Category Archives: Religion and theology

Jesus loves Osama—and that’s not the worst of it

Posted on by | 5 Comments

This is spot-on:

A couple of years ago, the Telegraph ran a story entitled Church’s ‘Jesus loves Osama’ sign criticised. Apparently, some Baptist churches in Sydney, Australia, put up signs which read simply, “Jesus Loves Osama.” Smaller print at the bottom contained the Biblical reference supporting that assertion: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:44).The signs were apparently not well received. Even the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, commented on the sign, noting the church “should have chosen a less offensive way of spreading its message.” . . .So, what’s so shocking about the “Jesus Loves Osama” sign? It isn’t that someone might understand that the church is saying that a human being’s killing of thousands of people is somehow morally acceptable. . . . No one who has the most basic understanding of Christian teaching would arrive at that conclusion. It isn’t that the church’s priority is wrongly focused. . . . The “Jesus Loves Osama” sign is a statement of straightforward Biblical truth.
The problem is this: we don’t want God to love Osama bin Laden. We want there to be people who do such awful things that God’s love doesn’t extend to them. We want some people—a very select few—to burn in hell. Our skin crawls to hear that some people like Osama bin Laden who have done great crimes may not pay for those crimes in the great hereafter. “Where’s the justice in
that?” we cry. It isn’t justice. It’s compassion. It’s mercy. It’s forgiveness.

This is the scandal of the gospel (or part of it, anyway):  “God loves everyone” actually means God loves everyone, including the people whom we don’t like and who hurt us and whom we consider enemies and of whom we don’t approve.  He loves those awful liberals and those awful fundamentalists and those awful atheists and those awful evangelicals, and those awful Republicans and those awful Democrats, and yes, those awful terrorists and those awful militarists, and pretty much anybody else that you might consider awful, just as much as he loves you.  And we really don’t want him to, and he does anyway; and not only does he love them, Christ died for them on the cross just as he did for you.  Whomever you define as “us,” and whomever you define as “them,” Christ died and rose again for both, and he loves both, and offers the free gift of salvation to both.  That, and nothing less, is the gospel.HT:  Shane Vander Hart

This is convicting

Posted on by | No Comments

from Brant Hansen of Letters from Kamp Krusty:

After working in both mainstream and Christian radio, I think I’m ready to write my own book about the many I encounter:  They Like Church But Not Jesus.I mean it.  I wrote before:  Based on my observation, Jesus is simply not the most influential guy around.  I’ve seen it over, and over, and over.  In fact, I’d say it’s a theme at my job:  People just aren’t that into Jesus.  He ticks people off.——————-I’ve been corrected many times by Christians—after reading something Jesus actually said.  They don’t like it.  I’m serious.  “You know, all the commandments can be summed up with love the Lord your God with all your heart, and mind, and soul, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.  Jesus said that, and . . .”Ringing phones.   “Hello?””You forgot one:  Evangelize.”Jesus stands corrected.Ring.”Well, it’s not quite that simple, you see, because . . .”No, no.  It can’t be that simple.  Not here. . . .No big deal, but—so you know—it happens again and again.  This is where my “If Jesus Had a Blog” stuff comes from, by the way.  Real conversations with learned Christians, and real objections to stuff Jesus said.People do love the Bible.  But not the Gospels.  They quote Biblical stuff to me all the time, but it’s not ever stuff Jesus said.

Now, to some extent, my own experience doesn’t exactly fit with that; at least, I haven’t seen that degree of Jesus-avoidance.  What I see is more of a pick-and-choose Jesus—people love Jesus (just look at the songs that dominate “contemporary” worship, to say nothing of our Jesus-ish commercialism), but the Jesus of their own imagination and reconstruction.  Brant’s right that the real Jesus continues to tick people off now the same way he did 2000 years ago; the difference is that when he’s not physically right in our face about it, we can find tamer, safer, more “spiritual” ways to deal with him than killing him.  We find ways to reduce him to fit our own agenda—including, as Brant notes, using other Scripture to defend ourselves against the radically challenging things he says, which is of course a radical misuse of Scripture.  As Luther reminds us, the Scripture is first and foremost the word which contains the Word, the cradle that holds the Christ; Jesus is the center on which the Scriptures pivot.I appreciate what Bill Roberts had to say about this over at The Thinklings:

