The Cruciform Employee

On the basis that 1 Peter presents the the cross as a paradigm of Christian existence with special reference to slaves, Howard Marshall offered guidelines for Christian employees to help them live a cruciform (cross-shaped) life. They are summarised in Scot McKnight's NIVAC volume on 1 Peter as follows:

1. All of our social relationships should find a behaviour that is driven by a desire to do God’s will.
2. Our conduct ought to be consistent with the obligations we assume in our relationship to that person and job.
3. Our conduct ought to be determined by that relationship, not by what we think of the personal traits of the employer.
4. When we disregard our relational contract with its obligations, we do disservice to the gospel.
5. If we suffer as a result of our obligations, such suffering is both commendable and Christian; it is not unchristian to suffer! 

McKnight adds: “In a world driven by litigation (which is itself driven by the desire to sustain personal rights), it is hard for us today to see that sometimes it is best not to assert our rights but to endure some kind of social pressure. That is, it might be best for a Christian man to endure the shame of not being promoted or getting a raise, or of a Christian woman of not asserting her equality or fighting for equal pay, because of the gospel!” (175)

• In the business world, Christians should not be known for their assertiveness as much as for their industriousness, their work ethic, their kindness, their loyalty, their fairness, and their honesty…
• In our personal lives we need to suppress the desire to be noticed…
• Another area of life where we need to let the pattern of the cross infiltrate is that of personal finances…A cruciform lifestyle with respect to possessions is found in persons who do not find their greatest pleasure in shopping, who are not motivated to buy more things when they get their paycheck, and who are not using the credit cards well beyond their limits. (177)

He observes: “It may not work – in the short run. But the way of suffering is the divinely intended manner of bringing the greatest victory of God into the world. What really works is what works with God, and what works with God is the cross!” (178)

Fear-Shaped Love

If you invoke as Father the one who judges all people impartially according to their deeds, live in reverent fear during the time of the exile.

! Peter 1:17

Belief in the final judgement often gets a bad press. Does the belief that God will reward the righteous and punish the evil dull our senses to the pain and injustice of the world, helping the oppressed to put up with things with which they should not put up? Karl Marx arguably had more respect for the religious sentiments of the oppressed than some of his successors and perhaps did not use "opium of the people" in an entirely negative sense but he made the notion popular that belief in a God who will sort out everything in the end is harmful to the fight for justice. No doubt religion has sometimes functioned in this way. But distraction by entertainment has perhaps always been the greater threat, cf. "bread and circuses" in ancient Rome.

1 Peter speaks of a new birth through the resurrection of Christ which allows us to address God as Father. It is a new existence which breaks with the inherited ways of life and sets us on a path that takes the long view. No longer focused on short-term benefits which could be gained by silver and gold which are so often acquired at the expense of the life of others (ancient mines were notorious as places of agonising death) but becoming part of a story that begun before the foundation of the world with the predestination of Christ's self-offering as the source of life (his blameless purity embodying the maxim he taught that "it is more blessed to give than to receive," Acts 20:35). This does indeed put value on enduring pain while suffering unjustly but Christ becomes instrumental in defining for us the God in whom we put our trust, our faith and hope and it is not as a God who above all demands submission but "the one who raised Christ from the death and gave him glory." Christ's vindication encourages us to seek God's kingdom and his righteousness,  trusting that goodness, beauty and justice will have the last word. 

Yes, Christians do not believe that all depends on us and may be less in a hurry to bring revolutionary change than those who have not been born into a living hope but addressing as Father "the one who judges all people impartially according to their deeds" should not lead to complacency. This is why 1 Peter 1:17 speaks of "reverent fear" for God - being in awe at the majesty, goodness and power of God not in the way of being "too heavenly-minded to be of earthly use" but with trembling that shapes the way we live in this corrupt world in which we are not quite at home.

We tremble before the one who loves the world so much that He will not allow His good purposes and the beautiful order he put in place to be disregarded without consequences. And it is such trembling, such reverent fear which enables true love. How so?

