I always stumble upon your formulations like “we have done community in UBF virtually opposite”. Because, it sounds as if the UBFers themselves came up with all these ideas about how the community should be run. But I know this was not the case. Everybody just tried to copy his shepherd as faithfully and closely as possible, ultimately copying from Samuel Lee. And what you call “wish dreams” were the ideas that have been put into their minds by the same Samuel Lee.

Or, with other words, were your thoughts more like “oh my God, we did everything wrong” or “oh my God, we blindly followed a bad leader”? It seems like the former is the case, because you still claim that Samuel Lee was a good mentor for you. Somehow I just want to open your eyes and want you to face the reality about how this all happened. You only started to see things more clearly after you were free from the influence and spell of Samuel Lee.

Just curious, Ben: When you had that thought, did it also include your mentor Samuel Lee in that “everyone”? And, if you had read the book not a few years ago, but maybe 15 years ago, while still under the influence of Samuel Lee, would you have understood these things just as quickly?

“Life together under the Word will remain sound and healthy only where it does not form itself into a movement, an order, a society, a collegium pietatis, but rather where it understands itself as being a part of the one, holy, catholic, Christian Church, where it shares actively and passively in the sufferings and struggles and promise of the whole Church. Every principle of selection and every separation connected with it…is of the greatest danger to a Christian community. …the human element always insinuates itself and robs the fellowship of its spiritual power and effectiveness for the Church, drives it into sectarianism” – See more at: http://www.ubfriends.org/2012/05/02/community-life-together-dietrich-bonhoeffer/?PHPSESSID=bb78d587bf74af4d2a00747ff03033ba#sthash.nbaLysTL.MFamnzQA.dpuf

The negative: Gosh, we have done community in UBF virtually opposite to what Bonhoeffer writes, such as forming a collegia pietatis and imposing our “wish dream” on the community: “Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial. God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious.” – See more at: http://www.ubfriends.org/2012/05/02/community-life-together-dietrich-bonhoeffer/?PHPSESSID=bb78d587bf74af4d2a00747ff03033ba#sthash.nbaLysTL.dpuf

The positive: Everyone in UBF should read the book in detail and write sincere repentant testimonies based on the book.

In the first chapter, Bonhoeffer talks about the difference between “human” love/fellowship and “spiritual” love/fellowship. A contrast between “human” and “spiritual” was and is a large part of the ubf culture. I assumed that Bonhoeffer was completely affirming us when he talked about the dangers of human vis-a-vis spiritual ideals. But when my wife and I reread the book a couple of years ago, we were astounded to learn that Bonhoeffer was using those words in the exact opposite way that ubf-ers used them. What Bonhoeffer called “human” was what ubf called “spiritual” and vice versa.

The human mind has an amazing capacity to distort and screen out evidence that is threatening to one’s own self-constructed identity and especially one’s tribal identity.

We *really* need to publish our ex-ubf material soon so that we can refer to the ubf glossary of terms.

Joe, yes that is the problem. All the words about Christianity have been re-defined so that it is so difficult to navigate the ubf problem.

Chris, I’m sure you already know this, but reading Bonhoeffer or anyone else won’t help likely because of this language re-definition. ubfers simply look for affirmation of their shepherding ideology. We read Bonhoeffer a lot in the early days of Toledo ubf, esp. the Cost of Discipleship, but we only read it to affirm and justify what we were doing and teaching.

Maybe the stronger emphasis in the messages is new, but the general idea and self-(mis)understanding of being a community defined by love was always there. I remember it clearly from my chapter and the chapter of my wife. The problem was that members did not seem to understand what love really means and that nobody seemed to see the gross discrepancy with reality that became visible when someone left the ministry. That person was immediately forgotten, or even badmouthed, became a persona non grata, no matter whether the person had been a friend and loyal coworker for years or decades. Such behavior is simply not possible if there is real love, so people seeing this happening should have been taken aback and start to question the delusion of being a community defined by love.

Maybe it will help if people start reading Bonhoeffer’s “life together” when they really have and interest of becoming a spiritual community that is defined by love.

