Category Archives: Religion and theology

Worry?

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These are fretful days—an unprecedented ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the situation in Afghanistan is coming apart, Turkey appears to be turning from ally to enemy right before our eyes, the economy’s in the tank and shows no real signs of climbing out, Iran continues to loom, and the Seattle Mariners are 19-31. (OK, so that last is nowhere near as serious as the others, but it still depresses me.) And of course, the list goes on and on, including such things as our government voting to abandon the Democratic Republic of the Congo (the former Zaire) to government by rape. These are not the salad days for most folks.

Which is why it was apropos, when I gathered the younger ones up to tuck them in (our eldest having uncharacteristically fallen asleep on her floor before 8pm) and pulled out the Jesus Storybook Bible to read to them before bed, to find ourselves here, at the Sermon on the Mount:

Wherever Jesus went, lots of people went, too. They loved being near him. Old people. Young people. All kinds of people came to see Jesus. Sick people. Well people. Happy people. Sad people. And worried people. Lots of them. Worrying about lots of things.

What if we don’t have enough food? Or clothes? Or suppose we run out of money? What if there isn’t enough? And everything goes wrong? And we won’t be all right? What then?

When Jesus saw all the people, his heart was filled with love for them. They were like a little flock of sheep that didn’t have a shepherd to take care of them. So Jesus sat them all down and he talked to them. . . .

“See those birds over there?” Jesus said.

Everyone looked. Little sparrows were pecking at seeds along the stony path.

“Where do they get their food? Perhaps they have pantries all stocked up? Cabinets full of food?

Everyone laughed—who’s ever seen a bird with a bag of groceries?

“No,” Jesus said. “They don’t need to worry about that. Because God knows what they need and he feeds them.”

“And what about those wild flowers?”

Everyone looked. All around them flowers were growing. Anemones, daisies, pure white lilies.

“Where do they get their lovely clothes? Do they make them? Or do they go to work every day so they can buy them? Do they have closets full of clothes?”

Everyone laughed again—who’s ever seen a flower putting on a dress?

“No,” Jesus said. “They don’t need to worry about that because God clothes them in royal robes of splendor! Not even a king is that well dressed!” . . .

“Little flock,” Jesus said, “you are more important than birds! More important than flowers! The birds and the flowers don’t sit and worry about things. And God doesn’t want his children to worry either. God loves to look after the birds and the flowers. And he loves to look after you, too.”

Thank you, Father. That’s just what I needed to hear.

The power of grace

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This goes well with Friday’s post on grace-driven effort; this is E. Stanley Jones, courtesy of Of First Importance:

Grace binds you with far stronger cords than the cords of duty or obligation can bind you. Grace is free, but when once you take it, you are bound forever to the Giver and bound to catch the spirit of the Giver. Like produces like. Grace makes you gracious, the Giver makes you give.

Jesus Manifesto: for those who have ears to hear

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Due to a combination of circumstances, I found myself this week filling in for my wife, who’s one of the book-review bloggers for Thomas Nelson (which now calls their review-blogging program, absurdly, BookSneeze), to write a review of the book Jesus Manifesto by Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola. It’s a 179-page (plus footnotes) expansion of a ~2400 word essay they posted last summer, which I noted at the time when Jared Wilson flagged it. The essay was a powerful challenge to the increasingly Jesusless American church, but there was plenty of room to expand on each of their ten points; now, each one gets a chapter. The resulting book is not perfect, by any means—there’s room for criticism, as there is with any human work—but I’m grateful to Sweet and Viola for writing it, and to Thomas Nelson for publishing it and pushing it, because the church in this country badly needs to hear what they have to say.

I will probably come back to this book and interact with it more than once, because there’s a lot here; but for now, let me just post here what I put up on my wife’s blog. The best summary of this book comes from the authors themselves, in the last chapter, in words taken straight from the original essay:

Christians don’t follow Christianity; they follow Christ.

Christians don’t preach themselves; they preach Christ.

Christians don’t preach about Christ: they simply preach Christ.

The purpose of the book is to lay out why that’s so and what that looks like, in order to address “the major disease of today’s church . . . JDD: Jesus Deficit Disorder.”

Sweet and Viola do an excellent job of this; they have written a book which is truly centered on—indeed, saturated with—Jesus. Rather than resting on human wisdom, it rests solidly on Scripture, the word that contains the Word, “the cradle that contains the Christ,” in Luther’s phrase; this is not to say that they ignore the wisdom of Christians through the ages, but they only use it to expound and amplify the voice of the Scriptures as they speak of Christ. This book will make anyone who reads it with an open mind and heart aware of their hunger and thirst for Jesus; one hopes it will do the same for the American church.

