The following program is a presentation of
Grace Communion International and Grace Communion Seminary
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On this episode of You’re Included,
author and theologian, Dr. Roger Newell, discusses Mary’s response to Gabriel’s announcement to her,
as well as the importance of the Incarnation.
Our host today is Dr. J. Michael Feazell
We really appreciate you taking time to be
with us today. As I understand it, you were
the first American student that James Torrance
had in doctoral studies in Aberdeen.
That’s right, that was 1978. I arrived just
a little bit after Professor Torrance came
the previous semester to be the professor
there after having been the teacher in Attenborough,
Scotland for quite a few years. So it was
a great opportunity and privilege just to
be his … one of his early students and to
get to attend his seminars and to get to know
him as a mentor and as a friend, and it’s
a great, great privilege.
You mentioned that he instilled the passion
in you for pastoral ministry …
That’s right. I mean, the time I went there
I was thinking maybe I wasn’t sure if I
was going to do pastoral work or just pursue
teaching. But having studied with Professor
Torrance I became more aware of a call that
I really did want to pastor and work … and
he inspired in me a sense that really the
parish, the local church is the laboratory
where people come to know the living God
and we become participants in that and to
be… roll up your sleeves and do that was
very, very significant, and I wanted to do
that.
So you spent better part of a little over
a decade in pastoral ministry before you began
teaching in George Fox.
Thirteen years total.
That would bring to the theology of real,
practical, meaningful, tone that we don’t
often see in theology.
Well, again I was also fortunate in having
studied with Ray Anderson at Fuller Seminary,
and Ray had made it important and modeled
for this same kind of connection and integration
between pastoral care and pastoral work and
the best theology one can articulate.
We had the privilege of having Ray on this
program two or three times. In some of the
writings that you’ve done, you’ve written
about the encounter between Mary and the angel
Gabriel. And Gabriel announces to Mary what’s
going to happen to her and then her response
to that, and then you tied that in with our
response. Could you talk about that?
The reason I started in with the story of
Mary as a way of trying to understand how
a person responds to God is because, in a
way, she’s the first one in the Church who
has the word spoken to her by the angel, … she’s
the one through whom the Word becomes incarnate.
And so her response then becomes, in some
ways, a way to begin to understand what it
means and how you and I can learn many years
later to be begin to respond. So she is a
great example to see what is actually going
on in learning how to respond to God. And
so I wanted to start with her.
Now, one of the things that we see with Mary
that you point out is that, her response is
not just some ideal, high, moral, Christian,
so called, godly response, as it were, as
we think of that sometimes – she’s a little
worried about it, upset, to some degree – there
all kinds of questions she has, it’s a very
human response.
Yes, if we take the halo pre-arranged off
her, then that’s very important to realize
that she, as the text says very clearly – was
deeply troubled. Here she is a young woman
going to her prayers, as a devout, young Jewish
maiden and what she got in her prayers that
day was not what she was looking forward to,
and it wasn’t expected, and the text is
quite clear that she was deeply troubled by
what happened and she was also afraid.
And so the text that they wanted to try to
make her into some kind of an idealized portrait
they would have air-brushed that very human
response away. But rather instead, there it
is and this is how she responded and it’s
part of her journey to then saying, “I’m
the handmaid of the Lord, and let it be to
me according your will.” But it’s all
included and that’s an important key, an
important thing for us to remember that – there
is no perfect way to respond to God except
to be genuine and have… and to be honest
before God. And if I’m… if there’s fear,
if there’s trouble – things going on in
my life – that’s part of what I openly
and honestly bring it to the table. And God
accepts that.
In preaching and teaching that, as we tend
to hear admonition that jumps us right to
the very end – let it be unto me as the
Lord has spoken, and…without even giving
acknowledgement to the fact that there is
a journey to get to that spot, a human journey
and the honesty that you spoke of, being a
part of what we are able to have as a part
of our response – at admitting to God, dealing
with God, like Jacob did – this wrestling
with God over issues, is a very real part
of the Christian experience. And as you’ve
written, that has become a bit lost in some
of the liturgy and some of the teaching and
preaching that we hear today.
Well, yes, I suppose it’s inevitable that
we jump too quickly to the last word and we
don’t always listen to the next-to-the-last
word to… we’re in little bit of a hurry
to the happy ending, maybe, or the perfection
and so, the real journey that people have
to on sometimes is telescoped or narrowed
because we… and maybe that’s part of the
fact that in our culture everybody’s in
a hurry, too. And the pastor’s in a hurry,
he wants to have perfected saints. He doesn’t
want… sinners are very messy to deal with.
