Category Archives: Religion and theology

Putting sin to death

Posted on by | 2 Comments

I’ve read a lot of books on the Christian life over the years—that tends to be an occupational hazard of being a pastor, after all—and I can’t say I remember most of them; but one of the most important books I’ve ever read, one which has had a profound effect on my thinking, is a little book by the great Puritan pastor/theologian John Owen entitled On the Mortification of Sin in Believers. It’s a collection of sermons he preached on Romans 8:13: “For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live”; Owen was a practical and pastoral theologian, and his concern was to lay out exactly how it is we may go about doing that.

It’s a splendid book, and of great value to anyone who wants to live a life pleasing to God, which is why I was pleased recently to discover two things. First, the full text of the book is available online through the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (which, by the way, is linked in the sidebar here; I’m not sure why it hadn’t occurred to me to look there for this book). Second, since Owen is a dense writer and no simple stylist, I was glad to find that Robert Thune has posted a brief outline of Owen’s argument, one which links in turn to a longer and more thorough outline of the book. I wouldn’t encourage reading either in lieu of Owen’s work, because there is so much good in the book, but they provide an excellent orientation to his argument. The longer outline in particular is a valuable reader’s guide.

What Owen is on to is a matter of great importance, and much neglected in the American church, which tends not to want to talk about the struggle against sin (or to take that struggle seriously); as such, his book may well be more important now than it was when it was written, for it provides a necessary corrective to our self-indulgent consumerist culture. It isn’t light reading, but it’s more than worthwhile, especially with Thune’s work to help, and I recommend it to anyone who’s serious about the Christian life.

We are not “spiritual”

Posted on by | No Comments

Justin Holcomb of Mars Hill in Seattle makes this point in an excellent Facebook note:

We do not practice spirituality because we have climbed the ladder to God through human means. Rather, Christianity teaches that our alienation from God is remedied by Christ, who absorbs the sin that separates us from God. God came near to us in Christ, so that Christ could consume that which separates us from God, and thereby, draw us near to him.

We are not “spiritual,” but Christ was “spiritual” for us. In other words, without God nothing is strong and nothing is holy. We are weak and unholy. Our natural inclination is to substitute anything for God. We repel the holy and opt for manageable and convenient versions of God. . . .

Spirituality includes beliefs and practices, theology and rituals, ideas and activities. These are all things that contribute to a rich and vibrant Christian life, both individually and communally. But at the heart of Christian spirituality is a reminder that no spiritual practice or ritual alone can draw us near to God. God must come near to us. That “God-coming-near” is what has happened in the incarnation and that is what we celebrate as Christians. . . . It is not that we have risen to spiritual heights, but that heaven has come down to us.

On not apologizing for Christmas

Posted on by | 2 Comments

This past Advent, I preached a sermon series on the women mentioned in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus—Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and of course Mary. (If you’re interested, you can find the texts of the series here, starting at the bottom of the page and working up.) It was the second time for that particular series, as I had preached it four years before in Colorado (though of course all the sermons were revised to one degree or another, since I’m a better preacher now than I was then; at least, I hope I am). It didn’t meet with the same degree of acceptance here as it had there, though; that probably shouldn’t have surprised me, since I know well the difference in culture between the small-town Midwest and the West, but it did. This was probably the first time I’ve ever met significant congregational resistance to an entire sermon series, with a number of people pronouncing themselves offended because “the sermons were so explicit” (or so I was told, at least; nobody would tell me who was offended, of course, since then I might actually be able to talk with them about it), and even the suggestion being made that perhaps I should apologize for the series.

