the sins of his former self, yet he suffers the consequences of the old man’s sins. As Reno puts it, "The righteous person I seek to become pays the debt of the sinful person I presently am." Kant has not dispensed with the need for substitutionary atonement and vicarious suffering but merely relocated it. In place of an external atonement through Jesus’ sufferings and death, Kant offers a self-atonement. Here it becomes clear that Kant’s "personal potency" criterion is supreme above all: What Kant and the Enlightenment reject is not atonement per se, but the idea that we need someone else to atone for us. Fundamentally, the Enlightenment rejected the Christian doctrine of atonement because it conflicted with the basic assumption that man is autonomous, capable of making his own way.

I wish to focus, however, on a second paradox, which is this: At the same time that theologians were busy seeking alternatives to sacrificial accounts of Christ’s death, anthropologists and psychologists were discovering that sacrifice was at the heart of ancient and primitive society, and had left a permanent imprint on human psychology and culture. Freud believed that society grew out of a primal murder, and James Frazer’s monumental Golden Bough traced the myth of the dying and rising god through Greek and other mythologies, showing how this provided the background for rituals of death and resurrection that were believed to renew nature and society. Early in the twentieth century, Marcel Mauss uncovered links between religious transactions and human social transactions by focusing on the phenomenon of gift-exchange. Relations with the gods were constituted by sacrificial offerings, in much the same way that relations among men were nourished by mutual giving and receiving. By the middle of the last century, Mary Douglas was defending the logic of supposedly primitive notions of pollution, purity, and sacrifice, and claiming that these were still at work in our own sanitized culture.

Over the past thirty years, the most thorough account of sacrifice and its role in social regeneration has been offered by the French-American literary critic and philosopher, Rene Girard. Girard has developed a theory of religion and culture that highlights the formative role of sacrifice and scapegoating, and this theory has led him to convert to Christianity. Girard’s theory is worth lingering over for a few moments.

Central to Girard’s work are his notions of "mimetic desire" and "mimetic rivalry." Contrary to the Enlightenment assumption that men are autonomous, Girard asserts that we are radically social, so much so that even our desires -- which we often think of as uniquely our own -- are socially formed. We desire "mimetically," that is, because we imitate the desires of others. When we see another person, especially someone we admire, desiring something or someone, we begin to desire it as well. This is simply a fact of human life, according to Girard, but it has a built-in bias toward rivalry. If I see my friend’s desire for a woman, and begin to imitate that desire, we are shortly drawn into rivalry for the woman. There is, after all, only one woman between us. Societies can degenerate into little more than a network of mimetic rivalries, and at that point they have reached what Girard calls a "sacrificial crisis," a time when "love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide. In cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked twixt father and son," when life is dominated by "machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves" (King Lear 1.2.106-109, 112-114).

Such a war of all against all can end in only two ways: either the society disintegrates completely, or the rivalries are defused through sacrifice. A society in the midst of sacrificial crisis reunifies and restores harmony by directing the violence of rivalry toward a scapegoat. Because every member of the society joins with others in abhorrence toward the "outsider" who serves as sacrificial victim, the slaughter of the sacrifice helps to restore order. Rivals are reduced to friends when they find a third party to attack together. For Girard, this sociological theory leads into a theory of religion: Ritual sacrifices are repeated regularly to avert dissolution and to maintain the order and unity of a religious community.

There is more to Girard’s theory, but this sketch is sufficient to indicate how Girard was led to embrace Christianity. In Girard’s view, though the gospels appear to endorse this sacrificial mechanism, they in fact undermine it. Jesus is made a scapegoat, but the gospels (unlike ancient myths) insist on his innocence and thereby expose the dynamics of sacrifice. Dissemination of the gospel and the gospels therefore unravels the dynamics of scapegoating that served as the basis for all previous societies, and open the possibility of another city, a society based not on victimization and slaughter but one based on love.

Despite its interest and in spite of Girard’s admiration for the gospels and Jesus, there are lingering questions. First, it is not clear that Girard’s theory requires anything like an orthodox Christology: Why is it necessary for the scapegoat to be the Son of God in flesh, or for there to be a god at all for that matter? Girard affirms in his most recent work that only the Son of God can bring an end to the scapegoat mechanism, but the whole theory was developed before Girard came to this confession. It appears that the incarnation is extrinsic to the atonement, something that cannot be the case. Second, in Girard’s theory redemption does not actually occur at the cross; instead, the story of the cross exposes the foundations of culture, and therefore the preaching of the gospel is the moment of redemption. True as this is in certain respects, in orthodox Christian doctrine the preaching of the gospel is the announcement of an accomplished event that objectively, apart from any response or announcement, changed the world.

