Pauline Metalepsis and Limited Atonement

If there is one Reformed doctrine that has received more scorn than the rest, it is the doctrine of limited atonement. It is the product of austere, harsh men, and it certainly has no basis in the Bible. I know a professor of New Testament who exclaims that there are four major 'Christian' doctrines that have falsely been propagated as biblical: premillenial rapture, infant baptism, the cessation of the charismatic gifts, and limited atonement. The other three aside; it seems to me that the doctrine of limited atonement does have very little textual support. For the most part it has been a doctrine argued for by logical deduction. Richard Hays' chapter on Christ's praying of the Psalms in The Conversion of the Imagination has given me new eyes to see this doctrine biblically, though.

Here are a few reflections:

It seems to me that one of the greatest fears in the Psalms is the fear of shame. Especially, throughout the so-called lament Psalms. The two phrases "Let me not be put to shame" or "Let them (my enemies) be put to shame" occur often (cf. Psalm 6, 25, 31, 35, 40, 44, 53, 69, 70, 71, 83, 86, 109, 119, 127, 129 in some of these chapters it occurs multiple times). Shame and honor are the ultimate punishment and reward. The idea of personal shame is horrific, and the shame of one's enemies is the climax of vindication.

What does this have to do with atonement? This is where Hays helps. Romans 15 is of course a chapter that calls the church of Rome to lay down their rights. It is a chapter that obligates the powerful to bear with the other. There is an interesting quotation of Psalm 69 that appears in verse 3: "The reproaches of those who reproached you fell on me." At face value this quotation only partially makes sense in its Romans 15 context. It is merely reminding the reader that Christ didn't mind a little vicarious suffering. But is this all Paul is trying to communicate? The literary trope of metalepsis may shed a bit more light. If one takes into account the context of Psalm 69, we get a broader picture of Paul's meaning.

"Let not those who hope in you be put to shame through me, O Lord God of hosts; let not those who seek you be brought to dishonor through me, O God of Israel. For it is for your sake that I have borne reproach, that dishonor has covered my face... the reproaches of those who reproach you have fallen on me" (Psalm 69:6-9).

Here is Hays, "the Messiah who prays such a prayer in the midst of suffering is a powerful model for the other-regarding conduct that Paul is urging. Paul wants the Roman Christians to echo the prayer of the Messiah by saying, in effect, 'Do not let the one for whom Christ died be put to shame because of me' (cf. Romans 14:15)".

Paul is arguing that there is a specific class of people that should labor to remove internal shame from their midst. Those for whom Christ died should bear with one another. The Church's identification with the death of Christ is an extra motivating factor in intra-ecclesiastical fraternity. If this identification is not unique to the Church, Paul's argument loses much of its force. Neither David nor Paul would, it seems to me, want to argue that vicarious shame has universal impact. Especially, when one remembers David's urge for God to humiliate his enemies (as shown above).

While this may not be the nail in the coffin, it at very least provides a potential biblical trajectory for the doctrine of limited atonement. More importantly for me personally, it gives positive pastoral implications for this austere doctrine. Here we have one more reason to practically love our brothers and sisters. They are those unique few for whom our Savior shed his blood.

Let it be known that I am in no way saying that Richard Hays is implicitly arguing for the Reformed idea of limited atonement in his book. He is definitely not. However, I doubt he would mind a little reader-response 'interpretation'.

Righteousness

My wife and Rose Marie Miller are the two women in my life pointing me again and again to the gospel. Dave and Barb Bindewald too. Our associate pastor Dave said over a pot of coffee and cookies one late night in our apartment about the great exchange in 2 Corinthians 5.21, ‘We usually get the first part at conversion, that Christ took our sins. But the second, that we gain Christ’s righteousness, well many of us will never get that.’

I thought, It sounds pretty straightforward to me. I get the accounting business of debits and credits. I wouldn’t dare speak of my own righteousness. My problem is not that I think that I have a righteousness of my own but that I don’t feel as deeply as my theology might indicate.

That was partly true. I really do know the right answer about the exchange that’s taken place in the gospel. But its not just my feelings that haven’t followed in suit – my whole life betrays a self-righteousness and I’ve been blind to it.

Self-righteousness is being shocked by the evil I see in others. It is a flat denial of those very sins dwelling deep in my own heart. It feeds a critical spirit, rabid cynicism, gossip, slander, and pride. I build a false record inwardly.

Self-righteousness is avoiding transparency, evading confessing my sins to brothers let alone repenting when I wrong others; it’s bristling at gentle correction and an eagerness to defend myself. It seldom fully forgives. It revels in being thought well of, being admired, being needed. I build a false record outwardly.

Self-righteousness is calling sin a ‘mistake.’ It’s presuming upon Christ’s forgiveness rather than seeking it. It makes for shallow times of repentance, vague references to broad sins, and a cross-less confession. With little sin I need a little Savior with a little gospel to make up the difference between a holy God and myself. I build a false record upwardly.

To myself, to others, to God – my presumptive righteousness demands so much of me and returns so little.

