Love Drives Genuine Transformation

Only love is capable of genuine transformation. Willpower is inadequate. Even spiritual effort is not up to the task. If we are to become great lovers, we must return again and again to the great love of the Great Lover. Thomas Merton reminds us that the root of Christian love is not the will to love but the faith to believe that one is deeply loved by God. Returning to that great love—a love that was there for us before we experienced any rejection and that will be there for us after all other rejections take place—is our true spiritual work.

 

Ignatius of Loyola suggests that sin is ultimately a refusal to believe that what God wants is my happiness and fulfillment. When I fail to believe this, I am tempted to sin—to take my life into my own hands, assuming that I am in the best position to determine what will lead to my happiness. As I become convinced that God wants nothing more than my fulfillment, surrender to his will is increasingly possible.

 

Properly understood, these three intended destinations of the journey—becoming a great lover, becoming whole and holy, and becoming my true self-in-Christ—demonstrate just how radical Christian spiritual transformation really is.

 

 - David G. Benner, Sacred Companions: The Gift of Spiritual Friendship Direction, 2009.

Becoming Our True Self-in-Christ

Pennington suggests that Christ’s temptations in the wilderness were temptations to live out of such a false center. First the tempter invited him to turn stones into bread. But Jesus said no to the invitation to establish himself on the basis of his doing. Then the tempter invited him to throw himself from the top of the temple into the crowds below, so they would immediately recognize him as the Messiah. Again Jesus rejected the temptation. He chose not to base his identity on the acclaim of others. Finally the tempter offered him all the kingdoms of the world. But once again Jesus rejected the offer, refusing to find his identity in possessions or power.

Jesus knew who he was before God and in God. He could therefore resist temptations to live his life out of a false center based on possessions, actions or the esteem of others.

Merton suggests that at the core of our false ways of being there is always a sinful refusal to surrender to God’s will.

My reluctance to find my identity and fulfillment in Christ leaves me vulnerable to living out of a false center. It leaves me no alternative but to create a self of my own making. This is where the problem begins. The self I am called from eternity to be has meaning only in relation to Christ. The unique self that I am called to be is never a self I simply dream up and decide I’d like to be. It is always and only the self that I actually am in Christ. This is my eternal self. This is the self I am intended to be. This is the only self that will allow me to be truly whole and holy.

- David G. Benner, Sacred Companions: The Gift of Spiritual Friendship Direction, 2009.

 

Becoming Whole and Holy

The purpose of salvation is to make whole that which is broken. The Christian spiritual journey settles for nothing less than such wholeness. But genuine wholeness cannot occur apart from holiness. In The Holiness of God, R. C. Sproul notes that the pattern of God’s transforming encounters with humans is always the same. God appears; humans respond with fear because of their sin; God forgives our sins and heals us (holiness and wholeness); God then sends us out to serve him. This means that holiness and wholeness are the interrelated goals of the Christian spiritual journey. Holiness is the goal of the spiritual journey because God is holy and commands that we be holy (Leviticus 11:44).

Holiness involves taking on the life and character of a holy God by means of a restored relationship to him. This relationship heals our most fundamental disease—our separation from our Source, our Redeemer, the Great Lover of our soul. This relationship is therefore simultaneously the source of our holiness and of our wholeness.

Human beings were designed for intimate relationship with God and cannot find fulfillment of their true and deepest self apart from that relationship. Holiness does not involve the annihilation of our identity with a simple transplant of God’s identity. Rather, it involves the transformation of our self, made possible by the work of God’s Spirit within us. Holiness is becoming like the God with whom we live in intimate relationship. It is acquiring his Spirit and allowing spirit to be transformed by Spirit. It is finding and living our life in Christ, and then discovering that Christ’s life and Spirit are our life and spirit. This is the journey of Christian spiritual transformation. This is the process of becoming whole and holy.

 - David G. Benner, Sacred Companions: The Gift of Spiritual Friendship Direction, 2009.

