you may wonder why I have hope in the midst of this suffering...... After the time of Pope Gregory, a gradual but significant shift occurred withing the church toward the belief that the appropriate response to [suffering] was to endure it patiently and thus, with the help of divine grace to merit heaven.....In other words, suffering became a way to work off your sins, with echoes of the Eastern karmic religions. If you accept suffering with patience, it eliminates some of your sin debt and helps you earn Gods favor and admission into eternal bliss. As an example of this, late medieval theologian Johannes von Paltz wrote Supplement to the Heavenly Mine in 1504. There he argued that patience under suffering was so morally valuable that even if you had lived your endure life in unrelenting sinfulness, you could merit complete remission for it all if you only accepted your death with calm faith at the very end. Ronald Rittgers points out that this emphasis on meriting salvation through suffering actually pointed away from early Christian teaching back into a more pagan prohibition of any expressions of sorrow. It resulted, in Rittgerss words, in a virtual Christianized Stoicism. Demonstrations of grief and pain could be interpreted by heaven as a lack of submissive faith, and therefore such outbursts would be less efficacious in procuring a remit from the debt of oness moral failures........ But the coming of European Reformation, and particularly Martin Luthers biblical theology, brought not only a renewal of the Church in general but also a deepening of the Christian understanding of suffering in particular. Luther rejected the medieval view of salvation as a gradual process of growth in virtue that eventually merited eternal life. Instead, he saw salvation as coming through faith, and faith not primarily as an inner quality of purity but as an essential receptive capacity. Faith is trust in the promise of God, the means by which we take hold of salvation as a free gift through Christs saving work, not our own. This had revolutionary implications for the Christian view of suffering. Luther preached that there was nothing more important for a person than to see that he or she could contribute nothing whatsoever to ones own salvation. We can be fully accepted and counted legally righteous in Gods sight through faith in Christ, solely by free grace. To understand and grasp this is to finally know freedom from the crushing burden of proving yourself - to society, family, other people or even to yourself. It means freedom from fear of the future, from any anxiety about your eternal destiny. It is the most liberating idea possible and it ultimately enables you to face all suffering, knowing that because of the cross, God is absolutely for you and that because of the resurrection, everything will be all right in the end. from Timothy Kellers book, Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering
Posted on: Fri, 29 Aug 2014 14:01:32 +0000
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