Written by T. M. Suffield |
Thursday, July 4, 2024
Our lives look the same as our neighbours. Our habits and the rhythms of our households look the same as everyone else of our social class who lives in our place. When we turn to more structural things, from the shape of the household to the objects we purchase and what we do for a living, we all again look pretty similar. I don’t think we’re supposed to.

We are in a discipleship crisis. Caused, perhaps, by the many other crises in the air, but here in the UK our faith is shallow.
To be more precise: our churches are not forming us into deep and rich faith.
I’ve been writing around this for a while, but I don’t think we’re talking about it enough. There are, of course, wonderful exceptions of individuals with deep and rich faith. You, dear friend, may well be among them. May Jesus continue to draw you towards himself.
There are even exceptions among churches, but in my circles less than we’d like. I don’t think this is for want of trying, and I hope most Pastors would recognise what I’m describing. I do think there are things we can do about this, though many of them aren’t ‘solutions’ because solutions are what got us here, and all of them are long-haul approaches. Perhaps we can change the face of Christianity in this nation by at best an inch or two in our lifetimes, but think of the fruit that could be borne a century or two downstream if we try. That’s a life worth living.
When I say our faith is shallow, what do I mean?
Broadly, that we have problems in three areas. Each I’ve touched on before, but I’ve not knit them together like this.
Life
Our lives look the same as our neighbours. Our habits and the rhythms of our households look the same as everyone else of our social class who lives in our place. When we turn to more structural things, from the shape of the household to the objects we purchase and what we do for a living, we all again look pretty similar.
I don’t think we’re supposed to.
Our churches don’t teach what a household or Christian life looks like in terms of real physical things. Many of us are good at habits of individual devotion—and I suspect if my neighbours knew I rose at six in the morning to read the Bible and pray that would seem strange, and I’m not unusual at all—and many of our churches have been good at teaching them. We’ve been less good at getting people to change how they live.
To take an example: churches have generally been good at teaching people to give their money away to levels that would appal our neighbours—and that explains how they can afford all those nice holidays—we need that for everything else.
Is this overstated? A little. I can name multiple ways that my rhythm of life makes no sense to my neighbours. “But why do you feed 12 people every Wednesday?” I remember when the builder questioned the need for the size of our dining-kitchen and we explained, he asked “are they family?” Sort of.
But we aren’t that radical. Well, I did once change jobs so I could go to a prayer meeting, so maybe I am that radical.
There are examples of radical living all over the place, but they aren’t that widespread. In the last week I watched a video of a church’s 50 anniversary celebration: it extolled the kindness of God to them over those five decades and was glorious.
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Written by O. Palmer Robertson |
Wednesday, September 25, 2024
At stake is the accurate record of the early proclamation of the saving gospel of salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. In terms of the progress of redemption, this speech of Paul at Antioch, delivered at the heart of the trade routes of Asia, represents the fullest record of an early proclamation of the saving gospel of Jesus Christ to the nations of the world, which therefore embodies a significant step beyond the record of Peter’s summary of the gospel as preached at Pentecost. 

