Apostasy

I remember a story I was told as a teenager.  Our youth group leader had been to a church nearby and he shared it from a pastor he had heard there.  Anyway, the story goes that this pastor was in the grocery store checkout line and the fellow in front of him gets ready to pay but instead of using cash or a check or a card he swipes his hand over the scanner and it comes up that he doesn't owe anything.  The pastor took this to mean that the man had the Mark of the Beast in his hand.  Now I heard the story secondhand and have always assumed that this pastor was pretty advanced in years.  It seems like the confusion and fear of senility to me, but in the culture I was raised in there was this undercurrent of terror about the End Times.  There were Signs of the Times everywhere.  The decline in morals was a sign that it was like it was in the days of Noah and that judgment was coming.  All of the signs were kind of clustered around Apostasy.

I first began to suspect that I am an apostate about age 14.  I thought about having sex constantly.  Now Christians are supposed to have this supernatural ability to resist temptation, to avoid sin, which I have never had.  I was terrified because to admit that I am constantly in sin, that every time I am tempted I fall, seemed to cut me off from all hope.  Moral reformation, me getting better, was the only reliable way to know that I was saved.  And although I couldn't admit it to myself, I could never shake the feeling that I was getting worse not better.    I didn't know that as long as my salvation depended in any way on me that it was a lost cause.  I didn't know then about Martin Luther and Monergism.

Luther's great protest against Romanism was against legalism and works-righteousness, against a church who had, almost professedly, used its tradition to make the Word of God of no effect.  The problem with Romanism is that they have added to Christ's finished work.  They have added to His Word tradition.  They have added to His prophetic office an infallible oracle in the Vatican.  They have added to His priestly office a legion of intercessors headed up by a substantially divine Queen of Heaven.  But my purpose is not to show the all too obvious sins of our brothers, but to convict our self-righteous asses of the same sins.

The Reformers accused the bishops of their day of inappropriately bringing money into the church, of the buying and selling of positions in the church, and of making themselves rich at the expense of God's people.  Can Evangelicalism with its pastors with private jets, Kenneth Copeland approaching billionaire status, living in church owned and paid for mansions, bring this charge today with a straight face?

They have justification by faith and works working together.  We have justification by faith alone with the indispensable addition of works, which we ludicrously call sanctification.  But if we consider the whole of salvation, rather than trying to slice it up like a bunch of lawyers, they have salvation by faith plus works and so do we.  If you have to split hairs to show how things are different then they are only different by a hair's thickness.  The buying and selling of indulgences is actually more spiritual than the Gospel of Success we have bought into.  So on their worst excess, the one that triggered the whole Reformation, they are actually doing better than we are.

They have transubstantiation, the belief that in the Eucharist the only thing on the table is the Body and Blood and it only LOOKS like there is bread and wine.  Our great advance on this is to teach that there is only really bread and wine on the table but it kinda reminds us of the Body and Blood of Christ.  I don't believe that any creature understands the mode of Christ's presence in the sacraments.  How the bread and wine is the Body and Blood of Christ is as mysterious as how God is Father and Son and Holy Spirit without confounding the persons or dividing the essence.  But if transubstantiation is out then I throw out with it any doctrine that refuses to admit the real presence of the bread and wine and the real presence of the Body and Blood.

Luther teaches the real presence of Christ's body and blood in, with, and under the elements, the oral manducation by unworthy as well as worthy communicants, and the ubiquity of Christ's body; while Zwingli and Calvin, carefully distinguishing the sacramental sign from the sacramental grace, teach—the one only a symbolical, the other a spiritual real, presence and fruition for believers alone. The Romish doctrine of transubstantiation is equally characteristic of the magical supernaturalism and asceticism of Romanism, which realizes the divine only by a miraculous annihilation of the natural elements. Lutheranism sees the supernatural in the natural, Calvinism above the natural, Romanism without the natural.  Philip Schaff Creeds of Christendom

(To which I would add modern Evangelicalism which sees the natural without the supernatural.)

 The history of the Christian Church is the best refutation of progressive sanctification that there ever could be.  I prove that we are not getting better individually by the fact that we are not getting better corporately.  The lesser, the individual's sanctification, is included in the greater, the church's sanctification.  It would be a great goal for the church to simply catch up to Luther, to advance to the position we occupied 500 years ago.  Sadly, we would probably not be any worse off with the Romanism of Trent than we are with our bastardized Evangelicalism.  The two are both equivalent to Judaism.

 This only I want to learn from you: Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?  Are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh?  Have you suffered so many things in vain—if indeed it was in vain? Therefore He who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you, does He do it by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?— just as Abraham “believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.”  Therefore know that only those who are of faith are sons of Abraham.  And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel to Abraham beforehand,saying, “In you all the nations shall be blessed.”  So then those who are of faith are blessed with believing Abraham.For as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse; for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who does not continue in all things which are written in the book of the law, to do them.”  But that no one is justified by the law in the sight of God is evident, for “the just shall live by faith.”  Yet the law is not of faith, but “the man who does them shall live by them.”

Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us (for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree”), that the blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles in Christ Jesus, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith. -Galatians 3

You can't do works by faith.  It is impossible.  "The law is not of faith, but 'the man who does them shall live by them'"  Faith can't keep a single commandment.

But the Scripture has confined all under sin, that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe. But before faith came, we were kept under guard by the law, kept for the faith which would afterward be revealed. Therefore the law was our tutor to bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But after faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor.

We are all apostates.  We have all gone back from the Gospel.  But by naming us all failures He makes us all objects for His pity, and His pity is truly great.  The Law exists to bring men to Christ, once that has been done it has no more use whatsoever.  

But the discipline of law creates a desire which it can not satisfy, and points beyond itself, to independence and self-government: the law is a schoolmaster to lead men to the freedom of the Gospel.  -Philip Schaff 

The Gospel is for Apostates.
There You Go(plus lyrics)