And if you could clean them up more quickly,
maybe everybody’s job would be a little
easier. But for whatever reason that, that’s
doesn’t seem to be how, how we are formed.
And so… but to try to prematurely, or shrink-wrap
Christians and make them saints, in a way
that’s artificial or you know, hot-house
plants, doesn’t seem to work. Then we have
to begin to unlearn the… maybe the false
responses we thought we begin to make to God
because we think everybody expects them of
us. But they aren’t from our own hearts.
And so we have to somehow sometimes unlearn
those manufactured approaches and learn again
to respond to God genuinely as did Mary.
You talked about the “ought” and the “should,”
how did you put that…
Well, the danger is that, in the urgency or
the anxiety sometimes we preachers have is
to get people to the bottom line is that we
can pressurize people to make the response
we think they ought to make and to… maybe
lack a little confidence that God is going
to do what he intends to do and so we feel
like we have to pull the strings a little
bit and so we can put pressure on people and
I think I said as a result.. instead of letting
people respond to the good news, we have this
twist and sometimes we turn the good news
into “should” news.
And this is something that’s been talked
about, I think very perceptively, by C.S.
Lewis and why he wrote theChronicles of Narnia. He
says that one of the things he thought that
was inhibiting people from really hearing
the gospel is that, he talked about the stained
glass window in Sunday School associations
whereby one was told, one ought to be grateful
to God, one ought to be thankful. And having
heard this so often it caused the person to
focus on themselves and their response, rather
than on the object that the reality of God
… which naturally evokes a response. And
so, we inadvertently, in the church too often
turn the good news into “should” news
and so, it’s not our intention but what
it means is the recipient … takes it eyes
off the source and tries to manufacture a
response that we think is expected and that
cuts off, ironically, cuts off our feelings
and our feelings freeze up.
Don’t we do that a lot especially in worship:
we try to make ourselves feel something, we’re
not sure exactly how we should feel but we
know, not to be holy and not to be sanctimonious
or something and so we try to will ourselves
into the right feeling and, as you say, our
attention is totally on ourselves then instead
of on the object of our worship.
Yeah, that’s exactly right and the problem
then is that we, we become self-centered in
our worship, either focusing on our virtue,
in our… patting ourselves on the back and
thinking well done … or we become also focused
on our failures, our inadequacies and whether
our self-centered response to God becomes
inflated, congratulating ourselves, self-righteous
on the one hand or we become discouraged and
deflated and put ourselves down on the other.
Both are ways of getting in the way and not
being responsive. But rather trying to create
some kind of virtue in ourselves and this,
of course, always leaves us frustrated, either
in a negative way or a positive way – you
know, the Pharisee thinking, you know, “Thank
you God that I’m not like other people.
Wow, I’m really good at this responding
to God.” Or on the other hand is the.. a
person who feels like, everything I do is
hopeless, and I can’t… like Martin Luther,
when he was a monk, he… whatever he did
wasn’t good enough. And so he constantly
was berating himself and criticizing himself
and he was… he had made himself miserable
Jesus told the parable about the two sons.
One responded right away with the right words
by saying, “I go, sir” when his father
told him to go work in the field. And the
other one, swore, refused… but in the end,
the one who responded with the wrong words
is the one who did what he was asked, and
the other one didn’t.
Right. Even though he said he would and so
the words came easily but actions, once the
father looked the other way, was nowhere to
be found. So it reminds us, I think, of how
important our response is meant to be not
just a verbal one but with our whole hearts
and so, again, the second sentence is a great
example of somebody who took him a while.
At first he let his father know, was it his
father or the master, I forget, he just said,
you know, “I’m not doing this.” But
it percolated, he thought about it, and he
was honest and genuine in his initial, “No”
but as he thought about it, and he thought,
“You know, I think I’m gonna do what I
was asked.” And so that was… that had
integrity.
We have a fear of responding in a way other
than rightly and so that contributes to wanting
to look at ourselves and analyze how we’re
responding, how we’re thinking. But aren’t
we freed to respond freely and honestly if
we remember that it isn’t our response that
matters, that Jesus has already responded
for us perfectly as our… as the human who
stands in for us before the Father, if we
can rest in that, we don’t have to worry
about or think about or second guess how we’re
responding.
