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Author Topic: How did you arrive at your current Theological stance?  (Read 4791 times)

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I will paste my "un-testimony" here.  I use the term because so many 'testimonies' go off center and introduce things that are truly not the once for all faith delivered to the saints. 

I would just add one thing.  Going out on a hike with my next oldest brother, back from a term at a Bible college, he said 'God can't just forgive sin; there has to be a cost, a punishment.'  When most people hear this they think of something they themselves must endure, but my brother was speaking of Christ.  I should add that though to this piece:



The Gospel with a Twist.  How I was introduced to the Gospel in spite of the Jesus revolution of the 70s
Marcus Sanford, www.interplans.net

I became a Christian at a Bible camp one summer in middle school.  I have found that the content of this was fairly unique.  The counselor explained that I had a debt of $100 with him.  And it needed to be paid back, or else…they might have to send me home.  No more water slides or 3:OO ice cream feeds. 

You have to realize 2 things at this point.  Going to camp was sort of your first experience completely away from your family or friends places where you sort of knew what the rules were.  You expected the counselor to be nice, but hey, he could be a rough character who liked to pick on little kids.  You didn't know yet, and this debt thing could kind of throw you.  The 2nd thing was that this was 1964.  How much was $100?  All that mattered was that it was huge, and out of my threshold.  I supposed I could earn it in a year, but I didn't even have a feel for a year.

Now, either I could come up with that (I calculated it would take about a year but at that age, I couldn’t even get a ‘feel’ for a week), or I could take an offer his friend (another counselor) was making to me to pay it off for me.  They even reenacted it.  I could hardly refuse.  I had little idea how advanced this was.  What I did realize later was that by comparison, the idea of Jesus coming inside you was not nearly has helpful as many adults thought.  Instead I had been introduced to debt, credit (from a 3rd party) and really to justification. It was not that I was short on joy or wonder from it all.  But all the adults who talked about Jesus being inside talked about that like they had found a way to make that happen.   

I was humbled by a sense of gratitude that this debt story had been presented. In fact, I didn’t know why, if the debt story was true, it would matter if Jesus “came into my life” (I mean, if the counselor was really right, the sort of ‘magic’ of the experience of Christ coming inside was off-target.  It is a metaphor, but not what actually matters).  I began to see that many times the debt and gift of credit arrangement was the actual construct of the business of being saved in some of Jesus' "simple" parables (in case someone thinks Paul 'complicated' him). Still later I found out that that is what justification by an imputed righteousness  means.

If you have trouble understanding the value of your justification before God through someone else's righteousness (Christ’s), it could very well be the nebulous effect of straining your imagination to grasp what it means to have Christ “inside” you as a child. You shouldn’t have to. That’s the Gospel I nearly missed, and how I nearly missed it.

In the 70s when there was supposedly a revival going on in America, the countercultural Jesus people, etc., I found the subjective emphasis to be hollow.  Telling an experience is by nature a bit competitive.  There was no equality, there was instead more attention to the person with the most drama.  This kept shrinking my concept of truth, until one day I heard a forum of speakers I can only describe as missionaries TO America say that it was all mistaken!

They were from Australia, and one was an ex-communicated-Adventist minister, but with the most coherent sense of truth I had ever heard.  Part of this was the trauma of being ex-Adventist, but part of it was his being submerged in Spurgeon and Luther.  I had no idea of the type of ground broken by Luther, or that the essential Roman Catholic doctrine all along was that the inner transformation of a person is what justification meant to them.  And so I had learned something of why God wanted me to hear the debt/credit story as a kid. 

Having grown up as an Missionary Kid, it had dawned on me that people might COME TO America for the same reason as I had gone to Africa.  In fact, by being gone between 1969 and 71, the revolutions of the 60s had shown themselves in drastic fashion (and I don't mean miniskirts).  What the Australian Forum's genius was, I learned, was that without a strong judicial framework in talking about our affairs with God, the side-effect on our culture, even if we thought we were talking Gospel, was a weakening of the awe and wonder and terror of God.  It is one thing wish people would get a sense of those things, and quite another to actually talk about imputed righteousness, which immediately clears up an incredible amount of subjective clutter.  As the Forum would say:  “The gospel of a ‘changed-life’ has taken the place of the Gospel which changes lives” and become a market-driven enterprise largely susceptible to the sexual revolution in its slack morality. 

That explained a lot.  A lot about America.  In fact, it was not long after this that "addiction" words were used about Jesus (psychedelic verbs, ‘far out,’ ‘trip,’ etc.), all about the most current of experiences, and no one was gaining in what Lewis would call the Asgard effect:  recognition of his honor and wonder and might entirely apart from 'what's in it for me' of a god who may not 'come up with goods' by tonight (also language from the drug world) or even for a long while. (Asgard is a 13th century Nordic king-god on whom Aslan is modeled).  So this is why I learned the Gospel as I did.  I hope I can pass on the legacy of this high view of God to others.  You always value imputed righteousness, because where past sin abounds, grace abounds even more, ever new.  But that is much different from the type of Jesus we hear about providing cash, motorcycles and new girlfriends.


 

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