November 24, 2009: Toward A Robust View of the Sovereignty Of God (Part 2): Greg Boyd And People Who Teach That God Would Never Want Something Bad To Happen To You

Last week I contended with theological giant Tim Keller; this week I just stomp on a midget, Greg Boyd. (I’m not alone. All orthodox Christians gag on Greg.)

Boyd teaches that God does not know all the future. He still claims that God is omniscient, though, because he believes that God knows everything that can be known. To Boyd, the future decisions of free moral agents are in principal unknowable, and therefore even God can’t be sure of them. So God makes his best guesses (he does have pretty good instincts) and guides us accordingly.

In his book God of the Possible Boyd explains how this insight enabled him to counsel a woman who was distraught over the breakup of her marriage. Suzanne met her husband-to-be in a Christian college where they were both preparing to be missionaries. They courted for three and a half years and prayed and attended church together. When he proposed she prayed over it, and they consulted their parents and friends and their pastor, and all agreed that the marriage was God’s will for them.

Then after they got married her husband had affairs, lost his faith, physically abused her and filed for divorce. She was pregnant at the time.

Boyd writes, “Understandably, Suzanne could not fathom how the Lord could respond to her lifelong prayers by setting her up with a man he knew would do this to her and her child.” Boyd saw three ways to understand the situation: (1) Suzanne had been mistaken about hearing God’s direction in the first place. It hadn’t been God’s will at all but Suzanne’s – and she had turned a disobedient deaf ear to the true leading of the Lord; (2) It was indeed God’s will for her to marry this man who he knew in advance would turn apostate and cruel; (3) It was God’s will for her to marry this man, but only because he didn’t know the guy would become a thug. Even God thought at the time that the marriage was a good idea. Give God a break - he’s doing the best he can. You can’t expect God to give you perfect guidance all the time when he doesn’t know how people will turn out. Boyd likes alternative (3), thinking it is theologically correct and that it is a compassionate way to sympathize with God and counsel the grieving.

Boyd is a heretic. (When my sister was involved in a woman’s group that was studying one of Boyd’s books I told her “NO! NO! Read something else!”, and when a friend told me that his pastor told him to drop out of Moody and read Boyd, I told him “Find another church - now.”) Boyd’s demeaning, condescending, biblically unorthodox view of God fails to comfort, inform, clarify or even interest.

But I am very interested in the other alternatives that Boyd gives. What do you think – did Suzanne follow the leading of our good and omniscient God when she married an antichrist, or must she have made a mistake somewhere, since God would never lead his child to marry someone bad?

I have discovered in some Christian circles that believers who would never accept Boyd’s major premise (God doesn’t know the future) nonetheless buy his minor premise (it can’t be God’s will for any of his followers to have a bad marriage.) Those who accept this minor premise tend to believe that if we pray, seek the Lord’s leading, marry only another believer, maintain our purity both before the wedding and within the marital relationship, and speak all our partner’s love languages, then God will certainly guide us into a marriage that both honors him and pleases us. How could he not?

But I’m afraid this view is simply false, has no biblical warrant, and does not reflect a robust understanding of the sovereignty of God. It stumbles over the simple question, “How could you possibly know it is God’s will for you to have a good marriage?”

Consider the biblical data. It was God’s will that the prophet Hosea marry a whore and be very unhappy about it. It was his will that Joseph be abandoned and sold into slavery and be falsely accused and languish in prison. It was his will that a sword of sorrow pierce the heart of the blessed mother of Jesus (Luke 1:35). It was his will that some “faced jeers and flogging, while others were chained and put in prison. They were stoned, they were sawed in two, they were put to death by the sword” (Hebrews 11:36). And on top of all that it was his will that his own Son be tortured to death. So why does it seem impossible to Boyd (and, I’m afraid, to many non-heretical Christians) that God could will one of his children to marry a seemingly good believer who goes bad? This really should be an easy call. If God, in his sovereign will, should determine that his Son be betrayed by a Judas, why shouldn’t he determine that you or I marry one? If you answer, “Because I can’t see any way at all that God could bring good out of that circumstance,” I would respond, “You lack imagination.”