We Are Rebels

You see, in our time we have over-emphasized the psychology of the sinner’s condition. We spend much time describing the woe of the sinner, the grief of the sinner and the great burden he carries. He does have all of these, but we have over-emphasized them until we forget the principal fact—that the sinner is actually a rebel against properly constituted authority! 

That is what makes sin, sin. We are rebels. We are sons of disobedience. Sin is the breaking of the law and we are in rebellion and we are fugitives from the just laws of God while we are sinners.
 
So it is with sinners. Certainly they are heartbroken and they carry a heavy load. Certainly they labor and are heavy-laden. The Bible takes full account of these things; but they are incidental to the fact that the reason the sinner is what he is, is because he has rebelled against the laws of God and he is a fugitive from divine judgement.

- Tozer, A. W., I Call It Heresy

Understanding Sin

Another way to calculate the importance of a biblical understanding of sin is through the use of a series of theological continua. For example, a high view of humanity (humans are basically good morally) and our capacity for good typically maintains a low view of sin’s serious effects upon humanity. Alternately, a heightened view of sin (humans are radically depraved) will result in a reduced view of human capacity for spiritual good.

The theological understanding of Christ’s work is also impacted by one’s view of sin. A milder view of sin tends to parallel a nonpunitive view of the atonement. When the cross is viewed as an answer to the wrath of God, a clearly heightened view of sin (human helplessness before a holy God) is the presupposition.

God’s grace is another area directly impacted by one’s view of sin. The more sinful we appear to ourselves, the more we recognize the strategic nature of God’s grace. In the matter of soteriology, a positive view of human ability coupled with an optimistic view of the human condition depreciates the need for salvation and opens the door for alternate interpretations of the nature of our deliverance from sin (e.g., liberationist definitions of salvation as deliverance from political, sexual, or racial exploitation). In terms of conversion, repentance and faith are directly related to the nature of sin. Thus, do we have the capacity to repent and believe, or are these capacities granted to us at conversion?

Finally, as became clear to Augustine, one’s view of predestination is impacted by one’s view of sin. A more severe view of sin prompts a more pronounced understanding of predestination and election. Alternately, modifications to God’s free unconditional election (conditional election, for example) are supported by a less stringent view of human depravity.
 

- John W. Mahony, “A Theology of Sin for Today,” in Fallen: 

A Theology of Sin, eds.  Christopher. W. Morgan & Robert A. Peterson, 2013.

The Reality of Sins

The strategic importance of sin theologically and practically prompts us to ask about the nature of sin itself. Typically, post-fall definitions of sin (that is, those that reflect our fallen condition) come from either lexical analyses of the biblical words or from the various biblical images for sin (such as disease, defilement, or debt). Christian confessional statements, articles of faith, and systematic theologies contain definitions that have been coalesced from biblical usage and historical precedents. 

More recent efforts to define sin, however, reflect the existential and realist contexts of the last century: “[Sin] is universal, tragic estrangement, based on freedom and destiny in all human beings, and shall never be used in the plural. Sin is separation, estrangement from one’s essential being.” Existentially, sin is a deep sense of dread or anxiety, the tension that arises from our finitude and the openness of the future.

The trend away from more objective statements about sin tends to cloud the issue of sin’s essence. Compared to the existential, man-centered approach to sin, classic doctrinal statements such as the Westminster Larger Catechism defined sin with a clear reference to God and his law: “Sin is any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, any law of God, given as a rule to the reasonable creature.” Within the Roman Catholic tradition, Thomas Aquinas defined sin as “a word, deed, or desire which is against the eternal law.” John Calvin defined sin as “unfaithfulness.”10 James Arminius claimed that sin is “something thought, spoken, or done against the law of God, or the omission of something which has been commanded by that law to be thought, spoken or done.”

Each of these definitions captures the essential meaning of sin as a violation of God’s law, covenant, or will. They also reflect a traditional understanding of the historicity of Adam and interpret the account of the fall in Genesis 3 quite literally. Consequently, sin is viewed more in relation to God. The perspective, however, is still post-fall.

