Author Archives: Rob Harrison

Skeptical conversations, part IV: Considering humanity

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Continuing the conversation . . . Parts I-III here.

R: Before we start talking about sin, though, I want to make a couple other points. One, our created purpose as human beings, our highest good, is to know, love and serve God, which means in part to serve others and to care for his creation. As the Westminster Shorter Catechism, one of the founding documents of the Presbyterian churches, puts it, “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” John Piper, a Minnesota pastor and author, has put a bit of a twist on that, rephrasing it as, “The chief end of man is to glorify God by enjoying him forever”; he captures the idea that true pleasure is only to be found in following God.

A: Pleasure? Since when does Christianity care about pleasure? It’s all about duty and self-denial and giving up pleasures because they’re sinful.

R: I’ll admit there are Christians who’d make you think so, but that’s not the truth at all. Remember, God created everything, and he created us as physical/spiritual beings; he created physical pleasures, from the smallest to the greatest, and he created them because he likes them. He’s a God of love, and of joy, and the pleasures of food, drink, sleep, sex and all the rest are gifts he’s given us for our enjoyment.

A: Sex? You’d better watch out, or your Puritan ancestors will rise up and throw you in the stocks.

R: Pure slander. The Puritans have been thoroughly distorted by later generations; you’d be surprised to see what they had to say about marriage. Yes, sex is a gift of God, one of the deepest. He created us as sexual beings—Genesis 1 tells us that he created us in his image, male and female—and that’s not merely a physical reality. I know there are people who argue that gender is socially constructed, but I have to disagree; our maleness and femaleness goes right to the core of who we are. It’s a way in which we represent the diversity in God. And sexual intercourse itself is more than just a physical act, which I think is a lot of the reason it’s so pleasurable; it really is, in a way, two people becoming one flesh, as Genesis 2:23 says. It’s our little experience of the unity in diversity that is God.

Which is why it’s so important that sex be handled rightly. That’s the problem with homosexual sex: it unites two people of the same essence, if you will, rather than bringing the male and female together as one. And that’s the problem with sex outside of marriage. The sexual union, to be what it is supposed to be, needs to be defended from invaders, for one thing; and because we’re human and imperfect, it needs to be supported and nurtured, to become a deeper and truer unity over time. Sex without that support—well, it’s like trying to put an anvil on a table, it’s going to do damage.

A: A doctrine of sex; I would never have thought to hear such a thing. I don’t know if I buy the argument, but at least I can see how you stand where you do.

R: I think much of it follows logically from taking human sexuality seriously. But you can see, though, that God’s strictures on sex aren’t born out of a desire to squelch our pleasure, but rather out of the desire to make that pleasure as full and deep as he created it to be. In general, that’s true. As C. S. Lewis put it in the essay “The Weight of Glory,” our problem isn’t that we want too much but that we’re too easily satisfied, that we settle for thin, weak imitations of pleasure; in his image, we’re like a child that wants to go on making mud puddles in a slum because it cannot understand what is meant by the offer of a holiday at sea. When we take the easy way—whether with sex, or food, or sleep, or drink, or whatever—we don’t just debase ourselves, we debase the pleasure. You can see that most clearly with recreational drugs like cocaine and heroin, which are imitation pleasure in its purest form.

A: It seems to me that you’ve come back around to the question of sin.

R: True; but then, you can’t talk about human existence for very long without dealing with sin. There is one last thing that needs to be said about human beings, though: we are free, self-determining moral agents, and this is how God created us. This is the root of our moral responsibility, for clearly if we were not free to act we could not be responsible for our actions. But we are free to choose, free to say yes or no to God, and so our actions are our own—and thus we may be judged for them.

A: But I thought you said that God is in control of everything. Wouldn’t that logically mean that he determines the choices we make, and thus that we aren’t free?

R: Yes and no. If I go out and order a hamburger, for instance, two things are true at the same time: I ordered that hamburger because I chose to do so, and I ordered it because God willed that I do so.

A: But if God wills it, then your choice is fixed and thus cannot be free.

R: That’s not necessarily true, actually. Did you make any choices yesterday that you regret?

A: Actually, yes—I bought a hot dog at the game. It gave me indigestion.

R: Sorry to hear that. Why don’t you change your mind and buy something else instead?

A: Huh? That’s the past, it’s done—I can’t change that, obviously.

R: So that choice you made is fixed. Does that mean you did not freely choose to buy and eat that hot dog?

A: What does that have to do with this discussion?

