Gospel, law, the dutiful path…

… and the Salvationist Pilgrimage | Gordon Sparks

Preliminary Music as Prolegomena

The pathway of duty

There’s a path that’s sometimes thorny,
There’s a narrow way, and straight;
It is called the path of duty,
And it leads to Heaven’s gate.
While we tread this path of duty,
We will find our needs supplied
From the river of God’s mercy
That is flowing close beside.

Chorus
By the pathway of duty
Flows the river of God’s grace.
By the pathway of duty
Flows the river of God’s grace.

‘Tis a blessed way and holy,
‘Tis a path of peace and joy;
Though sometimes the way be stony
And the cares of life annoy.
But this path that we call duty
Is the way the Master trod,
And the smile of love and beauty
Lights the way that leads to God.

Let us walk this path of duty
With our faces to the sun,
Carry all our burdens gladly,
Finish well what we’ve begun.
From the river of God’s mercy
That is flowing by the way,
We may drink and find refreshing
For the burdens of the day.

Sidney Edward Cox (1887-1975)

This is song 462 in the English-language Salvation Army Song Book (SASB).  The chorus is also found in song 320 and song 868.  This refrain appears three times in the English edition of our denominational hymnal; no other composition is pressed into service as much.  Of the 962 songs in the SASB collection, nine compositions appear twice.  However, the tuneful eleven-word assertion By the pathway of duty flows the river of God’s grace persists three times – six, in fact, considering that the chorus comprises the singing of the eleven-word witness twice.

Now, I recognize that the unique double encore of this particular refrain in the SASB does not constitute evidence of anything.  On the basis of the three appearances of the chorus alone, nothing can be concluded with certainty about the theology of the Salvationist faith community.  I admit my speculation here will not withstand statistical analysis.  However, over the course of our history, Army songs have been the primary repository and transmitter of our theology.  The Song Book has been the Salvation Army’s consistent effort at faith seeking understanding – theologizing – to which the critical mass of English-speaking Salvationists has been exposed.

The anglo-salvationist world has been the seedbed of other equally and, in some ways, more vital expressions of our movement.  The SASB, could be considered the English-speaking Army’s catechism. So I wonder if the fact that on three occasions the Song Book teaches us that by the pathway of duty flows the river of God’s grace (2x) isn’t reflective of belief that is at the very heart of Salvation Army life and witness.   By the pathway of duty flows the river of God’s grace.  Duty and grace.  Law and gospel.

Of course, the role of duty and grace or, possibly more precisely, law and gospel, in the Salvationist story requires further probing.  But I’ve gotten ahead of myself.  There’s an older story that sets the stage for Salvation Army apprehension of law and gospel.  It’s ancient.

Prehistory
God creates.  The three-one God lovingly renounces self, withdrawing to make space for other existences – other life.   Here’s Jürgen Moltmann reflecting on this fecund teaching, which is original to Jewish mystic Isaac Luria’s doctrine of zimsum:

The Creator is not an “unmoved mover” of the universe.  On the contrary, creation is preceded by this self-movement on God’s part, a movement which allows creation the space for its own being….  It is the affirmative force of God’s self-negation which becomes the creative force in creation and salvation.

So God creates by withdrawing.  And he culminates that extravaganza by sculpting from soil and exhaling into life the image-bearer (Genesis 2:7, TNIV).  This breathing of the human into existence “is warmly personal … with the face-to-face intimacy of a kiss….  An act of self-giving” (emphasis added).   “Very good!”  God exults (Genesis 1:31).  Unprompted, God gives space to the other.  God gives life.  Unmerited.  And the life God gives is one of partnering privilege that expresses as the following gifts:

