Affirming the Apostles ’ Creed
Page 7
THE NEW TESTAMENT
That the New Testament presents the Protestant view is hardly open to dispute (the dispute is over whether the New Testament is final!). The church appears in Trinitarian relationships as the family of God the Father, the body of Christ the Son, and the temple (dwelling-place) of the Holy Spirit, and so long as the dominical sacraments are administered and ministerial oversight is exercised, no organizational norms are insisted on at all. The church is the supernatural society of God’s redeemed and baptized people, looking back to Christ’s first coming with gratitude and on to his second coming with hope. “Your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory” (Colossians 3:3-4)—such is the church’s present state and future prospect. To this hope both sacraments point, baptism prefiguring final resurrection, the Lord’s Supper anticipating “the marriage supper of the Lamb” (Revelation 19:9).
The church is the supernatural society of God’s redeemed
and baptized people, looking back to Christ’s first coming
with gratitude and on to his second coming with hope.
For the present, however, all churches (like those in Corinth, Colosse, Galatia, and Thessalonica, to look no further) are prone to err in both faith and morals and need constant correction and re-formation at all levels (intellectual, devotional, structural, liturgical) by the Spirit through God’s Word.
The evangelical theology of revival, first spelled out in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the present-day emergence of “charismatic renewal” on a worldwide scale remind us of something that Roman Catholic and Protestant disputers, in their concentration on doctrinal truth, tended to miss—namely, that the church must always be open to the immediacy of the Spirit’s Lordship and that disorderly vigor in a congregation is infinitely preferable to a correct and tidy deadness.
THE LOCAL CHURCH
The acid test of the church’s state is what happens in the local congregation. Each congregation is a visible outcrop of the one church universal, called to serve God and men in humility and, perhaps, humiliation while living in prospect of glory. Spirit-filled for worship and witness, active in love and care for insiders and outsiders alike, self-supporting and self-propagating, each congregation is to be a spearhead of divine counterattack for the recapture of a rebel world.
Here is a question for you: how is your congregation getting on?
FURTHER BIBLE STUDY
The church’s nature and destiny:
1 Peter 2
Ephesians 2:11-4:16
QUESTIONS FOR THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION
How does the Roman Catholic use of the New Testament differ from the Protestant one? How does this affect the concept each holds of the church?
How does Packer define “the communion of saints”? Do you agree with what he says? Why or why not?
What is the function of a local Christian church in relation to the universal church?
NOTE
1 Anglican Article XX.
If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities,
O Lord, who could stand?
But with you there is forgiveness,
that you may be feared.
PSALM 130: 3-4
CHAPTER 16
Forgiveness of Sins
What are sins? Sin, says the Westminster Shorter Catechism, is “any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God.” This echoes 1 John 3:4, “sin is lawlessness.” It has other aspects too. It is lawlessness in relation to God as lawgiver, rebellion in relation to God as rightful ruler, missing the mark in relation to God as our designer, guilt in relation to God as judge, and uncleanness in relation to God as the Holy One.
Sin is a perversity touching each one of us at every point in our lives. Apart from Jesus Christ, no human being has ever been free of its infection. It appears in desires as well as deeds, and in motives as well as actions. The Anglican Prayer Book rightly teaches that “We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.... We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and (spiritually) there is no health in us.”
Sin is everybody’s problem in the sight of God, for he is “of purer eyes than to see evil” and “cannot look at wrong” (Habakkuk 1:13). But we find life to be a moral minefield for us; and the harder we try to avoid sin, the more often we find—too late—that we have stepped where we shouldn’t and have been blown to pieces so far as the required love of God and our neighbor is concerned. And where does that leave us?—”the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men” (Romans 1:18).
The good news, however, is this—sins can be forgiven. Central to the gospel is the glorious “but” of Psalm 130:4—”If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared”—that is, worshiped with loyalty (for that is what fear of God means).
VITAL AND REAL
Forgiveness is pardon in a personal setting. It is taking back into friendship those who went against you, hurt you, and put themselves in the wrong with you. It is compassionate (showing unmerited kindness to the wrongdoer), creative (renewing the spoiled relationship), and, inevitably, costly. God’s forgiveness is the supreme instance of this, for it is God in love restoring fellowship at the cost of the cross.
Forgiveness is taking back into friendship those who
went against you, hurt you, and put themselves
in the wrong with you. God’s forgiveness is the
supreme instance of this, for it is God in love
restoring fellowship at the cost of the cross.
