Thursday 21 July 2011
Sunday 17 July 2011
Life in the Spirit
In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.
Families come in so many different shapes and sizes, and no two are the same. Most of us have experience of belonging to a family, and although at times getting along with one another is tricky, and sometimes simply impossible, there is often a link that remains there that continues to somehow bind us together. Paul uses the image of the family in our reading from Romans as he speaks of those who are led by the “Spirit of God” as being “children of God” (Rom 8:14). He speaks of a familiarity and intimacy with God as he goes on to describe the assurance that the Spirit of God gives each of us in our own spirit that we are indeed much loved children of God.
The whole section leading up to this reading is sub-titled “Life in the Spirit”. I wonder what thoughts come into your head when you think about that. What does it mean to live in the spirit? The phrase that someone is “too heavenly-minded to be of any earthly use” may come to mind. We may know of people who, although they may have a particularly intense closeness and devotion to God sometimes almost seem as though they are on a completely different plane to the rest of us. Is that what it means to live in the Spirit? To become so completely focused and immersed in prayer and studying God’s word that everything else just seems so unimportant? Somehow I don’t think so! Vital though prayer and study of the Bible is, it is not by doing those things that we suddenly are able to become some kind of spiritual Superman or Superwoman.
During the services of baptism and confirmation a particular emphasis is made upon the role of the Holy Spirit. It is the Spirit who gives new life and new birth. Part of the prayer said by the bishop for those about to be confirmed has these words:
Let your Holy Spirit rest upon them:
the Spirit of wisdom and understanding;
the Spirit of counsel and inward strength;
the Spirit of knowledge and true godliness;
and let their delight be in the fear of the Lord.
This is the Spirit that each of us receives at our baptism, and is acknowledged more fully during our confirmation. The Holy Spirit indwells within us as we live out our lives in the world..........not apart from the world, but in it, and engaging with all its complexities and messiness. As I have mentioned before, we live and relate to one another through community, that may be the church community, but it is also our work community, our social group community, our neighbourhood community, our family community. Very few of us are going to be called to live in isolation, shut away from the world and reliant only on prayer to get by.
Last autumn as part of my reader training I was fortunate enough to go on a Quiet Day that was held at St Julian’s Church in Southwick. This beautiful medieval church once had an “anchorite cell” attached to it, in which once would have lived a hermit whose life was devoted solely to prayer and devotion to the things of God. It’s difficult these days to imagine what the conditions must have been like. Day in and day out, for weeks, months and years willingly being in just that one place, with only the occasional glimpse of what passed for everyday life. Passers by and pilgrims would stop at the small window that was the anchorite’s only link to the outside world and seek spiritual counsel and guidance. I suspect for most of us such an extreme form of isolation would very seriously threaten our sanity. Yet, what was it that sustained these people as they sought to follow the will of God in their solitude? I suspect it was the same Spirit of wisdom, understanding and inward strength mentioned in the confirmation prayer that kept them going and maintained their focus.
Yet, like I said, most of us won’t be called to such an ascetic life. For some of us our daily routine will involve getting up at some unearthly hour to get ready for work, or to take the kids to school. For others there might be appointments to keep or meetings to go to. It is the ordinary, simple things of our everyday life.....the way sometimes that life might seem to just plod on with nothing much really happening. Is this really what it is like for us to be living in the Spirit? Surely it should be more exciting than this?
Well no, not necessarily. Living the Christian life doesn’t always come with guaranteed excitement. I’m sure that there are probably a few of us here who breathe a sigh of relief about that! To live in the Spirit is to be filled with the Spirit and then go out and get involved in the hum-drum, sometimes messy, but often so very ordinary parts of our communities as we live out the gospel through our words and deeds. To live in the Spirit is to allow the Spirit to shine through us, daily, so that in whatever we do, whatever we say, there is something of Christ within us, reaching beyond ourselves to others.
Far from being some kind of super-spiritual ideal that seems almost impossible to achieve, life in the Spirit is here, for us now! We are children of God, loved and cherished by him and set free from fear and condemnation. It is for us to live out that life, and share it with others. For some that may be by getting involved in something like Sea Sunday last week at the Marina and being a very visible presence of the church. For others it may just be in going about their everyday business, quietly living out the good news of the gospel. But however we experience this life.....this inward strength, in our sharing it with others we still have a huge reservoir of it that we can draw upon ourselves. Our sharing with others, rather than diminishing it for ourselves, actually strengthens it as we live out the fruits of the Holy Spirit in our daily lives.
In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
AMEN
Wednesday 13 July 2011
Reflections upon Atonement
The doctrine of the Atonement
In the time since I began my reader training programme, one of the things that has most caught my interest is the great variety of views regarding the atonement. It is a doctrine that strikes at the very heart of what the Christian faith is all about, yet there is no singular view of what exactly the atonement is or what it achieves. The reading I have done displays a very wide range of opinion on the subject, some of it quite contentious at times.