A. H. Strong defined sin as the “lack of conformity to the moral law of God, either in act, disposition, or state.” In a subsequent clarification of the definition, he declared: “It therefore considers lack of conformity to the divine holiness in disposition or state as a violation of law, equally with the outward act of transgression.”

 “Lack of conformity,” however, is only true of humankind after the fall of Adam; the expression cannot be applied either to Adam before the fall or to the incarnate Son of God. From a pre-fall perspective, the essential nature of sin is expressed in a single act of rebellion; from a post-fall perspective, the violation of God’s law is only one component among innumerable others.

In regard to the post-fall perspective, then, sin possesses many different facets and expressions. The Scripture also uses an array of terms for sin and describes it in many different ways. The following is a summary of the biblical usage and serves as an exposition of the post-fall reality.

 

 - John W. Mahony, “A Theology of Sin for Today,” in Fallen: 

A Theology of Sin, eds.  Christopher. W. Morgan & Robert A. Peterson, 2013.

 

Rhetorical Analysis of Paul's Letters

Why was rhetoric so important to a young evangelistic religious movement like Christianity? T. Engberg-Pedersen explains the matter perfectly: "Paul has also shown that precisely when the question is one of changing other people's lives the very content of the gospel demands a ‘method' of effecting such changes which is directly opposed to any use of force [or trickery].... It is that of speaking to them in ways that do not encroach upon their independence." One cannot command people to believe the gospel but must persuade them, and the art of persuasion in the Greco-Roman world was rhetoric.
 
Even after one has persuaded persons to believe, an apostolic figure like Paul knew that it continued to be better to persuade than to command one's converts, as in his words to his coworker Philemon in the midst of another impressive piece of deliberative rhetoric: "Therefore, although I could be bold and order you to do what you ought to do, yet I prefer to appeal to you on the basis of love.... I did not want to do anything without your consent, so that any favor you do would be voluntary" (Phlm. 8-9, 14). Paul knew perfectly well that proclaiming a monotheistic Jewish message in a polytheistic culture where anti-Semitism was rife required more than just words spoken in earnest and with passion. It required persuasion. The objections and the mental and emotional obstacles in the minds and hearts of the listeners had to be answered and removed if Jesus was to become their Lord and not merely another religious sideshow. And Paul knew that God had not left it simply up to the Holy Spirit to do all the heavy lifting of persuasion. Rather God commissioned proclaimers to do their part so that word and Spirit might work together to persuade and convert. The use of rhetoric was especially apropos and important in cities in the empire heavily influenced by Greco-Roman values, including by rhetoric - cities like Philippi, which had at the turn of the era become a Roman colony.
 
Deliberative rhetoric, had been the rhetoric of the Greek assembly (the ekklesia), the rhetoric of advice and consent, the rhetoric that helped people make decisions about the course they would take into the future. This sort of rhetoric, in the main, is what we find in Paul's persuasive missives as he seeks to shape the course charted by his charges into their future, including when he would no longer be around. As Quintilian stressed, letters that are meant to be proclaimed on arrival are in the main written-out speeches and were closer in both form and substance, in both style and content, to acts of persuasion than to ordinary mundane letters.
 
A bit more should be said at this juncture about the rhetorical device known as "exemplification." According to Quintilian, a named or anonymous person's character is set forth in part to excite or conciliate an audience's feelings and to spur them on to imitation. Using such examples was not merely an effective way to embellish one's oratory and bring it to the point of persuasion, but also a deliberate means of paraenesis, and used precisely that way by rhetoricians and moralists of Paul's era. The importance of this for analysis of Philippians should be obvious. Paul is using theologically charged arguments, including using a Christ hymn to urge the audience to have the same mindset as was found in Christ and in those who, like Paul, imitate Christ, and to walk worthily of the gospel and its principles.
 

--- Ben Witherington III, Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, 2011.