Monthly Archives: September 2012

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September 10, 2012

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devotional literature, discipleship, theology

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You’re a Holy Mess (Or, Surprised by Sanctification)

I was teaching through 1 Corinthians last year around this time when I was first struck by something very odd in that letter. It’s something that can sneak past you unless you go through the thing a few times. Right at the outset of Paul’s letters he usually broadcasts what he’s going to be writing about in a kind of intro-prayer or in the greeting.

Paul, called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus, and our brother Sosthenes,
To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours:
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
(1 Cor 1:1-3)

Did you catch those words in verse 2 that I helpfully bolded for you to notice? Good. In the space of a few words, Paul calls the believers at Corinth “sanctified” and “saints”; he calls them holy.

Surprised by Sanctification

For those of us who have read the letter through, this is surprising to say the least.  This is easily the most jacked-up church we know of in the New Testament. Scholars think that Paul probably wrote more letters to the church than 1 and 2 Corinthians because of the issues with it. To give you a picture, the problems include: factions being formed dividing the church due to people buying into cultural notions of wisdom and power (chapters 1-4), Christians suing each other (5), one dude sleeping with his step-mom and everybody just acting like nothing was going on as well as people visiting prostitutes (5-6), screwy views about sex and marriage (7),  people eating food offered up to idols and demons at pagan temples (8-10), groups treating the poor like crud at church (11), getting drunk at communion (11), freaky pride connected to spiritual gifts (12-14), and, to top it off, false teaching about the resurrection (15).

Now, how in the world is Paul go and call this church “holy”? If you look up the word “saints” in a thesaurus, the antonym would probably be “Corinthians”. There is nothing that you could term righteous, moral, or upright about their character. In fact, in some ways Paul says they’re worse than the surrounding pagan culture. And yet, time and again Paul does call them just that. What’s more, in chapter six after listing off a number of practices they were supposed to avoid, he says “And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.” (1 Cor 6:11 )

Did you see that? “You were sanctified” is talking about a past tense action that makes the believer holy starting at a particular point resulting in a continuous state of holiness in much the same way that in the text he speaks of justification as occurring at a specific point in time resulting in you now being “justified.”

For those of us raised in general evangelicalism this is not typically the way we think or speak. Generally we think of justification as the once and for all legal declaration by God that we are vindicated, pardoned, no longer held as guilty against the covenant because of Jesus’ death and resurrection and now part of the people of the Messiah. It’s what happens at the beginning of our experience that we look back at. Sanctification is then the process that begins afterwards and is the increasing growth in holiness that makes us look more and more like Jesus. It’s the life-long process of becoming righteous in our character.

This is not a bad way of looking at things. Still, it’s also not the most accurate way of thinking about sanctification biblically. Historically Reformed theologians have talked about the difference between “progressive sanctification” and “definitive sanctification.” The first process is the one we’ve been describing that a lot of us understand. Definitive sanctification is that “once and for all act of claiming us as saints.” (Michael Horton, The Christian Faith, pg. 650)

Rethinking Holiness

See, the original idea of holiness or sanctification in the Old Testament was to “separate” something away from their ordinary or common use to a special use for God. The Temple, the sabbath, the tithe, the utensils and furniture for the temple were all normal things, taken and set aside, consecrated for use by God. God even does this with a people, Israel, (Exod. 19) He takes one people and sets them apart to be a light to the nations and show the world what life with God is like. They were to be “holy, for I the LORD am holy.” (Lev. 20:26) Paul and the rest of the New Testament picks up on this by seeing God’s act of saving us in Christ as a setting apart, a making holy totally independent of our own righteous acts. Jesus tells us that we are clean because of the word that he has spoken to us. (John 15:3) Indeed, Jesus says that he will be the one who sanctifies us by sanctifying himself, setting us apart through setting himself apart in his death. (John 17:19) The author of Hebrews follows Jesus by telling us that “by God’s will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.” (10:29)

In Christ, by the Spirit, God definitively sanctifies us, sets us apart to be his own in a once and for all way. When we place our faith in Christ, we’re united with him so that what is true of him, becomes true of us. We are holy because Christ is holy. “All that is found in Christ is holy, because it is in Christ.” (Horton, pg. 651) This is why before we’ve done anything good, righteous, holy, cleaned up our act, made good on our promises or done anything but trust Jesus’ work for us, we are declared saints. Before we clean up, God declares us clean in Christ. This is the holiness, the saintliness that Paul is often speaking of in his letters.

