We often use the term “spiritual immaturity” to describe Christians who don’t know enough yet. They need to expand their knowledge of Scripture. They need their doctrine corrected. But for the Apostle Paul the mark of spiritual immaturity within a community is not a lack of theological knowledge or biblical literacy. In 1 Corinthians 3:1-5 he is clear that the primary marks of spiritual immaturity are quarreling and rivalry.

The Corinthians have plenty of theological opinions on many different spiritual matters, and most of their opinions are completely wrong. But it isn’t the fact that their opinions are wrong that makes them spiritually immature (or “fleshly”). Rather, it is that they quarrel over them.

Having opinions and making judgments on things in life is a necessary part of what it means to be human. Paul is not asking them to stop making judgments and having opinions. What he expects them to do is to hold their opinions/judgments loosely. Paul wants them to realize that human judgments are always only provisional and secondary.

There is only one who has the final judgment and the last word: Jesus. This is the “secret ingredient” to spiritual maturity, to peace and unity within communities: all of our judgments have to be held with an open hand to the final word of judgment of Jesus. (Especially, for us, political opinions/judgments!)

One of our issues, though, is that we confuse our judgments with God’s judgment. Often, we act as if our opinion is simply God’s opinion.

That’s precisely how you create rivalry, quarreling, self-absorption, fundamentalism, and splits within the community.

Paul reminds us that we have “the mind/Spirit of Christ,” which is a mind/Spirit of humility, service, and love.

Here’s the extended quote I shared from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison in which he diagnosis the problem he faces in Nazi Germany as “stupidity.” We should hear Bonhoeffer using the term “stupidity” in its more technical sense: to be in a stupor, to be insensible, nearly unconscious.

“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy to the good than evil. One can protest against evil; it can be unmasked and, if need be, prevented by force. Evil always carries the seeds of its own destruction, as it makes people, at the least, uncomfortable. Against stupidity we have no defence. Neither protests nor force can touch it; reasoning is no use; facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved…

[Stupidity] is a moral rather than an intellectual defect. There are people who are mentally agile but stupid, and people who are mentally slow but very far from stupid…

…In certain circumstances people are made stupid or… allow this to happen to them… 

The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not mislead us into thinking that he is independent. One feels in fact, when talking to him, that one is dealing, not with the man himself [a person], but with slogans, catchwords, and the like, which have taken hold of him. He is under a spell, he is blinded, his very nature is being misused and exploited. Having thus become a passive instrument, the stupid person will be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. Here lies the danger of a diabolical exploitation that can do irreparable damage to human beings.

But at this very point it is quite clear, too, that stupidity can be overcome, not by instruction, but only by an act of liberation.

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Last week we looked at the paradoxical nature of the gospel. This week we turn to see that the paradoxical gospel reveals the paradoxical nature of God’s very being. 

The gospel is not a side project for God. The story of the gospel is God’s revealing of himself. This is who he is. The gospel is God and God is the gospel. And the God we meet in the gospel story is a God who is humble in his very being. His humility is his glory.

Diagram (from Ray Anderson)

Bonhoeffer’s Christology Lectures

In his Christology lectures Bonhoeffer argues that the incarnation is not a humiliation for God. It is not humiliating for God to become human. 

The typical (mis)understanding of the sequence of the incarnation would be:

The Son of God→Humiliation→Human

In this (mis)understanding, the Son of God must lay aside his divinity in order to become human. He must stoop from what he actually is in order to become what we are. Seen this way it is not fitting for God to become incarnate.

But Bonhoeffer suggests the sequence should be understood like this:

The Son of God→Human→Humiliation

Understood this way we can see that the Son’s taking humanity to himself is not a humiliation. Rather it is fitting for him precisely because God is humble. Jesus doesn’t have to change himself to take on humanity. That’s who he is! This is the paradoxical nature of God: God is God as a human!

But, Bonhoeffer says, there is a humiliation for God in the incarnation. It is in becoming sin for us. The cross is a humiliation for God. But because he is humble, he endures this humiliation (which is our own) for us.

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Paul begins his letter to the Corinthians stressing the “paradoxical” (two competing ‘glories’ alongside one another) nature of the gospel. The glory, power, and wisdom of God is found in the crucified Jesus. This is God’s wisdom. This is God’s Word. But it is foolishness to the world.

Christ crucified is to be the starting point, the measuring rod, the cornerstone by which we discern the truth of reality, the truth of ourselves, the truth of one another, and the truth of God.

