Gerhard Forde on Sanctification

This article from Gerhard Forde on sanctification is typically radical, frustrating and astonishing. In it he argues that sanctification is "simply the art of getting used to justification".

Then he asks "how then can we talk about the progress... from sin to righteousness, old to new?" He explains that there are "two aspects of this transition":

[1] The first is that since we always are confronted and given grace as a totality, we find ourselves always starting fresh. As Luther put it, "To progress is always to begin again." In this life, we never quite get over grace, we never entirely grasp it, we never really learn it. It always takes us by surprise. Again and again we have to be conquered and captivated by its totality....the transition is therefore not a continuous or steady progress of the sort we could recognize. It is rather more like an oscillation between beginning and end in which both are always equally near. The end, the total gift, is constantly and steadily given. But to grasp that we have constantly to begin "again" we never can get over it! It is like lovers who just can't get over the miracle of the gift of love and so are constantly saying it over and over again as though it were completely new and previously unheard of! And so it constantly begins again...

[2] The second aspect of the transition of the Christian from old to death to life, is that all our ordinary views of progress and growth are turned upside down. It is not that we are somehow moving toward the goal, but rather that the goal is moving closer and closer to us. This corresponds to the eschatological nature of the New Testament message. It is the coming of the kingdom upon us, not our coming closer to or building up the kingdom.... Being freed from sin by the unconditional promise means that the totality of it begins to overwhelm and destroy our fundamental scepticism and incredulity, our unbelief. Lord, "I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief?" becomes our prayer (Mk 9:24). We can see light at the end of the tunnel. We begin to trust God rather than ourselves. When Martin Luther talked about these things, he began to talk more about our actual affections than lists of pious things to do.

Under the pressure of the total gift, we might actually begin to love God as God, our God, and to hate sin. Think of it: We might actually begin to dislike sin and to hope for its eventual removal. Ordinarily we feel guilty about our sins and fear their consequences, but we are far from hating them. I expect we do them, in spite of all fears and anxieties, because we like them. Sanctification under the invasion of the new, however, holds out the possibility of actually coming to hate sin, and to love God and his creation, or at least to make that little beginning. It is not that sin is taken away from us, but rather that we are to be taken away from "sin" heart, soul and mind, as Luther put it.

He then explains that to the observer sanctification will look like "spontaneity, taking care, vocation and attaining a certain elusive kind of truthfulness and lucidity about oneself":

[1. Spontaneity] free, uncalculating, genuine, spontaneous. It would be like a mother who runs to pick up her child when it is hurt. There is no calculation, no wondering about progress, morality or virtue. There is just the doing of it, and then it is completely forgotten. The right hand doesn't know what the left is doing. Good works in God‟s eyes are quite likely to be all those things we have forgotten!

[2. Taking care] If we are turned around to get back down to earth by grace, then it would seem that true sanctification would show itself in taking care of our neighbor and God's creation, not exploiting and destroying either for our own ends, religious or otherwise.

[3. Vocation] carrying out one's vocation as a Christian in the tasks and occupations of daily life. We always get nervous about what we are to do, it seems. The magnificent hot-air balloon syndrome seduces us into thinking our sanctification consists in following lists of pious dos and don'ts. That always seems more holy. But it is in the nitty-gritty of daily life and its tasks that our sanctification is hammered out.

[4. Truthfulness and Lucidity] we are not to think of ourselves more highly than we ought (Romans 12:3)...

The talk of progress and growth we usually indulge in leads us all too often to do just that. But if we are saved and sanctified only by the unconditional grace of God, we ought to be able to become more truthful and lucid about the way things really are with us....The grace of God should lead us to see the truth about ourselves, and to gain a certain lucidity, a certain sense of humor, a certain down-to-earthliness.

God against God

Bobby Grow comments:

A doctrine of salvation that pits God’s justice against God’s love and mercy — what Karl Barth called a theology of "God against God" — is bad theology. This posits a rift in God's being and preaches a God that is inauthentic to the "good news" of Holy Scripture. This is not to deny that wrath and judgment are vital aspects of Christian soteriology. But we have to make sure that (in Barth’s words, again) we are not proclaiming that the No of God is the first word or the last word to men and women.

This is really at the heart of what I read as many Lutheran critiques of Barth. Many Lutherans seem to see in Barth a denial that we are always in relationship to God, even before the preached word. This is a relationship with what Forde calls the God-not-preached, or the hidden God. The God-not-preached is the same loving Creator God, but his primary word to a sinful world is "No". The God-preached however is the God of the Gospel who says "Yes" to us.

I'm not 100% convinced by either Barth or Forde but it is KEY that the God-not-preached, is NOT the God we should be preaching. On this both Barth and Forde agree, although Forde recognises the importance of acknowledging the experience of the God-not-preached.