1 Peter 1:22 spells it out. We purify our souls by bringing them in line with divine truth and this purification makes unfeigned, mutual love possible because such love cannot exist with lying and hypocrisy. There is a world of difference between mere niceness and mutual love. You do not have to be born anew to be nice, friendly, smiley but the genuine mutual love to which we are called is only possible through the new birth. We need to have become purified by obedience to the truth for which the living and enduring word of God is essential (1 Peter 1:23).

Niceness will cease, friendliness will pass away, smileyness disappears - love born out of faith and hope in God remains, a love that dares to speak the truth rather than hides in the superficial comfort of niceness, and a truth-telling that is not judgemental (the final judgement belongs to God) but has the other's best interests in mind because this is how God loves.

When you look at the cross, do you see the precious blood of Christ shed for you? (If so, how can we not encounter others in humility and forgive them as we have been forgiven?)

When you contemplate the empty tomb, do you submit to the truth that Christ is risen? (if so, how can we not rejoice in a living hope even in suffering for doing good?)

Let these truths sink in ever deeper and so let genuine love arise deeply from the heart.

A Living Hope

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

1 Peter 1:3

In 1 Peter faith is spoken of as hope, a living hope – not dead, futile, empty hope without reality and validity, a hope that makes alive. Let’s talk about hope (indebted to R. Feldmeier, 65-70).

“We are full of hope throughout our whole life,” says Plato. Having hope is one of the defining characteristics of being human. Human beings anticipate their future. They are ahead of their time.

On the one hand, hope is our strength. Our ability not to go from stimulus to immediate response makes for human development and culture. We can imagine different scenarios of the future and make long-term plans.

On the other hand, as the Latin proverb has it, Hope often deceives (Spes saepe fallit). There is therefore an ambivalence to hope which seems to be expressed in narrative form in the myth involving Pandora’s box (jug). Hesiod (ca. 700 B.C.) related that opening the container released misery and evil upon humanity. When Pandora hastened to close the container, only one thing was left behind. What is left when everything goes wrong is…‘hope’. But is it this a comfort that alleviates some of the suffering or, in the form of  “deceptive expectation” one more evil?

The hope of believers in the Bible is very different. It is not portrayed as ambivalent. It is ‘a hope [that] is not founded upon the unstable foundation of human expectation and fears but on the certainty of the trustworthiness of God; it bases itself not on something that one wishes to obtain or avoid but on God, the basis and content of hope. Right in the prayers of the Old Testament, the Psalms, one continually comes across confessions such as “the Lord is my hope” or something similar…’ Hope is not anticipating what we desire but a synonym for the relationship with God of trusting faith.

The NT builds on this: ‘The Christian hope is … based upon God’s act in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, through which he has defined himself as creator out of nothing and thereby as the death-conquering life force, who thus through the cross has saved from sin, death, and decay. The future is already decided in Christ and, with reference to the gospel, believers are then also certain of their future’

Having or not having such hope is the characteristic difference between Christians and non-Christians (cf. 1 Thess 4:13; Eph 2:12). We have an anchor laid in the future (E. Schweizer). There is a renewed reality (a new heaven and a new earth) which we get hold of by our trust in God. This trusting anticipation of the future is ‘virtually the life principle of the regenerate Christian humanity.’

Do you know the new birth? Are you born again?

The question is not or should not one about American culture politics. The question is: Do you accept that Jesus rose from the dead, that in the resurrection of Christ God has shown himself to be the God who makes alive? If you are alive with this hope, you have been born again.

To find out whether you have been born, you don’t try to dig out a birth certificate. You live, therefore you must have been sired.

But to find out whether you are a child of God, you don’t even directly examine your heart to see whether there is a sufficient level of joy and confidence. No, you look to the cross and you look to the empty tomb.

If at the cross you see blood that was shed to cleanse you from your sins and if you accept that the tomb is empty because God raised Christ from the dead, then you have been given the new birth. You are a child of God. You have a fabulous inheritance waiting for you. You have a living hope.

