July 26, 2023
Dear Editor:
In yesterday’s BNG, Mark Wingfield and Amber Wylde wrote: “The church needs a better story than living in fear” and one of them uses the phrase “the unforced rhythms of living in grace.”
“Church” is always associated with “Jesus” and far too often with an angry God who sits in judgment upon sinners. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” is often seen as the golden text of the Gospels. It includes and is based on the notion of Jesus’ vicarious death for us sinners to appease the justice of an angry God — all on the surface profoundly contradictory.
St. Paul spread the gospel of “Jesus Christ crucified” over the Roman Empire in the first century. And Christianity has been burdened with the sin-offering theology ever since.
It grows out of the Old Testament law of Judaism with animal sacrifices and other unrelated religious traditions. We struggle with Abraham’s dilemma when God commanded him to sacrifice his son and then easily accept God’s presumed sacrifice of his own son for sinners.
But God sent him not to judge and condemn the world but to save it. It is certainly a minority opinion that the essence of Christ’s mission was to model love for us and lead us to a godly way of living. But early and historical church scenes center on the “altar call” to repentance and baptism into the death of Christ.
Christianity as it has been known historically and as we know it today is in a significant measure the work of Saul of Tarsus, a self-described “Hebrew of Hebrews” and a student of the law of Moses. On balance, his “Christ crucified” theme dominates and overwhelms all the rest of the New Testament writers and thinking about the church.
The Roman church with its emphasis on sin, confession and the Eucharist carries this fully. The “gospel” is always about the cross, which may well have been incidental to the message of the early church. Jesus did say, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so much the Son of Man be lifted up.”
Naturally, early Christianity carried a heavy Jewish influence. After all, Jesus was a Jew as were the first early Christians. It would seem throughout history people have just assumed the cross to be central because it came out of Judaism.
“Unforced rhythms” makes me think of music. Classical with its complex and structured rhythms; jazz with its creative and impulsive rhythms; country with its simplicity and somewhat primitive rhythms. But the grace of Jesus Christ in its true form is “unforced.”
It flows as naturally as the love of a mother for her firstborn or the admiration of an artist for a sunrise or a bird in flight. There is nothing artificial or forced or odd about grace. It’s simple: Favor for undeserving souls whose response is also simple; trust in a good news message.
But Paul loaded grace up with Jewish thoughts and symbols — in spite of his well-known and valiant efforts to oppose the imposition of the Jewish law on new Jewish Christians. One cannot understand Paul’s marvelous Romans treatise on grace without understanding Judaism — or much of his other writings in our New Testament. The Jews as God’s chosen people who received Moses’ law were usually a faithless lot — captured and exiled and lost in a wilderness much of the time. Pharisees who loved the law and Sadducees who did not believe in the resurrection. Only two of the original 10 tribes were there when Christ came.
Egyptian circumcision is depicted on Egyptian temple and wall paintings dating from around 2300 B.C.
Christian baptism is not originally from the early church in Jerusalem. It is a shadow cast by other religions much older than Christianity. Yet it has been made into a topic of controversy and importance far beyond its original context in the church. It is simply dipping someone into water for some ceremonial cleansing purpose. Paul tied it to the death of Christ and his burial and resurrection and set it in stone for centuries. Religious organizations and clubs need membership initiation rites, and baptism became ours.
The Catholic mass with preceding confession of sins and the phone booths and robes and scarves are all human trappings that force an unnatural rhythm onto grace. When one believes in Jesus as Savior, sins are forgiven and grace covers the whole matter naturally and completely — and simply.
The law of Moses was on the one hand simple: Ten Commandments, easy and clear to grasp. On the other hand, there were myriads of rules associated, overdone and complex almost to infinity — “a burden neither we nor our fathers could bear.”
Law didn’t work. It left people guilty and condemned. Grace works because it is simple and unforced: God’s infinite love through the gift of his Son, appropriated by the act of trust.
We never needed complex church structures, denominations, councils and synods — just the gift of love and the act of faith. The Egyptians buried their pharaohs with food, drink, jewelry and much more. The early Native Americans believed in the sun god or the sky or the stars. And we believe in this eternal mish-mash of human thinking and proclivities that ultimately winds up with American religion as it is now: fractured, confused, burdensome, conflict-ridden and hopeless.
Perhaps Billy Graham came closer than anyone else to its essence: “Come to Jesus in faith and be saved.” Thousands walking stadium walkways and steps to salvation and peace — simple, natural, “unforced in rhythm.”
Paul Magee, Dallas