Good Friday

No blogging today as it is the holiest day of the year for Christians. Let us meditate on our sins today instead of reading (or writing) blogs about the sins of others. It is because of today that we have any hope whatsoever in this life and the next.

We read Psalm 22 in church this morning:

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
Why art thou so far from helping me,
from the words of my groaning?
O my God, I cry by day, but thou dost not answer;
and by night, but find no rest.

Yet thou art holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel.
In thee our fathers trusted;
they trusted, and thou didst deliver them.
To thee they cried, and were saved;
in thee they trusted, and were not disappointed.

But I am a worm, and no man;
scorned by men, and despised by the people.
All who see me mock at me,
they make mouths at me, they wag their heads;
"He committed his cause to the LORD; let him deliver him,
let him rescue him, for he delights in him!"

Yet thou art he who took me from my mother's womb;
thou didst keep me safe upon my mother's breasts.
Upon thee was I cast from my birth,
and since my mother bore me thou hast been my God.
Be not far from me, for trouble is near and there is none to help.

Many bulls encompass me, strong bulls of Bashan surround me;
they open wide their mouths at me,
like a ravening and roaring lion.

I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint;
my heart is like wax, it is melted within my breast;
my strength is dried up like a potsherd,
and my tongue cleaves to my jaws;
thou dost lay me in the dust of the earth.

Yea, dogs are round about me;
a company of evildoers encircle me;
they have pierced my hands and feet---
I can count all my bones--they stare and gloat over me;
they divide my garments among them,
and for my raiment they cast lots.

But thou, O LORD, be not far off! O thou my help, hasten to my aid!
Deliver my soul from the sword, my life from the power of the dog!
Save me from the mouth of the lion,
my afflicted soul from the horns of the wild oxen!
I will tell of thy name to my brethren;
in the midst of the congregation I will praise thee:

You who fear the LORD, praise him!
all you sons of Jacob, glorify him,
and stand in awe of him, all you sons of Israel!
For he has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted;
and he has not hid his face from him,
but has heard, when he cried to him.

From thee comes my praise in the great congregation;
my vows I will pay before those who fear him.
The afflicted shall eat and be satisfied;
those who seek him shall praise the LORD!
May your hearts live for ever!

All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the LORD;
and all the families of the nations shall worship before him.
For dominion belongs to the LORD, and he rules over the nations.
Yea, to him shall all the proud of the earth bow down;
before him shall bow all who do down to the dust,
and he who cannot keep himself alive.

Posterity shall serve him;
men shall tell of the LORD to the coming generation,
and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn,
that he has wrought it.
(Psalm 22)

Here is the Gaither Vocal Band with "It is Finished."

A Good Friday Meditation: The First Word from the Cross: Forgiveness

“Jesus said, “Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34)

The Gospels portray Jesus as being in charge of his own fate. The God-Man was not the helpless and passive victim of unforeseen circumstances that sneaked up on him, as it were, and overwhelmed him to the point that he unfortunately lost his life. Jesus did not die accidentally; nor did he die because of irresistible forces overcoming him and taking his life away from him.

He said plainly: “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Mark 10:45) Jesus struggled in prayer in Gethsemane and prayed “Father if it be your will, let this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will but as you will.” (Matt. 26:38)

Then, when they came to arrest him and Peter tried to defend him against arrest by using his sword to wound the servant of the High Priest, Jesus said “No more of this” and healed the servant. Jesus then said: “Am I leading a rebellion that you have to come with swords and clubs? Every day I was with you in the temple courts, and you did not lay a hand on me. But this is your hour – when darkness reigns.” (Luke 22:51-53)

Peter picks up on this in his sermon on the Day of Pentecost, which is recorded for us in the Book of Acts, and he forthrightly declares:

Men of Israel, listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know. This man was handed over to you by God’s set purpose and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him. . . There let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ. When the people heard this they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?” Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of you sins.” (Acts 2:22-24, 36-38)

Jesus died with words of forgiveness on his lips. He died saying “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” He died knowing that he was dying for the sins of the world and that through his sacrificial death, as the spotless Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world; salvation would come to his people Israel and through Israel to the whole world.

Jesus died, not as a helpless victim of fate, but in the foreknowledge and according to the good purpose of God. He died so that we might have forgiveness and he died praying for forgiveness for us.

Some people reject the doctrine of the penal substitutionary atonement, the teaching of Scripture that Jesus died in our place bearing our sins so that we could be forgiven because they envision Jesus as a helpless victim who is unjustly punished. They reject the idea that God must punish sin and they view the idea of the substitutionary atonement as irrational.

• But Scripture does not portray Jesus as a helpless victim, but as a willing sacrifice.

• It does not portray Jesus as unjustly punished, but as one who took our punishment upon himself consciously and deliberately.

• And it does not portray the cross as an unfortunate quirk of fate, but as central to the plan and purpose of God from all eternity.

