Category Archives: Religion and theology

Kierkegaard on love of enemy

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When Christianity requires us to love our enemies, one might say in a certain sense that it had good reason to require this, for God would be loved, and (speaking merely in a human way) God is man’s most redoubtable enemy, your mortal enemy; He would that you should die, die unto the world, He hates precisely that in which you naturally have your life, to which you cling with all your joy in living.

The men who have entered into no relation with God enjoy now—frightful irony!—the privilege that God does not torment them in this life. No, it is only the men whom He loves, who have entered into relation with God, whose mortal enemy (speaking merely in a human way) God may be said to be—but for all that out of love.

But He is your mortal enemy. He Who is love would be loved by you. This signifies that you must die, die unto the world, for otherwise you cannot love Him. . . .

How dreadful (speaking merely in a human way) is God in His love, so dreadful it is (speaking merely in a human way) to be loved of God and to love God. In the declaration that God is love, the subordinate clause is, He is your mortal enemy.

———and here we are playing the game that we are all Christians, that all love God, whereas by God being love and by loving God we nowadays understand nothing else but the nauseating syrupy sweets in which falsehood’s witnesses to the truth are wont to deal.

(from Attack upon Christendom, 1854-55; trans. Walter Lowrie, 1944, 1968, alt.)

 

Photo © 2009 Arne List.  License:  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic.

A different understanding of divorce and adultery

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(This is a second excerpt from chapter 17 of my manuscript on the Sermon on the Mount; the first excerpt is here.)

That the Pharisees confronting Jesus [in Matthew 19] don’t believe divorce to be sinful is clear from their belief that Moses commanded divorce.  Jesus shows them how far wrong they have gone, and how hard their hearts have become, by linking divorce to adultery.  He does the same in the Sermon on the Mount, and it’s instructive to put the two statements together.  Matthew 19:9 is straightforward:  “Anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery.”[1]  The man is the guilty party from start to finish.  If he divorces his wife unjustly, God will not grant his divorce.  Any remarriage on his part is adulterous because it defies the will and purpose of God in creating marriage in the first place.  God will not simply accede to our pretensions to set his work aside for our own selfish purposes.Read more→

Is that actually what the Law says?

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(As I noted yesterday, though I haven’t been posting here, I have been continuing to work on the Sermon on the Mount book; so while I’m getting other things spooled up, I’m going to start posting excerpts from the manuscript as well.  I’m not going to do them in any particular order, just as they occur to me.  First up:  the opening of chapter 17, “Our Law Is Too Small,” on Jesus’ words regarding divorce.)

The power imbalance between men and women in first-century Jewish culture shows even more clearly when Jesus turns to address divorce.  He introduces the subject with the statement, “It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.’”[1]  The use of the word “also” acknowledges the close connection in subject matter between this quotation and his citation of the law against adultery in 5:27.  Unlike 5:27, however, the law cited here is not a commandment from God through Moses.  It’s inferred from the Torah, not taken from the Torah.  In this case, that makes all the difference in the world.Read more→

Lent in the Time of COVID-19

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I’ve been spending a lot of time the last few weeks thinking about the fact that this pandemic season of physical distancing and isolation is a Lenten season, and trying to figure out what to do with that.  I wasn’t getting a lot of traction until I read an article this week in Christianity Today‘s annual issue for pastors on Evagrius Ponticus and the sin of acedia—which is usually translated “sloth” in English, but means much more than that.  I gave myself a while today to think out loud about it.

On the difference between judgment and discernment: A response to Mark Sandlin, Part II

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Over two and a half months ago, I began a series of posts in response to a blog post by Mark Sandlin (a liberal PC(USA) pastor) titled “At What Point Do We Get to Say Parts of Christianity Are No Longer Christian?”  Yes, this is the second in that series.  I truly did not intend to take that long to get back to this; life and other topics intervened.  I’m quite sure I’ll have the third up much more quickly than that, since I’ve already started working on it.  For now, though, go read Sandlin’s post and the first part of my response; I’ll still be here when you get back.

If you’ve done that, then I can take my positive comments on Sandlin’s post as read and go from there.  This is important because my first critical observation is actually implicit in my praise of his work.  Sandlin frames his subject in terms of judgment, and frets that identifying and calling out people who are using Christianity rather than practicing it (the distinction is his, and it’s a good one) is “judgmental” and “mean.”  My response, by contrast, is framed in terms of discernment, which is related but significantly different.  I believe there’s a category error lurking at the heart of Sandlin’s argument; it’s a subtle one, but important nonetheless.

