The Rev. Johann Vanderbijl: “Being Confident” (Philippians 1:3-11)
This week’s sermon by the Rev. Johann Vanderbijl of the Anglican Church of St. George the Martyr in South Carolina is titled “Being Confident” and is based primarily on Philippians 1:3-11:
Psalm 32 Philippians 1:3-11 St. Matthew 18:21-35
Being Confident
In his Epistle to the Philippians, the Apostle Paul boldly spoke about His confidence in the ability of the Lord Jesus to bring to completion that great work He had begun in each one of them, no doubt at the time of their entrance into the Body of believers through the administration of the Dominical Sacrament of holy baptism in which they affirmed their vows to renounce the devil and all the vain things of this world and to embrace by faith their new life in Jesus. However, he would have been the first to object to any thought that this confidence was not also dependant on their continuing in the fellowship in the Gospel of that same Lord Jesus. Indeed, the rest of the Epistle deals with the need for them to be unified in what they believed about Jesus. True faith in Jesus was and still is foundational to what it means to be Christian. Change what we believe about Him and we run the risk of worshiping a foreign god made in our own distorted image.
We may well ask why people could be prepared to surrender some, most or even all the essential claims of historic Christianity and yet remain doggedly determined to stay within the Christian Church. A Buddhist scholar recently asked a blunt yet pertinent question in her book “Buddhists talk about Jesus- Christians talk about Buddha”: “If they,” she wrote, “(and by “they” she meant to reference the Christians talking about Buddha in the book) were so taken by Buddhism, why did they hang on to Christianity?” Now, of course, her remark is limited to Christian-Buddhist dialogues, but as Dr. Timothy Tennent correctly concludes in his book, “Christianity at the Religious Roundtable”, her observation could be applied “throughout the whole field of interreligious studies”. And this is just as true in general social circles as it is in higher academic circles. We have all cringed at public remarks made by Christian leaders in which they clearly abandon the faith once received for a more inclusive, and in many ways, totally vague religion in which the god…(if they can even use the word for fear of offending nontheistic religions like Buddhism and Taoism)…but their god simply cannot be known other than through the individual’s subjective experience of some nebulous reality.
I mean, what does one do with comments such as “Our Mother Jesus gives new birth to a new creation and we are his children.” This statement doesn’t even make grammatical sense. Or, what about this? In answering the question, “Is belief in Jesus the only way to get to heaven,” this same church leader stated, “for us to assume that God could not act in any other way is, I think, to put God in an awfully small box.” (cf. Thaddeus Barnum, “Never Silent”, Eleison Publishing, Colorado Springs, CO, 2008, 251.) Never mind that Jesus said that He was the only way, the only truth and the only life and that no one could come to the Father except through Him. If this Christian leader is correct, what does it mean when Jesus tells us to follow Him if He is just one way amongst many others? Not to mention the fact that if He said He was the only way while He was not He was either deluded or blatantly deceitful. And what then happens to our confidence in that same Jesus bringing to completion that which He began in us if He is not Who He said He was?
Only someone totally ignorant to the claims of all other faiths can ever think that they are all the same. The Hindu believes in an impersonal Deity called Brahman who is above and beyond a pantheon of lesser deities. The Muslim believes in a very personal god called Allah. The Buddhist believes that in order to reach ultimate fulfillment one has to detach oneself from ones dependencies including any form of Deity. Now, how on earth can these all be equal? Either God is personal or He is not. Either He is the ultimate source and sustainer of everything that exists or He is not. Or as Tennent says, “Either He became incarnate in Jesus Christ or he did not. Either Allah spoke to Muhammad through Gabriel or he did not….(you see, dearest brethren, when one begins to study these religions in detail we cannot help but see that) there are genuine points of departure among (them).” Otherwise, St. Paul’s exhortation for the Philippians to walk by the same rule and to be of the same mind is totally meaningless…and his comment regarding those who were enemies of the cross of Christ (whose end is destruction and whose god is their belly, and whose glory is their shame and who set their mind on earthly things) is rendered nonsensical. If all religions lead to the same goal, then the death and resurrection of Jesus was an unfortunate blip on the radar screen of eternity.
If world religions merely “embody different perceptions and conceptions of, and correspondingly different responses to, the Real from within the major variant ways of being human”, as John Hick claims in his book “An Interpretation of Religion” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989, 240), then “Christianity is just one among many religions and has (absolutely) no unique claim as the final or authoritative truth” (Tennent, 22). In this case, we might as well pack it all in and go home to meditate on the divinity residing in our big toe. We may as well dispense with the Creeds and abandon any hope of ever knowing God at all, other than the god or gods of our own creation. And while we are about it, we might as well give up on the future because if the god of the Jihadists is the same God of the Christians then we are in a very sorry state indeed. With such an extremely dangerous infinitely huge schizophrenic ruling the universe, our only hope is that when we need Him, He will be in a calmer state of mind.
Now, I know I have painted a bit of a caricature of the pluralist position, nevertheless I do believe that if I am to be true to what the Bible has to say about the God I claim to follow, there are certain nonnegotiable hills I should be willing to die on. Dr. Tennent summarizes these neatly in his book into three basic statements and I am going to flatter him through unashamed plagiarism.
