The danger is also that we remove faith from the concrete of the means of grace and the work of the Spirit from those means of grace so that even God becomes an idea to inhabit the imagination rather than the God who fills the present so that He might fill eternity with us. The more we distance God from the means of grace the more we distance Him from anything we would call real and unchangeable. God is not an idea. He is a personal being who is known to us in a personal way through the concrete of the Word and Sacraments. Faith is not an idea or even an idea of this God. Faith is the trust in the God who has revealed Himself to us and made Himself known to us precisely because without His aid and Spirit, we would be left to a mere idea of Him and not the reality of Him and what He has accomplished for us.
Of all the things that are dangerous to Christianity, one of them is surely the idea that we turn God on and off like a feeling, that we decide for Him or against Him at will and whim, and that He lives in us as an idea in our imagination. No God like this has any power to save us eternally nor has He the power to change us in the present moment. Such a God does not need to be worshiped, is hardly with the time to pray, and will countenance our surrender to whatever desire we have -- including the one to disown Him when He no longer is needed or fulfills any purpose in our eyes. This God is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not the God of the prophets, and not the God who was made flesh in Jesus Christ. While I can only hope that evangelicals will tire of this view of God, I can warn the Lutherans who want to be like the evangelicals that this is not the God of our confession, not the God of our liturgy, and not the God of our prayers.
3 comments:
The fundamental problem, and we do this in many ways, is that we ignore what God has already richly done for us. Asking God into our hearts denies that, in Baptism, He has come into our hearts, in the Person of the Holy Spirit, and made us new creatures with all the benefits of membership in the Kingdom of God, including eternal life with Him in Paradise. Not enough?
I shudder when I hear a choir, in a Lutheran church, sing, “I want Jesus to walk with me!” What arrogance, what ignorance!
Peace and Joy!
George A. Marquart
I am not a koine Greek student, let alone a scholar, but unless I have been misinformed by several generations of men during my lifetime who are, the koine Greek word, "pistis," which is translated "believe" in the relevant verses, means not "believe" in the sense that I believe there is a nation called India, that the Earth rotates around the sun, and so on, but "trust," "rely upon," "give allegiance to." In fact, unless a thousand generations of villains have been lying to us all, a "decision" on behalf of Jesus Christ is therefore very much what we are commanded to make.
What is so wrong about a penitent and troubled person asking our dear Lord to come into their heart? Are we such legalists and theological bullies that we forget about the mercy of the Lord, and how each of us, imperfect and lost in sin, must come to Him earnestly and He loves us? Soli Deo Gloria
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