Jason Byassee has a review up on the First Things website of a book by Methodist theologian Amy Laura Hall titled Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction; the review is wonderful, and it sounds like the book is, too. I won’t try to summarize it, I’ll just encourage you to read the piece and mull over the ways in which “mainline churches have pursued a theology of ‘Justification by meticulously planned procreation’ (emphasis original), exemplified in a mid-century conference at which Methodists pronounced the Christian family ‘the hope of the world’”—and to let yourself be challenged and (I hope) energized by Dr. Hall’s final words: “The call to be a Christian has become, for me, a call to risk seeming like just the sort of backward, crazy, Holy Spirit-inspired white girl that my grandmothers hoped I would progress beyond.”
Category Archives: Religion and theology
Preliminary thoughts on the knowledge of God
I should begin by noting that while I intend this post to be able to stand on its own, it doesn’t exist in isolation; it’s part of my response to a couple of questions Erin posed me in the comments on this post on her blog, and to the overall discussion. In order to keep my comment there reasonably short, I thought it best to offer some of my thoughts here.What sparked my original contribution there was this comment:
if the rules and standards we live by are God’s, then it would have to be true that love is the measuring stick for everything . . . including this ever elusive “holiness”. And maybe we can’t help but fly once we grasp the awesomeness of God’s love.
The last line there I agree with wholeheartedly—indeed, I think that’s a critically important truth for the church to grasp—and I regret not having said so earlier; but I raised the following objection to the first statement:
I would say that God is the measuring stick for everything. Yes, God is love, but God is not reducible to love—God is light without darkness, God is perfect good without flaw, God is life without death, God is the source of all good things . . . we have to be careful not to pick just one biblical affirmation about God, even one of the key ones (like “God is love”), and lose sight of the others; doing that makes it easier for us to reduce our view of God to the size of our definitions.
Now, it’s easy to say that, but (as Erin pointed out), what does that look like, and how do we do that? For that matter, since we already know what love is, what’s the problem with just collapsing it down and using love as our measuring stick? Ironically, however, that’s precisely the problem: we already know what love is—or rather, we think we do. The reason we need to “grasp the awesomeness of God’s love” is that, most of the time, we don’t, even though we have been grasped by it; most of the time, for most of us, our understanding of love doesn’t really get all that far beyond the one we’ve learned from the world, and the world’s idea of love is adulterated. It’s weak tea beside the real thing, nowhere near deep enough, high enough, strong enough, alive enough, selfless enough, committed enough . . . any of it. This is why I would argue that we cannot simplify our view of God even to “God is love,” because when we say that by itself, we tend to shrink God down to our understanding of love. We need to hold on to all those other affirmations, not just because they’re all true, but because collectively, they reinforce each other; when we say that “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all,” it reminds us that when we say “God is love,” his love is a vastly greater thing than ours. Our love is too often sentimental, too often weak, too often prone to settle for comfortable half-truths and affirmations; we shrink back from challenging and confronting people, even when that would be the loving thing to do, perhaps because our love just isn’t strong enough to move us to do so, or perhaps because we don’t know how to do so as an act of love rather than as an act of anger driven by fear or hurt. We can’t really understand how a loving God could hate our sin as an act of love, and so either we keep our idea of love and soft-pedal the whole idea of sin, or else we keep the idea of sin and become loveless and merciless in judgment, because our understanding of love is too small. Because, as J. B. Phillips said, our God is too small. The problem underlying all this is that in logical terms, there is very little we can positively know about God; most of our affirmations about God are negative—which is to say, they take the form of “God is not this,” and “God is not that.” We can say, for instance, that God is eternal—that he is not bound by time as we know it—but we can’t say very much about what that means. Even some of the positive affirmations we find in Scripture work this way. “God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.” We know from this that “God is light” means that there is no darkness in God—no shameful thing hidden in secret, no dark motives, no shadow of any evil desires, nothing of that sort—but speaking positively, what does it mean? Does it mean that the speed of God is 186,000 miles per second, or that he can be refracted by a prism? Clearly, the idea is absurd. But what it does mean that God is light is mostly beyond our grasp; we simply affirm that there is no darkness in him, and hang on to that. We run into similar problems trying to grasp everything the Bible says about God. We can understand that his