William Willimon, from his book, Pastor: The Theology and Practice of Ordained Ministry, on baptism and grace:

Part of the point of becoming a Christian is that it is something done to us, for us, before it is anything done by us. What we might have done different, had it been our action alone, is not as important as what Christ and his church does for us in baptism. As an infant, I was the passive recipient of this work in my behalf. Someone had to hold me, had to administer the water of baptism, had to tell me the story of Jesus and what he had done, had to speak the promises of what he would do, had to live the faith before me so that I might assume the faith for myself. In other words, by water and the Word, it was all gift, grace.

This video is really quite interesting. A number of scholars are gathered at Tyndale House in Cambridge to discuss the different ideas of the word 'slave' and how it should be used in an upcoming revision of the English Standard Version of the Bible. If nothing else, it's a great window into what goes on behind the scenes as we wrestle to translate Scripture into our own language without losing the meaning and emphasis of the original text.

The noted Swiss theologian, Emil Brunner, wrote in his book, The Mediator: A Study of the Central Doctrine of the Christian Faith, of the absolute necessity of keeping our mediator, Jesus, at the very heart of Christianity:

In Christianity faith in the Mediator is not something optional, not something about which, in the last resort, it is possible to hold different opinions, if we are only united on the 'main point'. For faith in the Mediator – in the event which took place once for all, a revealed atonement – is the Christian religion itself; it is the 'main point'; it is not something alongside of the centre; it is the substance and kernel, not the husk. This is so true that we may even say: in distinction from all other forms of religion, the Christian religion is faith in the one Mediator... And there is no other possibility of being a Christian than through faith in that which took place once for all, revelation and atonement through the Mediator.

Our church's home groups are studying Romans 12-16 this term, and this past week we looked closely at Romans 12:1-2. We spent quite a bit of time discussing the idea that we must be 'transformed by the renewing of your minds', and how we work this transformation out in practice. The group that meets at our home talked about the importance of recognising the role of Scripture in this renewing of our minds. This meant devoting ourselves to sitting under the preaching of the Word, engaging in the study of the Bible in groups and individually, and so on.

Some years ago, I remember reading a portion of Don Carson and Douglas Moo's book, An Introduction to the New Testament, that related to this discussion of the importance of the Word of God in our transformation. In their chapter on the book of Acts, they write this:

An easily overlooked theme in Acts is the power of the word of God. Again and again, Luke attributes the growth and strength of the church to the dynamic activity of God's word. Preaching the world of God is what the apostles do wherever they go. 'Received the word of God' is another way of saying 'became a Christian' (Acts 11:1). Especially striking are those places where Luke, usually in transitional summaries, claims that the word of God 'grew' or 'spread' or 'increased' (Acts 6:7; 12:24; 13:49; 19:20). For Luke the word of God is especially the message about God's gracious redemption through Jesus Christ. For all Luke's emphasis on the importance of apostolic preaching, therefore, he makes clear that it is only as they are faithful witnesses to the Word that spiritual transformation takes place. As C. K. Barrett notes, 'Luke's stress on the proclamation of the Word...shows that the Word itself was the decisive factor,' and that the church is an agency of salvation 'only in so far as it provides the framework within which the preaching of the Word takes place.'

It really testifies to the significance of Scripture in the transformation of people that Luke gave it so much emphasis in Acts. And as we see in Romans 12, Paul felt the same way. If we are to be truly transformed, we must allow the Bible to have a prominent place in our lives. As David simply and honestly writes, 'How can a young man keep his way pure? By living according to your word' (Psalm 119:1).

John Stott, in his book, The Cross of Christ, briefly mentions the role of the image of a fish in early Christianity:

Only the initiated would know, and nobody else could guess, that icthys ('fish') was an acronym for Iesus Christos Theou Huios Sotēr ('Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour'). But it did not remain the Christian sign, doubtless because the association between Jesus and a fish was purely acronymic (a fortuitous arrangement of letters) and had no visual significance.

