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Our Swiss-cheese Bibles

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Scot McKnight has a piece up on the Leadership section of CT’s website about (and linking to) the hermeneutics quiz devised by BuildingChurchLeaders.com. I don’t actually find the quiz all that interesting, though I think they did a good job putting it together—the quiz informed me that I’m conservative, but moderately so, which wasn’t exactly news to me—but I thought Dr. McKnight’s comments were.

For some reason of late, I have become fascinated with the portions of the Bible we don’t tend to read, passages like the story of Jephthah. Or how God was on the verge of killing Moses for not circumcising his son, and his wife stepped in, did what needed to be done, and tossed the foreskin at Moses’ feet, and God let him alone. I’m curious why one of my friends dismisses the Friday-evening-to-Saturday-evening Sabbath observance as “not for us today” but insists that capital punishment can’t be dismissed because it’s in the Old Testament.I have become fascinated with what goes on in our heads and our minds and our traditions (and the latter is far more significant than many of us recognize) in making decisions like this.What decisions? Which passages not to read as normative. The passages we tend not to read at all.If we’re all subject to selective perception, at least to some degree, it’s important to recognize what we tend to miss or gloss over, especially if we’re church leaders.

He goes on to credit the quiz with helping us do this, which I don’t really think it does, to any significant degree; but I certainly agree that this is something we need to address, because it leads to us missing and misunderstanding what God wants to say to us. It gives us a truncated gospel—one which, funnily enough, usually tends to be truncated neatly to fit our comfort zones.There are, I think, several reasons for this. In churches that use the lectionary, a lot of this is done for you, as the folks who put the lectionary readings together did a nice job of trimming around all the troublesome spots. We do it ourselves, because dealing with those spots takes work—we can’t just toss out the pat answers we’ve all learned, we have to wrestle with the text and put thought and effort into it. What’s more, dealing with those sorts of passages carries an emotional cost, as we come face to face with the fact that we don’t worship a nice, comfortable god who wants us to live nice, comfortable lives. In some cases, as Jared Wilson points out, the Scriptures tell us things we just flat-out don’t want to hear; it’s no shock that we tend to avoid those passages if at all possible.And so we end up with Swiss-cheese Bibles, with great voids in them, and we take our nice neat slices with their nice neat holes in them, and we end up with a much less messy and much less discomfiting faith as a consequence; but then, it seems to me, we end up with a faith much less able to deal with the messy and discomfiting parts of life—they go sailing right through the holes. We need to make the effort to fill in the holes, to consider what parts of the Bible we’re avoiding, and why, and take them head-on; we need to open ourselves up to listen to, and proclaim, the whole counsel of God.

On the power of stories to teach, part II

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I’ve been meaning for several days now to get back over to Dr. Stackhouse’s blog, having gotten a couple weeks behind on reading his posts; I was interested to find there a four-post consideration and defense of the novel The Shack, which has generated quite a bit of interest and comment, both positive and negative. I haven’t yet read the book, and given the events that drive the book’s plot, I’m not at all sure I’m going to read it, either, at least in full; but given the responses it’s generated (both positive and negative), I definitely want to know as much about it as I can from reviewers who are both fair and perceptive. That’s why I appreciated his four posts addressing the book’s genre, some theological concerns, and some praiseworthy aspects of the book.In light of my post this past Sunday, I was also interested in the first of those posts for another reason. Dr. Stackhouse writes,

It seems to me important that authors of fiction defend art as needing no justification on some other grounds. From a Christian point of view, a well-rendered novel—or short story, or poem, or song lyric—needs only to be good in and of itself. It does not have to explicitly praise God or testify to Jesus or draw people closer to the gospel or attract people to Christianity—although the paradox is, I suggest, that inasmuch as it is authentic and true to both the artist and to reality, such fictional writing does indeed do all those things implicitly. Still, art needs no justification, as H. R. Rookmaaker’s book title reminds us, and it is good that art is free from the obligation to perform some other service.To assert that principle, however, is not to assert the corollary that art must not ever serve more than one purpose, and in particular must not “preach,” as Atwood says. One can defend art “for art’s sake,” as Wilde put it, without restricting oneself to aestheticism in which art is only for art’s sake. . . .So, yes, if you want to preach, write a sermon—which is a truism, in fact. But if you want to depict your concerns in a fictional way you hope will render them plausible, even cogent, to a reader, then the weight of western civilization is on your side.