I think that God has graciously given me an unfair advantage in perceiving this truth. You see, I am Suzanne. Not literally - but my story parallels hers in many details. Now, in the year 2009, I am by God’s sheer favor the happiest married man I know – and perhaps the happiest married man I have ever known. But this has not always been the case. For years I endured marital circumstances that became for me what C. S. Lewis called the “severe mercy” of God.

You don’t want God’s severe mercy. Trust me, you don’t. But you may need it. God in his sovereign grace may entwine into your life the cruelty of Joseph’s brothers, the whoring of Gomer, the sadism of Herod, the betrayal of Judas, and many other things besides. He knows full well what some people are going to do to you, and he leads you into their lair anyway. Why? Why would he do that? I don’t know. It would be presumptuous of me to guess. He’s God, and I cannot fathom his ways. Maybe sometimes we can see bits and pieces of what he is doing, and maybe after years we will even be able to say, “Now I know what that was about.” Maybe not. But in the meantime we trust him.

And we relinquish to him our misguided sense of control and acknowledge that his sovereign hand may lead us into some circumstances that are delightful and some that are appalling. Consider that when St. Paul wrote, “I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty” (Philippians 4:12) he was neither crediting his wisdom for the bounty he sometimes enjoyed nor bemoaning his foolishness for the deprivation he sometimes suffered. He had already determined to receive from the Lord both good things and bad things with the discipline of holy contentment.

Like Paul I have known both poverty and riches - though in my case they have been relational rather than economic. God's sovereign love and exact foreknowledge have guided me through both. All praise and thanks to this all-wise, ever-loving, all-knowing God.

November 18, 2009: Toward A Robust View Of God’s Sovereignty: The Fatal Flaw In Tim Keller’s Grace Narrative

I’m a big Tim Keller fan, and enjoy reading whatever the brilliant pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan writes. For a while now I’ve been recommending his book The Reason For God as the best nonfiction I’ve seen in years. But after reading a bold article by John Piper taking on C. S. Lewis (Hey! Who does Piper think he is?), I’m feeling bold myself this morning, and so will bleat a theological complaint I’ve had for a while against Keller.

I object to Keller’s grace rhetoric. Not that I am against grace – heavens no! I favor magnifying, and oppose diminishing, the role of God’s grace in the salvation of our souls. All I want to do is point out an area where grace rhetoric tends to dismiss - or perhaps just overlook - the claims of divine sovereignty.

In his essay “The Advent of Humility” in the December 22, 2008 issue of Christianity Today, Keller writes,

There are two basic narrative identities at work among professing Christians. The first is what I will call the moral-performance narrative identity. These are people who in their heart of hearts say, I obey; therefore I am accepted by God. The second is what I will call the grace narrative identity. This basic operating principle is, I am accepted by God through Christ; therefore I obey.

The problem here is that Keller ties human obedience to acceptance by God, whether as a motive (“I’ll obey so that God will accept me”) or as a reason (“I’ll obey because God has accepted me”). It seems to me that Keller sets up these alternatives as a binary choice. That is, he does not say there are three narrative identities, or fifty, but two, both of which comprehend obedience as something inextricably bound to God’s acceptance of us. It’s just a question of which comes first, or which drives the other, or which serves as the other’s foundation.

But I believe it is best to take obedience off the acceptance grid altogether, and let “acceptance by God” be irrelevant for determining either the motive for or the cause of our submission to him. God should be obeyed because he is God, because as Creator he has the sovereign right to command (and we have the corresponding obligation to obey) whether or not he accepts us, whether or not he shows us grace. I’ll call this the “sovereignty narrative identity.”

It is possible to embrace the sovereignty narrative as the ground for all of one’s moral obligations. C. S. Lewis did that before he ever became a Christian! In 1929 he reluctantly came to believe in God (though he did not yet believe in Jesus or the afterlife), and immediately recognized that he had to submit to the commands of the Absolute. He bowed the knee to the Ultimate and Personal God even though he knew nothing of grace nor approval nor reward in connection with that God.

Years later in Surprised By Joy Lewis wrote, “The commands were inexorable, but they were backed by no 'sanctions.' God was to be obeyed simply because he was God. Long since,…He had taught me how a thing can be revered not for what it can do for us but for what it is in itself…If you ask why we should obey God, in the last resort the answer is, ‘I am.’”