Yes, I think the way I would put it is, and
I say this because I’ve been just once again
wrestling with the whole relationship between
God’s reaching to us and coming to us and
our responding to this, and I’ve just been
re-reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his wrestling
with this issue in his little book, The Cost
of Discipleship, and he talks about the danger
of cheap grace – grace that is…. comes
without any response on our part because it’s
all been done for us. And he says, this is
what’s wrong with Germany, he’s writing
in 1937 when basically Fascism has taken over
a country of good doctrinally Lutheran justification-by-faith
Christians and yet somehow their response
is… has seem to have been perverted. And
so what we do… and so he is trying to recover
a sense of response that has integrity.
And so this is where, I think, he makes a
great point that grace is absolutely free.
It’s absolutely free but it’s always costly
because it cost God everything. It cost him
sending his own Son, so therefore, it could
never be had by us by anything other than
by a response of… a deep response of gratitude
and thanksgiving – that is far more than
verbal.
Professor Torrance used to bring this home,
I think, in an important way when he talked
about God’s grace being unconditionally
free, unconditional. But he says, as a result,
then the response is, “Therefore” not
“If you.” If you believe, if you have
faith I will love you, and so on. But because
our God, in Christ, has loved us and given
us himself so freely, therefore, we want to
respond. That freedom to respond is evoked
by the reality of God, not by some sense of
obligation on my part – that is, in order
to earn merit, but the most natural way of
responding to such a good gift.
And it’s freeing to know that our response
is taken up by Christ, in such a way, that
it matters and that it’s healed. There’s
so much of a tendency toward carrying unnecessary
guilt and carrying an unnecessary burden of
second-guessing everything we do and worrying
that God might not be accepting us and is
probably fed up with us and is angry at us.
But how freeing is it to know that as we respond,
out of gratitude and a heart of appreciation
for one who has, in fact, healed our responses
and made them right, it seems to me that when
I’m thinking rightly about that, that it
keeps me in a channel of rest and freedom
and the less I’m focused on myself and how
I’m responding, the better I respond. It’s
when I’m focused on myself and my responses
that I seem to be heading the edges all the
time and bouncing down the river instead of
going down the middle.
Absolutely, I mean. Another way that helps
me understand this better is to always be
aware that my response to God is always an
accompanied response. It’s not initiative.
It’s not me taking charge. It’s not me
asserting myself, but it’s learning how,
in my way like those people we read about
in Scripture, learning to realize that my
response, whether it’s initial fear, initial
hesitation or initially being deeply troubled,
is accompanied. And this is part of the importance
of the humanity of Jesus that Jesus became
human, fully human and his… whatever response
that we ever learn to make is never autonomous,
or on our own, but it’s shared with Jesus
himself in his own humanity connecting with
our humanity. And that is part of the freedom
and the freeing experience of learning to…
knowing that my response is not isolated in
some kind of splendor of its own religiosity
or whatever, but is taken hold of and brought
before God the Father by Jesus the Son.
You’ve written about Apollinarianism, which
you call functional Apollinarianism and how
it affects our worship patterns and even contemporary
music. What is… could you describe Apollinarianism
and then functional Apollinarianism and then
how does that affect our worship patterns?
Well, this is a very complicated issue, in
some ways and I don’t… maybe we could
get into this little bit further later on.
But what I would say now is what Apollinarianism,
for our purposes, is that it focuses on the
sovereignty or maybe, say, the deity of Christ
but forgets or sets aside the real humanity
of Jesus. And when sometimes this affects
us, we then have a worship experience, we
go to church in which we have forgotten that
Jesus is truly human and Christ in his humanity
accompanies us in our prayers, in our worship
and so we actually do have a priest – a
priest in his humanity who accompanies our
worship, again to the Father.
But if we don’t have that sense of Jesus
as humanity and we just have a sense of Christ
exalted Lordship, then we sometimes think,
well, I’ve got to substitute, I need to,
somehow intercede for myself or I have to
somehow, or maybe my pastor has to somehow
become the bridge. And we can inadvertently
put all of our marbles there on these very
frail humans – myself, or my pastor, or
whoever – to somehow create the connection
between ourselves and God and we end up with
a functional Unitarianism in our worship and
our prayers….
JMF:  Which is though Jesus is high and exalted
and we think of him that way and we re-create
the gulf between humanity and God by focusing
on Jesus as high and exalted…
Pure deity. God alone, God only. But the uniqueness
of our faith, I think, as Christians is that
God is, has in Jesus become truly human as
well as truly divine.
