A Reasonable Quest for the Impossible;

The Search to Grasp the Logic of the Christian Faith in its varied avenues of Expression

 

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            In my mind one of the most difficult parts of writing is to create a suitable title of anything to be written.  That is certainly true of this article.  I am trying to write an article that discusses how those of us who yearn to understand the Christian faith in its fullness, need in some ways to seek to understand the logic of the faith.  I will try to express what I mean by that through this article.

            This quest was first suggested to me years ago, when I was in college, many years ago now.  A friend, two or three years older than I, and I were talking about the writings of the Apostle Paul.  He was a literature major.  He said to me that he thought he would like to understand Paul’s writing enough, so that he felt as he was reading his letters he could anticipate through an understanding of reading St. Paul what he would say next.  In essence, my friend was discussing understanding the thought of St. Paul enough to be able to anticipate the conclusion of his writing before the Apostle’s sentence finished.  That is, he wanted to understand the internal logic of Paul well enough to draw the same conclusions in his own mind as what the Apostle Paul did in his writings.  He wanted to see within his own thinking a point in which the logic of his thinking was shaped to draw the same conclusions as that of the Apostle Paul.  That has seemed to me to be a reasonable but perhaps almost impossible quest to be pursued.  Over the years, and especially recently I have come to realize that such a quest should not be limited to our understanding of St. Paul’s writings, but to the various expressions of God’s revelation of the matters of the Christian faith revealed once and for all to his people in so many various ways.

            Part of the reason I want to write about this at this time, is because of how some who read my latest blog regarded it.  I write from a different perspective than some of my readers.  I have journeyed into an Anglican perspective after spending much of my life as a Baptist.  In my heart of hearts I want to write in a way that encourages people forwards and upwards in the matters of the Christian faith and life.  We modern Christians live in a setting where there are hundreds of denominations.  I am inclined to believe that God is content to reach out to us where we are, and so He blesses us in our many various denominations, wherever he finds men and women who love Christ, seek to honor him in faith, that sort of faith that has learned to trust and obey for there is no other way to be happy in Jesus.  So each of us in our many different backgrounds have discovered something of Christ, of God’s love, and an understanding of what it means to be a people redeemed for our Lord Jesus Christ.  I think furthermore that most of us, however we understand this Christian faith into which we have been granted to participate want to understand it more.  So that is where I am trying to write from whether you are an Anglican, Baptist, Charismatic, Pentecostal, Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, or simply a person seeking to learn about Jesus from a background where Christianity has not been part of your life or was once but you left it a long time ago and are coming back for a second look.  You want to understand it more, maybe even to be considering an aspect of the Christian faith and to have the logic of the Christian faith so written into your own mind, heart, and soul as to be able to draw the same conclusions of the faith that are drawn from the great teachers and apostles of the faith.  I think there are a handful of pathways to consider if we want to develop that sort of logic about the faith.

            I can anticipate that some of you might be thinking, “That is way too intellectual of an approach it doesn’t work like that.”  Of course you are right.  The quest we are discussing is a quest for understanding but understanding is always more than an intellectual pursuit.  It was more than an intellectual pursuit for our Lord Jesus.  Understanding the spiritual truth of the faith takes the intellect and yet always requires far more than mere intellectual insights.  Our Lord Jesus came into the world to become human in all ways as we are.  He was the Son of God, fully God as well as fully man, and yet he learned righteousness and obedience not simply through his intellect.  The New Testament book of Hebrews tells us “Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered: and being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him, called of God a high priest after the order of Melchizedec.  (Hebrews 5:8,9)  So if when I started waxing eloquently about trying to learn the logic of the Christian faith, you began to bristle up and say “Understanding the Christian faith is not by intellect alone” then you were already doing something of what my friend so long ago wanted to anticipate in his understanding of the faith.  You look at something I was saying and anticipated a real problem if we made our quest for understanding the Christian faith a mere intellectual understanding.  It isn’t and cannot be a mere intellectual understanding of the Christian faith, because our Lord Jesus himself grew in stature and wisdom as a man by learning obedience through the things he suffered.  He was a perfect 2 year old, a perfect five year old, a perfect 30 year old, but in between he was learning through his life experiences, his life in a godly family, his contemplation of the Scriptures to grow for the challenges God had before him.  It wasn’t mere intellect, but He was the one who came to understand fully the godly life of faith.  He learned it.  He learned what it was to love God with all heart, soul, mind, and strength.  At twelve years of age he was surprising the teachers in the temple with his questions.  Perhaps the teachers in the temple wondered who was there to ask the questions and who was there to give answers to those with questions.  A child and the rabbis may have come near trading places that day.  But at twelve years of age our Lord Jesus was a child moving towards adulthood asking questions that would help him become an adult ready to enter a three year ministry which would result in the salvation of God’s people.  In a sense it is our desire to so learn to understand the logic and lessons of the faith as we know Christ came to learn and understand in the development of his own human nature.  He was raised by godly parents who instructed him, attended synagogue with others in his community while growing up, asked questions of religious leaders when he had opportunity, and all of this was involved in forming his own human understanding and character until the time came for him to fulfill the Scriptures that he had first sought as a child to learn and understand.  He was the one who had come to understand the logic of the law and the prophets and the wisdom of the sages from the time of Adam to John the Baptist, to learn for his own life and to apply in the ministry of reconciliation to which he had been set apart from the foundation of the earth to fulfill.  When we seek to understand the Apostolic teachings we seek to follow them as they followed Christ and we seek to find the logic of the faith enough to have it direct our paths and become planted in us to the point that we can anticipate the logic of the most holy faith in our everyday circumstances.

