Second Terrace

Christ is the End of the Law

Two Law Theories

There are two opposite doctrines about the Law: one is right (i.e., “orthodox”), the other obviously is not. One such “theory” is the attempt to base your righteousness upon your successful completion of the Law — that is, your getting into heaven because you had enough of a “compliance” score.

This theory is the one St Paul is stridently arguing against in the entire Epistle to the Romans. In this Epistle, and also in the Epistle to the Galatians, St Paul proved systematically and in force that you cannot succeed at “righteousness based upon the Law.” You cannot justify yourself, or achieve justification based on your “good” behavior.

This, St Paul said, is exactly what was wrong with the Judaism that rejected their Messiah, Jesus Christ, the Son of God. The Law — whether the written Jewish Law in the Old Testament, or the unwritten law of the Gentile conscience (Romans 1.18-23) — is the divine calling to humanity to become “like” God, to live like Him, to think and act like Him, ultimately to love like He loves.

The End of the True Law

In other words — and here’s the crucial point — the meaning and purpose, the goal of the Law is the Word of God, Jesus Christ, the Son of God Who became the Son of Man. Jesus has always been for eternity the heart and original design (i.e., “law”) of humanity. When man was created in the Garden of Eden, and God said, “Let us make man in Our image,” that image was the Second Person of the Trinity, the Word of God.

Christ is the Cause, the Meaning, and Goal of humankind. That is why St Paul in Hebrews says that Christ is the Author and Finisher of our faith (Hebrews 12.2). That is why he said, in our Epistle reading today, that “Christ is the end of the law, that every one who has faith may be justified” (Romans 10.4).

If the Law’s “beginning and end” is Christ Himself, then it should become immediately clear that there is no possible way to fulfill the Law on your own. The Law that Christ is the end of cannot, then, be a list of legalistic achievements or checkboxes on your moral superiority “to-do” list.

Christ has always been and always will be the purpose of the Law. God’s demands for life as the Law started out in the Old Testament as a kind of progressive education, an anticipation, of the fullness and clarity of the Law in the New Testament. The Ten Commandments were glimmers and gleamings of the Beatitudes that would later come, with the Word of God Himself articulating them with His pastoral voice, the heart of all humanity and creation.

Mount Sinai, where the Law was received on tablets of stone, has been fulfilled and surpassed (not cancelled) by the the Sermon on the Mount.

The Law that is based on the “righteousness of faith” is not a possible and achievable sort of self-achieved smug righteousness. The Parable of the Publican and the Pharisee reveals this sort of self-righteousness, as opposed to the justifying faith of the Publican, which was based on the achievement of Christ.

To the contrary, the demands of God for true life and love are now enabled and made not just possible but made certain by the Lawgiver Himself, who has written the Law not on tablets of stone, but — through the Holy Spirit — on their hearts (Jeremiah 31.33; Ezekiel 36.26). We have entered into solidarity with Jesus Christ as we are His Body, and His Holy Spirit nurtures, grows, and perfects into the fulfillment of the Father’s own cherished hope — that we might, being deified, grow into into full communion with Him and all creation (when He is “all in all,” (1 Corinthians 15.28).

Righteousness DIY

But there are those who try to go it alone, who try to base their righteous on their own achievement of the Law. St Paul says this about them: “For, being ignorant of the righteousness that comes from God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness” (Romans 10.3).

Obviously, this is what was wrong with the Pharisees. St Paul would know this well, as he had been a Pharisee himself. And this willful ignorance of the “righteousness that comes from God” has always been a constant temptation for Christians. It is that legalistic self-justification, even self-satisfaction, from having been more (apparently) successful at the delusion of self-righteousness than others.

Legalism is always obvious when others do it. But we have it in our own Orthodox community as well, especially when asceticism becomes a “righteousness based on law.”

Eschatological Legalism

Legalism is a decadent, apostatized theory of righteousness. It is, actually, a heresy. And it reveals its wickedness most clearly when it is applied to life after death and to the end-times (i.e., eschatology). It comes out in the open as speculations about who goes to heaven and who goes to hell. St Paul actually quotes foolish questions that are typical of these theories (in the manner he often uses in his epistles):

‘But the righteousness based on faith says, Do not say in your heart, “Who will ascend into heaven?” (that is, to bring Christ down) or “Who will descend into the abyss?” (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead)’ (Romans 10.6-7).

