Sacramental Word and Faith

Was in a bible study group reading a Christian psychologist say that basically no one has a pure thought life.  We vacillate from soaring thoughts to gritting our teeth over some outrage to worrying about our bills.  This barrage of mental contradictions seems universal and causes a lot of angst. Our spiritual growth doesn’t seem to. What gives? 

    Martin Luther had such a thought life.  His 6 hour confessions were sins remembered and then worrying aloud about how his repentance might not be sincere.  On and on this would go until he often wore out his confessor.  A Catholic friend of mine laughed upon hearing this and remarked, “Now there’s a Real Catholic for you.”  Luther was led to consider hard what faith was.  And he concluded something that is less like Calvinism and Arminianism and the rest of Protestantism than it is like Catholicism and Orthodoxy. 

    Other Protestants hold to what is called a Reflexive Word.  That is, you listen to God’s Word, decide or are moved by the Spirit, and then are saved.  But Luther came upon his inspiration by reading Rom. 5:8, “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” That is, Salvation occurred when no one believed it.  In this sense, God’s Word and Salvation are Sacramental.  They come in from the outside and change us into the belief of faith. Faith doesn’t earn or achieve anything, but shows the Word has had effect.  God keeps his promises.  Faith occurs because God gives it.  That may seem rather strange to most Protestants. When I belonged to the Navigators in college, we used to discuss such things in a round-robin of Christians. Who was right? Of course, to believe is the important thing, so we just shrugged and kept sharing the gospel, not “wrangling about words” as II Tim. 2:14 says.

   Many years ago, I had a friend who was in the seminary who came for a visit.  He was having second thoughts.  His brothers back home were all getting nice careers back while he studied and knew he would never make much.  But what really bothered him was that the barrage of doctrine he was receiving in classes overwhelmed him and he didn’t know whether he really believed everything presented.  Why, he queried, did they require so much Greek and Hebrew?  What good did this achieve?  I didn’t know.  It’s all Greek to me and I don’t know Greek.  So I asked rather innocently what the Greek was for one of my favorite passages, Eph. 2:8,9, “For by grace are you saved through faith, and that, not of yourselves, it is the gift of God.”  He looked it up and furrowed his brow.  So, I asked, is it grace that faith chooses or grace that gives faith?  Well, he noted, the key word was “that”.  The Greek “that” which is used is a ‘strong that’ -- it refers to all the previous items in the phrase before.  So the grace, the faith, is all a gift.  And then he gave me a eureka look I will never forget.  He later told me that it was that conversation that made him suddenly feel like a pastor. 

    Because if faith works our response to God’s grace(reflexive), where does faith come from?  Is it our work?  But if faith is a gift, then what we have is God working a mystery within us (sacramental).  And if the Word is sacramental, it means that when we memorize our favorite passages, not as proof texts or comforts or whatever, but in some God-mystery, the Word changes us. (A bit frightening and goes far beyond a mere “inerrancy of scripture”)   It is like Chris Mullin paraphrasing Paul in that song about the Apostles Creed, “I did not make it.  It is making me.  It is the very gift of God and not the invention of any man.”

    Of course this is a subtle theological difference, this reflexive vs. sacramental Word.  The average Lutheran or Baptist or Methodist sitting in a pew probably doesn’t think much about it, having some preconceived notions about his own faith experience and that closes the issue. Yet there are differences.  The sacramental Word shows why Lutherans, Catholics and Orthodox don’t have and will never have much of a revival tradition.  It explains why they believe that baptism often begins ‘being in faith’.  Baptism confers God’s truth on an individual.  Justification isn’t tied to a single event of choosing or a spiritual experience.  It happens every time a Christian repents and returns to the power of baptism and Christ’s death on the cross. 

   Back to the psychologist’s observation. In a sacramental Word and Faith, the sinner doesn’t have to know the state of their faith.  A person who struggles with impure thoughts, doubts if he has faith at times, yet who cries out in desperation to God—is a believer.  We aren’t constrained by our own assurance and self-assessment.  The total power of salvation rests in God, not ourselves.  And so with Paul, we can write Romans 7 in the first person present, “For the good that I wish, I do not do; but I practice the very evil that I do not wish…  For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war…Wretched man that I am!  Who will deliver me from this body of death?  Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” 

   And then Grace is that undeserved kindness of God that makes us all that we are or hope to be.  Grace is God’s complete work on earth, not just a aspect of salvation.  Or as Senator Tom Coburn surprised a lot of listeners in his town hall, “Nothing on earth is free, except God’s unbounded Grace.” Um, he’s Baptist, I think.