Standing Under the Scriptures
June 15, 2008

Dear Fellow Voyagers,

The readings we are considering this Sunday are the following:

Romans 5.1-8: Our peace with God comes from Christ having died for us while we were still sinners.

Matthew 9.35-10.15: Jesus sends out his disciples to carry on his own ministry of proclaiming the good news, casting out demons, and curing the sick.

From time to time I have noted some of the principles on which our class operates---principles that we have discovered as we went along rather having been established a priori (our voyage of discovery has been concerned with how to approach the Scriptures as well as with the Scriptures themselves.) I will do a little more of that now.

Our basic posture is standing under the Scriptures, not over them. This means that rather than conforming them to our experience, we need to conform our experience to them, as best we can. This may seem challenging, dauntingly so. But in the end our peace and our joy lie herein, in becoming imbued with the Scriptures so that images from them rise spontaneously in our minds and guide us, in the situations with which life confronts us.

The foregoing comports I believe with the sixth Article of Religion (page 868 of the Book of Common Prayer): “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation… “ A corollary of this is that all things necessary to salvation are contained in nothing else. For otherwise there would be two or more different Scriptures, making neither or none finally valid. This does not mean that there can be no valid elements in such sources as literature or films. But only in the light of Scripture can we recognize the validity of these elements. It is Scripture which validates them rather than they which validate Scripture. Accordingly it is not with them or even with doctrine (which albeit derived from Scripture is only derivative), but with Scripture itself that we need to begin.

And beginning and continuing to stand under the Scriptures involves laying aside our preconceptions and looking at what is actually there. We cannot succeed in this entirely; for the most part we are unconscious of our presuppositions. Nevertheless we ought to do so so far as possible. It is to this end that in the class we draw on the original Greek and Hebrew texts and the findings of biblical scholarship. Our aiming to be intellectually rigorous is also is part of so standing. (These weekly notices are themselves intended to be rigorous, and somewhat provocative as well. Please let me have your critiques of their rigor and your responses to their provocations.)

Having said these things, I will now turn as usual to last Sunday’s discussion. Our passages were the Lord’s call to Abraham to leave his homeland (Genesis 12.1-9) and Jesus’ justification of his eating with tax collectors and sinners (Matthew 12.9-13). The pivotal nature of the first seemed evident. But in the latter we ran into complexities regarding justification and sanctification and the vital relationship between them. Some elucidations may therefore be desirable.

The call of Abraham is pivotal already in the Genesis narrative. In the preceding chapters the Lord has sought to deal with the fallenness of his creation negatively, as in the Flood and in the dispersion of languages at the Tower of Babel. But he has foresworn sending any more floods, giving the rainbow as a sign. And the dispersion of languages was inherently a one-time measure. Now he switches to a positive approach, the story involving at least the stuff of history and continuing all the way to and through the New Testament. The New Testament writers themselves regarded Abraham’s call as pivotal. In Acts Stephen, in his apologia before the council just prior to his martyrdom begins his recitation of “salvation history” with it. It features in the great list of “by faiths” in chapter 11 of Hebrews. And Paul takes it as the basis in Scripture (sc. Old Testament) for his concept of justification by faith. To be sure, his “Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness” in Galatians 3.6 refers in the first place to Abraham’s giving credence to the Lord’s promise of an heir (Genesis 15.6). But surely he must have had in mind Abraham’s responsiveness to the Lord’s call too. And, finally, Abraham’s call is pivotal also for us. For in his obedience he was obliged to leave behind his country, his kindred, and his father’s house, the very things which in that day would have given him his identity. To be sure, there were promises attached to the call, not only of offspring but of becoming a great nation. But these were matters of hope rather than actuality. But the Lord calls not just Abraham but, in Christ, all of us. Thus Abraham’s response points to what we must be prepared to turn our backs on in our own response---remembering the kingdom that, in Christ, he has promised to us.

This Genesis passage has no small relevance to ours from Matthew’s Gospel. This begins with Jesus’ call of Matthew the tax collector as he sat in his tax booth. It is recorded that Matthew simply rose and followed him, similarly leaving behind what had given him substance. But it is to the remainder of the passage that the call of Abraham has perhaps its most profound relevance. This tells of Jesus eating with a group of tax collectors (we know the odium attaching to them as agents of the Roman occupation) and of unspecified sinners. Eating with people was on Jewish reckoning not a casual act but instead conveyed real fellowship, as in the Passover meal and in our own Eucharist. And the Pharisees were not slow to call Jesus into question. His response was that, on the analogy of the sick rather than the well needing a physician, it was not the righteous but sinners that he had come to call to repentance. The essence of repentance, we may note, is letting go of the false things that one has clung to and turning to those in which life is truly to be found. Thus Jesus’ call to sinners, among them ourselves, is along the lines of the Lord’s call to Abraham.

By likening himself to a physician Jesus did not separate justification from sanctification, from making holy or whole. A physician’s function is not only to extinguish disease but also to restore health. But this has not kept many people from supposing that his concern was with justification only, that his association with sinners means that they themselves have been redeemed, and are therefore acceptable, even while continuing willingly in their sins. This approach has always made me uneasy; it was only some years ago I learned the words for it: it is to tear justification and sanctification apart. And the consequences of this tearing go far beyond the individual level. It is the basis, one may say, of the national church’s espousing of “inclusion” as the essential Christian virtue, of putting aside any requirement for transformation. This, however, is to leave the church without standards other than those of the surrounding, in its case mainly upper middle class, culture. That salvation lies in these, one may doubt.

It has happened previously that in my reading of Barth’s Church Dogmatics, or CD, (greatly facilitated by your presentation thereof to the library) I have come upon his discussion of the very thing we were considering in our class. And it has happened again with justification and sanctification. Barth is adamant that the two, while distinguishable, are not to be separated. In support of their distinguishability yet inseparability he cites Calvin’s telling image of the heat and light emitted by the sun: Si solis claritas non potest a calore separare, an ideo dicemus luce calefieri terram, calore vero illustrari (volume 4, part 2, page 504. I give the Latin so that you may know what I am up against in the CD). More tellingly still, Barth asserts that a justification without sanctification is an “indolent” justification.

But wherein lies the indolence? Is it in a particular concept of justification or in ourselves? And in the latter case, does not our sanctification become something that we do for ourselves? (A class member saw this question as arising.) Barth’s answer is that no, it is not our own doing. Like our justification it arises out of the humiliation of Jesus as the Son of Man and his exaltation as the Son of God, with which God has associated us. At the same time it does not mean that we are made perfect automatically or ex opere operato. Instead we remain sinners, as we have been hearing of late. But then is our sanctification only nominal? Barth’s answer is again no, for we become sinners with a difference. This difference is that we are no longer at ease with our sin but become disturbed about it. Further, limits are set to it which did not exist before; this is the source of our disturbance. What more Barth has to say on the subject I cannot tell you, for I have not yet got to it. Still we may conclude that we ought to avoid both extremes regarding sanctification. One of these is supposing that it does not matter and that we do not need to be concerned about it, the de facto position of much of the church today. The other is considering that though we have been justified we are in our sins about as before, which risks leading us to despair. At the least, sanctification as well as justification should be a focus of our attention.

Faithfully, Fr. Ted