Jesse balks… abandons sola scriptura to preserve sola fide… sad

I keep wondering why the tribe of bible believers I’m in touch with are too fragile to engage around the actual scriptures they believe are sacrosanct - even more sacrosanct than the 3rd person of the triune god: the Holy Spirit.

A few days ago I wondered about this fear and anxiety of theirs in writing on this blog as I have moment times at my brother Dan’s blog https://throughthesewoods.blogspot.com/?m=1

Well, one showed up: Jesse. 

Sure, Jesse showed up initially with empty snark. Sure, I reminded him of our earlier conversation on the 16th century idea of sola fide (coined by Luther but radicalized by Calvin and radical protestantism into a tortured anti-Catholic pike), a conversation he tried to deflect and divert from. Jesse is trying to hold on to the anti-Catholic prod of “sola fide” and so cannot address himself to Matthew 25:31-46.

But the other day, the dodge stopped for a moment. Asked again to address Matt 25, Jesse wrote this:

“Matthew 25 makes clear that we're not shopping for salvation by tallying good deeds—it shows that acts of kindness flow naturally from a heart transformed by grace rather than from a cosmic merit system. The righteous are surprised when asked, "When did we see you in need?" highlighting that true compassion isn’t about racking up points but about an unselfconscious response to Christ’s presence in others.”

I’ve never read one of the brutalizing Thugs, believers in a 16th century ideology, come out so fresh and clean and honest with their perspective. 

So I responded:

“Thank you, Jesse. An honest, heartfelt answer. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone give Dan an honest, heartfelt, and non-weaponized answer ever.

Can we move this to the appropriate post? Will you copy and paste the above there? And can we move forward from there? I can delete our previous exchange on that post.

Can that work for you?”

Well, Jesse has been writing on his blog and appearing elsewhere. But hasn’t been able to take up the olive branch of open dialogue.

Sad. The fragility, the fear and anxiety - and the existential rage that is the repressed defense against being conscious of one’s fear and anxiety - is so deep with these guys, that they don’t want to reach across. It would weaken their identity as militarized crusaders. Even if they only arm themselves with dusty, dead world concerns.

If he had responded the tenor of the following would undoubtedly be quite different. We could have had a gracious back and forth. But it seems to me that Jesse prefers a bunker war. 

Again I find that, in this instance with Jesse, a committed and micro-focused obsessive worshipper of “the Bible” doesn’t read it well. In fact, with Matthew 25 he reads into it stuff that simply isn’t there, and cannot be there until the Protestant Reformation starts to read scripture slant-wise with pre-determined concerns.

Jesse intuits right things - being smart and being affected for years by christian scripture - but is not fully conscious of what he intuits.

The last section of Matthew 25 is Jesus painting a picture of the judgment of “the nations,” and in the course of the narrative sets the terms of judgment: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and the jailed.

My contention is that this text absolutely ignores the protestant clamor about sola fide. It offers no support, or rather, presents judgment as considering only the position of anti-sola fide when the last judgment comes. It’s only and thoroughly about good works here. 

Also absolutely absent are Jews.* Really odd since the near entirety of Jesus’ message is to the Jews in the Roman province of Judea.

1. The term, “nations,” in the original Greek of the NT is ta ethnē. This term is used exclusively for all the rest of the known world, the Gentile world, and their various vassal states under the Roman Empire, the nations of the eastern Asian world, and the northern and eastern African world.

Jews are Jews and Gentiles are Gentles. And for Jews, all Gentiles are unclean: heathens and barbarians.

2. For Jesus to speak only of ta ethnē, the Gentile nations, as being possible figures of salvation is blasphemy to all Jews of his time. Including his own Apostles and disciples! Even well after Jesus’ resurrection, the Holy Spirit has to beat Peter over the head that the Gentiles are no longer unclean!!*

“And the voice came to him again a second time, ‘What God has cleansed, you must not call common.’ This happened three times, and the thing was taken up at once to heaven.” Acts 10

3. Therefore what we have here is Jesus, ascended as the King of heaven, and passing judgment on all the non-Jewish peoples of the world. 

