Stop Applying the Bible

Stop Applying the Bible

The Will of God Ep. 5 “Whoever accuses or judges a brother or sister, accuses the law and judges the law; but if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge.” -James 4:11 Bonhoeffer commenting on James 4 writes, Judging stands in absolute opposition to doing…There are two types of behavior with regard to the law, judging and doing; they are mutually exclusive. Those who judge understand the law as a measure that they employ against others, and see themselves as responsible for seeing that the law is implemented. They thus place themselves above the law. They forget that there is but ‘one lawgiver and judge, the one who is able to save and to destroy’ (James 4:12). For both Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer the two dirty words when it comes to God’s will are “application” and “interpretation” because both have to do with knowing/judging rather than doing God’s will: God’s commandment leaves human beings no room for application and interpretation, but only for obedience or disobedience. [God’s commands demand ]acts of obedience to be performed on the spot in a specific way, pure decisions the meaning of which is not open to discussion, because they do not in any sense point to a higher law, but is rather contained in the fact that God has decided in this way and spoken accordingly, so that human decisions can only obey or disobey the divine decision. In these texts there is no such thing as a general rule which can be debated and needs to be filled out in its application. This is the first temptation of that “pious serpent” in the Garden of Eden: “Did God really say…?” The temptation is to go behind the word of God to interpret it, to examine it for herself. But for us to interpret and apply God’s commandments puts us above the commandment for the moment. It leaves us in charge and gives us the power to do as we think best rather than simply obeying. The great irony here is that what the serpent tempts Adam and Eve with is something God has already promised: to be like God. The serpent tells them that if they grasp the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil they will be like God. The Latin is sicut deus. But God has already made Adam and Eve in his image and likeness. Imago dei. They fall from receiving the imago dei into being humanity sicut deus—or what Bonhoeffer calls “god-against-God.” To have grasped after the knowledge of good and evil is to become gods-against-God because it is to falsely become one’s own source, origin, and judge. Rather than living from the knowledge of God Adam and Eve now live from their own knowledge of good and evil. Thus the split between knowing God’s will and doing it. In his sermon “The Last Farthing” George MacDonald says that the greatest way to obscure Jesus’ teachings is to interpret them rather than do them. The parables and teachings of Jesus only make sense to the person that’s doing them. Elsewhere he writes: What have you done this day because it was the will of Christ? Have you dismissed, once dismissed, an anxious thought for the morrow? Have you ministered to any needy soul or body, and kept your right hand from knowing what your left hand did? Have you begun to leave all and follow him? Did you set yourself to judge righteous judgment? Are you being wary of covetousness? Have you forgiven your enemy? Are you hungering and thirsting after righteousness? Are you seeking the kingdom of God and his righteousness before all other things? Have you given to some one that asked of you? Tell me something that you have done, are doing, or are trying to do because he told you. If you do nothing that he says, it is no wonder that you cannot trust in him…You do not do his will, and so you cannot understand Him. …He knows that you can try, and that in your trying and failing He will be able to help you, until at length you shall do the will of God even as he does it himself. …If we do what He tells us, His light will go up in our hearts. Till then we could not understand him even if he explained it to us. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com [https://cameroncombs.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

How to Hear the Voice of God

The Will of God Ep. 4. This week we discuss how we can hear the voice of God. Bonhoeffer is convinced that the primary and the orienting way God speaks directly to us is through preaching. He writes: Proclamation is the specific mandate given to the church. God wants a place at which, until the end of the world, God’s word is again and again spoken, pronounced, delivered, expounded, and spread. The Word that in Jesus Christ came from heaven wants to come again in the form of human speech [in the sermon]…In this word God wills to be personally present. In the church God is determined to speak in person. Karl Barth, one of Bonhoeffer’s teachers, says that the logic of preaching is the logic of incarnation. Christ is both fully God and fully human in one person. So it is with the sermon. The sermon is both a purely human word but also a purely divine word. Why? Because Christ promises to bear the word of the sermon. Bonhoeffer will say that in the preached word “Christ steps into the congregation.” Elsewhere he says that “Christ is the sermon.” The human preacher is not cancelled out or obliterated by this divine activity. Think of the burning bush. The humble bramble is on fire with the fire of God but it is not consumed. Or think of the sacraments. Just as the bread remains bread and the wine remains wine while also becoming the body and blood of Christ, so does the sermon remain a completely human word, but also becomes the word of God by God’s grace. The speaking of the sermon is only half the work of preaching. There is also the hearing of the sermon. Jesus Christ is responsible for both. This is why the sermon is not a performance, but an act of God in his mercy. But, as Bonhoeffer says, we have lost the sermon. We do not equip or ready ourselves for what it actually is: the living God coming to speak to you personally through the proclamation. We as the people of God need to understand that each Sunday the pastor is preaching the word Christ has given to him or her to preach and we need to be listening specifically for what Christ is asking of us. St. Augustine says it perfectly: For we have Christ, the teacher within. When anything comes to your ears from my lips that you are not able to take in turn within your heart to the one who is both teaching me what to say and distributing understanding among you as he thinks fit. He knows what he has to give and who he is giving it to and so will present himself to the one who asks and open to the one who knocks. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com [https://cameroncombs.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Knowing the Will of God for Your Life

