The Lenses of Good Friday

More than once this week I’ve seen a meme posted online about how Jesus was crucified for standing up to the empire and not to atone for the sins of humanity, and I wonder why this is being pitched as a forced choice. Why must we divide into camps, the “redemptives” who view the cross of Christ as an atoning sacrifice in one corner, and the “politicals” who view the cross of Christ a regime-toppling act of socio-political defiance in the other corner?

Ephesians 6:12 has long been one of those reality-defining verses for me – “For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” If this is true – and I think it is – then “standing up to the empire” and “atoning for the sins of humanity” are not mutually exclusive competing agendas, but part and parcel of the very same thing. Sin is personal and social. The cross is political and atoning. Salvation is spiritual and temporal. We struggle against “flesh and blood” systems and structures, and “principalities and powers in  heavenly places.”

Because there was an attempt on His life by King Herod when He was born “King of the Jews” (Matthew 2:1-18), and He spent three years announcing that “the Kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1:15), and He was tried, condemned, and ridiculed “under Pontius Pilate,” a Roman official (Matthew 27:11-231; Mark 15:1-20; Luke 23:1-25; John 18:28-19:16), and had a placard nailed to His cross above His head that read “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews” written in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek (John 19:19-20), and had Roman soldiers dispatched to guard his tomb (Matthew 27:62-66), there is an unmistakable political lens through which to view the events of Good Friday. It is one of the Biblical angles through which to view the person and work of Jesus Christ.

The Empire killed Jesus. That’s abundantly clear from the Biblical witness. They killed Him because He was perceived to be a threat by them. That’s why Rome killed the two men beside Jesus on Good Friday too. But the death of Jesus means something more than just this. That’s abundantly clear from the Biblical witness as well. This is why when Pontius Pilate, the Empire’s legate in Judea, told Jesus that he had the power to release or crucify Him, Jesus relativized the boast by telling Pilate that any imagined power he thought he had had been “given to you from above” (John 19:10-11). The mechanics of the crucifixion were the work of the Empire, but the laying down of His life was something that Christ did “of His own accord” (John 10:18). “No one takes my life from me” Jesus explained, not Annas, not Caiaphas, not Herod, not Pilate. There was something more than just the struggle between political values and visions that put Jesus on the cross.

Jesus died. That’s what history tells us, and the Empire had a hand in it. That makes it a political act of violence triggered by Christ’s subversion of the “flesh and blood” agents of oppression that disregard the image of God that gives every human being dignity and worth. But Jesus died for our sins. It was the culminating act in his struggle with “the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” That’s what the Gospel tells us, and that’s makes what Christ did on the cross an atoning sacrifice.

My “progressive” friends and colleagues shake their heads at those of us who read the texts of Good Friday primarily and emphatically through redemptive lenses, and they wonder how we could be so blind to its obvious political implications.  And my “traditional” friends and colleagues shake their heads at those who read the Good Friday texts primarily and emphatically through political lenses, and point to its “eclipse of the atonement,” and to its “lack of clarity about the salvific efficacy of Christ’s suffering and death,” as examples of everything that’s wrong with the church today. 

Like children on the blacktop at recess getting up a kickball game, we’re all busy choosing up our sides. “Redemptives” over here, “politicals” over there.  The only problem is that I don’t want to play. One of the more troubling aspects of the church today is the way that we’ve stopped listening to each other.  So convinced are we of the rightness of our own positions as “redemptives” or “politicals,” that we’ve stopped listening to each other.  And the tragedy of this, again, if you ask me, is that in doing this, we’ve both settled for just half of Biblical Christianity.

It was reading E. Stanley Jones’ book “The Christ of the Mount” (Abingdon 1931) when I was a freshman in Christian College that persuaded me of the fact that Christianity has both a redemptive and an ethical side, and that “if the ethical side of our gospel is unworkable, then by that very fact the redemptive side is rendered worthless.”  To be sure, I find the redemptive side of the Gospel to be primary in my thinking and believing.  You may find the ethical side of the Gospel to be primary.  But so long as we both acknowledge that the Gospel is bigger than just what we ourselves regard as primary, that there is an ethical side to our redemptive side, or vice versa, depending on our perspective, then we’re within “hearing distance” of each other, and the possibility of the formation of a vital community of interpretation exists. But, for this to move from the potential and the possible to the actual and the experienced, then we’ve all got to act on it. “Politicals” need to show that they are just as interested in talking to “redemptives” as they are in talking to other “politicals,” and we “redemptives” have got to show that we are just as interested in talking to “politicals” as we are in talking to our fellow “redemptives.” 

As a first step, as a gesture of good will, we might begin by refusing to caricature each other, erecting stereotypes to be smugly and gleefully dismantled with our respective airs of spiritual superiority.  This is the “good faith assumption” that I find to be so missing from so much of recent theological and political rhetoric. It says that I will begin with the assumption that the person with whom I disagree is just as interested in and serious about the matter at hand as I am.  And then, as a second step, we might become more deliberate in sending signals that we are aware of the others in the interpretive community who see the texts with different lenses, and to embrace the idea that there is always more to the text than just my experience, perspective and presuppositions allow me to see. We’ve all got to stop speaking and acting as if matters of our shared faith that are held by equally faithful people in a rich variety of ways will finally sort out into a single position when everyone else truly understands it – and agree with what I think!  When I am just as committed to listening to you and your interpretation of the Gospel, as I am in trying to explain to you my interpretation of the Gospel, and to persuade you that I’m right, I believe that it is the Gospel that is actually served.  

“What is lost by letting go of the ‘Happenedness’ of the Gospel?”

A Conversation across Time with Marcus Borg – Part 2

If I were teaching a beginner’s class on contemporary theology, I would use Clark Pinnock’s book Tracking the Maze (Harper & Row – 1990) as the text.  I have long appreciated Clark Pinnock as a theologian, and this book is probably my favorite of the many that he wrote and that I have profitably read.   In the Introduction, after naming the incredibly “pluralistic and diverse” state of modern theology, Clark Pinnock lined out on a continuum the broad theological options that are available to us ranging from a “dogmatic” and “close-minded” “Modernism” on the left pole to an equally “dogmatic” and “close-minded” “Fundamentalism” on the right pole, with “Evangelical Liberalism” and “Conservative Evangelicalism” in-between.  And then Clark Pinnock observed that the middle positions “are often more open to discussion.”  In fact, he said that it had been his experience as an Evangelical theologian that “it often proved possible to have a very worthwhile discussion between evangelical liberals and conservative evangelicals but not at all easy to have one with either modernists or fundamentalists” (11).  It all came down, in his judgment, to just how “open” or “closed” the conversationalists were to what the other had to say, and he believed that one’s capacity for being able to do this decreased the closer to either of the extremes that you moved.

Since his death two weeks ago, I have been having a conversation with Marcus Borg in my weekly blog as part of my tribute to him.  He was part of the “faithful opposition” to my particular brand of Christian faith, and that’s why I read him and kept him around the household of my faith.  While he challenged some of my core convictions, I always felt like he did so reverently and respectfully.  He was “open” to the conversation, as am I, and so, with his passing, I feel like I have lost a friend.  Many of my colleagues and peers in recent days have been posting their tributes to Dr. Borg online, heralding him as the teacher who “saved” their faith.   That was not my experience with Marcus Borg.  When Clark Pinnock died on August 15, 2010, or Donald Bloesch nine days later on August 24, 2010, I lost two of the contemporary theologians who had decisively “shaped” my thinking and believing.  What so many of my friends are now saying about Marcus Borg I could have just as easily and authentically said about Clark Pinnock and Donald Bloesch then.  But as an “open” “Conservative Evangelical,” I am not oblivious to the way that Marcus Borg had an important hand in helping to refine what it is that I believe and proclaim, and so I have taken up the challenge of one of his last essays to try to explain from my faith perspective what is lost by letting go of the “happenedness” of the Christ event as the Gospels report and the rest of the New Testament bears witness to it, as the best way for me to honor his memory.

E. StanleyJones described the theological battles in the church of his day as “long-distance dueling.” He explained –

We have shelled each other’s positions, or what we thought were the positions, but there has been much smoke and confusion and not a little un-Christian feeling.  Why not sit down at Round Tables as Christian men and women… where we could listen reverently to what the other man would say [his faith’s convictions] were bringing to him, and we would share what it was meaning to us.  At the close we might not be agreed, but we would be mutually enriched, and certainly we would be closer to the real issues.  (Christ at the Round Table – Abingdon Press – 1928).

And so I write. DBS+

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The Next Step in the Argument:  The Trustworthiness of the Testimony
“That you may come to believe…and through believing that you may have life in His name…”

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book.  But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

– John 20:30-31

In last week’s “Borg Blog” I simply observed that the New Testament reads as if it were eyewitness testimony, the observations of people who were claiming to have had “a historical experience of the great event of salvation” (Rudolf Schnackenburg).  In that posting I pointed out that these people could have been completely mistaken about what they said they saw, or deliberately deceptive, or creatively embellishing, or certifiably crazy, seeing things that weren’t there and hearing things that weren’t said.  Last week I didn’t address the question of the trustworthiness of the testimony that the New Testament offers, I just wanted to establish the fact that the New Testament reads as if it were eyewitness testimony.  This week in my “Borg Blog” I turn my attention to the question of the reliability of what the New Testament authors are telling us, and next week in my last “Borg Blog” I will try to explain why it matters so much to me that what they say happened actually did.

For years at youth rallies and retreats, high school camps and conferences, it was a standard part of one’s bag of youth ministry tricks to divide everybody up into pairs and then to send them off on a trust walk.  The instructions were simple.  One member of the pair was told to close their eyes, or better yet, was blindfolded, and the other member of the pair was then asked to verbally guide their unseeing partner across the campground without running then into trees or off of cliffs.

The teaching point of this exercise was that faith involves this kind of trust.  As Peter put it in his first letter: “Though you have not seen Christ, you love Him, and though you do not see Him now, you believe in Him, greatly rejoicing with joy inexpressible and full of glory, obtaining as the outcome of your faith the salvation of your souls” (I Peter 1:8-9).  We haven’t seen Christ, but somebody did, and we now believe in Him “through their word” (John 17:20).  This was the whole point of those verses from the end of the Gospel of John with which I began this posting (20:30-31).  John explained that the selected and interpreted stories about Jesus Christ that he told his readers in his Gospel were there to move them toward a decision of faith about Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God, “and that through believing you may have life in his name.” 

