The Worldwide Church of God presents YOU

The Worldwide Church of God presents YOU’RE INCLUDED – the Good News of Jesus Christ. Our host is Dr. J. Michael Feazell.

JMF: Welcome to You’re Included. With us today is Dr. Ray Anderson. Dr. Anderson is senior professor of theology and ministry at Fuller Theological Seminary, he’s author of more than 20 books, including An Emergent Theology of Emerging Churches, and Judas and Jesus, Amazing Grace for the Wounded Soul. Dr. Anderson is also a contributing editor for the Journal of Psychology and Theology. Thank you for being with us today.

RA: Thank you, Mike, I’m glad to be here.

JMF: We appreciate your time.

RA: Glad to be with you.

JMF: We’re looking forward to discussing some very interesting and important topics. I want to begin by helping our viewers understand a little bit about what theology is and what difference does theology make to the believer.

RA: All right. You said my favorite word: theology. It’s a scary word, to many people. But really if you stop to think about it, it’s simply a way of thinking about God in respect to who God is and how God has revealed himself to us. So that theology, as I’ve often said, is reflection upon God’s ministry. So ministry precedes theology, I tell pastors that I often speak to, that it’s in the context of God’s ministry that theology emerges. When Jesus healed on the Sabbath day, for example, and the legalists challenged him on that, said, you can’t do that, you’re not supposed to do that on the Sabbath day. And for Jesus, that’s what God is doing. God is working and therefore, Jesus said, human beings were not made just to keep the Sabbath in a legalistic way. The Sabbath was made for human beings, for their welfare. Now, that’s a theological statement. Somebody could just have said, Jesus healed the blind man on the Sabbath – and that’s a narrative. But when interpretation is given of that, so that the work of God interprets the word of God, what God does interprets what God says. And the statement of that, that’s theology. See, Jesus had no text in the Old Testament for that. The blind man that’s healed is the text.

JMF: So the story tells us something about God … theology.

RA: Yes. But the responsibility of theology is to not just read and narrate the story, but it is to let the story tell us and speak to us of who God is because without the statement, that, well, this is who God is: God cares for you. God loves you. God will do his work of healing even on the Sabbath day. That’s the purpose of the Sabbath to Jesus, that’s an example for me.

JMF: So everybody, is it fair to say, everybody has a theology even though they may not realize it or think about it.

RA: Yeah, you cannot be a believer in Jesus Christ, without, in a sense, implicitly saying, well, I believe he is of God, I believe he was sent of God, I believe that (as Paul says) he died on the cross for me, was raised again to overcome the power of death, and in reciting the creed, whatever creed one recites, the Apostle’s Creed – that’s a theological statement. So that the average persons in the church hearing the story and confessing their own faith in Christ. They are doing Theology.

JMF: So one person might have a view of God, based on how they interpret what they read in the Bible that says, God is angry at me and I need to try to do better to get him back on my side. Another person may have a view – God is way off somewhere, and he’s made things and wound up the universe. And he’s way out there, now we have to just work things out for ourselves. Another person may say, well, God is full of grace and mercy and therefore it doesn’t matter what I do – he will still forgive me in the end and that’s why I can behave however I want.

The next person may say, God loves me and therefore I want to please him. And live according to what I understand him to expect of me. Everybody, each of those four let’s say, and any infinite number of … more people may have different views and these kind of reflect the idea there are many different theologies on the shelf, can you distinguish…

RA: It’s almost like when Jesus asked his disciples, “who do you say that I am?” They thought it was a multiple choice type of exam. So they came up with different possible answers. Well, some say you are John the Baptist raised from the dead, some say you are the prophet that Moses talked about. They have all these kinds of answers, and each of those were theologies, they were current theologies. And Jesus probed deeper, but who do you think that I am, you’ve experienced me. And when Peter finally dared to blurt out, you’re the Messiah, you are the one we’ve been waiting for. And then Jesus said to him, blessed are you, flesh and blood does not reveal it to you, but God who is in heaven. In other words, he said, Peter you’re right, but you will never know why… because that’s a revelation of God. But Peter wouldn’t have been right, Peter wouldn’t have been able to have that theology – you are the Son of God, you are the Messiah, apart from following him, experiencing him, and being there. Standing off at a distance, the Pharisees came to different conclusions. They said this man is not of God, John 9:16. After he healed the blind man, they said, he is not of God because he does not keep the Sabbath. Jesus was killed on exegetical grounds. They had a Bible verse that gives permission to kill Jesus because he violated the law. And Jesus must have said, what’s going on here? God is doing this work, God is in your midst. God is working through me. So the problem that all pastors face is, not that people are waiting to hear theology, not that they’re waiting to be told to believe something. They all believed something. Every person that sits down to hear a sermon already believes something. And that belief has to be taken away and changed. That’s the real task. That’s why pastors have to be theologians, because they have to know the true theology that God has revealed. And that has to enter in, in such a way that corrects the bad theology.

