And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless
and above reproach before him, if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed
in all creation under heaven, and of which I, Paul, became a minister.—Colossians 1:21-23 (ESV)Paul describes the effects of human sin and the work of Christ in a number of ways across his letters, to enable us to see it from different angles; unfortunately, the church has historically tended to pick and choose, to grab one description and lose sight of the rest. Thus, for instance, there are a lot of people who are quite fluent in the legal language which Paul uses elsewhere (which gives us the term “justification”) but miss the relational language which he uses here, talking about alienation and reconciliation. That’s too bad, because this is language which resonates with many people in our culture, and which helps us to understand ourselves and what Christ has done for us in ways that we might not otherwise catch.The truth is, the alienating effects of sin run in several directions. First, it alienates us from God; our sin separated us from him, breaking that relationship beyond our ability to repair—and indeed, beyond our ability even to desire to do so. Look at the old pagan religions, and you’ll see that they’re founded on fear; we take for granted this idea of a loving, caring God whom we can come to know on friendly terms, whom we can trust and on whom we can rely, but that’s not an idea people ever came up with. It took God even to give us the idea, because our sin had estranged us from him to that great an extent. Second, to be alienated from God is to be alienated from ourselves. It’s God who made us and who alone knows us as we really are; it’s God who holds us in his hand, and in his mind—we continue to exist only because he remembers us to ourselves. It’s God who is the source of all good things, including all the good gifts we possess. As a consequence, we cannot know ourselves truly, at least at the deepest level, if we don’t know him; we can figure out a great many things about ourselves, but we’ll always figure some of them wrong, whether just by mistake or out of our desire to believe ourselves better (or different) than we really are. What’s more, there will always be things about ourselves that we won’t be able to make sense of, and currents in our souls that run too deep for us even to see, though we may sense their effects. This is why we invented psychologists and psychiatrists and social workers, and why we conjured up Sigmund Freud so he could invent psychoanalysts, so they could tell us some of the nonsensical truths about ourselves that we would never have wit enough to see on our own; and even so, even at our best, we remain strangers in our own minds. Only God in Christ has the ability to reverse that alienation and restore us to ourselves; only in him can true healing be found.Third, since we were estranged from God, who is the source of all that is good in us, and since we were estranged from ourselves as a consequence, we were estranged from each other as well. We could build relationships across the divides between us as best we were able, friendships and marriages and families and business partnerships, and often, we did pretty well; but in our own strength, even the strongest relationships we can create are fairly fragile. The vagaries of life can break them, our own sinfulness can cause them to collapse, and even if everything else goes well, death brings them to an inevitable end. And even those who have the most and closest friends know far more people to whom they’re not close, some of whom may be rivals and competitors, and some of whom might even be true enemies. And beyond that, we divide ourselves up in myriad ways, companies and teams, political parties and ethnic groups, states and nations, and we fight with each other. War, of course, is one form of that—but economic competition is another, and sports yet a third, and politics a fourth.We as fallen human beings need reconciliation; we need peace with God, with ourselves, and with each other, and we can’t do it in our own strength. This world is never going to find a peace treaty to end all wars, and there will never be any such thing as a post-partisan political candidate, any more than there will ever be an economy where no company ever goes under or a sports league where every team ties for the championship. It’s just not in us. As Paul says, our wicked works prove that. It’s not just about life after death; Jesus didn’t just come so that after we die, everything would be good, though that’s certainly part of the gift he’s given us. More than that, though, he came to bring the reconciliation we need in this life. He came to remove the barrier of sin that isolates and alienates us, and to heal the breaches it created. He came to restore our relationship with God so that we could once again call him Father; he came to free us from the distorting burden of slavery to sin that warps and mars our souls; he came to bring reconciliation between us, that we might learn to love our enemies and do good to those who harm us. Indeed, he came to bring reconciliation to the whole created order, which has been broken and sent spinning off course and out of tune by our sin, to heal the damage we have done, to restore its harmony and set it right.He’s done this, Paul says, “in the body of his flesh by his death.” The one who is the image of the invisible God, the one who was God become human, the Lord of the universe and head of the church, in whom and through whom and for whom are all things, the one who holds all things together, hung bleeding on a cross in shock and agony until his heart stopped. This is the central fact of our faith, I think, taken together with the resurrection, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself by taking the overflowing cup of human sin with all its agony and draining that cup to the very dregs.This is what Paul wants the Colossians to understand, that there is simply no room for their delusions that they can contribute anything to their own salvation; the sacrifice of Jesus is so immense, in the awe-striking glory of who he is and the truly awe-full reality of the price he paid, that there is nothing we can add to it. The price he paid and the work he accomplished on the cross was sufficient for everything; it was truly an infinite sacrifice, the work of infinite love, the gift of infinite grace, and that sacrifice, that work, that gift, is sufficient. It is enough. Whatever may come, whatever may happen, whatever we may do, it is always enough; and it only is enough. It is Christ, by his work on the cross, who makes us holy and blameless in the eyes of God, able to stand in his presence with no reason for guilt or reproach; no matter how good we might be, we can’t live up to that standard, nor will we ever be able to on our own. We can’t earn our way there—and we don’t have to. In Christ, we have been given that status that we can’t achieve for ourselves; he took all our sin on himself on the cross and paid the price for it there, and gave us his righteousness in exchange.Now, you might have noticed that in verse 22, Paul says that Jesus has done this—“you who once were alienated . . . he has now reconciled in his body of flesh”—but then in verse 23, he says, “if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast.” What’s going on here? Does this mean that you can lose your salvation? There are those who argue that, of course, but no, that’s not what this means. The work of Christ on the cross is finished, it is completed, once and for all. At that moment, salvation was accomplished for all those who belong to him; it cannot be undone, and God isn’t going back on it. Paul isn’t turning around and casting any doubts on that, as if he were somehow lessening the work of Christ. Rather, what he’s doing is making a point that Jesus also made in Matthew 7 when he said, talking of false prophets, “You will know them by their fruits.” If we’ve been saved, if we’ve been reconciled through the work of Christ on the cross, if his Spirit is at work in us, that’s going to have certain clear effects in our lives; thus Jesus could go on to say, “Every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit.” One of the good fruit that we bear if we’re spiritually healthy—which is to say, if we’ve received the new life of God in Christ by the power of his Holy Spirit—is perseverance: if our salvation is real, we don’t walk away from it. We may drift at times, but in the end Jesus always pulls us back by his Spirit. He is faithful, and he will not let us go.