It was because of verses like these that Alexander Campbell, one of the founders of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), came up with “his” distinctive definition, which in turn became “our” distinctive definition of faith.

No testimony, no faith: for faith is only the belief of testimony, or confidence in testimony as true.  To believe without testimony is just as impossible as to see without light. The measure, quality, and power of faith are always found in the testimony believed.   Where testimony begins, faith begins; and where testimony ends, faith ends. (“Faith” – The Christian System – 1839).

And this makes the “trustworthiness” of the New Testament witness a matter of critical importance to faith.  The argument is succinctly and clearly stated in 2 Peter 1.

• In verses 13-15,  Simon Peter (the named author in 1:1), told his readers that he felt a certain urgency in stirring up their remembrance of the things that he’d previously taught them because he sensed his approaching death, and after his departure he wanted them to be able “to call these things to mind.”

• And in verses 16-18, Simon Peter told his readers that the things that he had previously told them about Jesus Christ “were not cleverly devised tales,” but things that he himself had a seen and heard about Jesus Christ as an “eyewitness.”   In other words, Peter was extending an invitation of faith to his readers based on the trustworthiness of his own testimony as an eyewitness, and this whole argument collapses if the things to which Peter bore witness never happened, or if Peter didn’t actually see them as he emphatically insisted that he did.  Peter was telling his readers to “trust” him and to believe that what he was telling them about Jesus Christ was accurate and true, and if it turns out that I can’t, well then, I’m converting to Buddhism, or Judaism, or Islam, or to almost anything other than Christianity.  You see, I believe in Jesus Christ on the basis of the apostolic word of testimony, on the basis of their “memoirs” of the Christ Event and their explanation of its meaning.

Marcus Borg pointed out that “conflict about the Bible is the single most divisive issue among Christians in North America today,” and I completely agree!   In fact, I think that  Andrew Wilson (a leader in the British “New Frontiers” Movement) is exactly right when he says that “the biggest theological debate of the next twenty years” is going to be the church’s doctrine of Scripture – how we read, understand and apply the Bible.

Much modern discussion about hell isn’t really about what specific texts say, but how (or even if) we should form our theology of judgment, or God, from them (from the text of Scripture).  Much modern discussion about the roles of men and women isn’t really about what specific texts say, but about whether or not the situation in which they were written was different enough from ours to allow us (or compel us) to apply them (the Biblical texts) differently today. As such, although the debates seem to be about one thing – hell, gender roles, gay bishops, the atonement, or whatever – they are actually about something else: how we understand and apply these ancient texts in the modern world. (http://thinktheology.co.uk)

The issue here is how the New Testament is going to function as the authority for the church’s faith and practice today. And the crucial question concerns just how much confidence we can reasonably have in the claims that are made by the New Testament documents.  Are they deserving of our trust as reliable witnesses to the Christ Event and as faithful interpretations of its normative meaning?

Spend a little time on the internet or in the library of your local seminary, and the complexity and diversity of the issues involved in sorting through this question will quickly become apparent.  There are a number of “forks in the road” that will send you down the path towards either confidence in or suspicion of what the New Testament reports.  Included among the issues that are vigorously debated are-

• The question of the nature of the New Testament texts themselves – what is their “genre”?  How did the authors of the Gospels actually intend their readers to understand what it was that they were writing? What kind of literature are we looking at?
• The questions of the accuracy and authenticity of the established New Testament texts?  Since we don’t have any original New Testament manuscripts – nothing from the actual hand and pen of Paul, or John, or Luke, or Peter – how much trust can we actually put in the copies of texts that we do have in our New Testaments?  Aren’t there wild variations between the different copies of the New Testament books that we do possess that substantially change the meaning of what is written depending on which one you are looking at?
• And how about all those contradictions, discrepancies and inaccuracies between the accounts of the events that are reported in the New Testament as we have it, and the irreconcilable differences between the meaning of those events as they are explained by other New Testament writers?   Things like Matthew and Luke saying that Mary was a Virgin when she conceived and gave birth to Jesus, and Mark, John and Paul not mentioning it all? Or the number of angels at the tomb on Easter Sunday morning?  Or Paul’s insistence that we are saved by faith and not works, and James teaching that faith without works is dead?
• Another hotly debated topic are the seeming parallels between what the Gospels tell us about Jesus and what we find in the mystery religions of the ancient Middle East about dying and rising saviors and the stories of divine births from the mythologies of other ancient peoples?  How much of what the Gospels report are just borrowed categories from these sources?  Familiar ways of symbolically talking about matters of spiritual significance and transcendence?
• And isn’t the New Testament as we have it just the “victor’s” account of things?  Early Christianity was crowded with competing versions of the faith, this take on things says. There were other books with other interpretations about Jesus that “lost” the contest for ascendency as the official faith of the church.  These books were “lost” and their teachings suppressed, but now, thanks to archeology, we are finding them and they provide us with entirely new ways  of thinking about Christianity.  Therefore the New Testament documents must be stripped of their “privileged” position as the authoritative source for our faith and practice as Christians and room made for these “new/old” voices.
• And finally, there is the big question of competing worldviews – the closed universe of naturalism in which Divine action is rejected from the outset making what the New Testament claims impossible versus the open universe of supernaturalism which the in-breaking of the Divine in the Incarnation, Atoning Death, Resurrection, Ascension and promised Return of Jesus Christ which the New Testament documents assume and affirm.

These are all the topics for doctoral dissertations and the subjects of thousand page scholarly volumes.  As wise King Solomon observed long ago, “Of the making of many books there is no end” (Ecclesiastes 12:12).   I am a working pastor, a practical theologian, which is to say that I read some of the books and understand the broad outlines of the arguments.  And what I know is this: For every argument made there is a counterargument that can be offered.  Every point has a counterpoint. I have found intelligent and articulate scholars on either side of all of these “fork in the road” issues, and this fact has lowered my expectations about what this process can deliver.

Intellectual certainty is a myth.

No question is beyond doubt, no argument is final. Both the “dogmatic” and “close-minded”  “modernists” and the “dogmatic” and “close-minded”  “fundamentalists” at the poles of Clark Pinnock’s continuum of contemporary theology make this same mistake.  They make their arguments, state their case and then drop the microphone and walk away, acting as if the question is thereby settled and the case is forever closed by the brilliance and indomitability of their logic.  It should be apparent by how I write that I have settled opinions on all of the “fork in the road” questions that I have listed above.  I have read the arguments and drawn my own conclusions about all of these matters that I think make the best sense of things.  But I hold those conclusions “modestly” and with a real appreciation for the “mystery” of it all.  The conclusions I have drawn are all “plausible,” or else I wouldn’t have drawn them.  But because we walk by faith and not by sight, my conclusion cannot be “absolute.”   And for me this means that I cannot act as if somebody who disagrees with me and my conclusions is stupid or wicked.  Their settled conclusions are “plausible” too, or else they wouldn’t have drawn them.  And it seems to me that this is the best we can hope for in the contest of ideas; a stalemate.

Faith cannot be compelled by logic, by the persuasiveness of some argument. And so John G. Stackhouse, Jr., urges Christians to adopt what he calls the approach of “humble apologetics” when fulfilling our I Peter 3:15 obligation to “give an account for the hope that is in you… gently and reverently.”  His whole book is an important read (Humble Apologetics – Oxford University Press –  2002), but this principle is at its very core –

Given historic Christian teachings regarding the finitude and falleness of human beings and of our thinking in particular, we must be careful not to claim too much for what we believe.  We Christians should not need postmodernists to tell us that we do not know it all.  We should not need anyone to tell us that all human thought is partial, distorted, and usually deployed in the interest of this or that personal agenda. 

…This we are as committed as we can be to what we believe is real, and especially to the One whom we love, worship and obey as the Way, the Truth, and the Life.  We gladly offer what, and whom, we believe we have found to be true to our neighbors in the hope that they also will recognize it, and him, as true.  We recognize that there are good reasons for them not to believe, even as we recognize that there can be good reasons for our own doubts. Indeed, we can recognize that God may have given them some things to teach us, and we gratefully receive them in the mutual exchange of God’s great economy of salvation.

[But] we recognize, ultimately, that to truly believe, to truly commit oneself to God, is itself a gift that God alone bestows.  Conversion is a gift.  Faith is a gift.  God alone can change minds so that those minds can both see and embrace the great truths of the Gospel, and the One who stands at their center.

And this opens the door on the last room in my “Borg Blog” that I want to walk through with you next week.  Suffice it for now to say that I think that the things that the New Testament tells me about the Christ Event, about what actually happened and what it normatively means, makes the most sense when it is taken at face value, as the eyewitness reports of “a historical experience of the great event of salvation.”  And I can direct you to the scholars and their works that I have read that makes this choice “plausible” – intellectually respectable and acceptable.  But when push comes to shove, the reason why I take what the New Testament reports at face value, is because it is what the New Testament tells me that Jesus Christ said and did that has convinced me that He is “the Messiah, the Son of God,” and it is through believing this that I have personally received “life in his name.”

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“Credo ut intelligam”

“Credo ut intelligam” (alternatively spelled “Credo ut intellegam”) is Latin for “I believe so that I may understand” and is a maxim of Anselm of Canterbury (Proslogion, 1), which is based on a saying of Augustine of Hippo (“crede, ut intelligas,” “believe so that you may understand”; Tract. Ev. Jo., 29.6) to relate faith and reason. In Anselm’s writing, it is placed in juxtaposition to its converse, “intellego ut credam” (“I think so that I may believe”), when he says “Neque enim quaero intelligere ut credam, sed credo ut intelligam” (“I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe, but rather, I believe in order that I may understand”).

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

“Three Things I do Every Morning”

Some “Grist” for Your New Year’s Resolution “Mill”

Three things I do every morning so I will be happy all day long.  The first is to affirm the reality of Jesus Christ and to thank Him for his Lordship.  The second is to call to mind the reality of Satan, who will seek throughout the day to make me a miserable contradiction of evident joy.   Third, I call to mind the gifts that are mine in Christ.  If I live each day faithful to my gifts, developing and improving them, I find that I am, indeed, a happy person.  If I am sloppy and careless in developing my gifts, I find a predictable negativity fixing itself into my life. 

