Divine Judgment as Solidarity

I’ve been reading Trevin Wax’s Counterfeit Gospels. I haven’t read all of it yet, but the way he frames his defense of God’s judgment makes me hopeful for the future of conservative evangelicalism. It’s not the usual depiction of an infinitely picky God whose honor is infinitely offended by sins that seem trivial to us. Instead, he talks about divine judgment as a process that involves both plaintiffs and defendants. Why does an all-loving God judge humanity? To Wax, he does so out of love for those who have been wronged. This gives me a lot of hope that the day is approaching and has perhaps already arrived when conservative evangelicals account for social justice as part of their theology rather than seeing concern for the poor and oppressed as some kind of secretly Marxist competing missional vision that must be defeated. Of course, it doesn’t entirely put to rest all of my discomfort with eternal damnation. I hope that my bullies from middle school don’t burn in hell forever on account of my suffering if they don’t “accept Christ” between now and the grave, so if God will let me testify at their sentencing hearing, I’ll probably say, “Forgive them for they knew not what they were doing.” I really don’t need them to burn, even though they hurt me pretty badly, because God used their wounds for His sanctifying purpose in my life.

Anyhow, Wax uses the notion of God’s solidarity to argue that divine judgment is actually a positive thing, which of course liberation theologians have been arguing for decades. This led me to take another look at Isaiah 2, which I think is a great paradigmatic representation of the two sides to divine judgment. In the first section of Isaiah 2, all the nations go to the mountain of the Lord to receive His judgment. This version of “judgment” and “settling disputes” doesn’t involve fire and brimstone. It involves turning swords into plowshares in a beautiful utopian future for humanity. A universalist might stop reading there. But when you keep reading in Isaiah 2, an entirely different vision of God’s judgment is described in which people run to hide in terror on the Day of the Lord, the “day in store for all the proud and lofty” (v. 12).

Of course, the word mishpat (judgment) isn’t used in the second part of Isaiah 2, but there’s a metaphorical relationship between the establishment of the Lord’s mountain as the “highest of the mountains” in the first part (v. 2), and the earthquake of the Day of the Lord in the second part that brings down the cedars of Lebanon, the fortified walls, the towering hills, etc (v. 13-16). All these high places have to be brought down for the Lord’s mountain to be established above them. Isaiah lived through a tremendous earthquake in 750ish BC which probably provided the imagery for the passage, but that’s beside the point. The point, according to Isaiah 2:17, is for the “arrogance of man [to be] brought low, and human pride humbled” so that “the Lord alone will be exalted.” In a way, the second part of Isaiah 2 has to happen to make the first part of Isaiah 2 a possibility.

So as I look at the two sides of God’s judgment depicted in Isaiah 2 and at the New Testament descriptions of Christ’s role as the judge of all humanity, it makes me wonder if the purpose of atonement is not to cancel out judgment (as some accounts of Calvinism’s imputed righteousness imply), but to prepare us to receive it like the nations do at the mountain of the Lord in Isaiah 2. Instead of hiding in the caves and the holes from the presence of God’s majesty, we go before Him to receive His discipline in the hopes of being transformed into the likeness of our King. To put this in Wesleyan theological terms, we receive justification through Christ for the sake of our subsequent sanctification into Christ’s likeness through the Holy Spirit, and this can only happen through divine judgment. Judgment and condemnation are not the same thing, though they are often conflated in popular evangelical discourse. Condemnation is receiving God’s judgment without the assurance of God’s mercy through faith in Christ. Isaiah 6 gives us a good illustration of the terror people experience in the presence of God’s perfect holiness without atonement. It’s not that God is infinitely picky; it’s that we will be convicted of how horrendously “unclean” we are compared to His perfect beauty. But if we have put our trust in Christ, then our encounter with God’s judgment is the chisel God uses to make us into a masterpiece (Ephesians 2:10). When we love Christ, we want that chisel, because we want to be like Him.