Read more→

The anti-sexism of Christianity

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There are a lot of historical arguments made to support the proposition that Christianity is bad.  Many of them are sheer, unmitigated tripe.  For instance, there’s the myth of the so-called “Dark Ages” in which, supposedly, the Church suppressed science and rational inquiry.  The truth is that the roots of modern science were firmly laid in the true Renaissance of the twelfth century—and that what’s commonly called “the Renaissance” was a reactionary movement that worked hard to unlearn all that medieval scientists had learned about the errors in Greco-Roman natural philosophy.  That doesn’t suit the agenda of anti-Christian polemicists, though, or the general chronological snobbery of our time.  It also doesn’t suit the triumphalist narrative of scientific history in which the work of science always advances, which has no room for the times when science regresses.

Another is the myth of the Crusades.  Yes, the Crusades happened (that much is no myth), but it’s a widespread myth that they were “brutal and unprovoked attacks against a sophisticated and tolerant Muslim world.”  In reality, they were a counteroffensive against Islamic expansionism.  Islamic armies invaded the Byzantine Empire in 634, southern Italy in 652, and the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal) in 711, plus they sacked Rome in 846.  The First Crusade wasn’t until 1095.  There’s a lot more to be said here, and maybe I’ll write a full post on this at some point, but the Islamic world only remembered the Crusades for the victories of Saladin until Westerners brought the myth to them in the 19th century.

Yet another canard is the idea that Christianity is intrinsically sexist.  To support this idea and buttress their claim that contemporary Christianity is anti-woman, some argue that early Christianity was particularly oppressive to women.  This is perhaps the most indefensible myth of all, resting on nothing but chronological snobbery.  Read more→

David Foster Wallace and the life-giving church

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As I wrote earlier this month (though I didn’t say this in so many words), for the church to be healthy, we who make up the church need a lived knowledge of our own sin, and we need to confess that and wrestle with it each week in the context of our worship.  Michael Morgan recently offered an excellent reflection on that point, out of his reading of David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest.

At a meeting of the “Advanced Basics” Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) group in Boston [Wallace gives us] a crisp—though finally inadequate—picture of what church could be like.  The group is so compelling because of three fundamental dispositions of its people:  they are profoundly empathetic, they are profoundly gracious, and they are profoundly consistent.

First, their empathy. . . .  They all came to be in the same room because their addiction, once invisible, had steadily bubbled to the surface until it had thoroughly enveloped and ruined them.  Right there, on the edge of a cliff between death and AA, they admitted their problem and sought help.  This same basic story unfolds with variable particulars as the rest of AA listens or, more importantly, as they identify.

This remarkable empathy leads to graciousness.  Nobody’s story is too broken, too “Out There.” . . .  Nobody can confess their way out of this strange fellowship.  This is because there’s absolutely zero pretense and therefore zero capacity for condemnation.  Each person in the room has touched the void of their own helplessness, so they can be present with the darkness in others with the humility of one who knows what it’s like to be freed.

Last, the core members of the Advanced Basics group are rigorously consistent.  Wallace writes that each member attends the meetings even if they “feel like they’ve got a grip on [their addiction] at last and can now go it alone.”  For them, AA isn’t a break-glass-in-case-of-crisis option.  They all realize they are never out of crisis since their disease is always prowling around, just waiting for them to misstep.  Their need for healing is innate, not circumstantial, so they pursue healing religiously.

Read more→

Relativizing ourselves

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The great problem I have with moral and cultural relativism is that they’re only ever wielded in one direction.  When we invoke relativism, it’s to relativize and thus dismiss those who disagree with us; we never seem to use it to relativize our own assumptions.  Functionally, moral and cultural relativism are a cloak of humility to disguise tyrannical moral/cultural imperialism.

Many of the assumptions contemporary Western mass culture considers self-evident and holds sacrosanct are actually far from obvious, and in fact would be seen as strange and highly implausible by most cultures in human history.  Gavin Ortlund is right:  “Secularizing late-modernity is a strange, new animal.”

Of course, as he goes on to say, “Identifying the historical and global isolation of our culture does not discredit it.  ‘Weird’ does not always equal ‘wrong.'”  However, we should always bear in mind Tim Keller’s wise observation that if the Bible is really God’s word, it will inevitably offend and infuriate every culture somewhere.  There will always be assumptions in any given culture which the culture considers self-evident and sacrosanct that Scripture flatly contradicts.  To that end, it’s worth looking for those aspects of our culture which are atypical or even strange in the broader context of human history, to help us see where we need to treat our own culture as relative rather than normative.

Ortlund identifies three for our consideration:

  • God is in the dock.
  • Morality is about self-expression.
  • Life is starved of transcendence.

It’s tempting to respond to these points with complaint, castigation, and nostalgia; but such a response is not productive.  As Ortlund writes,

Gospel faithfulness demands we engage our culture with both truth and love, yielding neither to compromise on the one side nor escapism on the other. This means we cannot simply bemoan the encroaching cultural darkness, swatting at the errors around us with our theological club.  As TGC’s Theological Vision for Ministry puts it, “It is not enough that the church should counter the values of the dominant culture. We must be a counterculture for the common good.”

