Works Righteousness

I have never believed in works righteousness. But it is only through the process of studying for my qualifying exams that I have come to truly hate it, and to sympathize with Luther’s vehement loathing of anything that smacked of it.

Allow me to explain.

At my university, we do qualifying exams as part of our Ph.D. program, like everybody else. My division has four written exams over set bibliographies and an oral examination where you retract defend your written essays. It is a fairly infrequent occurrence for someone to fail. Only students who’ve been around for some time can remember anyone by name, and most of my contemporaries know of only one story. Still, if you do fail, there’s no second chance. Your enrollment in the program is terminated. So you can imagine that even though one’s odds of failing are very slight, it’s hard not to be pretty nervous. And by nervous, I mean terrified.

For much of the last six months or so, as I’ve been preparing, I’ve had occasion to reflect on what the prospect of failure (however unlikely) means for me. Most of that has been on what it means for me as a person, how the possibility has to be embraced in order to ever do anything, how one’s sense of worth can’t be contingent on one’s success in one’s various endeavors, etc. And I’m pretty good on that count. But the other night, I woke up and it suddenly occurred to me that however okay I was with it psychologically, it would mean suddenly finding myself unemployed in the Great Economic Downturn of 2008-200920102011. My livelihood at the moment is my stipend from my school, and if my enrollment in the school came to an abrupt end, so would my income.

Like I said, it’s highly improbable that I would fail. But even after praying myself down off that very figurative ledge, I was quite resolved to do absolutely everything in my power to be sufficiently prepared. So I’ve gone back and re-checked out couple books that I’d just skimmed, figured out when I’ll read a few that I was planning to just skim, realized that there aren’t enough hours in the day or days left in the week (that’s a literal week; the exams start a week from tomorrow) to read and process everything I’d like. So I find myself asking how much is enough. I want to have mastered as many of these texts as possible. I don’t want to do the bare minimum. But when push comes to shove, and with my present livelihood on the line (not to mention my career in this field), how much is enough to not get kicked out?

So if you know Luther or any other strain of Protestant theology, you can probably see where this is going. I am reminded of Luther’s anxieties over his salvation prior to his eureka moment with Romans 1:17. He believed, like any good late medieval Catholic, that one must be holy to see the Lord (that much is scriptural, see Heb. 12:14). And for him, that meant not only being in a state of grace through baptism and penance, but dying in a state of grace, and then being purged of one’s sins in purgatory. So how do you get into and stay in a state of grace? How much penance did you have to do? How many works of piety and mercy were required to make God disposed to give you the gift of perseverance, so you could get into at least purgatory when you died?

Luther’s breakthrough came when he realized that there was no humanly possible way to bridge the gap between God and humanity. One can do nothing to merit grace. It’s called grace because it’s entirely unmerited. God has done absolutely everything involved in salvation. God imputes Christ’s righteousness to the sinner based on faith, and even this faith is a gift of God. Humans always want to be able to contribute something, to think they had something to do with it. But it the scandal of it is that there is nothing about salvation that is not a gift (this has a slightly different nuance in Wesleyan theology. We’ll talk about that some other time. I’m pretty Lutheran today).

I fear (at certain moments) rejection by my school, which is also my community, and being deprived of a paycheck and a certain career. Luther feared being rejected by God and being deprived of eternal blessedness (and subjected to eternal torment). As I agonize over how much is enough to prove my merit as a scholar (a cruel irony that I study the grace of God, but have to prove my merit), I am thankful that I do not have to live my life wondering if I’ve done enough not to be rejected by God. My admission to candidacy and continuance in this program depends on me showing that I am good enough. My salvation does not.

And given how agonizing this test is, even though I will almost certainly pass it, I find that I don’t just think that any theology is wrong that makes my salvation almost but not entirely certain (and therefore dependent in some some small measure on my ability to prove my worth). I find it utterly abhorrent, and censure it not as an unfortunate misunderstanding, but a damnable error, a snare of the devil. But thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”

Seeing as I managed to post all of four times in 2010 (two of them in January), it’s safe to say I haven’t been very good about this. WordPress has a post-a-week challenge they’re trying to promote. I will no doubt fail in this endeavor, but it’s a nice idea, and I will be more at leisure to do so once I take my exams (which start two weeks from tomorrow). So why not? Cause let’s face it, it’s embarrassing when you only have to scroll down a bit to get to posts from two years ago.

Against Truisms, Platitudes and (Unless You’re Careful) Tweets

I was just looking at a twitter feed, @EssentialChurch, which is apparently promoting a book on reaching out to church “dropouts” (not a bad way to phrase the problem of attracting/retaining young adults). Many of the tweets are about a missional or outward focus. For instance:

The most outwardly focused churches are many times the healthiest on the inside.

A missional church thinking outwardly usually is a healthy church inwardly.

Fair enough. I bring your attention to this because they are the sorts of things one hears a lot these days in many churches, and there is an obvious truth to them. You hear this, and even though it’s quite vague, you can’t help but nod. The church exists for the sake of its mission, they seem to be saying. We need to spend less time on inward focused things like denominational polity and the color of paint in the sanctuary and more time on reaching out and connecting with the things people actually care about. And who could dispute this? My guess is that even the people who make every church meeting so miserable by turning each trivial decision into an epic battle agree with it in principle.

But what I noticed was that both of these aphorisms could be inverted, and they would also express a truth. For example, we might say that churches that are focused on prayer and searching the scripture tend to have the most effective mission. Churches that listen to the word God speaks within might have the most powerful outreach. Doesn’t quite have the ring to it, but you get the idea. Christians of some eras have been most moved by interiority. I assume I’m not saying anything radical when I note that it’s not really a question of outreach or formation. One generation may get more excited about the one than the other, but you can’t have one without the other.

My point is only to say that we have to be careful about thinking in shorthand. Slogans have their place, and some churches have made very effective use of tweets and Facebook statuses. But we have to be sure that we don’t mistake a good one-liner for the whole story, or one generation’s truism for the truth. I fear that in our laudable efforts to employ current marketing techniques for evangelistic ends, we create echo chambers.

The Bible actually has something like a Twitter feed in the book of Proverbs. But it doesn’t just keep driving home a single message over and over. The individual proverbs supplement each other, nuance each other, sometimes contradict each other. “Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit” (Prov. 26:4-5). You see how you would be missing something essential if you only read one or the other of those verses? A good aphorism is more than a truism, good preaching is more than platitudes, and good exhortation more than cheer leading.

Tweet 140 characters at at time if you must, but don’t think that way!