Ted Haggard

This story has been on my radar screen pretty much since it happened. Both the liberals and the conservatives have pretty much thrown this man under the bus.

Two quick links from Beliefnet, rarely a fountain of judgmental fundamentalists.

http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2009/01/new-ted-haggard-sex-scandal.html#more

http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2009/01/ted-haggards-hard-road-to-rede.html#more

Sorry, when I have typos I always have to delete and rewrite.

Good review RJ!

Like Browder, I have kept my eye on this developing story. I thought his Larry King Live interview was a true testament of Jesus never letting us go, no matter the depth of our sin. Now that is some grace one can brag about

Dear Matt,

What do you believe disenables or prevents people from sinning?

Showing grace and enabling often look exactly the same. In practice, they often ARE exactly the same. We trust the Holy Spirit to make grace effectual.

Good stuff Nick

David, thank you so much for saying:

“No gospel was offered to this man because they don’t understand the gospel. The “gospel” they offered was conditional and had all sorts of strings attached and behavior modifications included. No gospel was offered because they don’t know what it is (to quote Fitz Allision).”

That made me think of Romans 10:14:

“How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?”

This passage seems to have been enormously influential on Luther and later on Lutheran liturgy. So much of their understanding is that a person can’t hear the Gospel until it is declared to them by another real flesh and blood person.

So it’s just so important for us to have pity and compassion for Haggart as a man who was surrounded from as early as a teenager by people who were not proclaiming to him the gospel. So how could he hear it?

Apparently, quite a bit before the first scandal ever broke, there was a White Horse Inn interview with Mr. Haggard where he astounded Michael Horton by stating that he did not believe that he sinned. Horton followed up by asking if he realized that in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus likened ill-will as murder and pressed Mr. Haggard about whether he sometimes felt ill-will towards the liberals who fought against the Christian right? Mr. Haggard said that the Lord had given him total victory.

I am just thankful that grace does not depend on the recipient, rather on the Giver.
Luther’s inability to make a perfect confession or to perfectly repent of his sin is one of the famous contributing factors to his own personal reformation. It is at the core of our understanding of God’s faithfulness to the faithless.

Sean..You Rock!

Great post.
My wife TIVOed the Oprah interview and we watched it last night. If you can get your hands on it, you really need to see it. The man has been completely broken yet built back by the Gospel. And his wife may be the most gracious woman alive! I felt Oprah was very offensive with him, yet she could never pin him down or throw him off course.

Michael -

beautiful words, and ones I forget all to often.

Matt –

I think that’s a bit of a straw man. It’s easy to wonder the “what ifs.” If our wills are bound, as we believe they are, we DO fall away, continually. It is the Spirit, acting out the will of God, that comes and gets us. The Spirit, a la Romans 9, doesn’t seem to come after everyone, which is scary…but he came after us.

this is an interesting perspective:

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/januaryweb-only/104-32.0.html

anonymous -

Interesting article. I completely agree with what it says about a “health-wealth” (glory) view of the Christian life vs a suffering (cross) view. I also really like what the author says about how the Haggard affair forced people who knew him to “deal in reality”.

I’ll have to see the HBO special at some point

sorry, requests fall on deaf ears–

Hey Matt. I wonder if the solution to the problem you rightly describe is the PROPER use of Law and Gospel.

One of the proper uses of the Law (and as we know there are only two) is restraining social evil, social chaos.

So the proper response to (say) Haggert or (say) one of the RC priests clearly guilty in the pedophile scandals, is twofold:

LAW: You are removed from office. You are removed from contact with private contact with children.

GOSPEL: We at your church love you unreservedly. We tell you that. We show you that by visiting you (even if you end up in prison), hugging you, crying with you, holding you, and welcoming you back into the pew as a parishioner every Sunday (if you are willing to come). We announce to you the word of Grace and freedom from God’s wrath and tell you the story of Christ’s love for sinners Of which we are chief).

How that might play out in other situations I think would probably involve a sensitive faculty for distinguishing Law from Gospel in each situation.

