I’m late to the party on this one, but I still want to take the time to note the important discussion of sanctification that took place last month on “Strange Herring,” a blog by Lutheran writer Anthony Sacramone. His question (and one too many of us are left sharing) is why so much of contemporary Lutheranism seems soft on discipleship. It’s certainly not Scripture’s fault; Christians are clearly called to live life differently as a result of their salvation through Christ. It’s certainly not something we can blame on Luther either; he’s the one who first named the heresy of antinomianism, after all. Nor is it the fault of our confessions; there’s that whole “third use of the law” thing. And the early Lutheran fathers were similarly clear on the importance of holy living. (See more on all this here and here.

And yet, some contemporary Lutherans seem to have abandoned any discussion about what the “inner man” accomplishes as the Holy Spirit works in us to kill the “outer man” (ie, “the Old Adam”). Too many influential works seem infected with an almost antinomian strain. One prominent example: Gerhard Forde’s On being a Theologian of the Cross. While good in many ways, this book explicitly contradicts the Lutheran confessions by denying the Third Use of the Law. It worries me, therefore, that so many quote-unquote “confessional” Lutherans recommend it so unreservedly.

I recently discussed Luther’s On the Freedom of a Christian over at First Things, focusing on the subject of good works in the Christian’s life. I’ve also broached the subject of modern-day Lutherans being slack on sanctification on this blog in the past too. But I’m glad to see it under discussion in the wider Lutheran blogosphere. The impetus for the most recent sanctification-debate was Anthony Sacramone’s reading of a Gospel Coalition review of Rev. Jonathan Fisk’s recent book Broken: 7 “Christian” Rules that Every Christian Ought to Break. That led to Sacramone’s important post “Is Lutheranism Broken?” Go read it. The next day, he put up his own review of Broken. It’s likewise insightful and worth reading. While you’re at it, read his 2012 post on “Lutherans and Sanctification” too.\

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A few weeks back I was asked to lead devotions for Lutheran Church–Canada’s Board of Directors meeting here in Winnipeg. Here is, more or less, what I spoke about that morning.

Reading: 1 Peter 1:3-9

In this letter from Peter, we see the paradox which so often accompanies the people of God: our faith is filled with joy; but it is also filled with suffering. We rejoice in the salvation won for us by Christ; but at the same time we suffer griefs and trials.

We rejoice in the salvation won for us by Christ; but at the same time we suffer griefs and trials.

In this book, Peter is writing words of encouragement to the faithful in Asia Minor. We learn in this letter that the Christians there were in some state of suffering.

At the point at which he’s writing, it doesn’t seem that outright persecution is the problem. That will come, but for now it may be that they are merely facing increased societal disapproval for being Christian. They are becoming Pariahs. Scapegoats. Outcasts. For this reason, Peter encourages the faithful not to be discouraged when they are insulted for being Christians. Instead, they ought to do their best to make peace with their neighbours. They ought to live such good lives that no one can accuse them of wrongdoing. They ought to be good citizens, obeying their rulers and authorities.

All good advice. But within a few decades, this social disapproval of Christians would transform into outright persecution. The Romans would begin executing the faithful for the simple “crime” of bearing the name “Christian.” During that time, this area of Asia Minor would come under the authority of a new governor: Pliny the Younger. What’s particularly interesting about Pliny is that he wrote a letter to Emperor Trajan describing the prosecution of Christian, and his letter survives to this day. In it, Pliny describes how he treats Christians when they are brought to trial: he gives them three opportunities to recant their faith. If they refuse all three times, he sentences them to death.

It is in this context of growing persecution of the Church in Asia Minor that Peter writes his letter. And it is Easter hope in the midst of this suffering that he offers.

“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,” he writes. “In his great mercy, he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” Right from the beginning of the letter, we are reminded that our hope as Christians is not found in our earthly comfort, but rather in the sacrifice of Christ. We don’t have a “living hope” because we have good jobs, or because we’re healthy, or because we are well-liked in this world. We are often the opposite of these things: we are poor, we are sick, we are despised.

But our hope looks up to God. We can have a “living hope” because Christ has been raised from the dead. His suffering makes us able to bear our own suffering. It’s a hope not in earthly things but a hope, Peter writes, of “an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade”—an inheritance “kept in heaven” for us. When things look difficult in this world, we look to the One who has overcome the world. We look to Christ. And though our earthly situations may be grim, we see in Christ God’s eternal goodness to us. And we can bless the Lord for that, “though now for a little while we suffer grief in all kinds of trials.”

The medieval theologian Bede writes well of this passage: “It is right for us to bless God,” he says, “because, although on the strength of our own merits we deserve nothing but death, he has regenerated us by his mercy to a new life. He has done this by the resurrection of his Son who loved us so much that he gave himself up to death for our sake. When that death was overcome by his resurrection, he offered it to us… to give us hope of rising again ourselves. For he died in order that we should no longer be afraid of death, and he rose again so that we might have a hope of rising again through him.”