Calvin Miller – The Taste of Joy – IVP – 1983 (17)

Calvin Miller was one of my companions on the journey.  I never actually met him.  I never even heard him speak.  But through his books he regularly broke open the living bread for me and spread a rich feast. This excerpt from his book on joy is dog-eared and well-marked in my copy.  Calvin said that some of his friends actually laughed out loud when he told them that he was writing a book on joy.  Apparently his spiritual temperament did not make him the most natural choice for the assignment in their minds. But write the book he did, and to my way of thinking, it was one of his best.

The “three things I do every morning” that Calvin identified have become part of my life since I stumbled across them some 30 years ago when I first read this book.  Two of the three things are spiritually sensible and theologically acceptable.  Who has any objection to “affirming the reality of Jesus Christ,” or “calling to mind the gifts that are ours in Christ”? This is the standard fare of Christian spirituality; familiar, even conventional terrain for our souls.  It’s the second thing that Calvin said that he acknowledged every morning that jerks most of us up short.  He said that every morning he “called to mind the reality of Satan” who he said he believed would “seek throughout the day to make him a miserable contradiction of evident joy.”

Now, we are theologically conditioned to dismiss talk of Satan as a primitive myth, and to immediately disregard anyone who would speak of Satan as being either sadly uninformed or willfully ignorant.  Talk of the Devil grates on our intellectual and spiritual sensibilities so much so that it’s hard for us to take seriously any wisdom that takes the Devil seriously.   Those who find it credible that there is an adversarial presence or power at work in the universe and in our lives are routinely dismissed from the grown-up table of serious theological conversation.

My introduction to the critical study of Scripture occurred when as a 17 year old college freshman at a conservative church related school my professor of Old Testament announced one day that he didn’t believe that there really was a Devil.   And from the reaction that his comment generated in that class, you would have thought that he had denied that Jesus Christ was his personal Lord and Savior.  What his comment forced me to do was to think theologically for the very first time in my life; to begin to connect the dots of the Biblical witness; to look for an underlying frame on which all of its stories, personalities and teachings might hang.  And so while many of my peers were agitating for his immediate termination because of his deficient diabology, I found myself instead in the college library reading just as much and just as widely as I possibly could so that I might be able to intelligently engage in the conversation of faith that he had initiated in such a carefully calculated way.  And I can tell you that it was by honestly entertaining the possibility that there might not be a Devil that I finally came to the conclusion that it just makes so much more sense to me to believe that there is.

I find in Scripture “an anti-God force, most often conceived personally, that exists and works in history, especially against the purposes and people of God.”  I find throughout human history and across human cultures a remarkably consistent awareness of the existence of supernatural principalities and powers and our struggle with them.  In fact, as Philip Jenkins has made abundantly clear in his recent writings about the emergence of “Southern-world Christianity,” they “overwhelmingly… teach a firm belief in the existence of evil and in the reality of the Devil,” so that right now we find ourselves in the middle of an “epochal cultural revolution” that is nothing short of a “new reformation.”  And in my very own experience as a Christian and a pastor, I find that the opposition that I face on a daily basis is purposeful.  It seems to know my name and have my address.  There’s nothing abstract or impersonal about the “push-back” that I experience in my life or my ministry.  It knows my vulnerabilities, and when they are most exposed.  It knows precisely where to attack me.

The Epistle to the Ephesians refers to “wiles” twice, once in reference to the trickery of other people (4:14) and the other with reference to the way that the Devil works against us (6:11).  The unusual word that gets translated from the Greek as “wiles” or “schemes” in both of these verses – “methodeia” – refers to something that is methodical.  And I can tell you that that’s sure how it feels to me.  In my experience the evil that I face is orderly, logical, deliberate, strategic, even “tailored” to my own particular “weaknesses and vulnerabilities.”  And so, in addition to the New Testament’s witness to a universe that is crowded and divided, it is evil’s intelligence and persistence that persuade me that it is more than just an impersonal force that we face; it’s a presence, and it feels like it “seeks to work me woe” as the Reformer Martin Luther put it in his hymn “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.” 

 There is something that pushes back; something adversarial; something antagonistic; something bigger than ourselves.  N.T. Wright has described it as a deep and dark force that operates at a “suprapersonal” level “pressing into the project of God.” 100 years ago the American preacher S.D. Gordon simply labeled it “the great outside hindrance,” and that makes good sense of what I know from revelation, reason, experience and tradition. Oh, believe me, I know just how ridiculous talk of the devil can be – how crude and cartoonish a figure the adversary cuts in the popular imagination – red suit, pointy tail, horns, pitchfork, stinking of sulfur. And yet…

Kyriacos Markides, a sociologist who teaches at the University of Maine, conducted a series of interviews on spiritual reality with Father Maximos, the Greek Orthodox Archbishop of Cyprus. In the course of their conversations, Kyriacos heard Father Maximos refer to the church as the “arena of an ongoing battle.”  As he explained to Father Maximos, “I was under the impression that the Church is a harbor of peace and healing, not a battleground.”  And so Father Maximos explained to Kyriacos that, “The Church is available to us as a vehicle for our salvation… (and) such a pursuit implies a struggle against those forces that labor to block our ascent toward God.”  Life is hard, there’s going to be resistance, there’s going to be a struggle, there are going to be forces that work hard to block our growth in grace and faith, and the best strategy, it seems to me, is just to admit it from the get go.

In fact, isn’t this what Jesus Christ Himself told us to expect when He taught us to pray saying: “Deliver us from evil,” which could just as easily and legitimately could be translated “Deliver us from the evil one.”  The Scandinavian theologian Gustaf Aulen cited this as part of the evidence that Biblical Christianity has an inescapable “conflict motif.” He explained that “faith looks upon existence as a dramatic struggle and sees the inner meaning of existence emerging out of this struggle where the divine stands in conflict with hostile forces.”  Gustaf Aulen warned that any attempt to understand Christianity without paying sufficient attention to this fact is “doomed to failure.”  And so are our annual New Year’s Resolutions, or any well-intentioned strategy for personal growth and self-improvement.   If the very real resistance that we will face from the “great outside hindrance” isn’t factored in, our plans will be sabotaged before they even begin.

Announce growth, and immediately you will encounter opposition; that’s just the nature of things.  And so every morning of his life Calvin Miller of blessed memory called to mind three great facts of his existence: First of all, Jesus Christ was His Lord and Savior and Calvin was living his life in response to Christ’s claim on him; Second, there was an adversarial something or someone out there that was hard at work trying to keep Calvin from becoming the person that Jesus Christ created him to be and from doing the sorts of things that Jesus Christ needed Calvin to do; and Third, in this struggle between good and evil, right and wrong, light and darkness, Jesus Christ had put at Calvin’s personal disposal an array of gifts and graces that if taken up by faith could enable Calvin to stand, and thrive.

Here at the beginning of a New Year, in your annual resolutionary exercise, I offer you the wisdom and example of my soul’s good friend, Calvin Miller, to help you tomorrow morning when you wake up in earnest pursuit of all the positive changes that you intend today, and find that the change you want is going to be harder and take so much longer than you ever imagined.  The promise is that you are not alone in this struggle. DBS+

…You belong to God, my dear children.  You have already won a victory…
because the Spirit who lives in you is greater than the Spirit who lives in the world.

 

– I John 4:4

 

“Do You Need God to do Church?” (3)

The “Antithesis” of Human Intelligence, Initiative
and Ingenuity in Making the Church Effective
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From an earlier blog –

Over the next few weeks I am going to be thinking out loud here about the part that human intelligence, initiative and ingenuity plays in making a church effective, and the part that the Divine presence, power and provision plays. Using Hegel’s dialectic, I am going to move from an examination of the thesis of Divine action, to an exploration of the antithesis of human action, to a consideration of the shape that some kind of synthesis of the two might take? And along the way I hope to bump into some truths that might actually serve the church and its ministry today.  DBS+

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While doing some research for my Doctor of Ministry Integrative Project some 20 years ago at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary I stumbled across this assessment of frontier revivalism by a professor at a Stone/Campbell Movement University –

Periods of increased evangelism, called “revivals,” occurred on the American Frontier, following the Second Great Awakening.   Frontier religionists usually explained these cycles of increased “conversions” as times when God poured out His grace in an abundant way to sinners.  They believed that man had little to do with these “revivals” occurring.  God alone made the decision concerning these “special outpourings of His Spirit.” Today, as we look objectively at these revival periods, most of them can be explained by greater zeal on the part of the evangelists themselves. Occasionally, however, an outbreak of some dreaded disease or a financial crisis caused frontier people to be more receptive to God’s message.  [Ronald Bever – “The Influence of the 1827-29 Revivals in the Restoration Movement” – Restoration Quarterly – Vol. 10; No. 3, Third Quarter, 1967 (134)]

I was struck then, as I am struck now, by the startling anti-supernaturalist bias at work in this assessment of our history. The author sniffed at the thought of revivals being the result of God’s direct action, a “special outpouring of His Spirit.”   “Objectively,” God wasn’t really needed for the renewal of the church according to this scholar.  Human beings just needed to “do more” and “try harder” in order to bring about revival – master some techniques – or else wait for social circumstances to get frightening enough to create a general condition of anxious receptivity in people.

Tim Spivey, a Stone/Campbell church planter in Southern California confronted this anti-supernaturalist bias in our spiritual heritage directly in a recent blog.

In his conversations with leaders in Churches of Christ, Pat Keifert noted that God was used as the subject of an active verb less roughly 5% of the time. Here’s what that means in part: leaders in Churches of Christ generally view God as passive. That finding doesn’t surprise me at all. As I hear churches discuss their futures, deal with crises, debate theological or textual issues–there is a sense that God indeed spoke, but doesn’t speak. He did, but doesn’t do. He lives, but isn’t living. [http://timspivey.com/deism-in-churches-of-christ/]

Now, contrast this with the reformational perspective of Martin Luther.

