I am very grateful for all the people who expressed deep concern over the movement I described in my April letter from the director to “cancel” the Gospel of John and remove John 18-19 from the lectionary readings for Holy Week, because of the claim that they foster anti-Semitism.  A link to that letter can be found here.

In that same article I mentioned an even deeper concern – a movement not just to cancel the passion narrative in John, but to “cancel” the passion.  There are many within the ELCA and other liberal/progressive, mainline denominations who reject the teaching that Jesus died for our sins.  Instead they make Good Friday into the supreme example of Jesus’ bold political protest against the Roman empire, even unto death.  And now we need to join in the work of dismantling empires and all other oppressive, political and social power structures. 

One pastor wrote, “Empire killed Jesus for being a good rabbi, telling the truth, and therefore was a threat to the power structure.”  Unfortunately, many agree. 

Another pastor offers the following rewrite of two verses of the hymn, “O Sacred Head Now Wounded.”

Verse 2 –

What you, dear Jesus, suffered casts light upon our way,

We see the cost of loving and living for the day

When all God’s children flourish in justice and in peace,

When hungry mouths will be fed and warring ways will cease.

Verse 3 –

What language shall I borrow to thank you, dearest friend;

For this your selfless living, your love that did not bend?

May my life bless all people, may my love bring you praise,

That all might share God’s blessing, that all would know God’s grace.

According to this approach, I do not need a Savior to die in my place, forgive my sins, break the power of sin, and defeat the great enemy death.  Rather I just need to be inspired and motivated to join in the effort to oppose all oppressive power structures.

But the Scriptures clearly teach that Jesus died for our sins.

In 1 Corinthians 15: 3-4 the apostle Paul emphatically states, “For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day.”  Paul clearly states that not only did Jesus die for our sins, but also that that teaching is “of first importance.” 

Revelation 1: 5 – part of the second reading for the second Sunday of Easter – says, “To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood.”  First John 2: 2 describes Jesus as “the atoning sacrifice for our sins.”  In John 1: 29 John the Baptist calls Jesus “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”  Is there any way to interpret that verse except to say that John is comparing Jesus with the Old Testament lambs upon whom the sins of the Israelites were laid and who died in their place?  Paul also wrote to the Corinthians, “He made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5: 21).     

Now certainly there are many additional ways to describe the saving work of Jesus.  He came to seek the lost (Luke 19: 10).  He rejoices when He finds us and when we come home (Luke 15).  He forgives, restores, and gives power for new living (John 8: 3-11).

I think one of the best passages for describing the rich variety of ways in which God has acted in Jesus can be found in the second chapter of Paul’s letter to the Colossians. 

We were buried with him in baptism and raised with him through faith in the power of God (v. 12).

When we were dead in trespasses, God made us alive together with Christ, when he forgave us all our trespasses (v. 13).

He erased the record that stood against us with its legal demands (v. 14).

He set this aside by nailing it to the cross (v. 14).

He disarmed the rulers and authorities and triumphed over them (v. 15).  (Based upon my reading of Ephesians 6, I am certain that Paul meant the spiritual powers of evil, not the political powers of Rome.) 

He made us alive. The charges against us were dropped.  The powers of evil were defeated.  All this Jesus did through the cross and the resurrection.  And that is a whole lot more than just calling on us to join with Him in His struggle against oppressive political and social power structures. 

Those who reject the teaching that Jesus as God the Son died for our sins do so because they claim that that teaching makes God the Father into a cruel, vindictive child abuser.

I would reply that rejecting the teaching that Jesus died for our sins is missing the whole point of the seriousness of our sins and the depth of God’s love.  Romans 6: 23 clearly says that “the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord.”  It is not that the Father inflicted His wrath upon the Son in order to satisfy the anger that He felt towards us.  Instead in giving His Son, God out of His great love for us gave Himself.  He Himself paid the price for us.  He satisfied His own requirements of justice.  And He won the victory over death and the power and penalty of sin.

But how widespread is it in the ELCA to reject the teaching that Jesus died for our sins?  I am not aware of any official doctrinal statement that has been approved by the ELCA Church Council, the Conference of Bishops, and/or a Churchwide Assembly which says, “We no longer believe that Jesus died for our sins.”  But evidence of how widespread this belief is is abundant, and it seems to be growing.  Here are some examples.  I will begin with two more extreme examples.

1.

Illustrated Ministry is a curriculum company whose faith formation resources are popular among many in the mainline denominations, including the ELCA.  Here is a link to an Easter resource. 