Absolutely. This was one of my biggest inner struggles. The social environment of ubf (especially in Chicago) was a pressure cooker. Under the leadership of SL, everyone felt constant pressure to do all the things that were expected of the model ubf disciple. Doing those things would earn you a steady stream of praise. Not doing them would earn you looks of disapproval, rebukes from the pulpit, Skokie training, being gossiped about, etc. They had at their disposal all the tools of an honor-shame culture and they used them very, very effectively. In that kind of environment, you have little or no chance to experience the freedom of doing something simply because you love God and others. In other words, you have little chance of growing into a mature, well integrated, self-motivated disciple.

I always sensed that this was a big problem. Once I brought this up during one-to-one Bible study with SB. The response that I got was, “I don’t think we should worry too much about our motives.” My wife’s experience was similar. We were told, “Stop harboring useless thoughts and worries about yourself. Just do it.” We heard that message again and again. In the short term, it was expedient for getting these done. In the long term, it stunted our faith and relationship with God.

I’m also glad that the dominant theme is now “a community defined by love.” That’s a big improvement over the past, which was all about being a community defined by mission. But everything now hinges on the meaning of love. I’m quite sure that many are thinking, “The best way to love someone is to ‘serve’ them through one-to-one Bible study and ubf-style shepherd training so that they can come out of their sinful lives and become great servants of God like us.”

Many cannot understand that love must be reciprocal. If you take it upon yourself to “love” me by teaching me your beliefs, discerning my sins, remolding my lifestyle, and so on, then sooner of later you had better be prepared to allow me to “love” you right back in a similar way. I believe that when a Korean missionary hears the word “love,” the mental image is that of a parent teaching and training a young child. (As you know, the parenting and educating of children in Korea is very harsh by our standards; very long hours of rote learning; copious use of berating, shaming, physical punishment for underperforming; and so on.) If that’s the implicit and unchallenged understanding of love, then the new emphasis will just be more of the same-old same-old. But if the missionaries allow their culturally conditioned understanding of love to be deeply and painfully challenged by the gospel, then good things can happen.

When you wrote “you always felt unsure of others motives”, another memory came into my mind, namely that I felt even unsure of my own motives. The reason for this were the rules and regulations and coerced obedience. Sometimes I did not know whether I attended a meeting because I loved the others and wanted to have fellowship with them, or because I wanted to show obedience and “deny myself”, or whether I just wanted to avoid all the inevitable foofaraw that was to be expected when I missed even once. (In fact once my marriage was cancelled as a consequence.) So it was often a strange and impure mixture of all these motives, even if I wanted to have pure motives. But I also suspected that others could not have pure motives of love either, when they were talking about obedience so much. How can you be sure about your own motives when you are not given the possibility to do things voluntarily? In fact, I very rarely saw other members do anything voluntarily, because the mandatory things were already so demanding and time-consuming that nobody could even think of doing something on top of that. Did others here have similar feelings about their own motives?

For whatever reason, I find this quite funny (sorry if some may not think so): “Trying to have a candid conversation with a leader in which their bs is exposed is like trying to pull teeth from an alligator. I had one leader yell at me one time, “nobody has ever left UBF because of something a missionary has done to them!” – See more at: http://www.ubfriends.org/2014/01/28/critique-my-ephesians-sermon/#comment-12237 I’m assuming that “bs” is not “Bible study.”

It’s interesting that these days, one thing I keep hearing in the messages is the idea that our community should be defined by love. That’s relatively new because before we were defined by how strong our evangelistic efforts were or our fervor to rescue college students from sin, etc. This seems like a change for the better, but underneath, it partly seems like lip service to me. Don’t get me wrong, I respect and love many people in UBF. I am exceedingly thankful for the ways that many of the congregants, including Pastor Ron and other elders, have cared for me and my family. I deeply care for these people. Having said that, I think that UBF’s idea of a loving community is one in which no one is ever criticized. It is a community where dialogue about extremely important issues is deliberately stamped out for fear that it might only promote divisiveness. Furthermore, everyone is on the same page and is primarily interested in reaching out to those outside of the church as well as equipping those within to continually do evangelism. Nothing wrong with evangelism, but we keep pretending (or are delusionaly convinced) that the primary problem is with the lost people “out there” to the neglect of those within. In recent years an effort has been made to focus on house churches. But deep down I still feel like a tool; like they are investing in house churches for the sake of making evangelistic units.

