Wright on Justification – 2

Posted on November 13, 2009 by Richard Heyduck

Notes on N.T. Wright, Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision, Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2009

Chapter 1

The dominance of a particular reading of justification within the reformed tradition has tended to shape the understanding of theologically concerned protestants the past couple of centuries to such a degree that it seems as obvious as the fact that the sun goes around the earth. Just step outside. Look up. Watch the sun move (but don’t stare at it, lest you go blind). Geocentrism is perfectly obvious. Yet dead wrong. Wright says, “The theological equivalent of supposing that the sun goes round the earth is the belief that the whole of Christian truth is all about me and my salvation.” (p.23) He claims, to the contrary, that “God made humans for a purpose: not simply for themselves, not simply so that they could be in relationship with him, but so that through them, as his image-bearers, he could bring his wise, glad, fruitful order to the world… God is rescuing us from the shipwreck of the world, not so that we can sit back and put our feet up in his company, but so that we can be part of his plan to remake the world. We are in orbit around God and his purposes, not the other way around.” (p.23-4)

Wright also uses the image of a jigsaw puzzle, accusing much study of Paul in recent generations of leaving out several important pieces. Cut out the Israel, Eschatology, Holy Spirit and History pieces of the puzzle, and theology – in this case, the doctrine of justification – will look very different.

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Wright on Justification – 1

Posted on November 12, 2009 by Richard Heyduck

In this and future posts I will be sharing my notes on N.T. Wright, Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision, Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2009. If you haven’t read it yet,  it’s well worth your time.

In light of the talk in some segments of current American Christianity about the “plan of salvation,” I find Wright’s subtitle ironic, and exactly to the point. Usually “plan of salvation” refers to the explicit steps an individual needs to take to get saved, which in this context is the equivalent of getting eternal fire insurance. Wright holds the OT and the NT much closer together, seeing “God’s plan of salvation” as stretching from Abraham, through Israel and the church, to the current day. God’s objective is not merely to rescue individual sinners (more, not less!) from hell, but to rescue all of broken creation, damaged, marred and corrupted as it is by Adam’s sin.

This particular volume is a response to John Piper’s The Future of Justification: A Response to N.T. Wright. Wright’s account of justification has been seen by the hard-core Reformed as insufficiently biblical (by which, according to Wright’s account of their account, they mean insufficiently in line with the tradition of reading the bible on justification stemming from Luther and moving onward). Wright, along with many others associated with the so-called New Perspective on Paul, believe the starting point to understanding Paul is neither Augustine vs. the Pelagians nor Luther vs. Medieval Catholicism. Instead, Paul must be read as thoroughly immersed in the OT. To the extent that we miss Paul’s close reasoning about Jesus from the OT (his Bible), we will fail to understand his teaching on justification (and just about everything else).

Wright identifies four themes, marginalized by Piper and the narrow version of the reformed tradition he represents, that come together in Paul’s teaching on justification.

  1. Jesus is the Messiah of Israel. Jesus’ Messiahship cannot be understood apart from the call and story of Israel.

  2. Based in the story of Israel, Paul’s approach to justification is thoroughly covenantal. Justification in Paul follows more or less directly from God’s covenant with Abraham.

  3. Justification is lawcourt language. It has to do with the verdict God the judge pronounces. It has nothing to do with moral performance – either positive (Jesus) or negative (ours).

  4. Justification in Paul is mixed up in eschatology. There are two movements, present and future (or final) in justification.

Posted in Books, John Piper, Justification, N.T. Wright, Salvation | 2 Comments

Three Cheers for Failure!

Posted on October 27, 2009 by Richard Heyduck

“Too big to fail.” we’ve heard that more than we like lately. A euphemism for businesses that are so intertwined with other businesses and societal institutions that we must do whatever it takes to keep them from failing, lest even worse things happen. This “whatever it takes” has amounted, of late, to pouring billions and billions of dollars into these failing enterprises.

