Nov 28, 2011
Incarnational Christianity: Believing Ideas or Believing the Gospel
Posted by Pastor Todd Murphy in | Comments (0)
This is a follow up on my post from November 21st. http://sjchurch.org/blog/details/cognitive-christianity-believing-ideas-of-believing-the-gospel
This now brings us to incarnational Christianity. What do I mean by this? It is a faith and practice that is being formed in the image of Jesus. It is an embodied Christianity. It includes the mind but it does not stop there. It encompasses the person as a whole, both body and spirit, both mind and emotions. It is not satisfied with just right doctrine, but it insists on right doctrine rightly lived in community with the Church and before the world. Jesus came and walked among us; he modeled the discipled life. He spent three years discipling the twelve apostles and many others. Incarnational Christianity is about living holy, godly and righteous lives among the heathen so that they may themselves repent and glorify God .
(1 Pet. 2:12) Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.
What is the thing that Peter indicates leads the heathen’s eventual repentance and worship of God? It is our “conduct” and “good deeds.” Do we really think he has private prayer and Bible study in mind here? No. He is talking about good deeds that affect them directly. They are acts of honesty, justice, and integrity that are being done to those that do evil toward us. Incarnational Christianity is simply belief in praxis.
There is a reductionism that has taken place in the evangelical/Protestant sector at large in the last couple centuries. It seems we have hijacked the great doctrines of justification by faith and stripped them of their nuance and beauty to look something like last year’s Christmas tree that no longer has any needles on it. It is just a sharp and sparse frame of the lush full evergreen it once was. It has now become a mere proposition rather than a life transforming posture. In the effort to protect the doctrine of justification we have developed a heaving gag reflex to any suggestion of “good works.” And this is quite sad when the New Testament reveals Jesus and his church quite to the contrary.
Jesus came doing the works of God (John 9:3). But this was not divine muscle-flexing, but it was to announce the kingdom of God was upon them (Matt. 12:28). And so the Church is formed up in the image of the incarnate Son by the power of his resurrection. Jesus’ words in Matt. 5:16 make this clear as well as a host of other texts: “In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven,” (Acts 9:36, 1Tim. 2:10, 5:10, 25, 6:18, Titus 2:14, 3:8 & 14). In Ephesians 2:10 Paul says that, “we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” We cannot forget either Hebrews 10:24: “And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works.” The Christianity that we live is to be created in the image of the God-man. So Mark McIntosh observes in his helpful book Mysteries of Faith:
Understanding Jesus in terms of the Incarnation, however seems to have been precisely the engine that drove the early church’s social awareness. Its relationships of forgiveness and love were understood to be the sign and test of its understanding of Jesus. The early Christians could tell whether they were truly entering into the mystery of Christ by how well they were managing to love one another, and in doing so they were forging the matrix on earth in which the trinitarian communion of loving self-giving and eternal joy could become available for all people... (McIntosh, 103-4.)
This means that the Church’s social ethic was eschatological. What does that mean? The word comes from the NT Greek term eschaton meaning last or final. So when we speak of something being “eschatological” we mean that it pertains to last things, that is to the kingdom of God. It is the eschatological orientation that separates the Church’s social ethic and good works form mere social “do-gooding.” Anyone can do nice things, but very few do them without self-glory as the motive. In anything we do, there is the temptation to find glory for self in it. It is only through an incarnational orientation to our good works that we offer them as true worship to God. This is because in an incarnational orientation they do not win us any points with God. They are an act of repentance. The social ethic of the Church is propelled by repentance because God is just and a judgement is coming. Those who are genuine servants of that king need to be found faithfully laboring when he comes.
Posted by Pastor Todd Murphy in | Comments (0)
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