Take me, for example. I opposed indulgences and all papists, but never by force. I simply taught, preached, wrote God’s Word: otherwise I did nothing. And then, while I slept or drank Wittenberg beer with my Philip of Amsdorf the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that never a prince or emperor did such damage to it. I did nothing: the Word did it all. Had I wanted to start trouble…. I could have started such a little game at Worms that even the emperor wouldn’t have been safe. But what would it have been? A mug’s game. I did nothing: I left it to the Word.”  [http://www.reformationtheology.com]

And here is the thesis of the necessity of the Divine presence, power and provision in order to do church effectively countered by the argument of the antithesis of the indispensability of human intelligence, initiative and ingenuity if the church is to be successful. So, which is it?  What makes the church effective?  Is it the action of God or the action of human beings?  Is it God’s sovereign grace or humanity’s obedient faithfulness?

A book that I stumbled across on my Sabbatical earlier this year that has greatly enriched my understanding of these questions was Ian Stackhouse’s The Gospel-Driven Church: Retrieving Classical Ministries for Contemporary Revivalism (Paternoster 2004). Ian is a British Baptist Pastoral Leader with firsthand experience in the Charismatic Renewal Movement.  In the words of another British churchman from an earlier generation, Ian “believes in the Holy Ghost not merely vaguely as a spiritual Power, but as a Person indwelling believers… who justifies our faith in Him” [Roland Allen – Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? – 1962 (149-150)].

In the first part of this book called “The Pathology of Revival” Ian critiqued both the utter passivity of those Christians who are entirely comfortable with the “tarrying” in Jerusalem until they have been endued “with power from on high” (Luke 24:49), and the frenetic busyness of other Christians who embrace every fad and pursue every new technique that’s guaranteed to produce numerical increase and congregational effectiveness.

There are Christians who intend nothing and initiate nothing until and unless the Holy Spirit has been released with power in them to make them witnesses (Acts 1:8). Some believers are always “looking for the alchemist’s stone” that will instantly and effortlessly renew the church.  It’s a kind of magical thinking.  And at the other extreme there are those Christians who think that they can automatically and invariably engineer spiritual growth by the discovery and application of the right techniques.  They are in a perpetual quest for “the ingredient, the program, the plan, the strategy that will bring about the breakthrough” (Stackhouse 19).  Church effectiveness is an entirely “predictable process.” Once you’ve mastered the method, just like a favorite recipe, it can be successfully repeated again and again.

To the first group of Christians it’s all about God and what God does. Go back and read that Martin Luther quote – “the Word did it” is their motto.   This is the thesis of Divine action (see my last blog for a further exploration of this idea).  And to the second group of Christians it’s all about us and what we do.  Go back and read that Stone/Campbell scholar’s naturalistic explanations for the revival on the American frontier. It was “the greater zeal” of the evangelists that brought it about.   And this is the antithesis of human action.  It’s point, counter-point; thrust and parry.  And it is in the push and pull of these “furious opposites” that the middle ground of a new synthesis emerges, and that’s what we will explore next week.  DBS+

 

“And I was a Stranger”

A Little Believing Thinking

Our most recent “Faiths in Conversation” session was on what our respective faith traditions (Judaism, Christianity & Islam) have to say about the “other,” the “stranger” and “sojourner.” As I wrote about last week, our tendency on topics like these is to jump immediately into the arena of public policy and political action.  And while I would be in full agreement that not to act on our faith’s convictions is the very definition of unfaithfulness (Matthew 7:21-27; James 1:22).  But I would also argue that not to root out actions in careful Scriptural reflection is equally unfaithful.  If being “hearers of the Word” but not “doers of the Word” is spiritually dangerous, then no less dangerous is our tendency to be “doers” without first being “hearers of the Word.” And so in this Interfaith presentation I attempted to summarize the New Testament’s primary teachings about the “stranger” and the “other,” and to describe the characteristic way that we as Christians have tried to keep faith with them.  DBS+

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Faiths in Conversation
“The Other & the Stranger” – September 14, 2014 – 7 pm
A Christian Perspective   (Second Revision)

Dr. Douglas B. Skinner
Northway Christian Church
Dallas, Texas

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The theological foundation for this conversation here this evening from the Christian perspective is Creation. The Apostle Paul writing to the Ephesian church reminded them that when he got down on his knees to pray, that he was talking to the God who is “the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name” (3:14-15).  Our creation by God makes us all members of the same human family.  This is what Paul meant when in his sermon to the philosophers on Mars Hill in Athens he told them that we are all God’s “offspring” (Acts 17:28), that “He made from one blood every nation of mankind to live on the face of the earth” (17:26).

Having said this, I think I could sit down right now, and feel pretty confident that I had fulfilled my assignment here this evening of explaining the Christian perspective on “The Other and the Stranger.” Our Creation by God makes us one people, one family, and technically this means that there are no outsiders, no strangers, no “others.” “On paper,” in principle, this is absolutely true. This is the way God intended things to be; His “Creative intent.” But the fact of the matter is that things right now are not the way that God intended them to be.

Following the opening picture of shalom in the book of Genesis where everything and everybody fit together with everything and everybody else in a web of perfect harmony and well-being just like the pieces of a puzzle making a beautiful picture, the stories that follow that portrait of “original blessing” are descriptions of its gradual unraveling.  The scholars talk about the stories of Genesis chapter 1-11 as “etiological” stories, stories of origin that explain why things are the way they are.

We have an innate sense deep inside us – what some of the more poetic theologians have called an “echo of Eden” – that tell us that things are supposed to fit and work together in perfect harmony.  But our experience of life in this world is anything but this, and so the stories that the Bible tells after the stories of creation are stories that explain why it is that we feel so estranged from God spiritually, and so estranged from our own selves psychologically, and so estranged from creation ecologically and so estranged from each other socially.  While we are all one family by design, all the children of the same God, we nevertheless experience each other by the things that make us different.  We divide from each other on the basis of things like race, gender, economics, geography, culture and language.

Donald Kraybill, a Mennonite Theologian and Sociologist, describes our familiar pattern of social interaction to a checkerboard.

Each square on the board represents a particular category of persons… Boundaries emerge to set groups apart from each other.  Members have a clear sense of whether they are “in” or “out” of a group… Social interaction is organized around the boxes and lines on the social checkerboard.  We relate primarily to persons in our own square and in nearby squares. (225)

And, we grow increasingly leery of those in squares away from our own.   This is what the story of the tower of Babel in Genesis chapter 11 is all about.  Since the separation of that scattering we have become strangers to each other.  We have lost Creation’s bond of shalom that makes us conscious of our connection with each other as members of the same family, and we have settled into different squares on the checkerboard where we become strangers and relate as “others.”

As Christians, when we talk about God’s saving work in Jesus Christ, we believe that what is being repaired is what has become unraveled; what is being restored is God’s original creative intent for us and the world, it’s about getting us back to the garden. And part of this healing is a movement away from the separation of Babel that has made us strangers, and a return to our more foundational identity as members of the same family.

The New Testament ends with a stunning vision of a new heaven and a new earth with a New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God when the work of salvation is finally complete. And the great architectural feature of this coming city of God are its four walls with four gates on each side, 12 in all, open every day and all night long so that the people of the nations can stream in bringing their glory and honor with them to lay before the throne of God (21:24-27).   And in the glimpse that John was actually given of God’s throne, it was surrounded by people of every tribe and tongue (Revelation 5:9).  In the end, by the grace of God, the human family makes its way “back to the Garden” where once again there are no strangers in God’s Shalom.

Until that day comes, we as Christians try to embody what we know about what it is that God is in the process of bringing about in Jesus Christ as best we can. We lean into that future that we believe that God is bringing about.  We who are Christians regularly pray – “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” – it’s the first part of our family prayer.  And believe me when I tell you that you can’t pray these words, and mean them, and then just sit idly by, indifferent to what it is that you know God wills for us and for the whole world. As John Killinger put it, when you pray these words –

You want to redesign the world in such a way that people are made to suffer less. You want the hungry to be fed and the infirm to walk.  You want the blind to see and the deaf to hear.  You want parents to love their children and children to grow up happy and morally committed to the right things. (115)

And you want strangers to be treated with respect, dignity and compassion because the New Testament makes it absolutely clear that this is something that God wants.

In Matthew chapter 25, in His instructions on the kinds of things that He expected His disciples to be doing out of their devotion to Him, Jesus Christ talked about taking in the stranger (25:35; 38; 43). “I was a stranger and you welcomed me” Jesus said (25:35).   Behind this spiritual truth was the literal truth of Jesus’ own experience as a refugee.  Matthew tells us that when King Herod went on his rampage killing all the baby boys in the vicinity of Bethlehem after Christ’s birth, Joseph packed up his family and fled to Egypt where they lived as sojourners and strangers.  Somebody welcomed them there; provided for them there, and in turn, Christ expected His disciples to do this same thing for others (2:13-23).

In Romans 12:13, the Christians of the Roman church were told to practice hospitality. The word that appears in that Greek text for hospitality is “xenophilia” which literally refers to loving the stranger, the exact opposite of the word that is probably more familiar to us – “xenophobia,” the “fear” or “hatred of the stranger.” Paul understood “loving the stranger and the sojourner” to be a characteristic of someone who is being “transformed” by the person and work of Jesus Christ in their lives (12:2).  In other words, this is something Christians characteristically do.

And the author of the New Testament book of Hebrews makes this same exact point when he or she wrote: “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers” (Hebrews 13:2). “Entertain” here does not refer to inviting them to the movies, or buying them a nice meal, or singing them a happy song.  No, what it meant was opening their hands, their arms, their hearts, their homes and their churches to them.  And according to Adolf von Harnack, the important German theologian and church historian from a century ago, the impact of the church in the ancient world was in no small part due to the way that the first Christians did exactly this.

They loved people in specific and concrete ways: by giving alms to the poor, especially to widows and orphans; by caring for the sick, the infirm and the disabled; by providing for the needs of prisoners and those languishing in the mines; by taking care of the dying, the enslaved, and those devastated by natural disasters like earthquakes and floods; by finding work for the unemployed and taking care of the unemployable; and by welcoming the sojourners and making room in their lives for the strangers.

When Christianity jumped from its exclusively Jewish incubator to the whole wide world in the front room of the house of a Roman Centurion named Cornelius in Caesarea (Acts 10), Peter stated the principle that has informed Christian conscience ever since: “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to Him” (10:34).  Now understand, Peter didn’t come to this conclusion quickly or easily.  The ways of Babel are strong in us; that checkerboard is tattooed on our soul.  This truth had to hit Peter like the proverbial 2×4 up the side of a Missouri mule, and then it had to grow in him gradually from the inside out.  And as a Christian, this is how I believe that it still works.  Things change for the better in ourselves and the world from the inside out.

