Holistic Spirituality

200px-Tullian TchividjianOne of the most common questions that come my way is how the concept of "heavenly rewards" fits into a proper understanding of justification by grace alone. Over at Liberate, my friend (and theologian-in-residence) Jono Linebaugh offers a robust theological framework for how to understand this apparent conundrum:

The champions of justification by grace through faith, from Paul to the Protestant reformers, have always confessed that Christ "will come again to judge the living and the dead." For many, however, this double affirmation of justification by grace and judgment according to works raises an honest question: If Jesus is the basis for our justification, how can our works play a role in our judgment? If, as 1 Corinthians 1:30 puts it, "Christ is our righteousness," how can anything we do receive a reward? The history of trying to answer questions like these is a tale of much spilled ink (and blood). According to Dane Ortlund's helpful taxonomy, there are at least fourteen different ways that scholars have attempted to coordinate justification by grace and judgment according to works. The extent of this discussion and debate means that this short reflection cannot pretend to offer a definitive analysis. Instead, what this post hopes to provide is an outline of how to explore this question by considering the relationship between justification and final judgment under three headings: 1) The comfort of Christ's coming, 2) Jesus as the basis for God's justifying judgment, and 3) Christ's righteousness and our rewards.

The Comfort of Christ's Coming

Question 52 of the Heidelberg Catechism asks, "What comfort is it to thee, that 'Christ shall come again to judge the quick and the dead?'" The hopefulness of this question may seem unnatural. The biblical descriptions of the Day of the Lord, whether in the Old Testament prophets, the synoptic Gospels, Paul, or Revelation, depict a "great and terrible day." In 1 Thessalonians, this day is a day of wrath and destruction (5:3; cf. Rom 2:5), and the recurring image of fire seems to evoke fear faster than faith. 1 Thessalonians, however, is a letter of hope, addressing suffering Christians with the comfort that the Day of Lord will be, for them, the day of deliverance (5:9). Picking up on this scriptural orientation, the Heidelberg Catechism says that Christ's second coming is a comfort because "in all my sorrows and persecutions...I look for the very same person who before offered himself, for my sake, to the tribunal of God, and hath removed all curse from me, to come as judge from heaven." In other words, the fundamental reason why Christ's coming is a comfort is that it is Christ who is coming. As Thomas Watson puts it in A Body of Divinity, Jesus' coming as judge "will be comfortable to the righteous" because "He will come as a friend." It is, as Watson continues, "he who loves them, and prayed for them, [who] is their judge; he who is their husband is their judge." It is Jesus, the one who "loved me and gave himself for me" (Gal 2:20), who is coming as judge. This is the reason –because it is the "friend of sinners" who is coming to judge the quick and the dead – that we can answer Sam Gamgee's question to Gandalf with hope: "Is everything sad going to come untrue?" Yes, we can say, because Jesus is the judge, and his coming is the comfortable day when God will "wipe every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore" (Rev 22:2; cue Mumford & Sons, "After the Storm").

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Jesus as the Basis for God's Justifying Judgment

Here's an important rule of theology: Talk about justification is talk about final judgment. As Peter Stuhlmacher, on the basis of numerous published investigations of the Old Testament and early Jewish literature, writes, "The place of justification is (final) judgment." (For those interested in such things, scholars like Simon Gathercole and the late Friedrich Avemarie have shown that inattention to eschatological judgment as the context of justification in early Jewish literature is a major deficiency in the interpretation of the soteriology of Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism in the tradition of E.P. Sanders' 1977 Paul and Palestinian Judaism.) When Paul introduces justification in Romans it is within a discussion of the day when "God's righteous judgment will be revealed" (2:5). This day is the day of judgment, the time when "[God] will repay each one according to their works" (2:6). Hence the first "doctrine of justification" in Romans: "the doers of the law will be justified" (2:13). The future tense of the verb and the contextualization of this justification as taking place on the day of judgment (2:5-10, 16) suggests that for Paul, as for his Jewish forbearers and contemporaries, justification occurs at the final judgment.

But then Paul says something strange: "By works of the law no human being will be justified" (Rom 3:20). The context here, as the repeated future tense indicates, is still future judgment, but on the basis of the criterion specified in Romans 2:13 (i.e. doing the law), Paul now concludes that final judgment will result in non-justification. This seems to be the end of the road. Justification, Paul concludes, is impossible. But then, "from depths of woe" (Psalm 130), Paul proclaims the impossible possibility: there is a future because there is forgiveness. To paraphrase the well-known words of Romans 3:21-26, believing sinners are now justified as a gift through God's judgment against sin that is the death of Jesus. But notice what's happened. Whereas Romans 2 describes a future justification for doers of the law, Romans 3:21ff announces the present justification of sinners. In Romans 2, the present is a period of "patience" (2:4) with the "revelation of God's righteousness judgment" on the horizon; in Romans 3:21-26, the period of "patience" is past (3:25) and the death of Jesus and the justification of sinners it effects is the manifestation (v. 21), demonstration (vv. 25, 26), and establishment (v. 26b) of God's righteousness in history. What Romans 2, and early Judaism more broadly, looks for in the future, Romans 3:21ff declares to have already occurred in the death of Jesus. The "now" of the cross is the "day of wrath" (2:5), but God's righteousness is revealed in the merciful surprise of atonement that judges ungodliness and thereby justifies the ungodly. (This pattern of announced judgment being enactment in the crucifixion of Jesus is also at work in the Gospels as Jesus' apocalyptic discourses [e.g. Matt 24-25, Mark 13] are proleptically realized at Golgotha as the death of Jesus is narrated as an apocalyptic event [e.g. the darkness over the land, the shaking of the earth, and the opening of tombs, all elements associated with the eschaton and final judgment in Jewish apocalyptic literature, see Matt 27:45-54; Mark 15:33; Luke 23:44; cf. John 19:28-30]. For a remarkable illustration of the cross as the already executed judgment of God, read the story of the two duck hunters).

