William V. Frame: The Dialogue of Faith and Reason: The Speeches and Papers of William V. Frame. Minneapolis: Lutheran University Press, 2006.

 

Note: William V. Frame was my academic adviser during my time at Kenyon College, 1969-1973. He taught comparative politics and introduced me to the study of Charles de Gaulle. He eventually chaired the Kenyon Political Science Department before going on to a career in corporate banking. These two paths served him well when he became president of Augsburg College, a Lutheran liberal arts college from 1997 to 2006. His book consists of a carefully arranged sequence of (mostly) speeches to audiences at the College, reflections on the character of Christian liberal education in contemporary America.

 

Frame situates his talks carefully within the College he governed as its chief executive officer. “Each was intended to draw into view a defining aspect of the college. It was this intention that led me back time and again to the foundings of the college, and then forward to contemplation of its modern mission”— and, it might be added, ‘above’ to its Christian character. With respect to the founding principles of the College’s regime, “during the nine years of my tenure, I became increasingly fascinated with the Reformation itself and the two giants who formed its traditions in Theology and Education—Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon. The Reformation, he learned, was “modern but alternative to the Enlightenment; Christian but calling us into the world in service; rejecting works righteousness but discovering in unwarranted grace the motive power of our good works; faith-based but intellectually demanding and respectful of human reason.” Such “has been Augsburg’s great gift to me”—most immediately, Augsburg College, more remotely but decisively, Augsburg, Prussia, where Melanchthon wrote the Augsburg Confession in 1530, a document later integrated into the Peace of Augsburg, “the first formal truce in the dispute between the [Roman Catholic] Church and the Protestants.”

He introduces his book with a speech given near the beginning of his presidency, at the College’s convocation ceremony in September 1997. On that occasion he pointed to the distinctive character of the place: “We have chosen—you and I—the one college in this part of the world”—he means Minneapolis, and he is almost unquestionably right—that “is dedicated to the provision of an education that is both practical and profound; that simultaneously supplies knowledge of the world and self-knowledge; that seeks liberation of the soul from cant of all kinds, both ancient and modern, and cultivates the capacity for obedience to the enduring principles revealed by both reason and faith; that silences our noisy prattle so that we may hear our calling, and returns us the new and literate voice of reflection so that our vocations—all of which will be pursued under the ascendant influence of urban, global and technological forces—are not only gifts to ourselves but serviceable to others and to God as well.” That distinctive character derives from the conjunction of two things: the founding of the College by “people self-consciously free of moral guidance by public opinion or governmental edict who wanted nevertheless to live rightly”; and the founding of the United States of America “by people anxious to give greater—not lesser—sway to the moral and ethical requirements of various faiths” precisely by establishing what Abraham Lincoln called “a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty than any of which the history of former times tells us.” That is, Augsburg College could be founded and perpetuated within the American regime because that regime afforded political liberty, along with the political means of defending it, to any set of people—in this case, a set of Lutherans from Norway—who consented to rule and to be ruled under the United States Constitution, which instantiated in civil form the laws of Nature and of nature’s God, understood to consist of the unalienable natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Without the institutions of the Roman Catholic Church, what would take its place? Luther said, “The fine liberal arts invented and brought to light by learned and outstanding people—even when those people were heathen are serviceable and useful to people in this life.” By “serviceable” Luther mean not ‘pre-professional’ and surely not something conducive to “self-expression or personal success,” but vocational in the Christian sense, attending the ‘calling’ of God in the midst of the world and following it throughout life. “The capacity for reverence is the bedrock of our honor of God and of our respect for human excellence.” “Only a college that puts faith into the crucible with reason and cultivates the capacity for reverence as the foundation stone of humility, can effectively provide the setting in which free men and women can fill the vacuum left by the withdrawal or ejection of officially authorized moral regimen—a vacuum too often filled in our time by the various progeny of nihilism and value-relativism—with a voluntary embrace of the good.”

In Part One, Frame gets right into the heart of the fundamental question facing any educator in a Christian liberal arts college. Do “the elements of Faith” in his college’s foundations “allow adequate room for Reason” and, complementarily, do “the disciplines of reason demanded by this mission” tolerate faith? Although “I have not and never will succeed,” “I would like to draw every member of the faculty away from partisan commitment either to faith or to reason and toward acknowledgment that the presence of each enhances the reliability of the other.” As Luther and the American Founders both acknowledged, reason and faith differ but they intersect. Luther called them the Kingdom of the Left and the Kingdom of the Right, neither meaningful without the other; the American Founders called them the laws of nature’s God, that is, laws stated in God’s revealed Word but also discoverable by means of human reason—for example, the unalienable rights upheld in the Declaration of Independence. To clarify this, Frame remarks the ‘Socratic turn’. The ’empiricists’ and ‘realists’ of Socrates’ Athens held, with Thrasymachus, that justice is the will of the stronger. They took their bearings from ‘natural philosophy,’ which had discovered a cosmos consisting of matter in motion. In such a cosmos, insofar as beings in it can speak, power is indeed the ultimate reality and ‘justice’ is what the most powerful say it is. Yet one of those powers, the powers of speech, leads the mind that exercises it beyond the empirical, toward the realm of ideas. The existence of varying opinions among speakers brings their opinions into conflict, inasmuch as those opinions contradict one another. In that collision of opposites, that dialectic, the ‘weaker’ argument—the one not propounded by the physically stronger—may overthrow the ‘stronger’ argument. 

At the same time, Platonic dialogues show Socrates and his interlocutors at times reaching an impasse. There is often a “point at which speech reaches its limit and can go no farther.” “It is at this point that the instructed student can look up and just for a moment glance at the formal notion of beauty or at the formal notion of justice.” This moment of noēsis or insight amounts to little more than a glance, and should therefore implant due modesty in the one who glimpses it. At the same time, that “glimpse leaves an ineradicable mark on the soul, and the possessor of that soul, down through the ages, will burn and reach for confirmation of the truth which it senses beneath the articulate level of knowing.” There may be times, as Luther would be the first to insist, that the Spirit of God amplifies and corrects what dialectical reasoning reckons, and this is where pagans differ from Christians. But the Spirit of God, too, speaks, conveys Logos, respects the principle of non-contradiction which is the core of rational thought. No one can believe a self-contradictory speech, once he perceives the self-contradiction, because such a speech has no meaning in the first place. The Apostle Paul “is responsible for the conclusion that you can’t get faith from reason,” that “faith is a gift, not an achievement.” But that doesn’t make faith logically incoherent, somehow absolving it from the need to meet the criterion of rational truth. In “describ[ing] the Gospel as ‘foolishness’ from the point of view of Reason,” Paul means to say that you can’t reason your way to “the Good News of the Cross,” not that reason is foolishness in the eyes of God. Reason rather needs to understand its limits, as it should when it proceeds dialectically not dogmatically. 

From his early childhood on an Appalachian farm to adolescence in a small town, to college (where he “led the fraternity chorus, had my own dance band,” and drove a cool car, Frame stumbled into graduate school, where “I encountered for the first time a form of learning that illuminated life,” the life he’d been living thoughtlessly. “I read a Platonic dialogue line by line with a small group of friends—voluntarily, no credit.” He then discovered philosophy as the love of wisdom, an inquiry into “the business of living: Who around us is living the best life? What distinguishes the good life from its alternatives? What is the nature of the noble and the beautiful, and why should we embrace these instead of such attractive alternatives as the powerful, the advantageous, or the pleasant?” He found that “the whole starting point of that great classical inquiry was an act of faith—a conviction, confirmed time and again by the testimony of thoughtful, open-minded, decent people but without demonstrable ‘facts’ or ‘hard’ data—that the universe, nature, made sense.” It was “composed by means of principles which people could grasp, and that those principles were implicit in ideas and ‘values’ as well as material.” What Christianity adds to this is the teaching of Revelation, of the God-given, ‘by-grace’ glimpses of the Person who created nature granted to human beings by that Person, through that Revelation. What Martin Luther “taught me” was that “faith is a form of knowing; that each of us relies on a conviction about the moral structure of life that cannot be vindicated by the facts and data that modern academe in its flight from conclusive recommendation of moral principles, or particular ways of life, depends upon. That Christian faith, as I learned it from Martin Luther, freed me from living rightly at the behest of duty” by seeing that the grace of a loving God absolves us from fulfilling the counsels of perfection that are true but humanly unattainable.

But what about those who hide not behind moral relativism but behind a moral absolutism that insists on fulfillment in this world, indeed, and very ambitiously, by the whole world? “Each student comes into the college with a whole raft of opinions about the admirable and the objectionable. At the very least, we must ask them to answer a fundamental question: Where does this bunch of opinions come from?” For the most part, they come not from Plato’s Socrates, Aristotle, or Cicero—from the ‘ancients.’ They come from the ‘moderns’ (even when those moderns call themselves ‘post-moderns’). For Machiavelli and Bacon, logic is less a matter of speech, less what Frame calls a “bridge-builder” between the human mind and the nature of which it is a part, as a tool for controlling nature. “‘We are going to know the truth about nature,’ Bacon seems to say, ‘not be communicating with it but by “vexing” it. “We shall poke it with a stick and watch it react.'” The modern mind in principle alienates itself from nature, makes itself foreign from it. “Ultimately, alienation is a phenomenon inside the soul of an individual. As a college in the city, we have a challenge in that we are inviting our students into the midst of modern distraction. If we don’t run this college, so as to break the tyranny of that distraction and open up other realms of thought, we are remiss in our obligations as a college.” Accordingly, “we have declared the city the new field for our mission activity, replacing Madagascar and China and Japan.” The near should replace the far, with “joint and collaborative work” not “directed by a central bureaucracy.”

Within that uncivil, because modern, city, civility can be made to stand as a Christian virtue. “There are those who believe that our religion is a ‘private’ matter, and that it has nothing to do with politics or economics—except to teach us, perhaps, that the two elements of this world that are truly corrupting—position and wealth—are the hallmarks of politics and economics, respectively.” Indeed, “many of see the act of voting as the key political act, just as we see ‘belief’ as they key element in our religious lives,” as “private in the secretive sense,” nobody’s business but our own. “But we Lutherans are called into the world in service”; Lutherans “have been given a little sliver of the Cross,” a burden, an obligation. To discharge that obligation will require the Christian to disagree with, to contradict, many regnant opinions. “Whoever reaches for a universal ipso facto reaches beyond the political and instantly comes into tension with it,” as Socrates knew before he tried and illustrated thereafter. The language of civility” enables one to do that, without destroying the indispensable bonds of fellowship among citizens in a country that recognizes speech and religion as free by their very nature, stunted if suppressed. “The speech of the city,” civility, “aims at agreement and ‘equity,’ not Truth or God or Perfect Justice. The participant in civil conversation is the citizens, not the philosopher, or the Preacher, or the true Believer.” “Plato knows that the order supplied by the city is the vital condition of the philosophic enterprise.” That enterprise must therefore proceed civilly. So it is with Christianity. “Christian Theology doesn’t appeal to the citizen but to the human being; not to the law but to the Gospel; not to peace but to the Peace that passes all understanding.” In making that appeal, the philosopher and the Christian both necessarily inflect the way of life of the city. The American Founders understood that they could do so in ways that would do well in the city, and for it, but only if neither withdrew from the city nor addressed it uncivilly, with contempt. Civility forms the basis for something even better than itself, friendship, “the human relationship that was crucial to the successful operation of the dialectic for both Socrates himself and for Plato’s Socrates,” along with the fellowship of the religious congregation. 

What then of the office-holder within a civil society—specifically, the vocation of a president governing a Lutheran liberal arts college?  “There may be other jobs like this, but I’ve never had one of them.” He sought guidance, therefore, not among his contemporaries but among his predecessors. “I, for one, will look for the future of this college among the principles of its founding,” he announced, upon assuming office in October 1997. Those principles “suppose that the human condition is superficially relieved—not fundamentally changed—by the modern techno-mastery of nature or the replacement of national by global societies.” That, it might be noted, will depend upon how far modern techno-mastery of nature goes toward altering human nature, and whether Lutheranism can thrive in “global societies” (whatever they may be) without the protection of the nation-state, upon which it depended for protection from the global (that is to say) Catholic society with which it was surrounded in the sixteenth century.