Despite these weaknesses, at another level Girard’s theory poses questions that have been inadequately answered in traditional theories of the atonement. By placing the cross in the context of a cultural history of sacrifice, Girard shows with striking clarity why redemption had to take the form that it did -- the sacrificial death of an innocent victim. And, Girard shows that there is an internal connection between the cross and the redemption of society. Girard, in short, insists on the sociological necessity of the cross, and if we cannot entirely accept his answers, at least we can appreciate the force of his questions.

II.
In addition to Girard and other anthropological studies, several developments in recent theology provide resources for exploring the sociological dimensions of the atonement. I will enumerate three, developing the last at somewhat more length. First, detailed and valuable work was done on Leviticus during the nineteenth century, and, inspired by the work of Jacob Milgrom, Mary Douglas, and others, study of the book of Leviticus has become a growth industry in Old Testament studies. This has produced a more nuanced and precise understanding of the nature of sacrifice in the Bible, which is essential background for grasping the significance of the sacrifice of Jesus.

Two points will illustrate how this might affect the theology of the atonement. Old Testament sacrifices were indeed expiations, cleansing sin through the death of a substitute, but that was only one moment of a larger sacrificial sequence. After being killed, the animal was transformed into smoke to ascend to heaven and its flesh was given to the worshiper as food, and that whole ritual comes under the rubric of sacrifice. Biblically, to speak of Jesus’ work as "sacrificial" means not only that He was put to death for our sins; Christ’s "sacrifice" embraces His resurrection, ascension, Pentecost, and even Eucharist. To speak of Christ’s sacrifice is to say that He achieved atonement by passing through death into the presence of His Father. Second, sacrifice is a liturgical act, and if the atonement was sacrificial, then it was an act of worship. How does an act of worship by the Incarnate Son atone for sin? Exploring this question may bring us close to Thomas Aquinas, who taught that Christ’s supreme act of reconciling obedience was a supreme and redeeming Eucharist. Jesus’ main explanation of His death occurred at the Last Supper, and that may be more significant than Protestants, at least, have realized.

Turning to New Testament studies: since Krister Stendahl’s landmark article, "Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West," New Testament scholars have recognized that Paul was not a theologian of the soul so much as a theologian of Israel and an apostolic herald of a counter-imperial gospel. Political theology is as central to Paul as the forgiveness of individual sins. Clearly, Paul is also a herald of the crucified Christ. If he is both a theologian of the cross and a theologian of Israel, Paul’s letters are central in any effort to explore the sociological dimensions of the atonement. Moreover, if Paul saw Jesus as the climax of the history of Israel, then that history must play a much larger role in our understanding of the atonement that it has traditionally done. Our theology of the atonement cannot bypass the Old Testament and move immediately from Adam’s sin to the cross. Atonement theology must be to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.

Finally, and a bit more expansively, recent treatments of the Trinity are very relevant to this discussion. As Bonhoeffer said, the Who question is more fundamental than the How question. The question, Who is the Redeemer? shapes our answer to the question, How is redemption accomplished? And the New Testament’s answer to the "Who" question is, Father, Son, and Spirit. How does this figure into our understanding of the cross?

In the wake of Barth, most writers in Trinitarian theology emphasize that we must move from the economic to the ontological trinity, that is, from the history of redemption to our understanding of who God is in Himself. Theology proper must take its cues from the revelation of God in His dealings with Israel and in Jesus. Michael Ramsey put it succinctly: "God is Christlike and in Him there is no unChristlikeness at all." If we move in the opposite direction -- from the ontological to the economic Trinity -- we run the risk of formulating a generic doctrine of God that limits beforehand what God might possibly do, an apophatic theology that defines God without any reference to His actual words or works.

This suggests that the doctrine of the atonement should be consistent with, should "fit," what we know of the inner life of Father, Son, and Spirit, and that the atonement in fact is one of the main places where that inner life is unveiled. To fill out this point, we can borrow some insights from the French Catholic theologian Francois Xavier Durrwell. Two themes guide Durrwell’s Trinitarian theology. First, in Augustinian fashion, he focuses attention on the Spirit as the bond of unity of Father and Son and as the love in which the Father begets the Son. Second, following insights from Athanasius, he insists that the relations of Father and Son are reciprocal, mutually determining. The Father is as dependent for His Fatherhood on the existence of the Son as the Son is dependent on the Father for His Sonship. There is no Son without a Father, but it is also true that the Father is not Father unless He has a Son.

