The Unsubverted Gospel, part 2 of 3

To recap part 1: The gospel is absolutely not that we go to heaven when we die.

The true gospel is that heaven comes here to abolish death entirely, and actually is already here, through those who follow and worship heaven’s King and exhibit his Nature.

While those two formulations might sound similar on some superficial level, they are diametric opposites, and our collective delusion and preoccupation with the former keeps us blind and negligent of the latter, which has crippled the Church.

Contrary to popular misconception, the Church is neither a “hospital for sinners” nor a “museum” for pious statues, but is a forge for saints: It is a foundry of divine life in which New Men are born and shaped from the fire of God’s Spirit, empowered and trained to act as God’s instruments and agents to implement divine order in the world. It is a portal through which the kingdom of God advances into the world for its eventual salvation.

But we don’t see that in practice because, well … we do not practice it, because we don’t believe and understand the gospel in anything resembling those terms.

The gospel, according to Scripture, is “salvation by grace through faith, not by the works of the law.”

That, as stated and properly understood, is the very power of God to save the world.

Except, we have an Enemy who has deceived us by whispering persistently, “Has God really said … ?” He has subverted and twisted every single term in that formulation, and the result is a so-called “gospel” that not only has no power, but actively emasculates and enervates us and teaches us to treat feckless passivity and mindless conformity as godly virtues. So, the Church is rendered effeminate and impotent and poses no threat to the Prince of this World and the spiritual forces of darkness in the heavenly realms who deceive and defile the nations.

When I speak of the Church’s function to be a “forge for saints,” I am often, quite naturally, asked to explain what that looks like in practical, concrete terms, and to explain what the Church should be doing in service to that mission, instead of what it’s doing now. Once the distinction registers between the common “pie in the sky when we die”-version of Christianity and the actual biblical gospel, however, I feel like answering that question becomes an exercise in pointing out the obvious, because the Scripture actually speaks for itself quite plainly once we identify and set aside our confirmation biases and read it on its own terms. Also, the specific manner in which the Enemy has perverted our terminology – and the correct understanding of that terminology – becomes clear as well.

Defining ‘Salvation’: A War Between Natures

“His divine power has given us everything needed for life and godliness through our knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence; through these, He has given us His very great and precious promises, so that through them, you may participate in the Divine Nature and escape the corruption of the world caused by appetites.” (2 Peter 1:3-4)

We already have everything we need for both life and godliness.

We have it by our knowledge of God, who has called us by His own glory and excellence.

It is through these – His glory and excellence – that He has given us His very great and precious promises.

It is because of His promises that we can 1) escape the corruption of the world and 2) participate in the Divine Nature.

That, in summary, is the whole of the gospel.

Now, the popular reading is that, because He “has given us everything,” nothing is left for us to do: We need merely believe, and if we hold the correct beliefs with sufficient sincerity, we are promised entrance into heaven and escape from hell when we die – our doctrinal correctness constitutes a fire-insurance policy to ensure a trouble-free afterlife.

That is clearly not what is in view here.

Rather, because God has promised that, through faith in Jesus Christ, we have God’s own Nature within us – if we believe that, we know we can participate in His Nature and escape the corruption of the world. We can claim that promise and so undergo that transformation.  

These are obverse ways of describing the same action: to participate in the Divine Nature is to escape the world’s corruption, and vice versa.

Many translations render it as “the corruption of the world caused by lust” or “… evil desires” or “ … sinful desires.”

These translations are highly misleading and reflect – I would contend – a bit of doctrinal projection on the parts of the translators, owing largely, I suspect, to our popular preoccupation with getting into heaven after a life of avoiding (or being forgiven of) obvious evil.

The Greek term is “epithumia.”

In Plato’s “The Republic,” he lays out his view of the human soul/psyche, which comprises three parts: the nous, or reason; thumos, or passion; and epithumos, the appetite. The prefix “epi-“ in Greek is an intensifier, meaning “at” or “upon,” which, applied to the root “thumos” means this is passion that is hard-wired into us, i.e., our base instincts and appetites.

I couldn’t say that Peter had Plato’s “Republic” specifically in mind when he wrote that, nor if Peter ever even heard of Plato, but his letter – like the rest of the New Testament and other early Christian writings – was in Koine Greek, and the Greek language of the 1st century, like the common language of any civilization at any point in history, was absolutely undoubtedly a reflection of Greek culture and the collective understanding of such terms, and Plato was inarguably one of the most influential contributors to that culture. So, it is entirely appropriate to consider his definitions of terms, along with other technical terms in wide use at the time, to understand their intended meaning in the Bible.  