If our sins were unforgivable, where would we be? A bad conscience is the most universal experience—and the most wretched. No outward change relieves it; you carry it with you all your waking hours. The more conscientious you are, the more your knowledge of having failed others, and God, too, will haunt you. Without forgiveness you will have no peace. A bad conscience delivering at full strength, tearing you to pieces in the name of God, is hell indeed, both here and hereafter.
LUTHER KNEW IT
A man distressed about sin wrote to Luther. The Reformer, who himself had suffered long agonies over this problem, replied: “Learn to know Christ and him crucified. Learn to sing to him and say—Lord Jesus, you are my righteousness, I am your sin. You took on you what was mine; you set on me what was yours. You became what you were not that I might become what I was not.” Compare Paul: “For our sake [God] made [Christ] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Link up with Jesus, the living Lord, by faith, and the great exchange is fulfilled. Through Jesus’ atoning death God accepts you as righteous and cancels your sins. This is justification, forgiveness, and peace.
Paul in Romans and Galatians, and the Reformers after him, spoke of justification rather than of forgiveness. This is because justification is forgiveness plus ; it signifies not only a washing out of the past but also acceptance and the gift of a righteous man’s status for the future. Also, justification is final, being a decision on which God will never go back, and so it is the basis of assurance, whereas present forgiveness does not necessarily argue more than temporary forbearance. So justification—public acquittal and reinstatement before God’s judgment-seat—is actually the richer concept.
BY FAITH ONLY
In the past (things are less clear-cut today) Roman Catholics did not grasp the decisiveness of present justification, nor see that Christ’s righteousness (“my Savior’s obedience and blood,” as Toplady put it) is its whole ground, nor realize that our part is to stop trying to earn it and to simply take it as God’s free gift of grace. So they insisted that sacraments, “good works,” and purgatorial pains hereafter were all necessary means of final acceptance, because they were among the grounds on which that acceptance was based. But the Reform
ers preached, as Paul did, full and final acceptance through a decisive act of forgiveness here and now; and this, they said, is by faith only.
Why faith only? Because Christ’s righteousness only is the basis of pardon and peace, and Christ and his gifts are received only by faith’s embrace. Faith means not only believing God’s truth but trusting Christ, taking what he offers, and then triumphing in the knowledge of what is now yours.
Is God’s gift of forgiveness by faith yours yet? It is easily missed. The Jews missed it, said Paul; their tragedy was that their “zeal for God” led them to try to establish their own righteousness (i.e., to earn his acceptance), and “they did not submit to God’s righteousness” (i.e., to his way of forgiving and justifying, by faith in Christ only): see Romans 10:2ff. The pathetic truth is that we sinners are self-righteous to the core, and we are constantly justifying ourselves, and we hate admitting that there is anything seriously wrong with us, anything that God or man might seriously hold against us; and we have to do violence to our own perverted instincts at this point before faith is possible for us. God save us all from repeating the tragedy of the Jews in our own lives.
FURTHER BIBLE STUDY
Justification through Christ by faith apart from works:
Romans 5; 10:1-13
Galatians 2:15—3:29
Philippians 3:4-16
QUESTIONS FOR THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION
What is forgiveness, and what does it do for the forgiven on a personal level?
What did Luther mean by saying, “You became what you were not that I might become what I was not”?
Why is it that forgiveness comes through faith only?
But our citizenship is in heaven,
and from it we await a Savior,
the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform
our lowly body to be like his glorious body,
by the power that enables him even to
subject all things to himself.
PHILIPIANS 3: 20-21
CHAPTER 17
Resurrection of the Body
Scripture sees death—life’s one certainty—not as a friend but as a destroyer. When my body and soul separate, I shall only be a shadow of what I was. My body is part of me, the apparatus of my self-expression; without it, all my power to make things, do things, and relate to my fellows is gone. Think of someone with full use of his faculties, and compare him with a paralytic; now compare the paralytic with someone totally disembodied, and you will see what I mean. Paralytics can do little enough; disembodied persons, less still. Thus death, while not ending our existence, nullifies and in a real sense destroys it.
COPING WITH DEATH
Death is the fundamental human problem, for if death is really final, then nothing is worthwhile save self-indulgence. “If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die” (1 Corinthians 15:32). And no philosophy or religion that cannot come to terms with death is any real use to us.