The Will of God Ep. 3. This week we discuss knowing the will of God for our lives. God’s will is not a secret. God has revealed it and wants us to know it and do it. We discuss the difference between abstract, universal moral principles and the concrete commandment of God and we looked at the life of Bonhoeffer as an example. Here are a few quotes that cut to the quick of the class: Bonhoeffer on knowing the will of God: [Meditating on Ps. 119:19 “Do not hide your commandments from me.”] There is no doubt: God has given his commandments for us to know and we have no excuse, as if we did not know the will of God. God does not allow us to live in irresolvable conflicts; he does not turn our lives into ethical tragedies; rather, he lets us know his will, demands its fulfillment, and punishes disobedience. Things here are much easier than we like. Our distress is not that we do not know God’s commandments but that we don’t do them—and that as a result of such disobedience, we are gradually unable to recognize them. It is said here not that God hides his commandments but: God is beseeched for the grace not to hide his commandments. It is within God’s freedom and wisdom to deny us the grace of his commandment; then, however, there is for us not resignation but far more the urgent and persistent prayer: “Do not hide your commandments from me.” Bonhoeffer on the specificity, clarity, and concreteness of God’s commandment: God’s commandment is God’s speech to human beings. Both in its content and in its form, it is concrete speech to concrete human beings. God’s commandment leaves human beings no room for application and interpretation, but only for obedience or disobedience. God’s commandment cannot be found and known apart from time and place; indeed, it can only be heard by one who is bound to a specific place and time. God’s commandment is either utterly specific, clear, and concrete or it is not God’s commandment. Just as specifically as God spoke to Abraham and Jacob and Moses, and just as specifically as God spoke in Jesus Christ to the disciples, and to the congregations through the apostles, so God speaks just as specifically to us, or God does not speak at all. Karl Barth on the definiteness of the divine command: In [Genesis and Exodus] there is no such thing as a general rule which can be debated and needs to be filled out in its application. …And, again [in the Gospel of Matthew], it is the case that those who want religious ethical principles will find nothing here, but will have to turn to the other words of Jesus which seem to be more pregnant in this respect. Yet if they do they turn away from the living and acting person of Jesus Himself which is the content of the Gospel. They overlook the fact that we can best learn what the commanding of Jesus means at this point where we are so unequivocally confronted by his sovereignty, where he himself and his will take the place of every universal precept, and where we see him make this very definite use of his sovereignty. This is what happens when Jesus commands. …In the command of God we are face to face with the person of God, with the action and revelation of this person, with God himself. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com [https://cameroncombs.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Becoming a Mother of God

The Will of God Ep. 2. A catena on the birth of God in each person: Meister Eckhart: Here, in time, we are celebrating the eternal birth which God the Father bore and bears unceasingly in eternity, because this same birth is now born in time, in human nature. St. Augustine says, “What does it avail me that this birth is always happening, if it does not happen in me? That it should happen in me is what matters.” We shall therefore speak of this birth, of how it may take place in us. Matthew Fox, riffing on Eckhart: What good is it to me if Mary gave birth to the Son of God 1400 years ago and I do not give birth to the Son of God in my own person and time and culture? . . . We are all meant to be mothers of God. Volker Leppin on the theology of the German mystic Johannes Tauler: Isaiah 9: “For a child has been born for us, a song given to us.” Tauler explains this verse with a three-fold hermeneutic. The biblical text initially speaks of the intra-Trinitarian birth of the Son through the Father, secondly of the historical birth of Jesus in time [to Mary]…and thirdly of the birth of God in the soul of a faithful person. Maximus the Confessor: The mother of the Word is the true and unsullied faith. Just as the Word, who, as God, is by nature the creator of His mother who gave birth to Him according to the flesh, and made her His mother out of love for mankind, and accepted to be born from her as man, so too the Word first creates faith within us, and then becomes the son of that faith, from which He is embodied through the practice of the virtues. Jordan Daniel Wood, commenting on Maximus: This is our adoption, how we become God’s children. As it was in the historical Incarnation, the Holy Spirit, who dwells perichoretically (wholly) in the Son, is ‘the one creating’ the Son’s birth in and as us. Maximus again: Christ is always born mysteriously and willingly, becoming incarnate in those who are saved. He causes the soul which begets him to be a virgin-mother. Dietrich Bonhoeffer: We can and should speak not about what the good is, can be, or should be for each and every time, but about how Christ may take form among us today and here. Bonhoeffer again: The will of God is nothing other than the realization of the Christ-reality among us and in our world. The will of God is therefore not an idea that demands to be realized; it is itself already reality in the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ. The will of God is…a reality that wills to become real ever anew in what exists and against what exists. The will of God has already been fulfilled by God, in reconciling the world to himself in Christ. To disregard the reality of this fulfillment and to set a fulfillment of one’s own in its place would be the most dangerous relapse into abstract thinking. Since the appearance of Christ, ethics can be concerned with only one thing: to partake in the reality of the fulfilled will of God. Chris Green: When the world as you know it starts to crumble…you need to understand that it’s just a birth pang, it’s just a contraction. God is being born…God wants to be born right here, right now—in your life and in mine, in your family and in mine, in this city, in our schools, in our children’s lives, in the lives of our neighbors—God is ready to be born…You need to remember that when everything is going wrong it’s just that Christ is crowning, and have hope. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com [https://cameroncombs.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

