Does the system of Reformed Theology lead to Apollinarianism?

A problem with a form of Protestant Reformed theology that understands the condition of humanity post-fall as being so utterly corrupted in our thinking that we cannot fathom how reality was perceived for Adam pre-fall is that it is a manifestation of Apollinarianism. Yet, for the incarnate Son of God to have been tempted in every respect as we are, able to sympathize with our weaknesses, he must have not only experienced the world as Adam did, but be able to share in the experiences of this world as post-fall humanity does. An aspect of the Apollinarian heresy is that

What does it mean to be perfect?

“You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” – Matthew 5:48

When teleios is translated as “perfect” the feel of the text is that there is a standard that one has to live up to with an emphasis on flawless living. While certainly a sinless life is the ideal goal, there is background narrative of a Law/standard that tugs at the heart of this translation directing the reader away from God as Father toward God as strict Judge. To the extent that the standard is a reflection of God’s character who is love, and with recognition that all the commandments can be understood as loving God and loving neighbor, living up to the Law/standard is certainly perfection. With this said, the feel of such a translation still leaves the reader with a faulty image of God in the text and needs quite a bit of systematics in order to arrive at the end to which the passage points.

Yet, if teleios is translated as “complete” or “fully mature” then the idea that is conveyed is that Man’s goal is to be like their Father, fully grown up, imaging God as they were designed to in the beginning. The idea is that the goal, the end, the completeness of full maturity is to be entirely like God. This is theosis. The idea here is that the one sharing in the divine nature has been filled completely by God, sanctified through and through in their whole spirit, soul, and body. This is the perfection of the Father that Jesus calls, rather demands, his hearers to attain, and the full maturity that Paul speaks of in Ephesians 4:13.

Repetition of word/phrases as lessons – (John 1:35-51) – Following Jesus

            When two disciples of John the Baptist begin to follow Jesus, he turns to them asking what they are seeking. They simply reply with another question, “where are you staying?” To which Jesus responds, “Come and you will see.” Later, when Philip, finds Nathanael and informs him that they have found the one whom Moses and the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, though Nathanael baulks at anything good coming from such a place, Philip responds, “Come and see.” 

It is interesting to note, that the first to follow Jesus do so because of the testimony of John who bore witness to the Lamb of God, who was the one to be revealed to Israel. After this, Jesus calls His disciples to follow Him. Only Andrew and another disciple follow Jesus in the beginning because of the witness of John.

In addition to this, we see Philip is mimicking Jesus in that the text tells us that, “the next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, ‘Follow me.’” Next, we read, “Philip found Nathanael” and seeks to bring him to Jesus. In chapter 1, between verses 41 – 45, we read the word “found” five times. This is a lot of repetition in such a short span. The finding pattern begins with Andrew who first found his brother Simon and told him that they had found the Messiah. Jesus then finds Philip who finds Nathanael, telling him that they had found the one spoken of by Moses and the prophets.

A clear observation from this seems to be that from the beginning of Jesus’ ministry the idea to follow Jesus is to mimic His life and mirror your life after His.

Salvation for you and me

What if God’s goal for humanity is both peace with himself and peace with one another?  The two greatest commandments seemed to indicate such a thought.  Whereas one wing of the Christian community has emphasized a person’s own individual salvation as the chief end of the gospel proclamation, often put in terms of invitation. The other end of the spectrum places the focus on the corporate service aspect and Thy kingdom come as the chief end of the gospel.  Maybe this is why God unites the two together in the issue of forgiveness.  A person can no more receive and retain the forgiveness of God who does not forgive his neighbor.  You cannot have peace with God, claiming to love him, if you don’t love your brother.

Light in the darkness, death has no sting, and the work of new creation

It is easy to give up.

When one is in a valley, unless they have sent the shout from the mountain to echo its way for those in dark times, it is easy for the sin of forgetfulness to take over, blind, and misguide oneself.

If hope is loss, selfishness takes root. Nietzsche becomes correct, power becomes all, and it is perfectly natural and logical to despair.

But as any good parent tells their children, the world does not revolve around us (leaving aside the scientific notion that in space, the only reference point is the one you choose).  God has created a world that is good. The story told is that sin has infected the whole created order, and evil, destruction, and ultimately the power of death has spread throughout the universe.