Clearly Stott never had the privilege of driving around 21st century America.

Towards the end of Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis, writes honestly about the reality that Christianity requires a transformation that is very difficult business: 

Christ says 'Give me All. I don't want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I don't want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down. I don't want to drill the tooth, or crown it, or stop it, but to have it out. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked – the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours.'

...The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self – all your wishes and precautions – to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call 'ourselves', to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at teh same time be 'good'. We are all trying to let our mind and heart go their own way – centred on money or pleasure or ambition – and hoping, in spite of this, to behave honestly and chastely and humbly. And that is exactly what Christ warned us you could not do. As He said, a thistle cannot produce figs.

...That is why the real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.

We can only do it for moments at first. But from those moments the new sort of life will be spreading through our system: because now we are letting Him work at the right part of us. It is the difference between paint, which is merely laid on the surface, and a day or stain which soaks right through. He never talked vague, idealistic gas. When He said, 'Be perfect,' He meant it. He meant that we must go in for the full treatment. It is hard; but the sort of compromise we are all hankering after is harder – in fact, it is impossible (197-198).

Matthew Mason, one of the regular contributors to the blog of the The Society for the Advancement of Ecclesial Theology, wrote in a post some time ago of the growing trend in evangelical circles to speak of 'repenting of our righteousness'. Mason points out that proponents of this perspective argue 'that the gospel is the beginning and end of of the Christian life, that all our problems come from a lack of orientation to the gospel...[and] that Christians should speak like this of our present attempts to obey God.'

The basic point they wish to make is sound – your understanding of salvation must be rooted in the gospel, along with the recognition that you can do nothing of your own to earn or merit salvation. Agreed. But the argument then extends further to include the idea that you grow as a Christian by increasing your belief in the gospel, or trusting more in the gospel, and so on. Well, to a degree, that is also true. This is emphasized so strongly, however, that any discussion of good works leads to a warning to be careful you're not trusting in your works for salvation.

So what is the place of righteousness, then? And what of the Bible's call to pursue righteousness and holiness? C.S. Lewis, in the second chapter on faith in Mere Christianity, writes,

The sense in which a Christian leaves it to God is that he puts all his trust in Christ: trusts that Christ will somehow share with him the perfect human obedience which He carried out from His birth to His crucifixion: that Christ will make the man more like Himself and, in a sense, make good his deficiencies. In Christian language, He will share His 'sonship' with us, will make us, like Himself, 'Sons of God'... In a sense, the whole Christian life consists in accepting that very remarkable offer. But the difficulty is to reach the point of recognising that all we have done and can do is nothing... And, in yet another sense, handing everything over to Christ does not, of course, mean that you stop trying. To trust Him means, of course, trying to do all that He says... If you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already.

Any attempt to earn your righteousness in salvation is to be avoided, certainly. But it is hard to understand how you grow as a disciple of Christ if you are not pursuing righteousness in response to the good news of the gospel. Our homegroups at church have just begun a series on Romans 12-16. It is particularly noteworthy that after discussing the gospel message in the first eleven chapters, Paul then goes on to lay out some pretty in-depth applications of that gospel and how it should shape our lives as Christians. Those last chapters of Romans show us that you must indeed make the gospel the centre of your life as a Christian, but that you do so by actively pursuing righteousness. And it is not just here in Romans; the Bible speaks repeatedly of the call to live righteous lives. Think of the Psalms, or the book of James.

The Heidelberg Catechism says two important things about this. First, in Q&A 86, it asks why we must still do good when we have been delivered from our misery by God's grace. The response:

We do good because Christ by his Spirit is renewing us to be like himself, so that in all our living we may show that we are thankful to God for all he has done for us, and so that he may be praised through us. And we do good so that we may be assured of our faith by its fruits, and so that by our godly living our neighbours may be won over to Christ.

