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Quote from: ChristNU on February 24, 2012, 07:59:08 AM

What's interesting about those who do identify with being "sinners saved by grace", is that while they think it is righteous way to think of themselves, in reality it becomes just another way to justify their sin. After all, I'm just a sinner saved by grace, thank you God for that grace thing, and I'll try and do better next time.

If your identity is that of a sinner, then sin is to be expected. A sinner, sins. But, if your identity is that of a saint, a forgiven, redeemed, child of the living God, then sin would be unexpected. We are who God says we are, and God says we are saints; not because of anything we do, but because of what Christ has done and continues to do in us.

Someone who has not had a drink in 25 years still identifies themselves as an "Alchoholic" in going to an AA meeting.   They say that because they are aware of being able to fall back into that hole if they slip up.

If we have EVER been sinning at any time in our life, we are sinners. That does not 'justify' anything.  It reminds us to be vigilant to not slip back into old patterns of thought and action, because we could end up in a real mess.

Speaking of "feeble attempts of vigilance"...

Peter Rollins has made an astute observation that "the very attempt to bring our actions into line with our stated beliefs can actually act as a barrier to transformation...It is in experiencing the license of grace rather than the legalism of prohibition that real transformation becomes possible."

From his book Insurrection;

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          Our Practices Do Not Fall Short of Our Beliefs; They Are Our Beliefs

It would be difficult to find a sincere Christian who would wish to attack the idea that Christianity involves the entire person. Throughout the Bible we are confronted with prophets who condemn any expression of faith practice entirely composed of words and rituals. They rail against any practice that is not cashed out in a concern for righteousness and justice, which pays no heed to the widow and the orphan, and which turns a blind eye to the cries of the poor and oppressed.

As a direct result of this, much preaching and teaching is aimed squarely at closing the gap between the verbal affirmation of God and living this out in practice. This teaching claims that it is not enough simply to proclaim a God of love, forgiveness, and compassion without living out the values of love, forgiveness, and compassion. However, behind this worthy desire to close the gap between words and deeds lie three interrelated problems. Let us take each in turn.

First, this attempt still prizes belief over action. Claiming that we should bring our actions into line with our beliefs still places intellectual confession at the center, as that which we must attempt to live up to.

Second, the very act of trying to overcome the divide between what we say we believe and our actions means that this distinction is taken as significant. All the energy that is exerted in attempting to close the gap between what we think and how we act fails to acknowledge that our practices do not fall short of our beliefs, but are the concrete, material expression of them. In other words, our outer world is not something that needs to be brought into line with our inner world but is an expression of it.

Finally, the very attempt to bring our actions into line with our stated beliefs can actually act as a barrier to transformation.

Paul articulates this reality when he writes of how the law does not stand in opposition to sin but rather is interwoven with it. In other words, the law and sin do not exist at opposite ends of a spectrum but rather occupy the same space and stand opposed to a fundamentally different mode of being (that of love). Here the law is not simply that which forbids sin but also is that which generates and maintains the desire to sin. The prohibition of the law is thus revealed by Paul as that which generates the very desire to transgress the prohibition.

Again let's look at the example of a child: telling a child not to open a door feeds her desire to open the door. The child may be fearful of her parents and thus not actually open the door, but the desire is born in the prohibition, and the more she resists opening the door, the more she will want to do so. This parental command is then internalized, and the conflict between her desire and his parents' desire is relocated in her own being. Here she experiences both the desire to obey and the desire to transgress at one and the same time.

One does not need to look far to see this expressed in preachers who rant against sexual practices they actively engage in, or who speak of generosity while demonstrating greed, or who preach forgiveness while harboring the most violent of attitudes against those who stand opposed to them. Of course one might just say that these individuals are simply hypocrites and insincere. And that is no doubt true of some. But what if many of them are very sincere about what they preach and that their transgression is actually intimately connected with their sincere opposition to that transgression? What if the idea that not all things are permissible, far from being helpful, is the very thing that stops them from finding freedom? And in contrast, what if Paul's radical claim that all things are permissible is the very embodiment of a grace that can actually lead to fundamental change.8 We can see this idea worked out in the following story:

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   There was once a young man called Caleb who was obsessed with gathering up possessions and gaining status. He was so driven by the desire to succeed that, from an early age, he managed to become one of the most prominent and influential figures in the city. Yet he was not happy with his lot. He worked long hours, rarely saw his children, and often became irritable at the slightest problem. But more than this, he knew that his lifestyle met with his father's disapproval. His father had himself been a wealthy and influential man in his youth, but he had found such a life shallow and unsatisfactory. As a result, he had turned away from it in an endeavor to embrace a life of simplicity, fellowship, and meditation.