Lest anyone think this is a Christian defense of propaganda, here’s the late Dr. Isaac Asimov saying something very similar:

But in every worthwhile story, however long, there is a point. The writer may not consciously put it there, but it will be there. The reader may not consciously search for it, but he’ll miss it if it isn’t there. If the point is obtuse, blunt, trivial, or non-existent, the story suffers and the reader will react with a deadly, “So what?”

The danger of propagandizing is very real, of course, for the writer who consciously desires to communicate their understanding of truth through stories, through fiction; the question of when one has crossed the line is very real. Dr. Stackhouse argues that that point comes

when the fictive art is compromised for the sake of the ideological message. When dialogue becomes stilted, when characters become inconsistent, when events become implausible, when a deus ex machina saves the day—in sum, when “what would happen” is sacrificed to “what should happen.”

Or, to put it another way, it comes when we as sub-creators cease to be thinking “primarily about what is best for this thing we are making” and let the good of our agenda trump the good of the creation; it’s when “what’s best for us or what we want to do” becomes the primary consideration.

Song of the Week

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As I said last week, I’m on a bit of a Steve Taylor kick. For this one, I’ll let Taylor’s own words (in the booklet for the boxed set Now the Truth Can Be Told) explain my reason for posting it:

Ah, to have the Bible’s sense of balance.My goal with “A Principled Man” was to write a song that inspired me to live a principled life. The seed came from a “tree motif” in the Book of Psalms: “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, or stand in the way of sinners, or sit in the seat of mockers. But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in His law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water . . .” (Psalms 1:1-3)But lest principles become an end unto themselves, we have in Ezekiel the dark side of the tree metaphor: “Therefore, this is what the sovereign Lord says: Because it towered on high, lifting its top above the thick foliage, and because it was proud of its height . . . I cast it aside.” (Ezekiel 31:10-11)This song still inspires me. May it continue to do so for all the right reasons.

A Principled Man

Under a flag they swore a bond;
Caught under fire they ran.
Are you the one standing your ground?
Are you a principled man?Followers fall, blinded by kings,
Lost in the lie of the land.
Are you the one sworn to be true?
Are you a principled man?Now . . . begin—come alongside it,
Seize the wind—come along, ride it.
One day it will be you believing
There is a principled man.Who goes there? Do you belong, lad?
You know there is a new dawn, and
One day to say, “Stick with me, baby,
I am a principled man.”Many’s the man grounded by greed,
Leaning on power and land;
Show me the one lost in the stars—
Show me a principled man.ChorusBleeding and hushed, hung between thieves,
There the foundation began,
Are you the one taking your cross?
Are you a principled man?Words and music: Steve Taylor
© 1987 Soylent Tunes
From the album I Predict 1990, by Steve Taylor

Malcolm Reynolds, patron saint of not-quite-lost causes

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—or at least, so he would be if he were ever actually canonized, which of course is a rather remote prospect. First the fight against the Alliance, which he could never quite stop fighting, then the “Can’t Stop the Signal” campaign after Firefly‘s cancellation—the man positively collects them, and keeps on flying.Which reminds me: there’s a rally at the Federal Courthouse in Seattle at 4:30 pm on June 16, part of the campaign to stop that modern-day robber baron and keep the Sonics in Seattle where they belong. . . . Anyone in Seattle have Nathan Fillion‘s number?(Update: the rally drew over 3000 people and earned serious attention from ESPN. Way to go, guys—you rock. Can’t stop the signal!)

Firefly, Tolkien, and narrative theology

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The heart of Man is not compound of lies,
but draws some wisdom from the only Wise,
and still recalls him. Though now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not dethroned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned,
his world-dominion by creative act:
not his to worship the great Artefact,
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons, ’twas our right
(used or misused). The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which we’re made.