life is undying, and that he gives us as his children undying life; we can even understand that his life is of a different quality from ours. But what that difference is, is much harder to grasp; we seek as Christians to live into that, to have his life more and more come alive in us, but we cannot define it, we can only experience it. It’s the same way, really, with his love. We can’t use it as a measuring stick, because a measuring stick is something we can pick up and hold and manipulate; it’s something which is useful precisely because we know its limits. We don’t know the limits of the love of God—if the cross should teach us anything at all (beyond that “God so loved the world that he sent his only Son so that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but shall have eternal life”), it should be that. We cannot hold it—rather, it holds us; and it is far too great a thing for us to manipulate. So, then, the question: “If we can’t measure things by Love, how would you measure things by God?” To which my rather perverse answer: we can’t. To say that God is our measuring stick is to say that we have given up measuring. It doesn’t mean there are no measurements; it simply means that we don’t make them, and we don’t determine them. We simply follow where he leads. That’s what defines us as Christians—not where we’re standing right now, or what we have right or what we have wrong, or what rules we follow and what rules we don’t, or any of that; what defines us is which way we’re moving. Christians are those who, however imperfectly and however confusedly, are on the road together behind Jesus, following him in his mission in this world. This is how we know God: not by affirming certain things or upholding certain rules, though some affirmations and rules are important in helping keep us going the right direction, but by following him. We know him as we know anyone: in relationship. And this is how we measure things by God: do they truly contribute to our following him, and to others’ doing the same? Which is to say, do they make us more like him? Or less? Because the way we know we’re truly following Jesus is that we’re becoming more like him, and thus doing the work he did: feeding the hungry; caring for the sick; welcoming the outsider; defending the oppressed; lifting up the downtrodden; loving the unlovable; breaking down the barriers between race and class and gender; and, when the opportunity arises, speaking the truth so clearly and unflinchingly that people want to kill us for it.
Keeping faith in mind
John Stackhouse has a series of posts up on his blog addressing the question, “Do you have to choose between your brains and your beliefs?” His answer, succinctly summarized: No, no, and sort of, but no.
Expanded somewhat, his basic points are these:
- “Obviously, obviously, you don’t. Many, many manifestly smart people don’t.”
- Faith is both grounded in what we know and important to our ability to know.
Everyday life, however, constantly presses us beyond what we know (or think we know) and requires us to exercise faith. We frequently find ourselves compelled to trust beyond what we’re sure of, to make commitments that go outside our sense of safety. And yet these moments of trust and commitment—these acts of faith—are intrinsically and importantly related to knowledge. . . . Faith relies on knowledge even as it moves out from knowledge into the unknown.
- Faith is ultimately necessary to be a Christian—we cannot get to Christianity by our own efforts (of reason or anything else), but ultimately only through God’s gift of faith by grace. However, we can’t get to anything else truly meaningful without faith, either.
As he sums it up,
So the question isn’t whether to have faith or not. The question is, In what or whom will I place faith, and on what grounds?
Decaf non-fat latté with a shot of God
Stand at a coffee bar long enough, you’ll eventually hear someone order a decaf latté made with skim milk. Whenever I hear that, I’m reminded of the coffee bar we used to frequent (even though I’m not a coffee drinker; you may have guessed that my wife is, though) that had gotten that order often enough, they’d put it on the menu. I think this may have been JP’s, in Holland, where Sara, Hap, Wayne and I went to college, since they were fond of naming their drinks; in any case, whichever establishment it was, in putting the decaf non-fat latté on the menu, had named it “What’s the Point?” For some reason, none of the patrons ever actually used the name—but you can bet the baristas did . . . 🙂
I was reminded of this recently in visiting another church for a funeral. It was a UCC congregation, and clearly in step with the liberalism of that denomination; I was out in the hall on kid duty, since our younger ones lack the patience or understanding to sit through a service, so I had plenty of time to read the various materials they had up on the walls. One big eye-catching display was of the graduates of their most recent confirmation class, with “CONGRATULATIONS CONFIRMANDS!” in big letters, life-size head shots of the teens, and copies of brief essays they had written. It made me rather sad, because from the essays, the only thing these students had been confirmed in was what they already believed; there was little gospel there, and little sense of God challenging their comfortable conclusions. It was all much more about them creating their own idea of Christianity than it was about God creating and recreating them.
