I've haven't been posting much because of the particular season of life I'm in, I'll spare you the details. I hope to get back to Vos's Heavenly Mindedness soon.
Here is a note I sent a friend this morning, a follow up to a phone chat we had recently. Maybe there is something here for you.
Dear Friend,
I’ve been thinking a bit about Paul
and the circumcision of the flesh since our recent chat. It was interesting to
me that you brought the subject up because for a few months I’ve been thinking
the unthinkable, that the therapeutic has so captured us (the Church) that we can
no longer think in Biblical terms regarding our transformation into the image
of Christ, of discipleship.
Passages such as 1 Cor. 2:1 – 3:4
are incomprehensible to us, the nuances and shades of language used make no
sense to a people who look to the therapeutic for their healing. Nor to a
people who are convinced that they will always have the prime identity as
sinners until they leave this life.
Haddon Robinson used to say that the
question for a guest speaker isn’t, “What do you want me to speak on?” But
rather, “Tell my about my audience.”
If Paul and company wrote to saints
– in both the devoted (holocaust) offering sense and the righteousness of
Christ sense (Romans 12:1-2, 2 Cor. 5:21), then perhaps we are missing
something if our words and message are not also directed to saints. John wanted
his readers to know that they had eternal life, not that they were miserable
worms destined to life in the earth.
I am so tired of hearing therapeutic
and sociological responses to Biblical questions of obedience and calling and
mission; as well as hearing the toxic refrain, “Well, we’re all just sinners.”
My goodness, I fail to see that in Christ’s words to the Seven Churches; I fail
to see that in the matrix of the Epistles, or of the Gospels. I fail to see
that in the Book addressed to the Covenant People of God from Genesis to Revelation.
Transformation into the image of
the Firstborn (Romans 8:29) is much less about “sin” than it is about being
transformed from the earthly to the heavenly – from the carnal to the spiritual,
from the natural to the supernatural. It is about Galatians 2:20 and John 15. We
owe the sarx nothing (Romans 8), we are now the sons and daughters of the
Living God.
But we have been robbed of Biblical
thinking, taken captive by the therapeutic and by a mindset that refuses to
glorify Christ by embracing the fulness of His work in His People...this is a
tragedy. Little wonder the NT book of Hebrews is a mystery to most of us.
We insist on remaining Jacob when our
Lord Jesus calls us Israel.
So how can we engage in the kind of
thinking we see in 1Cor. Chapters 1 – 3? Philippians 3:1 ff? How can we speak
about Col. 2:9 – 13? Galatians 2:20; 6:14?
I don’t know the answer to this.
Perhaps one of many reasons I am
refreshed by the Patristics is that they usually operate in a broad and transcendent
Biblical universe, with Christ as the center they navigate the heavens and
bring the heavens to earth, lifting the earth up to the heavens. Even when they
stub their toes you can see their souls, their hearts, on pilgrimage into the
eternal…desiring to take others with them, equipping others in Christ…serving
the Church, the Bride, the Temple. In the midst of social, political, and religious
upheaval they strive to fix their eyes…and the eyes of their people…on Jesus.
If we still had the language and
understanding of the sarx, the carnal; of “living just like men,” perhaps we
could better work through some of the chaos around us, but we don’t, we’ve lost
it. “Teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you,” has become I’m not
sure what…therapy? A surrender to the false identity of still being sinners
even though we are now in Christ? A return to the Old Covenant with its endless
reminders of sin (as we see in the Epistle to the Hebrews)?
Lamentations 4:1 – 2.
Much love,
Bob
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