R: I’m just trying to show that it’s logically possible for an action to be both fixed and free—because that describes every action we’ve ever taken in the past. Now consider my point earlier that God is outside our time stream—both our past and our future exist for him in the same way that our past exists for us—and the analogy I used to the author of a novel.

I don’t know if you know many writers; I have several good friends who are well on their way to completing novels, and one thing that’s true of all of them is that their characters are real people to them with minds of their own. My friends created those characters, but they aren’t puppets to be manipulated around the stage. Rather, they act out their own intentions according to their natures, sometimes doing things that their author didn’t expect, creating the story as they do so. And yet, it is the mind and hands of the author that produce the story, and the author who is completely in control. So in some sense, you see, everything that happens in the story is the product of two wills, of the author and the character; and authors will talk about their books that way, taking credit in one breath for writing a line of dialogue, but in the next crediting the character’s wit.

Now, this is only an analogy, and it’s limited; but I think it shows intuitively how it is possible for an action to be the result both of our will and of God’s will. God is outside the story of creation, while we are within it. From within, we are free agents, willing our own actions; from without, he is the author, writing every scene as he chooses. And after all, as free agents we are acting out our characters—and he is the one who created our characters.

A: I’ll have to think about this some more. I take it, then, that your explanation of human evil is that it is the result of human freedom?

R: More or less, yes. Adam and Eve, the parents of our race, chose to reject God. They alienated themselves from him and fell from the state of grace in which they were created; their actions left them guilty of sin and corrupted in their nature, and that is the nature their children inherited from them, and that the human race continues to inherit. Even in this, God was sovereign; he did not decree their fall in advance, as if he desired it, but he was still sovereign in their decision to rebel, though it grieved him. As Pascal said, he allowed us the dignity of causality, so that we might be truly in his image as free persons. In our fallen state, we are still free in the sense that our actions are not coerced by anyone else, but we are slaves in another sense: we cannot get free of the corruption in our nature, we are bound to it, and so we are slaves to sin. In everything we do, even at our best, sin is at work. This is what theologians call total depravity, that we are incapable of any action which is completely free from sin.

A: So you’re saying that we inherit our tendency to evil, as if it were in our DNA somewhere. Is that what the phrase “original sin” means, I assume?

R: Yes. We are born with our desires and motivations twisted and crippled, and this is the root of all the evil we do. It’s nothing we can fix or cure, because the damage runs all the way through us; only a radical change in our hearts can remove it. You might say that we need to start from scratch, to be born all over again.

A: Ahh, yes—“born again.” I’ve heard that phrase before.

R: It’s a phrase Jesus used in John 3, and it really is an apt description of what needs to happen if we are to be free from sin. It is, obviously, not a change which can happen through our own efforts, but only through someone else: Jesus Christ. I said earlier that God chose to respond to evil through self-giving love, and the coming of Jesus to earth was that response. The Father sent the Son, and the Son came willingly, and it is on that fact and its consequences that everything turns; T. S. Eliot called the cross “the still point at the center of the turning world,” and he was right.

Brief meditation: on art

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What is art? It’s a question that resists easy answers, in large part I think because it’s beyond us to ever fully answer. Art is something we do after the image of God, because he who is Creator made us (to use Tolkien’s term) sub-creators in his image; art then is something which partakes in some way of the nature of God, and so I suspect that just as we will never be able to fully define God, so we will never be able to fully define art. But then, what is a definition? It’s an attempt to constrain something, to confine it to a purely rational and intelligible space so that we can say confidently that we know what it is, and thus have some control over it. For most things, that’s good, because most concrete things and most concepts are small enough to be defined; but God isn’t. We shouldn’t seek to define God, because if we could define him, he’d be too small to be God. By analogy, I wonder if we should really want to define art. If it were that small, would it be worth pursuing? Rather, just as God calls us to know him not by definition but by recognition—”My sheep know my voice”—so too I think understanding art is a matter of learning to recognize it when we see it.

That does still raise the question, though: what are we looking for? Is art a matter of great skill and technique—is it something that can be graded empirically? I don’t think so; skill and technique unquestionably have their part to play, but art is bigger than mere virtuosity. Art, I believe, is akin to priestly ministry, and the work of the artist is somewhat like that of the priest, in that art is an act of mediation. Much as the great Episcopalian preacher Phillips Brooks described preaching as “the communication of truth through personality,” I would argue that the artist mediates a vision of reality through their personality, gifts, and chosen medium, to give that vision a particular expressive form which can be intuitively and sympathetically apprehended by an audience. That vision doesn’t necessarily need to be objectively correct in order for the result to be art, just as one doesn’t necessarily need to worship the true God in order to be a priest; I do think it helps, though, and that a truer vision makes greater art, just as better skill and technique makes greater art.