St Paul is saying that those who try to “base their righteousness” on their fantasy of succeeding at the Law get mired in endless questions of who is going to heaven, and who is going to hell. Or how few will be in heaven, and how many will be in hell. Or constructing intermediate stages of purgation and examination (like Purgatory, or a literal series of “tollhouses”), as if there were some tug-of-war between Jesus and the devil over a poor soul.

These legalistic speculations are Pharisaical and toxic. They fly in the face of St Paul’s soul-stirring words of Romans 8.39-39:

“For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

St Paul suggests, shockingly, that these speculations are, in effect, bringing Christ down from heaven and up from hell, thereby denying what Jesus has achieved.

In other words, if you redefine or reduce the Law into a self-elevation into Heaven, then you’ve ultimately ignored what Christ has done in achieving salvation. If you’ve reduced the Law into a judgement tool by which you have sentenced people to everlasting perdition, then you, too, have ignored Christ’s salvation, since you’ve denied that He has destroyed the power of hell.

This legalist “righteousness based on the law” thinks of salvation as a future event, as an event when a person is sent to either heaven or hell.

This is a “salvation” that is deferred until the future, until the point of death.

Against this, Jesus said “I am come that ye may have life, and life more abundantly” (John 10.10). Like right now.

Salvation in the Here and Now

Real salvation — the salvation that is “the righteousness that comes from God,” which is “justification by faith” in “Christ Who is the end of the Law” — this salvation is not far away at all. It is not deferred to the eschaton or delayed into the future. It is in the here and now.

As St Paul says in Romans 10.9, “The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart (that is, the word of faith which we preach); because, if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”

Salvation in the here and now means that we are no longer in the condition of “wrath,” which is not active divine punishment or perdition. The teaching that God actively inflicts suffering and pain is precisely what the Pharisees taught, and it flows from the defective doctrine of “righteousness based on the law.”

Rather, the “wrath of God” is the soul’s experience of rejecting God’s righteousness, which is His Love, His communion in the Spirit and solidarity with His Son. If someone turns away from the infinite presence of Love, then he torments himself even in the here and now. He rejects his own essence. He turns his back on his own nature. His whole existence darkens.

This is what Jesus called “the outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 8.12; 22.13; 25.30).

Prayer vs the Gnashing Teeth

Salvation is the spiritual Paradise that begins even now when we repent and are rescued (i.e., saved) from the outer darkness, as the Good Shepherd has found us — we who are the lost lamb for whom He left the ninety-nine behind.

Jesus goes out into the darkness, the dark storm of existential hell that is, tragically, present in the here and now. And He saves His lambs. Indeed: “we are His people and the sheep of His pasture” (Psalm 99.3 LXX).

Instead of weeping, there is joy. Instead of gnashing of teeth, there is the “peace that passeth all understanding” (Philippians 4.7).

There is — in that very Christological and Pneumatological Peace — the highest joyful work and privilege of Prayer. Prayer is the very height and essence of True Righteousness.

Prayer is the opposite of “gnashing of teeth.” The gnashing of teeth is the seething grieving soul that has turned against itself by rejecting Love. It can only be aware of itself in an egotistical hell (i.e., Jean Paul Sartre’s “No Exit”).

But Prayer is liberation. Prayer is life. Prayer is the pouring out of one’s self for the sake of the other. Prayer is what the Trinity does in being the Trinity. Prayer is the First Movement of Love, and the Only Movement.

The Righteousness of God is based and rooted only on this eternal Prayer of Love. On the other hand, the “righteousness based on the law,” the self-righteousness of legalism, cannot pray and fights against true prayer.

The very worst thing about legalism is that it smothers prayer. But the “righteousness from God,” Christ Who is the end of the true Law, is inseparable from prayer for anyone and everyone, especially in this suffering world.

This Spiritual Paradise of Prayer in the here and now will become, additionally, a Physical Paradise at the Resurrection. It will be Eden Again, where the Righteousness of God’s primordial peace, beauty, and goodness will become total reality.

That is what we are gifted in the here and now with the first glimmers of that ultimate transfiguration occurring in sacraments all around us, that same universal transfiguration worked by the Spirit and the Bride, starting in our hearts.

