Level 4
Statement for Unity As Being Primary
THE CHRIST-SPIRAL
by
The Rev. Dr. A. Rand Peabody
Specialized Minister, retired
Classis Rockland-Westchester, Regional Synod of New York
Reformed Church in America
Let me state at the outset that sound Biblical exegesis for us Christians MUST include an in-depth examination of the original language, whether Greek or Hebrew; PLUS, a thorough-going acquaintance with the historical-contextual milieu OUT of which that original language arose; AND, most importantly, what I will call a “CHRIST-SPIRAL”, meaning a Spirit-infused amplification of the spiritual principles involved.
“Christ-Spiral” exegesis entails this: that we Christians believe and affirm that our Lord uniquely fulfilled the purpose of the Law, both in His own Person, and by bringing into our human reality the reconciling guidance (and advocacy) of the Holy Spirit — the meaning of “Paraclete”, the word Jesus used for the Spirit in both John 14:6 and John 16:7. Christ’s supreme accomplishment results directly in an elevated new reality of our own being-toward-God (per II Corinthians 5: 17 (NKJV): “. . . if anyone is in Christ, [that person] is a new creature; the old things [have] passed away; behold, new things have come.”) And Paul goes on to say in Verse 18: “Now all things are of God, who has reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.”
This ministry of reconciliation is hardly wishy-washy in a moral sense— for living in the world as people of Christ’s reconciling love, while maintaining our own personal at-rightness in God’s eyes, requires our continuing Spirit-led adaptation on personal, interpersonal, and ecclesiastical levels. That’s difficult, yes. But can’t we agree that that is what we should be striving for? And if so, we must not ignore the impetus toward such a transformative reality with regard to any Biblical exegesis we undertake.
Indeed, the entire dynamic of the Sermon on the Mount spirals Christ’s hearers in this direction: from a focus on a simple adherence to the LAW of God, to an emphasis on our living in the love-dynamic newness of the reconciling SPIRIT of God which opens up a deepened dimension of faith-based obedience. For instance, at Mathew 5: 43-44 (NKJV), Jesus illustrates such Christ-Spiral exegesis this way: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you. . .” This is likewise what Jesus is pushing the Pharisees toward in Matthew 15, those would-be pious ones who remain stuck on the lower spiral of a rote and narrow obedience to the letter of the Law.
And similarly, in response to an inquiring Scribe, Jesus singles out the two greatest commandments of the Law: (Mark 12: 30-31, NRSV): “. . . you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ When the Scribe affirms what Jesus has said, He replies (v. 34), “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” Indeed!
Hence, the “top” of the Christ-Spiral might be thought of as nothing less than the “new heaven and the new earth” foreseen in Revelation 21, and perhaps also as the “ladder” connecting earth and heaven that Jacob
dreamed of in Genesis 28!
Now if Jesus had actually perceived all parts of Torah as being of equal weight, why would He have submitted in the first place to the Scribe’s question about identifying the most important of the commandments? And for that same sort of reason, on the last night of his earthly life, He gave us a single over-arching commandment of His own creation and institution— a commandment that he intended henceforth to be our primary standard of Christian conduct, and the hallmark of our Christian witness. “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13: 34-35, NRSV) That commandment is, of course, (in Latin) the “mandatum” of “Maundy” Thursday.
It could be said that we are living currently in what we might call “the Great Meanwhile”, the span of time between Christ’ s Ascension and Christ’s Coming-Again. And in this Great Meanwhile, the God-aided work of ongoing reformation on the part of our Reformed-and-Reforming Church must be seen primarily through this clarifying lens of Jesus’ Summary of the Law, powerfully amplified by the corollary of his New Commandment. Everything else found in the Law and the Prophets— and everything in the entire Age of the Paraclete that began at Pentecost— depends on such. While we may be “bound for glory”, in this ever-pressing present God expects us to bring that glory into reality here “on earth, as it is in heaven.” (Matthew 6: 10b, NKJV) And the way we are to fulfill this “Great Commission” of God’s is by undertaking ministries OF reconciliation IN the reconciling Name and Spirit of the Lord Jesus.