Meditation: on barbering churches

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“A haircut is defined by its edges. That’s what I was taught, that’s what I believe, that’s what I teach.” So declared my barber the other day, going on to talk about how if the edges are ragged or uneven, that’s what catches people’s eyes; and since he’s outstanding at what he does, and since what he said sounds perfectly reasonable to me, I believe him. He got me thinking, though: of what else could we say that? And specifically, is the church defined by its edges?

Of course, there are a lot of churches which quite deliberately define themselves by their edges, taking the “bounded set” approach to membership and identity: everyone who believes these twelve things is welcome, and anyone who doesn’t, isn’t. Keep the edges nice and neat, a sharp line between us and them, that’s the idea. It’s almost a way of defining the church by appearance. But what about churches which don’t take that approach? Are they, too, in some way defined by their edges?

I incline to think so, for a couple different reasons. Most obviously, there are those which quite deliberately and self-consciously invert that paradigm; they would tell you they don’t define themselves by their edges, but in fact, they do. It’s simply that, rather than taking pride in their nice neat edge, they take pride in having a ragged one—it’s their chosen mark of “authenticity.” “We’re open to x kind of people—we’re Christ-followers, we accept everybody just like Jesus did,” and so on. Certainly, sharing the desire of Jesus and Paul that the gospel should be preached to all people, regardless of any other considerations, is a good and noble thing; but focusing on the ragged edge for its own sake is unhealthy. For one thing, it can make us disinclined to challenge people to repent and pursue God’s holiness; some people won’t find that “accepting,” and they’ll leave. (Others, meanwhile, will answer the call, and grow in holiness, and as a consequence will no longer look different enough to remind everyone how accepting we are.) We need to remember that our purpose is to preach the gospel and make disciples of Jesus Christ, and that we can’t subordinate those tasks to any other goal, however noble.

For another, a focus on the ragged edge can all too easily become a fetish, and an opening for spiritual pride and self-delusion—the delusion, if nothing else, that we actually are accepting of all people, when actually we’re simply accepting one particular group of people who aren’t accepted elsewhere. That’s a noble thing in its own right, but it’s not the same as building a church where all people are truly welcome; for one thing, it’s much easier. Building a church to fit one “out” group really isn’t all that hard, as these things go; building a church in which the goal is that anyone who comes will be welcome is extraordinarily difficult (in fact, it’s impossible by human effort), because it means accepting people who don’t accept each other, and teaching them to get past that and accept each other as well.

Even leaving aside intentional self-definition, however, I do think that in part, the church will always be defined by its edges whether it wants to be or not. Most basically, the edges are where the church interacts with the world around it; thus, whether a church sees itself as a bounded set (defined by its boundaries, and thus by whom it chooses to admit or shut out) or a centered set (defined by its collective focus, on which its existence is centered), whichever of those two models it uses to define itself, the world is always going to be looking at the edges, and drawing its conclusions from them. Do we maintain a nice neat edge by only welcoming people who are just like us, or do we make room for people who stick out? (And if we do, do we allow them to continue to stick out, or do we set to work changing them?) Granted the difficulty of truly accepting people who “don’t fit,” do we try? Are we willing to pay the price to minister to people who are “extra grace required”?

It seems to me that if the church is being the church, we should expect some ragged edges. (This is the truth that gets exaggerated in churches that take pride in them.) After all, the only way to prevent that is to focus on the edges ourselves, and that’s not what we’re called to do; the church should be not appearance-driven but (to quote Jared Wilson) gospel-driven. As Jesus defines us, we are a people on the way, his disciples traveling together down the road through life, “following Christ in mission in a lost and broken world so loved by God” (to quote my denomination’s mission statement). This is why my own mental image of the church is rather like a comet: there are those who are farther along and more mature in their faith, leading the way for the church, and then others who haven’t come as far yet, and then the trailing edge is rather ragged indeed; but the key is that we’re all traveling the same direction, and that those who join us aren’t left to trail along behind, but instead are nurtured and discipled and mentored until they too are mature and strong in their faith and ready to do the same for others.

In a way, then, pastoring is a matter of barbering churches, but with a bit of a different emphasis than most people would probably expect. Being a pastor isn’t a matter of keeping the ragged edges trimmed; rather, we have to be careful to allow them, lest we end up trying to shut people out of the kingdom of God—and we need to make sure that the church as a whole understands this as well. At the same time, though, we need to make sure people aren’t left hanging around on the ragged edge, as if that was good enough; we need to bring them toward the center, toward the focus: toward Jesus. The movement of the church, and of everyone in it, must always be toward Jesus.