That is exactly correct. The answer is not “Because then I will approve of you,” nor “Because I have received you with grace,” but rather “Because I am God.” It is good that we let grace motivate our gratitude and praise and affection, but when we let it motivate our obedience we come perilously close to diminishing - if not dismissing - the divine demand for submission that knows no other foundation than the sovereign rule of God. Obey God even if he hasn’t shown you grace and never will. Obey God even if you are damned! Who are you to hope for (or respond to) some kind of approval before you’ll obey? Obedience must not concern itself with what it can get (or has already gotten) out of God.

Lewis expresses the value of the sovereignty narrative in a wonderfully provocative spiritual exercise where he writes, “I think it is well, even now, sometimes to say to ourselves, ‘God is such that if (though it’s impossible) his power could vanish and His other attributes remain, so that the supreme right were forever robbed of the supreme might, we should still owe Him precisely the same kind and degree of allegiance as we now do.’” That is right. We would have to obey God even if he couldn’t lavish upon us the benefits of his grace.

Think about it in terms of the parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15 – a favorite story of Keller and other “grace narrative” preachers. (See Keller’s mostly excellent book, The Prodigal God, an extended sermon on this parable.) Imagine an alternate ending in which the son returns from his disastrous experiment in loose living and sees from afar that his father’s farm is in ruins. He is told that his father has lost everything and is in poor health. Now he knows that not only will his father not clothe him in finery and throw him a party - he won't even be able to give him a servant's job. What should the son do now?

He should proceed to the house and fall at his father’s feet and beg forgiveness anyway! Why? Because that is his father. It does not matter whether the father chooses to show him grace, or even (contra the story and contra divine reality) he is even capable of showering him with tangible signs of it. It is enough that the man is his father and that he is good. His grace and his power to manifest grace in pleasing ways are glorious things to celebrate, but they are quite beside the point when it comes to the question of why a son should submit to his father’s will.

Permit one more illustration of this idea:

Suppose we ask some men, “Why are you faithful to your wives?” One answers, “Because if I’m faithful to her, then she’ll be faithful to me.” That’s the performance narrative. I do this good thing and have a right to expect her approval and response. Another man says, “I’m faithful to her because she has already been so good to me! How could I not be faithful to someone so kind and dear?” That’s the grace narrative. It sounds a lot better, but I still don’t like it.

Most accurately, a man must be faithful to his wife simply because she’s his wife! That’s the sovereignty narrative. It understands that the institution of marriage itself holds sovereign claim over a man’s obligation to faithfulness. Neither the wife’s anticipated response nor her gracious initiative are granted any relevance in the matter. (They are relevant to a good many other things, but not as motives or inspirations for fidelity.) Thus a good man who is happily married might say, “Well it is certainly true that she is loving and kind and gracious and that she would never cheat on me in a million years. But that’s another matter, and it doesn’t answer your question. I’m faithful to her because she’s my wife. I can’t cheat on a wife.”

Be like that with God. Obey him because he is God.

November 10, 2009: But Didn’t Jesus Forgive The Unrepentant?

It sure looks like Jesus forgave unrepentant people while he hung on the cross. He prayed “Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34). The first martyr, Stephen, said much the same as he was being stoned to death: “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” (Acts 7:60). These may be the two most remarkable utterances ever spoken by man. Think about it: if you were a Fort Hood soldier bleeding to death on the ground last week from bullet wounds inflicted by Nadal Malik Hasan as he praised the hell-bound angel of darkness known as “Allah,” would you be saying, “Lord Jesus, forgive him”? Probably not. My instincts would not be to forgive the demon-spewing maggot but rather grab a gun so I could shoot him in the head.

But if, as his victim, I desired Hasan’s death rather than his absolution, I’d be in pretty good company with the martyred saints of Revelation 6. They pray to God saying “How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the earth and avenge our blood?” (Verse 10). What an interesting prayer! If Christians are always supposed to forgive the unrepentant - if Jesus’ and Stephen’s requests are the norm and our refusal to forgive displeases God - then these saints’ petition should certainly meet with divine rebuke. But they don’t. Instead, the next verse indicates that God approves of their prayer for vengeance: “Then each of them was given a white robe, and they were told to wait a little longer, until the number of their fellow servants and brothers who were to be killed as they had been was completed.” (Verse 11).

