Nazarenes on discipleship

In 2006, the Church of the Nazarene adopted a mission statement to make Christlike disciples in the nations, which bears some similarity to the United Methodist mission statement of making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.

Here is a link to a report in a Nazarene magazine about the meaning of that mission statement and how it is lived out. I must confess there is a level of engagement with these issues and Wesleyan theology that I seldom see in official UMC media.

You can watch the same presentations in video format here.

What the Pope said

Some folks appear to be losing their minds over words from Pope Francis this week.

Here is a story from the best web site I know that writes about the intersection of religion and journalism. It basically says that Francis is Catholic.

Comments make two good points.

One, Catholics don’t jumble together the words redemption, salvation, justification, and sanctification the way we Protestants often do.

Two, the big deal was really more about an internal Catholic debate over what we would call limited vs. unlimited atonement.

Taking the angle of internal Catholic disagreement, it is more to do with refuting Jansenism, that is, the idea that Christ only died for pro multos (“for many”, not “for all”, which is a controversial phrase for some in the translation of the Mass).

In other words, the death of Christ only redeemed a certain portion of humanity, those chosen beforehand to be redeemed (the elect, more or less) and involves double predestination. To symbolise this, Jansenist crucifixes position the arms of Christ upwards or upright, to denote that only some are included, rather than opened on the cross in the traditional manner to denote that all are redeemed by the deah of Christ.

Pope Francis is reiterating the idea of the natural law (think of the Jewish concept of the Noahide Laws) which ‘is written on the human heart’ and constrains all humans, whether or not they have received news of the Gospel. Atheists, other religions, everyone – we are bound to do certain things and refrain from others due to the fact of our humanity. The duty to do good is one of them – this is not ‘buying your way into heaven by good deeds’, it is not the same as salvation, but it is fulfilling one of the ends for which we were created.

Curse of respectability

Reading John Wesley and about the early American Methodists always gives me a sense of deep conviction. These were people who took God seriously. They knew that what they did was important. They were willing to suffer for it.

It is not that they did not feel the same pull and tug that we feel. John Wesley wrote more than once that if it were up to him he would not have moved around so much, but he felt God had put it on him. He famously described his first round of field preaching with a biblical quote about submitting to be more vile by taking to the fields.

These tensions did not go away when Methodism moved across the ocean. John Wigger reports in his book Taking Heaven By Storm the social pressures on circuit riders not to take up the hard, poorly paid, and disrespected calling of itinerant preaching.

Dan Young’s mother urged him to join the Presbyterians or Baptists rather than the Methodists, and John Littlejohn’s mother threatened to disinherit him if he persisted in his preaching. Benjamin Paddock’s father found the Methodists to be “about as distasteful to him as any thing well could be.” Word that his son planned to join the itinerancy “frenzied him.” John Cooper’s father “threw a shovelfull of hot embers” on Cooper when he discovered him at prayer, but Cooper became a Methodist preacher anyway. Even the audacious Billy Hibbard has his early doubts about the Methodists. Following his conversion, Hibbard was torn between his desire for respectability and his attraction to Methodism. “I wanted to be a Congregationalist, and to be respectable. But I wanted the love and seriousness of the Methodists.”

I know in my own heart the desire for respectability. I fear that too many of us have given into that desire, to the end that Methodism itself is no longer controversial.

In his book Mainline or Methodist?, Scott Kisker argues that is precisely our problem.

We United Methodists have become a privileged lot. We are educated well beyond the majority in our society. We pay our clergy, as distinctly mainline, beyond the majority in our society. If we are to recover Methodism, freed from its addiction to the American mainstream, it will require the kind of conversion Wesley experienced that day in Bristol [when he submitted to be more vile by preaching in the open air]. It is a conversion to god and neighbor because we are witnesses to God’s ultimate kingdom of the new creation. For such a recovery, we must humble ourselves before almighty God, trust in the sacrifice and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and expect a blessing through a miraculous anointing of the Holy Spirit. Following that we must take some risky, perhaps uncomfortable steps.

The world was his parish

From a letter by John Wesley to “Mr. John Smith”

[W]herever I see one or a thousand men running into hell, be it in England, Ireland, or France, yes, in Europe, Asia, Africa, or America, I will stop them if I can: As a Minister of Christ, I will beseech them, in His name, to turn back, and be reconciled to God. Were I to do otherwise, were I to let any soul drop into the pit, whom I might have saved from everlasting burnings, I am not satisfied God would accept my plea, “Lord, he was not of my parish.”

Is your church ready to reach people?

My daughter is constantly telling me that the word “unchurched” is bad. I don’t have a better one, so here is an article about whether your church (or my church) is ready to reach unchurched people.

Blogging, Piper, & Evans

I won’t link to all the posts that go behind the link I’m about to include. The back story is simple: John Piper tweeted some biblical verses after the Oklahoma tornadoes. Rachel Held Evans sprung quickly to criticize Piper and his theology. Evans later apologized, sort of, for going off half cocked.

All that leads to this helpful post by Derek Oullette that is based in the above scenario, but I commend it to my fellow bloggers for the observations it makes about Christian blogging.

Newbigin on the false gospel

From Lesslie Newbigin’s Foolishness to the Greeks:

A preaching of the gospel that calls men and women to accept Jesus as Savior but does not make it clear that discipleship means commitment to a vision of society radically different from that which controls our public life today must be condemned as false.

Wesleyan take on predestination

Asbury Seedbed has published an excellent summary of the Wesley approach to predestination.

Read it here.

Here is the summary the post offers of the Wesleyan Arminian position on predestination:

 

• It was on the basis of these two areas of concern that Wesley advocated for his evangelical Arminian position on predestination, which can be outlined in the following six points:
  • Total depravity is affirmed by Wesley, meaning that the fallen human being is completely helpless and in bondage to sin. Contrary to popular misconception, Wesley does not believe that fallen human beings have an inherent freedom of the will.
  • The atonement is universal in scope.  Christ’s death was sufficient to atone for the sins of the whole world, not only an elect few, as proposed by five-point Calvinism.
  • Prevenient (or preceding) grace is universally available. God’s grace is present in our lives before we turn to Christ in faith, and this grace restores a measure of freedom so that we can respond to his gracious gift.  This is how Wesley could affirm that all human persons were free to respond to the gospel in spite of total depravity—but note that the freedom which humans possess is a measure of freedom (not absolute freedom in all respects), and it is freedom-by-grace, not an inherent endowment of fallen humanity.
  • Grace is resistible and can be rejected, to our own destruction.  God is actively drawing all people to himself, but his grace is not coercive.
  • Predestination is therefore based on God’s foreknowledge, not his will.  That is, God corporately predestines all those who respond in faith to salvation, and by foreknowledge he knows who will respond.  Yet the response of each person is truly theirs, because God’s foreknowledge does not cause their response.
  • Assurance of salvation is given by the Holy Spirit, who witnesses directly to our adoption as children of God through Christ, and whose fruit in our lives also provides confirmation that we are God’s children.