Some commentators have said we should just let these organizations fail. If we don’t have an organizational ecosystem in which organizations are allowed to fail, they simply won’t be able to make judicious use of risk. “Sure, this action is risky, but not to us. We can rake in huge profits if it goes right, and if it doesn’t, well, the taxpayers will bail us out.” If there is no downside to risk, then more irrational risks will be taken.

Other commentators observe that our mistake is in letting organizations become so large and intertwined as to be “too big to fail.” They argue that we need more smaller enterprises that can fail without taking the whole system down with them.

Because I am sympathetic to both directions of thought, I’m concerned about one sector of our economic ecosystem that is getting larger and larger. At the same time we decry business organizations that cost us bundles of cash because we must, at all costs, keep them from failing, we are seeking to centralize the health care ecosystem, a huge part of our economy. While centralization and bigness can enable us to save money by the economy of scale, such giants are often clumsy.

By creating a system – that right from the beginning – is too large to fail, we are overly optimistic about our ability to come up with the best system on the first attempt. Our aims are so high that I’m concerned whatever we come up with will not be allowed to fail – even if it’s horrible, that the best we’ll be able to do, without the whole system crashing, is to do little tweaks here and there.

Or are we already at the stage? Are we already at a place where we’re unwilling to tolerate failure?

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Our Audience

Posted on October 22, 2009 by Richard Heyduck

Eric Bryant asks, “Has listening to church attenders led to the decline of the church?”

Declining churches, in his experience, focus on the people they already have. What do they want? How can we keep them happy?

Innovative churches, on the other hand, listen primarily to people outside the church, people they want to reach.

My first thought was: Which was Jesus’ strategy?

If we consider the establishment represented by the scribes, Pharisees and Sadducees to be the insiders of the day, they were clearly not Jesus’ main audience. Jesus spent much of his time with outsiders – people those insiders didn’t think worthy of inclusion in the work of God. The insiders were increasingly peeved at him for his actions.

But that’s too simplistic. From an Israel point of view, all of Israel were the insiders. The Gentiles and the Samaritans were the outsiders. Jesus spent most of his time with the insiders. Sure, he had a few dealings with Gentiles, and at least one with some Samaritans. But most of his ministry, at least as depicted in the Gospels, was with Israel. When he sent out the twelve he explicitly commanded them to go only to the “Lost sheep of Israel.”

Notice he didn’t call them “the sheep of Israel.” They’re the “Lost sheep of Israel.” While all of Israel is, in a sense, on the insider, Jesus puts himself on the outside, and approaches them with the voice of the outsider. Not just any outsider, however, but an outsider whose design was to be the insider who defined their very essence: God.

There’s more to this insider/outsider picture. It is not exactly correct to say Jesus spent most of his time with outsiders. Rather, he spent most of his time with his disciples. These folks, drawn from the periphery of Israel, became a new Israel – the Remnant, to use OT terminology, or to use contemporary jargon, Israel rebooted. It was specifically with these peripheral Israelites, these insiders to the new work of God, that Jesus went to the outsiders, both the “lost sheep of Israel” and to those who were not Israel. Going to those folks was not what these new insiders desired. They were profoundly uncomfortable with the places Jesus took them.

So if the church wants to reach people today, to whom do we listen – insiders or outsiders? That way of putting the question guarantees the wrong answer. Our starting place is Jesus. We begin by listening to Jesus. When we leaders listen to Jesus, Jesus will lead (or shove?) us out of our comfort zone. He will direct us to those on the periphery of the church and to the outsiders.

The trouble with listening to Jesus first, is that comfort (except comforting the broken hearted) never comes into play. We don’t relax in church, comfortable with the way we’ve always done thing. We don’t morph the church into a spiritualized version of what the world calls comfort. We’re taking the message of Life to a lost and broken world.

