The Odd Question Out

A recent commentator introduced the Sermon on the Mount with a side-long glance at the “literally dozens of interpretations” this section of Matthew’s Gospel has produced.^[1] A similar lament could be entered over the leporine debates focused on just Matthew 5:48 as the crux and summary of the whole. These proposals distinguish themselves through their answers to what Ulrich Luz calls “the dominant question” in Sermon studies over the last half of the twentieth century, namely, its “fulfillability.”^[2]

It is worth noting at the outset that such deliberation strikes many inside and outside the church as morally unserious. Bob Dylan personified this critique in 1974’s “Up to Me,” singing, “We heard the Sermon on the Mount and I knew it was too complex/it didn’t amount to anything more than what the broken glass reflects.” But how did Dylan come to “know” that the Sermon was too complicated to be taken seriously? The text itself does not suggest equivocation. A staple of the Sermon’s appeal—from civil rights leaders (many of whom adopted Dylan anthems) to Mahatma Gandhi—has been the power of its simple, straightforward, others-centered ethic. Dylan shed light on his lyric in a later interview. “The thing about rock’n’roll,” he said, explaining his own musical preference for American folk music, “is that…there were great catch-phrases and driving rhythms…but the songs weren’t serious or didn’t reflect life in a realistic way.”^[3]

To transpose this insight onto the Sermon, what was delivered as a magnificent vision of life in the kingdom—the serious, super-natural, real Christian life—has been fractured by competing attempts to domesticate its call to discipleship. Dylan, gazing at the Sermon through its common catchphrases, saw only complexity in the service of spiritual lethargy; a mosaic of religious language used to excuse disobedience rather than beholding, in the compelling character of Christ, a vision for full, true human life.

It is also worth noting that this diminishment of the Sermon’s intent is a relatively recent development. Luz himself puzzled, “Oddly, this question [of fulfillability] was almost never asked by the old church.” In this chapter I want to trace the historical path that Luz frames but does not follow. The history of the interpretation of Matthew 5:48 suggests that the question of fulfillability is itself the outlier, and that it has been so for much longer than Luz acknowledged. There is, in fact, a cluster of four convictions regarding the interpretation of our text that remain remarkably consistent from the “old church” through the period of Reformed Orthodoxy. It is hoped that reseating the historical testimony around the interpretive table will aid in restoring the Sermon to its proper place at the head of a morally earnest, Christ-emulating, Spirit-empowered discipleship.

“Be Teleios” in Patristic Thought

The foundation of patristic thinking about the dominical command, “be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,” rests on our creation in the image and likeness of this God we are called to imitate. For Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–215), the imago Dei means that man is “naturally constituted for the acquisition of virtue.”^[4] Origen (c. 184–253), likewise, identifies the image of God in man, “not by any appearance of the bodily frame but…by the whole band of virtues which are innate in the essence of God, and which may enter into man by diligence and imitation of God.”^[5] In Christopher Holmes’ phrase, summarizing Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335-394), imitating God’s perfection is “restorative;” it “restores our nature to us, which was originally divine in that there was nothing in us that was not of God.”^[6]

The Fathers all include caveats similar to that heard in Holmes. (1) Our participation in God’s perfection never reduces the Creator/creature distinction, it is always, in Clement’s words, “as far as permitted to human nature.” (2) Believers will attain varying degrees of likeness to God; the Didache distinguishes between those who have matured to “bear the whole yoke of the Lord” and those who are still diligently, “do[ing] what they can.”^[7] Even the apostles, Augustine reminds us in his Retractions, still experienced “the passion of the flesh resisting the Spirit.”^[8] (3) This is not an instantaneous transformation but a process of sanctification, as Clement argued: “As one is righteous, so certainly is he a believer. But as he is a believer, he is not yet righteous—I mean according to the righteousness of progress and perfection.”^[9] (4) Even the greatest degree of perfection possible in this life will be far surpassed when we behold him and are fully transformed into His.

Caveats accounted for, the dominant note sounded in patristic discussions of Christian perfection was that, because we have been made in the image of the perfect God, imitating God as Christ calls us here to do is a summons to true humanity; to full human flourishing. To be “perfect” does not limit or diminish us but is rather, in Hilary of Poitier’s (c. 310–367) words, our “inheritance.”^[10] Augustine foregrounds this idea by identifying “perfection” in the Beatitudes not with the classes of people who receive blessing (as if perfection is found in our purity of heart) but the other way around, by the blessings themselves.^[11] Perfection is found in seeing God, etc. As Holmes summarizes Nyssen, “we progress, becoming more ourselves in relation to God rather than less. To be perfect is a matter of being true to our essence as those made in God’s image, and to achieve likeness to God, our beginning and end.”^[12]