Category Archives: Scripture
Skeptical conversations, part X: The coming kingdom of God
Continuing the conversation . . . Parts I-IX here. Also, I’ve updated the credo Wordle post.
R: I believe it was Churchill who once observed that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others; I think the same applies to the presbyterian form. Not much of an accolade? Perhaps. But it’s still a human structure after all, and still human beings running it, and so nothing you can do is going to make it perfect. Really, to form a perfect government you need to find a perfect person and give them all the authority. The further you get from that, the higher the minimal degree of imperfection in the system—and the less damage any one person’s sin can do, and the more chances there are to fix whatever problems may arise.
You see, there’s this split view of the church, in a way. You look at it from one angle and it’s a group of recovering sinners who sometimes do things beautifully and sometimes make big mistakes; and it’s terribly easy, down in the trenches of the day-to-day, to lose sight of the big picture and forget that we’re all headed somewhere. But then sometimes it’s possible to step back and look at the bigger picture, to get a sense of the church mystical, “spread out through space and time and terrible as an army with banners,” as I think Lewis has the demon Screwtape say. We need that change of perspective; if nothing else, we need it for the reminder that we are a pilgrim people, a church on the way, that we are headed for the kingdom of God.
A: This is the second time you’ve said that. Are you ready to explain yourself now?
R: Yes. The kingdom of God refers to the time when he will reign unchallenged over everything (it doesn’t mean “kingdom” in the sense that we usually use it, as a defined land with borders). It’s a future reality, as clearly we don’t see God as the unchallenged ruler in this world, but at the same time much of what Jesus taught indicates that the kingdom of God had come into the world through his presence and work—so, for instance, he says, “The kingdom of God is among you.” It’s both already here and not yet here.
The best analogy is the one used by Oscar Cullman, a Swiss NT scholar, who compared the coming of the kingdom to the Allied victory in WW II and the difference between D-Day and V-E Day: with the success of the Normandy invasion, the war was really over; Hitler would have been wisest to sue for peace at that point. But he refused to give up even though all was inevitably lost, and so the war continued. The war was won on June 6, 1944, but that victory was not consummated until May 8, 1945—almost a year later. In the same way, the kingdom of God arrived in the person of Christ and the decisive battle was won in his death and resurrection, but the victory has yet to be consummated; that is still in the future, because though the enemy is beaten, he will fight for as long as he possibly can.
The church is a sign of the kingdom of God, a sign that the future kingdom has broken into the present, because the church is a body of people who have stepped outside this world order and are taking our marching orders from the future.
A: Would you call the church a “new world order,” then?
R: Let’s not go there. As I was saying, the proclamation of the message that Jesus is Lord produces a response, which is the work of the Holy Spirit, and that creates the covenant community of the church; the church then draws its purpose from the activity of God in the world, in the ways I talked about earlier. It is the company of those who bow in the present to the kingdom of God, and so looks fundamentally to the future when that kingdom will come in full. This is important, for a couple of reasons. One, it’s the reason why we are called to live holy lives.
A: Give things up now, get the reward later?
R: In part, but not just that. The reward, after all, is the life of the kingdom, and that’s what we’re called to live now. It’s harder, of course, because living that life now is countercultural, it’s in conflict with the system of this world, which is under the Devil’s thumb; but part of the reward is coming to know the joys of the life of the kingdom in this world. That’s one reason why it’s important to keep our eye on the goal. The other is that the kingdom is our promise and our hope in times of suffering and injustice. We have the promise that all will be made right, that God sees our suffering and that it will all be worth it in the end.
A third point is that the hope of the kingdom sets us free from the fear of death, because we know that death is not the end; rather, death is the point at which we pass from this world into eternity.
A: If I understood you correctly, you don’t believe that the soul is immortal and separate from the body. If that’s so, and if death is the point of transition into eternal existence, why aren’t people resurrected as soon as they die? I’ve been to a few funerals, and there’s been a body at every one of them.
R: We aren’t resurrected individually; rather, all those who die in Christ will be resurrected together at the Second Coming.
A: So if you pass into eternity at death but aren’t resurrected until later, what are you in between?
R: Outside of time. From the perspective of God’s eternity, there is no wait in between.
A: So you die at one point in time, are resurrected at another point, but those are the same point.
R: I’m not sure I’d put it exactly that way (though maybe I would); I’m just saying that it seems to me that from a perspective outside our time stream, there isn’t a problem. Luther taught the doctrine of “soul sleep,” that the soul sleeps in between death and resurrection, but I really don’t think that’s necessary. I should note, by the way, that the resurrection body is a new, improved body—it isn’t that God will reconstitute the atoms that made up our body, but rather that our bodies will be made new, just as our lives have been made new and as all creation will be made new.
A: If I may change the subject, what about those horrible popular novels—the “Left Behind” series and others of that sort?
R: Ever read any of them?
A: The “Left Behind” books? I picked one up in a bookstore, out of curiosity, and read a bit. They make Grisham look like Dostoevsky.
R: That’s too harsh, I think, but I’ll grant they’re far from great literature. That’s not really my concern with them, though. I think those books, and others that offer a similar view of the last days, are based on rather poor exegesis—an overly concrete reading of Revelation and other texts that really doesn’t try too hard to understand these texts in their proper context—and as such, I think they offer a rather distorted view of the end times. That’s not necessarily a criticism of the broader theological position they hold, which is a form of premillennialism, but of the way they present it.
A: What’s “premillennialism”?
R: There are three basic positions dealing with the chronology of the end times, and they are distinguished by their understanding of the millennium, which is referenced in Revelation 20:4-6: “I saw thrones on which were seated those who had been given authority to judge. And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony for Jesus and because of the word of God. They had not worshiped the beast or his image and had not received his mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years. (The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended.) This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy are those who have part in the first resurrection. The second death has no power over them, but they will be priests of God and of Christ and will reign with him for a thousand years.”
One position is postmillennialism, which is sort of the theological equivalent of a belief in progress: the church is going to succeed in converting the world to Christ; peace will prevail, evil will be banished, and the reign of Christ in the hearts of humanity will be universal. After a while—the thousand years may be literal or symbolic—Satan will launch a revolt, and Jesus will return, squash him forever, judge humanity, and reign unchallenged from then on. Besides being unduly optimistic, this view doesn’t fit Jesus’ own statements about the last days, which indicate that events on earth will not be going well at the time of his return.