Firstly, he says, we must “affirm the unique authority of Jesus Christ as the apex of revelation and the norm by which all other beliefs must be critiqued. This position points out that the early church rejected the option of remaining a (private cult), which would have permitted Christianity to survive as a privatized religion accepting equal footing with other religions. (Indeed) the early church insisted on challenging the (whole) Roman Empire with its many religions by claiming that Christ was not only head of the Church, but (also) Lord of the entire (universe).” And really, dearest brethren, if we believe what we read in the Scriptures, we must affirm that “Jesus is not just one of many lights in the religious cosmos: (Rather) He is the Light. Those who are without Christ are, to use the words of the apostle Paul, “without hope and without God in the world” (Eph. 2:12).” If we don’t believe that, why are we here? Why do we call ourselves by the name of Christ? Why confess our sins…indeed, if all this is just one myth among many, how do we know there is such a thing as sin at all? And if our God is not Who we think He says He is, then how can we be confident of anything He claims to do? If His Word is not true it is not trustworthy in any form, shape or sense.
Then secondly, Tennent writes, we must “affirm that the Christian faith centers around the proclamation of the (incarnation, and) the historical (birth,) death and resurrection of Jesus Christ as the decisive event in human history. The Scriptures declare that “God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ” (2 Corinthians 5:19) and “making peace through His blood, shed on the cross” (Colossians 1:20).” And, dearest brothers and sisters in Jesus, we must remember that without the virgin birth, our Lord would be just one more man among many…a man “brought forth in iniquity” and conceived in sin as the Psalmist says and therefore incapable of paying the penalty for anyone else’s sin other than his own. And if the incarnation is a myth then there is no possibility of atonement for sin. And if the Gospel records of the life and death of Jesus are legends then we have no way of really knowing anything about the historical Jesus. And, as St. Paul said, if Christ is not risen, we of all people are to be pitied. You see, dearest brethren, without the biblical Jesus (not the Jesus of popular thought) we have no hope and therefore any talk of confidence is nothing more than illusionary. A Jesus of our own invention is simply wishful thinking as fragile as a soap bubble in a storm.
And finally, Tennent says, we must “believe that salvation comes through repentance and faith in Christ’s (finished) work on the cross and that no one can be saved without an explicit act of repentance and faith based on the knowledge of Christ.” Now there is a lot of what some call “Christinese” in Dr. Tennent’s sentence, so let me explain. The word ‘repentance’, as I understand it, means that the person firstly comes to a realization that his or her life is not in step with what God has revealed to be right, and then is truly bothered enough by their personal incompatibility with the divine will to seek to reject the wrong and to embrace the right. Obviously this act of repentance presupposes some prior exposure to this revealed will either by personal discovery or by some external discovery such as another Christian’s witness by word or deed or through dreams, visions or other supernatural means…such as many who hold to the Islamic or Hindu faiths have experienced. Nevertheless, repentance basically means a turning away from what God reveals to be wrong coupled with a turning towards what God reveals to be right…the two go hand in hand and one cannot really have the one without the other.
Then the phrase “Faith in Christ’s work” means that the person trusts that the sin which separated them from God has been removed through the act of Jesus taking the penalty for sin upon Himself on our behalf. This is why the cross and resurrection are extremely important to the Christian because without them our sins remain unforgiven. In the parable of the unforgiving servant, Jesus made it very clear that the only way out of our eternal indebtedness is to receive unconditional forgiveness through God’s personal absorption of that debt. This is often missed in this parable. By forgiving the servant, the King took his debt upon himself. Debt can never truly simply be ‘written off’ – someone has to pay it or suffer the loss of what was owed. Without the death and resurrection of Jesus there can be no forgiveness because then our debt has not been paid.
My bottom line is this: Remove any one of these three nonnegotiables and the claims of Christianity become totally indefensible. We might as well throw in our lot with the pluralists whose god is so vague it cannot be known and base our lives on our own subjective experience of whatever higher power we wish to create for ourselves. We could still attend church services, but we will either have to find ourselves a new age guru whose theology will go with any flow, or we will have to check our minds out at the door and merely say things we simply do not believe. Some seem to have managed to do this without too much difficulty, but, dearest brethren, I cannot and I simply will not.
My knowledge of God is not based on my subjective experience of Him…it is based on the fact that what He has revealed to be true in His holy Word has stood the test of time and of trial…many have sought to prove it wrong and have failed…others, such as Josh McDowell, have sought to prove it wrong and have themselves been convinced that they are wrong and have changed dramatically. Indeed, of all belief systems, Christianity is the most rational. No, beloved brethren, I know Whom I have believed and I am persuaded that He is well able to keep what I have committed to Him until that final Day. For this reason, I too have great confidence that He who has begun a good work in me and in you will bring that work to completion…
And this confidence is based upon that which the Eucharist represents…the finished work of our Savior Jesus Christ…His death on our behalf to pay our penalty for sin…His resurrection from the dead to give us life…His gift of His Spirit to apply this forgiveness and rebirth. And therefore, each time we come before His throne to receive the elements and symbols of that reality, my confidence in Him is strengthened and renewed, and I am once more enabled to boldly face the falsehoods of this world, standing firmly of the truth of His revealed Word.
© Johann W. Vanderbijl III 2009
One comfort I draw from believing in the objective inspiration of Scripture is that it does give me confidence that His Word is true and not just a delusion. As Fr. Johann says, “it has stood the test of time and of trial,” and we can trust that God will do what he has said He would in our lives and in the world.
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