This is a continuation, really, of my previous post, only now I’m gonna name names–well, at least terms. “Sin” is a big and important word in Christian circles.  Not hard to find well-respected preachers and churches tell you that one of the problems in the Church in America today is that we don’t want to tell people about their sin.  Side note: my pastor in law school had a running joke with his wife because of the emphasis placed on preaching about sin in his seminary days.  He would ask her, “Guess what I’m preaching on today.”  “Sin” was always the answer (though thankfully not the reality for this pastor).

The thought is, folks can’t see the good news for what it is if they don’t know the bad news of their sin (and “sin” is usually said with a serious, condemning tone).

I think it would be neat to do a word-association sometime to see exactly what people (Christians and non) think of when they hear the word “sin.”  Something tells me that current connotations go well beyond the biblical concept.  The word that gets translated as “sin” in the scriptures means literally “to miss (or fall short of) the target.” The Greek term used in the NT, for instance, hamartia, is actually an archery term.  I could be crazy, but I’m guessing that the term “sin” in America carries a little more baggage than “missing the mark”, unless archers in the first century were vilified, ostracized and felt condemned for “sinning.”  I really don’t think modern connotations are even remotely about that archery picture.   Here’s the rub, and the point of this post:

Despite the biblical concept, many evangelicals will be uneasy if I only use the definition of hamartia instead of the term “sin” when I’m teaching.

Think about that for a minute.  All kinds of harsh connotations have been built around the biblical meaning for “hamartia” and now we feel uneasy if we don’t make those connotations part of our teaching.  (Ironically, this is what the Reformation was about in significant part, only about different terms like “repentance” that was being translated as “do penance.”)  We’ve gotten to the place now in Christian circles where someone can use a phrase like “shortcomings,” as in the twelve steps, and Christians won’t recognize it as the same as the biblical concept of sin because they’ve been taught the cultural baggage as if it was a part of the biblical definition itself.  Or we’ve gotten to the place where we think there’s something magical about calling an act a “sin” for purposes of confession or salvation.  Like a magic incantation, you’ve got to get the words just right for it to work.  “They may admit their shortcomings, but they still need to confess them as sin!”

Let’s worship in spirit and in truth folks.  Let’s drop the religious linguistic games.  They are an embarrassment, a form of religious pride, and a stumbling block we needlessly place in front of outsiders and little ones, between them and Jesus and authentic community.  They are a hindrance to the healing that comes through transparency.  Don’t make people take on more baggage (and learn how to give it) in religious forms because it’s what we’re used to.  You want to see this work in practice in the spirit but not the letter?  Go to a 12-step meeting.  You may be there for months and never hear the word “sin” but you’ll see honest confession of it and the healing that can bring, often on a scale that is so far out of the norm as to be shocking.  You’ll even see Jesus at work in beautiful ways, often anonymously.  In a nutshell, you’ll see a group that puts the Church’s understanding of “hamartia” and the blessings of confessing our shortcomings to others to shame, because we want, too often, to focus on the right terms, while they are busy dealing with the substance among those in the world most broken and in imminent danger by their own shortcomings.

Here’s a great quote from Dave Black (HT, Alan Knox) about using the most accessible language possible when teaching the Bible.

In the course of teaching Greek (both classical and Koine) the past 34 years I’ve found that translating Greek into English is a very different enterprise from understanding what the text means. A translation may at times sound very erudite, but to be relevant and beneficial the text must be understood — and then applied. One of my greatest challenges as a teacher has been to get my students to see the need to give up theological jargon when translating from Greek into English. If we can use simpler and clearer words to express the truths of Scripture, then by all means let’s do so. Why, for example, should we render Rom. 12:11 “distribute to the needs of the saints” when “share what you have with God’s people who are in need” will do the job and is much clearer? Or why should we insist that the purpose of pastor-teachers is “to equip the saints for the work of the ministry” when we can say “to prepare God’s people for works of service”? If all we do is parrot the standard English versions while translating from English to Greek, I’m afraid we’ll end up with nothing but another secret religious society. If insisting on the use of theological jargon actually helped people to become more obedient to the Word of God, I’d say do it at all costs. But is there any evidence that it does?

