Three dimensions of salvation by allegiance

I’m reading Matthew W. Bates’ Salvation By Allegiance Alone this week, in which he argues that the word the Apostle Paul uses that is usually translated “faith” (pistis in the Greek) is better understood as “allegiance” in relationship to salvation. It’s an interesting way to look at things.

Bates argues that the essential proclamation of the Gospel in the NT doesn’t culminate in Jesus’ death and resurrection but rather continues to his ascension and reign as king and lord. He outlines it in eight points:

Jesus the king

  1. Preexisted with the Father,
  2. Took on human flesh, fulfilling God’s promises to David,
  3. Died for sins in accordance with the scriptures,
  4. Was buried,
  5. Was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures,
  6. Appeared to many,
  7. Is seated at the right hand of God as Lord, and
  8. Will come again as judge.

This is pretty well in line with NT Wright, not an uncommon take. Bates then outlines three “dimensions” of allegiance that he contends are components of salvific allegiance:

  • Intellectual agreement - basic assent that those eight components of the Gospel are true statements;
  • Confession of Loyalty - leaning heavily on Romans 10:9-10 here
  • Embodied fidelity - what he describes as “practical fidelity” to Jesus as Lord, referencing heavily to Matthew 7 and the “not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord’” text.

None of this appears to be hugely controversial at this point, but the reframing is helpful to me to get my head around how we might articulate salvation by grace through faith and yet still say that faith without works is dead.

More to come, I’m sure.

What are Evangelicals afraid of losing?

Dr. Michael Horton has a wise piece on CT in response to President Trump’s comments to evangelical leaders that they are “one election away from losing everything”.

Nowhere in the New Testament are Christians called to avoid the responsibilities of our temporary citizenship, even though our ultimate citizenship is in heaven (Phil. 3:20). However, many of us sound like we’ve staked everything not only on constitutional freedoms but also on social respect, acceptance, and even power. But that comes at the cost of confusing the gospel with Christian nationalism. … Anyone who believes, much less preaches, that evangelical Christians are “one election away from losing everything” in November has forgotten how to sing the psalmist’s warning, “Do not put your trust in princes, in human beings, who cannot save” (Ps. 146:3).

That’ll preach.

-- What are Evangelicals Afraid of Losing? - Christianity Today

Finished reading: 2018, part five

My reading has apparently slowed down a bit this summer. Still, there’s been some good stuff recently:

Well, first an intro to the first two books. I heard Brad Jersak speak at the Water to Wine Gathering back in June - what a treat. Brad is a Canadian pastor and author, more recent convert to Orthodoxy, and spent many years in pastoral ministry working with the mentally challenged and the poor. He’s funny, wise, and kind… and I’ll pick up whatever book he writes next.

A More Christlike God: A More Beautiful Gospel by Bradley Jersak If Christ is the truest expression of what God is like, what does that really mean? How should we then think about God? Jersak is no fan of the “loving Son protects us from the wrath of the angry Father” picture, and instead works through what it looks like to think that Jesus is what God the Father is like.

Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hell, Hope, and the New Jerusalem by Bradley Jersak Here Jersak takes a careful look at the Biblical texts about heaven and hell and judgment. While it seems he can’t quite bring himself to become a universalist, he makes a strong case for the potential that heaven will be much fuller, and hell much emptier, than my traditional evangelical upbringing taught me to expect. And I like the hopeful view. If there’s a reasonable case for being hopeful, why not be hopeful?

Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee Hugo-winning sci-fi to change things up. A decent story, nothing amazing but entertaining enough.

Adjustment Day by Chuck Palahniuk I picked this one off the library shelf on a whim and ended up not really liking it that much. Brutal, pessimistic, dark… No time for that nonsense.

Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky Kurlansky tracks the usage of salt through history. The book is more interesting when it focuses on ancient times, and progressively less interesting as it reaches the modern day. Also there were far more recipes for salting foods included than I will really ever need.

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin A classic from Baldwin, and the first I’ve read of him. What a writer! Beautifully written with a powerful message.