Christ and him crucified will never make sense rationally to us unless it is the cornerstone (the starting point) of our “building.” If our cornerstone is anything other than him, he will inevitably be a stumbling block within whatever structure we are attempting to build.

As the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann puts it: “In Christianity the cross is the test of everything which deserves to be called Christian.”

As always, feel free to leave comments here to keep the discussion going.

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One of the beautiful things about the Lord’s prayer, as one early church father points out, is that it can be prayed by anyone at any time in any circumstance.

It’s a prayer for the poor and the wealthy. For the sick and the healthy. For the slave and the free. For the young and the old. For the spiritually immature and the spiritually mature.

In other words: you never outgrow it. The Lord’s Prayer is shallow enough for a toddler to wade in, to play and splash around in without fear of drowning. But it is also deep enough that a deep-sea diver could never reach the bottom.

The second century church father Origen points out that Paul often writes about the gospel in reference to food. Sometimes Paul is upset with a congregation because he wants to be feeding them meat but they are still only capable of drinking milk. In Romans Paul says that the mature Christian eats meat, but the weak one is only prepared for vegetables.

Origen’s point is that the Lord’s Prayer works on all three levels of spiritual maturity: Milk for the child, vegetables for the sick, and meat for the athlete.

The true mark of spiritual maturity can be seen in Paul’s exhortation to “pray without ceasing.” This is the most spiritually mature step of all when it comes to prayer. The only way to pray without ceasing is for your whole life to become one integrated prayer.

As Origen puts it: “The person who prays ‘ceaselessly’ is the one who integrates prayer with good works and noble actions with prayer.”

We closed by taking a new (more ancient!) look at the story of Mary and Martha. Is Mary the more mature one or is Martha? Or has Martha learned to pray as she serves?

Further resources:

* I relied heavily on Wesley Hill’s wonderful little book, The Lord’s Prayer.

* To read a few of the early church father’s on prayer check out this little gem: Tertullian, Cyprian, and Origen On The Lord’s Prayer.

* For a more in depth reading of the Mary and Martha story, listen to this sermon from Chris Green.

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If the Apostles’ Creed is the heart of our faith, then prayer is the heartbeat of our faith; it is the life itself.

This week we look at the first two words of The Lord’s Prayer “Our Father.” These two words give us the substructure—the very foundation—of prayer.

When Christ teaches us to pray “Our Father…” he is inviting us to join into the eternally ongoing relationship between him and his Father. We have no native right to climb up into God’s lap and call him papa. That right belongs to Jesus alone. The gift of prayer is that Jesus invites us to piggyback our prayers onto his (which is why we often end our prayers “…in Jesus’ name. Amen.”).

The third century church father Cyprian of Carthage explains that when we pray the Lord’s Prayer:  

[We are] imploring God in his own words, sending up to his ears the prayer of Christ… When we make our prayer let the Father recognize the words of his own Son.”

Prayer is not us initiating a conversation with God. It is not about us trying to get God’s attention. Prayer is God’s own work in and through us. Prayer is us joining in the conversation that God already is between Father, Son, and Spirit.

Eugene Peterson memorably puts it like this:

Prayer is not something we think up to get God’s attention. Prayer is answering speech. The first word is God’s word.

When we see this, it alleviates all the anxiety that can often accompany prayer. God is a good and attentive Father who is already leaning forward in his seat with his ear already cupped toward us. Prayer is letting the very life of God take shape in us. It is allowing God’s Breath (his life-giving Spirit) to fill our lungs, loosening up our tight chests as we take it down deep into the core of our being, and then exhaling the life of God for the sake of the world.

In prayer God’s Breath becomes our Breath.

Here are some of the resources I relied on:

* Rowan Williams’ book Being Christian has one of the clearest and best chapters on prayer I’ve ever read. You can also find his lecture on prayer that I mentioned here.

* I drew heavily on the work of Robert Jenson. If you’re looking for a place to start in with Jenson’s theology (especially on prayer) I recommend his book A Large Catechism.

* Near the end of the teaching I was relying completely on Chris Green’s work. I always recommend his little book Surprised by God, but if you want to hear some of his thoughts on prayer, start with this podcast interview he did on God’s sovereignty and our freedom.

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Throughout the Apostles’ Creed we are shown the value the Christian faith places on physical creation. God is the Creator of heaven and earth. Jesus is conceived in the womb of the Virgin Mary, suffers in the body, and is resurrected bodily. The Spirit is at work in the church, made up of bodies, and is the power of the resurrection of the body.