• The gift of relationship with (1) God, (2) non-human creation (in view of one commentator’s insight that “rule” refers not to control but to the care an older sibling would rightfully exercise over a younger) and  (3) other similar and equal but, at the same time, strikingly different humans – “of the very stuff of Adam and yet a wholly new being” – reflective of the unity in diversity within the three-one Godhead (Genesis 1:27-28; 2:7, 18, 19-20a, 20b-24);
• The gift of creation cultivation in which the stewardship and perpetuation of God’s craft by the image-bearer entails attending to culture and nature (Genesis 1:28; 2:15, 19-20);
• The gift of image-bearing, dignifying expectation, whereby the free, holy God generates free-to-be-holy offspring, enjoined specifically to reflect the parental likeness of sanctity in freely-chosen obedient practice (Genesis 2:16-17).

These gifts are invitations to us to respond to the Creator as partners of the holy Master of the Universe.  They exhibit the space God gives us to exist in his presence, in the presence of the one who is All in All, and they elevate the human vocation from mere existence to the responsiveness of loving, representing, caring, co-creating, the optimum path being that of obedience, the reasonable responsiveness of creature to holy-loving Creator.  God acts-speaks; humans are given existence; God gilds that existence with revelation and vocation; and the image-bearer is granted capacity-opportunity to respond, which takes more specific shape in the form of free will.

And this spaciousness that characterizes the primal relationship between our holy Creator and us leaves us eyes-wide-open and speechless upon encountering God for the first time, “in the rubble,” so to speak, after the Fall.  In the face of the image-bearing creature’s disobedient rebellion against the Creator, surely damnation or, at least, disavowal, will explode from so cataclysmic an affront.  But what do we witness?  God “walking in the garden in the cool of the day,” calling, “Where are you?” (Genesis 3:8-9)  Not rebuke but pursuit.  Attentiveness.  A question.  Questions:  “Who told you?”  “Have you eaten?”  “What is this you have done?” (Genesis 3:11, 13)  God could have known the answers to these questions; however, the provision and assurance of gracious spaciousness for humanity seems here and throughout salvation history to prompt God to veil omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence.  Again we see God’s sacrificial opting for self-renouncing.  Even after such devastating failure, the image-bearer enjoys the dignity of God-given space.

We respond by refusing to take responsibility:  “The woman did it.”  “Actually, you did it, because you put her here.”  “The serpent did it.”  We seem here to spurn the very responsibility that is implicit in the privileged partnership of image-bearing.  We squander the gifts of relationship, cultivation, expectation.  We disobey our Creator and in the process betray our humanity.  We sin.

And all of creation is affected:

• the relationship between God and the image-bearer (Genesis 3:8b, 10, 12);
• the relationship of the human with her/himself (Genesis 3:10b);
• non-human creatures (Genesis 3:14; Isaiah 11:6-7);
• the relationship between non-human and human creatures (Genesis 3:15; Isaiah 11:8-9);
• the very work of fruit-bearing and cultivation that are essential to human vocation (Genesis 3:16a, 17b-19);
• the relationship between flesh-of-my-flesh (the archetypical inter-human reality – simultaneously similar, equal and different)  image-bearers (Genesis 3:12, 16).

The curse plunges deep and projects into the future (Romans 5:14; 8:18-25; 1 Corinthians 15:22a).  And even these devastating consequences witness to the dignity inherent in bearing God’s image.  Human decision is that consequential.  “God takes us seriously.”

Throughout this cosmic drama, even in the face of the tragic taint of curse, God creates space.  This is grace; more specifically, God’s walk in the garden in the cool of the day in pursuit, calling, listening, responding is a prototype of gospel.  In other words, can we consider that we hear the rumor of gospel in God’s follow-up after the Fall and even in the consequences that are the curse?  Rather than damning to the abyss of non-being, God preserves the image-bearer’s dignity by writing into the very narrative of creation’s story the eternal impact we have on God’s good creation (Genesis 1:31).  And if we can still impact God’s creation-cosmic masterpiece project, albeit in harm, might the possibility not exist on the horizon that we can impact in healing?  The image-bearer can at least be shown still to have influence.

