Along with salvation from sin, the Gospel is the story of how God glorifies himself. We cannot attain glory by pursuing glory, but by dying. Christ died and was raised again in glory. We will die and be raised with Christ into everlasting glory. God grants glory as a free gift to those who have died to self and glory by giving up themselves and, by the Spirit, being entirely identified with Christ. We must be crucified with Christ in order to be raised and glorified with him.
Heresy, no doubt, seems an extreme label. But what label do the perversions we make of the Gospel deserve? And we do pervert the Gospel, bending and twisting it so we can use it to mask our own agendas. What we each are looking for is what Martin Luther called a theology of glory, a way to avoid the Cross we are supposed to be taking up. To refuse the Cross is to pursue glory under a Christian guise, and that is disobedience, sin, doctrinal error, and heresy.
And, like all heresies, it is a self-defeating project. Heresies bloom and flourish for a time, but eventually die away. Without the vivifying presence of the Holy Spirit, they cannot sustain themselves over the long term. The present excitement over “family-integrated” Churches and reclaiming the culture through homeschooling, like other recent theologies of glory such as theonomy or the Moral Majority, will shortly fade away. What will endure is the Church and the Gospel of the Cross she proclaims.
Parenting will also endure, of course, but only for a little while. As an artifact of this present age, it will last just as long as this age does. What each Christian parent must decide is whether their children are to be their legacy or the Church’s, whether they are here for Christ’s glory or their own, whether they will use their time in this present age to serve the age to come. That choice, it seems to me, makes all the difference between whether you put a new law, a law of your own devising, on your children, or open up for them a door to enter into the grace of God made known through God’s crucifixion.
The law kills, and the Gospel gives life. Either your children die for your sake, your glory, or you die for your children’s sake. Either glory or the Cross, the imitation of Christ or the false glory of a world which is passing away. Either you lead them to the city which has foundations, or you try to make them sink foundations into the sand of this world.
We must decrease that Christ might increase, and we decrease just as John the Baptist did: by recognizing the cross which God has set before us and taking it up so Christ might be glorified by our passing away.
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