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| Reformation Wall, Geneva, Switzerland |
2 Corinthians 5:16-6:10
Reformation Sunday
25th October 2015
Sola scriptura. Sola
gratia. Sola fide. Solus Christus. Soli Deo gloria. These are the Five Solae, five Latin phrases that together
sum up the core theological vision of the Protestant Reformation. Scripture
alone. Grace alone. Faith alone. Christ
alone. Glory to God alone. The pillars of the
Reformation. They represent the broad theological tenets that
emerged throughout the Church’s Reformation in the early sixteenth
century. Each one is a counter claim, that is, a rejection of
prevailing theological views of the Roman Catholic Church at the
time. Scripture alone has authority, not
tradition. Grace, faith, alone, not works
righteousness. Christ, not the Pope. God’s glory, not the
glory of the Church or the glory of humanity.
These were the beliefs that rocked and then split the Church in the
early 1500s, unleashing a movement of reform that the Church had never
witnessed before or since.
Today,
as Presbyterians, as a people reformed, we are heirs of this
movement. On the 31st October 1517, in Wittenberg,
Germany, when Martin Luther (1483-1536) posted ninety-five reasons why the Church
should not be involved in the sale of indulgences, he never dreamed we would be
remembering him these many years later. Indulgences were basically certificates
one could buy to release a loved one from the confines of purgatory. One of the
indulgence sellers, Johann Tetzel (1465-1519) even came up with a little
jingle: “When the coin in the copper rings, the soul from purgatory
springs.” The proceeds were used to build St. Peter’s Basilica in
Rome. When Luther protested the sale of indulgences, he didn’t anticipate centuries
later we would be honoring his act of conscience.
On Reformation
Sunday, the Sunday closest to the 31st October, Protestants
around the world celebrate and remember the reformers: Luther in Germany, Jean
Cauvin (1509-1564) in Geneva, Ülrich Zwingli (1484-1531) and Heinrich Bullinger
(1504-1574) in Zurich, John Knox (c. 1514-1572) in St. Andrews and Edinburgh,
Scotland—we remember their passion, their commitment, their courage, their love
for the gospel and need to reform the church.
If
I could give you a walking tour of St. Andrews, I would take you to two places
in particular. I would shoud you to the
ruin of the bishop’s castle and invite you to look down at the pavement and see
two letters: GW. And then I would take you to St. Salvator’s, the University
Chapel. In the cobbles outside the chapel
are two letters: PH. These are the
initials of two men, George Wishart (1513-1546) and Patrick Hamilton
(1504-1528), who were burned at the stake for their reforming ideas.
One of my favorite places in St.
Andrews is the hill situated along the North Sea where the Martyrs Monument
stands. Inscribed on it are the names of the reformers who died for their faith
in St. Andrews. Whenever I’m back there I always make a point of going to
the monument. I find a bench and reflect
on their witness. I think of their
courage, their dedication to the gospel of Jesus Christ, what they experienced,
their commitment to these beliefs—sola scriptura, sola gatia, sola fide,
solus Christos, soli Deo gloria—and I ask could I, would I do the same?
Would you? Could you?
In
2017 we will mark the 500th anniversary of the
Reformation. Almost five hundred years on, the spirit of reform is
still alive, particularly in China and many nations in Africa. But, to be honest, in the West, it’s losing
steam. I’ve been to Geneva, the city of Calvin, twice. The
Protestant ethos is there in the people and the architecture, but the churches
are empty, which is true for most places in Europe. Iain Torrance,
who preached in this pulpit several years ago, former president of Princeton
Seminary, former moderator of the Church of Scotland, and now professor at New
College, Edinburgh, said several years ago that Reformed Christianity (the
heirs of Calvin) has lost its way. We have lost our vision.
For
several years now I’ve felt that something is seriously wrong with the Reformed
tradition. It’s been difficult to put a finger on
it. It’s more a sense, an intuition that something is
missing. Personally, to be completely honest, I’ve come to feel that
Christianity is in trouble. Yes, there are healthy and vibrant churches. I
give thanks to God for churches such as this one, and many others like it,
churches that are vital, engaged, and alive. I don’t want to be
pessimistic or negative, but you need to know that what we have here at
CPC isn’t the norm. So many churches are struggling to survive, many
are plagued by conflict (just ask a presbytery executive or a Committee on
Ministry chairperson), many have lost their focus, burnout rates among pastors
are very high, and seminaries are struggling as enrollment continues to
decline.
Several years ago, Dorothy Boulton returned from a visit to London. She
spent a day visiting Oxford and showed me a photo of a sign situated at the
entrance to the chapel of Christ Church College. It reads: “What is
the church?” The sign provides a description of Christian worship
and beliefs. Now, think about this for a
minute. You don’t have to explain what a
church is if people already
know. And you don’t have to explain what
goes on in church if people are actually
going to church, if they’re part of a church. The sign is itself a
symbol, a symbol that points to the deeper, pervasive reality that the Church
is becoming (has already become?) a relic from another time.