If this was all, we could look around and complain about why a good and all powerful God could allow evil to continue, until we were honest with ourselves and realized that we too are part of that problem, with a strand of evil running down the center of us all.

Then one day, when, through various moves of the pieces, all the forces of evil were gathered together: political, religious, social, personal, and supernatural – altogether condemning a man, damning, or better said, cursing, God-Incarnate on a tree of his own making.  And having come together in one place, the forces of darkness, those enfleshed in human institutions and individuals, were themselves dealt with, disarmed, and made a spectacle so that sin no longer has its power, for the one crucified, rose from the grave and overcame the greatest enemy of us all – death.

Jesus the Messiah, the one called Christ, was the firstborn of a new creation in which he is collecting with those who follow him, who have themselves been declared new creations, forgiven, and instructed to walk in the light of the dawn of a new heavens and new earth already begun.  For we walk by faith not by sight.  Indeed, we are not only to live in light of this fantastic reality but to work towards and pray for the fulness of the kingdom as we seek to destroy the vestiges of evil in our own lives and seek justice and mercy and forgiveness for the world around us.

‘This is, by the way, why genuine Christian theology is itself a redemptive activity. The effort to understand and articulate the way in which the Creator is gloriously right both to have made the world in the first place and to have redeemed it in just this way is itself part of the stewardly vocation of genuine human existence, bringing God’s order into the minds and hearts of others and thereby enabling people both to worship the true God and to serve his continuing purposes.’

– N.T. Wright “Evil and the Justice of God”  

Prayers for the dead in the New Testament?

In a previous post I mentioned having gone through all the named individuals in the letters of Paul, and what stood out to me was the remarkable amount of space given to one Onesiphorus in the 2nd letter to Timothy chapter 1:16-18″

16 May the Lord grant mercy to qthe household of Onesiphorus, for he often rrefreshed me and was not ashamed of smy chains, 17 but when he arrived in Rome the searched for me earnestly and found me—18 may the Lord grant him to find mercy from the Lord on uthat Day!—and you well know all the service he vrendered at Ephesus.

Onesiphorus, is remembered by Paul for having often refreshed him, and for not being ashamed of Paul’s chains.  He had searched earnestly for Paul when the later arrived in Rome, until he found him.  Thus Paul prayed for Onesiphorus’ household that the Lord grant mercy to them, but then he prays that the Lord grant Onesiphorus to find mercy from the Lord on that Day (judgment?).  Paul ends his little excursus on Onesiphorus with a reminder to Timothy of all the service the man had rendered in Ephesus. This man, more than any other person named by Paul in all his letters, receives the most attention, and the very odd thing about this, is that the man is referred to in the past tense as if he has past on, as if he has died.  Look through all the other named individuals that Paul talks about in his letters and see if there is anyone like this man.

Named individuals (acquaintances) in the letters of St. Paul

I was reading in St. Paul’s second letter to Timothy about a certain Onesiphorus, and the past tenses connected with Paul’s prayer for him, as well as the distinction between the man and his household, and this way of referencing the man started bothering me.  So I looked up all the named individuals (acquaintances) of Paul in his letters and here is what I found. [Note: I did not included named historical figures such as Adam, Abraham, Moses, David, etc., or even the risen Lord Jesus Christ, but only those whom Paul and his audience know or have had interaction.]

The Letter to “those in Rome who are loved by God and called to be saints” (Romans):

Phoebe, a deacon of the church at Cenchreae (16:1)

Prisca and Aquila, Paul’s fellow workers in Christ Jesus who risked … (16:3)

Epaenetus is to be greeted, & happened to be the first convert in Asia (16:6)

Mary worked hard for the Roman church (16:6)

Adronicus is to be greeted as Paul’s fellow kinsmen (Jew?) & prisoner (16:7)