A second characteristic of Christian perfection in patristic thinking is that imitating God, after the incarnation, is achieved through the imitation of Christ. Hilary comments that the call to “imitate our perfect Father” is exemplified in the life of Christ, who shows us the character of the Father.^[13] Clement asks, “is it not the Savior, who wishes the [disciple] to be perfect as the heavenly Father, that is, as himself, who says, ‘come, children, hear from me the fear of the Lord?”^[14] Clement’s taxonomy would benefit, perhaps, from additional nuance. But the parallel is clear. Those who seek to live, in Nyssen’s phrase, “the Christian mode of life,” imitate their Father by emulating the example of their elder brother.^[15]

A third characteristic of patristic thinking on Christian perfection, therefore, is an almost exclusive focus on enemy love. It is true that the fathers, Origen and Clement among them, bundled “the whole band of virtues” together in our imitation of God. And yet, to claim merely that Christians strive to be “virtuous” was, in the cultural context of their day, not to say nearly enough. Certain classical virtues, such as fortitude or wisdom, had to be re-defined in light of the cross. And the Christian “philosophy” emphasized virtues like patience that lacked classical support.

And so, imitating God in Christ required a Christian to go beyond what was pagan (the hatred of one’s enemy) and even what was human (the love of one’s friends) to emulate the mercy of the Father who sends rain on the just and the unjust, and the love of the Son, who laid down his life for those who spitefully used him. And so, Origen places this kindness, mercy, and enemy-love in parallel with “be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.”^[16] Hilary, likewise, suggests that we are “perfected by this mandate of goodness toward everyone, just as we are to imitate our perfect Father in heaven.”^[17] And the Didache calls disciples, reflecting on Matthew 5, “if someone gives you a blow on your right cheek, turn to him the other as well and you will be perfect.”^[18]

Finally, patristic thinking on perfection recognized the enabling presence of the Holy Spirit. Hilary reminds us that the merciful God who prodigally sends down sun and rain is our good Father, who also “confers the mystery of the Spirit” on those called to imitate Him. For Augustine, the final beatitude—“blessed are you when others persecute you on my account…rejoice and be glad”—not only summarizes and seals all the others, but it also corresponds to the call to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” This joy in our heavenly reward, overflowing as it does in mercy toward our enemies, is patterned after Christ (see Heb. 12:2), emulates the perfection of the Father, and is empowered by the Spirit. As Augustine pictures it, “the perfect man [considered by blessedness]…is signified by Pentecost…the day when the Holy Spirit was sent. By Him we are…comforted and fed and rendered peaceful. When we are thus rendered perfect, we inwardly sustain all the afflictions brought upon us on account of truth and justice.”^[19]

Patristic commentary on Christ’s summative command, “be teleios as your Father in heaven is teleios,” was worked out along these four lines. First, as the image of God, man was created for the purpose of imitating His Creator. Second, the incarnation (God the Son taking to Himself a true, full human nature) has concentrated our imitation of God on Christ-likeness. Third, as is clear from the immediate context of Matthew 5:48, a life patterned after God in Christ is particularly keen to shower love upon our enemies. Fourth, such a “contrast society,” to use Richard Hays’s term, walking “out of sync with the ‘normal’ order of the world,” is enabled in disciples of Christ by God the Holy Spirit.^[20] The summons to teleios-ity, therefore, calls Christ’s followers increasingly to lay down their lives for the good of others (especially their enemies), according to the purpose of the Father, after the pattern of the Son, and in the power of the Spirit.

“Be Teleios” Across the Middle Ages

In his historical sketch of the Sermon’s interpretation, David Crump notes that, “prior to the medieval period, the Sermon on the Mount was viewed as a straightforward presentation of Christian ethics.”^[21] But were the main contours of patristic interpretation irreparably altered after the rise of Islam? Or did they extend beyond the boundaries set for them here by Crump (and the similar timeline set by Luz above)? In what follows I sketch a handful of medieval continuities with the preceding summary of patristic interpretation.

First, the aroma of Augustinian thought lingered long over the Middle Ages. In addition to the influence of his sermons, quoted above, Augustine’s Confessions inscribed a vision of the Christian life that acknowledged Christ as “the perfect man,” the example of what it looks like to be truly and fully human. Accordingly, Augustine sought the mercy of God, “until what is lacking in my defective state be renewed and perfected,” after this image. For Augustine, this transformation toward Christ-likeness centered around coming increasingly to love what God loved and in the way that He loved it. Significantly, this transformation was carried out through the agency of God’s gracious (Spirit-empowered) word. The Augustinian prayer, “perfect my imperfections,” exercised an influence far beyond those groups that came to follow Augustine’s rule.^[22]

Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), for instance, wrote in his Cur Deus Homo of his confidence that, “God will complete that which He has begun with regard to human nature.”^[23] In Anselm’s moral theology, completion, or wholeness, is defined as a rational nature achieving the purpose for which it was created. Thus, reflecting on the argument of the Monologion, Thomas Williams argues that, for Anselm, “Since the purpose of the rational nature is to love God above all else and for his own sake, and to love other things for God’s sake,” human nature is perfect to the degree it loves in just this way.^[24]