It is striking here to note that God is praised through our righteous living. Those who call us to 'repent of our righteousness' would likely find these words hard to stomach. But perhaps it is even more striking, then, that assurance of our faith is linked with the practice of righteousness. And secondly, the Catechism indicates that genuine repentence and conversion has two parts: the dying-away of the old self, and the coming-to-life of the new. In describing the coming-to-life of the new, the Catechism tells us that this is marked by 'wholehearted joy in God through Christ and a delight to do every kind of good as God wants us to' (Q&A 90).

Belief in the gospel motivates you to act in accordance with it. That action is not an attempt to justify yourself, but an expression of your gratitude for God's grace and your acknowledgement of his rule as Lord and King of heaven and earth. You don't repent of your righteousness, because God calls us to righteousness.

Belief in the gospel and the pursuit of righteousness are not contradictory. To be sure, the latter does not precede the former. But the latter must flow out of the former.

Over the past few days, I have been reading the collection of essays that comprise the book, Reading Scripture with the Church: Toward a Hermeneutic for Theological Interpretation. Kevin Vanhoozer, in his contribution to the book, makes note of three convictions he holds to when approaching Scripture and its interpretation:

1. Dealing with texts is ultimately a mode of engaging persons and with what persons have done by means of writing.
2. As biblical interpreters, we are ultimately dealing with the Holy Spirit speaking and presenting Jesus Christ in the Scriptures.
3. As biblical interpreters, our task is to discern what the Spirit is saying by means of what the human authors of Scripture have said.

These are helpful convictions to hold as we ourselves approach Scripture. It can be a particular temptation of those who hold to a high view of the inspiration of Scripture to ignore the personal aspect, viewing the human authors almost as robots. But we miss something significant if we don't recognise the contribution of the whole person to the corpus of Scripture. The authors did not lose their personalities or individualities when writing, nor were they removed from their particular stories. All this needs to be kept in mind as we work to understand the revelation of the Bible.

In the past few months, I have made the Psalms feature much more prominently in my daily Scripture reading by working them through each month. As I got around to the end of last month, I came to one of my favourites, Psalm 119. It always strikes me that David's longest Psalm is an extended reflection on how much he loves God's law.

This time around, I spent some extra time thinking about verses 97-104. What stood out to me was David's perception that wisdom and understanding were given to those who loved God's law and feared him. Sometimes Christians find themselves on edge when they are confronted by some of Christianity's highly intelligent detractors, who have seemingly well-thought out and sophisticated objections to the faith. Indeed, dealing with these arguments can be troubling.

But that is why David's words here provide so much comfort, because it is not about how sophisticated your arguments are, or how airtight your logic is, or how knowledgeable you are. Wisdom and understanding, David says, come from following God's Word. And because he submits himself to God's revelation, he writes, David is now 'wiser than my enemies... I have more insight than all my teachers... I have more understanding than the elders.'

This is not to say, of course, that Christianity is something that defies all logic and reason. It makes sense, and provides the most coherent framework for understanding the nature of reality. We have apologists who have gone to great lengths to provide us with reasoned and sound defenses of our faith.

But if you have trouble making sense of all arguments and debates that take place on more academic levels, don't be discouraged by the seemingly intelligent and sophisticated criticisms that people level against Christianity. The truth is that by fearing the Lord and meditating on his Word, we gain the fullness of wisdom and understanding. All the knowledge in the world means nothing if you do not confess Jesus as Lord.

From his seminal work, On the Incarnation of the Word, the great Church Father Athanasius writes:

We will begin, then, with the creation of the world and with God its maker, for the first fact that you must grasp is this: the renewal of creation has been wrought by the self-same Word, who made it in the beginning. There is thus no inconsistency between creation and salvation; for the Father has employed the same agent for both works, effecting the salvation of the world through the same Word who made it first.

And all I add to that is a resounding, 'Amen!'