I think there are two paths we can take in response: the first and easiest one is separation: separating between us and them, “Christians” versus “Christ-followers”, those who believe they “get” Jesus and those who don’t (though all of us Christians think we do). Some have decided to chunk the church and be Christians all on their own. That’s tempting, because there are plenty of churches that don’t teach the Gospel, that are disobediently pursuing a success that is contrary to success as God defines it, and who avoid talk of Jesus because he offends people.The other path is the far better one, and far more difficult. It’s what I believe Brant’s saying here, and it’s being said by many others these days, and I’m so thankful for that. The other path is the path of reformation: to preach Jesus, to speak of Jesus, to speak of and live the Gospel 24×7. To face up to Jesus’ words, his glorious, terrifying words, and become people who live that Word out every day.

Do we need to have it all figured out?

Posted on by | 2 Comments

Bruce Reyes-Chow, an occasional blog correspondent, a pastor in the San Francisco area, and the current Moderator of the General Assembly of  the Presbyterian Church (USA), has a wonderful blog post up on “The pastoral secret that everyone already knows, but pastors keep trying to hide”:  namely, as Bruce puts it, that

pastors don’t really know what the heck they are doing.There I said it “out loud”. We all think it, know it and hard as we try to hide it, most of the folks we attempt to lead, pastor and influence know it too. We don’t really know what we are doing.I have always felt like somewhat of an impostor when it comes to this amazing role that I play in the life of a so many: my family, the congregation I serve or the denomination that I am part of. It is such an honor to be called pastor, but if we are not careful, we begin to believe our own hype and then driven by an insidious need for success, we get into trouble.

Lest anyone think otherwise, Bruce isn’t just speaking for himself or talking through his hat here; I don’t know that all pastors think this (there are bound to be some who feel they have a pretty good handle on what they’re doing and mostly believe they have everything figured out), but judging from the conversations I’ve had with colleagues (including some who’ve been pastoring churches longer than I’ve been alive), he speaks for many of us.  In fact, I just had this conversation recently with a few folks whom I respect greatly—when I expressed this sense to them, they told me not only that they feel much the same way, but in fact said they felt like they know less now than they did when they were young in ministry.The question is, is this a bad thing?I’m not at all sure it is (and again, I’m not alone in this).  When we think we know what we’re doing, we think we’re the ones doing it—and that we’re capable of pulling it off.  Truth is, we aren’t; our work matters as part of the process, but it’s the Holy Spirit who builds the church.  If we know what we’re doing and how we’re doing it, that means we’ve found something we can do in our own strength that “works”—which means in turn that we’re the ones doing the building.  That doesn’t necessarily rule out that the Spirit is also at work, because we can never really tell God what he can and can’t do, but in general, organizations that are built that way, while they may be wonderful organizations, aren’t great churches.None of this, of course, is to rule out the importance of giving God our best; he commands and calls us to do so, and he uses what we give him, and it does matter.  It would be just as wrong to use “trusting God” as an excuse for slacking as it is to try to build the church ourselves because we don’t trust God to do it right (i.e., our way).  But it is to say that God doesn’t ask or expect or even want us to understand everything and have it all figured out and all together.  Rather, what he wants from us, I think, is simply to serve him as faithfully as we can see to serve him in our given situation, in our given moment, and to trust him for the rest.  As Bruce says,

I firmly believe that we must all live in this tension between God’s yearning for us to simply embrace our BEING and the gifts that God gives us to get out there and do some serious DOING. Neither posture is better then the other, but must always be held in tension; for if we sway too much to one side, we lose out on the opportunities that the other may provide.So what do we do to balance this BEING and DOING that God demands and Christ’s calling requires?We listen, we pray, we discern, we act, we reflect and then we do it all over again and again and again and again.