When he was asked what the Bible was all about, Gardener Taylor, one of the great African American preachers of the last generation said, “God is out to get back what belongs to Him.” Starting where the Bible starts, Dr. Taylor saw the estrangement of humanity from God that the story of the Garden of Eden tells as the great fact of the human condition.  The expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden made them spiritual refugees from their own true native land with God, and the story that the Bible tells from Genesis through Revelation is the story of what God did to bring His people home again to Himself.

In the New Testament, this is the dominant thought when the subject turns to strangers and sojourners.   It’s first and foremost a category for a Christian’s own self-understanding.  We find it in the second chapter of the letter to the Ephesians, where the saving work of Jesus Christ gets framed as the way that Gentiles, people who had been spiritual aliens and strangers to the covenant of God, get restored to their place in His family.

Through Christ we have access by one Spirit to the Father… so that we are no longer strangers and aliens… but have become members of the household of God. (2:18-19)

In the Hebrew Scriptures the treatment of the stranger and the sojourner by God’s first covenant people was conditioned by their memory of having once been strangers and sojourners themselves (Deuteronomy 5:15). And in the same way, we who are Christians are commanded to treat strangers and sojourners in ways that are consonant with our own spiritual identity as strangers and sojourners ourselves.  A heart that has been welcomed home to the love of God in Jesus Christ is a heart in which room will be made for the other and the stranger because that’s what God wants, and that’s how God works.

Sources

Barrs, Jerram. “Francis A. Schaeffer: The Later Years Lesson 8.” Basic Bible Study Themes, III. http://www.covenantseminary.edu
Harnack, Adolf Von. “The Gospel of Love and Charity.” Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries.    http://www.ccel.org
Killinger, John.  Bread for the Wilderness, Wine for the Journey. Word Books. 1976.
Kraybill, Donald. The Upside Down Kingdom. Herald Press.

 

 

 

 

 

 

My “Defining” Books; The Serious Titles

A few weeks ago I listed the ten “popular” spiritual books that have had a strong hand in shaping my soul.  These were some of the books that I read before I was 20 years old, and that have remained on the bookshelf of my heart ever since because of the ways that they set the table for the rest of my spiritual life.  None of these books were “scholarly.”  None of them were written in the academy or for the academy.  They were written for ordinary Christians living ordinary lives as members of ordinary churches.

This week I turn to another category of “defining” books for me, what I am calling my “serious” collection.  These are ten of the books that have had the greatest influence on my theological formation.  How I think about who God is and what I understand God to be about have the tendrils of my soul all over these books.  They are the veritable lattice work that has held me up and given me direction as I have grown.  In fact, on my own personal spiritual Mount Rushmore, it would be four of these theologians who faces would appear – Augustine, Calvin, Bonhoeffer and Brunner.  These ten books demand more of the reader than the ten books that appeared on my “popular” list a few weeks ago, but none of them are beyond the capacity of a serious reader who is prepared to go slowly and thoughtfully.

Before giving you my list, let me first honor the man whose personal and professional example provided me with the example of how genuine believing and critical thinking can combine in a life of great faithfulness.  Dr. William Richardson was one of my professors of New Testament and Church History at Northwest Christian College in the early 1970’s.  He “had me” the day he began a lecture by opening his Greek New Testament and translating the text that we were going to be discussing that day right there on the spot.  I knew then that when I “grew up” I wanted to be just like him.  Dr. Richardson was brilliant, insightful, whimsical, engaging and fully invested in the learning process.  He was instrumental in showing me what Jesus meant when He told us to love God with all our minds (Matthew 22:37).  Paul talked about the foundation he laid that others would later build upon (I Corinthians 3:11).  Well, Dr. Richardson laid my theological foundation that these ten thinkers with their defining books later built upon.  Even now, with every book I read, every sermon I preach, every article I write, and every thought I have, I do so knowing that I stand on the foundation that my “wise master builder,” Dr. William Richardson laid so skillfully in my head and heart some 40 years ago, and my life and ministry of “thinking believing” has just been “a poor attempt to imitate the man.”  My desire and capacity to read books like the ones that appear on this list were instilled in me by the way that I watched Dr. Richardson’s faith seek understanding.  He inspired and empowered the same pursuit in me.

As I studied theology I often found myself captivated by what a certain theologian had to say, and that would send me off to the library to read a biography of them.   More often than not, the gap between the kind of people they turned out to be, the bad moral and spiritual choices they made on a personal level, and the profundity of their insight into the truth of Christianity staggered me.  It was and remains a mystery to me how somebody can grasp the meaning of Christianity with the brilliance of a great theologian, and not be seized by its truth in a way that produces a Christ-like character in that theologian who is thinking those thoughts and giving them such powerful expression.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer was the great exception.  His life was the laboratory in which he worked out the truths that he explored in his classic book The Cost of Discipleship.  Ostensibly a commentary on Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, this book challenges “easy-believism” and “cheap grace” as terrible substitutes for the obedience of faith  (Romans 1:5) to which we are called by the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  If you were to read just one book from the list of 10, make it this one!  It has the power to change your life.

My sister gave me a copy of Albert Schweitzer’s Quest for the Historical Jesus for my 12th birthday.  It was not because she perceived me to be a theological prodigy that she bought it for me.  No, it was because the book cost $2.95 new in 1965, which met her budget requirements, and it had “Jesus” in the tile, and she knew that since I was “religious” that I would probably like it!  It wouldn’t be until my first year in seminary, more than 10 years later that I would actually read this book with any degree of understanding. But once I had, I knew that the questions it asked were among the most crucial for the Christian Faith.  Like Bonhoeffer, the example of Schweitzer’s life is a stirring endorsement of the things that he concluded about who Jesus Christ is and why He matters. And while I don’t wind up in exactly the same place as Schweitzer did, I nevertheless believe that he got many things right, and it’s those things that have become and remained some of the most basic presuppositions in my own thinking and talking about Jesus Christ to this day.  This is a great book of stunning theological importance, one of the most crucial of the 20^th century.

I was sitting in the second floor student lounge at Brite Divinity School in the spring of 1976 when the door opened and a box of books were flung in.  A wild-eyed student stood there in the doorway for just a moment after throwing in the box of books before announcing, “I quit!”  And then as he turned to walk away he muttered that the books were ours for the taking, if we wanted them.  The dozen student sitting there fell instantly on that box of books like a pack of hyenas tearing at a fresh carcass.  Every so often from the middle of the scrum a book, a “discard” would get tossed out, apparently holding no interest for the alpha dogs, and that’s how I came into possession of my copy of Gustaf Aulen’s The Faith of the Christian Faith.  Peter said of Jesus Christ, “the stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone” (I:2:7), and that’s kind of how I feel about this book.  I got it because nobody else wanted it, and through the years it has become one of my “go to” systematic theologies.  Aulen had a perspective on the meaning of Christ’s death on the cross that recovered the ancient church’s understanding of the atonement as God’s confrontation with the powers of darkness and His triumph over them in the Resurrection, Ascension and Second Coming of Jesus Christ that has real power in our world today.  It’s this strand of interpretation together with his keen awareness of the reality of evil in the world that makes Aulen’s The Faith of the Christian Church one of those books that I’ve read multiple times throughout my ministry, and to which I turn frequently for understanding and strength.  If I was told that I could just have one systematic theology from my library of dozens for the rest of my life, this is the one that I would gratefully take with me and continue to use until that day when my faith finally becomes sight.

Seminary, at least in the Mainline Protestant tradition, breeds a kind of skepticism about what is perceived to be the naiveté of the affirmations that the church makes in her historic creeds.   You are taught to be suspicious of every faith claim and critical of every belief no matter how central or precious it has been to your spiritual development and vitality.  It was Karl Barth who helped me find my footing in this intellectual storm, and it was his book The Epistle to the Romans that sounded the clarion bell of God’s revelation of Himself and His purpose in Jesus Christ that provided me with my sense of spiritual direction in those days when everything was up for review.  Barth is not an easy read; there is still so much in what he wrote that I struggle to understand; but with that said, the broad sweep of Barth’s argument is clear enough for any of us to grasp, and for me, it has proven foundational.  Someday I intend to take a year or two to read Barth’s magisterial Church Dogmatics in its entirety (14 volumes… thousands of pages… very small print…) but until then, his Epistle to the Romans keeps me spiritually grounded and properly oriented.  Barth staked out the theological middle ground between the uncritical theological conservatism of my Christian College days and the hypercritical theological liberalism of my seminary days.  I owe him my soul.

I love this book, and have for years.  I read it for the first time in Christian College in a class on culture as part of the missions’ curriculum.  And I knew, even as I was reading it for the very first time then, that its importance and insights transcended the narrow application that we were making in that class.  In many respects, H. Richard Niebuhr lived in the shadow of his brother, the theological giant Reinhold Niebuhr.  I mean no disrespect to the other brother’s genius.  Reinhold Niebuhr may very well be the most important theologian that America has ever produced; although Jonathan Edwards might have something to say about that.  But the Niebuhr I love most is H. Richard, and the book that I cherish the most is his Christ and Culture.  Since the moment that Jesus Christ first sent His disciples into the world with the warning that they were not to be “of the world” (John 17:16), the church has struggled with how to remain faithful to Christ while actively penetrating that world.  The categories that this book establishes as the way the church has gone about this throughout history are the continuum of alternatives out of which the church still operates today.  Robert Webber wrote a kind of “Cliff’s Notes” version of this book called The Secular Saint, and it is a good place to begin the exploration of this question.  But don’t settle for Webber’s introduction alone.  Read Webber as a way of dipping your big toe into the water, and then jump into the deep end to Christ and Culture, I think you’ll find the plunge to be invigorating!