Caleb's father had taught him from an early age about the problems that come from seeking material and political influence, and he warned Caleb in the strongest possible way to embrace a life that delves deeply into the beauty of creation, the warmth of friendship, and the inspiration derived from deep and sustained reflection.

Caleb's father was an inspiring man, well loved by all, and Caleb could see that his father, while living in a modest way, was at peace with himself and the world in a manner that his friends and colleagues were not. Because of this, Caleb often looked with longing at his father's lifestyle and frequently detested the path that he had personally chosen. Yet, despite this, he was still driven to pursue wealth and power.

It was true that his father was a happy and contented man, but he was also concerned about his son, and on any occasion when they spent time together, he would criticize Caleb for the life he had chosen. But one day while Caleb's father was reflecting upon his son's life, a voice from heaven interrupted him, saying, "Caleb is also my son, and I love him just the way he is."

Caleb's father began to weep as he realized that all these years he had been hurting his son through his disapproval and criticism. So he immediately visited his son's house and offered a heartfelt apology, saying, "Please never feel that you have to change what you do or who you are. I love you without limit and condition just as you are."

After that day, the father began to take an interest in his son's life again, asking questions about what he was doing and how his work was progressing. But increasingly, Caleb found that he was no longer so interested in working the long hours. Soon he started to skip work in order to spend more time with his family and began to take less interest in what others thought about him.

Eventually, Caleb gave up his work entirely and followed in his father's footsteps, realizing that it was only after his father had accepted him unconditionally for who he was that he was able to change and become who he always wanted to be.

This is nothing less than a description of grace. In grace we are able to accept that we are accepted and, in this very act of knowing we do not have to change, we discover the ability to change. It is in experiencing the license of grace rather than the legalism of prohibition that real transformation becomes possible.

So then we have explored how we seek to avoid facing up to the possibilities that life is finite, our activities are meaningless, and our lives are more dark and selfish than the image we have of ourselves.

We have also seen how we avoid each of these through various distractions, a religious notion of God, and carefully crafted false stories of who we are.

Worst of all, Christianity has become little more than an ideological support of these strategies. The result is a Christianity that (1) offers us various activities to help divert our attention from anxiety, (2) affirms a religious notion of God, and (3) confirms that we are what we say we believe. The life of faith is thus reduced to a crutch, and the Crucifixion becomes nothing more than a mythology we pay lip service to.

The Church in its currently existing form is then an institution that helps us to cover over our anxiety and encourages us to think that faith is lived out in singing songs, engaging in certain rituals, and believing certain things. The Church thus ends up helping us maintain psychological equilibrium and integrate into society as it presently stands rather than throwing us off balance and being a catalyst for the transformation of society.

In this way, we witness the reintegration of paganism into Christianity—Gnosticism—the reintegration of balance and cosmic order into the rupture brought about by Christ. Something that is witnessed in the hymn "All Things Bright and Beautiful," which originally contained the lines,

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them,high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.

Christianity in this hymn is thus presented as a faith that justifies the world as it presently exists. The song implies that the present order is divinely instituted and that we must both celebrate it and protect it.

But what is truly revolutionary about Christianity is the way that it frees us from the power of the religious, Gnostic, God. In our experience of the Crucifixion, we fully confront the anxiety of death, meaninglessness, and guilt that the Church so often attempts to protect us from. A confrontation that must happen if we are to ever enter into the new life described in the Gospels as Resurrection. For Resurrection life is not some turning away from the experience of death that we find in the event of Crucifixion but rather describes a way of living in its very midst and finding there a way of truly affirming life.