For his part, within the circumstances of modern life, Frame worked to strengthen citizenship within Augsburg College itself by “transform[ing] employees into engaged citizens of that polity” and by “deriv[ing] leadership authority entirely from understanding of and commitment to the institutional self-definition” set down by its founders. This definition of the principles of the College’s regime then must be adapted to the immediate and like future circumstances of the College, crystallized in the form of what amounts to a social contract among the several “constituents” of the College, including not only employees but students and alumni, accomplished in a series of committee meetings. Initially, the president can serve as the arbiter among the several constituencies, but crucial to his task is to “a structure of institutional governance,” a “home for lasting leadership.” By these acts he intended to re-connect the people within the College to its original founding principles, after some forty years of responding to such practical necessities as financial solvency and the renovation of its buildings. “Academic leadership is possible only when the academy is founded as a polity, leadership in it is understood as a form of statesmanship, and institutional rehabilitation as an undertaking of citizenship,” citizenship aiming at the Madisonian end of seeking the permanent and aggregate interests of the community rather than the interests of the several groups within it. “The effort to make a polity out of a college is inspired by the Aristotelian (and teleological) proposition that, “Whereas the comes into existence for the sake of mere life, it continues for the sake of the good life.”

A college requires collegiality, that is, “the key element of social capital—trust.” By this Frame did not mean ‘Trust me’ but ‘I trust you.’ “Here, senior administrators are empowered to act outside the presence and blessing of the CEO”; “they are, after all, employees of the [College] vision not of the CEO, and so they are encouraged to establish their own reputations as leaders. This they cannot do except through the freedom to design the strategies for their particular jurisdictions through which the vision is realized.” As for the president, he “must take them as peers, reserving only two exclusive responsibilities—to relieve them of duty if they dissipate social capital and to maintain the official version of the mission and its reconciliation” with the overall goals of the College in its immediate circumstances. In this way, the way of limited but institutionally well-designed and responsible government, Augsburg College could become a civil association “that Tocqueville thought could restrain the growing epidemic of individualism,” by which he meant the ‘privatization’ of human life under conditions of social egalitarianism. Whereas Luther “intended vocation, especially for the lay professions, to reconnect the individual with society through work,” a Lutheran college in the modern world, now in many respects severed from the “ancient civil ideas at the dawning of the modern moment,” must itself work harder to teach its students but also its faculty and administrators, some of those ideas.

Here Frame sharply departs from the principles of the American founding. Given the “three critical axioms” supplied by Luther—”that we can do nothing of value by ourselves,” that is, without God’s assistance; “that our redemption by Grace does not erase the limitations of our humanity and so in this world, even Christians remain in need of law and the thrall of reason”; and “that the service we give the world through work in gratitude for our redemption is corrective and is therefore offered in both love and hope for the world”—is, he asserts, “challenged” by “the idea of natural right.” In his estimation, natural right “strained the relationship between citizen and society” by holding that “the individual is shaped by certain natal forces that are prior to and beyond the salutary reach of civil society.” This “leaves us alienated and individualized.” Lutheran vocation specifically and Christian vocation generally “survived the victory of the natural right position largely because that victory was never consolidated,” thanks to the soberer ‘moderns’ (Rousseau, with his critique of Enlightenment rationalism, and the prudent institutionalism of such thinkers as Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and Madison) and also to “the political history of the United Kingdom,” guided as it has mostly been by blunt common sense. Since all of the thinkers he mentions considered political institutions as means of securing natural rights, Frame may mean that the Enlightenment conception of natural right tended toward French-Revolutionary-like dissolution of institutions, the ambition to re-make human societies even as modern science invites us to master nature, by poking it with a stick and watching it react. He may also mean that “nations and communities” “derive their legitimacy, their very identities, from history,” by which he means not the movements of Hegel’s Absolute Spirit but traditions, myths, legends. However this may be, Frame again inclines to overlook the political thing Luther never took for granted, and needed, the thing that stands between the civil association and “global societies”: the nation-state. Given his background in comparative politics, this may strike the reader as especially odd. 

He himself supplies a corrective for such mis-thinking by considering the tragic story of King Oedipus. “His hubris was the condition of both his intellectual brilliance (he won the presidency by solving the Riddle of the Sphinx) and his radical lack of self-knowing.” From this monitory example he takes three lessons. First, self-knowledge “is not private even though it is exclusive to its owner”; one really does need to listen to the voices in the Chorus, even if determined not to obey them slavishly. Second, self-knowledge, especially in the soul of a king or president, “is constituted in part of learning, and about things that are profoundly public, it is acquired social, not in isolation.” Finally, in its quest for self-knowledge, by that quest, the soul (as it were) emerges as it engages in its vocation. For example, “the vocational president” will need “to be both serious and careful about his or her use of the rhetorical arts; he or she must do as did Churchill—labor incessantly over his impromptu speeches.” A college president is a sort of miner. His work consists of digging into the college over which he presides—not only by learning its founding principles but by studying how it has applied, misapplied, or even at times forgotten or knowingly rejected those principles, failed to live up to them even as it has believed itself to have been surpassing them. Only then can he refine his own vocation.

What is this talk of vocation, this “life of service”? In Part Three Frame addresses this question, which he regards as “the greatest contribution of the Reformation,” offering “the Faithful a life fully engaged in civil society and yet theologically legitimate,” even as “the individualizing and anti-political propensities of the Enlightenment were beginning their ascendancy.” “Now that the a-social human habits rationalized by the Enlightenment have proven unsatisfying, the idea of vocation is coming into its own,” he hopes.

Frame found these habits not mitigated but reinforced during his first job in liberal education at Kenyon College, which he doesn’t name but accurately describes as “a ‘highly selective’ liberal arts college in the countryside of the Midwest,” “purposely set well away from the city” by its founder, the marvelously-named Philander Chase, Ohio’s Episcopal Bishop, in 1824. Although Kenyon “introduced me to two of the critical axioms of the teaching vocation: great teachers begin and remain as serious student—of themselves as well as of the world—and learning improves life,” these “did not jell with the outgoing and service-oriented aspects of vocation.” At Kenyon, “most of us on the faculty preferred theoretical or classroom wisdom far above experiential learning.” “we diagnosed in those days; we did not propound therapies to advance civility or improve society,” whereas a city (he next worked at the Newberry Library in Chicago), “compels its aficionados to construct a coherent interactive public life.” 

In his next career, at the Bank of Chicago, what Frame “wanted most was knowledge of how the commercial republic, so long the subject of my teaching and writing, actually worked.” To his surprise, he found corporate life “far more humane—more candid and encouraging,” than academia and also, “shockingly, full of better-educated people.” “The international division that I joined after banking boot camp had six or seven Ph.D.’s, not counting those in the country-risk and economic-analysis units. More musicians and artists were on my floor than at the entire college. Perhaps most surprising, there was more hunger for serious conversation than among my faculty colleagues.” And more trust. “Contrary to the academic arguments about the role of self-interest in financial transactions, I learned that the only deals that hold together and lead to new interchanges are mutually satisfactory ones. In the corporate world, a trusted colleagues’ word is better than a signature on a legal document.” Such as “the radically social character of [commercial]-corporate life,” where “no transaction was completed” unless “it could be publicly described as meeting the interest [each party to the transaction] held in common.” It was this experience in modern corporate life that prepared his mind for Lutheranism. Trust is a form of faith, and trust implies knowledge of the person trusted. Con artists will be ‘outed.’ His corporate experience “facilitated my fruitful contact with Luther” for Christianity as a faithful vocation, by “forc[ing] me to deny my original academic view that the private realm is the exclusive venue for personal growth.”

This helps to explain both the strength and the principal weakness in Frame’s analysis. Corporate life has spread itself throughout the world. Far more than socialism, which has repeatedly fallen back on nationalism when crises erupt, it has proved a vehicle for internationalism or ‘globalism.’ At the same time, corporate life is indeed very much like socialism, when seen within the corporate body itself. Its ‘foreign policy’ may be competitive/’capitalistic,’ but its ethos is socialist. It is therefore disappointing but understandable that Frame can write, “One of the needs of society in our time is help in transitioning from national and regional parameters to global ones.” Like many corporate capitalists, he envisions ‘one world’ ruled by—well, he doesn’t come out and say it, but—corporate capitalists. Nation-states will go away. Christian vocation will aim “at the needs, not the preferences, of the world,” eliciting “the whole range of our gifts.” It transpires that both Christians and corporate bankers know better what’s best for us than we do. In Christianity, Jesus understands knowledge in a particular way. His sheep hear his voice because “I know them, and they follow me.” Now, “the distinctive characteristic of a sheepfold is that each of the sheep who constitute it is known. They don’t know; they are known.” Divine knowledge of the sheep “forms the sheep into a Sheepfold,” into the ecclesia, the Church, God’s assembly or regime. This way of rule makes sense in a liberal arts college—its students still young, even if adults. And Christianity of course insists upon the consent of the governed; like the college admissions process, it’s a two-way street. It isn’t clear that corporate bosses will much concern themselves with that. Evidently willing to take this risk, perhaps hoping to mitigate it, Frame set Augsburg College firmly along the path of the ‘internationalists’ mantra, ‘Think globally, act locally,’ with Minneapolis as its locale. There he stood, and he would do not other—at least as long as his presidency would last. This was his vocation, and the vocation he set for his colleagues and students.

To understand the path of Christian vocation as it relates both to the liberal arts college and the world into which its graduates will venture, Frame points wisely and emphatically to Philip Melanchthon. Melanchthon will help in the task of “get[ting] hold of both the promise and problem of vocation.” As the newly-hired Professor of Greek at Wittenberg University in 1518, just after Luther posted his 95 Theses, Melanchthon taught many courses, including history, medicine political theory, rhetoric, “lov[ing] most of all to move among them at the gathering point, which he called Philosophy—the love of wisdom.” This included theology. His joy in learning and teaching, and his formidable capacity for both, finally earned him the title, Praeceptor of the Germans. His early book, Loci Communes, became “Lutherdom’s bestseller,” second only to Luther’s translation of the Bible into German.

Melanchthon “blamed the political and moral collapse of Europe, but also the waywardness of the Church, on the decline of the ancient learning.” The Church had misunderstood antiquity, making of it a form of logic-chopping, of sophistry. By reading ancients in the original languages, Melanchthon could “leap over the dark valley of Scholasticism and get directly into conversation with the ancients, and with Aristotle in particular.” The greatest among the ancients, he discovered, did not direct their energies toward verbal deceit; on the contrary, they exemplified “the highest pre-Christian form of vocation.” They suffered two defects. The lived “these model lives of service in the narrow, cohesive, self-sufficient communities which had been stricken by empire, and then by chaos,” namely, the ancient poleis. And they overlooked original sin, “accomplish[ing] their work by means of a high regard for the human potential that was unacceptable to Luther’s and Melanchthon’s notion of fallen humanity,” a regard caused by their “conviction that reason and virtue were natural allies.” In refusing to believe that, Machiavelli was right. Unlike Machiavelli, however, Melanchthon never rejected Christianity on the supposition that it is too unworldly to engage in civil life. He “set out to extract and isolate” the “vaccine” of civility “through scholarship and then infuse it into Christian society through the medium of his students.” “Without civility, vocation would flounder on the selfish propensities of fallen humanity.” Although this by no means diminishes the indispensable character of divine grace, love of one’s neighbor needs the supplement civility provides, simply because the work of the Holy Spirit within us “is regularly frustrated by our egocentrism and our individualism.” This “idea of vocation was the principal contribution of the Reformation to the capacity and willingness of the Christian to love the neighbor as the self,” and the idea “had to be made at home in civil society.” “This is true whether or not the particular civil society in question was overwhelmingly Christian.” Without the “forms and images of virtues,” Melanchthon wrote, “which we follow in all decisions and in our judgments on all matters,” without the “humanity” which “shows the way to live properly and as a citizen,” men “are not very different from beasts.” With Aristotle, Melanchthon affirmed that man is a political animal.  Political philosophy, he wrote, can teach “the precepts for civil life [that] are necessary” for peaceful life with one another in a political community. In Frame’s words, “neither Christ nor the Gospel provide these to us” (Machiavelli’s complaint), but that wasn’t His, or their, purpose. Christ “expounded something else, about the will of god and trust in God, which human reason could not understand.” Aristotle, and behind him Homer, pointed the way to something else, “the sociality that is the bedrock condition of civility.”

The central chapter of the book describes Melanchthonian civility as “the reconciliation of faith and learning.” Frame’s occasion for writing it was a speech describing the College’s projected Center for Faith and Learning, an institution whose mission it was “to establish a mutually advantageous relationship of faith and learning for application in every discipline in our curriculum and for infusion into our recruiting of students, solicitation of donors, and management of the extra and co-curricular life of the college,” a task which will require the “very development and cultivation of civility in the learning community itself and in the relationship of the college with its neighborhoods, its industry, and its global relations with Church and society.” Just as Melanchthon and Luther together created in the crucible from which the Reformation actually emerged a new political science”—one distinct from the new political science of Machiavelli and Bacon—and “a new theology which widened the availability of the Gospel as a blessing for human life on this side of the grave and for believers as well as strangers,” so too, one infers, the Center was intended to develop a still newer political science, and perhaps a new theology, designed crucially to inflect the emerging “global” society and the corporations likely to guide it. If this came to pass, would Lutheranism do a better job at influencing a world government than it did in influencing the Prussian, and eventually the German state? One can only pray that it would.