Hagar the righteous

In Genesis 16 there are clear parallels to Genesis 3 and the Fall of Adam.  In the second story, Abram is another Adam and Sarai is another Woman (Eve).  Abram “listens to the voice of his wife,” (Gen. 3:17; 16:2) who has apparently twisted in her mind the word of the LORD to Abram and she “took” her slave, Hagar, and “gave” this forbidden fruit to her “husband” ( Gen. 3:6; 16:3).  Once Hagar “saw” that she had conceived (received) fruit in her womb she “looked” upon her mistress in contempt.  Hagar has looked upon the nakedness of Abram and she treated Sarai shamefully (Gen. 3:7; 16:4).  The story continues as Abram is challenged by Sarai for what has happened as a result of his sin, Sarai  and he in turn tells her, “the woman whom you gave to be with me” is the problem (Gen. 3:12; 16:6). Interestingly enough, the manner that Sarai rebukes Abram is by calling the LORD to judge (discern) between them.  In Genesis, from chapter 1 and following, seeing is connected to discerning or making judgements.  Indeed, God saw that all He had made was very good. Often times we think He said, and in the sense that the text is the word of God, He did.

Back to the story, so far, as the story parallels the original Fall, Abram, Sarai, and Hagar are acting in the flesh (Gal. 4:23), but the story turns in differing directions when the LORD confronts the slave who has fled (hid) to the wilderness.  In the original account, Adam is beckoned by God with the words, “Where are you?” to which he replied, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.” [fun side note: in the English translation of the LXX it says, “. . . Adam and his wife hid themselves within the tree in the middle of the garden . . .] In the Hagar account, the LORD found Hagar by a spring of water in the wilderness and says to her, “Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?” to which Hagar confesses that she is fleeing from her mistress. She is then blessed with the blessing of the Woman to come, “Behold, you are pregnant and shall bear a son. You shall call his name Ishmael” (Gen. 16:11; Isa.7:14; Mt. 1:23).

It seems as if Hagar sees the Lord Jesus, is honest with him and receives blessing (Gen. 16:13). She calls the place where the LORD spoke to her, “You are a God of seeing . . . truly here I have seen him who looks after me” (Gen. 16:13).  The LORD has listened to Sarai’s call to judge and He has seen Hagar and blessed her.

The interesting flip in the story is that as the narrative unfolds, Isaac from Sarah, not Ishmael from Hagar, will be the one to receive the covenant (Gen. 17:18-19 – for fun compare the NIV and ESV on these verses), and Sarah represents the faithful mother to the free covenant children while Hagar is the mother of the covenant of slaves (Gal. 4:21ff).

So does Hagar end up as the righteous slave? It seems she did.

A son of thunder gets to call down fire after all

In his playfully insightful investigation into the humanity of Jesus, The Jesus We Missed, Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon often provides observations that simply bring a jarred smile to the readers face.  Here is one that did it for me.  In Luke’s Gospel we have a scene where the two sons of Zebedee, James and John, ask the Lord if he desired them to command fire to come down from heaven and consume the Samaritans for not receiving Jesus as he journeyed to Jerusalem.  In Mark’s account, these brothers receive both a rebuke and nicknames from Jesus, sons of thunder, hotheads, and the name sticks.

Here is where Reardon’s insights play out.  

Luke, who describes the wrath of Zebedee’s sons against the Samaritans, also tells the ironic “second half” of the story, when he comes to the Samaritan mission in the Acts of the Apostles.  After Philip baptized the Samaritans, Luke tells us, the church at Jerusalem “sent Peter and John to them, who, when they had come down, prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit.”

Luke relished the irony of it: John bar Zebedee had wanted fire from heaven to fall on the Samaritans.  He got his wish! The church at Jerusalem sent him – when the time was right – as one of its delegates to call down on the Samaritans the true fire from heaven – the Holy Spirit (41).

On defining and describing what Christians mean by Salvation: A Summary

I recently came across a community that was attempting to rework their statement of faith in particularly on the statement of salvation.  The refined statement read:

By trusting in Christ alone, sinners participate in a great exchange, according to which God credits their sin to Christ and Christ’s righteousness to them from the moment they believe. Therefore, on the Day of Judgment, God will accept the believer, not on the basis of any good wrought in them or worked out by them, but solely on account of what Christ has already done for them.

This definition has some great points to it that I want to highlight.

1)   faith in Christ is properly recognized to be more than mental ascent but a trusting in Christ as the only name under heaven by which we must be saved

2)   the sinner’s sin is taken up by Christ (implying His righteous life, sacrificial death, and justifying resurrection)

3)   it emphasizes that a sinner is righteous based on Christ’s righteousness (though I would disagree on the notion that the status simply remains on the sinner without effect)

With the above stated, I think this definition is deficient in many ways: