Parable of the Shrewd Manager--Soviet Style (Luke 16:1-13)

The Parable of the Shrewd Manager (Luke 16:1-13) for Sunday, Sept 22, 2019

I received an email a few days ago from a former Princeton Seminary student who had been the coordinator for the Princeton Globalization Project at the seminary for which I was a consultant and speaker. Now a pastor in North Carolina, she was preparing her sermon for Sunday on the lectionary gospel reading—Luke 16:1-13--which is the Parable of the Shrewd Manager. Her email read in part:

“I want to tell the story you told at the Princeton Youth Forum about your work in the Soviet Union [in 1995]... You shared that your organization had to work with the young Russian mob to get the medicine to the people who needed it.  I'm preaching on the parable of the Dishonest [Shrewd] Manager and how Jesus is telling us to be wise...but to use it for good...which I thought you did.”

She was trying to remember a story I told over 20 years ago about my own shrewdness in asking members of a local mafia to help us deliver a container of emergency food and relief supplies in the mid 1990’s after the fall of the Soviet Union. 

The relief and development organization I was working with at the time had a single mission project to distribute nutritional food aid to displaced and marginalized Armenians living in Soviet Azerbaijan. My partner and I traveled to Baku for a complex assessment, partnership and planning.  Within the week we had to make a judgment call about whom to trust with the food distribution.  

We first met with the Soviet-style government officials and military officers who are typically tasked with such foreign aid.  We also met some young businessmen who operated outside the System, buying and selling goods on the black market as part of a local Mafia. As ‘gate-keepers’ and ‘movers and shakers’, they became our hosts, demonstrating their connections and interests to help us with our mission (and presumably to take some credit for the getting foreign aid to the recipients). 

So we lined up the various characters we met that week in our imagination and asked ourselves: Not “who do we trust?” But “who do we trust the most, here and now, to get this food to those poor families?” The answer was—the mafia guys over the more corrupt government officials. So, as shrewd managers, we decided to work outside the system and trust the equally shrewd young mafia dudes to get the job done.   And they did. 

 I hope this old story helped her preach her sermon on Sunday. It’s a difficult parable Jesus told and hard to preach on.  Such is the value of lectionary preaching.  Makes us think about texts we tend to avoid.

Coincidentally, I was in Oxford last week researching CS Lewis archives for original unpublished material and found 3 pages of omitted material from his published manuscript “Letters to Malcolm”. Those 3 pages were on his interpretation of the Parable of “The Unjust Steward.” But that’s a topic for another post… 

John Wesley on Theosis

Standing at Aldersgate Flame, London

The Royal Way of Love: Deification in the Wesleyan Tradition

By Michael J. Christensen, Ph.D.

On Wednesday, May 24, 1738, John Wesley records in his journal a profound religious experience he had at a group meeting in the Moravian chapel on Aldersgate Street, London:

In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street [in London], where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death. 

Earlier that day, before his heart was strangely warmed, Wesley was meditating on a particular verse of scripture—2 Peter 1:4.  “I think it was about five this morning that I opened my Testament on those words… ‘There are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises, even that ye should be partakers of the divine nature’.”  The phrase and promise in 2 Peter 1:4 to become “partakers of the divine nature” is the biblical grounding for a bold doctrine conceived in the Patristic era and developed in the various Christian traditions. “God became man so that man might become God”—is how Athanasius (293-373) interpreted this verse in relation to the Incarnation.  His famous line has been repeated and developed through the centuries as a doctrine of deification or theosis (lit. becoming divine).  The idea is that through a process of spiritual participation (communing with God, partaking of the divine nature), the children of God can grow up to become God-like, as far as possible, in how we live our lives and love each other. 

Inspired by this compelling patristic notion of theosis, John Wesley sought to live a holy life, worthy of his calling as a divinity student at Oxford University and as a parish priest in the Anglican Church.  Well-read and informed by the Church Fathers about the promise and possibility of perfection and even deification, he led the “Holy Club” at Oxford in seeking God’s blessing as they tried to live morally and spiritually perfect lives according to their vision of primitive Christianity. Years later, and after professional and personal failures in his mission to America, he felt spiritually bankrupt and open to new direction and light.  After his heart-warming experience at Aldersgate, Wesley came to believe that what had happened to him that day was part of God’s sanctifying work in redemption, offering him the gift of assurance of salvation.   Instead of perpetual striving after God’s favor, he felt like he did trust in Christ alone for salvation. Rather than viewing the promise of deification as a static notion of “becoming gods” resulting in some kind of absolute perfection, he came to understand God’s promise of “Christian perfection” in more relational and dynamic terms of becoming more and more like God in perfect love.

Theologically, how similar are these two ideas—deification and perfection—and what is the relationship of Wesley’s so-called doctrine of Christian perfection to the older, patristic conception of theosis?  Are all these terms more or less synonymous or critically distinctive?  Is Wesley’s 18th century understanding of perfection in continuity with more ancient views of theosis, or does the difference constitute a new doctrine of Christian Perfection? 

In another theological essay on the topic, I make the case that Wesley’s understanding of perfection is not only similar to, but also in continuity with, older ideas of theosis in selected patristic writers of the East.   This chapter assumes that Wesley’s promotion of Christian perfection depends on and is an outgrowth of the broader Christian tradition of deification, and aims simply to articulate the Wesleyan version of perfection as a derivative doctrine.  It also seeks to contribute distinctively Wesleyan theological resources and spiritual practices to the growing ecumenical discussion of human deification and perfection in Christ.

[NOTE:  This is an introduction to new chapter on Wesley I'm working on for forthcoming book on Theosis in the Christian Tradition.]

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