Justification and Sanctification (Part 1 of ∞)

A story about a week of struggle, culminating in a shallow scoop of some deep ideas.

This church is good because they baptize you and shampoo your hair at the same time.

What’s the point of Christianity, and why should anyone take it seriously? I’ve been going through a particularly rough patch personally the past few months, which I won’t get into here, but it has worked its way all the way into the core of my spiritual journey. And for the time being, there have been fewer and fewer consolations as I’ve gone — in Christian practice or in any other.

This week, for instance, as I was trying to sort things out, I was reading a book called Christian Theologies of Salvation: A Comparative Study by Justin S. Holcomb, which takes the history of Christianity and divides it into four eras: patristic, medieval, Reformation (and Counter-reformation), and eighteenth through twenty-first century, and it highlights four or five theologians from each. I think it’s a great way to approach the topic, and I was really looking forward to reading this book, but as I tried to get into it, everything I read seemed like dogmatic gobbledygook.

The sin of Adam, communicated to all of humanity. Saving blood. Justification. Faith versus works. What? I felt like I was trying to drink from the well of “living water,” but the well was totally clogged with the cork of dogma. As though Christianity comprises two billion people trying to undertake a serious yogic journey by wandering around in the confines of iron-age folk tales — an effort as effective as trying to run an multinational organization with nothing but a poem, or something.

When I get stuck in my efforts to engage in Christian practice, sometimes I try to back all the way out of Christian thinking altogether, back to premises that seem to me to be more systematically clear. I greatly admire Eastern spiritual models, Buddhism, Vedanta, for the way they are so focused on just describing processes and unadorned realities. You’re not trying to extract a way of being from a story about Abraham trying to kill his son because God told him to, or Paul’s ideas about what happened when Jesus was on the cross — or, for that matter, Martin Luther’s ideas about Paul’s ideas about what happened when Jesus was on the cross. Instead, you’re trying to get in touch with features of reality described in as direct and meticulously defined terms as the authors could manage.

In the Vedic model, for instance, salvation from the suffering of worldly life can happen through four means:

• karma yoga, self-abdicating service;

• bhakti yoga, devotion and worship of divine beings, whose intercession helps transform us;

• jnana yoga, contemplation of divine concepts, toward increasingly incisive insights;

• raja yoga, assiduous self-mastery and self-perfection.

All of these make sense to me, and all of these can be seen in Christianity — in obvious ways. So maybe Christianity is just a yoga. Right? Maybe it’s a yoga sort of discovering itself, using the cultural language of Judaism to gradually invent concepts that Eastern mystics developed much earlier? A clunky, crudely systematized yoga, tailored to a particular fandom, couched in a particular lore?

As I scratched around, I came across an essay entitled “Interreligious Encounter and the Problem of Salvation,” by John Moffitt, who had been a monastic member of the Rama-Krishna order for 25 years before he converted to Christianity. This seemed to me to be the dude I was looking for. And sure enough, Moffitt is arguing that God’s extends grace to everyone, though many religions, and he encourages Christians to learn from other religions. Nice.

But also, he builds his thesis partly around Pope Paul VI’s 1964 encyclical Ecclesiam Suam (Paths of the Church), in which Pope Paul asserted that Christianity (by which he meant Roman Catholicism) is the only true religion. Then Moffitt says that despite the diversity of Christian views, all Christians agree on four things:

First, God wills the salvation of everyone and does not positively condemn anyone unless he or she is guilty of an unrepented grave personal sin. Second, Christ is the supreme Savior and sole mediator of salvation: after Adam committed sin, no one has been able and no one will be able to obtain salvation except through dedication to Christ’s person. Third, one cannot pass by means of Christ to salvation except in uniting oneself -- at least in an invisible manner -- to the church, which is at the same time visible and invisible, and in having a real, positive relation to baptism (and also, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, to the Eucharist). Fourth, the duty of the church is to preach to the world the whole plan of salvation ordained by God and by Christ.

To be honest, a lot of this still seems to me like it’s going in the right direction, actually — depending on your definitions, and if you dial back the absoluteness of the rhetoric. But also, it’s not hard to sense how this would land with a lot of people. And on some level I found myself wondering, in a time when ICE agents are conducting paramilitary operations in U.S. cities in what is amounting to a sort of ethnocentric state-cult holy war, how does help, at all, to say that Christianity is the only true religion, or that salvation is only possible through Christ?

