Edgework

I recently found a good deal of comfort and clarification about my personal faith experience while reading Mark D. Baker’s book, “Religious No More: Building Communities of Grace and Freedom” (1999, InterVarsity Press).

Baker’s experience of doing missionary work in Honduras for ten years allowed him to discern some disturbing trends in many of the evangelical churches in that country. He says, “The evangelical emphasis on rules has apparently overwhelmed the doctrine of grace. Clearly, outside the church and… inside the church as well, people think that evangelicals teach that one must be good in order to be a Christian and go to heaven. Non-evangelicals tend to think they must straighten out their lives in order to become an evangelical Christian” (22).

Based on the title of the book, one might think that Baker appears ready to give up on faith altogether. But the opposite is the case. He uses the terms “religious, or religiosity” to refer to those churches that focus on line-drawing and legalism. He says that he is contrasting religious Christianity with authentic Christianity. He insists that the world is waiting to see and experience the latter.

In his book, “A Private and Public Faith,” William Stringfellow expresses similar sentiments. He states, “Christianity knows that God has already come among us…Religion considers that God is a secret disclosed only in the discipline and practice of religion…The church, where faithful to the news (of God embodied in Christ), is not the place where men come to seek God; on the contrary, the church is just the place where men gather to declare that God takes the initiative in seeking men” (Quoted in Baker, 39).

And Doug Frank, in “Straitened and Narrowed,” puts into words precisely what I experienced as a teenager in my torturous attempt to find God in the context of fundamentalistic faith community. “As a kid, I was commanded to love God. I tried earnestly to do so. But a steady diet of Sunday-school stories and revival sermons left my young heart doubting God’s love for me. I was to love a person who commanded me, under threat of eternal hell fire, to love him? Would I love the neighborhood bully if he grabbed me on the street and commanded me to love him?” (Quoted in Baker, 41).

I know this is not the experience of everyone growing up in the church, but it was for me. And that experience has left me with an abiding quest to find a better way of thinking about how one comes to faith. It is rewarding, indeed, to have discovered such a way.

Baker moves from his experience in Honduras to Paul’s book of Galatians in his attempt to articulate this better way. He notes that ever since the time of Luther, most Protestants have seen Paul’s main argument in Galatians to be that individuals are not saved by works of the law but by faith. Like in Luther’s case, all of us stand guilt-ridden before God until we put our faith in Jesus Christ and then – voilá – our guilt is taken away and we are free of any condemnation.

However, Mark Baker suggests that what is troubling Paul as he writes is not the question of justification by faith instead of by works of the law, but rather the divided table that is emerging in the Galatian context. He is afraid that that which happened in Antioch – where those of Jewish background were refusing table fellowship to uncircumcised Gentile believers (Galatians 2:12-14) – was beginning to happen in Galatia as well.

What Paul is trying to impress on Galatian believers is that the gospel places the initiative with God. It is common for most religions to proclaim that it is our actions that will do the heavy lifting of putting us in right relationship with God. Perhaps it is works of repentance, change of behavior or belief in the right things. So Paul’s impassioned message is to say that it is not on the basis of human effort that one is justified and invited to the table of the Lord; neither performing the works of the law nor the human act of believing. What makes us worthy of the table of the Lord is the faithfulness of Jesus Christ.

Karl Barth has said it well long ago in “The Church Dogmatics”: “Justification by faith cannot mean that instead of his customary evil works and in place of all kinds of supposed good works, man chooses and accomplishes the work of faith, in this way pardoning and therefore justifying himself” (Quoted in Baker, 106).

To take us to the crux of the matter, Baker directs us to Galatians 2:16 and particularly the phrases usually translated as “faith in Jesus Christ.” It is of interest to note that in the King James Version, the first and the last time this phrase appears in this verse it reads, “faith of Jesus Christ.” This, says Baker, should engender deeper reflection. Baker contends that this is a more accurate translation than that of most modern versions. An even better rendering, he argues would be, “through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ.” To say, “faith in Jesus Christ” (objective genitive) makes Christ the passive object of human faith. But to say, “faithfulness of Jesus Christ (subjective genitive),” makes Christ the acting subject.

In “Jesus’ Faith and Ours,” Richard B. Hays translates Galatians 2:16 as follows: “Knowing that a person is not justified on the basis of works of the law but through Jesus Christ’s faithfulness, we also placed our faith in Christ Jesus in order that we might be justified on the basis of Christ’s faithfulness and not on the basis of the works of the law” (Quoted in Baker, 107).

If I had understood this as a young teenager wrestling with questions of faith and eternal destinies I would have been spared much of the trauma I endured back then. Jesus Christ is faithful. Hallelujah!