-Nowhere does it intimate that these are christians and non-christians 

- Nowhere does it intimate that these are men and women; nor does it identify black and white and asian and native americans; nor Viking and Egyptian, Ethiopian, Syrian, Indian, Scythian, Celtic, Germanian, Hibernian, Hibernian, etc.; nor is their position in society pointed out, whether concubine or eunuch, shaman or jester, scribe or shit miler, gay or lesbian or King and Queen. They were, of course, all these things. Had to be. They are the people of the world outside Israel and the Jews living in the Hellenized world

The ONLY characteristic, the ONLY phenomenological aspect of these people on whom Jesus as King is passing judgment… is sheerly and solely their compassion for other people. 

Where is their faith? Nowhere mentioned, nowhere intimated, nowhere inferred. Simply, clearly, singly their loving care for all in need. 

They do call Jesus the King, “Lord.” Both those who are “blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world”, and those who must, “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels….” Both acknowledge the Lord because they are being actively confronted by the King of heaven in the judgment room. Duh.

What is Jesse sensitive to in this passage? For which I applaud him? 

1. That the “sheep” as they are categorized are not out for gain in doing what they are doing.  They are “not shopping for salvation by tallying good deeds.”

2. That true! “acts of kindness flow naturally from a heart”. The sheep are not performing love for other eyes, even the possible eyes of their own guilt. They intend to act on love. And they do. They DO acts of love.

3. The sheep are “unselfconscious.” And so are the goats. Both do not make an ideology out of loving others or denying others. They both are surprised that what they were doing was being seen and both are shocked that their deeds are being judged. 

But in my view, Jesse breaks his faith with scripture - unconsciously - in order to defend his absolute centralizing of the 16th century claim that faith alone obtains grace and not the good work of good people. (As if faith itself is not an act by the human person; but that’s another post.)

Jesse has to read things into this passage against its grain. Jesse violates the story, unconsciously, he is not aware and probably won’t agree that he is violating the text for ideological reasons.

How?

1. He has to import christian faith into the sheep so that their salvation is justified.

2. He has to move aside their acts of love for the suffering in order to centralize the sheep’s faith.

3. In centralizing the faith of the sheep, he has to position the good deeds as a secondary and natural consequence to right faith. Thereby erasing the plight of the suffering from the occasion of judgment altogether.

4. In order to put faith as central to what’s happening, he has to consider all the Gentile world as having been able to hear the gospel message of Jesus Christ AND given a thumbs up or down on believing in Jesus Christ AND, if time was available, having been baptized.

This is wholesale rewriting what Jesus says. Jesus says simply the Gentiles and their nations will be judged by the quality of their mercy to the suffering and oppressed. The Gentiles are only aware of their own relationship to the suffering. (The suffering aren’t even there: presumably they cannot be judged; “those who have little will be little judged.”)

They are all the peoples of the rest of the world and nothing about their identity is in the frame of judgment: whether they’d heard of Jesus or not; whether they were Christian or Zoroastrian or Stoics or Hindu, etc. Baptized faith, meager faith, other faith. All not applicable, not present, not at all the point of anything Jesus says. Some of the sheep may well be engaged in “an unselfconscious response to Christ’s presence in others.” But the text is unconcerned. And if the life of the sheep is a practice flowing from an experienced heavenly grace, nothing is intimated about the source of their beatific vision. May well be Buddha. Jesse of course will be anxiously claiming that it must be Christ. He shares that anxiety with Mormons who were motivated to write an additional testament in which the risen Jesus visits the Americas.

But this is all extra textual speculation that destroys the clear basis of Jesus’ judgment.

Surely they were not all christians? They clearly were not considering anything else in actively loving others. It is only Jesus himself who puts himself in spiritual relationship to the suffering: “my brethren.” It is only Jesus himself who involves himself, includes himself, in all acts of love in community THE WHOLE WORLD ROUND!

“Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.”

What Jesse has done is, as a matter of theological history, taken the position of 20th century Catholic theology. Specifically that of Karl Rahner, who, conscious that he is moving outside the referenced Jesus in Matthew 25, conscious that he is building on 2,000 years of biblical and systematic theology, and 400 years of Enlightenment philosophy, says that those who aren’t Christian but work in dedication to love and serve others, they are “anonymous christians”, unknown even to themselves but not to god. Their faith in love as practiced in their lives is what saves them.

Now, if Jesse wants to be consistent with the text in this way, I won’t stop him.

Otherwise, to save sola fide Jesse has to violate sola scriptura.

Coda: I do actually think that we have to consider this text in the context of the canonical whole of the New Testament. The New Testament is not entirely consistent and is sometimes contradictory. The life of the Christian faithful has continued to reflect on Holy Scripture for two millennia. At many times along the way we have benefited by dialogue with Jewish interpreters, Muslim philosophers, secular scholars. 

We cannot stop. The Holy Spirit is alive in us and moves and blows where it wills. We do not control the mind of god. And, as Jesus promised in John 14, when Jesus was gone he’d give us a book to “teach us everything! Hang on. No. It wasn’t a book he promised. Hmmm… what was it? Ah! The living and active  third person of the godhead!!! But these biblicists are habituated to put scripture before god the Holy Spirit because it gives a superior feeling of control. Blasphemy.

Matthew 25 sits in relation to the whole. But the whole does not give us license to mangle Matthew 25. All parts inform the whole and the whole binds the truths of the parts… when faithful readers engage with the holy task of interpretation as the body of Christ reading together and not as sectarian individuals.

Earlier in the chapter, Jesus honors those who are prepared and not actually surprised. Their preparation is in honoring their own gifts, their responsibilities, and their own role. They DO things that matter. Passivity by holding on to one thing only is death. The fig tree is alive. But it does not DO anything.

The war of “faith alone saves” vs being “saved by works” is an old, dead, misinformation rife, sectarian war that cost 40 million lives. In the latter quarter of the 20th century Catholics and sacramental Christians came to agree that faith is act in a life of love. This is what saves. Without love, everything is dead, even faith. Without faith love runs aground, exhausted, emptied.

Radical Protestants, though, live on dead dogma. Which is why they invariably become the most brutal of Christians.

It is not “fide” where Jesse goes wrong. It is “sola” where Jesse fails. Of course he will follow sola fide by describing what fide moves the human person to do. Fide is the cause of, the mover of behavior, and therefore primary to behavior. He cannot ascribe fide itself as a human person doing something. And so, doing things, loving things are secondary. Well, not even that. Jesse infers that doing loving things only count when there is at least an “unconscious” awareness of Christ. This makes the suffering ones tertiary or, in fact, erased. Jesse does not value actively loving the very person themselves as themselves. This is messed up. It contradicts what Jesus commands: “as I have loved you, love one another.” A (Jesus) loves B (me) who loves C (the other) who loves B back.

A to B to C to B.

In other words, Jesus is saying that faithfulness is a life of loving.

Jesse, replacing all human persons with the abstraction of “fide”, makes the series B is “aware of” A and so does good things to C. C is just an object not a subject.  This actually looks like consciously performed good works.

B aware of A does things for C. 

Salvation by works.

Oh, man! Jettisoned sola scriptura for sola fide and now lost both!

Damn.

___

* [to be added later]

___

Matthew 25 - The Judgment of the Nations

31 “When the Son of man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate them one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, 33 and he will place the sheep at his right hand, but the goats at the left. 34 Then the King will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; 35 for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, 36 I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ 37 Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty and give thee drink? 38 And when did we see thee a stranger and welcome thee, or naked and clothe thee? 39 And when did we see thee sick or in prison and visit thee?’ 40 And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.’ 41 Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; 42 for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ 44 Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see thee hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to thee?’ 45 Then he will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.’ 46 And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”