Ugliness Into Beauty #6: Proof of God’s Mercy

There’s an elephant in the room when we talk about the cross. The cross is indeed solidarity with the crucified, the victory of God’s truth over Caesar’s power, the introduction of nonviolence into the world, a means of reconciling enemies, and a pouring out of sacred life blood that removes the curse of sin from the Earth. Jesus’ crucifixion also pays a price that needs to be paid for my sin. For many Christians, this sixth blessing of the cross is the only blessing it offers; ugly misrepresentations of this blessing have polluted our discourse, causing many other Christians to reject this dimension of the cross altogether. Regardless of that, we need to be justified by the punishment Jesus suffers on our behalf because only people who know that they are unjustifiable and entirely dependent on the mercy of God can enter the kingdom. Otherwise, we are a danger to the communion of all who live in the vulnerable safety of God’s mercy.

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God’s grace in 4 stick figure drawings

We had the first session of our new member class today. During the first class, we do introductions and give a primer on Methodist theology. We had the fortunate problem of having too many people in the class so our introductions took up all but 15 minutes. I didn’t want us to leave having only done introductions, so I tried to explain in 15 minutes and 4 stick figure drawings the three kinds of grace we talk about in Methodism: prevenient, sanctifying, and justification, along with the Christian perfection that God’s grace draws us toward. The way I’ve illustrated it is a bit individualistic (which of course I would have criticized if someone else had done it ). I’m interested in hearing your feedback and suggestions for improvement.

Is God a capitalist? (John Locke and the Romans Road)

One of the theories Doug Campbell advances in The Deliverance of God is that the “Romans Road” account of salvation which has dominated American evangelical Christianity for the past half-century cannot really be blamed on Martin Luther or John Calvin. The Romans Road is paved through the reconfiguration of the Reformers’ theology to fulfill the “decision for Christ” salvation formula of Billy Graham, Bill Bright, and all the sidewalk pamphleteers of the Four Spiritual Laws, who are more indebted to the 18th century political and economic philosophy of John Locke (and others like him) than the Reformation itself. In other words, the debate is not where we think it is: John Calvin vs. Jacob Arminius over the question of free will. They have both been repurposed according to a set of 18th century British presumptions about capitalism, rationalism, individualism, and liberal democracy.

A law unto themselves: virtuous pagans in Romans 2

I’ve been struggling through the beastliest book about the beastliest book in the Bible: Doug Campbell’s 1000 pager on Romans called The Deliverance of God. Campbell has been pummeling the exegetical claims of the Four Spiritual Laws gospel of Bill Bright (aka “decision for Christ,” “sinner’s prayer,” “getting saved,” etc) that has become such a brilliantly successful commodity in the evangelical salvation industrial complex that most of today’s evangelicals cannot really imagine any other purpose for Christianity. What’s interesting is that to Campbell, Calvin and Luther are not the problem behind the disaster of the evangelical gospel; the problem is the 18th century British empiricist/rationalist lens (Hume, Locke, et all) through which Calvin and Luther are studied and interpreted. I’m only about a third of the way in and only that far because I skipped a hundred or so pages. But one of the hugest potholes in the Romans Road I’ve discovered is the presence of virtuous (perhaps even heaven-bound?) pagans in two places in Romans 2. Let me share the passages and briefly reflect on them.

What I taught the confirmands: the sea of wrath and island of mercy

For the past two years at our church’s confirmation retreat, I’ve shared a message based on Ephesians 4:14-16 that summarizes the way that I understand Christ to save us from sin by incorporating us into His body. I have often described my dissatisfaction with the popular evangelical account of salvation in which sin is understood solely as an offense against God’s honor which is “paid back” by Jesus’ blood on the cross. The problem with this predominant account is that it allows little recognition of the cross’s role in addressing the spiritual imprisonment sin creates as a powerful social force. In any case, the way I explained to our church’s confirmands the problem that Jesus’ cross resolves was by using the metaphor of a sea of wrath that we can only escape through an island of mercy created by Christ.

How We are Saved from Being

I know better than to view the comments section of online news articles as a barometer for the moral health of our country, since people who have the need to “sound off” in response to news articles generally represent a more acutely depraved subset of the population. But the responses I read today to an article about middle-class homelessness in Los Angeles offer a helpful illustration of the basic attitude that Jesus came to save us from having.

Learning to Love God’s Judgment

[This is a repost of an article I wrote for Ministry Matters on the two sides of God's judgment and the way that Christ's atonement converts us into loving God's judgment.]

Many have misinterpreted this year’s battle between Rob Bell and the neo-Reformed bloggers who have dogged him for the claims that Bell makes in his book Love Wins. It’s actually not a debate about whether or not hell exists; there’s a deeper question whose answer shapes how we understand the nature of hell and what we are saved from by the cross: Why does God judge us?

Illegal Aliens in the Kingdom of God

I have often struggled with the notion of imputed righteousness in reformed theology. It grates my soul to read preachers talk about how we deserve punishment, wrath, etc, since I cannot picture the God I think I know as an angry judge. I’ve also read so many books about how this conception of God was used to justify colonialism and slavery and gained currency as part of the myth that Europeans had a duty to save the heathen Africans and Indians by conquering them from a much worse fate before a fiercely wrathful God.