That, nothing less, is real righteousness.

“The word is near you, on your lips, and in your heart.” Amen.

read Jayber Crow

My whole purpose here is to get you to read a book, and that book is Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry.

It’s one of those rare books that when you read the last few words in the last sentence, you want to take a step back and take a new different look at things.

Recipient of the National Humanities Medal in 2010, Wendell Berry is the author of 25 books of poems, 16 volumes of essays, and 11 novels and short story collections. Since 1965 he has lived, worked, and farmed a plot of land on the Kentucky River with his wife and children. He and his family tried their utmost to subsist completely on what they harvested from their farm, going to the store only for the most necessary un-harvestable things.

As far as I know, Berry, who is all of 86 years of age, continues to till the fields with his horse and plow.

Wendell Berry’s main theme is that people change the land by living in it. And the land changes them. If the land is used well, and if other people are dealt with in a kindly fashion, then those changes will be good, or at least not so bad. He’s been a longtime critic of modern individualism, wasteful consumerism, self-aggrandizement, and conspicuous consumption.

He is a Christian writer who “tries to take the Gospel seriously,” but he makes partisans on both sides uncomfortable: no ideology can claim him. No one in the culture wars wants to hear, nowadays, words like these: “Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy” (from his essay “Economy and Pleasure” -- which is a very fine reflection on the great John Ruskin).

Rightwingers chafe at his pacifism and environmentalism. Leftwingers get hot and bothered by his lack of enthusiasm for abortion rights. Though most  contemporary conservatives (who are really libertarians) would not agree, I think Berry is very much an old-fashioned conservative -- so old that the moderns can't recognize him. But the same thing could be said of Christianity in general these days.

In this mean season of social media, techno-reality, and frenetic restlessness, Berry bucks the tide by his quiet insistence that there is no human life without community and nature. One’s life and work ought to be rooted in and responsive to one's place, and the people around him or her. 

Enter Jayber Crow, who did just that.

Wendell Berry is an acerbic critic in his essays. But in his novels, he’s a gentle artist. He portrays the citizens (or, what he calls the “membership”) of his fictional town of Port William with compassion. Even the villains, who betray human fellowship and violate land and nature, are still treated with humane-ness.

Port William is one of the most richly imagined communities in literature, certainly on par with Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or Harper Lee’s Maycomb, Alabama. In every one of his novels and short stories (and a few of his poems to boot), Berry has populated this town with honest depictions of human nature, good and bad.

There are joys and there are sorrows. Jayber Crow, as the sole barber of Port William, has gotten to know these stories first-hand from the confessional that old-fashioned barbershops used to be. Jayber (whose name is really Jonah) was orphaned at the age of ten, and was moved to an orphanage in central Kentucky. From there he attended Bible college in Pigeonville, as he had felt, at the time, that he had received the call to become a preacher.

But in Bible college, he wrestled with too many hard questions to allow him to preach in good conscience. “You have been given questions,” his wizened NT Greek professor told him (whose nickname was “Old Grit”), “to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out -- perhaps a little at a time.” 

There’s more than a little of Berry himself here. He’s a Christian, yes, but certainly not what you’d call a “denominationalist.” He is one of many who has justifiably struggled with the organized church. Thusly, he had Jayber opine that “Some of the best things I have ever thought of I have thought of during bad sermons.”

Jayber left Bible college and wended his way to Lexington. After a few adventures and misadventures, he ended up back in his hometown of Port William, and set up shop.

He became the oral historian of the town. Oral history is the best kind of history, as it proceeds from the deep collection of community memory. “Telling a story,” Jayber reminisces much later, as he’s retired and over seventy at the time of his narration, “is like reaching into a granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told. As almost any barber can testify, there is also more than needs to be told, and more than anybody wants to hear.”

The thing I like best about Jayber Crow is his growing -- and glowing -- recognition of his community in Port William, and what that community means, and the beautiful, poignant thing that community can be. 

Despite his honest problems with religion, Jayber comes to his clearest vision of God and his community -- ironically for him -- in church. Uncle Stanley Gibbs was the church janitor and gravedigger, but had been lately getting himself into trouble with his questionable vocabulary and his being too open about his plans for becoming a tomcat again once his old wife passed on. 

