The Good News is, You Have Loins
Pablo asked for some more explanation of something I had said in a comment. He noted how one of my comments said that the culture purposely produces weak men. He posed the question "I wonder how much of this is contrary to God's design. God, who tells Job to gird up his loins and the church not to be lukewarm." I said that "The older I get, the more I see the Gospel/Indicative side of that in addition to the Law/Imperative side of it." That last part was his question. How are God's commands on these points Gospel indicatives as well as Legal imperatives?
The idea that the same passage can be Gospel as well as Law is an old one. At different points of time, certain passages may come across to us as condemning or as promising. Even the Ten Commandments might offer Gospel readings if read in a certain light. "Thou shalt not steal" might be read in faith as "You won't need to steal, for I will provide for you." This doesn't require a lot of reading in, either. The Decalog has a preamble that says, "I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery." This is the background of the commandments. We can say on the one hand, this is why God is owed such obedience. But we can also say, this is why God is worthy of such trust.
So "Gird up your loins" doesn't just lay a burden on a man's shoulders. It says that his shoulders have been made to carry such a burden. He was created to be a man. This is good news in a world where people are acting like interchangeable cogs. The human chaos of modern society, where order is externally imposed or mechanistic, is not the world as it was created to be. Yes, it may seem a burden to go out and tell this to people. (Especially when half the presentations we've seen modeled don't really have a doctrine of creation as a backdrop.) But it is good to know that the world we see is not Plan A. That would be insufferable.
As to the lukewarm church, it is a relief to run into some of the passages just to see how false all the calls to be nice are. Especially when so many of the "nice" people are anything but.
I was once in a venue where a pastor had been called in to deliver an address to an audience. He cited some statistic about how his church body had a reputation for being among the coldest church bodies according to outsiders. I was not part of his denomination at the time. What it convince me of was that he really had no sense of how he was coming across to an outsider, even as he was discussing the opinions of outsiders. Coming from one of the so-called warmer churches in the survey, I knew that my pastor would never have subjected us to such a tirade.
There's a real limit to what can be done with imperatives. But we have a God of indicatives. He has created a good world. We've been called into battle with him. Some of the good news is that there is something worth fighting for.
posted by solarblogger @ 11/14/2006 11:25:00 AM
7 comments
7 Comments:
I can see where that could be looked at through a Gospel paradigm. God died on the cross for us and redeemed us from all our sins. Now we get to act like men were supposed to act We are allowed to fight alongside God for the redemption of this world. Or as Uwe mentioned we take part in the ongoing creation of this world.
That's a good way to put it.
As with other promises of restored Creation that are Gospel in the same way, it can turn into Law on us, too. But people often forget to see a Gospel side to these things.
There's forgiveness when we fail to be these men. But what are we to think of the guy who doesn't want to be one in the first place?
I don't really think I believe that the world is being recreated. I believe that it will be but just don't buy that it is. I believe that the world is static and will be until it is recreated at the consummation. I'm not for the "go team" spirit as much as I am the "let's do the best with what we got, and all do a dive roll out of the fireball at the end of the movie" spirit.
"Ongoing creation" is not a bad term. But it would require a pretty deep Bible Study to get a full sense of how Scripture speaks of this. There is a strong tendency to bring a conceptual grid from an old theology into these questions. We offer different answers than the old theology. But we forget that the grid may not work.
Think of Martha at the grave of Lazarus. She tells Jesus that Lazarus will be raised at the Resurrection. Jesus tells her that He is the Resurrection. She was thinking of a temporal event. In that context, her thought was orthodox. But she had misframed the question.
When we speak of a New Heaven and a New Earth, we may make the same kind of mistake. That it comes at a particular time. And in a sense, I think that is orthodox. But we may see some of it now. Isaiah 65:17 seems to say "behold I create new heavens and a new earth" in the present tense. The passage is clearly eschatological. So present tense doesn't necessarily mean that it was true when it was spoken. But I wonder if there isn't a little more to it than that. There has to be some reason that it does not read "I WILL create new heavens and a new earth." I think that what is spoken of is a bit enigmatic. Maybe in some way we can't imagine, a brand new heavens and new earth are compatible with some continuity with what we do down here.
Well, Already/Not Yet and all that jazz. Add on to the top of that our inability to grasp or to distinguish between temporality/eternality and we're basically screwed--conceiving this stuff then becomes a fool's errand. Or we devolve into pondering questions that have no answer. I prefer not to look much further than the end of my nose for the answer to these questions.
The scriptural support for my static creation theory would be passages like "you will always have the poor" or "there will be wars and rumors of war" etc...He's basically saying that things are gonna be shitty until the last day finally ends. Those types of phrases I believe are less ambiguous or at least don't require artsy movie type mental backflips to understand clearly.
I think that "the poor you will always have with you" is read as a universal when it is addressed to particular people. He is telling his disciples and Judas in particular that they always have opportunities to do good to the poor. But Jesus won't always be with them in the flesh to do such good deeds to. While I think it is true that we will likely have poor people till the end of time, I wouldn't use Jesus' statement as a prooftext. I think it had a more narrow application.
I don't have much hope in the idea that we can set up some course of unending progress. I think we can set up some great stuff, and it is only good so long as people are vigilant, which is not usually long. This has to do with people being mostly lazy and wanting things to go good without anyone being conscious or responsible. But when people are conscious and responsible, I think they create great stuff.
I've never been so moved or motivated by words than I have been in my American Political Thought class. Men like Jefferson, Thoreau, and others are great examples of what it means to be an American male and how to perform your civic duty. I really can't get enough of their deep wisdom.
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