Under the Dark Ages and then Scholasticism, “the disciplined study of literature reduced the quality of Theology,” rather as (one infers) certain late-modern philosophers and ideologues have reduced the quality of theology in the past two centuries or so. The Luther-Melanchthon “reform of both church and education, took form in the heat of the moment—in their joint effort to save and restore the Church and to recover learning from the only civilization that had so far as they knew, properly cultivated Philosophy—the ancients, particularly the Greeks.” Especially (again) political philosophy: from the civic life of the ancients he took what he called the “first law” of any “governing assembly, whether in the state or in the church,” namely, “freedom for those who speak and patience for those who listen.” Melanchthon continued, “How our century is afflicted more than anything else by the fact that the mighty cannot hear free speech, and not even any thought of freedom.” This is where learning intersects with civic life, and with the civil life inside God’s assembly. “Learning is accomplished only in community, by way of what he called ‘disputation’—not in an isolated carrel in a library, but in the classroom and ultimately in the town square.” The “eloquent deliberation” Melanchthon esteemed in the ancients “adds coherence to community be deepening its knowledge of itself.”

Melanchthon of course sees the danger in such well-turned rhetoric as clearly as the philosophers he studied did. “The liberation of thoughtfulness, armed by high literacy and powerful rhetoric, opens the possibility that the greatest rhetor, rather than the wisest, will wind the day. This danger explains Melanchthon’s very heavy emphasis on moderation.” In his understanding, moderation is a virtue cultivated not only by careful moral habituation of the young but by the intellectual character of dialectics within a Christian framework. That is, if nature, “the essence of creation,” is “a work of mind,” the mind of God, and “therefore accessible to reason,” the capacity to make logical distinctions, then the practice of deliberation in an assembly and the dialectic employed therein must moderate, limit, the power of rhetorical flourishes. In the assembly you get to answer back, not just sit back. To take the most malign ‘German’ example, what Hitler told you was unanswerable, on pain of death. By contrast, “dialectics, and the collateral rhetorical skills on which it depended were, for Melanchthon, instruments designed to keep the ‘fallen’ human mind attentive to nature rather than itself, to keep the disputation focused on the truth rather than on a particular expression of it or on the reputation of the expresser, and to make of the truths so discovered additions to the coherent substance of the community, rather than the exclusive secrets of an elite”—this last phrase a jab at the ‘Straussian’ political scientists who were his colleagues at Kenyon. (He does, however, laud Strauss for his recovery of political philosophy, the philosophizing of Socrates as depicted in the Platonic dialogues and as practiced by Aristotle.)

In this, Luther remained Melanchthon’s beau ideal of a statesman. The Great Reformer, he wrote, “adorned and defended civic life as it has never been adorned and defended by anyone else’s writings.” Luther “both knew the state and accurately perceived the frame of mind and wishes of all those with whom he lived,” understanding the Christian Church itself as a polity, having “read most avidly ancient and recent ecclesiastical writings and all works of history, relating their examples to the present business with outstanding dexterity.” Contrary to Machiavelli’s complaint about Churchmen, Luther, “said Melanchthon in the funeral oration, did not allow his piety to blind him to human reality.” The result, as Frame puts it, was that “the University, in which Theology and Philosophy meet and mingle, is the training ground of the response to the call, which the reformers named as vocational life.” Machiavelli and the ancients agreed on one thing, that civil life could not be made “dependent on an active, regularly intervening God, and not to forces that were perfected in heaven or some place other than right here.” What Machiavelli rejected, and what the ancients didn’t know, what Luther did know, is that “two kingdoms are better than one.” 

Why? “What Luther and Melanchthon saw in the contemporary landscape of early sixteenth century Europe was a Church that had ascended from literally nothing to so mighty a position that it had absorbed political as well as religious authority” under the rulership of priests. Their majesty, mystery, and authority simultaneously denatured politics and corrupted religion by reserving political rule to an elite against which there could be no earthly appeal, no ‘back-talk’ or public deliberation, and by polluting the sacred, removing from it the innocence of doves and leaving it only with the prudence of serpents. In opposition to this, Luther and Melanchthon wanted to know what those who receive and keep faith in the Christian God “will do when we get the faith.” They urge that we “feel such gratitude for the unwarranted act of grace which has freed us from the embarrassment of our human limitations that we give up our lives to the service of our neighbor,” to “move forward in faith and into congregation, parish, party and polity.” In this way, both the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Man “hold sway, simultaneously, among us.” To argue, as Machiavelli does, that this shared rule fatally bifurcates the human soul, makes it incapable of surviving in this world, the Kingdom of Man, overlooks or despises the fundamental trust upon which all human regimes depend.

As Providence (or Fortuna?) have it, the state of Minnesota during Frame’s presidency at Augsburg “possessed one the nation’s highest levels of ‘social capital'” or trust. Minnesotans could and did ‘bond’ with one another as a society of “similar or similarly situated people,” presumably a middle-class population with no shortage of ethnic Norwegians. To thrive in an increasingly ‘globalized’ world, in which “the ethnic and socio-economic diversity” of the Minnesota population was set to “expand dramatically,” Minnesotans would also need to enhance their capacity for “bridging,” for “reach[ing] across the boundaries of age, gender and socio-economic status and cultural and religious identity, then to find a joint and public purpose that pulls us together for social action.” To aid in this, the College could admit “emigrés from central Africa,” who are “among the most highly educated representatives of their societies” and ones “quickly absorbed into their new world despite their cultural and religious diversity.” What is more, the College should aim at “reconcil[ing] diversity (understood to include age, experience, cognitive capabilities, gender, sexual orientation”—what might Luther and Melanchthon say to that?—along with “religion, culture, and ethnicity).” Perhaps most immediately, “we need to run this business as a college!” That is, since “the corporate and academic worlds in the United States presently stand in desperate need of each other but remain isolated by a profound mutual distrust,” Augsburg should lead the way in their reconciliation.

With respect to ‘diversity,’ academe’s much-valorized goal, forever receding, for about half a century now, “I regularly rejected the pluralist approach,” “whereby the community is literally constructed of the differences it includes.” As he learned from Plato, “the unity of a diverse community is created by its ‘one-ness’ rather than its diversity.” That is, “the diverse elements which originally constitute a society issue in a new kind of person, largely by means of a process of interaction with a founding vision or constitutional act,” as in the founding of the United States. (On the basis of natural right, it should be added, contra Frame’s earlier remarks at least as they might be interpreted.) This vision seeks to “narrow the existing gap at Augsburg” between the liberal arts and professional knowledge or ‘expertise,’ between “experiential and theoretic wisdom,” between knowledge gained through action and knowledge gained by observation, and between reason and faith, Athens and Jerusalem—all without denying the distinctions between the elements of those pairings. To bring discrete dimensions of human life closer together is neither to succumb to pluralism or moral relativism, the way of incoherence and ultimately of civil war, nor to mush them together in a Hegelian or Marxist synthesis, the way of modern tyranny or ‘totalitarianism.’

Neither Hegel nor Marx but Jeremiah serves as a better guide. “As part of his call to the Jews in exile to sop dreaming idly of a return to Jerusalem and start constructing a decent life for themselves among their captors, he forecasts a new Covenant.” Christians see that new Covenant in Jesus’ call “to close the gap that all laws suffer to one degree or another—the gap between behavioral and heartfelt compliance.” In so doing, He “liberated us from our sin” by means of His graceful offer of forgiveness. Our acceptance of that offer does not “extinguish our sin” (“if that were done, we would become gods ourselves, and leave behind our defining humanity”), does what Abraham Lincoln would later imitate in his 1838 Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield: maintain that law-abidingness finds indispensable support in the spirit of lawfulness against the “towering genius”/tyrant (Lincoln is likely thinking of Napoleon, then dead only 23 years). Just as Lincoln called that spirit, that “reverence for the laws,” the “political religion” of the American nation, so did Jesus demand that reverence for God’s laws, founded in reverence for God, animate the new polity, the new assembly or ‘church,’ the new regime consisting of reverent Jews and Gentiles alike. Does Lincoln “not illustrate by the clarity of his effort, the direction to which we are called by the Reformation?” A direction taken “in the name of a profound freedom accomplished not alone by the order sanctified by Washington and the Patriots of `76, but by that more complete freedom provided by the Gospel.” 

Both the Declaration of Independence according to the Spirit of `76 and the Gospels place equality into the forefront of human deliberation, of human politics. Tocqueville saw this clearly, recognizing the importance of both the Christian equality of human souls before God and the natural equality of human souls as members of the same species, not to be separated by racial or class distinctions that treated any person as subhuman. But neither for Jesus nor for the American Founders, Lincoln, or Tocqueville did equality mean similarity. Indeed, “to the degree that equality amounts to similarity it is not satisfying,” failing as it does to give play to human excellence. Augsburg College, “for example, doesn’t want to be or feel equal” in that sense; it intends “to be outstanding, and to be recognized as such in the world.” How else could it participate in any degree to guiding the world? “All of us have been given but one Christ. But each of us has been given that Christ!” Such equality “does not bring God to our side, but more precisely it brings Him to each of us,” freeing us “to do and be our best,” opening “for our individualism a way to do God’s work” in the Kingdom of Man, which after all belongs to Him as much as the Kingdom of Heaven. And to do that work “in an outstanding way.”

It is hard to resist the conclusion that William V. Frame did his work at Augsburg College in an outstanding way. His concessions to some elements of the regnant niaiseries of ‘diversity’ might well have been intended as politic accommodations carried to an impolitic extent. His eagerness to partner with international business corporations hoping to bring about some sort of ‘globalism’ or world government was likely ill-judged. But it is hard to doubt that his own governance of the College was anything but a blessing to it, an elevation and enrichment of it.

 

 

 

 

 

Paul the Apostle: The Epistle to the Ephesians.

John Stott: Ephesians: Building a Community in Christ. Notthingham: Inter-Varsity Press, 1998.

 

Throughout the Bible, God founds regimes for His people—beginning with the simple regime of the Garden of Eden, which Adam rules as His vicegerent. The Bible also looks forward to a final regime for human beings, to be founded after the coming of the Messiah. Between the regime of Eden and the final regime, there have been several regimes, including both a republican and a monarchic regime for the ancient Israelites. There have also been several forms of ‘states,’ that is, communities vastly differing in size and centralization of authority—again ranging from tiny Eden to the Israelite empire at its peak.

The universal character of the Christian ‘state’ also required a new kind of regime. If God no longer legislated primarily for a particular people, giving them a fully articulated regime while leaving the other nations, the ‘Gentiles,’ to their own political devices, what would this new regime look like? And if God did not intend to rule the world’s nations directly until the advent of the Messiah—if there was to be no legitimate ‘world government’ until then—how could the new regime advance throughout the nations? Would rulers and peoples of existing nations not regard the new founding with considerable suspicion?

Saul of Tarsus’ spiritedness, his zeal in persecuting Christians, found itself redirected toward the founding and perpetuation of this new regime after his now-famous conversion on the road to Damascus. The Christian ecclesia or assembly, the Christian church, would be the institutional or formal element of the Christian regime, a regime ruled by God according to the purposes revealed in the Old and New Testaments. The Jewish community would continue to find authoritative guidance in the substantial body of law delivered through Moses in the Pentateuch. Paul addressed that community in his Epistle to the Hebrews. His main efforts concerned the Gentiles, peoples living under the rule of human laws and worshipping a variety of ‘gods,’ many of them declared enemies of the God of the Bible since the earliest days of Israel and indeed before that, when the Israelites were slaves in Egypt.

Located on the coast of Ionia, now a province in Turkey, Ephesus had been a Greek colony, its patron goddess Artemis. The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus was one of the ‘Seven Wonders’ of the ancient world. The empires of Lydia, Persia, Macedonia, and the Seleucids ruled Ephesus before the Romans seized it in 129 BC. The emperor Augustus made it the capital of the Roman colony in Asia Minor. As a cosmopolitan and commercial city, a port city, it proved fairly open to Christian evangelism; Paul had lived there between 52 and 54 AD. However, its still-vigorous cultic societies were well-known for their practice of sorcery, so while Ephesus afforded Christian founders a degree of tolerance, they would also find determined enemies there. 

By 62 AD, Paul was imprisoned in Rome. The salutation of his letter to the Ephesian Christians identifies who he is, what he is, and the source of the authority which entitles him to address them as their ruler: “Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God” (1:1) He also identifies his addressees: “the saints which are at Ephesus” and “the faithful in Jesus Christ.” Some interpreters claim that “saints” refers to Jewish converts, “the faithful” to Gentile converts; others claim that the distinction suggests that Paul addresses both the Christians at Ephesus immediately and Christians everywhere, wherever the letter may eventually circulate. Paul might also be suggesting the following nuance: “saints” emphasizes the fact that they are Christians in a place, a place with a regime foreign to the Christian regime, a place also limited in territory in a way the Christian state is not; “the faithful” emphasizes their own regime and state, ruled as they are by the universal God.