Church ministry – or innovation – is never about tickling the itching ears of either church members or currently-outside-but-maybe-future-church-members. I know I never would have been reached by the church if they had only sought their own comfort. I also never would have been reached by the church with the Gospel if they had only sought to meet my “felt needs.” I was an American teenager. To the extent that I recognized my felt needs, many of them were misguided. The innovation that built a bridge to me enabled me – over time – to gain a clearer and healthier understanding of my needs (to begin to feel some needs, and to stop feeling other needs) and to see Jesus as not merely the meeter of my needs, but as the Lord of the universe who calls me to follow him.

I want to lead a church that follows Jesus, a church that is willing to tolerate discomfort, change and innovation to be faithful to him, and to connect with people we aren’t now connecting with.

Posted in church growth, Discipleship, Ecclesiology, Evangelism, Jesus | 1 Comment

Ancient-Future

Posted on October 15, 2009 by Richard Heyduck

I sure have heard the adjectival phrase “Ancient-Future” thrown around a lot these past few years. As one who sees value in recovery of historic Christian doctrine, I can see “ancient” as embodying a willingness to be associated with the apostolic and patristic church. Within modernity, not surprisingly, the ancient was associated with the “out of date,” the “passe,” the “primitive,” as opposed to the “up to date,” “with-it,” “thoroughly rational” modern. “Ancient” brought to mind the dark ages, the opposite of this age of light.

Matched with my desire to recover historic doctrine is a desire to reach people so we have a church in the future. When it comes to theology, most folks would label me a “conservative.” But when it comes to methodology, to how we do things in the church, I’m pretty much a radical. Well, at least in what I’d like to do. I see so much of the way we’ve always done things, though some might call these methods ancient, ancient in this case means only a couple of generations old (for a quick illustration of how recent this form of ancient is, consider the dates of the hymns people in your church consider the “old timey songs”).

In my own congregation – and we’re doing better than some in our denomination – about 40% of our active and committed people are aged 70 or above. Chances are those same folks won’t be as active and committed in ten years. When you consider this with two other current facts, (a) we’re not reaching the younger generations well enough, and (b) I’m doing lots of funerals, we’re going to be in trouble in the near future. I really want the church to have a future.

So you’d think I’d be part of the pro-Ancient-Future demographic, right? Maybe. My first thought on hearing this however, is that it’s a way of saying “anything but now.” Let’s escape into the past or into the future – anything but now.  However much we admire the past and seek to learn from it, however much we yearn for a happy and healthy future, we’re here now. Now – the current time – is the bridge (and it can be a mighty short bridge, considering what you mean by ancient) between ancient and future.

But maybe that’s all they mean. Maybe they’re just trying to say the same thing I’ve just said. Maybe we are on the same page after all. We’ll see.

Posted in Culture, Ecclesiology | Leave a comment

Asking Questions

Posted on October 15, 2009 by Richard Heyduck

From ancient times, theologians have had a motto, “Faith seeking understanding.” As followers of Jesus we don’t start from doubt or from skepticism. We don’t even start from a position of knowing nothing, from a blank slate. We start from faith. Our faith may be at its beginning stages, it may be mature, it may be hard-won, it may be bursting at the seams. But we start from faith. Starting form that position, we then seek to understand that which we believe. Sometimes the understanding comes easily and quickly. Sometimes it takes a long time to gain some understanding, and we’re left with more that we don’t understand. We take more on faith than we can explain. When we see things way, questioning is an expression of faith (as it seeks understanding), not a challenge to it.

In saying this about questioning, I don’t think I’m saying the same thing as some who speak up for doubt as a Christian virtue. Doubts, like questions, are not best dealt with through a strategy of repression. Doubts can lead to questions. Sometimes, however, doubts are merely allowed to lie there. Faith is our starting point. Understanding is our ending point. Seeking is the work of exploration and questioning that leads from the one to the other.

There are some aspects of our faith that we do simply take “on faith.” A doubt or set of doubts might arise, calling attention to one of these aspects we had never closely considered before. (Doubt is by no means the only instrument that calls attention to our assumptions. Other instigators of questioning can be love, joy, and simple curiosity.) In this role doubt is not a fusillade of questions to bring down the edifice of faith, though if doubt is unaccompanied by a desire to understand and an underlying trust in God, it might do just that. Rather, doubt says, “Consider this. It doesn’t seem to fit. We need to look more closely.”

