How do we reconcile Heidelberg Q&A 20?

Question 20. Will all people then be saved through Christ just as they were lost through Adam?
Answer. No. Only those are saved who by true faith are grafted into Christ and accept all his blessings.

With 1 Corinthians 15:

20But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. ²¹For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being; ²²for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. ²³But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. ²⁴Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power. ²⁵For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. ²⁶The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

Looking for suggestions....

Justin

Last year during our trek to the game a lone soul also wearing a Tigers jersey found us, asked if we were going to the game and if we could show him the way. He told us that a bunch of Yankee fans had told him to take the downtown train. (For you non New Yorkers that is the wrong way.) So we navigated with him though the underground of NY till at last all three of us were standing at the doorstep of  baseball's colosseum. We had made the journey of the faithful fan, going to support our team though the darkest valleys, against mighty armies, and winning despite the odds being against us.

I find being a Christian not all that dissimilar sometimes. We journey through life dressed in the things that mark us as Christian, the hat of Baptism, the jersey of Communion, marking us and making us strangers in the land. We journey through dark valleys...meeting others who are marked with the sign and the seal as we are, journeying to a places where we can show the world our zeal for the Lord, and cheering for the work of God in this world.

P.S. This year I hope to be able to root for the Tigers as they face the Yankees in the playoffs (if anyone has tickets I'll take 2.)

Often times we would like to make our acceptance of God's grace the contingent factor on receiving God's grace....but that would make it about us....when it is all about God.

The closest thing that the RCA has to an official hermeneutic ….and I could be wrong….is that Scripture interprets Scripture. This can, and often does, lead to a circular argument. We all come with a hermeneutic of what the Scripture is that interprets itself…see already going in circles. If we start, as the RCA says we should, with the Bible being infallible in all it intends to teach, it says nothing about how exactly we are to interpret the Bible. We can interpret the Bible literally, we can say that some is literal and some allegorical, or any combination of both. The concepts of Infallibility and that Scripture interprets Scriptures say nothing about historical, textual, source, form, canonical, or narrative criticisms (not an exhaustive list of criticisms…I know.) Most Biblical scholars and even not so scholarly readers of the Bible each have their favorite criticisms or reject all criticisms. This alone makes having a common or “official” hermeneutic neigh near impossible.

Also as I was taught in Seminary…and as I now believe…the Bible is a living book and that it reads us even more than we read it. As we study the Scriptures our understanding of them change and grow..not because the Word changes but because we change. Each of us are unique individuals with unique experiences of Christ. This is shown clearly in the four gospels, each writer has a distinct “take” on the Gospel and they present it through their experience and to their particular audience. They each saw Christ in a unique way. If you ask anyone two people in church who Christ is to them…you will get two unique answers. Each of us reads the Word of God and God speaks to us through the word of God in unique ways. This, in addition to the above discussion of the scholarly issues, make having a common hermeneutic impossible in a local church let alone a denomination.

The RCA, in all it’s wisdom, (not being sarcastic) has never adopted an official hermeneutic, nor should they in my opinion, more than Scripture interprets Scripture.

So where does this leave us?

It leaves us with Christ. The RCA will never find a unified hermeneutic, but we can be unified in Christ. Someone asked in a follow up to one of the posts on these blogs if two who disagree can walk together. My answer is a hopeful yes! Peter and Paul disagreed but they still walked together. The Eastern and Western churches have disagreed yet they have still seem to walk together is some ways. The RCA and CRC have disagreed, yet we are now walking closer together than we have for over a hundred years!

With all things we need to trust the faithfulness of Christ, even if and when we prove to be faithless. Our hermeneutics may be wrong sometimes…but they for the most part are faithful and I trust that God will be faithful even when we err.

No matter what are hermeneutics are…Christ is common…Christ is the constant. If we start there we can walk anywhere with anyone.

I wonder...when was the last time RCA had a good time playing together.