As a pattern for this Christian perfection Anselm held up not a general Christ, but “the perfect image of the Crucified.”^[25] The cross, for Anselm, is our salvation. It is also the mirror in which we behold the true man loving God as we are called to do and loving others, even enemies, for God’s sake. Just as he “bore with gentle patience the insults put upon him,” therefore, we also return for evil a “perfect love” which “loves no one other less than [ourselves].” The ability to imitate Christ, who models the moral end for which we have been made, comes from the Spirit. Williams again: “it is the Holy Spirit who energizes and makes fruitful the human nature that the Father has created and the Son has redeemed, so that rational creatures achieve their appointed end.”^[26] Thus Anselm joins Augustine in bowing “my whole self before” the cross and praying, “help my imperfection!”^[27]

Thomas Aquinas (c.1224–1274) served up his Augustinian theology with a dominant Aristotelian, rather than Platonic, note.^[28] Nevertheless, he retained a dominant Augustinian note. For example, he argued that the essence of Christian perfection consists in keeping the great commandments, the love of God and neighbor.^[29] Bringing this conviction over to its application in Matthew 5, Thomas is chiefly concerned to demonstrate the right relationship between our two loves. He comments, “God is to be loved chiefly, and all men for the sake of God.”^[30]

Being “perfect as our father in heaven is perfect,” therefore, would first require that we love God “chiefly,” or “as much as He ought to be loved.” But this is absolute perfection, a love appropriately responding to God’s infinite goodness such that it is itself infinite. Perfect love is possible only for God. Nevertheless, made in the image and likeness of God, human nature is capacitated to imitate God’s love for God to an appropriate, creaturely degree.^[31] For Aquinas, Jesus’s analogical command, “be perfect as also your heavenly Father is perfect,” embeds an acknowledgement of the Creator-creature distinction. It “convey[s] a likeness by participation.”^[32] Analogy thus affords us the freedom to speak of perfect love as we love God according to our totality.

Imitating God, or being perfect, extends beyond our love for God to “loving all men for His sake.” To say it another way, we “hold God as last end in all our doings.”^[33] With the Father’s prodigal kindness and with the example of the Crucified before us, we recognize that the form God-like, or Christ-like love takes is often a bearing-with those who spitefully use us. Loving God with our totality and loving our (unworthy) enemy self-sacrificially is the appointed telos of our nature. It is this teleios-ity, therefore, which the gift of God’s grace perfects.^[34] Christopher Holmes sums up the Thomistic vision of teleios-ity with this hope: “The aim, in this life, is for there to be less and less in us that is incompatible with God. In so far as we obey the dominical precept to perfection we are more, rather than less, like God” and therefore more, rather than less, who we have been created to be.^[35]

Remaining for the moment in a Thomistic mode, we pause for an Objection. Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas wrote as leaders of monastic orders. Does this context not belie any claim that obedience to the Sermon was seen as a “straightforward Christian ethic,” broadly applicable to (or fulfillable by) all believers? Was not monasticism, after all, the epitome of a two-tier Christianity, with monks elevated over pedestrian Christians as the athletes of Christ?

I answer that, while much of great value to the Christian life was recovered at the Reformation, we should nuance the relationship between monasticism and Christian obedience in at least these three ways. First, acknowledgement of varying levels of spiritual attainment in relation to the Sermon goes as far back as the Didache: “If you are able to bear the whole yoke of the Lord, you will be perfect, if not, then do what you can.” This recognition may have resulted in, but cannot be dismissed as the outcome of, the institutionalization of monastic life. Second, Anselm’s Prayers and Meditations is but one example of a monastic leader drawing on their regular practices in order to mature those outside the monastery in spiritual reflection. The membrane between spiritual life inside and outside the monastery was often permeable. Third, our assessment of monastic life needs to keep the self-understanding of the medieval world in view. The works of prayer (religious), protection (knights), and provision (peasant farmers), along with their attendant lifestyles, were seen as totalizing claims. Groups within society, therefore, divided these tasks between themselves and delivered dedicated effort for the good of the whole. The religious service provided by the monks, according to the logic of this system, benefited each member of society.^[36]

Across the Middle Ages, therefore, as in the patristic era, the call to “be teleios as your Father in heaven is teleios” was met with hope for Christian compliance (1) from the intent of our original design in God’s image, (2) narrowed onto the example of the “perfect man,” Jesus Christ, (3) specifically as he embraced suffering for the sake of his enemies, (4) all of which is empowered by God’s gift of grace.

“Be Teleios” at the Time of the Reformation

As we move into the time of Reformation, we remember that Luther was, by education and intuition, a medieval man.^[37] The humanistic education of men like Calvin, Bucer, and even Melanchthon created some distance from Luther in this regard. Their intellectual posture was nevertheless furnished from a recognizable medieval milieu. Further, their proposals regarding the true nature of the church were prosecuted in a manner medieval minds would find persuasive.^[38] This meant establishing alignment between Reformation claims, the biblical text, and the best of the Christian tradition. Their indices provide eloquent testimony to the depth and diligence of this commitment. It is, therefore, with the expectation of strategic discontinuities, accentuated within a broad continuity, that we turn to the Reformers and their heirs as they take up the Sermon on the Mount.