I’m not trying to be negative or pessimistic. Believe me. What the Church needs, however, is a healthy
dose of realism. So what do we
do? We can celebrate our past, I guess. We can
commemorate the Reformation, reaffirm our beliefs—teach our children
well—remember what makes us Protestants.
There was a time when I thought knowing what we believe and why
was enough. There was a time when I thought getting the ideas right, getting
the theology right was the cure for what ails the Church. After
twenty-five years of ministry, I’m not so sure. Don’t get me wrong,
ideas matter, theology matters. As we know, there’s a lot of loopy
theology out there in the Church these days.
What I’ve come to know is this: Tending belief is
high maintenance. Beliefs require verification, right? And then proof,
right? And argument. And then they require protection, right? We
have to defend them. Welcome
to the belligerent world of beliefs! What I’ve found in the
belligerent world of beliefs is that often the beliefs we fight about have very
little to do with the reality of God. Instead, we’re often dealing with embattled egos, beliefs as extensions of frightened egos,
beliefs used as weapons by frightened egos against people who appear threatening. All of this has absolutely nothing to do
with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
The world has grown tired of beliefs. The world knows
the costly price of dogmatic assertions and fundamentalisms of every
kind. And the world has lost faith, is quickly losing faith in what
the Church believes because the Church has failed to truly embody it—incarnate
it, enflesh it—in its practice.
I, too, have grown tired, very tired of
beliefs. Sounds odd coming from a preacher, right? That’s
how I feel.
The first Jesus followers did not have a belief system. Jesus called people to follow him, which meant
more than believing in him, more than simply confessing certain theological
ideas about him, and certainly more than an anemic ethical
do-goodism (which often passes as “Christian” these days). The first followers
of Christ had an experience of the holy; they had an encounter with the divine; they participated in the power and grace and intensity of God’s Spirit
unleashed upon the world in a new way, gospeling creation in the
flesh, in a person, in Jesus Christ, who calls humanity to embark, like him, on
a heroic journey of divine dimensions and cosmic proportions! That was the
Apostle Paul’s experience too. Whatever Paul came to
believe about Christ was first experienced in and with and through Christ
and what he continued to experience through the Spirit.
These are the rich, theological claims we find in 2
Corinthians. This is Paul at his finest, with soaring rhetoric and
sublime theology. “So, if anyone is in Christ, there is a new
creation; everything old has passed away; see, everything has become
new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and
has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ, God was
reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them,
and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us” (2 Cor. 5:17-19).
Let’s go deeper into this text.
We can dissect this text, isolate its theological claims, all the beliefs of
the church: new creation, reconciliation, ministry. We can go deeper
and say something about God’s relationship with Christ, Christ’s relationship
with God, something about the doctrine of atonement, how God dealt with
sin. Implied here, too, is Paul’s understanding of the cross,
salvation, and resurrection. All of this (and more!) is going on in
5:16-21. We can “mine” these verses for their theological claims,
come up with a list of what one might believe about the faith. To
only approach the text this way misses the point. It misses
what’s behind these theological claims. Go deeper still to what’s behind the text,
which is Paul’s own life-experience, what he came to know through his own
encounter with the Risen Christ. And this encounter didn’t happen
once but again and again throughout his life.
Hear again verse 21, “For our sake he made him to be sin who
knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of
God.” Did you hear that? “…that in him we
might become the righteousness of God.” And now listen again to 6:1,
“As we work together with him, we urge you also not to accept the grace of God
in vain.” Did you hear that? “...As we work
together with him, we urge you …not to accept the grace of God in
vain.” And then Paul continues to talk about
the nature of his ministry, a life that flows from an experience of God’s
grace, not from trust in ideas or beliefs. His wasn’t a ministry of defending
ideas or beliefs, but one urged on by the love of Christ. It’s a
life, a ministry that, right now, participates in the presence
of the Risen Christ, who enabled Paul to undergo “great endurance, in
afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors,
sleepless nights, hunger: by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of
spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God” (2 Cor.
6:4-7). And I should note that “knowledge” here is not “theoretical
understanding of theological propositions” but a deep, personal awareness of
what Paul is being called to do.[1]
The Reformed tradition has never been comfortable with personal
experience. We prefer our rational, theological systems; we prefer to think our
way to faith. We are a people of creeds and
confessions. Don’t get me wrong: there’s a place for all of
these. But if beliefs hinder us from actually experiencing the grace we say,
as Protestants, actually saves, then something is missing, something is
terribly, seriously wrong. Even Calvin, known for his
methodical, systematic thinking, developed as his personal symbol the image of
an upturned hand, an open palm holding a heart with a flame above it: a heart
set on fire offered up to God, “Promptly and Sincerely.”[2]
Even Calvin, Mr. Cerebral Theologian that he was, knew that unless the gospel
is inwardly digested, made real in hearts, as well as minds, the gospel remains
at a distance from us, far away.
The gospel needs to penetrate the psyche, become part of who we
are, shape how we see the world; it needs to be embodied in our
lives. Without this our theological beliefs are just crafty
cerebrations that do little to transform lives. And if our lives aren’t
transformed, if we ourselves aren’t reforming and always being reformed by the
Spirit of God, then how on earth can we be expected to help reform the world?