This resource describes itself in this way.  “This script outlines the way in which Jesus upended corrupt systems of power.  Because of his power, popularity, and message, those systems retaliated.”  It also says, “The good news of Jesus is often bad news for those who would like to accumulate power over others.  But in the end, death was not the end of Jesus!  We witness how Jesus lives.  His message of love and justice gives us hope.”  Did you get that?  Jesus dies only because he “upended corrupt systems of power.”  It is not that our sins need to be and are forgiven.  Rather we are to go and do likewise.

2.

Daneen Akers, author of the highly popular progressive/liberal curriculum, “Holy Troublemakers,” is another person who believes and who spreads the belief that Jesus died because he upset the status quo.  Here is a link to her article.

In this article she quotes another person as saying, “Jesus’ death was an interruption in his ministry, not the point of it.  His message of love-your-enemies, the last-shall-be-first, and God’s-realm-is-for-all was deeply threatening to the status quo.  So he was executed by the state as a cautionary tale for those who would follow his teachings.  This is why Jesus died: His teachings upset powerful hierarchies and status quos, so he was executed by the state.  The good news is that death and violence didn’t have the last word.  It’s a love-ultimately-wins story.” 

Many of the books in the picture in the article are published by Augsburg Fortress and/or are assigned or recommended as texts in ELCA seminaries.   

But some might say, But that does not mean that anyone in a leadership position in the ELCA is saying anything like that.  Is anything like that being said by anyone who would officially represent the ELCA?  Here are three examples. 

1.

Here is a blog post from the Rev. Dr. Kristin Johnston Largen, president of Wartburg Seminary, in which she condemns Isaiah 53 as “abusive” in theology.

2.

Here is a Huffington Post editorial by the Rev. Dr. David Lose, former president of the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia and author of “Making Sense of the Cross” (published by Augsburg Fortress).  Dr. Lose also condemns “Christ died for our sins” as abusive theology.

3.

Here is a video from the “Animate: Faith” curriculum, published by Augsburg Fortress, in which famed ELCA pastor and public theologian Nadia Bolz-Weber condemns the idea that Christ died for our sins as divine child abuse.

I do not hear what Drs. Largen and Lose, and Pastor Bolz-Weber are saying as going as far as Illustrated Ministry and Holy Troublemakers are going in totally reinterpreting the life, death, and ministry of Jesus, but I also know that things never stay where they are now.  What is extreme now will soon become norm.  There is nothing about the ELCA that would tell me that the ELCA is able to go “just a little bit off base” without soon being “very far off base.”  Especially if more popular and accessible materials like those from Illustrated Ministry and Holy Troublemakers, and the content of books which are assigned as seminary texts, have a far greater influence on the average person and seminary students/future pastors than the writings of current and former seminary presidents. 

God is not a cosmic child abuser.  God is not wrathful and vengeful and anxious to take out on Jesus the anger He feels towards us.  But the Scriptures are very clear in teaching that Jesus died for our sins.  Any theology of what Jesus did on the cross must take that clear teaching into account in order to remain faithful to the Bible.   

There are many things that these people are saying that we need to hear, such as –

• The cross is God’s greatest expression of love rather than an expression of God’s wrath.
• The cross shows that when humans do their worst, God can bring about His best. 
• The cross shows that God is with us in all of our suffering.
• God is on the side of those who are the victims of the abuse of power, rather than on the side of the abusers of power.

From the cross Jesus cried, “It is finished.”  He did say that those who wish to follow Him must take up their cross.  But from the cross He did not cry, “Go and do likewise.”

As we entered 2022, and I faced the deadline for this article, I found myself struggling with what to write; what topic did I find compelling enough to spend time seriously reflecting upon?  What in the Church’s life was I passionate enough about at the moment that I thought I could add something substantive to Her discussion and deliberation?

Surprisingly for me, I had trouble identifying that thing.  Oh, sure, there was plenty that concerned me, problems around which my thoughts tend to eddy and swirl as I seek some pastoral, theological, philosophical, or practical understanding, strategy, or stance, but what was lacking was the passion that typically makes me put pen to paper — or hands to keyboard.

Passion… it is a word with a storied history in the Church.  In my first ecclesial job as a youth minister, our church’s youth ministry decorated the youth room wall with the words “Faith, Passion, Service.”  Upon visiting, a colleague commented, “Passion is something I think my youth already have plenty of… I’d think more about discouraging that.”

But the Church Fathers — the pastors during the Church’s greatest period of missionary expansion did not feel that way.  C. S. Lewis has introduced many modern Christians to the distinctions between the four Greek words for love through his book The Four Loves, and as a result, many Christians think of storge (affection), philos (friendship), and eros (infatuation with the beloved, not necessarily sexual) as immature or degenerate in comparison to the New Testament standard of agape, Christ’s own self-sacrificial love.