And again and again and again, being faithful day by day by day, until Christ gathers us home.  The faithfulness is our work.  The rest is God’s.

Because of Jews

Posted on by | 2 Comments

The story is told that on one occasion, Karl Barth was asked why he believed in God, and he responded, “Because of Jews.”  When his questioner, surprised, asked, “Why because of Jews?” Barth is said to have responded, “Find me a Hittite in New York City.”Now, I don’t know for a fact that Barth said that—though it sounds quite plausible to me—but whether original to Barth or not, it’s a good point.  The Jews are to anthropology and human history what the crocodile is to paleontology and zoology:  a remarkable survival from a vanished time.  And no, I’m not comparing Jews to crocodiles—quite the opposite, in fact, which only intensifies the point; where the crocodile has survived because it’s an indomitable predator that’s too mean and too efficient at killing things to die off, the Jewish people have not survived through power politics, but rather despite them.  They have survived and kept their national and religious identity through conquest and exile, enduring centuries in which everyone’s hand was against them.  This is a survival which is unmatched in human history.To understand this, consider Barth’s case of the Hittites—or for that matter, the Philistines, the Carthaginians, the Etruscans, the Assyrians, the Parthians, the Scythians, the Medes, or the Babylonians.  None of these peoples exist anymore.  They were conquered, assimilated, lost their national and cultural identity, and disappeared into memory.  This was, throughout the pagan era, the normal pattern.  Religion was the tentpole of the culture—the people took their identity in large part from the gods they worshiped, and the gods were worthy of worship as long as they sustained the independence of their people and brought them victory in battle.  When defeat came in battle and the nation was conquered, that marked the defeat of their gods by another, more powerful, set of gods; that brought an end to their religion (sometimes more gradually than others), which left the culture largely unsupported and caused it, over time, to collapse.Along with that, the language would go, because there was no longer anything to keep it alive, and no longer any utility in speaking it.  In the modern era, with the rise of nationalism, we’ve seen a force develop in resistance to that process, and efforts to revitalize languages from Navajo to Welsh and rebuild the base of native speakers; but in the pagan era, whatever efforts there might have been to keep languages like Hittite alive, they didn’t succeed.  There simply wasn’t the cultural capital for such an effort to succeed, or even to make sense, and so languages died with their cultures.The great exception from that time period is the Jews.  Granted, Hebrew largely died as a spoken language and had to be reconstituted, even reinvented; but it was possible to do so, and the people still existed to do it.  They survived conquest by the Assyrians and Babylonians, and endured as a distinct people in exile to be returned to their homeland under the Persians; they endured the rule of the Persians and the Greeks, won their independence for a while, were reconquered by the Romans, who ultimately dispersed them across the empire—and they endured that, too.  They existed as a people and a religion without a homeland, through many different cultures and under many different regimes, for the better part of two millennia; and after all that time, the idea of a Jewish state still made sense, because there was still an identifiable Jewish people to live in it.  We’re accustomed to this as we’re accustomed to so many things simply because they’re facts—and yet, what an extraordinary fact it is!  If we don’t stop and think about it, we miss that.To my way of thinking, then, Barth (or whoever actually said it first) was right to hold up the simple existence of the Jews as a reason to believe in the God of Israel.  This is one of the reasons why, contrary to what folks like FVThinker seem to believe, the God of Israel cannot be disproven on the same grounds as the old pagan gods:  his people still exist as his people, and theirs don’t.