One of my biggest concerns is that we have never adequately and properly addressed the aberrant spiritual environment of the recent past (I’m not talking twenty years ago, but like even five years ago). You have people who come to Sunday service with a smile on their face but when you talk to them personally you know that they are still hurting from wounds that were dealt to them in the past. If you try to discuss this with certain leaders in order to process this, you are usually shut down. And this to me is not loving. Trying to have a candid conversation with a leader in which their bs is exposed is like trying to pull teeth from an alligator. I had one leader yell at me one time, “nobody has ever left UBF because of something a missionary has done to them!” The context of that statement is not entirely important here, it’s a stand alone statement that is utterly worthy, in and of itself, of lols, perhaps even more so than a mention of Duck Dynasty in a Sunday sermon.

You said, “I know that I have been called to live out the gospel by being one with all who are in Christ. Saying this is easy; living it is extremely hard.” At the end of the day, this why I stay in the UBF community. I’m not perfect by a long shot and I know that people have a hard time putting up with my bs. But please let’s at least be honest and admit that we are all full of it and let’s start to talk about it. Maybe once the facades and distractions are gone we can take advantage of what Christ has done for us.

On a ministry to ministry level, interestingly, these days I get the sense that the individual as well as collective feeling of superiority that we once had toward other ministries is slowly beginning to wane. Perhaps it’s the result of some our staff members going to legitimate seminaries and coming into contact with elite church staff or maybe it’s the advent of high speed internet and social media which have provided a plethora of resources and wholesome sermons to learn from. It’s been made obvious to us through a number of avenues that our bible knowledge and church practice leaves something to be desired. So I think we are more prone to be a bit more humble toward other churches and their respective callings. But at the same time, I still sense an attitude which says, “ok, you’re laboring for the Lord as well, but don’t bother me”.

How do you cure tribalism? As cliche as it sounds, I believe that the gospel is the only real solution. The thing I like most about Joe’s sermon is that he explains how Christ’s death and resurrection practically applies to the whole church. He said,

“Jesus on the cross subsumed into himself all Jews and non-Jews – in other words, all of humanity – and in his humanity made them one with him, and in his divinity brought them into fellowship with God. His death on the cross became a birth, the birth of a new race, a new kind of humanity, where the tribalistic tendencies and rules of the old humanity died and no longer apply.”

Any church that deeply meditates on this kind of message cannot help but to eventually do away with their unChrist-like externally and internally imposed paradigms.

My recovery from the ubf heritage yoke and the personal shepherding yoke has taken about 3 years so far (since 2011) and that has been just to document and identify the issues.

So I see God’s wisdom in leading a few “pioneers” like us out from the heritage yoke and causing slow change. I am convinced this 4th “reform movement” in 2011 has caused a permanent paradigm shift for ubf. And I am so thankful for those who suffered during the first 3 reform attempts which opened the door for us.

I would not go on the same way. I would have to adjust my life. It would be a big change.

I used to say the same as you, that nothing would change if such-and-such were removed from my life. Then I realized I was lying to myself.

Such thinking is a sign of being disconnected from reality. To say such things means my mind has much healing to go through and that I’m often living in a perceived reality that has not been sufficiently challenged by other perspectives. And it is a sign that I was wouding other people around me withouth realizing it, especially my wife.

I experienced a similar escape from ubf, and I too am somewhat of an exception because I “pioneered”. I could say “ubf is great” back in 2004 because I was basking in the glow of “pioneering”, which for my family turned out to be the most liberarting thing ubf ever did for us. “pioneering” is a way out, but still does not remove the heritage yoke. So I think most “pioneers” like you, me, Joe and other “house churches” among ubf people, are the most free and most able to help our brothers and sisters still trapped under the heavy yoke of a Korean shepherd.

I spent 16 years under such a yoke. Then the next 8 years were as a “pioneer”, so I could think for myself and suddenly then after 24 years the yoke was broken.

So I’m glad that both of you (Ben and Joe) did not experience the yoke of a personal shepherd. And I am even more glad that you are willing to bear with and listen to and even change because of peopel like me, bigbear, Chris, Vitaly, Joshua, Phil2Five, and thousands of others who have lived under both the yoke of a Korean shepherd and the yoke of the ubf heritage.

I often said to others, “If I wake up tomorrow morning and there was no UBF, I would still do the same thing.” I meant that I would still “study the Bible and feed sheep,” the cliche that I used for my life, but which I would no longer articulate today.

Today, I might say, “If I wake up tomorrow and there was no UBF and no West Loop and no UBFriends, I would still do the same thing.” Today, I would mean “stay close to Christ, study Scripture, read books, and engage with as many people as possible.” I think I just made this up!