A good test of whether we have put our trust in Christ’s justification is whether or not we allow ourselves to be judged by God through His word in the Bible. The parables of the sheep and goats in Matthew 25 and the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16 serve as proof-texts for two types of Christians who consider themselves to be on opposite teams. For “social justice” Christians, what’s important about Matthew 25 and Luke 16 is that God judges those who don’t care about the poor. For conservative evangelicals, what’s important about Matthew 25 and Luke 16 is that the rich man and the goats are punished forever and there’s a giant abyss between heaven and hell that nobody can cross (even though the rich man is within shouting distance of Abraham). Maybe both types of Christians should stop cherry-picking pieces of Matthew 25 and Luke 16 to support theological arguments that puff them up with pride. What if instead we go to these passages to be judged because we trust God’s mercy enough to receive His judgment?

It is significant that in these two most explicit depictions of hell by Jesus, God’s judgment is derived in solidarity with the oppressed and neglected. It’s not that the goats or the rich man went out of their way to oppress the poor; it’s what they didn’t do that matters. Instead of arguing about whether the “eternal” punishment of the goats is “forever” or “infinitely intense,” what we should be asking about our theology is why it makes us feel comfortable with living like goats in disobedience to Christ. If what I believe makes me immediately say in response to Matthew 25, “Oh, actually that doesn’t apply to me, because I’m saved,” then there’s a BIG problem with my theology. Why in the world should Christ’s atonement save me from taking seriously Christ’s commands? Furthermore, just because we stand in grace before God, that shouldn’t void out the right of the Lazaruses we’ve ignored in our lives to hear God judge us for ignoring them. If God judges in solidarity with Lazarus, then He judges for the sake of the plaintiff as much as the defendant.

So I don’t think it’s Biblical to affirm that faith in Jesus exempts us from judgment, though Romans 8:1 says “there is no condemnation” for us. The Bible seems pretty clear that Jesus judges everyone, “saved” and “unsaved.” The question is whether we receive that judgment as condemnation or as loving discipline, and this depends upon whether we have received the assurance of God’s mercy through faith in Jesus Christ.

The Ridiculous Donkey-King

Matthew 21:1-11 (Sermon for Palm Saturday)

So what kind of a king rides into his royal city on a donkey? A donkey is not exactly the most elegant of creatures. It’s hard to wrap our head around this reality because donkeys make us think petting zoos and petting zoos make us think “cute.” So here’s a picture.

Now if Jesus was riding a donkey back then, what kind of a ride do you think he would he have today for his Jerusalem procession? Well he probably wouldn’t be in a limo. And he wouldn’t be in a Beamer. Or a Lamborghini. So what do you think it would be? Well I came up with three options. Let me show them to y’all and then we can vote. How about a Ford Pinto? Or an El Camino? Or a Yugo?! Which one do you think it would be?

I used to have an old beat-up Oldsmobile that I drove around the “hood” in east Durham, NC where I was working as a youth pastor. Y’all think y’all got hood in the Route 1 corridor? East Durham is the real hood. So it helped me feel safe to be in a junky car with the upholstery falling out as I was driving around visiting my youth. My kids called it the “low rider.” Sometimes when we went over railroad tracks too fast, I wasn’t sure the wheels were going to stay on. Well the Olds finally died and I got a hybrid Prius a few months ago.

I’m not sure Jesus would drive a Prius if He were around today. I know that Priuses are “green” and Jesus wants us to care about the Earth, but the fact is Jesus was a carpenter’s son from Nazareth who was born in an animal feeding trough. He didn’t get to jump between the hood and the suburbs like I do. His people were straight-up podunk, and Jesus’ donkey procession brings us back to an important question: why did God make His Word flesh among a podunk people?

God had a lot of better options for incarnating Himself. Why didn’t He go Greek for instance? The Greeks had a very rich intellectual culture at the time even though its heyday was a few centuries earlier. Jesus could have been a disciple of Plato and Aristotle who built on their ideas but became the greatest teacher of all. Then no scholar in the world would be able to question his wisdom, and atheism would have been proven wrong thousands of years ago. Why did Jesus waste his time with low-brow crowd-pleasers like healing paralytics and walking on water? If he hadn’t done all those miracles, then so many intellectually respectable people would be able to believe in him. Miracles are what people do in places like east Durham and the Route 1 Corridor, next to the pawn shop and the dirty movie store. If Jesus stuck to the intellectual high road, then the smart people could follow Him and the not-so-smart people would follow the smart people.

