Discipleship: Submission to Christ the Lord
Editor’s Note: This is the ninth in a series of articles by Dr. Stephen Noll, titled “The Jerusalem Declaration: A Personal Commentary.” Dr. Noll draws on decades of experience in the GAFCON movement, especially his role as Secretary of the Statement group that drafted the Jerusalem Declaration and its accompanying Statement.
Having rejoiced in the Gospel, received God’s Word written in Scripture, and upheld the rule of faith in creeds and confession, the Jerusalem Declaration now turns to discipleship: its call, its basis, and our response. Here is clause 5:
Sponsored
We gladly proclaim and submit to the unique and universal Lordship of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, humanity’s only Saviour from sin, judgement and hell, who lived the life we could not live and died the death that we deserve. By his atoning death and glorious resurrection, he secured the redemption of all who come to him in repentance and faith.
One might wonder whether clause 5 and clause 1—rejoicing in the Gospel—are a bit redundant. In fact, an earlier draft joined them together. But as they now stand, they form an inclusio, bracketing the gracious action of the Triune God in the economy of salvation with Jesus’ magisterial call: “Come, follow me!”
The phrase “we gladly proclaim and submit” is the retrospective boast of a person—and a church—that has come to know and follow Jesus as the Holy One of God (John 6:68-69). The recent video series The Chosen offers an imaginative portrait of the motley crew of disciples drawn to follow the rabbi from Nazareth. At the mid-point of the Gospel story, Peter confesses this Jesus to be the Messiah, and Jesus proceeds to reveal to his disciples his royal road to the Cross, and theirs:
“The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.” And he said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.”
Luke 9:22-23
The Call
Shortly after my conversion as a college student, I began reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship. I was struck by the phrase: “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” Looking up from my book, I idly said to my bride of three months: “You know, if Christ calls me, I’ll have to leave you…. Wait, why are you crying?”
Long on zeal, short on prudence, I was! With a little humility and wisdom, I came to know that God had given me a companion who would walk with me and often guide me in what Eugene Peterson calls “a long obedience in the same direction.”
Bonhoeffer was addressing a Lutheran audience that had, equally idly, employed “justification by faith”—the watchword of the Reformation—as an excuse for passivity in the face of Nazi neopaganism. Bonhoeffer turned the order of salvation—“by grace you have been saved by faith”—on its head, saying:
Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession, and absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.
Clause 5 describes a person’s—or a church’s—call to take up the Cross and follow Jesus.
The Basis of Discipleship: Jesus is Lord
According to clause 5, there are two poles of discipleship: the unique and universal Lordship of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and his saving death and resurrection.
The Lordship of Jesus Christ was revealed only gradually to the first disciples. Although Peter blurted out his confession, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God,” he immediately denied Jesus’ prediction of his coming Passion.
Shortly thereafter, he, James, and John received a vision of Jesus’ divine Person on the Mount of Transfiguration:
the appearance of his face was altered, and his clothing became dazzling white. And behold, two men were talking with him, Moses and Elijah, who appeared in glory and spoke of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.
Luke 9:30-31
Befuddled by the vision, Peter proposed building three commemorative shrines:
As he was saying these things, a cloud came and overshadowed them, and they were afraid as they entered the cloud. And a voice came out of the cloud, saying, “This is my Son, my Chosen One; listen to him!” And when the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone.
Luke 9:34-36
This was the one and only occasion when the disciples saw the Son’s glory manifest and heard the Father’s voice audibly, and they kept it to themselves. But after the Resurrection, Peter proclaimed openly the Lordship of Jesus: “Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:36). From this time on, the Church’s confession “Jesus is Lord” was equivalent to the Hebrew confession of YHWH’s sole lordship (cf. 1 Cor 8:6; 12:3).
IXTHYS: Son of God, Savior
The early Christians adopted the fish as an emblem, both to remind them of Jesus’ call to be fishers of men and because the Greek word for fish (IXTHYS) was an acronym for “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.” Clause 5 unites the Lordship of the Son with the saving death of Jesus on the Cross. (One might quibble with the Statement group for failing to include the Cross in the statement, but its presence is implicit in reference to Christ’s death.)
Also implicit in the sequence of clauses is the “order of salvation”: from the Fall of Man and its consequences (sin, judgment, and hell) to Christ’s Incarnation (“lived the life we could not live”), to “his atoning death and glorious resurrection.” While clause 5 does not spell out a theory of atonement in detail, by “redemption” it refers back to the Creed (“for us men and our salvation”) and to the Articles (9-15). In his magisterial work, The Cross of Christ, John Stott speaks of the “self-substitution of God”:
We may say, then, that the concept of substitution lies at the heart of both sin and salvation. For the essence of sin is man substituting himself for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man. Man asserts himself against God and puts himself where only God deserves to be; God sacrifices himself for man and puts himself where only man deserves to be. Man claims prerogatives that belong to God alone; God accepts penalties that belong to man alone.
John Stott, The Cross of Christ
The 17th-century poet George Herbert, whom I count as a mentor in the faith, converts this doctrine into verse in “The Agony”:
Philosophers have measured mountains,
George Herbert, “The Agony”
Fathomed the depths of seas, of states and kings;
Walked with a staff to heav’n, and traced fountains:
But there are two vast, spacious things,
The which to measure it doth more behoove;
Yet few there are that sound them—Sin and Love.
Who would know Sin, let him repair
Unto Mount Olivet; there shall he see
A Man so wrung with pains, that all His hair,
His skin, His garments bloody be.
Sin is that press and vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruel food through ev’ry vein.
Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice which, on the cross, a pike
Did set again abroach; then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as blood, but I as wine.
The Response of Discipleship
Clause 5 opens with proclamation and obedience and closes with repentance and faith, all of which are responses to the Person and Work of Jesus Christ, the Son of God and Savior. These responses are epitomized in the phrases “by grace alone” (sola gratia) and “by faith alone” (sola fide), which St. Paul terms “the obedience of faith” (Rom 1:5).
Obedient faith is not only an individual response to Christ’s call but a pursuit of a “common mind” among members of the church.
Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Phil 2:5-11
Having the mind of Christ, they can work out their salvation with fear and trembling, confident that God is at work amongst them (Phil 2:12). I believe the Lambeth Conferences up to 1998 and the Global Anglican Conferences since then are attempts to seek this common mind for our Anglican tradition.
Gratitude to Commitment in the Liturgy
The Eucharistic liturgy displays the same movement from humble gratitude to firm commitment, when, after the consecration of the bread and wine, the priest prays that
by the merits and death of thy Son Jesus Christ, and through faith in his blood, we and all thy whole Church may obtain remission of our sins, and all other benefits of his passion… And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and lively sacrifice unto thee; humbly beseeching thee, that all we, who are partakers of this Holy Communion, may be fulfilled with thy grace and heavenly benediction.
Discipleship, when all is said and done, is the welcome of the sinner to the wedding feast. George Herbert (once again) captures the image of this welcome in what is perhaps the greatest devotional lyric in English, “Love III”:
Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
George Herbert, “Love III”
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lacked anything.
A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?
Truth, Lord; but I have marred them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.
For Reference
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (Touchstone, 1959, 2018)
- Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction (IVP, 1980)
- John R.W. Stott, The Cross of Christ (IVP, 1986,2006)
- Chana Bloch, Spelling the Word: George Herbert and the Bible (University of California, 1985). This study by a Jewish poet of George Herbert’s absorption of the Bible has been a favorite of mine for many years.
Image: Wooden cross and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Photo by annette2022 from Getty Images Signature, courtesy of Canva. Digitally edited by Jacob Davis.
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