May God grant us to love Jesus Christ whom we have not seen, to believe in him whom we do not see now, and so to receive the outcome of our faith, the salvation of our souls, when Jesus Christ is finally revealed. Amen.

 

A New Birth

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

1 Peter 1:3

The Easter season helps us to let the significance of the resurrection of Christ sink in. Each year readings from Acts trace some of the impact, the positive ripple effect, the negative repercussions, the shock waves emanating from Christ’s resurrection, tracing the story from Jerusalem to Rome, from east to west. Every third year readings from 1 Peter supplement this. This letter is written to Christian communities in Asia Minor (Turkey) and generally thought to have been sent from Rome. So we have a west to east movement.

Together these readings give us a glimpse of the re-ordering of many lives and relationships, the turmoil in the immediate aftermath of the resurrection. Are we still aware today just what big a revolution was started “on the third day”? It is of course to be expected that over time the new norms and revolutionarily outlook gets normalised and established. And it is not an altogether bad thing for cultures and societies being shaped by what happened “on the third day” in such a way that it no longer seems unusual. But institutionalisation often means that the message gets neutralised, accommodated and made safe. Are we failing to get hold of the (full) reality? The Easter season is an invitation to take a fresh look.

The Gospel shows us the immediate response which was not very encouraging: suspicion (‘they have taken the body’), confusion (why is the linen left in the tomb?), fear (of the authorities), resistance to belief (on the side of Thomas who does not really have a good reason to refuse to believe). It is like people going around asking “what just happened?!” 

By the time 1 Peter was written the followers of Jesus are no longer disorientated but the revolution is still in full swing. The letter is addressed to “the exiles of the Dispersion” which is to say people who have become outsiders in connection with being chosen by God – a theme that runs through the letter.

The author points as to an appropriate response, namely thanksgiving. ‘Blessed be God’ is a typical Hebraic/Jewish way of acknowledging God’s goodness. The author does not ask us to be grateful, he leads by example: ‘Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.’

What just happened? We have been given a new birth. It is hard to imagine a more sweeping concept. What does this language about a new birth mean? Let’s tease it out. First, it points to  God’s initiative. No-one is responsible or contributes anything to their being sired. And just like our natural birth ideally was the fruit of an act of love, so our new birth is attributed to God’s great, abundant mercy. His decision, His love.

Secondly, a new birth speaks of new relationships and identity. Our natural birth relates to ethnic identity, citizenship, socioeconomic class, innate potential and much more. Language of a new birth suggests a new identity, new citizenship, new innate potential. We are taken into the Father-Son relationship, being made children of God. We are given a new home, paradoxically one that makes us in a sense homeless  in this world (as D. Sölle once pointed out), because Christians ‘no longer fit in well with the society in which they were once at home; their Christian faith brings them into conflict with the values and priorities of the society in which they live.’ (K. Jobes). But having God as our Father more than makes up for it. And of course it means that every Christian of whatever class or ethnic identity is our brother or sister.

Thirdly, this new birth brings new prospects: the children of God are heirs to ‘an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading.’ It won’t rot away, won’t be spoiled, it won’t fade. It is kept safe for us in heaven while we are kept safe by God’s power. Through the death, resurrection and ascension of Christ the rescue is all ready, our  salvation is secured. We are just waiting for it to be revealed.

Everything happened within three days. ‘It is through the resurrection that God has conquered the world’s separation from himself, a world that is subjected to transience and thereby sin and death, and has made a new beginning possible.’ (R. Feldmeier)

Christian existence is first all about what God has already done:

• He took the initiative.
• He reconciled us to Himself and to one another.
• He keeps our salvation secure.

Christian existence is secondly responding to what God has done:

• thanksgiving (which is the overall context here)
• living hope: a key concept in 1 Peter
•  joy: the risen Christ is not a figure of the past

This response is often summed up as ‘faith’ which is of course more than merely holding something to be true. Faith is accepting ‘the message of salvation, by means of which the human is at once placed into a new relationship to God, into an attitude of trust that embraces and determines his or her whole existence, of commitment, of hope (cf. 1:21).’ (R. Feldmeier) But 1 Peter talks about faith as hope, thus giving us a particular perspective on what it means to have faith in God.