JMF: So theology is wrapped up in God’s revelation of who he is rather than any other way of deducing or coming to … and that is in the person of Christ.

RA: Yes, and in the act of God. I went through three years of theological seminary and went out and started to preach and began to preach my systematic theology notes. God is omnipotent. He can do everything. God is omniscient, He knows everything, he’s omnipresent …

JMF: The classical …

RA: Yeah, the classical doctrine of God. And some of my people hearing that, said, well, you know, that maybe true, that’s easy to believe that God can do everything, but can he do anything? If he knows everything (you want me to say he knows everything, fine. I already sort of believe that). But what I want to hear, does he know ME and my small place? Does he enter into my life? Does he make a difference in my life. And I realized, theology I had been taught, didn’t answer that question. I have to start all over again. I went to the incarnation. Paul says of Jesus, in Colossians 2, in him is the fullness of the Godhead dwelling bodily. Everything that God is, is revealed to us through Jesus. See, that’s why again the Trinity is so important. People stumble at the concept of the Trinity, and say, well, it’s just a theological bit of metaphysics and doctrine, it doesn’t make any difference. Well, it makes a tremendous difference. If the one who heals and the one who weeps at the tomb of Lazarus, the one who groans with pain and agony when he is confronted with deformity, if that’s not the tears of God, if that’s not the pathos of God, then we’ve lost connection with that. Then we’re back to a kind of a dualism, as Thomas Torrance liked to say, my former teacher, that you separate the concept, the doctrine of God from the act and being of God. And suddenly we lost touch with that. And that’s why legalism and formalism and all of those things begin to take the place of the grace of God as a living reality. So that’s why I think the Trinity is that God is both above and he is below, God is involved. The one who dies upon the cross has to be as fully God as the Father in heaven. So that Jesus who says, God my Father, why have you forsaken me, that has to be, not only the language of Psalm 22 the human lament of forsakenness that Jesus takes on his own lips, but it has to be that God himself has, in a sense, assumed humanity estranged from God, so that atonement begins in Bethlehem. I wasn’t taught that in seminary. I was taught the doctrine of the atonement began totally on the cross. And it was Torrance who helped me to see. He said, no you have to go back to the very fact that the one who was born in the womb of Mary was born to assume the human estrangement, to assume the sentence of death, so that, in that sense, Jesus as the incarnate Son of God is dead man walking. Can God die? No. But for God to overcome human death, God has to become human and God has to assume that human death, so that when God the Son, as John says, the Logos enters in to become flesh has in a sense, placed God from below. That’s why in my The Gospel According to Judas, in my first book on Judas, I thought there is a way to get at this. If Judas is chosen by Jesus after a whole night of prayer which we assume to make sure he made the right decision, and yet Judas, one of the 12, ends up betraying him and then in his own remorse, said, I have killed an innocent man, I have done something wrong. And in remorse he went out and killed himself. For many people, say, well, that’s it. Suicide is the unforgivable sin and therefore that’s the end. But you see, what the gospel tells us is that, this Jesus who chose Judas, was betrayed by Judas, he’s the final judge. He is the one that will, in the end determine the final verdict.

JMF: And most of us grow up in the church hearing sermons, reading what we might read and we get the idea that God is out in heaven, he is out there somewhere, he looks at us, he judges us, we read the Old Testament and we see God gets angry and so we think of God as being a judge, an angry judge that is so angry that he sends his Son to die, because somebody’s gotta pay this price.

RA: And ends up making the Son merely the victim of God’s anger.

JMF: But you’re saying we need to see God as he shows himself to be in Christ as, not just the creator, but as the redeemer at the same time. And he is not just the judge, but the judge is the one who gave himself to save.

RA: As Barth says, he is the judge judged in our place. So it’s not only that we can set the Old Testament aside and say, well, we don’t need that anymore because we have Jesus. It’s only through Jesus that we read the Old Testament aright. Torrance helped me to see that with Jesus we can go back and see the antecedents for everything that Jesus revealed of God is already there. That in that divine covenant that God made through Abraham was universal – through [you], all the families of the earth will be blessed, through that seed that’s there. So that the particularity of the people of Israel was not simply, well it’s only them and nobody else – nobody else has the chance, except they want maybe to join in with them. No, the promise to Abraham, was the promise to a gentile. Abraham was a gentile. There were no Jews yet. And so when Paul sees the Holy Spirit coming upon uncircumcised gentiles, he goes back to Abraham and says, there is the example of that. And in Romans Paul says, when was Abraham declared to be righteous? Before he was circumcised or after? Well, the answer is obvious. Abraham as a gentile was declared righteous before God by faith, through grace. And then circumcision was given as a sign of that. And that’s Paul argument that we can go back and see from the Old Testament from the very beginning we have the grace of God is there. It’s grace that enters in when humans are hopelessly estranged from God, fallen away, and it’s universal, which means that through Abraham and through the grace of God everyone is included, no one is excluded from the stand-point of God’s intention. But grace itself places a demand. As Bonhoeffer said, grace is not cheap. Grace is not just believing a doctrine and following the rules. Grace is abiding and living in that relationship with God. It’s like a ….

