Withdrawals of a Theological Junkie

Christmas

2011-12-25T23:43:00.002-05:00

While this isn't the first Christmas in which I've actually believed in the Incarnation, it is close.

It is too much. There is no way to understand it; no way to comprehend it; there is only a deep mystery that can be accessed through communion.

In the midst of the joy and thanksgiving of this day, I was reminded of the violence that continues to plague our world -- that continues to contradict the Incarnation by its very existence; that snubs its nose at its Lord's creatures; that can only seek more of itself, although the more it seeks the less it can have -- it, in the end, can have nothing for it produces nothings, loves nothing, honors nothing, venerates nothing. I think of those Catholics bombed in Nigeria today while attending Mass. I think of Christians around the Middle East who have been persecuted by others or displaced by occupying foreign armies.

To end violence in the world, we must first end violence in ourselves.

This will not, of course, guarantee our own freedom from violence -- the example of our Lord shows that such is the opposite of the case -- but it does guarantee that we will not increase violence and oppression, nor will we violate our neighbors.

The truly free man is the one who gives his neighbor freedom.

We cannot decree Muslim extremism unless we are willing to decry American imperialism or Christian colonialism.

"But they started it...!"

And as my dad would say, "So what? You finish it."

There can be no end of violence unless we are put to death in Christ.

Here is one of the mysteries of the Incarnation: he became what we are so that we might become what he is. The Incarnation, the taking on of Adamic flesh and redeeming it, necessarily ends in the Crucifixion. Not only was his coming an assault on the kingdom of darkness, but an assault on our willed complicity: here is a human will completely in subjection to the divine will -- we shall kill it. We have not, nor have we ever, wanted to be in subjection to God's will, even though it is freedom. We have wanted self-actualization, individual freedom, or whatever slogan we comfort ourselves with. And so we will kill the Son of God, or any son of God, to maintain it. To truly live we must join Christ on the cross. For then we have new birth -- a birth into a harder existence: but freedom is hard. It will take much work to become that which Christ is making us, but he continues to be the main actor; we are his workmanship. But we must walk. This is why the virgin birth, baptism, and the cross are so closely connected: they all say, "he became what we are so that we might become what he is". We must be born of the Virgin, the Church; we must descend into the Jordan, taking up the name and cause of sinners; we must be crucified and raised for the sake of the world.

If we are to live, to truly live, we must partake of Christ, which requires our death.

To end violence in the world, we must end violence in ourselves.

Other things...tasty things

2011-12-03T12:36:00.006-05:00

I usually blog about theology here, however I do have other passions. One of these passions is baking -- I've only started this complex artform in the last 5 years, mostly out of necessity (our coffeeshop needed baked goods and I'm free labor). I've grown to appreciate and love this craft, even though I have precious little time to devote to it. Yeasted breads are by far my favorite things to produce. Here are some photos from this week, in which, uncharacteristically, I've been able to bake a lot more than usual (once again, somewhat out of necessity as our shop baker resigned to work at -- of all places -- a bakery).

First is some croissants and pain au chocolat (croissants with chocolate in them) that I made to celebrate Bethany's birthday: I can make cakes, but French pastries say "I love you" instead of "Oh yeah, I should make you a cake".

Second is cheese Danishes and pain aux raisin (literally, "bread with raisins," but it is tastier if you say it in French). I made these, well, because. Just because. I've wanted to make danishes for a long time (as they are my favorite sweet bread), but have always been too fearful of them. However, I found an excellent recipe courtesy of The Fresh Loaf and was able to make them and the raisin cakes from the same basic dough. Always a plus -- these sold out fairly fast.

This last one is the regular ol' cinnamon rolls that I make for the shop. These, though, came out better than any I've ever made. They are pillowy and huge and tasty. I might have one for lunch.

Apart from this I made 2 batches of scones, 3 trays of cookies, 2 batches of jumbo berry muffins, 3 pies, and 4 loaves of bread (with one more that I'll be making with my daughter tomorrow). It was a busy, yet wonderfully fulfilling, week of baking. While I won't do the French stuff very often (croissants aren't hard, but they do require a lot of you), much of what I do will be available at the shop every week.

Just to get a little bit of theology in here: the kingdom of God is like three grains of yeast hidden in three measures of flour.

The Shattering Gospel

2011-11-21T22:20:00.002-05:00

As a student of systematics (which still is somewhat surprising to me), I deal with neat and tidy categories. However, when we are dealing with a 1) living Being who 2) transcends our mental capacities and language categories, systems break down. God, who is infinitely free to be for His creation what He needs to be (the import, as I understand it, of the famous "ehyeh asher ehyeh" in Exodus 3) and who is Love (as I John makes clear what already had been established and confirmed through all the pages of Scripture -- even justice, judgment, and wrath are expressions of love when the beloved has been seduced, defiled, and abused), tends more often than not to break our neat and tidy categories.

As "recreational" reading, I picked up TF Torrance's Space, Time, and Incarnation (note: I added the Oxford Comma to the title, even though it isn't in the Oxford University Press original). Torrance, usually, is not an easy read: STI continues such difficulty. However, I've found that even when I vehemently disagree with him, that I will eventually see that his view is necessary to maintain a proper systematic outlook (ex. I read, for my initial Systematics class at Trinity School for Ministry, a selection from his Incarnation that dealt with Athanasius' argument concerning whether properly God is first to be called 'Lord' or 'Father': Athanasius and Torrance said Father, I said Lord. Now I see that the relational-communion that God is means it is more proper to say He is Father first in Himself, Lord in relation to us, and therefore secondarily.) In STI, Torrance relates why the early Church rejected the notion that "space" was a receptacle: this would lead to a "two-storey" universe in which we are here, in this receptacle, and God is "out there" in His own "space" (which somehow comprehends the incomprehensible God?). So the Church rightly rejected such a dualistic idea, even if it was (as Torrance maintains) added back into Western Christianity via the influence of Augustinian thought. God could not be contained in such a "space," nor could a real Incarnation happen, as God cannot be limited in creational categories (this seems to me to be part and parcel of what happened in the Transfiguration).

Instead, God's realm and our realm overlaps and intersect in many ways, some of which I have talked about recently on this blog. The Eternal enters the temporal in the Incarnation -- prepared for by the whole history of Israel -- so that the temporal might enter the Eternal in the corporate prayer and worship of the Church, who is the Body of the One who fills both heaven and earth. Instead of a primary dualism between two "spaces," heaven and earth physically conceived, there is a primary unity effected by Christ -- heaven and earth, the realm of the divine and the realm of the created, are forever joined by the actions of the Christ in the temporal realm (his life and ministry) so that we can evermore participate in the life of communion that God was, is, and always will be.

I'm still working through all this -- it is quite heady. But I see a lot of profit possible in Torrance's work.

The Glory of Baptism

2011-11-13T13:40:00.002-05:00

I heard a wonderful sermon on John 17:22-27 today, courtesy of Pastor Barry York of Kokomo, Indiana (the Beach Boys wrote a song about that place). The thrust of the message was that the Cross is where Christ's self-giving glory is fully revealed (it reminded me of G.B. Caird's work on doxa in the Gospel of John), so our glory -- which is given to us by Christ -- is fully actualized in our own suffering for the Kingdom and for each other. We find union with Christ by partaking of his sufferings and we find union with one another when we partake of each other's sufferings. In other words, the Eucharist continues -- even now -- to be a remembrance of his death, which we participate in (see The Reality of Worship for an attempted explanation of this) every time we take of it (I really do think that the most fitting end to today's Church would have been Eucharist -- hopefully someday we'll go to weekly celebration). To put all this in theology-speak, we undergo theosis as we share in Christ's kenosis.

How, though, do we partake of the sufferings of Christ, of his glory? The start of our glory is baptism, where we are put to death -- not physically, but in a more real way than that -- in Christ's historical and eternal act of self-giving. We participate in the Cross, fully and forever, at the moment of our baptism (this, thankfully, takes baptism out of the mode of the "magical" and places it firmly in the intersection between heaven and earth). This being "put to death" is the beginning of our glory, of our sharing in the Life of God Himself. When we are born again in baptism, we first die in Christ's death, so that we might no longer fear death, but live to God in all moments of our continuing biological existence. When Christ tells us that we have "passed from death to life" it means that our biological personhood has been transcended by our ecclesial personhood, our life in Christ and his Body, the Church. We now can go out into the world, sharers of Christ's glory, to do the work that Christ is already doing and has guaranteed success for us -- which is to bring glory to God in the realm of history and space, even as it already is in heaven.

Lord, glorify Your Son, and his Body, that Your glory -- Your self-giving nature of love -- might be seen in our lives and that the world might participate in that love which is Life. Amen.

The Desire of God

2011-11-03T23:20:00.003-04:00

Today in my Bible class (they are a patient lot), we were speaking of the changes in Old Testament spirituality between the time of the Tabernacle and the Temple. One of the themes that connects both of those "eras," as it were, is that of Divine intimacy (a phrase I owe to my professor and now colleague Dr. Byron Curtis). That is, God's goal, His desire, is to dwell with His people: "I will be their God and they shall be My people" being an oft repeated phrase. When this way of considering God's desire is fully imbibed, it can change the way we read the entire Bible.

Why does God call Israel? Because He wants to create the conditions necessary for His dwelling with men. What does that mean? The world has been infected by sin and death, from which it must be cleansed for God's holy Presence to abide there. Hence the sacrificial system: it is not there primarily as an means of God's wrath, but as a means of His great grace. The dwelling place, whether Tabernacle or Temple, must be coated in life ("the life of the flesh is in the blood" as Leviticus tells us), so that God's holiness, which is Life itself, may dwell there and so that the people may find life there as well (the Dwelling was the pre-incarnation icon of Christ's gift of the Holy Spirit). If OT Israel acts faithfully as God's priestly-kingdom, they will bring cleansing to the entire world, thereby restoring the Edenic conditions necessary for God to walk "in the cool of the day" with His image-bearers, man and woman. However, we see that this does not happen. Israel is too mired in sin and death, too mired in the corrupt state brought about by Adam in the Garden, to faithfully bring this task about. The Dwelling becomes more about privilege and magic (Is. 1:12-15 comes to mind here), where once sin and death are vaunted above God, all that is needed is a few hocus-pocus words, a substitute death, and -- voila! -- Israel is back on top. Israel, the new Adam, the ones who were to mediate God's Life to the nations, are no different than the goyim and must be cast out of the Sanctuary, lest they pollute it so much that God can no longer dwell there. And yet...

God travels with His exiles (this is the brunt of Ezekiel 1 and 8-10) into exile, continuing to show them that His goal is not judgment, but mercy (as James tells us, mercy triumphs over judgment -- Hallelujah!), not wrath, but intimacy.

This helps us to understand, if only partially (as it must always be with such a profound mystery), the Incarnation. God takes to Himself human nature, in the tightest intimacy possible, so that all human nature might be healed and set free from sin and death, from the corruption that effectively blocks full Divine intimacy. This makes the death of Christ not necessarily a "divine child-abuse," but rather the full healing of creation through sin and death doing their worst to the very Creator of the universe. Now Christ triumphs over them, for death cannot in the end snuff out Life (this can be seen in all Christ's miracles and seems to be their main import -- Life triumphs over uncleanness, sin, corruption, and death) and gives us of God's very Life, the Holy Spirit, so that we might live with the same quality of life that Jesus has (what we call "eternal" -- but the time referent is not the dominant idea here, rather the enduring quality of that life: this is also what makes Hell so heinous, it is "eternal" as well, an enduring quality of death).

This should change how we view the atonement that Christ has effected for God's creation: substitutionary atonement, in this view, sits comfortably side by side with more patristic views of Christus Victor, etc. God's love, not His wrath or justice, is the driving motivation and fully grounds wrath and justice: God implacably hates that which brings sin, corruption, and death and is willing to take them on in the Incarnation and Cross so that they eventually might be eliminated. This also affects our view of the Church: it is the place where the Life of God is to be most manifest -- what does the Life of God look like practically? Forgiveness of enemies, reconciliation, caring for the weak and vulnerable (here is where God's justice is fully expressed), and sharing in full communion with one another and with the Lord Christ who has given himself body and soul for our incorporation into the Life of God.

Hallelujah, for the Lord Christ reigns.

The Theology of the Kaiser's Kitchen

2011-10-22T11:37:00.002-04:00

"Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made." -- quote often misattributed to Kaiser Otto von Bismarck

I had always heard the quote above in the variant form: "If you enjoy sausages, stay out of the Kaiser's kitchen." An admittedly odd phrase, but the principal is apt. We like things until we see how the come to be. Church history, for example, is one of these things. We would like to belive that the Church has always, peacefully, believed what She does now -- however, the history is much different. It is a history, much like that of the Old or New Testaments, that reveal a fundamentally human element, yet one that is guided by God to a proper fulfillment: for example, Constantine was an Arian sympathesizer, yet allowed the Nicean Council to condemn it (this, by the way, is the exact opposite of the "popular" understanding that floats around on, say, the History Channel -- if you ask Gnostic scholars, you'll get Gnostic answers).

The study of the Bible is the same way. One of the corollaries of common, naive belief (and I don't mean naive perjoratively here) is that the Bible is the Bible is the Bible. Truth be told, textual issues make up some of the hardest to deal with part of scholarship: there is no one text of the Bible for the people of God. Just in the world of the Old Testament, there is the Masoretic Text (Hebrew), the Old Greek, the Septuagint (which has variant text bases), the Peshitta, the Targums, Symmachus, Lucian, Apollos, the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Vulgate. (It is important to note that while all these are different -- and often in different languages -- they agree on the large majority of things: textual criticism is a very careful science that is easily overblown in the popular imagination). Which of these is the "inspired Word of God"? If we look to the New Testament for answers, the answer is: sometimes the MT, sometimes the LXX, sometimes something different that nobody has (usually due to gezera scheva interpretation -- something the Church could do well with reclaiming). This has led historical-critical scholars toward conjectural emendation to produce some sort of Ur-text to rule them all (if only the had read their Lord of the Rings! Is the eclectic, critical text the "inspired Word of God"? I still have my doubts.

Maybe it is best to say that God always inspires His Word, not in a passive way, but in the active way of His Spirit guides the Church through the reading of the Scriptures, even if we are unsure of the exact text basis for all things. Being in the Kaiser's kitchen, seeing how the sausage is made, can turn us off from the sausage itself. We must remember, though, that the Lord of the Kitchen can still delight and satisfy all comers with His delectable flesh. Taste and see that the Lord is good.

Implications of the Incarnation

2011-10-11T09:42:00.002-04:00

The Incarnation, God's taking on of created matter in the body and soul of Jesus, means that Christianity is inherently an anti-dualistic faith (St. Irenaeus was right, in other words, to fight so ferociously against Gnosticism). That is, Christianity not only sees the created order (the kosmos) as essentially 'good' (Gen. 1), but as reestablished in its goodness due to Christ's coming "in the flesh" (I Jn.) and the eschatological work of the Spirit in the Church (Rom. 8).

This can be seen, firstly, in the interaction between Christ and the woman with an issue of blood (Mk. 5). In the Levitical standards, if a person comes into contact with someone who is 'unclean' (breaks the blood boundary, e.g., not necessarily a 'sinful' person), then they become unclean themselves. However, notice that Christ not only does not become unclean, but rather cleanses this poor woman. He, in the flesh, has brought healing and holiness to this woman. Her flesh is made clean by coming into contact with Christ (notice, as well, the role of allegiance or faith in the encounter -- her faith was an active faith).

More can be said, though. Some of the seemingly insignificant details of the Gospels become radiant when viewed through the Incarnation. When Christ goes down into the waters of the Jordan, his presence blesses all waters: the holiness of God has been brought down to the mundane level. Because of this reality, we can be thankful for all waters. When Christ eats with his disciples after the Resurrection, even though food was not technically necessary, he blesses food and eating forever, which we receive with thankfulness. When he is crucified on a tree, he blesses all trees, for which we can be thankful. Christ restores the world to its wholeness and fulness, even reversing the curse on the ground (Gen. 3) by wearing the thorns upon his blood-sweat brow and by being entombed in the earth.

The Incarnation, then, is the foundation for an ecological ethic: if Christ has made the whole world holy, then we must treat all things as such. All things have meaning in relation to God, especially as God has revealed Himself through the Incarnation. This is why the Apostle Paul might tell us that the whole creation eagerly awaits its release into the glorious liberty of the children of God. Christ, by his coming, has brought Jubilee -- the whole world has reverted to its rightful owner, the Lord Himself, and we are His tenants and stewards of this great, awesome, and mysterious place that has been cleansed for God's Presence by the body and blood of Christ himself.

Hallelujah.

Christology and Soteriology

2011-10-09T17:54:00.002-04:00

Another thing that should go without saying: whatever your Christology is (your beliefs about who Jesus Christ is, how he is related to God the Father, how he is related to mankind, what he has done, etc.) determines what your soteriology is (the teachings about what 'salvation' is).

I've been reading, in fits and starts, through R.P.C Hanson's "The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God" about the early 4th century Arian controversy. One of the problems he brings up, as he is detailing the history of interpretation, is that often scholars have assumed that Arius had no soteriology, that is, he was concerned only with the oddly impenetrable philosophical dogmas concerning the immutable, Platonic/Aristotelian High God (the Father) and the lesser, "second," mutable god (the Son). However, looking at the Patristic preoccupation with the "economy of salvation" (how God is working to save His creation in time -- often translated, interestingly enough, by the word Incarnation), it is hard to believe that Arius and the Arians could have made a sufficient splash into the turbulent theological waters of the time without a rival soteriology -- a rival economy to the pro-Nicenes.

I won't go into details of what that rival economy is, Hanson does a much better job than I could. The main point that I want to explore is: what soteriology does classical Christianity, that is, Christianity bounded by the creeds, produce? The Creeds, as is well known, are concerned either with the relation between Father and Son (Nicene, for example) or the relation between the Divine Person of the Word/Son and the assumed human nature in the history of Jesus the Messiah (Chalcedon, for example). That these are implicitly soteriology is not always obvious to those of us who aren't Eastern Orthodox, but they are. For the Trinitarian creeds (the first category), the assumption is that only God can save us, Jesus Christ saves us, therefore Jesus Christ must be God. The form this takes is the (seemingly still) controversial homoousias -- Jesus, the Word/Son, is of the same substance as the Father (the East would take this in a different -- and I think better -- direction than the West: God the Father is the Monarch from whom the Son and Spirit are respectively generated and spirated, instead of a (seemingly) autonomous and impersonal substance in which all three are implicated). The Christological creeds, then, take this soteriology further: certainly only God can save us, but mankind (humanity as such) must be brought by this action from death to life, so the Son must assume a full human nature (complete with body and soul: will included) that is brought through death to life, both in the fact that God has assumed it (the effects of the Divine Person of the Word on the body in the Incarnation) and the cross/resurrection event. If this does not happen, then we cannot be saved in the fullest sense: we cannot have a real union with Christ through the Spirit, who is the Life of God Himself (it is important here to remember that Patristic theologians never forgot that spirit can also mean "breath," that is, the very principle of life in an animate being: God's Spirit is His Life which He shares with us who are joined to Christ through faith and baptism.

This means that the concept of 'salvation' needs to be carefully explained. Certainly there is not an emphasis on salvation as a one-time event/experience of being "born again," as we find in modern evangelicalism broadly. Instead, the one event of salvation is that of the Incarnation (broadly conceived to include everything from the "incarnation proper" -- the miraculous conception of the Lord -- to his death, resurrection, ascension, and Session at the right hand of the Father) that, as both a historical, time-bounded reality and as the eternal reality of God as Trinity (see my post The Reality of Worship on this) is much broader and inclusive and objective than a subjective "born again" experience. 'Salvation,' as far as the human believer is concerned, entails being brought into the worshipping community of God (this is the real import of justification), and being conformed to the image of the Son progressively (sanctification or theosis). It is, then, a "once for all" event that reverberates throughout every moment of creational history: 'salvation' must be both entrance into the Church and growth into sainthood.

The creeds, by and large, assume the first aspect of salvation: Jesus Christ has come, he has died, he has risen, he will come again. The second aspect, the theotic aspect, is what they are concerned to safeguard. Our union with Christ, the progressive submission of our wills to the will of God (hence why monothelitism was such a threat!), must be maintained. If Christ is to not only be our Savior, but our model ("walk as he walked" as John says), then his humanity must be full and we must be conformed to that humanity. The 'how' of that I've attempted to explain in my Real Predestination series: the Spirit works in us and we work with the Spirit (asceticism and God's work are closely united). So man, by both the work and the hypostatic union of Christ, is brought to conformity with the Son in his glorified, resurrected humanity which must, if it is to overcome death and corruption, be united to God Himself through the indwelling of the Spirit.

The Reformed tradition, for the most part, does not make much of theosis. However, if we are to call ourselves orthodox, we must wrestle with the implications of the creeds we claim to profess. Part of the reason, it seems to me, that Calvin and his successors are often accused of Nestorianism is because we have not, by and large, connected our Christology to our soteriology.

Theology for the Unimpressed

2011-10-08T23:06:00.002-04:00

Theology is a discipline of listening attentively before ever speaking.

One of the detriments of the Reformed tradition is that we often speak before we listen. I've been part of and privy to many conversations that, had we known all the facts, had we consulted the sources, had we a hint of sense to shut up now and again, could have saved much strife, much fear, and much hurt to various brothers and sisters in the Lord (and even folks not in the Lord, whom we are never commanded to hurt). I'm trying to parse out whether this is just an unfortunately pitfall that is totally unnecessary for those in the Reformed tradition, or if it is part-and-parcel of the experience (yet still totally indefensible and sinful -- but since when does following God lead to sin?).

In other words, as I draw towards the end of another part of my theological education, I find I have much more to learn. Much of it cannot be learned from books (theology is, in that way, like farming -- those who learn it from books quickly find that they are destroying themselves and the land and those people who depend on the land), but books and writings are always nearby. Much of it needs to be learned through listening and participating in the Word of God, Jesus Christ, in worship: the communal reading of the Scriptures and the breaking of bread.

Lex orandi, lex credendi.

The Ascetic's Prayer

2011-09-24T21:07:00.003-04:00

To be said upon rising in the morning, each morning:

Lord, this day I begin walking the path of Christ. Give me the strength of Your Holy Spirit, who is Life, to walk without stumbling. Give me the peace of Your Holy Spirit, who is Life, to be raised by You when I fall. Give me the wisdom of Your Holy Spirit, who is Life, to know that I am always a youth in this Spiritual life.

In the name of Your Son, Jesus Christ, who walked the path before me and is the Way Himself.

Amen.

The Reality of Worship

2011-09-20T21:45:00.002-04:00

I've had the opportunity over the last two weeks to direct my sight to the Kingdom of God, in ways which either I hadn't for some time or never had at all. The more I learn, I find the less I know (in that infinity keeps getting bigger). We turn towards the Kingdom and find entrance through Jesus Christ, whom the Church witnesses to (even in our failure -- the essence of the Church is forgiveness and healing). This led to the following set of thoughts about what exactly it is that the Church does when it gathers for worship. (This will build off the Chalcedonian theology series that I have been steadily adding to, yet go in a significantly different direction).

God is the creator of all things, including time (Gen. 1:14). That means, regardless of how unfathomable it is, God dwells outside the constraints and bounds of time. He is truly eternal. Eternal, though, often is understood in terms of time: I recently heard a pastor speak of "eternity past," which -- while an interesting heuristic device -- does not a whole lot of sense; eternity cannot be past, present, or future. It just is. So God, dwelling in an eternal 'now' (getting deeper than this has taxed Christian theologians for centuries, for example Boethius in the early "medieval" period -- I have no desire to go beyond the bounds of Scripture, nor of received theology, so I will stay shy of such speculations), operates His Kingdom always in its fulness. Being that we are in time, and not yet in the fulness of His eschatological purposes, means that we cannot always perceive this reality (Jn. 3:3). However, when we speak of the Kingdom, we are speaking of this very present reality: a reality that is not "becoming" or "progressing," but simply is. Yet we are supposed to enter it, indeed enter it "born of water and the Spirit" (Jn. 3:5), that is by baptism and by faith. So this reality, this Kingdom, can only be entered via the mediation of the body of Christ -- which Christ acts through in time and space -- the Church. My contention is that in the regular worship of the Church we transcend earthly, time-bound reality and enter into God's Kingdom in the fullest way current possible -- indeed, Paul says that we are even "seated with Christ in the heavenly places" (a good question to ask that is often not asked: where is Christ seated?) (Eph. 2:6).

This really gets to the nature of the Church and its worship. God had said through Amos that "Surely the Sovereign LORD does nothing without revealing his plan to his servants the prophets" (Amos 3:7). Moses hoped that "all the LORD's people were prophets and that the LORD would put his Spirit on them" (Num. 11:29), which was prophesied by Joel (2:28ff.) and fulfilled at the day of Pentecost (Acts 2). All the Lord's people, who have been born of water and the Spirit, are prophets. But what is a prophet? We often think of prophets as those who receive messages from the Lord. While this is true (and we still do receive messages through the reading of the Scriptures which remain active, living, and powerful even today), the role of the prophet is greater than that: they are counsellors of God, like Abraham the prophet was (Gen. 20:7), who intercede for others (the ministries of Moses and Jeremiah are key in this regard). More on this anon.

Another aspect that must be considered is the role of the Church qua Church: an ekklesia, a called-out assembly, was a ruling council of the city-state in which it was found. Christ's ekklesia is part of his basileia (kingdom/kingship) and hence functions as his ruling-council, interceding for whatever Babylon the individual/metropolitan assembly happens to be in (this is the basis of local ecumenicity)--this is the kingly aspect of the Church. This dovetails nicely with the prophetic/intercessional role of the Church (the priestly, that is, the teaching role of the Church, will not considered here). We, the prophets/counsellors of the Lord, who intercede for the world, enter God's throne room (cf. the book of Revelation) to do the work God has called us to do, equipped us to do, in the world -- the work that He is already at work doing, but remember He does nothing without first consulting His prophets!

This means that whenever we enter into worship, we are entering the timeless, eternal state of the Kingdom for the very purpose of interceding for those in time. This makes much more sense of, say, the doctrine of predestination, as we in worship enter the realm of God's decree and intercede, saying (hopefully): "Lord, save all mankind (1 Tim. 2:1-4); may we be accursed from Your presence that some might be saved (Rom. 9:2-4)." Certainly, we do not make the decision for God (He remains sovereign -- notice that the word now has concrete meaning in the action of the deliberative royal council), but we cry out, knowing that "the prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective" (James 5:16).

This also has implications for our Eucharistic theology. Christ the Lamb, "slain from the foundation of the world" (Rev. 13:8 -- some translations refer this phrase to the writing in the book of life), is the one we partake of in his eternal enthronement. So when we partake of the Eucharist (or communion or the Lord's Supper or whatever), we are partaking of the very event -- which is both eternal and time-bound to ca. AD 30. Christ is slain, Christ was slain, in the Kingdom means the same thing. This would go a long way to resolving the ongoing debate between memorialists, consubstantionists, and transubstantists: we are speaking of the same eternal reality with different language (I'm still not convinced that Aristotelian categories, such as in the Roman Catholic and Lutheran traditions are particularly helpful, but that is neither here nor there): liturgical extension takes ourselves, our bread, our wines, our "one loaf" that is the Church, to the very event where Christ is present both as Victim and Victor.

It is important to note that although I am speaking of worship as an entering into an eternal state, I am not suggesting a magical suspension of time happens: time still passes for us for we are created beings not yet attained to the resurrection of the dead (Come quickly, Lord Jesus). It is precisely this interaction of the eternal and the temporal (in an hypostatic union, maybe?) that is the theatre of God's work: we leave the public worship of the Church, where we hear God's Word, partake of the Word, and speak the Word back to God so that we might bring the Life of God (the Spirit) to a dying world. To direct that world to the Kingdom of God, to see and to enter through "water and Spirit," so that the kingdoms of this world might become the Kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ. And He shall reign forever and ever. Amen.

A Children's Compline

2011-08-07T21:19:00.002-04:00

This is, roughly, what we do each night for prayers. Being that we are RP, the Psalms listed are selections from either the red or blue psalter. This little liturgy is based off of the short, daily devotional compline in the Book of Common Prayer. Feel free, if you like, to use it in your family. We find it very beneficial to have a set pattern for night time prayers, especially since the various repetitions allow for good, extemporaneous conversation and catechesis. Also, we raise our hands at the appropriate time during the "call to worship" -- children understand liturgical action, sometimes better than adults do: they aren't natural dualists.

Children will quickly memorize much of this. Olivia has Psalm 134, the Shema, the Lord's Prayer, and the benediction down pat. This is good, especially since she is learning to pray and needs many models/grammars to work with.

Depending on the size of the reading (and remember, "faith comes by hearing, hearing comes by the Word of God") determines how long this takes. We average between 5-15 minutes.

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Call to Worship: Psalm 134 (read or sung)
"Behold now, bless the Lord, all you servants of the Lord, you that stand by night in the House of the Lord! Lift up your hands in the holy place and bless the Lord! The Lord bless you out of Zion."

Reading: A passage from Scripture; we are going through the Pentateuch and afterwards will go through the Gospels
At the close of the reading: (Leader) "The Word of the Lord" (Everyone) "Thanks be to God"

(Leader) "And what do we believe about God?"
(Children) "The Shema: Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and strength. And you shall love your neighbor as yourself."
(Leader) "And what does Jesus say about the Shema?"
(Children) "There is no commandment greater than these" or "On these hang all the Law and the Prophets"

At the point, we ask for prayer requests, concentrating on what we are thankful for and for which neighbors we can pray. We either take turns praying or the leader offers all the requests to God. We end with the Lord's Prayer.

"Our Father, who is in heaven, hallowed be Your Name. Your Kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For Yours is the Kingdom, the power, and the glory. Forever. Amen."

Psalm 4 (sung from the red psalter): "I will both lay me down in peace and quiet sleep will take, because Thou only me to dwell in safety, Lord, dost make. In safety, Lord, dost make."

Benedition: "The Almighty and Merciful Lord, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, bless us and keep us. Amen."

Sermon Text: Matthew 14:13-21

2011-08-01T13:39:00.002-04:00

This is the text from a sermon I deliverd to 1st Presbyterian (PCUSA) Beaver Falls on July 31, 2011. Unfortunately there was no audio recording. A very kind and generous congregation -- I hope to be back there soon.

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Politics is always connected to food. Whether it is the question put to all politicians, meant to judge their closeness to the people, “How much do a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk cost?” or the reports that if some action (it doesn’t seem to matter what) is not taken about the debt ceiling, many will go hungry, politics is always connected to food. Our passage, and the one that immediately precedes it, show this to be true. There are two kingdoms being contrasted here: one whose politics are fear and violence; the other whose way are love, service, and abundance. These two kingdoms exist together, always in tension as tares and wheat, calling for our exclusive allegiance – our faith – and giving us a way of life to navigate this world.

The first kingdom presented to us is that of Herod the Tetrarch. It would be instructive to read these verses: (read 14:1-12). From the start, note that Herod is fearful. He wants to see Jesus because he is worried that this is John the Baptist, raised again from the dead. If this were so, it would indelibly stamp the execution as unjust, as tyrannical, and compromise Herod’s claims to power (we must notice, though, that no one – whether in the ancient world or today – did or does look at his actions as even remotely just, but the self-justifying heart of man is strengthened by power). All of Herod’s actions that led to the death of the Baptist were motivated by fear: fear of the multitude initially kept John alive, fear of his dinner guests killed John, and fear of John – a little late – causes him to seek out Jesus. Never, though, is there the fear of God which would have turned Herod away from his adulterous and incestuous sins.

Herod’s use of food here is in direct contrast to what we will see the Lord do. Herod does not feed the multitudes that he fears, but rather those who are already filled. While the Lord instructs us to go into the “highways and the hedges” to invite the blind, the poor, the sick, we can assume no such attendees at this swank gala – Herod is inviting those who share status, rank, and power with him. This is a birthday party to consolidate and legitimate his power over Judea – possibly even with an eye towards the title that his father held, “king of the Jews.” It is here that the request of a different kind of food is made: the head of John the Baptist on a platter. Herod’s fear and his lust have conspired together to devour the prophet of the Lord.

The second kingdom presented is different in almost every way. The Lord Christ has no fear of the multitudes, rather he has compassion, breaking his mourning over John to heal their sick. This healing, as always in Matthew’s Gospel, is connected to the in-breaking of the Kingdom of God. Recall the last time John and Jesus had correspondence. John asks him “Are you the one who is to come? Or do we look for another?” Jesus replies, “The blind see and the lame walk; the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear; the dead are raised up and the poor have the good news proclaimed to them. And blessed is he who is not offended because of me” (11:3-6). Jesus’ work as an exorcist, as a healer, and as a herald all point to the Kingdom, of which he is the head. Christ has no need to invite those in power to his messianic banquet; instead he invites the outcast, the prostitute, the tax man, the drunk, the homosexual, the drug dealer to share his bread and to change their lives, so that they might participate in the Kingdom of God.

As the healing work comes to a close with the onset of night, the disciples seek relief for these masses and for their Lord: send them to the villages for dinner and rest. It is, after all, a wilderness they are in. Jesus, though, will not send them away, he will not scatter them as sheep without a shepherd, as Mark tells us in his rendition of this story. Rather, the disciples are to feed them. But with what? There are only 5 loaves and two fish. This is where the religious principle of remembering comes in. In the Psalms we are often instructed to “remember the mighty works of the Lord.” The reason is twofold: we must be reminded of what God has done and can still do, but also we remind the Lord of our state and pray that He would do these mighty works again for us. Here, in the wilderness, with a large group of hungry people, the disciples’ memories should have gone to the Exodus. Has not God fed His people with manna from heaven? Couldn’t He do it again?

Not only does God do it, but in His abundance He goes above and beyond. The manna would produce only enough for the day, here there are 12 baskets of fragments left over. The manna would provide only for what was needed, here “all ate and were filled.” The host of this party, as opposed to Herod, did not provide this lavish banquet to secure his power, but rather out of the excess of his love and compassion. This contrast goes back in Matthew’s Gospel to a previous conflict of two kingdoms. While Jesus was hungry in the wilderness (how can we not see the connection Matthew has placed for us between these two stories?), Satan tempted him with earthly rule and bread: “If you are the Son of God, make these stones become bread.” To which the Lord answered, “It is written: Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” Jesus’ love for his Father, his willing obedience to the divine plan, overflows at this point so that he might love his neighbor better than himself. He did not seek the power that Satan offered him, nor does he seek it here. Indeed, at the start of the next story, Jesus makes his cabinet ministers (the disciples) leave the scene while he dismisses the crowd – this will not be a day that makes him a civil king, the road to his throne has yet to go through the cross. His power, true power, comes through self-giving service. The Lord first takes his throne on the cross, and dispenses forgiveness and grace to even his enemies from there: “Father, forgive them, they do not know what they do.” For it is in the cross of Christ, foreshadowed by his gifts of healing and sustenance, that the wisdom of God – the ways by which He has ordained the world to its goal of shalom and the indwelling of His Presence – are powerful: “We speak of the wisdom of God in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God ordained before the ages for our glory, which none of the rulers of this age knew; for had they known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (I Cor. 2:7). God rules through the cross; the cross rules – and transforms our lives now and in the fullness of the age to come – through our self-giving love to one another and to those who hunger, both physically and spiritually, outside the community.