To admit this inadequacy honestly can be very intimidating to the teacher. It means, in fact, that we can no longer be content to offer courses in Greek exegesis that fail to include serious self-examination.

We lose meaning and truth and community when we take a universally understood concept like “service” and consistently prefer to translate it as “ministry” when the concept shows up in the scriptures.  Stop it!  I still remember when I quoted Jesus to a law school buddy like this “Father, forgive them, cause they don’t know what they’re doing.”  He had heard that comment from Jesus many, many times (in the yoda-speak version–who talks like that?!?), but he said he had never really heard what Jesus was saying until I said it like that.  Think about that folks.  Why had this man who had attended so many services and heard that text quoted never “heard” it?  How many other messages have we failed to deliver, I wonder?  And this wasn’t a listener issue, as if he lacked ears that wanted to hear Jesus.  It was because in church, we’re proud of our mastery of Christian-ese and we revere the yoda-speak of so many translations like a badge of honor.  It’s not.  It’s a reason for shame.  Building or maintaining barriers to God’s message that aren’t necessary, or saying his message in ways that only insiders can understand when we don’t have to is nothing to be proud of.  It’s trying to mark our churches off as ’separate’ and more mature, more reverent, more godly by our religious sounding language.  It’s going the way of the Pharisee.

Scot McKnight has started a discussion over an extremely important topic: doubts (for people of “faith”).  He is highlighting what may be the best book I’ve seen for Christians in the middle of serious doubts, and he’s asking for stories and experiences.  Drop in at Scot’s blog an join the discussion.  Below is my comment as well as comments from Scot and David Opderbeck that really surprised and encouraged me; we need to talk about this more in our churches:

My most serious doubts were about my own salvation and along the Calvinist-Arminian fault lines. There was never a doubt about whether God was real, just whether I was “in” or “out” with him. Growing up in evangelical/fundamentalist churches and schools, that was THE question, and it remained the question for me for years even after I finally gave in to Jesus in a serious way. I knew I was “saved by faith alone” so what happened if I doubted my salvation? It was like having doubt in a faith-healing except the healing was my justification. It was a downward spiral of doubt and depression. Those passages in Hebrews about never entering God’s rest because of unbelief and others couldn’t have been more intense.

No amount of theologizing helped or could have helped. As a lawyer in training, I saw holes in every would-be propositional solution. Here’s what helped, in no particular order: I found solace in the Psalms, where people were “officially” praying what I was feeling and fearing. And I made the decision that even if I was damned/not elect and such a decision “does not depend on [my] desire or effort”, I still had to follow Jesus as best I could, mainly for my wife’s sake (my thought was for helping her and treating her as she should be treated). So basically, I eventually just accepted that I couldn’t do anything about it and gave the issue of my justification over to Jesus (the judge) while I read the Psalms and went to church (thankfully not an argumentative one). I accepted that I may be damned unless he said otherwise, which I may not know about in this life if at all. Over time, my thinking changed and the locus of my “faith” and hope slowly shifted from the salvation formula (which seemed to hinge on my faith) to Jesus as a person and on his love (a theme from the Psalms). Things got better. Much, much better.

Scot:

. . . not unlike my own experience in my college years and early seminary years. Shifting from “am I in?” and “do I have that saving faith or is my faith a self-deceptive fraud?” to “Look to Christ” led me out of that morass and spiral, during which time I learned deeply in theology, into a second naivete.

David:

I can totally, totally relate to your story. Isn’t it interesting that the end result of the kind of struggle you describe often is a kind of resignation: “it is all in Christ’s hands and there is nothing more I can do about it.” We realize then that this ultimately is “faith,” and all the formulas and formulations often are ways in which we try to control things ourselves.