Christ Our Great High Priest

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(Deuteronomy 33:8-10; Hebrews 7:23-8:2, Hebrews 10:19-25)

One of the problems with being Protestant is that most of us don’t understand priests. We don’t really know who they are, or what they do, or even what the whole priesthood thing is about—the whole idea is unfamiliar to us. One reason for this, of course, is that we aren’t Catholic (though a few of us used to be), and so we don’t have priests. We know the Catholic church down the street has a priest, but for most of us, that’s just external knowledge, not a matter of experience; while we know that the pastor there has the title “priest” and is addressed as “Father,” most of us don’t really know what that means, because it’s never been a meaningful part of our lives. Never having had priests, we don’t understand priests.

That being the case, though, it also needs to be said that even that would only get you so far, because Catholics don’t understand priests the same way the Old Testament did. There are some clear similarities, I will grant, but also some very real and significant differences. The biggest difference, of course, is the whole sacrificial system—to my knowledge, no Catholic priest has ever sacrificed so much as a pigeon, let alone a cow. This is no criticism of the Catholic Church, but it does mean that even understanding the Catholic priesthood is of limited value in understanding the Old Testament priesthood.

Which is unfortunate, because if we don’t understand what the Old Testament is on about, we’re going to have a hard time understanding a fair bit of the New Testament, and most especially the book of Hebrews. There’s some pretty important stuff going on here, but so much of it has to do with the priesthood and Christ’s priestly role that if you don’t understand priests, you’re not going to understand Hebrews—and that would be a real loss, for Hebrews has a lot to tell us about what Christ has done for us that we don’t find in the rest of the New Testament. Among other things, and of particular importance for the purpose of this sermon series, Hebrews is quite important in helping us to understand the meaning and significance of Jesus’ ascension.

Now, it isn’t possible to find one text that says, “This is why we have priests, this is what they’re for, and this is what they do”; to really lay things out, we’d be here a long time reading chunk after chunk of the Old Testament, and while I’m sure you all (and particularly Dr. Kavanaugh) would be patient with me, I don’t want to push it. But this little bit from Deuteronomy, from Moses’ blessing on the priestly tribe of Levi, captures the essence of the priestly role, if you look at it closely. In verse 10, you can see the two parts of the priest’s work, and the two directions in which that work moved. First, “They teach Jacob your ordinances, and Israel your law.” This is the work of representing God to Israel, of teaching them the will and the ways of God and proclaiming God’s word to them, and this part of the job we know; it’s the same thing, in essence, as I’m doing right now. So that, we’re familiar with.

But then take a look at the second half of that verse: “they place incense before you, and whole burnt offerings on your altar.” This is the work of representing Israel before God. The biblical term that gets used of the priestly role is “mediator.” We see that going one way in the task of preaching, as the priest (or the pastor, for that matter) mediates the word of God to the people of God—God speaks through the one who preaches rather than speaking directly. In the act of sacrifice, however, we see that mediation going the other direction. The people of Israel couldn’t go directly to God to ask forgiveness, because their sin got in the way; they had to go through the priests, and so they would bring their offerings of animals and grain to the priests and the priests would then offer them to God on behalf of the people. Every sacrifice was a prayer, and it was a prayer you couldn’t pray yourself; the priest had to pray it for you, because they were the only ones who were allowed to do so. They were sort of professional holy people—you might even call them professional pray-ers.

Now, obviously, our relationship with God works very differently. You all can pray for yourselves and for each other, by yourselves or together. When you sin against God, you don’t have to come to me and have me pray for you in order for you to be forgiven—you can do that yourself. When you have a need, I’m certainly glad to pray for you, but God will take care of you whether you ask me to pray or not—his action isn’t dependent on me one way or the other. I’m not a priest, I’m just a pastor. Or rather, I am a priest, but only in the same sense as each of you is a priest, that all of us who belong to Jesus are called to be priests to each other in the name of Christ.