Funny thing God doesn’t say to them, “What a shoddy bunch of saints you are! Why can’t you just forgive your killers the way my Son did, the way Stephen did? Haven’t you learned that you’re supposed to be nice to people who murder you?”

The question that intrigues me is how to reconcile Jesus’ and Stephen’s remarkable plea for forgiveness with the saints’ more natural plea for vengeance. Is there any way for both to be right?

I think a big piece of the explanation (there are probably other pieces I’m missing) concerns knowledge. Knowledge matters. It is true that Jesus said “Father forgive them,” but it is also true that he immediately gave the mitigating circumstance: for they do not know what they are doing.

These people did not know they were crucifying the Son of God. They (or at least many of them) thought they were doing a good thing: they were ridding the land of a dangerous heretic. They were ignorant. They would have done differently if they had known better. About 20 years later the Apostle Paul explained that if the rulers of this age had understood God’s wisdom, “they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” (1 Corinthians 2:8). And he could know that for sure because he himself had once been one of the ignorant! He told Timothy that though he was once a “blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man,” he was shown mercy “because I acted in ignorance and unbelief.” (1 Timothy 1:13).

But what if Paul had acted not out of “ignorance and unbelief” but with full knowledge that he was doing the devil’s work? Would he then have received preemptive grace, grace that opens the door ahead of time by crediting a possible future repentance? I don’t think so. In fact, I believe we have a biblical control that answers this thought experiment for us: Judas. People who crucified Jesus did not know what they were doing, and were pardoned, whereas Judas, who spent three years with Jesus and knew exactly what he was doing, was condemned. (Jesus even said it would have been better for him if he had never been born – Matthew 26:24.)

This theme of “He doesn’t know any better – let it pass” versus “He does know better – let him be condemned!” occurs a lot in Scripture.

For example, in Acts 17, Paul tells Gentile pagans that they shouldn’t think that “the divine being is like gold or silver or stone,” (verse 29), and that “In the past God overlooked such ignorance”. He did? God sure didn’t overlook it when the Israelites worshipped idols! That nation was judged a lot, and harshly, for worshipping gods of wood, metal and stone. But meanwhile Gentiles “got away with it” because at the time they didn’t know any better (until now: Paul continues, “but now he commands all people everywhere to repent” – verse 30).

Or consider the deliberate double standard in 1 Corinthians 5:9-11. Paul doesn’t mind it in the least if you associate with sexually immoral greedy swindling idolators – as long as they are unbelievers who don’t know any better. But if they’re Christians and behave like that, then you are supposed to shun them to the point of not even sitting at the same table with them. They should know better. They don’t get forgiven (or even tolerated) until they repent.

That same chapter tells the ugly story of a supposedly Christian Corinthian man who was sleeping with his stepmother. Paul does not command forgiveness for this unrepentant pervert but rather excommunication. It’s a last-ditch effort to try to bring him around. Those who would forgive the unrepentant fornicator would not be doing him any spiritual favor, but rather enabling a “sin unto death” (see 1 John 5:16) that would imperil the man’s soul.

In 2 Corinthians 2 Paul orders the forgiveness of a man who has been restored to fellowship after being punished. (Whether it's the same man we don't know). Paul writes, "The punishment inflicted on him by the majority is sufficient for him. Now instead, you ought to forgive and comfort him, so that he will not be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow." (Verses 6 and 7). Whatever the circumstances of this man's punishment and restoration, it should be noted that Paul's instructions concerning him are utterly incompatible with the doctrine that we must forgive people no matter what they do, even if they don't repent. If that were true, then Paul would not be instructing the Corinthians to forgive this man, but rebuking them for not having done so already!

The forgiveness of wicked men that Jesus offered while on the cross and that Stephen uttered while being stoned to death are not normative in all circumstances. They are limited to particular ones - especially those in which ignorance plays a part. Most of the time, badness must be rebuked and turned away from before we can forgive it.

November 3, 2009: God’s Prerequisites For Forgiveness

Suppose you are a sinner and you ask some Christian pastor what you have to do to be forgiven by God. What do you think he would say?

Specific answers would vary from pastor to pastor of course. But probably all of them would talk about confessing your sin and turning from it. I think I would quote 1 John 1:9: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” I’d mention the tax collector who cried out, “God be merciful to me, a sinner!” and the crucified criminal who said to Jesus, “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Both men received forgiveness from God. The God we worship stands eager to forgive all who despise their sin and confess it to him.