What does it even mean that Christianity is the one true religion, when Christianity is based in part on things like the original sin of Adam?

Who’s Adam??

Why not chuck the whole Christian exploration altogether? For me, it’s because in the best of times — which, for me, has been often — I still access something richer, more life-filled, and at once more soothing and more piercing in Christian practice than I do in Vedanta or Buddhist practice. I’m not saying that what I’ve experience is not accessible through Vedanta or Buddhist practice; I’m just saying that I don’t feel it in Buddhist and Vedic practice the way I do in Christianity.

I muddled through the week, into Saturday, when I started to write this. Along the way, I went back to Holcomb’s book, and suddenly I heard something that made more sense. And then following a reference in Holcomb, I went to Origen’s commentary on the Epistle to the Romans — which is not available on Kindle, by the way, for some reason, even in the anthologies of Origen’s writings, but which I was able to find and download through the WorldCat access I have through seminary.

I could quote Holcomb here, or Origen, to illustrate the experience I was having as things came into focus, but as I look through the texts I’m honestly not sure quotes would help. I’m realizing that, in my Christian studies, surprisingly often quoting the texts doesn’t help. Sometimes it feels like what one gets isn’t exactly in the texts; it’s more like when one’s reading the texts — scripture, or the writings of the most adept Christian theologians — something that is being harkened to by the texts starts to subliminally impresses itself on the mind. That’s what happened when I started reading Origen’s commentary on the Epistle to the Romans yesterday. Suddenly all that gobbledygook locked into a much clearer focus.

In a few classical Christian concepts, I saw ideas that I could clearly understand. What follows is not a proclamation of doctrine, it’s just me talking to myself about what I came up with — an talking aloud, so you can listen. (Or, hopefully, you’re still there):

Justification

Paul was the earliest theologian talking about justification in Christ. What does this mean? It can start to sound like a feature of a vicarious atonement, wherein Jesus had to be crucified to absorb and stave off God’s wrath — an idea that doesn’t make sense to me at all.

But here’s what does make sense to me: Here we are on earth, doing our best to make do. We head toward what seems good, and we turn away from what seems bad, and we make all kinds of mistakes. But the fundamental proposition is that, beneath all of this day-to-day activity, there is an underlying question of how much we are in rebellion against God. There’s an idea that God invites us to continual communion, promising not an easy way, but an ideal way through life, and rebellion occurs when we try to get ahead of God’s way (or when we shrink from it), through the improper exertion of our will.

(If you don’t resonate with the Biblical stories like Adam and Eve, or Cain and Abel, there’s an apt contemporary myth in the fall of Anakin Skywalker, I’d say, who couldn’t accept that he wouldn’t receive the title of Master, or that the Light Side path might entail the loss of his beloved. I also think of Napoleon snatching the imperial crown from the pope to put it on his head himself. That’s the kind rebellion we’re talking about here. Or one of the kinds, anyway.)

Rebellion can be buried under many layers of our day-to-day experience, including many layers of apparent success and even apparent (but shallow) fulfillment. It may not take more than a few moments of honesty with oneself to determine the extent to which this kind of rebellion is occurring. And, as I understand it, justification essentially describes the moment when this rebellion ends, and when we make the commitment to cooperate with God again. We fully accept our limitations, our calling, the crosses we have to bear in life — and in all that is broken, we are justified.

You can’t think of this in legalistic, contractual terms; you have to feel into the language toward a spiritual reality, intuitively. Look at the world, and all of the habits of mind and being that are counter to a true principle of just, harmonious peace, or shalom. Can you sense some of that rebellion in you? No? Then what I’m saying won’t make any sense. But, yes? Then maybe you’ll feel justification when some amount, the next layer, of that rebellion stops.

I can’t say that I fully understand these dynamics in the light of the most gracious, life-giving truth, let alone that I have wholly mastered them, but I’m pretty clear that this is a real thing. And that it’s worth some contemplation.

Sanctification

Sanctification is the process by which we are rendered more and more Christ-like, more and more like the nature of God, and what God intends us to be. Originally, this was the process that I was thinking about exploring with this essay, but in the end I think it’s hardly going to get discussed here. But there’s an idea that, while we are in recovery from our state of rebellion, we can’t necessarily always tell the difference between the parts of our consciousness that are in rebellion, and the parts of our consciousness that aren’t. Sanctification is, in part, the process by which this sort of thing gets cleared up. Our conscience evolves; our perception of the desirable and undesirable parts of reality evolves. We evolve. Toward God.

