We’re about to jump into the hardest
bit of theology for most folks in understanding what it means to be Lutheran,
the matter of free will (or not). For some, it’s as poisonous as breathing
sulfur dioxide. But to dead sinners on their last legs like me, it’s the purest
oxygen. And I hope you’ll be there with me when we’re done.
It all starts with
getting at the truth about us human creatures and our inaccessible God. We’re
involved in a lifelong game of hide-and-seek with God. As hard as we seek, God
stays hidden, and we human beings aren’t very good at being unsuccessful game
players. In our founding Lutheran documents from 1530, the Augsburg Confession,
right after its author Philip Melanchthon tells us about God’s existence in the
First Article he immediately moves to the consequences of our frustrated quest
to get behind God’s veil. He tells us all about sin.
It is taught among us
that since the fall of Adam, all human beings who are born in the natural way
are conceived and born in sin. This means that from birth they are full of evil
lust and inclination and cannot by nature possess true fear of God and true
faith in God. Moreover, this same innate disease and original sin is truly sin
and condemns to God’s eternal wrath all who are not in turn born anew through
baptism and the Holy Spirit.
That’s a mouthful, and
it sounds a lot like the fire-and-brimstone preaching of the New England
Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards in his famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands
of an Angry God.” It’s not something that sits well on our ears. Whether it’s
mom or a preacher, we don’t like a wagging finger or scolding words.
The years before I went to seminary I served as a youth minister in a little town on Highway 212 in western Minnesota. My last summer in that congregation the American Lutheran Church had a national youth gathering in Denver. We had a goodly batch of kids ready to go, but there were two ninth grade boys I had my doubts about. I knew that when it came down to it Ricky and Jay would always forsake the group and go their own way. Not such a bad thing in a town of 2000 surrounded by soybean fields. But I wasn’t sure that would be wise for two guys who imagined they were bigger than the Mile-High City. I found a program that Lutherhaven, one of our Bible camps in Idaho was offering. It was a design-your-own high adventure experience, and we opted for the whitewater rafting trip. So while the rest of the kids were busing out to Colorado, we hopped in my standard transmission Plymouth Reliant and trekked to Salmon, Idaho, to meet our camp staff member and our two rafting guides for six days on the Salmon River that’s more affectionately known as the River of No Return.
It was just the six of us on the river heading down that amazing canyon, alternating between wild rapids and eerily calm stretches. At the end of the first day, we pulled our raft onto a beach and set up camp. Our guide Bucky told Ricky and Jay they could splash around in the water but that they couldn’t go past knee deep. He said that even though it looked calm it was dangerously deceptive. The river’s current was so strong that it would grab you and sweep you around the bend to the next rapids, and there was nothing you could do about it. I trusted that Ricky and Jay would be obedient, but as I was setting up a tent I heard shouts from the river. My two boys had decided to swim across the river to a sand bar on the other side, and the current had gotten them.
I raced over boulders on the banks trying to keep up with them, urging them to swim to shore as hard as they could. All I could think was that I would have five more days on the river, that we were at least 100 miles in any direction from being able to communicate with the outside world, and that when I finally got to a phone I’d have to call back home to Minnesota and tell two sets of parents that their sons’ bodies were somewhere downriver. Jay made it to shore, and my dreaded phone call was down to one set of parents. But Jay headed back out to help Ricky. Somehow they were able to get back to the bank before the next rapids. I tell you, it’s hard to scold a couple cocky kids when you’re crying.
That evening on the Salmon is tattooed on my brain. And it’s a perfect example
of Luther’s view of the human condition. Ricky and Jay didn’t like our guide’s
warning words and strictures, and they decided they knew their strength better.
They decided to go it on their own. They used their own free will to make a
really bad decision. What else would they have done? How could they not have
been Ricky and Jay? They were stuck with their own hubris, their own
hormone-filled brains, their own desire to conquer all they surveyed, their own
will. What Melanchthon was doing in his description of sin in the Augsburg
Confession was talking about Ricky and Jay and all of us caught up in this
situation find ourselves in. How you understand Sin and free will will make all
the difference in whether you come out of the Reformation with Luther or with
those in opposing camps for the last 500 years.
When Melanchthon uses words like “innate disease” and “born in sin,” it’s another way of saying that, just by being born a human being, we’re stuck on one side of the veil with the hidden God on the other side. Sin is all about what happens when we try to get at that God: We’re bound to react by turning to something else that will do what God won’t. The stories of the creation, of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, of the serpent’s temptation of Eve in Genesis 3 and our first parents’ rejection of God tell us the same thing using a different angle.