I do not apologize for it; in fact, I insist on it, for good theological reasons. For one thing, I do not share the evident presumption of many that any pastoral offense must necessarily be grounds for apology. Indeed, though there are certainly exceptions, I believe that the problem with most American pastors is not offensiveness but inoffensiveness—we fail far less often because we offend people than because we water down the truth and dodge necessary conflict in a determined effort to avoid doing so at any cost. Though I do not compare myself to Jesus (as no one should, except to see just how incredibly far short we fall), I can’t help remembering that we worship a Savior who was frequently, bluntly, and often spectacularly offensive to the respectable people of his day. He was only “gentle Jesus, meek and mild” to the sinners who knew they were sinners in desperate need of grace. To those who thought they were doing just fine, if he ever pulled a punch, I’ve yet to find it.

This is not of course to say, or even to suggest, that offending people is therefore a good thing in and of itself, or that it’s always defensible; far from it. It is, however, to say that there is such a thing as holy offense, and that sometimes the only way to avoid offending people is to avoid preaching the word of God, and particularly the gospel of Jesus Christ. Put another way, if we are going to be faithful representatives of Jesus Christ on this earth, sometimes we’re going to offend people, and sometimes that’s absolutely necessary and important. The only question is, are we offending people for the right reasons?

Of course, even when the answer to that question might be “yes,” it can be at best a qualified “yes,” because our own flaws, limitations, errors in judgment, and of course sin always mar even our most excellent efforts. I have no doubt, for instance, that there were things in those messages that I did not do as I should have. For one thing, I manifestly failed to make clear to the congregation what I was doing with the series, and what my purposes were in preaching it—perhaps in part because, though I could easily have done a better job on the first part, I hadn’t really stopped to clearly articulate my purposes beyond a vague sense as to what I was doing. To make it sufficiently clear to them, I would first have had to do that work for myself.

Which isn’t to say that I didn’t know what I was on about, merely that I hadn’t taken enough time to bring that fully into focus (a fact which no doubt weakened the messages). In the first place, this series was (and is) aimed squarely at the debilitating sentimentality that clings in sticky cotton-candy clouds to our celebration of Christmas and our understanding of the Incarnation. We have this powerful image of Jesus the innocent and helpless, the perfect baby boy, which is certainly all true enough—but we’ve let it grow like kudzu all across the December landscape, choking out our ability to see anything else.

If we take Christmas seriously, this must be in truth a disturbing and unsettling holiday, the first intimation that we worship a God who is profoundly and disquietingly unsafe, not because he isn’t good, but because he utterly defies either our prediction or our control. It’s the first hint that we don’t worship a nice, respectable, moral God, but one who—while, yes, he certainly does proclaim a moral code—refuses to be constrained by any moral code we would consider reasonable (or to allow his commandments to be so constrained, either). It’s the first warning that God will not respect our conventions and our standards, but in fact is on about subverting them. It’s the first indication that reality is not going to conform to our expectations, that there is indeed more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy—and that in fact, in the last analysis, the fool may know more of how things really work than the wise.

In other words, at the heart of the message of Christmas is an announcement that God is not going to play by our rules or abide by our proprieties and protocols; it is the grand upending of our expectations and the complete upskittling of our comfortable assumptions. It isn’t a Hallmark-card moment in history, but a crashing, rocketing, tearing scandal—and as Matthew shows us, and as I was at some pains to show in that sermon series, that scandal is embedded in the story going all the way back to the early days of Jesus’ family line. It is implicit in the story of Jesus, as it must be, because Jesus comes among us as the ultimate subversive: he must necessarily subvert our expectations of him, because he comes to subvert the governing tragedy of all of human history.

Jesus wasn’t born to be nice, and he wasn’t born to teach us to be nice; respectability and propriety, while they have their place, weren’t what he was about, and he would not be bound by them if they were being used for purposes contrary to his own. The stories of Jesus’ ancestresses show us clearly that God can work to carry out his plan even through people whose morality is uncertain and whose grasp on his character is sketchy at best, and that he can turn even deeds which scandalize the upright, done by those who are outside the pale, into elements of his glorious work—and if we do not understand this, then we cannot understand why Jesus was born to an unwed mother among the common people, why he was feared and loathed by the most religious people of his day, or why they contrived to have him killed.

