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There is a line from Spike
Milligan in which he announces the survival of Archduke Ferdinand and
tells us that World War One was a mistake.
I have been having similar feelings about the Protestant Reformation while
reading Paul among the Postliberals by Douglas Harink.
As many of you will know, Luther based his protest against the Roman Catholic
church on a Bible verse from Galatians 2:16 (and variants)-"yet we know
that a person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith
in Jesus Christ". (New Revised Standard Version)
This was the text that Luther used to condemn the Roman church's linking
salvation to gifts of money through the sale of indulgences. Salvation
could not depend upon our own actions, no matter how good, but only on
our faith in Christ.
The problem is that Pauline scholars have revised the translation and
most agree that a better translation would be-"yet we know that a person
is justified not by the works of the law but through the faith of Jesus
Christ".
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Like so many things in theology,
much often stands or falls on such decisions of translation. The change
from "faith in" to "the faith of" makes an awful lot of difference to
our understanding.
The former translation has been influential in Protestant theology, especially
to the Fundamentalist wing of the church. This interpretation emphasizes
that it is the faith of the believer that is crucial.It is essentially
an anthropomorphic reading of the text in that it puts the believer at
its centre.
The new translation is what may be called a Christocentric orientation,
it is not our faith that is important but the faith that we see in Jesus
in his life and work and death. The objective reality of God is at the
centre, it is God who breaks through to us-God chooses us, we do not choose
God.
Of course there is a work to do in faith but it is not the determining
factor.
In the usual interpretation-which is followed by most modern translations-the
objective reality of the faith of Christ is displaced by the subjective
of our faith in him.
In its extreme and most clumsy form faith becomes a work that we do, not
a physical work but an intellectual one.
This is especially the case in our day because of all of the rationalist
objections to faith. Faith is a gargantuan work indeed because it flies
in the face of the truths of natural science.
In our day faith can only occur in us after we have sacrificed our rationality-thus
the intellectual work is a denial of intellect. So, whether we sacrifice
our money or our intellect in order to be saved, it amounts to the same
thing-both are works that we do that exclude the grace of God.
Luther came to his conclusion because of his own and his society's personal
anguish about justification and salvation in the face of the vivid medieval
imaginings of heaven and hell.
But Pauline scholars tell us that the spiritual agony of the individual
is not at the centre of Paul's theology. Rather, Paul had foremost in
his mind a new creation in Christ that is not the renovated individual
but the new socio-political order that is called church.
This is why there is so much in his letters about Jews and gentiles. In
Christ they will worship the same God whether they keep the Torah or not.
The subjective interpretation has had many unfortunate consequences.
Firstly, because the focus is on the believer's faith, the focus is taken
off the faith of Christ where it belongs. This means that the importance
to our lives of the life, ministry and death of Christ is diminished.
For example, John Howard Yoder (a Mennonite historian and theologian)
has written extensively on Jesus' way of nonviolence, that led him to
the final confrontation in Jerusalem and his death, and how this should
affect our attitude to violence and war. This is the most obvious feature
of the passion narrative and yet it has had little effect on the attitudes
of Christians about war and violence.
Similar things may be said about Jesus' attitude to wealth, the poor and
the freedom of the grace of God.
When it is our faith that counts, the person of Jesus disappears. There
is thus established a gulf fixed between the spiritual and the ethical.
One is said to be existential and the other practical. I have even heard
it said that ethics has nothing to do with religion. But this new reading
means that ethics has everything to do with religion, not as a new imposition
of law but by providing the image of the one true man who orders things
aright.
The second unfortunate consequence is that faith becomes formulaic and
therefore transparent and is subsequently dismissed by most modern men
and women. With its focus of the self it has joined all of the flaky self-help
movements that compete for attention in the marketplace of unease.
Again in its extreme form, it is our faith that will make us well, not
the faith of Christ that leads us to human wholeness and freedom.
The self is still enclosed in itself. Our faith may be just another form
of self-assertion and self-deception. This is why many outsiders look
at church members and see nothing different from the rest of the population.
The focus on one's own faith detaches faith from the ethical and the transformation
of the self that a meeting with Christ brings about.
It is a pity that the human heart is so reactionary and that it often
leads us to pile error upon error. Most would agree with Luther that the
church of the time was cynical in its use of the faithful to achieve its
economic ends and that he was right to protest.
Unfortunately, his chosen weapon contained within it the seeds of the
destruction of the church that we see all around us in increasingly thinning
congregations and much else. Despite his battle with the humanists and
his insistence on "Faith alone" the subjective interpretation of this
crucial passage left a fissure in which humanism could grow. The self,
in the end, becomes its own project.
Was the reformation a mistake? Can we now speak of a post-Protestant church?
Certainly there is less that divides Protestants and Roman Catholics in
the realm of theology than ever before. Theologians of both sides have
been working away quietly in the background for some time now and coming
to theological consensus. The question of the unity of the church should
rest on theological unity and that alone. It is a sign of our brokenness
that once theology has been reconciled, church structure, authority, practice,
or in a word, polity, keeps getting in the way.
Peter Sellick is Senior
Research Officer at the Department of Physiology, University of Western
Australia
and Deacon Associate at St Andrew's Anglican Church, Subiaco, WA.
Further information:
www.onlineopinion.com.au
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