Atonement and the Church

Atonement and the Church

I am reading Barth’s “Epistle to the Romans,” when I came across this article: “7 Churches Jesus Did Not Die For.” I couldn’t help but examine it in light of Barth’s Epistle to the Romans. Now the article title catches your eye, and I appreciated what the article, in my mind is doing, and that is getting the listener to think about how God defines His church and not the way we define her. We shouldn’t be defining the bride by her fashion through the decades on a spiritual runway. She is defined and arraigned by the one thing that does not get old nor goes out of style and that is His love letter to her, the Bible. I’ve described the not so simple church in a previous article. Here I’d like to look at the atonement more specifically and who Jesus did die for in relation to the church.

Charles Spurgeon said this of the Atonement:

“All the love and acceptance which perfect obedience could have obtained of God belong to you because Christ was perfectly obedient on your behalf. Those who set aside the atonement as a satisfaction for sin also murder the doctrine of justification by faith. They must do so. There is a common element which is the essence of both doctrines; so that, if you deny the one, you destroy the other.

Modern thought is nothing but an attempt to bring back the legal system of salvation by works. Our battle is the same as that which Luther fought at the Reformation. If you go to the very ground and root of it, grace is taken away, and human merit is substituted. The gracious act of God in pardoning sin is excluded, and human effort is made all in all, both for past sin and future hope. Every man is now to set up as his own saviour, and the atonement is shelved as a pious fraud.

 

I will not foul my mouth with the unworthy phrases which have been used in reference to the substitutionary work of our Lord Jesus Christ; but it is a sore grief of heart to note how these evil things are tolerated by men whom we respect . . .

 

I must have a righteousness, perfect and Divine; yet it is beyond my own power to create. I find it in Christ: I read that it will become mine by faith, and by faith I take it. My conscience tells me that I must render to God’s justice a recompense for the dishonour that I have done to His law, and I cannot find anything which bears the semblance of such a recompense till I look to Christ Jesus . . .”

When Spurgeon says “unworthy phrases which have been used in reference to the substitutionary work of our Lord Jesus Christ,” one can argue that many of the phrases used in the article that bears the appearance of cultural Christianity will suffice. Christ did not die for such things. We would say “Christ died to actually pay for all the sins of his people only”. And He did for All people to make a way for everyone to either receive or reject Him. He did not die for a style, not a look, not a feeling, but for you and I. You and I make up the Bride of Christ, His Church and she is not perfect. She is far from it. Sanctification proves she is still being worked upon. I’ve spoken and taught on this illustration hundreds of times. It is one of my favorite themes throughout Scripture, as it relates to the Church.

Matthew 18:20 defines what a church is:

• Two or three people:no need for a building, staff, worship team, or stain glass windows, just people.
• Gathered:Just as Jesus gathered His disciples to follow Him, and it continues today through His church.
• In His name:The focus of church is Jesus. We display that in our committed to obeying His Word not our wants and whims.
• I am with you:Jesus promises to be in our midst when we obey him. Matthew 28:19-20 tells us that we are commanded to go, preach, baptize and make disciples, and that if we do those things he will be with us. Acts 5:32 says the Holy Spirit is given to them that obey him.

There is a lot more there in that chapter than methods, styles, prejudices and culture. “Jesus did not die to have a disconnected collection of individuals who are saved and going to heaven. He came to fashion a people who belong to Himself, a bride, a body, a family.”

What yokes us together is not our feelings, our minds and our hearts.  No those things are knit together through Christ. Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans would speak against many of the examples displayed in the “seven churches” described in the article because much of it is anthropocentric and not Christiocentric. You may take offense to this, but you’ll need to try to support your argument with Scripture. When we start talking about our subjective conscious preferences, we must weigh them to Scripture to hold them in check. To Barth, anthropocentric Christianity was morally bankrupt and it permeated many churches in Germany. Before you say, “big deal,” look at what it led to. It resulted in the acceptance of German nationalism in both world wars. Many of the examples in the article could be compared to ideologies and cultural adoptions of its day much like the American church has adopted.