We have before us two kingdoms: the kingdom of Herod and the kingdom of Christ. Both are calling for our allegiance. The added difficulty for us is that sometimes the kingdom of Herod masquerades as the kingdom of Christ. Just this last week in Norway a young man, fighting for what he called the “European Christian culture,” took up the weapons of Herod against those who did not fit his ideal society. He feared the end of his way of life due to Muslim influence and followed in the footsteps of those who desire power over life. Proverbs speaks of those like this, warning us: “Do not enter the path of the wicked, and do not walk in the way of evil. Avoid it, do not travel on it; turn away from it and pass on. For they do not sleep unless they have done evil; and their sleep is taken away unless they make someone fall. For they eat the bread of wickedness, and drink the wine of violence” (4:14-17). This kingdom, often seeking to look like Christ’s kingdom, calls us to violence against that which is different from us. While we are not to let sin stand in our churches, Paul makes that abundantly clear in I Corinthians 5, we are to have compassion on those outside our community, showing them that the Gospel – the Kingdom of the Lord – gives a new, a different, a better way of life. Our war is not against flesh and blood enemies, after all, but against spiritual wickedness in high places – our weapons are the Word of God, prayer, and the self-giving acts of service such as the sharing of bread. This is the wisdom that those who think they rule the world, whether earthly tyrants or the demonic, cannot understand: “the light came into the world and the darkness did not comprehend it,” as John tells us.

This better way of life, this different politics of love and compassion, is not an easy road. Christ describes it later in Matthew this way: “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and those who are great exercise authority over them. Yet it shall not be so among you; but whoever desires to become great among you, let him be your servant. And whoever desires to be first among you, let him be your slave – just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many” (20:25-28). The thrust of this passage is clear: our way of living together, what we often call politics, is to be based on the example and the work of Christ. We are to follow him in all things. Rather than being served, we are to serve. For “he who seeks to find his life shall lose it, but he who loses his life for my sake shall find it,” says our Lord.
So, here is the mystery of Christ’s kingdom: it is not he himself who distributes the bread, but the disciples, both the Twelve and us today. In other words, to be allegiant to Christ’s kingdom is, as John puts it in his first epistle, to “walk as he walked.” Is not Christ’s primary call to “deny ourselves, take up the cross, and follow him”? We speak of politics and leadership often in terms of Herod’s kingdom – which we mistaken call Real Politik, instead of the self-giving Kingdom of Christ. Are we willing to give our lives, to deny ourselves and take up the cross, to follow the Christ who gives himself as a ransom for many? Are we willing, as John the Baptist was, to stand up to power with the good news of the Messiah, that the real world is not this way, not the way of war, of violence, but the way of peace that will, yes, require our lives and our faith in a God who raises the dead? Consider the words of John Stott, an influential theologian who passed away very recently, “The authority by which the Christian leads is not power but love, not force but example, not coercion but reasoned persuasion. Leaders have power, but power is only safe in the hands of those who humble themselves to serve.” Christ is king because he first humbled himself; we must follow in his footsteps so that God might be pleased to entrust us with His life-giving power.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a martyr of the last century, famously said: “When God calls a man, He bids him come and die.” Both kingdoms, that of Herod and that of Jesus, call us to die – that much is inescapable. The question is the basis of the kingdom: is it fear, or is it love? Is it selfish taking, or selfless giving? But not only this, we must also ask where the kingdom ends up. Certainly, the kingdom of Herod might end in earthly power, whether over Judea or as the last great superpower, but as Proverbs says, “The way of the wicked is like darkness; they do not know what makes them stumble.” The Kingdom of Christ, even though it may entail our physical death, ends in the resurrection. Consider what the Apostle Paul says about this: “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall certainly be revealed in us. For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Romans 8:18-21). Our giving up of the kingdom of Herod, as hard as it might be, is the entrance towards becoming like Christ – this suffering leads to glory, true glory, in which the shalom of God covers the earth, the lion lies down with the lamb, and “they shall neither hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain, says the Lord.”

This self-giving is best expressed in our sharing of food. Who we eat with is who we love; who we love are those that Christ has given his grace to, our neighbors, our friends, and even our enemies. Christ shared his food with the multitude and shares the true food that is his body with us in his wonderful Supper. His body, broken on the cross, makes us the one loaf that feeds the waiting world. Then he says, in the words of this parable, “You give them something to eat.” While Herod was content to share only with those who were like himself and could expand his influence and domain, Christ and his disciples share with those who hunger after justice, after righteousness, who walk on foot to hear the Master and be healed by him. There is no better thing for us to do, today and into the future, than to follow this Christ and to do his works – to feed the hungry, to slake the thirsty, to clothe the naked, to visit the prisoner, to offer even a cup of cold water to the one in need, so that the world might see and turn to the living God. Amen.

The Basis of Theology

2011-07-24T18:54:00.003-04:00

In the Psalms there is an emphasis on "recounting the deeds of the Lord." The Psalmist, whomever the individual writer happens to be (if that is even ascertainable or important), recounts or retells the mighty saving works of YHWH to remember them. However, this remembrance is not a mere wistful reminiscence, but rather a double call to action: we act certain ways because God has acted such-and-such in the past and we call on God to act in the ways that He has acted in the past; ways that are "just, true, and right always." This is the genius of the Psalms: they are not idyllic poetry, nor are they the syrupy language of modern praise songs, rather they are like Moses' intercession before God, they not only remind us and spur us to faithfulness, but call on God to act faithfully in a situation, especially where He seems not to care or to have 'forgotten' His covenant (the Psalms are replete with such language, what some might think of as "unbelief" but it rather serves this essential liturgical -- and psychological -- purpose). This is one of the reasons (and maybe the best) for a church to use the Psalms -- in some way, shape, or form -- in their worship: they are dialogical between the God who is there in Christ and us in Christ.

We see the same double act of remembrance (or 'memorial') elsewhere in the Scriptures: in Leviticus, one of the offerings -- the mincha or tribute (badly translated as "grain offering") -- is given "as a memorial." That is, it calls the worshipper to remember God's faithfulness, but also calls God to remember the offerer and act in his favor. The same language is used by both Jesus and Paul in regards to the Eucharist: "do this in remembrance of me." We both remember the sacrifice of the Lord Christ, but also call God to remember in also and bless us who are joined covenantally (by faith through baptism) to that same Lord who is now risen and rules over all as King.

These liturgical moments, repeated (hopefully at least) weekly in Christian assembly, are the basis of theology: the double memorial of the great works of God on behalf of His people for the sake of His whole creation. This is a decidely non-philosophical theology, in that philosophical speculation (whether about the one and the many or substance ontology or satisfaction and merit or whatever) is not the basis of Christian thought and praxis, but rather the historical (both Historie and Geschicte for those who have ears to hear) work of God in creation, redemption, and consummation. This realigns philosophy, however, to its proper place: the understanding of God's world and how properly to live in it. This also connects what has often been sundered: philosophy and the biblical Wisdom traditions.

An example, albeit brief, of how this might look comes from I John. Many people know the verse, "God is love" (4:8) from this book. Taken by itself, it can lead to a picture of God as abstract (and therefore irrelevant) as any scholastic theory. However, John thoroughly connects it to the economy of salvation a chapter earlier when he says: "This is how we know love: Christ laid down his life for us." In other words, if you want to know what it means for God to be love, you must look at the cross: all our understanding of God flows from His works in our history and are made present to us in worship.

My first sermon

2011-07-04T21:35:00.002-04:00

The texts for the day this was delivered were Jeremiah 24:1-10 and Romans 9:19-33. Pardon the tinny noise -- I am, after all, a theological android.

Read Predestination: Part 2

2011-06-21T00:12:00.002-04:00

What does the vision of predestination that I outlined earlier mean in everyday life? I think, first of all, that it drives the Christian to worship: this God is accomplishing His good plans of mercy and salvation, even in the midst of great evil. This is not the only thing, though.

A second practical corollary is that this God humbles us. Especially me. I often want to "bring in the Kingdom" on my own, at my own pace, in my own way. But this is not what is happening. God is doing the work. I am coming alongside -- what He calls us to is not to establish the work, but to fidelity. Our living in the Spirit, our Chalcedonian existence if you will, leads us to participate in the gradual recreation of the world by the Spirit. God is doing it, so we can come alongside. Note here that the brunt of the doctrine is not "God is doing it, so we don't have to." That is to fall headfirst into fatalism, which assumes that God is abstract and impersonal. If God does nothing without first revealing it to his prophets (Amos 3:7), why should we assume that God does anything without involving the body of His Son? (Here is another reason that I have turned back to orthodoxy -- incarnation is inescapble). Predestination, when viewed historically, produces humble action as the people of God exercise fidelity to God's plan, which He set out through the prophets and apostles, and supremely in Jesus the Messiah.

We reach, then, Ephesians 1, where Paul -- as prophet -- proclaims what the will of God is: to reconcile all things to Himself through Christ and His Church. He will do it -- it is now time to join Him.

What Use are the Creeds?

2011-06-12T21:37:00.002-04:00

Here is a draft of the second chapter of this short meditation. The chapters aren't meant to be long discourse, but are modelled after the brief remarks given by Bonhoeffer in his excellent little book on the Psalms.
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What Use are the Creeds?

Following, then, the holy fathers, we unite in teaching all men to confess the one and only Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. This selfsame one is perfect both in deity and in humanness; this selfsame one is also actually God and actually man, with a rational soul and a body. He is of the same reality as God as far as his deity is concerned and of the same reality as we ourselves as far as his humanness is concerned; thus like us in all respects, sin only excepted. Before time began he was begotten of the Father, in respect of his deity, and now in these "last days," for us and behalf of our salvation, this selfsame one was born of Mary the virgin, who is God-bearer in respect of his humanness.

We also teach that we apprehend this one and only Christ-Son, Lord, only-begotten -- in two natures; and we do this without confusing the two natures, without transmuting one nature into the other, without dividing them into two separate categories, without contrasting them according to area or function. The distinctiveness of each nature is not nullified by the union. Instead, the "properties" of each nature are conserved and both natures concur in one "person" and in one reality. They are not divided or cut into two persons, but are together the one and only and only-begotten Word of God, the Lord Jesus Christ. Thus have the prophets of old testified; thus the Lord Jesus Christ himself taught us; thus the Symbol of Fathers has handed down to us.
(The Definition of Chalcedon, AD 451)

The mistake that I made early on, an easy mistake to make, is that the Creeds act as a definite proclamation of theology. Rather, they are guide-rails, meant to keep us on the right path by showing what is not the road. Note in the Definition given above that the two natures are not positively defined, but negatively: united, yet not confused, not transmuted, not divided. The only positive statement, essentially, is “one and only Christ – Son, Lord, only-begotten.” The union is proclaimed, but the mechanics of such is not, nor can it be. This frustrated me early on, but now I see it as necessary – not all of God’s knowledge is for us, but “the things revealed belong to us and our children forever that we might be careful to do all the words of this torah” (Dt. 29:29).

The Creeds, then, are meant to be summary grammars of Scriptural teaching. Instead of being positive contributions – revelations of the character of God – they are signs of the paths we should avoid. Avoid, then, the Arian god Jesus, who is a lesser being that cannot save derived from a greater being that cannot love. And so on. That way dragons lay. Creeds, in the end, are not stand alone documents able to bring us to salvation, for “faith comes from hearing, hearing by the Word of God” (Rom. 10:17). The Church Fathers, in general, can helpfully be read this way. The Creeds only make sense and are only used properly when they are reflections on what has been called from ancient times the “economy of salvation.” The economy is God’s act (comprised of His many acts in both Old and New Testaments) to bring salvation to the world through Word and Spirit. The Scriptures bear testimony to this event, whom we know as the Messiah Jesus.

In my own experience, maybe it would be proper to compare the Creeds to Balaam’s ass. The donkey faithfully tried to warn its rider of impending danger, yet Balaam (the true ass) refused until God knocked him down.

In the case of Chalcedon, which this meditation seeks to understand, how might this guiding work? The key is that the mysterious two natures of the Christ – the truly human and the truly divine – are in full union with one another; there is no conflict or discord. While they might still be distinguished (they are not confused or collapsed into one another), they work together so well as to be understood as one Person. In other words, Jesus is not schizophrenic, nor has multiple personalities. Remembering Paul’s assertion that we are being conformed to the image of the Son (more on this anon) and Irenaeus’ contention that “Christ became what we are so that we might become what he is,” we can posit that we – human beings in faith – are Chalcedonian by created nature. That is, we have our human natures, but God also gives us His nature, His Life, His Spirit and joins us in union to Himself. We don’t become God, of course, but we are united with Him (here, again, we are in the realm of mystery and can only define negatively – the practical applications of this mystery, though, are immense). The goal of Christian life is the ever-deepening union with the Spirit of God that makes us more and more like the Messiah here on earth.

When we view the life and ministry of the Lord Jesus, then, we can read it profitably not just as an historical record, but as giving us hope and direction for our lives. While our union with Christ is not perfect (our human nature often giving fits), we can start to see how that Chalcedonian union gives power to the Christian life. Consider the temptation narrative found in Matthew 4.

Here we see Christ being tested as to his resolve to follow the Father in all things. Christ responds, not with assertions of deity, but by doing what every believer united with the Spirit can do – he lives out the Scriptures, proclaiming them as his own. While we are not yet perfect in our union with Christ, certainly we can follow his example – Word and Spirit to overcome sin and evil and even death.

This reveals something important for us who are traveling down this road. While biological growth cannot be stopped, spiritual growth can. Our union with the Spirit – even though it is predestined to be accomplished (Rom. 8) – can stagnate and shrivel. Our human natures can, by reason of sin and disobedience, push the Spirit out. Remember how King Saul and Judas both lost their places of honor and responsibility. Our union progresses as we are constantly connected to both Word and Spirit, since they are the path to the Father. This gives us reason, not only to be learning the Scriptures, but to be memorizing them, to be living them. “Let this mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus…” (Philippians 2). How, though, can we be connected with the Spirit? In a word, worship.

When believers gather together under the one Head, Jesus the Messiah, especially when they celebrate Eucharist (or communion) with him, they act as the one Body of Christ. Our human natures are joined to, and changed by, his human nature. At the same time, through the Spirit, God joins Himself to the community that is praying. This is especially true when the Psalms are being recited/chanted/sung, for they are the prayers of Christ to the Father. This joins the divine (God in the Spirit) to the human (God in Christ), creating a moment of union in the daily life of the Christian community. This moment, especially when pursued in the morning-evening pattern, gives a redemptive framework to the day: all that occurs between the moments of special union with God is offered up to God. It is in the context of this communal celebration that we have the opportunity – the privilege! – to hear God’s Word to us as a community. Instead of the individualization that often happens in our readings of Scripture, here we can join in union with Word and Spirit so that our common life might look more like the life of Christ. Think of how the earliest Church functioned in Acts, sharing all things so that the Word might be proclaimed.

The Creeds bring us to a way of reading – a hermeneutic – for the economy of salvation. Notice that this guidepost, though, doesn’t offer us a dispassionate, “objective” reading of the text, but one that fully takes the divine nature of it (its inspiration) along with its human nature (our contemporary application) seriously: the Word is living and active, as Hebrews tells us. Here is a Christ that is not far off, but as close to us as the confession of our lips (returning to Romans 10).

“Open my lips, o Lord, that my mouth might proclaim Your praise” (Ps. 51:15).

The Faith of Chalcedon

2011-06-12T00:07:00.002-04:00

Here is a first draft of an introduction to a proposed book on Chalcedonian faith. They say to "write what you know," so this is intensely personal. May God use it to give strength to those, who like me, have gone through the dark night of the soul and feel lost and forsaken.
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There is no such thing as dispassionate theology. Theology, like all branches of human endeavor, is necessary connected to the whole person. Yet, this particular branch, much maligned and much abused, has an even stronger claim to be passionate. It is born out of and returns, always, to worship. We ask questions about the God we meet in worship; theology helps us to make sense of that experience. Good theology, passionate theology, grows out of that experience and leads us back to it. This is one of the reasons that theology is for everyone, not just trained professionals and clerics: we engage in what is called “primary theology” whenever we pray communally or individually, whenever we sing, whenever we are overcome by the strange ineffability of the divine who works in history. But theology is passionate in another sense: it is necessarily connected to the Passion of the Messiah Jesus. That is, all thinking about God is anchored in what God in Christ did on Golgotha – this is true whether we are speaking of the “Old” Testament, the “New” Testament, or the history of Christian life and thought. Theology is passionate because it reflects on Christ’s Passion, when he reconciled the world to the Father. That unspeakable grace is given words by theology, so that we might worship the God who enacted them.

This is a theological meditation. As such, it is passionate. I am not interested in a dry, academic treatment of my Subject – to do so would be to worship another God, not the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. There are other reasons as well. When I was much younger, I decided to do a project for my (public) school about the history of the Christian Creeds. While I quickly became disabused of the notion that a high schooler could adequately tackle the topic (I chose, instead, to do a preterist interpretation of the book of Matthew), it forever changed my course and my path. In my preliminary background reading, the theory (which I accepted as absolute truth) that the Church Fathers had gotten their idea of what it meant for Christ to be the “Logos” (Word) of God from classical, philosophical paganism was presented. This is a fairly common – and always disturbing to Protestants – claim about the development of doctrine (teaching) in the early Church. Being of a very conservative theological background, I had grown a distinct disliking for all things Greek (except the language): Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics were all evil men who had maliciously attacked the Bride of Christ and stolen her doctrinal purity. Once the linchpin of understanding John 1 was taking away, I did not know what to think. I was a follower of Jesus, but who was He? Or he? I wanted to tackle the question of the relationship between Jesus and the Father (as I often put it) with intellectual honesty and vigor. When I told my pastor this, he responded (in words I can never forget): “That’s fine, but if you come to a conclusion other than that he was fully God and fully man, we will know you have apostatized and left the faith.”

Left the faith. Damned. Accursed. But if the foundation is Greek philosophy and not Biblical religion, how could the Christological building stand? How could any of it stay? Left the faith. Damned. Accursed.

Here started the decade of Hell.

St. John of the Cross described – beautifully – my Dantean descent into the “dark night of the soul,” in which the Christian is stripped bare so that he might be fit for the Master’s use. During that time, I wandered spiritually, growing ever more confident in my emerging unitarian beliefs, yet growing ever more fearful of my own damnation. How could I see, in Scripture, what so many countless others had not seen? Was I to ascribe it to the episcopal “will to power”? Did the Catholic and Orthodox Church hold a conspiracy to trap men’s souls for their own gain and sovereignty? I certainly could look at the abhorrent behavior of many Church leaders, whether Roman, Eastern, or Protestant, for confirmation of some sort of this thesis. Invoking ‘God,’ as many atheists and unbelievers alike point out, is an easy way to gain your own earthly desires. There was a fear that grew in me at that point, since I could no longer trust any teacher in the Church – to question the Trinity would be to question their vested interests. Still the nagging question of how so many could be so wrong for so long dogged me.

The Creeds continued to be witnesses against me. I’d excuse myself from the assembly when we would say them (we didn’t say them very often which helped to cloak my growing separation) – I couldn’t say “of one substance with the Father.” I instead developed a liturgical bent that emphasized the grammar of the Scriptures over the grammar of theology. I dove deeply into Biblical Theology and despised Systematics. I was being stripped – no part of me was to be left untouched. A new foundation had to be laid before anything could be built. It is strange to be thankful for heresy, but it is necessary.

While Nicea perturbed me, Chalcedon absolutely infuriated me. Here, indeed!, was the acme of Plato’s takeover of the Church: one Person (I still have not received a good definition of this), two Natures undivided, yet distinct; different, yet united. Surely there was nothing – nothing – in Scripture to back this up. Surely it was the final straw that made Christianity pagan. I could not, would not, have anything to do with it. Instead, foreswearing theology, I would read the Scriptures and only them.

For me, the Creeds and theology acted as a strait-jacket. I have since learned to see them as kindly guideposts, apophatically leading me away from theology as rationality to theology as worship. But to get to the full sense of what is happening, it is important to see what I thought of the heritage of the Church. It was rubbish. I had separately myself from the community of the faithful and stood alone.

And yet, in that loneliness there was a fresh Wind, a Breath from God.

I saw, in Paul’s epistles, a recurring theme: what God has done in Jesus, He intends to do in the whole human creation. I had, without fully knowing it, stumbled across the foundation I had been looking for and avoiding. This confirmed, in my mind, the full humanity of Jesus – the necessary humanity of Jesus. Much of my frustration with Church teaching was its implicit Docetism – Jesus became the Christ, the Pantokrator, the far-off and aloof God. Since his presence was no longer close, no longer that of a brother or a friend, but rather a Dread Sovereign, something was needful to fill that emotional gap: enter Mary and the Saints. Jesus, for me, had been rescued – what God had done in Jesus, He intended to do in the whole human creation. Jesus was close. Jesus was close.

Paul also led me to another important point. Whenever God the Father (or, as I liked to refer to Him, the Father, God) is mentioned, in the same breath Jesus and the Spirit are mentioned. I did not know what to make of it precisely, but there was something inescapable about the identity of God: He is forever connected to Jesus and the Spirit. They exist – in some way I couldn’t understand and didn’t want to admit – always in union, even if just linguistically. God is never separate from Jesus or the Spirit. And, if John is to be believed, then Jesus is somehow equated with God’s Word (albeit not Platonically); this means that God has always been linked, somehow, to Jesus as the Word and the Spirit. For God speaks and breaths always.

I had done the impossible (or, at least at that time, I thought that I had done it): I had become a Biblical Trinitarian. I did not want to go to the ontological level – I would never bow to Platonic metaphysics. I still needed some confirmation that this is where the Spirit was leading, but I knew I was on the right track.

In the midst of this I had reluctantly started seminary. This was a dark time. One day, as my wife and I sat in our empty coffee shop on a Sunday afternoon I lost it. I screamed in a voice and in a way I did not know possible. The dark night had done me in: I was naked and I was afraid. The words of Psalm 22, of Christ’s Passion, were extended to me. I screamed, “Either God has abandoned His Church since the 2nd century or He has forsaken me!” Not even the moon or stars gave their brightness. All was lost. In the darkest part of the night, all that remains is the promise of the dawn.

Two days later, in my Church History class, I was saved. That is an intentional word. Looking back over my journals and blogging, I had slowly stopped calling myself a Christian and was now only a follower of Jesus. He had the words of life, and I could not seem to leave him, but I couldn’t quite trust him. We read that day these words from Irenaeus, a 2nd century bishop in France: “Christ became what we are, so that we might become what he is.” What God has done in Jesus, He intends to do in the whole human creation. I cried, as I cry now, with a heart that was both broken and healed. The naked and bare Adam was given, not a coat of skins, but the garment of the Messiah – that adornment for a wedding feast. And he gave me a greater gift, one I had never had before, the Spirit of God filled me head to toe, enlivening me, freeing me, causing the tormentors of persistent sin and degradation to feel at the sign of the Cross, as Antony of the Desert counseled.

It is my firm contention now, dear reader, to take you further on this journey with me. It is a short step, I assure you, from this place to Chalcedon – to find reconciliation of the Scriptures with the Creeds. And it pertains to this mystery of Father, Son, and Spirit – not in a detached way, but the way in which they work, even now, to bring you and me into conformity to the image of the Son; to bring us into a hypostatic union, the divine Spirit and our created selves, body and soul, that joins us truly and wholly to the body of Christ.

Come and see.

The Necessity of Christian Communities

2011-06-11T16:55:00.003-04:00

For a long time, the monastic impulse in much of Christianity was foreign to me. I brushed it off as gnostically ascetic neoplatonism. That was wrong (much I've thought in the past, it turns out, was wrong -- hence the whole "rethinking" series). While I do not uphold celibacy as the best lifestyle for many (certainly it is for some), nor think it is wise for the "clergy," the life together of the monatic communities is something to emulate. As we've been thinking about the buzzword of 'community' at the assembly, it has slowly -- inexoriably -- dawned on me that the only way to reestablish a real, long-lasting, and effective Christian witness in a post-Christian society is to live in semi-monastic community. That this can be done by groups of families, I am sure of. It can even be done with folks who live blocks away (although not too many to walk -- it is interesting that this is a dominant metaphor of the Christian experience, we "walk with Jesus" daily, but it is almost totally disconnected from our actual life, as we must drive upwards of 30 minutes or more to worship together).

The demands of the Christian life cannot be met without the structure and support of a community that shares a common life, common values, common schedules of worship/work/play, and a common aesthetic. This does not mean, of course, uniformity in all those things, but there must be some sort of commonality that links them together. The adoption of morning and evening prayer by a neighborhood, for example, would quickly destroy the demands of greed, avarice, and non-neighborly competition (there is such a thing -- a good thing -- as neighborly competition) that our impersonal, "late" capitalist society places upon us. We speak of these things -- the things that control our lives in the realm of habits -- as forces (the force of the economy or history or whatever); Paul speaks of them as "principalites and powers" that must be warred against and have wisdom spoken to by the Church, which cannot exist only on Sundays, but rather is the foundation of the cosmos since it is the body of the Messiah himself. There are, and never have been, lone gunners for Jesus.

A local assembly cannot just talk about community without radically reorienting their lives to the demands of the Gospel. As much as I enjoy middle-class existence (and I do), it must be subverted to the life-giving programme of the Lord Christ. Spiritual growth is not an automatic thing, such as biological maturity, but rather occurs when we live, work, play, and worship together in God's world -- as, in other words, we are continually connected to the Spirit -- God's own Life! -- and each other -- the Messiah's own body!

The American Church, especially, has spoken enough about the individual -- and we have seen our economy be taken over by usurers, robbers, and crooks; we have seen our cities be eroded by both a corporate culture and an urban culture (often inextricably linked) that fosters death in the inner city, the suburbs, and the countryside; we have seen the family destroyed because there are no ties that bind them more than the progress and freedom of the individual. It is time for the Church, not only to speak of life together, but to live it. To Christ be the glory of a renewed, reconstructed, rejuvenated world.

To Hell with Hell? Symposium Presentation

2011-06-09T21:09:00.002-04:00

Below is the text of my presentation to the "To Hell with Hell?" Symposium. Some diveregences from this text were made during the presentation, especially towards the end. I hope you enjoy it. (NB: It is long.)
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My topic is the current understanding of hell. That is, as I’m sure you can imagine, an impossibly large topic. For every ten people, there are 11 views of hell. So, for this presentation I will concentrate on the biblical, historical, and cultural background to Mr. Bell’s understanding as a help into understanding our own. As will hopefully be seen, Mr. Bell is not arising out of a vacuum, but out of a long tradition of questioning and thinking that does go back centuries. As the writer of Ecclesiastes says, “There is nothing new under the sun.” Without possibly knowing all the influences behind him, Bell digs deep and yet goes farther than those before him. Whether we follow him or not is another story. What we can learn from him (and there are many things that can be learned) is how our own cultural and historical setting influence our thinking: no one theology totally comprehends the afterlife, or God Himself – no one human or human system can aspire to such great heights without itself being truly in the depth of an idolatrous hell. We shall return to think about our own views towards the end.

In C.S. Lewis’ The Last Battle, an odd scene unfolds when the young servant of the false god Tash, Emeth by name, is found to be in the New Narnia:
Then I fell at his feet and thought, Surely this is the hour of death, for the Lion (who is worthy of all honour) will know that I have served Tash all my days and not him. Nevertheless, it is better to see the Lion and die than to be Tisroc of the world and live and not to have seen him. But the Glorious One bent down his golden head and touched my forehead with his tongue and said, Son, thou art welcome. But I said, Alas, Lord, I am no son of thine but the servant of Tash. He answered, Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me. Then by reasons of my great desire for wisdom and understanding, I overcame my fear and questioned the Glorious One and said, Lord, is it then true, as the Ape said, that thou and Tash are one? The Lion growled so that the earth shook (but his wrath was not against me) and said, It is false. Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast done to him. For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath's sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted. Dost thou understand, Child? I said, Lord, thou knowest how much I understand. But I said also (for the truth constrained me), Yet I have been seeking Tash all my days. Beloved, said the Glorious One, unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek.

"Then he breathed upon me and took away the trembling from my limbs and caused me to stand upon my feet. And after that, he said not much, but that we should meet again, and I must go further up and further in. Then he turned him about in a storm and flurry of gold and was gone suddenly.

Each of the semesters that I have taught this text, students inevitably chafe at this scene. “Isn’t this teaching justification by works?” is a common rejoinder. I understand that reaction, but I think it may be beside the point (for some, however, that is always the point); instead, Lewis here is not focused on the fate of the moral infidel, but rather on the character of God. The question that I ask my students in return is: what is the nature of the God we serve? How do we understand Him in light of His name (ehyeh asher ehyeh – I will be what I am, underscoring the freedom and constancy of God) and His revealed nature (God is love)? Mr. Bell is asking this same question.

It is my task today, not to demean Mr. Bell’s position, nor to defend it. I have been asked to define it – not in the dictionary sense of the word, although I think there is a very particular word for his belief that I will investigate. Instead, I am to set the stage, much like the Chorus in Romeo and Juliet, to place before us not the whole of the play, but to situate us in Verona, to introduce us to the warring Montagues and Capulets, to warn us ahead of time that the lovers are, indeed, star-crossed.

The cover of Mr. Bell’s book gives the impression that the contents concern “heaven, hell, and the fate of every person who ever lived.” While this is true enough, it is somewhat misleading as well (I do not place this fault upon Mr. Bell; often writers have no control over either the title or subtitles of their books). It is similar to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (this is what happens when a Humanities professor is asked to speak at a symposium!): the title itself leads the reader to think that the book is about Dracula. However, and this is a spoiler – the book has been in print for at least a couple of years now, when Dracula is killed the battle takes up not much of a page. It simply isn’t important. The reader, when confronted with this, must ask themselves: what was this story really about? I’ll let you decide concerning Dracula. For Mr. Bell, “heaven and hell,” while being major issues (Dracula was, after all, a major character in that story) are only the precursory issues to the real event, the question: who is God?

But there is more to this question than initially meets the eye. Mr. Bell, as a consequence of his postmodern style and thought process, revives an ancient way of thinking about God and doing theology: the practice of apophaticism. Apophaticism is sometimes called the “way of negation:” it is a way of understanding God, not by saying what God “is,” but what God is not. The Creeds of ecumenical Christianity (the Apostles, the Nicene, the Athanasian, and I would add the Chalcedonian) are, in this way of reading them, not statements about what God is, but what He is not: He is not the Arian God, nor the Manichean, nor the Gnostic, nor the Mia- or Mono-physite. Instead, He remains beyond us and always out of our grasp. This last metaphor is important, since to have something (or someone) in our grasp means we have control of them, and when that is brought into the divine realm, that entails a belief in magic. Early Christianity, and I think Bell fits comfortably in this tradition, rejected the magical control over God by using theology as guidelines, not as propositions – God is too expansive, they would argue, to be controlled by our thought processes, but there is still truth that can lead us to Him – the economy of salvation. The apophatic way always must lead to an emphasis, not on what God is in Himself – not His essence, but rather on what He has done, especially in “Jesus Christ our Lord, who became man for us and for our salvation.” While we cannot fully comprehend God, we can know – have a covenanted relationship – with him because of what He has done and continues to do in Christ Jesus.

If we understand God by seeing, primarily, what God is not, we may get to the question at hand: what sort of god does Bell not believe in? Here is where the important bits of his thought about hell come into play:
“Of all the billions of people who have ever lived, will only a select number ‘make it to a better place’ and every other single person suffer in torment and punishment forever? Is this acceptable to God? Has God created millions of people over tens of thousands of years who are going to spend eternity in anguish? Can God do this, or even allow this, and still claim to be a loving God?
Does God punish people for thousands of years with infinite, eternal torment for things they did in their few finite years of life?” (Bell 2)
While just in the first pages of the book, these are the questions that reverberate all the way through. These questions give us an insight into the kind of god Bell is rejecting (the language of ‘rejection’ is not too harsh here, as Bell says on page 182, “Have nothing to do with that God”). The god that Bell rejects is one that creates “billions” of his creatures with no other intention than to plunge them into everlasting agony, despair, and torture. He rejects a god who gives a fiction of free choice, while deciding before to cast into hell for sins that they could not help but commit (for who has resisted his will?). Bell ably describes it thus:
Millions have been taught that if they don’t believe, if they don’t accept in the right way, that is, the way the person telling them the gospel does, and they were hit by a car and died later that same day, God would have no choice but to punish them forever in conscious torment in hell. God would, in essence, become a fundamentally different being to them in that moment of death, a different being to them forever. A loving heavenly father who will go to extraordinary lengths to have a relationship with them would, in the blink of an eye, become a cruel, mean, vicious tormentor who would ensure that they had no escape from an endless future of agony (Bell 174).

And so, as all good apophatic theologians must do, Bell returns to the economy of salvation to understand what God should be believed in, should be followed, should be worshipped, should be “glorified and enjoyed forever.” It is here that he sees Jesus, not as angry judge, not as helpless victim, not as good moral example, but as God incarnate, doing what God incarnate does – love. Returning to the previous quote, what sort of God “goes great lengths to have a relationship with them,” that is, is incarnate of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried, and rose again on the third day, and then promptly turns around and says: “Too late!”? The very economy of salvation, of Christ becoming what we are, so that we might become what he is, as Irenaeus said, militates against that.

It is here that the Biblical background comes into view. Much of Bell’s critique swells around an old Calvinist question: is God able to save? I put it that way because I’ve heard many amateur theologians confront their ostensibly Arminian friends about this: if the atonement is not limited to God’s elect, why doesn’t He save everyone? Is He not powerful enough to do so? Bell affirms that God is all-powerful and His will shall be done: the question becomes “what is God’s will?” For this, Bell relies on I Timothy 2:1-7:
Therefore, I exhort first of all that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks be made for all men: for kings and all who are in authority, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and reverence. For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God and one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time, for which I was appointed a preacher and an apostle – I am speaking the truth in Christ and not lying – a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.
The will of God, which shall be done on earth as it already is in heaven, is for “all men to come to the knowledge of the truth” for Christ “gave himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time.” This God is “good to all; he has compassion on all he has made” (Ps. 145, Bell 101), His anger “lasts only a moment, but his favor lasts a lifetime” (Ps. 30), so that already God’s self-revelation in Exodus 34 (“The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children’s children to the third and fourth generation”), this revelation is qualified by the shortness of God’s anger. Three to four generations is hardly “everlasting.”

There are other passages, both explicit and implicit, that Bell draws on. These are often the head-scratching passages, such as I John 2:2, “he himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the whole word” or Matthew 12:31, “every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven men.” Matthew 25, which seems to be in the background to the Lewis piece read earlier, also comes into play. Here we see the Son of Man judging between the sheep and the goats, the sheep going into eternal joy, the goats into eternal destruction. Note that the “nations” – the Gentiles! – who did not know they were serving Christ are ushered into the Kingdom, not Christians who are looking for Jesus’ face in the widow, orphan, stranger, and prisoner.