The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber Picked this one up after @johnthelutheran raved about it. I’d previously read Faber’s Book of Strange New Things and enjoyed it. The Crimson Petal and the White was something completely different - a Victorian novel that reminded me a good bit of Dickens - but it kept me interested all the way through.

David Bentley Hart's case for socialism

Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart takes a break from theology to talk briefly about his political views; he is, he reveals, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

His rant on socialism and the popular American distaste for it is too good to not share (though rather long):

I realize that in America, alone among nations with developed economies, the word “socialism” has a sinister ring in many ears. I take this as a symptom of our unique national genius for stupidity. I am well aware of how badly the various parts of a “socialized” economy can at times be managed (the tales I could tell of my experiences with the NHS); but, well managed, they make for a far more humane governing philosophy than ours, and one that comes as close to something like “Distributist” justice in the use of property and wealth as we can hope for under current circumstances. So I find it very odd that, when we look at those nations of northern and western Europe that enjoy the benefits of sane socialist policies, as a result of both their Social Democratic and their Christian Democratic traditions—nations, like Germany or Denmark or France, where the cost of healthcare per capita is far lower and yet coverage is universal, where life spans are longer, where working people are not rendered bankrupt by serious illnesses, where the children of the poor cannot be denied expensive treatments by predatory insurance adjusters, where people have far more savings in bank and endure much lower levels of debt, where wages generally keep pace with inflation, where every worker has decent vacation time each year, where suicide and opioid addiction are not the default lifestyle of the working poor, where homelessness has been nearly abolished, where retirement care is humane and comprehensive, where schools are immeasurably better, where literacy is far higher…—we recoil in horror and thank God that we are free from such things. Surely, we tell ourselves, these are curses, only a few steps away from the gulags. We know that civic wealth is not meant for civic welfare, but is supposed to be diverted into the pockets of the military-industrial complex, by the needless purchase each year of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons systems that will never be used, or is supposed to be squandered through unneeded tax cuts for the very richest of the investment class. We know that when the child of a working family is diagnosed with cancer, that the child should be denied the most expensive treatments, even if they alone can possibly save him or her, and then should probably die, and that his or her family should be utterly impoverished in the process. We call this, I believe, being free. And, as long as we have access to all the guns we could ever need to fight off invasions from Venus, what more can we ask?

-- A Brief Political Confession

Power corrupts. Including religious power.

Former Christianity Today editor Katelyn Beaty has a great op-ed over on RNS making the case that the #ChurchToo scandal isn’t as much a case of sex abuse as it is a case of power abuse. And while the church has spent a lot of time talking about the proper boundaries and exercise of sex, it has spent almost no time talking about the proper boundaries and exercise of power.

If money, sex and power are the unholy trinity of spiritual temptation, arguably most Christians have a relatively paltry understanding of the third. Churches teach regular tithing and Dave Ramsey-style financial management. Scads of books and articles are written every year helping Christians practice sexual purity before marriage and sexual fulfillment within it. By contrast, little is taught and written about power and its corrosive effects.

Beaty goes on to suggest three actions for the church if we want to avoid continued scandals like the one with Bill Hybels at Willow Creek. She hits the nail right on the head with the first one:

Churches must seek leaders who are accountable and vulnerable, not just charismatic and driven.

Hybels and Willow Creek have taught the evangelical church culture a lot of lessons over the past two decades about church growth and the megachurch model. Now maybe it’s time to start un-learning those lessons. Beaty has some good ideas on where to start.