But imagine now a pastor who responds, “Oh, no, no, no, you misunderstand! You don’t have to do anything to be forgiven by God. You don’t have to say anything, confess anything, believe anything, turn from anything, or even think anything. That is because he has already forgiven you! It’s a terrible mistake to think you’ve got to admit fault or be sorry for what you did. And you certainly don’t have to change your behavior, or even intend to change it. In fact, you could even say to God, ‘I don’t want your forgiveness' - and he would still forgive you anyway! That is because God forgives the unrepentant. He just forgives everybody no matter what they do.”

Those of you who love the Bible would recoil in horror, because you know that that is not how God forgives. It really takes very little investigation to discern that the Bible teaches - with vigorous consistency - that the unrepentant wicked are condemned while the humbly penitent are shown grace. This theme shines on practically every page of Scripture in one form or another.

Which is why it continues to amaze me that so many Christian teachers insist that we ourselves must forgive people who sin grievously but who do not repent. A highly respected and nationally syndicated preacher said that in his sermon a couple weeks ago. I wonder if it will occur to him someday that he is unintentionally suggesting to his congregation that the way God forgives us is pretty shabby. We can do better than God! Though God insists on repentance, we should be much more loving than that.

In the March 9, 2005 issue of Christianity Today, Rev. R. T. Kendall actually said yes to the question “Can I forgive those who have betrayed me if they are not repentant?” He wrote, “If we wait for those who have hurt us to repent first, we will almost certainly wait for a long, long time.” Well, yes, we may indeed have to wait a long time – but that is exactly what God does! Sometimes he waits decades for us to come to our senses and bemoan our sin. Jesus compared his Father to the compassionate father in Luke 15 who patiently waited his prodigal son’s return, and who forgave the young man the instant he came back. Kendall, regrettably, finds such waiting inappropriate, because “We...give ourselves a justification to stay bitter the rest of our lives.” No we don’t - that’s the old sleight-of-hand I mentioned last week, the confusion that equates “forgiveness” with “releasing yourself from bitterness” (and therefore understands “not forgiving” as “choosing to remain bitter.”). But that is not what forgiveness means. Forgiveness is the act of canceling an offender’s debt regardless of how you feel about it. Just because you lack bitterness does not mean you have forgiven, and just because you still have angry feelings doesn’t mean you haven’t.

The basic template for forgiveness, divine and human, is laid down in Luke 17:3 where Jesus says, "If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him.” The second “if” in that sentence must be allowed to stand as our Lord spoke it and not edited to “whether or not.” That is, Jesus did not say – nor would it have occurred to him to say - “If your brother sins, rebuke him, and whether or not he repents, forgive him.” The proper response to sin is rebuke, just as the proper (and gracious) response to repentance is forgiveness.

That point is nailed down in the next verse, where Jesus says, “If he sins against you seven times in a day, and seven times comes back to you and says, 'I repent,' forgive him." While our forgiveness should be inexhaustible, just like God’s, it should also be conditioned on the offender’s repentance, just like God’s.

Should there be any other strings attached to our grace? Absolutely. That is part of the lesson of the parable that Jesus told about forgiveness in Matthew 18:31-35. There a man owed a king a million dollars and couldn’t pay it. He begged for mercy and patience, and the king kindly forgave the debt completely (but conditionally, as we find out later). Then the same man went out and throttled a servant who only owed him a hundred dollars. The servant likewise pleaded for patience and mercy, but the man didn't give it. He had the servant thrown in debtor‘s prison.

When the king heard of the matter, he rescinded the original pardon that he had given the first man. There had been a string attached to it, a string which, verbalized, would sound like “Because I forgive you when you beg mercy from me, you must now forgive others when they beg mercy from you.”

Biblical forgiveness has conditions and strings which, when ignored, leave us with emotional mush rather than true grace. When you give no-strings-attached forgiveness to unrepentant people, you have not imitated your Father in heaven but rather simply enabled more wickedness and irresponsibility. And you may also have tempted yourself to wonder why God isn’t as nice and as loving as you.

I can imagine all kinds of objections to what I have written above (“But didn’t Jesus forgive unrepentant people from the cross?”), and will be happy to address those points next week.