JMF: We usually think of a relationship with God as being rules…

RA: … sure, but that’s again, that’s human beings from Adam and Eve on, thought that by somehow keeping rules they could get back into that relationship, and they misunderstood even that the sacrificial system put in place was not a rule to be kept but it was a way in which they could re-enter through grace. It’s the grace of God that overcomes that death. So that the overcoming of death in the Old Testament moves forward to God assuming that death and therefore, as Barth made clear and I learned from him (and from Torrance as well) that through the death of Jesus Christ and his resurrection there is a retroactive kind of theology, then to go back and to see that it isn’t just that the Jews were wrong and we can dispense with that. They are the ones that revealed to us God’s universal promise and purpose. But the Jews of Jesus’ day had torn the law out of the living community of faith and made the law of something a standard of correctness and became specialists in the law. Jesus said, I have come to fulfill the law, and grace. And so to me, that’s why it’s so difficult to preach today. Because everybody enters in with their own sense, if I just keep the rules – perfectionism and legalism didn’t start with theology. Legalism and perfectionism is a psychological effect. People think that if they somehow just do it right, that they will be accepted.

JMF: Jesus said that you search the Scriptures daily that you may find eternal life and then you refuse to come to me.

RA: Because, they were using, as I say, again that the Pharisees use Scripture to crucify Jesus, to condemn him. If he violates the Sabbath, he’s not of God.

JMF: So there’s a difference then between … in Elmer Collier’s book How to Read T.F. Torrance, he comments on the [here page 86] under the subhead of “The Latin heresy: a ‘gospel’ of external relations.” And he says, “Torrance sees a growing tendency in Latin theology from the 5th century on to reject the idea that Christ assumed our sinful alienated and fallen humanity and to embrace the notion that Christ assumed a neutral or an original and perfect human nature from the virgin Mary.” And it goes on to show how Torrance taught that whatever Christ did not assume is not healed.

RA: Yeah, Torrance is quoting there the Cappadocian theologian, Gregory of Nazianzus in the 4th century who said, what is not assumed is not healed. And that was in opposition to Apollinarius, basically, who argued that the Logos of Jesus was a perfect Logos in a sense, not totally human. That Jesus was only human from the neck down. That the self was not involved and Nazianzus said, well, the problem is in the self that we are under sentence of death, and that has to be overcome, so that the Latin heresy comes out of the western tradition at Rome at that sense, from Augustine and following, that began to tear apart the atonement from the actual person of Jesus and made out of it a formula – a system – and then began to take grace as almost a commodity so that grace became something that you could control by dispensing it. So that the sacraments became then the means by which you could dispense grace and therefore control it. So the heresy that Torrance points to, is the heresy of breaking truth apart from God, so to speak.

JMF: Is it kind of the difference between a written contract between two people and a devoted friendship between two people? In other words, if there is a contract, you work out a law, penalties, etc. if something goes wrong in the relationship. But in a devoted friendship, you can hurt the relationship but you’ve got the freedom to forgive and move on together …

RA: Well, more than that, you see, if in fact a relationship (such as a marriage relationship) is contractual, then we hold each other accountable to keeping the contract, so to speak. And therefore as long as I’m keeping my end of the contract up, you are obligated to fulfill my needs. Well, that’s hopeless, you see. That’s a form of legalism in marriage. When I do pre-marital counseling I talk about friendship, I say that friendship is the only human relationship that only survives because it’s constantly renewed and kept alive. Husbands and wives often will end up saying things to each other in times of anger, whatever … if they said it to a friend, they wouldn’t have any friends. Friends don’t have to take it. So, people will be off guard and preserve a friendship and at the same time destroy their marriage. So that I say, the quality of friendship, … so that God is more at the level of the friend. God is the lover. God enters[?] with Israel. Hosea said, He is the lover. He is betrayed but God still said I won’t give you up. I won’t let you go. So that it’s true that the legalistic, contractual aspect enters in… seemingly to give us security and truth, in a sense, that we can control. But the fact is, the moment that we think that we control the truth, if I think I control the truth about my wife, I’ve destroyed something. She’s always a mystery to me. She’s always someone that I have to be open to. And my concepts of her have to give way to who she really is, and it’s the same with God – our concepts of God. C.S. Lewis had an amazing statement that, in his mercy he must destroy all our finest concepts of him. That our theology is already a set of concepts that have to be redeemed. Torrance said the atonement is as much the redeeming of our theology and concepts of God as it is of our sin.

