At church last Sunday, the pastor was contrasting a Methodist version
of a Charles Wesley hymn with a Lutheran version. The hymn is “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling.”
The reason that the pastor was commenting on this is that she will soon
be leaving us to pastor another church, and the church that she will
pastor is a combination of Methodist and Lutheran churches. She once
told me that you see these sorts of combinations a lot these days, since
there are a lot of small denominational churches, and churches believe
that they can support themselves better and get more done by combining.
The pastor at the church that I attended in upstate New York before
moving here used to be involved in a similar set-up: he pastored a
church that was a combination of Presbyterian and Methodist churches.
But back to the hymn! The Methodist version of the hymn has “Take
away our bent to sinning.” But, according to the pastor last Sunday,
the Lutheran hymn asks God to take away our desire to sin.
When I first heard my pastor make that point, my thought was, “What’s
the difference? They sound to me like the same point!” As I reflected
some more, and especially as I read that book about George Whitefield, I realized that the points are different.
George Whitefield and John Wesley had debates. I already knew that
one of their debates was about predestination—-that God decreed before
the foundation of the world who would come to Christ and be saved, and
who would not be saved. Whitefield believed in predestination, whereas
Wesley did not. But Whitefield and Wesley also debated another issue:
whether sinless perfection is possible for believers in this life.
Whitefield said no, whereas Wesley said yes. (To read more about what
Wesley thought sinless perfection is and is not, see my post here.)
I thought back to Calvinist things that I had read, such as John MacArthur’s The Gospel According to Jesus, Faith Works, and Saved Without a Doubt.
A point that MacArthur made, if I recall correctly, is that Christians
will never be free from sin in this life, but that, once they become
saved, they do not want to sin. Their desire is to please God. When
they do sin, they feel bad about it. I have encountered this sort of
view among other Christians, as well.
That said, I can understand what the Lutheran version of Charles
Wesley’s hymn was saying, and how that differs from the Methodist
version. The Methodist version was saying that God can take away our
bent to sin. The Lutheran version, by contrast, was saying that God can
take away our desire to sin, but that we will still sin in this life;
the overall desire of believers, however, is not to sin. The spirit is
willing, but the flesh is weak, and, on some level, this will be the
case until our last breath.
Where my pastor takes this insight about the contrast between
Methodism and Lutheranism, I am not entirely sure. I doubt that she
believes that she has arrived at a state of sinless perfection. My
impression is that she does, however, prefer to focus on spiritual
growth and advancement, becoming closer to God, and doing good rather
than on beating oneself up on account of sins.
On a related note, I was thinking of a book that I recently read, Carl Schmuland’s Parables of the Deer,
which was written from a Calvinist perspective. Schmuland, in my
opinion, was rather ambiguous about what happens to the sinful nature of
people once they become born-again believers in Christ. In one place,
he said that believers are essentially like Adam and Eve in the Garden
of Eden, prior to the Fall: they can freely choose between good and
evil, rather than being bent towards evil. In another place, Schmuland
was saying that believers still have to contend with their sinful
nature, on some level, which implies that some bent towards sin is still
present within them. I am sharing my impression of what Schmuland was
saying, and I hope that I have conveyed his thoughts accurately, as
opposed to taking his thoughts in a direction that he did not intend.
I was meditating on the second century C.E. (according to A.F.J.
Klijn) Jewish work, II Baruch, a few days ago. II Baruch was saying
that, even though Adam and Eve sinned, people after Adam and Eve only
have themselves to blame for their sins and the punishment that God
dishes out to them. It seemed to me that II Baruch was interacting with
some notion of original sin, and I wondered how developed the doctrine
actually was in the second century C.E. In any case, these passages
encouraged me to ask myself: “If I were in the Garden of Eden, would I
eat the forbidden fruit?” Wouldn’t that be a sign of whether one has
the new, born-again nature—-that we would not commit the sin that Adam
and Eve committed, were we in their shoes? I have read or heard more
than one Christian say that human beings, with their fallen human
nature, would eat the forbidden fruit without hesitation were they in
Adam and Eve’s shoes. That is how some Christians try to justify the
idea that God is just to punish human beings for the sin of Adam and
Eve.
Would I have eaten the forbidden fruit? Speaking for myself, it is a
strong possibility. I can imagine myself not fully trusting God,
believing that God is holding something back from me, and desiring for
myself the wisdom, power, and divinity that the serpent said would come
from eating the forbidden fruit. Come to think of it, though, I can
also envision myself making the opposite decision. And, while I do not
know people’s hearts, I can picture even non-believers going either
way. It’s not as if all non-believers are power-hungry or obsessed with
vainglory.