In responding to these metaphysical, ethical, and existential Copernican revolutions in our culture, I believe we must work hard to establish the corresponding subversive biblical doctrine in each of three areas: (1) a high view of God, (2) a thoroughgoing notion of repentance, and (3) a transcendent vision of worship.

Read the whole thing.  It’s more than worth your time.

 

John Horsburgh, Bell Rock Lighthouse during a storm from the northeast, 1824, engraving, after a drawing by J. M. W. Turner.  Public domain.

A theology for suffering

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All whom the Lord has chosen and received into the society of his saints ought to prepare themselves for a life that is hard, difficult, laborious and full of countless griefs.

—John Calvin

Calvin knew the truth of this in his bones.  As Peter Sanlon writes in his essay “Calvinism: Best Drunk Shaken,”

It impossible to read Calvin’s work and not see that he spoke from experience.  Calvin himself had a sense of God’s goodness to him, even in trials and struggles.  Exiled, bereaved, persecuted, reviled and unhealthy—Calvin’s life was one in which he still felt God goodness toward him, personally.

Sanlon’s analysis of the ways that Calvin’s suffering shaped his theology, and his expression of his theology, is fascinating.

Read the opening sections of his 1536 Institutes.  The famous first sentence is present in a recognisable form:  ‘Nearly the whole of sacred doctrine consists in these two parts, knowledge of God and ourselves.’ . . .

in the 1536 edition, Calvin, after his opening sentence proceeds to assert, ‘Surely we ought to learn the following things about God . . .’  He then lists four lessons all should learn. In the next section, about the knowledge of man, he follows a similar approach of listing the main lessons.  All he says is true and important—but the tone is in stark contrast to later editions of his work.  After Calvin and Farel were forced out of Geneva in April 1538, Calvin wrote another edition of his Institutes.  This version, published in 1539, added the words:  ‘Which one precedes and brings forth the other is not easy to discern.’  A note of uncertainty, humility and awe begins to permeate what had previously been merely a clear explanation.

The humility Calvin seemed to feel before the awesome reality of God, climaxed in his 1559 edition, which may be seen to be markedly different in tone to the edition published in 1536.  Calvin probes and explores the obscure and intangible links between knowledge of God and humanity.  Gone are the three or four points that must be learnt; added is the section on piety quoted above.  The final 1559 edition carried readers into an experience of the knowledge of God, precisely because Calvin had himself matured and entered more fully into a personal sense of God’s goodness in suffering.  Doubtless there were people that Calvin ministered to in his time of exile from Geneva; they and us benefit from the embarrassment caused to Calvin by his experience of suffering.  Calvin’s sufferings were a shaking which caused his knowledge to be more personally appropriated.  His struggles inculcated piety.

Calvin’s suffering developed his theology in a profound and unusual way.  Many theologians have developed a theology of suffering, wrestling with it as a theological abstraction.  Calvin ended up writing a theology for suffering, in which suffering is incorporated into theology.  Suffering gives theology living depth, moving it from an intellectual exercise to an existential truth, apprehended at the deepest levels of the heart.  In turn, theology gives suffering existential meaning.

Suffering and sadness is a large part of our lot in this fleeting life.  It is how the theology of Calvin is shaken, so that it can be truly refreshing to those who drink it.  I would like to suggest that Calvin was cognizant of this need for theology to be shaken by life’s sadnesses. . . .

Calvin is teaching that a personal, existential appreciation of God’s kindnesses is essential to real Christianity. Indeed, bringing about such an experience is a key goal of his theological endeavors. There must be a sense of God’s kindness which goes far beyond the speculation so highly prized by Aquinas. Piety necessitates a ‘heart certainty’ (certitudinem cordibus) Inst.1.7.4.

A heart certainty which is to be sensed and experienced, must be forged in the travails of life. By definition that which is sensed cannot be attained by mere speculation. Calvin placed great emphasis upon the fact that knowledge of God must ‘not merely flit in the brain, but take root in the heart.’ There it must be ‘felt, sensed and adored.’ It must ‘affect’ and induce ‘wonder.’ Inst.1.5.9. With these and other terms Calvin urges readers to appropriate his theology.

The sufferings of life shake Christians; the result is that they experience, by faith in the Spirit’s power, God’s goodness in the midst of sadness. Such piety is not, as many Christians imagine, merely an extra, optional comfort to some who suffer. Rather, it is essential for all real Christians. Calvin’s theology must be shaken by life’s trials before it can be tasted for the revitalising drink that it is.

As Sanlon says, “One of the most satisfying aspects of Calvin’s views is that they taste best when shaken by life’s sadnesses.”  This is a great gift to the church.