So what keeps us from more perfectly doing that? The primal impediment to our Paraclete-empowered embracing and embodying of Jesus’ Summary of the Law is identified at I John 4: 16-19 (NRSV). There, the apostle stresses that love has not been made perfect in anyone who FEARS, “because fear has to do with PUNISHMENT”. It is only through our faith in God’s reconciling love as it has been perfectly revealed in Christ, and as it is being constantly refreshed by the Holy Spirit, that we can be carried beyond fear. Or we might put it this way: the Old Brain, with its fight-or-flight instinct, is henceforth transcended by what we might call the “New Brain” of that “New Creation” that Paul was inspired to describe at II Corinthians 5: 17-18. That salvific break-through can only happen as the direct result of the divine fiat that removes the crippling threat of eternal punishment. The entire Protestant Reformation was conceived on this point— that while we are ALL sinners, we are JUSTIFIED IN GOD”S EYES THROUGH OUR FAITH IN THE ONE HE SENT (Romans 5: 1, NKJV: “Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. . .”; and Ephesians 2: 8-9 (NKJV): “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.”
Now none of this is intended to decry those who remain rooted in an Old Testament sense of a legalized covenant with God, and who strive to be faithful to the resultant expectations of personal conduct and moralized application. For the one and only axis of the Bible, at whatever level it is entered upon, is the Word of God.
But for us Reformed Gentiles in the RCA and CRC, the Christ-Spiral must be seen as being the highest reality motivating our great Reformation principles: namely, that we are saved through God’s grace alone, and by our response of faith as bestowed by the Holy Spirit. Therefore, we are meant CONSTANTLY – the true meaning of “SEMPER”—to be about the business of reforming our faith-understandings and their moral and ethical applications according to the Word of God AS that Word is mediated through Christ and His Paraclete. As Hebrews 4:12 says of that divine Word that our High Priest alone can mediate: “. . . the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.”
We believe that Jesus brings a perfect embodiment of that Word into our human condition. And Jesus is an over-turner of tables. For that matter, so is the Apostle Paul! The whole Book of Philemon, for example, turns on the idea that a former slave can and should be regarded as a brother. Also, with an even bolder breakthrough, Paul’s inspired insight recorded at Galatians 3: 28 transcends three powerful religious and/or societal institutions: the first being a chosen-ness by birth-race— for from now on there is in Christ neither “Jew nor Greek”; the second being the societal institution of slavery— in Christ there is “neither slave nor free”; and the third being attitudes about male superiority in terms of a human being’s personal value— for in Christ there is “neither male nor female”.
SO in the light of this series of affirmations, can it not be said that the spiritual marriage of two Christ-centered human beings is NOT any longer dependent on birth-race, or on one’s standing in society, OR even on one’s gender? For all of us are now to be seen as being spiritually equal in Christ. And so, by the same Christ-spiraling principle, marriage now becomes a more fully SPIRITUAL union instead of merely a physical one. This in no way denigrates the institution of marriage. Rather, it elevates and dignifies all marriage.
This would seem to be why Jesus so decries divorce for Christians— because He perceives it as the destruction of a SPIRITUAL at-oneness that had been dedicated, at the moment of its inception, to God-in-Christ. We see Christ-Spiral exegesis clearly at work in what Jesus says at Matthew 19:8-9, NRSV: “It was because you were so hard-hearted that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another commits adultery.” Therefore, in Jesus’ eye, ANY sexual activity following such a willful destruction of one’s marriage body is inherently adulterous. This can only be seen as a clear amplification, in a spiritual dimension, of the primary meaning of the conjugal union as originally described at Genesis 2:24.
In such a perspective, then, the marriage “body” must be seen primarily as an en-Spirited and love-imbued partnership, and not mainly as an anatomical and purely procreative uniting. In Ephesians 5:32 (NKJV), for example, Paul describes a “great mystery” that encompasses the entire marital relationship. “This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church.” Surely, Paul did not mean to invoke anything of a sexual or gender nature in creating that metaphor!
It is perhaps just this sort of realization that has led Pope Francis to advocate recently for same-gender civil unions. If he thought such unions would bring eternal damnation, he assuredly would not have taken such a stand! “Homosexuals have a right to be a part of the family,” he is quoted as saying. “They’re children of God and have a right to a family. Nobody should be thrown out, or be made miserable because of it.”