“But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother.” (Gal 4.26)

Meditation on the Innovation of Boredom

In Boredom: the Literary History of a State of Mind, Patricia Meyer Spacks explains that boredom as such is a relatively recent invention, from the eighteenth century at the latest. Before that we had melancholy (which was a kind of affliction of the spirit) and, further back still, acedia (which was a sin). What’s distinctive about boredom is that we don’t see it as either a condition of our own selves or a sin, but rather something that just happens to us. When we’re bored, we don’t think there’s anything wrong with us: we think the world is at fault. Stupid old world — it doesn’t interest me. And interesting me is the world’s job.

(Alan Jacobs, quoted by Joe Carter, "Thirty-Three Things" on First Thoughts Blog, entry posted August 21, 2010, http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2010/08/21/thirty-three-things-v-11/ [accessed August 23, 2010])

What happened? If boredom is an innovation that roughly coincides with the enlightenment, it would seem that Descartes developing an epistemology in which everything but himself is doubted would lead to this very thing–– boredom. Ho-hum, clock-watching, face-heavy-in-the-hand, nose-picking, boredom. When everything– besides me– is made into an accessory, and when accessories gradually take on a disposable nature, and when everything disposable tarnishes and browns with age like a discarded issue of People magazine from 1994, what are we left with? Not much. Moreover, when God himself is deemed unnecessary, as Nietzsche lamented, we are in a doubly dire straight, because all transcendence becomes relegated to climbing the uselessly short ladder of our own mind. This is the post-modern milieu– boredom insulated by the earbuds of my I-Pod, noise bouncing off the interior walls of my skull with nowhere to go.

This innovation is more than incidental. When we consider that the medieval mind was everywhere haunted by the sacramental, boredom seems an impossibility. Seemingly everything was expressed in relational terms. Before an object falling was mere gravity, it was an object pursuing the ground with something like desire. The planets moved according to a kind of music, which suggests a scale that can be appreciated if not comprehended by the human mind. Christ was not absent at the communion, but was manifest in a "real presence." In a world like that, in which the eternal was constantly breaking into the temporal, who could be bored?

Here in Vancouver, during the long rainy months, I have found it fearsome to think that, as Christ walked among us with hard calloused feet, (to borrow from Gerard Manley Hopkins) the Spirit broods over this city in a low, heavy cloud, intermittently dunking and sprinkling us, and that the mountains surrounding it are somehow the cusp of the Father's palm, hovering somewhere between cradling and crushing this pile of glass, brick and mortar. It seems positively old-fashioned to imagine that mingling with the hydrogen and oxygen of the atmosphere, holding the space between atoms, is the same One who hovered over the waters in the beginning. As I sit on the bus, enduring the grind of my routine and trying not to make eye-contact with anybody in particular, I cannot think of a better way to remember God's immanence. It moves me to pray for the "timekept City," to remember that even in a country that claims something like 40% of the world's freshwater, "[Y]ou neglect and belittle the desert./ The desert is not remote in southern tropics,/ The desert is not only around the corner,/ The desert is squeezed in the tube-train next to you,/ The desert is in the heart of your brother." In a world like this, who could be bored?

(Poetry quoted from Eliot, Thomas Sterns, "Choruses from 'The Rock'" in The Complete Poems and Plays. [New York; Harcourt Brace, 1967] 96, 98)

Builders

As a seasoned pioneer missionary with twenty five years of church planting and upwards of fifteen thousand ministry miles under his belt, the apostle Paul unveils his crowning strategy for Spain in his letter to the Romans. As far as first century Roman Empire dwellers were concerned, Spain was the western “ends of the earth” (India to the east), and therefore the eschatological fulfillment of God’s pursuit of his glory (Is 66.19).

He writes: “I no longer have any room for work in these regions...I hope to see you in passing as I go to Spain, and to be helped on my journey there by you” (Rom 15.23-24).

There is an explicit and implicit charge in these matter-of-fact logistical plans for the first century Roman church and twenty-first century American church. Paul betrays a twofold stratus of commission calling. Explicitly, Paul highlights the calling of “foundation layers” such as himself - men and women commissioned to preach the gospel where it has yet to be heard.

This is Paul’s calling. And as a man duly called he expects “help,” propempo, the NT technical term for missionary support - funding, lodging, travel, regional coworkers, etc. Its Paul’s calling but the church’s task. Spain is Rome’s opportunity.

But there’s also an implicit charge. There is work to be done by “builders,” those Christians left behind. By this point, Paul has scarcely sprinkled the eastern Mediterranean world with a handful of fledgling house churches in major metropolises.

Take the church in Corinth for example. As far as we can tell several house churches of fifty plus believers constituted Paul’s plan for Greece. After that he felt claustrophobic in the region to know that one solitary city had that many Christians. There was no room for him to work.

The implicit charge is that members of these house churches build. They take Paul’s meager eighteen months of planting (Corinth) and begin to water. They organize themselves into a healthy church; care for their members; preach the Word, disciple, serve the Supper, guard the gospel; reach out to neighbors and coworkers with the good news; and begin thinking about multiplication in Greece.