Jayber became Uncle Stanley’s successor, and cleans the church each Friday evening in anticipation of Sunday morning worship. He had avoided attending church for years, but now he sits quietly in the back. He loves the singing (“In the sweet by and by” is his favorite) despite his withering critique of most of the sermons.

One night while cleaning the church, Jayber gets sleepy and lies down on the floor. He closes his eyes and sees all the people of his cherished Port William -- people he observes and loves. The chapter concludes, “They were just there. They said nothing, and I said nothing. I seemed to love them all with a love that was mine merely because it included me. When I came to myself again, my face was wet with tears.”

Now that’s community. That’s what a town can be and should be. Jayber’s best friend, Burley Coulter, says this of what being a “member” of Port William is all about: “The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain't in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don't."

The "membership" of Port William consists of any person who recognizes his or her place among -- and responsibility for the well-being of -- all the land, animals, and all the people of the place. It’s being totally pro-life as in “all life.”

Port William is, or should be, your town and my town. Your family and my family. Your church and my church. Your neighborhood and mine.

pray to God for us, fr sergius

 

Fr Sergius Bulgakov fell asleep in the Lord this day 77 years ago in Paris of 1944.

The Nazis were still occupying the fair city, which was, for Fr Sergius and many other Russian emigres, a place of exile. He had been driven out of Russia by the Bolsheviks. He, along with Berdyaev and Ilyin and 150 intellectuals, was forced out of the Soviet Union on the infamous "Philosophers' Ship."

 

Having suffered Bolsheviks and Nazis, and having been sorely disappointed by his own early adoption of Marxism, Bulgakov re-entered the church of his youth, and sought for the rest of his life to proclaim the Gospel to every phase of human existence.

 

He never shied away from tackling difficult tasks. Although he was all too familiar with the limits of human knowledge, and the transcendent mystery of God, he also -- with courage, persistence, and meekness -- took theological and philosophical thought far beyond the comforting limits of usual religious speech.

 

He refused to prematurely stop at conventional limits, as he recognized that these limits had contributed to the church's loss of vitality and persuasion.

 

Knowing that the ways of apophasis, or via negativa, has been much overused, and prematurely deployed, he left us with this evangelistic charge:

 

"Bondage of thought is not theology" (from "Augustinianism and Predestination"). It is irresponsible to too quickly say "it is a paradox," only to excuse one's unwillingness to engage in the apostolic task of "devoting ourselves to prayer and to the word" (Acts 6.4).

 

Despite the claims of his detractors, Fr Sergius Bulgakov was a prince of Biblical and patristic scholarship. He was faithful to the true contours of the real dogma of Holy Tradition -- moreso, perhaps, than those who suggested he did not.

 

Because the Gospel, and Holy Tradition, cannot be contained as an instrumentality of an institution. It exceeds all social, ethnic, geographical, ideological, and historicist compartmentalizations. It cannot be but the mere "content" of a sociological unit.

 

This, Fr Sergius knew and took seriously. He knew that sophiology had always been a theological method that lay implicit in the prophets, the apostles, and the fathers -- but in this modern age, it has become exceedingly and explicitly necessary. It really is not possible to disregard his sophiology, as some have tried to renovate him to make him more agreeable and more compliant with the demands of convention.

 

Bulgakov's many detractors to this day cast aspersions, which have come to be just as conventional (and supercilious) as the contours that this saintly theologian frequently crossed for the sake of the Evangel.

 

As a rule, these aspersions proceed from the familiar opinions of others (as opposed to direct reading). Or they proceed from misunderstanding (from superficial reading) -- Bulgakov frequently describes an errant opinion at length, and more than once I've seen a freshman critic mistake that description for Bulgakov's own position.

 

Or, most likely, they proceed sophomorically from the view that Orthodox dogma is a set-piece, static, written in stone, very much as Scripture is viewed in sola scriptura theory.

 

The Apostolic Proclamation does not change in essence, but its elaboration must be communicated to all times and places and peoples. This is the Great Commission.

 

And Fr Sergius Bulgakov received that Commission and took the Gospel further than most everyone.

 

It is said that at his repose this day seventy-seven years ago, there was miraculous light:

 

"We were witnesses to an amazing spectacle: Father Sergius’ face had become completely illuminated. It was a single mass of real light."

