Lecture 29: Already and Not Yet: Paul's Salvation and the Christian Life

The lecture, section by section

1. The many words for one rescue

   What has God done for us in Christ? Paul answers in a chorus of terms: forgiven, sanctified, reconciled, saved, redeemed, justified; God's wrath propitiated, the evil powers triumphed over. Take redemption: it is second-exodus language, freedom, liberation, release from sin's slavery, and it is an already-not-yet reality. We have the redemption that is in Christ Jesus now, and we still eagerly await, as Romans 8 says, the redemption of our bodies. Adoption runs the same way: the Spirit of adoption is already ours, and adoption's fullness waits for the resurrection.

2. Saints in Corinth

   Sanctification is already-not-yet too. Paul addresses the church of God in Corinth, of all churches, as those sanctified in Christ Jesus: believers are saints, positioned in the realm of the holy from the start, what theology calls positional or definitive sanctification, while the process continues and the perfection lies ahead. So when 1 Corinthians 6:11 says you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified, Paul has not earned an F in systematic theology by putting sanctification before justification. He names three things true at conversion: cleansed from sin, placed in the realm of the holy, declared to be in the right. The order is fine, and Paul gets an A, for as Schreiner told a colleague who once asked what grade Hebrews deserves hermeneutically: the biblical writers always get an A. They are always right, and we go with them.

3. Saved, and to be saved

   Even salvation itself carries both tenses. By grace you have been saved, Ephesians says, a past reality. And Romans 5:9 looks forward: since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved through him from the wrath of God. Salvation is present and future, and the future is certain precisely because the justification is past.

4. The verdict announced in advance

   We have been justified by faith, Romans 5:1 says, a settled past; and Galatians 5:5 says we eagerly await the hope of righteousness. How do the two fit? The end-time verdict of the last judgment has been announced in advance to everyone in Christ. It is certain and cannot be lost; what has not yet happened is the public announcement before the world. That is why believers can still doubt their justification now, though they will never doubt it in the new creation, and why no one walking through a crowd can pick out the justified; there is no visible glow. The final day brings the open declaration, and with it the resurrection of the body.

5. No utopia, no despair: politics

   The already-not-yet is the New Testament's fundamental eschatological portrait, and Schreiner insists it is intensely pastoral, beginning with politics. Deny the not-yet and you get utopianism: Marxism, under which several of his own college teachers taught, is in this sense a Christian heresy, promising heaven on earth by political means. Deny the already and you get the opposite error: all governments are corrupt, so just save souls and withdraw. Neither is right. There are proximate goods, and proximate goods are good: it did not take a genius to prefer Eisenhower to Stalin, a classroom can be made better even if not heavenly, and reliable electricity is a real service to one's neighbor. Secular work matters; believers in such work also meet unbelievers no pastor will ever meet. Schreiner never told his own children that ministry was the only way to please God, only: whatever you do, do it to the glory of God.

6. No perfect church, and good churches

   The same balance governs the church. People arrive at a famous pastor's church starry-eyed, and after a while make the great discovery: the pastor, godly and Christ-loving as he truly is, is a sinner, and so is everyone else there. Schreiner watched it across eleven years at Bethlehem, and again in the church plant he joined in 1998, six genuinely godly families who looked practically perfect until he had been around long enough to see the tensions. The American habit of hopping from good church to good church is over-realized eschatology in action: leaving a church that does not preach the gospel is right; forever chasing the flawless congregation is chasing the new creation ahead of schedule. And the under-realized opposite is just as wrong: churches are not all lukewarm and hopeless; there are truly good churches, imperfect and alive.

7. Marriage and children between the times

   Apply it to marriage: how many walk away because the marriage is not perfect? Schreiner quotes Chesterton, one of his favorites, who professed himself puzzled by divorce on grounds of incompatibility, since man and woman are by definition incompatible: compatibility is worked toward, not found. Marriages are not perfect, and marriages can be significantly, really good; despairing of them is under-realized eschatology. Parenting runs between the same ditches: the perfectionist parent, often anxious to look good before others, expects more of the children than of himself and, in Paul's word, exasperates and discourages them; the permissive parent teaches nothing and raises the child every host dreads. The already-not-yet is the balance.

8. The Christian life without extremes

   Over-realized eschatology in the Christian life promises perfect health, wealth, and sinlessness now. Under-realized eschatology mutters that we are all just failures. Both are false: God really blesses and really changes his people, so that lives of substantial holiness and goodness are possible in this age, while perfection waits for the next.

9. Be what you are: indicative and imperative

   Living between the times has a grammar: the indicative, who we are in Christ, and the imperative, the command to live it out. Schreiner's favorite example is 1 Corinthians 5. Facing the incest case, Paul commands: your boasting is not good; a little leaven leavens the whole lump; clean out the old leaven, discipline the man, so that you may be a new, unleavened batch. Then the astonishing ground: as you really are unleavened. In Christ the church is already pure, and therefore must become what it is; and beneath the indicative lies the cross, for Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed. The rhythm runs everywhere: work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you; you have died to sin, therefore do not let sin reign; you have been clothed with Christ in baptism, therefore put on the Lord Jesus Christ; you have put off the old self and put on the new, therefore put off the old and put on the new. Put on what you already have. None of these admonitions will be needed in the new creation; they are the grammar of the space between.

10. Commands as riverbanks

    But wait: did we not learn that the law cannot transform, that the Spirit transforms? Then why does Paul command spiritual people at all? Because commands are not contrary to life in the Spirit; they serve the walk. Paul tells the Spirit-indwelt Corinthians to flee sexual sin; he issues concrete prohibitions; and being filled with the Spirit in Ephesians matches letting the word dwell richly in Colossians, for the Spirit works with the word. Claiming the Spirit without the word breeds fanatics, from Thomas Muntzer marching to his death because God supposedly told him to, down to the person who is sure God told them to leave their marriage because the new love feels so right; if you are not led by the word, you are not led by the Spirit, whatever you feel. Yet Paul writes no Mishnah, no six hundred pages of rules with thirty-nine kinds of forbidden work; his exhortations are strikingly general: love one another, do not commit adultery, do not steal, be kind, be generous. Schreiner's image: the Christian life is a river, flowing with beauty and power, and the commands are its banks. The banks are obvious, for you are not loving anyone while committing adultery or murder or theft; lose the banks and the river disperses and loses its power. Within the banks, much of life is discernment: praying, thinking, testing what is most loving and pleasing to the Lord in situations no rule covers, which is why Paul prays for discernment and why elders deliberate hard cases together. God means to use renewed minds.

11. Why the new covenant baptizes believers

    A question about circumcision and baptism draws Paul's covenant theology into practice. Schreiner loves evangelical Presbyterians, but argues that infant baptism reads the Bible against its own storyline: it takes the old covenant pattern, entry by circumcision into a mixed multitude, and applies it to the new covenant, whose very heart is that every member has the Spirit and the law written within. That leaves the practice of baptizing those known not to have the Spirit, while praying they will receive him, which is precisely the old covenant's situation, circumcised in flesh and not in heart. To the standard reply, that Baptists too baptize people who later fall away, Schreiner answers: the cases differ completely. Churches baptizing on credible confession exercise the judgment of charity; they never knowingly baptize apart from the Spirit, and when someone falls away and does not return, the conclusion is that the Spirit was never there. History adds its own warning in the halfway covenant, the tangle that follows when covenant membership and new birth come apart.

12. Between the times

    The summary of the hour: the last days have arrived, but not in their fullness, and the whole Christian life is lived in that space. Already redeemed, awaiting redemption; already saints, being sanctified; already justified, awaiting the public verdict; already new, commanded to put on the new. In the new creation no one will need to be told to become what they are. Until then, that is exactly the calling.

1. Over-realized or under-realized: which is your temptation, in church, marriage, work, or your own holiness, and what would the already-not-yet correct in you this month?

2. Paul says be what you are. Which indicative about you in Christ do you find hardest to believe, and what obedience would flow if you believed it?

3. The commands are riverbanks, not a rulebook. Where are you facing a decision no rule covers, and how will you test what is most loving and most pleasing to the Lord?