The logic of Christ’s incarnation is at work at every level. God takes the physical world to himself (incarnation), judges it (crucifixion), and raises it (resurrection). This same logic of Christ applies also to his body, the church—to us. And it also applies to the entirety of God’s creation. God is bringing all his creation out of death and into resurrection.

The entire creation is destined for the flame of pentecost, which purges sin, death, and decay and transfigures as it burns.

Orthodox theologian, Sergius Bulgakov, puts it like this:

This fire—in which the present heavens and earth will be consumed on the day of judgment…—signifies the passage of the world through the Pentecost. The Pentecost’s fiery tongues become the flame of the world fire, not consuming but [transfiguring] the world. [This is] the cosmic Pentecost.

The call of Christian faith is to live faithfully in this penultimate world with the knowledge of the ultimate coming world (resurrection and life everlasting). Dietrich Bonhoeffer warns against two distortions of Christianity that we are tempted by: radicalism and compromise.

Radicalism is an other-worldly Christianity that wants nothing to do with this world and its worldly power. It is concerned only with the ultimate and ignores the penultimate.

Compromise is another kind of Christianity that desperately wants to be at work in the world, but hates the ways in which Jesus’s teachings interfere with getting stuff done and having control. It is concerned only with the penultimate and ignores the ultimate.

Bonhoeffer sums the problem of these two distortions like this:

Radicalism hates time. Compromise hates eternity.

Radicalism hates patience. Compromise hates decision.

Radicalism hates wisdom. Compromise hates simplicity.

Radicalism hates measure. Compromise hates the immeasurable.

Radicalism hates the real. Compromise hates the word.

Both radicalism and compromise are distortions because in Christ we see that the penultimate world and the ultimate world-to-come are brought together. He becomes incarnate in the penultimate world because of his love for it. He takes our flesh, our world to himself. He then judges it (crucifixion), and by that judgment brings about the ultimate world-to-come (resurrection).

The call of the Christian is to not compromise or become a radical, but to take responsibility for the world around us, for our neighbors and our communities. But we must do it in ways that are faithful to the way of Jesus (without seeking control through coercion).

Further resources:

* I drew heavily on Ben Myers’ wonderful book The Apostles’ Creed.

* You can find more from Bonhoeffer on the penultimate/ultimate and the radicalism/compromise distinction in his Ethics.

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We’ve been looking at different models of the atonement over the last couple weeks. This week we finish our discussion by turning our attention to one of the most prominent ways the New Testament describes Christ’s work in reconciling the world to himself: Christus Victor.

The lens of Christus Victor—Latin for Christ the victorious king—emphasizes Christ’s work in overcoming the Powers of Sin, Death, and Satan. Typically penal substitutionary models of the atonement only consider two actors in the drama of salvation: God and humanity. Christus Victor shows that there are actually three actors: God, humanity, and the Powers of Sin and Death that have the world enslaved.

Christ enters the hostile territory that Sin and Death have overtaken in order to rescue all creation from its grasp.

Here is the icon of the resurrection we ended with in class:

In this depiction, the resurrected Christ is emerging from the tomb and has ahold of Adam and Eve, bringing them up out of their graves. Notice the way Christ has ahold of them. Christ, the conquering King who conquers by being conquered, has by his death and resurrection defeated the Powers of Death and brought enslaved humanity up with him.

* Fleming Rutledge treats the theme of Christus Victor very thoroughly in her book The Crucifixion.

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This week we take a look at the primary way the New Testament and the earliest church understood the atonement: recapitulation.

The word recapitulation sounds archaic, but we often use the shortened version: “recap.” The entirety of Jesus’ life “recaps” the whole story of humanity. In solidarity with us, Jesus takes on our human nature, with all its corruptibility (sin and death), and heals it from the inside. The life of Jesus is like a healing medicine administered directly to the core of our very being. He takes our story and lives it truthfully, and so brings wholeness where there is brokenness.

While the focus of penal substitutionary models of the atonement focus primarily on the death of Jesus—often to the exclusion of the birth, life, and resurrection of Jesus—recapitulation focuses our attention on the incarnation. The whole life of Jesus, from his conception in Mary’s womb to his resurrection, is atoning, precisely because he is truly God and truly human.