In his book Christian Theology, Alister McGrath has much to say on the subject. He categorises the main views on atonement into four distinct (but not exclusive) areas.[1]
· The cross as a sacrifice
· The cross as a victory
· The cross and forgiveness
· The cross as a demonstration of God’s love
These four basic categories are used by many other theologians also, and demonstrate the main ways in which atonement doctrine is interpreted. The different theories could each warrant an essay in themselves. The view that is particularly dominant (certainly in evangelical circles) is that of sacrifice. This theory holds that Christ was sacrificed in order to placate an angry God who required a perfect, unblemished offering in order to satisfy his wrath at the misdeeds of the human race. A variant on this theme is known as “penal substitution” where Jesus receives the penalty for the sin of the world on behalf of humanity.
The concept of penal substitution has been much debated in recent years, most notably in the UK with the publication of The Lost Message of Jesus by Steve Chalke. Chalke was castigated by many in the evangelical community with his comment that “The fact is the cross isn’t a form of cosmic child abuse – a vengeful Father, punishing his Son for an offence he has not even committed”.[2] This remark parallels what Joel Green and Mark Baker say in Recovering the Scandal of the Cross as they quote Beverley Harrison and Carter Hayward, “As the classical portrait of the punitive character of this divine-human transaction, Anselm of Canterbury’s doctrine of atonement....probably represents the sadomasochism of Christian teaching at its most transparent”. God plays the role of the sadist who wilfully inflicts punishment and Jesus embraces the character of the masochist who willingly suffers it”.[3] Outlandish as this statement may seem I think it sums up how the sacrificial/satisfaction theory of atonement is open to interpretation that can lead one to view God as nothing more than a divine psychopath who is intent on causing pain and punishment on somebody who he fully knows is innocent of any wrongdoing. God in effect demands that an act of violence be performed upon his own Son in order that his indignation be soothed away before he is prepared to grant mercy to lesser mortals.
Mike Higton in Christian Doctrine appears to be slightly sympathetic to Chalke’s charge of “cosmic child abuse”. However, he suggests that by acting together as they do they “provide in their shared mercy the substitute that their shared justice demands”.[4] The position here is that rather than Jesus being subject to the unreasonable demands of the Father, the decision to act is one that is made jointly by both Father and Son.
Given my early Christian background of strongly evangelical Methodist, this view of the atonement was pretty much the only one I was exposed to. I was blissfully unaware of any other way of interpreting the death of Christ upon the cross. So far as I was concerned Jesus died on the cross to pay the penalty for my sins.....a penalty that I should have paid. And God had orchestrated it to be so! It seemed to be quite straight-forward.
The view that held sway in the early church was that of the cross as a victory, often termed “Christus Victor”. This interpretation saw the death and subsequent resurrection of Christ in terms of spiritual warfare against Satan and his forces. McGrath suggests that rather than this actually being a theory of atonement as such “it is more an expression of confidence in the difference that Christ’s death and resurrection have made”.[5] As such it provides groundwork for other atonement theories such as that of ransom as put forward by Origen and Gregory the Great. This states that the devil had acquired “rights” over sinful humanity and the only way this could be broken was by payment of a ransom (Christ). This payment of Christ to the devil would satisfy divine justice yet in being unaware that Jesus was divine as well as human the devil would be overstepping the boundaries and thus forfeit all rights he had to a claim on humanity. Gregory uses the idea of Jesus as some kind of divine bait waiting for the devil to bite and be hooked. The problem that arises here though is that this particular view may lead God open to a charge of deceit (which would go against his own nature) against the devil in order to achieve the desired outcome.
Daniel L. Migliore in Faith Seeking Understanding seems to be more sympathetic to the idea of the atonement being seen as a demonstration of God’s love, as earlier mentioned also by McGrath. Often known as the “moral influence” theory and originally put forward by Abelard, this posits the idea that the reconciliation of humanity to God is effected through the compelling love of Christ which will then be worked out in the life of the transformed believer.[6] Migliore stresses the “unconditional nature and transforming power of God’s love”[7] which demands a response of some kind on our part.
Each of these theories of atonement have something to offer the debate over what the death and resurrection of Christ means and how this is achieved. I no longer accept without question as I once did the seemingly dogmatic view that Jesus was punished on my behalf as put forward in the penal substitution argument. My own leanings tend towards that of the moral influence theory of the atonement as the ultimate act of love by which we too through Christ are able to be reconciled to God. As mentioned earlier however, each of the different theories intersect with one another at various points, and I do take on board the idea that there are elements of each that are able to be present within the doctrine of the atonement.
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