God’s glory in the Gospel connects directly to the display of his righteousness when he declares righteous a sinful human being, a depraved, wrath-deserving sinner who has repeatedly violated God’s law. That he might be “just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus,” God offered his Son “as a propitiatory sacrifice through his blood” (Rom. 3:26, 25). This justification by God of the guilty sinner through the substitutionary death of Jesus, received by faith alone, openly displays the righteousness of God.
Was Paul’s letter to the Romans the first time this “Gospel” was declared that so wondrously displays the righteousness of God in the justification of the sinner through the blood of Christ?
By no means! Before any written Gospel had been published, during the twenty years in which apostolic proclamation alone defined the Christian Gospel, Paul preached the doctrine of the “rising and falling church”—justification by faith alone apart from the works of the law.
When and where did he make this proclamation?
During his first missionary journey into Asia, as he preached in the synagogue of Antioch of Pisidia.
What exactly did he say?
Let it therefore be known to you, men and brothers, that through this man, the forgiveness of sins is being proclaimed to you. From all the things from which you are not able to be justified by the law of Moses, all who believe in this man are justified (Acts 13:38, 39).
Rather remarkable is the translation of the root δικαιόω as “freed” rather than “justified” twice in this passage, as it appears in the 1952 Revised Standard Version of the Bible (RSV).
It would be impossible to discover the thinking behind the Revised Standard Version of 1952 in its rendering of “freed” rather than “justified.” The RSV, it should be remembered, was the first major effort to provide a new translation of the Bible into English that would replace the King James Version of 1611, made almost 350 years earlier. The RSV is basically a good rendering of Scripture, representing a more “literal” rather than a “dynamic” translation. It is frequently used as a helpful tool by Bible translation societies. Yet one might re-imagine the climate of the 1950’s in which the RSV originated in cooperation with the National Council of Churches. Significant resistance to the translation arose when the classic prophecy of Isaiah 7:14 read, “Behold, a ‘young woman’ (rather than a ‘virgin’) shall conceive and bear a son…” As a consequence, this version of the Bible was rejected outright by evangelicals of the day.
In the prevailing climate that produced the RSV, it can easily be imagined that its translators could have concluded that the phrasing in Luke’s report of Paul’s speech in Acts 13 was “too Pauline” to be “authentically Pauline” at this early stage in his life and ministry. To read “everyone who believes” is “justified from everything from which you could not be justified by the law of Moses” might have appeared to them as simply incorporating “too much Paul” into this early speech in the Israelite synagogue of Antioch. These statements agree so perfectly with Galatians and Romans, Paul’s later writings, that it might have been concluded that they represented a “reading back” into Paul’s earlier speech in Acts the more refined theology of his subsequent formulations of doctrine.
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If we are calling for an apology but we all know that apology will only lead to further calls for greater sanctions, who is going to apologise? Particularly, it bears saying, who is going to apologise if they are only tangentially related? Even if an apology might be well received, or helpful in some way, if they know they will be implicated (especially if deeply unfairly so) why would they raise their head above the parapet?

Scandals in the church seem to happen with far greater frequency than any of us think they should or wish they did. There is something of a well worn path that follows now too. Usually starting with a bit of distancing between people and/or organisations that are clearly, if not actually and directly linked, certainly relationally so. What then follows is often a refusal to just say sorry.
Yesterday, Michael Tinker wrote a blog post making just this point. You can read that here. What I’m about to say is not to disagree with what he wrote. I think the point he makes is quite right. When organisations are rocked by scandals, when they had some level of involvement such that they could have addressed matters, the right thing to do is just say sorry. Sometimes there are others linked in such a way that may require apologies from them too. My purpose in writing this is to press a little further and ask, are there reasons why the elusive sorry is rarely forthcoming? I think there are.
For one, an organisation needs to be clear what it is sorry about. If an individual is caught in a scandal within an organisation and those very organisational structures allowed it to happen, that would be a solid reason for the organisation at large to apologise. Or, perhaps people within the organisation raised the alarm and were subsequently ignored. Being sorry for that seems entirely right. The problem is when we start dealing with relationally linked but technically separate groups or groups even further removed from matters than that.
What, exactly, is an organisation that isn’t directly involved – but clearly has some relational links with those involved – supposed to say sorry for? Sorry we knew the person at the centre of the matter but had no jurisdiction over them? Sorry we worked with them, not knowing anything about the matters that have come to light, but nevertheless sorry anyway? The further the degree of separation – even if we can draw some relational lines – the harder it becomes to know what these other groups and individuals are meant to say sorry for. I suspect, some of the time, that is why they don’t say it. They just don’t know exactly what they are meant to apologise for.
Some insist that as believers we should be clear that all of us are sinners and will therefore err but all of us have received grace and therefore should extend it in the face of repentance. This is Christianity 101. We all sin, we all need forgiveness, therefore confess your sin and receive grace. Why on earth, we may wonder, would a Christian person or organisation not be willing to say sorry or admit fault when that is the case?
I think, if we are honest, we know the answer. Just as organisations and individuals are fallible and may sin, organisations and individuals are fallible and therefore are often less than willing to show grace. Just as the well-worn path of foot-shuffling and buck-passing has been seen enough to know that sorrys aren’t forthcoming, we have also trod this path long enough to know that if and when they do come grace is rarely extended.
Sorry, as we know, is an admission of guilt. Once we have it, let’s be honest, matters rarely stop there. Demands for a mere sorry – and incredulous claims as to why we didn’t get an apology when that is all we want – are either naïve or disingenuous. Because what most want is not a mere sorry, but the extraction of an apology as an admission of guilt from which a series of retributive actions can then be established. I don’t presume any and all people ever asking for an apology are saying or thinking this, but enough instances have occurred for us to see that it is often so. I am left wondering why those who can rightly see so clearly that if sinners will sin they may well sin further by not confessing their sin and apologising cannot similarly see that if sinners will sin those who are supposed to confer forgiveness don’t always appear very forgiving when faced with contrition.
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