Tag: Vocation

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The Image of God and Freedom

The text of Genesis 1, quite specifically connects existing as God’s image-bearers with the dominion humans possess in creation.  After affirming his intention to make humans in his image, God addresses both the man and woman saying: “. . . have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Gen. 1:28).  Because God created humans in his image they share in God’s dominion over the primal creation and in his complete freedom.  This freedom exists in two horizons: coram Deo (before the face of God) and coram mundo (before the face of the world). 

Coram Deo, although primal humans are free from the law in the manner that Christians would later be free from the law in Christ, such freedom does not mean arbitrary or destructive lawlessness.  As the Formula of Concord correctly asserts, the law is God’s eternal will for his creation (lex aeterna) both before and after the Fall.  Nevertheless, in the state of integrity, God made human beings in the divine image. Therefore, human creatures wholly desired to perform the law.  The law was not contrary to their desires and therefore they did not need to place their desires in subordination to the law since their wills exactly mirrored God’s law.  Rules are only positive demands when they are not followed or if we do not desire to follow them.  If my expectation is for my children to clean their room, and they do it habitually on their own, then there is no reason to make it a family rule that children must clean their rooms each week.  Moreover, when children spontaneously clean their rooms, they are simply doing what they desire and are not subjecting their will to any higher authority than what they naturally desire.  In this scenario, they would clean their rooms out of perfect freedom, because in cleaning they would simply be doing what they wanted to do without any external authority telling them they must or coercing them to do so.   

Because humans share in God’s dominion and are free from the condemnation of the law in the primal state, they also possess a share in God’s rest as exemplified by the primal Sabbath.  Freedom from the law and its condemnation means rest from its demands relentlessly pressing down on humanity and demanding a response.  In the primal week, much as in the work of Christ, work led to rest and rest enabled work.  Regarding the primal week, God’s work in creation actualized the seventh day of rest.  Because God completed his works he could rest and bid his people enter into that rest.  Although a literal day in the primal week, the Sabbath as described by Genesis also has a typological meaning as the text itself indicates.  Genesis 2 gives the Sabbath has no boundaries since the language of evening and morning is intentionally missing, unlike with the other days.  Hence, the Sabbath becomes emblematic of the rest that the people of God enter into. Christians enter this rest when they receive by grace all that God has given them (Heb. 4), namely, the whole of creation along with God’s own self-donating presence with them.  This is true in the old creation within the narrative of the seven days. However, it is also true in the new creation when Christ’s work gives rest to the conscience of Christians suffering under sin and the condemnation of the law: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28). 

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Sanctification and Justification

https://www.azquotes.com/quotes/topics/sanctification.html

Sanctification is then not the building up of righteous qualities inside of believers, but believers learning to live outside of themselves as a result of their justification.  Such an existence lived outside of ourselves neither destroys the simul of Christian existence, nor the full and robust reality of sanctification.  The more the Christian meditates on the divine Word, the more he or she cannot help but feel the reality of his or her inner sinfulness.  This recognition will undoubtedly be augmented by the fact that we sin every day and therefore the older we become the more we have to regret.  Nevertheless, such a recognition of our innate sinfulness draws us ever more out ourselves into Christ through faith.  In turn, faith in Christ ever increases and overflows into service to our neighbors. 

Of course, Christian love is always imperfect.  Hence, there is a genuine insight in Luther’s early theology wherein he describes the believer as “partim peccator,”[1] and “peccatores in re, iusti autem in spe.”[2] In our present life, there is a real distinction between which actions of ours are the fruits of the Spirit and which are sins.  Hence, Lutherans have developed the paradigm of “active” and “passive” righteousness, within which believers are “partim peccator” according to the former category.  At the same time, any sin within us makes us “totus peccator” before God.  One either sins, or does not, and this fact grants us a status of total sinfulness or righteousness before God.  Even the good works of believers are imperfect, and therefore judged by the absolute standard of divine law are in themselves sinful (Isa. 64:6).  Hence, we are not “partim peccator” before the eyes of God according to passive righteousness.  In the present age, we are always total sinners coram Deo and therefore beggars before the divine throne of judgment and mercy.

Believers’ sense of their sinfulness drives on their sanctification.  If believers honestly contemplate their own actions, they cannot help but feel that their sinfulness outweighs their progress in good works. Indeed, the progress of sanctification cannot be quantified, and at times, we cannot detect any moral progress in our lives at all.  Such reflections should inevitably lead us to repentance and ever-deeper faith in Christ.  This divinely wrought faith in turn leads to overflowing love for God and our neighbor.  Thus, the Christian life can be seen as a perpetual cycle of believers suffering the work of the Word of God as law and gospel, until they are definitively transformed by temporal death and resurrection.

[1] WA 56:272.

[2] WA 56:269.

From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word (Lexham Press, forthcoming).

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Luther vs Augustine on Love

Since the self is properly oriented in its relationship with God by faith as trust, Luther now redirects love to the task of correctly orienting the external person in the earthly sphere.  This represents a total inversion of the Augustinian doctrine of love.  For the Bishop of Hippo, the love of earthly things functions as distractions from the love of God.  Indeed, in spite of being a biblical theme, at this stage of his development Luther seems uncomfortable about even talking about the love of God. Later in the Catechism, he again returned to the formula of “We should fear and love God, etc.,” and lost his aversion to talk of the love of God.  Nevertheless, in Freedom of a Christian, Luther consistently argues that love’s proper orientation is in fact an earthly object, namely the neighbor: “This is truly Christian life.  Here faith is truly active in love [Gal. 5:6], that is, it finds expression in works of freest service, cheerfully done, with which a man willing serves another [i.e. the neighbor] without hope of reward . . . “[1]   

Hence, the creative Word of God brings about a faith which orients believers toward God in Christ, whereas love is primarily directed toward the neighbor: “We conclude, therefore, that a Christian lives not in himself, but in Christ and the neighbor.  He lives in Christ through faith, and in his neighbor through love.”[2]  Whereas the person under the power of sin and self-justification stood curved in on himself (incurvatus in se), now the believer lives a life externalized in the other: first in Christ through faith, then through the neighbor in love.[3]  In this, the self becomes radically decentered in the form of ecstatic existence (raptus, exstasis).  In this, Luther borrows yet another theme from the mystical tradition,[4] yet remolds it around the biblical themes of faith in God and the love of the neighbor.

[1] LW 31:365.  Emphasis added.

[2] LW 31:371.  Emphasis added.

[3] See good description of Luther’s position here in George Wolfgang Forell, Faith Active in Love: An Investigation into the Principles Underlying Luther’s Social Ethics (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1999).

[4] See Karl-Heinz zur Mühlen, Nos extra nos: Luthers Theologie zwischen Mystik und Scholastik (Tübingen: Mohr, 1972).

From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word (Lexham Press, forthcoming).