That’s why these days I’m reading less theology and more
psychology, specifically the work of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl G. Jung
(1875-1961). If you’ve noticed, I’ve
referred to him a lot over the last eight years. I’m slowly starting to write a book on Jung
and Christian experience. But this isn’t
an academic exercise for me. I believe
that Jung has a lot to offer the contemporary Church; he has a lot to say about
how we view Christian experience.
Jung was truly one of the seminal
geniuses of the twentieth century. One reason he’s so relevant to us is because
he himself was a child of the manse. His father was a Reformed
pastor. Carl came from a long line of Reformed pastors and
professors. Carl learned the catechism from his father; he read
widely from his father’s library, he was confirmed in the church. But when he
first partook of Communion as an adolescent, he said it was a lifeless
experience, both for him and seemingly everyone else sitting around
him. Jung knew that his father was depressed, and he lost the zeal of
his faith. His father knew the creeds, knew the beliefs of the
church, regurgitated them in sermons week after week, but they didn’t touch the
depths of his soul. Carl, himself, had profound religious experiences as a
child. He always had a fire in his belly for the
divine. Jung eventually collaborated with Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
in the emerging field of psychoanalysis, but in the end it was the question of
religion, the experience of the holy, the numinous, that led to their painful
break. Freud wanted nothing to do with religion (he saw it as a
source of neurosis); for Jung, the psyche was and is essentially religious.[3]
 |
| C. G. Jung in his study in Kusnacht, near Zurich. |
The last thirty years of Jung’s life were spent exploring the
psychological aspects of Christianity. He was very critical of
theologians. Jung knew then, in the 1930s, that the church was in
trouble; he knew that Christianity was in trouble. So he approached
Christianity as if it were a patient in need of therapy.[4] He
wanted to help heal the church, heal Christianity. Why? Because
he saw it as the best hope for humanity. And he wanted to help heal
the Protestant soul, which he knew was sick, especially in Europe after the
Second World War. The Protestant soul is still in need of deep
healing.
In a famous interview with the BBC in 1959, Jung was asked, “Dr.
Jung, do you believe in God.” After pausing for a moment, he said,
“I don’t believe. I know.”[5] I know—knowledge rooted in
experience. Jung said, “The Churches stand for traditional and
collective convictions which in the case of many of its adherents are no longer
based on their own inner experience but on unreflecting belief,
which is notoriously apt to disappear as soon as one begins thinking about it.”[6] This is why Jung said that “Christian civilization
has proved hollow to a terrifying degree: it is all veneer, but the inner man
has remained untouched and therefore unchanged. His soul is out of
key with his external beliefs;….”[7]
The strongest indictment of Christianity was the fact that so-called
“Christian” Europe tore itself apart, and the world with it, in not one but two
cataclysmic world wars. “Christian
education,” Jung said, “has done all that is humanly possible, but it has not
been enough. Too few people have experienced the divine image as the
innermost possession of their own souls. Christ only meets them from
without, never from within the soul.”[8]
Jung insisted, “The advocates of Christianity squander their
energies in the mere preservation of what had come down to them, with no
thought of building on their house and making it roomier.”[9] I
think Jung is right.
The Church of Jesus Christ is not a museum. We’re not a historical preservation
society. We’re called to reform—reformed by the Spirit who is calling us to a new day. We need to
become roomier, building new homes in which the human spirit can thrive. We’re
not called to preserve the past or live in the past. Christ is alive. Christ is
at work within us, now.
It’s in the soul, in the heart, in the core of our being where
the reformation of God’s love and grace must be experienced in radically new
ways, in order for it to be seen in the world, in order for the world to be
reformed all for the glory of God. “In Christ there
is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become
new!” Reformed and always being reformed. When we experience
the ongoing reforming power of God’s grace—not just believe in it, but know it,
feel it, experience it—then the Church will really have something profound and
meaningful and relevant to offer the world again.
May it be
so. Amen.
[1] Ernest Best, Second
Corinthians-Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Louisville: John
Knox Press, 1987), 61.
[2] Calvin’s personal motto: “I offer my heart
to thee O Lord, promptly and sincerely.” (Cor
Meum Tibi Offero Domine Prompte Et Sincere).
[3] See Carl G. Jung, Memories, Dreams,
Reflections, Aniela Jaffé, editor (New York: Vintage Books, 2011).
[4] See Murray Stein, Jung’s Treatment of
Christianity: The Psychotherapy of a Religious Tradition (Chiron
Publications, 1986).
[6] C. G. Jung, “The Undiscovered Self (Present
and Future),” Civilization in Transition, Collected
Works of C. G. Jung 10, par. 521 (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1978).
[7] C. G. Jung, “Introduction to the Religious and
Psychological Problems of Alchemy,” Psychology and Alchemy, Collected
Works of C. G. Jung 12, par. 12 (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1977).
[8] C. G. Jung, CW 12, par 12.
[9] C. G. Jung, Aion: Researches into the
Phenomenology of the Self, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, 9,
II, par. 170 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).