Michael Gorman, while giving a taste of his coming review of Douglas Campbell’s new and important work on Paul’s message, The Deliverance of God, gives this comment and quote:

“[Campbell] rightly insists that the material content of Romans 5-8, transformation or sanctification or “ontological reconstitution” (e.g., p. 185), is not supplemental to the gospel or to justification but constitutive of them:

Paul’s account of sanctification is his gospel. His description of deliverance and cleansing “in Christ,” through the work of the Spirit, at the behest of the Father, the entire process being symbolized by baptism, is the good news. It requires no supplementation by other [e.g., “contractual”] systems. (p. 934; cf. pp. 187-88)

To which I gave this comment:

I’m encouraged by the bits and pieces of Campbell’s work that you and others are highlighting. When I’m explaining the gospel to people now, I tend to start with a description that “the good news” is about all the good that God is doing and wants to do for the world through Jesus. Everything he’s done, is doing and has in mind to do is good news (which is what the entire NT seems to be about). We are called to trust this good news, and get on board. I see a recovery of this “big gospel” in the quotes from Campbell’s book, and it encourages me to keep opening myself to that good news and keep living and giving it.

Once again, Michael Gorman makes a necessary, yet rarely made point; one that deserves more thought than it generally receives.

The church is not tied to any nation-state. It is made up of people from all nations and tongues, and it supercedes our national loyalties and identities. It does not love one nation more than another.  Yes, may God bless America . . . and Guam, and Russia, and Iran, and Japan . . .

Scot McKnight asks this question in his second post discussing Greg Boyd’s new book, The Myth of a Christian Religion: Losing Your Religion for the Beauty of a Revolution:

How central to the gospel and to the Christian faith is following Jesus? Is a Christian someone who follows Jesus? Or, would you define “Christian” in another way? How would you define it?

Go by Scot’s blog to read and comment on those and some other great questions posed by Scot about Boyd’s book. Here’s my comment:

On the first set of questions, yes, following Jesus is central to the Christian (little Christ) faith and to the gospel, IMO. Are we called to trust the atonement? Yes. But that is only one facet of trusting Jesus, which is the focus of the New Testament. Putting our faith in him simultaneously includes trusting his atonement, his resurrection, his promises, his teachings, his plan for overcoming evil, his Spirit, his ongoing leadership, joining his people, etc. The gospel is at the core, the proclamation of a person, the “Christ”-ened King, and his great deeds and plan for the world. This gospel calls us to quit working against him (because of what we all naturally trust and love) and start trusting, loving and following him above all.

But Luther defined “gospel”, despite the much larger NT usage, as “properly nothing else” than our justification. (Very odd for a founder of the ’sola scriptura’ movement.) Our idea of God’s “salvation” has also been similarly whittled down from the much larger biblical usage of that term to our legal status alone. Our “orthodoxy”, our ‘right teaching’ or ‘right belief’ of Christianity only includes facts about Jesus, generally speaking, but no teachings of Jesus. I think it is hard to understate how thoroughly, at least in its core concepts and our mental mapping of the faith, that we have divorced being a Christian from becoming a little Christ. Kudos to Boyd and the many others that point this out.

The following is an excerpt from one of several posts at i-monk’s blog interviewing Bryan Cross, who is a thoughtful Catholic philosopher and apologist.  My reason for posting this has nothing to do with Bryan’s Catholicism; I’m personally ambivalent about that landing place for him within the Body.  But his story within the protestant church is one that I think many will resonate with.  All church leaders should hear his story and be mindful of the stumbling blocks that we can so easily set before people, like the ones that were set before Bryan. 

During my undergraduate education at the University of Michigan, I was exposed to Christians of all different traditions, and this raised a number of questions for me. By the end of my senior year, I was reading various books on theology, and I became convinced that Reformed covenantal theology was more biblical than the dispensational theology in which I had been raised. For the following three years my wife and I led an international student fellowship composed of students from Eastern Michigan University and the University of Michigan. During that time I continued to read books on Reformed theology. By the end of that three years, I came to see that if I was going to be a pastor, I needed much better theological training. So we moved to St. Louis where I studied at Covenant Theological Seminary for four years, earning an M.Div.