Another position is amillennialism, which understands the millennium symbolically; there will not be a literal reign of Christ on earth. This is certainly reasonable, as Revelation is loaded with symbolic language, but there does not seem to be any consensus as to what that thousand-year reign might symbolize—and to me, none of the answers offered seems very convincing. More problematically, the amillennial interpretation runs into trouble when this passage references “the first resurrection,” since that is understood to happen before the millennium. Since every amillennial view understands the millennium as relating in some way to the period between Christ’s first coming and his second, “the first resurrection” can’t refer to the physical resurrection believers will experience when Christ comes again, and thus must be a spiritual resurrection. This interpretation seems to require straining the text beyond the normal bounds of interpretation to make it fit a pre-determined theory, and that is a problematic thing to do.
The most natural interpretation of Revelation 20 seems to be the premillennial one. Premillennialism understands the millennium as a literal thousand-year reign of Christ on earth, but unlike the postmillennial view it holds that the church will not succeed in converting the world. Rather, the world will grow worse, and ultimately there will be a period of great tribulation, after which Christ will come, those who have been faithful to him will be raised from the dead, and he will reign on earth for a period—whether a literal thousand years or not, I don’t know. At some point, however, Satan will mount one last attack and be defeated forever. At that point will come the second resurrection, of those who have not yet been raised from the dead, and the final judgment.
The “Left Behind” books are premillennial in their understanding. They also posit the theory that Jesus will return again twice: once at the beginning of the period of great tribulation to take his people out of the world (this is called the rapture), and once at its end to wrap things up. In support of their doctrine of the rapture, those who take this position cite 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17: “For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.” I think, though, that this is wishful thinking by Christians who don’t want to suffer. Nowhere in Scripture does it suggest that Jesus will return twice, for one thing; for another, this passage just says that we will meet Christ in the air—it does not say that we will leave with him. It could mean that we’ll meet him in the air as a welcoming party for his arrival on earth.
Rather, I believe that the church will go through the great tribulation, because it makes no sense to me that God would remove his people from the earth when they would be needed most, and that Christ will return again, once, at the end of that period. He will preserve his people in the midst of that period, just as he preserved Noah’s family through the great flood, but he will not remove the church. When Jesus returns, we will meet him in the air, yes—but as a welcoming party, and we will return to earth in his train.
A: I think I don’t know enough to make sense of the alternatives—though as you described postmillennialism, it sounded rather implausible to me. It seems that the central thrust of your position is that life will get very bad, but the church will win through.
R: Yes, and I think that’s the most important point. The details draw enough argument that it’s necessary to articulate a position on end-times chronology, and some of them really do make a difference—between postmillennialism and premillennialism, for instance, you have the difference between optimism and a more pessimistic view; and yet you also have the belief in a rapture, which allows some premillennialists to consign the rest of the world to the tribulation and not worry about it for themselves. That makes a difference, too. But the most basic point is just what you’ve said: the promise that if we are faithful to Christ, he is faithful to us and will bring us through all right by the power of his Spirit.
And then at the end comes the Last Judgment. I said earlier that I believe in Hell, so I’m not really saying anything new here. All that we have ever done and said and thought will be open for all to see, and we will be called to account for all of it; and then the choice we made in this life, for or against God, will be fixed into eternity. Those who have been faithful to God will be with him in the new creation, while those who have rejected him will be sent to Hell.
As C. S. Lewis put it in his book The Great Divorce, there are only two kinds of people in this world: those who say to God, “Your will be done,” and those to whom God finally says, “Yourwill be done.” Hell will be a place of God’s wrath, but at its core it will be the place of exclusion from fellowship with God. It will not be, however, a place where Satan reigns and God is not present; God will be just as present there as anywhere else in creation—but there will be no fellowship with him. Those in Hell will be in a state of complete estrangement and alienation from him, themselves and each other, and so the presence and love of God will be not a joy but a stabbing agony. God does not desire this for anyone, but it is his final act of respect for human freedom to allow those who reject him to have for eternity what they chose in this life.
A: But God is in control of that choice.
R: Yes, because he chose whom he would save. But those who reject him still do so of their own free will. God is sovereign in everything, but human beings are still free to choose as we will.
A: If God is sovereign in everything, why doesn’t everyone choose to serve him?
R: Do you want to change your mind and make that choice?
A: No.
R: Then how can you ask the question?
A: I’ll have to think about that.
R: While you’re thinking, one last point. I said earlier that I don’t exactly believe we go to Heaven. That’s because biblically we don’t leave this world for a different and better place; rather, the biblical picture is that this world becomes the different and better place. Once all this is accomplished, God will create the heavens and earth anew, as they should have been, with Jerusalem, the city of his temple, made new at their center. We will live eternally in the new creation, and nothing of the goodness of this world will be lost—not even that which is now lost.
The Gospel for 9/16/01
For me (and, I suspect, for many preachers), 9/16 is a date inextricably linked to 9/11: it was the day we had the task of standing in the pulpit and presenting the gospel response to the terrorist attack on America. That day found me the guest preacher at the Church of the Good Shepherd, a congregation of my denomination (the Reformed Church in America) in Lynnwood, WA, on the north side of the Seattle area. They were between permanent pastors at that point, and I had agreed several weeks before to fill in for the Sunday between the departure of one interim pastor and the arrival of the next. To preach to a strange congregation five days after 9/11 was a daunting task, especially with one as inexperienced as I was, but it had one great benefit: it gave me something to focus on that helped me absorb and process the shock of what had happened.It’s interesting, seven years on, to go back to that sermon; it certainly shows my inexperience, but I think the thrust of it was right. If I needed to use it again, I would no doubt rewrite a fair bit of it, but I could keep the core as is. Indeed, when almost three years later, our community in Colorado was hit by what I think we can fairly call an act of local terrorism, that’s pretty much what I did. For all that it’s clearly the work of someone who hadn’t preached very much, I can stand by what I was doing my best to say. (For anyone who’s interested, the sermon follows after the jump.)***********The world changed this week. When terrorists flew airliners into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and into the Pentagon, the earth shook, and those towers, those great mountains raised up by human effort, fell; and the world changed. It was not just Manhattan or Washington, D.C. that shook, it was the earth under our feet; we were shaken, as these symbols of our country were attacked in a way that we have never been attacked before. We were shaken by the loss of life—the hundreds aboard those four airliners, the thousands more who died in the buildings which were hit; the firefighters and police officers who died trying to help those caught in the wreckage. Through the network of relationships that unites us across this country as family, friends, and colleagues, we have all been touched by the fear and pain of this last Tuesday. September 11, 2001: this day will live in infamy alongside December 7, 1941, and we will never be the same again; we mourn the loss of thousands of lives, but we also mourn the loss of a little more of our innocence. What words can possibly work to describe what happened? Unthinkable? Unbelievable? Horrific? This was a disaster movie produced and directed by Satan; it was designed to kill and to destroy, as our enemy so loves to do, but also to shatter the foundations of everything we hold true. The world has changed, the earth has moved, and we will never again trust it in quite the same way. Yet there is hope, even as the horror of last Tuesday echoes in our minds and hearts: in the midst of this upheaval, there is still a place to stand where we will not be shaken. With all that has changed, we need to remember what has not changed. We need to remember that God is, and what that means for us.Let’s look to the Psalms this morning, and hear God’s reassurance. Open your Bible with me to Psalm 46, and let’s read that together:God is our refuge and strength,
an ever-present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way
and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea,
though its waters roar and foam
and the mountains quake with their surging. Selah
There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy place where the Most High dwells.