Some of my favorite moments of life together as a church family in the churches I have served have been around playful acts of fellowship. From hiding underneath the stage beneath the choir and leading the church secretary to believe she was going crazy during choir practice... to  tripping over my wife's purse when I was being introduced to the congregation for the first time and having to try to act graceful and dignified afterwards have been playful moments in my ministry. Moments of planned and spontaneous play bring us to a place where we remember that we were made, in large part, for God's good pleasure. Through the laughter, we as a community can share a laugh and experience, if ever so briefly, playful interactions where we let our guards down and simply be together.

I have the honor of attending General Synod this year as a delegate, and I hope that there will be a time for us to play together. The build up to Synod, or at least blogs that are  leading up to Synod, seem to be so serious.  And while we will be facing some important issues, hopefully we won't take ourselves so seriously that we miss the joy of being together as a community of sisters and brothers in Christ.

Thank you,

Justin

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/opinion/25carter.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=stephen%20carter&st=cse

In the article he notes:

Forty-five years ago, in his classic essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Richard Hofstadter warned against this tendency, and worried that it would recur in every era. There is, he suggested, something in the Western psyche that too often makes us retreat to a vision of politics inwhich there is no complexity.

I fear that in the psyche of the church there is something that too often makes us retreat to a vision of God and faith in which there is no complexity.

My hope for us as a denomination is that we can be reminded by Carter's article on Democracy, that like Democracy, faith and religion need dialogue and complexity more than bumper stickers and tag lines to grow and be healthy.

The question of pro-life/pro-choice is whether the government has the right to tell a woman if she can or can't have an abortion, and also how she should value life.

The question of gay marriage is similar, depending on how you view homosexuality. Banning gay marriage becomes an issue of legislating morality by decreeing who can and can't get married and if a homosexual lifestyle is moral.

Taxing the wealthy more in order to give to the poor (as has been a topic of earlier discussion on the Herald blogs) is an issue of legislating morality by mandating through taxes the spreading of wealth and caring for the poor vs. people doing it on their own.

One thing that is important to me is to be theologically consistent. Though it often seems that people (myself included) are not consistent in regards to what or how much morality the government can legislate.  I wonder if it is possible to determine how much the government should do and if we dare draw lines.

So I throw this out there.....how and when should government legislate morality...if at all?

This is my theological conundrum of the day.

We are a world and a people redeemed by Christ. While sin no longer holds an eternal power over us, we still sin and have to face the consequences of that sin. Greed has left this country in one huge economic mess. Pride leaves us isolated and alone. Lust and Adultery destroy marriages. Just to name a few. While sin is not some sort of Karmic force where one good thing = one bad thing, to have a healthy doctrine of sin, is to know that we are still mired both in our own sin and other's sin day in a day out.

Last Sunday, one of the young men in the confirmation class said, "Before I am ready to be confirmed I need to know, why does God let the bad stuff happen. I mean why, if God loves us so much is there still all this war and destruction?" The short answer is sin. While Christ freed us from the eternal consequence of sin, we still need to live with the choices we make. We lie....people won't trust us. We lust....we se people as objects not as people. We place other things and gods before God.....we can't see the true joy that God has for us. People sin, nations sin, we all sin, and we are constantly dealing with the immediate consequences of it. "God forgives us the consequences of being sinners, but not the consequences of our sins." That was a good start for the young confirmand and he continued on and asked his next tough question.

To me, to be missional is two things. 1. Spread the good news that in Christ the consequence of being sinners is forgiven. 2. To be a community where sinners can find help to face and to find healing for the consequences of their sins. Maybe an oversimplification, but a place to start.

He told me story about his work. He was one of the firefighters on the fire boat that was rescuing the passengers and crew of the Airbus that crashed in the Hudson last week. He shared with me what it was like to be on that boat, working around the plane. He claimed not to be a hero, and that the real heroes were the pilots and crew of the plane. Even though they didn't know what brought the plane down they tied up next to it to save the people and the plane with what I imagine were the echoes of 9/11 still ringing through his head. A true humble hero.

Thank you Clayton for helping me to now approach this unique individual in ways that I didn't think of before.

Thank you to the brave pilots and crew who saved countless lives by landing in the water.

Thank you to all those who risked uncertainity and weather to save those on the plane.