While there can (and should) be many objections to Bell’s reading of the economy, I must leave that to the able hands of Dr. Shidemantle: I am just setting the scene. But this introduction to the real question is vital. The uproar over this book should not concern the specifics of Bell’s doctrine of hell, nor do I think it really does. Frankly, we do not have enough information to make adequate judgments about the details of the damned afterlife. Maybe Meatloaf does, but he returns us to Mr. Bell, since he “would do anything for love.” Instead, the uproar over this book concerns our conceptions of who God is, what He has done in the economy of salvation, and how that applies to all of world history, especially the parts of Christendom.

Bell’s views on the afterlife, both heaven and hell, flow out of his belief concerning God. It is important to mention, as he does throughout the book, that his views are not of his own invention: they are, in fact, ancient. He says, “In the third century the church fathers Clement of Alexandria and Origen affirmed God’s reconciliation with all people. In the fourth century, Gregory of Nyssa and Eusebius believed this as well” (107). The view, though he does not use the word, is known as apokatastasis. Instead of hell being a punitive place of torture, it has a pedagogic and purifying function, as least in the case of Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and, possibly, Gregory of Nazianzus. For each of these writers – all of whom are well respected among the Fathers – the main issues are the image of God, the telos (purpose) of the incarnation, and the nature of God. While they all have difference, they share these common foundations.

We tend to think of the image of God as what we were created in, but have lost. For the early writers, the image of God is what has been restored in Christ and what will be totally restored as people are incorporated into the body of Christ, who is the image of God. Man, as mankind without remainder, has been made in that image, so man, as mankind without remainder, must be remade in that image. For this reason did God become man. “Coming in human nature to restore humanity, he spread out his holy bodily form to the ends of the earth and gathered mortals and formed them into one. He placed this one into the arms of the great Godhead after he had washed away all stain with the blood of the Lamb and, as leader of mortal humanity, lifted them up on the path to heaven” (Gregory of Nazianzus, Carmina). The very telos of the incarnation was not merely to deal with sin, for that would leave man basically as he was ontologically; rather, the purpose was to raise man to a new height, higher than Adam himself, through the resurrection of the body in union with Christ. That is must happen to all stems from their reading of I Corinthians 15:22 “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive.” The nature of the God who is doing this, then, could not want to torment His image eternally, but rather would want to purify it. For those who come by faith to the Christ, this purification happens in this life. For those who do not, it seems that hell is their lot, until they are purified – here we should see the beginnings of the doctrine of purgatory. In fact, the doctrine of apokatastasis is often called the “purgatorial” view of hell. All the writers, including Bell, shy away from saying that hell shall one day be emptied: a view that was condemned by the Council of Constantinople in 543AD: “If anyone says or holds that the punishment of the demons and of impious men is temporary, and that is will have an end at some time, or that there will be a complete restoration (apokatastasis) of demons and impious men, anathema sit.” The hope that is held out, though, is that maybe the mercy of God will win out over His judgment, as James (2:13) tells us, “Mercy triumphs over judgment.” Hell is meant, not to punish, but to educate and finally restore the soul that was recalcitrant during life. Whether or not it is successful depends on what one thinks of the relation between God’s will and man’s will. It is obvious that if the god is a puppet-master, then none of this matters: human freedom is an illusion. This is a god that Bell does not believe in. Yet, he retains an interesting strain of predestinarian thought: Love Wins. In the end, God gets His way, His “will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Even the most hardened of sinful wills came be wooed, swayed, and persuaded by this mighty and loving God.

In the midst of all this comes the problem of time and eternity. As noted before, Bell is particularly reluctant to have anyone sent to “billions and billions of years” of torture and torment. Instead, he presents hell (and, it could be argued, heaven) as a state of mind. At this point, it is helpful to see that he recommends C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce. This delightful story concerns a man who has dreamed (much in the tradition of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress) of being in Hell and in Heaven, watching the interactions between the various inhabitants thereof. Much of the story is conversations between the Bright (or Solid) People – those in bliss – and the Ghosts – those either in Purgatory or Hell itself. The poet George Macdonald acts as Lewis’ Beatrice (for those of you who know Dante’s Divine Comedy), explaining the strange sights and experiences the narrator encounters. At a certain point, Macdonald begins to unravel, ever so slightly, the mystery of hell, heaven, time, eternity, and the fate of every person who has ever lived. I quote at length:
“Not only this valley but all this earthly past will have been Heaven to those who are saved. Not only the twilight in that town, but all their life on earth too, will then be seen by the damned to have been Hell. That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say ‘Let me but have this and I’ll take the consequences’: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say, ‘We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,’ and the Lost, ‘We were always in Hell.’ And both will speak truly.”
He goes on to speak of the conditions of pride, hubris, and navel gazing that characterize the damned and will continue to do so eternally. The narrator asks about the saved, then, and elicits this response:
“Ah, the Saved…what happens to them is best described as the opposite of a mirage. What seemed , when they entered it, to be the vale of misery turns out, when they look back, to have been a well; and where present experience saw only salt deserts memory truthfully records that the pools were full of water.”
To this the narrator responds, “Then those people are right who say Heaven and Hell are only states of mind?”
“Hush,” said he sternly. “Do not blaspheme. Hell is a state of mind – ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind – is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakable remains.”
In other words, Heaven is the true reality. For God’s will “to be done on earth as it is in heaven” means that God’s reality is the true reality, our reality either conforms to Him through union with His Son and so can be heaven, or maybe better, eternal life even now, or it deforms from God into a shadowy existence hardly worth calling existence at all. This being away from man’s telos, his ultimate goal of union with God in Christ, is the worst torment of all. It involves becoming more and more fully what one had started to become during physical life; all the inhabitants of “hell town” hate each other and themselves, moving further and further away from one another and the celestial bus that could ferry them over to the other side, until night falls and darkness covers all.

Both Bell and Lewis work within similar understandings of the afterlife at this point, especially the idea that we become what we were in life (although Bell is less clear about this than Lewis). Part of this revolves around the idea that in death humans cease to be in time, even though we cannot properly imagine such a state (we are, in this life, necessarily time-bound creatures and can only think in such terms). Eternity, then, is less a quantity of moments as it is a quality of life. The thinking stretches back to Boethius in the sixth century. For him, as well as many other Christian philosophers and theologians, God exists and acts in the Now, the moment that contains all moments of what we call past, present, and future. This is why asking what God did before the creation of the world makes no sense: there is no before “in the beginning” – for there is no time. Instead, the quality of being fully oneself, which is what God is, is what is given to us through Christ (note here that Boethius, although he uses heavily philosophical language, is not far off from the Eastern Gregories): we have “eternal life” both now and after death. For those who do not place their trust in the Son, though, who insist on the primordial Augustinian sin of selfish pride, they are already dead, under judgment, under the wrath of God. Whether that it an everlasting – in the temporal sense – state of being is unclear, but quality-wise it is eternal, total, unrelenting. It reminds one of the parable of the wheat amongst the tares: while they look similar for a time, eventually they show their true colors, and then are divided according to what they, by nature, are and have always been.

This brings us to Bell’s most extended exposition of Scripture: the tale of the prodigal son. The party that is thrown when the prodigal returns is like Heaven, with both the damned and the saved there. The saved, knowing they have nothing to offer, are invited in; the damned, even though they have been in possession of the party all along, refuse to come in and so lose all. The attention is not focused on the choice of the saved – the choice there was to base service, but instead glory was given – but on the choice of the damned. Here, then, Bell is not presenting a stereotyped Arminian theology: the saved are not saved by their “choice” to accept Jesus, but by the love of the Father. The damned, however, are damned by their own choice because they cannot humble themselves enough to be in the Father’s love – even being in His presence is a hateful thing.
“[The elder brother’s] problem is his ‘goodness.’ His rule-keeping and law-abiding confidence in his own works has actually served to distance him from his father…Our badness can separate us from God’s love, that’s clear. But our goodness can separate us from God’s love as well” (186-7).
Here Bell engages in a trenchant critique very similar to that of Karl Barth. Barth claimed that Jesus was the Aufhebung of religion. In the larger Church Dogmatics this is mistranslated as “abolition” or “destruction.” Instead, it means that religion – our response to God – must undergo death, so that it might be purified through resurrection. In other words, our religion must be transfigured if it is to be true:

Our relation to God is ungodly. We suppose that we know what we are saying when we say ‘God.’ We assign to Him the highest place in our world: and in so doing we place Him fundamentally on one line with ourselves and with things. We assume that He needs something: and so we assume that we are able to arrange our relation to Him as we arrange our other relationships. We press ourselves into proximity with Him: and so, all unthinking, we make Him nigh unto ourselves. We allow ourselves an ordinary communication with Him, we permit ourselves to reckon with Him as though this were not extraordinary behavior on our part. We dare to deck ourselves out as His companions, patrons, advisers, and commissioners. We confound time and eternity. This is the ungodliness of our relation to God. And our relation to God is unrighteous. Secretly we are ourselves the masters in this relationship. We are not concerned with God, but with our own requirements, to which God must adjust Himself. Our arrogance demands that, in addition to everything else, some super-world should also be known and accessible to us….And so, when we set God upon the throne of the world, we mean by God ourselves. In ‘believing’ on Him, we justify, enjoy, and adore ourselves. Our devotion consists in a solemn affirmation of ourselves and of the world and in a pious setting aside of the contradiction. Under the banners of humility and emotion we rise in rebellion against God.

Bell’s critique of our understanding of who God is is an act of Aufhebung, an attempt to show that many times those of us engaged in theology and ministry worship our mental constructs, our ways of semi-magically controlling God, so that we might have the control. All those who have any experience in ministry know the temptation to take control, know the need for certitude instead of mystery, know that sometimes God does not act in ways we prefer nor in time frames that are suitable. For Bell and for Barth, this is a fatal toxicity: the real rationale behind it is not a true understanding of God – who apophatically is always beyond our grasp – but a desire to be god ourselves. It is the primordial sin. “Our goodness can separate us from God’s love as well.”

It is at this point that Bell’s rhetoric combines all three historical and cultural strains we have been investigating. “As obvious as it is, then, Jesus is bigger than any one religion. He didn’t come to start a new religion, and he continually disrupted whatever conventions or systems or establishments that existed in his day. He will always transcend whatever cages and labels are created to contain and name him, especially the one called ‘Christianity’” (150). The human tendency is to create idols, idols in our own image and idols that suit our agendas, to which we ascribe the names of Yahweh, Jesus, the Trinity, and other “cages and labels.” Instead, Jesus takes our sin-limited view, and transfigures it continually: it is always under judgment, being purified by God’s fire, so that it might be a true response to the mystery that is the event of Jesus Christ. Here his exegesis takes on an original stance concerning John 14. The much beloved passage, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me” is often used to say, in effect: if you don’t follow our way (you don’t belong to the right church, you don’t believe the right theology, you don’t pray this prayer, etc.), you cannot come to the Father – because we are Jesus’ representatives. Instead, Bell turns the traditional understanding on its head: it is a passage, not of hubris, but of humility:
“What [Jesus] doesn’t say is how, or when, or in what manner the mechanism functions that gets people to God through him. He doesn’t even state that those coming to the Father through him will even know that they are coming exclusively through him. He simply claims that whatever God is doing in the world to know and redeem and love and restore the world is happening through him” (154).
That is, we don’t hold the key to Jesus, Jesus holds the key to the Father. Our response to God, even our response of faith and obedience, must go through Jesus – through death and out the other side through resurrection – is they are to be pleasing and acceptable to God.

This does present us with a difficulty: Bell intentionally is placing us in the position of the elder brother looking on as the party is starting. If we don’t have our theologies to give us certitude, or our liturgies, or our experience, what do we have? We have Christ, who has “become man for us and our salvation.” We have access, because of Christ and Christ alone, to God the Father who gives us His very Spirit – His life! – so that we might have communion with Him. The ever-present and ever-true testimony of this is the Scriptures, but we must always – with the Spirit’s help – resist the urge to turn the Bible, or our worship, or our experience into an idol with which to close off Christ to the rest of the world: to do so would be to repeat the error of the Judaizers, an error that we are too often prone to repeat.

Regardless of what we think of Bell’s position, the question posed by him is this: have we rightly understood God? Are we worshipping the Creator of the universe, who in His self-revelation shows us that He is love, His mercy is everlasting, His anger lasts but a moment, and is willing to die for us to live? And not us only, but also for the whole world? Or are we worshipping and following an idol? Here is where the story of the painting from chapter two comes into play. The culture we make is a reflection of what we truly believe, but it also shapes what we can believe. Here are some paintings of hell from throughout the years: how have they shaped not only what we think of the afterlife, but who God is? The task in front of us today in this symposium and outside in our lives and ministries is: what God are we presenting in our catechesis and our evangelism? Are we getting our doctrine of the afterlife from the Bible or from somewhere else? Much hinges on this question. Time does not allow us to look deeply into some of the “classic” hell sermons, such as Jonathan Edward’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” or John Wesley’s “On Hell.” But it is clear that, at least as far as Bell is concerned, the traditional understanding of hell – whatever that turns out to be – has not fully integrated all the Biblical data and stands in need of, at least, readjustment. Bell would argue, it is clear, that readjustment may not be enough, but rather a complete overhaul is needed. I leave it to the other presenters to tackle that claim. We need an Aufhebung of our religion, of our ministries, to fully take on the issues that confront us today. There are two phrases that I’d like to leave you with, one theological and one from the humanities. The first is the oft quoted motto of the Reformation: “ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda secundum verbum Dei,” which means “the Church reformed, always reforming according to the Word of God” – the “secundum verbum Dei” is often left off, but it is the most important piece. Since Christ is the Word of God, he is the one reforming us according to his Scriptural word. We must return to the Scriptures for wisdom and guidance. This will require us to take up the old standards of Scripture memorization and chanting, so that the people of God at any age may be equipped to serve. The second phrase is from the Renaissance: “ad fontes,” which means “to the sources.” Evangelical and Reformed Christianity has long shied away from the sources of our faith, the Church Fathers and the early Councils (not to mention the wealth of medieval sources). It is time, as we rethink these issues, to come to terms with what our faith is really about, what has “been believed everywhere, always, and by all,” as Vicent of Lerins advises us. We may start in the seedbed of our own traditions, whether that is Bonar, or Wesley, or Cranmer, or Calvin, or Luther, or Ratzinger. From there, we can progress back to the great masters of faith such as Bernard of Clairvoux (Calvin’s favorite monastic) or Francis of Assisi. Irenaeus and Ignatius, early bishops, will help draw us closer to the Scriptures as well. Bell’s challenge, in the end, is not for us to give up our doctrines and theologies, but to reexamine them – to be Bereans who search the Scriptures and the Tradition: to bring our own faiths through the death of Christ into his glorious resurrection light.

Much more, of course, could be said about the scene in fair Verona. Bell’s combination of apophaticism, apokatastasis, and aufhebung gives us much to think on. Many will not follow his conclusions as far as he does, but even one of my very Reformed friends said the other day, “I hope Bell is right.” As much as we talk about God, and claim to have His very mind, we are human: beset by sin and limited (thank God!) by our own finite existence. In the end, we rely on God’s character and nature, set forth in the Scriptures, in the person of Jesus Christ whom the Scriptures testify, and in the Spirit that is promised to “guide into all truth.” This is what we have: this is all that we need.

Real Predestination

2011-06-07T21:29:00.003-04:00

I've written elsewhere about the primacy of worship in the theological enterprise, rather than straight rationality. Whereas Aristotle might say (depending on translation) that man is a "social" or "political" animal, and whereas many college students might say that man is a "party" animal, I think the Biblical definition is inescapble that man is, at his core, a worshipping being (my apologies for the male-centric language -- no offense is intended). The effect of this on theology is at least two-fold: we can only understand the mysteries of the Christian faith (and there is much irreducible complexity) by worshipping and theology that is understood in worship is inherently historicized. The latter point is what I wish to attend to now (although the former is very vital -- if my book of Chalcedonian faith ever gets written, I'll be dealing with that).

What is meant by "historicized theology" is theology that is relevant for the life of the Church. Or, to put it negatively, historicized theology is the opposite of philosophical theology. Many in the Calvinist Tradition (the "Geneva Rite," I suppose), end up worshipping a philosophical God, especially concerning the doctrine of predestination. We talk about the "eternal decree" and the "double will" of God, about the necessity of reprobation, and other things that are, frankly, more philosophical than Biblical (to be clear, they are derived from the text, not necessarily impose from an outside system). Predestination, then, gets turned into a charicature such as can be seen in Love Wins by Rob Bell, which he bases his whole argument against. In the end, this "god of the philosophers" ends up producing a very troubling sort of theologian (I should know, I've been through this ghastly "phase"): an arrogant know-it-all who, instead of being humbled by God's grace, cannot wait to shove the esoteric knowledge down the unsuspecting Arminian's (or whatever) throat.

What might a "historicized" predestination look like? Consider Romans 8. Here (St.) Paul is discussing God's plan for the world through Jesus the Messiah -- the restoration of all creation into the "liberty of the sons of God." A beautiful picture. It is this picture that is capped with Paul's great assertion that God has "predestined [us] to be conformed to the image of His Son." That is, God is remaking the world right now, God is remaking us right now, God is going to do it through this strange and wonderful collusion of His love, His justice, and His power. And, He's given us His Spirit so that we can fruitfully tag along. Instead of the abstract, eternal decree, Paul seems to be describing predestination as a very this-worldy phenomenon (whether the plan originated before or after the Fall seems to be quite beside the point), the brunt of which is this: God is doing this great work, He's equipped you to be a part of it, don't you want to orient your life and the life of your community correspondingly?

Here is where worship comes in. We do not worship a remote, far-off god who, even if he could hear prayers it would not matter; instead, we worship the God who created the world "and everything in it" and who is actively remaking the eagerly-waiting world, who gives His Spirit now to us so that we might join Him, and who guarantees success in the endeavor. There are no words that can truly express the worship that bubbles up in me when this Gospel is proclaimed -- thank God for the Psalms and liturgy, to supply my dumbstuckness with a voice! "Open my lips, O Lord, and my mouth shall proclaim Your praise!" This worship, then, this moment where the Spirit joins the community in union with the Messiah, sends us out into that "eagerly waiting" world to hear the news that its captivity has ended, its sins have been paid for, and it is time for the "seasons of refreshing to come."

Even so, come Lord Jesus.

Why Christians Need the Final Judgment

2011-05-17T21:27:00.002-04:00

The stereotypical view of Christians is that we believe that "we" (however that is defined) go to heaven and everyone else goes to hell. That Jesus has given us a card that not only gets us out of hell, but out of punishment altogether (we wouldn't want any overtones of purgatory, now would we?). We, I use "we" intentionally as I am not apart from this, seem to have forgotten about the last, or final, judgment. We need to remember.

We need to remember because Jesus does not give us a free pass to do and be whatever we want. Disinheritance is a real option, even if we don't talk about it much. Those who, even though they claim Jesus, worship other gods -- whether actual other 'divinities' or money, self, sex, war, whatever -- won't inherit this Kingdom, so says the Apostles Paul and John. When Jesus calls a man, as Bonhoeffer witnesses to us still today, he calls him to come and die. Die to his old life, his old ways, his old self and identity. But Jesus does not stop there, he calls us to die daily. The last judgment calls us to this: we must die not only to our sin, but to our ecclesial pride ("we have the right interpreation" -- whether that interpretation is based on the latest findings of historical science or the oldest traditions of the Fathers), to our legitimizations of power and lust and war that hurt the least of these, or aggrandize the truly evil. It is true that Paul gives hope that in the last reckoning we will be "saved, yet as through fire," but this is also a day of gloom: have you cared for the least of these? If not, do not be surprised when they rise up against you, either in the here and now, or in the judgment. Have you cut off hand or gouged out eye to enter life maimed? Or are you going to go to hell whole and secure?

I'm meeting more and more people who aren't convinced of the Gospel because they see no difference between Christians and pagans. In fact, Christians are often arrogant, isolated, and stand-offish. I'm seeing more and more people turned away from the Gospel because we hide behind our theologies, which often serve those in power instead of the One enthroned above, who calls us (both Old and New Testaments) to love our enemies, to take care of the poor, the widow, the orphan, to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God. They see us engage in wars that decimate Christian populations in other parts of the globe (for example, the wars persecuted by our current and former presidents have been the direct cause of the slaughter of many Assyrian and Palestinian Christians) because the cause of godless democracy is more important than the cause of Christ. Judgment always begins in the house of God, we must not forget.

The Cross is foolishness. It doesn't make sense. It never has. It never will, God willing. We adopt arrogant attitudes when we think that our position is logical and obviously true in the world's way of reckoning things. Nobody wants to look like a fool, even though that is what the Apostle Paul calls us to. Apologetics has never started with this premise because it seems self-defeating. That may be so. But apologetics has never converted an empire, not even the Roman Empire, certainly not the American Empire -- the foolish work of Christians to exercise, not their own political dominion, but the dominion of Christ in healing the sick, educating the poor, interposing between power and wealth and the disenfranchised and weak, dying to self and for others, that is the blood of the martyrs which is truly seed, as Tertullian rightly saw.

Maybe the faith of the martyrs is what we need to recover. We are not even willing to give up our favorite TV shows, much less our lives for the cause of Christ. We have stopped believing that it is better to die for Christ (in both the literal and metaphorical senses) than to live in this world. We have decided, like the rich young aristocrat, to go away sad with our many goods, rather than forsake all and follow the Christ. No wonder they don't believe; we are telling them to follow One who we don't even know.

Whether we are rich or poor, male or female, Jew or Gentile by descent, black or white, slave or free, we must sit loose to the things of this world, even as God has entrusted them to us. Certainly, there may be rich Christians, but those riches are not yours -- they are Christ's, to be used according to his rule (which he gives us guidelines about in both Old and New Testaments, and shows us wisdom through Church history). There will be poor Christians, our poverty is to Christ, who became poor for our sakes. We must forswear envy and jealousy of those in power and with wealth. Has God called us poor or to be poor? Then follow the poor Christ and minister to your fellows in privation! Has God made you a male? Follow Christ the Man, the only guide of manliness -- who chastises those in power, builds up the lowly and downtrodden, and calls all to repentance (no one gets a free go, rich, poor, male, female). Are you a female? Follow Christ the Groom, who values women as no man ever has (read the Gospel of Luke): be the woman who God has made, Eve redeemed, a picture of how the Church is to act.

It is time to live in light of the final assize, it is time to act like Christians, the humble servants of the King who rules through the Cross.

Closing Time

2011-05-09T23:20:00.002-04:00

Another school year has ended. Another set of students, some that I've gotten to know quite well, are gone. Maybe forever. Bethany and I wondered, when we were in college, how professors managed after pouring their lives into students for 4+ years to just let them go. Now that I've been teaching half a decade, I still don't know. It is hard. But it is good.

It is good in a way that is hard to explain. I'm not so far from graduation myself that I've forgotten how the 'real world' seemed. We were frightened and bitter in no small measure that all our education had not prepared us for taxes and leases and car payments and gas bills (we then realized that this was not education's job, but ours). I cannot believe that it will be much different for other students that I've seen graduate -- some go out and conquer, some just go out, some get conquered.

It will be 6 months after graduation for some of them to learn what we strove to teach them freshman year. For many others, it will be much longer, if at all. Our public school paradigm of careless knowledge dumping (this is an overstatement, of course) does not work with Wisdom -- you cannot teach wisdom, you can only point the way and say 'The Lord precedes you; walk in faith." That is a hard lesson for me to follow, much less an 18 year old. But we point as we walk, knowing that they will quickly overtake us. We hope for postcards.

It is rarely the "good" student (the A+ student, stereotypically) that really shines. Too many years of working the system can damage your ability to really grow (I speak from experience -- my own shining, if indeed there is any, comes from my decade long "dark night of the soul"); those who get Bs and Cs, who scrape by it seems, often make something of themselves in ways that are refreshing and surprising -- they break the industrial paradigm and seek green pastures, so to speak. They often remember to send postcards. They are the ones, it seems, who when pointed towards the Way actually make it on the narrow road. Obviously, this is not always the case: sometimes the "successful" student does it, sometimes the "failure" does also. Often times "average" students don't make it. Maybe it is just that I have a few who have shined so brightly that I think immediately of them.

At the end of a semester, it is good to be a teacher. It is hard. But it is good.

Send postcards.

More on Chalcedonian Life

2011-04-03T15:50:00.004-04:00

Given the various comments and discussions generated by my first post on this topic and some new developments of thought, I'd like to expand on what I said towards a more practical appropriation.

Part of the difficulty is that whenever we speak of the "two natures" or "hypostatic union" of Christ, the discussion quickly gets railroaded by philosophical problems. What is the "divine nature"? What is "human nature" (this one is especially tricky now that the NIV -- amongst others -- has unhelpfully made the flesh to be the essential 'sin nature' of man: another reason to avoid that translation, I suppose)? How does these things relate to discussions of "substance"? In the life of the Church, important as these questions may be, many believers' eyes roll into the backs of their heads and they wonder how Christian doctrine can be so (1) boring and (2) impractical. In the last post, I tried to spell out how our union with Christ (our own "hypostatic union" as it were) is effected and made actual through common worship. The question was raised: what about the time we aren't in common worship? This is where a discussion of nature is helpful.

Whatever else "nature" may be, it is the record of action. A human is what a human does. God is as we see Him working in creation and redemption. So, if we are becoming more and more "conformed into the image of the Son" (Rom. 8), it means that we are doing the work of the Son. This is vitally important. We often act and believe as if Christ did his work on earth and ascended and basically is done working until the Second Coming. However, if we believe that the Father and Jesus share the Spirit, and that the Spirit has been poured out on "all flesh" (Joel 2 and Acts 2), we believe that God through the Son and Spirit is still working -- in fact, He is the primary actor in history (even today), and we join His work. All our work, whether the work of worship (we join in the worship by the Son to the Father; the Father blesses the Son and all those united to him) or our daily vocation, is the work of Christ: he is building his Kingdom, he is beautifying his Creation, he is bringing peace and release from all the effects of sin. So, whatever our work is, should be patterned after the work of the Son: we are, after all, "seated" (that is, enthroned) "with him in the heavenly places" (Eph. 1). This can give us great comfort, that we are not only not alone, we are not the instigators of the work, Christ is. However, if our work is to be a function of his reign, then our work -- whatever it is -- needs to take on the character of his action (or nature). What is Christ's nature? The Gospels make it clear: he is the compassionate One, the One who seeks out the poor, the lame, the blind, the outcast, the leper, the sinner and calls them to repentance and cleansing. He is the One who confronts power and privilege with the Gospel of self-giving, calling all the rich and comfortable to share with those who are united to him, building up one Man, one humanity that differs from the old, adversarial way of being (Gen. 3).

Is our work, our daily theosis (whether this be a "job," raising a family, being a student, etc.), following this pattern? Or are we "conformed to the world" whether it is in needing the right pay-scale or the proper amount of vacation days, or even being too far away from parish or home to be of any service to the poor, outcast, or sinner in our midst? The reign of Christ will change us (remember, it is his work!), but he has graciously called us to repent of the old forms of life, whether outright pagan or the "American Dream," so that we might join him in his work freely. So, it is not just common worship, but our common life in our everywhere places that show forth this active work of God's Spirit (His very Life!) and how we look, from glory to glory, more like the Son who has saved us and is redeeming the world.

Remembering

2011-03-12T10:16:00.002-05:00

It is easy to get frustrated -- and despondent -- when you forget not only what you are working for, but whom. I don't mean this in the exclusively divine sense ("I work for Jesus!"), but also the human. Last year, at seminary, was one of my most fruitful years in terms of insight and joy -- I had a spiritual awakening and I also knew who I was studying for. This year I seem to have lost a bit of zest. Apart from often feeling buried in work (but that is not a new feeling), I've lost focus. This year I've been concentrating on making professorship my career. It has made me miserable. I like being a professor. I can easily see doing it for years and years (even though my post a couple of days ago might seem to argue against that). But if I am just working on getting a secure job, I'm working for the wrong reasons. In that regard, I've never been particularly ambitious: working to 'get ahead' just does not interest me.

But this week, I've been reminded of who I work for, who I study for, and who I am ambitious for: the community of saints here in Beaver Falls. Why study theology? To draw the community together to worship God and to realize His Kingdom in this place. Why make coffee? To draw us together in conviviality and fellowship. Why bake bread? Man shall not live on bread alone, but he does -- every once and awhile -- need good bread. Companion comes from the idea of eating bread together. Thinking this way energizes my living and my work and draws me into tighter union with those who are also united with the Messiah.

This is the reason that my dream -- however nascent! -- of starting a bakery here never dies. This is the reason that my hope of reestablishing the fresh water spring in our neighborhood is growing into action. God has not only called me in general, but called me here with these people and others who He will call.

The need for theological education

2011-03-07T20:14:00.003-05:00

We had a nice Harvest Co-op meeting tonight about the development of variegated co-ops in our local community (or at least the parts I got to hear -- various duties call). One aspect of building local community that has struck me as necessary, and particularly neglected, is theological education for youth. I don't mean theoretical or philosophical/speculative theology (whether Trinitarian or over heady matters like 'free will/predestination' that our youth tend to love), but rather building wise, mature Christian men and women able to effectively join their ecclesial neighborhoods (or, in that wonderful old way of speaking, parishes). Due partly to ecclesial communities that only recognize the authority/worth of ontologically ordained members ("priests") or that relegate the eldership to bureaucratic matters, the Church produces either sycophantic yes-men or dependent moochers (obviously, these are extreme categories): Christians that either tow the party line in an obnoxious, arrogant way or those that can never seem to be freed from some besetting sin, even though they have been united with the Spirit for years, or even decades (I speak here, in both cases, from experience).

Part of the difficulty of this, at least in traditional Protestant circles, is that we have no idea what we are training our children to be. We want them to join the Eucharistic fellowship (assuming here that most are not paedo-communion sorts), but don't have any adequate means of explaining why that is important. We don't think, also, of the ecclesial of being the fundamental social category of existence: we are the Body of the risen Christ primarily, with all other categories (race, gender, nationality, job/vocation, etc.) coming out of that primary mode of being. So, we don't know how to teach our youth the importance of God's Word and the absolute claim to obedience that God makes on all of life, nor do we know why.

My proposal, then, is to reinvigorate this primary Christian education. It needs to be straight-forwardly Biblical, with an emphasis on the text as we have received (and we are supposed to be guarding) it. That is, we cannot let our students get lost in the morass of historical-critical ways of thinking (this is not, by the way, to minimize the importance of historical study of the text -- it is important, but it is not primary for developing wise citizens of God's Kingdom). Instead, the text must be allowed to stand as it is, warts and also (and what glorious, Chalcedonian warts they are!), especially since it is often the text in itself that points (and re-points, and re-points) us to God in Christ. From experience, I have seen that students are intrigued by, for example, the coat-and-goat theme of Genesis. But deeper than that (since that is largely a surface level literary facet), we see what we are supposed to do -- in the here and now -- through the text: we are to be guardians (Adam, the priests, etc.) of the Bride (Eve, Israel, the Church) for the world (east of Eden, the Gentiles, those outside the Church). The text, if read with an eye of faith that is attuned to the reading of faith seeking understanding, sees these things. Then, the Law is about -- not salvation in the limited sense of final destination -- but guarding the gifts that God has given me and requires at our hands. The Wisdom books (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, etc.) teach us how to navigate this world that God has given us and will more fully give us. And the list could go on.

Obviously, this is just a start. Wisdom as a goal (rather than sin-management) requires discipline, which requires some sort of binding authority structure. Are we willing to grant such things to our elders (and, in the image pattern of God, require it at their hands) and live by them? Are we willing to become lay-elders, training our children and the children of our neighbors, if the formal eldership is asleep at the wheel? Are we willing to submit to God in His Word, or shall we continue to have the State teach our children what it means to be citizens -- what it means to be wise administrators of what we have?

The Excitement is Gone

2011-03-04T22:22:00.005-05:00

I've been teaching at the collegiate level for almost 5 years now. I wonder, often, about what in the world I'm doing. I was raised to believe, both by family and by the Church, that I could change the world. But what happens when the world doesn't change? What happens when you meet students that, for no apparent reason except maybe that you are scheduled to teach them at 8 in the morning, absolutely despise you? The irrationality of what I do, at these times strikes me.

I'm asking these things rhetorically, but with a certain poignancy. I know of professors, brilliant men and women who could change the world, who are burned out by the politics, the narcissism, the you-name-it of education. As a young professor who has his career yet ahead, I weep for these but also hide it in my heart. That will be me some day. I don't say 'might' because these are far better, far stronger people than myself. I'm already feeling the burn as I try to speak for wisdom over monetary comfort -- a worthwhile and futile pursuit in any age. In the end, Jesus often looks exactly like Mammon.

Here, maybe, is the danger of the Protestant rejection of the monastic economy. In trading out a life of constant worship for one of work, we declare loudly who our God is. This is not to say that work is a bad thing -- it certainly eagerly awaits the revelation of the sons of God -- but in our desire to demythologize 'calling and vocation' away from monastic and 'religious' orders we have not ably reenchanted the concept away from a baptized Weberian secularism. Work shall save us by giving us material comfort, high status, and a sure sign of God's blessing in our lives. We tell our students to investigate their 'worldviews' to gain a sense of deep 'calling,' which, for many, looks like the job they came into college to get. The point of cognitive dissonance is not reached until either mid-life or, possibly, post-college quarter life when the debt stacks high and the ability to be content just working for the glory of God has been sapped out by such winsome talk of 'purpose' and 'vocation.'

What we may, instead, want to start preparing students for is the necessity of being despised. For all the glamor and idealism of 'calling' I find myself being stepped on by adolescents. I see my mentors dragged through the mud casually by teens who consider themselves benefactors of the college. I also see students, told that God has a specific purpose for them, struggling -- tearfully -- to make any sense of it: for if God Himself has a purpose for me, it must involve clarity, direction, and some glory. God must be calling me to something 'special.'

Possibly would it be better to simply say that God has called you to become a mature person, a citizen of the Kingdom, doing work that just needs to be done? Do we really need to fill our heads with illusions of grandeur of how God is going to change the world through us? God changes the world through suffering -- there is the message that we don't hear. You want to be called by God? Come and die.

The Chalcedonian Nature of Common Prayer

2011-02-21T17:58:00.003-05:00

When believers gather together under the one Head, Jesus the Messiah, especially when they celebrate Eucharist (or communion) with him, they act as the one Body of Christ. Our human natures are joined to, and changed by, his human nature. At the same time, through the Spirit, God joins Himself to the community that is praying. This is especially true when the Psalms are being recited/chanted/sung, for they are the prayers of Christ to the Father. This joins the divine (God in the Spirit) to the human (God in Christ), creating a moment of theosis in the daily life of the Christian community. This theotic moment, especially when pursued in the morning-evening pattern, gives a redemptive framework to the day: all that occurs between the moments of special union with God is offered up to God. The creation, instead of being negated, is rightly ordered and given its full meaning in the economy of worship found in the Trinitarian structure of God's work in the world.

The Primacy of Worship

2010-03-07T23:26:00.003-05:00

More and more, the deeper I get into theology (and, therefore, into the intricacies of philosophy) the more I need to worship. It is too easy to lose sight of the Object of my study. I have been caught up in plenty of theological debates, both edifying and destructive -- it is what, years ago, led to my desire to give up the whole enterprise, but which led further to the "fire within my bones" that this calling of teaching and disciplining engenders. Theology should start in worship and lead to worship.