But this is not the way the Church Fathers spoke.  They spoke of God’s divine eros that burned for lost humanity so completely it agape’d the world enough to give His only Son… to give Himself.  Far from fearing passion, a Church whose largely convert members had drunk deeply of the wine of Roman success, who had tasted fruits imported from every corner of the conquered empire (now redubbed “the civilized world”), who had participated fully in the “good life,” the Pax Romana for which so many had given their lives in labor or battle, had come to realize that far from their passion being too great, it was too small.  This was a Church quite literally world-weary, who would have agreed whole-heartedly with Lewis when he preached in war time,

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”[1]

They would have agreed with this because they made a distinction that we post-enlightenment, postmodern, post-truth people, whatever our religious convictions, fail to make.  It has been noted by some that we represent “psychological man,” products of what Charles Taylor terms in his eponymous book A Secular Age.  We are people who, however we think of ourselves — straight or gay, cis-gendered or trans, conservative or progressive, believing or unbelieving, a sack of meat directed by selfish genes or made in the image of God — we are a people who almost ineluctably conceive of our identities as emerging from a murky subconscious that is fundamentally comprised of appetites. 

For us, love is almost always conceived of as downstream from appetites in which we are not fundamentally different from animals.  I have 1600 hours of C.P.E. to my credit, and I can tell you that while theological conversation is by no means absent from my cohort groups, it must always be respectfully conditional (to make room for disparate, even conflicting convictions), but the psychological theories that form the substance of our didactics are not so much deferred to as referenced in ways that establish their authority.  These theories, whether Freudian, Behavioral, Object-Relations, or of some other school, all stipulate appetite (conceived of as need) as fundamental and love as an experience later articulated on the basis of such.  Appetite is the water within which we swim, the air we breathe to nourish our sense of self.

This was forcibly brought home to me by my daughter when at age nine she ebulliently showed me one of her bug-eyed Beanie Baby stuffed animals.  After waxing eloquent about how much she loved it, she paused then thoughtfully added, “but you know, I’m pretty much programmed to feel this way about it because it has big eyes.  All mammals are programmed to respond to their babies that way.”  As she skipped back merrily to her play, I not only celebrated inwardly that somehow the brute biological “fact” had not diminished her childish joy, but marveled that this Christian homeschooled, thoroughly-churched girl without social media or unsupervised internet access had somehow been catechized so thoroughly by our culture’s tacit view of humanity… I hoped she would not later be seduced by its reductionism, the storge of a mother for her child diminished to mere genetic necessity.

The Great Tradition of the Church views humanity very differently, in a way that should not sit as peacefully alongside our modern biological and psychological conceptions, as it too often does. If we are truly made in the image of God, the template of our souls is not the paltry desire that modernity stipulates and Kierkegaard lamented.  Rather, what is fundamental to our identities is love — a divine eros that burns hotter than we can imagine, for “our God is a consuming fire.” (Hebrews 12:29)

The ascetic tradition of the Church cautions us about passion, but in this, it does not mean the passion of love — any of the four loves about which Greek is so articulate in comparison to English.  Our elder brothers and sisters in the faith knew well from personal experience that appetite could easily obscure love as the prime mover of the soul, for it offered easier and immediate (albeit temporary and incomplete) satiation of the desire that is one of the many aspects of love.  Love desires the beloved, not as a possession but as simply its object, the sun around which it orbits.  A robustly Christian anthropology would see appetite as parasitically imitating love, seeking to consume or possess the thing or person desired, not as the foundation upon which rarified “conceptions” of love would later be built.

The seeds of ascetic Christian spirituality are already evident in 1 Corinthians. There the Apostle Paul states:

²⁴ Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. ²⁵ Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. ²⁶ So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. ²⁷ But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.[2]

We must not let the force of the Apostle’s words here be softened as I have heard too many well-meaning preachers do into weak-kneed warnings, back-handed reassurances that we might not “finish well.”  The salvation that is by grace through faith may be lost — we may be disqualified — if our appetites convince us that their satiation is the face God’s love takes for us, if our trust in them slowly but decisively supplants our faith in Christ.