God is within her, she will not fall;
God will help her at break of day.
Nations are in uproar, kingdoms fall;
he lifts his voice, the earth melts.
The LORD Almighty is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress. Selah
Come and see the works of the LORD,
the desolations he has brought on the earth.
He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth;
he breaks the bow and shatters the spear,
he burns the shields with fire.
“Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth.”
The LORD Almighty is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress. Selah“God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.” “Trouble” seems far too mild a word for what the psalmist has in mind—“disaster” would be more to the point. First, there is natural disaster, and the language is vivid, evoking the earthquake to end all earthquakes: the earth heaves so fiercely that the very mountains crack and collapse; their rubble falls into the ocean and causes great waves, great enough to shake the remaining mountains all over again. It is a scene of incredible physical terror—but the psalmist says, “We will not be afraid, because God is our refuge, our strength and our help.” Second, there is potential national disaster, the threat of the nations against the city of God; but the city will not fall, because God is there. No matter what disaster may come, God is very near to us, and he is our refuge.In the midst of disaster, God is our refuge. We can rest in him and he will protect and comfort us, body and soul. If you look at your outline you’ll see the opening of another psalm, one of my favorites, Psalm 91: “He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty,” as the NIV has it. The psalm gives us the image of a bird comforting its chicks, protecting them from the traps left by the hunter and from diseases which could kill them; under God’s wings, in his shadow, we are safe from diseases of the spirit and those who would attack our souls. We may not be free from pain, but we are comforted.But as we look out at the world this week, we still see the suffering. Who can forget the images of a 110-story building collapsing into so much twisted, broken wreckage? Who can forget the nightmare thought of secretaries, janitors, and receptionists who actually found jumping out of windows 90+ stories up their best hope of survival? And it doesn’t end there. The television still shows us shattered buildings, rubble everywhere, people in grief and shock; how could this happen? Is the Devil bigger than God after all?The Psalmist’s answer is firm: No. Even in the midst of suffering, destruction and war, God is in control. In Isaiah 45, the prophet puts this even more strongly, as God declares, “I am the LORD, and there is no other. I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the LORD, do all these things.” In other words, what happened on Tuesday didn’t take God by surprise; he isn’t pacing around his throne room pulling out his hair trying to figure out what to do about this situation. In all the circumstances of life, in all the trials we face both huge and smaller, the one who is our refuge and our help is in control of the situation. As your congregation looks for a new pastor, and as you suffer setbacks in your search, God is in control. As you struggle with difficult relationships, whether in your family, at work, or elsewhere, God is in control. As you or someone you care about fights serious illness, God is in control. As those of us who are unemployed look for jobs, God is in control. And yes, as men with evil in their hearts turn our airlines into weapons of inconceivable mass destruction, God is in control. He has not been outwitted; he has not lost the battle, much less the war. The God who is our fortress and our help is still the one writing the story, and evil will not have the last word.But this raises a hard question: if God is in control, if he is the one writing the story, then why do we get chapters like this week? Why does he allow such evil and suffering?I don’t have any easy answers; and if I did, I don’t imagine you’d trust them. There aren’t any easy answers. In part, we know that when God created us, he gave us the dignity of freedom, to choose to follow him or not; and he respects us and leaves us free to choose, even though so often our choices pierce his heart. At the end, God will tell all the nations, “Be still, and know that I am God,” and all evil will be banished, but until then he gives us the dignity of being able to say no to him. But that’s only part of the answer; it doesn’t tell us why evil succeeds, why things don’t go right the first time. How much of a change, really, would it have taken for the men who carried out this attack on our country to fail rather than succeed in their efforts? A few alert, suspicious security guards, perhaps, and none of those planes are hijacked.I don’t know; but if I have learned anything in my life, it is the lesson C. S. Lewis put so well: that “God whispers in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain.” God is shouting to us in this time—it may just be a coincidence, but did you notice that the date of this attack was 9/11? 911. Perhaps this is an emergency call to a nation that is in desparate need of God. And people are picking up the phone. On CNN, a newscaster admitted that “Even if you don’t believe in God, at times like this you want to reach out to a higher being for salvation.” As horrific as this attack was, even this God can turn to his purposes, even this he can use to rescue people who are lost and need him; even from these black, evil, poisonous roots, God can grow beautiful flowers.God whispers in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain. And so, as the great Catholic mystic Julian of Norwich once wrote, God did not promise us, “You will not be troubled, you will not be belabored, you will not be disquieted”; but he did promise us this: “You will not be overcome.” Therefore we will not fear, though the earth shake, the mountains fall, and our cities be attacked; we will not fear, though we struggle financially, or with our families, or with our past; for God is our fortress and our help, and he is still in control, whatever may come.And we will not fear because in the midst of our weakness, God is our shepherd. Let’s turn to our second psalm, Psalm 23:The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not be in want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside quiet waters,
he restores my soul.
He guides me in paths of righteousness
for his name’s sake.
