How Did We Get Here?

"A God without wrath brought men without sin into a world without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross." In this famous and more than slightly scolding description of Protestant liberalism in the 1950s, Yale's H. Richard Niebuhr actually put his finger on the perennial heresy of the human heart since humanity's fall in Adam. In this article, I will lay out in very broad terms the rationale for the theme we have chosen for 2007: "A Time for Truth."  

The Glory Story: Why Pelagianism Always Makes Sense

 

A British monk named Pelagius arrived in Rome and set about to initiate a widespread moral clean-up operation. Augustine, a North African bishop of great standing in the church, stood in his path. Hardly uninterested in holiness, Augustine himself had been set free from a licentious life. Nevertheless, he knew that the power of that liberation was the gospel of God's free grace. By the time the fracas was over, Pelagianism, with its denial of original sin and rigorous demand that people save themselves by following Christ's moral example, was condemned by more church councils than any heresy in church history. Nevertheless, it has remained the most constant threat to the gospel. Why does it keep growing back so quickly right after it has been cut down? Because Pelagianism just makes sense to us. It's the "glory story."

Following Luther's Heidelberg Disputation, which was following Romans 10 and 1 Corinthians 1 and 2, the Reformation contrasted the theology of glory with theology of the cross. As Gerhard Forde nicely summarized,

The most common overarching story we tell about ourselves is what we will call the glory story. We came from glory and are bound for glory. Of course, in between we seem somehow to have gotten derailed-whether by design or accident we don't quite know-but that is only a temporary inconvenience to be fixed by proper religious effort. What we need is to get back on "the glory road." The story is told in countless variations. Usually the subject of the story is "the soul." ... The basic scheme is what Paul Ricoeur has called "the myth of the exiled soul."     Continue at Michael Horton