But experientially, I do appreciate what Forde (and other Lutherans in the same line) has to say, even if it causes me more headaches:

From Luther's perspective, the question about whether we in our Angechtungen wrestle with God, and do not solely experience God as gracious, is quite plausible. Believers and non-believers deal with this hidden God in their various life experiences, precisely in their attempts to master the world and their fate. It is the role of the gospel to turn us to the "preached God," who through Jesus Christ as sacramentum gives us assurance with regard to God's disposition toward us. The person of faith holds this "hidden God" accountable to the promise, even appealing to God against God!

(p. 40, Mark C. Mattes, The role of justification in contemporary theology)

This post is a bit of a 'first thoughts' post. It is really a marker for future discussion. If I ever get time to read some proper theology again, I would like it to be Barth and Lutherans on just this topic.

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))

Christological titles and stories

Listening to: Balmorhea: Constellations

Prompted, but not in response to, Chris's blog (go read it). This post is largely a riff on Gerhard Forde's argument in pp.62-67 of Theology is for Proclamation, which is where the quotes are from unless otherwise stated. I haven't really thought it all through so please pick holes.

Jesus' question in Mark 8 "Who do you say that I am?" is a question that Jesus cannot answer directly. "Traditionally", Forde says, "titles cannot be self-designations" (cf. John 8:54: "If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing"). Therefore Jesus only makes "an implied christological claim", and "does not speak of himself openly and directly".

Instead he puts others "on the spot to speak for" themselves. As soon as we start to talk about Jesus we find that the question of what title to give him is "inevitable". "We are called upon [like Peter was] to make explicit what was implicit in him".

There are two inter-related dangers in this:

The first danger is that we rewrite the story to fit what the title means in our culture.

Every new title brings with it its own world of meaning, its own story. Inevitably pressure is exerted in countless subtle ways to rewrite the story to fit the title [...] Perhaps that is why the Jesus of the Gospels either refuses the titles or wants them kept secret. The story is not yet over and all the fine titles press toward a different end.

To avoid this danger "the title must be transformed to fit the [true] story." I.e. language, and the culture expressed in language, must be 'redeemed'. But Jesus will ensure that this happens. In his church it will happen in part now and universally it will happen in the future when "every tongue confess[es] that Jesus Christ is Lord".

Most evangelicals today think that content is all that matters and that the form and mediums we use to express it (e.g. the style of music, venues, the language we use) are insignificant. Jamie Smith, sees this as naive and criticises evangelicalism for:

unwittingly reducing Jesus to one more commodity precisely because, in the name of "relevance," they've adopted a worship "style" that simply mimics the mall. Since ... the form/content distinction is specious, you can't simply take Gospel "content" and drop it into the "form" of the mall's worship because that form is already loaded and primed to another end or telos. This doesn't make the the church relevant; it reduces Jesus to a commodity.

However, this wise caution about Jesus being co-opted to serve another end can go to an extreme which is a lack of confidence in the power of the Word to transform what seems unredeemable by the Holy Spirit. Luther and Melanchthon in the 16th century would justify themselves before more radical reformers for being slow to reform the liturgies of the church because they were confident that as long as the Gospel was preached it had power enough to transform everything else. It has the power, and God's promise, to burst out of any constraints placed upon it.

We should find a middle road of confidence but not complacency that is realistic about both the power of the Devil and the power of God over our language and liturgies.

The second danger is that we rewrite the story to fit what we, personally, would like the title to mean.

The hearer, it should be realized, has a stake in the giving of titles. The title represents dreams and hopes: the final ratification of our aspirations; a judge who will finally give evildoers their comeuppance; a Messiah, a Christ who will finally do in all the enemies; a Son of God who will be a universal ruler; a liberator; a man for others; one in whom God-conciousness reaches its zenith [...] We would like nothing better than that all our dreams, without alteration, should be realized in him.

To avoid this danger we must be changed by the title. With Jesus' question "who do you say I am?" we are "drawn into the story" and either it is fitted to us or we are moulded by it. Our dreams and our loves have to be reshaped by the story of Jesus, so that we long to see God face-to-face, we hate evil and love communion with God and his church.

This need for change of the culture and ourselves (not that you can separate the two) cannot be avoided because Jesus will be king, and not let titles rule him. It is also a radical change of death and new-birth. That is why Jesus follows Peter's confession and rebuke with the statement that "if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me."

We have to reach the "end of our story". We are drawn into Jesus' story by the confession, and if we cannot shape it around ourselves then we will be shaped by Jesus' story of death and resurrection.

Everything in Christ poured into this moment by his Spirit

Listening to: Radiohead: The Bends

The deed of proclamation in the living present is the deed of the living God! It is what God has in mind for us. The mighty acts of God are not over, not relegated to the past ...Everything that God has done in Jesus Christ has been poured into this moment. The incarnation, death, and resurrection of the Son of God in Jesus is the authorization for the proclamation of the will of God in the living present. The preacher needs the "nerve" - the Spirit - to act on that...