In my last year of seminary, I took a graduate philosophy class at Saint Louis University on the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas. Studying Aquinas raised many questions regarding the Reformed tradition. I couldn’t answer those questions at the time, but it was clear to me that there was at least a deep tension between the philosophical and theological positions and methods of the Reformers, and those of Aquinas. I had hoped that a rigorous study of the biblical languages and exegesis would provide the means to resolve interpretive disagreements between the Christian traditions. I had poured myself into exegesis with that hope, so much so that at graduation the seminary faculty honored me with the exegesis award. But I began to see the implicit role that philosophy was playing in our interpretation of Scripture. My belief as a seminarian was that other Christian traditions didn’t agree with us (Presbyterians) primarily because they didn’t know exegesis as well as we did. At the seminary we believed that exegesis was on our side, that it was exegesis that validated our position over and against that of all the other Christian traditions. But when I began to see the degree to which philosophy was playing an implicit role in our interpretation of Scripture, my beliefs that exegesis was a neutral objective science, and that it was sufficient to adjudicate interpretive disputes, began to crumble. So I decided to study philosophy, in order to get a better understanding of the relation of philosophy to theology throughout the history of the Church. If I couldn’t avoid bringing philosophy into exegesis, at least I was going to do my best to bring in true philosophy.

I completed the internship required for ordination and continued to teach Sunday school at the Presbyterian church we were attending. But at that point I decided not to pursue ordination, because for me there were too many theological questions unanswered. Two years after finishing seminary, my youngest daughter went through a very seriousness illness, and during the following year I went through what I would call an intellectual crisis concerning theology and the ecclesial practice of Christianity. It wasn’t a personal faith-crisis; my belief in Christ and love for Him was never in question. At the time, I couldn’t have explained exactly what was the problem. Anglicanism and Catholicism were not even on my conceptual horizon. I knew that I didn’t want to go to church to hear any more “man-talk,” i.e. opinions of men. If church were primarily about “man-talk,” I could go to the library and find much more erudite thinkers and writers. With what I was learning from ancient philosophers and medieval theologians, I found myself mentally refuting sermons point-by-point as they were being delivered during every service. Of course I knew we are not supposed to forsake the assembling of ourselves together, and yet existentially I couldn’t see any good reason to “go to church.” At one point I stopped going to church altogether because I was so frustrated with the whole scene, a scene that to me seemed spiritually vacuous and human-centered in its continual “man-talk.”

Eventually a friend of mine suggested that I visit an Anglican church, so I did. I went by myself. It was completely different. It was quiet and reverent before the liturgy began. The liturgy itself was beautiful, rich, and meaningful. Here for the first time I found freedom from “man-talk.” There was no personality at the front of the church with a microphone, saying whatever came into his head at that moment. There was no speculative exegesis or theological argumentation which I could critically dismantle. The liturgy is God’s speech spoken back to Him by His people or by one representing them. Of course Holy Communion is the climax of the liturgy, and it too is not “man-talk.” In this sacrament God was speaking to me not through words and propositions, but through a physical action, giving Himself to me in a very intimate way. This was not something toward which I could take a critical, disengaged stance. I could only receive it humbly and gratefully. In that respect, this sacrament almost bypassed my intellect and went straight to my heart. We received Holy Communion at the front of the church, on our knees. The very form of worship communicated something altogether different from the way of taking communion I had previously known. I found God to be present there in the beauty, reverence and silence of the liturgy. In that sacredness my heart, which had been starved under a diet of mere propositions, was drawn anew toward God.

Thankfully, Bryan eventually came back to the Body instead of staying out permanently.  We need to know that there are people in the congregation more studied than we are, smarter than we are, even more mature than we are.  And we need to know there are the opposite as well.  For all these folks we need to exercise humility and not put forward our words as God’s.  We need to know the difference, say the difference and find ways to minimize our words and maximize God’s.  Lastly, we need to learn and increase our own appreciation for the many ways God speaks outside of a sermon.  We should treasure these and give them appropriate space among the meetings of God’s people.