Further into that, though, worship de-abstractizes theology. It is easy, even if ultimately disconcerting, to debate the relationship between God's creational sovereignty and the 'problem of evil.' We abstract evil and we abstract God and ultimately make them into a dualistic dancing pair of irresolvable and eternal scope. In worship, though, we "proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes," and bring this problem squarely into the realm of human existence: we do not know how or why evil came into the world, but we do see Jesus, hanged on the Cross to bear the weight of sin and evil and so exhaust it and provide a way out for us humans. We hear the call to proclaim this death and even to join in his sufferings for the sake of the world. Worship of the transcendent God grounds us in the reality of created, embodied existence. The God that we serve is no construct of the Platonic Deists, but the God who has deigned to dwell among us, even though the greatest heavens could not contain or limit Him. The God who wipes away tears. The God who, even though it is often hard to see, is bringing the world out of its long and hard night into His daytime. In the midst of this, the Cross and the eschaton, the 'problem of evil' is not resolved in any intellectually satisfying way, but the problem seems to pale in comparison with the rich, and real, love of God in Jesus Christ.

The same goes, in many ways, with Trinitarian theology. Many who are close to me know of my struggles to comprehend and, at times, to believe in orthodox theology. It is inherently mysterious -- we do not have all the appropriate information. It arises out of worship, though: how do we worship the one God through Jesus the Messiah and by the Spirit? How can that be reconciled with biblical monotheism? From here, of course, it is easy to get ethereal and esoteric and philosophical...and confusing. Many of the defenses of Trinitarian doctrine (and much of the brunt of anti-Trinitarian doctrine) comes from exactly this point: the abstraction of God. However, all these problems and quandaries and quagmires pale in the light of Jesus himself: the one who acts out God's restoration of the world through his suffering and death and is raised to the very right hand of God the Father. This grounding in history, while it doesn't answer every question we might bring about the exact relationship between the Father and the Son, does send us back to worship in grateful thankfulness for the work of God the Father in the Son of God through the Spirit of God. We cannot, in worship or in life, speak of God without in the same breath speaking of Jesus and the Spirit: the history of God revealing Himself to His creation will not allow it.

And is this not salvation? "To know you, the true God, and Jesus the Messiah whom You have sent," that is, to worship God amongst His community by living the truly human life of Jesus Christ amidst the world.

Rethinking It All: The Lectionary

2010-02-28T23:11:00.003-05:00

M.D. Goulder, in a series of well-worth-reading books, proposed a controversial account of how the Synoptic Gospels got their final form: as liturgical pericopae for the Jewish Torah lectionary system. By no means is his argument air-tight, but it is well worth considering. From the book of Acts, it seems clear that various Jewish holy days were still important to early Christians, if not binding upon Gentile converts. However, the liturgical year would still have been in place and attractive to these amalgams of Jewish and Gentile worshipers. So much so that "Quartodecimanism" (or celebrating Easter always on the 14th of Nisan, as Jews start Passover) controversy created major splits in the early Christian community -- possibly because it would be easy for many converts to return to the communities that they originally hailed from (Rodney Stark argues this point, in The Rise of Christianity, for Chrysostom's invective against Jews in his time). Later, of course, the standard Church year would arise, not celebrating festivals of Passover, Tabernacles, and the like, but instead Easter, Christmas, Lent, and Pentecost (not, notably, in that order). Being from a staunch Scottish Presbyterian background which holds to the so-called "Regulative Principle of Worship", I knew little about this or its historical background. My own study has led me to the conclusion that not only is the Church year a good thing in its own right, but that a return and reformulating of the traditional lections are greatly needed in the Church today.

If Goulder is right (and I think, with certain modifications and provisios, that he is), then the key to understanding why some of the NT books are the way they are, and the key to the Synoptic problem lies not with "Q" or some such mythological construct of the scholars, but rather within the life and activity of the Church. The Bible is, was, and always shall be the Book of the Church (which is why, not incidentally, the text of the book is important, but I've already argued for the Byzantine text tradition elsewhere). This Book, read properly -- that is, liturgically -- opens up vistas of interpretation for the common man, not just the cloistered clergy or lofty academic. The Book of the Church becomes the Book of the Community of God.

Ordered lections guard the people of God, as well, from well-meaning ministers who always face the threat of Marcionism. Many churches rarely, if ever, read from God's Torah or the Prophets. Many concentrate either on Paul or the Gospels, to the neglect of other parts of Scripture the interpret these things properly. A lop-sided view of the faith, or a fear of the Torah, or some such thing often arises ("we're New Testament Christians"...whatever that means!). Having lections requires the discipline of reading through the Bible once a year (this is assuming daily lections, but I've also heard of three year or even monthly patterns of lections), leaving nothing out as "unseemly" or "not Gospel" (as if any word from God was not a reflection and expression of the Word of God -- no part of Scripture is mere "straw"!). Lections force us to confront what we do not wish to confront in Scripture, that it is not a book of religious niceties, but God's story about His redemption of the world through His Son (Israel as type, Jesus as fulfillment), even in the messy bits of human life. We do not, understandably, want to be confronted in worship by the Levite's concubine, or even the atrocity of the Crucifixion, but we must be: the story of Sodom must be balanced by that in Judges -- the "people of God" commit worse crimes that the most flagrant pagan, even to crucifying our own Lord! The Scriptures leave none exempted, but also bring all in (such is the beauty of recapitulation): the Messiah, crucified by the world and the people of God, is made alive and offers new life to those whom had murdered him, and all their descendants, whether Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female.

However, this does not mean that I endorse any particular lectionary system. Being associated with the Anglicans here in Beaver County, I've had a little bit of experience with their system. It isn't perfect, as no lectionary can be. However, since the time of the early Church is past us, and we have seen a revival in interest in Jewish-Christian relations, it may be time to match up our readings with that of the old Jewish year, while still retaining, in full, the Christian year. This does not imply celebrating Jewish feasts (although reading the Megullah of Ester on Purim was extremely edifying), but rather remembering the olive tree in which we are grafted. If we were to match up our Gospel readings with the various Torah readings (John with Genesis, Matthew with Exodus, Acts with Deuteronomy, etc.) we might find vistas opened up in our relationship with our estranged older brothers in Abraham, we would see how the Messiah Jesus really is the "goal/apex of the Torah" as Paul puts it in Romans. Would this require a sizable amount of Bible reading daily and on Sundays? Yes. Would this require our ministers to bring their unwieldy sermons under control to fit all the readings and their expositions into a reasonable time frame? Yes. Would it require a greater understanding of Scripture by the common worshiper? Yes and amen, but it would build it also, especially if our translations were not wooden "religiousy" sounding blah-factories, but rather the earthy, allusive translations that these texts call for: ever had a pastor bring out the Greek or Hebrew about a passage and compare it with the language in another passage from a different book? Why don't our translations reflect those beautiful word-plays and obvious recapitulations of wording, rhythm, style? The Bible is essentially an aural book, meant to be read-aloud, to be chanted and sung, to be repeated until the words, rhythms, syntaxes, and allusions permeate our minds and shape our very way of thinking everyday.

Much work to be done, but it is good work for the people of God.

The Christmasization of Life

2009-12-22T12:54:00.002-05:00

I'm not going to tell you to put Christ back in Christmas, nor am I going to tell you of it Saturnalia origins, nor am I going to rail about consumerism.

Instead, I want to expand the Advent season to include the whole year. I really want Christmas in July, but not in the usual ways. Whatever else Christmas is about (and it is about a lot of things), it is about the ontological change of the aeons -- the coming of Messiah to bring the "olam haba", the age to come, into fruition. Christmas, then, is about living in a different mode of existence -- not in the way of the old world, but in the way of the new age come in Messiah Jesus. In many ways, this new age is defined by 'righteousness', which has a multivalent definition. The aspect of its meaning that I find most significant at this point in the year is 'set in right relationship'.

So, for Christmas, maybe these presents might be an option (and can even be given last minute):

-Forgive someone who has hurt you, even if they are not seeking or do not want forgiveness
-Seek forgiveness from someone you hurt, especially if you have since lost contact with them
-Break bread with an enemy and listen to their viewpoint, even if you still end up disagreeing with them
-Mediate between two warring parties
-Confess your sins
-Adopt a child

Of course, this need not apply only to human-to-human relationships, or to divine-human ones.

-Care for the neighborhood stray
-Adopt an animal that has been abused
-Stop using destructive means to control pests
-Eat right (which means learn how to cook and bake)

The list could go on, and I'd love to hear your stories/ideas of how you are making Christmas an integral part of your, your family's, your neighborhood's, and your environment's lives.

Rethinking It All: God

2009-11-30T23:04:00.003-05:00

I blogged about Athanasius, the (in)famous Alexandrian bishop three years ago. I have had reason, by way of Seminary to revisit this seminal thinker. Now that I am actually studying the nuts and bolts of Church history (instead of taking potshots based on strawmen and secondary interpretation), I can see where Athanasius is coming from in his critique of the Arians. This is, and remains, no small issue.

Arius, if nothing else, was defending a credible understanding of the Biblical God, revealed in Jesus the Christ, in line with Greek philosophy. I say 'credible' because in Greek thought, it worked. The problem, though, is what the Platonic milieu he spoke in meant by the multivalent word 'God'. For the thorough-going Platonist of that era (and who wasn't?), God was totally transcendent, wholly other from Creation -- so much so that he/she/it/they could have no real contact with said Creation, in other words, there could be no mixture of "essence" or "nature" or "substance". This God fit the Greek criteria of impassibility, unmoveability, and immutability. The problem was that, in some way, the Word of God (however conceived) was revealed as "becoming flesh" (Jn. 1:14) -- if the Word was fully God how could he/it commingle with the created flesh of Jesus? But positing a difference in "nature" or "essence" (the infamous 'ousia'), the Greek transcendence problem could be overcome. And leave the Church, substantially, with two divine sources, or two Gods. If the Word was God, he/it could not suffer and salvation could not happen. Therefore the Word was "god" in a lesser, derivative sense and so could.

Athanasius' response is ingenious and complicated. Suffice it to say that he was very concerned to stress the reality of the divine nature of the Word, equal with God and the human nature, at least of the body/flesh, of the hypostatic union known as Jesus. The Word must be God to save; the Word must be made flesh so that man could be saved. He ran the risk (and may have fallen headlong into -- it is hard to tell) of both Sabellianism and Apollonarianism.

In doing so, though, Athanasius effected a fundamental shift in the world of thought, quite unconsciously: by using Platonism he effectively destroyed the overall system. It is clear that Athanasius held to a similar conception of the divine substance as other Platonic thinkers: separate, impassible, etc. However, he also defined "death" as disintegration of the person, that it total solitary self-reflection without reference to another outside (cf. Zizioulas in Being As Communion, this is a fundamentally Eastern way of understanding personhood), which is a very close description of the Platonic God! In the Wholly Other's place, though, he substituted a more Biblical understanding of a God that is transcendent, but also extremely near in Jesus the Messiah. This God is one of intimate and everlasting relationship, which is his definition of life. To have a share in this God (theosis) is to have life, instead of sharing in the god of death and non-existence (being not in relation to anyone else). While he did not take this idea to its logical limits, it was (and is!) pregnant with possibility, especially in undertaking some sort of understanding of the economy of salvation, how God gets things done.

The interesting piece, historically, to add is that whenever the Platonic god raises his ugly (and totally other) head, various heresies come along with it: with the rise of Deism (extremely Platonic) we have the reemergence of Sabellianism, Adoptionism, and other forms of Unitarianism, such as the Jehovah's Witnesses. When God is thought of in relational terms, no such heresies exist: note that the detached, otherworldly Trinity of the Western Church has led to many such outbreaks in history, but the Eastern tradition has had no such 'luck'.

The historical accomplishment, even if flawed at some levels, of Athanasius and the Cappadocians after him, needs a heavy reassessment by Christian thinkers. A God in relation is necessarily a God for us, revealed in Jesus the Messiah and in the Spirit of God, Spirit of Jesus. Let the doxology flow.

Reprive: A Breath, A Wind, The Spirit

2009-09-07T23:33:00.003-04:00

What if we've gotten the gospel the wrong way around? I've heard a preacher recently regale his congregation about how we cannot keep the Torah, and we need to keep it perfectly to be save, and that's why we need Jesus to keep it perfectly so we don't have to. Breathless...and backwards, I think.

Were Adam and Eve in a perfect relationship with God before He gave His command? Were the Israelites delivered from slavery in Egypt before the Sinai theophany and the descent of the Torah? While we were still in Exile (as Jews) or outside of God's family (Gentiles), did the Messsiah die for us and welcome us in? Is grace first or obedience first?

There is no question that we are supposed to live as God has intended His human creatures to live and that there are dire consequences if we opt to do otherwise. Sin, living outside of God's proscribed limits, has consequences -- far reaching and destructive, even to disinheritance. Sin is a fact in the human condition and it has permeated into every facet of existence. Whether or not we perfectly obey Torah, live as the wise creatures we are supposed to, we still inherit the Adam's rebellion and his curse. We need the action of God before any sort of obedience truly matters. It is here that Jesus comes in, taking the curse of Israel's disobedience and the Adam's as well upon himself, exhausting all wrath and fulfilling justice. His completely Torah-obedient life did not take away our duty, but was necessary for him to be able to have a curse-reversing death: only the obedient was worthy to undo the unworthy action of the disobedient. Jesus' death, as Messiah the faithful Israelite, establishes us in the Kingdom of God: his life was a prerequisite to that obedience. Since he himself did not need to be rescued from the dominion of sin, he could effect the new Exodus in his death.

And he lives, for death could not hold him, he needed no rescue, but due to his faithful obedience had the authority to take his life up again. His Spirit-animated existence now he passes onto us, we who have been incorporated "in him". What God has done in Jesus, he intends to do in His whole human creation, and what He does in the humans, he intends to do for all creation.

A breath of fresh air.

Rethinking It All: The Last Withdrawal

2009-08-29T18:52:00.002-04:00

It is time, dear reader, to draw this series to a close. I have much more that I would like to say concerning the Church year, lectionaries, and other things regarding worship specifically, but I must stop here. There is much changing where I am and I won't have a chance to speak to those things for the time being -- more time in Arabia is needed before anything can be confidently said.

What have I learned through all of this? In many ways I cannot answer that confidently: I suffer from the same pop-Protestant aversion to anything about my religion other than just "Jesus is the answer." The freedom given us, at least prima facie in the New Testament, coupled with the dearth of historical information about how the first century Church actually operated, leads to an almost hopeless morass of various opinions on how we should live and worship today. Not to mention the ambiguity on matters of Torah observance, ecclesial polity, and the continuation of the Spirit today. I honestly want to throw my hands in the air in distress and disgust.

At the same time, some of the conversations that this series have sparked amongst my friends have been truly enlightening. Micah's question, "What does YHWH require of you?", has become a regular and lively query. It is very humbling to me to see other men and women bow themselves to the simple, yet incredibly difficult, demand of obedience: training our eyes, ears, hearts, minds, and hands to listen carefully, to be careful, and to act in a peaceable and gentle way.

It is the simplicity of the demand that proves to be a stumbling-block. For what does it mean to be faithful in our circumstances? We have Torah to guide us, it is true, but we must not let that be our focus, otherwise we will tithe on the mint and cumin, but forget the weighter matters of peace and compassion. Compassion seems to be the main focus of Jesus' ministry even: compassion to neighbors, to socially and religiously outcast, to the ostensible enemy. Not because sin should be pooh-poohed, but instead because the real battle lies elsewhere, with the Satan, not with Rome or sinners.

But we are distracted. Debates on the meaning of justification (endless it seems), on ecclesial polity, on the state of Israel in prophecy, and so on, take our attention away from obedience. We are left with a high view of our rational skills and sophisticated rhetoric. However, the woman on the street, abandoned by her husband and with no marketable skills, finds no comfort that you are "of Wright" or "of Piper", "of Luther", "of Calvin" or "of Ratzinberger". She sees, rightly, through this game as a play of power and money, of status and pride, of mint and cumin. The Enemy, the real enemy, has us ensnared and confused. We know the Scriptures but haven't the foggiest of what they actually mean. We know our responsibility to the poor, outcast, widowed, hungry, naked, but act on it through our Republican or Democratic proxies all too willing to enforce "equity" and "justice" through brutality and theft. And the Church is powerless to do anything because we are too tied into it: how can we proclaim peace and reconciliation to our "enemies" within the gates of the Church when we are so eager to bomb the infidels out of existence because they threaten, even if just theoretically, our comfortable way of life? We are distracted.

In many ways, this rethinking has been a quest for significance. When Paul sojourned in Arabia, he found his calling being strengthened and confirmed by his reading of Isaiah and the Torah. In his work was the fulfillment of many of God's longstanding promises: Israel restored through the Messiah, the Gentiles brought near to worship the true God. I continue to probe and pry the mysteries of God, but have not yet found myself in Paul's shoes. All the better for now, I suppose, I am not yet sanctified to the priesthood that God calls all his people to.

And so the sojourn continues for me. I cry out that God has left me and me alone to rethink, but I know there are at least 7,000 who have not bowed their knees to any other God. I am no Elijah, nor a Paul, but I am trying -- feebly -- to follow in their footsteps. In an age where everyone is a role model, we desperately need these men of faith, and of failure, to show us a better way.

Rethinking It All: Jesus the Jew

2009-08-01T21:21:00.003-04:00

I was recently approached about publishing this little series. I have agreed, although now I feel the intense need to go back and rethink the rethinking. Something about being in "official" print. Blogging, in my mind at least, is about one or two steps below self-publication in a plastic binder. This all, in other words, needs a serious gussying up.

I remember vaguely when it first dawned on my that Jesus was a Jew. Not that I didn't know it, but much of the Christianity I'd encountered was content to let his ethnic background be a bit of embarrasing (and somewhat unnecessary) familial history. In other words, aside from historical accident, it wasn't important. Once the realization that it was important -- that Jesus' Jewishness formed his mindset, his symbolic universe, his way of discourse, and who and what he cared about -- the rethinking really began. If I could remember the date, I would say it was the date that I became uncomfortable with evangelicalism and an overly systematic understanding of the faith. My exposure to what is called Biblical Theology (basically, in an extremely reductive way of saying it, reading the Bible as a story and drawing theological conclusions from that) both from the Tyler theonomists and Geneva helped me along this path. There was something important, vitally important, about understanding Jesus as a Jew. Missing that understanding stunts a very vital part of the faith. Included in this are why his mission was to the "lost sheep of the house of Israel" instead of the more general "mankind"; why the Bible seems to be relatively unconcerned with divinity claims, but bends over backwards to confess and prove that he is the Messiah, the promised Jewish king who would also be lord over the gentiles/nations; why apocalyptic texts aren't talking about the end of the physical world, but the corrupt nature of the world-systems that inhabit God's good creation; why circumcision is a big deal in the early Church and not later; and the list could go on. The path to this understanding has been endless fruitful in my attempts to be obedient to the faith and in my knowledge of the one we call "Lord and Christ", but it also has been endlessly frustrating because nary a conversation happens or a sermon gets preached that I don't get riled up over what happens when this basic paradigm is misunderstood or ignored altogether. Blessing and cursing live, as always for a spiritual leper like myself, next door to each other.

The thing that has grasped me lately, though, has been an off-shoot of all of this: I am a Gentile. I was born a Gentile, I will die an ethnic Gentile. I can no sooner become a Jew than a leopard can change his spots. So, when I approach Jesus, I am not just divide by the servant-master principle, but also by a deep cultural divide. Of the Jews are the promises, the covenants, the beautiful Torah, the election, the patriarchs, the kingdom, and salvation. I am but a former idolater, rescued from the no-gods of my ancestors, and placed firm footed amongst the worshipping company of those who have held the true God as the only god for millennia. If I am seeking to understand this Jesus and what he has said, I must develop a certain cultural sympathy to a people that has been at the apple of God's eye since Abraham (this is not to say that modern Jewry can be affirmed as it stands, it still has the same need as Gentiles to bow to the Jewish Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth). I approach as the other to this wholly Other.

So now I see that we must approach the Scriptures in a totally different way, not only through Jewish eyes, but also through Middle Eastern eyes as well. This causes a significant problem, though: what about the perspicuity of Scripture? The perspicuity doctrine would state that everything necessary for "salvation" (a tricky word to define as it is) is understandable by anyone straight from the text of Scripture or the "preaching" (yet another one of those words) of it. If we take a cultural understanding to be necessary, doesn't that just add a layer of elitist hierarchy for the common folk to be part of God's people? Yes and no.

First off, the basic confession is that "God raised Jesus from the dead and Jesus is therefore Lord". One can read or hear Scripture and get the basics of this confession down, be changed by the Holy Spirit, and have a saving faith. However, like the Ethiopian eunuch, there is much to misunderstand. What do we mean by "raised from the dead"? (Still) leading NT scholar Rudolph Bultmann would say it means "the disciples got a sense of Jesus' presence after his death" -- a highly influential opinion in large swaths of Christianity. Others would say that Jesus' physical body was raised from a physical grave, albeit changed in significant ways (see the Gospel of John, for example) -- this is the confession of much of Christianity from the earliest days and fits in not only with the Biblical record, but with a cultural understanding of what "resurrection" is. Another question that arises is the word "lord". What does it mean? What does it not mean? (That might be the more important question). There are a variety of answers in the public square, but while many may do justice to some part of the linguistic range of the Bible's use of the term in reference to Jesus, many do not fit at all, even traditional understandings fall into this sometimes. So, again, the answer to the above question is: yes and no.

Secondly, there has always been an interpreter in the Church: that father to the son on Passover, the Levite to the common folk in rural ancient Israel, Ezra, Jesus, Paul and the apostles. Whether that role needs to be clouded with "ordination" or not is another issue for another day. What is needed is men (and women) of solid character -- in other words, those whose lives reflect their obedience to the faith -- who take upon themselves the burden and privelege of studying the Scriptures deeply, not just at a linguistic or exegetical level, but at the cultural, historical, economic, and sociological levels: to know not just the words, but their deep contexts, embedded in real history that we can know, albeit often times through a glass darkly. Once this has happened, and the people of God are trained to do this for themselves (they must first see the need of total discipleship!), will the Jewishness of our Messiah really mean something: he will be confessed by all to be appointed by God as both Lord and Messiah.

Rethinking It All: The Revelation

2009-07-27T22:28:00.003-04:00

This topic is scary for a number of reasons. One the imagery used in the book scared me so badly when I was younger that I was more receptive to hear the Gospel, even if the viewpoint presented then does not represent my viewpoint now. Second, because neither Luther nor Calvin wrote anything of substantive length on this book -- fools rush in where angels dare to tread.

But my purpose here is not to challenge any eschatological system or put forward a new one. The debate there is intractably muddled. I spent a good chunk of my life wandering amongst dispensationals, postmillennials, amillennials, preterists, and futurists to know the dead ends that there lie.

Instead I wish to speak of worship. Putting "worship" and "Revelation" in the same sentence is, in some parts of my denomination, tantamount to taking the proverbial mark. The worship scenes in the Revelation involve non-Psalm tunes, musical instruments, incense, and other heterodox accoutrements to some. I've heard tell that we cannot use any of the material in this book to account for our styles of worship because it is symbolic, therefore the Regulative Principle somehow does not apply. Whatever one thinks of this is, at least in this post, of no concern to me, maybe I'll address it another time.

What I do wish to speak about is the contention that it does apply to our worship today, specifically the claims of the late David Chilton in his magnum opus The Days of Vengeance. Chilton takes a hard look at the liturgical structure of the book, showing in very detailed ways that the book is really a Day of Atonement/Yom Kippur ceremony, except about the destruction of apostate Jerusalem (in AD 70, mind you) and the vindication of faithful Israel (the Church composed of Jew and Gentile). So far, so good. However, Chilton often makes the point that this should be the model for our worship: with the bishop/pastor representing God, the elders gathered around him, etc. It leads to a very High Church ecclesiology, with especially the pastor having an almost godlike status (and, if reports are to be believed, this is often what happened in Tylerite churches, to much ill effect and spiritual damage, but I cannot corroborate those rumors). It is here that I think Chilton misses a very important facet of Revelation (and, to be fair, it is no fair to pick on someone who has been deceased over a decade -- I mean no ill will to him and have learned much from his commentary and other writings). Revelation is not modeling a pattern for continuing Temple-like worship of the Church, but rather showing forth the last Temple liturgy that was accomplished with the Messiah's eschaton (the life, death, resurrection, ascension, and vindication of the Messiah through the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70). Revelation, then, if I am correct (and these are very preliminary thoughts) is a book that finalizes the old order of things, showing that the Messiah has truly fulfilled all that the Temple was and stood for, in a cosmic way, once for all time, and so now in the New Jerusalem, the Church adorned as a Bride, there is no Temple save the Lord God and the Lamb in its midst. Temple worship of any sort is fulfilled in the Messiah.

This, of course, does not mean that worship is done, but instead we must look to the very fruitful model of the synagogue as the early Christians did.

All Theology is Local

2009-06-28T22:18:00.002-04:00

If a pastor/priest/preacher whatever is not in tune with their local community, both insiders and outsiders, they cannot do their job -- at best they will be ineffective, at worst they will be incredibly damaging. The trouble, then, will systematics is that it is theology abstracted from place and time. If your pastor is a systematics person, pray for them to be rooted and resist any attempts to make theology esoteric or trivial or over complicated. All theology is local.

Rethinking It All: Symbolic Interpretation

2009-06-18T21:42:00.003-04:00

Reading through The Jewish Roots of Christological Monotheism has brought up a few things that I have not considered in a long time: interpretive maximalism. This idea, proffered by James B. Jordan and expounded by David Chilton in his magisterial Days of Vengeance, looks for symbolic resonances throughout Scripture. In many ways, it is sort of a "Scripture interpreting Scripture" on steroids. The thought behind it is that in an aural and oral society, verbal and symbolic resonances would be easily picked up by the hearers with a minimum of forward allusions. The classic example, if I remember correctly, is that of Abimelech's death in the book of Judges. He, an enemy of God's people, is killed by having a woman throw a stone upon his head. The verbal and symbolic import of the text, though, (not to mention syntactic parallels) ties it in with the promise of the redeemer in Genesis 3: an enemy of God's people, the serpent, is killed by the seed of the woman crushing his head. The key symbols here are the enemy, the woman, and the head-crushing (compare, once again, Sisera and Jael elsewhere in Judges). It is not, of course, an exact parallel, but rather an evocative way of telling a story. The idea of "intertextual echo" proffered by Richard B. Hays is in some respects similar, but his has to do more with narrative underpinnings, rather than symbolic repetition.

In reading an essay in Jewish Roots by Margaret Barker, these ideas came running back. While Ms. Barker tends to be into what I might call the strange side of interpretive maximalism (believing YHWH to be the son of El Elyon, for example), some of the resonances that she brings up about the high priest in ancient Israel deserve closer attention. Sometimes, when interpreting Scripture, it can be easy to stick just with rational and narrative analysis, which have arguably been the Protestant's bread and butter since inception. Oftentimes, as Barker proves unwittingly, this sort of symbolic interpretation can lead into some weedy territory, which the early Reformers wanted to avoid, especially as they saw it in some allegorizing in the Catholic tradition. To avoid symbolism in the Bible, though, is to throw the proverbial baby out with the (equally proverbial) bathwater. Care, of course, must be exercised and other interpretive methods must be used to balance the symbolic. Once this is the case, though, the symbolic can then be used in tandem with historical, narrative, and theological interpretive criticism to further probe the meaning of Scripture in its original context and for us today.

The difficulty, as I see it, is reconstructing anything like the ancient symbolic worldview. Our symbolic universe, replete with the goddess Freedom and her entourage, is hard enough to pin down since our public discourse is largely demythologized. Instead of the evolving hand of Marduk, we speak of evolutionary processes. Instead of the cruel mastery of Mammon, we talk about economic determinism, both capitalistic and socialistic. The list, as always, could go on and on. The ancient worldview, at least the ancient Israelite shared (with significant variation and mutation) by the Biblical authors, is populated by angels and demons, primeval "welter and waste", gardens, serpents, nudity and clothing, names and Names and naming, blood crying out from the ground, and wanderers with marks of protection, just to mention some of the symbols from the first chapters of Genesis. We hear talk of the earth, the heavens above, the waters in division, and the grave below: so temporal space is conceived tripartite, with the sea in league with the underworld. This symbolism is powerful and still resonates today, but with a muted voice. Reclaiming it in a post-secular, post-Enlightenment world may be impossible for life, but essential, at least, for understanding the Biblical mindset.

One of the things that Barker argues is a symbolic tie between the high priest's work and Jesus' acclamation in Philippians 2. I've heard interpretations using Adam and Israel and the Servant (all of which have very good points, but that it for another time), but never the high priest. The parallels that she draws are quite intriguing, if I ultimately disagree with her overall interpretive scheme (she has a hammer of Temple symbolism and therefore everything is a Temple nail). It is an occasion to further study in a passage that I love and deeply lack understanding of (most of the Biblical passages that I keep returning to in my studying and questioning I deeply lack understanding). But it must be carefully tempered, otherwise we may develop symbolic worlds that make sense to us, but separate us from the realities that they are supposed to point us towards.

Rethinking It All: Theonomy

2009-06-17T22:39:00.004-04:00

My formative years of learning about what the Christian faith means in the day-to-day ethics of living came from the relatively small, but quite outspoken group known as the Theonomists or Christian Reconstructionists, headed by such luminaries as RJ Rushdoony, Gary North, and Kevin Craig. While practical application differed between the various schools of theonomists (how many schools? as many as there were theonomists), the exegetical base established by Greg Bahnsen seemed to be reasonably normative. That is to say, the Torah has abiding moral and legal principles for life in a post-resurrection world, which should not just be applied in a private or "spiritual" sense, but in the public realms of jurisprudence and legislation. In other words, "God's Law or Chaos" (so says a bumper sticker I have in my collection).

For many years, I have come under flak for being sympathetic to the theonomic cause. (I prefer the appellation 'theonomic' over 'Christian Reconstructionist' largely because of political differences inherent in those titles.) One professor even labeled the movement as 'demonic', albeit in some jest. The vitriol of many theonomic writers, especially North and David Chilton, occasioned this sort of derision. Looking back on some of their more polemic writings (especially "Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt Manipulators"), it doesn't strike me as odd in the slightest that theonomists were, by and large, a lonely bunch. I still hold onto the basic tenet and exegesis: the Old Testament, especially the Torah on which the whole is built, is fundamentally important to the Christian Church and we ignore it or 'spiritualize' it to our own peril. The Torah of Moses does have very significant things to say not just about our individual, private or family lives, but also about our public and political discourse, especially in an increasingly antagonistic pluralist polytheist society (for many in the Church, I realize, the realities of the demonic side of the 'principalities and the powers' is a reality that the North American branch of the Church has not yet fully understood or contended with, but we are starting to feel the pressure).

My rethinking comes along the lines set forth, not only by the theonomists, but by much recent and erudite scholarship that is pouring over the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. That is, the ever present, and apparently and paradoxically divise, debate about Paul and the Torah, whether on the more scholarly level (Westerholm, Sanders, Wright, et al) or the more popular Lutheran-esque revisions (Piper and company). When thinking about this, though, it is important to set it in proper historical context, especially as we find it in the book of Acts: how does the relation of the Torah ("holy, just, and good") to the Gentile converts work?

In reading Marcus Bockmuehl's Jewish Law in Gentile Churches and Mark Nanos' The Mystery of Romans, I have been introduced to the halakhic concept of how Gentiles were supposed to act in the land of Israel if they wanted to be part of the common life and the worship (however limited they might experience it) of the one true God. These regulations are found primarily in Leviticus 18-20 (further confirming my suspicions that the Church's ignorance of this book has been theologically deadly) and consist mainly of three categories: idolatry/blasphemy, blood regulations (both dietary and 'blood shedding'), and sexual immorality. Interestingly enough, these same things appear in Acts 15 under the auspices of the Apostolic Decree, a document drafted to answer the question "What must Gentile converts to the Messiah do in order to be saved?" Of course, here, a redefinition of soteriology is in order -- in Acts the question is not "how does one get into heaven" but "how does one have a place in the eschatological community that will have a place in the age to come". Salvation is never primarily individualistic (although it does involve the individual), but speaks of how we are to be truly human now, in anticipation of God's final plans for creation (for example, Rom. 8).

These categories (which in later Rabbinic thought would be categorized under the heading of "Noachide Laws") give the theonomist much to think about. Many of the laws to Israel were exactly that, to Israel as it lived in the land. The relevance to diaspora Judaism has been much debated in Jewish circles, and Christians should consider the relevance to ethnic Jews who follow Messiah, as they are the restoration of "the lost sheep of the house of Israel" (of course there is much debate here). But to the Gentile who believes in Messiah? It would seem that many of the laws, especially concerning 'ritual' or Sabbath or kosher or circumcision, do not have anything to say to the Messianic Gentile. These are the things that make Jews Jews, and Paul says (and the Apostolic Decree confirms) that "there is neither Jew nor Greek" (that is, Jews are Jews who follow Messiah, Gentiles are Gentiles who follow Messiah, they do not need to become the other). In thinking about public ethics, then, it becomes important not to overstate the theonomic case, but what is there in Lev. 18-20 and Acts 15 (not to mention Ex 20, the Ten Commandments, but that is another story for another time) must be studied and understood. In many ways, it seems, the New Testament understands the Gentile converts to not be a separate institution, but a part of God's eschatological community, which includes the restored Israel of which I've spoken in previous posts. The Church, then, is to be neither Gentile nor Jew, but builds off of what God started with Israel and forms something new, where the distinctions between Jew and Gentile are relativized in Messiah, but certainly foundational ethical principles form the basis of continued community life, in both intra-community dialogue and table fellowship and also in public discourse and legislation.

The Limits of Competence

2009-06-09T07:21:00.002-04:00

I have been raised and reared under the Gospel of Excellence. If everything we do is supposed to be "to the glory of God", then (the assumption goes) everything we do must be excellent, because only excellent things are worthy of the glory of God. However, having lived under that burden for many years now, I'm beginning to see that the assumption entailed in it are incorrect.

Anyone under the burden of "perfectionism" knows that ultimately perfection is unattainable, but the drive to grasp it shoulders guilt upon us. So we try harder, and fail -- maybe a little, maybe epically -- and we try again to get it just right. I wonder, though, if this call to perfection might be part of Adamic pride, the desire to be as God. If so, then it is a peculiar sin, since even God did not make all things perfect: ask any farmer about their marginal land, ask any carpenter about marginal wood, ask a coffee roaster about 'defect' beans, etc.

Instead, I would like to proffer the idea of competence: we work not for perfection, but for fit. To return to a bit of agriculture (or gardening, if you prefer), marginal land is not rendered useless by its status as marginal. Instead, special care and consideration is needed to make proper and sustainable use of that land (sustainable being understood as use that preserves or improves the fertility and integral structure of the land). Sometimes its best use, its most competent use, is being marginal: a barrier between the rows of crops and the 'wild'. However, if our agriculture standard is 'perfection' (and that usually is defined in an industrial economy as 'efficiency'), then marginal land qua marginal land is useless. It must be (incompetently) turned into row land, which makes it unsustainable and is deeply damaging to the structure of the land and the humans who are to care for it, as Wendell Berry might point out.