Even though I walk
through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff,
they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
Surely goodness and love will follow me
all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever.Our God is no impersonal God—he knows each of us by name, and he watches closely over each of us; he cares for us and takes care of us as a shepherd watches over and takes care of his sheep. He wants us to know and love him as he knows and loves us, and he wants us to call on him when we are uncertain, when we are in need, when we are in pain, when we are in danger. That, after all, is what a sheep does: when it realizes that it is lost in the wilderness and has no idea where its flock and shepherds are, it will lie down and begin to bleat at the top of its lungs so that the shepherd can come and find it and bring it back to the flock. The sheep knows it’s in a bad situation, but it trusts the shepherd to take care of it, and God wants us to trust him in the same way.We can trust him for a couple of reasons. First, in our uncertainty, God is our guide; he leads us as a shepherd leads his sheep. He leads us in the paths of righteousness—not crooked paths which will wear us out uselessly and waste our efforts, but the right paths, those which will take us where he has called us to be; the paths which will lead us to growth in righteousness. When we wander from the path, he leads us back, even when that means lifting us up and carrying us. But the straight path is often not the easy one; in Israel, the best way from one pasture to the next often led through deep, narrow canyons and ravines where the steep, high slopes kept out the light, where the sheep could only trust and follow the sound of their shepherd’s voice. In the same way, the path for us often leads us through pain and suffering, through valleys like this week when the road is too dark for us to see beyond the next step. In times like these for our nation, when the weight of suffering and loss seems too great to bear, God is our shepherd. In this time of uncertainty for you in this church, God is your shepherd. We are in this place, we are in this time, dark as it is, because God has led us here, because this is the right path, the path that will bring each of us where he wants us to be; but he has led us into the valley of the shadow of death in order to lead us through it and out into the light once more, and he is here to comfort and protect us in the darkness. “God did not say, ‘You will not be troubled, you will not be belabored, you will not be disquieted’; but God said: ‘You will not be overcome.’” That is a promise for us this morning, here in the valley of the shadow.The promise, too, is that God will meet our needs, because he is our shepherd; in our need, he is our provider. That, after all, is how Psalm 23 begins: “The Lord is my shepherd, I will not be in need.” He provides us with green pastures and quiet streams, not merely meeting our physical needs but doing so in a way which refreshes us and gives us rest. He restores my soul, the Psalmist says.Do any of you feel the need to have your souls restored this morning? I know I do; there have been times in the last few days when it seemed wrong and unfair somehow that we had blue skies and sunshine and could still see the beauty of the day when at the World Trade Center the sun had not shone since Tuesday for all the smoke. Others I know felt violated by this attack; my brother’s comment, after a long conversation, was, “I want my country back.” Another friend of mine said he has been walking around in shock since hearing the news, that part of him is frozen up inside. The promise to us this morning is that God meets us at this place of our need, that he will restore our souls.God is our strength in the midst of disaster, and our shepherd in the midst of our weakness; he provides for us in our need and guides us through the darkness. Through everything we face, God is with us. That is why we need fear no evil as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death—because God isn’t leading us from up ahead somewhere, he isn’t sending us on from behind, he is walking through the valley with us, carrying his staff to keep us on the right path and his rod to drive away enemies. That’s why he is able to restore our souls, because he is with us in our hurts and losses and fears. That’s why he is our refuge and strength when we are under attack. And it’s why we can trust him when we don’t know how we’ll pay the bills . . . when we fear what the future holds for us . . . when we don’t know what to do next . . . when someone we love is sick . . . and even when we watch the news and hear the death toll from Tuesday’s attack: because he is with us. He was there with those people who lost their lives in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he was there with the passengers who died on the airliners, he was there with the firefighters who rushed in when the first tower was hit and died when it fell on them, he is there with those who have lost sons, daughters, husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters; he is here with us this morning as we struggle to come to grips with what has happened, as we think of those we know who escaped or are among the missing, and as we deal with all the other problems and struggles that fill our lives. He is here with us in his Spirit, and his Son came and walked the very same earth we walk. He knows us, he knows us inside and out, he loves us more than we will ever understand, and he is here with us to care for us as a shepherd cares for his sheep. We worship a God whose name is Immanuel, God with us, and if we are too weak to stand that is just fine with him; he wants us to lean on him as he leads us through—and out of—the valley of the shadow of death and into his glorious light.
Saying goodbye
What shall I render to the Lord for all his benefits to me?
I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord,
I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people.
Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.—Psalm 116:12-15 (ESV)I tell you this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep,
but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:
“Death is swallowed up in victory.”“O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting?”The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God,
who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.—1 Corinthians 15:50-57 (ESV)It’s been a long couple days. Sunday I had a meeting after church and places to be all afternoon, and then yesterday was my first funeral here in Indiana, as we buried one of the lovely old saints of this congregation, someone who’d been a part of the church here for 44 years. On the one hand, it was a real celebration of a woman who’d lived a remarkable life and blessed a great many people; we did not grieve as those who have no hope, nor did we weep for her, because no one had any doubt at all that she died in Christ. On the other hand, that doesn’t make our loss right now any less real, and it was a very emotional service.Still, I would have loved to have been able to bear witness to the Resurrection the way Sir Winston Churchill did at his state funeral in St. Paul’s Cathedral. For most of the service, it was a very traditional Anglican funeral, but after the benediction, a bugler positioned high in the dome of St. Paul’s began to play Taps: “Day is done, gone the sun from the hills, from the earth, from the sky. Go to sleep, rest in peace, God is nigh.” Not typical procedure at an Anglican funeral, but normal for a military funeral, and so certainly fitting for Churchill. But no sooner had the last note faded to echoes than another bugler, positioned across the dome from the first, began to play Reveille—“It’s time to get up, it’s time to get up, it’s time to get up in the morning!” It was Churchill’s final testimony, that at the end of history, the last note will not be Taps, it will be Reveille—a Reveille to wake the very dead, as the trumpet will sound not an end but a beginning, not death but resurrection, and the end of all death. That is the promise of Easter; that is our hope in Christ.
What the Internet was made for
(which too often isn’t what it’s used for)Since I first discovered Pauline Evans’ blog, Perennial Student, I’ve come to appreciate her work for a number of things—not least that she has a sharp eye for all sorts of interesting stories that I would otherwise miss. A few days ago, for instance, she pointed me to a real piece of good news in the world of biblical scholarship: the guardians of the Dead Sea Scrolls have launched a five-year multi-million dollar project to put them on the Web. Specifically,
the fragments will be photographed first by a 39-megapixel colour digital camera, then by another digital camera in infra-red light and finally some will be photographed using a sophisticated multi-spectral imaging camera, which can distinguish the ink from the parchment and papyrus on which the scrolls were written.Eventually all the fragments will be available to view online, with transcriptions, translations, scholarly interpretations and bibliographies provided for academic study. “The aim in the end is that you can go online and call up the scrolls with the best possible resolution and all the information that exists about them today,” said Pnina Shor, head of the Artefacts Treatment and Conservation Department at the antiquities authority. “We want to provide opportunities for future research on the scrolls. We feel it’s part of our duty to expose them to the world as a whole.”