            That is what I tried to communicate in writing about Pentecost from a perspective of understanding a church calendar.  I think I did a clumsy job of it.  I am afraid that for people who have learned Christ in a different background where the church calendar was not a significant part of their learning of Christ this all must have seemed strange.  That was not my goal.  Looking back I wish I might have written that article a little bit differently.  But I do think that people without a church calendar could appreciate some of the connections I made between understanding the Passover and Pentecost from their Jewish backgrounds and realizing how Christ came to fulfill both of these great Old Testament feasts.  In the Passover, Israel was saved from the death of their firstborn by the blood of the sacrificed Lamb.  During the Passover our Lord Jesus Christ died and suffered for the sins of His people.  He prayed forgiveness for those who had put him to death.  He promised pardon to a sinner next to him. He purchased us from death and sin with his death on the cross.  On the third day he overcame sin and death and left the tomb having become eternal victor and Lord over sin and death.  According to Luke 1 for forty days he lingered upon earth and taught his apostles about the kingdom of God and the Gospel to prepare them to carry out the Great Commission.  He ascended into heaven on the fortieth day, and then ten days later came Pentecost.  Pentecost was a harvest festival, a time of joy, when the first fruits were offered from the seed that had been sown earlier.  On Pentecost Sunday, the Holy Spirit descended upon the church, filled the disciples and they spoke in tongues to every people in their hearing in their own language as the Gospel began its spread not only to Israel but to all the nations and languages upon earth.  This was the harvest of joy following the sowing of the seed.  Christ’s ministry of being sown into the tomb and resurrected in the Passover had begun to collect its harvest with the saving of three thousand on the Day of Pentecost.  There is a sort of logic between Passover and Pentecost.  That is what I wanted to emphasize.

            Do you understand what sort of logic this is?  It is the sort of logic that connects the purpose of the great events of redemption until there is a sort of logic.  That is why many of us enjoy learning the story of the great deeds of Christ through a yearly passage of the church calendar.  The calendar helps us to connect Israel’s period of waiting for Messiah, with Christmas, and then seeing Christ being manifest in the season of Epiphany, of his undergoing temptation and a struggle with the demons and with his own appetites in a forty day fast during the season of Lent, and then to see His sufferings in Holy Week and his death on Good Friday, and his hours in the tomb on Holy Saturday and his resurrection on Easter Sunday, then on to the day of his ascension into heaven and then to Pentecost.  We learn something of the logic of God’s work of bringing about redemption from the great and mighty acts of God.  There is a logic running between each of these seasons and each of these acts of God in his saving his people through Jesus Christ.  It is not of primary importance if a Christian is in a church which uses the church calendar as a tool to teach and instruct Christians.  I personally like that sort of church, but the important thing is for the believer to understand that there is a sort of logic running between the various deeds of God in the history of God acting on behalf of his peoples’ salvation.  Churches and ministries that don’t make use of the tradition of the church calendar can still draw attention to their people under their ministry how these deeds are connected within God’s saving mighty acts.

