Confessing Evangelical

Apparently Norman Nagel coined this phrase (our pastor studied under Dr Nagel and has quoted it on a number of occasions). The point is that it is all-too tempting for us to make ourselves the "active party" in the Christian life, the subject in all the verbs. In fact, whether one is considering justification, sanctification, worship or whatever, ultimately it is God who should be driving the verbs, God who is the truly active Party in the Christian life.

I came across an interesting illustration of this yesterday, when I had cause to look up the Roman Catholic doctrine of indulgences in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paras 1471 to 1479. At one point this says:

[The Christian] should strive by works of mercy and charity, as well as by prayer and the various practices of penance, to put off completely the "old man" and to put on the "new man".

This brought to mind the fourth heading in the section on Holy Baptism in the Small Catechism:

What does such baptizing with water indicate?
It indicates that the Old Adam in us should by daily contrition and repentance be drowned and die with all sins and evil desires, and that a new man should daily emerge and arise to live before God in righteousness and purity forever.

The contrast is striking, but what particularly caught my attention for the first time was the use of the passive voice: "should ... be drowned", "should daily emerge and arise...".

How easy it would have been for Luther to write, "that we should by daily contrition and repentance drown the Old Adam in us", etc. What a world of difference a slight change in grammar makes: the difference between us driving the verbs (as in the first extract) and God doing so (as in the second) is the difference between a truly evangelical Christianity and every other religion in the world.