The overcoming of doubts would be the arrival at a state where one could say, “I have considered this issue and explored it to a degree that I have reached satisfactory understanding.” What counts as a “satisfactory understanding” is relative to where we stand in our faith and where the particular issue sits in relation to our faith. If it is a marginal issue, a satisfactory understanding can be still attended by many doubts and continuing questions. The solidity of our faith lies elsewhere. If, however, the issue is of greater weight or more central to our faith, the substantial that satisfactory understanding will need to be.

Some questions we ask are our own, some come from outside us. Some of those that come from outside us do not originate in faith – or at least in anything we recognize as faith. They come to us, to where we stand, as challenges, as provocations to doubt. Sometimes we are in a place where we can help people with these questions. Sometimes we aren’t. When we aren’t it is still of value to be able to direct people toward sources where they might explore their questions (or to put it in a more philosophical way, to question their questions).

I hear too many stories of young people today – or people who were young recently, who tried to ask questions – questions generated by their faith and its interaction with the world and life – who felt discouragement from the church. They (for the most part) find themselves unable to bury or forget their questions. So they choose the alternative – burying or forgetting their faith. I major part of my calling in life is to help people deal with questions. Since I had had so many throughout my life, I am relatively comfortable with other people asking questions. It breaks my heart to see the church losing younger generations – for this or any reason. Part of my calling is to turn this around. For that very reason I encourage people to ask questions and invite them to join me on my own journey of exploration.

Posted in Discipleship, Spirituality | Leave a comment

Kirbyjon Caldwell at the Gathering

Posted on September 24, 2009 by Richard Heyduck

This year’s Gathering (Texas Conference Pastors Retreat) began with a message from Kirbyjon Caldwell of Windsor Village UMC. Kirbyjon is always worth listening to. He began with a statistic about our current situation: The United Methodist Church is losing 73,000 worshipers each year. Considering a single institution in our church, one heavily weighted toward the older end of the age spectrum, he suggested in that in fourteen and a half years there would be no one left in UMW (United Methodist Women).

I don’t see how anyone could dispute this. Though my own congregation is doing better than some, when I see the high percentage of our highly committed and active folks are over 70, I’m forced to recognize that chances are against them being as active and committed in ten years.We have simply don an inadequate job reaching younger generations.

It’s time for United Methodists to wake up and change, he says. We’ve all heard it, “When you do what you’ve always done, you get what you’ve always got,” but we keep on doing what we’ve always done.

Our problem is that some of the things we’ve always done used to work. We keep doing them because they worked in our younger days. We grew attached to them. In many cases our actions declare that we’re more in love with our ways of following Jesus than we are with Jesus himself. In other cases we have identified key parts of our Christian identity as “things we’ve always done that no longer work” – preaching the bible, the doctrine of the Trinity, the resurrection of Jesus, evangelism, etc. While I understand the slogan, slogans do not make for well-finessed arguments.

Kirbyjon sees Bishop Huie’s leadership in the Texas Conference as one beacon of light in the denomination.

I agree with Kirbyjon, but I sometimes fear it might be too late. We have not yet broken the back of despair and resistance to change endemic to the system. The distrust that built up between pastors, churches and conference leadership over the years is still under the surface (ok, sometimes it’s under the surface, sometimes it’s way above the surface).

Kirbyjon turns to Jesus and John Wesley for some ideas for our future, seeing them as “masters at planting incremental changes in people which in turn lead to collective transformation.”

But they both used plenty of non-incremental change. When he cleansed the temple Jesus didn’t take out the pigeons one week, then after that change had been received come back for the lambs, and only later come back for the money changers. When Wesley began field preaching he didn’t make it there by inching away from the pulpit week by week.

From this beginning, Kirbyjon made two broad suggestions.

