Above Reproach

By Maria Boccia, PhD
Professor of Pastoral Counseling and Psychology and
Director of Graduate Programs in Counseling at the Charlotte campus

I don’t know about the rest of the country, but here in Charlotte, one cannot turn around without reading or hearing something about the exploits of South Carolina’s governor, Mark Sanford. He got into the news because he disappeared for five days without letting anyone know where he was going. Turned out, he flew to Argentina for a tryst with his mistress. Now, there is an urgent investigation of his performance as governor, calls for his resignation, and speculation about the state and future of his marriage. After several weeks of this, he refuses to resign, and says that his spiritual advisor has helped him see the light, that he has violated God’s law, but intends to reconcile with his wife. And, he will not resign because God works all things together for good.

God works through broken people. Aaron made the golden calf, and later God called him to be Israel’s first high priest. David committed adultery and murder with Bathsheba and God called him friend and made David and Bathsheba ancestors of Jesus. Peter denied Christ three times, and Jesus called him to feed his sheep. Paul persecuted the church, and God made him the apostle to the gentiles and writer of much of the New Testament.

And yet. James warns that leaders of the church, teachers in particular, will be held to a greater judgment, and cautions against too easily taking on these responsibilities. In 1 Timothy and Titus, Paul gives instructions about the leadership of the local churches in Ephesus and Crete. He says leaders of the church are to be above reproach. For example, in Titus Paul writes:

An elder must be blameless, faithful to his wife, a man whose children believe and are not open to the charge of being wild and disobedient. Since an overseer manages God’s household, he must be blameless—not overbearing, not quick-tempered, not given to drunkenness, not violent, not pursuing dishonest gain. Rather, he must be hospitable, one who loves what is good, who is self-controlled, upright, holy and disciplined. He must hold firmly to the trustworthy message as it has been taught, so that he can encourage others by sound doctrine and refute those who oppose it. (Titus 1:6-9, TNIV)

How do we understand these disparate lessons from Scripture, and how do we apply this in the life of the church, in the face of struggling and/or fallen leaders? Do we embrace fallen leaders and encourage them to continue their ministries or disqualify them because of their error?

Closer look at the stories of some of these individuals in Scripture might help. The fallen leaders in these stories go through a process of removal from leadership and spiritual restoration. For example, after Paul’s conversion he did not immediately become the apostle to the gentiles. He withdrew to Arabia for 3 years. Peter went through a restoration process with Jesus himself after his resurrection. Aaron went through serious judgment, and it was at least a year between the golden calf incident and his anointing as high priest. Still, one can feel the tension between the highest standards we are called to in 1 Timothy and Titus, and God’s grace and mercy to all sinners, including church leaders. The challenge and the solution, I think, as with many things is to find a way to hold these two things in a dynamic tension that allows God to work in our lives.

This feels like the same tension we encounter in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus’ teaching is directed at his followers, and he calls us to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5:48). It is an incredibly high standard. How can we, in our fallen, imperfect condition be perfect this side of heaven? We strive to be the people God calls us to be, empowered by his Holy Spirit, knowing that only in him can we be what he calls us to be. And when we fall short, we fall on the mercy of God, repent and seek reformation.

For me, when I see a situation where a leader gets into trouble, it has a lot to do with the response of the leader and the process they go through before they continue or resume their leadership. We know the tree by the fruit it bears. Do they truly get it, and repent of their sin? Do they understand the value of and pursue a course of withdrawing for a time to pursue healing? Do they show the fruit of repentance in a changed life? We can identify too many leaders of the church who, like Sanford, refuse to withdraw from leadership to pursue healing and spiritual renewal. We have a responsibility to come along side fallen leaders, to hold them accountable, to protect the people, and to restore them as much as possible. But we also have the responsibility to guard the church leadership by not restoring too quickly one who has fallen. It is in evidence of a changed life, in endurance and persistence that the truth is found.