Indeed, if we do not understand this, then we cannot understand why he died, much less why he rose again, for this is the reality and the mystery of redemption. Redemption isn’t for the worthy—whether for those we consider worthy, or those who consider themselves worthy—it’s for those who know and confess themselves unworthy. Which fact is, inevitably, offensive to many who are unwilling to do so, including many whose unwillingness is rooted in their perception of themselves as “nice Christian people.” Which is, in the end, why these are the stories the church needs to hear, if we’re to be true followers of the Christ whose name we claim.

Marriage is serious business

Posted on by | No Comments

It hasn’t happened to me in Indiana, but when I served the church in Colorado, I used to get a lot of calls from couples (mostly from the female half) asking if I could marry them on Friday, or next week, or in two weeks, or next month. Often, the request was accompanied by prattle to the effect that they already had the reception hall, the musicians, the caterer, and everything else all lined up, and now all they needed was a church and a pastor for the ceremony. (Which, Colorado law being what it is, they actually didn’t need, but never mind that.) Sometimes, I instead got the explanation that they were on vacation in the Rockies and had just decided to get married. Either way, they were always surprised and unhappy to hear that I was neither interested nor, in fact, able to drop everything and marry two complete strangers at the last minute with no preparation and no idea of the health of their relationship; they wanted to get married, what more did I need to know? Trying to explain to them that I took their impending marriage far too seriously to marry them never seemed to work, somehow.

And yet, that was neither more nor less than the truth. Read more→

The self-dissolution of idolatry

Posted on by | No Comments

Courtesy of the Anchoress, I was struck this evening by this passage from Pope Benedict XVI. His argument is subtle, but important.

We should see that human beings can never retreat into the realm of what they are capable of. In everything that they do, they constitute themselves. Therefore they themselves, and creation with its good and evil, are always present as their standard, and when they reject this standard they deceive themselves. They do not free themselves, but place themselves in opposition to the truth. And that means that they are destroying themselves and the world.

This, then, is the first and most important thing that appears in the story of Adam, and it has to do with the nature of human guilt and thus with our entire existence. The order of the covenant—the nearness of the God of the covenant, the limitations imposed by good and evil, the inner standard of the human person, creatureliness: all of this is placed in doubt. Here we can at once say that at the very heart of sin lies human beings’ denial of their creatureliness, inasmuch as they refuse to accept the standard and the limitations that are implicit in it. They do not want to be creatures, do not want to be subject to a standard, do not want to be dependent. They consider their dependence on God’s creative love to be an imposition from without . . .

Human beings who consider dependence on the highest love as slavery and who try to deny the truth about themselves, which is their creatureliness, do not free themselves; they destroy truth and love. They do not make themselves gods, which in fact they cannot do, but rather caricatures, pseudo-gods, slaves of their own abilities, which then drag them down.

We want to be more than what we are, and in acting on that desire, we make ourselves less; we want to be free to “follow our bliss,” and in trying to grab that freedom, we make ourselves slaves. The human tragedy in a nutshell.

Thought on gender and God language

Posted on by | 2 Comments

If all people, male and female, are made in the image of God—or rather, to put the matter correctly, if humanity collectively, including male and female together, is made in the image of God—then why does the Bible use male language and primarily (though not exclusively) male imagery for God? It’s a fair question, and there are reasons for it—none of which is that God is male. That one is yet another self-interested idolatrous distortion of the biblical text (which, like most such, eventually came back around to bite the folks who pushed it, or at least their heirs).

Indeed, it should be stated quite clearly that the use of masculine pronouns does not mean and is not intended to mean that God is male. That particular confusion doesn’t belong to the original Hebrew but is a product of our largely degendered English language; in Hebrew, which is like every other ancient language in that every word has a gender, where the words “wind” and “brick” and “meat” are all feminine while the words “cook” and “valley” and “mouse” are masculine—where the word “king” is of course masculine, but the word “kingdom” is feminine—the fact that the words for “God” are masculine wouldn’t necessarily be taken as limiting God by gender. To the best of my knowledge, that false interpretation is much more recent than the Hebrew Scriptures.