Cur Deus Homo?

Cur Deus Homo? (Why did God became man?) is one of the most famous works on the atonement.

Why did Jesus come into the world? In John 18 we hear Jesus’ own answer: to testify to the truth (John 18:37). He says so in answer to a question about whether he was a king, clearly implying that he is indeed a king. Jesus is king by way of testifying to the truth, by gathering people around him who listen to his voice. He is not a king over people who live in a particular land or over people who are under his military thumb but he is king over those who submit to the truth, who belong to the truth. He thereby implies that a true king is someone to whom people listen, whom they follow.

As autonomous adults, mindful of many bad historical experiences, we, by and large, don’t like to listen to someone just because they are in a position of authority. Jesus earned the right to be listened to by speaking the truth reliably. We do not trust Him because He is the guy in charge. We acknowledge Him as being in charge because He is trustworthy.

Alas, many post-moderns like their own self-determination so much that they deny the very existence of objective truth. Pilate was a precursor for such an outlook in his lack of concern for truth – or justice, for that matter (ultimately it is hard to maintain a concern for justice without a concern for truth). For him, as for many today, it’s all power play.

In fact we find the same lack of concern for truth being spoken in the Sanhedrin – and Jesus puts his finger on it: ‘If I have spoken wrongly, testify to the wrong. But if I have spoken rightly, why do you strike me?’ (John 18:23)

But it isn’t just the drive for self-determination, the exercise of power that leads people to turn away from the truth, it is also the fear of power, of what might be done to them if they were to speak truth. So we find Peter denying Jesus three times –­ out of fear.

It turns out that turning away from the truth is not a modern phenomenon after all but has a long history. It is because we so readily turn away from the truth that Jesus came into the world. Why did God become man? To testify to the truth.

 

But why does this get highlighted in the Passion story? Why not in connection with the teaching of Jesus? The parables of Jesus speak of God’s kingdom. The Sermon of the Mount offers kingdom ethics. But it is here that the question is raised and answered: What sort of king is Jesus? One who came to testify to the truth. Presumably this is because it is his passion that profoundly testifies to the truth.

How so? E.g., by bearing witness to the fact that our lives belong to God who cares for us which is why it would be wrong, a denial of the truth, to seek our own comfort at the expense of doing God’s will.

The passion of Christ also testifies to the truth by showing up how readily we turn away from the truth, if it does not suit us. Christ’s suffering embodies our rejection of God, of God’s rule, our rejection of truth .It shows us that such rejection leads to death.

Best of all Jesus testifies to the truth of who God is and that He is worthy of our trust even when it leads to suffering and death because suffering and death will not have the last word.

Peter’s attempt at self-preservation at the expense of truth leaves him wretched. Jesus, by contrast, having sanctified himself in the truth of God’s word, as he had prayed for his disciples (John 17:17–18), is vindicated in his resurrection from the dead.

Jesus earned the right to be listened to by speaking the truth reliably and by committing his life to the truth, rejecting the use of power to enforce his rule.

 

Can we independently verify the claim of Jesus to testify to the truth? No, not really. But Jesus did not fall from heaven. He was born to a Jewish mother as the culmination of a long history of God revealing Himself to humanity. Jesus fulfilled a pattern laid down in what we call the OT Scriptures. As Ian McGilchrist says about the “argument” he presents in The Truth of the Matter (London: Perspectiva Press, 2021)

And yet it is also not an argument, in the conventional sense, at all. If we want others to understand the beauty of a landscape with which they may be unfamiliar, an argument is pointless: instead we must take them there and explore it with them, walking on the hills and mountains, pausing as new vantage points continually open around us, allowing our companions to experience it for themselves.

Come and see! Come and taste! The truth will set you free and the new life vindicates the truth.