So, was I really “yoked for life to UBF”?

Only the gospel, such as Joe’s excellent Ephesians sermon, can break this yoke. Thank God my yoke was broken! This is the primary theme of my upcoming book (in addition to Andrew’s book).

I want to comment on this statement: “the most damning thing about UBF is that we don’t understand that it is not primarily a race issue that we’re dealing with, but a different kind of social aspect; we are deeply tribalistic in terms of spiritual practices.”

You are spot on to say that cultural issues are not the main issue (yet that is one layer of problem). But if you think that tribalism is the most damning thing about ubf, you haven’t dug deep enough.

The most damning thing about ubf is the excessive and undue and un-Christ-like control and manipulation of bible students.

Tribalism can be overcome. But the most fundamental layer of problem in ubf is in the shepherd/sheep paradigm where your personal problems are messed with and controlled.

I described some of this in My journey of Recovery article.

There are at least 8 distinct layers of problems in the ubf KOPHN fantasy land. And depending on your viewpoint (ousider or insider) you see different layers.

Maybe someday we will discuss these things?

Seriously, though, it’s been a long time since I’ve heard anything good coming from traditional UBF pulpits. (That excludes West Loop, Hyde Park, …) In the current climate, in which relationships which have been strained almost to the breaking point, it’s very hard — actually impossible — to carry out an effective teaching and preaching ministry. For as long as I can remember, the mindset of UBF leaders has been to treat Bible study — not the Scripture itself, but the act of engaging in UBF-style Bible study — as a magic cure for everything. Got relationship problems? Study the Bible. Ministry falling apart because people are leaving? Study the Bible. Newspapers publishing articles on abuse going on in your ministry? Go back to the Bible.

Eventually it dawned on me that Bible study becomes ineffective when the people in the room have been burying all their problems and treating one another like crap. On the rare occasions when I’ve poked around on the Chicago website to see what the messengers have been saying, I haven’t seen any visible improvement. (Sorry, putting comments in a message about how Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty is standing up for biblical values doesn’t quicken my spirit right now.)

Perhaps your relationships with Chicago leaders are better than mine. You may be in a better position than I am to hear what they are saying. But when you’ve known people for 30+ years, and they make it clear to you again and again by their words and actions that they don’t care a whit what you think, and unless you are willing to keep quiet and keep attending their meetings and supporting their events on their terms with their agenda you should just disappear — well, in that kind of relational environment, it’s hard to listen to their messages and think that they are beautiful and heart-moving. When people pay lip service to love but don’t act accordingly, their words sound like clanging cymbals. (I’m sure that from their perspective, my words sound like clanging cymbals as well.)

I guess I shouldn’t be too hard on them. After all, they were all trained by a leader who managed the environment to make everyone and everything revolve around him. When your personal shepherd and role model was a narcissist (and I say that very carefully in a clinical sense — he exhibited all the symptoms of NPD), it’s very hard to recover from that without looking at the problem squarely and addressing it through intentional personal counseling and group therapy. So it’s understandable that their relationships with the people who are supposedly “under their care” would be seriously messed up.

David, you are spot-on about the self-affirming mindset. It never ceases to amaze me how deft people are at finding evidence to affirm their tribe’s superiority even in the most absurd ways. Jonathan Haidt writes at length about this in his book from many different angles. It’s a manifestation of confirmation bias — the mind can be extremely blind to evidence that does not affirm your group.

My sermon was and is very challenging to me personally. Through the New Testament, I’m convinced that God is calling Christians to relational unity with one another. I know that I have been called to live out the gospel by being one with all who are in Christ. Saying this is easy; living it is extremely hard.

This tribalistic, sectarian “huge blind spot” hinders unity, friendship, trust, humility, and breeds an unfounded spirit of superiority about oneself and often ugly condescension toward others. Perhaps “huge blind spot” is a gross understatement.

In terms of general UBF reactions, I can only speak from the point of view of the Chicago chapter because this is where I’ve spent the majority of my time. I would venture to say that if you preached this message to a typical Sunday congregation in Chicago, most would receive this well. We’ve actually recently studied Ephesians and many of these cosmic themes were surprisingly communicated well from the pulpit. I could say more about how Ephesians shaped our congregational mindset, but perhaps that would be a slight digression. Anyway, I’m sure most would find the analogies and fart spray study you cited humorous. I’m also sure that some would zone out on the part of the sermon when you talked about how we rationalize our moral judgments. Some would complain of it being akin to “postmodern pontifications”. From my end, I especially like this part because you were able to present a plausible viewpoint on the OT law which I had never thought of before. I also think that many would like the personalized story you gave in the beginning.