Durrwell’s way of making these points, however, is peculiarly illuminating. As summarized by Anne Hunt, Durrwell taught that "The Holy Spirit . . . flows from the Father not just in a primordial or originating sense but in loving response to the Son. In other words we can understand that the Son’s love of the Father prompts the love of the Father for the Son." Durrwell himself stated the point this way: "The Father fills the Son with his Spirit of Love and the love that takes over the Son elicits from the Father the gift of the Spirit in a perpetual round." This conception of Trinitarian life is certainly evident economically, in the atoning work of the Incarnate Son. As Peter said in his Pentecost sermon, the Son who obeyed unto death was exalted by His Father and given the gift of the Spirit, which was then poured out on the gathered disciples. If we can reason from economy to ontology -- on the assumption that God is as He has revealed Himself -- then this is a revelation of the interTrinitarian life: The Father gives the Spirit to the Son, who, in the Spirit, offers Himself to the Father in love and obedience, which in turn elicits the outpouring of the Spirit from the Father to the Son. This is a round; or, as Catherine LaCugna put it, the Trinitarian life as eternal chiastic motion and exchange.

This gives us some insight into the structure of the atonement, as well as its sociological import. On the cross, the Son, incarnate in the likeness of sinful flesh and operating according to the demands of the fallen world, offered Himself to His Father in perfect obedience to death, and as a result elicited the gift of the Spirit from His loving Father. The sociological dimension immediately follows. The Spirit is the bond of communion, the Lord and giver of life, including social life. When the Spirit is poured out, the earth is renewed, the fruits of the Spirit flourish, the righteous decree of the law is fulfilled, and men worship and serve the Creator rather than the creature. The need for the redemption of society can be stated as a need for the outpouring of the Spirit, who is the unity of the society of Father and Son, and the Spirit is secured for us by the obedience of the Son to the Father. A Trinitarian theology of the atonement thus integrates the theological and sociological dimensions, and takes a step toward accounting for the sociological necessity of the cross. The Spirit is necessary for the redemption of society; the Son’s obedience on the cross secures the Spirit; and therefore the "sacrifice" of Jesus is the necessary condition for the redemption of society.

A fine recent article by Kahled Anatolios, published in Pro Ecclesia, brings out another feature of a Trinitarian account of the atonement. Anatolios describes the Spirit as the immanent (within the Triune life) agent of the "mutual love" of the Father and the Son and the Spirit’s economic work (God’s actions outside Himself) as the "availability" of God to us. It is through the Spirit that we come to share in the inherently "un-sharable" sonship of the Eternal Son. This Trinitarian soteriology also takes on an ecclesial or social dimension. The Spirit, who is the agent of God’s availability to us, works to open us out in availability for others. As Anatolios puts it, "By the Spirit, we experience, from within, the appeal to render available to others as much love as we ourselves receive as ‘beloved,’ so that the outward availability of this love, in the Spirit, becomes equal to our status as beloved, in the Son." Since mutual availability is the prerequisite of community, it is the Spirit, secured and given to us by and in the Son in His atonement, who is the bond of any true "commonwealth."

III.
I have been discussing the theology and "theory" of the atonement, and have grasped for ways to express this. But Robert Jenson is no doubt correct that a theory of the atonement is far less important than its enactment, and particularly its liturgical enactment. What will make the sociological necessity of the cross most obvious and persuasive are not a theologian’s puzzlings, but the joy and praise and self-sacrifice of a church that knows, worships, and serves Jesus, and Him Crucified.

Taken from: Leithart.

Salvation's Guarantee

37 All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out. 38 For I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me. 39 And this is the Father's will which hath sent me, that of all which he hath given me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day. 40 And this is the will of him that sent me, that every one which seeth the Son, and believeth on him, may have everlasting life: and I will raise him up at the last day.

John 6

Christ's Redounding Glory

"And he prayed to God, that "if it were possible," (or, as one of the Evangelists hath it, "if he were willing,") "that cup might be removed:" yet he gently added, "nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done." Of what strange importance are the expressions, John xii. 27. where he first acknowledgeth the anguish of his spirit, "Now is my soul troubled," (which would seem to produce a kind of demur,) "and what shall I say?" And then he goes on to deprecate his sufferings, "Father, save me from this hour;" which he had no sooner uttered, but he doth, as it were, on second thoughts, recall it in these words, "But for this cause came I into the world;" and concludes, "Father, glorify thy name." Now, we must not look on this as any levity, or blameable weakness in the blessed Jesus: he knew all along what he was to suffer, and did most resolutely undergo it; but it shows us the inconceivable weight and pressure that he was to bear, which, being so afflicting, and contrary to nature, he could not think of without terror; yet considering the will of God, and the glory which was to redound from him thence, he was not only content, but desirous to suffer it."

Scougal

Thou Art God

Psalm 90:2 ~ "Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God."