So with a drunk who is wreaking chaos at work and his family God may work his will first through through Law (the man is fired, the wife takes the kids and leaves him, his friends deliver the killing NO of not buying him drinks) — and then at some point he bottoms out and begins to despair of himself and someone is able to tell him the word of Grace.

Even so the emphasis is on the PROPER use of the Law (and Gospel). The Law is not used as a hectoring bully to get him to fly right. It is used to (1) protect his place of work, protect his kids — to restrain overt social harm (2) To convince him that he needs the absolution of Christ

Likewise the Gospel is not used as a permissive way of telling him that all flight patterns are equally good. It is used always but only in its proper place — as words to a man terrified of the wrath of God, words that tell him that he is forgiven.

I am sure that you guys can probably say this better. But I think Luther had it right when he talked about the essential business of the theologian being distinguishing Law from Gospel.

OK, Burton, when you say that I am gonna start throwing things at you, I feel like a real bad guy! LOL. I am so sorry if I come across as combative. That’s so not the guy I wanna be.

But let me see if I can try to explain my thinking more. For example, like in the case of the drunk we talked about.

The law (judgment, wrath, consequences, punishment, etc.) might lead to him being fired from his job, his wife taking the kids and divorcing him, refusal of his friends to support him in his habit: these are all the Law acting in its power of negation, criticism, judgment. They are all a true and righteous NO to him.

The Law in this example would be acting in both of its capacities (1) restraining social evil and civil chaos and (2) driving him further to utter despair of his own abilities and righteousness.

Do note the good and helpful function of #1. The law is actually helping the other people he’d otherwise be devastating even further. It’s sad that he was fired, but the law steps in to prevent him from completely wrecking the company and hundreds of other lives with it. It’s sad that his wife left him; but in this case that may have been God’s way of protecting her and the children from terrible abuse. It’s sad that his friends don’t get to enjoy a few beers with him, but their No to further drinking with him may be the Law preventing him destroying their lives further.

Note also that just because the Law steps in in its capacity of protector of others (civil restraint) — that in no way stops him in his own process of spiraling downward toward (we pray) a despair of himself and a need to be forgiven.

Likewise, in your question about the RC priest, well in most cases I would imagine that being judged as a child molester, likely facing criminal prosecution, certainly the dreadful shaming of the loss of trust and a parish — the terrifying force of the Law here would make almost anybody despair of himself. The solution, however, is not giving a criminal continued access to children so he can keep discovering that he’s got a problem at their expense.

Does that make better sense out of what I was saying?

You said “you seem to say that he has to be stopped, that his destructive behavior has to end….”

Well, I am not sure I’d say “has to” — that seems to suggest that behavior control is the main thing on my mind.

What I would say is, when the Law is working in its first use capacity, then yeah it is very interested in restraining overtly destructive behavior to other people: the drunk’s wife, children, colleagues, friends, etc. to take that one example.

In its deeper second use, it might serve (God strangely acting sub contrario here) to intensify sin all the more so that the person can give up on himself and finally turn to God.

My personal belief is that in this sense the Law and also the sweet sound of the Gospel is not about fixing behavior. Sometimes Grace is (i believe wrongly) presented to people as a “nice” form of behavior fixing. To continue with the analogy of the alcoholic, the value of bottoming out and hearing the word of love, in this Faux Gospel, is so that he Can Finally Get Sober. I think sobriety is awesome for such a person. But if a person is experiencing the word of grace — with the litmus test later that they better start bearing the fruits I intended by it — then it’s no grace at all.

So personally, I place a very low premium on trying to get people to fly right, since my own personal experience is one of profound recidivistic bondage to sin as a redeemed Christian. And I can see it also (to return to the example of the alcoholic) in the street people I know. What they need is to hear the word of God’s forgiveness — not to be made to fly right, which frankly may not happen.

Of course, in the case of a person’s overt behavior deeply hurting others, then the Law can and does step in to restrain that.

Hope that helps clarify my muddled thinking a bit!

Are you asking about forgiveness between God and the guilty sinner?