This is truly splendid, and should be a huge boon to biblical and historical scholarship—especially as it’s already produced unexpected side benefits:
The new infra-red photography has picked out letters that had not previously been visible to the naked eye. “The ink stays dark and the leather becomes light and suddenly you can see text that you may no have been able to see,” said Tanner. “We have revealed some text that has not been previously seen by scholars.” The detailed colour photographs of papyrus fragments may help to identify pieces that fit together and to identify fragments written by the same scribes. Scholars hope this new information might enable them to piece together more of the fragments and so come closer to putting complete sections of the scrolls together.
For a 90° turn: meditation on faith and reason
OK, I’m going into overload here; I have to shift gears or I’m going to fry the engine, and besides, I have other things I need to be thinking about. So, while I will no doubt have more to say about John McCain, Sarah Palin, and their detractors before long, I’m going to take a deep breath and send my brain in a different direction: specifically, the issue of the relationship between faith and reason.
One of our best guides in this regard is St. Augustine, in whose writings this issue looms large. It’s only to be expected that this should be so; as a philosopher, he is committed to reasoning his way to truth, but as a Christian he must accept some things as true on faith rather than by his reason, and these two stances might seem incompatible. It’s a major part of Augustine’s task as a philosopher to reconcile these seeming opposites, to prove that Athens does indeed have fellowship with Jerusalem.
Before he can begin building his case, Augustine must define his terms. In doing so, he draws a sharp distinction between knowledge, which is the result of rational thought, and belief, or faith. Knowledge is “the rational cognizance of temporal things”; in other words, it is the understanding, brought about by reason, of the things of this world. Belief, by contrast, is a matter of “consenting to the truth of what is said.” Rather than being an act of the reason to discover something to be true, it is a decision of the will to accept something as true. However, the statement that faith is an act of the will rather than a product of human reason does not automatically make faith opposed to reason. This is a critical point; otherwise, reason and faith are irreconcilable and the entire enterprise of Christian philosophy is in vain. Augustine offers several arguments to show that faith is indeed reasonable, and thus that faith and reason can and do complement each other.
The first point is that faith does not spring out of nothing, but out of rational thought.
For who cannot see that thinking is prior to believing? . . . it is yet necessary that everything which is believed should be believed after thought has preceded; although even belief itself is nothing less than to think with assent. . . . everybody who believes, thinks—both thinks in believing, and believes in thinking.
This means that faith is not antithetical to reason but a possible product of it; reason can lead to faith.
Augustine further argues that faith leads to knowledge, not merely belief. He draws this argument from Scripture, citing the words of Christ in John 17:3 (“And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent,” ESV) and Matthew 7:7 (“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you,” ESV). His point is,
One cannot speak of that being found which is believed without knowledge, nor does anyone become prepared to find God who does not first believe that which he is afterward to know.
The goal of faith, according to this interpretation, is to bring the believer to a point where it is possible to gain true knowledge of God, not simply to rest in believing things about God. Thus reason and faith complement each other in the quest for understanding.
The reason why this is so, according to Augustine, is that some truths are too big for the mind to comprehend them through reason alone. Citing Isaiah 7:9, he says,
We must first believe whatever great and divine matter we desire to understand.
Our minds are limited, and thus our reason cannot see all truths. Since reason lacks force to compel us to accept these truths, we can do so only by an act of the will.
As such an act isn’t grounded in our own reason, it must be based on authority external to ourselves. Augustine even declares,
For those who seek to learn great and hidden truths, authority alone opens the door.
As he sees it, while reason is higher and more fundamental than authority, authority must precede reason in operation, at least for human beings, in order to ensure that reason proceeds in the proper direction to reach truth. He sums up the relationship between the two by saying,
Authority demands faith, and prepares man for reason. Reason leads him on to knowledge and understanding.
For Augustine, then, the quest for understanding begins with faith in authority, which prepares the soul to use reason to gain understanding of that which is believed. This does not mean, however, that reason is “useless to authority; it helps in considering what authority is to be accepted.” This is very important to Augustine, because faith is worthless if it is misplaced. Those who place their faith in God are on the road to true understanding, because God, the creator of all, is the source of Truth Itself. Those who place their faith in a false authority, however, can never reach true understanding, because the foundation for their reason is flawed. Reason thus has an important part to play in finding a true authority to accept.
In Augustine’s understanding of the pursuit of truth, then, reason and faith are intermingled. Reason provides a basis for faith by determining which authority is worthy of acceptance. From that rational basis, the individual chooses to accept that authority as true. That authority in turn prepares the individual to seek understanding, and gives a foundation for the use of reason in that search. Thus reason and faith are integrated in the search for truth, keeping all of life together as a whole rather than splitting it in two.
It’s important to note here that for Augustine, a questioning faith is true faith because it is seeking to grow in understanding. That is the proper aim of faith, to apply reason to gain understanding of God and the things of God. While Augustine grants that those who fail to do so will still reach heaven, he does not believe that they are truly happy, for they are falling short of that for which they were made.
The Risen Lord
For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised. From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ,
be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin,
so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.—2 Corinthians 5:14-21, ESVA print of this painting, with a caption taken from this passage, hangs in my office, behind my desk (on the side wall, so I can see it). The artist, one of my favorite contemporary painters, is Dr. He Qi, a painter and philosopher of religious art who has taught at Nanjing Union Theological Seminary and Nanjing University (in the philosophy department). His website describes his art this way:
He has been committed to the artistic creation of modern Chinese Christian Art since 1983. He hopes to help change the “foreign image” of Christianity in China by using artistic language, and at the same time, to supplement Chinese Art the way Buddhist art did in ancient times. In his works, He Qi has blended together Chinese folk customs and traditional Chinese painting techniques with the western art of the Middle and Modern Ages, and has created an artistic style of color-on-paper painting.
If the piece above interests you, I encourage you to explore his website—he’s done some truly brilliant work. (You can also find an inexpensive set of prints—taken from the PC(USA)’s 2004-05 planning calendar, which used his artwork—here.)
Elemental powers
“See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ. For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority. In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead. And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him.”
—Colossians 2:8-15 (ESV)
The word translated “elemental spirits” in the beginning of that passage is stoicheia, which literally means “elements”; this refers to the spirits who were thought to control the physical world—the four elements, the stars, the other heavenly bodies, the signs of the zodiac—all those things which were commonly thought to control human destiny. These were the powers, people believed, that ruled the world, and had to be placated in order to get on with life.