Another option Jesus had was to go Roman. Instead of being born in a barn because of the census decree of Roman emperor Caesar Augustus, he could have been born to Caesar Augustus. He would have had the bully pulpit from the time he was a boy. The crowds would have had to listen to him preach and they would hang on every word even if he rambled longer than Fidel Castro or Moammer Gadhafi. The Roman emperors had a tradition of calling themselves gods anyway and Jesus could have said, “Guess what? Y’all thought you had gods before. Well I actually am God.” If Jesus had been a Roman emperor, Rome could have conquered the whole world and brought all of its people into submission under the universe’s rightful King. Then the new Jerusalem would come down from the clouds, and the story of humanity would have reached its happy ending long ago.

So why did Jesus go podunk? Why did he grow up in a carpenter’s family? And why in the world did he ride into Jerusalem on a donkey? Somehow I suspect that if I walked up to Jesus and told him how utterly ridiculous it was for the king of the universe to ride a donkey instead of a chariot or at least a decent horse, then he would probably get a gleam in his eye and say, “Exactly!” Because Jesus is the king of ridiculousness. Now I don’t mean ridiculous without a purpose. Jesus’ ridiculousness has a purpose, because it make us do things that are ridiculous too.

Look at this story again. The donkey isn’t the only ridiculous thing in the picture. The Bible says that people took off their cloaks and put them down on the road so that this animal that had been walking in the road all of its life would have a softer place to walk. Now that’s ridiculous! Why in the world would you get your cloak dirty in order to protect an animal’s feet? There’s nothing practical about that. It’s kind of like that crazy woman we talked about a few weeks ago who wasted a year’s wages of expensive perfume by dumping it all over Jesus’ feet just to show her love for him. Ridiculous!

Or what about Zacchaeus? Y’all remember the story about the four foot ten tax collector who Jesus went to lunch with? Well like most tax collectors, Zacchaeus took a little cut for himself on top of the emperor’s money. It was a completely normal part of the economic system that made people groan but nobody tried to do anything about it. Well for some reason Zacchaeus was so moved by the fact that Jesus paid attention to him that he decided to do two very ridiculous things – he gave half of his money to the poor and paid back the people he had cheated four times what he owed them.

Many people did ridiculous things in response to Jesus. His disciples got up and left their jobs when he said come follow me. Crowds of people traveled miles to see him. People who had never walked before were running through the streets carrying their mats and shouting hallelujah. Kids ran up and started climbing on him even though he was a stranger and even though his disciples tried to stop them. You know, I really wish I could have been there to see what it was about his body language and the laughter in his eyes and the commanding but gentle tone in his voice that made the people in that street know that this was their Messiah.

He wasn’t a Greek philosopher babbling strange mysteries to a handful of intellectuals who had read all the prerequisites and taken all the right classes. He wasn’t a Roman emperor looking down from some tall chariot to all the masses, separated by legions of soldiers armed to the teeth. But somehow this carpenter’s son from Nazareth riding on the lowliest of mountable creatures was the Word of God made flesh and dwelling among us. And this beautifully ridiculous reality moved a whole mob of people to want to do something, anything to show him honor. They didn’t have any money but they did have the cloaks on their backs. So they put them on the ground, thinking what an honor to wear home a muddy footprint that the Messiah’s donkey put there. Ridiculous!

But there’s something beautiful about this kind of ridiculousness. If we allow ourselves to be infected by the spirit of this donkey-riding king, it’s more contagious than democracy in the Middle East. We become people who engage in random acts of kindness and pointlessly extravagant gestures of hospitality, even if they don’t make a dent in the national debt, even if we don’t get enough bang for our buck, even if it doesn’t help us win any arguments, even if all that we accomplish is to make a donkey’s toes a little less calloused and all that we get back is a dirty cloak to add to the laundry pile.