Jesus as a Preacher of Repentance

By Roy Ciampa, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

In one of the most extensive and important studies of the “historical Jesus” John Meier makes a revealing comment regarding Jesus’ statement about forgiveness in the Lord’s Prayer (Matt. 6:12; Luke 11:4):

It is most significant that Jesus makes the disciples’ forgiveness of others in the present the condition of God’s definitive forgiveness of them at the last day…. Making God's final forgiveness of individual believers depend on their forgiveness of others in the present moment may create problems for Christian theology. But, since Jesus was not a Christian theologian, he seems sublimely unconcerned about the problem.[i]

It is a shame that Meier does not give more attention to the place of repentance in the message of Jesus (even doubting, it seems, that repentance played any significant role)[ii] since that is probably the key to explaining why Jesus’ statement was not a problem for him or for the Christian gospel writers, and should not be a problem for any other Christian theologian either. Recent research into the meaning and significance of repentance for the Judaism of Jesus’ day may shed important light on aspects of his teaching that have caused Christians to scratch their heads from time to time.[iii]

The Synoptic Gospels all agree that repentance was an important part of Jesus’ message (see Matt. 4:17; 11:20-21; 12:41; Mark 1:15; 6:12; Luke 5:32; 10:13; 11:32; 13:3, 5; 15:7, 10; 16:30; 17:3-4; 24:47), as it was for John the Baptist (see Matt. 3:2, 8, 11; Mark 1:4; Luke 3:3, 8). The Old Testament background to the idea of repentance is found, e.g., in Leviticus 26:40-42; Deuteronomy 4:29-31; 30:1-6; 1 Kings 8:46-50 (paralleled in 2 Chronicles 6:36-39); Joel 2:12-14; Jeremiah 29:10-14; and what is known as the penitential prayer tradition (including the prayers of Ezra 9, Nehemiah 9, Daniel 9 and several other prayers of the Second Temple Period[iv]). In these texts repentance is understood to be a prerequisite to forgiveness for the sins which led Israel into captivity (and the on-going state of oppression by foreign powers). Key terms or concepts that came to be associated with repentance (due to their presence in the Old Testament texts listed above) include turning to God (and/or from sin), confession of sins (), and seeking God.

Repentance must be reflected in a changed living (just as new life reflects itself in those very same changes), and if there is no change of life there is no real repentance (or new life), but that does not mean the biblical teaching of repentance amounts to salvation by works or by moral effort or rigor. In the context of a call for repentance one’s obedience to God and rejection of sin are not understood as means of meriting, earning, or being worthy of salvation. Rather, it is a reflection of one’s understanding that God’s righteous judgment stands over against us and that we are utterly dependent upon God’s grace and mercy if we are to survive his that coming judgment. The confession of sins and/or request for forgiveness, the turning from sin and seeking after God may all be understood as interrelated manners of expressing one’s recognition of guilt. While a penitential prayer expresses one’s culpability and need for forgiveness verbally, “fruit in keeping with repentance” (Matt. 3:8; Luke 3:8) are non-verbal means of expressing the same ideas.

The Gospel of Matthew suggests virtually all of Jesus’ teaching might be considered under the umbrella of the theme of repentance. Matthew 4:17 says that “From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand’” (ESV). Both “from that time” and “began” suggest the message of repentance was a continuous and/or primary theme of Jesus’ teaching from that point on, despite the fact that the explicit language of repentance does not often appear in the rest of the Gospel of Matthew, or in the other gospels, for that matter. Matthew expects us to understand that virtually all of Jesus’ teaching is to be understood within that framework. This is the framework within which we are to understand the beatitudes (including, most obviously, Jesus’ references to being “poor in spirit” and “those who morn”) and the rest of the Sermon on the Mount.[v] The petition for the forgiveness of sins in the middle of the Lord’s Prayer may well relate it to the penitential prayer tradition.[vi] While it does not contain a separate confession of sins, the very request that God would forgive us “our sins/debts” entails an acknowledgement of sinfulness and need for forgiveness. And that takes place in the midst of a prayer that is clearly focused on the coming of God’s eschatological kingdom. The reference to fruits by which God’s people can be recognized at the end of the Sermon (Matt. 7:16-20) is the first reference to fruit since John the Baptist spoke of the need to produce fruit in keeping with repentance (Matt. 3:8-10).