Jesus’s words “Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing” express the central purpose and meaning of the cross. For Christians from the apostles to us today these words stand at the very heart of our faith for our glad testimony is that we have found forgiveness of sins at the foot of the cross. And still the invitation given by Peter on the Day of Pentecost remains open to all who will believe. “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins.” (Acts 2:38)

Good Friday Sermon - 2009

Here are the sermon notes I provided for the congregation from the sermon I preached today at the Good Friday Service. I have been wrestling with issues surrounding the doctrine of penal substitution since I taught a 4000 level seminar course "God, Violence and the Atonement" a couple of years ago. I have sought to listen carefully to criticism of the penal substitutionary view of the atonement from feminist, liberal, emergent and non-Christian sources. After reading a dozen books or so books and thinking about it for about three years, I have come to a position of peace with regard to the whole issue. Penal substitution does not say everything there is to say about the meaning of the cross and it does not exhaust the teaching of the NT on the cross, but it is an indispensable element of an orthodox doctrine of the atonement. The Church must not follow the culture into oblivion, but be a sign of contradiction on this matter. Sin, judgment and atonement are of central importance in the preaching of the Gospel.

The Doctrine of the Atonement as the Basis of Christian Worship
Dr. Craig Carter - Westney Heights Baptist Church - Good Friday, 2009

Introduction - Is it possible to be “too atonement-centered?”

I. Is the Atonement Out-dated?
There are a number of Evangelicals who are wavering on the importance of the atoning death of Christ as the basis for forgiveness of the sin that separates us from God. (eg. Alan Mann, Atonement for a ‘Sinless Society’).

He argues that the post-modern self of the modern world has constructed a narrative to explain the nature of reality in which the concept of sin as breaking God’s law & thus incurring moral guilt no longer makes sense.

Mann quotes another author who says that Christians have allowed the biblical concept of sin as broken relationships to be reduced to sins, that is, to guilty thoughts, words and deeds, especially of the sexual variety. Sin has been reduced to what could be termed a “petty moralizing.” He says that we need to stop talking about: “sinners,” “guilt,” “forgiveness,” “separation,” & “judgment, and talk instead about “persons,” “relationships,” “acceptance,” & “openness to the other.”

II. Two Explanations of the Meaning of the Cross
There are two main explanations of the meaning of the cross:

1. Traditional Evangelical preaching on the cross emphasized Jesus dying in our place bearing our sins and making possible our forgiveness. (Rom. 3:22b-26)

2. Traditional liberal preaching on the cross emphasized the death of Christ as God demonstrating His love for us. (Rom. 5:8)

Now, what is confusing here is that both ways of preaching the cross are true unless the second way chooses to deny the truth inherent in the first way. And this is exactly what is happening in certain circles of the Church today.

To say that we are sinners under God's wrath does not in any way diminish God's love for us. The whole point is that it is guilty, condemned sinners that God loves, not pretty good people who deserve to be loved - or at least tolerated. The wonder of the cross is how God's wrath and love come together and how love emerges triumphant, but only because God has taken his own wrath upon himself.

III. The Rejection of the Penal-Substitutionary Doctrine of the Atonement
Many Evangelicals and many popular authors who are being read by Evangelicals today are attacking what is known as the penal-substitutionary doctrine of the atonement, eg. Steve Chalke:

“The cross isn’t a form of cosmic child abuse – a vengeful Father, punishing his Son for an offence he has not even committed. Understandably, both people inside and outside the Church have found this twisted version of events morally dubious and a huge barrier to faith.” (The Lost Message of Jesus)

“Though the sheer bluntness of my imagery shocked some, I contend that, in truth, it represents nothing more than a stark unmasking of what I understand to be the violent, pre-Christian thinking behind the popular theory of penal substitutionary atonement.” (The Atonement Debate, 34)

Three things hang together in this debate: sin as law-breaking, moral guilt as a result of sin, and penal substitution. If you deny any one of the three, you deny them all implicitly.

IV. The Gospel is A Call to Repentance and Faith
There is mystery in the cross. We can never hope to understand it totally. But the NT does make it clear that we are sinners lost without God and without hope in the world.

The liberal, heretical version of the Gospel, as taught in Liberal Protestantism, is the so-called “gospel of inclusion.” It starts with the idea that God loves everyone as they are and so preaching the gospel means calling everyone into one big inclusive tent where they do not have to repent or change. All they have to do is celebrate their diversity, accept each other unconditionally and pat themselves on the back for being so open-minded.

· Forget sin - that is just old-fashioned mythological baggage
· Forget about guilt – there is no such thing as guilt, just guilt feelings that can gotten rid of in therapy
· Forget about repentance – that is just Fundamentalism

But the true Gospel is all about confessing our sin, repenting & believing in Christ’s atoning death as our hope.

Conclusion - The Fathers of the Church, in meditating on John 19:35, understood the water and the blood as symbols of Baptism and Eucharist. As we come to the Eucharist, (the word means "thanksgiving") we come as sinners saved by grace, as those who have been bought with a price, the precious blood of Christ shed for us. Let us truly be thankful.