JMF: I see that we are going to have to have more than one interview because there are a number of things we’ve got to talk about yet.

RA: Well, that’s because you get me started to talking on theology, Mike.

JMF: I need to get into your book Judas and Jesus: Amazing Grace for the Wounded Soul, but we’ll save that for the next program.

RA: I’ll be back.

JMF: I just want to come back to the kind of theology that Thomas Torrance is explicating and the number of other theologians kind of from Karl Barth’s theology, that … I think we call it Trinitarian theology and that is a corrective to this what Torrance calls the Latin heresy. Could you talk about that?

RA: Yeah. Because as Torrance often made clear in class when I sat under his teaching in Edinburgh of Matthew 11:27 he said is the key verse. Now most of us memorized Matthew 11:28, “Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden.” But he said, Matthew [11]: 27 is the key verse, which says, “Only the Father knows the Son, and only the Son knows the Father, and those to whom it is given.” That’s a Trinitarian statement. Knowledge of God is self-knowledge. It’s knowledge of God that begins of the Father knows the Son, the Son knows the Father. How do you gain entry into that? You say, well, if only the Father knows the Son, then if I go to the Father, I’ll know the Son. Well, you can’t do that, because only the Son knows the Father. So, uh, ok, I’ll go to the Son to know the Father. Well, you can’t do that, because only the Father knows the Son. OK, then I’ll have to be brought into that. The Holy Spirit brings me into that inter-relationship between the Son and the Father. And then Torrance said, that’s where atonement takes place. Atonement didn’t just take place on the cross. Atonement takes place within the inner being of God – to God’s love and mercy. Jesus is the lamb slain before the foundation of the world. Jesus said, the Son is come into the world in order to assume human death, die that death, and in resurrection overcome that death. So that death no longer has the power to determine human destiny. No person’s death determines their destiny. And that’s the Judas thesis. That it’s Jesus that determines the destiny of Judas, not even his own action. But we’ll talk about that some day. But that’s Torrance’s theology of the Trinity, atonement takes place and a relationship is bound up in that. If you don’t have the Trinity then God becomes an abstract set of rules or concepts and we’re on our own – our own humanity then, has to, in a sense, bear the weight of worship and prayer. As it is, Jesus, in his own humanity, continues even now to be the one who prays with us and for us. Our worship is the worship of the Son to the Father (that’s James Torrance, the brother of Tom, wrote a book on that). True worship is the worship of the Son to the Father and we are brought into that worship. Our own humanity cannot bear the weight of authentic prayer and worship. The humanity of Christ does that.

JMF: So practically speaking then, when we pray, we’re not really, or we ought not to be really thinking, I hope God hears my prayer. We’re able to say with the Holy Spirit that this prayer I pray is the prayer of Christ praying in me therefore I have confidence that I actually stand with Christ…

RA: That’s why when we pray in his name it doesn’t mean as a little magical formula to put in the end. That’s not the bank code that gets you into the ready teller. Praying in his name is to say that the Holy Spirit brings us in, so that Jesus takes our prayer and offers it up to the Father.

JMF: So a recognition that we actually stand together with Christ and he is with us, standing with us, in all that we do, in our relationship with God, gives us a freedom that is not a legalistic…

RA: You see, the legalistic means we’ve got to do it right, but we can’t ever do that, see, we’re in default from the beginning, so that if in fact Jesus has assumed our condition and has, in a sense, made it right, that’s what justification and righteousness mean, he has made it right. But he has made it right not as an abstract deposit in our account that we can draw. He made it right by saying, come unto me and join with me and we’re going to enter into the kingdom together.

JMF: So there’s a … our faith then is in Christ himself, not in how well we pray or how…

RA: No. That’s right. Our faith is not in something, not in doctrine, it’s not in a concept. Faith is itself a relational aspect. It is trust and it is the Holy Spirit that brings us into that relationship. So we’re saved not by works but by faith. And faith is for Paul a synonym for Jesus. (In Galatians 3, it’s interesting that Paul says before faith came we’re under the law.)

JMF: Let’s hold that thought, because we are out of time.

RA: All right. We’ll take that up next time.

JMF: And let’s pick that up as soon as we get together.

RA: All right, all right.

JMF: Thanks very much for being with us, Dr. Ray Anderson.

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