Review: Following Jesus, the Servant King (Lunde)
by tim on May.29, 2011, under Book, Review
In March, Zondervan announced via their Koinonia blog that they would be hosting a blog tour for Jonathan Lunde’s book Following Jesus, the Servant King.1 The premise was simply that readers were offered a review copy of the book and, in return, they would post a review on their personal blog and an online retailer of their choice. The reviews were to be posted during the first week of April.
I signed up to participate, but unfortunately my review copy didn’t arrive until after the completion of the blog tour. This, combined with the intervening birth of a baby girl into our family, means that I am only now able to complete my end of the deal. I hope it’s worth the wait!
Lunde’s book is organised around three questions that are (or should be) important to every Christian:
- Why should Christians be concerned to obey Christ’s commands if they are saved by grace?
- What does Jesus demand from his disciples?
- How can disciples obey Jesus’ high demand, while experiencing his “yoke” as “light” and “easy”?
The bulk of the book is given over to answering these questions from Scripture, with the final chapter being a consideration of how the answers thus achieved might apply to the life of today’s Christian.
In response to the first (‘Why?’) question, Lunde notes the propensity of Christians to fall into a model of ‘best effort’, with grace to make up the difference. Alternately, many Christians redefine or water down Jesus’ demands in an effort to avoid ‘legalism’. Lunde rightly rejects both of these approaches. Instead, he offers the observation relationship with God is necessarily covenantal relationship, and that the New Covenant is no exception. All of the biblical covenants are a mixture of grace and righteous demand, with God graciously providing prior and sustaining grace, yet requiring certain things in response (chapters 2-4). He distinguishes two different types of covenant, ‘grant’ and ‘conditional’, arguing the the New Covenant which governs Christians is a ‘grant’ covenant. He then draws on this distinction to explore the relationship between faith and works of obedience (chapter 5), arguing:
Whereas the Mosaic Covenant was a conditional one that demanded faithful works of obedience for the ongoing reception of its blessings, the New Covenant in Jesus is a grant covenant, whose blessings are only dependent on God’s faithfulness to fulfill them. (103)
He concludes by saying:
Jesus’ disciples are those who have experienced the fulfillment of the prophetic expectations of the Spirit’s outpouring on God’s covenant people. As the [113] prophetic portrayals make clear, the effect of this divine endowment will be a deeper enablement for righteousness. Paul echoes this in his discussion of the Spirit’s effect on God’s people. Those who are led by the Spirit will inevitably produce the fruit of the Spirit and fulfill the law of Christ. As Spirit-enabled New Covenant partners, those who follow him ought to be continually concerned regarding obedience to all of Jesus’ covenantal demands. (112-3)
Thus Lunde’s answer to the ‘why’ question is that the New Covenant, like all of the other biblical covenants, contains ‘righteous demands’. These demands, though not conditions of receiving grace, are nevertheless an integral response to the covenant. Even here, however, God provides sustaining grace that empowers this response.
In the next section (chapters 6-10), Lunde attempts to answer the question of ‘What Jesus demands’, building on his analysis of the relationship between the New Covenant and the previous covenants (in particular the Mosaic). He begins by establishing Jesus’ role as both prophet and King in the context of the New Covenant (chapter 6).
Jesus authoritatively articulates the will of Yahweh as the Prophet who carries the authority to mediate the final expression of the law to his people. But he also summons people to follow him absolutely as the King, who faithfully represents Yahweh’s righteous reign. Jesus’ disciples follow him as their King, even as he articulates God’s demand as the great Prophet. (125)
This then sets the scene for a discussion of the varied ways in which Jesus mediates the law to us, developed using three analogies: some things get ‘filtered’ out through their fulfillment in Christ (chapter 7); others are brought into ‘focus’ through Jesus’ teaching and example (chapter 8); and still others are ‘elevated’ or ‘heightened’ in order to more fully display God’s glory (chapter 9). Chapter 10 traces Jesus’ summons to mission, and its grounding in covenantal expectation.
Thus, Lunde’s answer to the ‘what’ question appears to be that Christians are called to obey the law as mediated to us by Jesus.
The third section explores the ‘how’ of Christian discipleship: how can Christians simultaneously obey Jesus’ demands and at the same time experience his yoke as ‘easy’ and ‘light’ (Matt 11:30). Once again, Lunde turns to the pattern of covenantal relationship in the Old Testament for answers. He starts by noting the inaugurated nature of the New Covenant argued by analogy with the inaugurated Kingdom (chapter 11). Thus, the day spoken of in Jeremiah 31 has not yet arrived in its fullness, though we experience some of its benefits today.
