Over the last few weeks, a few of my friends have posted the following from John Piper on their Facebook pages:
“To walk away from Jesus because His representatives are failures is to make an absurd choice. Jesus is our only hope. The fact that he has bad representatives, including me at times, doesn’t make Jesus defective. Jesus is the one person in the universe who has no defects. To walk away from Him is to walk away from the one hope of your life.”
It’s short, it’s clear and it’s essentially true, but it still leaves me a little uneasy.
The underlying problem with this statement is that it drives a wedge between Jesus and his representatives. You don’t like the church, that’s ok, you should still follow Jesus. The problem is, when you follow Jesus, you get the church whether you like it or not. Christianity is a community religion, it’s not about individuals following Jesus, it’s about a body of people growing together. In fact the Bible uses that word body to talk about the church; it actually says that the church is Jesus’ body. If you want to see Jesus on this planet; you have to look at the church. And that’s scary.
John Piper seems to be saying that if you are looking for hope in life, you can avoid all the messy stuff with people and latch on to Jesus who is perfect.
However, the Scriptures teach is that Jesus came down to us, lived amongst our messiness, identified with it and drew together a community of people in his name. The glory of the Gospel is shown in the cracked lives of Christians living together. Through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, his people have been reconciled to God and are learning to be reconciled to each other. Yes, we make a mess, but Jesus is not ashamed to call us his siblings.
Yes, Jesus is without defects and he is our only hope; but we come to that hope through living with his representatives, making mistakes, learning to forgive and learning to be forgiven. It’s not easy being part of the church, but it’s all part of the equation when you follow Jesus. Our corporate life together is a living demonstration of the truth of Jesus message, it’s not an optional extra.
John Piper, for all his strengths, is a product of the extreme individualism which dogs the Western Church at this point in history. We need to take a fresh look at Scripture and to learn from the rest of the world to see that Christianity is not about “me and my personal saviour” but it is about a saved and redeemed community growing and learning together.
Edit: A couple of people have been kind enough to point me to the source of the quote, which comes from an interview which you can find here. It is true that my blog post is reacting to a quote out of context, which is not entirely fair – but that’s the way the quote has been presented. Had I been commenting on the full interview, I would have weighted my comments differently, but much of what I said would still stand.
23 replies on “Jesus and The Church”
Will Sawers liked this on Facebook.
Not sure that I would read that quote to say it’s ok for you to have Jesus without the church. More that not liking the church is a bad reason to give up on Jesus.
@kouya have you watched the whole video? The quote comes in the context of why church is vital.
I happen to have just watched the interview from which that quote is lifted yesterday and I have to say it seems like you have criticized a statement being presented out of context. In the sentences both prior to and following this statement he makes it clear that he draws a one-to-one relationship between loving Jesus and loving his church. This note about Jesus’ representatives is sandwiched in an adamant defense of not being able to divorce following Jesus from being in communion with the institution of Jesus’ church.
I’m not a Piper fan boy and disagree with him on plenty of things, but this isn’t one of them. If anything I would criticize the people that are excerpting this sentence without including its context rather than Piper himself whose whole point in the interview was the point you are making.
Doing Church is not easy, but Jesus didn’t promise a bed of roses. He did command us to love one another as He loved us,, SO THAT all men will know that we are His disciples.
That’s missional, that’s the challenge
John 3:16–18 (ESV) — 16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.”
I do not think Piper is an “extreme individualist.” Piper is one who recognizes an individualism that is Biblical. In the passage I quoted above, there is ultimately, in regards to salvation, an individual character to it in that individuals are saved. They are saved and brought into the church. They form a covenant community. Piper is warning individuals that ultimately it is Christ that they will have to give an account to. No one who walks away from Christ gets a free pass because they claim that in the church there were hypocrites.
This is not “extreme individualism.” This is sound pastoral counseling.
And one could well argue that the dogged individualism that Piper represents here is a major factor in the church coming out so badly so much of the time!
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I agree with Eddie but at the same time I find the conclusion a little disturbing. I think we are a living demonstration of the truth of Jesus’s message, but that’s an incredibly high standard that we are not capable of achieving. It means that when the Church fails, fights, divides, and does things that are ugly and lacking in love, it demonstrates to the world that Jesus’ message has not fully transformed us. If we’re supposed to be showing that Jesus’s message is true, what happens when we fail? Doesn’t that suggest to the world that Jesus’s message is not true?
So I can see why people like John Piper would want to say “Don’t look at us, look at Jesus,” even if that is a way of avoiding responsibility. It’s a bit like the doctrine of invisible unity – we haven’t achieved the visible unity in the Church that Jesus prayed we would have, so let’s find a way of claiming that we are united anyway.
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Love the last line of your post about Christians learning and growing together. The world is looking for connection and community. Yes, we don’t do it perfectly, but loving community is a powerful evangelism opportunity.
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@kouya and into that discussion have you seen this with Mark Meynell? http://t.co/CNE0Dhwmi4
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Os Guinness in his excellent book “Fools Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion” talks about recognising hypocrisy being a driver for change. The proper response to hypocrisy is to turn and repent not to try and pin the blame on someone else 🙂
Interesting stuff Eddie, thanks for posting. Though I have to say, while I agree with a lot of whats been said, I would still support & use the Piper quote in the specific situation it was intended for – namely consoling those who are think of giving up on/have given up on faith because of the failures of the church. I think that’s what Piper was doing when he said it – encouraging specifically people who have been hurt by Mark Driscoll and the Mars Hill fallout to not turn away from their first love and to persevere with Jesus. I’m at risk of starting a Bible study here, but I’m working my way through Hebrews currently, and it continues to strike me how often the writer encourages us to consider Jesus, or to look at Jesus or to pay close attention to Jesus – and the reason for the majority of these “considerations” is so that we don’t drift away, or that we don’t lose hope, or that we shouldn’t fail to reach the goal. Whilst the writer does mention the church and its role in our perseverance (Heb 12:1), it does seem to me that the overall thrust of the book is to consider Christ for our continued perseverance in the faith – a la the Piper quote. Interesting stuff anyway. Sorry for the slight essay there, maybe I should consider a blog next time!
Yes, but how many of those references in Hebrews are in the singular? Without checking, I suspect the vast majority are plural commands, something that English misses.
Interesting. Maybe it would be better if Piper went one step further in his quote, to say “Don’t give up on Jesus because the church fails, and if you’re not giving up on Jesus then don’t give up on the church either.” I agree that we don’t want people thinking they can continue on in the faith without christian community. Perhaps that encouragement has to come after the encouragement to consider Jesus though. I’m thinking as I type here..