Is such gospel not foreshadowed in the curse-couched prophecy of Genesis 3:15?  The image-bearer channels death, but he also channels life (1 Corinthians 15:22; John 14:12: Matthew 28:18-20). In Genesis 3:21, the curse’s tragedy gives rise to the spilling of the blood of a fellow creature over whom we were to have ruled, a “younger sibling” to whom we were to have given tender care.  And out of that death, God provides cover for his image-bearer.  Grace.  Gospel.  God-Creator self-discloses as God-Redeemer.

Maybe we can think of this constellation of the gestation and generation of the God-human relationship as the theological primal soup out of which emerges the more fully developed law-and-gospel dialogue. This is essential prehistory, I believe, for the salvation-historical playing out of God’s initiating act-word of grace and his invitation to humanity to respond freely with obedience.  In these dawn-of-time events, the call and response of law and gospel is prefigured.  And the first word in this dialogue, “God’s initiating act-word,” is unmerited.  It makes sense, then, to reverse the terms and refer to the dialogue as “gospel-and-law,” acknowledging that God’s gracious overture sets the tone for the talk.

As we ponder these happenings on the early God-human relationship front, we also do well to notice, again, the continuity between creation and salvation, which prepares us better, I think, to embrace law with sufficient biblical seriousness. Elsewhere the Scriptures witness to creation-salvation interaction.  Psalm 8; 19; 72; John 1:1-18; Romans 8:18-25; Colossians 1:15-20 are examples.  And listen to the fascinating acknowledgement N.T. Wright makes of the connection: “The creator and covenant God can be relied upon to act in accordance with his creating power and his covenant fidelity, to put the world to rights.”  Maybe the tendency toward a hyper-mystical, a-historical, non-material (almost gnostic) salvation-orientation among some Christians can find a biblical corrective in the recognition of creation-salvation continuity. In turn this gives encouragement toward attending more closely to the concrete, specific, pertaining-to-the-ordinary, i.e., the earthy, matter of law.  On the other hand, maybe the law’s attention to the particulars of feet-on-the-ground, everyday existence can help us see more clearly the continuity between creation and salvation and, in that process, assure us of the Creator’s commitment to the good creation – God’s commitment “to put the world to rights.”

So these glorious provisions of gospel and law are initially manifested in the early biblical narratives through God-initiative and human-responsiveness.  Out of the far-off shadows of this distant story, gospel and law emerge, eyes squinting, into the bright, special light of scriptural clarity that is refracted through the glorious prism of innumerable Jesus-faith communities.  We look now at one such expression - The Salvation Army.

The Salvation Army on Law and Gospel
In the inaugural issue of the journal Word & Deed, co-editors Drs. Roger J. Green and Jonathan S. Raymond begin their first editorial with this stirring assertion, “By the grace of God this is a critical theological moment in the history of The Salvation Army.”  Among those many thinkers and schools from whom we are wise to draw for our on-going theological formation at this momentous juncture, William Booth’s declaration of allegiance, “To me there was one God, and John Wesley was his prophet,” commends to us the eighteenth-century Anglican thinker as first among equals.  Wesley is our natural theological forebear.  And so in recent years The Salvation Army, a movement of nineteenth-century revivalist-holiness vintage and, as such, a quintessentially modern (in contrast to premodern or postmodern) phenomenon, has become increasingly intentional about its relationship to a theologian from another era, John Wesley.

Wesley taught that the “moral address of God is heard prototypically, first in the Decalogue and most fully in the Sermon on the Mount.” So God’s image-bearer-affirming, dignifying expectation of us is voiced in the Ten Commandments and in Jesus’ premier sermon. Further direction is given by Jesus and the New Testament writers.  The rightful response to that expectation, of course, is obedience to God who mediates his will to us through his Word.  Wesley called this the law-gospel correlation.