The late Donald Bloesch showed me how to be a serious theologian with Evangelical convictions serving in a Mainline Protestant denomination (The United Church of Christ).  I chose his 2 volume work Essentials of Evangelical Theology for my list because it is easily his most accessible work, and because it is his comprehensive exploration of what it means to be an Evangelical Christian, but I could have easily chosen his 7 volume Christian Foundations series, or his absolutely magnificent book on the theology of prayer (The Struggle of Prayer), or any of his incisive books on the state of the church’s life and faith at the end of the 20^th and the beginning of the 21^st century (Crumbling Foundations: Death and Rebirth In An Age of Upheaval, The Future of Evangelical Christianity, or The Evangelical Renaissance).  Bloesh was not fancy.  He rarely dazzles.  He was no flash in the theological pan, an intellectual acrobat turning spectacular somersaults in a phosphatized suit high on the flying trapeze to the amazement of the crowds below.  Instead, Donald Bloesch undertook the proverbial “long obedience in the same direction,” and for that I am forever grateful.  His theological breadth, depth and maturity was always a powerful encouragement to someone like me who has spent his life and ministry trying to walk the same path that he travelled.

Back in the days when I was reading Karl Barth for the very first time, and really struggling with the complexity of his thought and expression – again, he is not an easy read – somebody told me that for English speaking readers, the writings of Barth’s contemporary and sometimes rival, theologian Emil Brunner are so much more accessible.  And so on my next trip to the theological bookstore, I picked up a copy of the first volume of Emil Brunner’s Systematic Theology – The Christian Doctrine of God – and dug in.  Before I had gotten through the first 10 pages I was hooked.  I now have dozens of books that Brunner wrote, all dog-eared and thoroughly highlighted.   If I cut my theological teeth on Francis Schaeffer, it was Emil Brunner who then seasoned and deepened my theological appetites.   Whoever it was who pointed me in Brunner’s direction did me a great favor.  I understand Brunner, and I deeply appreciate his perspective, the same perspective that Barth had, only in a much more approachable way.  His little book Our Faith is the perfect introduction to both his particular theological perspective and to the scope of systematic theology as a whole in my opinion, and it’s online @ http://www.religion-online.org/showbook.asp?title=2075.  This easy and even entertaining little book will give you a good feel for his style and his perspective, and if it whets your appetite to go deeper, then I think that the three volumes of Brunner’s Systematic Theology are as good a set from the school of Neo-Orthodoxy as you will find.

I came out of Christian College thinking that everything that was wrong with Christianity could be laid at the feet of just 2 men – the Emperor Constantine and the Protestant Reformer John Calvin.  Needless to say, when I went to the bookstore to get my textbooks for the first theology class that I took in seminary, I was more than just a little bit alarmed to discover that John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion was going to be our primary text.  I swallowed hard and bought the set.  And then the next few months were spent reading and discussing what Calvin had to say, and slowly I came around.  Today I am a Calvinist in the same way that Jacobus Arminius was a Calvinist, which is to say that I regard John Calvin to be the formidable theological force from the Reformation era that can’t be ignored or avoided.  You can’t go around him; you’ve got to go through him, and when you do, Calvin changes you.  You may disagree with him and his conclusions, but you can’t dismiss him, especially if you purport to be working from Scripture on matters of faith and practice.  In many respects John Calvin has become my theological baseline, the theologian I use to check the things that I am going to say about God as a preacher and a teacher.  I don’t want to be found “misrepresenting” God (I Corinthians 15:15); the stakes are just too high (Matthew 18:1-9; James 3:1).  And so I let John Calvin function as my theological speed bump.   He forces me to slow down and to think carefully, reasoning all of my positions, theological and moral, from Scripture.

If Calvin is the theological giant you can’t avoid from the Reformation era of Christianity, then Augustine is the theological giant you can’t avoid in the era between the Apostolic age and the Reformation.  He is the station through which every train of thought must pass, and the turnstile into this station is Augustine’s spiritual autobiography, Confessions.  This book is part of the canon of Western Civilization.  It would be hard to think of yourself as educated and not to have spent some quality time with this book.  Written in the form of a prayer, Augustine reviewed the journey of his soul with God, reflecting on the experiences, encounters and ideas that brought him into a meaningful relationship with God in Christ.  It is timeless, however, everything depends on the translation.  People who complain that they just don’t “get” Augustine, are usually the victims of a lousy translation.  The two best that are out there are Frank Sheed’s and Maria Boulding’s.  I also highly recommend that you companion read Augustine’s Confessions with Peter Brown’s Augustine of Hippo: A Biography.  Brown’s work puts Augustine in context and that’s a key to understanding, and understanding Augustine is crucial for an informed faith.  After the New Testament, Augustine is the next great voice that echoes down the corridors of time.  You need to hear what he was saying.

I went to Fuller Theological Seminary in 1976 to study with George Eldon Ladd.  I had been introduced to his work in Christian College, and I found him to be both challenging and clarifying for my faith at the same time.  Another Evangelical in a Mainline Protestant church (American Baptist), I viewed him as another role model for serious scholarship.  The New Testament Theology class that I took at Fuller was supposed to be taught by him, but health concerns precluded him from being able to do so.  And so I studied his book with his hand-picked substitute.  I felt like Dr. Ladd was being “channeled” by this teacher, and it was probably the next best thing to actually having Dr. Ladd there himself.  And the end result was positive, spending an intensive semester working through Dr. Ladd’s A Theology of the New Testament.  This experience, in my first semester of seminary, was the theological bridge between my spiritually nurturing undergraduate experience at Christian College, and my spiritually challenging graduate experience at seminary.  And I have always been grateful that it began with three months of drilling down hard into Dr. Ladd’s text.  It set out the markers for the field on which my consciously Biblical faith has played ever since.  The way I think about what the New Testament is and what the New Testament teaches were both decisively shaped by this book.  In fact, next to the New Testament itself, this just might be the most important book that I have ever read; it certainly has had the most enduring consequences for my believing and my behaving.

So, there it is, my list of the ten “defining” serious books in my life.  Just like the last list, there are so many others that deserve to be here – books by Carl F.H. Henry, Alister McGrath, Thomas Oden, David Bosch, Bruce Metzger, T.F. Torrance, P.T. Forsyth, Anthony Hoekema, Roland Allen, Hermann Bavinck, Gordon Fee, Harvey Cox; books and authors who have challenged my thinking and impacted my believing.  But these ten are somehow the most “foundational.”  Together they form the slab on which my life and ministry have been built.  DBS+

 

 

“It’s More Complicated than You Think”

George Will began his 1983 book Statecraft as Soulcraft by telling his friends and critics to his political right and political left that “it’s more complicated than you think.” And this has become something of my mantra as I listen to politicians and people talking politics these days.

The bitter partisan divide of our country, its fragmentation into Red and Blue camps with membership assured only by a slash and burn mentality that can acknowledge no integrity and concede no intelligence to those who have lined up on the opposite side of a social, moral, economic and/or political issue from your own is not serving us well. The death of Howard Baker last week, and the affectionate eulogies of him as a strong partisan political leader who nevertheless understood the fine art of negotiation and the real value compromise in our governance process has left me longing for “the good old days.” As I said at the end of my sermon yesterday in our “Freedom and Democracy” Service at 8:30 am (see “When Christians Disagree” in the “Sermons” file under “Worship” @ northwaychristian.org) –

Hubert Humphrey and Everett Dirksen were lions of the Senate in their day. Politically, at the point of party, policy and legislation, they were almost always at odds. But when he was Vice President, Hubert Humphrey said of Everett Dirksen, his longtime political rival, that while he rarely agreed with him, that he never doubted the sincerity of his heart nor questioned the validity of his Christianity.

It’s that kind of honesty and modesty that I find to be so absent from the present political climate and in most of the current political debates. Today, the motives of those with whom you politically disagree are more likely to be impugned, their concerns dismissed, their sincerity questioned and their beliefs mocked. This is bad enough when it happens in society at large, but it is even more troubling to me when I see it happening between brothers and sisters inside the Christian community of faith.

As I have said before, I have a real problem with Christians, and especially ministers, becoming so partisan politically that it interferes with their ability to share Christ with and to offer God’s grace to those who have a different perspective. My August 28, 2012 blog “Frankly, I Don’t Care Who You Are Going to Vote For” still stands. I think that it is spiritual malpractice of the highest order when a minister holds and states his or her political opinions in such a way that those whose political conclusions differ feel like they cannot relate to them spiritually or trust them with their souls. But beyond this, it seems to me that if anybody should be able to appreciate the kind of complexity that George Will identified at the beginning of his book, it should be Christians who acknowledge the inspiration and authority of Scripture.

One of the things that the evangelical theologian Francis Schaeffer taught me was about how that the Bible teaches its truths. He included in the Appendix of his book The Church Before the Watching World an essay he called “Some Absolute Limits.” This is where he introduced me to the notion of “circles and cliffs.” He said that the Bible does not teach us its truths by providing us with “precisely worded” dogmatic statements which allow for no variation at all. “The Christian doctrinal and intellectual position” Francis Schaeffer explained, “lays down a circle rather than a point, or, to say it another way, doctrines are not merely lines to be repeated.” A circle has a line past which we “fall off the edge of the cliff,” but within which we have real freedom of exploration and expression. R. Paul Stevens, another evangelical theologian, takes this idea a step even further and suggests that within that circle of God’s truth found in Scripture there is a kind of “inspired ambiguity” that requires of us a “contemplative approach.”

Pick a topic of current political and social interest, and try to “think Christianly” about it (Harry Blarmires – The Christian Mind – 13), which is to say, go to Scripture and try to identify all of the relevant principles that have a bearing on the topic. Let these principles draw the circumference of the circle, and then when you’re finished, take a step back and see just how big the circle is. If you are true to Scripture, following the contours of its teachings past the neat and tidy doctrinal, moral and ethical packages that have become substitutes for actually having to look at the Bible for yourself, you will bump into what the Protestant Reformer Martin Luther called the Bible’s “furious opposites.” The Bible teaches all of its important truths by way of paradox: God is one and three; Christ is God and Man; we are saved by faith without works, but saving faith always includes works; The Kingdom of God has already come but is not yet here; the Bible is the Word of God and the words of men. Need I go on?

The Jewish rabbis called this “halakic reasoning,” and they said that God’s truth is always found when both strands of a paradox are held in tension and balance (James R. Lucas – Knowing the Unknowable God – xiv). “It’s the process of firmly grabbing both ideas in a paradox and them merging the two into a greater understanding.” Our assignment as people of Biblical faith is to navigate these narrow passages between the Bible’s great opposite truths. R. Paul Stevens calls it “the contemplative approach” to Scripture.