Theology and discipleship

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Time was, I used to read a lot of systematic theology; I don’t do that much anymore. Rather, I’m much more likely to read commentaries. This is not to disparage the work of systematic theology—I still have a lot of it on my shelves, and I make use of it; but I think the church, at least since Aquinas, has tended to make much too much of theological systems, to the point where we identify with and believe in them rather than in what—or rather, Who—they’re supposed to point us to. Just consider the labels Protestants use: Lutheran, Calvinist, Wesleyan, Baptist, Reformed, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian. (Those churches which call themselves Catholic and Orthodox are different because they defined themselves against each other—the purpose of their names is to identify them as the true church and the other as not.) I think systematic theology has a useful and important purpose in helping us to interpret Scripture holistically, in the big-picture view, with integrity; but we must always remember that it is merely a guide to understanding, not the substance of our beliefs.

It’s easy to lose sight of that, but it’s true, because true Christianity isn’t about believing in beliefs, it’s about believing in a person: Jesus Christ, the Son of God, in whom the fulness of the Triune God is revealed. Doctrines, even true doctrines, don’t save us—only Jesus saves us; it matters that we believe true things, yes, but we seek to believe true things in order that we may more clearly see and know and believe in the one who is Truth.

Christ cannot be summarized in propositional statements and assertions of fact; indeed, all the true statements we can make about him and his teaching are of necessity partial. We cannot follow him by making up a list of things to do and not to do, or by identifying the things he did and trying to do them; we cannot help others know him merely by telling them things about him, even if every last one of them are true things. Christian faith cannot ultimately be explained, nor can it fully be taught, even though teaching is an important element of the work of the church. In the end, it can only be lived, Christ in us by his indwelling Holy Spirit; and the only way we can fully carry out his command to make disciples is by living in him and allowing others to live closely with us as we do so, so that we can say to them, “Follow me as I follow Christ.”

What’s different about Jesus (updated)

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Everybody in the post-Christendom West seems to want to claim Jesus, even if they don’t actually know anything about him or like what he actually taught; the vestiges of the cultural authority the church used to have (which are, admittedly, a lot greater here in the U.S. than elsewhere) no doubt have something to do with that, along with the lingering sense that Jesus was somebody really special. The result is a great many attempts to bring Jesus down to the desired size so that his image can be manipulated without fear; Jesus must be reduced to just another great teacher—the greatest of all, perhaps, so long as the difference between him and, say, Buddha is understood to be a difference only of degree, not of kind.

The problem is, that just won’t wash if you actually look at Jesus; as C. S. Lewis pointed out, making the modern world aware of an argument dating back to the early days of the church, that’s the one option Jesus doesn’t leave us. He makes claims that no good, sane person would make, and says things that no one who doesn’t accept his claims would tolerate.

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

If you can praise him as a great teacher, it’s proof you haven’t taken him seriously. And as James Stewart points out in his book A Faith to Proclaim, this goes further even than what he taught, into how he taught.

There is nothing in the Gospels more significant than the way in which Jesus deliberately places Himself at the very centre of His message. He does not say with other teachers, “The truth is everything, I am nothing”; He declares, “I am the truth.” He does not claim, with the founders of certain ethnic religions, to suggest answers to the world’s enigmas; He claims to be the answer—“Come unto Me, and I will give you rest.” He does not offer the guidance of a code or a philosophy to keep men right through the uncertainties of an unknown future; He says, “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.”

Teachers are people from whom we learn and then depart, doing whatever we will with their influence in our lives and our relationship with them; their true authority extends no further than the limits of our submission. While there are many who refuse to acknowledge Jesus’ authority, it is not in reality so limited—indeed, it isn’t limited at all; and he did nothing whatsoever to encourage us to think that it was, or is.

Update: It occurred to me today that I missed an even more important distinction in that last paragraph. Teachers are, as a class, primarily important to us for what we learn from them; there may be a significant relationship there as well, but not necessarily, and even when there is, it’s almost always secondary. That’s not to say anything about teachers, but rather about the way our society understands education: the importance of teachers in our lives is all about us. Jesus is primarily important to us for who he is, for our knowing him and being united to him; what we learn from him is secondary, important not for its own sake but because it contributes to our relationship with him.