-- As Willow Creek reels, churches must reckon with how power corrupts

Bullet Points for a Wednesday Morning, German Edition

I’m on work travel this week, visiting Cologne, Germany. It’s my second visit to Cologne, which is a lovely European city. Random thoughts:

  • Jet lag is a weird thing. I’ve slept solidly the past two nights here in Germany but I’m still dog tired mid-morning and late afternoon. Coffee is only marginally helpful.
  • One thing I love about Cologne is the number of bakeries with fresh bread and rolls easily available. A croissant and coffee for breakfast is just my speed.
  • 18 people in my meeting today and only 4 women. Which, sadly, is still better representation than our industry overall. We should do better.
  • I’m astonished by the number of people out and about to very late hours. 10 pm and it’s just twilight, restaurants all still going strong, lots of people hanging out along the river.
  • Trips to Europe turn into opportunities to do two workdays - just as the workday here is ending, the one back home is cranking up. Lots of stuff popping back at the home office this week.
  • I wish they did air conditioning better over here. It’s HOT.
  • “Economy Comfort +” on an old Boeing 767-400 is kind of a joke. It’s still expensive and isn’t really comfortable.
  • They have an abundance of beer house restaurants over here that are remarkably the same - get your choice of bratwurst, wiener schnitzel, or schwein haxe (pork knuckle) with potatoes and sauerkraut. They only serve one kind of beer, the house brand. It’d be kinda like choosing between the Budweiser Restaurant, the Miller Restaurant, and the Coors Restaurant, all of which served similar burgers and fries.
  • So much beer, not enough water.
  • That all being said, it’s kinda fun to order 1/2 meter of bratwurst at the restaurant.
  • I just realized last night that I misplaced a meeting on my calendar for the fall, and since my wife has already scheduled around it, I’ll probably just need to miss the meeting. Oops.
  • On the other hand, if I could keep that trip I might just make it to gold status with Delta for the first time. Two international trips this year and a bunch of domestic travel…
  • Oof I’m tired. Where’s the coffee?

Welcome to America...

David Bentley Hart with a prophetic critique of America in a recent NYT column (HT to Richard Beck for pointing it out):

“America — with its decaying infrastructure, its third-world public transit, its shrinking labor market, its evaporating middle class, its expanding gulf between rich and poor, its heartless health insurance system, its mindless indifference to a dying ecology, its predatory credit agencies, its looming Social Security collapse, its interminable war, its metastasizing national debt and all the social pathologies that gave it a degenerate imbecile and child-abducting sadist as its president — remains the only developed economy in the world that believes it wrong to use civic wealth for civic goods. Its absurdly engorged military budget diverts hundreds of billions of dollars a year from the public weal to those who profit from the military-industrial complex. Its plutocratic policies and libertarian ethos are immune to all appeals of human solidarity. It towers over the world, but promises secure shelter only to the fortunate few.” –David Bentley Hart, “The New York Yankees Are a Moral Abomination”

Zahnd: Christianity vs. Biblicism

I attended the Water to Wine Gathering at Word of Life Church in St. Joseph, MO a couple weekends ago. WOLC’s pastor Brian Zahnd included in one of his talks some discussion of the dangers of biblicism. I had hoped to summarize that talk in a blog post, but happily Zahnd has published a post of his own doing just that. (It’s actually the preface to an upcoming book, but he shared it on his blog.) I find his thinking very helpful in how we approach and interpret the Bible.

I particularly enjoy his opening metaphor:

As modern Christians we are children of a broken home. Five centuries ago the Western church went through a bitter divorce that divided European Christians and their heirs into estranged Catholic and Protestant families. The reality that the Renaissance church was in desperate need of reformation doesn’t change the fact that along with a reformation there also came an ugly split that divided the church’s children between a Catholic mother and a Protestant father. In the divorce settlement (to push the metaphor a bit further) Catholic Mom got a long history, a rich tradition, and a unified church, but all Protestant Dad got was the Bible. Without history, tradition, or a magisterium, the Bible had to be everything for Protestant Dad — and Protestants have made the most of it.

He goes on to liken the Bible to rich soil out of which grows the tree that is the Christian faith. The Christian faith is rooted in and draws nourishment from the Bible, but Christianity and the Bible are not synonymous. To approach it this way, says Zahnd,

…is both conservative and progressive. Conservative in that it recognizes the inviolability of Scripture. Progressive in that it makes a vital distinction between the living faith and the historic text.

I probably have some readers getting very nervous at this point, but if so I would really recommend reading the whole thing. Zahnd and others like him are pointing the way to embrace Scripture while at the same time moving past reading it in a flat, biblicistic way.