Motivating his instructions to the Corinthian congregation is the reality that, in Christ, they are clean. In essence, “You’re holy! Now act like it. Become what you already are in Christ.” Over and over again in the New Testament we are told that we have been made righteous in Christ or holy in Christ and so now we should live like that’s true.

But I’m Still A Mess

“So, I’m already holy, so now I should live like it? Is that what you’re saying? Okay, here’s my problem: I don’t feel holy. In fact, most of the time I feel angry, lustful, annoyed, proud, downcast and anything but holy. Where does that leave me? It’s fine that God legally sets me apart as holy, declares me righteous, etc., but I still feel like me. What does God saying something out there have anything to do with me in here?” Everything, for at least two reasons.

First, as Michael Horton points out, for an orphan to enjoy the love and care of a new family, they must first by legally adopted. Or, for two nations who have been at war with each other to begin peaceful relations, they must first declare a legal peace. (Pg. 652-653) The definitive declaration of God “out there” is the legal basis of that secures our relationship to the sanctifier. God’s declaration is your hope of sanctification.

Second, God’s declaration isn’t really something that happens “out there.” When God sets us apart, he sets us apart in Christ, in the power of the Spirit. This act actually connects us to Christ like branches being inserted into a vine from which it then begins to draw strength. (John 15) We are connected to Christ like members of a body to the head. (1 Cor 6; 12; Eph. 4) We are given the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, who is a new power at work in us to progressively conform us to reflect the image of Christ. We receive strength and righteousness from the source of all goodness, Christ. God’s definitive sanctification of us is the source of God’s progressive sanctification in us.

You don’t feel holy, but honestly, your feelings are not the ultimate reality you need to be focusing on. Instead, you should be focusing on who you are in Christ. You’re a mess, but in Christ you’re a holy mess who’s getting cleaned up because you’re in the one who is clean. In fact, forget even focusing on who you are at all. Focus on Christ. “Abide in my and I will abide in you.” (John 15:4) When you do that, that’s when things start coming together.

Maybe this is why what Paul writes to his wayward saints the way he does. In the first 9 verses of 1 Corinthians he mentions “Jesus”, or “Jesus Christ”, or “our Lord Jesus Christ” 9 times. Apparently he believes that if his people are going to become holy, start living into the holiness that they’ve been brought into, they need to focus their eyes on Christ, the Holy One.

May we do the same.

Soli Deo Gloria

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September 4, 2012

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biblical studies, cultural commentary, hermeneutics

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Kierkegaard on Interpreting the Text to Death

It is a truism today to say that the Bible needs to be interpreted. In fact, it was a truism back when the Bible was being written that it’s not simply a matter of just “reading” the thing all the time. Even the Bible says that it’s hard to understand. (2 Pet. 3:16) Or, as the Westminster Confession comments:

All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all: yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation are so clearly propounded, and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them. (2.7)

We’ve known for a long time then that even though the basics are clearly laid out, there are at least some parts that are not obvious or plain. For thousands of years now, Christians have wrestled with, commented on, and interpreted the text of the Bible. Today we have seminaries with classes in hermeneutics, study of the original languages and ancient cultures that form the setting and background of the text, dictionaries, commentaries that are thousands of pages long, and journals where scholars devote dozens of pages to analyzing the nuances of a single word in the context of a single verse. (No joke, I wrote 30 pages on 2 verses in Colossians in my MA program and just barely scratched the surface of the literature on the subject.) Without a doubt, our knowledge of the text has expanded and been deepened by the faithful work of scholars and interpreters over the last few generations and this is a good thing.