Chapter 12 outlines the way in which life under the Mosaic covenant promoted a threefold relationship to God of ‘remembering’, ‘receiving’ and ‘responding’. He concludes:
Ideally, the covenant people in the Old Testament lived in the iterative pattern of remembrance, reception, and response. That is, the covenant provided regular occasions of remembering and receiving Yahweh’s grace toward them throughout their yearly, seasonal, and weekly lives. In response to the reception of those blessings, they were to devote themselves afresh to keeping the covenant demands of righteousness. In this way, obedience to the law was constantly grounded in and empowered by God’s prior and sustaining grace.
As New Covenant disciples, we too must learn to live covenant lives, returning repeatedly to the Servant for renewing and enabling grace so as to experience the sort of enablement that will enliven our obedience to the King. In and through all of this, the New Covenant gift of the Spirit will be actively making Jesus’ grace present to us. (208-9)
The next chapters constitute a sort of extended reflection on the image of the Servant in Isaiah 53. Jesus is the Servant who is our representative, who turned away sin on our behalf throughout his life (chapter 13). He is the Servant who is our Redeemer, enduring the suffering of the remnant on our behalf so that we need not (chapter 14). Jesus is also the Restorer, who brings eschatological redemption to his creation and judgment to his enemies (chapters 15-16). Lunde concludes:
Remembering and receiving these expressions of Jesus’ grace should move us to respond with covenantal faithfulness in the living out of lives of sight, hearing, and proclamation, unencumbered by the impairing power of Satan. In this way, we will be empowered to follow him in mediating those same dimensions of grace to those around us. (263)
Lunde then draws the strands of these chapters together in chapter 17, showing the relationship between Jesus’ roles as both Servant and King:
As the fulfillment of the Servant of the Lord, Jesus supplies the consummation of God’s grace in the establishment of the New Covenant and its blessings. As the fulfillment of the promises regarding the Messiah, Jesus is the King who mediates the fulfilled law to his New Covenant disciples and summons them to follow him. This distinction, though helpful, breaks down at several points, since Jesus also provides grace as the King. This is inevitable since he fulfills both roles. Nowhere is this overlap clearer than in his crucifixion. (264-5)
Thus, I would summarise Lunde’s answer to the ‘How’ question as follows: New Covenant obedience is facilitated by remembering, receiving and responding to Jesus’ roles as both Messianic King and Isaianic Servant. In Lunde’s own words ‘Grace foils legalism. But grace fuels righteousness’ (274).
The final chapter is given over to exploring the contemporary implications of the theology he has outlined. In particular, he applies his answer to the ‘why’ question to contemporary attitudes towards God (‘Moralistic Therapeutic Deism’), evangelism (easy-believism, ‘get-saved’ evangelism) and catechesis (developing disciples able to articulate covenantal relationship with God).
Overall, Lunde has offered an articulate and creative exposition of covenantal theology. In particular, his explanation of the relationship between various covenants and the New Covenant is very helpful, and I can see myself using his analogies of filter, lens and prism in my own teaching.
However, the central thesis of this book, that discipleship should be identified with the ‘righteous demands’ of the New Covenant, requires closer examination. Whilst Lunde spends the bulk of his book working out the implications of this assertion, he devotes little or no time to defending it in the first place. On what basis should we choose covenant as the category in which to define discipleship? Why privilege it over, say, kingdom obedience (though the two are not unrelated), love (John 13:35), or the obedience of a student to his teacher (Luke 6:40)?
On this last, Lunde somewhat disarmingly asserts that ‘This book is not a detailed examination of the historical background of the term “disciple” (mathētēs) or of the nature of the relationship between Jewish rabbis and their students in first-century Palestine,’ admitting that ‘this approach to discipleship is somewhat unexpected’ (32). However, this omission represents a weakness in Lunde’s overall position, since by it he effectively broadens the scope of biblical discipleship to be coextensive with anything one does as a Christian. Similarly, he effectively defines the ‘righteous demands’ of a covenant as anything done by the lesser party of the covenant that is not part of the ‘condition’ of a conditional covenant. In this way he is able to equate the two disparate concepts. One wonders why, if covenant is so important in understanding discipleship the New Testament writers rarely (if ever) refer to it?
Another methodological weakness in Lunde’s argument is that it is largely founded on characteristics of individual covenants assumed also to be characteristic of the New Covenant. In the early chapters, he establishes certain characteristics that are common to all covenants – prior grace, sustaining grace, righteous demands. Yet in latter chapters he argues from, say, the law of the Mosaic covenant to the ‘law’ of the New Covenant without offering justification of this reasoning. This is not to say that such a position is unjustifiable, just that Lunde hasn’t justified it. Perhaps his assumption is that the New Covenant is the sum of prior covenants, incorporating them in their entirety albeit mediated by Christ in the same ways as articulated for the Mosaic law?
In summary, then, Lunde has offered us an excellent book on ‘covenantal obedience’. It is left to the reader to decide whether this may then be equated with New Covenant ‘discipleship’.