ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CUENet AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION DOGMATICS 2 LESSON 26 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> As I've done some of my studying for this class, I've run across a concept which is new to me. I hope you can help me understand it better. What do we mean by Christ's active and passive obedience? >> DR. DAVID SCAER: First of all, I'm going to make a comment about your name, David, since I share the same name. It's a great advantage to have this kind of a name. I was brought up in a Jewish community in Brooklyn, New York. And when you have a name like David, you immediately have an entrance into the Jewish community. And nobody can say. That you have any type of prejudice against them. And so with that kind of a name, the Jewish community has to accept you. Of course, not that that's the important thing. But rather that will give you an opportunity to give a witness to Christ as the true Messiah so you just take advantage of that. When I hear the phrase "Christ's active and passive obedience" I think of my own Confirmation back in Trinity Lutheran Church, which obviously in Brooklyn, New York, that my father was the pastor. And back in those days instead of having testimonies for Confirmation class, we had these kinds of questions. And I'm not so sure the kids ever understood it. But maybe that's not so important. They understand it later in life. You ask what is the -- what do we mean by Christ's active and passive obedience? And some kid says baptism and the Lord's Supper. So you say well, that's okay. You undoubtedly have already gone through Confirmation. So some of this terminology is already familiar to you. And it intends to be shorthand rather than totally embracive. I think we made this point before. That the use of the terminology in no way guarantees that the person who is using it understand it. And it certainly doesn't communicate the Gospel. And when we speak about Christ's active and passive obedience, we are referring to his life on earth. We are referring from the time of his conception to the time of his death. We're not referring to his pre-existent life with the Father and the Holy Spirit, of the Trinitarian life. And we are not speaking about his life of exaltation. When we use the term active obedience, we are referring to all of the things that Jesus did before the time that he was crucified. We mean by this phrase that he fulfilled the law for us. By the phrase passive obedience, we are -- we are referring explicitly to the atonement. That activity whereby God laid on him the sins of the entire world and which he carried in order that we could be forgiven. I think a number of things have to be said to make this absolutely clear. Sometimes it is -- the atonement is attached to Christ's active obedience, the things that he did. His life, his sinless life. That is not sufficiently accurate. And we should shy away from that. And maybe we'll get to that later. And that -- the statements of Jesus, he makes it quite clear that his atonement is attached specifically to his death. That's the time in which he was made a ransom for the sins of the entire world. Jesus himself said, "The Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve." And how did he do this serving? By giving his life as a ransom for many. When we speak about even the passive obedience, I know it's shorthand. And I know it refers to the death of Jesus. You have to be very careful about this. Because it may give the impression that in offering up a sacrifice for sins, Christ simply was passive. And to a large extent, that's true. Based on the Gospel of Matthew, the Gethsemane scene, Jesus prays to the Father that he would remove the cup. "Father, I pray you that you would remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will but Thy will." The cup is a reference to the wrath of God. And Christ consumed the entire wrath of God. We must be very careful. There was no wrath -- the wrath of God that exists now is against unbelief. It's not because God is wrathful against the human condition before Christ came. That has been resolved. Now, if we want to point -- picture Christ as passive -- and that's the way the Gospel writers at least portray it for us -- we also want to say that in the passive obedience, Christ is active. He says, "No man takes my life from me but I lay down my life of myself." We can't get the impression that Jesus is doing something he didn't want to do. When you use a phrase like passive obedience, you get the idea that one person is giving out the orders and another person is fulfilling them, whether he likes it or not. In fact, that's the way our entire existence is. I see a police car on the interstate up the road. I'm obedient. Put my foot on the brake. When I know that April 15th comes around, I don't have a choice. That's passive obedience. I go and do what somebody tells me to. But in the case of Christ, this is something which he wants to do. We never want to picture this in such a way is that there are two different motives -- that there are two different motives within the Trinity. That the Father wants the Son to do something which he doesn't want to do. Now, when Christ has ex- -- expresses reluctance about his death -- and we should in no way minimize this as if this is simply some type of show -- his reluctance has to do with his humanity. It has to do with his weakness. He is weaker than all other people. He doesn't approach the will of God with complete confidence that he is going to endure the suffering and enjoy it. That's one of the great advantages of this motion picture "The Passion," which you may have seen and which many people -- which many other people have seen, too. It really is a great statement of the faith. I'm not so sure it converted anybody. But at least it brought out the very -- it presented the very heart of Christianity, which is the person of Jesus himself and the agony which he went through. And he is. The word passive obedience is absolutely fine. Because in his death, from one perspective, he completely committed himself to God. The Lord's Prayer was given by Jesus to the church to pray. He doesn't say that he prays the Lord's Prayer. But that's not exactly true. He prays all of the Lord's Prayer except the petition that the Father would forgive sins. And what is at the beginning of the Lord's Prayer, "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done." The active obedience is that he devotes everything which he has and everything which he is to the coming of the kingdom and doing the will of God. And what is the kingdom of God? The kingdom of God is his own death. And what is the will of God? The will of God is that Jesus would accomplish this atonement for the sins of the entire world. Now, this is not a -- the phrase as the active and passive obedience is not like the Latin phrases that we were tossing around before, genera. The genus apostelis maticum, the genus ***myastoticum. It's not like those phrases at all. Because these are phrases that you're going to be using. And you're going to be using them in Confirmation class. You're going to be using them when instructing adults. It's shorthand. Always understand it's shorthand. Shorthand is never fully embracive of the great truths. It tends to communicate. But here is another case where the shorthand helps us to go through large areas of theology in a shorter time. From time to time students bring their parents into the classroom. This frequently happens during special seminary celebrations. Like the assignment of Vicars and the giving out of calls to the graduates. And I'm not so sure that's always a good idea. Because they walk into a situation which we are using all of these terms. And they wonder what in the world is this all about? Well, that's part of a seminary education is to learn the shorthand so that we do not have to go over those things which we agree with already. But certainly when we get up into the pulpit, we are going to expound on these things. And where do you find out about the active and passive obedience of Jesus? Well, you have your choice: Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. And as a preacher, you preach on the three-year series. And you're going to go through all of those gospels in four years. And so this is going to be something which you're going to be saying -- and I'm not exaggerating -- you're going to have to be preaching the active and passive obedience of Christ every Sunday. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***