It’s not enough, though, to say that this is merely grammatical; there were in fact theological reasons for using masculine language for God—and no, they didn’t have anything to do with any sort of supposed male superiority. Rather, they had to do with differentiating the worship of Yahweh God of Israel from the religions of the surrounding nations.

For one thing, in those religions, as in their modern descendants, where a goddess was worshiped as creator, the process of creation was envisioned as the goddess giving birth to the world—meaning the world is made of the same stuff as the deity, and thus is partly divine itself. Genesis rules that out: God speaks, and creation happens, outside himself—he is Father of creation, not its mother. For another, as anyone who has read The DaVinci Code knows, goddess-worship among Israel’s neighbors involved ritual sex, as it also usually does today; this is nothing God would ever tolerate among his people, and especially not in the form it took then, where the temples basically had female slaves to serve as sacred prostitutes.

In both these respects, the relationship between God and his creation—and consequently, the worship he desires from his creation—differs dramatically from the pagan conception; and so there is the need for different language to portray that, to limn a different picture of that relationship than the one the pagans held. The purpose of masculine God-language isn’t to define or delimit our picture of God; it is, like most biblical language about God, more illustrative and suggestive than definitive. But it is also, like all biblical language, the language God has chosen, because the boundaries it sets are necessary.

Doing what comes naturally

Posted on by | No Comments

It is the most natural thing in the world to falsify God. All we have to do is follow our intuitions and good intentions. But whenever our uncrucified selves take over, bad things start happening. Worshiping Christ alone is an adjustment. It is unnatural—and freeing.

We pay a price to follow Christ. We pay a far higher price not to follow Christ.

—Ray Ortlund

The time that is given

Posted on by | 3 Comments

In the great fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings, near the beginning of the first book, the wizard Gandalf tells the young hobbit Frodo Baggins, who will in the end be the great hero of the story, about the dark times in which they live, and the great challenges that lie ahead. Frodo, understandably, says he would rather live in happier times, times that aren’t fraught with such darkness; to which Gandalf responds, “So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

The time that is given. In modern Christianity, it’s almost an article of faith that C. S. Lewis was a very wise man; but it’s too easy for us to forget that his great friend J. R. R. Tolkien, the man who played the most important role in leading Lewis to faith, was also a very wise man—because we mostly know him for his fantasy stories. But there is very great wisdom in that line, wisdom rooted deep in Scripture, and particularly in the creation account. We are limited creatures. We are limited in our abilities—good at some things, bad at others—and while we can grow and develop, we’re limited in our ability to do so. We’re limited physically—I’d love to be able to play shortstop in the majors, but that was never even a vaguely plausible dream—and limited mentally as well. We’re limited by our gender, and to some degree by the societal expectations that go along with it. We’re limited in our ability to control or influence the world around us—we can only reach so far, and what is beyond our reach eludes us; our bodies stop at the edge of our skin, and everything beyond that is not-us, carrying on its existence apart from us.

And most fundamentally, we are limited by space and time—we are creatures of place, and of the time we have been given. We are creatures of the places we live and have lived, and we are creatures of our place in human history; we will never know the life of an English knight who fought with Henry V at Agincourt, or of a Russian revolutionary in October, 1917, or of one of the shoguns who ruled Japan in the 1800s. We were each born at a particular time, in a particular country, and have lived through a particular set of experiences; we know our life and no other.