What this all means is that justification is God's final judgment. As Wilfried Joest writes, "there is no second decision after justification." In the language of the Reformation, the "sole and sufficient basis" for our justification before God's eschatological tribunal is Jesus Christ (solus Christus), freely given (sola gratia) to sinners in the word (solo verbo) that creates the faith (sola fide) to which Christ is present. In Jesus, God's future word has invaded the present in such a way that, by faith, we know the future: "Who shall bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justified. Who is to condemn? It is Christ who died" (Rom 8:33-34).

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Christ's Righteousness and Our Reward

The standard reformational way to talk about the relationship between justification and judgment takes its cue from Paul's prepositions: justification is through/by (διά/ἐκ) faith and judgment is according to (κατά + accusative) works. This pattern of speech makes a theological point: the basis or grounds of our justification is Jesus Christ, the righteous one, who is received through/by faith; the evidence or testimony of God's love evoking love is the fruit produced by the Holy Spirit. This means that whereas justification (i.e. God's final judgment verdict, announced in the present) is based on Jesus' righteousness given in the word and received through faith, the judgment referred to in passages like Romans 14:10-12 and 2 Corinthians 5:10 will correspond to the fruits of faith produced by the Spirit – and this because "he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ" (Phil 1:6).

That our judgment according to works does not determine our salvation is evident in 1 Corinthians 3:12-15. Paul portrays the judgment ("the Day," as he calls it) as a testing of "each one's works." This was a common image in early Jewish texts. In the Testament of Abraham, for example, "the archangel Puruel...tests human works by fire." The double-result of this testing is that if the works are consumed "the angel of judgment immediately seizes the person and takes them to the place of sinners, a most bitter place of punishment." Conversely, "if the fire approves the work of anyone...the person is justified, and the angel of righteousness takes them up to be saved" (Test. Abr. 13). The imagery here is similar to 1 Corinthians 3, but the understanding of salvation couldn't be more different. In the Testament of Abraham, a person is punished or justified based on their works: if works are consumed, punishment; if works are approved, justification. Paul tells a different salvation story: the fire of judgment will test the quality of human works, but even if a person's work is "burned up...he himself will be saved" (1 Cor 3:13-15). For Paul, as we saw above, the declaration that we are righteous results not from our works but from the finished fact that because "God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us" we can, in him, "become the righteousness of God" (2 Cor 5:21). 1 Corinthians 3 helps to settle that question, but it also raises another one.

1 Corinthians 3:14 says, "If the work that anyone has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward." But if the person whose work is burned up is still saved and if our righteousness is not a reward for work (Rom 4:4-5), what is the relationship between Christ's righteousness and this reward, between our justification and this judgment? There is a temptation when considering this kind of question to say more than we can. The truth is Scripture doesn't (and in keeping with Scripture, the Reformation confessions don't) provide a lot of detail here. Romans 2:16 and 1 Corinthians 4:5, like the image of the opening of books in Revelation 20:12, indicate the day of judgment is day of disclosure, a revealing of that which has been "hidden." But again, this unveiling is, for the Christian, a comfort: Christ is our righteousness (1 Cor 1:30) and God's future verdict has been announced in the present tense in Jesus' name. And it is this righteousness, the righteousness of another given to us in the gospel, that makes talk of rewards possible.

This works in two directions. First, as Calvin says, "that the deeds of the pious are approved is not by any means owing to their perfection, but it is because the imperfection and deficiency are not reckoned to their account." In other words, God approves the imperfect fruits of faith because in Jesus he forgives our faults. In this sense, our works, as Ursinus notes, are not rewarded because they are "meritorious;" they are approved because God is merciful. But God does more than forgive the faults in our feeble works of love; he actively delights in the fruit he produces. And so, second, "after he has received us into favor," Calvin says (speaking about the priority of justification), "he receives our works also by a gracious acceptance." And then he adds this key phrase: "It is on this that the reward hinges." In other words, the reward hinges on the justification effected in Jesus that both forgives sins (blotting out the faults of "good" works) and bestows the righteousness of the only One to whom God can say, "In you I am well pleased" (Mark 1:11) and "Well done, good and faithful servant" (Matt 25:21, 23).

Bringing these themes together, we can say that God rewards good works not because they are exclusively good (they are not) and thus deserve to be rewarded (they do not). Rather, God's reward flows from the double-reality that he "does not count our sins against us" and in Jesus graciously accepts the imperfect fruit of our faith. And, because this fruit is the fruit of the Spirit, because it is God who both began and will complete his good work, "God does not crown your merit as merit," as Augustine once said; "He crowns nothing else but His own gifts."

http://liberatenet.org/2013/08/12/the-good-news-of-final-judgment-2/

 

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  • I Lift My Hands

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Hidden Blessings

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  • Wilberforce, Hollywood's Amazing Grace, Charlotte Allen +

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  • Making Beauty out of Ugly Things: Grace by U2 +

    Grace, she takes the blame She covers the shame Removes the stain It could be her name Grace, she carries Read More
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