This is the builder’s call, no less than the pioneer foundation layer. I suspect for all his gifts, Paul would have made a lousy builder. That’s probably why far from disparaging Christian builders in Rome, he greets them with reverent admiration in the following chapter.

When the Christianity in the Fridge Goes Bad

Finally, somebody wrote this article (interesting that it's in the Wall Street Journal).

I've seen this guy's book in the bookstore and wondered what it was all about. I'm relieved that it's not another book that we'll come to lament like those photos of ourselves in middle school wearing really baggy pants.

Summer Reading: The (Very) Short List

Well friends, it's probably more summer where you are than where I am, but nonetheless let's don the sunglasses, let our whitened thighs distract a few satellites, and grab some reading to occupy us for a short spell. Here's two articles I have enjoyed recently:

"The Christian Paradox: How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong"(Harper's, Aug. 2005) - Many of you won't need much convincing of Bill McKibben's basic premise– that American Christianity is probably on the whole more American than it is Christian– but McKibben offers some valuable statistics and analysis. When he observes that "America is the most professedly Christian of the developed nations and the least Christian in its behaviour," he holds a frightening mirror up to us that we ignore to our peril. I don't agree with all of his assumptions (namely that the issue of the death penalty is clearly prohibited in scripture), but that our culture is composed of a kind of uncritical pseudo-Christianity that has managed, in spite of its best intentions, to live out an increasingly ironic faith will surely drive us to examine this dangerous dualism in our midst. Reading this alongside Bonhoeffer's Cost of Discipleship has been scaring the (I hope) hell out of me.

Whither Wheaton? The evangelical flagship college charts a new course. (SoMa Review, January 13, 2010)-

Second up is an article well worth archiving. Andrew Chignell's account of the Wheaton presidential search is proof that Wheaton College is often a microcosm of young Evangelicalism. I personally have very little interest in the presidential search, but the issues surrounding it are in many ways bigger than that school. At more than one point I felt like his comparisons between the Wheaton of last decade and the Wheaton of today would have sufficed for my own experience at a small Bible college. Something is changing in Evangelicalism, and Chignell offers important insight as to what the nature of that change might be.

Some thoughts against Carlos Whitaker (A Review of Up In the Air)

I recently sat down to watch a movie that I had been anticipating for some time, Up in the Air.
The movie, shot almost exclusively in hotels, airports and corporate offices is a tremendous effort to capture what defines a relationship. The movie is a parable on communication, relationships and humanity.

For those that haven't seen the film a brief synopsis.
Ryan Bingham, the film's protagonist, (George Clooney) travels over 300 days out the year to various offices as a contracted employment terminator. He fires people. While out on the road, he meets Alex (Vera Farmiga). Alex, like Ryan is out on the road, or up in the air, just as much, going from Herzt to Hilton to O'Hare and back again. The two strike a relationship that is matches their non-committed worlds. Then enters Natalie Keener, the over ambitious recent grad with a new plan to save the company a fortune by carrying out these firing through an internet video chat system.

The film gets interesting as we see these three characters in a dance of mistrust and misunderstandings. Natalie's new plan to fire people via iChat lacks the experience that veteran Ryan has. She shadows Ryan on these visits to ease the transition of face-to-face to online. Ultimately the switch fails. This lost in communication is highlighted by the fact that halfway through the film, Natalie is dumped by her fiance via text. Alex and Ryan's no trust relationship suddenly gets complicated and comes in nothing less than a crash landing...

This is a shotgun summary of the plot. What the film demonstrates is the irreducible complexity of human communication. I could have said human relationships, but the plot is more pointed than that. What is irreducibly complex about communication? Since, it seems to be increasing in every direction possible (social media, hot spots, 4G). This is the question that Up in the Air asks. Is all this technology really making things any easier? Is communication merely being able to transfer a verbal message? Video? Audio? All together? Up in the Air offers the proposal that there is no substitute for human interaction.

I want to now direct my argument against a practice that I fear is only going to increase. Doing ministry online. There are many examples of this, but one of the worst is Carlos Whitaker. I am almost tempted to refer to him by his Twitter account name LosWhit, since that it is all I really know. Whitaker is a self proclaimed "artist, pastor, thinker, experience architect, and Web 2.0 junkie". He has worked at some churches doing interesting things usually involving hyphenated titles with words like "creativity". If you go to his website, you will find he offers "coaching" services. This coaching consists of him following you on all and any social media sites and offering suggestions via a video chat conference an hour once month for $200 a month. (I'm not concerned about whether this is a fair rate.) I want to ask the same question as Up in the Air, is this really communication? Is this ministry? Is this the best medium for communicating?

There is more than I am aware of that gets lost in a mediated communication. McLuhan's basic thesis in The Medium is Massage is that the technological means that humans use to communicate alters, shapes, reduces, reforms that message.

LosWhit is an example of a dangerous trend. Paul did send letters to churches, but it was obvious that he valued being there in person over a letter. He even sent someone to deliver the letter. I don't think these are merely technological constraints. I think Paul knew the importance of a human being in the presence of another. When a Christian is before another, Christ himself is before that brother. What is lost in video chats and online sermons is the body of Christ. Unfortunately much of the ministry being done this way will remain up in the air.