“Epithumia,” then, being the plural of “appetite,” would be morally neutral, as can be seen by its use in other contexts in the New Testament: “Jesus said to them, ‘I have eagerly desired (Greek: epithymesa,the verb form of epithumos) to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.’” (Luke 22:15)

There is nothing intrinsically evil or sinful about being hungry and wanting food or having fight-or-flight instincts nor, even, with sexual desire, per se. And, the word simply doesn’t lend itself to the idea that sexual desire (the typical connotation of “lust”) is the sole or even primary source of corruption in the world. So, those common translations miss the point of the text entirely, which is that it is not our obviously wicked, evil and sinful desires that corrupt the world, but our basic bodily drives, allowed to master us, that do so. They become sinful when we are dominated by them, and being dominated by them is our default setting in our fallen state.

This is consistent with the rest of the Bible and its framing of the problem of the human condition. When Man was cursed for eating the forbidden fruit, God told him, “Cursed is the ground because of you … dust you are, and to dust you shall return.”

This wasn’t merely a condemnation to mortality and eventual death, but a relegation to his animal nature.

In Genesis 1, the wild animals created on the Sixth Day were all “living souls” (Hebrew “chay nephesh”) that had emerged from the earth. When Man was made, it reads that “God formed Man (‘adam’) from the dust of the earth (‘adamah’) and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a chay nephesh.”

In calling attention to the recurring use of “chay nephesh,” I don’t want to camp out on that and distract from the main point. I just want to get the common misconception out of the way that “Humans are different from animals because we have souls and they don’t.” No, humans are “souls,” and so are animals. That’s what makes us the same as animals, according to the Bible, not what makes us different.

By the fact that the very name “Adam” is derived from “adamah,” meaning “from the dust of the earth,” the text is emphatically enunciating Man’s identification with the earth, in common with the animals, in juxtaposition with his divine nature from having been made in God’s image and having been brought to life by the breath of God. Adam is a hybrid being, both animal and divine, made of the stuff of the earth and of God’s own breath/lifeforce.

So, when God told him, “Cursed is the ground because of you … for dust (the ground) you are, and to dust you will return,” that meant, “By betraying Me and renouncing My Nature within you, you are reduced to your animal nature, and so you will live like an animal and suffer the fate of animals.”

Being relegated to the level of an animal, humanity’s corruption is in being ruled by our animal appetites. When the Bible speaks of our “sinful nature” that we inherited from Adam, it isn’t that some new quality of “corruption” entered in when Man left the Garden, nor even when he ate the fruit. The corruption is from having been made to be God’s image-bearer and endowed with the nature and faculties thereof, but then stripped of our connection to God and relegated to our bestial nature – a nature that is appropriate and morally unobjectionable for animals, but is obscene for and beneath the dignity of Man. 

This is why the imagery of “beasts” is so often employed to describe the enemies of God’s people, and of the Antichrist in particular. In Peter’s letter, he describes false teachers and other bad influences as “unreasoning animals, creatures of instinct, born only to be caught and destroyed, and like animals they too will perish.” Paul likewise characterized phony believers and enemies of the Church as those whose “god is their stomach.”

“Salvation,” then, means being restored to the original Divine Nature – we are made spiritually alive as God’s own children, and so we have that Higher Nature to draw upon and thereby overcome the bestial nature that corrupts us.

On our own, we are “dead in sin,” meaning, we lack the life of God within us, and so we have only our fallen, animalistic nature to draw upon, which our human faculties of reason and self-awareness can only mitigate and manage through laws and government and societal constraints, but never truly overcome.

Being reborn as the children of God, however, now we can live by the Spirit and be immortal instead of living by the flesh and being doomed to reap only death.

Defining “Faith” and “Grace”: A Quest Worth Pursuing

The all-too-common institutional understanding of this salvation is that, because it is all by God’s grace and not by works, that means there is nothing for us to actually do – just believe, and await God’s grace on the other side of our funerals.

The Adversary has convinced us that the “faith” that is the condition and prerequisite of regeneration just means “holding the correct doctrines affirmatively in our minds,” or, even – “uncritical acceptance of whatever conventions are handed to us by our particular religious institution.”

But, no – “faith” in the sense intended by the biblical writers just means “faith” in the same sense as in any other context outside of religion:

It means investing where we believe we’ll reap the best return.

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.,” Jesus said.

Likewise, when Peter wrote that God “has given us everything needed … to participate in the Divine Nature,” it was not to assure Christians that they could relax and coast on the promise that God had already done everything for them.

Rather, the apostle wrote, “For this very reason, you must make every effort to add to your faith Arete (typically translated “excellence,” or “virtue” or “goodness,” but is best left untranslated for reasons to be explained), and to Arete knowledge, to knowledge self-mastery, to self-mastery perseverance, to perseverance godliness, to godliness brotherly affection and to brotherly affection love.”

Clearly, he wasn’t talking about “faith” to mean passive belief in a set of doctrines as our ticket to heaven. “Faith” means believing God’s promise that He has given us His own Nature, and if we believe that – first, we understand what an unspeakable, incomprehensible Gift that is.