The big, and it is big, negative generalization I would say is that many in UBF, especially the leadership, would find this sermon self-affirming. You said,

“Wherever and whenever we allow Jesus to override our tribalistic instincts, to put aside our differences and come together to worship and fellowship in the person of Christ – wherever these intimate relationships are forming in the church – that is where the glorious future is pouring into the present, and the kingdom of God is most clearly in our midst.”

Many in Chicago would say we’re doing exactly this. Look at how Americans and Koreans are co-working together; this is not done in other churches and has even surprised some missiologists who have visited our church, so we are very special (this is what one leader, almost verbatim, stated to me). I won’t deny that I have some good, genuine friendships as well as co-working relationships across the racial divide. But I would say that the most damning thing about UBF is that we don’t understand that it is not primarily a race issue that we’re dealing with, but a different kind of social aspect; we are deeply tribalistic in terms of spiritual practices. So much so that those who are different, in a religious sense, are often marginalized, seen as rebellious or simply ignored. Perhaps this is beginning to change. But every sermon I hear always affirms that what UBF is doing is exactly what is taught in the Bible. We cannot see this huge blind spot, imo.

We all know there is no documented ubf teachings or doctrinal statements that we could verify or deny your claim. I suspect a Korean ubf missionary would simply shut down and be silent or just dismiss the discussion and move on to something else. None of us who have been in ubf even more than 20 or 30 years can tell clearly what ubf as an organization would state in regards to atonement. Who knows what the Koreans in ubf think? We’ll never know and they don’t care– as long as some sheep are “accepting God’s purpose to be a kingdom of priests and holy nation and are fishing sheep and marrying by faith and accepting God’s will for them to be a shepherd for college students.”

After worshiping only in a ubf environment for 30 years, I distinctly remember what it was like when I began to attend non-ubf services and listen to non-ubf preaching. I felt a negative physiological reaction to all the aspects that were not ubf-ish. The music. The clothing. The preaching style. The prayers. Although I was intellectually aware of my reactions and consciously fought against them, they were extremely difficult to overcome. I hated the fact that I was reacting that way, but I just could not help it; a steady stream of irrational negative judgments kept running through my mind. It took several months before my system was purged and I was free from the instinctive negative reactions.

And now it’s the opposite. I have instant allergic reactions whenever I encounter ubf-style teaching and preaching, ubf-style prayer, and so on. I believe that my new reactions are based on genuine, well-reasoned convictions that I have developed through a long process of reading, thinking, evaluating, and conversing with people on this website and elsewhere. But they also have a strong instinctive, emotional component. They still come from the gustatory cortex. I just can’t escape being human.

I think basically, it is the already decided before hand “moral judgment” (its yucky Bible study, not yummy “UBF Bible study material”) using their own “rational justification” to support it.

Are you saying or suggesting that what is deficient is that which we Christians need to fill up and make up for what is deficient, as though the blood of Christ was inadequate in redeeming the cosmos?

I am a firm believer in SA. I definitely need to learn how to teach and preach it well (not dry or forced). I am especially touched by the way Tim Keller preaches SA in tremendously innovative and creative ways that is faithful to the biblical text, such as when I heard almost all of his sermons in Genesis.

I do not believe that the proper teaching of SA should ever downplay the active suffering of Christ in the believer. The doctrine of SA should never ever cause any Christian to think, “Because Jesus suffered for my sins, therefore I do not need to suffer.”

Since Paul’s primary sentiment is love and gratitude for what Jesus has done for him (Gal 2:20b), then his active suffering of Christ in his own body is simply a response out of thanksgiving and love for Christ and for Christ’s redemptive purpose for the church and the cosmos.

“Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church…”

In SA, the idea of us actively sharing in the suffering of Christ is often downplayed, ignored, or inserted as an afterthought, because it seems to interfere with the doctrines of grace. But Paul talks about it often. How would you explain it?

As you said, the key is to teach SA (or any other teaching or biblical doctrine) well. “Parroting” (thinking we are practicing “imitation”) has not, does not and will not work.