The most extreme example of this, and the one that really caught my eye, was one young woman who declared in her essay, “I am an atheist.” I looked at that and I thought, “Why bother? What’s the point?” And what’s the point of a church that can teach its children about God, have one of them come out declaring herself an atheist, and consider that a good thing and something to be celebrated? She has every right to her atheism, certainly, but I can’t help thinking, that’s an awfully thin-blooded version of the gospel; in the end, in the coffee bar of life, that’s little more than a decaf non-fat latté with a shot of God (or maybe even a half shot). What really is the point, anyway?
Another idea of a good Christian woman
So there’s a discussion going on elsewhere regarding a conservative Christian stereotype known as the Better Christian Woman, or BCW—the label comes from Erin, who may well have coined it (as a sardonic label, anyway), and I know Hap and my wife have joined in, as have others; Barry contributed a post or two addressing the fact that men in the church deal with these sorts of expectations as well, which seems to have surprised some (female) folks.
I’ll be honest and admit that while I see the effects of this in the lives of people I know and love, it’s all a little alien to me. I grew up in a conservative family and a conservative church, but apparently a somewhat different kind of conservative; after all, one of my grandmothers was a career pastor (specifically, she and Grampa were officers in the Salvation Army), and my mother was an ICU nurse who got her start in the Navy. The women in my family show a distinct tendency toward the helping professions (add in a couple social workers, for instance), but then, so do the men (ditto, plus a couple more ministers, including me). I guess I just grew up with the idea that God calls people on an individual basis, depending on who he made each of us to be and what particular set of gifts he’s given us, rather than a categorical one.
It might be in light of that, and it’s certainly in light of the ongoing discussion, that I was interested to read this piece by the Rev. Dr. Linda Schwab, a chemistry professor turned Methodist pastor, on her career path and choices. Her situation is a little different, but ultimately I think her piece raises and deals with the same basic set of questions: who am I, and who am I supposed to be? One of the things I value about her essay is that she understands where the answer to those questions is to be found: not in human expectations, but in God.
Justice and mercy
“Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just:
that his justice cannot sleep for ever.”
—Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 289
God is our judge; he is a God of justice. It’s a major biblical theme, a heavy biblical truth, and it’s one that a lot of people don’t like; we tend to prefer the warmer biblical language that God is love, that he’s our good shepherd, and so on, and so a lot of times, we quietly shuffle the “judge” language out the back door into the shed. In some ways, this is ironic, because many of those who most dislike thinking about God as judge are quite convinced they want justice, even folks who really should be asking for mercy (as the Calvinator noted in the comments a while back); I guess the lesson here is that people want “justice” defined as them getting whatever it is they happen to think they deserve. We want justice measured by our own standard, and God uses his standard, not ours.
If we’re going to be faithful to Scripture, though, we just can’t go along with that. All through the Law, the Psalms, and the Prophets, as God declares himself the God of the weak and the powerless, of whom the archetypal examples are the widow, the fatherless, the homeless foreigner, and the stranger; over and over, he condemns the evildoers who “kill the widow and the stranger, [and] murder the orphan.” Again and again, we have the affirmation that God is a God of justice, and that those who exploit the poor and defenseless will be punished. The psalmist may ask, “How long shall the wicked exult?” but he does so in the certainty that the one who disciplines the nations will dig a pit for the wicked in the end. Those who build their mansions on the backs of the needy may prosper for a time, but not forever.