First, we need to change our Procedures and Practices to fit the needs of the community. John Wesley did this in the areas of education, health care and economic development. He noted that within our laity we have people who are experienced – more experienced than the clergy – in leading successful organizational transformation. We need to find ways to draw on their leadership, even, he suggested, find a way to bring them into episcopal leadership.

Our current system of guaranteed appointments – with their guaranteed pay checks encourage mediocrity.

The big question we need to ask: What changes must I make in my current ministry to turn things around?

We also need to work, secondly, on Preaching and Proclamation. Within this area of change we need to do a number of things.

First, someone needs to be accountable for the quality of our worship. When we’re accountable we will need to identify resistant leaders and “preach the hell out of them;” quit pitying their situations (Sure, church leadership in this age is tough. But it’s tough for everyone); and we need to “Set the table so that people want to come to church.”

Second, we need to be authentic. He told the story of Keith Kellow, one of the conference oldtimers who had hoped that the merger of the central conference in 1960 would have brought the energy and life of the black churches into the white churches. Instead he saw the black churches become too much like the often-dead white churches. He observed that while American culture will tolerate pornography, greed, lust, and the like, it won’t tolerate boring.

Third, we need to preach with authority. He quipped, “If you don’t preach well, then don’t preach long.” He also said we need to never preach a sermon with no Bible. John Wesley and Jesus were both scripture saturated – we must be also.

Fourth, we must cast a vision of the Christian life and the Gospel of Universal Redemption. We have tp preach hope to those with no hope.

Posted in Texas Annual Conference, United Methodism | 5 Comments

Letter to a Pilgrim

Posted on September 17, 2009 by Richard Heyduck

One of the phrases I’ve heard all my life is “If you want it done right, do it yourself.” I’ve seen the truth of it in much of my life. What amazes me is that God doesn’t think that way.

Rather than doing everything he wants done, God invites us to join in what he’s doing. That’s the third step of grace offered to us that I see in Ephesians. The first step is what we usually call “salvation by grace.” We see that in Eph. 2:8-9. We’re not saved by our resume, our pedigree or anything we do. All of salvation is by the grace of God offered in Jesus. It’s great news. But too often we stop there.

The second step of grace is in the second half of Eph. 2. We see there that the salvation offered in Christ is more than just a matter of individuals getting right with God. In addition to reconciling us with God, Jesus breaks down the wall between Gentile and Jew, or in more general terms, the walls that exist between people because of sin. Jesus came not only so that I could spend eternity with him, but so that we together could be his people now and forever. If we miss out on the loving fellowship and unity of the church, we miss out on the fulness of salvation in Jesus.

But there is a third step, found in Eph. 3. There we hear Paul say, “This grace was given me, to preach the unsearchable riches of Christ to the Gentiles.” Grace not only brings me into a healed relationship with God and a healed relationship with others, it also draws me (us) into God’s continuing activity. If I say, “Nah, that’s only for preachers and ‘full time Christian workers,’” I again miss out on the fulness of salvation found in Jesus.

You’ve had a big weekend. You’ve experienced God grace – perhaps in new ways or in refreshed old ways. Perhaps you’ve felt God’s claim on your life, saying something to you like, “Your my child, bought with the blood of my Son, mine for eternity.” That same Jesus also says, “As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.”

Scary? Maybe. But it’s not an issue of “Ok, you’re saved, now here’s your work assignment, hop to it. Report in when you’re done.” No, in the same context where Jesus says, “As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you” he also says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” There is no way to live the Christian life on our own. We need the Holy Spirit living within us.

We also need each other. Jesus doesn’t send us out as lone rangers, individuals out among the wolves. He sends us out together. As you follow Jesus, you’re never in it alone. Jesus says, “I will be with you to the very end of the age.” And he says that to the people around us as we travel together in his way.

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A Dry Brook

Posted on September 9, 2009 by Richard Heyduck

Today’s a normal Wednesday – prayer meeting & bible study in the morning (along with the requisite preparation), Rotary at noon, later picking up HRH at school, then cooking dinner since my wife will be running the church children’s program this afternoon. In the times between these events, I’ve been listening to bits and pieces of The Nines, a one day leadership event put on by Leadership Network and Catalyst.