The rights of the Author

Posted on by | No Comments

Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer, who formed you from the womb:
“I am the Lord, who made all things, who alone stretched out the heavens,
who spread out the earth by myself.”—Isaiah 44:24 (ESV)For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.
My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there was none of them.
How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!—Psalm 139:13-17 (ESV)The Lord rules all creation because he made all of it. He is the Author of the story, and it’s his word that brought all things into being; as the author, he has absolute authority over everything that is in the same way as I have, under him, absolute authority over this sentence. Indeed, his is far greater, not only because his authority is over me and working through me as I write, but also because at any given point I might make a mistake, while God never does. His authority is not only complete, unrestricted by any limitation whatsoever; it’s also perfect, unflawed by any error of any kind, and perfectly sufficient, not shared with anyone or anything beside himself. It’s not just that no power can compete with God’s—it’s that in comparison to him there is no other power. He is the great Author of everyone and everything else that exists; there is no one and nothing capable of rising off the page and wresting the pen from his hand.This includes the fact that the Lord is the one who formed you in the womb. He made, specifically, you. Your character, your body, your gifts, your strengths and weaknesses, the things you value and the things you dislike, aren’t simply the semi-random product of your genes and your environment; sure, God used your genes, and he used the environment in which you grew up and in which you live, but he is the one who created you and who made you who you are. He gave you the gifts you would need to do the work for which he created you, and he gave you the character and temperament he desired you to have to be the person he wants you to be.Granted, to be human and not God is to be sinful, and so you also have traits that aren’t what God wants for you—but even those have been allowed for, and even in those, he’s at work to teach you to trust him and depend on him, and to trust and depend on others. The point is, God knows you far better and far more deeply than you know yourself, because he is wholly responsible for making you who you are, and he is Lord over your life not just at the superficial level, but all the way down to the deepest wellsprings of your character and nature.(Excerpted, edited, from “God’s Mysterious Way”)

The limits of liberty

Posted on by | No Comments

“What exactly is liberty?  First and foremost, surely, it is the power of a thing to be itself.  In some ways the yellow bird was free in the cage.  It was free to be alone.  It was free to sing.  In the forest its feathers would be torn to pieces and its voice choked for ever.  
Then I began to think that being oneself, which is liberty, is itself limitation.  
We are limited by our brains and bodies; and if we break out,
we cease to be ourselves, and, perhaps, to be anything.”—Gabriel Gale, in “The Yellow Bird.” The Poet and the Lunatics.  G. K. Chesterton

Does God hide?

Posted on by | No Comments

Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior.—Isaiah 45:13 (ESV)What are we supposed to make of this statement?  What does it mean?  It’s hard to say for sure, but I suspect there are three truths in view here. First, God could be said to hide himself in that he’s often not to be found where we look for him, in the ways in which we expect to find him.  God is not to be found in our conventional wisdom; he doesn’t do things in the ways that we expect, according to what makes sense to us, because he isn’t limited by our knowledge and understanding. That’s why the gifts he gives aren’t limited by our knowledge and understanding, either; that’s why he kept trying to give Israel something so much bigger than they wanted—he kept trying to give them the gift of being the ones through whom he would redeem the nations, when they just wanted him to help them conquer the nations. That’s why the late singer-songwriter Rich Mullins spoke truth when he said, “If you want a religion that makes sense, go somewhere else. But if you want a religion that makes life, choose Christianity.” So often, the problem is that we’re looking for a god who makes sense to us on our terms; it’s not really that God is hiding from us, but that our expectations and assumptions are blocking our eyes and ears.What this means, in practice, is that God is not found by those who are unwilling to find him; he isn’t found by the proud and the haughty, by those who have all the answers, by those who are confident in their own strength to conquer life on their own terms. He isn’t found by those who aren’t really seeking him, who aren’t willing to surrender their lives to him; he isn’t found by the assertive and the self-sufficient. God is found by the humble and the contrite, by those who know they need him.This is why it’s said at times that he hides his face from Israel in judgment—Israel knows he’s there, not because they sought him and found him but because someone else did, but too often, they aren’t really seeking him at all, they’re only seeking his benefits. They want him to give them what they want while they disregard his commands, and so he hides his face from them, he turns away and leaves them in the silence until they will humble themselves and truly seek, not their own best interest, but his face.There’s another aspect to this as well, that in the ancient world, all the other gods had their statues; only the God of Israel, as far as I know, went without physical images for his people to worship. The nations around Israel expected to be able to walk into a temple and see the god—but in this, too, the Lord was (and is) a God who hides. This might seem like a minor point, but in truth it’s quite the opposite. The gods of the world can be represented, can be seen; the one true God can’t. In theological terms, he is transcendent—he’s so far above and beyond us that, as he tells Moses in Exodus 33, no frail, sinful human being can see him and survive the experience. He is too bright to see:  he is “immortal, invisible, God only wise, in light inaccessible hid from our eyes.” That’s why the poet Henry Vaughan, in one of his finest moments, wrote, “There is in God—some say—a deep but dazzling darkness.”  God’s light is so bright that it overwhelms our ability to perceive it, and becomes to us instead the deepest of darkness. He is too bright, too big, too great, to be seen.And here, then, is the wonder, and here is the miracle: this God who was hidden from us in unapproachable light, this God whom no one could see and live, crossed that divide in his own power and revealed himself to us as Jesus Christ. This God who forbade us to make any image of him, who would not allow us to imagine our own version of him, gave us more than just an image of himself—he gave us himself, becoming fully human and living a full human life.When we talk about Jesus coming, we tend to focus on his death and resurrection—especially in this season of Lent—and there’s certainly good reason for that; and we focus too on all the things he taught, and that’s also completely appropriate. But I think we lose sight, sometimes, of the fact that those aren’t the only reasons he came; and that one of the reasons he came is simply that we might know him in a new way and be able to relate to him more closely. God will always be beyond our ability to fully understand, certainly and there will always be times when his face seems hidden to us. That’s just the way it is in this broken, sin-haunted, pain-darkened world of ours. But at the same time, even as it remains true that no one in this world has ever seen God in all his glory, yet it’s no longer true that no one has ever seen God: for as John 1:18 says, God the Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, has made him known. The divide we could never cross, he crossed for us, out of love for us; in Jesus, the hidden face of God has been forever revealed.(Excerpted, edited, from “A God Who Hides?”)