—J. R. R. Tolkien, from “Mythopoeia”It has been my custom, while using my rowing machine, to watch episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street, which I consider one of the two greatest television shows I’ve ever seen. (I don’t believe TV as a medium has produced much true art, or many truly great stories, but I do believe both are possible.) Lately, however, I’ve been watching other things while I row, and this week, I started in on the other greatest series I’ve ever seen: Firefly. It’s the first time I’ve watched any of the episodes since the movie came out; what Joss Whedon did with the movie hit me too hard. That’s also why I haven’t posted about being a Browncoat, or linked to fan sites like “Whoa. Good Myth.” Rather like being a Mariners fan these days, it’s just been easier not to stress about it too much.Now, this might seem like an odd and pointless thing to get worked up about—so a TV show was canceled after fourteen episodes—so what? It’s still a TV show, after all. So Fox handled it badly, gave the show no real chance, and canceled it unfairly soon; is it really that big a deal? Well, it was that big a deal for all the folks who worked on the show, for one thing. Beyond that, we all have our reasons, and I’m sure mine aren’t the same as everyone else’s; but for me, it’s the story, or rather, the stories, which were untimely cut off, and the lives of the characters in those stories. Whedon, Tim Minear, and their crew of writers had a great world and a great set of characters and stories going, both enjoyable and deep; to have that brought to an untimely end is a great loss.That’s why I rejoiced when the movie deal went forward; which meant that what Whedon did with Serenity really hit me hard. I think he put his own ideas of what is artistic ahead of what was best for his creation—not only the story and the characters, but also the communities he had created, most importantly the actors, writers, and crew, and also all of us who call ourselves Browncoats. Tolkien speaks of us as sub-creators, people who create what he calls “Secondary Worlds,” creations which are real within their own laws, to the best of our ability to make them real; we create in reflection (or, perhaps better, as refractions) of the great Creator who made us, because we were made like him. The desire to be gods ourselves may have been what led us into sin, but it was not perhaps a wholly wrong one, properly channeled—for when we create, we are in a sense small gods to our creation. If we take Tolkien’s point of view, however (as I believe we should), this has a significant implication for our creative activity: we have the responsibility to be, as best as we can, good gods to our creation. Our work has to be primarily about what is best for this thing we are making, whatever it might be, not merely about what’s best for us or what we want to do. On my read, from the things he’s said, Joss Whedon violated that with Firefly/Serenity; he was a bad god to his creation.Still, though, you might say: does this matter? Wasn’t it, after all, still just a TV show? Yes, of course it was a TV show, but no, it wasn’t just a TV show. Nothing is ever just anything—especially not people; and thus, especially not stories, to the extent that they’re true stories about people. By that I don’t necessarily mean factual; there are biographies and histories which are factual but aren’t really true, because they miss the heart of the matter, while many historical fictions, though they depart from the facts, are far truer because they give us real understanding of people and events. Indeed, many novels about things that never happened and people who never lived are nevertheless true stories in that they broaden our awareness of ourselves and of others, open our eyes and minds to things we have not before seen or realized, and deepen our knowledge of what it means to be human.Stories are powerful things. It’s one thing to express an opinion, or to set forth a proposition about how the world works; it’s quite another thing to bring that opinion or proposition to life in a story. People who might reject, or at least argue with, your position if it were plainly stated may find themselves influenced by it, if your story is powerful enough and sufficiently well-crafted; and those who wouldn’t understand it intellectually in a propositional form may well get it intuitively and affectively if you bring it to life in a story. That’s what stories do with our ideas: they bring them to life, incarnating them in the lives of the characters we create, making them not merely intellectual realities, but human realities.This is one reason why the greatest of all Christian theologians is not Paul, but Jesus himself. (There are others, of course, such as the fact that Jesus was original, while Paul was derivative of Jesus.) This is something too often missed, as Dr. Kenneth Bailey points out (and as Jared Wilson has also said, though his emphasis is a little different), because we tend to see Jesus as a nice moral teacher telling quaint stories; we don’t really believe that those stories can be theologically profound and powerful. In fact, though, they can, and they are; the more overtly “theological” works in the New Testament, profound as they are, are simply developments, explications, and applications in propositional form of the truths already communicated incarnationally through the parables of Jesus, and also through the broader narratives of the Gospels, Acts, and the Old Testament. God doesn’t give us a three-point outline, he gives us a story—from which to learn, and in which to live.Of course, it’s possible to take this too far; there are those who would overbalance the other way, exalting the biblical narratives to the extent of diminishing or even discounting the NT epistles (and other non-narrative portions of the Bible—but the epistles, and particularly Paul, usually seem to be the main target). That’s not right either. What we need to remember is that the epistles, though not themselves narrative texts, are nevertheless part of a narrative; their context is a story. They were written for particular reasons to particular human beings in particular situations dealing with particular things, even if we don’t know all those particularities (in some cases, we have a pretty good idea; in others, we can only speculate); and when we read them, we read them in the middle of our own story as God speaking to us in our particular situations and issues. We need to understand them accordingly—and we need to understand that that fact is the reason why they matter.Stories matter. They matter because they’re the stuff of our life, of our reality and our nature, and the expression of the creative ability we’ve been given by (and in the image of) the one who made us—and we matter. They matter because they affect us, moving our emotions and shaping our view of the world, both for good and for ill. And as a Christian, I affirm that they matter because everything we do matters, because the best of what we do will endure forever. And if they matter, then we need to take them seriously, both as readers and, for those of us so called, as writers—for our sake, and for everyone’s.

