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Category: Discipleship

  • Matthew 28:16-28 and Titus 2:11: Christ's Archy and Jesus' Teachings

    You should not call anybody Rabbi, for one is your instructor, namely the Messiah, and you are all brothers. (Matthew 23:8 Author’s Translation)*
    For, the grace of God (the salvation of all men) has appeared, training us, so that, renouncing ungodliness and worldly desires, we would live wise, righteous, and godly lives in this present age. (Titus 2:11 Author’s Translation)
    Jesus and Paul agree. Jesus came to instruct people in God’s ways. He came to do more, but he never intended to do less. I have no intention of dealing with the tension of Scripture concerning God assigning some to be teachers in the church, but I do want to show that Jesus came to teach God’s ways to man.
    For anybody to live under Christ’s rule, they must, absolutely must see him as their Teacher.
    This means that learning from Jesus Christ matters. He is our instructor and teacher, he desires to train his people, but not merely with information or facts, but with the daily practice of living under his rule. This requires these things (among others):

    1. To believe Jesus Christ, not merely about him, not merely in him.
    2. To learn from Jesus Christ, not merely about him, but what he said and modeled for us.
    3. To be trained by Jesus Christ, not merely in knowledge, but in the experience of obeying him in the mundane details of our lives.
    4. To realize when we fail, or worse sin against him, that though we want him away from us for we are sinners, he still says, “Follow me. (Luke 5:8-10)” In other words, he not only trains us in righteous, but that he is our righteousness.

    To learn from Jesus is the project of the whole church, but it is also the project of the individual. No rule or authority in life is absolute except that of Jesus Christ, we would do well to be his students.
     
    *I am aware of the text variant, but I cannot think of a good reason to add, “the Christ” there, the context makes it too evident for somebody to gloss it. But an omission because it seems redundant with the next sentence makes sense. Either way, the meaning is preserved.

  • Excerpts from The Subversion of Christianity – The Contradictions

    According to Henry, this project had its impetus in a comment made by Geoff on his blog while discussing the book Christian Archy by David Alan Black.
    In the first chapter of Christian Archy, Black credits Jacques Ellul and Vernard Eller for their contributions to the topic of “Christian Anarchy” and for influencing his own thoughts and writings on the subject. I thought it would be good for us to start this project with a discussion of some of the comments of one of those two influential authors.
    The first chapter of Ellul’s book The Subversion of Christianity is called “The Contradictions.” In this chapter, Ellul outlines some the basic problems that he found among the church. For example, he writes:

    How has it come about that the development of Christianity and the church has given birth to a society, a civilization, a culture that are completely opposite to what we read in the Bible, to what is indisputably the text of the law, the prophets, Jesus and Paul? (p 3)
    What Jesus says is that those who hear his words and do them are like the one who builds on the rock. In other words, the rock is hearing and doing. The second part, however, is more restrictive. Those who hear the words he speaks and do not do them are like the one who builds on the sand. Here undoubtedly practice alone is the issue. We can thus say that it is the decisive criterion of life and truth. (p 5)
    If Christians are not conformed in their lives to their truth, there is no truth. This is why the accusers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were right to infer the falsity of revelation itself from the practice of the church. This makes us see that in not being what Christ demands we render all revelation false, illusory, ideological, imaginary, and nonsalvific. We are thus forced to be Christians or to recognize the falsity of what we believe. (p 7)
    In fabricating Christianity, therefore, Christians have known what they were doing. They have freely chosen this course. They have voluntarily forsaken revelation and the Lord. They have opted for new bondage. They have not aspired to the full gift of the Holy Spirit that would have enabled them to take the new way that he opened up. They have made a different choice and left the Holy Spirit unemployed, idle, present only on sufferance. This is why the burning question is a purely human one: Why have Christians taken this contrary course? What forces, mechanisms, stakes, strategies, or structures have induced this subversion? For human aggrandizement and nothing else. (p 13)
    quoted from Jacques Ellul, The Subversion of Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986)

    What are your thoughts on Ellul’s indictment against modern Christianity?

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