He died in order that we should no longer be afraid of death.

“He died in order that we should no longer afraid of death.” And if we need not fear death, neither need we fear trials in this world. The situations Peter is addressing in this book are ones we in Canada are beginning to understand a little. In the past, Christianity and Christians were respected in our society. Today, we are reminded only too often that our faith is not welcome in the public sphere. We begin to face, as Peter’s audience in Asia Minor faced, “insults” for being Christian. We are accused of intolerance for confessing the Word of God—for proclaiming the reality of sin and the need for a Saviour. Prominent politicians label such beliefs “unCanadian.” More and more people are convinced faith should be restricted to the home and not be brought out in public.

And we face other trials too, as a church. Our membership numbers have dropped; we have less and less resources to do the work we are called to do. But in all of these things, we have Peter’s words of comfort: “These trials have come so that your faith… may be proved genuine, and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.” Joy is coming. In the meantime, Peter tells us, we are “shielded by God’s power” “through faith” “until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time.”

Do we in Canada suffer to the same extent today that the early Church did? No, and God-willing, we won’t anytime soon. But when we face difficulties as Christians—be they griefs in our personal lives, concerns over the future of our churches, or increased resistance to Christianity in wider society—when we face these trials, we must look back to the light of Easter and look forward to the return of Christ.

At present, we live between the two moments: Easter happened two thousand years ago; Christ’s return is still to come. But while we wait, while we live between Easter and the coming Kingdom, we do so with a living hope. “Though we have not seen him, we love him; and even though we do not see him now, we believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy. For now, right now in these present days, we are receiving the goal of our faith: the salvation of our souls.

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“In the beginning was the Word,” we read, “and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1).

We know the verse, but too often we read it too quickly. Too often, I say, because this is a weighty sentence, a sentence requiring more than a moment’s pause. The Word was God. God was the Word. And that Word, we continue to read, “became flesh” (John 1:14).

But exactly what kind of word is this Word?

An answer comes in Moses’ encounter with God at the burning bush. Moses asks, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?” (Exodus 3:13).

God responds with this Great Word, the simple and unfathomable declaration: “I Am.”

“I Am,” God says. “I Am That I Am” (Exodus 3:14).

He is also the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—the God of the Israelites’ fathers, as the passage explain. But this is God defining Himself in relation to His creation—explaining Himself so that Moses can understand his own relationship to Him. But on His own, He is simply “I Am.” He is. He exists. He will always be.

This God, this I Am, is He who exists independently of all other things. God is not a contingent being, to borrow St. Anselm’s phraseology; He is a necessary being. That is to say, He does not rely on anything else in order to continue existing. God simply is. He is before the world was created. He is when the world will be destroyed.

God simply is. He is before the world was created. He is when the world will be destroyed.

What is more, without Him, nothing else could exist. His own existence is what makes possible the existence of other things. “For in Him we live and move and have our being,” Paul quotes the Greek poets (Acts 17:28; cf. 17:24). God is He who holds the whole of creation together.

And it is this great, uncreated, all-sustaining I Am who is the Word of John’s Gospel—“The Word who became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14). Yes, the infant boy born to Mary is the same God “through whom all things were made and without whom nothing was made that has been made” (John 1:3).

The Word becomes flesh. The necessary God becomes contingent human, marrying forever human nature and divinity in his Person. Intangible deity becomes tangible man.

In Christ, the unknowable “I am” comes close and speaks to us. “I am the Bread of Life,” the Word says. “I am the Light of the World. I am the Gate. I am the Good Shepherd. I am the Resurrection and the Life. I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. I am the Vine.” In the seven “I Am” statements of John’s Gospel, Jesus declares to us who He is in terms that reveal our relationship to Him.

Yes, He is the great I Am, God of all, immortal, incomprehensible. But He wants us to understand—just as the great I Am wanted Moses to understand—that He is a God who exists in relationship with His creation. In Christ, we see the “image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). He is not a mystery—a question without an answer. He is the Word of God made manifest to us. In Christ, the immortal comes down and pitches His tent among us. He in whom we find our life chooses to live with us—and die for us—so that we might at last live with Him.

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Chances are you’ve heard of St. Augustine even if you’ve never read anything by him. But how about St. Clement?

Few of us know this saint very well: he was an early bishop of the Church in Rome, is said to have been installed by St. Peter himself, and has been sometimes associated with the Clement mentioned by St. Paul in Philippians 4:3 as a “fellow worker” for “the cause of the Gospel.” Even if we have heard of him, few of us realize that some of what he wrote has come down to us today. Subsequently, we do not realize that his epistle to the Corinthian church (written a few decades after St. Paul’s letters to the same congregation) was considered so important by some parts of the early Church that they counted it Scripture.