Competence, then, involves a few neccessary things that distinguish it from 'perfection': humility to see and know the work, land, idea, people as they really are; care to get into the marginal parts of life along with the 'better' elements and to understand them; place, since no thing is ultimately disconnected from where it grows, whether we are speaking of plants or ideas or factories. 'Perfection' or 'excellence' are, in the end, Platonic ideas, ideas beyond the reach of man that make us feel trapped in our creatureliness; competence embraces creatureliness, yet mourns sinfulness (not the same thing!), and makes the best of its created circumstances. Competence is thrifty -- even apple peels can have copious amounts of canning pectin rendered from them. Excellence ends up being wasteful, as apple peels cannot contribute to a larger goal (pectin is never the goal in perfection). The idea of scale really does hit home here: competence can be content with the small, with excellence is always striving for the 'big' solution to the 'big' problem.

Developing competence, of course, is no easy thing. Especially since competence is so wide ranging: one can be 'excellent' in only a few things; one can be competent in many. Consider just the duties of a house husbandman: carpentry, plumbing, painting, mechanical maintenance, care for animals, care for wife and children, etc. Competence in these things is developed over long periods of time and in conjunction with community (we observe and help others to build these skills). Excellence in any of these things, apart from a conscious disciplined career choice, is impossible for us -- I certainly will never understand the full inner workings of my car, but that doesn't mean that I cannot use and maintain it properly.

Excellence, however, is still needed. I strive for excellence in my theology and in my coffee roasting -- however, excellence must itself come by way of competence. Only when I have learned to care for these things as concrete entities, as placed things, can I develop them to their greatest potential.

Interlude: The Psalms

2009-06-02T22:14:00.002-04:00

Dear Reader and Fellow Rethinker,

I appreciate your patience with this series of posts -- I do not know how many will be a part of the whole or even if I will "finish". In many ways, I hope that I do not, for that would call for another rethinking: I am not infallible and I must be allowed to disagree with myself. In some ways, this Arabian process is one of self-discovery -- but not in the sense of "self-actualization" but rather the sense of "it is no longer 'I' who lives, but the Messiah who lives within me". This process changes me, brings me to repentance, and is conforming me to an image of the Messianic Other. It is uncomfortable, and (as a friend tells me) dangerous considering some of the ties I have in the Christian world. But it is something that must be done and has been pressing on me for years.

Which brings me to the Psalms. My religious tradition uses only Psalms in corporate worship. It is one of the things that led me to embrace the tradition and which has caused this rethinking: in many ways that tradition is being consumed in the gnostic modernism that I described earlier, I do not wish it to be. The Psalms can be an antidote to that tendency.

The Psalms are, really, God's song-book. Whether or not a Church tradition makes use of them says much about that tradition. Many "evangelical" traditions forswear them or relegate them to "personal devotion", if that. The vapidity of much modern Church music does not need to be recited here, instead I would like to examine some of the positive aspects of the Psalms.

The Psalms connect the Messiah's Body and Bride with its past. This is a collection of works that span around a half-millennium in time, from the foundation of the Kingdom to the initial return from exile and speak of the common hopes of Israel. If the full restoration of Israel is important in understanding the New Testament, then the Psalms are indispensible: the themes of forgiveness, restoration, vindication, triumph, and God's royal sovereignty pervade the poems and songs. In that light, it is important, though, to recognize that even though we sing these songs and they do have modern applicability, they are Israel's songs. Those of us who are Gentiles in the faith must see them in their proper historical and eschatological light before we just take them as our own. When we sing of vindication over enemies, let us remember that God has done this in the death and resurrection of the Messiah. When imprecations are sung, let us remember that the Messiah is the conquerer and that the enemy may not be the Romans or the Taliban or whoever, but "the last enemy that shall be defeated is death". When return from exile is longed for, let us remember the book of Acts and our responsibilities towards the historically called Israel "according to the flesh", for the "gifts and calling of God are irrevocable".

The Psalms emphasize the community that God has called, not just the lone individual. We are called by the Messiah not to be individual brides, as if Jesus were some cosmic polygamist, but to be a part of -- to participate in -- his one Bride, the Church, made up of Israel and righteous Gentiles together praising God. Even those songs that are spoken from an individual point of view are often the king singing, giving them an undeniable Messianic cast. Those of Asaph often express the individual longing to be back in the community, amongst the throng of worshippers (such as Psalm 42/43). The individual finds meaning and purpose in the midst of this worshipping community, who share songs and history, who are called into being, not by themselves, but by the Shepherd.

The Psalms remind us that not everything is well, that there remains mighty acts of God for us to participate in, pray for, worship God for, and so on. There is exile still, there is sin, there are enemies, death still reigns over much of the world. But the Messiah has conquered and is conquering through that worshipping community. If man fell into sin by his selfish idolatry, what is true salvation but the restoration of worship and koinonia between man and his Creator? All is not well, but the Messiah reigns (Psalm 2) and the troubled history of Israel (Psalm 105-106) has brought the mighty act of God on the cross of Jesus of Nazareth to bear on the whole world.

The Psalms remind us that we know God, not by idle speculation or theological dogma, but through His acts in history to restore, redeem, and recreate. God is a revealer, but He does so through acting in history, especially through His chosen ("salvation is from the Jews"), culminating in their representative and our Lord, Jesus the Messiah. Christian knowledge is not esoteric, not far off, not the exclusive provenance of the priestly caste (regardless of ecclesial nomenclature), but the common property of His people and knowable by all who would investigate these things which "were not done in a corner".

The Psalms tell us that even though the public works of God are available to all -- Jew or Greek, male or female, slave or free -- they ultimately lead us to recognize the Creator's great unfathomability: "how unsearchable are your works". God acts, we can understand, but let us not think that we have exclusive or exhaustive knowledge of God's doings or plans: "the secret things are God's, but the revealed things are our and our children's".

The Psalms, in other words, form important cornerstones for Christian worship and keep us grounded in the full history of God's mission in the world: Abraham to Israel through Moses to David past the exile to the Messiah and the ingathering of the Gentiles, of which many of us are. In the great words of the Psalmists: Praise Yah!

Rethinking It All: The Primacy of Acts

2009-06-01T22:11:00.003-04:00

When thinking about the ideas of simplicity and clarity in theology, one quickly runs into a fasinating doctrine from the Reformation: the perspicuity of Scripture. Perspicuity means clarity (why they don't use that much more clear word is beyond me) and has to do with the idea that the necessary things to believe for one to be a part of the people of God are accessible to anyone. I love this idea, but too often our understand of what we must believe for salvation is clouded by centuries of minutae from systematic theology: justification, the innards of trinitarian speculation, whatever eschatology we call home, etc. Instead, looking at Scripture, it is (with a few exceptions that prove this rule) a story -- exactly the story that we need in our postmodern/modern malaise and loss of certitude, exactly what we need to found and sustain a community such as I describe in the last post. In other words, what is necessary to believe is the mighty acts of God. These are relatively clear and point the way to being explained by the apostles in the New Testament. In that regard, if we are to reassess and understand New Testament theology, how it connects to the Hebrew Bible, and how the whole story fits together, primacy in interpretation must be given to Acts: the perspicuity of Scripture practically demands it.

However, how well do we know Acts? In some ways, due to its classification as a "historical" book, it often is slighted or ignored: where are its great discourses into Christology? Or Justification? Or any other doctrine that props us up against our theological enemies? Usually, when people start reading Acts, they begin to notice that their theology doesn't stand up to it, so they say that Acts is "early", "primative", "undeveloped", "not a credible witness", "perfunctory", "not normative" or something of the sort. Acts does not have a high christology, or concentrate very much on justification, and seems to up end any eschatological speculation (why, after all, does Peter say that his audience was in the last days? More on that anon). Acts humbles overly spiritual and overly intellectualized theologies both, and therefore gets tossed in the dust bin. Even if a Church or denomination claims to be centered on the "Word of God", rarely is Acts preached through or even mentioned -- except maybe to note the ostensible tension between it and Galatians, with Galatians always coming out on top as being Paul's "more mature thought". Whenever data that doesn't fit hits an entrenched worldview, it is often ignored or belittled until the evidence mounts so high as to create a paradigm shift or a breakdown of the sacred canopy. I know this because I do it myself, hence the need -- the desparate need -- for rethinking, for Arabia. Acts must send us to Arabia, to hear with fresh ears and to see with fresh eyes the magnalia Dei, the wonderful works of God.

Key, it has become clear to me, is the disciples question in the beginning chapter. "Will you at this time restore the Kingdom to Israel?" Often times, at least in all the commentaries I've read and all the sermons I've heard, this is considered a juvenile or completely off-base question: how, after all, can the disciples still be thinking and speaking in such earthly terms? How can they consider Israel important at all since the Messiah has come? But notice that Jesus does not chide them or say "O you of little faith" which was his common way of addressing their former failure to understand: "It is not for you to know the times and eras that the Father has set by his own authority, but you shall be my witnessess in Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria, and unto the ends of the earth." In other words, they had not asked a wrong question, but the answer was not going to be given to them at that time. However, if we understand a little bit of the basic Jewish eschatology of the time (and I'm thankful for )Mark Nanos for bringing this obvious point to my attention), we know that the restoration of Israel from exile, to its position of God's wise stewards of Creation and ruler over the nations, was expected before the Gentiles could come into the true worship of the one God. Note the prevalance of this theme in Jeremiah 30-33: Israel is restored to God's favor, then the Gentiles worship alongside of them.

What happens in the book of Acts is that through the proclamation of Jesus as "Lord and Christ" (code, as it were, for the functions that the Messianic King was to have -- Anointed One over Israel "Christ" and Lord over the Gentiles), Israel is being restored: their sins are forgiven, the Spirit of God rests on them instead of the Temple, and the are united with the Messiah. The tricky part comes when Cornelius believes and receives the Holy Spirit, just like the Jews. This is unexpected, as it is generally believed at this time that the Jews will have a precedence over the Gentiles in the Kingdom -- lord to servant, if you will. For the Gentiles to become full members of the people of God, to become children of Abraham, they will -- in the mind of some Christian Jews -- be circumcised and take the full burden and privelege of Torah upon themselves. Not so say Peter and James and Paul, but instead they must comport themselves like changed Gentiles, "righteous Gentiles" in the Apostolic Decree (Acts 15). But the point is, since Israel is restored through the work of the Messiah and the proclamation thereof, the Gentiles can come into the Kingdom as equal participants, not as "second-class citizens" (basically the argument of Romans and Galatians). This is why Paul's ministry continues throughout to be "to the Jew first and also the Greek" -- Israel must be restored, then the Gentiles can enter in alongside as equals, both vindicated (justified/acquited) as God's people based on their faith in the Lord Messiah alone.

Reading Acts in this way, with the dual focus on the restoration of Israel and efficacy of the witness "unto the ends of the earth" calls for a rereading of the epistles: how do the situations and controversies in Acts find their expression in Paul's dense rhetoric in his letters; how about Peter; or John? Once situated thusly, I've been finding in my reading that the epistles make a lot more sense -- they speak to genuinely first century issues -- not to fourth century or even sixteenth century ones. That does not make them any less relevant, though. We live in a storied world, where Acts (not to mention Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Esther, Ezra-Nehemiah, etc.) makes up a vital chapter in our corporate history -- denying its validity would be tantamount to saying that because we don't relive the American Revolution constantly, it must not be important (which maybe the British wouldn't mind?). Such a devaluation of history in the Church bespeaks a prevalent and pernicious gnostic influence: only the timeless is important, history is important only if it teaches us lessons for today. May it never be in God's Church! Instead, we continue the narrative of Acts in our local parishes: we are witnesses, not to "personal conversion" but to the resurrection of the Messiah, to the restoration of Israel, to the in-gathering of the Gentiles to the true worship of God. What Jesus "began to do and teach" continues, by the Spirit he and the Father share, in the workings of the Church qua Church in the world today -- there is no need to relay the foundation of the Messiah and his apostles, but to build the Temple of God upon it (I Corinthians 1-3). Many of the lessons in the book, of course, do have contemporary relevance, especially since the arrogance of Jew over Gentile has been radically reversed in Church history: instead of Gentiles needing to become Jews, often times it is Jews that must become, not Jewish followers of the Messiah, but Gentiles!

It is high time for us to reconsider the role of Acts in our thought, actions, and worship as the people of God.

Rethinking It All: The Church

2009-05-31T19:50:00.003-04:00

In some ways, it is rather odd to start rethinking with the Church. After all, the Church is emphasized only in the New Testament (it is in the Hebrew Bible, but not in the same capacity) and only after the work of the Messiah brings the eschatological fulfillment of Israel's hopes to bear. History, however, has shown that the Church -- where Christians of all stripes live and move -- has not been particularly faithful to its mission or even to its constitution. From early on, it has been gnosticized and mysticized beyond any reasonable recognition of an institution that would have grown out of Temple and synagogue. However, this is where we most fully image the Messiah, as his body, so the Church is indeed one of the forgotten emphases of the faith, one that desparately needs to be recovered before any positive steps can be taken in the redemptive acts of God in the world.

Rather than talking about the marks of the "true" Church, which could be classified as one of the most damaging and violent debates of all human history, re-examining the difference between visible and invisible Church is in order. I am used, in the past, to speaking of the invisible Church as being those who "truly are in faith" as opposed from the "masses" who populate the pews. Philip J. Lee, in his wonderful Against the Protestant Gnostics, calls this what it is: gnostic elitism, leading to a bifurcated people of God, the superspiritual versus the moderate or the normal. Really, this gnostic belief is the same as the Judaizers, only in different terminology: you must be circumcised to be a part of the Messiah's people, or, you must have "true" faith to be part of the Church. Since we can never know for certain whether or not anyone other than ourselves have "true" faith, we must rely instead on the visible Church as our means of defining the community of God's people. In other words, as far as humans are concerned, those who are united with the Messiah are those who unite with his people in worship -- which seems to be Paul's argument throughout the book of I Corinthians. To take it a step further, though, the argument can (and should) be made that the only real example of what the Church is, is found in the local parish. The Church, the true Church, is made of a collection of real people in real places that have participation with the Messiah through faith and therefore have participation with each other, the Messiah's body. The word koinonia, which often is translated rather dully as "fellowship", has this double edge to it: we participate in the Messiah, so we participate with each other. The idea of the imago Dei finds its fullest expression here as well: if the Messiah is the imago, and we are united with the Messiah, even called by his name (12:12), then we -- as the body -- are imago Dei as well. (A quick note to say that this does not mean that either individuals or those outside of the Church are not imago Dei, but the Church qua Church is the expression of the renewed, redeemed imago found in the Messiah).

What then of the invisible Church? We do have the "wheat and tares", however I'm not sure if that parables applies outside on the historical division between those who are allegiant to the Messiah and those who are not, evidenced at AD 70 and AD 135. We do have a wonderful model to consider, though, in the book of Revelation. In God's throne room, where the seer John is taken up, we see not only the redeemed of Israel (the symbolic 144,000), but also ones from "every tribe, tongue, nation in the earth". While we normally experience the Church only on the local level of real people that we know and can interact with, when we worship the one true God, we join the rest of those who are outside of our parish community in heaven, so that the Messiah's body is one on the local level and one worldwide.

The question becomes, and quite relevant, what makes the Church itself? The word itself, ekklesia, comes from the idea of being "called out"; called away from being destructive and dehumanizing, called into a mission of living a truly human life in the midst of sin -- characterized by hospitality, mutual submission, and self-giving. In an earlier post I talked about the unfortunate marriage of religion and power, or probably better put, religion and violence. The New Testament is clear, it seems to me, that the Church is the court of the Messiah, his Session if you will: Paul says that those "called out" are "seated in the heavenlies with the Messiah" -- that seating, of course, is next to the one enthroned at the right hand of God the Father. However, that rule is not to be "live the Gentiles who lord it over their subjects" but rather "the greatest among you shall be the servant of all". The rule of the Messiah turns all other rule, by what Paul calls the "principalities and powers", on its head, openly shaming all those who call themselves the "true authority" or the "answer". The Church, the visible Church wherever it is, is supposed to lead this -- by leading lives characterized by love, mutual edification, and worship of the true God, who is the Creator and, through the Messiah, is the Redeemer of Jew and Gentile.

Rethinking It All: Part Two

2009-05-26T22:06:00.002-04:00

One other figure in the Bible that sojourned in Arabia was Elijah. Like Paul, he went there to seek God, asking similar questions: how can these things be? In his case, it was about the idolatry of Israel and the impending destruction at the hands of those idols. For Paul, it was how the God of Israel's righteousness could be revealed in the death of the Messiah. My own escape has clarified, at least a little bit, the historical crises that confront us today (all history is crisis, a golden age has never been).

One of the most alarming trends that I have been a witness to is the prevalent defection from the faith: one strong Christians hanging their hats elsewhere or nowhere at all. At the start of my Arabian adventure, I was there as well -- I have almost left the faith a number of times in the last decade (rethinking, after all, does not come without its perils). By the grace of God, by which I mean the resurrection of Jesus, I have not left -- but I have not been left unscathed.

People change allegiances for a variety of reasons: I am not here to comment on any individual reasons for doing so. If you have left the faith, you know them and you know whether or not they are good reasons. My place, and I would argue most everyone else's, is not to judge your reasons, but instead to try and figure out what exactly it is that is creating and nurturing the environment for those reasons to exist in.

One of the most obvious to me, for I keep running headlong into it, is the dissolution of the old certitudes. Any superficial student of history knows that it is ridiculous to call Christianity a religion of peace: early on it was coopted for the purposes of violence and power, and it has been comfortable in that position. The railing of many "Christians" in our day and age about politics sounds oddly familiar to the railings of elder Christians who argued for the establishment of denominations: the State "defends" the Church with the sword against all enemies, whether heretics or homosexuals or infidels or (insert whatever your church tradition is against). Digging a little deeper into history (ever repeating) it is also easy to see that the Church is in no position to separate itself from this history, since its very theology since the 4th century has been concerned with nurturing and furthering the relationship between Christ and Caesar. I do think Christianity is a religion of peace, but only once it is separated from its dependence on power to assert and maintain its claims.

But this is only one of the old certitudes that have been shattered. The rise of modernism with the Enlightenment was seen by many as a deathblow to Christianity ("God is dead and we have killed him" for example). Christianity adapted and adopted adeptly and became thoroughly modernist, even those branches (American Reformed churches, for one) that clung to an older, "purer" fundamentalism: instead of decimating the division between doctrine and experience (or facts/values, faith/science, whatever dualism you want) the church solidified it in its actions, but denied it in its words. So now we have Christians quite content to say their prayers as a private action, believe in their own salvation (in opposition, of course, to everyone else), but yet not be noticibly different from those who adhere to none of the teachings of the Messiah. Postmodernism, in many ways, has shown that form of Christianity to be a sham: it is all about power, about sex, about money, about the tenets of Nietzsche, Freud, or Smith instead of Jesus. But, as any student of pomo knows, no story replaces the shattered myths, leaving us without a sacred canopy to give direction and meaning.

Now we live in a storied world, as before (even though we denied it), but it is not a coherent or cohesive story: it is many stories, almost all in opposition, vying for credibility, for power, for the 'means of production', for cultural change. Which story to follow, which 'ism' to grasp onto, is the question of the day, even if it is unconscious or implicit. I have seen many students crash upon the waves of consumerism, of 'hard-headed realism', of various forms of theodicy, and not come out the other side. If we believe that God exists to make us happy, or wealthy, or comfortable, or understanding, or anything other than a fellow crucified disciple of Jesus, then our worldview will shatter upon the rocks of the fallen world. Many students have written in papers recently that their main goal in life is to 'be happy', in a sort of morbid (and moribund) christian Utilitarianism. Mill and the Pleasure Principle coopt Christ and the Crucifixion. In a world of competing stories, how can we say what is right or wrong for anyone else (always a good question) or for ourselves? The restrictions, the boundaries, the limitations of the covenant are forgotten because we have no story to bind us to them: our Exodus has been so overly spiritualized that it means absolutely nothing. If our ultimate goal is to attain individualism in heaven, then it makes sense to seek it pre-emptively on earth.

In the midst of this, I feel somewhat like Habbakuk: how is this better? The violent Babylonians of Modernism and Postmodernism cannot really be the scourge that will eschatologically cleanse the people of God! But like Habbakuk, I must realize that my eyes do not see clearly, that the violent -- whether Christian or pagan -- do not ultimately triumph, but the meek shall inherit the earth.

Rethinking It All: Part One

2009-05-24T21:23:00.002-04:00

In my mind, one of the most important historical bits of Scripture for my personal life is when Paul says (in Galatians) that after his meeting with Jesus at the Damascus Road, he went to rethink everything for over a decade in Arabia. That passage has caused much consternation over what exactly I should do with the training I have received and nurtured for close to a decade. The more I read of historically-based exegesis, the more troubled I become with the history of Christian interpretation, the history of ecclesial activity (especially the confluence of theology and power), and the basis of present Christian devotion and worship. In many ways, I feel completely outside the pale of this long-standing historic community. I've called it my "postmodern Protestant dilemma" (those interested can look up the link). It is, and will remain, a critique from within -- I am a follower of Israel's Messiah and the Gentiles' Lord. I do not critique out of spite, but out of gratitude for the grace I have received in that Messiah. My writing and thinking revolve around the twin foci of being faithful to God's revealed Word (a faithfulness that does not equal correctness necessarily) and God's redeemed people (both Jew and Gentile who worship the one true God in the Messiah).

My start down the road to Arabia began with a simple premise: the broad outlines of God's mission and work in the world should be comprehensible to all of God's people, even if that comprehension comes from the Spirit rather than 'rationality'. In other words, if an idea/doctrine takes a clergyman to understand, then it probably is there to legitimate power rather than a part of God's revelation. In many ways, I still hold to this premise, but what I have found is that the simplest of things can, upon further investigation, but intricately complex. I understand how a car goes, but I could not tell you the intricacies of a driveshaft, powertrain, or fuel-injection (God bless you if you can). The other premise is that a doctrine or theology must be practical. This one has been harder to hold onto -- many teachings in the history of the Church were practical for that time, but have devolved into abstract, ahistorical concepts now. I learned this, interestingly enough, from pagan philosophy: Plato's battle with the Sophists produced amazingly complex philosophy that was practical in his time, but seems so disconnected now (and has destroyed much theology because of it). These two premises, clarity and simplicity still drive my thought. They have, though, both been chastened. Might I even call them mature?

Even though I teach Bible, I still feel in Arabia. I know I have said things that I do not now agree with: theology must be understood as a human endeavor -- anyone claiming the title of 'mouth of God' perpetuates a dangerous and damaging lie (Let those who have ears hear). The power that comes from the burden (yes, a burden) of teaching the Bible is frightening: I am influencing those for whom the Messiah died. Anyone who teaches that is not scared to death of that should not teach, ever. That fear is a necessary part of my Arabian experience: I have been humbled, and continue to be humbled, but this calling from the Most Holy God. Reading student essays this last semester brought this home to me: are we teaching our students well enough to be independent of their teachers? When erudite non-Christians challenge them on their allegiance to the Messiah, will they be able to stand? I fear the worst.

And so I remain rethinking it all. Some of the conclusions I have come to have rocked my world, so to speak. I have had to hold tightly at points to the resurrection of Jesus as the only fixed point in my faith. In the end, it is not my knowledge that leads me into the life of the age to come; he is my Lord and he holds me in his hands. I mean that in a significantly different way than I did years ago. It is no mere religious trifle or pleasantry, but rather the only way I can speak about my everyday reality: the Messiah loved me and gave his life for me and now the life that I lead must be in the Son of God.

What is salvation?

2009-03-22T16:46:00.002-04:00

From Luke 1:67-75:

Now [John's] father Zacharias was filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied, saying:

Blessed is the Lord God of Israel, for He has visited and redeemed His people, and raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of His servant David...that we should be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us, to perform the mercy to our fathers and to remember His holy covenant--the oath that He swore to our father Abraham: to grant us that we, being delivered from the hand of our enemies, might serve Him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before Him all the days of our life.

Wait, Zacharias! What about going to heaven when we die?

Developing Virtue

2009-02-13T02:35:00.003-05:00

The whole corpus of Biblical law and ethics is focussed on one goal: the maturation of families (and individuals within them) to exercise God's rule upon the earth. To do that, responsibility, the fruits of the Spirit, and virtue must be practiced. The mature Christian's job is to lead others in that development (here is the true Biblical idea of eldership).

I have found myself in the position, more than once, of helping others mature. As I look at my employees and (more significantly in many ways) my daughter, I am struck by my own lack of maturity, of real Christian virtue. How can I hope to see God's will done on earth in my tiny sphere of influence if I haven't been willing to do what His will is?

I desire for Olivia that she be thrifty, hard-working, honest, faithful, dependable, loyal, trusting-yet-shrewd, long-sighted, and loving. I am few of those things and none all the time. How can I hope for her what I am not?

But God gives us the Spirit to be made and remade into the image of His Son.

Faithless Christians

2009-01-21T12:51:00.002-05:00

After a long time doing an informal study, I'm convinced that many (if not most) Christians do not believe in prayer. We do not believe that it has power, that it changes things, that it is effective (and therefore important) in any way. So we don't do it. When we do, it isn't prayer that is deep or meaningful or even semi-articulate. It certainly doesn't assume that we are part of the royal court of Christ's kingdom, co-rulers with the one at the right hand of God. We don't, for that same reason, believe in blessings or benedictions. Pious words, maybe, but nothing more. Today in class, during the final benediction, the students--acting in accord with their underlying presuppositions--packed their bags. Nice words, well-meaning (of course) but devoid of any power to create or change. These are the same students that placed great energies into believing either on "Country First" or "Change". It may be that we don't believe in the Spirit of God (we don't--we wouldn't know what it would be like to have a genuine revival, regardless if we are Pentecostal or not).

Could it be that we are now faithless because we finally have succumbed to what other, alien cultures have said the world really is? That there is no way scientifically or biblically that the world might have been created in 6 days? That the worldview of angels and demons, divine kingship, and speaking assess is bogus or "naive"? Assess still speak, instead of being beaten, though, we now elect them to offices political and ecclesial. This degradation of language and symbol could be posited back to the rise of rationalism as an alternative to orthodox Christianity. It could be posited back to when categories of shaliach and malach were replaced with "ousia" and its various forms. I'm not sure--but I know that the powers that be, which are supposed to be in subjection to Christ through his Church, do not want us to think biblically or apart from the Church's or State's "sanctioned" (ordained) interpreters.

Faithlessness is easy.

A Theological Burden

2009-01-03T17:51:00.002-05:00

My brother and I were talking the other day about the way various philosophers interact: mainly using hubristic personal attacks and ignoring evidence. His specialization is philosophy of science, which I know precious little about. His comments, though, could easily be transfered over to the realm of theology, where I dwell. So much hatred spreads back and forth in this discipline, centered often, I think, on the assumption that what these folks say is what God says (vox theologica, vox dei?). That, depending on which theologians you cling to, whether explicitly or not, determines your salvific standing before Christ. Let me profer a new way of understanding theology:

All theology is man's attempt to understand the self-disclosure of God.

A few notes are in order. "Man" here is shorthand for any human creature that seeks to understand the divine, with the background assumption of the "noetic" effects of sin. That is, man's mind has difficulty understanding the things of God because sin effects all of creation, including the mind of man. For all the smoke blown about theological humility in every Christian tradtion, the noetic effects have often been the burden of whoever your theological opponent is. But you, dear budding theologian with a chip on your shoulder, are impacted by sin as well. And me as well.

Another note. Labeling theology as "man's attempt" is crucial. All theology apart from the inscriptured, authoratative documents of the Bible, is fallible. All creeds, confessions, synods, anathemas, and footnotes are subject to constant revision and error-correction. There is no reason to assume that God wouldn't allow a recalcitrant people to be led astray by a doctrine for a long period of time--he did it will ancient Israel when they became inflamed with pagan power (I Sam 8), why wouldn't he do it when the Church became inflamed with the same power (approx. time range is the early 2nd century)? For all the philosophical brillance of the Church Fathers, the Reformers, and others throughout Church history, theology remains a human endeavor.

If theology is a human endeavor, then motives must be very clear. Oftentimes, theological thinking has been related to power. If the Church has the power to say "this one is (or is not) saved..." then the Church's teaching can easily be corrupted to exclude whatever groups or individuals the teachers of the Church do not like/do not want to share power with. So the gentile Christians become anti-Semitic. So the Christian Platonists revile the Aristotelians. The Aristotelians look down on those who do not adhere to Thomism, etc. The power of the Church, which historically quickly became associated with the wealth, land-holdings, and politics of the State as "faith-protector", becomes another way of exercising god-like authority over the "infidel". In other words, the Church becomes an empire as tyrannical as Caesar ever was. Except that Caesar could only destroy the body.

This is not to say, and this is important, that all theologians (or even any theologians) are solely motivated by power or greed or sex or what-have-you. Such a Nietzchian analysis does not hold up in any way, shape, or form to historical reality. But all theologians, given that they are human creatures in the line of Adam, have mixed motives and cannot usually see the long-term consequences of their actions. Do you think the Puritans envisioned they way their legal and educational policy would change into modern Massachusetts (Increase Kennedy, anyone?) or Harvard University?

The way of persuasion remains. It is not that it has been tried and failed, but that it is assumed to fail and therefore not tried. Yes, there are those who are so recalcitrant in their beliefs that they won't listen to reason. Them we will always have with us, no matter our force of arms or tongue. Presenting arguments that are clear, concise, and well-reasoned may not carry the day with your opponent, but it will carry the day with many of those in the audience.

Why, if adequate persuasion has been used, have the same issues been violent bones of contention in Church history? Christology, ecclesiology, soteriology, and on and on the list goes of "obvious" or "established" or "orthodox" doctrines that are held in force by power (often times that of the State), but that well-meaning Christians have problems with. Sometimes, yes, the opponent, the "heterodox" has power on their minds--but that just shows the deeper disease of which the heretic is a symptom. Jesus said that the greatest among us, the one who wants or who holds power, should become servant of all. Impractical? Yes. Thank God for the impractical. Instead of burning your brother at the stake of the State or the stake of your fiery tongue, why not follow the command of Jesus in Matthew 18 (go to your brother, reason with him, if he doesn't listen, take witnesses and help, if he doesn't listen, take him in front of the believing community, if he doesn't listen, don't let him eat with you)? Persuasion does sometimes lead to ostracism, but the witnesses and the church are supposed to balancedly ascertain the issues and reasonably decide--not descend into an orgy of fire and blood because a system is challenged.

It comes down to this: unless you can show why your way is right and your opponent's is false, you should probably keep quiet until you can do so. I need to follow that advice just as much as others.

Review of Pagan Christianity

2008-11-17T21:37:00.002-05:00

The history of Christian doctrine and ecclesial practice has long been a passion of mine. There is something distinctly unsettling about the way and the why of our corporate actions. Too many doctrines that ignore or downplay passages of Scripture that don't seem to fit. Too many practices that seem well and good, but were added by the powerful to either protect the regular Joe Churchgoer (positively) or to keep the regular from becoming the powerful (negatively). The question that Viola and Barna explore in this small tome (with powerfully small-type footnotes) is "Are we doing Church 'by the book'?" Their answer: no. Unsettling? Yes. Completely convincing? No, but mostly because of internal faults, not faults of evidence.

At the start, Viola and Barna (and the main author seems to be Viola, with Barna there for his research clout--henceforth I'll refer to both of them as "Viola") set a polemic, rather than a neutral tone. A neutral tone would convey something more like an academic feel, which Viola makes clear is not his intention. Such a book would "be read by a few people" (xx). An academic writing style does not necessarily a dull book make, however. Viola often descends into quite harsh and inflated polemic, which is often contracted and softened in the "Delving Deeper" sections that end each chapter. However, rhetoric aside, the writing style betrays an underlying anti-intellectualism that pervades Viola's vision of the Church. He speaks often of how the institutional church of Protestantism depends so much on the intellectual sermon to build spirituality in its listeners--a practice that he and I would both agree has negatively affected the church. He also lambasts seminaries as being too academic (my experience with seminaries, interestingly enough, has tended towards the opposite direction)--opting for what he calls "Spirit-led, open-participatory meetings and non-hierarchical leadership" in the church: non-ordained, non-theologically trained leadership in the Church. I actually don't disagree with him, at least superficially, but I am concerned that a voice of studied reason within one of these meetings would be marginalized as not partaking enough of the "Spirit", where everyone brings a message, a psalm, and whatnot. While it seems that this was Paul's practice, as per the Corinthian correspondence, the first generation believers, even the Gentiles, had a greater grasp and understanding of the Hebrew Scriptures than most church members do today. I've heard highly educated people say some stupid things in church, but that doesn't mean theological education is a bad thing--it needs heavy reform. His system of apprenticeship (the "elders" teaching the youngin's of the congregation) would work as long as the "elders" were properly educated themselves--something he leaves up to the post of the "church-planter apostle" who gets trained by? The answer is unclear, but Viola presupposes some sort of "apostolic succession" (as all Christians do, whether they realize it or not), especially as he says that the ekklesia shouldn't follow the ways of the historical Church, but should follow its teachings (262). Here, though, is where the anti-intellectual bent of the book becomes positively schizophrenic. Viola, for all his historical research, has not combined the historical practice of the church with its historical beliefs. Would the Church have called synods, councils, creedal assemblies without the rise of the one-bishop rule, the college of bishops, and the institution of a clergy-laity system? Would our historical, creedal doctrines have taken the shape they did without the influence of the church-state marriage (both Arianism and Nicene orthodoxy were heavily politicized doctrines which gave the Caesar power of the decisions of the church--an outcome that was quickly regretted, but never alleviated by rethinking the doctrines outside of a pagan, Greco-Roman philosophical milieu)? Probably not. However, he says "the historic creeds can be helpful guideposts to keep a church on track when it comes to the essential teachings of the faith" (262). The problem is that with one goes the other: you cannot reject the teachings of ecclesial practice without calling into question the doctrines that gave rise to them. If one wants cake, one must eat it as well.

The Viola concept of worship also has some issues to be dealt with. Once again, the issue isn't necessarily evidence, but the way it is presented. Peppered throughout the book is that phrase already mentioned: "Spirit-led, open-participatory meetings and non-hierarchical leadership". The problem here is that Viola never really defines what that means. To figure it out, as footnote readers will quickly become weary and wary of, you must read some other book he has written. This tactic is less about saving space as it is about making money: to figure out how Church should really be, you must buy another book. To figure out God's "eternal purpose" other than "saving souls", you must buy another book. Not to mention that Viola never mentions any other books, by scholars perhaps?, that back up his view of the Church or God's eternal purpose. Only his own get highlighted. Of course, theology should never be dictated by the more learned, eh?