This is how we are; and as Genesis shows us, we were created so. When God created the first human, he didn’t just drop him off to wander around, homeless; rather, he placed the human in a garden which had been created to be his home. God gave him a location, a home address, a neighborhood, even if his only neighbors had either four feet or wings, and he told the human, “Do your work in this place.” Today, he tells all of us the same: “Do your work in this place, the place where I have put you; follow me in this community, in the home where you live, in the family of which you are a part, in the relationships you have now.” As Eugene Peterson put it in his book Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, “All living is local: this land, this neighborhood, these trees and streets and houses, this work, these people,” and thus it is as locals that we must live out our faith, placing the word of God in the concrete reality of “this land, this neighborhood, . . . this work, these people”—and bringing it alive in our life in response to all the concrete frustrations, irritations, and problems that “this neighborhood, . . . this work, these people” bring us. It is this place on earth that gives our lives their shape.

It is also this place in time—and, more generally, time itself. As Genesis also tells us, we are creatures of time, our lives shaped and formed in every respect by time in its passing. We can see this in our bodies, which are a collection of rhythms—the rhythm of our breathing, in and out, in and out; of our pulse, the twofold beating of our hearts, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM; of sleeping and waking, as day succeeds night and night follows day in turn. We can see it in the rhythm of the seasons, spring-summer-fall-winter and spring again. We can see it in the music that threads its way through our lives, providing an ever-changing soundtrack to our existence, and in the flow of our movements as we walk, or run. And we can see it most fundamentally in Genesis 1, which shows us God creating the universe in time, in the flow of time, and shaping a rhythm: and God said, and God said, and God said, in six-part harmony—six parts to creation, and then a seventh part, the seventh day, the day of rest.

This is, by the way, true even if Genesis 1 isn’t talking about six 24-hour days; the point isn’t counting hours, it’s that this is the rhythm God built into creation, the rhythm for which we were created, of work and rest. Both are part of his design for our lives, and both are necessary if we are to live as he made us to live. Whether you’re still working for a living or you’re retired, God has work for you to do in this place; whether it’s necessary for you to support yourself or not, it’s a part of God’s plan for you, both for your sake and for the sake of others. He also has rest for you in this place, time set aside in his schedule for you to set work aside, during which we gather to worship him as one people; and together, together, they make up the base rhythm of life, the meter to which the poetry of our days is to be set. I should note, I am indebted to Cambridge theologian and musician Jeremy Begbie for that way of putting it, and more generally for his use of music to illuminate Christian theology.

The problem is, the world tries to convince us that limitations are a bad thing, and specifically that this limitation is a bad thing; but it isn’t. Think of our music, and I think you’ll understand, because in our Western musical tradition, meter is one of the standard limitations that gives shape and character to the work of composition. Think of 4/4—the time signature of a Sousa march, and many of our great hymns. “A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing.” Or 3/4—I remember being told in elementary school that this was waltz time. I was, what, seven years old, I didn’t even know what a waltz was, but that’s what stuck with me—3/4 is for waltzes and Irishmen. “Be Thou my vision, O Lord of my heart.” 6/8 is always fun—beat it in two, sing it in triplets. “In shady green pastures so rich and so sweet, God leads his dear children along.” And so on. The meter isn’t a straitjacket; you can vary the rhythms, throw in changes of time signature, whatever you will. But the meter provides the structure, the necessary base rhythm within which, and against which, all those other things can work to produce their desired effects. As another great Christian novelist, Flannery O’Connor, said, art transcends its limitations by remaining within them.

In the same way, God has given us this sevenfold rhythm of work and rest, of work and worship, to be the base rhythm of our lives. You don’t see too many songs written in seven, because that extra beat throws things out of the typical patterns, but I actually learned one this weekend. “What we have heard, what we have known . . .” It’s a setting of Psalm 78, and I don’t know if that’s why Greg Scheer wrote it in 7/8, but the time signature gives it a real sprightliness; the extra beat breaks it out of ordinary time into something else quite again. The same is true in our lives of the Sabbath, of the day of rest—it breaks us out of the ordinary time that our world and its economy would dictate, a straitjacket rhythm of work, work, work, work. That’s the driving beat of money and accumulation and more, more, more; it is, if you will, the meter of a life governed by nothing but material concerns and the desire for things. Think of it as 4/4 with never a change in tempo or stress and nothing but quarter notes in sight. But the Sabbath—the mere fact of this God-ordained day of rest throws us out of that meter; it fatally disrupts the profit-driven, consumer-driven, one-who-dies-with-the-most-toys-wins, all-about-me rhythms of this world, and shows us another way to live.