The canon, of course, is closed today, and St. Clement’s letter didn’t make the cut. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t things we can learn from this associate of St. Peter and St. Paul—this early teacher of the Christian Church.

You’d think, with credentials like that, Christians today would be lining up to hear what he had to say. And yet that’s not the case. We might run out to buy the latest book by Rob Bell, but somehow dead old authors like St. Clement and the other Church Fathers are almost entirely forgotten.

I’m not sure why that is.

It is oft noted that Christians today have little sense of the Church’s history. This criticism is most frequently levelled against Evangelicals. And, indeed, many of us do hold a rather shallow history of the Church in our heads. It goes something like this (from the New Testament on): Jesus came. Then St. Paul sent some letters and visited a bunch of places. Finally, St. John wrote the Book of Revelation. Then, sometime around 1950, Billy Graham started preaching.

Of course, Lutherans and members of the other old Protestant churches really don’t fare much better. Sure, some of us can name St. Augustine (though most of us haven’t really read much, if anything, by him). And then in the 1400s Martin Luther showed up. And John Calvin. And John Wesley. And a few other guys. But even if we could name great Christian thinkers from the Reformation on, we’d still have some pretty significant gaps in our knowledge. There’s the two to three-hundred year gap between the Apostles and Augustine, and then a thousand-year gap between Augustine and Luther. The fact is, most of us just don’t know that much of the Church’s history. And we’re especially lacking in our knowledge of the early history of the Church—the era of the “Church Fathers,” those Christian thinkers from just after the time of the Apostles who helped cement our understanding of such essential doctrines as the Trinity and the nature of Christ.

Surely what these early Christians thought is important. They wrestled with the same questions of faith and theology we do, and we can and should learn from them, just as we learn from pastors and theologians and Christian friends today. G.K. Chesterton calls this idea the “democracy of the dead”—the idea that our spiritual forebears have something to contribute to discussions of faith in our own time. Their votes matter. We might not always agree with them (in fact, they often disagreed with each other), but they are members of the same Church as us. We are together members of one body. As the hand to the foot, we cannot simply say, “I don’t need you.”

All of this explains why I was delighted—and challenged—when my fiancée approached me recently asking whether we might join an online group planning to read through the Church Fathers. This group has broken down the voluminous works of the Fathers into easy reading of a few pages a day over several years. All the works are available for free online, so there’s no cost involved—except the cost of commitment. The group also plans to facilitate ongoing discussion of the readings on their website, creating a community to encourage and teach one another as we go through the Fathers’ writings.

I’d like to challenge you to consider joining in, at least for a little while. At the very least, give the first book a shot. It’s St. Clement’s epistle to the Corinthians, and it will only take you three days to get through (reading just a few pages a day). Ever wondered what happened in the Church of Corinth after St. Paul wrote his letters? Here’s your chance to find out.

The official start of the reading group’s plan for the Church Fathers is this Sunday, December 2, 2012. Check out the information at their website here.

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Note: Both my fiancée and her roommate mentioned this group to me, so I’m not entirely certain which one of them found it first. But I’m grateful to both of them for letting me know!

That’s the title of a new post of mine over at A Christian Thing. I use Agatha Christie’s short story “The Flock of Geryon” (a tale about a cult) as a jumping off point to discuss how we broken people always seek out leaders to speak what our itching ears want to hear. A snippet appears below:

The story illustrates a problem all too common in our time. Instead of seeking the God in whom our restless hearts find rest (à la Augustine), we accept the restless desires of our hearts and fashion gods as restless as we. We want peace, but we do not want peace as Christ gives it—a peace that passes our understanding and which divides father from son, mother from daughter. And so we elect leaders to preach an easy peace—peace where there is no true peace. We want reward, the promise of family, land, and possessions, but we do not want it “with persecutions,” as Christ offers it. We want rather the assurance that moth and flame will not destroy earthly treasure; and the prosperity preachers answer our call. We want joy and spiritual fervor, ecstasy and radical emotion; we do not want pain and suffering and dying to the self. We want miracles of power; we do not want water or bread and wine. We want glory; we do not want the cross.

Read the rest over at A Christian Thing.

Today is Reformation Day—the day Lutherans (and other Protestants of varying types) mark the anniversary of All Saint’s Eve, 1547. On that day, according to popular legend, Martin Luther nailed 95 Theses outlining papal abuses to the church door in Wittenberg. The church door acted as a kind of bulletin board, and it was a notice that Luther wanted to hold debate or discussion on the topic. If that’s all that had happened, perhaps history would have played out differently. But, the legend continues, readers of the theses were so struck by the force of Luther’s complaints that they decided to share them with others. They went off to the nearest copy shop (ie, printing press) and made multiple, bootlegged copies. These subsequently made their way across Germany and other parts of Europe, bringing Luther’s complaints to an audience far larger than that of little backwoods Wittenberg.