This is depressing

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I haven’t been over to Viola Larson’s blog, Naming His Grace, for a while—in large part because, for a lot of reasons, I’ve been very low on energy for dealing with the internecine warfare in the PC(USA)—and now I rather wish I hadn’t. Nothing against Viola in the slightest, and in fact it’s a good thing that I know about this . . . I just wish it wasn’t there to know about.

In an attempt to get the Presbyterian General Assembly to not receive the paper Christians and Jews: People of God the Israel/Palestine Mission Network lied about the Jewish organizations in the United States suggesting that they sent a bomb to our Presbyterian headquarters and burnt down a church. They also lied about the Jewish people in their synagogues. The Israel/Palestine Mission Network lied.

Why won’t more Presbyterians speak up? Surely even those Presbyterians who believe that everything Israel is doing is wrong can’t believe that lying about Jewish organizations in the United States is the right thing to do? Why isn’t there an outcry from fellow Christians about this?

The IPMN insists that the rising anti-semitism, the caricatures of Jewish people, in all countries, is caused by the Jews themselves. That is an old story. Less than eighty years ago such lies led to the death of six million Jews.

Anti-Semitism is on the rise again, driven by this queer alliance between the Western Left and the anti-Western wing of Islam; it’s grievous to me to see people trying to use the PC(USA) to further it.

To be driven by grace

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My thanks to Jared Wilson for pointing out this gem from one of my favorite NT scholars, D. A. Carson:

People do not drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.

That’s dead-on, but as Jared goes on to say, it does raise another question: what does grace-driven effort look like, and how is it different from all other forms of effort?

I think grace-driven effort springs from parking ourselves at the gospel and beholding. People who behold (super)naturally move into mission. . . .

We don’t graduate from the gospel. We hold true to it. And it alone propels us out and empowers us to press on.

Grace-driven effort is effort that flows from the joys and wonders of worship that flows from beholding the amazing gospel of God’s grace.

That’s dead-on too. If you’re having trouble seeing the distinction, you might say it’s between doing something because you have to and doing something because you want to. Legalistic religion motivates by pushing and bribing, the carrot and the stick. The push may be an appeal to fear—which is a very powerful driver in most people’s lives, since an awful lot of folks out there are slaves to fear in one way or another—or it may be a guilt trip, or it may play on people’s sense of their own weakness and inadequacy; the bribe tends to be tailored to people’s “felt needs” (hence the popular “7 Steps to a Better ________” approach). Whatever the particulars, it’s all about control, both for the leader and for the followers.

The opposite to that, of course, is the drift that Dr. Carson talks about. Grace-driven effort is a wholly other thing; it is the action that springs from amazed gratitude at the unparalleled and almost incomprehensible grace of God; from joy in worship that focuses our minds and hearts on his beauty and goodness; from desire for his restful purity and undivided holiness, which frees us from our chaotic impurity and unrighteousness, which divides us against ourselves; and from whole-hearted love for him who first loved us, and who loved us that much.

The problem, I think, is that too few of us preachers actually trust that message to have any effect; it’s too easy and too tempting to go for the “short cut,” to go right to messages prescribing whatever efforts we deem most important. But effort which does not arise in response to the gospel of grace, even if it seems to be in the right direction, is not the right sort of effort, and in the end, it will not bear fruit in keeping with repentance.

Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained.

—Philippians 3:12-16 (ESV)

Fox News and sexual hypocrisy

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Douglas Wilson, of Credenda/Agenda and Christ Church of Moscow, Idaho, is at his best when he can let his snark ascend and just turn it loose. He’s also at his best when he has something deep and profoundly important to set his teeth into and be snarky about. (This is, I think, why he was the perfect person to debate Christopher Hitchens.) As such, it’s no surprise that his recent guest piece at the Washington Post‘s “On Faith” blog, titled “Foxy News,” is Wilson at his best.

Preaching against porn while consuming it avidly is certainly inconsistent, and is what theologians in another old-timey era used to call “a sin”—a theological category that perhaps needs to be rehabilitated. But I want to consider this issue at another level—we need to start thinking about the politics of porn. . . .

A number of evangelicals are up in arms about President Obama himself, and Obamacare, and Obama-other-things, and Obama-anything-else, and are warning us in dire tones about the impending slavery that is involved in all this “socialism.” And—full disclosure here—I am economically pretty conservative myself, just slightly to the left of King Arthur, so I am not pointing out this part of it to differ with any of it. But what I am noticing in this discussion is a striking public tolerance for right-wing skankyness. When I am cruising around for my Internet news, I am far more likely to run into Moabite women at Fox News than anywhere else. . . .