The Salvation Army’s most explicit, formalized expression of that dynamic is found in doctrine 9:  “We believe that continuance in a state of salvation depends upon continued obedient faith in Christ.”  Obedient faith.  And with theologically astute sequencing, this doctrine emerges from doctrine 8:  “We believe that we are justified by grace through faith in our Lord Jesus Christ and that he that believeth hath the witness in himself.”  Gospel and law.

In Salvation Story: Salvationist Handbook of Doctrine, we discover teaching on gospel and law that is consistent with our biblical and Wesleyan heritage.  We’re reminded of the relational-covenantal context of God’s giving of the law in reading: “God gave the Law to enable his people to live in right relationship with him.”  And further on we learn of the full-flowering of that covenant:  “Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of all that the Old Testament law had promised and anticipated.  He taught that the Law was, in fact, fulfilled in love.  This was the ethic of love.” It makes sense then that we, too, following after Jesus (1 John 2:6), would be privileged to be loving, obedient covenant keepers: “The sanctified believer is empowered by love and guided by obedience to keep covenant,” and that we enter that relationship by faith, which in and of itself is not a good work, but that good works naturally spring from that covenant trust.  We see a lovely portrayal of the Christian life as a project of following (obedience-law) along the God-made way (grace-gospel), and this with an aim to becoming like Christ.

Here’s the description:

Our conversion inaugurates a journey during which we are being transformed into Christ’s likeness….  It is the beginning of a pilgrimage with Christ.  This pilgrimage requires from us the obedience of separation from sin and consecration to the purposes of God.  This is why ‘obedient faith’ is crucial: it makes pilgrimage possible.

And finally we are enjoined not to veer from that pilgrim path:

Our salvation is assured as long as we continue to exercise faith in Jesus Christ.  Such faith is expressed in obedience to his leadings, will and commands.  Obedience as a free-will choice is a consequence of faith, and without it, faith dies.

The law-gospel correlation.  We must not veer from that path!

What path exactly?  The pathway of duty spoken of in the song with which this article began?  The pathway of duty that is the only refrain sung as many as three times in the English edition of the Salvation Army Song Book?  I remember sharing with a friend a number of years ago that I had a renewed appreciation for this song, By the pathway of duty flows the river of God’s grace.  I explained that my appreciation arose from the interplay between God’s work and our response that I perceived to be celebrated in the song – the law-gospel correlation, I would say today.  My friend proceeded to explain that her father couldn’t stand the song.  He thought that it should be banned.  He was a counselor of Salvation Army officer-pastors and daily witnessed broken people who were striving to be faithful “by the pathway of duty” and in the process were killing themselves – or losing themselves.  Duty had become deadly — destructive.

This is a danger for all of us.  Works-righteousness is as threatening to our faithful fulfillment of vocation as image-bearers as is antinomianism. And there exists a unique temptation towards works-righteous in a faith community steeped in military culture.  Rank and command structure expose the Salvationist disciple to the allure of works-righteousness. He/she can be seduced to seek self-worth, self-satisfaction, even self-justification in dutiful obedience to the system. And so regimented a system tends to reinforce such compliance. But much is lost. Responsible critical thinking – a discipline whose exercise is essential in the devout work of loving God with our minds and, therefore, for the faithful disciple of Christ – is neglected, even spurned, in the interest of rendering dutiful submission to the system. When this occurs, our faith community is malnourished, withering, having squelched redemptive creativity that results from responsible, loving critical thinking. And, ironically, that dutiful exercise and the proud, concomitant avoidance of insubordination at all cost is deemed noble. “Ask no questions. It’s our duty!”

Undoubtedly the recognition and acceptance of duty is biblical treasure. However, in the biblical worldview, duty is not unqualified. There is nothing virtuous about generic duty and embrace of the same. Moses was not dutiful toward Pharaoh; Nathan was not unquestioningly dutiful to David; the prophets were outspoken critics of the way things were, refusing to offer the status quo dutiful behavior; and Jesus was anything but dutiful toward the power structures of his day. In a world that is fallen, such readiness to resist, modeled by Jesus, is necessary. An always loving but, nonetheless, critically thoughtful approach to all of life makes perfect biblical sense.