To most people, I suspect, Paul’s warning in Colossians 2 seems irrelevant—it has nothing to do with how we live now. Sure, there are those who are into astrology and won’t do anything without consulting their horoscope, but most people know better than to think that the stars rule their lives; surely, the concern Paul raises is nothing we need to worry about in our own lives.
For my part, though, I’m not so sure; I think our culture has its own set of stoicheia that continue to assert their authority in our lives. They may look different, and they may not be tied into religious observance (as they were in Paul’s day), but they wield similar influence. I think we need to ask in all seriousness—and try to answer in all seriousness—what are the spiritsour society accepts as the elemental powers that rule human destiny?
I don’t have a complete answer to that, by any means; but I think that one force that has assumed that role in our culture, anyway, is sex. The ancients believed the stars ruled their fates, and that however hard you tried to resist or avoid your fate, you couldn’t; increasingly, our culture has much the same view of sexual desire, seeing it as a force too great to resist—and indeed, one which shouldn’t be resisted. Even among Christians, who should really know better, this sort of thinking is used to justify an appalling number of adulteries and divorces; on a larger scale, it’s also the assumption which underlies the debate over homosexuality. Clearly, on our society’s view, asking people not to act on their sexual desires is completely unreasonable—you might as well ask them to jump out a window and not fall.
Biblically, though, that’s neither more nor less than slavery “to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.” Granted, certainly, it’s a slavery which is (at least on some levels) comfortable and pleasant for us, and which is difficult and painful to escape; there’s no question that to tell people, whatever their particular desires may be, that God calls them to resist sexual temptation is to ask them to commit to a difficult and painful struggle, and one in which they may not know true victory in this life. This isn’t something we can do in our own strength; it’s beyond human ability.
That’s why Paul immediately moves from his warning to this wonderful passage about Jesus. We can’t do what God wants us to do: our sin, the debt we can never repay, gives the “elemental spirits of the universe” power over us, and we can’t get free of that power. But what we could never do, Christ did for us, and in us: he took that debt, he blotted it out, and then he nailed it to the cross. In his crucifixion he took those spirits and he disarmed them, stripping them of all their power and authority; in his resurrection he made a public spectacle of them, displaying their powerlessness for the world to see in the light of his great triumph. Nothing in this world has any power over you any longer, Paul says, because you are in Christ and Christ has defeated every other power—he alone is victorious.
One in Christ
Paul gets bashed sometimes by modern Western types for not denouncing slavery and trying to launch an abolitionist crusade; but if he’d tried, he would only have made things worse. He would have suddenly been taken far more seriously by the Romans as a troublemaker (and most likely executed as a result), Christians throughout the empire would have abruptly been treated with far greater suspicion and hostility, people who already didn’t like Christians would probably have been roused to defend slavery . . . and all in all, the gradual drift of Roman society away from slavery would probably have been reversed somewhat, not speeded up. He was simply too outnumbered and outgunned for a frontal assault to work.In the letter to Philemon, though, we can see how Paul sought to work against slavery in and through the church. He wrote the letter as an amicus domini—a “friend of the master” interceding on behalf of a fugitive slave, in this case Onesimus—and took full advantage of the opportunity as a teachable moment. The keynote of the letter comes in verses 15-16, where he writes, “Perhaps Onesimus was separated from you for a little while.” Note that. He doesn’t say, “Perhaps Onesimus separated himself from you”; he says, “perhaps he was separated.” That’s what’s called the “divine passive,” and you’ll find it all over the Old Testament. The Jews were so careful about not taking God’s name in vain that they avoided using it whenever possible; and so if they wanted to say God did something, they would often write, “It happened.” That’s the divine passive, and that’s what we have here: Paul is gently suggesting to Philemon that it wasn’t Onesimus who did this—it was God.To what purpose? Onesimus’ salvation, for one; more than that, a major change in his relationship with Philemon as a result. We cannot know how Philemon treated his slaves, though given his position in the church one would hope he treated them well; but it seems likely that he treated them, and thought of them, as slaves—people, yes, but definitely second-class, second-tier. Now Paul is saying, perhaps God was at work here so that Onesimus might be saved and Philemon might have him back “no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother” in Christ, a fellow Christian. This is the keynote to everything Paul says in this letter, to his appeal to Philemon to welcome Onesimus back rather than punishing him and all the rest of it: Philemon, this man isn’t just your slave anymore, he’s your brother in Christ; I led him to Christ just as I led you to Christ, and you can’t look at him the same way as you used to. In the world, you own him and he’s your inferior; in the church, Jesus owns both of you, and Onesimus is your equal.This is how the church gradually ended slavery in the ancient world; slaves became members of the church alongside freemen and citizens, and they became elders, and they became pastors, and some even became bishops. About forty years after this letter was written, one Onesimus became bishop of Ephesus; we don’t know if it was the same one or not, but personally, I think it was. And the more people saw slaves as their equals, and sometimes even their betters, the less supportable slavery became, until eventually the Emperor Justinian ended it altogether.Everywhere this dynamic has been allowed to work (rather than being undermined and suppressed by the church itself, as one must admit has happened all too often), everywhere that Christians have learned to see one another first and foremost as people whom God loves, for whom Jesus died, all the distinctions that we use to say this person is better or more important or more valuable than that one have tended to fade away. That’s why Paul could tell the Galatians, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”; and we could add, there is neither rich nor poor, black nor white nor Hispanic nor Asian nor American Indian, Republican nor Democrat nor independent, American nor foreigner, not because these divisions don’t exist but because they aren’t what really matters. Jesus is for everyone, and loves everyone equally—that’s what matters in the end. Everything else is just details. Everything else.
Skeptical conversations, part VIII: The gifts of the Spirit
Continuing the conversation . . . Parts I-VII here. Also, I’ve updated the credo Wordle post.
But this is starting to move me into ecclesiology—the doctrine of the church—and I’m not done talking about the Spirit yet. If the first element of the Spirit’s work is to reveal the Father and the Son, the second comes at the point of conversion. It is the Son who atoned for our sins on the cross, but it is the Spirit who mediates that to us.
A: What do you mean by that?
R: The work of conversion is the work of the Spirit. It is he who moves us to conviction that we have sinned, and he who calls us to repentance; and it is he who applies the saving work of Christ to us, who sets us free from sin and regenerates us. From that point on, then, the Spirit of God lives within us, which is the third thing which must be said about his work. The Spirit brings us into the fellowship of the Trinity, bearing our prayers to Jesus, interceding for us when we do not know what to pray, and speaking to us in return; and as he began our transformation by bringing us new life, so he works to continue that transformation, nurturing that new life in us and making us more and more like Jesus.