One person I was able to hear in whole this morning was Steven Furtick. His nine minute talk (that’s how the Nines works) was about Elijah. God had sent Elijah out into the wilderness during a time of drought in Israel. For a good amount of time Elijah was able to get water from the Brook Cherith. But then the brook dried up.

If you’ve been around bible teaching for any length of time, you’ve probably encountered use of the metaphor of dryness. Once there was a flow, once there was life. Now we’re parched. We’re thirsty. We’re needy.

Furtick asked why the brook went dry. By extension, we would ask why we experience dryness in our lives. The first part of his answer was to observe that it was a drought after all. Brooks often dry up when there is no rain. It wasn’t that Elijah had done something wrong or that God was sending judgment on him. No, it was just the effect of events in the broader world.

But the dry brook gave Elijah a chance to move on – to go have his needs met elsewhere. Furtick suggested that sometimes as leaders we experience times of dryness, and in those times, God is enabling us to move on and find other sources that he has prepared for us.

So if we want to have – need to have – a fresh encounter with God we need to move, actually, physically move somewhere, relocate our residence? I don’t take that to be Furtick’s point. Instead, there are some things we are currently doing that we need to stop doing. There are some practices we are not now engaging in that we need to take up. We need to enter some new relationships and perhaps recontextualize some old ones.

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Success in ministry

Posted on August 29, 2009 by Richard Heyduck

Several years ago we had an after-school ministry for upper elementary aged children. By the time we stopped it, it looked like a whopping success. Our little small town church would have 40-50 kids, mostly not from our church, show up on Wednesday afternoons. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

But there at the end, it was mostly chaos. Our few volunteers lacked the energy to keep up with the kids. We felt a day was a success if no one had been seriously injured or broken anything. Did the kids learn anything? Hard to tell, since most of our time was spent working on behavior issues.

Our current after school ministries are much smaller. But they are also orderly enough that the kids can get something out of them.

The mistake we made earlier – and are still prone to make – is to think our primary focus should be on ministry to children and youth. In a declining church full of old people, it’s really easy to argue for that position. Despite our lack of younger folks, both locally and denominationally, I think seeing our ministry to children and youth as primary is a mistake. What we should see as primary is a discipling ministry with adults so that these adults will then be the doers of ministry with children and youth. Why?

A first reason to focus on adults is that parents have the primary responsibility to disciple their kids. Sure, it’s rare for parents to do that. We’ll teach them to hunt, fish, cook, drive, and other things of life. But do we teach them them to pray? To read and understand the bible? To share their faith with others? To interpret their lives and encounters with the world in terms of the Kingdom of God? Usually not. At least in many UM churches, many of the adults are too spiritually introverted to feel “comfortable” doing these things. Better leave these really important things to the professionals, i.e., the Sunday School teachers and church staff.

I know the temptation here. We on staff reason that if the parents aren’t doing it, we ought to. It’s too good a thing to leave undone. True. But we’re displacing the parent’s responsibility. They will still have to answer to God.

A second reason to have a primary focus on adults is pragmatic. Parents are the ones who have control over their lives. Sure, their control is relative, but compared to children and youth, their control is immense. If they want to go to worship on Sunday morning, for instance, all an adult has to do is get up on time, get ready and go. In this age when you get to church gatherings in a car, children are at the mercy of their parents. Parents have more power to bring children along than children have to bring parents along.

The major consequence for those of us who are in leadership is that our primary job is not performing functions. We don’t hire people to do what we currently think of as our primary ministries (even if we can’t find anyone who is willing). We hire people to invest in the lives of others who will then become the doers of those ministries. Perhaps once upon a time churches could afford to hire people to do all the ministry that needs to be done. Not any more. The people we hire need to be leaders, catalytic people, who develop others to do ministry.

Posted in church growth, Leadership, Local church, Ministry | 1 Comment