 

We must be mindful that such Liberal theology and rudimentary hermeneutics made it possible to see both Kaiser Wilhelm and Adolf Hitler as God-appointed leaders in hopes of bringing unity to the German people. Too often evangelicalism appoints methodologies, Pastors, Teachers, Books, Systems, political platforms, emotionalism, experience, moral and ethical topics as the next hope to bring change, unity, etc. We are reminded that it was in 1933, Barth led a rebellion against the uncritical acceptance of Hitlerism, creating the Barmen Synod of the Confessing Church. As a result, he was expelled from his teaching position in Germany and returned to his native Switzerland.

The irony here as one author put it is, “Barth rejected the idea that humans can discover in themselves and their own activities God’s relationship to them. Rather, that relationship is solely and freely determined by God in his own way and time, and the result of such a relationship is more likely to disorient humans and call them away from their accustomed activities than it is to reassure them and legitimize those activities.”

The more comfortable you are in the way you do worship and the more legitimacy you create by your subjectivity and feelings should not affirm, but give rise to caution. Christ died and atoned for your sins. Don’t make your preferences one of them. It is to self we must die to Ephesians 4:22-24. Every day taking up our cross Luke 9:23. Every moment taking every thought captive, in what we say, how we worship, whom we love and serve. If we are legitimizing our church and her actions, teachings and habits with anything other than Scripture there is a great likely hood that Bride is in need of some attention. What kind of attention? The kind of attention Paul writes of to the church in the Epistles.

The letters to churches like Ephesus and and Corinth tell me Christ loved those who were in those churches and desired them to continue adorning themselves with the gospel to prepare His bride, although at times they were not encouraging the bride to look like the one Christ hung on a cross for and arose from the grave for. If he didn’t love them why did he write this love letter to them and to us. A better statement might be “Seven Churches that don’t show Jesus they love Him”. So rather than suggest Christ didn’t die for a 70’s church, a struggling legalist, a business model, or trendy bells and whistles. I will challenge you to do this. Be the church Christ did die for. Are you showing you really love him or do you only think you are. Read His love letter to Her, to you every day. Question what you are taught as the Bereans were told to do, so they would always have the right measurement to be the church ( who has the last word) for more on that subject.

One final thought from Tom Schreiner that flanks Spurgeons earlier thoughts on the atonement so well.

Schreiner said, “The church has been changed by the grace of God, but it is also a pilgrim people marked by imperfection. It isn’t yet without spot and blemish, and sometimes the blemishes are deeply embarrassing.”

This is speaking to the imperfection that exists in the bride and also our justification through Christ. So yes Jesus died for those the seven examples in the other article, but not for what they were doing. We don’t have to continue to let the bride look like this. Francis Schaefer address this in his book “The church before the watching world.”

Our time with the Bridegroom is crucial to Schaeffer’s thinking.  He believes that the church has banked on the doctrine of justification by faith alone but she’s failed to live in the it’s light:

“As the bride puts herself in the bridegroom’s arms on the wedding day and then daily, and as therefore children are born, so the individual Christian is to put himself in the Bridegroom’s arms, not only once for all in justification, but existentially, moment by moment” (The Church Before The Watching World, 135)… “We are to act as that we are.  We are not just going to heaven.  We are even now the wife of God.  We are at this moment the bride of Christ.  And what does  our divine Bridegroom want from us?  He wants from us not only doctrinal faithfulness, but our love day by day” (The Church Before The Watching World, 148).

Schaeffer calls the church to demonstrate the reality of the Christian faith in tangible ways to the watching world.  He holds that the essential quality of a believer is love for one another (John 13:35).

“Our love will not be perfect, but it must be substantial enough for the world to be able to observe or it does not fit into the structure or the verses in John 13 and John 17.  And if the world does not observe this among true Christians, the world has a right to make two awful judgments which these verses indicate: that we are not Christians, and that Christ was not sent by the Father” (The Mark Of The Christian, 197). – Francis Schaeffer

Let’s help each other look more like Christ and ready His bride for his return and not give the world or anyone an excuse to make such judgements.