Worldly heavens make me ill

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My wife already commented on this, but I think I need to as well, because it’s disturbing me more and more the longer my backbrain has to chew on it: “Heaven Is An Amusement Park That Never Closes.” It’s the latest thing up on Strange Maps (which is a great blog, if you’re a map geek like Sara and I are), and it’s both brilliant and sick. The brainchild of a California comic artist named Malachi Ward, it certainly does a brilliant job of capturing the vague cultural idea of what “heaven” is like, to the extent that it gets beyond clouds and harps and pearly gates; in the process, it also shows just how sick that idea really is.Of course, I could be taken to be biased on this point, since, as I’ve posted before, I firmly disbelieve in the whole popular idea of “heaven”—but I don’t think so. Rather, I think any notion of what God has for those who believe in him that a) makes any sense in earthly terms and/or b) makes any sense apart from the overflowing light and presence of the Triune God, God the Father, Jesus Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit, is theologically appalling. I think any such idea of heaven both distorts and impoverishes our faith—even the best-intentioned versions. As for cultural ideas like the one Malachi Ward so powerfully captures (and satirizes? I hope): may the God of all truth deliver us from such poisonous rubbish.

“Doubting Thomas”?

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Now Thomas, one of the Twelve, called the Twin, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.” Eight days later, his disciples were inside again, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.—John 20:24-31 (ESV)

Doubt’s a funny thing, sort of a grey area between belief and unbelief—between, you might say, two different kinds of certainty. It can be paralyzing, leaving people unable to act because they don’t know what to do. Sometimes, it can be liberating, freeing people to let go of a false certainty to seek a true one. It can be unhealthy, especially if it becomes obsessive; but it can also be a healthy thing, reminding us that we might not know quite as much as we think we do. Of course, doubt can be dishonest, really a mask for a determination not to believe something—or, in some cases, for a refusal to commit to any belief at all; but honest doubt, doubt which is truly open to belief and truly seeking understanding, can be an important prelude to true faith. The problem is, it’s all too easy to lose sight of that, and so you find churches that treat doubt as a sin—as if believing in Jesus and following him are supposed to be easy, which they often aren’t—that fail to see the difference between doubt that doesn’t want to believe, and doubt that does.

The story of Thomas is a corrective for us in that respect, if we actually read it. Unfortunately, this is one of those stories we already think we know; even people who’ve never knowingly been within fifty feet of a Bible know what a doubting Thomas is. Just for grins, I Googled the phrase “doubting Thomas” and found 903,000 hits, including a page on Dictionary.com which informed me that a doubting Thomas is “one who is habitually doubtful.” That’s our picture of Thomas, based entirely on this passage, as if he were the sort of guy who wouldn’t believe you if you told him the sky was blue.