Paul offers a triple blessing. “Grace be to you, and peace, from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual [pneumatikos] blessings in heavenly places in Christ” (1:2-3). This reciprocal blessing proceeds from God and His Son through Paul to the Ephesians, then from Paul back to God the Father and to Lord Jesus Christ—that is, from one who is ruled to his Ruler(s)—and finally to the blessing from Christ to both Paul and the Ephesians. These blessings have the effect of showing the bonds that unite Christians to Christ and to His Father, while simultaneously showing that these bonds are invisible, spiritual, in Heaven not on earth, even as both Paul and the Ephesians now live on earth, one of them literally imprisoned on it. For Christians, members of a new kind of regime and a new kind of empire, physical bonds matter less than spiritual bonds.

What is the character of these spiritual bonds? Christ has “chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy”—separate from other regimes—”and without blame”—innocent of wrongdoing—and “before him in love [agape]” (1:4). The Ruler of the regime chose His subjects, not the other way around, from the other peoples ruling themselves in other regimes, to be law-abiding or blameless not only out of fear—the binding sentiment of most regimes, and one them in this—but out of the specific kind of love Christianity brings to prominence. Agapic love seeks not the possession of the beloved but his good, his perfection. As Paul elsewhere is never shy to remark, the radical defects of human beings make them impossible to perfect without divine power, manifested in the divine graciousness animated by that love.

At the same time, Christians also seek to serve their Ruler’s good. God has “predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the beloved” (1.5-6). Here the image of the ruling body shifts from the regime of a political community to the regime of a family—far more intimate. Jesus is God’s Son; we Christians are Jesus’ adopted children. This puts His children under an obligation of gratitude; God deserves the praise of His glory precisely because He has adopted us, done something indispensable for the achievement of our good. 

Through the centuries, most Christians have taken the strong language of God’s choosing of His people “from the foundation of the world,” His predestination of them, to mean that He has predetermined who will become a Christian, a ‘saved’ human being, even before human beings were created. Supplementing this is the argument that if God foreknows all events they are ‘as good as’ predestined. The question turns on the weight the interpretation gives to the word ‘predestinated.’ If Christians were predestined by God to become Christians, regardless of their own will, agency, intention, then God’s intention is mysterious. Why did He select these people and not those—especially since His grace demonstrably has no correlation with the discernible virtues of the individuals chosen, as distinguished from those not chosen? If, however, ‘predestination’ means instead that God wants all of his human creatures to join Him in His regime but leaves them free to choose whether they do join—if He leaves room for human consent—then their praise for the glory of His grace becomes a moral obligation, a matter of consent, and also more of a genuine good God’s creatures can bestow upon God.

What is clear is the foundation of human gratitude to Christ. He redeemed them “through his blood,” through the sacrifice of His life, obtaining forgiveness for otherwise-indelible sins against the Father from the Father. In Christ “we have redemption”; that is, we are ransomed from slavery to the harsh non-Christian regimes, all of them condemned by God the Father as contradictory to His laws, His way of life. This is more than liberation alone. “The riches of his grace” preeminently amount to “wisdom and prudence,” sophia and phronēsis (1:8).The knowledge of Being, which philosophers seek, theoretical knowledge, and the knowledge all men, but especially political men, seek, the knowledge of practical affairs, of ‘what to do’ in the shifting circumstances of life in this world, both require divine assistance. But, as in the case of ‘free will’ or consent to God’s rule, interpreters have varied regarding the part human ‘agency’ plays. Does God simply lead men to their theoretical and practical discoveries? Or does he grant a certain ‘space’ for their own efforts? However this may be, obedience to God’s regime in His empire evidently heightens both theoretical and practical intelligence. As the Word of God, the Bible makes you smarter.

In what way has God added to, or simply provided, the discoveries of these two kinds of wisdom? He has “made known unto us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure which he hath purposed to himself” (1:9). That is, He has revealed to us certain matters that we could never discover on our own, and has done so for His own purposes, dependent as He is on no one. The good God seeks from us—indeed commands from us—is our just gratitude for the gifts of life, liberation, and wisdom. Our gratitude pleases Him without making Him in any way dependent upon us. His regime is not ‘political’ in Aristotle’s sense of politics as reciprocity of ruling and being-ruled. God rules but is not ruled in turn. His regime is what Aristotle calls kingship: the rule of one over the many, for the sake of the good of the many, as distinguished from tyranny, the rule of the one over the many for the sake of the one. The good rule of the one over the many may also serve the good of the one, and the bad rule of the one over the many may surely be bad for the one, even if he supposes it good. In that sense there is reciprocity of goods if not of rule. But in the case of divine as distinguished from human rule, the good of the One entails a humble, just duty of the many to the One; the One doesn’t need that offering, being capable of ‘happiness’ without any such homage, any such subjects, at all.

God’s founding of His regime has yet to be completed. In “the fullness of times” he will “gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth; even in him: In whom also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will: that we should be to the praise of his glory, who first trusted in Christ” (1:10-12). The regime of God in its future perfection will encompass all of His creation; the adopted children within His family will receive membership in this regime even as children of a human father receive their inheritance of property from him. The twelfth verse, central to the first ‘chapter’ of Paul’s epistle, repeats the purpose of this regime insofar as human beings contribute to it—the praise of God’s glory—and the terms in which it is permissible to offer it—as beings who have trusted in, have had faith in, Christ as their sacrificial redeemer. Underlining the dependence of human beings on God, and the independence of God on human beings, the subjects are to praise God’s glory; God’s glory exists whether or not they praise it, God having been glorious whether human beings existed or not.

To enter God’s regime, one must first trust Christ—consent to His rule—then hear “the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation” (1:13). After believing it, you then receive the royal seal, the “Holy Spirit of promise,” which is the “earnest” or guarantee of the family inheritance “until the redemption of the purchased possession” (1:14). Having acknowledged the Ephesians’ membership in the regime, Paul thanks them and tells them that he prays that the Father will “give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him” in three ways: knowledge of “the hope of his calling”; what “the riches of the glory of his inheritance” are; and “what is the exceeding greatness of his power” toward all those under His regime (1:17-19). These powers were manifested in His raising of Christ “from the dead” and His setting of Christ “at his own right hand in the heavenly places” (1:20). That is, God’s power is so great that it can not only reverse death but it can raise His Son beyond the reach of the regime that killed Him, and indeed “far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come” (1:21). The spiritual, Christian regime is indeed enforced, not by human rulers but by God.

The Father has set His Son at His right hand—that is, the hand of strength—so as to give him authority over “all things in the church, which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all” (1:22-23). Although the Roman regime had broken Christ’s body on the Cross, the Church is His new ‘body,’ of which He is the “head” (1:22). Political communities or states, families, and bodies all have regimes—the latter still suggested by our term ‘regimen,’ a plan of diet and exercise.

The first ‘chapter’ of the epistle thus describes a regime with a ruling body compared initially to a family, then to a physical body. The regime consists of a father and a son ruling their subjects, children, or members. The unique character of these rulers is their holiness, their separation from and superiority to all ordinary families, all ordinary bodies now alive on earth. The purpose of the regime is wisdom and prudence, knowledge of both ‘being’ and of practice. Since a fully-articulated regime also consists of forms of rule—the ruling structures or institutions—and a way of life, readers may expect or at least hope for an account of those things.

Just as the rulers of the Christian regime are holy, so the subjects are also set apart. Christ has “quickened,” made living, his subjects; you “who were dead in trespasses and sins,” walking “according to the course of this world”—its way of life, its regime— according to “the prince of the powers of the air,” who rules “the children of disobedience” in all other regimes, has in effect done for you what His Father did for Him: raised you to life out of a spiritual death (2:1-2). The way of life of the prince of the powers of the air leads to death; that way is disobedience to the way of life of God. Since the subjects of God’s regime within the city of Ephesus manifestly remain physically alive, this new life must be spiritual. Paul emphasizes this by calling the non-Christian regime one guided by “the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh, and of the mind”; to live in that way is to live the way of beings who “were by nature the children of wrath” (2:3). This is why he compares the Church to a body; the natural body and the natural mind love ‘erotically,’ aiming at possessing those things that the body and the mind crave by their nature. Lives lived according to erotic love consist of ways of life that resist God’s way of life. 

“But God, who is rich in mercy,” loves not erotically (there is nothing he needs, nothing he yearns to possess) but agapically (2:4); in justice, He could leave us in the way of life we have chosen, but by his grace He has chosen to save us from our own way of life, inviting us back into His regime. He has “raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (2:5). His purpose in raising us above the natural regime of the human body and mind is to show us “the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus” (2:7). Beyond the riches He has already bestowed upon His people in ‘this’ life, He will give them still more after their bodies die. Among these gifts will be companionship with his Son, rather as family members keep company with one another.

Paul makes it clear that Christians’ newfound, elevated status was strictly “the gift of God,” having nothing to do with our own efforts (2:8)—which are ruled by the prince of the powers of the air, through natural eros. Human nature has been misdirected, but as “created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in,” that nature has now been redirected, placed into a new regime entailing a new way of life, this one marked out by God and involving works that are good, no longer misdirected.

Gentiles are uncircumcised, unmarked by the physical practice that symbolizes membership in God’s regime, Israel. Without Christ, you were “aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world” (2:11). But thanks to a different shedding of blood—not of your own blood, by circumcision, but of Christ’s blood, by crucifixion—you have become members of His body, His family, under His regime. Christ shed physical blood, sacrificing the life which blood supports and symbolizes, in the world He created. When His Father raised Him to life at His right hand in Heaven, both Father and Son revealed a life beyond physical life in this world. But that better life can only come through obedience to God’s regime, as His Son demonstrated in the Garden of Gethsemane by determining to obey His Father’s command to submit to crucifixion for the sake of the human beings He had created.

In this way God is “our peace,” having made Jew and Gentile “both one,” breaking down “the wall of partition between us, “abolish[ing] in his flesh,” on the Cross, “the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances; or to make in himself of twain one new man,” like Saul himself, a man at peace with himself (2:14-15). This new man, neither Jew nor Gentile, has also reconciled with God, being now “in one body by the cross” (2:16). By allowing His human body to be destroyed, Christ showed the way toward rejecting the erotic love of misdirected human nature by replacing that love with self-sacrificing and humble agapic love. Erotic love is the way of “wrath” in the sense that it aims at possession, aiming at what I want to be mine and not thine, which must lead to conflict, to war over who gets what he wants and who is left empty-handed. But if through Christ “we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father,” then we have no more cause for conflict (2:18). This is how Jesus “preached peace” (2:17), how His regime brings the union all regimes aim at but none other can deliver, misdirected as all of them are.

“Now therefore you are no longer strangers and foreigners; but fellow citizens with the saints; and of the household of God” (2:19). Here the metaphor shifts. Not only are we members of one body, children of one family, but also citizens of one house, the “foundation” of which is “the apostles and prophets” (again, both Jews and Gentiles) and the “chief cornerstone” of which is Jesus Christ (2:20). The cornerstone ensures that the foundation is square; a square foundation is a stable foundation for the house. The house upon which the foundation is being built, consisting of the citizens God has chosen is “a holy temple” (2:21)—a new temple to replace the one in Jerusalem. You are “builded together” as a “habitation of God through the Spirit” (2:22); you, the Church or assembly of God’s people, are the new house of God, the new ‘body politic’ not insofar as you are of flesh, whether living flesh marked by circumcision or the solid and stolid ‘flesh’ of a stone temple, but a meta-physical, beyond-physical, house designed by God according to his architectural plan. Like a body or a family, a building has a ‘regime’: a ruler or owner; a structure designed by the architect; a ‘way of life’ determined by the owner but also partly determined by the structure; and a purpose or set of purposes such as shelter and comfort for its ‘citizens’ or residents.

Paul’s body now lives not in a physical temple but in a Roman prison. Although an outlaw in the eyes of the Roman regime, I am not, he writes, so much the Romans’ prisoner as “the prisoner of Jesus Christ for you Gentiles”; the “cause” or reason I am so imprisoned is to be a sacrifice, a sacrifice parallel to if not equal to that of Jesus, a sacrifice of the body in the service of the Spirit (3:1). In prison I can write this letter disclosing the “revelation [Jesus Christ] made known unto me” regarding the “mystery of Christ” (3:4). In previous times this mystery “was not made known unto the sons of men” (3:5). The revelation to Paul, a Jew, was that the Gentiles he had been persecuted “should be fellow heirs” to God’s inheritance (3:6). “I was made minister,” thanks to God’s grace, grace given “by the effectual working of his power” (3:7). Paul was given a ruling office in God’s regime. Just as ‘ministers’ in an ordinary political regime on earth execute the intentions of the ruler, the sovereign, so Paul has been selected to execute the intentions of God. To the question, ‘Who died and left you in charge?’ Paul answers, ‘Jesus died and left me, among others, in charge as His designated ‘representatives’ as executors of his Word. Paul’s physical weakness, his incarceration, serves to highlight his spiritual authority.