Here, however, Christianity stands out. Alone among the world’s faiths and “isms” it views death as conquered. For Christian faith is hope resting on fact—namely, the fact that Jesus rose bodily from the grave and now lives eternally in heaven. The hope is that when Jesus comes back—the day when history stops and this world ends—he will “transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body” (Philippians 3:21; cf. 1 John 3:2). This hope embraces all who have died in Christ as well as Christians alive at his appearing: “for an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear [Jesus’] voice and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life” (John 5:28ff.). And the raising of the body means the restoring of the person—not just part of me, but all of me—to active, creative, undying life, for God and with God.
NEW BODY
In raising believers, God completes their redemption by the gift not of their old bodies somehow patched up, but of new bodies fit for new men. Through regeneration and sanctifica-tion God has already renewed us inwardly; now we receive bodies to match. The new body is linked with the old, yet is different from it, just as plants are linked with, yet different from, the seeds from which they grew (see 1 Corinthians 15:35-;44). My present body—“brother ass,” as Francis of Assisi would have me call it—is like a student’s old jalopy; care for it as I will, it goes precariously and never very well and often lets me and my Master down (very frustrating!). But my new body will feel and behave like a Rolls-Royce, and then my service will no longer be spoiled.
In raising believers, God completes their redemption
by the gift not of their old bodies somehow patched
up, but of new bodies fit for new men.
No doubt, like me, you both love your body because it is part of you and get mad at the way it limits you. So we should. And it is good to know that God’s aim in giving us second-rate physical frames here is to prepare us for managing better bodies hereafter. As C. S. Lewis says somewhere, they give you unimpressive horses to learn to ride on, and only when you are ready for it are you allowed an animal that will gallop and jump.
A dwarf I knew would weep for joy at the thought of the body God has in store for him on resurrection day, and when I think of other Christians known to me who in one way or another are physical wrecks—deformed, decaying, crippled, hormonally unbalanced, or otherwise handicapped—I can weep too for this particular element of joy that will be theirs—and yours and mine—when that day dawns.
SOUL AND BODY
This bit of the Creed was probably put in to ward off the idea (very common for three centuries after Christ, and not unknown today) that man’s hope is immortality for his soul, which (so it was thought) would be much better off disembodied. There was a tag, “the body is a tomb,” that summed up this view. But it shows a wrong view both of matter (which God made and likes and declares good) and of man (who is not a noble soul able to excuse the shameful things he does by blaming them on his uncouth material shell, but a psycho-physical unit whose moral state is directly expressed by his physical behavior). The disordering effect of sin is very clear in the way my physical appetites function (not to look further); but for all that these appetites are part of me and I must acknowledge moral responsibility for whatever active expression they find. The Bible doctrine of judgment is that each of us will “receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil” (2 Corinthians 5:10).
LIKE CHRIST
The promise that one day we will have bodies “like his glorious body” (Philippians 3:20ff.) challenges us—do we really, from our hearts, welcome and embrace our promised destiny of being like Christ? (Cf. 1 John 3:2ff.) Facing this question could be a moment of truth for us. Some find their whole identity in gratifying physical itches (for sexual excitement, sleep, food, exercise, violence, alcoholic or drug-induced “highs,” or whatever) and feel—alas, with too much truth—that were they deprived of these, nothing would be left of them but an ache. And they see Jesus, who was not led by physical itches, as the “pale Galilean” through whose breath, according to Swinburne, the world grew cold, and whom D. H. Lawrence wanted to humanize (I have to use that verb in fairness to Lawrence, though it is the wackiest nonsense I have ever written) by imagining for him a sex life with a pagan priestess. Such a vision makes the idea of being like Jesus—that and no more—sound like being sentenced to a living death. Now is that how, deep down, it sounds to you?
If so, only one thing can be said. Ask God to show you how Jesus’ life, body and soul, was the only fully human life that has ever been lived, and keep looking at Jesus as you meet him in the Gospels until you can see it. Then the prospect of being like him—that and no less—will seem to you the noblest and most magnificent destiny possible, and by embracing it you will become a true disciple. But until you see it—please believe me: I kid you not—there is no hope for you at all.
FURTHER BIBLE STUDY
The resurrection hope:
Mark 12:18-27
1 Corinthians 15:35-58
Phili
ppians 3:4-16
QUESTIONS FOR THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION
Why is a religion that does not deal with death valueless to us?
What evidence does the Bible give to show that death has been conquered?
How much can we say that we know about the state of the resurrected?
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth....
And I heard a loud voice from the throne
saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is
with man. He will dwell with them,
and they will be his people, and God himself
will be with them as their God”...
the Lord God will be their light,
and they will reign forever and ever.