Is that really fair, though? Does he really deserve to be universally known as “Doubting Thomas”—to be a cliché? He’d been off on his own, away from the other disciples, and while we don’t know for sure why that was, it seems likely that he reacted to grief and loss the same way many of us do: he pulled away from other people, shut them out, and tried to work through it by himself. The Scottish New Testament scholar William Barclay notes that England’s King George V used to say, “If I have to suffer, let me be like a well-bred animal, and let me go and suffer alone”; this seems to have been Thomas’ approach. When he got to the point that he felt he could bear to be around the other disciples, he joined them, expecting to commiserate and reminisce with them—and instead they fed him the most implausible story he had ever heard. Put yourself in his shoes—would you have believed it?

Of course, part of the reason Thomas picked up his label is his response to the other disciples, with his statement that unless he could see the wounds and put his hands in them, he would never believe that Jesus was alive again; if you read the commentaries, you’ll see that they treat his statements as if he made them calmly and rationally, as if he were matter-of-factly stating the terms which would have to be met before he would believe. Stop and think a minute, though—do you really imagine that Thomas, confronted with this ridiculous fairy tale, tugged on his beard, carefully considered the situation, and then set forth the conditions on which he would believe the story, as if he were a philosophy professor grading a blue-book exam? No! He responded the way many people would have, with anger, sarcasm, and hyperbole: “You expect me to believe that? Why, unless I see the wounds in his hands—no, unless I can touch them myself—there’s no way!” OK, so maybe it’s not an admirable response; but really, which of us would have done any better?

The fact of the matter is, Thomas was no more a doubter than any of the other disciples who didn’t believe until they saw Jesus with their own eyes, and the Bible never portrays him as such. We do know that he was something of a pessimist, and that he loved Jesus greatly; in John 11, when Jesus announced his intention to go to Jerusalem, setting his feet on the road to the cross, Thomas told his fellow disciples, “Let’s go with him, that we may die with him.” He was sure the worst was coming, but he made no excuses; better to die with Jesus than to abandon him. In the event, the worst happened and Jesus was crucified, but Thomas survived; he had seen it coming, but was still broken-hearted at Jesus’ death. If he hadn’t cared, he no doubt would have had an easier time believing in the resurrection; as it was, his grief was too great for belief to come easily.

To be sure, Thomas does come across as something of a skeptic—but there are skeptics and there are skeptics. There are certainly those who are “habitually doubtful,” who refuse to believe anything anyone tells them, whether because they’re suspicious and distrustful, because they’re contemptuous of others, or for whatever reason; but Thomas doesn’t fall into that category. Thomas doubts, yes, but he doubts because faith comes hard. How much of that is grief and how much is his natural character and temperament, we don’t know, but he just needed more, some sort of tangible proof. He was willing to believe, but he needed more than just a crazy story; he needed to see Jesus himself.

Given that, it does need to be said for Thomas that at least he was honest about it. When the others told him they’d seen Jesus, he didn’t try to play along or try to humor them; he was completely honest, telling them straight out that he didn’t believe their story. What’s more, he didn’t leave, either; it must have been a little uncomfortable—they were celebrating the resurrection, he was still grieving the crucifixion—but he stuck around. Thomas doesn’t get credit for either of those things, as a rule, but both say a great deal for him.

The text doesn’t tell us, but I can only think that he stayed because his fellow disciples were his connection to Jesus; he stayed because he wasn’t giving up on them, because he wasn’t giving up on God. As for his honesty, how many of us are honest enough to admit we don’t understand, or believe, something when we don’t? Better someone like Thomas, who insisted on being sure and was open and forthright about his doubt, than someone who just plays along, mouthing the words and pretending to believe. As Barclay noted, “It is doubt like that which in the end arrives at certainty,” while those who just pretend never get anywhere at all. It also needs to be said for Thomas that he didn’t do anything by half measures; when he doubted, he doubted, and when he believed, he believed. Once he saw Jesus—and you’ll notice, for all his talk, Thomas didn’t need to touch him, just to see him—his doubts were gone, his belief total. Faith didn’t come easy for him, but once he was sure, once he had counted the cost, there were no halfway measures, and no holding back.

Perhaps that was part of the reason for his skepticism; it’s easy to make commitments, after all, if you only make them half-heartedly, but that doesn’t seem to have been an option for Thomas. We can see that in the statement he makes when he sees Jesus, which is really pretty remarkable. It’s been said that this is the key moment in the entire gospel, the key statement about Jesus, and I think that’s true, because Thomas here moves from several steps behind the other disciples—disbelieving the resurrection—to a step ahead of them; in an instant, he sees what the resurrection truly means, and from his heart he exclaims, “My Lord and my God!”