Luther preached through the Sermon over Wednesday evenings in Wittenberg from 1530 to 1532. The timing was significant. Luther here expounded Christ’s call to discipleship with the benefit of five-years’ further reflection on the ethical framework he established in The Freedom of a Christian from 1525. His earlier effort, to use Richard Lovelace’s term, had been one “to rebuild the understanding of the Christian life incorporating [his] insight of justification.”^[39] The tool he chose for this renovation was the dialectic between freedom and slavery. A Christian is free, regarding his acceptance before God, from any necessity to do good works. We are justified by faith alone. With regard to others, however, that same believer is a slave, obligated to serve our neighbor with good works leading to his evangelism or edification.^[40] We are justified by a faith that is not alone but pays itself out for the good of others.

Luther has now to put further flesh on these bones. In preaching on Matthew 5:48, he makes three interrelated (and by now familiar) claims. First, he observes that Jesus is speaking “only about what Christians as Christians should do, and in particular what they should do on account of the gospel.”^[41] These qualifiers, “a Christian as a Christian,” and that “on account of the gospel,” do the heavy lifting. They exalt the cross and the character of Christ. Luther comments: “my reply to someone else’s hate or envy, slander or persecution should be…my love and my help, my blessings and my prayers…That is how our Lord Jesus is, and his heavenly Father himself, to whom he points here as the pattern.”^[42] The Geneva Bible glosses this text in a similar fashion, “We must labor to attain to the perfection of God, who of his free liberality doeth good to them that are unworthy.”^[43] Luther, in fact, sees in the sun, grass, and bird-song a paternal rebuke; we do not provide half so much good to those who misuse us, though they insult us far less than their sin has dishonored God.

The fact that Jesus speaks here to “children of the Father,” not only foregrounds the pattern of God in Christ, but also anticipates the help of the Holy Spirit. “[Human] nature,” admits Luther, “finds it impossible to recompense evil with all sorts of good.” We are not limited, however, to natural resources. We are called to an “exceeding” or “different” righteousness; which has in view not the imputed righteousness of Christ but, resting on it and working out from it, a progressive Christ-likeness in the power of the Spirit. Calvin agreed that, “the same Spirit, who is the witness, earnest, and seal of our free adoption, corrects the wicked affections of the flesh, which are opposed to [God-like] charity.”^[44]

Second, if it is true that only Christians are able to imitate their Father in His enemy-love, it is also true for Luther that all believers are obligated to do so. The Roman relegation of “perfection” to the religious orders meant that, “the word becomes completely inapplicable to the ordinary Christian way of life, as if such people should not be called perfect or be perfect. But you hear Christ talking here not to bishops, monks, or nuns, but in general to all Christians who are his disciples, who want to be called sons of God.”^[45] Calvin echoed Luther’s insistence on the categorical nature of Christian perfection: “Who shall dare to say that we are not bound to observe this doctrine?…it is an express command, and everyone who neglects it is struck out of the number of the children of God.”^[46]

Third, and significantly, Luther uses the language of “wholeness” to designate the fruit of Christian perfection. “How does it come about,” Luther asks, “that they [all believers] are perfect?” It does not mean that they have no sin.” Peter Martyr subpoenaed the apostolic testimony to head off any idea of sinless, or static perfection. At the end of his life Paul still wrote of “not having achieved” but “always pressing on toward” the upward call.^[47] Instead, wrote Luther, “Here and everywhere in Scripture, to ‘be perfect’ means, in the first place, that doctrine is completely correct, and then, that life move and be regulated according to it.”^[48] The English reformer William Ames developed this idea in the seventeenth century as an integral union of “faith and observance.”^[49] Integrity between (right) belief and (devout) obedience is thus the principle of perfection. As such, it lends its unitive character to each of its concrete applications. Luther takes, as an example, the enemy-love of Matthew 5. He points to what he calls “the Jewish teaching” that we should love only our friends. This is not correct doctrine. To live out of this belief, therefore, is to suffer a love, “chopped up and divided. It is only half a love.” The link is clear between false doctrine and a fractured heart, or life. Instead, “what [our Father] wants is an entire, whole, and undivided love, where one loves and helps his enemy as well as his friends.”^[50] Here is the example of our heavenly Father, “who does not split or chop up his love and kindness.” It is also a picture of the way wholeness for the human heart is regained as we mature (by discrete examples) in our perfection (as a principle)—living by the truth as it is in Jesus. Obedience to God’s commands, embodied in Christ, empowered by the Spirit, leads toward teleios-ity.