The sexuality debates that have riven the Church of late should put a recognizable face on the process, at least for readers of this periodical, but I do not wish to direct this warning toward those who have appetites with which I do not struggle; I need this strong medicine myself, as the consumerism of our unbelieving culture’s annual Christmas bacchanal has brought into sharp focus for me.  I say, “brought into sharp focus,” because what I am seeing as I write this reflection is true of me all year around; though I call myself a Christian, though I believe I have faith, the shape of my life (which reflects the shape of my soul) is still largely formed by the unsanctified narratives of our cultural moment.  My life is far more driven by appetite than I would care to admit on most days.  I too often shop for new theological books rather than re-read those in my library whose arguments I have digested but whose wisdom eludes me in the daily practice of Christian discipleship.  I too often tune-in to pedagogic YouTube videos rather than practice my guitar.  I too often numb the pain of a day in which I have dealt with the tragic consequences of life in a world ruled by the power of death and the devil or the sinful choices of people who know better with a scotch or a mindless movie than with prayer and time with the Great Physician who alone can heal my infirmities.  Too often, my appetites direct my activity rather than my faith.

In that last sentence, I nearly wrote, “my appetites dictate my activity.”  The great hope we have — the promise of discipleship and evangelical freedom — is that I used the proper verb, and that with the help of the Holy Spirit, our history need not be our destiny.  To be sure, “we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves,” but while we are bound, Christ is not and He may direct us differently.

I am coming to believe we focus so much on what we are saved from that we too often neglect what we are saved for.  The 2007 film Amazing Grace about the life of William Wilberforce begins with his motion to abolish slavery being defeated on the floor of the British Parliament because some of those who had promised to vote for it were given tickets to the Comic Opera by his opposition.  The modern equivalent would be binge-watching a Netflix series when, led by the Spirit through our faith, we should be praying, consoling someone, enjoying time with a friend, reading Scripture or similarly engaged.  How many key moments have each of us missed when, through Jesus Christ, God had a Spirit-led motion upon the floor of our lives?  Appetites distract, dim, and partially satisfy, making us forget — and so fail to enjoy — the promise of the freedom for which we were saved.

The acedia, the sloth, the deadly sin of passionless-ness with which I began this little reflection is a sign to me that I have been too much with my appetites, that they have been directing me in spiritually unhealthy ways, leading me to seek satisfaction too often on the penultimate rather than the ultimate.  I generally love the Christmas season, but this year for the first time I found myself discontent and eager for Twelfth Night to arrive so we could begin the process of undecorating.  This year, for the first time I understood in my bones the words of the twentieth century theologian who said, “the only time I don’t feel like a hypocrite is when I am in liturgy.”

The feast of Christmas is over, and I am ready for the fasting of Lent to begin, not because I cannot bear to feast, but so that the joy of feasting — dining with Our Lord — may return.

 

[1] C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses

[2] 1 Corinthians 9:24–27 (ESV)

THE PRAYERS

Palm Sunday/Sunday of the Passion, Cycle B (March 25, 2018)

Let us humbly beseech God for his mercy upon the Church, the world, and one another.

A brief silence

Holy God, your Son was acclaimed Son of David and Son of God by the pilgrims in Jerusalem. Fill your pilgrim Church with faithfulness, boldness, and compassion; so that, through its witness, many may join it in singing, “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest!”

Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

Your Son was met by people crying “Hosanna,” – Lord, save! Grant his salvation to the Church wherever it is persecuted for his sake. We pray also for our companion synods and for your missionaries throughout the world.

Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

Your Son accepted the praises of the crowds who worshipped in Jerusalem. Fill this congregation with such love and zeal that we may eagerly worship and praise our Savior, humbly do your will, and lovingly serve our neighbor in His name.

Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

Your Son was greeted with sweet Hosannas by infants and children.  We pray for our little ones, and for children throughout the world, that their mouths might be made perfect in praising your name.

Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

Your Son entered Jerusalem as the Prince of Peace. Fill the leaders of the nations with a hunger for peace, a thirst for justice, and a love for the people entrusted to their care. Teach us all to do your will and to long for the day when Christ shall return in glory as King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

Your Son entered Jerusalem on a donkey, not a war horse.  Fill all places of warfare and violence with his peace; and protect and bless those who must stand in harm’s way. Bring them home in safety to their loved ones.

Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

Your Son was greeted with joy as he entered the Holy City. Fill with joy the hearts of all who suffer in mind, body, or spirit, especially: {List}.  Turn their sorrow into joy; their suffering into health; and their cries for help into shouts of praise.

Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

Most gracious heavenly Father, your Son opens the gates of the New Jerusalem for all who die trusting in him. We thank you for receiving them into that glorious city. Bring peace and hope to all who grieve; and fill us with imperishable hope, so that we gladly follow where our Savior leads us – until he leads us safely home.

Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

For these things, and for whatever else is needful, dear Father, we pray in the name of your Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit reigns, one God, now and forever. Amen.