Wheaton College Alumni Magazine Spring 2014 | Page 19

I

Q

How can the church point to Jesus’ love
when we’re such a sinful mess?
& A: Dr. Daniel J. Treier, Blanchard Professor of Theology

Yes, there are clergy abuse scandals, declining and divided

denominations, and worship wars. At college we used to get up
from the lunch table with the line, “Let’s make like a Baptist
church and split.” (You should feel free to replace “Baptist” with
your own kind of church.)

Theologians talk about the church too much with ideal concepts,
so we need more confession of personal and corporate sin along
with less triumphalism. In different ways the Catholic and
Orthodox traditions remind us, though, that the gates of hell
shall not prevail: God has promised to build the church and will
not let her comprehensively fail.
From a Protestant perspective, this doesn’t provide guarantees
for any particular institutional arrangement, but it also doesn’t
authorize us to abandon a church at the fi rst sign of trouble.
The church, like its members, is simultaneously justified and
still sinful. If the church weren’t sinful, it would be empty:

Jeremiah 29:11 promises, “‘For surely I know the plans I have
for you,’ says the Lord, ‘plans for your welfare and not for harm,
to give you a future with hope.’” In other ways, Scripture
challenges a simplistic equation of suffering with sin. John 9, for
example, recounts the story of Jesus and the blind man from
birth. According to the text, “His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi,
who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’
Jesus answered, ‘Neither this man nor his parents si