“Be Teleios” in Reformed Orthodoxy

In October of 2021, Tony Reinke posted a twitter poll asking whether “Explicitly applying divine simplicity to Christian living (sincerity/single aims) is: unwise, promising, or a solid move.” The question was prompted by anecdotal evidence that, “2 out of 3 old Reformed authors I read does something like this.”^[51]

The “old Reformed authors” Reinke had in view were those writing between 1560 and 1760,

the period known as Reformed Orthodoxy.^[52] These stewards of Reformation doctrine applied divine simplicity to Christian living in two steps. In the first place, they linked God’s perfection with his simplicity as a way of identifying his attributes with his essence. The Lutheran Johann Gerhard (1582–1637), for example, wrote that as “the cause of all perfections [God] is simply and absolutely perfect.”^[53] The simplicity of God means that His perfections, as we perceive them, (i.e. goodness, wisdom, love, and power) are inextricable, unimprovable, and immutable. The language of Matthew 5:48b was a frequent proof text for this claim.^[54]

In Matthew 5, however, proof of the Creator’s perfection is prefaced with a creaturely analog: “as your Father in heaven is perfect.” Reformed Orthodoxy took the second step, therefore, of locating perfection and simplicity on a scale relative to the nature they had in view. Gerhard for example: “the more simple something is, the more perfect it is.”^[55] The result was that simplicity in the creature, as we aspire to the absolute example of our heavenly Father, takes the form of an increasing integrity and an intensity among our various perfections. In the (unironic) words of Petrus van Mastricht (1630–1706), our “simplicity of heart” included “three distinct things…first, that the inward heart should be pure…second, that the heart, being pure, should aim at one goal, the glory of God and…third, that the pure and simple heart should strive for its simple goal with a constant and uniform endeavor as much as possible.”^[56] This lack of division within our heart, this cohesion of our moral fiber, this emulation of Christ, is the end for which we were created.

Van Mastricht, something of a poster boy for Reformed Orthodoxy, was a vigorous advocate of the idea that creaturely perfection should be seen in terms of accommodated simplicity, or wholeness. He began with an explicitly Christological amplification of Ames’s definition of the theological project, “the doctrine of living for God through Christ.”^[57] He then turned to the work of the Spirit. Such a life—like God as it was increasingly like Christ—was possible for the fallen creature because our spirit was originally “stamped in his image” and was now being restored through the process of our sanctification as we come increasingly to share in the moral goodness of God.^[58] The goal of this restoration was to accomplish God’s original design for His children to become partakers of the divine nature.^[59] Simplicity, or sincerity, is for the sake of teleios-ity.

There is a suggestive echo here of Luther’s equation of our moral goodness with whole-heartedness; that is, we emulate our Father’s teleios-ity as we imitate the prodigality of his love. Van Mastricht writes that the good “for which we were created” is to “devote ourselves with the simplicity and sincerity of God, not with a double heart, which is attributed to hypocrites, a heart which looks to itself, the world, and temporal things, at the same time as it looks to God. But instead, with one simple heart, which is carried in one straight line to the one God.”^[60] Such a united, God-ward and God-like heart is animated by zeal to imitate God’s love, first for God Himself and then for our neighbor, “without any respect to worthiness or repayment.”^[61]

Categories such as “simplicity,” and the method employed by Reformed scholasticism may lend an initial air of unfamiliarity to their conclusions. Yet a moment’s reflection reveals that the same concerns characterize their explication of Matthew 5:48 that have recurred in our study to this point. A right and robust understanding of the call to “be teleios as your Father in heaven is teleios” began with imitation as the telos of our being made in the image and likeness of God, exalted Christ as the true man and so our pattern for imitating the Father, focused on the unmerited or unnatural aspect of God’s love in Christ, and stressed the need in all of this for the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Fracture and the Way Forward

It is remarkable that the general contours of the church’s understanding of Christ’s command in Matthew 5:48 remained largely stable for seventeen hundred years. In the opening decades of the long eighteenth century, however, this interpretive consensus on the Sermon began to fracture into Dylan’s broken glass.^[62] We move this chapter toward a conclusion through a brief consideration of this loss of consensus, as well as ways in which recovering the great tradition could resource contemporary interpretation.

Debates about the language of “perfection” do not long escape the gravitational pull of John Wesley (1703–1791) and his concept of Christian perfection, entire sanctification, or perfect love.^[63] Over decades of sermons and tracts defending his understanding of Jesus’ command in Matthew 5:48, Wesley showed himself to be an able exegete, a keen student of church history, and committed to approach the call to holiness with utmost earnestness. His defense, therefore, capitalized on much of the best of what we have seen in our brief tour, to this point, including the idea that teleios-ity is a call toward being “grown” or mature.^[64]