The disciples had been calling Jesus “Lord” for quite some time, but that’s a word that can cover a lot of ground; on the one hand, it was the standard Jewish substitution for the name of God, but on the other, it was a standard form of polite address, meaning roughly “Sir.” Somewhere along the line, the disciples started to mean more than that by it—they clearly realized that he deserved more than the ordinary level of respect—but how much more is impossible to say. For Thomas at this moment, however, it’s very clear exactly what he means by “Lord”: he’s giving it all the meaning it can bear. In putting “Lord” and “God” together, he’s joining the two great Old Testament names for the Creator—Elohim, which we translate as “God,” and the personal name of God, often rendered in English as “Yahweh” or “Jehovah,” but which the Jews substituted with Adonai, “Lord,” because no observant Jew would speak it. In calling Jesus “Lord” and “God,” then, Thomas is affirming Jesus as YHWH Elohim, the God of Israel, the very God of all creation, deserving of all worship and obedience. His realization is the cornerstone of our faith now, but then it was a new and radical statement; for a Jew who had been taught in no uncertain terms the vast difference and separation between God and his creation, even human beings, to come to understand that God had stooped to cross that divide by becoming human was a truly remarkable and world-expanding realization indeed.

Jesus responds by approving Thomas’ recognition, and then goes on to say, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Some people think that Jesus is rebuking Thomas here for his unbelief—that fits in with the whole “Doubting Thomas” thing, after all—but if so, it’s a very gentle rebuke, and one addressed to the others, not just to Thomas; after all, there were very few at that point who had believed without seeing Jesus with their own eyes. Jesus isn’t singling out Thomas for rebuke, and I’m not at all sure he’s rebuking anyone, since he doesn’t say “More blessed.” He simply blesses all those, both then and throughout time, who had and would come to believe without visual confirmation. He pronounces a blessing on, among others, us.

Now, if Thomas’ confession is a critical moment in this gospel, I think Jesus’ response is almost as critical. Remember that John chose to include these words for a reason—none of the other gospel writers did so—and notice that they are followed immediately by verses 30 and 31, which set out the purpose for this book: “These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.” Jesus pronounces a blessing on those who believe without seeing, and the purpose of this gospel, the reason John chose to write it, is to bring people into that blessing, to bring people who have never seen Jesus in the flesh to believe in him anyway. In that light, I think it’s worthwhile to ask why John tells this story; and I think one reason is to show us vividly that faith didn’t come any easier for those disciples than it did, or does, for anyone else.

Modern skeptics know how hard it is for them to believe that Jesus actually rose from the dead, and they tend to assume that it must have been easier for the first disciples, or else they never would have believed such a crazy tale; but Thomas shows us otherwise. As we’ve seen, he’d expected the worst, and the worst had happened, and that was just too powerful, too real a thing for him to set aside just because the other disciples told him he should. These were his friends, the people with whom he had walked the length and breadth of Israel who knew how many times—these were the people he trusted if he trusted anyone—but his pain and loss were too real and too great for him to hear. Their testimony wasn’t enough; Thomas had to see Jesus for himself before he could believe.

And here’s the key: that doesn’t disqualify him. His doubt doesn’t rule him out. Instead, he cries out for a reason to believe—and God gives it to him; and after all this, it’s Thomas, not any of the others, who makes the great confession which is the climax of this gospel. It’s Thomas, who spells out his inability to believe in great detail, whose doubt persists longer than any of the others, who then makes a statement of faith which goes beyond that of any of the others. It is the one who went through this period of doubt, who heard the story of the resurrection from those who had seen Jesus alive again and declared, “I don’t believe you, and I’m not going to believe until I can touch him for myself,” who then called Jesus both Lord and God. It was out of the dark soil of his doubt and grief that the bright flower of his great confession grew.