History, legend and fiction are rife with stories of adventurers going on dangerous and arduous quests for great mystical or scientific artifacts that will bestow immortality or enlightenment or otherwise answer life’s greatest questions or challenges – the Holy Grail, the Golden Fleece, the Fountain of Youth, the Philosopher’s Stone, the Spear of Destiny, the Library of Alexandria, the Monolith, the Kwisatz Haderach, etc.

In these stories (a few of them actual historical accounts), men risked untold blood and treasure in pursuit of such a Prize because they believed all their sacrifice and struggle would pay off, somehow, by achieving immortality (literal or figurative), enlightenment, divine favor or some great knowledge that would be the Answer to life.

In the word of God, we are promised infinitely more than that. Everything we could hope to obtain by finding the Holy Grail or any of those other MacGuffins is already promised to us, if we have faith. 

“I have become (the Church’s) servant by the commission God gave me to present to you the word of God in its fullness – the mystery that has been kept hidden for ages and generations, but is now disclosed to the Lord’s people. To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory,” Paul wrote to the believers in Colossae. 

The gospel is that, for those of us who put our faith in God through him, the Messiah – “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,” Paul said – dwells within each of us individually, and even more so collectively.

If we put our faith in God through Christ, we are heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, and that means we are destined for immortality, enlightenment and the universe itself.

“All things are yours, whether the world or life or (victory over) death or the present or the future – all are yours, and you are of Christ, and Christ is of God,” Paul wrote to the believers in Corinth.

If all of those aforementioned relics and artifacts and MacGuffins actually existed in real life and were everything they are reputed to be within their respective legends or narratives, and if a person managed to amass all of them, the benefits still would not begin to compare to what we are already promised by God through faith in Jesus Christ.

So, first, Peter wrote what he did to convey the immense, unfathomable greatness of God’s grace toward us. He didn’t elaborate or belabor the point as I have because his audience already understood what that meant – having “the Divine Nature” within you already said it all. For us, though, it isn’t so obvious, because 2,000 years of familiarity has bred a level of contempt or, at least, indifference, which is compounded by our collective misconception about what “salvation” actually means.  

But he wrote that also to reiterate that the transformation does not happen of itself. God doesn’t just do it all for us – acting upon us as passive objects, in exchange for us merely holding the correct doctrines. The entire point of the gospel is to restore us to our original design as God’s active agents in the world. He sent the Messiah to redeem us to by turning all of us into messiahs, in effect: “Christ in you, the hope of glory,” Paul said.

We have the life of God and all that it entails within us, but in seed form. The Christian life is a matter of cultivating it, which is why Peter said, “Therefore, you must make every effort to add to your faith” those qualities of the Divine Nature that he listed.

And this is consistent with plenty of other passages in the New Testament in which believers are likewise exhorted to strive, to press forward, to labor, to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”

These exhortations are made to individual believers, of course, but it’s on the understanding that the Church itself exists for the purpose of mentoring us in this – the entire mission of the Church is tied up in that single pursuit: in “making disciples,” which only begins with winning converts, but just as essentially entails training those converts in their participation in the Divine Nature:

“So Christ himself gave that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of ministry, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.

“Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming. Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of … Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.” (Ephesians 4:11-16)

Of course, we have no shortage of institutional machinery in routine operation within the Church that purports to be doing this, and we declare this to be so as a matter of doctrine, but … Does anybody really buy that?

That aforementioned familiarity has bred so much casual indifference and low expectations that we gloss passages like this over and think of it all in terms of vague abstraction, so we don’t read a passage like this and then compare it against the complete disarray and immaturity and doctrinal (and functional) confusion that characterizes modern Christendom.

The messages we consistently get from the pulpit convince us that when Peter wrote, “Therefore, you must make every effort to add to your faith” those qualities of the Divine Nature, we take “you must” to mean, “It is totally optional, if you want to score bonus points with God, if you want to make a token effort to be a good person.”

Which likewise numbs us to the rest of the passage, in which Peter lays out both incentives and warnings regarding his exhortation:  

“For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. For anyone who lacks these things is nearsighted and blind and has forgotten the cleansing of past sins. Therefore, brothers, be all the more eager to confirm your call and election, for if you do this, you will never fall. For in this way, entry into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ will be richly provided for you.”

Being unfruitful and unproductive in our knowledge of Jesus Christ is a serious danger, we read elsewhere. Salvation can be – and all too often is – lost, we read in this very epistle only a few paragraphs later. It can be lost by willful, defiant, unrepentant sin, but is far more often lost by complacency and neglect.

Our entire mainstream, popular Church is characterized by such complacency and neglect, though, and that’s why we don’t see passages like Ephesians 4 and 2 Peter 1 lived out practically.

With that background established, we can return to the original question that elicited this series of articles: What does “the Church as a forge for saints” actually look like, in practical terms?

What does it mean for the Church to mentor people in their “participation in the Divine Nature”?