In addition to his office as God’s minister, Paul is also a preacher of that Word, God’s spokesman. “Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, is this grace given, that I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ” (3:8). Why “the least”? Perhaps because he had been a persecutor of Christians: Paul does not say. What he does say is the purpose of his ministry and of his preaching: “To make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God, who created all things by Jesus Christ” (3:9)—the last a fact not made known in God the Father’s revelations to Moses and his earlier prophets. The intent of Paul’s activities as minister and preacher in God’s regime is to “make known” the “manifold wisdom of God”—wisdom being the virtue most needed in a ruler (3:10). This newly revealed matter, centering on the existence, words, and actions of the Son, must be promulgated, as all legitimate commands are. Paul is a messenger ordained for that purpose, the human promulgator of God’s promulgation to him. This means that the ‘new’ regime is really the original regime; what is new is the revelation that the Son was there all along, that the Father created the world through Him, and that this authorizes him to unite Jew and Gentile in one regime, by this promulgation “unto the principalities and powers” (3:10).

Any subject, and any citizen, will want access to his ruler or rulers. The Father has set down his “eternal purpose,” for which end He made “Christ Jesus our Lord” (3:11). Christians “have boldness and access with confidence” to Jesus through their “faith of him” (3:12). For this reason, Paul’s physical imprisonment, the effect of the power of the Roman regime over him, should not cause the Ephesians to “faint,” to ask ‘Where is God?’—to suppose that the foundations of God’s regime are unsteady, not worthy of confidence and courage (3:13). On the contrary, Paul’s “tribulations” will serve “your glory” (3:13), again in imitation of Christ’s greater sacrifice. Paul prays for them, “bow[ing] my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (3:14). The image of bowing is the image of the bow; the ‘goddess’ of Ephesus was Artemis/Diana, the huntress whose weapon was the bow. She is to be replaced by Christian ‘hunters’ and ‘fishermen,’ spiritual huntsmen and huntswomen. Paul prays that the Father “would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man” (3:16)—inner strength or power is spiritual not physical, agapic not erotic, the presence of the indwelling of God’s Holy Spirit and of His Son in the human soul. Paul further prays that Christian souls, “rooted and grounded in love” (3:17), will comprehend the vast dimensions of God’s regime, no longer restricted to the Israelites but to the nations, the Gentiles, as well; that they will know Christ’s love for them; that they will be “filled with the fullness of God” (3:19). As His new body, family, temple, city, you are His dwelling place, inwardly, in your hearts—that is, in your minds, newly repurposed for the purposes of God’s regime. 

Paul expresses this in a paradox, praying that the Ephesians will know the love of God, “which passeth knowledge” (3:19). This means that they will know that God’s love exists by perceiving it inside themselves, without knowing why God offers it to them. To be filled with the fullness of God is a form of personal knowledge, not ‘abstract’ knowledge, just as one might say he knows a human person without being able to say what his chemical composition or other impersonal characteristics are. 

Not only does God’s knowledge surpass man’s knowledge, His power far exceeds human power, in part because what He can do far exceeds “all that we ask or think” (3:20). Human power is limited in part because human knowledge is limited. The new knowledge available in the ‘new’ regime will enhance the power of human beings in the way Paul shows, by praying to God in the knowledge that He is the Father of our Lord, our ruler. Prayerful appeals to God as Father of our Lord, our Ruler, remain within the bounds of God’s just and gracious regime because they honor the right Person: “Unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end” (3:21). In all regimes citizens and subjects are expected honor the rulers of their regime; when the rulers are no longer honored, revolution, regime change, may follow. That attitude of honor, along with the criteria for defining what is honorable, limits the uses of the powers they request from their rulers, and also limits the powers the rulers may use in attempting to meet those petitions.

Having established the major premises of his argument in the first half of the epistle, Paul reaches his first conclusion, his first ‘therefore’ clause. “I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you that you walk worthy of the vocation wherewith you are called” (4:1). Since I am less the prisoner of Rome than the willing “prisoner” of Jesus Christ, having prayed to Him to ask that the Ephesians know Him, he now ‘prays’ to the Ephesians, requesting that they follow the way of life God has established for them in His regime. A prisoner is confined; to walk is to be free; to walk along a given path is to consent to follow the restrictions and draw nearer to the end of that path. The first half of the epistle consists of teaching first principles and praying for their fulfillment among the members of the Church, although to describe Paul’s teaching as the enunciation of principles alone is incomplete and somewhat misleading, as the ‘principles’ include the filling-up, the animation, of human souls with the Holy Spirit, a Person not an abstraction. The second half of the epistle consists of Paul’s exhortation to actions in accordance with those principles.

To follow the way of life of the Christian regime requires four virtues: “lowliness” or humility; “meekness” or gentleness; “longsuffering” or patience; and forbearance “in love” (4:2). Forbearance was originally a legal term meaning abstaining from collecting a debt; here, the forbearance derives not from self-restraint but agape. All of these virtues aim “to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (4:3). If the Church, God’s regime in its this-worldly manifestation, is to survive and prosper, like all bodies, families, buildings, and cities it must have some bond, some ligament, some structural tie to hold it together. Since the Church is first of all a spiritual unity, this bond cannot be sustained ‘automatically,’ like the bonds that sustain bodies and buildings do. A spiritual union requires moral and spiritual bonds—that is, those moral virtues most consistent with the rule of the Holy Spirit, the Son, and the Father. While the classical virtues of courage, moderation, wisdom, and justice are all esteemed by God and His people, these less natural virtues are the ones that put obedience to God above self-sufficiency or self-rule. They are the virtues that ‘shine’ less, giving glory to the Ruler and conducing to a willingness to abjure self-assertion and work toward the good of the regime as a whole.

There is not one bond of unity but seven. They are: one body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and “one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all” (4:6). This follows from the premises of the argument Paul has already cited. The Church body differs from natural bodies, animated by agapic instead of erotic love, by Spirit not ‘flesh,’ aiming at, hoping for, full citizenship in God’s regime. Central to the list is the Ruler of the regime, its “one Lord” (4:5), Jesus Christ—as indeed the matter of ‘who rules’ must be of central importance in any regime. God the Father is at once universal (“Father of all”), superior to (above all members of the regime), pervasive (“through all”), and present within each member (“in you all”). 

But how can God the Father be universal, superior or “above,” pervasive, and present “in” each member of His regime, all at the same time? Universal and superior are manifestly consistent attributes; there is no contradiction in saying that a Being rules everywhere. It is the seeming contradiction between God’s ‘aboveness’ and His pervasiveness and ‘in-ness’ that can cause confusion. God’s pervasiveness evidently refers to the Church as a whole, whereas His ‘in-ness’ refers to each individual member of the Church. How so?

Paul explains that “unto every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ” (4:7). The Father acts through His Son, who ‘measures out’ God’s grace, giving different gifts or abilities to different persons. The Son is the link or bond between the universal and infinitely superior Father and both human individuals and human organizations. When the Son “ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts to men” (4:8). Picking up his theme of imprisonment, Paul compares Jesus’ resurrection from the tomb to a liberation from jail, a liberation from the debtors’ prison in which all human beings are confined because they have violated God’s laws, and from which Jesus freely gives those prisoners their own freedom in God’s regime. He even liberated dead men from Hades, having also “descended first into the lower parts of the earth” (4:9). “He that descended is the same also that ascended up far above all heavens that he might fill all things” (4:10). Earth, Hell, the heavens, and Heaven: all the parts of God’s creation have now been ‘filled’ by Christ, used for His purposes. 

What were the gifts Christ gave to human persons? They are the distinct but coordinate gifts needed to be apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. A prophet of God receives direct revelation from God; a pastor or a teacher doesn’t receive such revelation, and does not need to receive it, having the revelations entrusted to the prophets available to him in the Bible. The purpose of actions in accordance with these various gifts is “the perfecting of the saints,” the “work of the ministry,” and “the edifying of the body of Christ” (4:12). Whereas the perfection of the natural person by natural means is ethics, as seen in the four ‘classical’ virtues, the perfection of the Christian as a citizen of God’s regime requires the four Christian virtues as revealed to those gifted by God in these enumerated ways, and then taught by those ‘gifted’ persons to the Church members both as individuals and as citizens and subjects of the regime.

This teaching will continue “till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (4:13). Just as citizens of earthly regimes emulate the heroes held up by that regime, so the imitatio Christi will remain the task of each Christian. Paul exemplifies this in seeking to free the Ephesians from their earthly ‘prison’ while in Rome’s prison. In imitating the Ruler of the Christian regime, Christians intend to “henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine”—every breeze and every storm directed at them from the prince of the air—”by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive” (4:14). Philosophy, and especially Socratic philosophy, is the human cure for sophistry and rhetoric; philosophic dialectic is the means by which the philosopher can question sophists and rhetoricians, expose the contradictions in their arguments. Socratic philosophy does not, however, provide definitive answers to the questions, it raises, or at least to all of them. God’s revelation does provide answers to many of those questions, although the revelation is always partial, with God reserving some mysteries for Himself.

“Speaking the truth in love,” Christians “may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ”—from whom “the whole body is fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in that measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love” (4:15-16). The Christian regime, like all regimes, seeks to educate its citizens. It does so, however, not only for the sake of the rulers, for the sake of their glory, but in agapic love—for the sake of the ruled. Paul here has recourse to his metaphor of the Church as a body, the most tightly organized of the several entities to which he compares the Church. Agape edifies or strengthens the body, builds it up, and at the same time does so justly, in right measure, as the head of a natural body animates and directs the inferior members. 

This leads Paul to his second conclusion, his second “therefore” clause. “This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind” (4:17). Through His apostle, the head of the Church ‘body’ directs its members onto the way of life of the regime of God, and away from the regimes of other nations insofar as they depart from God’s regime. In its vanity or futility, the natural human mind (in fact unnatural, not in accordance with God’s original intention for it) leads all other regimes to some extent into wrong ways of life. Under those regimes, their “understanding [is] darkened,” “alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart” (4:18). They are blind, alienated, and ignorant because they are animated by the wrong love, erotic or possessive love.

This leaves room for acknowledging that some regimes lead citizens and subjects in worse ways than others do, depending upon how much their ways intersect with Christian ways. Paul’s teaching also explains why he, and many other Christians, wind up in prison, or on other forms of the Cross. Christians live in the regimes of man, ‘the City of Man,’ while reserving their final allegiance to the regime, the City, of God. This may provoke the wrath of the regimes of men in which they live, which quite often dislike competition over the question of who rules and who does not rule. Christians live in the City of Man, but the City of God lives in them. That conflict will remain as long as the earth is not yet the new earth, under the rule of Jesus Christ.

As Christians, human beings who now acknowledge that “the truth is in Jesus,” men have “put off” the “old man,” who is “corrupt according to the deceitful lusts” of erotic love, and are “renewed in the spirit of your mind,” “put[ting] on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness” (4:21-24). Without feeling the need for the competition, the wars, resulting from erotic or possessive love, Christians no longer feel the impulse to lie. A Christian can “speak truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another” (4:25).

Paul is no utopian. He does not claim that Christians will no longer become angry. Indeed, Jesus Himself became angry on occasion, expelling money changers from the Temple at Jerusalem in one notable instance. There is righteous anger, and there is sinful anger; righteous anger is for the defense of God’s regime, whereas sinful anger serves the ‘lusts’ or erotic love of the one angered. “Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath,” giving no “place to the devil,” the prince of anger. Similarly, given our existing physical nature, we must eat. We must still acquire things, possess things, satisfy bodily eros to some extent. Therefore, “Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labor, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth” (4:28). As for the natural mind, “let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers” (4:29). In each case, anger, greed, and the power of speech and reason are not only moderated—let not the sun go down on the first, let one work for bodily things, not steal them, let the mind use speech for truth-telling, not lying—but redirected agapically toward the good of others—indignation at offenses to God, charitable giving of the fruits of labor, Christian witness to partners in conversation.

With the right kind of love, Christians can begin to “put away” bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking, along with “all malice” (4:31). With the right kind of love, Christians can instead “be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you” (4:31). The grace-beyond-justice of God should be reciprocated not toward God, who doesn’t need our grace, but toward one another as citizens of God’s regime. Christian love of God is just gratitude; Christian love of men, whether fellow-Christians or even enemies, is graceful, more than just.