This is important, because as Genesis will show us in chapter 3, human sin disrupted the music for which God created us, and so the rhythms of our culture are now very much at odds with his will for us, and with the life for which he made us. As Dr. Begbie puts it, in calling us to focus on God and God alone, worship sets up a cross-rhythm in our lives—the rhythm of the cross, which runs counter to the pounding beat of our culture. God calls us to live very much across the grain of that culture, and we can’t just do that by main effort; our culture is too powerful. It’s like the big black SUV stopped next to us at the light with the bass cranked so high it’s shaking our car from the tires up. To overcome that overwhelming sound, we need consistent, steady exposure to the cross-rhythm of worship—to what Eugene Peterson, in his translation of the Bible, rendered as “the unforced rhythms of grace.” We cannot work our way into a truly Christlike life, because we learn to work from the world, and we learn to work in its way; but if we cannot force it, we can let God’s unforced rhythms of grace carry us along, as we learn to worship. We can focus our minds and hearts on him, opening our lives to his rhythm, and in so doing, allow him to transform us. Instead of trying to beat our own time, we can accept the time our great Conductor has given us, and let him direct us on.

(Cross-posted from Of a Sunday)

For the blessings of the evening

Posted on by | No Comments

Every once in a while, I hear a sermon that really shifts me, one through which God speaks to me and works in me in such a way that I know I have been changed. I had that privilege this morning at the Worship Symposium as Laura Truax brought us the word of God; I’m going to listen to this one again once the audio is up, and take some time to reflect on it. For now, I’m just thanking God for a truly blessed day.

Dr. Jeremy Begbie’s plenary address was also exceptional (as I expected); he’s also giving the plenary address tomorrow, so I’ll probably wait to write about that until I’ve heard both of them and had the chance to consider them together. I think what he had to say may well produce significant change in my sermon this Sunday, though. The three workshops I attended were also all excellent (I probably won’t write about all of them, but all three were very helpful); and then I get to spend the evening with my brother-in-law and his family. God has definitely poured out riches on me this day, and for that, I am humbly grateful.

Fire the committee

Posted on by | 2 Comments

Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.

—James 4:8 (ESV)

This verse has been echoing in my mind ever since I preached on James 4:1-10 a few months ago; which is why this post from the Rev. Dr. Ray Ortlund really struck me today:

You and I are not integrated, unified, whole persons. Our hearts are multi-divided. There is a board room in every heart. Big table. Leather chairs. Coffee. Bottled water. Whiteboard. A committee sits around the table. There is the social self, the private self, the work self, the sexual self, the recreational self, the religious self, and others. The committee is arguing and debating and voting. Constantly agitated and upset. Rarely can they come to a unanimous, wholehearted decision. We tell ourselves we’re this way because we’re so busy with so many responsibilities. The truth is, we’re just divided, unfocused, hesitant, unfree.

He’s right; and as he says, it isn’t enough just to “accept Jesus” if all that means is that we give Jesus a seat on the committee, which too often is all we do. That leaves us still divided in our allegiance—divided against God, divided against ourselves. The only real solution is far more drastic:

The other way to “accept Jesus” is to say to him, “My life isn’t working. Please come in and fire my committee, every last one of them. I hand myself over to you. Please run my whole life for me.” That is not complication; that is salvation.

“Accepting Jesus” is not just adding Jesus. It is also subtracting the idols.

Which is why, as C. S. Lewis said, Christ plus anything equals nothing—because if we insist on hanging on to anything else, we don’t get Jesus.