But when we let this donkey-rider be our king, we become the opposite of cynical, a basic change of heart that’s more important than having the answers to all the world’s problems. God can’t use us very well when we hide behind our practicality but he can use people who aren’t afraid to look ridiculous! So what about you? Are you willing to be ridiculous? Are you willing to treat people with ridiculous kindness especially when they’re being ugly? Are you willing to throw down the cloak off your back and make the ground a little softer for someone else to walk on? Well then be ridiculous! And maybe our savior’s donkey will put his footprint on your heart.

Three forms of justification by faith

I want to hypothesize that the basis for the opposing perspectives in the “Rob Bell debate” that has swept through evangelical Christianity lies in different understandings of the doctrine of justification by faith. The concept of justification by faith is developed throughout the Pauline epistles. The following two passages seem to capture it the best:

Romans 5:1-2
Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand.

Ephesians 2:8-9
By grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God–not the result of works, so that no one may boast.

To put in a nutshell, justification by faith means that we cannot earn “peace with God” through our efforts. Whatever the “faith” is that saves us, it is the “gift of God” rather than “the result of works.” But how can you believe something without making an effort to believe it? It would seem that there’s inherently an effort involved in having faith at least if it means making a decision of some sort. The different resolutions to this puzzle are the three major strands of evangelical Christian thought.

1) SINCERE PERSONAL DECISION-ISM
This is a term I would coin to describe the understanding of faith typically offered by Baptists and other proponents of human free will who think that God dishes out heaven and hell in response to whether or not we have made a “sincere personal decision” to follow Jesus. We have faith if we have responded to Christ’s atonement by “deciding” to accept His salvation. The problem with this perspective is that the “personal decision” becomes the work that “earns” salvation, which violates the principle of justification by faith.

2) PREDESTINED FAITH INSTILLED BY GOD
The Calvinist resolution of the puzzle of justification by faith is to say that God predestines our ability to have faith. The reason our faith is not itself a work is because God plants it in those who have been predestined to have it. God decides to damn or bless us based upon a decision God made before the beginning of time. This way of describing God is a stumbling block for many people but it does resolve the problem of justification by faith.

3) LIBERATION FROM SELF-JUSTIFICATION
The Wesleyan approach to this problem is to say that Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross has more to do with persuading us that God loves us than persuading God that He should forgive us for our sins. We are justified by faith because faith in God’s mercy is what liberates us from the prison of self-justification, a state in which we seek in vain to earn God’s approval through our works. So faith is not a work because we’re not proving anything to God with our faith; instead we’re liberated from thinking that we have something to prove to God. As a Wesleyan, I would say that self-justification itself is hell because it inherently creates an irreconcilable separation from God. The purpose of the cross’s atonement is to break us free from self-justification so that we can enter into God’s holy presence without fearing or hating God.

I don’t think that “sincere personal decision-ism” can avoid the heresy of works-righteousness. While Calvinism seems doctrinally orthodox, I worry that it creates an unnecessary stumbling block by making God look like He “unfairly” rewards or punishes us for His own behavior. Though I recognize that God’s mode of existence as Creator is not analogous to ours as creature, I don’t think most people including myself can get our heads around that reality. The other problem I have with both Calvinism and “sincere personal decision-ism” is that they aren’t guarded enough against the real dangers of self-righteousness/self-justification, which is the miserable state of being that I think Christ’s justification saves us from.

The purpose of all doctrine is discipleship. Jesus says that what matters is our fruit. As 2 Timothy 3:16 says, all scripture’s purpose is for “training in righteousness.” Paul also tells Timothy in 2 Tim 2:23 to “have nothing to do with stupid and senseless controversies.” What matters about what we believe about salvation, heaven, hell, etc, is the impact it has on our Christian discipleship. Paul writes that “knowledge puffs up but love builds up.” If our theological debates serve the purpose of puffing ourselves up, then they are of Satan. If they serve the purpose of building the church and helping people get past their stumbling blocks, then they are fruitful.

This doesn’t mean that we jettison all controversial teaching so as to accommodate worldliness. What it does mean is that we shouldn’t be controversial just for the sake of feeling more hard-core in our beliefs than other believers. The time when it’s appropriate to be controversial is when discipleship would be compromised otherwise. That’s all for now.