What will matter?

Posted on by | No Comments

Here’s a bit more wisdom from Rich Mullins, from that 1997 concert in Lufkin, TX:

You know, people go to Ireland, and they come back and they have those really beautiful, big sweaters, real big, bulky, and they’ve got all kinds of stitches and stuff in them. Well, they started doing that because each of those different stitches are different charms and prayers and stuff that they would weave into their husbands’ sweaters. If it worked, then their husbands would come back alive, and if it didn’t, because fish don’t eat wool, they could tell who was who by what sweater was on them. . . .So go out and live real good and I promise you’ll get beat up real bad. But, in a little while after you’re dead, you’ll be rotted away anyway. It’s not gonna matter if you have a few scars. It will matter if you didn’t live. And when you wash up on that other shore, even though you’ve been disfigured beyond any recognition, the angels are gonna see you there and they’ll go, “What is this? We’re not even sure if it’s human.” But Jesus will say, “No, that’s human. I know that one.” And they’ll say, “Jesus, how do you know that one?” And he’ll say, “Well, you see that sweater he’s got on?”

“God is right; the rest of us are just guessing.”

Posted on by | No Comments

The late, great Rich Mullins on Psalm 137, from a concert in Texas shortly before his death:

It starts out: “By the waters of Babylon we lay down and wept when we remembered thee Zion, for our captors required of us songs, saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion.’ But how can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” Which is a good question because what land have we ever been in that wasn’t foreign?It starts out so beautifully and then at the end of that psalm, the last verse of that psalm is, “How very blessed is the man who dashes their little ones’ heads against the rocks.” This is not the sort of scripture you read at a pro-life meeting. But it’s in there nonetheless.Which is the thing about the Bible . . . that’s why it always cracks me up when people say, “Well, in du du du du du du du duh, it says . . .” You kinda go, “Wow! It says a lot of things in there!” Proof-texting is a very, very dangerous thing. I think if we were given the Scriptures, it was not so that we could prove that we were right about everything. If we were given the Scriptures, it was to humble us into realizing that God is right and the rest of us are just guessing.