And in the end, though talk of God as a God of justice and judgment rings a harsh note, it’s important for us to remember that the judgment of God comes on those who do evil, on those who reject his ways; and it’s important to remember that it’s rooted in his insistence on making right all that is wrong, and on his concern for the powerless—and that his concern includes us. The highest and greatest expression of this concern came in Christ, in his death and resurrection on our behalf, taking the punishment for our sin and paying the price that we were powerless to pay, winning for us the freedom we were powerless to win.
Which means, I think, that here we see justice and mercy meet; God’s greatest act of mercy was also his greatest act of justice, as here he defeated not just human evildoers but the power behind them, the slavemaster who bound all of us helplessly in sin. In showing us mercy, he was working justice on our behalf.
The Jesus heresy?
Perhaps the most thought-provoking session I attended last week was one I took as a second choice after something else had filled up, a session with Lester Ruth on the view of God in contemporary worship music. I thought it would be interesting, but I didn’t expect a lot more than that. I was positively surprised. Dr. Ruth (no jokes, please) is a Methodist pastor and worship historian who teaches at Asbury Seminary and the Webber Institute for Worship Studies, and what he had done was to take 15 years’ worth of top-25 lists from CCLI and analyze the songs they included (72 in his sample) for their Trinitarian content. The results, which can now be found (in updated form) in chapter 1 of the book The Message in the Music: Studying Contemporary Praise & Worship, were dispiriting; they revealed not only a near-total absence of the Trinity in the most popular songs of the contemporary church, but very little explicit awareness of either the Father or the Holy Spirit. Jesus got the most attention, but even then, only about half the songs were addressed to him; most were generic. As Dr. Ruth noted, on the whole, the songs he examined could be described as “functionally Unitarian.”
There’s a lot that could be said about his findings, including various aspects I haven’t mentioned (such as the paucity of references to the saving work of God, even with all the songs directed to Christ), but what struck me the most was this question Dr. Ruth posed to us: “Is it possible to worship Jesus too much?” In thinking about it, I’d have to say that it is. There’s a lot of insistence in evangelical circles that our faith is all about Jesus, that Christian piety has a cruciform shape, that our worship has to be Christ-centered, and the like, and in a way, all of that is true; but when it leads us into a sort of Jesus-only Unitarianism, which seems to be the case in a lot of churches, then that ceases to be true. British Methodist scholar Susan White, in raising this question, titled her paper, What Ever Happened to the Father?: The Jesus Heresy in Modern Worship, and if her title is provocative, I think it’s on point.
The reason for this is that if our worship is Christocentric, as it should be, but not fully Trinitarian, as it also needs to be, then it distorts our understanding of Jesus; we cannot be properly Christocentric if we are not also Trinitarian. We need to remember that it isn’t all about Jesus, because Jesus wasn’t all about Jesus; his purpose was to point people to the Father. Similarly, while we are united with Christ, we are united by the Holy Spirit, and so we cannot understand who we are in Christ if we leave the Spirit out. It is in Christ that God most fully revealed himself to us, and God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, and so Jesus is our entry point into the life of the Triune God; our worship must be Christocentric because there’s simply no other place to start. However, while we must start there, we must not stop there; to borrow from Stephen Seamands, we need to offer worship in Jesus Christ, the Son, to the Father, through the Holy Spirit, if we are to worship God truly. If we direct our worship to Jesus alone, our worship is false—even our worship of Jesus.
Repentance: accepting being found
First day of the symposium: seminar with Kenneth Bailey on “Jesus as Theologian” and plenary session with Dallas Willard on “Worship as the Fine Texture of Life in Christ.” In other words, an embarrassment of riches, and certainly more to think about than I can absorb in one day—and it’s only the beginning. One thing that particularly struck me, though, was this from Dr. Bailey’s analysis of the Parable of the Lost Sheep (Luke 15:1-7):
Repentance is defined as acceptance of being found. The sheep is lost and helpless and yet it is a symbol of repentance. Repentance becomes a combination of the shepherd’s act of rescue and the sheep’s acceptance of that act.