The Crisis

To some degree, bloggers who want to be “relevant” have to proclaim a “crisis” to justify their relevance. There are tons of books out there that offer up their own great “crises” in contemporary evangelical Christianity and solutions to these “crises.” Usually the solution is something along the lines of “focusing more on Jesus,” which certainly sounds theologically pious to say but also pretty self-evident and platitudinous.

So here’s how I would describe the crisis perhaps in terms that are probably a little too dramatic: we have become exactly what He came to Earth to stop us from being. What I mean is that Christians (or perhaps just the loudmouths among us) have turned into a bunch of self-promoting, ideology-fetishizing Pharisees. Jesus was gentle with almost everybody he met, even scoundrels like Zacchaeus and sinful women who erotically smooched on his feet. The only people Jesus ever raked over the coals were the religious leaders who used doctrinal correctness as leverage for their power plays — a.k.a. the Pharisees.

Is it not the saddest irony that we have become the very same as the people who crucified Jesus for being a heretic? We crucify our own heretics, though it’s not civilized to use Roman nails anymore, so we do it in cyber-vitriol instead. I’m not saying that doctrine is unimportant and that people who are preaching a false gospel should not be challenged, but where is the grace in evangelical Christian discourse? Do we have any interest in trying to understand where people who disagree with us are coming from?

From what I’ve observed, the one thing that gets people into bad theology more than anything is a genuine interest in apologetics, trying to come up with a simple or decontroversialized way of describing Christianity that doesn’t quite do it justice with the purpose of getting past obstacles that keep other people from believing. There are many genuinely thoughtful, compassionate people in our world who have been tragically turned off to Christianity by the sinful self-righteousness of our modern-day Pharisees. I want to reach them myself which means I’m probably going to commit some heresies when I reach too far. There are many compromises that are made with the gospel by people who profess to be staunchly against compromise. The version of the gospel that American evangelicalism has ossified into is a very middle-class-friendly gospel (but that’s a topic for another post).

If you read through the Pauline epistles, time and time again he exhorts the Galatians, the Corinthians, the Romans, and all the others to have mercy on the brother whose faith is weak and not judge him too harshly. When our purpose is scoring points and promoting ourselves, then our strategy for bringing ourselves glory is going to be skewering other Christians who we think are wrong. But if you really think someone else is mistaken and you want to win them to the truth out of your love for them, then you’re going to take a very different rhetorical approach than the scorched-earth “gotcha” method. You’re going to talk in such a way as to win their trust by affirming what they say that’s worth affirming and speaking delicately when addressing what you find problematic.

What interferes with our ability to gently prod people in the right direction when they’re speaking heretically is when we have an agenda of proving ourselves right. I would argue that the more you need to prove yourself right, the more likely you remain outside the saving grace of Christ’s justification because to be justified by Christ’s blood is to be liberated from the prison of self-justification. He died to rescue us from the type of pompous gesturing to which we remain addicted.

What does it mean that we are justified and can stop self-justifying? How we can live into this new reality of freedom? I really feel like the hell that we are saved from is nothing other than our own self-righteousness and the separation it creates between us and God.  We take ourselves out of God’s presence just fine without His help. Self-justification is plenty lake of fire and outer darkness on its own. This is what I took Rob Bell to be saying in his “heretical” new book that one of my fellow pastors was fired for promoting in his blog (hence my anonymity). My only beef with Rob Bell is he makes it sound easy to choose heaven. Without accepting the amnesty of Christ’s blood as proof of God’s love, eternity in communion with our Creator would be utter terror.

So I’m not saying there is no hell. Actually what I’m saying is that hell is very real and many of the most devoted evangelical Christians who are Pharisees no less zealous than Paul was before the Damascus trip continue to persist in hell, clinging to the “filthy rags” that Paul eschewed. They are the ones who Jesus described in Matthew 23: “You lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. For you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in, you stop them… You cross sea and land to make a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice the son of hell  that you are.” Isn’t it eerie how prophetic those verses are?!!!

My goal is to rage against this hell of self-justification and rescue as many of my fellow evangelicals as I can. That’s part of my calling from God. I’m sure that I’ll be called a heretic. I’m sure that I’ll be despised, but that’s why I call myself exouthenemenos.

May God grant you the courage to embrace your freedom!