The preacher acts on the presupposition that only the present-tense, here-and-now deed of God, the proclamation itself, can be the solution to the problem of God. The proclamation is the end result, the culmination, of the great acts of God in history. The preacher ought to have the consciousness of standing in that place knowing that the Word and sacrament are themselves the end (telos), the purpose of it all. The concrete moment of the proclamation is the doing of the mighty act of God in the living present.

(pp. 30-35, Gerhard Forde, Theology is for Proclamation)

I'd qualify whether the Word and sacrament are "the end", otherwise we are over-realizing our eschatology. We must not forget that the glory is still hidden with Christ in God until the he is revealed in power and we are revealed as sons in our bodily resurrection.

I love that phrase: "Everything that God has done in Jesus Christ has been poured into this moment". Perfect! But don't you want to add something? That poured into our hearts by hearing through our ears and consuming by the mouth, the Spirit of Christ is bursting to be revealed - to transform us from the inside out in holy lives in the present and glorify our bodies when Christ comes again so that the whole world gives God the glory.

Systematic theology

"I take systematic theology, therefore, to be the kind of reflection that takes place between yesterday's and today's proclamation. One who hears the proclamation reflects on it so as to say it again in a different time and context. It is a reflection that takes place between the ear and the mouth." (p.4, Gerhard Forde, Theology is for Proclamation)

If that is the case then good systematic theology will be:

1. Listening to the Bible obediently and attentively.
2. "not only [leaving] room for proclamation but [making] the move inescapable" (p.5)

A sprinkling of MP3s

In some neglected corners of the web I've found a few unique talks that others may be interested in:

1. Speaking To, Of, and For the Triune God by Robert Jenson (at the 2010 Lutheran CORE Theological Conference)
2. God's Decision and Our Decision by Gerhard Forde (at Mount Carmel Ministries)

"Misery loves company" v the active God

There have been some ugly responses from Christian's to the disaster in Haiti. There have also been some pretty weak ones. Neither are likely to be much comfort to the sufferers, or convincing to those observers hearing them on the news. Gerhard O. Forde characterises the weak responses we hear most in the UK:

God is supposed to be more attractive to us because he identifies with us in our pain and suffering. "Misery loves company" becomes the unspoken motif of such theology. (p. viii, On Being a Theologian of the Cross)

As Forde points out, the reason this is so unhelpful is that Jesus is seen to be utterly passive in this theology. We follow our leader, and those who see Jesus in this way are similarly passive in their response to suffering. They have nothing to say; although they may offer to pray, they don't seem to expect God to actually do anything as a result.

The story of the Bible, from Creation to New Creation, has something much more powerful to say. It warns us that suffering is God's judgment on humanity's sin - although that does not mean that particular events are caused by particular sins of particular people. But joyfully it also tells us that God hates suffering and, because he is not passive in his hating, has gone to war against it to destroy it completely for all who share in the New Creation life of Jesus Christ.

The classic question "if God is both able and willing to prevent evil, why is there evil?" may be unanswerable from our perspective; or at least answerable only partially. But that doesn't mean the church has nothing to say. It can say that is that God is not passively waiting to be examined but has acted, is acting and will act to save his people.

Why did we start trying to excuse God?

Gerhard Forde wonders why "there were so few attempts to construct theodicies prior to the 18th century". He quotes Hannah Arendt as offering an answer: "When men could no longer praise, they turned their greatest conceptual efforts to justifying God and His Creation in theodicies" (pp.84-85, On Being a Theologian of the Cross).

I had a 20min conversation with a colleague at work today about why he wasn't a Christian. It was annoying because I had to cut it short because after 20min of just chatting it was about time we got back to some work. But it was also annoying because I did a really rubbish job of giving a reason for my hope... One of the many problems I see looking back on it was I failed to really praise God with what I said.

Lets pray God uses the foolish and sinful.

The law came in to increase the trespass

The law is not a remedy for sin. It does not cure sin but rather makes it worse. St. Paul says it was given to make sin apparent, indeed, even to increase it. It doesn't do that necessarily by increasing immortality, although that can happen when rebellion or the power of suggestion leads us to do just what the law is against. But what the theologian of the cross sees clearly from the start,is that, more perversely, the law multiplies sin precisely through our morality, our misuse of the law and our success at it. It becomes a defence against the gift.

(italics original (bold by me), p.27, Gerhard O. Forde, On Being a Theologian of the Cross: Reflections on Luther's Heidelberg Disputation, 1518)

So the law does not increase sin by making us more like younger brothers, but like older brothers which is worse.

I can't believe that this thought is new to me. It is one of those occasions where I wonder whether after all my reading I'm still yet to really get Luther's main points.

But does it make sense of Romans 7 to see sin increased by:

(a) increasing immortality; or

(b) through our morality as a defence against the gift?

I'm not sure. But I think the fact that it is the sin's deceit that Paul draws attention to (v.7) may support Luther and Forde.