This is a huge change from the way things were back in the Old Testament, and the reason for that change is much of what the book of Hebrews is talking about. Again, we could have read a lot more from Hebrews than we did this morning—it’s a book that rewards deep study—but for the moment, I just grabbed a couple key passages to highlight the key ideas here. The book of Hebrews presents Jesus as the great high priest, the one who fulfills and completes the whole priestly system and thus brings the need for earthly sacrifices to an end, replacing them with something better. How did he do that? Well, first, he lived a perfect, sinless life—a life completely and unfailingly in accordance with God’s will. As such, he had no need to offer sacrifices for himself, for he had committed no sin for which he needed to atone; being perfect, he was therefore able to offer a perfect sacrifice. Second, that’s exactly what he did—he offered himself, his own blood, on our behalf as the sacrifice for our sin; he offered for us a sacrifice of infinite value, one sufficient to cover all our sin. In this way, in his death on the cross, Jesus made all the other sacrifices—the daily offerings, the sin offerings, the guilt offerings, and so on—unnecessary; he died once for all, and that was enough for everything.

And then third—and here’s where it gets a little foreign to our normal way of thinking, even as Christians—he took that sacrifice into the Holy of Holies, into the very presence of God. You see, under the Old Testament system, the most important day was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. That was the day, once a year, when the high priest offered the prescribed sacrifices for the sin of the nation—all of it—and then brought the blood into the Holy of Holies, the place of the presence of God on earth, and sprinkled it there, presenting it to God. In the same way, Christ offered himself on the cross as the sacrifice, rose from the dead, and then ascended into the very presence of God to present his sacrifice to the Father. You can see this in Hebrews 9:11-12: “When Christ came as a high priest . . . he entered once for all into the Holy Place, not with the blood of goats and calves, but with his own blood, thus obtaining eternal redemption.” It wasn’t enough just to offer the sacrifice, you had to present the sacrifice to God—and this, Hebrews tells us, Jesus did in his ascension, returning to the throne of God as our high priest who offered the sacrifice which has redeemed and purified us forever and always.

Now, I’m sure that sounds strange and foreign to many of you—we just don’t think that way in this day and age—but it’s important. It’s important because it helps us better understand what Jesus did for us, but no less because it helps us understand what he’s doing for us right now. I think many of us tend to have this idea that Jesus came down to earth, did his thing, then left and turned the work over to the Spirit, and that he’s just resting right now until it’s time for him to come again. But Hebrews gives us a very different picture: Jesus is our great high priest, and he is at work now in that role on our behalf. What were the priests? They were the ones who presented the prayers of the people to God. And Jesus? Jesus is doing the same. We pray, and the Spirit of God carries our prayers to him, and he presents them to the Father, interceding on our behalf, pleading our case for us. When we pray, then, we do not pray alone, or relying on our own merits—Jesus prays with us and for us, and we rely on his merits. This is why we pray in Jesus’ name; indeed, this is what it means to pray in Jesus’ name.

And this is why, as Hebrews 10 says, we have confidence to enter the heavenly sanctuary—the holy place, the presence of the living God—by the blood of Jesus. In the great temple in Jerusalem, the Holy of Holies was separated off by a thick curtain, a curtain that divided the small part of the world that contained the presence of God from the rest of the planet; at the time of Jesus’ death, that curtain tore in two, from top to bottom, because that separation was over. In his death, resurrection, and ascension, Jesus opened a way for us through the curtain, into the presence of God. Because Jesus ascended to the Father’s side, we are free through the Spirit to approach the holy and almighty God of all creation and present our prayers to him through his Son, our high priest, the Lord Jesus Christ, in full assurance of faith.

Now, we’ve grown used to that fact, but in truth, it’s an amazing gift; though familiarity has dulled our eyes and ears to just how incredible this is, prayer is no small, safe, domesticated thing. Those of you who were here for my installation last Sunday afternoon will recall my friend Wayne quoting the writer Annie Dillard; it’s one of my favorite passages anywhere outside the Bible, one I think he first heard from me. For those who weren’t here, listen to what she has to say:

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.

Prayer is nothing less than that. It is having the sheer nerve to stand before the one who created everything that is just by speaking, and whose will keeps everything going, and say, “Daddy, I want to talk”—and to do so in the complete certainty that he does, too, and that in fact he will not take offense, because he loves us that much. When you really think about it, this is an incredible gift—who and what are we, to be given such a privilege?—and so Hebrews urges us not to take it lightly, but instead to take advantage of it! Draw near to God in prayer, in the certain faith that your prayers are heard—no prayer ever bounces off the ceiling, or gets lost in the background noise, because Jesus takes every one and presents it to the Father on our behalf. God may not always give you the answer you want, but none of your prayers are ever ignored, and none go without any answer at all—and even though he doesn’t always say yes, God takes our prayers into account in everything he does. Stand firm in your faith, hold fast to this hope; Christ died and rose again for you and now intercedes for you before the throne of God, and therefore your salvation and ultimate victory is sure, regardless of what that may come along the way. Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift.