This approach views the ambiguity of Scripture as a pointer to God, an indicator of truths so great that they can only be seen in full from God-height. A contemplative view takes seriously the fact that the Bible is more often historical than abstract, more often narrative and metaphorical than systematic. A contemplative approach welcomes the mystery…

When we fire off our political conclusions with black and white clarity and open and closed certainty, we are short-circuiting this process by letting go of the paradox, shutting down the conversation with those who have decided the question differently from us and confusing those for whom the answer to the question is just not so obvious. And, for a minister to occupy a political position, firing off his or her opinion like an MSNBC hostess or a FOX News host without any reference to the Biblical principles that are at work in their reasoning process of “thinking Christianly” is to abdicate the unique role that he or she has to play in this whole exercise.

People learn how to make chicken cacciatorie not by seeing the final product beautifully plattered on a cooking show on the Food Network, but by seeing the step by step process of the prepping, chopping, sautéing and baking. And it’s not what a minister thinks about a topic of political and social interest that matters, but rather how a minister as a Christian trained in theology, ethics, church history and Biblical interpretation thinks that is massively important. Unfortunately, it’s easier to be a pundit than a pastor, and so the political broadsides fly, hitting their targets but failing to advance the cause of “thinking Christianly” that is the greatest need of the hour. DBS+

 

“Befriending Death”

Peter Kreeft, the very fine Christian Philosopher who teaches at Boston College, says that death wears five faces – that of an enemy, a stranger, a friend, a mother, and finally, a lover (Love is Stronger than Death – Ignatius Press – 1992).  This continuum moves from negative and alienating perceptions of death – “enemy” and “stranger” – to more positive and intimate perceptions – “friend,” “mother” and “lover.”  This book with its development of these fives “faces” of death is more than worth the effort it takes to read, but the big idea that I’m interested in with this blog is the journey by which this change occurs, how death ceases being the enemy that we avoid at all costs to the friend that we welcome and perhaps even embrace.  It’s what the spiritual author Henri Nouwen described as the process of “befriending death.”  In his 1994 book Our Greatest Gift: A Meditation on Dying and Caring (Harper Collins), Henri Nouwen asked –

Is death something so terrible and absurd that we are better off not thinking or talking about it?  Is death such an undesirable part of our existence that we are better off acting as if it were not real?  Is death such an absolute end of all our thoughts and actions that we simply cannot face it?  Or is it possible to befriend our dying gradually and live open to it, trusting that we have nothing to fear?  Is it possible to prepare for our death with the same attentiveness that our parents had preparing for our birth?  Can we wait for our death as for a friend who wants to welcome us home? (xii-xiii)

I thought about these things as I watched the movie “Heaven is for Real” last week.  I had not planned on seeing it, but a review in the paper that said that it set a new high water mark for faith-based movies, and an interview with Greg Kinnear, the engaging “star” of the movie, on one of the Sunday Morning Talk Shows peeked my interest.  And so I invested the $6 for an early bird matinee on my day off and the two hours it took to watch the film.  When it was over I had the feeling of having just seen a Hallmark Special – a really well acted and well produced television movie, but a made for television quality movie nonetheless.  It was not terrible, but it was pretty schmaltzy and it played for the easy emotional response at every turn.  The crisis of faith that it narrates could have been more profoundly explored in the dynamic between a character in the story whose son was killed in military action and her relationship with the father of the little boy who survived his medical crisis and in the process had his experience of heaven.  That’s a story that I would have liked to have seen.  But instead what we got was the standard sentimental/inspirational story where everybody hugs in the closing frame while somebody affectively sings a beloved hymn.  It was probably the best Hallmark Special I’ve ever seen, but at the end of the day, it was still just a Hallmark Special category and quality film.  Two unrelated notes: (1) If there’s an Academy award for cute, then the little boy in this movie has already got it locked down; and (2) the audience – and there was a pretty good crowd of us in theater – were all people in the last decades of life, 60, 70 and 80-somethings.  For us the question about the reality of heaven is apparently not just some abstract debate, instead it’s pretty urgent and immediate!

“Heaven is for Real” is based on the 2010 book of the same title.  It’s the story of four-year-old Colton Burpo’s Near Death Experience during an emergency appendectomy and how it changed the life and faith of both his family and their church (Colton’s father is a pastor in the Wesleyan Church).  Many of you read this book when it first came out, and some of you enthusiastically shared it with me in those days.  At roughly the same time another book with a very different tone about the Near Death Experience, Don Piper’s 90 minutes in Heaven (Revell – 2004), was making the rounds and getting some attention as well.  And then there was Dr. Mary Neal’s extraordinary book To Heaven and Back (WaterBrook Press – 2012).  A good summary of her experience and its consequences on her life can be found at http://www.deseretnews.com/article/765576971/Life-after-life-This-Wyoming-surgeon-says-she-believes.html?pg=all.  But it has been the enduring work of Raymond A. Moody, a physician and psychologist, with people, and especially children, who have reported Near Death Experiences that has been particularly influential on my thinking (Life after Life – Bantam – 1976).

When I was in Houston in the 1980’s I was a volunteer chaplain with the Houston Hospice and served as their first Director of Spiritual Care.  In that capacity I arranged for a series of Continuing Education Events for our volunteers on spiritual issues, and one of the most popular of the series was the one I put together on the subject of Near Death Experiences. I had a couple of people who had Near Death Experiences come and tell their stories, and then I has a panel of religious leaders talk about how they made sense of such experiences from their particular faith perspectives.

In the course of putting this program together, I had to come to terms with my own thoughts and feelings about Near Death Experiences.  Specifically, I wrestled with how they “fit” into “my” theology.  Theology is just a matter of thinking and talking about God.  If you have ever thought or talked about God, then you are a theologian.  You may be a good theologian, or you may be a bad theologian, but if you think and talk about God, then you are a theologian.   Now, what determines whether you are a good or bad theologian has an awful lot to do with your sources and how you use them.   When you say something about God, what makes you say what you do?  What are the sources of your thinking?

A standard tool for theological reflection and conversation is called the “Quadrilateral.”  It is often associated with the name of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, although its origins go back much further than him (some say back to St. Augustine).  Wesley was the Quadrilateral’s great popularizer. The quadrilateral looks like this –

What the Quadrilateral says is that there are four sources for our knowledge of God – Scripture, Reason, Experience and Tradition – and therefore, there are four ways to assess what people are saying and thinking about God – Scripture, Reason, Experience and Tradition.  The critical question in this system is which of the four has primacy?  When a fight between the Quadrilateral’s four components breaks out (and they do all the time), which one functions as the referee?  When reason and experience come to blows, or when tradition and Scripture start throwing punches, which one of the four steps up settles the dispute? Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians say tradition.  Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians say experience. Mainline Protestant Christians say reason.  Evangelical and Confessional Protestant Christians say Scripture.  Because I am a Christian of this fourth variety, Scripture has always had the primacy in my thinking and talking about God.  I am not dismissive of reason, experience or tradition.  They are invited to the party too.  They all have seats at the table of my soul.  They are welcomed and valued participants in the conversation of faith, it’s just that when push comes to shove in my head and heart, the voice of Scripture, properly understood and rightly interpreted, is privileged.  Scripture has primacy in what I think and say about God, and this has a direct bearing on a story like that told by the book and film Heaven is for Real.  The way I look at things, in the final measure, our experiences must be evaluated by what the Bible says and means.  So, what does the Bible say about Near Death Experiences?

Apart from the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and its implications for our own destinies (I Corinthians 15:20-24; 35-50; I John 3:2), Luke 16:19-31, the story of “The Rich Man (‘Dives’) and Lazarus” is our best source of information Biblically about what happens to us when we die.

 

From this Biblical narrative, I draw some conclusions –

1.  Life continues after we die.
2.  There is a double destiny, a realm of intimacy and blessing, and a realm of separation and sorrow.
3.  These two realms are separated and our place in them gets settled by the time we die.
4.  Our identity remains intact after death, our personality is preserved.
5.  Our choices, experiences and relationships from this life get carried over with us into the next life.
6.  Our relationship with God and each other find their completion in the next life.  What starts here will get finished there.

How do these conclusions line up with accounts of the Near Death Experience in general, and the story that gets told in Heaven is for Real specifically?   Well, I think that they are pretty compatible, but that conclusion is not nearly as important as the process by which I get to that conclusion.  It’s how I work with Scripture, and from Scripture, to test what reason, experience and tradition assert, that really matters.  I believe that “Heaven is for Real,” but not because of a little boy’s Near Death Experience, dramatic as it may be, but rather because I find that it is something that is clearly and consistently taught by Scripture.

Years ago in an interview with the writer Annie Dillard in Christianity Today, she was asked how what she experienced of God in nature fit with what she knew of God from Scripture. She answered that what the Scriptures teach are like the black lines of a cartoon in a coloring book for her.  They are what establish the boundaries and determine the shape of the picture.  What nature supplies are the colors that fill in the blanks.  It provides the shading that brings depth and the hue that brings texture to the picture that unfolds between the lines.  And it seems to me that this is exactly how a story like Heaven is for Real functions within the framework of the Quadrilateral.  Scripture sets the boundaries within which reason, experience and tradition then bring their distinctive colors.  The colors bring warmth and have a real capacity to generate deep feelings, but their place is always inside the lines.  It’s “Prima Scriptura” – Scripture first.   DBS+

 

 

 

A Pelagian Lent?

         “Lent is not an orgy of Pelagian self-improvement!”
          ~ A Fr. Blake of St. Mary in Brighton ~
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On Ash Wednesday this year the noon Bible Study that I teach each week just happened to be looking at Romans 10:6-8 –

The righteousness based on faith speaks as follows: “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’ (that is, to bring Christ down), or ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’ (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead).” But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart”—that is, the word of faith which we are preaching…

This is clearly an echo of Deuteronomy 30:11-14 –

For this commandment which I command you today is not too difficult for you, nor is it out of reach. It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will go up to heaven for us to get it for us and make us hear it, that we may observe it?’ Nor is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will cross the sea for us to get it for us and make us hear it, that we may observe it?’ But the word is very near you, in your mouth and in your heart, that you may observe it.