This brings Paul to his third “therefore” clause: “Be you therefore followers of God, as dear as children” (5:1)—children of God, not vacillating children of men. Children of God imitate God, “walk[ing] in agape, as Christ also has loved us” (5:2). Erotic love must not be perverted to fornication, uncleanness, or covetousness, for the sake of the ‘name’ or reputation of the Church, the honor God’s regime ought to merit. The speech of Christians should be centered on their gratitude to God, not “filthiness, nor foolish talking, nor jesting” (5:4). Persons who speak and act in that way, who walk in that way of life, have no “inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God” (5:5). As with speaking, so with listening: “let no man deceive you with vain words” (5:6), words empty as the wind that carries them to your ears. 

If there are citizen-subjects of God’s regime, and also those alien to it, foreigners, how to tell the difference? There are no physical markers; there aren’t even political borders to cross or town walls to protect. This too is a problem of knowledge, a difficulty in discerning truth, separating it from falsehood. The best human beings can do to distinguish “the children of light” from the children of darkness is to observe “the fruit of the Spirit” (5:8-9). The observable actions of men are the most reliable windows into their souls. “The fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness and righteousness and truth”; this is the proof or test of Christian citizenship. Typically, the “unfruitful works of darkness” are hidden from men because they are shameful, but there can be no shame in exhibiting the fruit of the Spirit—and no pride, either, inasmuch as they are the fruit of the Spirit, not the fruit of our own natural virtues. Evil things are “made manifest by the light”; ‘shining a light on them’ makes them visible. The Spirit is the light, and that light shines forth from its fruits, with neither shame nor pride.

For this reason, Jesus commanded the dead to awaken and arise, “and Christ gave them the light” (5:14). If you awaken you need the light to see the way, and not to stumble over things you otherwise would not see. “See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools; but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil,” “understanding what the will of the Lord is” (5:15-17). Unlike the will of a human being, the will of God is by definition wise, inasmuch as God is the ultimate reality; insofar as human beings are given to know the will of the Lord they are wise, enlightened, “filled with the Spirit” (5:18).

In this, Christian unity means both sameness and differentiation: sameness in the sense that all understand the will of the Lord, as given by the Holy Spirit through the Word of God, itself delivered to them by God through His prophets; differentiated in that members of God’s regime should speak to themselves “in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord” in gratitude” (5:19). Each singer brings his own voice. In this Paul sees what Aristotle saw about unity in a sound political regime. Some would-be regime founders, Aristotle writes, attempt to homogenize the many elements of the polis. But this is to reduce “a theme to a single beat.”

Closely related to anger, but in appearance opposite to it, is fear. Just as there is good anger and bad anger, so there is good fear and bad fear. Bad fear is the fear of men. Good fear is fear of the Lord, which the prophets of Israel called the beginning of wisdom. Although Paul emphasizes the obligation of love of God and neighbor over the obligation of fear of God, he never forgets the necessity of fearing God. “Submit yourselves one to another in the fear of God” (5:21); “wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands as unto the Lord,” because “the husband is the head of the wife”—giving direction to the household—even “as Christ is the head of the church” (5:22-23). Further, as Christ is the savior of the Church, so the husband protects the household. This leads to Paul’s next “therefore,” which is really an argument from analogy: “as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing” (5:24). Those who assume that this spells tyrannical rule of husbands over wives should guess again. Paul writes “as the church is subject unto Christ.” The Church is rightly subject unto Christ because Christ loves the Church not erotically but agapically, and husbands are to follow His standard. “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it,” sacrificing his life under torture (5:25). His purpose in so doing was to “sanctify and cleanse” the Church, “washing [it] with the water of the word,” so that “he might present it to himself a glorious church,” a church “holy and without blemish” (5:25-27). “So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself.” (5:28) This is why a man shall “leave his father and mother,” his flesh and blood, “and shall be joined with unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh” (5:31).

If Paul and Aristotle concur in understanding a sound regime as analogous to a musical harmony, blending many into one, they diverge somewhat in their understanding of marriage. Aristotle regards the family as the foundation of the polis. The husband is the head of the household, but rule over the children and slaves within the household is shared by husband and wife, who rule reciprocally, “ruling and being ruled in turn.” This is the political relationship, strictly speaking. In Paul, the husband rules absolutely, as Christ does His Church, but with the agapic love that seeks the good of the beloved. The closest thing to absolute rule with agapic love in the Aristotelian family is the rule of the parents over their children, a rule that aims at the good of the children. 

Christ’s love of the Church, the Church’s status as “members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones,” is “a great mystery” (5:30, 32). Paul doesn’t say why it is mysterious. It may be because the head of the body would usually sacrifice the other members of the body to preserve itself, but Christ is the head of the body of the Church, yet He sacrificed Himself for the sake of His members. The mystery, however, dissolves with His resurrection, his placement at the Father’s right hand; His sacrifice was real, but it issued in His return to rule over His church on earth, from a seat above the heavens. As to husbands still on earth, “let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband” (5:33). Do husbands not sometimes go so far as to sacrifice themselves for their wives and children? When they do, they imitate Christ.

This brings Paul to consider the children in the family. “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right” (6:1). This isn’t blind obedience, but obedience in the Lord, who gives light. Honoring your father and mother brings the benefit of living well and long. Just as fathers should be reverenced by their wives, they should be honored by their children, but again with indispensable condition that they do so lovingly, not provoking their “children to wrath”—that is, to the natural, unrighteous anger Paul has already criticized. “Bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord” (6:4). The Lord’s nurture and admonition, opposites in one sense, equally bespeak His agapic love. That love frames and pervades the Christian family, even as it frames and pervades the Christian Church or assembly. 

Regarding the third element of the household, the slaves, they too shall obey their masters “according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ” (6:5). They should obey their masters “not with eyeservice, as men-pleasers, but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart” (6:6). In Aristotle’s household, the husband and wife rule the slaves absolutely, aiming at the good not of the slaves but of themselves. (This is why Aristotle may be said to subtly question the moral foundation of slaveholding.) In Paul, slaves obey masters not insofar as the masters are human—human nature as it exists now is no badge of honor, and no measure of justice—but because in doing service “in good will” they serve Christ, indeed imitate Him (6:7). And they do so “knowing that whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord, whether he be bond or free” (6:8). This is the equality of master and slave. In ordinary life under the nations’ regimes, slaves are not citizens. But they are citizen-subjects under God’s regime, a kingdom not a tyranny because the Ruler rules for the good of His people.

What kind of military protection does this regime need? Being a spiritual regime, without physical power on earth, the Church may seem weak. On the contrary, Paul insists. It is strong in the way that it needs to be strong in order to fight the war it must fight. “Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.” (6:10-11). This strength, this armor, consists first of wisdom, ‘theoretical’ and practical, second of the moral strength to resist temptation. Both wisdom and moral strength are crucially informed by the Holy Spirit, with whose wisdom and strength Christians can “wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (6:12), a struggle they must lose, and were losing, without the Holy Spirit. “Wherefore take unto you the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand” (6:13). As Stott remarks, “A thorough knowledge of the enemy and a healthy respect for his powers are necessary for victory in war” (58). 

Paul’s final set of metaphors consists of the armor and weaponry for the spiritual warrior who defends and advances the spiritual regime. His belt is truth; his breastplate is righteousness; his marching boots are “the gospel of peace”; his shield is faith; his helmet is salvation; his sword is “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God” (6:13-17). The sword of the spirit thus hangs on the truth; righteousness protects his heart; salvation protects his head, which directs the course of the rest of his body. His boots protect his feet, which march in either defensive or offensive operations; since the aim of any war is peace (as Aristotle observes) the Christian war aims at peace, peace on the only terms that can endure, the peace of agapic not erotic love. The shield of faith is “above all” the other accoutrements of battle, as it enables him “to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked” (6:16). Paul puts the defense of the faith above its advancement, although he was himself perhaps the most effective evangelist the Church has seen; he doesn’t want to extend the range of Christ’s regime at the expense of allowing it to rot from within. Hence his epistles to the several Christian churches.

What action does Christian warfare consist of? Prayer and vigilance: Christians should be “praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints” —with guidance from God and care for all members of God’s city. What role will Paul play in this war? As God’s ambassador: He shall “open my mouth boldly, to make known the mystery of the gospel,” its witness to Gentiles as well as Jews; even in the prison, “I am an ambassador in bonds,” an ambassador who, unlike other ambassadors, stays in one place and speaks not ‘diplomatically’ but “boldly, as I ought to speak” (6:19-20). He is an ambassador who appoints his own ambassador, who is not imprisoned but free to travel to Ephesus, so that “you may know our affairs, and that he might comfort your hearts” (6:22), showing them how Paul bears witness to the Gospel even as he sits in a jail of the Roman regime. The epistle itself shows that, too.

Paul ends with a blessing. He wishes peace to his brothers in the Christian family. He extends agapic love and faith to them, as well. This peace and this love are from “God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” (6:23). This peace, and not any peace, is the aim of Christian warfare. To peace and love with faith he adds the wish for the grace of God for all those who “love our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity” (6:24). Just as agapic love must be protected by the shield of faith, that love itself must be real, not feigned, in a spiritual regime, a regime not satisfied with mere outward compliance with its laws.

Paul thus contributes to the founding of the Christian regime in Ephesus and, by extension, anywhere. He identifies its Ruler; he describes its way of life; he discusses its purpose. Of the four elements of a regime identified by Aristotle, he takes little note of the regime’s form or structure, its ruling institutions, although he does list the functions of its several officers, including his own. The unique character of this regime is its spirituality. It does not fight physical wars. It exists within other regimes, threatening them in challenging their spiritual foundations. With regard to those other regimes, the Christian founding is at once the least threatening and the most dangerous of all foundings. It in no way resists the physical power of those regimes, posing no military threat, no threat of domestic insurrection. It does resist—more threatens—their underlying claims on the human soul.

 

Sinclair B. Ferguson: Devoted to God: Blueprints for Sanctification. Carlisle: The Banner of Truth Trust, 2016.

 

Ferguson knows his audience: Americans, who pride themselves on their practicality—American Christians no less than any others. Hence such locutions as “blueprints for sanctification”—designs for “building an entire life of holiness” with the aid of this “manual of biblical teaching on holiness.” And the Bible does indeed insist on right human practice. God issues commands, telling his creatures what to do and what not to do. But Ferguson is much more interested in teaching what sanctification is and why we should want it. “This is not so much a ‘how to’ book as it is a ‘how God does it’ one.” A ‘pragmatic’ people may incline to insist on taking their own way, becoming do-it-yourselfers of life. But for Christians, only by first understanding God’s purposes and God’s ways of achieving those purposes can we rationally address the question of what we should do. Putting human action, human ‘methods’ and ‘techniques’ at the forefront inclines us to exaggerate our already ample desire to serve ourselves. “Many modern Christians are often too interested in the development of the self but little interested in the development of their understanding of the triune God.”

Understanding God’s holiness and human sanctification may also clarify modern minds confused by the philosophic doctrine of historicism. In Hegel, preeminently, ‘God’ means the ‘Absolute Spirit.’ He describes the Absolute Spirit as being “immanent” in all things, going so far as to compare all of Being as symbolized by Christ, by God-become-man. But the God of the Bible is a Creator-God, not an immanent force— a holy God, separate from His creation. Sanctification means holiness or becoming-holy; the main difference between the two words is ‘merely verbal,’ as the “sanctification” derives from a Latin root, “holiness” from an Anglo-Saxon root. One aspect of God’s holiness is His separateness from sin; another is devotion, “the intensity of the love that flows within the very being of God, among and between each of the three persons of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” Love is a desire for someone or some thing; one cannot love something that is not in some way separate from ourselves. At the same time, love aims at uniting what is separate or distinct, whether these are the Persons God manifests within Himself or, more surprisingly, the creatures separated from their Creator, first by the fact of their creation itself, then compounded by their sin, which has altered their original nature. Holiness in such profoundly flawed creatures means devotion to Him, “being entirely his, so that all we do and possess are his”—still separate in the original sense, in their status of creatureliness, but redeemed from the further separation of sinfulness, even as they cannot claim to be sinless. Agapic love reunites God and human beings; it also provides the basis for uniting human beings with one another, under God, animated by His Holy Spirit.

Ferguson begins his exposition of these points with I Peter 1:1-7. The churches in Turkey were having their faith tested; Peter writes his letter to strengthen their understanding of what faith entails. As Ferguson summarizes the passage, these Christians “have been chosen (elect) through the love God had set upon them (foreknowledge) in order to be reserved by the Spirit (sanctification) with a view to their devotion to Christ (obedience) and the enjoyment of a life of covenant fellowship with him (sprinkled with his blood).” To know how to live, what way of life to walk, you must know, first, “whose you are,” then “who you are,” and finally “what you are for.” Similarly, when Moses meets God manifested in the burning bush he wants to know who God is and who he, Moses, is, to have been chosen by God for the mission God commands him to undertake.