Surely it should be possible to access fair and balanced news without running into women who think they are supposed to be a sale at Macy’s—with 40 percent off.

What then? On the assumption that what we are willing to associate with in public is just a fraction of what we are willing to associate with in private, one of my basic concerns about evangelical involvement in politics in the age of Obama (measured in this discussion by their general friendliness to Foxy News) is that they are not nearly as hostile to “slavery” as some of the rhetoric might seem to indicate. I know that politics is supposed to make strange bedfellows, but “strange bedfellows” was always supposed to be a metaphor, wasn’t it?

A man cannot sell himself into slavery in his private life, and then turn around and successfully take a stand as a free man in the public square. At least, that is how the thinking used to go among conservatives. If sexual indulgence is one of the more obvious bribes that can be offered to a slave, how does it change anything if a person takes the bribe in private? And if that bribe is taken in private, over time, indications of that reality will start to show up in public, in the sorts of ways I have been discussing.

Be sure to read the whole thing—it’s truly priceless. I remember when Fox was a favorite target for ire of conservatives, because of shows like “Married . . . with Children” and, yes, “The Simpsons.” (It seems a little strange now to think of that.) People would occasionally point out, as a mitigating factor, that Rupert Murdoch was pretty conservative in a lot of ways, but that was usually dismissed with the comment that the sleaze he peddled disqualified him. Until he launched Fox News, and before too long, political expediency took over . . .

Politics in the end view

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I don’t make any apologies for blogging on political matters; I believe they’re important, and that we as Christians need to learn to see all aspects of life, including politics, with the eyes of faith. There are some things going on in our country right now that deeply concern me, and I think that concern is both warranted and appropriate. That said, there’s a risk in this, too—the risk of coming to overvalue political victories and defeats, to attach too much significance to them. It’s the risk of narrowed perspective, and it has contributed to the politicization of all too much of the American church (on both sides of the political divide).

To counter it, we need to pull back and reorient ourselves. We need to remember not only that this world isn’t all there us, but that for those of us who are in Christ and now live by the Holy Spirit, it isn’t even really our home. In Christ, we have been made citizens of another country, and given the life of the world to come; we don’t simply live in the present anymore—we live in the future, too. Our life comes from the future, from the coming kingdom of God which is breaking into the kingdoms of this world—in us, the people of God. In us, the future kingdom of God is present, the rule of God is exercised, the authority of God in and over this world is proclaimed. We are ambassadors from the future to the present, and the life God calls us to live only makes sense if we see it in that perspective.

Put another way, what we need to understand is that biblically, we are in the last days. To be sure, we’re still waiting for the last last days—this isn’t to say that the end of the world is right around the corner; people keep thinking it might be, but so far, it hasn’t happened. The point is more this: in God’s time, itwill happen, and we don’t know when that will be—and for that matter, many of us will die before then, which will be the end of the world for us, and we don’t know when that will be, either—but whenever it comes, that’s the end toward which we’re moving, when everything God has begun in us will be completed and fulfilled. That’s the destination of our journey, the purpose of our calling, the goal that will make sense of everything along the way.

To live in the last days, and to live in the understanding that we’re in the last days, is to live with that orientation and that focus: toward the future, toward dying and being reborn, toward the kingdom of God. It’s to live with the understanding that what happens in the present is primarily important for the effects it will have in the future; what we do in this world matters, and this world itself matters, not because it’s all there is but because it isn’t. What matters isn’t the things, and the worldly victories, and the worldly praise; rather, what matters is what will endure: the people we meet, the truth we speak, the lessons we learn, the love we give—and of course, the ones we don’t, as well. In the end, if we shut people out, if we refuse to speak or to hear truth, if we withhold love, for whatever reason, the only person we impoverish is ourselves. If we focus our attention, our concern, our efforts, on the things the world values, such as money and power, we may get the rewards the world has to offer (or we may not), but when this world goes, they’ll be gone. As my wife’s grandfather used to say, “You can’t take it with you, but you can send it on ahead”—and it’s only what you send on ahead that will last.

As such, we ought not get too tied up in winning victories now; after all, we worship a God who has been known to do more with earthly defeats than worldly victories anyway. We need to work for what is good and right and true to the best of our ability and the best of our judgment, but we need to remember that in the end, winning isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Whether we win or lose, God is in control; what matters most is not that we get our way, but that we do things his way, that we speak his truth in his love, fearlessly, every chance we get. If we do that, we can let the chips fall where they may, because by his sovereign will, he controls every last one of them.

(Adapted from “The Life of the World to Come”)