I’m pretty clear that this is a real thing, too. And I think it would be interesting to try to explore this idea through psychological frameworks.

Jesus / the Christ

In Christian practice, the agent that brokers the truce, at the moment in which our rebellion ends, is Jesus, the Anointed, the Christ. In evangelical Christian practice, one of the ways to do get this going is to call Jesus into your heart, or to ask to be saved, in some kind of formal ritualized way. In most Christian practice, it is believed that it can also be done through the rite of baptism. Rites are fascinating. They’re symbolic, but they can also be genuinely activating. Eucharist . . . Labyrinth . . .

In my experience, the intercession of Christ is this process is distinct, particular, and unmistakable. The whirlwind ceases. A little patch of good, solid ground appears. Something turns in the battle. Something which has been unwell within is made well. Perhaps something which has been unwell without is made well, too. It feels like it’s not just us in the fight, but something working on our behalf. And it’s not at all a dry, theoretical experience. It’s a rich, light-filled, love-filled, saturated reality.

What exactly is taking place when you connect with the Christ, and what this has exactly to do with the first century prophet from Palestine, is not entirely clear to me, and I’ve never heard it articulated in a definite way that seems to me to be truly enduring. But it’s clear to me that something in this is real, too — whether or not it is absolute. If there’s indeed a spiritual battle between surrender and rebellion and, perhaps, involving the surrendered part and the rebellious part of any of us (and I perceive there is), then something about turning to the Christ can put us on solid ground.

The way to encounter any of the realness here is not to read and read and read theological premises, necessarily, but to encounter premises, even in very small bits, and then feel into what starts to seem real from there. Any the reading about Jesus, for instance, is for the purposes of achieving a relationship with a living Christ. The words are meant to transport; they’re not the thing.

The Church

The process of sanctification occurs through an on-going process of three to four relationships, depending on how you look at it. Bare minimum, there’s a relationship with God, with Jesus, and with the members of the church. (Or, you could say there’s relationship with the church, and relationship with the Triune divinity of God, Jesus, and Holy Spirit.) But it’s clear to me that having the divine relationship and having a community relationship are both essential to the process. Without either, the process starts to stall out.

One of the peculiar things about this for me is that the relationship with a church is important even though the premises that are the basis of the church may seem a little off. In fact, I don’t think you really have much of a choice in this matter; I think maybe you have to find community in a place where you generally feel good about being, but the premises don’t fully makes sense. I don’t think that the demonstrated value of church community justifies the premises; I just think that the real underlying spiritual mechanism, whatever it is, requires engagement with spiritual community, the sangha, the assembled body of Christ, and that the work of this mechanism is happening even when it’s not being perfectly described by the language of group — which is, basically, always.

It would be great if one day some assembly could be undergirded with a set of premises that was truly durable. That’s something I’ve never experienced in the fullest way that I think one can, and it’s one of the main things I’m looking for in life, and that’s one of the main reasons I do all of this writing.

I think it’s vital to test every premise against one’s own personal sense of what’s true and good, to feel into ideas that are beyond your current understanding, but also not to accept anything that doesn’t jibe with your own sensibility. This means, I think, that it’s vital to be really tuned into oneself and one’s own reactions to reality. To arrive at a radiant truth, you have to be studying the “book” of yourself, also. Then when you encounter the faith claims, you can test these and metabolize them. Divine teaching comes in human wrappers. There’s a translation, sometimes, an alchemy that occurs when the divine in the human-wrapped teaching authentically meets the divine within us.

At the same time, it’s important to have a steady diet of spiritual premises — even though they may be wrapped in human limitations — in order to fuel this alchemical process. Scripture. Theologians. Etc.

Fundamentally, it occurs to me that religion begins with need. Right now, I am personally living with a need for justification, and that’s what I see in Christianity: the justification that occurs in surrender to God’s will. There is divine agency that helps, and there is spiritual transformation that is profoundly deep — indeed, cosmic in depth and scope.

Or, there are just words upon words. Who knows whether or not these words, about other words, are in any way pellucid?

Deep breath.

Have I said anything new or useful here? I’m not sure. God knows. And you, of course, will judge for yourself.

Our journeys continue; our journey continues.