Martin Luther wrote that “this little letter,” I Peter, “contains virtually everything a Christian needs to know.” And while Ferguson rightly allows that “the German reformer had a fine line in hyperbole,” he agrees that “Peter’s opening words constitute one of the New Testament’s most comprehensive descriptions of what it means to be a Christian.” Without holiness or sanctification, “no one will see the Lord,” the Apostle Paul writes, in concurrence. Although ‘belief in’ God is a gift delivered by the Holy Spirit, holiness is not a gift. It is “worked into us” over time: “We actually become holy.” In so becoming, we are ‘justified’ in the root meaning of the word: aligned with the will of God, the source of the good, the right. “Justification never takes place apart from regeneration which is the inauguration of sanctification.” Sanctification occurs as we obey the rule of God; it is the result of that obedience. “We are not justified on the basis of our sanctification” because only God can realign us, straighten us out. “Yet justification never takes place without sanctification.” Even the thief crucified with Jesus, who had only a short time left to live, undertook sanctification by “confess[ing] his own sinfulness,” “recogniz[ing] Jesus’ lordship,” manifesting respect for Jesus, and praying—even “rebuk[ing] his companion,” the other criminal, “for the vitriol he heaped on his new-found Master.”

In acting to sanctify Christians, “God is restoring in our lives the image which we were created to reflect,” “changing you from what you were to what he means you to be—making you more and more like himself.” Holy or separate from sin Himself, He makes you more nearly separate from it. Ferguson identifies six “foundations” of this new life.

The first foundation is God’s purpose. “God chose us in order to sanctify us.” That is, “everything depends on God taking the initiative.” All three Persons of the Trinity contribute to this sanctification: as Father, God chooses or ‘elects’ us to citizenship in His kingdom; as the Holy Spirit, God sanctifies us, guiding us along the way of life that characterizes His regime; as the Son, God provides the ruler of his regime, the one whom we shall emulate and obey. “Every Christian’s experience, wherever it begins, has its ultimate origin before the dawn of time in the heart, mind, and heavenly love and purpose of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” and “the whole Trinity co-operates in bringing me to the goal,” cooperating among themselves and with me “in order to make me more like Christ.” “God has in the past destined us, and in the present is transforming us, so that in the future we will ‘be conformed to the image of his Son.'”

The second foundation of the Christian regime is a command, “the commandment of God to be holy,” as seen in Leviticus 19 and I Peter1;15-16: “Be holy, as I am holy.” In obeying this command, we open ourselves to God’s agapic love. “Sanctification is growing in holy-love; love is growing in holiness.” Ferguson rejects the claim sometimes heard in churches, that the Old Testament is ‘legalistic’—requiring merely “outward obedience to the Ten Commandments.” The prophet Isaiah, for example, “realized that he was a sinner, not just someone who had committed various sinful act contrary to the divine standards”; “sin infected his own lip and came to expression whenever he preached.” This is the meaning of the purification of his lips with the “searing heat” of the coal the angel pressed on his lips. His wrong acts had issued from his own ‘being,’ and it was his ‘being’ that needed purification. Be holy, as I am holy “now means, ‘Become like Jesus.”

Thirdly, Christians should understand themselves as the Israelites understood themselves when they left Egypt—as exiles. When Augustine called Christians a “third race” of men, he meant they were a new nation, neither Greeks nor Jews. This nation had been founded at great cost. Jesus was a sacrifice, redeeming His chosen people “not with silver and gold”—as most debtors are redeemed—”but with his own blood,” the matter that animates the living body. Fourth, having been so redeemed, so liberated from debt, Christians then find themselves ‘ministered to,’ brought to the new way of life, by the Holy Spirit. In terms of the family, the Holy Spirit guides us in “a real transformation of our lives so that we begin to develop the characteristics of our adoptive family” as “the children of God.” Nation derives from natio or ‘birth.’ In antiquity, the Israelites were the sons of Israel, Moabites the sons of Moab, and so on. Nations often were named for their ‘founding father,’ and they share some of the characteristics of that father, certain family resemblances. For Christians this means that “we love what we once despised, and despise much that we once loved,” inasmuch as Christ, the founding father of the Christian family and nation, Himself manifests the agapic love which animates the Persons of the Trinity for one another, and for creation.

Families and nations typically undergo severe trials, and not only in the ‘founding period.’ Four score and seven years after the American founding, Abraham Lincoln called the Civil War a test of the endurance of the American regime “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” No less do the trials God sends to His people or allows them to suffer test the genuineness of their devotion to Himself, their ruler, and to propositions (and more) the commands He has set down for them. God “knows he can rely on and test his own work.” “Why does he do this?” Christians ask. “To build Christian character, making us more like Christ.” “The Christian character is strengthened by stress.”

Finally, the sixth foundation of God’s way of life for His nation is the reward of faithful obedience, “the glory to come.” “The New Testament teaches us to live in the light of a future reality that is far more substantial than the present.” So enlightened, His subjects have reason to live now in a way that will enhance their lives then. “This final salvation will be holiness completed,” as Christians “will see the face of Jesus Christ and be transformed into his likeness.” All regimes have this characteristic, holding up models of persons deemed worthy of emulation. For Christians, living in God’s regime as exiles from all others, “those who will enjoy holiness there and then are those who want to pursue holiness here and now.”

Wanting to pursue holiness is one thing, knowing how to do so another. Ferguson is quite fond of lists; sure enough, as there are six “foundations” of the Christian’s new life, so there are four “principles” by which it should be guided. The first is that “sanctification flows from the gospel,” which centers on the depiction of “God’s character and grace.” More specifically, “divine indicatives (statements about what God has done, is doing, or will do) logically precede and ground divine imperatives (statements about what we are to do in response),” faithfully and obediently. God’s grace “effects”—does not merely affect—”our faithfulness.” “This is the logic that explains the power of the gospel.” This is very different from thinking, “If I do this then God will do that.” Such a belief “stands the gospel on its head.” God’s actions always come first, whether it is the initial act of salvation in Christ or “what the Spirit is now doing in me.” Obedience means “we should no longer live for ourselves but for Christ,” even as a true patriot lives not himself but for his country and, if subject to a king, ready to sacrifice his life for his king.

The second principle follows from the first; “Sanctification is expressed physically.” “We express ourselves only by means of our body. In that sense we are our bodies.” Sin makes us aliens in God’s country—more than aliens, witting or unwitting enemies of God. Each day our bodies, through our senses, are tempted or tested by sin at the hands of the rival ruler, Satan, the anti-Christ, “but we can face it well-armed if the eye, or ear, or mouth, or hand, or foot has already been devoted as a living sacrifice to the Lord Jesus Christ.” What we do with our bodies today reveals our allegiance. “For all our sophistication (not to say riches) the western world may not have seen so many tattoos since the days of paganism.” The rule of atheism causes men to abandon “the biblical teaching that we have been made as the image of God,” reducing the body to a billboard for the passions and thus “reduc[ing] man to biological functions.” “Now the body is everything, whether it be the human body, animal bodies, or the earth body.” Paganism induces men to worship earth as a goddess.

The third principle, “mind renewal,” counteracts this materialism. Who will rule your mind? The regime or way of life informed by materialism (especially if matter is said to have divinity immanent within it) “gradually” and “imperceptibly” forms our mind, as any regime will do to those who live under it. But if human beings do not consist only of matter in motion, then that way of life, the habits of mind and heart that it inculcates, will not satisfy. “Knowing who we are will shape how we live”; Ferguson deploys the contemporary term ‘lifestyle,’ but the Bible offers the less frivolous term used also by classical political philosophers, the way. God consistently speaks of “My way.” He opposes ‘our’ way, the human-all-too-human way. He commands from us a metanoia, a change of mind. God’s instrument in mind-changing is the Gospel. “In receiving it we are actively passive,” by which Ferguson means it is a message from God to us, not the other way around, but a message we must act on, after receiving it.

By so acting, Christians test the will of God, coming “to see it as ‘good and acceptable and perfect.'” “Faith in Christ involves an experiment—we trust him, but we cannot second-guess what the consequences will be in our lives.” In other words, we are not putting God to the test; He is testing us. “We learn to discover what God’s will is in each situation only as we find ourselves in it and as his providence slowly unfolds his purposes.” This is what Jesus means by telling His disciples to be prudent as serpents; prudence, practical wisdom, is the characteristic of the good ruler, who knows what to do in each circumstance, what speech or action will advance his regime. Here, God is the ruler, and it is up to His subjects to guide their own actions by His spirit. “When we thus yield our lives to the Lord, and our thinking is renewed by his word, we also begin to find God’s will is acceptable—it becomes a delight to us.” To those who refuse God’s rule, “God’s will is inevitably unpleasant, simply because it is his will and not their will.”

How then to discern God’s will? To do so unassisted by God is obviously impossible. “What does God do in order to bring us to the Christlikeness which is his ultimate goal?” Ferguson cites Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians: “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” The ‘I’ who has been crucified is a body, but even more a way of life. The gospel does not denigrate the body. “Rather it changes the kind of life we live in the body.” God has shown what kind of life might be lived in a human body by “taking and sharing our human nature”; “his union with us in our flesh, and not our faith union with him, is the foundation of our fellowship with him.” Having lived a life ‘within’ human nature, “in all its frailty and poverty,” but at the same time being God, and therefore capable of rejecting every temptation, every Satanic testing, and of ruling that nature instead of being ruled by it, and moreover having “died for our sins,” sacrificing that human physicality for the sake of all those still stuck in and with it, having been “raised into new life, and ascended to his Father in the nature he assumed,” Jesus as Christ has given the Holy Spirit the “resources” which can justify, sanctify, and “indeed even… glorify us.” Sin’s wages are death, but Jesus broke “the power of death in his resurrection.” In the letter to the Hebrews Paul calls Jesus “the founder” of Christians’ salvation, a salvation made “perfect through suffering.” The Greek word for founder, archēgos, means the one who embodies the archē—which means both ‘beginning’ and ‘form’ or framework, as in our word, ‘architect.’ The word “is used only four times in the new Testament, always of Jesus.” Aristotle calls politics the “architectonic art,” the art of beginning or ‘founding’ the forms or institutions of rule which direct the pathways on which human beings live their lives. His word ‘regime’ refers to rulers (especially the founding rulers), the forms or institutions they devise as means of ruling, the way of life of those who live within the framework of institutions, and, finally, the end or purpose set by those rulers, reinforced by those forms, and pursued by citizens or subjects according to that way. For Christians, the Ruler, Who is holy and His subjects, the faithful, all have one archē, the same nature: “The Sanctifier must share the same nature, and in that sense be one flesh, with those he sanctifies.” “By coming into the family of flesh and sanctifying his whole life, then by dying our death and being declared righteous or justified in his resurrection,” Jesus became the archēgos “of both justification and sanctification.” It is the Holy Spirit who connects us with the Founder, and who strengthens our connection or bond, our ‘political’ union with Him, our rightful ruler.

This means that a Christian lives in faith in the Son of God, “transfer[ring] trust from self to Christ, all the while recognizing that I cannot carry the heavy load of my sin and guilt, but he can,” being divine not human, all-powerful not frail. Ferguson points especially to Paul’s eschewal of the word ‘Christian.’ “We never find him describing believers as ‘Christians.'” “He speaks only of believing in Christ” and indeed about “believing into Jesus Christ.” By this Paul means that “faith brings us into a person-to-person union and communion with Jesus Christ so that what is ours becomes his and what is his becomes ours.” All regimes need union; the American Founders were obsessed with it, Lincoln defended it. But the Christian “union and communion” is more intimate, and stronger, than any merely human union can be. Ferguson calls this “the deep melody of grace.” Aristotle compares political union with a harmonic scale, warning against reducing this to “a single beat,” as he accuses Socrates of having done in his simply-ordered ‘ideal regime.’ For those ‘in Christ,’ there is no such danger, as in Christ there is “hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3).