The Ascension, the body, and the kingdom of God

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Barry posted a comment on my post on heaven expressing his ongoing surprise that “the whole immortal soul/heaven idea has become such an immovable foundation of the faith of most Christians when there’s no evidence for it in the Bible.” I agree, and I think it’s unfortunate, but I can understand it. Gnostic and quasi-Gnostic ideas of spirituality and the body are just very natural to us, I think, going all the way back to Genesis 3 (it would be a stretch to call Gnosticism the original temptation, but I think it’s a very close descendant); it just seems obvious to us that if we’re going to have eternal life, we must be immortal, and if any part of us is immortal, it must be our spirits. Throw in that a lot of folks don’t want to have to take the body seriously (either because they want to transcend it and become “more than human,” or because they want to be free to do whatever they like), and you have a pretty strong pull to this sort of thinking. It’s easy for people to drift into it (since that tends to be the way the times go) without ever really realizing that it’s less than what God promises us.

Whether people realize it or not, though, it is less, because our bodies aren’t unimportant, and they aren’t incidental to who we are. We exist as body and spirit together, and our bodies, though fallen and subject to sin, are beautiful and precious; certainly, to live forever in bodies that aged and fell ill and broke down would be no good thing, but to leave them behind forever would be no good thing either, for it would make us less than ourselves. That’s why God promises to raise us, whole, from the dead, in imperishable, incorruptible bodies, because our bodies are part of us, and every part of us matters to God, in every aspect of who we are and what we do.

This means that what we do with our bodies matters, because our bodies are sites of God’s redemption; his Spirit is alive and at work in our bodies as well as in our spirits, for they are inseparably woven together, to remake us into the people he created us to be. This is why Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6 that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, and why he tells the Corinthians that they need to watch what they do with their bodies, because there are no merely physical acts. Every act is spiritual, because every act that affects our bodies—food, sex, exercise, sleep, slipping and falling, getting back up—every act affects our spirits, and we won’t be leaving these bodies behind. They’ll be transformed when God makes all things new, but they’ll still be our bodies, and what we do with them matters, to us and to God.

To some, this might not seem like good news, but I think it is; it’s the good news that because Jesus ascended into heaven in the body, as a human being, there is room for us in our full humanity in the presence of God. There is no part of us God will not redeem—no good thing he will not purify, no bad thing he will not transform. There is room for us in the kingdom of God as whole people, scars and all, because he has redeemed us as whole people, scars and all; when the kingdom comes, even our scars will no longer bring us pain, or shame, for they, too, will be the marks of the redemptive work of Jesus in our lives.

The old made new—not replaced

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As I noted a few days ago, God doesn’t promise us an escape from this world—he promises us the world remade new, and ourselves remade new within it, to start all over again. Sort of. Surprisingly, though the human story began in a garden, when God remakes the world, it will center on a city, the new Jerusalem; we aren’t going backward to be Adam and Eve again (contrary to Michael Omartian’s classic song), with all our mistakes erased as if they had never been, but rather, forward, with our mistakes redeemed—and with them, our accomplishments. To be sure, there are many of us who don’t care for cities, but as a whole, as Jacques Ellul has written (thanks to John Halton for his post on this), “The city is . . . our primary human creation. It is a uniquely human world. It is the symbol that we have chosen.” For God to center his rule on a city (especially when the city is “the place that human beings have chosen in opposition to God” [emphasis mine], as Ellul notes), is a sure sign that in remaking the world, God will take our works into account and redeem the works of our hands, even to the point of turning the center and hub of our fallen civilization into the center of his perfect reign. This tells us that the good that we have made, the good things we have built, the honorable works of our hands, will not be swept away in the final judgment; even as God will redeem and perfect us, so too will our accomplishments be redeemed and perfected. The gifts God has given us, and the good things we do with them to his glory, will also be saved. This is what it means that Jesus is preparing a place for us—that who we are and what we bring with us matter, and will remain.

Of course, that redemption and perfection are an important part of the picture. The late great Dan Quisenberry once quipped, “I have seen the future, and it is much like the present, only longer”; but if that tends to be drearily true in human history, it will not be true at all of the new creation. We will be raised in our own bodies, but our bodies will be different in kind. Now, they are perishable; our bodies erode, they wear out, they catch diseases, they break, they fail, and we die. In the new creation, they won’t be subject to any of that; they will be imperishable, what Paul calls “spiritual bodies.” Flesh and blood as we know it now cannot endure the glory of God, it cannot stand up to the brightness of his presence; it’s too frail and flimsy and shadowy a thing to breathe the air of heaven. It must be made new, remade, along with the rest of creation, in order to be solid enough and real enough to stand in the very presence of God. So too the works of our hands, those things we have forged out of our own hard work and the raw materials God has given us; that which is worthy will endure, but not as we have known it, for it too will be remade by the hand of God.