The "non-hierarchichal leadership" clause, repeated over and over again to provoke Pavlovian egalitarians to drool, is suspect. He speaks of "informal" elders and leadership, which is what I take his meaning behind "non-hierarchical" to mean, however any sort of leadership, no matter how fluid, is hierarchical. The family is made up of husband-wife-children hierarchy that is, yes, mutually submitting to one another (at least as Paul conceives it). Just because there is mutual submission does not take away that there is hierarchy. God-Jesus-Church also exhibits the same qualities ("God is the head of Christ; Christ is the head of the Church; etc"). Once again, just because Jesus submitted himself to die for the Church does not make an egalitarian situation: he is Lord Messiah, we are his ruling council (a meaning for ekklesia that Viola ignores). The problem he has, as readers of the book no doubt notice, is with a static leadership that creates passivity among the regular Joe Churchgoer (to borrow from the recent pagan presidential race). Fair enough, but the language used to describe what the Church should be needs to be precise and accurate. There is leadership in the people of God and it is hierarchical, just not rigidly so. The orthodox Jewish community, interestingly enough, gives some creedence to this view. The older members (dare we call them elders?) teach the younger members who will take their place in business, religious training, and social activity: it isn't rigid, even the rabbi has an outside job to support himself and he is always teaching other members of the community how to rightly exegete the Scripture and Talmudic tradition. Protestantism could learn a lot from this system, but hierarchy is still there. The question isn't hierarchy or no hierarchy, but which hierarchy?

So far, this has been a fairly negative review. However, I did appreciate the historical research and the clarifications that the book offered. If it were rewritten, it could be a major catalyst for change in the Christian world. However, as it stands, it is self-defeating and will only cause disappointment in the authors and in the lives of those who take up their style of polemic and ambiguous definitions.

For the Next Four Years

2008-11-04T13:04:00.003-05:00

I don't know if you voted today or who will win. If you know me, you know that I don't care about either thing for various reasons. What I do care about, though, is seeing a change in the way we Americans do things. Politics, for what it is worth, is about the ability to extract involuntary taxes from various groups of the populace or the whole of the populace. Civil governments may use the resources for good things or bad things, but the point remains that civil government uses violence to collect taxes (Don't believe me? Then don't pay your taxes next year.) I do not believe that Obama or McCain, or anyone else for that matter, will be able to extract enough taxes or inflate/debase the currency enough to "solve" America's problems without creating massive new ones. So, over the next four years, regardless of who you voted for (or didn't), I'd like to ask you to join me in rethinking what politics are about. The only way to do that isn't really to waste our time discussing the relative merits of Socialist Warmonger A versus Warmongering Socialist B. Instead, during the next four years consider doing one of these things to become more self-governing:

--start a business that your community (within walking distance from your house) needs
--talk to a scared young girl who is pregnant and help her through the adoption system
--help an impoverished person to stand on their own two feet, regardless of whether their poverty is their fault or the systems or just plain bad-luck
--insulate your house
--repair a bike and use it for your small chores and errands and also to reduce your dependence on the Industrial-Military-Medical Complex
--learn to cook and share with your neighbors and the poor
--learn to bake and share with your neighbors and the poor
--learn to sew, mend, darn, resole, or some other task that could help your neighbors save money and reduce the relentless asinine commerce we are so subjected to
--learn to maintain and improve your house/rental property; look up the defintion of usufruct
--(from Kevin Craig) write/speak to a politician once a month about how they can reduce/eliminate taxes/government programs--make sure to tell them how you are reducing your and your neighbors dependence on them!
--grow your own vegetables/fruits, or exercise your consumer preference and power by helping local farmers meet your needs/demands
--help your neighbors/friends/family members settle a conflict peacefully

I'm sure there are other ways that we can act free, even though our freedoms are becoming less and less by the year. I'd love to hear your ideas in the comments.

The Snark, oh the Snark

2008-10-20T19:44:00.002-04:00

This last week or so I've been confronted with the need for change. My sense of humor has been getting the best of myself and my friends, starting a slow process of alienation from them. I'd best explain...

Humor for me is a way of being. It is in my blood: my dad and his dad trading barbs, my dad and myself trading barbs, etc. It is our way of communicating. However, I'm noticing that it is also our way of keeping real human interaction to a minimum. When you snark someone, if they are not on the same wavelength as you (as no one really is), then it is going to push them away. I'm thankful enough that one of my friends told me to stop; another friend has drawn away, and I don't blame him.

Humor, in that way, is a means to power. If you tear someone down, even if it is "all in good fun", you position yourself in authority. You are better than them, even in a jocular sense. It is fitting to me, I guess, that this would be the form of power I struggle with. I've spent so much of my life avoided and forswearing power. I was warned by my collegiate advisor to be careful how I led; not to not lead, but to be wary of my own ability to sway people--an ability that at the time I didn't even know I had. Now, years later, I do know that I have that power and not just because I inhabit offices of authority as a business owner or professor. I've had friends tell me that they hang on every word I say, that they've changed their opinions because of mine. I've always been a tad bit confused about that, though, since I rarely actually set out to change anyone's opinion. In all my aversion to power, however, I developed a way to lead. Instead of working out some godly way to lead my family, my friends, my employees, and my students, I've turned to a sick sort of dark and malicious humor to assert dominance. It isn't a question of whether to exercise authority or not, but how authority is going to be exercised. I'm not, by nature and by gifting, a follower, but I've been so uncomfortable with leading that I don't know exactly how to do it rightly and justly.

And so, I set off down a long road of discipleship, always keeping in mind that passage in Matthew: "the Gentiles lord it over their subjects, but it shall not be so among you, whoever wants to be greatest shall become the servant of all." The pagans lord it over through malignant humor and I'm not called to be a pagan. Funny how my means of human connection do the exact opposite. Funnier still how I long ever more piquantly for connection with every barb I trade.

The End of the Exile

2008-10-14T20:42:00.002-04:00

Now that Tom Wright has brought the concept of the exile to the mainstream conversation, there are some questions to be asked. That the "end of exile" is an important piece of salvation in Christ I take for granted. I recommend either Wright's The New Testament and the People of God or Brant Pitre's Jesus, the Tribulation, and the End of the Exile for starters.

The basic thrust is this: the end of the Babylonian (and in Pitre's arguement the Assyrian) exile is necessary for the Messianic "new age" to arrive. That is to say, one of the major promises made to Israel/Judah in the latter Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, etc.) is the return of these groups to "the land". Recently, while reading David Klingenhoffer's Why the Jews Rejected Jesus, I noticed that this reason for rejection came up often. It is, however, not a problem much dealt with in Christian theology: we tend to look at "return from exile" passages as
Rapture passages.

The problem arises, of course, because the return of either group, did not happen within Jesus' lifetime or Paul's. In fact, Paul, in his missionary journeys, seems to hedge more towards the one Abrahamic family of Jew and Gentile, even to leaving the synangogues (and the Jews therefore) when they responded in disbelief. However, this is balanced with his statements in Romans 9-11, where he speaks of the bringing in of the Gentiles (then followed by the Jews? depends on who you ask) as the "salvation of all Israel".

I think that Jesus, though, does talk about this. Compare Matthew 24:31 with Deuteronomy 30:1-5. The destruction of Jerusalem is tied directly to the return from exile; paradoxical, yet fitting as Jesus has cast Jerusalem into the role of Babylon and Assyria. However, it does still leave the question of how will God return the exiles, especially since "land" and "temple" have been redefined by the Messiah's appearance.

I'm beginning to think that "angels" as Matthew 24 has it is not the best translation. Better to go with "messangers"--Jesus sends out the messengers to gather the exiles unto himself; Paul speaks of the heralding of Christians bringing about the salvation of "all Israel". The exile has begun to end with Jesus; his people bring it to a definitive conclusion by their faithful work through his Spirit. Certainly gives a different look to evangelism.

John 14:2-6 in Historical Perspective

2008-09-28T18:25:00.004-04:00

The Gospel of John is sort of like the highest peak in a mountain range. It is the benchmark by which all other mountains are measured: the mountaineers all boast of their ability to climb it, but few ever accomplish it. In modern American evangelicalism, however, those who have claimed to climb it have stridently asserted its ease for the newcomer to the faith, with many disastrous effects. John is, and will remain, one of the most opaque books in the Christian Scriptures. Almost every dialogue that Jesus has in it ends with confusion: whether Nicodemus, the "crowds", the "Jews/Judaeans", or his own disciples. Confusion seems to be a reigning theme throughout the book--while on the surface many things seem simple, even the "teachers of Israel" struggle with the words and actions of this mysterious Rabbi, whom John would claim as the historical embodiment of God's long-awaited message of salvation. This should warn us enough to not base entire systems of Christology, eccesiology, or soteriology upon the text: we don't understand it enough to do so. However, its mystery has led many to invent and propagate many doctrines that seem to work prima facie with the text, but do not upon further investigation. The text of chapter 14 has suffered much at the hands of neoPlatonic evangelicalism, so it is my focus today.

Looking at the mountain, however, I do not claim that it is easy to climb, or that I have successfully climbed it. I have not. The book largely remains a mystery to me, so I undertake this exegesis with a healthy amount of fear and trepidation: my interpretation of this passage, though I think it works well with the historical background and the overall message of the book, is tentative and subject to revision, both by me and by others more qualified than I. Such is the nature of all theology, even the theology that has long defined our communities of faith.

"In my Father's house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to myself; that where I am, you may also be. And where I go you know, and the way you know." Thomas said to him, "Lord we do not know where you are going and how can we know the way?" Jesus said to him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me."

The keys to understanding this passage are two: the Temple and Jesus' Messiahship. That the book of John is primarily concerned with Jesus' claim of "Messiah" (and not, as is often supposed from the prologue, his divinity) is manifest from the end of the book: "...these are written that you may believe Jesus is the Christ, the son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name" (20:31). What exactly that means, however, will take us to what the Messiah was to accomplish.

If the Messiah was supposed to be like David (his son, in fact) or like Solomon or like Zerubbabel in Zechariah, then his main activity was to be the building/restoration of the Temple, and therefore God's throne, for God's people. Any Messiah that did not accomplish a Temple-building action would not be a Messiah, but a fake and a fraud. Hence the charge laid at Jesus' feet in all the Gospels: "Destroy this Temple and in three days I will raise it up." The Messiah would build and outfit the eschatological Temple expected since the days of Isaiah and the other great prophets. Part of this would be the "preparation" of various priestly rooms and vestibules in the Temple precincts--the places where they lived while on duty or cooked the sacrifices, etc. There were, judging from the accounts of Chronicles and Ezekiel (in the vision of the great eschatological Temple) many rooms.

But none of this would matter except that regularly in the Old Testament, the Temple was referred to--not with the Hebrew word for "temple" which was reserved to describe the holy of holies--by the word for "house". In other words, the Temple was "my Father's house".

Jesus, his face set towards the confrontation with the priests and the Pharisees, tells his disciples that he is going to accomplish the great Messianic act of building the true Temple of God. Once he has accomplished that, he will receive his disciples to himself, that is, he will install them as the true priests of God's Temple--not the disinherited Sadducees or the would-be defenders of Israel, the Pharisees. The disciples, because of their allegiance to this King, would be rewarded, much like the priests and aristocrats that followed David were rewarded once he finally had his rule established. So Jesus' statement, "and where I go you know, and the way you know" takes on a cryptic tenor to his disciples: he has filled them in with no details. They do not know the plan of attack, as it were, nor the strategy for rescuing God's Temple from the Romans or the Judaean leadership. So Thomas says, "Lord, we do not know where you are going, and how can we know the way?"

It is here that Jesus brings together his understanding of his vocation and God's eschatological plan. Jesus is not going to restore the Herodian Temple or prepare it for God's worship (which required the sacrifice of animals to "make atonement" for the altar and sanctuary, etc.). That Temple Jesus already judged and condemned in chapter two. Instead, Jesus is going to the cross to symbolically destroy the current Temple and raise a renewed, everlasting Temple in its place. "Destroy this Temple and in three days I will raise it up" referred not to the Jerusalem Temple, as his interlocutors and false witnesses assumed, but rather to his body, his flesh that had been made the dwelling place of God's word, his plan of salvation. Now the "atonement" of God's final dwelling place with man would be secured by the death of the Messiah; the establishment of that Temple as where God would forever meet with his people, the connection between heaven and earth, would happen as that Temple was raised from the grave, never to be defiled (as the other Temples had been) and never to be destroyed. He would receive them to himself after his resurrection, making them cornerstones in his Temple, leaders over his body (the origin, I suppose, of Paul's metaphor).

The way to make this happen though, which the disciples must follow, is the way of Jesus' humiliation and crucifixion. They must follow, they must be faithful to his vision of what the Messiah is and is supposed to do, if they wish to be the priests who appear before the Father: there is no other way.

This interpretive schema, which has many resonances in the following verses ("we will come and make our home with him, etc."), brings together many disconcertingly fragmented bits of traditional Johannine interpretation. The indwelling logos from chapter one, the indwelling Spirit from chapter 14, the many claims to supersede the Herodian Temple and the Saduceean priesthood, and the tension between what was expected of the Messiah and Jesus' cryptic actions. It also pulls the interpretation out of some neoPlatonic and Philo-based worldview that posits Jesus as basically advocating non-Jewish mysticism and world-escapism. Instead, it puts Jesus squarely within the Jewish Scriptures and forces the choices that his disciples would have to make: not "pie-in-the-sky", but rather allegiance in the "here-and-now". Even on an initial ascent up the mountain, one can see that the ending vista is beautiful and even promises glimpses of the Promised Land.

The Difference Between Desire and Actuality

2008-08-09T23:07:00.002-04:00

I want to write.

I want to write about love and hate, freedom and tyranny, theology and everyday life, thoughts I have and thoughts I should have had (and hope aren't copyrighted intellectual property), about education and its enemy schooling, about what makes me tick, about the Church and her Lord and the world it wants--wrongly--to leave behind.

But every time I start, something comes up. A new thought, a twist in the mind that changes how I feel, and the uncomfortable humility needed to express possible wrongness. I need to live under the general impression of rightness, we all do, but wisdom is recognizing the tenuousness of our positions, the need to rethink, to disagree with ourselves a year, ten years, or a few seconds later. But that is hard to do--with writing comes a commanding presence, a sit-up-and-implement to your audience that is difficult to retract. Even though I'm in no realistic position to start riots, revolutions, or rebellions, my words are still heard somewhere, even if it is only in my own head, where I tend to be the most impressionable. And what about my students? I'm not haughty enough to believe that any listen to me a second longer than they have to (many don't listen to me during the seconds required anyway), but what if? The power of the written word is not to be taken lightly, you never know where you are going to be quoted. Teachers have the harsher judgement, so do marketers, the teachers of our age, or at least the ones we actually listen to.

Think about that famous line from Isaiah: "My word shall not return to me void, but accomplish the purpose for which I sent it." The word, the message of God's love for the world so that He would sacrifice His Son, the message made tangible made flesh, the word saying "it is finished" with Isaiah not far in the background.

And yet.

I wrestle, in both my professions, with content-less words. In coffee, since taste is largely (but not totally) subjective, descriptors of coffee, of drinks, is tentative and sometimes plain misleading. The concept of quality has lost almost all meaning due to the collusion of national, lowest-common-denominator chains and poor excuses for independent shops claiming the high ground simply because they are trying to out-Starbucks Starbucks. In religious education, since the Bible has been misused every since the first word was spoken, by charlatans and the righteous alike--injecting meaning in the words to fit a preconceived paradigm inside of seeking the meaning-filling given to the words by the original authors (a process, it must be noted, that never ends, hence our endless obsession with having the words defined once-for-all for us by confessions, creeds, and traditions, themselves a process, woe!). Words thusly treated, whether by "baristas" or "theologians" become meaningless, but still retain power because they can mean whatever the more powerful want them to mean.

And yet.

The meek shall inherit the earth. The haughty, the prideful, the powerful shall be disinherited, not only from the Kingdom of God, but the earth as well, but the world of language as well too. Language is truly powerful when it most closely conforms to the usage of the Kingdom; when the Spirit fills mere human words with power to image the inSpirited Word; when 'yes' means 'yes' and 'no' 'no'.

Language only works for us when we reject the hubris of being God/god/gods and be humans, with all the interpretive difficulties that are part of our created nature. Inheritance implies power, meekness implies the lack of power, but the phrase makes sense since to think of ourselves as the prime meaning-makers of our words brutalizes the speaker and the listener, destroying the power that was sought after; whereas words properly placed edify--construct like the New Jerusalem--speaker and hearer in the presence of God.

The Beaver Falls Manifesto: Part Two

2008-07-13T17:58:00.004-04:00

In part one of the BFM, I said this:

"God has called his people, the Church, to be leaders is restoring this world (and all its parts) to their original created purpose and glory." Part two, I hope, will help to unpack this statement in a practical way. If you are any sort of a regular reader of this blog, then you will know that my idea of what the Church is and is supposed to be about has changed over the years. I am much more "high" Church than before, yet hold tenaciously to the "democratic" impulse behind Ephesians 4. My individualism has in many respects broadened to be cognizant of community, especially that of the Church. Individualism becomes idolatry if it is not subservient to God's sovereignty, which commands and commends care and love towards the Church, the community of God's people in this world. The difficulty with doing this, though, is that it is too abstract. Oftentimes, loving the saints means inaction and sentiment. If the Church is placed, though, is neighborhooded, then that love can take great form and can overflow into the mission of the Church--the healing of the world, starting with the neighborhoods and cities we are in here and now. With that said, here now are some propositions for the second part of the Beaver Falls Manifesto. As always, these are incomplete thoughts to be refined and expanded in community dialogue and action.

I. If the Church is to lead the way in the God-ordained restoration of Creation here in Beaver Falls, it must become both more unified and more diversified. More unified in that individual churches must recognize their unity in Christ, based on his historical work of redemption. Regardless of what we think about the fineries of theology or the subtleties of practice, what we are and what our mission is is based on the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. More diversified in the sense that our churches must become more neighborhooded as their primary concern. The old parish model, long abandoned in this area (and in Protestantism generally), has much merit to commend it. Churches, as much as possible, should serve the needs of the neighborhoods immediately surrounding them, not the needs of far-off places. As much as possible, our membership rolls should reflect the local demographic and be filled with local addresses. This is not to say that outside members should not be accepted (such would be foolish), but that those from outside the walkable area around the church should be trained and equipped to set up a community church from their area, or given the tools to reform wayward churches that are already there.

II. The Church must expand its concept of its mission to be more in line with that of Romans 8 and similar passages. The Church's job, its God-given mission, is not "saving of souls" in a dualistic sense, that is, of "getting people to heaven." The Church's mission, as always, is to be the agent through which "Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." Jesus has already done the great eschatological act of inaugurating the kingdom through his death, resurrection, and enthronement; our job is to continue, by his Spirit, the work of restoration through the proclamation of the gospel. The gospel comes with power, the power to see things changed, not to try and escape. The goal is not to escape to heaven, but to bring the order, the shalom, of heaven into the earth in anticipation of the Day when both heaven and earth shall be renewed.

III. The Church, as a neighborhooded people, has claims that it may rightly make on its covenanted members. (Here I must be careful, as I do not believe that the unwieldy and bloated bureaucracy of much of the "Church" is a true representation of what the Church really is). The work of the Church, the rebuilding and restoration of its local areas through its neighborhood churches (note the capitalization distinction), is more important than school or athletics or business. In the life of the people of God (what I mean by Church) all of these loyalties find their true expression in Christ--the ultimate loyalty lies in Christ alone. However, in this loyalty to Christ alone, we see Scripturally the place of the Church by his side. This is where the distinction between Church and church becomes vitally important. The Church is the life of the people of God, that collection of all God's saints, the ones who are called by Him to do His will on earth. The church is the local body of believers, whether in a neighborhood, a presbytery, a denomination, or a sect (Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, what have you). The church is the institution; the Church is the people. In that sense, the specific action of the church (corporate worship) must not claim superiority over the total lives of the Church. A fine distinction, but an important one nonetheless.

More to Come...

Science V. Faith

2008-07-06T20:53:00.002-04:00

The old division of science against faith doesn't work. "Faith," properly understood, is just another term for allegiance, for loyalty. The modern scientific worldview itself calls out for loyalty, not unlike the various Christian scientific perspectives. As Dooyeweerd or Clouser or Seerveld might suggest, all knowledge comes out of a faith commitment--an allegiance--to some god or God or gods. The question, rather, is "hubris v. mystery" of which both science--the human study of the Creation, and religion--the human expression of Creator worship, can partake. In the public debate about evolution and creationism, religion is seen by many as the embattled, somewhat quaint, needs-to-be-defended part against the ruthless, "atheistic" science. However, it wasn't that long ago that various "religious" faiths battled all over Europe for the domination of regular people trying to live their lives. France, as I've heard from missionaries, still carries the scars. Religious hubris, whether "Christian" or "scientific", is still a plague.

2008-05-06T22:44:00.001-04:00

Maybe wisdom is found when we realize that regardless of how independent we become, we still need others.

A Modern Tragedy

2008-05-06T07:13:00.002-04:00

I see college students all around me asking the same question over four (+) years. It is the question of career and calling. Many come to college (like myself) to get clarity and direction. Many leave searching for that same clarity and direction (like myself). They are spending money and time in search of a career that will call out to them, saying, "I'm important! Devote your time, energy, and life to me!" But, in our industrial and informational economy, most careers do not have that sort of voice, but instead call out "Comfort, suburbia, and 'disposable' income!" even at the expense of pleasure from work or working close to where you live or coming anywhere close to any reasonable vision of the good life. The tragedy is the disconnection to people or place.

Professions, of course, have their place. We must have great training in various ways of work, etc. (whether or not they all, or even most, need a college degree is another point altogether) but without some sort of higher allegiance to human things the professions are essentially rootless, which is to say, mercenary. Luther called this sort of wandering the "masterless men" and not in a good way.

The various professions, which seem to expand every year, used to be rooted in community. If a community needed a pastor, or a lawyer, or a doctor, then a young person would take up the call, receive education, and return to the community older, wiser, and able to take up the calling. Now, for various reasons, the community needs are not met, much less even considered. This is not to say, though, that the community one is raised in is the community one is called to. But it is to say that the concept of 'calling' is properly located with people and places and only secondarily to profession. Where the call is to, or to whom it is, is the most important thing to determine--from there an adequate sense of what must be done to serve these two can much more easily come into focus.

I have a friend, a good friend, who embodies this. He and his family are called to the formal ministry because of their calling to serve the people of God and their home in Vermont. Currently they reside here in Beaver Falls, but always with an eye towards whom and where their calling comes from. I have often wished that their place of calling would be here in Beaver Falls, but I am not the one to determine that. However, their sense of whom and where gives drive and passion to what they are doing. I know, when I felt called to the ministry (many moons ago), that I quickly dried up under the pressure of having a 'calling' and no people or place. Now that I am working in community building I have a much clearer sense of what I am supposed to do. My role in my church (dare I say parish?) has expanded much more as of late, especially since the opening of BFC&T. My role at the shop has expanded as we try to improve the life of our community through it. Without the people here or this place, though, our shop would be reduced to the marketing-heavy, soulless coffeeshops that litter our strip malls and highways.

People and place, that is to say 'community', are necessary for human flourishing and shalom. Without them, the root dries and wandering commences. Bedouin societies aside (for they are a different category altogether), wandering is not a good thing. It may be necessary for a short while, but our society (and religion, unfortunately) have made wandering the rule, not the exception. Rootless plants cannot survive long and neither can rootless people.

Hamlet the Danish

2008-01-27T23:44:00.000-05:00

Why is it that, when searching for a decent cheese danish recipe, the first line in all of them is "8oz can of premade crescent rolls"? If I wanted premade, I'd get it at the grocery store, which is about my opinion of every recipe that calls for some brand name end-product.

Anyone got a from-scratch recipe they care to share?

You Don't Need A Teacher

2008-01-13T00:23:00.000-05:00

It wasn't that long ago that the majority of people were not college-educated, or even high-school educated. However, now I hear more and more from students, friends, and even my own inner monologue, that "a Master's Degree is needed for a good job" or, the more cynical and depressing, "you need a Doctorate to get anywhere." The first questions, of course, are where "anywhere" is or what a "good job" is: the answer to these will reveal your biases and inner dualisms. The next, even more important, question is why we are letting this be the case. Why should a Bachelor's degree even be necessary for all but the most specialized tasks (engineering, laboratory science, etc.)? Why should our educational system be under this antiquated system of credits and hours, when that doesn't work for skill mastery such as music or cooking? We have, in fact, so inflated the status and importance of teachers so that earning equivalent degrees to them becomes more important than mastering the subjects and skills that they are purportedly offering. In the end, as I've said before, our educational system is not about education, it is about certification. Only by grasping this will any positive change be possible to the system.

It is not lie that many (if not most, if not all) students are not prepared for college (or for what college is supposed to do). Many come in not knowing why they are there, or what they are trying to get certified for, or (worse) what they are called to do for their neighbors, themselves, or their God. If 12 years of guided teaching hasn't shown them, we should wonder whether four (to six, to eight, to twelve...) more years of the same is really going to clarify things. By the time a person is eighteen, having another teacher isn't the answer, it's part of the problem--and I say that as a teacher of eighteen and nineteen year olds.

I can say this out of experience. In many ways, I can be compared to J.D. on the show Scrubs: I'm always looking for that mentor, that teacher, to come along and make it all better, all easy, and to form me professionally and as a person. While I believe that mentors are indispensable, the dependence on them, so much that I went to grad school to "be back in the classroom" is not only unhealthy, it is idolatrous. The need to be graded (a success indicator, but not the same as success) still drives many to this day. However, as graduation used to indicate, at some point a student goes from 'student' to 'graduate', that is, an independent actor able to take what they have learned and apply it towards their lives and callings. With education as certification, however, we have tons and tons of students who have no idea how to take their education to their lives, callings, or even careers--hence the need for further certification to show that you cannot produce and independent thought, but must rely on teachers to "show you the ropes (again)."

This isn't to say that teachers are to be blamed for it all; many teachers are caught in the same trap, but war against it. I've thankfully had many such teachers who instilled in me (whether intentionally or not) a desire to see things differently. If you are a student who wants to master your subject, the best things you can do to learn are to learn outside the classroom for the majority of your learning. Get in the library and read the history of your discipline, read your Bible, and analyze the foundations of your field. Start compiling areas where you see indiscrepancies, where former teachers seem to have fumbled or fallen into idolatry, and bring them up to your teachers. Many teachers, especially at State institutions, view their job as producing "new research": bring holes and problems with "old research" and challenge them (humbly and gracefully) to bring harmony. This will be hard--it is something I've avoided with all my teachers for fear of reprisal. But without problems, no paradigm can be changed.

It is true, education starts with parents (who aren't certified) to bring children into self-education, and sometimes teachers take the role of parents in guiding and certifying (which isn't a bad thing in itself), but education of anyone over the age of thirteen relies (and has always relied on) the individual themselves. The only way that you (or I) are going to get educated is if we take the initiative to actually do the work, try things out, and even fail...a lot. You cannot learn to cook from watching TV or reading cookbooks, even if they provide invaluable information and technique, nor can a cook do the work of food prep for you; you've got to make the muffins, the steaks, and the wontons if even you can call yourself free.

Review of 300 (the movie)

2007-12-23T18:43:00.001-05:00

There is fundamentally something wrong with the world. For whatever reason, humans have always believed--regardless of culture, religion, or location--that we are to be an active part of the solution. Whenever this marring evil is identified or personalized, something must be done and that something is always war.

In 300, the war is against slavery, tyranny, and ingloriousness. The Spartans believe that, at least to some degree, they hold this. They have perpetual peace because they train for perpetual war. The Persians represent hubris, barbarism, and the end of the Spartan way of life--they are the bringers of slavery and tyranny. So the leader of the Spartans, Leonidis, sets out with 300 of his best men to meet the massive Persian army in full combat, to rid Greece of evil and protect freedom.

The overtones to the current American situation in the Middle East, or looking back to the Soviet Union era, are obvious, even if they may not be intentional. You cannot tell a story about a people rising in violence against an enemy that threatens their very way of life in this age without hearing the subtle undercurrents about terrorism, 9/11, or another ruthless Asian regime. If the battle is not engaged, the only outcome will be loss of life, liberty, and property...or so it seems.

As others have said better than myself, war always leads to loss of liberty, no matter what side you are on. Governments never back down and get rid of "emergency measures," nor do they shrink the size of their armies and navies, nor does the propoganda machine ever stop. With victory comes insecurity; there is always some other convining not-like-us group that is waiting in the wings to take the position as king of the hill. Hence perpetual war for perpetual peace. The idea itself that violent conquest leads to peace is itself an old piece of propoganda that in the hands of the powerful becomes a call to honorable war, but in the hands of the powerless is known as crime, rebellion, or treason.

This is not to say, though, that negotiations always (or ever) work. There will always be madmen (and women) who will not listen to reason, or be empathetic, or what have you. There will always be those who have a never-ending thirst for blood. Or power. Or victory. Or security. These people cannot and will not be stopped by force of words alone. Whatever happens to be fundamentally wrong with the world, it is foolish to believe that it will listen to reason. Or that it will agree to your definition of reason to begin with.

In a broken, sinful, violent world, war is inescapable.

I have been a pacifist for a number of years now. I've been called illogical, a coward, looked at as "less than American," and generally ignored. That is because pacifism has been confused with cowardice and compromise. While I do not agree with many things that they said or did, I look to Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi and wonder what they would have thought (or what they did think!) of such an assessment. To be a pacifist does not mean the denial of war, but instead a different assessment of how victory is to be accomplished.

The Messiah was supposed to be a great military leader, like Joshua, or David, or Ehud, or... He was supposed to throw off the pagan yoke and crush, with the force of God Himself, all pretentions to Israel's place in God's plan--as Adam, as ruler of the beasts that the pagans had turned themselves into. The war was with the Caesars and once Rome, the embodiment of the Serpent, was torn down, then the sons of God would rule in wisdom, prosperity, and with peace. However, Jesus did not do this. It is not because he had a great love for the Romans--he considered having one of their coins idolatrous and an affront to the true God. It was not because he hated his countrymen--his tears were always to gather the people to himself and to God. It was because he saw that the war being fought (at that time) coldly was the wrong war.

While we were watching 300 I asked Bethany when she thought that the Persians soldiers would start defecting over to the Spartans. She responded that they were slaves. Exactly. A slave is forced to do what they do not because of love or loyalty, but because of compulsion. They do the will of the master, whoever that master might be. I thought that they would see the victories of the Spartans over the Persians (free men versus slaves) as a reason to defect, to become free, and to fight against their old masters. That did not happen in the movie, partly, I surmise, because slaves are given limited vision. They cannot see freedom by changing allegiances, but only freedom through the destruction of the other. This is the doctrine that they are fed by their masters and it is impossible to not believe it. Worse when one master pits two sets of slaves against each other.

The problem wasn't the Romans, just like it isn't the Iraqis, or the Iranians, or any other number of "incarnations of evil." The problem isn't the slaves, it is the masters. Whereas his comtemporaries saw the Romans as the great, gnashing, Danielic beast, Jesus saw them as pawns of that beast, the accuser, the evil one, the first serpent and last dragon, the one known in Hebrew as the satan. Yes, the Romans had to be defeated, but by changing loyalties, not bloodshed. The satan had to be crushed and his weapon is always violence and death. Jesus didn't deny the war, he denied the way it was to be fought and the terms that would be used.

Leonidis, instead, perpetuated the circle of violence. His attack on Persian would necessitate a counter-attack, which would provoke a counter-attack, and so on, until one (or both) groups were decimated to historical and cultural irrelevance. The war would go on in different guises until the whole world was at each others' throats. The battle was won, but the enemy was not disarmed.

Jesus, by submitting to death--to the fulness of God's curse and the full power of Caesar and satan--defeated it, because it had no legal claim on him. He triumped by taking the very weapons out of the hands of the enemy and parading them around as paltry, restoring them to the place of servants to his people instead. That is why martyrdom is honorable; because death is defeated in resurrection--both Jesus' in the past and his peoples' in the future.

So, the pacifist has a toolbox full of weapons at his disposal, but none are carnal or "of this world", instead we fight with the resurrection of Jesus and overcome by resisting to play evil's game. The only lasting victory, or sustainable peace, can be won this way: by overcoming evil with good.

Review of Fight Club

2007-11-24T14:48:00.001-05:00

(Some spoilers, but it isn't like this is a new book)

Rarely, if ever, when someone reads about the Church in the Bible, do they go out and start churches where they are. Even more rarely if someone "explains" to them what Christianity is "all about". Even more rarely if they have any interaction with Christianity as it is. At least in the United States. I cannot speak for anywhere else.

When men read Fight Club, they start fight clubs. Lincoln, NE, not far from where I grew up, has made them illegal. Persecuted, or rather prosecuted, members for their "subversive activities". Tyler Durden, the "hero" of the story (as author Chuck Palahniuk calls him in the afterword), sets up these churches of masculine salvation and devotes the top members--the true believers--to (de)construct cultural salvation through self-destruction. Whether he meant to or not, the author describes the birth and life of a focussed religion, complete with converts, symbols, and rites, around nihilistic categories. And people, especially men, love it.

Men love it because we have no idea what it means to be a man. Are we tough and aggressive, tender and compassionate, effeminate and passive? This question shows up starkly in the unnamed main character, who cannot figure who he is. Is he his furniture? What others have told him? Even his name? When does a man become a man? Where is that cultural/social threshold that used to have the "trial of endurance", going off in the woods with only a knife to survive, that made one ready to join larger society, no longer the boy, but the responsible man? Now, all you have to do is hit 18 or 21 and you are all that is man. A legal adulthood has never made any boy a man--and we know it. Is it your "right" to drink? Or to vote? Or to smoke cigarettes? If we really think about it, all of these "rights" would never make someone a good citizen, or a good person, or a good man. Just like a marriage license doesn't really make a marriage, and certainly cannot make a marriage good. Or a driver's license doesn't really mean you can drive, and certainly not that you (or I) drive well. But, in the same vein of thought as Seth Godin, we tell ourselves lies that "make" it so for us. We believe that a diploma means we are educated; or our age means that we are an adult; or that our marriage means we are in love. Fight Club reminds men that status doesn't mean anything meaningful. Status changes; nothing is static (interesting how closely related "status" and "static" are). Berger, with his "social construction of reality," really is a nice backdrop to the book. When the myth is exploded or imploded, then the "sacred canopy" comes off, causing fear, alienation, and anarchy. The plot of FC is forcible removal of the sacred canopy, for the good of self and others. That is what it means to be a man--taking off all masks, all delusions, whether sacred or secular. By any and all means necessary and available. It is the changing of the ages, the Novum Ordo Seclorum, that needs to happen, and fast. Imminence is always a part in apocalyptic scenarios.

In the end, though, no one that Tyler Durden liberates becomes free. Including himself. They are tagged as "space monkeys" and "human refuse", part of the plan to make them lose everything so that they have everything, and they end up being just that--expendable and meaningless. Their identities don't get defined by "who they really are" or "who they want to be", but by what Tyler tells them to do and say and be. Their existence, their meaning, is tied up in his existence. When he "dies" at the end of the book, they lose their meaning. But since Tyler has set up a new sacred canopy for them, they don't even need him, since his body (the living narrator) and his memory can carry them on. All they need are his messianic promises to tell them to wait for his second coming out of the loony-bin. The whole point, though, is to not ever rise again from the ashes--to always be the dung heap of the world, God's middle, forgotten children; to be lost in the oneness of destructo-salvation. The old Buddhist dream of attaining Nirvana through the complete loss of individuality.