As Paul puts it in Ephesians 1:9-10 “For he has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will, according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite [recapitulate] all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.”

He takes what is ours (sin, death) and makes it his own and extends to us what is his (the very life of God). As Athanasius (4th century) put it: “God became human so that humans might become God.”

Recapitulation emphasizes the mysterious union we have with Christ, much like a fetus has with her mother. The life of Christ becomes my own life. What happens to me is happening to him, and what has happened to him is happening in me.

Hans Urs von Balthasar summarizes it well:

The stupendous exchange takes place: God becomes ‘nothing’, so that the ‘nothings’ might become God, Irenaeus [2nd century] calls this wonderful thing recapitulation. What he means is this: the second Adam is the repetition, in divine truth, of the first Adam, the Adam who turned away from God. The second Adam repeats the whole natural development of man at the higher level of divine reality. Sinful, lost, and wandering man is not just put back on course by the companionship of love; more profoundly, he is taken into that love.

Here is the handout from the class:

Recapitulation: The Early Church Fathers’ Atonement Model

(Adapted from Ben Myers “Atonement and the Image of God”)

* Humanity, created in the image of God, is loved by God.

* But human nature has succumbed to the power of death.

* To rescue humanity from its plight, God would need to retrieve human beings from death.

* But God is unable to enter a state of death.

* What is God to do?

* In Christ, God becomes incarnate: the divine nature is united with human nature.

* In this union, each nature retains its own distinctiveness while participating in the properties of the other. Christ’s human nature (without compromising its humanness) is filled with divine life; and the divine nature (without compromising its divinity) is able to enter death.

* When Christ dies, the fullness of divine life enters the state of death. As a result, death itself is filled with His life (or canceled out). In the death of Christ, death dies (the resurrection).

* What happens to Jesus’ human nature happens to humanity as a whole.

* Human nature is now freed from the power of death and is restored to its created position. This is a Good Thing. (The Solution)

* Human nature is now united to God and receives benefits far surpassing its created position. This is a Very Good Thing. (The Surplus)

Further resources:

* Ben Myers: “Atonement and the Image of God”

* You can read the paper here and listen to the lecture here. It’s phenomenal work that I return to often.

* If you want to get your toes wet in atonement theology I recommend starting with Scot McKnight’s good introduction on the topic called A Community Called Atonement.

* If you want to go deeper I would recommend Fleming Rutledge’s magnificent treatment on the atonement in her book The Crucifixion.

* If you still aren’t satisfied—what’s wrong with you?—I recommend Hans Boersma’s wonderful book Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross.

* For more on the subject of “union with Christ” see Michael Gorman’s Cruciformity or Inhabiting the Cruciform God.

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On first reading the ending of the Apostles’ Creed it can seem like the last few clauses have almost nothing to do with one another. We all have that one kitchen drawer where all the random, loose odds and ends wind up. Is that what we have at the end of the Creed? Is this the Creed’s “junk drawer?” What does “the holy catholic church” and “the forgiveness of sins” and “the resurrection of the body” have to do with one another?

The truth is that all these final clauses are tightly related, but it can be hard for us to see the relation between them. This week we began to talk about the relationship between “the forgiveness of sins” and “the resurrection of the body.” For many modern western Christians these two “doctrines” seem to be only tangentially related primarily because of our stunted view of the atonement (the salvific work of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection).

Many of us will have grown up understanding the atoning work of Jesus only through the lens of what is called “penal substitution.” This is that “court room scene” most of us have heard. God the Father is the judge on the bench, Satan is the prosecuting attorney, and we are the defendants being prosecuted. Jesus, our defense attorney, is the one who defends us and makes us innocent because he takes the death sentence for us.

But while the New Testament does use judicial/legal language to describe Jesus’ atoning work, it is not the only—or even primary—way it describes it. Scripture gives us many different metaphors for understanding Christ’s saving work on our behalf.

The problem comes when our only way of conceiving of the atonement is through the judicial/legal metaphors. As the saying goes: to the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Our concept of the atonement is severely stunted and narrow.

In my view, this has caused untold damage to believers. In this teaching I try to explain some of those issues. The only goal of this week’s teaching is to clear the ground of the debris that we’ve been given when it comes to Jesus’ death and resurrection, in hopes that we can reconstruct a fully-orbed doctrine of the atonement.

I drew two diagrams in class to show the difference between expiation and propitiation. Both words are used to translate the Greek word “hilasterion” which is about the removal of sins. Both words suggest that a barrier exists for the overcoming of sin, but the difference is in what that barrier is and where it exists.