            I have to admit that I have noticed often times a weakness in some of the churches like mine which make extensive use of the church calendar.  There is a tendency for such churches to all too often never take the time to have Bible studies of various books of the Scripture.  It would seem instinctive to me that men and women who gather to break bread, to say prayers, and to give themselves to the study of the Apostles’ Teaching would do Book studies from the Bible.  How can we say we are serious about understanding the Apostles’ Teaching if we have never sat down and tried to understand a book written by the Apostle Paul, James, John, Peter, or Jude.  We find these books to be wonderful expressions of the mind and heart of Christ as the Apostles struggle to see Christ formed in the hearts and mind of the people of the early church.  The truth is, you can read a Book like the Book of Romans and come away with some new appreciation of Christ or of the faith every time you read through it.  These books will also help us to think about how we connect the rituals and deeds of God.  How do we understand baptism without understanding St. Paul’s teaching in Romans 6 or St. Peter’s instruction in I Peter 3?  How do we understand the Lord’s Supper or Eucharist if we haven’t contemplated St. Paul’s instruction in the eleventh chapter of I Corinthians?

            My friend, long ago, had grasped that for him to really understand the Christian faith, meant that he needed to think about the Scriptures and the faith until the logic or the connections between one teaching and aspect of the Christian faith helped him understand other teachings and aspects of the faith because he had begun to be so acquainted with the acts and teachings of God that he could anticipate the relationships between the varied mighty acts of God and the various words of instruction taught by the Scriptures.

            I want to leave you with an example of how seeking such an understanding of the faith will enable to see truth in ways we would not have when we started the process of seeking to understand the mighty acts of God or the teachings of Holy Scripture.

            As a Protestant, for many years I read the Apostle Paul’s writing to the Romans and thought in terms of justification, sanctification, and glorification.  That was good.  But I took a class that interested me at a local junior college where someone taught a class about the Jewish background of the Christian faith.  I learned that in the time of the Apostles that within Judaism a new convert to Judaism often had a proscribed set of things he needed to do to convert to Judaism.  First, he needed if he were a male to become circumcised.  Secondly he needed to undergo ceremonial washing by passing through the water.  This was sort of a symbolic representation of leaving Egypt and crossing the sea unto salvation, or of entering into the Land of promise by crossing through the Jordan.  In Christian terms this was a baptism.  Finally the new convert to Judaism was expected to give a gift to the temple while it remained in existence.  In the Book of Romans, the Apostle Paul was teaching about the Gospel and its implications to a church that included men and women from both Jewish and non-Jewish backgrounds.  If you understand this then you realize what a brilliantly written work it was.  If you were not Jewish and did not know much about Judaism you still understood what he was saying because you understood that you had failed to keep the moral understanding of a virtuous man and that meant you were a sinner.  You could understand that as a sinner you had no right to be acquitted by God during the judgment of your life.  But there was justification for Christ had died for our sins.  God had demonstrated his own love for us in the death of Christ for sinners.  You learned that in baptism you were brought into union with Christ’s death for sinners and were meant to come into union with the perfect life of Christ.  So in sanctification your desire in your new Christian life meant to grow in the life of Christ putting on Christ and doing away the sins of the past.  Finally you would look forward to the day of Christ’s glorification when you would be glorified as one of the sons and daughters of God, when the whole world would be redeemed and perfected in accordance with Christ’s redemption, for the whole of creation groans for the redemption of the sons and daughters of God, when the whole world will again be made right according to God’s original design.

            But if you had read St. Paul’s writing as a Jew you might have seen the same letter to the Romans with a bit of a different emphasis.  Teaching the same truths but in terms of Jewish rituals you might have read Romans like this.  If it is important for one to be circumcised it is because humankind has a sin problem.  So circumcision is required, but not a circumcision of the flesh as undertook in the ritual but a circumcision of the heart so that God begins cutting away at our love of things contrary to God’s will.  St. Paul teaches the Jewish man or woman using the rituals they understood from their own connection with Judaism.  Then St. Paul moves from a need for a circumcision of the heart to deal with our sin problem, to baptism.  Here is the second requirement for someone wanting to become Jewish.  St. Paul says basically that the meaning of baptism is to be baptized into the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  It is a new life; a life of union with God in our union with Christ.  Finally, what is the requirement of this new life in Christ discovered through the reality of our baptism?  St. Paul teaches in Romans 12 that we are to become living sacrifices living unto God in Christ.  We are to render our own bodies a living sacrifice.  That is our reasonable spiritual duty of worship according to St. Paul.  So, if you had been reading the Book of Romans as a Jewish man or woman you might have read the book as making three main points: circumcision by the Spirit, baptism into Christ, and rendering yourself a living sacrifice unto God.

            That is part of what I think it means to seek to understand the logic of the Christian faith.  May our gracious Lord impart his wisdom and grant his strength to each of us as we seek to do his will and to understand his ways.  My prayer is that God’s grace would use these words to speak to his people, wherever they may be, even through the weakness of my words and understanding.