This is no accident; it’s no mere coincidence that Thomas made this statement; rather, it’s a lesson for us. We often tend to treat doubt and faith as opposed, as if doubt were the opposite of faith—but that isn’t true at all of honest doubt, like that of Thomas. Rather, doubt can be essential in working our way through to deeper faith. If we never doubt because we never ask questions about our faith, if we never doubt because we never really face the hard times in our lives, if we never doubt because we never admit to ourselves that we might have reason, then we don’t have more faith—we have less; we aren’t exercising our faith, we’re protecting it, and that means we aren’t really trusting God. Part of having real faith in God is trusting him enough to doubt him—I know that sounds strange, but it’s true. Faith doesn’t mean never doubting, it means trusting him enough to believe that if we express our doubts, as Thomas did, that God will respond and give us reason to have faith in him.

I think we sometimes tend to be afraid of our own honesty, afraid of admitting what we really think and feel, and we need to understand that God isn’t. True faith in him means trusting him enough even in our doubts to believe that God can handle our doubts just as well as he can our professions of faith—and that if we bring our doubts to him, they will be answered, and we will find that we really can trust him.

Song of the Week

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My post last Wednesday set me off on a Steve Taylor kick; this song of his seems an appropriate bit of reflection for a Sunday morning. (I do wish he’d just written “want to,” though . . .)

I Just Wanna KnowLife’s too short for small talk,
So don’t be talking trivia now;
Excess baggage fills this plane—
There’s more than we should ever allow.
There’s engines stalling and good men falling,
But I ain’t crawling away.I just wanna know—am I pulling people closer?
I just wanna be pulling them to You.
I just wanna stay angry at the evil;
I just wanna be hungry for the true.Folks play “follow the leader”—
But who’s the leader gonna obey?
Will his head get big when the toes get tapping?
I just wanna know, are they catching what I say?
I’m a little too young to introspect,
And I surely haven’t paid all my dues,
But there’s bear traps lying in those woods—
Most of ’em already been used.ChorusSearch me, Father, and know my heart,
Try me and know my mind,
And if there be any wicked way in me,
Pull me to the rock that is higher than I.ChorusWords and music: Steve Taylor
© 1985 Birdwing Music/C. A. Music
From the album On the Fritz, by Steve Taylor

Oh, the irony

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In my last post, I responded to my wife’s vision for the church; now, alas, I find myself commenting on a very different vision indeed, a vision in which the local church exists for the support and self-aggrandizement of the denominational hierarchy, as the property of that hierarchy. In that vision, if churches want to leave, the Powers that Be have the right to stop them by force; and if the presbytery refuses to go along with that, the synod can take them over, too. I don’t, in general, agree with those who decide to leave the Presbyterian Church (USA)—I think their actions help to bring about exactly that to which they object—but I believe they have the right to do so; they aren’t denominational property, and neither are their buildings, and for the denomination to put its own material wealth ahead of the spiritual health of its churches, even those which are seeking to leave, is little short of reprehensible. This is the sort of behavior that gives the church a bad name.

It also, incidentally, gives the lie to the argument (made by Greg Coulter of Eastern Oklahoma Presbytery in a letter to Presbyweb) that the Synod of the Sun, in establishing their administrative commission over the Presbytery of South Louisiana, had merely been “invited” into the situation “to partner with them in furthering the peace, unity, and purity of the labors of those serving Christ in South Louisiana.” Clearly, the skeptical among us were right: for the Synod, it’s property über alles—and then they have the gall to call it “one part of the church body helping another part.” For shame.

It’s a wonderful thing

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being married to somebody smarter than me. I’ve said this many times, and will no doubt say it many more. At the moment, I’m saying it again because my wonderful wife has just put words to something very important, something we both feel very strongly, and done so better than I’ve yet managed to do. I’ve been talking through some of this with our elders, and preaching about it some, about what it means to be that kind of church, and how we get there; I’ve talked about how we become a church of square holes (and triangular, and star-shaped, and rhomboid, and . . .) so that people feel it’s OK to be a square peg, and I’ve been encouraged to find people listening, and open. But there’s no question, we can’t get there on our own; to do that, we need a response from others outside ourselves. We need to find ways to earn people’s trust (which means, of course, continuing to grow ourselves to be worthy of that trust), so that we can all be the Church of the Exploded Comfort Zone together.Anyway, go read Sara’s post; she really has said it better than I can.“Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain . . .”—Psalm 127:1a