It all begins with,
well, the beginning – and especially with how God makes it all happen. Genesis
1:1-5 tells us:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the
earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of
the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said,
“Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and
he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the
darkness he called “night.” And there was evening and there was morning – the
first day.[1]
God uses a simple, ordinary thing to create something out of nothing
(theologians use a Latin phrase creatio ex nihilo). It’s divine
words that create the cosmos. When God speaks, stuff happens: light, seas, the
moon and stars, and creatures that slither, swim and fly. Finally, God’s words
speak you into existence. Those divine words establish a relationship with the
creation. Just like when you’re angry and say, “I’m going to give her a piece
of my mind,” God’s words in Genesis are an expression, literally God’s very
being pressed out as the creation in a way that the whole cosmic schmear exists
in God.
The relationship God’s word creates shows up clearly in the words delivered by
the prophet Jeremiah: “I will be their God, and they will be my people”
(Jeremiah 31). God’s word is about God constantly and eternally creating and
sustaining that relationship, both with you and the whole creation. It’s the
story of patriarchs, judges, kings and prophets in the Old Testament. As we’ll see,
it’s the story of Jesus. It’s the story of Paul and Silas, Peter and Mary
Magdalene, Lydia, Dorcas, St. Augustine and his mother Monica, St. Thomas
Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Martin Luther King, and Johnny Cash. And it’s the
story of you since your baptism.
But something went wrong
when the human creatures God made for a relationship spurned the relationship
in a great battle of wills. It goes back to the wide chasm between a hidden God
and God’s human creatures who live in this tangible, earthly realm. In Genesis
2, God puts the man and woman in Eden, smack in the middle of God’s delight
(which is what the Garden’s name means). That tells you something about the
good pleasure God takes in the creation and God’s relationship with it. But God
is also aware of the difference between being God and being human. God tells
our first parents to eat up; everything in Eden is made to please and sustain.
There’s only one thing
God forbids Adam and Eve to eat: the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good
and Evil. In this one rule, God retains all the great “omni’s” that theologians
use to describe God: omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence. God is
all-knowing, all-present, and all-powerful. There are things that are placed
only in God’s job portfolio, ultimate things like life and death, heaven and
hell, and, here in the Garden, the judgment of good and evil. Even God’s great
promise in Jeremiah we saw above (“I will be your God, and you will be my
people”) asserts that God will be God. And in the Garden, Adam and Eve – and by
implication, all their descendants including you – may not cross the
line. God tells them his determination and will to be God and remain God is so
great that the consequence of bridging the chasm by eating of the Tree will be
death.
The problem, of course, is that it’s so very hard to trust a God who remains
hidden. Sure, God is present in the whole of the creation – God made it, after
all – but how are you to find God there? So the serpent in the Garden zeroed in
on that question. The serpent’s temptation in Genesis 3 wasn’t to hold out some
of the Tree’s juicy fruit for Adam and Eve’s hungry mouths to savor. Instead,
the temptation was to not trust the word of a God who wouldn’t be seen. The
temptation was to think that God isn’t good and maybe, just maybe, is holding
something back that you want or deserve – something like the knowledge of good
and evil or other things that would give you power and control in what seems
like a random world and before what seems like an arbitrary God.
When Adam and Eve were
tempted they found it was impossible to avoid sinning with their mistrust.
Christian thinkers in the Middle Ages said it’s non posse non peccare,
or “not possible to keep from sinning.” This kind of sin is called original
sin. Think of it as the origin of all other sin – a condition that makes the
rest possible and keeps you from ever being able to avoid it. That’s a
different way of thinking about sin than you might often hear of. Usually,
people talk about sin as bad things you do or good things you avoid doing. We
ought to pay attention to that kind of sin, because it has all kinds of
consequences, both for you and your neighbors in the world. But there’s a
deeper way to talk about sin that can lead you to understand yourself and your
Lord in an equally deep way. Thinking about sin as wrong thoughts and actions
comes right out of the story of Adam and Eve and the serpent, but so does
thinking about sin as a condition.
The first way to look at
the story is to use the traditional label for it: The Fall. In this way of
interpreting the story, Adam and Eve entered into a Downward Fall by eating the
fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Our first parents had an
exalted place in the Creation. God had given them dominion over all things,
after all. But the serpent tempted them to submit to their baser urges. Eating
the fruit of the Tree was wrong, and they became less than what God had
intended them to be. In their bad actions they moved down from their exalted
place and away from God. If God is spirit and the edenic couple was flesh, they
abandoned the spiritual and the godly, and they attached themselves to the
mundane things of the earth – and, as theologians like St. Augustine taught,
Adam and Eve were especially moved by their physical urges, including sex. They
turned their backs on the ultimate spiritual being and engaged in wrong
physical actions. That’s lower-case sin – “little S sin.”