In both places what we are being told is that the Word of God is not far away in some remote place inaccessible to us. In Deuteronomy God’s Word is the Law, and in Romans God’s Word is the Gospel. The Protestant Reformer Martin Luther said that God only and always speaks just two words to us – Law or Gospel – and then he added that a true theologian knows the difference between the two!  The point of both of these texts is that we don’t have to go on some long arduous quest like Bilbo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings in order to get to the Word of God, either the Law or the Gospel.  In both cases, they are close by because God has spoken them to us.  As the theologian Carl F.H. Henry (a distant relative of our own Dr. Henry I have been told) put it, God’s revelation was a willing self-disclosure, an expression of His grace. God forfeited His own personal privacy in order that His creatures might know Him. We didn’t have to go looking for God in the darkness; God spoke to us out of the darkness.  We don’t have to pry God out of His hiding place in the heavens; God has shown up in our midst all on His own.  God has taken the initiative.  God has made the effort.  God has overcame the separation.  God has closed the gap. We are just the recipients of His gift, the beneficiaries of His actions.  This is something we really need to keep in mind during Lent.

Because Lent “talk” usually centers on what you are “giving up,” what has sometimes been described as “spiritual subtraction” – the sacrifices that you are prepared to make out of your devotion to God in this season of spiritual preparation for Easter, or on what you are “taking on,” what has been described as “spiritual addition” – the spiritual disciplines that you are exercising to expand your spiritual capacity to receive the fullness of the Easter blessings, it is real easy for Lent to slip into the old heresy of Pelagianism.

Pelagius was British monk who showed up in Rome in the late fourth and early fifth century, the era of St. Augustine, and was immediately distressed by the moral laxity and spiritual immaturity that he witnessed.  He taught a muscular version of Christianity that concluded that our basic problem as human beings is ignorance and a lack of will power.  If we would just be better taught and then get really motivated, we could become better people and thereby create a better world.  Jesus for Pelagius was a moral example of the kind of people we could become with a little bit of effort.  C. FitzSimons Allison, the retired Episcopal Bishop of South Carolina, described this as the “Roger Bannister doctrine of the Atonement.”

Before Roger Bannister no one was able to run a mile in four minutes.  Many even declared it physiologically impossible.  In breaking the four-minute barrier however, he broke the psychological impediment in the minds of athletes the world over and scores soon followed him in that accomplishment. …Jesus broke the mental and psychological barrier in the minds of people who felt that righteousness by the law was impossible to win.  (But) Jesus had now actually done it …The meaning of his life and work was, thus, reduced to an example for us to follow. (The Cruelty of Heresy 31-32)

Do you see how, if we are not careful, Lent can become a thoroughly Pelagian exercise?

The annual invitation that we extend each year on Ash Wednesday “to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy Word” can be heard as a list of requirements that must be met before the grace of this season of the church year can be experienced by us, or as a description of the kinds of faithful responses that we can make to the grace that has already broken into our lives in Jesus Christ. Taken the first way, and what you have is Pelagianism – thinking that it will be by your own heroic efforts at following the example of Jesus Christ that you will work your way into spiritual maturity. Taken the second way, and what you have is the Gospel – a salvation by grace through faith and not by our works that nevertheless issues in good works (Ephesians 2:8-10).  Taken the first way and Lent is something that I would urge you to avoid like the plague.  It is a spiritual dead-end that can do some real damage to your soul.   But taken the second way, and Lent can be just what you need to get some focus in your spiritual life and to better position yourself in the current of God’s grace that is flowing into your life as a Christian through the channels of the means of grace that God has appointed and is actively utilizing to fuel your spiritual growth.

Mark Roberts, the theologian in residence down at Laity Lodge down in the Hill Country, provided this “Pastoral Word” in a resource that he produced a couple of years ago for people who were coming to the tradition of Lent for the very first time –

Let me note, at this point, that if you think of Lent as a season to earn God’s favor by your good intentions or good works, then you’ve got a theological problem. God’s grace has been fully given to us in Christ. We can’t earn it by doing extra things or by giving up certain other things in fasting. If you see Lent as a time to make yourself more worthy for celebrating Good Friday and Easter, then perhaps you shouldn’t keep the season until you’ve grown in your understanding of grace. If, on the contrary, you see Lent as a time to grow more deeply in God’s grace, then you’re approaching Lent from a proper perspective.

As a minister on a college campus put it to her students: “If your Lenten disciplines don’t lead you closer to Christ, ditch them… He understands.”   DBS+

Icons: Windows into Heaven

I just finished painting (technically I “wrote” it) my sixth icon with the noted American iconographer Peter Pearson. It’s an icon of the Angel Gabriel. The image to the left is not the icon I wrote, but it is from the same prototype by an iconographer who is much more “painterly” than I am. I do not have the hand of an artist, but then again, icons are not art. When I “write” an icon it is not about the product but the process. It is not an art project that I undertake when I write an icon but a spiritual discipline that I embrace. Long before I started “writing” icons, I was “reading” them. As a Christian with a spiritual temperament that is strongly “head” oriented – for heaven’s sake, reading systematic theology is a big part of my daily devotional life – I knew that I needed to be consciously cultivating my “shadow” side – my “heart” capacity – and it was on my deliberate journey in this direction that I stumbled upon, or was it, I was “led” to icons.

My relationship with icons began in the mid-1980’s when I was befriended by an Orthodox priest who was part of a ministry to the Homeless in Houston that I was part of too. Fr. Peter Demro sidled up beside me one day during a lunch break at an Allocations Committee meeting of the Houston Campaign for the Homeless and began grilling me on my Christology. The questions that he asked me about what I believed were far more rigorous than any that I had been asked by the committee that interviewed me for ordination in the denomination or by any pulpit committee that I had ever sat down with through the years to consider a call. And after an hour’s conversation about Caledonian Christology and Nicene Trinitarianism, Fr. Demro concluded that I was “orthodox” in my faith, embraced me as a brother and soon became my very best friend in ministry in Houston.

It started with a little icon of Christ on a prayer card. Peter gave it to me at the end of that first day we met. I was deeply touched, and so I put it in a little frame and I have kept it on my desk at the church where it still sits all these years later. When I travelled, especially when I was in denominational leadership facing the complicated and contentious issues that were facing the church, I started taking this little icon of Christ with me. I found that it had a strange capacity to keep me centered. It actively fostered in me an awareness of the presence of Christ in all my moments and activities. Someone has said that a relationship with an icon is kind of like a relationship with a cat – you’ve got to let it come to you; you’ve got to let it “find” you; you’ve got to let it address you first, and on it’s own terms. And this is what that little icon of Christ that Fr. Demro gave me nearly 30 years ago did. It “found” me.

In the ensuing years there were more icons to come. On birthdays, at Christmas, on no special occasion and for no particular reason at all, Peter would just show up with an icon in his hand and from his heart for me. I started hanging them on my office wall and discovered that they had the same capacity to usher me into God’s presence as had that little icon of Christ on the prayer card that Fr. Demro had first given me. They drew me into a spiritual presence. And then five years ago I started writing icons myself with Peter Pearson as my teacher – St. Francis, St. Clare, Christ the Pantocrator, one of the Virgin with the Christ child, Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, and now the Archangel Gabriel. And as I have, I have become even more aware of how icons function for me as windows into heaven. They are doorways through which I pass from earth to heaven.

Henri Nouwen explained, “Icons are painted to lead us into the inner room of prayer and to bring us close to the heart of God… and as they speak, they speak more to our inner than to our outer senses.” Of course, icons are not the only objects to serve this function in the spiritual life. Morton Kelsey in his essay on “How the Spiritual Breaks Into Our Lives” in his book Transcend (Crossroad 1986) named 14 different ways, both helpful and unhelpful, of how this happens in people’s lives. In recognition of this, Madeleine L’Engle, the novelist, took a wider view of icons. “Whatever is an open door to God,” she wrote, “is, for me, an icon. An icon is something I can look through and get a wider glimpse of God and God’s demands on us than I would otherwise.”  The “key” here, it seems to me, is in those two little words “look through.” While we “look at” most art, an icon is for “looking through.” And for me, for some reason, icons just “work.” They function in my life as windows into the spiritual realm. They have a capacity to take me by the hand and heart, and to usher me into the presence of the One about whom all my theology books were written to explain and explore.

The bottom line for me is that icons have helped to take what it is that I believe is true in my head, and made it real for me in my heart. They have consistently facilitated encounters with the holy for me. I believe that this is a work of the Holy Spirit and that icons are just the tools that the Holy Spirit happens to use in my case to get the job done powerfully and effectively. Icons may or may not do this for you; that’s unimportant. What is important is that you find what it is that “works” for you; that you find what is it is that helps you make that arduous 12 inch journey from your head to your heart so that your Christianity might be just as real for you as it is true.

The Catholic Theologian Karl Rahner observed, “The Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist at all.” By “mystic” Rahner meant the lived experience of God in our hearts to go along with our beliefs about God in our heads. I am not one to denigrate the importance of the mind in our spiritual awakening and formation. In Romans 12:2 Paul told the church that the key to our spiritual “transformation” is to be found in the “renewing of our minds.” This means that the spiritual depth and reality for which we long begins in our heads with our thinking before it descends to our hearts and our feelings. I believe that Passionate Christianity starts with “a serious applying of the mind to some sacred subject,” and then it gradually distills into our “affections being warmed and quickened.” But contact with the Divine – personal and experiential – is what we need, and for this to happen we are going to have to take seriously the reality of the spiritual world.

A.M. Hunter, the Scottish Theologian of the last generation (one of my favorites), used to say that in his experience there are “one world” people – people whose perceptions are limited to empirical reality, to just that world that they can touch, see, taste, smell and hear with their senses. And then, Professor Hunter said that there are also “two-world” people, people who while fully present in the realm that the “one world” people inhabit, are nevertheless fully aware of another world as well, a world behind the “one world” of sense perception. This is the spiritual world, and the whole premise of Biblical faith is that it is real and that it breaks in on this world of our senses. Isn’t this what we praying will happen in the familiar petition of the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”? We want that unseen spiritual world to impinge upon this visible material world and to change it. “Maranatha” was a prayer of the very first Christians. It means “Come quickly Lord Jesus!” It was a prayer about the Kingdom coming at the close of the age (Revelation 22:20), but it was also a prayer that was known to erupt from the faithful in services of public worship (I Corinthians 16:22). Either way, it was a plea for the spiritual world to break in upon the physical world, and whether the door through which this happens for you and in you is icons or not, you need to find where that door is in your heart and what opens it. And then, you’ve just got to let it happen. Your spiritual well-being depends on it.  DBS+