In other words, our repentance is one more act of the grace of God, not our hard work in which we can take pride, but something God does for us which we gratefully receive. In the later (and better-known) Parable of the Two Lost Sons (usually miscalled the Parable of the Prodigal Son), the prodigal’s repentance doesn’t come in the far country—that’s just a scheme to work his way back into favor; his repentance comes in the village, when his heart breaks at his father’s sacrifice for him, and he accepts being found; he accepts being welcomed back into the family without his having earned it.
Forgiveness, repentance, and the Gordian knot
A while back, I commented on Dr. Stackhouse’s first post on repentance and forgiveness, which was the beginning of his reflections on Advent this year; I meant to go back when he posted the second part and comment on that too, but other things distracted me, and I’m just now getting back to it. As with the first part, it’s an excellent piece, one which directs our attention to the key truth in understanding repentance and forgiveness: our sins aren’t just between us human beings, they’re between us and God. The Psalmist even goes so far as to say to God, “Against you and you only have I sinned” (Psalm 51:4).
This means that when we sin against someone else, or when they sin against us, we aren’t inextricably bound to them by that action; we aren’t enslaved by their refusal to repent, or by their refusal to forgive us if we repent. God is the one against whom the offense was ultimately committed, and he gives us the opportunity to free ourselves from it. We are free to forgive the one who hurt us even if they do not repent, because it’s not up to us to bring about their repentance (or their judgment)—that’s in God’s hands; and we are free to repent and receive forgiveness even if those on this earth whom we’ve hurt will not forgive, because God can and will forgive us, if we truly confess our sins to him and repent. (As Dr. Stackhouse notes, “the Bible says surprisingly little about repenting to each other, and a lot about repenting to God.”)
One of the ways in which our sin enslaves us is by binding us together in Gordian knots of guilt and pain and suffering and shame, knots we often cannot seem to undo no matter how hard we try, even though we were the ones who tied them. In Christ, however, God calls us to repent of our sins and be forgiven, and to forgive one another, and thus to cut that Gordian knot, and find freedom. In so doing, as the Rev. Casey Jones says, we can leave behind this world’s way of life and enter into the life of the kingdom of God here and now. This is good news; this is gospel.
(Note: subscription required for that last article; but the first month’s subscription to Presbyweb is free.)
God’s own fools
18 For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19 For it is written,
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,and the discernment of the discerning I
will thwart.”
20 Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. 22 For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, 24 but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
26 For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. 27 But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; 28 God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, 29 so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. 30 And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, 31 so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”
God’s foolishness begins with a crucified Messiah, but it doesn’t end there. If God’s use of the cross is foolish on our terms, is it any less foolish that he chooses to use us? Put it another way—if you were God and wanted to fix the world, would you start with us? I don’t know about you, but I think I’d be inclined to focus on the important people, the ones who control the world’s governments, media, money, etc.
Once again, though, God doesn’t work that way. He certainly wants to save the rich and powerful just as much as anyone else, but he doesn’t focus on them; rather, he chooses the weak, the powerless, the insignificant, the foolish—he chooses ordinary people, and many of the weakest and most vulnerable among us—in order to show up those who think they are powerful and important and don’t need him. God does this because we matter to him as much as those in power do, but he also chooses us to make it clear that there is no one who has the right to boast in themselves; there is no one who does not need him, and no one who can stand against him. There is no one he cannot raise up, and no one he cannot bring down.
We are called as Christians to be fools in the world’s eyes; our salvation is foolishness to the world, and the idea that God would choose to use us is foolishness, so if we are to follow God we must choose his foolishness over the world’s wisdom. We’re called to follow Jesus Christ, God’s own fool, and to live in this world as he did. He turns to us as he did to Peter and says, “Come, follow me”; if we protest, “Lord, they think you’re a fool,” he just says, “Come be a fool with me.”
But what does that mean? Clearly, we aren’t called to random acts of foolishness, after all; we’re called to be fools like Jesus. Just as he valued doing God’s will over all the things the world thinks important—comfort, success, material well-being, and the like—so should we. More than that, just as he valued doing God’s will more highly than his own life, accepting suffering and death in his Father’s service, so should we. In the world’s eyes, this is foolish; but to us who are being saved, it is the power and the wisdom of God.