Reluctant Leaders and Wounded Healers - Part II
I should declare my hand. I consider the Bible, New and Old Testaments, to be the word of God.
I used to doubt its historical accuracy, had a problem with the miraculous, and thought, even if the person of Jesus had lived, his disciples had a vested interest in inventing the resurrection. But someone asked me how I came to believe in gravity and other scientific theories and whether I had inspected the evidence for my theories about the bible with as much rigour. One thing led to another, and my previous views were turned upside down.
I believe it’s historically accurate and is more than a collection of outdated ancient literature. But, if it is the word of God, its relevance for any age is beyond doubt. The debate about the bible is for another time! But I thought I ought to come clean before you decide to read on!
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The bible is a record of how heaven and earth are not disconnected and how God who created the world is in the world, not a distant irrelevance but very close…and how He will not conform to our image of how God should act. For example, God seems to select the wrong types of individuals for leadership again and again…and yet it works.
Moses, the murderer, hiding in the desert, is chosen to lead the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land – and he succeeds. St Paul, the persecutor of the church, who had ‘made havoc of the church, dragging off men and women, committing them to prison’ Acts 8v3 becomes the apostle appointed by God to bring the gospel to the gentile world.
God, it seems, often chooses the reluctant and the wounded to lead and heal. None of us is excluded or written off by God.
Welcome to Part II: A theological starter & mains before returning to reluctant leaders and wounded healers for pudding.
The Menu:
Starters: The inclusive death of Christ.
Main: Divinisation – the Eastern Orthodox doctrine.
Pud - Name changing (saved for Part III)
Starters:
Evangelicals, Pentecostals, and Charismatics have written some stirring and fantastic hymns, over the past 400 years which reflect their faith in what has been known as substitutionary atonement: ‘And Can it be’ being one of my favourite Charles Wesley hymns! Putting it (very) simply, when Jesus died on the cross, He took our sins and died for us, in our place, taking the punishment we deserved so that we could be forgiven and restored to God. Religion, the attempt to please God by obeying commandments, is replaced by a relationship with God, restored through Christ.
But can anyone show me a hymn or a song that celebrates the inclusive death of Christ? That, when Jesus died on the cross, He took ‘us’, not just our sins, with Him on the cross. To quote just one verse: ‘I have been crucified with Christ, it’s no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. The life I now live I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me’ Gal 2v20
They’re coming! The hymns and the songs are coming. When the revelation of the substitutionary and inclusive nature of the cross, artists, playwrights, songwriters, poets, authors, preachers, will not be able to keep silent.
Mains: Eastern Orthodox doctrine of ‘divinisation’ or ‘theosis’
Evangelical believers, and Roman Catholics, will quite readily subscribe to the view that Jesus was 100% human and 100% divine.
Christianity is not a religion of self-improvement but the creation of a new race
But the problem with limiting our understanding of the cross to be a substitutionary sacrifice, is that the ‘sinner’ remains a sinner albeit wonderfully forgiven and free from condemnation. A common phrase heard amongst those who believe in substitutionary atonement is ‘I’m a sinner saved by grace’. The future, then, becomes one of ‘sanctification’; a process whereby through the power of the Spirit, the sinner is made progressively more like Christ.
But this is not New Testament teaching. This is polishing a turd.
Christ did not die so that we could be rehabilitated, but so we could be crucified with him.
Christianity is not a religion of self-improvement but the creation of a new race, Jesus being the forerunner, the first.
To quote C. S. Lewis: ‘I have called Christ the ‘first instance’ of the new man. But of course, He is not merely a new man, one specimen of the (new) species, but the new man. He is the origin and centre and life of all the new men…other men become ‘new’ by being ‘in Him’…to become new men means losing what we now call ‘ourselves’. Out of ourselves, into Christ, we must go…millions and millions of ‘little Christs’, all different, will still be too few to express Him fully. He made them all. He invented – as an author invents characters in a novel – all the different men that you and I were intended to be.’ C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Collins.
This is consistent with the Eastern Orthodox doctrine of ‘divinisation’ or ‘theosis’ which views a Christian as a man, but a man saturated with the life of God, a union of the human and the divine. Not that the one human person, man or woman, has become God but that he or she is, as C.S. Lewis stated is ‘in Christ’.
As Peter wrote we become ‘partakers of the divine nature’ 2 Peter 1 v 4.
Life, looking forward, is not to be seen in terms of sanctification, as if sanctification means transforming the ‘sinner’ into a ‘saint’, but, L-plates on, learning to live as a person who is now ‘in Christ’ as a ‘mini-Christ’, as a ‘Christ as me’ person in the world. If that seems strange, consider the human body: every cell in my body is alive. But with who’s life? John Stevens is quite unaware (no comments!) of what each cell is doing, acting seemingly independent of me, but this is an illusion. The life of each cell is the life of John Stevens. It doesn’t have any other life.
It is the same for us ‘in Christ’. It’s not that ‘Christ in me’ means that it’s 5% Christ and 95% of Jesus, or some other ratio, somehow ‘inside’ me, as if we are two people vying for one body! The truth is that, as St Paul put it, ‘It’s no longer I who live but Christ’ Gal 2v20 and ‘Christ our life’ Col 3 v 4.
That gives us something to chew on, to digest, to come to terms with. And if you’re anything like me, struggle to believe when the evidence is…rather thin at times!
Time for pudding.
Pud: Part III, Name changing
There’s always room for pudding…first, a short break.