Suffering and the Patience of God

Pope Benedict XVI , in his first message to the world after being elected pope, writes:

"It is not power, but love that redeems us! This is God's sign: he himself is love. How often we wish that God would show himself stronger, that he would strike decisively, defeating evil and creating a better world. All ideologies of power justify themselves in exactly this way, they justify the destruction of whatever would stand in the way of progress and the liberation of humanity. We suffer on account of God's patience. And yet we need his patience. God, who became a lamb, tells us that the world is saved by the Crucified One, not by those who crucified him. The world is redeemed by the patience of God. It is destroyed by the impatience of man. " (Let God's Love Shine Forth: The Spiritual Vision of Pope Benedict XVI, ed. Robert Moynihan, p. 191)

Here we catch a glimpse into the mystery of why justice is delayed and why evil is allowed seemingly to triumph. God is not passive or powerless and judgment deferred is not judgment denied. We live in an eschatological moment between the Ascension and the Return of our Lord and during this moment the salvation of the world is being accomplished. It is a deeply profound thought that we need God's patience, even though we suffer on account of it. In this way we participate in the joyful redemption of the broken world that comes only through suffering and cross-bearing. If we but only knew it, our brief moment of suffering is but a short, dark tunnel though a mountain into a beautiful valley on the other side.

The Cross as Judgment

In the two quotes on the heading of this blog, we see St. Augustine expressing the common faith of the early church in the doctrine of Divine judgment. The end of the second article of the Apostles' Creed says: "He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, whence He shall come to judge the living and the dead."

In the first quote, St. Augustine sees the cross as a judgment seat from which Christ begins (and foreshadows) his work of dividing the sheep and the goats to his right and and to his left respectively. In the second, St. Augustine speaks of the future bodily second coming of Christ when he will judge all men in human form. In the same passage just prior to this quote, St. Augustine notes that, even though the Father will judge, He will judge by the coming of the Son and quotes John 5:22, which says that the Father "Judges no one, but has committed all judgment to the Son."

In modern, liberal interpretations of the cross I note that quite often the element of judgment is muted or elided. The current debate within Evangelical circles arising from the attempts of some to dismiss the penal substitutionary theory of the atonement as sub-Christian is a sign that liberal theology is becoming more congenial to some Evangelicals than it used to be. I do not think that the atonement can be reduced to nothing but the penal substitutionary theory, as if the Christus Victor and exemplarist theories were unimportant to a full-orbed understanding of the meaning of Christ's death. I do, in fact, see something true in all the major theories of the atonement. But I do not think that one can simply throw out the idea of Christ bearing our sins as our atoning sacrifice and the wrath of God falling on Him instead of on us and still do justice to the New Testament as a whole. Christ is the "Judge Judged in Our Place" as Barth famously put it. (CD IV/1, 211).

When I wrote The Politics of the Cross: the Theology and Social Ethics of John Howard Yoder, I did not interpret Yoder as denying the fact of God's judgment of sin either on the cross or in the future, although many others do interpret Yoder in such a way as to make God completely passive in simply bearing sin Himself, but not judging sin actively, and in suffering the wrath of the powers but not being wrathful against "the godlessness and wickedness of men." (Rom. 1:18) The suffering love God endured in the person of the God-Man on the cross is sometimes seen as the sum and substance of God's redemptive action in history and as the model for us to adopt as nonviolent followers of Jesus.

But I cannot accept a definition of Christian love as essentially, or exclusively, passive suffering; I think it is necessary to see God's love as active judgment as well as passive suffering. In the cross we are confronted with a mystery of Divine love and Divine wrath coming together in such a way that God bears the sins of the world in Himself, that is, in the person of the God-Man. Modern liberal theology takes the tension out of this mystery and resolves the meaning of the cross into a rationally comprehensible principle of nonviolence. Many theologians in the Anabaptist tradition see this liberal emphasis as a logical expression of their theological tradition. I do not.

As a Baptist, I have one foot in the Anabaptist tradition and the other in the Puritan wing of the Anglican Church out of which the English Baptists came. So perhaps it is not up to me to say what the logical culmination of the continental Anabaptist tradition is or is not. But let me say this quite clearly: if the logical development of the Anabaptist tradition is the bland theology of inclusion and acceptance as currently taught in liberal Protestantism, then I cannot recognize that tradition as my own. And if I am wrong about the proper interpretation of John Howard Yoder's thought (as I may well be, after all,) then I cannot recognize the Anabaptist/Liberal Yoder as a good teacher or myself as his follower.

This is why I have posted these quotes from St. Augustine on the header of this blog. I believe in a christologically-determined politics, a politics of the cross, but I do not believe that such a politics is mere passivity and the avoidance of violence through the adoption of a posture of withdrawal from the world. I don't believe Yoder reduced Chrisitian social witness to mere passivity and the avoidance of violence either; though that is a debate that is on-going. But the kind of christological politics (or politics of the cross) that I think is faithful to the complete biblical revelation of Jesus Christ and the tradition of the Church catholic is a politics that recognizes that in the cross God was in Christ both saving and judging the world simultaneously. And the mission of the Church involves bearing a witness to both of these aspects of the cross. Preaching Jesus is not the same thing as preaching Ghandi.