Masters Revisited: One of the friends mentioned in my previous post about the Peter Masters sermon had actually been working his way through the same message and forming his own thoughts before he ever saw mine. So, in a sense, we were both looking at it at the same time, independently of one another. Now that I have seen some of his reservations and observations, there are a few that I think are worth considering further – not because I want to begin dissecting the entire sermon, but because they raise some larger questions that go well beyond Peter Masters or this particular message.
One of them is Masters’ phrase, “credited freely to our moral account.” I had already kind of balked at that wording myself. Scripture does speak of righteousness being counted, reckoned, or imputed – especially in Romans 4 – so that language itself is plainly biblical. But “moral account” feels like it stretches the image a bit further than Scripture does, almost like turning it into a detailed heavenly bookkeeping system. Romans 5 just speaks more simply of “the gift of righteousness.” Maybe the caution isn’t against reckoning or imputation itself, but against letting the accounting metaphor get more elaborate than the Bible’s own language.
Another observation raised a question that seems worth considering. Are we sometimes so concerned to explain exactly what we mean by righteousness that our qualifications begin to overshadow Scripture’s own wonderfully simple declarations? Scripture never directs us to any righteousness found within ourselves, but it does speak with remarkable boldness about the righteousness that is ours in Christ. “By the obedience of one shall many be made righteous.” Romans 5:19. We are “made the righteousness of God in him.” II Corinthians 5:21. And Christ “is made unto us – righteousness.” I Corinthians 1:30. Perhaps there is something to learn from that simplicity. Our righteousness is not a fiction or merely a theological designation. It is real because Christ Himself is our righteousness, and we are really in Him.
After some of the conditional language that both of us picked up on, my friend made this observation, and I have kept thinking about it:
“Why does he blame Catholic teaching when this is the thoughts of all flesh by nature – and is so prevalent in ALL religion! All men think God requires sacrifice and atonement and works? And that ceremony works, law keeping works, and that grace is needed. It’s co-operative effort – no? Don’t they? Yes, historically Luther had to deal with the Church’s doctrine, but he had to deal more with the flesh! Which agreed with his church! Only Scripture could release him!”
That seems to me much larger than a criticism of Roman Catholicism. The instinct to contribute something to our acceptance before God did not begin with Rome. The flesh already wants that. It wants some place for works, obedience, ceremony, faith, or human response to stand alongside grace. Religious systems may organize that instinct differently, but the instinct itself is universal. Rome may have given that instinct a theological system, but it did not create the instinct itself.
Luther certainly had a church system to confront, but underneath that he had the same flesh every man has. And perhaps that is the larger point worth carrying away from all of this. The Gospel does not merely correct the errors of one church or one theological tradition. It confronts something native to us all – that persistent desire to bring something of ourselves into the ground of our acceptance before God. Only the Word of God can strip us of every imagined contribution and turn us wholly away from ourselves to Christ. MPJ