The captivated heart and captive will

From an interview with Ashley Null (author of Thomas Cranmer's Doctrine of Repentance: Renewing the Power to Love):

According to Cranmer’s anthropology, what the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies. The mind doesn’t direct the will. The mind is actually captive to what the will wants, and the will itself, in turn, is captive to what the heart wants.

The trouble with human nature is that we are born with a heart that loves ourselves over and above everything else in this world, including God. In short, we are born slaves to the lust for self-gratification, i.e., concupiscence. That’s why, if left to ourselves, we will always love those things that make us feel good about ourselves, even as we depart more and more from God and his ways.

Therefore, God must intervene in our lives in order to bring salvation. Working through Scripture, the Holy Spirit first brings a conviction of sin in a believer’s heart, then he births a living faith by which the believer lays hold of the extrinsic righteousness of Christ. Of course, the perfect justifying righteousness by which we are made right with God must be outside of us, for the ongoing presence of sinful concupiscence in our mortal bodies renders it impossible for us ever to be truly holy in this life. Indeed, the glory of God is his love for the unworthy, that although we are sinners, he makes us his own.

Now, in effect, justification gives us a heart transplant. For at the same time that we receive the gift of justifying faith by which we are credited with Christ’s extrinsic righteousness, God also sheds abroad in our hearts a new love for him and one another. This new heart love for him, from him, naturally redirects our wills away from sinful selfishness towards a life lived in thankful obedience to God’s commands. Even though we continue to have to struggle with the pull of concupiscence in our mortal bodies, the the supernatural power of God’s abiding love has fundamentally changed us. (HT Mockingbird)

I'd tweak that as I think the heart/mind/will view of humanity over-simplifies how we work (anyone know the origins?), but if you're going to use those categories then I do think that this is the best way to relate them. I have a post brewing centred on this theme waiting till after tomorrows exam!

Which 'I' are you talking about?

Listening to: The NA Band: Looked Upon

After my last post on a radical anthropology, you may be wondering what that looks like in practice. An anecdote from Gerhard Forde may help (from my vague memory).

Forde was approached by a young man who had read his book Free to Be. The young man was a bit shocked by the unconditional forgiveness he had read about and asked "does this mean I can do whatever I want?"

Forde answered, "which 'I' are you talking about?"

As Christians we are free to do whatever the new 'I', "created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness" and "led by the Spirit", desires.

The old 'I' is under the law and so it is not free to do what it desires. But actually it never has been, and never can be, because it has always been enslaved to Sin, the Devil, other people, etc. Even if we think the old 'I' was free we are just being blind to how other people's opinions, self-love, sexual desires, etc have always controlled us.

The law (climaxing in Jesus as example) was a postcard of the Lake District sent to captives so that they could see that they had been living in a concentration camp all their life. The Gospel (climaxing in Jesus as Christ our Saviour) is Jesus Christ throwing open the gates.

The need for a clean break anthropology

The radical gospel of justification by faith alone simply does not fit, cannot be accepted by, and will not work with an anthropology which sees the human being as a continuously existing subject... The radical gospel is the end of that being and the beginning of a new being in faith and hope...

Virtually all the failures and shortcomings of Lutheranism [and any other Christian teaching] can be seen in the hesitancy to proclaim the gospel in uncompromising, unconditional fashion, to proclaim as though we were about the business of summoning the dead to life, calling new beings into existence. Most generally, it seems, the gospel is preached as though it were a repair job on old beings, a 'new patch on an old garment.' It is preached to old beings instead of for new beings.

(Gerhard Forde, "Radical Lutheranism", LQ Vol I (1987))

Calvin and Luther's anthropology of the Christian

Some interesting selections from Mark Seifrid's article "Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth: An Introduction to the Distinction between Law and Gospel" that relate to discussions among some blogs about whether we are simul iustus et peccator (e.g. here and here). I've collected some links to Mark Seifrid articles here.

In such passages as Gal 5:17-26, "flesh" and "Spirit" do not appear there as capacities or qualities of a unified human person, but two different descriptions of the whole person. The old, fallen human being in Adam exists along with the new creation that God has made us to be in Jesus Christ. We must hasten to add that the relationship between the two is unequal. Our sinful self, which is incapable of faith and obedience to God, has been crucified with Christ (see, e.g., Gal 5:24-26; Rom 8:7-8). Although our fallen person, "the flesh," remains present until the end of our earthly life (Rom 7:24), that fallen existence is present now only as a conquered reality. [...]

The Christian life consists in our "putting to death" our former self [i.e. us as "sinner"] by our new self [i.e. us as "saint"], present in the Spirit who dwells in us (Rom 8:12-14; Gal 5:16-17).

As is the case with Scripture and our understanding of God, so it is with us for Luther: the unity of our person lies outside of us in Jesus Christ. We grasp it now by faith, but it is only in the resurrection that it shall become visible. Calvin regards regeneration to effect a new state within the human being, which is partially present and active. The "flesh" likewise is present as a power that exerts partial influence on us. [...] Luther, as we have seen, finds a radically different anthropology in Scripture. The old, fallen creature exists as a whole alongside the new creature, who is likewise a whole.