What was unique in his work was a redefinition of sin, blended as it was with an extraordinary view of the human capacity for obedience. Regarding sin, Wesley emphasized the intention of the heart. This led him to define sin as “a voluntary transgression of a known law of God.”^[65] Transgressions due to ignorance, if made from a heart of love to God, were not sins but “mistakes.”^[66] Regarding the human will, Wesley read the commands of Christ (i.e. be perfect) as requiring the possibility of obedience, and that in this life. While he did not develop his doctrine of Spirit baptism to the extent followers like John Fletcher and then Charles Finney would do, Wesley did charge his preachers to herald the possibility of an instantaneous experience of entire sanctification accomplished by the Spirit.^[67]

Wesley’s ministry is thus rightly seen as something of an interpretive watershed on the meaning of perfection. The instantaneous nature of the experience of perfection, as well as the stratification of sin(s) based on the intent of the heart, departed from the Christian tradition into a kind of over-realized teleios-ity. The love of God, and of all things for God’s sake, remained the admirable goal.^[68] But Wesley’s insistence on the instantaneous nature of the Spirit’s work, as well his surrender of the necessary integrity between motive and act, sounded a sour note when transposing the anthem of divine perfection into an imitative, creaturely key.

Wesley’s position divided Methodism into Calvinistic and Arminian camps, with this latter group sustaining further division through the rise of the Holiness and Higher Life movements.^[69] His participation in the Evangelical Revival exerted a similar impact on nascent evangelicalism more broadly. But the watershed of Wesleyan perfectionism was not the source of interpretive division we are interrogating. Wesley, and indeed the trans-Atlantic Awakening, was itself a response to the increasing prominence of Enlightenment categories, particularly its rationalistic epistemology, over the preceding decades. The concern within Reformed Orthodoxy noted above—to maintain a vital link between piety and doctrine—had this epistemological crisis already in view. Richard Muller described the thinkers of High Orthodoxy (1620–1700) as already “beginning the feel the impact of Cartesian thought,” and thus as prosecuting a “highly nuanced engagement with the rationalists of the 17^th century.”^[70]

The Enlightenment’s prioritizing of epistemology over theology, a consequence shifting authority from revelation to reason, eviscerated discussions of virtue. Even Gertrude Himmelfarb, at pains to argue that the British Enlightenment did in fact contribute an emphasis on the virtues largely absent from its French and American counterparts, must admit that it was “not personal virtues but the social virtues of compassion, benevolence and sympathy that the British philosophers believed naturally, instinctively, habitually bound people together.”^[71] That was the idea, at any rate. The story she traces, however, is an unfortunately familiar one within post-Kantian social ethics; a tale of men so inspired by love of humanity they avoided the obligations of concern for actual people.

The logic of Matthew 5:48 helps us understand the loss society must sustain once it follows Descartes, and then Kant, off of the epistemological cliff. Christian virtue is predicated on the imitation of our Father in heaven but, for Kant, we “can never know the God that is, we can only postulate some god that ought to be.”^[72] Further, our imitation of God is predicated on our being made in his image. And our participation in that image is exemplified in the saving work of Christ and empowered by the indwelling Spirit. Theology (divine ontology and act) is, therefore, the foundation of piety.^[73] The call of Matthew 5:48 is incoherent outside of this interpersonal context. To immanentize ethics, as happens when revelation is sacrificed to the canons of reason, is to saw off the very branch one demands to bear fruit. Any project to speak of virtue apart from a transcended Standard and Source becomes self-referential and results in a severely under-realized teleios-ity.

The self-defeating nature of Enlightenment ethics, in turn, helps to explain the reaction of both Wesley’s over-realized teleios-ity as well as the hermeneutical fault lines that erupted along the lines of the Sermon’s “fulfillability.” The language of “virtue” and “ethics” was maintained throughout Enlightenment discourse, including those branches of the church that accommodated themselves to it. The concept of Jesus as (exclusively) moral exemplar also retained traction. But without its theological or doctrinal referent, the effort to go beyond what is “natural” in our ethic proved insupportable. The result was a proliferation of attempts to explain (away) just what it was Jesus was calling his disciples to do; attempts which, often as not, reflected the sensibilities of those in the pulpit or behind the lectern. As Jesus emphasized in his parable of the good Samaritan, when we do not know who our God is, we will not be able to recognize our neighbor.

While it means leaping whole epochs at a single bound, we close by giving a brief moment of attention to the relevant witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945). Bonhoeffer’s famous broadside against cheap grace was a rebuke to the fruit of both rationalism and pietism, with their attendant under-realized and over-realized teleios-ities, as they made their way into the first half of the twentieth century. It is not coincidental that the constructive portion of Bonhoeffer’s work, his argument for costly grace, was built as an exposition of the Sermon on the Mount. His work provides us with an example of how retrieving the historical consensus on the Sermon, particularly the call to participate in our Father’s perfection, can serve the church attempting to be teleios “under the conditions of modernity.”^[74]

Weaving all four historically prominent themes together into a compelling vision of a life wholly, truly, and really Christian, Bonhoeffer asks,