Think of the set-up for
this story as a great ladder reaching up to God on the top rung. Every creature
has its place on the ladder, and our goal is to climb up the ladder and become
ever more godly and spiritual. In this Downward Fall, Adam and Eve climbed down
rung after rung, and in every sinful action after that they moved ever farther
down the ladder. If sin is moving away from God and our problem is doing things
wrong, then the solution to our sinfulness is to climb back up the ladder.
Fixing the Downward Fall requires upward striving, spiritual success, more
devotion and lots of religion. Lots! The way to make things right is to start
doing things right. The most important person in your salvation is you. You
have to do the work of turning away from your urges, instincts, and
inclinations.
You have to engage in
spiritual behavior to counteract your flesh-driven sin. It’s a good thing you
have Christ on your side, though, because he can show you how to live right. In
this way of looking at the story, Jesus’ main job is to be a role model, and
his death on the cross is all about giving you an example of how to endure hard
stuff. Christian life in this scheme follows what Thomas รก Kempis called the
“Imitation of Christ.” A Christian’s days, then, are intended to be a constant
refrain of “What would Jesus do?” And the power of Christ’s death and
resurrection becomes an after-thought, if it’s thought of at all.
It all hinges on the
assumption that you have a free will. The Scholastic theology Luther was taught
said that you have a spark of goodness left in your fallen, sinful self. All
that’s needed is a little oomph from God’s grace to fan it into flame. Then you
could exert your free will and decide to become the person God made you to be.
You could freely opt for God’s will, fill God’s commands, and merit what Christ
had done on the cross. The catchphrase of that theology was facete quod
in te est, or “do what is within you to do.” Choose to do your best, and
God will do the rest. There were plenty of options for what you could choose:
pilgrimages, visiting relics, entering a monastery, or donating some cash to
the church’s latest fundraiser.
Luther was no slouch
when it came to his scrupulous attempts to bend his free will to become better.
The problem for Luther, though, was that the focus remains on you. It all
devolves into some moral system where God becomes a divine accountant and Jesus
is left out of the equation. And you’d never turn away from yourself. You’d
always swim across the river and get caught in the current. You’d always find
yourself in the rapids with no way out.
The other way of
thinking about what happened in the Garden looks at it as an Upward Fall. The
first question Eve hears when she encounters the serpent has to do with being
able to trust God’s Word. The serpent reminds her of the strictures against
eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, particularly
the warning that eating will bring death. Eve is forced to answer the worst
question you could face on this side of the chasm between us and God: Did God
really say this? She and the man start wondering if God can really be trusted.
Maybe God was lying about dying. Shouldn’t they be allowed everything in
the Garden? They deserve it. Why is God keeping something from them? It wasn’t
enough for them to be God’s human creatures. They wanted more. The serpent’s
temptation is to point them to the throne of God and get them to think it’s
empty.
Nature abhors a vacuum
and so, apparently, does the human heart. If we can’t see a divine being
occupying the throne, we have a perfect candidate for what we think will be the
cushy divine chaise-longue. Adam and Eve no sooner hear the serpent’s
temptation than they plop themselves into God’s throne. Instead of
turning away from godliness and engaging in bad actions like
in the Downward Fall, Adam and Eve raised themselves to a high position. They
put themselves in God’s place. In essence, they made themselves their own gods.
You could say it another way: Sin is always a disregard for God Word, for the
relationship that God imparts in creating you. This way of looking at your
problem as a creature who doesn’t trust God is upper-case Sin – “big S sin.”
It’s a condition on whose coattails all the “little S” sins float into the
world on. When you think about Sin in this way, it will change who you think
Jesus is, what the remedy for your condition is, and what you think the
Christian life looks like.
With the Upward Fall,
God doesn’t fix things by simply demanding that you straighten up and fly
right. This way of thinking rejects your free will and assumes instead that
you’re captive to your own will – you can’t escape that your so-called free
will continually chooses its own way. Here God recognizes the chasm and your
terror of the Hidden God and so reveals to you in the person of Jesus exactly
what kind of God you have on your hands. All those “little S” sins are dealt
with at their root when the Word that was the agent of creation at the
beginning comes to you in Christ. At the beginning of his gospel, John tags
Jesus as the Word: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.” In Jesus you’re given God fully, in the way God wants to
be known.