It was the first act in the theological drama to come.

Reformation Day is for us a bitter-sweet remembrance. On the one hand, we celebrate the theological movement that took place under the care of people like Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon. They called for a “re-formation,” that is to say, a “forming again” of the Church. They believed the Church had strayed from the teachings of the early Church, especially on the question of how we are saved. The Reformers championed (rightly, I think) God’s grace toward sinners, received through faith—something that had been obscured by popular teachings on indulgences and works. Luther cried “ad fontes”—“back to the sources!” Back to the Scriptures. And it wasn’t just a call to theologians; the average person should have the Scriptures opened to them; to that end, he translated the Bible into the common language of the people. In all these things—grace alone, faith alone, Scripture alone—, the focus was ultimately on Christ. For Christ was (and remains) the giver of grace, the perfector of faith, and the very Word of God made flesh. Yes, through Christ alone. And so there’s plenty to be thankful for come Reformation Day.

And yet, while we celebrate the Reformation, we must also recognizing the division in the Church it brought about—division which exists to this day. Luther was excommunicated by the Roman Church. And to be fair, Luther could be a particularly vicious opponent; it’s not terribly surprising he was likewise met with fierce opposition. But even the more peaceful Melanchthon could not broker peace between the Evangelicals (for that is what the reformers called themselves—those devoted to the “Evangel” or “Gospel”) and supporters of the status quo. Despite Melanchthon’s contention that the Evangelical faith was well within the boundaries of historic, orthodox Christianity (a contention I obviously agree with), the Roman church disagreed. The Council of Trent drew the final dividing line: if you believed in salvation by faith alone, you were anathema. And it’s hard to have a discussion with someone who believes you’re anathema. (Though, no doubt, the Pope likewise found it difficult to hold discussion with those who called him Antichrist.)

Today is a day of mixed feelings: a matter for rejoicing as well as a matter for great sorrow. We rejoice over the doctrines rediscovered in the days of the Reformation. We sorrow over the divisions which rent the body of Christ in that time and continue to rend it today. Ours is gratitude tempered by the painful awareness of separation. The Church ought not be divided. And yet it is—or at least the Church visible is.

We earnestly thank God for the Reformation. But we do so with heavy hearts; we grieve its necessity. And we pray that the Desire of nations would at last come and bid our sad divisions cease—that He would make us one openly and visibly, just as spiritually the Church of Christ truly is one.

Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. Have mercy on us, O Lord, have mercy on us.

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This post is published concurrently at A Christian Thing.

It seems I have, rather unintentionally, become involved in theological discussions of gender and masculinity. I know: I’m as surprised as you. Theology of gender was definitely not something I ever planned (or desired) to really get involved with.

By “gender theology,” I mean particularly the question of what it means to be created male; or rather, what God intended “manhood” to be. I first entered into this discussion publicly with my Converge magazine article, “The man God hasn’t called you to be: What the Christian masculinity movement keeps getting wrong.” The origin of the story came about in this way: I had recently read an article in Converge which suggested the Christian male’s calling was something akin to fighters in the Ultimate Fighting Championship, a mixed-martial-arts fighting event which has drawn criticism for its extreme violence. I was aghast, and said as much to a friend of mine. Christian men would do well to remember, I told him, that God created the first man to be a gardener—not a warrior. Unknown to me, this friend passed along my criticisms to Converge magazine. Shortly thereafter I was asked by the magazine to write an article outlining my own take on Christian masculinity.

There’s been a fair bit of response since my article came out in early 2012. I’ve answered the occasional email about it—and, regrettably, failed to answer a few others. At some of the Lutheran conferences I’ve been at this year, a number of pastors have stopped me to thank me for the article. And Gareth Brandt, Professor of Practical Theology at Columbia Bible College and author of Under Construction: Reframing Men’s Spirituality, gave me a very positive review over at his website.

For my own part, I’ve considered writing a blog post or two more on the subject of Christian masculinity; one of these I’ve even completed (though I subsequently junked it before it ever saw the light of day). In particular, I’ve thought it might be good to write a post responding to some of the questions/criticisms my original article received.

That may still come, but in the meantime, something else has caused me to take up the topic again. Converge, the magazine which published my article, recently published an article by Chelsea Batten entitled “Stud service: How the Church makes it hard to be a man.” It takes a decidedly different approach to the subject of Christian masculinity than mine. And I’m afraid I felt the need to respond. You can see my response “Does the Church make it hard to be a man?” over at A Christian Thing.