Getting into graduate school...

Is easy compared to getting through it. So, you may have noticed a lot fewer posts these days. That would be because classes have started, and when you add internship, TA hours, and oh, having a life...blogging gets a little lower on the list. So, I thought the way I could keep this up is to post some of my essays as I write them. They probably will be a little too long for blog entries, a little too boring, and a little too intellectual for what most people want in their free time.

But, it's the best I can do. I have this awesome spirituality class that really challenges me. This is my first essay, written on the question, "Why do Christians need to continually hear the Gospel?" It refers to our readings for the week:

Rom 5:1-11
Richard Foster's Celebration of Discipline p. 1-11
R.F. Lovelace's Dynamics of a spiritual life: an evangelical theology of renewal


Here it is:

There are many reasons why Christians need to continually hear the Gospel. First and foremost, as the Church, we continually live as if we have yet to hear, or fail to believe, the Gospel. Rarely does the daily life of an individual Christian reflect that “…we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation” (Rom 5:11b). More so, our faith communities, expressed through the institutional church, continually reflect a poverty of understanding and practice, when it comes to the Gospel. As alleged by Lovelace, our collective inability as a body to understand justification has led to three “aberrations” of the Gospel, “cheap grace, legalism, and moralism.”

Using Foster’s metaphor of faith as a narrow ridge with a sheer drop-off on either side reiterates why Christians must continually hear the Gospel. Without constant redirection, Christ followers easily stray away from spiritual discipline into a damaging abyss, and fail to produce any viable fruit, as well as miss out on the process of sanctification in Christ. I find the words of Derek Webb, a musician whose works have touched my heart to be particularly moving:

We mistake, as a Christian Culture, the Gospel for the thing that we only preach to nonbelievers in hopes they would come down the aisles of our churches and place their faith in Jesus. Now, it certainly IS that. But much more than that, the Gospel must have, necessarily has, a primary place in the life of believers. We must hear it everyday…If we stop hearing that everyday, then we are never ever going to grow, and our communities never change, and our hearts never be sanctified. Flattery at its very best will encourage nothing more than behavior modification.

I know well the need to continually hear the Gospel in my own life. Having grown up in the Church, and coming to faith at an early age, one might assume that I had a “head start” of sorts in cultivating the spiritual disciplines in my life. Actually, this is not the case. I was raised in a faith community where Foster’s concept of externalism was glorified. Lovelace’s concept of cheap grace, or justification without sanctification, was dispensed every Sunday, and on occasion, a good dose of legalism was administered to ensure my continued contribution to the Church.

After leaving for college, I struggled for years with why my willpower was not strong enough to overcome my propensity toward sin. I turned away from the Church and then from my relationship with God. I manifested some very carnal sins, and the doctrine of sin that I had learned in the Church left me with such a thwarted concept of God that I felt paralyzed with fear at the thought of returning to a relationship with Him. I had truly come to believe, as stated by Derek Webb on his album House Show:

We often believe, if we’re really honest with ourselves, that the Christian life is about how well we can learn to hide our sin. Honestly, I think a lot of us, and I do this all the time, we think that we’ll be able to measure the growth of our spirituality by how little we are sinning. Or how much we can convince everyone, ourselves included, about how little we are sinning.

This agrees with Lovelace’s assertion that, “A church with a weak understanding of sin will thus be a church in which the flesh is alive and spiritual vitality is dampened.”

When I did return to church, I had to hear the Gospel. In fact, much of the past two years of my life has been focusing on truly believing the Gospel. Undoing all of the hurt caused by an incomplete view of the Gospel is a daily endeavor for me. From my conversations with a group of twentysomethings from similar Evangelical faith backgrounds, I have learned that they carry similar scars from this incomplete understanding of what it means that “But for God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). I have a truly difficult time seeing God accepting me as the father does his prodigal son. Allowing the Holy Spirit to work daily in my life is difficult and rather new for me, but necessary.

In a more practical sense, it is necessary for Christians to continually hear the Gospel to balance the concerns of individual and institutional sin. At this stage in my walk with Christ, I feel caught between the dead conformity and angry resistance that Lovelace touches on. The Spiritless orthodoxy of my past faith is moving into a more socially aware existence that I continually fear with become a Spiritless expression of social activism. Cultivation of both sides of faith can occur by allowing ourselves to be sanctified by the Holy Spirit. Lovelace believes that a “mutual movement toward sanctification in these two sectors” would “result in an immense release of spiritual power within Western Christianity.” For this to occur, each side of this divide must hear the Gospel continuously to be corrected by the Spirit.

As I talk to more Christians in my generation, who feel caught between these two faith approaches, who are honestly seeking the voice of the Holy Spirit, it excites me to think that a time such as this may come to pass. I know that I experience the whispering of the Spirit about a theonomous understanding of the flesh, and others with whom I share my faith, experience this as well. But it takes continuous hearing of the Gospel for me to discern the intricacies of what sanctification looks like in my own life.

Finally, Christians must continually hear the Gospel because the process of sanctification makes it a new message every time it is heard. As we grow in faith and maturity, different areas of sin become problematic, different areas of our faith are ripe for exploration and correction, and different messages are to be had from the Holy Spirit. Therefore, a continual hearing of the Gospel is necessary as each Christian embarks on the journey of sanctification toward glorification, so that we may have a more correct understanding of the true nature of God in all three Persons.