The Ontology of Jesus Christ: A Lament for Modernity

The widespread effort in modern biblical scholarship to downplay the ontological and metaphysical claims of the New Testament terms, and thus their Trinitarian and Christological implications, is particularly frustrating and damaging to orthodoxy, in the academy and the church.

Take, for instance, Jesus’s self-referential uses of ἥκω (“I have come”) and of ἐγώ εἰμι (“I am”) in John’s Gospel. The first “denotes the coming of the deity to men” in the Greek world (Schneider), while the second explicates the Hebrew Tetragrammaton. Both invariably reveal Jesus is the eternal God.

However, because of the downgrade in modern commentary on John in particular, as seen for instance in the highly influential New Testament Theology of Rudolf Bultmann, scholars are checked in their full-throated affirmation and inhibited from a deep appreciation of Christ as God.

Instead, the modern commentaries focus upon the function of Jesus rather than the ontology and metaphysics of Jesus. Let us be clear: Jesus was pursued to death by the Israelite religious leaders precisely because of his ontological claims, his theological self-identification.

And if Jesus was willing to state his deity so clearly, then his followers must state his deity clearly, not merely as a datum but as a thoroughgoing identification.

Christ does not merely function as the means to our salvation. Christ is God, the theological end of salvation!

On Christian Freedom: The Sausage Affair

The Affair of the Sausages is as historically significant among the Reformed churches as Luther’s Nailing of the 95 Theses is among the Lutherans. On Ash Wednesday in 1522, Christoph Froschauer and his publishing team were physically tired after printing a new edition of the Letters of Paul. So Froschauer served his famished crew what he had on hand: hard meat sausages.

However, the medieval church’s laws regarding Lent required Christians to fast from eating meat, eggs, and cheese. When the Catholic authorities found out, Froschauer was arrested. Ulrich Zwingli, the preaching pastor at the Grossmünster in Zürich, had been at Froschauer’s place when this all happened. He had not himself participated but was ready to defend the freedom of others to participate.

Zwingli’s sermon, On Rejecting Lent and Protecting Christian Liberty from Man-Made Obligations, addressed the crisis. For Zwingli, the eating of meat at Lent is a matter of Christian freedom, as is choosing not to eat meat. The gospel of Jesus Christ frees people from self-justification. This includes the tradition of fasting for 40 days prior to the celebration of Easter.

For Zwingli, the choice to participate in Lent is a matter of “Christian Liberty.” The Good News sets the believer free from any effort to make himself or herself acceptable before God.

Zwingli’s passionate defense of Christian liberty in the practice (or not) of the Lent tradition led to the First Disputation, which in turn sparked the Swiss Reformation. Switzerland long remained the center of Reformed Christianity. The Anabaptists and the Baptists emerged primarily from the Reformed and related churches, so the theological lessons learned in 1522 belong to those traditions, too.

I agree with Zwingli in this matter: Observe Lent if you feel led to do so, but do not demand others observe Lent. Don’t observe Lent if you feel so led, but do not demand that others reject Lent to satisfy your own conscience. Celebrating Lent won’t help save you; neither will rejecting Lent save you. 

Trusting in the Gospel of Jesus Christ alone saves you. Everything else in the Christian life is free gravy, including sausage gravy on your biscuits, if you like.

 

Prayer for Ukraine

Lord God, King of Kings, Ruler of Rulers, Governor of All Things, we pray for peace, justice, and hope. 

We pray for the peoples of Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus. We pray for the area in Eastern Europe known by historians as the Borderlands and the Bloodlands, for Ukraine in particular. We pray for this nation of your precious image-bearers, comprised of Jews, Christians, and unbelievers, who suffered tens of millions of their own people dying due to Soviet starvation policies in the 1930s, under the genocidal armies of the anti-Semite Adolf Hitler in the 1940s, and the senseless purges of the anti-Christian Josef Stalin. We pray for these people, who are even now in the fourth day of a relentless assault on their very lives.

We pray, King of Kings, that you will protect the grandmothers cowering in their homes as missiles strike all around them, that you will provide for the mothers and babies seeking shelter even being born underground, that you will protect the men and women who block the advancing tanks with nothing but their own bodies. And we pray for the men and women who have taken up arms to defend the defenseless in their cities, villages, and farms.

We pray also you will empower the churches of your Son, Jesus Christ, to be bold in their witness to the only hope any human being has. We pray you will be with Yaroslav Pyzh and other Christian leaders as they convey both humanitarian relief and the gospel to the hundreds of thousands of women and children fleeing west toward safety. We pray you will be with Dasha and the many Christian missionaries from Ukraine who now find themselves classified as refugees in Africa and elsewhere with no way to check on their strife-torn families. We pray for the churches and synagogues who awake to find their places of worship were bombed.

We know that ultimately this conflict is not about man versus man but about the heavenly war in which Satan has declared a world rebellion against you, Lord God of Hosts. We pray you will shatter the demonic princes who mislead the nations. We pray you will not allow evil human leaders to prevail in this mortal conflict but bring them to justice by their own people. Please give all three nations democracy, personal liberty, freedom of conscience, and real religious liberty. Topple the tyrants, deliver the oppressed, elevate the lovers of liberty.

We pray for peace in our time. We pray for justice in our time. We pray for hope in eternity through faith in the Good News of Jesus Christ to be carried on every set of lips in Ukraine in our time. We pray for every ear in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine to hear and receive your forgiving love for all people through the Cross of Christ. We pray this horrific event will be the last of history’s brutalities visited upon these great nations and the beginning of worldwide revival even as we await your Second Coming, Lord Jesus.

Father in heaven, our hearts are broken. Hear our prayers in the name of Jesus Christ the Lord. Send your Spirit to execute justice, to heal the hurting, to offer life in the place of death.

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Note: Today, Pastor Mark Forrest asked me to pray for Ukraine during our morning service at Lakeside Baptist Church. My prayer came immediately after we learned that the Russian Nuclear Forces had been put on alert. Many of the congregants have asked me for a copy of the prayer. Perhaps it will help you voice your own prayers for the Lord to intervene. As you pray, please remember the lessons of Daniel 10: There is a greater spiritual battle occurring above the visible events we see. God answers the prayers of his people. There is no need for his people to be afraid.