Living with Disagreement

Disagreement about the teaching of marriage and sexual intimacy is arguably more serious than, e.g., the disagreements between Presbyterians and Anglicans. It is therefore not one more disagreement which we can add to the list of secondary matters on which we "agree to disagree" and move on. If a revised understanding of what it means to be chaste is embedded in pastoral guidance and/or official prayers, it cannot but do substantial harm to our unity. 

The Bishop of London believes that God is calling us to live with our current disagreements. The reasoning she offered to General Synod in February for having reached this conclusion seemed specious to me but here I want to make the point that believing that God calls us to live with our disagreements does not yet resolve the question how we are to live with these disagreements. There are perhaps three options for the moment, none of whom especially attractive:

(1) continuing as before, namely tolerating the revisionist teaching and (unofficial) practice of blessing same-sex couples without changing our doctrine or the prayers we commend or the moral requirements we put on clergy and others,

(2) creating structural space for "two integrities" with different approaches to Scripture and different understandings of sin and repentance, the Gospel and the Christian life,

(3) welcoming revisionist views as consonant with Anglican teaching and making liturgical space for these new understandings of living out our sexuality while keeping, for now, the marriage canon in place in the hope that the relevant parties are prepared to make the required sacrifices (revisionists foregoing "marriage equality" for now, traditionalists accepting that revisionism is properly Anglican too).

Sarah Mullally favours the last option but this is deeply problematic because very many who hold to the traditional view of marriage feel unable to bring the sacrifice asked of them. My preference is for the second option in the form of creating a separate legal space for those who want to promote a changed understanding of marriage and sexuality. This would be challenging because numerous legal issues would need to be resolved but it has the advantage of preserving integrity. It is not a refusal to live with our current disagreements but rather a (better) way to live with them. Alas, the discussion seems to be cut short by the insinuation that being called to live with our disagreements necessarily means to walk in the way the Bishops lead us, abandoning the normativity of previous teaching.

LLF and London Synod

The London Diocesan Synod on Wednesday 22 March 2023, with a dedicated session on Living in Love and Faith (LLF). The report is sobering. It perpetuates the mischaracterisation of those who are compelled to resist the new teaching as purists who cannot bear disagreement:

There are those who believe that our unity as Christians depends on our agreement on certain doctrinal issues, including those around sex and sexuality. Then there are those who believe that unity is possible and desirable even if we disagree.

But surely ALL of us believe that our unity as Christians depends on our agreement on certain doctrinal issues. The question is whether these doctrinal issues include teaching around marriage and sexual intimacy. And surely ALL of us believe that unity is possible and desirable even if we disagree. The question is whether our disagreements around marriage and sexual intimacy fall in the category of disagreements which we can accommodate or in the category of disagreements that cannot be reconciled within the same structures.  

The Church of England does not ordain Presbyterians or Baptists, even if we do not deny that they are fellow members of the body of Christ. We thereby acknowledge that there are disagreements which lead to structural differentiation. The mischaracterisation of the situation is very discouraging because it reveals a failure to listen and to ask the right questions.

Other statements made suggest serious deficiencies in understanding church history. Every heresy within the church has been argued from scripture. The statement that “both of these approaches can be argued from scripture” is therefore vacuous.

The claim that “the Church of England has always been an intentionally and uniquely broad church” sits uneasily with the fact that close to 2,500 clergy were expelled from the Church of England following the 1662 Act of Uniformity. It is only in modern times that we begun to abandon the principle that what we believe and how we worship must conform to a canonical standard and even then nonconformity is tolerated in some areas but not in others.

The observation that clergy will be free to choose whether or not to use the prayers is not at all reassuring because this freedom of conscience treats the question what it means to be chaste as one of indifference when it comes to being a loyal Anglican. It is not only a further step towards the privatisation of religion but a rejection of the belief that the revisionist teaching about marriage and sexual intimacy is not in agreement with Scripture and not consonant with Anglican teaching and tradition.