Every regime includes certain habits of mind and heart, excludes others as enemies to its structure and its way of life. The Christian, the one who lives in Christ, believing into Him, asks the Holy Spirit to guide him in crucifying, killing, making war against his ‘old’ or sinful nature, his membership in “the family of Adam,” who disobeyed and was expelled from the homeland God made for him. Since “the crucified Christ to whom I am now united is also the risen Christ,” “I cannot be united to him in his crucifixion without being united to him in his resurrection as well.” The sacrifice of our old ‘self’ will be for the sake of a supremely good and joyful purpose: life beneath the new Heaven and on the new Earth, in our new, resurrected bodies, under the perfect Ruler. Therefore, “I no longer live, but Christ lives IN me,” dwelling in us “through the Holy Spirit.” This means that we not only enjoy an intimate union with God, but an intimate union with fellow-members of His regime. The sum of the Law is to love God and to love one’s neighbor as oneself. This becomes possible among Christians, imperfectly, in their lives in the Christian ecclesia, assembly, ‘church’ on this earth, and will become our way of life perfectly in the world to come. “It is a truism that we become like the people with whom we live” because “the intimacy of life and love together has brought” us “to think, act, and react, as one.” As in the family, as in the city, so in the City of God—only more so and better so.

Union with Christ has three dimensions: an eternal dimension, inasmuch as God “chose us in Him before the foundation of the world”; a covenantal and incarnational dimension, “since in his incarnation Christ was obedient as the second man and last Adam”; and an existential dimension, “since the Holy Spirit brings us into a real spiritual bonding with the risen and ascended Lord.” Although baptism is something we do in the sense of ‘going through the motions,’ it symbolizes what God has done for us, our baptism “into Jesus Christ”—rather like the formalizing of a resident alien’s citizenship or, to use Ferguson’s analogy, the naming of a child, who integrates the name into his own identity later on. In being “named for the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” you join the family of God, the Kingdom of God. “As believers we possess an permanent and irreversible new citizenship.” As in all families and regimes, you will then be taught what it is to be a member. In this case, the Gospel amounts to a comprehensive citizenship lesson: “Thinking through the logic of the gospel corrects, cleanses, recalibrates, transforms, and sanctifies us emotionally as well as intellectually.” Your soul turns its attention away from the principles and habits of your former ‘family’ or ‘country,’ In entering the new regime you put aside the habits of mind and heart you once had. “How can we who died to sin still live in it? You cannot both have died to something and still be living in it. There is a law of non-contradiction: you cannot be in one and the same sense, at one and the same time, in both and the same realm, both dead and alive.” “This is gospel logic,” and the conclusion of the syllogism is that we have, in Paul’s words, “died to the reign, the dominion, the authority, and the rule of sin.” “We are no longer sin’s citizens” or, more accurately, its slaves. Christian freedom means freedom from sin, in Christ; as with any regime change, freedom from one regime entails entering another. Not all revolutions or regime changes are for the better, but in this case, “by nature we were in Adam, but now we are in Christ”—“transferred from Adam-Land to Christ-Land,” a substantial improvement. Baptism thus “means fellowship with the Trinity through union with Christ in his death and resurrection.”

Any regime requires a certain way of life. “Know your new identity,” your new family name, your new citizenship, “and it will determine how you live.” It is the responsibility of the Holy Spirit, and also of the human rulers of the Christian ecclesia, to teach that way of life through action or example and through rhetoric and logic. This will be necessary because (again like any regime) this one will face conflict, ‘civil’ and ‘foreign.’ “We are now involved in a Spirit-against-flesh war.” This war differs from the wars we fought in the previous regime. “We may have experienced inner conflict before we became Christ’s. But any conflict we experienced then with the flesh was in the flesh—instances of “simply battling with ourselves.” The rule of reason over thumos, the rule of reason-directed thumos over the appetites seen in (for example) Plato’s Republic, is a triumph of natural morality. But it isn’t Gospel morality. Paul maintains that “only if we live by the Spirit can we avoid gratifying the desires of the flesh”—philosophy, the love of wisdom, being a naturally better rule of flesh over flesh. “Flesh” means not only our bodies but our minds and hearts. We can defeat sin “only by refusing the desires of the flesh and simultaneously living in the power of the Spirit.” In this we model Jesus in His crucifixion (“the ultimate negativity”) and His resurrection (“the ultimate positivity”). When Augustine writes that Christians live as captives and strangers in the earthly city, he means we have become aliens to our former regime by rejecting its way of life, members of the regime of the Spirit. “I used to be a citizen of the first. I have become a citizens of the second.” To be sure, the “flesh” is still in you. It is impossible for a human being to emigrate from one country to another, or to undergo a change of regimes in his own country, without carrying with him some of the habits of mind and heart he absorbed when living that way of life of the old regime. You will always speak the new language with a trace of the old accent. But you can be progressively sanctified, be made more and more separate from the way of life of the old regime and more attuned to the way of life of the new regime.

Therefore, to advance in sanctification, to ‘naturalize’ ourselves in the new regime, the new citizen should ask himself: Does this thought, sentiment, action “enable me to overcome the influence of sin, not simply in my outward actions but in my inner motivations? Does it increase my trust in and love for the Lord Jesus Christ,” the Ruler of the new regime? Since sin’s “root cause is the worship of self,” how does a given thought, sentiment, or action turn my soul away from myself, and toward God? Ferguson calls attention to Paul’s command to “put away orgē,” usually translated as wrath but more precisely as exasperation or impatience.” “The root cause of impatience and exasperation lies in our response to the providence by which God superintends our lives,” a passion which “at its heart is a self-exaltation over others, and a dissatisfaction with the way God is ordering and orchestrating the events of our lives.” When Christ “comes by his Spirit to dwell in each of the members” of His regime, he gives them the authority to rule the passions, even the thoughts, that disoriented us in the past, and threaten to disorient us again. “Expulsion” of in and “infilling” of the Holy Spirit “must accompany each other” if sanctification is to occur.

The Gospel amounts to a sort of Declaration of Independence. “The Spirit does not bypass our minds and work directly on our emotions or affections” but instead “addresses our minds through the word of God, simply because we are created as rational, thinking beings. How and what we think determines how we feel, will, and live.” As with the Declaration of Independence, this means war, an “inevitable” war because, like the Americans of 1776-1781, “we have not yet been fully and finally delivered” from the grip of the tyrant. Like the Signers of the Declaration, we are personally responsible for acting on our declaration, enabled to resist by the Spirit but acting in self-defense. And we must will ourselves to fight. The reasons so to will are the rewards we will gain, justice, and gratitude. That is, we will gain the better way of life, forever; we will fulfil our obligations to the God Who created us; and we will acknowledge the sacrifice God made to redeem us. And ‘we’ is the correct term. The church is indeed an assembly, an association or fellowship. For all the French revolutionaries’ exaltation of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, “where you deny the place and role of God the Father you cannot maintain the family concept beyond its genetic and nuclear context”; soon the Terror commenced, and so it has done in many subsequent, far worse, regimes that have purported to uphold communitarian principles.

All this talk of the Spirit and of God’s love might suggest that spirituality and agapic love, the powers that unite the new Christian regime, have displaced the laws of God detailed in the Torah. Ferguson rejects the sentimentality of love, even agapic love, unstructured by law. Hence the denigration of the ‘legalism’ many Christians charge against the Israelites, and often against modern Orthodox Jews, as well.

But “the role of the sanctification of the Christian cannot be quite as simplistic as a radical love or law antithesis might suggest.” As the ‘Old’ Testament makes clear, “love was always at the heart of God’s law,” which He gave “by love to be received in love and obeyed through love.” Although we now live in “an antinomian world in which the law of God is regarded as the enemy even if human laws are still necessary,” “Jesus himself teaches that if we love him we will keep his commandments.” Indeed “not only does love not abolish law, but law commands love,” as seen in the double command to love God and love your neighbor as yourself. “Love provide motivation for obedience, while law provides direction for love.” God wants his creatures to love Him, but not in any way they choose. He sets the terms and conditions of rightly-offered human love, whether it is directed toward Himself or toward human beings. He has also set conditions on His own love for us, as seen in His covenants.

Ferguson points to changes in God’s regime and therefore His laws. The law governing Adam and Eve differed from the law delivered to Moses, and both of these differed from the Noachide Commandments. Like all wise founders, God laid down laws suitable to the people for whom He legislated, living in the circumstances of their time and place. For example, “the Ten Commandments… expressed, largely in negative terms, what God originally willed I a positive way for Adam and Even in the Garden of Eden.” The law again “takes on a new context and shape after Pentecost—Jesus is now the model of obedience. Yet it is, in essence, one and the same law of God.” It aims at the human good as defined by the Creator of human beings, not as human beings define or misdefine the human good. After the Fall, “major distortions and malfunctions have affected our instincts.” “Were that hard-wiring totally destroyed we would cease to be distinctly human,” but “relics” or “fragments” of it remain, and all of God’s postlapsarian regimes, and all of His postlapsarian legal systems, build on that.

Jesus’ own life on earth showed “what perfect obedience to the law looks like.” “In him we see God’s law in human form.” Further, Jesus teaches ‘the spirit of the law’—its meaning. He condemns the scribes and Pharisees not for their legalism but for what Ferguson calls their “externalism,” their failure to understand and live by the law’s purpose. “By contrast,” Jesus “shows the spiritual significance of the law” insofar as it “deals with inward thoughts and not simply outward actions.” The law commands men not to commit adultery by their actions, but its intent, its spirit, is to rectify their minds and hearts, to curb their sexual passions.

With respect to the structure of the Mosaic law, Ferguson finds in it three divisions. The moral law, the Decalogue, “was foundational.” The Decalogue “was then applied to the life of the community in the land in civil legislation and a penal code.” Additionally, some of the laws were ceremonial, “directives given for the restoration to sinners of a way of access to and fellowship with God.” Because the Decalogue underlies the others, they alone were “spoken to the whole congregation”; they alone “were written on stone tablets”; they alone “were written by the finger of God”; and they alone were kept in the Ark of the Covenant. The civil laws, by contrast, were not directly written by God and were “to be kept while the people were ‘in the land'” of Israel. Unlike the moral laws, the civil and ceremonial laws “possessed no inbuilt permanence” but were “in place only until the coming of the promised Messiah.” It is of course the status of Jesus as Messiah, and as God, which divides Jews from Christians to this day. In maintaining that Jesus is Messiah, that Jesus is one person of the Trinity, Christians maintain that “the final sacrifice” has been made, thus abrogating the ceremonial law, and that the international ecclesia of the faithful has been founded, making the civil laws of ancient Israel no longer necessary. The law now exists “in the hearts of God’s people through the indwelling of the Spirit.”

With respect to “the moral dimensions of the law,” Jesus fulfilled them by obeying the law and “also by paying the penalty for our breach of it.” “The law-maker became the law-keeper, but then took our place and condemnation as though he were the law-breaker.” His death and resurrection fulfilled the law’s ceremonial dimension because Jesus acted as High Priest, “offering himself as the real sacrifice that would take away sins once for all.” There would subsequently be no need for repetitive sacrifices, except in the sense that Christians sacrifice not themselves but their sins in their Holy Spirit-guided and empowered efforts at sanctification, at aligning their hearts, minds, and actions with God’s regime. And finally, Jesus fulfilled the civil dimensions of the law by founding a kingdom “not limited by either geography or a distinct ethnicity.” “We can still learn important principles from the way in which the Decalogue was applied in the sphere of civil law, but we are no longer ethnic Israel.” The Christian equivalent of the exodus from Egypt to the Promised Land is the exodus from the human regimes, ‘the world,’ to God’s regime, His ecclesia. Ferguson quotes the Book of Jeremiah 31:31-34 as the prefiguration of this: “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.”

Sanctification therefore means the imitatio Christi. All regimes aim at some conception of ‘the good’ for those who live within it. Paul “defines ‘good’ in terms of God,” saying “that the ultimate ‘good’ towards which all things work together is our conformity to Christ.” As Ferguson puts it, “only those who are like him will be able to see him as he is”; “only what is Christlike can survive in his presence.” This regime end or purpose and the means by which the laws of God direct us to reach it draw “a demarcation line between Christians and non-Christians”—not the physical borderline seen on maps and enforced by armed guards and walls but a spiritual borderline that may or may not be respected by ordinary ‘worldly’ regimes in their dealings with Christians.

Why does God love us enough to grant grace to us? After all, we aren’t all that loveable. “God does everything for his own glory.” This makes sense if it means that God requires the beings He has created and redeemed to glorify Him. This is the basis of man’s agapic love for God as a command, as a law. In describing the way God’s love for man works in this world, Ferguson carefully translates the phrase in Romans 8:28, panta sunergei eis agathon. Translators often render this, “All things work for good.” Looking at the context of the passage in the argument Paul is making in chapter 8, Ferguson prefers the meaning, He works all things for the good. “God himself is the worker, perhaps more specifically the Holy Spirit whose ministry Paul has been particularly expounding in the preceding verses.” This is the holy God, not the immanent Absolute Spirit of Hegel. His human creatures are sanctified or made more nearly like Him by the working of the Holy Spirit, “the executive of the Trinity.” “Likeness to Christ”—in suffering, death, and resurrection—”is the ultimate goal of sanctification. It is holiness. It is therefore also the ultimate fruit of being devoted to God.”