This is the promise of the gospel—the promise we see realized first in the resurrection of Christ, whom Paul calls “the firstfruits,” the first harvest, “of those who have died”; as the first one to be raised from the dead, as the one who went before us to show us the way, he shows us the new life that waits for us. We will be raised from the dead, not merely as we are now, but as he is, and the sting of death, the victory of the grave, and the power of sin in our lives will be no more, forever and ever and ever.

Holy discomfort

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E. J. Dionne has a good column up on the message with which Pope Benedict XVI is challenging America on his first papal visit. Given that Dionne is such a conventional American liberal Catholic, he’s surprisingly open to that message, with little more than a ritual genuflection to the “the Church needs to become more like us” altar; by and large, he seems to understand that the change needs to run the other way. To be sure, part of that is his recognition that the Pope’s message is in fact as countercultural and challenging in many ways for conservatives as it is for liberals, but even so, I’m glad to see him close with this:

For myself, I admire Benedict’s distinctly Catholic critique of radical individualism in both the moral and economic spheres, and his insistence that the Christian message cannot be divorced from the social and political realms. . . . Perhaps it is the task of the leader of the Roman Catholic Church to bring discomfort to a people so thoroughly shaped by modernity, as we Americans are. If so, Benedict is succeeding.

This is good news, because indeed, an important task for the church is to bring us to a holy discomfort with our lives and our world—to inspire us with a sacred disquiet with the selfish, reductionist assumptions we absorb from our culture, and with the ways in which that culture shapes us; and (as Dionne’s Washington Post colleague Michael Gerson notes) because of its size, ubiquity, and theological tradition, the Roman Catholic Church is and must be one of the chief standard-bearers in that work. It’s good to see that standard carried well.

From the “Good News” file

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Any actual medical use is still a long way off and far from assured, but we may have seen a major conceptual breakthrough in cancer treatment. Certainly many cancer researchers think we have, and they’re excited about the possibilities. The basic idea, the brainwave of a businessman, radio technician and cancer patient named John Kanzius, is simple: use radio waves and small metal particles (carried into the cancer cells by specially-modified antibodies) to cook cancer while leaving normal cells alone. It’s already been used to kill small tumors in animals; if they can find ways to target cancer cells that don’t rely on doctors knowing the cells are there (and thus to ensure they get all the places where cancers metastasize), they should be off to the races.

Iraq as a litmus test for presidential seriousness

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The great problem with the Iraq War in American politics is that most Americans believe what the media tells them about it, and the media haven’t sought to report accurately and fairly from Iraq; instead, they’ve been trying to use their reporting to score points on the Bush administration and the GOP. As such, lots of people believe we were “lied into war,” when in fact, as Christopher Hitchens has pointed out, that point of view is based on a misunderstanding (or misrepresentation) of what President Bush actually said; lots of people believe that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and other terrorists, when in fact (as Hitchens also notes), the connection has been clearly established; lots of people believe that the war in Iraq has nothing to do with our war on al’Qaeda, when in fact al’Qaeda itself knows better (see here for the highlights); and lots of people believe our work in Iraq has strengthened al’Qaeda, when in fact they’re a shell of their former organization. The fact is, the surge has largely worked, we’re winning the war, and things in Iraq are getting better, to the point that good reporting is beginning to convince Iraq War opponents they were wrong.

Unfortunately, the MSM are still trying to spin the war for maximum benefit for the Democrats rather than simply reporting it and letting the chips fall where they may. This distorts the public understanding of the situation in Iraq and makes it difficult to have the kind of forthright national discussion that would truly serve our nation well; in particular, it enables those who want an immediate and total withdrawal from Iraq, notwithstanding that (as Israel’s experience in Gaza shows) such an act would only give aid and comfort to our enemies. Now is a critical stage in the evolution of Iraq as a nation, and in our campaign against al’Qaeda; this is exactly the wrong time to back down. As such, this is when we most need sober, dispassionate reflection from the presidential candidates as to what would be the best course to chart in Iraq, because this is perhaps the key test of their seriousness as potential American leaders on the world stage.

