#reconsiliation

How we get around the 60 vote. Reconciliation. Just as they have done in the past, the Democrats in the Senate are already claiming that they will derail the Trump train. Many bills take a 60 vote to pass. How to respond? Reconciliation. Reconciliation allows some tax and spending bills to pass with a simple majority vote. Republicans plan to use this process to increase spending on border…

How we get around the 60 vote. Reconciliation. Just as they have done in the past, the Democrats in the Senate are already claiming that they will derail the Trump train. Many bills take a 60 vote to pass. How to respond? Reconciliation. Reconciliation allows some tax and spending bills to pass with a simple majority vote. Republicans plan to use this process to increase spending on border…

I don’t believe in vicarious law keeping.  Well, I do, but not in the way it is described nowadays.  I believe in vicarious humanity.  Christ saved all of who we are, not just some juridical aspect. I don’t believe in salvation being accomplished by cosmic paperwork.

And I don’t believe works can ever attain salvation, not even Christ’s, because the wages of sin is DEATH, NOT WORKS.

God isn’t bound by some impersonal abstract concept of cosmic justice. The whole idea of atonement (at-one-ment) is relational (covenantal!) and NOT abstract.  It goes to the heart of WHO God is. The atonement is relational – it is Trinitarian. My hope is personal, it is in a person, in Christ.  Not an abstraction of him, not an idea of him, but in him himself and I do NOT have hope in my belief in Christ either.  I don’t believe in belief, I believe in Christ.

Tell me that’s not an evangelical gospel and I will call you to repentance!

I don’t “go to Heaven” because of what I believe, I am rescued from sin, death AND myself, because Christ took on humanity (what/who I am) united himself to me and rescued me (all of me) for living a life (here and now) that is pleasing and honoring to him.  I share in HIS resurrection.  I am his brother by Adoption… ALL of this relational!

I had a recent interlocutor who the audacity to accuse me of not being honest in my exegesis.  Stay with me here, because this is key.  Exegesis doesmatter.  In an attempt to find penal substitution under every rock he is literally unravels God.  He argued that Christ WAS indeed abandoned by the Father on the Cross.

Because this is an issue near and dear to my heart, to refrain from emoting, I want to quote someone more gracious than myself to address the exegesis of the passage(s) he alludes to.  Again, why I care is that he is literally willing to shatter WHO God is to “prove” his silly doctrine and he does this by purporting an idea that has not only been *not* held to for the first 1,800 years of the history of the church (even the reformers) but that was also condemned by the ecumenical counsels, and for good reason.

Now what does one do after he throws away thousands of years of exegesis, thousands of years of God’s spirit working in and through his church?  He has to grasp at a new “theory”.  He breaks up the Trinity to throw stones at sheep which in turn causes further division within the Body of Christ.  Penal substitution from these passage at the cost of the ontological Trinity.  And if that isn’t enough, lets through harassing our fellow brethren into the mix.  And all this to the glory of Christ right?

No, let’s be honest.  It feels more like a sport at this point, God and his ways are only thought experiments at this stage, who cares what reality actually is anymore.

I am going to quote somebody at length here.  The reason being though that this man is more patient and gracious than I.  He graciously, patiently and humbly steps us through the position of the church (East, West, Protestant, etc.) for the last 1,800 plus years… without footnotes…  in a very pastoral tone…  Instead of using this passage to undo God, beat people up, or stir the pot, Pat Reardon, actually makes the passage encouraging, edifying and God honoring.  He shows how God (in Christ) was identifying himself with humanity.  He encourages me (albeit indirectly) to engage the Psalter, to learn the mature language of lament there in, and shows how that “helped” Jesus in his hour of need.  Jesus was after all Jewish, the Psalter was more than likely memorized by him and a regular aspect of his daily prayer rule.

This is all very different from what contemporary pop-evangelicals and quasi-calvinists are espousing about these last words of Jesus.  This is the historic faith – the heart of the ecumenical counsels and creeds of the church… ironically exegetically defensible from Scripture (and more to the point from the passage that was being so radically twisted and abused).

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Excerpted from The Jesus We Missed:  The Surprising Truth About the Humanity of Christ by Patrick Henry Reardon [2012 Thomas Nelson] Chapter 11, The Bridegroom is Taken Away, pp 183ff TASTING DEATH

Evidently, there were several “final words” of Jesus on the cross, some recorded in Matthew and Mark, others in Luke and John.   As we have just observed, only Luke narrates the conversation with the thief.  Luke alone, likewise, records the two times Jesus cries out to God as “Father”: “Father forgive them for the know not what they do”, and “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:34, 46).

John, an eyewitness to the Savior’s death, tells us how the dying Jesus committed to him the future care of his mother (John 19:26-27).

As for Matthew and mark, they both testify that “Jesus cried out again with a loud voice, and yielded up his spirit” (Matthew 27:50; cf. Mark 15:37), but neither author relates what the “loud voice” said.  One conjectures that Matthew and Mark are alluding to Jesus’ final words as they are recorded in Luke and/or John.