Apart from its self-conscious coopting of Buddhist and nihilistic elements, FC is a trenchent analysis of modern society. At one point, the phrase (the book is a collection of pithy one-liners at its heart) "Generations working to buy things that they don't need" clarifies what drives most of our modern economy. We make and sell shoddy things to people who don't need them. Apropos since we have commenced this year's Christmas shopping season. We do end up defining ourselves by what we have and what we don't have. Very few of us know what it means to be destitute or even in need. Tyler Durden promises to his disciples that they will know what rock-bottom is, because you have to hit rock-bottom before you can be reborn. He compares it to Jesus on the cross and the resurrection. You have to disown what owns you, but instead of selling all and giving it to the poor, you have to destroy it. Burn it to the ground.

Whether he wanted to or not, Chuck Palahniuk has issued a challenge to the Church. People get excited about finding their humanity by losing through fight clubs. They love the idea of throwing off the shackles of consumerism, modernism, and the anti-masculine culture of the West. They love the idea of fighting for something that gives deeper meaning than corporate America, than education that gives no reason for loyalty to school or to discipline, than families that shatter faster than they form, than churches who don't want to help people but want their checkbooks (and, to tell the truth, any church that passes a 'collection plate' or 'tithe' aroud looks greedy, whether it is or not). I love the idea of fighting something. There is something virile and deeply masculine about fighting, even if it isn't with fists. The Church, however, has not been about fighting--except to whine about how it is losing influence, or dollars, or people to 'the world' (defined Marcionly as whatever the leadership of the church happens to not like at the time). If the dream that is Tyler Durden was ever carried it, it would be an unimaginable nightmare. However, the dream that the Church has played out has been almost as bad: inquisitions, heresy hunts, crusades, the European Reformation wars, and the list could go on. The dream, that of world-wide influence and power through Christendom, has got to be rethought.

Once the Church has a clear, accessible, masculine-affirming story to tell, then we will see men building churches after reading the Bible. And it won't be a moment too soon.

The Christian as Manager

2007-10-19T20:28:00.000-04:00

In his economic commentary on Leviticus, Boundaries and Dominion, Gary North proffers this thesis:

The economic pressure on Jews to move from the farm to the city was basic to Levitical law. The closer a man lived to Israel's holy city, the less time he had to spend on the road. If he had to spend time on the road, he might as well become a traveling salesman. The Israelites were pressured economically by the laws of the festivals and the sacrifices to become a nation of traders. The economic laws of Leviticus also pressured the farmers of Israel to move into the cities. The residents of cities were in turn pressured to become international traders. This does not mean that there were to be no Israelite farmers in Israel, but there can be no doubt that the general thrust of the economic incentives under the Mosaic law's system of costs and benefits was to move God's covenant people off the farms and into the cities. They were to become a nation of manufacturers, shopkeepers, traders, and bankers -- an early version of what England became in the nineteenth century.

His argument revolves around the three required festivals of ancient Israel (Passover, Pentecost, Tabernacles) and the mandatory journeys required for them during the peak agricultural season. He states that even though he believes the Torah pushes Israel in this direction, that it was never carried out, because (mainly) of sin. He goes on to say that the logical thing for an Israelite farmer far from Jerusalem to do would be to lease his land to Gentiles, since they didn't need to go to the feast. The Israelite and his family would move close to Jerusalem and the agricultural areas would be under the control of those who do not know God and did not care about his creation (North brings up his claim that being agrarian is always tied to paganism--based on the root of the word--hence the modern environmental movement; I think here we have the classic rhetoric North is known for, tossing baby and bathwater down the drain).

While creative, I don't think that this thesis works, but I think it should get Christians thinking about our place in God's world and our place in relationship to those who are not followers of the one true God. I don't think that Israelites would have become absentee landlords, living close to the city, and leaving all their food needs in the hands of Gentiles. Your spiritual enemies having control of your food supply is just as dangerous as your political enemies holding the same power. Controlling one's property from afar is fraught with problems: what would stop a Gentile, who enjoyed his rashers of bacon, from bringing a few swine onto holy land? Not the owner, that's for sure. He's out in the city. Plus, if the land stewardship of the Gentile is poor, it will take a long time to rectify it, if the now practically landless Israelite even cares anymore (his money is coming from his city endeavors, after all). Absenteeism doesn't work economically.

Instead, I think going back to Genesis, the original agricultural book, gives us hints on what situation the Mosaic economy would actually present. Adam, the gardener, was told to tend to the garden and also subdue the beasts, including the beasts of burden. He was, in effect, a manager. The image of beasts, over which Adam is to be ruler, comes up various times in Scripture, eventually being changed to a metaphor of Israel (Adam) and the Gentiles (Beasts) in Daniel 7. Abraham, the father of the faithful who Paul (among others) enjoins us to imitate, does not retire to the city like Lot, but rather manages and directs the affairs of his 300+ non-Abrahamic servants. Going to the city, in fact, is seen as an act of rebellion. These two men, Adam and Abraham, give the model of what the Mosaic law was trying to accomplish: Israelites were to bring Gentiles under their authority by putting them to work, showing them the benefits of the covenant, and training them how to live and work righteously. From there evangelism would spread throughout the globe, taking wise agriculture and wise living along with it. Traveling merchants can only do so much; they are placeless and do not have time for discipleship.

If we transfer this forward, we can start to see how the Christian is to carry this out. The Israelites had inherited the land of Canaan; we have inherited the world. We are supposed to be doing what we do well enough so that we can rise to positions of authority, whether owner or manager or whatever, so that the Gentiles (non-believers) under our care might share in the blessings of a covenantally faithful individual. We train them, manage them, and share our faith-in-action by our work. Christians are supposed to be managers.

This places things in the proper authority structure: God - Jesus - members of the Church - those outside the Church - the non-human world. As North goes on to say later in the book, this relationship is judicial: each one is responsible for each link below themselves on the chain (I should not that this obviously is not an ontological chain). That should inspire quite a bit of humility into Christians: when we mess up, the effects are judicially placed on both our fellow human beings and the non-human creation. We are responsible for the protection and flourishing of them. If we fail, or act evilly towards them, then we feel the consequences and so do they. This, of course, raises the question of how we are to act towards them. Maybe starting with Jesus' reinterpretation of the Mosaic code in Matthew 5-7 is a good start; there is no place for a heavy-handed, coercive, violent relationship towards our fellow human beings, whether they believe in our God or not, or towards the non-human creation. A good manager doesn't demean his charges, but helps them to flourish at work and as human beings.

This also has implications for the Church as a whole and its relationship to the other structures of this world. More on this anon.

On Vacation

2007-10-18T23:33:00.000-04:00

Bethany and I are mid-week of our vacation to Martha's Vineyard, Mass. For me, vacations are a lot like a Shakespearean tragedy, at least in narrative form. There is the beginning, the rising action, the climax, the falling action, and the denouement. The difference, hopefully, is that we all won't end up dead due to our character flaws.

Today, for me, was the climax. I have been using this vacation as a time to recenter myself and evaluate the way things are going in my life. This last year has been an incredible time for us, but many bad things have happened. As I tried to express in the last post, my faith has been at a low-ebb. I also (just ask my staff) have been frequently frustrated, angry, and difficult to deal with--not characteristics I'm famous for. I've even said to one of my workers that I'm not the person I want to be. So this vacation couldn't have come at a better time. Today especially.

I took a five-mile walk to rethink many bedrock parts of what I say I believe and what I actually do. The problem, for me, comes down to the Spirit. I'm not sure I have the Spirit, not sure if I would know if I did, and am not sure that I see the Spirit working in the Church today. I ranted, I raved, and I attained at least a little peace. All the percolating thoughts about textual problems, the God-Jesus-Spirit problem, my own lack of distinguishing Christian characteristics, and what my role in God's plan is all seemed to settle. I have questions, but I also have a quest en route now. My explorations will take me back to my roots (working in Hebrew and Greek), through different traditions (especially Orthodox Judaism), and mostly between myself and God.

But now starts the falling action. I want to get back home now. I want to get into the texts, I want to start praying in my called-to-place, I want to start working again. I especially miss being able to make espresso and roast coffee--the Vineyard isn't the best place for a good cup, an ok cup maybe, but not a particularly good one.

I imagine that a vacation should work like a Sabbath. At first, the excitement of not going to work is paramount, leading up to the climax of worship with God's people (the sacrament and the spoken Word), and falling through mealtimes until, right before bed, the urge to work appears strongly again.

I'm glad to finally feel rejuvenated and to have the desire to go back to work, work that I love, work that means something to myself and my community.

Great vacation so far.

Further Thoughts on a Crisis

2007-10-15T11:08:00.001-04:00

Over two years ago, I wrote a couple of pieces dealing with my so-called Postmodern Protestant Dilemma, in which I did not come to any sort of suitable conclusion, but left myself with a sense of confusion and befuddlement that has persisted to this day. Since then, I have concentrated heavily on defining what the Church is, how authority works in it, and what my own role in that authority structure is. However, the question of a transcendent standard that legitimizes and authorizes the Church continued to evade me. I mentioned, briefly, in my initial post that the Bible had had its own authority questioned by the higher critics, which effectively took the Bible out of the running for most of the Western Christian world, except for the "provincial" fundamentalists, some compromised and schizophrenic Reformed groups, and the Catholics. Since then I've returned to reading a loose collection of essays by Theodore P. Letis called The Ecclesiastical Text. I had read this sometime before my master's work started but after the conclusion of my undergrad, during which time the amount that I read was probably the highest I ever had, so much of what was read has fallen through my Orwellian memory hole.

Letis' broad thesis (if I understand him correctly) is that lower criticism (text criticism) and higher criticism (the conservatively scorned source, form, etc. German academic tools) are organically linked. If pressure to accept the lower form is bowed to (as B.B. Warfield did), then the higher is not very far behind. Why? Because a text that claims to be authoritative must have a fixed form. A constantly changing sacred text cannot be authoritative because it is never the same text (much like a famous Greek river). Since new "critical" editions of both testaments are constantly appearing, the "authoritative" text of the Church keeps changing. Even if textual variants supposedly do not change doctrines (although the case of John 1:18 should put that myth to rest), the fact that we cannot decide which text is "best" or "most original" destroys any forming authority that the Bible can have in the community of the Church and, therefore, the world.

Letis' answer is to restore, in a postcritical, Brevard-Childs-sort-of-way, the Ecclesiastical (or Byzantine or Textus Recptus, etc.) to the state of authorized text in the Church. (A quick note to say that Letis does not advocate for any certain translation to have inspired authority, such as the KJV, which many Byzantine text fans flock to--God spoke in Hebrew and Greek, not English). This text-type has the advantage of being the official text of the Church from the fourth century onward to the rise of lower criticism in Erasmus. The Reformers, both Lutheran and Calvinian, adopted this text over the Roman Vulgate or the Eastern Septuagint as the authoritative text of the Church. Importantly (and Letis labors this point), this text is not inerrant, that is, it suffers from scribal mistakes. However, it is infallible, it contains the Word of God as spoken by Him in the original languages, or in theological terms, it is verbally inspired. The seventeenth-century Protestant dogmaticians spoke at great length for this textual tradition as the authoritative one; so did the WCF. In my mind, the Ecclesiastical Text has a lot going for it and should be considered by all Church communities for their text.

The ET places doctrinal and practical authority back into the text of the Bible, which the Reformers would argue is its proper place. The Bible has transcendent origins and can, in able hands, be applied at all places and all times (which, it is important to note, does not mean it is a collection of universally-applicable propositions--hopefully the narrative focus of postmodern Christianity has put that colonialist impulse to rest). However, its authority stills owes itself to the human-based Church.

With the "inerrant autograph" theory, ultimate authority resides only with the text: the autographs from the pen of Paul or whoever, carry the inspired text of the Bible. Sounds good, except for the fact that the autographs are lost from history. This is the theory that guides Christian textual criticism, with the (fools?) hope that the original text can be recovered through means of objective scientific reconstruction and emendation. Thank goodness that all human fallibility is taken off of the text! Now the perfect, neutral text can reign supreme in faith and practice. Except for the fact that the scientific fingerprint of man is larger than we even thought, it being dusted by Thomas Kuhn (what a paradigm shifting work that was!). The "critical text", a child of the "inerrant autograph" theory, is a new text, never having been used in the wide history of Church until the advent of the NIV and its descendants. In other words, the "inerrant autograph" theory leaves the Church constantly without an authorized text because the authorized text changes all the time. The Word of God is taken out of the hand of everyday folks and placed squarely in the hands of textual critics and committees, the new, unofficial, priesthood of Protestantism.

To return to the ET, the authority of the text is in the text also, but by means of the Church. This is the text that the Church has agreed through many generations is the text that contains God's Word. When this text took its final shape, though, is long after the inspiration period of the apostles, in the fourth century. If you read my original post on my dilemma, part of the problem is that the Church has been so heavily influenced by Greek philosophy, especially as 'orthodoxy' was being determined in the fourth century. Bart Ehrman, one of the premier Church and text historians today, blew this all open with his book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: 'orthodox' scribes knew how to "turn-a-phrase" to guarantee an orthodox interpretation, just as the heretics knew how. Both groups did it with frequency and much power at stake. Part of the interest for me in ancient christology is how all groups were not just arguing who Jesus was, but what authority Caesar should have in the Church, both sides (to my mind) ignoring the (especially Pauline) evidence that with Jesus, Caesar is unnecessary--but that is another point for another day. So, the ET may not have gotten a pure apostolic sanction either. In other words, no texts that we have can reasonably claim to be the original texts of the apostles and prophets: their faith communities have changed them to fit their needs and agendas. The greatest example of this, to my mind, is the difference in texts between Hebrew Jeremiah and Greek (LXX) Jeremiah. I argued in a term paper once that HJ was the product of the needs of the Babylonian captivity Jews, whereas GJ was the product (most likely) of Jeremiah himself in Egypt and the community there. My conclusions at the time were heavily in favor of the Greek recension, but I have since changed my opinion in favor the Massoretic or Hebrew version. Why? Because, according to Jeremiah!, the Egyptian community was rejected by God for not going into Babylonian captivity, instead returning to their original bondage in Egypt (pardon me for not having the reference on hand). The Babylonian community were the bearers of the Abrahamic promise, so they get the hat tipped in their favor, ecclesiastically at least. The point is that there is no such thing as a pristine text and it is historically arrogant and foolish to try and recover one. Community involvement also throws much of the "critical text" into question, which rests on the assumption that the variants produced by various manuscripts have no taint of theological corruption, except (of course) if the orthodox had their hands on them (which is that case, obviously by now, of the ET).

As a Protestant it pains me to say this, but it seems that the Scripture and "Holy Tradition" are inseparable, at least as far as texts go--interpretation is another matter altogether. The question is, as always, whose "Holy Tradition"? The Catholic Church with its Latin Vulgate tradition, the Eastern Church with its Greek Vulgate, the early Reformed and Protestant with its Hebrew-Greek hybrid and ET, or the modernist Church with its ever-new, never-settled "critical" tradition?

To vote on which text to use is to vote on one's connection to Church history. The modern Church has voted to be completely disconnected and it shows. However, various recent movements have been reversing this trend: the late seventies/early eighties defection to Catholicism, radical orthodoxy, and various "revivals" of ecclesial tradition amongst more conservative Reformed groups. Eventually I think that the textual issue will come to a head in these groups (for the Catholic converts it never was an issue, the Roman Church has stuck by the Vulgate through think-and-thin) and we may see some rejecting of the modernist NIV and its offspring.

As for me, these textual issues leave me in a greater state of disarray than before. I think that the "genesis" of the texts holds the key to offering a stable and long-lasting authority for Protestants and Christians in general. If we could agree what text to use, we might realize that our schizmatic differences are based on interpretation and tradition, bringing us one (admittedly small) step closer to ecumenity. In the end, there is no way of separating the text from its community, so the decision becomes about adherence and allegiance to which community and whether or not the reasons for doing so are legitimate and compelling. Unfortunately, to my mind, there will be no magical cure-all that says "here is the text and there is the community", but instead it will be much more "here is the community and there is the text". So my dilemma to find indisputable divine sanction continues, but isn't this what Church history has been always anyways?

Marketing and the Church

2007-09-13T21:15:00.000-04:00

Anyone concerned about the sad state of Christianity in America would do well to read (re-read, archive, and read weekly) one of Seth Godin's recent posts: Thinking About This War\. Go ahead, read it, I'll wait.

What does this have to do with the Church? Everything. The current failure of Christianity in the United States has to do more with marketing than we may ever have previously imagined. Marketing is basically telling a story. Christianity is telling the wrong story.

The current story is about a rampant individualistic existence that does not care for anything outside of oneself, except possibly a deistic god. It is about giving up things that seem like God created them (tobacco, alcohol, dancing, fun) so that you can live it up in heaven some day (doing what, exactly, is not mentioned much--what is mentioned is what happens if you do live like a human...hellfire). The pietistic instinct in dualistic Christianity eventually forces it this way or towards an antinomian "social gospel", like what happened to the mainstream churches in the 19th and 20th centuries.

To folks we live in the world of materialism and "wealth-as-happiness", the constricting story of Christianity doesn't make much sense. It is easy to shrug off, especially since the loudest voices have been the worst representatives (it is hard to maintain that homosexuality is wrong while engaging in homosexual affairs, as the non-Christian world pointed out to the evangelical community recently).

This is not to say that the story Christianity must tell is the one that the world wants to hear. That is just another death-affirming road, just like pietism. Instead, it is time that the true story of the gospel is told: God created the world, evil has infected it, Jesus has come to cure the infection through his work and his people, and God is calling everyone to join in the rebuilding effort. Instead of denying Creation, this view puts it in its proper place. Something is wrong; there are broken families, alcoholism, inner-city and suburban violence, the loss of millions of tons of topsoil every year, and slavery to name a few things. The gospel does not affirm these things, but instead calls them what they are: abberations from what God intended and commands. However, the gospel does not go so far in the other direction to deny Creation by saying that alcohol or aggression or farming or work are wrong. Instead, working within the limits of creatureliness, we in the Church, through the work of Jesus in history and in our lives, try to reestablish God's good purpose in his good Creation. We change structures of injustice so that God's intention for man and for the rest of the world might stand. It does require us to tell a hard story that conflicts with many other stories. But the story is ultimately life-affirming and the Church needs to stand in the role of priest and intercede for the world.

Thought of the Day

2007-09-08T23:27:00.000-04:00

The best managers balance the equally important task of growing a business as agent of the owner(s) and guiding employees to their full potential as human beings.

Something I aspire to...

The Beaver Falls Manifesto: Part 1

2007-08-30T23:23:00.000-04:00

One of my employees/friends the other day chided me on having too many dreams. He had been speaking about his cheese obsession (2lbs per week, if I remember correctly). One thing about this area is that because of the hilly terrain, we have a lot of dairies, but no local artisan cheese. In fact, the closest I've seen is either Kraft (who knows where that comes from) or Cabot (Vermont, not exactly across the street). Part of the reason, of course, is the current low demand for local creameries and the ridiculous government intolerance of raw milk. He didn't chide me for the dream of good, local, dependable, and healthy milk, cream, and cheese; I daresay he may even enjoy the thought. He chided me, rather, for having the dreams of a local, independent market (too complex to describe at this time); a local ceramics industry (like the former Beaver Falls/Mayer China company--PA soil is basically all clay as it is); a local, sustainable timber industry (complete with draft horses); more coffeeshops (each with complete microroasting capabilities); and many more things (I can't think of others because I'm tired, not for lack of ideas). The health of any society is it's lack of dependence for necessities (and luxuries) on places far away. A city (or set of cities placed along a river) should be able to provide food, shelter, companionship/recreation, and clothing (the four foundations of culture) from within itself and its surrounding rural areas. The rural areas should be able to receive plenty of manure nutrients, cultural opportunities, and companionship from their dependents, the cities. This sort of urbanist-agrarian thought is what leads to a placed idea for Beaver Falls. It is one thing to be jonesed about an idea, but the practice is where we see if being more concerned about neighbors we can see, rather than GDP, is what makes the world a better place. So, here is the start of the Beaver Falls Manifesto--something I hope to expand in the future as a groundwork for rejuvenation here at home. So far, it will seem a series of disjointed propositions. My apologies for that, I'll give it a slicker look and feel when I can.

I. Beaver Falls (and the surrounding area, it should be assumed from here on out) is worthy of care and pride. The land, sky, and river around it have been created by God who calls us to exercise culture in beautification, production, and conservation of that place. To that end (as well as humans do that task), the cultural expression of the city was founded and itself is worthy of care and pride. It is currently marred by human greed, sloth, and covetousness; but God has called his people, the Church, to be leaders is restoring this world (and all its parts) to their original created purpose and glory.

II. Beaver Falls will never have a chance to attain to that purpose and glory if it (that is, the people who live in/near it and the people who "govern" it) continues its self-destructive behavior of wasteful consumption; production of cheap, disposable goods; and economic/agricultural/cultural dependence on non-local sources. Many seem to view Beaver Falls as incapable of being "better" (whatever that means) than Chippewa, Cranberry, or Pittsburgh because of its present state. However, economic indicators can no longer be the primary means of judgement: health, both human and non-human, must be the deciding factor. Can the way we live here now be sustained into the indefinite future without giving up local independece, knowledge, neighborliness, and "crisis-nimbleness"? If not, why not?

III. A future-orientation is absolutely essential to the rebuilding of this area. If we continue to run by the short-term profit motive, we will exhaust our soil, our air, our water, our animals, and ourselves before future generations can receive the gifts of soil, air, water, animals, and selfhood that has been passed down to us by previous generations. A gift-outlook, one that recognizes that with anything not absolutely owned (and only God owns anything absolutely) responsible care and "acting worthy of the gift" (that is, gratitude in its full sense), is essential for both short-term and long-term prosperity.

IV. Ownership is also necessary. A sense that what we have been given with continue with us through multiple generations is necessary for proper care of anything. Nothing, in the end, is disposable; someone always cleans up. This is not absolute ownership, but neither is it mooching. The principle of usufruct (something should be more valuable health-wise after leaving our care) should be fully enforced as a cultural mandate (not a government one, for it is a cultural concern not definable by the powers that be). Home ownership should be especially encouraged, for it roots a family in a neighborhood where real change is possible. If neighbors are healthy (in the varied ways that can be understood--the word 'salvation' comes from a word meaning health), then we are healthy and safe. Also, the principle of neighborhood increases practical wisdom in ownership, plus adds the benefit of more hands to help in case of emergency and everyday issues that accompany any cultural, human product (such as decay and "human error").

More to Come...

Remembering Old Friends

2007-08-21T16:35:00.000-04:00

The world is not the same as it was when I was in high school. It is strange to me to consider that some friends have departed forever, some have disappeared, some stay close--but none geographically, and some have started families.

I've never been good at communicating with those I see infrequently. My neighbors hear from me quite often, as do my geographically-close friends. However, my extended family, friends from Omaha, and others I've met along the way may hear sporadic news, but often there is nary a sound.

That world, the one that existed from 1996-2000, was assumed to be the world. However, as one friend who proceeded me to college said, when you go away you can never come back in the same way. So many close friendships around me disintegrated because people came back "different" from college. Disintegrated not in necessarily a dramatic or hurtful way, rather communication lines ceased and folks drifted apart. I was determined to not let that happen to me. But communication did fail and friends became out of sight, out of mind.

So it was especially poignant to me to see that one person I was extremely close to, but had lost all contact with, was married and had a child. This lady helped me through a dark passage of my life--a time in which my neediness outweighed my ability to give (all the time, though, considering myself to be very humble and self-sacrificial). It was years later that I realized my drain on her, and how unfair that was, but also how it has changed me and effected me in the years since. I am a stronger person because of that friendship, no matter how selfish I was in it. In many ways, the qualities that she brought to the friendship were ones that I found magnified in my wife (whom I'm didn't know at the time of this friendship). One of the difference, of course, is that Bethany is not afraid to give me a (metaphorical) swift kick in the butt so that my selfish tendencies don't overexert themselves. But my friend served as a prescient model for whom God had for me in marriage.

Those we consider indispensible may, in the end, be only momentary players in our lives.

The key, though, is to not let these moments become too inward focussed. In a way, it hurts that I have not been as important in old friends' lives as I thought I would be. But, the same is true I'm sure from their perspective. Life goes on. That is why it cannot be just about me, why my life has to have a broader perspective than my own horizon. That is why I need a story, which I didn't have in high school, to anchor me to reality. The story, as I've come to understand it, encompasses all the small and large things of individual lives and also the seemingly big "world-historical" movements and figures. It connects us to the past, the present, and the future, so that when I am gone awaiting resurrection, the life of the world and my friends and my family goes on. My part in this drama is small and seemingly insignificant, but rooted in the larger story of God's work in the world, it takes on meaning and significance that I could never have dreamed of when I was pouring my soul out (constantly) to my friend back in high school. That story, and all that it contains, is the only connection that will ultimately last between people.

The Church and Place

2007-08-06T22:41:00.000-04:00

As can probably be seen from the last two posts, I think that the concept of place, or rootedness in a long-lasting local community, has not been sufficiently taken into account with our major abstract and abstracting institutions. Like higher education, the church too has made its identity (not to mention its money) on the belief that every place is the same and so none of them matter.

This has recently become especially poignant to me as my local assembly is losing its pastor of some seven years. His leaving, while completely justified, obviously will be somewhat of a shock to recover from. He has done a good job and is beloved by many. He will be greatly missed, but like all the pastors before him, will eventually be replaced by another. The difficulty is that, in many of the churches I have been a part of, the focus is not on the place where God has called us to live and work, but rather on "the preaching". I, and others in the congregation, am expecting a fairly significant drop-off in attendance numbers to happen following his departure. Many folks go to church to be "fed", but not to feed or learn to feed others outside of the faith. They may even travel far distances, even though many churches in their area could use their gifts and talents to bring healing to their places.

I have named it "The Cult of the Pastor". Part of growing up, whether physically or 'spiritually', is going past the point where you need a teacher. This does not mean that there is no learning going on, but the formal structures of education are meant for children. Part of educational history is that the time of "adolescence" was invented in recent history to prolong young adults from entering into full membership of their communities and society at large. Self-education is a dying art, even among people long out of school. This is especially true, it seems, in Christian circles. How many times has it been said, "My pastor says/believes/teaches thus and so..."? Very little critical thought is expended by many Christians, especially in how to apply God's Word to their everyday lives and their places. We attach ourselves to a teacher, who is supposed to do the learning for us and pour it into our empty heads. Just as that is the road to political tyranny, so religious tyranny cannot be far behind. Unwitting tyrants, often seeing that their "people need them," are worse than usurpers who aren't liked by the people they bully and oppress. Pastors leave or retire, places stay around.

This is not to denigrate the office of eldership or the pastorate. With the level of immaturity that the church suffers, these offices are necessary, but they need--more than ever--to be committed to what they are ordained for. These offices are to prepare the saints, that is the common Christian, for "the work of the ministry" (Ephesians 4). And our work is intimately connected to where we are.

In our attempt to escape earth, whether through the Rapture or the transmigration of the soul (otherwise known as "going to heaven when you die"), we have forgotten that God calls us to bring healing to his good-created world. Instead, ministry--pastoral and laity--has become almost exclusively about "salvation" (escape), with possible a little charity tacked on because it seems like the right thing to do. This has led to an empty evangelism, devoid of real, earthly help and real, earthy discipleship. Polishing the brass on a sinking ship has always been and always will be a stupid idea.

What, though, if we reclaimed a robust doctrine of creation and of covenant? One that postulates that God enjoys the world he has created and wishes to see it made whole again under the vice-gerency of humankind? Or that God called Abraham and his seed to set the world to rights? Since we can only act in a small-enough scale to actually effect healing instead of causing more problems (the deficiency of the industrial economy), we must act to set the world to rights in our own cities, neighborhoods, and communities. That the healing must start between the people of God is almost a no-brainer, but the pettiness and selfishness that infects the body of Christ (what a horrific thought) shows that we have a long way to go before we can pontificate on how the outside world should solve its problems.

More later...

College and Place

2007-08-04T22:52:00.000-04:00

Residential education is near bankruptcy. This could be said for many areas, but especially economically. Many colleges, especially Christian ones, are finding it harder and harder to keep up with the demands of maintenance, room allocation, and rising utilities. To raise tuition much higher, though, would effectively kill any chance of solvency--especially for schools with small endowments, or poorly managed ones. With the onslaught of online education, residential collegiate experience may cease to exist. Many are beginning to see that they can get the career training/higher salaries that college offers for a fraction of the price--and can stay close to friends/family, plus start working on their futures right from their very own computers at home (which, invariably, have faster connection speeds) or the local library. Hence the pride that some institutions furtively take in being called "party schools". The residential experience, by itself, does not offer enough any more for many to justify a $100k+ investment that will take years to pay off. Debt, in other words, is killing traditional higher education.

Residential colleges need, quickly, to rethink their very foundations. Since more and more are choosing to stay closer to home, or to save their room/board fees to rent an apartment where they want to live/work, I think it would be wise for residential institutions to put their best foot forward in this very instance: place.

Residential colleges, part of the Enlightenment fabric, have bought whole-heartedly into the idea that place does not matter. There is very little study of the places where colleges are located, since every place has been (for a long time) assumed to be just like any other place. Some institutions even perpetuate a hatred (usually implicit, sometimes not) of the place they are located--religious institutions, with their dualistic hatred of Creation, are particularly prone to this. Many offer majors in fields that have no economic footing in the surrounding area (within, say, 50 miles), implicitly offering the opportunity to "escape" the surrounding landscape. Why?

Part of the American heritage, for better or worse, is that when the going gets tough, the tough leave. Whether for reasons of economic or religious oppression, many have left their long-established homes for an American restart. This, of course, is not a bad thing: immigration, legal or otherwise, has been an important and formative part of U.S. history. However, when transplanting places, the dominant attitude has been to scorn any thought of the older place--note the perennial efforts of career politicians to limit any other languages than English in public discourse, despite the fact that the United States has no official language. Immigrants are often looked down upon for bringing some of their customs and culture with them, being viewed as "un-American" or being asked why they didn't just stay where they were, the assumption being that the smaller, more familial aspects of their culture is what was the problem, instead of overbearing political and religious (that is to say, abstract) systems.

This translates, very easily, into our own hatred of the local. The grass is greener elsewhere, so why not go there? It creates a perpetual homelessness, physically and spiritually. So why go to school to learn how to bring wisdom (that is what education is after all, right?) and healing to your place, when you could much more easily learn how to run the system that brings immediate gratification, even if your children will have to pick up the bill? (On another note, this may be why our culture is in the sexual/abortion state it is in: sex is immediately gratifying, children run the risk of never being gratifying, but instead end up like ourselves.

Internet education, for all the positive possibilities I think it has, plays right into this culture. Place, ultimately, is an unnecessary inconvenience easily overcome by the application of technology. In fact, the place you want can be easily created by developing an avatar, or a persona as a blogger. Residential colleges, especially Christian ones, have the possibility, not yet explored, to resist this dangerous and deathly cultural trend. These colleges can be about the health, well-being, and prosperity of the communities that surround them, both human and non-human. The residence halls can become places where human life flourishes, instead of diminishes in a drunken and pseudo-erotic stupor. The town-and-gown clashes must cease, with the (often) arrogant institutions of "higher" learning not working in a top-down way to "improve" the locale, but instead working with and, most urgently, for the local population to give educated answers to pressing local questions, whether they are scientific, artistic, or cultural/religious. This does not mean, however, that institutions should change their century-long alliance with the federal government to a just-as-corrupt-or-corruptible local government. Instead it means working with the actual people to bring education to all those around who would make the own lawns greener, instead of always coveting their neighbors. Do this, and higher education will live and possibly flourish in ways that are mutually beneficial to their communities, refuse this and in ten years (or less) we will see residential higher education become a dusty footnote in the educational history of America, read online and usually skimmed over.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Liturgy

2007-07-28T22:23:00.000-04:00

The American religious heritage, by and large, is anti-liturgical. Not just non-liturgical, but against it. As far as I can tell, this has deep roots not only in the (especially) Scots-Irish Presbyterian past of the nation, but also in the early political turmoil of secession from Britain. I think that this is why both Anglicans and Roman Catholics had a harder time finding acceptance in the "New World" than Presbyterians. The liturgy of both those "high" churches was indelibly linked to their politics. Anglicans = head of church is king of England, whom (as you might recall from history class) was not a favorite to early Americans. Catholics = head of church is Pope, another obvious connection due to the decidedly Protestant flavor of America (to this day even). Many Protestants reacted so strongly against these liturgical traditions as to deny any liturgy at all. However, just like the Campbellite movement, which claimed "No Creed but Christ" follows their own formalized statements of faith, non-liturgical Christians follow their own liturgies. A liturgy is technically nothing more than an order of service in a formalized worship setting. So whether it is the "Our Father" or "3 hymns and a sermon", it is still a liturgy. If we are going to meet together to worship, we are going to have a liturgy, implicitly or explicitly. Liturgy is an inescapable concept. In other words, it isn't a question of "liturgy or no liturgy", but what, or rather whose, liturgy it is. Here is where the political background of the Presbyterian reaction to liturgical traditions shines the strongest. It has to do with what exactly, apart from the technical understanding, liturgy is.

I've become more and more convinced over the past couple of years that humans attain knowledge through stories. I cannot here defend the idea, but there is plenty of good reading out about it nowadays. Our actions tell stories, have backgrounds that explain them, and subvert or clarify larger stories that others tell. This is what story-telling looks like at an individual level. However, once individuals come together as groups, they start to tell similar stories (or vice versa--I'm not intending to start a "chicken-egg paradox" here). These founding myths, or worldviews, color how people relate to each other. There are always those elders, who are well versed in the traditional stories, who have power in the community precisely because they tell the "authorized" versions of the stories. Hence the clash of Jesus with the scribes, Pharisees, and priests--an unaccredited upstart retelling Israel's story not centered around Torah, but around himself! The book of John basically seems to revolve around this story-telling clash, hence the judicial feel of the book. But to return to the point, the story-tellers of any group rule that group. Liturgy, conceived as the weekly (or preferably daily in the family setting) retelling of God's story, is intimately connected to power. What version of God's story are they telling? Is it the "authorized" version, the "orthodox" version? In other words, who is telling the story and why do they have the right to tell it (II Corinthians is taken up with whether Paul was an authorized story-teller)?

To return briefly to the political climate, if the American people, recently freed from British rule, submit to British liturgy, what does that say about this people? The British would still rule. If Protestant people, separated by the Reformation gulf, returned to Catholic liturgy, what does that say about this people? The Reformation would be over. Interestingly enough, because of the secularization of the American Protestant tradition, nationalist politics has controlled the liturgy ever since--the main mantra, of course, being "religion is a private affair, with no place in the public square" (it even rhymes).

However, this story, the story of God's dealings with the world, is too important to just be left in the hands of others, no matter how well intentioned they might be. Ephesians 4 has an interesting passage in which it says that some are called to be pastors, teachers, evangelists (traveling story-tellers), etc. so that the people of the church might do the ministry. "Ministry" has never been intended to be relegated to a professional class. It is the bread-and-butter of the everyday Christian, not just those who hold a "degree". What if the American political story was changed? What if someone were to say that the American Revolution was anti-Christian (and, therefore, morally wrong)? Wouldn't that person run the risk of being labelled as "un-American" (leniently) or even suffering physical harm (severely)? Why? Because they are messing with the founding story, what gives this country its legitimization, not just for existence, but to continue its course in the present and future.