Diagram 1: Expiation

“Expiation” means that the barrier that sin causes lies outside God. The barrier is not in him but in us. So the word entails God’s action in removing sin.

Diagram 2: Propitiation

“Propitiation” means that the barrier lies within God himself, so it entails God’s action in satisfying the divine wrath.

Further resources:

* Scot McKnight, A Community Called Atonement

* This book is a great introduction to the different models of the atonement found in Scripture.

* Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion

* My discussion of expiation vs. propitiation was heavily reliant upon Rutledge’s brilliant treatment.

* N.T. Wright, “Jesus and the People of God”

* I played a snippet of this lecture in class. You can find the whole lecture at the link above.

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“No other God has a church. None other would want one.”

-Robert Jenson

The third article of the Apostles’ Creed opens with “Holy, Holy, Holy.” We believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, and the communion of the saints (sanctorum communio).

The word “catholic” in the Creed has been a stumbling block for some because of it’s association with the Roman Catholic Church. But the word “catholic” simply means “universal.” There is only one church because there is only one Lord. Despite space and time separating believers, the church is united by the Holy Spirit in Christ.

In the waters of baptism all the old social divisions are relativized. The church includes every kind of person; it is universal: rich or poor, male or female, Jew or gentile, slave or free, living or dead. The church cannot be segmented by any barriers that we erect. It cannot even be separated by death. In Jesus’ death and resurrection he stepped across the ultimate barrier and restored communion between the living and the dead. The Spirit is forming one family that stretches out not only across space but across time as well. So, when we gather to praise God we praise him along with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rachel, Leah, Hannah, Mary, Peter, Paul, and all those beloved to us that have died.

The word “catholic” in the Creed is precious.

The church is not an add on to the life of Christians. It is the very way of life for Christians. As Stanley Hauerwas says, one of the biggest problems the modern American church faces is that we often assume that we only come to church to express our private, individual relationship with God that we already have on our own. That’s not true. The truth is we wouldn’t have a relationship with God without the church. The church is the means by which your faith has been mediated to you.

In his classic study of Christian Community, Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer argues that the greatest threat to the church is communal idealism.

“At this point Christian brotherhood is threatened most often at the very start by the greatest danger of all, the danger of being poisoned at its root, the danger of confusing Christian brotherhood with some wishful idea of religious fellowship…In Christian brotherhood everything depends upon its being clear right from the beginning that Christian brotherhood is not an ideal, but a divine reality.”

The church community is a physical community made up of flesh-and-blood people. It is always concrete never ideal. Which means it cannot escape discord and disagreement. True community is always messy. Why? Because it involves real people living together in actual shared space. And the idealist can’t stomach this reality.

This is the danger Bonhoeffer warns against: we can become more committed to our ideas of the church than to the actual flesh-and-blood people around us. But the first is an idol and doesn’t exist in the real world. Only the latter is the actual church, the church that Christ loves and died for.

Our idealized visions of what the church should be are idols that, in His mercy, God shatters.

“God hates this visionary dreaming because it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. Those who dream of this idealized community demand that it be fulfilled by God, by others, and by themselves. They enter the community of Christians with their demands, set up their own law, and judge one another and even God accordingly. They stand adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of the community. They act as if they have to create the Christian community, as if their visionary ideal binds the people together.”

The church is not built on a foundation of a shared experience. That’s how every other community is built. The church is built on the foundation of the work of the Holy Spirit binding us together in faith.

God binds us together, not our shared experiences or goals.

The church can lose its way when it is most concerned with itself; with its own survival. But the church is not the primary actor in its own story. God is the primary actor in the story the church tells. The church isn’t even the secondary actor in the story. God’s action is always in and for the sake of the world that he loves.

The church’s calling is to bear witness to the world that God loves the world and has reconciled the world to Himself.

As Origen (2nd century) remarks, the church is to be like the moon, reflecting the light of the Sun (the light of the World) into the darkest spaces. When the church hoards the light for itself and is concerned only with itself, it becomes unfaithful.

This is the great irony of the church: all its worship and all its thinking is not about itself. The church is not called to defend, much less expand, its own territory and its own interests. The church is called to be a witness to the world that the world is loved and reconciled by God.

Some further resources:

* Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

* Andrew Root, Churches and the Crisis of Decline

* Ben Myers, The Apostles’ Creed

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