Now the Christian life
isn’t about constantly improving your moral backbone, being more frenetic in
your religious activity, or becoming less worldly by attaining pure
spirituality. Instead, the Christian life is what the old Shaker hymn, “Simple
Gifts,” says: You “come round right” to “live in the valley of love and
delight.” That involves God bringing you into his divine promise, into the
Word, where you can hear exactly what God is up to with you.
In 1525, the same year
Luther’s prince Frederic the Wise died, the Peasants War resulted in 150,000
dead serfs, and Luther found himself a married man waking up with pigtails on
the pillow next to him, in that year Luther got into a bit of a spat with
Erasmus of Rotterdam who had written a treatise against Luther called The
Diatribe on Free Will . In Luther’s response to the great Humanist,
called On the Bondage of the Will, he said that by zeroing in on
the matter of free will Erasmus had become the only person in
all Luther’s disputes who’d understood the essential question at the core of
everything: your messed up will. Once you get this business of the captive will
down, everything else will fall in place.
In another treatise
Luther argued that the main task of lay people in a congregation is to judge
doctrine. What he means is that lay people need to hold the feet of their
pastors to the fire and demand that the clergy get their theological act
together. I’d argue that the place to start is to begin listening carefully for
how we talk about God, Christ, and the Christian life. Most folks would say the
most important thing to listen for in a sermon, for instance, is grace. But
grace doesn’t ever truly exist if you have a free will. When you have a free
will, the burden is always on you to shape yourself up and then, whether you
admit it or not, deny Jesus’ work on the cross. So you need to be on guard for
any time the free will wants to sneak back into the equation, especially from
the pulpit.
But if preachers
understand Sin and the captive will, then something amazing will happen. When
you finally despair of your ability to freely make your future happen, then God
can go to town on you with the gospel and make his will come alive in your
life. That’s the place where God pulls you down the ladder to where you belong,
to be a creature who fears, loves and trusts God, and to serve your neighbor.
When Luther explained the Ten Commandments in the Small Catechism, he assumed
that you have a will that’s captive to yourself. Each of Luther’s explanations
of the Commandments has two parts. Each Commandment means that you “should fear
and love God so that…” and then continues with what you should and should not
do. For instance,
[w]e should fear and love God so that we do not
anger or despise our parents or others in authority, but respect, obey, love,
and serve them.
The first half of each explanation shows the kinds of things you’re bound to do
when you place yourself in the divine throne where you have no business being
and then function your own God, even though you’re too lily-livered to admit
it. The second half of each explanation describes what you’ll look like when
God’s word creates faith in you: You’ll trust God to be God. You’ll be content
to remain a human creature. And you’ll serve your neighbors – other people,
other creatures, and the creation itself. In fact, you’ll have your petitions
in the Lord’s Prayer answered. When you pray “hallowed by thy name, thy kingdom
come, thy will be done,” God will make you into the person who
relishes in those things and turns away from your own name, kingdom, and will.
This is why, in Luther’s little pamphlet on Christian freedom, he said one
thing and one thing alone is needed to become that person. The only thing
needed is the word of God. That means the old you with your
curved-in-on-yourself posture that characterized the bound will must be put
down. Your opposable thumbs need to be loosed from your grip on God’s throne
and your hands instead be placed on Christ’s crucified and risen body. But you
can’t simply decide to do it on your own, like someone who thinks they can just
lick their opioid addiction by going cold turkey. You’ll always fall back on
yourself. And you’ll always fail. You need something stronger that can truly
overcome the devil, the world, and your sinful bound self. You need something
to show you that God has never held anything back from you,
something that shows you God ultimately gives everything. Maybe something like
an execution hill outside the wall of Jerusalem.
There you get God completely unbound, relentless in divine freedom, choosing to
submit to the wrath of us and our fellow religionists who have refused to let
go of their free will and shout “Crucify him!” And God sets a seal on it by
sneaking into the tomb and raising Jesus’ 15-hour-dead body to new life. There
you see that the only way for God to deal with your captive will and
unavoidable capital-S Sin is to be subject to it and then, surprise of
surprises, absolve it. The only way for you to be truly free is to be forgiven.
This is why the central ways we proclaim the gospel in the church always
revolve around Jesus’ death and resurrection. It delivers the goods in a way
that your fear of God and love of doing it your way now become love of God and
fear and suspicion of your own will.
When that happens,
something new in your will happen. We call it faith – a simple trust that
Christ has done everything needed for you. As Paul says, God has emptied
himself for you. He became such an empty hollow shell for you on the cross that
there’s room for you inside him. Your life doesn’t need to be concocted on your
own power by twisting your own will but is instead hid in him. You have Christ
put on you as assuredly as you wore a white gown at your baptism or will have a
white pall draped over your dead body at your funeral.
No comments:
Post a Comment