How about if someone told the story of God that synthesized pagan philosophical beliefs with the very Jewish roots of Christianity? What if they changed the story from God saving his creation from ruin-by-sin to say that God's intention was to take his people out of created reality (presumably to become ontologically one with the uncreated) and destroy this creation? Needless to say, those who control the story control the Church.

Stories give meaning, purpose meaning, to our lives. Our communities live on stories, but what stories are they and who is telling them? More importantly, possibly, what legitimizes someone as being an "authorized" story-teller, whether you want to call them apostle, elder, pastor, evangelist, or heretic?

This is what gives liturgy its power. The story of God is retold weekly in worship services all across the world. It is a story that deals with very historical events, from the creation of the world through the call of Abraham and on to the death, resurrection, ascension, and session of Jesus. Even so, it has great applicability today and all Christians should be concerned with the story they are hearing. Is it the true story or an imitation? And how would we know the difference?

Pete Steen Festschrift

2007-07-23T14:58:00.000-04:00

Pete Steen Festschrift Project Very intriguing. Thought all you neo-Cals might be interested.

Christological Confessions

2007-07-19T12:42:00.001-04:00

I've been studying christology intensively for about 7 or 8 years now. It is a hard subject, since most statements made both by popular writers and even scholars are shallow, content-empty, or closetly heretical. Also, if the party line (whatever the individual heresy hunter defines that line as--it is frustratingly flexible) is not toed (or towed), then you are liable to come under some sort of judgement, whether personal or ecclesial. Thankfully, I've had good friends come along side me during this journey who have been patient and attentive, while still holding to their own views. To all of you, many thanks, especially as I went through the whole spectrum of both 'orthodox' and 'heretical' views (those words are especially tricky to define, and impossible to enforce).

At its base, who Jesus is is simple. Jesus is the human being anointed by God to be the means by which he would set the world to rights. However, from here either speculation or nuance usually takes over. I remember when I first started this study how I balked at speculation (and still do). I read in a premier church history that the Fathers had based their doctrine of the Logos (the 'word' from John 1) on a Greek, mostly Platonic, understanding. In other words, due to what I surmised as the anti-semitism of the post-apostolic church, the Fathers effectively threw out the Old Testament in order to co-opt pagan Plato (this is a gross oversimplification, I realize). I opted to go the way of nuance instead, even though I didn't know it.

Christology becomes nuanced when the themes and images of the Bible start to be allowed to play through the interpretations of Jesus offered by the apostles and other New Testament writers. You have Incarnational imagery, which is a broad category, encompassing Logos ("the word became flesh"), Torah ("I am the way..." see my second post on this blog), and Temple ("dwelt/tabernacled among us" "the fulness of God dwelling in him", etc.). You have Davidic imagery ("Son of David" and "Son of God"--meaning the king of Israel, the one who represents Israel, who early in Exodus is called the "son of God"), this encompasses the Messianic themes ("Son of Man", the Servant from Isaiah). You have, as NT Wright points out in his The Climax of the Covenant, Incorporative themes: (Jesus sums up Israel's destiny by taking the Torah's curse, the new people of God--made up of Jews and Gentiles--act as the resurrection body of Jesus on earth, so to speak of them is to speak of what "Jesus continued to do and teach", also note how Temple themes work so well with ecclesiology). Lastly, you have Agency themes: Jesus having the role of God himself, which is what led to later developments in Trinitarian thought. Jesus did what God said he himself would do. All of these things are interconnected. It is difficult for me to separate them into these "neat" categories. It is much like a tapestry, beautifully woven to lead to worship and imitation.

Which brings me to what I think is the biggest christological insight: what God did in Jesus, he intends to do in the renewed human race. The glorified man Jesus is the prototype, or new Adam, of what the human race is supposed to become. I think you can go so far and say that this was God's plan all along, but that might be more speculative. That is the genius of Incorporative christology: Jesus was filled with the Spirit, so should/will we. Jesus was delivered from the clutch of death, same eventually for us. Jesus glorified in his physicality, so also we. Obviously, though, as the book of Hebrews might point out: he is preeminent because he is the pathbreaker, the author and finisher, and great high priest. The renewed humanity is "of the Messiah" and will always be known that way. In other words, even Incorporative christology allows for demarcation. The many (the people of God) are not collapsed into the one (Jesus), even though the link between them is hard to fully define. Same with classical trinitarian thought according to the council of Chalcedon.

"I believe in Jesus of Nazareth, God's Son..."

The End of History

2007-07-16T17:19:00.000-04:00

The end of history has been the end-goal for the Christian Church almost since its inception. I say 'almost' because neither Jesus nor any of the apostles believed in it in the way we do. All that rich, eschatological language is metaphoric for very this-worldly events. I can't say more about that here, but there is plenty of good scholarly work about apocalyptic language and how the proper meaning of it has often been left behind.

When the Bible speaks of the "new age" or the "new heavens and new earth" it isn't imagining a place where there is no time. Being time-bound is part of our creatureliness, to transcend time (which doesn't make much sense anyway) would mean to no longer be human, but instead to be God (who has never been bound by time). Ah, here's the rub! Athanasius said it best in his On the Incarnation of the Word of God: "God became man, so that man might become God." Under the influence of pagan thought, as the Church steadily came under once the apostles were out of the way, the Church gradually lost touch of what the New Creation was to be about and why it is important that we are, and remain, human. Nowadays this translates to popular preachers and laity hoping for the end of existence as we know it--becoming disembodied souls who are eternal. In other words, to be as God.

However, being time-bound is a good part of being a creature. Our finiteness allows us to develop and mature, to become more conformed to the image of the Son of God. We need the ability to look back upon the past and not know all the details of the future. Otherwise, we are not human. The point of the incarnation, the resurrection, the ascension, and the parousia is to make us more, not less, human. What, then, does the Bible look forward to when this age fully ends and the next one finally supercedes it?

Not the end of history, the end of time, but the end of death. The structure of time is not corrupted by the Rebellion, but rather the direction that it takes. Instead of time being a blessing to mankind, time in which to laugh, love, build, plant, and harvest; it is instead a curse, a looking forward to its end in our individual lives. Instead of growth, there is decay. Is this time's fault? No, it is the curse of death. Death is the ultimate dehumanizer. When we die, we effectively become sub-human. That is why there is so much emphasis on resurrection in Scripture. Not the transcending of time or finitude, but instead transcending the ultimate limit of death, so that our humanness can flourish and God's good created world can finally prosper.

--To Anna and Paul--

College and Calling

2007-06-22T22:37:00.000-04:00

One of the great unanswered questions of our time:

What is college for?

Students, being that they don't have years of experience thinking deeply about what their education actually does for them, usually don't have the opportunity to answer this with hindsight. Educators, being that they do have those supposed years of experience, never answer it clearly or anywhere near satisfactorily. For that, education is hard. What education, at the end of the day, does for one person it may not do for another. I remember an instance, early in my Master's program of Higher Education, having a particularly astute teacher facilitate this exercise:

He asked us if we enjoyed college. Most everyone did, enthusiastically so. He asked us what part of college was the best overall. Most everyone answered the relationships or community or activities. Not one person in memory answered academics. Lastly, he asked us whether or not everyone should go to college. Unanimously, no one said college was for everyone. I hope you notice the disconnect here.

College is good, especially for the development of lasting relationships. But not everyone should go to college. I ruminate on this experience constantly. Especially since $85,000+ is a lot to pay for developing relationships (which, interestingly enough, can also be done for free, just like learning).

My dream for higher education, probably never to be realized, is that it would be used for two things:
1) A student who knows (with job prospects already found) what general field they want/need to study for their specific career and goes after that training full force.
2) A student who has been doing their calling for some time and wants further advanced and up-to-date training in that field.

One caveat and two important things to note. Caveat: calling does not equal occupation. Two things: (1) college as it is today isn't necessary for either of these two things and (2) 'liberal arts' education isn't necessarily part of the curriculum.

The first thing noted has to do with the fact that all formal education isn't necessarily about learning, but about certification. That is what a degree is: a publicly attested certification of some level of skill, whether learned or BSed. The second thing noted may seem a little strange. I am a believer in a well-rounded, liberal (freedom-giving) education. If careerism is all that we train/educate for, then we are denying the essential humanness of ourselves and our students.

The reason that higher education does not necessarily need a 'liberal arts' component is two-fold. (1) Whether teachers admit it or not, all learning, even the technical stuff is interdisciplinary. If your teachers don't teach their discipline listening to other fields such as the hard sciences, the social sciences, the humanities, and business, they have failed you as teachers. Switch to different professors or different schools. (2) If your education hasn't prepared you for living as a free human being by the time you are 18, then a liberal arts education is going to do very little for you. Needless to say, a bulk of responsibility is on the student to use their education, not just believe everything teacher says (I did mention that 'liberal' education is about freedom, didn't I?)

Part of being a free human being, from my point of view, is having a purpose. I've seen too many students coming into and leaving college with no real sense of what they are about, and I don't mean just career-wise. Many of them have no real connection to a place or a tradition or a home. Without that, no sense of calling, real yes-it-includes-occupation-but-is-so-much-more-than-that, Steve Garberian calling can happen. It is ridiculous for parents and students to spend so much money and time on certification when the student doesn't have a clear sense of calling. It is ridiculous to assume that you will find your calling in the strict bubble of the educational system (how many people outside of your age group do you have real, genuine interaction with each week?), separated from family, home, work, and place?

Part of this train of thought is brought on by a conversation I had earlier today with a friend who went to school with me. We both, for all intents and purposes, are outside of academe. Neither of us totally, but most of our lives is not spent as teachers, but as independent business people and regular folks. Neither of us regret our studies, but neither of us are in the fields in which we spent so much labor, sweat, time, and money. With a little foresight, and maybe some guidance from the informal teachers in our lives who really know us, could have saved us much time and energy. An internship here, a book to read there, a heart-to-heart about what is really important in life. Someone to tell us that being in college is much more about status than education (if you don't believe that, it is because the fact is taken for granted in middle class America).

Honestly, I want to go back to college now. Not because I need to, but because with my callings in urban renewal, business, the interdisciplinary work of coffee (surprisingly so), I have much to learn. However, I'll be doing most of that learning through independent reading and by having conversations with people who are living their lives, who are passionate about what they are doing, whether that is educating, laboring, running a business, raising a family, caring for those in need, or just relaxing a bit by biking the country.

In the end, I think that our educational system is fundamentally flawed. Why is it that we keep students in school for more and more years to learn less and less? Longer hours, more homework, longer school years haven't produced the social salvation that has been promised for decades. It is time that we rethink how and why we do schooling and why it is so disconnected from learning.

Religious Individualism

2007-06-17T19:35:00.000-04:00

I wrote, not too long ago, about change. As it is a persistent question bearing directly upon spirituality, I have wanted to address it further.

I consider myself to be a modified individualist, that is, I believe that I am created as an individual and have a divinely-created sphere in which I have been given authority. I am self-governed, where most of the importance governance of my life happens. There are areas within that sphere in which the State and Church cannot legislate, prosecute, or ban. This does not mean, though, that I believe myself to be autonomous or atomistic. I can never be autonomous, because I am a creature under the authority of God--nothing can change that and I do not wish for it to be changed anyway. Also, I am a communitied individual (here's the modified part): I live in a genetic family, with my wife, in a neighborhood, within a nation, part of creation. All of these things bear down on the questions I can ask and the answers that are possible. However, this does not make me parochial, part of being an individual in the midst of other individuals is that if I want peace and prosperity, I must look outside myself to the wisdom, idiosyncracies, and faults of others. Humans are both one and many, both being equally created, equally ultimate, and equally good. Throwing them out of balance by being atomistic or borg-ish perverts God's good creation. However, I don't believe them to be in dialectic tension; instead they are to work together in harmony, which I believe only happens as individuals are joined to the body of Christ (the metaphor itself being a wonderful example of the one-and-many).

Acknowledging that I have a sphere of self-governance is a good thing. There are aspects of my being that, from my human point of view, are under my control. I have chosen to ask Bethany to marry me (her choice, at this point, of course bears upon the questions I could ask and the answers that could be received). I have chosen to write this blog post. In other words, no immediately coercive force has determined my life. One of those aspects, if you read the Torah, is my choice of sin or not sin. However, I've noticed that when I try and excise certain sins out of my life, they persist and even get worse. The two questions that invariably pop into my head are: do I really want to not sin [and] am I one of God's people after all? Both, however, while not being bad self-reflective questions in-and-of-themselves, are missing the point.

One of the difficulties of being a Reformed Christian is that, by and large, we don't believe in the Holy Spirit. Beside believe in God's absolute sovereignty, we often work that "Protestant Work Ethic" into what is classically called sanctification. In other words, we don't work for our salvation, but we sure as hell make ourselves morally pure. Or we get the State to do it for us (Prohibition, anyone?). However, this religious individualism always ends up in a bad conscience. Just as in salvation, we cannot change our spots or the color of our skin, nor can we change the way we act. However, unlike salvation, God isn't the only actor. In our change towards being more human, God's Holy Spirit gives us the ability and power to change, sometimes seemingly in spite of us.

Not only the Holy Spirit, though, but also the rest of the body of Christ. If a part is sick, the whole body is affected and the whole body is needing to administer the cure. Does a member of the body sin? Confession to other members, rebuke (if necessary), and reconciliation through others is necessary for any long term change. Yes, the change starts between God and myself, but others are a part of my long-term growth into true humanity.

That is why I've grown impatient lately with my own attempts to change (and my public vows to do so). If I'm going to be public, it needs to be as one who is seeking restoration, not as a lone-gunner for Jesus who doesn't need anyone else on this road. Unfortunately, in a religious tradition nourished on Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, it is hard to get around the inherent (and dangerous) atomism of the Protestant heritage.

Silencio!

2007-06-16T22:25:00.000-04:00

He who has knowledge spares his words: a man of understanding is of a calm breath. Even a fool is counted wise when he holds his peace: he shuts his lips, "Perceptive!" (Proverbs 17:27-28, WAV)

...let your 'yes' be 'yes' and your 'no' 'no'. For whatever is more than these is from the evil one. (Matthew 5:37, NKJV)

One of the classic Christian disciplines is silence. By far, it is the hardest to practice for me. Fasting, relatively easy--just stop eating (doesn't mean it happens much). Study, never stops. Prayer, strangely connected to silence, is probably the next hardest but I find myself praying much more than not talking.

I've been meditating on silence for quite some time. The connection in Scripture between control of the tongue and righteousness/justice has always intrigued me, but not just in an intellectual way; it has touched the very core of my being. There is a saying of Jesus where he speaks about every idle word coming under the judgement of God. As usual, Jesus means something a little bit deeper (but not esoteric): if idle words come under judgement, how much more those words spoken intentionally. In other words, let your 'yes' mean 'yes' and your 'no' mean 'no.' There was a time in my life when I was known for eloquent, lengthy prayers, especially in public. However, as I've grown more knowledgeable of the way language works and is used, I've come to see that most folks (including myself) who are verbose, whether politician or preacher, layman or lawyer, usually mean half of what they say and don't understand the other half. That is why, as of late, I've become so disillusioned with religious language. Too many people have used the language of God-is-on-our-side for rational assent. I've longed many times to hear our leaders, both political and spiritual, to just shut up. That is why the 'yes' and 'no' passage is so important: every word we speak should be treated as a vow. How do we know if God is on our side?

Add to this the times that the Bible speaks about not taking rash vows. All the more reason to drop the dressing from words and speak plainly. However, there is power in language, especially if you can make someone believe something and help them create a symbolic universe based on words (linguists and sociologists agree that this is the formative-normative nature of language). "Us v. Them" is the most powerful set of words that I know of, and also the most dangerous.

But, what am I saying? That is exactly the question. I can complain about those in power till I'm blue in the face, but the log will remain in my own eye. In other words, until I'm silent, who can I expect anyone else to be--especially those whose job it is to talk!
------------------------
There is a passage in Richard Foster's Celebration of Discipline in which he speaks about justifying our actions. Really, it is the reason that I wanted to write this post. It is amazing how often I try and give my actions a little different spin with words because the action is either ambiguous or may really reveal my intentions. Silence disciplines, then, not only the tongue, but the whole body, as James says. If I were to let my actions speak for themselves, Francis of Assisi-style, I would need to be much more intentional with how I act. Silence leads not only to purity and clarity of words, but purity and clarity of action.

Such is the discipline of silence.

The Narcissism of Hate

2007-06-09T19:06:00.000-04:00

Currently Reading: Blue Like Jazz

As I said to a friend the other day, I'm theologically arrogant. It comes with being a junkie. I read big, important books with lots of footnotes. I rarely read fiction and even more rarely do I read the more "popular-level" books like Blue Like Jazz. However, strangely enough, I've always enjoyed and learned a lot from books like Jazz, or Ragamuffin Gospel, or (gasp) Sacred Romance, or even (double-gasp-don't-tell-Byron-Borger) Wild at Heart.

Jazz itself is a particularly insightful book for me. Don Miller and I seem to share some of the same concerns about religion and the Church and about ourselves. Both of us are "influential" people in our circles, but neither of us feel particularly comfortable with the role, possibly for different reasons. He is, in many ways, a contrarian, which I can identify with (although not too much, otherwise it wouldn't be very contrarian of me).

Anyway, Miller points out something of great significance to me. The greatest lie that he used to believe is that life was a story about him. It is ridiculous how profound that is. If only I, for a second, would stop living life for myself (with a thin veneer of altruism), what could be different? Or, better yet, what couldn't be different? I expect to wrestle with this for some time. Hopefully for the better. The thing I've noticed today, though, is how insufferably selfish I have been (and my wife can corroborate that, especially after my silly, childish temper tantrum earlier). Why is it that when a sin is pointed out, the ability to not do that thing diminishes, at least initially? But that isn't the point today.

The most obvious response to my selfishness is humility. Humility before God, before my family and friends, and before anyone else that I have dealings with. The easiest way to do this, it seems, is to be self-deprecative or self-hating. Blaming myself for everything, making fun of myself, beating myself up for things that aren't my concern or my fault or even remotely my responsibility...and doing it publicly. What I'm realizing (even though this is an old realization, that doesn't mean I've applied it) is that this form of "humility" is another, more insidious form of pride and narcissism. When I become focussed on myself in hate or bitterness or whatever, nothing about my selfishness changes. I haven't become humble before God or others or even myself. I've become so certain that the problems of the world rest so solely on my shoulders that I've forgotten about that Jesus fellow or God's sovereign love or even other human beings in this world. I'm focussed on me and how irredeemable I am. Publicly. Here's the real catch.

Repentance, the few times that I've actually had a true form of it, was mostly private. If I needed to repent of something that I did to someone other than God, then it was public, but in a limited fashion (I make it a point to try and not offend large groups of people). Most of the time, though, it is spent in actual silence before God--not just lip silence, but mind silence. Job put his finger over his lips when he repented, a sign of absolute silence. True repentance, for me, involves the same. It does no good to flaunt repentance, to talk about it publicly. When that happens, it is all show and nothing has really changed about me, except that I very selfishly believe I'm less selfish.

This hateful Narcissism, strangely, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even though I'm not feeling particularly self-hating at this moment, I'd like to keep the next set of things in the first person. I believe I am unlovable for whatever reason (I've done something terrible, I'm not attractive, I'm a failure at this-that-or-the-other-thing). This changes the way I think, speak, and act. I think, speak, and act in unlovable ways: maybe I act completely (and obnoxiously) dependent on others, maybe I act like a spoiled child, maybe I turn into a hollow, angry shell, and the list could go on. This irritates people and they start to not love me (for which, as a self-hater, I don't blame them, but secretly hate them for it). I end up believing that I am unloved. If I am unloved, if must be because I'm unlovable. And so on.

I don't think that this attitude is a product necessarily of the theological tradition I'm a part of. However, when the first tenet of your religious system is that you are total depraved (even after redemption), it is hard to not be down on yourself. It led me to question, along with another book I was reading--Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross by Hans Boersma--the concept of the sin nature. The phrase itself isn't in the Bible, instead it is a translation of the Greek word for flesh. Paul, the main user of the term it seems, doesn't mean to separate the physical body out as evil (otherwise he would have used the term 'body'), but "flesh" sort of as the total system of sin that currently comprises a part of our being. So, you may be thinking, I believe in sin nature. Yes and no. I don't have a problem with the 'sin' part, but the 'nature' part. Saying something is 'natural' is tantamount to saying it is inevitable. There is no way to escape nature. I could no more stop being a male than I could change my skin color (I realize that there is surgery for the former, but being physically a male through a scalpel doesn't really make you male, it makes you deviant). In Christian thought, something natural is the way God created it. In other words, if we have a sin nature, we cannot ever escape sin, for to be human is to be sinful. What a terrifying thought. If such is the case, even the traditional interpretation of the virgin birth (having a body specially created outside of the normal sexual union keeps Christ free from original sin) doesn't do it. Just being a human makes Jesus sinful. Well, the ancient heresy of docetism isn't far behind...and if you look at mainstream Christology, it is alive and well on planet earth. Once again, a terrifying thought.

In the words (or book title) of one of the Plantingas, this isn't the way it's supposed to be. If we believe the Bible, then it isn't until at least a day after man is created that he becomes a sinner. He wasn't created that way. It wasn't until after God finished creating man (that is, after he created both man and woman, androgeny wasn't the intention) that he and she decided to rebel. Man wasn't created with a sin nature, nor is it 'natural' for him to sin. Sin is an historical aberration from God's intention. That doesn't mean I believe in perfectionism, though.

I am an American. I was born in America, I live in America, and I will probably die in America. A formative part of my identity is guided by the history, geography, and worldview of America. I could not, tomorrow, wake up and say "I am now a citizen of Poland." (Not just because I don't look Polish, either). It isn't my choice to be American, I was born that way. However, that doesn't make it 'natural' that I am American. It is an historical thing. If I went through the proper processi, red-tape, and cultural emigration I could become Polish. Even though I was born American, I could live Polish. Sin is the same way (note: I'm not saying that being American is the same as being a sinner, all analogies break down eventually).

I was born is the status of sin, sometimes called being 'in Adam'. It wasn't my choice, but that doesn't mean I'm not responsible for it (just like I was born a Warren, not by choice, but I still have responsibilities to that name and family). Being born in something, or having the status of something, gives guidelines as to what questions can be asked, what answers can be given, and what ways are acceptable (or possible) to live. Being in the status of 'sin' questions, answers, and dictates certain things. If I stay in that status, I will more and more conform to the questions, answers, and dictates of that status. I will become epistemologically self-conscious. This is part of maturation. Have you ever noticed how children ask questions that our thought-systems cannot even handle, but seem decidedly profound? I think that is because they are not epistemologically self-conscious. Their thought process has not been fully formed, so they don't know what rules to follow intellectually. Maybe that is why Jesus told us to be 'like children'?

So, the more and more I stay in the status of 'sin', the more and more of a sinner I become. I think sin, I speak sin, I act sin. It isn't till I'm transported/emigrate to another status, another kingdom (if you will) that the status changes. Instead of being 'in Adam', I can be 'in Christ'. If I am in Christ, then I cannot be in Adam at the same time. If this is true, then the very defining characteristic of being 'in Adam', sin, no longer holds status power over me. I have a new status, that of righteous. However, since I didn't get my membership transferred until late in the game, as it were, I still have a lot of habits and thought-processi that are epistemologically closer to sin than to Christ. In other words, I still sin...often.

However, to get back to my original point, just because I sin while being a Christian does not mean it is 'natural'. It means that I haven't become epistemologically self-conscious as a Christian (known classically as sanctification leading to glorification). I still sin because sin is what I know, the status-kingdom of sin surrounds me and calls to me constantly to not remember the bad things about it and revel in all the 'good' things about it. Just because I am a Christian doesn't mean that I'm not constantly under the influence of sin. However, I am in a community of other ex-sinners who want to be more in Christ than in Adam (most of the time, at least).

Here, in some ways at least, is the antidote to self-hating narcissism (is there really any other form of narcissism?). Evil is not the way I am created, even if I act that way and others around me act that way. I, instead, was created in the image of God and am being restored to that status after a long absence. Only through Jesus, though, can this restoration happen, since I need my transferring papers, which he secured on the cross. Otherwise, I never would have even known about any other status than sin. The most comforting thing about this is that even if I do continue to think, speak, and act as in sin, Jesus is patient to help me, mould me, and change me more and more into his image.

Espresso Culture in Beaver County

2007-05-27T22:37:00.000-04:00

When many folks think of espresso, the first thing that comes to mind may be the sterilized, middle-class, faux third place atmosphere of a St*rbucks or just a bunch of snarky, "artist-types"--either behind the bar or at the tables--who may talk a big game about their own liberally-minded activities, but are really just the same ol' stereotypical Seattle yuppies that have, effectively, defined espresso culture in America. That is why, reading Seth Godin's blog recently, I began to ponder comments made to me about my work here in Beaver Falls, Beaver County, PA. Seth says:

Craig writes in with a story about a Dyson vacuum:

I have a question for you about buying decisions.

A while back I upgraded my Dyson vacuum cleaner when I got a great deal on the latest model. I had been using my old one for about 5 years or so but it was still in perfect working order. I had even replaced a couple of attachments for it via the Dyson website.
I gave my old Dyson to a friend. She had never used a Dyson before and she loved it. So much so that the very next day her own vacuum cleaner was put outside ready for the refuge collection!

But here’s the thing: a few months later the Dyson I gave her stopped working (not sure why, that thing was indestructible) so she decided to buy a new vacuum. Even though the vacuum I gave her was the best she had ever used, she didn’t buy a Dyson.

I was amazed how someone could love a product so much but replace it with an inferior product. I don’t think it was about cost because I told her where she could get an excellent deal on a new Dyson.

This just doesn’t make sense to me so I thought I’d ask if you had any thoughts as to why this happens?

My take: Craig’s friend didn’t see herself as the kind of person who would buy a Dyson. Sure, she might use one, especially if it was free. But buying a weird, fancy-looking vacuum is an act of self-expression as much as it’s a way to clean your floors. And the act of buying one didn’t match the way his friend saw herself.

So many of the products and services we use are now about our identity. Many small businesses, for example, won’t hire a coach or a consultant because, “that’s not the kind of organization we are.” Wineries understand that the pricing of a bottle of wine is more important than its label or the wine inside. The price is the first thing that most people consider when they order or shop for wine. Not because of perceived value, but because of identity.

Other than the fact that I've had nasty experiences with Dyson (never, ever buy their handheld vacuum), the post intrigues me. Many folks that I've talked to, both from and outside of the area, are always surprised by the presence of a coffeeshop in Beaver Falls (except, they say, because of the college). Things such as "The people there wouldn't care about espresso, just a cup of coffee" or "You're going to have a hard time talking people there into caring about quality". Maybe these things are true, but I don't think so in the end. Yes, Beaver County, and especially Beaver Falls, are blue-collar places. However, that is exactly the sort of fertile soil that an artisan-based culture can thrive in, along with a vibrant, re-thought espresso culture.

First, some un-education:

1) Espresso is not synonymous with yuppies or the consumerist culture. Espresso originated in Italy, where many folks in Beaver County can, with great joy, trace their roots. Espresso in Italy is associated not with the up-and-up, but with everyday life, whether you are a baker, a factory-worker, or a cubicle-dweller. Espresso, instead of being a symbol of the bourgeois, is a symbol of the varied and diverse sorts of people that make up every place.

2) Coffeeshops are not synonymous with those either. A coffeeshop, if being true to its historical roots, is a leveler--and has been persecuted throughout history as being too "democratic". Coffeeshops are places of relaxation, debate, bravado, humility, and artistry. Coffeeshops are places of humanity. And they smell great too.

With that in mind, it is easy for me to see why espresso culture, rightly conceived, can be so successful in this place. We want to be a welcoming, hospitable place where collegiate, businesser, laborer, home-maker, retired, and young can meet, mingle, and become a strong, democratic local community. All of the problems that people see within Beaver County, could be addressed by that sort of community. But this is another topic for another day.

A place with the mindset of hard work, thrift, and a history of (somewhat suppressed) artisanry is ripe for a full-orbed, healthy espresso culture. A culture that encourages hard work, thrift, quality, humanness, scale, and community. I'll drink to that.

Change

2007-05-25T23:56:00.000-04:00

A recurring question in my life, ever since (at least) high school:

Why, when we know of personality issues that need to change, do we not change them?

A related question:

Why, when we know that God has freed us from sin by the death and resurrection of Jesus, do we continue to sin?

Customer Service is Dead

2007-05-16T16:01:00.000-04:00

Two incidents from today:

1) I received a shipment from one of our suppliers today. Noticing that the product was not the right size, I called the company. The woman on the phone told me it would be at least a week before it could be rectified (even though their company driver had just left). She then proceeded to tell me that I agreed on two separate occasions to the smaller size, in an angry and aggressive voice. I tried my best to calm her down, admitting that possibly the mistake was mine (I learned later that they had called to verify the size change the day before but were greeted with questions marks from my employees--so much for "double-checking"). Even if the problem was my fault, the way that it was handled on their end left a sour taste in my mouth. Customer satisfaction is the most important part of business. Even if it is the customer's fault, trying to maintain a relationship is much more important than pride-of-being-right. Her pride has, quite possibly, lost her a potentially lucrative account. Not to mention that if something is wrong, you should go out of your way to make it right, not "It'll be a week" for it to travel 25 minutes from the warehouse. What that says to me is: "You are not important as a customer. Our system is much more important." However, without customers nobody pays for the system.

2) I called a newly opening banquest facility to try and get our catering side of business on their rolodex. Allow me to write out the entire conversation.

"Welcome to ... Food Service and ... Banquet Center. Please press "1" for an alphabetical list of employees or "2" to dial their extension directly."

I have no idea who I am calling. There is no contact information past the initial phone number. I press "1".

"Dial "1" for John, "2" for Larry, "3" for Monica"

Names have been changed to protect the forgetful. I press "1".

"Hello, this is John, what can I do for you today?"
"Hi, my name is Russ Warren and I'm looking for a way to get in contact with the ... Banquet Facility."
"Let me see if I can get them to help you."

At this point, I'm put on hold, wondering who exactly "them" is, because if "them" was option 2 or 3, I would have the ability to call back later if they weren't there. But what if, horror, it wasn't someone on the automated list? I couldn't only wait and hope.

And wait and hope.

And wait and hope.

And wait.

And wait.

And, after almost 10 minutes on a muzak-less hold (not even a reassuring voice telling me that my call was very important but obviously ignorable) I hung up. Obviously, the banquet facility has no desire to have anyone rent it. They had no idea what I was going to ask for, so I may have, for all they knew, wanted to rent it out every Thursday for a year. That would have been a great contract. However, such was not the case. They didn't care about me or any other potential customer. Any business that doesn't have a human initially pick up the phone to talk to me already has shown me contempt. The difficulty here, though, is different from incident 1. They will get by just fine without my catering services (although they need to redo their phones so that folks can get in touch with them in the first place), however I am out of a potentially profitable rolodex because they don't care to take care of people.

Customer service, RIP 2007.

All I can say is...

2007-05-15T22:41:00.000-04:00

My new site, yet to be built--work is a little hectic right now, will be located at:

http://www.artisanalculture.com

Artisanal Culture. What a beautiful idea to me.

Time for a Change

2007-04-28T16:48:00.000-04:00

Well, all good things must end. Plus some bad ones too. I'm hoping to do a complete site makeover, once I figure it all out. I'm realizing my need for a professional image, especially here at my flagship.

As inspiration, I look to Gideon's redone hub. It is a truly beautiful piece of work. Also, I'm glad that he has come back online, as it were.

The questions I'm asking as I consider redesign are not, "what image do I want", but instead "what are my deepest commitments and concerns" and "who am I". I'm learning that if you want to build a "brand", whether as a company or as a virtual persona, you cannot create authenticity--you just have to be authentic.

Here's to the future!

The War Has Begun

2007-04-21T08:38:00.000-04:00

I usually don't write overly personal posts, but this is one. My family is at war. More specifically, my daughter and I are at war. The war is over the rights to the milk (wonderful, delicious whole milk) and the Cheerios. She takes them separately, I take them together.

This really should be an easy war. I'm bigger than her. However, as every parent knows, children always get their way...always (they are much like Wal-Mart in that regard). We only get one gallon of whole milk a week, so the supply is scare. However, I think we are coming to a truce: it seems that I can squeeze out two bowls of Cheerios and still leave enough milk for her. The problem now is that I finished the box of Cheerios while she was asleep this morning (lucky for me that I wake before her--victory is mine!). Thankfully, she has these star puffs of various unintelligible flavors.

War is hell.

Gesundheit

2007-04-11T22:38:00.000-04:00

I've been reading a few marketing books by Seth Godin as of late. I highly recommend them for his "intuitive" marketing approach, I've found it helpful and fruitful, as I've written elsewhere. One of the concept that he has termed is the "ideavirus" or how something (whether an idea or a product) spreads from one person to another. Interesting way of putting it, memorable if nothing else (which, I believe, is the point). He calls the folks who spread this communicable idea "sneezers". I am a sneezer.

I love talking about things I like. I've recommended Seth's stuff at least twice today, not counting the above paragraph. I try and give friends leads on good blogging, good websites, good businesses, and good people within businesses. One of the best experiences business-wise I've had lately is with Everything Coffee & Tea, one of our wholesalers. I emailed them about a novel tea brewing concept I had heard about and their reply was prompt and detailed. The tried the concept in store because of my idea. That is fantastic service. The company will go far because of it.

At the same time, though, sneezers like me are easily put-off and hard (oh so hard) to win back. There are places I won't go, people I'll try and interact with as little as possible, and businesses I won't patronize because they have been off-putting. Of course, I'm willing to try again, but it takes a lot to convince people like me to actually take the step to try again.

Understanding this, to me, is very important. I want as many positive sneezes as I can get for Beaver Falls Coffee & Tea. The possibility of making a bad drink, then, becomes downright terrifying. However, drinks aren't the only thing that make sneezers here sneeze. If it is a bad drink, more likely than not, they will tell me. In that case, my employees and I have the opportunity to make a great sneezer: we can win them over with our customer service and our desire to listen. Since sneezers like me like to talk, we also love to be listened to. If we are listened to by an establishment, even if the product needs work, we will positively sneeze all over the place.

Gesundheit.

Is Gideon Gone?

2007-04-10T08:46:00.000-04:00

I, along with others, have noticed that Gideon Strauss' blog has been password protected for a week or so. I haven't been able to figure out what was going on until I looked at another blog of his. Here's what he says:

Sadly, the server that hosts my blog seems to have crashed. With unexpected, quick, thorough help from John Barach I have salvaged the content. The plan is to relocate my blog on the Comment server. But it will take a month, since everyone is very busy on other projects. Thank you to Jeff S. for suggesting I mention the problem here - I was at a loss as to how I might notify people of this situation. Even this note will only reach some of my readers, I suppose ....

This is my attempt to further promulgate the news. Hope to see you back soon, Gideon.