 

Pray to God for us, Fr Sergius, in this night.

the cost of partisanship

Every Fall, in the seminary courses that I teach, we take a good look at the American Religious Landscape Survey. For obvious reasons, it’s pretty important for a newly-ordained clergyman to have at least a notion of what he’s getting himself into when he sets out with the Gospel into the American scene.

It should go without saying that the American religious scene has always been something like the Wild West. Things have always been changing, indeed, but not like they are right now.

Ever since the 1990’s, the fastest growing religious group in America isn’t religious at all. These are the “nones.” As in “no religious affiliation,” or “unaffiliated.” This group has been growing by leaps and bounds. 

Its rise has been shocking to religious observers like me. In 2019, the Pew Research Center reported that the unaffiliated rose from 17% in 2009 to 26% in 2018. That is an almost unheard of increase in less than ten years -- a scary rise by nine whole points, which should have been most unsettling to anyone in the religious community.

I felt like Chicken Little two years ago, telling all my evangelical and mainline, Orthodox and Roman Catholic, friends that the sky was falling for sure.

Well, the sky doesn’t seem to be falling -- at least, not falling so quickly, and not falling for everyone. 

This past Thursday (July 8), the Public Religion Research InstituteIn released its brand new 2020 American Religious Landscape. 

Some things are not surprising. Christians of color and non-Protestant Christians (e.g., Orthodox like me) have pretty much held their own with little increase or decrease in the last 20 years. 26% of Americans identify themselves are “Christians of color” (like African-American and Latino protestants). This is a slight increase from 23% in 2006. 22% of Americans are Catholic, and 0.5% are Orthodox (I know that’s tiny, but at least it’s held stable).

But there are two big surprises.

First, the “unaffiliates” are not growing so fast anymore. They seem to have stabilized at 23% of the American population. The shocking growth from the 1990’s to 2020 has settled down from a wildfire to a campfire. 

Still, no one should take too much comfort in this. An enormous 36% of the crucial young adult age group (i.e., 18-29 years of age) put themselves in this “none” category -- and this should be  at the top of anyone’s list of concerns for the religious future of the nation.

The other surprise is bigger. 

For the first time (I think ever), the population segment of white evangelicals is shrinking. "Since 2006,” PRRI reports, “white evangelical Protestants have experienced the most precipitous drop in affiliation, shrinking from 23% of Americans in 2006 to 14% in 2020." 

This is new, arrestingly new. For decades -- since the 1970’s -- it’s been a truism that conservative evangelicals have bucked the tide of religious decline in America. In 1972, sociologist Dean Kelly wrote a famous book called just that: Why Conservative Churches are Growing. He concluded that while mainline Protestant churches were concerned about popular political issues, conservative evangelical churches were concerned with Biblical demands upon life, relationships and responsibilities.

But this started to change remarkably in 2015. The evangelical segment started to decline rapidly (from a more gradual decline in 2006). At the same time, mainline denominations (like Episcopalians, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians) started to increase.

This is something I never thought I’d say. According to this landscape report, there are more Americans who are white mainline protestants (16%) than there are Americans who are white evangelicals (14%).

What accounts for this? There is no new big influx into the mainline churches. Most of their gain seems to be coming from those who had left the mainline community for the evangelical community years ago, but who are simply returning to the church of their upbringing.

The decline of white evangelicals seems mostly to result from the larger changing demographics of America. This is obvious. There is an irreversible change from a white majority to a plurality of ethnicities in the country. This is happening no matter what one thinks about immigration or voting policies.

But there is another factor that has contributed to the decline. When Dean Kelly wrote his book in 1972, the evangelical community was focussed upon concrete “Biblical lifestyle issues.” Since then, the focus has broadened to involvement in political, partisan issues and the “culture wars” -- the very sort of involvement that Kelly had blamed for mainline decline 50 years before.

Now it seems that the chickens have come home to roost. The Pew report of 2019 observed that it was just because of explicit political partisanship that many young adults are leaving the evangelical community, most likely landing squarely in the “unaffiliated” category.

I’ve always told my seminarian students, especially in preaching class, that they should never hesitate to talk about ethical and moral issues from the pulpit.

But they should never, ever, endorse a candidate or preach partisanship. 

And this has turned out to have been good advice.