There is for the follower of Christ an unqualified duty to which we must give our lives. Scripture interpreted in the household of faith alone circumscribes such radical yieldedness.  In fact, we Salvationists assert this boldly in our first formal declaration to the world, doctrine 1:  “We believe that the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments were given by inspiration of God, and that they only constitute the Divine rule of Christian faith and practice.”  We, like Wesley, are people of one book.  All of our other doctrines – all that we are and do as The Salvation Army – is premised upon this doctrine.  We will be a healthy, whole faith community only as we submit dutifully in the power of the Holy Spirit to what our loving three-one God has revealed in the Scriptures.  If our pathway of duty is the way of the righteous of Psalm 1, the whimsical way of delighting in the law of the Lord and meditating day and night, then we will be like trees planted by streams of water, which yield its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither – Whatever we do will prosper (verses 2-4).  The fulfillment of that duty – a roomy, spacious exercise – will bring the breathtaking, exhilarating abundance of freedom (Psalm 119:45). To our lives. To The Army.

Click here to download a pdf version (140 KB) of this article, complete with a list of cited works and endnotes.

Writer: Gordon Sparks attended Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and completed an M.Div. at Asbury Theological Seminary. He completed further studies at Columbia Teachers College and Union Theological Seminary (education), Fordham University (biblical studies) and Drew University (Wesleyan and Methodist Studies).

He worked for the Greater New York Division of the Salvation Army’s US Eastern Territory in various capacities: assistant to the corps officer (Bronx, NY), Mission & Growth and Stewardship Secretary (Brooklyn and Manhattan, New York), Commissioned as a Salvation Army officer in 1994 and appointed to the Chelsea/East Boston Corps in Massachusetts. In 1996 he was appointed to the School for Officer Training (Salvation Army seminary) and worked in officer formation in the capacities of Personnel Officer, Associate Director of Personnel and Director of Curriculum. Taught church history, doctrine, ethics, Old Testament, biblical interpretation, preaching, missiology and world faiths (English and Spanish).

While on staff at The School for Officer Training, he was granted the opportunity to serve on the board of the Canadian Territory’s Ethics Centre and on the Salvation Army’s Doctrine Council, involvements he continues to have.

Currently partnering on pastoral team with wife Karen and Edwin Velez at the Salvation Army Chapel at Worthington Woods Worship and Service Center, Columbus, Ohio, a remarkably generous and hospitable suburban corps-congregation with an impassioned longing to serve the poor, various evolving expressions of that commitment (a point of attraction for many seekers), and an inspiring readiness truly to know them.

Gordon is married to Karen with whom he shares in the breathtaking, thrilling and frightening, adventures of partnering and parenting Elisha - 21, Emma - 14, and Erin - 12.

1 Comment to Gospel, law, the dutiful path…

1. Gordon

   Thank you for this article.
   You have clearly made the point that many Salvationists and other Christians have missed in the past. Duty (doing good works et al) does nothing before salvation and does in no way bring us into the family of God. It is His grace and only His Grace when we repent that brings membership in the Forever Family. However duty follows after Salvation as we live in continued obedient faith to God. And by the pathway of duty lies the river of God’s Grace that allows us to work for others, to bring social justice, to addres the needs of a dying world. Our strngth to do such comes from Grace.

   So often I have met and talked with Salvationists who live an ordered live, who obey all the rules and regulations and think that any slip from that brings backsliding. They put so much emphasis on duty they forget the river of God’s Grace that is there for us. Following the law, obeying rules and regulations does not save or sanctify–it is only His Grace.

   John Stephenson
John Stephenson on May 6th, 2009

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