The people of God need preachers and pastors who will roll up their sleeves and get to work on the task of discerning what the Lord has spoken and is even now speaking in the text. Poor interpretation is at the root of so much bad preaching and teaching in the church, which leads to bad living by the church. Preachers, teachers, and even lay-people who have come to rely on them, still need to work at the task of interpretation.

Now, to some this might seem troublesome and daunting. As someone who has devoted my life to wrestling with the text in order to teach and preach it faithfully, I absolutely love this stuff. Digging into the interpretive issues and the complexity of the Scriptures is what I live for. “What’s that you say about an ingenious new understanding of that obscure verse in Leviticus? Brilliant! Let me read it.”  “Is that a new commentary on a book I finished studying last month? I must have it!” Anybody who’s seen my desk at home or at work knows that I live knee-deep in this stuff. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Now why do I bring this up? To alert us to a deadly risk we run when engaging in the interpretive task.

Kierkegaard tells a cautionary parable about the danger that can come with an unbridled focus on interpretation:

Imagine a country. A royal command is issued to all the office-bearers and subjects, in short, to the whole population. A remarkable change comes over them all: they all become interpreters, the office-bearers become authors, every blessed day there comes out an interpretation more learned than the last, more acute, more elegant, more profound, more ingenious, more wonderful, more charming, and more wonderfully charming. Criticism which out to survey the whole can hardly attain survey of this prodigious literature, indeed criticism itself has become a literature so prolix that it is impossible to attain a survey of the criticism. Everything became interpretation—but no one read the royal command with a view to acting in accordance with it. And it was not only that everything became interpretation, but at the same time the point of view for determining what seriousness is was altered, and to be busy about interpretation became real seriousness. Suppose that this king was not a human king—for thought a human king would understand well enough that they were making a fool of him by giving the affair this turn, yet as a human king he is dependent, especially when he encounters the united front of office-bearers and subjects and so would be compelled to put the best face on a bad game, to let it seem as if all this were a matter of course, so that they most elegant interpreter would be rewarded by elevation to the peerage, the most acute would be knighted, etc.—Suppose that this kind was almighty, one therefore who is not put to embarrassment though all the office-bearers and all the subjects play him false. What do you supposed this almighty king would think about such a thing? Surely he would say, “ The fact that they do not comply with my commandment, even that I might forgive; moreover, if they united in a petition that I might have patience with them, or perhaps relieve them entirely of this commandment which seemed to them too hard—that I could forgive them. But this I cannot forgive, that they entirely alter the point of view for determining what seriousness is.” -For Self-Examination, pp. 58-59

With this little parable Kierkegaard throws up a large, flashing, red warning sign for those of us enamored with the endless study of the text. The danger comes when interpretation becomes an excuse for disobedience. Kevin Vanhoozer has pointed out that the proper interpretation of the text of Scripture requires performance. Ingenious readings are not the point–hearing and rendering a fitting response to the voice of God is. When the task of interpretation eclipses our actual response to God speaking to us out of the silence, calling us to repentance, commanding us in righteousness, convicting us of sin, consoling us in pain, and drawing us to communion with Himself, things have gone awry. At that point you have sentenced the text to a slow and agonizing death by commentary.

Do not mistake this for an anti-intellectual call to “just read the Bible” without trying to engage with it at that deeper level. Study the Bible. Wrestle with it. Don’t be satisfied with simplistic readings of difficult passages. Go read big books on the subject. At the end of the day though, we must never forget that when the “Word of the Lord” came to the prophets it didn’t come as a word to be inspected, dissected, and thereby domesticated, but as the mighty command of the King who intends for his subjects to hear and obey his voice. We study in order to hear–we interpret in order to obey.

Soli Deo Gloria