How are disciples different from nonbelievers? What does ‘being Christian’ consist of? At this point the word appears toward which the whole fifth chapter is pointed, in which everything already said is summarized: what is Christian is what is peculiar [exceeding righteousness, vs 20]…It is the great mistake of a false Protestant ethic to assume that loving Christ can be the same as loving one’s native country, or friendship, or profession; that the better righteousness and the iustitia civilis are the same. Jesus does not talk that way….What is the [difference]? It is the love of Jesus Christ Himself, who goes to the cross in suffering and obedience. It is the cross. What is unique in Christianity is the cross, which allows Christians to step beyond the world [what is natural]…Here are those who are perfect, perfect in undivided love, just as their Father in heaven is. It was the undivided, perfect love of the Father which gave the divine Son up to die on the cross for us. Likewise, the passio of the communion with this cross is the perfection of the followers of Jesus.^[75]

Nathan Tarr is Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology and Doctor of Ministry Program Director at Phoenix Seminary.

1. Michael Wilkins, Matthew: The NIV Application Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004), 195. See, for example, no fewer than nineteen takes (and those all Continental) presented in Clarence Bauman, The Sermon on the Mount: The Modern Quest for its Meaning (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1985). ↑

2. Ulrich Luz, The Theology of the Gospel of Matthew New Testament Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 46. ↑

3. Bob Dylan, “Up to Me”, Track 5, Side 7, Biograph (Columbia: 1985), Vinyl. 1985. ↑

4. Clement, Stromata, ch XII. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson eds., Ante-Nicene Fathers Vol. 2 Fathers of the Second Century: Hermas, Tatian, Athenagoras, Theophilus, and Clement of Alexandria (Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 2004), 502. ↑

5. Origen, On First Principles, trans. G.W. Butterworth (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 327. ↑

6. Christopher Holmes, Theology of the Christian Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), 58. Citing Gregory of Nyssa, Soul and Resurrection, 267. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection, in Ascetical Works, trans. Viriginai Woods Callahan, ed. Roy Joseph Deferrari, Fathers of the Church (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1967), 267. ↑

7. Didache, 6.2. As Clement has it, “one applies less, one more, to learning training.” Clement, Stromata, 502. ↑

8. Augustine, Retractiones, 202. (1.19.2). ↑

9. Clement, Stromata, 504. ↑

10. Hilary of Poitiers, Commentary on Matthew, trans. D.H. Williams (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 73. ↑

11. Augustine, Commentary on the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount with Seventeen Related Sermons, trans. Denis J. Kavanagh (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1951), 26. ↑

12. Holmes, Theology of the Christian Life, 55. ↑

13. Hilary, Commentary on Matthew, 73. ↑

14. Clement, Stromata, 546. ↑

15. He also calls this “the God-loving life.” Nyssa, The Christian Mode of Life , 152. Elsewhere, he wrote, “If one can give a definition of Christianity, we shall define it as follows: Christianity is an imitation of the divine nature.” Nyssa, On What it Means to Call Oneself a Christian, in Ascetical Works, 85. ↑

16. Origen, De Principiis, 381. ↑

17. Hilary, Commentary on Matthew, 73. ↑

18. Didache, 1.4. ↑

19. Augustine, Commentary on the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, 29-30. ↑

20. Richard Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1996), 97. ↑

21. David Crump, “Applying the Sermon on the Mount: Once You Have Read It What Do You Do With It?” Criswell Theological Review 6.1 (1992): 3-14. ↑

22. Augustine, Confessions trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin, 1961), 123, 145, 150. ↑

23. Anselm, Why God Became Man, in Brian Davies and G.R. Evans eds., Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works (Oxford, 1998), 268. ↑

24. Thomas Williams, “God Who Sows the Seed and Gives the Growth: Anselm’s Theology of the Holy Spirit,” Anglican Theological Review 89.4 (2007): 621. ↑

25. Anselm, Book of Meditations, CCEL, 128. ↑

26. Williams, “God Who Sows the Seed and Gives the Growth,” 614. ↑

27. Anselm, Book of Meditations, CCEL, 124. ↑

28. It will not do to style Aquinas as Aristotelean rather than Platonic. He was a synthesizer of the best from both. Sebastian Morello, The World as God’s Icon: Creator and Creation in the Platonic Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Brookyln: Anglico Press), 2020. ↑

29. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II.184.3-4. This was something that could be done, Thomas held, by those who had not taken vows of poverty, chastity, or obedience. ↑

30. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, 5.12.552. commenting on Matthew 5:48, trans. Jeremy Holmes and Beth Mortensen, available at https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~Matt.C5.L12.n552. ↑

31. This likeness is ontological as well as theological. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I.4.3. ↑

32. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, 5.12.554. ↑

33. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, 5.12.553. ↑

34. Famously, for Thomas, grace does not destroy but “perfects nature,” meaning that it enables men to accomplish their divine end (telos). Summa Theologiae, I.1.8. ↑