Perpetual Conversion (Reframing the Question of Salvation)

I had an epiphany while I was reading Kurt Willem’s Red Letter Christians article on being a Christian disciple rather than doing Christianity. It’s not like it’s the first time I’ve heard people talk about being rather than doing. It was very trendy among the writers we read in seminary to talk that way. But this is the first time I thought of these two words as being analogous to works-righteousness (doing) and justification by faith (being). And so I wanted to put forward a somewhat risky proposal (which can hopefully be treated as theology-in-progress rather than heresy by my more zealous critics). What if salvation is properly understood as a perpetual process of being converted from works-righteousness to justification by faith?

Love: One Georgia Mayor’s Response to Immigrants

Came across a story on CNN about Paul Bridges, the “conservative Republican” mayor of Uvalda, Georgia, who’s been speaking out against the new Georgia law that makes it a crime to provide humanitarian aid to undocumented immigrants. Bridges is just a laid-back Christian guy from the country who happened to bump into a Hispanic couple outside a grocery store 12 years ago. He saw them carrying heavy grocery bags on foot so he offered them a lift to their house in his pickup truck. When he saw that 30 people were living in two broken-down trailer where they lived, he decided to go back with some lasagna to share with them. One thing led to another until he ended up visiting his immigrant friends in Mexico and then coming back to get trained as an English as a Second Language teacher. Now they call him Don Pablo and he’s part of their community.

This guy reminds me a lot of my great-uncle Walter who used to have a watermelon farm down in Premont, south Texas where he employed undocumented immigrants almost exclusively. Walter has spoken so much Spanish in his life that on the rare occasion he talks in English like when his brother Ralph and great-nephew Morgan come to visit, he has a thick Mexican accent. I remember going to see him one summer a few years ago when Texas was contemplating an anti-humanitarian-aid law. Walter kind of teared up talking about it and said, “I don’t give a damn if I go to jail. How’s the law going to tell me I can’t help them?”

Being a pastor in one of the few churches I know about where conservatives and liberals are able to worship together side by side, I really want to be careful about how I talk about controversial issues like this in public. I can totally understand where people are coming from who are angered by a government that doesn’t enforce its laws. Their anger at governmental dysfunction is absolutely legitimate and it’s completely unfair to call that racism. I also understand people saying that we need to have tightly regulated borders both for security reasons and for economic reasons. That’s perfectly reasonable.

Having studied the issue extensively, I do have to confess that I feel pretty strongly that the current immigration system is unfair (check out this helpful illustration of the current process if you’re interested). It also has been frustrating to me to see the statistics of how the US trade agreement NAFTA destroyed millions of jobs in the Mexican agricultural industry and pushed workers into migrating (see article). To be fair, there are reasons why we’re stuck with the immigration system we have and they’re not completely cynical (a fair immigration system would require a lot more overhead on the part of the government, for instance). Also some economists challenge the argument that NAFTA caused illegal immigration. So I can respect the fact that decent people are going to disagree with me on this issue.

However, just like Paul Bridges and my uncle Walter, I have spent enough time among undocumented immigrants to view some of them as part of my family. That’s why I cannot accept the way some people try to moralize this issue and say that undocumented immigrants are evil and sinful. It would be profoundly ungrateful for me to say that it’s sinful for people born on the south side of a river in the desert to cross that river to the side that I was born on so their children could have the same chance of a decent life that I do. I have privileges that I did not earn, so who am I to say that another person doesn’t deserve them because of where they were born?

As with a lot of other issues, you feel differently when you actually know people whom the issue concerns instead of thinking about it completely according to abstract principles. It’s very natural and entirely Christian to wish for the well-being of people you care about, even if they’ve broken the law. God’s law is to love your neighbor as yourself. When God’s law conflicts with human law, we should follow God’s law. Whatever else is true, I know that as a Christian, I belong first and foremost to the kingdom of God. My allegiance to American laws is subordinate to my allegiance to God and is only relevant insofar as it serves the purposes of God’s kingdom. I follow the law of the land because to do otherwise in most cases would be to blaspheme the name of the God I’m supposed to represent and harm my witness to others as a Christian.

With respect to God’s kingdom, I am an illegal alien washed clean by the Rio Grande of my baptism and legalized only by the unmerited amnesty of Christ’s blood, which is my green-card. None of us are not illegal aliens in God’s kingdom because none of us deserve to be there, but the only way to forfeit the heavenly citizenship God freely offers us is to live as though we are the kingdom’s rightful citizens and don’t need Christ’s amnesty. When I judge undocumented immigrants for chasing after privileges I have that I do not deserve any more than they, I am acting like the unmerciful servant in Jesus’ parable and cultivating a presumptuously ungrateful attitude that is eternally hazardous.

God bless Paul Bridges for his beautiful Christian witness! I disagree with the current immigration laws myself, but you don’t have to abandon your belief in even those laws to love unconditionally the people that break them.