He is the bridge and the mediator as a human
being (That’s right.) I think a lot of people
think of Jesus as being human when he was
on earth during the Incarnation itself and
then he was… when he’s resurrected and
ascends to the Father, he’s not human anymore
– now he is the exalted God, with God, and
we lose the human connectedness, but he remains
human…
Yes, this is a very profound and important
thing that our humanity has been taken up
into God through Jesus, and our humanity is
no longer apart from Jesus. And so, this is
a tremendously important thing to think of.
The implications continue to to multiply,
I think, as we ponder what this means. But
certainly, part of what it means is that my
human response to God is never… and should
never be seen in isolation from Jesus as accompanying
me in his humanity. So this is the great theme
of the book of Hebrews that Jesus is our high
priest who in all things knows what we’re
going through, as tempted as we are and yet
without sin. But he takes… he knows what
it’s like to be human and he knows that
from the most deep place of what it means
to be a human being – in terms of all our
human frailty.
And that is the humanity he has worn and recovered
and then taken up to God. And that includes
me and all of my awkwardness, and my brokenness
and my imperfections, as well as my strengths.
But that’s been accompanied and that’s
what then I’m learning to offer back up
to God. But not in a way that’s uniquely
set apart from…in some kind of a … isolated
offering to God. But then again, it’s this
communion, a communion of love with the human
Jesus.
We’re one with him as he is one with the
Father and he’s… there’s no other way
to be human except to be human in Christ – where
we live and move and have our being in him
and not just as the exalted, resurrected One,
which he is, but as the human being – the
glorified human.
And even in his glory – remember those wonderful
words from Charles… or John Wesley – rich
wounds he had visible above and beauty glorified
– even in his being exalted, he is… his
wounds are still visible – his humanity
has not been discarded as being something
extraneous to the Incarnation, extraneous
to the reality of God, but has been brought
together again – this is the healing, the
bringing together of heaven and earth, where
God’s will shall come and his will… shall
be done on earth as it is in heaven. And Jesus
is the first fruits of all that. And he is
going to take all of creation with him and
he has done that. And he will do that, but
it’s an accompaniment now. And creation
will no longer cut off and separated from
the redeemer – from its creator and redeemer.
Reminds of one of the last scenes of Jesus
in the New Test… or in the Gospels with
the disciples, is after his resurrection,
… they’re out fishing and he’s on the
shore and he wants them to come and have breakfast
with him. This is the resurrected Christ,
it’s very intimate …
And very physical (… real), yeah, and very
physical eating food and this part of the
sheer earthiness of our humanity and this
is included.
You are working on a new book?
Yeah, the… well, the things we’re talking
about initially about Mary and the meaning
of her response is a… this has been a great,
one of the great challenges for me to try
to make sense out of it… encouraging discipleship,
encouraging others to grow and develop as
a pastor and in my own journey to be faithful
to Christ in a way that becomes and continues
to be healthy and real and not artificial
and contrived in order to earn approval – from
either others, or ones congregation, or from
God. But rather comes out of a heart of genuine
response to the good news.
And so I started with Mary, but I’m really
trying to make sense out of what I see as
a tremendous gift that C.S. Lewis, in his
writings has given the church about teaching
people how to respond to God and how to…
and in his instance, how to respond to literature.
What is it about? Why was Lewis such a great
reader? Why was he so receptive that he could
get to the very heart of what he was reading
and pull out what really mattered? There’s
a wonderful wisdom, I think, in his whole
approach to literature which, I think he learned,
and it came to him in his own journey of faith
– where he learned as a … to recover a
faith that he lost to the “should” news
and he learned how to recover and receive
again the grace of God as he went through
a very difficult time. You know, losing his
mother to cancer as a young boy and then his
father virtually… as well because his father
sends him off to boarding school, and he becomes
an atheist, you know, officially and so on.
But all the while he was still trying to be
open and exploring what life is about, but
he had some relentless willingness to be open
and to ask awkward question of reality and
of himself too and ask questions of himself
and eventually this leads him back to, back
to faith. And applying some of those lessons,
which he, as a world-class literary critic,
wonderfully gifted reader, applying that then to learning how to be open in reading of Scripture, our sourcebook.
Like so many, I’m a big fan of C.S. Lewis’
writings so I’m looking forward to that;
I hope it’s published soon and can’t wait to read it.
Well, thank you, me too. I’m working away,
trying to get it in a presentable shape.
You’ve been watching You’re Included,
a production of Grace Communion International.
