What Would it Look Like if You Put a Camera on Top of a Golden Eagle and Set it Loose in the Scottish Highlands?

Why Must We Keep Saying the Gospel is for Christians?

One answer I don't hear articulated often:

Because of the faulty premise widespread in the evangelical consciousness that believing the gospel at conversion sets a permanent, invariably sustained trajectory of gospel-believing for the whole of one's life. 

Following conversion, do we believe the gospel, looking to Christ alone for our righteousness and joy, the rest of our lives?

Yes and no. We need to discern a distinction.

At conversion, we trust in Christ, believe the gospel, at two levels: the doctrinal level of mind-assent, and the existential/psychological level of heart-trust (what the old saints called fiducia). The snare is that we naively collapse the sustainability of the latter into that of the former. We think that because we believe the gospel doctrinally the rest of our lives, we believe the gospel psychologically the rest of our lives. But au contraire! One belief-level is static, the other dynamic.

I'm a soteriological Calvinist. At the most fundamental level, I am an irreversible 'believer' the rest of my life, by the grace of God. But at another level I move from believer to unbeliever (from faith-in-Christ-exercising to faith-in-Christ-forsaking) dozens of times, hundreds even, each day. At the doctrinal level we look to Christ with sustained, consistent permanence. But at the existiential level we keep faltering, keep swiveling away from Christ and looking to other saviors--even Christian saviors like theological erudition or Bible memory or service in the church or spiritual reputation.We can forsake heart-level gospel-trust in the very moment of defending it theologically. (Haven't you ever heard an evangelical theologian defend atonement or some related subject with self-justifying defensiveness? What's going on there?)

If we discern this distinction--if we perceive that while on one level we see the gospel in a once-and-for-all way (doctrinally) but that on another level we keep lapsing time and again into gospel blindness (existentially/psychologically)--we find one more reason the gospel is for Christians.

Trusting God in the Dark

'Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love . . .'
--Genesis 22:2

The command to offer up the son of the promise, with whom the whole future lies, seems the complete contradiction of the Purpose of God on which Abraham has set his faith.

Abraham in the story is called by God to make a supreme sacrifice, an act of complete and entire worship, trusting God in the dark, committing everything to him: 'not my will but thine be done.' While God did not in the end demand this sacrifice to be made, that which he did demand was the entire willingness to make the offering.

Such is the meaning of the story as the writer tells it; and because this and nothing less is the true and original meaning therefore we, in interpreting it, may and must look onward to the self-giving of our LORD, in whose case no offering of a substitute was possible. Hence we may and must find the final answer to Isaac's question 'Where is the lamb for a burnt-offering?' and Abraham's reply 'God will provide himself the lamb for a burnt-offering, my son' (22:7-8) in the words of John 1:29, 'Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world.'

--Gabriel Hebert, The Old Testament From Within (Oxford University Press, 1962), 34

The Secret to Imitating Christ: Know You Can't

Oscar Cullmann (1902-1999), German New Testament scholar who helped a generation read the whole Bible as telling an objective history of what God has done in our real time and space (as opposed to the de-historicized existentialism of Bultmann)--

An imitation of Christ is possible only when we are first of all aware of the fact that we are not able to imitate him.

He is sinless; we are not. He offers the sacrifice of atoning death; we cannot. It is precisely the decisive act of obedience which effects our perfection which we cannot imitate. In Hebrews and in Paul the connection between our perfection and the perfection of the High Priest can be understood only as happening in faith in the ephapax [Gk: the 'once-for-all'-ness] of the high priestly act. 

 --Oscar Cullmann, The Christology of the New Testament (rev. ed.; 1963), 100-101

Light and High Beauty

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tower high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.

 --J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

HT: Wade Urig