FOUNDATIONS
02/09/23 18:05
If our foundation is shoddy our building will be insecure.
If our assumptions are misguided our reality will be skewed.
If our frame is crooked the picture will be distorted.
If our hermeneutic is wrong our belief system will be perverse.
OUR WARPING LENS
Douglas Campbell observes that, “If we press on boldly with our foundationalist project, anxious that if our system collapses, then our faith does as well, we tend to end up—with “the god of the philosophers.” This is because when we construct our foundation, we are invariably deriving some universal principle or dynamic from our own reality as our truth criterion and extrapolating or developing it in a way that will hopefully lead us to God” (1)
HUMANISM IN CHRISTIAN GEAR
Campbell is referring to humanist, anti-super naturalist/materialist assumptions imposed on a view of God. But this observation fits just as readily with law inverted Christianity of the kind in which Christ leads not to the spirit but to another version of the law – a variety of Christianity that is actually a Christianized version of the knowledge of good and evil. Such a distortion is similar in effect to the Arian heresy that if adopted would have hollowed out the salvation Christ won for us and made it a ‘something and a nothing in a religious guise’ which is what legalized gospels do.
CHRIST IS YOU
Jesus is our life which means that He is both our justification and sanctification which is why Paul calls Christ our life. He is for us and He transforms us. Alexandra Radcliff asserts that “The rooting of sanctification with justification is a compelling feature of the Torrance s’ soteriology. What holds the two together is the vicarious humanity of Christ.
WHAT IS TRUE OF HIM IS TRUE OF US
For the Torrances, the vicarious humanity of Christ means that ‘Christ takes our place and represents us, so that what is true of him is true of us, and what he did in his (our) humanity is ours.’ This is what they believe is expressed by Jesus’ assertion, “For them I sanctify myself that they too may be truly sanctified” (John 17:19). They also believe it to be indicative in Paul’s claim that Christ ‘became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption’” (1 Cor. 1:30). (2) Our life in Christ is better according to the scriptures and testimony of the apostles than it is according to dilutions, myths and a legalistic taint.
WRONG WAY
Law adherence is a diversion that is Christianity distorted. Distorted by the humanistic , foundationalist assumption of the knowledge of good and evil as the way that humanity becomes pleasing to God. Here the Satanic ploy is not to suggest outright disobedience to the Christ but to drum up a form of Christianity that negates Christ’s achievement for us and leaves us back in the kind of self-validation that is ours that means that Christ has died for nothing as Paul warns in Galatians.
WAY OF MORBIDITY
Of course, legalism makes no one holy, and is the key to a non-victorious Christian life. In this mode, Christians may fight unsuccessfully against sinful degradations and wonder why they are so much overcome by sins that so easily beset them, even as they try so hard. Caught in this trap Believers either live in despondency or become agnostics and atheists.
Some Christians are rational/legalist by socialization and bad teaching. They live head-knowledge so actively that they think the Spirit is either a myth, emotionalism or even of the devil. Thus, they live by bruising themselves in this head-banging religion.
REJECTING THE SPIRIT
Leanne Payne describes this as, “Folk, thinking they are being honest, suffer from the notion that to practice the Presence is an exercise not in faith, but in mere credulity. But to acknowledge the Presence of the God who is really there is actually a form of prayer, a way of praying always as the Scriptures exhort us to do. When we do this, the eyes and ears of our hearts are opened to receive the word He is always speaking. We enter into a path of obedience perhaps unknown to us before where we joyfully acknowledge, “Jesus is Lord.”
The best prayer is a life lived in God.
(1) Douglas Campbell. Pauline Dogmatics The Triumph of Gods Love (Campbell, Douglas A. p41.
(2) Alexandra S Radcliff,..The Claim of Humanity in Christ: Salvation and Sanctification in the Theology of T. F. and J. B. Torrance (Princeton Theological Monograph Series Book 222) (p. 135). Pickwick Publications, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.
(3)Payne, Leanne. The Healing Presence (p. 25). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.