In the beatitudes Jesus promises that the merciful will receive mercy (Matt. 5:7). This presumably presupposes the idea that the merciful are those who (in a repentant spirit) already recognized their own need for divine mercy and who extend similar mercy to others as a reflection of their own repentant attitude. This brings us back to the suggestion that “Jesus makes the disciples’ forgiveness of others in the present the condition of God’s definitive forgiveness of them at the last day.” Understood in the context of a theology of repentance, this hardly means people will gain forgiveness through their own merit or that they will be thought deserving of it because they happen to extend forgiveness to others. Rather, it means the person has come to realize their own culpability before God and their desperate need for his mercy and forgiveness, and has thus begun to live a life consistent with such a repentant attitude.

The Old Testament indicates the change in the lives of God’s people will come as a result of the heart surgery he will do in the eschatological time of salvation. Deuteronomy 30:6 says God will circumcise the hearts of his people so that they will love him. Jeremiah 31:33-34 says God will write his law on the hearts of his people so that they will all know him. Ezekiel 36:26-27 says God will give his people a new heart and put his Spirit within them so that they will obey him. So the changed life of the repentant believer is not a human achievement but a divine work. It is the work that God himself has begun and that he will bring to completion (Phil. 1:6). The Gospel of Luke makes it clear that repentance is something granted by God to both Jews and Gentiles (cf. Acts 11:18).

It is important that we not “explain away” Jesus’ teaching about the necessity of forgiving others (e.g., Matt. 6:12, 14-15), showing mercy (Matt. 5:7), etc., in order to make him say what we wish he had said. But it is also important to understand how it fits into a broader biblical-theological framework (in this case, the framework relating to repentance granted by God in at the threshold of eschatological judgment) which helps explain its coherence with the rest of biblical teaching about salvation.

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[i] John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Volume 2: Mentor, Message, and Miracles (New York: Doubleday, 1994), p. 301.

[ii] While admitting that the imperative “Repent!” is “hardly impossible in the mouth of Jesus” he agrees with other scholars that “sayings that mention repentance and that can be seriously attributed to Jesus are relatively few, if any” (A Marginal Jew: Volume 2, p. 431). In a footnote he suggests that E. P. Sanders “may be too skeptical about the matter” (p. 485 n. 152, see Sanders, Jesus and Judaism [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985], pp. 106-13). For more optimistic appraisals and fuller discussion of this topic, see, e.g., Joachim Gnilka, Jesus of Nazareth: Message and History (Trans. Siegfried S. Schatzmann; Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1997), pp. 204-8; N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God, 2; Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress, 1996), pp. 246-58; Steven M. Bryan, Jesus and Israel's Traditions of Judgement and Restoration (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 68-72.

[iii] See “repentance” in the subject indexes of Mark J. Boda, Daniel K. Falk, and Rodney A. Werline, eds., Seeking the Favor of God: Volume 1: The Origins of Penitential Prayer in Second Temple Judaism (Early Judaism and its literature, 21; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2006) and idem, Seeking the Favor of God: Volume 2: The Development of Penitential Prayer in Second Temple Judaism (Early Judaism and its literature, 22; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007), especially Boda’s discussion of the theology of repentance on pp. 27-34 of the first volume. See also Bryan, Jesus and Israel's Traditions of Judgement and Restoration, pp. 57-72.

[iv] See the texts discussed in the volumes edited by Boda, Falk and Werline,

[v] See Gnilka, Jesus of Nazareth, p. 207.

[vi] “Penitential prayer is a direct address to God in which an individual, group, or an individual on behalf of a group confesses sins and petitions for forgiveness as an act of repentance” (Rodney A. Werline, “Reflections on Penitential Prayer: Definition and Form,” in Mark J. Boda, Daniel K. Falk, and Rodney A. Werline, eds., Seeking the Favor of God: Volume 2: The Development of Penitential Prayer in Second Temple Judaism [Early Judaism and its literature, 22; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007], p. 209).