Do you have it online at your website?

The main difference between substitutionary atonement and recapitulation is that SA emphasizes that Christ did something (suffer) FOR (instead of) us; recapitulation emphasizes that he did something (die and rise) WITH us. SA is mainly about replacement; recapitulation is about co-identification.

Imagine you’re watching the Superbowl. There’s one second left in the game. Your team is down by 2 points. They have the ball. It’s fourth down, and the ball on the 50 yard line. What do they do? Of course, they bring out someone to kick a very long field goal. The entire game now rests on this one man. It’s up to him to make the goal. The entire game is summed up or represented or recapped in a single player and a single play. But if he makes the field goal, the game is won, and everyone on the team wins; they all share in the victory, because they are his teammates, and he is on their team.

In a similar way, Jesus carried in himself the fate and destiny of all humanity when he died on the cross. The old humanity (the one from Adam) died on the cross with him, and a new humanity was birthed when he rose from the dead.

One reason that I like this view is that it helps me to understand why Paul so often emphasizes being “in Christ.” Unless SA is taught really, really well, the idea of being united with Christ and one with Christ seems like an addendum to SA rather than the main point. In SA, salvation and eternal life are sometimes talked about as if they are extrinsic to God himself, which doesn’t make any sense.

Was this given to the New Hope church community as well?

My thought is that SA was just so poorly done, taught, presented and preached, so much so that Jesus dying for me, or Jesus dying in my place, just does not touch or move me (and others). It was certainly not meaningful or moving in any substantial or significant way.

But when I began to read systematic theology and biblical theology, SA now gets to my core being. It touches me deeply and intimately, so much so, that SA is not a teaching or a doctrine that I must be forced to accept, or else… Rather, it is felt and perceived personally and intimately as the mysterious and unfathomable sheer love of God for me, in spite of me.

That’s what I think UBF has lost or assumed or both, and that’s why I think some/many UBF people are both inwardly and outwardly tired and discouraged, habitual and predictable, angry and irritated at others (such as UBFriends!). Grace is assumed, but lacking in power to genuinely love those who are not like UBF.

I’ve learned a lot from Wright and NPP, but that’s not really what influenced this sermon.

The gospeling in this sermon is rooted in the very ancient teaching of recapitulation. Recapitulation (from which we get the word “recap”) predates substitutionary atonement. It was how some of the earliest church fathers, including Irenaeus and Athanasius, explained the gospel. It has been well preserved in Eastern Orthodox churches but largely forgotten by evangelicals.

I don’t think that recapitulation is always the best way to preach the gospel. But neither is substitutionary atonement. Both of these are metaphors; they point to a greater reality beyond themselves. And both are useful for understanding the Scripture.

Honestly, when I tried to understand Ephesians just from a standpoint of substitutionary atonement, I didn’t get very far. Yes, I could understand some parts of chapters 1 and 2. But the overall flow, the big picture, of what Paul was saying didn’t start to register with me until I began to think about recapitulation.

Everyone in my congregation has heard the message of substitutionary atonement over and over, and for many listeners it has grown stale. Trying to force everything in the Bible, or even the Pauline epistles, into a framework of SA just doesn’t work for me anymore; it seems disrespectful to the text. Is SA biblically supported? Yes. Is it the overarching paradigm that unlocks all the mysteries of the Bible? No way.

Your explanation of Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind regarding moral judgments and rational justifications is worth the price of admission (reading your sermon).

I think you are aware that you are promoting or advocating for N.T. Wright’s (and others) NPP (New Perspective on Paul) view of justification as ecclesiology (Jews and Gentiles being united together), in contrast to the Reformed view of justification as soteriology. Maybe my non-scholarly perspective is a cop out, but rather than choosing between the two, I embrace both, with an inclination toward the latter, while embracing the former.

btw (in contrast to Brian), I actually liked the questions at the beginning. It was cute and funny, creative and instigating, and it sparked an interest and a curiosity to immediately want to read the rest of your post.

I was a little put off by the addition of the question/answer to introduce the sermon, but I quickly got over that after reading on.

Your excellent point about the wall of hostility deserves more discussion. My first question would be: Why would we try to obey the Law and thus rebuild the wall of hostility? Acts 10 leads me to believe the entire Law was only a foreshadow. Acst 15 confirms it once and for all. I pity the Gentile who tries to obey what Jews could not.