With John McCain, we know where he stands; he started pushing for the surge in 2003 in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, and has maintained a consistent position ever since, even when that position seemed an insurmountable obstacle for his White House ambitions. That’s consistency, integrity, character, and wisdom of a sort that Barack Obama hasn’t shown with respect to Iraq; where Sen. McCain has situated himself firmly in the internationalist foreign-policy tradition of “people like Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Stimson, Dean Acheson, John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan,” Sen. Obama began a major speech on foreign policy by appealing to Woodrow Wilson. Mismatch, anyone? (No wonder the New York Times has resorted to flat-out dishonesty in attacking Sen. McCain’s foreign-policy credentials.) Ironically, Sen. Obama then went on to make the case for pulling out of Iraq immediately in order to . . . escalate the war in Afghanistan and dramatically increase our involvement in Pakistan. Indeed, in declaring, “For years, we have supported stability over democracy in Pakistan, and gotten neither,” he essentially endorsed the Bush Doctrine. So, Senator—why in Pakistan, but not in Iraq?

What shall we do with a Christless preacher?

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(If you know the sea chantey, feel free.)

Over at Gospel-Driven Church, Jared has been writing a fair bit about the problem of Christ-free, counterfeit-gospel preaching in the American church, which he’s quite correctly dubbed “the new legalism.” He’s not the only one, of course; another redoubtable voice on the subject has been that of Michael Spencer, the iMonk. Recently, though, someone asked the iMonk, “What do we, in the pew, do about this?” (scroll down near the end of the comments)—an important question, but not one I’d seen raised; so Jared set out to answer it. IMHO, he did his usual excellent job, and I commend the post to your reading.

The one thing I would add, from a preacher’s perspective, is to reinforce something Jared says: if your pastor isn’t preaching the gospel, talk to them about it if there’s any way you can—and specifically, do three key things. One, find whatever gospel elements you can in their preaching, tell them you appreciate that, and tell them why. Give them whatever positive feedback you can that will draw them in the direction of preaching Christ. Two, tell them you’d like to hear more of that (in positive terms, though I wouldn’t advise going so far as flattery), and ask them to try to preach more of the gospel, more about Jesus and his life and work, and to put Christ more at the center of their preaching. If you know others who think and feel the same way, tell them so—and use names. (One thing preachers in most churches learn quickly, if they’re going to survive, is to give anonymous complaints/suggestions very little weight.)

I say this for two reasons. First, while there are no doubt preachers who don’t feel the need, most of us are always trying to evaluate our preaching to see if we’re improving, how the congregation is responding, if our sermons are actually influencing anyone—if our preaching is “working,” whatever we might understand that to mean—but that’s very hard to do without clear, specific, intelligent feedback; and in most churches, that kind of feedback is hard to come by. For most preachers, if you present that kind of feedback in an encouraging, affirming, appreciative way, you will receive a positive response; and while that might not result in any real change in their preaching, then again, it might. (If it does, of course, follow that up with expressions of gratitude and further encouragement.)

Second, most of us preachers are, at some level, utilitarian in our view of our preaching. That’s not to say we’ll do anything if it works (though some will, to be sure), only that there aren’t many of us who will keep on doing something that clearly doesn’t. In some ways, that’s unfortunate, because in churches that are resisting the gospel message, what needs to be done is to keep preaching the gospel whether it’s “working” or not; but in another way, it’s not only proper but necessary. After all, if our preaching isn’t bearing any fruit, then clearly, we need to change something. The only real problem here is making sure that we have the right definition of “fruit.”

All of which is to say, whatever your preacher is preaching, it’s a reasonable bet that they’re doing it because they’ve been told that’s what works, and unless your congregation is small and shrinking, their experience has probably convinced them it works. Realistically, you’re not likely to get your preacher to change unless you can get them to believe that gospel-centered, Bible-rooted preaching will also “work”; and the best way to make that happen is to help them see that people in the congregation are hungry for it.

There’s a third key thing you need to do as well if your preacher does begin to change: support them through the backlash. Assuming attendance is healthy in your church, it’s likely that many (if not most) of the folks there like the preaching just fine and don’t have the same problems with it that you do; of those folks, there will almost certainly be some who will strongly resent the changes, and they’ll let the preacher have it with both barrels. At this point, three main scenarios present themselves:

—the preacher gives in and the church reverts to its previous normal;

—the preacher leaves and the church reverts to its previous normal; or

—the preacher digs in and there’s a conflict of some sort.

Given the tendency among most preachers to conflict avoidance, the third scenario is the least likely unless they have your strong, vocal support, and the strong, vocal support of everyone who appreciates the new direction in their preaching. What’s more, if you’ve been involved in urging them to change, and they’ve changed as a result, you have a moral responsibility to support them as they deal with the consequences of that change.