God Is (Not) in Control

The Will of God Ep. 1 Here is an excerpt from Chris Green’s Surprised by God [https://a.co/d/021IkHdj] that not only cuts to the heart of what we discussed in class, but is the genesis for all my thoughts on the matter: “In many ways, our move toward a mature grasp of the truth begins in the recognition that God is not in control of what happens in the world, and that all that we experience in this world is at best an incomplete realization of God’s will for us. Perhaps we want to think God is in control because of our own fantasies for control or our own anxieties of being controlled. Regardless, we have to come to terms with the fact that God is not in control–even as we confess in faith that God is sovereign… “[S]overeignty is utterly other than what we have known as control. Control makes something act in ways false to itself. It violates, overpowers, coerces, masters. Control takes away freedom, forcing someone or something to do what is against its own nature or will. And God, as creator, simply does not–and indeed, cannot–do that kind of violence. God gives being to creatures, affording them their freedom, their integrity. To say that God is sovereign is to say that God does not need control to get his will done. He does not have to destroy our freedom to express his own; he does not have to subjugate us to make himself known as Lord. God’s sovereignty is such that his freedom is not at odds with our freedom, and his Lordship does not subjugate but frees and empowers and fulfills. Creatures overpower; God reigns. And that reign is absolutely identical with God’s love… “Luther said that if all we had to go on was our experience of the world, we would have to conclude either that God does not exist or that God is evil. But by faith we see more than our experience of the world: we see God, and hear his promises to set all wrongs right. Until the end, therefore, when God’s will is finally fully done, we have to maintain a distinction between what happens and what God is doing, trusting that nothing happens apart from God’s will but that not everyuthing that happens is itself God’s will. Or to say the same thing another way, everything that happens takes place within the will of God but not everything that happens is the will of God. What is more, nothing that happens is God’s will in fullness. Whatever happens, then, and whatever GOd does, we are left waiting for the fullness of God’s action, and so we pray, even after GOd has acted, “Let your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt 6:10)… [Tragic events need not be said to be “the will of God,” as if God planned for this tragedy to happen just like so.] “It is best, I think, to say that [tragic events take] place not as the will of God, but within the unfolding of that will of God. Difficult as it is to imagine, [those moments] remain open to the will of God—God even now is still active then and there, in a time closed to us as past. Hence, we must patiently endure until God’s will is finally, fully done. And when that will is done, then we will see that God indeed is good… “In history, God has not yet acted fully–except in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. IN him, we have seen already what we do not yet see anywhere else for anyone else. As the writer of Hebrews says: ‘Now in subjecting all things to [human beings, as promised in Psalm 8], God left nothing outside their control. AS it is, we do not yet see everything in subjection to them, but we do see Jesus’ (Heb. 2:8-9a). That is, we do not see human beings in their rightful, promised place. WE do not see the world set right. But our hope is that what has already happened to Jesus, what is already true for him as the Last Adam and the head of new creation, will be true of us too in the end. We believe that God already has done everything God can do for Jesus, but not yet for us—and so we live by faith and not by sight… “Whatever happens to us, whatever comes or goes in our experience, good or bad, fortunate or unfortunate, we can know God is not through being God yet, not through doing what he eternally purposes to do, and when God’s will is finally fully done, all things will be made right…When God is all in all, everyone will know what we see already not by sight but by faith. In the meantime, we remain faithful, hoping against hope in a God for whom all things are possible and in whom all things not only have their beginning but also their rightful and joyous end.” (Surprised by God, pp. 39-44) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com [https://cameroncombs.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]