Or forgiveness extended by one (injured) human to another who did the injuring?

The two dynamics are alike and also different, I think.

I think prudent future decisions based on the guy’s past history, especially decisions rooted in protecting innocent and vulnerable others, is completely independent of whether you have forgiven him.

Forgiveness to me would mean “I love you, I harbor no bitterness or anger or resentment toward you, I’ve let all that go, and I just want good for you 100%.”

It doesn’t mean “I have now deluded myself into believing that you never did the bad thing.”

If it did, it would mean that, since we are asked by Christ to forgive everyone, that a woman who is brutally raped by a guy should, if she’s forgiven him, want to go out on another date with him.

It would mean that a father who’s small girl is molested by her soccer coach, should later wish to put his second daughter alone with him too — if the father is a good Christian.

That’s why I can see that, while forgiveness involves for sure letting go of all desire for revenge, or resentment, and even more positively loving the injurer, wanting good for him — it can’t mean on a human to human level pretending in an insane way that nothing happened — because as humans we have an obligation to protect others and even ourselves from gross harm.

That said, I think forgiveness is as much as possible conjoined with a kind of erasing the past. You do that as much as you can. So when you give the 2nd and 3rd and so forth chance you do it in such a way that you act as though it never happened. But if you are also acting as the guardian of other vulnerable people, then you have to do it less.

I also think forgiveness is a separate issue from removing someone from a job — we all need to be loved, but we don’t all have the right to have a certain job.

John – totally agree with your construction of law/gospel. Count me in, because there has to be a breaking point. In regards to Burton’s comments about letting someone bottom out, I think that proper use of the law – firing someone, kicking them out of the house, removing a minister from the pulpoit – is part of the “bottoming out” process. In fact, that’s a softer landing than letting someone have a DUI arrest or seeing them get beat up by their bookie’s thugs.

Thanks John, I appreciate your comments on Gene R and Ted H.

I suppose I do not feel personally affected by Haggard, so talking about forgiveness sounds a bit self-important to me…who am I that I need to extend forgiveness to this man?

Much of what you’ve said reminds me of R.T. Kendall’s book ‘Total Forgiveness’ which I also found quite helpful. I think the church needs to be cautious about being sub-biblical by ignoring apostolic precedents. I notice a willingness in the Epistles to ‘call people out’ for the well-being of the larger church.

So, I ask the larger M’Bird community, if we eschew the notion of ‘church discipline’ altogether, what basis do we have for formally disagreeing with any destructive action of clergy/laity? Is removal/public chastisement not church discipline?

A harmless gadfly,
–Dylan

Dear Burtonia,

Do you believe we should have civil laws in society? And why (yes or no)?

Hey Burton! This is so great talking to you and Matt.

I think it’s important not to talk in vague terms of “showing grace” when you are talking about real specific people in a real specific situation. You have to talk in more specific terms and then think how grace might apply.

So when you say:

“At what point do we show grace [to VGR]? When he deserves it because he repents?”

… I’d need to know more about what you mean. Do you have in mind agreeing with him that homosexuality is morally neutral? That you think his views and actions have been sound? Is that how we’d show him graceful loving?

Or does it mean being tender and warm and gracious to him in person?

As Dylan says, most of us don’t actually know the guy. We aren’t likely to meet him either. So for me you’d have to help me understand specifically what form the graceful loving you propose would take.

Certainly I am all about treating him tenderly in person. I am also all about treating him kindly as a public figure on blogs — not making him the freakin Prince of Darkness, and showing compassion for him, and so on.

By the way, I am absolutely NEVER saying that grace and forgiveness should be withheld until repentance comes first. Take a look at what I wrote in this thread and you’ll see that I imply that most of the time repentance can only come AFTER the inbreaking word of Grace and Forgiveness. In this I am grateful to be in line with Fitz and Cranmer and Hooker and a lot of other folks.

In VGR’s case, that is not going to happen because he’s surrounded himnself with people who’ve told him how good he is. But of course that shouldn’t stop us from being tender and kind to him.