It is clearly the case that NOWHERE in the Bible is there any explicit teaching regarding the marriage of same-gender couples, and certainly not with regard to female same-gender marriage. All we know is that the New Testament clearly condones the monogamous marital relationship as being the ONE fit container for sexual expression. ALL other forms of sexual activity can be considered porneias. But NOT marriage! So why invoke the fear of eternal damnation— others’, or our own— as a pretext for banishing Christ-confessing, faith-justified would-be MARRIAGE partners from our fellowships?
In such a light, then, might we not picture Jesus likewise saying, with regard to same-gender couples, “Commit these faithful ones to me— and meanwhile, you go and do what I care MOST about— spreading my love wherever you can, and being fishers of humanity.”
Can we really justify the notion that the Lord would desire that we destroy an entire denomination, and indeed one with great missional power, either because some of our churches, in their own studied and prayerful Christian conscience, believe that there is no Biblical impediment to their solemnizing such marriages, or, in the opposite case, because others still find enough implied Biblical reason to do so?
In conclusion, the New Testament, and indeed Christ and His Paraclete in particular, consistently spiral the physically-based personal and societal identity of God’s covenant-people to a more highly en-Spirited level, with Love paramount over Law. And again, I would stress: the AXIS of that spiral, at whatever level it is entered upon, is ever and always the Word of God. That is so from Genesis to Revelation. It is so in every passing moment of our lives. But for those of us who come into a consciousness of God’s love uniquely through our faith in Jesus? Aren’t we able to perceive God’s everlasting Word though a lens that is vastly (infinitely?) different than what can be seen simply through the covenants of the Old Canon? This must surely be a major aspect of what Paul affirms as our “new creation” in Christ. And it entails our deepened experience of a perfect love that casts out all fear of damnation, along with all the Old-Brain attitudes that result in fight-or flight reactivities based on a fear of everlasting punishment.
Praise God, our faith in such perfect love, along with our attempts to
express it, are made possible only by the sheer grace of the Lord who made heaven and earth, and whose will it is to justify us through such faith, now and eternally.
And THAT is the power and promise of the CHRIST-SPIRAL that should figure into ALL of the Biblical exegesis we undertake.
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Response
The Statement above reaches its main point when Galatians 3 is dealt with. It seems that conclusion is captured in the following quote:
SO in the light of this series of affirmations, can it not be said that the spiritual marriage of two Christ-centered human beings is NOT any longer dependent on birth-race, or on one’s standing in society, OR even on one’s gender? For all of us are now to be seen as being spiritually equal in Christ. And so, by the same Christ-spiraling principle, marriage now becomes a more fully SPIRITUAL union instead of merely a physical one.
It seems the conclusion here is that the liberation of Galatians 3, as far as same-sex marriage is concerned, lifts us above gender limitations. Marriage is now spiritual instead of merely physical.
With this in mind I’d like us to consider an approach that was taken years ago. In the mid-1800’s John Humphrey Noyes founded the Oneida Community near Oneida, New York. One of their practices was what was called complex marriage. This was an expression of free love in which any and all members of the community were free to engage in love making, as long as both members consented. It has always been the understanding of the Christian church that members of the church are all members of the same family. We are all brothers and sisters. It is a spiritual bond that unites us. So, according to the conclusion above that marriage is now spiritual and not merely physical, that fits right in with the Oneida Community’s practice of complex marriage. So couldn’t the reasoning above in support of same-sex marriage also be used to justify complex marriage? The freedom that Galatians 3 expresses with respect to Jew/gentile, slave/free and male/female is certainly not a freedom limited to just two; it is not only relevant between two people who are married. It is relevant for the entire Christian church. So there should be no reason to limit marriage to just two people.
However, Galatians 3 is not about marriage. Taking a look at the seven verses surrounding Galatians 3:28 it is clear what the topic at hand is:
23 Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. 24 So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith. 25 But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, 26 for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. 27 For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. 28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. 29 And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise. [bold added]
In 7 verses no less than 15 times words are used which refer to salvation by faith. The entire chapter, the whole book of Galatians is about salvation by faith, not works. This passage has nothing to do with marriage.
Applying the words of this chapter to marriage opens us up unavoidably to practices such as complex marriage. That would not be right.
B
Conclusion
As this Statement currently stands it is not considered to stand under scrutiny. This material is open to further comment. If it is determined that the Statement does in fact stand under scrutiny this page will be modified and this material will also be added to Level 3.