Let us begin then, with the “second to last” sentence of Jesus as transmitted by Matthew and Mark, who cite it in an Aramaic/Hebrew mixture: “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?’ that is, ‘Mt God, my God, why have You forsaken me?’” (Matthews 27:46; cf. Mark 15:34).

This anguished cry of the savior has been variously interpreted.  In particular, there has arisen, in recent times, the notion that God the Father, actually didforsake His son hanging on the cross.  Jesus’ abandonment by his Father – his experience of damnation – is sometimes understood, indeed, to be the very price of salvation.

This theory should be examined with a certain measure of caution, I believe.  I suggest that the following points should be considered with respect to this caution.

First, the Christian faith firmly holds – as doctrine not subject to contradiction – that the true God never abandons those who call upon him in faith.

Second, whatever Jesus’ experience was – as expressed in this cry – it was still an experience.  That is to say, it was existential; it pertained to Jesus’ existence, not his being, or essence.  In his being, or essence, Jesus remained God’s eternal and beloved Son.  Consequently, it was not possible that his cry of dereliction declared, as a fact, that God had abandoned him.

For those who, like me, follow the doctrinal guidance of Ephesus or Chalcedon, it was not possible for God the Father to forsake his Son in any real – factual – sense, because the Father and the Son are of “one being” (homoousios).  The godhead is indivisible.  God does not abandon his friends and loyal servants – much less His Son.

Therefore, Jesus’ cry conveyed not an objective, reified condition of his being, but rather his human experience of distance from God.  The abandonment was psychological, not ontological.

It often happens that God’s friends and loyal servants feel abandoned, and they feel it very keenly.  And when they do, they often enough have recourse to the book of Psalms… as Jesus does in the present case.

When the Savior expressed this painful experience in prayer, the opening line of Psalm 22 arose to his lips – in Hebrew, ‘Eli, ‘Eli, lamah ‘azavtani –“My God, my God, why Have you forsaken me?” he could have hardly prayed this line of the Psalter unless he knew the Father was still “my God”.

In making this prayer his own, Jesus was hardly expressing a sentiment unique to himself.  He was, rather, identifying himself with every human being who has ever felt alienated from God, abandoned by God, estranged from God. Jesus became, for us, what the ram in the thorns became for Isaac.  That is to say, in making this very human prayer, Jesus expressed oneness with the rest of humanity so that (in the words of a Baptist friend of mine) “the full weight of the curse fell upon the Son as a sin-bearer, the fulfillment of both the scapegoat, and the sacrifices of the old covenant.  Jesus thus experienced every aspect of the curse: death, exile, broken communion with God.”

Perhaps this prayer best expresses what we mean when we speak of “the days of his flesh” (Hebrews 5:7).  It was in this deep sense of dereliction that we perceive, most truly, that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14).

After he prayed the first line of Psalm 22, did Jesus go on to finish the psalm silently? Christians have always suspected that this is the case.  Continuing the psalm, he told the Father such things as this:

All the ends of the world Shall remember and turn to the Lord, And all the families of the nations Shall worship before You. For the kingdom is the Lord’s, And He rules over the nations (Psalm 22:27-28)

I wonder, moreover, if we should stop with Psalm 22. Indeed, why should we?  Let us imagine, rather, that Jesus, as he was dying, continued praying the next several psalms after Psalm 22.  If he went on, quietly praying the subsequent Psalm 22 were: Adonai ro’I lo’ ‘eshar – The Lord is my shepherd / I shall not want.”

It is not difficult to think of Jesus going on with the other psalms in this sequence:

Lift up your heads, O you gate! And be lifted up, you everlasting doors! And the King of glory shall come in… Show me your ways, O Lord Teach me your paths… The Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life Of whom shall I be afraid? (Psalm 24:7; 25:3; 27:1)

If Jesus did pray this short sequence of psalms, it took only a few minutes for him to reach Psalm 31:5, which Luke indentifies as his final words on the cross: “Into Your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46). Indeed, I suspect that these were the very words – recorded by Luke – to which Matthew and Mark refer when they tell us: “Jesus cried out again with a loud voice, and yielded up his spirit”.

[…] —

So, it turns out that God wasn’t undone, the Trinity didn’t break.  Penal substitution may be true, or at least part of a larger picture, but not because of this passage.  It turns out that Jesus was just being human and Jewish in his praying to God in the language and verbiage he learned from the Psalter.  But again, nuance, literary structure; who has time for that when you can proof text random passages?

Imagine if you will, someone, let’s say a Mormon, trying to defend his view of deification for example.  He is going to apply essentially the same hermeneutic most evangelicals will use.  So we come across a key passage on church authority and also on forgiveness. John 20:23, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”  Now, just like the “reformed” camp who want to see penal substitution under every bush, he wants to see deification behind every rock… so he says, “See, this passage clearly established we are gods.”  “What?!”, we would retort.  “No really”, he would calmly reply, “listen, in the gospel of Mark (2v7) we see VERY clearly that no one but God (and him alone) can forgive sins, so clearly if we can bind and loose sins and forgiveness of those sins, then we must be gods.”