35. Christopher Holmes, Theology for the Christian Life, 46; Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew 5.12.553, commenting on 5:48. ↑

36. See Georges Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). ↑

37. See David Steinmetz, Luther in Context (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2002); Christine Helmer ed., The Medieval Luther Studies in the Late Middle Ages, Humanism, and Reformation 117 (Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck), 2020. ↑

38. See David Steinmetz, Calvin in Context 2^nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Tony Lane, John Calvin: Student of the Church Fathers (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1999). ↑

39. Richard Lovelace, Dynamics of Spiritual Life: An Evangelical Theology of Renewal (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 1979), 100. ↑

40. Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian in Timothy Wengert ed., The Annotated Luther: The Roots of Reform (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 488. Originally published in 1525. ↑

41. Martin Luther, The Sermon on the Mount and the Magnificat in Luther’s Works vol. 12 ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1956), 119. ↑

42. Luther, Sermon on the Mount, 119. ↑

43. Marginal note on Matthew 5:48, Geneva Bible, 1560. ↑

44. John Calvin, Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, trans. William Pringle (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845), 307. Originally published 1559. ↑

45. Luther, Sermon on the Mount, 129. ↑

46. Calvin, Commentary, 306. ↑

47. Peter Martyr Vermigli, Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics The Peter Martyr Library Vol. 9, ed. Emidio Campi and Joseph McLelland (Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2006), 350. ↑

48. Luther, Sermon on the Mount, 129. ↑

49. William Ames, The Marrow of Theology ed. John Eusden (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1968), 79. Originally published in 1642. ↑

50. Luther, Sermon on the Mount, 129. ↑

51. @TonyReinke 10/30/21. Results were mixed, with skeptics comprising the largest single category (41%), but those inclined toward or confident in the idea combining to make the majority (59%). ↑

52. Herman Selderhuis ed., A Companion to Reformed Orthodoxy Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition 40 (Leiden: Brill), 2013. ↑

53. Johann Gerhard, On the Nature of God and On the Most Holy Mystery of the Trinity, Theological Commonplaces: Exegesis II-III, trans. Richard Dinda (St. Louis: Concordia, 2007), 254. Originally published 1625. ↑

54. Carl Trueman points up the significance of Richard Muller’s argument that, “proof texts in the seventeenth century were not intended as simple, blunt answers to complex questions. Proof texts operated rather as exegetical markers, directing the reader to the key verse but doing so in the expectation that the reader would check the classical expositions of that verse.” This makes attention to commentaries and sermons a vital practice in tracing the history of interpretation. Carl Trueman, “The Revised Historiography of Reformed Orthodoxy: A Few Practical Implications” Ordained Servant (October 2012). Online at https://opc.org/os.html?article_id=325. ↑

55. Gerhard, On the Nature of God, 253. ↑

56. Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology II, trans. Todd Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), 150-51. Originally published in 1687. ↑

57. Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology I trans. Todd Rester (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2018), 8. Originally published in 1682. He returns to this theme throughout his second volume, concluding his treatments of the various attributes of God with the reminder, “[the immutable etc.] God, in whose imitation our every perfection exists.” The statement is accompanied, in most cases, by a reference to Matthew 5:48. Van Mastricht, TPT II:163, 276, 341, 381. ↑

58. Van Mastricht, TPT II:141, 341. ↑

59. Van Mastricht, TPT II:341. ↑

60. Van Mastricht, TPT II:150. ↑

61. Van Mastricht, TPT II:381. ↑

62. Bauman suggests that it was through Tolstoy (1828-1910) that “the Sermon on the Mount first became a problem to the modern conscience.” But this is too late. Tolstoy was grappling in literature with a tension philosophers had discussed for a century. Bauman, Modern Quest, 7. ↑

63. John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press), 1966. Originally published in 1777. ↑

64. Wesley, Plain Account, 24. ↑

65. Wesley, Plain Account, 66. ↑

66. In so doing, Wesley seems to give away the integrity between motive and action that Jesus reclaimed through his antitheses in Matthew 5. ↑

67. William Arnett, “The Role of the Holy Spirit in Entire Sanctification in the Writings of John Wesley” Asbury Journal (1974):5—23. ↑

68. Wesley, Plain Account, 9. ↑

69. Andrew David Naselli, No Quick Fix: Where Higher Life Theology Came from, What it is, and Why it is Harmful (Bellingham: Lexham Press, 2017), 7-27. ↑

70. Richard Muller, Post Reformation Reformed Dogmatics (Grand Rapids: Baker Publishing Group, 1987), I:73, 74. ↑

71. Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 5-6. ↑

72. Shao Kai Tseng, Immanuel Kant (Phillipsburg: P&R, 2020), 141. Italics original. ↑

73. As Bavinck put it, “In dogmatics, God loves us; in ethics, therefore, we love him.” Herman Bavinck, Reformed Ethics ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), xxvi. ↑

74. Bruce McCormack, Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 232. ↑

75. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 114-115. ↑