A: And you say this process is going on in every Christian?
R: Yes.
A: I would think, if that were so, that I would see more evidence of that. I can’t say that I see very much.
R: In part, I’d say that there are many who call themselves Christian and aren’t saved; Jesus made it very clear that this would be the case. Certainly there are some remarkable perversions of the gospel out there.
A: Such as that church with their picket signs that say “God Hates Fags”?
R: Ahh, yes, Fred Phelps and his “church.” They do make the rest of us look rather bad, don’t they? But of course, I have to be careful in saying that—I know full well that I make Christians and the church look bad sometimes; and if spiritual pride, which is the sin of the Pharisees, is a subtler sort of betrayal, it’s no less poisonous for all that. Indeed, since it tends to creep in when we do something good, if we don’t watch it pride can corrupt all our victories. That illustrates, I think, the other point that needs to be made, which is that sanctification—the process of becoming holy—is a long, hard fight.
In truth, you might say that it’s two processes side by side. One is the unceasing war on sin, the work of putting sin to death; the other is what you might call the positive element, which is the work of nurturing the good. They are closely interwoven, of course, since our soul is going to grow something, whether it is good or bad; clearing out the weeds is an important part of caring for the good plants, while efforts to kill weeds are rather pointless without trying to grow something valuable in their place. Both, however, are the work of the Spirit in us, and both are also our work; once again, we have that combination. Paul puts it this way in Philippians 2:12-13: “Work out your salvation in fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.”
A: Interesting. I’ve heard people talk about the Holy Spirit before, but only Pentecostals, and they seemed more interested in justifying some fairly odd behavior.
R: Ahh, yes. Well, through his Spirit God has given his people gifts to contribute to the work of the church. Note that well, because a lot of Christians don’t really realize it: these are gifts of the Spirit to the church, not just to the individual, and so they aren’t necessarily new to the person who uses them. Some of the gifts of the Spirit are natural abilities which he blesses—administration, for example, or leadership.
A: Administration is a gift of the Spirit?
R: Well, it’s included in a list of them in 1 Corinthians 12. After all, running a church isn’t any easier than running a business; I can testify from personal experience that having someone gifted in that respect to take care of administrative tasks is a great blessing. It might not seem “spiritual,” but it’s a real asset to the ministry of the church. Anyway, many of the gifts of the Spirit are what you might call natural gifts—the gift of teaching is another example—but the supernatural gifts, such as prophecy, healing and tongues, tend to be the ones that draw the attention. It’s understandable, as they’re somewhat spectacular and tend to provoke strong reactions one way or the other.
A lot of people hold that the Spirit doesn’t give these gifts anymore, but I don’t think that argument holds water. The arguments from Scripture for this position are questionable at best, and the experience of the church worldwide doesn’t support it. For what it’s worth, my own experience doesn’t either, as I have seen the gifts of prophecy, healing, tongues, and words of knowledge and wisdom used to build up and strengthen the church; so for all those reasons, I believe that the Spirit still gifts his people in those ways.
That said, it is clear that there is great potential for self-deception and counterfeit gifts, and so it becomes very important to test any apparent supernatural gift. For example, one of my NT professors in college was a Pentecostal (as were all of my NT professors in seminary; rather an odd thing, that), and her rule for dealing with any apparent prophecy was not to trust it unless the Scripture supported it. Indeed, most of the time I have seen someone receive a word for a church or another person, it has been a word of Scripture—which would be a case of the Spirit directing the application of the text he inspired. I wouldn’t want to establish that as a typical means of exegeting Scripture—
A: Sorry, what does that mean?
R: My apologies—force of habit. Exegesis is the process of drawing out the meaning of a biblical text. It goes together with hermeneutics, which is the process of interpreting that meaning for and applying it to the needs and concerns of one’s audience. Rough definitions. Anyway, I’m a believer in careful exegesis supported by careful and detailed study of the Bible, and just because someone quotes Scripture doesn’t necessarily mean what they say is from the Spirit––the Devil knows the Bible, too, after all. The key is whether the statement offered is in line with the whole of Scripture, not just one proof-text; but then, that goes for all our efforts to interpret the Bible, all of which should be illuminated by the Spirit.
In any case, just to summarize: yes, I believe that the Spirit still gives people supernatural gifts, but these must be tested when they manifest themselves to ensure that they are truly from the Spirit of God. It seems to me, though, that to deny that he can or will give such gifts is rooted in our discomfort with them, and that such a denial is in essence an attempt to limit God, to make him more comfortable and predictable—and that is always a dangerous thing to do.
A: You seem to be a firm believer in a dangerous God.
R: I’m not sure “dangerous” is the right word; I would say “perilous,” perhaps because that’s the word Tolkien uses in The Lord of the Rings to describe those who are good and beautiful beyond the ability of mere mortals to handle. I like the way the writer Annie Dillard put it:
Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offence, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.
“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”—and I don’t think “fear” just means “respect.” He loves us, but everything about him is so much greater than we are that even his love for us is perilous—we cannot accept it and remain unchanged. Or as Lewis always has it said in Narnia, he’s not a tame lion. Good beyond imagining, but anything but tame.
A: I’m beginning to think that you’re a Christian for the same reason you’re a Tolkien fan.
R: Good, but backwards: I’m a Tolkien fan for the same reason I’m a Christian. For that matter, so was Tolkien, I think. But the thirst for God is primary, and underlies every other desire for that which is good and true and beautiful, and most especially the longing for something more, because God is the source of all that is good and true and beautiful, and because St. Augustine was right—our hearts are restless until they rest in him.
A: Either that or it’s the evolutionary impulse pushing us forward.
R: You could look at it that way, of course. In any case, I want to go back to my assertion that the gifts of the Spirit are gifts not primarily to the individuals who receive them but to the church. We often don’t think of them that way; we think of them as “my gifts,” even if we realize that we have been given them in order to build up the church. But it’s clear from the contexts in which these gifts are mentioned that they are truly gifts to the church through its individual members; the lists in Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12, for instance, occur together with Paul’s description of the church as the body of Christ, in which all the members fit together and each has a role to fill. But while this doesn’t fit our individualistic culture, it does fit the biblical understanding of the church, which is that God calls individuals not as lone wolves but as members of a larger community. His covenant is not with individuals as such but with a people.